SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) (44 page)

"Skippy! The point, please. Here's another good
quote for you to remember: brevity is the soul of wit."

"And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief," Skippy finished the quote for me. "Man, I try to
smack some culture down on you-"

"And we ignorant monkeys greatly appreciate it,
Skippy, at the appropriate time, Ok?"

"Fine," he said with a huff. "As I was
saying, before, I guess before I rudely interrupted my own train of thought,
huh, I see your point now, Joe. Damn, my mind wanders sometimes. I was saying,
the communications security aboard that ship is shockingly bad, their cabling
must be completely worn out, more of the data signal leaks out than gets to its
destination. It is so bad, that even if they had a functioning stealth field,
which they do not, I'd be able to listen in. You monkeys are a young, impatient
species, so without further embellishment, here's the news: the Thuranin star
carrier that dropped off this ship at the edge of the star system will not
return for another four and a half months, that's 'meh' level accuracy for you.
That means the Kristang ship will be here for four months, at least. During
those four and a half months, the Kristang on that ship may become bored, and
start poking around, scanning, and looking into things better left alone. They
might discover the human presence on Newark."

"Damn it!" I looked around and met people's
eyes, they were all indicating alarm. "That isn't the only problem,
Skippy, we only have three months of food with us here." My group may be
able to stretch out our supply of dehydrated sludges to three and a half
months, possibly another week under extreme conditions, we were already on
rather lean rations as it was. The main group, back at the caverns near the
cathedral complex, had more food, they might make it to four months. None of us
were going to survive four and a half months.

"That is a problem, and with that ship in orbit,
I can't send another food delivery. The
Dutchman's
supply of sludges is
almost exhausted anyway, and I can't make more until the ship is up and running
again. Joe, this sucks, because I've been making substantially progress up
here, had a couple spots of good luck, and I expect to have the ship ready jump
in and retrieve you in about a month. That's only one week longer than the
original schedule."

"Fantastic, Skippy, that is incredible, and we'll
give you the slow clap of amazement when we get back up there-"

"Hey! A slow clap? Is this a sarcastic
thing?"

"What? No. Oh, uh, sorry, Skippy, I guess that
can have a double meaning. In this context, I meant we would be genuinely
amazed by how you fixed the ship."

"Damn, I will never understand monkey social
norms."

"Me neither, Skippy. Back to the subject, is
there anything you can do about that Kristang ship for us?"

"Not that I can think of yet, Joe. I have two
missiles, one ready and one partly assembled, only needs a propulsion
unit."

Only
needed a propulsion unit? What was
he planning to do, launch it from a really big slingshot? "One missile
isn't much help, huh?"

"Unfortunately, no. That ship would detect one or
two missiles while they are inbound, and likely destroy them both beyond their
effective range; the Kristang who own that ship are barely maintaining their
internal systems and jump drive, but their sensor field and defensive batteries
are functional. A failed missile attack, at such long range, would get the
Kristang asking uncomfortable questions, and poking around places we'd rather
they don't look."

"Understood. I'm pretty sure none of us down here
can throw a rock up far enough to hit that ship in orbit, so you keep trying to
think of a solution, Ok?"

"I'll do my best, Joe. I'll do my best."

Skippy' best thinking, he admitted to me early the
next morning, wasn't nearly good enough. "I thunk on it all night, Joe, in
between, you know, building a starship out of moon dust up here. And I got a
whole lot of nothing. You military brains down there come up with an
idea?"

"No," I admitted. We'd talked about it late
into the night, tossing around increasingly unlikely and impractical ideas,
until I called a halt, and told everyone we'd begin again with fresh minds in
the morning. "No, Skippy, we also got nothing down here. We're working on
it. Let's both have faith, Ok?"

"Ok." He said quietly. The fact that he
didn't make a smartass remark told me how discouraged he was feeling.

His mood mirrored my own gloominess.

"Skippy, we have come way too far to fail now. We
got all the way to this star system without any power from the reactors, we
defeated a superior Kristang force without them firing a single shot at us, and
we've managed to survive on this damp, rainy, chilly mudball of a planet. Also,
I didn't kill anyone for singing Ninety Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall, like,
way too many freakin' times, which is a solid gold gosh-darned miracle. I am
not giving up now."

Taking a tiny, tiny risk, I slid my butt along the
rock at the cavern entrance, so I had a clear view of the only partly cloudy
early morning sky. In theory, the Kristang ship might have a snowball's chance
in hell of seeing me, if it had been looking right at our cavern through a gap
in the clouds at that exact second. Somewhere up there, at this time to the
right of Newark's small moon, was the microwormhole that we used to communicate
with Skippy. Looking up at the invisible wormhole, I felt just a tiny bit
closer to that annoying little beer can, an alien AI who I inexplicably felt
some measure of affection for. A true miracle from Skippy, the wormhole allowed
almost real-time communication through- "H-o-l-y shit."

"What?" Skippy asked.

"The way this microwormhole thingy works
is," I said very slowly, thinking through my idea as I spoke, "you
send radio waves through it, so we can talk without a big time lag?"

"Given your monkey-level understanding of
physics, sure, let's go with that. Oh, man, Albert Einstein would be weeping
for your species right now."

"You send photons through the wormhole, so-"

"Wait! Uh! Uh! Hush, you! Not this time. Not
this
time! This is where you think you have some brilliant idea that I should have
thought of, right?"

"Uh, maybe?"

He laughed gleefully. "Ha! Hahahahahaha! I know
exactly what boneheaded monkey-brain idea you're going to tell me, and I can
tell you ahead of time, it won't work. You want me to send missiles through the
wormhole, and hit that ship. That's it, right? Hahaha! You can forget it,
Mister Smartypants, because that won't work. We only have one functioning
missile right now, remember, dumbass? Also, that wormhole is less than half a
nanometer in diameter, no way can we squeeze a missile through it. So, you're
not so freakin' smart, are you? Hahahahahaha!"

Skippy's rant hadn't let me get a word in. "You
done gloating now?" I asked.

"Give me a minute, I want to let this soak in.
Ahhhhhh, this feels good. I
like
this feeling. You think you're so
smart, and you're not. Here, pretend I just tossed a coin into your hat, dance
for me, monkey, dance!"

"Great," I said. "Because I was going
to suggest you send a maser cannon beam through the wormhole, not a
missile."

A long silence. Long. Like, really, awkwardly long.
Then, Skippy said "
Damn it
! Excuse me, I'm going offline a moment
so I can smash something."

"Skippy?" Silence. "Skippy?"

"Yeah, yeah, I'm here," he finally grumbled.

"Did you smash something? You feel better
now?"

"I didn't smash anything yet, but there's a pair
of small moons here that are going to have a
very
bad freakin’ day in
about two hours. A maser cannon shot through the wormhole, huh?"

"That's the idea."

"Damn you, Mister Smartypants. You have no idea
how thoroughly, utterly humiliating this is for me."

"I'd love to hear, can you explain in great
detail? Don't leave anything out, all of us ignorant monkeys on this end would
truly enjoy hearing it, I'll record it for you. How does this make you feel,
with your god-like intelligence?"

"Sure, I'll pencil you in for the twelfth of
Never, or how about the fourth of Shut-the-hell-up, do either of those dates
work for you?"

Maybe I should have named him 'Snarky' instead of
Skippy. "The maser beam thing, it will work?"

Skippy sighed. Deep down, all the way into whatever
spacetime most of him resided, he had to be incredibly frustrated with himself.
"Yes, yes, it will. I'll need to refocus the emitter to narrow the beam,
that will attenuate the power somewhat, hmm, I can goose up the, well, this is
all technical stuff on my end, nothing worth explaining to monkeys. Yes, it
will work. We'll only get one shot at this, pun intended, transmitting that
much power through the wormhole will collapse it completely. After we shoot, I
won't know whether it worked, until your radio signal gets here more than an
hour later. We'll be limited to slow speed of light communications after we
lose the wormhole. We need to make this one shot count, I'll have to target
their reactor directly. Breach containment there, and that ship is a nice
firework in the sky for you. The remaining problem with this plan is, I have
only a limited ability to aim the beam when it comes out your end of the
wormhole, and that ship's orbit right now doesn't take it within the targeting
cone. You got any ideas how to fix that?"

"Uh, huh, figured that might be a problem."
I thought a moment. How to get a ship to change its orbit? "Yeah, I
might."

"Does your idea involve sending a message to that
ship, asking it to pose for a photo in front of our wormhole?"

"Um, no. Our two stealthed satellites, you can
move them, slowly, without the Kristang detecting?"

"Yes. Those satellites are tiny, Joe, so forget
about me trying to smash one into that ship. If that is your best idea, we are
in big trouble."

"That wasn't my idea. How about this: you
position one of them some place away from the microwormhole, and then you
adjust the satellite's stealth field, so it looks like a stealthed ship whose
field is failing? You can do that?"

"Piece of cake, Joe. I'm waiting for the
brilliant part of your plan. If you don't have that, the only mildly stupid
part of your plan would amuse me, also."

"Great. If that Kristang ship thinks another
ship, a stealthed ship, is suddenly in the area, will it jump away
immediately?"

"No, not from where it is, the ship is too deep
in the gravity well for it to jump away right now, it would need to-, oh, I see
your plan now. I position our satellite to flush the Kristang ship toward our
wormhole as it tries to climb out to jump distance, so I can get a clean shot
at it?"

"Yup, that's the plan. Will that work?"

"You are such a smartass," Skippy said with
a disgusted snort. "I hate you."

"I love you too, Skippy."

"And?"

"I'm not saying I love you back!" He said
disgustedly.

"The 'and', in this case, means," I
explained patiently "
and
, will my plan work?"

"Yes."

"I couldn't hear that very well, Skippy, did you
just say a monkey plan will work, when your incredible intelligence couldn't
think of a way out of this mess?"

"YES! For crying out loud, I said
yes
.
Damn, you are annoying. You know what, when I get this ship fixed up, I am
declaring it a monkey-free zone. No filthy monkeys allowed. Ah, it will be like
paradise up here."

"Yeah, paradise," I pointed out the flaw in
his plan, "except for the part about you being stuck right there for
eternity, or until the
Dutchman's
orbit degrades, and the ship falls
into the gas giant's atmosphere. After that, you will sink to the core of a
slowly cooling planet, until the heat death of the universe, quadrillions of
years from now?"

"Yup. No monkeys. Like I said, paradise."

Skippy only had one shot at that ship. Of course, he
only needed one shot, despite his grumbling about how we were asking him to do
the impossible, as usual, and how we didn't truly appreciate his incredible
awesomeness. To shut him up, I offered to bake a cake in his honor when we got
back aboard the
Dutchman
. That afternoon, while the Kristang ship
frantically accelerated to jump altitude to get away from a phantom ship that
didn't exist, Skippy fired a full-power maser cannon beam through the wormhole,
scoring a direct hit on that ship's already overheated reactor. The result was
a brief, bright flare in the partly cloudy sky, and then silence. No Kristang
ship above us, but also no Skippy.

On our zPhones, we were able to view satellite data
that showed the Kristang ship exploding. After the debris field cleared, we
tracked pieces of the ship in orbit, the largest piece was smaller than a
dropship. All the pieces were dead, no internal power, no signs of life. For
days after, we saw things burning up as they fell into the atmosphere. The
satellites were supposed to notify us immediately if any piece of the ship
began moving on its own, or generating power, or transmitting signals. Just in
case, I checked satellite images and data several times a day, and ordered the
team to maintain cover.