SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) (45 page)

Several hours after he shot the maser cannon through
the microwormhole, Skippy saw the distinctive flash of a reactor losing
containment, then jump drive coils exploding, as the Kristang ship ceased to
exist, so he knew he'd accomplished his mission. That part of his mission,
anyway, he still needed to finish rebuilding the busted
Dutchman
. The
time lag for radio signals was enough of a problem, the larger problem being
that our low-powered zPhone antennas could barely pick up signals from the
Dutchman
,
and it was almost impossible for the
Dutchman
to hear our weak
transmissions at all. We managed to maintain only the minimum communication
necessary, the bandwidth limited us to text messages only, no voice.

That began the absolutely most miserable period of our
time on Newark. For one, it rained most days, and without Skippy we didn't have
weather forecasts, we could see satellite images, and there was nothing but
solid cloud cover most of the time. The only time we could safely go out of the
cavern was when there were solid clouds overhead, we couldn't risk being seen
walking around, if there was a Kristang presence in orbit that we didn't know
about. Our time outside was limited, if we went for a run or a strenuous hike,
our heat signatures might be detectable even through a thick cloud layer. Most
of the time, we stayed bundled up in our now grimy, smelly and always-damp cold
weather gear. After we'd been stuck inside for three solid days of rain, I
ventured out to collect grass, low-growing brush, and a sort of lichen off the
rocks. We laid it out to dry in the back of the cavern, and two days later, we
risked a small fire in a side cavern that had a hole in the roof. As best we
could, we took off the under layers of our clothes and hung them up to dry. The
clothes I got back smelled like a damp grass fire, but they were warm and dry.
Man, that felt good, my skin had been starting to get minor sores, from
constantly wearing the same wet clothes.

The only food we had left were cold, rehydrated
sludges. At least people back at the main caverns near the cathedral had hot
food, real food, and a variety of it. The worst for our group, huddled together
in our damp, cramped, mud-floor caverns, was the lacking. Lack of exercise.
Lack of anything to do. Lack of purpose. Lack of real food. People, even
dedicated, elite special forces troops, get bored, and little frictions added
up. The team leaders handled the minor disputes well, without me needing to get
involved.

For my part, I found myself missing being able to talk
with Skippy, not only not being able to get detailed status reports, I missed
simply talking with that annoying, insulting beer can. When we finally received
the message from Skippy that the
Flying
Dutchman
was ready to
come to Newark, I felt like dancing. To spare myself the embarrassment, I
didn't. What I did do was pass the word around that we'd soon be getting off
Newark, and I transmitted back to the
Dutchman
the 'go' code, to
activate the jump we had programmed into the autopilot before we departed the
ship.

Seven hours later, Skippy's voice once more boomed out
of my zPhone. "Greetings, Colonel Joe and the whole barrel of monkeys down
there! Tis I, Skippy the Magnificent. Because of my amazing beneficence, I
bring you a starship that is almost as good as new, including such luxuries as
heat, and oxygen! Also, the deluxe rustproof under coating package, at no extra
charge!"

"Skippy!" I couldn't keep the pure glee out
of my voice. "We're safe, there are no Kristang up there?"

"Yessiree, there be no lizards around these
parts. Parts of that ship are still tumbling in orbit, but it's no threat, no
one is alive aboard the wreck. We'd better hit them with a maser anyway, before
we leave, just in case. How are you doing, Joe? I've been monitoring the
weather, and it sure looks depressing."

"I'm all right, Skippy, we're all Ok down here.
Damn, it is good to hear from you. I missed your irascible self," I said
before realizing I was talking on an open channel.

"Ah, you're just happy that I brought the ship
back, so you can get off that miserable frozen mudball."

"That, too. You, uh, allowing monkeys aboard your
squeaky-clean ship?"

"Yuck. I'd forgotten about that. Filthy monkeys,
doing filthy monkey things? Ah, what the hell, you caught me in a generous
mood, Joe. Come on up here, before I change my mind. I've got two dropships on
the way down. We'll need several trips to bring up everyone and all your stuff,
so I loaded clean clothes and fresh food aboard."

"That was very thoughtful of you, Skippy, thank
you."

"Like I said," he grumbled, "hurry,
before I change my mind."

The dropship he sent down to the assault party
couldn't hold all of us, it was the smaller of the two dropships we had left. I
stayed behind, and enjoyed warm, clean, dry clothes and a hot meal of real
food, while the dropship cycled up to orbit and back again. With Captain
Smythe, I sent the Elder AI and the comm node up to the ship, knowing Skippy
was anxious to get those two items aboard as soon as possible. We both had
hoped that, by some miracle, when the new AI got close enough to Skippy, it
would activate somehow, and also that he could figure out how to make the comm
node work.

He called me shortly after the dropship was aboard the
Dutchman
, it surprised me how quickly he ran his analysis of the Elder
artifacts. "No dice, Joe, the AI and the comm node are both dead as
doornails. Crap, this isn't right. What could kill an AI like me? This
frightens me."

"You're certain it was alive at some point, it
wasn't just a canister that never got an AI loaded into it?" That would be
the best scenario for Skippy.

"No such luck, Joe. No, there is a residual
presence there, jumbled data, something bad happened to him. The connection of
the canister, as you call it, to other dimensions has been broken, it's now
merely a beer can of tightly-packed exotic materials. It was a long time ago,
too, I can tell that for certain. And there's something else; whatever happened
to this AI, it happened roughly around the time Newark got pushed out of its
original orbit. That can't be a coincidence. If we could, I'd like to stay here
and investigate this planet in detail."

"We're going to leave our two satellites, here,
right? They'll collect data, we can swing by in the future and see if they
found anything interesting." I wanted to know if our satellites ever saw a
Kristang ship poking around the places we had lived on Newark. Even though we
were going to be careful to take our trash back up with us, there was plenty of
evidence from DNA alone, that humans had been on Newark. If the Kristang ever
learned that fact, they were going to start asking uncomfortable questions, and
I wanted advanced notice if that ever happened. Skippy judged it very unlikely
the Kristang would ever again bother with Newark at all, now that it had been
emptied of useful Elder artifacts, and I agreed with him. I also needed to be
prudent and not assume something very bad would never happen.

"The satellites will help, a bit, what I'd like
to do is perform a deep scan that the satellites can't do. Even for me, a scan
like that could take months, I'd be running time back in other spacetimes,
there's no way to rush that, darn it. I really do need to know what happened
here, it does not make any sense. What bothers me most about it, is this
incident calls into question what I think I know about the Elders. Perhaps I
should have said, that's what bothers me most, other than an entire sentient
species being wiped out, of course."

"I knew what you meant, Skippy. Sorry about your,
I guess, brother AI. Can you do anything with that comm node?"

"No. Frustratingly, no. It's like the first one
we captured from that Kristang research base, it appears to be fully
functional, but it is not connecting to the network. I'll keep working with it,
I don't have much else to do."

Or, I didn't say, maybe there was no longer any
network to connect to. Skippy had to be worrying about that, he didn't need me
to remind him of that awful possibility. If there was no longer any network
enabling the Collective, then our entire fool's errand of a mission was doubly
worthless.

The dropship coming back was a welcome sight, even if
Skippy did set the damned thing down a half kilometer away, and a cold rain was
pouring down from dark gray skies. I didn't care, I was getting safely off
Newark, my entire crew was safely off Newark, in fact, I was the very last
person to leave the planet. Chang was aboard the
Dutchman
, Simms had
stayed at the main cavern until the last person and last piece of equipment and
last scrap of trash had been loaded into a dropship. To speed up clearing
evidence of our presence off the planet, I had ordered Skippy to use both
dropships at the main cavern, until Simms declared they were finished. Until
then, I waited in our cramp, damp cave, in my relatively clean, warm, dry
clothes. With me were two US Army Rangers and three Indian paratroopers who had
volunteered to remain behind with me, because there hadn't been enough room
aboard the first dropship. We played cards and enjoyed eating real, hot food,
and the day and a half delay almost flew by, because we knew we were leaving.

We spent a few minutes peering around rocks in the
caverns, making sure we hadn't left a sludge container or an old sock behind,
then dashed through the rain to the open door of the dropship. I paused at the
bottom of the ramp, my boots still sinking into the chilled mud of Newark.
"What is it, sir?" One of the Rangers asked.

Looking up at the leaden sky, blinking away raindrops,
I said "It seems like I should say something profound, something better
than 'we are
so
out of here'. This planet wasn't always the half frozen
pile of shit we experienced, it was a nice place once, with forests and deserts
and tropical beaches. Like Earth. An entire civilization, and entire species,
an entire
biosphere
was wiped out here. I feel like I should say
something about these people. Maybe more important, say something about whoever
the hell it was that did this."

The Ranger nodded. "We are unlikely to do anything
against beings who moved an entire planet, so how about 'vengeance is mine,
sayeth the Lord'?"

"That's good," I agreed.

One of the Indian soldiers said "We have a saying
that is, in essence, something like that; we say 'karma is a bitch'. Whoever pushed
this planet out of orbit is going to get what's coming to them, one way or
another."

"Amen, brother." The Ranger said, and they
bumped fists.

That was more eloquent than anything I could have
said, so I kicked the mud off my boots, walked up the ramp, and left Newark
behind.

Being aboard the somewhat sterile, artificial
environment of the
Flying
Dutchman
again was like paradise,
compared to the damp chilliness of Newark. The air aboard the ship was warm and
dry, my clothing was clean and dry, I had a bed to sleep in, and real food to
eat. My initial thought was to declare our first day back aboard a 'fend for
yourself' day in the galley, figuring I'd spare anyone from taking a shift in
the galley. Fortunately, Colonel Chang had already set a duty roster, and the Chinese
team had a hot bowl of noodles waiting for me, after I dumped my dirty clothes
off in my cabin and took a too-quick shower. The galley didn't look much different
from before, maybe a bit larger, one of the bulkheads was further away from the
door than I remembered. The whole compartment was a soothing light blue color,
Skippy had done a great job. The bowl of noodles, and a cup of hot tea with
sugar in it, tasted like heaven. I even tried eating the noodles with
chopsticks, I was in such a good mood. "You know what I need?” I asked in
particular, thinking that an hour in the gym would do me good. Or maybe a game
of basketball, I felt soft and slow from laying around inactive too long. I
should have known not to ask an open-ended question like that when Skippy was
around, I’d gotten used to being away from him on Newark.

"A shower?" Skippy suggested from the
speaker in the ceiling.

I shook my head as people laughed. "I showered
after I came aboard."

Skippy made a sniffing sound. “Hmm, doesn't smell like
it. Maybe you could rinse off with some of that degreaser we use on the engine
couplings. Hey, Joe, there weren’t any showers on Newark?”

“No, Skippy, of course not," I replied while
slurping hot noodles.

“Huh. Without a shower, how did you take care of your
morning boner?”

There was nothing I could do, other than sit there
with a sheepish look on my face while people laughed. “Man, I am missing Newark
already,” I said.

Skippy hadn't only repaired the
Flying
Dutchman
,
he had modified it. On the dropship ride up, I'd noticed our formerly very
long, spindly star carrier had been substantially shortened. Shortened to the
point where, instead of long rows of docking hardpoints for shorter-range
starships, there were only three hardpoints, arranged in a single ring. Instead
of the engineering section at the aft end of the ship being so far away that it
appeared not to be attached to the same ship, it was right behind the trio of
hardpoints. "New and improved, Joe," Skippy told me, "except for
the new part. And maybe the improved part. Well, some of it is improved."

I snapped my fingers. "Before I forget, Skippy,
while you refueled the ship, did you get some for yourself?" Dr.
Friedlander on the science team had inquired about Skippy's own fuel requirements,
and that reminded me to ask him. The last time we talked about it, he only had
several thousand years before he ran out of fuel. "You need, something
like, metallic hydrogen?" Which I personally didn't know was a real thing
or not, I thought hydrogen was a gas, not a metal. But then, what did I know of
science?

"Yes, yes, I did, Joe, thank you for asking. It
wasn't much, enough for eight hundred years or so. It will have to do for
now."

"Great. Improvements, huh?" According to the
display, we now had two functioning reactors. Two. Not six, not even four. Two.
"Does reducing the number of reactors count as an improvement?"

"Yes, Joe," Skippy assured me, "these
two reactors make the power of three original ones, they're more reliable, and
they require a lot less maintenance, and their shielding is way better. A
near-miss by an exploding warhead won't knock these new reactors out. Not as
easily, anyway."

We also had only forty percent of the original
compliment of jump drive coils, which was not a problem, Skippy said, because
he'd reconfigured the entire drive, top to bottom. "Should have done this
when we first took this ship," he said proudly, "that Thuranin drive
was crap anyway. Now we can jump thirty percent further, and the coils charge
eighteen percent faster. Also, the coils are divided into three separate banks,
so if one bank of coils goes out of calibration, we can use the two others. Or
just one, if needed, in an emergency."

I'd noticed the three docking hardpoints were empty.
"The
Flower
is gone?"

"Yeah, sorry about that, I know you liked having
a spare tire. That ship contained components and materials I couldn't get
elsewhere, and I needed its reactor to supply power for a while. The
Flower
dipped into the atmosphere to get fuel, after it was done with that, I had to
take it apart, and use most of it as a high-energy particle accelerator, to
manufacture exotic materials. What was left, I loaded with trash and dropped it
into the gas giant. It was a good little ship, Joe, actually, it was a piece of
shit, but it served us well."

Desai wouldn't be happy about that, while she loved
flying the giant
Flying
Dutchman
, the
Flower
was the first
starship she'd ever flown. "You did what you had to, Skippy, you performed
a miracle up here, I'm sure not going to be the ungrateful monkey who second
guesses you. We have only the two dropships?"

"Unfortunately, yes. Plus one drone that can be
used for performing maintenance outside the ship. Should I check if any
dropship dealers in the area are having a holiday blow-out sale?"

"Ha! Somehow, I suspect our credit isn't good out
here."

"Good point. Unless the dealer will swap a
dropship for bananas."

After a hearty bowl of noodles, I went to my office
near the bridge, reading reports on my iPad, trying to act like a real colonel.
What I really wanted to do was go play basketball or just hit the gym. That
could wait for later. There was no rush, we'd done two successful jumps away
from Newark, and Skippy was fiddling with minor adjustments to the jump drive
unit. I had just bent down to untie a boot, to get comfortable for a long
session of intense boredom, when Skippy called me through my zPhone earpiece.

"Hey, Joey, I have some, um, a bit of bad news
for you."

"Ah, damn it, I knew I should have brought tequila
or something on this trip, I need a drink before you tell me any more bad news.
Do I a favor, is this bad news of the
Joe-needs-to-dream-up-a-way-out-of-a-mess-Skippy-got-us-into variety?"

"No, this bad news is of the
pissed-off-aliens-attacking-Earth-and-turning-it-into-a-wasteland,
in-the-process-wiping-out-humanity variety."

"Holy shit." I retied my boot lace with
fingers that were already shaking.

"Blasphemy is a particularly bad idea right now,
Joe. Prayer would be entirely appropriate in this case.”

"What the hell happened? For crying out loud, we
just left Newark behind!"

"Well, heh, heh, you know that Kristang ship I
blew up there?"

"My idea."

"Oh, man, are you
ever
going to give that
up?"