SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) (50 page)

"I have to admit," Skippy said, "this
barrel of monkeys has come up with some decent ideas."

"Thank you, Skippy," I said guardedly.
Knowing Skippy, he was going to add a snarky and insulting comment. He didn't
disappoint me.

"The reason I said 'decent' rather than 'good',
is because these ideas are fine in theory, with the tiny, tiny problem that we
do not actually have a practical way for me to, as you so ignorantly assumed,
hack into a Thuranin ship."

"What?" I asked in shock. "You took
over this ship like," I snapped my fingers, "that. In the blink of an
eye! How did you do that?"

"Uh huh, yup, excellent observation skills you
have there, Joe. I took over the
Dutchman
with my incredible
awesomeness. However, since you apparently weren't paying attention at the
time, the Thuranin brought the
Flower
into a docking pad, before I was
able to seize control of their crude computer and put those idiot cyborgs into
sleep mode. To do that, I had to be close, Joe, by close I mean within about ten
thousand kilometers. We got that close because the
Flying
Dutchman
is a star carrier, that expected to be taking a Kristang frigate aboard. None
of the Thuranin ships in the surveyor task force will let an unknown ship come
that close to them."

"Well, hell, Skippy, you could have told us that
earlier, before we wasted all this time dreaming up impossible plans."

"But you were having so much fun, Joe, I didn't
want to spoil it for you."

"We're not here for fun, Skippy," I said
between gritted teeth. "We may be stupid monkeys to you, but the monkey
brains on this ship, and you are all we've got to come up with a plan to stop
that surveyor ship from destroying our home. You think this is funny-"

"Pathetic would be more accurate," he
mumbled.

"-but we do not. You're telling me it is
impossible for you to hack into these ships?"

"Again with you not paying attention, Joe. You
seem distracted. Are you hungry, or is this just you being perpetually horny so
you can't think straight? I didn't say it was not possible, I said it was not
easy. There is a huge difference between those."

"You really-" Fortunately, Skippy
interrupted me before I said something harsh.

"Let me explain it to you," he said.
"We know those two support ships will be tanking up from the second planet
in that system, a gas giant. We jump in behind the fourth planet, another gas
giant, we jump in on the far side so the planet will mask the gamma rays from our
entry. Then someone takes me on a stealth flyby close to one of those support
ships, and I can hack in."

"Oh, like flying by that relay station. That's a
great idea, Skippy. We do the flyby in a dropship again?"

"Nope, it's not going to be that easy, Joe. To
hack in while I'm flying by, I will need to be within about four thousand
kilometers at the closest approach. A dropship, even stealthed, would be
detected at that range. And the Thuranin wouldn't let a comet get within four
thousand kilometers of them, they'd either move it away or blast it to
pieces."

"No dropship? Then how are we supposed to fly
from one planet to another?"

"Well, heh, heh, you're not going to like this
idea."

He was right, I hated the idea. It was a terrible,
awful, stupid idea from Skippy. It was also the only idea we had, damn it. We
jumped in on the far side of a gas giant, a planet that was a quarter of the
way across the star system from the planet where the Thuranin support ships
were taking on fuel. With the
Dutchman
in stealth mode, we let our orbit
take us around the planet, and Skippy picked up transmissions between the two
support ships. The good news is those ships were alone, we had been afraid
they'd have a frigate or destroyer with them. The bad news is we arrived almost
too late, one ship had already half-filled its fuel tanks, and the other was
not far behind its sister ship. We had to move quickly.

Desai piloted the dropship, with Lieutenant Xi of the
Chinese Air Force as her copilot. I took Skippy with me, plus Giraud as my
backup. In what I thought was an interesting maneuver, Desai burned the
dropship's engines hard while we were on the far side of the gas giant, then
cut power back as we slingshotted around the planet and escaped from its
gravity well. After another three hours of relatively gentle thrust, we were moving
faster than a speeding bullet, on course to intercept the tanker ship as it
hung in low orbit around the second planet.

To remain undetected, we could not burn the engines
for deceleration until both tankers were on the other side of the gas giant,
which was complicated because while we were racing through interplanetary
space, the first tanker finished taking on fuel had moved away. We were cutting
this close, very close. There was only a twelve minute window fire the engines,
before the orbits of one or the other support ships brought them around into
view. Desai decelerated us to the proper speed in a high-G burn maneuver that
busted a blood vessel in my left eye and gave me a nosebleed, while those ships
were hidden by the planet, then she cut off the engines, and I attached my
helmet, stepped outside and gently pushed off to drift away.

Skippy's idea, that I didn't like at all, was for
someone to get into a Kristang spacesuit, with Skippy, and a jetpack. Skippy
was irritated that we called the thing a 'jetpack' instead of an Individual
Maneuvering Unit, his argument was that the thing technically did not have
jets. We ignored him. It was a jetpack. Jetpacks were cool, 'IMU' was not cool.
A stealthed suit, even with a jetpack, was small enough to fly past a lowly
tanker ship, as close as four thousand kilometers, without being detected. In
addition to the jetpack, my suit had a waist belt with an attachment point for
Skippy, and a portable stealth field generator.

The idea was for someone in a suit to take Skippy on a
flyby, using the jetpack to make small course corrections as needed. The suit
wearer and Skippy would then swing around the other side of the planet, fire
the jetpack to climb into a slightly higher orbit, where the dropship would be
to retrieve them eventually. That was the plan, anyway.

This idiotic plan was why I was hanging seemingly
motionless in space, with the target gas giant planet a basketball-sized orange
blob in front of me. With gentle puffs of thrusters, Desai moved the dropship
safely away from me, then she fired the engines to make the dropship swing much
wider around the planet.

"Captain Desai, can you hear me?" I asked.

"Loud and clear, Colonel," she replied.

"Skippy, we're communicating through the
wormhole?" We were still close enough to the dropship that it might be
able to pick up my faint transmission directly.

"Yes, affirmative. Wormhole is active and
operating nominally," Skippy reported. To allow us to talk to the
dropship, without the Thuranin detecting our transmissions, Skippy had done his
microwormhole trick again. One end of the wormhole was near the dropship and
moved with that spacecraft, the other end stayed a hundred fifty meters behind
Skippy. According to that super smart beer can, it was extremely unlikely the
Thuranin ships could detect either our very low-power transmissions, or the
faint radiation from the microwormhole. That was good, because small as one
person in a suit was, I was way too large to fit through that super tiny
wormhole.

"Great. To be safe, Desai, we don't transmit if
either of those Thuranin ships are line of sight to us."

"Understood, Colonel," she agreed.
"Cutting thrust in 3, 2, 1 now. The first Thuranin ship should be coming
around the planet in two minutes, forty seconds."

The sensors built into my suit were not sensitive
enough to detect the ships yet, I had to take Desai's word for it. For the next
four and a half hours, I zoomed through empty space, the planet ahead of me
growing larger in my vision. Really, I was racing through space, only there was
no sensation of movement. No reference point except the giant planet. Skippy
and I chatted only occasionally, there wasn't much to talk about, other than
him instructing me to make tiny course corrections with the jetpack. After four
hours, he told me to activate the stealth field. The stealth unit required a
lot of power, and the generator we brought along could only supply power for a
couple hours. If all went well, a couple hours of stealth is all we would need.

If all went well.

"There's the first ship," Skippy announced.
"Right on time, it hasn't altered its orbit at all. Picking up ship to
ship transmissions, there are still only those two support ships in
system." We had been concerned there might be a warship escorting the
tankers, there didn't appear to be. This deep inside Thuranin territory, they
didn't see a need to escort such low-value ships.

A symbol for the first ship popped up on the inside of
my helmet faceplate, it was hugging the crescent of the planet, climbing away
slowly. We waited, and a symbol for the second ship popped up, it was still too
far away for me to see with the naked eye.

"Uh, oh," Skippy said, "we've got a problem.
A big, big problem."

"What is it? They detected us?"

"No, those crappy ships couldn't see us yet even
if we were lighting off fireworks out here. That second ship has been slower to
take on fuel because of a fault with its drogue, the unit at the bottom of the
fuel line it has lowered into the atmosphere. The fault has gotten worse, the
Thuranin have decided to retract the fuel line now, even though the ship's
tanks are only 82% full."

"Yeah, so?" I couldn't see how a flying gas
station was a problem for us.

"So, as soon as the drogue is clear of the
atmosphere, that ship will be changing course to join the other ship, climbing
out of orbit to jump distance. From its transmissions, I can predict the ship's
course, and it is a very big problem. The jetpack does not have enough fuel to
alter our course sufficiently that we can intercept that ship, not within four
thousand kilometers. We'll be too far away for me to hack into their
systems." He sounded genuinely sad. "I'm sorry, Joe, we're going to
miss this chance."

Crap. "This is our only chance. You sure where
that ship is going?"

"Yes, I am sure. The degree of uncertainty is not
great enough to make us intercepting that ship be a realistic possibility. It
is simple orbital mechanics, Joe, the jetpack does not contain enough
fuel."

"Force equals mass times acceleration?" I
asked.

"Um, yeah. I'm surprised you know-"

"Our problem right now isn't the acceleration
part, it's the mass, right?"

"Correct. Between me, you, the stealth field
generator, and the suit, the jetpack can't manage to provide the delta vee, the
change in velocity, for us to alter course sufficiently to come close to that
ship."

"The problem isn't you, either, it's me and this
suit."

"Mostly the suit, it has more than twice your
mass, Joe."

"Yeah, I can't take the suit off, so." I
reached down to unbuckle the fasteners that held my suit attached to the
jetpack.

"Joe, what are you doing? We need that jetpack,
you dumb monkey."

The jetpack came loose, I swung it around in front of
me, and held it steady with my legs.  Although in zero gravity is weighed
nothing, its substantial mass made it awkward to move around. "No, Skippy,
you
need the jetpack." The stupid tool belt fastener was on the
side, not the front, and to undo it, I had to turn a knob to expose the button.
It was intended as a safety feature, I'm sure. Right then, it was a pain in the
ass. The tool belt finally came undone, and I pulled it tightly around the
jetpack, trying to keep the mass of Skippy and the stealth field generator centered.
"There, done." I let go of the jetpack with my legs, and it hung
right in front of me. "Tell me how to program a course into this
thing," I asked. The jetpack had a limited ability to be controlled
remotely from a module strapped to my left wrist.

"A course? Where?" Skippy sounded panicked.
"Back to the dropship?"

"No, Skippy," I explained patiently, "a
course to take you within four thousand kilometers of that tanker ship. You
said it, we're going to miss this chance if the jetpack has to move my mass.
This is our
only
chance, Skippy, our only chance to follow that ship to
the surveyor and destroy it. Our only chance to stop the Thuranin from reaching
my home planet and killing everyone. You are not going to miss that chance.
You're going to flyby that ship, you're going to hack into it, and you're going
to rendezvous with the dropship. Then you are going to do everything you can to
stop that surveyor ship."

"May I point out the glaringly obvious flaw in
your plan, you brainless monkey?"

"The fact that, without the jetpack, I'm going to
hit the atmosphere and burn up? Yeah, I know that, Skippy. I don't need to be
reminded of that, thank you very much."

"Shit. Joe, this is the second time you've
offered to sacrifice yourself for a noble cause-"

"The first time, I offered to sacrifice myself
for you, you little shithead."

"No cause could be more noble indeed."

"I offered to sacrifice myself for you, because
you're more valuable to the mission than I am. The
Dutchman
can go on
without me, Chang will make a fine commander. That surveyor ship can be stopped
without me, but it can't be stopped without you. Unless I'm missing something
here."

"No, astonishing as it may seem, your logic is
correct on this one. Damn, why does the monkey pick now to start using
logic?"

Despite the situation, he made me smile. "I love
you too, Skippy. You see an alternative? If we use the jetpack to rendezvous
with the dropship, by the time we get there, those two tankers will have jumped
away already, and we'll never find them. We will lose our one chance to
intercept that surveyor ship before it reaches Earth."

"It will take the tankers longer than you think
to reach a safe jump distance; this planet has a deep gravity well and they are
heavily loaded with fuel. You are correct, however, that this is the only
opportunity I see for being able to track these ships, and locate the
surveyor."

"Right," I breathed heavily, and
unintentionally fogged the faceplate for a second. "Is there any way to get
you to within four thousand kilometers of that ship, and also make sure I don't
hit the atmosphere? Can we split the difference, use the jetpack to move both
of us just enough so I miss the planet, then you fly off to intercept the
tanker?"

Skippy replied immediately, which was a bad sign. If
there was any chance for both of us to get out of this, he would have paused a
split second to run a couple million calculations. "Given the laws of
physics, which I can't screw with because those tankers would detect us, the
answer is, unfortunately, no. Joe, I'm sorry."

"You have nothing to be sorry about."

"I know that. 'Sorry' is something you monkeys
say as a social courtesy, whether you mean it or not. That custom seems
particularly stupid now."

"I appreciate the effort, Skippy. All right,
before I change my mind," I was deliberately not looking at the planet
ahead, "can you program the jetpack to fly you near that tanker, and I'll
engage it with this controller on my wrist?"

"I don't like this, Joe."

"I'm not jumping for joy about it either,
Skippy."

"Jetpack autonomous navigation system has been
programmed. Ready." He simulated taking a deep breath. "Are you sure
about this, Joe? It seems like such a waste."

"Skippy, I'm a soldier. I knew the risks coming
out here," my voice choked up a bit and I paused to swallow hard. "I
am not going to do nothing, and let that surveyor ship reach Earth. If you have
a better idea, I am all ears."

"Legitimately, no, no, I do not have any other
idea. Joe, there is a big difference, or there should be, between taking a risk
of dying, and taking an action that will result in certain death. Suicide does
not seem like something a soldier should do."

"Skippy, let's get real here, Ok? Yeah, in a way,
this is suicide, but really, it is only an issue of timing."

"You'll need to explain that one."

"This whole mission is suicide, I explained that
to everyone before we left Earth. Be straight with me, what are the odds we
humans can fly the
Dutchman
back to Earth by ourselves, after you leave
us for Collective heaven, or whatever the hell it is you're looking for?"