SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) (51 page)

"Zero. Well, close enough to zero that your
chances of success are statistically insignificant. If you like, I can recite
the actual odds to a hundred decimal points, however, I expect you are
satisfied with 'meh' level math on this one."

"You got that right."

"Captain Desai has become a skilled starship
pilot, for, you know, a monkey, and she has trained other pilots well enough
for basic maneuvers. My calculation of your odds are no reflection on your
merry band of pirates, they are all dedicated, and, considering your species'
miserably low level of development, reasonably intelligent, no offense."

Inside my helmet, I had to smile and roll my eyes. In
one sentence, he insults us, and says he intended no offense. Sometimes I
wondered about his intelligence.

He continued. "The problem is the
Flying
Dutchman
is an incredibly complex machine, and you humans have no idea how it works, not
really. If anything goes wrong, there is zero possibility you can fix it. Even
routine maintenance, which I have been doing for you using Thuranin robots, is
beyond your capabilities. The jump drive coils, for example, will drift out of
calibration with each time you jump. Without me fine-tuning the jump system, I
estimate the drive will become unusable within twenty, certainly twenty five
jumps. Jumps that you program will be so inaccurate, that you would have no
realistic chance to emerge near a wormhole. You'd have to jump as close as you
can, and fly through possibly half a lightyear of normal space to where a
wormhole is going to open. Frankly, you will run out of time, and food, before
you got home. Although, by that time, the jump drive would be so hopelessly
screwed up, you would not be able to jump at all, anyway."

"Is there any way you can load a submind into the
ship's computer, to take care of that maintenance stuff for us, after you
leave?"

"Ha, ha! No way, dude," Skippy laughed.
"The memory and processing power on the
Dutchman
are much too small
to contain a stable submind. It might work fine for a week, maybe two, then it
would start going funky on you, and without me to adjust it, the submind would
go senile and destroy the ship, So, no to that one. Before you ask, I could reload
the original Thuranin AI into the computer, modified to work with you instead
of wiping you out as soon as it became aware of your presence. That would not
help, the Thuranin's cyborg nature is integrated into their AIs to such an
extent that the AI cannot completely control the ship without them. That is
both because the Thuranin wish their minds to be as close as possible to an AI,
and because the Thuranin don't want an AI to be able to run the ship without
them, for security reasons. Especially because the Thuranin are quite rightly
concerned about the Maxohlx hacking into their systems. Many crucial control
and maintenance functions require cyborg participation, particularly in
controlling the robots. Humans can't fill the role of the Thuranin, and the
system's processing substrate lacks the capacity for me to replicate the cyborg
function inside it."

"Uh huh. Like I said before, this whole fool's
errand is a suicide mission, and me falling into this planet is only shortening
the trip somewhat for me."

"Unfortunately, I am forced to agree with your
point. I still do not like it. Joe, I need to understand something. You came
out here, knowing there is almost no possibility that you will ever return to
Earth. Why? Why did you come with me?"

"The short answer is that you had that wormhole
on a timer, and if we didn't come out here with you, there would be a whole lot
of pissed off lizards and little green men coming to Earth and asking awkward
questions. Beyond that, I came out here because I promised you that I would,
it's that simple. We have a bargain, you sure kept your end of it, this is my
end of the deal. We owe you, Skippy, we humans owe you more than we can ever
repay. Billions of humans are safe today, because of you. I understand you
don't belong with us, that you need to go home, or find answers about who you
are and where you came from.”

“Huh. You monkeys are more complicated than I
expected.”

“Yup, sure. Now, I'll give you a little push, so you
can drift away before I engage the jetpack?"

"Yes, it would be best if you were at least
eighty meters away before the jetpack fires thrusters."

There not being much left to say, I hugged the jetpack
tight to my chest, then pushed it away, trying not to make it wobble or spin.
My best effort left it turning ever so slowly, and left me spinning also. In a
maneuver I had practiced during training, I used my arms and legs to halt my
spin, so that Skippy and the jetpack were off to my left, and I was facing the
planet. Facing it, facing it right there. Damn, it looked close already.
"Hey, Skippy, should I go silent now? You're taking the microwormhole with
you, right?"

"You are now outside the stealth field, so, yes,
you should cease even your low-power transmissions. I will send a tight beam
message to you after I fly by the tanker; that should be within the next twenty
seven minutes. Soon after I fly past the tanker, it will go behind the horizon
of the planet, and we can communicate again. About forty minutes from
now."

I almost said 'goodbye' before catching myself at the
last moment. "Talk to you then, Skippy."

Man, that was a long forty minutes. On the display
inside the helmet faceplate, I was able to track the two tanker ships, they
were big, they were close and they weren't using stealth. In fact, their crews
were chatting and exchanging data almost continuously, it would have been
impossible not to notice them. Of Skippy and the dropship, hidden inside their
stealth fields, I saw and heard nothing. The planet kept growing larger until
it completely filled my view, in order to see the darkness of space I had to
turn my head.

And, darn it, the view was eerily beautiful. The
planet below me was mostly orange in color, when I left the dropship, from that
far away it had been an orange blob the size of a basketball. Now I was close
enough to see details, and it looked like a creamsicle; swirls of orange and
white, with less prominent streaks of purple, light browns and greens. The
planet didn’t have a big spot like Jupiter had, the cloud formations were more
subtle; great swaths of darker or lighter clouds stretching across an entire
hemisphere. Some of the clouds below were moving so fast I could see them
changing as I watched, it was hypnotic. Clouds swirling and spinning and
merging with each other and splitting apart. The speed at which the upper
atmosphere was moving must have been mind-boggling, this is one case when I
wished I could talk with Skippy, so he could bore me with sciency details.
Right then, it would have been good to talk with anyone. I’d never felt so
alone in my life; even when my dropship was frozen inside a comet I had at
least been in a familiar environment. Walls, floor, ceiling, seats, displays
and controls, and a breathable atmosphere. In my alien space suit, racing silently
just above the cloud tops, there was nothing familiar or comforting around me.
Nothing in sight was welcoming to warm-blooded, air-breathing creatures. The
view was beautiful in its cold, unending indifference to life.

Almost exactly at the thirty two minute mark, I
received a short "Mission successful" message from Skippy, then
nothing for another eight minutes. That eight minutes was awful, made worse
because my helmet display kept flashing a warning that I was going to hit the
planet's thick atmosphere in another thirty nine minutes, and I didn't know how
to turn the damned thing off. It was annoying.

Finally, another message from Skippy. "We did it,
Joe! Whenever that tanker jumps, it's going to leave behind drones like a trail
of breadcrumbs. And, major bonus, I was able to hack into their navigation
system, and download data. We now know where and when the tankers will
rendezvous with the surveyor ship! This mission is totally successful."

Except for the part about me falling into a planet.
"Excellent, Skippy, outstanding. I knew we could count on you. Sincerely,
thank you, from all of us."

"How are you doing?" He asked.

"Ok so far," I tried saying that as a joke.
The stupid display flashed another warning at me, a warning I didn't need.

“So far? Is this like the old joke about the guy who
falls off a building, and when he is halfway to the sidewalk below, he thinks
to himself ‘Ok so far’?”

“Something like that, yeah, Skippy.”

"Is there anything I can do, Joe?"

"I don't know, Skippy, is there anything you can
do?" Part of me was hoping he'd thought up a brilliant plan.

"About the major problem, no, I got nothing.
Sorry. Anything else I can do for you?"

"Mmm, keep talking to me? Hey, I know. DJ
Skippy-Skip-"

"And the Fresh Tunes, don't forget the Fresh Tunes.
I also go by Grandmaster Skip."

"Sure, you got it. Play some music for me,
please. You have music stored in your memory, right? Human music."

"Uh huh. All of it."

"
All
?"

"Yup. Well, all music that was stored in digital
format, while I was on Earth. What type of music do you want?"

It still surprised me how much data Skippy could
store. While we were on Earth, he'd told me that he had downloaded the entire
internet, including the darknet, I hadn't quite believed him.
"Anything."

"Bluegrass?"

"Anything but bluegrass."

My helmet speakers played some new age type soothing
instrumental thing, something I hadn't heard before. It was nice, and
appropriate.

"Thanks, Grandmaster Skip."

He didn't reply immediately, making my heart leap with
fear that something had gone wrong. "Joe," he finally said, "I
have been alive for a very, very long time, millions of years, I think. It just
occurred to me that, no matter how much longer I exist, in all the infinite
universes of probability, I will never talk to you again." He sounded
convincingly broken up about it, his voice was unsteady. "That makes me
very sad."

"You are an incredibly arrogant, irritating, smug
little shithead, Skippy, but I'm going to miss you too."

"Joe, what do you want to do with your
stuff?"

That seemed an odd question, Skippy may have been
nervous and searching for something to talk about. Before I left Earth, again,
I had updated my will through an Army lawyer; my parents would get everything,
including my back pay. The lawyer had explained that, in the extremely likely
event the
Dutchman
was never heard from again, I would be declared dead
after three years, and my Army pay would stop accruing. It sucked, but that was
the deal offered to everyone in the ExFor, I wouldn't get, and didn't request,
special treatment. "You mean my stuff aboard the
Dutchman
? Lt
Colonel Chang will know what to do with it." There wasn't much anyway.
"Hey, promise me you won't give him a hard time?"

"Ugh, all right, damn, you hate me having any
fun. No worse than I give you."

"Fair enough."

He simulated a sigh. "Would you like me to keep
talking to you, or do you prefer silence at this time?"

"Talking, please. Hey, it won't be silent when I
hit the atmosphere, will it? The air particles, molecules, atoms, whatever,
will start bouncing off my helmet, and I'll hear that, I think."

"You will hear sound transmitted through the
outside of the helmet, yes. Very high pitched sound at first, because you are
moving at high supersonic speed. Then there will be a roaring sound. The visor
that sits atop your helmet will automatically drop down and cover the faceplate
to protect it, you won't have a real view then. The faceplate will switch to
showing images from the exterior cameras."

"I don't like that. Can you override the visor? I
want to see."

"Without the visor," Skippy warned,
"the faceplate will deteriorate quickly. It is made of a tough material so
it won't melt, but it will fog, and you will be blinded anyway."

"All right, fine. It's going to be quick, right?
When I hit the atmosphere, this suit won't last long." The cloud tops
below me looked close enough for me to reach out and touch them already.

"Although I want to tell you yes, the answer is
no. Kristang armor is rugged, it will last longer than you expect. Or, in this
case, I'm very sad to say, longer than you will want. The suit will hold
together long enough for you to get sufficiently deep in the atmosphere, that
the force of deceleration will crush you inside the suit. Other than your
bones, your soft tissue will become a liquefied, hmm, guess you don’t need to
hear about that. The good news is you should lose consciousness around twelve
gees."

Good news? In context, I guess it was good news.
"Wow, these suits are super tough. This material can take all that
heat?"

"No, no. The outer protective layers of the suit
will flake off, in a process called ablation. As the material heats up, it will
ablate away, exposing fresh layers below, this protects the integrity of the
suit, and the wearer, as long as possible. In combat, ablation technology
defends the wearer against directed-energy weapons such as masers and particle
beams. And-"