SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) (7 page)

“Skippy? Are you about to tell me something you
overhead? Remember the talk we had about privacy?”

“Sure, but-”

“Does whatever you heard pose a threat to the ship?”

“No, but-”

“Listen, Skippy, you want people to treat you as a
person, and not as a computer, right?”

“Yes.”

“Here is what a person would do, assuming the person
is a friend; he would simply say something like ‘head’s up, dude, Venkman’s on
her way to pester you’.”

“I am not calling you, ‘dude’, Joe. How about ‘chum’?”

“Damn, Skippy, you need some context on your
understanding of slang. Nobody has used the word ‘chum’ that way since, like,
nerdy English boarding schools in the 1930s. Chum is fish guts you throw over
the side of the boat as bait.”

“Hmm. You sure about that?”

“Pretty sure, yeah. You call someone ‘chum’ and that
majorly sets off their social awkwardness alarm.”

“Huh. Damn, you monkeys just came out of the freakin’
trees, and already you’ve got inscrutable social rules. All right, how about if
I simply say ‘Joe, Venkman’s on the warpath and she’s on the way to your
office’?”

“Now that’s cool, Skippy, you’re getting the idea.”

“Unbelievable. An entire galaxy for me to learn about,
after being asleep for a million years, and what am I cluttering up my memory
with? The current social customs of filthy, ignorant monkeys. Oh, man, I am totally
wasting my life.”

“How much unused memory do you have? Like, uh,” I
tried to remember a ginormous number that was in some Wikipedia article I had
glanced at, “it’s measured in yottabytes, something like that?”

“Ha! A puny yottabyte? Hahahahahahahahaha!” For a
moment, he was laughing so hard, he couldn’t speak. “Damn that is precious!
Joey, a yottabyte is such a tiny part of my memory capacity, I couldn’t measure
something that small. A yottabyte,” he chuckled, “that’s a good one. Ha!”

“Uh huh, so, you learning about monkey, I mean, oh.
Damn it! Now you’ve got me calling us monkeys. Info about human social customs
doesn’t take up a significant part of your memory, so what’s the harm?”

“The harm? What’s the harm in a few worms in an apple,
Joe? What's the harm in a few bacteria on your food? It’s the contamination
that I’m worried about. Come on, it wasn’t that long ago that the social
customs of your species were limited to picking lice out of each other’s fur.
And, eating the lice, yuck.”

“Hey, those lice have got to go somewhere. They’re
loaded with protein.”

“Oh. My. God. See? It’s having that kind of thinking,
anywhere in my memory, that worries me. To have monkey ideas in my-”

“Hello, Mister, or is it, Captain,” Venkman knocked on
the frame of the door to my office, “or Colonel, Bishop? They didn’t give us a
briefing on military protocol before we left.”

“Hello, Doctor,” I said, rose from my chair, and
gestured for her to sit. “My rank is colonel, my position aboard the ship is
captain, I guess you call me Colonel, that’s the easiest, I think.”

“Very well, Colonel.” She glanced around my office,
nothing more than a Thuranin storage closet that had been emptied out, and
outfitted with a desk and three chairs. And a small cabinet that, so far,
didn’t have anything in it. The only items I had added were a laptop that I
rarely used, an iPad that I used all the time, and a coffee mug that I’d taken
from the galley and not yet returned. No paper, no pencils or pens, no calendar
with pretty landscape photos. Not even a photo of my family. I should have
brought one, there hadn’t been time before we left. “I’m told that you have
ordered the ship to prepare to leave this star system," she said, "to
proceed to the next target, because we did not locate an Elder communications
node here. The science team, myself included, would like you to reconsider. We
would appreciate an opportunity to collect more data about this system. We have
been using this ship’s extraordinary sensors, and have gathered valuable
information, however, the data we’ve collected to date presents an incomplete
picture. Without a complete data set to analyze, we won’t be able to draw any
conclusions. And none of the science team has been aboard the alien station
yet. We've seen the video sent back by the special forces teams, it is not the
same as being there.”

This was a conversation I didn’t want to have,
shouldn’t need to have. We had covered this subject already.

Before we left Earth, I wrote down our mission
objectives, so everyone who signed on would understand exactly why the
Dutchman
was going back out. And so they were completely, one hundred percent, aware of
the risk they'd be taking by coming aboard. My hope had been to discourage
people from coming aboard. It hadn't worked. Here the objectives are in
easy-to-read bullet format, something I'd seen recommended in officer training
somewhere.

1)
                 
Prevent
other species from discovering humans had stolen a starship, and were involved
in shutting down a wormhole

2)
                 
Where
it doesn't interfere with item 1 above, keep Skippy satisfied that we are
making a serious effort to help him contact the Collective

3)
                 
Where
it doesn't interfere with Items 1 & 2 above, return the crew safely to
Earth, someday, if we can. Like that's ever going to happen. That last sentence
wasn't actually part of the written objectives; it was my own comment.

You might think the order of the first two items were
reversed, that the whole purpose of the
Dutchman
going back out, was for
Skippy to contact the Collective. You would be correct about the purpose of the
trip, however that was not the primary objective for the crew. We owed Skippy
our loyalty. We didn't owe him so much loyalty that we would risk the safety of
our home planet and our entire species. Humans stealing a starship was bad
enough, the Thuranin would be immensely pissed, but starships being destroyed
or captured, even by lesser species, was not all that unusual. If the Maxohlx
or Rindhalu ever learned humans had a way to manipulate wormholes, a technology
even they could only dream of, they would rip our planet apart to get our
secret.

And you might think objective 2 should be simply 'help
Skippy contact the Collective'. You would be wrong there. We didn't know
whether it was possible to contact the Collective, even whether they still
existed. Or had ever existed, Skippy's memory in that area was not the
greatest. All we could do is make Skippy happy that we were keeping up our end
of the bargain, until he either contacted the Collective, or gave up. Keep
Skippy happy that we were making a sincere effort to help him, whether we
actually were able to usefully help him or not. In the back of my mind was a
time limit, of maybe a year, that we would devote to helping Skippy. If we
hadn't found a way to contact the Collective by then, my plan was to gently
convince Skippy to give up that particular quest. How I could convince a
stubborn alien AI, who could devote a thousand years to a task without thinking
about it, was something I'd figure out when we got there. For me, this
constitutes fairly advanced planning, compared to the way I normally do things.

The most important objective for prospective crew
members to read was number three. Not so much the text of that objective, but
its position in the mission objectives order of priorities. Our return to
Earth, our survival, was third in line. Everyone needed to understand that. If
they didn't believe it, they could go stare at the collection of self-destruct
tactical nuclear devices in one of our cargo bays.

Perhaps even more important for prospective crew
members was objective Four. Oh, there is no objective Four on the list, you
say? You are correct. There is no fourth objective like 'learning important sciency
stuff', or 'exploring the galaxy', or 'getting intel about our potential
enemies' or 'gathering useful advanced technology equipment', or even 'engaging
in special operations warfare against the enemies of mankind'. If we could do
any of those not-one-of-our-objectives-things without interfering with the
three stated objectives, then great. If not, that's tough. I was not going to
risk mission success, or lives, to make our science team happy. And I sure as
hell wasn't going to approve any combat operations unless we absolutely had no
choice. Or, I guess technically, not unless engaging in combat was a better
option than not engaging in combat. If that meant our gung-ho special forces
and brainy science team were unhappy and bored, so be it. In fact, I would
consider our mission a complete success if we were able to return to Earth
safely, without a single dangerous or interesting thing happening. Semper
Taedium could be our motto: 'Always Boredom'. I'd be happy with that.

Which is why I was mildly irritated that Venkman
brought up the subject now. Actually, not irritated that he raised the
question, he had a right to ask, just as I had a right to say no. What
irritated me was his attitude, that I had ordered the
Dutchman
to
prepare for departure, only because of my ignorance, I couldn’t see the
potential for important scientific discoveries right where we are. What I
wanted to do was tell him flatly no, hell no, and not to question my orders
again. Doing that would have only proved his point that I was too young and
inexperienced to command a starship. Or, for that matter, a rowboat. Slapping
him down would have felt good. Commanders don’t often get to do what feels
good, they have to do what is good for the mission, and sowing dissension among
the crew would have hurt morale. No matter how large the
Flying
Dutchman
was, we had seventy people living in a limited space, seeing the same bulkheads
every day. At least I, and most of the soldiers and pilots, had been able to
get off the
Dutchman
, go over to the Kristang space station, and look at
something different for a while. The science team had been stuck inside the
ship since they came aboard.

I tried to let her down gently. “Doctor, I appreciate
your eagerness for scientific inquiry,” I said, surprising myself at using such
fancy words, “and I need to balance that potential gain in humanity’s
understanding of the universe, against the risk of us being discovered here.
The longer we remain here, the greater the risk to the overall mission, and to
all our lives. This star system, particularly, because it previously had a
Kristang presence, has an unacceptably high risk that enemy ships could jump in
here at any moment, and we can’t risk that. I’m sorry, Doctor. You may use the
ship’s sensors, as long as you do not interfere with the crew, until we are
ready to jump.”

“Captain, perhaps we- “

“Doctor Venkman,” I waved a hand to stop her from
talking, “you may be used to an academic setting, where discussion and debate
are encouraged. This is a military vessel, a warship. As the commander, I
welcome advice from my staff, however, once I have made a decision, it is
final, and not open to debate.” We might be traveling between the stars
together for a long time, I thought it important to lay the ground rules early,
and avoid problems later.

I was a hundred percent right. I still felt like a
jerk.

The abandoned space station was somewhat of a
disappointment, in terms of our not finding an Elder communications node there.
Thinking longer term for the mission, it was a great success in my opinion. All
of our pilots had opportunities to fly during a real mission, and all of the
SpecOps troops gained experience with powered armor space suits in a real
operation. All of the troops, by the time we left the space station behind, had
experience free diving in space. Other than a few very minor incidents that
were dealt with quickly and professionally, I felt everyone had passed the test
to be a space diver, and I asked Skippy to fabricate a special badge to wear on
their uniforms. The badge was based on the US Army’s Freefall Parachutist
badge, with the difference being we replaced the tail feathers at the top with
an arc of three stars. Pilots received spaceflight wings, similar to the Army
Aviator badge, with the center shield replaced by a five-pointed star.

Sure, the new badges were not official, and UNEF may
frown at the idea if we ever got back home. In the meantime, the crew were
thrilled to be wearing badges that no other humans had qualified for. My
awarding badges began the process of Lt Williams warming up to me, slightly.
After the award ceremony, we had a party in the galley, a party that spilled
out into the corridor because our galley wasn’t large enough. The strongest
beverage available was iced tea, I took a tall, cold glass and made my way over
to Williams, who was talking with his four-man SEAL team. Pointing to the Navy
Special Warfare insignia he wore, I said “Lieutenant, we need to change the
acronym for your team.”

“How’s that, sir?” He asked warily.

“SEAL is SEa, Air, Land, right? After today, it should
be SEALS for SEa, Air, Land and
Space
.”

 “I think you’re right about that, sir,” he said with
an ear-to-ear grin.

Garcia asked “What would the plural of that be?
SEALSes?”

“Oh, man,” Skippy interjected. “Do not ask Joe
anything about grammar, he butchers the language horribly. Lieutenant Williams,
sincere congratulations to you and your team.”

“For realz, Skippy?” I asked, figuring he was inevitably
going to add a disparaging comment about monkeys.

“For realz this time, Joe. Considering that you are,
after all, a barrel of primitive monkeys, this crew has accomplished a lot in a
short time. I have to give you props for that.”

I am not a morning person. I am not even a mid-morning
person. As a soldier, I have to get up early, and I manage to do it, it still
doesn't come naturally. Because of the crew schedule that some idiot put
together, an idiot whose name rhymes with 'Shmoe Bishop', my duty shift on the
bridge started at 4AM ship time, so I dragged my ass out of bed an hour early.
Time enough for a shower and a cup of coffee. Without coffee, I was mostly
nonfunctional in the morning.

What had caused me to wake up an hour early wasn’t an
alarm, or Skippy, it was anxiety. We had gotten lucky checking out the
abandoned space station, lucky not in the sense that we found something useful,
lucky in that we had found the entire star system abandoned, and that we hadn’t
gotten into a fight, or had to plan some sort of risky combat. The potential
for combat had gotten the special forces keyed up and kept them focused, and
gave them experience using powered armor space suits. In zero gravity and hard
vacuum. That was all good.

What wasn’t good was, our next target was still way
too dangerous. When we left the abandoned space station behind, we had set
course for the second target, because we didn't have an alternative. The
advantage of the second target was that Skippy knew for sure there was a comm
node there. The disadvantage of the second target is that the whole area was
closely monitored by the Maxohlx and by Sentinels. “Skippy, I got a question.”

“Good morning, Joe, I’m going to ignore your poor
grammar for the moment."

"Poor grammar?" I asked, surprised.

"You
have
a question, Joe, you don't
got
a question. At least you didn't say that you
gots
a question. Damn, you
already butcher the English language enough with your terrible accent."

"Accent? What's wrong with the way I talk?"
I talked the way every native New Englander north of Boston talked. Normal.
Everybody else had a terrible accent.

"What's wrong? Let's start with the way you
pronounce 'car' like 'cah', you leave the Rs out of everything. Tell me, Joe,
were your ancestors so poor they had to sell all the letter Rs?"

"No, Skippy, we save all those Rs so we can use
them on words that should have an R at the end, but don't. Like, my uncle Norm
retired to where?" Which I pronounced 'Nahm' and 'way-uh'.

"That's easy, he's in Florida."

"Wrong! See, he lives in Florider. And the
capital of Maine isn't Au-gust-a, it's Auguster."

"Wow. Incredible. How did you and your buddy
Cornpone ever manage to communicate? With your Maine accent and his Southern
drawl, it's like neither of you is speaking English."

"We don't speak English, Skippy, we speak
American. And we managed to communicate just fine, thank you."

"If you say so, Joe. I have noticed you tone down
your accent around most people. Like, at home you say 'Ayuh', but here you say
'yes' or ‘yeah’ or 'uh-huh'. When you visited your parents, before we left
Earth, you were all like 'Ayuh' and 'wicked pissah' and your 'fah-tha' shot a
'de-ah', and your mother was cooking 'pah-ster' for spaghetti. Most of it was
utterly incomprehensible to me."

"Ayuh. You gots to pay attention they-uh,
Skippy-O."

"Oh, forget it. What is your question?”

“We started looking for this comm node dingus in
places where some database said it should be, right?”

"Ayuh," Skippy said with a chuckle,
"don’t you usually look for something in a place you know where it is?”

“Duh, yeah, that’s not my point- “

“You so rarely have a point, I felt safe to assume
this time was no different.”

My sleep-addled brain being not ready for snappy
comebacks, I ignored his trying to bait me into an argument. “My point is, we
hit that asteroid base, because you knew that place had a comm node. There are
other places that have a comm node for sure, we decided those places are too
risky, too tough for us to hit.”

“In your opinion, they are too difficult,” he said
sourly.

Ignoring him, I continued. “Next you looked at places
that might have one of these Elder comm node thingies, because the place is
known to have a bunch of other Elder crap, right?”

“If this conversation is going to be you telling me a
bunch of obvious stuff I already know, I’ll tune out for a while and let you
talk. Wake me when you’re done.”

“Can we go one step further?”

“Damn it, now you have my attention, on the
infinitesimally tiny chance you might say something monkeys consider
intelligent. Go ahead, amuse me.”

“The first step was to look where we know there is a
comm node, because somebody found an Elder site, got a comm node and logged it
in a database. We already did that, when we raided the asteroid base. The
second step is to look where there might be a comm node, because somebody found
an Elder site, got a bunch of other Elder stuff, and logged that other stuff in
it a database.”

“So far, I am not blown away by your logic.”

“So, step three,” I continued to ignore him, “is for
us to look in places that should have comm nodes, but they aren’t in a
database, because nobody has found those Elder sites yet.”

“Huh? I’m not following you. How are we supposed to
look in a site that hasn’t been found yet?”

“By you figuring out where the Elders
would
have put stuff, comparing it to a map of Elder sites the Thuranin and Jeraptha
know about, and determining where there
should
be Elder sites that
nobody knows about.”

“By how? Guessing?” He snorted.

“No, by,” I searched for the right word to use, “I
don’t know, extrapolating, inferring, deducing, predicting? Whatever you want
to call it. You know the Elders better than anyone in the galaxy today. You can
figure where they would likely have had colonies, space stations, that sort of
thing, right?”

“Huh.” This time, his ‘huh’ wasn’t a question.

“You have a map of Elder sites the Thuranin know
about, and sites the Jeraptha know about, right?”

“Yes, the two mostly overlap, there isn’t much either
side knows about, that the other side doesn’t also know.  This war has been
going on for a very long time, much territory has swapped back and forth
several times.”

“Can you do it?”

“You want me to predict places where we, in this one
ship full of monkeys, will find Elder sites that have not yet been discovered,
by advanced species who desire nothing more than to find technology the Elders
left behind? Species who have entire fleets of ships searching for Elder
technology.”

“That’s about it, Ayuh. You told me the galaxy is
vast, bigger than I can imagine, that even now, most of it is unexplored.”

“It’s unexplored, Joe, because most of the galaxy
isn’t worth exploring. Or it’s too far from a wormhole.”

“I notice you haven’t answered my question. Can you do
it?”

“I’m thinking!”

“Think faster.”

“Joe, this is actually not a one hundred percent
completely awful, terrible, stupid brainless idea. Hmmm. Very likely, very,
very likely, this is a tremendous waste of my time. However, I am intrigued
about how much this will test my analytical capabilities, so, I’ll do it. This
is going to take a while; I’ll need to run simulations.”

“A while, as in you already did it between saying
‘need’ and ‘to’?”

“Not this time, smart guy. Go, I don’t know, get some
coffee, eat a banana, scratch yourself, do some monkey thing, and I’ll let you
know when I’m done. Don’t bother me in the meantime, I’ll be super extra busy
in here.”

I took a quick shower, got dressed, walked to the
galley, drank a cup of coffee, and chatted with a couple people. Then I walked
to a porthole to look through the tiny window at nothing, because there is not
much to see in deep interstellar space. Before going on duty, I got a second
cup of coffee, and headed for the bridge. The whole time, I’d been expecting
Skippy to shout in my earpiece that my idea was stupid, and about how monkeys
only wasted his extremely valuable time. Thirty two minutes had passed since
Skippy began his analysis, this was an eternity in Skippy time. He remained
silent until I was halfway to the bridge.

"Joe, I have good news and bad news." Skippy
announced.

Uh oh. Skippy's idea of good news could be bad, so I
answered carefully "Give me the good news first, please." I stopped
and leaned against the bulkhead. If he was going to tell me how stupid I was,
I’d rather not be on the bridge where the duty crew could hear it.

"The good news is I found some very good
prospects for Elder sites that have not, as far as I know, been discovered by
other species. You were right, although my memories are substantially blocked,
my familiarity with the Elders allows me to extrapolate where they should have
had colonies or other installations. What I did was-"

I let him talk without interrupting, even though his
rambling on about statistics, metadata and collating sensor mapping data from
dozens of species went way over my head. He was proud of what he'd
accomplished, it was likely only he could have run such an analysis in so short
a time, if at all. When there was a split-second pause in his nonstop talking,
I took the opportunity to stop him from rambling on. "Amazing, Skippy,
that is amazing. Maybe this is why you have such enormous processing capacity,
so you can find the Elders', uh, legacy, stuff, and protect it. Or keep track
of it."

"Huh. I hadn't considered that."

Before he could go off on a half hour tangent of
speculation about his origins, I asked "Have you verified your data model,
by checking whether it predicts Elder sites that are confirmed? Elder sites
that other species do know about?"

"Verified my data model?" Skippy asked
slowly in amazement. "Joe, where did you learn nerdy tech talk like that?
I am mildly impressed, considering that it's you."

"It was in one of the thousand-slide PowerPoint
decks I'm supposed to study as officer training." Maybe I shouldn't have
told him I was only repeating buzz words. "Did you do it?"

"Yes, duh, I told you I ran the model back to
determine accuracy within a standard deviation of-"

"You
tried
to tell me. Remember, Skippy,
you're explaining things to me, you need to dumb it down a couple notches. You
can use real sciency math talk when you're discussing stuff with the science
team."

"Fair enough. Breaking it down Barney style, pun
intended, the answer is yes, my method of predicting the location of Elder
facilities is 96.7% accurate, when compared with a map of Elder sites known to
current species."