SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) (23 page)

"After the first hit, yes,” Skippy answered, “it
was partially down, because I had to divert power to the shields."

This is what I'd been afraid of. "The Thuranin
now know one of their own star carriers is hostile."

"Yes, however, I must point out, I altered our
jump drive signature to make us appear to be that star carrier that disappeared
seventeen years ago, as we discussed."

"Great, excellent." One less thing for me to
worry about.

Chang looked puzzled. "What star carrier?"

Damn it, I should have told people about that, it had
slipped my mind. That's what happens when I have late night conversations with
Skippy. "I'll explain later. It is some good news."

Simms looked at me pointedly, unhappy that there was
something I hadn't told my command crew. "We can use some good news now.
Sir." There was a distinct pause before she'd added the 'sir'.

She'd made her point, people needed me to explain
right then. I turned the chair to face the CIC. "There was a Thuranin star
carrier, very similar to the
Dutchman
, that disappeared seventeen years
ago, the Thuranin think the Kristang stole it. Skippy altered our jump drive
signature so the
Dutchman
appears to be that missing ship, instead of
this ship that mysteriously disappeared near Paradise, where humans are living.
Hopefully this will throw the Thuranin's suspicions away from humans and onto
the Kristang. It should keep them chasing ghosts for a while. Skippy, no way
the Thuranin know there are humans aboard this ship?"

"No way, Joe. In order for the Thuranin to know
that, they would have had to get close enough to actively scan this ship with
our stealth field deactivated, and that never happened. Your secret is still
safe, Joe. The slow, clumsy way this ship flew and reacted, during the battle,
would lead the Thuranin to suspect this ship is being flown by a lower-tech
species. However, as we discussed, the Thuranin will suspect the Kristang,
there is no reason they would consider humans as being involved in any
way." Skippy paused. "Oh. Hmm. Captain Desai, I did not mean to
disparage your piloting abilities."

"I understood what you meant, Mr. Skippy,"
Desai responded. She had done her best to keep the Dutchman out of the line of
fire during the battle, still the ship had been struck by particle beams many
more time that it would have, had Thuranin cyborgs been in command.

From the expression on the faces of people in the CIC,
including Chang and Simms, the crew was not happy about me neglecting to
mention that I had inquire about whether our star carrier was unique enough to
be immediately identifiable. They were right to be upset; I should have told
them. I thought of another problem, and zoomed out on the main bridge display.
"Newark is on the other side of the star now, right? Not completely, close
enough."

"Yes."

"How are we going to talk, when we’re down there,
and you’re way up here? There will be a time lag of, what? An hour?"

"Light will take around hour to travel one way,
yes, and the problem will grow worse as Newark's orbit takes it further
away."

I shook my head. "That is unsat. Isn't there some
sort of Skippy magic you can do, to speed up our communications? What if you
get stuck on a crossword puzzle, and you need my help?"

"Like if the clue is 'feline', three letters, and
it starts with 'C' and 'A'?"

"Yeah, see? I can tell you the answer is not
'pussy' like you were thinking." I caught a glance from Simms in the CIC
when I made that remark. Damn it, this is why I liked to have conversations
with Skippy in private, so I didn’t have to watch what I was saying. Also so
people couldn’t hear him insult me frequently.

"If either of us is thinking about pussy, it's
not me, Joey. To be serious, yes, there is Skippy magic I will be using. I'm
going to create a microwormhole we can use to communicate through. One end of
the wormhole will be with me, the other end of the wormhole will be in
geosynchronous orbit around Newark. For your benefit, Joe, that means-"

"I know what a geosynchronous orbit is, Skippy.
On Earth, it means the satellite is parked 22,500 miles above the equator, so
it is always at the same place in the sky as the Earth rotates. That's because
at that altitude, the satellite is moving at the same speed as the Earth's
equator rotates."

Silence.

He got me worried. "Skippy? Hello?"

"Sorry, you just completely blew my mind for a
minute. How do
you
know that?"

Feeling mildly insulted, I explained. "A guy
tried to sell my parents a satellite TV system, and I had to explain to them
why the pizza box dish antenna needs to point low in the southern sky, like
over Brazil. I looked it up on Wikipedia."

"Is all your scientific knowledge based on
internet articles?"

"No, Skippy, of course not. I also used to watch
the Discovery channel."

"There is no hope for your species,” he said
sadly.” You monkeys should surrender to the cockroaches immediately, and get it
over with. You, for one, should welcome your new cockroach overlords."

"Hey, cockroaches may eat stuffed-crust pizza,
but did they invent stuffed-crust pizza? I don't
think
so."

"Stuffed-crust pizza?" Skippy said slowly.
"Your species' single contribution to galactic culture."

"You forgot fantasy sports, Skippy."

"I rest my case."

"Great. This microwormhole dingus means we'll be
in constant communication, then?"

"Not quite. Even Skippy magic can screw with the
laws of physics in this spacetime only so much. On my own, I can't project a
wormhole that far, and a jump breaks the connection between wormholes, so the
Flower
can’t carry the wormhole for me. I have modified a missile to carry the other
end of the wormhole, as soon as it is ready, I will launch it toward Newark,
the missile will take five days to get there, because I have to save more than
half its fuel to slow down once it get there, to maneuver the wormhole into
orbit. The missile will launch before the
Flower
returns, however, for
your first several days on the surface, there will be a major time lag in our
communications. It is vital that during those days, you make an exceptional
effort to avoid doing anything stupid."

"Hey, no worries, Skippy, it's me."

"Exactly what I'm afraid of."

The communications time lag wasn't a problem only when
the crew was on Newark, it also meant I would have no idea what was going on
with the
Flower
, until that ship returned from its scouting mission. In
making plans, we had discussed the possibility of the
Flower
using its
armaments to pound the Kristang settlement from orbit, and eliminate the threat
entirely. As a frigate, the
Flower
wasn't designed for orbital
bombardment, but it did have a railgun and we could make do. We'd discarded
that idea for two reasons. If the first shot didn't take out every single one
of the Kristang, we'd have a hell of a time hunting them all down. We had no
certain knowledge whether the Kristang were all in one place, or scattered
across the planet. We couldn't afford to have the
Flower
lingering in
orbit for a long time, exposed, searching for Kristang one by one. Second, and
most important, our entire plan hinged on our presence on Newark not being
detected, because if we were discovered, the Kristang there could call for help,
and then we'd be screwed whether we had beat-up stolen frigate or not. If,
maybe when, a Kristang ship arrived to pick up the lizards on the surface, it
would not be good for that ship to find all the lizards on the surface dead,
with evidence of them having been attacked from orbit. That would cause the
Kristang to intensely scan the surface. And inevitably find us. No, what we
wanted, if a Kristang ship arrived, was to find only a bored, desperate gang of
lizards who wanted to get off the surface and depart Newark as soon as
possible. We wanted them to find that, and nothing else.

To prevent the Kristang on the surface from detecting
a human presence on Newark, Skippy had another trick up his sleeve. Because he
couldn't get close enough to handle it himself, he had loaded a submind into
the computer system of the
Flower
, complaining all the time that the
frigate barely had memory storage enough to hold a dumdum monkey brain, and was
completely inadequate to contain a useful AI submind. Even stripping out the
Kristang software completely, the dumbed-down submind was dangerously unstable,
and we had to hope it would survive long enough to do its job before it broke
down.

The submind's job was to infiltrate the two small
satellites the Kristang had in orbit. Infiltrate, and over write the existing
processing system, so the satellites would from then on ignore any images or
sensor data about humans on or around Newark. When the Kristang scavengers
looked at the surface from a satellite camera, if those satellite cameras or
sensors were pointed at a human settlement, the Kristang would not see anything
unnatural. The images would be edited in real time to show nothing but blank,
boring snow, mud and tundra. If that worked, we only had to worry about a
Kristang aircraft flying over us, and someone looking out the window.
Hopefully, that was unlikely, and from our own satellites, we would have plenty
of warning if a Kristang aircraft approached where we were hiding.

The
Flower
was going to drop off two tiny, stealthed
Thuranin satellites for our use. One satellite would be in polar orbit to cover
the planet's entire surface once each day, the other would be moved in
geosynchronous orbit above our hiding place, after we decided where that was.
Skippy could access satellite data through the microwormhole, and we could
access the satellites in real-time, through an encrypted tightbeam maserlink.
The only way the Kristang could detect the satellite feed is if one of their
aircraft happened to fly through the communications maser beam, a beam less
than a human hair in diameter. Since we would be able to see their aircraft
approaching, and be able to see everything the Kristang were doing and
intercept all their communications, it would be impossible for them to sneak up
on us.

All this was according to Skippy, who would be by
himself at Skippy's Garage and Gas Station on the other side of the star
system.

I had faith in Skippy, he had certainly earned it.
What bothered me was not our plans, or our ability to implement such plans, or
the top-notch people I was privileged to have under my command. What bothered
me was our rotten luck.

Lt. Colonel Chang had told me, back when I was trying
to convince our original merry band of pirates on Paradise to follow me on an
ill-defined, ultra-high-risk mission, that he agreed to sign on not because I
was brave, or smart, but because I, somehow, was
lucky
. That I had a
knack for being in the right, or wrong depending how you looked at it, place at
the right time. I do not believe in astrology, or numerology, or any of an
infinite number of increasingly whacky conspiracy theories, but there was no
one who could deny that luck was a real thing. Skippy had hinted more than once
that there was no such thing as luck, that humans conceived of 'luck' because
we had no idea how the universe truly worked.

Whatever.

What I knew for sure was that our 'luck' so far on
this mission was crap. Places where we should have found Skippy's magic radio
for talking to the Collective were empty, or mysteriously blown apart. The
mission had lasted longer than it should have, because things that should have
been in a place, were not in that place. For no logical reason Skippy could
explain. In fact, against all logic Skippy knew of. Rotten luck.

Then, we'd jumped into a trap, a trap that could not
have been set for the
Dutchman
, no way could the Thuranin have
anticipated the
Dutchman
would arrive, there, then. A trap we'd barely
escaped from.

Now, against all odds, we had managed to travel
between stars, in a ship with no functioning reactors, travelled to an
unwanted, useless star system that no one cared about, and what do we find in
the middle of nowhere? A group of Kristang! Crap! What the hell were Kristang
doing on Newark? What are the odds, right? That is totally rotten luck. Rotten
luck that made me afraid that my good luck had run out, and it would all be
downhill from here. Downhill for all of us, not only me. Was this karma coming
back to bite me in the ass? Had I been so lucky in the past that I'd cashed in
all those chips, and now I was in debt to the house?

I felt useless, sitting aboard the Dutchman doing
nothing, while Chang was on a scouting mission with the
Flower
. "Skippy,”
I asked, “you're sure none of us could stay behind to help fix the ship?"

"Help from monkeys? By doing what? Burping and
scratching yourselves?"

"No, Skippy," I was heartened to hear he'd
gotten a bit of his snarkiness back. "I'm talking about us burping and
scratching ourselves
at
the
same
time
."

"Oh, well, then. That changes things. In that
case, no. Joe, I'd love someone to stay aboard to give me someone to talk to.
No offense, you all need to get off the ship. There isn't going to be any
oxygen here, most of the ship won't have any atmosphere at all part of the
time. Until I can get a reactor back online, the shield generators are going to
be dead soon, and the radiation will kill you biologicals."

Biologicals? That was an improvement over 'meatsacks',
Skippy may be warming up to us. "Still, five months? Five months is a long
time." Skippy would be alone aboard the
Dutchman
. The entire crew
would be stranded on an unknown, unexplored planet.

"Long? Five short months is a genuine grade-A
freakin' Skippy miracle. Joe, to rebuild this ship, I have to use raw
materials, scavenged from the ship and gathered from the planet's moons, in
order to build the tools I need, to build other tools, to build other tools, to
finally build the tools to fix the ship. Then I have to begin fixing the ship.
You know those so-called reality shows, where some scruffy-looking guy is out
in the wilderness, all he has is a knife, and he's supposed to survive for a
month?"

"A knife, plus a camera crew with satellite
phones and a helicopter?" I pointed out. "But yeah, I know what you
mean."

"That guy on TV has at least has a knife. I'm
starting with only a paper clip, and I'm rebuilding a gosh-darn starship."
Skippy complained. "You're right, that guy on TV has a camera crew if he
gets in trouble. All I have is a barrel of monkeys, and you'll be way over on
the other side of the star system. If something bad happens before the
Flying
Dutchman
is ready, like if a Thuranin ship arrives looking for us, we
are all totally, totally screwed."

"Yeah, I know. I'd be more comfortable if we had
some margin for error. You really need the
Flower
?"

"Absolutely. First, I need that ship to dip into
the gas giant's atmosphere for collecting helium 3 to refuel the reactors.
After that, the
Flower
contains materials not readily available in this
planet's moons or ring system, so that frigate, and our old busted up Ruhar
Dodo, have to be sacrificed to rebuild the
Dutchman
."

"I understand that. My problem is you have all
your chips on the table. All three Thuranin dropships have to stay here? One of
them can't stay with us on the planet? With those Kristang hanging around,
we'll be sitting ducks if the only way we can get around is by walking."

"Sorry Joe, no can do. I'll be mining this
planet's moons and rings with those dropships and with robots that weren't
designed to operate independently of the ship. Leaving a single dropship with
you would increase my estimated repair time from five months to seven. That is
two additional months, during which the Kristang on the planet might discover
your presence, or a Kristang ship may arrive to pick them up, and detect you
from orbit, or a Thuranin scouting force may come to this star system and find
our stolen star carrier. We have to balance the risks."

"You're right, you're right." I would have
made the same call. In fact, I did, the first time Skippy explained his plan to
me.

I still didn't like it.

The
Flower
jumped back in from its scouting
mission, right on time. It would take the frigate over two hours to match
course with the dead and drifting
Dutchman
, so Chang transmitted his
data immediately. There was no reason to wait. We couldn't wait. Conditions
aboard the star carrier were becoming unlivable, we needed to get off the ship
soon. Or not. It was my decision. I needed intel.

Skippy poured through the data recovered from our
stealth satellites, the Kristang satellites that Skippy's submind had
successfully infiltrated, and Kristang databanks on the ground. It was, as
Skippy was fond of saying, good news and bad news. His initial guess about the
Kristang group there was correct, they were a scavenger crew that had been
dropped off almost a year ago, to comb the surface of Newark for the debris of
a crashed Elder starship. Their leader was a third son of a second-tier leader
of a minor clan, as such, he was desperate to recover something useful to raise
his family's fortunes within the clan. With him, he had five other semi-trusted
clan brothers, and twenty eight forced laborers. The forced labor came from
Kristang who were criminals, or slaves captured from other clans, or clan
brothers whose families were deeply in debt and had sent their sons to work off
part of the debt.

The scavengers were a low-budget group, using second
or third-hand, worn-out equipment without sufficient spare parts or expertise
for properly maintaining the equipment. Originally, they had a beat-up dropship
and two aircraft, one of the aircraft had crashed near their base, and the
leader didn't want to risk flying their dropship, so they only had one
functional aircraft. They had six sets of powered armor suits, two of which
were no longer working. And since they landed a year ago, five laborers had
died in accidents, plus another two had been executed for disobedience. Morale
in the scavenger group was bad, to say the least. They were all males, not even
a single female with them. They had no fresh food, not even for the leaders,
their base camp was cramped with limited recreation facilities, their one medic
had died in an accident, and their medical treatment capability was provided by
a AI that worked only about half the time. From their records Skippy had access
to, the Kristang had remained within 300 kilometers of their base, that was
where the debris from the crashed Elder ship was buried. All that was good news
for us.

The bad news was about geography. Only the equator of
the planet was livable, the remainder of that world was frozen solid, with
awful weather and temperatures humans couldn't survive, and the ice pack and
glaciers closer to the equator were mushy from the summer warming, with the surface
there too treacherous for habitation. The last thing we wanted was for an ice
cavern to collapse on us. Of the land exposed along the equator, much of it was
frigid swamp and spongy thawing tundra, with no place for us to burrow into and
hide. Three quarters of the equator was ocean, there wasn't a lot of real
estate for us to choose from. What Skippy recommended was uncomfortably close
to the Kristang base, less than 1300 kilometers to the east. The terrain there
was grassland, eroded canyons and hills, with caverns Skippy thought would be
good places to take shelter away from prying eyes.