SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) (55 page)

"Wait! There is some extra good news, Colonel
Joe," Skippy said, "by some stroke of luck, or luck as you monkeys
think of it, that second tanker is the one I infected when we flew by on our
space dive, so it will be dropping off drones as it jumps. That makes it much
easier to follow. I'm pinging the drones now. And, yes! Got a response. I know
exactly where that ship is. Hmm, that's interesting, it's going to a secondary
rendezvous point, it is supposed to go to the secondary rendezvous if there is
trouble at the original rendezvous location. Oh, darn it, the tanker is
probably there already, and it's supposed to remain there almost six hours.
After that, the tanker's orders, if no other ships appear at the secondary
rendezvous, is for it to make its way back to its base star system, using a
random course. Damn it, we won't be able to use our neat trick of knowing
exactly where a ship will jump in."

"No," I said slowly, while thinking.
"But we do know, from the drone, pretty much exactly where that ship is
now, right?"

"Within ten, twelve thousand kilometers, most
likely, yes."

"Good, great. This is perfect. If that ship does
escape us, I don't want it to see us trying to use that trick again. Here's
what we're going to do; we jump into where that ship is, and launch missiles as
soon as we clear the wormhole. We can project a damping field, right, to
prevent that tanker from jumping away?"

"A weak damping field, yes, I had to disassemble
much of that unit's mechanism to repair the ship. Hmmm. You are proposing we
act like a real pirate ship?"

"Something like that, yeah."

"I love it! Jump course plotted and programmed
in, missiles are ready for launch."

It almost worked like I hoped it would. Our jump to
the secondary rendezvous point was spot on, we emerged within seven thousand
kilometers from the tanker, better than Skippy hoped. Our missiles were away
even before we detected the tanker, unfortunately that ship was on a hair
trigger to jump and it fired up its jump drive as soon as it picked up the
gamma ray burst of our inbound jump. Its caught the edge of our damping field,
so it wasn't able to jump far, and Skippy quickly pinged the drones it dropped
off. We abandoned our two missiles. even though we were running low on
missiles, and jumped after the tanker within forty seconds of jumping in to the
secondary rendezvous.

This time, we skipped launching precious missiles
blind, and relied on our damping field. We emerged within four thousand
kilometers, the tanker tried to jump, but at that distance, it was trapped, an
attempted jump would have ripped apart its jump drive coils and effectively
destroyed the tanker for us. The tanker crew didn't have the magic of Skippy
working for them. With the tanker unable to jump away, it was a straight up
firefight, a tanker against a partly rebuilt star carrier.

"Weapons free," I ordered, and the CIC crew
responded by locking maser cannons on target and hammering away at the tanker's
defensive shields with sizzling beam hits. After only a couple seconds, the
tanker's shields and proximity sensors were so degraded, that we felt confident
enough to launch a pair of missiles. The tanker's point defense systems knocked
out one missile regardless, Skippy was impressed by the Thuranin's accuracy. No
matter, our second missile scored a direct hit on a reactor, and there was a
spectacular explosion. An explosion, right after the tanker launched a pair of
its own missiles at us, at extremely close range.

"Missiles inbound!" Chang warned from the
CIC.

My eyes flashed to the display, the enemy missiles
were so close, our own point defense systems had engaged. Before I could say
anything, Desai initiated a short jump away from the missiles and tanker
debris, on her own authority, under the rules for space combat maneuvers. We
emerged only eight hundred thousand kilometers away, safely out of missile
range for now. "Is there anything left of that ship?"

The CIC crew was silent for a moment. "It's hard
to tell, Captain, there is a big cloud from the fuel load that tanker was
carrying, its tanks ruptured. Until the cloud disperses, we can't see-"

"Oh, for crying out loud, you monkeys will take
forever," Skippy complained. "The answer is yes, Joe, the forward
section of that ship is still partly intact, and even I can't tell if anyone is
left alive in there. Their computer core is in that section, it would be wise
for us to not leave that behind."

"Agreed. Colonel Chang, one more missile, please,
let's clean up after ourselves. We shouldn't leave part of that ship drifting
around out here, it's a hazard to navigation."

"Certainly, sir," Chang replied with a tight
grin.

Having taken care of the four ships, we now needed to
clean up after the flight recorder drones they had ejected. Because three of
the ships had been hit with no warning, they had not been able to launch more
than a few drones. The last ship had apparently scattered drones along its
route; that ship’s captain must have known he was in serious trouble. I asked
Skippy to ping for a drone in the immediate area.

"Transmitting signal now,” Skippy reported. “The
signal, and the reply message, crawl along at the speed of light, don't expect
an instant response."

"We figured that, Skippy," I said. It still
felt odd to be waiting for something that traveled at the speed of light. On
any human scale, light speed was instantaneous.

"Got it!" Skippy shouted excitedly a few
seconds later. "We're too far away for me to hack directly into the drone.
Pilot, I loaded the coordinates into the nav system."

"Captain?" Desai asked.

"Take us there, pilot," I ordered.

Desai gave me a thumbs up and her fingers flew over
the controls. In the past, Skippy would have programmed the autopilot to take
us to the drone, and all Desai would have done was press a button to engage the
autopilot. Now, we monkeys were skilled enough to program the autopilot ourselves,
or fly the ship manually, as Desai was doing. Flying manually was good practice
for combat maneuvers. When we arrived close enough to the drone, Desai matched
course with it while Skippy did, whatever magical AI thing it was he did.

"Okeydokey. Done with that one, it's gone silent
again," Skippy reported.

"Great. Pilot, take us far enough away from the
drone for a safe jump."

"Whoa!" Skippy warned. "Another jump
already? What are you doing, monkey?"

"Jumping to the next set of coordinates, wherever
that ship dropped off a drone." It seemed fairly obvious to me.

"No, no, no, no, no, no. We're not done here,
dumdum. That was only one drone. Thuranin ships typically drop off drones in
sets of three, in case one or two drones are destroyed by whatever threat
caused the ship to eject drones."

"Damn it. Why didn't you tell us that? Hey, wait.
You sent out the signal, and only one drone pinged us its location."

"Duh. Each drone in a set of three has a
priority, the primary drone responds first. If the primary drone doesn't
respond, the secondary drone does, and so on. And after one drone responds, any
other drone in the set will no longer respond to the original retrieval signal,
they switch to another retrieval code."

"Great, fine. You have that other retrieval code,
right?"

"Nope, I didn't have time to download the full
set of codes. But any Thuranin ship that comes looking for the drones will have
the full set of codes."

"Damn it! We're screwed, you little shithead. Why
didn't you tell us that?" I was pissed, so were the crew in the CIC.
"Now we've got three drones out there, two of them contain their ship's
real flight logs, the Thuranin will know somebody screwed with the data in that
one drone. I know you are absent-minded sometimes, but this is inexcusable,
Skippy. You can't do-"

"Joey, as entertaining as this rant is, and I'm
sure you were winding up for a full-blown award winning diatribe aimed at me, please
cool your jets a minute. I didn't mention not having downloaded the other
codes, because I don't need a copy of them. The Thuranin are unimaginative and
predictable, I can figure out the what other codes must be, based on their
pattern. And, mmm, yes, I sent my test retrieval code, and another drone just
responded. We're good, pilot, the drone's location is in the nav system."

He was right, I was winding up for a good
old-fashioned rant about is forgetfulness, now I was pissed because I felt
cheated out of yelling at him. "You just love yanking my chain, don't you,
Skippy?"

"Hey, it gets back for all the times you make me
feel foolish. Payback is a bitch, buddy-boy. Anywho, we're good, we can find
the other drones and alter their flight logs also. Mission will soon be
accomplished, Joe! Too bad we don't have any fresh bananas to celebrate with."

Damn, locating all those drones was tedious, it took
us four full days for Skippy to be absolutely confident he had located all of
them.

"That's it, we're done," Skippy announced.
"The last drone now contains the altered version of the flight logs. I suggest
we skedaddle out of here, on the tiny chance a Thuranin ship happens to already
be searching for the surveyor and its escorts."

"Right, good idea. Pilot, set course for Earth,"
I announced happily.

"What?" Skippy exclaimed in surprise.
"Our mission isn't done, Joe. I know we-"

"
This
SpecOps mission is over, Skippy.
UNEF Command sent us on this fool's errand, with the assumption that our home
planet was safe, because the wormhole was shut down. Now we know that shutting
down our local wormhole has only made Earth somewhat more safe than it was, not
entirely safe. UNEF, and our governments back home, need to know that. I report
to them, not to you. I want the fastest course back to Earth, that won't take
us through any dangerous areas."

"Whoa! You're making that decision without
checking with me first? Good luck getting the jump drive to remain calibrated
all the way back to Earth, without me."

"Do I command this ship or not, Skippy?"

"Depends-"

"Command must be an absolute, Skippy. This is a
simple yes, or no."

There was a pause. Longer than I was comfortable with.
"Yes," he said finally.

"Look, Skippy, I told you that we would help you
find your magic radio, and we will. Think about what we've seen out here. A
previously unknown Elder site that has a big mysterious hole scooped out of it.
An entire civilization that is extinct because their planet was moved by Elder
technology, after the Elders supposedly left this galaxy. An Elder AI that is
now a dead lump of metal. Comm nodes that don't connect to a network. A moon
that was completely vaporized. Is contacting the Collective still your biggest
priority, or should we try to get some answers, before you go knocking on the
Collective's door?"

He gave that heartfelt sigh that was by now familiar
to me. "You're right, you're right. I do have a lot to think about, and I
need more data. Besides, you monkeys have done a good job out here, and you all
deserve a big bunch of fresh bananas."

Damn it, even when he was being nice, he was an
asshole.

With the mission complete, and my duty shift on the
bridge over, I headed to the galley to get a cup of coffee. On the way, I asked
Skippy a question that had been bugging me for hours. "Hey, Skippy, why
didn't we use these super-duper quantum resonator things, when we were being
chased by a whole squadron of Thuranin destroyers? We have resonators aboard,
right?"

"We have resonators aboard, yes. We didn't deploy
them at the time, because they wouldn't have been much use, Joe. We were only
capable of microjumps then, with short jumps like that, both ends of the
wormhole are so close in real space, it is almost impossible to mask their
connection. Also, our jump drive was so badly out of calibration, each jump was
like ringing a bell that could be heard halfway across the galaxy. Trying to
mask that with quantum resonators would have been like throwing stones into the
ocean during a hurricane; sure, there are some extra ripples in the water,
they're not going to affect the waves."

"Oh."

"Duh. If I thought it would have helped, I would
have launched our quantum resonators, we have almost a hundred of them. Or we
had almost a hundred, I needed to use most of them to rebuild the ship. Now we
have three of them left."

"Three? Only three?"

"You wanted me to fix the ship or not?"

"Sorry, Skippy, I know you did an amazing,
incredible job, all by yourself."

"Hmmf," he snorted. "You have no idea
how amazing. I had to build machines to create exotic matter, that your monkey
brains can't even imagine. And I'm still waiting for that cake you promised me,
back when you were on Newark."

Crap. I'd forgotten. What did an AI want with a cake?
Was I supposed to make a cake out of metallic helium 3 for him? "Skippy,
I'm sorry," a word I was using too often, "I completely forgot your
cake, with all the crap that went on after we left Newark behind. I will bake a
very special cake for dinner, tonight. I'm headed to the galley right now,
anyway."

"Great! Everyone can enjoy cake, and sit around
talking about how awesome I am, even though you monkeys can't truly appreciate
the full gloriously awesome extent of my awesomeness. Hey, I just composed a
song you can sing in my honor. I call it 'Skippy the Magnificent'. It goes like
this 'Skippy, oh, Skippy, we monkeys are so unworthy, you are so awesome'-"

"Skippy! How about we monkeys enjoy eating cake,
while talking about how awesome it is that we've been able to resist the strong
urge to toss you out an airlock?"

"That'll work also."

We did have cake that night, I baked four cakes,
enough to feed everyone. Two chocolate, because chocolate was always a
favorite, a lemon cake, and a strawberry roll with whipped-cream icing. Damn,
that strawberry roll was gone so fast, I could have made a dozen of them and
still not had enough. And, yes, people did help me with the baking, I didn't
want to risk screwing the cakes up by myself. We gathered everyone in the
galley, except for the six people on duty in the bridge and CIC, the mood was
festive. Word that our mission had been successful, and more important, that we
were going home, had raced around the ship. I dropped a hint to Major Simms
that it would be more than Ok with me if she had violated regulations, and
smuggled some champagne or wine aboard. Champagne wasn't something I drank more
than two or three times in my life, and I wasn't sure that I liked it, but it
seemed appropriate for such an important celebration. Alcohol aboard ship was
against the rules, as if the rules mattered, in a stolen alien starship, two
thousand lightyears from Earth. After we 'd taken care of the last drone, and I
ordered us to head back to Earth, we jumped several times, and were now nearly
two lightyears away from the battle zone. Our jump drive coils were fully
charged, the stealth field was operating perfectly, we were in deep interstellar
space. Skippy said the odds of any ship stumbling across us out here were so
small, he didn't bother to give me an estimate. I felt safe, safe that letting
the crew have some fun, and blow off steam, was fully in order. We'd endured
harsh conditions on Newark, and almost from the moment we came back on board,
we'd been engaged full time in the effort to prevent the surveyor ship from
reaching Earth.