SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) (8 page)

"Damn. That is impressive."

"Ahhh, not so much, if you really understood the
data." Skippy said sourly. "The Elder sites known to current species
are the easy to find, obvious ones. The dumdums inhabiting the galaxy today
only find Elder sites if they happen to trip over them in the dark, so to
speak. Almost all of the Elder sites that have been mapped are in star systems
capable of supporting carbon-based life. The unmapped sites, that I predict we
should find, are mostly in star systems centered around obscure stars such as
red dwarfs. I am not yet, of course, able to determine how good my model is at
predicting the location of more obscure, minor Elder sites. However, I am
highly confident."

"Great. This time, your good news, is good news
for sure. What's the bad news?"

"The bad news is where we have to go to check out
these unknown, potential sites. By definition, they are in out of the way
locations, else they would have been discovered by now. The model predicts only
a handful of sites that are conveniently close to our location."

"Well, we will check out those-"

"Whoa, whoa!" Skippy cautioned. "No so
fast, hot shot, let me finish. Of the handful of predicted sites, two are
inaccessible now, the stars they were orbiting have become red giants and
swallowed those planets. Another site was in a star system where the star went
nova; even if that site still exists, it is likely damaged, and we'd have a
hell of a time finding it now, it would have been thrown off its original orbit
in an unpredictable fashion. Three other sites remain undiscovered, but are in
star systems occupied by species with equivalent, or superior, technology to
this ship. It would be substantially risky to enter those star systems."

"There's nothing we could check out around
here?"

"Oh, I didn't say nothing. There are four sites
within a month of here. Two of those sites are good prospects, the other two
are low probability."

"Mmm hmm, within a month from here. How long to check
out all four sites?"

"Oof, you had to ask me that," Skippy
sounded disgusted. "Uh, calculating now, a least-time course would take,
meh, three and a half months, the sites are scattered inconveniently, we have
to take roundabout routes through wormholes to get to all four sites."

"Meh?" I said, surprised.

"Huh?"

"You said 'meh'. Like when something isn't bad,
it isn't great, it's just, you know, 'meh'."

"Oh, yeah. In this case, 'meh' was me suppressing
my instincts, and telling you that the estimated transit time is three and half
months, instead of me saying three months, seventeen days, ten hours, twenty
one minutes and forty eight point two six seven seconds. Roughly."

"Roughly? In the future, let's go with
'meh'."

"I thought so. Also, that is average transit
time, not including time to match course with the sites, fly down in dropships,
explore the sites, all that."

"Kind of implied, Skippy."

"Yeah, you'd think so, but I'm trying to explain
hyperspatial navigation to monkeys, so-"

"Got it. Not all monkeys aboard this ship are as
dumb as me-"

"None of them are, Joe. Well, I'm only
considering standard IQ tests in the crew's personnel files, of course."
Skippy paused. "Oh. Hmm. Did I just insult you?"

"Ya think?"

"Hey, blame that facts, not the messenger.
Besides, I've told you before, that the standard IQ tests of your species, are
woefully inadequate predictors of ability to create innovative solutions
to-"

"Christ, Skippy, you sound like the buzzwords on
those stupid PowerPoint slides that I'm supposed to study."

"Sorry. To dumb it down for you," he said,
while supposedly intending
not
to insult me, "somehow your tiny
monkey brain is able to think of things, that my god-like intelligence misses.
Like when you had the idea to get rid of the Kristang ships by jumping them
into a gas giant. Or when you asked me how Thuranin fought in their flimsy
space suits, because it didn't occur to me to tell you about their combots.
None of your original merry band of pirates, who mostly had higher IQ scores
than you, had those ideas. Joe, you may not be particularly smart in a
conventional sense, but you apparently have a talent that is more useful in
your current role; you are
clever
."

"Space suits."

"Darn it, you had to remind me. Yes, I hate to
say it, but that is a good example."

I was damned proud of myself. As a senior officer, I
may be grossly inadequate for my responsibilities, according to the United
States Army. As an infantry soldier, I had, in my humble opinion, good common
sense, including the ability to ask obvious questions that everyone else was
missing. Believe me, patrolling the Nigerian jungle in full battle rattle, on
ill-defined missions, had caused me to ask a whole lot of common sense
questions. "Thank you, Skippy. You can program us a course for the closest
site?"

"Already loaded into the nav system."

"Of course it is. Great, I'll tell the
pilots." And everyone. No one had looking forward to a lonely, dull
fourteen month voyage to the second site.

Sitting in the command chair on the bridge, I was
waiting for the jump engines to recharge. We had changed course to check out
the closest of the sites where Skippy thought we might find an Elder facility
that wasn’t known to the Thuranin or Jeraptha. I didn’t have much to do, and my
mind wandered. "Skippy, something has been puzzling me."

He made an exaggerated sigh. "Darn it, I knew
this was going to happen sooner or later. All right, fine. Joey, when a Mommy
and a Daddy love each other very much-"

"I know about the birds and the bees,
Skippy!" Damn it! I should have known better than to try asking Skippy a
serious question while other people were around. In the CIC, I could see people
smirking, and one of the pilot's shoulders were shaking as he laughed. At me.

"Boy, that is a relief. The last thing I want to
explain is monkey mating rituals. You're puzzled. Is this about shoe tying
again? I think you'd be best to stick to Velcro until-"

"You know why I need shoes? Because I can walk!
Let's see you do that, beer can."

"Whoa. That's the best you've got? Pretty lame,
there, Joey."

"I'm trying to be serious here, Skippy."

Another sigh. "Fair enough. You do understand how
difficult it is for me to take anything you monkeys say seriously, right? What
is your question? If it's not outrageously stupid, I will consider wasting my
time on you."

"We lowly, unworthy monkeys would greatly
appreciate it. My question is about stealth technology. I've heard you say this
ship has a stealth field. And I've seen you detect other ships soon after we
jump into an area. Don't those ships also have stealth? And how does a stealth
field work? We have stealth jets on Earth."

"Wow. Man, there isn't enough aspirin in the
galaxy to fix the headache I'm going to get while trying to explain this to
you. Fine. Listen hard, Mister Bigstupidhead, you might learn something. No,
you do not have stealth jets on Earth. You have laughably crude pieces of metal
that try to bounce radar waves in a different direction, instead of back to the
radar receiver. Or you have coatings painted on your jets that try to absorb
radar waves. That coating don't work so well when it's wet or dirty, by the
way. And good luck to your Navy, trying to maintain delicate stealth coatings
on aircraft in a corrosive salt spray environment. No, you do not have stealth technology.
Your species has glanced the basic mechanics of stealth technology; you haven't
been able to make it work yet."

"Fine. What's the difference?"

"A stealth field bends light waves around a ship.
When a stealth field is working optimally, light flows right around an object
as if it wasn't there. If a ship using stealth is between you and a star, all
you will see is light from the star, the stealthed ship won't cast a
shadow."

"Cool. Is that why sometimes Ruhar or Kristang
aircraft have a fuzzy outline, they're hard to see?"

"Yes, exactly. Although using stealth in an
atmosphere is almost not worth doing, any decent set of sensors can track how
an aircraft disturbs the air around it, and the engines emit a heat signature
that a blind man could see from a hundred miles. There is an important drawback
to a stealth field, can you guess what it is?"

Skippy played the annoying theme music from 'Jeopardy'
while I thought furiously, trying to impress him with my monkey smarts. Light
bent around the ship, radar waves bent around the ship, light- "Hey! If
all the light bends around the ship, how can the ship see anything? It would be
blind, right?"

"Bing bing bing bing bing! We have a winner! That
was pretty good, Joe. Yup. All light bends around the stealthed ship. A ship
inside a stealth field might accidentally fly into, or too close to, a star,
because the light from the star wouldn't contact the ship's sensors. Don't
worry, a stealth field has intentional gaps that allow in enough light for
detection."

I looked at the display. "Huh. That's how we can
still use the sensors when we're stealthed. Cool. But other ships use stealth,
right, and you're able to detect them. Is that more amazing Skippy magic?"

Skippy snorted. "Amazing magic to monkeys, sure.
The answer is no, I make our sensors significantly more effective, however, the
technology for active scanning is used by all star faring species, even dumdum
lizards. Ships use an active sensor field, projected from the ship, to detect
objects around them."

"Wait just a minute. That doesn't make sense. Why
would a ship in stealth, that is trying to hide, project something that gives
away their position? Missiles could home in on the source of that field, and
blow up the ship." Figuring that out made me feel pretty darned smart. My
uncle Bob has a friend in the Navy, on a nuclear submarine, and one time at a
cookout in my uncle's backyard, I listened in while the guy talked about what
it's like to be in a steel tube under the waves. One thing he said is that real
subs almost never use their 'active' sonar, sending out a sonar pulse ‘ping’
and listening for it bounce back. The whole point of a submarine is that it's
quiet and it's underwater and nobody knows where it is. Sending out a sonar
pulse is like shouting 'hey, look at me, I'm a dumbass, here I am'. Using
active sonar invites a torpedo to follow the sonar waves back to the source,
and sink the sub.

"The sensor field isn't spherical, you
dope," Skippy explained. "It has an irregular shape, and it
constantly changes shape, and the field intensity varies throughout it, the
field isn't strongest closer to the ship. To find the source of the field, a
missile would need to first map the shape of the field, and calculate where it
must be projected from. That would take way too long, and the field shape is
constantly changing, there is no practical way to map it. When an object enters
a ship's sensor field range, even if that object is stealthed, it will change
the field's shape, that data feeds back to the source ship. Because the source
ship knows what the shape and local density of the sensor field is supposed to
be at any time, it can tell what object distorted the field. Where the object
is, how fast it is moving and in what direction, an outline of the object, all
that. It gets complicated during combat, of course, because ships try to
distort other ships' sensor fields, in ways that mask who and where they truly
are. Ships can even project sensor ghosts, distort or jam a sensor field and
create a false reading. The big limitation to sensor fields, at this level of
technology, is that they propagate at the speed of light, so they are painfully
slow by the standards of space combat. By the time an object is detected and
that data gets back to the source ship, the object will have moved in an
unpredictable fashion. That makes long-range targeting difficult, even with
speed of light weapons. You fire a maser or particle beam, and by the time the
beam gets there, the target has moved."

"Oh. Wow. A ship can dodge a maser beam.
Cool."

"Oh indeed. Are we done with kindergarten for the
day? If you're good and take a nap now, I'll get you a juice box. Oy vey, I've
got a headache. I need to lay down with a cold compress on my forehead."

"No juice box needed. Could you do one more thing
for me? Explain all that to our science team?"

"Science team? You are referring to the group of
marginally smarter monkeys? Oof, then my head would explode. Tell you what, I
just forwarded a video recording of our conversation to their zPhones, they can
watch it, and save me from having to explain it all over again."

"Great, thank you, Skippy."

"Don't mention it. Seriously, please, do not ever
mention this again."

Having gotten Skippy to smack some knowledge down on
me, I was feeling pretty good about myself. This lasted less than three
minutes. Skippy, true to his word, had forwarded a video of our conversation to
the science team. And to everyone else on the ship. That was great. What was
not so great was, that shithead little beer can had replaced my image in the
video with a chimpanzee. Instead of me sitting in the command chair, it was a
chimp, with my voice coming out of its mouth. And not just sitting in the
chair, this chimp was swinging around the bridge, eating bananas, scratching
itself, playing with its private parts, hooting and bouncing around the bridge,
and other embarrassing things. My first notice that something had gone horribly
wrong, was when people in the CIC began laughing uncontrollably while looking
at their zPhones.