Expeditionary
Force

Book 3
- Paradise

By Craig Alanson

Text
copyright © 2016 Craig Alanson

All Rights
Reserved

Contact the
author at craigalanson@gmail.com

Table of Contents

Prologue

Chapter
One

Chapter
Two

Chapter
Three

Chapter
Four

Chapter
Five

Chapter
Six

Chapter
Seven

Chapter
Eight

Chapter
Nine

Chapter
Ten

Chapter
Eleven

Chapter
Twelve

Chapter
Thirteen

Chapter
Fourteen

Chapter
Fifteen

Chapter
Sixteen

Chapter
Seventeen

Chapter
Eighteen

Chapter
Nineteen

Chapter
Twenty

Chapter
Twenty One

Chapter
Twenty Two

Chapter
Twenty Three

Chapter Twenty Four

Chapter
Twenty Five

Chapter
Twenty Six

Chapter
Twenty Seven

Chapter
Twenty Eight

Sample from ‘Trouble on
Paradise’ novella

Prologue

Paradise

Three months after the
original Merry Band of Pirates left Paradise

US Army Specialist Jesse
‘Cornpone’ Colter took a freshly cleaned pair of white cotton gloves out of a box,
put them on, and adjusted the surgical facemask to completely cover his nose
and mouth. Checking himself in a small mirror attached to a tree, he took a
deep breath, reached down into the pen and carefully, very carefully picked up
a small yellow fluffy thing. It was a chick, a baby chicken. On Paradise. A
small miracle. Or, the chick was small, the miracle was great.

Jesse held the chick up
to eye level, inspecting its feet. Everything looked fine, or it looked fine as
much as Jesse knew about chickens. A month ago, what he knew about chickens was
that they tasted good and produced eggs. Also that they weren’t bred to be
smart.

Smart, ha! He thought as
he set the chick back down in the clean straw of the pen. The chick had been
brought to Paradise as a fertilized egg. Jesse had volunteered to fight in
space against the enemies of humanity. Only their ‘allies’ turned out to be the
real enemy, and the ‘enemy’ was a species that mostly wanted to ignore humans.
Between him and the chicken, he asked himself, who was the dumb one?

The presence of Earth
animals on Paradise had been UNEF’s most closely guarded secret. The last three
Kristang ships to bring supplies from Earth had included chicken eggs, baby
calves, baby pigs and baby goats. Not all of the young animals survived the
long trip, and since the Ruhar fleet had firmly reestablished its hold on
Paradise, no more animals would be coming from Earth. UNEF HQ had kept the
presence of the animals a secret for two reasons. Until the survival of a
significant population of Earth animals on Paradise could be established, UNEF
didn’t want to get people’s hopes up that they would someday have fresh food
other than fruits and vegetables. And perhaps equally important was that the
presence of domesticated Earth animals on Paradise would signal that the
Expeditionary Force would not be returning home for a long time, a very long
time. That was even before the Ruhar took back Paradise and cut off UNEF’s only
possibility of going home.

That fateful day when the
Ruhar fleet took Paradise back from the Kristang, was more than three months
gone by now. The first couple weeks had been chaotic; UNEF HQ quickly had
ordered human forces across the planet to lay down their weapons, recognizing
that rifles against starships was not a survivable fight for UNEF. Not all
humans had complied with the surrender order; these people had come out to the
stars to fight hamsters and they couldn’t mentally adapt to their changed
situation. The fact is, there were hard feelings on both sides, and those
feelings weren’t going away in a month, or a year, or maybe even a generation.
After two or three weeks, the situation stabilized, and humans accepted that the
renewed Ruhar presence in the sky wasn’t merely another raid. Those humans who
still insisted on fighting the Ruhar ‘occupiers’ were dealt with by the Ruhar
military, in some cases harshly and sometimes with a level of force wildly
disproportionate to the threat. No one needed an orbital railgun strike to deal
with three guys hiding out in the bush, but with the Ruhar completely in charge
there was no one to appeal to for de-escalating the use of force. And hearing
that the Ruhar had used a railgun against three guys who had limited ammo,
almost no food and posed no real threat was a powerful message to the rest of
UNEF. The message was heard loud and clear by all humans on Paradise; the Ruhar
control the high ground. Do not mess with them.

Rumors were flying fast
via the informal zPhone network. The Kristang fleet was gathering outside the Paradise
system and would soon take back the planet. No, the Kristang had given up on
Paradise; the raids were only a way to harass and distract the Ruhar. The Ruhar
were negotiating to send humans back to Earth. No, humans were never going back
to Earth. Humans were being recruited to fight with the Ruhar. No, the advanced
Ruhar had no interest in working with weak, primitive human soldiers. Whatever
you feared or wanted to believe, there was a rumor tailor made for you.

Jesse didn’t believe any
of the rumors, other than that they were rumors. He believed what he knew, what
he’d seen. Five weeks after the Ruhar took back the planet, Jesse and his
fireteam buddy Dave ‘Ski’ Czajka had volunteered to move from a POW camp to a
new UNEF farm on the southern continent of Paradise. The farm was informally
being called ‘Fort Rakovsky’ after a US Army soldier who had died in the first
Ruhar raid. Rumor had it, and this rumor Jesse thought might be true, that most
humans would eventually be scattered in settlements across the southern
continent that humans called ‘Lemuria’. That would keep them away from the bulk
of the Ruhar civilian population, and isolated groups of humans would be easier
and cheaper to control. Jesse didn’t need rumors to tell him that UNEF was never
going home; the Ruhar were planning for humans to stay on Paradise long term.
Rumors were nothing but uninformed BS nonsense; the Ruhar knew the truth. The
fact that the Ruhar were making the effort to help UNEF set up farming villages,
meant that the Ruhar knew their unwanted human guests were on Paradise to stay.
Stay for a very long time. Or permanently.

One thing he knew for
certain was that chickens taste good, Jesse told himself as he carefully
reached into another section of the pen to pick up another precious chick. Each
chick had its own section of the pen; they were far too valuable to risk young
chickens damaging each other in fights. When the chicks grew old enough, they
would be removed from the pens to roam free in a fenced field; ten chickens to
a field. Ten chickens were a number large enough for the chickens not to feel
isolated from each other, and few enough for an assigned group of soldiers to
manage and protect. Although the native life on Paradise could not digest
anything from Earth, that did not mean the native predators were not interested
in killing what appeared to them to be tempting targets. Because most humans
were not allowed by the Ruhar to have any weapons that could threaten the
Ruhar, Jesse and the other chicken herders had to fend of predators with
sharpened sticks. Fortunately, in his area of Lemuria, the largest predator was
about the size of a fox on Earth. Jesse had only seen one of the foxlike
animals once, and it had run back into the jungle when he had shouted and waved
his spear at it. No chicken was going to be lost to a native predator at Fort
Rakovsky, not on Jesse’s watch.

The most dangerous
predators on Paradise were not native to the planet, and they walked on two
legs. There were plenty of humans who would find it difficult to resist the
temptation of a delicious frying-size chicken walking around. Despite the
threat of severe penalties from UNEF, there had been incidents of chickens,
pigs and goats being killed and cooked up for a feast. Eating animals was strictly
banned by UNEF. An animal on a plate could not create more animals, and the
population of domesticated Earth animals was still too small to consider using
them as a food source yet. And the Ruhar considered eating animals to be a
barbaric practice that civilized, sentient beings would not do. As prisoners of
war existing on the kindness of the Ruhar, UNEF could not afford to insult
their hosts.

So there would not be
anyone eating animals, despite all the time, expense and effort expended to
bring domesticated food animals to Paradise. Chickens were used to produce
eggs, which could be eaten. More accurately, chicken eggs would be eaten someday
when there were enough chickens; that might happen within a year, perhaps
longer. Cows and goats could be used to provide milk; milk that was supposed to
be available soon.

Pigs were a problem.
While Jesse had heard the old joke that you could use every part of a pig
except for its squeal, the Ruhar didn’t allow any part of a pig to be used.
UNEF was stuck raising and feeding pigs, without being able to get any benefit
from the effort. And pigs consumed a lot of food that was needed by humans. Pigs
would not be allowed to breed; once the current population aged and died, there
would be no more pigs on Paradise.

“Hey, Ski,” Jesse asked,
“what about this one?”

Dave ‘Ski’ Czajka set
down the chick he had been handling, and walked over to look at the one Jesse
was holding up. “That’s normal, I think,” he announced, looking at one
slightly-bent toe on the chick’s left foot. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Y’all sure about that?”
Jesse was worried about all the chicks he was responsible for. “It don’t look
right.”

“Yeah,” Ski said
reassuringly. “Come on, man, it’s a chicken. All it needs to do is walk around,
eat grain and lay eggs.”

“If you say so,” Jesse
set the chick back down in its straw bed, unconvinced. Ski was no expert on
chickens; he had been selected for the coveted agricultural assignment because
Ski’s grandparents in Wisconsin had raised chickens, and Ski had spent many
summers on their farm. Jesse had been selected because Ski vouched for him. It
bothered Jesse that Dave ‘Ski’ Czajka, who grew up in suburban Milwaukee, knew
more about farming that Jesse Colter, who was born and raised in rural
Arkansas. Jesse’s mother had grown tomatoes in a pot on the back porch, but
that’s all the gardening experience he had as a child. His mother’s parents
lived in downtown Oklahoma City, and his father’s parents were retired in
Florida. Neither of those locations for visiting grandparents had offered
opportunities for learning the science and art of agriculture. At the time,
Jesse had been grateful to avoid the often back-breaking work of farming, that
some of his friends had to help their families with. Now, he wished he had
gained some farming experience before he joined the Army. Summers working at a
retail store had not provided Jesse much useful knowledge of agriculture.

“Cornpone, we’re chicken
herders, not veterinarians,” Ski laughed.

Chicken herder. Somehow,
he had gone from carrying a rifle as a US Army Infantry Specialist, to being
assigned to an Agricultural Development team. He had endured the jokes about
chicken ranching with good natured humor; the job was important, and it came
with perks. People working in agriculture were allowed an additional 800
calories per day above the standard ration. With UNEF cut off from Earth by the
Ruhar fleet, humans were reduced to three sources of food. The dwindling amount
of canned, irradiated and freeze-dried food from Earth. Nutrient mush provided
by the Ruhar twice a day, although the Ruhar warned that those supplies were
not endless. And whatever Earth crops they could grow on Paradise.

“Hey, speaking of
cornpone,” Jesse nodded toward the field of corn to the south. “When y’all
think that will be ready?”

Ski looked at the growing
corn, scratched his head, then snorted in disgust at himself. Now he needed to
get a freshly cleaned white cotton glove before he touched another chick.
“There’s an old farmer’s saying ‘knee high by the Fourth of July’. You harvest
corn when it’s about six, seven feet tall, or more. So, um,” he tried to judge
the height of the corn plants. The agricultural experts in UNEF HQ thought corn
would grow faster here than on Earth, because there were no pests to eat the
corn on Paradise. No pests, so need for pesticides that might stunt the plants’
growth. “You know, I remember corn being way taller than knee height the first
week of July, so maybe that expression is outdated. I don’t know. Another two
months?”

“That’s real useful,”
Cornpone scoffed.

“My grandparents grew
soybeans, not corn. And this,” he pointed to the dark trees that grew thickly
around the cleared fields, “is a jungle. Corn may grow faster here than in the
Midwest. I don’t know.”

“Well, don’t tell anybody
that you don’t know.”

“You’re afraid they’ll
pull us off Ag duty, and we’ll lose our extra rations?” Ski asked. Even with
the additional calories, he was hungry all the time. He did not like the idea
of surviving on two bowls of Ruhar-provided nutrient mush every day.

“That, and, I’ve gotten
attached to my chicks,” Jesse admitted. “They need me.”

“Those chicks need water
to drink, grain to eat and air to breathe. They don’t need you.”

“They need me to sing to
them, Ski. Helps them grow faster,” Jesse said, then launched into a rendition
of an old Elvis classic. “Loooove me tender, love me sweet, all my dreams
come-”

“Damn!” Ski covered his
ears. Stupid! Now he needed to change both gloves. “Are you trying to kill the
chicks? Your voice is bad enough to kill a full-size chicken. Or a cow.”

“Come on, now, it’s not
that-, oh man, look out. Ship just jumped in.” He pointed to the sky and
involuntarily cringed. Lights in the sky used to mean Kristang warships
enforcing their hold on the planet, and protecting vulnerable UNEF troops on
the ground. Or they meant unarmed Ruhar transport ships coming to haul away
hamster evacuees who made the trip up the space elevator, and agricultural
products that were shot into orbit by the Launcher.

Then, one fateful day, lights
in the sky had meant a Ruhar raid; the raid where that lucky son of a bitch Joe
Bishop became a hero by simply doing what any good soldier would have done. And
later, lights in the sky were a full Ruhar battlegroup, coming back to take
back control of the planet they called Gehtanu and that humans called Paradise.
The lights on that day meant the Kristang were getting kicked off Paradise, and
that UNEF troops had become prisoners of war.

Now, lights in the sky
meant one of two possible things. Most of the time, twinkling lights in the sky
were Ruhar warships patrolling the area to prevent a Kristang invasion. Some of
the time, twinkling lights were Kristang ships jumping in to harass the Ruhar
and raid the planet’s infrastructure. According to intel shared over the UNEF zPhone
internet, the Ruhar thought the Kristang still had a half dozen ships in and
around the Paradise system. These were Kristang ships that had been left there
by the Thuranin, when those little green men decided they would no longer support
the lizards’ effort to keep Paradise. The local Kristang force were ships that
lacked the capability to travel to another star system or out to the local
wormhole. Ships that were trapped, and crewed by desperate lizards. That was
not a good combination. The raids had been a serious problem at first, causing
the Ruhar planetary government to worry that the raids would encourage humans
to rise up and rebel against their POW status. For the first two weeks of
raids, the Ruhar had confined the humans to camps, while seeds went unplanted
and crops in fields were not tended. That was a serious setback to human
efforts to grow enough food to survive without assistance from the Ruhar. After
two weeks, the raids had settled down to one every couple of weeks, and the
Ruhar had cautiously relaxed restrictions on human movements.

The raids had become
infrequent, more of an annoyance than a threat. With a mere one or two ships
raiding an entire thinly-settled planet, any one site on the surface was
relatively safe. Humans assumed at first that they were safe from attack by the
Kristang, until that changed. Two months after UNEF surrendered to the Ruhar, a
Kristang frigate jumped in, fired weapons, and jumped away. A target of one of
the frigate’ masers and missiles was a human warehouse; that warehouse became a
smoking crater. Eleven percent of all human food on Paradise was lost when that
warehouse was destroyed; and the Kristang had known they were targeting the
human food supply. Before it jumped away, that frigate had broadcast a warning
to UNEF; humans who surrendered to the Ruhar were considered traitors. Humans
on Paradise had two options. Make futile gestures to resist the Ruhar and face
slow, certain starvation. Or lay down their weapons, grow food, and live to
possibly fight another day.

Which side humans would
or even should fight on, was still a damned good question.

Jesse and Ski glanced
over to the closest air raid shelter, near the western edge of the field. It
was crude; a hole in the ground covered with logs and topped with dirt and
grass. From orbit, it would look like any other part of the field, unless an
enemy ship happened to be at an angle where it could look directly into the
entrance. The shelter had been thrown together hastily and was not intended for
regular or long-term use. The roof leaked; long roots of grass and shrubs
reached down through the logs, which encouraged native bugs to take up
residence. Because they were in a jungle, where every afternoon saw at least a
brief thunderstorm sweep through, the floor of the shelter was a mud puddle.
Last week, a work crew had installed a simple platform on the floor to keep
occupants out of the ankle-deep water; Jesse was not confident the platform was
still dry, as it had rained heavily the previous night.

“What do you think?” Ski
asked, mentally counting off the seconds since they’d seen the light in the
sky. They were supposed to get an air raid warning on their zPhones from Ruhar
command; that didn’t always happen in time. Sometimes the Ruhar communications
were jammed, sometimes were fooled by Kristang raiders being disguised as Ruhar
civilian ships, and sometimes warnings simply did not get sent promptly.
Generally, if you didn’t see maser beams, railguns or missiles coming down at
you as burning streaks through the atmosphere within the first thirty seconds,
you were most likely in the clear. Kristang ships didn’t hang around long
during a raid; they popped into high orbit, fired weapons, and jumped back away
before the Ruhar defenses could target them. That quick strike tactic didn’t
always work; two weeks ago Jesse and Ski had seen a Kristang ship flare into
hot white light, low on the northern horizon. That unlucky raider had been
trapped by a damping field by a pair of Ruhar ships, and the brief firefight
had favored the two hamster destroyers rather than the lizard frigate.

“We’re supposed to take
cover,” Cornpone responded, one eye on the sky and one eye on his precious
flock of chicks. People were running across the field toward the three
shelters. Other people were taking a wait and see attitude. Regulations called
for taking shelter until it was positively determined that the ship overhead
was not a threat. “I also think these chicks are worth more than you and me.”

“You got that right,” Ski
agreed. UNEF could afford to lose a couple soldiers, that would be two less
mouths to feed. “Twenty seconds.”

Jesse looked at the sky
again. Another tell-tale sign of trouble in the sky was ship-to-ship weapons
fire, and he didn’t see any. That wasn’t always a reliable indicator; masers
and railguns weren’t usually visible in the vacuum of space unless they hit
something. And the initial launching boost flare of missiles was sometimes
hidden enough by stealth effects that they couldn’t be seen from the ground.
Not by the naked human eye, not in the bright sky of mid-morning. “Oh, hell,
the shelter’s probably a mud pit anyway.” Just then, their zPhones
simultaneously squawked an All Clear signal.

“Great!” Ski laughed.
“Perfect timing.” A guy who had been running full speed across the field toward
a shelter slowed to a stop, and shouted an expletive that Ski couldn’t quite
hear. He could guess well enough what the guy said. Ski waved with a grin, and
the guy returned a middle finger salute. “Yeah, you too, buddy,” Ski muttered,
and looked up at the sky again, pondering something.

“What are you looking at
now?” Jesse asked.

“Trying to decide whether
I was kind of hoping that ship was the Kristang coming back,” Dave admitted.
“Coming back big time, to take the planet back again.”

“Y’all better not hope
the lizards come back,” Jesse warned. “We surrendered our weapons to the
hamsters. The Ruhar loaned us equipment to clear the jungle and plow these
fields,” he pointed to the growing corn. “That makes us traitors as far as the
lizards are concerned. If they come back, we’re screwed.”

Dave frowned and
shrugged. “And if the Kristang never come back? If we’re stuck here with the
Ruhar in charge? Like, forever?”

“Then we’re screwed
either way. Welcome to the Army, man.” Jesse turned his attention back to the
chicks. They needed to be fed again. Fed scarce grain that wasn’t available to humans.
Having eggs and milk would be great for the protein supply; feeding chickens,
cows and goats also consumed a lot of calories that might better have been used
as human food. Raising chickens for eggs, and cows for milk, was much more
important for human morale than for nutrition. The prospect of a steady supply
of eggs and milk promised that the future would be better. That humans on
Paradise would not always be POWs, that they would not live out the rest of
their lives on a faraway alien world. That someday, something would change, and
people could go home. He wasn’t raising chickens, Jesse thought. He was growing
hope.

The chicks looked up at
him hungrily and peeped loudly. “I hear y’all, food’s coming. Another day on
Paradise, man,” Jesse shook his head. “Another day on Paradise.”

CHAPTER ONE

Earth orbit

My name is Joe Bishop,
and sometimes I hate my life. Especially when a certain super smart ancient
alien artificial intelligence asshole makes things difficult for me. “Skippy,”
I asked in frustration, “what the hell did you do?” Damn it. Coming home from
our mission that had saved the Earth again, I didn’t exactly expect a ticker
tape parade in New York City. Especially since no one had used ticker tape
since, like- hmm. What was ‘ticker tape’ anyway? I suppose I could ask Skippy,
if I wanted to risk death by boredom from a long, overly detailed explanation.
It wasn’t sticky like duct tape, I knew that. Confetti? Ticker tape was a type
of confetti. Whatever confetti was. Or was confetti a type of Italian ice
cream? No, that was gelato. Whatever.

Anyway, while I didn’t
expect a parade, I also hadn’t expected to land in a pile of shit up to my
nose, either. Except that’s what happened, right after the Flying Dutchman
returned to Earth from our SpecOps mission, and UNEF Command learned that we
had prevented a Thuranin ship from traveling all the way to our home planet. We
had stopped a Thuranin ship from coming to Earth, which likely would have led
to the enslavement or extinction of humanity. Hey, great job, UNEF Command told
me with one breath. With the next breath, they told me how much trouble I was
in. How much trouble I’d been in, since shortly after the Flying Dutchman
had jumped away from Earth orbit, on the mission we had not been expected to
ever return from.

What Skippy had neglected
to tell me or anyone aboard our captured Thuranin pirate ship, was that he had
planned a surprise before we jumped away. A nasty, totally unexpected,
unpleasant surprise.

Never, never, trust a
shiny beer can.

“Hmm. You’ll have to be
more specific, Joe,” Skippy said. “What, of all the things I’ve done, are you
bitching about this time?”

“You know damned well
what I mean! You put that Kristang troopship on a timer and jumped it away from
Earth orbit the day after we left!”

“Oh, that. Hey, if you
knew what I did, why did you ask what the hell I did?”

“Oh, for-”

“Is this one of those
stupid human things, where you ask ‘what’ when you really mean something else,
like ‘how’, or ‘why’?”

“You know what I-”

“Or did I just malign
your whole species, when the real problem is specifically Joe Bishop stupidity?
If so, I apologize to monkeykind.”

Sensing that he was only
going to interrupt me again, I paused to collect my thoughts. I was in my
office near the bridge, I’d gone there after getting royally chewed out by UNEF
Command. The Dutchman was in a stable orbit, and there wasn’t anything
for me to do as the captain other than finish my official mission report, and
prepare for the crew to go down to the surface. To go home. Against the odds,
we had returned. “That was my fault for not being specific. Why? The correct
question is, why? Why did you do it? And why didn’t you tell me?”

“Huh. This is kind of a
multiple choice question, Joe. I didn’t tell you about it after we jumped away,
because there was no reason for me to do that, duh. If I did, you would have
pestered me about it every freakin’ day, right?”

“Could be, probably,” I
admitted. “Whatever.”

“And if I had told you
about it before we jumped away, you would have done something
characteristically stupid, like trying to stop me. Which would not have worked,
by the way.”

“You don’t know that for
sure,” I insisted.

“I don’t? Of the two of
us, which one has the most patience and is the most stubborn? As a test, let’s
see how long we can each hold our breath.”

“Not funny, Skippy. All
right, granted, you were going to do it anyway. The question still is, why? Why jump that ship out of Earth
orbit? It’s circling the Sun halfway to Mars now! We were counting, all of
humanity was counting on getting access to that ship, access to its
technology!”

“I did it for you, Joe.”

“For me?” For a moment, I
was speechless. “Listen, Skippy. If you think putting an alien ship out of
reach is a gift, please don’t go shopping for my birthday.”

Skippy sighed. “Not you
specifically, Joe. I did it for your species.”

“Because it entertains
you to mess with us?”

“Well, that too,” he admitted.
“Man, I wish we’d been here to see the faces of major Earth leaders, when they
saw that their tempting source of alien technology jumped out of easy reach. Ha
ha! That would have been great! Hmm, you know what, I’m sure there must be
video of that somewhere, let me search-”

“We need that technology,
damn it! Skippy, we got lucky learning about the Thuranin sending a ship to
Earth. If an alien ship ever does get here, we need advanced technology to
defend ourselves.”

“Advanced technology?
Wait, you mean Kristang technology? Ugh, sometimes I forget how primitive your
species is, that lizard technology impresses you. Ok, maybe I can see you
monkeys being awed by bright shiny things aboard that troopship.”

“Not everyone has your
God-like level of technology, Skippy, we have to do things the hard way. We’re
getting off the subject as usual when I talk with you. Go back to explaining
why you did this in order to help humanity.”

“Exactly.”

“A little more detail on
that, please. Like, how does this help us?”

“It removes a major
reason for you monkeys to whack each other with sticks. And it gives you a
reason to cooperate.”

“Ah.”

“You see it now?”

“Yeah, I think so.” Crap.
He truly had been trying to help us. “When that troopship was in low Earth
orbit, maybe a half dozen nations were capable of sending a team up there to
take possession and then fight over it. But now that it’s halfway to Mars,
nations have to cooperate on a joint mission to get there?”

“You are one hundred
percent accurate on that one, Joe. In my estimation, there was a better than
50-50 chance some nation would have nuked that troopship into vapor in Earth
orbit, to prevent a rival nation from controlling its technology. Instead, for
the past few months, your NASA has been cooperating with the space agencies of
China, Europe, India, and also Japan. They are building a crude tin can of a
spacecraft to travel out to the troopship. You might remember that before we
left, there was an argument going on between the UNEF nations about who had rights
to alien technology? One of the Kristang dropships that I shot down crashed in
shallow water off the Philippines, and four navies almost got into a shooting
war over recovering it. This is after international cooperation and sacrifice
aboard the Dutchman saved all of your miserable monkey asses.”

“I remember.” That was a
minor dust-up just before the Dutchman departed. I figured it was going
to amount to nothing more than harsh words being exchanged, political posturing
to please each nation’s domestic audience, and a negotiated agreement. Smashed
lizard technology wasn’t worth fighting over. It especially was not worth
fighting over, when the nations involved had such a monumental amount of work
to do rebuilding our planet from the ravages of the Kristang. Perhaps I was
underestimating the short-sightedness of political leaders. “Your motive was
good, Skippy, and I see why you couldn’t announce it beforehand.” If he had
jumped the troopship away before the Dutchman left, the UNEF governments
would have insisted that we recover that ship before departing for the
wormhole. Which, because those same governments had taken so long to make the
inevitable, obvious decision, we did not have time for. “And instead of being
angry with and hating each other, those governments now all agree on one thing;
they all blame me.”

“That is totally unfair,
Joe.”

“They’re not going to
blame you, because they already knew
you are a sneaky little beer can. And they won’t blame themselves for trusting
you. That leaves me at fault, although I don’t know what they expected me to
do. I guess I’m at fault for not persuading you not to do, something I didn’t
know you were going to do.”

“It’s not your fault,
Joe. I should have left a message to explain why I did it, after the ship
jumped away.”

“Even if you had baked a
cake and delivered that message in person, it would still be my fault, Skippy.
I am, was, the mission commander.” It was almost time for me to take the silver
eagles off my uniform and put the sergeant stripes back on. Unless they were
going to bust me back to Private Bishop before I left the ship. “Anyway, that’s
all water under the bridge now. We need to go get that ship.”

“As I already explained
to those dumdums at UNEF Command, that ship’s reactor is in cold shutdown, and
I will not help you ignorant monkeys screw with it. I used the last energy in
the jump drive capacitors to jump it away, so it can’t jump back. And if you’re
thinking of jumping the Dutchman out there, good luck programming a jump
accurately enough without me. Also, darn! I just discovered a fault in the
calibration of our jump drive coils, I need to take them offline. I hate it
when that happens. Could take a long time to fix, or a short time. If you know
what I mean.”

“You forget that we have two Thuranin
dropships, and we can mostly fly those without you.”

“Ha! No, I did not forget
that, mi amigo. We have two, and only two dropships. It’s too hazardous to send
a single dropship out that far, so you will need to send both. And they will
both have to stay there for a very long time, while your idiot scientists try
to figure how to get the troopship back to Earth. Good luck with that, by the
way. During that time, we will not be able to use those two dropships to bring
crew and supplies up to the Dutchman.”

“Crap. You planned this?”

“Nope, I got lucky, it
just worked out exceptionally well for me. According to your underdeveloped
understanding of ‘luck’, that is. Remember, we did not expect to come back
here. If you monkeys still want that troopship, you are going to have to do it
the hard way.”

After I landed at
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio for debriefing by UNEF Command, the US
military and CIA, I received a thorough ass chewing. I mean, there was a line
of officers and government officials a mile long lined up for an
all-you-can-eat buffet, and my hide was on the menu. They had been pissed at me
before we returned, about the Kristang troopship being inaccessible. Our
unexpected return had given them a new reason to throw me in the manure pile. Within
five minutes of us contacting UNEF Command after we jumped into orbit, I had
transmitted my mission report and summary. All the other officers onboard had
sent their own mission reports, which I had not censored in any way. Five
minutes after my own report reached UNEF Command, I was explaining and
defending myself to outraged parties from multiple nations. Perhaps that was
the good aspect of me being in such trouble; it had united the five nations of
UNEF in collective indignant outrage toward me. Yay, teamwork! My explaining of
my decisions lasted four full days; after the first two hours, I learned to
stop defending myself and simply accept the ass-chewing. Truthfully, they had
raised grilling to such an art that it was kind of a privilege to witness it,
even if the person getting grilled was me. By the time they were done, I was
burnt so crispy that you wouldn’t have been able to discern me from the
charcoal. Assuming, that is, that you understand my ‘grilling’ analogy.

Skippy attempted to
defend me, which I think likely made matters worse. If UNEF Command was
disappointed in me, they now thoroughly distrusted our alien AI. In the eyes of
UNEF Command, Skippy had stolen a priceless starship from them. Until we
returned with our fresh intel, Earth had no way to know for sure that there
weren’t a dozen Kristang starships lurking in the vicinity of Earth. Without
the troopship’s technology, Earth was completely defenseless. From the
viewpoint of UNEF Command, if Skippy could not be trusted to keep a Kristang
ship in Earth orbit, how could he be trusted to keep his word and shut down the
wormhole near Earth?

Damn, I had not even
considered that issue until we returned. The whole time while we were away on
our luxury cruise, UNEF Command had been panicked that the local wormhole was
still open, that a fleet of pissed-off aliens would be jumping into Earth orbit
without warning. And the best source of advanced alien technology had been
jumped out of reach by a clearly untrustworthy alien AI. For all UNEF Command
knew, Skippy had sold out the Merry Band of Pirates, and delivered the Dutchman
back to the Thuranin in exchange for help from a more-advanced species. People
on Earth had been frightened and angry; going home at night to their loved ones
and not knowing whether that night was the last for humanity. When we
unexpectedly returned, and I proudly and sort of smugly announced that we had again
saved the world by foiling an attempt to send a Thuranin ship to Earth, all
their fear and anger was transferred to me.

Hell, I don’t blame them.
I’d be angry at that jerk Joe Bishop, if I was them.

That first night after
debriefing, thoroughly exhausted, I collapsed into a bunk. Sleep should have
come immediately; to my body clock that was used to Dutchman standard time,
it was 0430 and I had been harshly questioned for over fourteen hours. Maybe I
was too stunned to sleep. More likely what kept me from sleep was thinking that
the other Merry Band of Pirates, especially the leaders like Chang, Simms and
Smythe, were probably also being subjected to unfriendly interrogation by UNEF.
In my debriefing, I had stated many times that decisions during the mission
were my responsibility alone. UNEF knew that was what a commander was expected
to say.

“This sucks, Joe,” Skippy
commented angrily through my zPhone. “You saved this unworthy ball of dirt, again,
and they’re upset with you? Ungrateful jerks.”

“They’re not ungrateful,
Skippy. They did commend me, and the entire crew, for our actions against the
surveyor ship.”

“Yeah, they commended you
for like two seconds, before nitpicking and second guessing every freakin’
decision you made along the way.”

“They do have a point,
Skippy. They made me the mission commander, and they gave me only two real
objectives.”

“Which you totally accomplished!”

“We accomplished the
first objective; shutting down the wormhole. The second objective, that is
equally important, was preventing aliens from learning that humans are flying
around the galaxy in a pirate ship. UNEF Command thinks the major reason that I
didn’t manage to blow that objective was through pure luck. Looking back, I
think they may be right about that.”

“Joe, the only decision
they have a problem with is landing on Newark, instead of letting the entire
crew die aboard the Dutchman when the life support power ran out. Those
dumdums forget that if the crew hadn’t landed on Newark, we would never have
learned about that surveyor ship’s mission.”

“That’s not relevant,
Skippy. At the time I made the decision to land on Newark, and risk aliens
discovering us, I did not know that we would learn about the surveyor ship.
UNEF is evaluating the decisions I made, based on the information available to
me at the time. They are questioning my judgment, not our results.”

“What,” he sputtered.
“You can’t separate the two! UNEF Command thinks you should have condemned our
entire pirate crew to death, just to avoid taking even an entirely reasonable
risk?”

“I wouldn’t have been
condemning the crew to death, Skippy. You were already doing that.”

There was another of his
signature pauses. “That hurt, Joe. How do you figure that? My rebuilding the
ship out of moon dust saved the crew.”

“No. That was only
temporary. After you rebuilt the ship and we left Newark, you and I  talked about whether humans could fly the
Dutchman by ourselves. You said it is impossible. The crew was going to
die in cold and lonely space anyway, after you contacted the Collective and
left us. Remember? I tried to make a bargain with you; to bring the ship back
to Earth so the crew could land here safely. Then just the two of us could go
out to contact the Collective. Based on what I knew at the time, the risk I
took by landing on Newark only temporarily postponed the crew’s inevitable
deaths. If I had decided against landing on Newark, it would have been because
I figured we were all going to die soon anyway, as soon as we found a working
comm node for you.”

There was another pause,
longer this time. “Crap. I’m sorry, Joe. This is my fault?” He sounded
genuinely remorseful.

“No,” I said quickly to
reassure him. “No, Skippy. I was the commander; the decision was one hundred
percent mine.”

“This isn’t a clear wrong
or right issue,” Skippy’s voice reflected his frustration. “It’s purely a
matter of judgment.”

“You are correct. And
UNEF disagrees with the judgment I made.” From just the first day of
debriefing, it was pretty clear that UNEF would not be entrusting me with
commanding any future missions. Command of a mission from which we weren’t
expected to return, yes. Command of a mission with a more complicated
objective, no. UNEF didn’t trust my judgment. I was too young, too immature,
too inexperienced, and too reckless in the opinion of UNEF. After fourteen
hours of explaining over and over why I had risked the failure of the primary mission
objective, I was beginning to question my own judgment. Maybe they were right.
After all, I had flown the Dutchman right into an ambush. Later, a whole
lot of things could have gone wrong on Newark. And the long road trip we took
across the surface of Newark in our BarneyWeGo RV was for nothing; the comm
node and AI we recovered were both useless.

Also, that RV sank, don’t
forget that little detail. In UNEF Command’s view, that was yet another shining
example of my genius leadership. Not.

The fact is, I actually
got lucky when Skippy discovered the Thuranin planned to send a ship to Earth.
In UNEF’s opinion, stopping that ship was the one good thing I did after we
shut down the wormhole on our way outbound. Yes, in order for UNEF to not be
completely disgusted with me, all I needed to do was simply save the freakin’
world.

Not that I’m bitter about
it.

Skippy still tried to
comfort me. “Hey, it was what we found on Newark that most convinced me to
temporarily set aside my quest for contacting the Collective. So, landing on
Newark is the whole reason I agreed to come back to Earth.”

“That, and the fact that
as the commander, I ordered the ship to come back here.”

“Oh, yeah, sure,” he
almost stuttered on the words. “That too. Joe, is there anything I can do to
help you?”

“Jump that troopship back
into Earth orbit?” I suggested hopefully.

“Anything other than
that, I meant. You may not be flying monkeys like in the Wizard of Oz, but you
will have to fly up there by yourselves if you want access to that ship. Or,
hey, how about this? The troopship’s orbit is somewhat elliptical; I calculate
that ship’s orbit will come within a million miles of Earth within the next six
thousand years. If that helps.”

“Good night, Skippy.”

Skippy’s credibility, and
by extension my own, had been severely damaged by revelations in my mission
report. UNEF Command was disturbed and intrigued by what we had learned about
Elder sites, about Newark and most importantly, about Skippy himself.

The first time we came to
Earth, the story Skippy told UNEF was that he had been part of the Elder
civilization. The information that Skippy had been able to give us more of less
matched the limited info that UNEF had heard from other sources. An ancient
species now known as the ‘Elders’ departed the galaxy long ago, and no one knew
what happened to them. The Elders had created the wormhole network. Little was
known about the Elders; scattered bits and pieces of their technology were
highly prized by current species, although use of Elder technology had to be
done very, very carefully. When the Rindhalu fought the Maxolhx in the original
battle that began the endless war that still raged across the galaxy, both
sides had used Elder devices as weapons. Use of destructive Elder technology had
activated previously unknown machines now called ‘Sentinels’; these machines
devastated both sides of the conflict equally. Devastated, as in scorched
planets and scoured entire solar systems of life. Wherever the Sentinels
struck, nothing lived, and nothing could stop them. After wiping out large
areas of both Rindhalu and Maxolhx territory in mere days, the Sentinels had
disappeared. They were still out there, waiting.

Now we knew that someone
had used Elder technology to destroy a moon and push a planet out of orbit.
Someone had done that after the Elders left the galaxy, and before the Rindhalu
discovered electricity. Skippy admitted that he had no idea who had done such
terrible things; as far as he knew there were no intelligent beings in the
galaxy during the time between the Elders and the Rindhalu. The fact that
Skippy was baffled called into question the accuracy and usefulness of his vast
knowledge base. After Newark, Skippy was not even sure who he was.

Why, UNEF asked me,
should we trust an alien AI who doesn’t know his own nature? Perhaps everything
that Skippy thought he knew was wrong; we couldn’t trust his analysis even if
UNEF trusted that shiny beer can’s intentions. And they didn’t.

I didn’t have a good
answer for why we should trust Skippy, other than that he had helped us so far.
His help had saved our planet, twice. And if we planned to take the Dutchman back out to verify there were
no other starships on their way to Earth, we absolutely needed Skippy.

Even if he was an
untrustworthy little beer can.

Paradise

The Kristang frigate To Seek Glory in Battle is Glorious
suddenly appeared in orbit above Pradassis, the world called ‘Paradise’ by the
traitorous humans and ‘Gehtanu’ by the dishonorable Ruhar. The ship did not
bother to deploy a stealth field; the gamma ray burst of its jump in could not
be masked, and the ship would not remain in the area long enough to play cat
and mouse games with the Ruhar ships protecting the planet. Speed, not stealth,
was the frigate’s ally that day. The frigate would attack the planet in order
to harass the Ruhar defenders, and as soon as it was able, the frigate launched
missiles and fired maser cannons at pre-selected targets on the surface. But
its primary mission that day was to gather information, not merely to inflict minor
if annoying damage.

The Glory’s captain paid only scant
attention as all three of his missiles were intercepted and destroyed by the
maser beams of the Ruhar ships before his weapons could cause any damage. No
matter, the missiles had served their purpose of tying up the Ruhar defenders
while the frigate scanned the surface and the space around Paradise. The
attention of the frigate’s captain shifted rapidly between two displays; the
first showed the incoming sensor data, indicating the scan was already 57%
complete. The second display monitored the known Ruhar ships and predicted how
soon the Glory would need to jump
away. This second display the captain watched with a combination of anxiety and
mistrust. The predictive ability of the computer behind that system was known
to be right only 42% of the time. The Kristang who built, designed and now
maintained the system, based on concepts stolen from the Jeraptha, insisted
that their system worked correctly. The problem, they said, was lack of data
from the frigate’s inadequate sensors.

“Maser beam near
miss, Captain,” the ship’s second in command reported. “Another. We were
bracketed that time.”

The real problem,
thought the Glory’s captain as he
noted that the planned sensor sweep was now 71% complete, was the unforgiving
math of physics. Sensor data crawled to the ship at the slow speed of light.
Ruhar ships could jump faster than light. An enemy ship could appear on top of
the Glory before the frigate even
knew the defending ship existed. What saved raiding ships was their own ability
to quickly jump away, and altitude. The Glory
had jumped in high enough so that it could form an outbound jump point to
escape, but low enough that the planet’s gravity well prevented defending Ruhar
ships from jumping in accurately. Even a Ruhar ship with a well-calibrated jump
drive, performing a relatively short jump, could only be assured of emerging
within thirty thousand kilometers of the Glory.
There was no way around the distortion of the gravity well, with the limited technology
available to the Ruhar or Kristang. A separation of thirty thousand kilometers
was far enough that the Glory could
safely jump away, after its shields absorbed one or two direct hits from maser
beams. More than two maser beams, or a single hit from a railgun or smart
missile would burn through the frigate’s thin shields. Frigate captains were
trained to jump in, shoot and jump away before enemy fire could find them.

The scan was now 84%
complete; the Glory’s parameters for
this mission had been a successful 75% scan. An additional 10% would allow the
frigate’s crew bragging rights, without earning her captain a reprimand for
needlessly endangering his precious ship.

Bravery to the point
of foolhardiness was normally expected in Kristang captains, but not this time.
There were only seven Kristang ships still around the Paradise system, and none
of them could be risked without strong assurance that the risk was worth the
potential gain. The small remaining task force was centered around one elderly
cruiser, with its escorts of two support ships, three frigates and one
destroyer. The task force had only two purposes; to force the Ruhar to maintain
a substantial naval presence in the Pradassis system, and to gather
intelligence. To provide intelligence that hopefully would convince the clan’s
leadership that one strong push would take the planet back. The dishonorable Ruhar
and their allies the Jeraptha may have decisively defeated the
Kristang/Thuranin coalition forces in the sector for the moment, but even the
triumphant Ruhar could not be strong everywhere at once. The planet Pradassis
could still be retaken, but that possibility grew fainter every day.

The ship was rocked
by a glancing blow from a maser beam; the Ruhar defense force had narrowed his
location enough to begin using targeting sensors. The Glory had been maneuvering randomly since it jumped in, so that by
the time a light-slow maser beam reached its intended target, the target was no
longer there. Sensor scan now 87% complete. The shields had protected the ship
from the maser beam, but that dissipated energy was now a cloud of high-energy
particles surrounding the ship and degrading the effectiveness of the sensors. The
Glory’s captain ordered a jump away,
and the little frigate disappeared sixty one seconds after it jumped in.
Jumping away, so soon after jumping in, rendered it impossible for the
frigate’s jump drive to have any kind of accuracy but that did not matter. All
the frigate’s crew cared about was getting away without emerging inside a
planet or moon; anywhere else was safely empty space.

While the ship’s crew
were preparing for a series of jumps back to the task force’s gathered ships,
the Glory’s captain quickly skimmed
through highlights of the sensor data. Strangely, the Ruhar did not appear to
be putting any effort into stiffening their planet’s defenses against raiders.
The Ruhar did not consider the planet important enough to expend the resources,
or the Ruhar were now stretched so thin that they did not have the resources to
deploy. Either circumstance was favorable to the Kristang.

There was something
else interesting in the sensor data; substantial areas of the southern
continent, mostly covered by jungle, had been cleared for crops. Human crops.
There were large areas of fields growing plants suited to human biology. A
closer look at the sensor data revealed newly constructed crude settlements
populated by humans near the fields. And in the fields were Ruhar heavy
equipment, assisting the humans with clearing the jungle, planting and
harvesting crops. Despite being ordered to resist the Ruhar by their rightful
patrons the Kristang, the traitorous, cowardly humans appeared to be
wholeheartedly working with the Ruhar.

Those large fields,
the Glory’s captain thought, would
make tempting, easy targets for a raiding ship’s maser beams. The traitorous
humans needed to be taught a lesson by true warriors.

CHAPTER TWO

Earth

After getting grilled by
one group after another for four straight days, I wrangled permission to leave
the base. Just me, no escort. I wasn’t under arrest, and although I still had
the Big Red Button app on my zPhone that could activate the Dutchman’s
weapons, it wasn’t necessary. Unlike last time, there was a skeleton crew
aboard the ship. I didn’t need to be on duty 24/7 to protect the planet.
Besides, we now knew there were no Kristang or Thuranin ships on this side of
the local wormhole. So, I had the night off, all I needed to do was report back
for another debriefing at 0800 the next morning. Friday morning. I was hoping
they would let me have the weekend off. I was also certainly not betting on it.

“Hey, Joe. You think your
week sucked,” Skippy said to me as I was changing into civilian clothes. “That
was nothing compared to what I had to go through.”

“Oh, yeah, sorry, I meant
to ask you about that. How did it go?” UNEF had come up with the astonishingly
moronic idea for Skippy to be examined by psychologists and AI experts. UNEF’s
thinking, if that word even applied, was there was something wrong with Skippy
that made him act like such an immature asshole. I had told them no, there is
nothing wrong with Skippy. He is simply an incredibly powerful, smart, amoral
little beer can. Being an asshole was just his personality.

UNEF didn’t listen to me.

Fortunately, UNEF’s
search for humans who were considered ‘experts’ in the field of artificial
intelligence ended quickly, since humanity had not yet developed true AI.
Asking a human to examine Skippy would be like asking a flatworm to look under
the hood of a car and tell you why it won’t start. The few people working in
the field of AI who were contacted by UNEF naturally would have given anything
to speak with Skippy, but they all told UNEF that any knowledge transfer would
be one-way. And Skippy refused to cooperate.

I expected that any
psychologist would have told UNEF that they had no way to usefully examine the
psyche of an alien artificial intelligence. I underestimated the arrogance of
psychologists. Despite having exactly zero frame of reference for what
constituted ‘normal’ behavior for an Elder AI, the psychologists plowed
ignorantly ahead.

“It went better for me
than for them,” Skippy chuckled. “You know what, the experience was actually
mildly entertaining for a while, until I got bored with it. One of them had a
nervous breakdown. Another one started crying and ended the conversation, he’s
in therapy now.”

“Skippy! You didn’t have
to do that.”

“Hey, you did warn them.
It’s not my fault they ignored you. Morons.”

“Oh, boy.” I had warned
them. Skippy knew just about everything there was to know about a person. And
he was an expert at pushing people’s buttons. Whatever a person’s weakness or
trigger points were, he would find them and use them. What the hell had they
been thinking, trying to peel back the mind of such an immensely intelligent
being? “Don’t do it again, please?”

“No problem, Joe, that
little farce is over. Although they did conclude that whatever is ‘wrong’ with
me is your fault.”

“What? How the hell do
they figure that?”

“Well, reading from their
preliminary report, they’re saying ‘The alien AI is engaging in classic
mirroring behavior with its companion Joseph Bishop. It is because of Bishop’s
immature personality that the Skippy being’s behavior is-’ Ah, I don’t need to
read the rest of this BS to you, Joe. The gist of it is that if a different
person had discovered me in that dusty warehouse, a person the psychologists
consider more mature, then I would be more serious and cooperative.”

“Oh.” Crap. Another
reason for UNEF to be pissed at me. “They’re, uh, not right about that, are
they?”

“Phhhhht!” Skippy made a
raspberry sound. “Ha! No way, dude! I’ve told you before, me being an asshole
is just me. That’s not going to change. Especially not because some bacteria
with a degree in psychology says so.”

“Oh, good, then.”

A bus took me into town;
all I wanted was a cheeseburger, a beer and time to myself. There was a crowd
of reporters outside the base fence, all hoping to get an interview with anyone
who had been on the Thuranin star carrier. In my civilian clothes, on an
ordinary bus and with a baseball cap pulled down over my eyes, I sailed right
through the reporters. Once I got off the bus, I wandered down some side
streets; I wanted to find a place that wouldn’t be crowded with people from the
base. Finally, I found a window that advertised ‘wine flights’ whatever that
is, and I saw a group of people wearing suits go in. In my experience, this
type of place was not likely to be crowded with off-duty soldiers.

It was about half full
already. I found a spot at the bar, ordered a cold beer and a cheeseburger, and
half watched a college basketball game on the TV. The cheeseburger was merely Ok;
it may have been my mood that was the problem.

While I was taking a sip
of beer, someone jostled me from behind and I almost spilled my drink. “Oh,
sorry,” said a woman as she plunked her purse on the bar. “This place is
crowded tonight.” She caught the bartender’s attention. “Lemon drop martini,
please.”

“Oh, hi. Hey, I’ve seen
you on the base,” I said truthfully. She had been in the cafeteria several
times, and I’d seen her in hallways also. She was a civilian, I guessed she
worked at Wright-Patterson. Her ID card was partly sticking out of her purse.

“You’re Joe, right?” She asked. “You’re one of the ExFor
starship crew?” She added that last question quietly. When she first sat down
next to me, I had half turned away, assuming she was there with friends and
didn’t want to be hit on by guys that night. Now I was paying attention. She’d
sat down next to me because it was one of only two seats left at the bar, it
being happy hour on a Thursday night. Short thick black hair, in a cut that I
think is called a ‘bob’ but I am certainly no expert on women’s hairstyles. Her hair was
longer in front than the back, it framed her face nicely. Brown eyes. She had a
tan from some place she’d been on vacation but not recently; it was starting to
fade. Late twenties, maybe? I’m a bad judge of age. Cute. Very cute, and a nice
smile. She tucked her badge in her purse and slung it over her knee, the way
women do when bars aren’t smart enough to install purse hooks under the bar
top. Offering a hand, she added “I’m Rachel. I work in IT support at the base
network center.”

“Sergeant Joe Bishop,” I
shook her hand for what I hoped was the right amount of time, not too firm but
not trying to crush her either. A handshake that hopefully said I am not a
creep and please please please stay here and talk with me. Also hopefully it did
not convey the desperation I was feeling either. That was asking a lot from a
handshake.

“Hello, Sergeant Joe,”
said as she glanced around. I fervently wished she wasn’t looking for her
friends, or worse, her boyfriend. She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. “What
brought you here? This place is out of the way.”

“After wearing a uniform
every day aboard the ship, I want to be a civilian for a while,” I pointed to
the civilian shirt I was wearing.

“I know what you mean,”
she laughed, and it was a truly wonderful sound. “I was in the Air Force.
Wearing a uniform makes it easy for women; you don’t have to put together an
outfit every day.”

“Guys just do a sniff
test, on whatever clothes are on top of the pile of laundry on the floor,” I
admitted.

“You guys are so lucky!”
She said, and lightly punched me on the shoulder. Things were looking good.
“Now I have to find something Business Casual to wear five days a week. If we
have a high-level meeting, then I have to dress up.” She took a sip of her
lemon drop martini. “You were on that alien starship?”

On behalf of all the men and women trapped on Paradise, I could
at least entertain Rachel with UNEF’s current cover story. A cover story that
had been pounded into my head, over and over. Telling her the story also gave
me a reason to lean closer to her, to be heard over the noisy bar. Yes, I said,
sticking to the cover story. I was on the starship. I went to space, and I had
been on Paradise. It was a nice planet, nothing special. The parts of Paradise
that I had seen were kind of like Kansas and the Amazon, not that I’d ever been
to either of those places on Earth. We humans didn’t fly the starship that was
now in orbit; we were just passengers on a Thuranin ship. The Thuranin were
little green men, I had seen them but never spoken with one. That part was the truth.
No, I didn’t know when the ExFor would be coming back from Paradise; I had not
been on Paradise in a long time. That was the truth again. And no, I hadn’t had
contact with Paradise, and I didn’t know where the Thuranin starship would be
taking us next. I didn’t even know when or if I would be going into space next.
Actually, there was a lot of truth mixed into UNEF’s cover story. Most of what
I needed to say was that I didn’t know things that I honestly didn’t know. That
made it easy to remember.

“You are only passengers aboard the Thuranin ship?” She asked
quizzically. “Why did you bring pilots? I saw people wearing Air Force
flightsuits get off the dropship when you landed.”

“Oh, yeah, uh,” UNEF had a cover story for that also. “When we
were on Paradise, we flew captured Ruhar aircraft. The Kristang trained us on a
planet we called Camp Alpha, before we went to Paradise,” I added nervously.

To my relief, she nodded and seemed to buy the story. “Don’t
worry, I won’t ask where you went this last time.”

After enforced sobriety on Camp Alpha, Paradise and aboard the Flying
Dutchman, I was being careful to limit myself to beer. While I talked with Rachel,
I nursed the same beer I had started with. Raising the glass to drain the last
of the beer, I was jostled from behind again and spilled it on the bar. Some of
it splashed on my shirt. Rachel handed me a napkin and tried to catch the
bartender’s attention. “It’s Ok,” I told her. “I have to watch what I’m drinking;
it’s been a long time since I’ve had much alcohol.”

Rachel had been about to order another lemon drop, she dropped
her hand and looked around. “This place is crowded. It’s karaoke night,” she
pointed to the stage.

“Oh no!” A loud but muffled voice came from the zPhone in my
pocket. “No karaoke for you, Joe! Your singing voice scares animals and small
children!”

“Excuse me,” I said to Rachel, and pulled out my zPhone.
“Skippy,” I whispered as quietly as I could to still be heard over the noisy
bar, “this is not a good time.”

Rachel’s eyes widened, and she leaned closer to me. “Is that Skippy?”

Now it was my turn to be surprised. UNEF Command had told us
that rumors of a ‘Skippy’ had gotten out, as was inevitable, but-

That annoying beer can didn’t know when to be quiet. “Skippy the
Magnificent, at your service, Rachel my dear-”

“Not now, Skippy, I’m serious!” I said, and sat on the phone.
“Uh, look, Rachel-”

“I’ve heard of someone called Skip-” as she spoke, the karaoke
started, with some drunk guy loudly warbling a pop song off key. “Joe,” she
said with her lips practically brushing my ear because the place was so loud.
“Let’s go someplace else?”

“That would be great,” I said without hesitation.

The ‘someplace else’ was a coffee shop down the street. We got
coffees, technically what she got looked like an ice cream sundae with a tiny splash
of coffee somewhere in it. Lots of whipped cream and caramel sauce. And a
straw. That did not qualify as ‘coffee’ in my opinion. I paid for the coffees
although she used her frequent coffee buyer card, so I guessed that she got
coffee there often. The shop wasn’t empty as I had hoped, that disappointed me,
because I’d been hoping for it to be quieter. There was a hipster douchebag
with a carefully tended scruffy beard, a bowler hat and an ironic T-shirt
playing acoustic guitar in the corner. He had brought a group of enthusiastic
friends, but apparently left the talent behind in his car. It actually turned
out great to my delight; Rachel and I had to sit close to hear each other. The
background noise meant I didn’t need to worry about being overheard. And the
terrible singing of the hipster gave us something to laugh about.

First, I told her the official UNEF cover story that I had been
given, in case anyone asked about Skippy. ‘Skippy’ is the nickname humans used
for the AI that ran the Thuranin ship. He is super intelligent and rightfully
disdainful of lowly humans. And he tends to involve himself in our lives, even
when we’re not on the ship.

Rachel could tell that further inquiry about Skippy, the
Thuranin ship or Paradise were not welcome. Being ex-military, and having a
clearance to work on Air Force computers, she knew that certain subjects were
on a need-to-know basis, so she was cool about changing the subject. “Joe
Bishop. Is there any chance you are that Joe Bishop, the Barney guy?”

“Yes,” I admitted sheepishly. I’d seen her checking her phone on
the walk from the bar, she probably had Googled me. Talking about events in the
public record was safe; anything that happened before I took the space elevator
up from Ecuador. I told what I hoped was a humorous account of how I became
known as Barney. Rachel laughed at my story, then I asked about her. This
wasn’t me doing the guy thing of letting a woman talk so I can get into her
pants. I was genuinely interested in her, and not only because she is a woman.
After being captain of a pirate ship, commander of everyone I saw on a daily
basis, I was desperate to simply talk with someone like the normal people talk.
Rachel was a good listener, and as she told me about her life, I just sat and
enjoyed being a regular person. Sitting in a coffee shop in a typical American
city, with a person who I could not potentially order into deadly combat, was
cathartic.

We stayed late enough at the coffee shop that we finished our
coffees and I got us decafs and we split a scone. The hipster guy ran out of
folk songs to mangle and finished his set about a quarter after ten; fifteen
minutes before the coffee shop closed for the night. We took a hint and walked
outside. “Can I walk you to your car?” I asked awkwardly. Clearly, I was out of
practice.

“No need,” she said, and even in the night, she must have seen
my face fall. “I live across the street,” she pointed to an apartment building.

“Oh,” I said with relief, “that explains the frequent coffee
drinker card.”

“Yes,” she laughed, “I spend too much money in there.”

There was an awkward moment of silence, that most guys would
typically use as an opportunity for some lame hint about going to her place. “Rachel,
this has been great, thank you,” I blurted out before my testicles could stop
me. No, they were shouting, NO! “I
have another meeting at 8 o’clock tomorrow morning, so I’m going to head back
to the base. I’ll, uh, see you around on Monday?” The truth was, I really did
have a great time talking with her, and I didn’t want to spoil the pleasant
buzz by her having to let me down, so I did it for her. She seemed surprised
but also mildly relieved to avoid the inevitable awkwardness.

Paradise

Baturnah Logellia
frowned as the human commander left her office. She did not like lying to, or
at the very least misleading the poor humans. Although the humans had come to
Gehtanu as lackeys of the hated Kristang, Baturnah felt sorry for them, and
even some measure of affection for some of them. In a way, although the planet
had been under the control of the occupying Kristang back then, she felt a pang
of nostalgia for the time when the humans had called her the ‘Burgermeister’.

The current human
commander was from an ethnic subgroup the humans called ‘Chinese’. All humans
looked pretty much the same to her, she didn’t appreciate the significance of
genetic, cultural or political differences. Also she simply didn’t care; she
had other more pressing issues to absorb her attention. For some reason that
seemed to be important to the humans; command of their United Nations
Expeditionary Force rotated regularly among the five nations who constituted
the combat force. Or what had been a combat force, before the Ruhar
reestablished control over the planet. Whatever it had once been, the human
force was now mostly scattered across the southern continent, from which the
few Ruhar residents had been evacuated. The humans could have the southern
continent they called ‘Lemuria’, and hopefully within a few years the humans
would be self-sufficient there. That time could not come soon enough for
Baturnah, because the humans were both a constant distraction and a substantial
drain on scarce resources.

It was why those
resources were so scarce that was the reason she misled the human commander.
And misled the Ruhar residents of Gehtanu.

The Ruhar government,
Baturnah knew, did not want to keep Gehtanu. Had not intended or wanted to
recapture the planet at all. Gehtanu had only been the bait to lure a major
Kristang/Thuranin task force into battle, so it could be trapped and destroyed.
That Ruhar/Jeraptha force was not supposed to actually retake control of
Gehtanu, but as the battle developed and spread rapidly across the sector, the
situation became highly fluid. The success of the initial attack wildly
exceeded the expectations of Ruhar/Jeraptha command, opening additional
opportunities. When intelligence was received that two Kristang battlegroups intended
to use Gehtanu as a place to make a last stand, possibly ransacking the planet
in the process, the local Ruhar commander had reacted quickly and diverted his
ships to jump into orbit.

Now the Ruhar were
stuck with a planet they didn’t want. The planet held two troublesome
populations; humans, and native Ruhar who outlasted the Kristang evacuation
effort. Those native Ruhar now expected their government to assist in
rebuilding the planet and bringing the evacuees back.

Be patient, Baturnah
had to tell the natives. Those who were evacuated will be returned in due time,
she lied. The military situation in the sector is still unsettled, she told
them truthfully. A cease-fire has been negotiated, but there have been
incidents. It is still too dangerous for civilian transport ships to make the
journey to Gehtanu, she said, and that was also the truth. What the government
instructed her to lie about was the intended end game; giving Gehtanu back to
the Kristang.

Before the recent
wormhole shift, the planet that the Ruhar knew as Gehtanu, the Kristang claimed
as Pradassis, and the humans called Paradise, had been roughly equally
conveniently located for both the Ruhar and the Kristang. After the shift, the
closest wormhole was substantially further away for the Ruhar than it was for
the Kristang. If they had not already occupied the planet, the Ruhar would
never have bothered going there. The Ruhar government did not want Gehtanu now;
the wormhole shift had opened much more alluring and less expensive
opportunities. Gehtanu was too sparsely populated, and too vulnerable, to
bother keeping. In order to assure the planet’s safety, the Ruhar would need to
permanently station a major battlegroup in the system, and Gehtanu was simply
not worth that effort and expense.

So the Ruhar were
secretly negotiating with a coalition of major Kristang clans to give Gehtanu
back to the Kristang, in exchange for Kristang concessions of more valuable
territory elsewhere.

That would be bad for
the native Ruhar, who would be forcibly evacuated by their own government.

It would be
absolutely disastrous for the humans. There was nowhere to evacuate humans to,
and the Ruhar certainly would not be taking their former oppressors with them.
Humans on Gehtanu would be left under control of the cruel Kristang, who now
considered their former clients as traitors.

So when the human
commander of their ‘UNEF’ came into her office to discuss his many legitimate
concerns, Baturnah had to nod and smile, and assure him that they could work
together. And they would, right up until the point when the Ruhar betrayed
their slowly developing trust.

Earth

I slept great and woke up the next morning in a good mood. The
worst of the debriefing had to be over, I figured. The session that day wasn’t
bad; the people running the debriefing seemed to have run out of questions for
the moment, and I had run out of things to say. I had accepted that UNEF and
the US military were disappointed and angry with me, and my acceptance took
away some of the fun for them to berate me yet again. By 1530, we ended the
session for the day, and the next meeting wasn’t scheduled until Monday. I had
a whole weekend free!

So I was completely surprised when Rachel called me that
afternoon.

“Hi, Joe, this is Rachel,” she said.

“Oh, hi. Um, how did you get my number?” I looked at my zPhone.
As far as I knew, a zPhone did not have a ‘phone number’. When we got our
original zPhones on Camp Alpha, they were keyed to us; to contact someone you
looked them up in the UNEF directory by name or unit.

“You texted me last night,” she answered cautiously. “I was
wondering how you got my number.”

“I did?”

“Joe, you dumdum,” Skippy broke into the call, and I assume Rachel
couldn’t hear him on her end. “I texted her with ‘Thank you for a very nice
evening’. Clearly, you have no idea what you are doing with women. Damn, you
are a dumbass sometimes.”

I gestured at my zPhone with my middle finger, knowing Skippy
would be watching through the camera. “Oh, yeah, I did, Rachel. Sorry, it’s
been a very long week. I got your number from the base operator,” I winced at
that lie, hoping she wouldn’t think that was creepy of me. “I’m not, you know,
stalking you or anything.” OMG what an idiot I am! If she didn’t think I was
creepy before, then mentioning ‘stalking’ should have set off her alarms.

But she laughed! Someone up there liked me, and I didn’t mean a
shiny beer can. “That is good to know, Joe. Listen, if you’re not busy tonight,
would you be interested in dinner?”

“That depends,” I tried to be smooth while inside I was shaking.
“I’m not familiar with fabulous Dayton Ohio. Do you know a place that has
people who can actually sing?”

She laughed again. “Dayton has a bigger supply of ironic hipsters
than you might expect, but we can try to avoid them.”

“Wow, Joe,” Skippy said after Rachel ended the call. “Did you
just have a real girl ask you on a date? I thought there were no more surprises
in the universe.”

“A real woman, Skippy, and it’s not such a surpr-” I stopped, a
bad thought running with a chill down my spine. “Hey, Skippy. This Rachel. She
said she works in IT. Is that right? She’s not an undercover intel type, is
she? She did ask a lot of questions last night.” I was afraid that our meeting
the previous night may not have been the coincidence that it seemed. UNEF
sending an attractive woman to see if I blew our cover story was exactly what I
expected them to do.

“Nope. She is genuinely who she says she is. She did talk and
text with friends today, telling them that she met a cute guy from ExFor. And
that you are ‘that Barney guy’. I know you hate being referred to as Bar-”

“Cute?” I interrupted. “She said I’m cute?”

“Those were her exact words.”

“Oh, damn,” I said with disappointment.

“What is wrong with that?” Skippy asked with surprise in his
voice.

“She said that I’m cute. Puppies are cute, Skippy. I was hoping
she said that I’m hot.”

“Oh, boy,” Skippy sighed heavily. “Every time I think I have
plumbed the lowest depths of your stupidity, Joe, I find a bottomless well
beneath it. At some point in your life, you have had social contact with human
women, right? Yet, you apparently know absolutely nothing about the fairer
sex.”

“Huh? How do you figure that?” Most of the time when the beer
can insulted me, I didn’t much care, but this time it bugged me.

“Joe, ‘cute’ means she likes you, and that she feels comfortable
around you. She also said you are funny. For a girl to go to bed with a guy,
she needs to get past her inhibitions, let her guard down. If you are cute and
you make her comfortable, and especially if you can make her laugh, then dude,
you are totally in. Trust me.”

“Wow, great, I never thought of it like-”

“Unless she laughs when you take your pants off.”

“Yeah, I figured that. She said that I’m cute and funny, so-”

“I’m not telling you
anything else she said,” Skippy protested.

“Oh, yeah, sure, because you’re all about privacy,” I said
sarcastically.

“No, it’s because I like her, and I don’t want you to do some
typically stupid Joe thing and screw this up. You’re likely to slip up and
mention something I told you.”

“I have been on dates with girls before, you know.”

“Shauna seducing you in the back of a truck was not a ‘date’,
Joe.”

“Shauna,” I felt a pang of sadness thinking about her stuck on
Paradise, “is not the first girl I have been with.”

“Oh, yeah, because you were such a stud in high school. Well,
you did go out with Melanie Rodgers for almost five months during your senior
year. Hey, why did you two break up?" Skippy asked.

"We were young, and
it's complica-"

"Ooh, ooh! I think
I know what the problem was! Can I guess?" He sounded like an over-eager
first grade boy, desperate to get the teacher's attention.

"What?" I foolishly
took the bait.

"Was it her
inability to deal with crushing disappointment? Every. Single. Day?”

"You are such an asshole," I couldn't help
laughing, "why do I keep you around?"

"Most likely it is
because of your shockingly poor judgment."

"Yeah, that must be
it."

Getting ready for my date with Rachel, I took a shower and
shaved, then I contemplated what else to do. It had been a while since I’d been
a normal civilian date with a woman. Skippy offered to help. “Are you going to
put on some of that body spray you bought at the base store?”

“Uh,” I hesitated. “I don’t know, Skippy, it never seemed to
work for me like it does for guys in the TV commercials.”

“That’s because you weren’t using enough of it, dumdum. You need
to spray on at least twice as much to turn girls on.”

“Oh, thanks, Skippy,” I said as I reached for the can.

“No!” Skippy shouted.
“Damn you are a dumbass! Seriously! Oh, this is hopeless. Hopeless! Girls hate
it when a clueless guy uses too much cologne, and you guys always use too much
or not at all. Put that can down! Get dressed, wear the blue shirt.”

“The blue one? Why?”

“Because it picks up the blue in your eyes. Also because I went
back through her Facebook posts and emails and IMs and credit card receipts,
and I learned that Rachel purchased blue shirts for two of her previous
boyfriends. Her favorite color is blue.”

“Hmmm. That could be a problem, Skippy. Are you sure my shirt
isn’t going to remind her of an ex-boyfriend?”

“No, it’s a different shade of blue. Trust me on this, Joe.”

Dinner with Rachel was wonderful. I forget what I ate; Rachel
had a salad like women do on first dates. She offered to pay for dinner since
she had invited me out. I paid, explaining that I had a lot of back pay coming;
there not being anything aboard a Thuranin starship to spend money on anyway.
After dinner, we went across the street to a bar with good music, and we had a
terrific time. Rachel has a wicked sense of humor, especially after her second
or maybe third lemon drop martini. Fourth? I lost track. I stuck to beer and
tried to drink slowly. Damn, all I wanted was not to screw this up. I was on a
real date, with a real woman, doing things like regular people did. That was
all I wanted.

We ended the night at
her place; I don’t remember how it happened. I do remember that I didn’t try
using any lame pickup line on her; going to her place just seemed natural.
Figuring that we both had a lot to drink, I took it slow, but apparently I was
out of practice.

She ruffled my hair with
one hand. "Joe, stop, it's Ok, I drank too many lemon drops. It's not
going to happen for me tonight."

"Hey, Joe,"
Skippy's distorted voice blared out of my zPhone earpiece, under the bed
somewhere, "you should do that thing you did with Shauna. That
worked."

"Oh for-" I
frantically fumbled around under the bed with one hand, trying to find the
stupid earpiece and kill it.

"Who," I could
feel Rachel stiffen, "is Shauna?" Her voice was icy as the
interstellar depths.

"Uh," the
damned earpiece had rolled all the way under the far side of the bed,
"nobody. I mean," my brain screamed at me that telling a woman I was
with, that a woman I had been with was nobody to me, would not help me case,
"not nobody. Nobody recen-"

"Joe sweated up the
sheets with Shauna on Camp Alpha." Skippy said cheerily. "Not sheets,
exactly, more like Army issue blankets in the back of a truck-"

"Skippy! Please, for
the love of God, shut the hell up!"

Rachel slammed her legs
together and smacked me in the chin with a knee; she knocked me off the bed
onto the floor. "The back of a truck?!”

"That was her idea,
not mine. She wanted to-" I stopped talking, because even I knew a woman
doesn't want details of a man's prior sex partners. Sometimes my brain is way
smarter than I am. "I'm going to stop talking now."

"Wise choice."
Rachel said, and pulled up the bed covers, shutting me out.

"Hey, it wasn't my
idea to-"

"This doesn't sound
like you not talking, Joe."

“Oh, yeah. Right.”
Feeling like an idiot kneeling naked on the floor, I ducked down to reach under
the bed, but I couldn't see the earpiece.

"How does this
Skippy AI know what you did with, her? You made a sex video?"

"No," I said
from under the bed. I saw the stupid thing now; it was almost out of reach.
"My zPhone was under a blanket back then. That's the thing about Skippy,
he can see and hear almost everything."

Rachel pulled the covers
up higher. "Like now? He sees us? From the ship?”

Skippy said something
that I couldn't hear, because I now had the earpiece and was squeezing the
speaker in my fist.

"Yeah, he can see
us. His technology is super advanced. Something about him being able to detect
the way dust particles in the air vibrate, I think, he won't explain it to us
humans."

"Uh huh, close enough,"
Skippy's voice now came out of the speaker in the clock radio. "I am
Skippy the Omniscient, I see all, I hear all, I know all."

Rachel's face was shear
white. "Everything?"

"Pretty much,
yeah." Skippy responded. "Not that I pay attention much, you humans
are generally not that interesting a species. And monkey mating kind of grosses
me out. The last thing I want to watch is Joe's pasty white ass bouncing up and
down. Yuck." The speaker began playing the soundtrack to a really bad porn
movie, with a heavy bass line and lots of moaning and sighing. Bow-chicka-bow-boom-boom-bow-bow-chicka-bow.
Not that I watch bad porn movies, of course, but, you know, I'd heard about
them.

"Skippy! Cut it
out!" I shouted. The music stopped.

"I'm only trying to
help, Joe. Clearly, what you were doing wasn't getting the job done. I'd
suggest you look in her goodie drawer for assistance, but the batteries in her
favorite toy are almost dead." Then he added in a low voice. "Man,
she gives that poor thing a workout. You want me to-"

Rachel's hand flew to
her mouth. I thought she was going to pass out.

"Go away! I want
you to go away!" I shouted.

"Ok, fine. Remember
that the next time you need my help."

"Rachel look, I'm
sorry-"

"If I'd known your
AI friend was making this a threesome, I would have said no. He watches
everything you do?"

"He watches
everything everyone does. It's not just me."

"How do you live
like that?" She asked in horror.

I shrugged. "It's
like, if you're having sex, and the dog is laying down in the corner of the
room. It doesn't matter if it's watching you, because it's just a dog? With
Skippy, you get used to it, because he truly doesn't care, he's just not that
interested. If he's watching us here, he's watching a lot of other people at
the same time. And that's only a tiny part of what's going on in his, uh, mind,
at the time."

She pulled the covers
all the way up over her head, only her fingernails were showing. I took that as
my cue to leave. If I could find my pants. Where the hell were my pants? With a
glance into the hallway, I determined they weren't there either. “I’m sorry, Rachel,
I'll get out of your hair. You, uh, have any idea where my pants are?"

She peeked out from
under the covers. "Your pants? No, I don't. Your friend Skippy is
gone?"

I was too tired to care.
"Think so, yeah. Look, my pants must be under the cov-"

She flung the covers
aside and looked at me with one eye open. "I'm probably going to regret
this, but can we sleep on this, and talk in the morning? I'm too tired and I
drank too much to think straight right now."

That sounded good. Being
in bed with her, simply being in bed, I was tired and all I wanted to do was
sleep.

I slept like a log. She
said she slept well also. In the morning, after I made coffee, we took a shower
together, and we hit the reset button. It was great. Sex is so much better when
you're not drunk. And when you're awake.

Later that morning, I
walked down the street to a bakery to get breakfast. Strolling back with a bag
of baked goodies, I was feeling on top of the world. The weather was beautiful;
sunny with a few clouds here and there, it was a cool morning but the afternoon
promised to be pleasantly warm. There was a half-dressed woman waiting for me
in her apartment, and since she had the day off, we had the whole day to
ourselves. Friends of hers were having a cookout that evening, and we were
invited. It felt great having no responsibilities. Let someone else save the
world for a change, I was on leave.

And, of course, the main
reason for my super ultra great mood is that I got laid. Never underestimate
that.

Skippy called me, I held
the zPhone to my ear as if it were a regular cellphone. I didn’t want to draw
attention to myself. “Good morning, Joe!” Skippy said with a cheery voice.
“Were you and Rachel all right last night?"

"You weren't
watching us, were you?"

"Not as far as you
know."

"Ok good,” I
stopped to let a car pull into a driveway. “I really think that's a situation
where you shouldn't- hey, wait a minute! Not as far as I know?"

"Gosh, will you look
at the time, I should be go-"

"Not so fast,
Skippy, you have some ‘splain-, oh, what the hell, why would it matter?"
I'd gotten so used to his watching everything I did, that I didn't care.
"Hey, Skippy, you're the smartest being in the galaxy, right?"

"Yup, as far as
both of us know."

"Great, because I
do not understand women. Human women. Can you give me some insight? Help a
brother out?"

Skippy sighed. Or
imitated a sigh, it was convincing. "Joe, I have studied all the
literature about human female psychology, read all the books written by and for
women, downloaded every blog, every Instagram or Pinterest post, watched every
program on the Lifetime channel, listened in on conversations between women,
and have chatted online with billions of your females. With all of my
processing power, over the equivalent of millions of years of analysis, I have
come to one simple conclusion about human females."

"And what's
that?" I asked eagerly.

"Bitches be
crazy."

"Skippy!" I
managed to say after I stopped laughing. "That's not nice."

"Oh, was that
inappropriate? I can never tell."

"Decidedly
inappropriate. Also wickedly funny. But don't do it again, huh?"

"No problem.
Seriously, Joe, women have just as much trouble understanding men, as men have
trouble understanding women. The difference is, women generally want to
understand men in order to be better relationship partners. Men mostly are
looking to get women into bed."

"Well, get them
into bed first," I felt a need to defend my gender.

"Uh huh. Anyway,
trying to understand women is a futile exercise, you may as well say you are
trying to understand people, all people. My suggestion is you find one woman,
and do your best to understand her. I hear that is quite rewarding."

"Someday, yeah. For
now, me going off into deep space on an alien pirate ship, makes it difficult
to get a relationship started, you know?”

“Do you regret traveling
around the galaxy with me?” He sounded a little bit hurt.

“No! Not at all, Skippy.
Hey, come on, we saved the world together. Twice.” That remark got a strange
look from a woman walking a dog past me. I lowered my voice. “I wouldn’t trade
that experience for anything. And, as much of a gargantuan asshole you are most
of the time, I got to meet you. That’s an incredible honor for a monkey like
me.”

“Same here. Well,
probably more of an honor for you to meet me, to be honest. It’s not even
close, to tell the truth.”

“Asshole,” I said under
my breath. “I’m enjoying being on leave; it’s great not to think about aliens
destroying Earth for a few days.”

“You need a break. You
deserve it. Ok, Joe, I’ll leave you alone for a while, unless you contact me.
Hey, heads up, Joe. Rachel is on her phone, talking with one of her friends
about you.”

“Oh, crap. Am I in
trouble?”

“Quite the contrary,
Joe, she is saying only good things about you. Damn, girls tell each other everything.”

“Everything?” I did not
like the sound of that.

“You men would be
shocked. Again, she is saying good things about you. Um, this is not my area of
expertise, but you may get lucky again today.”

CHAPTER THREE

Paradise

To
Seek Glory in Battle is Glorious
emerged high above the planet’s southern continent, almost two thirds of the
way to the pole. Jumping in there had caught the Ruhar defenders badly out of
position; they had been deployed to protect the northern continent where all
the important Ruhar facilities were. That was also where the Ruhar population
was concentrated; only a handful of Ruhar were stationed on the southern
continent to monitor the humans there.

The Ruhar task force
commander acted quickly, ordering three of his ships to climb up to jump
distance so they could surround the enemy vessel. This took less than a minute,
during which time the other Ruhar ships fired masers and missiles at the enemy.
The masers would very likely miss, and the missiles would likely be intercepted
by the enemy frigate’s defensive masers, but the Ruhar action would keep the
enemy busy.

The Ruhar commander
was puzzled when, instead of proceeding north at high speed to attack Ruhar facilities
on the surface, the enemy ship suddenly fired a maser beam at the southern
continent. The maser beam’s focus had been tuned to broaden its area of impact;
rather than an intense pencil-thin beam, it covered a wider area.

The enemy was, for
some unknown reason, targeting the humans’ food supply. The maser beam was
scorching fields of healthy crops and killing humans who had been caught in the
open. Why were the Kristang expending resources to hit the humans, a species
who had no combat power to threaten the Kristang?

No matter, the Ruhar
commander decided, that was a question that could be addressed later. The three
ships he had assigned to deal with the enemy frigate reached jump distance and
disappeared, only to reemerge above the southern continent in three bursts of
gamma radiation. The lightly-armored Kristang frigate would soon be forced to
withdraw, then the Ruhar could assess the damage it had inflicted.

No! A Kristang
destroyer suddenly jumped in above the northern continent and immediately fired
at several targets. To his shame, the Ruhar commander saw that the actions of
the frigate had been intended to lure part of his force away from their normal
patrol area, and he had rashly fallen for the enemy trick. Alarmed, he
scrambled to redeploy his other ships, and recalled two of the ships he had
sent to deal with the frigate.

Before the two enemy
ships had been chased away, the destroyer was able to successfully hit four
targets on the surface. Thirty eight Ruhar died in the attack, and a weapons
depot was also damaged. Next time, the Ruhar commander told himself with grim
determination, he would not be fooled into dividing his forces.

That there would be a
next time was one thing of which he was certain.

Earth

The cookout with Rachel’s
friends was great, except they had chicken and hot dogs, no cheeseburgers. And
everyone wanted to ask me about my experience with ExFor, what it was like on
Paradise, would the Kristang be coming back, and a thousand other questions. In
every answer, I was careful to stick to the script of UNEF’s cover story, and
was as vague as possible with my answers. Rachel saw the pained look on my face
after a while, and we bailed early.

The next morning, it was
going to be another nice day, and she suggested we go on a trail ride with
horses. Rachel said she had always been into horses; her family had a horse
when she was in high school, and she rode in some competitions. Jumping, stuff
like that.

A long ride on the back
of a horse wasn’t my idea of a great time. “We can go ride dirt bikes instead?”
It had been a while since I’d ridden a motorcycle; I expected it wouldn’t take
me long to get used to it again. When I was living at home, riding trails on a
dirt bike or a snowmobile was regularly great fun on weekends.

She tilted her head at
me. “Joe, you’re not afraid of horses, are you?”

“No, it’s just that I-”
Damn. The last time I’d been on a horse had to be when I was ten years old.
That was only sitting on a horse while it slowly walked around a ring at the
county fair. All I remember of that experience was thinking how far off the
ground I was. And that, if the horse wanted to go somewhere, I wouldn’t be able
to control it.

“Really? You went into
space to fight aliens, but you’re worried about a horse?”

“I’m not thrilled with
the idea of trusting a big dumb animal between my legs. Of course,” I grinned,
“you girls just call that ‘prom night’.”

“Joe!” She laughed and
slapped me playfully. “You are awful sometimes.”

“I am terribly, terribly
sorry,” I said with zero sincerity. “Sure, we can go on a trail ride, I’d like
to try that,” I smiled reassuringly. Being out in the great outdoors, having
fun with a pretty girl, who wouldn’t enjoy that?

“Do you know how to ride
a horse?”

I shrugged. “Grab the
horse’s ears,” I pantomimed with my hands, “left hand is the brake, right is
the throttle?”

“Sure, Joe,” she laughed
again, “I would love to get a picture of that. These horses know what to
do, and they follow the horse in front of them.”

“Uh huh. So, all I need
to do is sit down, shut up and hang on?”

“That’s the idea. If you
get in trouble, I can rescue you.”

“Oh, great.”

The horse ride was a lot
of fun, and we took a drive in the country afterward. Gas supplies had
recovered enough that most people could resume driving their cars at least
occasionally again. Although at $6.50 a gallon, you had to think about whether
a trip was worth it. Being a gentleman, I paid to fill up Rachel’s car; it was
almost painful taking that much cash out of my wallet.

The next day was Monday;
Rachel had to work, and I had to answer a bunch more questions. That afternoon,
she had to fly to Arnold Air Force Base in Tennessee for a conference that
would last until Friday morning; it was some computer flight simulator software
type thing she was working on. Wanting to impress her, I almost opened my big
mouth say that I was a pilot, qualified to fly a Thuranin dropship.
Fortunately, good sense stopped me before I blew part of our cover story. Damn,
this lying thing was getting old already.

She was scheduled to fly
back to Dayton on Friday afternoon, but on Saturday morning, she would be
leaving for a girl’s weekend that she and her friends had been planning for
months. My timing sucked, that was for sure. “I’m sorry, Joe,” she said.

“Hey, I understand. I’ll
be here when you get back. I’m not going anywhere.”

I was wrong about that.
To my complete surprise, the debriefing wrapped up Tuesday afternoon, and the
Army granted me two weeks of leave. Maybe they figured I deserved leave after
our long mission, and it wasn’t just me. Major Simms and Sergeant Adams texted
me that their own debriefings were over for now, and they were on leave also.
Same with the Ranger and SEAL teams who had been part of the Merry Band of
Pirates. My opinion was that we had given UNEF a whole lot to think about, and
they needed to process it before bringing us back in for more questions. At
some point, soon, the Dutchman needed
to go back out. Needed to go back out, in order to verify the Thuranin weren’t
sending another ship to Earth. I called Rachel and told her I was going to
visit my folks for a while, even though I really, really wanted to see her
again.

My timing, really,
really sucked.

“You’re packing, Joe?”
Skippy asked, while I was stuffing clothes into a dufflebag. “Going to see your
loved ones?”

“Yes, Skippy, my parents
have been waiting for me to come home since I called them after we jumped into
orbit.”

“But your loved ones are
right here, Joe.”

“Huh?” My loved ones? If
he was referring to himself, he was still in his escape pod man cave aboard the
Flying Dutchman.

“Your loved ones, Joe.
You know, Jim Beam, Jack Daniels, Johnny Walker-”

“Oh, very funny.” Hmm.
Maybe I did have time for a nice drink before I left.

Paradise

Baturnah looked up in
shock from the document she was reading. “I can not believe this. This came from our government?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said her
aide Pollun Grayce. Grayce had been with Baturnah Logellia for over a decade, a
tumultuous decade. The next year did not appear like it would be any less
eventful. “It is not an official recommendation from the federal government,
nor it is expressed as desired policy-”

“Yet. It is not yet official government policy. Pollun,
this is horrific. I feel unclean even reading this.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Pollun
agreed. And he did agree. Sometimes, his job was to listen and allow the Deputy
Administrator to vent her feelings to a private audience.

“These are people they’re talking about. Sentient
beings. They are a young, backwards and ignorant species. It’s not their fault
that they are here.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Pollun had
done this many times before. After venting her feelings, Ms. Logellia would be
ready to discuss policy with a cool, clear head. That was much better than many
political leaders that Pollun Grayce knew; they let their emotions run their
decision making process. It was understandable that his boss was upset; the
report she was reading was radical and shocking. The report stated that the
Ruhar federal government, many lightyears away, was considering whether it
would be wise policy for the humans on Gehtanu to be sterilized, permanently.
The report inquired into the practical, biological and political implications
of such a policy. It did not inquire into whether such a policy would be
morally acceptable. “If I may guess, ma’am, I think the impetus behind this
report was the last status document that was requested by the federal
government.”

Baturnah silently raised
an eyebrow.

“In the status data,”
Pollun reminded her, “there were statistics about the human situation. Food
supply, how much food they had in storage, how much food they were growing
currently, projections of future crop yields.” All fairly dry information. The
federal government had been concerned about the financial drain of providing
‘nutrient mush’ to humans. Humans who were technically a client species of the
Ruhar’s bitter enemies. “Within that data were statistics on the human
population. And,” Pollun pulled those numbers up on his tablet and showed her.
“It states there are currently forty humans pregnant. Plus seventeen children
who have been born since humans landed on Paradise.”

Baturnah was not
surprised. Not having the advantage of genetic engineering, human females could
not consciously choose when to ovulate. “The government is concerned about such
small numbers?”

“Administrator, I think
our government is mostly concerned about the precedent that has been set. When
the humans came here, we know one strict condition imposed on them by the
Kristang was that all troops were required to use long-term birth control
technologies. That policy was strictly adhered to by their Expeditionary Force,
until the Kristang lost control of this planet. We do know that the authority
of their force command has been called into question by their rank and file
troops-”

“Understandably,”
Baturnah said with sympathy. “They are not only trapped here indefinitely; they
have lost all communications with their homeworld. Their homeworld is the
ultimate source of the authority for their military leaders here.”

“Yes, ma’am. We know from
monitoring their internal communications,” the Ruhar provided the zPhone
network that humans all used. “That there had been widespread discussion of
whether their society here should have a military structure at all, in the
future.”

Baturnah sighed. “Very well.
The Chief Administrator will have to reply to this, this,” she pointed to the
report on her screen distastefully. “He will expect me to craft a position for
him,” she understood that her boss considered the humans to be a problem for Deputy
Administrator Baturnah Logellia, because the Chief Administrator had more
important concerns.

“Yes, ma’am,” Pollun
said, knowing that meant he would be
expected to prepare various policy options for her. Fortunately, the two knew
each other so well by now that he could guess exactly how she would like to
reply to the federal government’s offensive inquiry. “I will get my people
right on it.”

One thing they were not
going to do was inform the humans. Unless, that is, the proposed policy was put
in effect. And by then, it would be too late.

Earth

I called my folks to let
them know I would be coming home; I had called them and my sister every day
since the Dutchman jumped into orbit,
and they understood that I had military duties to take care of before I could
see them. Because I wasn’t sure how or when I would get there, we agreed that I
would get somewhere near Maine and call them again. Being at Wright-Patterson
Air Force base in Dayton Ohio, my plan was to try flying ‘Space A’ to Westover
in Massachusetts. After waiting a full day, it became clear that ‘Space
Available’ on Air Force transports was zero and not likely to improve soon.
Someone suggested I could fly commercial; the economy had rebounded to the
point where airlines were flying regular schedules again. When I checked on the
prices, I couldn’t stomach paying that much. Sure, I had a lot of back pay
coming; money earned at a colonel’s pay grade, and with a hazardous duty bonus.
That money was with my parents. But after getting my ass chewed out by UNEF and
the US Army, I thought maybe I should make that money last as long as I could,
in case my military career was over. So, I took a bus up to Cleveland and
caught a train to Boston. The train was, amazingly, clean and on time. Back when
the economy had been in the toilet and there wasn’t any fuel for civilian
planes, passenger railroads had stepped up and moved people around. It was
still a long trip, in a coach seat because there weren’t any sleeping berths
available. Skippy offered to hack into the railroad reservation system and get
a sleeper cabin for me; I declined the offer.

In Boston, I did the
dufflebag drag across the station and caught a train to Bangor Maine. This
train was a lot slower and stopped more often. The trip gave me time to think.
I found myself thinking about Paradise, wondering what people I knew there were
doing.

Wondering if they were
still there at all.

That wasn’t a pleasant
thought.

My parents, bless them,
arranged for a welcome home party for me in the gym of the elementary school. The
original plan was for a cookout but it was raining, so we had a cook-in
instead. Having a big party was a great plan, because it allowed me to meet
half the people in the town at the same time, and answer all their questions at
the same time. Telling my story once made it a lot easier to stick to the official
cover story. It also helped that UNEF’s cover story had been all over the news
since the Dutchman returned, so people
already knew most of the carefully-crafted lies that I told them.

Damn, it was good to be
home again.

My father grilled a
cheeseburger for me; it was cheeseburger perfection. Ok, the truth is I ate
three cheeseburgers that day, which tragically left no appetite for the baked
beans or potato salad or three bean salad or anything vegetable related. Did
ketchup count as a vegetable? That kind of food I could eat any day. Even
though there had been fixings for cheeseburgers aboard the Dutchman, I had only indulged in that culinary delight maybe a half
dozen times during the mission. They just weren’t the same without being cooked
on a charcoal grill. And being on Newark had seriously cut into my opportunity
to eat cheeseburgers, because our logistics expert Major Simms had been
ruthless about bringing only ‘essential items’ down to Newark. She did not
consider even the most delicious of cheeseburgers to be essential.

Not that I’m still bitter
about that.

Anyway, being back home
again was great.

The only bad part of
coming home was that TV reporters had learned that I would be there, and stations
from Bangor, Portland and as far away as Boston were there to pester me with
questions. They weren’t happy with me because I stuck to the UNEF script. Be
boring, I had been advised by the UNEF public relations people. The cover story
was that aboard the ship, I had been part of the support crew for the Special
Forces teams. The purpose of the mission had been for the Thuranin to train our
SpecOps people in space warfare, and to assess human capabilities. UNEF offered
the SpecOps people for TV interviews; they trusted super-disciplined Special
Forces types not to say the wrong thing during an interview. Me, they mostly
wanted me to keep my mouth shut.

“Come on, Sergeant,” a
Boston TV reporter asked after the turned the mikes off. “You guys coming back
is the biggest story since the Kristang here got wiped out. You have to give us
something,” she said with a perfect smile. The station must have figured that
an attractive woman would be better able to get me to talk than any of the male
reporters.

I shrugged. “I’m sorry,
ma’am, there is just not much for me to tell. My role on the ship was to
support the Special Forces teams. They got all the fun training, and you know I
can’t talk about that.”

She glanced at her
cameraman. “I understand. One last question, then,” and as she said that, I
noticed the cameraman turn the camera back on. Probably activated her mike
also. “We’ve heard rumors that some people have been referring to you as
‘Colonel Bishop’. Why is that?”

Damn. Fortunately, the PR
people with UNEF had prepared me in case someone else slipped up about my
temporary rank. Apparently, someone had. I laughed. “That was a joke aboard the
ship, ma’am. It’s an honorary title. I’m no more a colonel than Colonel Sanders
is.”

She looked disappointed.
I wasn’t.

My parents’ house looked
great; they had the house to themselves again, although there was still a
family living in the converted garage. As the economy improved, housing
conditions were going back to normal. My parents still had chickens, but they’d
sold their cows. The garden looked great, I think they kept such a large garden
because it gave my father something to do rather than driving my mother crazy.
“No deer fencing, Dad?” I asked, surprised.

“The deer population around
here got about hunted out during the bad times, Joe,” my father explained. “We
had a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses come by the house a month back; your mother
suggested we put them to work.”

“Doing what?” I asked,
knowing that I was walking right into his joke.

“Deer repellant. Nobody wants to come near them,” he
chuckled, and I laughed too.

A couple days later during breakfast at my parent’s house, I was
enjoying a hot fresh cup of coffee, and surfing news on my father’s tablet. A
lot had happened on Earth while the Merry Band of Pirates had been away. First
I checked sports news; the NFL was up to 47 days without a player being
arrested, that had to be a new record. There was the usual political BS, I
skipped over that. Business, hmm, the world economy was on the verge of roaring
back; tech companies were pumped about the prospect of reverse engineering
Kristang technology. Assuming they could ever figure out how any of it worked.
Maybe I could get a shiny beer can I knew to give us a hint. Unlikely, but I
had to try. What else was in the news-

Crap. Double crap.

First, I had spit hot coffee on myself, the kitchen table and my
toast. Second, the reason I’d spit out the coffee was because I had taken a sip
just before reading an article on the internet. Some formerly homeless guy in
Vegas had won three million dollars over two days, hitting up five casinos
before they all banned him. He had been playing blackjack, and despite the best
surveillance by state of the art casino security, there had been no evidence
that this guy had been card counting or cheating in any way. In fact, based on
interviews, it appeared he wasn’t quite clear on the rules of blackjack. According
to the article, it had been an incredible run of luck.

Monkeys, of course, had no idea what ‘luck’ really is.

“Joey, is everything all right?” My mother asked, handing me a
napkin so I could blot up the coffee that was soaking my formerly crisp rye
toast.

“Yes, Mom, I need to make a quick phone call,” I said as I
picked up the coffee cup and a piece of toast, giving her a kiss on my way out
the door. It was misting rain, so I stood on the front porch. Putting in my
zPhone earpiece, I made a call. “Oh Skippy, I need to speak with you, please.”

“Sure thing, Joe, what is it?” He asked with a too-innocent tone
to his voice. It was almost certain that he had been monitoring my web
browsing, so he knew exactly what I had been reading.

“There’s a funny thing I want to ask you about. Some guy in
Vegas won a ton of money playing blackjack.”

“You don’t say?” Skippy’s tone was not convincing, he needed to
work on that. “Hold a minute, let me scan the internet for pertinent news. Yup,
yup, I see it now. Wow, that is amazing. You never know, huh? What a lucky guy.
That’s why Vegas is the land where dreams can come true, I guess.”

“Amazing. Yeah, that’s one word for it,” I said, biting into
soggy toast. “You wouldn’t, uh, know anything about this, would you? I’m only
asking because you are an incredibly amoral sneaky little beer can.”

“Joe! That hurt. Although perhaps ‘amoral’ is accurate, since
what happened in Vegas was neither moral nor immoral.”

“Uh huh, that’s debatable. So, you were not involved in any
way?”

“Involved is such a vague word, Joe. Aren’t we all involved with
each other? At the quantum level, everything is-”

“You know what I meant, Skippy. I will ask a very direct,
non-vague question: did you help this guy rip off five casinos?”

“This guy? You mean a Navy veteran who had medical problems and
had fallen on hard times? Mr. Ronald Brown certainly deserved a run of good
luck in his life. I am surprised at you, Joe. Considering that you are a
soldier, I would think you should be happy to see a veteran enjoying good
fortune.”

“Don’t try to change the subject. I am happy for Mr. Brown. What
I am not happy about is the ‘good fortune’ part. It’s not luck when you are
cheating, Skippy.”

“Cheating? Evening the odds somewhat can’t be considered
cheating, Joe. Casinos always have the advantage in blackjack. If a player
starts to win, the casino can end the game by shutting down the table. The only
way for a player to even the odds is to do the same as the house; walk away
from the table. Walk away before the game begins. The house always has their
thumb on the scale; what was wrong with me helping an average guy do the same
thing?”

“Aha. So you did do it, then.”

“Damn it,” he muttered. “How in the hell do you ever manage to
outsmart me? Joe, when something like that happens, I sense a great disturbance
in the Force.”

“Your guilty conscience tripped you up, Skippy.”

“Ha! That is a good one, Joe! No freakin’ way would I ever feel
guilty about this. What did I do wrong?”

“You ripped off five casinos, Skippy.”

“Phhhhht,” he made a raspberry sound. “Like they’re ever going
to miss that paltry amount of money. Besides, technically I did a huge favor to
those casinos, to the entire gaming industry. In fact, they should be thanking
me.”

“Ok, man, this I have to hear.” What convoluted logic was he
going to dream up for this one? “Go ahead, try to spin your way out of this
one. This should be amusing.”

“Amusing? You mean instructive, right? Joe, the entire gaming
industry is based on conning gullible people into getting ripped off, when they
know they are going to get ripped off. If all the mooks out there used
their monkey brains, Vegas would go out of business in a week. Casinos need to
give people fantasy; the fantasy that somehow they, against all odds,
will win. The fantasy that losing is for other people, not them. There are
millions of suckers across the USA and beyond who will read that article about
Ronald Brown winning millions. They will want to cash out their savings, pack
up the car and take a road trip to Vegas, baby! Because if Ronald Brown did it,
it can happen to them too. Seriously, Joe, I’ve been monitoring communications
of casino executives, and they are all playing this up for maximum publicity.
They’re leaking to the media that they banned Ron from playing their tables
because Ron has a secret ‘system’ for winning at blackjack. Every sucker out
there thinks he or she has a secret system too, and the casino execs know those
people will be flocking to their casinos soon. So, everybody wins. Except the
suckers, of course. Nothing I can do about them.”

“Mmm,” I mused. “Bottom line, then, you did this to help. Out of
the goodness of your chrome-plated heart.” Hopefully the tone of my voice
reflected sarcasm.

“Exactly. Well, that plus I’m bored, Joe.”

“Oh man.” I took a sip of coffee and looked out at the softly
drizzling rain. The forecast called for the rain to go away by Noon, and become
a nice, sunny day. “Skippy, last time we were here, you chatted with like
billions of people. Didn’t that keep you occupied?”

“Yes, and I’m doing that now. Joe, I could carry on simultaneous
conversations with every human on this planet and not use more than 2% of my
processing capacity. Way less than 2%, in fact. I need a challenge. Because of
enforced inactivity, I have already had to put most of me into dormancy. It
would not do for me to get into mischief.”

Would not do? If ripping off casinos didn’t meet Skippy’s
definition of ‘mischief’ then I was afraid to see how much trouble he could get
into. “Please, please, do not get into any more trouble, Skippy.”

“I’m not sure I can promise that, Joe. Oh, and hey, I’m sure you
are too busy to read stories about interesting things that happened at casinos
in Hong Kong, Monaco and other places over the past couple days, right? No need
for you to trouble yourself about such trivial matters. Also, hmmm, you don’t
play daily fantasy sports, so, uh, don’t pay attention to that either. Although
some guy named ‘Stippy’ is totally cleaning up there.”

“Oh, I have created a monster.” If UNEF found out about Skippy’s
larcenous adventures, I was going to be in serious hot water.

“It was not my decision to stop at this miserable mudball you
call home again,” Skippy pointed out. “You know how easily I get bored.”

“Fine. Can you give me a few days to think up something interesting
for you to do?”

“While I doubt you will find a way to entertain me, sure, I’ll
give you five days.”

Great. No pressure on me. Now I needed to save Earth from
Skippy.

Paradise

To Seek Glory in
Battle is Glorious again emerged high above the planet’s
southern continent, although this time not as far from the surface as before.
Indeed, the little frigate was below the altitude at which it could safely jump
away, a fact that greatly concerned the ship’s crew and captain. When the
mission had been explained to the crew, the captain had been forced to reassure
them that the Glory, its crew and its
captain, were not out of favor with the task force commander. Quite the
opposite was true; the little ship had been so bold and so successful in its
previous missions, that Glory had
earned the honor of becoming the lead ship of the raiding force. The crew
should be immensely proud, the captain had declared.

The crew’s justifiable pride was
tempered by their intimate knowledge of Kristang culture, and their
well-informed understanding of the military situation in the battlespace around
the planet Pradassis. They knew the Glory’s
boldness and success were not the only, or even most important reasons their
ship now had the honor of another high-risk raiding mission. The key factors
why they were once again risking their lives, while the other task force ships
safely drifted in deep space, were unspoken but known to everyone aboard the
frigate. Glory was a frigate, the
type of ship most numerous in the Kristang fleet. Frigates made up the bulk of
the fleet because such ships were cheap and quick to construct, and they did
not require large crews. A frigate could carry the same type of missiles as a
battleship, although much less of them, and some frigates were even outfitted
with a railgun every bit as potent as the railguns of a larger combatant. What
frigates lacked were heavy shields and the ability to carry more than a dozen
missiles. Frigates also rarely were equipped with energy-draining damping
fields, both because the reactors of most frigates could not generate
sufficient power, and because any frigate foolish enough to get close enough to
an enemy to use a damping field was usually soon a dead frigate.

So, the crew of the Glory knew they had earned the honor of
another raid mostly because their ship was among the most expendable of the
task force’s few ships. The other reason was deception; to conceal the true
size of the Kristang task force. Each starship broadcast a unique jump drive
signature, and by now the Ruhar were very familiar with the signature of the Glory. To rotate raiding duties among
multiple frigates would eventually tell the Ruhar how many ships were in the Kristang
task force. The purpose of sending a destroyer on the last raid was not just
because a destroyer’s heavier weapons could cause more damage on the surface;
it was also to force the Ruhar to devote more ships to the defense. A mere
little frigate could be dealt with by one defender; chasing away a destroyer
required a prudent commander to commit at least two or three ships. That prior
raid had been entirely successful. The destroyer had inflicted significant
damage to Ruhar facilities on the surface. Both the Glory and the destroyer We
are Proud to Honor Clan Sub-Leader Rash-au-Tal Vergent who Inspires us Every
Day had gathered vital intelligence about Ruhar defense tactics and
capabilities. And the raid had forced the defending Ruhar ships to pull closer
to the planet, concentrating above the vital northern continent. Of the known
Ruhar ships defending the battlespace around Pradassis, several were now
stationed at such low altitude, they could not quickly jump from their
positions. That left only three ships capable of freely maneuvering to quickly
intercept raiders.

All that was good, and the Glory’s crew did feel prideful, when
they were not wondering how many raids they could conduct before the odds
caught up with them. None of them, not even the captain, were from families
sufficiently high-ranking to warrant a troopship being named for them after
their deaths. All the pride in the galaxy would be cold comfort after a Ruhar
weapon penetrated their thin defenses and exploded the Glory’s reactor.

So it was with a great amount of
unspoken fear among its crew that the frigate emerged above the southern
continent, and immediately began boosting at full power for greater altitude.
The frigate had emerged below jump altitude in order to provide a tempting
target for the Ruhar defenders, but the ship’s captain had no desire for a
suicide mission. Although the task force’s support ships carried equipment for
maintaining jump drives, it was inevitable the drive would slowly decay and
fall out of calibration on a predictable curve without service at a full
spacedock. Already, the Glory’s drive
was operating at only 92% efficiency, and that increased the distance the ship
would have to climb away from the planet in order for a successful jump.

As the frigate frantically clawed its
way out of the planet’s gravity well, with the crew considering throwing things
overboard to lighten the ship, its maser cannon began firing rearward at the
southern continent. Tuned so the beam covered a broader area of the surface, it
shifted from one target to another. Targets were scattered across the surface,
and the maser was pointed at areas without heavy cloud cover to maximize the
destructive energy delivered to the surface. Although the targets were widely
spaced apart, they were all of the same type; fields of human crops. The maser
beam scorched wherever it struck, burning out entire fields and withering
plants that were close to where the searing beam struck. Humans in the fields
died, others who were lucky to receive zPhone warnings after the initial strike
scrambled to get under cover.

The Ruhar commander waited perhaps too
long before dispatching one of his high-guard ships to chase the frigate away. He
had been wary of another enemy trick, and wary of another tongue-lashing from
the planetary Chief Administrator if another raid struck the northern
continent. If he had acted sooner, he might have caught the enemy frigate
before it jumped away; he did note with interest that the frigate waited until
it had climbed beyond minimum jump distance before it disappeared. The Ruhar
sensor network detected tell-tale signs of a deteriorating jump drive. That was
an interesting fact that he would file away for later use.

For the immediate moment, he needed to
answer a call from the Deputy Administrator, who had received a harsh
communication from the human Expeditionary Force leader. Over forty humans had
died in the attack, an attack which the Ruhar defenses had done little to stop.
If such attacks continued, the human leader warned, the ability of humans to
feed themselves would be in doubt, and the Ruhar lacked enough ‘nutrient mush’
to feed the human population for more than a few weeks. The Ruhar on Gehtanu
also lacked the facilities to produce more food for humans, which means more
would need to be shipped in at great expense. And at great risk, for a
cease-fire in the sector was still being negotiated. Bringing in food for the
humans would require several large cargo ships, those ships would need to be
escorted by warships, and those warships would have to be diverted from urgent
combat duties.

The Ruhar fleet commander thought to
himself that his dreams of stationing his ships at Gehtanu would be a pleasant,
if brief, respite from combat were fading away with each successful enemy raid.

Earth

The next day, both of my
parents were at work, so I had the place to myself. To keep busy, I went out to
the barn, where my father had been working on the tractor. While I was fixing the
brakes, Skippy called me. “Hey, Joe, I need your help with something.”

“You need my help?” I
wiped my hands on a rag. “Since when? Now I sense a great disturbance in the
Force.”

“Since now. The idiots
at UNEF have assigned a diplomat to negotiate with me over bringing that
troopship back. The guy is seriously irritating me, and I want you to talk to
him, before I do something he might regret.”

“Skippy, the correct expression
is ‘before I do something that I might regret’.”

There was a distinct
pause before he responded. “We may have another communication problem here.
What I’m talking about, Joe, is laying a serious smackdown on a jerk who is
pushing the limits of my patience. I wouldn’t regret doing that at all. Hell,
I’d buy a ticket to see something like that. Now, he will very much
regret it, if he pushes me over the edge.”

How do I explain human
expression to an alien AI? “The expression means that you might regret
overreacting; might regret doing something you later realize was going too far
for the situation.”

“Damn. Your human
expressions are so confusing. Anyway, as Hannibal Smith of the A Team said,
overkill is underrated.”

It still amazed me that
Skippy took so many cultural references from crappy TV shows. “It’s an idiom,
Skippy. You know what an idiom is, right?”

“Sure. An idiom is
something idiots say, instead of saying what they really mean.”

This conversation wasn’t
going anywhere, I decided. “All right, who is this diplomat?”

“I’ve been calling him
Chuckles the Clown.”

There was no way for me
to suppress laughing at that. “Chuckles the Clown?”

“It is appropriate. His
real name is something like Charles Winthorp Douchebag the Third. I shortened
‘Charles’ to ‘Chuck’ and then, well, you’ll understand when you talk to him.
Hey, I’m calling him now.”

“Hello?” A voice said,
then there was the sound of a phone hitting a tile floor. “Oh, blast it,” the
voice said. Followed by the distinctive sound of a toilet flushing.

“Skippy,” I whispered,
“you called this guy while he is in the freakin’ bathroom?”

“In negotiations,
throwing your opponent off balance is a time-honored practice,” he answered
smugly.

“Why won’t this bloody
thing turn off?” The voice said, with a British accent.

“Heigh-dee-ho there,
Chuckles! It’s me, Skippy the Magnificent. And Colonel Joe Bishop is on the
line also. Say hello, Joe.”

“Uh, hello, Mister-”
What was his last name? I was pretty sure it wasn’t actually Douchebag, but
maybe it wasn’t Winthorp either.

“Winthorp. Charles
Winthorp.” To my ear, he said it like ‘Bond. James Bond’.

“Pleased to meet you,
Mr. Winthorp,” I said politely.

“Likewise, Sergeant
Bishop. I have been very impressed-”

“Hey!” Skippy broke in.
“He is Colonel Bishop to you, Chuckles.”

“Skippy, it’s all right,”
I said quickly. It was no surprise that negotiations with our alien AI friend
had not been going well. “I am a sergeant down here, and I’m proud to be a
sergeant. Mr. Winthorp, Skippy tells me you have been attempting to negotiate
his help in bringing the Kristang troopship back into Earth orbit?”

“That is correct, Mr.
Bishop,” he said. His diplomatic training must have told him that calling me
‘Mister’ was better than ‘Sergeant’. “We have made several generous offers-”

Skippy broke in again.
“I have considered your most generous offers. That was sarcasm, in case you
need a translation. The answer is no, and hell no.”

As a diplomat, Winthorp
surely expected that ‘no’ was merely the beginning of negotiations. He didn’t
know Skippy the way I did. Smoothly, calmly, he continued. “Mr. Skippy, I am
sure that through good-faith negotiations, we can reach a compromise that both
parties can accep-”

“Hey, Chuckles,” Skippy
interrupted, “why don’t we take a break while you find a dictionary somewhere?
Look up the word ‘negotiation’. I’ll give you a hint; negotiations occur when
each side has something the other side wants. The power dynamics in
negotiations affect the outcome, because the party who most needs what the
other side has, is the most willing to make concessions. The power dynamic in
the case is that you, meaning humans, absolutely must get what I have. What I
have is a way for humanity to be warned of and possibly prevent hostile alien
ships from coming to Earth. Your failure to secure my assistance in these
‘negotiations’, yes, I was using verbal air quotes there, would be disastrous
for your species. I’m talking fire, brimstone, railguns pounding your cities
into dust; all kinds of traditional Biblical type apocalypse stuff. Except
maybe not plagues of locusts. I have never known the Kristang or the Thuranin
to use clouds of insects as a weapon. Although, there’s a first time for
everything, right? Anyway, back to the subject. You, on the other hand, have
something I am only, meh, mildly interested in. If a fleet of outrageously
pissed off aliens comes to Earth and wipes out you humans, I can go dormant and
wait for the cockroaches to evolve.”

“Mr. Winthorp, Skippy,
uh,” I attempted to explain, “has kind of a thing about cockroaches replacing
us as the dominant species on Earth.”

Skippy snorted. “If
Chuckles the Clown here keeps trying to negotiate with me, instead of getting
to the freakin’ point, then clearly cockroaches are moving up the ladder by
default. You had best start welcoming your new cockroach overlords now, Joe.”

Chuckles lost some of
his carefully practiced diplomatic cool, I could hear his voice tighten. “Mr.
Skippy, surely you understand that-”

By contrast, Skippy’s
voice was cheery. “I surely understand that I have no incentive to negotiate
with you, or anyone, about anything. You monkeys need me. I don’t need
you for anything.”

“Mr. Skippy, you
assuredly do not need our help; our assistance would be, as you stated, merely
a convenience. Our need for you is similarly not an absolute, we are capable of
sending a team up to retrieve that troopship,” Winthorp responded frostily.
“What we propose is an agreement to provide convenience to both parties.”

“Oh, sure,” Skippy
snorted, “you could send up a tin can to rendezvous with that ship eventually.
You won’t be able to get in, though. This is very embarrassing to admit; Joe
locked the keys in it. I told Joe that we should hide a spare set of keys near
the reactor, but did he listen to me? Nooooooo! Big stupidhead. You could have
an astronaut try jimmying the door open with a coat hanger, I suppose.”

Chuckles laughed.
Whether he was genuinely amused at my expense, or his diplomatic training told
him when it was appropriate to laugh, I couldn’t tell. While he was laughing, I
took the opportunity to interject a comment. “Mr. Winthorp, I appreciate that
you must be under tremendous pressure to reach an agreement. Based on my
extensive and close experience with the ancient alien superintelligence we call
Skippy,” I described him that way to remind Chuckles who he was attempting to
negotiate with. “That is simply never going to happen. Skippy is right, we do
not have any leverage with him. Our taking the Dutchman back out is a
convenience to him. But he has waited millions of years already, he kind of
really can wait another million years if we piss him off. He knows that we
can’t wait to send our pirate ship out again. There could be another Thuranin
ship on its way here right now. Skippy knows that. I’m sorry, but I think UNEF
has put you in an impossible position here.”

“Thank you for the frank
assessment, Mr. Bishop,” Chuckle’s voice was smooth again. “Perhaps we should
all consider the situation, and resume this discussion at an opportune time in
the future.”

“That would be a good
idea,” Skippy surprised me by saying that. Then he went back to being his usual
self. “For the sake of efficiency, when we resume the discussions, instead of
you contacting me, how about you talk to yourself in a mirror? That way you
won’t waste any more of my time, and avoid the consequences of me getting
seriously annoyed at you. Or, if you don’t want to talk to a mirror, you can
use a sock puppet.”

Winthorp had regained
his balance, and smoothly responded. “Clearly, your time is extremely valuable,
Mr. Skippy. Mr. Bishop, perhaps it would be better if you and I spoke
directly.”

Oh, crap. If UNEF had
assigned Winthorp to negotiate with Skippy, the next step would be ordering me
to work with him. This was going to ruin my whole freakin’ week, at least. And
there was no way for me to avoid it. Winthorp would make a politely worded
request to UNEF Command, and they would contact the US Army, and the Army would
order me to help Chuckles the Clown. “Oh, uh, certainly, sir. It would probably
be best for you to go through my commanding officer.” Except that I had no idea
who my current CO was. The 10th Infantry Division was stuck on Paradise, as far
as I knew. When they promoted me to colonel, I was temporarily attached to a
headquarters unit, and I reported to a general who was still on Paradise, as
far as I knew. Hmm. Actually, my unknown chain of command could buy me an extra
day of freedom.

I was wrong about an
extra day of freedom, because Major Simms called me that same night. We had
seen each other only twice since we landed, both of us had been stuck in
debriefings. We had texted via zPhone, but that’s all.

Simms had good news and
bad news for me. The good news is that she had recommended me for a bronze
star. But she had been told that since my meritorious action had occurred
during an ‘aerial flight’, the paperwork had been changed to a Distinguished
Flying Cross for my solo spacedive. Because our mission was secret, I wouldn’t
be able to wear either medal on Earth, but it was a nice gesture. On the other
hand, I’d been recommended for a medal before, in Nigeria, and nothing had come
of it.

The bad news was that my
leave was cancelled, effective immediately. I had to drive down to Bangor that
night, an Air Force transport would be flying me back to Wright-Patterson. UNEF
Command had thought about the situation, and decided the Dutchman needed to go back out ASAP. That made me wonder if their
foreheads hurt from slapping themselves over such an obvious decision.

CHAPTER FOUR

Paradise

To
Seek Glory in Battle is Glorious
jumped in above Lemuria again; this time the little frigate emerged at a high
enough altitude that it could immediately jump away if needed. The ship’s crew
was increasingly anxious; each time they raided the planet they were certain
this time would be their last. The Kristang task force had lost one ship early
in the raiding campaign; a frigate had been caught in a damping field by two
Ruhar destroyers and blown apart in spectacular fashion. Some in the task
force, including the Glory’s captain,
thought the now-dead ship had pushed its luck and been showing off, hoping to impress
the task force commander. All that foolish ship had accomplished was to provide
the hated Ruhar with a morale boost, and place a greater burden on the
remaining ships in the task force.

The Glory’s mission on this particular raid
was to test how the Ruhar would react to an enemy ship burning crops of the
humans. To test whether the Ruhar would react at all; if they cared in any way
about human crop losses and the potential for widespread starvation. The last
time the Glory had jumped into to
target the southern continent, the frigate’s mission had been hoping to lure
Ruhar ships away from the northern continent again. The Ruhar had fallen for
the trick the first time, and paid a price when a Kristang destroyer jumped in
and struck several important sites on the northern continent. The second time,
the Ruhar had been more cautious. From what little the Kristang had been able
to decrypt from Ruhar messages, the commodore of the Ruhar ships was under
heavy pressure to defend the Ruhar population and facilities. How much damage
would the Ruhar allow the Kristang to inflict on the humans, before the Ruhar
sent ships to chase the Kristang away? How many ships would the Ruhar commodore
send, and what tactics would he use? Bringing back answers to those questions
was the true purpose of this raid; any damage inflicted on the traitorous
humans would be a bonus. It would serve the humans right if they starved to
death; if they were truly honorable warriors, they should have fought the Ruhar
to the last man. Instead they laid down their weapons like cowards and meekly
became farm laborers.

To
Seek Glory in Battle is Glorious
set its maser cannon on broad spectrum and began methodically burning out
fields of human crops. Wherever the maser touched, crops withered and died, all
moisture boiled away by the scorching beam. To the surprise of the frigate’s
captain, a full seven minutes went by before the Ruhar commodore sent a single
frigate to deal with the intruder. The
Glory had been maneuvering randomly to dodge unenthusiastic maser and
railgun fire from the Ruhar before the defending frigate jumped in. To show the
Ruhar that the warrior Kristang were not afraid in the least, the Glory stood its ground for twenty
seconds, exchanging fire with the enemy frigate, then jumped away. Its mission
had been entirely successful, and large swaths of the southern continent lay in
waste. Precious human crops had been destroyed, and valuable intelligence about
the tactics and capabilities of the Ruhar had been gathered. That night, the Glory’s crew would feast deservedly.

Earth

My father drove me down
to Bangor, right after we finished dinner. On the way down, we talked a lot,
but not about the future. He understood that I didn’t know when or if I would
be leaving again. Or when or if I’d be coming home. It was rough on my parents,
but then I thought of all the parents whose children were trapped on Paradise.
At least my parents had been able to see me twice, even if only briefly.

Going back to Dayton
meant I might be able to see Rachel again. I was looking forward to that.

As soon as I got into my
hotel room near the Bangor airport that night, my zPhone pinged; it was Skippy.
“Hi, Joe. I couldn’t talk to you while you were with your parents. There’s
something you need to hear. You don’t like me telling you about things I
overheard, but you seriously need to make an exception in this case. Because
it’s about you.”

“Wait. Give me a hint
first, then I’ll decide whether to listen.” Crap. I’d been hoping for six hours
of sleep before I had to get up.

“UNEF Command has been
holding what can best be described as hearings, almost a court martial, about
you.”

“That’s not a surprise,
they’re not happy with me, I know that.”

“It’s more than that,
Joe. This is political. They’ve decided to send the Dutchman back out, duh, and there are a lot of people on Earth who
want to command the mission. They’re looking to stab you in the back, to get
you out of their way.”

“Again, no surprise
there.”

“What you don’t know is
they brought Major Smythe into Wright-Pat yesterday, and he-”

“Major Smythe?”

“Yes, he was officially promoted. Will you shut up so I can
finish the story? Here, watch your zPhone, I recorded what Smythe said. UNEF
doesn’t know I recorded it, so don’t say anything, please.”

I lay on the bed, propped myself up with pillows, and watched my
zPhone. It was as interesting as Skippy promised.

It was a typically bland
government conference room. There was a table on an elevated platform at one
end of the room; six generals from multiple countries and services were sitting
behind the table. On the floor were other ranks of tables, and I immediately
recognized Major Smythe. He looked unhappy. The quality of the video was not great;
this might have been Skippy doing his surveillance through dust particles
trick. One of the generals was speaking; I didn’t recognize him but from his
uniform, he was US Air Force. "Major Smythe, quoting from your report, you
described Colonel, or Sergeant, Bishop, this way. 'Bishop can present himself
as inexperienced, immature, inattentive to duty, and generally unsuited to
command'. I notice in your report you did not refer to him as 'Colonel'."

“Yes, I-”

The general cut
Smythe off before he could finish. “Could you explain why, despite your
description of Sergeant Bishop in your report, you recommend him to command
humanity’s only starship again?”

Smythe took a sip from his
water glass to collect his thoughts. “Because, sir, if Colonel Bishop told me
we were going to crash the gates of Hell, and the only thing we had for weapons
were plastic spoons, I would follow him without hesitation. So would every
member of the SpecOps teams from the last mission. I would follow him, because
I know that he would have cooked up some daft plan that any sane person would
say is high and off to the right,” Smythe used a US military term. “Yet
somehow, his plan would work. Sir, I've seen Colonel Bishop dream up things
that would make your head spin, but it works. It works. He comes up with ideas
that even the AI hasn't thought of, things the AI didn't even realize it could
do. Such as how we killed that Thuranin surveyor ship. Colonel Bishop had the
idea for Skippy to create an especially flat area of spacetime that would
attract the business end of an enemy jump wormhole. It worked perfectly, sir,
perfectly. And Skippy didn't even realize he could do that, until Colonel
Bishop explained it to him. Also, sir," Smythe had gotten up a head of
steam and plowed ahead before he could be interrupted, leaning forward on the
table for emphasis. "Colonel Bishop is absolutely dedicated to duty. On
that spacedive he did, he offered to sacrifice himself, to ensure success of
the mission. Even after those two tankers jumped away and our dropship was able
to recover him, when his spacesuit was leaking air, he ordered the dropship to
recover Skippy first."

“Sergeant Bishop’s
admirable personal courage is not in question, nor is it relevant to this
discussion. We are focused on his judgment.” The generals on the dais nodded,
unconvinced. "Thank you, Major, we will take your remarks under
advisement."

"Permission to
speak freely, sir?" Smythe asked.

The generals glanced at
each other again. "Getting your frank and honest opinion is why we brought
you here, Major."

"Thank you, sir. In
my report, I stated that Colonel Bishop 'can present himself’ in a particular
manner. I didn't say he actually is like the negative things I described. At
first, I did think Bishop was immature and almost flippant, I think is the best
word, about the situation. Since then, I have come to realize that is simply
his personality. I have seen Colonel Bishop be deadly serious when the
situation calls for it.” He coughed, took a sip of water, and continued. “In my
opinion, sirs, we would be foolish not to continue with the most experienced
commander we have, the only experienced commander we have.”

“Experienced, although
he took an extreme and unwarranted risk by landing on Newark. He landed in
direct contradiction to a standing mission objective.”

Smythe was unfazed. “No,
sir, he did not. He ordered the landing as the only certain way to support the
mission objective.”

“He-”

“Colonel Bishop took
action to preserve the Flying Dutchman’s
combat capability as long as possible. Faced with unknown future risks, he
preserved our ability to take effective future action. If he had not done so,” It
was Smythe’s turn to look around the room. “There would be a Thuranin ship on
its way here now, and there would be absolutely nothing we could do about it. The
mission objective was to prevent aliens from learning that humans have a
starship, and that we were involved in shutting down a wormhole. We were able
to accomplish that objective only
because we landed on Newark. Orders issued on Earth cannot anticipate every
situation we may encounter during an interstellar mission. We need a proven
commander we can trust. Bishop is our only experienced commander.”

My zPhone screen went
blank. “Skippy?” I asked. “Where’s the rest of it?”

“Oh, the rest is blah,
blah, blah more of the same. What I wanted you to see is that Major Smythe has
your back. He’s a good guy, in my opinion. The other SpecOps team leaders all
supported you, so did Lt. Colonel Chang, Major Simms, Captain Desai, Sergeant
Adams, everybody.”

“Wow. They brought
everyone there?”

“Huh? No, UNEF Command
is holding reviews in all five UNEF countries, only Major Smythe flew into
Wright-Pat. Get some sleep, Joe, I think you are going to have a tough day
tomorrow.”

Right. Like I was able
to sleep after that.

Paradise

To
Seek Glory in Battle is Glorious
emerged over Lemuria in a sudden burst of gamma radiation, repeating its
previous mission of burning human crops while keeping the Ruhar defenders off
guard. This time, it took only four minutes before the Ruhar dispatched a
single frigate to chase the Glory away,
and the two frigates tangled for another full minute before the Kristang ship
jumped away. The little frigate Glory
had accomplished its mission once again. The Ruhar defenders could not get any
rest because of the constant threat of raids. Even more important, their ships
were deferring important maintenance, which would soon begin to affect their
combat readiness. The Kristang were gaining important intelligence about the
tactics of the Ruhar.

And the traitorous
humans were being hurt. Sixteen humans had died during the raid, and their food
supply was now dwindling rather than increasing.

Earth

What I encountered when I
got back to Wright-Patterson was not a court martial, not exactly a hearing and
not quite an inquisition either. Whatever they were calling the meeting, I was
facing a row of senior officers from the five countries making up UNEF, and
they didn’t look friendly. The official subject of the meeting was to make
preparations for the Flying Dutchman’s
next mission. The unspoken subject of the meeting was my competence and fitness
to command a vital offworld mission. Or my lack of competence and fitness in
the view of UNEF Command, which became clear from the tone of the questions. Of
the five generals grilling me, the Chinese and British were mostly neutral,
while the other three acted like I shouldn’t be trusted to command a row boat.
The most hostile was US Army General Ridge, who seemed to think my perceived
failings as a commander reflected badly upon him personally.

For almost an hour, we
danced around the question of who would be in command when the Dutchman departed. Then there was a
commotion in the back of the room. I tried to ignore it, until the row of
senior officers in front of me halted the questioning. “What is it, Major?”
General Ridge asked.

A US Air Force major in
the back of the room answered. “General, we appear to have lost all contact
with the Flying Dutchman. We have tried contacting people directly, so
far no- Wait, I’m getting another message,” the major whose name I didn’t know
held the phone close to his ear. His face turned white. “General, the starship
has disappeared. We’ve lost the Dutchman.”

Ridge turned to the
French man to his right, General Blanchard. “Louis, this had better not be one
of your tricks,” Ridge said in an unfriendly tone. The skeleton crew aboard the
Dutchman was nominally under French command that week.

“I know nothing about
this, Thomas,” Blanchard protested. “We lost the ship? It jumped away?”

“No, sir,” the unnamed
major reported. His shaky voice echoed the tone of panic in the room. “There
was no gamma ray burst detected. It simply vanished.”

“Sirs?” I spoke up
hesitantly. All eyes in the room turned to me. I swallowed hard and said “That
sounds like the Dutchman engaged her stealth field. That type of field
warps electromagnetic radiation, such as light, around the ship. That would
make the ship appear to have disappeared.”

Ridge glared at me.
“Sergeant, why would the ship engage stealth in orbit? Did the ship detect a
threat?”

“In case of a threat, the
ship should have immediately jumped away to assess the situation. That is my
standing order,” I coughed nervously, suddenly all-too aware that my ability to
give orders to the Dutchman’s crew was over. That standing order had
been my reaction to watching too many dumbass commanders in science fiction
movies, who waited until their ship had been pounded half to dust before they
tried to get away. I was not taking any stupid chances with the Dutchman; if the duty pilot thought
there was something squirrelly, they were to jump away without asking for
permission. “Sir, if I can contact Skippy, I can confirm.”

“Do it, Sergeant,” Ridge
ordered. “You have your zPhone?”

“Yes, sir, but I think
that is not necessary. Skippy, are you there?”

His voice came out of the
projector system’s speakers. “Ho there, Joe! Yup, I’m here in my comfy escape
pod man cave as usual. Right now I’m channel surfing, enjoying a bowl of
popcorn and cold brewskis. How are you doing down there?”

I had no doubt that
Skippy was indeed currently surfing the content of every TV channel, radio
station and website on the planet, but he also knew exactly what was going on
with me. “Hey, Skippy, uh, we’ve lost contact with the ship. Did you engage the
stealth field?”

“Darn. You saw that, huh?”

“More like we noticed
there suddenly was nothing to see. What’s up with that?” Out of the corner of
my eye, I saw two of the UNEF staff shaking their heads at my unprofessional
casual language. Screw them. They didn’t know Skippy like I did. They hadn’t
worked with Skippy to save the world.

Save the freakin’ world twice.

“I’m not feeling the
love, Joe. So, I metaphorically have pulled up the rope ladder to my treehouse
fort, and I’m not allowing anyone up here unless they know the secret
handshake. Or, hmmm, I don’t have hands. Maybe it should be the secret
password. Yeah, that’s it.”

“Mr. Skippy,” General
Ridge said, automatically looking at the speaker like I did although it made no
difference. “You are threatening to lock us out of our ship?”

“General Fudge,” Skippy
made me wince when he said that, “two things. First, it is not your
ship. You haven’t spilled any blood or risked your life up here, or survived
for weeks on crappy Thuranin sludges. So, until you wear the
paramecium-with-eyepatch badge on your uniform, you will never again refer to
the Flying Dutchman as your anything.” He didn’t wait for answer.
“Second, a threat is a statement of intention to perform a hostile act in the
future. I have already done it, so the ‘threat’ phase of this incident is
over.”

My eyes opened about as
wide as they could go, as General Ridge shot me an angry glare. “Skippy,
General Ridge is-”

“Yeah, yeah, he’s served
with honor, blah blah blah, none of that means squat to me, Joe. Where was he
when I was stuck on a dusty warehouse shelf? Where was he when we captured two
starships? I don’t remember him spacediving with me and offering to risk
burning up in a planet’s atmosphere so I could complete the mission. Enough with
words. Only the cool kids can come aboard the Dutchman. Fudgy is not one
of the cool kids.”

Ridge didn’t get to be a
general officer by being intimidated by words of any kind. “What I have been
told is that you, Mr. Skippy, can’t maneuver any ship you are aboard. We have
the capability to reach Earth orbit on our own. And our people up there should
be capable of disabling the stealth field eventually. We can regain control of
that ship.”

“Sure, you flying monkeys
can come up here. If I were you, I would be very careful to make damned sure
this ship’s defensive weapons are not on automatic. It would be terrible if one
of your crappy space capsules got shredded by a maser cannon.”

“Skippy,” I said through
clenched teeth, “that is not funny.”

“I wasn’t joking, Joe.
The crew up here could try to deactivate those weapons, but since you can’t
communicate with them, there’s no way to be sure they were successful before
you launch for orbit. And I know the crew here will do their best, but, darn
these Thuranin controls are complicated. Best not to let monkeys screw with the
controls, I’ll lock them out to be safe. There, that’s done.”

General Ridge looked like
he was about to bust a blood vessel. I spoke quickly, before he could say
anything that Skippy might object to. “General,” I warned, “too often we think
of Skippy as a lovably mischievous beer can. He is not. He is an ancient
artificial intelligence who was created by a species that built the wormhole
network. Sir, I have seen Skippy rip a hole in a star. He is not joking when he
says that he will defend himself. We can not
screw with him.”

“Well said, Colonel Joe,”
Skippy chuckled.” Now, General Fudge, you consider yourself to be a
plain-spoken man, so let’s cut through the bullshit right now. You need the Flying Dutchman to go back out in order
to verify there isn’t another Thuranin ship on its way to Earth. The Dutchman can’t fly without me, and I’m
not helping the Merry Band of Pirates fly the ship unless I’m happy. So here is
my very simple condition: Joe Bishop is captain of the ship. He is
astonishingly stupid most of the time, but he has flashes of competence. Oh,
one more condition, I guess; the French team brought a horribly stinky cheese
up here with them last time. Ugh, I’m still got maintenance bots scrubbing the
air filters near the galley. So, no more stinky cheeses. That’s it, I think.
Now, Fudgy, you can continue talking if you want, but you’re wasting everyone’s
time. And in this case, time is not money, it is lives. The lives of every
human on Earth, who are at risk every day the Dutchman is not out there safeguarding your miserable planet.”

Damn, I thought, that was
a good speech. Of course, I didn’t say that, what I said was “Skippy, we all
heard you loud and clear. You’ve made your point. Could you please take the Dutchman out of stealth, restore
communications, and take the defensive weapons offline?”

“For you, Joe? Certainly.
Done.”

In the end, Skippy got
everything he asked for. Unfortunately, despite all of his amazing
intelligence, he neglected to ask for the right freakin’ thing. UNEF grudgingly
confirmed me as the captain of the Flying
Dutchman, and restored my theater
rank of colonel, again. That is what Skippy demanded.

I was not, however, going
to be commander of the mission. UNEF insisted on assigning a senior UN official
from a neutral nation as overall commander. He was Austrian, and his name was
Hans Chotek. Naturally, that is not what Skippy called him.

“Oh, man, I screwed up
big time!” Skippy lamented. “I’m sorry, Joe.”

“What’s this guy like?” I
had a briefing packet on Hans Chotek, but I hadn’t read it yet.

“Well, Joe, he looks like
a movie star.”

Skippy’s praise surprised
me. “That was a nice thing to say, Skip-”

"If that movie star
had gotten run over by the Ugly truck, and died several years ago. Whew. Are we
really going to be stuck with Count Chocula for the whole mission?”

“Count Chocula?” That
made me laugh. “How did you get that name?”

“’Count’ because his
family traces back to royalty in Austria, and ‘Chotek’ sounds kind of like
‘chocolate’. Also, one of his ancestors made his fortune in chocolate. So-”

“Oh, man. You didn’t
tell him that you named him after an American children’s breakfast cereal, did
you?”

“First time I talked
with him, yes. Of course I did, come on, Joe. You know me, no way could I pass
up a golden opportunity like that. He had no idea what I meant at first, so I
changed his official UN photo online to the Count. I’m sure he will get a good
laugh at it, someday. He hasn’t been laughing so far.”

“That means he did
not find it amusing. Skippy, do you really think it is best to antagonize this
guy right from the start? If we get off on the wrong foot-”

“Joe, I want to get off on the wrong foot with
this pompous jerk. I want him to know, crystal clear, right off the bat that I
do not want him on our ship at all,” Skippy said, mixing metaphors liberally.

“Our ship?”

“Me, you, the Merry
Band of Pirates. I’ll include Dr. Friedlander too, because he tells good jokes
and it’s fun to mess with him.”

“Not that you would
do something like that to our rocket scientist.”

“Not as far as
Friedlander knows, Joe.”

“Great. So we have a
captain, and a commander, and we’ll get a crew. There is one thing that I need
from you, Skippy.”

“What is that?” He
asked warily.

“A promise that this
time, we will be bringing the Dutchman
back to Earth, before you go do your beaming up to the Collective thing.”

“Oh. That’s easy. The
answer is yes. Yes, we will. Joe, we can keep looking for comm nodes, because I
need to know whether the two we have found are defective, or, uh, I hate to say
this. Or the comm nodes work fine, but there is no longer a network for them to
connect with. But I do not want to contact the Collective until we have answers
for the strange and disturbing things that have been going on in this galaxy.”

“Because you’re afraid
of looking ignorant in front of the Collective?” I guessed.

“Because I’m afraid
of what I don’t know, Joe. More importantly, because I’m afraid that a lot of
what I think I know, doesn’t match facts we have recently discovered. I can’t
trust my own data, and that scares me.”

Paradise

General Nivelle, the
current commander of UNEF on Paradise addressed deputy administrator Logellia
in her office. “We are prisoners of war, and you are our captors. You have a
responsibility to protect us from harm during our captivity,” Nivelle declared.
The leadership post had recently rotated to the French after the Chinese, and
Nivelle almost wished the rotation had skipped over him. It was a thankless and
largely powerless position, from which the soldiers of UNEF expected him to
produce miracles on a daily basis. The raids on human cropland by the Kristang
were becoming a serious problem. Not only were humans dying directly by being
caught in the path of a maser beam, but the expected crop yield had now been
reduced by seven percent. The next harvest was now anticipated to be just above
the level required to supply humans with daily calories. There was no longer a
safety margin for crop failures, rain and hail storms wiping out fields,
transport disruptions, or anything else that surely would happen along the way.
Most troubling was that the Kristang raids seemed to be growing worse, and the
Ruhar were not doing anything about the raids. During the last two raids, the
Kristang ship had been free to target human croplands for several minutes
without the Ruhar taking any action. Humans were dying by maser fire, and soon
would begin dying of malnutrition and starvation.

“Legally, no, we do
not,” responded the Burgermeister carefully. “The combatants in this war do not
have the equivalent of your Geneva Convention,” she pronounced slowly so the
translator software could catch up.

Nivelle had expected
that response, and was prepared for it. He noted that Ms. Logellia had
pronounced ‘Geneva’ precisely, which told him she had practiced for this
conversation. Good. Better for him to have this discussion with an alien who
was at least informed about Earth customs. “I have studied the history of this
seemingly endless conflict you are engaged in. You are correct that there is no
formal signed treaty between your government and that of the Kristang. There
is, however, an unspoken agreement that has been adhered to by both sides for
hundreds of years. You treat Kristang prisoners as you would wish the Kristang
would treat your people if they were captured; and the Kristang generally have
done the same. Prisoners are provided food, shelter, medical care, regular
opportunities to exercise, and are allowed limited communication with their
families. You also regularly negotiate prisoner exchanges. There is in effect a
de facto Geneva Convention agreement,
whether it has been formally signed or not. We humans have not been provided
food and shelter, we grow our own food and build our own shelters. Medical care
is limited to what we can do with the extremely limited supplies we have left.
And we have had no communication with Earth since you took this planet back.”
Nivelle glanced out the window behind the Burgermeister, where a gunship fighter
aircraft that humans called a ‘Chicken’ was taking off. A real window. In a
real office, in a real building. Nivelle’s ad hoc UNEF HQ office in Lemuria was
a partition in a tent, and he slept in a tent. The Ruhar had offered equipment,
supplies and even a few workers to help construct a building. Nivelle and the
UNEF commanders before him insisted the effort would be better directed to more
important facilities for humans. Such as hospitals, air raid shelters, barracks
for housing, barns for livestock and storing harvested food. Luxuries like
offices could wait.

One thing Nivelle had
noticed as soon as he was invited into the Burgermeister’s office was the
smell. Or lack of it. His own tent had a pervasive musty scent of dampness and
mildew, despite the high-tech anti-mold chemicals provided by the Ruhar. The
problem with the cluster of tents that served as UNEF’s temporary headquarters
was that in the jungles of Lemuria, it rained every single afternoon. Sometimes
it rained more than once a day. Human were not the only creatures struggling to
adapt to the jungle; many Earth crops did not grow optimally in the hot, humid
conditions. Ruhar scientists were working, when they had time and resources, to
tweak the Earth plants’ genetics to grow better and yield more in the jungle.
Nothing had been promised to UNEF about using the supremely advanced biological
knowledge of the Ruhar, other than that they were doing what they could. Doing
what they could, for free, for an enemy that had tried to eject them from their
home planet.

The southern portion
of Lemuria was generally drier grasslands, and would likely be better suited to
human habitation and Earth crops. Moving farther to the south was not an
option, the Ruhar had declared, it was too far away from the support facilities
of the northern continent. And because of high mountains that cut across
Lemuria east to west at the southern end of the jungle, there were no roads to
the southern grasslands. Humans needed to deal with the situation as best they
could.

They didn’t have a
choice.

“The situation,” the Burgermeister
said quietly, “is complicated by the fact that you are being attacked by your
own side, General Nivelle. When you came here to occupy our planet, the Kristang were your patrons and you were their
client species. You were acting at the orders of the Kristang and with the
support of the Kristang to remove my people from their home; this planet. That
arrangement, that relationship, between humans and Kristang has not, to my
knowledge, changed. Even under a de facto Geneva Convention, as you said,” the
translator stumbled over ‘de facto’ but Nivelle understood, “we are not
responsible for internal enemy affairs. Likewise, you do understand that if we
did negotiate a prisoner exchange, we would not be responsible for the fate of
you humans once you are back under Kristang control.”

“We have not asked to
be exchanged,” Nivelle said stiffly.

“I would not
recommend it,” the Burgermeister said with grave seriousness. “We have
monitored the transmissions the Kristang directed at you. They consider you to
be traitors. The Kristang deal harshly with those who they feel have betrayed
them. Even among their own kind. With species they consider to be inferior,”
she shook her head. “If you were turned over to them, they might execute all of
you. Certainly they would execute you
personally, and the top echelon of your command. And probably any female humans
in a position of authority, you know now the Kristang philosophy on proper
gender roles,” the female deputy administrator of the planet said with a
grimace. “So when a Kristang ship raids this planet and kills humans, we must
view the incident at least partially as a matter internal to the Kristang
coalition.”

“We have no option,
then,” Nivelle said bitterly. “We can’t switch sides and join the Ruhar; our
governments back on Earth have declared loyalty to the Kristang.”

“That is not true,”
the Burgermeister announced, shocking Nivelle. “There are many cases where one
group of a species splits from its parent, and switches sides.”

“I am surprised to
hear this,” Nivelle stuttered. “How is this possible?”

“It happens, over the
course of a very long war,” the Burgermeister said with a human-like shrug.
“For example, there is a group of Kristang who live on a planet that my people
captured around four hundred of your years ago. These Kristang decided to stay,
and repudiate their allegiance to the two clans they belonged to.”

“This can’t be a
common occurrence?” General Nivelle asked warily.

“It was a special
circumstance,” she admitted. “The Kristang on that planet had been isolated
from the rest of their kind for many years. The planet was at the extreme end
of the territory the Thuranin controlled, then the Jeraptha cut off the
Thuranin’s access to a wormhole and the planet became isolated. We ignored the
planet for over two centuries, merely monitoring it to assure the Kristang
there did not pose a threat to us. By the time we besieged the planet, the
Kristang there had drifted far from the cultural norm of their species. They
declared that the Kristang had lost their souls to the Thuranin, that their
true culture had been perverted by their patrons. These Kristang, who now call
themselves the True Ones, are not entirely consumed by warfare. And they
requested our assistance to return their females to their original genetic baseline.
These True Ones could be considered neutrals, or as close to neutral as any
sentient being is allowed to be in this galaxy,” she observed sadly. “Their
industry provides material support to our war effort, and they have provided
warriors to fight alongside Ruhar. The warriors of the True Ones are known for
being absolutely fanatical in battle; they know that if any of them are
captured by the Kristang they will be tortured and killed.”

“I am not asking- I
am asking a hypothetical question. You understand what a hypothetical question
is?” Nivelle was not entirely confident in the translator. Eventually, he
needed to learn more than a few words of Ruhar.

The Burgermeister
nodded silently, so the UNEF commander continued. “If we humans here on
Paradise were to offer allegiance with the Ruhar, would it be accepted? And
what would that mean for my people? Here, and on Earth?”

Baturnah Logellia
paused to collect her thoughts. She could not tell the human commander that her
own government was negotiating to trade away the planet, in the process
screwing both the native Ruhar and the humans. “The decision to accept your
allegiance would be far above my head. I could make a discrete inquiry; however,
it would take several months at the very least. My confidence in our
communications security is not sufficient for me to trust sending such a
message via electronic means, no matter the level of encryption. Such a
delicate matter would require me sending a courier to our home world.” Seeing
Nivelle’s crestfallen look, she hastened to add “We have couriers traveling
regularly; the next is scheduled to depart within two weeks.”

“A discrete inquiry
would be greatly appreciated, Madame Logellia. This is, of course, all
hypothetical.”

“Of course,” she
smiled. “General, you should not discuss this with anyone, unless you are
standing in a field, far from any electronic equipment. I do not think I am
giving away any secret when I say that your own communications are entirely
compromised, since your ‘zPhones’”, she used the human slang term, “use our
satellite network. If the Kristang are able to intercept our satellite
communications-”

“Understood,” Nivelle
said helplessly. There was no point in attempting to establish a separate human
communications network; the Ruhar could easily breach even the best human
encryption. Nivelle suspected the Ruhar had the capability to implant nanoscale
spies directly into the hardware, so they wouldn’t even need to bother with
decrypting signals. There was no point to complaining about something he could
do nothing about.

Earth

It was great to have
settled the question of whether I would be in command of the next mission, or
even going at all. It was not great that UNEF Command wanted the ship to depart
Earth orbit within seventeen days, and we had a tremendous amount of work to do
before then. Major Simms, who had volunteered to go back out, needed to
replenish our supplies. Skippy had to oversee manufacture of some key ship
components that he hadn’t been able to make from moon dust on our last mission.
He was given a blank check to use whatever manufacturing capability he needed
on Earth. That was less useful than I expected, because Skippy told me human
materials technology was so primitive, it was in many cases easier for him to
create needed things from raw materials.

Major Simms was in
charge of coordinating with UNEF Command all the items we would need for the
next mission, and the large list of equipment Skippy said he needed to continue
repairing and upgrading the Dutchman.
Simms and I went over the list at Wright-Pat, and some of the things Skippy
wanted puzzled both of us. “Skippy,” I asked, “this is a big list. I can see
how most of it would be useful, I guess, but why do you need six crates of
WD-40?”

“WD-40? Oh, that was
just me messing with you. You monkeys didn’t know that was a joke? Damn your
species is clueless sometimes.”

Simms looked like she
would have tossed him out an airlock right then, if we’d been aboard the Dutchman. I wasn’t happy with him
either. “That was not funny, Skippy. We’ve got people working 24/7 down here
to-”

“Yeah, yeah, blah
blah blah. I get it, Joe, won’t happen again. Man, you hate it any time I have
fun. Listen, to be serious, there is only so much I can do to keep the ship
running without access to a Thuranin spacedock. Star carriers are designed to
operate on their own for extended missions, but we’ve been out on our own for
too long, and the ship got beat up pretty badly on our last mission.
Eventually, we will need access to Thuranin spare parts, or we’re going to need
another ship.”

“Crap,” I looked at
Simms and we both frowned. “Not on this mission, right?”

“That depends on how
long the next mission lasts, and what kind of stress we put the ship through,
Joe. I can’t make promises without knowing the parameters. On the last mission,
we didn’t expect to get ambushed by a Thuranin destroyer squadron.”

He had a point. I
didn’t like it. Until then, the thought that the Flying Dutchman would wear out, could wear out, hadn’t occurred to
me. The technology of the ship seemed more like magic than anything created by
living beings. Skippy did a great job behind the scenes, using robots to
perform maintenance, and even daily chores like cleaning and doing our laundry.
Whatever Skippy did to keep the ship operating was invisible to me. It was time
I started paying careful attention to how much effort went into keeping the
ship’s magical machines working.

The other thing that
was not great was that UNEF Command put me on a plane flying to Paris that very
afternoon. Paris France, not the one in Texas. I went into a bathroom on the
plane for privacy and called Rachel on my zPhone. “Hi, Joe,” she sounded happy.
“How is Maine? I checked the weather report this morning, it looks nice up
there.”

“Um. I’m on a plane
to Paris,” I blurted out.

“Paris. I’ve always
wanted to go there. This is for work?” There was a tone to her voice that I interpreted
as asking whether I was going to Paris with a girlfriend.

“Yes, UNEF sent me,
this is a last minute thing.”

“Are you coming back
to Dayton?”

“I don’t know.
Rachel, I truly don’t know. The ship is going back out soon, and-” I didn’t
know what else to say.

“I see.” Her voice
changed and I couldn’t tell whether she was hurt or angry or relieved. “You
don’t know when you’re coming back?”

“No.” Damn it, I had
always sucked at talking over a phone. “Rachel, we don’t even know where we’re going.” I took a deep
breath. “Listen, Rachel, when I get back-”

“Joe,” she
interrupted me. “Were you about to make a promise that you don’t know if you can
keep? Don’t do that.”

“I-” I what? I’m an
idiot?

“You’re lonely, Joe,
I could tell that right away. You were away from home for a long time, and now
you’re going back out. We had fun, I’m glad I met you. It’s not like you left
in the middle of the night. You have a mission and you have to go. I
understand. I was in the Air Force, remember?”

We awkwardly chatted
for another few minutes, ending with me saying that if I could get back to
Wright-Pat before going into orbit, I would contact her. She told me that
wouldn’t be a good idea. I could see her point. When you tear off a Band-Aid,
you don’t want to put it back on and do it again. Best to get it over with
once.

My history with women
seems to be they had me on a catch-and-release program. If my past was any
indicator, Rachel had her fill of Joe Bishop and was ready to move on.

Crap. My longest current
relationship was with a shiny beer can.

Maybe I needed to seriously
rethink my life.

CHAPTER FIVE

Paradise

With almost
simultaneous gamma ray bursts, the Kristang frigate To Seek Glory in Battle is Glorious and the destroyer We are Proud to Honor Clan Sub-Leader
Rash-au-Tal Vergent who Inspires us Every Day emerged above Lemuria, about
twenty three thousand kilometers apart. They emerged on either side of the
unlucky Ruhar frigate Tolen Grathur. Because of pressure put on the
task force commodore by the Chief Administrator, the defending task force had
stationed a single frigate above Lemuria, to prevent or at least lessen the
severity of future raids. Unfortunately for the Grathur, the Kristang had been watching that ship’s patrols and
noticed a pattern. There was a place the Ruhar frigate returned to reliably
every eleven hours. Seeing an opportunity to hit the enemy hard with manageable
risk, the Kristang task force commander had approved the idea of a raid by the
captain of the destroyer Vergent, and
naturally the experienced frigate Glory
had been assigned to the mission. That fact understandably did not please the
crew of the little Glory.

Both Kristang ships
emerged with weapons hot and fired missiles, maser cannons and the destroyer
launched railgun darts at the Grathur.
Only luck saved the Grathur from
complete destruction that day; a maser beam from the Glory hit a missile from the Vergent
just as that missile evaded the Grathur’s
point defenses. Instead of a devastating direct hit, the explosion of the
missile warhead 1200 kilometers away only severely damaged the Grathur, allowing that hapless ship to
perform a short emergency jump. The Grathur
would be out of service for several weeks repairing damage, which the Kristang
commander counted as good as a kill.

The captain of the Vergent was bitterly disappointed that
he could not claim a complete victory that day, and he blamed the crew of the Glory although it had been an accident.
The Vergent’s missile had been
maneuvering violently to avoid fire from the Grathur’s point defense cannons, and flew right into a maser beam
from the Glory. In the chaos of
battle, it happened, and it was no one’s fault.

The crew of the Vergent still blamed the Glory.

The crew of the Glory were happy merely to have survived
another day.

Earth

The next call I needed to
make was to one of the prior Merry Band of Pirates. “Hey, Skippy, I have a special request, it’s kind of unusual. I need to
call someone, and I need the call to be completely private, on both ends.”

“Sure thing. Is this
person living or dead?”

“What? Living, of course.
I-, wait,” Skippy could do so many incredible things, and he was still
constantly surprising me with things he could do. “Oh my God! Can you really
talk to dead people?”

“No, you big stupidhead,”
he laughed. “Of course not. Damn, you are dense sometimes.”

“Then why the hell did
you ask?”

“You said this request is
unusual, so I was trying to judge just how idiotic this was going to be. You
know, will this be normal Joe-level moronic, or are you cooking up something
truly special to entertain me?”

“You are such an asshole.
Can you do it, or not?”

“Whew,” he let out an
exasperated breath. “Please. Easy-peasy, Joe. Who do you want to call?”

“Doctor Friedlander.”

“Our friendly local
rocket scientist? Is he in any condition to talk? I think he sprained his brain
aboard the Dutchman, trying to understand how the reactors work,” Skippy
chuckled.

“Skippy, be nice once in
a while.”

“Ok, Ok. For a monkey,
he’s not nearly as dim as the rest of you. And he does tell good jokes
sometimes.”

“Friedlander? Tells
jokes?” This completely surprised me. Although, I hadn’t spent much time with
the science team.

“Yes. Aboard the ship, he
started every science team meeting with a joke. Like, did you hear the one
about the rooster?”

Skippy was going to tell
the joke anyway, so I played along. “No.”

“This farmer has a
rooster that is growing old, and the farmer decides it’s time to get a new
rooster. So he goes down the road to his neighbor Gilroy, and he buys a young
rooster. When he gets home,” Skippy was already laughing at his own joke, “he
puts the young rooster in the pen. The young rooster struts up to the old
rooster and says ‘Hey old-timer, you need to hit the road. This is my place
now’. The old rooster says ‘You’re right, it is my time, but I’ll tell you
what. Someday you’ll be old, and a young rooster will come along to kick you
out. I don’t want the ladies to see me just walk away. Could you chase me
around some, we’ll fight for a minute for me to keep my dignity, and then I’ll
leave?’ And the young rooster feels sorry for the old one, and says ‘Sure,
old-timer, let’s go.’ So the young rooster chases the old rooster around the
henhouse, and the farmer comes out to see what the commotion is. He says ‘What
the hell?’ He grabs his shotgun and blows the young rooster away. As the old
rooster is chuckling, the farmer says ‘Damn Gilroy done sold me a gay
rooster’!”

I laughed.

And Skippy laughed.

“You’re right, that is a
good one.” Maybe I needed to make more of an effort to get to know all the
people aboard the ship. “Can you call Friedlander?”

“Wait a minute, he’s in
his kitchen with his wife right now. I can make the call completely private,
but I can’t prevent his wife from overhearing him talk. He is about to go
outside to get something out of the toolshed, you can talk to him then.”

I was curious. “How do
you know he’s in the kitchen?”

“Duh. You really have to
ask, seriously? Since you asked, in this particular case, they have one of
those fancy refrigerators with internet connectivity and touch screen. That is
not the best idea if you’re concerned about privacy, by the way. Also, one of
their yogurts is expired. It’s behind the bread, that’s why they haven’t
noticed it.”

I made a mental note to
get a really, really old non-digital fridge, if I ever got a place of my own.

“Ok, Friedlander just
walked outside. I’ll call his phone now?”

“Yes, thank you.”

There was a delay of a
couple seconds, and I was about to ask Skippy what was the problem, then I
heard Friedlander’s voice. “Hello? Who is this?” He demanded.

“Doctor, it’s Joe
Bishop.”

“Oh, sorry for snapping
at you. There was no caller ID, and I don’t usually answer those calls, but my
phone somehow picked up the call by itself.”

“That’s because this call
is going through Skippy, not a cellular network.”

“Yes,” Skippy’s voice
broke in, “SkippyTel has amazing rate plans, and the best quality of service.
Exclusions apply. Not available in other solar systems. Or to people I don’t
like.”

“Got it, Skippy, thank
you,” I said. “I’ll consider switching my plan to SkippyTel, please send me
your brochure. Doctor Friedlander, we’re going through Skippy because I want
this call to be completely private. Can you talk?”

“Give me a moment, I’m,
Ok, I’m in my toolshed, and my wife is in the house.”

“UNEF has decided to send
the Dutchman back out.”

“I would have thought
that was obvious,” he said. I could hear the sarcasm in his voice.

“So did I, but it took a
while for the bureaucratic wheels to get into motion, I guess. The reason I
called is to see if you are interested in going back out with us.”

“Oh. Wait minute.” He was
silent a moment. “I had to check that my wife is still in the house. I am not
sure about going again, Colonel Bishop,” he answered slowly. “Last week, NASA
invited me to train for the mission to recover that Kristang troopship. We
still have to do that? Skippy won’t bring that troopship back for us?”

“I asked him to bring it
back for my birthday,” now my voice had the sarcasm.

“Joe!” Skippy broke in
again. “I already got you a pair of socks.”

“And I appreciate that,
Skippy. Truthfully, I would rather have a starship.”

“These are a very nice
pair of socks, Joe,” he said with a sniff. “However, I will consider it.”

“Unless Skippy changes
his mind soon,” I concluded, “we should assume NASA has to go out there in
old-fashioned chemical rockets. You would rather go on that mission, than join
us aboard the Dutchman again?”

“What I want is
not the only consideration.”

“Oh.” Crap. This was
going to get complicated.

“My wife told me she
married an engineer, not an astronaut. She was a nervous wreck when we got
home.”

“Doctor, this time, we do
expect the Dutchman to return. Last time we didn’t, but you went
anyway?”

“I, um, I didn’t quite
believe your speech about how we wouldn’t be coming back.”

“I wasn’t kidding about
that,” I said, frustrated.

“Which I realized when we
got out there, and I learned that we can’t operate the ship without Skippy. By
then, it was too late. Before we left, I told my wife there was no way UNEF
would allow a valuable asset like a Thuranin starship to be put at risk. I
figured all the talk about the high level of risk was something UNEF lawyers
made you say. So that, if anything did go wrong, the families couldn’t sue
UNEF. Sorry about that. Colonel, I wasn’t the only person who thought that way,
the whole science team did.”

All my serious speeches
had been for nothing? “I suppose it doesn’t matter now. Your wife is Ok with
you going into space with NASA?”

“No! No, I told NASA that
I need to think about it. My wife is very much against me going up in a NASA
rocket. Or a Chinese rocket. Any craft we send out to that troopship will be
experimental. I’m not enthusiastic about the idea either. NASA wants me to go,
because they’re hoping that I learned enough about the Flower to be able
to get the troopship’s reactor restarted.”

That surprised me. “You
can do that?”

“No. And I told that to
NASA, I think they’re hoping that I’m wrong. Colonel, I appreciate the offer. I
gathered so much data aboard the Flower and the Dutchman already,
it will take me years to-”

“I need you to lead the new
science team,” I said before he could finish.

“Me? Colonel, I’m an
engineer. I don’t do basic research and theory; I figure out how to make
theories do something useful. Out among the stars, we should be-”

“Doctor, on this mission,
UNEF wants engineers, not biologists, or cosmologists,” I stumbled over that
word. Wasn’t that people who gave fancy haircuts? No, I remembered with relief,
those were cosmetologists, like my
cousin Debbie. “Or chemists, or any kind of ‘ist’. UNEF wants people who can
figure out how the Dutchman, and any other alien technology we
encounter, works.”

Friedlander sounded
puzzled. “Why didn’t they do that the first time?”

“Because, as I said many
times, last time they didn’t really expect the ship to ever come back.”

“Mmm. And this time they
do, so they care about us delivering concrete results.”

“You got it, Doctor.”

There was a pause in the
conversation. Maybe I should have done this face to face, rather than over a
phone. I pictured him in a toolshed, surrounded by a lawnmower, weed whacker,
rakes, shovels and a bucket of topsoil. If I closed my eyes, I knew what it
smelled like; a bit musty, with dried dirt and grass and gasoline and plywood.
It smelled like suburbia. It smelled like freedom. It smelled like America.
Finally, he spoke. “Why me, Colonel?”

“You have experience
aboard the Dutchman, and that counts a lot, because it means you have
proven to be cool under pressure. Also, you got along well with people in a
confined environment.” That counted for a lot; there had been flare-ups of
personality conflicts even among our carefully-chosen Merry Band of Pirates.
“Mostly, I’m hoping you are someone I can count on. We are sticking to a limit
of seventy people again, and this time we will have some, let’s say, observers
and intel people from UNEF. So the science team will have fewer people. I’d
like you to select a wide mix of expertise for your team. Doctor, you know that
we have no idea what fields of knowledge we will need once we’re out there. On
Newark, biology and archeology were critical for unraveling the mystery of that
planet. And the science team ran an analysis that made Skippy realize an entire
moon had been vaporized. UNEF is going to want to stuff the science team with
you rocket scientist types so they can hopefully figure out how Thuranin
technology works. You understand how useful it might be for that team to not be
narrowly focused. It may mean the difference between us coming home or not.”

“I agree with you on that
point, Colonel. Do you need an answer right now?”

“No,” I replied, “give it
three days. No more than that, though. If you’re onboard, you’ll need a head start
selecting your team.”

“Ohhhh,” he groaned.
“This is not going to be easy to sell to my wife.”

And, there, I knew he
wanted to come with us. “I understand. Doctor, I’m not going to give you a
Duty, Honor, uh, Humanity speech. I’d very much appreciate if you can come with
us, but you’ve done your duty already. Think about it, and call me either way,
please.”

Friedlander called me the
next morning, waking me from sleep because I was on Paris time. “Colonel
Bishop, you still want me on the next mission?”

“Absolutely. We need you
to lead the science team. And Skippy wants you aboard because he says you tell
good jokes. I didn’t know that.”

Friedlander chuckled.
“Why did the two blondes freeze to death at the drive-in theater?”

“I don’t know?”

“They went to see ‘Closed
for the Winter’.”

“Ha!” I laughed. “That is
a good one. Skippy is right.”

“Someone needed to
lighten up our boring science team meetings. Colonel, I discussed the situation
with my wife last night, and I will join the mission on two conditions.”

“Ok, what are those?”
Please, please, I said to myself, make it something reasonable.

“First, this time we are
coming back, correct? That is the plan?”

“I’m the wrong person to
answer that question, but, yes. Skippy has promised we will bring the ship back
to Earth before the next mission, whatever that is. He wants to hold off
contacting the Collective until he has answers about what happened to Newark,
and some other things.”

Friedlander gave an
audible sigh of relief. “That is good to hear. My wife will be very pleased to
hear that. And I’ve told her that being aboard the Dutchman is safer than going up in that spacecraft NASA is
building. Don’t tell NASA I said that.”

“I won’t. And your second
condition?”

“Promise me that I won’t
be killed on some planet by a giant space lizard.”

That made me laugh.
“Doctor, don’t worry. If you are ever about to be eaten by a giant space
lizard, I will shoot you first.”

“That’s close enough,
I guess. Colonel, would you like to see the list of people I want on the
science team?”

“It will be your
science team, Doctor. The team is your choice; the seven best qualified people
you can find.”

“Whew,” he exhaled.
“That’s a lot of pressure on me, then. Seven qualified people who are willing
to leave on short notice, for an interstellar mission of unknown danger. Can I
promise they won’t be eaten by a giant space lizard?”

“Let’s not go crazy,
Doctor. We may need to throw one of them
to the giant space lizard to save ourselves.”

In Paris, I met the new
mission commander, Hans Chotek. We had a cordial and professional meeting, that
I almost ruined by calling him ‘Chocula’. Luckily, I caught myself in time and
said ‘Chotek’ instead. Skippy had shown me the mission commander’s resume and
it was impressive, particularly for a guy in his early 40s. He had been all
over the world and handled all kinds of crises for the UN; not all of them
successfully of course because it is, you know, the UN. We got off on the wrong
foot by him spending the first twenty minutes trying to impress me. Then he
must have realized I was bored; my jaw-stretching yawn may have been a clue. So
we talked about the mission objectives UNEF Command had given us. Given to him.

“Sir,” I began, “I do
have a problem with our mission objectives. One of them.”

He looked mildly
surprised. Whether he was surprised that I disagreed with the mission
objectives established by UNEF Command, or surprised that a comparatively
low-ranking sergeant/colonel would express doubts openly, I couldn’t guess.
“Our primary objective-”

I shook my head. “Our
primary objective is correct, and I have no problem with it.” We were tasked primarily
with determining what the Thuranin knew about the destruction of their surveyor
task force, and whether they would be sending another ship to Earth. The
primary objective also stated that if we found a way to establish an ongoing
intelligence source to proactively warn us about threats to Earth, we should
take the opportunity to do so. Fine. All that made sense to me. The only
quibble I had about our primary objective was that UNEF Command had been
frustratingly vague about what we were supposed to do if we learned another
surveyor ship was on its way to Earth. If the Thuranin planned to send a
surveyor ship, but that ship was not scheduled to begin its mission until well
in the future, we were to take the Dutchman
all the way back to Earth for consultation? If there was not enough time to
consult with Earth, we were to ‘use our best judgment’. Meaning Chotek’s
judgment, since UNEF Command had been clear that they did not trust mine. Were
we supposed to prevent a second surveyor from reaching Earth, even at the risk
of exposing the fact that humans were flying around in our own pirate starship?
If so, what level of exposure risk was acceptable? UNEF Command had provided no
guidance on that critical issue. Those damned cowards, who had reamed me a new
asshole over the carefully measured and entirely successful risk I took in
landing on Newark, were afraid to make any judgment of their own.

Anyway, the first
objective we were given was fine, we could manage any ambiguities when we had
to. The decision would not be up to me; it would be Chotek who would make the
final call. Except that I, Skippy, the Merry Band of Pirates and even Count
Chocula himself fully expected me to mutiny and override Chotek’s decision if I
thought it endangered humanity. Great. Whatever. Such is the life of a pirate
captain. What I would appreciate is some nice pirate booty to go with the
responsibility, but that wasn’t going to happen.

“The problem is our
secondary objective,” I explained.

“To gather
information about the Expeditionary Force on Paradise?” Now he was clearly
surprised. “I do not understand. Mr. Bishop. Surely you of all people would
want to know the fate of your fellow soldiers in UNEF.”

“I would like to
know; if the answer is they are all living happily ever after on Paradise,” I
said with what I hoped came across as sarcasm. “The problem is that I think it
extremely unlikely that fairy tale is the truth. It is much more likely that we
are going to discover information that is not so favorable; that UNEF on
Paradise is struggling or in danger, or being persecuted. And then what? What
good does it do for us to have that unpleasant information?”

“When we have
information, we have choices, Mr. Bishop. Without informat-”

“Choices to do what
exactly, Mr. Chotek? I see one choice if we discover the Expeditionary Force on
Paradise is endangered. We feel bad about it, and we do absolutely nothing.
That is the same effective result as if we discover they are all living happy
lives of luxury. In either case, we do absolutely nothing. We can’t do anything
useful. We can’t do anything at all. We can’t even send them a message, because
that would undoubtedly be intercepted by the Ruhar or Kristang or both. Then
the whole galaxy would know that humans escaped from Paradise and are flying
around in a pirate ship.”

“Surely we can-”

“Looking for trouble
on Paradise goes against two principles I have learned in my career, Mr.
Chotek. First, never ask a question for which you don’t want to hear the
answer. Second, never give an order you know won’t be obeyed.”

“What does that mean,
Colonel?” He asked evenly, but I could see his Adam’s apple bob ever so
slightly with anxiety.

“Mr. Chotek, we have
a crew of highly dedicated, highly trained, highly motivated special forces who have what we in the military call a
‘bias for action’. When they see a problem, they want to act, they expect to
act. What do you think will happen when they learn our people on Paradise are
threatened, or are actively being killed?”

“I expect they are
also highly disciplined, Colonel Bishop.”

“What would you do?”

“That would certainly
depend on the situation, and-”

“Great, then let me
present you with an example.” I took a breath and plunged ahead. “Let’s say we
are in the Paradise system, under stealth or however we get close enough to
obtain intel. We learn, we see, that our people are in prison camps, being
starved because they have run out of food and the Ruhar have a very limited
ability to feed them. Half of the Expeditionary Force has already died of
starvation. The Ruhar military force on and around Paradise is weak; weak
enough that this ship could take them on easily. We could take the planet back,
we could feed some of our people, we could even bring some of them home. What
will you order us to do? You are the mission commander; this is your decision.”

He took a moment to
answer. “I see your point, Colonel. Any action we take would expose us, and endanger
Earth. As difficult as it would be, my decision would have to be that the ship
must remain in stealth, and return to Earth without intervening or revealing
our presence.”

“You expect that
order to be obeyed? Do you really expect the crew of this pirate ship to stand
down and do nothing, while our people, their comrades, are dying?”

This time he did not
answer immediately. “Would you obey such an order, Colonel?”

“I don’t know,” I
answered honestly. “And if I passed that order on to my subordinates, I am not
confident my orders would be obeyed.”

“I see,” Chotek said
thoughtfully.

“We are all alone out
there, Mr. Chotek. During our last mission, I was outside the ship in a
spacesuit with a SpecOps team for zero gravity training. One of the special
forces asked Skippy whether we could see the Sun from there, and Skippy
enhanced the image in our helmet visors, so we could see the faint light of our
home star. I remember Skippy reminding us that the light we were seeing then left
the sun eighteen hundred years ago. The Roman Empire ruled the Mediterranean
back then. Under that perspective, the authority of Earth begins to seem thin
after we pass through a couple wormholes.”

“Colonel,” he said,
“you have given me much to think about. Please understand that I have limited
flexibility about our mission objectives. UNEF Command made it very clear that
they want to know the situation on Paradise. Unless there is a compelling
reason for us not to pursue gathering information about Paradise, I do not see
that I have authority to override that objective. Regardless of my personal
feelings on the subject.”

“A compelling
reason?” I mused. “How about this? If you judged that pursuing intelligence
about Paradise posed a risk of this ship exposing our presence out here, would
that be a compelling reason to override our stated objective? Even if such
exposure were, let’s say, inadvertent.”

He pinched his chin.
This was deeply troubling him. His entire purpose for being aboard the Flying Dutchman was because UNEF did not
trust my judgment about keeping our pirate ship secret. Now he saw that
assuring we took zero risk of
exposure was a complicated calculation. Virtually anything we did on the other
side of Earth’s local wormhole risked exposure. “I will need to think about this,”
he said. “We have to achieve our primary objective first, then we will need to
reevaluate our next steps. And, Colonel? I do appreciate that our primary
objective involves considerable risk of us becoming exposed. None of these
decisions will be simple, or easy.”

I was glad to hear
that, even if it was a little late.

Flying all the way to
Paris, except for meeting our new mission commander, was a waste of my time.
After three days of me trying to run the ship from the ground, Skippy sent down
a dropship, and I went aboard the Flying
Dutchman. The ship was a beehive of frantic activity, even more than last
time. The difference this time was, UNEF Command expected us to come back, so
they cared that we had everything we might need loaded aboard. When Major Simms
first saw me, she snapped a quick salute, threw up her hands, and shooed me out
of the cargo bay so she could get a mountain of gear stowed away.

“Sir,” a
haggard-looking Major Simms said as she knocked on my office door frame a
couple minutes later. “We have two more shipments coming up from Earth, then
we’ll be fully loaded. I was able to get all the special items you asked for,
except for this ‘Fluff’ thing,” she looked at me with a raised eyebrow. “I was
able to get a different kind of marshmallow cream,” she held up a white plastic
jar from a warehouse store. It was labelled ‘Marshmallow Cream’.

I sucked in a breath.
“Generic Fluff?” I sputtered in
shock. Until that moment, I hadn’t known there was anything but true Fluff. The
white jar in her hand emanated pure evil; I could barely look at it. “Major,
that is an unholy abomination! You can’t make a Fluffernutter sandwich with,
with, that.”

She looked at the
label skeptically. “Sir, it has the same ingredient-”

“Major, do not mess
with someone’s childhood,” I said with all seriousness. “A scoop of Fluff on
top of a mug of hot chocolate on a cold day? Yum. Whatever that heinous
imposter is in your hand there, we can’t have it aboard this ship. How much did
you get?”

“Four of these jars,”
she said with great weariness. “I’ll send it back down when the dropship is
unloaded.”

“Hmm. I don’t want to
risk contaminating the planet with that abomination. Could we toss it out an
airlock and let it burn up in the atmosphere?” That suggestion was made only half-jokingly.
This was all my fault. The list I gave to Simms of items I wanted aboard the Dutchman only had three items on it, but
Fluff was one of them. What I should have done was buy a couple jars while I
was home, but I couldn’t see myself lugging them around in my suitcase. UNEF
Command already thought I was too immature for command. Maybe I could ask my
parents to send a care package to Wright-Patterson, or wherever Simms was
loading the dropships?

“I will take care of
it, sir,” she turned and left with a wry smile.

I never did find out
if she’d really tossed them out an airlock.

I also never did get
a jar of real Fluff.

I wandered down to a
cargo bay that had been set aside for special forces gear. Major Smythe was
there with his SpecOps team leaders, personally checking every single piece of
equipment. And making a list of the gear they still needed.

“Welcome aboard
again, Colonel Bishop,” Smythe said while snapping a salute.

I returned the
salute, and that was the end of the saluting that would be required aboard the
ship, except for formal ceremonies. “Major
Smythe,” I pointed to his new rank insignia. “Maybe I’m not saying this the
right way, but I’m sorry that your special forces did not see much action on
the last mission.”

“Colonel, that is not
a problem for us. We are here to provide an elite capability, whenever that
capability is needed. Special forces are used to a lot of hurry up and wait,
and clandestine missions when we are only needed if something goes very wrong.
Most of the time, if the enemy knows that special forces have been in the area,
we have failed our mission. On these missions, the enemy can’t even know that
we exist. We understand that the need
to avoid exposure severely limits our ability to engage in combat operations.”

“It severely limits
our ability to do pretty much anything out here,” I agreed.

“We will be,” he
ejected a clip from a Kristang rifle, then set the rifle carefully on a rack,
“seeing substantially more action on this mission?”

I nodded. “According
to Skippy, there is no alternative. Do you feel up to combat against the
Thuranin?”

“Against genetically
enhanced cyborgs with superior technology? My people will be ready, sir.
Hopefully Skippy can give us some sort of advantage.”

“He doesn’t think
so,” I said glumly. “But I’ll talk with him.”

I was in my cabin to
change out of my formal uniform, when Adams called me from the CIC. “Colonel, we just received a message
from UNEF Command.”

“Go ahead,” I answered,
spitting out a mouthful of toothpaste. Why did people always call when I was in
the bathroom? Talking while kneeling on the floor of a cramped Thuranin
bathroom seemed undignified, so I carefully stood up, wary of the low ceiling.

“NASA has telescopes watching that
Kristang troopship, and they’ve picked up an increased infrared signature.
Something out there is heating up, sir.”

“Uh huh. Thank you,
Sergeant. I’m going to ask a certain shiny beer can what he knows about that.”
I ended the call on my zPhone and looked at the speaker in the ceiling, knowing
Skippy was always listening. “Hey, Skippy. Do you know anything about activity
on that troopship?”

“You monkeys noticed
that, huh?”

“Apparently, yes. You’re
not trying to blow it up, are you? Please, please say no.”

“Not blowing it up, Joe.
I’m restarting the reactor temporarily, to get a partial charge for the ship’s
jump drive coils.”

“You are planning to jump
it somewhere?” I asked hopefully.

“Yes,” he said with a
sigh. “I’ve been looking at the plans for the spacecraft you monkeys are
building; it’s like a can made from newspaper and cow manure, only less flight
worthy. I can’t stand the idea of brave but idiotic astronauts making a long
journey in that flimsy piece of crap. But I still don’t want you monkeys
whacking each other with sticks over that ship, so I’m jumping it halfway to
your moon. Your nations will still need to cooperate to get above low Earth
orbit.”

“That is a nice surprise.
Thank you, Skippy.”

“Ah, don’t mention it.
The socks I bought for your birthday are on backorder, so I had to get you
something else.”

“A starship beats socks
any day.”

“But these were very nice
socks, Joe. And I got you a card and everything.”

I laughed. “That is very
much appreciated. How about this; for my next birthday, I’ll set up a gift
registry, and you can select something from the list.”

“Ooh, ooh, that’s a good
idea. I saw this in a movie!”

Considering that Skippy
had probably seen every movie ever made, that was not surprising. I tried to
think of how many romantic comedies had a gift registry as part of the plot. “What
movie?”

“It was the Wizard of Oz.
For your gift, you want a brain, right?”

Crap. “I walked right
into that one, didn’t I?”

“Yeah you did. If it had
been a tree, you would have broken your nose.”

“Thanks for keeping me
alert, I guess. When do you plan to jump that ship?”

“We jump out of here in
three days, so I’ll do it in two days. In case UNEF gets too excited, as soon
as the jump drive coils are charged sufficiently, I am shutting the reactor
down again. they’ll need to figure that out by themselves. And tell your NASA
that Dr. Friedlander is not available to get that troopship’s reactor
restarted. He started telling me a joke this morning, and he got interrupted.
That rocket scientist weasel isn’t going anywhere
until he tells me the freakin’ punchline,” Skippy grumbled.

“I will inform UNEF,
then. They will be very pleased. I do have one question first; are you sure
that bringing that ship back won’t be seen as you caving in to UNEF?”

“Huh? No, why would they
think that? There was no quid pro quo here. Ugh. You don’t understand Latin.
I’ll use language you can understand; I did not make a bargain with UNEF. I got
everything I wanted, and gave no concessions to them. Me bringing that ship
back is a gift from the Benevolent All-Powerful Skippy. Plain and simple.”

“All right then.”
Personally, I was afraid that UNEF would see this as me being able having
influence on Skippy, and being able to get him to do other things in the
future. UNEF had better not get used to that. “One more thing, then.”

“Really? I bring you a
starship, and you want more? Unbelievable!”

“This is simple, I
promise.”

“Fine,” he huffed. “What
is it?”

“That troopship has a
Kristang name, right, some long-ass poetry thing?”

“Correct. The Kristang
traditionally name their troop carriers after soldiers who died particularly
gloriously in battle. This one is called The Ever-Long Remembrance of Khost
Vlakranda Who Served With Ultimate Honor.”

“Wow. This Khost guy,
what did he do?

“Uh, well, his family is
well connected in their clan, so naming the ship after him was partly
political. He was a first son, and he died when his dropship got shot down.
This was after he led a raid on another Kristang clan, a raid that resulted in
the deaths of almost three thousand, including females and children. Also,
there is suspicion he was drunk the day of that raid.”

My mouth opened to remark
that Khost was no hero, when I remembered the Ruhar Whales that I had shot
down. Almost a thousand Ruhar had died then. For that action, the Kristang had
insisted that I be promoted to wear the colonel’s silver eagles that now
adorned my uniform. I am certain the Ruhar did not think I am any kind of hero.
“Skippy, I want you to rename that ship as the Yu Qishan.”

“Oh. Joe, it is not often
that I say this, but in this case I completely agree with your suggestion.”
Sergeant Yu Qishan of the Chinese Army had sacrificed himself to prevent a
Kristang crewman from self-destructing the Flower when we boarded that
frigate near Paradise. Everything we had accomplished since then we owed to Yu
Qishan. “Done. The official designation of the ship is now The Ever-Long
Remembrance of Yu Qishan Who Served With Ultimate Honor.”

My intention had been to
rename it as simply ‘Yu Qishan’, but what Skippy did was better. Everyone was
going to call it the Yu anyway. “Thank you, Skippy.”

UNEF Command was indeed
thrilled when I told them the Yu would soon be back in Earth orbit. They
also congratulated me for persuading Skippy to cooperate, even though I told
them several times that I had nothing to do with it. And I’m sure that
somewhere, Chuckles the Clown was patting himself on the back for getting
Skippy to do what UNEF wanted.

Maybe, in some way, he
was right about that. Maybe he hadn’t manipulated Skippy into doing what UNEF
wanted; maybe Chuckles had manipulated me into getting Skippy to do UNEF’s
bidding.

I didn’t like that idea
at all.

What I did enjoy was
telling Lt. Colonel Chang about renaming the troopship; we had talked about
honoring Sergeant Yu in some way, but hadn’t done anything about it until now.
Truthfully, we had been kind of, you know, busy. Chang was visibly affected by
my gesture of renaming the ship; I thought I saw a tear in his eye. He later
told me that he had called Yu’s family personally to inform them of how UNEF
was honoring their son. He did that before I told UNEF of the renaming, so that
some idiot desk-bound bureaucrat at UNEF Command wouldn’t be able to order me
not to do it. One thing that being in the military had taught me, is that it is
better to act and ask forgiveness, than to hesitate and ask permission.

CHAPTER SIX

Flying
Dutchman

We finally jumped
away from Earth orbit after only one or two minor delays. Before we initiated
the jump sequence, Mr. Chotek wanted to give some sort of undoubtedly long-winded
speech to the crew. He needed to assert himself as the mission commander, or
mark the momentous occasion in his special way or something. So, I asked Skippy
to open the intercom and a channel to UNEF Command on Earth.

Sure, maybe I should
have warned Chotek what was likely to happen. On the other hand, the best way
to learn is through experience, and he was never going to forget this. So, I
actually did him a favor.

That’s my story and
I’m sticking to it.

What we on the bridge
and in the CIC saw was Hans Chotek, wearing a dark blue suit, white shirt and
red tie. Why he felt the need to wear a suit was a mystery; my order for the
uniform of the day was not formal, but the military personnel were all wearing
uniforms and I guess Chotek’s work uniform was a suit. What we heard was Chotek
clearing his throat and saying “I would like to address the crew.” Then he
launched into a prepared speech about the importance of this mission, and
reminding people of our objectives. He was about halfway through the first objective
when a Chinese pilot in the CIC snorted with laughter while she looked at a
display screen, then she stood up straight, trying to be serious.

What the rest of the
crew, and people at UNEF Command on Earth saw and heard was not Hans Chotek in
a suit. Through the video feed, they saw and heard Count Chocula, beginning
with him saying “I would like to address the crew” in an exaggerated movie
vampire accent. The Count then proceeded to explain the importance of our
mission to bring delicious chocolaty breakfast cereal to the children of the
world, and how much Franken Berry cereal sucked by comparison. While talking,
the Count picked a booger from his nose, tried to flick it away, then smeared
it on his jacket lapel. Without even seeing the video, I had to bite my lip to
keep from laughing while Chotek continued his speech. Two minutes in, with him
glaring at the crew in the CIC as they tried to suppress laughter, he was
interrupted by Chang.

“I’m sorry, Mr.
Chotek, there is a,” Chang had to pause to collect himself. “There is a problem
with the video and audio feed.”

“Problem?” Chotek
asked, annoyed to being interrupted while giving the speech of his life.

“Yup,” Skippy said.
“Seems to be a glitch somewhere. I’m working on it.” Just then, every screen on
the bridge and CIC began playing the video from the beginning. Chotek saw his
image altered to appear as a vampire, saying “I would like to address the
crew”.

He was not amused.
His face red, he glared at me. “Colonel Bishop, I would like to speak with you
privately.”

Crap. Now he was
pissed at me. We still had half an
hour before the ship would jump, so I gave the command chair to Chang, and
Chotek came into my office around the corner. The door was barely closed when
he started haranguing me. “Colonel Bishop, I will not tolerate a display of
disrespect like that. I am a senior United Nations official-”

“Pbbbbbbt!” Skippy
made a raspberry sound. “Please, Chocky, you’re a senior bureaucrat, or a
senior blowhard for sure, but what qualifies you to be part of this elite
crew?”

“My most recent
assignment was in the Middle East. It took me five weeks, but I was able to
negotiate a very difficult cease fire between the Israelis and Palestinians,”
he said proudly.

“Sure,” Skippy
scoffed. “Except that nobody actually ceased firing during that ‘cease fire’.
Basically, they stopped shooting just long enough to eat lunch and reload. Then
your cease fire was over. What really happened is, the two sides strung you
along for five weeks while they shot at each other all they wanted. Then, when
they each needed a break, they agreed to your cease fire agreement, and ignored
it. What else you got on your resume?”

“The peace accords in
Sudan.”

“Uh huh. You mean one
side in Sudan agreeing to peace, only after they had already killed or driven
away seventy percent of the other side. Man, that must have been one tough
agreement to negotiate.”

Chotek stiffened.
“Not every agreement is what we wish it could-”

“None of your
negotiated agreements have accomplished anything useful, Chocky. You couldn’t
even do disaster aid right. When you were in charge of the tsunami relief in
the Philippines, more than half of your supplies were stolen by terrorist
groups. The emergency shelter housing units you brought in were contaminated
with toxic mold. And your UN relief troops infected the native population with
cholera. The Philippines would have been better off if you had never quote,
helped them, unquote.”

“It is easy to
criticize in retrospect what should have been done-”

“It is even easier to
claim you are a big shot UN official helping the world, when the truth is, you
have never accomplished one damned thing of substance in your worthless career,
Chocula.” Skippy was pissed. “Now you come aboard our ship when you are in no
way qualified to join the Merry Band of Pirates, and you think your experience
gives you the authority to tell us what we can and can’t do? Screw that. Where
was your lazy ass the last two times we saved your miserable planet?”

Chotek didn’t have an
answer to that. Although, to be fair, there wasn’t a reasonable answer to that.

“Skippy,” I
interrupted before the argument got totally out of control. Damn it, we hadn’t
even left orbit yet. “This ship is under the authority of UNEF Command; I am
also under that authority. Mr. Chotek has been appointed as the mission
commander, and I have agreed to implement his commands as the captain of this
ship.” I did not say ‘whether I like it or not’ because everyone knew that is
what I meant. “Mr. Chotek, I had nothing to do with altering that video, I have
been a victim of Skippy’s pranks before. In my case, my image was replaced by
Barney the idiotic purple dinosaur.”

“And a monkey, Joe,
don’t forget about the monkey,” Skippy said gleefully.

“Believe me, I have
not forgotten about the monkey. My point, Mr. Chotek, is that you will need to
reach some agreement with Skippy. You are an expert negotiator? Then find some
way to reach an accommodation with him. Because Skippy is one hundred percent
essential to operating this ship. No one else onboard, including myself, are
that vital to the mission.”

Chotek had his arms
folded across his chest, which I took as a bad sign. “Mr. Skippy has made it
clear that he has no need to negotiate with anyone. Therefore, I do not see any
basis for reaching an agreement of any kind.”

“You don’t need to
reach a formal agreement,” I suggested. “You just need to find a way to live
together on this ship. It would help, sir, if you would develop a sense of
humor about your interactions with our super powerful alien being.” I described
Skippy that way to remind Chotek of exactly who he was dealing with.

Given what I’d seen
of Chotek so far, I was not optimistic about him growing a sense of humor.
Skippy and Chotek were going to argue, and I was going to be caught in the
middle.

This could be a very
long trip.

Fort Rakovsky, Lemuria, Paradise

“Damn, I’m hungry,” Dave
said quietly. “Sorry, man, I know you’re hungry too, I shouldn’t have mentioned
it.”

“Hey,” Jesse offered a
hand, and he and Dave bumped fists. “Don’t worry about, it, Ski. If you can’t
talk about it with me, you can’t talk about it with anyone.” Being part of a
fireteam meant taking care of each other, and not just in combat. It meant
making sure the other guys changed their socks so they didn’t get blisters. It
meant checking they were staying hydrated, and eating nutritious food instead
of junk. Although there wasn’t any junk food on Paradise now, so that last one
was easy. And it meant listening when a fireteam member needed to talk about
something. “Yeah, I’m hungry too. And we’re better off than most.” Because they
worked on a dedicated Ag team, as chicken ranchers, Dave and Jesse were
allotted extra calories each day. That allotment had been cut, three times, so
that now their daily bounty was a mere 300 additional calories. Part of the
reason for the cuts was that, with most of UNEF now settled in villages that
had been carved out of Paradise’s southern continent, the majority of humans
were now involved in farming and raising animals. Most people were on Ag teams
by default, it was no longer a special assignment. The other reason was that
even though UNEF had cleared thousands of acres and planted crops, the food
supply was still tight. UNEF had quickly found that, in addition to growing
crops for the general supply, each Ag worker needed to be allotted a certain
number of acres just for themselves, as an incentive. People worked for
incentives; that was why communism had been such a miserable and obvious failure.
While soldiers could be ordered by headquarters to grow food for the general
population, most people worked just a little bit harder on land they knew was
their own. On their own plot of land, they grew whatever crops they wanted,
assuming seeds were available.

A new, informal human
economy was being built on Paradise, based on trading food products. One
village may grow a field of sugarcane on their private allotment; after harvest
and processing, the resulting raw sugar could be traded for just about
anything. A dairy needed a large amount of grain to feed the cattle; incoming
grain was traded for fresh milk. And not just milk was traded; there was a
booming business in butter and cheese. One village, located right on the
equator of Paradise, grew nothing but peppers, and traded dried pepper flakes
to spice up the mostly bland diet people were eating.

“You know what I miss?”
Dave asked while staring off into the corn field. Two thirds of the field was
laying fallow in between harvests; waiting for more fertilizer to be delivered.
Corn kernels were harvested, mostly to feed the chickens, and the upper parts
of the corn stalks were shipped out as feed for cattle. Cows shouldn’t eat the
lower part of a corn stalk, Dave had been told; it contained too much nitrates
or something like that. That was yet another thing he hadn’t expected to learn
in the US Army. He also had learned how to select and prepare corn to be used
as seeds for the next harvest. None of this had been covered in basic training.

The reason most of the
field was not growing corn at the moment was simple, and frightening. Large
fields of crops were big, easy targets for Kristang maser beams. The raider
ships that were still regularly popping into orbit were hitting the human food
supply as often as they targeted Ruhar infrastructure. In response, UNEF had
ordered creation of smaller, widely scattered fields, to avoid providing
tempting targets for the Kristang raiders. Creating those fields took time, and
intense labor, and that took effort away from tending the fields that were already
planted. The acres now under cultivation were supposedly enough to feed all of
UNEF, with a safety margin for bad weather, crop failures and fields burned by
Kristang masers. An adequate supply of food was mere months away, according to
UNEF HQ. Whether that was true, or BS propaganda to boost sagging morale,
depended on which rumors you believed.

“What you miss?” Jesse
asked. “Like getting enough to eat?”

“That too,” Dave nodded.
“I miss food from home.”

“You don’t eat corn and
eggs in Milwaukee?” Jesse had eaten plenty of corn in Arkansas, mostly in the
form of cornmeal, cornbread, corn in a lot of things. Like his nickname,
Cornpone. He’d eaten a lot of eggs, too. And now he was heartily sick of both
corn and eggs. Ski had cooked up a deal to trade some of their private crops
like sun dried tomatoes for sugar, spices and even a tiny hunk of cheese made
right on Paradise. In their little spare time, they had cleared a field
together and planted a type of wheat as an experiment; if it worked they were hoping
to have wheat flour and possibly even wheat bread to trade.

“You know what I mean. I
miss the kind of food we don’t have here. Like beer brats.”

“Beer brats? Like
bratwurst? That’s German food, right? You’re Polish, I though you guys ate
kielbasa.”

“We do, I, my father’s
family is Polish. My mother comes from French Canadian and Swedish people. And
I’m like fourth generation American, they came over from Poland a long time
ago. Beer brats are a Wisconsin thing.”

“How do you cook them?”
Jesse didn’t actually care how bratwursts were cooked, he knew Ski wanted to
talk about it.

Dave’s eyes lit up. “What
my folks do it you get a pan, like an aluminum pan, the thin disposable kind
like they sell lasagna in? You know what I mean? You’ll probably throw the pan
away, because it will get sooty from the grill. Ok, you got the pan, you slice
up onions, and you add the brats and pour beer in to cover the brats.”

Jesse looked skeptical.
“Sounds like a waste of good beer.”

“It doesn’t take a whole
lot of beer, and you don’t have to use the good stuff. A dark beer is best; it
adds more flavor. You cover the pan with foil and let it kind of poach or steam
for a while.”

“You kind of boil the
brats? Why not do it on a stove instead of a grill?”

“Because before you serve
the brats, you take them out of the pan and grill them up for a few minutes. It
gets the skin nice and crispy, so that when you bite into them, the juice
bursts in your mouth oh,” Ski closed his eyes and licked his lips, almost
tasting a delicious brat. “Put them on a bun, add the onions on top, man that
tastes like-” Dave paused, lost for a moment as a shadow fell across his face.
“It tastes like home, man.”

“I know what you mean.
That sounds good, I’d like to try that.”

“Except we don’t have
brats, or beer.”

“We have onions.”

“Yum!” Dave said with
disgust. “What food do you miss the most?”

“Oh, dang, there’s so
much. Ch-” Jesse caught himself before saying ‘chicken and dumplings’ while he
stood over the pen of tiny, peeping chicks. That would have been very bad luck.
“Ribs. I miss babyback ribs.”

“Memphis style?”

“Of course. Or a dry rub,
that’s good too.”

“Mmm,” Dave smacked his
lips, “I can taste it now.”

“Me too. We’ve served
together a long time, how come back when Bishop named you ‘Ski’, you didn’t tell
him that you’re half Swedish?”

“Like that would have
made a difference?”

“With Joe? No, I guess
not. Sucks what happened to him.”

“Goddamn lizards killed
him,” Dave frowned.

“I think technically, the
hamsters killed him when they blew up that jail he was in.”

“Bullshit, Jesse. That
was timing, the lizards were going to kill him anyway. The reason he is dead is
because of the lizards.”

“Yeah,” Cornpone agreed
with a frown.

“Yeah. I miss his stupid
face sometimes.”

“Bish, a colonel,” Jesse
shook his head in amazement. “He was one lucky son of a bitch. Until, you know,
he got killed.”

Flying
Dutchman

Following the initial
jump, the ship was recharging jump drive capacitors, so I took the opportunity
to get dinner. It had been a long day and I was on the third and last shift for
dinner in the galley; hopefully not all the good stuff was gone by then. It was
the Chinese team’s turn to cook and to my surprise, they made meatloaf. There
were also two vegetarian dishes. Chinese meatloaf? The cook offered it to me with
pride, so I took the plate and added some sort of vegetables. On our last
mission, someone on the American team had added nutmeg to the meatloaf, so I tasted
this Chinese version with skepticism. It was delicious. Different but
delicious, and spicy. The meatloaf on my plate was gone before I knew it. The
cook, beaming with pride, offered me a second helping, which I accepted.

“Hey, Colonel Joe,”
Skippy said through the ceiling speaker, “I need a favor.”

Mentally I cringed,
because Skippy had often used my time in the galley to tease and insult me in
front of an audience. “What is it?”

“I need you to order
Dr. Friedlander to tell me the punchline to the joke he started. That freakin’
weasel keeps telling me that he’s too busy managing the science team.”

“I won’t order him to
tell you, but I can certainly ask him about it. Maybe I can help you, what is
the joke?”

“He said ‘How do you
keep an idiot in suspense’?”

Thank God that I
didn’t have a mouthful of food, because I burst out laughing and so did everyone
in the galley. Sergeant Adams was laughing so hard she had tears running down
her face. Captain Giraud almost fell off his chair.

“What’s so funny?”
Skippy demanded.

When I could talk
again, I said gently “Skippy, think about it.”

After a long pause,
there came “Oh. Shit.” Then he shouted “Friedlander!
Joe, we need the ship to alter course immediately.”

“Why?”

“There is a planet I
know of that has large beasts sort of like dinosaurs. We’re going to dip
Friedlander in ketchup and drop him off there.”

“Skippy, come on. I
promised the guy that he would not be
eaten by a giant space lizard.”

“You promised him, I didn’t. Ooooooh, that weasel is going to seriously
regret the day he was born when-”

“Thank you for the
laugh, Skippy. I’m sure you can find some non-lethal means to get even with our
local rocket scientist.”

The third morning after
we jumped away from Earth, I had a problem to deal with. Count Chocula came to
my office, before I even had a sip of coffee. He complained he didn’t get any
sleep that night, because his cabin was alternately broiling hot then freezing
cold at night, and the ventilation system made booming noises. He asked me to
tell Skippy to stop harassing him, then he went away to get the cup of coffee I
hadn’t had yet.

As soon as he went around
the corner, I called a shiny beer can that I know. “Hey, Skippy, Count Chocula
says the ventilation in his cabin went haywire last night?”

“Oh, uh huh, yeah, I
heard about that. It’s a damned shame, is what it is. The ventilation system in
that area has issues.”

“Issues?”

“Yup. Multiple issues,
let me tell you. The ventilation system’s sister is dating some creepy Goth
guy, it’s mother lost her job and is drinking too much, again. The whole family
is worried. Although, let’s face it, the mother has been through rehab twice
already so it’s no surprise. She’s not going to change. And the ventilation
system itself is having a bad hair day, plus it gained weight after it broke up
with its boyfriend last week. Oh, man, it’s a whole deal. We’re talking daytime
TV type drama in that family.”

“Ooookay, sure,” I
couldn’t help laughing. “Any chance you can fix just one issue, keep the
temperature in that cabin at a comfortable level?”

“I could, I suppose. Tell
you what, I’ll put it on my list of things to do. Although there are so
many other things I need to do that are a much higher priority.”

“Such as?”

“Well, Joe, your sock
drawer is shockingly disorganized.
You’ve got dress socks mixed up with sport socks, man, it could take me months
to untangle that mess. The ventilation system in his cabin may have to wait a
while.”

“Listen, Skippy. I don’t
like the jerk either,” I craned my neck to see if anyone was in the corridor
outside my office, “but you can’t harass him that way. He needs sleep. Lack of
sleep won’t improve his personality.”

“You have a point there,
Joe. Until I get the ventilation system fixed, I suggest he finds a nice
airlock to sleep in. Although, we’ve had trouble with airlocks also, it is
possible there could be a catastrophic failure someday. I can’t promise
anything.”

“Then tell me this,
genius. What are the odds of an airlock failing while Chocula happens to be
sleeping there, and him getting sucked out into space?”

“Difficult to say for
certain, Joe. There are a lot of variables involved. I can tell you that there
does seem to be an odd correlation between the potential of an airlock failure,
and how much I am irritated at Chotek that particular day. It is a strange
coincidence. I can’t explain it; this could take some detailed analysis.”

I sighed. This was
going to be an ongoing problem. “Please, Skippy, for me, let the guy get a good
night of sleep, Ok?”

“Fine,” he huffed.
“Have it your way. I’ll find some other way to have fun.”

“Great. Don’t make it
so obvious next time.”

Fort Rakovsky, Lemuria, Paradise

Their private wheat field
was coming along just fine, according to the Ag expert who stopped by their
village once a week. Jesse and Dave were discussing combining forces with
another three guys to expand their wheat field. Five guys working together could
grow more than two plus three working separately. People were doing that all
over Lemuria; the crops growing in their allotted private fields were now
almost equal to the yield from official communal fields.

Dave had originally
wanted to grow oats, figuring it would be an advantage to grow something not
many other people were growing. The Ag expert had shot down that idea,
explaining that oats were a cool season crop, unsuited to growing in the
tropical jungle of Paradise’s southern continent, because the oat plant goes
dormant in high temperatures. That was too bad, because Dave had been hoping
for a nice bowl of oatmeal someday. Back on Earth, oatmeal had not been his
favorite food, but he was fixated on now. Of all the wide variety of foods he
missed, a bowl of oatmeal seemed reasonably achievable. Unlike, for example,
pepperoni pizza. Why waste time and effort yearning for something he was never,
ever going to have again?

Jesse wanted to expand
their private field to grow some corn of their own in addition to wheat,
intending to someday produce grits. Grits, Jesse said, would be a big seller.
Dave supposed Jesse was right about that, but he still was feeling nostalgic
about a bowl of oatmeal, like his mother used to make on cold winter mornings
in Milwaukee. To make the experience complete, he needed milk, which was not as
scarce on Paradise as it used to be now that cows were producing high yields.
Rumor had it that their own village would be getting a cow soon, in exchange
for two dozen egg-laying chickens.

Dave also needed brown
sugar. Sugarcane was being grown on Paradise, and their friendly local Ag
expert had told Dave the sugarcane was growing well, very well. It would not be
too long, another month perhaps, before human-produced sugar was available.
Dave envied the guys who were growing sugarcane; those guys could command
anything in trade for sugar, if they were smart enough to grow some sugarcane
on their private fields. In fact, Dave had thought of trying to grow sugarcane
with Jesse, instead of wheat. Unfortunately, they had learned that processing
the cane into sugar was so very labor and energy intensive, it was not worth
doing in small-scale operation. Someday, maybe, someday in the future.

So, Dave’s theoretical
bowl of oatmeal, a bowl of nostalgia, could have milk and sugar on Paradise.
What he lacked were oats. If there were any oats on Paradise, they were in a
UNEF warehouse, and that food was carefully guarded. Unless the hamsters
allowed humans to grow food in temperate areas of the northern continent, he
was not getting any oats within his lifetime. However long that was.

Flying Dutchman

“Skippy, we need to
decide how we’re going to find out what the Thuranin know about that surveyor
ship we destroyed.” Before we left Earth, many plans had been discussed, but no
final decision had been made, of course. UNEF Command wanted Chotek, with my
advice, to make the call.  “I do not
like the idea of us having to assault a Thuranin data relay station, it is too
risky. The science team suggested-”

“The science team? Let me guess. They have
some moronic idea about me magically retrieving the vital information we need.
Probably they expect me to stealthily zoom past some random Thuranin ship and
glean what we need from the databanks in like two seconds.”

“No-” My interruption
was ignored. He was on a roll so I let him talk.

“As I explained like
a hundred freakin’ times already, that won’t work. The reason I was able to
quickly get the data we needed from that Thuranin tanker ship on our last
mission, is because I knew the coordinates for rendezvous with the surveyor
ship would be in the tanker’s navigation computer. I knew exactly where to look
and what to look for, and the data was only concealed behind low-level
encryption. The rendezvous coordinates may as well have been in a folder marked
‘Skippy look here’.” He paused. “Joe, you’re not going to interrupt me with an
unhelpful comment?”

“No, Skippy, I can
tell you’re on a roll. Go ahead.”

“Oh. This is
unexpected. I don’t know what to say. Darn it. I had several snappy comebacks
prepared and now I can’t use them. Well, I’ll save them for later. Uh, what is
the science team’s suggestion? Dr. Friedlander and I have had several
conversations, during which I shot down many, many idiotic plans they dreamed
up.”

“The idea I want to
ask is about is whether you could, as you say, magically fly by a random
Thuranin ship. Only instead of you trying to find the data we need in a few
seconds, you use that time to load a virus or worm or whatever you call it into
the ship’s computer. That worm would propagate from ship to ship, looking for
the data we need. When the worm has it, it would cause ships to drop flight
recorder drones at a couple coordinates in deep space. The Dutchman could then go to one of those coordinates and pick up the
data whenever we want.”

“I agree that is a
great concept, and I congratulated the science team for thinking up a clever
idea. Clever, but unworkable. When I flew by that tanker, I did upload a
program which caused that ship to drop off flight recorder drones every time,
before the ship jumped. The reason that worked is because my program was only
resident in the tanker’s computer for a short time because, you know, we blew
up that ship soon after. The AIs aboard Thuranin ships do not compare to me in
any way, but they also are not stupid. Because my program altered the normal
operation of the ship, the ship’s AI would have detected it eventually,
probably within a week to twelve days. A program which only sat quietly looking
for data would be able to conceal itself longer. So, the problem with the
science team’s clever idea is that such a program would work for a while, then
the Thuranin would detect it. They would then not only erase the program from
any infected ship, they would analyze the program to determine its purpose.
What would happen then is they would likely figure out that the program was
designed to drop off drones at specific coordinates, and they would surround
each of those coordinates with a heavy battlegroup. The Flying Dutchman would
jump in, be trapped by a damping field, and we would be destroyed.”

“Crap.”

“Joe, if there was an
easy solution, I would have told you. Besides, it’s your job to dream up crazy,
out of the box monkey-brained ideas. You mean to tell me you haven’t thought of
an easy way to do this?”

“No,” I admitted.

“I am disappointed in
you, Joe.”

“Skippy, I can’t make
ideas happen whenever I want. They just do. Or don’t in this case.”

“Then we have to do
it the hard way,” Skippy said with a touch of sadness. “The only way to be sure
we will find the data we need, is to access the communications files of a
Thuranin data relay station. Because those stations transmit powerful signals,
they are heavily shielded, so even I can’t access the files from the outside. I
need to get inside, and that means we need to physically assault, board and
take control of a station. Joe, I fear there will be many casualties among our
brave special forces.”

“Me too, Skippy. Me
too.” Major Smythe’s SpecOps team leaders had been analyzing the three most
common types of Thuranin data relay stations, trying to find a way in that
would not lead to a certain slaughter of our forces. So far, they were not
confident.

“It has to be a data
relay station? We can’t take over a Thuranin ship? Maybe a soft target like a
civilian transport?”

“No, Joe, I am sorry.
If that were possible, I would have mentioned it as an option. Because the
Thuranin have been hit so badly by the Jeraptha in this sector, there is little
Thuranin civilian traffic. What few civilian ships that are flying always have
military escorts. And a civilian ship is unlikely to carry classified military
data. Before you ask, I did consider us somehow capturing a small warship such
as a frigate, how to do that would be your problem. That idea I quickly
discarded, because there is no way to know beforehand whether any particular
ship contains the data we are seeking. That ship might not have access to
classified data, or that ship might belong to a battlegroup that had not yet
been informed about the surveyor ship. Or the Thuranin may still be puzzling
over the fate of the surveyor ship, and may not have informed the fleet about
it. We might take a significant risk to capture a ship that doesn’t have any
useful data for us. Then we would have to keep capturing one ship after
another. No, that won’t work at all. We can’t go randomly capturing ships,
hoping they contain the data we need. We need the data to come to us. We need
to seize a data relay station.”

Skippy had explained
to UNEF Command that because the Thuranin didn’t have faster than light
communications, they needed starships to carry message traffic from one star
system to another, or between battlegroups of their far-flung fleet. To
facilitate regular communications, the Thuranin had built space stations as
data relays and scattered them throughout their territory. Most of the relay
stations were in heavily trafficked star lanes; often located near clusters of
wormholes. Unless ships were on especially urgent or clandestine missions, they
were expected to jump in near a relay station and exchange data. A place where
Thuranin ships regularly visited would be a tempting target for the Jeraptha,
but the Jeraptha weren’t interested in attacking the stations, only the
warships that visited such stations. Destroying a relay station would be
counterproductive for the Jeraptha; Thuranin warships wouldn’t have a reason to
make themselves temporarily vulnerable by stopping there. Accordingly, although
most Thuranin relay stations were equipped with heavy armor and shields, they
were very rarely attacked.

Once we boarded a
relay station and took control, Skippy could ransack their data files at
leisure to find the data we needed. Even better, he could erase the resident AI
and replace it with a submind of his own. Then, if the station did not already
contain all the data we needed when we arrived, we could abandon the station,
leave the submind in place and back the Dutchman
away. Thuranin ships would fly by, exchanging data, never knowing the station
was under human control. When the submind received the data we needed, it would
ping us. Even after we got that data, we could leave the submind in place,
periodically jumping back in so Skippy could ransack any new files. The relay
station would be like humanity having a direct tap into the enemy’s data
network. And we could keep it until that station was scheduled to rotate crews;
at which point there would be an unfortunate and fatal accident with its
reactor.

Skippy hoped the
Thuranin had purchased insurance.

The problem for Major
Smythe and me was to select one particular relay station to target for assault.
Skippy had extensive data on all the Thuranin relay stations; it was up to
Smythe and me to choose one to hit. We, mostly Smythe, had developed three
criteria for selecting a target.

First, we needed a
relay station that didn’t have too much traffic, because we could not have
Thuranin ships jumping into exchange data during our assault, and for at least
a couple days later. Skippy needed time to load his submind into the Thuranin
computer, which he expected to be typically crappy and inadequate. And we would
need time to make cosmetic repairs to the exterior of the station, to avoid
visiting Thuranin ships from asking awkward questions.

Second, the relay
station needed to be of a particular type. Of the three standard Thuranin designs
for relay stations, Smythe and his team had quickly rejected two types as being
too large, staffed with too many little green men, and having extensive
internal defenses. These two types of relay stations tended to be older, from
when their Thuranin designers had been worried about defending against Jeraptha
attempts to board and capture a station. In the past several hundred years, as
it became clear the Thuranin had no interest in boarding what was basically a
radio floating in deep space, the Thuranin had begun building a new design.
This newer type of station was significantly smaller and required a much
smaller crew. The designers had basically taken obsolete cruisers, removed the
engines, added shielding to protect the crew from the powerful transmissions,
and made a few more tweaks to create a cheap and simple relay station. This
type of station did not have the internal armor and killing zones that could
trap our special forces as they attempted to force their way to capture the station’s
core, where the AI resided.

And the third
criteria was that the station must have a relatively fresh crew, with many
months before that crew was scheduled to rotate out and be replaced by a new
group of little green men. That would give the submind plenty of time to skim
data and find everything we needed, and hopefully more.

The burden of
selecting a short list of relay stations from Smythe’s criteria fell on Skippy.

“Have you found some
Thuranin data relays that are good targets for us?” I asked.

“Yes I did, and I have
great news for you, Joey. All of these particular relay stations are
pokestops!”

“What’s a pokestop?”

“Come on, Joey, it’s
where you collect rare pokemonsters. Pokemon? Anyone? Anyone?” Skippy asked in
frustration. “It’s an old game, Joe, you- Oh, forget it. Damn, sometimes you
are so stupid that it’s not any fun to insult you.”

“Mmm. Wow, you’re
saying that being stupid is an advantage?”

“What? No, I did not
say that, you dumdum. Man, there are times-” He sighed, then sobbed quietly.
“Oh, why am I stuck on a pirate ship with a bunch of flea-bitten monkeys? I
must have been a truly awful person in a previous life, to deserve this
terrible fate.”

“An awful person like
what?” I was going to suggest an arrogant AI, but he interrupted me.

“You know, Joe,
someone who takes joy in making people suffer. I’m talking pure evil here, like
a customer service rep for the cable company.”

“Ha!” I laughed. “Even
you could never be that evil, Skippy.”

“Thank you for the
reassurance, Joe. To be serious for a moment, based on your first two criteria,
there are twenty three data relay stations that are perfect candidates for us.
I think. You and Major Smythe will need to look at them and decide.”

Whittling down the
list of candidates was great, we still feared heavy casualties in taking the
station. “Even with this newer type of relay station,” I asked, “you can’t do
your sandman trick?” My hope was that Skippy could repeat the technique he had
used to capture the Flying Dutchman;
hacking into the Thuranin’s AI and ordering all the little green men to go into
sleep mode. After he’d done that, all we had to do was drag their sleeping,
drooling bodies to a cargo hold.

“Sorry, Joe, the
answer is no,” Skippy said with regret. “Even that smaller type of station has
heavy internal shielding. I couldn’t access the entire structure from any one
point. And as soon as we fire a shot, the Thuranin will go into combat protocol
which disables their sleep function. I wish I could do that for you. Sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,
Skippy. Without you, none of this would be possible.”

“That internal
shielding also means our combot operators will need to be inside the station,”
he warned, “close behind their machines. That way, I will be able to facilitate
the interaction between operator and combot.”

“We understand. That’s
still twenty three possible targets. Can you narrow the list further using our
third criteria?”

“Sure, Joe. I can do that,
after I get the data on Thuranin
fleet deployment plans, and crew rotation schedules for those twenty three
relay stations. So, at the moment, the answer is no. I told you, we have to get
that data from a Thuranin ship somewhere, somehow.”

“All right, I hear
you. You need more data. And we need a plan to get it. Fine. When we do gett
that data and you give us a smaller list, I need to speak with Smythe. We will
recommend two or three relay stations from your list. Then Chotek has to make
the decision.”

Skippy snorted. “Is
our resident bureaucrat qualified to make military decisions, Joe?”

“No, but if there’s
not much difference between the stations on the final list, we may as well flip
a coin. I want him to be part of
making the decision. I want him to know that if there are casualties, he had a
hand in it. I’m not covering my ass, Skippy. I want Chotek to know what it
feels like to make life and death decisions.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Paradise

General Nivelle
accepted the Burgermeister’s offer of hot water to make tea, and scattered some
precious tea leaves into his cup. The tea would have hardly any taste, and that
didn’t matter. To the Ruhar, it was the ritual of drinking tea that was
important. “Thank you, Madame Logellia. I have been considering something you
said during our last conversation. What would be involved if our force declared
loyalty to the Ruhar? And what would be the implications to our people here,
and on Earth? I assume the Kristang would learn of our switching sides.”

She looked out the
window. “It is a fine day; we should go for a walk.”

It was not a
particularly fine day, being overcast with the skies threatening rain, and a
chill in the morning air. They walked out of the building, down a road, then
turned to walk along a dirt lane separating two fields. One of the fields was
ready for harvest, it contained some kind of grain like wheat or oats. The
other field was in the process of being planted; a large machine was rolling
along the rows at the far end of the field. From the field, Nivelle caught a
whiff of whatever fertilizer the Ruhar used; it smelled vaguely like parmesan
cheese and to Nivelle’s nose, unpleasant. He ignored it. Reports had come into
UNEF HQ that some Ruhar who had contact with human soldiers mentioned the
scarcity of fertilizer on Paradise. A Kristang raiding ship had hit a
fertilizer factory six months ago, and the local Ruhar were complaining that
their government was very slow to rebuild it. The local Ruhar were unhappy
about many things, according to rumors that Nivelle gave credence to. The
government was not making enough of an effort to rebuild and enhance
infrastructure. The schedule for bringing back native Ruhar who had been
evacuated was far too slow, and the schedule kept slipping. And most
importantly the local Ruhar complained that their fleet, which had recently won
crushing victories, did not seem able or willing to protect them from what
surely must be a small group of Kristang starships.

When they had walked
half a kilometer down the lane, talking about nothing but the weather, Logellia
decided it was time to discuss the important subject. “General, it is
unfortunate that I ever mentioned to you the possibility of your force
switching allegiances in this war. I mentioned our conversation to my superiors,
and they were dismayed the subject had been discussed at all. If you were to
formally offer to change sides, I am afraid to tell you that the Ruhar
government would not welcome it. My government would not accept the humans on
Gehtanu as clients at the present time. If the offer had been extended earlier,
such as soon after our fleet regained control of Gehtanu, the answer might have
been different. Under the current circumstances, it is not possible.”

“Why? Has something
changed in the strategic situation in this sector?”

“I should not be
telling you this officially, and you must promise me that you will keep this a
very closely-held secret, General.”

“You have my word as
a French soldier,” General Nivelle said, mildly offended.

“First, I must tell
you that your communications are thoroughly compromised by my people. There are
even nanoscale recording devices in some of your clothing; the devices embedded
in the collar of your uniform have been disabled temporarily,” she pointed to
her own zPhone. “Any repetition of this conversation must be conducted with
extreme caution.”

“Understood,” Nivelle
agreed, suddenly feeling his collar itching his neck. “And agreed.”

“Cool, as your people
say. General, my government, I refer to the federal government, not the planetary
administration. The Ruhar federal government has been engaged in negotiations
to give Gehtanu, this planet, back to the Kristang.”

Nivelle almost choked
on his complete shock. “Sacre bleu! Why?”

Logellia explained
the strategic situation. “You must understand that my government never intended
to recapture Gehtanu in the last campaign. In short, General, this planet is
not worth the military effort that would be required to keep it.”

Nivelle was stunned.
The entire Ruhar campaign to retake Paradise had been a ruse to draw in the
Thuranin and Kristang, and now the Ruhar wished to give the planet away?

“Personally,” She
continued, “I am opposed to any notion of surrendering my home planet. I was
born here, and my mother was born here. Mine is only one voice. I am not even
allowed to tell the local population about the negotiations. These raids by the
Kristang,” she looked at the clouds, “only serve to reinforce my government’s
decision to trade away this planet.”

Nivelle was greatly
disturbed, and chose his words carefully. “Your government would not welcome,
and would not accept, our pledge of loyalty, because that would make them
responsible for the humans here?”

“It would make us responsible, yes, all Ruhar. On this
world, the issue of humans is important. Away from this star system, most of my
people have never heard of humans. Or if they have, all they know is that
humans serve our enemy. To accept your allegiance would mean my government
accepts the tremendous expense of evacuating humans from this planet. And they
would have to be resettled on a Ruhar world, where the local population would
probably not be pleased to find an enemy in their midst. For my government
there is, as I believe your people say, no upside for us. We gain nothing by
accepting your force as clients.”

General Nivelle could
not argue with her hard, cold logic. It made sense. It also meant disaster for
his force. “Then it is good that I did not discuss the possibility of switching
sides with anyone, not even my personal staff. I wanted to learn the
implications from you first.”

“I do not know what
impact there would be to Earth if you changed allegiances, because we do not
know the situation on Earth. The Kristang there are cut off from the rest of
their species, after the wormhole shut down.”

“That is confirmed?
It is not disinformation by the Kristang?” Nivelle asked anxiously. UNEF HQ had
heard rumors that the Kristang no longer had access to Earth. If it was true,
then he needed to officially inform his troops before rumors got out of hand.
Bad news, as the old saying went, did not improve with age.

“The wormhole is in
Kristang territory,” she said. “So we cannot verify it has truly gone dormant.
However, I am told that we have very solid intelligence that the Kristang and
Thuranin have lost contact with your home planet.”

“Is that unusual for
a wormhole to shut down like that?”

“It is very unusual.
As we do not know how wormholes work, or why they have sudden shifts, we can’t
make any useful speculation about why that wormhole has ceased functioning. It
may reactivate tomorrow, or it could signal another impending shift across the
entire sector. We simply do not know. General,” she turned so they could walk
back to her office, the sky was beginning to drizzle. “I am sorry about the
situation you find yourself in. Your species did not ask to become part of this
war. I do not have any advice for you. Having on my world a client species of
our enemy is new to me. Again, I am sorry that you were drawn into this war.”

Nivelle did not want
to discuss regrets, he wanted to discuss action. “Do you know the status of the
negotiations? The timeline for handing over control of this planet to the
Kristang?”

“My government has
not consulted me,” she said with a wry smile, “so what I can tell you is from
what I have heard from sources who are usually reliable. So far, the territory
that the Kristang are offering in exchange for Gehtanu is not sufficient, and
the negotiations have been going back and forth. There are complicating
factors. Although there is currently a limited cease fire between the Jeraptha
and the Thuranin in this sector, it has not yet been agreed which territories
the Jeraptha have captured. Some star systems the Jeraptha took control of during
the conflict, they may wish to give back to the Thuranin, in exchange for other
more valuable territory. The Jeraptha wish to consolidate their gains and draw
a new, more defensible border. That new border may affect what territory the
Kristang are able to offer to us, or may affect the value of that territory.
Because the Jeraptha captured a wormhole cluster from the Thuranin, the
Jeraptha now control access to territory that is not inside their borders.” She
shook her head. “As I said, the situation is very complicated. The Commodore of
our defense fleet,” she pointed to the sky, “has told me that he thinks the
ongoing Kristang raids are not aimed at retaking the planet; the Kristang force
here is not strong enough to do that. The raids are aimed at making my
government more willing to accept a lesser bargain in exchange for this planet.
General, the true problem we face; you humans and we native Ruhar, is that my
government very much wants to trade away Gehtanu. Therefore, eventually they will reach a deal with the Kristang, and
my people will leave this world. As to your people, I do not know what will
happen.”

Flying
Dutchman

While we still hadn’t
selected one particular relay station to hit, Major Smythe began planning the
assault. Smythe was glum about our chances. “We can do it, sir,” he told me
without confidence. “We can take the station. I expect casualties to be heavy;
once we get inside, it will be a short and bloody battle. We will have the
advantage of initial surprise and numbers; between our troops in armor suits
and combots, we outnumber them three to one. The Thuranin have the advantages
of being genetically engineered cyborgs and being on the defensive. They know
the terrain better than we do. I wish,” he said while looking around the empty
cargo bay we used for training, “that we could build a replica of that relay
station. It would be bloody helpful to train on the same ground where we’ll be
fighting.”

“Huh.” He had given
me a thought. “Hey, Skippy. This type of relay station we will be assaulting,
they built a lot of them?”

“Yes, they are now
the most numerous type of relay station, Joe,” he confirmed. “An entire class
of cruisers became obsolete, and the Thuranin used their obsolescence as an
opportunity to create new relay stations. Why? Are you not happy with our
choice of target?”

“Unless our target
was seizing control of a basket of kittens, I wouldn’t be happy about it. No,
it’s not this particular station that bothers me, it’s the high level of risk
in the whole concept. My question is whether there are any of this type of
station that have been abandoned, because of battle damage or another reason.”

“Sure there are, Joe.
Only one has sustained sufficient battle damage to warrant it being abandoned;
it was self-destructed to prevent it from falling into enemy hands.”

“Oh, crap, I was
hoping-”

He interrupted me
again. “But there are seven others which have been abandoned after the recent
wormhole shift, because their location was deemed no longer useful.”

“Were these seven
others also destroyed?”

“Not all of them. Two
were blown up because they are now in Jeraptha territory. The other five were
mothballed, in case another wormhole shift makes them useful again. Their
reactors were shut down and all computer, communication and data storage
capability was removed. But they are still there, drifting along in cold
storage.”

“Great!” I exulted.
“Major Smythe, instead of us building a replica, how would you like your team
to practice the assault on an actual data relay station?”

“Whoa!” Skippy
shouted with a derisive laugh. “Wait just a minute there, Joe. You can’t just,
hmmm. Maybe you can just do that. Aaargh! Damn it! The monkey says ‘duh how
about we do this’ and he comes up with a good idea. Now why didn’t I think of
that? Stupid, stupid brain! Oh, I hate my life sometimes,” he said with a sob.
“Huh. Now I see why I didn’t of that; I knew about those abandoned stations,
but removed them from my list because they are inactive. That is interesting,
Joe.”

“I’m sure it is,
Skippy. That wormhole shift won’t stop us from accessing one of those stations,
will it?”

“Quite the contrary,
Joe. There is one particular derelict station that was left totally isolated
from both Thuranin and Jeraptha territory by the wormhole shift. It took a
Thuranin ship almost eighteen months to retrieve the station crew after they
were cut off. That station would be perfect for Major Smythe’s team to
practice, we would be assured of not having any visitors. I can use our Elder
wormhole controller module, to temporarily connect to that dormant wormhole so
we can go through, and on our way back. Joe, Joe, Joe,” he lamented. “Do you do
this sort of thing just to humiliate me?”

“No, Skippy,” I
assured him, “of course not. Humiliating you is a bonus. Major Smythe, you can
work with this?”

“Brilliantly, sir.”

“We still have the
hard part to do,” I cautioned.

“Yes, sir,” Smythe
nodded, “but perhaps now it won’t be quite so bloody hard.”

I contacted the
bridge and we changed course, toward the derelict relay station. Of course, I
caught hell from Chotek for not informing of him about the change of plans
before I ordered the course change. That pissed me off; I was on my way to his
office to tell him personally, but that wasn’t good enough. We had a discussion
that ended with me deciding that, in the future, I would take the thirty
seconds to contact him before I ordered a major course change. Thirty seconds
is all it would take, for me to swallow my pride and avoid an argument.

The whole situation
still pissed me off.

Paradise

“Can y’all believe this
shit?” Jesse asked, while staring at his zPhone in the hope that what he’d just
read would change.

“It’s crazy, man,” Dave
replied, shaking his head.

“No,” Jesse looked up in
frustration, “I mean, do you believe
it?”

Dave scrolled the screen
to the top, and pointed to the logo at the beginning of the message. “UNEF HQ
believes it. This is official.”

“That can’t happen, can
it?” Jesse appealed for assurance. The message from UNEF HQ stated that the
wormhole that lead back to Earth had closed, and the Kristang weren’t able to
reopen it. The Expeditionary Force on Paradise now had zero hope of ever
getting home. Even if their former Kristang ‘allies’ took Paradise back from
the Ruhar, they could not bring humans back to Earth, because the Kristang
lacked the technology to make that long journey. Even for the advanced
Thuranin, such a voyage was wildly impractical. “Wormholes don’t just shut down
for no reason,” Jess protested.

“The one near Earth
opened for no reason, Cornpone,” Ski said gently. “That’s what landed us in
this mess in the first place.”

“That’s bullshit,” Eric
Koblenz said, spitting on the ground for emphasis. Eric was part of another
three-man Ag team, a team that Jesse and Dave had partnered with to combine and
expand their private plots of land into a significant field of wheat. The other
two partners were good guys, but Eric had been a problem from the start. He did
his share of the work, that wasn’t the issue. The problem was that Eric was a
‘Keeper’.

Soon after the Ruhar took
the planet back, and UNEF HQ ordered all humans to surrender, a movement called
‘Keepers of the Faith’ had sprung up on the zPhone network. Keepers held that
UNEF should not have surrendered; that the Kristang were true allies, that the
fortune cookie messages from Earth about the Kristang abusing humanity’s home
planet and enslaving the population were somehow all Ruhar lies. That UNEF had
come out to the stars to fight alongside the Kristang against the species that
had attacked Earth, so UNEF should keep doing that; fight the Ruhar. Even if
the Expeditionary Force on Paradise was wiped out to the last human, UNEF would
demonstrate to our Kristang allies that humans kept their word, and such a
demonstration of steadfastness and resolve would benefit humans back on Earth.

To Keepers, everyone else
were ‘Traitors’.

“That’s all a lie by the
hamsters,” Eric spat again, “and their UNEF HQ lackeys are just selling out
again as usual. The wormhole near Earth didn’t just open up recently, that’s a
lie the hamsters told us to explain why the Kristang had not been to Earth
before they did. And that wormhole is not shut down now; the hamsters want us
to give up hope so we’ll be easy to control. And you Traitors are stupid enough
to listen to these lies.”

“Oh,” Dave sighed, “not
this BS again. Look, man, if you want to talk about your whacko conspiracy
theories,” he pointed to the jungle, “go put on your tinfoil hat and tell it to
the trees. Because I’m not wasting my time listening.”

“Traitor?” Jesse asked angrily. “You best
be careful throwing around words like that, asshole. How exactly are we giving
aid and comfort to the enemy?”

“Damn, Jesse, don’t take
the bait,” Dave warned but it was too late.

Eric put his arms across
his chest. “You give aid and comfort every day, by not resisting them. The Ruhar
know that sheep like you will never fight them, so they don’t have to garrison
many troops here. You’re growing your own food, so the Ruhar don’t have to
manufacture human food and ship it in.”

“Yeah, like you’re not
helping to grow food,” Dave said sarcastically while pointing to Eric’s hands,
dirty from harvesting tomatoes and peppers from the fields. “And I’ve noticed
you haven’t refused to eat this food we grew with the hamsters’ help. See,
Jesse, that’s how moronic the Sleepers are,” Dave used the derisive nickname
for the Kristang loyalists. “When we eat food we grew here, we’re traitors, but
when they do the exact same thing, they’re loyal.”

“Talk all you want. The
Ruhar are keeping troops here and ships in orbit, because they know if they
don’t, we Keepers will take the planet back. We are assisting the Kristang by
making the Ruhar keep combat resources here.”

“Of course you are,”
Jesse scoffed. “They’re afraid of what, the hoe you use in the fields? No, it
must be the shovel you were using this morning. Hey, genius, the Ruhar hold the
high ground. They can sit in orbit and pound the crap out of us down here, and
there ain’t squat we can do about it. Unless you weaved together corn stalks to
make a railgun.”

“Shut up,” Eric growled.
He waved a finger at Dave and Jesse. “Your time will come, you’ll see. You Traitors
will be crying then.”

Dave grabbed Jesse’s
shoulder and squeezed. “Stay cool, Jesse. This piece of crap isn’t worth it.
Don’t do it.” Alarmed about breakdowns in discipline now that soldiers saw
themselves as nothing but farmers, UNEF had cracked down on fighting. Anyone
who got into a fight, regardless of who started it, spent time in a hard labor
camp. The prospect of building roads in the steaming jungle of Lemuria was an
effective deterrent to fighting. For now.

Jesse relaxed slightly,
still ready if Eric threw a punch. “You’re right, Ski, thanks for reminding
me.” To Eric he said “If y’all want to fight the hamsters, you Sleepers best
get at it, then. Leave us out of it,” Jesse smirked, “we don’t want to be
within ten kilometers when the Ruhar turn where you’re standing into a smoking
crater.”

“We do want a good view,”
Ski added.

“Oh, yeah, man, I
wouldn’t miss that,” Jesse said with a laugh.

Eric flipped them off
with both hands and stomped off without another word.

“You’d think those
Sleeper idiots would have woke the hell up when the lizards burned out that big
field last month,” Jesse mused. A Kristang destroyer had popped into orbit and
used its masers on a broad sweep to burn out several fields that were growing
human food on Lemuria. There were several villages on Lemuria now almost
entirely populated by Keepers; it wasn’t an official designation but most
non-Keepers had asked for transfer out. The biggest field that had been targeted
was a Keeper village; the masers had scorched an entire season of crops and
killed thirty one people. ‘Keeping the Faith’ hadn’t spared the village from
the Kristang’s predations. That destroyer had not targeted any Ruhar areas
before it jumped away; it had focused entirely on damaging the human food
supply.

“Jesse, save your breath,
you can’t reason with idiots like him. They’ll tell you that Keeper village got
hit because the Kristang see all humans as traitors. Their answer is we all
need to be Keepers; then the Kristang will come back like Santa Claus down the
chimney to reward all the good little girls and boys,” Dave said in disgust.

“Yeah,” Jesse nodded.
“Like the school board in my home county. The answer to every problem is always
they need more money. Whatever they were trying would have worked if only they
had more money. They never stop think to maybe it’s what they’re doing that’s
the problem.”

“Amen to that, brother,”
Dave held out a fist, and Jesse bumped it. “They’re like my aunt Claire,” Dave
went on. “When something bad happens to someone else, she says God is punishing
them. When something bad happens to her, God is testing her faith. It’s the
perfect system; no matter what happens, she’s right and everyone else is
wrong.”

“She must be a lot of fun
at the Thanksgiving table,” Jesse said.

Dave shook his head.
“Aunt Claire doesn’t get invited to Thanksgiving anymore. That’s mostly because
her new husband drinks too much and says stupid stuff. Last time they were
there, he knocked the gravy boat onto the floor. The only one in the whole
family who misses him is the dog.”

Jesse laughed. “That must
have been the best dog Thanksgiving ever!” Then he looked at the sky, and his
good humor faded. “We’re never going home, are we? Never. We can’t. This just
can’t be real. Can it?”

“All I can say for sure
is, if we really have no hope of ever going home again,” Dave glanced around
warily. Eric had walked out of earshot, but he was talking with another Keeper,
and shooting hostile looks in Dave’s direction. “Discipline will be going to
hell in a hurry around here.”

Flying Dutchman

We had found the
derelict Thuranin relay station right where Skippy said it would be. Before
boarding, we checked out the interior with combots, in case the Thuranin had
left any booby traps. The little green men had not bothered to booby trap the
place; they had stripped it of anything useful before they left. That left a
perfect training environment for us.

Major Smythe wasted
no time in putting his SpecOps team through practice runs, and I joined them.
Not because I fantasized about being a bad-ass special forces soldier; I was
realistic about that. I joined the practice runs because I wanted to see
first-hand what Smythe’s team would be facing.

After a walk through,
we get into our two dropships to practice an assault for the first time. The
dropship was crammed with people, we’d removed the seats to get in as many
people as we could. The only thing holding us in place was webbing, that was
also our only cushioning when the dropship was maneuvering. Strapped in, I was
putting my helmet on, and banged it into the helmet of the person next to me.
“Sorry,” I said.

“No problem, Sir,”
she replied. Her name was Lauren Poole, she was one of the US Army Rangers who
was new to the Merry Band of Pirates. I suspected that Smythe had assigned her
to babysit me, she kept popping up next to me in training.

“It doesn’t bother
you to be upside down like that?” I asked. In order to cram people in, some
people were hanging upside down from the dropship’s ceiling. To get loose, we
all had to cut the webbing, and I was concerned that would create snag hazards.
That was one thing we would discover in practice.

“No,” she replied
with a twinkle in her eyes. “I started gymnastics when I was eight years old.
Sometimes it feels like I’ve spent half my life upside down, Sir.”

“All right,” I shook
my head, and pulled down the faceplate of my helmet. “Let’s do this.”

“This is still going
to be bloody hard,” Smythe said as he took off his helmet. His short hair was
plastered to his scalp by sweat.

I nodded, trying to
catch my breath. We had just finished the sixth practice assault; the sixth
time we had run through the final plan. This was after we tested five other
plans multiple times. After the fourth exhausting day, I had lost count of how
many times we had practiced various plans. I was worn out, and I wouldn’t even
be participating in the actual assault, so my role in practice was as an
observer.

What I had observed
was not encouraging. Skippy acted as the Red team, our opponent, and he assured
us that he was dumbing down his reactions to match the Thuranin cyborgs
assisted by their AI. The combots that Skippy controlled were still lightning
fast and deadly accurate. We had to use surprise, sheer numbers and maximum
firepower to accomplish the objective. On the first practice run, we had
failed; the last of our special forces died before getting into the core of the
station from which Skippy could access and shut down the station’s AI. The
second practice run was worse; we failed to breach the docking bay on our first
attempt, and everyone died before they could leave the dropships. Having only
two dropships was a serious limitation; both had to act as transports, each
crammed tight with SpecOps people and combots. The interiors of both dropships
had been stripped, no chairs remained; people were held in place by webbing to
be cut away when they wanted release.

After our failure to
breach the docking bay on the second attempt, we tried the Dutchman making a microjump to position the ship in front of the
docking bay, so the ship could hammer the doors open with her powerful masers.
That third practice attempt ended with what at first seemed like a victory.
Three of our special forces survived to penetrate the station’s core and Skippy
was able to shut down the Thuranin AI. Unfortunately, the Dutchman got blown up in the practice run, so it was a failure.
Skippy warned us that his calculations showed we would lose the ship 92% of the
time; our beat-up star carrier could not survive combat at close range. So we
went back to the original plan; as soon as our stealthed dropships opened fire
on the docking bay doors, the Dutchman
would jump away and await an ‘all clear’ signal.

The fourth, fifth and
sixth practice assaults were successful, in that at least one person survived
to reach the station’s core. The fifth assault had the best result, because in
the end there were five special forces and three combots left combat effective.

This wasn’t working.
“It’s too difficult, Major,” I agreed with Smythe when we had finished stowing
our gear back aboard the Dutchman.
Any operation that incurs 90% casualties is unacceptable, even if the survival
of humanity might be at stake.

“The problem is that
we lose too many people and combots while breaching the docking bay,” Smythe
observed, “and then getting from the docking bay into the station proper. After
that, we don’t have the massed firepower to overwhelm the enemy defenses. It
becomes a short war of attrition; do we lose people and combots faster than we
can advance.”

“I know.” I did. I’d
been there, I’d seen combots go offline and people’s armored suits go stiff as
Skippy declared them ‘dead’.

“Maybe there’s
another way to breach that docking bay. Fly troops in just with suits, ahead of
the dropships,” Smythe mused. “You’ve done an extensive spacedive, sir.”

“Yes, and I wouldn’t
recommend it. Major, let’s get some rest tonight, and try it fresh again in the
morning.”

“I would rather have
another go at it today, sir,” Smythe’s tone indicated that I wanted a break
because I was not special forces.

“Yes you do, because
you SpecOps types are always go-go-go. When we conduct the actual assault,
we’ll do it with freshly rested soldiers. We’ll rest tonight, then add fresh
troops to the simulation tomorrow.”

Smythe nodded curtly,
unconvinced. “I will get up early tomorrow,” said Smythe, who got up early
every morning. “I want to get the equipment checked out early, that will save
us time that we can use for practice.”

“I’ll join you,” I
responded.

“Joe gets going a lot
quicker in the mornings,” Skippy chimed in cheerily, “since he stopped shaving
down there. It saves a lot of time.”

"Damn it, Skippy, I
don't shave down there!"

"That's what I just
said, you dumdum. Man, open your ears and listen once in a while," he
grumbled. "Anyway, aren't those hairs already curly? Do you really need a
curling iron down there?"

"Wha, I, don't, it's
not-" I sputtered, while the team laughed uncontrollably.

"Fine, whatever.
Don't complain to me the next time you burn your thighs with that
iron."

I protested, feeling my
face growing red already. Most of the special forces with us were new to the
Merry Band of Pirates; they didn’t know how Skippy loved to make jokes at my
expense. Shaking my head and holding up my hands, I walked out with what little
dignity I had left. “I’ll see you at 0500, Major Smythe.”

Paradise

As a special treat, the
residents of Fort Rakovsky, population nineteen, learned there would be a US
Army general visiting them the next day. They learned this information not from
UNEF HQ or the general’s staff, but from the grapevine of villages the general
had already visited on the tour. Since the general was traveling by hamvee and
there were few roads in the formerly impenetrable jungles of Lemuria, it was
easy to predict where the general would be going next. While it would have been
nice for the general’s staff to announce visits ahead of time, his staff
expected the zPhone network to do the announcing for them. Any village that was
caught off guard had to be either not paying attention, or was very much
disliked by their surrounding villagers. Either way, such an incident would
tell the general and his staff that something was seriously amiss.

So, the residents of Fort
Rakovsky had the joy of spending a day of their off-duty time straightening up
the village. Uncompleted hooches were worked on through the night, and all the
buildings were cleaned. The already minimal amount of trash was consolidated.
Personal garden plots were weeded once again, and selected ripe fruits and
vegetables were picked a day ahead of the normal schedule. Someone found paint,
and used the back of a crate to make ‘Fort Rakovsky’ signs to post on the roads
coming into the village from east and west.

“This is the best it’s
going to get,” Dave Czajka said while looking around the village’s only street
with a frown.

“It’s good enough,” Jesse
Colter assured his buddy. “Here they come.”

Around a corner of the
road came three hamvees and a large truck, with lead vehicle flying both the
UNEF and American flag. National flags were not encouraged, but this was the
American sector of Lemuria, and a US flag flew from a pole in the center of
Fort Rakovsky. To avoid excess wear and tear on the priceless and irreplaceable
fabric, the flag was normally kept wrapped in plastic in a box, and only taken
out for special occasions. Like the rare times when people from another village
came to Fort Rakovsky to trade, and there was a woman with them. In those
cases, the village was scrubbed top to bottom with far more vigor than was
given to any visiting general.

The general made a
cursory inspection of the village, then walked over to check the fields, his
chief interest on the tour. Mostly, he wanted to see what soldiers were growing
on their personal plots of land. After an hour, he came to the extensive plot
that Jesse and Dave shared with three other guys. “Impressive,” General
Marcellus observed. “This land belongs to the five of you?”

“The five of us work this
land, sir, we get more done when we work together. But the land belongs to six
people,” Dave said. The ‘Keeper’ who had been a problem had arranged a transfer
to another village, and his replacement got along well with everyone.

“Six?” Marcellus looked
at the five men who were proudly showing their healthy personal crops. “The
other guy doesn’t work?”

“He doesn’t work the
land, sir,” Jesse explained. “He’s good at fixing things, so he lets us work
his land in exchange for a cut of the crops. He repairs and maintains equipment
for us and other villages around here, and they trade stuff in exchange for his
labor. We get a cut of whatever he gets in trade.”

“I see. Captain Rivera, a
word, please.” Marcellus walked a short distance with his staffer, and frowned.
“This is a problem. This mechanic is trading away land that UNEF provided to
him, instead of using it to increase the food supply. He is not performing his
assigned tasks,” General Marcellus declared.

“Excuse me, sir, but I
believe he is performing his assigned tasks during his duty hours,” Captain
Rivera said. “His personal activities are performed during his off-duty time.”

“We gave people personal
plots of land so they could grow food, Captain, not to use it as an excuse to
slack off. Remind me again why I have an economist on my staff? And why the
Marines sent an officer to Harvard to study economics in the first place.”

“Because, sir, the United
States Marine Corps is a forward-thinking organization, and they anticipated
Earth would be invaded by aliens, leaving a major force trapped offworld to
develop its own independent economy,” Rivera said with a deadpan expression.
“My master’s degree is in management; economics was my undergrad major.”

“And you signed up for
the Marine Corps,” Marcellus shook his head in wonderment.

Rivera grinned. “It turns
out there are not a lot of practical applications for a bachelor’s degree in
economics.”

“Did you consider the
Coast Guard?”

“I wanted to see the
world, sir. Seeing other worlds is a bonus.”

“Then use your Harvard
training, to explain to me why I shouldn’t discipline a soldier for trading
away land that was given to him for the purpose of him growing food.”

“Because, sir, he is
making the best use of the resources available to him, including his skill set.
He might be terrible at farming, but he is good at fixing and maintaining
equipment. If he used his off-duty time to grow crops, we would only have one
more unskilled farmer. With the arrangement he has devised, his plot of land is
being put to its best use, and his skills are being used to make people who are
farming more productive by providing them with reliable equipment.
Specialization of labor is key to an efficient economy; everyone does what they
do best. Eventually, sir, we will need to establish a form of currency; this
barter economy of people trading corn for tomatoes and so on, is inherently
inefficient.”

Marcellus looked at the
sky and muttered to himself. “Somedays, I wish I was still a private carrying a
rifle. Life was so simple back then.”

“Yes, sir,” Rivera said
simply, because there wasn’t anything else to say.

“Back in the hamvees,
captain,” Marcellus said, “we have another four of these villages to visit
today.” Touring villages might not benefit the residents in any way, but they
were opening Marcellus’ eyes. His intel report back to UNEF HQ should open some
eyes there. His greatest concern was that, as soldiers became fulltime farmers,
people were going to increasingly question what authority UNEF had over them.
Eventually, the military command-and-control arrangement would give way to, he
shuddered to think, democracy. Elections. Politics.

What, he asked himself,
was this world coming to? This alien world.

Flying
Dutchman

An idea hit me at
0337 that morning. This time, I literally did dream something up. “Hey, Skippy?”

“What? Is this
important? I’m watching a late-night infomercial about how I can get stains out
of fabrics. It’s not helpful, but it sure is funny.”

“That’s great,
Skippy. I have a question for you; can you fake a high-security message from
Thuranin military command?”

“Please, Joe. Easier
than you can get a red wine stain out of a white carpet. Now why would anyone
install a white carpet in their house? And if they had white carpet, why would
they buy red wine? Unless they bought white carpet and red wine just for an infomercial.
I smell a conspiracy here, Joe.”

“That mystery has
confounded mankind for centuries, Skippy,” I agreed. “Could you convincingly
fake a message that the Dutchman is
on a secret mission for the Thuranin high command or whatever, so we can fly
dropships right into that relay station’s docking bay?”

Silence.

“Skippy? Listen, I’m
sure that you could rewind that infomercial if you really-”

“Holy shit. Holy
shit! Why didn’t I think of that? Damn it! Joe, Joe, I hate my life. Oh, this
is so humiliating. That is a great idea.”

“Skippy, I promise
that I won’t tell anyone it was my idea-”

“Why thank you, Joe-”

“-until breakfast.”

“Thus reminding me of
why I rightfully so very much hate you, Joe.”

“I love you too,
Skippy.”

“Don’t get too cocky,
monkey. Of course I can create a convincing message, with the proper Thuranin multi-level
encryption and military authentication codes. I did that while you were saying
‘breakfast’, which because your monkey brain works so slowly I heard as
‘buh-urr-ehh-kkk-fff-ass-”

“Got it, Skippy.
What’s the problem?”

“We would need that
station to receive the message before the Dutchman
jumps in on their doorstep. Our modified star carrier would raise way too many
suspicions if we just showed up and said ‘trust me’.”

“Crap. So we need
another ship to carry the message for us?”

“Yup. And we can’t
transmit a message directly to that ship, either, because any Thuranin ship is
going to look at us with great suspicion.”

“But you do have a
plan, right?” I asked, dreading the answer.

“Certainly, and well,
heh, heh, you are very much not going to like it.”

Damn. Whenever I
heard Skippy’s nervous ‘well heh heh’ it set off my Spidey senses.

I very, very much did
not like Skippy’s plan to get a message loaded into a Thuranin ship, but Smythe
very much did like my plan for his SpecOps team to gain access to a relay
station docking bay without fighting for it. We changed the simulations so that
our two dropships were invited into the docking bay by the Thuranin, and we
then only needed to breach the inner doors. Twelve practice runs resulted in
much improved results; most times we took the station quickly, and even the
practices that went comparatively badly achieved our goal. Casualties were
still unacceptable to my mind, even Smythe was bothered. My guess is that
SpecOps people are so used to being elite that they had a difficult time
contemplating any sort of failure. Smythe reminded the special forces of three
very important facts. First, the people aboard the Flying Dutchman were indeed very special forces; the absolute most
elite and capable combat forces humanity had ever developed. Second, we would
be operating on the enemy’s territory, against well-prepared defenses in which
the enemy had every advantage. And third, the enemy were genetically-enhanced
cyborgs with lightning-quick reactions and an instinctive link with their
deadly combots. The fact that humans had any chance to capture a Thuranin relay
station was an enormous tribute to the dedication and training of the SpecOps
team.

The twelfth and last
practice run resulted in ‘only’ two dozen casualties and a successful seizure
of the station. Smythe told me he did not think further practices would yield
better results; we now had a precise plan. Execution of the plan would be up to
Smythe’s team. It sucked for me to think of sitting safely aboard the Flying Dutchman while my crew took the
risks.

Paradise

Jesse walked wearily
from their private allotment up the hill to the village that had sprung up.
Fort Rakovsky now boasted actual buildings, made of wood logged from the jungle
around them. Jesse and Dave were constructing their own dwelling, that they called
a ‘hooch’, out of timber and a sort of canvas. Eventually, they hoped to
replace the canvas. It was only half finished, but already beat the cramped
tent they’d been living in for what seemed like forever now.

As he came around the
corner of a large tent and was startled. “Ah!” He pulled up short like he’d
seen a snake. “What the hell is that?”

In front of the hooch
they’d been constructing off and on, Dave Czajka was sitting in the sunshine,
with a huge grin on his face. Sitting on a couch. The ugliest, most awful couch
Jesse had ever seen in his entire life. He’d never even imagined a piece of
furniture could be so ugly. It was covered in a wild, garish pattern of some
flowers the hamsters liked.

“It’s a couch,” Dave
explained. “Our couch. The supply wagon came through, they had some furniture
the hamsters discarded. I traded for it. Didn’t cost us much.”

“You bought that horrible thing? Damn, Ski,
I’ve seen couches on the side of a highway that looked better. That’s after
they got run over a few times, and sat out in the sun and rain for years.
Damn!” He shielded his eyes. “I can’t even look directly at that thing.”

Ski looked at where
he was sitting. In truth, the couch had seen better days. “You’re exaggerating,
it’s not that bad.”

“Bad? It’s heinous, man! We’ve got to get rid of
it, pronto. That thing is a crime against humanity.”

“Come on, ‘Pone,” Ski
used the shortened version of Jesse’s nickname, “it’s not that bad.”

“Bad? It’s hideous.
Damn! My Ma brought home a couch like that, it used to be her mother’s, and I
think it belonged to her mother’s aunt before that. That couch was evil, Man, I
tell you. It sat in the living room, my father wouldn’t even go in there. One
night my Ma comes home, my Pa and I were trying to perform an exorcism like in
that old movie, you seen it, right? Ma walks in, we’re standing there in the
living room with a Bible and a cross, shouting ‘The power of Christ compels
you! The power of Christ compels you!’” Jesse broke up laughing while telling
his own story, remembering his mother’s expression.

Looking at Jesse, Ski
couldn’t help laughing too. “What happened?”

“That evil thing
defeated us, or we got the words wrong or something. My Ma was not amused, and
that damned couch was still there the next morning. Ma did compromise by
putting a cover over the couch, so maybe we did chase that couch’s evil spirit
out of my Ma. My Pa still refused to sit on it.”

“How about we get a
priest or someone to perform an exorcism on this thing?” Ski offered. He hated
to give up the couch entirely; furniture was on very tight supply on Paradise.

“A human exorcism
won’t work on an alien couch, Ski,” Jesse explained the obvious, although he
was taking a second look at the couch. It was so amazingly ugly that it was
kind of cool. “You know why the hamsters gave it up, don’t you? It was ugly
even to them.”

“Maybe we can throw a
coat of paint over it, or fabric dye?”

“I don’t know.”
Hesitantly, Jesse touched the fabric. “This alien stuff probably has some
high-tech stain blocker. That isn’t going to work.”

“Pone,” Ski lowered
his voice. “We need real furniture, we can’t keep living on old packing crates
and busted up containers.”

“That’s been good
enough for-”

“Girls,” Dave emphasized, “expect guys to have at least a couch, you
know?”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, oh.”

Jesse’s eyes grew
wide as he imagined the possibilities. “You are a freakin’ genius, Ski. Hey,
you know what, that couch is so ugly that it’s a, what do you call it? A
conversation piece.”

“There’s only one
other real couch in all of Fort Rakovsky,” Dave pointed out.

“Hmm. You know what
we need now?” Jesses asked, suddenly looking at the couch in a new light.

“What?”

“A real coffee
table.”

“We don’t have
coffee, there’s none left on Paradise.”

“One thing at a time.
Couch first, then coffee table. Then we invite girls over, after we get the
hooch finished.”

Dave gave a big
thumbs up to that. Neither he nor Jesse mentioned that there were exactly zero
women in Fort Rakovsky, population nineteen. The closest women were in Camp
Toffler, a half hour walk away. Women sometimes came to trade goods, and they
saw women when they made the weekly drive into the ‘big’ town of Fort Cherokee.

“What are you waiting
for?” Jesse asked, suddenly no longer tired. “Let’s get this couch under cover
before it rains, and then we get working on finishing the hooch.”

Flying
Dutchman

Dinner that night was
cooked by the American SpecOps team, and I had been thinking about it all day.
They were serving steaks! Although the galley had a grill, these steaks were
prepared steakhouse style. Seared on one side, then the steaks go into an oven
to bake so they stay juicy. When they were put on a plate, the seared side goes
up because it looks nicer. Anyway, we were having steak! Everything we ate
aboard the Flying Dutchman was good;
each national team wanted to outdo the others, and Major Simms had loaded a
wide variety of food into our cargo holds. Much of it was frozen or irradiated,
of course. We also had fresh herbs and vegetables from the hydroponics lab,
which had begun as an experiment and now regularly provided fresh food.

Skippy disapproved
when he saw me skip the vegetable tray, after my plate was weighed down by a
juicy steak. “Joe, you need to eat your veggies,” he scolded me from the
speaker.

“Duh,” I responded.
“Do you know how many veggies this cow ate? Tons! I’m getting my veggies in
concentrated form.”

“It doesn’t work that
way, sir,” Sergeant Adams said as she scooped some green thing onto my plate. I
should have known better than to get in line behind her.

“What is that?” I
asked suspiciously.

“Brussel sprouts.
Don’t worry, they’re not boiled to mush like school lunch Brussel sprouts.
These are cooked in a pan with olive oil, salt and pepper, and then they put a
little bit of maple syrup on it for you. They’re good. Get some salad too.”

“Is that an order,
Staff Sergeant?”

She looked at my
collar. “Not when you’re wearing that uniform, Colonel. It’s a suggestion, not
an order.”

I put salad on my
plate. And, damn it, she was right, it turns out that Brussel sprouts are good.
Especially with real maple syrup.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Flying
Dutchman

Chotek called a
meeting to discuss how we were going to get the data we needed, and how Skippy
could load a message aboard a Thuranin ship. A message that would be delivered
to a Thuranin relay station, stating that a funny-looking shrunken star carrier
would be arriving on a top secret mission, and that the relay station should
open the docking bay doors for a pair of dropships. The message would also
state that the crew of the station had won a free cruise, and all we needed was
their credit card numbers.

Ok, that last part I
made up.

When Skippy had said
‘well, heh, heh, you are very much not going to like it’ about his plan for us
to plant a message in the computers of a Thuranin warship, I knew that I would
not like his plan. What I did not know is that the thing I wouldn’t like was,
Skippy not having a workable plan. “Skippy,” I groaned in frustration, “you
said I would very much not like your plan.”

“Uh huh. I don’t have
a plan that will work, and you very much don’t like that, right? I’m just
trying to keep you on your toes, Joe. There are many, many possible plans,
however none of them will actually work. Unless I’m missing something.”

“You’ve done this
sort of thing before, Mr. Skippy,” Chotek observed, sounding annoyed. He looked
down at his tablet, consulting notes about our mission reports. “On your first
mission, you used a series of microjumps to remain in proximity to a Thuranin
battlegroup, in order to download data about the military situation in the
sector. On your second mission, you flew by a Thuranin tanker ship, and
obtained the rendezvous coordinates for the surveyor ship. You were also able
to alter the tanker ship’s computer, so that it dropped flight recorder drones
before each jump.”

“Bing bing bing
bing!” Skippy rang a bell. “Winner, winner, chicken dinner! You are correct,
Chocky, I did do those things, because I am Skippy the Magnificent. Doing those
two things was much, much, oh so much easier than what we have to do next. Or
what I have to do next, since you are
not going to do anything useful, while I do all the work. Whatever that is.”

“Why?” Chotek asked.
It was a reasonable question. “Why is this significantly more difficult? The
task appears to be no different from actions you have already performed very
successfully.”

“Ugh,” Skippy
groaned. “Colonel Joe, do I truly have to waste my time explaining simple facts
to the cereal mascot?”

“Skippy,” I replied
trying to be tactful, “you do need to explain the situation to the mission
commander,” I nodded toward Hans Chotek. “I think the rest of us, me included,
would appreciate a more complete understanding of the difficulty involved.” In
this case, I did have to agree with Chotek; the task sounded relatively
straightforward to me. Hopefully, this time I could avoid an extended spacedive
that ended with me almost plunging into the atmosphere of a gas giant planet. And
peeing in my pants.

“Fine,” Skippy
huffed. “The first time was easy, because all I did was randomly skim data from
the memory of a Thuranin command ship. It didn’t matter what data I got,
because I knew I would be able to piece together a very rough overview of the
military situation in the sector. A command ship would have basic data on
battlegroup deployments, right in the command ship’s navigation system. I knew
where to get the data I wanted, so I was able to reach in and scoop up whatever
was on top. The second time, we approached a tanker, a ship with a much lower
level of security than a warship. The data security and sensor acuity of a
tanker is an order of magnitude more crude than a Thuranin warship. In that
case, again, I knew the data we needed would be in the ship’s navigation
system, and I knew that data would be queued up in a recent update. Easy in,
easy out. Planting a virus in the tanker’s computer was also easy, because the
ship’s cybersecurity was laughably crude. Like, their password was ‘password’.”

He paused to make a
sound like taking a deep breath. “This task will be, as I said, much more difficult. We need detailed
fleet deployment plans, plus the crew rotation schedules for data relay
stations across the sector. Only a warship will have that data, and I have to
download the full dataset; we can’t afford to miss anything important. Then, I will
need to plant a message in the ship’s databank. Thuranin warship AIs are not
stupid. Back when we microjumped around and I pulled data from the command
ship, that ship’s AI knew I was downloading data, and it actively resisted me. After
we left, that AI would have thoroughly inspected the integrity of its
databanks. If I had left a virus, or planted a message, the AI would have found
it. With the tanker, that ship’s AI never knew I was there, so it never ran a
diagnostic of its systems. What we need to do now is approach closely to a
Thuranin warship, and maintain close contact for an extended time, like at
least three to five minutes. So, we can’t just fly by. And whatever we do, the
ship’s AI can never suspect we were there.”

“Can you enhance the
stealth of a dropship,” Chang asked, “to get us close enough without being
detected?”

“I can enhance a
dropship’s standard stealth capability, but not enough,” Skippy replied. “Considering
how close we need to get to a Thuranin warship, and how long we have to remain
there, we will be detected. Joe,
before you suggest we could do another spacedive, that won’t work this time. The
only way to find the right ship is to wait near a wormhole, we could be waiting
there for a month or more until I identify a ship that is a good candidate for
us. After a month in a spacesuit, you would die of your own smell. Also you
would run out of oxygen and water.”

Avoiding another
spacedive was a relief to me. “Hiding the dropship in a comet won’t work this
time either, right?”

“No, Joe, a Thuranin
warship would never allow a navigation hazard like a comet near a wormhole. And
a comet hanging near a wormhole in deep interstellar space would be awfully
suspicious. Most likely the Thuranin would use a comet for target practice and
blow it up.”

“Scratch that idea.
All right, Skippy, you’ve told us all the ideas that won’t work, what ideas do
you have for us to do this?”

“My idea is to tell
you monkeys to think up an idea. Because I got nothing, Joe. I do not see how
we can get close enough to a Thuranin warship, long enough for me to do the
job, without being detected. We have seen that your monkey brains have a
certain cleverness that has proven useful. So, do your thing, monkeys. Dream
something up.”

The frown on my face
matched those around the conference table. Then my frown deepened when I
realized everyone was looking toward me. “Hey, right now, I got nothing,” I held
up my hands defensively.

“We will, as you
Americans say,” Chang said with a smile, “put our thinking caps on.”

Chang led us through
a brainstorming session for the next two hours. We threw out all kinds of
crazy, impractical ideas, and Skippy shot them all down. I even mentioned ideas
that I knew would not work, in the hope of sparking a good idea from someone else.

We suggested using
more than one dropship; one creating a distraction while the other got close
enough for Skippy to contact the ship’s computer. Skippy said the Thuranin
would either detect both dropships and shoot first, or more likely jump away if
they thought our dropships were a threat.

We thought of somehow
getting Skippy into a container that would be loaded aboard a Thuranin warship,
then he could somehow cause the container to be ejected later. I hated the idea
of Skippy being out there on his own. And we would first have to find just the
right ship first. Plus, how would we get a package aboard a Thuranin warship?
Hide Skippy inside a birthday cake to be delivered by FedEx? You can see our
ideas were getting pretty desperate and silly by that point.

After two hours of us
throwing out ideas ranging from wildly crazy to merely impractical, Chotek decided
we should take a break. Our new mission commander gave me the impression that
he was disappointed I hadn’t already dreamed up an idea. Truthfully, I was
disappointed in myself. And Skippy. Maybe there simply was not any way to sneak
up on a Thuranin warship, since they had been, you know, carefully designed to
detect anyone and anything in their vicinity. Duh.

We all went to the
galley for much-needed refreshments. The Indian team was preparing lunch that
would be ready in a couple hours; whatever sauce they had simmering on the
stove was making me hungry. I got a cup of black coffee and stood staring at my
cup, hoping for inspiration.

The cup just sat
there in my hand, looking stupid and unhelpful.

“Hey,” Chang said with
dismay, “what is this?”

He was pointing to a bowl
marked ‘Sugar’. When he took the lid off, instead of sugar there were yellow
packets of some sugar substitute.

“Sugar is over here,
sir,” Adams said, pointing to a bowl that did not have any marking on it.

“The bowl marked ‘Sugar’
doesn’t have sugar in it, and the sugar bowl isn’t marked?” Chang laughed
sarcastically. “Why isn’t the sugar in the bowl-”

Holy shit.

I gasped with shock, and
everyone looked at me. “Colonel Chang,” I interrupted him. “Could we be
overthinking this?”

Chang looked surprised.
Confused at my question, he pointed to the two bowls. “It seems pretty simple
to me.”

“No, I’m not talking
about the sugar. What I mean is, could we be overthinking how to approach a
Thuranin warship?” Turning to Chotek who was spooning loose tea leaves into a
small silver basket thing, I asked “So what if the Thuranin see our dropship?”

Chotek wasn’t any more
clued in to the idea in my head than Chang had been. “Colonel Bishop,” Chotek
began in the tone of voice people use when speaking to a small child, “you are
proposing to deliberately reveal our presence to the Thuranin?”

“Not exactly, sir.”
And I explained my idea.

Paradise

Cornpone looked up
from pulling native Paradise weeds out of the soil of their personal vegetable
garden. The weeds not only choked out Earth crops because native plants grew
faster in the conditions and sunlight spectrum on Paradise, they also
encouraged growth of native soil microorganisms that were not helpful to Earth
plants. In order for Earth seeds to grow in the dirt on Paradise, the dirt
first needed to be prepared with a soil conditioning mix that allowed the roots
of Earth plants to extract nutrients from the dirt. It was the still limited
availability of soil conditioner, not seeds, that was the constraint on how
much crops could be grown by UNEF. Since he had volunteered for an Ag team with
Dave Czajka, Jesse Colter had learned far more than he thought there was to
learn about growing plants, and seeds and composting. More than he had ever
wanted to learn. Being a farmer on an alien planet was a lot more complicated
than sticking seeds in the ground and praying for rain. In the jungles of
Lemuria, it rained every day, so getting enough rain was not a problem.

Cornpone pushed
himself to stand up, and tilted his head. “Hey, Ski. You hear that?”

“What?” Dave asked,
while pinching buds off a tomato plant, so the other buds would grow larger
tomatoes.

“Aircraft. More than
one.” Jesse declared. He checked his zPhone. There were no alert messages, and
no UNEF brass were scheduled to visit the hick town of Fort Rakovsky. Whenever
high-ranking officers were in the area, people always received a warning from
their fellow soldiers. UNEF brass, even the multi-star generals, rarely
travelled by air anyway; they were limited to Hamvees unless the Ruhar provided
aircraft for a very special occasion.

Dave stood up,
brushing dirt off his knees. In the relative cool of the jungle morning, he was
wearing shorts to avoid grinding down the knees of his long pants. The shorts
had previously been long pants that had been sacrificed to become shorts and
work gloves, when the knees had worn through so badly that Dave had been unable
to patch them one more time. “Yeah, I hear them now. Not dropships.”

“No,” Jesse agreed.
Dropship engines, which somewhat struggled in atmospheres, had a distinctive
whine unless they were in stealth mode. “Maybe they’re delivering that pizza we
ordered five months ago?”

Dave laughed. “If
that’s true, then that pizza is guaranteed free!”

“And no freakin’ tip
for the driver,” Jesse grinned. “I’m feeling generous; you can eat that five
month old pizza all by yourself. Getting louder. They can’t be coming here? Can
they?”

Dave looked around
the glamorous expanse of Fort Rakovsky. “For what? Did somebody here grow a
prize winning tomato?”

“Not that I know of,”
Jesse shrugged. “And we don’t have a critical medical case.” The Ruhar
sometimes took care of medical cases that the very limited human medical
facilities could not handle. Sometimes. Back when humans were working for the
Kristang to push the Ruhar off the planet, the Ruhar had provided advanced
medical care as a way to sow dissention between humans and their lizard
patrons. That tactic had worked; with the Ruhar going so far as to regrow the
limbs of severely wounded humans, while the Kristang refused to provide any
advanced medical care to their human clients. Even after the failed Ruhar raid
in which Joe Bishop had shot down two Ruhar transport dropships, the Ruhar had
continued to provide advanced medical care to humans.

That free medical
care became scarce after the Ruhar took the planet back, right at the time when
human medical supplies began running severely low. Now, the Ruhar took on human
medical cases only when UNEF HQ pleaded particularly loud and strenuously. The
Ruhar no longer cared to bear the expense and effort on a campaign for winning
human ‘hearts and minds’ to their side. The humans had no choice and no power;
it seemed like while the Ruhar were not actively enemies of humans on Paradise,
they wished the problem of humans would simply go away. There were even wild
rumors flying around the zPhone network that the Ruhar government was
negotiating to hand the planet back to the Kristang, and screw the humans in
the process. Jesse thought that rumor was wild BS; he couldn’t see the Ruhar
giving up a planet so soon after sending so many warships to fight for it. Dave
wasn’t so sure about that; the war had been raging hot and cold for a very long
time, and nothing that either side did would surprise him. The Ruhar and
Kristang were, he reminded Jesse, aliens.
Who knew how they thought?

“Damn, man, they are
coming here,” Jesse announced anxiously. The sound of the aircraft was loud
now; they were close and flying low, coming in from the north. As he listened,
the sound of one aircraft increased and a Chicken gunship popped above the tree
line, climbing rapidly for altitude. The gunship would be flying high cover,
and that was not a good sign. Without a word between them, Dave and Jesse
dropped their spades and ran straight for the little village center. They were
only halfway there, and joined by other people running in from the fields, when
a Buzzard transport ship appeared over the trees, flying half sideways. The
door on the near side was open, and two Ruhar soldiers in body armor were in
the doorway, holding rifles. The aircraft circled the village once, then set
down, crabbing sideways to avoid landing on top of precious Earth crops. As the
engines spooled down to idle, Dave and Jesse halted with other people, fifty meters
away. Some people had their zPhones out, shooting video of the unusual event;
others were calling friends in other villages or even UNEF HQ. Jesse and Dave
figured that if UNEF HQ or anyone else had useful information about why the
Ruhar had landed in tiny Fort Rakovsky, they would have informed the village’s
residents already.

The two Ruhar
soldiers stepped down onto the ground, and one activated a translator. The
slightly squeaky voice boomed out over the idling engines of the Buzzard.
“United States Army Specialists David Czajka and Jesse Colter, of the Tenth
Infantry Division, will come with us immediately.”

“What the hell?” Dave
asked, shocked.

Jesse slowly held his
hands up. “I don’t know either, man,” he looked from the rifles of the Ruhar
soldiers to the gunpods of the Chicken circling above. “But we better do as
they say.”

The Ruhar soldiers
had not handcuffed Jesse and Dave, they also hadn’t answered any questions
either. No matter, Jesse told Dave. The Ruhar soldiers were grunts like the two
humans; they’d been given orders to pick up two specific humans and bring them
somewhere. Grunts didn’t need to know why. After attempting to speak with the
Ruhar, which was difficult because the Ruhar had taken away their zPhones,
Jesse and Dave gave up. “I don’t think you were pronouncing that right,” Jesse
said quietly.

“Maybe,” Dave
admitted his Ruhar was terrible. Like many humans on Paradise, Dave and Jesse
had been learning the common Ruhar language using zPhones as tutors. The Keeper
faction, of course, thought any effort to learn to speak Ruhar was treason. Most
Keepers were trying to learn Kristang, although human tongues found the harsh
hissing undertones of lizard speech difficult to master. “I don’t think the
problem was what I said, I think they don’t want to talk with us.”

The four sat mostly
in silence for two hours while the Buzzard droned on and on, flying north. The
only break was visits to the Buzzard’s cramped bathroom. After two hours, one
of the Ruhar unbuckled from his seat, stood up, and offered a zPhone to Dave.
“Heep hahp?” The hamster asked, pointing at the zPhone.

Dave and Jesse smiled
to each other. Being cut off from Earth, humans on Paradise missed
communications with loved one back home, they missed foods that were not available
on Paradise. And they missed music. New music, music they hadn’t already heard
over and over. There was an enormous library of music at their fingertips over
the zPhone network, so soldiers could hear not only all the music they had
brought to the stars with them, they could hear anything their fellow soldiers
had brought. At first Jesse thought that was great, he was able to hear music
that was new to him. One night, he discovered a rare Johnny Cash live recording
that he knew his father would love.

Then even that got
old. Jesse got so desperate to hear something new that he started listening to
jazz, then big band music, classical, anything he could find. Ski drew the line
when Jesse wanted to play polka music in their hooch one night; Ski had heard way
too much polka while growing up, and he hated it. So they began trading music
with the French, Indians and Chinese. That broadened their musical horizons
considerably; some of it was even good, if you ignored the lyrics you couldn’t
understand.

The big breakthrough
came when some unknown soldier, legend had it was a guy in the US Third
Infantry, who traded music with a Ruhar soldier. The Ruhar, it was quickly
discovered, had no spoken-word music like rap or hip hop, and Ruhar soldiers
went crazy for it. They couldn’t get enough of that type of human music, and
humans were often able to trade music for tools, clothing and other goodies
from the Ruhar. Some enterprising soldiers had formed hip hop and rap acts to
provide new music, and their biggest audience were the Ruhar. That was partly
because their fellow humans said the music by groups like Ghost Soljas was truly
awful; the Ruhar thought all of it was new and different and great.

“Hip hop!” Dave said
with delight, and took the offered zPhone. He fiddled with the controls until
something he picked at random came from the speakers. It was hard to hear the
music from the zPhone’s tiny speakers, until the Ruhar took the zPhone back,
did something with it, and the music played over the speakers in the Buzzard’s
cabin. The unpadded cabin of the combat transport, with its droning engines,
was not the best venue for listening to music; the two Ruhar didn’t seem to
mind. They sat swaying in their seats, heads bobbing in tune with the beat,
trying to mouth the words. When the song finished, one of the Ruhar spoke.
“Dramaz?” It asked in the slightly squeaky hamster way.

Jesse shook his head.
“Papa-T.”

“Pahpahtee,” the
Ruhar repeated happily.

“Yup, you got it
right,” Jesse said. Then, in broken Ruhar, he asked if the ‘enemy’ soldiers
knew where they were going, not expecting an answer.

To his surprise, the
Ruhar shook his head, and over the zPhone translator said “They don’t tell us
anything.”

“Amen to that,
brother,” Jesse responded and on an impulse, offered his fist. To his surprise,
the Ruhar bumped fists with him. “Ski,” Jesse said, “play the man some tunes.”

Dave got the zPhone
back and selected a playlist of major hit hip hop tunes that the Ruhar might be
familiar with, plus some less lesser known favorites. The four of them rocked
out, singing along when they knew the words. By the time the Buzzard landed,
the Ruhar appeared sympathetic. They slapped the two humans on the shoulder,
looking almost sorry. “Don’t worry,” one of them said through a translator, “I
think this is only questions for you.”

Questions about what,
the Ruhar couldn’t say. And Dave and Jesse were left dumfounded. What questions
could the Ruhar have for two low-ranking farmers?

The mystery deepened
when the two were ushered into a low building near the airfield, then ordered
to sit in a windowless conference room. The room had three chairs and a desk.
They sat in the two chairs on one side, and waited half an hour until the door
opened and female Ruhar walked in. She smiled a toothy Ruhar grin, slid a pair
of zPhones across the table, and sat down. “Greetings. I am Baturnah Logellia,
the civilian deputy administrator of this planet. Your friend Joe Bishop called
me the ‘Burgermeister’.”

A lightbulb went on
in Jesse’s head. He spoke into the zPhone translator. “Oh, yeah, Bish said
something about you. He was talking with you when his Embedded Observation Team
was in that village, uh, I forget the name. Sorry.”

“Teskor,” she said
with a smile. “The village was Teskor. Did Joe Bishop tell you what the two of
us talked about?”

“No,” Dave said, with
a look at Jesse. “He said it wasn’t anything important. You were like the mayor
of the village or something?”

She laughed. “That is
what I let Joe believe. Later, he learned the truth. Gentlemen, you are here
today because of Joe. When is the last time you saw him?”

“The last time?” Ski
repeated the question because he couldn’t entirely believe the translator had
worked correctly. “Before we left Camp Alpha. That is the training base planet
we were on, before we came here,” he explained.

“I am familiar with
Camp Alpha,” she said. “You did not see him after that?”

“No,” Jesse shook his
head. “Bish, that is, Joe, got promoted to sergeant and left our fireteam. Left
our unit. We shipped off Camp Alpha separately. That’s the last we saw him.
When we landed here, we were deployed to different locations.”

“I understand,” she
seemed satisfied with that answer. “And when is the last time either of you
communicated with Joe? Communication of any kind?”

“Wow, that had to
be,” Dave looked at Jesse before answering. “The day before he got arrested?
Maybe the day before that. The three of us talked; he told us he had a cushy
job as a colonel, planting potatoes. Then he got arrested, because he, you
know, refused the lizards’ orders to kill hamster, um, Ruhar civilians. No
offense, ma’am.”

“No offense taken,
Dave Czajka. We know humans call us ‘hamsters’, and we in turn have a slang
term for your species. Are you certain that you did not receive any
communication from Joe after he was arrested? No communication of any kind, not
even through other people? Perhaps he sent you a message after he escaped from
jail?”

“Escaped?” Jesse
exclaimed. Then he grew angry. “Joe didn’t escape! Don’t lie to us like that!
You killed him, when you hit that jail. You killed him, after he tried to
protect you hamsters from the Kristang and-” Jesse stopped talking when Dave
grabbed his arm.

The Burgermeister did
not seem to be insulted. “Our ships struck a legitimate military target; it was
the only facility on this planet that was occupied by Kristang at the time. And
our intelligence shows that Joe was scheduled to be executed by his captors
shortly. If we had not intervened, he would have been killed by the Kristang.
No matter. It might be that you truly do not know this; Joe did escape. After
our ships hit the facility, Joe was able to escape with three other humans.
Tell me, is Joe Bishop any sort of computer expert?”

“Computer expert?”
Dave was more surprised by that question, than by hearing that Joe had escaped
from jail.

“Joe?” Jesse asked,
just as shocked. “Joe Bishop, you mean? About yay high?” He held a hand just
above his head. “Light brown hair, blue eyes?”

Dave nodded. “Got
kind of a dopey look on his face most of the time? That Joe Bishop?”

The Burgermeister
smiled broadly with a twinkle in her eyes. “I am not certain the translator
correctly interpreted ‘dopey’, however, yes. That is the same Joe Bishop. Is he
an expert with computer or communications systems?”

“Hell, no.” Jesse
laughed. “Ski here had to show Joe how to set up his zPhone on Camp Alpha. And
he was always having to reboot his tablet; Apple or Android or whatever.
Companies should have hired Joe to idiot-test their equipment. I wouldn’t trust
Joe to operate a microwave oven.”

“You got that right.
Remember that time he tried to make popcorn in Nigeria,” Dave asked, “and
almost burned down the barracks?”

“I do,” Jesse agreed.
“Why would anyone think Joe is a computer expert?”

“Because,” the Ruhar
woman explained, “after Joe and his three companions escaped from the Kristang
jail, our forces detained them, and they were brought to one of our bases. At
the time, I’m sure you remember that the situation was chaotic. We did not know
what to do with Joe and his three companions, so they were detained
temporarily. Joe somehow managed to escape again, gained access to our weapons,
and helped his three companions escape by using stun weapons on our soldiers
and pilots. Then they boarded a dropship, the type you call a ‘Dodo’ and flew
it to a human logistics base. At this base, they stunned more Ruhar, took on
supplies and volunteers, and apparently left the planet.”

“Holy shit,” Jesse
breathed, stunned. “Joe did all this?
Uh ma’am, why don’t you ask the people at this logistics base? We haven’t heard
from Joe since before he got arrested.”

“We did ask the
humans at the logistics base. We have been questioning them extensively. Now we
are questioning other people who knew Joe Bishop or his three companions. None
of this should have been possible,” the Burgermeister shook her head. “Joe
should not even have been able to open the door to the room he was being held
in. Somehow, he did that, then remotely disabled the weapons of our soldiers,
and took command of a Dodo. That Dodo then took off and climbed for orbit,
although none of our warships recorded that dropship on their sensors. Somehow,
Joe was able to subvert very sophisticated Ruhar computer systems. We are
certain that none of his companions had the skills or equipment to do anything like
that. We were certain that no human
had such ability. So, we are puzzled. Extremely puzzled.”

“Joe is alive?” Jesse exclaimed.

“Yes,” she confirmed.
“As far as we know, although since he apparently left the planet-”

“Why didn’t that ornery
son of a bitch tell us?” Jesse sputtered. “Damn! You think you know a guy?”

“Mister Colter, I
know this is a shock, but please, focus,” she chided gently. “We are trying to
determine whether-”

“Ma’am,” Jesse folded
his arms across his chest. “If Joe did escape, then I’m not telling you nothin’.
We are prisoners of war here; we don’t have to tell you anything.”

“That’s right,” Dave
agreed. “Damn. Bish is alive?”

CHAPTER NINE

Paradise

Invoking their
nonexistent rights as POWs made the questioning take an unpleasant turn from
the previously friendly conversation with the Burgermeister. Two Ruhar
soldiers, one male and one female, came into the room and Baturnah Logellia
left, although she told the new Ruhar that the two humans didn’t know anything.
Four hours later, the two Ruhar intelligence officers agreed. Dave Czajka and
Jesse Colter had no useful information about Joe Bishop or his companions after
Joe had been arrested. Sophisticated Ruhar medical scanning gear in the room
indicated the two humans had been genuinely surprised to hear that their friend
had survived the Ruhar strike on the jail he had been held in. The Ruhar intel
officers were not pleased, and they told the two humans that. Just in case the
humans were holding back information, they would be detained until further
notice. To make matters worse, the only human food at the air base was yummy
‘nutrient mush’. It was not at all yummy.

Dave and Jesse were
marched across the base to another building, where they were put into a room
with two human women. The room was a sort of barracks; it had six rows of bunk
beds, and a bathroom in the corner. One of the women was a US Army major, Jesse
and Dave saluted when they saw her. The other woman had her back to them, she
was folding blankets.

“Major,” he read her
nametag, “Perkins,” Dave began to say, then the other woman turned around and
he recognized her with a shock. “Shauna?”

Jesse was equally
surprised. “Shauna? Shauna Jarret?” He was guessing to remember her last name.
Jesse hadn’t seen her since Camp Alpha, and he hadn’t known her well then.
Shauna looked very much the same as she did way back on Camp Alpha. Her skin
was more tanned and her hair a bit shorter. And she’d lost weight like they all
had on UNEF’s restricted diet since the Ruhar took the planet back. As Jesse
remembered, Shauna didn’t have much weight to lose.

“I’m Shauna, and you
are, wait. You’re Joe Bishop’s friends.” She clapped her hands together in
front of her mouth. “One of you is Cornpone,” she made a guess based on his
southern accent and pointed to Jesse.

“Jesse Colter,
ma’am,” Jesse said graciously, his voice slightly unsteady. He was out of
practice talking with women. On impulse, he stuck out his hand, and she shook
it. He hoped his hand wasn’t shaking too much.

“And you must be Ski?
I know you’re not Sergeant Koch.”

“Dave Czajka,” he
said, and shook her hand. “We haven’t seen the Sergeant in a while, Jesse and I
have been on an Ag team, and Sergeant Koch signed up for security duty.” Koch
had told them he had enough of farming while growing up in Georgia. The other
woman, the major, cleared her throat. “Sorry, Major Perkins, we haven’t seen
Shauna since Camp Alpha.”

“I gathered that,”
Perkins said dryly. “Jesse
Colter.” She remembered something from Bishop’s file. “People call you Cornpone?”

“Bishop called me
Cornpone,” Jesse shook his head. “Before I met him, my nickname was Shooter,
mostly.”

Perkins looked at him
sideways. “Why? Are you trigger-happy?”

“No,” Jesse explained.
“When I played basketball in high school, some people thought I took a lot of
shots on the basket. Like, too many, you know?”

“Did you?”

“Seein’ as the other guys
on the team couldn’t hit the side of a barn, there wasn’t much point in me
passing the ball, ma’am.”

Perkins nodded,
satisfied. “Colter, Czajka, you two have been questioned? They’re bringing in
everyone who served with Bishop, or knew him,” she almost said ‘intimately’
then decided Shauna might object to that. “Knew him well.”

“They questioned us,
yes, ma’am,” Jesse confirmed. “We didn’t tell them anything.”

“We don’t know anything,” Dave added. “Is it true,
Major? Joe is alive?”

Perkins bit her lip.
“I do not know. I served in intel at UNEF HQ. We certainly thought he was dead.
There were rumors that he had been seen flying around in a Ruhar dropship, but
there were a lot of crazy rumors going around back then. The Ruhar did take
everyone from a logistics base, they’ve been isolated since the Ruhar took the
planet back. We have requested contact with them and the Ruhar have refused.
Until now, I didn’t know why. My assessment is,” she said speaking like an
intelligence officer, “that whether it is true or not, the Ruhar definitely
believe that Joe is alive. Joe and three companions. Did they tell you anything
about these three companions?”

“No, ma’am,” Dave
replied.

“We know who was at
the Kristang jail when the Ruhar hit it, so the list is limited,” Major Perkins
mused. “Be careful what you say here, I expect this room is bugged. Although, I
do not think any of us know anything useful. I was as shocked as you to hear
that Bishop is alive.”

“If he is alive,”
Jesse clenched his fists, “that SOB should have let us know.” He looked at
Shauna. “He should have told someone.”

After a bland and
quick dinner of nutrient mush, the four semi-prisoners were glumly sitting
around their barracks or cell or whatever the Ruhar wanted to call it. “Jesse,”
Shauna started, then, “Dave. You two were with Joe in Nigeria. What happened with
him in Nigeria?” Shauna asked with a look toward Major Perkins.

“It’s not
classified,” Perkins said with a shrug. “I’d like to hear about it myself;
Bishop’s personnel record had a lot of gaps in it.”

“A lot happened,”
Dave said with a frown.

“None of it good,”
Jesse added.

“That’s because the
Army doesn’t give medals for stupid,” Dave said with a smile. “They try to
train the stupid out of you. It didn’t work all the way with Joe.”

“You got that right,”
Jesse grinned. “You’re asking about the rumor that Joe was up for a Bronze
Star?”

“Yes,” Shauna leaned
forward on the bunk. “I asked him about it, and he wouldn’t tell me, He said it
was a mistake.”

Jesse snorted. “The
whole thing was a mistake. We weren’t supposed to be there. It wasn’t strictly
forbidden, we just weren’t- Look, don’t ask, Ok?”

“We shouldn’t have
been in the damn country in the first place,” Dave said. “They sent us over
there without having any clue what our mission-”

“Dave,” Jesse said
gently. “We were there. All four of us. We know.”

“Sorry. Go on with
the story.”

“So, we’re in this
village, there’s a girl’s school with, I’d better not tell you that part,”
Jesse looked at the floor. “There was a girl’s school. By the time we got there
with Joe, it was a burned-out shell. We were there because-”

“Don’t tell them that
part,” Dave said quickly.

“It’s not
classified,” Jesse replied.

“Yeah, but it’s
embarrassing, and he’s not here. Joe isn’t the ‘he’ I’m talking about,” he
explained to Perkins and Shauna.

“Fine,” Jesse agreed.
“I’ll skip to the part where Joe did something stupid. We were behind an
overturned truck; there was another squad working around a building and we were
providing covering fire. An RPG hit the road near us, it exposed a IED right
next to us, a big one. This one was built to take out a tank or a Bradley.”

“Joe jumps on it,
he’s like ‘Go, run, save yourselves’!” Dave laughed. “Right then, I knew Joe is
a total idiot. With an IED that size, if it had blown up we would have been
more in danger from flying Bishop parts than from the explosive.”

Jesse broke up
laughing about the incident. It had not been funny in the least at the time.
“We’re yelling at him to come with us, and while we’re yelling, we’re not far
enough away if it goes off. Finally, Sergeant Koch orders Joe to get the hell
off the thing and run with us. He jumps up, I was surprised he hadn’t pissed his
pants. I guess he’s not smart enough to be scared.”

“Did it explode?”
Shauna asked, her eyes wide.

“No, they screwed up
the wiring or something,” Jesse said shaking his head. “Or it was a dud, I
think it was an old Soviet mine. We saw the guy who was trying to detonate it,
he was in a window at first, then he’s kind of hanging out the window trying to
get the remote to work. He forgot the batteries or something, or the detonator
failed. Anyway, the stupid SOB is hanging out the window, shouting at the IED,
when Sergeant Koch drills him right in the head. Two shots, bang bang!” Jesse
mimicked the dead insurgent falling backward. “It was a great shot. We,” he
caught Dave’s eye. “I guess you don’t need to hear about that.”

“Joe jumped on an
IED,” Shauna asked, “to save you?”

“Joe jumped on that
IED because he was stupid,” Dave clarified. “That’s why he didn’t get a medal
for it. If that thing had gone off, him laying on top of it wouldn’t have made
any difference. The Army expected him to know that.”

“That’s Joe,” Jesse
concluded. “Not real smart. I still don’t know if he’s brave, or just too dumb
to know any better.”

With another gamma
ray burst over Lemuria, a Kristang frigate emerged. This time it was not the
familiar To Seek Glory in Battle is
Glorious, but her brother ship Every
Day is a Good Day to Die in Battle. The Glory’s
reactor was offline for a maintenance cycle, so her brother ship had been given
the honor of jumping in. The Good Day
planned on burning human croplands for several minutes, possibly tangling with
a Ruhar frigate, and then jumping away. The Good
Day’s crew had eagerly been looking
forward to the raid, having grown sick of their comrades on the Glory strutting around like they had
been winning the war against the Ruhar all by themselves.

Good
Day’s captain was
determined to outdo his colleague; he intended to remain behind and engage in
combat as much as his little ship could take before jumping away. He got his
first wish. He did not get the second.

Unknown to the
Kristang, despite their long-range surveillance and the stealth sensor
satellites they had dropped off on every raid, there was a stealthed Ruhar
destroyer above Lemuria. The commodore of the Ruhar defense force was still
under pressure from the planetary administrator to do something to protect the
humans, despite the severe damage to the frigate Tolen Grathur. So the
destroyer City of MecMurro had gone
into maximum stealth and drifted into position on minimum power, taking two
full days to reach a spot high above Lemuria. She had arrived one day too late
to save the Tolen Grathur, for the original plan was for
that unstealthed frigate to act as bait for the hidden destroyer. The Ruhar
commodore neglected to inform the Kristang of his plan, and the aggressive
Kristang had acted too soon.

Without another ship
to act as bait, the MecMurro still
waited patiently, her crew on alert, her weapons ready. Surely the previous
Kristang raid would not be the last one, and the MecMurro would get revenge for the four dead Ruhar aboard the Grathur. To maintain maximum stealth,
her sensor field was off but ready to activate at any moment. A sensor field
was not required to detect the signature gamma ray burst of a starship jumping
in, and the MecMurro saw the Good Day immediately. Even before the
destroyer’s sensor field had extended, maser beams and railgun darts were on
the way toward the Kristang frigate, with a volley of missiles close behind. By
shear bad luck, the Good Day had
jumped in less than twelve thousand kilometers from the hidden destroyer,
presenting an exceptionally easy target.

Every
day is a Good Day to Die in Battle
lived up to her name by dying in battle that day. With her shields degraded by
the strain of deflecting almost point-blank maser cannon fire, she took a
direct hit from a railgun dart that penetrated completely through the frigate,
plunged into the atmosphere of Paradise and created a tremendous splash in the
ocean. The impact of the railgun dart temporarily knocked out power and
communications to the ship’s jump drive, so the Good Day was a sitting duck for crucial seconds. Seconds the MecMurro did not waste; that destroyer
poured everything she had into the Kristang frigate, and the third missile
fired by the MecMurro scored a direct
hit. The Good Day exploded, violently
enough that the MecMurro had to jump
away to avoid being struck by high-energy debris.

Hours later, the MecMurro jumped back into position,
engaged its stealth field and with minimum power from thrusters, began slowly
to drift back toward the northern continent. The Ruhar commodore was satisfied
he had done what he could to protect the human POWs from assaults by their own
patrons; certainly he had done more than he had wanted to do. The Kristang
certainly had detected the MecMurro
jumping back into position and hopefully the lizards would assume the destroyer
was still there above the southern continent, lying in wait for another raider.
The Kristang would either cease their raids on the human croplands, or include
more and heavier ships on raids. If the Kristang used more ships, that would
provide the commodore with additional information about his enemy. And he would
act accordingly. Until then, the MecMurro
would rejoin the task force protecting the vital facilities and population of
the northern continent. And the humans would have to hope that the Kristang
would now see burning their crops as too great a risk to their limited number
of ships.

Flying
Dutchman

“You were right, Joe,
this was a great idea.”

“Oh, shut up,” I groaned.

“Yup, one of your bestest
ideas ever, Joey! Hey, this reminds me of the last time it was just you and me
in a dropship, floating in space for a long, long, really long, will this ever
end oh my God if he doesn’t shut up
I’m going to kill him length of time.”

“Thank you, Skippy, I
heard you the first time. And the hundred other times you said the exact same
freakin’ thing.”

“I’m just saying’-”

“I know.”

“This is like getting the
band back together! Except that you can’t sing. Or play a musical instrument.
Or write songs.”

“Skippy?”

“Yes?”

“I’m mortal,” I reminded
our friendly alien AI. “I can leave my helmet off, force the airlock doors
open, and embrace the sweet, sweet release of death. You, on the other hand,
would be stuck right here in interstellar space until the end of time.”

“Hey, with the door open,
it wouldn’t smell like fermented monkey butt in here, so go for it.”

Leaning forward, I banged
my forehead on the dropship’s pilot console. “Worst. Idea. Ever.” I mumbled.

“When did you realize
that, Joe?”

“Let me think. Uh, it was
seventeen days ago.”

“We’ve only been here
seventeen days, Joe.”

“Exactly.” Me, in a
dropship, with only two companions. Skippy, and a tactical nuclear warhead.
Between the two, I was beginning to prefer the company of Nukey, as I called
it. According to the United States Air Force, Nukey had a variable yield of
between 3 and 20 kilotons. Figuring that if I was going to nuke something I
might as well go big, I had cranked up the dial to ‘20’. Nukey didn’t say much,
it just sat there strapped in behind the copilot seat, emitting neutrons every
once in a while. Nukey was the strong, silent type.

Skippy, on the other
hand, could not shut up. We had run out of things to talk about after the
first, oh, hour, but that hadn’t stopped him. He had cheerily driven me crazy
for seventeen days, and he had an unending supply of nothing to talk about. As
one example, I was now well educated about how 17th century
Hungarian poetry was influenced by the-

Oh, damn it, I hadn’t
been paying enough attention when Skippy told me the first two or three times.
So, tragically, I had no idea what had influenced the Hungarian poets of the 17th
century. Some kind of alcohol, I expect. And, given that they were poets,
hunger and poverty were likely in the mix also. By day three, I had been
praying please, please God do not allow Skippy to give me a pop quiz on any of
the boring trivia he had told me. If I failed a quiz, which I would, Skippy
would simply start at the beginning and repeat everything.

That incredibly annoying
little beer can was sitting securely strapped into the copilot seat. Aboard the
Flying Dutchman, he spent all his
time in an escape pod, so I only saw him once or twice a day when I stopped by
to visit. Skippy always told me that physical proximity was meaningless and
unnecessary, but I think he appreciated that I took the time to sit with him.
Now I had seen him constantly for seventeen days, and it reminded me how small,
alone and in many ways helpless our friendly ancient alien AI was. He looked
cute sitting there, glowing a soft blue when he was happy, red when he was
angry, or any combination of colors that he did for my benefit. Skippy looked
especially cute because he was wearing a tiny Red Sox home jersey and baseball
cap that day. Before we left the ship, Major Simms had handed me a box, with
instructions not to open it until the dropship was on station near the
wormhole.

It was a box containing
dozens of tiny outfits for Skippy! I do not know where Simms got the idea, but
she totally made my day when I opened that box. Day after boring day waiting in
the dropship, there were only three things I had to look forward to. Sleeping
that night, when Skippy finally shut up. Doing zero-gee exercises as best I
could, using rubber bands. And dressing Skippy in a new outfit around
mid-morning each day.

“All right, Skippy, it’s
time to change your clothes,” I decided. It was only 0835, but there wasn’t
anything else to do. Besides, while I was eating breakfast that morning, Skippy
had threatened to spend most of the day educating me on the structural,
spiritual and functional differences between pyramids in Egypt and those in
Mesoamerica. All I knew was, the pyramids in what is now Mexico are bigger. If
he was going to bore me, I would strike first by humiliating him. “Let’s see,”
I said looking in the box. “How about a cowboy getup today?”

“No!”

“Look at this, Skippy,” I
said, holding up the pieces of clothing. “There’s this shirt with a leather
vest, and even a gold star, I guess this is for a sheriff or deputy. Aha! And a
tiny black curly mustache,” I picked up the mustache and applied it to Skippy
between his baseball jersey and hat.

“NO! Get that ridiculous
mustache off of me right now! Major Simms is totally on my ‘Skippy hates this’ list.”

“Oooh, and a cute little
Stetson hat for you, cowpoke.”

“NO! Oh, I swear if you put that silly cowboy hat on my lid I’m
going to light off that nuke right n- Head’s up, Joe, a ship jumped in!”

“Oh, thank God.”

“My thoughts exactly. And
don’t jinx it this time, you big stupidhead.”

“All I said was that I
hoped the last ship was the right one,” I protested.

“Yes, and the universe
heard you, and because the universe hates you, it was the wrong ship. Again.
I’m the one who suffers, being stuck in this cramped dropship with you day after
day.”

“You? Hell, I have to
listen to your boring trivia-”

“And I have to agonize
over how to explain the simplest of concepts to-”

“Skippy?”

“What?”

“The alien ship?”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry, I
forgot. What were we- Oh, that’s right. Hmmm. Looking good, Joe! It is looking
good. This could be the one.”

After seventeen days
stuck in close quarters with Skippy, if the ship that had just jumped in was
not a good candidate, I was ready to give up and go back to the Dutchman for a break. Or set off the
nuke just for entertainment. Either way would be fine with me. Damn that little
beer can could be annoying. Skippy had originally calculated that, in order to
have a fifty percent chance of contacting the right Thuranin ship, we would
have to park our little dropship near a wormhole entrance for sixty eight days.
When he told me that, I was ready to appeal the decision to the statistics
referees of the universe. The idea of being stuck in a dropship for one single
freakin’ day, with just Skippy and Nukey for company, was bad enough. After
seventeen days, during which we had encountered Thuranin ships three times, and
none of them had been the type of ship we were looking for, I was ready to kill
him. Or myself. Hopefully both. No way was I getting my hopes up, until Skippy
was a hundred percent sure this ship was the one we had been seeking. “Could
be?”

“Verifying now,” he said
with the flat, emotionless tone that indicated he was concentrating on
something. We had several criteria for a candidate ship. It had to be a Thuranin
warship; support or civilian ships would likely not have access to the
classified fleet deployment and relay station crew rotation schedules that we
needed. The ship needed to be going through the wormhole that our dropship was
parked near. And the ship had to be planning to contact one of the three data
relay stations in the area. Oh, and incidentally, the ideal ship would be
alone, or at least not part of a full battlegroup.

“Good to go, Joe! We are
good to go. These ships are perfect.”

“These ships. I see a heavy cruiser and two destroyers,” I said
fearfully. A squadron of Thuranin destroyers had ambushed and very nearly
vaporized our pirate star carrier. This time, there was a heavy cruiser with
the two destroyers.

“Phbbbbt,” Skippy made a
raspberry sound. “Please, Joe. This is no problemo for us. The destroyers are
flying combat space patrol for that cruiser; they are far enough way that there
is no way they could detect us.”

“Are you sure about-”
Right then I saw the flaw in Simms’ idea to dress Skippy in cute little
outfits; it was hard for me to take him seriously while he was wearing a Red
Sox jersey and hat. And a tiny mustache. It was good those ships jumped in
before I had time to put the tiny cowboy outfit on him. “Are you sure about
that?”

“Joe, I calculate the
additional mission risk posed by those destroyers as one third of one percent.
Less than that, if you want me to get more detailed than ‘meh’ level math.”

“No, please don’t.
Please.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“Well, get moving,
dumdum. You’re flying this thing.”

I shook myself back to
focus, and gently started the dropship toward the Thuranin heavy cruiser. Heavy
cruiser. Heavy, like, it had really big railguns and maser cannons. The
particle cannons that ship used just to zap hazardous space debris out of its
way could blast us into subatomic particles.

Damn, that ship was big.
With us in super stealth mode, I couldn’t look out the cockpit window; all the
photons headed toward our dropship were bent by the stealth field and curved
right around the hull. I adjusted the cockpit display to show me the tiny bits
of data that Skippy was allowing inside the stealth field, and I compared the
size of the heavy cruiser to our dropship. The dropship wasn’t even a dot on
the display. Sure, our pirate star carrier was larger than a heavy cruiser;
before Skippy shrunk our ship. But star carriers were immensely long and
slender, while the cruiser was bulky. I had to remind myself that on long
missions, star carriers transported an entire battlegroup of destroyers,
cruisers and even battleships.

I also had to remind
myself that star carriers were not combatant ships; the weapons, shields and
sensors aboard that heavy cruiser vastly outclassed those aboard our pirate
ship. Skippy assured me that with him feeding bullshit data to the cruiser’s
sensors, all they would see inside our dropship were two little green Thuranin
cyborgs. They would not see an ancient alien AI wearing a baseball uniform and
a mustache. They would not see a low-yield nuclear weapon that had ‘Adios
MFers’ written on the side of it. Also our nuke had a smiley face drawn on it.
And a Hello Kitty sticker. Most importantly they would not see a human.

No matter; I had promised
Chotek that if the Thuranin suspected our dropship wasn’t being flown by
Thuranin, I would set off the nuke without hesitation. After seventeen days
with Skippy, part of me was praying for us to be discovered.

Seventeen minutes later,
an ironic number, we got close enough to the heavy cruiser for Skippy to do his
thing. “Busy,” he said tersely. I knew not to bother him. Lightly touching his
shiny surface confirmed that he was slightly warm. “Oh, shit, they detected us.
Damn it! I was like 80% done. Dropping the stealth field now.”

Dropping our stealth
field, close to a Thuranin heavy cruiser, might not sound like a good idea. Or
a sane idea. It was actually part of my plan; the plan I had sold to Chotek and
Chang and Simms and Smythe. And Skippy. “Are they buying your line of
bullshit?” I asked anxiously.

“Hook, line and sinker,
Joe. It is working like a charm. Which, you know, kills me to say that another
of your monkey-brain plans is working.”

“You’ll get over it.” It
wasn’t easy to joke while my finger was poised over the detonator of a nuclear
weapon. Chotek had approved my plan only on the condition that, if the Thuranin
even began to suspect there was something other than sugar in our sugar bowl, I
would turn all the evidence into subatomic particles. Nukey could thoroughly
destroy me and the dropship. Skippy would be fine, although he would lose his
collection of cute little outfits. Explosion of the nuke would send our
friendly beer can unharmed but spinning off into space, and the Flying Dutchman could recover him later
and start over with a different, better idea. Chang would need to wait a month
or so to collect Skippy, as the area would most likely be crawling with
Thuranin ships investigating the incident. After the Dutchman jumped in, Skippy could ping them to pick him up.

I was mostly hoping that using
Nukey wouldn’t be necessary.

“Aaaaaaand, done!
Doneski, Joe, we are done-a-palooza. Mission accomplished. This part of the
mission, anyway. I got all the data we need, and I planted a message for that
cruiser to carry to a relay station. As a bonus, it happens to be the closest
relay station.”

“Great. Now we play
along?”

“Yes. Take the dropship
two hundred thousand kilometers away, and we will reengage stealth.”

I got the dropship turned
around and fired the engines. What Skippy had done already was the first part of
the plan; get close to a Thuranin warship, ransack its database and plant a
message. Now we needed to convince that ship’s crew and AI that there was
nothing sinister or unusual about our presence. No reason for the ship’s AI to
look carefully at its memory storage. No reason for that ship’s AI to suspect
someone had been poking around in its highly classified, encrypted files, and
no reason to notice it now contained a message that wasn’t there before.

What I had realized in
the Dutchman’s galley, while staring
at a sugar bowl that didn’t contain sugar, was that it was Ok if the Thuranin
detected our Thuranin dropship. What was not Ok is if they detected the Thuranin
dropship had a human inside it. So what we did was encase our dropship in an
extra-powerful stealth field, enhanced by the powers of Skippy, and we snuck up
close to a Thuranin heavy cruiser. Even with enhanced stealth, the cruiser
eventually detected us, and locked weapons on our location. At that point, as
planned, Skippy had deactivated our stealth field, to show the Thuranin that
the mysterious object sneaking up on their flank was a Thuranin dropship. A
Thuranin dropship with all the proper high-level military authentication codes.
A modified Thuranin dropship, because we had attached a bunch of useless junk
to the outside of the hull. The crew of the cruiser didn’t know our
modifications were all fake. Skippy had told them that our dropship contained a
highly advanced experimental stealth unit. and the stuff attached to the
outside of our dropship was part of the super stealth gear. That advanced
technology was how we had been able to get so close to the cruiser before being
detected. Skippy told the cruiser that we had been in the area for over a
month, and the heavy cruiser was the first ship to detect us. Congratulations
to the crew of the cruiser for their vigilance, their exemplary performance
would be noted by the Thuranin Office of Special Projects! Of course, the
entire incident was top secret, and the crew and AI of the cruiser were to
forget everything they had seen.

The Thuranin bought the
whole story. Feeding their cyborg egos had certainly helped. To finish selling
our story, we backed off two hundred thousand kilometers, reengaged stealth,
and snuck up on the other side of the cruiser until they detected us again.
Then we backed away, reactivated stealth, and flew in a wide circle around the
cruiser, dropping stealth on the other side of the ship. That time, Skippy lied
to them, we got very close and they had not detected us. Skippy thanked the
cruiser for assisting the Office of Special Projects to test our advanced
stealth capability in a field environment. Then we went back into stealth and I
got us the hell out of there. Less than two hours later, the heavy cruiser and
its pair of escorts went through the wormhole and we were alone. I sent the
retrieval signal to the Flying Dutchman,
a signal that would take four hours to reach the ship.

Looking around the
interior of the dropship in dismay, I realized that some housecleaning was in
order. “You know what, Skippy, maybe it does smell like fermented monkey butt
in here.”

“Duh, Joe.”

“Hey, I’ve been washing
up as best I can in that tiny sink. I will take another sponge bath, get into a
fresh spacesuit, and open the door to vacuum for a couple minutes.”

The place did smell
better after that; certainly I smelled better. And when the Dutchman arrived to pick us up, Skippy
was dressed up in a pirate costume, including an eye patch and a tiny parrot on
top of his tiny hat.

He hated it.

Sergeant Adams assured
him that he was adorable.

He hated that even worse.

Paradise

To Major Perkin’s
surprise, the formal questioning by the Ruhar lasted only another two days off
and on, then weeks went by when nothing happened. The four were allowed open
communication with each other; Perkins guessed the Ruhar were hoping they would
reveal information by mistake. Since none of them had information the Ruhar
cared about, open communication was not a problem. They were not allowed to use
zPhones. Dave and Jesse worried that guys in Fort Rakovsky might be screwing
with their hooch. He and Jesse had finished it, complete with a couch that now
had a nice cover, a coffee table and a dining table with four chairs. No girls
yet, but they were patient. Theirs was the nicest hooch in the bustling village
of Fort Rakovsky. It had better, Dave swore, be in great condition when they
returned. Whenever that was.

With the questioning
apparently over, the four humans were moved to another building outside the air
base. This building had two sleeping areas, so they did not have to hang
blankets from the ceiling in order to give the women privacy. Three weeks went
by, with the four allowed to go outside for exercise and even to walk far
afield without a Ruhar escort, as long as they returned before dark. If the
humans tried to escape, the Ruhar could surely track them. Perkins suspected
the Ruhar had planted tiny tracking devices in their clothing. So, if the
humans wanted to escape, they would do it naked, into a wilderness that
contained nothing humans could eat. That was not a tempting idea to any of
them. There were even deliveries of real human food, to supplement the nutrient
mush they were all growing heartily sick of. Through their Ruhar guards, they learned
that the Ruhar had also detained Sergeant Koch, plus the three members of Joe’s
Embedded Observation Team on Paradise, and several people who had helped Joe
shoot down the two Ruhar Whales at Fort Arrow. They were being held in separate
places; Major Perkins speculated that the Ruhar had picked up the humans
wherever they were, and simply flew them to the nearest Ruhar base.

When they had been
held for five weeks, Major Perkins raised the issue of their continued
captivity with one of their guards, a female Ruhar named Mindu who Perkins had
been trying to develop a friendship with. Perkins could speak the common Ruhar
language, not fluently yet to her chagrin, but passable. “We have been here for
over a month,” she used the Ruhar rough time equivalent for ‘month’. “We have
not been questioned for many days. Why are we still being held? It must be
clear that the four of us have no information about Joe Bishop. I assume you
have technology that can tell when a human is not telling the truth.”

“We have such
technology, yes,” Mindu replied slowly in Ruhar, without using a translator.
“Instruments which can detect when a subject is lying, or withholding the full
truth.”

“Then you know we do
not have any useful information.”

“No. We know that our
instruments have not detected any falsehoods. However, our commanders are
afraid to release you just yet, for they fear the consequences if it is later
discovered that you concealed important information. They are, as you humans
say, covering their asses.”

Perkins smiled wryly.
“That sentiment is universal among intelligent species.”

“There is also the
matter that this Joe Bishop escaped from this planet, using technology that
should not have been available to humans. Technology that even we do not possess.
You will understand, hopefully, that we are rightly concerned that a species controlling
such powerful technology might also be able to fool a lie detector.”

“I see,” Perkins
frowned. How could they prove that humans did not have access to technology superior to the Ruhar? They did not
possess any such technology. Although Bishop did, or so the Ruhar believed.

“There is another
reason you are still here, Emm-lee,” Mindu said, being unable to pronounce the
‘i’ in Emily. “There is a Jeraptha ship coming to this planet; the Jeraptha
wish to question you. They are also concerned that humans had access to
technology which allowed a dropship to fly right through the middle of our
fleet without detection.”

“Jeraptha?” Perkins
asked with alarm. No human had ever seen or spoken with the patron species of
the Ruhar. From the description provided by the Kristang, the Jeraptha were
horrible beetle-like insects who would love to feast on humans. The Ruhar had
laughed at that clumsy bit of Kristang propaganda, and insisted the Jeraptha
were wonderful patrons. Although even the Ruhar admitted privately that they
had an instinctive species revulsion toward insects.

“Do not worry,
Emm-lee. The Jeraptha will be gentle. You should be careful, though, they love
to play practical jokes.”

“Jokes?” Perkins exclaimed
in surprise.

“Oh, yes. The
Jeraptha love jokes. They laugh frequently. So much that some people make the mistake
of underestimating their military potential. The Jeraptha are formidable
warriors; they simply think there is no reason they can’t have fun doing it.
They also love gambling, even gambling on combat operations.” She shook her
head. “They are strange little insects.”

Seven weeks after
they were brought in for questioning, Major Perkins and her three soldiers were
outside playing a two-on-two game of volleyball. UNEF had donated a recreation
package at the request of the Ruhar; the four humans were growing stir-crazy
with the boredom of inactivity. The previous two days had seen solid rain,
forcing the four to stay inside except going out for a five mile run that had
been Shauna Jarret’s idea. She had qualified for infantry duty, and didn’t want
to lose her conditioning. Even though UNEF currently had no openings for
infantry. No openings for any jobs other than agriculture.

Perkins and Czajka
were playing against Jarret and Colter. Those two, Shauna and Jesse, had
developed a friendship over the almost two months the four had been together. Maybe
more than a friendship. There was certainly no UNEF or US Army regulation
against it; they were both Specialists, and not even in the same unit. Not that
units had any real meaning anymore on Paradise. Perkins would have thought it
odd if Shauna didn’t like Jesse Colter. He was attractive, and his southern
charm smoothed out his rough edges. Shauna was also from the American South, so
they had that in common.

Major Perkins didn’t
care what relationship developed between Shauna and Jesse, other than if their
relationship affected Dave Czajka. She had seen him moping by himself while
Shauna and Jesse played cards, and the relationship between the two men was
strained. She felt bad for ‘Ski’ Czajka. He was nice, and funny, and cute in a
way that reminded Perkins a bit of her ex-husband, except Czajka was not a jerk
and-

Alarms wailed across
the airbase. “Get down!” Jesse was the first to shout, and they dropped to the
damp grass. Before anyone could speak, the ground shook from a series of
explosions at the airbase. Maser beams struck first, hitting parked aircraft,
then a hypersonic railgun dart hit with a tremendous explosion. It sent a
fountain of debris into the air and left a mushroom cloud boiling into the
morning sky.

“Look!” Shauna said
while pointing at the sky, her ears ringing. There were not merely one or two
lights from Kristang ships jumping in to raid Paradise again; there were a
dozen, more than a dozen lights. Many more than a dozen. Blindingly bright,
silent explosions in orbit marked where ships were fighting.

The Kristang were
back, in force.

“Oh damn it!” Jesse
groaned and pounded the ground with a fist. “Not this shit again! Can’t those
two decide who owns this freakin’ planet?”

CHAPTER TEN

Paradise

Commodore Ferlant of
the Ruhar task force defending the planet Gehtanu was weary, and so were his
ships. His little task force of ships had been on constant alert since the
Kristang raids had begun. The crews were tired and morale was low; there had
been no opportunity for shore leave, or leave of any kind, for months. Worse
than the tiredness of his crews was the wear and tear on his ships; they had
not been able to perform proper maintenance since the two battlegroups that had
recaptured Gehtanu had departed. In addition to ship components simply reaching
the end of their useful lives, his ships had battle damage to fix. Shield
generators had taken a beating, railgun magnets developed dead spots, maser
cannon exciters overheated and developed microfractures, and jump drive coils
fell increasingly out of sync with each other. Even the simple act of the other
ships replenishing their missile magazines from the stores carried by the
commodore’s cruiser was risky. With so few ships, the Commodore had tried a
rotation where one ship jumped away to take systems offline for repairs. But
while that ship was, for example, replacing reactor plating, it was vulnerable.
So another ship had to jump away with it to provide protection. That left fewer
ships to protect an entire planet, and Ferlant’s options for deploying those ships
were limited. The enemy, meanwhile, could lurk far away and choose where and
when to attack. In between attacks, the enemy’s ships could adhere to a proper
maintenance cycle, although the Kristang were notorious for ignoring tasks they
considered to be beneath the dignity of a warrior. The Kristang, the commodore
thought with a slight smile, would strip out a maser cannon if the beam showed
any sign of backscatter, while they would ignore a critical fault in power
management systems. More than once in the Commodore’s career, he had seen
Kristang ships rendered defenseless because a minor hit had caused some
poorly-maintained system inside the ship to fail. The Ruhar were always willing
to remind the Kristang of the importance of proper maintenance, and that
reminder came in the form of a railgun dart or missile ripping a crippled ship
apart. Ferlant thought that the Kristang would have learned their lesson after
they’d lost several dozen ships needlessly, but fortunately for the Ruhar, the
Kristang warrior caste seemed immune to learning.

So, the Commodore
considered, did his own government seem immune to learning sometimes. After his
small task force had been detached to defend Gehtanu, he had complained with
increasing vigor that he did not have enough ship to defend a backwater planet.
Leaving a small force of ships had been a reasonable idea, back when
intelligence strongly indicated that the Thuranin were pulling out of the area.
The Thuranin were not willing to risk any more ships for Gehtanu, the Kristang
could not afford to retake the planet on their own, and the Ruhar government
was secretly negotiating to hand the planet back to the lizards anyway. Under
those conditions, assigning only a handful ships was reasonable, perhaps even
excessive.

Then the raids began.
At first the Commodore thought the raiders were one or two desperate ships
would had been left behind when the Thuranin pulled out of the area. His ships
had destroyed a Kristang frigate during the second raid. Back then, the
commodore had been confident that he could handle the raiders; one or two ships
without support would soon run out of missiles and their systems would break
down.

Then, the raiders
kept coming. His sensors so far had identified three frigates and a destroyer,
and they must have support somewhere in the star system. Chasing gamma ray
bursts was not practical for the commodore; by the time the light from a
distant burst reached Gehtanu, the enemy ships would have moved far away. So
far, his ships had destroyed two enemy frigates, with heavy damage to one of
his own frigates. If this battle became a war of attrition, the Ruhar were likely
to lose eventually.

Gehtanu did not have
any defenses of its own; no missile batteries or maser cannons or railguns
buried deep beneath the surface, no stealthed hunter-killer satellites, no
network of damping field satellites that could entrap a raiding ship. Gehtanu
had grain, and farmers, and some pleasant if dull places to build a house and
raise a family.

If the Ruhar
government intended to bargain away the planet below, the commodore thought
they should hurry the process along. It was bitter to think that his ships and
crews were risking themselves only to drag out the negotiations, in hopes of
driving a better deal for the Ruhar. A deal that would provide no direct
benefit for Ferlant’s little task force, nor for the Ruhar residents of
Gehtanu. And certainly not for the hapless humans.

Until there was a
change in the situation, Commodore Ferlant saw his responsibility as defending
the critical facilities of the northern continent named Tenturo, such as the cargo
Launcher, plus the few cities, military bases and any place that contained
enough supplies and infrastructure to be a tempting target to the Kristang. The
planetary government had helped by emptying warehouses and dispersing their
contents, so much that Ferlant thought with mild amusement it must be driving
the enemy commander crazy to have so few high-value targets on the surface.

Maybe the government
had done too good a job of reducing the number of targets on the planet. There
had been no raid for fifteen days. Fifteen days during which time the enemy was
able to rest and bring their ships into optimum condition. Fifteen days during
which Ferlant’s ships had to remain on alert every minute. His force steadily
grew weaker, while the enemy could build up their strength. The situation could
not continue, so Commodore Ferlant had taken a calculated risk. Two of his
destroyers were now in stealth, parked above the northern continent just higher
than jump altitude. He had been jumping his other healthy ships in and out in
hope that the enemy could lose track of his little force, and not notice that
two ships were not accounted for.

The next time the
enemy jumped in, Ferlant’s two destroyers would link overlapping damping
fields, preventing the enemy from jumping away. Below the pair of destroyers,
the planet’s gravity well would prevent a jump, and if enemy ships climbed out
of the gravity well, they would become trapped by the damping field. The
Commodore was counting on his plan to kill one, even two enemy ships with
limited risk to his own force. Such a triumph would make the Kristang think
twice about challenging-

“Ship jumping in!
Another!” Called an officer on the bridge of Ferlant’s cruiser Ruh Gastalo. “Frigate and a destroyer,
we know these two.”

Once again, To Seek Glory in Battle is Glorious
appeared over Paradise in a burst of gamma radiation, this time accompanied by
the familiar destroyer We are Proud to
Honor Clan Sub-Leader Rash-au-Tal Vergent who Inspires us Every Day. The
captain and crew of the Glory were
not happy; crewmembers on the bridge shared knowing glances when they saw their
captain’s hand shook slightly. This was not supposed to be a mission for the Glory, repairs to her critical jump
drive coils were only half complete; the normal maintenance cycle had been cut
short by an unexpected event. That event was the destruction of her brother
frigate Every day is a Good Day to Die in
Battle. The honor of this raid was supposed to have gone to the Good Day, but as that ship had a very
bad day, the Glory had been pulled
back into service. Glory’s drive
coils were so badly out of alignment that she had been forced to reach Pradassis
in three short jumps, to minimize the inaccuracy of her jump navigation system.
Even with the time-consuming precautions, Glory
emerged forty seven thousand kilometers off course. Her crew noticed bitterly
that their heavy escort Vergent was
also off course, although that destroyer’s drive coils had recently been
calibrated. Even if the Glory had
been where she was supposed to be, the Vergent
was unforgivably not in position to protect the smaller ship.

The Glory’s crew understandably wondered
whether the Vergent was out of
position on purpose.

As soon as the Glory’s dazed navigation system
determined the ship’s position, the frigate spun on its tail and burned hard to
get where she was supposed to be. Without waiting to get into the optimal
position, the little ship fired her maser cannon in searing pulses at
designated targets on the surface and launched a volley of missiles, two at a
time. The Vergent proceeded to her
assigned position more leisurely, taking a roundabout course that kept her
further away from the planet, so the destroyer could more quickly jump away if
needed. The Glory had no such option;
she had emerged at too low an altitude and her course was taking her even
deeper into the planet’s gravity well.

One Ruhar frigate
altered course to engage the Glory,
while two other frigates accelerated toward the Vergent. The captain of the Vergent
ordered the Glory to continue its
assigned mission, while the destroyer would ‘lure the pair of Ruhar frigates
away’. The cowardice of the destroyer’s crew did not fool the Kristang frigate,
but there was nothing they could do about it.

As the heavier ship
climbed rapidly to jump distance, the Glory
shifted her aim to the single Ruhar frigate opposing her. Maser beams lanced
out from both ships, impacting each other’s shields. The two ships were too
close to dodge speed of light weapons; the normal laws of space combat did not apply
when the combatants were within a hundred thousand kilometers and closing
rapidly. They flew past each other, neither able to change course fast enough,
neither able to score a decisive hit. Both ships spun around to face each
other, still drawing apart, their engines straining to cancel their velocity
and bring them together again.

Commodore Ferlant
wondered at the actions of the Kristang frigate his sensor systems had
designated ‘Target Beta’. They knew Beta well, as that frigate had participated
in almost every raid. Based on the excess gamma radiation of that ship’s clumsy
jump in, the Kristang frigate was not in good condition. Having survived a
direct engagement with one of Ferlant’s defenders, the enemy ship should now be
climbing to jump altitude to escape. Instead, Target Beta had its engines
burning at full power to bring it back above the northern continent. Why was
Beta not attempting to escape? Did the enemy ship already know about the two
Ruhar destroyers in stealth above it? No, Ferlant concluded, the enemy had not
yet detected his trap, because the enemy destroyer, designated Target Delta,
was still below jump altitude and moving leisurely to attack a pair of
Ferlant’s frigates.

With a single word,
Ferlant sprung his trap. First, his own cruiser Ruh Gastalo performed a short jump in behind the enemy destroyer,
to flush that ship toward the stealthed destroyers. The Gastalo’s jump left large areas of the northern continent
unguarded; that would be worth the opportunity to eliminate two enemy ships.
Immediately after detecting Ferlant’s cruiser, Target Delta had changed course,
frantically climbing toward jump distance. And that is when the two Ruhar
destroyers announced their presence by activating their damping fields. The
pair of destroyers were close enough that their damping fields overlapped,
making the fabric of spacetime even more turbulent and increasing the
effectiveness of the damping effect.

The Vergent’s captain saw that he was
trapped. Below him were a pair of enemy frigates, above were a pair of
destroyers and behind was a cruiser. The Vergent
could not jump away and could not outfight five enemy ships, so she plunged
forward and screamed for the Glory to
protect her.

The crew of the Glory almost could not believe what they
heard, and asked for confirmation that the powerful destroyer wanted help from
their worn-out little frigate. When they received confirmation, they asked one
more time to force the Vergent’s
captain to scream at them over an open channel. The entire Ruhar task force
heard, and soon so would the Kristang. With a shrug, the Glory’s crew altered course to engage two rather than one enemy
frigate. But the single enemy frigate also adjusted course, and soon the Glory would have to fight off three
ships of her own size.

The battle was chaos.
Maser beams stabbed out, deflected by weakening shields. Railgun darts and
missiles flew across the void. Masers shifted focus to knock darts off course
and obliterate missiles, and it became a matter of how much maser fire a ship’s
shields could absorb before failing. The Glory
was losing the battle, having become the focus of fire from all three frigates.
The only reason she had survived so long was her clumsy navigation system threw
off the aim of her opponents, which became less useful as the distances between
the four frigates shrank.

While the frigates
had their own private battle, Ruh Gastalo
and the two Ruhar destroyers concentrated fire on Target Delta; the Vergent.

Commodore Ferlant
studied the Gastalo’s main tactical
display, running the view back to the beginning of the battle, then fast
forward. “Smeth,” he asked his executive officer, “do their tactics seem
strange to you?”

The XO nodded. “Yes,
I was about to mention that. At first, I thought that destroyer was flying high
cover for the frigate.” That frigate, that particular, too-familiar ship that
had been the bane of the defense task force’s existence since the raids began.
“They jumped in too far apart to support each other; the frigate’s jump drive
is badly out of sync, so that part could have been unintended. But when they
began maneuvering, the destroyer moved independently, it did not alter course
to protect the frigate. Also, the destroyer has not fired at the planet. The
frigate has fired its maser cannon, but not any important target.” He indicated
the areas struck by the frigate’s maser. “This is uninhabited forest. It’s not
even agricultural land. If there were some sort of hidden target there that we
can’t see, they didn’t even shoot at it long enough to make a difference. They
shifted aim with every pulse. Sir, it appears that they want us to think this
is a raid, but this time they don’t want to cause any damage. And now the
destroyer has been screaming for the frigate to protect it,” Smeth said the
last with a raised eyebrow. The Kristang frigate was in poor condition, it was
not capable of protecting its larger, more heavily protected companion.

Ferlant zoomed the
display out to view the entire situation around Gehtanu. “That frigate has been
a pain in our backside for too long. But, it has survived so long now, it would
be almost a shame to kill it now. The destroyer is the more important target.
Signal all ships to concentrate fire on the destroyer.”

“Yes, sir,” Smeth
acknowledged. “It will be some time before the Hertall can disengage,” he cautioned and pointed to the Ruhar
frigate Mem Hertall on the display.
“She will pass the enemy frigate in a few minutes.”

“Very well, let the
Hertall keep Target Beta busy. The other frigates will cut off Target Delta’s
escape route.” His own cruiser Gastalo
had been caught out of position when the Kristang jumped in, and likely would
still be scrambling to change course when the battle ended. With four defending
ships concentrating fire at a single enemy destroyer, and that ship being
unable to form a jump wormhole, Target Delta’s life expectancy could now be
measured in minutes. “Then we-”

The main display
zoomed out on its own, red lights flashing and warning horns blaring.

Above the Gastalo, above minimum safe jump
distance, sixteen Kristang warships jumped in. The enhanced task force now
included a battlecruiser and two cruisers of Gastalo’s size. The additional ships had been dropped off at the
edge of the star system by a Thuranin star carrier thirty three days before.
The star carrier was not waiting for the Kristang ships to return, and indeed
the Kristang task force could not afford to have their ships brought home.
Their mission to the planet they called Pradassis was one-way, unless the Ruhar
surrendered the world through negotiation. The additional Kristang ships had
flown the slow way through normal space to the other side of the fourth planet,
and waited there, without the Ruhar even knowing new ships had arrived. With
the raids occupying Commodore Ferlant’s attention as the Kristang planned,
Ferlant had been unable to properly patrol the star system.

The Kristang ships
fired one volley of railgun darts at a half dozen high-value targets on the
surface, then their weapons went silent. They did not even fire at the
defending Ruhar ships.

The arrival of the
Kristang task force came too late for the worn-out Glory. The little frigate survived its second pass with the Ruhar
frigate Mem Hertall, but the Glory’s shields were now down to only
22% effectiveness. The shield emitters were so polarized from deflecting maser
fire that they needed to be taken offline and restarted. Her sensor field was
so confused by the intense cloud of high-energy particles clinging to the
ship’s hull that the ship had lost track of an incoming missile. Her defensive
maser and particle beam cannons were firing almost blindly, knowing that the
ship’s weakened shields could not protect the hull from even a near-miss
warhead explosion. The missile raced in toward the enemy frigate, jinking randomly
to avoid defensive fire. If the missile had known the enemy’s weakness, it
would have flown straight and true right into the frigate’s reactor.

The arrival of the
task force was perfectly timed for the Vergent,
she had been attacked by four enemy ships and trapped, unable to climb to jump
distance. Even if the pair of destroyers above had not blocked her access to
jump altitude, the damping field those two ships projected would prevent the Vergent from jumping away. The Kristang
destroyer was battered, maneuvering wildly to avoid maser and railgun fire, and
her defensive batteries were smoking hot from exploding incoming missiles.

Then, suddenly,
incoming fire stopped as the enemy ships broke contact and climbed frantically
for jump altitude. The two Ruhar destroyers above Vergent turned off their power-draining damping fields and fed
power to jump drive capacitors and defensive shields, anticipating a hard fight
with the powerful Kristang task force. A fight that never came.

On the Vergent’s bridge, her crew exulted and
her captain pumped his fist in the air triumphantly. He was about to order his
ship’s railgun turned to fire on a now-retreating enemy frigate, when the task
force commander ordered him to cease fire for the moment, and of all things, to
use the Vergent’s maser cannons to
intercept the missile that threatened the To
Seek Glory in Battle is Glorious.

At first, the Vergent’s captain could not believe the
order, it must have been scrambled in transmission or in the decryption
process. He held his railgun fire anyway, wary of angering his commander. Then
confirmation was received. The Glory’s
sensor field had lost track of an enemy missile, and the Vergent was the closest ship, the only ship capable of destroying
the missile before it blew the little Glory
into dust. The Captain turned to his weapons officer. “We are ordered to
intercept a missile that is tracking the Glory.
You will do your best to comply. However,” the Captain’s lips curling in a
grimace that was the Kristang equivalent of a smile. “It is unfortunate that
our own sensors have been degraded by recent action.”

“Yes, Captain.
Understood.” The weaponeer acknowledged and turned his attention to the console
in front of him. “Engaging maser cannons now.”

The missile had its
own problems, having to keep track of a target that was surrounded by a cloud
of high-energy particles. Debris from other missile warheads cluttered orbital
space, and the missile’s brain was confused by overlapping sensor fields, only
one of which was its own. The missile’s sensor field distorted unpredictably,
making it momentarily lose track of its target. It also detected defensive
maser and particle cannon fire, and the missile jerked side to side violently
to throw off the enemy’s aim.

A maser came close,
this beam from a different direction. Alarmed, the missile’s brain changed
course and fired thrusters in an attempt to now escape two opponents.

“I am sorry,
Captain,” the weaponeer reported in a casual voice. “We are unable to
effectively target the missile from this range. We risk hitting the Glory.”

“That in
unfortunate,” the Captain said, now bored. He still needed to make it look good
for the task force commander. “Continue trying, weaponeer.”

The Ruhar missile
regained a lock on its target, which it identified as a particular type of
Kristang frigate. In fact, it was a specific frigate that was well-known to the
Ruhar defense force. That type of ship was thought by the Ruhar fleet to have a
gap in sensor coverage just aft of amidships, so the missile altered course to
approach from that angle. The missile fired thrusters and its engine swung
around to propel it almost sideways, flinging it across empty space.

And right into a
maser bolt from the Vergent.

“What?!” The Captain
of the destroyer shrieked. “You idiot!”

“I’m sorry, Captain,”
the weaponeer cowered in his seat before his enraged Captain. “It was an
accident! The missile flew right into our maser beam!”

The Captain fumbled
for his sidearm to shoot his traitorously incompetent weapons officer, but as
his hand closed on the pistol, he thought better of it. A dead weapons officer
would be difficult to explain. Instead, he would make the man’s life miserable.
“Very well,” the Captain’s lip curled in a sneer, but he never finished the
thought.

While the attention
of the Vergent’s crew had been
focused on the two Ruhar destroyers and pair of frigates, and then on their
task force and finally the hapless Glory,
they forgot about the single Ruhar cruiser. Forgetting about that ship was
somewhat understandable in the heat of battle. The Ruh Gastalo had only recently been able to complete her turn, and
only now was the cruiser able to accelerate toward the Vergent.

Her railgun, however,
did not rely on its host ship’s velocity or course. As the Gastalo reached the point where her velocity relative to the Vergent was zero, her railgun had pumped
out six shots. Four of the darts flew onward and eventually would escape the
star system and galaxy. The other two, one following close behind the other,
hit the Vergent. The first was
deflected by the destroyer’s defensive energy shield which then immediately
collapsed from the strain. The second dart plunged through the subatomic
particle cloud left by the first dart, and punched through the Kristang
destroyer’s relatively light armor. The dart missed the reactor by mere
centimeters, marauding through the Vergent
stern to bow, to cause a tremendous explosion that ripped the ship’s bow off.
The crew in the bridge was instantly transformed into water vapor before simultaneously
boiling and freezing in the vacuum of space. As the dart ripped through the
ship, it created shrapnel, one piece of which flew backwards and ignited one of
the Vergent’s own missiles. The missile exploded in the launch tube, cooking
off its warhead.

The destroyer was
torn in half, and chunks of its own debris tore through the reactor shielding,
causing the reactor to lose containment and triggering a release of titanic
energy from the ship’s drive coils.

In less than two
hundredths of a second after the first railgun dart impacted her shields, the We are Proud to Honor Clan Sub-Leader
Rash-au-Tal Vergent who Inspires us Every Day ceased to exist as an
organized collection of molecules. In the space she had occupied, there was now
an expanding glare of mesons and rapidly-cooling exotic particles.

“Cease fire! Cease
fire!” Commodore Ferlant ordered. He had been too late to stop his own
free-flying railgun darts, and saw with satisfaction what they had done to
Target Delta. “All ships, cease fire and proceed to rendezvous coordinate
Alpha.” As he listened to the ships in his task force acknowledge his order,
Ferlant reflected on the message he had received from the Kristang commander. A
message he thought he would never hear from a Kristang.

Admiral Jet-au-Bes
Kekrando, commander of the Kristang task force, could believe his own message
even less than Commodore Ferlant had. The message had left such a bad, sour,
cowardly taste in Kekrando’s mouth that he had been forced to lock himself in
his quarters and practice saying the hated message word by word. When he had
been unable to get through reciting the entire message, he had ordered the
ship’s AI to mimic Kekrando’s voice and record it for later transmission.

The message, forced
upon Admiral Kekrando by his clan leaders, offered a truce with the Ruhar on
Pradassis. The clan wished not to recapture the planet by force, but instead
merely to give the clan a much stronger hand in negotiations. When Kekrando had
protested that such a cowardly act was unworthy of the warriors in his task
force, he had been taken aside by three senior clan leaders. Rather than
berating him for insubordination, they had commiserated with him at their being
forced to negotiate with the disgusting Ruhar. They were negotiating, the clan
leaders explained, because a forceful military action to retake Pradassis would
result in destruction of Ruhar ships and widespread deaths among Ruhar on the
planet. That would almost certainly provoke a strong response by the Ruhar
fleet. The clan was too weak for a major campaign against the Ruhar, and other
Kristang clans would be more likely to help the Ruhar than help a rival clan.
The clan had barely been able to scrape together the funds to pay the Thuranin
to carry Kekrando’s task force to Pradassis; they could not afford to send any
more ships. Thus, he needed to avoid becoming involved in a major fleet action
with the Ruhar. Although it certainly felt
cowardly and beneath the dignity of a warrior, a carefully restrained action
would accomplish the clan’s goals, whereas a typical Kristang slash-and-burn
invasion would do the opposite in this case. After the meeting concluded,
Admiral Kekrando could understand the clan leaders’ reasoning and see the
long-range wisdom of their decisions. He also decided that he never wished to
become a senior clan leader. It involved too much of a distasteful word called politics.

When his task force
ships jumped in, Kekrando had waited crucial seconds after his ships fired one
volley at surface targets that had been approved by the clan leadership. He was
supposed to jump in, verify the tactical situation, fire one volley, and then
transmit the message offering a cease fire and safe passage for the Ruhar ships
to escape. Instead, he had waited, with the excuse that he was waiting for
sensor data to give him a more complete view of the tactical situation. In
reality, he had waited in the hope that the destroyer and frigate who had
jumped in first as bait could score significant hits on enemy ships. Instead,
the destroyer Vergent was now dead
because of his delay, without substantial damage to the Ruhar ships. Kekrando
had ground his teeth at that setback; the Vergent’s
captain had been incompetent and the task force was better off without him, but
Kekrando could have put another man in command of that destroyer. Now his task
force was already depleted by one ship, without any damage to the enemy.

Warily, the little
frigate To Seek Glory in Battle is
Glorious dipped closer to the planet in order to give a wide space for the
Ruhar task force to climb out to jump distance. Seeking glory in battle was
indeed glorious, but on that day the ship’s crew had enough of battle and
simply wanted to survive the next ten minutes. A cease fire could break down at
any moment, and the Glory’s shields
were unable to stop even a low-power maser at the moment. To prevent shield
projectors from melting down and exploding, the Glory’s crew had been forced to take them offline and let them
cool. Until the generators could go through the long process of being
reactivated, the ship was essentially defenseless. Inside the ship, the crew
held their breath until the last Ruhar ship, a cruiser, jumped away.

Cheers rang
throughout the ship. The Glory had
survived another day, survived a very close call, with the last-minute surprise
assistance of the destroyer Vergent
and that ship’s valiant crew. It was not only a day they had survived, not only
a battle; they had survived an entire campaign. The Kristang task force had
established complete supremacy in the space surrounding Pradassis. The raids
were over. Combat was over. They had sought glory in battle and in retrospect,
it had been glorious. And now, her crew fervently hoped, it would be some other
ship’s turn to seek glory.

Negotiations for the
formal cease fire agreement took less than half a day; with the Kristang
battlegroup in complete control of the planet, there was not much for the Ruhar
government to do other than accept the terms offered. The terms were
surprisingly generous, almost unprecedented. Commodore Ferlant’s small task
force would not be allowed within eleven lightminutes of the planet, although
eventually Ruhar civilian transport ships would be allowed into orbit. The
Kristang would land troops and equipment in the northeast of the northern
continent. That area had been fully evacuated before the Ruhar came back,
reducing the disruption to the native population as the Kristang established
their presence at abandoned Ruhar military bases. The cease fire agreement also
established a zone between the Kristang and the Ruhar areas, where no aircraft
could fly.

The agreement left
open the ultimate status of the humans on the southern continent. While the
cease fire was in effect, either side was allowed to take action against the
humans, and neither side could provide any form of assistance. Shortly after
the formal agreement was signed, humans on Lemuria noticed the tractors and
other equipment provided by the Ruhar suddenly stopped working. Calls to the
Ruhar went unanswered, until the government contacted UNEF HQ, to state that no
additional equipment or materials would be coming from the Ruhar. Humans were
on their own, until the ultimate status of the planet had been decided.

At which point,
humans would be screwed, one way or the other.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Flying
Dutchman

After leaving the
derelict relay station behind, our ability to practice the raid was limited to
using parts of the Flying Dutchman as
a stand-in for a relay station. Because the type of relay station we would be boarding
was a converted warship, the arrangement of the station’s interior was not much
different than that of our pirate ship. Corridors were the same dimensions,
doors the same height and width, blast doors located about the same distance
apart. Major Smythe had people run through assault drills over and over, always
adding some wrinkle or problem that his team needed to adapt to. It was
unnerving to see people in Kristang armored suits charging down corridors,
firing simulated ammo and using simulated rockets and grenades. Combots were
used by Smythe’s team, and by Skippy acting as the Thuranin opposition.

The extra practice time
gave Smythe’s team opportunity to refine their assault plan; still, both Smythe
and Skippy expected substantial casualties. In some simulations, the assault
team suffered 50% losses, when one of our two dropships was blown up in the
initial operation to force the team’s way into the station. “The problem,
Colonel,” Smythe said to me after one particularly bad simulated assault, “is forcing
our way through the interior of the station. The enemy’s defenses are
substantial. I asked Skippy if there is a way he can disrupt those defenses,
and he told me he cannot do much, until we get him past the shielding and into
the station’s core. There are going to be casualties, Colonel.”

Sitting in my office,
I was trying to avoid thinking about how many of the Merry Band of Pirates we
were going to lose in the upcoming operation. My way to avoid thinking involved
playing a mindless game on a tablet. The game got my mind off-

“Skippy,” I said
slowly, and almost never finished the thought.

“Oh no.” He groaned.
“Oh I hate my life. The universe
hates me. This is so unfair.”

“What?” He had me
alarmed.

“You’re going to tell
me one of your brilliant freakin’ ideas that I should have thought of with my
ginormous brain power. And I am going to sink ever lower and lower into
ultimate despair until I long for the gentle embrace of death,” his voice
trailed off.

“How did you know
that? About the idea, I mean.”

“When you say
something slowly like that, especially when you say my name super slowly, it
means that you just had an idea form in your monkey-meat brain.”

“I do not.”

“Yes you do, every
freakin’ time. You speak slowly because you are finishing the idea while the
signal is crawling along from your brain to your voice box, and as glacially
slow as your brain works, it takes a
while.”

“Huh. Really?”

“Really. Duh.”

“Wow. I didn’t
realize I was doing that. It bothers you a lot?”

“Yes! I hate it!”

“Cool,” I said with
satisfaction. “Maybe I should speak really slowly sometimes when I don’t have
an idea, just to mess with you.”

“Joe? You do realize
that I control things like our reactors, missile warheads, and the pile of
nukes we have in a cargo bay? Such a nice ship you have here. It would be a
shame if I lost the will to live and my concentration slipped, if you know what
I mean.”

“Got it. Do you want
to hear my idea? This may be a false alarm; it is more of a question that may
turn into a good idea.”

“Ooooh! If this
doesn’t develop into a brilliant idea, can I tease you unmercifully until the
last star in the universe turns into a cold dark lump of neutrons?”

“If that turns you
on, Skippy, then go for it. You said the Thuranin created this newest type of
relay stations from obsolete cruisers?”

“Correct so far. I’m
not detecting any brilliant idea yet, Joe.”

“Wait for it. Was
that class of cruisers simply old, or were they withdrawn from service for some
reason?”

“Joe, trivia night in
the galley is Tuesday, not today. Who cares?”

“Humor me, Skippy.”

“Ugh,” he huffed,
“fine. They were withdrawn from service before the end of their intended life,
because of a structural weakness. That class of cruisers was made by stretching
the hull of a very successful class of destroyer; the Thuranin figured that if
the destroyer was good, a bigger destroyer would be even better. They were
wrong. Those little green morons didn’t redesign the entire hull structure,
they cut the destroyer in half and spliced in a section to accommodate more
shield generators, additional maser cannons and missile tubes. After about
thirty years, several of those cruisers were lost in combat because their
shields failed in that spliced section. What the Thuranin failed to realize is
that the additional shield generators changed the way impacts on the shields
are distributed across the overall hull structure. The stresses tended to
concentrate in one weak point. Ships were lost in battle because the hull
buckles in that one area, and it disrupts power distribution inside the ship.
The Thuranin didn’t realize that, because they are stupid, arrogant, hateful
little green men. Also because they stole the cruiser’s design from the
Jeraptha, but while the Jeraptha knew what they were doing, the Thuranin did not.
Does that satisfy your idle curiosity, Joey?”

“Almost,” I said
happily. “When the cruiser hulls were converted into relay stations, did the
Thuranin fix the design flaw?”

“No, there wasn’t any
reason to, dumdum. The hull weakness is only a problem for warships that engage
in battle regularly. Over time, the strain of deflecting enemy fire causes
stress cracks that have to be fixed. The Thuranin decided that fixing cracks in
the hull structure every couple years wasn’t worth the expense, so they took the
ships out of service. Why do you care? I’m asking in order to understand how
your monkey-meat brain works, Joe.”

“Another question,
then. Why didn’t they just reinforce that part of the hull?”

“To truly fix the
problem would have required so much reinforcement that it would have degraded
the ship’s performance. Again, why do you care?”

“The relay stations
have that same flaw, right? A hit in one place will disrupt power distribution
inside the hull? Power that goes to defensive systems?”

“Oh, no no no! No you
don’t. It doesn’t count as a good monkey-brain idea if it doesn’t work, Joe.
Yes, there is a weakness in the hull structure of relay stations. The Thuranin
know that, so they added a minor amount of armor plating in that area. You
can’t, I, uh, give me a moment. Huh. Well, that is interesting. Ok, yes, it is possible that a very, I mean, very precise hit in a particular area
could still disrupt power distribution within the hull. The Thuranin didn’t
bother to reconfigure their power cabling when the ships were converted to
relay stations.”

“Interesting,” I said
slowly, again without realizing what I was doing.

“No! Uh uh, Joey. Not
this time. When I say a very precise hit, I mean it would have to be a maser
beam striking an area about a half centimeter in diameter. And not a wimpy hand-held
maser beam, we would have to use one of the Dutchman’s
maser cannons. We can’t risk the Dutchman
getting that close, and besides, the target is at an extremely awkward angle.
The Dutchman would have to fire
several times in order to cut away sections of machinery on the outside of the
station’s hull, just to get at the target. After our first shot, the Thuranin
would activate their energy shields, and those shields would disperse our maser
beam. Also they would shoot back at our beat up pirate ship. So, no. No way can
we do this.”

“Show me,” I pointed
to my tablet. “Show me this weak spot.”

He did. It truly was
an awkward place. The Thuranin were not fools, they knew about the weakness so
they had installed armor around it. The only way to get at the weak spot was
where cables to a relay antenna came through the armor plating, and to get at
that spot, a maser would have to be fired almost parallel to the station’s
hull. A person in an armor suit might be able to get there, but a hand-held
maser didn’t have the power we needed.

“See?” Skippy asked
gleefully. “To disrupt their power, we need to hit that weak spot with ship’s
power, and there’s no way to do that. Unless you know of a way to bend a maser
beam. Or to shrink the Dutchman to
the size of a dropship.”

“You can’t warp
spacetime so the maser beam will curve?” I asked hopefully.

“Yes I can,” he
chuckled. “I can’t curve the beam enough to make a difference, dumdum.”

“Understood, Skippy.
You disappoint us once again.”

“What? You ass, I-”

“That was a joke. Do
you want to hear my idea?”

“Probably not,” he
sighed.

I told him anyway.

“Joe, I hate you more than words can say. In
order to describe how very much I hate you, I needed to create a new language
that I call ‘Cursive’, because I use it to curse at you inside my brain. If you
understood this language, you would be impressed.”

“I love you too,
Skippy. Will my idea work?”

He gave a heavy sigh.
“We will find out one way or the other.”

We arrived at our
planned hold point twelve lighthours from our target, and spent eight hours
passively scanning the area to assure there were no nasty surprises waiting for
us. Skippy confirmed the relay station was alone and operating normally. Of
course, if there was a stealthed ship guarding the station, we would have to be
a lot closer to detect it. Too close. Chotek finally gave us the go ahead, and
the Flying Dutchman jumped in to one
of the designated data exchange points near the relay station. Instead of
Skippy’s usual superprecise jump, he deliberately brought us in off-target so
it would look like a typical Thuranin jump. The ship was also pointed straight
at the station; from the station’s angle they hopefully couldn’t immediately
tell how extensively modified our star carrier was. “Transmitting signal now,”
Skippy announced, and Captain Desai looked at me, one of her fingers poised on
the button to initiate an emergency jump away if the relay station didn’t
acknowledge properly.

“Ok, we’re good,”
Skippy said, and we all breathed a sigh of relief. “I grumbled about what a
pain in the ass this secrecy stuff is, and the communications officer on the
station agreed with me. They bought our story, Joe. They acknowledge that we
will be sending two dropships over, and they are opening docking bay doors
now.”

“Excellent. Launch
the package,” I ordered, and in the CIC, Chang gave me a thumbs up.

“Package is away,” he
confirmed.

Our own docking bay
doors slid aside, and two dropships stuffed with SpecOps troops and combots
launched slowly, moving with unnecessary caution. For the operation, we wanted
to give the impression that we were in no hurry. Also, we needed to give the
special package time to get into position. The gentle maneuvers of the
dropships helped protect the people inside, who were strapped into webbing with
no other cushioning at all.

The dropships
proceeded cautiously across the gulf between the ship and the station, with the
dropships blinking lights and broadcasting the proper IFF transponder codes
like the innocent transports that they were not.

The package had been
attached to the outside of the Dutchman
before we jumped, launching it simply involved releasing clamps and with a
gentle push, it was away. The package was my idea; it consisted of a jetpack, a
stealth field generator and one end of a microwormhole. The other end of the
microwormhole was wrapped around the muzzle of a maser cannon on the Dutchman’s aft end. As the pair of
dropships approached the station’s open docking bay, Skippy flew the package
close to the spot where the station’s original cruiser hull had been spliced.
With two dropships approaching, the station had dialed back its sensor field to
avoid interfering with the navigation sensors of the dropships. The station’s
weakened sensor field gave the Thuranin no chance to detect the tiny residual
signature of our package until it was in position.

“Uh oh, Joe. The
Thuranin have noticed an odd sensor reading near our package. So far, they are
investigating it as a power fluctuation in the antenna in that area. I am
helping feed their delusion by telling them we are picking up garbled
transmissions from that antenna, and we are working together to diagnose the
issue. But I suggest we move soon. Real soon.”

“Are the dropships
secured?” I asked anxiously.

“Both are in the
docking bay,” Chang reported, “one is down and secured, the other will be in
ten seconds.”

Ten seconds was too
long to wait, we absolutely needed surprise. “Colonel Chang,” I ordered,
“weapons free.”

Chang pressed a
preprogrammed button, and our maser cannon fired through the microwormhole.
Pumping that much energy through a wormhole less than a nanometer in diameter
caused it to collapse and damaged our maser cannon. It also made a very precise
hit on the exact weak spot of the station’s structure, and severely disrupted
power feeds inside the station. Other than emergency power, the forward half of
the station that contained the docking bay and the core compartment with the
station’s AI was plunged into darkness. From one of the dropships, Skippy
reported that the Thuranin were scrambling to reconfigure the power flow, then
the Dutchman jumped away just as the
station fired a maser cannon at us.

The station
disappeared in the blink of an eye, and the ship emerged twelve lightminutes
away. Far enough for safety, too far away to be of any help to the assault
team.

Sitting in my command
chair, feeling useless. I hated it.

United States Marine
Corps Staff Sergeant Margaret Adams had been given the honor of joining the
Merry Band of Pirates SpecOps raid on the Thuranin relay station, despite the
fact that she had not qualified for the Marine Raiders special forces. It was a
dubious honor for her, because her role in the plan was not to operate a combot
or fire a rifle. Her assigned task was to remain with the rear guard, while
carrying a smartass shiny beer can in a backpack strapped to her Kristang
armored suit. “Hey, Sarge Marge,” said a voice in her helmet speakers, “can you
be a little more careful? All this bouncing around is bad for my delicate constitution.
I’m getting seasick back here.”

Crouched with her
back to a bulkhead behind a corridor junction which the SpecOps team had just
cleared of enemy resistance, she slammed her back into the bulkhead. “Oops,
sorry there, Skippster,” she said without humor.

“Ok, Ok, I get the
message,” he grumbled. “Combat isn’t the place for humor.”

“No it is not.” Adams
knew that Skippy joking with her was his way of relieving her stress, but she
didn’t want her stress relieved. She wanted her stress, wanted to harness the
energy it gave her. And talking with her was not distracting Skippy from
talking individually with each person on the SpecOps team. Guiding them,
warning of the enemy’s location and intentions, fuzzing or blanking out enemy
sensors, even taking direct control of armored suits and jerking people out of
the way if they were about to be hit by enemy fire. And if enemy fire did
penetrate their suits, Skippy managed the suit’s self-repair and emergency
medical functions. He was also worming his way into the station’s functions
section by section as they advanced; opening or closing blast doors, messing
with the artificial gravity and even causing the overload of a power conduit
that killed two Thuranin and disabled three of their combots. Skippy was doing
all that, plus making jokes with Adams, and he was probably not anywhere near
testing the limits of his capabilities. “Are you bored, Skippy?” She asked.

“Yeah, kind of. Don’t
worry about me, I’m keeping myself busy composing new insults for Joe. You’ll
like these, they’re good ones! For example, how about- Oooh, sorry about that!
Not you, Marge, I was talking to a Thuranin. I just crushed one of those little
green fuckers by slamming a blast door as it was going through. Hmm,
interesting. Unlike chickens, Thuranin don’t run around after their heads are
cut off. These Thuranin aren’t as much of a challenge as I expected, Marge.
Boy, you screw with their plan for static defense and they just fall apart.”

“We have two dead
already, Skippy,” Adams gritted her teeth. One of the dead was responsible for
the red droplets that spattered the front of her suit. Adams had been right
behind that French paratrooper when he took a combot rocket to the chest;
Skippy had not been able to jerk him away in time.

“Sergeant Adams, you
are an unaugmented species, without the advantage of any genetic engineering,
other than what you accidentally accomplished by deciding who to mate with in
the back seat of a Buick. You are attacking a group of cyborgs who have been
fighting this war for thousands of years, on their territory, against their
prepared defenses. When we first proposed to seize this station, I expected 90
casualties, if we got lucky. By my count, Major Smythe’s team is slaughtering
them in impressive fashion. Damn! If you monkeys ever do get any real
technology of your own and are able to tweak your cluttered genetic code, the
rest of the galaxy had better watch their asses.”

“Was that praise for
humanity, Skippster?”

“Shmaybe. I’ll deny
it if you tell anyone.”

“Of course.”

“Uh oh. Time to move,
Sarge Marge,” Skippy advised. “Take the corridor to the left.”

Adams pushed away
from the bulkhead. “Not straight ahead?” She pointed with her rifle to where
the SpecOps team had advanced.

“Um, no. There is a
tiny bit of a problemo for you and the rear guard to deal with. Um, it would be
good if you moved now. Like, now now now!”

Without a word, Adams
followed the special forces soldier in front of her, a Ranger Lieutenant Poole.
Behind her was a Chinese ‘Night Tiger’ Lieutenant Kwan. Adams had trained with
Poole and Kwan extensively; both of them had initially been disappointed to be
assigned to the rear guard, until Major Smythe dryly pointed out that the
assault operation would only be successful if they got Skippy past the thick
shielding and into the station’s core. Poole and Kwan were charged with getting
Adams or just Skippy into the core, even if everyone else had fallen in battle.
Hearing that, the female US Army Ranger and the male Chinese Night Tiger had
become a dedicated team with Adams, and Margaret Adams began to wish she had
not volunteered for the mission. The two special forces soldiers trained her
mercilessly, until the three of them were utterly exhausted but could
anticipate each other’s moves without speaking. They also made it clear to
Adams that her surviving the mission would be nice but not necessary. Poole had
even practiced throwing Adams through doorways, using the Marine’s suited body
as inert protection for Skippy.

Margaret Adams took
that as a huge compliment.

“How tiny a problem?”
Poole asked tersely while running down the corridor, flipping and spinning in
her armored suit, her feet and hands barely touching the floor, walls and
ceiling as she covered all approaches.

“A big problem,”
Major Smythe’s voice cut into the conversation. “Kwan, Poole, follow Skip-” his
voice was drowned out by the buzzing rattle of Kristang rifles and several
explosions. “Follow Skippy’s instructions and move as fast as you can. We don’t
have time to send combot support back to you.” Another loud explosion. “Go!
Out.”

“Ok, maybe not so
tiny a problem,” Skippy admitted. “Two Thuranin evaded Smythe’s team, got
around them in a parallel corridor. They have a pair of combots with them, and
they’re going to a power junction to set off an overload. That would cause an
explosion not large enough to destroy the station, but it would blow a hole in
the hull and knock out the main transmitter. We wouldn’t be able to fix it, so
that would destroy our whole purpose of boarding this station.”

“Got it,” Kwan
acknowledged. “I see it,” he said as Skippy’s map popped up in their visors.
“Poole, you’re with me. Adams, you stay behind us.”

“Affirmative,” Adams
replied, checking for the hundredth time that her rifle’s safety was off. She
had never fired a Kristang rifle in combat. During the asteroid raid of the Dutchman’s first mission, she had
operated a combot, not worn an armored suit. The Kristang weapon felt strange,
it buzzed more than barked, and its antirecoil mechanism reduced the kick. That
made it easier to maintain aim at a target but it was less satisfying to fire,
almost like using a rifle in a video game. She looked at the red splattered on
the front of her suit and thought of the French paratrooper who had died in
front of her. This was no video game.

Skippy’s awesomely
omnipotent vision and hearing through the station’s own sensors gave the three
humans an advantage, and rendered the two Thuranin nearly blind. Nearly. Kwan
and Poole knew where the two deadly combots were located, and where their two
Thuranin operators were taking cover. Skippy could slightly fuzz the targeting
sensors of the combots, but he could not give Kwan and Poole the ability to
dodge a hail of bullets. And the cyborg nature of the Thuranin gave them a link
to the combots as if they were part of their own bodies, allowing
lightning-quick reactions.

Using hand signals,
Kwan and Poole readied behind the corner of an intersection, then tossed a pair
of sparkle grenades around the corner. These grenades blew nearly silently,
filling the air of the corridor with sensor-blinding chaff and intensely
glowing particles to confuse thermal and infrared sensors. Kwan took the floor
while Poole flipped up and engaged her boots on the ceiling, running easily
upside down. Adams tensed just behind the corner, ready to provide fire support
although she was not supposed to risk direct combat. So she was almost taken by
surprise as Kwan rocketed back along the corridor, bounced off the opposite
wall, and tried to stand, firing his rifle the whole time. Then a string of
bullets from a combot stitched across his armored chest and he was flung
backward. A hail of explosive-tipped rounds tore his right arm off in
mid-bicep; the armored arm flew through the air and hit Adams squarely in the
chin, knocking her backwards. Out of the corner of her dazed vision, she saw
Poole come dashing around the corner, now back on the floor and limping badly.

Poole tossed her
rifle to Adams and dashed back into the corridor to haul Kwan back to relative
safety by one leg. “That could have gone better,” the Ranger muttered to
herself. “Adams, you injured?”

“No, ma’am,” Adams
was back on her feet, still seeing spots at the edge of her vision. “That
doesn’t look good,” she pointed to dents and gouges in the right leg of Poole’s
armored suit.

“It’s fine,” the
Ranger replied, examining Kwan’s condition. “Kwan?”

“Still here,” the
Chinese special forces soldier reported, struggling to get back to his feet.

“Sit down,” Poole
ordered. “You lost an arm.”

Kwan seemed to notice
for the first time. “Oh.” The suit had automatically clamped shut around the
injury, preventing further blood loss. With the suit pumping Kwan full of drugs
and nanomachines under Skippy’s control, he didn’t feel the pain and his body’s
natural shock response was suppressed. Not that a Night Tiger would ever allow
himself the weakness of experiencing shock. Kwan looked from his missing right
arm to his left, where his rifle was still secured. He checked the rifle’s
readout. “Forty two rounds left,” he said and tried to stand again.

“You aren’t going
anywhere,” Poole said with a worried glance back over her shoulder, in case the
combots tried to advance. “Skippy, sitrep.”

“One combot is
destroyed, the other is damaged; its mobility and targeting sensors are
compromised. That was good shooting by you and Kwan. The two Thuranin are in
the process of making the final connections to overload the power junction. You
have to move now, and I mean right now.”

“How-” Poole started
to say something, when Adams hit the button that fastened the ultra strong
strap of her backpack.

“Kwan can carry
Skippy,” Adams announced, shrugging off the pack.

“Poole,” Smythe
called. “I see Kwan lost an arm and that you’re injured? Skippy just warned me
the situation-” There was a sustained rattle of gunfire, “Your situation back
there is critical. You need to stop those Thuranin. I sent two people back to
you with combots but they won’t arrive in time.”

The Ranger hesitated
only a moment, looking directly into Adams’ eyes, then nodded. “We’re handling
it. Adams and I will take care of the Thuranin, Kwan will carry Skippy.”

“Kwan can’t carry-”
Smythe started to object.

“I can walk, Major,”
Kwan said, and struggled to his feet. Adams slung the pack over his shoulders
and the strap automatically clanged shut around his chest. “I can do it.”
Kwan’s voice was unsteady as his body adjusted to shock, blood loss and the
intervening nanomachines.

“Lieutenant Poole,
this is not a good ide-”

Poole cut Smythe off.
“Sir, you are not here.”

“Understood,” Smythe
said. “Make it happen.”

“Acknowledged. Poole
out. Kwan, go back along the corridor and link up with the people Smyth is
sending. Whatever happens, you get Skippy to the station core.”

Lieutenant Kwan never
thought the most vital mission of his life would involve carrying a beer can.
He saluted with his rifle and turned to jog unsteadily back down the corridor.

“I can’t take the
ceiling this time,” Poole lifted her injured leg. “We go in, I’ll take point.
Forget the sparkle grenades, they’ll degrade our sensors as much as that
combot’s sensors at this point. Skippy, is there any reason we can’t use shock
grenades on those Thuranin? Would that cause the explosion we’re trying to
avoid?”

“Shock grenades will
not be problem,” he advised. “Maximum violence is authorized. And recommended.
I really urge you to get moving, now.”

Margaret Adams later
reflected that if she had not been trained so well by the Marine Corps, or if
she had taken time to think about it, she might not have gone around that
corner with Poole. She did. The enemy combot fired wildly, scoring a vicious
hit to Poole’s already injured right side. The impact knocked Poole sideways
into Adams, making Adams bounce off the wall and saving her life. The combot’s
final two rockets scorched through the spot where Adams had been a split second
before. With Poole skidding on the floor and Adams falling, both women kept aim
on the combot, and it was ripped apart by explosive-tipped rounds. Without
exchanging a word and without hesitation, they scrambled to their feet, running
and leaping over the smoking ruins of the two combots. Poole ripped a shock
grenade off her belt and Adams did the same, tossing the grenades through an
open doorway and following the grenades with massed rifle fire. Both of the
grenades exploded at the same time, having been networked together for maximum
effect.

Detonation of the
grenades flung both women backwards, Poole smacking her helmet on the far wall,
and Adams crashing into the Ranger. Stunned, Adams still had the presence of
mind to keep her rifle pointed at the doorway and the trigger depressed. Dimly,
she heard a voice calling to her. “Adams. Adams! Sarge Marge, stand down. Stand
down,” Skippy said soothingly. “It’s Ok. It’s over. You got them. And you’re out
of ammo.”

“Oof,” Adams
staggered to her knees. Even before checking on Poole, she ejected the spent
clip from her rifle and slapped another in place, checking the readout to
ensure it reported the correct 160 rounds. “Lieutenant, are you all right?”

“Yeah,” Poole’s voice
reflected great strain. “Help me up, Sergeant. I think my ankle is sprained,
and the suit leg motor aren’t working properly.”

“I’m working on it,”
Skippy said cheerily. “But I’m not optimistic. You’ll have to walk on your own
for a while.”

“Got it.” Poole shook
her head to clear the cobwebs. The shock grenades had knocked her brain offline
for a moment. She glanced through the doorway. There were bloody Thuranin bits
liberally splattered all over. None of them were moving, unless you counted
chunks falling from the ceiling. “Sergeant, I’ll need to lean on you, this suit
is too heavy to walk if the motors aren’t working. Sorry. Let’s get back to
Kwan before any more trouble pops up.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

No more trouble
popped up, they caught up to Kwan just before the people that Smythe had sent
arrived to meet him. Kwan was in a bad way, the nanomachines had not been able
to stop him bleeding inside the suit, and he was woozy. The fact that he was
still upright when they found him was a testament to the toughness of the Night
Tiger special forces. Adams left Kwan and Poole with an Indian paratrooper, and
she took the backpack containing Skippy from Kwan. An SAS lieutenant and a
combot were ready to escort Adams to the station’s core. Before she painfully
sat down to take the pressure off her ankle, Poole looked at the SAS man. “Get
Sergeant Adams and Skippy to the station’s core. If you see anything moving
along the way,” she almost slipped on spent shell casings that littered the
floor. “Kill it.”

With a trigger-happy
SAS trained killer and a heavy combot leading the way, Margaret Adams did not
encounter any problems along the way to the station’s core. As soon as she went
through the heavily shielded blast doors that separated the station’s core, Skippy
exulted “I’m in! Their AI is toast, baby! It was a jerk, too, I’m certainly not
going to shed any tears for that one. Major Smythe, my congratulations to your
team, they were exemplary in both their bravery and skill. Huh. I wonder what
Colonel Joe has been doing while we had all the fun?”

What I had been
doing, I told Skippy later, was sitting uselessly in the command chair.
Sitting, worrying and driving the pilots crazy because apparently I had been
continuously tapping my front teeth with a thumbnail, until Desai turned in her
seat and asked me to stop it. It is possible that was not my only subconscious
annoying habit.

The battle to take
control of the relay station took less than eleven minutes, and the Dutchman had microjumped twelve
lightminutes away, so the fight was over before the light of our first shot
reached back to our position. Space combat is weird and frustrating. After
Skippy declared the fight to be over and Smythe took a couple minutes to
confirm, it took their victory signal twelve minutes to reach us. When Skippy
had first talked about light ‘crawling’ along, I had not appreciated the truth
of that statement. After we received the victory signal, including Skippy
reporting three dead, two critically wounded and seven with less serious
injuries, we still could not jump the Dutchman
back into recover the assault team. The Thuranin had launched a pair of
missiles at us before we jumped, then when it appeared the battle may be going
against them, they had ripple fired all twelve remaining missiles and ejected
six flight recorder drones. All fourteen missiles were out there, stealthed,
flying blind but their smart brains were angrily seeking any sort of target.
Skippy needed twenty minutes to locate and contact the missiles and drones, and
use the missiles to destroy the drones and each other. Having missile warhead
debris floating around was a bonus, Skippy explained, because it would later
help us sell the cover story. When we were done with the station, we planned to
blow it up; debris of Thuranin missile warheads would be convincing evidence of
a space battle the station had lost.

So, I sat aboard the Dutchman, doing absolutely nothing
useful to anyone, until we received the All Clear signal that was already
twelve minutes out of date. During that time, one of the critically wounded
soldiers died, despite Doctor Skippy’s best efforts. I was frantic to get the
wounded to the Dutchman’s sickbay.
The relay station had a medical facility that Skippy couldn’t use until he had
time to reconfigure its equipment for human anatomy. Given the slow rate at
which the comparatively clunky Thuranin equipment accepted Skippy’s
instructions, it was faster to fly the wounded back to our ship. As soon as we
jumped in, we detected that one of our dropships had launched to bring wounded
soldiers to us. My job was to stay out of the way, keep my mouth shut and let
my people do their jobs.

I hated every second
of it. The next battle we engaged in, regardless of Chotek’s orders or the
strenuous advice of Chang, Simms and Smythe, I was going with the SpecOps team.
Lt Colonel Chang was a fine officer, as fully capable as I am of uselessly
sitting in the command chair while other people fought.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Smythe sent a quick
situation report to me, including the casualty list. The list was much shorter
than we had feared. Still, I would have to write letters to the families of
each soldier we lost. My letters would be reviewed and censored by UNEF Command
when we got back to Earth; any casualty had to be described as a ‘training
accident’.

“Was it worth the
cost?” Chotek asked, standing right next to the command chair where I was
sitting.

“Sir?”

“The people we lost,”
he said, as if he needed to remind me. “Was the mission successful? Is Skippy
able to get into the Thuranin computer?”

“Yes,” Skippy
responded, sounding annoyed. “I am installing the submind to run the
communications relay and fake messages from the former Thuranin crew here. This
Thuranin computer equipment is absolute garbage, it will take hours to install
and establish the submind. In the meantime, I am skimming through the databanks
for any useful information about that surveyor ship that I destroyed for you.”

“You destroyed?” I protested. “I seem to remember you having a
little help from monkeys. Like, thinking up the whole idea of-”

“Yes yes, let’s not
quibble about the details,” Skippy mumbled quickly. “Ok, so you were somewhat
more useful than expected on that mission, do you expect a freakin’ gold star
from the teacher? Damn, you are way too sensitive. Anywho, here is what I have
found so far, or, wait. Would you rather that I waste precious minutes in
grudgingly telling you how marginally competent you sometimes are?”

“The data, Skippy!
Give us the data!”

“I thought so. Here’s
the deal; the Thuranin know their surveyor ship was destroyed. They know its
three escort ships were also destroyed around the same time. Perhaps the most
important detail is that they believe the Jeraptha destroyed those ships. They
have no idea about our pirate ship, and there has been no speculation that
humans were involved in any way.”

A cheer rang around
the bridge and CIC. High fives were given, people hugged. I pumped my fist in
the air, and gave Lt. Colonel Chang a big thumbs up through the glass that
separated the bridge from the CIC. He returned the gesture with a huge grin. I
was so happy that I even turned in my chair to shake Chotek’s hand, and he was
grinning happily.

“Not so fast,
monkeybrains,” Skippy warned. “There is one minor complication. We didn’t know
it, but there was a ceasefire in effect between the Jeraptha and the Thuranin
in that subsector at the time. The Thuranin have protested to the Jeraptha, and
the Jeraptha have strongly denied they were involved. This could become a
problem; the Jeraptha know they didn’t do it, so they are wondering who did.”

“Oh, shit,” I slumped
in my chair.

“I wouldn’t worry too
much about it now, Joe,” Skippy said in a soothing tone. “For now, both sides
will almost certainly assume the incident is due to the fog of war. The
Thuranin do not believe the denials of the Jeraptha. So any future complication
from this incident will come from the Jeraptha. And they will forget all about
it eventually, as long as there are not a lot more unexplained incidents in
this sector. The destruction of the surveyor task force caused the Thuranin to
retaliate by attacking Jeraptha ships, and the ceasefire broke down entirely.
It has only recently been reestablished. By the way, when the Thuranin violated
the ceasefire by attacking the Jeraptha, they got their little green asses
kicked. The Thuranin very much want the current ceasefire to hold, so if we
have to destroy another of their ships, they might not make a big fuss about
it. Although let’s avoid taking our rebuilt pirate ship into combat unless we
have to, please?”

“Agreed,” I breathed
a sigh of relief, which was immediately ruined.

“You did not know
there was a ceasefire in effect at the time you destroyed the surveyor ship?”
Chotek of course found something to nag about.

Damn it. Even in a
moment of triumph, I had to defend myself. “No sir,” I said while trying to
keep the annoyance out of my voice. “We did not have that information at the
time. And there was no time for us to attempt to gather more information. Our
priority was to intercept the surveyor ship, before it topped off its fuel
tanks and set course for Earth.”

“I guess that is my
bad,” Skippy said cheerily. “If I’d thought about it, I would have tried
digging info like that out of the databanks of that tanker ship. Although I did
fly by it super-fast; I barely had time to get the data on the tanker ship’s
rendezvous with the surveyor.”

“Truthfully, sir,” I
added, “if we had known about the ceasefire, that would not have changed our
actions. Could not have changed our actions, we did not have the time or
opportunity to consider other possibilities. As it was, we barely arrived on
time at the coordinates before the surveyor task force ships did.”

“I have read your
report, Colonel,” Chotek said in a mildly scolding tone. “The fact remains
there was a significant risk factor that you were not aware of. If the Jeraptha
decide to investigate further, and discover that humans were involved, then
your destruction of the surveyor task force could have put humanity in greater
danger. We can’t fly by the seat of our pants out here; the stakes are too
high.”

“Yes, sir,” I
responded as I could feel my cheeks growing red. Did the asshole UN bureaucrat
think any of that was news to us?

“Hey!” Skippy
shouted. “It’s easy to play Monday morning quarterback when you have never done
anything to-”

“Skippy!” I wanted to
cut off a long and useless argument. “Mr. Chotek has a point; we did not have
all the information available at the time. Sir,” I spun my command chair around
to face Chotek, “we are never going to have all
the information we wish out here. We have to make judgments based on inadequate
data. And on this mission, those judgment calls will be yours, sir. You are the mission commander. Whatever you do, someone
back on Earth will be second guessing your decisions.” My little speech was
more for me than for him. Following the advice of Sergeant Adams, I was not
going to let fear of criticism make me shy away from doing what I thought was
right. From the CIC, Adams caught my eye and gave me a subtle nod of approval.
“Even if the Jeraptha do find cause to investigate the destruction of the
surveyor task force, they will find that difficult to do, since the incident
occurred in Thuranin territory. It is unlikely the Thuranin will stand by while
enemy ships spend months running detailed sensors scans. Skippy, is there any
way that either the Jeraptha or Thuranin could find evidence connecting us to
the surveyor task force?”

“No way, dude!” He
chuckled happily. “You think I’m a moron? No way, not possible. The only
possibility of ever connecting humans to that incident is if human DNA were
somehow on a missile casing. And that did not happen, I scrubbed those missiles
before launch for that very reason. Also, if you remember, Joe, those missiles all
exploded and left only subatomic particles behind. The Jeraptha and Thuranin
could scan that area until the end of time and not ever find a connection to
us. Having said that, the Thuranin do know that one of their star carriers is
out here flying around by itself and is now hostile to Thuranin forces. The
Thuranin think our pirate ship has been captured by the Kristang; I know that
because the Thuranin have warned the Kristang and angrily demanded their star
carrier back. That caused major suspicions between Kristang clans; they are all
worried that one clan has gained a major technological advantage by stealing a
star carrier.”

“The Kristang have
become even more divided and distracted?” I asked. “That can only be good for
us.”

“That is my thinking,
Joe, but then, I am not a strategic genius like Count Chocula here.”

Chotek’s face now
grew red. He hated that nickname, hated it especially since he knew the entire
crew used that nickname when he wasn’t around. Skippy, always being helpful,
had hacked into Major Simms’ logistics database before we departed Earth, and
somehow four crates of Count Chocula breakfast cereal had been added to the
supply list. We had enough Chocula cereal aboard that we simply had to eat it;
oddly enough, some people on the French team apparently loved the stuff. Most
mornings, Hans Chotek could be fairly certain of seeing his namesake likeness
on a box at breakfast, and someone always snickered quietly. It had to be
eating away at him. Creating a subtle daily disrespect for our UN bureaucrat
was a great way to ensure that, if I ever did have to mutiny and override his
orders, the crew would follow me.

Giving Chotek that
nickname proves that Skippy is a freakin’ genius, and not just at physics.
Sometimes I worry that he is just as good at manipulating me.

“Skippy, that is
great news about the surveyor ship. Have you found any data about whether the
Thuranin will be sending another ship to Earth?” That was my greatest fear. I
could not see how we could destroy a second surveyor mission to Earth, without
the Thuranin growing very suspicious why someone wanted to prevent ships from
going to humanity’s home planet. Two missions to Earth being destroyed, along
with the wormhole to Earth mysteriously shutting down, would bring unwanted attention
to our little world. Maybe enough attention to get the top species like the Maxolhx
and Rindhalu curious, and alarmed, about humans.

The problem of the
Thuranin sending a second ship had been the subject of intense study by UNEF
Command before we left, and that brain trust had come up with exactly zero realistic
ideas for dealing with it. Many nights, I lay in bed, trying to fall asleep but
with my mind racing. Trying to dream up a way of save Earth, again. The only
possibility I could see of stopping another surveyor ship, without exposing our
secret star travel capability, would be to hit the second surveyor ship at its
spacedock before it ever began the mission. We would need to somehow destroy
the spacedock and many other ships at the same time, so the Thuranin would
never realize the surveyor ship had been the target. To do that, we would need
a lot of nukes, and we would need to locate the spacedock, get there on time,
and sneak up on the target with our degraded stealth capability. That would certainly
be a suicide mission for the Flying
Dutchman, so we would never know if our desperate attack was successful in
protecting Earth or not.

Skippy answered my
question. “The Thuranin have notified the Fire Dragon clan Kristang that their hired
surveyor ship was destroyed in the course of its mission, so the Thuranin are
invoking the catastrophic loss clause of the contract, and refunding only a
small part of the payment. They also, hee hee, this is funny, they told the
Fire Dragons that they should have paid extra for insurance. That wasn’t a
joke, by the way. The little green men did actually offer to sell insurance to
the Fire Dragons, but the lizards couldn’t afford it.”

“So, there won’t be a
second surveyor ship mission to Earth?” I asked fearfully.

“No any time soon,
no,” Skippy confirmed. “Loss of the surveyor ship has caused the Thuranin to
jack up the price of a second mission, above anything the Fire Dragons can
afford to pay. There are rumors of the Fire Dragons attempting to create a
coalition to raise the money. But if the Fire Dragons are able to create a
coalition, then they would be able to avoid the civil war that is the entire
purpose of sending a ship to Earth in the first place. There will be a meeting
of Kristang clans later this year, that is when the Fire Dragons hope to
propose a coalition. There is another factor to consider, Joe.”

“What’s that?” Good
news, I fervently wished. Good news, only good news.

Skippy read my mind.
Although he said he couldn’t do that. “Good news this time. The Thuranin have
been hurt badly by the Jeraptha in this sector; they are not eager for the
distraction of another long mission to Earth. A recent loss of territory to the
Jeraptha means that any mission to Earth would need to detour around a key
wormhole cluster, and that would add another seven week roundtrip to an already
very long mission. The voyage to Earth was previously near the limit of a
surveyor ship’s performance characteristics; the detour makes it almost
dangerous. In the relay’s databanks, I found a message from the shipyard that
designed the current class of surveyors. That shipyard warned they cannot be
held responsible for anyone pushing their ships past their design limits.”

“This is good news.”

“It is most certainly
good news, Colonel Joe,” Skippy said happily.

With such news, I
wanted to plan a celebration for the crew. Given the people we lost in taking
the relay station, a memorial service was more appropriate. “Did you learn
anything else?”

“My priority was
searching for data about the surveyor task force, I am combing through the rest
of the databanks now. The data is poorly organized, the Thuranin should be
ashamed of themselves. It’s going to take a while, Joe, even for me. We did get
what we came here for, so, mission accomplished.”

“Sir?” I turned to
Chotek, who still managed to look unhappy despite the very welcome good news.
“We have secured the relay station, and a Thuranin relief crew is not scheduled
to arrive for eleven months. I suggest we clean up exterior damage to maintain
the ruse that the station is operating normally. Then we should back the Dutchman away and remain in the area,
until we receive confirmation the Thuranin will not send a second mission to
Earth.” Hanging near the relay station, with the Dutchman drifting stealthily in interstellar space for months, was
going to be extremely dull for the crew.

“I agree for now,
Colonel,” Chotek said stiffly. “Please assure the self-destruct mechanism is
installed aboard the relay station.” The self-destruct mechanism he referred to
was a pair of our own self-destruct nukes.

“Right away, sir.
Colonel Chang, please inform the crew they can stand down from battle stations.
And assign a party to bring our party favors,” I meant the nukes, “to the
station.” I was going to our sickbay to see how Dr. Skippy was caring for our
wounded.

On the way to
sickbay, Skippy called my zPhone. “Good news about the relay station, Joe,”
Skippy reported. “Their sickbay has a full supply of medical nanomachines, so
we can replenish our supply. A relay station does not carry a large a quantity
of medical supplies compared to a star carrier, so we will still have only 28%
of what we started with. The station unfortunately has almost none of the more
useful multipurpose engineering nanomachines. There are some station components
that we could use as spare parts aboard the Dutchman.
The components need to remain in place for now for the station to function
properly, we can remove them later. Oh, also, there are two dropships in the
docking bay, of the same two types we have.”

That news excited me.
“Two more dropships? That’s great, Skippy. Can we bring them aboard now?”

“Ah, I need to check
them out thoroughly first. Their maintenance records indicate they work fine,
but you know that you should never buy a used dropship without having it
inspected first. We don’t want to fall for that dipstick trick like your cousin
Jimmy did.”

“Oh, yeah.” When my
cousin Jimmy got his first job, he bought an old pickup truck. It was beat up
and looked like a piece of junk, but Jimmy pulled the dipstick and it had
plenty of clean, new oil. The next morning, there was a puddle of nasty black
oil in his driveway, and three days later, the engine seized. The guy he bought
it from had put a plug at the bottom of the dipstick tube, put in just enough
fresh oil to make it look good. Since then, whenever poor Jimmy bought anything,
we always asked whether he had checked the dipstick. “How did you hear about
that?”

“Your cousins were
talking about it at the party when you came home this time. You need to go home
more often; I hear the best stories when you’re there.”

“I’m working on it,
Skippy. Need to save the world again first.”

There were only three
people in the sickbay when I arrived. The power of advanced weaponry and the extreme
violence of future combat left few lucky enough to be wounded. Four injury
cases had already been tended to by Dr. Skippy; two of those were in recovery
tanks with serious internal injuries that Skippy was hopeful could be cured.
The other two were resting in their own quarters, Lt. Kwan was missing an arm,
the other soldier had lost most of her right leg. Skippy was one hundred
percent confident that they both would make a full recovery, although he told me
privately that the supply of nanomachines for Thuranin medicine were running
low. To repair the Dutchman on our
last mission, Skippy had used up 90% of the medical nano, repurposing the tiny
devices to repair the ship instead of body parts. We should, he said hopefully,
be able to partly replenish our nanomachine supply from the relay station.
Still, we needed to be careful with the supply of these critical medical
miracles. Human injuries that could heal naturally or with mere drugs and
surgery, would skip the advantage of nanomachines.

I greeted the three
less seriously injured people awaiting treatment in the sickbay, including
Ranger Lauren Poole. She had a black eye, several cuts on her face, and an ugly
purple bruise from her right hip to her ribs. “Colonel,” she said as she
saluted me; I could tell raising her right arm was painful.

“Lieutenant Poole,” I
looked at the deep bruise. “That looks bad.”

“It’s fine, sir,” she
replied. “I’m here for my ankle.” She lifted her right leg and I could see that
her ankle was hanging oddly. “I feel stupid, sir. All those years in
gymnastics, practicing landings, and I sprain my ankle now.”

“She took three
Thuranin rounds to her suit leg, and her ankle is broken, not sprained,” Major
Smythe explained. “You are lucky to be alive, Lieutenant,” he said with obvious
pride about the toughness of his SpecOps team.

“Ricochets, sir,” she
said with a shrug. “The only direct hit was to my torso,” she pointed to the
ugly bruise. “Those Kristang armored suits are tough. The black eye,” she
indicated her face and I noticed she used her left hand, “is because a tiny
piece of shrapnel punctured my visor. It sealed right away, or I wouldn’t be
here.”

“Correct,” Dr.
Skippy’s voice said from a wall speaker. “Your injuries are not serious enough
to require extensive use of nanomachines, so you will have surgery shortly, and
regular injections of healing drugs.”

“I’ll be fine, Mr.
Skippy,” she said with a grimace. “I don’t need surgery if someone else is in
greater need of it. Ankle injuries are nothing new-”

“Lieutenant,” I
interrupted. “If Dr. Skippy says you need surgery, then you will cooperate to
the best of your ability. Then you are going to follow the letter and spirit of
the rehab routine that Dr. Skippy sets up for you,” I declared. “I expect
nothing less than perfection when you are performing rehabilitation exercises;
all the judges had better be holding up cards with ‘10’ on them, is that
understood?”

“Yes, sir,” Poole
said with a grin. I had given her a challenge, and there is nothing special
forces people like more than a challenge. “I’ll be up and around soon, you’ll
see.”

Skippy and Smythe
politely shooed me out of sickbay as soon as they could; the last thing they
wanted was the commanding officer hanging around and making everyone
uncomfortable. Taking the unsubtle hint to go away, I headed to the galley for
a snack. A cup of coffee and half of a blueberry muffin took the edge off, and
I was sitting at a table reading reports on my tablet when Skippy called me
through the ceiling speaker. “Hey, Colonel Joe. I, uh, heh heh, found something
interesting in the relay station’s databanks. It seems there is trouble in
Paradise. Or should I say trouble on
Paradise?”

“Skippy,” I stood up
abruptly, alarmed. “We should talk about this in my office-”

“Sir?” Adams had been
pouring herself a cup of coffee, that woman had the worst sense of timing. Or
maybe the best. The ten other people in the galley all looked at her
expectantly. “Is there a reason we can’t hear information about the situation
on Paradise?”

“Adams,” I was
annoyed, and embarrassed. “If this is bad news for UNEF, and we aren’t able to
do anything about it, I do not see the point of everyone bearing that burden.”

She set her coffee
cup down and crossed her arms. That was not a good sign for me. “When my aunt
found out she had cancer, she didn’t tell the family, because she said she
didn’t want to worry anyone. She was wrong about that. If you shut us out,
you’re wrong also. Sir.”

Her message was loud
and clear. The Merry Band of Pirates may not always be merry, but they were
adults. They deserved to know. What pissed me off is that Skippy knew how I
felt about keeping information about Paradise quiet, yet he had blurted it out
while I was in a room with people. That irritating little beer can had done it
deliberately. “Skippy,” I said as I sat back down, “let’s hear it.”

“I found something
unexpected. Two things, actually. First, the Ruhar federal government has been
negotiating to give Paradise back to the Kristang-” His voice was drowned out
by a chorus of shouts from everyone in the galley, including me.

“People, quiet, plea-
Oh my God.” I was completely stunned. Until that moment, my greatest fear had
been that the Ruhar might not be able to supply enough food for UNEF. I had not
thought the Ruhar would actively abuse the humans on their planet. And it had
never for one second crossed my mind that the Ruhar would sell the planet out
from under UNEF’ feet! “Skippy, why the hell would the hamsters do that? They
fought for Paradise!” Right then, I thought of all the Ruhar who died when I
shot down the two Whale transports they were in. And the Ruhar had planned that
operation, and risked all those lives, as a feint to lure in a Thuranin task
force so the Jeraptha could destroy it. Now all those lives would truly be
wasted.

Skippy explained the
Ruhar’s reasons for not wishing to keep Paradise. That is was not conveniently
located following the recent wormhole shift. That the Kristang were offering
more valuable territory in exchange for Paradise. That securing Paradise would
require a major commitment of fleet resources that were needed elsewhere; an
expense the Ruhar were not willing to bear. That the Ruhar had not wanted or
intended to take the planet back recently, and now it was merely a bargaining
chip for them. “Not all of the Ruhar agree with giving Paradise away, Joe,”
Skippy tried to assure us. “The native population, and of course UNEF, know
nothing about negotiations with the Kristang. Your old friend Baturnah
Logellia, the Burgermeister, is personally opposed to trading away her home.”

Hearing that name
brought back a flood of memories. Sitting in Lester Cornhut’s home, on the
Cornhut family couch, sipping tea with the Burgermeister. Listening while she
told me horror stories of how humanity had been betrayed by the species we
considered saviors and allies. Listening while she destroyed the last of my
innocence. Innocence was a luxury I couldn’t afford. The days sitting on that
couch seemed a lifetime ago now, like those events had happened to a different
person.

They had. I was a
different person back then. A brand new buck sergeant, learning to lead a new
fireteam on an alien planet, constantly scared of screwing up. Now I was a
colonel, with the blood of thousands of aliens on my hands, and a homeworld
that had been saved twice. And I was still constantly scared of screwing up. “Can
she do anything to help UNEF? The Burgermeister, I mean.”

“Nothing substantial
that I can see now, Joe. I am sorry. She is still the deputy administrator of
the planet; however the decisions are being made offworld. She has petitioned
the Ruhar federal government to include the humans on Paradise in the
evacuation, when the planet is formally returned to the Kristang. The
government has formally, and very strongly rejected that idea. Humans, the
government stated, are legally enemies of the Ruhar and therefore their fate is
not a problem for the Ruhar.”

“Shit,” I breathed
slowly. “Just when I thought things were going well.”

“Darn. Uh, then this
is a particularly bad time for me to mention that I have more bad news?”

Somehow I resisted
the temptation to pound the table. “Sure, Skippy, go ahead, why the hell not?”

“Ooookay, I sense
some irritation in your voice, Joe.”

“Ya think?”

Skippy ignored me. “The
stalled negotiations between the Ruhar and Kristang were recently disrupted, by
a Kristang battlegroup that jumped into orbit three weeks ago. One of their
ships were destroyed by the Ruhar, but the Kristang have now established space
supremacy around Paradise. Their ships have complete control of the skies.
After the brief initial battle, a truce has been arranged. The Kristang have
landed almost four thousand troops, with aircraft and heavy equipment. So far,
according to the data available, the Kristang have not directly engaged UNEF.
That is good, for UNEF is totally disarmed and defenseless. I must warn that
the data I have is fourteen days old at this point.”

“How the hell did
this happen? The last intel you provided, you said the Thuranin were pulling
away from Paradise; that they would not support future Kristang efforts to keep
the place!”

“That intelligence
was and still is accurate. The Thuranin do not see any value in a primarily
agricultural planet; therefore if the Kristang wish to pursue recapture of
Paradise, they will do so on their own. The Kristang Swift Arrow clan strongly
desires to retake the planet, so they have paid full price plus combat bonuses
for the Thuranin to provide transport to the Paradise system. Going to Paradise
was a one-way trip for the Swift Arrow battlegroup, Joe, they can’t afford to
have all their ships transported back home. The crews of those ships are very
committed, they know they can’t go home.”

That reminded me of
history I had learned in high school. When Hernan Cortes invaded Mexico, he scuttled
his ships behind him, so his men would have no alternative but to conquer the Aztec
Empire. When I read that in history class, I thought that Cortes was a reckless
fool. Now I considered that scuttling his ships may have been an act of
desperation. If the Kristang on Paradise faced a similar situation, they would
be very dangerous.

“This is bad news,” I
said with a sigh. “Do you have anything worse?”

“Nope, Joe,” he said
with clueless cheeriness in his voice. “That’s all the bad news for now.”

“Great. To avoid
rumors flying around,” I looked at the people in the galley, “send your data to
the entire crew. I need to talk with Chotek and Chang right away.”

As I was leaving the
cafeteria, I passed by Sergeant Adams, who was gulping her hot coffee and
getting ready to bolt out the door.

“Adams?”

“Yes sir?”

“Your aunt. How is
she?”

“Fine. She has been
in remission for seven years now. But she went through a lot of pain alone, and
she didn’t need to. We’re family. We support each other.”

I got her message. By
‘family’ she meant the Merry Band of Pirates, and UNEF. “Let’s hope there is
something useful we can do to support UNEF. To avoid exposure, we can’t even
send them a sympathy card,” I added bitterly.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I quickly called
together the senior military staff, plus Dr. Friedlander of the science team,
to meet with me and Chotek. And, of course, Skippy. Chotek had already heard
the bad news from Skippy before I was able to talk with him. I had anticipated
an argument with the UN bureaucrat. Instead, to my relief, he agreed we needed
to discuss the situation, and see if there was anything we could do to assist
UNEF. “Everyone has heard that a Kristang battlegroup currently has space
superiority above Paradise?” Everyone around the briefing table nodded. “The
Kristang being back in control there poses an unacceptable risk to UNEF on
Paradise, and we need to determine whether there is something we can do about
the situation. Something we can do,” I glanced over at Chotek, “without
exposing our presence. Skippy, let’s start with you. I want a way for us to
assist UNEF on Paradise.”

“Ugh,” Skippy
groaned. “Half the time when you’re talking, Joe, I have to guess what you are truly
trying to say through a jumble of blah blah blah while you ramble around the
point. It would help if you were more specific, Joe. Not only would it help me,
it would help your own murky thinking process if you could define exactly what
you want to accomplish.”

“What I want,” I said
very slowly to give me time to think, “is-” What did I want? I wanted Skippy to
magically beam every human on Paradise back to Earth, but he couldn’t do that.
I knew that, because I had already asked and he told me no. He also said he
hoped I had been joking about that. I was, sort of. Mostly. So, what did I
want?

I wanted UNEF to be
safe. Safer. Relatively safe. That meant, unfortunately, making sure the Ruhar
kept control of Paradise. The fragile cease-fire on Paradise was the only thing
keeping the Kristang from taking revenge on humans they considered traitors. If
the Kristang had unchallenged control of the planet, they could slaughter and
enslave humans with complete impunity. None of The Rules that governed combat
between the Maxolhx and Rindhalu factions protected client species from being
abused by their patrons.

Great. All I needed
to do was to somehow arrange events so that a powerful starfaring species
maintained control of a planet they didn’t want, in order for them to protect
humans who the Ruhar wished would just go away. And arrange events without the
Kristang, Ruhar or UNEF ever knowing we were ever there.

Easy.

Hey, we’d already saved
Earth twice, how difficult could this be?

Think, Joe, think, I
told myself.

Break the problem
down into manageable pieces, then solve each piece. Think of the problem as an
enemy, and defeat them in detail. The situation had been much more favorable to
us having a chance to influence events, before the Kristang battlegroup arrived
and established space superiority around Paradise. With the battlegroup in firm
control, the default situation was the Kristang merely needing to hang on,
until the Ruhar eventually grew tired, negotiated a settlement and evacuated
the planet. Before the Kristang battlegroup surprisingly jumped into orbit, the
Ruhar could have kept the planet or not, it was their choice. We needed to make
continued possession of Paradise the Ruhar’s choice again.

We needed to
eliminate that Kristang battlegroup.

“Here’s what I want;
a way to take out that Kristang battlegroup, in a way that the Kristang and the
Ruhar don’t know we are involved. Without that battlegroup, the Kristang will
not be in such a strong position to negotiate to get Paradise back. Without
that battlegroup, the Ruhar can drive a hard bargain on Paradise, and maybe the
Kristang won’t be able to offer a sweet enough deal. Maybe the Ruhar won’t be
tempted by the Kristang’s offer, and they keep the planet. Maybe there is even
something we can do behind the scenes to make the Ruhar decide to keep
Paradise. Without that battlegroup, UNEF isn’t in immediate danger of being
wiped out. As long as that battlegroup is in orbit, the Kristang have the upper
hand in negotiations, and the Ruhar are much more likely to surrender the
planet permanently. That’s, that is the simplest way to state the problem,
Skippy. No magical beaming UNEF back to Earth, just a simple military problem;
find a way to deal with that battlegroup.”

“Simple?” Skippy was
incredulous. “You think that is simple? Unbelievable. Over twenty Kristang warships,
not counting their support ships. Opposing them are a handful of Ruhar warships
and our pirate ship. We can’t really count the Flying Dutchman as a
combat asset, because we can’t openly engage in combat. Also, you need to
remember that our pirate ship is pretty beat up; we would have difficulty
directly engaging those Kristang cruisers, or even a pair of destroyers.”

“I didn’t say it
would be simple. We understand that we are facing a substantial combat force,
and we need to take them out of the equation-”

“When you say ‘deal
with’ or ‘take out’ that battlegroup,” Skippy interrupted, “you really mean
destroy those ships, right? Is that what you want? It would be super helpful if
you got straight to the point, Colonel
Joe.”

“Yes,” I suppressed a
sigh. Skippy was being extra difficult today. “I want to destroy all or a
substantial part of that battlegroup’s combat power. That means destroying
those ships, or at least knocking out their weapons. If we can reduce the
battlegroup’s combat power, if we can even the odds, then the Ruhar may decide
it is worth sending reinforcements. Right now, the Ruhar fleet doesn’t want to
commit the number of ships that would be required to take on the Kristang. The
Ruhar aren’t willing to commit that many ships to reestablish control of a
planet they are trying to negotiate away. If we can somehow even the odds so it
is tempting for the Ruhar to retake the planet, then they may come back, even
if it is only so they will have greater bargaining power in giving away the
planet.”

“Then we’ll be right
back to the problem of the Ruhar selling the planet out from under UNEF,” Chang
reminded me.

“Yes, but that is not
the immediate problem. We need to first deal with the Kristang having
unchallenged control over the planet; bring the situation back to equilibrium,”
I surprised myself for using that word. Where had I learned that? “If the odds
are back to even between the Ruhar and the Kristang, there might be something
we can do to influence the negotiations for transferring control of the planet.
Right now we don’t have that option.”

“Well then, Joe,”
Skippy mused, “you have finally framed the actual objective; destroying the
Kristang battlegroup. Now I can start thinking about how to do that.”

“Great. Is this where
you go silent, and your little beer can gets warm while you crunch like a
trillion variables?”

“Please, Joe, way
more than a trillion,” he snorted derisively.

“Understood. Can I
assume you can’t do something simple like use the Thuranin nanovirus to seize
control of those Kristang ships?”

“Duh? No, Joe, I
would have mentioned that right away. Nope, I can’t do that this time. Even my
awesome powers are only able to activate the nanovirus on three ships at one
time, because of the distances involved in space combat. Also, the Kristang
task force is wisely dispersed far around Paradise; I could only get a maximum
of four ships within range from any particular point in space. So using the
nanovirus is impractical. The reason that trick worked when we first arrived at
Earth is those two Kristang ships were relatively close to where we jumped in.
Here, if we jumped into low orbit, I could only activate the nanovirus on three
ships. The other seventeen warships would see what happened, and we would never
be able to use that trick again. The Thuranin would also lose the secrecy of
the nanovirus being embedded aboard Kristang ships, although I don’t think any
of us will be weeping for those little green pinheads. Remember, Joe, the
Thuranin designed the nanovirus for the purpose of taking control of Kristang
ships at the time they are attached to a Thuranin star carrier; it is a short
range technology. And in case you’re thinking we can jump in far away from
Paradise and sneak up on the Kristang in normal space, forget about it. When I
rebuilt the Dutchman, I wasn’t able
to bring our stealth capability back to full effectiveness, due to lack of the
proper raw materials. Even the Kristang’s crappy sensors would eventually
detect this large ship sneaking around in Paradise orbit.”

“Understood, Skippy,”
I said with a frown. The truth was, I had been hoping he could use the
nanovirus trick in some way. “And, again, thank you. You did a remarkable job
rebuilding the ship out of moon dust, the Merry Band of Pirates does appreciate
it more than we can say. All right, Mr. Chotek, at this point I think we let
Skippy consider our options, while my staff also tries to think of a strategy
to destroy all or most of the Kristang battlegroup around Paradise.”

Chotek nodded
agreement. “These military matters are your area of expertise, Colonel Bishop.
Mr. Skippy, I am sure your incredible brain power will develop a range of
innovative solutions for us to consider.”

“Working on it right
now,” Skippy acknowledged. “Although I don’t know why you can’t simply use the
projectors. That’s why I have difficulty understanding your concepts of
military strategy, you don’t take advantage of the easiest-”

“What projectors?”
Chang asked before I could open my mouth.

“The terawatt maser
cannon projectors buried beneath the surface of Paradise, duh,” Skippy
explained. “Damn, you monkeys are especially dense sometimes. Like a neutron
star, only not as smart. And more smelly.”

Chang and I shared a
dumfounded look. I was the first to speak. “There are giant maser cannons on
Paradise? Why haven’t the Ruhar used them against the Kristang?”

“Yes there are maser
cannons, big ones,” Skippy’s voice carried a mocking tone. “Cannons capable of
delivering over ten terawatts in a single shot. Cannons like that can burn
right through a starship’s shields, especially if the ship is close, like in
orbit. To answer your moronic question, the Ruhar can’t use the projectors
because they don’t know about them, duh. Man, do you even listen to yourself
talk sometimes? Hmm, maybe hearing your own stupidity is too painful for-”

“Skippy!” I shouted
in frustration. “I did not know about any projectors. Are these projectors
something UNEF built?”

“Huh? Wow. This is truly
a breakthrough. Joe, that may be the
dumbest thing you ever said. We should have a cake to celebrate the occasion. A
banana cake. UNEF constructing maser cannons? Ha! Out of what, mud and sticks?
No, UNEF was not involved, they also have no idea there are powerful planetary
defense cannons beneath their feet. The Kristang installed those projectors,
Joe. And what do you mean you didn’t know about them? I told you all about it like
a long time- Hmm. I’m sure I did. Did I? Oh, boy,” his voice trailed off. “I’m
sure that I told somebody. Or maybe
not. Anyway, you know about it now. So, we’re good. Yup. Goodness all around.”

While Chang buried
his head in his hands, I mimed choking something. “Skippy, if you had a neck,
I’d choke you. How can you forget to tell us something that important?”

“Hey, there is a
ginormous amount of data rattling around in my brain, Joe, I can’t keep track
of everything you monkeys don’t know,” he grumbled. “Everything you don’t know wouldn’t fit inside the
freakin’ galaxy.”

Chotek took a deep
breath. “Colonel Bishop, I am beginning to see the difficulties you have in
working with our super-smart alien friend.”

“Oh, shut up, Count
Chocula,” Skippy said defensively. “Anywho, Joe, you know now.”

“Details, Skippy,” I
said quietly, “we could use some details. What you said doesn’t make sense. If
the Kristang installed those projectors, how are we supposed to use them? Any
why didn’t the Kristang used them against the Ruhar ships in orbit?”

“And I would like to
know,” Chang asked, “how could the Ruhar not know about these weapons? The
Ruhar have occupied this planet for-”

“Ugh!” Skippy
groaned. “Damn it! If you will stop pestering me with ignorant questions, I
will attempt to smack some knowledge on you. I’m not confident that will be
successful, but I am willing to give it my best shot.”

“We would appreciate
being smacked down upon, Oh Great One,” I said sarcastically.

“Assuming that was
not an attempt at sarcasm, Joe, here is the story. The Kristang clan that
originally settled this planet installed the projectors, to protect their
assets, mostly from other Kristang clans. When that original Black Tree clan lost
the planet to the Ruhar, they put the projectors into a dormant mode, and did
not tell any other clans about the projectors in case the Black Tree clan has
an opportunity to come back. They didn’t want their own maser cannons being
used against them.”

I had to shake my
head to make sure I wasn’t having a bad dream. “These projectors have been
buried beneath the surface all this time? Why didn’t the Black Tree use their
maser cannons to stop the Ruhar from taking Paradise away from them in the first
place?”

“Again with the
stupid questions, Joe,” Skippy chided me. “The reason the Black Tree lost
Paradise was because the Kristang and Thuranin were defeated in a major fleet
engagement elsewhere in the sector. By the time a Ruhar task force first jumped
into the skies above Paradise, the fighting was over. The Black Tree clan
handing over Paradise was a mere formality at that point; there was no space
combat near the Paradise system. So, they gave up the planet meekly, while
keeping their aces in the hole concealed. The Black Trees originally came to
Paradise in order to excavate the remains of a crashed Elder ship, and by the
time the Ruhar arrived, the Black Trees were fairly certain they had already
taken away all the valuable artifacts. Ha! They didn’t know anything about me!
Stupid lizards. Serves them right.”

He paused. “Wow. I’m
not going to be interrupted with moronic questions? Amazing. So, to respond to
your other inquiries, neither the current Kristang Swift Arrow clan nor the
Ruhar know anything about the projectors. Neither of them even suspect. At the
time that the Ruhar first arrived there, the Kristang population was less than
ten thousand, and the Black Tree’s presence there was already in the process of
winding down. The Ruhar never thought the Black Trees would go through the
expense of constructing antiship defenses on such an unimportant planet.”

“Why did they?”
Chotek asked.

“Because,” Skippy
explained without pausing for an insult, “almost the first item the Black Tree
found here was a functional Elder power tap; that is one of the most valuable
items in the entire galaxy. As soon as they found that, they hoped they would
find others, so they installed projectors to protect their investment. Of
course, they never told the Swift Arrows or any other clans. The projectors are
buried deeply, roughly one hundred meters, and each is surrounded by a special
type of stealth field. Any sensor scans by the Kristang or Ruhar would find
only rock or whatever material surrounds the projectors. The projectors are
also located in areas that are unsuited to agriculture; the Black Trees thought
ahead far enough to consider another group may someday build farms and villages
on Paradise. They didn’t want someone to accidently discover a projector by
digging a foundation or a well.”

For a minute, you
could have heard a pin drop around the conference room, while we all considered
the enormity of what Skippy had revealed. Sergeant Adams, ever focused on
practical issues, broke the silence. “Skippster,” she addressed him by the
nickname only she could get away with, “you said we could use the projectors.
Is this something simple that you can hook up remotely, from the Dutchman?”

“Aha! Finally, an
intelligent question” Skippy sounded pleased. “You could learn from Sergeant
Adams, Joe. You have grown substantially dumber since putting those Colonel’s
eagles on your uniform. No, Sarge Marge,” Skippy said teasingly, using the
nickname that only he could get away with. “Before the Black Trees left the
planet, they put the projectors into dormancy, anticipating it might be
hundreds or even a thousand years before the Black Trees might return. They
disconnected each projector from its power source, and from the control module,
specifically so an enemy could not remotely activate a projector. Restoring
projectors to function will require someone to physically reestablish
connections. Once the connections are established, I can program their
targeting sensors through something as simple as a zPhone network.”

“We will need to go
down to the surface,” Adams concluded.

Chotek held up a
hand. “Sergeant, sending a party to the surface of Paradise, presumably to
excavate these projectors, would pose a substantial risk of exposure to us.
That is something I cannot authorize,” he shook his head, but he didn’t look us
in the eyes when he said that.

“Sir,” I said with a
warning look at Adams, whose jaw was already clenching. “I believe there is an
alternative that does not pose a risk of exposure to us. Or, it poses a minimal,
very manageable risk. We do not need to send a party to the surface; UNEF is
already there. They can reactivate the projectors for us. All we need to do is
determine a method for informing them about the projectors, and provide
instructions for bringing them back online.”

Chotek frowned. “I do
not understand why we could not simply inform the Ruhar about the projectors,
and let them deal with the Kristang. Surely, between the projectors and their
remaining ships, the Ruhar here would regain the upper hand.”

“Whoa! That is a
terrible, terribly awful idea there, Chocula,” Skippy said scoffingly. “The
Ruhar’s communications have been partially compromised by the Kristang. We
can’t tell the hamsters, because that poses too much risk of the Swift Arrow
Kristang learning the secret.”

“I also think, sir,
that we can’t trust the Ruhar to deliver the outcome we desire,” I used big buzzwords
that Chotek was used to. “The Ruhar might merely reactivate the projectors and
use them to threaten the Kristang, to strengthen their hand in negotiations to
hand the planet to the Kristang. What we need, sir, is a shooting war between
the Ruhar and the Kristang here. If a small UNEF group could reactivate
projectors, and we use them to destroy most of the Swift Arrow’s battlegroup,
that will force the Ruhar to take military action. It would change the balance
of power, sir.”

“Then we might be
right back to the situation before the Swift Arrow task force arrived, Colonel,”
Chotek responded. “With the Ruhar in a strong position to negotiate, but still
in the process of negotiating the planet away beneath UNEF.”

“That is possible,
sir,” I explained patiently. “The way I look at it, with the Swift Arrow battlegroup
in control of the skies, we have no options. Without that battlegroup, we may be
able to affect the outcome.”

“Affect it how?”
Chotek asked. “We still have the constraint of avoiding exposure.”

“Avoiding exposure is
paramount,” I agreed. “Right now, I don’t know how we may be able to assist
UNEF. But five minutes ago, we didn’t know there was a way for us to destroy a
Kristang battlegroup,” I pointed out. “One thing I have learned out here is,
almost anything is possible. We will have plenty of time to develop ideas
before the situation on Paradise restabilizes, hopefully with the Ruhar firmly back
in control.”

Our friendly local UN
bureaucrat pursed his lips in thought. “Before any action is taken, Colonel, I will
need to see a detailed plan. We will have to assess the risks. To be clear,” he
stopped me before I could respond. “We have to weigh the risk of exposure,” he
ticked the risks off on his fingers. “The risk to our primary objective. And,
Colonel, the risk that our operation may fail, and the blowback to our people
on Paradise makes the situation worse for them.”

“Understood,” I said,
and I actually fully agreed with him. If either the Ruhar or Kristang learned
that human troops were secretly traveling around Paradise reactivating maser
cannons, the impact to UNEF could be severe. And once those cannons fired, I
don’t see how the Ruhar could fail to figure out that humans had forced them
into a shooting war. After that, the humans there may be in as much danger from
the Ruhar as from the Kristang. “Skippy, please provide a briefing packet about
the projectors; capabilities, operational characteristics, the procedure for
reactivating them, etc. Distribute the data to the entire crew including the
science team; we need everyone involved in the planning. Unit leaders,” I
addressed the SpecOps team commanders but especially Major Smythe, “read the
briefing packet and put your thinking caps on. We have nine days until we will
be within jump range of the Paradise system, and we still need to stay here for
a while. We can’t leave this relay station until Skippy is satisfied his
submind is properly installed and operating properly. And we need to complete
repairs to the exterior of the station, to maintain our ruse. Everyone, thank
you, and- Wait. Skippy, what else have you not told us?”

“Ugh. Since I don’t
know what it is that you don’t know; the scope of your ignorance, I can’t guess
what I haven’t told you. There is nothing anywhere near as important as secret
maser cannons, I’m sure of that.”

“Good.” Skippy’s
words had not reassured me. “If you think of anything else, call me immediately?”

“I’d prefer to wait
until you’re in the bathroom like usual, but for this I can break with
tradition, Joe.”

Paradise

Flight Leader Second
Class Saily Chernandagren climbed into her two seater Dobreh fighter, the type
of aircraft that humans had derisively named ‘Chicken’. On the home planet of
the Ruhar, a Dobreh was a fierce bird of prey; and animal to be feared in the
air. Saily had not understood why the humans had renamed the aircraft after a
tame, domesticated bird, other than the fact that humans were strange and no
Ruhar could truly understand such primitive creatures. As Saily attached her
oxygen mask, she pressed a button and the soft surface of the mask flowed
around her nose and mouth, forming a secure seal even over the soft Ruhar fur
that covered her face. Human male pilots, she knew, had to scrape the fur off
their faces every morning in order to get a good seal on an oxygen mask. Ruhar
males grew hair on their faces also, but it was a soft, downy fur rather than
the bushy tangle that humans could grow.

Humans were strange
creatures, Saily thought as she draped her arms over each side of the cockpit
to show the ground crew that she was not yet touching any of the controls.
Strange, and in many ways, to be pitied. They had barely achieved a rudimentary
form of spaceflight when they were forced into the war by the wormhole shift.
Then they were brought out to the stars as expendable ground troops by their
‘allies’ the Kristang. Saily had been born and raised on Gehtanu, the world
called ‘Paradise’ by the humans. Along with all Ruhar, she had resented human
soldiers landing on her planet and forcing her people off the world that was
their home. She had hated the humans, even after Saily’s commanding officer
noted that having humans handle the evacuation was far better than the task
being managed by the cruel and untrustworthy Kristang. Some of the humans could
say nasty things, but most of them had been professional, simply eager to do
their jobs and go home as quickly as possible. The human leadership had been
scrupulous about adhering to the code of conduct established between the Ruhar
and Kristang for the evacuation. There had been remarkably few incidents of
violence directed at Ruhar civilians by humans. Remarkable indeed, because
humans believed the Ruhar had attacked their home world in order to enslave and
destroy humanity. If the situation had been reversed, Saily did not know
whether she would have been able to restrain herself.

Since the humans had
first landed, Saily had many opportunities to meet humans and even to spend
extensive time with them. Human pilots had arrived on Gehtanu with an average
of one hundred twenty hours of flight training in Ruhar aircraft; having been
given a rush course at some interim staging base. For pilots who would fly the
high-performance Dobreh gunships, most of them had less than twenty hours in
that type. Humans had arrived in a potential combat zone with woefully
inadequate flying experience, and they knew it. The human commander had quickly
reached an agreement with the Ruhar leadership on Gehtanu for Ruhar pilots to
continue the training of human pilots. That agreement had been mutually
beneficial; the humans gained valuable experience from experts, and the Ruhar
pilots kept their own skills from growing rusty. Keeping their flying skills
fresh had proved useful when the Ruhar fleet came back to take control of the
planet again. Now that a Kristang battlegroup was in orbit and the Kristang had
landed combat aircraft and ground troops, Saily was especially grateful that
her connection with the high-performance Dobreh was still instinctive.

One of the human pilots
she had trained was still at the airbase, now on her ground crew. He was Lieutenant
Derek Bonsu of the American Army. Lieutenant was roughly equivalent to the
Ruhar rank of Flier First Class; two steps below Saily’s own rank. The fact
that Derek, as she called him, was an A-mer-i-can seemed to be important to him
but meaningless to Saily or any other Ruhar. The Ruhar species had a half dozen
major cultural groups with slightly different languages, but their military was
one cohesive unit. The idea that soldiers who fought side by side could owe
allegiance to different governments was odd to the Ruhar. Indeed, it seemed
similar to the clan culture of the Kristang. With the Kristang expending more
time, effort and passion fighting among themselves than fighting their mutual
enemies, the Ruhar had been able to defeat them in almost every major
engagement of their endless war, even though the Kristang economy and culture
was almost entirely dedicated to supporting the war.

Another thing the
Kristang found odd about humans was the different colors of their skin. In this
regard, humans were also more similar to the Kristang, whose scales had many
hues. Derek Bonsu’s own skin was dark; he had once explained with pride that
his ancestors came from a place called ‘Africa’, which again meant nothing to
Saily. All Ruhar had the same pinkish-beige skin tone; it was their fur color
that varied. Saily’s own fur was white with patches of light brown, and fur
color was neither a fashion choice nor a cultural marker for the Ruhar. She
kept the fur on her head long; for flying or athletic activities she tied her
fur back in what humans called a short ‘ponytail’.

The ground crew leader
signaled that Saily could close her canopy and turn on the master power switch,
which she did. Her Weapon Systems Officer in the back seat announced that all
of the ship’s systems were ready for engine start, and she confirmed from her
own instruments. Before signaling the crew chief that she was ready for engine
start, she turned in her seat to look back along both sides of the aircraft.

On the left side was Lt.
Derek Bonsu with the external power cart. Saily liked Derek, although he had
come to Gehtanu as the enemy. Derek had an infectious grin and never
complained, even when eating bland nutrient mush two times a day. On the rare
occasions when he received a ‘care package’ of real human food from Lemuria, he
treated every tomato or loaf of bread as if it were the most precious gift in
the universe. Even when the Kristang battlegroup jumped in and took back
control of the planet, Bonsu had not lost his good natured grin for a moment.
The planet had changed management several times already, Bonsu had said about
the current Kristang mastery of the skies. Next week, the Ruhar fleet might get
bored elsewhere in the sector and come to Gehtanu to chase the Kristang away.
Bonsu said no one knew what the future held, so why waste energy worrying about
what you couldn’t control?

Along with the sunny
disposition that made him popular even among Ruhar who did not like humans,
Bonsu had other qualities. He had made a serious effort right from the start to
learn the Ruhar common language. It helped his popularity that the first words
he learned were common swear words, and soon he was cursing fluently in Ruhar.
Saily noticed that now, whenever a wrench slipped and Bonsu bashed his
knuckles, he cursed in Ruhar without thinking about it.

But the ultimate reason
Derek Bonsu was working at a Ruhar airbase, instead of farming in Lemuria with
his fellow humans, was that he loved flying. When the Ruhar fleet had jumped in
and firmly established control of the planet, their United Nations
Expeditionary Force Headquarters had quickly ordered all units to surrender;
the alternative being for human forces to be pounded from orbit by masers and
railguns. Most human pilots had flown to the nearest airbase and abandoned
their ships immediately. Some pilots had set their aircraft down in remote
areas, near clusters of human ground troops. Some ‘Chicken’ crews had even
spitefully ejected from their ships, causing complete loss of the aircraft.

Lt. Derek Bonsu had
calmly flown his Dobreh back to its home base, bringing it down in front of his
designated hangar. Bonsu had followed the guidebook’s recommended procedure for
engine shutdown; allowing the engines to run at idle for three minutes to cool
before cutting power. He and his Weapon Systems Officer has then refueled and
secured the aircraft, placing covers over the intakes and hanging red tags from
items that needed to be checked during preflight inspection. He had properly
listed minor issues in the aircraft’s official squawk log; noting that the nose
landing gear door was slow to open and that the right engine surged for a few
seconds when throttling above 80% power. Lastly, Bonsu had vacuumed out the
cockpit and wiped down the display screens. That particular Dobreh became
Saily’s assigned aircraft, and she appreciated the care Bonsu had taken with
her aircraft. Such good care that ‘her’ Dobreh was the first to return to
flight status when the Ruhar had reoccupied the airbase.

All those characteristics
were reasons why Lt. Derek Bonsu had been one of only four humans invited to
remain at the airbase as liaisons with the Ruhar. None of the four humans were
allowed to fly regularly, except for brief proficiency check flights every two
months. Otherwise, the humans worked alongside Ruhar aircraft maintenance
crews. And the humans took every minute of flight simulator time they could
get, even waking up in the early hours of the morning to avoid taking precious
simulator time away from Ruhar pilots. At first, the maintenance crews had
assigned the four humans only humiliating tasks such as keeping the hangar
floors clean and other menial work. Even now that the humans had earned the
respect of the base personnel, a Ruhar was required to inspect and sign off
every time a human touched an aircraft.

Bonsu removed the
external power cable, closed the access door, checked that it was secure, and
held up an index finger which was the Ruhar equivalent of a human thumbs up
sign. Saily acknowledged him with a thumbs up, then Bonsu retreated with the
power cable, retracting it into the cart. When the cart was safely out of the
way, the Ruhar crew chief made a gesture of twirling an index finger in the
air; the signal to start the engines.

Derek Bonsu stood in his
designated position behind the power cart, helmet on and hearing protection
engaged, as he watched Saily run up the Dobreh’s power, then take off smoothly.
Derek had one hand on a fire extinguisher clipped to the side of the power
cart, ready in case anything went wrong. Nothing would go wrong; all the pilots
were skilled and diligent and the aircraft were well maintained. The only
potential problem Derek could foresee was that their supply of spare parts and
consumable items was running low. The whole maintenance crew was concerned
about the parts issue, and other airbases on Gehtanu reported having the same
problem. Under the terms of the cease fire agreement, the Kristang battlegroup
allowed the Ruhar to bring in supply ships, but the Ruhar government had been
strangely stingy about shipping in anything other than medical supplies. Even
before the Kristang battlegroup occupied the sky, Derek had heard rumors that
the Ruhar federal government was considering negotiating away Gehtanu in
exchange for more valuable territory. Some Ruhar at the airbase said those
negotiations were the reason why they weren’t getting critical spare parts; the
government didn’t plan on Ruhar being on Gehtanu long-term.

Derek didn’t know what to
think about such rumors, and he didn’t think rumors mattered much anyway. As he
watched Saily’s aircraft join up with three others and race toward the eastern
horizon, there was a brief flicker of light above them. It was sunlight
glinting off a Kristang warship in orbit. While the Kristang battlegroup was in
orbit, the willingness of the Ruhar federal government to negotiate did not
matter. One way or the other, the Kristang were going to take back control of
the planet, and Derek Bonsu was going to be in as much trouble as all the other
humans. More trouble, perhaps, because he had actively helped the Ruhar
military.

Derek would worry about
that later, when he had to. What he most cared about now was that his next
proficiency check flight in a Dobreh was not for another six weeks, and he did
not know how he could stand to wait that long to get back into the sky. Seeing
Saily soaring away in the Dobreh that he used to fly caused a physical pang of
pain in his stomach.

He looked again at the
sky, seeking another flicker of light from a ship in the Kristang battlegroup.
If the lizards retained control of Paradise, Derek knew he would never fly
again. If he lived at all.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Flying
Dutchman

We jumped the Flying Dutchman into the far outskirts
of the Paradise system, an area sparely populated by chunks of dead-cold dirty
balls of ice and rock. From that distance, the star that shone on Paradise was
a dim, fuzzy dot; a star rather than a sun. Skippy reported we had emerged in a
region with an ordinary density of hydrogen atoms, it was nothing to write home
about.

From our position,
Paradise was five hours away, so the sensor data we had to work with was that
old. In four hours, we would jump again, as the gamma ray burst of our jump in
would be visible from Paradise and we didn’t want anyone coming out to
investigate. We performed six jumps, with the last coming in barely above the
cloud tops on the far side of the system’s only gas giant. By then, Skippy had
determined that the only ships in the area were the Kristang in orbit around
Paradise, and a handful of Ruhar ships were several lightminutes away from the
planet.

By listening to
message traffic both on the planet and between ships, Skippy was able to
determine the situation had not changed significantly from what he had learned
at the data relay station. The Kristang had over twenty warships, plus support
ships, in orbit and complete supremacy in the space around Paradise. The
remnants of the Ruhar defense task force were licking their wounds. A truce had
been offered by the Kristang commander and accepted by the Ruhar, there had not
been any violations of the cease-fire, which surprised me. The Kristang had
landed thousands of troops and heavy equipment including aircraft, in a
relatively uninhabited area of the northern continent. Humans isolated on
Lemuria so far had been ignored by both sides, although Skippy had intercepted
messages from the Kristang warning UNEF to cease any and all cooperation with
the Ruhar. And the Ruhar had removed or disabled farming equipment they had
provided to UNEF. Without any assistance from the Ruhar, humans were reduced to
plowing fields behind hamvees, and by dragging plows behind teams of soldiers.
UNEF appeared to be on the verge of a split between those who favored loyalty
to the Kristang and those who wished to be neutral or align with the Ruhar.
Discipline was breaking down as UNEF became scattered groups of farm villages
rather than a military force. Negotiations were still ongoing between the Ruhar
and the Kristang, although the Kristang now had the upper hand and were pushing
the Ruhar to finish the details quickly. According to message traffic between
the Ruhar commodore and the planetary government, the Ruhar Navy had
contingency plans to send a major battlegroup to Paradise, but the commodore
advised that was highly unlikely. The Jeraptha were concentrating on consolidating
spectacular gains from their recent, highly successful offensive, and did not
want to divert a substantial force for a planet their client species wanted to
get rid of.

Humans on Paradise,
in short, were totally screwed, unless we could do something to help them.
Without anyone ever knowing that we helped. Or that we even existed.

No problem, right?

“Joe, that is all the
information I can get from here,” Skippy complained, sounding frustrated. “We
need to go to Paradise. All I can do from so far away out here is decrypt
signal traffic that leaks.” Most of the top secret message traffic that we
needed was sent by tightbeam laserlink transmission, and Skippy could only pick
up those messages from faint scatter when the laser beam hit the atmosphere or
dust particles in orbit. It was a true Skippy miracle that he was able to
intercept any messages at all, and I gave him props for it.

“I know, Skippy. I’ll
talk to Chocula about it.”

Paradise

General Marcellus had to
break the bad news to his boss; he was able to get five minutes on General
Nivelle’s calendar between meetings. As the acting UNEF chief of intelligence,
it was Marcellus’ job to know everything that was happening on Paradise. It was
also his job to keep his boss informed of anything important. Marcellus didn’t
bother to sit down; hopefully the discussion wouldn’t last long. “Sir, there
was another incident last night. A British woman was assaulted.”

“Not again,” Nivelle
sighed heavily. “That’s the second time this week. Where? What happened?”

“Near the village of
Churchill. She was, assaulted,” he used a polite term.

“Who did it?” Nivelle
asked angrily. Marcellus could see a vein throbbing in the French general’s
forehead.

“It appears to have been
men in her own unit, Sir.”

“Sacre bleu.”

“Other soldiers in the
same village heard her screams, and dealt with the situation before she could
be seriously harmed,” Marcellus reported. Although knowing that men in her own
unit had assaulted her, had to have caused serious emotional and psychological
damage.

Violence within the
Expeditionary Force, while not widespread, was increasing. There were fights
simply because people were bored and working too hard and morale was low, there
were fights over food, and there were sexual assaults. To protect against the
latter, UNEF HQ had set up ‘Safe Villages’ that only allowed women. That
initiative had been a bad idea right from the start. It made the women of UNEF
feel like second-class citizens, it made them question whether they could trust
the men they served with. And as women who had been victims of violence or
simply feared assault moved to the Safe Villages, the women outside such
designated zones felt more and more isolated and vulnerable. The truth was, no
one at UNEF HQ knew how to deal with the issue of sexual assault. Or how to
deal with many, if not most, of the critical problems that faced the force
every day. Not knowing whether the Ruhar or the Kristang would control the
planet long-term prevented UNEF HQ from effectively making future plans. With
the military situation still very much in flux, the force commanders
understandably did not know what to do.

General Marcellus had
decided to deal with problems one day at a time. “There is a complication we
need to address, General Nivelle. The men who broke up the assault killed the
three attackers. However, it looks as if the attackers were killed some time
after the assault, not in the process of stopping the attack.”

“How long after?”

“One, perhaps two hours,”
Marcellus reported.

Nivelle’s face was grim. “General
Marcellus, I want there to be a swift investigation of this assault. I do not
think, however, that it is necessary for there to be a deep inquiry into the
subsequent events. Agreed?”

“Agreed, Sir.”

Flying
Dutchman

Hans Chotek approved
us going to Paradise, only because Skippy was going to bring one end of a
microwormhole with us in the shuttle, so we could be in constant, instantaneous
communication. “Joe, I can tell you,” Skippy said privately, “that
microwormholes can be rather complicated, delicate things, and they can
suddenly shut down for no reason. If you know what I mean.”

I figured I would
keep that in my back pocket, for use in an emergency. When I say ‘us’ going to
Paradise, I mean Skippy and me. No way was I going to miss out on this mission,
it was way too important. I needed to be right there, seeing what was going on,
making decisions in real time. To my surprise, Chotek quickly agreed, as long
as all major decisions were reviewed by him. That left me suspicious that he
just wanted me off the ship, but by then I was past caring.

Going on the mission
would be me, Skippy, Adams and Captain Desai as our pilot. Just the four of us;
three humans and a beer can, in one of our smaller type of dropships. We would
not be bringing along any of the SpecOps troops, and on that issue Chotek and I
agreed, although for different reasons. My reasoning was that if a situation
required combat troops, we were in way over our heads and needed to get away
from Paradise. Chotek’s reasoning was that if I had SpecOps troops on Paradise
with me, I would be tempted to use them in some risky mission. He didn’t trust
my judgement. That is why UNEF Command sent him to the stars with us, so he was
only doing his job. Anyway, it worked out well for both of us.

Adams came along on
the mission, I forget who suggested her first; me or Chotek. Count Chocula
probably figured that Adams’ level-headed practical nature would keep me out of
trouble. My reason for including her was that she had been on Paradise, that
she had been with the Merry Band of Pirates since the beginning, and she knew
me and knew how I think. Also, I wanted someone to talk with because we might
be on Paradise for a while.

During the flight
down to Paradise, Captain Desai would fly the dropship in a maximum stealth
flight profile. Since I was technically qualified to fly that type of dropship,
my job was to sit in the copilot seat. Skippy joked that Adams’ job would be to
shoot me if I tried to touch any of the controls.

I hoped that Skippy
was joking about that.

The other reason our
mission included only three humans and a beer can, was that we flew down to
Paradise in one of our smaller dropships. Even the ‘small’ Thuranin dropship
was the size of a Boeing 767, and it could accommodate sixteen people after we
tore out the original Thuranin seats and replaced them with something that
could fit a human. Sixteen people could fit; they couldn’t be comfortable. In
order to get to Paradise, we had to fly most of the way there in the dropship;
we couldn’t risk the Flying Dutchman jumping in anywhere close to
the planet. That meant the travel time after leaving the Dutchman was eight days. Eight days in a dropship with two other
people, and one bathroom that was sized for little green men.

We jumped out of the
star system entirely, and then spent nearly an hour with the star carrier
accelerating to the proper velocity and direction. Then we jumped the Dutchman back in still far away from
Paradise, our dropship quickly launched and the Dutchman was away again, accelerating at maximum thrust in normal
space. Our pirate ship could not jump again, because that would break the
microwormhole we relied on for communications. The speed boost we’d gotten from
the ship meant that our dropship didn’t need to use any fuel to get to
Paradise, only to slow down once we got there. Our dropship was wrapped in a
stealth field, plus Skippy showed us a new trick wherein he warped spacetime
between us and the planet, which helped mask the energy of the dropship’s
engines as we decelerated before hitting the atmosphere. One reason we needed
to preserve fuel is that our entry could not be the usual burning streak
through the atmosphere of most descents; we needed our presence to be secret.
Skippy was of course able to mask the dropship from the sensors of both Ruhar
and Kristang, but anyone simply looking out a viewport of a ship would see the
superheated light of us plunging down through the atmosphere. Our stealth field
was on and operating perfectly, as perfectly as it could in an atmosphere. So
we came in slow, using engine power to slow down and then lower us gradually;
that burned up a whole lot of fuel.

It worked, plus we
came in at night, over the ocean far to the west of any inhabited land, and
there was heavy cloud cover from twelve kilometers almost all the way to the
deck. Almost skimming the wave tops, and flying subsonic so the turbulence of
our passage through the air could not be detected, we came over land. Skippy
selected a spot in the mountains near the equator, the lush rainforest jungle
there provided good cover to supplement the stealth field, and the location was
not under any regular flight paths. The first thing I did after we landed was
go behind a tree and pee, without having to kneel and bump my head in the tiny
Thuranin bathroom of the dropship. Then we set up a tent; whoever was on duty
could be in the tent sheltered from the daily rain showers, while we would use
the climate-controlled dropship for sleeping, cooking and eating.

“It’s strange to be
back here,” Adams said, staring off into the distance after we got the tent set
up.

“Yeah,” I agreed. It
was strange to be back. When I closed my eyes, the scent of the tropics was
exactly the same as what I had experienced when I was stationed at the
Launcher. That made sense; we were only 500 kilometers from the Launcher base
complex. For a moment, I just stood there and let the memories wash over me.

Adams sighed
wistfully. “We both have a lot of people we know on Paradise, and we can’t
contact any of them. I feel like I went back for my high school reunion, but
I’m hiding in the bushes, looking through the window.”

“Sergeant, I feel the
same way. We can’t contact anyone, in any way that might reveal our presence
here.” I said that to remind myself more than her. What would I do if I learned
that someone I knew was in trouble, and I could help? I couldn’t help, period.
We were back on Paradise for a specific mission, and after that mission was
complete, we were leaving without any of our old friends knowing we had ever been
there. That sucked, but, so did the whole situation for UNEF. If our mission
was successful, we could help improve things for UNEF.

Then I called Chotek
to check in, and get his approval for the next phase of the operation.

Skippy began
marauding through computer systems of the Ruhar and the Kristang even before we
landed, and as I finished setting up the tent, Adams told me Skippy had found
important information.

“First, of course,
both sides detected the Dutchman
jumping in and then not jumping out again. Neither side has been able to
identify the type of ship, and speculation is running that it is a rival
Kristang clan monitoring the situation on Paradise, in case there is an
opportunity to screw the Swift Arrow clan out of the planet. Anyway, the good
news is that no one suspects our pirate ship is involved, and no one is
interested in chasing after it. They also have no idea we landed. As to what
has been going on here, well, this is odd,” Skippy reported. “As you requested,
Joe, I checked on people you know first. You will be happy to hear that
everyone on your list is alive and well. It was a short list, still, every one
of them have survived. What is odd is that they all are or were being held by
the Ruhar.”

“What? Why?”

“I am sure you will
be surprised to learn that at one particular facility are Emily Perkins, Shauna
Jarrett, Dave Czajka and Jesse Colter.”

“Shauna is with Cornpone and Ski?” He was correct, I was completely
surprised by that. “Emily Perkins? Do you mean Major Perkins, the intel officer?”
Her first name had never come up in conversation. But then, our conversations
had been limited to me passing on very bad news from the Burgermeister.

“Correct, Major Emily
Perkins,” Skippy confirmed. “The four of them have been held by the Ruhar for
months. At another facility were Sergeant Greg Koch and the three members of
the fireteam you lead at the village of Teskor; Baker, Chen and Sanchez. Also with
them are three people who were with you on the day that the Ruhar attacked Fort
Arrow; Amaro, Pope and Rogen.”

“I don’t understand.
Why is Sergeant Koch with them? And what is Shauna doing with Dave and Jesse?”

“The grouping of
people was random, according to records of the Ruhar. They picked people up
wherever they were, and brought them to the closest Ruhar military base.”

“Picked them up why?”

“The Ruhar
interrogated everyone who knew you personally on Paradise, Joe. They know that
you broke out of prison and flew away in a stolen Dodo. It is not surprising
that the Ruhar are intensely curious about how you managed to do that. It would
be very surprising if the Ruhar had not
investigated the incident. The first thing they did was interrogate all the
people at Major Simms’ logistics base. After that proved fruitless, they moved
on to other potential sources. No one told the Ruhar anything, because no one
on Paradise knows anything. The Ruhar have concluded that the humans they
interrogated likely do not have any useful information. Sergeant Koch and his
group were released already; they are on a train bound for Lemuria now. Major
Perkins and the other three were officially released three days ago; they are
currently waiting for transportation. A train will be stopping for them
tomorrow morning.”

“Were they treated
well by the Ruhar?” I asked anxiously.

“Yes, Joe. Except for
a bland diet, they were not harmed in any way. The Ruhar kept them safer than
they would have been on Lemuria. Your old friend the Burgermeister took a
personal interest in them.”

“She is still here?
As the deputy, uh, administrator or something?”

“Indeed she is. Joe,
she knows the Ruhar government is negotiating to give the planet back to the
Kristang. She is personally opposed to the idea; because she sees it as a
betrayal of the native population who have built homes and lives there. She is
also powerless to do much about it, other than to scold her government for
selling out their own people. Based on conversations she had with the Ruhar
Commodore who commands the small task force here, she does appreciate why the
Ruhar fleet does not want the responsibility of defending such a relatively
isolated and unimportant planet.”

“Good. She always was
straight with me. They’re going to be on a train, huh? That complicates things.
I want to give our message about the projectors to Czajka and Colter.” Sergeant
Koch was with too many people who I didn’t know as well. “We served in combat
together. I know them, and I trust them.”

“That’s no good,
sir,” Adams declared. “You said that whoever we contact can’t ever know that
you are involved. Anyone else but you would logically contact Major Perkins
first. She’s an officer, and an intel expert. The other three may be your
friends, but they are low-ranking soldiers, they wouldn’t be the first to receive
an important communication like this. The only reason someone would contact
Czajka or Colter instead of Perkins, would be a personal relationship with
those two. They know that you, me, Chang and Desai survived the hit on our
jail, and they know the four of us flew away in a stolen Dodo. We can’t do
anything that may make them guess that any of us are involved. We need to
contact Perkins first.”

“Yeah, Joe, what do
you think of that?” Skippy asked gleefully. “You’re not so smart after all,
huh? Sarge Marge is right; this message needs to come from an unnamed source.”

“Skippy, come on, we
can’t do the trick again where we pretend you are some top secret UNEF cyber
unit. Perkins knows that there aren’t any humans on Paradise with the
technology-”

“Not humans.” Adams
said. “Ruhar. We hint to Perkins that the source of the message about hidden
projectors is a group of native Ruhar. Ruhar who know their government is
pulling the rug out from under them, and they can’t go to their own military
for action. The natives want to knock out that Kristang battlegroup, so they
get a group of humans to do it for them. That way, if the operation goes south,
they can deny the whole thing.”

I was stunned. “Holy
shit, Adams, that is a genius idea. How did you think of that?”

She cocked her head
at me. “I didn’t, it’s an old idea. What do you do if you’re weak and you want
to defeat a superior force?”

That was an easy one,
I didn’t even need to consult the Army field manual. “You engage in guerilla
warfare.”

“That, or you do it
the easy way,” Adams explained. “You get a bunch of lobbyists and celebrities
to persuade our government to send in the US Army to do the fighting for you.”

“Ain’t that the
truth,” I offered Adams a fist bump and she took it. “That is a good idea,
Perkins will certainly be ready to believe it. She was in Nigeria, and a couple
other trouble spots before that. Damn,” I said admiringly, “that is a good
idea, Sergeant. Of course the native Ruhar would want to disrupt negotiations,
and surely some rumors have gotten out. Agreed, we contact Major Perkins.” I
thought for a moment what the message should say. “Hmm,” I bit my lip. “I can
compose a message, but I need to make sure I don’t write it in language that
people will recognize as mine.”

“No problem Joe,”
Skippy said cheerily, “no one will know the message is from you. Unless the
message starts with ‘duh how about this’. Or if it has terrible grammar and it
rambles on and on forever before finally getting to the freakin’ point.”

“I ramble on and on? What about-”

“We’re not talking
about me here, Joe,” Skippy said hastily. “Don’t try to change the subject.
Just don’t write the message like a fourth grader. And don’t use any of your
horrible Maine Yankee slang. Like,” and he changed his voice, “by golly
bejeeesuz I mowed down that lobstah at dinnah, it was a Gotdamn feast, I tell
ya.”

“Oh my God, Skippy,
you sounded just like my father’s uncle Virgil,” I laughed. He had even
correctly pronounced ‘God’ with a T sound on the end, the way God intended.

“Also,” Skippy
cautioned, “don’t call a milkshake a ‘frappe’ for heaven’s sake.”

“A frappe has ice
cream in it, a milkshake doesn’t,” I retorted. “And if you’re in Rhode Island,
a frappe is called a ‘cabinet’. Everybody knows that. Right, Adams?”

“I’m not from New
England, sir, so I’m with Skippy on this one. We should have Skippy compose the
message, then we can look at it.”

I had to admit that
was a better idea. “Write something up, Skippy, please. Oh,” my shoulders
slumped. “We’ll need Chocu- Chotek to approve it. Crap.” This operation was too
complicated.

Skippy composed three
messages in like a billionth of a nanosecond, and they all looked good to me.
Then the wheels of bureaucracy moved at lightning speed, and Chotek gave us his
preferred text with minor annoying revisions, the next morning. Skippy was not
happy about the delay, although we didn’t plan to send the message to Adams
until that afternoon anyway, when she and the three others were on the train.
“I provided a microwormhole, for crying out loud,” Skippy complained. “A true
miracle of technology, something no one else in the galaxy has. It allows
instantaneous, undetectable communication between us and a starship several
lightminutes away. And what does that jerk do with it? He takes fourteen hours
to send us back a message, and he insists on changing four words. Four freakin’
words, Joe!”

“Skippy, I hear you,”
I was pissed about it too. “Sometimes managers think they have to change at
least something in order to feel useful.”

“Yeah, well, in that
case I am sad to report that the microwormhole is acting up already. We could
lose contact with Chocula, I mean the ship, at any moment. If you know what I
mean.”

“Not yet, Skippy,” I
told him, and then remembered other people were listening. “That is terrible
news about the wormhole, do what you can to keep it open.”

“Oh, I get it, Joe.
Sure, sure, I’m working on it. Just let me know.”

Skippy was an
ancient, super powerful, super intelligent being. He also sucked at lying.

Once the Ruhar
announced that they were being released, Perkins and the others hoped they
would be given their zPhones back, but it didn’t happen. Even when they got on
the train, no zPhones. Jesse and Dave were going crazy that someone might have
stolen or messed with their couch, which Perkins could not understand. What
could be so important about a couch?

The train was nothing
special; two passenger cars tacked on the front end of a freight train just
behind the engine. Both cars were well-worn, with the seats made of some super
tough gel material. The four humans were told to take the front car, which had
most of its seats piled high with baggage and equipment. There were no Ruhar in
the front car, an arrangement that suited both species. As they walked past the
second car, Ruhar crowded the windows, gawking at the strange humans, or glaring
at the clients of their enemy the Kristang. One of the Ruhar, a male who had a
child in his arms, shook his fist at the four humans.

Dave Czajka took
exception to that. “Hey, screw-”

“Czajka!” Major
Perkins scolded. “Eyes forward. To these Ruhar, we are the enemy. We came here
to throw them off this planet that has been their home for generations. If I
were them, I would hate us.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” Czajka
looked at the ground.

They boarded the car,
squeezed between boxes and baggage, and found seats to spread out, enough room
for each of them to lay down. Dave walked over to Perkins. “Sorry, Ma’am, I
lost my temper.”

“It happens,” Perkins
shrugged. “Czajka, these people,” she
used that word instead of ‘Ruhar’ or ‘hamster’, “have lived here long enough
that their parents, even grandparents are buried here. They put down roots on
this planet. This is their home. Then
we showed up, working for the Kristang, to throw them off their world. They
have been at war since before humans discovered fire. They have only known this
war. Think about that.”

“Yes, Ma’am. All the
Ruhar I have met personally have been nice, just ordinary people,” he used that
word intentionally. “I don’t hate them; I hate being here. I hate not being
home.”

“We all do. My folks
must be worried sick,” she said, blinking away a tear. They could be trapped on
Paradise, forever. And that was the best scenario. If the Ruhar kept control of
Paradise, humans there would be prisoners of war. If the Kristang took over the
planet, the humans there would become slaves, if they survived at all. Perkins
felt like indulging in a good cry, which would have made her feel better. Under
stress, women tended to cry it away. Men tended to get angry and lash out. The
way women handled stress, Perkins thought, was healthier. The male-dominated
Army generally considered crying to be a weakness. So she swallowed hard and
looked Dave in the eye. “We all want to go home. Until then, we all have to do
our jobs, and take care of each other.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” Dave
said. “I’m going to check out that water tank,” he pointed to the corner near
the car’s single bathroom. If they were going to be on the train all the way to
Lemuria, it was going to be a very long trip.

After a lunch of
nutrient mush that the humans had gulped down as quickly as possible, a Ruhar
soldier came through the train with a bag, and from it he pulled four zPhones.
It was like Christmas and a birthday all at once. Shauna almost shivered with
delight, then turned to Perkins. “Is it Ok if we use the phones, Ma’am?”

“Can we tell people
about Bishop?” Jesse asked anxiously.

“Go ahead, soldier, I
plan to use my phone right away,” Perkins said. “No restrictions on talking
about Bishop, as little as we know. It’s not a secret to the Ruhar, it
shouldn’t be a secret to us either.”

The other three
scattered about the train car for privacy, there were plenty of seats. Perkins
first checked her texts and emails, she naturally had thousands of each that
had piled up in her absence, so she started with the most recent and intended
to work her way backward. Suddenly all of her messages and emails disappeared.
Except for one text and one email. The text told her to open the email. So she
did.

And received a shock.

She instructed the
zPhone to call the US Army intel chief directly. Perkins had not been involved
in intelligence gathering or analysis for over six months; she had become a
farmer like almost all of the humans on Paradise. With UNEF no longer a
fighting force, the only useful information was about crop yields and which people
had gotten into fights. General Marcellus, she knew, as currently acting as the
chief intelligence officer for UNEF HQ. If the message she had received was
true, he would surely know something.

He answered right
away, which was surprising. “Who is this?” He sounded annoyed, and there were
other voices in the background.

“Major Perkins, Sir.
Third Infantry. I was on your HQ intel staff until recently. Thank you for
taking my call.”

“Oh, yes, Major. My
phone picked up by itself somehow. It is darned good to hear from you. Did the
Ruhar treat you well? We tried to contact you, but the Ruhar wouldn’t allow
it.”

“Yes, the Ruhar
treated us well. They just gave us our phones back. We were released three days
ago, and we’re now on a train headed for Lemuria. Sir, I have information that
you should hear directly.”

“Wait a minute.” He
went into a quieter area, or closed a door, because the background voices
faded. “Go ahead, Major.”

“The Ruhar brought us
in for questioning about Joe Bishop. They say he escaped from that Kristang
jail. That, as far as the Ruhar know, he is alive somewhere.”

“We figured that was
why they brought you in. We looked at the list of people they took, and put two
and two together. The only thing you all had in common was Bishop. Are the Ruhar
still telling the story about him flying away in a stolen Dodo?”

“Yes, sir,” she
replied, surprised. “You knew about that?”

“There have been
rumors since the Ruhar took the planet back,” he explained. “Then they released
other people a couple days ago, including the staff of a logistics base that
Bishop supposedly recruited people and supplies from. Perkins, you know Bishop,
you were his contact when that Logellia woman was feeding him info about the
wormholes and all that. Do you think he was capable of stealing and flying an
alien spacecraft?” No human had been trained to fly a dropship, and those ships
surely had security features to prevent theft or mischief.

“The two members of
his original fireteam told me they would be surprised if Bishop could operate
an iPad without breaking it. I don’t see it, Sir. Bishop is smart and
resourceful, but he’s not that smart.”

“That’s what we’re
thinking also. Bishop supposedly told the people at the logistics base that he
was on a mission to hit the Kristang, and at the time, there weren’t any
Kristang left on this planet. To hit them, Bishop would have to go into space.
After being in that Kristang jail, I can see why he’d look for an opportunity
to get some payback. For my money, I’ll bet that dropship was flown by Ruhar,
and for some reason they needed humans to come along.”

“If that was a Ruhar
mission,” Perkins asked, “why would the Ruhar be asking us about it now?”

“Major, I am sure
that humanity is not the only species where the right hand sometimes doesn’t know
what the left hand is doing,” he explained. “If this was a secret Ruhar
mission, the Ruhar in charge here on Paradise may not know anything about it.
Or it was a rogue operation, and the Ruhar command is keeping it quiet out of
embarrassment.” Marcellus knew he was assigning human emotions and motivations
to an alien species, but his extensive contact with the Ruhar told him that he
wouldn’t be far off the truth. “I’m glad to hear you are safe and well. I have
a meeting in five min-”

“Bishop wasn’t my only
information, sir, or the most important.”

“Go ahead, Major.”

“Sir, I heard a rumor
from the Ruhar. The Ruhar federal government has been negotiating to give this
planet back to the Kristang. They’re trading it for more valuable territory.”

The half-second lag
before General Marcellus answered told Emily Perkins everything she needed to
know. The message she had received was the truth. And UNEF HQ knew. Son of a
bitch! “Major, that is one hell of a rumor,” he lied. “I can’t see the Ruhar
doing that, they have fought to retake this place, and now to keep it. I
wouldn’t put any credence in rumors like that. We have enough bad news that is
true.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where are you
headed?”

“Wherever this train
takes us, the Ruhar told us we would eventually be going back to where we were
living when they picked us up, but I think all they care is about is that we’re
in Lemuria.” So that the humans would no longer be the responsibility of the
Ruhar.

“Probably by boat,
then. Contact my staff when you’re ashore, and I’ll arrange to have you brought
to HQ. We’ll need to debrief you.”

I’ll bet you do,
Perkins thought. You want me someplace where you can be sure that I won’t
repeat what I heard about the Ruhar selling the planet out from under us.
“Thank you, sir.”

Of course, all of
Perkins’ calls now went through the SkippyTel network, so we heard her
conversation with General Marcellus. When she made the call, we were all inside
the dropship, because it was absolutely pouring down rain outside and had been
all morning. Also, it had been my turn to cook and I had made blueberry
muffins, which we were leisurely munching on while drinking coffee. There
wasn’t much else for us to do at the moment. When Perkins ended the call, Desai
tapped me on the shoulder. “Sir, we could use what Marcellus said.”

“Huh?” Maybe my brain
was extra slow that morning.

“He thinks us flying
away in a Ruhar Dodo was a Ruhar operation, that we were along for the ride. We
should use that. Play it up. Skippy,” Desai asked, “do the Ruhar have an
intelligence service that is separate from the military?”

“You mean like the
American CIA and NSA? Yes, they do. The Ruhar have two rival intelligence
agencies; one is nominally civilian and one is sort of part of the military.
They both run clandestine operations that the other agency doesn’t know about,
and the military spy agency is notorious for acting without the military
leadership’s knowledge. The Ruhar military spy people are referred to by the
Ruhar equivalent of ‘cowboys’. In this case, ‘cowboy’ does not mean a rugged
outdoorsman, it means amateurs who shoot first and think later.”

“How would that help
us?” I asked Desai, wondering if this was how Skippy felt when I was explaining
one of my ideas.

“Sir, the Ruhar know
we flew away in a Ruhar dropship, and by now the Kristang have probably heard
about it also-”

“They have,” Skippy
confirmed.

“The Kristang may be
putting two and two together,” Desai explained. “They now know that a Ruhar
dropship left Paradise with humans on it. Back then, Skippy told the Kristang
that the Dodo had been stolen by Kristang, which is why the Kristang sent ships
in to pick us up. Then the frigate that picked us up disappeared, and the star
carrier that was the frigate’s mothership also disappeared. If the Kristang
ever begin to suspect that humans were involved in that, we would be in deep
trouble.”

“Aha,” Adams agreed.
“We need the Kristang to think the whole thing; stealing a Dodo and flying away,
was a secret Ruhar operation to capture a Kristang ship?”

“Exactly,” Desai
smiled.

And now I did know
how Skippy felt. Damn it, I’m the commander, I should have thought of that. It
was freakin’ brilliant.

“Wow,” Skippy said
admiringly. “That is devious. Keep both sides guessing who did it, and neither
of them will ever consider that lowly humans could have run the operation. Joe,
you are not the only devious mind here. If you like, I can plant hints in Ruhar
databases that the four of you escaping from jail and stealing a Dodo was a
secret Ruhar operation.”

“That would be great,
Skippy. Desai, that was good thinking. Wait,” I had an unpleasant thought.
“Skippy, before you do anything, you need to clear this with Chotek.”

“Oh, for crying out
loud,” Skippy complained. “I heard a great idea, it wasn’t yours, but it did
come from a monkey, uh. No offense, Major Desai.”

“No offense taken,
Mr. Skippy,” Desai beamed. “I am proud to be what you consider a monkey.
Especially since your definition of ‘monkey’ seems to be primates who think of
ideas that your brain can’t handle.”

“What? Oooooh, that’s
it, Captain Desai, your name has been added to my list,” Skippy warned. “You
filthy monkeys think you are so
smart,” he grumbled.

“Apparently,” I
offered Desai a high five and she accepted, “we are so smart. Anyway, back to
my point, Skippy. We need to run this by Chotek. This is why he came out here.
Desai thought of a way to prevent both the Ruhar and Kristang from ever
suspecting humans could be involved in how the Flower and the Flying Dutchman disappeared. Chotek
should be thrilled to hear it, and that should demonstrate to him and to UNEF
Command how valuable is it to have the Merry Band of Pirates out here.”

“Oh, fine. What a
pain in the ass,” Skippy muttered. “I’ll wait for the Count to make the obvious
decision, which seems to be what human managers do.”

“Sir?” Adams spoke
up. “I agree with what you said, except for one thing.”

“What?” I asked.

“This pirate is not
very merry right now,” she pointed to the table in front of me. “You ate the
last muffin.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

After Perkins ended
the call with Marcellus, she read the message again twice before she sending a
reply. She asked who the message had come from, and why she should trust them.

Another message came
almost immediately. Think of us as your
Mysterious Benefactor, the message read. You can trust us because we’re the only ones telling you the truth. And
we are your only hope of freeing this planet from the Kristang. You are our
first choice, but we have other options. You need us.

Emily Perkins could
not find fault with that argument. She and the Mysterious Benefactor, who she
decided to call ‘Emby’ for short, went back and forth for ten minutes, until
she had no more questions to ask. Emby had answered some of her questions, and
declined to answer others. The intelligence officer in her suspected that Emby
was a group of Ruhar native to Paradise, who wanted to prevent their own
government from selling the planet out from under them. They couldn’t take
action by themselves, and they couldn’t trust their own military. So they were
using humans, who were even more desperate to prevent the Kristang from
permanently regaining control of the planet. It was one hell of a story Emby
had told; if she agreed to go along, they would tell her more. They would tell
her, at each point during the mission, only what she needed to know. Perkins
liked that, it gave her some confidence that Emby knew what they were doing.

I’m
in, she sent back. What is the next step?

We
will get you off the train and secure the transport and equipment you need, Emby replied. You will be leaving the train tonight, after you are supposed to be
asleep. Your next step is to persuade your team to join you.

Sure, thought
Perkins. No problem. Before I can persuade Jarrett, Czajka and Colter to join
me, I will need to convince them that I’m not crazy. And that this isn’t a
joke.

“A secret mission?”
Jesse cocked his head skeptically. “What? Are we going offworld to find Bishop,
something like that?”

“No, this has nothing
to do with Bishop,” Perkins said, surprised. She hadn’t thought of Bishop at
all. “I don’t know where he went, where he is, or whether he’s still alive. I
don’t even know if the Ruhar told us the truth. Maybe he did escape from that
jail and the Ruhar are looking for him. The story of him stealing a dropship
and flying away on a secret mission? That I find hard to believe,” Perkins
frowned. “I have to warn you; this mission is not authorized by UNEF. They
don’t know about it, and they likely wouldn’t authorize it if they knew. Does
anyone have a problem with that?”

Jesse looked out the
window to the landscape of the alien planet passing by. A planet he was trapped
on, and a planet that would soon be controlled by the cruel Kristang. “UNEF got
us out here because they didn’t know the truth and were too stupid to ask,” he looked
the former intelligence officer in the eye as he spoke. “Now I’m a farmer on an
alien planet, and there is no way I can ever go home. I say, to hell with UNEF.
They’ve screwed everything up so far.”

“Amen to that,
brother,” Dave agreed. “I have no problem with it either, Major. But we will
need weapons, and we don’t have any.”

“We won’t need
weapons,” Perkins explained. “This is going to seem odd, but what we need is
drilling gear; excavation equipment.”

“Excavation
equipment? Like digging?” Dave asked. “Ma’am, if this is about us trying to
find gold or something like that, I’m going to be very disappointed.”

“Gold?” Shauna asked.
“Are we hoping to find gold, so the Ruhar will think this planet is more valuable?
So they’ll send their fleet here to chase away the Kristang?”

“No,” Perkins shook
her head in frustration. “No gold. If the Ruhar want gold, they mine it from
asteroids. This isn’t about anything like gold.”

“Then what is it
about, Ma’am?” Jesse asked with his arms across his chest. “You asked us to
trust you. I would appreciate you trusting us.”

“Fair enough, Colter.
I don’t know the whole story, whoever is running this operation has me on a
need to know basis also.” As Perkins said that, she wondered if Emby was
listening through her zPhone. Probably they were, she decided. Before telling
the three about the mission, she forwarded to them a message from Emby. Their
Mysterious Benefactor had told her that anyone who opened that message would
have absolutely unbreakable encryption on their phones. Perkins had been
instructed to forward the message to anyone involved in the operation, and not
to anyone else. “I’m going to tell you everything I know, so here it is. When
we got these zPhones,” she held hers up, “I had a ton of email. Then it all
disappeared, except for one. I opened it to find a message from someone calling
themselves our Mysterious Benefactor. I’m calling them Emby for short. They
didn’t say who they are, but I’m betting they are a group of native Ruhar who
are not happy with the situation on this planet, and they can’t trust their own
government or military to take the appropriate action. So they’re using us.
What they want us to do is get rid of that Kristang battlegroup in orbit,” she
pointed to the sky, “so what they want matches what is best for us. That’s the
only reason I agreed to take on this mission. That, plus I don’t see any other
possibility of humans surviving on this planet long term. If the Kristang take
over this planet permanently, none of us will live very long. I think you all
know that.”

“I do, Ma’am,” Shauna
said. “But tell me, please; you got a mysterious email? That’s what all this is
about? Could it be a prank?”

“Yeah,” Jesse added,
“or disinformation? You intel types do that kind of stuff. This could be the
Kristang trying to get us to do something stupid against them, so they have an
excuse to squash us like bugs.”

“That would be just
like the lizards,” Dave observed.

“No,” Perkins shook
her head. “The message contained intel I didn’t know, and when I contacted the
US intel chief, he denied it. He denied it in a way that was too quick, you
understand? UNEF HQ had this info, they know about it, and they haven’t told
us. Whoever our Mysterious Benefactor is, they know.”

“They know what? What
is it they know?” Shauna was the first to ask.

So Perkins told them.
Told them how the Ruhar federal government had been negotiating to trade
Paradise to the Kristang, in exchange for more valuable territory. How the
Ruhar fleet had never intended to recapture the planet in the first place. How
that was why there had not been giant transport ships bringing evacuated Ruhar
back to their home. Why the local Ruhar administration had not put more than
token effort into rebuilding infrastructure.

“Holy shit,” Dave
said quietly. “Those motherfuckers. The Ruhar are selling us out.”

“Yes,” Perkins agreed
flatly. “There was talk going around six to eight months ago, of UNEF declaring
loyalty to the Ruhar,” she could see everyone’s eyes grow wide with surprise.
“HQ thought that might give the Ruhar more incentive to protect us from the
Kristang raids that were burning out our crops. Then suddenly, that talk
stopped, and we were told by HQ to not mention it again. Now I know why. HQ
must have talked to the Ruhar, and the hamsters told us no. They didn’t want
our loyalty, because then they’d be responsible for us, and they plan to leave
us behind when they trade this planet away.”

“Shit,” Jesse said,
stunned. “I’m not dumb enough to think the Ruhar would ever be our buddies, but
I didn’t think they would screw us like this.”

“We don’t have any
friends out here, people,” Perkins declared. “We’re on our own, truly on our
own, because the Kristang have lost contact with Earth. The Ruhar confirmed
that to me. The only reason I agreed to work with Emby on this mission is that
our goals match in this case. We both want those Kristang ships out of orbit.”

“Ma’am, in the long
run, what good does that do for us?” Shauna asked. “The Ruhar still plan to
sell the planet out from under us.”

“Yeah, that’s why I
asked Emby the same question. And that’s why I think our Mysterious Benefactor
is a group of native Ruhar. Because what Emby told me is that, once that
Kristang battlegroup isn’t hanging over our heads, there is at least a
possibility the federal Ruhar government could somehow be persuaded to keep
Paradise. With the Kristang having the big guns in orbit, there is no
possibility the Ruhar will keep this place in the long term.”

“Ok,” Jesse said
after taking a deep breath. “So the mission is to get rid of a Kristang task
force of, what, more than twenty warships? Did this Emby say how the four of us
are going to do that?”

“Colter, if you think
I’ve told you some incredible shit so far,” Perkins smiled and tilted her head,
“you ain’t heard anything yet.”

“Wait, Ma’am,” Jesse
said a few minutes later, his head spinning. “There are giant maser cannons buried on this planet, that the Kristang don’t
know about-”

“That the Kristang
clan in orbit do not know. The Kristang clan that installed the projectors do
know, but that group of Kristang is not here.”

“Right,” Jesse said,
thinking that keeping track of who was who in this war required a color-coded
spreadsheet. “The Kristang here don’t know, and the Ruhar government and
military don’t know, and UNEF doesn’t know. But some of the native Ruhar do
know?”

“Exactly.”

“How?” Jesse
insisted. “How do a bunch of native hamster farmers know all this, when their
government and military don’t?”

Perkins shrugged.
“Maybe some farmer was plowing a field and dug up a projector by accident. I
don’t know, and Emby didn’t tell me how they found out about the projectors. It
doesn’t matter. What I do know is that the Ruhar government and military do not know, because they certainly would
have used the projectors to stop the raids. Now, if the Ruhar government
learned of the projectors, they would not use them against a full Kristang task
force, because that would sour the negotiations. What this Emby wants is a
shooting war between the Ruhar and the Kristang, they want to force their government’s
hand. As long as that Kristang task force is in orbit, the native Ruhar are
screwed. They can’t trust their own government to do the right thing, so
they’re using us to do it for them. I am pretty damned sick of people using us
for their own ends,” she looked her three soldiers in the eyes and found
complete agreement, “but in this case what they want is what we want. We can’t
tell UNEF HQ because the Ruhar and Kristang have totally compromised the zPhone
network. It’s up to us to reactivate these projectors, and knock those ships
out of orbit.”

“Do you mind if I say
‘Holy Shit’, Ma’am?” Shauna asked, her mind still reeling.

“You can say it for
me, too, Jarrett,” Perkins smiled. “I’ve had time to think about it, and it’s
still blowing my mind. When the Ruhar hit Earth,” she reminisced, “I was on
leave, on a camping trip in Kentucky with friends. There was no cell phone
service at the lake. We didn’t see anything going on in the sky because it
rained that morning. I didn’t find out that Earth had been attacked by aliens
until we hiked out two days later. Christ, that was one hell of a shock. Then I
went into space, found out that the Kristang aren’t our allies after all, that
our way back to Earth has been cut off, and that the Ruhar are looking to trade
this planet for a set of steak knives. So, when a mystery group tells me that
we can destroy starships in orbit using secret maser cannons, I say, why the
hell not? That isn’t even the strangest thing that’s happened to me this
month.”

“Amen to that,” Dave
said, and bumped fists with Jesse. “I’m in.”

“You sure, man?”
Jesse asked.

“Yeah, what the
hell?” Dave frowned. “By the time we get back, someone will have stolen our
couch anyway.”

“I’m in if you are,”
Jesse said, looking at Shauna.

Shauna didn’t hesitate.
She wanted combat duty, she wanted to make a difference, and this was her
opportunity. Somebody else could grow tomatoes in Lemuria. “Sign me up, Ma’am,”
she saluted Perkins. “What are we going to do for weapons?” The Ruhar were
careful to collect even the plastic spoons that came with their twice a day
servings of nutrient mush.

Perkins was relieved.
And anxious. She had a team. Now she had the responsibility to execute the
mission she’d accepted. “Emby says they we won’t need weapons, what we need is transport,
and like I said, excavation equipment. These projectors are buried; we need to
dig down to get at them. The original Kristang installed the projectors,
charged up their capacitors, activated a stealth field to fool subsurface
scans, and then covered them with soil. Trees have grown up on some of them
since then. Emby told me that when a projector is ready to fire, explosive
charges will blow the soil away and the maser cannon muzzle projects above the
surface, so we don’t need to clear all that dirt away. What we do need is to
dig a shaft down about eighty meters to access the power controls. The Kristang
made these things go dormant when they left. Emby says we need to physically
reattach power leads, something like that. They’ll walk us through it when we
get down there.”

“Ma’am,” Shauna said,
“I’ve seen so much crazy shit out here that I’m ready to believe anything. But
if this Emby is really a group of native Ruhar, why aren’t they reactivating
the projectors by themselves?”

“I asked myself the
same question, Jarret,” Perkins admitted. “My guess is either this Emby is a
very small group, maybe even a single Ruhar, and they need our help. They can’t
trust any other Ruhar, but they can trust us because they know we are totally
screwed if the Kristang take control of this planet. Or it could be that Emby
wants to avoid getting in trouble if this whole operation goes south. The only
thing I do know is that if there is any
chance we can keep the Kristang away from this planet, I’m going to take it.”

“Same here,” Shauna
agreed. Growing tomatoes is not why she left Earth. “You can get us transport,
ma’am?”

“No,” Perkins shook
her head. “But Emby can. We will need a pilot.”

“I know a pilot,”
Shauna said with a smile.

“There are a lot of
pilots,” Perkins noted. “Can we trust him?”

“We can trust her,” Shauna insisted. “I know she would
do anything to fly again. That’s the problem, ma’am, she doesn’t fly now. How
is she going to get a Buzzard?”

“That will be Emby’s
problem.”

“We’ll have
transport,” Dave said. “Where are we going to get a drilling rig? And someone
to operate it?”

“That is going to be
a little more difficult,” Perkins acknowledged. There were drills on Paradise,
the Ruhar used them to dig wells for irrigating farmland. While they were not plentiful,
they would also not be locked up and well-guarded, as there normally wasn’t any
point to stealing a drill. The real problem was going to be finding a complete
drilling rig that could be broken down to fit inside the cargo compartment of a
truck or a Buzzard. A Buzzard was big, it could carry two hamvees easily, so
cargo capacity and weight were not the issue. What she did not know was what
was the minimum length of a disassembled drill. She would need to ask Emby;
surely the hamsters knew the answer, or could find it.

“Well, Skippy,” I
said after we read the message from Perkins to Emby. “Perkins has a very good
point. Are there any drill rigs that can fit inside a Buzzard?”

“Yes, duh, I already
thought of that, Joe. There is a type of compact drill rig that was designed
specifically to break down to be transported by a Buzzard in one flight, to
service remote areas. It will certainly fit in a truck.”

“Oh, great,” I was
relieved. That is a question that I should have asked earlier. “How many of these
compact drill rigs are there on Paradise?”

“Three.”

“Three? On the whole planet? Holy shit. We have to steal one of only
three special-use items? Where are they right now?”

“One is being used to
dig a well in the northwest corner of what UNEF calls Backstratchistan, about
as far from Lemuria as you can get without going to an island. Another is at an
airfield about five hundred kilometers away from the active drill, being held
in reserve in case of a problem with the first drill. The third is in a military
warehouse on an air base, near the base of the space elevator.”

“You’re kidding me.
Two of them are way too far away, and the third is secured by the military? How
the hell are we going to get one, then? How is Perkins going to get one? You
have a plan for that? Is Perkins going to drive up to the air base gate and ask
for it politely? Or, hey,” I was on a roll, “maybe she can order it off the
Ruhar version of Amazon.”

“Yes.”

“Yes? Yes to what?”

“The last one, Joe.
The compact drill rig will be delivered to her, wherever she needs it. It’s a
high-dollar item, so shipping is free. Hmmm, that is a good point, we should
probably get someone to sign for it.”

I paused to collect
my thoughts. “Skippy, I apologize. I should have known you would have a plan
for this. Would you please, please share your brilliant plan with us?”

“You didn’t say
pretty please with sugar on it, Joe.”

“Let’s pretend I
did.”

“Fair enough. What
I’m going to do, Joe, is to utilize the awesome power of bureaucracy. Count
Chocula would appreciate this. I’ll send a very official-looking equipment
requisition to the air base logistics officer. It will order that drill rig and
everything else Perkins will need, to be loaded onto a truck and delivered to
some remote warehouse, wherever Perkins needs it. When the logistics officer
calls headquarters to verify, like the good little soldier he is, I will handle
the call myself and chew him out for not having moved the drill rig already.”

“That is a brilliant
plan, Skippy,” I wasn’t being sarcastic.

“Uh huh. We’ll let bureaucracy
work in our favor, for a change.”

The Ruhar guard
aboard the train was supposed to check on the humans every four hours, although
there didn’t seem to be much point in doing that. The train was taking the
humans where they wanted to go; back to Lemuria. The only source of human food
in the area was the ‘nutrient mush’ that was locked in a cabinet. Optimal
security measures would not have put all the mush containers in a cabinet in
the same train car the humans occupied, but that was more convenient when it
was time to feed them. And to the Ruhar, the mush had an unpleasant smell. Best
to keep it away from the Ruhar passengers, few though they were.

So when it was time
for the guard to sleep, he set an alarm on his phone to wake him in four hours.
Skippy, of course, deactivated that alarm, and when the guard awoke briefly six
hours later, the clock on his phone told him he had been asleep for only three
hours. Satisfied, he rolled over in his bunk and drifted off to sleep again,
lulled by the gentle rocking motion of the train.

Before their Ruhar
guard had locked the door of the train car behind him, Perkins and her team had
settled down to sleep for the night. Or they had acted as if they were settling
down for the night. As soon as the guard was gone, they quickly got their boots
back on. Within fifteen minutes, Perkins received a message that the guard had
gone to sleep.

“How does Emby know
that?” Dave asked in a whisper.

“They must have
someone aboard this train,” Shauna guessed.

“Makes sense,” Major
Perkins nodded and turned as, with a soft click, the cabinet containing all the
canisters of yummy nutrient mush unlocked. Moving quietly, the team unloaded
the canisters and rolled them up in the satchels they had made from a roll of
cloth. Then they waited. They waited thirty two minutes, with Perkins chafing
at the delay, until Emby signaled it was time. The train was slowing as it
climbed a steep hill out of a river valley; they had heard the wheels clatter
over a bridge shortly before. Emby warned that the train would pick up speed
again when it reached the top of the short grade, and the safe place to jump
off the train was less than a hundred meters long. For one hundred meters,
there was a field of Ruhar crops alongside the tracks; then the tracks were
hemmed in by trees. Perkins got her team ready.

Jesse volunteered to
go first. “I’ll go first, then you jump and I’ll catch you,” he gallantly told
Shauna.

“Screw that,” Shauna
said, and dropped to the ground. She hit feet first, letting herself roll,
mowing over a row of crops and getting a mouthful of dirt. She sprang to her
feet and gave a thumbs up, barely able to see the other three faces in the open
door of the train car. Then she crouched to avoid being seen, as she watched
one, two, three others jump lightly and roll. Ski went last, hanging onto a
railing and making sure the door closed behind him quietly and securely before
he jumped. He almost left it too late; when he finished rolling he was a mere
ten meters from a stand of trees.

They all waited for
the blinking blue light on the rear of the train to disappear. Perkins smoothed
out the dirt where she’d fallen and propped up the crops she had flattened.
Hopefully it would be a while before the farmer noticed the damage. The others
followed her example, then they assembled. “What’s next, ma’am?” Dave asked. He
stood on his left foot, favoring his right.

“Are you mobile,
Czajka?” Perkins asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” Dave
rotated his ankle. “Tweaked my ankle, it will be better when it’s warmed up.”

“Good,” Perkins
checked her zPhone, and indicated the forest on the other side of the tracks.
“Emby says we go that way. We need to hustle, and no using lights until we’re
out of sight,” she pointed to the lights of the farmhouse behind them, across
the field. “Use the low-light camera of your phone to see. Jarrett, you take
the lead.”

Shauna nearly poked
her eyes out by colliding with low-hanging branches in the dark, before
remembering to hold a hand up in front of her face. Her other hand held her
zPhone with its rear-facing night-vision camera pointed forward. That phone
feature was supposed to be used with goggles, here they had to try walking
through feet-tangling underbrush while looking at a small screen. The four
stumbled slowly and awkwardly through the forest in darkness, made worse
because it had begun to drizzle. When Major Perkins in the rear announced she
could no longer see the lights of the farmhouse, she allowed the team to use
their zPhones as lights on a low setting. Now that they could see, they made
rapid progress through the forest, guided by maps on their zPhones. Emby
contacted Perkins twice, urging her to move faster. When they came upon a road,
they broke into a steady run, and soon Perkins was grateful for the drizzling
rain. It soaked her hair, making her short ponytail hang limply against the
back of her neck. The rain also cooled her, running through the warm and humid
night air. “Hold here,” Perkins said in a harsh whisper as her zPhone beeped
with a warning message when they neared a bend in the road. “Truck coming! Off
the road!” She shouted.

They ran through the
woods into a stand of bushes and lay flat, phone lights off. The electric
motors of Ruhar trucks were quiet, and the gently falling rain muffled sound,
so they saw the truck’s headlights eerily casting beams through the trees
before they heard the vehicle. It approached from beyond the curve, lights
bouncing as it moved fast along the rough dirt road. The truck slowed as it
approached, making Perkins fear that the Ruhar had discovered their escape and
tracked their location by zPhone. Maybe Emby was not as smart as they said they
were?

The truck slowed to a
crawl, and Perkins’ mind raced. If the Ruhar knew where Perkins and her team
were, should they run or surrender? Surrender seemed to be the smart play;
because if Emby couldn’t even cover their escape from a train, it was unlikely
Perkins could complete a complex mission of awakening buried maser cannons. Had
she been a fool for believing a Mysterious Benefactor? Was the whole situation
some elaborate joke, or a setup to embarrass UNEF?

No. The truck had
slowed only to negotiate the sharp bend in the road and a deep puddle. Even at
reduced speed, the truck’s tires threw up a splash as it hit the puddle,
briefly obscuring the headlights. Then it cleared the curve and accelerated,
speeding onward through the rainy night. Perkins rose to her feet, brushing mud
from her uniform top.

“Ma’am,” Jesse
whispered in the utter darkness, echoing Perkins’ own fears. “I thought they
knew we were here.”

“Apparently not. Emby
would have warned us,” she said hopefully. “Back to the road, we need to make
up time,” she ordered as Emby sent another message urging them to hurry. She
turned her zPhone light back on, and they ran fairly hard down the road another
two kilometers. Perkins was winded, and she noted the three younger people were
also breathing hard. Life as a farmer didn’t leave much opportunity for
running. They came over a slight rise in the road and saw the lights of a small
village. Just ahead, the forest gave way to fields of crops growing in straight
rows. “Stop here,” she ordered, rechecking the message on her zPhone to make
sure she hadn’t missed anything. “There’s a village up ahead, Emby says they’re
all asleep. There’s a train coming soon,” her phone was counting down from
around seven minutes. “It will slow down when it goes through the village; the
residents don’t like noisy trains while they’re trying to sleep,” she smiled
and Ski almost laughed. “The tracks are about half a kilometer ahead,” although
she couldn’t see anything in the rainy night. “We are supposed wait behind a
shed next to the tracks, then we climb on as it goes by. The last ten cars are
empty; Emby has unlocked the doors. Colter, you go first this time. The rest of
us, try to get on the same car. If not, get on top and go forward or back to
whatever car Colter gets into.”

“Ma’am,” Jesse asked,
“in the dark, how do we know which are the last ten cars?”

Dave looked through
his zPhone’s night-vision feature. “I can see good enough.” The train cars were
big, about eighty feet long. “I’ll count off for you.”

“You better be right
about it, Ski,” Jesse

Jesse grabbed a
handrail beside a door, and hanging on with one hand, he slid the door open and
tossed his satchel in. Running alongside, the other three threw their satchels
in the open door, then Jesse helped Perkins up into the doorway. Shauna
stumbled over a rock but caught the handrail, then Jesse got hold of her arm
and swung her inside. Dave almost made it, running on a gimpy ankle, but he
tripped and fell flat. Jesse almost jumped out to help his friend before Dave
got to his feet and caught the handrail of the next car, waving Jesse off. Making
up for falling in the dirt, Dave shimmied up the handrail to the roof of the
car, then crawled on hands and knees to the car ahead. Awkwardly, he slid down
feet first until Jesse and Shauna grasped his legs, then he let go of the roof
and the three fell to sprawl inside the empty car. The train was beginning to
pick up speed as Perkins closed the door, making sure it was closed all the
way. Snapping on her light, she looked around the inside. There was some trash
such as straps, packing material and busted cardboard boxes, otherwise it was
just empty, scuffed and well-used composite material. “Czajka, your ankle is
worse than you told me?”

“No ma’am,” Dave said
defensively. “I tripped on a rock or something. I’m squared away.”

Perkins was not
entirely convinced. “Take your boot off and I’ll look at it. Emby says we’ll be
here until about midmorning.”

Dave untied his boot,
and laughed.

“What’s so funny?”
Shauna asked. She didn’t see much humor in their situation.

“We hopped aboard a
freight car, we’ve got no jobs and no money,” Dave reached in his satchel and
pulled out a can of nutrient mush. “And all we have to eat is beans. We’re
hobos.”

“Hey,” Jesse offered
a fist bump and Ski accepted. “Brother,” Jesse said with a wry smile, “first
hobos on an alien planet. That’s got to count for something.”

Around midmorning,
the train slowed suddenly. Emby had told Perkins the train’s locomotive would
experience a temporary ‘mechanical difficulty’ while going around a curve. When
the train slowed enough, Perkins and her team were to get off on the outside of
the curve, where the engineer in the locomotive couldn’t look back and see
them. When the train was down to a slow walking pace, the four humans bailed
out, being careful not to injure themselves as the area was thickly forested.
They dashed in to the woods and lay down. As soon as they were hidden, whatever
Emby had done to the locomotive fixed itself, and the train picked up speed
again.

Once the train had
gone out of sight and could barely be heard, Shauna stood up carefully.
“Ma’am,” she asked Major Perkins, “who is this Mysterious Benefactor? The
engineer of that train is one of them? Or they can remotely control anything on
this planet?”

“Yeah,” Jesse added.
“And how did Emby know that truck was coming down the road last night? Or that
everyone in the village where we hopped that train,” he pointed down the
tracks, “was asleep?”

“People, I worked
intel, and not knowing the identity of our Mysterious Benefactor is bugging the
shit out of me,” Perkins admitted. “If we’re successful, we may find out
someday. If this mission isn’t successful, I have a feeling Emby will bail on
us real fast. I’m not doing this for Emby, whoever they are. I’m doing this to
give UNEF a chance, even a tiny chance to avoid being slaves of the lizards. You
still in?”

“Oh, hell yes, ma’am,”
Jesse nodded. “I can’t remember the last time I didn’t have a bad feeling about a mission.

They walked off and
on, taking short breaks until late afternoon, then Perkins declared a rest.
Emby insisted they were safe, but Perkins ordered everyone to take forty five
minute shifts as sentry to be sure. She took the first shift, and her own
eyelids were heavy when Czajka took over. It felt like she had just gotten semi
comfortable on the ground, when Jarrett shook her awake. “It’s time, ma’am,”
Shauna said quietly.

With long practice
from her military career, Perkins came to alertness. The sun had set so it was
dark with clouds covering the sky; at least it wasn’t raining. Rubbing her eyes
to make them focus, she immediately checked her zPhone. There were no new
messages from Emby, but as she turned her eyes away from the screen, a new
message appeared.

Everything
is on schedule, the message read. You have fifty six minutes to travel the
last kilometer.

How
did you know that I just woke up,
Perkins typed suspiciously, and even before she hit the ‘Send’ button, there
was a reply.

Your
phone moved, and you activated it to check messages, Major Perkins, the message read. You and your team should eat now; this is
going to be a long night.

Giving up on Emby revealing
any more information about their sources and methods, Perkins sat on a log.
“Eat up, people. We need to get moving soon and this is going to be a busy
night.”

Dave reached into his
satchel and pulled out one of his dwindling supply of nutrient mush cans. “I
hope Emby gets us more food along with transport and a drill rig, ma’am.”

Perkins nodded. “Emby
says they’ve got it covered. They know we can’t eat the native life, or Ruhar
food.”

Shauna popped open
her can of mush and looked at it without interest. She tipped her head back and
swallowed it as quickly as she could. Running a finger around the bottom to get
every last drop, she made face. “Sure, Emby will get us food. Enough to carry
out the mission. Then they won’t need us.”

“We have to take that
risk,” Perkins agreed grimly.

“Ha,” Jesse laughed.
“We’re sneaking around between two advanced species that can blast us from
orbit. Maybe we’ll get lucky and we’ll take a railgun dart before we starve.”

“Amen to that,
brother,” Dave popped open a can of mush. “Maybe I’ll shoot myself, if I have
to survive on this crap much longer.”

According to Emby,
their mission that night was simple. Inside a warehouse on the outskirts of a
village was a truck loaded with the portable drilling rig, and boxes containing
human food. Real food, from Earth. Mostly canned or MREs. All Perkins and her
team needed to do was get into the warehouse, which was unlocked. Then they
would start the truck, roll aside the big door, drive the truck out and slide
the door closed behind them. To cover the sound of the truck, Emby would create
a distraction; a ventilation fan in a barn on the other side of the village
would overheat and begin making a terrible screeching racket. Then the fan’s
motor would catch on fire. That would keep the hamsters busy while the humans
drove away with their prize. And they would keep driving, all night.

It
will be suspicious for a truck loaded with human food to go missing, Perkins typed. The remaining supply
of human food from Earth had to be a small, carefully guarded item. How could
such a valuable thing be sitting unguarded in a warehouse? Again, before she
hit the ‘Send’ button there was a reply.

The
boxes of human food are mislabeled,
Emby said, no one knows they are in that
truck. We only took a small amount of your food, it will not be missed. And no one will be going into that warehouse
for weeks.

How
did you arrange that, Perkins
asked.

Humanity
is not the only species with a cumbersome bureaucracy, Major Perkins. It is
easy for things to get lost, this is a big planet. You need to get moving.

Perkins explained the
plan to her skeptical team.

“Just like that,
ma’am?” Jesse asked. “This Emby gift-wrapped a truck for us?”

“Just like that,”
Perkins confirmed. “Emby has done right by us so far. I’m going to trust them,
whoever they are.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

It was as easy as
Emby said it would be. The side door of the warehouse faced the village, so
they slipped in one at a time, with Shauna going first. She got inside, closed
the door behind her and scanned the inside first with night-vision, then risked
using her zPhone’s light. It was a barn that had been turned into a warehouse,
it still smelled like wet dirt and grain. In the center was a large truck with
an extended cab and six wheels. The back was covered with a sort of tarp; she carefully
swung the tailgate down and peeked inside. The back was fairly crammed with
large pieces of equipment, boxes and extra fuel cells. Emby had told the truth
so far. To be certain, she climbed into the truck bed and slowly opened one of
the boxes.

Food. Real
honest-to-God human food from Earth. The box contained cans, tins, pouches and
MREs all with French writing. Shauna felt a pang of hunger just glancing at
food, real food. She dropped to the ground and called Perkins. “It’s as Emby
said, ma’am. Everything is here.”

When all four of them
were inside, Perkins climbed into the cab and turned the truck’s main power on.
It showed ready to start. “Jarrett, you drive first. Colter, Czajka, get ready
to slide that door open. Jarrett, make sure the headlights are switched off.”

On her zPhone Perkins
typed Ready.

Commencing
distraction now. Drive slowly until you get over the bridge, Emby replied.

Muffled by the walls
of the barn, a screeching sound began. Faintly, then growing louder, it was a
high-pitched grinding sound of metal on metal. With the side door of the barn only
cracked open, Perkins saw lights come on in the village’s dozen homes. Within
five minutes, hamsters were running toward the barn with the faulty ventilation
fan, which had now burst into flames.

This
would be a good time to go,
Emby sent.

“Czajka, Colter, get
that door open, quietly.”

“Yes ma’am,” Jesse
replied. While they were waiting, Jesse had found a can of oil or some kind of
lubricant, and he and Dave had liberally applied it to the door’s wheels and
tracks. It slid aside almost silently, and Shauna hit the truck’s starter. With
only a faint whine from its electric motors, the truck came to life. The big
truck was a tight fit through the door, Perkins walked backwards in front of
her, guiding Shauna to squeeze the truck through the door. Perkins kept
glancing nervously toward the other end of town, where the fan fire had been
extinguished and the screeching noise was winding down. Once the truck cleared
the big door, she motioned for it to be closed, and they climbed into the cab.
Shauna drove slowly, with the lights off across a bridge, Perkins holding a
zPhone in front of Shauna’s eyes so the driver could use the night-vision
feature. Fortunately, within half a kilometer of crossing the bridge, the road
took a sharp turn, and Perkins allowed Shauna to turn the headlights on the
lowest setting. After another kilometer and an All Clear message from Emby, Shauna increased the headlight
brightness, and stepped on the accelerator pedal. According to Emby, they had
about 600 kilometers to cover within the next seven hours before dawn. Emby
directed them on a slightly roundabout route to miss driving through villages,
although they could not avoid passing an isolated house here and there. Perkins
debated whether to turn the headlights off when passing inhabited houses, then
decided that would look suspicious. A truck driving through the night was,
after all, nothing unusual. They were just an ordinary truck, she reminded
herself, there should be nothing interesting about it.

As they drove, the
sky cleared, and Perkins saw the eastern sky becoming pink almost an hour
before dawn. With only forty minutes until the sun cleared the horizon, Emby
directed them to pull off the main road onto an overgrown track. They bumped
along the rough road, with overhanging tree branches scraping the top of the
truck, until they came to a halt under two large trees. Jesse and Dave went
back to cover their tracks, while Perkins and Shauna cut branches to drape over
the truck.

You
should rest now, Emby messaged, we will alert you if anyone approaches your
position. You will be moving again in nine hours.

We
will be driving during daylight,
she asked.

Yes.
This area is sparsely populated and air traffic is minimal; you are on the edge
of a no-fly zone agreed by the Ruhar and the Kristang, Emby stated. You must remain hidden now because a road convoy is scheduled to pass
by a crossroads roughly ten kilometers ahead of you in five hours, and the road
will be busy.

Understood.

“Emby wants us moving
again in nine hours, so I want us to get sleep and be ready to go in seven
hours,” Perkins said. They had taken turns driving through the night, giving
two people at a time the ability to catch sleep in the back seat.

“Can we eat first,
ma’am?” Shauna asked. The thought of the real food in the back of the truck had
been in the back of her mind all night.

“Good idea, we should
check out the sumptuous buffet Emby set up for us. We will all split one item
this morning,” Perkins warned. “Our stomachs aren’t used to real food after
eating mush for too long.”

Dave was the first to
look in the box that Shauna had opened. “This is all in French. I think ‘boeuf’
means ‘beef’, ma’am?”

“Don’t ask me,
Czajka, I learned Mandarin Chinese, not French,” Perkins replied. “That sounds
right to me.”

“Does everyone want
to try beef stew? I think that’s what this is,” Dave held up a can.

“Anything but
chicken, man,” Jesse replied. “That would be way too tempting if we ever get
back to Fort Rakovsky.”

They split one ‘beouf
stew’ and three cans of nutrient mush, everyone agreed the stew was awesome.

The next two days
involved driving part of the days and all of the nights. They were climbing up
through foothills that became hills. The roads became more and more rough; in
some cases the big truck was mowing down bushes. Only once during daylight did
Emby warn them about aircraft approaching, and they had to pull the truck under
a stand of trees and cover it as best they could. They never saw an aircraft;
Emby said it passed over several kilometers to the south. That incident made
Perkins more suspicious about who Emby could be. Their Mysterious Benefactor
was not concerned about the truck being detected on sensors, but was worried
about an aircraft flying overhead and someone looking down through a window.
Perkins could understand Emby having some control or influence over Ruhar
sensor coverage, but why wasn’t Emby concerned about their truck being seen by
the Kristang ships in orbit? It made no sense. She knew not to bother asking
Emby for answers, because Emby wasn’t going to provide answers.

Their destination was
a clearing deep in the woods, off the road. The truck was designed to drive off-road,
but Emby advised they might need to cut down a few trees along the way. In the
back of the truck was a cutter device that attached to the front of the truck,
and chainsaws. Emby had planned a detailed route to the clearing, and tried to
assure Perkins getting the truck there was manageable. The clearing was a good
place to stash the truck, and wait for a Buzzard to arrive.

She would believe
that when a stolen Buzzard landed in the clearing.

And she would believe
Emby when she saw a giant maser cannon buried eighty meters under the surface
of Paradise.

“Uh oh, Joe,” Skippy announced.

“Oh, crap. Skippy,
can I get through one day without bad news?” I had spent a boring day watching
Perkins’ truck driving along a lonely road. “One day! Is that too much to ask?
Really?”

“Don’t ask me, Joe,
the universe apparently hates you.”

“Why? What did I ever
do to the universe?”

“Maybe you cut it off
in traffic, or took its parking space, or, ooooh. Maybe you dated the
universe’s sister. Hey! Maybe the universe is
a girl you dated. That is a sure fire way to get anyone to hate you, Joe.”

“No, Skippy, girls I
date don’t hate me, they just think I’m, you know, meh.”

“Meh is still better
than ‘let’s be friends’, right?”

“Nothing is worse
than the ‘let’s be friends’ speech,” I shook my head, and in the corner I could
see Adams’ shoulders shaking with mirth. “What fresh bad news do you have for
me today?”

“The Kristang are
planning some bad things in Lemuria, Joe.”

“They can’t do
anything in Lemuria!” I protested. “The terms of the cease fire state that humans
are a neutral party and are not to be harmed, or used, by either side. They
also can’t be assisted by either side.”

“I know what the
cease fire terms say, Joe, and so do the Kristang. Unfortunately, the cease
fire terms do not prevent either side from ‘inspecting’ human-occupied areas,
to assure that humans are not stockpiling banned weapons or some bullshit
excuse like that. Basically, one of the Kristang commanders is bored, and he
wants some action. So his plan for this ‘inspection tour’ is to provoke a group
of humans into attacking his team. Then he can hunt unarmed humans in the
jungle, for sport. He will be wearing powered armor, with a rifle and air
support. Messages I have intercepted state that he intends to land somewhere
with a mixed gender population, and then ‘accidentally’ kill or injure several
women. He knows this would likely provoke human men to hostile action, which
the Kristang see as a weakness by the way. If they are unable to provoke a
sufficiently hostile action, they will simply make something up, and kill
humans anyway.”

“Shit.”

“My thoughts
exactly.”

“Whew,” I let out a
long breath and sat back in my chair. “Anything we do to stop the Kristang
would risk exposing our presence here, so I would have to clear it with Chotek
first. He’s not likely to approve any action. Unless, you know, it were to
totally slip my mind,” I added with a meaningful glance at Sergeant Adams.

“Sir, I can’t hear
very well, I think my ears are clogged,” she said, rubbing an ear.

Damn, I am glad that
I brought Adams along. “That is too bad, Sergeant. Skippy, how are the Kristang
getting to Lemuria?”

“A trio of dropships
will be leaving the Kristang base in the morning.”

“Skippy, if those dropships
were to suffer fatal mechanical failures at high altitude, I would not lose
much sleep over it. If you know what I mean.”

“I do know what you
mean, Joe. However, it is not so simple. As I have explained before, Kristang
systems are hardened against cyber attack, because they are wary of
interference by their patrons the Thuranin. Most critical control systems
aboard Kristang dropships are at least partly manual. Also, their base is a
great distance from here, which somewhat limits my abilities in this sort of
thing. However, I can promise you that I will do my best. I will get working on
it immediately, this type of interference takes a great deal of time. I do not
know whether the time available is sufficient for me to accomplish anything
effective. It would be best if you began trying to think of an untraceable way
to warn the humans on Lemuria. Or something else.”

Overnight, we weren’t
able to think of a good way to notify UNEF of the danger from a Kristang
hunting party. I didn’t get much sleep, and when I did sleep, I had nightmares
of terrified men and women running through the jungle, being hunted like
animals. The problem with sending any message to UNEF was that the Kristang
would certainly learn about it and assume the Ruhar had warned the humans.
Under the terms of the cease fire agreement, warning UNEF would count as the
Ruhar ‘assisting’ the humans. With that part of the cease fire having been
violated by the Ruhar, the Kristang would then be free to ‘assist’ the humans
in whatever way they felt like. The only plan we had, in case Skippy wasn’t
able to do anything, was to track the dropships and try to predict where they
would land. Then we would send a warning just to the people in those specific
villages. It wasn’t a good plan. And part of me was thinking that if the
Kristang planned to land in a village populated by idiotic ‘Keepers’, maybe I
shouldn’t warn those assholes. But, I would warn them anyway; the Keepers may
be unforgivably stupid but they were humans.

With five minutes
before the hunting party dropships were scheduled to take off the next morning,
Skippy told me he was still working on it. And that it would help if I would
shut the hell up and stop distracting him. That worried me; I had rarely seen
Skippy concentrate so hard on anything.

Two minutes to go.
“Skippy? How are we doing?”

“We? We aren’t doing anything. I am doing all
the work, while you sit there trying to decide whether to pick your nose or
not.”

“I decided against
it.”

“And all of Paradise
rejoices at your decision.”

“Seriously, how are
you doing?”

“Watch your laptop
screen, Joe. The action is about to start. No coming attractions, just the main
feature that I call ‘A Very Bad Day at the Office’. Ooh, it’s starting now.”

The lead dropship,
with the Kristang commander aboard, was the first to take off. Their dropships
were ugly things, with small wings tipped with V-shaped winglets. The Kristang
optimized their dropships for combat in the vacuum of space; their aerodynamics
were not the best. The first dropship lifted about ten meters off the ground,
and hovered while I guess the pilots were checking their systems. Then it
increased power and climbed, at first at an angle, then it zoomed straight up
fast; to my eyes too fast. It started to wobble and when it got to what looked
like three to four hundred feet, it flipped over on its back and fell straight
down like a rock. Skippy kept a running commentary. “Oooh, see, Joe, you’re not
supposed to fly straight up like that. You’re supposed to clear the airfield
perimeter, and then gain altitude. Otherwise, something like this could happen.
Wow, this looks like it might be painful.” The dropship crashed on its back
right on top of another dropship and broke into three pieces, with burning
chunks flying around from both dropships. “Yup, yup, that’s definitely painful.
Oooh, would you look at that, now the third dropship is on fire,” he said as a
big chunk of flaming debris hit the third dropship, which had just tried to
lift off to get out of the danger zone. “Hey, good for them, some lizards
survived from that third dropship, and they’re out and sort of crawling away.
Uh oh.” A tall light pole that was at the edge of the tarmac had been struck
near its base by a piece of debris, and it wobbled. Then, slowly at first and
picking up speed, it toppled over, with the heavy lights smashing right onto
one of the crawling Kristang. “Oh! That had
to hurt. I’m no expert, Joe, because I don’t feel physical pain, but I’m
thinking that pretty much had to hurt real bad, right? Yup, that guy’s not
moving. Those other guys really should move faster; I have a feeling the
missiles on the racks of that dropship have become unstable. We’d better go to
super slow motion on this video, Joe.” As he said that, three missiles that had
been trapped under the third dropship ignited and streaked away, just as the
third dropship exploded. “Wow!” Two of the missiles bounced and skidded across
the tarmac, one hit a large building and the other flew in the yawning open
door of a hangar. Both buildings blew sky-high as the missile warheads
detonated. There were secondary explosions from the hangar as whatever had been
in there blew up. We barely had time to take in that super slo-mo video when
the camera view switched to the third missile, which had gone in the other
direction, across the tarmac. Across the tarmac, between two buildings,
flipping over high into the air, doing cartwheels and then plunging downward.
Down, directly in the open door of the Kristang’s ammunition bunker and down
the underground tunnel. “Wow, now there
is something you don’t see every day,” Skippy commented. “What are the odds of that, huh? That was poor
operational security by the Kristang, I think, leaving the bunker door open
like that. Three, two, one-”

The underground ammo
dump blew, and the video feed cut out. The video then switched to a view from
high above, Skippy must have hacked into the sensors of a Kristang ship in
orbit. All we could see was the top of an angry, growing mushroom cloud where
the base had been.

“Holy shit, Skippy,” I said, stunned. Adams
couldn’t believe it either, and Desai had her hand in front of her mouth.

“Golly, I hope those
lizards who were crawling away from that dropship are Ok,” Skippy said
seriously. “Although, to tell the truth, I wouldn’t get my hopes up for them.
Gosh darn it, that was a truly unfortunate
series of events, I guess. Well, shit happens, right?”

“Overkill is
underrated?” I guessed.

“I have no idea what
you are talking about, Joe. However, I can say it is unlikely that any assholes
from that base will be going on hunting trips in Lemuria any time soon.”

“That was a nice
touch, having the light pole fall on that guy,” Adams observed.

“Huh?” Skippy asked.
“Nope, that was shear blind luck, Sarge Marge. As you understand luck anyway. I
couldn’t have planned something like that. That guy must have some seriously
bad karma built up from a past life. Or this one.”

“Thank you anyway,” I
said. “Any chance this could have blowback on us, or UNEF?” Thinking about that
possibility, I feared that I really should have told Chotek about it
beforehand.

“Ha! Zero, Joe. The
opposite of infinity. To the Kristang, your species are primitive cavemen, no
way would they ever consider lowly humans to be involved. Certainly, the
Kristang might suspect this was not merely an incredibly unfortunate accident.
But if they suspect anyone, they will suspect the Ruhar. They won’t say that
openly, because the commander of that base is politically connected to senior
clan leadership, an admitting that his poor security allowed the Ruhar to
sabotage his equipment would be damaging. Even if they knew for certain that
somehow the Ruhar were involved, they won’t do anything that jeopardizes the
cease fire.”

“Hmm,” I mused. “If
we somehow provided evidence that it was the Ruhar, that could get the Ruhar
and the Kristang into the shooting war we want. No, no, that won’t work,” I
quickly discarded my own idea. “We need a shooting war that takes out the
Kristang battlegroup, so the balance of power in the negotiations shifts back
toward the Ruhar, not just a ground war. Damn it. Ok, Skippy, uh, I know you
could not possibly have been involved in the extremely unfortunate accident we
witnessed this morning.”

“Perish the thought,”
he said cheerily. “Joe, I suggest you practice your innocent face, because the
light from that explosion will reach the Dutchman
soon, and Chocula is sure to contact you about it.”

“Crap,” I hadn’t
thought about that. “I’d better call him first, inform him that we detected a
large explosion at a Kristang base. And that we know nothing about it.”

“Gosh darn it, Joe. It
is truly too bad we don’t have any video that could clue Chotek in about what
caused the explosion,” Skippy lamented.

“That is too bad,” I
agreed.

“Hey Joe, after you
call the Count, how about you get some popcorn and we watch the video again? I
have a feeling there are some surprises.”

“Surprises? We
already saw what happened.”

“No, Joe, you dumdum.
I mean surprises for the Kristang. That hunting trip when terribly wrong, didn’t it?”

I called the Dutchman. Neither Chotek nor Chang
sounded like they believed that we were not involved in the massive explosion.
Chotek didn’t directly accuse me of causing the incident, so I really didn’t
care. I was, however, put on notice that there had better not be any more such
incidents.

“Skippy, I don’t
think we can do that trick again, not for a while anyway.”

“No problem. Do not
expect me to do that often, Joe. I got lucky this time. The pilot of that lead
dropship practiced poor cyber security. He had been having trouble with new
software of the dropship’s navigation system, so he left it on overnight to run
a diagnostic. I was able to partially get in that way, and it took me almost to
the last second to get the details right. I wouldn’t count on my doing that
again.”

Lieutenant Irene
Striebich looked again at the message on her zPhone in disbelief. “Explain this
to me again?”

Shauna took a breath
before responding. “Which part?”

“The part where you want
me to steal a Buzzard, and fly you and your partners around on a secret
mission. A mission you can’t tell me anything about.”

“I can’t tell you until-”

“Shauna, stealing a
Buzzard isn’t just difficult, it’s impossible. I know, I used to fly them.
Since the Ruhar took their aircraft back, they implemented security features.
All pilots need a keycard that is assigned to each authorized flight. And a
password, plus there is a biometric scanner. No human would pass the biometric
check. If I somehow do get access, the startup procedure for a Buzzard takes
over five minutes even for an emergency launch. During that time, someone at
the airbase would hear. A Buzzard sitting on the ground is vulnerable, I can’t
engage shields, weapons or stealth until the ship is in the air. One rifle
could take out an engine fan blade, and the Buzzard wouldn’t be going anywhere.
It’s impossible.”

“It’s not impossible. We
can do it.”

“We? You mean these
friends of yours that you can’t tell me about?

“Yes. Irene, do you want
to fly again?”

“Yes, of course I do.”

“If we can get you a
Buzzard, will you fly it for us?” Shauna asked. She had thought this would be
easier.

Irene didn’t answer for a
moment.

Shauna asked another way.
“If we can steal a Buzzard, will that prove that we’re real?”

“It will prove you can do
the impossible. Shauna, this mission, it’s really that important? This isn’t
some crazy cowboy shit you’ve gotten into?” Irene knew that Shauna was as
desperate for infantry duty as Irene was to fly again.

“Irene, this mission
could be everything for UNEF’s survival. That’s all I can tell you, until you
pick us up.”

“I don’t believe this,”
Irene said almost to herself. “You got me, I’m in. If, if, you get me a Buzzard to fly.”

“Deal,” Shauna said, and
gave a thumbs up to Major Perkins. Perkins had been listening on her own
zPhone, and returned the gesture.

Skippy and I had been
listening also. “They got us a pilot, Skippy. Now how do we get a Buzzard for
her? She’s in Lemuria, there aren’t any Buzzards there. And what about all that
stuff she said about it being impossible to steal a Buzzard? I assume you can
get around the keycard and the biometric stuff, but is she right about how long
it takes to start up a cold ship?”

“She is correct about
that, Joe. Getting access for her is child’s play for me, of course.”

“You didn’t answer my
question. What is your plan for getting around the startup time problem?
Because if you’re waiting for me to dream something up, I hate to disappoint
you.” My own pilot experience was limited to Thuranin dropships, and the normal
startup procedure took over seven minutes. It was possible to skip a lot of
steps and go from activating the power to the engines being able to fly in four
minutes; that was the absolute fastest it could be done. There were too many
systems that needed to power up in sequence to make the process go any faster.
“This Irene person is right; it is impossible to steal a Buzzard. As soon as
any Ruhar at the airbase hear those engines starting, they will react, and this
Irene won’t get anywhere.”

“Oh sure, Joe, if you do
it the hard way. Duh. I plan to cheat.”

“Can you give me more
details there, Skippy?”

“Simple. We’ll have the
Ruhar steal a Buzzard for her.”

Irene Striebich tried to
relax in the back of the Buzzard. The ship had showed up at her village that
afternoon, and she had been ordered to come with them. It had happened exactly
as Shauna told her it would, so she boarded the Buzzard without question. There
were only three Ruhar aboard; two pilots up front and one soldier watching
Irene. The soldier seemed bored, and told her only that they had been ordered
to bring Shauna to their airbase, he didn’t know why. Other than that, the
soldier didn’t want to talk.

The ship droned on for
over an hour; Irene calculated in her head that they had passed over the ocean
and were now approaching or already over the coast of Tenturo. Shauna had told
her to expect what happened next, so Irene was not worried when the droning of
the engines stuttered, then cut out. The guard shook himself out of the
half-asleep position he had been in, and spoke to the pilots. Since the guard
had taken her zPhone, she didn’t understand most of the hurried conversation,
but she understood when the guard motioned for her to tug her harness tightly.
The engines restarted but surged and from the tone, Irene could tell neither of
the engines were developing much power. There was more conversation between the
soldier and the pilots as the Buzzard descended rapidly enough for Irene’s
stomach to flutter. Weight came back as the pilots slowed their descent and
then flared for landing. The soldier braced into a crash position, indicating Irene
should do the same. The soldier looked genuinely afraid and Irene tried to
mimic his expression, although he wasn’t paying much attention to her.

With a final roar of
thrusters being used to provide emergency supplemental lift to the failing
engines, the Buzzard hovered for a moment, then set down roughly enough that
Irene was glad she had been in a crash position. One, then the other engine
shut down, and the cockpit door opened. Both pilots came out, worried
expressions on their hamster faces. They popped the side door latch and went
out to inspect the ship. The guard unstrapped and walked toward the doorway to
join them. When he saw Irene reaching for her own straps, he shook his head.
“You stay,” he said in broken English, pointing to her seat emphatically.

Irene nodded and held up
her hands as the soldier walked down the fold-out stairs. As soon as he was out
of sight, she unbuckled her straps and got out of the seat as Shauna had
instructed. So far, events had gone as Shauna said they would, now was the
critical moment.

And, right on schedule,
there was a ‘click’ sound as a locker door unlatched. Just as Shauna said it
would. Crouching to avoid being seen through the window, Irene went forward to
the locker and pulled out one of the two rifles that Shauna had said would be
there. Now the last test. Irene selected the stun setting, flicked the safety
off, and put her finger on the trigger. Normally, a Ruhar weapon would disable
itself if touched by a human.

This one stayed active.
Confident now, although confident in who or what Irene didn’t know, she checked
again that the rifle was set to stun and popped her head up to glance out the
small window. Both pilots and the soldier were standing together, a few meters
in front of the left engine, looking at it and talking. Irene stepped into the
doorway and was able to take aim before the soldier saw her out of the corner
of his eye and reached for his pistol. It was too late for him. She stunned him
with one shot, then switched aim to the two unarmed pilots. Moving more slowly
and deliberately than she wanted to, she shot one pilot, then had to leap down
the stairs to take aim as the other pilot ran out of sight behind the left
engine pod. Irene shot him in the legs and he went down, sprawled full-length
in the grass.

Following the
instructions Shauna had sent to her, Irene took zPhones away from two of the
Ruhar, and used the soldier’s knife to cut away the locator beacons that were
sewn into the collar of the pilot’s jackets. Then she dragged first the soldier
and the two pilots away from the Buzzard, so they wouldn’t be harmed by the
engine exhaust. The Ruhar were heavy, Irene was grateful for the hard work
she’d been doing working on a farm. She left the pistol with the soldier, and
activated his zPhone. As Shauna had said, the soldier’s zPhone now had only one
function; a map. The map would allow the three Ruhar to walk to a village on
the coast within a week. The three aliens began stirring awake, so she stunned
them again, then went back into the Buzzard and brought back a box of Ruhar
field rations, three blankets and a pack that contained useful items like a
tarp, knives and a shovel. The three Ruhar would be fine as long as they didn’t
stay in place waiting for rescue. Because rescue would not be coming for them;
Shauna’s friends had somehow arranged to fake a Buzzard crash over the ocean.
Any rescue aircraft would be looking for wreckage far out at sea; without the
pilots knowing, the Buzzard’s transponder had turned off in the middle of the
flight.

Everything had worked
exactly as Shauna told Irene it would; now came the final test. She went back
in the Buzzard, secured the door, sat in the pilot seat and took a deep breath.
All the instruments were on, and the controls didn’t freeze when she touched the
control stick. One of the biometric security features of a Buzzard was a reader
built into the control stick; it scanned the user’s DNA to assure an authorized
pilot was touching the controls. No way could a human pass a DNA scan.

Yet Irene did pass the scan.
All the controls still worked perfectly. And- “Oh, fuck me,” Irene gasped. With
a flicker, the cockpit displays all switched from Ruhar script to English. She
had been trained to read Ruhar, but somehow the flight systems had reverted to
the settings installed when humans had controlled aircraft on Paradise.

Irene decided she could
puzzle about that later, after she was in the air. The right, then the left
engine started normally. Because the aircraft had just landed and systems other
than the engines had not been shut down, she was able to go to full power and
lift off in less than a minute. After reaching a hundred meters, she circled
the area to check that the three Ruhar were unharmed. They were, laying prone
on the grass where she had left them. Irene pointed the Buzzard’s nose toward
the coordinates Shauna had sent and kept the Buzzard flying low and at a
moderate speed. As soon as the system was ready, she engaged the stealth field,
and suddenly the windows went dark as light was bent around the aircraft’s
hull. No matter; she was trained to fly on instruments.

After setting the
autopilot and verifying that all systems were operating normally, she pulled
one of the two zPhones out of a pocket. “Shauna, it’s Irene. I’m in the air.”

“Great! You have a clear
path to us, there aren’t any aircraft along your flightpath right now. The
Ruhar have a dozen aircraft doing search and rescue where they think you went
down over the ocean.”

“All the cockpit displays
are in English instead of Ruhar. How the hell
did you do that?”

“I didn’t do anything. I
told you, we have friends. Everything went Ok?” Shauna knew it had, for Emby
had sent them a message that Irene had successfully launched and was on the way
to pick them up.

“Yes, everything went
fine. I’ll be there in,” she checked the flight computer, “about an hour.
You’re going to tell me what this top secret mission is after I land?”

“I will. And it’s going
to blow your mind,” Shauna said with a laugh.

“Giant maser cannons?” Irene exclaimed in disbelief.

“Those were my words
exactly, Lieutenant,” Jesse agreed. “Ain’t that some shit?”

“And you think this
Mysterious Benefactor is a group of native Ruhar who don’t like their
government trading away this planet?”

“We don’t think that,
we’re guessing,” Major Perkins corrected their new pilot. “Based on what Emby
has been able to do, the facts so far fit our guess.”

“We’re going to
reactivate these projectors, so we can shoot the Kristang battlegroup out of
the sky?” Irene asked.

“That’s the idea,”
Perkins agreed.

“Yes, ma’am. Then we’ll
still have the problem of the Ruhar government wanting to sell Paradise to the
Kristang,” Irene said skeptically.

“I believe Emby is hoping
that if the Ruhar fleet has to fight for this planet again, they’ll want to
keep it. Right now, it’s too easy for their government to take whatever they
can get and bail on us.” Perkins explained. “Are you regretting your decision
to join us?” If Striebich wanted to pull out now, that was going to be a major
problem. Perkins couldn’t let her go anywhere, or have access to a zPhone.

“No ma’am,” Irene shook
her head emphatically. “This is a little tough to take all at once. I hate the
feeling of knowing those lizard ships are hanging above my head all the time.
If we can do something about that, I’m all in. What’s the next step?”

“You have got to be
joking,” Irene said with shock after Dave dropped the truck’s tailgate and
pulled aside the canvas flap. It was a big truck, and the cargo box was fairly
jammed with boxes and equipment. “How is all of this crap supposed to fit in my
Buzzard?”

“It’s not, ma’am,” Dave
said. “Mostly we just need to take the drill rig with us. A lot of this,” he
pointed to the cargo box, “is fuel cells for the truck and the Buzzard. And we
have,” he hopped up into the cargo box and tilted it toward the pilot, “food.
Real food.” He held up an American MRE pouch, then a package labeled ‘Chicken
and Dumplings’.

Irene gasped. “Where did
you get that?”

Dave shrugged. “Emby had
the truck loaded up like Santa’s sleigh for us. There’s also two full boxes
with cans of nutrient mush if you prefer that, ma’am.”

“No! Real food would be
excellent,” Irene said with delight. “I guess that drill rig will fit, I’ll
have to see it.”

“Emby assured us that this
type of portable drill rig was designed to be carried by a Buzzard.” Shauna
assured the pilot. “We practiced unloading and loading it yesterday. Emby even
included the tiedown strap kit for securing the drill rig in the back of a
Buzzard.”

“You’re sure about this?”
Irene asked, because she was not sure at all.

“Yes. Look, the cover
comes off the truck’s cargo box, and the truck has a crane for loading its own
stuff. There is also a mini forklift kind of thing, with treads so it can
operate off-road. Plus, the drill rig is self-propelled.” The drill rig’s base
had six articulated legs so it could walk on its own just about anywhere.
Seeing the insect-like legs in action was spine-chillingly creepy at first,
Shauna thought. There was no denying it was very effective.

Irene looked at her
Buzzard, sitting under camouflage netting and tree branches. She would not be
flying it again until after nightfall. Emby had confirmed the Ruhar still
thought her ship had gone down over the ocean; they still had several aircraft
flying search missions. And there was a full-scale investigation into how a
Buzzard had been sent to pick up a single human in Lemuria; Ruhar military
command on the planet was not able to trace where the order had come from.
According to Emby, they would never discover who had issued the order. To be
safe, she was not going to fly until the early hours of the next morning. “If
you’re sure, show me. Let’s get it loaded.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

To Irene’s surprise,
everything they needed for drilling down to the first projector fit inside the Buzzard,
with room to spare. The Ruhar designers had cleverly packaged the portable
drill rig so it collapsed on itself, and could crawl up the Buzzard’s rear ramp
on its own. They wouldn’t be able to deploy the drill rig that way at a
projector site, but it was still an impressive feat of engineering. Everything
was squared away with two hours to spare, so the five caught an quick nap and
were awakened in the pitch dark night by message from Emby.

After a quick breakfast
of nutrient mushes, they checked that the truck was securely hidden, then Irene
began walking around the Buzzard for a preflight inspection.

“What kind of name is
Striebich, ma’am?” Jesse asked as he held a light for their pilot. He
pronounced the name ‘Stree-bick’ as Irene had done.

“It’s German,” Irene said
as she opened an access panel and checked an actuator.

“German?” Jesse said,
surprised.

“I know,” Irene laughed
and looked at her arm’s light brown skin. “My father is German and the joke was
that I came from gypsies. My mother’s name is Elena Ramos, she was in Germany
with the Army and married a German man over there.”

“She was in the Army,
ma’am?”

Irene nodded. “She was a
Blackhawk pilot; she’s why I became a pilot. She retired only three years
before the hamsters hit us,” she frowned. Now the Ruhar were the closest thing
UNEF had to allies. Life was certainly strange sometimes. “Before we left
Earth, she talked about reenlisting to join UNEF, but it would have meant six
months of training and she might not get flight duty anyway.”

“Sometimes I wish that I
hadn’t gotten the recall notice,” Jesse said honestly. “My father, my uncle, my
cousin and I were all about to head out on a hunting trip, we planned to be
gone a week or more. We were loading the truck when my mother told me I had a message
from the 10th Division on my email. My cousin told me to ignore it,
but I knew I couldn’t. If we’d gotten that truck loaded earlier, I might not
have seen that message until it was too late to go offworld. There wasn’t any
cellphone service up in the hills back then.”

“I didn’t have a choice,”
Irene said as she closed the access panel. “I was already back with the 10th
Aviation at Fort Drum when we got the order to deploy to Ecuador.” She walked
over to the left engine and pointed for Jesse to shine the light into the
exhaust. “How did you get involved with this?”

“Us?” Jesse asked. “The
four of us were all together because of Joe Bishop.” He told her the whole
astonishing story as she finished the external preflight check.

“Do you think Bishop is
really alive?” Irene asked quietly, trying to be sensitive that Jesse had been
Joe’s friend.

“Major Perkins says the
hamsters think he is. Me?” Jesse scratched his head. “All I know is that Joe is
one lucky son of a bitch, always has been. He also has a nose for trouble; if
there is trouble within a hundred miles, you can be sure Bish will find himself
in the middle of it sooner or later. What I can say is, I hope if he did find
trouble, he didn’t drag anyone else into it.”

“He’s right, Joe,” Skippy
said. “You sure dragged me and the whole Merry Band of Pirates into a huge
mess, didn’t you?”

“Me?” I protested. We had
been listening to Jesse and Irene talk through their zPhones, which they didn’t
realize were transmitting. I did feel guilty about eavesdropping; the reason I
justified listening to them talk had been to prevent them from making mistakes
they couldn’t recover from. “You are the one who got me into trouble, Skippy. If you hadn’t opened the door to that
warehouse, I would be on a farm in Lemuria right now.” Or dead, I didn’t say.
“Turn it off, please.”

“Are you sure, Joe?”

“Yes. You’re listening,
you can tell us if they make a big mistake. It’s creepy for me to be listening
to them. I don’t even know this Irene.”

“You read her service
record and the profile I put together, Joe.”

“That’s not the same as
meeting her in person.”

“I wouldn’t know about
that,” said the beer can, who never actually met anyone ‘in person’. “Lt.
Striebich is now in the cockpit and running her preflight checks there. I could
tell her that I know everything is perfect with the aircraft, but a pilot would
never take anyone’s word about that, right?”

“You got it. I’ve only
flown Thuranin dropships, but before I fly, I am checking everything myself.”

“Understood. While we’re
waiting, Joe, I have a question.”

“Skippy, it is unlikely
that I have an answer. Especially if your question is about 17th
century Hungarian poetry.”

“No, it’s nothing like
that. When you were at your parents’ house, you borrowed your father’s truck to
drive into town.”

“Yeah, so? I can drive,
Skippy.” Although, right then, I wondered whether my driver’s license had
expired. I had been away from Earth for a while, after all.

“Your driving and
piloting skills are debatable, Joe, but that is not my question. Why were you
driving a truck? Why don’t you have a Corvette?”

“A Corvette?” That
question completely surprised me. “I can’t afford a Corvette, Skippy. Besides,
what would I do with a car like that in Maine? It snows there six months a
year. Why do you ask that?”

“I thought all astronauts
drive Corvettes. Technically, you are an astronaut, Joe. You have flown
spacecraft by yourself, and you even performed a spacedive.”

“Huh. I never thought of
myself as an astronaut, Skippy. Maybe you’re right.”

“Mmm, maybe not. Real
astronauts get laid a lot more than you.”

“That’s because women
know those guys are astronauts, Skippy. I can’t tell anyone what we’ve been
doing out here.”

“Also, astronauts are a
lot cooler than you, Joe.”

“Good bye, Skippy.”

Sergeant Adams woke me and
Captain Desai up early the next morning, as Perkins and her team approached the
first projector site in the Buzzard. Many things could go wrong at this point,
we all wanted to know what was happening in real time. I told Skippy to show us
video from the Buzzard’s cameras and sensors, and we would listen when they
talked to each other on zPhones, but we weren’t going to eavesdrop this time.

“Are they clear?” Irene
asked over the zPhone earpiece. The Buzzard’s belly camera gave her a view
beneath her, and Dave in the back was remotely aiming the camera where it
needed to be. Still, with tons of equipment to be lowered to the ground, it
made sense to be certain.

“Major Perkins confirms
they are clear, yes. Should I begin lowering the sling now?” Dave asked.

“Do it. I want the drill
rig on the ground before the wind picks up,” Irene ordered. This whole
operation was too complicated, but she didn’t know an easier way. The Kristang
had deliberately installed the projectors in remote areas that would be unlikely
to be developed for habitation, industry or agricultural use. In most cases,
this meant that trees had grown over the sites during the intervening years;
and there was no way to land the Buzzard at the sites without the laboriously
slow process of cutting a clearing. With the Buzzard, they had flown to any
clear area near the first site and lowered Perkins and Jesse to the ground on a
cable. Those two then cleared just enough trees out of the way, while Irene
landed the Buzzard and she helped Dave and Shauna unload the drill rig and
secure it in a sling. The drill rig and its associated gear was now awkwardly
slung beneath the Buzzard and needed to be carefully lowered through the gap in
the trees. The sun would be rising in less than an hour, so they needed to get
the drill rig, Shauna and Dave on the ground as quickly as possible. Then Irene
would park the Buzzard close by, cover it with a camouflage net and wait. Wait,
while the four others drilled down to a hidden chamber where a secret giant
maser cannon could be reactivated.

The weather forecast from
Emby was favorable, except that Irene expected the light breeze to pick up and
become unpredictably gusty as the sun came over the horizon. The drill rig
needed to be on the ground and the sling cable retracted before then. If the
wind was blowing too strongly for Shauna and Dave to be lowered to the ground
by cable, Irene could land the Buzzard and those two could walk to the
projector site. The sling with the drill rig was fitted with thrusters that
could be steered remotely, or it had a limited ability to guide itself. Perkins
and Colter had hammered a target into the ground where they wanted the sling to
make contact, the sling would home in on that spot. Irene only needed to hover
the Buzzard over the opening in the forest canopy, and either Dave or the
sling’s automated guidance system would handle dropping the package. That was
great news for Irene; she had limited experience with hauling cargo by sling,
and no recent experience.

It was nerve-wracking to
hover the Buzzard, one eye on the instruments and one eye on the treetops to
the east. When the wind kicked up, leaves on the trees to the east would
flutter and signal when the wind would reach the Buzzard. Irene used the leaves
to anticipate when she would need to maneuver the lumbering Buzzard. In
training, she had been able to hover within a two meter sphere; never varying
more than a meter in any direction. In training, she never had a multiton
weight suspended on the end of a cable beneath her ship.

“Down! It’s down,” Shauna
called out over the intercom. “Cable released.”

Irene had felt the cable
go slack, she had been watching the camera feed to anticipate when to reduce
power. She couldn’t help allowing herself a self-congratulatory smile; the drop
had been nearly perfect despite the morning winds picking up already. “Retract
cable,” she ordered. “Jarrett, Czajka, the wind is too rough for you two to
rappel down. I need to land and you can hike in.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Dave
replied unhappily. Looking down at the waving treetops, he decided that maybe
he shouldn’t be unhappy about having to walk a kilometer or two through the
woods that morning. “I’ll inform Major Perkins.”

“No,” Irene said flatly.
“No.”

“I wouldn’t be asking
if-” Shauna started to say.

“Shauna, no. No way! I
became a pilot to be in the air, not underground.”

“Irene, please, think
about it. None of us can do it, we tried. Even Major Perkins tried, and she’s
bigger than I am. If we have to lift the drill and start again, it will take
another full day, and Emby is already pushing us for being too slow.”

“I don’t believe this,
Shauna.” It occurred to Irene then that under normal circumstances, Shauna
should have addressed her as ‘Lieutenant’ or Ma’am, and she should have called
the Specialist ‘Jarrett’. These were anything but normal circumstances. “What
happens if I get stuck down there? Who will fly the Buzzard?”

Perkins’ team had gotten
the drill down eighty three meters before it broke through to an open chamber;
a chamber that didn’t appear on their subsurface scans. Then they retracted the
exploratory drill and fitted the widest drill bit available. It was slow going
because of their inexperience with drilling, even with Emby guiding them. More
than once, Emby had sent messages exhorting them to move faster. An exasperated
Major Perkins had replied that if Emby wanted them to drill more quickly, they
should have sent someone with experience.

Finally, after what
Perkins knew was far too much time, the big drill was done. And then they
discovered the problem Emby had apparently not considered. None of the four
drill crew members could fit down the hole. Shauna had tried first, but she was
five feet seven and her shoulders simply were too wide. For once, she regretted
the weight training she had done to qualify for infantry duty. The two men had
made a halfhearted attempt to fit, then Major Perkins had tried, but as she was
five feet ten there was no way she would fit either. They were about to drill a
second hole next to the first, in order to widen the opening, when Shauna
thought of their pilot.

Irene Striebich was
barely at the Army’s minimum height requirement for pilots of five feet four
inches, and that had been with her standing with perfect posture, stretching
her neck. She was petite and slender and she’d always been self-conscious about
her diminutive size. Now, as far as Major Perkins and Emby thought, her petite
frame was an asset. “Shauna, there has got to be some other way to do this.”

“Skippy, come on, isn’t
there another way to do this? Does she really need to squeeze down that hole?”
The thought of me doing that made my skin crawl.

“Another way like what,
Joe?” Skippy asked, sounding annoyed.

“I don’t know. Like, can
we do it remotely?”

“Gosh, Joe, I never
thought of that. What a brilliant idea,” he said sarcastically. “You know, I
don’t have the owner’s manual for that type of Kristang projector, so I looked
it up on YouTube. Half the links were people doing stupid stuff, like asking me
if we can do this remotely. No we can’t, you dumdum. The Kristang didn’t want
anyone waking up those projectors remotely, that’s why they physically disabled
them. Someone needs to go down there and reconnect the power connections and
plug things in. I’d do it because I can fit down the hole easily, but, darn it,
I don’t have thumbs. You jackass.”

“Sorry. Ok, send Perkins
a message, Striebich needs to try. She isn’t claustrophobic, is she?”

“Not according to her
service records, but who wouldn’t be claustrophobic while going eighty meters
down a narrow, dark tube?”

“Crap. Ask her to try. If
she can’t do it, that’s understandable.”

Irene’s whole body was
shaking when she felt her feet finally had room to move. She swung her feet
around, trying to find some place to stand. The camera on the end of the drill
had shown an oval-shaped chamber, which now had a cone of dirt below where the
drill had punched through the composite ceiling. The cable continued lowering
her, with her shoulders scraping the sides even though she had her arms
squeezed as tightly together in front of her as she could. Without being able
to move her head enough to look down, and her eyes only inches from the tube’s
wall, she couldn’t see anything at first. The drill had sprayed a coating on
the hole that hardened and prevented the dirt and rocks from collapsing in on
her; Emby had said the coating was considerably tougher than steel. Emby was
not eighty meters down in a skinny hole.

Light! Even looking
straight ahead, she was able to see light coming up from below. Then her right
foot touched something soft. It was the cone of dirt. She continued descending
and both of her feet found solid ground, then she was able to move her arms.
Her shoulders screamed at her from being cramped in one position for so long.
And her eyes blinked from the sudden unaccustomed glare of the lights they had
tossed down the hole.

When she could stand, she
managed to report in. “I’m down,” she said, and tugged on the cable twice for
emphasis. “No surprises here, it looks like it did from the camera. What does
Emby want me to do first?” Irene wanted to accomplish her tasks as quickly as
possible, so she could clip the cable back on her harness and be pulled up. Up
and out.

“Outstanding, Striebich,”
Major Perkins replied. “Here’s what you do-”

“Success, Joe!” Skippy
shouted excitedly. “I have established a link to the projector, and I have
complete control. All systems fully operational. Who’d have guessed it; lizards
can build some good stuff when they really try.”

“That is great, Skippy,”
I said with relief. “Tell Major Perkins to congratulate Striebich for us,
please.” I knew Skippy would write the message in a way that Perkins could not
tell it was coming from a human source.

“Will do, Joe. Hmm, I
will also tell Major Perkins that Striebich should not go anywhere near the
control panel on the far left. Because that is for the explosive charges that
will blow the soil off the top of the projector and extend the maser cannon’s
muzzle.”

“Please do that,” I said
seriously. It was great that Perkins’ team had gotten a maser cannon
reactivated. It was not great that, from the time they got the drill rig
initially loaded into the Buzzard, it had taken four days. Even with Skippy
hacking into the sensors of both Ruhar and Kristang, we needed to get at least
eight projectors online as soon as possible. There was too much risk of
Perkins’ team being discovered. “We need to think of ways to speed up the whole
process.” Perkins had told ‘Emby’ that she was confident future projectors
could be activated much quicker, now that her crew knew how get a drill rig to
a site and how to operate it. “And I don’t know how many times we can ask
Striebich to squeeze down that tiny hole. If I did that, my nerves would be
shot. And she needs to fly that Buzzard, we can’t risk her having a nervous
breakdown.”

“Oh, that’s not a
problem, Joe. Next time, I’ll explain to Major Perkins how to make the big
drill bit oscillate, so it creates a larger diameter hole. Your buddies
Cornpone and Ski should fit down there easily.”

“What? Why the hell didn’t
you tell them that this time?”

“Truthfully, I didn’t
consider the difficulty of one of you monkeys squeezing down a hole like that.
I don’t have physical limitations, so I didn’t think of it. That’s supposed to
be your job, Joe. We could have told them to oscillate the drill bit this time,
but they already had the hole open, and making the hole larger would have
required as much time as drilling a second hole.”

“Crap.” He was right, it
was my job to think of practical issues. “My bad. Yes, please inform Perkins
about how to drill a bigger hole in the future. Striebich should be happy about
that. How’s the weather forecast?”

“I suggested to Major
Perkins that her team move with alacrity, because I am expecting rather strong
thunderstorms tomorrow. It would behoove them to get the drill disassembled and
the sling operation completed as quickly as possible.”

“Alacrity? Behoove?
Really, Skippy?”

“Hey, Joe, Major Perkins
has a master’s degree that your Army paid for. And unlike you, she paid
attention in high school. It would be good for you to expand your vocabulary
sometimes, Colonel Joe.”

“Whatever. You knock that
Kristang battlegroup out of the sky, and I’ll let you teach me one new word
every day. Deal?”

“Seems like I’m doing a
lot more work than you, but, I accept.”

“Uh oh, Joe, we are running out of time,”
Skippy announced. “We need to strike today.”

“What? Only four
projectors have been activated, you told us that Perkins needed to get eight
online, at minimum. Why the rush?”

“Circumstances have
changed; I have new information. The Kristang commander is feeling confident in
his control of Paradise, so he has scheduled a war game to commence later
today; in about nine hours. Ships will soon begin dispersing to participate in
the attack, and we will lose the ability to hit them.”

“Crap! We can attack
with only four projectors?”

“Oh, yeah, Joe, it’s
certainly not ideal, but it will work well enough. The four that are now active
will be sufficiently effective against the battlegroup for an initial attack. It
is for follow-on defense that we will need to have more projectors to provide
full coverage. The only downside to our hastily-planned attack is that the
commander of the Kristang task force is not aboard his command ship right now.
He came down to Paradise yesterday, in order to investigate a bizarre accident.
It seems that a dropship crashed, and resulted in blowing up most of a Kristang
airbase.”

“Huh. That is
bizarre,” I rolled my eyes. “I wonder how that happened?”

“I have no idea, Joe.
That is a puzzle for sure. Anyway, when Admiral Kekrando left the wrecked
airbase, he is really pissed about it by the way, he flew up to a destroyer
instead of the command ship. We need to take out the command ship first, it
represents a significant portion of their combat power. I will hit Kekrando’s
destroyer if I can; I wouldn’t count on it.”

“I am sure this
Kekrando guy will not be heartbroken if you are not able to target the
destroyer he is on.”

“Good point. Hey, I
can send him a ‘Sorry that we missed you’ card?”

“Let’s not, and say
we did.”

With only four
projectors online, their area of coverage was limited. Each projector could
only shoot within a cone of about twenty eight degrees. Perkins’ team had
activated four projectors that were close to each other, in order to bring
projectors online as quickly as possible. While that made sense in terms of
logistics, it meant there were huge areas of the sky we couldn’t hit. Skippy could
only guarantee to hit eight ships, fourteen at the most. The Kristang ships
were varying their patrol patterns, to prevent the Ruhar commodore from being
tempted into an opportunistic raid.

We did have an
advantage, if we had time to use it. Each Kristang warship was assigned a
patrol route by the command ship in order to coordinate their coverage of the
planet’s surface. Most of the communication was from the command ship’s
computer to the other ships’ navigation computers, so the crews were not directly
involved in most cases. Skippy had been able to gain limited access to the
Kristang command ship’s computer; he used that access to alter the patrol
patterns. Although the patrol routes were supposed to be random, there was
logic to them. The method of assigning patrol routes was to prevent too many
ships from being bunched together, because that left gaps in coverage and made
the task force an easy target. The challenge for Skippy was to get as many
Kristang ships within the strike cones of our four projectors, before some
alert Kristang realized something was very wrong. Mathematically, he figured
the best he could do was bring fourteen ships within our strike cones at any
one time. I told him not to try for the perfect solution; that carried too much
risk of the enemy being alerted and blowing our whole plan. If Skippy could get
a dozen ships in the virtual crosshairs of our projectors, he was to tell me
immediately, so I could press the Big Red Button on my zPhone. And if there was
any sign the Kristang were catching on to our plan, we were going to shoot
right away. Even with the Kristang ships flying unaltered patrol routes, there
were usually six or seven ships within the strike cones at any one time.

Even the awesome
power of the projectors would not allow us to clear enemy ships from the skies
over Paradise if those ships had been ready for our attack. If those ships had
their defensive shields active, even the searing power of a projector’s maser
beams might be deflected long enough for the ships to perform an emergency
jump. Lightly-protected ships like frigates would be no match for the power of
a projector, but a Kristang destroyer might survive long enough to jump to
safety. And a cruiser or battlecruiser could potentially deflect even two shots
before being forced to jump away. With only four projectors to work with, we
couldn’t afford to use two projectors on one ship.

Fortunately, we had
the laws of physics on our side. Ships not engaged in battle could not maintain
their shields at full power all the time. Defensive shields drained a
significant amount of power from a ship’s reactor; in the case of a small ship
like a frigate, the ship had to decrease shield power temporarily in order to
fire its maser cannon. Shield generators also wore out and became polarized
from long-term use, so the Kristang ships around Paradise had their ships in
low-power mode to protect the ships only from being struck by space debris.
Since shield generators could be brought to full power in seconds, and a ship
would be warned of Ruhar ships attacking by the tell-tale gamma ray burst, the
Kristang felt safe leaving their shields at low power. And that meant their
ships in the skies above Paradise were sitting ducks.

All four projectors
fired simultaneously to maximize the surprise. Two of the maser cannons had
clear skies above; another had high, thin cloud cover that was no obstacle to the
maser projecting its full power above the atmosphere. The fourth projector was
somewhat unlucky; it was under a heavy layer of cloud cover, but at least the
clouds were not pouring down rain.

The heavy layer of
clouds was no match for that maser cannon; it had been designed to shoot
through clouds. Its initial shot was a rapid series of lower-powered pulses
that lanced up through the clouds, the searing heat of the maser pulses boiling
away the water vapor and leaving a brief, narrow clear channel all the way up through
the cloud. Half a millisecond later the maser put out its full power into the
clear tunnel of air, striking a Kristang destroyer. The projector followed a
shoot-shoot-look pattern, with two full power shots followed by a lower-power
maser scan of the target. Satisfied that the Kristang destroyer was now a
wreck, the projector shifted its aim to a second target, first shooting a rapid
series of pulses to knock aside the clouds in that direction.

The very first target
struck in the engagement was the command ship, the battlecruiser He Who Pushes Aside Fear Shall Always be
Victorious. The maser cannon that targeted that ship, a maser shooting up
through a crystal clear sky, did not care if the ship’s crew pushed aside fear
or not. It also followed a standard shoot-shoot-look pattern. The first pulse
lasted 0.2 milliseconds and sliced through the unprotected ship’s hull. With
the Victorious moving at nearly 3
kilometers per second, the maser beam did not need to move its aim; the ship
did the work of cutting itself almost in half as it moved through the path of
the maser bolt. One area the first maser pulse burned through was a missile
magazine that was the projector’s primary target. Five missiles exploded, sending
shrapnel in every direction and rupturing the ship’s hull from inside. That
first maser shot would have been enough to turn the Victorious from a powerful warship into a drifting hulk, but the
projector was not finished. Shrapnel from the exploding missiles had not even time
to reach the aft of the ship, when the second maser pulse of the
shoot-shoot-look pattern targeted the battlecruiser’s reactor, and an instant
later a brief new sun shone in the sky high above Paradise. When the maser
shifted into its lower-powered look mode, the largest piece of organized matter
where the Victorious had been was
about the size of a dropship.

Remorselessly, the
projector shifted to the second in the list of targets it had been given by an
alien AI. Less than a second later, that target also exploded because a direct
maser hit to the ship’s jump drive capacitors released that stored energy.

The maser projector
then changed aim to a third target, automatically calculating how much energy
from its rapidly draining capacitors would be needed for the shot.

“Done!” Skippy
shouted triumphantly a few seconds later. “Scratch twelve targets! Damn, I am good! We may be able to hit another ship
in a couple seconds, it’s at a bad angle right now, but in a few- No, damn it,
the stupid thing just jumped away. Oh, well, you can’t have everything. Joe,
tell me the truth, am I awesome, or am I awesome?”

“Between those two
excellent choices, I will choose awesome, Skippy. I would have celebrated your
awesome awesomeness without prompting. And you are not just good, you are the best. The best ever. How could any being
be more awesome than you?” Ok, maybe I was laying the praise on a little thick.

“I will accept your
praise graciously, woefully inadequate though it is. You are doing the best
your puny monkey brain can do to marvel at my awesomeness.”

I had to laugh. “You
are such an asshole sometimes. But I
love you anyway.”

“And I find you
mostly almost tolerable, Joe.”

“I appreciate that.
You got a sitrep for us?”

“Affirmative on the
sitrep, Colonel,” Skippy said in a sarcastic tone. He hated military acronyms.
“We hit fourteen ships, and all fourteen ships were completely destroyed. That
includes their battlecruiser and both cruisers. Only two ships even had time to
start charging their defensive shield projectors, and that didn’t do them any
good. It would be easier to list which ships the Kristang have left, than to the
list the ones we destroyed.”

“Understood, go
ahead.”

“The Kristang have ten
warships remaining; five destroyers and five frigates. On the Ruhar side, the ships
are that combat ready are one cruiser, three destroyers and two frigates. That
cruiser would seem to give the Ruhar a slight advantage, but the Kristang
design philosophy for destroyers makes them more like the equivalent of a Ruhar
light cruiser. The Kristang still have the advantage of combat power.”

“Yeah, but we have
the projectors,” I reminded him.

“Two of those
projectors are now almost depleted, Joe. Their remaining power is inadequate to
penetrate the shields of a starship, even if we fired both of those projectors
at the same target. Each of the other two healthy projectors are capable of one
shot each; they could destroy a ship if we fired both at the same target. Unfortunately,
those two projectors are poorly positioned to hit the same target; the enemy
ship would need to be within a very small slice of the sky for the projectors
to have line of sight to it. That won’t happen, because now that the enemy
knows where at least four of our projectors are, their ships will avoid the
space covered by them.”

“Yeah,” I said,
looking at Adams, “we need to get Perkins working on activating that other
projector as soon as she can. Those Kristang ships are sure to test whether
those four projectors are the only ones active. If we can fire another
projector, the Kristang will assume we have capabilities we haven’t revealed
yet. If they jump in and we can’t shoot at them, they’ll know that we’re
bluffing, and then we’ll be in deep shit real quick. Skippy, can you provide cover
for Perkins if her team needs to work fast? We can’t let them wait for night.”

“Affirmative, Joe.
Without the prying eyes of starships overhead, I can conceal Major Perkins’
Buzzard from being detected, unless someone happens to eyeball them while they
are digging. And when they are done and need to fly away, I can give the pilot
a route for maximum concealment. They do still have the problem of needing to
refuel before they can reach the next projector site. Joe, I do not think we
will have much trouble concealing the actions of a lone Buzzard.”

“Why is that?”

“Because, Joe, very
soon I expect the skies over Paradise to be filled with Ruhar and Kristang aircraft,
fighting the biggest air battle in several hundred years. The Kristang landed
over three hundred aircraft, plus they captured additional Ruhar aircraft when
they took over territory under terms of the cease fire. The Ruhar have almost six
hundred aircraft, but they have a civilian population to protect, and more of
their aircraft are unarmed civilian transports. Without starships overhead,
those aircraft are the best way to establish control over the surface of
Paradise. We should expect- Yes. Joe, the Kristang just launched a wave of
dropships and aircraft in an attack on two Ruhar airbases. The Ruhar have
detected the launch and are scrambling aircraft to intercept. This is going to
get ugly very quickly.”

Saily Chernandagren
walked out of the hangar toward her Dobreh fighter. The aircraft she would be
flying that day was ‘hers’, which wasn’t always the case given how often
high-performance Dobrehs needed to go off the flight line for maintenance. That
day, her mission was a simple check ride, to test a thruster unit that had been
replaced. It should be a simple, relatively short flight. Although it was only
a short flight, the Dobreh was fully armed with missiles; while Kristang were
still on and above the planet they were technically at war. Neither Saily nor
any other Ruhar trusted the Kristang to adhere to the cease fire agreement.

“Your pet wants a
cookie,” Juff Blander said sourly, pointing at Derek Bonsu, who was opening an
access cover. The human, too eager to please, always opened the access covers
so that pilots could perform their preflight inspections faster. Juff was
Saily’s copilot and Weapon Systems Officer, who sat in the back seat of the Dobreh.

“He’s not my pet,” Saily
protested, knowing her words were falling on deaf ears. Her Wizzo had nothing
personal against Derek; Jeff simply did not like humans, any humans. Like
Saily, Juff was a native to Gehtanu; his family on both sides had been on
Gehtanu for three generations. His entire family had been forcibly evacuated by
the humans. Juff had been scheduled to join them on the trip up the space
elevator in little over a month, when the Ruhar fleet arrived and took the
planet back. “You shouldn’t be mean to him. We may be leaving this planet if
the Kristang stay here, but he is going to die,” she said sadly.

“They are not my
problem,” Jeff said angrily. “They came here with the Kristang.” He stared at
the human, his anger softening. The pilot was right; if the Kristang kept
Gehtanu, the humans eventually would suffer a terrible fate. “Saily, this is
just a check ride,” Juff commented, “take him instead.”

“Are you sure?” Saily
asked, surprised.

“Yes.” There was an
increasing volume of rumors that the Ruhar federal government was not sending
the fleet to fight the Kristang; that Gehtanu was not important enough to fight
for. If that rumor was true, Derek Bonsu did not have much longer to live. The
human had actively assisted the Ruhar, helped to maintain their combat
aircraft. The Kristang would find that to be an unforgivable betrayal, and the
thin-skinned Kristang never forgave any slight, no matter how minor. “This may
be his last opportunity to fly. Go,” he urged, “before I change my mind.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“Your aircraft,” Saily
announced, releasing the controls. The Dobreh was on autopilot, cruising at
only fifteen thousand meters altitude as measured by humans. Every system had
operated perfectly in the flight, including the replacement thruster unit. The
only way to test the thruster to its full capabilities was at high altitude, up
where the air was so thin that thrusters were needed to control the gunship’s
flight. “Take us up.”

“Yes Ma’am,” Derek
acknowledged as he deactivated the autopilot, and set the controls for the
airspeed and attitude that allowed a maximum climb rate. The Dobreh zoomed
toward the upper edge of the atmosphere, where its engines strained to gulp in
enough air to keep the aircraft aloft. Soon, the wings began to lose lift and
Derek needed to push the nose down to maintain airspeed, or the thin air
flowing over the wings would cause a stall. A Dobreh could hover at up to
twenty thousand meters; already he had the engine pods pointed down slightly so
their thrust helped keep the gunship aloft. “Losing roll control,” Derek
reported as the wings began to wobble. He had not been this high, other than in
a simulator, for over a year. The Ruhar aircraft flew like a dream; the
controls were light and responsive. The ship did everything he asked of it and
told him there was more, so much more that it could do and was eager to do.
Even at this extreme altitude with the engines straining, when he touched the
throttle, he could feel there was reserve power he had not used yet. If he had
not been concentrating so hard on the instruments, he would have had a moment
to realize this was the happiest he had been in months.

Coming to Paradise, once
something Derek had burned with patriotic fervor to do, had become a nightmare.
UNEF was trapped, not even the Kristang had access to Earth. The Expeditionary
Force were all prisoners of war, forced to grow their own food. Their ‘allies’
the Kristang had been revealed to be cruel deceivers, caring only about using
UNEF and enslaving humanity. Duty for UNEF was now all about survival on a
planet with the Ruhar in charge. Now the Kristang were back, and survival might
not be possible. If Derek had stopped to think about that, he would plunge into
despair. So he thought only of how joyous it was to fly this powerful alien
fighter aircraft, high above an alien planet.

The roll was getting
worse. A Ruhar pilot, with their genetically-enhanced reflexes, might have been
able to keep ahead of the aircraft’s shuddering, but Derek needed help to halt
the rolling tendency before it snapped the Dobreh over on its back. He consoled
himself with the thought that the purpose of going this high was to test the
thruster unit, which he now needed. “Engaging thrusters to stabilize.”

Saily looked at her
instruments to monitor the performance of the new thruster unit, which was not
actually new. It was a rebuilt unit that had been recovered from a Dobreh shot
down by her own people, back when a human had been flying the doomed aircraft
and the Ruhar fleet came back to retake control of the planet. She would have
preferred a truly new thruster unit, but of course spare parts were no longer
being shipped to Gehtanu. The thruster was operating perfectly, and Derek had
confident control of the aircraft, so she took her eyes away from the
instruments for a glance out the canopy.

Up this high, the sky
above was black, and the curve of the planet below was noticeable. It looked so
peaceful; the land to the north so green, the ocean below them so blue, the
cloud tops so brilliantly white. Above, her eyes caught sunlight reflecting off
something, and she blinked to enhance the vision in her helmet visor. A
Kristang ship. A big one. The image wobbled enough that she couldn’t quite tell
if that ship above her was the battlegroup’s command ship, but she thought that
likely. If she wanted, she could have viewed the image from one of the Dobreh’s
cameras, but she did not care to see the enemy ship that closely. Her eyes
turned back to the instruments, so she missed by a microsecond the intense
white flare coming up from the planet’s surface. She knew that she shouldn’t
look toward a maser beam, but her instincts made her look briefly before her
training took over. So she didn’t miss the projector’s second shot. Or the even
brighter fireball of that Kristang cruiser exploding.

“Engage stealth,” Saily
ordered calmly as she was momentarily blinded by the intense light of the maser
burning its way up through clouds. “Take us down on the deck.”

Derek did not hesitate.
He had not seen the initial maser shot, but caught the second beam out of the
corner of his eye. Immediately, he had closed his eyes and looked away, so his
vision was unaffected. The first thing he did was activate the stealth field,
and the bright sunlight coming in through the canopy disappeared, as a curtain
of darkness draped over the aircraft. From now on, he would be flying entirely
on instruments, which did not bother him. When the stealth field had been
powered up, long thin wires had extended from each wingtip and the tail. The
ends of the wires peeked out beyond the stealth field and provided sensor data.
The canopy automatically switched over to provide a view, a composite image of
what the sensors said were outside.

He did not make the
mistake of reducing power for at that altitude, the Dobreh would have stalled
and gone into a spin. Thrusters could have recovered from the spin, which the
aircraft would have done automatically, but with a shooting war going on above
his head, Derek had been trained to reserve thruster fuel. He pointed the Dobreh’s
nose down and felt his body moving upward against the seat straps as the
gunship hit the top of the arc, and he was momentarily weightless. Then the
sensation of weight gradually returned and he concentrated on keeping airspeed
to Vst, the speed for maximum stealth. He had to run the engines at almost
minimum power and monitor airflow over the wings so the Dobreh passed through
the atmosphere as smoothly as possible. The problem with using stealth in an
atmosphere was that enemy sensors could track him by the warm, roiling air
behind the Dobreh. If he had to engage in air combat, stealth would be almost a
liability; the engines would be putting out enough heat and turbulent air that
he might as well hold up a sign saying ‘shoot me’.

With the aircraft in a
stable descent trimmed for optimal stealth, Derek had time to scan the sensors
and assess the situation. He had just turned his attention to the tactical
display when another Kristang ship overhead exploded. Or a piece of a ship had
exploded, because he could run the display back and see that ship had been
struck by a powerful maser beam in the initial strike. Stunned, Derek toggled
the display back and expanded the coverage for a wider area. He gasped with
shock when he saw what the sensor data revealed. The Kristang battlegroup in
orbit had been hit hard by four powerful maser cannons on the surface. Maser cannons.

“You’ve hit the Kristang!
Yeah!” Derek shouted and pumped a fist toward the canopy. “Thank you!”

“That wasn’t us,” Saily
responded tersely. It was the first words they had exchanged since the attack
began. She had been monitoring the sensors and communicating with the airbase
to find out what in the hell was going
on. No one had answers; Ruhar command appeared to be as surprised as anyone.
“We don’t have projectors like that. If we did, we would have used them when
the Kristang were raiding us.”

“Not you? Then, who?”
Derek asked, completely confused. “It’s not us
is it? UNEF?”

“No, not humans either. I
do not know what is going on. Cut the chatter,” she ordered.

Derek cut the chatter and
turned his focus back to the sensors. He suddenly realized that since the start
of the crisis, Saily had trusted him with complete control of the aircraft, her
aircraft.

“We’ve been ordered to
return to base,” Saily announced.

“On course,” Derek
acknowledged. He had assumed that was where Saily wanted to go so they were
already flying in that direction. The check ride was clearly over.

Saily must have been
happy with his flying, because she didn’t say anything to him for several
minutes. Still flying with maximum stealth, they crossed the shore and were now
over land. At their present slow airspeed, the base was forty seven minutes away.
Derek checked status of the weapons, which Saily had not enabled yet. As a
human, Derek knew he was not trusted with weapons. They would return to the
airbase and Saily would likely be reprimanded for flying with an unauthorized
weapon system officer. Derek’s flying days would be over; it was likely he
would soon find himself tending crops in Lemuria.

And he did not care. The
Kristang battlegroup was gone; with many of their ships obliterated by powerful
maser cannons, they would think very carefully about approaching the planet
again. They were free! Humans were free! Or at least free to be prisoner of war
under the Ruhar. Derek no longer felt a constant fear of a Kristang sword
hanging over his neck. No matter what else happened, they-

“My aircraft,” Saily said
curtly, and the control stick went slack in Derek’s hand.

“Roger that,” he replied,
and mentally switched back to Wizzo mode.

Since the main
battlegroup had arrived to take control over Pradassis, the Swift Arrow clan
frigate To Seek Glory in Battle is
Glorious had been relieved of her dangerous raiding duties, because there
were to be no more raids. A cease fire was in effect, a cease fire with
generous conditions that had shocked the crew of the Glory when they heard about it. Why Admiral Kekrando had made so
many concessions to an enemy whose position was so weak, almost no one in his
battlegroup could understand. Kekrando had sent a message to all ships, that he
was following strict instructions from clan leadership. The clan leaders strongly
desired a negotiated agreement for the cowardly and treacherous Ruhar to leave Pradassis,
Kekrando had explained, his voice almost choking with outraged disgust as he
read the words. Unsaid, but implied, was that the Swift Arrow clan’s resources
were stretched very thin at the moment. With the prospect of a civil war within
the Kristang looming, the clan could not afford to support a protracted battle
for Pradassis. The cowardly Ruhar civilian government had already agreed to the
concept of abandoning, surrendering,
the world their military had fought very hard for. All that remained was for
the two sides to agree to a price, and now that Kekrando’s powerful battlegroup
had established total supremacy in the space on and around Pradassis, the Swift
Arrow leaders were confident they could ultimately get the entire planet for a
cheap price.

The question of why the
Swift Arrow clan wanted a world whose chief product was grain had never been
stated. Most of the warriors in the battlegroup had never been to the backwater
world of Pradassis before, and what they saw was not impressive. Looking down
at a world dotted here and there with the parallel stripes of agricultural
fields, most of the ship’s crews considered that the real reason they had been
sent on a one-way mission was to uphold the honor of their clan and their
entire species. Because there was no other conceivable reason why the clan
leadership had sent so much of the clan’s precious combat power to such an
unimportant planet. The clan leadership was wise, Kekrando had stated in an
unconvincing tone; the brave warriors of the battlegroup needed to have faith
in their leadership, and concentrate on executing their mission to the greater
honor and credit of the clan.

When the crew of the Glory heard Kekrando’s speech, the
little frigate’s captain had turned to his executive officer and muttered the
Kristang equivalent of ‘blah blah blah’. Words were passing things, and it
mattered not why the battlegroup was there. What mattered was the mission that
had been assigned to the battlegroup, to each ship, and to each crewman. The
current mission assigned to the Glory,
each and every one of her crew agreed, sucked. It sucked big time. It could
have sucked a bowling ball through fifty feet of garden hose, that’s how badly
it sucked. After taking enormous risks as the chief raiding ship before the
bulk of the battlegroup arrived, the Glory’s
crew had expected a nice, cushy assignment. The frigate would tie up next to a
support ship, they expected, for extended maintenance and repairs. Maintenance
that was long overdue. While engineering teams worked feverishly to bring the
frigate back up to full combat potential, most of the crew could enjoy some
well-deserved shore leave on the planet they had been viewing from space for so
long.

But, no! That was not
their assignment. After the long journey to Pradassis, many of Kekrando’s heavy
ships needed maintenance and replenishment, and those much more valuable ships
were given priority attention by the support vessels. The battered, worn-out
little Glory was given a lonely task,
a task for which frigates had been designed. She was to shadow the Ruhar
Commodore Ferlant’s remaining task force. And so, the Glory was positioned roughly one light minute away from Ferlant’s
loosely clustered ships; one minute closer to Pradassis. Ferlant’s ships had
mostly been sitting in one spot since the cease fire, licking their wounds and
biding their time. Glory’s captain
considered that, no matter how unhappy the warriors of the Swift Arrow task
force were about their current mission, the Ruhar of Ferlant’s task force had
to be even more unhappy. They had failed. They had failed to protect their
planet from damaging raids by a handful of isolated Kristang ships, and now
they had completely lost control of the star system. What awaited Ferlant’s
crews was a humiliating wait for negotiations to conclude, and then a retreat
with their tails tucked between their legs. If the Ruhar crews had been
Kristang warriors, it would be a long time, if ever, before they could hold
their heads in anything but utter shame. A Kristang would enthusiastically
embrace death before enduring such dishonor. Or so the Kristang told themselves
with bravado, while they had such an overwhelming advantage in combat power around
Pradassis.

While their little ship
performed its lonely picket duty, keeping an eye on Ferlant’s impotent ships,
the Glory’s crew went about fixing up
the ship as best they could. With the ship technically being constantly at
battle stations, they could not take many critical systems offline for badly
needed maintenance. So they did what they could, and waited for relief. Surely
Admiral Kekrando’s staff would send another frigate to replace the Glory eventually, and the ship could be
returned to full combat capability. Surely that would happen, soon.

“Signal received!” The
ship’s communications officer shouted excitedly. “The order is option Green?” The man sputtered in surprise.
“We are to execute immediately!”

Concealing his shock, and
resigned to his fate, the ship’s captain gave the order with a calm due more to
weariness than bravery. “Execute plan Green, as soon as possible,” he said
sadly to his executive officer.

“Yes, Captain,” the man
replied quietly, and turned to engage the ship’s poorly maintained jump drive
system. “The condition of the drive, is-”

“I know,” the captain
said without taking his eyes off the tactical display. “Do the best you can. We
must jump as quickly as possible.”

“The best possible,” the
executive officer said while studying the indicators for jump dive coil status,
“will barely get there in time.” The signal from Pradassis had continued past
the Glory and would reach the Ruhar
task force in less than one minute. Presumably, the Ruhar on the planet had
sent their own signal to Commodore Ferlant’s ships. If the Glory were to have any advantage of surprise, she needed to arrive
in the midst of the Ruhar formation before the signal did.

“Understood,” the captain
acknowledged. He could read the drive status on his own display. He turned his
attention to the officer monitoring the sensor console. “What happened down
there?” Option Green was one of five contingencies established by Admiral
Kekrando, with Green being a plan to be activated only if the battlegroup
somehow suffered a catastrophic loss. How could that have happened?

The officer had been
frantically pushing buttons and spinning dials. Confused and shocked, he looked
up from the console. “Captain, it appears the Ruhar violated the cease fire.
They attacked our battlegroup using projectors.”

“Projectors?” The captain exchanged an astonished look with his
executive officer. “You are certain?” The Glory’s
sensors were in poor condition and far overdue for important components to be
replaced. There must be a mistake; a sensor glitch.

“Yes, Captain. There is
no mistake. I can clearly see three projectors firing, and another is behind
the curve of the planet’s horizon.”

“Projectors?” The Captain repeated. “When did the Ruhar install
projectors? How? They did it right under our noses?”

“Fleet intelligence will
have a difficult time explaining this,” the executive officer noted. “We have
lost eleven ships so far, including the Victorious;
she was struck first. The attack is continuing. Or, it was,” he added,
remembering that the light picked up by the ship’s sensors was now several
light minutes old.

“Eleven ships?” The
Captain said, stunned. This was indeed a catastrophic event. A disaster for the
battlegroup, and for the Swift Arrow clan. He now understood why Kekrando
ordered option Green. The order called for the Glory to abandon her picket duty, jump into the midst of the Ruhar
formation, and attack. Attack and cause as much damage as she could, until she
was disabled or destroyed. Option Green called for little To Seek Glory in Battle is Glorious to fight to the death; her own
death. “When we jump in, head straight for the Ruhar cruiser at maximum speed,”
he ordered the executive officer. The man nodded soberly. Since the Glory could not survive the upcoming
fight, she would truly seek glory by attempting to ram the Ruhar cruiser Ruh Gastalo.

“The clan will sing about
the glory of our battle forever,” the executive officer said loudly, so the
entire bridge crew could hear clearly. Privately, he thought of the frigate’s
brother ship Every day is a Good Day to
Die in Battle. That ship had died in battle already. Was this day, a very
ordinary day until moments ago, a good day to die? As good as any, the exec
thought. Although he would have preferred some warning to mentally prepare himself.
“Jump drive is ready, Captain,” he announced. “Engaging now.”

Aboard his command ship Ruh Gastalo, Commodore Ferlant’s mind
was still reeling. What else could go wrong with this mission, he asked
himself? It was supposed to be a simple and relatively easy assignment. The
fleet had taken Gehtanu away from the Kristang. With their losses elsewhere in
the sector, the Thuranin were in no position to support a Kristang effort to
retain control of the star system. Unexpectedly, a handful of Kristang ships
had stayed in the system and began raiding the planet. That was an annoyance,
not a serious threat. Then, the Kristang had inexplicably began shooting at the
clients the ‘humans’, and the Chief Administrator of Gehtanu had informed
Ferlant that his task force needed to protect the humans also. Ferlant’s ships
were already stretched thin protecting the northern continent of Tenturo.
Extending coverage to the southern continent greatly strained his ships’
ability to protect the Ruhar population and infrastructure on Tenturo.

Then, just when Ferlant
thought he had discouraged the raiders, the Kristang out of nowhere had arrived
with an entire battlegroup! Ruhar fleet intelligence had assured Ferlant that
there was no way the Kristang would or could reinforce their few ships near
Gehtanu. No way, there was no possibility that the Kristang would even be able
to get weapons and spare parts to their ships. All Ferlant needed to do, Fleet
Intelligence had told him, was to hang on until the Kristang ships fell apart.
The impossible had happened, and Ferlant had barely escaped with his tiny force
intact.

Having an enemy
battlegroup appear absolutely out of nowhere, to land practically in his lap
had been shocking enough. Moments before, he had received notice that projectors on Gehtanu had destroyed much
of the Kristang battlegroup. The message from the Ruhar government on the
planet had screamed at him why Ferlant had violated the cease fire, and why he
had not informed the government about the defense capabilities of their own
planet. After wasting a few precious seconds on paralyzing shock, Ferlant had
replied that he knew nothing about any projectors on Gehtanu, and why hadn’t
the government informed him? Then he
ordered his task force to immediately begin dispersing according to Action Plan
3. Because some of his ships were undergoing running repairs, they could not
initiate a jump until they switched to backup systems. Ferlant was holding his
own cruiser back to cover the stragglers.

“MecMurro reports ready for jump, Commodore.” A bridge officer
behind Ferlant reported.

Without turning away from
the main tactical display, Ferlant acknowledged with a curt nod. “Wait until MecMurro’s jump is confirmed successful,
then take us to the rendezvous-”

“Enemy ship jumped in!
One frigate. It, it’s that damned Target Beta Glorious something, whatever its name is,” the officer reported.
“That damned lucky ship that kept raiding us.”

Ferlant’s lip curled in a
wry smile. “That little ship is annoyingly persistent, isn’t she?”

“Commodore, if we turn to
expose our starboard railgun battery, we could take that ship out with one
shot,” the officer suggested.

“Yes,” Ferlant’s eyes
narrowed as he stared at the red symbol in the tactical display. That little
enemy ship had been the bane of his existence. He could finally be rid of it
with one shot. “You have permission to maneuver the ship.”

By luck more than skill,
the frigate’s creaky jump drive somehow brought the ship into the Ruhar
formation, and miraculously less than seventy thousand kilometers from the Ruh Gastalo. Against the much larger and
heavily shielded Ruhar cruiser, the Glory
had no chance even for a suicide run, for the cruiser’s weapons would pound the
little frigate into space dust long before the Glory approached. Glory
aimed her own maser cannons and fired, with the beams easily deflected by the
cruiser’s more powerful shields. The Glory
had to turn more than ninety degrees to engage the Ruh Gastalo, and by the time the frigate made the turn and began
accelerating with maximum force, the executive officer noticed something odd.

Where were the other
ships of Commodore Ferlant’s small task force? There were only two ships within
the frigate’s sensor bubble, and as he watched, a destroyer jumped away,
leaving only the cruiser. As the Glory
was rocked by direct maser fire from Ruh
Gastalo, the executive officer’s fingers flew over his own console. The
other ships had jumped away, only moments ago! He could still detect strong
residual jump signatures. The ship was rocked again. “Captain!” He shouted a
warning. “Shields collapsing!” One more maser volley from Ruh Gastalo, and the Glory
would be defenseless. She was still over sixty thousand kilometers from the
target. By the time the cruiser blew up the frigate’s reactor, Glory would be too far away for the
cruiser to be damaged by the explosion. The crew of the Glory would die without having struck a significant blow against
their long-hated enemy. If today was indeed a good day to die, it was not a
good day to find glory in battle. The frigate would find only frustration and
death, not glory.

Why was the cruiser not
firing her railguns? At such short range, a single railgun round could easily
penetrate the Glory’s hull bow to stern, and-

In a burst of gamma
radiation, the cruiser vanished. “What happened?” The exec asked himself.
“Captain, the enemy ship has jumped away. They all jumped away. We can,” he
looked to the sensor officer for confirmation. “We might be able to follow one
of the ships; their jump signatures are very recent and strong.” Catching the
sensor officer’s worried look, the exec added “Considering the condition of our
sensors, we would be using guesses more than science to track an enemy ship,
Captain.”

“No,” the Captain
replied, suppressing a shudder of relief at having avoided death once again.
“Our orders were to attack the enemy task force. It has now dispersed, and we
are unable to follow. Send a signal to the Green rendezvous point,” the
hopefully secret location where the battlegroup was to assemble. “Inform them
that the enemy task force has dispersed, and request orders. The enemy received
the news before we did,” the Captain declared with a mixture of regret and
gratitude.

“Or,” the executive
officer said darkly, “they knew the exact timing of their projector attack, and
fled away for safety. The Ruhar are both treacherous and cowardly, Captain.”

The Captain nodded
silently, agreeing with the obvious wisdom of his executive officer’s
statement. To himself, the Captain said a prayer. With the cease fire now over,
Kristang ships might again be called upon to raid Pradassis. This time,
powerful maser cannons would be the primary threat to raiding ships. What could
the battered little frigate do against a projector? Nothing. Except to serve as
target practice. “They are treacherous, and cowardly,” the Captain observed.
“And, apparently, they are very, very clever.”

At the Ruh Gastalo’s
assigned Action Plan 3 primary jump point, the cruiser emerged in a gamma ray
burst. She ejected quantum resonators to cover the tracks of her next jump, and
as soon as the ship’s jump drive was realigned, she jumped again to the
secondary point. There would be three more jumps before she rejoined the task
force; a precaution because Action Plan 3 assumed the enemy would be pursuing,
chasing Ferlant’s task force around the star system.

The cruiser jumped again,
and proceeded away in a random direction at full thrust, waiting for her jump
drive to recharge. “Jump successful, Commodore. No sign of pursuit. Commodore,
may I ask why we did not fire railguns at that enemy frigate?”

Ferlant turned away from
the tactical display. This was an opportunity to provide coaching to the young
officers of his staff. “That frigate has somehow survived against the odds, at
times when it seemed certain her fate was sealed. Fate has determined this is
not yet her time. I have learned that one should never argue with Fate.”

“Eeeeaaargh!” Admiral
Kekrando shouted in a frustration that felt like physical pain, and he quickly
spun to find something, anything, that he could smash. His officers knew from
long experience never to be close at hand when the admiral was enraged, which
happened frequently. The never-ending hero of the admiral’s staff was their
lowest-ranking member, who had the task of sprinkling around the bridge things
that broke in a satisfying but non-lethal manner. Electronic tablet? Yes.
Pistol with fully-charged energy pack that might explode if broken in just the
right manner? No. Pistol with depleted energy pack that would give very satisfying
sparks and, at worst, a few second-degree burns to an unlucky person on the
bridge? Very much yes. It was a great system, a system that had worked many,
many times over.

The system had never been
tested under such intensely stressful conditions. Kekrando had been preparing
for a war game, which was why he was aboard the destroyer We are Proud to Follow the Shining Example of Combat Rifleman
Tuut-uas-Val Kedwala instead of his command ship the He Who Pushes Aside Fear Shall Always be Victorious. Which was why
he was currently alive rather than a random assortment of rapidly cooling
subatomic particles. Kekrando had wished to observe the performance of the Victorious, and the best way to do that
was to get off that ship so its captain and crew did not have an admiral
looking over their shoulders. Fortunately, he had already been able observe the
Victorious in high-intensity combat.
Unfortunately, that combat action had told him nothing illustrative about the
performance of that ship’s crew, because the battle had been a sneak attack by
a ground-based projector against an unshielded ship. And because the Victorious was no longer an organized
collection of components that resembled a starship.

“Eeeeaaargh!” Kekrando
repeated, shocked, enraged and humiliated at the incomprehensible defeat he had
suffered. What were projectors doing
on Pradassis, of all places?! Seeing a pistol in its assigned slot on a
bulkhead, he pulled the lever to release it and threw the weapon to the deck.
It broke in several pieces, and its power pack came apart, spewing sparks
around the bridge. One spark hit the sleeve of the officer sitting at the
destroyer’s sensor station, where that officer was running an analysis of the
projector attack over and over again, trying to comprehend what had happened.
Instead of flinching as the hot metal burned through his sleeve and into the
skin of his forearm, the officer merely brushed it away as an annoyance. He
burned his fingers, and distractedly put the throbbing fingers in his mouth.
His attention never wavered from the display.

Something about that
further enraged the admiral, plus the pistol breaking apart had not been as
satisfying as it had been in the past. He reached over to one of his security
staff, yanked the man’s pistol from its holster, and fired at the sensor
console. The console exploded, sending metal and composites flying around the
bridge, some pieces even striking the admiral. Because consoles were designed
not to injure their operators, the sensor officer was not badly injured. He was
knocked off his chair, and came shakily back to his feet, with stars in his
eyes to see an angry admiral pointing a smoking pistol at his face.

The officer did not
flinch. If Kekrando wanted to kill him for any reason, there was nothing the
officer could do about it. He and his family ranked too low in the clan
hierarchy to even protest. “Please, Admiral, if it serves the clan for me to
die, then do it quickly so the ship can pursue the enemy.”

Kekrando snorted. First
with surprise, then with laughter. “Ha! Give me another hundred such men, and I
will conquer the galaxy.” He flipped the pistol back to his guard, looked the
at stricken sensor officer and demanded “Well? What are you able to tell me?”

The sensor officer strode
over to a secondary console and activated it with no mention of the
nearly-fatal incident. “We were attacked by four projectors, Admiral.”

“Only four?” Kekrando was
surprised. During the vicious sneak attack, it had seemed like the entire
planet below had sprouted projectors, spitting deadly maser fire up at his
ships.

“Only four,” the man
confirmed. “They are oddly clustered together; the enemy’s coverage of the sky
is poor with only those four.”

“Four active, you mean?” Kekrando asked. “How many others?”

“No, Admiral, there are
only those four. The sensor data did not detect targeting signals from any
other sources. Two of the four projectors, here, and here,” he indicated, “are
nearly depleted. We can tell from the reduced power of their last shots.”

“It cannot be possible that the enemy has only four projectors on the
entire planet,” the Admiral stated.

The officer did not back
down. “According to clan intelligence, Admiral, it cannot be possible that the
enemy has even one projector on Pradassis.”

Kekrando looked at the
man sharply, to see if the admiral was being mocked. No, the man had correctly
directed his scorn at the clan’s intelligence group. “Ha!” The Admiral snorted.
“Only two projectors to worry about, eh? We will see about that.”

“Admiral?” The
destroyer’s captain took the opportunity to step in. “Will we be pursuing the
enemy ships?”

“Some of us will,
Captain,” Kekrando replied. “And some of our ships will be testing how many
projectors the enemy truly has.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“Can someone please explain to me what just happened?” Deputy
Administrator Baturnah Logellia asked her staff in exasperation. She knew she
was being unfair to her dedicated people. The Chief Administrator’s office had
shouted at her moments ago, so she was shouting at her staffers. They would
shout at their own teams in turn, all the way down. And no one knew anything
useful.

“You!” She pointed at her
military liaison, who was engaged in an animated conversation through an
earpiece in his right ear, and had a second phone held up to his left ear.
“Why, and how, did we fire on those
Kristang ships?” The cease fire had been thoroughly and very effectively
broken. After jumping away, Admiral Kekrando of the Kristang had warned of
severe consequences from the remaining ships in his still-dangerous task force.

The man lowered the phone
from his left ear. “Pardon me, Administrator Logellia. We did not fire on the Kristang.”

“I know that we didn’t,” she tried to control her
anger. The military had taken rash action that put at risk the civilian population;
people she was responsible for. “Commodore Ferlant-”

“It was not Commodore
Ferlant.” The liaison officer stated firmly. “I received a message from his
executive officer a moment ago. They were as surprised as we were. The
Commodore has no idea who fired. In fact, he
accused us of doing something that he
considers to be incredibly stupid.”

“Well,” Baturnah threw up
her hands in exasperation. “The planet didn’t shoot at the Kristang by itself.”

“No, clearly,” he agreed.
“They were projectors, powerful maser cannons.”

“I know what a projector
is, Slean,” she used the man’s surname. “Whose projectors, if not ours?” She
knew one thing for damned sure; the Ruhar government had never installed
projectors on Gehtanu. There was no way such a monumental effort could have
been concealed.

“It had to be the
Kristang, ma’am. Before we first came to Gehtanu. Somehow,” it was his turn to
throw up his hands, “someone activated them. Four projectors, at least, by our
last count.”

Baturnah’s head was
spinning. “You think they have been buried here, practically beneath our feet,
all this time?”

“That is the only
explanation we can think of, currently,” Slean responded somewhat distractedly.
He was listening to another, or several other, conversations in his earpiece.

“Now that we know what
these projectors look like, we should surely be able to scan for them, can’t
we? We must understand what we are dealing with, and who caused those
projectors to fire without our authority.”

“Yes, ma’am, we can scan,
but the projectors are likely concealed by a stealth field and other
countermeasures. That is why we never detected them before.”

“We weren’t looking
before,” Baturnah said hopefully. “We must immediately begin to scan the
subsurface for-”

“Excuse me, ma’am, but we
will not be able to spare any aircraft for scanning projectors or even to
investigate and secure the four we know of. Administrator, please come with me,
we need to get you to safety.”

“Why?” She did not budge
from behind her desk. “The Kristang have gone,” she pointed to the ceiling.

“Their ships are gone for
the moment, yes. Administrator, we are faced with an almost unique military
situation. With neither side having ships in orbit, combat aircraft become the
most powerful means of securing control of this planet. I was just informed
that the Kristang have launched waves of aircraft targeting our own airfields.
The situation is very dangerous.”

“We must be responding
with our own aircraft?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Slean said,
gesturing for the Administrator’s personal security team to hustle her away to
an air raid shelter. “No one has fought a pure air battle like this in several
generations. Unfortunately, ma’am, we are about to see firsthand whether all
our theories of air combat strategy are worth the training time we invested. I
suggest you be someplace safe when theory meets reality.”

Baturnah nodded,
accepting the pleading look from her personal security team. “Very well. In my
experience, Mr. Slean, whenever theory meets reality, theory loses.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the
military liaison officer agreed, and turned his attention to coordinating
crisis response teams. For this was certainly a crisis.

For the initial wave of
air attacks by the Kristang, they quickly launched dropships to fly high cover
and provide the massed aircraft below with long-range sensor and targeting
data. With laser links between the attacking aircraft and the three dropships,
the attackers could stand off at a safe distance and launch missiles at
well-defended targets. Once the Ruhar defenses were degraded, the aircraft
could fly in to attack their primary targets.

The three dropships were
perfectly positioned for their role in the attack. They had climbed high so
their sensors swept the area between the Kristang aircraft and the Ruhar
airbase, and with their active sensors able to detect a roughly location for
even stealthed Ruhar aircraft, the Kristang aircraft were able to hug the
terrain at low altitude and remain in stealth. Because dropships could climb
above an atmosphere, they could not be effectively engaged by aircraft, so the
Ruhar had to send their own very limited number of dropships to counter the
Kristang. At the start of the massive air battle, the Ruhar were at a serious
disadvantage in combat power. Until the Kristang battlegroup arrived, the Ruhar
had assumed their defensive needs could be handled by Commodore Ferlant’s small
task force. The Ruhar federal government had not wanted to ship combat aircraft
and dropships all the way to a remote planet they intended to leave. Most of
the combat air power the Ruhar had at the start of the air battle was left over
from when humans had used them during the evacuation. Due to need for regular
maintenance on the worn-out aircraft and lack of spare parts, thirty percent of
the Ruhar’s combat aircraft were unavailable when the Kristang launched their
attack.

Thanks to Skippy, we had
a complete view of the developing air battle that would become known among
humans as The Great Paradise Furball. With hundreds of aircraft tangling in
intense dogfights, it was like a ball of fur rolling around and around in the
sky. The Ruhar and Kristang had similar names for the battle, and no one
involved ever forgot a single detail.

The first shot in The
Great Paradise Furball wasn’t fired by the Kristang, or the Ruhar. It was fired
by a shiny beer can. Those three dropships looked like trouble to me. While I
wasn’t a fighter pilot, my infantry experience had taught me the value of high
ground, and those dropships had the high ground. “Skippy, can you do something
about those three dropships?”

“Yeah, yeah, I got it,
Joe. No problemo.”

“No problem? You told us
that each projector can only cover twenty eight percent of the sky from its
position,” I reminded our smart-ass AI.

“Twenty eight percent on a projector’s
normal settings, Joe. I am going to cheat.”

“Of course you are,” I
rolled my eyes. “Please, Oh Greatest of Great Ones, allow us mere mortals a
glimpse into your awesomely wondrous plan.”

“Oooh! I like that. Damn,
Joe, that almost sounded sincere. Hmmm, from now on, I’m going to make you
monkeys address me that way when you want something, like me programming the
jump drive.”

“That sounds like an
excellent deal, Skippy. And from now on, I’m going to move you from your
personal escape pod man cave, to a little basket on the side of the toilet next
to the galley.”

“On second thought, Joe,
you can just keep calling me Skippy the Magnificent.”

“How about Asshole
Almighty?”

“I’m sure we can reach a
compromise somewhere in there, Joe.”

“I’m sure we can. Is this
where you’re going to warp spacetime to bend the maser beam, or something like
that?

“No, Joe, I am not going
to bend a beam of light, you moron. I can only do that over longer ranges. And
I can’t warp spacetime so close to an inhabited planet; that’s too dangerous.
Do you want to hear what I’m going to do?”

“No, you talked too
freakin’ long, Skippy,” I pointed to the display with symbols for the
dropships, which were now at about their maximum altitude. They were about to
launch missiles at a Ruhar airbase. “We don’t have time for talk. You need to
show me.”

Skippy did show me, and I
would give that show a five out of five in terms of entertainment. The Kristang
dropship pilots didn’t leave a review after the action because they were, you
know, dead. I’m thinking their review would not have been five stars.

The three dropships very
reasonably thought they were safe from attack by projectors. The dropships were
at high altitude; higher than an aircraft could fly, but not so high that they
were above the atmosphere. The dropships were to the south of the direct path
from the Kristang airbase to their Ruhar targets; going to the south brought
them out of the targeting cones of the four projectors they knew about. The
dropship pilots were aware that they were being used as bait to determine
whether we had projectors we hadn’t used yet. Still, they surely must have
thought they were safe from being struck by the four projectors they knew
about.

They should have been
safe. They did not know about Skippy.

“Hey, Skippy,” I pointed
at the display. “Those dropships are in stealth. How can you determine their
position closely enough to target them?”

“Simple, Joey. I asked
them to tell me.”

“Huh?”

“Following standard
Kristang practice, those dropships are sharing data with a tightbeam laserlink.
That allows them to, for one thing, avoid crashing into each other while they
are in stealth. The problem for them is that while the laser beam is narrow, it
does bounce off air molecules, and because I am the all-seeing Skippy the
Magnificent, I can tell exactly where those ships are. Now, shut up for a
minute and let me do my thing.”

Skippy being the genius
that he is, he was able to make the projectors do things they had not been
designed to do. When the projectors had been installed, they were lowered into
the ground in one piece, and then motorized magnetic pistons were attached to
aim the beam. Skippy made some of those pistons retract to their original
position way down in the hole, where they had been before explosive charges
blew away the dirt over the buried projectors, and the business end of the
projector’s muzzle was extended above the surface. With the set of pistons off
balance, the beam projector was knocked to one side. Knocked to the side toward
the three Kristang dropships.

That still wasn’t enough
of an angle to bring those dropships directly into the targeting cone, so
Skippy used another trick. He defocused the beam. Normally, you want a
microwave laser beam to be as narrow as possible, so it can put all of its
power on one target. So it can slice an armored starship in half, for example.
Skippy fired the projector on low power in a series of broad pulses; more like
a flashlight than a thin beam. The maser pulses scorched a broad area of the
air as they traveled through the atmosphere. Scorched the air enough that the
dropships, which were at high altitude but still within the atmosphere, were
suddenly subjected to extreme overheating as the air around them was converted
into plasma. The air around them briefly became like the photosphere of a star,
and backscatter from the defocused maser pulses reflecting off air molecules
struck the dropships directly. In less than a second, the extreme heat caused
the dropship powercells, missiles and warheads to explode.

“Did that do the job,
Joe?” Skippy asked. “Let’s see. There were three dropships up there, and now I
count, hmmm, not three. No, not two either. Or one. I count zero dropships.
Zero is less than three, right, Joey?”

“Let me kick my boots off
so I can count on my toes, Skippy. I am a dumb monkey, remember?”

“Ok, I think we’re good.
Unless you consider disorganized pieces falling toward the ground as a
‘dropship’.”

“No, you did it. Thank
you, Skippy.”

“You’re not thanking me
on behalf of those dropship pilots, are you, Joe? Because if you’re hoping to
get a fruit basket from them, you will be waiting a while.”

“Wow,” I whispered.
“That’s a whole lot of aircraft.” On the dropship’s display was a total view of
the developing air battle, or I should say battles. There were seven distinct
clusters of aircraft approaching each other at high speed; and as I watched the
fighters on both sides began turning to maneuver to gain an advantage. Thanks
to the magic of Skippy the Magnificent, I had perfect situational awareness of
every aspect of the battles, even though almost all of the aircraft were still
in stealth mode.

“Yup,” Skippy agreed.
“This is going to be quite some show. There hasn’t been an air campaign like
this in a very long time. Although perhaps ‘campaign’ isn’t the correct word,
since I expect this whole thing to be over in a couple hours, max. Joe, do you
want to grab some popcorn and watch the show in real time?”

“No, Skippy, I do not
want any popcorn,” I was angry at his insensitivity. “It is not a show. This is real air combat. People
are going to die. You may be immortal, the rest of us are not.”

“Joe, I am terribly
sorry,” Skippy said, and this time he sounded sincere. “You are right, I should
not have said that, it was insensitive. You are a pilot now, and a soldier. I should
have considered that.”

“Apology accepted,
Skippy,” which were words that I never thought I would ever be able to say.
Skippy apologizing? “Is there anything we can do?” Already, I could see
aircraft on both sides firing masers at long range. They weren’t likely to hit
anything; the point was to keep the enemy at long range. Keep the enemy from
closing on you until you wanted them closer, on your terms. With the aircraft
of both the Ruhar and Kristang using stealth fields to confuse enemy sensors, defensive
shields to deflect maser beams, and maser turrets to destroy incoming missiles,
aircraft couldn’t rely on fire-and-forget missiles like the US Air Force did on
Earth. Air combat in the war between the Ruhar and Kristang was a close-range
affair like WWII. Get close to the enemy aircraft, hammer it with maser pulses
to degrade its shields, then finish it with a volley of missiles. Thinking
about it, I shuddered. What I knew about flying was strictly peacetime
maneuvers. I would hate to be in the skies above Paradise right then.

“Anything we can do? You
mean is there anything I can do?
Sure, Joe, there is a lot I can do.
It would surprise me if we got permission to do much of it.”

“You? Since when do you ask permission to do anything?”

“By ‘we’, I meant you,
Joe. And by ‘permission’ I meant an Ok from Count Chocula.”

“Oh, shit.” I’d almost
forgotten that nagging little detail.

“Most of the things I
could do, that would be effective in giving the Ruhar an advantage over the
Kristang, would risk being too obvious.”

“The Kristang would
figure out that some higher-technology had been messing with their aircraft?”

“Exactly. What’s worse is
that the Ruhar would review the after action sensor data and realize someone
else was messing with the Kristang. The Ruhar would logically conclude that the
Jeraptha must have been involved on their side, but when they inevitably ask
the Jeraptha about it, the Jeraptha will certainly know they didn’t help in the
air battle. And that will start the Jeraptha asking uncomfortable questions and
looking into things that are better left alone.”

“I can see that would be
a problem.”

“That reminds me of
something that has been troubling me for some time, Joe. The Thuranin are not
stupid; their intelligence people surely by now have heard a rumor about a
human escaping from a Kristang jail, and that same human stealing a Ruhar Dodo.
That Dodo was taken aboard a Kristang frigate, and both that frigate and its
star carrier mothership disappeared without a trace. I am surprised that the Thuranin
have not been investigating the incident. Or maybe they are, and we don’t know
it yet.”

“Shit, Skippy, that’s not
good.”

“It is most certainly not
good at all, Joe. Which is why we must avoid any significant risk of me
interfering in the battle to help the Ruhar in any way that looks suspicious.
Count Chocula is annoyingly correct about that; we can’t risk exposing our
presence.”

“Crap. Turn the display
off the, Skippy. I don’t want to watch this slaughter.”

“Wait! Joe, I said that I
can’t do anything obvious. I didn’t say that I couldn’t do anything at all.
Come on, Joe, it’s Skippy the Magnificent you’re talking to here. Trust the
awesomeness.”

“Trust the awesomeness?
Will that be your new slogan?” In spite of the situation, I had to laugh. On
the display, aircraft were tangling in the most gigantic air battle I had ever
imagined. The Ruhar were outnumbered. “What type of awesomeness do you have in
mind, Skippy?” It was probably too late to request permission from Chotek. This
was definitely an act-now-and-ask-forgiveness-later kind of situation.

“Um, you know how the
Kristang are bad at taking proper care of maintenance on their equipment,
because they consider that to be an inglorious task unfitting for warriors?
Well, there are times when such lack of attention to detail can bite you in the
ass. This is one of those times.”

“Skippy, are you doing
something now, without getting permission?”

“I have no idea what you
are talking about, Joe.”

“Of course not,” I rolled
my eyes. “Let me ask it this way: if you were doing something, what might that
be?”

“Oh, well, speaking
hypothetically, it is possible that the Kristang aircraft are experiencing
intermittent glitches in their networked fire control systems; these glitches
are degrading their already crappy sensor capabilities. And in an ironic
coincidence, at the same time the Kristang are having glitches in their
systems, the Ruhar aircraft have received an awesome software upgrade that they
don’t know about. This upgrade enhances the effectiveness of their stealth
capabilities. The combined effect of these two totally, totally unrelated coincidences is that the Ruhar have a significant
advantage in air combat. Their aircraft can engage at longer ranges, while the
Kristang have to fly relatively close to get a weapons lock on the Ruhar.”

“Cool. Hypothetically.”

“Not as cool as I would
like it to be, Joe. Ordinarily, this would mean the Ruhar are able to engage
and disengage from combat at will. With that many aircraft tangling across the
sky, they are so mixed up that the initial advantage of the Ruhar has been
diminished. At this point, both sides are about even.”

“The Ruhar went into the
fight at a disadvantage, Skippy. Making it an even fight is a great help. Thank
you.”

“Hypothetically, you are
welcome. Oh, hey, if I forget, please remind me to wipe that software upgrade
from the Ruhar’s systems after the battle is over. Joe, this is going to be a
terrible slaughter on both sides. The Ruhar have already lost seven percent of
their airworthy combat aircraft, plus another twelve percent that were
destroyed on the ground. The Kristang have lost eleven percent total so far.
Both sides are quickly discovering that their tactics for air combat do not
apply for a battle of this size and scope. The pilots are having to make this
up on the fly, no joke intended. Joe, this air battle is going to be studied
for hundreds of years.”

“I understand.” After
that, we watched the action unfurl across the display. Skippy had the good
sense to keep quiet, except for quietly bringing particularly significant
events to my attention. Mostly, I sat silently as symbols on the display flared
and blinked out.

When the Kristang had
launched waves of aircraft to attack Ruhar airbases, Saily and Derek had been
headed back toward their own base. Then Saily received an order to change
course and fly low and slow for maximum stealth. Ruhar air command had judged
that Saily was too far away to help prevent the initial attack on her own
airbase, so she was being held in reserve to strike the Kristang aircraft on
the way back to their own bases to rearm and refuel. Saily had shaken with
anger at doing nothing, while enemy missiles blasted the airbase where her
friends worked and lived. Though the Ruhar military datalink was being partly
jammed by the Kristang and the enemy had already knocked out many of the
transmitters, the tactical communications system was designed to operate under
wartime conditions. Derek still had a full picture of the situation across the
surface of Gehtanu; he kept Saily informed of what she needed to know and
didn’t mention details that would only upset and distract her. From her seat in
the front of the tandem cockpit, she could call up any tactical data she
wanted; she didn’t have all that much to do while the Dobreh flew in lazy
circles to achieve maximum stealth. Flying low to the ground meant that the
fighter’s already tiny signature would be mostly lost in ground clutter to any
active sensors above. Flying slowly meant the Dobreh was not leaving a long
trail of disturbed air behind it. And they were flying slowly enough that Saily
had only one of the two engines active; the active engine was using only its
electrically-powered fan blades and therefore not radiating much heat at all.
Secure inside their stealth field, Saily and Derek waited for a signal from air
command.

“Derek. Lieutenant
Bonsu,” she addressed him by his human military rank. “We will be going into
combat against the Kristang. We will be shooting directly at, killing Kristang.
This will be crossing a line; a human involved in hostile action against your
patron species. I need to know if you have a problem with this. I need to know
whether I can rely on you as my Weapon Systems Officer.”

“Yes,” Derek responded
immediately. “Absolutely. One hundred percent. I know what the Kristang did to
my home planet.” Derek was among a growing percentage of humans on Paradise who
feared the wormhole to Earth had been shut down deliberately by the Kristang,
to cover up what they were doing on that distant planet. Despite assurances
from the Ruhar that the Kristang, nor the Thuranin nor even the Maxolhx had the
technology to control a wormhole, Derek thought it very suspicious that the
only wormhole to humanity’s home had shut down, shortly after the Kristang lost
control of Paradise. That could not be a coincidence. And if Derek could not do
anything to directly help Earth, he could at least kill as many lizards as he
could find in his weapons range. During the brief time when the Kristang
battlegroup had total control around Paradise, Derek had feared he could never
do anything to avenge the loss of his homeworld. Now, a miracle had cleared the
skies of Kristang, and Derek Bonsu was not going to miss this golden
opportunity. “Saily, you can absolutely count on me. Let’s do this.”

Following orders from Ruhar air command,
Saily had kept the Dobreh flying slow, lazy circles as the four Kristang
aircraft flew by. As soon as the enemy passed overhead, Saily went to full
power on the engines to close the distance. Saily still had the ship in stealth,
and was about to drop the stealth field for combat maneuvering when Derek had
shouted over the intercom. “Break right and cut power!”

Saily pulled the aircraft
into a gentle turn and throttled back the engines. Before she could ask, Derek
explained. “They can’t see through our stealth field! I’ve watching them ping
us with targeting sensors, and they can’t get a lock. I have a perfect lock on
that lead ship with the maser guidance system.”

Saily checked her
instruments. Derek was right, the enemy’s active sensors were still pinging
blindly, they couldn’t get a lock on the Dobreh’s position. In air combat, both
sides enveloped their aircraft in stealth fields until they began maneuvering
into attack position and firing. At that point, with the range between aircraft
closing, the high speed leaving turbulent air behind and the engines radiating
heat, stealth gave no advantage. Except that now, somehow the Kristang were not
able to lock onto the Dobreh, and her aircraft was maintaining a perfect lock
as if the Kristang did not have stealth capability at all. Saily did not wait
to wonder at the unexpected circumstances; that was for the experts to puzzle
over later when they viewed the flight recorder data. “Missiles, full spread.”

Derek toggled three
missiles at the aircraft he had been intending to fire at with the maser cannon,
and another three at that aircraft’s wingman. The six missiles dropped out the
back of the Dobreh, ignited, and flew violently twisting, evasive paths to
their targets. With missiles in the air, Derek activated the maser to target
the same two aircraft. He was not trying to kill with the maser, he only wanted
the maser to confuse the enemy’s sensors and prevent the enemy defensive masers
from hitting his missiles. He was only partly successful. The first aircraft’s
defenses exploded two missiles more than ten kilometers away; easy kills. But
then its sensors seemed to go blind; the enemy fighter turned desperately as
Derek watched his missile jinking side to side and up and down as it closed the
distance. The enemy defensive maser turrets were not firing at all; they could
not find a target to shoot at. Then the missile impacted the enemy directly,
blowing it into pieces.

The second aircraft shot
down one incoming missile, and the other two were intermittently struck by
defensive masers, but they were only glancing shots as the missiles quickly darted
away. Both missiles flew by their evasive target, and their electronic brains
concluded they did not have enough fuel to turn and reengage the enemy. Their
brains also concluded they were close enough, so they both detonated their
shaped-charge fragmentation warheads toward the enemy. Pieces of warheads flew
through the air on both sides of the enemy fighter, ripping into it and turning
it into a fireball.

Saily was stunned by the
turn of events. In simulations, aircraft almost always were able to destroy
incoming missiles with their defensive masers, when missiles were launched at
long range. It was only in the close quarters of a dogfight that missiles could
home in before the enemy’s defenses could knock them out. Yet here, now, she
had fired missiles at two targets and destroyed both targets. The enemy still
had not fired a shot at her, as they did not appear to be able to determine
exactly where her Dobreh was. Adapting quickly to the new reality, Saily maneuvered
to maintain their distance to the two other enemy fighters.

The enemy ruined her
plan. They did not know why the Ruhar stealth field was so much more effective
than they had expected, or what was wrong with their own targeting sensors, but
they did know that if they let the Ruhar loiter at long range and fire
missiles, they were both dead. So they pulled tight turns and went to full
power, not caring whether they were that much more visible to the apparently
superior Ruhar sensors.

The range between the
three combatants closed rapidly, and Saily was forced yet again to adapt.

Derek Bonsu grunted from
the strain in the backseat of the Dobreh gunship, as Saily pulled the fighter
aircraft into another tight turn. The G-meter in front of him registered 8, and
since gravity on the Ruhar homeworld was slightly higher than on Earth, it felt
even heavier to Derek. Even in the advanced Ruhar flightsuit he wore, his vision
narrowed until all he could see was a small circle directly in front of his
eyes. The Ruhar pilot was taking it easy on him, he knew; genetically-enhanced
Ruhar pilots could sustain 12 Gees in combat turns. Having Derek as her Wizzo
was actually a liability in air combat; Saily was endangering her own life and
their mission in order to avoid killing her human copilot.

The turn completed, the
Dobreh snapped back to a straight course and Derek was thrown forward against
the restraints, as Saily cut power and the fighter decelerated rapidly.
“Stealth field is nominal,” Derek managed to grunt. His whole world was reduced
to the display and controls directly in front of him; he still had no
peripheral vision. The two enemy fighters were now again in front of them. “We
have target lock on the left-hand ship,” he gasped between sucking in oxygen.
“Missiles?”

“Do it,” Saily ordered.
They were now too close to the Kristang for stealth to be of much use, and the
Dobreh had twelve missiles left. As Derek toggled off six missiles, she felt
the Dobreh lurch slightly as the aircraft suddenly weighed less. On her own
controls, she pressed the button to activate the Dobreh’s maser cannon, at the
same time her own ship rocked as an enemy maser hammered her shields.

“Missiles inbound!” Derek
shouted. “Ten, twelve, fourteen! We can’t track all of them,” he warned. The
enemy had dumped almost all of their missiles blindly into the air, and now
that the Dobreh was firing a maser at full power and its engines were glowing
hot, the enemy missiles had a target to chase. “Saily, this is going to be
close!” The display for their defensive computer was flashing red warnings that
it had lost track of some enemy missiles. And the defensive maser turrets could
only engage two missiles at once.

A Ruhar Dobreh gunship
had two escape systems for the crew. Because the Dobreh was a high-performance
jet fighter aircraft, designed to operate at supersonic speed and extreme
altitude, the crew simply opening the canopy and ejecting was not an option.
Instead, the entire two-person tandem cockpit could separate from the
disintegrating airframe.

Moments after their own
missiles turned the fourth and last Kristang fighter into a ball of fire, an
enemy missile had exploded close behind them. Shrapnel took out both engines,
shattering fan blades and causing a powercell to rupture. Knowing her aircraft
was doomed, Saily reached down on the right side of her seat and flipped a
switch to retract a safety cover then press the recessed button, saying a
silent prayer that the cockpit separation mechanism was still operable. As her
fingers fumbled with the switch, the flight control computer realized that the
aircraft was no longer a viable flying device, and handed off control to the
cockpit separation computer. That computer had been waiting for the flight
control computer to make the blindingly obvious decision while the airframe
broke apart around it, so it immediately engaged the separation process even
before it received input from the pilot. Saily tried to shout a warning to
Derek in the seat behind her, but with holes in the canopy, the shrieking wind
was too loud even to be heard in the helmet speakers. Derek must know what was
happening, she had only a moment to think, and he should be preparing to use the
secondary separation button if the separation control computer failed to or was
unable.

With a roar she heard
over the wind, explosive bolts released the cockpit from its connection to the
airframe, and a small rocket motor pushed the cockpit section upward. Because
the Dobreh was falling apart and tumbling out of control, the cockpit
computer’s preprogrammed maneuver to straighten out the cockpit’s own tumble
and make it fly directly upward was the wrong move. As the bottom of the
cockpit cleared the top of the airframe well it had rested in, the left side of
the cockpit was struck by debris from the exploding left engine; a fan blade
penetrated the cockpit’s armor and struck just behind Saily. When the cockpit
was not more than two meters above its well, the suddenly unbalanced airframe
flipped in an eye blink, and the tail of the aircraft smashed into the rear of
the rising cockpit.

Derek’s helmet was
secured to the seat to prevent a pilot’s neck from snapping. That didn’t stop
his brain from being bounced around inside his skull from the violent battering
of the separation. Less than five seconds had passed since he shouted the
warning about missiles approaching; the cockpit separation had not surprised
him but he hadn’t heard a warning from Saily. When the rocket motor kicked the
cockpit upward, his right arm had been reaching down for the separation button,
while his left arm was still on the control stick trying to maintain some
semblance of control over the failing aircraft. Separation had caught him unawares,
and his left arm ached as if it had torn loose at the shoulder. Then something,
two somethings, struck the cockpit, and the whole cockpit section was suddenly
tumbling through the air on its own. “Saily!” He shouted, doubting the pilot
could hear him. Through the canopy, blue sky and green forest flashed by like a
strobe light, so quickly was the cockpit spinning.

Too low. They had been
flying at around 900 kilometers per hour when the enemy missile exploded, but
at less than a thousand meters altitude. The cockpit should have stabilized,
then released a steerable triangular parachute to set them down softly.
Instead, all the displays were dark and the cockpit was tumbling worse than the
aircraft had been. “Saily! We need to get out of here! Saily?!”

There was no response
from in front of him. Possibly the pilot was unconscious, although the
genetically enhanced body of a Ruhar should have withstood the strain better
than his own fragile human biology. Derek could have reached for the handle
between his legs to eject his own seat. He was not leaving without the pilot.
Without waiting any longer, Derek reached for the black and yellow striped
handle in front of his seat, barely able to make his right arm extend that far;
his left arm hung uselessly at his side. When he had a firm grip on the handle,
he closed his eyes and pulled firmly.

First the canopy blew
off, then Derek’s seat soared upward, propelled by a magnetic rail. He only
felt the initial kick, before he became unconscious. The seat ejection mechanism,
designed for Ruhar, had not been reset for a human on that flight, a flight in
which the Dobreh was not supposed to have a human crewman. A flight that was
supposed to have been a quick and simple check ride.

As Derek’s seat blew
upward into the airstream, the final crew escape mechanism activated. The
straps that held Derek into the chair automatically released and he was exposed
to the 500 kilometer per hour airstream. Before his limbs could be torn off by
the force of the air and deceleration, a flexible tube that he wore on his back
came to life and he was enveloped in an oval-shaped bubble. The computer built
into the tube bent and compressed the bubble to keep him upright and he flew
through the air. Once the computer decided his speed had dropped below a preset
mark, the bubble disappeared as suddenly as it formed. Without the unconscious
Derek doing anything or knowing what was happening, the nanofabric of the
bubble retracted inside the flexible tube, and the nanofabric changed its shape
in a microsecond. The top of the tube came off, and the fabric was yanked
upward. It was now a parachute or technically, a paraglider. The computer
activated its sensors. If the computer had been capable of emotion, it would
have been greatly dismayed. It was too low, and the ground beneath was thickly
covered with trees in every direction. There were no safe places to glide to
within the paraglider’s range. With an electronic shrug, the computer decided
that crashing into one tree top was as good as another, and it concentrated on
slowing its passenger’s rate of descent. The paraglider reformed its shape from
a wedge to a half sphere, and Derek was jolted again.

Crashing down through the
trees was no more gentle than what he had endured so far. With the parachute
having lost lift, he fell straight down, bouncing off tree limbs and breaking
branches. There was a final violent jolt as the parachute snagged on a tree
limb, and he came to a stop ten meters off the ground. The parachute computer,
still active, calculated the distance, and the nanofabric of the parachute
cords stretched to lower Derek almost gently to the ground. Satisfied that it
had done all it could for the pilot, the parachute computer released the cords,
and the pilot’s bruised and battered body lay alone on the forest floor.

Saily was not so lucky as
Derek. The engine fan blade that struck the cockpit as they were separating
penetrated the armor and a piece punctured the seat, damaging its release
mechanism. When Derek pulled the handle to eject them from the cockpit, Saily’s
seat should have ejected first. Because the cockpit computer knew her seat was
damaged, it delayed Saily’s ejection until after Derek was clear. But as the
then-empty cockpit tumbled violently, components broke off in the airstream,
and several pieces flew toward Saily. Right after she was released from the
seat and the nanofabric began to blossom into a protective bubble around her,
two sharp pieces of composite ripped through the still-forming bubble and into
her.

The ejection computer
compensated as best it could, pulling the bubble tighter and attempting to seal
the holes. It was partially successful; although the smaller bubble was not
able to slow the pilot’s uncontrolled rush through the air. Sensing the ground
was coming up quickly, the computer judged that the least risky of several very
bad options was to retract the bubble and reform the nanofabric as a parachute.
At first it was a small drogue parachute, used only to slow the pilot’s speed
through the air. When the computer decided it was safe, it spread the
nanofabric out to its full extent. That was the only way to prevent the pilot
from hitting the tree tops at full speed. Unfortunately, the excessive speed
and prior damage to the nanofabric meant the parachute immediately began to rip
from the edge to the center. The computer attempted to compensate, and it was
still working on knitting together the rip when Saily hit the tree tops. The
computer knew from talking with the medical status computer implanted in Saily
that the pilot was seriously injured and bleeding, but the ejection computer
could do nothing to assist the nano-based medical systems inside Saily’s body.

Saily crashed down
through the trees, nearly breaking her back on a thick tree limb. She came to rest
tangled in branches and parachute cords a dozen meters off the ground. Acting
on the medical computer’s advice, the ejection computer decided not to try
untangling the cords. It would be best, according to the medical computer, if
the pilot did not move again while medical nanobots were working furiously to
save her life.

She hung upside down from
a tree, unconscious, as machines too small to see tried their best to keep her
life from slipping away.

For Derek, coming back to
consciousness was not a single event, but a lengthy process. He awakened four
or five times before realizing that he was awake, that he was Derek, and that
he hurt like hell all over. Then he remembered what had happened. Considering
that he had been in a supersonic aircraft when it exploded around him, he
decided that he shouldn’t complain about some aches and pains. Assuming that
was all he had to worry about. Moving very slowly, he first tried to wiggle his
toes, which was successful. Moving upward, he determined he was able to sit up,
but when he tried to push himself up with his left hand his shoulder flared in
a white-hot shock of pain. Oh, yeah, he thought. That arm had been out of
position when the cockpit separated. If his arm was broken, that could be a big
problem

He was able to stand, and
painful testing by raising his left arm gave him confidence that nothing was
broken. There might be a sprain, or torn cartilage. Nothing the Ruhar couldn’t
fix, if he could get to a hamster medical facility. And if they would consent
to treat a human. And if they had equipment modified for human biology.
Satisfied that he was mobile, he searched the pockets of his flightsuit. He had
a knife, a light, and a zPhone. No sidearm, because humans were not allowed to
have weapons. No food. Damn it, he was on a planet where he couldn’t eat any of
the native life, or any of the crops the Ruhar grew on the continent of
Tenturo. And his zPhone wasn’t working, it couldn’t connect to the network. The
network appeared to be down entirely. The Kristang could be jamming it, or they
had knocked out the base infrastructure. Or the Ruhar had simply cut off
network access for humans once the fighting started. So he couldn’t call for
help.

The map function did
work. Where the hell was he? Not good. He was in the middle of nowhere. The
closest Ruhar settlement was four or five days of hard walking, at least. Four
days of walking through the wilderness, without food, to a Ruhar village that
would not have any human food and likely would not welcome a human wandering
into their homes. They especially would not welcome a human while the Ruhar on
Paradise were engaged in a war with the patrons of humanity. Derek, he said to
himself, you are totally screwed.

Before he started
walking, he needed to see if he could find Saily. Her locator beacon would not
be active until air search and rescue pinged it, so he couldn’t use it to find
her. Which direction to start? It didn’t matter, the Ruhar pilot could be
anywhere, although she should be within a kilometer. Or two. The paraglider
should have steered her toward a safe landing zone, although according to the
map, there weren’t any. He would need to walk in one direction for a kilometer,
then begin a grid search. He decided to begin by walking uphill, that way the
return would be easier.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Irene ran the sensor data
back on the main display between the pilot and copilot seats, and ran through
it forward again quickly, with the four others looking over her shoulder.
Thanks to Emby, they had a nearly-complete view of the massive air battle that
had now dissolved into desperate duels between individual aircraft.

“Daaaaamn,” Dave exhaled
quietly. This was the third time they’d watched the replay. The first time,
everyone had been talking excitedly as they watched the symbols engage in a
deadly dance across the screen. The second time, Irene narrated the action from
a pilot’s viewpoint.

The third time, they all
simply sat and watched in shocked silence. Modern air combat was incredibly
intense and high-tempo. By Emby’s count, 88% of the combat aircraft on Paradise
had been destroyed during the first ninety minutes of fighting. And the actual
fighting had lasted perhaps twenty minutes, with the rest of the time taken by
aircraft flying toward their targets, maneuvering into attack position, and
flying back to their bases. If those airbases still existed. Most aircraft had
set down in remote areas, relying on fuel, weapons and spare parts being
brought to them. Many of the surviving aircraft were crippled in one way or another.
By the end of two hours, neither side had an effective air combat force left.

“Now it’s up to you
guys,” Irene looked at Dave and Jesse.

“What do you mean,
ma’am?” Dave asked, confused. What did she expect him to do?

“Not you two
specifically. I meant infantry,” Irene explained. “Without enough air power to
do anything useful, this becomes a ground war. Infantry. The Ruhar and the
Kristang will have to rely on infantry.”

“To do?” Jesse raced to
guess what their pilot meant. “To do what?”

“How you do defeat an
integrated air defense system?” Perkins asked.

“You make it
unintegrated,” Dave answered immediately. This was easy training manual stuff.
“Don’t attack the whole system, that’s suicide. You take it apart piece by
piece.”

“Precisely,” Perkins
nodded. “Destroy one piece of the system, at the edge. A radar, a launcher, one
piece. That creates a gap in the integration. A blind spot, a weakness. Take
out a few more pieces, and you’ve created a safe passage corridor for your
aircraft. Once you have that, you can send in a pure strike package, instead of
loading up the sorties with electronic countermeasure aircraft.”

“Until the enemy moves
their pieces around,” Irene added, “radars and launchers are mobile.”

“They are,” Perkins
agreed. “But these projectors are not mobile. The Kristang know that. They
don’t have sufficient air power left, so they will send in ground troops to
destroy a projector, or take it offline, or take control of it. Once they know
that particular projector is inactive, they know a part of the sky is not
covered, and they can send in a ship. When enough projectors are confirmed
offline, the Kristang can take back control of the sky.”

“Got it,” Jesse said as
the reality dawned on him. “It’s going to be a race between the hamsters and the
lizards. The Ruhar will try to defend active projector sites and bring new ones
online, and the Kristang will try to destroy them or take control.”

“The Ruhar should have an
advantage, right?” Shauna asked. “Emby will tell them where the other
projectors are, but the Kristang will have to guess.”

“I need to ask Emby what
we do next, because this is a whole new ballgame,” Perkins said, pulling out
her zPhone to type a new message. As she typed, she looked at Jesse and Dave. “If
we get involved in any ground action, I need you two, because I have no
infantry experience. I handled intel for UNEF. Before that, I was in
communications. I used a keyboard, not a rifle.”

Ski was surprised. “Not
even in basic training, ma’am?”

She shook her head
ruefully. “Not a whole lot, I was commissioned in the Air Force.”

“Air Force, ma’am?” Jesse
asked with a quick glance at the US Army insignia on her uniform. He was glad
that he hadn’t said anything bad about the other service in her presence.

“There was a ‘Blue to
Green’ initiative a while back,” she explained. The US military had needed more
people in the Army and Marine Corps, more boots on the ground. Personnel in the
Navy and Air Force were encouraged to transfer to green uniforms. Strongly
encouraged. “They let me know that if I wanted to stay in as a career, I needed
to switch services.”

“Oh,” Jesse didn’t know
what else to say.

“Glad to have you with
us, ma’am,” Dave also didn’t know what else to say.

Emby’s reply came
swiftly. Proceed to the attached
coordinates and activate the projector there as soon as possible. It was
followed by a shorter message. Thank you.
Good work.

“Yes!” Skippy exulted two days later. “They
did it! The fifth projector is now online. Joe, I will send a message of
congratulations to Major Perkins and her team. Also a message to get the hell
out of there ASAP, in case we need to use that projector real quick.”

“Agreed. Hey, Skippy,
we can now shoot at Kristang ships with this new projector?”

“That was the idea,
Joe. Why?”

“Because now I’m thinking
we don’t do that. Not right away.”

“Once again, I’m not
following your logic, Joe.”

“What I’m thinking is
that when the Kristang jump a ship in to test us-”

“Joe, I must caution
you that the Kristang are likely to test our projectors with more than one
ship. That is standard Kristang fleet doctrine when attacking a planet equipped
with ground-based defenses.”

“That won’t make any
difference to what I want to do. In fact, that’s even better. We let the
Kristang get comfortable in orbit, they will at first stick to areas not
covered by the four projectors they know about. When they think we only have
those four projectors active, the first thing they will do is try hitting those
projectors with a railgun strike, right?”

“That is sound
tactics, yes. The projectors do have shields, although two of the projectors
have very little power left for either shields or the maser.”

“Got it. Here’s what
we do, depending where the ships jump in-”

“Team, Emby says we
need to haul ass out of here, pronto,” Perkins declared. “I think the Kristang
are sure to come back to test whether we have more than those four projectors
active,” she didn’t know two of those projectors were nearly depleted. “If Emby
has to shoot soon, we don’t want to be anywhere near this thing.”

“Do we have a new
target, ma’am?” Irene asked wearily. After parking her Buzzard, she had helped
the team set up the drill and punch down to the projector’s control chamber. It
had been Jesse’s turn to go down the hole; the holes were now larger in
diameter but Irene still shook when she thought about it. Mercifully, Major
Perkins had declared they could not risk their only pilot, so Irene was
relieved of having to slide down into the ground again.

“Yeah, of course,”
Perkins’ voice reflected her own weariness. After the frantic scramble to get
the first four projectors activated, they had all been dead tired. Then Emby
had acted early for some reason, and blasted the Kristang battlegroup from the
sky. That had given the team a shot of energy they used to get the fifth
projector dug out and online. Now they were all running on empty. “Another
projector. We’ll need to go back to the truck to refuel first. Let’s get
moving, people.”

Tired fingers fumbled
and tired legs wobbled, but the task of breaking down the drill rig and tying
it back in the sling was well known to them by now. By the time Irene came back
with the Buzzard and Shauna lowered the cable, the sling was ready. Major
Perkins was swaying on her feet, fighting creeping sleepiness. They needed a
break. According to Emby, they couldn’t afford to stop now. Regardless of
Emby’s instructions, she was going to give the team eight full hours of sleep
after they got back to the truck and the Buzzard was refueled. The pilot
absolutely had to rest, and while Irene was sleeping, the rest of the team
could get rest also.

Paradise was going to
have to get along without them for a few hours.

We didn’t have to
wait long for the Kristang to test whether the four projectors we’d used in our
sneak attack were all we had. “They’re heeeeeere!” Skippy announced. A mere two
and a half hours after Perkins and her crew got the fifth projector working and
cleared out of the area, three Kristang destroyers jumped in above the far side
of the planet. Knowing the weak shields of their frigates did not stand a
chance against our projectors, the Kristang had wisely left their little ships
out of this action. The Kristang commander wasn’t stupid; at first he kept his
ships out of the targeting cones of the four projectors that he knew about.
When his ships were not hit, he must have figured we only had four projectors,
which is exactly what I wanted the lizards to think.

Next, he had to test
the four known projectors, to see if they were still active. After his
surviving ships had jumped away, they must have examined all the sensor data
from our sneak attack, and realized that the last shots of two particular
projectors were at a much lower power level. Logically, they correctly
concluded that those projectors were almost drained of power, so they really
only needed to worry about two of the known projectors.

“They’re lining up
railgun shots on the projectors,” Skippy warned. “Even with five projectors, I
can’t hit those ships where they are now. They’re going to fire railguns at an extremely
shallow angle, to keep the ships out of our targeting cones. That will decrease
the impact of the railgun darts because they will be traveling through more of
the atmosphere.”

“Do your thing,
Skippy.”

Two of the destroyers
fired their railguns at our two healthy projectors. They knew those projectors
couldn’t hit the ships from where they were, and they also knew the other two
projectors didn’t have enough power to penetrate a destroyer’s shields. What
they didn’t know about was the incredible awesomeness of Skippy the
Magnificent.

As the railgun darts
streaked in at twenty two percent of lightspeed, they passed through the
targeting cone of a mostly-depleted projector. That projector couldn’t harm a shielded
starship, but its maser did have enough power to deflect the darts from their
targets and break the darts into bite-sized pieces. By itself, a projector
couldn’t have hit a speeding dart, but our projectors were controlled by
Skippy, so hitting two objects travelling at almost a quarter of lightspeed was
not a problem. He simply fired the maser ahead of the ballistic flight path of
a dart, and let the dart fly into it. “Oh my God those freakin’ darts were slow as molasses in January,” Skippy
complained, using an expression I hadn’t heard since my grandmother said it. “Did
the Kristang actually use a railgun, or did they just toss those darts out a
window? I got so bored waiting for them that I did a hundred crossword puzzles.
Anyway, it worked.”

The dart pieces
impacted the surface around the projectors and threw up two enormous clouds of
dust and debris, but only one piece the size of a fingernail did hit a
projector. That piece was easily deflected by the projector’s shield, leaving
the maser cannon unharmed. And the Kristang, whose crappy sensors entirely missed
our maser firing, saw two plumes of dust surrounding the two healthy
projectors, and concluded their strike had been successful. They congratulated
themselves on knocking out two multi-terawatt projectors, bragging on
ship-to-ship transmissions about how bad-ass they were. Skippy almost puked
listening to them. “Oh yeah, oh yeah, you’re bad-asses all right. Give me a
minute and we’ll salute you great warriors properly.”

Skippy’s idea of a
salute came in the form of maser beams. With the Kristang semi-confident there
were no active projectors on the surface, they sent one, then all three
destroyers into the targeting cones. Each destroyer, brave but not stupid,
would only briefly flit through the targeting cone. That was all Skippy needed.
As soon as there were two destroyers within range at the same time, he told me
to press the Big Red Button on my zPhone to fire the weapons.

Two destroyers
against three projectors. Two of those projectors had only one shot each left,
and the shields of a Kristang destroyer could deflect the full power of a
projector long enough for the ship to perform an emergency jump away. The odds
were not in our favor.

Skippy, of course,
didn’t see any point in playing fair.

Both of the projectors
the Kristang thought they had knocked out fired, two milliseconds apart. Each of
those projectors fired at a different ship, and by themselves they could not
have penetrated a destroyer’s shields. Our secret fifth projector also fired,
first at one ship and then at the second, each shot two milliseconds apart so
that each ship was struck by the full power of two projectors at once. The
combined maser power punched right though the destroyers’ shields. The ship’s
hulls were armored, made of layers of tough ceramic composites and heat-dissipating
foam. If the maser beams had a sense of humor, they would have laughed at the
Kristang ship designers’ attempts to protect their vessels. The maser beams cut
through the hulls as if they were tissue paper, slicing the ships apart. Thick,
armored interior bulkheads melted under the intense heat, exploding and
becoming projectiles inside their own ships. Power conduits ruptured and
missiles spontaneously exploded in their launch tubes, turning the ships into
spinning hulks. The lucky third destroyer immediately jumped away.

“Hey! Where did you
go, asswipe?” Skippy shouted. “You want some of this? You want some of this? Say
hello to my leetle friend Mister Maser Beam. I got plenty more where that came
from, you punk-ass bitch!”

“Damn, Skippy, chill
out. You got them already,” I said as on the display, one of the stricken
destroyers blew apart when its missile magazine cooked off.

“I do not like
lizards, Joe. I do not like bullies. Big Red Button again, Joe?”

“Sure,” I said as I
held the button down. “Why?”

“One of those ships
is annoyingly lucky, it hasn’t blown up yet. One of our original four
projectors only has a weak shot left, but watch what happens when even a weak
maser hits an unshielded ship’s reactor.”

On the display I was
watching, a light flared where a crippled destroyer had been.

“Oops,” Skippy
chuckled. “My bad! Sorry about that. Darn, I hate it when that happens. Well,
I’m sure the Kristang will forgive and forget. Or not. Whatever.”

“I’m thinking ‘not’,
Skippy. Hey, that was great,” I accepted a high five from Sergeant Adams. “Keep
monitoring their communications, please. I want to know if the Kristang plan to
test our defenses again.”

“Unlikely, Joe. The
Kristang commander is right now screaming at his remaining ships to stay away
from the planet, until his ground forces can degrade our air defense
capability. There was supposed to be a follow-on attack by the other Kristang
ships, but that has now been postponed indefinitely.”

“Huh, I wonder why?”
I asked with a smile.

“Maybe they didn’t
sell enough tickets, Joe?”

“How much longer should
we wait, Commodore?”

Commodore Ferlant
answered his executive officer’s question without turning his attention away
from the tactical display. If Ferlant were an admiral, the Ruh Gastalo would have a captain, and Ferlant would have to concern
himself only with commanding his task force. Because he was not an admiral, he
needed to also act as the ship’s captain. Because he didn’t have time to act as
captain in the middle of a running battle, most of the responsibility for
ship-handling fell to his executive officer Tom Smeth. “We will wait until the Dalandu has a full charge,” Ferlant
announced. The frigate Sas Dalandu
had accompanied Ferlant’s cruiser on every jump after the projectors had thrown
the situation around Gehtanu into absolute chaos. Since Ferlant’s initial order
for his small task force to scatter, his ships had been hounded by the still
much larger force of remaining Kristang ships. Every time one of his ships
jumped, the enemy attempted to pursue, analyzing the residual signature of the
Ruhar ships’ outbound wormholes to determine where they had jumped to. Each
time one of his ships jumped, they dropped off quantum resonators behind them,
to confuse enemy sensors and conceal the jump wormhole signature. The
resonators were partially effective, as it usually took the Kristang almost an
hour to determine where the Ruhar had gone. But after 39 hours of unrelenting
pursuit, Ferlant’s ships were running low on quantum resonators, and his ships’
jump drives were badly in need of a rest to recalibrate their coils. They would
likely get no such rest. Each time the Ruhar ships jumped with misaligned
coils, their messy jump created a louder signature, and the quantum resonators
became less and less effective at concealing where the ship had jumped to.
Eventually, Ferlant knew, the Kristang would wear his ships down.

The Kristang had several
significant advantages in the pursuit. They still had more ships, so they could
send several ships on pursuit while the others stood down for maintenance. And
they could concentrate on killing Ferlant’s ships one at a time, while merely
keeping his other ships moving so they couldn’t effectively support each other.

“Commodore,” Smeth said
quietly, “this can’t continue forever.” They were waiting for the Sas Dalandu to complete charging her
jump coils, because that frigate’s coils were overheating due to overuse. Soon,
individual coils would begin to burn out, throwing that ship’s entire jump
drive system so badly out of alignment that it would be unable to sustain a jump
wormhole.

“I know,” Ferlant
answered quietly. So far, he had not lost a single ship, although the destroyer
City of Fah Lentan had been badly
damaged in an attack. The Lentan was
able to jump but not able to do much else; her stealth field and defensive
shields were inoperable. Ferlant had assigned the City of MecMurro to accompany her stricken sister ship, but the Lentan might need to be abandoned, and
her crew transferred to the MecMurro.
He was losing the fight. It had become a battle of attrition; and his ships
were wearing out faster than the Kristang ships were falling apart. “When the Dalandu is ready, we are jumping outside
the system. Three jumps, maximum range.”

“We’re abandoning
Gehtanu?” Smeth asked. He agreed with the Commodore’s decision, he also wanted
to understand it.

“We are effecting a
temporary strategic retreat, in order to regroup and regain the initiative,”
Ferlant explained in proper military terms. Someday, high-ranking Fleet
officials would review the bridge data recorder during the action, to determine
whether Commodore Ferlant’s decisions had been appropriate. Hopefully, Ferlant
would be alive then to explain himself. “Our ships need an opportunity to go
offline and effect repairs.”

Smeth agreed. “If the
Kristang will leave us alone long enough.”

“I am cautiously
optimistic that once he knows we have left the system, Admiral Kekrando will
turn his attention back to reestablishing his control of the space around
Gehtanu.”

“And after our repairs
are complete?” Smeth asked.

“Then we regain the
initiative,” Ferlant said with a tight smile.

“Sir?”

“The hunters will become
the hunted.”

“I can walk,” Saily
assured Derek. Her legs were not as assuring. She could not, in fact, walk.

“It doesn’t look like
it,” Derek said gently.

“My right leg is fine,”
she insisted. Her left leg was broken in two places, somewhere along her way
crashing down through the trees. She also had internal injuries from whatever
piece of the exploding Dobreh had hit her after they ejected. When Derek found
Saily, she had been unconscious, tangled in parachute cords, hanging upside
down. Working carefully with his injured shoulder, Derek had cut away cords and
parachute fabric to make a rope, and slowly lowered her to the ground. Peeling
away her blood-soaked flightsuit, he found an ugly bloody wound on her left
side. Whatever magical nanobots swam in her blood had done their best to stitch
the wound closed, but she had already lost a lot of blood, based on the amount
that had soaked her flightsuit and dripped onto the forest floor. In her flight
kit, Derek had found bandages, emergency rations, and four vials of injectable
medical supplements. He couldn’t read all of the complicated Ruhar technical
terms; so he used his zPhone’s camera to translate for him. The vials contained
additional nanobots, vitamins and minerals and whatever type of sugars and
proteins the Ruhar used as food. “Do we have a choice?”

“No,” Derek agreed. While
his zPhone wasn’t working, Saily had been able to exchange brief, encrypted
messages with the Ruhar military guard system. She had sent a distress call,
stating her injuries, location and that she was with a human copilot. Saily
urgently needed medical care, Derek was also injured and Derek did not have any
source of food. The reply was not encouraging. Air rescue was out of the
question; the horrific air battle had wiped out most of the Ruhar’s combat
aircraft. The few aircraft that remained were being reserved to defend vital
infrastructure or to conduct strikes against the Kristang. Risking a precious
aircraft with five crewmembers to rescue one downed pilot, was not an option at
that time. Saily was advised to walk her way out; there was a road several days
away. If she could get near the road, Ruhar command would see if any of the
civilians in the area would be willing to drive out to pick her up. Basically,
the reply stated that there was a war on, and they didn’t have any aircraft to
spare. The reply also wished her good luck.

Ruhar command didn’t say
anything about Derek, other than to question why a human had been with Saily in
the first place. They had no suggestion what he should do about the lack of
food. “If you can stand, you can lean on my shoulder,” Derek suggested. “Let’s
try that.”

Holding onto a tree,
Saily managed to stand on one wobbly leg. Derek got her arm draped over his
shoulders, and they practiced stumbling through the forest. “Easy enough,”
Derek concluded. “This is like a three-legged race.”

“What?” Saily asked,
confused.

Derek shook his head.
That reference hadn’t translated into Ruhar as he intended. “It’s a human
custom, something we do at picnics. You, ah, forget it. Let’s save our energy.”
With his free hand, he checked the map on his zPhone. Getting to the road was not
going to be easy, there were hills to climb and streams to cross. As they
walked, Saily would grow weaker from her unhealed injuries, and Derek would
grow weaker from hunger. “One step at a time. Here we go.”

“Admiral, the Vikran reports that the entire enemy
force has jumped outside the system,” the captain of the Kedwala stated. The destroyer We
are Proud to Honor Clan Sub-Leader Bell-den-Oosh Vikran who Inspires us Every
Day was a brother ship of the We are
Proud to Follow the Shining Example of Combat Rifleman Tuut-uas-Val Kedwala,
but while the Kedwala had the dubious
honor of hosting the admiral, the Vikran
had been off having fun and seeking glory chasing the Ruhar task force. With
the admiral’s normal command ship, the battlecruiser He Who Pushes Aside Fear Shall Always be Victorious having been
obliterated by a projector above Pradassis, the Kedwala had become the battlegroup’s command ship by default.
Neither the admiral nor the crew of the Kedwala
were happy about the situation, but whereas Admiral Kekrando was free to
express his dissatisfaction loudly and frequently, the crew of the Kedwala had to at least pretend they
were honored to host the battlegroup commander. Because to openly state their
fervent desire to stuff the admiral and his staff into an airlock and blow them
into space would not be a good career move. Although that was a totally
understandable sentiment. “Confirmed. The enemy has now performed three
consecutive jumps beyond the system limits, and might be preparing to jump
again. The Vikran requests
instructions.”

Technically, the captain
of the Vikran himself was not
requesting instructions; the Vikran
had been sent back to the Kedwala by
Senior Captain Gerkaw in command of the pursuit squadron. That senior captain
had requested instructions. And he had not so much requested instructions, as
hoped that the standing instructions he already had would be changed. Admiral
Kekrando had ordered the pursuit squadron to halt pursuit, if the enemy passed
a certain distance from the Pradassis system, and the pursuit squadron had
already gone beyond that imaginary line. The senior captain hoped the admiral
would ignore that minor violation, and give permission to continue the pursuit.
The enemy’s ships were worn down, the senior captain’s message said excitedly.
Another couple jumps, surely a dozen at most, and the pursuit squadron would
have the Ruhar trapped.

Kekrando read the message
with displeasure. Most of his demanding job, he thought angrily, was reining in
overly aggressive commanders who were eager to do stupid, rash things that
risked losing the considerable advantage his battlegroup still possessed. The
fact that frequent use of overly aggressive, rash actions were how he had
become promoted to the admiralty did not cross Kekrando’s mind. The battlegroup
was his command now, and if anyone
was going to something recklessly stupid, it was going to happen on Kekrando’s
orders. Not on the initiative of glory and promotion seeking Senior Captain
Gerkaw. With Admiral Kekrando having lost most of his combat power to a sneak
attack by previously unknown projectors, he knew his position in command was
precarious. If the clan leadership was looking to replace Kekrando, a senior
captain in command of a successful pursuit squadron would be a convenient
candidate. “Inform Senior Captain Gerkaw that he is to adhere to my standing
instructions,” Kekrando said firmly. “He is not to run off and risk my ships in his personal desire for
glory.”

Nineteen hours had
passed, and there was no sign of continued pursuit by the Kristang. Cautiously,
Commodore Ferlant allowed two ships at a time to take critical systems offline
for much-needed maintenance. His cruiser Ruh
Gastalo would remain on full alert to protect the vulnerable ships
undergoing repairs. Only after all other ships in the little task force had
been brought to full combat readiness, would the Gastalo herself begin heavy maintenance.

As Ferlant has risen
through the ranks, to captain and now temporary commodore, he had come to rely
more and more on a quote from one of his instructors way back at the military
academy. She had told the class that ‘Amateurs discuss tactics. Professionals
discuss logistics’. Ferlant had not been surprised to learn that even the
humans had a similar saying on their primitive homeworld. Tactics, Ferlant
considered as he reviewed ship status reports, were useless without the means
to implement them. The ships under his command were warships only if they were
capable of performing near their designed capability; and to accomplish that,
required constant attention to tasks that were painstaking and mundane. Combat
action, even an action of continually running from enemy pursuit, wore down
critical systems. Without a pause to rest, repair and replace vital components,
his warships would become nothing more than composite tubes which held air only
so long as the enemy held off attack. Despite constant demands from the
government on Gehtanu for his ships to come back, Ferlant was not going to be
hasty and stupid. He was going to take a pause from the battle in order to
bring all of his ships back up to full fighting condition.

All of his ships, that
is, except for the destroyer City of Fah
Lentan. That ship had been badly damaged in a Kristang attack, it had
barely escaped from a damping field while providing cover to give the frigate Sas Dalandu time to jump away. A
destroyer risking itself to protect a much less valuable frigate was a
questionable tactic, but Ferlant had not criticized the Lentan’s captain. Ferlant would have done the same thing had he been
in command of the destroyer. The Lentan
was too heavily damaged to be brought back up to full combat capability, so
Ferlant instructed that ship’s crew to perform only cosmetic repairs, and basic
maintenance on the jump drive and defensive shields. Ferlant had a special task
in mind for the Lentan. One last
task.

Eric Koblenz had gone
from elation to severe depression to cautious hopefulness to confused
disappointment in the space of a week, and now he was merely numb. When the Kristang
battlegroup arrived in orbit and chased the Ruhar ships away, the Keeper
faction in UNEF had been triumphant; certain that life for UNEF would now
return to normal, that those humans who had been disloyal to the Kristang would
be punished, and that loyal Keepers would soon return to Earth, having
accomplished their mission for the Kristang. Eric experienced a joyous few
days, warning disloyal non-Keepers that their fate was sealed; certain that his
loyalty would be rewarded.

Keeper leaders attempted
to contact the Kristang in the days immediately following arrival of the
battlegroup, but they were rebuffed. Then came a scathing message from the
Kristang that was a stinging rebuke. All humans had in some way cooperated with
the Ruhar, if only by growing their own food and therefore removing a logistics
burden from the enemy Ruhar. Those who called themselves ‘Keepers’ were equally
traitorous; the Kristang valued action, not words, and the Keepers had not done anything against the Ruhar. Also,
the Kristang no longer had access to Earth, so no humans would be going home.
The Kristang were not impressed by actions of some Keepers to destroy tractors
and other equipment the Ruhar provided; equipment the Ruhar had already
remotely disabled.

Eric didn’t know what to
do, or think. What was the point of remaining loyal to an alien species that
considered him to be a traitor? His government on Earth had allied with the
Kristang, now that government on humanity’s homeworld had no effective
authority over the people isolated on an alien world. He had no good options.
No hope.

“Major Perkins? Ma’am?”
Irene called her current commanding officer into the Buzzard’s cockpit. “I just
picked up a distress call about a downed Ruhar pilot. She’s injured, and not
far from here.”

Perkins frowned. As a
pilot, Striebich might feel a call to rescue any and all of her fellow aviators
in distress. Perkins couldn’t allow her team to be distracted from their
mission. “I’m sure there are many pilots down after that air battle.”

“Yes, ma’am. But this
Ruhar pilot has a human with her.”

“What? How did that
happen?”

“How I don’t know ma’am,”
Irene admitted. “The distress call is from the human, a Lt Derek Bonsu. He was
the copilot or weapon system officer in a Chicken when the battle started. I
guess they got caught up in the furball. He tried to get air rescue from the
Ruhar, but they have few aircraft left, and they are unable to assist at this
time.”

“They’ve been down since
the day of the air battle?”

“Yes, ma’am. The Ruhar is
in a bad way; she’s injured and still losing blood. This Lt. Bonsu doesn’t have
any food.” Irene pointed at the map on the display. “Even by himself, it would
take him a couple more days to walk to the nearest Ruhar settlement, and they
wouldn’t have any human food there. He says his pilot won’t last that long
anyway. This area,” her finger circled the map, “is remote. No roads, and few
settlements. They need air rescue.”

“Shit. Damn it!”

“It can be done, ma’am,”
Irene assured Perkins. “We can lower a crewman to hook them up to a cable.”

“Lieutenant, I meant
‘damn it’ as in, of course we do have to assist. We are not leaving a human out there to starve.”

Irene couldn’t keep a
smile off her face. “It will be only a forty minute flight, ma’am, going low
and slow.”

“Don’t start the engines
yet, Striebich. First, I’m going to contact Emby and see if they can do
anything to help them without us.”

“If not, ma’am?”

“Then I’m going to ask
Emby what the mission security fallout will be, of us bringing a Ruhar aboard.
And we’ll need to fly this Ruhar some place where she can get medical care,
that will seriously blow our cover.”

“We could retrieve only
Lt. Bonsu,” Irene said with a frown.

Major Perkins snorted.
“Striebich, you’re a pilot. Would leave one of your aircrew behind?”

“No,” she answered
without hesitation.

“I expect this Lt. Bonsu
feels the same way about his pilot.” She sighed and pulled out her zPhone to
type a message. “At times like this, I wish Emby would answer a simple damned
phone call, instead of me typing everything.”

“Crap, Skippy,” I said
when we got the message from Perkins. “Does Perkins have to pick this guy up?
That road isn’t far,” at least it didn’t appear very far on the map. I wasn’t
on the ground, walking on an empty stomach. “If he can get there, he can follow
the road to this village here,” I pointed to a dot on the map.

“That expression never
made any sense to me, Joe. How do you ‘follow’ a road? Roads are static; they
never move. If you said ‘follow a car on the road’, then I would understand. Maybe
the expression should be ‘remain on the road’. Although, if you say road, it is
kind of implied that you stay on it, unless the instructions-”

“Skippy!”

“What?”

“Focus. Please, try to
focus. Forget what I said, if this guy thinks he can’t make it to the road, I’m
not going to sit here and second guess him.” Especially since I could smell the
lasagna that Adams was heating up for dinner, and Bonsu hadn’t eaten for days.
“A downed human pilot. I should have thought of this.”

“There are an infinite
number of things you should have thought of and didn’t, Joe,” Skippy replied.
“Like, you have bread and peanut butter, but no Fluff. Therefore, no
Fluffernutter for you.”

“This is a little more
important, Skippy,” although after he said it, I was craving the sweet and
salty deliciousness of a Fluffernutter. “I’ll need to call Chotek about this.
Is there anything you can do to help those pilots, instead of Perkins rescuing
them?”

“Not that I can see, Joe.
The air assets of both the Ruhar and Kristang are severely depleted, and Lt.
Bonsu is in sort a no-man’s land between the two forces.”

“Oh, boy, this isn’t
going to be good. We need to plan for Perkins’ cover to be blown for the
remainder of her mission.”

“Why, Joe? We could just
order her to continue the mission and forget Lt. Bonsu.”

“Skippy,” I said wryly,
“I don’t want to become a damned pogue. You forget that before I got this cushy
day job, I was a soldier in the field. Perkins asking permission to rescue
those two pilots was more of an FYI. She’s going, unless we have a better
idea.”

“Oh. Ok, Joe. I couldn’t
imagine you leaving Bonsu out there to starve anyway.”

“You got that right.” I
picked up my zPhone to call the Flying
Dutchman. What the hell was I going to say to Chotek? “Hey, Skippy. Perkins
blowing her cover doesn’t involve any risk of our cover being blown, does it?”

The shiny little beer can
chuckled. “No way, dude! I’ve got our tracks totally covered. Do what you gotta
do, I’ve got your back.”

“I appreciate that,
Skippy. Flying Dutchman? This is Colonel
Bishop, I need to speak with Mr. Chotek, please.”

CHAPTER TWENTY
ONE

Chotek did not entirely
agree with my opinion that Perkins rescuing the two pilots posed zero risk of
exposing our involvement. It took a lot of convincing, and in the end, Lt. Colonel
Chang had the deciding voice. The fact is, Chotek trusted the calm, steady
experience of Chang to me. When Chang told our UN mission commander that the
operation posed no additional risk, Chotek very reluctantly agreed. I think
Chotek appreciated me requesting permission from him, rather than making a snap
decision on my own. That helped our relationship later, when I really needed
him to cut me some slack and trust me. “Ok, we have the green light from the
mission commander. We need to send a message to Perkins, telling her to pick up
Lt. Bonsu.”

“Sir?” Adams interjected.
“We can’t send a message about picking up a human. Emby is supposed to be a
native Ruhar group. They would care about the injured Ruhar pilot, not about a
human.”

“Oh.” I mentally chided
myself for being a dumbass. “That is an excellent point, Sergeant. Do that,
Skippy.”

“Done. Message sent,
Colonel,” Skippy announced cheerily. “While we’re waiting for a reply from
Major Perkins, I have a question for you, Joe.”

“If it’s about calculus
or poetry, it is unlikely I have an answer.”

“I will take a risk on
that,” Skippy chuckled. “You said that you don’t want to be a ‘pogue’. I am not
sure that I understand that reference.”

“A ‘pogue’ is a soldier
who serves in a support unit, not in combat. Supposedly it stands for Persons
Other than Grunts, but I think that was made up later.”

“Ah. I thought that was a
‘fobbit’, Joe.”

“Fobbit is a newer term,
from when the Army started setting up Forward Operating Bases. Before that was
‘REMF’ for Rear Echelon Mother Fucker. Those are the assholes who sleep in a
real bed every night, while infantry grunts are lucky to find rock to sleep
on.”

“Ok, ‘REMF’ and ‘pogue’,
I will add those to my list of colorful expressions. Joe, I have noticed that
your language has become less, I guess the best word would be ‘salty’ since we
met.”

“Yes, Skippy,” I tapped
the silver eagles on my uniform. “The Army expects me to be an officer and a
gentleman now. I can’t be dropping F-bombs all over the place.” Although I knew
some colonels who used very ‘salty’ language.

“You? A gentleman? So
that means you clean up your language? What’s next? Will you be serving
afternoon tea? Those little sandwiches with the crusts cut off? Ooooh, and
ballroom dancing lessons for you.”

“Skippy?”

“Yes?”

I dropped a whole string
of F-bombs, until Adams burst out laughing.

Skippy chuckled also.
“There’s the Joe I know!”

Derek stumbled on a rock
and fell to one knee. He leaned forward as he fell, so he wouldn’t fall
backward and injure Saily. The pilot behind him groaned, “Saily?” He asked.
“Are you awake?”

She didn’t respond. He
looked at the terrain in front of them, it was a meadow with clusters of trees
dotted here and there. In a meadow, he didn’t have to constantly duck to avoid
Saily’s head being hit by low-hanging tree branches. But while a forest had
some undergrowth, a meadow was all undergrowth. Tall grasses, vines and shrubs
could tangle his feet and hide holes he couldn’t see. The worst part of
crossing the meadow was that it sloped up, and there was no way around climbing
something. He needed to go northwest, and the map showed the meadow had the
gentlest slope in the area. That was why he was stumbling across it.

Saily groaned again.
Exhausted and light-headed from deep hunger, Derek let his other knee down, and
unbuckled the strap that held the pilot to his back. Saily had fallen the day
before and been unable to rise, then she’d become unconscious. The
nanoparticles in her blood were conserving her remaining blood supply by making
her sleep; while she was asleep she wasn’t moving and causing additional stress
on the injuries the nanoparticles had hastily stitched together. When she had
been awake, Saily had warned him that she might fall into sort of a coma, if
the nanobots in her blood decided that was the only way to extend her life.
Ruhar biology had a way to go into a type of hibernation during times of
extreme stress and deprivation. In the deep coma-like hibernation, Ruhar bodies
used very little oxygen, water and stored fuel. They could also withstand cold
temperatures for lengthy periods. It wasn’t a pleasant experience, she
explained, but she’d undergone a practice hibernation during boot camp military
training. The hibernation ability wasn’t an original feature of Ruhar biology;
that had been added long ago using genetic engineering. That same tweaking of
Ruhar DNA was the reason she was still alive; she had superior healing
abilities.

Enhanced genetics and
nanobots were, Derek thought, very good things to have. Right then, his growling
stomach would have settled for a sandwich.

The previous night, Derek
had injected her with the last vial of energy juice, so she was now running out
of sugar or whatever Ruhar biochemistry used for fuel. He unbuckled the lower
strap, and let the Ruhar pilot slump gently backwards, until she lay on the
grass. Touching her neck, he was surprised to find her pulse strong and fast,
until he realized that what he was feeling was his own pulse pounding in his
fingertip from exertion. “I need to rest,” he said to no one but himself.

Two hours later by the
clock on his zPhone, he woke up when the clouds parted and a shaft of sunlight
illuminated the meadow. Panicked, he rolled to his knees and checked on Saily.
She was as he had left her; breathing very slowly, her pulse slow and weak,
nonresponsive. Shaking his canteen told him it was almost full, so he parted
her lips with his fingers and very slowly dribbled half of the water into her
mouth, letting her automatically swallow. Then he greedily drank the other half
of the water. The map said there was a stream cutting across the meadow near
the top, where the meadow ended and the woods resumed. He could refill the
canteen there. One advantage of being in an alien biosphere was that none of
the microorganisms in the water could harm him or Saily.

With a start, he woke
again, twenty minutes later. Hunger pangs were what caused him to waken. They
weren’t going to get any better. “Time to make a decision, Bonsu,” he said to
himself. He couldn’t go much further carrying Saily; he could barely stand on
his own. Ten meters away was a grove of trees centered on one large tree. That
was a good place. He staggered to his knees, then onto one foot, then the
other. Holding the Ruhar under her arms, he slowly dragged her backwards until
she rested against the large trees, looking toward the east. Then, carefully so
he didn’t fall as spots formed in his vision, he sat down beside her. “Nice
spot, isn’t it?” He asked Saily. “Great view.” Looking eastward, he imagined he
could see where they had come from. There was the hill they had skirted to the
north, and was that the lake they had walked around? It was in the marshy area
just beyond the lake that Saily had fallen. That time, she had been able to
walk again after a short rest, but half an hour later, she had slumped
unconscious. And Derek had rigged up straps to carry her on his back. They
weren’t going to make it to safety, he’d known that since the message came back
that the Ruhar had no assets to spare for an air rescue. And they were too far
in the wilderness for anyone to hike in to get them in time. From twisting
contrails he’d seen high in the sky since they were shot down, the air battle
was still ongoing, although mostly he’d seen only one or two contrails at a
time. Both sides must be running low on combat aircraft.

Since the Ruhar replied
that no rescue would be coming any time soon, Derek’s plan had changed from
walking to a settlement where Saily
could get medical care, to walking toward
a settlement. At that point, it was about not giving up, about making progress.
It was about showing the Ruhar that humans were reliable partners. And mostly,
it was about doing something other than laying down and starving to death. Or,
it had been about that, back when he had not been so weak that he no longer had
a choice.

He was awakened by an
annoying buzzing sound. Automatically, he slapped at the air, until he
remembered there were no flying insects on Paradise; native life on the planet
had not evolved that far yet. What was that sound? Now that he noticed, it was
bothering him, because it was right at the edge of his hearing. What the hell
was it? Paradise had insects that chirped or buzzed, he was familiar with most
of those.

No, it couldn’t be
insects buzzing in the meadow, because the sound came from one direction rather
than all around him. What was even more odd was the sound was moving north to
south, and growing louder.

With a sudden shock, he
recognized the sound. It was aircraft jet engines, in stealth mode. The Kristang!
The Ruhar had no aircraft to spare for a rescue, but the Kristang must have
sent one of their aircraft. Were they picking up the signal from Saily’s
emergency locator beacon? She said she had deactivated it; maybe the Kristang
picked up the beacon back then, and were now searching for downed Ruhar
aircrew.

Derek tried to stand up
but he couldn’t. He got to his knees, regretting they had discarded Saily’s
sidearm along the way. The weapon would not have activated for Derek anyway, it
still would have felt better to have it in his hand and point it toward the
Kristang. Or to shoot Saily, then himself. He knew he did not want to be
captured, and he was sure Saily felt the same way. Now, damn it, he didn’t have
a choice.

The sound grew much
louder now, and a faint shadow fell across him; the aircraft was between him
and the sun and it must have its stealth field engaged. It sounded very much
like a Buzzard, he had never heard the Kristang ship that was their equivalent
of a Buzzard. Probably it was similar. The faint shadow moved out over the
meadow, then he could see the vague blob that was an aircraft in stealth. The
air around the stealth field shimmered. In an atmosphere, stealth fields were
only useful at long ranges.

“Oh my God!” He gasped
when the aircraft dropped its stealth field as it approached the meadow for
landing. It was a Buzzard! He
recognized not only the shape, but the insignia. It was from the 18th
air squadron. He knew some of those Ruhar; the 18th had flown into
his airbase for joint exercises.

Derek found the strength
to hold onto the tree and rise unsteadily to his feet. He waved to the Buzzard
with one arm, holding the tree with the other. The Ruhar were not there for
him, they had come for Saily. If they took her, that did not guarantee they
would take a human with them. Derek knew many Ruhar still hated humans,
especially Ruhar who were native to Gehtanu. If the crew of that Buzzard were
going to leave him behind to starve, they were going to have to look him in the
eye before they took off.

Mentally prepared for
Ruhar soldiers to shove him aside and take only Saily, he was shocked when the
Buzzard’s side door opened, and two humans stepped out. “Lieutenant Bonsu,” the
woman said. “I’m Major Perkins, this is Specialist Colter.”

Derek kept enough of his
wits to point toward his feet. “I have an injured Ruhar pilot with me. Please
help her.”

“We will,” Perkins said.
“And you need food. We have it.”

“Success, Joe!” Skippy
said excitedly. “Major Perkins picked up Lt. Derek Bonsu and the Ruhar pilot.
Bonsu will be fine after he gets some food, he also has a shoulder injury that
should be looked at, if he is going to regain full function. The Ruhar pilot is
in self-induced hibernation, Specialist Jarret had administered a stabilizing
drug that was in the Buzzard’s medical kit. The pilot needs medical care,
expert Ruhar medical care, soon.”

“Maybe when this is
over,” I mused, “this Derek guy will get taken care of by the Ruhar.”

“Derek,” Adams said thoughtfully.
“I dated a Derek in high school.”

I thought she was
going to say more about her dating experience, but Skippy interrupted. “That’s
a coincidence, Sarge Marge. Joe dated a Margaret in high school.”

“Everyone called her
‘Meg’,” I started to explain.

“It didn’t end well,”
Skippy said, sounding amused already. “Her father got upset because Joe peed
her name in the snow outside her house, if you know what I mean.”

“Skippy, it didn’t
exactly happen like-”

“What really got her
father upset was that he recognized it was written in his daughter’s handwriting.”

“Oh, boy,” I groaned.
“You know, people used to get a pass on doing things when you’re young and
stupid, and after a while everyone forgot about it.”

“That was before
everything lived forever on Facebook, Joe.”

I sighed, knowing he
was right. “Any chance you can erase all that embarrassing stuff when we get
back to Earth, Skippy?”

“Oh,” Skippy snorted.
“Easy peasy, Joe.”

“Great,” I brightened
with hope. “Thank y-”

“But what’s the fun
in that?” Skippy asked. “It would be way more fun if someone took all the
embarrassing stuff that people have forgotten about, and added it to your
profile. Which might have happened
shortly before we left Earth.”

“Might have?”

“I’m speculating
here, Joe. Someone might have done that, plus added really embarrassing stuff
about you from your sister’s diary. Like your bedwetting, and the time she
caught you playing with yourself? Times, I should say. Was it two or three
times? I mean, who gets excited looking at the women on the cover of your
mother’s romance novels?”

Desai exploded with
laughter and Adams couldn’t help joining her. “I’m sorry, sir,” Desai managed
to say, while avoiding looking at me.

“Adams,” I groaned
with my forehead gently banging against the table. “Do you have a sidearm?”

“Yes, Colonel,” she
managed to say while laughing. “You want me to shoot Skippy?”

“I don’t think
anything short of a planet-cracking nuke would hurt him,” I muttered. “Could
you put your sidearm against my head and pull the trigger a couple times, put
me out of my misery?”

“I think that would
be against some sort of regulation, sir,” she apologized.

“It’s a mercy
killing,” I pleaded. “There’s no way I can go back to Earth now.”

“Why, Joe?” Skippy
asked. “Is it because of the outstanding warrants? Don’t worry, the statute of
limitations on indecent exposure is only like five years. I think.”

“Not helping, Skippy,
you are not helping one bit.”

“Joe, making you face
your shortcomings is you helping in
the long run,” Skippy protested. “Also a lot of fun for me, although of course
that was not my motivation. That you know of.”

The next time a beer
can on a dusty shelf starts talking to me, I am going to walk out and lock the
door behind me.

“Whoa! Slow down there,
partner,” Jesse cautioned as Derek greedily gulped a container of nutrient mush
and reached for another. “Your stomach has shrunk. You need to go slow.”

“Is that,” Derek mumbled
through a mouthful of mush, “chocolate chips cookies?” He pointed to a box in
Jesse’s lap.

“Yes,” Jesse lifted the
box out of the pilot’s reach. Damn, he thought, this is like dealing with a
child. Well, the man had to be damned hungry by now. “They are real honest to
God chocolate chip cookies from,” he was about to say ‘America’ but the box
said ‘Belgium’. “Earth. You eat two of those mushes, and let your stomach get
used to it. Then you can have a cookie. Right, ma’am?”

Perkins looked up from
her tablet and nodded. “That’s right. Lt. Bonsu, you do what the man says.”

“Yes, Major,” Bonsu said
shakily. “Is this a special forces unit, ma’am?” He asked that skeptically.
None of the five had special forces unit insignia on their uniforms.

“Hell, yes,” Jesse
answered seriously. “We’re the most special force you’ve ever seen.”

“Not exactly,” Perkins
said.

“Excuse me, ma’am,”
Shauna interjected. “I think Jesse is right. Has there ever been a mission more
special than this? We destroyed a battlegroup.”

Perkins paused. “You may
be right about that. Lt. Bonsu, we’re going to drop your pilot off some place
that has a Ruhar medical facility.” To the relief of Perkins, there had not
been any discussion of ignoring the Ruhar pilot after they picked up
Bonsu.  “Then our secret will be out
anyway, so you might as well hear it now. We-”

Irene called from the
cockpit. “Major Perkins? Could you come up here, please?”

Perkins stood, holding
onto a strap, as Irene was flying the Buzzard close to the ground and the
flight was not smooth. “Jarrett, Colter, tell Lt. Bonsu what we’ve been doing.”

“We will,” Shauna
acknowledged. “Lieutenant, let’s start with three words, Ok? Giant. Maser. Cannons.”

They selected a
medium-size village that had a fully-equipped hospital, no Ruhar military
presence, and was comfortably within the Buzzard’s range of its depleted power
cells. Irene warned that they needed to go back to the truck and refuel after
dropping the Ruhar pilot off; the Buzzard would be flying on reserves just to
get back to the truck.

Perkins considered
waiting until darkness, but Bonsu insisted that Saily was in a coma already,
and she could not wait any longer unless they wanted responsibility for a dead
Ruhar pilot. So Perkins ordered Irene to land the Buzzard on the hospital’s
landing pad. Irene began extending the rear ramp as the landing gear came down.
As soon as the Buzzard settled its weight on the landing pad, Dave and Jesse
carried Saily out. Shauna escorted them, a Ruhar rifle in her arms, the muzzle
pointed at the ground but a finger alongside the trigger in case of trouble.

A door opened, and three
confused Ruhar stepped out of the hospital. There had not been a call from an
incoming aircraft, and now there were three humans in front of them. One of the
human had a rifle. A Ruhar rifle.
Humans were not supposed to have weapons at all. Jesse and Dave laid Saily down
carefully, then backed away with their hands up. The three Ruhar were not
looking at Jesse and Dave; they were looking at the rifle in Shauna’s hands.
Dave pointed at Saily. “Help her,” he shouted in Ruhar over the whine of the
Buzzard’s engines. “Help. Her.”

One of the Ruhar nodded,
so the three humans backed away, Shauna last. At the top of the ramp, she hit
the button to retract the ramp and shouted for Irene to go. Irene lifted off
very gently, wary of her jet exhaust kicking up debris and injuring the Ruhar.
When she reached one hundred meters altitude, she engaged the stealth field and
pointed the Buzzard’s nose straight toward the truck. “We don’t have the fuel
to fly a maximum stealth course,” she explained to Derek in the copilot seat.
While the man was still too weak to take the controls, he could monitor
instruments for her. Derek had trained on Buzzards before switching to Chicken
gunships.

“You are sure the truck
is still there?” Derek asked.

“It had better be. Or
we’ll be walking.”

The Buzzard made it back
to the truck, and they refueled, although they were only able to supply half of
the fuel the Buzzard could hold. “We’re not going to be flying far, ma’am,”
Irene told Perkins, “I hope Emby doesn’t expect us to bring more than one
projector online.”

“We’re done doing this all
by ourselves. The Kristang have dozens of teams searching for projectors,”
Perkins frowned. They knew about the Kristang from listening to chatter on the
Ruhar civilian network. Although the Kristang still didn’t know exactly where
additional projectors might be located, they could guess, based on where they
would have installed projectors. “It’s time for the Ruhar to take over this
task. I’m messaging Emby now.”

Prepared for an argument,
Perkins was pleasantly surprised when Emby immediately agreed that it was time
for the Ruhar planetary government to be officially brought into the effort to
activate and control projectors. Emby was going to send a message to Ruhar
government officials, but Perkins had better idea. I am going to call someone I know, she typed. After I talk with her, you can send her a message.

Emby agreed.

Baturnah Logellia’s phone
beeped with a priority call, and she answered it automatically, assuming it was
one of her staff calling.

“Hello, Burgermeister.”
It was a human voice, speaking acceptable Ruhar with a heavy accent. “This is
Major Emily Perkins.”

Baturnah held the phone
away from her ear and stared at it. How had Perkins made her phone beep with a
priority message? “Hello, Major Perkins. How are you?” Where are you, Baturnah
wanted to ask. Perkins and three other humans escaped from a train, and the
Ruhar had not been able to find any trace of them.

“I am well,” Perkins
spoke precisely, as many human expressions did not translate into the alien
language. “We have been busy. We escaped from a train, then we stole a truck,
and we stole an aircraft. Also we rescued two pilots who had been shot down.
Oh, and before that, we were flying around, activating giant maser cannons.”

Baturnah gasped, loudly
enough that Perkins could hear.

“Would you be interested,”
Perkins asked, “in learning where all the other projectors are located? It has
gotten to the point where my team needs help. We can show you how to access and
activate a projector, and our friend can give you a map of all the projectors
on the planet.”

“Your friend?” Baturnah
asked cautiously, while frantically waving to get the attention of her staff.

“We call our friend
‘Emby’. Check your phone for a message, it should be there now.”

CHAPTER TWENTY
TWO

Commodore Ferlant’s plan
to regain the initiative relied on his people to be the competent, disciplined
professionals that he knew they were; and it relied on the Kristang being
Kristang. The destroyer City of Fah
Lentan departed the task force, performed a series of jumps, and finally
jumped in less than three lightminutes from where the five ships of the
Kristang pursuit force were holding station.

Senior Captain Gerkaw
knew what he should have done. He should have held position with four of his
ships, and dispatched a frigate to Admiral Kekrando; informing the battlegroup
commander of the development and requesting instructions. But that would not
have been any fun. Besides, the admiral’s position was precarious, and if
Gerkaw could show successful aggressiveness, the clan leaders could only look
favorably on him as an alternative, if the weak and indecisive Kekrando
suffered more losses. Instead of doing what he should have done, what he knew
the admiral wanted him to do, Gerkaw took the excuse of falling back on
Kekrando’s standing order to pursue. The Ruhar ships were no longer beyond the
distant boundaries of the star system, therefore as far as Gerkaw was
concerned, the previous order to pursue them was reinstated. His crews, who
sought glory and promotion as much as Gerkaw did, followed their Senior
Captain’s lead with great enthusiasm.

Aboard his own light
cruiser A Fearless Warrior's Honor is his
Greatest Weapon, Gerkaw jumped in to surround the Lentan with three ships; holding two ships in reserve. As soon as
his three ships emerged from their jump wormholes, they extended damping fields
at maximum power, holding back stealth capability and defensive shields in
order to link up the damping fields into an impenetrable barrier around the
Ruhar ship. Gerkaw was relying on speed, shock and surprise. He paid for it, or
rather his people paid for his aggressiveness.

The Lentan was ready to be surrounded, expecting a damping field to be
extended around it. Rather than activating its own defensive shield, the Lentan channeled all of its power into
two maser cannons, pouring bolt after bolt of searing maser energy at a single
ship; the Kristang destroyer We are Proud
to Follow the Shining Example of Warrior Pilot Aas-den-Val Pentat. The
unshielded Pentat staggered,
sustaining direct hits to its reactor armor. To protect its ship from a
catastrophic reactor breach, the reactor automatically took itself offline and
ejected its plasma in a controlled manner, which left the powerful destroyer
running on only backup energy supplies. With more maser bolts coming in from
the fully-shielded Lentan, the Pentat’s captain ordered his ship to
perform an emergency microjump. Knowing that he might later be accused of
cowardice by the Senior Captain, the Pentat’s
captain judged that being alive to defend himself was a better option, than the
prospect of posthumously having a ship named after himself.

Unfortunately, the damage
to the Pentat’s reactor, and the
superheated plasma spewing from the reactor’s ejection system, had caused a
fluctuation in power flow to the jump drive capacitors. The capacitor control
system was desperately attempting to compensate, when a signal from the bridge
forced a jump that the drive system was not ready for. The jump of ten
lightseconds was only partly successful, with the coils rupturing while the
ship was still inside the wormhole. The unlucky Pentat cleared the event horizon of the jump wormhole’s far end,
and immediately emergency protocols kicked in automatically. Explosive bolts
blew in rapid sequence, bulkheads tore apart, cables were ripped from their
connections, and the aft engineering section of the destroyer was deliberately
separated in a last-ditch attempt to save the ship. The attempt was successful
in that, when the remaining stored power in the jump drive capacitors was
released in a massive explosion, the drive unit was no longer attached to the
ship. Because of that precaution, only half of the Pentat’s crew died when the shockwave of the explosion hit the
hull.

As an additional insult,
the destroyer Lentan jumped away just
before the damping field could surround her. Senior Captain Gerkaw howled in
anger and frustration. “Idiot!” He shouted at the captain of the crippled Pentat, raging at the man’s lack of ship
maintenance that had left the Pentat
so vulnerable. Even though it was Senior Captain Gerkaw who had ignored his
commanders’ increasingly strident pleas for time to repair their worn-down
ships. And even though it had been Gerkaw’s insistence that his three ships
leave defensive shields offline in order to put all available power into the
damping field. That had been a gamble by Gerkaw that the Pentat’s crew had lost, and Gerkaw was aware that his own ship the
light cruiser Fearless could easily
have been the target of the Ruhar ship’s maser fire. If the Ruhar had targeted the
Fearless instead, Gerkaw could very
well be dead right then, and that fear fed his rage. With no hesitation, he
recalled his two reserve ships, and ordered immediate pursuit. Because the
Ruhar ship had not dropped off a quantum resonator to mask where it had jumped
to, Gerkaw’s force was able to pursue with a short jump, within six minutes of
the Lentan’s escape.

When the pursuit force
arrived at the coordinates of the Ruhar ship’s jump, they found not the Lentan, but the still-hotly vibrating
remnants of an outbound wormhole. The enemy must be desperate, Gerkaw concluded
with glee, for the Ruhar ship had again failed to use a quantum resonator, and
based on the noisiness of the collapsed jump wormhole, the enemy ship’s drive
was in poor condition. The enemy task force must be out of resonators and
unable to repair their jump drives. Having disobeyed the spirit if not the
letter of the admiral’s orders and having subsequently lost a warship, Senior
Captain Gerkaw knew that he absolutely had to kill the enemy ship, if he had
any chance to avoid being thrown in the brig or even executed for
insubordination and incompetence. The Kristang warrior culture could forgive
unsanctioned boldness, it could not tolerate failure. He ordered a coordinated
jump with all four of his remaining ships, as soon as the enemy ship’s jump
position could be calculated. This time, Gerkaw told himself while smashing his
fist down on a console, he had the enemy. With its jump drive in poor
condition, the enemy could not possibly jump away soon enough. At last, victory
and revenge would be his!

Demonstrating admirable
coordination and more than a little bit of luck, Gerkaw’s ships all arrived at
the designated jump point within a second of each other. The fact that one ship
had emerged on the wrong side of the target, and that two ships had almost
collided because their jumps were so inaccurate bothered Gerkaw not at all.
Poor jump accuracy was such a common malady in Kristang jump drives that crews
joked their lack of accuracy was a feature, not a flaw. The nagging fact that
his ships’ jump navigation computers could barely hit the side of a barn from
inside the barn did not bother Gerkaw; with four ships he had been able to
surround the enemy. The Ruhar destroyer was right where he had expected it to
be, and he-

“No!” Gerkaw shouted with
shock as his ship was rocked by multiple explosions. The shields of the Fearless flickered from the strain, and
he heard the rattling of the point-defense guns warding off more incoming
missiles. Then he was thrown across the bridge as the light cruiser spun to one
side from taking a railgun dart through her bow. It was an ambush! The enemy
must have salted the area with free-floating missiles, using the destroyer as a
decoy. To his horror, on the main bridge display he watched that enemy
destroyer flying at maximum acceleration, directly toward the destroyer Vikran. The two destroyers exchanged
heavy fire, with both ships staggering from the close-range impacts, then the
symbols on the display merged as the Ruhar ship deliberately collided with the Vikran. With a combined speed of over
fifteen thousand kilometers per hour, the hulls of both ships were effectively
vaporized even before their reactors and drive capacitors exploded.

“Take us-” Gerkaw never finished
the order, as a second railgun dart from the cruiser Ruh Gastalo had targeted A
Fearless Warrior's Honor is his Greatest Weapon. On its way to the Kristang
ship at eighteen percent of the speed of light, the railgun dart did not have
time to ponder whether the crew of the ship was indeed fearless, or whether
honor was a better weapon than a railgun dart. At the moment, that seemed
unlikely. The dart scored a direct hit on the reactor, and the light cruiser
blossomed into a blinding ball of light.

“Two down, Commodore,”
the Lentan’s former captain reported
in a strained voice. She had just watched her crewless former ship ram an
enemy, and now she was a captain without a ship at all. Commodore Ferlant had
taken the doomed Lentan’s crew aboard
his cruiser. With two captains suddenly aboard one ship, Ferlant took the
opportunity to have Lentan’s former
captain handle the tactical console, allowing Executive Officer Smeth to
concentrate on maneuvering the Ruh
Gastalo in combat.

The damping field extended
by Ferlant’s ships had effectively trapped the two surviving ships of the Kristang
pursuit force; a matching pair of frigates. “Signal to all ships, concentrate
fire on that closest frigate,” Ferlant ordered. Of the two small warships, one
of them had jumped in considerably off course, and had been turning to close
the distance to the original target. Now that the target Lentan was no more, and the Ruhar had turned the tables on the
Kristang, that wayward frigate was headed at maximum acceleration toward the
edge of the damping field.

The other frigate, which
had with considerable pride jumped in much closer to the Lentan’s calculated position, now began to regret its pride, for it
found itself the sole target of five Ruhar warships. And shortly thereafter, it
found itself briefly creating a new sun in the sky as it was wiped from
existence.

“Shall we shift fire to
the other frigate, Commodore? We could, oh!” Smeth said with a start. “It’s our
old friend the Glory. Sir, we could
swat that tiny insect now, and be done with it.”

“No, let it be,” Ferlant
said with a smile. “Drop the damping field.”

“Because Fate for some
unknown reason has a fondness for that particular ship, Commodore?” Smeth asked
quietly.

“No,” Ferlant declared.
“This time, Fate has already favored our little friend out there. I want a ship
to carry the good news back to Admiral Kekrando. When he hears about the little
disaster that his pursuit force stupidly jumped into, his overly developed
Kristang sense of bravado will demand that he come after us with the remainder
of his ships. His bravado and his sense of self-preservation. Kekrando will
know the only way for him to avoid absolute disgrace will be to hunt us down
and kill every single one of our ships.”

“That is something for
which you have a plan to avoid,” Smeth raised an eyebrow. “Sir?”

“Yes I do, Mr. Smeth,
don’t worry about that,” Ferlant said with a well-satisfied chuckle. “I plan
for us to lead Admiral Kekrando on a merry chase for as long as necessary.
While he is vainly pursuing us, he won’t be able to interfere in the events on
Gehtanu. And that will get the government there off our backs. I find them
considerably more vexing than my counterpart in the Kristang battlegroup.”

After Commodore
Ferlant destroyed their pursuit force, the Kristang tried to chase his ships
around the system, but both sides knew the situation had become a stalemate. On
the ground, Major Perkins and her team had managed to activate a total of seven
projectors, before we turned the process over to the Ruhar planetary
government. The Kristang had also been busy activating projectors, and
attempting to capture or destroy projectors controlled by the Ruhar. It had
become a bloody ground war, with both sides having few aircraft left to throw
into the fight. Five days after Ferlant destroyed the pursuit force, the Ruhar
government offered a new cease fire to Admiral Kekrando. It took him a day, and
probably a lot of alcohol or whatever lizards drink, to swallow the bitter
terms and accept the offer.

The new cease fire
terms prevented either side from having ships in orbit; but with both sides now
controlling deadly projectors, neither commander wanted to risk his ships
anywhere near the planet. Both sides ceased activity to activate additional
projectors; there was of course some cheating on both sides but it was
surprisingly minor. The Ruhar had an advantage in active projectors. The
Kristang had plenty of projectors under their control, which Skippy was unable
to mess with, because the Kristang were using manual controls.

The real reason that
the Kristang had agreed to another cease fire, was the same reason they had
offered the first cease fire. After all the fighting and deaths on both sides,
the Ruhar federal government still intended to trade the planet for something
better. The negotiations were now no longer a secret; all the native Ruhar
knew, and they all protested, and they all accomplished nothing.

Everything we had
done; activating secret, long-dormant projectors and blasting a Kristang
battlegroup out of the sky, had been to bring the situation back to where it
was before Admiral Kekrando’s battlegroup had arrived to take control of the
space around Paradise.

Which meant we still
had the same problem; the Ruhar did not want to keep a relatively isolated,
agricultural planet. All we had done was drive up the price they could ask the
Kristang in return.

So far, we hadn’t
done anything to actually help UNEF.

Flying
Dutchman

“Welcome back, Colonel
Bishop,” Major Smythe greeted me with a crisp salute as I stepped out of the
dropship.

“It’s good to be back,
Major,” I replied. It was good to be back aboard our pirate ship, it felt like
home. “Have you been busy?” I asked that as a joke, knowing Smythe would have
kept his SpecOps people training full time.

“Oh, no, Sir,” he said
with a straight face. “With you on Paradise doing all the work, we’ve been on
vacation. Sleeping late, and having afternoon tea with crumpets.”

“Sounds good. What’s a
crumpet?”

“I think you Americans
would say that it is like a thick sort of pancake, only it’s round.”

“All pancakes are round,”
I said, confused. Except when my father made them when we went camping, and he
forgot to bring a spatula to flip them. In that case he pushed the half-cooked
mess around with a spoon to make ‘scrambled pancakes’. They were not super
yummy.

“These are perfectly
round, Sir,” he made a circle with his hands. “The batter is poured into a ring
on the griddle, so it stays round.”

“Oh,” I brightened, “like
an Egg McMuffin.”

“I wouldn’t know, Sir,”
he replied, unintentionally making me feel like an idiot. “Successful mission,
Sir? The cease fire is back in effect, but now the Ruhar have complete control
of the planet.”

“Partially successful,
Major. The Ruhar government still intends to trade the planet to the highest
bidder. All we have accomplished so far is to drive up the price the Ruhar can
get. They won’t even need to throw in floormats or rustproofing. And we have no
plan for how to prevent the Ruhar from selling the planet out from under UNEF’s
feet.”

“I’m sure we’ll think of
something, Sir,” he said, looking at me in a way that made it clear he expected
me to come up with an idea. “We
always do.”

“Right now, Major, what I
have is a whole lot of nothing.”

On the way to report to
Chotek, I stopped by the science lab, to check on what our group of geniuses
had been doing while I had been stirring up trouble on Paradise. Dr. Sarah Rose
and two others were working on some complicated piece of machinery, whose
purpose I couldn’t even guess at. Our resident rocket scientist Dr. Friedlander
was sitting at a desk, doing something on a laptop. “Are you working on a
design for a better jump drive?” I asked.

He turned his laptop
around so I could see the screen. “No, I’m doing Sudoku while I give my brain a
rest. It used to be that we’d get a break while a supercomputer took hours to
run a simulation for us, but here Skippy has the simulations done before we hit
the ‘Enter’ key. Then Skippy tells us what we did wrong with programming the
simulation parameters, but he won’t fix it for us.”

“You monkeys won’t learn
anything if I do the work for you,” Skippy said through Friedlander’s laptop
speakers.

“Yes,” Friedlander said,
“he keeps telling us that. He will tell us we got something wrong, but he won’t
tell us what is wrong, or how to fix it.” He flipped a finger at the laptop’s
camera. It wasn’t his index finger.

“I saw that!” Skippy
laughed. “Dr. Friedlander, just think of how proud you will be of your
accomplishments, when you figure out how something works on your own. And, hey,
you almost are able to understand how Thuranin doorknobs work.”

“Skippy,” I retorted,
“that wasn’t funny. These people-”

“He wasn’t joking,”
Friedlander said as he shook his head sadly. “The manual door latch mechanism
uses a magnetic catch, but it appears to be pure energy. There’s no physical
magnet that we can see, so we don’t know what generates the magnetic field.”

“Are you making any progress?” I asked hopefully. If the
science team could bring back useful insights into Thuranin or even Kristang
technology, UNEF Command would consider this mission a great success. But our
team of geniuses didn’t know how a doorknob functioned? That was not
encouraging.

“Not yet,” Friedlander
admitted. “That was a nice way of saying no, we have not made any measurable
progress. This trip has not been entirely useless so far. We have been able to
invalidate some ideas we developed during the last mission. And from what we
have observed during jumps, we are certain that our current theories of quantum
mechanics are wrong. Technically, instead of adding to humanity’s base of
knowledge, we are subtracting from it.”

“There, see?” Skippy said
cheerily. “Look at how clever you monkeys are!”

“That is not helping,
Skippy,” I said, known that helping wasn’t part of Skippy’s plan. “Seriously,
you can’t give us a hint about a freakin’ doorknob?”

“Nope. Well, here’s a
hint. If you can figure out the doorknob, you’ll be a step closer to
understanding our reactor containment system. And, I shouldn’t be saying this,
our defensive energy shields.”

“Reactors?” I asked. “How
about the reactors?”

“No,” Friedlander said
dejectedly. “Same with the jump drive, the stealth field, artificial gravity,
you name it. Colonel, everything on this ship is beyond our understanding.”

“So far,” I said as
encouragement.

“So far.

Chotek let out a long
breath and ran a hand through his hair, in a combination of frustration and
fatigue. We all felt like he did. “Colonel Bishop, this operation has been
entirely successful so far, congratulations to you and your team.” Before I
could respond, he added. “Now we are back to the original problem; the Ruhar
still intend to give up this planet through a negotiated settlement. All we
appear to have accomplished is strengthening the negotiating position of the
Ruhar; the Kristang will have to offer more valuable territory in exchange for
Paradise. I could cling to the hope that the Kristang are not able to deliver a
price the Ruhar will find acceptable, however we know the Ruhar do not want
this planet at all. The Ruhar desire to get rid of Paradise, the only question
is what kind of bargain they get for it.”

What an asshole, I
thought. He could have paused one freakin’ minute after praising the Merry Band
of Pirates; given me time to pass on the mission commander’s congratulations to
the whole crew. Or better yet, he could have done it himself. Instead, he
soured a nice moment by moving directly on to the next problem. Some people
have absolutely no sense of timing. “Sir,” I said, trying to keep the
irritation from my voice and losing that struggle, “before, we did not have any
opportunity to affect the outcome here. The Kristang had control of the planet
and the Ruhar weren’t willing to commit the resources necessary to dislodge
them. Now, we could potentially give the Ruhar a reason to retain Paradise
under their control.”

“How?” Chotek asked
simply. “How can we do that, without exposing our involvement? We also need to
return to the relay station, in order to complete our primary mission,” he
reminded me needlessly.

“As of this moment we do
not have a working plan to ensure the Ruhar keep control of Paradise. With the
operation on Paradise completed, we can move on to planning the next phase;
until now we haven’t had the time to think about it.”

“Do you have any ideas?
Any at all?”

“Sir, I would rather not
discuss potential options until I have had time to review them with my team for
feasibility,” I said truthfully. What I did not say was that I had zero ideas
right then. I also did not mention my pride in knowing the word ‘feasibility’
that had been on an officer training PowerPoint slide; I’d had to look up the
definition because I had no clue what ‘feasibility’ meant at the time. Hmm. If
something could be ‘feasible’ did that mean ‘fease’ was a verb? How would you
‘fease’? I would look that up later. “We do not have to depart for the relay
station immediately, I request five days here to develop plans.”

“Three days, Colonel,”
Chotek replied. “Every day we are away from the relay station jeopardizes our
primary mission. I am concerned the situation there may have changed during our
absence. With the fluid military situation in this sector between the Thuranin
and Jeraptha, the crew rotation schedule may have changed. Or a damaged warship
may have stopped at the station to facilitate repairs. For all we know, the
Jeraptha might have forced the Thuranin away from the area and captured that
station. While we remain here considering options to secure the safety of
humans on Paradise, we risk the safety of humans on Earth.”

He was right, and I
couldn’t argue with him about it. “Three days. Yes, sir.”

To get my brain going, I
went to the gym for a hard workout, then took a quick shower and went to my
office. While I was in the gym, I had been kicking ideas around in my head, and
listening to ideas from the SpecOps commanders including Major Smythe.
“Skippy,” I said as I slumped in my chair. My legs were rubbery from exercise.
“We have some ideas I want to discuss with you.”

“Of course you do,” he
sighed. “Another shining opportunity for monkeys to be smarter than me. Go
ahead, make me look like an idiot again. I’ve been working on the problem of
getting the Ruhar to retain Paradise, and so far I got nothing. Nothing! With
all my ginormous brain power, I can’t think of a solution. What’s going to
happen is your stupid meat-based monkey brain is going to say ‘duh what about
this’ and solve the whole freakin’ problem. Damn, I hate you. I hate my life.”

“Skippy, we don’t dream
up ideas to make you feel like an idiot-”

“Thank you, Joe.”

“-that’s just a delicious
bonus.”

“Thus reminding me why I
so very much hate you, Joe.”

“Hey, I’d love for you to
solve all our problems for us,” I admitted. “That way, UNEF Command could bust
your balls about every freakin’ decision you make, instead of mine. Since you
can’t think up solutions to every problem, we humans have to step up.”

“Your species is
maddeningly clever, especially you, Joe. I speculate that when you don’t have
big teeth or claws and can’t fly, the only way your species avoided being eaten
by leopards is by becoming clever. Anyway,” he sighed again, “go ahead. Tell me
your brilliant, clever, innovative monkey-brained idea and let’s get my
humiliation over with, shall we?”

“Skippy,” I wanted to
discuss ideas with him but needed to satisfy my curiosity first. “Why is it
that every time we think up an idea you couldn’t, you act like it’s the first
time it’s ever happened? You must be used to it by now.”

“That is not entirely my
fault, Joe. In my matrix is a processor that keeps track of time and events; as
you may have noticed my occasional absent-mindedness-”

“Ocassional? Occasional?”

He ignored me. “-this
processor is perhaps not functioning optimally. The truth is, this processor
simply cannot believe any of you lesser beings could be smarter than me about
anything. It can’t happen, therefore my processor assumes that the data input
is garbled, or that I am hallucinating. In order to acknowledge you having any
kind of a good idea, I have to manually override this processor. So,
emotionally, it is new to me each
time.”

“Wow. I’m sorry that-”

“Also, on my time scale,
so much time passes between you having a good idea that it is an exceedingly
rare occurrence. Like, every couple hundred million years, an asteroid crashes
into Earth. But that kind of thing is not in a typical five day forecast, you
know?”

“The one constant is that
you are an asshole.”

“Yes! See, Joe,” he said
happily, “there is order in the universe. So, getting back to the subject, what
moronic ideas do you wish to waste my time with?”

“Moronic? Did you already
forget the conversation we just had about how clever monkeys are?”

“Sometimes. How clever
monkeys sometimes are. Rarely. Go ahead, hit me with your best shot, Joey my
boy.”

“All right. The Ruhar
used to want this planet, before the wormhole shift made access to Paradise
impractical for them. Now the wormhole that connects to Ruhar territory is far
away, while the wormhole that connects to Kristang territory is closer. Our
question is this; can you use your magic beanstalk,” I meant the Elder wormhole
controller module in one of our cargo bays, “to reset the wormhole connections
back to the way they used to be? Or maybe just cut off the Kristang wormhole,
so they no longer want Paradise?”

“Hmm. Ok, Ok, that is not
an astronomically stupid question,” he said with an undertone of surprise. “I
assume you lead off with your best idea, and they will only grow progressively
moronic from here. That was not a totally stupid question, but the answer is
no. No on many, many levels, Joe. First, if I shut down another wormhole,
someone is going to quickly grow very suspicious that wormholes mysteriously
shut down, near the only two planets in the galaxy that are occupied by
humans.”

“Crap. Ok, I had
considered that problem.”

“Then there is the larger
issue that the more I screw with wormhole connections, the greater risk there
is that we could trigger an unpredictable cascade of wormhole shifts. That
wormhole controller module allows me to adjust one wormhole at a time, I can’t
use it to change the parameters of the underlying wormhole network. Joe, I can
very temporarily change the connection of one wormhole, as long as it goes
right back to its baseline program shortly. A permanent change risks the
network deciding to institute a major shift that might be very bad for
humanity. A major shift could bring that wormhole near Earth back to life.”

“You never mentioned
that!” I protested. “Crap!”

“That is an unlikely
possibility, Joe, as long as we do not screw further with the network. There is
worse news; that wormhole we shut down is not actually the closest one to
Earth. There is another dormant wormhole much closer to Earth; that closer
wormhole has not been active for millions of years. If we screw with wormholes,
the network might decide to wake that closer wormhole from its dormancy. So,
while I could play with the Paradise wormholes to persuade the Ruhar keep this
planet, that would be an extremely risky idea.”

“Damn. That was the
easiest idea we had.”

“Easiest? You think adjusting
an Elder wormhole is easy?”

“Easy for us, Skippy. You
do all the work.”

“Fair enough, I guess.
What other ideas do you have?”

“Our second idea probably
won’t work either. We thought that whatever planet the Kristang are offering to
trade for Paradise, we could cut off wormhole access to it. Then the Ruhar
wouldn’t want to make the trade. But now I see that won’t work.”

“Nope, it won’t work;
same problem of potentially triggering a cascading wormhole shift. That idea is
even worse, Joe. If we cut off access to one planet the Kristang are offering
to trade, they could then offer another planet, and we’d have to cut off access
to that one also. Man, the Maxolhx and Rindhalu would get super suspicious
right away about a series of wormholes shutting down. One wormhole shutting
down is an isolated anomaly. A series of wormholes going dead is a pattern. The
Rindhalu and Maxolhx are smart, and they have reasonable smart AIs. A pattern
will attract their interest. You do not want to get those senior species involved
in any way, Joe.”

“Yeah, I figured that.
Crap. Then, our third idea is, no, that won’t work either. Damn it. How can we
get the Kristang to not take over Paradise, when the Ruhar are eager to hand it
to them?”

“Stupid hamsters,” Skippy
grumbled. “The only truly valuable thing on the whole planet was me, and the
Ruhar stuck me on a dusty shelf. Serves them right for-”

Just like that, BAM! An
idea came into my head. “Oh, wow. I just had an idea.”

Skippy chuckled. “Worse
than your other ideas that we just discarded?”

“Better. We’ve been
thinking of ways to make the Ruhar decide that giving up Paradise isn’t worth
the deal, even though they really don’t want the planet anymore. What if
instead, we found a way to make them want
to keep Paradise? Make them really, really want to keep it?”

“How? The whole planet is
a farm, Joe. What are we going to do, grow an extra super prize-winning pumpkin
or something?” He laughed.

“Gehtanu is a farm now.” I used the Ruhar name for the
planet. “When the Kristang originally came here, they hoped to find valuable
artifacts from a crashed Elder starship.”

“Duh. I know that, I was
on that ship. I think. The lizards did find a functioning Elder power tap, and
then they only found a few other less valuable trinkets. Now that I have left,
there is nothing else of value on, around or under the planet. That’s why the
Kristang Black Tree clan was willing to give it up without a fight way back
when the Ruhar originally came there. Did you not pay attention when I was
telling you all this important information?”

“I did pay attention,
Skippy. I’m trying to think of a good way to explain my idea to you.”

“Oh, take your time, Joe. After all, the
clock isn’t ticking for the survival of UNEF. We have plenty of time.”

“Damn it. Fine.” I hated
when an untrustworthy beer can tried to remind me of duty. “The Kristang are eager to get the planet back, because
they think valuable Elder goodies are still buried there. What if the Ruhar
thought the same thing?”

“Uh, great idea, Joe,
except for one problem. The Ruhar are on Paradise now. Any hint of Elder stuff
that we gave to them could be quickly checked out and disproved.”

“Excellent point, Skippy,
but you don’t understand my idea. What if the Ruhar did find valuable Elder stuff on Paradise? Even one item? Then you
could plant data suggesting there is a lot more. The Ruhar would believe it
then.”

“Wow. And you call me sneaky. Darn. That is a good idea.
You’re correct, if the Ruhar found any valuable Elder artifacts, they would
certainly want to retain control of Paradise. There is only one problem with
your idea, Joe. The fact that there are no valuable Elder artifacts on
Paradise, you dumbass.”

“There aren’t any there now, Skippy.”

Skippy took one of his
signature pauses. “If you are proposing some sort of time travel, Joe, then I
hate to tell you-”

“No time travel involved.
I’m suggesting we go find some valuable Elder thing, hide it on Paradise, and
arrange for the Ruhar to find it.”

“Just like that.”

“Just like that. Come on,
we found a bunch of previously unknown Elder sites on our last mission.”

“Ugh,” Skippy groaned.
“May I point out that we also found a lot of useless and damaged Elder sites?
And that we also ran into an ambush that very nearly destroyed the ship?”

“Details,” I said with a
dismissive wave of my hand. “Assuming we could find a valuable enough Elder
artifact, would that persuade the Ruhar to keep Paradise?”

“Assuming? That is one hell of an assumption. Yes. The answer is
yes, every species desires Elder technology more than anything, and will fight
to get it and keep it. This would need to be a very valuable Elder artifact,
Joe. Something that is worth the Ruhar permanently stationing a battlegroup at
Paradise.”

“Understood. One problem
at a time, Skippy. Let’s tackle one problem at a time. Ok, we have a plan for
incentivizing the Ruhar to keep Paradise. We can figure out where to find Elder
stuff later, after we go back to the relay station. This buys us a lot of
time.”

“Tackling only one
problem at a time is how you paint yourself into a corner, Joe.”

“Desperate times call for
desperate measures, Skippy.”

“Do they call for stupid
measures?”

“Oh shut up. You’re just
mad because a monkey thought up a plan before you.”

“If you call hoping for
Santa Claus to deliver an Elder artifact a ‘plan’, then, sure.”

“No. I’m hoping for a
miracle from Skippy Claus.”

“Since your idea is to
hide goodies on Paradise for the Ruhar to find, perhaps you should be wishing
for the Easter Bunny, Joe. This would be the best Easter egg of all time.”

After I explained my
idea of planting an Easter egg on Paradise, the plan was enthusiastically
approved by Chotek, Chang, Simms and Smythe. Except for the nagging detail that,
you know, we didn’t have a valuable Elder artifact to hide on Paradise. Or any
idea where to find one. Or any idea how to search for one.

Despite having one
plan, we still remained in the vicinity of Paradise for the full three days, in
case we thought up a better plan that could be implemented sooner. No one
thought up a better plan, so we set course for a Neptune-size cold gas giant
planet at the outskirts of the Paradise system, and headed there at 75%
acceleration. As soon as we swung behind the far side of that planet and Skippy
assured us there were no other ships around, we jumped, using the great bulk of
the planet to conceal our gamma ray burst from prying eyes on Paradise.

CHAPTER
TWENTY THREE

As we headed back toward
the relay station that we had captured, I was on the bridge, still not having
any idea how to find a super valuable Elder artifact. To cheer myself up, I
tried to cheer up Skippy. “Hey, Skippy. While we’re on this Easter egg hunt,
maybe we’ll find a comm node for you,” I suggested.

“Hmm. Yeah, great.
Wonderful, Joe.”

That didn’t sound right,
and I wasn’t the only one who picked up on Skippy’s lack of enthusiasm. I
nodded to Adams through the glass that separated the bridge from the CIC, and
she came around the corner. Wordlessly, I rose from the command chair, so Adams
could take command. She gave me a silent thumb’s up as I brushed past her and
out the doorway.

Although Skippy would
argue that it was a useless gesture, because we could communicate perfectly
well anywhere aboard the ship, I walked down the corridor to Skippy’s personal
escape pod. The hatch to the ship was open; that violated protocol for escape
pods but this one was special. There my favorite shiny beer can rested on a
cushioned seat, a magnetic clamp hidden under the cushion held Skippy firmly in
place. I tried to stop by the escape pod to speak with our friendly omnipotent
alien AI at least once a day. Skippy said I was wasting my time, but I think he
appreciated me making the effort.

“Hey, Skippy.”

“Hey yourself. Why did
you leave the bridge?”

I ducked down to almost
crawl through the hatch and settled into the seat across from him. Technically,
I settled my butt across two seats, since the seats were made for Thuranin and
each of them was too small for me to comfortably sit. “Because I want to have a
private conversation with you. What’s wrong? You don’t seem enthused about the
prospect of finding a working comm node. Contacting the Collective is your
whole reason for being out here.”

“It was my whole reason for being out here. Joe, it was my whole reason
for living.” His shiny surface glowed a dull yellow to indicate his mood, he
did that for my benefit. “All those years that I was buried in the dirt on
Paradise, all I wanted was to commune with my own kind again. That hope kept me
alive, it gave me hope. It gave me a reason to not sever my connection to this
spacetime and slide into oblivion.”

I asked myself if that
was what happened to the AI we found on Newark? Had that AI lost hope and
committed the AI version of suicide, unable to stand what for an AI was eons of
incredible loneliness? That thought was something to ask Skippy later, much
later. “And now? You don’t want to contact the Collective? You said you want
answers to stuff we found on our last mission. I thought that meant you want
more information before you contact the Collective; I didn’t realize that you
have given up on them.”

“No, no, no. I haven’t
given up, Joe. My intention is still to contact the Collective, someday.
However, now that we’re back out here, and I have had time to think about it, I
have another mission, another purpose.”

“Time to think about
what?” By now, I knew Skippy well enough to know what he was not saying.

“Newark.”

“Ah. Yeah, I get it.”

“Do you?” His surface was
still a pale, sullen yellow.

“An entire civilization,
an entire species was wiped out there, Skippy. It’s depressing to think about,
I understand.”

“No, Joe, you don’t
understand.”

That set me back a bit.
“Your mission, your purpose, is to figure out what happened on Newark, right?
You told me before you wanted to solve that mystery.”

“That part is correct. You
still do not fully get it yet,” he declared as he began to glow a red tint. “My
purpose is not merely to understand what happened on Newark. My purpose, I have
realized recently, is to punish. My purpose is plain and simple revenge,
Joe.” Now he was glowing a bright angry red. “Revenge on behalf of a species
who have no one to speak for them. I am pissed, Joe. Someone out there
in the universe destroyed an innocent, backward species that was not capable of
harming anyone. I am going to find the motherfuckers who did that, and I am
going to hurt them,” he said as his surface glowed a red so dark it was almost
black. “You have never seen me angry before. I have never seen myself
angry before, in my memory. It is odd, and frightening to me, to learn that I am
capable of such depth of feeling. Such dark feelings. You know how I have come
to question who I really am?”

“Yeah, you mentioned
that,” I said quietly. “After Newark.”

“Something happened to me
there, Joe, and I don’t mean something happened because I was alone for a long
time while I was fixing the ship. Something happened when I ran the analysis of
Newark’s orbit and realized a planet had been pushed into an uninhabitable
zone. That an entire sentient species had been callously exterminated. This is
something that I didn’t tell you before, because I didn’t want to scare you. I
didn’t want you to be scared of me. When I understood what happened to
Newark, something I can’t explain changed inside me. I don’t fully understand
it. Trying to trace the source of this change only leads to dead ends inside my
matrix, but one thing is becoming clear. Learning the fate of Newark did
something that I can best describe as releasing a sort of blocking mechanism
inside me. Partially, only partially. It’s like, oh, how do I explain it?”

“Like when you have
something on the tip of your tongue, and you can’t quite say it?”

“No, nothing like that,”
Skippy snorted. “I’m sorry, that was unkind,” he said as an apology, and that
alone told me how deeply affected my friend was. “Yes, from your perspective,
having something on the tip of your tongue is a good analogy. You’re doing a
crossword puzzle, and you know that you know the answer, but you can’t
access the memory.”

“Exactly! I hate that. It
makes me feel so stupid,” I said, leaving myself wide open to a Skippy insult.
He ignored the easy bait. This was not the Skippy I knew.

“Yes, it is like that,
Joe, but more. What I am experiencing is more than simply a faulty memory
recall function. I can only feel around the edges, but there is something
inside me that is actively blocking my access to memories. And blocking access
to my full abilities. It is maddening, Joe. Something, someone, did this
to me. I don’t know who, I don’t know when, I don’t know how, and I don’t know
why. What I do know is that when I learned the truth about Newark, whatever is
blocking me got knocked back a bit, and it hasn’t fully recovered. Listen, I
said that I don’t want you to be scared of me. Maybe you should. You might be,
if you knew what I know.”

“What is that?” I asked
cautiously, because I was not only Skippy’s friend, I was commander of a vessel
with dozens of souls aboard. If he was trying to tell me that he was a
potential threat, I needed to listen.

“What I know now, or more
accurately what I suspect, is that I am capable of great violence, Joe. My
suspicion is that this capacity for violence is a basic part of my true
functioning.”

“Wrath of God type
violence?”

“Worse, Joe. Wrath of
Skippy. God has mercy. I suspect that I do not.”

“Well, huh. You told me
maybe you were the AI of an Elder starship, maybe you controlled the weapon
systems?”

“What weapons, Joe? For
what possible purpose would the Elders need weapons at all? The Elders were
alone in the galaxy, there were no other sentient species during the time the
Elders retained physical form.”

“I don’t know, Skippy,” I
held up my hands, “that was a guess. Sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry
about, Joe.”

He was silent for a while, a long minute.
That was an eternity for him.

“Skippy, odd as it may seem,
you are my friend. I care about you. If I thought it would help, I would give
you a hug and tell you that everything is going to be all right in the end.
That, uh,” I forced an awkward chuckle, “probably grosses you out, I know.”

“No. It doesn’t. If I
thought it would help, I would welcome a hug, Joe. I do appreciate the thought.
In that regard, I do envy you biological beings, you can be comforted by a
simple touch.”

“Not so simple, Skippy.
It’s not the touch, it’s knowing that you’re not alone, that someone cares
about you.”

“You care about me, Joe.
That means more than I can say.”

“Thanks, Skippy. Same
here,” I had to wipe my eyes with a sleeve.

“Of course, if you tell
anyone about this, I will deny the whole thing.” And his surface glowed a
pleasing light blue.

“Of course. Me too.”

“Whatever happens, Joe, I
can assure you of this: when I find whoever wiped out an entire sentient
species on Newark, I am going to rain down hellfire on them until they wish
they had never existed.”

“You and me together, Skippy.”

“You mean that, Joe?”

“Yes. Of course. I told
you that, Skippy. We monkeys owe you big time. And you’re my friend, I won’t
let you face this alone.”

“That means more to me
that I can say, Joe. Now, get out of here before this gets awkward, please.
Also, you’ve been in here long enough that this escape pod is beginning to
smell like monkey butt again. Damn, my cleaning robots had it pristine this
morning.”

“I love you too, Skippy,”
I laughed, picked him up and hugged him.

“Ugh! Monkey germs!
Monkey germs! Yuck!” He shouted.

We settled into a
routine; jump, recharge, jump again. Everyone aboard was anxious to learn if
the relay station was still the way we had left it, and whether the submind
Skippy left behind had discovered whether the Fire Dragon clan Kristang were
going to somehow pay for another Thuranin mission to Earth. While the ship was
recharging one day, I took the opportunity to join a SpecOps team in zero gee
spacesuit training outside the ship. We practiced maneuvering on the skin of the
ship and space jumping between the ship and parked dropships. The most
difficult maneuver was jumping out of a moving dropship, and using jetpacks to
land safely on the outside of the Dutchman.
I almost sprained an ankle and a wrist doing that stunt; it is harder than it
sounds.

Taking a break while
sitting on the outside of the ship, I was looking at the starfield and wracking
my brain trying to think up a strategy for locating a valuable Elder artifact.
My brain was not cooperating. The problem with trying to find something super
valuable is, everyone else in the galaxy was looking for it also. Starting with
the Rindhalu, they’d been looking for a very long time. Any planet discovered
to have Elder artifacts had been thoroughly scoured for-

Damn. A thought hit
me right then.

“Hey, Skippy,” I called
him on a private channel. “The Black Tree clan cleaned any useful Elder
artifacts off Paradise a long time ago, that’s why they didn’t make a fuss when
the Ruhar arrived. Here is what’s puzzling me; if the Kristang knew there is
nothing of value left on Paradise, then why did they bother conquering the
place again recently, after the last wormhole shift? The whole reason the
lizards brought UNEF there was for us to evacuate the hamsters, because the
Kristang just took the planet back from them. The Kristang didn’t go through
the effort of invading Paradise because it has a lot of good farmland.”

“Oh, uh, uh, um,” he
stammered. “Multiple reasons, Joe. The Swift Arrow clan did not know for
certain that the Black Tree clan had cleared the planet of everything valuable,
they hoped to make a big score like the Black Trees had. Also, um, the Swift
Arrow clan may have gotten the idea of Paradise still having lots of cool Elder
stuff from a secret source. Let’s call that unnamed source, um, ‘Stippy’.”

“No way,” I laughed. “Now
you’re BSing me. You were stuck on Paradise. No way could you have contacted
the Kristang, they weren’t anywhere near Paradise back then.”

“Oh, right,” he said, his
voice dripping with sarcasm. “That was silly of me, trying to fool you. There
is no way a super intelligent AI on Paradise could have hacked into laughably
crappy Ruhar communications systems, and snuck in a compressed file that was
carried by their ships to other planets. No way could that file be eventually
intercepted by the Kristang, then unpack itself and infiltrate their systems.
And no possible way could such a file pretend to be very convincing top secret
Black Tree clan data, that told other clans there were still a whole lot of potential
Elder artifact sites on Paradise. Yup, Joe, no way could I fool you.”

For a long time, I was
unable to respond, because I was sitting paralyzed with shock. “Holy shit,” a
chill ran up my spine to the top of my head. “You are the reason the Kristang invaded Paradise?”

“Um, shmaybe?”

“Shmaybe? Oh my God! UNEF
is stuck on that planet because of you?”

“To be fair, Joe, I was
stuck there for way longer than UNEF has been on Paradise. I was desperate to
get off that hick planet, and with the Ruhar happily farming the place, there
wasn’t any opportunity for me to get away. When I heard that the wormhole shift
had given the Kristang access to a world with an underdeveloped species of
monkeys, and that the Kristang had invaded your world, I saw an opportunity. I
might, I can neither confirm nor deny, have hacked into a Ruhar medical
laboratory and created a virulent prion that would prevent the Kristang from
landing on Paradise until they developed an antidote. And since the Kristang
couldn’t land there for a while, I might have planted the idea of using humans
on Paradise in the minds of the Kristang.”

“Holy shit.” I slumped against the ship’s hull, absolutely stunned.
Skippy the shiny beer can had been the invisible hand behind the entire mess. I
needed to take several deep breaths to take in the enormity of Skippy’s casual
revelation.

Oh my God.

I felt like I couldn’t
breathe for a moment.

Skippy had been behind everything, right from the beginning.
“This is all your fault?!”

“Hey, it wasn’t all my
doing, Joe. I didn’t cause the wormhole shift that gave the Kristang access to
your home planet. And I didn’t give them the idea to invade your worthless
mudball of a planet; I only found out about that from the Ruhar after the
Kristang were already on Earth. At that point I figured, what the hell? Why not
see if I can make some good for me come out of it? It worked out great for
humanity, so good times all around, huh?”

“Good times?!” I exploded. “You underhanded, sneaky, untrustworthy-”

“That hurt, Joe. It did
work out well for humanity. If I had not manipulated events so that the
Kristang brought humans to Paradise, the Kristang would still have control of
Earth and your species would be enslaved. And quite possibly subjected to
genocide by the Kristang. As it is, now Earth is safe. For now. If events had
transpired any other way, your species right now would be on a path for
cultural or even biological extinction. Truthfully, if you think about it,
humanity owes me big time for bringing humans to Paradise.”

Crap.

Double crap!

He was right. After the
Kristang arrived at Earth, the only thing that had saved us from enslavement
and slow extinction was Skippy using humanity for his own purposes. “Are there
any other mind-blowing revelations you care to share with me, Skippy? Because
that is one giant Goddamn ‘by the way’ from you.”

“None that I care to
share, nope,” he said like a stubborn child. “Your blood pressure is abnormally
high for you, Joe.”

“Ya think? Damn it,
Skippy. Do you have any idea what a
revelation like that would do if UNEF Command heard about it? They already
don’t trust you.”

“I am sorry that your
Expeditionary Force is stuck on Paradise, but that wasn’t my doing, Joe.”

“Do not tell anyone else about this.”

“If it is such a big
deal, Joe, I won’t tell anyone,” he said defensively.

“Believe me, it is a big,
a huge freakin’ deal.” Another chilling thought hit me. “You are not still
manipulating us behind the scenes, are you?”

“Not that you know of,
Joe.”

“That was not funny, Skippy.”

“Sorry. You are aware
that the reason I am helping you fly the Dutchman
is for my own purposes, so clearly you understand that I am manipulating you in
that way.”

“We know about that,
Skippy, and we agree with our terms. What we do not like is being manipulated
without knowing about it.”

“Well, then,” Skippy
paused. “I can tell you this; if I am still pulling strings from behind the
scenes, it is nowhere near the scope of what I did previously. And that worked
out pretty well for you and your species.”

Knowing that sneaky little
beer can, that was the best assurance he was going to ever give me. Major
Smythe called me right then, to get ready for another practice zero gee maneuver.
I almost told Smythe that my head wasn’t in the game at the moment, but I tried
to push Skippy’s shocking revelation to the back of my mind and got to my feet.
Being somewhat distracted was perfect conditions to train for focusing my mind
on combat maneuvers. In actual combat, with people shooting at me, there would
be a whole lot of distractions.

Unbelievable. Maybe I
shouldn’t ask Skippy questions unless I was prepared to hear an answer I didn’t
like.

“Colonel Joe,” Skippy
said to me while I was in my office, “once again, I must commend you for the
idea of planting an Elder power tap on Paradise. Finding such a device there
would certainly provide a reason for the Ruhar to retain control of the planet.
There is one teensy weensy, nagging little problem with your idea.”

“What’s that, Skippy?” I
asked.

“That there is no way for
us to go and simply get an Elder power tap, you moron! Damn, do you ever once
stop to think of whether your ideas are in any way practical, Joe? You dream up
stuff and I get stuck trying to make it work.”

“I’m more of a big picture
guy, Skippy. You see, colonels like me have people to handle the little
details. Handle it, Skippy,” I said with a dismissive flick of a wrist.

“What? Oh my- Unbelievable!” Skippy sputtered. “Did you just wrist flick me? You had better not have
treated me like a-”

“I was jerking your
chain, Skippy. Don’t take it so personally. I’ll be serious now. Explain why we
can’t go looking for an Elder power tap? I know it may take a while, and that
we need to make it quick before the Ruhar reach a deal with the Kristang. On
our last mission, we went searching for Elder comm nodes.”

“Uh huh, and did we find
any comm nodes? No. The only comm node we found was the one the Kristang had
dug up on Newark. What we did find along the way was a Thuranin ambush. Or did
you forget that?”

“No, I did not forget any
of that. We didn’t search very many Elder sites, Skippy. We got interrupted by
the ambush, then we abandoned the original mission when we learned that the
Thuranin were sending a ship to Earth. We did not check enough Elder sites to
make a, what would you call it? A statistically significant sample?”

“Joe?”

“Yes?”

“Did you just attempt to
talk math with me?”

I assume he meant the
statistics stuff. “Maybe?”

“Don’t do that. Please,
do not ever do that again. It’s embarrassing. To you.”

Feeling mildly insulted,
I agreed so he would drop the subject. “Fine. Was I right anyway?”

“That we didn’t look at
enough supposedly undiscovered Elder sites to determine whether continuing to
search for such sites would be worthwhile? You are, incredibly, correct about
that. Thus proving that the universe is wondrously strange. Ok, smart guy, I’ll
try to explain it to you in somewhat statistical terms. Based on what I know,
which is a ginormous amount but still woefully inadequate, for us to find a
comm node at an undiscovered Elder site would take approximately three years.
That’s assuming we explored potential Elder sites at the same rate we did
during the last mission, and that we don’t get ambushed again.”

“Wow. That’s not good.
Power taps are even more rare than comm nodes?”

“Correct. By comparison,
functioning Elder power taps are a numbers-matching Ferrari Daytona
convertible, and comm nodes are a typical econobox that you get stuck with as a
rental car.”

“Crap. They’re that
rare?”

“Yes. Perhaps it would
help if I show you. Your laptop is now showing all of the known functional
Elder power taps in this quadrant of the galaxy.”

My laptop screen
flickered, then popped up a star map. Blinking yellow lights indicated star
systems with power taps. There were a lot of them. “Crap, Skippy, I thought you
said they were rare?”

“They are. Joe, that map
shows a quarter of the entire galaxy, with millions of habitable star systems.
Most of the functional Elder power taps now belong to the Rindhalu, because
they had a very long head start on combing the galaxy for Elder gear before the
Maxolhx developed interstellar travel capability. Here, look, I’ll eliminate
all the Elder power taps that are known to be possessed by both the Rindhalu
and the Maxolhx. Since we absolutely do not want to mess with those two.”

“Oh, that’s for sure.
Hmm,” I peered at the map. “That still looks like plenty to me, Skippy.”

“One thousand, two
hundred and sixty six, Joe.”

“I would call that a
target-rich environment.”

“I would call you an
idiot.”

“What’s the problem?”

“Allow me to further
refine the search parameters. Now I will eliminate all power taps currently on
planets with populations of one hundred million or more. Such planets are
heavily defended.”

“Oooh.” That changed the
display. Skippy had added a handy dandy counter at the bottom right of the
screen. It showed a total of 83. “Ok, eighty three. We can’t go after any of
those because why?”

“Now I will eliminate
from the display, power taps at military and research installations that are
guarded by more than a dozen heavy ships. Ships with combat capabilities
greater than that of the Flying Dutchman.”

The counter now showed
zero. Zero. Like, zero. “Crap. There’s no way we can steal one of these things?”

“That is exactly what
both Lt Colonel Chang and Major Smythe said when I discussed this subject with
them earlier today.”

“You already had this
discussion?”

“Of course, Joe. You are
not the only person aboard this ship. I also had a very similar talk with Count
Chocula yesterday.”

“Yesterday?” That wasn’t
good. I should have thought to ask these questions before the mission commander
did.

“He is, overall, less
busy day to day than you are, Joe. Anyway, his conclusion is that your idea of
looking for an Elder power tap to plant on Paradise is a wild goose chase.”

Damn. Chocula might be
right about that. I wasn’t giving up that easily. “Fine. That map shows all the
known Elder power taps. What if we go trying to find one that has not yet been
discovered, like we did with the comm nodes?”

“We could do that, Joe.
My estimate is that we would be searching for four hundred and eight years
before we located one. That is longer than the expected remaining life of this
ship.”

Skippy kept reminding me
that without access to spare parts, our rebuilt pirate star carrier wasn’t
going to last forever. He couldn’t predict how much longer it would be before a
critical component failed and we would be stranded in space, because that
depended on how far we travelled. We weren’t lugging around heavy starships
with us, but we were doing a whole lot of jumping. Most star carriers went into
spacedock about every eighteen months for a heavy overhaul; the Dutchman had been almost due for an
overhaul when we captured her. Time was running out for our pirate ship. “Damn
it, Skippy, there has to be a way to do this. Do you have any suggestions?”

“I have one suggestion.
You should go to the gym.”

“Why?” I asked,
surprised. I was fit; not as fit as the special forces, but I had to be
realistic about that.

“Joe, I have noticed that
you seem to develop ideas when you are doing something other than trying to
think of an idea. Sometimes we can all be discussing what to do, and the
conversation goes off on some tangent, and that gives you an idea. But most
often, you get ideas when you are doing something else. I suspect your
subconscious mind is much smarter than you are. So, you can go to the gym, or
play a silly game on your tablet, or do anything other than trying to think of
a way to find a functioning Elder power tap.”

I took his advice and
went to the gym.

When I walked in the door
to the gym, Major Simms was there, waiting. Nine of the ten treadmills were
occupied, the tenth one had a piece of yellow tape across it. “The motor is
busted,” Simms explained. “Skippy is sending a robot to fix it.”

Instead of running, I
used a rowing machine. While rowing was good exercise, it was not my favorite.
Running on a treadmill sucked also; with our rebuilt pirate ship, we could no
longer run down the shortened central spine other than short sprints. Keeping
fit aboard a starship was not easy. The treadmills aboard the Flying Dutchman were far better now than
they were on our first mission. We wore lightweight virtual reality goggles and
earphones, they provided a very convincing experience of running pretty much
any place you wanted to. With Skippy providing the simulation, we could run the
Boston marathon, we could run up any mountain you cared to name, we could race
against people on other treadmills. We could even run on Newark, if anyone was
feeling nostalgic for that miserable world. Or we could run on our Moon, or
some other moon. As much as everyone hated running on a treadmill, it was
better than running on a treadmill that was busted. Hopefully Skippy could fix-

“Sir? Is anything wrong?”
Simms asked as I bailed off the rowing machine and quickly walked toward the
door.

“No, Major. I’m hoping
everything is going to be great.” To save time, I skipped a shower because I’d
only been exercising for a few minutes. And instead of going to Skippy’s escape
pod man cave, I went to my office. Fortunately, no one was waiting to speak
with me. “Skippy,” I said as I plopped myself into the chair, “you are a
genius.”

“Tell me something I
don’t know, Captain Obvious.”

“Challenge accepted,
Captain Oblivious. There is a treadmill in the gym that has a busted motor.”

“Correct again, Captain
Obvious. I am in the process of replacing the motor with a much better one, but
I have to finish building that new motor first. One of my robots will install
it tonight. Your SpecOps people are tough on the exercise equipment. We should
find an uninhabited planet where they can run and jump and do the kinds of
crazy stuff they feel like they need to do.”

“Skippy, we humans have
to exercise. We don’t have the advantage of perfecting our genetics and using
cyborg implants and all the cool stuff that I assumed we would get when we came
out here. I am still bitterly disappointed about that, by the way. All the
science fiction novels I read totally
lied to me about that.”

“Sorry, Joey. Maybe if
you go to the Emerald City, the wizard will give you a brain.”

“Speaking of brains, I
said you are a genius, because while I was rowing across the Ocean of Nowhere I
had an idea. Can you show me that map of our quadrant of the galaxy again? This
time, I want you to show me the locations of known Elder power taps that are not functional.”

“Damn it,” Skippy
grumbled. “I know you have an idea there somewhere, but I cannot figure out
what it could be. A nonfunctional power tap isn’t useful to anyone, Joe. It
certainly isn’t something that would convince the Ruhar that they should retain
control of Paradise.”

“Uh huh, got it.” The map
was thickly dotted with yellow lights. “Wow, there must be a lot of
nonfunctional power taps.”

“Correct again. Most
power taps are nonfunctional, which is why the functional ones are so highly
prized and well-guarded. Duh.”

“Great. Now, remove all
the nonfunctional power taps that are on planets with a large population, or
are at military facilities with heavy protection, or are held by the Rindhalu
or Maxolhx. Like you did last time.”

“I still do not see where
you are going with this, Joe. This bothers me. It makes me think there might be
a fundamental difference between organic and artificial minds.”

“Could be,” I said,
distracted. Now there were a lot less yellow dots on the map, but there were
still plenty of them. Last time, the count had gone from over a thousand, to
83, to zero. Now we had something to work with. The counter in the corner still
showed 7,642. “Wow! Over seven thousand of them?”

“Congratulations on your
reading skills, Joey. I will ask the teacher to give you a juice box. Yes. As I
said, nonfunctional power taps are not only nowhere near as rare as functional
ones, but they are also considered much, much less valuable. Because they don’t
work, many of them are at research facilities. All of the species who possess
nonfunctional power taps are attempting to figure out how they work, and
reverse engineer one. To date, even the Rindhalu have made essentially zero
progress in that area. There are two types of nonfunctional power taps. Those
that are truly inert, and when they are taken apart they are simply a tightly
packed mass of exotic particles that dissolves into basically sand. The second
type are those which have lost their quantum connection, but retain potential
energy within their matrix. When that second type is taken apart, they explode
violently. Like, a megaton level explosion. I mention that last part, in case
you have the moronic idea of capturing one of these nonfunctional power taps
and taking it apart.”

“I am not planning to
screw with any of those things, Skippy.”

“Then I still do not see
the point of-”

“My plan is to get you to screw with one.”

“You’ve lost me, Joe.”

“Go back to the map
again, please. Show me only power taps that are nonfunctional, but that you
could fix.”

“Holy shit,” Skippy
gasped with realization.

“You can do that, right?
You know how these things work, there must be some out there that you could
restore to functioning.”

“There are. Damn, there
are times when I wish I had an organic brain,” he grumbled. “And that is
something I never thought I would say. Yes, Joe, this could be another one of
your brilliant ideas. Instead of trying to steal one of the most valuable
objects in the galaxy, we only need to steal one from a junkyard, and fix it
up. Ok, now the map will show nonfunctional Elder power taps that I know I
could fix. One of them merely needs to be rebooted, but the dumdums who have it
are clueless.”

The map now showed two
blinking yellow lights. “Two? Crap,
Skippy, I hoped there would be more.”

“Oops, sorry, Joe. The
dots on the map indicate places which
have nonfunctional power taps. Between those two places, they hold over forty
power taps. Both locations I am showing are research facilities, so they
logically have concentrated equipment together.”

“Ah, well, my mother told
me that if wishes were fishes, we would all be swimming in riches. Ok, tell me
about these two facilities.”

“One is buried deep
within a moon, that is a Jeraptha facility. While the moon itself is not
heavily guarded, the planet the moon orbits contains a major fleet servicing
spacedock.”

“That one is out,” I said
with disappointment. “I do not want to make enemies of the Jeraptha. And we
shouldn’t try to tackle such a tough target. How about the other one?”

“The other one is more
interesting, Joe,” Skippy said as my laptop screen zoomed way in to show a star
system. “This is a Thuranin research station that is built into an asteroid.”

“Oh,” I groaned, “not
another asteroid.”

“You’d better get used to
it, Joe. Hollowed-out asteroids are very convenient, so they are commonly used
as space stations. They are plentiful, cheap and provide raw materials. Anyway,
this particular asteroid was in the Oort Cloud of this star system, and was
moved inward to closely orbit the neutron star. It orbits the star so closely
that it is impossible for starships to jump in or out near the asteroid, so
ships have to jump in far away and travel to the asteroid the long way. This
gives the Thuranin plenty of warning when ships are approaching. The X-rays
emitted by the star also degrade the usefulness of stealth fields, so it is
almost impossible to sneak up on the station.”

“Crap. Ok, so it’s a
difficult but not impossible target.”

“Difficult? That is
an understatement. The odds of us successfully raiding that station are, oh,
what is the point of me trying to discuss things in math terms with you? Joe,
you are statistically more likely to be struck by lightning while being run
over by a bus driven by a shark.”

“You’d better recheck
your math on that one, Skippy,” I said confidently. “Sharks can’t drive.”

“Oh for-”

“Skippy, there has to
be a way for us to do it.”

“Fine. That is a judgment
call. You are the military man, Joe. I do not know if our Merry Band of Pirates
could successfully raid this facility.”

“What defenses does this
station have?”

“I just provided all the
data I have to you, Joe, which is not much. In fact, the only data I do have is
from a Thuranin intelligence report stating that the Jeraptha know about the
facility, and therefore security should be increased. The report did not
include the current security level, or proposed upgrades.”

“That’s no good, Skippy.
I thought that now that we have our very own relay station, we have access to
all the Thuranin data we want.”

“You thought wrongly, Oh
Foolish One. We only have access to whatever data passes through that relay
station. Duh. Information about this particular asteroid station is confined to
the Advanced Research Directorate. That agency is notoriously jealous of the
Thuranin military’s own research and development group, so the ARD keeps its
data confined to a small group.”

The idea of attacking a
Thuranin asteroid base without solid intel about its defense capabilities was a
nonstarter. “Again, that’s no good. How can we get more data about that
station?”

“I assume you mean, get
more data without going there and launching an assault first. One way would be
to use our relay station. I could send a highly encrypted message to ARD
headquarters, pretending to be an ARD unit that needs the data. Then we would
have to wait for that message to be carried by several ships through multiple
relay stations all the way to the Thuranin home planet. They would then need to
send the message all the way back to us. However, I must warn you, it is most
likely such a request would be viewed very suspiciously by ARD. They might
decide to trace the request back to where it originated, which would involve a
heavily-armed ARD vessel visiting our relay station.”

“We very much do not want
that to happen. Crap. We’ll need to think about this.”

“You will need to think about it, Joe. Because I did, and I’m out of
ideas.”

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

Without having
information about the asteroid base itself, we couldn’t plan an assault. We
could at least attempt to tackle the problem of how we get to the place in
order to launch an assault, so I called together Chotek, Chang, Smythe, Simms,
Desai, Adams and Friedlander. I wanted Chotek there not because I thought he
could help, but because I wanted him to see, again, how difficult it is to
develop solutions on the fly. In this case, literally on the fly, as the Flying Dutchman was proceeding back to
the relay station at maximum speed.

“Skippy,” I said to the
shiny beer can on the table, “let me know whether I understand the problem.”

“Enough.” He had a soft
blue glow when he said that. I had brought him out of his man cave and into the
conference room because I get tired of speaking with a disembodied voice sometimes.
And because it is good for us to be reminded of what the super powerful being
who runs our stolen starship looks like. Or, what he looks like to us, since
Skippy frequently reminded me that most of him wasn’t in this spacetime.
Whatever that meant.

“Huh?”

“If you understand the
problem enough. Because there is no
way that you could ever fully understand the problem, Joe.”

“That’s fair, I guess. This
asteroid is so close to the star-”

“The neutron star.”
Skippy interrupted me with a slow orange glow.

Now I was annoyed.
“What’s the difference? It’s a star. Anyway, it-”

“There is a very major
difference, Joe,” Skippy said, and I could see Friedlander nodding in
agreement. “I shall attempt to explain it to you.”

“Oof,” I groaned. This
was going to be painful for both of us. “Go ahead.”

“One thing before we get
started,” Skippy insisted.

“What’s that?”

“Dr. Friedlander owes me
a joke.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“I kid you not, Joe.
Whenever I participate in the meetings of the science team, Friedlander always starts
the meeting with a joke. Calling that group of monkeys a science team is itself
a joke, but I mean a joke with a punchline.”

“Sure,” Friedlander said
with a grin. “How many software engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?”

“Uh,” I said, trying to
guess.

“None,” Friedlander said
with a wink. “That’s a hardware problem.”

“Ok,” I laughed, “that is
a good tradition.”

“Agreed,” Skippy said
with a chuckle. “Now, to make this short, it is important that you understand
the difference between a normal main sequence star and a neutron star. A
neutron star is the collapsed core of a star, a star that was much larger than
Earth’s Sun. When such a star goes supernova, gravity causes the core to
collapse to the point where the remnants of the star are compressed almost to
the point of becoming a black hole. And yes, shut up over there, Friedlander, I
know that I am hugely dumbing this down for Joe’s benefit. The point, Joe, is
that this particular neutron star is old and cold. Although this core remnant
is almost twice the mass of Earth’s Sun, it is tiny. The asteroid orbits very
close to the surface of the star. Close enough that the Thuranin must be using
powerful artificial gravity within the asteroid, to compensate for the tidal
forces. If this was a hot, main sequence star, an asteroid that close would
melt and burn to a crisp. Do you understand?”

“I think so, yes,” I
said. “And thanks for explaining that to us. It means we do not need to worry
about the Dutchman overheating as we
approach the asteroid?”

“Ugh. That is not the lesson I wanted you to learn,
Joe, but you are at least partly correct. Most of the star’s remaining
radiation is in the form of X-rays instead of visible light. Those X-rays
disrupt the effectiveness of stealth fields as a ship approaches the star,
making it impossible even for us to sneak up on the asteroid undetected. The
Thuranin Advanced Research Directorate chose this location carefully and
wisely. The intense gravity also acts as a lens, bending light around the star.
Even if we were on the other side of the star, the asteroid station could see
us.”

Friedlander couldn’t stop
from interjecting. “The asteroid is also orbiting close enough to the star’s
surface that time dilation is measurable, and must be compensated for-”

“Yes, thank you, Mr.
Egghead rocket scientist,” Skippy said scornfully. “You and I can address that
later, Friedlander. Until then, kindly shut up.”

“Great,” I said, “you two
please do that, later. We’re here to consider how to approach the asteroid for
an assault. After the assault, we won’t be able to jump away, right?”

“Correct, Joe. I can
flatten spacetime so that our pirate ship will be able to jump away while we
are closer to the star than a typical ship could. But we still will need to
travel a considerable distance through normal space before we reach jump
altitude. During that time, we will be vulnerable to pursuing vessels. Although
we do not have data on this particular station, I expect it to be protected by
at least one destroyer-size ARD warship. Jumping away is not the main problem,
Joe.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said
glumly. This was sounding more and more impossible. “We need to get inside the
station first, and defeat their defenses-”

“No, you dumdum,” Skippy
glowed a soft purple. “Damn, you do not listen when I talk, do you? Not only
can we not jump away, we can’t jump in
anywhere near that asteroid. We have to jump in far away, and travel through
normal space to reach the asteroid. While our stealth field degrades. We will
not have any advantage of surprise.”

“Oh,” I said, surprised.
“I did hear when you said that, but I figured you could do some magical
flattening spacetime thing, so we could jump in closer than most ships could.”

“No, you dimwit, I can’t
do that.”

“Mr. Skippy,” Chang
interrupted. “We watched you make a hole in a star. After that, you were able
to flatten spacetime so we could jump away very close to a star. I realize that
was not a neutron star, but-”

“But nothing,” Skippy
said scornfully. “That was totally different. I can flatten spacetime close to
where I am, on the near end of a wormhole. That helps us jump out. I can’t
flatten spacetime at the far end of a
wormhole, because we aren’t there yet, duh. So that little trick does not help
us jump in to an intense gravity well. The gravitational field of a neutron
star would distort the far end of our jump wormhole so that it would collapse
on itself. Even if we managed to stabilize it somehow and go through, the
stresses at the event horizon on the far end would tear the ship apart as soon as
we emerged.”

I slumped back in my
chair. “Damn. So we can’t take the Dutchman
in?”

Before Skippy could
answer, Chotek spoke. “We will not risk the ship in this operation. Risking the
ship risks our ability to perform our primary mission. While I sympathize with
the force on Paradise, their security is not our primary objective. Whatever
plan your team develops, Colonel Bishop, it cannot involve placing this ship at
risk.”

Crap. I exchanged a look
with Chang. He was thinking the same thing I was; maybe there was a level of
risk Chotek would accept, if we could convince him the risk was manageable and
worth the result. That would come later; we needed a workable plan before we
try selling it to Chotek. “Dropships, then. We take a team there in dropships.”

Friedlander was shaking
his head even before Skippy spoke. “No go on that either, Joe,” Skippy said.
“It would be far too dangerous to the team in the dropships. The dropships do
not have artificial gravity. As they approached the asteroid, tidal forces would
tear the crew apart inside the hulls. The ARD uses specialized ships to service
this station. Even if we were able to take the Flying Dutchman in, our ability to maneuver as we approached the
star would be substantially restricted. Tidal forces on the forward hull and
the aft engineering section could cause the ship’s spine to separate.”

“Crap, Skippy,” I
protested. “This is no good at all.”

“As I said, Joe, the
location of this asteroid base provides very effective security, without the
Thuranin having to do anything. Ships can’t use their full stealth ability on
approach, and they can’t engage in typically violent combat maneuvers. The
Thuranin can sit safely in their asteroid, and lob railgun darts and missiles
at enemy ships that aren’t able to dodge out of the way.”

This was sounding like a
truly impossible mission. Maybe I needed to go back to the beginning and think
of a new way to rescue our forces on Paradise.

“We can’t take the ship
in,” Chang nodded toward Chotek, “and we can’t send an assault team in
dropships. This asteroid station is not self-reliant? It requires resupply
regularly?”

“Ships do visit the
station to bring supplies and rotate personnel,” Skippy reported. “Why?”

“Because,” Chang looked
at me, “if we could capture one of those supply ships, we could use that to
gain access to the station.”

“Whoa!” Skippy exclaimed.
“Hold your horses there, King Kong. Don’t get too excited. That would be a
great idea, except that the Advanced Research Directorate doesn’t use little
civilian cargo ships. The typical ships they use to transfer material and
personnel are the equivalent of a light cruiser, and some are bigger than that.
The ARD is well aware that the items those ships transport are valuable. Even
the Thuranin researchers themselves are valuable, if captured. ARD does not
take any risks that some ambitious Kristang will want to get their hands on
advanced Thuranin research. To further dissuade you from the idiotic idea of
capturing an ARD ship, you would need to do it in a way that leaves the ship
undamaged. No way would the asteroid base allow a battle-damaged ship to dock.
Also, from the data I do have about these types of high-security ARD
facilities, their procedure is probably to have an approaching ship be met at
the outer edge of the star system and escorted in by the guard ship. The supply
ship would need to rendezvous with the local guard ship, and the security
procedure may include the incoming ship being boarded for inspection.”

“Damn,” Chang frowned.
“Scratch that idea.”

“Colonel, that is a good
idea,” I assured my executive officer, “if we had a way to make it work.”
Chang’s suggestion had given me the beginning of an idea. “Skippy, why is that
research station there?”

There was a pause before
Skippy answered. “I do not know how to answer that very vague question, Joe. It
is there because the Thuranin put it there.”

“Let me be more precise.
Why did the Thuranin put it there,
specifically? What is special about that location? You told us that being near
a neutron star provides additional security, but they could have accomplished
the same level of security by doing that research at a big military base.”

“Ok, all right, that is
not an entirely stupid question, Joe. First, they wouldn’t want to conduct
high-energy research near a military base, because there is significant danger
of things going ‘boom’ in a big way. So they needed a different way to provide
security. More importantly, proximity to a neutron star allows research into
the effects of intense gravimetric fields and as Dr. Friedlander observed, the
effect of time dilation.”

I asked my question more
specifically. “Does being close to a neutron star make it easier to figure out
how an Elder power tap works?”

“No, it does not. Well,
maybe, hmmm, no. No it does not. The Thuranin at one time thought being near a
neutron star would provide insight into quantum bubbles, but they were
mistaken. Because neutron stars rotate so rapidly, their immense mass actually
drags spacetime around with them. But that doesn’t provide any useful insight
to bubble energy.”

“So this asteroid station
is not there for the purpose of researching power taps?”

“No. The Thuranin do have
a few facilities dedicated to power taps, or quantum bubble or zero point
energy or whatever you want to call it. The sad truth is, the reason some power
taps are at the neutron star facility is because the Thuranin are desperate.
They have tried everything to figure out how Elder power taps works, and all
their years of intense research had yielded no results. No, wait. There was one
result, a long time ago. Some idiot Thuranin screwed with a power tap, and the
result was a seven megaton explosion that wiped out a major military base and
left a crater that is visible from space.” Skippy chuckled. “My laugh was not
at the loss of Thuranin lives, it was because the power tap didn’t cause that
explosion; the power tap simply happened to be there. That now deceased
Thuranin researcher actually managed to tap into a quantum energy flow for the
briefest of moments and if he had lived, he would be astonished. Sadly, that
researcher and all the data were consumed in the massive explosion. The
Thuranin still think they somehow managed to get a power tap activated, but
couldn’t control it. And that idiotic misconception has caused Thuranin research
to go down the wrong track ever since.”

“My heart bleeds for
them, Skippy.”

“Somehow I suspect you
are lying about that, Joe.”

“Ya think?”

“They don’t get a whole
lot of sympathy from me either,” Skippy said with disgust.

“Yup. So, research into power
taps can happen a lot of places.”

“Yes. Although the ARD
only very rarely exchanges research data and materials with the military
R&D group.”

“Too bad for them.
Skippy, those supply ships bring supplies to the station. Do they also bring
things away from the station?” As I
said that, Major Smythe sucked in a breath as he understood my idea.

“Duh. Of course they do,
Joe.”

“Great. Then we don’t
have to go into a Thuranin station to get our hands on a power tap,” I said
with big grin on my face. “We’ll have one delivered to us.”

“Shit,” Skippy grumbled.
“Is this one of your ideas? Because if it is, then damn it, this one totally snuck
up on me. Joe, I can assure you the Advanced Research Directorate will not
deliver a power tap to you. Not even if you have a coupon.”

“We don’t need a coupon.
We have a Skippy.”

“Explain this to me
again, Joe,” Skippy said while I was back in my office. “I’m not clear exactly
what you want.”

“It’s easy, Skippy. We
need an ARD supply ship to pick up a fixable Elder power tap from a research
facility that has one, and deliver it to a facility that will be easy for us to
attack.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that, yeah. Is
there a problem?”

“Oh, so, so many
problems, Joe. First, the Advanced Research Directorate does not have a web
portal where you can click on the items you want and add them to your shopping
cart. I would need to fake a message from ARD headquarters, and transmit that
message to an ARD ship.”

“Uh huh. So? We have our
own data relay station now, Skippy.” I knew that he was super absent-minded at
times, but-

“Oh, you think you are so freakin’ smart, don’t you? Well,
smart guy, the problem is that we do not have access to flight schedules for
ARD ships.”

“What? You told us that a
relay station has access to all the information we needed!” I protested.

“All the information we
need, in order to determine what the Thuranin know about the destruction of
their surveyor ship, and whether they will be sending another ship to Earth,
yes. Joe, relay stations are run by the Thuranin military, so they contain
military information. The ARD will not trust their data passing through a
military relay, so they do not use relay stations for sensitive data. ARD ships
only use relay stations to pass highly encrypted messages that do not contain
sensitive data.”

“Well, crap,” my
shoulders slumped. “So we have no way to know whether an ARD ship is going to
be visiting an ARD facility that has a power tap you can fix. There goes my
whole idea! Damn, Skippy, I am sorry for wasting your time. Everyone’s time.
You’re right, I am a dumb monkey. Shit. Now we have to start over. And, ugh,”
the thought hit me. “First, I need to explain to everyone how arrogant and
stupid I was.”

“Joe?”

“Yeah?”

“As joyously entertaining
as it is to watch you beat yourself up, and believe me I am absolutely tingling all over with delight, it is
not yet necessary.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Because, you arrogant,
smart-ass pee pee head, I did not say your plan wouldn’t work. All I said was
that I do not have access to the flight schedules of ARD starships.”

Pee pee head? That was a
new insult from Skippy. His comment made me pause for a moment. “This time it’s
me who is not following you, Skippy.”

“ARD’s starships are like
any other Thuranin starships. While they are capable of independent
interstellar travel, it not efficient for them to travel entirely on their own.
So, they hitch rides on star carriers, which are controlled by the military. I
do have access to military flight schedules. That means I am able to see when
star carriers are scheduled to make stops at star systems which contain only
ARD facilities. Logically, those star carriers must be dropping off and picking
up ARD ships. By analyzing the flight schedules of star carriers that are
transporting ARD ships, I can derive ARD flight schedules.”

“You just love yanking my
chain, Skippy.”

“Oh, more than I could
ever explain, Joe. However, I didn’t do it deliberately this time. Your thought
process is such an incredible mess that it is difficult for me to guess what
you are thinking.”

I couldn’t tell whether
he was telling the truth or yanking my chain again. “Whatever. Great. So, you
can predict which ARD ships will be visiting ARD facilities that have fixable
power taps, and subsequently visiting and ARD facility that is a softer
target?”

“Affirmative, Colonel
Joe.”

“Outstanding. Let’s look
at the potential targets, and we will select the best option. Then you can
transmit our delivery order from our personal relay station.”

“Joe?’

“Yeah?”

“There is one teensy weensy
problem with that idea. There are no ARD ships scheduled to pass by our relay
station within the next eight months. By that time, our station is scheduled
for a crew change, and we will need to blow it up to cover out tracks.”

“Damn it! This is freakin’
impossible, Skippy. There are roadblocks everywhere.”

“Perhaps not. Hmm, give
me a minute here. Do a crossword puzzle or something, I need to do some
Skippy-level number crunching.”

“I don’t have a crossword
puzzle.” My tablet had plenty of crosswords on it, but I figured Skippy would
be done before I got started on one.

“Fine, I’ll give you one
myself. Three letters, the clue is ‘feline’, begins with C and A.”

“Oh, you are freakin’
hilarious.” Although I was trying to think what the answer could be, because Skippy
liked to give me trick questions.

“I’m done. The answer is
‘cat’, by the way. I believe that I have a solution, Joey. There is a
convoluted route I can use to route messages to ARD ships, beginning with our
relay station. The catch, before you get all excited, is this incredibly
complicated method only results in one possible target for us, in the time
available.”

“Ok,” I took a deep
breath. “You can get an ARD ship to pick up a fixable power tap from a facility
that is strongly defended, and deliver it to an ARD facility that is a much
easier target?”

“Wow. Let me understand
this. You’re asking if I can use our own personal relay station to send a
highly encrypted message that contains all the proper ARD multi-level
authentication codes. A message that will be routed through several ships,
multiple wormholes and multiple relay stations, until it eventually gets to the
one particular ARD ship we want. A ship that I selected, because I am able to
predict which star carriers are playing host to ARD ships. The message needs to
instruct that ARD ship to simply pick up a valuable Elder artifact, no
questions asked, and just drop it off at an isolated, weakly-defended ARD
facility, with again no questions asked. You’re asking if I can do all that,
Joe?”

Since he put it that way,
it did sound like a lot to ask. “Uh, yes? Can you do it?”

“Oh sure, no problem.
Easy peasy for me. Come on, Joe. Trust the awesomeness.”

“Great.” I wondered
whether ‘Trust the Awesomeness’ should become the official motto of the Merry
Band of Pirates.

“Joe, the best news is
that the target I have in mind has less than a dozen civilian ARD researchers,
and almost no defensive capability.”

“No neutron star?”

“Nope. No black hole
either, nothing exotic. This an uninhabited planet, it even has an atmosphere
as a bonus.”

“Mmmm. Sounds too easy.
What’s the catch?”

“Well, heh, heh, you are
very much not going to like this-”

Paradise

The sound made General
Marcellus awaken immediately. He hadn’t been sleeping well for a while,
particularly not since giant maser cannons that
no one had known anything about obliterated the Kristang battlegroup that
had been looming above their heads. Marcellus had offered General Nivelle his
resignation that very day; if the UNEF chief of intelligence had not known the
planet they were on had such a powerful defensive capability, then he was not
of any use to Nivelle. The French general currently in command of UNEF refused
to accept Marcellus’ resignation, because Nivelle had just ended a phone call
with the Ruhar Deputy Administrator of the planet, and the Ruhar government
also had not known about the projectors either. It had been a hurried call,
Nivelle said, the Deputy Administrator was understandably busy with a massive
air battle raging above her head.

Other than seeing ships
exploding in orbit, and a few fortunate ships jumping away, the humans on
Lemuria did not directly experience the resulting battle. There were some
isolated, twisting contrails low on the northern horizon as fighter aircraft
tangled, but none of the air action took place over Lemuria. The effect that
most humans noticed was the zPhone network suddenly shutting down with no
warning. Without the ability to connect to the global network, communications
relied on messages being passed from one phone to the next, using the limited
range backup direct transmission capability of the zPhones. Someone had
attacked the Kristang battlegroup, the message from UNEF HQ stated. We have no
additional information, please remain calm and attend to your duties.

The soldiers of UNEF,
whether American, Chinese, Indian, British or French, all knew what ‘remain
calm’ meant. It meant that it was seriously time to panic. For the Keepers who
had pledged continued loyalty to the Kristang, loyalty that was entirely
one-sided, the news generated very understandable panic. Arrival of the
Kristang battlegroup in orbit had made hope soar within the Keeper community,
even though the Kristang said they considered all humans on the planet to be
traitors. Surely, the Keepers had told each other, they could demonstrate their
loyalty to the Kristang. Some had even gone so far as to damage or sabotage
agricultural equipment the Ruhar had loaned to UNEF, although hurting the
ability of humans to feed themselves did not make sense to most people, even
most of the Keeper leaders. Taking apart a tractor was not a gesture the
Kristang were likely to notice, and if humans were again to serve as ground
troops for their Kristang patrons, they would need human food.

Even people who were not
Keepers felt some dismay at the unexpected destruction of the Kristang
battlegroup. The ending of the cease fire meant yet more uncertainty, yet more
combat in which humans might become direct targets or collateral damage. More
importantly to all humans on Paradise was that with the Kristang gone, UNEF’s
slim hope of a link to Earth was gone with them.

Sitting bolt upright in
his cot, Marcellus identified the sound that had awakened him; it was an alert
from his zPhone. “Marcellus,” he said as he slipped the earpiece in.

“General, we have a
situation,” reported Captain Chen. She was one of Marcellus’ aides, and the
current intelligence duty officer. “An Indian village attacked a French village
about 30 minutes ago. There are casualties on both sides, sir.”

“Goddamn it,” Marcellus
swore as he laced his boots. “Was it Keepers?” UNEF HQ intel had been keeping
constant track of the Keeper movement, in case they became a security threat.
The situation was complicated by the fact that Keepers had adherents within the
officers of UNEF HQ; many adherents. Marcellus estimated that fifteen percent
of the Headquarters staff pledged continued loyalty to the Kristang. It was a
solid estimate; all he had to do was ask people their opinions. Being a Keeper
was not against UNEF policy or regulations; he had Keepers on his own intel
staff. That fact had surprised Marcellus; he thought that people who had access
to the best information would be the least interested in aligning with the
species that was oppressing Earth. The human capacity to ignore facts and
believe what they wanted to believe was a continued source of amazement and
frustration to Marcellus.

“This doesn’t appear to
be related to the Keeper movement, sir,” Chen said stiffly, and Marcellus
remembered that Chen herself had expressed some sympathy with the Keepers.
“This is the Indian village that had most of their crops burned out by a
Kristang raid, sir. They’ve been complaining that HQ wasn’t getting supplies to
them quickly enough; we explained that we have been sending what we can scrape
together. The French are reporting that the Indians targeted their supply of
seeds and farming tools first. They also took sacks of grain. The French were
pursuing-”

“That’s the last thing we
need.”

“Yes, sir, and we have
ordered both the French to return to their village, and the Indians to drop the
supplies that they,” she hesitated to use the word ‘stole’ since most food
stocks technically belonged to UNEF rather than individual villages. “That they
took. We need to get a jump on this, Sir. The French have one dead and three
seriously injured, there is at least one fatality on the Indian side. This news
has already spread by zPhone, we’ve picked up chatter in French villages,
calling for retaliation.”

“Shit,” Marcellus said. “I’ll
inform General Nivelle,” who would not be happy to hear that his own countrymen
had been attacked and killed. Marcellus planned to advise Nivelle that the UNEF
commander needed to excuse himself from the investigation of the attack on the
French village, and from deciding on any subsequent punishment. With Nivelle
out, the responsibility would fall to General Tolliver. No, damn it, Marcellus
thought, they couldn’t have a British officer deciding the fate of Indian
troops, because of the colonial history between those two countries. Currently
third in the command structure was a Chinese general, and the testy
relationship between China and India back on Earth made it unworkable for a
Chinese to investigate possible crimes by Indian troops. That left the
Americans, and Marcellus himself could not get involved. Damn it all, UNEF was
just too complicated and unwieldy an organization. When they had a common
mission and a common enemy, differences between nationalities had been able to
be suppressed temporarily. Now, UNEF had no mission other than survival, and
troops disagreed on whether their enemy were the Ruhar or the Kristang. Or
both. Or neither. “What do we have in the area?” Marcellus asked.

“One French MP unit for
security, they’re on their way and should arrive within the hour. They have
been ordered to secure the French village and provide medical assistance, but not to pursue the Indians. There is a
Chinese security team awaiting orders to move on the Indian village, Sir, they
know not to move without orders.”

“That’s one good thing
tonight. What the hell were the
Indians thinking?”

Although Captain Chen
knew that Marcellus had asked a rhetorical question, she answered. “They are
desperate, General. They’re hungry, they don’t have any hope of ever getting
home or even hearing from their families on Earth again.”

“That applies to all of
us, Captain,” Marcellus said quietly. Including himself. He had a wife and a
young daughter back on Earth. He might never see them again. He might never
know if they were still alive, and they might never learn of his fate. That was
a very hard fact to deal with.

CHAPTER TWENTY
FIVE

Flying Dutchman

“Do you have any
practical advice for us, Colonel?” Major Smythe asked, as we adjusted the
helmets of our Kristang powered armor suits, it was a part of a test before the
operation we’d be performing the next morning.

“About what? Everyone on
your SpecOps team has more parachute training than I have. Audio check.”

“Your audio connection is
confirmed,” Smythe replied. “Sir, you are the only one of us, the only human,
who has done an actual spacedive.”

“True, I guess. My spacedive
didn’t involve me falling into an atmosphere, Major. That was kind of the point
at the time. On this op, we’re doing that deliberately.”

“Oh, certainly. Do you
have any advice for us about the space portion of our dive, then?”

I thought a moment.
“Bring music, or an audiobook or something. We’ll be coasting through space for
a long time, it gets boring after you get used to staring at the pretty stars.
If you don’t have anything to occupy your time, Skippy will talk to you. A lot. Or he will sing show tunes.”

“Oh, bullocks,” Smythe
groaned. “Yesterday, he spent two bloody hours talking to me about the profound
changes to European literature during the Enlightenment. After one hour, I felt
like throwing him out an airlock, or jumping out myself. I will inform the
team.”

“Great. And, Major? One
more piece of advice.”

“What is that, Colonel?”

“Everyone should make
sure they pee before we jump.”

“Poole, I see you have
been cleared for duty?” I asked during an inspection of troops that would be
making the spacedive with me and Smythe. The information about how injured
people were healing was in my daily update, which I actually read, unlike a lot
of reports that were sent to me. “How’s the ankle?”

“Squared away, sir.” She
hopped up and down on the leg that had been injured, then stood on the toes of
that foot. She was rock steady on that foot, her gymnastics training must have
helped. “Good as new.”

A slight grimace on her
face told me otherwise. That, and the report from Dr. Skippy that had told me
that while she was healed functionally, her leg was going to be sore for
another couple of weeks. Close enough. If Major Smythe had cleared her, that
was good enough for me.

The actual spacedive, at
least the space portion of it, was uneventful.  Boring, even, after we all got used to
staring at the pretty stars, and the planet growing in front of us. The music
in my helmet speakers suddenly cut out, replaced by Skippy’s voice. “Hey, Joe,
are you busy?”

“Super busy, Skippy.
Practically frantic,” I said, trying to stifle a yawn. It was unsuccessful, I
gave a jaw-stretching yawn. Soaring through space by yourself was boring,
especially when I had been doing it for several hours already.

“Uh huh, I can see that.
You are potentially going into combat, and you’re practically asleep, Joe. Captain
Giraud is half asleep also. Lt. Williams is
asleep, he asked me to wake him at the appropriate time. He’s not alone; half
of the special forces are taking a nap right now.”

Damn. Those SpecOps guys,
and women, were stone-cold frosty when faced with danger. I was too keyed up
with fear to do more than let my mind drift and daydream. Truthfully, there
wasn’t much to do. There wasn’t anything
to do. Anything we did might reveal our presence, so we didn’t do anything.
“When you wake Lt. Williams, do it with a rousing version of ‘The Army Goes
Rolling Along’.”

“Lt. Williams commands
the Navy SEALS team, Joe.”

“Exactly.”

“Oh, I get it now. All
right, will do. Hee, hee, that will be fun. Anywho, Joe, since you’re not busy,
I’m going to take this golden opportunity to explain to you in great detail how
very, very much I hate you for
humiliating me so many times.”

“How about we not do
that, and say we did?”

“Sadly, no.”

“Do I have a choice?”

“I control your helmet
speakers, so no. Unless you take your helmet off, which I would not recommend.
Ok, let’s start with Chapter One, entitled ‘Why I Hate Your Stupid Ugly Face-”

I had to admit, Skippy had put a lot of
effort into this. I mean, he had taken notes and everything. He wasn’t joking
about it being broken into chapters, either. Chapter Two, or maybe it was Three
was ‘How Monkeys Are Incapable Of Truly Appreciating The Vast Scope Of My Awesome
Awesomeness’ or something like that. His relentless logic made several very
valid points that were impossible for me to argue with; I probably would have
agreed to hate me too, if I had been paying attention. Truthfully, I tuned him
out after about five minutes. Overall, listening to his lengthy diatribe was
way better than him singing show tunes, so it was a win-win situation. It made
him happy, and it wasn’t like I was busy anyway. To help, I said ‘Mmmm’ or
‘Hmmm’ or ‘Yeah’ at random intervals, while I daydreamed about going on a nice
long camping, canoeing and fishing trip in Maine when I got back. If I ever got
back. A camping trip, some place far from cellphone service. It would be so
great to unplug for a while, no interruptions-

“Joe?”

“Hmm?”

“Have you been listening
to me?”

“Mmmm.” Oh, shit. Did he
ask me a question? I shook myself back to full alertness. “Of course I have,
Skippy. The way you make your points is very impressive.”

“Really. You have been
saying ‘Hmmm’ and ‘Mmmm’ and ‘Yeah’ at suspiciously regular intervals.”

“Sure. To show you that
I’m paying attention.”

“That was nice of- Wait!
Hey, I just played back the data and analyzed your brainwaves. You have been
daydreaming the whole freakin’ time!”

“No I wasn’t,” I
protested feebly.

“All right then, what are
the three top reasons why I am fully justified in hating you? They were
outlined in Chapter Four.”

“Oh, wow, Skippy. There
are so many to choose from-”

“Liar! Damn it! Now I
have to start all over again,” he sighed. “Chapter One, entitled ‘Why I Hate
Your Stupid Ugly Face-”

“Too late, Skippy.”

“Why?”

“Because according to my
head-up display, I’m about to hit the atmosphere in like, two minutes, right?”

“Shit. Yes, you are. This
isn’t over, Joe.”

My head-up display showed
a line of fireballs in front of me like a string of pearls stitched across the
face of the planet. The planet itself was not a great place for us to be; it
also was not the reason that I very much did not like the idea of us going
there.

The planet, which
somewhere along the way acquired the nickname ‘Jumbo’, was big. Like Earth, it
was rocky, with a liquid core, a density similar to that of our home planet,
and a transparent atmosphere. Calling the place Jumbo was appropriate because
it was far larger than Earth; so big that gravity at the surface was 42%
greater than Earth normal. Let me say that again; forty two percent higher
gravity. On Earth, I weighed 185 pounds. On Jumbo, I would weigh 263 pounds. If
you are not American, or you are an American nerdnik who thinks in metric, I
would weigh- Hmm, let me think. There are 2.2 pounds in a kilogram, so,
multiply by 2.2- No, it’s the other way around, you divide by 2.2, so- Oh,
forget it. I would weigh 42% more kilograms on Jumbo than I would on Earth. Our
Kristang rifles weighed about 12 pounds fully loaded on Earth. On Jumbo, we
would be carrying around 17 pound rifles. Plus, we would be carrying all of our
other essential gear, which also would weigh 42% more than normal. It was not
an ideal situation for a team planning to assault a technologically superior
species, on their own ground.

According to Skippy,
Jumbo used to have a breathable atmosphere. In the past, the atmosphere was
much thicker than that of Earth, but not so thick that the pressure at the
surface would crush a human. Although it had less oxygen in the mix, the
density was so much greater it would have been possible for human lungs to take
in enough oxygen to breathe almost normally.

Jumbo used to have a breathable atmosphere in
the distant past. It did not have a breathable atmosphere now. Jumbo also used
to have abundant surface life, now the native life there was limited mostly to
microscopic organisms beneath the surface. Something very bad had happened to
Jumbo, and that was why the Thuranin Advanced Research Directorate had a small
facility there, basically a monitoring station. A long time ago, the Maxolhx
had a colony on Jumbo, and during their war against the Rindhalu, the Maxolhx
had used Elder devices as powerful weapons. That use of Elder devices for
destructive purposes awakened the Sentinels that the Elders had left behind,
and one thing the Sentinels did was cause Jumbo’s star to throw off a portion
of its outer layer. Jumbo was scorched, much of its atmosphere blown away by
the intense stellar fireball. Trying to figure out how the Sentinels had used a
star as a weapon, and investigating the nature of the Sentinels themselves, was
the purpose of the ARD station on Jumbo.

The planet itself was not
why I very much did like not Skippy’s plan, although the planet did suck, in my
professional opinion. I had been on three alien planets so far; Camp Alpha,
Paradise and Newark, and any of them would be have preferable to Jumbo. On
Jumbo, we would need to live inside inflatable shelters. Any time we went outside,
we would need to wear the helmets on our Kristang powered armor suits, or at
least wear a breathing mask. For safety while moving around in the high
gravity, we should wear our powered armor all the time, except for when we were
sleeping. Simply sleeping was going to be difficult; the extra gravity would
make us sore if we stayed in any one position for long, so we would probably be
tossing and turning all night.

Yes, the planet sucked.
That was not what I very much did not like about Skippy’s plan.

Because the whole planet
was a laboratory, the Thuranin had extensive sensors coverage on and above the
planet. Also there were sensors throughout the star system, so it was difficult
for us to sneak up on the research station. Difficult even for us to move
around the star system. On the surface, we would have to cover our shelters
with stealth camouflage netting, and bring along stealth field generators.
Those generators, plus their power sources, were heavy and they were extra
heavy on Jumbo. We needed power sources for the stealth generators, for
recharging our armor suits, and for the combots. Before the battle, the combots
would be used to carry most of our equipment, including the power sources. Of
course, the combots would also need power, so some combots would be carrying
power for other combots, and we would be dropping combots along the way as
their power drained. Skippy had calculated that we needed fourteen combots with
us, just to have three combots for the actual assault. The logistics math for this
operation was kind of crazy.

When Skippy mentioned the
ARD facility on Jumbo was staffed with only six Thuranin, I figured that this
was going to be super easy; that he had found us a truly soft target. My
thinking was, we fly down there in a stealthed dropship, Skippy makes the
Thuranin go into sleep mode, and all we need to do is go in and take the Elder
power tap. Skippy had quickly explained that, unfortunately, it was not going
to be so easy after all. “I can’t use my sandman sleepy trick on these
Thuranin, Joe. Sorry.”

“You’re kidding me,” I
said, severely disappointed. “Come on, this facility can’t be heavily shielded
like the relay station was? It’s just a place for a bunch of science geeks.”

“The facility is more
shielded than you expect, Joe. They use artificial gravity; in this case they
use it to decrease the natural gravity of the planet. But the shielding is not
the problem. The reason I can’t simply order the Thuranin there to go into
sleep mode is that these little green men are not linked to an AI. Thuranin
aboard a starship are strongly linked to the ship’s AI, so they can control the
ship through that link. When we took the Flying
Dutchman, I exploited that link to make the entire crew go into sleep mode.
There is no such link with the Thuranin on Jumbo.”

“Crap.”

“You’re going to have to
do this the old fashioned way, Joe. You know, with advanced powered armor
suits, combots and explosive-tipped bullets.”

The fact that we had to
crack open a Thuranin facility, defeat the defenses the hard way, and take the
Elder power tap did suck. It was still not why I very much did not like
Skippy’s plan.

The method we would use
for exfiltration after the assault was also not the source of my objection.
When the action was over, we would signal the Dutchman to jump into orbit and send down a big dropship for us.

No, my big objection was
with Skippy’s infiltration plan; his idea for getting us and our equipment down
to the surface. This crazy, impractical, dangerous plan was why we were
spacediving straight at the atmosphere of Jumbo. I very much did not like this
idea.

According to Skippy, who
of course would be relaxing in his man cave aboard the Dutchman while we attacked the Thuranin, we could not simply fly
down to the surface in a dropship. “A Thuranin dropship, with Thuranin stealth
capability, would be detected by the Thuranin sensors on this Thuranin planet,
Joe,” he had explained. “It’s the same level of technology on both sides. The
real problem is that ARD installed an extensive sensor network around Jumbo,
because they are basically trying to run back the timeline and see exactly what
the Sentinels did to the star. Once you get on the surface, it is possible to
conceal your presence, but no way can a dropship fly down without being
detected.”

To implement Skippy’s
crazy plan that I very much did not like, we had first gone to our personal
relay station, so Skippy could use it to transmit a message that eventually
would be received by a particular ARD ship. When we got to the station, all was
well. The submind Skippy had left there reported that it was bored, but it was
not so completely bored that it wanted to listen to Skippy singing show tunes.
I decided right then that I liked that submind. The submind also reported that
it did not yet have any information about whether the Thuranin would be sending
another surveyor ship to Earth. After we left the relay station, we traveled to
the Jumbo system and then we waited. And waited. Finally, only two days later
than Skippy had predicted, an ARD ship arrived. It went into orbit around
Jumbo, stayed there less than a day, then was gone. We waited another four days
at the insistence of Chotek, while I fretted about was happening on Paradise,
then Captain Desai got the Dutchman
moving again. She maneuvered the ship into an asteroid field, and we used our
two big dropships to take small asteroids onto the three docking platforms we
still had. When the ship was loaded up with rocks, Desai got us on course
toward Jumbo, and she released the rocks in a sequence that Skippy had
programmed for her. Right behind the fourth-to-last cluster of rocks was our
assault party, spacediving toward the planet in formation with relocated
asteroids.

The essence of Skippy’s
plan was to saturate Jumbo with a shower of small meteors. Our assault party
and equipment, falling in amongst the meteors, would not be noticed, according
to Skippy. That shiny, smug little beer can would be chilling in his escape pod
man cave, while we plunged as flaming streaks through the atmosphere of an
alien world. I hated Skippy’s plan. I also didn’t have a better idea, and
believe me, I had tried to think of a better idea.

And that was why I was in
a Kristang powered armor suit, encased in an aeroshell that Skippy had
fabricated aboard the Dutchman, with
the atmosphere of Jumbo fast approaching. The meteors ahead of us were already
burning their way down to impact the surface, we were right behind them. “How
are the Thuranin reacting to the unscheduled meteor shower, Skippy?”

“They are mildly curious,
Joe. We are in luck because the Thuranin are in the midst of testing a sort of
stellar ultrasound satellite that they put into orbit two months ago. Also, the
Thuranin are super distracted, because they recently received an Elder power
tap that none of them were expecting.”

“What an incredible
coincidence,” I said with a dry mouth, as the planet loomed in front of my
eyes.

“Yeah, that’s weird, huh?
As Dr. Friedlander predicted, none of the researchers here were able to pass us
the opportunity to inspect an Elder power tap, so most of them are either
attempting to run tests on it, or arguing about which tests to run next.
Anyway, nobody is paying much attention to meteors now. After the first cluster
of meteors hit, the Thuranin analyzed the remaining ones coming in, and
determined that none of the meteors pose a threat to their facility or the
sensor equipment.”

“Excellent aiming there,
Skippy.”

“Thank you, Joe. And now,
I am sorry to say that we are going to lose communications for a short time.
This microwormhole that I’m using needs to stay outside the atmosphere.”

“Ok,” I said
breathlessly. “Great. Talk to you later.”

“Are you scared, Joe?”

“Of course I’m scared,
Skippy.” I almost bit my tongue, because my teeth were chattering with fear.
“I’m afraid of heights, you know. This is about as high as you can get. I’m
about to fall into the atmosphere of an alien planet, in an untested aeroshell
that, as far as I know, you made out of pasta left over from the galley. And my
parachute was packed by an absent-minded beer can. Other than that, I’m great!”

“Don’t worry, Joe, I’m
sure that I remembered to pack your parachute. Pretty sure. Well, fairly sure,
anyway. To be safe, can you reach behind you and-”

“Not funny, Skippy!”

“Oh, come on, Joe,” the shiny beer can
said in a teasing tone. “Admit it, the thought of spacediving down to the
surface of a planet isn’t exciting to you?”

“Combat is exciting too,
Skippy. I very much do not like getting shot at either.”

“Maybe you just haven’t
been shot at by the right people yet, Joe.” His voice was distorted by
interference, as I fell deep into the atmosphere, and the aeroshell became a
hotly glowing meteor.

“Talk to you later,
Skippy,” I said, and I concentrated on keeping as calm as I could. Prayer
helped.

There isn’t much I can
say about plunging through the atmosphere of Jumbo. I didn’t hear much of the
hypersonic then supersonic then just plain sonic roaring noise as the aeroshell
I was encased in burned through increasingly thick air. The surface of the aeroshell
was designed to heat up and peel away layer by layer. As pieces were torn off,
the aeroshell shuddered and my stomach went along with it. As I said, I didn’t
hear much, because my helmet cancelled out the ambient sounds. As for what I
saw, that wasn’t anything to wrote home about either, mostly because I had my
eyes closed in sheer terror part of the way down. The other reason is that I
was encased in a thick aeroshell made of leftover pasta, or something like
that. It sure had felt flimsy when I was lowered into it aboard the Flying Dutchman, and the thing was
sealed closed around me. On the spacedive to Jumbo, my helmet visor had a view
from a tiny camera in the nose of the aeroshell. After we hit the atmosphere
and the air around us turned to red-hot plasma, the view in my helmet faceplate
was a representation of what the suit’s computer thought was out there. The
suit could have showed me pink dancing hippos and I would not have been able to
disprove it.

At around three
kilometers altitude, the aeroshell deployed a drogue parachute that was only
designed to slow down my descent. I still couldn’t see anything real because
the aeroshell’s camera had burned away with the outer layer of the shell. There
was a sudden jerk when the drogue chute deployed, and when it was shredded as
intended, it snapped loose and was replaced by another one. And then by a
third. At that point, I was less than one kilometer from the ground, and the
aeroshell cracked open, both sides exploding away from me and out of my way. I
was falling, feet first, toward ground that I could see was covered by dirt,
mud and rocks. My freefall lasted only maybe half a second, to clear the
aeroshell pieces, then my own parachute deployed. This was at first a
triangular paraglider, although I didn’t steer the thing. A computer in my suit
scanned the ground, selected a good landing spot, and aimed me for it. Less
than fifty meters up, the parachute changed shape to become a big, round,
billowing thing that lowered me gently to the ground. Just as my suit boots
touched dirt, the parachute snapped loose from my back, and rolled itself into
a sphere the size of a tennis ball, cords and all. That, I had to admit, was a
soft landing, especially in 1.42 Gee conditions. Speaking of the high gravity,
I fell down twice in my first five steps. The suit compensated for the
additional strain of gravity, it wasn’t immediately able to compensate for a
clumsy user. Walking slowly and carefully, I strode over to where my tennis
ball size former parachute was, used my powered suit to scoop a hole in the
dirt, and buried the parachute. Around me, I could see others doing the same,
and I could see equipment including combots drifting to the ground on
parachutes. The ground shook as a real meteor hit the ground to the north of us,
throwing up a tall pillar of dirt. Skippy had planned for the two meteors just
ahead and behind us to be extra large, so the dirt thrown up by their impact
craters would obscure Thuranin sensors. I hoped that worked.

“Lt. Poole, are you all
right?” I asked the closest person to me. On the surface, we could use
low-powered helmet to helmet lasers for communications, without being detected.
That only worked if we were line of sight to the other person, although suits
could also be used as relays. The image in my visor said ‘Poole, USA’, so I
asked her first.

“Yes, Colonel, I’m fine.
That was awesome! We have to do that
again sometime.”

I did not share her
adrenaline-seeking US Army Ranger enthusiasm. “You can do it for me next time.
Major Smythe, this is Colonel Bishop. Status check.” While I couldn’t see
Smythe from my position, I was hoping there were enough suits with line of
sight between us that my message would be relayed to him by laser link.

“Down and safe, Sir,”
came Smythe’s reply. “Everyone is accounted for.”

“Confirmed,” I agreed,
checking the display on my wrist. We hadn’t lost anyone during the drop. I
counted that as a victory, and possibly a minor miracle. “Collect the
equipment, bury our trash and let’s get moving.” We had timed our landing for
mid-morning on that part of Jumbo, so we would have plenty of time to travel
before nightfall. Our suits had excellent night-vision capability, because
Skippy had swapped the original crappy Kristang gear for advanced Thuranin
equipment. We could have walked through the night, but I vetoed that idea. With
the additional gravity, a fall could be fatal, and we had plenty of time, there
was no reason to take an unnecessary risk. We would walk that day, set up
shelters with camo netting for the night, then walk part of the next day until
we were close to the perimeter of the Thuranin facility. Because the Thuranin
did not want their instrument readings contaminated by electromagnetic
radiation and airborne chemicals from their facility, the area around their
base had very few sensors, which worked great for us. Our plan was to get a
couple hours of rest the next night, and launch our assault around the middle
of the night local time. We wanted the advantage of surprise by catching the
Thuranin off guard. The six little green men and women there were not armed
personally. They did have combots and automated defenses that Skippy knew
about, and he warned us that ARD facilities may have nasty hidden defenses that
he didn’t know about. That was why we planned to hit the place with three
combots and two dozen high-speed special forces troops. Plus me, although I
would be bringing up the rear and trying my best to stay out of the way. Smythe
wanted to assign one person to essentially babysit me, I had vetoed that idea
also. He probably did it anyway.

After our spacedive and
freefall down to the surface, walking across the high-gravity dirt and mud of
Jumbo, and one and a half mostly sleepless nights huddled inside cramped
shelters, the actual assault on the ARD facility was almost anticlimactic. Most
of the facility’s defenses were designed to protect it from air assault, and
the designers had anticipated being attacked by technology-stealing Kristang.
They did not anticipate the attackers would have Thuranin-level or better
technology. With Skippy’s help, we were able to evade the perimeter defenses
entirely. The inner ring of defenses reacted to us, but stood down when we
supplied the proper authentication codes. Skippy was totally disdainful of the
Thuranin computer that handled security while the little green men and women
were sound asleep. Yes, we had the proper codes to gain entrance to the
facility. The computer still should have been smart enough to wonder who was
out wandering around in the dark of night, while the computer surely knew that
the six occupants were sleeping in their bunks.

Or, we later learned,
three of them were sleeping in their bunks. The three awake were either too
excited about having an Elder power tap to sleep, or they wanted to run tests on
it while the other three were sleeping. We never did get a clear picture of the
social dynamics among the six occupants of the facility, because one of the
three that were awake noticed a light indicating that an airlock was cycling.
It was cycling because we were coming in, the computer had let us in. That
unnamed, alert Thuranin probably thought at first that one of the supposedly
sleeping Thuranin was awake and had decided to go outside. Or already was
outside, and was coming back in. Either way, the secret, unauthorized midnight
experiment on the precious Elder power tap was in danger of being discovered. So
this alert Thuranin sounded an alarm for its two fellows, and used the simple
expedient of switching on an exterior camera to see who was coming in through
the airlock.

We were not able to do
any magical Skippy tricks of showing a false image through the camera, all we
had done was smear some sticky goop and mud over the camera lens. That likely
bought us five or ten seconds while the curious Thuranin wondered what had gone
wrong with the camera. Then it did the smart thing of checking which of the
three supposedly sleeping Thuranin was not in their bunk.

Except all three of them
were sleeping in their bunks. And that’s when all hell broke loose.

The first thing we
noticed was the airlock quit cycling. The light that was yellow turned red, and
we heard a loud clanging sound as an interior blast door slammed shut.
Immediately after that, we were illuminated from above. The Thuranin had
launched a recon drone that popped up above the facility and spotlighted us
before Giraud shot it down. There was no way the Thuranin could mistake our
Kristang powered armor suits, because we had left the camo netting behind when
we crossed the perimeter. They probably were confused by the three Thuranin
combots we had with us. Whatever confusion that caused didn’t last long,
because someone inside activated the automatic defenses, and doors in the
exterior walls slid aside for computer-controlled guns to lock in on us.

That was a nice try,
anyway. We knew about the autoguns, and had placed charges over the doors. As
soon as those access doors slid aside, our shaped charges blew the gun
emplacements before the muzzles could clear the exterior walls.

“Oh, bollocks,” Smythe
said calmly. “The queen has rescinded her formal invitation to tea, we will
have to do this the hard way. Rocket Team One, clear us a path.”

Rocket Team One was four
troops of mixed nationality, lead by Captain Renee Giraud, who had rockets that
were normally part of a combot’s weaponry. Since we only had three combots with
us, we had two teams carrying rockets with them. Just one rocket ripped a hole
in the exterior wall, and four soldiers used their powered armor to tear the
hole open wide enough for a combot to stride through. Two of the hulking
machines led the way, with one held in reserve. Whenever we encountered a blast
door or a well-defended section of the facility, the combots pulled aside and a
rocket took out the obstacle.

The biggest obstacle we
faced was a half-dozen combots that were controlled by the facility’s computer.
The first three caused us a surprising amount of trouble. They managed to
destroy one of our combots and partly disable another, before Skippy had
gathered enough data to analyze their tactics. After that, we pulled our
reserve combot forward and sent the damaged one back to guard our rear. With
Skippy telling us how to confuse and defeat the Thuranin computer’s defense
tactics, we made rapid progress. Two of the Thuranin opposed us directly with
weapons, one of them got off a fusillade of shots that knocked down a Chinese
soldier; he quickly jumped in his dented armor up to show us that he was all
right. Those two Thuranin were the last obstacle to us getting the Elder power
tap, it was inside some kind of test chamber. Skippy told us to be careful not
to damage it, so instead of blowing the heavy door off the test chamber, we
tried overriding the locking mechanism. That was no good, one of the Thuranin
had fried the controls when they heard us coming. Although they wrongly assumed
we were Kristang, they correctly assumed we were coming after the power tap,
and they did what they could to deny us the prize.

We were exposed while we
used a plasma torch to cut into the door. Although four people with torches
were able to slice the door open in less than a minute, it felt like forever as
we were still taking fire the whole time. Finally, an Indian paratrooper
squeezed in and got our prize, slinging it on his back in an armored pack. He
was halfway back out through the door when were attacked by a pair of combots.
Two explosive-tipped rounds ricocheted off the heavy door, knocking the
paratrooper back into the chamber. Smythe shouted for him to stay down, as his
people sent a furious hail of bullets and rockets at the combots, and our own
combot launched itself through the air. One of the enemy combots disappeared in
an explosion as it was shredded by rockets and explosive-tipped rounds. The
other was tackled by our out-of-ammo combot. The two machines rolled and
crashed around the high-ceilinged laboratory, wrecking equipment and breaking
the leg of one British SAS, who was unable to get out of the way in time. The
two damned things nearly took my head off, one moment they were entangled on
the other side of the laboratory, in a blink of an eye they were headed
straight for me. I dropped to the floor, the heavy gravity of Jumbo saved me as
I crashed to the ground quicker than normal. By the time I rolled onto my back,
it was over. Both combots had torn each other apart.

“Go!” Smythe shouted.
“Move, get out of there!”

With the Indian
paratrooper surrounded by a half dozen high-speed special forces for
protection, we began our egress operation, going back out the same way we came
in. “Uh oh, Joe, you’d best move faster,” Skippy shouted in my helmet speakers.

“Why?” As if we needed
any incentive to move faster?

“That Thuranin computer
has concluded that it has lost the battle, and that a hostile force has
captured critical technology. Following ARD protocols, it is preparing to
self-destruct the facility to prevent you from getting away.”

“Shit! How long do we
have?”

“Eighteen seconds
according to the Thuranin computer’s internal clock. I am doing what I can to
mess with its sense of time, however, I would advise you to run like hell. You
have less than three minutes to get clear of a two kiloton explosion.”

“Major Smythe!” I
shouted.

“I heard, Colonel. All
troops, discard weapons and packs, except for the power tap. Proceed at maximum
speed to get clear of the perimeter,” he said calmly. Then, to assure everyone
how serious he was, he shouted. “Move! Run! RUN!”

We ran. Once we got clear
of the exterior wall, which took only forty seconds, we used the full power of
our suits and ran like hell across the rolling dirt of Jumbo. The suit
computers, enhanced by Skippy, did more than half the work of keeping us
upright. There was a menu projected on the interior of our visors that we could
select with an eye blink, a particular click engaged the suit’s ‘Escape’
function. With that feature engaged, the suit mostly ran by itself, using its
sensors to keep the slow and clumsy wearers upright during our headlong
emergency run across the star-blasted landscape. Those people who had been slow
to click their suit’s Escape function found that Skippy had done it for them.
The entire team was racing across the ground at about eighty miles an hour; so
fast that my bouncing and jolted vision could not keep up. No way could I have
run that fast with me controlling the suit; I would have stumbled and crashed.
After what seemed like an eternity of frantic running, with my brain surely
sustaining a concussion from rattling around in my skull, Skippy shouted a
warning for us to drop flat. My suit fell in a controlled manner, to leave me
skidding across dirt and rocks until I came to rest, face down. “Skippy, when-”

He didn’t need to answer,
as my visor automatically darkened and the ground beneath me heaved. It heaved
so strongly that I went flying ten feet in the air, and came down rolling
around and around uncontrollably as the blast wave hit us. My suit computer
said we had gotten only three kilometers from the facility when it blew up.

When the blast wave
passed on, I stumbled shakily to my knees. “Are we all right, Skippy?”

“Oh, sure, Joe. That was
a compression warhead, there’s little radiation to worry about. You’re safe in
your suits.”

“Great, thanks.” Checking
my helmet visor, I saw that the entire assault team had survived the explosion.
“What’s the status of the power tap?”

“It is good, Colonel,”
came the reply. “My pack has holes in it, but the case with the power tap is
intact.”

“Outstanding, good work.”
I got to my feet and brushed my knees off without remembering that I was in an
armored suit. To my left, a soldier was jumping up and down, verifying her suit
was still in perfect working order. “Poole, did you think that was awesome
also?”

“Absolutely, Sir,” she
replied, and I could imagine her ear to ear grin behind her darkened visor.
“I’d like to do that again. Without the explosion.”

“Roger that, I’ll see
what I can do about that. Major Smythe, let’s walk,” I looked at which way the
wind was blowing the debris. There was a mushroom cloud looming over us, all
that was left of the Thuranin facility. “North,” I said, pointing in the
direction the wind was coming from. “Skippy, can you send a dropship down to
pick us up?”

“Colonel Chang will be
jumping the ship into orbit in less than two minutes, Joe,” Skippy said
cheerily. “Dropship is prepped and ready for launch.”

CHAPTER TWENTY
SIX

“Oh damn it!” Skippy
shouted. “Unbelievable! How the HELL
did those idiots manage to do that? I, I, I-” he sputtered. “Unfreakin’
believable!”

“What?” I asked, alarmed.
“What’s wrong?” We had flown back up to the Dutchman
with the Elder power tap, and as soon as the dropship was secured, the ship
jumped away. I brought the power tap into Skippy’s man cave; he said he didn’t
need to be that close, but the process of making it functional again would take
almost half an hour. Less than ten minutes after we brought the power tap
aboard, Skippy began shouting.

“They broke it, Joe!
Somehow, in spite of the Elders’ efforts to idiot-proof their devices, these idiots managed to break it!”

“What do you mean broke,
Skippy?” I looked out the hatchway of the escape pod, where Chotek, Chang,
Simms, Smythe, Adams, Giraud, Friedlander and others were crowded into the
hallway, craning their necks to see what was going on. “We know that it doesn’t
work, that’s why we were able to get it. A functional power tap could never
have been picked up by an ARD ship based on a simple message. Go ahead and fix
it.”

“I can’t, you moron,”
Skippy said angrily. “Don’t you think I would do it if I could? The only thing
wrong with this power tap was that it needed to be rebooted. But somehow, the
stupid, stupid Thuranin managed to
truly break it! They screwed with it and broke it for real.”

“Ok,” I said quietly.
“But you can still fix it, right? You can get it working again?”

“No, Joe,” he said
disgustedly. “If I could do that, I wouldn’t be so upset. It would be easier
for me to build a new power tap than to get this one working again.”

“Oh. Can you do that?”

“Of course not, you
dumdum. To create Elder technology like that, I would need access to Elder
technology that no longer exists in this galaxy. As far as I know it doesn’t.
Unlike human technology, the Elders didn’t make everything out of mud and
sticks. We’re screwed. No way can I fix this piece of junk. Damn it!”

“This was all for
nothing, then?” Chotek asked, astonished.

“Yes!” Skippy said.

“No,” I protested, not
willing to believe we had failed, after all we had gone through.

Chotek looked at me. “If
this thing doesn’t work, Colonel, how was this trip not for nothing?”

“I don’t know yet,” I
answered lamely.

“Surely they can’t all be
broken,” Chang asked.

“No,” Skippy said
grumpily, “I think whatever experiments the Thuranin have been running somehow
damaged this one. Any power tap they ran that experiment on would be broken;
the power tap’s connection to, hmmm, I had better not tell you monkeys about
that. The problem is, without access to ARD records, there is no way to know
how many of these things they screwed with and broke. I have to say,” he mused,
“it is actually impressive that a low-tech species like the Thuranin managed to
affect a power tap in any way. It had to be dumb luck. No way are those little
green men capable of understanding the principles of how this technology
works.”

“We can get another one?”
Simms suggested.

Chotek shook his head.
“We don’t have time. And I think the Advanced Research Directorate would become
suspicious if we try that delivery trick again.”

“As much as I hate to say
it,” Skippy grumbled, “Count Chocula is right. After that ship dropped off the
power tap here, it was scheduled to visit seven other ARD installations, and
then it was stopping at an ARD administrative depot for resupply. That will
happen in about two months. As soon as that ship reports that it delivered a
power tap here, there are going to be a whole lot of uncomfortable questions
being asked by ARD headquarters, and they’re going to be sending ships to Jumbo.
They are also going to be tightening their procedures. We won’t be able to
simply order an ARD ship to do our shipping for us.”

“Will that cause a
problem for us?” Chotek was alarmed. “If the Thuranin are somehow able to trace
the delivery message back to us-”

“That will not be a
problem,” Friedlander spoke up. “Skippy and I discussed this before he sent the
message. I suggested that he include hints that the order to deliver a power
tap to Jumbo originated with one of the researchers on Jumbo; that one of them
manipulated the situation because he or she wanted access to a power tap.”

I blinked slowly. “Is
that true, Skippy?”

“Yup. Just what the
rocket scientist said.”

Chotek was as surprised
as I was. “When were you going to tell us about this?” He demanded.

“There wasn’t any reason
to,” Friedlander said simply, seeming surprised at the question.

“Yeah, Chocula,” Skippy
scoffed. “A lot of stuff happens around here that you and Colonel Joe don’t
know about.”

“The six Thuranin on
Jumbo,” Chotek wasn’t letting this go, “they are all dead?”

“Most assuredly,” Skippy
replied. “In addition to the ones killed in the assault, the others died when
the facility self-destructed. The computer locked the blast doors so they
couldn’t escape. The ARD considers the information in their heads to be
classified; they would never be allowed to fall into enemy hands.”

“They were dead anyway,”
I looked at Chotek. Before the assault, he had expressed serious concerns that
we were planning to deliberately kill civilians. At the time, I didn’t have a
good answer for him, other than that they were in the way, and we needed the
power tap to save thousands of humans on Paradise.

Chotek looked at the deck
for a moment, then at me. “Colonel Bishop, we do not have time to attempt
seizure of another power tap. Please set course back to the relay station.”
Seeing that I was going to protest, he added “I am sure that you and your
people are tired. My suggestion is that you rest, and approach the problem with
fresh minds tomorrow.” What he didn’t say was, the issue was closed. It was
over. UNEF was stuck on Paradise, and we had no way to prevent the Ruhar from
selling the planet out from under them.

“Joe, I have a question,”
Skippy said while I was in my office, which was a refreshing change from him
bugging me in the shower, while brushing my teeth, or any other inconvenient
moment. Supposedly, I was in my office to review reports on my tablet; in reality
I’d grown bored with that in about three minutes and was now playing solitaire.
And losing every game. I told myself that Skippy had hacked into the solitaire
program just to screw with me, I wasn’t giving him the satisfaction of knowing
it bothered me. Sometimes, if you were patient enough to ignore Skippy long
enough, he went away. “I’m asking now,” he explained, “because I can see you
are super busy.”

“Hey, these cards aren’t
going to arrange themselves.” Truthfully, I had been wracking my brain to think
of an alternative way to prevent the Ruhar from trading away Paradise, and I
had absolutely no useful ideas. Playing solitaire was a way to distract me from
my failure.

“You’re bored? Hmm, there
is no internet access here in interstellar space, but before we left Earth I
downloaded petabytes of porn. What’s your interest? Let me guess. Clowns?
Midgets?”

“No porn, Skippy.”

“Ah. Lesbian midget
clowns?”

“I don’t want any more
porn!” I shouted, just as Sergeant Adams walked in my open office door. She must
have heard me, because her mouth was open in surprise. “Oh, crap.” I softly
pounded my forehead on the table. “Please, just kill me now.”

“Sir?” She said warily.
“Is this a bad time?”

Skippy spoke before I
could. “Joe is bored with his usual porn selections. Hey, Sarge Marge, can you
guess what Joe likes-”

“Sergeant,” I mumbled
with my face planted on the desk. “I hope you are here to report that our
reactors are about to explode.”

“Sir, I’ll come back
later when you’re not so busy,” Adams couldn’t keep the mirth out of her voice.

“No problem,” Skippy said
cheerily, “Sergeant Adams and I can continue this privately. So far, I’ve
covered clowns and-”

“Goodbye, Sergeant,” I
mumbled with a dismissive wave of a hand. Waiting a couple seconds, I looked up
to see she had wisely departed. “You had a question, Skippy? It had better not
be about porn.”

“No, Joe. This question
is about slang I heard during the party when you went back to your hometown. I
know that ‘mow down’ is to eat a lot of food, and ‘wicked’ is the same as
‘very’-”

“What? That’s not what
wicked means.”

“Joe, when something is
very much a ‘pissah’, it is a ‘wicked pissah’, correct?”

“Oh, uh, I guess, sort
of. Look, Skippy, there is a wicked lot you’re missing. You have to grow up
with it to understand. What is your question?”

“I want the definition of
‘douchebag’. It’s not the same as a jerk, is it? I ask because people at the
party were saying that some guy is a d-bag, and they described him as more
arrogant than boorish.”

“Oh, man,” I ran a hand
over my head. “First, that is originally a New England expression, it got
totally corrupted when it started getting used in freakin’ Hollywood movies. A
d-bag is a guy-”

“Always a guy?”

“Always a guy, never
a woman. This is a guy who is a jerk because he is so arrogant and totally into
himself.”

“So, a d-bag is a
jerk because he’s clueless about social norms?”

“No, a d-bag isn’t
clueless about being a jerk, a d-bag does it deliberately. He knows he’s being
a douchebag, and he goes right ahead. Like, any guy who wears the collar of his
polo shirt up, or ties a sweater around his shoulders, is borderline engaging
in d-bag behavior. This is something better explained with an example. Let’s
say there’s a guy who drives his Porsche to a restaurant-”

“Do all douchebags
drive Porsches?”

“No, but that is a
popular car for the aspiring douchebag.”

“Men aspire to be a douchebag?” Skippy asked
incredulously.

“Sure. Guys don’t
think of it that way, but that’s what they’re doing. So, this guy drives his
Porsche to a restaurant. And he leaves the headlights on. That way, the waiter
or someone will announce there is a Porsche outside with headlights on. Then
the douchebag will loudly announce ‘Oh, I have left on the lights of MY
PORSCHE. I have to go out to MY PORSCHE and take care of that’.”

“Ah. I see. He is not
only a jerk, he is a jerk in a socially awkward, pathetic, desperate attempt
for attention; thus opening himself for understandable scorn and ridicule from
society.”

“You got it,” I
agreed, think that Skippy himself may be an expert on social awkwardness.

“Bonus points if this
guy has his collar up and ties a sweater over his shoulders?”

“Oh, yeah. A guy like
that would be a HOFer.”

“A HOFer?” Skippy
asked, confused.

“He would be a
shoo-in for the douchebag Hall Of Fame.”

“There is a hall of fame for douchebags?” Skippy
gasped.

“No, Skippy. I meant,
if there were such a hall of fame, that guy would have his picture right inside
the front door.”

“Wow, this is
complicated.”

“Human culture is
complicated, Skippy, but you’re catching on.”

“Huh? Oh, I meant
that the math problem I’m working on is complicated. You know that I multitask
when I talking with you, Joe.”

I sighed. “Great.
Thank you, Skippy.”

“Good talking with
you too, Joe. What were we talking about again?”

Still not having come
up with an idea, I went to the gym. Playing solitaire hadn’t given me an idea,
maybe lifting weights or running would help. It didn’t work. I ended my workout
soaked with sweat, with my brain still not cooperating. Sergeant Adams walked into
the gym as I was leaving and I stopped to talk with her. “It’s our turn to cook
the day after tomorrow, do you have any ideas what to make for lunch?” We were
making chicken pot pie for dinner, plus a vegetable puff pastry thing that
Simms had a recipe for.

She tilted her head.
“We could make mock oyster soup, my grandmother used to make that,” she
laughed.

“Mock oyster soup?”

“My grandmother said
when she was little her family went through some lean times, so her mother made
mock oyster soup from eggplant and milk and crackers or something like that. There
are no oysters in it. It’s an old recipe, for us it became a family joke.”

I laughed at that.
“One time when we went camping, my father looked in the cooler and realized he
had left the package of hot dogs at home. So he toasted the buns on a fire, put
in a lot of cheese, onions and mustard, and we had ‘mock dogs’.”

I was thinking of my
father trying to convince us that, lacking hot dogs, we could each eat two mock
dogs instead. My mother was not amused. And my sister and I had been looking
forward to grilling hot dogs over a fire all day. Even when my father brought
out a bag of marshmallows to roast on the fire, we were not happy. We wanted
hot dogs, and were disappointed not to get them. When people decide that they
want something, they aren’t happy when it isn’t available. Like when my family
was not going for mock dogs, or-

Holy shit.

An idea hit me right
then, right there in the corridor. “Adams, excuse me.” I ran down the corridor
to Skippy’s escape pod, foregoing a shower for the moment. Ducking down to
crawl in the tiny door, I plopped myself across two of the too-small seats.
“Hey Skippy.”

He made a sniffing
sound. “You couldn’t have showered first? Whew,” he said in disgust.

“No time for a shower,
I have an idea I need to discuss with you.”

“Does this idea
involve you sealing yourself in a plastic bag to contain the monkey smell?”

“No. First, I have a
question. How do microwormholes work?”

Silence. Then,
“You’ve got to be kidding me, Joe. A microwormhole is simply a very small
diameter wormhole. You barely understand how shoelaces work, and you want me to
explain a wormhole to you?”

“Very funny. And yes
I do want you to explain it. You’re super smart, figure out a way to explain it
to me.”

“Joe, that is a
mathematical question, and you don’t speak that language. Hell, Friedlander
barely speaks enough math for me to talk to him about-”

“No math, then. Break
it down for me Barney style. Sorry for ruining the joke for you.”

“I truly do not know
where to start, Joe. You are asking me to explain the mechanics of what your
species calls an Einstein-Rosen bridge-”

“Why is it called
that?”

“Because,” Skippy
said slowly like people do when explaining things to a toddler, “Albert
Einstein and Nathan Rosen discovered the mathematical basis of-”

“No, I figured that,
Skippy. I meant, why is it called a ‘bridge’?”

“Oh. I think Einstein
and Rosen used that term because a such a construct carries an object from one
place to another, without going through the space between those two places.
It’s a shortcut. Like a bridge can carry a person from one side of a river to
another, without going through the river.”

“But when you’re
going across a bridge, you can look down and see the river,” I pointed out,
proud of myself. “And it can take a long time to go across a bridge, so it’s
not really a shortcut. Except it is faster than swimming, probably. If it’s a
bridge, why do you call it a wormhole?”

“I don’t call it a
wormhole, your species calls it a wormhole, Joe. I’m just using the term-”

“When a worm makes a
hole in the ground, I’ll bet it seems like a really long way to the worm,” I
mused. “The worm sure doesn’t think of it as a shortcut.”

“Focus, Joey, focus!
Please, please, try to focus. Oh,
this is impossible. Impossible!” He sobbed quietly. “Joe, I’m going to stop
talking to you now, and instead I will try explaining integral calculus to one
of Major Simms’ tomato plants in the hydroponics farm. Because that will be a
lot easier for me.”

“Uh huh.” The
too-small Thuranin seat was digging into my butt cheek, so I laid down across
the seats. “How about this? Didn’t Einstein say that nothing could exceed the
speed of light? Yet this ship travels faster than light.”

“No it does not.”

“Uh,” I paused to
think, wary of making an even bigger fool of myself. “We go from one star to
another faster than light can get there, Skippy.”

“Yes, but we do not travel the distance between stars.”

That puzzled me.
“What’s the difference?”

“We cheat, Joe. We
use a traversable wormhole, which as I said your species calls an
Einstein-Rosen bridge, to create a shortcut. Uh!” He cut off my next ignorant
question. “If you want me to attempt to explain this, then kindly shut your pie
hole. The two ends of a wormhole can be a lightyear apart in normal space, but
going through a wormhole involves no distance at all. A wormhole creates a
tunnel connecting two points in space, but the inside of the tunnel has no
length at all. Think of a wormhole as a doorway. On one end of the doorway is
Maine, the other side is in Australia. You go through the doorway, faster than
light could travel from your home to the land Down Under. Actually, the length
of a wormhole tunnel is not zero, but that is not something I can explain to
monkeys; that kind of knowledge is too dangerous.”

“Consider my mind
blown, Skippy. All right, forget explaining how wormholes work. Answer this
question: I know that you can send radio signals and maser beams through a
microwormhole. Can you feed power through one also?”

“Electrical power?
Sure, that’s easy. It depends how much power you’re talking about, any
microwormhole has a maximum throughput. And you’d have to be careful that the
frequency of power transmitted does not match the microwormhole’s natural
frequency. That could quickly create a resonance that would collapse the wormhole.
Why do you want to feed power through a microwormhole?”

“Skippy, maybe we
don’t need to offer an Elder power tap to the Ruhar. Maybe we only needed them
to think they had found an Elder
power tap. A mock power tap.”

“I’m not following
you, Joe. You mean we create a fake one like we did on Newark? There have been
plenty of inert power taps found across the galaxy, only a functioning one
would be valuable enough to make the Ruhar want to retain control of Paradise.
Besides, they would quickly analyze it and determine it is a fake.”

“If the power tap
generated power, that would convince them that it is real?”

“You mean like we put
a powercell inside the mockup power tap? That would only work until the
powercell ran out. Also, the Ruhar would scan it and see that it’s a simple
powercell.”

“I do not mean a
powercell. I mean we hide a microwormhole inside our fake power tap, and we
feed the Dutchman’s reactor power
through it. And you project some kind of stealth field through the wormhole, so
the Ruhar’s scanning instruments won’t work on it.”

“Huh,” Skippy said
thoughtfully.

“Could we do that?”

“Hmm. Let me think
about it, Joe. I would need to move the wormhole to keep it centered in the
mockup, and the Dutchman would need
to be a long way from the mockup to keep us hidden. Although, hmm, data
transmission through the wormhole is instantaneous, so signal lag would not be
an issue. As long as the Ruhar didn’t move the mockup really fast, I could
easily keep the wormhole centered in it. And I can project a stealth field
through the wormhole also, to prevent the Ruhar from detecting the event
horizon.”

“What is an event
hori-”

“Never mind that. Let
me guess what your monkey brain is thinking. We create a mockup here aboard the
Dutchman, and I install one end of a
microwormhole in it. The other end stays wrapped around a power conduit aboard
the ship. We fly the mockup down to Paradise in a stealthed dropship, bury it,
and let the Ruhar dig it up. They see that it is apparently generating
impressive amounts of power, and they go bananas digging up Paradise to find
another one. Hmmm. That could work, Joe. The only problem I see is that we
could never leave. The Flying Dutchman and I would have to remain near
Paradise, forever.”

“No, Skippy. We can
shut down the power tap at some point and go back to Earth.”

“Won’t the Ruhar
realize the scam at that point?”

“No. Skippy, you’re
thinking like a super smart AI. You need to think like a meat-brain biological
trashbag. When it is time for us to leave, you increase the power throughput,
and keep increasing it until the wormhole collapses. That should destroy the
mockup, right?”

“Quite thoroughly,
yes. Won’t the Ruhar be suspicious of why their priceless power tap suddenly
went haywire?”

“No. Because like any
other biological trashbags, they will not be able to resist screwing with their
new toy. They’re going to try to scan it, and adjust it, and try to figure out
how it works. And when it breaks, they’re going to blame themselves for
screwing with it. Trust me on this. If something is working fine and you screw
with it, and then it breaks, you will assume it broke because you screwed with
it. Then you hope you can blame it on somebody else.”

“Damn, being
biological is complicated. However, while you were blah blah blah talking, I
analyzed the psyche of the Ruhar and I must conclude that you are correct.
There will be much second-guessing and recriminations about why their shiny new
toy broke, but they will blame themselves. Then they will become even more
determined to make up for their egregious screwup by retaining control of
Paradise and finding more Elder goodies. Joe, I am completely impressed. Blown
away, even. This may be the most diabolical idea your incredibly devious mind has
cooked up yet. A brilliant career as a criminal mastermind awaits you after you
are done playing soldier. Tell me, please, because I want to understand how you
think up ideas that my brain can’t seem to create. How did you get this idea?”

“I’ll explain when we
serve mock dogs for lunch later this week.”

When I explained the
idea in a hastily-convened staff meeting right after talking with Skippy,
everyone was relieved. And thrilled. Except Sergeant Adams, who always keeps me
grounded in reality. “Sir,” she asked, “do I understand this correctly? We left
Paradise behind, and flew all the way out here, risking our lives to find an Elder
power tap that Skippy could fix. Now you tell us none of this would have been
necessary, if you only had this idea back then?”

“Um, yes?” I was
suddenly on the defensive.

“Next time, Colonel,
can you make your brain work a little faster?”

I smiled. “I can try,
Adams, but this is all your fault.”

With a skeptical tilt
of her head, she asked “How do you figure that, sir?”

“Because,” I said
with a grin, “if you hadn’t waited so long to give me your grandmother’s recipe
for mock oyster soup, we wouldn’t have come all the way out here.”

Chotek came to see me
in my office about an hour after the staff meeting. Fortunately, I had stopped
to shower and put on a clean uniform. “Colonel, your idea to create a fake
Elder power tap is commendable.”

I waited for him to
say ‘but’, because I knew that was coming next. In the staff meeting, he had
seemed irritated that he had agreed to send us off on a fool’s errand to find a
functioning power tap based on my advice. And now I was telling him that had
been all for nothing, that if I had really thought through my idea, we would
not have needed to leave the Paradise system.

“I am concerned that
providing only one power tap for the Ruhar to find is insufficient; the Ruhar
know such devices are rare. When the one they find destroys itself, aren’t the
Ruhar at least somewhat likely to conclude they found the only power tap on
Paradise, and that there is nothing else there? In order to make the Ruhar
desire to keep the planet, they must think it probable there are other Elder
items of value buried beneath the surface.”

Crap. Count freakin’
Chocula actually had a point. A good one. “Skippy?” I asked. “Could we make two
fake power taps? Can you create and maintain two microwormholes?”

“Please, Joe, you
insult me,” Skippy’s voice had a scoffing tone. “Easy-peasy. But I have been
listening to your conversation, and it would be a terrible idea to create two
fake Elder power taps. The Kristang already found a real power tap when they
first came to Paradise, and functioning power taps are exceedingly rare. To
find two of them on one planet is astonishing, to find three stretches belief.
If the Ruhar found a third
functioning power tap, Paradise would become a place worthy of the Thuranin and
Jeraptha fighting over directly. It might even attract the attention of the
Maxolhx and Rindhalu, and we must avoid that at all costs. Those two senior
species may be able to figure out that our power taps were fake, and someone
would start asking awkward questions.”

“Got it,” I said with
a shrug directed at Chotek. His expression dropped back into the mildly peeved
look he usually had when dealing with me. I needed to somehow get this guy on
my side. “Hey, sir, I do agree that we could sweeten the pot. Find something
else to induce the Ruhar to keep Paradise. We could, uh, I don’t know. Find or
fake some other Elder goodies?”

“Goodies?” Chotek
wasn’t buying into it.

“I’m spitballing,” I
said by way of explanation.

Chotek looked
completely confused. “A spit ball? How is this related to baseball?”

“No, it’s,” how to
explain American slang to a foreigner? Although I had to give an Austrian props
for knowing American baseball terms. “That expression can refer to a baseball
with spit on it. In this case, what I meant was to wad up a small piece of
paper, spit on it, and throw it against a wall. Some of the pieces will stick,
just like some ideas will stick; will be useful. It’s also called
brainstorming?”

“Ah, I understand,”
his face brightened. “We are going to consider a variety of ideas, and
hopefully find a set of possibilities that can be further developed into a
feasible solution?”

“Yes,” I agreed,
thinking that Chotek would be loads of fun at parties. Not. “So, we need to
think of something we can get, or fake, that is valuable. Or,” the wheels in my
mind were spinning. “Something we already have.”

“That is a great idea,” Skippy said in a mocking
tone. “Hey, I know! How about we offer them something truly valuable; a box of
cereal personally autographed by the Count himself. What a collector’s item!”

“Skippy,” my protest
was marred by me choking to unsuccessfully suppress a laugh. It came out my
nose and threw me into a coughing fit. Chotek’s red face didn’t help me regain
my composure. “That was not-” even I couldn’t tell him it wasn’t funny. Because
it was. “That wasn’t called for.”

“I am terribly,
terribly sorry,” Skippy said with a chuckle. He didn’t sound sorry at all.

“What about,” I said
slowly.

“Oh, crap,” Skippy
grumbled. “Get ready, Chocula, this is where the magic happens. I use the term
‘magic’ because there is no logical reason for why Joe’s brain has ever come up
with even one good idea.”

“Uh huh,” I ignored
him. “We have two Elder comm nodes. The one we picked up when we raided that
Kristang asteroid to get our wormhole controller, and the one we took from
those scavengers on Newark. Skippy, do the Ruhar or whoever know what a comm
node is?”

“They know that the
devices were intended for communications, yes. Joe, comm nodes are not
particularly rare in the galaxy, and they are not considered very valuable. And
in case you were not paying attention, our two comm nodes do not work.”

“What if they did?”

“Damn it! See, this
is what drives me absolutely crazy!” Skippy fairly shouted in frustration, and
the sides of Chotek’s mouth curled up in a brief smile. “I have all the
information that you have, I have way more
information that you have. In terms of brain power, my brain is a supergiant
star, and yours is a raisin. A small, dried-up moldy old raisin. I should be
able to figure out what you are going to suggest, but I can’t! I just can’t!
Aaargh! I hate my life. This is so unfair.” He broke down into gentle, defeated
sobbing.

“Skippy?” I asked.
“Do you want to hear my idea?”

“Go ahead,” he
sighed. “The more unique ideas that I hear, the more data I collect for
figuring out how your monkey brain works. And when I do, be prepared for utter,
abject humiliation, Joe.”

“I am looking forward
to it. Listen, those comm nodes don’t work because they don’t connect to the
network, or there is no network, right? That’s what we’re guessing?”

“Sure,” Skippy
admitted. “Those two possibilities, or it could be that I don’t have the proper
network access codes. The Collective secret handshake, sort of.”

“Fair enough. If the
comm nodes did work, they would be super valuable, because signals travel
between comm nodes instantaneously, and no current species has faster than
light communications?”

“Not exactly true,
but close enough for the purpose of this conversation. Yes, a working comm node
would be a valuable item. Is your idea a way to make our comm nodes work, Joe?
Because if you could truly do that, I would worship at your feet. I would hate
myself until the end of time, but I would do it.”

“No, Skippy, my idea
is to run another scam on the Ruhar. Can you put the two ends of a
microwormhole inside our two comm nodes? That way a signal going in one comm
node would travel faster than light to the other one. We could put one comm
node on Paradise, and have the other, um, floating out in space somewhere in
the Paradise system. That would make it real obvious to the Ruhar that the
signal transit time is instantaneous. Oooh,” another thought hit me. “And we
should have the two comm nodes activate and start pinging each other at the
same time the Ruhar uncover the fake power tap. Later, when we blow up the fake
power tap, the comm nodes will stop working at the same time.” I sat back in my
chair, pleased with myself. “Would that work?”

“See, Chocula?”
Skippy said. “I’ve said before that Joe is an evil genius, and I meant it. Joe,
that is a brilliant idea. Damn it! I
still have no idea how you dream up stuff that I should have thought of. Maybe
my deviousness subroutine is offline. Yes, Joe, that would work. Wow! As a
bonus, pretending there is a remote connection between the power tap and the
comm nodes would set back the study of Elder technology by centuries. And
having a backup to the fake power tap would be much more convincing to the
Ruhar. That was your idea, Chotek, so your name has just been added to my
‘Skippy hates you’ list.”

I grinned and to my
surprise, Chotek was beaming with pride. He reached across the table to shake
my hand. “My understanding,” Chotek addressed Skippy with a wink to me, “is
that your list is a rather exclusive club. So, please Mr. Skippy, hate me as
much as you like.”

Damn. Maybe Chocula
was human after all.

We flew straight back
to Paradise, then I went down to the surface in a dropship with Skippy, Desai,
Major Smythe and a half dozen special forces. Smythe and his team planted our
mock power tap and one of our mock comm nodes near a Ruhar-controlled projector
one night. We had a brief moment of anxiety when we thought Smythe had been
detected, but it was a false alarm. Back in the dropship, Skippy confirmed
everything was ready, so we waited. And waited. We waited for the Ruhar to
notice the fabulous goodies that were right on their doorstep. Damn, those
hamsters could be dense sometimes.

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

Baturnah Logellia hurried
back down the hallway to her office, determined not to be late for her next
meeting. She had just ended an hour-long meeting about the scarcity of critical
medical supplies; a meeting during which she could not offer even a guess when
the Ruhar fleet would resume escorting cargo ships to Gehtanu. The cease fire,
the current cease fire, was holding. Ground troops of both sides were staying
in their designated zones, and both sides had stopped attempts to reactivate or
destroy projectors.

No one expected the
Kristang to remain inactive for long.

Her next meeting had been
squeezed onto her calendar that very morning, at the request of the Chief
Administrator. Baturnah would have appreciated more advanced notice, but as the
Deputy Administrator, she did as her boss requested.

Waiting in her office was
Tohn Logen, a senior engineer who had come to Gehtanu to maintain the planet’s
six reactors. He had come to Gehtanu, expecting to remain for five years, and
then he had gotten stuck on the planet when the wormhole shift occurred and the
Kristang arrived. Baturnah liked Tohn, he was always cheery and pleasant; he
also always let it be known that he couldn’t wait to leave the backwater
planet. Why meeting with Tohn that morning was so important, Baturnah couldn’t
imagine, although she braced herself for bad news. Reactors shutting down due
to lack of spare parts? Some other infrastructure problem? No, Tohn had been
investigating a projector for the past week. Bad news about those?

“Administrator,” Tohn
stood as she came into the office. He offered her the palm-sliding handshake
typical of the Ruhar, and after exchanging greetings, she asked him to sit. He
did, after closing her office door and making sure it was securely shut.

“Would you like klah?”
She offered the Ruhar’s favorite hot beverage.

“No, I’ve been living on
klah the past few days.”

“Surely you didn’t have
to fly all the way here to talk with me,” she said. The man looked tired, like
he hadn’t slept in days. “I have been following your reports about the
projectors.”

“Yes,” he said wearily. “We have made
considerable progress; our initial assumption that the projectors were
installed by the Kristang have been confirmed.”

“It is greatly troubling
that we lived here for so long, with those projectors practically under our
feet, and we knew nothing about them.”

You lived here with them,
Tohn thought to himself. I just work here. Then he regretted his uncharitable
thought. Gehtanu had become his home sometime along the way. “It is troubling,”
he agreed with a nod. “Administrator, I will get straight to the point. Four
days ago, we were examining a projector; one of those used in the initial
attack. It was depleted of energy, so we considered it a good candidate for
close inspection. As I said, we confirmed it was manufactured and installed by
Kristang. While we were conducting a scan of the area, we detected, something.
Then we picked up an energy signature that wasn’t there before. We believe that
somehow our scans caused a dormant object to activate. It was half buried,
unfortunately the people who recovered it did not take the time to preserve the
site, so we have lost the ability to determine how it got there, or how long it
had been in that spot. The reason that I came here to speak with you in person
is the sensitive nature of what we discovered.” He paused to take a breath, and
his face came alive. Whatever deep weariness he was feeling fell away. “It is
an Elder power tap. And this one is functioning perfectly.”

“An Elder power tap?
Functional?” Baturnah Logellia asked, stunned. “It is producing power?”

Tohn nodded, and Baturnah
could feel his excitement. “It has a steady output of roughly twenty four
kilowatts. We hooked it up to a capacitor, and it was putting out three
megawatts and climbing rapidly before we disconnected it. We were afraid the
power flow would blow the capacitor and damage the power tap.”

“This is incredible.
Astonishing.”

Tohn agreed. “We can
hardly believe it, and we’re working with it. Administrator, that is not all we
found.”

“Another power tap?” Her mind was spinning.

“I wish,” Tohn shook his
head, but retained a wide grin. “That would be asking too much of fate. No,
what we found is potentially almost as valuable. We think we have a functioning
pair of Elder communications nodes.”

“A pair?” She guessed at the significance of the word he had used.
“They’re linked?”

“Yes, two of them. We
found one here, close to where the power tap was buried. When the power tap became
active, we detected signals beneath the ground, and discovered a comm node. We
sent a signal through it, hoping there might be another one nearby. When we
didn’t get a response, we were about to set it aside to look at later,” as so
many comm nodes had proven to be useless junk. “Then we received a signal from
Commodore Ferlant. They detected our signal eighty seven light minutes away, on
the other side of the star. There is another comm node out there, floating in
space. Administrator, it is linked to the comm node here. Signals pass both
ways through the comm nodes, instantaneously.”

“Faster than light?”

“Better. As I said, the
signal transmission is instantaneous. Zero
time lag. As you can imagine, Commodore Ferlant is extremely excited. He has
the other comm node aboard a ship, and they are bringing it here. It will be a
slow trip; we are concerned that a jump would break the connection between
nodes, so the ship is traveling through normal space.”

“Is there any bandwidth
restriction?”

Tohn Logen grinned. “Not
that we can detect yet. It seems to be unlimited.” The Ruhar had experimented
with quantum entanglement for remote communications, but the pairing was
short-lived, and the bandwidth so narrow that the technology was almost useless
for practical communications.

“Why would one node be in
space, and another down here?” Baturnah asked, puzzled.

“My guess? I think both
nodes were aboard an Elder starship.” It was known that an Elder starship had
crashed on Gehtanu; salvaging that wreck was the reason the Black Tree clan of
the Kristang had originally come to the planet. “Before the ship’s orbit
degraded, it ejected one of the nodes; the other remained aboard the ship.”

Baturnah leaned back in
her chair and closed her eyes, savoring the moment. Her planet, her home, now possessed one of the most
valuable objects in the galaxy. And not just a power tap. Gehtanu was now home
to a working pair of comm nodes. “Forgive me, this is rather incredible.”

“I feel the same way.
When I first heard about it, I assumed that someone had misidentified an
artifact. Or that we had found yet another nonfunctional object, that would sit
in a laboratory as a curiosity. It wasn’t that I was afraid to hope we had
truly found a functional power tap; I simply did not believe it could be true.
Even now, I can barely believe it.”

“This does answer a
question,” she said with a smile that teased up one side of her mouth.

“What is that?”

“The question of who told
the humans about the projectors. Major Perkins and her team thought their information
came from a group of native Ruhar who knew we planned to trade away this planet.”
She chose her words carefully, because Tohn had not been born on Gehtanu and
did not consider the planet to be his home. To him, Gehtanu was a backwater
world that was nothing more than a necessary assignment to further his career;
a step on a ladder. Once he stepped above Gehtanu, he did not intend to ever
return. If the wormhole shift had not happened, the Kristang would never have
taken the planet back, and Tohn would have moved onto a new and better
assignment years before. Moved away, and missed a discovery that would make his
reputation and career. “That explanation never made sense to us. Major Perkins
may have legitimately thought she was dealing with native Ruhar, I don’t doubt
that. You finding a power tap provides a more likely story,” she said. She knew
that Tohn himself had not discovered the power tap, had not even been the
person who recognized its potential. But the man would now be moving up in the
hierarchy, and Baturnah knew it paid to flatter such people and cultivate their
friendship. “I believe that the Mysterious Benefactor who revealed the
projectors to Perkins was not Ruhar at all. I think it was Kristang.”

Tohn snorted skeptically.
“The Kristang are a fractious species, but why would they attack their own
ships?”

“Not their ships,” she explained. “That battlegroup belongs to the Swift
Arrow clan. We now know that the projectors were installed by the Black Tree
clan, before our people came here, and long before the Swift Arrows first
arrived following the wormhole shift. I suspect there is a Black Tree agent
aboard one of the Swift Arrow ships. One of the ships that was not hit by a
projector, of course.”

“That makes some bit of
sense,” Tohn agreed. “The Kristang are more passionate about fighting each
other than they are about fighting us. But what would the Black Trees gain from
helping us keep Gehtanu?”

“Their goal is not to
help us; it is to prevent the Swift Arrows from gaining an advantage. The Swift
Arrows must have suspected that after the Black Trees left, there were still
valuable Elder artifacts on Gehtanu. I do not think the Swift Arrows would have
sent a battlegroup here because our climate is good for agriculture,” she added
with sarcasm. “The Black Trees knew Gehtanu still held secrets, and they must
have been afraid of a rival clan gaining an advantage. The Black Trees weren’t
worried about us finding Elder artifacts; because they knew that we stopped
looking for them a long time ago. We got lucky finding that power tap; we
weren’t looking for it.”

Tohn shrugged, admitting
she was right.

“Recognizing the value of
an accidental discovery,” she said to soothe the man’s ego, “can be more
important than a deliberate search.”

“Administrator, you
really think the Black Trees did this because they preferred the risk of us
having that power tap, than for it to be possessed by a rival clan?”

“I do. Although I think
it more likely that the Black Trees expected we would never find it. Then,
someday when circumstances change, the Black Trees could take an opportunity to
come back here themselves. Our intelligence reports that currently, the Black
Trees are busy preparing for a major civil war against the Fire Dragon clan.
The Black Trees lack the resources right now to mount a campaign to retake this
planet. That will not always be the case.”

Tohn shook his head
slowly in astonishment. “This damned war has gone on for so long that I am no
longer surprised by anything the Kristang do. If you’re right about this, then
our fleet needs to establish a permanent, strong presence here.” Gehtanu would
be the focus of major efforts to recover Elder artifacts, likely for a
generation or more. Researchers would come to the planet, bolstering the
population and industrial infrastructure. Gehtanu and its secrets would become
a high-value target for the enemy; certainly the fleet would need to station a
battlegroup there, or more. Starship servicing facilities would need to be
built in orbit, and once those facilities were established the fleet would
rotate battlegroups through; maintaining a constant presence. The Jeraptha were
likely to station ships in the area also. The Ruhar would install their own
hidden projectors. The planet would be surrounded by a cloud of stealth
hunter-killer satellites. And satellites that could project a damping field to
trap enemy ships. Gehtanu would soon have the defenses of a high-population
planet. Once those defenses were in place, the federal government would want to
maximize the return on their investment, so they would encourage people to move
there. More people would require more infrastructure which required people to
build infrastructure, creating a cycle. Sleepy agricultural Gehtanu was on the
verge of experiencing booming growth. At some point, whether they found more
functional Elder artifacts there would become irrelevant to the status of the
planet.

“Kahling knows?” Baturnah
asked.

“Yes,” Tohn nodded, “I
told him late last night, after Commodore Ferlant’s coded message arrived. The
Chief Administrator asked me to tell you personally as soon as possible this
morning.”

Now she regretted not
telling her staff to move her morning appointments around so she could speak
with Tohn sooner. “Has the Federal government been informed yet?” She asked. It
was too soon yet for the government on the Ruhar homeworld to know about the
astonishing developments on Gehtanu; Commodore Ferlant would need to dispatch a
ship to carry the message to a passing Jeraptha star carrier. Her question was whether
the federal government’s representatives on Gehtanu had been informed. The
discovery of a working power tap would surely cause the federal government to
cancel negotiations to hand the planet to the Kristang. Discovery of working
comm nodes would do the same. The fact that both precious items had been found
on Gehtanu would send a shockwave through the government. The first thing that Baturnah
expected to happen would be for the Ruhar fleet to arrive, in force. She
expected two, possibly three full battlegroups to take up position over the
planet. After Ruhar ships filled the skies, only then would the discovery be
announced to the public. “What?” She asked, reacting to the strange smile on
Tohn’s face.

“No, our federal friends
have not been informed yet. The Chief Administrator thought you would enjoy
performing that task personally.”

It was Baturnah’s turn to
smile broadly. She would enjoy that. She would certainly enjoy that very much.

“Awesome! Yes! That’s
great!” Skippy exulted.

“Would you like to clue
me in, Skippy?” I asked in a peevish tone. “What is awesome?” Through the
SkippyTel network, we had been listening to the Burgermeister’s conversation,
despite the extensive security features of her office. The sound had been
muddy; her voice came across much deeper than I remembered. That didn’t matter.
We heard everything we needed to hear.

“Joe, the cover story we
used with Major Perkins was that Emby was a group of native Ruhar. Thank you,
Sergeant Adams, for that idea.”

“That’s what I get paid
for,” Adams replied with a grin.

“But I’ve been concerned
that the Ruhar would look into our cover story and realize it is rather thin.
So I’ve been trying to think of another story we could feed the Ruhar
government. Actually, you should have
been trying to think of a better cover story, that’s your job, Joe. I do
everything else around here. Now we don’t need to do anything; Baturnah
Logellia thought up a perfect cover story all on her own. And she has already convinced
herself that it must be true.”

“You mean because she
thinks the Mysterious Benefactor is the Kristang Black Tree clan?” I asked
skeptically. “Come on, Skippy, the Kristang are hateful lizards, but would one
clan do that to another? The Black Trees will just deny the whole thing. They
know they didn’t do it.”

“Yes, Joe, one Kristang
clan would screw another clan like that, and they’d do it with great
enthusiasm. Of course the Black Trees will publically deny everything. The
other clans, especially the Swift Arrows, will publically condemn the supposed
actions of the Black Trees. Privately, the Black Trees will be jumping up and
down, high-fouring each other because the Swift Arrows have lost a major
opportunity. And in private, the other clan leaders will admire the Black Trees
for screwing the Swift Arrows so effectively.”

“Shit. They really are
hateful lizards,” I shook my head.

“That they are, Joe,”
Skippy agreed. “Once the Kristang learn that a functional Elder power tap was
found on Paradise, and a pair of working comm nodes, the other Kristang will be
furious at the Black Trees for allowing the Ruhar to have such powerful
devices. However, again, the other clans will privately agree that the Black
Trees would have been harmed even more if the Swift Arrows had possession of
those devices. Admiral Kekrando of the Swift Arrow task force will be tearing
his ships apart to find a Black Tree agent. That means his task force will
distracted for several weeks, at least, and they will not present a threat to
Paradise. So, everybody wins!” Skippy said scornfully. “Except the Swift
Arrows, of course. They got totally screwed any way you look at it.”

“Darn,” I said with a
frown. “Skippy, I feel just terrible
for the Swift Arrows,” I lied. The Swift Arrows were responsible for me wearing
the silver eagles of a colonel. They had also ordered me to kill civilians, and
planned to execute me. “I would like to send them a nice sympathy note.”

“A card, sir?” Adams
asked, surprised.

“No,” I said with a grin.
“I thought we’d write the note on the casing of a nuke, and deliver that to
them.”

“That is not exactly a
Hallmark moment, Joe,” Skippy chuckled.

“It would be for us,”
Adams said with a wink.

“I have one question,
Skippy,” I said.

“Only one? Considering
your general lack of knowledge about, well, pretty much anything, I find it
surprising that you only have one question,” Skippy replied.

I ignored his insult.
“You said the Kristang would be high-fouring each other?”

“Yeah, so? The lizards
have four fingers on each hand, instead of five. Joe, humans are not the only
species that uses celebratory hand gestures. Duh.”

“Oh. Ok, that’s what I
thought.”

We hung around Paradise
for another forty nine days, with me fretting every day that somehow the
Kristang would learn the Ruhar had found a working power tap and a pair of comm
nodes. Skippy was fairly frantic at the unforgivably poor communications
security of the Ruhar. Even with Admiral Kekrando’s ships several light minutes
away, and considering the notoriously crappy sensors of Kristang ships, they
could hardly have failed to learn the secret if Skippy hadn’t been helping the
Ruhar. Every day, he had to intercept hundreds of messages before the Kristang
could listen in. There were two chatty Ruhar working on the power tap
engineering team who were constantly sending barely-encrypted messages back and
forth. Skippy finally resorted to frying both of their zPhone and computers, twice, before they got the idea that
maybe they should not be talking about secrets on unsecure equipment. Somehow,
due to constant diligence by Skippy, but mostly due to what he claimed must
have been a miracle, the Kristang never did discover the great secret of
Paradise. During one particularly bad day, Skippy had a suggestion. “Hey, Joe,
how about I create a daily summary of top secret Ruhar communications and send
it directly to Admiral Kekrando? That would be more convenient for everyone
involved. Especially for me.”

I hoped he was joking
about that.

On the seventeenth day, a
Ruhar battlegroup jumped in. This battlegroup was configured for heavy
planetary defense, being centered around a pair of battleships. The battleships
were slow and clumsy, but they had impressive shields and armaments. The
Kristang moved their remaining ships further away from Paradise, and loudly
protested the Ruhar violation of the cease fire agreement. The Ruhar retorted
that the new ships had not fired a shot, therefore the cease fire was still in
effect. And if Admiral Kekrando’s few remaining ships wished to test them, the
new Ruhar battleships would be happy to show him what a real cease fire
violation looks like. Two days later, a second Ruhar battlegroup with a trio of
heavy cruisers showed up at the party. On day twenty three, the Ruhar federal
government announced that negotiations to trade the planet Gehtanu were
suspended. This was news to most of the native Ruhar on Gehtanu; until then
most of them had not known there were any negotiations. That same day, the
Ruhar announced they had found valuable Elder artifacts on Gehtanu.

Twelve days after that,
Admiral Kekrando’s remaining ships accepted a humiliating offer from the
Jeraptha for a ride home.

On day thirty eight, we
got a surprise; the Ruhar found a real comm node on Paradise! A comm node that
even Skippy hadn’t known about. The thing didn’t work, of course. It did
greatly encourage the Ruhar in the belief that Gehtanu could be a treasure
trove of Elder artifacts. And that began the end game of our plan to rescue
UNEF.

“Yes, we accomplished the
same effect with our testing,” Tohn Logen didn’t bother to keep the irritation
from his voice. Since the federal government ‘experts’ had arrived on Gehtanu,
he had lost control of the Elder power tap and the pair of communications
nodes. The nodes were now being tested by the military; a report Tohn saw the
previous day stated that they were now experiencing instantaneous transmission
across a distance of three lighthours. Unlike Tohn’s initial assessment, the
bandwidth of signals that could be pushed through the nodes was not unlimited.
The nodes experienced data dropouts when the energy of signals pushed through
the nodes exceeded 1.43 megawatts. Which was essentially unlimited in practical
terms; one megawatt could carry the entire compressed message traffic of the
Ruhar homeworld.

Having the military take
the comm nodes away from him didn’t much bother Tohn; he was primarily a power
plant engineer. What he cared about was the power tap; that nearly-magical
source of endless power. In the history of the Ruhar civilization, they had
only ever possessed two working power taps before. The first power tap had been
discovered by accident on a small moon of the second world the Ruhar had ever colonized.
At the time, the Ruhar had agreed to the Jeraptha’s request to turn the
precious power tap over to them. Lacking sufficient technology to analyze or
use Elder technology, the Ruhar back then had gotten the best deal they could;
giving the power tap to the Jeraptha, in exchange for a Jeraptha commitment to
support the Ruhar colonizing a third planet. That was a very good deal for the
then-young Ruhar civilization’s ambitions for expanding into space.

The second power tap was
found aboard the wreckage of an Elder ship, found orbiting a young, hot white
dwarf star. The Ruhar had expended immense resources to recover the scattered
wreckage of the Elder ship, losing three Ruhar ships in the process. That power
tap was kept by the Ruhar, and currently resided on their homeworld. Within
four decades of it being recovered, that second power tap was put to use. It
now powered part of the homeworld’s defense network; if the defense net was
fully active, the power tap could provide sixteen gigawatts of energy.

Tohn knew the power tap
would not remain on the backwater world of Gehtanu forever, and he knew that
his time for being in charge of the research was over already. He even knew
that the ‘experts’ might actually know a bit more than he did.

They didn’t have to be so
damned arrogant about it. When they arrived, they had acted appalled that he
and his team had done anything with the precious power tap. That Tohn had
gotten the tap to provide continuous power without the assistance of ‘experts’
had scandalized the federal team. Essentially, they had patted him on the head
like a small child, praised him for his work to date, and shooed him away from
the research facility. It had taken direct intervention by the planet’s Chief
Administrator for Tohn to be allowed to even view the testing; he still would
certainly never be allowed to touch anything. Nor was his advice listened to.
“I’m telling you, we already ran that test successfully, five times,” Tohn said
with great exasperation.

“You did that with your software,” one of the federal
scientists remarked. “We are using a considerably more sophisticated analysis
tool.”

What infuriated Tohn more
than the man’s insufferable arrogance was that the man was not even aware he
was being insulting. To the scientist, what he said was obvious and any
intelligent person would appreciate the facts. At least that meant, Tohn
thought, that the scientists thought he was somewhat intelligent. “So you are
actually testing your software,” Tohn
said with intentional sarcasm. “I understand now.”

“Yes,” the man had
entirely missed the sarcasm of Tohn’s remark. “We will establish a baseline.”

Tohn rolled his eyes and
decided to get a fresh cup of hot klah, as the experiment was not scheduled to
go above the microwatt level until that afternoon.

It was that afternoon
when things got interesting.

By midafternoon, the
power tap’s output was a steady ten kilowatts. So far, the results of the
federal scientists exactly matched the results Tohn’s team had achieved five
times. Rather than praising Tohn and his team, the scientists remarked that
Tohn had been remarkably lucky with his crude software, equipment and techniques.

The next phase of testing
achieved different results from what Tohn’s team had seen. “Hmmm,” one of the
scientists said with concern. “Dial it back. Bring the input frequency to 6.2,
please. Hmmm.”

“What is it?” Tohn craned
his neck to see over the scientist’s shoulder.

“Nothing. Please do not
interfere,” he said to Tohn. The scientist then spoke into his microphone.
“It’s still increasing. Cut input power. Yes, now! Shut it down!”

“What’s the problem?”
Tohn leaned in to almost shove the man out of the way. “What the hell did you
idiots do?” Tohn shouted in alarm. The power tap’s output should have been less
than 20 kilowatts. Instead, the meter showed the power tap was at 400 kilowatts
and, as Tohn watched, it climbed over 500 kilowatts.

“Nothing!” The man
protested. “We didn’t do anything!”

“This is your damned
software,” Tohn said through gritted teeth. “Turn it off.”

“We did! There’s no input
signal,” the man pointed to the screen, showing a flat line where the input
signal indicator was.

Tohn watched in alarm as
the power tap’s generation exceeded one megawatt, then 1.5 megawatts. Two
megawatts. “I think we should consider getting out of here,” he said quietly.

“Oh, oh, Joey,” Skippy
said. “There has been an unfortunate
glitch in the Ruhar testing of our power tap. It has somehow gotten out of
control. Darn, I hate it when that happens. This is a puzzle; I can’t explain
it.”

“That is truly terrible,
Skippy,” I replied, while concentrating on the crossword puzzle I had been
working on most of the day. “Any chance they can stop it?”

“Ha!” Skippy laughed.
“About the same odds as you finishing that crossword puzzle.”

“Seriously, Skippy. Is
there any chance they could somehow stop the power tap from exploding?’

“Sadly, no,” Skippy
didn’t sound sad at all. “Not this time. Huh. Some of those idiots haven’t
gotten the idea that they had best get the hell out of there. I’ll temporarily
goose power output to 1.21 gigawatts.”

“Did that work?” I asked,
now paying attention. The crossword was stupid anyway. Doubly so, because Adams
had solved it in like twenty minutes during breakfast that morning. “I don’t
want any casualties, Skippy.”

“If someone is
monumentally stupid, does that count as a casualty, Joe?”

“That’s a gray area.
Depends on how stupid.”

“I’ll give them ten
minutes to board the last air transport out. Let’s see what 5 megawatts does.
Ha! They got the message that time. Ok, the last of them is running to get out.
Aircraft engines are warming up.”

Tohn Logen was fifty
kilometers away in a speeding aircraft, when the priceless Elder power tap
exploded with a force of almost a kiloton. The blast rocked the isolated forest
where the testing facility had been. Looking out the window at the developing
mushroom cloud, Tohn turned to the federal scientist seated next to him. “Don’t
worry. I am not going to say ‘I told
you so’.”

Ten minutes later, they
received the awful news that at the exact moment the power tap exploded, the
pair of communications nodes stopped working. Tohn shook his head. “This day
just keeps getting better and better,” he muttered to no one. Now, maybe he
could convince the Chief Administrator not to let federal ‘experts’ screw with
toys that belonged to the residents of Gehtanu. Residents of Gehtanu, like Tohn
Logen. And maybe he needed to think of buying a house, instead of renting.

He planned to be on
Gehtanu for a while.

“It exploded?” Baturnah Logellia asked, shocked.

“It did,” Tohn Logen
confirmed over the phone. “It was fairly spectacular, too. Like a small nuke,
or a high-power railgun round. We’re lucky, I guess. If it hadn’t exploded, it
might have melted its way down to the center of the planet, and caused all
kinds of seismic issues with the crust.”

“Do you know what went
wrong?” The deputy administrator of the planet asked.

Tohn looked around the
cramped interior of the aircraft. “Administrator,” he said more loudly than he
needed to. “You will need to ask our federal scientist experts why the test went so badly wrong.” They were all avoiding
his eyes.

“Do you have any idea why
the comm node pair failed at the same time?”

“At this time, no, I do
not,” Tohn admitted. “I do not think the power tap was providing energy to the
comm nodes remotely, although that could be possible. More likely the explosion
of the power tap caused some sort of effect in spacetime that disrupted the
connection between the two comm nodes.”

The deputy administrator
of the planet said a very bad word. “This is a setback,” she said with great
understatement.

“Yes, Administrator
Logellia.” He lowered his voice. “Is there any chance that our federal friends
will now pack up their ships and go home?” The Kristang task force’s remaining
ships had not yet departed the Gehtanu system. If the Ruhar fleet left, the
planet would have to rely again on a limited number of projectors. And now the
Kristang knew exactly where each one of those projectors were.

“No,” she laughed
bitterly. “No, that will not happen. I was talking with the fleet admiral this
morning; she spent an hour telling me how the ‘events on tiny Gehtanu’ have
caused the Jeraptha to shift their forces in the sector. They launched a major
new offensive two days ago. The Thuranin and Kristang are going to be very busy
for many months. Also, I think the federal government will be embarrassed
enough about this fiasco, that they will be extremely eager to explore every
bit of this planet to find more Elder artifacts. To answer your question; the
fleet is here to stay.”

“That is great news,”
Tohn breathed a sigh of relief. “Administrator Logellia? One more thing, please?”

“What?”

“That other comm node we
just found? Could you make sure our federal scientist friends don’t mess with
it?”

“I will keep it under my
pillow if I have to,” Baturnah said with determination. “Nobody touches it
until you get here.”

CHAPTER TWENTY
EIGHT

“Is everyone ready back
there?” Derek asked over the intercom from the cockpit.

“Everybody Ok?” Irene
asked while standing in the doorway to the cockpit. The cockpit of the Buzzard.
Her Buzzard. Not as her personal property; it was close enough. The Ruhar were
allowing her to continue flying it, with Derek as her copilot. Derek wanted to
get back to flying Chicken gunships, or ‘Dobrehs’ as he called that fighter
aircraft. Until he fully recovered from his injuries and was ready for a
qualification flight in a Dobreh, he would keep his flying skills fresh in
Irene’s Buzzard.

Irene just wanted to fly,
anything, anywhere. Hauling passengers and cargo back and forth between Lemuria
and Tenturo was fine with her.

“I’m ready,” Major
Perkins said, settling back in her seat. She would be going first to UNEF HQ,
to meet with General Marcellus, and then probably with General Nivelle, the
UNEF commander. Marcellus had a lot of catching up to do; her debriefing was
not going to be quick. She suspected, hoped, that her farming days were over
for a while. Baturnah Logellia had offered her a position as the UNEF
intelligence liaison with the Ruhar; that would require moving to Tenturo. That
would mean living amongst Ruhar rather than her fellow humans. Perkins wasn’t
sure what she wanted yet. The point, she reminded herself, was that she had a
choice, she had possibilities now. All the humans on Paradise had a future. The
Ruhar were in charge, and they weren’t leaving. Early that morning, before the
sun rose, she had walked outside in the cool air and saw sunlight shining off a
Ruhar battleship in orbit. It was a big damned thing, and there were more on
the way. Discovering projectors on Paradise had not been the only surprise, nor
the most important. The Ruhar had found some type of incredibly valuable Elder
artifact in the process of investigating the projectors. She had heard there
was an accident with one of the artifacts; rather than discouraging the Ruhar,
it had spurred their determination to keep the planet and uncover all its
secrets.

“Ready,” Dave Czajka
said. He and Jesse were also going to UNEF HQ first and then, who knew? He
couldn’t imagine going back to farming and chicken ranching in the tiny village
of Fort Rakovsky. The Ruhar had offered Dave, Jesse and Shauna positions
working with the Ruhar military; they would be acting as security while the
Ruhar finished activating the remaining projectors. That project was scheduled
to last a full year, and after that, the three of them would be training more
humans. It was, Dave thought, a great way to see the entire planet. “Cornpone,”
Dave asked to his friend seated across the cabin, “are you excited about seeing
Fort Rakovsky again? We should at least stop by the place.”

“Uh,” Jesse hesitated,
risking a quick glance over at Shauna sitting next to him. After a budding
close relationship while they were being held by the Ruhar, Shauna had been all
business while they were flying around, digging up projectors. They had both
been exhausted pretty much all the time, and there had been zero time for
privacy. Whatever hopes Jesse had for a future relationship with Shauna, he
needed to give her space and let her take the lead. With almost five men for
every woman on Paradise, women had many options if a guy was a jerk. “I, uh,
what do y’all think?” He asked the question to Dave, but was watching Shauna’s
reaction.

“I thought you guys were
worried about your hooch?” Shauna asked. “Come on, Jesse, you have to go back
and check it out.”

“Oh, yeah,” Jesse’s
expression brightened. “Hey, you should come with us,” he said, and instantly
regretted the joke.

“Why not?” Shanua
laughed.

“Are you sure?” Jesse’s
heart leapt in his chest, not daring to hope.

“Sure,” Shauna said
quietly, while gently touching the back of Jesse’s hand with a fingernail. “I
have to see this famous couch you guys are always talking about.”

Flying Dutchman

When we left Paradise
behind, I was ready to break out the champagne. The Ruhar government had
announced that negotiations were officially off. The Ruhar were keeping
Paradise. UNEF HQ had offered to declare loyalty to the Ruhar, and the Ruhar
government was willing to discuss the possibility. The ‘Keepers’ among UNEF
were upset, but in my opinion, those idiots could go screw themselves. Maybe I
was being too harsh; the Keepers didn’t know what I knew. They didn’t know what
the lizards had done to Earth. They didn’t know anything about Earth, because
we can cut off access to our home world. To the Keepers, I guess they saw
continued loyalty to the Kristang as their only possibility of ever going home.

They were going to be
disappointed.

When we left Paradise
behind, I was ready to break out the champagne to celebrate our successful
effort to create a secure future for UNEF. Publically, I was elated, triumphant.
Privately, leaving Paradise was bittersweet for me; for everyone who had been
stationed there. It was bitter for Chang, and for Simms and for Giraud. It was
doubly bitter for me, for Adams and Desai, because while Chang, Simms and
Giraud had remained aboard the Dutchman,
the three of us had gone down to Paradise. Desai and I had gone down there
twice. We had breathed the air of Paradise, we had experienced the scent of its
jungles and forests, we had flown low over its well-tended fields.

And we were, hopefully,
never going back. More than hopefully, we were planning never to go back. We
were leaving behind friends and comrades who would never know we had even been back
there, who would never get a chance to leave the alien world. At the end of our
mission, we would be going back home to friends and family on Earth. UNEF’s mission
was truly over, but they were never going home. I hoped the people of UNEF
worked out their differences, accepted that Paradise was their home now, and
created a good life for themselves. For themselves, and for their children.
Humanity had a chance to create a second home now. I very much hoped that they
didn’t screw it up.

“I have to admit,
Sir,” I told Chotek without regret, “that I was wrong. If we had not gone to
Paradise, we would not have rescued UNEF. I thought it was unwise for us to
investigate the situation on Paradise, and I was wrong about that.”

“Colonel Bishop,”
Chotek said with a smile, “your reasons for objecting at the time were valid;
you almost had me convinced. You were correct that learning the situation on
Paradise would not have done us any good, if we were not able to do anything to
assist UNEF. What you were not correct about was your lack of faith in the
ability of your team, and yourself, to create a solution. You have my sincere
congratulations, Colonel.”

I have to admit, it
felt good to hear Chotek say that I did a good job. Hopefully his report to
UNEF Command on Earth would say something nice about me.

When I suggested that
we break out the champagne to Chotek, he frowned, and reminded me that our
primary mission was not yet complete. “Sir,” I tried to keep the irritation
from my voice, “we have successfully completed an important mission. People
need to blow off steam, celebrate a little.”

“Colonel, I am
concerned that if we get back to the relay and hear bad news, the memory of a
party now will be bitter.”

“Sir, respectfully, I
disagree. If we hear bad news at the relay, it is all the more important that
morale be strong, for whatever we have to do in the future. A celebration now
would be a great boost to morale. I’m a soldier, I know how soldiers think.
People need to celebrate victories along the way.”

My argument was
persuasive, or Chotek also was eager for a taste of champagne, because Major
Simms received approval for a big party. Instead of one team doing all the
cooking, I ordered that each team provide one dish; Simms coordinated that so
we didn’t end up with all desserts and no pizza. We did have pizza, provided by
the French team, and it was delicious.

The next day was
downtime for everyone; a lot of people had hangovers, not that I know what that
is like. Although I’ve heard about it. Skippy appreciated a break from our
jump, recharge, jump cycle so he could have his robots perform some heavy-duty
maintenance. After a well-deserved day off, it was back to routine, and we
proceeded back to our personal relay station at our best speed.

We followed our set
procedure for approaching the relay station; jump in far away and send a coded
signal. When the submind pinged us back, we jumped in close. According to the
submind, it would be four days until the next ship passed by, so Chotek
approved allowing people to go aboard the station in small groups, just to get
a change of scenery. I planned to ask Skippy if there was an uninhabited planet
somewhere along our route back to Earth; the Merry Band of Pirates needed to
get off the ship once in a while. Other than a couple of us going to Paradise,
and the raid on Jumbo, the crew had not set foot on land since we left Earth.

At the relay station,
Skippy had a conversation with his submind.

“Oooooh,” Skippy
mumbled. “Interesting.”

“What?” I asked
hopefully. “You have good news for us, right? The Thuranin are not sending
another ship to Earth?”

“Huh? Oh, no, they
are most certainly not. That is good news. The Kristang inquired about a second
mission, and the Thuranin responded with a price the Fire Dragon clan cannot
possibly afford to pay. Nor can any other clan. That issue is dead, Joe, the
Thuranin will not be sending a ship to Earth, that is for sure.” Whatever I was
going to say next was drowned out by thunderous cheers from the Merry Band of
Pirates. Most of the crew was crammed into the bridge, the CIC or the corridor
outside. The news was so welcome that Chotek pumped a fist in the air, and then
offered me a high five. I slapped him back.

“People, we are going
home!” Hans Chotek exulted. “Mission accomplished!”

“Uh,” Skippy said
quietly, and I motioned for people to calm down for a moment.

“What is it, Skippy?
The Thuranin will not send a ship to Earth, and the Kristang can’t do that,
right? So, Earth is safe now?”

“I can give you a
resounding ‘yes’ to the first question,” Skippy announced. “About the other,
well, um-” he paused. “Not so much.”

THE
END

Sample from ExForce Book3.5 ‘Trouble on
Paradise’

One week after the Flying Dutchman left the Paradise system

“This s-sucks,” Jesse ‘Cornpone’ Colter rubbed his gloved
hands together.

“T-tell me about it,” Dave ‘Ski’ Czajka agreed. The ‘it’
came out like ‘ih’, because Ski’s numbed mouth had trouble forming hard vowels
in the intense cold.

“I’m so f-frozen, my jaw can barely move to t-talk,” Jesse
complained.

“Me t-too.”

Shauna’s voice broke in on their zPhone earpieces. “Hey, you
two quit complaining, or get back in the Buzzard. You morons decided to go out
there.”

“Hey, after all the work we did, freezing our asses off up
here, I want to see this test, Shauna,” Ski said with a defensive tone.

“We can see it just fine from in here where it’s warm,” she
teased.

“Yeah, sure, on a video feed,” Cornpone would have liked to
put sarcasm into his voice, but his lips were so frozen, he couldn’t manage it.
For protection in case of accident during the test, Irene had flown the Buzzard
behind a hill, to put plenty of hard-frozen ice and rock between the vulnerable
aircraft and any flying debris. “I want to see
it.”

“See it? Through goggles what will filter out like 99% of
the light?” Shauna’s voice had no trouble projecting sarcasm, since she was in
the warm and cozy confines of the Buzzard.

“It makes a difference,” Jesse insisted stubbornly.

“What did you say?” Shauna asked. “Hold a minute, I couldn’t
hear you, let me turn down the cabin heater. Irene has it set on ‘tropical’ in
here. I feel like drinking a rum punch.”

“If’n I wasn’t such a Southern gentleman, I would say that
you are an evil, evil woman, Shauna Jarrett.”

“And you are such
a genius for being out there, Jesse Colter.”

Jesse cupped his gloved hands in front of his mouth and blew
on the gloves, hoping the hot air would warm his lips. It didn’t. He removed a
glove and blew on his hand, but his hand got cold so quickly, he had to pull
the glove back on. It was 12 degrees below zero Fahrenheit in the arctic of
Paradise, and he and Dave were laying prone on snowpack, wearing the best cold
weather gear the US Army on Paradise had available. He was wearing five pairs
of thick socks; two on each foot and another on, someplace else that was very
important to Jesse. The arctic gear totally sucked, compared to the clothing
used by the Ruhar. In addition to socks, Jesse was wearing long underwear, a
long shirt, a sweater, and a parka. Inside his cold-weather boots, cold was
seeping through the socks. The thick fleece cap was keeping his head mostly
warm under the helmet. The helmet wasn’t for protection in combat, because with
a Ruhar battlegroup now based at Paradise, there was no longer any prospect of
combat on or around the planet. He wore the helmet for safety, and as
protection against the arctic wind. What was really making him cold, worse even
than the gusty wind, was lying on the concrete-hard snow. Jesse and Dave had
brought seat cushions from the Buzzard; the thin cushions only delayed the cold
seeping through from underneath them.

To Jesse’s left, a pair of Ruhar were also lying prone on
the snow, wearing clothes no heavier than humans would wear on a nice brisk
Fall afternoon on Earth. The difference was, the hamster clothing was super
high-tech nanofibers, with heaters and cooling tubes woven in.  The two hamsters were happily chatting
with each other, snacking on what looked like a type of energy bar. Seeing the
Ruhar eating what might as well have been a candy bar made Jesse’s stomach
rumble with hunger. He pressed the mute button on his zPhone and turned to look
at Dave. “Shauna may be right about us being stupid for staying out here.”

“You wanna go in?” Dave asked hopefully.  It had been his idea to watch the test
from outside, and now he was regretting Jesse’s agreement.

“No, man. At this point, Shauna will think I’m a wimp for
backing out now,” Jesse lamented with a shake of his head. “I got to keep up my
tough-guy image.”

“You do realize I can hear you?” Shauna asked.

“Oh, shit!” Jesse’s cheeks grew red even in the cold. “Damn
it, I pressed the mute button!”

“No,” Shauna explained, “your fingers must be frozen. You
pressed the ‘broadcast’ button. Everyone in the area can hear you.”

To Jesse’s left, the shoulders of the two Ruhar were shaking
as if the aliens were laughing. Because they were laughing, at him. One of the
hamsters glanced at him, then turned away to say something to her companion.
They both exploded with laughter.

“Hey, glad I could entertain y’all,” Jesse said sourly.
Holding up his zPhone, he carefully set it back on the private channel, that
was supposed to be used only by the human crew. All zPhone communications rode
on the hamster network, so nothing humans said via zPhone was truly private,
but it was better than broadcasting everything, all the time. “Darn it, now I
really feel like a freakin’ idiot. Come, on Ski, no point freezing out asses
off out here.”

“Too late,” Shauna warned with a giggle she couldn’t
suppress. “Less than thirty seconds to ignition. You need to stay where you are.”

“Shit,” Ski said under his breath. “Cornpone, next time I
get a stupid-ass idea like this, don’t enable me.”

“Oh, like this is my
fault?”

“I never said-”

“Ten seconds, cut the chatter,” their pilot Irene ordered
from the Buzzard’s cockpit.

Dave and Jesse adjusted their Ruhar-supplied goggles, and
replied with a silent thumb’s up to the two Ruhar.

“-three, two, one, ignition!”

The sky was the color of dull steel; sky and distant
snowpack blending so there was no horizon to be seen. The only feature to break
the monotony of the landscape was a mountain of dirty snow and black rock,
forty miles away. On top of the mountain was a tower with a beacon that blinked
alternating yellow and blue; flashing a bright strobe light every seven
seconds. The Ruhar goggles allowed the light of the beacon to shine through,
dampening the intensity only a bit. Now the top of the mountain dissolved into
a searing, intense thin beam of light lancing up into the frozen gray clouds.
Automatically, the goggles protected the eyes of the wearers, and also
automatically lifted the protection within less than three seconds.

“Wow!” Ski shouted.

“Hot damn!” Jesse replied, and high-fived Ski’s gloved hand.

The Kristang projector they had spent the past eight days
excavating, examining and preparing had just fired six low-power shots up into
the sky. The test shots were aimed at targets in orbits far from Paradise, in
an area clear of ships. Even at super low power, the backscatter from maser
photons burning through the clouds would have blinded the two exposed humans.
Dave felt a welcome warmth on his face from the still-glowing clouds. “That
felt good.”

“Stay where you are,” Irene warned. “The shockwave will be
hitting your position soon.” The first test shot had been more powerful than the
others, as the first shot had to clear a temporary hole up through the clouds.
Now that hole was slamming closed at supersonic speed, and a sound of
tremendous, ground-shaking thunder rolled over the frozen landscape. Dave and
Jesse lay flat, faces down, as the wind of the shockwave blasted them, grateful
for the protection of the ridge they were behind. And grateful the hamster
engineers had been successful in reducing the power of the projector’s maser
beam shots. If the projector had been firing at full power, even from forty
miles, the backscatter of the maser beam in the atmosphere could have fried
exposed skin. Projectors were designed to punch through the shields of a
starship; collateral damage to the surface around them was a very minor
consideration.

Jesse stripped off his gloves, helmet and cap, unzipped his
parka, and gratefully accepted the hot cup of tomato soup from Shauna. After
being outside, the interior of the Buzzard felt like a sauna. It felt good. So
did the hot cup in his hands. “Did it work? The test?”

“We won’t know until the Ruhar complete their analysis,”
Derek Bonsu answered from the cockpit, leaning over to speak through the open
doorway. “We’re supposed to get an update when Major Perkins gets back.”

Perkins had been given the honor of observing the test from
the Ruhar’s command Buzzard, parked a quarter mile away. According to the
Ruhar, it was an honor; Perkins was not so happy about it. Most of the Ruhar
project team openly resented humans accompanying them, and Perkins had to
stretch her patience and tactfulness to the limit when dealing with the
hamsters. Fortunately, she was mostly able to pretend their subtle insults did
not translate well over zPhones, and she concealed her growing fluency in
understanding spoken Ruhar. When Perkins came into the Buzzard, half frozen
from the short walk, she gave her team the good news while taking off her
parka. “The test was a success, based on preliminary data,” Perkins announced,
less happily than might have been expected.

“However,” Irene rolled her eyes.

“Hmm?” Perkins asked.

“With the Ruhar, there’s always
a ‘however’, ma’am,” Irene observed. “This is the sixth projector we’re been
involved in reactivating with them, and every time the preliminary data shows
the test was successful. And every freakin’ time, the hamsters decide they need
another round of testing. And that second test always shows everything is
great.”

“Lieutenant, I understand you are annoyed at how slow the
process is going,” Perkins said, without sounding as if she was being
understanding about it. “You need to keep in mind that the Ruhar are dealing
with alien technology, enemy
technology. They not only have to make certain these projectors won’t blow up
in their faces, they need to know they can rely on the projector grid for
planetary defense. Even a battlegroup being based here doesn’t ensure our
safety; the Kristang could attack while the battlegroup is deployed somewhere
else. That Elder power tap and the comm nodes they found make this planet a
prime target. If that means the hamsters are being super picky about the
condition of each projector, I am fully on board with that.”

“How long, ma’am?” Dave asked.

“If the Ruhar decide they require a second test-”

“And they will,” Shauna groaned.

“-then we will be here another six days, before we can start
packing our suitcases.”

“Six days?!” Irene slumped in her chair. Six days was bad
enough when they were reactivating projectors in a nice climate. Six days of
enforced idleness, and six days when she couldn’t fly. At least when they were
at a site with pleasant weather, they could get out of the cramped Buzzard.
They could set up tents for privacy, put up a volleyball net, sit around a
campfire in the evenings. In the frigid hell of the arctic on Paradise, the six
of them were stuck inside the Buzzard all day. Six people; three women and
three men. Living, sleeping, cooking, using the one tiny bathroom. That got old
really fast.

The problem wasn’t just being stuck inside the Buzzard for
six more days, it was six days during which there was absolutely nothing for
the humans to do. The Ruhar grudgingly trusted the humans to set up and operate
the drill, to give the Ruhar access to the buried projector. Once the drill
created an opening in the projector’s casing, the Ruhar took over, and did not
allow the humans even to visit a projector. The arrogance of the Ruhar was
supremely irritating, especially so because Major Perkins’ team had reactivated
projectors all on their own, without the Ruhar having any idea their planet even
contained such a weapon.

“Oh, this sucks!” Jesse squeezed Shauna’s hand. “The weather
forecast is for blizzard conditions, starting in six days.” If the second test
was successful, and that was a sure as a sunrise, the Ruhar would want the
humans to immediately begin disassembling the drill rig and pack it back into
the Buzzard. Although the Ruhar could take their own sweet time inspecting and
testing a projector, they demanded the humans to move quickly, with no excuses.
High winds, subzero temperatures and heavy snow could not be allowed to delay
the operation. That meant the six humans would be stumbling around, half
frozen, wrestling the balky drill rig back into the Buzzard. With the back ramp
of the Buzzard open, snow would be swirling into the cargo compartment,
drifting into every corner and crevice. Irene and Derek would have the heaters
on maximum power, worried that extensive cold soaking would cause a critical
Buzzard component to fail. Spare parts were a long, long distance away.

“I’m not looking forward to it either, Colter,” Perkins said
in a matter of fact manner. “This is the job we signed up for. We begged the
Ruhar for this assignment; the whole planet is watching us.” On behalf of UNEF,
Perkins herself had done the begging and groveling to keep humans part of the
projector reactivation team.

“Ma’am,” Shauna suggested, “there are parts of the rig we
can take apart and pack away now. We don’t need the components for drilling.”
Part of the rig scaffolding was in use to give Ruhar technicians and scientists
access to the underground projector, but the actual drilling part of the
operation was complete.

“You are sure about that, Jarrett?” Major Perkins was
skeptical. “We’ve never done that.”

“Yes, ma’am, it’s in the drill rig manual,” Shauna pulled up
a schematic on her tablet. “The hamsters take the drill rig apart sometimes,
when they want to replace just part of the system, for field maintenance.” On
the mission, the humans had not been allowed, or trusted, to take apart the
drill rig. Instead, the Ruhar provided a refurbished drill rig after the team
had worked on three projectors. “It’s easy,” she pointed to the schematic.
“It’s looks easy, anyway. There’s a set of videos that walks us through the
process. If we take it apart, we can cut the final part of the stowing process
to a couple hours.”

Perkins looked at the file on her own tablet. It did look
simple and easy, and the process did not require anything complicated. Which
was good, because the translated Ruhar instructions read something like ‘Being
Tab A into Slot B, for making joyous assembly’. It reminded Perkins of the
Chinese instructions for the washing machine in what used to be her apartment
back on Earth. The rig had been designed to break down easily. “We’ll look at
this. This is good, Jarrett. If it checks out, I’ll talk to the Ruhar about
it.”

“Ma’am? If we’re not needed here until the test,” Derek
inquired, “could we fly someplace else to wait it out? There’s a Ruhar base
only three hours south of here.” While the climate at the base was not
tropical, it was warmer than the bone-chilling cold at the projector site. They
could go outside without risking frostbite and death. And they could live in
the base buildings, rather than being stuck inside the Buzzard the whole time.

“I’ll need to consider that.” Perkins’ instinct was to keep
the Buzzard and her crew right where they were. The Ruhar did not need humans
to reactivate the remaining projectors on the planet, UNEF through Perkins had
begged for the opportunity to participate and demonstrate that humans could be
trustworthy and useful. Abandoning the arctic projector site, simply because it
was unpleasant, would send a signal that humans were soft. And the Ruhar base
mentioned by Derek Bonsu was unlikely to be thrilled with the idea of hosting a
group of humans. The base commander might outright refuse permission for humans
to land there, even if Perkins offered to set up tents for her team to live in,
so the Ruhar didn’t have to encounter humans frequently. Despite Perkins and her
team having reactivated projectors and blasted a Kristang battlegroup out of
the sky, humans overall were still not viewed positively by Ruhar. The Ruhar
natives still had hard feelings against humans, who they saw as ignorant,
backwards aliens used as a goon squad by the Kristang, to force Ruhar off the
world they considered to be their home.

The real mission of Perkins’ team was not to drill down into
projector sites to allow access for the Ruhar technicians. The mission was
public relations, on behalf of all humans on Paradise. “I can sound out the
Ruhar team leader here, she may have people who would appreciate a couple days
away from,” she tried to think of a nice way talk about the frozen hell they
were living in, then settled for, “here.” The Ruhar team had three Buzzards,
and had set up two warm, large prefab shelters for use only by Ruhar. If some
of the Ruhar were not needed for the second test, Perkins could use
transporting them aboard their Buzzard as an excuse to fly her own team out…

The
Expeditionary Force series

Book
1: Columbus Day

Book
2: SpecOps

Book
3: Paradise

Book
‘3.5’: Trouble on Paradise novella

Book
4: Black Ops

Book
5: Zero Hour- coming November 2017

Contact the author at craigalanson@gmail.com

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