SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) (27 page)

“Skippy says there is no such thing as luck,” she
reminded me.

“Skippy says a lot of things,” I cautioned her. “He
doesn’t always know what he’s talking about.”

“I have faith that we’ll get out of this, somehow.
That you will get us out of this, somehow, and get us back to Earth.”

“Oh, great. No pressure on me, then.”

“If you didn’t want any pressure, sir, you shouldn’t
be wearing those silver eagles,” she said. “Hey, look, sun’s coming up!”

And so it was. There were patchy clouds on the eastern
horizon, enough that we couldn’t see the full disk of the local sun. We could
see enough. “Skippy also says there are no such things as omens, either. I
think he’s full of shit about that. This,” I pointed to the sunrise, “I’m
taking as a good omen.”

By the end of our first week on Newark, we had settle
into a routine. Each morning, I got up early, meaning 0530, to run with a
SpecOps team. To avoid playing favorites, I joined a different team each
morning. By two weeks in, the teams had started to mix; Smythe, Chang and I
wanted the teams to learn from each other, and to bond as one team, not by
nationality. Waking up at 0530 was a luxury, the sun didn't rise over the
horizon until around 0600, and I didn't want people stumbling around in the
dark, unless we were specifically conducting night training.

That morning, I ran with a mixed team of SEALs and
French paratroopers. As usual, I was dragging in the rear, although it was
encouraging that after a ten mile run, I finished only a hundred yards behind.
It rained the whole time, I was eager to get out of my wet clothes and put on
something dry, if not completely clean. Laundry facilities on Newark were
rudimentary, despite the best efforts of Major Simms.
"Oh,
man," I said with a shiver, "now that we stopped running, I'm chilled
to the bone. Anybody want a hot chocolate?" As soon as the words were out
of my mouth, I regretted them. These were super-fit soldiers and sailors who
just finished a hard training run, not little children playing in the snow.

“That sounds great,” Lt Williams said, to my surprise,
and other people nodded general agreement. Since our little talk in my office,
I had warmed up to Williams, although Skippy was still suspicious, and referred
to him as Baldilocks.

We got hot chocolate made, from a mix of course, and
not as good as homemade. It was hot, it was chocolaty
and it was better
than being outside in the rain. Other people wandered over to join us,
including Sergeant Adams. It became like an impromptu party, only it was early
morning, and we had cocoa instead of alcohol.

Williams lifted his mug and asked, "hey, you
think maybe before they decided to sell a hot chocolate mix as 'Quik', did they
test market a product called 'Slow'?"

I laughed. "For when you're not in a hurry?"

"Yeah," Williams said, "like, they give
you a cocoa bean and a stalk of sugar cane? You make your own cocoa
powder." That drew a laugh from the group.

"Do-it-yourself hot cocoa?" I asked.
"My father used to joke about our neighbors who bought a do-it-yourself
kit for a full set of oak furniture, cheap."

"What's that?" Williams asked.

"For ten dollars, you get," I said while
laughing at my own joke, "an acorn and a saw."

That got a big laugh.

"Waiting for an acorn to grow into an oak tree,
would still be faster than some contractors out there," Williams said
sourly. "My parents gave a contractor a deposit to remodel their kitchen,
back before Ruhar raided Earth. So far, all he's done is tear out half the
cabinets and disappear. That's why I really came out here," he added with
a grin, "the contractor is apparently not on Earth, so I figure he must be
out here someplace. I'm going to hunt him down and drag him back to my parents'
kitchen."

“Yeah,” I said, “I know what you mean. My uncle hired
a contractor to build an apartment above his garage. The guy tore the roof off,
covered it with a blue tarp. Then he had to wait for some supplies, then he
hurt his back, or some crap like that. When it got to be November, the tarp
started leaking, my uncle said screw it, and called my father and me. The three
of us worked nights and weekends, including over Thanksgiving. Working in a
garage with no roof, in late November, made me want to punch that contractor,
if I ever met him. Anyway, it rained all Thanksgiving weekend, we had a roof on
by that time, but no heat in there. Reminds me of the weather on this miserable
planet.”

"Hey Joe," Skippy said from the zPhone on my
belt, "look on the bright side. With this cold crappy weather, you don't
need to worry about having a beach body this summer."

"Yeah," I rolled my eyes, "that's what
I was worried about."

"You know, all that shaving, and plucking and
waxing," Skippy mused.

"Skippy, it's none of your business what the
women here-"

"Oh, I was talking about you, Joe."

"Very funny."

"Hey, that reminds me, I've been meaning to ask
you, Joe. Why do you shave down there in the shape of a lightning bolt?
Wouldn't a question mark be more appropriate for you?"

"Lightn- I don't shave anything!" I
protested as people began laughing. Adams slapped the table, and had tears
rolling down her cheeks she was laughing so hard.

"Question mark-" Adams gasped, she had to
hold the table not to fall off her chair.

"Oh," Skippy said innocently, "shoot,
sorry Joe, is this one of those privacy things you talked to me about? Don't
worry, your secret is safe with me," Skippy said, in a cavern full of
people.

"I don't shave down there," I said through
gritted teeth. If I could, I would have strangled that beer can right then.

"Aha, Ok, got it. Riiiiiight, you don't."

"I'm serious, Skippy."

"Um, I'm getting mixed signals here, Joe."

"Can we drop the subject?"

"What subject? See, I can be discrete."

I looked around the compartment at people who were
having a great laugh at my expense, and trying to avoid my eyes. "Why
couldn't I have just left that beer can on a dusty shelf?"

Mornings began with running, then breakfast. After
breakfast, I walked around, checking on people, making sure we had no problems
with supplies, that anyone injured or sick was being tended to. Generally
letting people know that I cared. After lunch, I had free time, which I was
using to study how to fly the
Flying
Dutchman
. Skippy called me
as I was learning about the flight controls.
“Joe, it’s admirable that you are
learning to fly, are you sure you’re not overdoing it? You’re training with the
special forces units, you have all the administrative BS to deal with, and
you’re way behind on your officer training.” It surprised me that he didn’t
make a snarky joke about how I was learning to fly, because I had nothing else
to do.

“Can we be serious for a minute, Skippy? This will
only take a few minutes. A one hundred percent, dead serious, human to advanced
being conversation.”

“Hmm.
A
minute is not the same as
a few
minutes. Tell you what, Joe, I’ll give it a shot, and I’ll pay as much
attention as I can, depending on how interesting what you have to say is.”

“Fair enough. Here’s the truth; I am learning to fly,
because I want to be able to pilot the
Dutchman
all by myself. Skippy, I
want to make a deal with you, and this is the serious part. We came out here,
not knowing what will happen when you contact the Collective. Before people
signed on, I told each one of them there is a very good chance we will not be
returning, that the ship will not be able to return, after you contact the
Collective and leave us.”

“Ok, I don’t like where this conversation is going,
Joe. We already have a deal. Your home planet is safe, I shut down the
wormhole.”

“Yes, and we are eternally grateful-“

“Doesn’t sound like it, if you now want to make a new
deal with me.” His voice wasn’t the usual light-hearted Skippy that I knew.

“My fault. Deal was not the right word. What I am
asking for, Skippy, is a favor. Let me explain what I want, and you can decide
whether to do this favor for me.”

“You ask a favor from me?” He said that in a hoarse,
scratchy voice. “For the moment, I will refrain from making the humorous
Godfather references that you know I am dying to say, so make it quick.”

“Thank you. What I want, what I would like, is that
after you contact the Collective, before you leave us, we take the
Dutchman
back to Earth, and drop off the crew. Then, you and I take the ship back out.
Since, in this scenario, you’ve already located the Collective, you only need
me to fly the ship for you, we don’t need additional crew to help. It would be
finishing like we started, Skippy, just you and me, one last time.”

“Huh. Interesting. What’s in it for you, Joe? I’m
curious.”

“What’s in it for me is, I’m in command of this ship,
I’m responsible for the lives of my crew. It’s my duty to bring them back
safely, if I can. If you want to be cynical about it, what’s in it for me is
avoiding a guilty conscience.”

“Wow. Ok, I will think on that a while.”

“Thanks. Is this one of those things where you have to
think on it, and you already did that between saying ‘a’ and ‘while’?”

“That would be a no, Joe. This isn’t simple high-order
mathematics; this is a moral question. Also a practical one. I will consider
it.”

To my surprise, Skippy didn’t give me an answer the
next day, or the day after that. Either he was still considering it, or his
answer was something I didn’t want to hear, and he was sparing my feeling while
I was on the cold, miserable planet. My thinking was that I’d ask him about
again after we were back aboard the
Flying Dutchman
.

In the meantime, I stuck to my routine. Get up, go
running with a SpecOps team. That morning, I ran with the Chinese team, and
Captain Xho had planned a very tough ten kilometer run up and down steep hills.
It was a struggle, my lungs were burning, my breathing ragged and my legs felt
like rubber. The Chinese took pity on me, and paused at the top of a hill.

Captain Xho knelt on the ground, broke a small branch
off a shrub, and examined it closely. After looking at it and sniffing, he
touched a finger to the place where he'd broken it off, then tasted a tiny
sample of the sap or whatever it was.

"Should you be doing that?" I asked him.
"Is that safe?" My concern was heightened because the plant life on
Newark was edible to humans, perhaps the poisons could affect humans also.

"Yes, it's safe,” he replied, “the science team
tested these plants. They're not edible to us, they're also not poisonous. If
we brought goats with us, they could eat these grasses and shrubs, the lichen
also. Goats will eat anything," he said with a grin. "I was
thinking," he said as he held the piece of shrub up to examine its bark,
"how useless much of our training on Earth was."

"How do you mean?" I asked.

"Part of our training, for Chinese Army special
forces, is to live off the land. We are trained to identify edible, and
poisonous, plants and animals. We are expected to survive, on our own, for
weeks, even months, in different habitats; jungles, deserts, forests, the
Siberian tundra. Drop me almost anywhere in the world, and I can find something
to eat, I can make tools and clothing, all the things needed for independent
survival. Now, here," he gestured to the horizon with the branch,
"all that training is useless. There is not a single thing to eat on this
entire planet, and no animals to use for furs, skins, nothing. Ha!" He
laughed.

"It wasn't all useless," I assured him.
"You learned to improvise, to think on your own, to keep a positive
attitude. And to adapt. We've all had to adapt, and I think we've done well. I
wish," I said, massaging my aching right calf muscle, "that my body
adapted to this extra gravity and low oxygen, as well as we have all mentally
adapted to our situation."

"Perhaps you are right, Colonel," Xho said,
flinging the branch down the hill. "Let's see how we adapt now to running
down this hill, and up the next one."

"Oh," I groaned, "this is going to be
fun. Not."

Part of being the commander was to check on every
person on Newark, I tried to talk with each group at least twice a week. That
morning, it was the science team’s turn, and I wandered over to where Dr.
Venkman was doing something at a table that held a pile of scientific
instruments. “Good morning Doctor,” I said, “how is the science going?”

"Good, good. We are currently struggling with a
puzzle. Some aspects of the biology here make no sense."

"Like what? Keep in mind, I'm not a
biologist."

Venkman laughed. "Neither am I. The biology department
people treat me as a mascot, or a gofer. I don't mind one bit, this is
fascinating. I took a biology course in college because it was required, now I
wish that I'd paid more attention."

We did not have a biology 'department', Venkman was
still thinking in academic terms, I knew what she meant. "My last biology
course was as a sophomore, maybe my freshman year of high school." The
fact that I hadn't taken a biology course in college, because I hadn't yet gone
to college, wasn't mentioned. She knew it, I knew it.

“Here is the problem, in the simple terms that were
explained to me. Look at this, tell me what you see,” she pointed to her iPad,
which was hooked up to a fancy Thuranin imager microscope thing that we’d
brought down from the
Dutchman
. Under the imager was a stick, a small
branch from one type of small shrub that grew everywhere on Newark. Everywhere
that wasn’t covered by ice, or ocean. Or rocks.

I used my fingers to pinch the image and zoom out,
then zoomed in to enhance the image. The imager was impressive, I kept going,
just to experiment how detailed it could get, until I was seeing individual
cells, then inside the cells. Venkman shifted her feet beside me, I took that
as a cue she was growing impatient with my playing around. Bringing the image
back to where I started, I stared at the branch, or twig or whatever it was.
“It’s a branch from one of the shrubs out there.”

“Yes, I meant, what do you see here?” She pointed to a
small bump, a raised area of bark, with a tiny scar of a slightly darker color.
This time, I put some thought into it. “Looks to me like that is where a leaf
broke off.”

“Close. The biologists tell me there was a flower
there. A tiny, vestigial flower, a bud that doesn’t develop into a full flower,
because the plant does not any longer put energy into growing flowers.”

“Huh.” Even now that I knew what I was looking at, it
didn’t mean anything to me, I couldn’t tell the scar had been from an
undeveloped flower falling off, it could have been a leaf for all I knew. “I
read somewhere,” hopefully that sounded more impressive than the truth that I’d
seen it on TV, “that some big snakes, like pythons, have tiny rear legs under
their scales. Snakes evolved from lizards, they used to have legs before they
started, slithering on the ground.”

“Correct,” Venkman said with a smile. “Along the way,
in snakes, the gene that causes legs to develop has become switched off. Here,
with these shrubs, we haven’t made any progress in analyzing their DNA, of
course, what we do know is these plants used to have flowers, but since flowers
are no longer useful, the plants have stopped growing them fully.”

“Ok. The part that doesn’t make sense, is it that
plants no longer need flowers now, or that they used to need flowers?”

“Both.”

It pissed me off a little that the great Doctor
Venkman was toying with me, instead of giving me a straight answer.

Maybe she saw a flash of irritation on my face,
because she added “I didn’t get it either, we are not biologists, that is for
certain. The biology team explained that a plant which used to have flower, and
now does not, means that plant used to rely on animals, like insects or birds,
for pollination. Typically, an animal goes from a flower on one plant, picks up
pollen as it eats the nectar the flower provides, and deposits that pollen on
another plant, when it visits the flowers there.”

“Like bees, right? There are no birds or insects on
Newark.”

“Precisely the problem. Plants here would not have evolved
flowers, unless there used to be animals to use the flowers. The purpose of
flowers, their color and scent, is to attract animals. There are no animals, no
land animals, and certainly no flying animals, today. Plants therefore no
longer waste energy growing flowers, it appears they now use the wind to
disperse pollen.”

“Where did all the animals go? Oh,” I got it in a
flash of insight, “Newark must have been warmer in the past.”

“Much warmer. This area, near the equator, should have
been very warm, even tropical.”

“So, the planet is in an ice age now?”

“A major, catastrophic ice age. We know from data
downloaded from the Kristang satellites that it snows even at the equator here,
depending on the season. I mentioned it to Skippy, the science team asked him
about it, he replied that is mildly interesting, and he may devote some
processing resources to the climate question, when he is done repairing our
starship.”

“An ice age? How did that happen?”

“We don’t know. That is one of the many mysteries
about this world.”

Running in the mornings with SpecOps teams was good
for me, both physically and to familiarize myself with the people under my
command. It was such a good idea, that it gave me another good idea.
"Good
evening, Doctor Zheng,” I said, acting as if I had casually dropped by the
table she was using as a makeshift laboratory. Plant samples and vials of soil
and water covered the table, all of it carefully labeled. I knew, because I had
helped her gather some of the samples. "Your personnel file says you are a
triathlete, before you signed on with us?"

She looked up at me in surprise. "Only halfs, I
competed in two or three half Ironmans a year, never had time to train for a
full one"

"
Only
a half Ironman. That's what, seventy
miles?"

"Seventy point three." Of course she knew
the distance to the tenth of a mile, she also knew the exact times of her last
five or so races, that's how serious endurance athletes were. Anyone who
competed in multiple half Ironmans every year was, in my view, a serious athlete,
considering the training time they put in every week.

"You have a doctorate in biology, you are also
a," I almost said 'real', "a medical doctor. You were a surgeon? You
practiced as a surgeon?"

"Yes, I was a surgeon for six years, then I got
into medical research, that's when I went back to university for a second
doctorate in biology. You know that Colonel, it's part of the reason I was
selected for the science team. As a backup medical doctor, in case the Thuranin
medical technology fails, or is unavailable. Like now."

"We are grateful to have you here on Newark with
us." So far, there had not been a need for a medical doctor on Newark, I
wasn't expecting that happy situation to continue for the length of our stay.
Extra gravity, low oxygen, damp, cold conditions, living under ground, boredom
poor morale, all of those factors could lead to misjudgments and accidents. If,
when, that happened, we would need human doctors. "You have continued
exercising aboard the
Dutchman
." That wasn't a question, I'd seen
her in the gym.