SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) (29 page)

“Millions?” I asked, surprised.

“As of now, we don’t know,” Graziano admitted. “This
chamber was sealed until we broke in, the stones were set very closely
together, using almost no mortar to fill the gaps. Moisture and oxygen were
kept out, and this chamber is above the cathedral, it is protected from
flooding, We see marks of flooding on the walls of the cathedral chamber, the
flood marks reach only one third of the way up that low-ceilinged passageway
you climbed.”

I looked around the chamber. “They didn’t live in
here. This was a tomb. They left the bodies, and sealed it behind them.”

“We think so, yes,” Venkman said. “It may have been
one of the last things they did. Perhaps the very last thing. I would not be
surprised to find more bones, and more tools, beneath the floor of the
cathedral. The items here, and in the chamber before this one, were preserved,
because moisture and oxygen were kept out, after the chambers were sealed.”

“I can’t imagine this,” I said with complete candor. A
civilization, an entire species, moving steadily toward the equator as the cold
crept down from the poles, until they reached the furthest point they could go,
and it, too, began to freeze.

“No one can,” Friedlander said quietly.

News of the discoveries at the cathedral complex
spread like wildfire among our small population, and with news inevitably came
rumors. By the following morning, so many people wanted to visit the cathedral
complex that I knew I had to do something about it. Graziano, who had slept at
the cathedral overnight, had come back to the main cavern for more supplies
that morning, so I found him talking with Major Simms. "Doctor Graziano,”
I said, “could you put together a briefing of what we think we know at the
moment? There are a lot of rumors flying around, there's no reason for
disinformation."

Simms snorted when I said that. I knew what she was
thinking. "Sorry, Major," I offered, "there was a time when
disinformation was necessary, on Paradise. I couldn't tell the truth about
Skippy, without revealing it to the people who were staying behind. And we
couldn't risk them telling the Ruhar, or Kristang, or whoever is in control of
Paradise at the time. Besides," I gave a grin that I hoped would lighten
the mood, "that was a damned inspiring speech I made, right?"

Simms snorted. "It wasn't your speech, sir.
Frankly, given your, what little I knew of your reputation," she glanced
at me to gauge my reaction, "I was afraid the special forces mission you
claimed to be running would be some slap-dash operation, thrown together at the
last minute."

"Like going after an invading force with an ice cream
truck?"

"Yes, sir. I didn't know much about you, before
you fell out of the sky onto my base in a stolen Ruhar spaceship. All I knew
was, you did some rash thing on Earth, and got lucky, then you got promoted as
a publicity stunt for the Ruhar. Sorry, sir, that's what most people were
thinking, at the time."

"No apology needed, Major, I knew it was a
publicity stunt. I was afraid UNEF would have me going around giving speeches
to sell war bonds or something, before they assigned me to plant
potatoes."

Simms nodded. "That Dodo you flew in, that was
more convincing than any speech; being able to steal and fly an alien
spacecraft was impressive. Oh, and when you came out of the Dodo, stunned those
Ruhar, and they weren't able to shoot back. I saw that happen, one of those
Ruhar was totally shocked that his rifle didn't work. That, and the message
from UNEF HQ, that I now know Skippy faked," and her mouth turned down at
the thought of being manipulated.

"Sorry about that, it was necessary. If it wasn't
my speech, what convinced you to come with us?"

"The faked orders from UNEF HQ, and, you caught
us at the right moment. You said you were going to hit the Kristang, not the
Ruhar, we'd all heard rumors about what was going on back on Earth. I'd seen
fortune cookies myself, we got them regularly enough when we opened boxes at
the warehouse. You were the first UNEF officer who told us what we all wanted
to hear; that we were taking action against the Kristang. We also, especially
us in the supply corps, figured we didn't have much to lose."

"How's that?" I couldn't understand what she
meant by that last remark.

"We knew, better than anyone else, how thin our
food stocks were getting back then," Simms explained. "You sent Chang
and Adams to the warehouse, to check on supplies, and they came back to the
Dodo saying supplies were adequate, right?"

That was a while ago, I had to pause to think back
that far. "Uh, sure."

"What they didn't know was the warehouse was a
lot more empty than it looked. My aide and I would go into the warehouse, late
at night, with a wheelbarrow of rocks, we used the rocks to fill food boxes
that we pushed to the back of the shelves. Then we'd fudge the inventory
records, so even my people didn't know how thin our supplies were. I gave orders
that we weren't to issue the last two boxes of anything with my direct
approval, so people didn't unknowingly issue a box of rocks to the field. When
we loaded up the Dodo, I made sure we got only real food containers, not
rocks."

That surprised me. "Major, I knew our food stocks
were running low, I had no idea-"

"HQ knew," she said. "They were closing
regional logistics centers, supposedly to consolidate operations as we cleared
hamsters by sector, the real reason is that HQ didn't want people to see empty
warehouses. You take what little supplies are left, concentrate the supplies in
a few logistics bases, and when people see those bases have plenty of supplies,
they think we're good. They didn't see the overall situation. My base was
scheduled to shut down in two weeks, before the Ruhar took the planet back. I
was sweating that, by the end of two weeks, I figured all we'd have left is
boxes of rocks. My CO knew about me faking inventory records, I got the idea
from an intel officer with UNEF HQ."

"Intel," I said sourly. "Yeah, I know
the type." As the words came out of my mouth, I realized that, however I'd
felt screwed by my experience with Intel operations, I'd done worse, much
worse. I had deceived people, concealed the truth, revealed only those parts of
the truth I felt was convenient at the time. All for a good cause, of course.
If I hadn't deceived people, we would never have gotten enough volunteers to
capture a Kristang starship, a Thuranin star carrier, and to raid an asteroid
base to get an Elder controller device to shut down the wormhole that gave the
enemy access to Earth. With me initially lying to people, Earth would still be
under the cruel control of the Kristang. It had all been worth it, I would do
it again without regret. That didn't make me feel any better about having done
it. Maybe all people who work in Intel feel that way, until they get used to
it.

"Sir," Williams spoke up to defend me,
"however you did it, we on Earth are very grateful. Things were getting
desperate. It was bad enough what the lizards were doing on Earth, it was
almost worse that we had no communication with the ExFor, we knew you had
landed on Pradassis, that's all the Kristang told us."

Simms and I shared a knowing look. "We didn't
hear anything from Earth," she said sadly, "until we got our first
fortune cookie. You know about the fortune cookies?" She asked the
question to Williams.

"Not until I read your debriefing," Williams
said, "that must have been a closely-held secret on Earth."

"And then the fortune cookies stopped,"
Simms said, "because the Kristang stopped bringing supplies from
Earth."

"Yes," Williams added. "We knew things
were going south for the ExFor, when the Kristang shut down the space elevator
in Ecuador. The thinking on Earth was, the only reason to do that was they
didn't need to ship a lot of supplies offworld anymore. There were rumors going
around that the entire Expeditionary Force had been wiped out, we knew the
Kristang on Earth were pissed about something, I guess that must have been the
Ruhar raid when your team shot down those two dropships, the Whales?"

"Could be," I nodded. "My parents told
me that they thought I was dead, it surprised the hell out of them when I
called."

"What was your cover story?" Williams asked.
"You didn't tell them the truth, did you?"

It surprised me that Williams didn't know the cover
story that UNEF had cooked up, until I remembered that he, and most of the
SpecOps people, had been selected less than two weeks before the
Dutchman
departed, and those two weeks had been frantic eighteen hour days for everyone
involved. Although the entire original Merry Band of Pirates had all been given
the cover story, UNEF hadn't planned to release it to the public until after
the
Flying
Dutchman
left Earth orbit. "The cover story? Your
team wasn't read in before we left?"

"There wasn't time, sir. UNEF wanted us aboard
the
Dutchman
as soon as possible after we were selected. I think part of
that was operational security, we couldn't talk to people on Earth if we were
already in orbit."

That made sense to me, I remembered that UNEF had
insisted all communications to and from the
Dutchman
went through UNEF
HQ in Paris. Skippy, naturally, had ignored silly monkey regulations, as the
commander, I had done my best to comply with the rules, whether I liked it or
not. "UNEF’s cover story, it should have been released to the public on
Earth by now, is that the Merry Band of Pirates, you know, the original crew,
came back to Earth aboard a Thuranin ship, because the Thuranin were upset that
the Kristang on Earth were acting without authority. The public thinks we were
passengers on the ship, flown by Thuranin, and the Thuranin killed the Kristang
on Earth, because those lizards were ransacking the planet of an ally.
Governments thought it would be too much for the public to take, if they
learned that both the Ruhar and the Kristang are our enemies, that the entire
galaxy is hostile to humans. Hostile, with an overwhelming technological
advantage. For myself, I'm not sure the Ruhar are enemies, they seem more
likely to ignore us than bother conquering us. I also don't know that the Ruhar
would go out of their way to help us, they have enough on their plate. When I
was on Paradise, after the Ruhar took the place back, their deputy administrator
told me they had plans to sustain UNEF, for a time, until humans could grow
enough food for themselves. That's all great, it all depends on what happens
with the Ruhar's wider military campaign, really it depends on how the Jeraptha
fare against the Thuranin. If the Jeraptha suffer a major defeat, the Ruhar
won't have the resources to spare for a low-tech species like humans. UNEF has
a lot of mouths to feed on Paradise, and I'm sure most of the Ruhar there don't
feel like they owe humans anything."

"Do you trust the Ruhar?" Simms asked.
"You had more contact with them than I did." I had told her about the
intel the burgermeister gave to me, intel I had distrusted, intel Skippy later
told me was a hundred percent accurate.

"I trust that the burgermeister, the deputy
administrator, was sincere about what she told me," I said honestly.
"I don't trust whether she will be able to deliver, it's not only up to
her." I turned my attention back to Graziano. “Doctor?”

“Yes, I will create a summary of what we know to date.
It is not much,” he said, almost as an apology.

“We all understand that, Doctor. Do the best you can,
and, whatever resources you need, to learn more about the people who lived here,
you will have it.”

Graziano asked for more people, and more equipment, to
assist in excavating the cathedral complex. There was no need for me to request
volunteers, everyone wanted to help. Graziano’s problem was not lack of help,
it was restraining the volunteers’ enthusiasm for moving rocks and digging
soil. Skippy volunteered also, he assigned a submind to research what he could
about Newark, attempting to figure how a civilization could have arisen on such
a frozen planet. And what caused them to become extinct. He called me while I
was helping Doctor Zheng collect samples from a pond three kilometers from our
home canyon. "Joe, after you found those bones, the tools and the ruins, I
took a look at Newark, and I discovered that something is very wrong with this
star system."

"Wrong, beyond it being a crappy place to
live?"

"Very much so. Disturbingly so. I wasn't paying
attention before, because I'm busy enough repairing the
Dutchman
and
passively scanning for enemy starships, so I didn't bother to investigate this
star system beyond the basics. It didn't matter before. Now it does, very much.
There is no way a complex species, an entire civilization, could have evolved
on Newark, the way the planet is now. There are currently no land animals at
all, above the microscopic level. Clearly, the planet's climate has changed
radically. The star's output has not varied significantly within the last
several million years, that cannot be the reason for the climate changing so
radically. Since you found those perplexing ruins, I ran back a mathematical
model of the orbits of all seven planets, and the math tells me that something
disrupted their orbits around 2.7 million years ago."

"Wow. I read something like that in a book
once."