SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) (43 page)

"Cease fire! Cease fire!" Skippy shouted
over the private channel. "Stop shooting, those two are dead. You're wasting
ammo."

Before I had to say anything, we all stopping shooting
at the two now-inert Kristang leaders. Our two men in armor didn't hesitate,
they kept running toward the armory building. This was the moment of maximum
danger; if that lizard in the armory decided he had nothing to lose, and
detonated the explosives, we could lose our two men in suits, the comm node,
and the AI. I was about to order the two men in suits to halt, so we could try
talking to the remaining Kristang, but the sharp crack of a rifle interrupted
me. The sniper we had assigned to cover the armory had not lost focus for a
second, despite the gunfire ringing out all around him. The massed fire had
attracted the attention of the laborer in the armory, curiosity, or maybe the
fear of not knowing what is going on, overcame his better judgment, and he
popped his head up for a quick look.

Not quick enough. Our sniper, from the Chinese team,
drilled him once in the head with an explosive-tipped round, and that was the
end of it. Fortunately, the laborer hadn't rigged up any kind of dead-man
switch on the explosives, nothing happened. "You certain you got
him?" I asked the sniper.

"Yes, sir," he said, and transmitted his gun
scope camera image to my zPhone.

There was no question about it, that lizard's head had
exploded like, well, I'll spare you the unpleasant details. What mattered was,
that lizard wasn't going to be a problem for anyone, ever again. "Alpha
team," I ordered the two men in suits, "approach with caution. Everyone
else, hold position."

We waited while the Alpha team in their armor
carefully leapfrogged toward the armory. This was a situation where I wish we
had the full suite of Kristang infantry fighting gear, especially recon drones.
We could have launched a drone into the armory, without risking anyone's life,
to get us all the intel we needed. As it was, with only two armored suits and
no recon gear, we made do with what we had. One, then both, of the Alpha team
disappeared inside the large door of the armory, then one of them came outside
and waved to me. "All clear, sir, no booby traps. He would have had to
manually set off the explosives, looks like he was mostly bluffing."

"Skippy?" I inquired. "What do you
think?"

"I concur, all is clear. None of the Kristang are
alive."

"Damn," I breathed a sigh of relief,
"we did it. We actually did it."

Smythe safed his weapon, stood up, and crisply saluted
me. "Sir, we destroyed their air power, and neutralized all of them,
without a single shot being fired in our direction. This is the most successful
operation I've ever been involved in. That was a hell of a plan, sir."

"So far, Captain. So far." We still needed
to hide from the Kristang ship that would arrive before the
Dutchman
was
ready, then later get off the planet safely. "Let's secure Skippy's magic
radio and the AI, and then I'll think about celebrating somewhat."

The Elder gear we wanted was in a pile on the floor of
the armory, underneath a dead lizard. I ordered the Alpha team to remove the
dead Kristang, as the seven foot tall body was too heavy for me to move by
myself. It took a few minutes of sorting through the pile to find the two
things Skippy sought; the AI and the comm node. The comm node I found first, it
was in a box, surrounded by padding; the Kristang must have recognized it as
something at least semi valuable. "Ok, we have the comm node-"

"No!" Skippy interrupted me. "The AI,
find the AI."

"All right, all right," I assured him.
"Looking for it now." Setting aside the comm node, the magic radio we
had come all the way out here to find, I continued sorting through the pile,
until I reached the bottom. There was no AI. "It's not here."

"What?" Skippy's voice carried a touch of
panic. "It has to be there!"

"Hold on, Skippy, don't worry yet. I only looked
through the Elder gear that guy had with the explosives. He probably didn't
have time to take all the Elder artifacts out of where they are storing them.
There's a bunch of lockers and containers here, we'll find it."

And we did find it, forty minutes later. We tore the
armory apart, looked in every container, every locker, and we found all kinds
of Elder artifacts, mostly damaged, all worthless according to Skippy. The AI
wasn't anywhere. "Crap!" I swore in frustration. "We'll have to
search every nook and cranny of this entire base, then. Captain Smythe, split
up the team-"

Williams interrupted me. "Got it! Found it, sir,
I think. Is this it?" He held up an object identical to Skippy, except
this one had some green sticky substance on one side.

"Yes!" I exulted. "Where did you find
it?"

"In the trash can, sir," Williams answered.

"The trash can?!" Skippy shouted. "Damn
it! If those lizards weren't already dead, I'd kill them for that."

"Skippy, they didn't know what they had. The
lizards and the hamsters kept you on a dusty shelf, they didn't know how
valuable you are either." I took the AI from Williams and carefully rubbed
the green goo off with a rag, it came off easily, nothing stuck to that shiny
chrome surface. "Ok, what's next?"

"Touch your phone to the surface, it needs to be
in direct contact."

"That's all?" I asked skeptically.

"Yes, we're making do with what we have here.
I'll take it from there. Good, hold it right there, right there. Huh," he
said, "let me try it again. Huh."

"Anything?"

"No, no, nothing. Trying it again. Damn it."

"Skippy?" He didn't answer me. I had been
touching the top of my zPhone to the top of the AI. Now, I set the zPhone down
on a table, and put the AI on it. It couldn't be touching any more firmly.
"Hey, Skippy," I said softly, "do you want to try it again?
Skippy?"

"I did already," he said, and he didn't even
bother faking a sigh.

"Nothing? I'm sorry, Skippy." Damn I felt
just awful for him. Essentially alone in the universe, he thought he had found
one of this own kind, but it was inert. "Hey, listen, we'll bring the AI
up to the
Dutchman
with us, and you can try it again there."

"Why? It's dead, Joe, there's nothing in that
canister. There is no use bringing it to me."

"You know this because you have contacted
apparently inert AIs before?"

"No. Duh. This has never happened before, as far
as I know."

"Then you don't know that it won't work,
right?"

He sighed, and the fact that he made the effort to do
that for my benefit was encouraging. We didn't need a depressed AI working on
the delicate task of repairing the ship. "You're right," he said
glumly. "Sure, what the hell, I'll try that."

"I'm sorry, Skippy, I really am."

"Yeah, I know. Ah, time heals all wounds, right?
It's only been a minute for you, but in Skippy time, that happened like a year
ago, I've gotten over my initial disappointment," he said more cheerfully.
"You're right! Yeah, maybe the AI needs to be within my true range, using
your phone only allows me to work within this spacetime. Yeah! Hey, that's it.
Damn it, I'll have to wait until I can send a dropship down to get it. Ok,
let's try the comm node now."

"No," I said flatly.

"No?" Skippy said, surprised. "Oh, shit,
is it damaged? You told me in was in a nice padded box, you jerk!"

"It's not damaged, Skippy, I don't want you
screwing with it, until we're back aboard the Dutchman. Think about what might
happen if this comm node works, and you contact the Collective right here? Like
you told me, you might go Poof and disappear. And then we monkeys would be
stuck down here, with repairs to the
Dutchman
incomplete, and us with no
way to get back to the ship anyway." I caught Smythe's eye, and he nodded
approval. None of us wanted to risk Skippy disappearing before we were ready to
leave Newark behind. "So, the answer is no, you're not going to attempt to
use the comm node yet, I'm keeping it securely in the box. If you want to try
using it, then you finish fixing up the ship, get it here, and send down
dropships to pick us up."

"Fine," he huffed. "I guess that's
fair. To tell you the truth, as much as I do want to contact the Collective, I
want to see if I really can fix this ship first. That would be something to
brag about, huh?"

"If? You mean 'when'," I said fearfully.
"
When
you fix the ship, right?"

"Oh, yeah, sure. No problemo, Joe. Uh huh, right.
I mean when I fix the ship. Things are going well up here, Joe, no major
disasters within the last, oh, six hours, almost. Nothing I can't handle."

"Great." I had to take him at his word, there
wasn't an alternative. "Is there anything else we can do here,
Skippy?" I asked, panning my zPhone camera over the array of Elder
artifacts laying on the floor, "Bring any of this other stuff with
us?"

"None of it is useful to us," Skippy said,
"although we need to do something with it anyway, if that Kristang ship
gets here and detects a whole bunch of Elder gear still in the vicinity of the
scavenger base, that will blow our cover story of another Kristang clan coming
here and ripping off the scavengers. We can't count entirely on our missile
getting all of it."

"Uh, huh, got it," I said with dismay. Some
of the Elder gear was heavy, or bulky, or both. Bringing all of it with us
would be a substantial burden, the hillside caverns where I planned for us to
hole up were seventy kilometers away. So was most of our food supply.
"This is a lot of stuff to carry."

"Sir?' Gomez spoke up. "This guy here,"
he nudged the dead laborer with his boot, "had the place ready to blow if
we tried to capture him. Maybe our cover story could be the scavengers here
blew up most of the Elder gear, to keep the Red Stone clan from taking
it?"

I looked at him in surprise.

Smythe nodded agreement. "That would save us from
having to haul all this kit a long way, sir, we could take some of it with
us."

Damn, that was a good plan, I should have thought of
it. "Skippy? Does that sound good to you?"

"Yeah, sure, what the hell," he answered
listlessly. "Sorry, Joe, I'm very disappointed about the AI, that's all.
Yes, that plan makes sense. Pile the explosives around most of it, set a timer,
and blow it. That will be convincing. If the ship scans the area, they'll see
plenty of expended Kristang cartridges from the firefight. The missile is on
its way, that will cover up any contradictory evidence."

"Great. Good thinking," I addressed Gomez
and Smythe. The missile, which Skippy had launched on its long journey across
the star system while we were still driving the RV across Newark, had been
taking a slow orbital approach to Newark. Now that we had cleared the scavenger
base of Kristang, and retrieved the useless Elder gear, the missile only needed
our strike team to clear the area, before it accelerated in and impacted the
center of the base. The missile was one of Skippy's handmade units, not one of
our precious Thuranin ship-killers with the fancy atomic compression warheads.
Skippy's homebrew warhead was powerful enough to burrow into the soil of
Newark, and create a crater larger than the scavenger base perimeter, it also
would leave trace signature elements of a typical Kristang warhead blast. That
missile was Phase Four of my plan, covering up evidence that the base had been
raided by a party traveling overland. Data that Skippy would plant in the two
Kristang satellites would show a Kristang ship unstealthing in orbit, a pair of
dropships strafing the scavenger base, then landing and a firefight at the
base. The armory would blow up, with most of the Elder gear, then the dropships
would take off, and the ship would fire a missile at the base, before
recovering its dropships and jumping away. I'm sure Skippy would make the whole
event look thoroughly convincing in the satellite data banks. When the Kristang
ship arrived to pick up the scavenger leaders, it would find a muddy crater
where the base had been, and a familiar story of the scavengers being raided by
a rival clan. There would, I fervently hoped, be absolutely no reason for that
ship to have any curiosity about the rest of the planet, no reason to actively
scan the surface. No reason to initiate a scan that might find RV tracks
leading toward the base, a scan that might detect an RV sunk in a river. No
reason to scan the area around the two crashed scavenger aircraft, a scan that
very likely would detect signs of recent habitation. Signs of the area being
inhabited by, of all unlikely things, humans.

If the Kristang ship hung around Newark a moment
longer than it needed to, I hoped that all it would send a dropship down to the
Elder crash site, to see if the scavengers had missed anything useful. That
would keep the Kristang busy, until they got bored and went away. No humans had
been to the crash site, so the new group of Kristang wouldn't find any trace of
us there. "I'll take the b-" I almost said 'beer can', "the AI
and the comm node." Maybe Skippy could find something useful to do with
them later, and it didn't feel right leaving the dead AI where it was.
"The rest of it, we cover with explosives, and set a timer." I looked
up to the north, where dark clouds were gathering, and a chill wind was
beginning to stir. "Let's get moving, we have a lot of ground to cover
before nightfall."

When the Kristang ship arrived, I was outside the cave
getting much-appreciated fresh air in the early morning hours, stretching my
legs and taking in a quick change of scenery. During daylight hours, we kept to
our three cramped caverns, a big treat for us was bunking in a different cavern
for a few days, being able to see relatively new faces. We got notice of the
ship's arrival almost simultaneously from our zPhone detecting the gamma ray
burst, and from Skippy calling us. "That Kristang ship is here, Joe, you
best get under cover."

"Roger that," I replied, and didn't need to
say anything else, as we all double-timed back to our respective caverns. No running,
this was a disciplined group and no one needed to be scolded for risking a
twisted ankle or broken leg in the semi-darkness. "ETA?"

"It jumped in far away from the planet, far even
for a Kristang ship, their jump drive appears to be in poor condition. My guess
is they won't enter a stable orbit for another day, maybe more. They're pinging
the scavenger camp, and of course getting no reply. They also just requested a
download from the satellites, I'm giving them everything we want them to see."

"Great. I'll check in with you every six hours,
you contact me if anything happens that I need to know about."

"Affirmative.
Dutchman
out."

"Hey, Colonel Joe," Skippy called me,
startling me. I'd been sitting on a rock near the entrance of the cavern,
watching a cold rain splatter down outside, slowly drinking a cold
chocolate-banana sludge. There wasn't much else to do, and I'd slept plenty
already, maybe too much.

"What's up, Skippy?"

"Uh, we gots a tiny problemo."

"Oh, like what?" I snapped my fingers to get
people's attention, and around me, I could see people stirring and putting on
their zPhone earpieces so they could listen in.

"Two pieces of news, one bad, one merely FYI. The
FYI part is that ship is sending a dropship down to check out the Elder crash
site, in case the scavengers missed something. For now, they're not going to
bother inspecting what's left of the scavenger base, and they're not interested
in the crash sites near our main encampment, where we shot down those two
scavenger aircraft. They completely bought the story I fed them in the fake
satellite data. True to Kristang, they 're not even pissed about being raided
and having all the scavengers killed, thy are only pissed that some other clan
stole the Elder artifacts."

"That is actually good news so far, Skippy.
What's the bad news?"

"More like extremely annoying news, but it could
turn out to be devastatingly bad, we'll have to wait and see. From internal
ship communications, leaking through their hull because of a shockingly, and I do
mean I am truly, actually shocked this time, Joe, I'm not merely doing the old
joke where I only pretend to be shocked, you know what I mean? You say you're
shocked, but you actually mean the opposite? The most famous usage of that
phrase, of course, was by Claude Raines in the movie Casablanca, although that
line is strangely misquoted very often. The correct-"