SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) (47 page)

The senior staff were all gathered in the galley,
waiting for me. Chang was there, along with Simms, and the leader of each
country's SpecOps team. Plus Desai, representing the pilots, and Dr. Venkman
representing the science team, because I needed creative ideas from the science
team. And Sergeant Adams, although technically not senior staff, she was there
because I needed practical ideas. "We have a problem, a serious problem.
Not with the ship," I added hurriedly as I saw concern on people's faces.
"The ship is fine, and will be ready to jump again in six hours."

"Yup," Skippy said, "the ship is
hunky-dory, all-"

"Skippy, I will be speaking," I cut him off.
"I'd appreciate it if you hold your comments until I request your
input."

Faces around the galley reflected surprise, they all
expected me to joke around with Skippy as usual. The fact that I didn't, told
them this was not business as usual. Of course I couldn't see Skippy's face,
the tone of his voice spoke volumes. "Very well, Colonel," is all he
said, with no snarkiness, or friendliness.

"Thank you. Skippy was able to access data from
the ship that he destroyed in orbit over Newark, part of the data was messages
to the scavenger leader from his clan. To us, the most important of those
messages states that the Kristang are paying the Thuranin to send a special
long-range ship to Earth, without using a wormhole. That ship will arrive at
Earth in twenty nine months." People gasped and glanced at each other in
fear and shock. “You can see why this is a problem. We not only need to stop
that long-range ship from reaching Earth, we need to destroy it in a way that
the Thuranin will not realize the ship was attacked by humans, or even that the
ship was attacked because its destination is Earth. Somehow, we need to destroy
that ship, and make it look like an ordinary casualty of war. But, first, we
need to find it.”

On the trip from Newark to Fire Dragon clan territory,
we had a lot of time to come up with a plan to destroy the surveyor ship and
its escorts, before the surveyor began its long lonely journey to Earth. Our
collective brainpower, including Skippy, had nothing. Zero. No clue how, in our
no-longer-quite-a-star carrier, we could take on even one ship, without the
Dutchman
very likely being destroyed in the process. I was getting increasingly
desperate, even considering a suicide mission where the
Dutchman
would
jump in way too close to the surveyor, hit it with everything we had, and
detonate the dozen nukes in our cargo bay. Before I did something so desperate,
I would need to find an uninhabited planet that could sustain human life, to drop
off most of the crew. Trouble is, Skippy pointed out, planets that could
support complex, sentient lifeforms, and were within practical range of a
wormhole, were rare and valuable, and likely already had someone living there.
Even if I kept everyone aboard the
Dutchman
and self-destructed the
ship, it might not result in killing the surveyor ship, and even if it did, the
enemy would know the surveyor had been the target of someone very desperate,
desperate to stop that ship from reaching Earth. So, we were back to square
one. We needed data on where the surveyor was, where it was going, and what
ships would be escorting it. Without that, we were only playing useless 'what
if' games.

Which is why I found myself alone with Skippy, in the
smaller of our two remaining Thuranin dropships, buried inside a small
ice-and-dirt comet, drifting at high speed toward a Kristang data relay owned
by the Fire Dragon clan.

Our biggest problem, I had decided with a genius flash
of insight while I was in the gym, was not that the
Flying
Dutchman
was only one ship, or that it had been designed as a star carrier instead of a
purpose-built combatant intended to engage enemy ships directly, or that our
Dutchman
now had only two reactors instead of the original six. No, after I'd spent a
full hour in a brainstorming session that had yielded absolutely nothing, I
realized the problem was that we didn't have enough missiles. If we had a whole
lot of ship-killer missiles, we could jump in near an enemy ship, launch a
cloud of missiles, jump to another nearby location, launch more missiles, and
so on. Minimize the risk to the Dutchman with quick jumps, and eventually our
barrage of missiles was bound to overwhelm an enemy ship's defenses and score a
hit. The surveyor could jump away, we'd track it and jump to follow. "Hey,
Skippy," I said while bending down to wash my hands in a too-low Thuranin
sink, "can we make more missiles, and by 'we', I mean you? With the
equipment we have aboard the
Dutchman
?"

"Nope."

That wasn't quite the detailed answer I was hoping
for. "Because? Come on, Skippy, usually you want to give me a ton more
info than I ask for."

"And you ignore me and interrupt me until I can
dumb it down sufficiently, so my answer to you is a simple 'nope', you dope. I
already told you, what we have aboard is all we’re going to have. Some items,
like the atomic compression warheads, are impossible to create, without very
large, specialized facilities. The missiles propulsion units are also not
something I can make out of moon dust and dreams. In addition to the limited
number of Thuranin Model 30 missiles we have, that's what their designation
translates as, I was able to scrape together enough material to create a few
ship-to-ship missiles, roughly equivalent to a Kristang design that went
obsolete about seven hundred years ago. That's the extent of my miracles,
Joe."

"Crap. Dang, I figured that, had to ask anyway.
All right, well, can we get more missiles somewhere?"

Skippy snorted. "Your time on Newark, away from
me, made you dumber, huh? Sure, Joey, we can pop over to the local Missile
Mart, they're having a two for one sale for new customers with good credit. You
moron."

"I'm serious, Skippy. We've got a ship full of
bad-ass SpecOps troops that are spoiling for another fight. We raided a heavily
guarded asteroid, there must be an armory somewhere or a stores ship, where we
can steal some missiles."

"Uh, no. Hmm, you know what? I wonder sometimes
if you can even hear yourself talk, or do monstrously idiotic ideas escape your
brain without you realizing that you are speaking out loud? The Thuranin, and
Kristang, have stores or supply ships, that transport materials to
battlegroups. Those do frequently contain missiles. Those ships are also always
escorted by combatant ships; frigates or destroyers, precisely because they are
such tempting targets."

"Damn. Scratch that idea."

"Raiding armories, another idiotic idea you
mentioned, is close to impossible. The facilities that Thuranin use to
manufacture missiles, and atomic compression warheads, are always on large,
rocky, airless or nearly airless planets or moons. Uninhabited planets or
moons, in case of industrial accidents, which happen from time to time. The
facilities are buried very deep underground, I'm talking kilometers
underground, and they extend for dozens of kilometers, or more. Making atomic
compression devices is a very energy intensive process, the Thuranin use them
because their explosive yield is near that of a nuclear weapon, without the
radiation that is banned by The Rules, remember?"

"Yeah, I remember." Rules enforced by the
Rindhalu and Maxohlx on the lesser species that did the fighting for them,
Rules intended to keep the war from spiraling out of control and damaging
precious habitable planets that the two dominant species cared about.
"You're right, no way can we raid a place like that. Whatever plan we come
up with, it needs to make do with the weapons we have now."

"Unfortunately, yes. Also unfortunately, I still
do not see a way this ship can destroy a surveyor and its escorts. Destroy that
ship, in a way which avoids the Thuranin realizing the surveyor was the
target."

"Uh huh. Damn it, there has to be a way to do
that, we just haven't thought of it yet."

"In an infinite multiverse of probabilities, you
may be right. In this particular localized spacetime, I do not see it."

Which is, again, why Skippy and I were in a dropship,
frozen under the surface of a dirty snowball, hurtling out of control on the
very outskirts of a star system controlled by the Fire Dragon clan. Burying a
dropship in a comet was the best idea we had for how we could sneak Skippy
close enough to the relay station so he could ransack it for data. He needed to
fly within three hundred thousand kilometers to do that, and as the relay would
not simply dump all their data to us if we asked nicely, we had to sneak in
close. It was a chicken and egg problem, Skippy explained, the access codes we
acquired when Skippy took over the
Flying
Dutchman
had since been
changes in the normal rotation schedule followed by the Thuranin. With such
codes, we could have simply jumped in near the relay, requested a data dump,
and been on our way. Data relay stations were maintained at the edge of star
systems so Thuranin ships could exchange information, without having to risk
traveling into the web of gravity wells and relatively close confines of the
star system. The only easy way to get data from a relay, including the full set
of access codes, was to have a proper access code. Which we didn't have. Thus,
it was a classic chicken and egg problem.

A dropship, even a small dropship with an optimally
functioning stealth field, could not get close enough to a relay station. While
a stealth field would conceal the dropship, the relay station's sensor field
would detect some hidden object distorting the field, and investigate closely.
Perhaps the investigation would take the form of a missile or maser beam
strike.

Which is why we, actually Captain Desai, had come up
with the idea of us capturing a dirty snowball, carving a dropship-size hole in
it, and covering the hole. We rendezvoused with a small comet in an uninhabited
neighboring star system and got it wrestled it into a docking bay, by a dozen
people in powered suits. The damn thing still massed a couple tons, and we had
to be very careful even in zero gravity, not to squash anyone by a clumsy move.
Once in the landing bay, which was kept in cold vacuum, we carved out a hole,
Skippy and I got into the dropship, and the guys in suits carefully maneuvered
us into the hole and covered it.

"This is an awful, idiotic, terrible, terrifying
idea," Skippy lamented, "an idea of epic, incredible, mind-blowing
stupidity, Joe. Truly, in the history of the galaxy, I can't think of anything
that even comes close."

"What?" I asked. "This is a hell of a
time to tell me now, Skippy. It was your idea to encase the dropship in a
comet!"

"Yeah, that idea is truly brilliant."

"Then what about this is terrifyingly
stupid?"

"I didn't think
you
would be flying the
dropship, Joe. We are doomed!"

"Very funny.
Dutchman
, this is Barney,
we're ready in here."

"Roger that, Barney, you sit tight in
there," Desai replied.

Desai then accelerated the
Dutchman
in normal
space, so that when the comet was dropped off, it would have the precise course
and speed to fly by the relay station in the guise of uninteresting, ordinary
space junk that hung around the edges of all solar systems. The
Dutchman
jumped in, gently released the comet, maneuvered to a safe distance, and jumped
away. We were on our own. If all went well, we would fly by the relay station
in twenty two hours, and the
Dutchman
would jump back into recover us in
twenty six hours after that. Yay! Forty eight hours, alone with Skippy. He was
as thrilled about it as I was.

"I hope you didn't eat anything gassy for
breakfast. And, damn, could you lay off the aftershave a bit?"

"Oatmeal and wheat toast for breakfast, no
worries there, Skippy. And I'm not wearing aftershave, I didn't bring any when
we left Earth, you ass."

He made a sniffing sound. "Ugh, so that's your
natural smell? Next time, you should reconsider not bringing aftershave. Oh,
damn, and there's not even a shower aboard this thing. This is going to be a
long trip."

"Uh huh. You want to play chess, or
something?"

"With you? Ha! Maybe a game of 'Go Fish'?"

We mostly left each other alone after that, I read a
book on my iPad, tried to nap, ate a simple lunch, and read some more, while
Skippy did whatever asshole beer cans did. When I finished the book, I tried
playing chess against my iPad, concluded my always miserable chess skills may
have somehow deteriorated, and glanced over at Skippy, who was strapped into
the copilot seat.

"Hey, Skippy, you there?"

"I'm here. Always. What's up?"

"Something's bothering me. Terrifies me,
actually. How did that Thuranin destroyer squadron set a trap for us?"

"They-"

"Because if they know humans are flying this
ship, then even if they don't know we messed with the wormhole, we are totally
screwed."

"I don't-"

"Did I screw up somewhere, Skippy? Did I get us
all killed? Not the crew here, I mean, did I get all of humanity killed?"