SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) (6 page)

Before committing to the second target, we were going
to investigate the first target, the supposedly abandoned Kristang space
station. Hopefully, we would find a comm node there. If not, I had maybe a week
to think up an alternative to Skippy's second target.

I needed to put my thinking cap on.

Before we investigated the abandoned space station for
real, we practiced maneuvers in vacuum and zero gravity. I ordered the ship to
halt in interstellar space, and Desai flew the
Flower
a short distance
away, to act as a target. Then, several teams practiced getting into a small
dropship, flying over near the
Flower
, and people in suits crossed the
remaining distance to the
Flower
as an assault team. Using Kristang
powered armor suits in deep space was very different from playing around with
them in a cargo hold. Many times, Skippy had to seize control of suits to
prevent the wearers from hurting themselves or others. We all learned together,
slowly. The suits by themselves had small thruster units, which allowed the
wearer to prevent spinning out of control, the suit thrusters weren't much use
for flying across distances. We had a sort of jetpack that could be attached to
a suit, the jetpacks were bulky, and we only had fourteen of them, and we
shouldn't need them to get across the short distance between a dropship airlock
and the space station. What we practiced was one person launching him or
herself from the dropship's airlock, carrying a line. When the line was firmly
attached to the
Flower
, the rest of the team followed by pulling
themselves along the line. We also practiced recovering people who had gone
spinning off into space, that was good practice for our inexperienced dropship
pilots. And if many of those people had gone spinning off into space by
accident, that only made the recovery exercise more realistic. One of those
unfortunate people who had accidently gone spinning off into space and needed
to be recovered had a name like 'Shmoe Bishop', that guy really felt like an
idiot.

After two full days of intensive exercises, during
which every SpecOps team and every pilot had multiple opportunities for
practice, I was satisfied that we were ready enough to investigate the space
station for real.

We approached our very first target slowly and
carefully, initially jumping in to the far edge of the star system, and sitting
there quietly for eighteen hours. Our passive sensors listened for any sign of
activity, no matter how faint, and found nothing. Next we jumped in about a
million kilometers from the target, and listened for six hours, although Skippy
complained that he'd gotten all the useful data in the first three hours. So, I
listened to him complain for fifteen hours, that was a real treat for me.

Finally, we went to battle stations, and jumped within
a hundred thousand kilometers of the supposedly abandoned space station. The
pilots were on a hair trigger for an emergency jump away, they didn't need to
wait for an order from the duty officer. "Skippy," I asked anxiously,
"what do you think? Is this place really abandoned?"

"Give me a break, Joe, I'm stuck with the speed
of light here, everything is incredibly freakin' slow. There are no ships in
the area. The whole area certainly appears to be dead, nothing out there is
generating power. What I can't tell yet is whether there are any hazards like stealthed
mines. That's what I'm scanning for now, with this ship's crappy sensors, it
will take an hour for a full grid search. I have to warn you, Joe, in order to
verify there are no booby-traps inside the station, we need to move the ship
close. I'm talking about physical devices, like explosives attached to
airlocks, that sort of thing. I need to be closer, like within twelve thousand
kilometers."

"Ooooh." Twelve thousand kilometers, that
sounded way too close to me. The distances involved in space combat were hard
to comprehend, all my military experience involved line of sight warfare. Even
in space, with nothing between me and the target, I couldn't actually see
anything from twelve thousand kilometers away. The problem with space combat
was the enormous distances involved, distances so vast that even light took
seconds or minutes to cross the gap. Against the distances separating
combatants were the speeds of the weapons; masers, particle beams,
hypervelocity railguns, missiles that could accelerate at five thousand times
the force of gravity. From our position a mere one hundred thousand kilometers
away from the station, we were in danger from speed of light weapons, which our
shields could deflect long enough for us to jump away. If we went in only twelve
thousand kilometers, a railgun or even a missile could close that distance,
punch right through our shields and knock out a reactor, before we could jump.
Did I want to take the risk of bringing the ship in that close? "Can we
send a dropship instead?"

"No, I need this ship's sensors. This may all
look like magic to you monkeys, Joe, but this is technology, and even for me,
it has limits."

"Damn. All right, Pilot," I said to Desai,
"bring us in. If you think anything is a threat out there, don't wait for
me, jump us away."

"Aye, aye, sir," she acknowledged.

There were no threats, and, Skippy declared, no booby-traps.
At least, no booby-traps in the outer layers of the station structure. The
space station appeared to be exactly what that data Skippy captured said it
was; an abandoned wreck. From twelve thousand kilometers, we could clearly see
holes had been blasted in it, jagged holes, and there were structures that had
been torn away like tissue paper, with pipes and cables sticking out. Because
people could get tangled up in those cables flopping around, we needed to avoid
those areas. That was not a problem, we located several airlocks with no
obstructions, and easy approaches for a dropship. There was also an open
docking bay, plenty large enough for several dropships, it was tempting, maybe
too tempting. I wanted a dropship to be able to get away quickly, that meant
avoiding confined areas like an open docking bay that could be a trap.

What I decided was for a single one of our smaller
dropships to go in, with two pilots, me, Giraud, and two others. Giraud had
removed the healing sleeve from his arm and found that it was very nearly as
strong as the other arm, and he declared himself fit for duty. Doctor Skippy
agreed, that was good enough for me. Desai backed the
Flying
Dutchman
off to fifty thousand kilometers away, and I left Chang in command. As the two
pilots of the dropship were British, I chose Captain Xho of the Chinese team
and Captain Chander of the Indian team to go in with me and Giraud, to make our
initial exploration team truly international. It was very important, I thought,
to avoid the appearance of me playing favorites among the five nations that
comprised UNEF.

The pilots parked the dropship fifty meters away from
the airlock we selected, and we opened the dropship's own airlock. Giraud went
first, he flew across the fifty meters of vacuum and missed the airlock by only
a meter, he was able to grasp a handhold and pull himself over to the airlock
and attach the line. I followed, with the Indian and Chinese soldiers right
behind, pulling ourselves along the line. The armored glove of Giraud's hand
touched the airlock door, and nothing happened. "I suppose it's too much
to hope the power is still on," he said, bending down to peer at the
dust-covered panel to the right of the door, "after all this time."
Moving as carefully as he could, he tried to brush the accumulated layer of
dust away from the panel, most of it smeared, or clung to his gloves.
"That didn't work," he complained, "we should have brought a
brush with us, or a towel. Where did all this dust come from?"

"Debris from the battle that caused the station
to be abandoned," Skippy explained. "The station's surface was
slightly magnetized from its defensive shield, when the shield was deactivated,
particles were attracted to it. There is not that much dust, Captain, the
problem is your gloves are only smearing it around."

"Do you see any lights on the panel,
Giraud?" I asked. The view from his helmet camera was available on the inside
of my helmet faceplate, I could toggle the display either on my left wrist pad,
or with my chin, although I hadn't quite gotten the knack of doing it with my
chin, I kept flipping the display back and forth annoyingly. The view from his
helmet camera was distracting, he was moving around too much. I pulled myself
over next to him, far enough away not to hover over his shoulder and distract
him.

"It's hard to tell," he answered, "the
light is very harsh here, without an atmosphere to filter it." Giraud had
a good point, all of our zero gravity training had been in deep interstellar
space, with artificial lights provided by the
Dutchman
, the
Flower
or a dropship. We should have, I should have, thought of how being in intense
starlight would affect people in suits.

"All right, we can't stay out here, try the
handle," I ordered. The door, like almost all airlocks, had a manual
release mechanism, for use in case of power failure. This door had a nice big,
obvious lever, painted yellow and red, on the right side.

"Trying it now," Giraud said.

I could see his right hand reach out and grasp the
lever, then turn it to the left. Immediately, a loud trilling sound blasted out
of my helmet speakers. "Get out of there!" I shouted. "Retreat!
Ret- wait, wait. Everyone, wait." I recognized that trilling sound from
somewhere. The trilling sound repeated, then I heard voices, human voices, it
was difficult to make out what they were saying. "Skippy, what, what the
hell is that?"

"Oh, that's ‘Soul Finger’ by the Bar-Kays."

"Soul F-. Oh! My! God! What the
hell
is
that song doing all the way out here?" I looked around, everyone I could
see had their mouths agape with astonishment. Why in the hell did a Kristang
space station, abandoned hundreds of years ago, have a human 1960s funk R&B
song as a door alarm? My brain almost locked up in confusion.

"What? Duh, it doesn't, Joe, the real airlock
alarm is a boring 'beep beep' sound, I spiced up the signal for you over your
helmet speakers. Oh, hey, you dumb monkeys thought that was
real
? Oh,
man, this is freakin' hilarious! Hahahahahahahahaha! Oh, damn, Joe, you should
have seen the expression on your faces. Hahahaha! Man, now that was truly
priceless! Damn! I got to do that again sometime."

I was pissed. "No, you got to do that again,
never. Understand? You scared the hell out of me, Skippy. That could have been
dangerous, if someone had moved too quickly and been injured. Everyone, do you
see now the crap I have to put up with from our friendly beer can?"

"Colonel," Giraud responded, "I've told
you before, any time you want Skippy to take a long ride out an airlock, you
let me know, I'll be happy to do it for you."

We got the door open, and the inner door, and
discovered there was a thin residual atmosphere in parts of the station. Skippy
warned us not to try popping open our faceplates and sniffing the air. It was
too thin, he reported, and contaminated with dangerously toxic chemicals left
over from the battle. Skippy didn't need to warn us; no one was tempted to open
our space suits.

The inside of the station looked very much like the
inside of the
Flower
, a standard Kristang design that had changed little
in several hundred years. Our captured frigate the
Flower
itself was
almost two hundred years old, and Skippy said the Kristang were still building
frigates that were almost identical today.

Our investigation of the space station took two full
days, and was a complete bust. We found only a few, useless pieces of Elder
artifacts. It wasn't clear who was more bitterly disappointed; me or Skippy.
After forty six straight hours of rotating teams in and out of the station, we
had poked our noses into every nook and cranny of the place, and not found
anything useful. "Skippy, is there any point to us staying here longer?
The Kristang put a space station here because an Elder starship broke apart in
orbit, is there a chance they missed something? Should we scan space around the
planet, see if we find any Elder artifacts?"

"I already did that, Joe," Skippy responded,
"space around here is empty of anything useful, the lizards did a good job
of picking up all the valuable pieces. They should have, this station was
operational here almost two hundred years before the conflict damaged it,
plenty of time to survey every cubic meter of space for a half million
kilometers from the planet. Even dumdum lizards couldn't miss finding all the
good stuff when they have two hundred years to do it. The answer is no, there
is no point to us remaining here any longer, unless you find it useful for crew
training."

The
Flying
Dutchman
had hung motionless
in space, exposed, for far too long. I wanted us to get the hell out of there
and on to our next objective. Our next objective, which we still hadn't decided
on. I ordered an end to the exploration effort, as soon as the Chinese team
aboard the station could be extracted. "Colonel Chang," I said over
my zPhone, "we're pulling out, get your team back aboard the dropship as
soon as you can do so safely."

"Yes, sir," Chang replied, "this is a
good opportunity for training, but there is nothing useful for us over here.
We'll be back aboard the
Dutchman
within an hour."

News that we were pulling out quickly spread
throughout the ship, and within less than ten minutes, Skippy called me while I
was in my office. “Joe, Doctor Venkman is on her way to see you, the science
team asked her to talk to you about-”