SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) (9 page)

Oy vey.

Now I had a headache.

Before we made the final jump, to recon our first
target of Skippy’s list of potential Elder sites, I wanted to speak to the
crew, the entire crew

"No chimp this time, Skippy, Ok? No replacing my
image with a monkey, no matter what you think of us."

"Agreed, Joe, that was only funny one time."

"Thank you."

It was a short speech, nothing inspirational, simply
reminding everyone that we were about to jump into a star system that we, even
Skippy, knew little about, and that we might be jumping away with no notice to
the crew. The pilots had orders to initiate a short emergency jump on their own
judgment, without waiting for the officer on duty in the bridge. It was a
simple talk to the crew, that I did not intend to be anything memorable, but,
Skippy had other ideas. I learned almost immediately what he had done after
clicking the intercom button off. I learned about it, when Sergeant Adams
forwarded a video recording of my speech to my zPhone.

Crap. On the video feed to the rest of the ship,
Skippy had replaced my image and voice, with Barney. Barney, the big stupid
purple dinosaur. He hadn't only altered my voice; he'd changed some of my
words. My speech didn't begin with 'This is Colonel Bishop', it began with
'Duh, hello, boys and girls', in classic moronic Barney tones. There I was, a
big idiotic dinosaur, sitting in the command chair in my uniform, talking like
I had an IQ of 30. Damn it, I hate that smug little beer can.

On the other hand, everyone got a good laugh at my
expense, so it was good for crew morale. “All right, all right,” I said with as
much good nature as I could muster, “let’s focus, people, we have a jump in
twenty minutes.”

I took a quick bathroom break, and used it as an
opportunity to speak with Skippy in private. "Skippy, about that Barney
video-"

"Funny, huh? The crew loved it."

"Yeah, hey, you know, there were other characters
painted on the side of that ice cream truck. Why don't you show me as Ironman
or-"

"The Smurfs?"

I'd forgotten about the Smurfs.

"Not the Sm-"

"The only one people remember is Barney."

"All right," I was tired of fighting about
it, "fine, Barney. This is another case where it's only funny once, you
understand that, right?"

"You sure about that?"

"Pretty sure, yeah."

"Uh oh. Hmm.”

Crap, I thought. "What did you do?"

"I can neither confirm or deny, but, somebody
whose name rhymes with, let's say, 'Stippy', may have left behind a virus that
altered your image, on all the video recordings of your intelligence
debriefings in Colorado Springs. That virus may have taken effect after we left
Earth."

Great. Just great. "Some guy named Stippy,
huh?"

"Yup. You should never trust him, that guy's a
real asshole."

The jump in was uneventful, Skippy declared within
five minutes that we were alone in the star system. Fifteen minutes later, the
crew monitoring sensors in the Combat Information Center agreed, and I ordered
the ship to stand down from battle stations. Then we began the painstaking
process of searching for an Elder site. The star system, centered on an
unremarkable red dwarf star, had one smallish gas giant planet, about the size
of Neptune. Skippy thought the most likely place for the Elders to have located
a facility, was on a rocky moon orbiting the gas giant. Quickly, the ship’s
sensors identified three large and two small rocky moons, plus two more that
were covered in ice. Skippy warned that locating an Elder site could take
considerable time, as the Elders may have partially hidden it, and most of the
facility could be buried deep under the surface.

He was wrong. “Ah, damn it, found it,” he announced,
sounding disgusted. “It’s on the second largest moon, on top of a plateau.
Whatever its purpose, the Elders didn’t make any attempt to hide it. And
somebody has already been there, there’s debris scattered around the site and
the surface is disturbed from where dropships landed. Crap! We are way too
late. Some hooligans already ransacked the place.”

Hooligans? I wondered where Skippy picked up his
slang. “Sorry, Skippy, but, hey, this is not a failure. I think this is great,
we proved your model for locating unmapped Elder sites is correct, and we
didn't encounter any hostiles when we jumped in, or take a risk checking the
place out. This is the first place we've looked; did you really think we'd hit
the jackpot the very first time?"

"It would have been nice," he grumbled. Then
sighed, I wondered how Skippy decided when to fake a sigh, since he didn’t
actually breathe. "You're right, you're right. This does prove I know how
to locate Elder sites that are not known to the Thuranin or the Jeraptha, or at
least not in databases I have access to. Anything useful was probably taken
from this site a long, long time ago. Joe, when you've been waiting as long as
I have, it is frustrating to get all the way here, and find some jerk has
looted the place."

“Is it worth going down there anyway, to check it
out?” With this star system apparently uninhabited, I wanted to take advantage
of an excellent opportunity for training. Our pilots could practice flying
dropships down to the surface of the moon and back, and soldiers could gain
experience using suits on the mood, in low gravity. Partly because I felt bad
about denying the science team more time at the abandoned space station, I
wanted the science team to also be able to get away from ship, go down to the
moon, and poke around in an Elder site. Even if the site had, as Skippy feared,
been stripped of anything valuable, the science team could learn what an Elder
site looked like, get used to it, so if we found an unmolested site, the team
would not waste time with sightseeing and marveling at the novelty of it.

“Sure, what the hell, why not? It’s possible that the
hooligans who vandalized the place were only looking for weapons, or something
they could sell to buy drugs,” he said bitterly, “they might not have recognized
a comm node as anything valuable. It would be good for you monkeys to get the
sightseeing over with here anyway, when we do find a site that hasn’t been
screwed with, I don’t want to waste time with you monkeys taking selfies and
crap like that.”

“My thoughts exactly, Skippy,” I agreed.

"Colonel Chang," I turned the chair to look
into the CIC, "how about you take the Chinese team, and the Indians,"
those two teams were currently at the top of a randomly-chosen rotation,
"and a scientist down there, recon the site, see if the looters left
anything useful? If not, we at least gain experience using suits on the surface
of an airless world."

"Yes, sir," he responded eagerly.

"Captain Desai," I turned back face the
front of the bridge compartment, "if flying a mere dropship is not too
boring compared to a starship, would you like to ferry Colonel Chang's team
down for some sightseeing?"

"Oh, I think I can manage it, sir," she said
with a wide grin, sliding out of the pilot couch.

Desai set the dropship down carefully, half a
kilometer from the largest building of the Elder site, and Chang took first
three people over to the site, then called in others. It wasn't easy for me to
resist the temptation to micromanage the landing party from orbit, so I pretended
to a calm I didn't feel and went to my office, to give Major Simms more time in
the command chair. And to let Chang and Desai make decisions on their own. After
an hour, I couldn't stand it any longer, and returned to the bridge. Simms
stepped back to her duty station in the CIC. Right away, I noticed something
odd on the main bridge display, a sensor analysis that depicted the gas giant
planet was surrounded by a loose cloud. "Major Simms, what is that?"

"We have been practicing using the sensors, sir,
Skippy wanted sensors to scan the orbit around the planet, we've been trying to
see if we can get the same readings from the data as he does. There is some
kind of atmospheric gas surrounding the planet."

"Good idea," I said, we shouldn't rely on
Skippy for everything. "What is so interesting about this space gas,
Skippy?"

“Joe, I’ve found something odd," Skippy said, in
a voice that I associated with my high school science teacher. "There is a
measurable part of the planet’s atmosphere in orbit.”

“You mean, higher than it should be?”

“Yes, these gases are not technically part of the
atmosphere now, however, from the ratio of elements in the orbiting gases, I
can tell they came from the planet, they aren’t something ejected by a volcanic
eruption on one of the moons. Except, hmm, that is odd.”

“What?’” Truthfully, right then I did not much care
what scientific oddity Skippy had discovered about a small gas giant planet,
orbiting a dull red dwarf star, a long way from Earth. On the other hand, I did
not want to insult Skippy by being openly disinterested. “What’s odd about it?”

“The chemical elements that are missing.”

“Uh, can you be more specific?” Trying to feign
interest, I was about to suggest that he discuss this with the science team,
rather than me. “This planet is missing some type of gas, that, uh, gas giants
normally have?” In a flash of insight, I asked “Is that because this planet is
small, for a gas giant? Hey, is there a special name for a gas planet that
isn’t a giant? Do we call it a gas normal, something like that?”

“We don’t- “

“If the planet was much smaller, it couldn’t be made
of gas, right? The gravity would be too low to contain the gas, and it would
escape into space, be boiled off by the solar wind?” Man, I was proud of myself
for thinking that on my own, I remembered reading that the reason the
atmosphere of Mars was so thin, was that most of it had been blown away by the
Sun’s solar wind over millions of years.

“Yes, that is both correct, and irrelevant to the
current situation,” he said. “This planet has a normal distribution of gases,
for a planet of this size, considering the gaseous composition of its star. The
odd part, which I was about to tell you before you side tracked me with your
moronic speculation on a subject you know zero about, is that there are gases
present in the planet’s atmosphere, that are almost entirely missing from the
cloud of gases enveloping the planet in low orbit. For example, and most
telling, helium 3.”

Moronic? Now I was insulted, and figured this was a
challenge. “Well, uh, some elements are lighter, and so those would have been
pushed out of orbit by the solar wind here? And the heavy gases would have
fallen back into the atmosphere.”

“Joe?”

“Yes?”

“Here’s a quote I read, from a smart monkey: 'it is better
to remain silent and be thought an idiot, than to speak and remove all doubt'.”

“Oh, that’s hilarious, you shithead.”

“Me a shithead? You’ve been giving me guesses that are
about on the level of astrology in terms of scientific relevance. If you will
please
,
shut your pie hole for a moment, I will smack some actual, useful knowledge on
you. Knowledge that, as the commander of this mission, and man, every time you
open your mouth, I realize what a gargantuan mistake that was to put you in
command of anything more important that a lemonade stand, you should be
interested to hear, because it represents a potential threat to the ship.”

“Shutting up now,” I said in all seriousness.

“Great. Finally. Planets that are surrounded by an
orbiting mixture of atmospheric gases are not unusual, I have seen them many
times before. It is not the fact that this planet is surrounded by escaped
gases that is interesting, what is interesting is why those gases are likely
there. My guess, and when I make a guess it is based on solid data and rational
analysis, unlike the idiotic BS that comes out of your mouth, my guess is that
those gases are in orbit because they were pulled up in the process of ships
extracting useful gases from the atmosphere. Starships use gas giant planets as
a supply of elements for fuel, reaction mass, and other purposes, depending on
the technology of the ships involved.”

“Holy crap!” I gasped. “You’re telling me this damned
planet is a gas station?”

“Sort of, yes. Not the sort of gas station that has a
convenience store where you can buy Slurpees and week-old hot dogs. Maybe, it
is more of an inconvenience store, where you have to make everything from the
basic elements. But yes, the sensor data points to this planet having been used
to extract starship fuel, in the past.”

“Past, like, yesterday, or like, a million years ago?”
I asked anxiously. To Skippy, who had existed possibly for millions of years,
time had a totally different meaning than it did for modern-day humans, who
measure time mostly in terms of TV show seasons.

“That is difficult to tell, even for me, Joe. We don’t
have enough long-term data about this star system, for me to accurately
forecast timelines.”

“Give me a wild guess, was it more or less than a
thousand years ago?”

“Oh, in that case, less. Not yesterday, either. Maybe,
within the last year. Or, hmm, I’m running an extrapolation here, maybe, more
like within the last month, based on dispersement of the waste gases. Possibly
less than a month, there is a whole lot of waste gas in orbit here. And, while
this star is nothing special, it is conveniently located between two wormhole
clusters, so it is a particularly good candidate as a frequently-used refueling
stop.”