Black Ops (Expeditionary Force Book 4) Read online

  Chotek ran a hand through his hair, I could tell he was forcing himself to be patient. As he made that gesture, I realized my timing could not have been worse. He was in a good mood, an almost celebratory mood. He had approved my plan for a mock attack on the Ruhar, rather than his preference of approaching the Ruhar openly to offer an alliance. He had suffered through an incredibly complicated operation to pick up two derelict starships. Now we had a Q-ship to use in the mock attack, and instead of acting pleased, I was throwing cold water on the whole idea. My timing sucked. I should have had this discussion while Skippy was working on the Q-ship. Or before. “You want to get another starship?” He asked quietly, in a tone with more than a hint of exasperation.

  “Yes, Sir. If we can.”

  “You have an idea of how we could do that?” His skeptical expression implied that if I had such an idea, we should have done it already. Perhaps we should have done it instead of constructing a Q-ship out of discarded transports.

  “We’re working on concepts, Sir. If we have to, we will go with the single Q-ship. For now, we should proceed toward the nearest Elder wormhole; that will take us two days. Once we get there, you can decide where to go. Skippy says we have plenty of time before the Ruhar arrive at the negotiation site.”

  Back in my office, Skippy’s avatar popped to life. “Joe, I heard your conversation with Count Chocula. I do agree that hitting the Ruhar with our one Q-ship is unlikely to make the hamsters pull out of the negotiations. However, you were wrong about one thing; it will take us five days to get to a wormhole, not two,” Skippy chided me.

  “Really?” I flipped my tablet open and pulled up the star chart app Skippy had supplied. It was constantly updated with the ship’s position, so the little pirate-monkey-on-a-flying-banana icon for the Flying Dutchman was always in the center. “There’s a wormhole, like, two days from here,” I tapped the screen, leaving a smudge mark.

  “Ugh, you smudged the screen again, Joe. I hate it when you don’t wash your hands after eating potato chips, it makes extra work for my cleaning bots.”

  “Huh,” I had been wondering how my iPad screen was always squeaky clean every morning. Feeling guilty, I absent-mindedly wiped my hands on my pants.

  “Damn it! Don’t clean your hands on your pants, Joe!”

  “Don’t worry, Skippy, the uniform of the day is Army Combat Uni, so on this camo, a couple greasy chip stains actually improves the digital pattern.”

  “You don’t have to do your own laundry,” he said in a huff.

  “Yeah, thank you for that.” Like the entire crew, I dropped dirty clothes in a bin, and the next day, they reappeared, cleaned and folded, tucked into drawers or the closet in my cabin. Skippy’s Magical Cleaning Fairy bots took care of most domestic chores aboard the ship. Somehow, he knew exactly which clothing belonged to which person, even Army-issue socks that looked identical to me. I had tried putting my dirty T-shirts in a bin far from my cabin, and the next day, my T-shirts were back in a drawer in my cabin. Skippy never said anything about me testing him, and I wasn’t going to mention it. “So, like I said, there’s a wormhole two days from here.”

  “Yup, wow, you can read a star chart. Do you want a trophy?”

  “No trophy needed, how about you give me an explanation instead?”

  “Me explain hyperspatial navigation to you? Ugh. I should get a trophy for that. All right, here goes nothing. Yes, Joe, there is a wormhole only two days from here. We can’t risk using that wormhole, we need to use the wormhole that is five days away.”

  “Incredible. Gosh, that was so difficult for me to understand, Skippy. Me caveman, hmm, two days not same as five days? Huuh? Me primitive mind blown! How about you, oh, I don’t know. What the hell, let’s go crazy; how about you explain why we can’t use the wormhole that is three days closer to us? You can manipulate wormholes to change their connections, right?” In one of our cargo bays was a ‘magic bean stalk’, an Elder wormhole controller module we had stolen from a Kristang asteroid research base during our first mission. Skippy could use it to shut down a wormhole, which is how the Thuranin and Kristang no longer had access to Earth. He had discovered that he could also use it to temporarily change which distant wormhole a nearby wormhole connected to. That had been my idea, by the way. Being able to temporarily change local wormhole connections saved the Merry Band of Pirates a tremendous amount of time, because we could use a single wormhole to get to our destination, rather than hopscotching from one wormhole to another like all other ships in the galaxy had to. We could go directly from, say, Atlanta to Duluth, instead of going Atlanta-Dallas-Chicago-Detroit-Duluth. Except, of course, there is no reason for anyone to ever to go to Duluth.

  Oh, crap! Now I’m going to get flooded with angry messages from the Duluth Chamber of Commerce. All I can say is, get in line behind the people from Newark, after I maligned their fair city by naming a miserable planet ‘Newark’. Anyway, bite me. “Before you tell me how stupid I am, I do know that each wormhole can only connect to a limited number of wormholes, and the potential connections don’t all make sense.” Like, a wormhole could be made to connect to another wormhole a thousand lightyears away, but it could not connect to a wormhole ten lightyears away. Skippy said the reason was complicated, which was his way of saying that he didn’t understand it.

  “Yup. That is not the reason why we can’t use the wormhole that is only two lightyears away. There is actually another wormhole that is only half a lightyear away from here, Joe, I didn’t show that closer wormhole on the display because it is dormant, and its potential connections do not go in the direction we need to travel. The reason we can’t use the closest active wormhole is I have become concerned that my messing with wormholes is dangerous. The more times I screw with wormholes, the more likely it is that someone will notice abnormal wormhole behavior, and attract the attention of the Maxolhx and Rindhalu. That has already happened; on our last mission, a pair of Thuranin ships were waiting for a wormhole that never appeared, so they had to jump to another wormhole emergence point and wait there. That was only one anomaly, but wormholes are predictable as a sunrise; even one hiccup is deeply troubling to the species who use them.”

  “Shit! Skippy, you didn’t tell me the Thuranin noticed us messing with wormholes.”

  “It was only that one incident, Joe. Uh, well, one that I know of,” he admitted. “I have tried to avoid messing with heavily-traveled wormholes, for that reason. The more traffic a wormhole has, the more likely it is that anomalous behavior will be noticed.”

  “Okaaaay,” I kept my breathing even. Crap. An idea I thought was a great timesaver for us, a major tactical advantage, might give away our presence and endanger our home planet. Maybe I should stop trying to think up clever ideas. “We should only use wormholes that don’t get much traffic, then?”

  “Yes. There is another problem, an even worse problem. There are three wormholes we have manipulated more than once, because they can be adjusted to provide convenient routes to Earth or Paradise. Each time I alter one of those wormholes, I notice their connection to the network is slightly less stable. And all wormholes in the surrounding local area become less stable. The level of instability increases on a roughly logarithmic scale, I won’t bother attempting to explain the math to you. To put it simply, I am concerned about destabilizing the entire wormhole network in this sector, and causing a shift. Another shift could undo everything we have accomplished out here. It could make it impractical for the Ruhar to base a battlegroup at Paradise; forcing them to abandon that planet and leaving UNEF at the mercy of the Kristang. Another shift could also give the Kristang access to Earth again. As I told you, the wormhole I shut down is not the closest one to Earth. This could be a major, major problem.”

  “Shit. Oh, shit. Should we stop messing with wormholes completely?”

  “I do not think that is necessary. Not yet. Some wormholes can be safely manipulated; for example the one five days away has never been adjusted, and it is o
n a local network we have never used. When I say it is ‘safe’, I mean in terms of not inadvertently causing a catastrophic wormhole shift. We will always run the risk of someone noticing that wormhole behavior has changed.”

  “Great. Just great.” We have a huge tactical advantage, and now we couldn’t use it. “So, I’m thinking the rule is you only mess with wormholes if it’s an emergency?” Crap. When was the Merry Band of Pirates ever not responding to an emergency?

  “That would be prudent, Joe.”

  “I will tell the crew.” Crap. Count Chocula was absolutely going to love hearing this news. Especially the part about the ship’s captain, me, not knowing about this danger until it came up in a casual conversation with our absent-minded alien AI. “Skippy, you need to tell me about these type of things.”

  “I figured there was no reason to worry you about it, Joe, until it became an actual problem.”

  “You figured wrong. As captain, I need to know about potential problems, so we can avoid making them into actual problems.”

  “Hmm. Um, I should probably tell you about Reactor Two, then-”

  A few minutes later, I wished he hadn’t told me. The ship was in even worse condition than I thought.

  Because I had learned that bad news does not improve with age, I went to see Chotek, while the ship accelerated away from the planet. Chotek had left his office and was in the conference room, talking about some boring thing with Simms and a few other people. When I told him we needed to talk about the condition of Reactor Two, he summoned me to sit down. What I told him was not good news.

  “Mister Skippy,” Chotek said, studiously avoiding looking at Skippy’s avatar. “Records from your second mission indicate you rebuilt the ship from raw materials. Can you not do that again?”

  “Correct, I cannot do that again.”

  Chotek and I shared a look. I bailed out my boss. “Skippy, that expression means-”

  “I know what it means, dumdum,” he said with his avatar’s hands on its hips. “I meant what I said. I can’t do that again. Yes, last time I used raw materials, but those only supplemented the materials and equipment on hand. I had to cannibalize parts of the ship to fix other, more critical parts. The equipment remaining aboard the ship is not sufficient to repair or rebuild most of the sophisticated systems that are wearing out. The Flying Dutchman is not a Von Neumann machine, you know, it- Oh, boy. Now I have to explain what a ‘Von Neumann Machine’ is to you.”

  I was puzzled by the reference, so I guessed. “A ‘70s progressive rock band?”

  “No,” the avatar buried its face in its hands. “This is hopeless-”

  “Oh, sorry, duh,” I said, embarrassed. “Hey, is Von Neumann the guy who wrote that song ‘I Love L.A.’? What does that have to do with-”

  “No, that was Randy Newman! Oh, why do I bother trying to explain anything to you? And you, Chocula, put your hand down, stop feeling so smug. Just because you know what a Von Neumann machine is does not make you smart; you’re like a four year old who is proud that he can go potty by himself. That is not a major accomplishment. For your education, Joe, a Von Neumann machine is a device that can make a copy of itself, using only raw materials from the environment.”

  That didn’t sound like any big deal to me. “So, it’s a woman?”

  “What?” Skippy sputtered. “No, you-”

  “Because any woman can do that,” I observed, getting an appreciative look from Major Simms.

  “No, it’s not a wom-”

  “Women do need a little help-” I started to say.

  “Very little help,” Simms rolled her eyes, and made air quotes with her fingers when she said ‘help’.

  “We men call that the ‘fun part’,” I laughed.

  “Joe!” The beer can avatar was hopping up and down on the tabletop. “Focus! Please,” Skippy broke down sobbing, “please, try to focus. Oh, why do I even bother? I’m on a pirate ship full of ignorant monkeys.” The avatar got on its knees, face in its hands. “I’m doomed, doomed, doomed.”

  “Wow, sorry, Skippy. You were saying that the ship can’t make a baby,” I suggested. “or, something like that?”

  “You totally missed my point as usual, Joe,” the avatar shook its head sadly, but at least it was standing up again. “The ship can’t fix itself, because it is not capable of making the machinery needed to create replacement parts. The Thuranin fleet does include support ships with extensive fabrication facilities, but even those ships can’t produce certain items, like atomic compression warheads. Or the exotic matter in superconducting magnets used for reactor containment systems.”

  “Got it,” I thought I understood him. “Even your magnificent awesomeness can only do so much, with the crappy equipment you have to work with.”

  “Exactly!”

  Chotek had gotten irritated by my back-and-forth with Skippy. UNEF Command should have included a sense of humor in their requirements for a mission commander, but they hadn’t, so we were stuck with Hans Chotek. To be fair, he wasn’t as stiff as when he first came aboard, but he could still be a major dick sometimes. Most of the time. “Mister Skippy, we appreciate that this ship can’t continue flying forever, without access to a Thuranin shipyard. How long can we fly, until the ship becomes permanently disabled?”

  “Even I can’t answer that, Chocky,” Skippy said as his avatar put a hand on its chin thoughtfully. “There are too many variables; the number and distance of jumps we make, whether we engage in combat again, all that. Even flying through normal space creates wear and tear on the shield generators, to prevent impacts from space junk and protect the crew from radiation. The stealth field is the system that is most likely to fail without being repairable; I am using my own capabilities to enhance our stealthiness, so we can use the ship’s stealth field at a lower power level. The jump drive coils are the most critical system we have aboard; as they wear out, we can’t replace them. If you ask me to guess, and of course you will, I would say that Reactor Number Two will be the first to fail. The good news is that when I have to shut down Two, I can cannibalize it to keep One and Three online longer. At our current tempo of operations, Reactor Two will likely fail within seventy four days.”

  Based on the shocked faces around the table, seventy four days was much less than the crew expected. If they had even thought of the ship as something that could wear out at all. With Skippy’s magical, largely unseen bots handling all the maintenance, most people aboard tended not to think of the Flying Dutchman’s systems at all; it was like air on Earth. You breathed without thinking about it, and never considered free atmospheric oxygen as something that needed to be renewed. I had the most frequent contact with Skippy, and even I often took our stolen star carrier’s smooth operation for granted. “Sir,” I looked at Chotek, “in a way, this makes decision-making simpler.”

  “Simpler? How?”

  “We have all been thinking, in the back of our minds, that whatever our current mission is, we need to make sure the Dutchman is available for future missions, indefinitely. Now, instead of planning missions with the idea of preserving the Flying Dutchman as a resource available to UNEF Command, we need to think of the ship as a use-it-or-lose-it proposition. Our pirate ship has a limited life remaining, so we need to make the most of it, before some critical system fails and leaves us stranded dead in space.”

  “Colonel,” Chotek said with a troubled expression, “I hear you. However, I believe we should not give up on this ship, until we have considered all alternatives. Mister Skippy, Earth has considerable industrial resources. Is it possible that an extended stay at Earth could allow you to construct the equipment needed to keep the ship functional?” As he spoke, I could almost see the wheels turning in his head. He was hoping humans could build facilities to create advanced technologies that would not only repair the Dutchman under Skippy’s direction, but also be available for humans to construct our own ships in the future. Our own totally human-controlled ships, that would not require Ski
ppy to operate. UNEF Command would love to break our reliance on an untrustworthy alien AI.

  “Uh, no.” Skippy’s avatar rolled its eyes. “Earth does not have industrial resources anywhere near the level of development that would be useful in repairing this ship. And before you ask, the answer is no; I can’t give you the technology needed. Right now, I am already skating on the thin edge of having to shut myself down by talking with you. You know that my programming prevents me from revealing my presence to technologically advanced species. Humanity’s level of technology is still pitiful, but you being aboard a Thuranin star carrier, simply operating basic flight controls, or sensor and weapon systems in the CIC, has me on the verge of shutting down. I am having to fight with some of my internal systems, and that causes conflicts that make me create workarounds. The next dumb question you are going to ask me,” the avatar looked directly at Chotek, hands on its tiny ‘hips’, “is whether I could give you a data dump of technology you need, so that even though that will cause me to go silent, you would be able to operate the ship on your own. The answer is no, and hell no. I know this, because I have tried doing that already.”

  “You did?” I asked, surprised. “When was this?” He had not mentioned it to me before.

  “On our second mission, when we got jumped by that squadron of Thuranin destroyers. If you remember, I heroically volunteered to sacrifice myself for this troop of flea-infested monkeys-”

  “I do remember, and I remember that was a terrible, awful plan, Skippy.”

  “Ok, so maybe it wasn’t the best idea I ever thought of, but still, I valiantly offered to lead the Thuranin away so you could escape-”

  “Which would not have worked.”