Black Ops (Expeditionary Force Book 4) Read online

  "Gaaah!" I jumped up from my chair, startled. "What the hell is that?"

  Standing in my office doorway was a slightly fuzzy Jedi knight, with brown robes and a glowing lightsaber. The reason I knew it had to be Skippy was the face was chrome rather than skin. “This is my avatar, Joe. You said it is difficult for you hairless apes to converse with me sometimes, because I am a featureless chrome beer can. Is this better?”

  “You decided to become, what, Skippy Wan Kenobi?”

  “Sure, let’s go with that.”

  I sat back down and leaned my chair back. “I don’t know about that, Skippy. The Jedi were mystical warriors who could control the universe through the Force-”

  “Uh huh, yeah, and yet they fought by whacking the bad guys with sticks.”

  “It’s a movie, Skippy, don’t think too hard about it, Ok? I don’t want you geeking out and trying to calculate the numbers of janitors needed aboard a Death Star or something like-”

  “That’s easy, Joe. Assuming a diameter of-”

  “I said don’t geek out on me.”

  “Well, if I can’t be a Jedi, don’t ask me to be Darth Skippy.” The Jedi avatar turned off his lightsaber and crossed his arms.

  “Darth Skippy?” I snickered. “That’s funny.”

  “It is not funny! Darth Vader is a loser! They should have painted a big white ‘L’ on the forehead of his helmet.”

  “What? Vader is a loser?”

  “Joe, Joe, Joe. Think about it.” Skippy Wan Kenobi shook his head sadly and leaned back against the doorframe. “Oh, damn, it’s you, why do I ask you to think? Listen, what Anakin Skywalker wanted was to be a great Jedi and to have a life with his wife and family. Instead, he gets suckered by the Emperor and used by the Dark Side of the Force; murders a bunch of children, gets his ass thrown into volcano so he lives in constant terrible pain, gets his wife killed, and his own son ends up chopping his hand off. Loser. Looooser.” Skippy Wan Kenobi used a thumb and index finger to make an ‘L’ on his avatar’s forehead.

  “I never thought of it that way,” I had to admit.

  “Joe, you could have ended that sentence with ‘I never thought’ and it would be completely accurate.”

  “Could you be Skippy the Hutt?”

  “Uh, no,” Skippy stuck out his tongue at me. “Han Skippy?”

  “You? Not happening. Chewbacca?”

  His avatar became a tall, fur-covered alien, but the fur was silver. “Raraaaaragher!” His voice trilled gruffly like a Wookie. “I just asked you if this is good, in Wookie language.”

  “Oh. It sounded like you were choking on a Chewbacca-size furball.”

  “Very funny.”

  Skippy was really getting into the avatar thing; I wondered if having Nagatha communicating with us had made him jealous of the positive attention she got from the crew. Could an ancient, super-powerful AI get jealous? “Ok, forget Star Wars, then,” I suggested.

  “How about Star Trek?” The avatar was now dressed in a Starfleet admiral’s uniform.

  “Can I think about it? This avatar things will take some getting used to. And don’t go scaring the crew, please.”

  “Um, too late for that, Joe. You should have told me that right away, you dumdum.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Um, my Jedi avatar just surprised Sergeant Adams when she was coming out of the shower. She has impressive reflexes for a human; if I wasn’t a hologram she would have given me a beat down. I won’t be doing that again.”

  “How did you do that?” I closed my eyes, imagining the trouble he was causing for me.

  “I can create multiple holograms at the same time, Joe,” the avatar replied with a tone that implied an unspoken ‘duh’.

  “Oh,” it was my turn to groan, “you’ve got to be kidding me. Adams-” Right then my zPhone rang, and who would have guessed? It was Adams. “Sergeant, I-” I had to hold the phone away from my ear, she was yelling so loud. Covering the microphone with a finger, I waved to Admiral Skippy of Starfleet. “I’ll talk with you later, Skippy, this is going to take a while.”

  “Uh huh,” the avatar nodded knowingly before blinking out of existence. Through the speaker in my tablet, he continued talking. “There are, um, eight other people trying to call you right now. No, now there are twelve. Damn, who would have thought you humans would be so sensitive, about an avatar appearing while they are naked in the shower?”

  I slapped my forehead. It was fifty minutes before the beginning of the morning shift; a time when a lot of the crew would be showering. “Oh, this is going to be-” My thoughts were interrupted by a livid-faced Major Simms, her hair still wet and her uniform top misbuttoned, knocking on my doorframe. I softly pounded my forehead on my desk. “Damn it, I hate my life.”

  My day just kept getting better and better after that.

  We jumped in almost a million miles from the red dwarf star’s gas giant planet; Skippy had been cautious when programming the jump, due to our lack of data about the star system. What little we did know was data gathered at long range, mostly by the Jeraptha. The system had a star that was small and cool even for a red dwarf, and three planets. Two small, rocky inner planets, and gas giant about the size of Neptune. If we had not needed fuel, there was absolutely no reason to ever visit that star system.

  “Hmmm. That is interesting,” Skippy said shortly after the jump. “The planet has an incomplete ring. Huh. There is a significant cloud of rocks in orbit, that’s going to make navigation tricky.”

  “Tricky, like we should find another place to refuel?” I asked.

  “No, we can keep the Dutchman outside the cloud; the problem is the dropships will need to make a longer flight from the ship and back, and they will need to insert from a polar orbit. This is curious, the orbital mechanics of the meteor cloud do not match the five moons. Something must have disrupted the orbits of- Oh, yeah. Hmm. Very interesting. Even the moons have been thrown off their original orbits. Something odd happened here.”

  My Spidey sense tingled. “Could this be anything dangerous, Skippy?”

  “I haven’t completed a sensor scan yet, but there is no sign any ship is here, or ever has visited this system. There are no loose gases in orbit, like I would expect if a ship had picked up fuel here. No sign of ships here now, or any satellites. No, Joe, this isn’t dangerous, it is merely curious. You should be happy; poking into the mystery of what happened here will keep me busy for a while.”

  “Busy is good. Tell the pilots which orbit you want us to put the ship in; I want us humans to fly the ship by ourselves. How long until we can launch the dropships?”

  “Roughly thirteen hours. Our momentum is carrying us away from the planet; we will need to reverse course to slow down, then catch up to it before we can establish a stable orbit. I will have the rock cloud fully mapped by then.”

  “Pilots, follow Skippy’s instructions.”

  I expected Skippy to protest that us flying the ship by ourselves was a waste of time; he must have been extra busy unravelling the mystery of the unexplained moon orbits, because he replied distractedly with “Uh huh, yeah, sure. Fine. Course plotted and transferred to navigation system. While we are waiting, we could- Uh oh. Wow! Joe, you need to see this!”

  Before I could open my mouth to ask what was so exciting, Skippy replaced the main bridge display’s status readouts with a sensor image of a moon. Or most of a moon, because a big piece of it was missing. “Whoa,” was all I could say.

  “That’s a Death Star,” Adams exclaimed excitedly. She was right. The moon was spherical, and a whitish gray in color. The surface was covered in the usual assortment of meteor craters; what made this moon different was the giant crater that had been scooped out of one hemisphere. This crater was bigger in diameter and deeper than the laser dish of a Death Star. The very bottom of the hole was flattened, like lava or something deep within the moon had flowed into the gap and filled part of it in.

  “That thing is more like
a Dead Star,” I remarked without taking my eyes off the display. “Skippy, I am leaning toward jumping us the hell out of here right now.”

  “No need to do that, Joe!” He answered anxiously. “This solves the mystery of why there is a cloud of rocky debris around this planet. There is absolutely no indication of recent activity in this system. I am running back the orbits of the debris cloud, give me a moment here. Gosh, I used 78% of my processing capacity to perform those calculations quickly. The debris cloud was created millions of years ago.”

  My Spidey sense tingled hotly. “Millions of years, like around the time Newark was pushed out of orbit, and funky stuff happened to Elder sites?”

  “Uh, hmm, exactly. At first, I thought two moons might have collided here, but when I ran the orbital mechanics backwards, I can see this was no natural event. There had to be Elder-level technology involved in blowing up that moon.”

  “This does not make me happy, Skippy.”

  “Me neither, Joe.”

  “I meant I am not happy about being here.”

  “Oh. I meant I am not happy that I did not predict this star system could potentially be host to an Elder site. I still do not understand why the Elders would have placed a facility on that moon. Since a big chunk of the moon is missing, I may never know.”

  “Sergeant Adams,” I turned to look at her, “you are correct; that moon does look like a Death Star. But that crater is way bigger than the laser dish thing in Star Wars. Skippy?”

  “This moon is three thousand miles in diameter,” Skippy stated, “and the crater is almost one thousand miles across at the lip. The crater is only three hundred miles deep, still, the event which left that crater almost cracked that moon in half.”

  “You think maybe the Elder facility exploded somehow?” An accident would be the least alarming scenario I could think of right then.

  “Nope. This was deliberate. There was hostile action here, Joe. I hasten to remind you this happened a very long time ago; it does not represent any threat to us today.”

  Great, I thought. The science team would be beating on me for permission to drop down to that moon to examine it. And they were right, we should not miss an opportunity to gather more information that might help explain what the hell had been going on in the Milky Way galaxy, after the Elders departed and before the Rindhalu developed space flight capability. Since I couldn’t send a science team down by themselves, they would need an escort, and of course Major Smythe would want the opportunity to conduct low-gravity training on that moon. If the away team took a nuke with them, maybe Chotek would grant permission for a mission down to the moon. I doubted that, but I would ask anyway.

  Hans Chotek surprised me again. He not only gave permission for the science team to land on the Dead Star moon, he wanted to go with them. Being aboard the relay station, he told me, had given him a different perspective. He had been able to think of the mission as a whole, rather than focusing only on the actions of the Flying Dutchman. “Besides,” he told me with a slightly embarrassed shrug, “it would be a shame for me to return home, without having walked on something other than the deck of this ship.”

  Once he had made the decision to go down to the moon, Chotek was eager to get going; he left in one of our big Thuranin ‘Condor’ dropships as soon as we were close enough. To speed his journey, I asked the pilots to change course so we would swing close to the Dead Star. It’s not that I was trying to get rid of Chotek as fast as I could, I- Oh, hell, that’s exactly why I did it. It would be good to let someone else deal with him for a while. The away team took two dropships, two nukes, portable shelters and plenty of extra oxygen tanks. I almost asked Major Simms to pack stuff so they could make S’mores on their camping trip, but then I realized since he was an Austrian, Hans Chotek probably had never heard of a S’more. That was his loss.

  Simms assured me she had packed plenty of Austrian chocolates aboard Chotek’s dropship. I think she was happy to be staying aboard the ship this time.

  Adams walked into the gym as I was finishing a workout. “Sergeant,” I waved her over. “I didn’t see your name on the list of people requesting to go down to the Dead Star.”

  “Yes, Sir. I had shore leave the first time you went down to Paradise,” she meant the mission where we used Perkins’ team to reactivate the buried maser projectors. “I want to give someone else an opportunity to get off the ship for a while.”

  “That’s nonsense, Adams. You named the Dead Star,” technically she called it the Death Star but close enough. “You should see it in person. There is plenty of space in the dropships,” the away team was flying two of our large Thuranin dropships we called ‘Condors’, “and in the shelters. And we’ll be rotating people back to the ship; this crazy refueling ops Skippy has planned is going to take a while. Also, with the science team going down there, I need some adults to supervise.”

  “It would be good to get off the ship for a change,” Adams said, in a longing voice women usually reserve for the prospect of getting chocolate.

  “You’re a Marine, Adams,” I teased her, “you’re supposed to be deployed aboard a ship.”

  “Not all the time, Sir, not every. Freakin’. Day. And being deployed shipboard doesn’t mean we enjoy that, it’s just part of the job. I guess being out here has its benefits; I haven’t been invited to any cookware or candle parties.”

  “Huh?” I had no idea what she meant, and wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  She rolled her eyes. “One of those ‘parties’ where you go to some woman’s house and they serve wine, and then get to you buy a bunch of useless crap you don’t need.”

  “Oh!” I laughed. “Yeah, my mother used to get dragged to those parties. Adams, that is one reason why being a guy is way better than being a woman. If one of my buddies invited me to, like, a fishing tackle party, I’d say: ‘Get the fuck outa here. I’m not going to your stupid party. What the hell’s wrong with you?’ And that would be totally Ok, nobody would get hurt. Also, no guy would ever try that shit again. But you women can’t do that.”

  “Sometimes you have to support your friends,” she replied defensively.

  “If one of my friends needs extra money, he can do something useful like replace the roof on my toolshed, or replace the brake pads on my truck. Don’t try selling me a bunch of crap. Or I’ll loan him cash.”

  “Being a man is so much easier,” she admitted.

  “Hey, you women make these social rules, you can change them.”

  “I’ll get right on that, Sir. After we save the world-”

  “Again,” I finished the thought for her.

  Adams walked off to the treadmills, while I picked up a dumbbell to do curls.

  “Joe, are you flexing in front of that mirror?” Skippy chuckled.

  “Checking out my guns, Skippy,” I grunted while curling a weight, flexing my biceps. Sure, I wasn’t in Olympic athlete condition compared to our SpecOps team, but-

  “Ugh. Damn, it’s a good thing there aren’t many women in here to witness this travesty. It’s supposed to be beefcake, Joe, not Spam cake.”

  A woman behind me laughed and I felt I needed to defend myself. Especially because the woman was a Chinese Night Tiger and she could kick my ass from one end of the ship to the other. “Hey, I’m not-”

  “Maybe tufocake, since it’s you,” Skippy mused. “Something soft and squishy.”

  I almost dropped the weight on my foot. Crap, maybe I needed to start working out in my tiny cabin.

  “Explain this to me again, Skippy,” I said as I ran a hand over the kludgy rig we had installed on one of our larger dropships. It looked like a cross between a high school science project and a yard sale. A lame science project like one of mine, not a project by one of the smart kids who actually knew what they were doing. While Chotek with most of the science and SpecOps teams were away on their fun-filled camping trip on the surface of the Dead Star, and Skippy’s bots were busy skittering around repairing the ship as best t
hey could, the Flying Dutchman’s crew was supposed to be collecting fuel.

  “Again?” Skippy sighed. “Joe, this is the third freakin’ time! I explained it to you twice before. Were you not listening, or can your brain not comprehend even this tiny bit of my awesomeness?”

  The truth was, I wanted him to explain it again, in order to delay launching two of our dropships on what I considered a dangerous mission of dubious value. “Both, Skippy. I have a meatsack brain and a short attention span. Humor me, please.”

  “Ugh,” he sighed. “Fine. Most ships that refuel from a gas giant lower a special fuel-collection drogue into the atmosphere, at the end of a long cable. Star carriers do not refuel themselves, so we do not have a drogue. And before you ask me another stupid question, no, we did not have a drogue the last time we took on fuel either. Back then, we had a frigate,” he meant our captured Heavenly Morning Flower of Glorious Victory, “that I could remotely dip into the atmosphere. Now all we have is a lifeboat that has no propulsion. So, my plan is to have two large dropships dip into the atmosphere, flying in formation with my super-duper fuel collection scoop gizmo suspended between them.”

  “Calling it a gizmo is not a great way to convince me you know what you are doing.”

  “I am not a salesman, Joe. Imagine I said it in a way that will convince you.”

  “You are not going to be flying one of these things, Skippy,” I stood on my toes, reached up and rapped my knuckles on the cabin of the dropship. “The pressure vessel on this thing is, what, 2 millimeters thick? That is the only thing holding the air in, to protect the crew.”

  “More like one and half millimeters, Joe. You are correct that the pressure vessel is the only thing protecting the crew from the harsh vacuum of space. On this mission, holding air in will not be the problem. For my fueling gizmo to work efficiently, the dropships will need to get deep enough in the atmosphere that they will experience pressure equal to thirty times that on Earth’s surface. If the pressure vessel ruptures, the cabin toxic gases will rapidly pour in, and the crew would be crushed.”