SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) (17 page)

Either I sucked at lying, or my parents simply knew me
too well, my story didn't convince them. They knew not to ask too many questions;
I could see it in their eyes. The next morning, my mother left the table at
breakfast because she was crying so much. My father took me out in the field
behind the house, supposedly to show me how he'd modified the tractor to run on
home-brew wood alcohol. "Son," he said, with his head half under the
engine cover, "I don't know what the real situation is, and I'm not going
to ask you to tell me. You're wearing sergeant's stripes now, and I heard one
of those Air Force security people call you 'Colonel' last night. Whatever is
going on, know that your mother and I are damned proud of you. I have only one
question I'd like you to answer." He pulled his head out of the engine
cover and looked me straight in the eye, with a glance over at Sergeant
Kendall, who was standing a discrete distance away. "Are we safe now from
those damned lizards? And the hamsters, and whoever else is out there?"

"Yes, Dad. I can't tell you why, or how."

"Good," he breathed a sigh of relief.

"Good." I said, not knowing what else to
say. Sergeant Kendall cleared her throat meaningfully, with a look at the
dropship. It was time to go. "You did a good job on the tractor
there."

"Ayuh. We're getting gas supplies again, it's
rationed, of course. And electricity, you saw that."

"Yeah. Looks good." My parents' house had
lights all night again, things were getting back to normal on Earth. That was
worth fighting for. "Dad, I have to go."

"Ayuh, I suppose you do." He stuck out his
hand awkwardly, his jaw set. That's the way it had always been in our family,
we didn't talk about things. "Good visit, thanks for coming home."

I had been through too much to go for that bullshit
again. Not this time. Not again. I took my father's hand, then pulled him in
for a back-thumping hug. And I cried. And he cried too.

"Ah, shit on a shingle," he said after we
separated, and he wiped his eyes with the back of his flannel sleeve.
"You'll let us know what you're doing, when you can?

"Sure thing, Dad. You can count on it."

"So what did you forget?" Skippy asked,
bringing me back to the present.

"What?" I was still thinking of my last day
on Earth.

"Damn, you are forgetful," Skippy scoffed.
"You stopped in the middle of the corridor, because you said your forgot
something."

"Oh, I forgot my weightlifting gloves, that's
all."

That night, or actually early the next morning, I
awoke with a sudden jerk. Not the kind of thing where, when you're falling
asleep and your leg jerks by itself. I hate that. This was me soundly asleep,
having a dream, when my subconscious rudely pulled me out of it. For a moment,
I froze in shock, wondering if something had happened to the ship. No. No
alarms, no beeping from my zPhone, no Skippy shouting at me through the speaker
in the ceiling. It wasn’t the curry I had for dinner the previous night either,
that was delicious.

Then it hit me. An idea. I had thought of an idea
while I was sleeping. I rolled out of bed and began pulling pants and a shirt
on, after glancing at my iPad for the uniform of the day. Damn. It was 0337 in
the morning, ship time. Sometimes I wish my stupid brain would just let me
sleep. "Hey, Skippy, you awake?"

"Always. That must have been quite a dream, you
woke up fast."

Whatever I'd been dreaming about, it was gone now.
"Yeah. Hey, that map you showed us, of why it's going to take us five
weeks to get to the next potential Elder site, can you show me that again on my
iPad?"

"Done. Why? You checking my math in the middle of
the night?"

"Like that's ever going to happen. No, I'm
checking your logic."

Skippy snorted. "Wow, you sure you're not still
dreaming? Me? A flaw in my logic?"

"Not a flaw, a gap." I looked at the map. On
the 2D surface of an iPad display, it wasn't as impressive, or easy to
understand, as on the 3D displays of the ship's bridge. There was no sense of
depth. When Skippy first showed us star maps, I thought the 3D effect was nice
but not necessary, because the Milky Way galaxy is a disc, so not seeing the
thickness of the disc didn't matter much. I was wrong. At any scale other than
looking at the entire galaxy from far, far way, it sure does matter, because
the arms of the Milky Way's disc are thousands of lightyears thick, top to
bottom. The
Dutchman's
current position was in the Orion Spur, about six
hundred lightyears from the Gum Nebula. Yeah, that kind of description didn't
used to mean much to me either, back when stars were something I only saw from
Earth's surface. I touched the iPad display and zoomed in the view with my
fingertips. Wormholes now appeared, scattered here and there at random, the
wormholes showing as blinking purple lights. I touched a wormhole symbol, and a
dotted purple line appeared, showing which other wormhole it connected to.
Skippy had a way, on the main bridge display, of showing all wormhole
connections in the local area, I didn't need that at the moment. Some wormholes
connected to a wormhole only a dozen or so lightyears away, a few connected
points thousands of lightyears apart. The furthest Skippy knew of, was a
wormhole that connected to a wormhole seven thousand lightyears from the
Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, a distance of fifty five thousand lightyears from its
origin wormhole in the Perseus arm of the Milky Way. Why that particular
wormhole ended thousands of lightyears from the closest star, no one knew. The
average was around six hundred lightyears, no one knew why one wormhole
connected to another, for most wormhole connections went past wormholes they
should, logically, connect to. Even Skippy didn't know, and not knowing
frustrated the hell out of him. The arrangement of wormholes in the galaxy made
no sense, that was an affront to Skippy's sense of how the Elders would have
left things. And that left him wondering whether some unknown force had screwed
with the Elders' stuff, after they left. Or, worse, if what he thought he
remembered about the Elders wasn't complete. Or true.

"A gap?" Skippy asked. "I'm intrigued
by whatever your dumdum monkey brain could possibly consider as a gap, go
on."

"The problem is, there are other potential Elder
sites closer to us, but those sites aren't close to a wormhole, so we can't get
there, right?"

"Flawless logic with no gaps so far. You got it,
Captain Obvious."

No way was I getting back to sleep now, so I pulled my
boots on. "Tell me something, Captain Oblivious. We have our magic beanstalk,
an Elder wormhole controller module, in a cargo bay, right? Are there any
dormant wormholes you could open with the module, that would create a shorter
path to a potential Elder site? Or could you connect a nearby wormhole, to a
wormhole near some place we want to go, instead of where it connects to
now?""

"Ho-leey shit," he said slowly.

"That wasn't exactly an answer, Skippy."

"Give me a moment, for crying out loud, I'm
running through a ginormous data set here. Ginormous even for me. This could
take a while."

Skippy's voice faded away, replaced by a rock and roll
song.

"Skippy?" I was beginning to get worried.
The music kept playing. "Skippy?!"

"Ooooooh, that was a lot of data. Hey, I used 37%
of my capacity that time, a new record."

"What the hell was that?"

"Huh?"

"The music!"

"Oh, that was Don't Stop Believin' by Journey. I
thought you'd be lonely while I was crunching numbers."

"Very thoughtful. You scared me. Don't do that
again."

"You didn't like DJ Skippy-Skip and the Fresh
Tunes? Hey, I'm bangin' out nothing but hits here, home boy."

I laughed, in spite of my recent anxiety.
"Another time, maybe. You said crunched the numbers, and?"

"Oh, happy day. The answer is yes. Damn it, I am
a dumbass.
I
should have thought of this idea. Shown up by a monkey, how
humiliating. Damn it, now I'd be embarrassed to contact the Collective, they'd
all laugh their asses off at me. There are two sites we should check out, less
than a month away, if I reprogram an active wormhole, to connect to a wormhole
that has been long dormant. Hmm. Problem is, I'll need to put the original
wormhole back the way it was after we go through. Even then, somebody is going
to notice there is something odd going on with wormholes in this sector."

"That is actually a bonus, Skippy. Then the
wormhole near Earth will not be the only strange-acting wormhole, and that
makes it look less suspicious. The Thuranin or Maxohlx or whoever can chase
their tails trying to figure out what's going on, and take attention away from
Earth."

"The Maxohlx are vaguely cat-like in appearance,
but they do not have tails."

"It's an expression, Skippy."

"Oh. So noted. Hey, uh, Joe, we can, uh, keep
this between us, right? No need for the whole crew to know that I missed
something super obvious?"

I hit the door button and stepped into the hallway,
attaching the zPhone earpiece. "Don't worry, your secret is safe with me,
Skippy. In private, of course, I'm going to bust your balls about it every
chance I get."

"I would expect nothing less. A new course has been
loaded into the navigation system."

"Great. I'm going to the bridge, I'll notify the
pilot."

When I got to the bridge, Sergeant Adams was the duty
officer, sitting in the command chair. The two pilots, a French woman and a
Chinese man, were relaxed in their couches, it appeared they were running a
flight simulation. According to the main bridge display, the jump engines had a
22% charge, there wasn't anything for the pilots, duty officer or sensor team
in the CIC to do for a long while. The
Dutchman
was hanging in deep
interstellar space, 2.2 lightyears from the nearest star system, a red dwarf
that was a dime a dozen in the galaxy, a star nobody would care about.

"Captain on the bridge!" Called out someone
in the CIC behind me.

Adams turned the chair to face me. "Good morning,
Captain," she said while rubbing on one of her fingernails with a frown.

I blinked and opened my mouth, unsure what to say.
Before we left Earth orbit, I told the crew to dispense with saluting and most
formal military protocol, we were all going to be stuck in a can together for
months, possibly years. Adams not saluting me, therefore, was not a problem.
What surprised me was seeing Sergeant Adams using nail polish, and apparently
fussing over her nails. She hadn't been wearing nail polish when we first met,
at the Kristang jail where she had been tortured and we were both scheduled to
be executed. And we hadn't brought along any nail polish when we left Paradise.
When we landed on Earth, after the first day, she'd been taken away for a
medical checkup and debriefing, and I hadn't seen her again until the week
before the
Dutchman
departed, a week in which everyone involved was
frantically working 20 hour days to get the ship ready, and supplies loaded and
stowed away. If she had nail polish then, or in the weeks since, I hadn't
noticed. Most of the time I'd seen her, she'd been in the gym, or in the cargo
holds we were using for training. Neither of those places were good
opportunities for me to observe her personal grooming habits.

It wasn't that her wearing nail polish was a surprise,
she was a woman, and women do that, even when they are tough as nails Marines.
Maybe especially when a woman is a tough as nails Marine, she may feel a need
to have something that is personal and feminine. I don't know, women are still
a mystery to me. Adams is an attractive woman, if I can say that without being
creepy as her commanding officer. When I first met her, and all the way back to
Earth, her hair had been kept cropped very close, almost shaved. Now her hair
was loose, wavy sort of Afro type curls on top, short on the sides, and she had
kind of a, I guess it was a lightning bolt or stripe or something, shaved into
the right side. Also, when I'd first met her, busting her out of a Kristang jail,
her naked back had been scarred from torture. We had never talked about how she
had been abused by the Kristang, if she didn't want to talk about it, I wasn't
going to push her. What I had seen was that she'd been in pain when working out
in the gym then, and she'd worn loose-fitting clothes. A couple days ago, I'd
seen her in the gym, wearing shorts and a tank top, and there were no scars on
her skin. Dr. Skippy had taken care of her scars on the outside, Marine Corps
doctors had cleared her to return to the
Dutchman
, telling me they were
satisfied with her scars on the inside.

I raised my eyebrows and glanced at her nails.
"Red? Is that official Marine Corps red, Adams?" I knew she was a bit
self-conscious about being the only United States Marine aboard the ship.

She laughed. "No, sir, this is a more of a coral
red. The rest of me belongs to the Corps, this is for me. I just did my nails
this morning, and I chipped this one already."

"Looks good." I didn’t know what else to
say. "How are we doing?" As the captain, I probably should have been
more formal, requesting a sitrep or ship status, this is what happens when an
Army infantry grunt gets put in command of a ship. The Army has boats, not
ships.