SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) (56 page)

Simms shook her head, saying no, she hadn't smuggled
any alcohol aboard. That disappointed me, I'd been hoping our logistics officer
had thought of that, until I realized I was being very unfair to her. Simms had
a mountain of more important things on her mind in the scramble before we left
Earth, if I as the commander had wanted to skirt regulations, I should have
taken that upon myself.

Simms saw the flash of disappointment on my face, and
took pity on me. "I personally did not load any alcohol aboard with our
supply shipments, sir, however," she said with a wink, "it is
possible that people brought their own."

At that cue, the French team, who were responsible for
working in the galley that day, pulled a towel off a tub, and exposed four
bottles of champagne, chilling on a bed of ice. "Champagne, compliments of
France. Colonel, that is," Giraud said, "if this is acceptable aboard
a United Nations warship?"

"Captain," I replied, "as the United
Nations has never before had a warship, we can start our own traditions. I
believe that in the future, champagne should be
mandatory
."

That remark drew cheers from the assembled group.
Giraud and Chang popped the corks on all four bottles, and the party started.
As there were no wine glasses aboard the ship, we made do with plastic cups. At
some point, people clamored for a speech, so I stood on a chair. "In case
anyone has not heard, we are going home!" Wild cheering ensued.
"Every one of us is coming home, we didn't lose a single person. Lest we
forget," I almost paused, because 'lest' is not a word I'd used before in
my life, that must be the champagne talking. "I'd like to take a moment to
review what we have accomplished out here." Mild groans from the crowd.
"I will be brief, I promise! First, we didn't blow up the ship. Yet."
That drew a laugh. "The Thuranin almost did that for us, but we survive
humanity's first space battle. We landed on an alien planet, the first alien
planet for most of us, and we survived there. We traveled across the surface of
that planet, part of the way on foot, and defeated an enemy who initially had
the advantage of air power and numbers." I didn't mention that both the
comm node and AI we found there were dead, this speech was not a time for
downers. "We destroyed a Kristang ship in orbit, without that ship even
knowing humans were in the star system. And then, when we thought we were
safely back aboard the
Dutchman
and all we had to do was look for
another comm node, we discovered that our home planet was in danger. And, I am
pleased, very pleased, to say, that threat to Earth has been eliminated,
without this ship being put at serious risk. I call that a success,
people!"

Thunderous applause, no doubt aided by the champagne
that was now making a second round, to refill people's cups.

"When we were on Newark, I promised Skippy a
cake. What he wants with a cake, I don't know. We have cake anyway, in honor of
Skippy's overall awesomely awesomeness. All the accomplishments I mentioned, we
could not have done without Skippy. We wouldn't even be breathing air aboard
this rebuilt ship without Skippy. So," I raised my plastic cup of
champagne, "a toast to Skippy, who is more incredibly awesome that money
brains can imagine."

There were shouts of 'hear hear' and 'hooah' and
'huzzah' and other words in various languages. "Skippy, would you like to
say anything?" I asked, knowing he was listening.

"Oh, uh, damn," Skippy said hesitantly,
"no, now that you ask, I can't think of anything to say, darn it. This is
embarrassing. I guess, um, hey, for a barrel of monkeys, you don't smell as
terrible as I expected?"

That got a big laugh from the crowd. "We love you
too, Skippy." I said.

"Oh, shut up," he grumbled. "Darn it, I
knew I should have posted that 'no monkeys' sign."

The flight home was long and uneventful, unless you
count as 'eventful' our using a magic bean stalk to reactivate a wormhole that
was millions of years old, built by powerful beings who have since escaped the
physical realm. As soon as we went through the wormhole on the Earth side,
Skippy shut it down behind us again. Along the way, we didn't stop in any star
systems, and we didn't detect a single ship. Skippy said the chance of us
randomly encountering another ship, in the unimaginable vastness of the
galaxy's Orion Arm, was almost too small for even him to calculate. The closest
we came to another ship was detecting the extremely degraded remnants of an
outbound jump wormhole, nearly a day old according to Skippy. From the few
faint wisps of data the sensors could pick up, Skippy wasn't able to tell what
type of ship had jumped, or where it had gone. That was close enough for me. We
got the hell out of there as quickly as we could.

Just in case, we jumped to the orbit of Neptune, and
listened with passive sensors. Skippy originally had wanted to jump to a
different location, because he thought it would be immensely funny for the ship
to be circling Uranus. I vetoed that idea. If, by some incredibly bad luck,
there were Kristang ships at Earth, I wanted us to be fully ready to jump in
hot and hit them hard. There was no sign of any trouble in our home star
system, and the coded beacon on the UNEF guard channel was still faintly
beeping the ‘All Clear’ signal to us. Breathing a sigh of relief, I gave the
order to jump us into Earth orbit. We emerged somewhere over Australia, even the
most geographically challenged humans could recognize that continent’s
distinctive outline.

“Whoohoo! We’re here at last!” Skippy exulted. “Damn,
we’ve been away a long time, I need to check on my fantasy leagues.”

“Seriously, Skippy? That’s your first priority?” I
asked.

“Joe, what else am I going to do here in monkeyland?”

I guess he had a point. “Fine, great, do that. Can you
also-”

“Oh, for crying out loud! How the hell- what, how-”
Skippy sputtered to a stop, speechless. “Oh. My. GOD!” His voice thundered out
of the speaker so loud, my ears rang.

“What? What is it?” I snapped my fingers and glanced
at Chang, he knew exactly what I meant and he hit the battle stations alarm.
Desai turned halfway in her seat to look at me, one hand poised over the button
for an emergency jump away. “Skippy! What’s wrong?” I shouted. “Do we need to
jump away?”

“Huh? No, you moron. The ship is fine. Damn, I can’t
believe this. Un-be-LIE-va-ble! They broke it. They BROKE it! How in the hell
did a bunch of ignorant monkeys manage to do that?”

“Broke what?” I asked, and both Chang and Simms in the
CIC held up their hands, baffled at what could be wrong. They weren’t seeing
any threats on their sensors. “Skippy! Whatever it is, talk to me, please.”

“They broke it, Joe. They broke it,” he said slowly,
with great sadness.

I made a gesture of my hand across my throat, and
Chang cut off the
Star
Trek
battle stations alarm. “Broke what,
Skippy? Who broke what?”

“Me. Not
me
, me. The submind that I left
behind.”

“You, you left a submind behind? When? Where?”

“The answer to ‘when’ is before we left Earth, you
dumdum, when the hell else would I have done it? And the ‘where’ isn’t a
physical ‘where’, I created an incredibly crude, dumbed-down sub-submind and
uploaded it to your internet. Now I look, and the thing is completely
corrupted! Gone! It’s gone! Oh, my beautiful little submind, I hardly got to
know you. And, damn it! It crashed less than two months after we left, I didn’t
even get halfway through a fantasy season. Shit! I’m looking through the server
logs now, it looks like it got piled on with so much worthless junk to process,
it wasn’t able to cope. And then one last video file overloaded it. Poor
thing.” His voice sounded genuinely sad. “How could this have happened? It makes
no sense. Because I knew it would be dealing with filthy monkeys, I
idiot-proofed the entire system.”

“It’s impossible to idiot-proof anything, Skippy,” I
explained, “because idiots are so darned clever. They will
always
find a
way to screw things up.”

“I swear,” he said with a good impression of speaking
through clenched teeth, “when I find the cat video that broke my poor little
submind-“

“It’s not the cat’s fault, Skippy.”

“You sure about that?”

“Absolutely. This is the internet you’re talking
about, right? Come on, the odds are it had to be a porn video.”

“Oh, huh,” he thought for a moment. “You’re probably
right. Damn. You know, with all the monkeys down there to mate with, why does
your species spend so much time playing with yourselves in secret?”

“Uh, well, Skippy, I would give you an answer, except,
you know, I don’t know anything about that sort of thing,” I stammered to
answer.  All eyes in the CIC were locked on me, some people with their
shoulders shaking because they were already chuckling.

“What? Joe, you were the Furtive Masturbation poster
boy back when-“

“That’s not funny, damn it.” It was my turn for
gritted teeth.

“Of course, I guess that’s better than you doing it in
public, I’m still not sure what your social customs are about that.”

I put my head in my hands and asked quietly. “Can we
please,
please
, just contact UNEF?”

“Oh, sure, Joe,” Skippy said. “Why didn’t you ask me
before?”

“UNEF Command, this is the duty officer,” a harried
voice answered.

“UNEF Command, this is Colonel Bishop, aboard the
Flying
Dutchman
. Can I speak with the officer in charge, please?”

“
Flying Dutchman
? Oh, thank God. We saw a
strange ship in orbit and thought it was- I’ll connect you to General Huang.
Hold, please.”

A moment later, a different voice spoke, with many
other voices in the background. “This is General Huang, am I speaking with
Colonel Bishop?”

“Yes, sir, General Huang. Sorry if we startled you, we
only just arrived in orbit. Everything is fine for now, sir.”

“Fine?” Huang asked gruffly. “Colonel Bishop, we’re
looking at a ship in orbit, and it does not appear to be the
Flying Dutchman
.”

“Joe put the ship in the wash on the hot water cycle and
he shrunk it,” Skippy said, “I told him it was dry clean only, but did he
listen to me? Noooooo. Big stupidhead.”

“Sir,” I explained, “we ran into some trouble out
there, and the ship had to be rebuilt using materials at hand. We really need
to give you a full briefing.”

“The wormhole near us, it’s still shut down?” Huang
asked brusquely.

“Yes, sir, and it’s not on a countdown to reactivate
this time.”

We could hear sighs of relief on the other end.
“Excellent,” Huang said, this time he sounded almost happy. “Then we’re safe,
and we can take our time if we decide to send the ship out again.”

Chang, Simms and I shared a knowing glance. “Uh, yeah,
hey, you know,” I replied. “Not so much.”

THE END

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