Read SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) for Free Online

the issue of our ship’s name. Don't
worry, they will issue a report long before Earth's sun explodes. Probably.
    "Jump complete." Desai announced from the
pilot's seat.
    "Are we clear, Skippy? No unfriendlies in the
area?" I asked.
    "You tell me. You say you need to be able to fly
this ship on your own, so look at the sensors yourself," Skippy said in a
peevish tone.
    I wasn't going to argue with him, he was mostly right.
The cold hard truth was that we did not need to be able to fly the ship on our
own, what we did need was some sliver of hope that we might be able to fly the Dutchman on our own, after Skippy left us. Clinging to that tiny bit of hope was the
difference between a high risk mission, and a suicide mission. The crew,
including myself, had signed up for a high risk mission. Super high risk,
admittedly. Risk of the if- anything -goes-wrong-we-are-totally-screwed
level. "Pilot?"
    Desai answered more slowly than was optimal, and she
knew it. "We jumped to the right place, within, seven hundred, yes, seven
hundred thousand kilometers." The tone of her voice was not filled with
confidence. She let out a breath she'd been holding in. "Yes. Confirmed.
Jump was successful," she turned in her chair to look at me, and gave me a
thumb's up, with a weak smile. Desai had programmed the jump herself, this was
the first jump Skippy had not loaded into the autopilot for us. Skippy had
grumbled and complained loudly at the delay, then refused to check the numbers
for us. "All I'll tell you is, you won't be jumping us into a star,"
is what he had said.
    His grumbling about a delay was understandable, Desai
had programmed the jump into the computer yesterday, and we'd then spent the
intervening time checking that the programming was correct. Three different
teams of pilots and scientists had checked the programming, and that was after
two days of analysis to decide what should be programmed into the Thuranin
navigation computer. Skippy reluctantly had restored the original Thuranin
operating system to the navigation system, running it parallel to his own
access, making snarky comments about it the whole time. It wasn't the true
original operating system, the Thuranin ship AI, it was a dumbed-down version
that allowed humans access, and was simple enough for us to use. Skippy
cautioned that if there was a glitch in the system, after he left us, we would
have no way to debug or fix it. To which I had responded that, if there was a
glitch anywhere in the navigation system software, that could only be Skippy's
fault, for screwing up the programming, or missing something. That insulted his
boundless ego enough for him to declare the software perfect, better than
perfect, for he had loaded in his own maintenance and repair subroutine into
it. I never let on that I'd played him, so I could use that particular trick
again.
    "Sensors?" I called out to the people
manning the consoles in the Combat Information Center, beyond the glass-like
diamond composite bridge walls.
    "Nothing, uh, nothing on the scopes. That we can
detect, sir," came the answer.
    That wasn't reassuring. Without Skippy controlling the
data feeds, the bridge and CIC displays didn't contain the helpful color coding
designation for Thuranin, Maxohlx, Jeraptha, Kristang, Ruhar and unknown ships.
No matter in this case, there was absolutely nothing on the scopes within a
quarter lightyear. We'd deliberately jumped from the middle of nowhere to the
middle of nowhere, and we'd only jumped the distance from Earth's Sun to
Jupiter, a small test for a first jump. If there had been anything dangerous in
the area, Skippy would have told us, he was unhappy, not suicidal.
    We had jumped only a short distance, and still missed
the mark by over half a million kilometers. No way could we jump anywhere near
a planet with that lousy accuracy, we needed to get better, a lot better, or
the Dutchman would be spending a lot of time crawling through normal
space. And we didn't have the time,