Read SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) for Free Online Page B

interesting,
firsts held people's attention and kept them from getting bored.
    Then the tedium set in. Even the pilots, the only
people aboard who needed to actually do anything other than eat, exercise and
sleep, got bored with their regular duties. Mostly the pilot duty consisted of
waiting for jump engines to recharge, Skippy to program a jump into the
autopilot, and the chief pilot on duty pressing a button. There was always at
least a little tension following a jump, when the Dutchman's sensor net
determined whether there were other ships around. The crew on duty in the CIC
scanned the sensors, the two pilots had fingers poised next to buttons for
triggering a preprogrammed emergency jump away. Then, when nothing was
detected, after five minutes the All Clear signal was given, and everyone went
back to the tedium of routine.
    The pilots spent most of their time, unless they were
sleeping, but often including while eating and running on a treadmill in the
gym, learning how to fly first our Thuranin star carrier, then our beat-up
Kristang frigate and finally Thuranin dropships. One of our new pilots, a
hotshot French flyboy who came to the Dutchman from serving as a test
pilot for the Rafael fighter, told me the training was beyond tough, it was
crushing, impossible. And he was one of Desai's best students. I told him that
Captain Desai had flown a dropship, then a frigate then a star carrier, with
zero training, in combat. The guy did have a point, I talked to Desai and
Skippy about adjusting the tempo of the flight training. After the first two
weeks, the new pilots adjusted to drinking from the fire hose. Desai started
sleeping more than four hours a night.
    Boredom was bad for regular people. Boredom for
gung-ho elite SpecOps people could be deadly. The third week of our pleasure
cruise, two Indian paratroopers suffered broken bones in a training accident.
Thanks to Doctor Skippy's magical use of Thuranin medical technology, their
broken bones would heal fully in two weeks, unfortunately they couldn't resume
normal training until they were fully healed. When we arrived at our first
target, those two paratroopers would be unable to join their fellows in any
action, they'd either be staying aboard the Dutchman , or operating
combots.
    I went to the ship's sickbay, nobody wanted to call it
an 'infirmary', as that implied a special forces soldier could be infirm. Which
was unsat. The two mildly chagrined paratroopers were sitting on the too-small Thuranin
beds, not actually beds, they were some sort of form-fitting gel. Both already
had their broken legs encased in hard sleeves, with thin tubes connected to the
beds. The tubes provided nutrients, and nano machines that knitted the bones
and tissues back together, all controlled by Dr. Skippy the mad scientist. Both
of the injured men were eager to get mobile as soon as possible, of course, I'd
already talked to Skippy to assure he didn't release them from sickbay until
they weren't likely to further injure themselves by overdoing their rehab
exercises. Sickbay was crowded, with me, the two injured men, and six
scientists, who were trying to understand the Thuranin technology Skippy was
using.
    "Are you learning how all this equipment
works?" I asked the doctors.
    "No!" Said Skippy before any of the doctors
could reply. "That would be a huge waste of time, I've told you that. You
don't need clumsy monkeys poking around your insides with crude knives, when
Doctor Skippy can fix everyone up with medical magic. Real medicine, not the
idiot guesswork you monkeys use."
    "Yes,” I said, irritated at having this
conversation again. “You have told me that, and I've told you that if, or I
should say when, you find the Collective and leave us, our own doctors need to
be able to use this equipment to care for the crew."
    "Never going to happen."
    "That is unsat-"
    "For crying out loud, stop flapping your jaws for
a minute and listen to me, you might learn something. I doubt it, but