Free SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) by Craig Alanson Page B

accent and his Southern
drawl, it's like neither of you is speaking English."
    "We don't speak English, Skippy, we speak
American. And we managed to communicate just fine, thank you."
    "If you say so, Joe. I have noticed you tone down
your accent around most people. Like, at home you say 'Ayuh', but here you say
'yes' or ‘yeah’ or 'uh-huh'. When you visited your parents, before we left
Earth, you were all like 'Ayuh' and 'wicked pissah' and your 'fah-tha' shot a
'de-ah', and your mother was cooking 'pah-ster' for spaghetti. Most of it was
utterly incomprehensible to me."
    "Ayuh. You gots to pay attention they-uh,
Skippy-O."
    "Oh, forget it. What is your question?”
    “We started looking for this comm node dingus in
places where some database said it should be, right?”
    "Ayuh," Skippy said with a chuckle,
"don’t you usually look for something in a place you know where it is?”
    “Duh, yeah, that’s not my point- “
    “You so rarely have a point, I felt safe to assume
this time was no different.”
    My sleep-addled brain being not ready for snappy
comebacks, I ignored his trying to bait me into an argument. “My point is, we
hit that asteroid base, because you knew that place had a comm node. There are
other places that have a comm node for sure, we decided those places are too
risky, too tough for us to hit.”
    “In your opinion, they are too difficult,” he said
sourly.
    Ignoring him, I continued. “Next you looked at places
that might have one of these Elder comm node thingies, because the place is
known to have a bunch of other Elder crap, right?”
    “If this conversation is going to be you telling me a
bunch of obvious stuff I already know, I’ll tune out for a while and let you
talk. Wake me when you’re done.”
    “Can we go one step further?”
    “Damn it, now you have my attention, on the
infinitesimally tiny chance you might say something monkeys consider
intelligent. Go ahead, amuse me.”
    “The first step was to look where we know there is a
comm node, because somebody found an Elder site, got a comm node and logged it
in a database. We already did that, when we raided the asteroid base. The
second step is to look where there might be a comm node, because somebody found
an Elder site, got a bunch of other Elder stuff, and logged that other stuff in
it a database.”
    “So far, I am not blown away by your logic.”
    “So, step three,” I continued to ignore him, “is for
us to look in places that should have comm nodes, but they aren’t in a
database, because nobody has found those Elder sites yet.”
    “Huh? I’m not following you. How are we supposed to
look in a site that hasn’t been found yet?”
    “By you figuring out where the Elders would have put stuff, comparing it to a map of Elder sites the Thuranin and Jeraptha
know about, and determining where there should be Elder sites that
nobody knows about.”
    “By how? Guessing?” He snorted.
    “No, by,” I searched for the right word to use, “I
don’t know, extrapolating, inferring, deducing, predicting? Whatever you want
to call it. You know the Elders better than anyone in the galaxy today. You can
figure where they would likely have had colonies, space stations, that sort of
thing, right?”
    “Huh.” This time, his ‘huh’ wasn’t a question.
    “You have a map of Elder sites the Thuranin know
about, and sites the Jeraptha know about, right?”
    “Yes, the two mostly overlap, there isn’t much either
side knows about, that the other side doesn’t also know.  This war has been
going on for a very long time, much territory has swapped back and forth
several times.”
    “Can you do it?”
    “You want me to predict places where we, in this one
ship full of monkeys, will find Elder sites that have not yet been discovered,
by advanced species who desire nothing more than to find technology the Elders
left behind? Species who have entire fleets of ships searching for Elder
technology.”
    “That’s about it,