SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) by Craig Alanson

Ayuh. You told me the galaxy is
vast, bigger than I can imagine, that even now, most of it is unexplored.”
    “It’s unexplored, Joe, because most of the galaxy
isn’t worth exploring. Or it’s too far from a wormhole.”
    “I notice you haven’t answered my question. Can you do
it?”
    “I’m thinking!”
    “Think faster.”
    “Joe, this is actually not a one hundred percent
completely awful, terrible, stupid brainless idea. Hmmm. Very likely, very,
very likely, this is a tremendous waste of my time. However, I am intrigued
about how much this will test my analytical capabilities, so, I’ll do it. This
is going to take a while; I’ll need to run simulations.”
    “A while, as in you already did it between saying
‘need’ and ‘to’?”
    “Not this time, smart guy. Go, I don’t know, get some
coffee, eat a banana, scratch yourself, do some monkey thing, and I’ll let you
know when I’m done. Don’t bother me in the meantime, I’ll be super extra busy
in here.”
     
    I took a quick shower, got dressed, walked to the
galley, drank a cup of coffee, and chatted with a couple people. Then I walked
to a porthole to look through the tiny window at nothing, because there is not
much to see in deep interstellar space. Before going on duty, I got a second
cup of coffee, and headed for the bridge. The whole time, I’d been expecting
Skippy to shout in my earpiece that my idea was stupid, and about how monkeys
only wasted his extremely valuable time. Thirty two minutes had passed since
Skippy began his analysis, this was an eternity in Skippy time. He remained
silent until I was halfway to the bridge.
    "Joe, I have good news and bad news." Skippy
announced.
    Uh oh. Skippy's idea of good news could be bad, so I
answered carefully "Give me the good news first, please." I stopped
and leaned against the bulkhead. If he was going to tell me how stupid I was,
I’d rather not be on the bridge where the duty crew could hear it.
    "The good news is I found some very good
prospects for Elder sites that have not, as far as I know, been discovered by
other species. You were right, although my memories are substantially blocked,
my familiarity with the Elders allows me to extrapolate where they should have
had colonies or other installations. What I did was-"
    I let him talk without interrupting, even though his
rambling on about statistics, metadata and collating sensor mapping data from
dozens of species went way over my head. He was proud of what he'd
accomplished, it was likely only he could have run such an analysis in so short
a time, if at all. When there was a split-second pause in his nonstop talking,
I took the opportunity to stop him from rambling on. "Amazing, Skippy,
that is amazing. Maybe this is why you have such enormous processing capacity,
so you can find the Elders', uh, legacy, stuff, and protect it. Or keep track
of it."
    "Huh. I hadn't considered that."
    Before he could go off on a half hour tangent of
speculation about his origins, I asked "Have you verified your data model,
by checking whether it predicts Elder sites that are confirmed? Elder sites
that other species do know about?"
    "Verified my data model?" Skippy asked
slowly in amazement. "Joe, where did you learn nerdy tech talk like that?
I am mildly impressed, considering that it's you."
    "It was in one of the thousand-slide PowerPoint
decks I'm supposed to study as officer training." Maybe I shouldn't have
told him I was only repeating buzz words. "Did you do it?"
    "Yes, duh, I told you I ran the model back to
determine accuracy within a standard deviation of-"
    "You tried to tell me. Remember, Skippy,
you're explaining things to me, you need to dumb it down a couple notches. You
can use real sciency math talk when you're discussing stuff with the science
team."
    "Fair enough. Breaking it down Barney style, pun
intended, the answer is yes, my method of predicting the location of Elder
facilities is 96.7% accurate, when compared with a map of