by David Ryker
“Fucking hell, Foyle. What the hell’s the matter with you?”
I’d never spoken to a superior officer like that before. The words just came out. He glared back at me, desperate to blame anyone other than himself for his predicament, and I realized I had made an enemy.
R’kk’kar looked even angrier than I did.
“You abuse our generosity?” he boomed. “We allow you to fly our best fighters and this is how you thank us?”
“We need to understand the technology we’re working with. How are we going to save you otherwise?” his voice came out whining, almost pleading. He knew he was in deep shit.
“Save us?” R’kk’kar shouted. “The Dri’kai do not need to be saved! We are the greatest warriors in the galaxy! Get off this space station!”
The two Dri’kai guards frogmarched him to the shuttle bay. I followed, trying to speak to R’kk’kar.
“I’m sorry, my friend and comrade in arms. His behavior was inexcusable. Accept my deepest apologies.”
R’kk’kar wouldn’t talk to me. He wouldn’t even look at me.
We got to the shuttle bay. The pilot and copilot of our shuttle had been called up and were standing there confused.
“We got a message saying the entire team was leaving,” the pilot said.
“Prepare the shuttle,” I sighed.
I turned to R’kk’kar. “We have much to do. I understand if you want to eject Foyle, but—”
“We cannot trust the officer if we cannot trust his men,” was all he said.
A minute later the science and engineering team showed up, bewildered and escorted by two more Dri’kai.
“What’s going on?” Valeria asked.
I shook my head. “I think Foyle just ruined everything.”
“Shut up, Ayers!” Foyle snapped. “While you were getting all buddy buddy with these escapees from the zoo, I was trying to collect some intel.”
Yeah, he said that. Right in front of a group of Dri’kai, plus a Subine and a Vrimjlen who had just walked in. Nice one, Foyle.
I listened as all their translators chattered away in their own languages, passing on his words to representatives of the three major races we had had dealings with, including the race that ran this station.
The Subine’s tentacles all made hooks pointing in Foyle’s direction.
“The Subine is making an aggressive gesture,” my translator informed me.
Yeah, I kinda figured that.
The Vrimjlen probably made some sort of nasty reaction too, but I didn’t get to see it because I was too worried about what the Dri’kai would do.
The Dri’kai on the left pinioned Foyle’s arms behind him. The Dri’kai on the right pulled out a curved, serrated knife. I prepared to leap in and save him.
“Stop!” R’kk’kar cried, holding up his hand.
The Dri’kai stopped. I stopped too.
“Out of respect for General Ayers, we will allow him to punish his subordinate.”
“Subordinate?” Foyle shouted. “I’m his commanding officer!”
Amazing. This guy was on the verge of death and he was still worried about how people saw him?
“I will take him back to the Nansen and deal with him in the proper manner,” I blurted out before Foyle could say anything more. “Put him in the shuttle.”
The Dri’kai shoved him through the shuttle door. I hurried in to keep him from getting out and trying something even stupider than he already had. The others followed.
R’kk’kar didn’t say a word. The aliens quietly left the shuttle bay and we began launch procedures.
The ten-minute ride back felt like an hour. Foyle would not shut up. He complained about the Dri’kai, he complained about the other aliens, he complained about me, he complained about everything except his own dumbass move.
None of us said anything. There was no point trying to reason with him.
Within fifteen minutes of docking at the Nansen, we were sitting around the table in the command deck meeting room with the rest of the high command.
And Commander Loftsdóttir looked pissed.
She sat at the head of the table, hands flat on the surface like she was preparing to leap out of her chair and launch herself at someone. I was hoping that someone would be Foyle. He was her second in command, and he had just let her down.
Let us all down.
You wouldn’t know it looking at the guy. He sat there, giving us all cocky, defiant glances. Well, he didn’t do that with the commander. Secretly he looked down on her, thinking she was weak and inexperienced. He had badmouthed her to me on a couple of occasions, trying to get me on his side. To her face, he was all respect.
“So tell me what happened,” Commander Loftsdóttir said, her voice coming out flat. She turned to Foyle. “You first.”
“We did a test run in the Dri’kai fighters. Awesome machines. I had a pocket scanner I had brought with me to check out some stuff on the station, so I decided to take some close scans of the hull material and the electronics. Readings were weird. You should have seen them, Iliescu. They were all over the place, like nothing I ever seen.”
The commander cut him off. “Did you ask permission to take readings of the Dri’kai fighters?”
Foyle shifted in his seat. “Well, no. It’s not like they would have said yes.”
“Exactly,” she said.
Commander Loftsdóttir didn’t say anything more, she just let that one word hang in the air.
It’s all she had to say, really. We had barely survived a fight with a technologically and numerically superior race, managed to make peace, have them offer us access to their best equipment, and Foyle repaid that miracle of understanding and generosity by acting like a spy. Now our status among all the intelligent races in this part of the galaxy was under threat, and we might well end up friendless in a section of space we weren’t familiar with and more to the point, one that was about to be invaded.
But did Foyle think any of these things? Probably not. He was probably worried about whether he was going to get demoted.
I was wondering about that too. I realized that if he got canned, I’d be the most likely candidate to be promoted to his position. While I didn’t really want the extra responsibility, being more in control of things might increase my chances of survival. Having an idiot like Foyle as second in command was definitely reducing them.
Then I caught Commander Loftsdóttir looking at me. Her gaze moved away, but I could have sworn she was sizing me up.
At last she spoke. None of us had dared fill that painful silence. Not even Foyle was that dumb.
“We need to fix this. Now. Suggestions?”
“An apology seems in order,” Barakat said.
“That might work with the Subines or some of the other species,” Valeria said, “but the Dri’kai are a warrior race. An apology would make us look weak.”
“I sensed that when I apologized to them,” I said. “R’kk’kar thinks I’m Foyle’s commanding officer, and held me responsible for his actions.”
Foyle looked about to object, but then thought the better of it and shut his trap. He looked around the table, eyes calculating.
The obvious suggestion would be to strip him of his rank and hope that would be enough to satisfy our allies. I couldn’t suggest that because it would make me look like I was bucking for his position. The others didn’t want to suggest that because if he didn’t get demoted, they’d be in for a world of shit. Foyle’s skill as a fighter pilot in the battles against the Dri’kai had made him a hero to many in the crew. Those who didn’t work with him on a day-to-day basis didn’t know about his faults, only his victories.
Another long silence settled around the table. I glanced at the commander, wondering why she didn’t do the obvious. She had been surprisingly tolerant of Foyle in the short time we had all been working together. I wondered about that. Was it because she still felt insecure in her position? She had been promoted well above her level of experience,
but then again so had I, Foyle, and a bunch of other people. Maybe she felt threatened because Foyle had more combat expertise and we were in a combat situation?
Or maybe she couldn’t think of a better second in command, because while Foyle was annoying and had just make a spectacular fuck-up, in the day-to-day handling of the ship he was fine. And he was awesome in battle.
There was also this strange hostility I’d been feeling from Commander Loftsdóttir. It was nothing I could put my finger on. She was professional, attentive to my ideas, and yet I felt a frostiness just under the surface that hadn’t been there before.
And I had no idea why.
Then something R’kk’kar had said gave me an idea.
“I think I have a way to satisfy the Dri’kai,” I said.
Everyone turned to me. I licked my lips, suddenly feeling awkward with all the attention.
“Dr. Stark, would you be able to fake an operation?”
The head of medical blinked. He had probably thought that since this was a security decision, he could sit this uncomfortable meeting out. “Well, um, it depends on the procedure.”
“Castration.”
“What?”
That was from Valeria. Everyone else looked shocked too.
“From what R’kk’kar told me, castration, or being ‘neutered’ as he put it, is a common punishment in their fleet. If we show the Dri’kai a film of Foyle getting castrated, perhaps they’ll—”
Foyle slammed his fist on the table. “How dare you suggest something like that! Who the hell do you think you are?”
“It wouldn’t be a real castration,” I said with as much calm as I could muster. Not breaking out in hysterical laughter was taking all my willpower.
“I’m not going to sit here and be insulted by a fellow officer, and one who was pretending to rank me when speaking to a member of an alien military!”
“Quiet.”
Commander Loftsdóttir’s word silenced him. She was really good with those one-word sentences. They got through even Foyle’s thick skull.
She turned to Valeria. “You received an encyclopedia as a gift from the merchants’ association. Have you found any information in it on how to placate our allies?”
“It’s a huge database,” Valeria said. “So far I haven’t found anything.”
The communicator at the commander’s end of the desk chirped. She hit a button.
“I asked not to be disturbed.”
The voice of one of the command deck crew came over the communicator. “Sorry, Commander, but this is urgent. The merchants’ association has told us we have two hours to vacate this space. They want us to leave the solar system.”
“Did they say where we should go?”
“No, Commander. It was a simple order to leave.”
“It’s a test,” Barakat said. “They want to see if we’ll make amends.”
Commander Loftsdóttir nodded but did not speak.
“Fine, we’ll leave,” Foyle said. “This isn’t our fight. We can—”
“Do not speak until you are spoken to, Executive Officer Foyle,” the commander said.
His face reddened, but he did not reply.
Valeria was looking at a touchscreen. “From what I see of the Dri’kai, they are a race of hermaphrodites. All individuals are capable of bearing children but they are fertile for only a few days a year.”
Well, that explained why they had so many different things down there, but I didn’t see how this was relevant.
“Their criminal justice system is quick. They feel it is unfair to the defendant not to be tried within a few hours of the crime being discovered. If found guilty, punishment must be immediate, and a common punishment for serious crime is neutering.”
She looked up, blushed, and put her hand over her mouth. I wondered if she was laughing behind it.
Foyle jerked back in his chair, turning away and shaking his head.
The commander turned to me. “You’ve built up a rapport with the Dri’kai general. Do you think this would assuage him?”
Ignoring Foyle’s sputtering, I said, “To be honest, I’m not sure what would smooth things over. Apologizing made us look weak and only made things worse. For some reason, R’kk’kar already assumed we used this punishment in our culture, so I’m thinking this is the best way forward.”
“We could tell them it’s not normal for us,” Valeria said. “That way we could show we are willing to go the extra mile.”
“This is ridiculous!” Foyle shouted. As the commander was about to speak, he cut her off. “No, Commander, I have to speak. Not only is this giving in to a race that killed a bunch of our people, but it will make it impossible for me to assert any authority with the crew.”
Interesting that he assumed he’d still be executive officer after all this. But maybe he was right. The obvious thing was to demote him, and the commander still hadn’t suggested that.
Why not?
“The crew won’t know,” the commander said. The whole table took an intake of breath. “We will perform the false operation in secret and transmit it to the Dri’kai. Commander Ayers, make up some story about how our culture forgives the criminal once punishment is done and no one speaks of it. Hopefully that will keep the Dri’kai and the other aliens quiet.”
“This is absolutely—”
The commander cut Foyle off again. “Executive Officer Foyle, you have endangered the entire Nansen with your rash act. Before you went over there I told everyone in the team to keep tight discipline and not to cause any friction with our new allies. Then you went beyond your authority and tried to steal data on the Dri’kai fighter ship after General R’kk’kar explicitly told you not to. You will cooperate with the doctor in this charade and we will speak no more about it.”
Foyle sat up straight and gave the commander a defiant look.
“Ship regulations specifically state that punishments cannot be cruel, unusual, or humiliating.”
“It’s not humiliating because it’s not a real punishment,” the commander replied in a firm but more conciliatory tone. “No one outside the high command will know, and we all know it’s not real. Your authority will not be undermined.”
“What about with the Dri’kai?” he shot back. “How can I represent the ship as second in command if they think I’m half a man?”
Demote him, I screamed at her in my mind. Why don’t you demote him?
When the commander paused, I stepped in.
“R’kk’kar allowed you to represent the Nansen and ride one of the fighters, even though he already thought you were neutered.”
Foyle stared at me. “Why would he think that?”
I looked him in the eye. “Your behavior.”
“I acted like a professional the entire time!”
“They found you boastful and selfish, especially during your captivity.”
I couldn’t believe I was saying all this to a superior officer, and yet it was true. All of this was important information that the high command should know. Hell, Foyle should know it too, if he ever wanted to clean up his act.
Somehow I didn’t think that would happen.
Foyle lapsed into grim silence. Dr. Stark began discussing how they could fake an operation in a way that didn’t use trick photography and yet still look convincing. Something about a prosthesis. I wasn’t really listening. Neither was Foyle.
He was glaring at me.
My heart skipped a beat and made several feathery half-beats. I took several slow, deep breaths to get it back to a normal pace. Damn, what I had just done was more dangerous than flying through that broken moon.
Foyle would keep his rank, and lose face with all the members of the high command. Nothing mattered to him more than his reputation.
I had made an enemy for life.
12
You’d think that my suggestion was made out of malice, as a way to finally one-up a vain, selfish asshole who once put my life in danger because he was too busy showing
off instead of looking out for his wingman.
And you’d be right. But that wasn’t the only reason I did it. I also did it because I thought it had a decent chance of saving the situation with our allies and no one else had come up with a better plan. I also thought that the commander would demote him afterwards, that she was only putting it off to get him to cooperate with the fake operation. I even had a little hope it might teach him a lesson.
Turned out I was only right about one of those things.
But before I found out about that, I had to endure the rest of that long meeting. When it concluded, Dr. Stark left with Foyle to go to the medical wing. The doctor assured him that they would keep the “operation” in strictest confidence and no other medical personnel would be in attendance. Not even the rest of the high command would see the video.
Even so, it was a horrible thing to do to a man, and I felt bad that I had come up with it. Even Foyle didn’t deserve this bad of a takedown. He had gotten us into this mess, though, and it was his duty to get us out of it.
When we left the meeting room to go back to our posts, Iliescu tugged on my sleeve and took me to an empty lab room.
“What do you think he’ll do?” he asked, whispering even though there was no one to hear.
I leaned against the wall and rubbed my temples, suddenly exhausted. It had been a hell of a day, and here it was only late afternoon. All I wanted to do was sleep.
“I don’t know. We haven’t heard the last of this, though.”
“So were the fighters really that good?” he asked. “They sure looked impressive from what we managed to scan of them. Hard to get a fix, though.”
“Hell yeah, they were that good. Unbelievable.”
“Tell me about them.”
I told him every detail I could remember. He listened with growing fascination.
“A self-healing ship? That’s remarkable,” Iliescu said.
“I don’t see how it’s possible,” I said.
“Oh, it’s possible. There were experiments with such a thing on Earth back before we left. Specialized nanites that would fix wiring and computer hardware.”
“But this fixed an entire wing.”
