by Zieja, Joe
“CALL FUNCTION [PROTOCOL 162]. OUTPUT STRING: DIE, HUMAN!”
“Damn it, Deet, shut that thing off!” Rogers said. “I can’t think straight! Why can’t you do this work in the engineering bay where the rest of the scrap is?”
“Sorry,” Deet said, cutting the power to the droid. He made a droid’s approximation of a sigh, which might be described as a floppy synthesizer noise. “I can’t figure this out. It’s like they keep reprogramming themselves every time I reset them. I could try rewriting the code from scratch, but I’d need some sort of template to work off.”
Rogers waved the comment away. “We’ve got bigger problems, anyway,” he said. “I’m still trying to figure out how to run away from the Thelicosans without getting everyone killed.”
Why did Admiral Klein have to fly into that asteroid? The man had been incompetent, yes, but at least he wasn’t Rogers. The last thing Rogers wanted right now was to be in charge of anything. He hadn’t even had time to restock the Flagship’s alcohol supply before this mess went down. Meridan Naval Headquarters had said a replacement admiral was on the way, but Rogers had no idea when he’d get here. And he had no idea how he’d get through the Thelicosan blockade to relieve him.
What a mess. And Rogers was stuck with it.
“Have you considered actually fighting them?” Deet asked as he unplugged from the droid he’d been examining. A second cable attached him to a constant power supply; being a droid, he was unable to move around freely without a gravity generator to help him keep his batteries charged.
Rogers scoffed. “Absolutely not. Do you see the size of that fleet?” He made a grand gesture out the windows. “They’d crush us at the first sign of a plasma blast. We’re not fighting them.”
Commander Belgrave cleared his throat.
“What?” Rogers said.
“I know you’re new to this whole commander-of-the-fleet thing,” Belgrave said, “but generally those sort of we’ve-lost-all-hope comments are made in private. If you’re going to continue to be all negative and weird, can I ask, respectfully, sir, that you go do it somewhere else? Your stateroom, perhaps? Some of us are still trying to maintain a delusional level of military superiority, and you’re not helping.”
Rogers looked at him, feeling a little ashamed. Whether he wanted it or not, he was in charge. These people needed him to be a bedrock against the chaos that was coming. Well, the chaos that was already here. “You’re right, Commander. I’m sorry.”
Belgrave shrugged and pressed a few buttons on his console. Rogers wondered, if they weren’t really able to maneuver very well anyway, why Belgrave was at the controls and not sleeping. In fact, now that Rogers thought about it, he’d never seen anyone else at the helm, and had never seen Belgrave eat, sleep, or do anything else except press buttons.
Rogers tapped his fingers on his chair for a moment, shifting in his seat.
“Hypothetically, though,” he said slowly. “If I were to tell you to turn the ship around and run away, could you?”
Belgrave gave him a look. “No, sir.”
Well, this was stupid. If he couldn’t fight, and he couldn’t run away, and he couldn’t surrender because he couldn’t talk to anyone, what was he supposed to do?
“I need to take a break,” he said, exasperated.
“You’ve been here for eight and a half minutes,” Deet chirped, his head almost completely buried in the chest of the disassembled droid he was working on. “From my careful analysis of Meridan naval regulations, I believe this is approximately one-seventieth of a standard work period.”
“Shut up,” Rogers said. “I’m going to go talk to someone who might know something about violence.”
He pushed his way toward the exit from the bridge. An uncomfortable feeling welled up inside him as he avoided eye contact with everyone, especially Belgrave, who suddenly seemed to be a font of command wisdom and theory. As the door closed behind him, he thought he heard two techs talking about the possibility of the THEY’RE ATTACKING US button being broken.
Putting on his fake arm sling—which he only wore in areas of the ship where someone might be encouraged to salute him—he plodded down the hallway, deep in thought. He’d never wanted this. Not just the war, or the strangely declared invasion, but the responsibility, the duties, the maniacal face-slapping droids. What was an ex-pirate ex-sergeant supposed to do about all this fighting ?
The ship’s transportation system, full of partially floating people and equipment, shuttled him through the belly of the Flagship as he contemplated the several ways he was likely going to die soon. It didn’t make for a very productive trip down to the medical bay, but it certainly helped pass the time a bit. His downcast, fraught expression also likely discouraged everyone from talking to him, for which he was grateful.
Frantic medical personnel roamed the hallways in the infirmary, all displaying a mixture of exhaustion and panic. It wasn’t that there was a huge number of wounded troops or anything. It was just that the most serious things they’d had to deal with in the last two hundred years had been things that marines picked up while on shore leave, like food poisoning, parasites, or gonorrhea. During the attempted droid coup, people had actually been shot with actual weapons. Everyone was a little unsettled by a military unit that actually had to fight.
Rogers wasn’t sure why, but when he found the door he was looking for, he stopped for a moment. Suddenly, big, overarching problems like the impending doom of his entire fleet paled in comparison to what was beyond that threshold. A tingle of excitement worked its way through him when he remembered the last time he and the Viking had met. The room ablaze, him trapped under a fallen piece of debris in the control room of the hangar, encased in a Vacuum Mobility Unit. The memory of her kicking down the door, ringed in fire and smoke—it nearly made him pass out.
He realized a few moments later that it had, in fact, made him pass out. Suddenly he was leaning backward at an awkward angle, held to the ground only by his magnetic boots, and a gruff voice was yelling at him.
“What the hell are you doing, metalhead?”
The shock of it caused him to whip upward like the pole in a pole vault.
“You!” he said, which was not what he wanted to say.
“Me,” Captain Alsinbury—the Viking—said. “I thought I heard a puppy whine outside my door.”
Alsinbury was a monument to the fierce killing power of a determined woman; Rogers could never really tell if she was about to wind back and hit him in the face or just wind back and hit him in the face slightly more gently. She made no move to help him regain his balance, but she did step back into her room.
“I came to visit you,” Rogers said—again, not what he wanted to say. His face was becoming terribly hot.
“I kind of figured that,” the Viking said, making a cursory motion—with her uninjured arm, he noticed—for him to step inside.
Peeking in, he saw the clear signs of a wounded marine recuperating from a disruptor shot to the shoulder: body armor, a disassembled disruptor rifle with cleaning supplies around it, and a handful of bent nails scattered across a table.
Rogers realized for the first time that they weren’t alone, either. Sitting on a chair and flipping through something on her datapad, the recently promoted Sergeant Cynthia Mailn raised an eyebrow at him and uncrossed her legs.
“Hey,” she said.
“What?” Rogers joked. “No jumping to attention and yelling ‘sir’ and all that? I got promoted like five ranks, you know.”
In response, Mailn shrugged and went back to looking at her datapad.
“Damn right,” Rogers said, grinning. He was really growing to like the young sergeant, particularly because he absolutely hated being called sir. “What are you doing here?”
Mailn shifted subtly in her chair and put the pad down again. She looked up at Rogers as if to answer, but the Viking beat her to it.
“Helping me not put a hole in the wall every ten minutes,” she said. She began messing wi
th the components of the disruptor rifle in a way that did strange things to Rogers’ insides. “Someone else has been too busy on the bridge with all the brass.”
“Hey!” Rogers said. “I’m not brass. I’m barely copper.” He’d barely been a lieutenant a few weeks ago.
For some reason, Mailn gave him a long look, slowly shaking her head. Had he missed something?
“Yeah, well,” the Viking said. “It’s quiet down here.” Her hands were moving so fast over the rifle, it was almost impossible to tell what she was doing. Rogers found himself mesmerized as he watched her work. What he wouldn’t give to be that rifle right now . . .
“How’s the arm?” he asked.
“It’s fine,” the Viking said. “I keep telling these idiots it’s fine, and they keep feeding me some bull about ‘cellular regeneration fragility’ or something like that. I want to get back to my marines, especially if there’s a Thelly fleet sitting out there.”
“About that,” Rogers said. “I need your advice.”
The Viking stopped what she was doing and looked at him in a strange way. It was almost like she was raising an eyebrow, but also grinning maniacally, but also about to impart violence. It wasn’t exactly unattractive.
“Oh?” she said. “Not looking to strap on a VMU and jump out the garbage chute?”
Rogers felt his face turning red. “That was only once,” he said.
“So far,” Sergeant Mailn said, not looking up from her datapad.
Rogers ignored her. “I don’t know what to do here. I don’t know how to fight. I honestly don’t even know what end of the gun to point at someone trying to kill me.” He sighed. Boy, he felt tired. “I thought maybe you’d have another perspective.”
The Viking didn’t answer for a moment, but she didn’t start putting her disruptor rifle back together, either. Rogers thought about mentioning the safety concerns of field-stripping a weapon in the middle of the infirmary, but something—perhaps repeated memories of being hit by this woman—stopped him from saying anything. Eventually, the Viking made her way back over to her bed, where she sat, the hospital gown flowing around her. It was the closest thing to a dress he’d ever seen the marine in.
“Listen, metalhead,” she began.
“You do realize that I was the main reason the droids didn’t take over the ship, right?”
The Viking went on. “You gotta realize something. The Two Hundred Years (And Counting) Peace isn’t exactly the best time for warriors to get experience in pitched battles.”
Rogers frowned. For some reason, the Viking seemed to be very uncomfortable.
“So?” Rogers said, pulling a rolling desk chair—which was actually a floating desk chair, without the gravity—across the room and sort of, kind of sitting down. Boy, he hoped Hart got the gravity generator fixed soon. “Haven’t you done pirate interdictions, or at least simulations?”
Shrugging, the Viking lay back in the bed, using the railings to push herself down. “I’ve busted a few skulls, sure. And officer school had plenty of simulations. But do you have any idea what the training budget has been like the last two hundred years?”
Rogers nodded sagely. He had absolutely no idea what the training budget had been like the last two hundred years.
“Right,” the Viking said. “You want me to get on a transport full of marines and board an enemy ship? Let’s do it. You want me to plan a war?”
She shrugged, possibly the first helpless gesture Rogers had ever seen her make. It made him feel like he should comfort her, which was a completely different level of strange.
For some reason, Rogers expected her to continue, but she didn’t. She lay there, looking at the ceiling, while Mailn flipped through whatever it was she was reading on her datapad. Rogers had never seen the two women quieter.
“Well,” he said, standing up and allowing his magnetic boots to connect with the floor. “I tried. I’m going to go try to surrender now.”
“Hey,” the Viking said, sitting forward. “Just because I don’t know how to plan fleet maneuvers doesn’t mean I’m going to go in there with my hands up and my pants around my ankles.”
Rogers paused, swallowing. “Are you sure you wouldn’t do that?”
The Viking swung her legs over the side of the bed and latched on to the ground with her own boots—a very strange accent to the hospital gown.
“You listen to me,” she said, her demeanor changing rapidly. Rogers could never tell if he liked her more when she was really angry, or just angry. “I didn’t come all the way out here to end up a prisoner in a Thelicosan algebra colony.”
“What the hell is an algebra colony?”
“You don’t want to know,” Mailn chimed in.
“No, I actually, really do,” Rogers said, but he didn’t get an answer. The Viking was too busy barreling toward him to answer, and for a moment he thought she was about to tackle him and knock him senseless.
When the datapad beeped, telling him he had an incoming call, he wasn’t sure if he was angry or relieved about being interrupted. According to the display, the bridge was calling.
“What?” he barked as he answered.
“Are you coming back up here?” It was Deet’s voice. “We’re getting some reports in that someone like, you know, the commander of the fleet might want to listen to.”
“He’s too busy trying to figure out how to get us all interned in algebra colonies!” the Viking shouted.
“It’s not like that,” Rogers said softly, covering the mouthpiece of the datapad. “It has nothing to do with not wanting to fight. I just don’t want to die. I’m in charge of this fleet, after all, aren’t I?” He paused. “I really need someone to tell me what an algebra colony is.”
“Then maybe it’s about time you started acting like a commander,” the Viking said. “We have other options.”
Rogers shook his head. “No, we don’t. We have no options at all. We’re sitting ducks in the middle of open space, millions of miles from Merida Prime. Even if we were able to talk to anyone, reinforcements would take half a year to get here, since they’re blocking the Un-Space point. What kind of options are those?”
Someone on the other end of the datapad clicked a tongue, and Commander Belgrave’s voice came through the speaker. “Really, sir, what did I just tell you about disparaging talk on the bridge? You might as well have Munkle over here announce it to the entire ship.”
“Grr mrr,” Lieutenant Lieutenant Munkle said somewhere in the background.
“What difference would that make?” Rogers asked into the datapad. Munkle could tell everyone they were about to fly into a black hole and nothing would happen. As a member of the Public Transportation Announcer Corps, he’d been hired specifically for his unintelligibility. He used to be the intelligence officer until Rogers moved him and, well, put a Thelicosan spy in his place. Rogers already didn’t have a great track record for administrative issues.
The Viking shook her head. “I said you had options. Why would I say you had options if you didn’t?”
Rogers sighed, shaking his head. “What ‘options’ are you thinking of ? Pack a ship full of grunts and fly them into glorious battle to smash heads, and all that?”
The Viking gave him a look, and Rogers’ breath caught in his throat. Why had he said that? He wasn’t usually so bitter—especially not to the woman of his dreams, with whom he had barely managed to have a civil conversation—but the stress of the last month or so was really starting to get to him.
He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I just don’t know what to do. I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing up here.”
“Again,” Commander Belgrave’s voice came through, “you’re really not doing a great deal to inspire confidence when you say things like that.”
“So shut the damn speakers off!” Rogers said. “I’m just being honest.”
“Commanders never got anywhere by being honest,” Belgrave muttered.
Rogers grunted. Admiral Klein ce
rtainly hadn’t been honest. He’d spent his entire career hiding the fact that he was a moron.
Turning back to the Viking, Rogers tried to push out all the aggressiveness from his bones. He let out a deep breath. “What was it that you had in mind?”
The Viking chewed on her lip, which Rogers found very sexy. “Packing a bunch of grunts into a ship and flying them into glorious battle to smash heads.”
“That’s irony, right?” Deet asked from the bridge.
“No,” Rogers barked. “Wait. Maybe. I think it might have been.” He threw up his hands. “That’s not important now! The important thing is that we have a giant fleet of people who may or may not be trying to kill us within visual range and blocking our Un-Space point. The 331st is under siege, and we’re powerless to do anything about it!”
Commander Belgrave sighed again, just as some really irritating beeping noises started to bleed through the datapad. Why had they interrupted such a good conversation with the Viking? He never had good conversations with the Viking.
“What the hell is that noise?”
Some rustling bubbled in the background as someone approached the communications terminal to talk to him. Eventually, someone whose voice he didn’t recognize—probably one of the techs on the bridge—came online.
“It’s hard to say, sir,” the tech said. “Thelicosan jamming is blocking even short-range radios, but one of the fighter patrols out there is trying to send a report back in. It’s garbled, but it sounds like they’re saying the Thelicosans are running away.”
Rogers frowned. “Running away?”
“That’s what I’m hearing, sir.” Another couple of beeps and a pause. “He says they’re pulling their drawers down.”
Rogers’ face turned a little red. “What?”
“Sorry,” the tech said. “They’re drawing down.” He cleared his throat. “Of course they’re not pulling their drawers down. That would be ridiculous. Our fighter patrol is returning to the ship now to give a full report.”
Hopefully their report included something other than the cryptic “we’re invading” message that had come from the Thelicosan command ship, identified as the Limiter. Was that really the kind of correspondence that ended a peace that had lasted for over two centuries? It seemed kind of . . . anticlimactic.
