by Zieja, Joe
“Alright, whatever,” Rogers said. “I’ll be back up there soon to check it out.” He clicked the datapad off.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” he said to nobody in particular. “The Thelicosans looked like they were about to charge head-on when they came out of that Un-Space point, and now they’re just sitting there. And now their warships are backing off ? I can’t imagine we’ve scared them into rethinking their invasion.”
“Not with your attitude we won’t scare anybody,” the Viking said.
“I’m being realistic,” Rogers said. He was surprised at his own self-control; he hadn’t turned back to stare at the woman since being interrupted by the comm tech, and now he was mostly enchanted by his own thoughts and his imagination of what it looked like outside the ship. A lot of metal was floating around in that open space.
“You’re being a coward,” the Viking shot back at him. Why wouldn’t she let this go? It was his fleet, goddamn it. Sure, it was only his fleet because of a couple of harebrained schemes and an admiral flying into an asteroid, but it still counted on paper.
“What? No. I’m being—”
“Listen,” she said, leaning in wonderfully close. “I’m not going to take that kind of shit from a coward like you. You don’t have the guts to run this fleet. I don’t care what Klein said about you.”
“Hey,” Rogers said, bristling. “I saved this fleet.”
“Yeah,” the Viking said, “with the help of everyone on board, including someone who busted down a door to pull your ass out of a fire. Big deal. I’m sick of paper-pushers like you being in charge.” She loomed as she walked toward him. “I’m sick of the brass giving the cooks weapons. I’m sick of my marines busting their asses every day so that you can sip whiskey in your stateroom.”
Rogers didn’t know what to do. What was her problem? They had been doing so well. For at least the last five to eight minutes.
“I don’t drink whiskey,” he said, for some reason. Of course he drank whiskey; he was just feeling contradictory. “I drink Scotch. And I’ll have you know—”
He’d seen this image before. Twice, actually. The vision of a set of knuckles rapidly approaching his forehead, backed by a meaty hand and arm. Each time, it seemed to happen more slowly. Rogers wasn’t sure if his reactions were just getting faster or the Viking was just getting a little tired.
When the fist made contact with his face, he realized it probably didn’t have anything to do with his reaction speed improving.
“Duck!” called Mailn.
But it was too late. Dimly, he realized that further command decisions would have to be postponed until he came back from whatever orbit the Viking had just put him into.
Back in a Flash
“You’re beautiful and I love you and everything is going to be okay!” Rogers screamed as he sat bolt upright in bed.
He realized immediately that he wasn’t on the bridge or in the infirmary—he was in his stateroom instead. Well, the admiral’s stateroom, anyway. Rogers was using it while he waited for the new admiral to arrive—if he ever did. It was way more comfortable than Rogers’ old room, particularly because his old room had no gravity, thanks to Klein’s belief that his secretary couldn’t hang himself in null-g. Not that it mattered, since the whole ship had no gravity at the moment.
Rogers put his hands to his face, which was quite tender, and rubbed his eyes. What was he doing here?
“I didn’t know droids could be beautiful,” Deet said. “I wonder what the real definition of beauty is. Is it something that reflects our own inner desires? Is it a reflection at all? By what standard can beauty actually be measured? Or does it lose its purpose if we try to measure it against anything?”
“Oh my god, shut up,” Rogers said. He let his arms fall to the bed and immediately realized that something was different.
“Hey,” he said. “Gravity! And you’re not plugged in.”
“Well, at least we know you’re healthy enough to continue stating the obvious,” Deet said. “Yes, Master Sergeant Hart and his crew fixed it a few days ago. Every room in the ship is back to normal, except your old room, of course. Nobody can seem to figure out where Admiral Klein disabled your room’s gravity from.”
Rogers gave a sigh of relief. It would be nice to not have stuff floating around the Flagship anymore and to be free of his ridiculous gravity boots.
“Wait,” he said as he pulled himself out of bed and realized that he was phenomenally hungry. “Did you say a few days?”
“Yes,” Deet replied as he played with some switches inside the chest cavity of another droid. “You’ve been unconscious for a bit.”
“Wow,” Rogers said. “That lady hits hard.”
“And you’re a wimp,” Deet said. He retracted his data cable from within the inactive droid and closed the robot’s chest plate. “Are you really going to make me keep doing this? I don’t know about you, but plugging myself into random members of my own species kind of feels a little uncouth.”
“You’re doing it for the good of mankind,” Rogers said, shaking his head. Looking down at himself, he realized he wanted a shower very badly. His uniform was rumpled and gross-smelling for an uncountable number of reasons. “Is it really possible to be knocked unconscious for a couple of days? That seems a little ridiculous.”
“I’m sorry,” Deet said, “I think I should have added that the Viking has been hitting you repeatedly every time you regained consciousness. You’ve only been out for a few hours at a time. I think you’re only awake because she found something else to do.”
“I see,” Rogers said. “What did I say that pissed her off so badly?”
He thought back to their conversation—or what he could remember of it—and couldn’t help but feel a pit open up in his stomach. He’d missed something—missed something big—and he still didn’t know what it was.
Deet made a beeping noise that indicated he didn’t know, didn’t care, or both. Walking over to Rogers on his makeshift legs—legs that had been assembled from a mixture of garbage and Rogers’ own ingenuity—he presented Rogers with a datapad.
“What’s this?” Rogers asked.
“It’s a report on the activity from the last few days, including the information from the patrols coming in. I thought you might want to read it.”
Rogers grunted, then started flipping through the report as he munched on a cold, but filling, bowl of some kind of porridge that Deet had brought from the kitchens. Hopefully it was less than a day old. It tasted of honey and ginger, and Rogers was thankful it wasn’t one of the standard edible wartime rations—or SEWR Rats, as they called them. He’d eaten enough of those in the past month to last him—and his colon—a lifetime.
“What is this?” Rogers asked. The “report” was delivered in a style he didn’t recognize. In fact, he wasn’t sure anyone would be able to recognize it. It was just a bunch of pictures of some guy’s hands in various positions, with captions that didn’t make any sense, at least not to Rogers. One picture of a pair of hands, palms flat, one “chasing” the other, had the caption “Then I pulled a sick three-gee turn. Kept my shades on, though.”
“Oh for . . . I forgot what it was like to deal with fighter pilots. Did he even sign his name to the report so I can ask him to give it to me with less sign language?”
Rogers flipped through a few dozen pictures of hands and one that appeared to include an elbow representing a way point to find the last page. It said: “Report totally written by Lieutenant Lieutenant Nolan ‘Flash’ ‘Chillster’ ‘Snake’ ‘Blade’ Fisk.”
“How many callsigns can one guy have?” Rogers wondered aloud.
“What’s a callsign?” Deet asked.
“It’s like a nickname, but lame. Pilots insist on being called by it. Some of them won’t even respond to their given names anymore.”
“Can I have a callsign?” Deet asked.
“No.”
Deet made an annoyed beeping noise that sounded a l
ittle bit flatulent. “That’s not fair. If pilots can get callsigns, so can I. Why can’t I have a callsign?”
“Look, I’ve got a lot of work to do. Get me a new uniform and send out a message to the commanders. We need to talk about what the heck we’re going to do about that giant enemy fleet staring at us. And invite this, uh, Flash guy too.”
“Hey, don’t try to [EXPLETIVE] boss me around, [ANATOMICAL ITEM].”
Rogers rolled his eyes. “Is your profanity generator still broken? Bossing you around is my job now. I could just have you decommissioned with the rest of the droids.”
“Don’t make me protocol 162 you.”
Rogers shot him a look. “With droid fu? I’d rather not be bored when I die. I want you to send a message to all the section commanders on the Flagship and tell them to meet on the bridge. I want to go over this report with this pilot and see if there’s something we can do.”
“Fine,” Deet said, “but that kind of sounds like the sort of meeting that should happen in the war room.”
Rogers paused, looking up from the asinine report. “We have a war room?”
“Of course we have a war room,” Deet said. He beeped, and his chest plate projected a schematic map of the Flagship into the air. “It’s right here.” A portion of the ship, also on the command deck but just far enough away that it would make sense to use the in-line, lit up.
“I thought that was just sort of an empty area. I never see anyone back there.”
“That’s because we’ve never been at anything close to war. I’m not even sure when the last time it was used was.”
Rogers thought for a moment. “Fine. I guess it makes sense for us to meet in the war room. But ‘war’ is such a . . . committal sort of word. Won’t everyone get the wrong idea?”
“You mean that an enemy fleet has just charged into our territory, destroyed our communications, and issued a notice that they were going to kill us?”
“Right,” Rogers said. “War room it is. Thirty minutes.”
* * *
“Probably should have checked on the war room first,” Rogers said. Deet beeped.
As one might have expected regarding a room that hadn’t been used seriously in over two centuries, the war room was in a state of . . . slight disrepair. It was difficult to see what it had looked like in its prime, but Rogers imagined a long wooden table with comfortable chairs all around it, a videoconferencing screen, a holograph projector in the center of the table, and lots of nervous young officers sitting around the edges of the room, fervently taking notes for superior officers who weren’t actually listening.
Now, however, it looked more like a bombed-out alleyway. The table had been broken in half at some point and pieces of it had been cut off by someone who had absolutely no skill with a saw. Most of the chairs were gone; some of them had been turned upside down to make what was perhaps a blanket fort in a corner of the room. Actually, as Rogers studied it, he couldn’t help but be impressed. It was a two-story blanket fort, complete with a portcullis made from pencils and tape. The second story was supported by whiteboards, braced by more pieces of the table.
“If I ever find out who did this . . .”
“You’ll throw them in the brig?” Deet asked.
“No, I’ll hire them to build me a blanket fort.” Rogers gestured at the structure. “This is brilliant.”
Aside from that, there was a rusted-out garbage barrel in the center of the room. The distinct smell of burning refuse wafted from its contents, and peering inside, Rogers could see the dying embers of a fire. And the bones of what he was pretty sure was a squirrel.
“Shit,” came a voice from behind him. “I didn’t know we were meeting in New Jersey.”
Rogers turned around to find the Viking, back in her uniform and surprisingly not winding up to punch him in the face. A surge of confusing emotions welled up inside him. She had, after all, repeatedly knocked him unconscious; a man had limits. That, and she’d started acting a little crazy in the infirmary. Rogers could deal with rough and tough. He kind of preferred it. He just wasn’t so sure about being able to deal with crazy.
Sergeant Mailn was in tow. She was a petite blond with a permanent wiseass smirk on her face; it was difficult to envision her wielding heavy weapons and cutting through enemy troops. The dangerous glint in her eyes said different.
“Been a while, Cap,” she said.
“Yeah,” Rogers said. He threw a glance at the Viking, who seemed to be avoiding eye contact. “I’ve been in bed with a couple of concussions.”
Mailn shrugged. “Not my fault you have a soft skull. Though I gotta say, if we’re gonna keep you in command we really need to get you down to the training rooms. If you don’t learn how to duck, the Viking’s going to give you a blunt-edged lobotomy.”
Rogers shook his head. “Any idea what’s gotten her so riled up?”
Mailn frowned at him. “Hell if I know. She’s my boss; we’re not exactly into having sleepovers and pillow fights.”
For a moment, Rogers imagined what a pillow fight with the Viking would be like. He saw feathers everywhere. And bodies.
Mailn’s expression slipped for a moment. She looked at the Viking, then back at Rogers.
“Listen,” she said, her voice low enough that the Viking, who was exploring the other side of the room, couldn’t hear her. “You need to open your ears a little bit.”
“What do you mean?”
“The captain . . .” Mailn said, then appeared to chew on her words for a moment. “She’s done a lot for me, you know. Helped me get my head on straight. I guess I want to return the favor.”
Rogers blinked. “I feel like we’re talking about algebra colonies again.”
Mailn gave him a level look for a moment, then sighed. “Of course you do,” she said.
Before he could ask her anything else, the Viking turned around, holding pieces of a broken chair in each hand, and shouted at them.
“So what are we going to do with this mess?” she said. Rogers couldn’t help but wince; the way she was standing made it look like she was about to charge into battle with broken furniture as weapons.
Rogers looked around at the chaos. “I don’t know,” he said. “Just . . . put it in the hallway and hope it disappears?”
The Viking gave him a look that said “You’re an idiot,” but she pitched in, obviously not having any better suggestions. Primarily, she pitched in by lifting the giant metallic garbage barrel over her head and throwing it out the door into the corridor of the command deck. They spent the next several minutes dismantling improvised structures, sweeping out ash and dust, and converting the usable half of the table into something that could hold a meeting.
“It’ll just have to be a bit more intimate of a planning session,” Rogers said.
Deet beeped. “Is ‘planning session’ a euphemism? I’m still not really clear on this whole implied subtext thing.”
“No,” Rogers said. “This is a war room, not a brothel.” He sniffed. “At least not anymore.”
Eventually they had something remotely resembling a place where professionals could meet and discuss important things like war. The holographic projector in the center of the table was useless, and Rogers wasn’t sure where they could get a new one, so he had Deet lie in the middle of the table.
“This is humiliating,” Deet said as he tested his projections.
“That’s a pretty advanced emotion for a robot,” Rogers said. “Just be happy you’re being useful instead of shut down like the rest of our droid friends.”
“Everyone’s going to be able to see my parts,” Deet said.
Rogers ignored him. He was too busy feeling uncharacteristically nervous about speaking to other people. This was his first official meeting as acting admiral of the fleet; he’d said a thing or two over the public-address system and held a few briefings on the bridge, but this felt completely different. Maybe it had something to do with preparing thousands of men and women to go fi
ght other thousands of men and women.
Eventually people started to shuffle in. Some of them Rogers recognized. The Viking was already there, of course, as the representative of all the Meridan marines assigned to the 331st. There was a real commander—General Something-or-Other—who resided on a marine vessel. They’d found in the past that marine commanders and fleet commanders didn’t work well on the same ship, in the killing-each-other kind of way.
Commander Belgrave, the helmsman, walked in first, and that kind of bothered Rogers.
“Um,” Rogers said. “Is anyone up there piloting the ship, Belgrave?”
Belgrave, a pale man whose body had the distinct look of someone who sat hunched behind a console all day and, perhaps, all night, looked at him with a frustrated expression.
“We’re floating in free space at the edge of solar and planetary gravity,” he said. “I’ve had the Flagship on autopilot for the last two years.”
Before Rogers could ask him what, in fact, he had been doing all damn day, the rest of the crowd shuffled in. Master Sergeant Hart, functioning as the engineering and logistics chief since there was currently no officer suited to the position, gave Rogers a terse nod as he came in. He’d been Rogers’ supervisor years earlier and was probably one of Rogers’ favorite people in the fleet. He walked with a cane and a noticeable limp, thanks to an attempt to kick a droid in the face.
“What kind of shithole is this?” Hart said. “We could have just met in the garbage chute.”
And that was one of the reasons he was one of Rogers’ favorite people in the fleet.
“Nice to see you, too, Hart. How are things down in the Pit?”
“Most of my best people are floating somewhere else in the fleet, and I’m still cleaning boominite containers out of the corners of the bay. It’s going great.”
Hart sat down on one of the chairs with a humph, releasing a cloud of dust that sort of floated around the room, threatening rain. Rogers let him be for the moment. If they ever got any alcohol back on this dry town of a ship, Rogers would hope to have a beer or two with the man. He was a little easier to talk to when he was drunk.
