by Zieja, Joe
Mailn had explained to him that the datapad he was perpetually carrying in a holster hanging from his belt could have done all this, but Rogers had insisted on the secret lapel microphone. It was way cooler.
A noise brought him out of his reverie. He turned his head to where he thought he’d heard it—something metallic, though that wasn’t exactly rare on a spaceship—but he didn’t see anything out of place. They were transiting through a systems control room now, heading toward a small corridor that dead-ended at a high door. The systems control room had a few doors leading to other places in the ship, but they were all closed. The elevator that led perhaps to the cockpit or another hatch was open.
“This way,” Xan said, somehow able to make two words sound like a disinterested eulogy at an empty funeral. Rogers exchanged a look with Tunger, who was still smiling in a way that made Rogers doubt whether he really understood the gravity of their current situation. Differential equations or not, this meeting ground was not even close to equal.
Xan approached the control panel of the door and pressed a few buttons. The door slid open to reveal a meeting room that seemed unnecessarily big for such a small ship. It was circular, with stadium seating extending for three-quarters of the circumference of the room, and in the center was a dais with a large projection device hanging above. Rogers had seen prototypes of that sort of technology in Meridan meeting rooms—it was a holographic meeting server, designed to make it seem as though everyone in the meeting was physically there. Apparently the Ambuscade wasn’t so technologically old after all; the Meridans hadn’t caught up to this sort of development. Bold lettering on the side indicated it had been made by Snaggardir’s. What didn’t that company make?
In the center, where the holographs would project, was Rogers’ quarry.
The Grand Marshal, Alandra Keffoule, was striking. Specifically, she was striking a tall wooden dummy that somehow had made its way into the middle of the room. The loud cracking noise that erupted with every hit gave Rogers a keen awareness of two things. First, that he now knew what the strange sound had been in the hallway. Second, that one pair of underwear had not been enough.
The leader of the Thelicosan fleet was smaller than he’d imagined her, with dark, smoky skin and a head of hair that looked as wild as her repeated spinning back kicks. Keffoule, upon seeing them enter, stopped beating the poor humanoid dummy senseless and, for some reason, gathered up some of the shards and handed them to Xan.
“Thank you, Grand Marshal,” Xan said, not abating Rogers’ confusion at all. “The crew will appreciate this.”
“Any ideas on what the hell that was?” Rogers muttered to Tunger.
“None whatsoever, sir,” Tunger whispered back.
Rogers swallowed. It couldn’t really have been anything except a way for Keffoule to set the tone of the meeting—a tone he did not like. Was the dummy supposed to represent Rogers? It seemed all too likely.
Xan put the wooden shards in his pocket and gestured—boringly—at Rogers. “May I present—”
“I know who this is,” Keffoule said, her voice assertive but smooth, like worked-over leather with a feminine touch. Her accent was much heavier than Xan’s, but still mostly understandable. “Oh, I know who this is all too well.”
Nope. Rogers did not like that tone. He did not like it at all.
“And you must be—” Rogers began.
“Leave us,” Keffoule said to Xan. She didn’t raise a hand to gesture. She didn’t even look at him; her eyes were locked on Rogers’.
Leave us? Rogers thought. Who says that?
Without further comment, and, Rogers thought, without blinking, Xan left the room. Rogers was left in a room with the two people in Fortuna Stultus he wanted to be with the least: an enemy commander and a zookeeper.
Keffoule, still staring at Rogers, moved smoothly to where a small table had been set up to the side of the dais. Two chairs, austere but comfortable, were pulled up, but turned outward, giving the meeting an open impression—if meeting on an enemy ship in a completely empty room with a scary-looking lady could be considered open at all. The Grand Marshal extended her hand, as though to indicate that Rogers was to sit, but then whipped her arm to point at Tunger instead. The movement was so quick that it actually made a whooshing noise in the air. Rogers’ body tensed, but he resisted the urge to duck.
“Never duck when no one is hitting you,” Mailn had said. “It only confuses people.” She was a wise woman.
“Who is this man?” Keffoule said, her voice still soft but with an increased measure of intensity. “The instructions were to come alone.”
“This is Corporal Tunger,” Rogers said, trying to keep his hand from trembling as he gestured toward the zookeeper. “He’s my interpreter.”
“Hullur!” Tunger said brightly. Rogers elbowed him in the side.
“Interpreter?” Keffoule said, her fine eyebrows raised in a way that might have signaled insult. Rogers knew he shouldn’t have brought Tunger.
“It’s just that . . .” Rogers said, fumbling for a diplomatic way to say that he hadn’t thought he was going to be able to understand a word of the bastardized language that came out of her mouth. “He was under the impression that Thelicosans speak differently than Meridans, and he’s been studying your language and culture.”
Keffoule folded her body back and sat gracefully in the chair opposite the one to which she had gestured. Every muscle moved like a wild animal’s. She leaned back and crossed a pair of long legs, though Rogers couldn’t see any of her shape. From what he’d seen so far, Thelicosans wore their uniforms baggy.
“I am a high-ranking official in the Thelicosan military,” Keffoule said proudly. “I have been trained in six languages and can adjust Standard to make myself sound like anyone I wish. I can become anyone I wish, Captain Rogers. There will be no need for interpretation.”
Tunger looked crestfallen. “Aw, but sir! Can’t I stay? Please? Pleeeease?”
Rogers elbowed him again. “Tunger!” he muttered through clenched teeth. “You are embarrassing me in front of the Grand Marshal.” He flashed a winning smile at Keffoule and, for some reason, thought he saw her flinch. “I will send him back to the shuttle.”
Keffoule waved the suggestion away. “He may stay if you require him to stay. I will not presume to order around your troops. Though misguided, your idea of an interpreter might have been prudent with a lesser commander.”
For some reason Rogers couldn’t understand, this made him more nervous than if Tunger had been dismissed. Logic told him it was a good idea to have a friendly face nearby during this talk. More logic told him Tunger was probably an exception to the previous logic.
“Take a seat halfway up the rows,” Rogers told Tunger, pointing to the stadium seating around the meeting room. “And if I even hear you fart too loudly, you’re going back to the shuttle.”
Tunger’s face went pale.
“What is it?” Rogers said.
Tunger hesitated. “Just thinking about what I had for lunch, sir. I’ll try my best.”
Rogers shook his head as he watched Tunger walk, in a stiff, tight way, up the stairs and find a seat. The corporal sat slowly, exhaling in a hiss as he did so.
For all that was wrong with Tunger, his antics seemed to have calmed Rogers down. Rogers felt more at ease than he had when he’d entered the room, and, amazingly, didn’t trip and fall on his face as he moved over to the chair opposite Keffoule and sat down.
“I apologize,” Rogers said.
Keffoule’s head shook almost imperceptibly. “It is nothing.”
They spent a moment staring at each other, which just about erased all the relaxation Rogers had gained by watching Tunger fart-walk up a flight of stairs. The Thelicosan commander seemed to be studying him with great interest, her body looking both frozen and relaxed in her chair. Were her dark eyes hiding a smile? Had she just brought him here to gloat about her superior position? Was she going to shoot him?
&
nbsp; “So, Grand Marshal Keffoule,” Rogers said, just to break the silence.
“It’s pronounced ‘kiff-OOL,’ ” she said.
“Oh,” Rogers said. He’d been saying “kiffle,” which he now realized was kind of stupid.
“So, Captain Rogers,” Keffoule said by way of continuing their conversation, once Rogers had lapsed back into strangled silence.
“It’s pronounced ‘row-JEERS,’ ” Rogers said before he could stop himself.
Yeah, Rogers thought. That’s what this conversation needs. Levity and sarcasm, you moron. Well done. Bang-up job.
Keffoule raised an eyebrow. “Really?”
“No,” Rogers admitted.
The Grand Marshal frowned. She was going to kill him. She was going to flip the table and shoot him in the face. Keffoule didn’t even have a weapon that Rogers could see, but he was pretty confident she could produce one, should the will to shoot him in the face be strong enough.
Keffoule shifted, uncrossing her legs, then crossing them again the opposite way.
Good god, this was awkward. And scary.
“I appreciate your being willing to meet with me,” Rogers said, his voice absolutely not cracking.
Keffoule nodded magnanimously. “We are in a precarious situation, you and I,” she said.
Rogers thought she was going to continue, but she merely stared at him. He would have given a bottle of Jasker 120 to know what this woman was thinking.
* * *
Oh. My. Science, Keffoule was thinking. Oh my Science. Captain Rogers. Right here in front of her. And he had a beard. It wasn’t exactly the most prominent beard in the world, but there it was, draped across his strong chin like a banner of manliness. And he looked like quite the ruffian, with his hair matted, his uniform wrinkled and greasy—a wonderfully exciting deviation from strict Thelicosan appearance standards. She couldn’t remember the last time she had looked at anything so incredible in all her life. By Newton’s Laws, what she could do with a little inertia right now.
She had the protractor under the table. All she needed to do was give it to him. His acceptance of her proposal was a given; she was one of the most powerful women in the entire Thelicosan military, with a distinguished career and strong hips. He would be a great husband, and she would lord it over him as any good Thelicosan woman would.
Stopping an intergalactic war and cementing ties with the Meridans via marriage? They’d have to take her back into the F Sequence. The plan was perfect. And it just so happened that Keffoule was madly in love with the man who would make it all possible.
* * *
But all she was doing was staring at him.
“Precarious doesn’t even begin to describe this whole thing,” Rogers said. “Why did you come across the border?”
“To eliminate the threat,” Keffoule said plainly. “You.”
Rogers absolutely did not like being the direct object of the verb “eliminate.” He tried to hide his discomfort and replace it with honest-to-goodness confusion.
“Threat?” he asked. “What kind of threat could we possibly pose? Weren’t you getting reports from that idiot McSchmidt? We were in the middle of the biggest fiasco since the War of Musical Chairs!”
Keffoule’s face made an imperceptible adjustment. And maybe went a little red. Was she confused?
“I read the reports,” she said, her voice sounding perhaps a little husky. “Many times. Many, many times.” She cleared her throat. “The intelligence passed to us showed that you were planning a surprise attack on our fleet,” she said slowly. “The reports were broken, yes, but . . .”
Rogers felt like he’d just been dunked in a giant container of ice water. “You were scared that you were going to get attacked by us? Do you have any idea what the disposition of our forces was after the droid attack? We barely had enough supplies to keep basic operations going, never mind mount an assault on a numerically and technologically superior force.”
The Thelicosan commander’s face was turning a little red. She was beginning to look very uncomfortable, and Rogers began to realize—whether with relief or anger or terror, he wasn’t sure—that this whole thing might have been a giant misunderstanding. What would the intergalactic courts make of it? The Thelicosans had violated the treaty first, of course, and they had sent that message . . .
“Oh yeah!” Rogers said. “And you told us you were invading!”
Keffoule sighed, the first display of any real overt emotion that Rogers had seen from her.
“A mistake,” she said, bowing her head slightly. “It was supposed to say that we were inviting you to negotiate on a neutral vessel to discuss the terms of the mutual military drawdown. I have . . . disciplined the communications officer responsible for the error. You have my most sincere apologies.”
Rogers felt all his muscles relax. It had been a misunderstanding. Somehow, the Thelicosans had gotten their reports mixed up, or something, and then they’d come across the border to try to clear things up, but had sent the wrong message. For all the stories he’d heard about Thelicosan military competence, this didn’t seem to line up with the legends.
“Well,” he said, leaning back in his chair. He couldn’t stop the somewhat delirious grin that was spreading across his face. All the tension was replaced by a sort of giddy relief, and he could feel a half-insane chuckle bubbling up inside his chest. “That’s that, then, isn’t it? You can lift the jamming net, we can send word home that everything is okay and to please send beer, you can fire just about everyone in your intelligence squadron, and I can finally—”
“Tell me, Captain Rogers,” Keffoule said suddenly, leaning over the table. Her body moved so fluidly, so quickly, that Rogers’ butt barely had time to clench. “Do you have a home somewhere in Merida?”
“I, uh, what?” Rogers said, disarmed by the sudden personal question. “Not really. I used to live on Merida Prime, in one of the smaller cities, but I haven’t been there in years. I prefer open space, I guess.”
Even as his mouth formed the words, he was surprised by them. How long had he been dreaming of retiring on Dathum? Suddenly the idea of sitting on a beach sipping drinks for ten hours a day didn’t seem so appealing.
“So, it doesn’t quite matter where that open space is, does it?” Keffoule said. Her tone was curious—was it the Thelicosan version of shyness? Of all the things Keffoule had seemed since Rogers had walked in, shy had not been one of them.
“Well, it matters a little bit,” Rogers said, shrugging. Where was this going? “I mean, open space in the middle of a refuse dump at the outer rim of a galaxy wouldn’t be very interesting at all.”
“I see,” Keffoule said, a slow smile playing across her face. Her eyes sparkled. “So, interesting things interest you, do they, Captain?”
Rogers squinted, frowning. “I was under the impression that the definition of ‘interesting’ demanded that it hold someone’s interest.”
Oddly, he wished Tunger would come down from the seats and tell him what the hell this woman was thinking. This might have been the most bizarre conversation he’d ever been a part of, and he thought—he hoped—that his lack of understanding of Thelicosan culture was the biggest contributing factor. Tunger might have some idea why being interested in interesting things had anything to do with avoiding a very messy war.
For some reason, his remark seemed to please Keffoule. Rogers had the strange desire to scoot his chair away from her. In fact, he was having an increasingly strong desire to get the hell out of this chair and run away. He chided himself for being so skittish; she was only the most powerful Thelicosan woman currently in the middle of his territory asking him strange personal questions.
Rogers cleared his throat. “Look, this has been, uh, interestingly interesting, and all, but don’t we both have fleets to run? Since we’re in agreement that this is just something that needs to be undone, why don’t we just shake hands and, uh, go undo it?”
Again, Keffoule seemed to be eit
her unaware of or uninterested in his attempts to hurry this parade of awkwardness along. She sat further forward, generating the impression that she was getting ready to pounce.
“Captain,” she asked, “does Bernoulli’s principle deal with conducting or nonconducting fluids?”
Tunger shifted in his seat so abruptly that Rogers could hear it. Another noise was beginning to make rumblings somewhere else in the ship, but at the moment Rogers couldn’t tell what it was.
Rogers frowned. “Nonconducting. If you allow for conduction, it—”
“And Euclid’s algorithm?”
“What about it?” Rogers asked, getting annoyed.
“Sir!” Tunger shouted. Rogers ignored him; he was busy being distracted by pointless mathematical questions. Thelicosans were so strange. A culture based on physics was kind of a given—you couldn’t just disobey Newton or Einstein or Bob—but a culture obsessed with it was entirely different. And, Rogers thought, unnecessary.
“What does it find?” Keffoule asked. Her face was getting really red now.
“It’s a way to find the greatest common divisor of two numbers. Is there a point to this?”
Keffoule ignored his question. “Kepler’s third law?”
“With or without Copernican correction?”
Keffoule raised an eyebrow.
“Just kidding,” Rogers said. “That’s not a real thing.” He rattled off the rest of the law and watched as Keffoule’s face went from smug to absolutely ecstatic. She looked like a kid who’d just been given the biggest cone of cotton candy in her entire life. It really didn’t make sense at all. This was all really basic astrophysics and engineering stuff. He wouldn’t be a very good engineer if he couldn’t handle some simple math.
