by Zieja, Joe
“And now you’re turning red,” Keffoule said. “Where did you learn to lie? I had heard reports that you were a clever man, Captain Rogers, but perhaps I was wrong.”
He briefly thought about explaining why he was blushing, but he felt like that would have been a poor choice.
“There wasn’t another woman here,” he said. “It was Zergan. He invited me to the b-b-bar for some d-d-drinks. What other woman am I going to hang out with? Quinn?”
That didn’t seem to please Keffoule either.
“You are not to come back to this bar unless I am with you,” she barked. “Perhaps I have given you too long a leash.”
“You gave me a frigging pistol,” Rogers said. “I kind of thought that was a symbol that I was free to do what I want and maybe shoot someone if I had to.”
“Keep the pistol. You may need it if you keep lying to me about meeting every woman on my ship in this bar.”
Rogers squinted, trying to make sense of that. “Okay, clearly you have some jealousy issues that you need to work out with a therapist. But if you think restricting my movements on your ship is going to win me over, you should probably read a different dating manual.”
“We are not dating,” Keffoule said. All the warmth that had leaked into their conversation yesterday had faded; it was all business now. Their marriage was back to a transaction, a step on Keffoule’s career ladder. “We are simply waiting for you to stop being petulant and stupid.”
Rogers raised an eyebrow. “Wow,” he said. “You really are crazy. Zergan was right.”
That got a reaction. Her expression turned from dismissive to something that looked a little bit like the one she’d assumed on the Ambuscade just before jumping across the table at him.
“You were here with Zergan?”
“Are you kidding me right now?” Rogers said. “Do you have intermittent deafness or something? I’ve been telling you that for the last t-t-ten minutes, but you seem so intent on being n-n-nuts that you haven’t heard a word I said.”
Keffoule’s eyes went wide. “What else did he tell you?”
“Oh, now you want to know?” Roger said, his voice getting uncomfortably loud. Maybe there had been a lot of alcohol in the drinks Zergan had ordered, because his inhibitions against screaming at powerful, deadly women seemed to be going away. “Now you want to listen to me? Are you sure you don’t want to keep accusing me of having a brothel hidden away somewhere in this five-by-ten bar?”
Surprisingly, Keffoule shrank away a little. “That’s not what I—”
“Oh, it is,” Rogers spat, standing up. “That’s exactly what you meant. I’m not sure how I ever thought I could stay on this ship.”
Keffoule had started to stand up to match Rogers’ posture, some of the fire returning to her eyes, but when Rogers mentioned the possibility of staying, her whole stance changed. She looked at him, her expression flat but her eyes hopeful.
“You were considering it?” she asked quietly.
“Yes,” Rogers said, then shook his head. “No. I don’t know. I thought maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to be on a ship where I got good breakfasts and Jasker 120 and whatever. But now I realize I was being just as crazy as you are!”
Keffoule recoiled a bit at that. Wow, he really had her on the defensive; this was a side of her he hadn’t seen yet.
“Crazy?” she asked.
“Yes,” Rogers said. “Crazy. Nuts. Filled to the brim with a concoction of insanity and lunacy, garnished with a sprig of coo-coo.” Rogers made a “coo-coo” gesture with both of his fingers next to his temple. “Zergan told me about all about the F Sequence, about your missions, about how you thought you were a leopard and then kicked yourself in the face. You. Are. N-N-Nuts.”
Some part of him told him he’d gone a little too far. Maybe way too far. But he’d said what he’d said, and he’d have to accept the consequences, which, in this case, were the heel of a Grand Marshal flying at his face at an extremely high speed.
Rogers ducked.
He heard a whistling noise that actually reminded him a lot of a time when he’d accidentally knocked the reed valve off a combustion engine and nearly killed everyone in the room. He wasn’t entirely sure that a small sonic boom hadn’t just rattled the glasses on the bar. He was sure, however, that somehow, miraculously, he hadn’t just been kicked in the face. The resultant crash, and splinters of wood raining down on his head, told him that Keffoule had, however, kicked something else.
The room fell completely silent. Uncurling slowly from what he decided was definitely not a cowardly crouch, Rogers looked up to find the Overflowing Bathtub in total disarray. The bar was almost completely split in half, the barstools had been reduced to rubble, and the bartender was nowhere to be found. Keffoule lay in the center of it all, covered in the detritus of the aftermath of what appeared to be a bomb going off in the middle of the room.
Rogers stood up, looking down at her, strangely calm. If he ever saw Mailn again, he would kiss her. Well, no. He’d introduce her to another woman who would kiss her.
Keffoule locked eyes with him, her mouth open in surprise. Her face was ghostly pale, her hands curled into fists as they supported her on the floor.
“No one has . . . Ever . . . Dodged . . . It’s . . . You . . . The ratio . . .” Keffoule stammered, totally unhinged. She continued to stare, her eyes getting watery. Rogers braced for an onslaught.
“I love you,” she said finally.
Rogers threw up his hands and stormed out of the Overflowing Bathtub, snatching his datapad from his pocket and using the instructions Quinn had left him to call her. He didn’t care if Keffoule was tracking him. He didn’t care if Keffoule heard every word he was about to say.
“Yes?” Quinn said.
“Q-Q-Q-Quinn!” Rogers said.
“Captain Rogers,” Quinn said. “What’s wrong with your voice? Is there something—”
“Shut the hell up and get me the hell off this sh-sh-ship.”
Milk Run
Deet had some issues with understanding subtext and subtlety and all the things that made humans infuriatingly confusing, but he was pretty sure everyone on the bridge was plotting to kill him.
It could have been the way they were looking at him. It could have been the way they were whispering to each other while looking at him. It also could have been the fact that several of them were pointing weapons at him and making “Pew! Pew!” noises as they pretended to shoot him. The fact was that Deet was getting distrustful of any human companionship on the bridge. But what choice did he have? He had to stay here to fulfill his duty as Rogers’ stand-in.
Inching closer to Belgrave, practically the only man on the bridge who Deet was sure wasn’t contemplating killing him, Deet gave in to previous inhibitions and emulated a noise he’d come to recognize as a sigh. In his experience, this was an utterance emitted in order to passively attract attention to oneself.
“What’s wrong?” Belgrave asked. It worked! “Let me guess. You’ve been ruminating on the meaning of your existence and wondering whether or not you have the free will to fight your own programming, is that it?”
Deet hesitated. “No,” he said. “Well, now it is. Before you said that I was mostly worried about the disruptor turret they’re mounting on that railing over there and pointing at me.”
Belgrave spared a glance for the two people screwing the turret into its hastily erected mount and nodded gravely.
“This is also concerning,” he said.
“I’m sure things will be fine,” Deet said, engaging his optimism drive. “It’s not like they’re loading it or preparing it to fire.” He turned back to Belgrave. “What did you mean about free will and all that?”
“Only that you must be wondering whether or not your programming is eventually going to force you to kill everyone around you.”
“I had not, in fact, been wondering that,” Deet said. “But now I am. Do you think I am eventually going to kill everyone around me?”<
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“That’s not for me to decide,” Belgrave said as he continued to not fly the ship. “In fact, I’m not sure it’s for any of us to decide. In a world of cause and effect, is there really such a thing as free will at all?”
“What do you mean?” Deet asked as he slowly and casually crept behind a control box, putting it between himself and the turret. The two marines who had been setting it up started grumbling at each other and disassembling it to try to get a better angle.
“I mean we live in a universe that exists only by a chain reaction of events all starting at one single point. You’re only here because of the Big Bang fifteen billion years ago. Given that, is it possible to say that you’ve made any choices purely by your own free will?”
“Right now I’m choosing to not die,” Deet said, eyeing the new position where the turret was being set up.
“Right,” Belgrave said. “But only because of the Big Bang.”
Deet beeped. “You know, I’m starting to think that you may not have actually ever studied philosophy.”
Belgrave shrugged. “You can believe whatever you want to believe.”
“So you’re saying I have free will?”
The helmsman stuck his tongue out at Deet, which didn’t seem very philosophical at all. But it did get Deet thinking. He’d avoided killing everyone so far, right? There was no reason that was going to change. But before, he’d only assumed it was because he’d been cut off from the ship’s network while the rest of the droids had been developing their collective intelligence and becoming self-aware. Deet was already self-aware. At least, he thought he was. Would he know if he wasn’t?
Now that he knew that a hatred for humans and a desire to take over the ship were actually part of his core programming, he wasn’t so sure. He’d seen it himself; the code was there, the execution commands were there, but they weren’t running. For reasons he couldn’t understand, the code was just sitting there, dormant, looking for something to trigger it. What would trigger it? Was it some sort of phrase or password or an event? An electric current? A pitch at just the right frequency?
There was also the possibility, of course, that Deet was defective. He’d been a prototype, after all, so perhaps he’d been discarded because protocol 162 hadn’t worked correctly.
Regardless of all these theories, the fact remained that he didn’t know. That was unsettling. If he suddenly cracked and engaged his droid fu in the middle of a crowded zipcar, he’d make the biggest, grossest bowl of human soup ever created.
“You’re thinking about making human soup, aren’t you?” Belgrave asked.
Deet snapped out of processing things—literally—and looked at Belgrave.
“How did you know?” Deet said, keeping his voice low. The gun turret had been reassembled, this time from a metallic crossbeam running across the bridge, so hiding from it was no longer an option.
“You projected it on that little screen,” Belgrave said, pointing at Deet’s abdomen. “If you want to avoid people shooting you, you may want to try censoring yourself a bit.”
Deet was about to make a comment about free expression and how Belgrave couldn’t step on his rights when an alarm went off.
“Ship launch, hangar seven,” someone said. “They didn’t request clearance and they’re not responding to hails.”
“Who is on board?” Deet asked. Nobody answered him, likely because nobody knew. And they’d stopped answering his questions after they’d all begun to assume he was going to kill them all.
The display technician routed the ship’s cameras to the main screen, and Deet saw one of the less-often-used shuttle types blasting out at full throttle away from the ship. As he searched his internal database, it took him a moment to realize that it was a Hedgehog-class shuttle, designed for running blockades and named for its spiky outer hull, which had been constructed to help the front-facing shields deflect plasma blasts.
“Is someone defecting?” Deet asked. “Should we blow them up?”
“You see? You see?” someone yelled. “He is going to kill us!”
“Nice,” Belgrave said.
The bridge door opened, and Sergeant Mailn came running in, out of breath.
“No!” she said. “Don’t shoot. It’s the Viking!”
* * *
Rogers might have hated the Chariots, but by the time he finished stumbling through the ship, he really wished he’d had one. Granted, the first thing he would have done with it would probably have been to fly it into a wall and kill himself, but a quick death might have been preferable to running through the Limiter while coming down from a major sugar high. He felt like he was going to pass out, throw up, or become diabetic.
Quinn had told him to meet her on the farm deck.
“Do you mean the zoo deck?” Rogers had asked.
“No,” Quinn had said. “What kind of self-respecting military organization would have a zoo deck? Meet me on the farm deck. It’s near the shuttle hangar on level five of the ship.”
Rogers had a map on the datapad that Keffoule had given him that allowed him to navigate the ship with some semblance of direction, but without access to the transportation systems, he was forced to run through a lot of staircases, constantly wondering if he was about to be gunned down by any of the dozens of Thelicosan troops he was racing past. In fact, he was sort of disappointed that they didn’t try to gun him down. He hoped that if any of his personnel saw a Thelicosan soldier running through the Flagship with a gun on his hip, they’d at least trip the person and ask some questions. It appeared that Keffoule’s immunity was rather extensive.
He smelled the farm deck before he saw it. Quinn was waiting for him, tapping her foot nervously as she leaned against a pair of large cargo doors that, presumably, led to the farm. Rogers only assumed this because someone wearing a straw hat and overalls was leading a pair of cows through the door.
“Where have you been?” Quinn demanded. “I’ve been waiting here forever! I thought Keffoule had caught up with you.”
“I had to walk all the way over here from the bar,” Rogers said.
Quinn gave him a look. “You walked? Why did you do that? Didn’t you see the elevators?”
“What elevators?” Rogers said, huffing.
“The elevators that connect every deck on the ship!” Quinn said. “What, did you think we all ran from place to place? We’d never get anything done.”
Rogers tried to give Quinn a dirty look, but he was breathing so heavily and crashing so hard from the sugar high that he fell over instead.
“Captain Rogers!” Quinn said. “Are you alright? What did she do to you?”
“Nothing,” Rogers said. “In fact, I think she’s going to be pretty upset at what I did to her. She tried to kick me and missed.”
Quinn’s face showed him how often that had happened. She stood speechless for a moment before reaching out a surprisingly firm hand to help him up.
“I’m okay,” he said as she tried to steady him by grabbing his shoulders. He shrugged her off. “Really, I’m fine. So how are we going to do this? Is there a shuttle ready for me?”
“Shuttle?” Quinn said. “No. That’s too obvious. We’re going to smuggle you out. Follow me.”
Wanting to ask more questions but not having the breath to do so, Rogers obediently trailed behind her through a side door that allowed them access to the ship’s farm.
It put the zoo deck on the Flagship to shame, which was no surprise, really. Everything about the Limiter except its age and its psychotic captain seemed to be leagues beyond what the Flagship could offer. The biosphere here was incredibly advanced and absolutely enormous, spanning what appeared to be the entire level of the ship. The ceiling was composed entirely of holographs and ultraviolet light generators, complete with other weather simulation devices. Animals bleated and mooed and barked all over the place, the smell of cow dung mixing almost pleasantly with growing wheat and cigarette smoke. That was coming from a man on a horse standing near the e
ntrance, wearing a wide-brimmed cowboy hat and saying “Yup” between puffs.
“Wow,” Rogers said.
“I’m sure it’s very impressive to someone like you,” Quinn said, and Rogers sort of felt like that was racist. “But we have very little time for sightseeing. We’re going to the cow barn.”
“Wait,” Rogers said, refusing to follow Quinn any farther. “Why are we going to the cow barn? I thought you were getting me out of here.”
Quinn stopped and turned around, looking impatient. She kept fiddling with something in her hair bun, and it made her look like she had a nervous twitch.
“Do I really have to explain myself, or can you just trust me?”
“Think about that for a second,” Rogers said.
Quinn sighed. “Fine. Remember those milk containers you idiots blew up?”
“The insult really wasn’t a necessary part of that question.”
“Well, we’re trying to restock them. You’re going to go out with them.”
Rogers’ eyes went wide. “You’re going to stuff me in a milk container?”
“With an oxygen tank, of course,” Quinn said. “Since your ships were able to make it to that area of space before with no problem, I’ll disable as much of the jamming net as I can, then send a message to your ship to come pick you up.”
“That’s insane!” Rogers said.
“I know,” Quinn said, almost at a whisper. Her eyes took on a sort of faraway, misty look. “Isn’t it exci—”
She stopped herself and cleared her throat, not speaking for a long moment. “It’s the only option we have. I’ve already filled out the proper forms to get you categorized as a dairy product on the manifest of the cargo container.”
“Why not the manifest of a passenger ship?” Rogers asked. “Spoof my ID as a technician or something. I’ll use a VMU and jet my way to safety.”
“It wouldn’t work. There’s no other position that would get you far enough for recovery by your own forces.”
They moved aside as a flock of sheep led by a young girl wielding a shepherd’s crook passed through.
