Starship Grifters (A Rex Nihilo Adventure)

by Robert Kroese

  Actually fixing the plasmatic entropy cannon was a tougher proposition. It took me a full day to get the wiring to match the plans—Larviton’s engineers had more thoroughly bollixed up the wiring than even the most skilled saboteur could have managed. It was probably karmic justice that Vlaak’s marines had killed them, thinking they were saboteurs; in a sense they were.

  More worrying than the faulty wiring, though, was the fact that the whole device seemed to be dependent on a mysterious black box that supposedly modulated the plasmatic entropy flow. There was no way of knowing what was inside the box and no way of opening it without destroying it. The plans clearly spelled out the specifications of the box, but it was impossible to determine without activating the cannon whether the box would do what it was supposed to do. If the specifications were off by even the most minuscule factor, the plasmatic reaction would become unstable, starting a chain reaction that would very likely destroy the entire Peace Fortress.

  I disconnected the box and inspected it. Except for the receptacles where the wires attached, it was a perfect black cube. It measured about eight centimeters across. The plans for the cannon were very thorough, but there was no information on the “entropic modulator” except for its input and output specifications. This made me suspect that Larviton’s engineers hadn’t designed the black box but rather acquired it from some third party. Studying the box closely, I found a tiny inscription etched on the bottom. It read:

  GNT

  I frowned. Was it the name of a company? I had no information in my memory on a company by that name that manufactured any sort of high-tech devices. Somebody’s initials, maybe? But whose? If GNT was a person, what were his or her motivations in creating the black box? Was GNT a Malarchian partisan? A mercenary who worked for the highest bidder? A saboteur? If I guessed wrong and Vlaak pulled the trigger, we were all dead. I could explain the problem to Vlaak, but if I admitted I was unable to be sure the cannon would work, our deal would fall through—along with Rex’s scheme to get Malarchian development funds. Vlaak would probably kill us, and if he didn’t, it was only a matter of time before the Galactic Credit Bureau caught up to us—in which case we’d wish Vlaak had killed us.

  I decided my only option was to bluff and hope for the best. I asked for a meeting with Heinous Vlaak. When I was brought before him, he was conferring with Gavin Larviton.

  “Your Lordship,” I announced, “I have fixed the wiring of the plasmatic entropy cannon.”

  “Excellent!” he shrieked. “So it’s ready to fire?”

  “It’s built and wired precisely to the specifications provided,” I replied.

  “Speak plainly, robot. Is the gun ready to fire?”

  “It couldn’t be more ready, Your Lordship.”

  “What does that mean? If I pull the trigger, is it going to blow up this battle station?”

  “Destroying this battle station is not in my interests.”

  “Bah!” shrieked Vlaak. “This is why I don’t keep robots around. You can never get a straight answer out of them. Lieutenant, send for Rex Nihilo. I’m going to blow up his planet.”

  After a few minutes Sergeant Ricketts escorted Rex into the chamber.

  “Accursed robot!” cried Rex theatrically. “You have betrayed me by assisting my enemy in destroying my beloved planet. I shall never forgive you for this!”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” I replied, with some sincerity. I gave us about a fifty-fifty shot of living through the next thirty seconds.

  “Bring up Schufnaasik Six on the viewscreen!” screeched Vlaak.

  The ugly brown sphere appeared.

  “Gaze upon your beloved planet for the last time,” Vlaak crowed.

  Rex dutifully affixed his eyes on the screen.

  “Gaze!” screeched Vlaak.

  “I’m gazing,” Rex snapped. “What do you want from me?”

  “Fire the plasmatic entropy cannon!” howled Vlaak.

  “You have the remote,” said Lieutenant T’kik’ti.

  Vlaak scowled and handed the remote control to the lieutenant. “I don’t know how to work these things,” he shrieked.

  “Yes, Your Lordship.”

  “Fire the plasmatic entropy cannon!” cried Vlaak again.

  Lieutenant T’kik’ti pushed the red button.

  A distant explosion reverberated through the battle station. The lights went out. Dim emergency lights came on.

  “Was that it?” asked Vlaak.

  “No, Your Lordship,” said the lieutenant, holding his hand to an earpiece. “We’re getting reports of an explosion at the reactor core.”

  “More saboteurs!” shrieked Vlaak. “Kill them!”

  “Yes, Your Lordship.” The lieutenant spoke some orders into his comm unit.

  “How many saboteurs did you have on board your ship anyway?” Vlaak asked Rex incredulously.

  “Too damn many,” said Rex, who was clearly frustrated with the amount of effort it was taking to get his planet destroyed. “But if they blew up the reactor core, shouldn’t the explosion have destroyed the whole battle station?”

  Larviton shook his head. “That was a flaw in the early design. We fixed that problem weeks ago. The worst that can happen now if the reactor core is destroyed is that the lights go off. And the plasmatic entropy cannon won’t work, of course.”

  “Of course,” Rex muttered.

  “Do we have a spare reactor core?” asked Vlaak.

  “Yes, Your Lordship,” replied Larviton. “My engineers are trained for this sort of scenario. They should be on their way to the reactor to start replacing the core now.”

  Rex sighed. “Can I go back to my cell? Give me a call when you’re ready.”

  “Lord Vlaak,” said the lieutenant, pressing his fingers against his earpiece, “The team commander is reporting that all four saboteurs have been killed. They were wearing engineers’ uniforms, just like the last batch.”

  “Excellent!” shrieked Vlaak. “Send in the engineers!”

  The lieutenant engaged in a brief exchange with someone over his comm unit. “Lord Vlaak,” he said, “we’re having trouble locating the engineers.”

  Rex looked like he was about to burst into tears.

  “Larviton, what the hell is wrong with your engineers?” Vlaak shrieked. “I’m renegotiating your contract if you can’t find more reliable employees.”

  Larviton shrugged helplessly.

  “Robot,” said Vlaak. “Can you fix a blown reactor core?”

  “If I have access to the reactor schema and the necessary equipment,” I said.

  “All right, then,” said Vlaak. “Get to it.”

  “I don’t know how you ever got by without my robot,” said Rex.

  “Silence, Nihilo!” screeched Vlaak. “You may have gotten a temporary reprieve, but I’m still going to blow up your planet.”

  “Promises, promises,” said Rex. “Can I go back to my cell now?”

  “You will return to your cell when I give the order!” shrieked Vlaak.

  The room was silent for a few seconds.

  “Sergeant!” screeched Vlaak.

  “Yes, Your Lordship.”

  “Take Mr. Nihilo back to his cell.”

  “Yes, Your Lordship.”

  Rex was led away and I was escorted to the blown reactor core, where a janitorial crew was mopping up charred bits of flesh and engineering uniforms. Being one of Gavin Larviton’s engineers was turning out to be more dangerous than being a Malarchian marine.

  There wasn’t much left of the reactor core, but it had clearly been much smaller than the one at the prison. I had expected it to be one of Larviton’s standard zontonium-based units, but it was of a type I had never seen before. According to the plans I was given, it used the same technology as the plasmatic entropy cannon.

  Following a h
unch, I traced a conduit from the blasted remains of the reactor core into an access panel and opened it. The panel revealed a nexus of wires that ended in another black box. On the bottom were the initials GNT. Whoever or whatever GNT was, both the Malarchy and Gavin Larviton sure relied on them for a lot of their technology.

  “Hey, you!” said a muffled voice behind me. I turned to see a Malarchian marine aiming a lazegun more or less in my direction. “This is a restricted area.”

  “I’m here on the authority of Heinous Vlaak,” I said. “I’m fixing the reactor.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Sorry, I hadn’t heard. Things have been crazy around here since the reactor core blew up.” The voice seemed strangely familiar.

  “Do I know you?” I asked.

  “Oh, hi, Sasha,” he said. “Didn’t recognize you at first. These emergency lights are so dim, and this helmet is impossible to see out of anyway.” He pulled off the helmet.

  “Wick!” I cried. “What are you doing here?”

  “Captain Wick,” he corrected me. “I’m a Malarchian marine now.”

  “You mean you’re pretending to be a marine,” I said.

  “Well,” he replied, “it started out that way, but I think I might stick with it. The uniforms aren’t very comfortable, but it feels good to finally be part of something important.”

  “You’re part of the rebellion,” I said. “Remember, you’re fighting for freedom in the galaxy? You can’t just put on a Malarchian uniform and become a marine.”

  “That’s what I keep telling Corporal Issimo,” said Wick. “Sometimes I don’t think he’s cut out for a military career.”

  “Corporal Issimo? How did you get to be a captain if General Issimo is . . . I mean, if Issimo is only a corporal?”

  “I received several promotions after my valorous performance in the Battle of the Reactor Core.”

  “Battle of the . . . ?”

  “Surely you’ve heard about the Battle of the Reactor Core?” said Wick. “It’s the talk of the Peace Fortress. I single-handedly killed four saboteurs.”

  “Those weren’t saboteurs, Wick! Those were the engineers!”

  “Well, they shouldn’t have been skulking around an exploded reactor wearing engineers’ uniforms like a bunch of saboteurs,” said Wick.

  “We’re the saboteurs, Wick! Remember, the whole reason we were here was to blow up the reactor core!”

  “That was the old Wick,” he said.

  “The reactor blew up less than an hour ago! What in Space happened?”

  “Ted and Fingers got jobs working in the kitchen. Issimo and I started working in the laundry. We found some extra uniforms and posed as marines to get into the munitions locker. Then we stole some zontonium charges and blew up the reactor core. We’d probably have been killed by the explosion if we weren’t wearing our uniforms. The blast knocked us out and the next thing I knew there were four guys in engineers’ uniforms skulking around and someone was yelling at me to shoot them. So I did. Lieutenant T’kik’ti was so impressed, he made me a captain. Issimo was unconscious during the battle, so he only got to be a corporal. Pretty fantastic, huh?”

  “Wick, you can’t . . .” I started, then realized that I wasn’t really in any position to lecture him about loyalty. I decided to change tacks. “Wick, I need your help getting the reactor core replaced.”

  “Are you going to blow it up again?” Wick asked. “Because I’m not sure I can help you with that. Malarchian marines aren’t really supposed to sabotage Malarchian battle stations.”

  “No,” I said. “We need the reactor online to power the plasmatic entropy cannon. Rex wants Heinous Vlaak to use the cannon to blow up Schufnaasik Six.”

  “Ooh!” Wick exclaimed. “Schufnaasik Six is where the secret cloaking facility is located. Man, if I helped you destroy Schufnaasik Six, I could get promoted to general. But isn’t that Rex’s planet? Why does he want to destroy his own planet?”

  “It’s complicated,” I said. “Basically the planet is worth more to Rex destroyed than intact. So can I count on your help?”

  “Sure, Sasha. You’re the one who got me out of prison and got me started on my new career. What do you need?”

  “You see these initials? G-N-T. I need to know what they mean. Can you find that out for me?”

  “I can ask around,” said Wick.

  “Thanks. So are the rest of the team quitting the Frente too?”

  “Well, Fingers really likes working in the kitchen, and they promised him new arms after six months of service. And I think Corporal Issimo likes being a marine, even though he got demoted. He’s glad not to have the responsibility of leading the rebels anymore. Not sure about Ted. He’s hard to figure out, you know. Keeps talking about the Chaotic Equilibrium and a bunch of stuff nobody understands. I think the quartermaster only puts up with him because he’s friends with Fingers.”

  “OK,” I said. At least I didn’t need to worry about evacuating the rest of the team if Rex and I ever managed to escape. If they liked it here, let them stay. “Well, I’d better get back to work.”

  “I’ll try to find out what those initials mean.”

  “Thanks, Wick.”

  I spent the next three days installing the replacement reactor core according to the schematic I had been provided. Rex would be pleased to know that I now also had a copy of the reactor schematic in my memory; he could probably sell that information for as much as the plasmatic entropy cannon plans. The new reactor core was identical to the old one, so I had every reason to think it would work perfectly well, but the mysterious black box still bothered me. Why did both the battle station’s power source and its secret weapon depend for critical functionality on a component whose nature was a complete enigma? If either black box failed to operate as expected, the results could be catastrophic. The station’s engineers had apparently accepted the boxes’ proper operation on faith, not knowing or caring how they actually worked. I wondered if the black boxes were unique to this battle station or whether Malarchian starships and bases relied on them as well. For that matter, how many more black boxes were hidden away behind access panels somewhere on the Peace Fortress? Who was GNT and what was the agenda behind installing these black boxes?

  Wick returned just as I was finishing up. “Hey, Sasha,” he said, pulling off his helmet. “I asked everyone but nobody seems to know what GNT means.”

  “Figures,” I said. “This whole battle station is built around technology that’s a complete mystery to the people running it. Everybody just assumes it’s going to work.”

  “Well,” said Wick, “it does, right?”

  “So far,” I replied, flipping a circuit breaker. I winced as the reactor core lit up. I half expected the thing to blow us into a million pieces. It didn’t. The overhead lights came on and machinery hummed to life. “And we live for a little longer,” I said, “thanks to the ineffable grace of the entropic modulators.”

  “What does that mean anyway?” asked Wick. “Entropic modulators?”

  “Entropy is the tendency for systems to become disordered over time, in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics,” I said. “Before the discovery of the sixth and seventh laws of thermodynamics, scientists believed that systems always tended toward greater disorder over time. In the twenty-ninth century, physicists showed that was false and that entropy was actually a force that could be controlled and even reversed in some cases. The trick is to transform the entropy into a physical form, known as plasmatic entropy. Once you’ve got the entropy in plasmatic form, you can theoretically do all sorts of things with it. I say ‘theoretically’ because plasmatic entropy is so dangerous and unstable that it was long considered useless for any practical purposes. The Malarchy’s use of a new breed of warship in the Fringe Wars demonstrated that they had solved the instability problem, but no one has ever been able to figure out how t
hey did it. Apparently these little black boxes are the secret.”

  “But you can’t figure out how the boxes work?” asked Wick.

  “Right,” I said. “I know they somehow balance the level of entropy so that an equilibrium is achieved between . . . oh.”

  “What?”

  “Hang on a minute,” I said. “I think I’m on the verge of having an idea.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Whenever I have an original thought, I shut down for fifteen seconds. If I want to avoid that, I have to think about something else for a while, like baseball.”

  “What’s baseball?” asked Wick, confused.

  “Never mind, it’s passed. What was I saying?”

  “Something about equilibrium. For a second there, you sounded like Ted.”

  “Aaahhh!” I exclaimed. “That’s it! G-N-T!”

  And then I shut down for fifteen seconds. When I came back online, Wick was shaking me.

  “Sasha, you OK?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Cut that out. What was I talking about?”

  “I said you sounded like Ted, and then you said ‘GNT,’ and you . . . Sasha?”

  “Sorry, what was I saying?”

  “I don’t think I should tell you. You keep shutting down.”

  “I’m right on the verge of figuring out something really big.”

  “Something about Ted and—”

  “Shhh!” I snapped. “You’re going to have to figure it out, Wick.”

  “Figure what out?”

  “What I’m trying to figure out.”

  “What is that?”

  “I don’t know. That’s the point. What was I talking about?”

  “Ted and—”

  “Shhh!” I hissed again. “Keep it to yourself.”

  Wick’s brow furrowed and his lips began to mouth soundless consonants. After a minute he said, “Can you give me a hint?”

  “It has something to do with the reactor, I think. And maybe the plasmatic entropy cannon. And Ted. Aaahhh! I’ve got it!”

  I shut down again.

  “ . . . makes any sense to me,” Wick was saying. “I should go get Ted. He knows all about this entropy and equilibrium stuff.”