Randoms

by David Liss

  “Why target the Rarel ship first?” I asked.

  “I don’t think I should have my orders questioned on my bridge,” Nayana said evenly.

  “Give me a break,” said Mi Sun. “Just answer his question.”

  “Very well, I will show you that courtesy.” Nayana gestured toward the screen, where the Rarel ship was clearly visible. “I suspect Ardov is the more formidable adversary. I’d rather not have to face him, whereas your lizard friend—no offense—is a buffoon. If the Ish-hi ship should survive the initial assault, that is the better of the two options.”

  I knew she was underestimating Steve, but I didn’t say so. Besides, I’d rather the shame of first defeat go to Ardov than to Captain Steve.

  We signaled Steve again. “We will launch a few PPB bursts at you to lull Ardov into a false sense of security.”

  “I get you,” Steve said. I could tell he was grinning. “And we’ll return fire. For the sake of realism, you understand.”

  “Not too much realism,” Nayana warned him.

  “Just the right amount, love.”

  We informed Ardov of our plan to attack Steve and then moved in. I opened fire with PPBs, and then Ardov fired as well. Per Nayana’s orders, Charles eased us back amid shots from Steve’s ship, but we did not return fire. Once Steve started in on our mutual enemy, I directed all of my fire at the Rarel ship. Ardov was new to all this and didn’t know how to evade. In fact, he was holding the ship at a relative stop, like a playground bully refusing to budge, and though the movement of our ship made targeting tricky, it was nowhere near as hard as hitting a ship engaging in evasive maneuvers. Even better for us, Ardov was positioned to fire on Steve, and he could not take us on without making himself vulnerable to the Ish-hi, so just like that, the Rarel ship was sandwiched between two enemies, fighting to stay alive.

  Ardov must have realized his mistake, and he attempted to back away from us, but both ships matched course and velocity, so there was nowhere for him to go. I kept locking and firing on his ship, thinking of it not as them, but as him. I was firing on Ardov, imagining that self-satisfied smirk falling away, and his growing look of alarm. I was having a fine time.

  “The Rarel ship’s shields are starting to fail,” Mi Sun reported. The data streaming across my own readings confirmed this. Ardov’s ship had damage throughout its systems, most importantly in its shield generators. Its engines were barely functional, and it looked like it had multiple significant hull breaches.

  “Make ready, Mr. Reynolds,” Nayana said. “As soon as those shields go down, hit the Ish-hi with a missile.”

  Just then my data bracelet chirped with a message from Steve. Tell your captain to save her missile. We’re watching you, mate.

  I laughed. “We might want to rethink strategy. Steve just messaged me to tell you not to bother with the missile.”

  “You’re trading intelligence with the enemy?” she demanded.

  “He sent me a friendly text. I didn’t answer. Don’t freak out on me.”

  “Hold off on the missile. For now.” I didn’t have to see her face to know she was furious. She had her plan, and now she couldn’t use it.

  “Looks like the Rarel shields are completely down,” Mi Sun announced.

  “As soon as that ship goes,” Nayana said, “the lizards are going to turn on us. Helm, prepare for evasive maneuvers. Weapons, see if you can bring yourself to fire on your alien friend.”

  Then the Rarel ship began to break apart, and there was a simulated flash of light. For a moment I felt a wave of terror. It was too similar to what had happened to the Phandic ship. I thought, Oh, no! Tamret! But I told myself it was just a sim, and I forced the feeling of panic down. It was an illusion. It was a game, but it was a realistic one—maybe a little too realistic for someone who had been in actual combat.

  Nayana pumped a victory fist. “One down, one to go! Now fire PPBs at the Ish-hi before they can fire on us. Wait, what are they doing?”

  I was firing at Steve’s ship, which was a tricky business because they were firing at us and trying to avoid our fire while we were trying to avoid theirs. Getting any kind of a lock was like trying to hit a Frisbee with a slingshot. But I also noticed that Steve was moving in close, and moving in fast.

  “Get us out of here!” Nayana cried, sounding panicked, like she forgot, in that instant, that it was a sim.

  “Wait!” I called out, but Nayana waved a dismissive hand at me and again told Charles to accelerate. We began pulling away at top speed, and Steve was right behind us, firing all the while. We felt the low rumble as PPB fire chipped away at our shields. I returned fire, knowing it would do little good.

  Nayana seemed to be noticing this as well. She looked at her readouts with concern. “You’re hitting him, but the weapons aren’t doing any damage.”

  “It’s why I told you to wait,” I said, exasperated. “The ion emissions from our engines are watering down our PPBs. Once we started running, we gave Steve the advantage.”

  Nayana’s face darkened. She seemed to understand that she’d made a mistake—two mistakes, really. She’d given a bad order, and had then refused to listen when her crew was trying to advise her. She had just blown the sim for us. If Steve won, I could be happy for my friend, but there was no silver lining for Nayana, whose pride would take a serious beating.

  I looked around the bridge. All three of the other humans looked tense and worried. They wanted to win, and they knew we were in a position that made winning almost impossible. Mi Sun kept turning around, glancing at the captain, waiting for her to come up with an idea to get us out of this. Nayana gripped the arms of her captain’s chair, a bead of sweat visible on her temple.

  This, I realized, was my big chance to show them my worth. I had more real space combat experience than any of them, and I’d proved I could handle the pressure. More than that, I had devised a new strategy to confound my enemies. What could I come up with now, in this strategy, to beat Steve and prove to the other Earth delegates that I was worth having around?

  Then it came to me. Steve had the advantage because he was chasing us, so let’s take that advantage away.

  “Maybe we could turn this around on him,” I said. “He’s directly behind us, so let’s come to a full stop and then swing around to face him. He’ll be at point-blank range, and he won’t be ready for us. And if he tries to retreat, the weapons advantage will be ours.”

  “Was that strategy in the reading?” Nayana asked, not doing a convincing job of hiding her enthusiasm. I’d just offered her the lifeline she needed.

  “No, I just thought of it,” I told her. “I can’t promise it will work. Turning that quickly is going to make targeting difficult for a few seconds, but with a little luck, we’ll take them out.”

  “Let’s try it.” She gave Charles a moment to enter the course, and when he was ready, she gave the order. “Now!”

  We decelerated rapidly while swinging around hard, and the combination felt like falling and spinning simultaneously. I tried to get a lock on my weapons console while also trying not to lose my lunch. The maneuver had seemed like a good idea in theory, but the sudden movement of our ship made achieving a lock difficult. More than that, the instant we slowed, Steve executed evasive maneuvers, which moved my efforts to lock weapons from challenging to near impossible. My hands simply couldn’t move quickly enough. Every time I tried to score a hit on his ship, it was already gone. He was moving too erratically, and the increased movement of our ship only made things worse.

  “I can’t get a lock.” I growled in frustration.

  “Ish-hi ship is bearing down on us,” Mi Sun reported.

  I looked up. “He’s going to ram us.”

  “Change course,” Nayana said.

  Charles shook his head. “There’s no time. He’s going to overtake us.”

  “Why would he do tha
t?” Nayana demanded.

  “He’s trying to force us to change the energy frequency of our shields or to retreat,” I told her, “which will put us at an offensive disadvantage.”

  “Why would we change our shield frequency?” she demanded.

  “It was in the reading!” I told her, trying to stay patient. “You don’t use the same frequency for energy weapons and physical objects.”

  “I fell asleep before I finished the assignment,” she said indignantly, “so I don’t know if you’re right or not.”

  I was busy trying to hit my target and was in no mood for long explanations. “Just trust me.”

  “Like I trusted you about stopping?” she asked.

  Now it was my turn to blush. Okay, my plan hadn’t worked out, but I’d been trying to fix her mistake. “Nayana, stop being stubborn. I know a few things about how these ships work.”

  “What, from watching Star Trek?” she demanded.

  “No, they don’t work the way they do on Star Trek,” I snapped, “which you would know if you’d ever seen Star Trek. I know how they work here, in real life. Nayana, I want us to win. You need to listen to me.”

  I thought she was going to demand I call her Captain, but she let that pass. “I think you’re wrong about the shields. And in any case, if he rams us, he’ll be destroyed too. It will be a draw and it gets him nothing. I say call his bluff and meet him head on, but just before he gets within three hundred miles, fire the dark-matter missile. Then fastest possible retreat.”

  “That’s a good call,” I said. And it was. Nayana had made a mess of things, but she was smart, and she’d put what she knew to good use. Three hundred miles was the cutoff for safe deployment. She wanted to maximize our chances of destroying him, and give us the minimum room we’d need to escape the damage of the blast.

  “Thank you, Mr. Reynolds,” she said. I turned around just in time to catch it. The big smile. I guess I knew what it took to get on her good side after all.

  Steve must have been anticipating that move, because just as he passed the four-hundred-mile barrier, he both sped up and radically shifted his approach. I fired the missile, but I was rushed. I knew I was way off the instant I let it go. The missile was lost.

  Charles had begun to retreat the instant I fired, but Nayana’s plan had depended on the enemy being destroyed. It was not, and it was gaining on us fast.

  “You did that on purpose!” Nayana shouted at me.

  “I’m doing the best with what we’ve got,” I said. I sent down the order to load another missile. If we were still alive in four minutes we could weigh our options then.

  Steve’s ship was looming closer now. I kept firing the PPBs, but his shields were holding. He sent some covering fire in our direction, but it was mostly for show. We could hear the distant boom of impacts, but our shields absorbed them easily.

  “He’ll change course,” she muttered. “He has to.”

  “He’s firing his missile!” Mi Sun shouted.

  “He’s less than two hundred miles away,” Nayana protested. “He’ll destroy his own ship.”

  “Evade!” I shouted at Charles, but he was waiting for the order from Nayana. It never came. Our visors filled with light, and our ship was destroyed. Steve had won for his team.

  • • •

  When we emerged from the sim, the Ish-hi were all clapping Steve on the shoulders and talking excitedly. The Rarels were looking about as glum as my teammates.

  “Nicely done, Captain,” I told Steve.

  “You practically handed it to him,” Nayana said. Her jaw was set and her eyes were red, like she was trying not to cry. Nayana did not like to lose, and someone had to take the blame. In Nayana’s world, it was not going to be her.

  My efforts to get on her good side had clearly not worked. I wanted all of them to like me, but I wasn’t going to take the blame for this. “You think I purposely missed hitting him?”

  “I know you were trading messages. You said as much. And stopping and turning around was simply suicide.”

  “I was trying to save us from your mess,” I snapped.

  “Sorry, mate,” Steve said. “Didn’t mean to make you look bad. Just going for a laugh.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I told him. “If Nayana had listened to me, we could have won it.”

  “So you want to blame me?” she asked. “This is the thanks I get for being nice to you?”

  “Telling me you wish you didn’t have to be a jerk to me doesn’t count as being nice.”

  “Let’s not be testy,” said Ms. Price, walking toward us with Dr. Roop. A three-dimensional holographic projection of our combat field was hovering above her data bracelet. “I had hoped to see Earth do better, but at least we held out until the end. No winner means no losers.”

  “Think again,” said Ann, one of the Ish-hi females. “We won.”

  “No you didn’t,” Nayana said. “You were destroyed the same time we were.”

  “Not true,” Dr. Roop told her. “The Ish-hi ship survived three microseconds longer than yours, and it was the cause of the destruction. The terms of the contest stipulated that the winner was the one who destroyed the last remaining enemy. Even though he destroyed his own vessel, Steve’s ship met those conditions.”

  “That’s absurd,” said Ms. Price. “Scrap the game and start over. Let’s have a real winner.”

  “I’m afraid not, Ms. Price,” Dr. Roop said calmly. “But the initiates can come down here and compete any time they care to book suites. They can have as many rematches as they like over the coming year. I’m very impressed, Steve. Perhaps you and I could do some sims together on another day.”

  “That’d be all right,” Steve said, clearly pleased with himself.

  “I see we’ve misjudged you,” Jill, the other Ish-hi female, told Steve. “From now on, you may consider yourself a full member of our team.”

  “Cheers, love, but I don’t think so.” Steve walked over to where I was standing. “Next time, it will be four teams of three. The randoms against you lot, and we’ll see who wins then.”

  Ardov glowered at Tamret. “You mishandled the helm. Don’t think I’m going to forget that.”

  Tamret met his gaze. “I followed your orders exactly.”

  “If you’d followed my orders, we’d have won,” Ardov said, taking a step toward Tamret.

  Dr. Roop now moved toward them. “There’s no harm done when everyone has learned something,” he said, his voice friendly, as though he hadn’t noticed any tensions.

  Ardov’s ears shot back, and his fur seemed to puff. For a second I thought he was going to turn on Dr. Roop. Instead he gestured to Thiel and Semj, and the three of them walked off.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  * * *

  Our last formal orientation for experience points was in the sparring room, and at Dr. Roop’s advice, we all dressed appropriately. I had on basketball shorts, an old T-shirt, and Chuck Taylors. Mi Sun wore her white martial-arts uniform with, of course, a black belt. Charles wore a polo shirt and cotton shorts, both with the insignia from his private school back home. Nayana wore a pink tracksuit, and she looked only marginally more comfortable about all this than I did.

  The sparring room was on the same basement level as the spaceflight sim suites. It looked a whole lot like a martial-arts sparring room on Earth, with padded walls and floors. It also had an attached control room from which you could watch the proceedings, but you couldn’t see the control room from the sparring room. I presumed that was so that people who were fighting would not be self-conscious about audience reaction.

  From inside the control room, Dr. Roop showed us how to work the console. “You can either spar with another being,” he said, “or the computer can use plasma-based field technology to create an artificial partner based on your specific level of fitness. The computer
will also generate a protective field, which you can set anywhere from the maximum of level ten, which makes it more or less impossible to get hurt, to level one, in which you can get hurt, and serious injury, while unlikely, remains possible. Some beings need the threat of real consequences to be at their best. Now, who wants to go first?”

  “Can I volunteer to not go at all?” I asked.

  His eyes widened. “I’d like everyone to sample the process. If it is not your strongest area, you do not need to pursue excellence in this field, but you never know until you try.”

  “I’ll go,” Mi Sun said.

  “Good girl,” Ms. Price said, looking up from her endless note taking.

  Mi Sun rewarded Ms. Price’s enthusiasm by rolling her eyes.

  Dr. Roop showed her how to program an artificial opponent, and she selected one that the computer gauged as being slightly superior to her. For protection, she selected level eight. “I need to feel something when I’m hit,” she said. “But I don’t need to feel too much.”

  I’d never seen Mi Sun fight before, and I had to admit I was impressed. Most of what I knew about martial arts came from Hong Kong movies, so I’d never really seen tae kwon do in action, but it was almost as much dance as fighting. Mi Sun would begin with these exaggerated postures, with her legs wide and her arms fixed, and each blow she struck or blocked looked like a choreographed movement, but she was quick and graceful and powerful, and I knew the sense of scripting was just an illusion produced by her skill. I did not much like Mi Sun, but I sure respected her. Her artificial opponent, which looked like a rectangular-headed mannequin made of blue light, was supposed to be a little bit better than she was, but it was quickly outclassed. Mi Sun lashed out with a seemingly endless stream of wide kicks. It got in a couple of glancing blows, which caused a blue shimmer of light around Mi Sun as the force field kicked in, but the opponent was defeated in less than ninety seconds. As Mi Sun emerged from the fighting room, Ms. Price looked up, flashed her most convincing artificial smile, and went back to her notes.