by Nate Duke
“I’m fine,” I told Flanagan.
He stared back at me with a ‘really?’ expression.
I was fine. Better than usual, in fact. There was enough blood on the floor to scare anyone, especially a soft engineer like me, but I was alive.
Don’t take me wrong; I’m averse to death and violence. But, honestly, I’d rather have the Cassock dead in front of me than with his hand around my neck. Once dead, his threat was over, but we had a whole new set of threats on the other decks and in four other frigates. I couldn’t let myself think about the man’s death or the blood on the floor. My adrenaline levels hadn’t gone back to normal yet, and I needed them to take the other decks.
“Let’s go back with the others,” I told Flanagan. I took my gun back and stole the Cassock’s sword. He wasn’t going to need it, and a new sword always comes handy.
We got rid of the corpse and I hacked into the ship to seal their communications and their axial elevators. Without their intercoms, limiting their movements meant keeping them blind and defenseless, just like they’d left us aboard the North Star.
Once the men had finished disabling the intercoms and preparing the explosives, we gathered near the bridge. Kozinski kept scratching behind his neck and York slapped him on the chest to make him stop. The Cassocks were deadly mercenaries, but they hadn’t noticed our presence aboard their own ship.
We entered the bridge and caught the Cassocks off-guard. They fought bravely, but we knocked them down with our electric guns before they fetched theirs. Cassocks always shoot themselves dead to avoid capture, but we’d incapacitated many of them with our electric guns. We took their weapons and I fetched the captain’s sword.
The captain used a real rapier with a sharp point, pointy enough to stick it into your enemy’s chest. I saluted the incapacitated captain with his own sword and asked the men to lock him and the other Cassocks up in one of the rooms. They weren’t going to tell us where to find the brig, so we’d have to use other means at our disposal.
“Kill me,” the captain said as the men dragged him away. His blue eyes were full of shame and begged for an end to his dishonor. “Kill me.”
The men stopped taking him away. Flanagan would’ve wanted to slit the captain’s throat like he’d just asked. It would’ve been less trouble than doing the paperwork of capturing a ship, taking prisoners home, and making sure that they didn’t cause us any trouble while in our custody.
I’d read about Cassocks. They were an honorable fighter culture who sought perfection in everything they did. They won most fights, and defeat was not an option to them. They despised their enemies and considered us inferior. Our reluctance to end our own lives only encouraged their negative opinions of us.
Is it unfair to force a man to live with dishonor if his culture demands him to take his life? My own survival instincts wouldn’t have allowed me to end my life if there was a remote chance of escape or of success.
I had no right to decide. The Laws of Space were clear, and I had to keep prisoners alive and take them into custody. I was going to follow the rules; I wasn’t going to end my officer career before even starting.
I nodded at the door so that my men continued escorting the captain out. The Cassock captain switched to insulting me in German.
Knowing Cassocks, he probably thought that I was keeping him alive to flay and gut him once we got bored. We weren’t going to hurt him, but he didn’t need to know. I smirked and winked an eye at him. “You’ll see what the Admiralty’s planned for you, mate.”
The Cassock captain’s face reddened with rage, and he started shouting and spitting with every word. Some of my men exchanged satisfied grins with each other. The men needed strong officers, even if it was just a pose.
Once the men had left the bridge with the Cassocks, I finally breathed and stared at my own clothes. I wore a blood-stained olive cassock. I’d broken many laws by supplanting the Cassocks and using their own uniforms, but the men were starting to take me more seriously. Was it the uniform? Had my black engineering clothes limited my credibility? Perhaps I should take a couple of cassocks back to the North Star and wear them. It would make me look badass and dangerous.
We’d expected to rescue our lads, but the frigate’s brig was empty. We still had four more frigates to board. We’d captured one easily; how hard could the others get?
Chapter 4
We boarded the second frigate using the same strategy and seized control of it. The Cassock captain ended his own life before we could stop him. The frigate didn’t hold our men hostage either. We tried it once more and a fourth time, and we were equally unlucky.
For the last frigate, we used the communications systems. I used an instant translator to supplant a Cassock and ask for help in the North Star, and the captain quickly sent many of his men aboard transport shuttles. We shot their shuttles down and disabled their engines, but the Cassocks chose not to survive and blew their shuttles up before we reached them. One of our own shuttles had been ready to board the frigate as soon as the others left, and we boarded them to stop the Cassocks from killing our men in retaliation.
We encountered the Cassock captain when he was heading belowdecks, probably to the brig. We exchanged shots and I hit him straight in the chest. The ship was ours. If our men were still alive, they’d be aboard this final frigate.
The adrenaline boost of shooting at the enemy filled me and blinded me with energy. I’d fought once more, and I was starting to like it. Why had I stayed in an engineering lab all my life? I should’ve started shooting sooner. I was awesome!
Are you judging my ego? Do you know what capturing five out of five frigates means? It meant that either the Cassocks were stupid or I’d picked the wrong career.
Capturing ships makes you think that you’re invincible, and now I wanted to take this small fleet and start conquering the universe with it. If I was half as lucky, I’d crush all enemies within a month. Defeating five ships when outmanned and outgunned is no easy task.
“Good shot, sir.” Flanagan put his gun back on his belt and approached the captain, who was retorting in pain with the shock. He was impressed by my luck when shooting, and he was starting to take me seriously as an officer.
Not bad for an ego boost, but the men couldn’t praise their acting captain like one praises a dog when it performs a trick. I’d never paid attention to subtle attacks to my authority, but if real officers took it seriously, so was I. Though, if we were lucky, we’d find a couple extra lieutenants in the brig and I’d return to my lab and forget about leading anyone but my engineers. I couldn’t risk it, though.
“Save your flattery, Flanagan,” I said. “I wouldn’t need to take my gun out if any of you looked at your targets instead of daydreaming.”
Most of my engineers would’ve hidden under a table and wasted hours in breakdown mode. Normal crewmen weren’t like engineers. Flanagan nodded and seemed satisfied with my response. He actually expected officers to keep the men under their boots, and so did the others. The Navy was insane, but it wasn’t horrible if you were an officer.
I left most of our remaining men on the bridge and tasked them with contacting Gomez, who was in charge of the North Star. On my first day as an acting captain, I’d turned into an acting commodore in charge of a fleet of six. Regardless of how many officers we found in the brig, I’d end up commanding one of the frigates back to friendly territory so that the Admiralty transformed her into one of our own.
Once we’d secured the bridge, I took Flanagan’s squad with me to the brig in case we found any rogue Cassocks. When you capture a ship, some enemies end up hidden and waiting for their chance to slit someone’s throat. They’re less likely to act like heroes when you have Kozinski at your side.
We’d disabled the communications and the transportation systems, but fixing the axial elevators was easy… even after Kozinski had used his persuasion skills on their control panels. It took a while, though, and the men had to wait for me to repair the
systems to go belowdecks.
“Won’t understand officers, I won’t,” Kozinski told York. He talked quietly and assumed that I couldn’t hear him. “He keeps talkin’ about engineerin’, but then gets us to break things. You need no engineer to break no computer.”
“Shut up,” York cut him. “He’s told us to break stuff because we don’t understand him. He’s an engineer. He’s studied and learned books; wanted a neat solution instead of breaking things.” He moved his hands in the air, drawing a flat line with his palm. “It’s always you and your asking for explanations, you know? We could’ve done things nice and neat. Shortcut and tinker, nice and neat. Not smashing things like brutes. We’ll never get civilized if we don’t act proper.”
York was probably talking about short-circuiting the motherboards and tinkering with the fuel supplies, like I’d suggested before. The message had been distorted in the transmission, but York didn’t mind.
“I ain’t not said nothin’!” Kozinski shook his head and sat on the floor of the room. He kept his back to a wall and faced the entrance. He was used to keeping his back safe from aggressions. “Lieutenant Wood wants to break things, I break ’em, I do. I ain’t not ignoring an officer for your ci… civili… whatever.”
“So you plan to be a seaman forever?” York grunted and sat beside him, pulling a deck of cards from his pocket. The men never used their tablets to gamble and play cards so that their officers couldn’t tell when they were wasting time instead of spending the whole night on watch. He dealt the cards while he continued talking. “You won’t get no real job outside the mines if you can’t act nice and proper.”
“I like this job.” Kozinski drew a card from the pile and groaned. “Keeps me fed, it does. Warm food in front of me every mornin’, better than the wife’s food.”
“That’s because you married wrong, you fool. You had to pick a girl to make you dinner and look after you, not act like a posh lady and make you cook for her.”
Kozinski shrugged. “The lass had nice breasts and a better rear. What could I do?”
Free time sometimes got the men too unfocused. No wonder that many officers became controlling and expected the men to jump whenever they instructed them to. I didn’t mind them chatting, but they weren’t letting me concentrate. If our men were held captive belowdecks, we needed to free them quickly in case Cassock survivors decided to eliminate their prisoners.
“Gentlemen.” I raised my head from the task and looked sternly at them. At least as stern as I could look; I wasn’t used to acting like an officer. “Why don’t you let me concentrate so that we can free our lads? I’m sure that they’ll be eager to get out of the brig.” I returned to work and ignored them. The sooner I fixed the axial elevators, the sooner we’d get some rest.
“You keep talking and don’t let the lieutenant hear himself think,” York told Kozinski.
They continued blaming each other and arguing, but I finally unblocked the axial elevators. The brig was ours.
Chapter 5
Cassock frigates are more impersonal than the Navy’s ships. They use metal everywhere, even for the chairs. Haven’t they heard about seat cushions? They don’t make your ass turn flat after hours of sitting down, and they’re warmer when you first sit on them. Their axial elevators follow a similar design pattern: long ladders that the men need to climb instead of pressing a button. The men need to exercise and build muscles whenever they change decks, but carrying stuff from the core to the outer deck had to be an odyssey.
The brig looked like your typical Middle Ages dungeon: damp, cold, and as dark as it could get. The constant clanking and creaking of metal added to the atmosphere.
Our men had been captured and taken there. Everyone had heard enough legends about Cassocks. We’d seen men return from the front, and we’d seen the asylums that helped them. A few hours of captivity at the hands of those savages were enough to make most men go insane. Some of our men could be dead, maimed, or wounded, and they’d been alone in a cold, damp cell thinking that nobody would rescue them.
The cells closer to us were empty. They were better lit, and the Cassocks didn’t want their prisoners seeing well enough to think. It was merely a psychological effect: we were all scared of them, so now they just needed to dump us into a cell and turn off the lights to make us shit ourselves.
The place froze my blood; I won’t deny it.
“It’s cozy enough,” Flanagan said, “I’ll give you that.”
Kozinski laughed with his classic who, who, who. York glared at him and glanced at me in case I disapproved their lack of seriousness.
At least someone was having fun. Perhaps they didn’t realize the possibilities of how we could find our crewmen. Perhaps they did, and it’s what scared them the most. They needed to laugh to overcome their stress.
As soon as we spoke out loud, we heard some complaints from the inner cells. A man’s desperate shouts made us look at each other and run towards him. If we found any Cassocks, they were going to pay for whatever they’d done to our men.
We ran in. It was as dark as before, but there was no sign of Cassocks.
Several of our men stood up in one of the cells. I recognized Hatfield, one of the surgeons, and several midshipmen. They approached us and leaned their hands on the old-fashioned metallic bars on the door. Hatfield wore a clean white shirt, his classic dark blue sport coat with a white handkerchief in his left chest pocket, and white dress pants. His clothes were so clean and shiny that he almost glowed in the dark. The midshipmen were generally scruffier because nobody took cleanliness as seriously as Hatfield, but nobody had harmed them.
Kozinski was the best diplomat in our team, so we tasked him with breaking the locks. It was going to take a while, and the kids started pacing around their cell.
“It’s good to see friendly faces at last.” Hatfield smiled at us with a calm and very polite English smile, as if there hadn’t been any bars between them and us and as if they hadn’t been imprisoned by the country’s most ruthless enemies. “We were just about to run out of conversation topics.”
“Conversation, huh?” Flanagan didn’t like the comment or the surgeon. He disliked most officers from the start and ended up tolerating some after a while. Luckily for me, he’d tolerated me enough to stop a Cassock from killing me. He walked along the door and hit each of the vertical metallic bars with the handle of his electric gun. They looked basic, but it was one of the most resistant alloys in the world. He turned to me. “Hear them, sir? We should’ve taken it easy and kept our asses warm aboard the Star. They were doing fine.”
Hatfield nodded politely at him. A smile of disagreement, but a smile nevertheless. Men from wealthy families can’t keep their manners from showing. Naval men didn’t appreciate excessive politeness.
“Want to be nice and proper like him, don’t you?” Flanagan shoved York aside and tried to help Kozinski open the door sooner.
York glanced at Flanagan, then at Hatfield, then at me. He was trying to find something to say that wouldn’t get him into a fight or offend anyone. It wasn’t easy at all; both the upper and lower classes were easy to annoy.
“Proper?” Hatfield raised both of his white eyebrows in surprise, marking the lines on his forehead even more. He was about 80, but he took care after himself too much for my liking, so he could’ve been over 100. Extended life expectancies made middle-aged people look young, and old people look younger than 50. “Propriety is nothing but a charade we play to consider ourselves better than those who don’t. It used to frustrate me when I was younger, and look at me now: I’m its living portrait.” He stopped to adjust the cuffs of his shirt under his jacket, but he didn’t sneer at York or treat him condescendingly. “Don’t waste your time, young man, or you’ll end up having to smile at impolite brutes instead of breaking their noses.” He nodded at Flanagan and smiled politely yet again.
Wow. It had been a virtual punch in the nose.
Flanagan didn’t react negatively. Instead,
he nodded to himself and seemed pleased that the polite Englishman wasn’t soft. The crew has a curious way of demanding authority: they try to step on you when they actually want you to step on them.
The common crew had been split amongst several other cells near the officers. Some of them had burst lips and superficial wounds, but they were fine. We let them out, gathered them together, and informed them of the fates of most of the crew. The prisoners had mostly been on watch, and the Cassocks had sneaked into the North Star because nobody had stopped them. Their faces showed regret and shame. Perhaps they weren’t taking their watches seriously enough, and now most of our crew was dead.
Back in the Roman Empire, men on watch had had the responsibility of being alert to protect their brothers. Whenever someone fell asleep during his watch, his fellow soldiers beat him to death with their own hands. The Navy’s rules were similarly stern: officers executed the men who didn’t defend their ship while on watch.
I wasn’t going to blame the men for something that nobody could’ve stopped. The Cassocks had designed a system to dodge our radars, and now we owned six ships instead of one. Manning them to fly back to Earth was going to be our greatest problem.
We’d rescued a surgeon, some nurses, a few midshipmen, and close to 80 men. They were ecstatic and thanked Flanagan’s squad for rescuing them. None of them addressed me directly aside from a few midshipmen.
Why? I’d taken part in the mission as much as anyone else. I’d even faced the Cassocks directly. Was it because I was a boring engineer dressed in black?
Wait. I was still wearing a Cassock uniform splattered in blood. They considered me the acting captain, their boss. They couldn’t address me directly because of the boring naval protocol. Real officers were left alone and ignored. Engineers didn’t respect those rules and I was always part of the team, but I was starting to understand why everyone spoke about the solitude of command.
