Starship Ragnarok

by Alex Oliver

  "Mom!" Yas cried again, throwing himself against the terminal as if he could dive through it to her side.

  "I'm fine," she whispered. "I'm fine. I'm fine, don't worry."

  The sky seemed to bend downward, buckling the very curvature of the planet, and then something black and shiny came hurtling straight down, almost plowing into the tops of the trees. It looked—this was ridiculous—like a hoof. Like an enormous, sable, demonic hoof.

  The picture on the terminal flickered. "No!" Yas yelled, but it was happening again, the connection fading and flaring just to show images that made no sense. Wheels, golden wheels in the sky, and all the trees bowing down from the blast.

  And then it cut out.

  Yas stood speechlessly watching the blank screen for a heartbeat before stabbing at the controls, but nothing could bring the connection back.

  "You saw that!" he yelled at his companions, who were looking at him with too much sympathy and not enough anger. "You saw that. That was my mom. I've got to go home!"

  "You can't just—" Lt. Mari began, but Yas had shoved down his doubt too long. He'd given it his best shot, trying to do what everyone wanted of him, trying to be a good little soldier and obey, and now all that self-repression had reached bursting point.

  He dived under her outstretched hand and ran for the needle-ship in which he'd come.

  "Halt!" Mari ordered—the first time he'd heard her actually sound like an officer. "Sub-lieutenant, you're coming with us."

  "I'm not," Yas growled, his hands shaking so hard he could hardly swipe in the command to the automatic machinery to deploy the needle.

  "Oh yes you are," Yueh grabbed at his arm. He didn't mean to hit her, but the combat training had been too freshly instilled. He back-fisted her in the jaw. In return, she went with the movement, spinning and kicking out the backs of his knees.

  He found himself on the floor, pinned by Yueh and Zardari together as they fought to get his helmet on and avoid his flailing hands.

  It seemed a strange strategy until the seal clicked and immediately the outer airlock door opened. Mari had vented the whole room just to make it easier for the three of them to drag Yas bodily out into the stairwell and lock the airlock door behind him.

  "Damn you!" he yelled, getting a kick in at XO Mari that he would never have tried in his right mind, but his blood was up and he had somehow convinced himself that if only he could win this fight and fly home, everything would be fine again and his family would be safe.

  "Sundeen, you are in serious trouble. Stand down!" Mari got close enough that he could hear it through the vibrations of his face plate as well as through the suit radio. Carried away, he reached out for the latches of her helmet—

  He stopped, sanity dousing him in a flood of cold water.

  "What?" Yueh breathed like a whisper down the back of his neck. "What the fuck do you think you were doing? Were you going to let her air out?"

  Yueh grabbed again for Yas's arm—Yas surrendered at once, still stunned himself that he had almost done that—almost unlocked a colleague's helmet in the deep cold and airlessness of the void. He let them haul him to the surface without protest, wanting to say sorry but also knowing that sorry wasn't enough.

  His stunned silence lasted through the teleport beam, and through the manhandling that followed as Lt. Mari stormed off and Yueh and Zardari stripped him of his suit and racked it in a locked cupboard to which he was not given the access code.

  Mari returned with binders, and Yas swallowed as he was cuffed.

  "Sorry," he managed at last, as he was marched by the three of them through a route he already recognized as that which lead to the Captain's cabin.

  "I didn't hear you, sub-lieutenant."

  'Sorry,' was hopelessly inadequate, he knew, but he tried again anyway. "I apologize lieutenant. I don't know what came over me. I was--"

  "Upset about your mother. I know. Well, congratulations, now I'm upset too."

  This time, the Captain had them come through to an inner office with desk and a single chair, in which Harcrow sat examining his nails while Lt. Mari made her report.

  The captain sighed at the end of it and looked up, exposing Yas full-on to the cameras embedded in his face. If there were any watchers still for the Raggy’s feed, they were all seeing his humiliation live. His skin crawled with the thought and he had a sudden realization of why Harcrow so rarely raised his head. It was consideration, maybe. Protectiveness.

  Yas swallowed, made suddenly aware of the fact that he could feel even worse. The panic of not knowing what had happened to his mom and sister, and the shame of having almost done real bodily harm to the XO, was joined by the reflection that maybe he had been too premature in his judgment of his Captain too.

  He had really not done well in his first posting so far.

  "Sub-lieutenant Sundeen," Harcrow rubbed at his eyebrow as though his head hurt. "You attacked your shipmates, and you almost endangered the XO's life. What do you have to say for yourself?"

  "I had," Yas really wished the man would look away. The cameras were bad enough, but those heavy eyes were worse. Their gaze was crushing. "Something is attacking my homeworld. I was desperate to get back there and--"

  "And do what?"

  Yas dropped his gaze to the deck plating, where the paint had bubbled and the metal was visible as round red dots. "I don't know," he admitted. "Just be there, I suppose. Just be there with them."

  Harcrow sighed again. "Let me give you some advice, son. You don't get sympathy by attempting to murder your superior officers in the execution of their duty. And you don't get my sympathy for having been given a posting or an order you don't want to carry out. Guess what? None of us really want to be here, but our job needs to be done. So suck it up."

  "Yes sir," Yas ventured. It was safest just to nod. No matter how much he disliked being told to suck it up, he supposed the Captain had a point. "But Nahasdzáán?"

  "The battleships will deal with that," Harcrow rubbed at his temple, looking exhausted. "Try having some faith in the organization that raised you and trained you, and let other people do their damn jobs."

  "Yes sir," Yas hung his head again. This was a valid point too, though he disliked admitting it.

  "Looks to me like you came on board thinking you were too special for us, am I right?"

  "No sir," Yas lied, but Harcrow pinched up his mouth as though he'd heard everything that was going on in Yas's head over the past day, and knew better.

  "So you can spend your first night in the brig, and consider how lucky you are to be given this priceless opportunity. I expect you to thank me in the morning. Dismissed."

  "You deserved that," Mari said as she walked him down another level into the hottest atmosphere yet and shoved him into a small bare room next to the engines. “That man’s carrying enough disappointment without having extra from you.”

  She pushed him inside and slammed the door before he could say again "I'm sorry," or "It wasn't attempted murder. I wouldn't ever have gone through with it. Look, I was as mad as I ever get, and I still stopped."

  From the fact that he was only in here over-night, he assumed she knew already that he hadn't meant it. At least the Captain knew. He was being treated as a cadet who had over-stepped and not as a dangerous criminal. Wasn't he?

  Surely if they really thought he was dangerous they would send him back to Luna to the arms of the Military Police. Departure was due any moment, but they could find time to delay it, to send him back and bring on board his replacement if they'd wanted to.

  Oddly, even though he'd been desperate to get home only thirty minutes ago, the prospect of being dismissed in disgrace burned him. The fear of it had him walking from wall to wall in a trapped beast spiral like a bear in a bad zoo.

  About forty circuits of the room on, the pitch of the vibrations through the starboard wall rose, and the room's temperature soared to tropical.

  That was it, he thought. The Raggy was moving away from the last
gate into the dark spaces between galaxies, and he had lost the chance of seeing that historic moment. His mom had been wrong to be proud.

  ~

  A bare bench ran along the hottest wall, with a nozzle for a vacuum toilet capped and socketed beneath it. He sat there, running through the images of whatever it was that had appeared in the clouds above his homeworld. The things he had seen made no sense. Hooves? Claws? Wheels, in space? If he had not seen them through long distance viewcall, he would have believed they were the result of an hallucinogen. But no, that was like accusing a 20th century phone of having been drugged because he didn't like the caller's voice. He had seen what he saw, even if it was unbelievable.

  Now that he had time to think, however, perhaps it hadn’t exactly been an attack. The hoof had not made contact with the ground. The wheel had hovered in the sky like an anti-grav equipped spaceship.

  Maybe he had seen it wrong, and it was simply an unusual weather phenomenon? Maybe he was having some kind of breakdown? Maybe… He stretched out on the bench, scoffing at this thought even as it came. He didn’t go in for religion. But what if it had been one of the Yeis of his planet, slipping briefly into the human world? That would be a cause for celebration, not for panic.

  The thought that he could have over-reacted was reassuring. He had indeed been known to have outbursts in the past when he could not force himself to be diffident any longer, and often the thing over which he had blown his top turned out not to be serious as he feared.

  This time, he told himself, would be just like that. A vision in the sky was not the same as an attack. Even if it was, everyone from his mother on down wanted him to be here, doing a good job here. So that was what he would do.

  He determined to somehow win back the confidence of his team mates. It was true that he had been flaky recently, but he would do better, and they would see that they'd misjudged him. They'd forgive him because living with him for ten years otherwise would be miserable for everyone.

  And then he'd work on being everyone's hero.

  He closed his eyes. There was nothing to do here but stew--and in this heat that was almost literal. So he might as well sleep. Sleep and do better in the morning.

  ~

  A thud woke him. He came to his feet without thinking. That had sounded like someone falling against the door. "Are you alright?" he called, but there was no reply.

  A few moments later his blood curdled as a high pitched scream rolled down from the floor above via the ventilation system. This time he beat on the door and yelled. "Hello! Is everything alright? What's going on?"

  The engines' steady throb fell silent all at once, and then the gravity generator cut out, leaving him floating. That was supposed to be impossible—gravity generators had proved so reliable over the past three hundred years that mag boots had been dropped from the uniform before anyone alive was born.

  His stomach churned at the strange sensation, or perhaps with fear, because now, after the scream there came the thud, thud, thud of marching feet and the shrieking whine of a single blaster.

  Blasters too were something he thought he'd never experience. Since universal peace, the NXA troops had been issued with stunners only. A live sidearm was issued only to the ranking officer of any ship. That must be Harcrow out there then, shooting something.

  "Captain!" Yas yelled through the brig door, feeling ready to explode with fear and frustration. "What's happening?"

  But there was another soft thud from outside and the marching feet broke into a run and grew fainter as they drew further away. "Captain?" Yas said again, not sure now whether he wanted to be heard. He pulled at the lock, tried beating it with his shoe, then tried to jimmy it with the flat buckle of his uniform belt - with no success.

  It was when he was leaning down to try to peer through the gap beneath the door that he noticed it first. Red globe-like droplets seeping around the door, jewel-like crimson and stinking of meat. Blood floated weightless in the air - someone out there was dying.

  CHAPTER SIX

  In the brig

  Yas had been trained in highly realistic simulations of real battle, complete with artificially created gore, but he was still not prepared for this, the first time he had encountered genuine violence. He found himself hyperventilating, dizzy. He fought a wave of nausea, terrified by the thought of vomiting and filling his small cell with globes of sick. His head swam and for a moment he had no idea whatsoever what to do. Even his tongue seemed to have glued itself to the roof of his mouth, so he could no longer speak.

  When he was certain he would not be sick, he began to beat at the lock again, each blow making him recoil back into the room and bouncing him off the further wall. Perhaps the panting was not nerves after all, nor was the sweat--it was very hot in here.

  Think, he told himself. Think, what can you do?

  His com link had been left with the comms officer, Lt. Desultory, to have the ship's internal network loaded onto it. So he couldn't call for help. Could he jimmy the door? He'd tried shoe and buckle, was there anything else? A quick inventory of his clothes did not come up with anything with which he could break out of a secure cell. It would have been distressing if it had. These places were meant to keep prisoners put, and despite the popularity of holofilms in which the daring hero found a cunning way of breaking out, the engineers who designed them had thought things through.

  He was fortunate that he had curled up into the corner of the cell between the bunk and the wall. When the gravity suddenly came back on, he only fell a foot and bruised his knee. The bench had become a wall, though—orientation was no longer 'downwards' towards the engines but 'sideways', as if a giant hand was pulling the ship wholesale out of the sky. The blood droplets rained and spattered to the wall, and if Yas wished to beat on the door now, he had to stand on tiptoe to do it.

  He did it anyway, beating the door with his open hand in the hopes that someone would come. But as the time wore on and the sweat pooled at his back, he had to keep breaking off to pant and recover himself. It was so hot. He was cooking in here. His mouth chapped as the hours wore on, and his palm blistered. The dizziness of earlier morphed into full on fainting fits during which he had to sit by the toilet tube and uncap it to feel the slight cold breeze of air escaping and reassure himself that if he was sick he could get most of it out of the ship before it suffocated him.

  By what must be mid day, he had lost all track of time and sunk into a dark place in his own mind so miserable that the outside world scarcely reached it. He thought he was hallucinating when he began to hear something new from outside.

  It was a slurring, slushy sound, as of something soft being dragged down the corridor. There were no footsteps to indicate who was doing the dragging, and the invaders had definitely made footstep-sounds. This could be Desultory? The Ocuilin were normally perfectly silent as they drifted along in their favorite form—that of a large slug with one great foot, lubricated by the natural slime they produced. But they were usually accompanied by a small fleet of cleaning remoras—creatures who had adapted to eat the excessive slime and to keep their skins free of parasites—and the remoras were inclined to chitter.

  This was not that kind of sound. It was halting, laborious, and it was coming closer.

  As it approached, he began to pick out the faint shlurp of something suctioning to the deck and then releasing. The corridor out there was tipped on its side in the artificial gravity, and though some main corridors retained their integral hand-holds, the reliability of normal gravity generators meant that the less well traveled areas of the ship were made with only one direction of down in mind. Now that down had shifted, it must be as impassible as a deep well.

  Still, the fact remained that something was coming. Yas renewed his attempts to draw attention. Whatever it was, if it opened the door he might be able to haul it inside and scramble up its falling form to make it to the door and freedom. He edged himself to the side of the door where he would be less visible when it opened. He
could use his belt to lasso it, perhaps? A belt buckle aimed at the face often distracted.

  Curling the end of his belt around his hand he felt all his senses begin to come back on line now the adrenaline was kicking in. Even the sweltering sauna-like conditions were no longer entirely unbearable.

  He bit his lip as the noise approached. It was on top of the door. Yas bunched himself up ready to strike.

  The door lock released with a loud click. It swung open. Yas leaped from hiding and snapped out his belt, just as the silver head of the doctor peeked over the edge. One of the AI’s hands shot out and grabbed the buckle, fast and sure, while the other tensed and drew it further up so it could hook its armpit over the ledge.

  "Sorry!" Yas exclaimed, grinning with relief. The doctor's faceplate was blank, expressionless but for the star of an impact crack high up where his eyebrow would have been had he possessed one. It looked better, to be honest, than his glowing artificial face. "I thought you were an invader."

  "I was expecting assault. A salt. A spice of something of the sort," the doctor complained. "It would not have been the worst of my injuries even if it had struck."

  He dragged himself over the edge of the door and slithered into the cell.

  "Oh damn," Yas breathed.

  "Indeed."

  Someone had pulled the doctor's legs off. The connections where they should have fitted dangled, stretched, torn and blackened with electrical fire.

  "You dragged yourself all the way here to rescue me? Like that?" Yas found it hard to swallow again. He'd been thinking of this new crew as something of a joke. Now it wasn't so funny.

  "My parameters did not include sentiment," said the AI. "The repair labs on floor 15 are fingerprint locked to organic crewmembers only. I need you to unlock them so I can find my new parts."

  It didn't change anything, as far as Yas was concerned. He was still deeply grateful, even touched. "Okay," he agreed. "I can do that. But how am I going to get up and down the corridors?"