by Nick Webb
“Al, what the hell are you doing?”
The dark-haired man paused, an exaggerated sigh his only acknowledgement of the interruption from his companion. Straightening himself up again in front of the mirror, he tugged at his uniform, tidying out a stray wrinkle, and stared confidently at his own image.
“—uncontested champion of the gravitic field equations, humiliator of moderately endowed men, chess grandmaster, maker of—”
The man’s companion cleared his throat again and tossed a rolled-up dirty sock at him. Ensign Alessandro Bernoulli glanced down at his roommate with a scowl.
“Look, friend, I’m trying to work on my introduction, yes? How can I expect to woo Imperial Fleet women if I don’t flaunt my goods, so to speak?”
His roommate, Ensign Jefferson, a squat, balding fellow, laughed out loud and tossed the other sock. “Woo women? Al, you’re about to meet your new commanding officer, not go out to some bar!”
Bernoulli shifted his gaze back to the mirror, nodding. “She might be a woman.”
“He or she is your commanding officer! Captain Tonks! You can’t go introducing yourself to your captain like that.”
Bernoulli reached for his chin and stroked his smooth, bare face. “Well, obviously, you don’t know the first thing about making a memorable first impression.”
Ensign Jefferson reached for a data pad and punched a few commands. “Look, buddy, let’s settle this.” He examined the readout, and with a yell of triumph tossed the pad at his roommate. “Look! See? Tonks is a man. You’re practicing your pickup line not only for your commanding officer, but for a hairy dude.”
Bernoulli frowned and caught the pad. “Yes, yes, friend. But look,” he held the pad and tapped it repeatedly with his finger, “the executive officer, Commander Takato, she is a woman.” He glanced back at the pad and furrowed his brow. “I think. Bushy unibrow, square angular jaw, but otherwise very feminine.”
Jefferson rolled off the bed and reached for his boots, pulled them on and walked over to the sink. “Look, just don’t embarrass me our first day on the ship. It was a big thing to be assigned to the Indomitable, and you’re not messing this up for me, genius or no.” He turned the faucet on and splashed his face.
Bernoulli glanced back into the mirror. “Calm yourself, my excitable friend. You’re forgetting the whole purpose of this uniform.” He pulled at his, and picked at a few stray pieces of lint—the whole ship seemed full of it, being a brand new Capital starship of the Corsican Imperial Fleet.
Jefferson blew air out his mouth as the water streamed over his face. “And that is? Exploration? Security for the Thousand Worlds? Glory?”
Bernoulli snorted. “Pussy.” He reached down and, licking his thumb, rubbed a smudge off his boot. “Exploration, glory, and pussy. Do you realize how much we’ll get to score offworld with this uniform? The women—they throw themselves at our feet.” He stood back up and grinned. “You’ll see, friend.”
“What the hell did you expect, Ensign, that I’d throw myself at your feet? Do you think I care about the letters after your name?” Captain Tonks was larger than he appeared in the personnel file. Thin, bristly mustache, a bulbous head that sat on a neckless torso filling his black captain’s uniform, and the enormous round belly spilling over his protesting belt—the man exuded blustery Corsican confidence and girth.
“Well, no, sir, I merely thought that—”
Captain Tonks snorted. “Think? Did I ask you to think? Bernoulli, you’re on this ship because we need warm bodies to fill the seats in engineering, not because of your bullshit Ph.D. in quantum fucking math whatever. Our new engines are so advanced, all we’re going to need you to be doing is to look up from jerking off every few minutes to make sure that the computer is still plugged in, got it?”
“Uh… yes, sir.” Bernoulli wasn’t used to people not appreciating his intelligence, and for the first time in his life he didn’t know what to say. Glancing around the sterile bridge, he saw furtive smirks and glances from the bridge crew—all probably terrified of saying anything their captain might interpret as insolence or original thought. Like furtive sheep—all glancing nervously at the Captain, hanging on his every blustery word.
“Good. Now get your asses down to engineering and report to Commander Weatherly. We’re about to begin our patrol of the Davidon sector, and I want everything ready. Reports say that the November Clan is becoming increasingly bold out there, raiding Imperial supply depots and exacting their bullshit tax, and I want to teach the bastards a lesson they won’t soon forget.”
The door to the bridge slid open and in walked Commander Takato, or, Commander Unibrow, as Bernoulli called her in his head. And immediately he felt a warm fire down in his pants.
She was beautiful. Full, black eyebrows, yes, but her personnel file certainly didn’t do her any justice. Sweeping, confident curves, thin waist, eyes that dazzled like black obsidian stars. He grinned as the bulge in his pants grew, and he turned to face her.
“Good morning, Commander Takato. Ensign Alessandro Bernoulli at your service,” he reached out a hand. She smiled a tight grin, as if she dreaded meeting yet another upstart and over-eager young Ensign from Old Earth—doubtlessly a run-down backwater in her eyes.
“Ensign, good to meet you.” She immediately turned to the Captain, not giving Bernoulli a further glance. “Sir, weapons installations all report ready. Railgun turrets loaded, gigawatt laser banks charged. Imperial Command down on Peleo has given us the all-clear to depart. Just waiting on your orders.”
“Excellent, Commander. We’ll be making the grav shift within the hour, assuming,” he turned back to Bernoulli and Jefferson with a slight sneer, “our resident professor can find his way to engineering and help babysit our engines.”
Bernoulli, still mesmerized by Takato, blurt out, “Commander, have you ever heard of the Bernoulli equation?”
Both Commander Takato and Captain Tonks did a double take.
“Excuse me, Ensign?”
“The Bernoulli equation? You know it? It is quite well known.”
Commander Takato glanced at the bewildered Captain, who shrugged his shoulders. “Yes. Is there something relevant concerning our engines or—”
“Good! So you know that pressure in a fluid is always dependent on the velocity of the fluid. And, of course,” he waved his hand lazily, “on the depth of said fluid in a gravity field. But no, that is not the Bernoulli equation I was referring to.”
“Oh?” Takato looked vaguely annoyed, but still too uncaring to tell him to shut up and get his ass to engineering, which it looked the Captain might do again very soon.
“It’s mine. I made it up. My own Bernoulli equation. And it is very simple. Very simple math, yes. You, plus me, equals….” He broke off as Ensign Jefferson coughed loudly and jabbed him in the back with his elbow. Takato’s eyes went wide, and her jaw hung slightly open.
“Well, Captain, Commander, it’s our pleasure to be aboard. We’ll go down to engineering now, sir,” he said, saluting the Captain and pulling on Bernoulli’s arm. Captain Tonks was already talking to the tactical crew and Commander Takato just watched them go with what Bernoulli guessed, or rather hoped, was fascination.
In the hallway, Jefferson finally let go of Bernoulli’s arm and marched towards the elevator shaft at the end. “You’re unbelievable, you know that?”
“Of course! But just think of it—Commander Takato will always be thinking of me now. Always. She’ll wonder what I was about to say before you interrupted me. I made an impression.”
Jefferson eyed him from the side. “Yeah, you sure did.”
In Engineering, things went more smoothly. Both Jefferson and Bernoulli were right in their element, gawking at the massive gravitic engines in the center of the vast room, the sleek fusion drive that formed one of the walls, and the busy hum of engineers performing their varied tasks, getting the new engines ready for their first shakedown cruise.
After receiving their as
signments from Commander Weatherly, the chief engineer, they huddled over the phase array spanner in the corner. Bernoulli smirked as he pulled the compartment lid off and examined the contents. “Look at this, friend. Fifty trillion credits spent on this bloated, over-engineered hulk of a phallic symbol—over-compensation for some Corsican Admiral’s diminutive manhood, no doubt—and all they can give us is some hundred-year-old phase array spanner! What do they think we’re going to do with this?”
Jefferson rolled his eyes and got to work, shoving his arm deep into the compartment. “Realign the auxiliary gravitic phase array, like Commander Weatherly told us. Look, I know it ain’t CERN, but stop complaining and let’s get this over with.”
Bernoulli handed the other man an omni-meter, and busied himself with the interface. “Look, friend, we had our share of old equipment at CERN, do not take me wrong. But at least there we had a sense of history. There was equipment hundreds of years old, but it was old because it was useful. This? This is just cutting corners. It is as if the Empire dumped a whole shitload of money to make the outside of the ship look nice—enough to impress the senators and scare off any pirates—but its innards are worthless shit. Just like the Empire, if you ask me—”
“Shh!” Jefferson whipped his hand out of the spanner and held a finger to his lips. “What the hell are you doing? You sound like a … like a November Clan pirate or something. Knock it off before someone hears you, got it?”
Bernoulli made a face, not even attempting to hide his feelings. “And? I have not hidden my feelings about the Empire before.”
“Well try now. You’re an Imperial officer, remember?” Jefferson rolled his eyes and turned back to the spanner. “Maybe if you try hard enough, you won’t get kicked out of the Fleet like you did at CERN.”
“Friend, that was completely different.” Bernoulli typed in a few test commands into the terminal and watched with bored satisfaction as the positive results pinged back as expected.
“And how is that? You just told me two days ago that speaking your mind has always gotten you into trouble. Even at CERN. Didn’t they fire you when you insulted the director?”
Bernoulli snorted. “I insulted the director by being smarter than him.”
The other man winced as his hand got caught at a pinch point between two conduits. “Well just try not to let the Captain think that you’re smarter than him.”
A distant rumble interrupted him. The walls shook.
“What was that?” Jefferson looked up at the ceiling, then over at the engineering command console where the chief engineer had stood up suddenly.
Another rumble, this one nearer.
And then a violent explosion that knocked them all off their feet.
When Bernoulli came to, all hell had broken loose in engineering. Acrid smoke filled the air and he could hardly understand a thing through all the shouting and klaxons.
“What happened, friend?” He reached up to Jefferson, who had stooped to offer a hand.
“Don’t know. Big explosion.”
Bernoulli managed a wry smile. “Clearly.” He jogged over to the command station where the chief engineer was alternating between barking out orders to his engineers and shouting into the comm, presumably to the bridge.
“No, sir! Gravitics are out! Main engine offline! Auxiliary power only … no, no, sir, not enough to power all weapons—we’ve got barely enough for life support and a the railguns … yes, sir, understood.”
The chief engineer pointed at Jefferson and Bernoulli and shouted. “Get your asses back to gravitics and get me some maneuverability.”
Bernoulli nodded, and said, “yes, but sir, isn’t Lieutenant Barker head of the gravitics team?”
Commander Weatherly didn’t skip a beat. “Yes, he is, but he was on deck fifty realigning the auxiliary internal gravitic generator. And deck fifty is no longer there.” He pointed back to the gravitic drive. “Go!”
Bernoulli hesitated—the first time in his memory that he’d recently done so. Jefferson’s mouth hung open. “Gone? Where did it go?”
Weatherly was looking back down at his console, frantically studying the damage readouts of the main engine. “November Clan. They hit us in a surprise attack, the rebel bastards. Must have gotten wind of our upcoming mission and decided to attack us when our pants were down. Now move!”
The November Clan? Attack a brand new, massively powerful Imperial Cruiser in orbit of one of the central Corsican Empire planets? Even they weren’t that brazen, were they?
The pluming, acrid smoke began to dissipate as the fire suppression system kicked into gear, and Commander Weatherly turned to give orders to other engineers running in from the various wings of engineering. Bernoulli saw one woman struggling to limp to the exit, her head and shoulder a burned, bloody, sticky mess.
It had been years since he’d seen violence and blood like this. More years than he liked to count. But the memory of it all spurred him to action.
“Come, friend. We’ve got engines to fix.” He pulled a shell-shocked Ensign Jefferson along with him to the gravitic drive.
The engines were a mess, of course. But he’d seen worse. He’d seen gravitic generators back at CERN so mangled that no one ever thought they were reparable. But he’d always done it. He lived gravitics. He breathed it. When you write a dissertation on it, you have to.
“Friend. Stabilize the field emitters while I take the main generator off-line.”
“Ok,” said Jefferson, still vague and distant. The man was clearly not prepared for action. Neither was Bernoulli, but at least he was able to focus on the engines—his specialty. More explosions roared in the background and they could hear the pounding of weapons on the hull.
In the background, he could hear the harried activity of the rest of the engineering crew—struggling to contain the fire in the conventional drive wing, fighting with the main engine to not go into overload, flurrying over the various subsystems that no one ever worries about until they malfunction—artificial deck gravity, lighting, air. Without those, work on the gravitics was hopeless. Turning around, Bernoulli realized grimly that no one was rushing to help them, mainly because there were only a dozen or so engineers in the vast room.
The rest must be on other decks.
How many of the other decks were lost?
He shook the thought from his mind and focused on his engines.
“There. Now modulate the frequencies randomly until they find a resonance.”
Jefferson snapped his head up. “What?”
“Just do it.”
“Random?” Jefferson was shaking his head.
Bernoulli manipulated the generator controls, almost as if he were massaging them, he thought. Almost like the bare shoulders of a beautiful woman.
“Yes, random. It was my dissertation, you know. Random modulations converge on the resonance solution faster than computed ones. At least, that was chapter forty-two of the dissertation.”
Jefferson shook his head. “How is that even possible?”
“It’s just another Bernoulli equation, friend. Now do it.”
His head still shaking, Jefferson did as Bernoulli said, and within a few seconds, the frequencies had settled onto the resonance. The man’s mouth hung open in shock, and Bernoulli nodded. “Now, take the emitters offline.”
“Offli—” Jefferson began, but thought better of arguing and did as he was told.
On the outside of Bernoulli’s periphery, he heard the Commander shout into the comm. “No, sir! No gravitics yet … a shift? Are you kidding me, Captain? I can’t even give you gravitic maneuverability, much less a gravitic shift out of the system. I … no, sir … no, sir … I understand, sir, but ….” Bernoulli couldn’t hear what the Captain was saying, but Commander Weatherly looked put out. “Sir, I understand you need weapons, but main power is still down. If I had ten minutes without November Clan fire giving me more headaches, I could give you something … no, sir, the only way to get to the other side of
the planet is chemical thrusters at this point.” Weatherly sighed. “Yes, sir. I don’t have high hopes for that plan, sir, but you’re the Captain. Engineering out.”
Weatherly shouted over to them. “All power to weapons. Even life support and gravitics. Cut the engines, boys!”
And Bernoulli understood what he needed to do.
“Friend, align the emitters into this configuration I’m entering into the console now.” He typed it in, throwing in every beautiful exponent, array, and confluent hypergeometric series he’d worked on for so long. After a few seconds, he smiled. There it was.
Chapter fifty. The last section of his dissertation.
The final Bernoulli equation in the damned book he’d toiled on all those months.
“What the hell is that, Bernoulli?”
“It’s another Bernoulli equation. Just do it. Align the emitters.”
“Another one?”
“Yes. This is the sixty-first Bernoulli equation, if you’re wondering. But my favorite is still the first, which I do hope Commander Takato will come to see. But for now, this one will do.” He glanced at the clock on the wall. “Please hurry, friend. I fear our time is short.”
With a sigh and pursed lips, Jefferson’s hands danced over the emitter controls, and within a minute they were ready. Bernoulli checked the capacitor banks and the plasma flow control, and nodded his approval.
Satisfied everything was as good as it was going to get, he turned to the chief engineer. “Commander Weatherly, I have a solution to your problem.”
Weatherly looked up from his console. “You can get our main power back online?”
“No, sir, sadly not.”
Weatherly looked back down. “Then don’t interrupt me. If we don’t within another minute, we’re dead.”
Bernoulli strode over to the command console. “We can shift to the other side of the planet.”
