My Life: An Ex-Quarterback's Adventures in the Galactic Empire

by Colin Alexander

  “Fine. And you’re sure that all of that he was spouting there had nothing to do with me?”

  “Absolutely. You cool, man?” he asked.

  “Sure.” It seemed like a good time to lie. Actually, I was wishing that I was somewhere else, just about anywhere else.

  “Okay,” Angel said. Then he turned back to Gerangi and said something very brief.

  Gerangi grunted and nodded. I wondered whether that direction meant yes or no to a Srihani. Even on Earth, it wasn’t uniform. Before I had a chance to make up my mind, the three of them got up and filed out, leaving me alone with Angel.

  “Okay Angel, now that they’re gone, will you tell me what that was all about?”

  “Sure.” He picked at some dried blood on his cheek. “It was no big deal. I told Gerangi about you and he accepted you as a member of the crew.”

  “What!” Press-ganged. Shanghaied. “You can’t do this to me!”

  Angel had a face that would never look innocent, but he did look hurt. “Come on, Danny-boy,” he said, “I offered you a job back in Cleveland. You didn’t walk out then, and I sure didn’t notice you trying to bail out of my Jeep. Besides, Gerangi wasn’t exactly ecstatic that I came back with only you. You back out now and my ass is grass. Not to mention yours.”

  Angel seemed to think better of that approach and changed tack, but it was enough to give me a flavor of what most of the discussion with Gerangi had been about.

  “Hey, Danny-boy, look on the bright side,” Angel said. “You’re a tough guy, you told me you were always a good leader. You’ll be a natural. Beats going back to see the judge, doesn’t it?”

  He had me there. Going back to Texas had looked palatable only when I was expecting imminent death. Somewhere in the recesses of my mind, I must’ve made a decision, but I wasn’t aware of it. Maybe I had actually made it in Cleveland. Maybe what I had decided was to go with the flow.

  “All right,” I said, “I’m a space pirate. Now what? I mean what’s my job?”

  “Right now, you got it easy,” Angel replied. “After all, there’s not much you can do ’til you learn the language. After that, you’ll be with me, on the Strike Force.”

  “And what in hell is a Strike Force?” I asked.

  “That’s the boarding party,” Angel told me with a grin. “We’re the guys who go over to the other guys, kick the shit out of them, and take their ship.”

  “Boarding party? Angel, are you trying to tell me that these guys fly around the galaxy in starships and they need boarding parties? What do you do, lash a rope to an antenna and swing across in a space suit?”

  “Not exactly,” he laughed. I was glad at least one of us could find some humor in the situation.

  “Angel, I’m not sure I’m cut out for this,” I said.

  “Bullshit,” he said. “Come on, let’s get you settled. You’re gonna love it. I know.”

  I most certainly did not love it, at least not right away. I wasn’t treated as a prisoner—that much was true. I had free run of the base. What would have happened had I tried to leave is another question, but I never put it to the test. It was easier to stay there and know that Texas could no longer touch me. The real problem was boredom. There was nothing for me to do.

  Everyone else, including Angel, was busy. Angel had been right that they were almost ready to leave. The repairs had been completed. It was now time to load the last of the supplies onto the boat, along with some units the engineers had been working on in the shop, close up the base and go.

  The main ship, piquantly named the Flying Whore, had spent its time orbiting in the shadow of the Moon. A rendezvous had been planned in a close Earth orbit, to allow Carvalho to help shield the boat from detection but they wanted to keep the time the Flying Whore spent near the planet to a minimum. Apparently, Earth’s technology had advanced to the point that Carvalho was concerned about detection if the ship spent too much time near the planet. With the Moon between the ship and the boat, no communication was possible, so the rendezvous had to be a timing pattern.

  It took them three days to do the job to Gerangi’s satisfaction. The last chore, setting boobytraps in the base, Gerangi handled himself, along with one of the engineers. Finally, Angel came by to tell me that it was time to go. This departure lacked all of the drama I remembered from watching rocket launchings at Cape Canaveral. It was more like boarding a commuter shuttle at an airport, which it probably was for the Srihani. The seat harness looked strange, but it fastened like a backpack’s across the hips and chest and proved easy enough for me to figure out. I sat there tensely, expecting a god-awful blast and to be squashed back into my seat like an astronaut. Instead, there was a gentle, sustained push, a lot like going down the entrance ramp on the freeway. After about a half hour, there was an announcement overhead. Too bad it was all Greek to me.

  But Angel listened to it, then turned to me. “We’ll be on the ship in fifteen minutes,” he said. “No sweat.”

  Hello galaxy, good-bye Earth. The one thing I still regret, though, is that I’d never had the chance to see Earth from space.

  Chapter 4

  It took a little while to get accustomed to the idea of being on a spaceship. There were no portholes or viewscreens that I could find. For all that I could see, I could just as easily have been in an underground bunker, or a very spacious submarine. And, suddenly, weirdly, I was homesick, because I was actually in space, and there was no way of going back. I was not going to play football in Dallas again; I was not going to spend anymore nights barhopping in New York. Of course, I wasn’t going to jail in Texas either. I consoled myself with that.

  Measuring time by my body clock—I think my watch was still in Cleveland—the ship took three days to reach the outskirts of the solar system. There was no sensation of movement. We walked around without restriction—or I did. Everyone else looked busy. About the middle of the fourth day, there was an announcement of some kind overhead. It was followed by a bump, and the whole ship shuddered. Then it became quiet, and even the muted buzz that had filled the ship went away. I didn’t know it then, but we had made our transition into a wormhole. In fact, I didn’t even know what a wormhole was until a lot later. Since most of you will probably never have the opportunity to travel through one, let me try to explain how they work.

  Interstellar travel is feasible only because wormholes exist. A wormhole is not really a tunnel; it is a property of space that provides a means of moving from point A to point B without having to traverse the ordinary three-dimensional distance in between. They can be entered anywhere the local gravitational field is weak enough, although for obvious reasons, the mapped ones are around stellar systems. A ship doesn’t so much enter a wormhole as interact with it. A burst of energy is released and the ship goes elsewhere. There is still a physical limit to velocity in a wormhole, but it is vastly different than in three-dimensional space; in fact, it varies from wormhole to wormhole. There is a distance between going in and coming out too, but it is different than the distance in normal space.

  Time is funny, too. The net effect of transiting a wormhole is that you cover vast distances in the three-dimensional universe in days and weeks instead of years and centuries. The empire could not exist without them. In fact, you could say that the empire was built on wormholes, a prophetic statement if there ever was one.

  Of course, I didn’t know any of that at the time. What I did know was that travel through a wormhole was just as dull as travel in normal space. Aside from the jerk at transit, I didn’t perceive any motion. Had the transit not been announced, I would have been unaware of it. The things that did catch my interest were things in the ship.

  Clothing was the first of these. I’d been wearing blue jeans and a Dallas T-shirt, both slightly on the gamey side, when I left. I didn’t need Angel to translate the instructions that they would not do on the ship. Pirate or not, Carvalho’s crew wore uniforms, tight black trousers, black boots that came up just over the ankle, a plain, och
er tunic and a wide belt with holders for tools and weapons. The cloth was light and slippery, something like a mix of silk and polyester, but without the shiny appearance. I rather liked the way I looked in it.

  Everyone had a shipsuit too. It appeared to be a one piece replica of the uniform. Angel showed me a thin, red seam that ran from neck to groin, concealed under a flap. When I slid my finger along this, the front of the suit split open, and I put it on like a pair of coveralls. At first, it fit like a poncho. When a green patch at the waist was pressed, however, the suit responded like plastic shrink-wrap. In less than a minute, I was wearing a perfectly form fitting suit that remembered the shape it had fit itself to.

  The suit’s memory was hardly its only remarkable feature. Altogether, it was maybe two to three times the thickness of regular cloth. The inner surface was composed of filmy material that nestled right up against the skin everywhere it touched. The outer layer was airtight, made of a material that flexed easily but completely resisted radial expansion. In between was a maze of circuits and miniature plumbing embedded in a superinsulator. Gloves and helmet, attached by a fastening that appeared to melt into the suit, giving you a serviceable vacuum suit. The outer surface prevented decompression, the plumbing and insulation kept you comfortable in space or on ship, and a small pack fastened to the belt generated oxygen. It wouldn’t serve for someone working continually, or repeatedly, in space. It would serve to keep the wearer alive if the ship was breached. Many of the crew, I noticed, wore them all the time, gloves and collapsed helmet hanging off the belt. Both the uniform and the shipsuit were not only formfitting, but provided support at strategic locations. It was a little like a whole body corset, but comfortable. It was a great way to make a midriff bulge disappear. (Not that I needed it, of course.)

  Simply wearing the right clothes, however, wasn’t enough to make me part of the crew. The keys were learning the weaponry and the language.

  The weapons were the easiest part of it. The standard in galactic personal arms was the handblaster, which related to the weapons I had seen the guards carrying as a pistol does to a high-powered rifle. As with the larger ones, the “barrel” was a sapphire rod, blackened and cratered at the firing end. The grip held a replaceable power pack, a gauge to read the charge remaining, and controls to govern the intensity of the discharged blast. Instead of a trigger, there was a stud where the thumb fit. Depressing it fired the weapon. The armorer let me fire once on full intensity, just to be used to it. There was no kick, but a loud crack (think of a cherry bomb), an orange flame danced for a second at the end of the rod, and a purple line connected the blaster and the target. Sparks flew from the metal plate used as a target and the beam drilled a hole through it. I was impressed.

  The science behind the blaster I didn’t understand then, nor do I understand it now, but using it was easy. The same could be said of loading it. Press the thumb over the correct area at the bottom of the grip, a spot that normally wouldn’t be touched, and the power pack dropped out, much like the clip of an automatic pistol. Slide a new one in and away you go. So, now I knew how to fire a blaster. I doubt the army could have taught me to use an M16 that fast. On the other hand, that was all the instruction I got.

  What I had was a death ray with a bunch of gauges and settings and no idea what to do or when to do it. I went running to find Angel.

  He laughed. “Danny, they make these things so people with shit for brains can use them. Look, you want intensity at the top, like you have it. It’ll fire like a lightning flash. Now, put frequency at the top, too. It’ll pulse as fast as it can. The beam will flicker like a strobe, imagine it’s an automatic pumping out bullets instead of lightning. Duration is just how long it will fire before it re-cycles. Max that, too. Don’t fuck with the settings.”

  “Will this block it?” I dumped a leathery coverall I’d gotten from the armory on the table. It looked like what the guards at the base had worn.

  “That’s half-armor,” Angel said. “Makes Kevlar look like cheap nylons. It’ll stop bullets, anything like that. Now, with a blaster, you aim it at your target and, at these settings, it’ll even burn through half-armor if you can hold it on target for a bit. That’s why I told you not to fuck with the settings. You need the high-end for armor. Now, people not wearing armor, you can set this low and it’ll stay on like a flashlight and you can sweep it across a bunch of ’em and burn ’em all, but, if you want to stay alive, assume they’re in armor.”

  “Why did you call it ‘half-armor’?”

  “That’s what they call it. There’s full armor that’s even tougher, but it’s too expensive and hard to get. We don’t have it and neither will anyone we’ll fight.”

  “That’s totally reassuring, Angel.”

  With my basic training, such as it was, swiftly completed, I had no choice but to confront the language. Until I’d mastered it, I had to live in a separate cabin and wasn’t treated as part of the crew. It’s a bitch of a language: polytonal, the way some Asian languages are, and it formed many compound words that also changed meaning depending on the tone of the component syllables. Fortunately, the empire had designed an impressive machine to do the teaching for them and, at some point, Carvalho and the Flying Whore had appropriated one of them. Basically, you sat in a relative of a dentist’s chair with your head in what looked like a hair dryer. I’m not certain whether it interacted with the weak electrical field that the brain creates, or whether it used an even more arcane science. Regardless, when I sat down with the Teacher, I saw images and heard words and after a very short while, the words began to make sense.

  Once I’d acquired enough familiarity with the language to navigate around the ship, they transferred me out of the small cabin to a regular crew berth. This was, as Angel had predicted, with the Strike Force. Even though a single cabin on a starship is counted as a luxury, by the time I moved, I was feeling so cooped up that I didn’t mind.

  The Strike Force was divided equally into four sections, each section having its own living area in a different portion of the ship. The accommodations for my section were typical: a cramped, barracks-style bunkroom containing ten triple-tiered bunks, an adjoining bathroom and exercise facilities. The bunks were narrow, enough room to roll over once but not twice. Not all of them had occupants, an obvious side effect of our way of life. It was easy to see why Gerangi had been annoyed when Angel had returned with only a single recruit.

  The Strike Force was all male, as was the entire ship’s crew. I was astonished at the number of them who could neither read nor write, not in the common language of the empire, nor in the language of their home world if it was different.

  Angel shrugged when I brought it up over a bitter brown drink in the mess one evening. “What did you expect, Danny? Most of them come from planets in the Outer Empire. Shit, I went to school, some of the time, but most of them … they’ve never seen one. The computers talk and listen and, if you need ID, your palm and your eye work fine.”

  “And this doesn’t bother anybody?”

  “Not in the Outer Empire. You don’t spend money on schools for the likes of them when you need beams and missiles.”

  “Outer Empire?”

  “That’s where we operate,” Angel said. “No law out here. The Fleet doesn’t pretend to keep the peace. Some places are still in pretty good shape, most aren’t, and some have totally fallen apart so nobody’s been there for a hundred years. They all fight over whatever there is to have and we’re just in it for our share.”

  “Let me get this straight. This empire has fallen to pieces to the point that most people can’t even read and we fly around stealing or smashing what’s left?” (Sounds like some great job I’d landed, huh?)

  “What’s your problem, Danny? They’re shooting at each other most of the time and they’re happy to shoot at us any chance they get. Why is it my fault if the place is fucked up?”

  I let it drop there because I could see Angel was starting to get hot and if there
was one person in the galaxy I didn’t want to piss off then, it was Angel.

  I spent the night thinking about it, though. As far as the crew not being literate, I guessed that universal education wasn’t a priority for planetary governments facing dwindling trade and increasing defense needs. You can get away with that, of course, only as long as technology can be imported and a high level of automation maintained. When the imports dried up and the machinery broke, the resources saved by ignoring education would be dwarfed by the problem of trying to prop up a society with so many unproductive members. It would be a downward spiral, both for the society and its illiterates. Not surprisingly, the life of a freebooter was attractive to members of that underclass, even though most of them were limited to positions that required little more than a willingness to follow orders and fight. Those who could read and had some skills could hope for better positions on the ship and, maybe, eventual promotion. But not very high, even then. I discovered that department heads and the entire bridge crew were all well-educated, many from the aristocracy of their worlds. It spoke volumes about where the empire’s talent saw their opportunity.

  The Strike Force might have been the bottom of the barrel, but it had a pecking order all its own. As a newcomer, I was largely ignored, with the exception of the inevitable bully or two whose method of sizing up an individual was to pick a fight. I declined the fights. Maybe that was a violation of custom, and certainly earned me some humiliation, but it seemed safer. At least, I was allowed to decline. I was left out of the gambling and casual conversation that seemed to fill most of the spare time, but it could have been worse. In a sense, it was a little like being a rookie in training camp all over again. The problem was, this time, I was not sure how to become one of the boys.

  Angel was always available, at least if he was not busy working or gambling. I think that, as much as he fit easily into the social routine of the ship, he was happy to have a compatriot around. He loved to brag about his exploits. Unfortunately, his stories all had the same plot. If even half of them were true, and if I were planning to go along with Angel, I was going to need an asbestos condom. Beyond that, however, the topics were sparse. There were limits to the conversational potential of food, sex, football, and drugs since we didn’t have three out of the four and the food lacked variety. Worse yet, I began to suspect that he really shared his old man’s opinion of my passing arm.