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

by Colin Alexander

  “No, no problem for us,” Ruoni said. “Thjonarodni is just an undistinguished world. They used to maintain their own kvenningar until recently. Then, somehow, they ran afoul of Carrillacki.”

  “That sounds like a bad thing.”

  “Yes. A little odd, too, since Thjonarodni was never wealthy and is far removed from the centers of power. Still, they did and Carrillacki took them apart. Mostly from the inside and by assassinations. There was very little outright fighting. Now Carrillacki has them, but it seems they were more interested in taking the world than managing it. That has left a lot of Srihani out of work. It is not an unusual story today.”

  The view screens, as we came in, gave a deceptive view of our approach. From far away, as we entered the star system, it was no different than looking out a porthole. The screen showed nothing but star points in the black. Then a new star appeared in the center of the screen and slowly changed into a tiny disc. It grew with our approach until it was a multicolored globe that filled the screen. Thanks to the magnification of the ship’s telescopes, the process began at much greater distances than it would have through a porthole.

  Once the globe was the size of the screen, however, it stopped growing. The ship’s computer arbitrarily set a certain scale as appropriate for the image and decreased the magnification as we approached to keep it constant. The visual effect was of being stalled in space. The numbers and charts the computer provided said otherwise, but the eye still fooled the mind.

  It didn’t bother me. Thjonarodni was the first earthlike world I had seen from space. It was beautiful, with continents of brown and green set against deep blue oceans, white swirls of cloud over both. The continental outlines were unfamiliar, but I had never been able to recognize North America under cloud cover in the NASA photographs either. The dark side of the planet showed little sparks of light, evidence of civilization. They were few and far between, which surprised me for a world which was supposed to measure its history in millennia. Meanwhile, the computer hadn’t kept the image there for me to sightsee. Symbols appeared to show the cities, defensive installations, and orbiting satellites. Thjonarodni’s defenses were not very impressive.

  “There is one warship in orbit,” Ruoni said. “A small one, destroyer class, not much bigger than us. IFF is Carrillacki. That is interesting. According to our records, Thjonarodni should have had three such ships.”

  “I guess Carrillacki is satisfied with less firepower for the planet than the locals had been.”

  “It is cheaper, certainly,” Ruoni replied. “And another reason to believe we can find crew for hire.”

  Aside from the ship, there was a network of orbiting satellites, none of which, from the readouts, had enough punch to do in even the wounded Flower. There were powerful beam weapons sited on the planetary surface, but all in all it didn’t look like an arrangement capable of holding off a determined attack.

  Ground control made contact as we neared the satellite net. The screen windowed to show a middle-aged Srihani wearing Carrillacki insignia.

  “Unscheduled merchanter,” he hailed us, “our computers indicate that you have sustained battle damage. You will identify yourself, explain your presence and account for your condition.”

  Wonderful. Demand that the victim account for the mugging. The official looked like he was enjoying what must have been a rare opportunity to throw his weight around. Probably, he thought that his defenses could blow the Flower and was anxious for the experience.

  There wasn’t a sound, not a hint from the bridge crew. This was my baby to handle.

  “Andrave,” I asked, “can you put me on line with this joker?”

  “Certainly.” Almost simultaneously, a little red light glowed on the arm of my chair.

  “This is the Flower of Rianth and I’m Captain Danny a Troy.” It was still an effort to say my name that way, but I figured if I kept it up maybe I would get used to it. “We were damaged in a fight with a freebooter and we’re here because we heard it would be possible to sign on crew. I trust that meets your needs.” The statements were all true, just a little misleading.

  “Sign on crew?” He gave a sour grin. “You’re a little late, but you should still find some. There were enough ships decommissioned.” I waited while he carried on an offscreen conversation. When he came back on, he said, “You have clearance to land one boat. The main ship must remain in a specified orbit. Launching and orbital parameters will be sent to your helm. You will be fired upon if there are any deviations.”

  You’re all heart, I thought. Actually, it was all irrelevant. Stuoronin was our only pilot and helmsman so there was little alternative to taking a single boat and leaving the Flower in a fixed orbit. Even if they had been willing for us to land the main ship, I would have been nervous about our chances of being able to take off again.

  After the necessary arrangements had been made, I stood up to play leader. “All right, Ruoni,” I said, “let’s see if we can draft us a good offensive guard.”

  The statement obviously puzzled him. “Why would you do that, Danny? A good guard should not be offensive.”

  “Never mind, Ruoni. It’s not worth the explanation.”

  Four of us, myself, Ruoni, Stuoronin and Angel dropped toward Thjonarodni in one of the landing boats. The composition of the party had been easy to determine. Stuoronin had to pilot and the captain had to be present. I needed Ruoni there to help judge the prospective talent. Why Angel? Well, a guard was good for show and there was nothing for him to do aboard ship. The descent was smooth enough, with Stuoronin bringing us in at the designated port. Once down, it took more time for them to decide to let us out than it had taken to come down from orbit. Stuoronin waited for the bureaucratic rituals to be played out, then popped the hatch. We stepped out onto the field where a small ground effect vehicle was waiting for us.

  It was my first experience on an alien world and not even the necessities of the moment could stop me from feeling the strangeness. The sky was blue, but not quite the blue I knew. The sunlight was a bit orange. The wind had an odd tang to it. My subconscious adjusted rapidly, much the same way it did when I put on a pair of tinted sunglasses. Still, the strangeness of that first impression remained.

  I was disappointed by the car that met us. The vehicle floated maybe three inches off the ground, with a driver and two rows of empty seats under a clear canopy. I would have expected a galactic civilization to wing passengers around the globe in a speedy little jet. When I said as much to Ruoni, he told me that some places did still use aircars, but, “if the engine dies, it’s safer to drop half a foot than half a mile.” I guess he knew better than to trust local maintenance. As we pulled away from the ship, I could see that the field stretched away in all directions, but was mostly empty. There was a long, low building on one side, toward which the driver steered. Actually, he went just to the left of the building, which showed few signs of life, and went through a gate. Once away from the field, the vehicle headed off along a smooth roadway that allowed the car to move at high speed.

  The driver was friendlier and a good deal more loquacious than the port official. Intent on looking around, I missed the first part of his conversation with Ruoni.

  “He’s right that you should be able to fill out your crew,” the driver was saying when I tuned in. “Carrillacki already has people to handle the cargo in and out of Thjonarodni. That’s why they had no interest in keeping our ships in service. There was a lot of crew with nowhere to go.” He chuckled at the memory. “Of course, the really good ones are long gone. Outfits started showing up to recruit almost before the change was official. Probably the busiest trading we’ve had in a long while. Don’t worry though,” he hastened to reassure us, “there will still be plenty of serviceable bodies around for you. As serviceable as anything on this planet these days. I’ll take you in to the main guild hall in the city center.”

  The city, when we reached it, was a massive disappointment to me. I was expecting towers and s
pires, iridescent in the sun, with aerial ramps between them. What I saw was brick. Brick! For that, I could have gone to the Bronx. In fact, although the brick had a purple tint, many of the low structures had a tired, ill-kept appearance that would have suited the Bronx. A few vehicles like the one we were in plied the streets and there was a smattering of citizens wearing tunics that reminded me of dashikis, but it was pretty quiet for an urban center. The impression was building that all was not well on Thjonarodni.

  The guild hall was a block square, a two-story structure of the purplish brick. The first floor was almost entirely open space, a cavernous exhibition area. I would have loved to know how they supported the floor above it. The driver conducted us to one of many M-shaped tables along the periphery—the same table, I noticed, as the one Gerangi had had back in South Dakota.

  “The authorities have announced that you are here and willing to sign on crew,” he said. “You should keep your position open continuously until you are ready to leave. You can purchase food at the shop across the street to your right and sleeping quarters are on the floor above. I would suggest that if you do need to go out, you do so in pairs and go armed. It’s not too bad during daylight, but after dark is another matter. You can stay as long as you like. There will be no pressure to leave.”

  The last, I thought, was said with a touch of sarcasm. Ours was the only occupied position in that whole huge place. The Srihani who had driven us there turned to go and would have left, had I not grabbed his arm.

  “Wait just a moment,” I said. “We were told that we would be able to recruit in one of your major cities. This looks more like a relic from some civilization without airplanes, not a city of an interstellar empire.”

  I wasn’t certain of what sort of reply to expect, but I didn’t expect him to laugh in my face. Which is what he did.

  “You want to go to an Imperial city?” he asked me. “I can take you. There’s one just west of the spaceport. But nobody goes there except for a few outlaws, and nobody has for a couple of hundred years. Between wear and tear over time and no way to make repairs, plus damage from the occasional freebooter, it’s impossible to keep a city like that functioning. This is modern Thjonarodni.” He stamped his foot on the floor and the sound echoed hollowly around the room. “That’s the relic.” He pointed in the direction of the old Imperial city.

  He caught himself, as though embarrassed at the heat he had put into his words. Likely, the proper, the truly Imperial thing for him to have done would have been to pretend that the brick city was just as good, if not better, and not to admit the truth, even to himself. When nothing else was said, he left. I stared at his departing figure, struggling with my disbelief. I might have stood there a long time, had not Ruoni interrupted my thoughts.

  “Believe him, Danny. What he says is almost certainly true. This planet lacks the resources to maintain itself on its own and it doesn’t generate enough trade to maintain itself the way Tetragrammaton does. So it deteriorates slowly. There must have been some trade of value, or Carrillacki would not have bothered with it, but now Carrillacki will control that trade and whatever profit flows from it. That is, they will until Thjonarodni deteriorates to the point at which there is no profit. Then they will cut it adrift. It’s not an unusual scenario in the Outer Empire.”

  “And the empire permits this?” I asked, knowing inside what the answer had to be. “It just lets worlds fall to pieces?”

  Ruoni gave me the shrug I had come to associate with any discussion of why things happened the way they did in the empire. “The empire cannot be intervening in what happens between kvenningari, or internally on individual planets. If it tried, we would have civil war.”

  “So, instead, you have civil chaos,” I snorted. Ruoni only shrugged again.

  Stuoronin ignored the whole exchange and took a seat at one end of the forward legs. Since there was little point in continuing to discuss the decline of Thjonarodni, we followed suit. Ruoni stationed himself at the end of the other leg, while I sat at the dimple in the middle. Angel lounged against the wall behind us. Judging from the other tables, and remembering Gerangi’s identical one, I figured that this was the standard format for an Imperial job interview. At the time, it seemed like a large assumption that anyone in the half-empty husk of a city would show up.

  They did, though. It took a while, but they began to arrive in ones and twos, then in groups. The initial trickle turned into a flood that formed a ranked crowd in front of our table. It was an eloquent statement about life on Thjonarodni, that one little freebooter drew such a crowd. Some of them were from the decommissioned Thjonarodni ships, still wearing the insignia of their defunct kvenningar. Some were drifters who had landed at Thjonarodni by some means or other, and were now looking for a way off. Others were Thjonarodni civilians, mostly youths from the city or the surrounding farms, eager to leave a world that had no future. The farm boys surprised me. They were, almost all of them, illiterate, unable to handle even computerized equipment unless it was equipped with voice recognition and response. Apparently, agriculture was an industry that could be easily de-automated, saving the authorities from expending credits on it and absorbing some of the otherwise useless part of the population. Of course, the youths most likely to be able to find off-world jobs were the best and brightest of the lot, precisely the ones that worlds like Thjonarodni needed to retain. Meanwhile, the city streets were unsafe and illiterate peasants with dung on their boots herded flocks within sight of a starship port.

  There were relatively few Srihani from Thjonarodni ships, but many drifters and civilians. It was clear that the cream was already gone. What was left was the dregs. But I couldn’t complain too much. This was, after all, an expansion draft.

  The process was simple. The applicant moved up to either Ruoni or Stuoronin. They would question him about what he could do and what his past performance had been. If they liked what they heard, they sent him to me. Otherwise, the applicant was dismissed. Since we needed almost an entire crew, we couldn’t afford to be too choosy. Still, I noticed a difference between Ruoni’s choices and the ones Stuoronin sent through. Ruoni was more inclined to send the journeymen away and take the local civilians, some barely literate if he liked them otherwise, while Stuoronin was the opposite. In theory, the final say about signing someone was mine. In practice, however, I had no basis for making an independent assessment. Consequently, I took whoever Ruoni and Stuoronin sent, registered their palms and retinas, and sent them to stand with Angel.

  It was nearing sundown when the Srihani stopped coming. By then, we had three rows of them lined up against the wall. They would pass for a full crew in numbers, if not in skills. The chances, however, of finding more skilled Srihani by waiting another day were almost nil, so we decided to leave with the ones we had. That was easier said than done. Even if we had been able to find enough vehicles to transport all of them to the spaceport at once, the landing boat could lift only a fraction of them at a time. Of necessity, we had to go up in shifts. Four of the Srihani we had signed claimed to be able to pilot the boat, so Stuoronin would not have to fly it each time. Ruoni and I went up with the first boat, while Stuoronin and Angel stayed on the surface until the last boat loaded.

  It was amazing, the change that adding a crew made in the old Flower. Where the corridors had been so deserted as to be spooky, they were now filled with Srihani trying to sort themselves out. Our skeleton crew was too small to quickly assume direction of the newcomers, and too many of the latter had no spacefaring experience at all. It took two days just to assign everyone space and put them into it. The problem was exacerbated by the change the Flower was making from merchanter to freebooter. We had signed on crew to constitute a strike force, but the layout of the merchanter wasn’t fitted to accommodate them all. We had to convert some of the cargo space to bunkrooms. It wasn’t satisfactory, and complaints were loud.

  Once we had the ship organized, I called a meeting of my officers. The Flower still needed
repairs as soon as possible and, if she were to take up a career as a freebooter, she needed more weaponry. Paying for that was going to be a problem. It was the old catch-22. We couldn’t fight without repairs, but the only way to get the money for the repairs was to fight.

  The Conference Room was crowded. With the exception of a minimal watch, all of the officers from each of the ship’s departments were there. The only familiar faces were the officers who’d come out with us from Tetragrammaton. Of the new hires from Thjonarodni, most were subordinate to the original crew members, but not all. Andrave, for example, had kept Communications, but ceded Damage Control to Kryan a Damour, who had worked in that section for a freebooter before being wounded in action and left on Thjonarodni. Stuoronin, likewise, had kept Helm but not Navigation.

  Another newcomer who headed a department was Vymander a Hausen, our strike force commander. Stuoronin had interviewed him and reported that he had fought for three small kvenningari prior to coming to Thjonarodni in search of a command, only to find Carrillacki in the process of taking over. He was a tall, slim Srihani whose charcoal skin clashed with pale-blue eyes and blond hair. He had come up with Stuoronin on the last ferry run. Since then, he had spent most of his time trying to organize and settle his force. He had acted decisively, though, and apparently had the Strike Force in order. Completing the roster in the room were Angel and four other guards pulled from the Strike Force.

  I’m not good at speeches, after dinner or otherwise. Anyway, I didn’t know the protocol for welcoming a new pirate crew. I went straight to business.

  “This conference is to discuss our options for obtaining the equipment we need, and I’m open to any information any of you have that will help us to do it.”

  Vymander stood up.

  “Captain. I believe I have the information you want. Before I reached Thjonarodni, I stopped at a station where I met a Srihani who’d come in on a merchanter so wrecked that it blew as it headed insystem. He had escaped in a lifeboat with two others, but they had died of their injuries shortly after docking. I tell you this so that you will know the information isn’t widely known. Previously, their ship had been hit by a freebooter, but they had managed to fight off the attackers and fled through the only wormhole they could transit. They wound up at Gar, a useless world, almost never visited anymore. Srihani live there, but they have no ships and no station although there is an old spaceport. They thought, I believe, that they could use the old port at Gar and their cargo—which was spare parts and tools for a spaceport—to fix their ship. They failed. The port had never been a major depot and what equipment was there broke down years ago. None of the locals had any idea of how to fix the equipment at the port and they weren’t very friendly either. In the end, they decided to try to make it to a base with their ship as it was, having stored the cargo at the port to reduce their mass. They failed in that, too. Since my informant was killed in a fight a few days later, and the locals on Gar have no use for the cargo, I’m sure it is still there.”