Ship's Boy (The David Birkenhead Series)

by Phil Geusz

Captain Blaine blinked. “How… Indulgent.” Then he forced another smile and nodded down at James’s datapad. “May I see what you’re reading now?”

  My friend beamed, offering his most childish grin and turning the pad around to face the captain. “Sure! It’s a story!”

  “What about?” he asked, in a very adult-to-child manner.

  “It’s called ‘The Aeneid’,” James gushed. “By a guy named Virgil. Dad loved it, so I read it sometimes too.”

  Blaine scowled, examining the pad. “That’s gibberish!”

  “No it’s not,” James answered, his grin fading. “It’s Latin.”

  Blaine’s scowl deepened, then he sighed. “Well… James, I fear that I must ask that you return to a normal school curriculum henceforth—I’ll set up the computer accordingly, and you’ll be tested every week.” His face went hard. “You’re a very important young man, and I’ll have no one claim that I allowed any of your best learning years to go to waste. I’ll be monitoring your progress personally.”

  My friend’s jaw dropped for a moment, then he simply nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “Good!” Blaine declared, his voice hearty for the first time since entering the room. Then he turned to me. “And now you, David.” He smiled insincerely. “I must admit that your situation has caused me even more worry than that of his Lordship’s. I mean, no one anywhere knows how to properly raise a free Rabbit. Or at least not that I know of.”

  I nodded and said nothing.

  “Well…” he said eventually. “I see that you’re playing with a datapad too. Can you actually read?”

  I nodded slowly. “Uh-huh.”

  Blaine beamed. “Excellent! Far better than I feared. Good bunny!” Then he reached out for the instrument and I handed it over. He stared at it for a long, long, time. “What in the world?” he asked eventually.

  “That’s an equation representing the current state of your engines, approximated to six dimensions,” I explained. “I’m trying to figure out how much power we’ve actually lost due to that warped control rod in the number nine warp generator.” I blushed. “It’s only an approximation, sir. To obtain reliable figures you need to work an n-dimensional formula. And I don’t know enough calculus to do that yet.”

  “I see,” the captain replied, his voice flat and hard. He handed the datapad back, then crossed his arms. “Well… What I had in mind was to offer you the chance to learn something more practical for a Rabbit. Something that might actually help you earn your keep as a freedman, in other words.”

  I let my ears rise in curiosity. “Sir?”

  Blaine sighed. “Pedro is overworked,” he admitted. “I meant to buy another Rabbit, but that cursed factor on Magus Prime…” He shook his head and frowned. Then he turned to James. “It’s good for a Rabbit to work,” he explained. “They must work, you see, in order to be truly happy. It’s how they’re designed. If they don’t work they go to seed and die young.” He looked away. “I’ll rate him the same as a human ship’s boy—he is free, after all. Wages and everything. And I’ll make a special note in the log that he’s to be discharged when you leave the ship. But.. My Lord, you’ll ruin him if you let him lie about all day in here and…” He pointed at my datapad. “Draw squiggles.”

  I turned to James, who was already looking at me with eyebrows raised. “I am bored,” I admitted. “Nor afraid to work. He’s right about that part.”

  James nodded. “I only wish I could go with you. It sounds like it might be fun, at least sometimes.” Then he turned to Captain Blaine. “He agrees.”

  The baronet looked immensely relieved. “Excellent!” he declared. “David will report to the galley at the beginning of the first watch tomorrow for instruction in his new duties.” He looked down at my “squiggles” again, his eyes blank. Then he smiled one last time. “I’m sure you’ll make something of yourself given a chance, David. After all, milord clearly thought well of you.” Then he was gone.

  There was a long, long silence in the cabin before James finally spoke again. “What do you know about the ranks of nobility, David?” he finally asked.

  “Not much,” I admitted.

  “Well…” James continued. “Do you know exactly what a baronet is? Or how somebody gets to be one?”

  I shook my head.

  “A baronetcy is a purchased rank. A hereditary title that can be bought and sold. Usually those who buy the silly things are incredibly vain and small-minded. It seems to run in the families, too. For generation after generation.”

  “I see,” I replied, understanding beginning to dawn.

  “You can also purchase rank in the navy,” James observed. “Though those who buy it are usually assigned to jobs where they can’t do much harm. Like commanding revenue cutters, for example, teamed with highly-experienced and long-suffering first officers who can be trusted to carry them along.” He shook his head. “Dad absolutely despised some things about our system, David. Baronetcies and purchased rank among them. He said we needed wholesale reform. And I begin to understand why.”

  I nodded wordlessly.

  “Well,” he said eventually, snapping off his datapad. “I suppose I’d best get some rest—I’m supposed to tackle the sixth grade tomorrow, after all! And you have to get up early to go learn a trade appropriate to your capabilities.”

  I smiled and nodded again. “Yes, sir.”

  James sighed and turned out the lights. “David?” he asked a few minutes later.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Please quit ‘sir’-ing me. At least in private, that is. After the fun we had with poor Sir Leslie tonight, I expect that we’re going to be best friends for life.”

  13

  Being a ship’s boy wasn’t too bad, though I’d have hated being forced to make a career of it. Sir Leslie liked me a lot better when I was serving him tea than when I was sleeping in his bed, for example—sometimes he even smiled and fozzled my ears. Pedro was extra-nice too, now that he was allowed to speak to me. While he might not’ve been a very bright Rabbit, he was certainly a good, decent and above all patient one. “Everything’s so much better now that you’re working with me,” he declared over and over again while bustling about making sandwiches for the officers on watch. “A free Rabbit, living in the captain’s cabin with no work to do!” He huffed. “Imagine that!”

  Pedro always explained everything over and over again; he was still telling me how to properly carry a serving tray, for example, almost a week after I’d mastered the art. And every time I washed dishes, he told me about eleventy-billion times to make sure I kept the silver and steel flatware separate. Being a ship’s boy might be a lot of hard work—I’d grant anyone that. But it wasn’t exactly rocket science.

  One of the very nicest things Pedro did for me was keep me well away from engineering and some of the other less-pleasant parts of the ship. My friend Percy the marine had been right to steer me away from there. Pedro handled all the engineering coffee runs himself, and often came back a long time later looking tired and drawn and carrying a tray full of unspeakably filthy china. He never told me about what’d happened, even when I asked. Instead, he just groomed himself and muttered afterwards.

  James had it considerably worse than I did—he was required to sit at his console all day long and pretend to actually be challenged by the sixth grade. It must’ve been excruciatingly boring, because the moment I came back every day his face lit up and he immediately tackled me, so that we could wrestle and laugh for a while. Then he made me tell him about everything that happened, sometimes twice. Usually I was pretty honest with him, though I edited some things. Like how the purser already had my name signed on an induction form, for example, so that I could scrawl an “x” alongside it to make it legal. That was bad enough, but the form had also been made out for a five-year enlistment, with no mention of my being allowed to leave the ship at the next opportunity. I might’ve made a big stink out of it, I suppose. But in the end, what good would it have done? So I simply
asked to fill out a new form with the “mistake” corrected. He didn’t argue, so I suppose he knew all along. This one I signed with a flourish, smiling up at the legal-document recording camera that was purring away. My penmanship is especially attractive, or so Dad always said.

  I might’ve had to work hard and there might’ve been people eager to take advantage of me, but at least I got to know most of the ship and its crew. They were pretty nice, for the most part—Dad always said that most people were, once you got to know them. First Officer von Selkim, for example, turned out to be a very good friend indeed. He always smiled, except sometimes when Captain Blaine was around. Pieter, as he asked me to call him, took his coffee with lots of milk and sugar and drank four or five cups per watch. Best of all, he’d actually met Dad and thought that he was a fine ship’s engineer indeed. Percy had warned me not to let anyone know that I was an apprentice engineer, but one day Pieter out and asked me if I was interested in the subject myself. I told him the whole story, since we were alone just then. He sort of smiled at first and seemed happy for me, then grew more thoughtful. In the end he agreed that it was indeed probably for the best if I kept the matter quiet, but also promised to help me any way he could. From then on whenever he sent for coffee he ordered an extra little cookie for me to eat myself—I liked him a lot.

  But it was the marines I liked best of all, I think. Even their sergeant, who on such a small vessel was in charge of the entire contingent, went out of his way to be nice to me. This was a little strange, since according to Percy he hated everyone. The black-uniformed men treated me almost like one of the family, tossing boots at me and telling me all sorts of nasty jokes I’d never heard before. Percy told me once that this was because they’d worked with me under emergency conditions and liked what they’d seen—apparently I’d impressed the sergeant in particular. He kept talking to me about signing up as a batman, which was sort of the marine equivalent of a ship’s boy, and said he’d put in a good word for me if I did. Someday, he hinted, things might change enough that I could hope to become a real marine—nothing would make him happier. He liked me so much that he asked Captain Blaine to assign me exclusively to marine duties for two weeks, so that I could learn how to properly launder and stow uniforms, arrange lockers, and of course shine boots. It was probably the best part of the whole voyage, except that I missed seeing Pieter the whole time. James was envious—he was considering becoming a marine himself someday, when he did his required service. And, I decided, if I did finally end up having to become some kind of servant even though I was free, well… I could do worse than the marines myself.

  Maybe I might even end up as James’s batman?

  I was still working in the barracks compartment learning how to properly sew ribbons onto tunics when Hummingbird made its last alteration of course in Marcus Prime space. Then she went back to maximum thrust, committing us finally and irrevocably to making our intersystem Jump at Point Five.

  Where a crippled Imperial light cruiser was still inching her way towards her own translation, in a perfect position to take potshots at us as we flashed by.

  14

  Space battles are long, drawn-out and boring affairs, except when they occur in the immediate vicinity of a Jump point. That’s where the vast majority of them take place, however, and our upcoming struggle was to be no exception. This was because the Points serve as navigational choke-points. While in theory a ship can translate into hyperspace anywhere and at any time, only at Jump points is it even close to being real-world feasible for objects with any noticeable mass. A few labs had successfully Jumped subatomic particles deep in gravity wells, sometimes even all the way down on planetary surfaces. But these were mere scientific stunts. Practical interstellar navigation mandated the use of Jump points, and the use of such points created bottlenecks where battles often took place. Hummingbird and the enemy cruiser were now headed for precisely the same point in space at almost exactly the same time; our ship would eventually beat the crippled Imperial warship there by a margin of several hours. First, however, we had a gauntlet to run.

  Captain Blaine cleared for action a good hour before we moved into range of the enemy’s guns. James, Pedro and I all three were ordered to remain in the lower stores hold, which was as deep within the hull of such a small, fragile ship as it was possible to get. Someone had set up crash couches for us there. Since we had so much time to get ready, I borrowed a portable console from the marines so that we could at least watch the action as it unfolded.

  The cruiser began firing as predicted almost down the second; while her engines might’ve been badly damaged by whatever accident had befallen her, the vessel’s guns still worked just fine. She was equipped with eight medium-caliber naval blasters that vastly outranged our little popguns, and their crews belted out salvo after salvo in beautiful synchronization. The range was long and Hummingbird both small and agile— the odds were overwhelmingly against the enemy so much as scorching our paintwork. I’d just finished explaining this to Pedro for perhaps the seventh time when suddenly our ship staggered violently, then shook herself like a wet dog. The enemy had gotten lucky after all!

  “I knew we’d be hit!” my nominal supervisor declared, his eyes wide with terror. “We’ll all be killed!”

  “Everything’s fine,” James replied, his voice low and soothing. Pedro, we’d already learned, accepted reassurance far more willingly from a human than he did me. Especially a noble-born human. Meanwhile I fiddled with the console. It didn’t have anything like the level of access we’d enjoyed in the captain’s cabin, but I was still able to call up generalized damage reports. “They hit us in the engine room,” I reported once I was certain. “Did some damage, too.”

  “Really?” James asked, keeping his voice level and calm for Pedro’s sake.

  I nodded. “The number nine warp coil is down entirely now. So are three, four, and six. One and two are warming up fast.”

  James raised his eyebrows eloquently, but said nothing.

  “We’re slowing down,” I explained. “A lot. Because we have to. Now they’ll have a lot more time to shoot at an easier target.”

  We rode on in silence after that for a while; once a slight shudder marked a grazing impact that didn’t do any further harm so far as I could see. “We’re almost to the Jump point,” I reported at long last, finally breathing a bit easier. “Translation in three, two, one-“

  Then, just as everything began to gray out for the Jump, another blast struck home square in our center of mass and penetrated deep into Hummingbird’s guts.

  15

  I’d never been in a ship struck squarely by a naval-caliber blaster before, and I rather fervently hoped I never would be again, either. Unlike the earlier hits, this one ripped through our weakened Field as it were tissue paper, and the result was rather akin to taking a hard right to the jaw even buried so far down in the ships’ innards. Plus the lights flickered and died, the gravity cut out for a moment, and huge electrical arcs flashed and flickered about like lightning as Hummingbird equalized all her potentials. And all of this was on top of the warp translation effect, which was more than a little stupefying in and of itself. Engineering held together just long enough to complete the Jump, then everything on my little monitor flatlined. The only systems left working seemed to be the backup lighting and the gravity, though the latter was only at about a quarter power.

  “Damn!” James swore as he and I climbed out of our acceleration couches, though neither of us had the faintest idea of where to go or why. “We’re in for it now!”

  I couldn’t help but agree as I toggled through the ships’ systems over and over again. Engineering must be little more than a scrapheap; all we had left was battery power. Even worse, we were floating powerless directly in front of the Jump point, helpless prey for the next enemy to come through. Which would be in less than two hours, according to the last estimate I’d made. We didn’t even have any pre-existing vector to work with—Field-based drives ope
rated under an inertialess effect, so that once a ship’s drive ceased to function it’s pre-existing inertia reasserted itself. In our case, that meant we stopped dead right where we were.

  Which rather effectively described our situation, actually. Dead, that is.

  “Oh!” Pedro keened, as even his rather dim mind began to really understand. “Ohhhhh!”

  “Hush!” James ordered him. Then my friend stepped over to where the still-strapped-in Rabbit sat gaping at him with wide, terrified eyes. “My family takes the very best of care of its servants. We pride ourselves in it.” He smiled and scratched Pedro’s ears. “Now, I want you to just sit here quietly like a good bunny until someone tells you it’s okay to get up. Till then, just remember that I’ve given you my word of honor that you’re going to be all right. D’ye hear me?”

  I looked at James and blinked as Pedro smiled and nodded and fawned over my friend. One the one hand, I was sort of ashamed of Pedro—as much as I liked him for the kind, gentle creature he was, well… I could never be so easily led. Or could I? another part of me wondered. Because there was indeed something about James’s voice, when he played the nobleman. Something that reached deep inside and touched me to the core. And left me sort of wishing that he’d scratch my ears and call me a good bunny too.

  Most of the ship was still holding pressure, though the bridge had been evacuated and engineering was Swiss cheese. The ship’s auxiliary command center was two compartments down from us, and when the senior officers came trooping past we just sort of naturally glommed onto the procession ourselves. Captain Blaine actually smiled at James for a moment, though the expression was clearly forced, and First Officer von Selkim patted me on the head with his good arm—the other was dangling in a bloody medkit sling.

  “All right,” Sir Leslie reported once everyone was gathered in the crowded little room—James and I stood just outside, and no one complained. “Status report, please.”