“I’m so glad you asked,” I said, turning to him and ignoring my royal Tilday cousin, “because it’s a hazardous mission requiring a unique and limited skill set that each of you, in your own way, have shown you possess.”
“Although I can’t imagine how you think you can trust us, a pair of unwilling conscripts, to carry out whatever outrageous plan you’ve come up with. Enough with the mystery and word games; just spit it out, Flat Nose,” Bethany flared, obviously feeling just how inconsequential she and whatever she had to say where and resenting the blazes out of it.
“Very well,” I said my smile sharpening to a shark like expression, “I want you to make a deal with the droids.”
“What?” her jaw dropped open.
Tremblay closed his eyes his lips moving in what I assumed to be a silent prayer.
“One of the droid factions—the one called the United Sentient’s Assembly—I want you to go talk with them,” I explained, wickedly enjoying the expression of horror on her face.
For once it seemed I’d literally removed Bethany’s ability to speak. So, taking advantage of the disbelieving silence, I continued speaking in order to relay the full import of my plan uninterrupted.
“Yes indeed, I have finally found a use of your diplomatic credentials, political instincts, and cold-blooded nature and the solution for how to yoke it to my own designs. You see Bethany,” I said, my eyes boring into hers, “all I hope for is that you can stall them. If you succeed in opening a dialogue and get them to break off their attacks,” I squared my shoulders and leaned forward and even though more than six feet separated us, she leaned back as if standing before a strong wind, “I suppose something’s I can learn to live with.”
For a moment Bethany continued to stare at me but Caprians—and especially Caprian Royals—are made of sterner stuff and she quickly rallied refusing to be intimidated, and her stare soon morphed into a glare.
“This isn’t a diplomatic mission; it’s a suicide mission plain and simple, don’t try to deny it, Jason. You’re sending me out to die!” Bethany raged. “Do you hear me, Admiral?” her voice filled with complete and utter scorn for me. “This is the same thing as signing my death warrant, or sending me for a ‘walk’ outside the airlock without a suit. This is murder!”
“There’s the cousin I know and love,” I mocked, “I send two of you on a mission of mercy—one that could save countless lives—and the only person you’re concerned about is yourself. Thank you for once again for validating my long-held belief that your human nature is more snakelike than warm-blooded.”
“You don’t have to do this,” she said quickly, even though her face was still reddened, “I can help you. You don’t have to be like the Montagne’s of old—like Jean Luc the pirate—you can be better,” her voice was gaining a delicious hint of desperation as she tried to appeal to some hypothetical better side within me and simultaneously shame me with the specter of the blood thirsty, blood feuding Montagne’s of old. “Listen, you have enemies in the Assembly and the Core Worlds but I can identify them for you. Send someone on the mission if you have to—send Raphael; Great Destroyer knows he’s outlived his usefulness—but I know things. I still know things that you don’t, things that you need! Why risk sending an unwilling diplomat out there, when you could instead use me. Use me, Jason; don’t just throw me away out of pettiness and spite!”
I looked at her skeptically, wondering if anything she knew was worth more to me than the oxygen she would burn saying them and reluctantly decided that they probably were, but I was done with her. But call it justice, call it revenge, or call it simple peace of mind; we were just going to have to struggle along without her insights.
“Let me be clear on this,” I said, reaching down just below the surface for the coldness that lurked inside whenever I thought about Cousin Bethany, and all the trouble and lies and outright backstabbing she’d done, “if, for some reason, you set your desire to spite me over the good of millions—or even billions of lives—and try to get yourself killed, or dare I say, make things worse for the people of Sectors 23 and 24 by inciting the droids to kill you…I’ll still rest comfortably in the knowledge that at least the universe has been made a slightly better place.”
Tremblay stared at my royal cousin while we spoke and slowly his face hardened. “If she tries anything like that I’ll kill her,” he said, hatred in his voice as he continued to look at my cousin. “I may not be the bravest or most resolute officer, but if the droids succeed in those two Sectors what is to stop them from coming here? I won’t let that happen.”
“A surprising position to espouse, considering the source,” I scoffed, raking him up and down with my eyes and finding my former First Officer wanting.
He squared his shoulders and glared at me. “What I have done, and however poorly I may or may not have been at doing it,” he said stiffly, refusing for once to be cowed by my gaze, “I have always acted with the best interests of the people—the Caprian people—in mind. I may not like this assignment but I won’t consign them to a metal death by the slave races of the AI’s.”
“Finally…something we can agree on,” I said coolly.
“I won’t die this easily,” Bethany exploded back onto the scene leveling a finger at me dramatically, “mark my words, Jason: I don’t die easy. I’ll be back and you’ll rue the day you sent me off like this!”
I shook my head and gestured toward the guards.
“And you,” she rounded on Tremblay, “don’t think for a minute that you can—”
“Take them away,” I said impatiently and gestured toward the shuttle they would take to the Pride of Prometheus. As the Lancers laid hands on a now squawking Bethany, I handed a chip to the head of the Lancer quad, “Give this data crystal to the Captain of the Pride when you get there and tell him his Mission is a go. He’s got the green light.”
“Yes, Warlord. It will be as you command,” the Lancer replied with a thick, Tracto-an accent. His accent was thicker than I was used to in truth, but I shrugged it off as immaterial and turned away.
I had a few more things to check on before we were ready to leave.
Chapter 24: Spalding vs. Spalding
“If anyone needs me I’ll be down in the ship’s locker,” Commander Terrance Spalding said in a loud voice, not looking at anyone in particular as he made this declaration. Which, since the only people present were the ship’s current Chief Engineer and a couple of petty officers, it could have been considered an insult to the only other officer in the room. Not that the old reprobate cared about any of that.
Tiberius looked over at old half man, half cyborg, and shook his head in disgust.
“If by that you mean you’re going into the half deck that used to house ship’s old intelligence section, please, go knock yourself out,” he said cuttingly. “But while you’re doing that, if you could restrain yourself and refrain from any further attempts to romanticize things by trying to label them with myths and fantastical names right out of old spacers tales for my benefit, I would appreciate it.”
For a moment it looked like the old man was about to burst a blood vessel he turned so very red in the face that Tiberius could actually tell where the real skin stopped and the synth-+flesh now covering parts of his mechanical skull began.
“Well, Mr. Chief Engineer of the Furious Phoenix, in case you hadn’t noticed I am an old spacer,” the old man thundered. “And if ye’re thinking I’m doing this for yer benefit then you couldn’t be wronger. I stopped caring what the blazes you believed the moment you went Parliament!”
“If that was true you’d be the Chief Engineer of this tub and I’d be comfortably sitting out the rest of this insanity inside a prison cell!” Lieutenant Tiberius shot back irritably. “But for some reason you seem content to continue with the farce that I’m in charge of this ship’s Engineering section continue. That’s fine; I’m a grown engineer and a prisoner of war in all but name, thanks to that tyrannical King of ours. So stand
there gloating and interfering with the ship’s work crews all you want for whatever mysterious special projects you have going on down there in the old ‘intelligence section’, but do not,” his voice rose and kept rising, “DO NOT!” he all but screamed, “insult my intelligence, or the intelligence of everyone else present by dumbing things down with tall tales and your particular brand of insipient spacer mysticism!”
“Is that what you believe?” Commander Spalding said looking taken aback and somewhat saddened. “That I couldn’t put personal feelings aside and show you the respect the man wearing the uniform of Chief Engineer deserves, one Chief Engineer to another, no matter what his political leanings? And that everything I say from sayings about Saint Murphy to the ship’s locker is all somehow about you? Son…it hasn’t been about you for the past five years.”
“It’s been ten,” Tiberius flared, refusing to be sucked into the old man’s lunatic asylum world once again, “ten years since I signed up with the SDF as a parliamentary officer.”
“It’s a good thing your mother raised you,” the Commander said damningly, “since I wouldn’t have it bruted about the fleet that I raised a self-centered fool.”
“No risk of that, old man; you were gone more than you were around—even when you and mother were still together,” Tiberius said bitterly.
“As Saint Murphy is my witness, that was not by choice. Even when—” Spalding declared sucking in his breath but Tiberius cut him off with an angry wave.
“Save it for someone who cares, because I don’t,” the engineering Lieutenant said bitterly. “Next thing you’ll be saying that the Locker’s a real place, not just whatever forgotten corner of a ship you can slap the name on. I suppose I should watch out for grav-carts and the Fraternal Order of the Space Wrench is holding a secret meeting there tonight, which is probably why you can’t hang around." He shook his head damningly, “Next you’ll say that Captain Moonlight still lives and continues to protect us from rogue droids everywhere, when he was nothing more than a vid-stream creation and the whole ‘fraternal order’ was a crock of space dung. In case you haven’t noticed we’re about to embark on a mission to go out and fight a real droid menace. That’s probably the one thing I can actually imagine, the one threat I can see, that I can actually get behind helping you and your fake Confederals destroy. And you know what? I don’t see Moonlight showing up to this real life party. Why?” he asked venomously. “It is because he’s not the secret identity of some patriotic but sorely misunderstood engineer? Nope. It’s because he doesn’t exist in the real world of real people and real, non-holo-vid problems. There is no secret hero ready to jump out of the shadow and save the day, and I curse you for trying to fill my head with lies back when I was a child and too stupid and ignorant to know the truth. No,” he said flatly, “you go down to your ‘locker,’ do whatever the blazes you like, and get blasted. The less I hear of it the better!”
Tiberius didn’t care that every single one of the engineers that hadn’t been pressed, along with him, drew back with censure and increasingly hard looks in their eyes. Tiberius knew this had been a long time coming and needed to be said. He wasn’t some impressionable youth, and his father wasn’t part of some secret order of hidden do-gooders who couldn’t make it home for the holidays because of some secret menace up in an empty inactive yard full of mothballed ships. He was a sworn Parliamentary officer and his father was a Royalist traitor who deserved to hang for what he and his so-called Confederation confederates had done.
“The Demon take me…” the elder Spalding said, his voice quavering as he spoke, “I may have held things back but I have never once told you a lie. Not once! No matter how damning it appeared or how unbelievable it seemed on the face of it,” the old cyborg said stiffly, his half-human body quivering with emotion.
“Enough of the craziness,” Tiberius snapped. “If you can’t scrap the spacer myths and delusions of grandeur for one minute and just speak like a normal person who has to deal with the simple, cold, hard duralloy reality of life as a non-crazy person then I’ve got no use for you. I’ve got a ship to maintain,” Tiberius tossed his hands in the air, glad to have finally told the old reprobate exactly what he thought. If he was spaced for it then so be it, but he was done catering to the insanity ten years ago when he turned old enough to cast his first vote and join the space force as an SDF officer candidate in engineering school.
“You’ve got no soul, lad, and until you take the blinders off and find it again I have nothing but pity and contempt for you,” Terrance Spalding drew himself up and thrust a finger down at the younger man. “So you deal with your simplified duralloy reality and keep going around putting lube in the proverbial space bearings like a good little voter drone what’s too busy and too stupid to look beyond what he can see to what is possible. It’s a big universe out here, and the galaxy is a dangerous place. So,” he shook his head in disgust, “I’ll be down in the ‘locker’ figuring a way to save the ship and win this thing for the Fleet. Anyone who wants to use their brain to actually think knows where they can find me if they want to stop spinning their gears!”
“Get stoked,” Terrance Tiberius Spalding muttered under his breath and pivoting on his heels. “Have fun in the intelligence half-deck,” he tossed over his shoulder before leaving the room.
Did the old fool really think that myths and spacer dreams and delusions were going to have any practical applications? It was going to take sound engineering principles and lots of them—not to mention quick, well drilled damage control teams. If this ship was actually going to run head long into a droid invasion fleet, like it was rumored through the grapevine to be setting out to do, damage control might very well be the highest priority.
Fortunately, while the old man was down on the half deck abasing himself before some homemade shrine to Space Gods, there was a real engineer ready to do something about it. And while he might not care about the so-called ‘Confederation’ traitors, he didn’t want to see his own pressed engineering teams—or the helpless masses stuck in the invasion route of a droid fleet—killed or converted to biomass.
Praying for victory and tinkering around with random bits of old useless technology like the old loser, a man so stupid and lost to reality as to walk into an active fusion reaction, he shook his head.
Oh, Tiberius had heard the tales and seeing the man’s borged out body, he couldn’t deny the eyewitness accounts he’d heard. Instead of using an automated robot or suit…he brought himself up short.
Anyway, he had seen the manifests of what ‘Commander Spalding’ had ordered brought onboard and stored in his ‘locker,’ and none of it was going to save anyone!
No, whatever duct-tape-and-a-prayer rattle trap abortion the half cyborg ‘Commander’ had dreamed up wasn’t going to work. Saving this ship, if anyone was going to do it, was going to be up to an non-irradiated, non-senile Engineer who’d had his feet grounded in sound and solid engineering principles ever since he joined the SDF.
It was going to be up to him to get this ship in fighting trim and not only keep it there, but get it operating at 120% of specs if they were going to make it.
Fortunately, while the old man had been ordering examples of technology so old and outdated it had been scrapped centuries ago, Tiberius had made full use of the half cracked Imperial database cloned from this ship and the imperial level manufacturing facilities at the Gambit Production Yards.
“Pray to your Space Gods, and duct tape your antiquated contraptions together, old man,” he muttered to himself. “Meanwhile I’ll tune up our rectors, increase the range of our lasers, and turn our single and double turbo- mounts into double and quad mounts. Wherever possible,” he admitted out loud.
He’d had to jerk out some of the heavy and medium laser mounts to do that, which had cut some holes in the ship’s close-range defenses. “Which is why I had our crews pull the rest of the laser mounts; I mean why not?” he muttered to himself. The girdle of duralloy the Confederals
had mated to the damaged Mono-Locsium hull had already been causing troubles with the targeting arrays and power lines anyway. It hadn’t been enough to really slow them down, but if this mission was everything it was rumored to be they couldn’t afford so much as a percentage or three under establishment.
So Tiberius had figured ‘why not go extremely close-range and play around with the new Imperial technology we’ve gotten our hands on?' Why no one else there had the vision to use the latest Imperial updates, he was unable to understand. He didn’t really care about them, though; they could all eat vacuum and die—but not his crew.
As long as they were stuck on this infernal ship, they needed the best and the best meant upgrading the remaining heavy and medium lasers on this Strike Cruiser with the newest plasma and ion cannons.
They may be and in fact were extremely close ranged but the turbos could hold off anything remotely close to their weight class in metal and if they couldn’t then the enemy was getting close anyways and he for one saw no advantage to fighting a droid invasion force of boarding units. The plasma cannons should deal with most of them and the ion cannons would take care of the rest. They would really have to swarm them in unbelievable numbers, or have super-hardened equipment to survive the short-ranged throw weight he was setting up.
Fortunately, Chief Gunner Lesner—unlike the old fossil down in his ‘locker’—had a pair of brain cells to rub together and despite being a brainwashed royalist like his father, was actually able to see the potential in the new advanced Imperial weaponry plans and had backed his drive to replace the old weapons, since they’d been stuck working beyond schedule fixing the engine housing anyway.
The old man should have retired with grace back when he was still worth something, but fortunately for him and everyone else on this tub, there was a real engineer present to pick up the slack.
Whistling to himself, Tiberius set off to inspect the run lines from the power banks to the new plasma cannons. He couldn’t wait to see the look on the old man’s face when he found out that whatever he was trying to kludge together down below not only wasn’t going to work, but wasn’t even needed.
Spineward Sectors 6: Admiral's Spine Page 22
