Aye, Robot (A Rex Nihilo Adventure) (Starship Grifters Book 2)

by Robert Kroese

  “Blast it, Sasha!” Rex growled. “You were too slow. Now we’re stuck in this rattletrap with Navyman Bob.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “Ugh,” Rex said. “I’m going to go see if this ship has any decent places to sulk.”

  “Good idea, sir. What should I do in the meantime?”

  “What do I care?” Rex said. “We’re pirates now. Do pirate stuff.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “Aye, Sasha.”

  “Sir?”

  “Pirates say ‘aye,’ not ‘yes.’”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “Aye, sir. Yes, I know, sir. Aye.”

  Still grumbling to himself, Rex stomped away down the corridor.

  Chapter Eight

  Pirate stuff, I thought to myself. I wasn’t entirely certain what that meant—nor did I particularly want to find out. When a job goes bad, Rex often lapses into funks like this, and it’s up to me to try to shake him out of it. I usually fail. The good news is that Rex lacks the attention span for a prolonged depression. The bad news is that what ultimately snaps him out of it is usually some sort of monumentally terrible idea for making a quick fortune.

  Although Rex had no love for our new ship, he seemed enamored with the idea of playing at being space pirates, so it was up to me to come up with some “pirate stuff” to occupy us before he decided to ram a cruise ship or something equally ill-advised. I decided to do a search of the ship’s nav computer to determine what the pirates had been up to. Fortunately, thanks to Rubric Malgastar’s lack of attention to detail, the pirates had left the computer unsecured. I found a complete log of all the hypergeometric jumps the Chronic Lumbago had taken. Most of these didn’t tell me anything, but one destination in particular jumped out at me, because it was in the middle of an uncharted area of the galaxy called Dead Man’s Nebula. Dead Man’s Nebula was a roughly oval-shaped area of space about seventeen light-years in length. As far as I knew, nobody had ever ventured more than a few thousand klicks into it. Jumping into the middle of it was insane.

  One of the other problems with traveling by rationalized hypergeometry is that when you’re dealing with alternate geometries, even tiny bits of matter floating around your target destination can cause very big problems. A speck of dust a hundredth the size of a grain of sand can blow a basketball-sized hole in your hull. Although Dead Man’s Nebula is 99.9999% empty space, by cosmological standards it’s chock full of such specks. If you were to jump into any random section of the nebula, there’s a good chance your ship would be torn to pieces. And yet, judging from the ship’s nav log, the Chronic Lumbago had made the jump dozens of times.

  While I was trying to figure out how this was possible, I heard a sort of metallic skittering sound behind me. I spun around to find myself alone on the bridge.

  “Sir?” I said.

  There was no response.

  I walked down the corridor a few meters, then stopped to listen again. After a few seconds, I heard the metallic skittering again. It seemed to be coming from a corridor to my right. I made my way down the hall. Several overhead light panels had gone out here, so the corridor was mostly dark. The only panel still working flickered badly, giving the dank corridor a decidedly eerie feeling. I tiptoed hesitantly into the darkness.

  “Sir?” I said again. Still there was no response. “Ensign Boggs?”

  I walked several more paces. Ahead of me a few meters, the corridor turned sharply to the left. As I craned my neck to the right to try to see, something about the size of a greyhound darted around the corner, crashing into the wall to my right. It lunged at me. I turned and ran, but made it only a few steps before the thing landed on my back, knocking me to the floor. The thing rolled off me, landing on the floor in front of me. I looked up to see a vaguely humanoid face regarding me curiously. I screamed.

  “Bad friend!” I heard Boggs’s voice from behind me yell. “Why did you do that?”

  “Do what?” I asked, backing away from the thing slowly. It looked like a robot dog, but with a humanoid head. It was unsettling, to say the least.

  “Not you, Sasha,” Boggs said. “I was talking to my new friend. I made him from parts that I won.”

  “Parts that you…” I started, staring at the thing in shock and disgust. Its midsection was from a humanoid robot. In place of legs it had small robot arms with hands serving as feet. Its robot head was perched on an oddly angled and weirdly elongated neck which, I realized after a moment, was also an arm. Boggs had built a robot with arms for all the appendages. It was horrifying.

  While the thing continued to watch me, I got cautiously to my feet.

  “Holy Space!” Rex cried, from the direction of the bridge. “It’s Donny!”

  The thing turned its head toward Rex. “I am Donny?” it said.

  “Of course you’re Donny,” said Rex, approaching the abomination. “Who else would you be?”

  “I am Donny,” the thing said, apparently satisfied.

  “Why did you name it, sir?” I said. “It’s horrible. That thing should be destroyed.”

  The thing looked at me and frowned.

  “Don’t be jealous, Sasha,” Rex said. “Donny isn’t going to replace you, even if he does have four times as many arms as you.”

  “Five,” said Boggs proudly. “His neck is an arm.”

  “So it is!” Rex exclaimed. “That’s a game changer. Forget what I said earlier about not replacing you, Sasha.”

  “Very funny, sir.”

  Donny brushed up against Rex’s leg, and Rex patted him on the head. “Good boy, Donny,” Rex cooed. I noticed now that Rex was wearing a black patch over his left eye.

  “What happened to your eye, sir?” I asked.

  “I put a patch on it,” Rex said. “Pretty cool, huh? I found it while I was looking for a place to sulk.”

  “I see that, sir. I was asking why you were wearing it.”

  “I just said it was cool, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “This is really good work, Ensign Boggs,” Rex said, scratching the robot-thing’s head. “Do you think you could do anything for Sasha’s arm?”

  “Sure I could, Potential Friend,” said Boggs. “I’ve fixed up lots of pirates who lost limbs.”

  “Really?” I asked hopefully. “But we only have these tiny little robot arms.”

  “Oh, that’s okay,” said Boggs. “I’ve fixed up pirates with a lot less.”

  “You think you can make me a regular-sized arm with the parts you have?”

  “You bet, Sasha. No problem.”

  I regarded Donny again. I had to admit, horrifying though the creature was, it was impressive work. I wasn’t sure I could have done it even if I had both of my arms.

  “You’ll have to shut down before I can work on you,” said Boggs.

  I raised an eyebrow at him.

  “Just do it, you big chicken,” Rex said. “You’re not much use to me with one arm.”

  “I saved your life,” I said.

  “And then you nearly got us all killed.”

  “Not because I only have one arm.”

  “Maybe not. There’s no way to know for sure, though, is there?”

  I sighed. “Fine. Fix my arm. Let’s go find a place where you can work. And keep that thing away from me.” Donny and I regarded each other circumspectly as I passed him in the corridor.

  We found a relatively clean, well-lit room where Boggs could work on my arm. Boggs left, returning after a moment with a toolbox and an armful of spare parts.

  “You should shut down now,” Boggs said. “I don’t want to short anything out.”

  I regarded him skeptically.

  Rex, who was standing in the doorway, said, “I’ll be watching the whole time, Sasha. Everything will be fine. You do want a new arm, don’t you?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “Good,” said Rex. “Then shut down. I’ll monitor the whole process.”

  I nodd
ed. “All right,” I said, and shut down.

  An indeterminate amount of time later, I awakened to see Rex and Boggs grinning at me.

  “Good morning!” Rex cried.

  “Good morning,” I said. “Did you—WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO MY ARM?”

  “It’s a hook!” Boggs exclaimed. “Potential Friend said you would like it better than a regular arm.”

  I glared at Rex. “You said you were going to supervise!”

  “I did,” Rex replied. “Supervising means you have to make the hard choices. Boggs was just going to give you a lame regular arm. Now you have a hook, just like a real pirate!”

  “I don’t want to be a real pirate! I want my arm back!”

  “Look, if I have to wear this eye patch, you have to have a hook arm.”

  “You don’t have to wear the patch! You put it on because it looks cool!”

  “It does, doesn’t it?” Rex said with a grin. “Do you like it better on the left or the right? I can’t decide.”

  I groaned. “Sir, you’re voluntarily wearing an eye patch because you think it’s cool. I’ve been given a hook for an arm against my will. Do you honestly not see the difference?”

  Rex shrugged. “Not with this eye,” he said. “Let me try the other one.”

  I shook my head. I supposed I should be grateful that so far Rex’s pirate fetish had only cost me an arm. Maybe he would tire of the idea now.

  “So,” Rex said, “what sorts of swashbuckling derring-do adventures have you come up with, Sasha?”

  “I haven’t had a lot of time, sir,” I said. “In any case, perhaps you should consider that we aren’t cut out to be pirates.”

  “Nonsense, Sasha. We were born to be pirates.”

  “I wasn’t born at all, sir.”

  “No, but you have a hook for an arm, so it’s hard to take you seriously as an anti-piracy advocate. Now are you going to come up with some swashbuckling adventures or am I going to just have to ram a cruise ship?”

  “No, sir. I mean, yes, sir, I’ve come up with something.”

  “Aye,” said Rex.

  “Yes, sir. Aye, sir. I’ve come up with something, sir.”

  “Well?” Rex asked impatiently.

  “I’ve gone through the ship’s nav logs,” I said. “I thought it would be helpful to determine where the pirates have gone in the past.

  “Brilliant, Sasha! If we know where the pirates have gone, we could find the Flagrante Delicto!”

  “Aye, sir,” I said. “I suppose so.” The thought had occurred to me, but I’d suppressed it. I had a bad feeling I knew exactly where Rex’s search for the Flagrante Delicto would take us, and I’d vainly hoped I could entertain him with some sort of harmless pirate roleplaying until he tired of the idea and forgot all about the Flagrante Delicto. Clearly that wasn’t going to happen. “But I was thinking, sir,” I said, “What if we sold this ship and used the proceeds to engage in some sort of grift? You used to love grift.”

  “Those days are over, Sasha,” Rex said. “We’re pirates now. Now what did you find in the nav logs?”

  “Oh, lots of stuff,” I said. “The Chronic Lumbago has been all over the galaxy. The Ragulian Sector, the Perseus Arm, Dead Man’s Nebula, the Orion Hub, the—”

  “Hold on,” said Rex. “Did you say Dead Man’s Nebula? I didn’t know you could even go there.”

  “Nor did I, sir. Traveling there would be extremely dangerous and ill-advised. The nav log indicates the Chronic Lumbago has been there several times, but I suspect it may have been manipulated to hide their true destination.”

  “Captain Malgastar didn’t strike me as being that clever,” Rex said. “And these pirates must have a hideout, right? Isn’t that how pirates work?”

  “That’s the rumor, sir. Supposedly the pirates have a hidden lair to which they can retreat to evade the authorities. It would explain why the Malarchy has been unable to snuff them out.”

  “A secret pirate lair in the middle of Dead Man’s Nebula,” Rex said. “Fantastic. Sasha, rationalize a course there immediately.”

  “Have you been listening, sir? Making a hypergeometric jump into uncharted space is suicidal. We could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova. That would end our trip rather quickly.”

  “We wouldn’t be real pirates if we didn’t take a few risks,” Rex said.

  “What if we just stuck to stealing intellectual property?” I suggested. “Ripping off movies, that sort of thing?”

  “Stop stalling and make the jump, Sasha.”

  I spent another twenty minutes trying to talk Rex out of jumping into Dead Man’s Nebula, but it was no use. He was determined to get the Flagrante Delicto back, even if it took killing us all to do it. I even tried to recruit Boggs to talk some sense into him, which went about as well as you would suspect. Boggs broke down crying and ran back down to the cargo hold. Thankfully he took Donny with him.

  Finally I gave up. I rationalized a course for the coordinates specified in the log and made the jump.

  Chapter Nine

  Fortunately we didn’t die the instant we re-emerged in Euclidean space inside Dead Man’s Nebula. We did, however, find ourselves on a collision course with our own ship.

  The dirty little secret of hypergeometric travel is that there’s nothing preventing one vessel from re-emerging into Euclidean space directly on top of—or even inside—another vessel. Nothing except the sheer vastness of space and the laws of probability, anyway. Not to sound like a Sp’ossel here, but space is just so damned big that even if two ships travel to the exact same star system at exactly the same time, the odds of one of them hitting the other are astronomically low. In fact, even after millions of recorded jumps, no ship has ever jumped into space occupied by another vessel, and there have only been a handful of collisions.

  So it was rather surprising to find ourselves suddenly bearing down on a ship that looked very much like the Flagrante Delicto but which the onboard nav system insisted was the Chronic Lumbago. The ship appeared to be in orbit around a small, greenish-brown planet.

  “Pull up!” Rex shouted. “Pull up!”

  “I’m working on it, sir!” I replied, desperately trying to maneuver our awkward and underpowered ship to avoid a collision. We missed it by centimeters.

  “Whew, that was close,” said Rex, as we shot past the vessel. “Alright, come around and hail them.”

  “Aye, sir,” I said. I flipped the ship on its axis and fired the jets until we were slowly approaching the other vessel.

  “Wait,” Rex said, studying the display, “why does that say the Flagrante Delicto is the Chronic Lumbago?”

  “Rubric Malgastar must have escaped the Raina Huebner to the Flagrante Delicto and then changed the call signs again.”

  “The Chronic Lumbago, you mean.”

  “Right, he changed it to the Chronic Lumbago.”

  “No, you said he left the Raina Huebner for the Flagrante Delicto. But the Raina Huebner was the Chronic Lumbago at that point. We’re on the Raina Huebner.”

  “Aye, sir,” I said. “I was mistaken. The key point is that the erstwhile Flagrante Delicto is now the Chronic Lumbago. Whatever ship Rubric Malgastar is on seems to be the Chronic Lumbago.”

  “That bastard,” Rex said. “He has no right to sully the Flagrante Delicto with that name. Hail him and demand that he change the name back.”

  “Aye, sir,” I said. I fired our retrorockets as we neared the Chronic Lumbago, slowing our approach and matching its orbit over the moon. I picked up the mic and set it for standard hailing frequency. “Hello, crew of the Chronic Lumbago. This is Sasha. I’m the first mate of the… well, it’s kind of a funny story, actually…”

  “Give me that!” Rex snapped, grabbing the mic from my hand. “This is Rex Nihilo, rightful captain of the Flagrante Delicto. I’m speaking to the individuals who have illegally absconded with my ship. Get off it or we’ll blast you to atoms.” He took his finger off the button. “We can do
that, right?”

  “It’s possible, sir,” I said. “I’d just have to keep hitting buttons to find out.”

  But no response came from the other ship.

  Rex tried again, but still there was no answer.

  “Deploy the docking corridor,” Rex said. “We’re going to board them.”

  “Aye, sir,” I said. This seemed like a bad idea to me, but it was among the better of the bad ideas that Rex might suggest at the current moment, so I decided not to protest. I maneuvered the Raina Huebner into place and deployed the docking corridor. I waited until the corridor was pressurized and then opened the hatch.

  “All right, crew,” said Rex. “We’re boarding the Flagrante Delicto. Boggs, you go first.”

  “We’re boarding the Chronic Lumbago, sir,” I said.

  “Whatever,” Rex replied.

  “Me?” said Boggs. “I never leave the ship.”

  “Donny goes?” said Donny. I jumped as he spoke. I’d figured Donny was still lurking on one of the other decks.

  “You’re too valuable to send on a boarding mission, Donny,” Rex said. “You’re a marvel of modern science. Meanwhile, Boggs is incredibly large and presumably known to the pirates. They might think twice before blasting him.”

  I couldn’t argue with this logic, particularly since none of us was armed.

  Boggs nodded. “Stay here, Donny. I will go. Pirates are not friends, but they will probably not shoot me.” He strode into the corridor while the rest of us remained behind. When he reached the hatch, I shouted the combination to him. He punched it into the pad and tried to open the hatch. It wouldn’t budge.

  “There may be a slight pressure differential,” I said. “Try pulling harder.”

  Boggs grunted and tried again, planting both of his feet against the hull and pulling with all his might.

  “Um,” I said. “Maybe we shouldn’t—”

  But just then the hatch flew open, accompanied by a loud sucking sound. A blast of wind blew me into the corridor. Rex and Donny tumbled on top of me, and loose papers fluttered down the corridor like agitated birds. After a few seconds, the breeze died down as the pressure equalized. We got to our feet.