System Failure

by Joe Zieja

  Xan, her ever-faithful attendant, suddenly appeared next to her following the telltale sound of the Chariot platform approaching, which was reminiscent of high-pitched bubbles. His face, saggy both from the ritualistic face weights and his New Neptunian personality, had the tiniest hint of sadness in it. It was almost impossible to detect any sort of emotion from that weathered face, but she knew it was there. And she knew why.

  “Grand Marshal,” he said, his voice echoing inside his own cheeks, “it is time.”

  Alandra swallowed. She would not show weakness here on her bridge. Death was a part of war, part of their jobs. If she was so derailed by a single death, she had no right to stand up here and call herself the commander of the Colliders.

  “Fine,” she said softly, stepping onto the Chariot. Xan silently whisked them away into the Circus Tubes through which they could navigate to practically anywhere on the ship. Alandra tried very hard not to think of where they were going as the guts of the Limiter zoomed by. She noticed that the wedding cake she’d ordered made for her and Rogers still stood untouched in the refrigeration room. How long would it keep before it went bad?

  They zoomed silently through the ship, her heart beating a little faster than it should have, until they came to a quiet, nearly empty room down near the very bottom of the ship.

  It took all of her will to step off the Chariot, but eventually her feet were on the floor.

  “That will be all, Xan,” Alandra said.

  The only indication that Xan had heard her was the bubbling and puttering of the Chariot zooming away. The room they’d arrived at, cold and dispassionate like everyone was supposed to be during war, held only one thing: the man who had been her best friend and deputy.

  She touched her hand to the casket. Alandra knew there were other duties that desperately needed her attention—answering a lot of questions from the Council, for one—but she needed this moment more. Edris Zergan had been a friend. No, he’d been more than a friend. He’d been a comrade-in-arms, a loyal devotee, the right angle to her hypotenuse. There had been many years when Alandra had thought that they’d eventually be married, if they could ever disentangle themselves from their careers. An unlikely scenario, given both of their dispositions toward greatness and duty, but a possibility nonetheless.

  Looking down at the casket—a drab, black thing that looked more like a rejected children’s building block than a monument to death—Alandra took a deep breath. Had he really been a friend? All those years, he’d secretly been working for the Jupiterians. He’d secretly been a Jupiterian. How much of what they’d experienced together could she trust? Was it all just an elaborate ruse to follow her to the position of fleet commander, then usurp her authority for the advancement of the Jupiterian cause?

  But no. Edris had said he wanted to “recruit” her. He’d wanted to keep her with him. Perhaps he’d been pretending for a time, but they had truly been friends at the end, and he’d truly been regretful that they’d had to part ways.

  Then he somehow hung himself in zero gravity. For reasons she did not understand, this fact infuriated Rogers.

  “You idiot,” she said suddenly, her voice trembling.

  “I am sorry, Grand Marshal,” Xan said. “Have I done something wrong?”

  She jumped. “Xan!” she barked, whirling around. “I told you that would be all!”

  Xan bowed and zoomed off into the Circus Tubes. When had he come back?

  Alandra sighed. What was she going to do with that man? So faithful, but a little bit too much like an overprotective father than an assistant sometimes. And so absurdly sneaky, even when he didn’t want to be. She knew he was just concerned about her.

  Turning back to Edris’ casket, she felt like whatever she’d been about to say had been stupid and immature. First of all, he was clearly dead and could not hear her. Second of all, Alandra generally did not like airing her grievances out loud. Edris knew she was furious with him for betraying her, furious at him for dying, furious at him for their last interaction being a spinning back kick to the face. No matter how professional they’d been together, Edris Zergan could always turn her into a bratty little girl with a few choice words and his wolfish smile.

  And now this. The casket was closed, so she couldn’t see his face, but there was a clear label on the outside: 1EA. TRAITOROUS ENEMY COMMANDER/FIRST OFFICER OF THE LIMITER. She frowned. Yes, it was accurate, but they could have at least spelled out the word “each.” Maybe assigning mortuary affairs as an additional duty for the supply clerks had been a bad idea.

  Something stirred inside of Alandra as she looked blankly at the casket. Before hatching the plan to marry Captain Rogers, she’d been resigned to her fate of being put out to pasture after her . . . incident in the F Sequence. Edris had always pushed her to resist that feeling, to never let go of her ambition and always seek redemption. Perhaps he didn’t want that to involve marrying an enemy fleet commander, but they had been two paths to the same goal as far as she was concerned. He just hadn’t understood that.

  “I will do it,” Alandra said, breaking her rule about delivering a monologue to an empty room. But really it was just four words, not a long, detailed explanation of what they meant. Everyone in the mortuary who wasn’t dead—namely just her—knew exactly what she’d meant. It was time to throw off the ragged old cloak she’d been given by the Thelicosan Council, throw off the burdens of the jungle that had nearly turned her into a wild animal. There was a war to be fought.

  Unholstering her datapad, she inputted the codes that told the ship that she, as commander, was officially recording the death of Edris Zergan, dispatching messages to his next of kin, and authorizing the destruction of his remains. A small forklift of sorts emerged and took the casket away as she put her datapad back in its holster. Alandra couldn’t watch it go.

  Not because she was that emotionally disturbed, but because someone had just thrown a flash-bang grenade into the morgue.

  Instinctively, Keffoule found herself rolling across the floor and reaching for her sidearm, which she didn’t have. Instead, she managed to draw her datapad again, and when the haze cleared from her vision she found herself using her index finger to repeatedly send an email in the general direction of Secretary Vilia Quinn. The blond, sharp-featured bureaucrat was completely unaware that she was about to be obliterated by infinite “RE: RE: RE: FWD:” tags of a message subject line, since she was currently screaming with her hands over her eyes.

  “Gaaahhh!” Quinn said, which was very unlike her. Much as throwing a flash-bang grenade was also unlike her.

  Unfurling herself from her crouching return-fire position, Alandra stood up and holstered her deadly datapad. It wasn’t the first time she’d been flash-banged—it wasn’t even the first time she’d been flash-banged in a morgue—but it was definitely the first time she’d been flash-banged by a politician.

  “Quinn!” she shouted, but the secretary was now covering her ears, tears streaming down her eyes. Keffoule wiped her own tears away—a totally natural response that had nothing to do with emotions—and punched Quinn in the arm.

  “Quinn!” she repeated. The physical shock of being hit in the arm snapped Quinn out of her panic, and she opened her wet eyes to look at Alandra with a strange mix of shock, embarrassment, and terror.

  “Grand Marshal,” she screamed, much too loudly. Was there nobody on this ship who didn’t have some kind of trauma-induced hearing problem? “I came to speak with you.”

  “I gathered that,” Keffoule said, the ringing in her own ears just starting to fade away. “I’m not entirely sure why you felt the need to deploy a nonlethal explosive to do so.”

  “Ah, yes,” Quinn said, turning red. Alandra frowned. Quinn never turned red. Then again, she never threw flash-bangs, either. “That. I apologize for the inconvenience. I’ve only just become familiar with these, and I fear I pulled the pin accidentally. They are much more complicated than Molotov cocktails.”

  Keffoule could agr
ee with that, she supposed. She nodded, accepting the apology. Much had changed between the two of them since the attempted Jupiterian takeover of the Colliders. Despite her meek appearance and flawless track record of annoying Keffoule at every turn, there was no denying that Quinn had played a significant role in the recapture of the Limiter.

  “What is it that you need?” Alandra said. And why couldn’t it wait until I was on the bridge?

  Quinn hesitated for a moment.

  “I believe we might have gotten off on the wrong foot.”

  “Several months ago?” Alandra asked, her eyebrow raised.

  “Yes. I mean, obviously we’re not still on that same foot; we’ve moved on to other feet. There are other . . .” Quinn blinked rapidly and stopped talking. “I’m trying to say that I understand I have been a thorn in your side for quite some time.”

  “That’s putting it mildly,” Alandra said. She saw the woman scrunch her face up, and for some reason Alandra felt remorse for the barb. Maybe it was the death of a friend/traitor that was playing with her emotions. She took a slow breath.

  “I haven’t been the easiest to work with either,” Alandra said. “I deliberately kept you in the dark on things so I wouldn’t have to deal with your opinion.”

  “Intergalactic law isn’t exactly opinion,” Quinn spat back.

  Alandra shrugged. “That’s your opinion. Did you really come all the way here so we could mutually apologize for being irritating?”

  Quinn narrowed her eyes. “I am not irri—” She stopped herself. “Never mind. No. I came here to make a request.”

  Ah, Alandra thought. Of course she wants something. Rather than asking her, Alandra simply waited for Quinn to continue speaking. Despite considering herself a professional, Alandra couldn’t help but enjoy the next few moments of Quinn clearly trying to figure out the right way to make her “request.” Quinn had been bombastic at times, particularly when she thought someone wasn’t filling out forms properly, but she’d never been quite this . . . adolescently shy and bumbling.

  Finally Quinn broke the silence. “I want you to help me be more badass.”

  “What?” Alandra said.

  “I just mean that you’re always solving problems one way and I’m solving them in another way,” Quinn continued hurriedly. “Each of us has strengths, and now that we’re clearly both in agreement to put our differences aside, perhaps we could instead use those differences to enhance each other. Punching people in the face felt so amazing, it was like—”

  Quinn cut herself off and appeared to be slyly measuring her pulse by grabbing her own wrist. Her mouth moved in the shapes of numbers. One. Two. Three.

  “Are you sure you’re well?” Alandra asked. “Did you get a medical checkup after the battle?”

  “I’m fine,” Quinn said. “In fact, I believe I am better than I have ever been. But whatever intuition carried me through the attempted takeover, it seems to have vanished. I keep trying to learn a bit more about the military part of civ-mil relations, but I’m not very good at it. I just flash-banged both of us, for Newton’s sake, and yesterday I crashed a flight simulator.”

  “Everyone crashes flight simulators,” Alandra said. “That’s what they’re for.”

  “No,” Quinn said. “Somehow I dislodged the main compartment from the simulator and physically crashed it into another simulator. I never even got to the part where you turn the system on.”

  “I see,” Alandra said. “And you don’t think that this sort of training might be in direct violation of your status as a noncombatant?”

  Quinn’s face distorted, and she looked away. Alandra had hit her right in the bureaucracy.

  “It’s not for practical use,” Quinn said. “Understanding your way of life helps me be a good liaison. Like studying the culture of a place in which you are a foreign diplomat.”

  “Right,” Alandra said. She sighed and folded her arms. She really didn’t have the time or the patience to take a “Council dog,” as Zergan had called her, and turn her into a wolf, especially for no good reason. But what harm could there be in entertaining the idea for a few minutes longer? Her shuttle to the Flagship wouldn’t depart for some time.

  She might have gotten a wave of goose bumps thinking about meeting with Rogers. She hoped the huge marine wasn’t with him. Alandra would hate to have to kill her.

  “And you’re asking me this in the morgue because you’d like to start your lessons by seeing how to hide bodies more efficiently?” Alandra offered. She gestured grandly at the small, thankfully underused room.

  Quinn recoiled as though someone had put a snake in her coffee—something Keffoule could also show her if she liked. “What? Do you do that? No!” She cleared her throat, composing herself. “I’m asking you here because I knew you’d be alone. It’s not something I want the entire bridge to know, exactly. Or my superiors. They might not think it’s in my job description, and then I’d have to petition the Council for a rewrite of the job description manual and there would be so many signatures required—”

  “Yes, I see,” Alandra said. “Unfortunately, I fail to see how this benefits me in any way. My time is valuable, Secretary Quinn, and unless you haven’t noticed, there’s a galactic war going on right now. I’ve been asked to accompany Captain Rogers as a Thelicosan ambassador to Meridan central command.”

  “That’s exactly how this benefits you,” Quinn said. “You’ll need ambassadorial skills. Communication, negotiation, mastery of subtlety and nuance. The things that make me good at my job are the things you lack.”

  Alandra bristled. “I do not lack these skills.”

  “You attempted to make a Meridan man marry you by kicking him in the face and taking him captive aboard your ship.”

  “The golden ratio is—”

  “Not at all relevant in issues of intersystem diplomacy, Grand Marshal,” Quinn said. “Something like that would never hold up in the courts, even in the Thelicosan courts. You are very competent in many areas, but this is one where you could use some help. If the Council ever found out about what you did . . .”

  Tension blossomed in Alandra’s chest. Of course the Council was going to find out what she’d done. Quinn was likely sending weekly reports to her superiors, and diving across an intersystem boundary while mistakenly transmitting “We’re invading” was not likely a detail she would leave out.

  “You . . . ,” Alandra began.

  “I will not be submitting any reports with those details in them,” Quinn said. “That’s the other thing I wanted to talk to you about. While I believe your actions to be very misguided, perhaps even disturbing, they did short-circuit a Jupiterian plan to take over the Colliders. While my duties require me to relay such information to the Council, I will be . . . losing some of my paperwork. I’ve already canceled a report that was slated to send after communications were reestablished.”

  Considering this for a moment, Alandra wondered if perhaps she’d misjudged Secretary Quinn. She’d always seemed like an annoying puppy to her, with her impeccable and omnipresent hair bun standing as a testament to just how anal retentive a person could be. But this was clever, even devious. Suddenly Alandra’s eyes went wide as she realized what was going on.

  “Blackmail?” Alandra said. “Are you blackmailing me into teaching you how to be worse ass than you are now?”

  “ ‘More badass,’ I think the phrase is. You can’t make it a comparative,” Quinn said. “And the fact that it took you that long to figure out that I might be blackmailing you is exactly why you need my skills.”

  Alandra was about to teach Madam Secretary about the link between blackmail and black eyes. Quinn must have noticed the subtle shift of Alandra’s right foot—the foot she used for spinning back kicks—because she interjected once more.

  “But no, I am not blackmailing you. I am doing you a favor as a gesture of goodwill.” She shrugged. “I wanted to reset things between us and then let the rest work itself out.”

&nbs
p; Goodwill certainly wasn’t something Alandra was used to spreading. She could spread chaos, violence, confusion, even a little bit of stomach flu if she had the proper authorizations and the target had poor hand-washing hygiene. But goodwill? She wasn’t even totally sure she knew what that meant.

  “Fine,” Alandra said. “I’m not sure I care about goodwill, but I will teach you some basic military techniques if you do not embarrass me in front of the Council. At least not until Rogers and I are officially married.”

  Quinn looked like she was about to say something, but she very wisely kept her mouth shut.

  “And you can help me become a better negotiator,” Alandra concluded with a nod.

  “I think that’s fair,” Quinn said. She rocked on her heels a little bit, her hands balled into fists at her side, clearly excited like a little girl outside a planetarium. Her face, however, remained still.

  Pulling out her datapad, Alandra called Xan.

  “Xan,” she said, “how long do we have until my shuttle is ready?”

  “Twenty minutes,” Xan said from about six feet away. The Chariot was parked next to him.

  Alandra jumped—Quinn actually squeaked—and pointed an accusatory finger at the face-weighted New Neptunian immigrant.

  “By Kepler’s rotating balls!” she yelled. “How long have you been there?”

  “Since you called me,” Xan said.

  Alandra looked at him, then looked at her datapad, then back at him. Xan seemed to be making less sense every day since the incident with the Meridan fleet had reached its apex.

  “Alright then,” Alandra said, calming herself. She turned to Quinn. “We have time for a little work now. Let’s start with face punching.”

  • • •