by Joe Zieja
“That’s a very rude request,” Xan said. “I’ll thank you not to treat my—”
Keffoule silenced him with a wave of her hand. “That is enough, Xan. I can defend myself, thank you.”
Despite the declaration, Keffoule made no move to defend herself in any way. She simply looked at Suresh, both eyebrows raised, and waited for him to answer Rogers’ question.
Rogers knew that look. He hated that look. It was the look that said that Keffoule already knew she’d won. Suresh looked down at his datapad, tapped the screen a couple of times, and made a few contemplative noises.
“Hm,” he said. “Well, it looks to me like all the personnel have already been assigned to their rooms. Premiere Thrumeaux is already set up with her assistant on the entertainment deck—she said she wanted to be near the drama, or something?—and General Krell has already claimed the extra room on the command deck . . .”
He tapped the pad a few more times, frowning.
“I’m sorry,” Keffoule interjected. “Did you say General Krell will be on this deck?”
Suresh nodded, distracted. “Yes, ma’am.”
Keffoule swallowed. “I see.”
Rogers thought he would search the galaxy far and wide for the rest of his life and never find anyone that made Alandra Keffoule nervous, but there was a tone in her voice that Rogers could only ascribe to discomfort. He watched her face intently for a moment, but she gave nothing else away.
Suresh shrugged and let the datapad fall to his side. “I thought I saw the grand marshal move her things into a room already. That’s the one, sir. The only one I have left.”
Keffoule’s brief flash of uncertainty faded into one of mirth. Rogers scowled. Someday, that woman would get very much the opposite of what she wanted, and Rogers hoped he would be there to see it.
Well, Rogers had been there to see it when she had nearly lost her entire fleet to a backstabbing friend who had betrayed her and nearly killed her. So there was that.
“I guess I’ll see you later, then, Captain Rogers,” Keffoule said, grinning. “Often.” She walked away, Xan in tow.
Rogers watched her go, feeling like his insides were going to crawl out any orifice they could find. The thought of possibly spending the rest of his life with that woman fifty feet away from him made him nauseous. All the more reason to make sure they won this fight. Then he’d at least have more life left to live that didn’t involve her as a bunkmate.
“Oh, that’s just great,” the Viking said, again looking at Rogers instead of anyone else who was actually causing the problem. “Now you and your Thelly girlfriend can hang out all the time and talk about battle tactics, and all that.”
“Not the tactics again,” Rogers said. “This isn’t my fault, you know. You’re standing right here. You can clearly see my every effort to put as much distance between me and this woman as possible, right?”
“You invited her on the ship,” the Viking said. Was she pouting?
“I was ordered to!” Rogers said. “Just like I was ordered to take over the droid combat squadron and ordered to try and escape from the ship.”
The Viking gave him a level look.
“Okay, so I wasn’t ordered to try and escape from the ship that one time. But you have to understand that everything is so wildly out of my control over here that I’m having trouble figuring out when I am allowed to go to the bathroom anymore.”
As he spoke, he felt an uncontrollable rage build up inside him. It had been so long since he felt like anything was within his control, since he could make his own damn decisions. All of this was so simultaneously depressing, terrifying, and extremely inconvenient that he thought he might explode. Starting a rant in the middle of the command deck wouldn’t be a very good idea, but he wasn’t sure he could hold it all in much longer.
“Yeah,” the Viking said, obviously going to continue, but Rogers had had enough of all of this.
“Stop,” Rogers said, holding up a hand. The Viking stared at his hand, her mouth open, not sure what to do. Rogers wasn’t sure what to do either. He just felt very strongly like he needed to extricate himself from this situation as soon as possible.
“I can’t,” he continued. “I can’t do this right now. If you can’t accept the fact that Keffoule is not your rival in any way except maybe in a face-kicking contest, then I don’t know what else I can do to fix it. Don’t you have a missing marine to take care of? Isn’t that why you came over here in the first place?”
Jeez. Rogers’ chest rose and fell with the effort of heavy breathing, and sweat rolled down his back. He was really worked up. In a weird way, he also felt like he might break out crying. Not like a couple of tears, but huge, wracking, childlike sobs. He desperately wanted to run away and slam a door and yell at someone for “just not getting him.”
The Viking, obviously not accustomed to being interrupted and dismissed like that, stared at Rogers for what seemed like an eternity. People all over the command deck flowed around her. Rogers wanted to reach out and hug her, or something, but he just stood there, waiting for her to go away. He couldn’t concentrate when she was around, and right now he needed to concentrate on not getting everyone in the galaxy killed.
“Yeah,” the Viking said. “Yeah. Okay, Rogers. Yeah.”
Without another word, the Viking turned around and walked away, her shoulders maybe a little slumped. Rogers took a moment to admire the view—he wasn’t that busy—and contemplate things a bit. The Viking wouldn’t be able to sleep until she found Mailn; of that he was certain. But Rogers was pretty sure she wasn’t going to find her. Because Rogers was pretty sure she’d run away to join the pirates.
Suresh, who’d been quiet for a while, cleared his throat.
“I’m sorry, sir, but I’ve just been standing here not doing any work while you’ve continued this conversation. Will you be needing anything else from me at the moment, or can I get back to it?”
“That will be all, Suresh, thanks. Nice work getting all this squared away.”
“I feel like geometric shapes have very little to do with this,” Deet said. He looked around. “This place seems to be a bit more octagonal than anything else. Do you need to have your vision checked?”
Suresh paused a moment, looking at Deet. It had been a long time since Rogers had had anything to do with Supply, and it might have been the first time that Suresh had seen Deet since the incident with the murderous droids.
“You look familiar,” he said, his expression flat. “Like the kind of droid that once froze me in cryo-wrap and nearly killed me.” He punched a couple of buttons on this datapad. “Shouldn’t you have an inventory number? I’m not sure I’ve seen you on the ship’s manifest.”
“I’m not a piece of inventory,” Deet said.
“Yes, you are,” Suresh said.
“Yes, you definitely are,” Rogers said. “Let’s leave this alone for right now, okay, Suresh? Deet here is my deputy and personal assistant.”
“And also really great,” Deet said.
“He’s alright,” Rogers conceded.
Suresh didn’t look convinced. As the supply chief, the idea of having something unaccounted for was probably anathema to him.
“Yes, sir.” He made a move to salute, but then didn’t. “Well, let me know if you need anything else.”
“Yeah, sure,” Rogers said.
As Suresh walked away, leaving Rogers with no other human companionship on the command deck, Rogers couldn’t shake the feeling that something was very out of place. Maybe it was all the strangers on his ship or the threat of imminent destruction. Those were the obvious causes, but some instinct told Rogers there was more to what he was feeling. His thought pattern edged dangerously close to an examination of his inner thoughts, and his instinct told him to run away from introspection like he usually did. Maybe, though, just this once, he could mull on it for just a second.
“Deet,” he said, “you ever feel like you did the right thing, but then also feel
like you did the wrong thing?”
“Oh, now I have feelings?” Deet said. “Go [SELF-FORNICATE].”
And that was why Rogers never examined his feelings.
“Come on,” Rogers said, starting to walk. “I need to get back to my stateroom. I want to scream into a pillow for a few minutes before I get everyone in the war room for an initial briefing. My stomach also feels a little—”
The keypad on his door dinged loudly, and a familiar voice spoke.
“Congratulations on assembling a joint force of the Fortuna Stultus galaxy’s systems! You are entitled to one free joint-stabilizer exercise ball, available at any of the many Snaggardir’s Sundries locations across the galaxy. Remember, whatever you need, you can Snag It at Snaggardir’s™!”
“Wait just a goddamned minute,” Rogers said.
“Very strange,” Deet said. “That’s not the same meaning of the word ‘joint’ at all.”
“I don’t think that’s the strange part,” Rogers said.
That was the second time that a Snaggardir’s courtesy announcement had mentioned something that had not only just happened, but was supposed to be secret. Was it possible that all the Snaggardir’s devices that had gone rogue also had transmitters that were funneling information back to the Jupiterians? That seemed like a large oversight for people not to check them, if so.
It meant one of two things. Either Snaggardir’s equipment was self-teaching, and Deet really had a lot to learn, or somebody close to them was a spy.
“It’s McSchmidt!” Deet yelled. “He’s back from the dead!”
“Oh, shut up,” Rogers said.
Lessons Not Quite Learned
Deet had repeatedly been told something about “learning his lesson” during the many lectures he’d received during and after his encounter with the security team on Merida Prime. Given that, to his knowledge, he wasn’t in any sort of formal schooling, the expression confused him. And, despite all of the admonitions, he’d hardly uncovered anything useful from any of the machines he’d plugged into. Maybe some correlations between certain organizations and Jupiter, like the company that made the SEWR rats. But who cared about that? Or the fact that the last batch of standard edible wartime rations that had come onto the Flagship from a Snaggardir shadow company’s production facility had been intentionally contaminated with norovirus. But certainly nothing he’d been interested in when it came to the conception of artificial intelligence, the enigmatic Dr. Mattic, and Deet’s origins.
“You son of a bitch!” Rogers yelled from inside his stateroom’s bathroom. “You—hurk!—son of a—hurk!—motherless whore!”
No, Deet hadn’t discovered any useful information at all. Worse, Rogers didn’t seem to be at all concerned about it. In fact, he’d seemed downright incensed when Deet had finally relayed the information about the contaminated food to him. Of all the things Deet had expected, anger hadn’t been one of them. Perhaps he’d been slightly late with the delivery, though.
Another understatement! Deet thought triumphantly. He was getting quite good at those.
Of course, while Rogers was occupied in the bathroom, Deet had his dongle firmly inserted into Rogers’ personal console, trawling the network for any data he could find. In some ways, this had become a habit of his. Any time he found a terminal, he felt compelled to connect to it. Did that qualify as an addiction? Were these really “impulses,” or were they just logic and decision trees that led to plugging in and extracting data? These were the very mysteries he was trying to solve by his research, of course, which seemed to place him in an infinite loop. His dongle always presented him with twice as many questions as answers every time he stuck it someplace it didn’t belong.
More retching noises came from the bathroom, accompanied by swearing and, Deet thought, glass breaking. Deet would have called it distracting if he was convinced he could be distracted. In this case, he merely turned down his auditory sensors, ignoring Rogers entirely. As he did so, he realized that perhaps this was an option he could utilize much more often, in many more scenarios.
This foray into the network wasn’t any more useful than the others, at first. The problem with having an interconnected galaxy with more devices than people was that the amount of data processed was overwhelming.
He had been able to begin to categorize the data streams into schema and at least glean some generalities. In this case, mostly what he saw was rising panic. The Galaxy Eater video had been broadcast throughout Fortuna Stultus, and the resulting pandemonium was nothing short of apocalyptic. Of course, it was literally apocalyptic, so Deet supposed that it was warranted. What did Deet think about his own preservation? Could he die, or would his data just be loaded into a new model and he could carry on as normal? If he couldn’t die, did that mean he wasn’t really alive?
More questions than answers, again. While interesting, these questions mostly got in the way of what he was trying to do at the moment. He put them into a special memory bank he’d been accumulating, titled Examinations of the Definitions and Purposes of Life, and continued searching.
Panic, chaos, mayhem, Deet thought. Blah, blah, blah.
“Blah, blah, blah” was a phrase he’d recently picked up from Rogers that was so brilliantly convenient he couldn’t help but use it at every available opportunity. From his understanding, he was pretty sure it meant “I will ignore swaths of important details in an effort to radically oversimplify a situation and allow me to process it without going insane.”
Jupiterian sympathizers were rising up in all of the systems, some incidents of which were alerting the public to exactly how deep the Jupiterian revolution went. People had hidden their identities and affiliations for hundreds of years, waiting for the right moment to strike, all organized by Snaggardir’s. In truth, it was an impressive testament to the patience of a species that didn’t tend to live very long in the grand scheme of things. Deet wondered if any other such sympathizers were in the newly christened Joint Force. Probability theory indicated that it was a near certainty, but there were no real methods to discern who was who unless they came out and said it.
All of this information about the war and its potential outcomes, but nothing new in the network that had anything to do with Deet and his origins.
Deet was about to unplug and go make fun of Rogers for sounding like a little girl when he threw up when something drew his attention. It was a ship’s report, somewhere at the very edge of Meridan space, but it wasn’t from a Meridan ship. One of the groups designated to help escort the pirates into battle positions had sent out a distress signal that looked very strange. Not that there was anything strange about distress signals—Deet had seen logs of hundreds of them just in this foray into the network alone—but this one didn’t seem to be quite finished. Not only that, but the distress message, though sent, didn’t seem to ever have been received by anyone in the sector.
Diving deeper into the message and its path, Deet saw that, although relays were in every sector of known space for this express purpose, the relay closest to where the distress message had occurred hadn’t passed on the message to any other system. To utilize a metaphor—which Deet was quite proud of himself for—it was as though someone had given a relay station a paper note, and instead of passing it on to the next relay it had simply put it in its pocket and gone about its business as though nothing had happened. Not only that, but there were several layers of encryption.
This puzzled Deet. If there had been encryption, why had he been able to see the message so clearly, so quickly? He didn’t have to hack into it at all. The message just opened itself to him, laying bare not only the contents of the message, but the rerouting information that had caused it to stop at the first relay station.
Then it hit him.
Well, it didn’t physically hit him. It was just data, of course. But the expression of physical impact seemed to apply here.
The cyphers used to encrypt the message were already in his core memory banks; the messa
ge had been encrypted by other droids.
A whole host of facts became instantaneously clear to him as he processed the real contents of the message in under a nanosecond. The message was cut short because the ship had been taken over prior to the captain being able to input all of the information. He’d sent it prematurely, likely in the hope of getting at least some of the information out, but it had been intercepted and quarantined by droids. The ship that had quarantined the message was, as he’d suspected, the Rancor, also known as the Beta Test to the droids who had commandeered it.
That meant that there were more droids out there, possibly more Froids as well. They had become savvy enough to not only keep the Rancor from being discovered, but had also likely taken over other ships. The brief message from the captain of the Curtain Call—the ship from which the quarantined message had originated—said that they’d been boarded, not fired upon. Were the droids attempting to build a fleet of their own? Should Deet relay this information to Rogers?
The knowledge that the Rancor was still out there, and still populated by active droids, was clearly important to both Deet and Rogers. Yet some instinct told Deet to keep the information hidden for now.
What was an “instinct”?
“If I ever find that ship,” Rogers said, “I am going to utilize every gun in the fleet to blow it to the smallest possible particles of space dust.”
Deet’s expression of surprise wasn’t exactly fine-tuned yet. His processors merely interpreted things he didn’t expect as new information with high priority. Yet it seemed like this required some sort of reaction, so Deet slowly raised both arms over his head and waggled them from side to side.
“Um,” Rogers said. “Are you alright?”
Deet considered that this perhaps was not the correct “surprised” response, but chose not to explain his actions any further. Rogers’ voice, now in close proximity, could be detected by Deet’s lowered auditory-detection systems, but Deet had not heard him approach. Slowly, stealthily, Deet retracted his dongle.
