System Failure

by Joe Zieja

  “Aye-aye, sir!”

  Rogers sat on the edge of his chair, squeezing all the stuffing out of the armrests and using his top teeth to file down his bottom teeth.

  Duty was such a pain in the ass.

  * * *

  I. Obscenities

  II. He would not.

  III. He would not.

  IV. He would not.

  Unlikely Functions

  Obviously, the Jupiterians had not read Sun Tzu Jr.’s The Art of War II: Now In Space. Rogers assumed this because, instead of just doing predictable, old-hat tactics that were rip-offs of the pages in the book, the Jupiterians came at them with a wild, almost reckless combat style. Since their ships were stolen from the fleets of all four systems, and also combined with some proprietary Snaggardir’s ships, they couldn’t utilize the same kinds of synergy that, say, the Thelicosan fleet could. Instead, they appeared to be completely insane.

  Rogers wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do with that. Neither was Rholos, and neither was Zaz. Both of them, who had produced new laminated sheets with nothing on them, looked between Rogers and the sheets with equal measures of confusion and helplessness. To try to help stop the stove-piping of orders coming from the top, Rogers delegated tactics all the way down to the squadron level. His grand, strategic guidance for them was to “try really, really hard to win the battle,” and they seemed okay with that for the time being.

  The pirate fleet helped, but not as much as Rogers had hoped. With Mailn essentially staging a mutiny on her wife’s ship, she was now in charge of a sizable portion of the pirates. She explained, through several broken communications, that she had no idea how to pilot a ship, never mind lead an attack using a fleet of them.

  So far they’d heard nothing from the Jupiterian fleet. Not even any good-spirited taunting, which Rogers had kind of expected given the dramatics associated with the revelation of the Galaxy Eater. They just seemed hell-bent on the destruction of Rogers’ fleet.

  “Given my detailed observation of this situation,” Deet said, “I believe there are several colloquialisms that might apply to the overall level of satisfaction we are experiencing. The strangest part, though, is that they all seem to have to do with fecal matter.”

  Rogers looked at him, barely able to see anything through the sweat droplets that kept falling into his eyes. “You know, maybe this isn’t the time—”

  “Such as, ‘This is a bunch of [BOVINE EXCREMENT].’ ”

  “That, uh, would work, yes, but—”

  “[EXCREMENT] storm.”

  “Yep.”

  “[EXCREMENT] show.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “[EXCREMENT] sandwich? Now that just seems unsanitary.”

  “We have a lot of uses for that word. Can we focus a little bit here? Can’t you do something useful over there with your dongle, or whatever? Hack into the Jupiterian ships and make them shoot each other?”

  “I can’t just go around using my dongle for whatever you want, Rogers,” Deet said.

  “What about the Viking? Have you heard from her yet?” Rogers chewed on his lip. He needed to talk to the Astromologer, yes, but he also needed her to start prepping her crews in the event they were boarded or needed to board anyone else. It wouldn’t matter how long he talked to that charlatan if they were all dead by the time she found him.

  “I haven’t heard from her, no,” Deet said.

  Rogers growled to himself. Before he knew what he was doing, he’d snatched up his datapad and was calling her. It was so automatic that when she picked up, he was shocked into a stunned silence for a moment.

  “Rogers, if you’re just calling me to breathe heavy again, I swear to god—”

  “No, no,” Rogers said, finally getting ahold of himself. “I told you: that wasn’t me.”I

  “What do you want? Feeling like sending me to typing school now, or some shit?”

  Rogers sighed. This really wasn’t the time for this, either.

  “Stop looking for that Thelicosan moron and get your crews ready. It’s not looking that great out there, and there’s a chance this might come to rifle butts in faces.”

  The Viking laughed at him through the comms.

  “I’ve made some mistakes,” Rogers said. “But we don’t have time to go through all of that right now, okay?”

  “Are you sure?” the Viking spat back at him. “Because I’m pretty sure everything in that metal head of yours is so ass backward that—”

  “Captain Alsinbury,” Rogers barked, much louder than he thought himself capable of when talking to the woman of his dreams. “I need my marines, and you are the best of them. Go get them ready to fight.”

  The comms went silent for a moment. Rogers felt his own words hang in the air like a noose.

  “Aye-aye,” the Viking said, and the line cut out.

  Letting out a deep breath, Rogers tried to keep his heart from pounding out of his chest. What was more terrifying: love or war? Because right now he was doing both at the same time.

  Rogers turned for a status update from Rholos and Zaz. Both of them were talking furiously into their headsets, taking breaks to squeeze water into their mouths from those green bottles they had taken to carrying in holsters at their sides. Zaz indicated that he was in the middle of something interesting and turned away from Rogers for a moment to examine the displays. Rholos followed him, and the two of them began gesticulating with a definite amount of enthusiasm at one particular blue blip.

  “Captain,” Commander Zaz said, walking over to the command platform, “one of our Ravagers is acting a little strange.”

  “What’s going on?” Rogers said.

  “We’re not sure yet,” Zaz said. “He’s flying erratically and there are some strange comms coming in. There’s a chance he could be hypoxic.”

  That’s just what they needed. If there was a fault in the oxygen supply for one of the fighters, there was a chance that it was in many of the fighters and they hadn’t noticed yet.

  “Starman Brelle,” Rogers called out. “Get in touch with Master Sergeant Hart in Engineering and have him talk to the maintainers. Check the oxygen tanks and make sure we’re not looking at any contaminated supplies.”

  “Yes, sir,” Brelle called back.

  Rogers turned back to Zaz. “Who is it? Can we recall them?”

  Before Zaz could answer, a familiar voice came over the comms.

  “Wooo! Can’t recall the Chillster, Skip!” said Flash. “I’m always at full burn.”

  “That’s not bad oxygen,” Rogers said. “It’s a bad pilot. I thought I left explicit instructions not to let Flash near the cockpit anymore? Who is in charge of flight operations?”

  “He is, sir,” Zaz said.

  “Oh. Right. The other guy flew into an asteroid. We need to change that.” But maybe the middle of a space battle wasn’t the right time to make personnel changes. As long as Flash wasn’t out there losing the war for him, it was a risk he was going to have to take so he could focus on other things. “Anything else I should know?”

  “Yes,” Rholos said, her face white. “We’re losing.”

  Rogers didn’t need them to tell him that. He was a complete failure as a commander, but he wasn’t a complete failure as a human being. The blue dots were quickly being overrun by the red dots on the big display, and a brightly lit scoreboard at the bottom read “Jupiterians: 50, Good Guys: 10.” What the numbers actually meant, he had no idea, but unless they were playing golf (and they weren’t), it was a bad sign.

  “Do we have any options at all here?” Rogers asked.

  Rholos looked at her laminated sheet. “We could, um . . . win first and then go to war . . . in space.”

  “Stop that!” Rogers said. He ran his hands down his face, grabbing hold of the hairs on his beard and pulling as hard as he could. His pulse was going a million miles a minute, his sweat glands were producing a veritable ocean, and every part of him felt like it was shaking. Even his shakes had shakes. Wha
t kind of a commander was this terrified?

  Probably one who knew he was about to lose.

  “Captain!” a defensive-systems technician yelled, standing up. “One of the Jupiterian fighter screens has broken off from the main group and is heading in our direction. It’s being accompanied by what we think are two heavy Freezee™ class gunships.”

  “I’m sorry—what class?”

  “It’s a proprietary Snaggardir’s ship, sir.” She looked a little embarrassed. “We just kind of started naming them.”

  “Right. Let me know when we start getting targeted by Beef-E-Stix torpedo runners.”

  “Sir!” someone shouted. “We have three Beef-E-Stix class torpedo runners approaching us at high speed.

  “Now that’s just absurd!” Rogers said, now out of his seat, gripping the rail in front of him so hard he thought he might break a couple of his own fingers.

  “They’ve broken through our fighter screen and are targeting our ship’s critical systems. If the Freezee and the Beef-E-Stix don’t get scattered, they could break through the shield.”

  “And then?” Rogers said.

  “And then they destroy our critical systems.”

  “And then?!” Rogers said, his voice getting higher.

  Of course he knew what was going to happen. He just had absolutely no idea how to stop it from happening, and he thought that maybe continually asking questions would give him time to think. In this case, however, he felt like maybe time to think was exactly what he did not need, as it was merely causing his sympathetic nervous system to begin to implode.

  “Skip,” Zaz said, swallowing. “There are some other ships trailing the attack formation headed for the Flagship. It looks like a boarding crew.”

  “Goddamn it,” Rogers said. In a way, that was a relief; it meant that, unlike the pirates, the Jupiterians didn’t want him and his crew dead. But why? They certainly didn’t seem to have any issues with blowing up everything else his fleet had to offer. Maybe they thought that by capturing, rather than killing, the command crew, they could force a surrender. If the Flagship was destroyed, everyone in the fleet would fight to the last man to avenge him. At least that’s what he thought would happen.

  If that was the case, it meant that he had some other options. He punched keys on his console.

  “Captain Alsinbury, I hope you got everyone ready. We might have company.”

  • • •

  “I just did it!” Quinn yelled over the radio. “I just disemboweled a man with—”

  “It’s best we leave these sorts of details out when we’re broadcasting on open channels,” Alandra said. She had taught the woman quite a bit before she’d left the Limiter, but she’d left Quinn with some instructions and a few training videos to get better. It seemed the secretary had devoured the training with a voracious appetite. The only thing Alandra had seen her more enthusiastic about during their time on the Limiter together had been filing paperwork.

  The war room had been reconfigured in what Alandra considered to be an ingenious way. Divided into four parts, it was possible for each of the system commanders to manage their own portions of the fleet while maintaining direct contact with Rogers on the bridge. It was similar to the way they had operated when Alandra had been trying to control her fleet in the battle against Zergan, but the room smelled much better this time.

  “It was so . . . so . . . so . . . awesome,” Quinn said.

  In a strange way, she and Quinn had become pen pals since Alandra’s departure. They’d sent each other messages, and in exchange for Quinn’s information on relationship building, and how the Limiter was performing under the new leadership of Chinnaker, Alandra had offered to critique self-taped videos of Quinn’s attempts at learning how to fight. They’d admittedly gotten better over a short period of time—a testament to the secretary’s attention to detail—but Alandra had never expected Quinn to be reporting these sorts of details to her so soon.

  And certainly not from the belly of an enemy ship that she’d led a boarding team onto. That just seemed reckless. Admirable, but reckless.

  “Awesome is not typically how we describe warfare, Quinn. For all that I’ve taught you in physical violence, I apparently have left out the lesson on tact.”

  “Yes, alright, fine,” Quinn said. “Now why don’t you apply a bit of my lessons?”

  “What do you mean?” Alandra said.

  “Remember when I told you that if you felt like you weren’t getting anywhere in a negotiation with one party, you should move on to another?”

  Alandra frowned. She noticed Krell looking at her over his terminal, grinning like he always did. “Yes, but I don’t see what that has to do with me.”

  Quinn sighed, which, over the comms sounded like a weird burst of static. Her mouth was too close to the microphone. Why was she spending time talking to Alandra, anyway, if she was in the middle of a firefight? The sounds of disruptor blasts and men and women screaming could be heard in the background.

  “Of course you don’t,” Quinn said. “Anyway, I’ve got some skulls to crack over here, so I’m going to let you go. Remember what I said, Lanni.”

  The line cut out. Lanni? Why in the world would Quinn call her Lanni? That wasn’t even a shortened version of her name. The woman had gone completely blood-lust crazy.

  There was, however, no time to think about this now. Someone was screaming at them.

  “Boarding!” Rogers yelled over the comms to her station. “Boardilyboard! Being boarded! Boards are coming, boards that are coming out to our ship to board us! Defend your positions! Position your defenses! What? No, get that rifle away from me, I can’t shoo—”

  The communication stopped, but Alandra was already out of her seat, Xan at her side with the alacrity of someone who really didn’t seem to move very fast at all. He began to say something, reaching for a case he’d brought with them from the Limiter, but was almost immediately shouldered aside by General Krell. The New Neptunian general showed no signs that there was about to be a firefight on board.

  “You know,” General Krell said, handing her a disruptor rifle. “This could be the end for us. In the fleeting moments of life, it’s important that we—”

  “Oh, for the love of spinning quarks, shut up!” Xan yelled.

  The war room stopped. Krell looked as though he was about to burst at the seams with anger. Thrumeaux and her attendant, who was just beginning to gather the folds of the woman’s long cape, stopped what they were doing and stared, open mouthed, at the unassuming, face-weight-wearing man who had never raised his voice in his life. Alandra would have dressed him down, but she was too shocked to move. Xan was also apparently not finished with his tirade.

  “You came into this council and all you’ve done is smile and grin and be pompous. You don’t even know the grand marshal! You haven’t sat by her side for years. You haven’t seen the strength of this woman, seen her power and majesty. You’re just a primped-up caricature of a general. You are not deserving of the grand marshal, and your smarmy attempts to sway her romantic feelings are completely and totally full of shit!”

  Face weights swayed violently from side to side, detaching one of the bottom pieces and sending it flying across the room. It slammed into a terminal screen, rendering it instantly useless, and left Xan tilting his head to one side. It created the impression that Alandra’s assistant had just become a sort of zombie.

  “Now look here,” Krell began. “I find your tone unacceptable.”

  “I find your face unacceptable,” Xan spat back, which struck Alandra as a little immature, but things were getting out of hand. “And I will not continue to sit here while you disrespect the woman that I love.”

  Alandra nearly gasped. “Xan! But I hardly know you. I haven’t read any intelligence reports about you, only your résumé. Intelligence reports are the best way—”

  “No they are not!” Xan yelled, his face red and his voice, unused to saying anything above a whisper, trembled w
ith the effort. “The best way to know and love someone is to be by their side for years and years, anticipating their needs and being there for them in every situation. It’s serving breakfast to the man she wants to marry and holding my tongue during every disgusting minute of it. It’s attaching weights to my face because I couldn’t stop smiling every time you walked into a room.”

  “But why would smiling be a bad thing?” Krell asked.

  “Because I hate smiles,” Alandra said, breathless. “And Xan knows it.”

  In a display of macho posturing that Alandra found more than a little interesting, Xan had put himself in between her and the general and was literally punctuating his sentences by bumping Krell in the chest. Krell, for all his blustering, didn’t seem ready to get into a fistfight. In fact, he was practically retreating across the war room, chest bump by chest bump.

  “Now, if you were too busy copying pickup lines from old movies to notice, we’re being boarded. So grab your Newton-damned rifle and get the hell away from my grand marshal!”

  General Krell looked for a moment like he might retaliate. The tension had drawn his shoulders practically up to his ears. The copious amount of military medals draped across his uniform rattled as his body shook. Then, without looking at Alandra, he deflated and grabbed a disruptor rifle.

  “There are more important things to focus on now, anyway,” Krell muttered, and fled the room with his head down.

  Alandra stood looking at the place where Krell had been a moment earlier and slowly drew her eyes to Xan. The man stood in front of her, his face back to being blank and unreadable. There was, however, a leftover redness that indicated some recent physical exertion. Xan took a step toward Alandra, and, to her surprise, she actually flinched.

  What had just happened?

  Why had she liked it?

  Opening the case, Xan presented it to her. Inside, displayed with a beautiful austerity, was a bundle of toothpicks, a small serving of popcorn, and Alandra’s favorite disruptor pistol. Given to her by the Thelicosan Council for valorous conduct on a mission about which she was never to speak to anyone, it had remained unused for nearly a decade.