System Failure

by Joe Zieja

  “I am prepared to offer you compensation for my withdrawal,” Alandra said, clearing her throat and drawing herself up. It was customary for a marriage payment to go to the family of the male in Thelicosa, and hers would have been substantial. Pulling the rug from Rogers, so to speak, wasn’t fair.

  Then Rogers jumped up in the air, pumped his fist, and made a loud whooping noise. Alandra rankled. Had he just been after her fortune this entire time?

  “Keep your compensation,” Rogers said, a wild smile blossoming on his face. “Keep the New Neptunian. Keep the face weights. Keep the protractor. Now I’m ready to go save the galaxy! Whoop!”

  The first time, he’d just made a whooping noise, but the second time he’d actually said the word “whoop.” Alandra couldn’t help but think he was mocking her, somehow. Or, more likely, his grief had triggered some kind of irrational chain reaction in his body, and this was how he dealt with things that were overwhelming and beyond his control. She’d certainly seen him behave strangely during war.

  Rogers darted past her and grabbed Xan by both his shoulders, kissing him on the cheek. He missed, however, and bashed the bridge of his nose against Xan’s face weight.

  “Thank you—ow, jeez—thank you!” he said, as he turned and skipped out the door.

  Alandra stared at the empty doorframe for a long time, silently. She knew she’d made the right choice—she felt it deep in her bones. Normally any feelings she had deep in her bones indicated that there’d been some sort of explosion, but not this time.

  Xan gave her shoulder another squeeze. Yes, the right choice.

  “Let’s go get you ready for war, Tangential Tornado,” Xan said.

  • • •

  Pack, Lucinda thought. Pack as fast as you can.

  Coming straight from her third graduate-degree program into her unpaid internship meant that Lucinda didn’t really have a whole lot to bring with her. Other than a couple of pieces of memorabilia from home, some hygiene items, and one sweater that she really, really liked, not much was important enough to take with her through all of her dormitory moves. Snaggardir’s had supplied her with the things she required to live a normal life, and the rest she’d acquired by chance.

  Even the bag she was hurriedly stuffing things into was a loan from Snaggardir’s. She’d decorated it to the point where nobody would recognize it as a company product—which was strictly against company policy—and just looking at it gave her a little bit of comfort. It told her she could still be an individual in a station of people who had absolutely lost their minds.

  Funneling information to Rogers’ force was the only thing she could think of to do to see if she could prevent total galactic collapse. She wasn’t sure if it had worked at first—and Sara was starting to get very suspicious of the scripts she was handing her—but now she knew that she’d dramatically altered the balance of the war, and not in Snaggardir’s—Jupiter’s—favor.

  But now what? Their ambush had failed, resulting in huge losses to the Jupiterian fleet and the introduction of an unknown force that kept making Dr. Mattic smile in a very unsettling way. She’d heard him and General Szinder talking in the hallway shortly after the news had come through. Well, General Szinder was yelling. Dr. Mattic wasn’t doing anything except stifling chuckles.

  Pack, she thought again, mostly because it prevented her from thinking about the fact that she had no idea what she was going to do after she packed. Focusing on just putting things into her bag and running frantically around her room was keeping her mind off the more terrifying issue of her future.

  It was possible to steal an escape pod. But that likely wouldn’t do her any good. She wasn’t a pilot, or a navigator, so she’d likely just end up getting towed back into the station. Or worse, they’d blow up the pod and leave her to rot—or be indefinitely preserved, she guessed—in space.

  What was she going to do?

  “Pack!” she yelled out loud to stem the flow of panicky thoughts bubbling up inside. She ran over to the cage where Snoot, her gerbil, seemed totally unaffected by the world falling apart around her. Snoot could always be relied upon as a rock of stability in an otherwise chaotic world. True to her promise to take him with her, she grabbed the cage by the handle. At least she’d have one companion on this journey.

  “Ms. Hiri.”

  She whirled, cage in one hand and a toothbrush in the other, to face whoever was accosting her.

  The person she wanted to see the least stood in the doorway. Mr. Snaggardir himself, his bald head shining in the lights. His face, normally placid, if not pleasant, stared at her with a hard expression, his eyes narrow and his brow so furrowed it looked like one might be able to hide small trinkets in its folds. On either side of him was a Jupiterian security member, who, since the rebellion had started, had revealed their true colors and now dressed more like the highly trained military that they really were. Both looked passively grim, if that was a real thing, and both held rifles at the ready.

  “Mr. Snaggardir,” she said, not knowing how else to react. Her heart, beating fast enough already, started pounding on the interior of her rib cage. A dizziness fell over her, like she’d suddenly been placed in a centrifuge. A million terrible fates swam around in her head, each of them worse than the last.

  “I believe we’ve come to a very unfortunate crossroads, Ms. Hiri,” Mr. Snaggardir said. “I’d like you to come with me.”

  And just like that, at the sound of his voice, Lucinda let it all go. All the speculation vanished, all of the wondering if she’d done the right thing or the wrong thing, if she could have done anything differently to have prevented all of this. It all went away. She tried to come up with a similar experience she’d had in her life, but there wasn’t anything that came close.

  This was it.

  “You can leave that behind,” Mr. Snaggardir said, nodding toward her.

  “The toothbrush or the gerbil?” she asked, absurdly waving both in the air. She felt surprisingly calm. She hadn’t even gone into interview mode.

  “Both. You won’t be needing them.”

  • • •

  Rogers’ unrestrained glee over being loosed from Keffoule’s leash was short lived as he realized that he was most likely marching to his untimely and useless death. What were these people thinking, suggesting that he accompany them on a suicide mission into Snaggardir’s corporate HQ? What utility could he possibly provide such a plan other than to think it up and send everyone on their merry way? Wasn’t that what commanders were supposed to do?

  Briefly, as he deployed his antisalute sling, he wondered if he could also deploy some kind of anti-doing-anything-else sling. It would have to be kind of a whole body cast made of plaster that he could remove at will. If there had been a single drop of alcohol on the ship . . .

  “Rogers,” called out the voice of an angel. His heart nearly stopped in his chest. Looking up, he saw the Viking moving through the command deck crowd like a bowling ball through pins. Rogers knew he was likely imagining it, but he thought he saw some of the Flagship crew flying in the air as they were tossed aside by her sheer presence. Rogers felt himself rooted to the spot, like a giant marine was sitting on his shoulders.

  “Oh,” he said.

  The Viking stopped a few feet away from him like she’d hit a wall. One of her hands was balled up into a fist, but it was her left hand, not her right hand. Not that she couldn’t pummel Rogers ambidextrously, but typically she came at him with a strong right hook when conversation wasn’t effective enough to get her message across. In this case, however, her right hand grabbed at the side of her pant leg. Her brow glistened with a thin sheen of sweat, likely from the combat gear she’d just had to don and doff during the threat of being boarded by the Jupiterians.

  “I heard we’re all about to do something really stupid,” the Viking said.

  Rogers nodded, then motioned for her to follow him. He needed to get his things together from his stateroom, and having this conversation in
the middle of the hallway wasn’t a good idea for many reasons.

  “Yes,” he said as they reached his door’s control panel. “And I wanted to tell you that—”

  “I swear to god,” the Viking said, blocking his door, “if you start the next sentence with the words ‘it’s too dangerous . . .’ ”

  “—I’m sorry for trying to sideline you, and I need you to come with me.”

  The Viking raised an eyebrow, and for once she didn’t seem to have anything to say. The entrance to his room was far enough away from the hum of conversation that he no longer felt like he needed to shout to be heard, and he felt safe taking off his antisalute sling.

  “They want me to go on this suicide mission because I look like a normal schmuck, and apparently Snaggardir’s is full of normal schmucks. Just, you know, normal schmucks that are collectively trying to take over the galaxy. Anyway . . . I desperately need you.”

  A moment of silence hung over them.

  “On this mission. I desperately need you on this mission.”

  The Viking looked suspicious.

  “Oh, for the love of god, Viking. I desperately need you on all my missions.” He rubbed his tired eyes with the palms of both his hands, then looked at her again. “Wait, that came out wrong. Or did it finally come out right? I don’t know.”

  He took a deep breath, and locked eyes with her, something he never failed to find both terrifying and exhilarating.

  “I’ve realized a lot over the last few days,” he said. “And I’m sorry for trying to make you my secretary. You have to know it was for the right reasons, though. I just didn’t want to risk you getting hurt.”

  The Viking seemed content to let him talk, and silence made him feel funny inside, so he kept going.

  “You’re doing what you love, and what you’re best at. Taking you away from that would have been bad for you and bad for the Flagship.” He looked around him. “I’ve literally spent my entire second military career doing things that I don’t want to do. Between being Klein’s manservant, the commander of a bunch of robots, and now the commander of this entire fleet, I’ve been handed task after task that I would have sooner put my eyes out with glowing-hot plasma coils than accomplish. It’s been awful. And I almost made you experience that too. I’m sorry.”

  The Viking stood there for a moment with no change of expression or body stance. That was good; Rogers was starting to understand her physical tells for violence, and so far he hadn’t noticed any. The fist that had been balled up by her side only a few moments earlier had actually relaxed, and she was no longer gripping her pant leg. No visible weapons either. Maybe his luck was still running strong.

  “You . . . really want me to go with you?” she asked.

  Rogers frowned. Typically, the Viking was a little more perceptive than that. He’d clearly just said he wanted her to go with him, and here she was asking him if he wanted her to go with him.

  “I want you by my side until we accidentally turn on the Galaxy Eater—because, again, we don’t know what we’re doing—and we all turn into space spaghetti. If I see someone that needs punching, I want you to be the one to do it. If I need a door broken down, a wrench thrown, a”—he swallowed—“a burning rafter lifted off my leg, I want you to be the one to do it.”

  Why was she still just staring at him? Distantly, he knew that there were other people on the command deck, but he felt like he could no longer hear them. All ambient noise was replaced by a rushing sound deep in his ears, and for a moment he thought that maybe he was about to pass out. It wouldn’t have been the first time. But miraculously, he stayed conscious before the awesome power that was the presence of Captain Alsinbury, the Viking of the 331st.

  Then she moved.

  He ducked, but it didn’t matter. He wasn’t fast enough. And when he realized that she was kissing him rather than punching him, he was never more glad that he was an overweight, out-of-shape ex-sergeant who couldn’t duck for anything.

  She didn’t just kiss him. She kissed the ever-living shit out of him. She kissed him into next Tuesday, where a kiss-shaped bomb exploded and sent him back to the present.

  It was over faster than he ever thought a moment could be over. One minute he was in a rocket ship of happiness, orbiting around Kissarium VII, and the next he was back on the command deck, still wearing the rank of a captain in the Meridan Galactic Navy and still in charge of a suicide mission. He’d felt fewer ups and downs during his brief experimentation with zip jack.

  He looked up at the Viking, who was now a reasonable distance away from him. Red blossomed on her cheeks, but she didn’t let the fact that she’d just grabbed his face and kissed him into cardiac arrest change that stoic facial expression of hers. If Rogers was honest with himself, he would have been disappointed if she had.

  “But,” he said, searching for words and finding the dumbest ones he could manage. “We haven’t even had our date yet.”

  She laughed, but it wasn’t the barking, cynical laugh that Rogers was used to whenever he said something stupid. It was lighter, freer. He liked it. He liked the other one too, of course. Really any sound she made was fine. But this was a good change of pace.

  “I don’t have time for any more ‘Let’s maybe have a drink sometime,’ bullshit,” she said. “And neither do you, Rogers. Go get ready. When we get on the station, I’ll punch any goddamned thing you point at.”

  Without any further explanation, the Viking turned and headed toward the up-line.

  Why did this have to happen now? Rogers thought, a sinking feeling in his stomach. He should have been elated—and he was—but with the mission looming over his head, he felt like he’d just received a winning lottery ticket stapled to a diagnosis for a terminal illness. What was the point of that one kiss if it was not only the first, but the last?

  That old instinct bubbled up inside him, the one that told him to get the hell out. Find an escape pod. Figure out some way to get out of Fortuna Stultus, or at least make the rest of the galaxy acquiesce to the Jupiterian demands. There had to be some way out of this situation other than doing what they were about to do. He could take the Viking with him. Sure, he’d lose every ounce of respect she had for him, but at least they wouldn’t be dead.

  No, he thought, as he watched her walk away. I have to do this.

  The idea of dying still sucked, though. Totally not part of the plan. But the Viking hadn’t been part of the plan either. Sometimes you gave away a good card or two in the hopes of a better hand.

  * * *

  I. She got the wrong answer.

  Your Innate Ability

  Tension dominated the last hour of their preparation. Sped forward by adrenaline and nervousness, everyone had suited up and gotten ready much faster than they needed to, taking only a little bit of time to eat what might have been their last meals and get dressed up in some utility uniforms that Tunger had come up with. Now they all gathered in the docking bay, looking out at what was normally an unoccupied space sector on the way to Grandelle. Except today it was filled with swarms of ships from every system and the motley fleet of droid ships that was supposedly going to be their saving grace for the second time in one day.

  Pieces of ruined fighters, small freighters, and even a capital ship or two littered the blackness of space. Rescue crews had been working nonstop since the battle had ended, picking up both friend and foe alike and trying to distribute them to ships with fully functioning systems and extra supplies.

  General Krell had suggested that they wait a little bit longer to try to interrogate some of the Jupiterians who were picked up, but Rogers shut the idea down. According to the droids, they had a plan to get them into the HQ that had a very short expiration date. Besides, Tunger appeared to have been quite high up in the food chain, with his familial ties probably helping. If Tunger wasn’t privy to the information they needed, it wasn’t likely that any of the Jupiterian fighter jocks, or even ship commanders, knew it either. If they couldn’t win with t
he information they had now, they couldn’t win at all.

  Rogers was pretty sure they couldn’t win anyway, but he’d learned a thing or two about never saying die.

  He said it all the damn time. Nobody listened.

  They’d been instructed by the droids to keep the crew small, but they hadn’t given an exact number. This surprised Rogers, since droids were pretty much programmed to be anal retentive about everything, so the lack of a definition for “small” struck him as very strange.

  They elected to go with a team of five: Tunger, Rogers, the Viking, Mailn, and Keffoule. Four out of five of them had combat experience and/or experience pretending to be someone they weren’t. Rogers had successfully lied to people, on occasion, so that was what he was bringing to the table. He was going to have to con his way to the control room of a doomsday device. It was an interesting but unwelcome challenge. Krell and Thrumeaux had demurred, and that made sense to Rogers. Neither of them looked particularly like entertainment equipment service people.

  Then again, none of them really looked like entertainment equipment service people.

  The plan was a classic, tried-and-true infiltration method. Pretend to be fixing stuff, then break it instead. Tunger was fairly certain he could come up with some fake IDs relatively quickly, and Rogers now trusted him in all matters of disguise and deception. He’d also furnished them with things that might help change their appearance. Rogers wasn’t exactly famous, but he and Keffoule had been involved in enough exploits that there was a chance someone might recognize his face.

  Keffoule had succumbed to Tunger’s ministrations with enthusiasm, complimenting him on his work as he went. From one secret operative to another, they seemed to hit it off now that he was no longer masquerading as a moron. When Tunger finished, Keffoule might have been confused for a distant relative of herself, but was otherwise unrecognizable as the grand marshal of the Thelicosan fleet. Xan had nattered at her about preferring her real face, and Keffoule actually playfully batted his arm as she shooed him away. It was a bizarre sight.