System Failure

by Joe Zieja

  Without waiting for Rogers, he left the small arcade room they’d barricaded themselves in. Rogers hurried after him, tripping on the detritus of close-quarters combat and trying not to look at the downed Jupiterians. One benefit of being ambushed was that the room had cleared itself out. Now they were free to explore every inch of the area.

  They moved through the rest of the complex fluidly, without speaking, coming up with a sort of methodology on their own. Since the entryway was somewhat circular, they started at six o’clock and moved outward, Rogers moving counterclockwise and Tunger moving clockwise. Every once in a while Rogers would hear Tunger whistling like he was on his way to pick up a loaf of bread. What a psychopath.

  It became apparent very quickly that what they were looking for was not located in any of the main rooms. Soon they met at the twelve o’clock position of the entryway, and Rogers finally saw some doubt in Tunger’s expression. Was it possible that the Galaxy Eater wasn’t here? Was this another trap? Was Tunger another Astromologer? It seemed unlikely, but “unlikely” didn’t really mean a whole lot these days.

  “Should we check again?” Rogers asked.

  Tunger shook his head. “Don’t think so, mate. I’ve got a knack for seeing how old Sal likes to set things up, and I haven’t seen anything here that would tip me off. We’re missing something.”

  We’re missing the end of the goddamn galaxy, Rogers thought. He sighed, looking around just to do something productive. Tunger moved over to the Jupiterians he’d shot and collected some of their weapons and ammunition. He handed one of their rifles to Rogers.

  “You might need this,” Tunger said.

  Rogers took it. “Then you need to stay behind me.”

  “I can take care of myself, old chap, if you haven’t noticed.”

  “I’m well aware,” Rogers said. “There’s just much less of a chance of me shooting you if you are physically behind me.”

  Tunger chuckled, but Rogers couldn’t bring himself to laugh with the man. For all their work, all of their planning, they had nothing to show for it. If the Galaxy Eater console didn’t pop out of the wall right now, they might as well shoot each other and get it over with. Rogers didn’t know what being collapsed along with a galaxy would feel like, but he was pretty sure he didn’t want to experience it.

  He let his eyes drift around the room until he was able to see the entrance. A little sign caught his eye.

  “What’s that?” Rogers asked, pointing.

  “Well, I feel like you can read it as well as I can. It says ‘Retro Room.’ I’d hazard a guess and say that there’s some older games in there.”

  Rogers nodded. Come to think of it, he hadn’t seen any of the real classics in this place. Given that Snaggardir’s seemed so thorough about providing entertainment for its employees and their families, it would be uncharacteristic of them to forget about games like Un-Space Invaders or Flip-a-Burger.

  “Is your Uncle Sal a classic-games enthusiast?”

  Tunger didn’t answer; likely he was thinking the same thing as Rogers. They moved out of the main recreation complex and headed down a short hallway, passing by what looked like a small hotel or surrogate guest quarters.

  Tunger started to jog, and Rogers started to wish he jogged more often. The Retro Room wasn’t that far away, but it was far enough that Rogers started to worry about how much time they were wasting. When they arrived at the doorway to the secondary arcade, it was locked. Tunger shot the door and kicked it open, which made Rogers feel like kind of a badass, if vicariously.

  “Come on in, mate,” Tunger said. “Clock is ticking.”

  Rogers did that thing that he’d seen people do in movies where he sort of crouched and swept his gun into the room to make sure it was clear. He bashed the barrel of it against the doorframe and hurt his wrist. Tunger didn’t say anything, but Rogers decided that he should stop trying to be cool and start trying to save the galaxy.

  The Retro Room was, as one might have expected, filled with old video games that must have spanned a thousand years of gaming history. Old carnival games, like the Skee-Ball that Rogers had mentioned to Mack earlier, adorned the walls and the floor space, filling the room with that annoying yet strangely comforting cacophony of chaos. Rogers could have sworn he smelled cotton candy. It felt, weirdly, like home.

  Before Tunger said anything, Rogers knew he’d found it, and he felt like an absolute idiot for not having thought of it before. There, in the back of the room, framed in neon lights like one might expect the instrument of the galaxy’s destruction to be, was the arcade game that matched the exact outline of the schematic. It didn’t look like an arcade console—it was an arcade console.

  Rogers looked at the console and smiled a broad, mischievous smile. Of course he knew this game. It was Plumber Mash. It was the single most popular bar game ever made, omnipresent in just about every drinking establishment throughout the galaxy. Rogers’ initials topped the high-score charts of every machine he’d ever touched. He had no idea it had been made by Snaggardir’s, but it certainly made sense, given what he knew now.

  “That’s it, eh?” Tunger asked. He wasn’t looking at Rogers; he was looking between the door and places around the room where he could get to cover if he needed to.

  “That’s it,” Rogers said, walking up to the game. It didn’t exactly look like a doomsday device, but looks could be deceiving. Like a convenience store being the conduit for the destruction of all mankind. That kind of deceiving. He turned on his datapad and made his first report; now that they were there, he felt like they could talk more freely.

  “We found it,” Rogers said. “Working on it now.”

  “Goddamn shitnuts!” the Viking yelled back. Disruptor pulses pinged in the background, the soundtrack of war. “Piss off, goddamn Jupe shitfuck ass bastards!”

  That didn’t sound like a particle accelerator.

  • • •

  “What is ‘goddamn shitnuts’?” Keffoule called to the Viking.

  “It’s what we’re all in right now, noodle arms!” the Viking yelled back. “More fighting, less math please!”

  Keffoule scowled. Fighting was math. Everything was math.

  Szinder had, unfortunately, slipped through their fingers for the moment, but not before the Viking had—quite impressively—supplied them with weapons and keycards by manually pummeling every officer who had been talking to Szinder in the briefing room next to the particle accelerators. She’d dropped in, using the ninety-degree gravity shift to physically crush the first soldier, and had beaten half the room to a pulp before Keffoule and Sergeant Mailn even arrived.

  For an old general who wasn’t quite in fighting shape, Szinder was fast. Once he’d seen them coming, he’d started barking orders on his datapad, setting off alarms all over the place, and throwing anything he could in their path. To the Viking’s credit, almost nothing slowed her momentum until he’d managed to hijack a backhoe and drive it between them, but Szinder was still getting farther away. Now they were stuck in a small intersection of hallways, fighting through the latest crew that had responded to Szinder’s call for aid.

  Keffoule delivered a very satisfying spinning back kick to the face of someone who she realized was not a combatant, but a hot-dog vendor holding something that, in the heat of the moment, looked like a disruptor pistol but was actually a mustard dispenser. Neither Sergeant Mailn nor the Viking questioned her error. Regardless, he was one of the last standing Jupiterians in their current skirmish, and they all looked around frantically for the fleeing general.

  “Where the hell did he go?” the Viking shouted. She clubbed a Snaggardir’s security officer in the face with the butt of her stolen disruptor rifle and was back with their group before he even hit the floor. Keffoule gave her an approving nod and received a grunt in reply.

  “There!” Sergeant Mailn said, pointing her rifle down a branching hallway and firing twice. The shots hit the corner of a wall where Keffoule could just see the fle
eing back of General Szinder disappear. They all took off running without further preamble, silent except for their rushing footsteps and rattling of gear. Keffoule looked sideways at the Viking, and some instinct inside her told her this was as good of an opportunity as she was going to get to talk to the woman.

  “I wanted to let you know,” Keffoule began, “that you have nothing to worry about anymore. Rogers is yours.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” The Viking threw her a glance.

  “Oh please. I may not have completed all of my lessons with Quinn on human interaction, but I can tell a lovesick woman when I see one.”

  “I am not lovesick,” the Viking barked. An unfortunate Jupiterian security officer stepped out of a doorway and prepared to level his rifle, but the Viking leveled him instead. Sergeant Mailn popped off a few shots behind her, taking down a couple of troops who had started to pursue.

  “I can’t imagine it was easy competing with me,” Keffoule said.

  “Never worried me for a moment.”

  “But you must know that the competition is over. I have, as we say, solved for ‘x’ in another equation.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “I’m going to marry Xan.”

  Just saying it out loud gave Keffoule a thrill that worked its way through her bones. She hadn’t even given him a protractor; he’d just sort of asked her if she’d mind terribly if they got married, and she’d said yes without thinking. It was highly irregular. And, considering that there was a good chance the world was about to end, perhaps a little late in the timing. That was alright; it gave Keffoule extra motivation to make sure that Rogers did his job.

  The Viking didn’t respond, primarily because they had turned the corner and found a platoon of Snaggardir troops waiting for them. These weren’t the meager security forces they’d been encountering up until now, but clearly trained military. They wore vacuum suits, which struck Keffoule as odd until she remembered that she’d just heard them all talking about escaping. They were preparing for space travel and space combat.

  Keffoule computed all of this while coming to a halt and diving back behind the wall for cover. The Viking and Sergeant Mailn did the same. As they all got to safety, spraying covering fire in the general direction of the waiting platoon, Keffoule could see General Szinder boarding what appeared to be a transportation system. They’d lost him.

  “Kepler’s rotating balls,” Keffoule swore. “We’ll never catch up to him now.” She pulled out her datapad as the other two fortified their position and started looking for a way around. “Rogers, it’s Keffoule. Szinder is on his way to you, and we won’t be catching up any time soon. And it looks like the Jupiterians may have found a way out of the galaxy; get the fleet ready to come in and mop up as soon as you’ve got the Galaxy Eater disabled or we might lose the Snaggardir leadership. We need—”

  A disruptor-rifle shot hit her datapad.

  • • •

  “What was that?” Tunger asked.

  “A lot of not-good news,” Rogers said. The idea of the Viking, stranded somewhere on the station and being shot at, sent waves of panic and guilt through him. Somehow he was sure this was all his fault. All the more reason to hurry this up. They’d scoured the machine, looking for anything that might indicate a way to operate the Galaxy Eater or access the console from here. Obviously it couldn’t just be an arcade game.

  Miraculously, the Jupiterians hadn’t caught on that they were using the datapads to communicate with each other, or they’d have jammed the signals. Rogers was able to place a relatively clear call to the Flagship, which was waiting on the edge of an Un-Space point. It would only take a few minutes for them to arrive on scene once Rogers gave them the word.

  “Oh, hi, how’s it going?” Deet asked. “Have you saved the galaxy yet while I rot away on this ship, pondering my own existence?”

  “You’re made of metal, Deet,” Rogers said as he looked underneath a nearby pool table to see if there was some sort of lever to pull. Where was the damn entrance? “You don’t rot.”

  “You can’t take away my right to rot!” Deet barked. “I have [EXPLETIVE] rights!”

  “People have argued for a lot of really stupid things in the past, but I’m not sure anyone has argued over a right to rot.”

  “Actually,” Deet said, “there was a riot on Urp just seventy years ago when the government ruled that cremation was the only acceptable method of—”

  “Now is not the time for this, Deet! I need you to get everyone to battle stations and prepare for immediate assault as soon as I give the signal. Do you understand?”

  The line went out for a second. Rogers felt around the back of an empty sort-of bookshelf. Nothing there, either.

  “Sorry.” Deet came back on line. “We were discussing whether or not we actually had battle stations.”

  “Of course you have battle stations!” Rogers said. “We went to them when we were in Furth. How can you go to battle without battle stations?”

  “They’re just our normal stations, Skip,” Rogers heard Commander Zaz say in the background.

  “Then tell everyone to get to normal stations and get ready for my signal. Rogers, out.”

  He shut off the link and holstered his datapad. “Anything yet?” he asked Tunger.

  “No,” Tunger said, and for the first time Rogers thought he might have heard a bit of dejection in his voice. Rogers glanced over to where Tunger was poking and prodding at the wall to see the man start to bang his fists on whatever was nearest to him. “I can’t find a bloody thing. Do they expect us to beat the bloody game to get access?”

  Rogers stopped. He looked at the Plumber Mash console, and he could have sworn his eyes started to sparkle. Obviously he couldn’t see his own eyes, but the image in his head looked pretty good. Of course that was it. The only button they needed to press was start.

  Footsteps and shouts came from the hallway. Time was up.

  “Company!” Tunger shouted. He stopped looking and moved to the door, which he began to barricade with whatever loose furniture and entertainment consoles he could move around by himself.

  “It’s alright,” Rogers said, stepping up to the front of the console. “I’ve got this.”

  He put his hands on the controls. Pounding erupted on the door. He was meant for this moment.

  “Are you serious? It was only a bit of a joke, mate. I’m not really sure there’s time for games.”

  “It’s obviously the only way to get this thing unlocked,” Rogers said. His mind felt cool, calm. He was meant for this moment.

  He pressed start. A small explosion as the Jupes tried to breach Tunger’s barricade. He was meant for this—

  “Got it!” Tunger shouted as the arcade game turned off and slid to the side.

  Rogers looked at Tunger with a flat expression. Tunger pointed to a button on the side of the console that wasn’t even very well hidden.

  “You told me you checked the side of the machine already,” Tunger said.

  “I did,” Rogers muttered. “I didn’t see any stupid button.”

  They stepped inside what turned out to be a very small hidden alcove in the middle of the Retro Room, barely big enough for two people to stand in. The chaos in the hallway grew louder with every moment; the second breaching charge had malfunctioned, congratulating its implementers for “trying all twelve flavors of ice cream” instead of exploding. A gruff voice had appeared somewhere outside and had started yelling.

  “What the hell is taking you idiots so long?” the voice yelled.

  “Our breaching charges keep malfunctioning, General Szinder!” a soldier yelled back. “We sent Samson out to get a few more.”

  General Szinder was here, outside this room. Likely with a key that he planned on using to start the Galaxy Eater. But the intel had said they needed two keys, hadn’t it? Where was Sal Snaggardir? Could they perhaps use the keys at separate times? Either way, it was better not to let any
keys be put in any holes at this point.

  “What are we looking at?” Rogers asked, because he legitimately didn’t know. In front of him, tucked away in the hidden alcove, was, ostensibly, the Galaxy Eater control panel. It kind of reminded him of a table set for breakfast; a tall, rectangular device stood in the middle of a small console, with a bowl-shaped interface in front of it. On either side, Rogers could see two slots that looked like they might have been keyholes. The rectangular surface that seemed to be the centerpiece of the device had a display on it, though it was currently blank.

  “This is it, mate,” Tunger said. He stood, his stolen disruptor rifle hanging loose at his side, staring at the Galaxy Eater with a flat expression.

  “Okay, great. Do we like . . . shoot it or something? Is there a chance there’s a fail-safe that will detonate the device if we try to use force?”

  “Probably.”

  “Well, I’d hate to come all the way out here, having the express purpose of not destroying the galaxy, and then destroying the galaxy.”

  “Yes, that would be rather ironic.”

  Outside, General Szinder was starting to yell obscenities. Rogers could hear disruptor pulses bounce off the door.

  “Here, use this,” someone yelled.

  “But this is a coffee machine!”

  “It’s a Snaggardir’s coffee machine made for a Meridan admiral that never got shipped out. Stand back! Ahem. Coffee machine—I’d like a latte, please.”

  An explosion rocked the room, sending vibrations through every surface. Outside the hidden alcove, Rogers could hear pieces of metal and destroyed arcade games ricocheting off the walls. He and Tunger reflexively moved behind the thin cover of the alcove wall, which shielded them from everything except the remains of some unidentifiable piece of furniture.

  “Shit!” Rogers said as he flicked the burning embers of a stuffed animal off his shoulder.

  He hazarded a glance backward to see that where the barricaded door had been there was now a large gaping hole in the wall. The opening left plenty of room for an army to jump through, but some of the detritus had fallen in an awkward configuration. The troops were having to sort of high-step over obstacles.