System Failure

by Joe Zieja

  Keffoule actually stuck her tongue out at him, which seemed to surprise even her. “I have been speaking with Quinn on a regular basis.”

  Rogers had only witnessed conversations between Quinn and Keffoule that had involved a lot of dirty looks and snide comments, but maybe it had done them both a bit of good.

  Looking back to the last couple of entries in the database, he could see that there had been five people checked in to the brig today, one of which was Lucinda Hiri. There was some sort of special protocol next to her name, upgraded security or something.

  “Found her,” Rogers said. “Cell twenty-six, a quarter of the way down the main hallway to the left.”

  They moved smoothly, the three women expertly covering all of the possible ambush points with their rifles as Rogers waved his around randomly.

  “By Newton’s apple, there are whole families in here,” Keffoule said.

  The cells, made of a sort of plexiglass that appeared to also function as a one-way window, displayed an array of inmates that ranged from the clearly rough-and-tumble to the totally absurd, like the family of four playing a board game and laughing as though there was absolutely nothing wrong at all. But, no. They were definitely in jail.

  The Viking grunted, but it was the kind of grunt that Rogers had come to recognize as one of disgust and contempt. Mailn outright spat.

  “I’d love to see what damage a four-year-old could do to the revolution,” Rogers said. He realized that it sounded like a cynical joke, but he actually meant it. He’d seen some four-year-olds . . . “Let’s focus. The faster we find the leadership, the faster this will be over for them, too.”

  The conveyor walkway made it feel like they were sprinting rather than just tactically crouch-running down the hallway. Soon, they arrived at cell number twenty-six, and Rogers stepped off the conveyor belt to look at the occupant. Lucinda Hiri was younger than him, dirty-blond hair, pretty if you were into that mousy sort of look. She was dressed in clothing made for moving—almost as though she’d been arrested while on the way to the gym—and looking very, very nervous.

  “Lucinda Hiri?” Rogers said, mustering all of the heroic demeanor he could in his voice. “We’re here to rescue you.”

  For someone in jail, and likely on her way to being executed, Lucinda didn’t seem happy to see him at all. In fact, she completely ignored him, continuing to stare at the floor in front of her like he hadn’t just delivered the best news she’d heard all day.

  “You moron,” the Viking said. She pressed a button on the outside of the—now evidently soundproof—plexiglass, and the door to the cell opened.

  This time, Lucinda jumped to her feet, ashen terror written on her face. She brought her hands reflexively up, though to defend herself against what, Rogers had no idea, and closed both of her eyes, emitting a constrained yelp of surprise.

  “Relax,” Rogers said. “We’re busting you out.” He stood on the outside of the door, not brave enough to go waltzing into an open jail cell, and motioned for her to come out.

  Lucinda opened her eyes, and her look of fear was replaced by what Rogers might call optimistic confusion.

  “You’re . . . Captain Rogers, aren’t you?” she said.

  Rogers couldn’t help but let his chest puff out a little bit. He turned to his team. “See? I’m famous.”

  “I’ve seen your picture in every staff meeting for the last couple of months,” she said. “Sal Snaggardir wants to strangle you with your own intestines.”

  “Super famous,” Mailn agreed.

  Rogers swallowed. “Geez. Did he use those exact words?”

  “Is this really the priority right now?” the Viking barked. “Come on, Rogers, grab our new friend Noodle Arms Jr. here and let’s go.”

  “I do not have noodle arms!” Keffoule shouted. “They are finely toned!”

  Lucinda, to her credit, didn’t seem put off by the insanity of the troupe that was breaking her out of jail. She came out of the cell, looking left and right as though this might be some sort of twisted trap, and stepped on the conveyor belt leading back to the entrance of the brig.

  “I, uh, thank you,” she said. “But why did you come for me?”

  “We’ve disabled the Galaxy Eater and are trying to find the rest of the leadership so we can end this,” Rogers said. “We checked the manifests to see what escape ship he was on, but—”

  “He’s on all of them, right?” Lucinda said. “He has a lot of contingencies.”

  “Including finding a way out of Fortuna Stultus?” Keffoule asked.

  Lucinda frowned. “A way out? No, I haven’t heard of that.”

  “We can figure that part out later once we have them in hand,” Rogers said. “Can you tell us where they are?”

  “Yes,” Lucinda said. “It’ll be down in the maintenance hangar bay, where all the repair ships are stocked. The local ones that work on the outside of the station. One of them looks like a maintenance tugboat but is actually a fully outfitted escape vessel with room for five people and all of Snaggardir’s sensitive information. I’ll know which one it is when I can see it. But we’ll never make it there; the only way there is going to lead us right past the main armory and troop barracks. We’ll get swarmed.”

  “We’ve handled swarms before,” the Viking said.

  “I like where your head is at,” Rogers said as they returned to the entrance of the brig. “But I don’t think that two soldiers can handle the entire Jupiterian army.”

  “Four soldiers,” Keffoule said.

  “I count as negative one.”

  Keffoule nodded. “Math,” she said.

  “Math,” Rogers agreed. “But I do have another idea.” Stepping off the conveyor belt, he jogged back over to where the Jupiterian guard had left his ID in the terminal and brought up the command screen. “It’s time for an emergency jail break.”

  “I don’t know if that’s the best idea,” Mailn said. “It’s impossible that every single person in these cells is a dissident.”

  “Oh gosh,” Rogers said, putting his palms against his cheeks. “Do you think we might accidentally release a murderer? Like one that might threaten to turn the Fortuna Stultus galaxy into a reverse Big Bang?”

  “Right,” Mailn said. “I guess you’re not a total idiot.”

  “Not all of the time, anyway,” the Viking chimed in.

  “Thanks, you two. Now let’s see here . . .” Rogers looked around the computer terminal. “I could probably help direct the masses if I . . .” He waggled his fingers in the air, looking for something. “There it is!”

  The sound of speakers clicking on echoed throughout the hallway as Rogers activated the microphone attached to the desk.

  “Attention, uh, people who have been put in jail by Snaggardir’s for one reason or another.” Rogers voice rang out over the public address system. “This is Captain Rogers of the, uh, people who are not Snaggardir’s.”

  “Really?” Mailn said. “People who are not Snaggardir’s? Should we get that on the unit patch?”

  “Shut up,” Rogers said, a command which reverberated throughout the detention facility since he was still on the microphone. “Not you, I mean. I was talking to someone else. Look, we’re the good guys, okay? There is a full-scale assault going on out there, and we’re trying to prevent everyone from dying. If preventing everyone from dying interests you, then when I press this button to open the cells, I want you to get out there, run toward the maintenance hangar, and punch a Jupiterian.”

  “Um,” Lucinda said.

  “Rogers,” the Viking said. “They’re all Jupiterian.”

  “Right,” Rogers said. “Don’t just punch any Jupiterian. Because they’re probably not all bad. Don’t punch each other. Punch Jupiterians with a level of discretion. Selective punching. Goddamn it. Here we go!”

  Rogers pressed the “unlock all” button with authority. An alarm sounded, followed by the sound of hundreds, maybe thousands, of feet entering the corridor in front
of him.

  “Alright, everyone,” Rogers said. “Let’s ride this wave!”

  • • •

  The wave, as it turned out, reminded Rogers a whole lot of a concert he had attended in Haverstown, but now was not the time to reflect on poor choices he’d made in the past. Now was a time to think about all the poor choices he was about to make in the present.

  “I’m so glad you got my messages, Captain Rogers,” Lucinda said as they cleared the small office space that connected the larger station with the hangar and proceeded down the windowless cargo elevator.

  “What messages?” Rogers asked.

  “The ones I was sending you with Sara’s voice on them. I was trying to let you know that there was a spy among you, and that you needed to be careful. There were other messages too, like that the Astromologer was a plant and the exact location of the Galaxy Eater, and to definitely not use any of the sandwich machines. Did you get those?”

  “. . . No.”

  “Oh.” Lucinda blinked, then smiled. “Well at least you got some of the important ones, obviously, and acted on them, or you wouldn’t be here.”

  “. . . Yeah.”

  “Sandwich machine? We thought we started all of this,” the Viking said, “but now that you mention it, we did hear some guys talking about someone trying to buy a sandwich from a vending machine with a fake ID. You know anything about that?”

  Rogers laughed, probably a little too loudly. “That sounds like the stupidest thing anyone could ever do. Certainly not someone smart enough to be the commander of a joint force. And anyway, if he did do something like that but then—just for example—he saved the galaxy, I think people would forgive him for the oversight, particularly because—I mean hypothetically—he was really hungry.”

  The Viking whapped him on the back of his head with her knuckles.

  As expected for the largest company in the galaxy, the maintenance hangar bordered on absurd in its size. It put the Flagship’s to shame—and a lot of things broke on the Flagship that needed fixing. If Snaggardir’s had outfitted every repair ship with a plasma cannon, it might have rivaled any one system’s defense force in terms of size and firepower.

  “Oh good,” Rogers said flatly. “At least picking one ship out of this thousand will be easy.”

  “That’s what I’m here for,” Lucinda said. For a corporate sycophant, she seemed to fall into her role as hero pretty quickly. Maybe Rogers should stop judging people. “It’ll be close to the hangar doors for easy exit. Let’s head that way.”

  The hangar actually had three large doors that allowed passage through the airlock and into the vacuum of space, and Lucinda had pointed at the one closest to the cargo elevator they’d just exited. As might be expected for a station that was likely being abandoned, most of the repair ships were dormant, though a considerable amount of personnel ran about, barking orders and questions at each other. On the very far side of the hangar, Rogers could see several fighter spacecraft being repaired by what was undoubtedly a very exhausted and panicked maintenance crew.

  Surprisingly, they received very little hassle on their way to the edge of the hangar. It was a great improvement over the last times he’d been running around a hangar bay, during which he’d been chased, and shot at, by either droids or Thelicosans. He thought that after this was all over maybe he should spend some time just avoiding hangars altogether.

  The small amount of hassle could have been because everyone who tried to talk to them was knocked unconscious by Keffoule, Mailn, or the Viking. Lucinda seemed moderately horrified by all of the violence, but maintained her focus on looking for the ship in question.

  “I can’t see it,” she said.

  “How will you know which one it is, again?” Rogers asked.

  “The maintenance tugs all have hard landing gear instead of magnetic chocks,” Lucinda answered as she started toward the next hangar door. “But Mr. Snaggardir had this one modified to allow for extra storage.”

  “So we’re looking for one ship with mag chocks?”

  “That’s right. It’s possible that they’re already gone.”

  Rogers whipped out his datapad and made a call. “Deet? Start visual scanners of all maintenance tugs outside the main station. Look at the landing gear. As soon as you see one with mag chocks instead of hard tacks, grab that ship. Copy?”

  “What do you want me to copy that to?” Deet asked.

  “Damn it, you frigging robot, I wanted to know if you understood me!”

  “Then why didn’t you just ask that? I heard you fine. It’s modern communications technology, Rogers.”

  Rogers was about to tell Deet exactly what he thought of modern communications technology when Lucinda pointed at a ship ahead of them and yelled.

  “There! That’s the one!” She started sprinting.

  “Wait, never mind, Deet,” Rogers said as he made his own poor attempt at a sprint. “We found it.”

  “Can you not waste my [EXPLETIVE] time with things that you don’t actually need, Rogers? I’m trying to fight a war over here!”

  Rogers holstered his datapad with much more grace than he’d ever holstered a pistol and fought hard to catch up to his team. The gangplank of the tugboat/modified escape shuttle was still lowered, and two guards stood outside, rifles in hand. They barely saw the Viking and Keffoule approach before they were on the ground, their weapons skittering across the cold metal floor. Seconds later, all of Rogers’ crew charged up the gangplank.

  “Freeze!” the Viking bellowed. God, Rogers loved that bellow.

  The four occupants of the shuttle turned around. Sal Snaggardir’s mouth stretched into a thin line, his old, haggard face turning a mixture of white and red. Sara Alshazari, who was putting a bag away in one of the compartments, dropped it to the floor with a gasp. The other two people, presumably pilots, looked at each other. No one said a word.

  Rogers flicked the barrel of his rifle, making a loud ding noise.

  “Congratulations on getting totally owned by the people who are not Snaggardir’s!” Rogers said. “You are entitled to sit the fuck down.”

  An Epic Failure

  Although Deet knew that there was no need to do this, he read the message a second time. It was a dramatic thing that humans did now and then when they couldn’t believe the news that was in front of them, but Deet had noncorruptible memory. Once he saw the message the first time, it was ingrained in his memory banks, and he could call it up at any time. Still, he felt like it was something that could have used a second glance. Even though it didn’t.

  D-24, the message said. I am very pleased with your progress. I would like to meet.—Dr. Mattic.

  Of course, Deet’s first action was to completely take apart the metadata of the message in as many ways as he could think of, but it was as though someone had come into the room, typed the message into the terminal, and uploaded it directly to Deet’s database through a hard wire. No traces of the message’s origin remained in the data, not even a return address. When he tried to track the relays through which the message had been sent, he came up blank. It was as though it hadn’t been sent at all, but had manifested organically. Was this some sort of built-in system that Dr. Mattic had created when he’d made the droids initially?

  Dr. Mattic didn’t want to be found, but he clearly was asking Deet to find him. It was that sort of paradoxical request that was so typical of humans.

  Wait. Did this mean that he and Dr. Mattic were dating?

  No, no. That was a ridiculous notion, even by human standards. Deet didn’t even have an online profile. From what he had observed of human dating so far, you either needed an online profile or you needed to kick your potential mate in the face, and use lots of euphemisms about cooking. And he wasn’t interested in dating right now; he was focused on his work. At least that was the excuse that a lot of lonely humans used to make themselves seem less lonely.

  Was Deet lonely? His newfound senses, still foreign and chaotic in his dat
abase, couldn’t answer for him.

  If Rogers was here, he’d probably tell him no. But Rogers was kind of a [REAR ORIFICE]. He was also relaxing on a beach instead of taking care of the 331st.

  Deet sighed, emitting a wind-rushing noise that made everyone in the launch bay look around in confusion. He really needed to get his profanity generator fixed. It wouldn’t be the first thing he asked Dr. Mattic to do, but it would be near the top.

  Stepping to the side, Deet watched as a group of Snaggardir’s troops were led through the hangar and loaded on a transportation ship, probably to head to Merida Prime for logging and, perhaps, trial. Even now, they were still sorting through everyone and making sure that there wouldn’t be any flare-ups of rebellion anywhere else. The galaxy was a big place with a lot of planets, and it was going to take a considerable amount of time to restore balance. And, also, figure out what to do with a legitimately angry group of people who had been completely ignored for the last two hundred years.

  His sensors alerted him to an incoming vessel, which smoothly came through the airlock and landed uncomfortably close to him. He could feel the force of the engines, but he was heavy enough that it didn’t blow him backward. It was the same vessel that had come to pick up all of the “bodies” of the decommissioned droids. The gangplank lowered, and the same trio of droids walked out to greet him.

  “You appear to have been waiting here for some time,” the lead droid, who clearly had the Froidian Chip, said as he approached.

  “That’s right,” Deet said.

  “Why? You were informed of the exact time that we would be here.”

  Deet was about to say that he’d been anxious before he realized that the droid he was talking to likely had no idea what anxiousness was. Instead, Deet was silent for a moment. Where did he belong, exactly? What did belonging really mean?

  It didn’t matter right now. Right now, he had a lot of questions to ask someone he had no idea how to find. Even if he didn’t belong with the droids, there was a good chance he would learn at least a little bit about himself in the meantime.