by Joe Zieja
Mailn kept grinning.
“Will you stop that?” Rogers said. “Your face is going to freeze like that.”
Mailn kept grinning.
“For god’s sake, what? ”
“I found out an interesting piece of news after Klein came in the other day. Remember how I said he just got a new executive officer?”
“Yes . . .”
Mailn paused for dramatic effect. “He hung himself.”
“No,” Rogers said, sitting up and gripping the sheets in white-knuckled fists.
“Which means there’s an opening for a plucky lieutenant with bravery, fortitude, and aptitude to spare.”
“No,” Rogers said again, clenching his teeth.
“And there happens to be a brand-new lieutenant who fits that description and just fainted himself out of a command.”
“No!” Rogers screamed.
Mailn reached over and handed him his personal datapad that had been sitting on the stand next to the bed, on which was displayed his transfer orders.
“Congratulations, Lieutenant,” she said. “You’re a secretary.”
* * *
Rogers walked through the corridor with his head hung so low, he could barely see where he was going. Beside him, Corporal Tunger nattered incessantly.
“This is so exciting, sir,” he said. “Two promotions and a chance to be next to one of the most brilliant men ever to grace the MPF! You must be beside yourself with joy.”
Rogers mumbled something offensive.
“I mean, really,” Tunger continued, “to have that level of responsibility and prestige thrust upon you after discovering one of the most dangerous flaws in the AIGCS programming. You’ve had quite the exciting career, sir! And to think, just a few weeks ago, you were an ex-sergeant.”
Tunger switched the bag he was holding to his other hand. He’d remained as Rogers’ orderly, which seemed utterly absurd. It basically made him the secretary of a secretary, but the man had nowhere else to go. Apparently, all the people trained in zoo operations had been moved to finance, and Tunger had been the odd man out before the AIGCS came along.
“Are you sure they can’t take you back to the zoo deck?” Rogers asked, trying to veil his hope that he’d be rid of the man. He still hadn’t forgiven him for running out of the room during the fire drill, and he’d never liked the idea of having an orderly, anyway.
“Oh no,” Tunger said, “though I’d be lying if I said I didn’t ask for it once I found out that the AIGCS had been disbanded.” He looked up at Rogers, embarrassed, and added hurriedly, “It’s all I know, you see. I’ve been managing animals my whole life. It wasn’t out of disrespect, sir.”
“No offense taken,” Rogers said.
“Oh good. I wouldn’t want to offend anyone.” Tunger sighed. “One day, though, I hope they pick me up for that spy slot. Chimpanzees—and you—are great, and all, but . . . Aie wursh they could see maie taalunts for whut they ur.”
Rogers shot him a look.
“Sorry, sorry.”
They boarded the up-line—which also went down, and sometimes sideways, so Rogers wasn’t really sure why they called it the up-line—and zoomed through the belly of the Flagship toward the command deck, which also held the bridge, the war room, and several other conference rooms that Rogers hoped he never set foot inside. Part of the short list of benefits to being transferred to serve as Klein’s executive officer included moving from the quarterdeck to a stateroom on the command deck. It also hopefully meant no more inspections, a room with a view, and one less glowing picture of a droid on his wall.
Rogers was dismayed to see that a couple of droids also occupied the small car, as well as a smattering of officers of similar rank to his own who all looked haggard and generally annoyed. None of them spoke.
“CALL FUNCTION [MAINTAIN AWKWARD SILENCE].”
Rogers looked up to see the droids—three of them—standing in the direct center of the car, all looking toward him. At least, he thought they were looking toward him. How did one really tell what those glowing blue orbs were looking at? The last thing he wanted to deal with right now were droids, so he made it a point to turn his back on them and look through the viewport at the head of the car, watching the guts of the ship blur by.
“CALL FUNCTION [MAINTAIN AWKWARD SILENCE].”
“What’s their problem?” Rogers muttered to Tunger.
“I don’t know, sir,” Tunger replied. He placed the bag of Roger’s things—things that Rogers had insisted he could carry himself—on the floor and sat down on one of the seats on the edge of the car. “Maybe they think you’ll accidentally destroy them, too.”
Rogers frowned. “Was that a joke, corporal?”
“No, sir,” Tunger said earnestly. “I’m not very good at joking.”
“CALL FUNCTION [MAINTAIN AWKWARD SILENCE].”
“Oh, stop it!” Rogers said. “You know you’re not maintaining any kind of silence when you keep announcing it, don’t you?”
The droids didn’t reply. They got off at the commissary deck, where, presumably, they were heading toward one of the mess halls to plug in and make a mockery of human dining practices. If Rogers ever met the man who programmed those things, he would punch him in the face. Unless he had a droid with him; his knuckles still hurt from giving Barber Bot a rap on the head.
Despite his abject misery, Rogers couldn’t keep his nerves down. Working for Klein wasn’t like working in the engineering bay. The man was charismatic, wise, tactically minded, and rumored to be ruthless in combat. Although Rogers couldn’t imagine what combat he’d been in unless the admiral was over Two Hundred Years (and Counting) old. There would be no shirking his duties. No drinking. No gambling. Not that there was any of that on the Flagship nowadays, anyway. But at least before being transferred, there had been hope.
The car arrived at the command deck, and everyone aboard piled out into the utter chaos of the corridors. Unlike many of the other areas on the ship, the command deck was packed with officers and high-ranking enlisted, all hurrying through the hallways with their datapads held in front of them like weapons that generated bullshit and sprayed it all over the fleet. It was like he could feel the weight of minutiae and meaningless queep bearing down on him, a hyperbaric chamber of regulations and memoranda.
He thought he might vomit from it as Tunger led the way toward the exec’s quarters, but Rogers barely had time to do anything except exchange salutes with the enlisted and higher-ranking officers passing by. In fact, he saw that everyone was carrying the aforementioned datapads in their left hands, because their right hands were almost constantly slapping themselves in the foreheads as nearly everyone they passed required a salute. This custom was mostly ignored everywhere else in the fleet except for ceremonial purposes. Why not here?
“Shit,” Rogers said as he shook his arm out during the brief intervening moments between a sergeant and two lieutenant commanders, “how the hell does anyone get anything done around here if they’re so busy saluting all the time?”
“I don’t know, sir,” Tunger said, offering Rogers a salute.
“Stop that!”
“Yes, sir,” Tunger replied, snapping him another.
By the time they reached the large oval intersection that led to the bridge, the war room, Klein’s quarters, and Rogers’ new room, Rogers felt like his arm was going to deflate and fall off. Sweat trickled down his back; even Tunger was breathing harder with the effort.
“Quick,” Rogers said. “Open the door and let’s get inside before someone invents a double-handed salute and we get in real trouble.”
“Yes, sir,” Tunger said. He retrieved a pair of keycards from his pocket and handed one to Rogers. “This is to replace the one you lost.”
“I nearly forgot about that. What happened to it?”
“They found it permanently attached to the side of the command pad. Apparently, even after you lost consciousness, you kept trying to unlock the pad with it, and eventually, the fric
tion caused it to melt.”
For some reason, Rogers counted that as a victory. He tucked the keycard away in the holster that also held his new personal datapad, and allowed the insistent Tunger to open the door for him.
“Aie prusunt to yeou . . .” He cleared his throat. “I present to you your new quarters, Lieutenant Rogers.”
Rogers didn’t even have the cognitive capacity to yell at Tunger for his slip back into the Thelicosan accent. The spectacle beyond the doorway held every inch of his attention.
The executive officer’s quarters was nothing short of spectacular. A bed fit for a king, or at least a very successful pimp, was expertly made up with a shimmering red velvet comforter and a gaudy wrought-iron bed frame. A desk of expensive-looking wood with golden handles. A double-door wardrobe of stained oak, complete with a full-length mirror attached to the side with a silver frame. A computer terminal with not one, not two, but three screens displaying various systems on the ship and a daily calendar. A bookshelf with actual, no-kidding books. And, for some reason, a pet cat.
That would have all been great had it not all been floating around in zero gravity.
“What,” Rogers said, unable to fathom what he was seeing in front of him, “in all of the circles of hell is going on here?”
“Ah,” Tunger said. “I forgot to mention that part, sir.”
“That my room’s gravity generator was broken? That’s a pretty big piece of information you forgot, Tunger. It could have saved us the trip up here. I’m not moving in here until it’s fixed. Get maintenance on the line and—”
“Oh, it’s not broken, sir. It’s been disabled.”
“Disabled?”
“Disabled.”
“Why the hell has my room’s gravity generator been disabled?”
“It was Klein’s idea, sir, as a suicide deterrent. His last few executive officers hung themselves, you see.”
“So?”
“Can’t hang yourself in zero-g, sir.”
Rogers looked, mouth agape, at Tunger. “You must be joking.”
“As I said earlier, sir,” Tunger said, “I don’t joke very well. Could I have made a joke about this?” He made a tugging motion above his own head. “Something about hanging yourself in no gravity? It doesn’t seem like a very funny subject.”
Slowly, Rogers reached out and grabbed his personal effects from Tunger’s hand and turned to face the interior of the snow globe that would now be his own personal hell.
“No,” Rogers said, feeling a lump in his throat as he stepped over the threshold and floated between the hissing cat and a glowing poster of a droid. “There’s nothing funny about this at all.”
* * *
I. The rank of Lieutenant Junior Grade, formerly the rank just below full Lieutenant, was abolished during the Great Naming Crisis, during which all families ran out of ideas for their offspring and simply started calling them “junior.” It became far too confusing, and the MPF introduced the rank of Lieutenant Lieutenant, similar to Lieutenant Colonel in that it signified the rank just below Colonel. There are some (many) in the MPF who regret this decision.
Ein Klein Flottenchef
“Lieutenant Rogers, report to the bridge immediately. Lieutenant Rogers, report to the bridge immediately.”
Rogers, floating in the middle of his room, glared at the computer terminal and attempted to throw a chair at it. The chair, as it turned out, was much heavier than he was, so it merely resulted in his doing a very uncoordinated backflip. His shins slammed into a pair of books that had wormed their way off the bookshelf, sending them flying across the room to crash into the poster of the droid. The poster, Rogers learned, had been encased in shatterproof material. The books merely turned the poster into a rapidly rotating moving picture, sending bright flashes of light spinning around the room and nearly making Rogers lose the breakfast he hadn’t eaten.
“Son of a bitch!” he yelled, still rotating wildly and gripping his shins. Tucking into a ball to do so made him rotate faster, and it took a few attempts to grab the heavy chair again to steady himself. For all the alcohol he hadn’t been drinking, he certainly felt hung over. Was the room spinning, or was he spinning?
Sleep had never struck him as a terrifying activity, but last night had changed all of that. Being constantly in fear of the ship’s inertia sending furniture at you put a different perspective on “hitting the hay.” The hay was, instead, hitting him. Why there was also a bale of hay in his room he had no idea, but the cat seemed to like it. The cat also seemed to like clawing at his uniform and using him as a jumping-off point to get around the room. Rogers didn’t understand how the feline had adapted so well to zero gravity.
“Lieutenant Rogers, report to the bridge immediately. Lieutenant Rogers, report to the bridge immediately.”
“I’m trying!” Rogers yelled. He pushed off the chair but not quite at the right angle. He hit the space just above the door with his shoulder and bounced back off the wall, only to find himself flattened against the surface of his desk, a stapler—who used a stapler?—jabbing into his kidneys. The desk, at least, was easier to push off than the chair, and the next jump put him right at the room’s exit.
Gravity kicked in as soon as he passed through the threshold. Unfortunately, he did so sideways.
“You alright there, metalhead?”
Rogers looked up so fast, a sharp pain shot through his neck. Towering above him like an obelisk of beauty, the Viking stared down at him, shadowed dramatically by the lights overhead. If he squinted a little, he could have sworn there was a glow around the edge of her frame.
“Ah, hello,” he said.
Then, in a moment that would live in his memory forever, she extended a hand to him. He took it and was thrown to his feet as effortlessly as if she had been picking up a pillow from the floor of their vaulted-ceiling bedroom with two cathedral windows and tastefully decorated art that hung over their canopy bed.
And suddenly, he was standing in front of her. Not ready to receive a blow to the face, not bracing for the next cold insult. Just standing there. Was she smiling at him? No, she was chewing on a small piece of leather. But if he looked at it just right . . .
“Nice to see you?” he said brilliantly.
“What are you doing jumping out of doors?” she asked gruffly. She looked past him—over him—and swore. “Looks like my room after I’ve had a bad day.”
“I’d love to see your room,” Rogers blurted. “I mean, no, that’s not what I mean.” Yes, it was. “Are you having a bad day?”
She looked at him, thick brows coming together in something that might have been an amused expression. “As a matter of fact,” she said, “I’m having a pretty good day. Just got done briefing the admiral on combat readiness.”
“Oh,” Rogers said. Why was he sweating so much? “Well, are we ready?”
“Ready to lay down and die!” she barked. Rogers took a step back and felt his foot come off the floor, weightless. He stumbled forward again back into gravity, but the Viking didn’t seem to notice.
“I’ve got a bunch of cooks trying to shoot things with guns. You ever seen a cook try to shoot something?”
Rogers shook his head silently.
“It looks like apes flinging shit at each other in the zoo,” Captain Alsinbury said. “And it does about as much damn good in combat.”
“That doesn’t sound very good at all,” Rogers said. “Does that usually make for a good day?”
The Viking chuckled, a low rumble that sent all sorts of sensations to all sorts of places in Rogers’ body.
“It makes for a pretty shitty day,” she said. “But at least today I don’t have to do it with combat droids training in the next room!”
She let out a belly laugh and slapped him on the arm, nearly knocking him back into zero gravity. Rogers’ teeth clacked together noisily, but he withstood the blow—cherished it, let it sink into every fiber of his being—as best as he could.
“Trust m
e,” Rogers said, feeling a little bit of the tension bleed out of him. “You’re not nearly as glad as I am.”
For a moment, those words echoed in Rogers’ head as a falsehood. Had he been better off as the AIGCS commander? All he had to do was hang out with a bunch of stupid droids all day and pretend to train them. He’d been an ensign, too, and nobody expects anything out of an ensign except a repeated exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide. Now where was he? On the command deck, as a lieutenant, working for the admiral. Maybe droids hadn’t been so bad after all.
“What’s the matter?” the Viking asked. “You look like you just licked a plasma converter. Are you a cook?”
Whatever he was about to say was obliterated by the loudspeaker’s call.
“Lieutenant Rogers, please report to the bridge immediately.”
“I forgot you were the new exec,” the Viking said. She gave him what might have been considered a grin. “Nice knowing you.”
She hit him on the forehead with the palm of her hand and snickered as she walked away. Rogers turned and watched her go, watched her consume the hallway with her presence, wanted himself to be consumed by her. Their conversation had gone well. Surprisingly well. Not happily-ever-after well, but at least he no longer felt that he was about to be crushed under her boot (without asking for it). It might have really gone somewhere, had she stuck around for a few more minutes and given Rogers some time to really kick his charm into gear.
But that damn loudspeaker, this damn job had gotten in the way. Everything on this ship was always getting in the way of everything else. He was sick of it.
A disgusting splattering noise came from behind him, and he turned to see that one of the cat’s hairballs had suddenly discovered gravity again.
“I hate my life,” he muttered.
“Lieutenant Rogers, report—”
“Shut up!” he shouted. “I’m coming!”
For some reason, the loudspeaker did indeed shut up. He realized a moment later that it hadn’t been a loudspeaker at all but Corporal Tunger standing in the hallway with a megaphone.
