Valkyrie (Expeditionary Force Book 9)

by Craig Alanson

  I was in my spacious new office aboard the Valkyrie, which still made me uncomfortable. My old office aboard the Flying Dutchman was cramped, barely large enough for a small desk and three chairs. Really, two chairs, unless people were bumping knees and elbows. That desktop was completely filled if it had a laptop, a cup of coffee and Skippy’s avatar. When getting out of my chair, I used to turn to the side and carefully swing my legs around the desk leg, then awkwardly stand up without getting my feet tangled in the desk or chair. That office was a converted closet or something like that, I had chosen it because the location was right up a passageway from the bridge. When he took the Dutchman apart in Earth orbit to rebuild it, Skippy had offered to move bulkheads and machinery around so he could enlarge my office. Or, he suggested, I move my office to a cabin if I wanted a place that was more cozy than grand.

  I had turned down both of his offers. Kicking someone out of their cabin did not seem right, and there was a whole lot of critical stuff he needed to fix aboard the old Dutchman, he did not have time to screw around making a fancy office for me.

  Those were the official reasons I gave to him back then. The real reason I didn’t want him screwing with my old office was that I liked the place. It was so small that people were not tempted to just come in and hang out, so most of the time I had it to myself. It was the only place aboard the ship that was mine, other than my also-cramped cabin.

  So, part of what made me uncomfortable about the new captain’s office aboard our mighty Valkyrie was just that it was new, and I was having trouble adjusting to the changes. The other problem was getting used to the size of the office was not the only adjustment I had to make. The massive built-in desk used by the previous captain of the ship had been way too big and way too ugly. Also, the thing smelled funny. The entire interior of the ship smelled funny, because the Maxolhx had kind of a musky-sweet natural scent, and that odor lingered long after they were gone. Skippy had bots busily scurrying around scrubbing surfaces and replacing air filters, but the scent was everywhere. Anyway, I had asked him to tear out the old desk, which contained a bunch of electronics he could use elsewhere. For my new desk, I was still using two old crates and a rectangular piece of plastic. The new desk was still less ugly than the old one. Yes, Skippy was still working on both ships, and the fabricators on both ships were cranking out parts constantly, but whenever he suggested making a real desk for me, I told him to wait. The truth is, having a new desk in my new office would mean I accepted that the Valkyrie was my new home. Accepting that, meant accepting the reality of all the people we had lost in the Armageddon ambush at the supply station. As long as my desk was basically a sheet of plastic sitting on crates, I didn’t have to deal with the fact that I had led my people into disaster. There were plenty of other reminders aboard the ship. Jeremy Smythe, having to learn how to walk around on his new bionic legs. Margaret Adams, still in a medically-induced coma. Me, having to remember that Chang was in command of the Flying Dutchman, because Fal Desai was gone.

  Those were the gloomy thoughts weighing down my mind when I sat down in my office chair, finding that it still squeaked annoyingly. Until then, I had been ignoring the squeak, because enduring that cringe-inducing annoyance was a way of punishing myself for losing most of the crew, my crew.

  That was silly, I realized. It was self-indulgent. The crew needed to see their captain as calm, confident and determined. The desk thing was silly also. Having a real desk in my office would emphasize my authority, which would be good when dealing with the new people we recently pulled off Avalon. Most of the ship had been nicely adapted to human needs, my flimsy desk was one of the reminders that Valkyrie had been a floating collection of Legos.

  Yes, I decided. I would call Skippy and get him to fix my squeaky chair, plus he could install the new desk that I assumed he had already fabricated.

  Man, making that decision was an enormous weight lifted off my mind. We had lost people. We would likely lose people in the future. We would go on, because that’s what we did.

  “Hey, Skippy,” I called out. “Can you-”

  Music blared out and instead of his usual avatar, Skippy’s hologram appeared wearing jeans, a leather jacket and slicked-back hair. “And suddenly the name, will never be the same, to-” He jerked, startled, stopped singing and his avatar reverted to the usual admiral’s outfit. “Oh. Damn it, Joe! Why do you always call right when I’m in the middle of something important?”

  “Aren’t you always doing something important?”

  “This is-”

  “Like, running the reactors so they don’t blow up?”

  “Well, sure, but-”

  “And stopping this ship’s AI from murdering everyone?”

  “Ok, that too, but-”

  “Doing all your special super awesomeness stuff?”

  “Yes! Yes, damn it, I am doing all that. Jeez, I just want five freakin’ minutes to myself.”

  “Five minutes in slow monkeybrain time?”

  “That would be great, but I’d settle for five minutes in magical Skippy time. What do you want, now that you have so rudely interrupted me?”

  “Uh, what was that? What you were singing, I mean. That wasn’t your Broadway show about penguins, was it?”

  “Um, no. I’m still working on that.”

  “I know that song,” I snapped my fingers while searching my memory. When I thought of Skippy’s ginormous memory, I imagined a huge, gleaming library, spotlessly clean and organized. Any information he wanted could be located and retrieved in an instant.

  The loose jumble of junk stored in my head was more like that huge dusty warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Except in my head, trucks drove into the warehouse and just randomly dumped stuff everywhere, piled high to the ceiling. Finding any particular bit of info in that mess was mostly luck. I know I had heard that song before. Where? When? I had no idea. “Ah, forget it. What was that song?”

  “Ugh. How could anyone not know that? It is ‘Maria’ from ‘West Side Story’.”

  “Aha!” Snapping my fingers, I finally remembered. That musical had been performed at the regional high school when my sister was a sophomore. Or maybe she was a freshman. It was before I got there. “You were looking for inspiration?”

  “No. Actually, I am thinking of staging a production here.”

  “Here?” That astonished me. “Aboard Valkyrie?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh. That’s a, uh- Why would we do that?”

  “To bring the new crew together after we pulled them off Avalon, you big dope. Give them something to work on, something that is not about fighting and killing.”

  “That’s- That’s actually a great idea, Skippy.”

  “Well, of course it is. So, you know this musical?”

  “Sort of. There were two street gangs, and they danced and sang in the streets?”

  “Yes, Joe. The Jets and the Sharks.”

  “Uh huh. I think that, in real life, gangs that sang and danced would get beat up a lot, you know?”

  “It’s a musical, Joe.”

  “Hey, is there a part in there for me?”

  “You? Er, um, heh heh,” he chuckled nervously. “Why, sure, Joe. You can- No, that won’t work. Um, let me think. Ooh, you can be one of the Jets.”

  “The gang?” I asked, because I was really vague on the plot. All I remember is, like I said, a lot of dancing, and two gangs fighting while they were dancing. And some guy got shot because he was with the wrong girl. Or maybe I was remembering Romeo and Juliet? We had to read that Shakespeare play in high school, and it was the longest two months of my life. “Jeez, Skippy, I don’t know if I can dance like that.”

  “Oh. I didn’t plan for you to dance, Joe. Or sing. Or talk. You can stand in the background, kind of snapping your fingers in time to the music. Um, maybe it’s best if you just pretend to snap your fingers, and I’ll dub in the snapping sound with the proper timing.”

  “Asshole. I suppose you
will have the starring role?”

  “Duh. Seriously? Is that even a question? I will be performing the part of Tony,” he struck a dramatic pose, “whose tragic death is the climax of the story.”

  “Uh huh, uh huh, you could do that. Or,” I put my thumbs together and lifted my index fingers to make a frame, like I was a Hollywood director looking through a camera lens. “Instead of just putting on a production of the original story, you could do something different. Something unique, to showcase your creative talents.”

  “Mmm hmm, I am intrigued,” he gushed with enthusiasm. “I like it, Joe! What are you thinking?”

  “A bold re-imagining of the story,” I said in Dramatic Movie Announcer Voice.

  “Yes!” He gushed excitedly. “Tell me more!”

  “Where Tony’s tragic death is the opening scene.”

  “Wow! That would surprise people! I could re-write the story so- Hey! You jerk! If my character dies in the first scene, I can’t sing in the rest of the story!”

  “Well,” I explained, “artists have to suffer for their work. Sacrifices must be made.”

  “Ooooh, I hate you so much.”

  “And how about after Tony tragically gets run over by a garbage truck in the first scene-”

  “A garbage truck?!” he screeched.

  “-that Maria chick falls for the new leader of the Jets, a finger-snapping bad boy.”

  “Oh, like that is gonna happen. She falls for you?”

  “Hey, I can’t get the girl in real life, Skippy. Throw me a bone, will ya?”

  “How about Tony tragically dies while saving Maria from ninjas in the first scene, and he comes back as a spirit to protect her from a creepy, finger-snapping weirdo?”

  “That sounds like Ghost, not West Side Story.”

  “You said this would be my unique vision.”

  “How about we just perform the original story?”

  “Probably a good idea,” he muttered. “What did you want?”

  At that moment, I had totally forgotten why I called him. “Before we get to that,” I said to stall for time. Why the hell had I called him? “I’m serious that a musical or play or something would be a good idea. People need to be busy or they get into trouble. I want you to work on West Side Story or something like that.”

  “Well, I was also thinking of producing Man of La Mancha.”

  “With you as the hero, and I play the sidekick guy?”

  “I was thinking you could play the sidekick’s donkey, but something like that.”

  “Asshole,” I muttered under my breath and sagged back in my chair, which squeaked. “Oh, hey. I remember now. Can you fix this chair?”

  “I offered to fix it weeks ago, but you wanted to feel sorry for yourself.”

  “Yeah, I’m over that self-indulgent shit,” I slapped my makeshift desk for emphasis, and it wobbled. “I have a job to do. Fix my chair, and install a new desk.”

  “Fix your chair and install a new desk,” he paused.

  “That’s it, just those two things.”

  “Ugh. Little Joey, what do you say when you ask someone for a favor?”

  “Please. Do those things, please.”

  “That’s better,” he sniffed.

  “Sorry.”

  “You take me for granted, Joe.”

  “I take your little helper bots for granted, Skippy. When I think of you, I think of great awesomeness things, not little stuff like fixing squeaky chairs.”

  “I am going to assume you meant that as a compliment,” he sniffed, looking down his nose at me. “Fine, I will install your new desk, if you promise to like it and praise my design skills.”

  “How can I promise to like it, before I see-” Just then, I remembered who I was speaking to. “I promise. It will be awesome, as with everything you do.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Building Valkyrie from the collection of Lego parts was an ongoing process, and Skippy was constantly tinkering with it. When we used the chain of wormholes to trap the Maxolhx battlegroup outside the galaxy, we had gone into that potential fight with one-third of our missile launchers, only half of the maser cannons and a single railgun available. But nothing else, especially not the more exotic capabilities of our ship. That morning, Skippy greeted me by having a bot deliver a hot cup of coffee to my cabin, which was nice because I hadn’t slept well, as usual.

  “Good morning, Joey,” he said cheerily, and I groaned while hoping he didn’t hear me. Too often, when Skippy was cheery like that and eager to talk with me first thing in the morning, he had done something overnight and wanted to tell me how awesome it was. How awesome he was. Really, what he wanted was for me to tell him how awesome he was. Skippy was a machine that ran not on Helium-3, but on ego. He could never get enough praise, despite his protests that he did not care what lower beings thought of hims

  “Mmm,” I grunted through a mouthful of coffee. “Wow, this coffee is extra delicious, thank you,” I gushed, though it tasted like the same coffee I drank every morning.

  “Oh, gosh, well, you know, I do my best, Joe.” He stammered, verbally blushing.

  “So, what’s up?”

  “We now have Valkyrie’s full suite of weapons online! Well, the ones I could bring online. The spatial distortion of the bagel slicer seriously dorked up some of the equipment, you understand.” He then proceeded to run down a long list of the weapons that were available.

  “Uh huh, ayuh, great.” That was as much enthusiasm as I could manage when he paused for me to praise him.

  “Great?” Skippy used his I-can’t-believe-this voice.

  My reply was the innocent tone of a child who knows exactly what he did wrong. “What? I said it was great.”

  “It’s the way you said it. Damn it, I hand you a senior-species battlecruiser on a freakin’ platter, and you are disappointed?”

  Sometimes with Skippy, you have to bite your tongue and just not argue. The way I remembered acquiring our mighty Valkyrie, it had not been handed to us on a platter, we took it with blood and sweat. That’s what I wanted to say. Since that would have dragged the conversation down a rathole, and accomplished nothing other than pissing him off, I kept my mouth shut. It was not possible to change Skippy’s mind about anything, so why bother trying? “I am terribly sorry, Your Magnificence. We very much appreciate the amazing gift you gave to us filthy monkeys.”

  “But?”

  “But what?”

  “But, you are disappointed.”

  “It’s just-”

  “Aha! I knew it! You ungrateful-”

  “Skippy, come on. Give me a break. I’ve had a bad, day. Month. Hell, I’ve had a bad career.”

  “True, but that’s been going on for years. What is wrong with this new ship, that you say is so amazing?”

  “Nothing is wrong, I just- Look, we have missiles, and masers, and particle cannons, and railguns. That’s all great. I’m sure the masers and stuff are more powerful that the ones aboard the Dutchman. The missiles are faster, smarter, and uh, more explodey. But, other ships have all that stuff. I thought a Maxolhx warship would have something, you know, more awesome.”

  “Like an antienergy beam pulse cannon?”

  “Antienergy? Is that like dark matter?” My guess was based on Star Trek technobabble.

  “It’s energy, Joe, not matter. Duh. Although, ugh, to generate the beam, we first have to create antimatter. Then that is obliterated to yield antienergy.”

  “See? I was right.”

  “You were not right, you guessed, and it was a stupid monkey guess.”

  “Whatever. In regular matter, the protons at the center of the atom have a positive charge, and the electrons orbiting the center are negative. Antimatter is the opposite, right? Protons are negative and electrons are positive.”

  “Um-”

  “I know that because whenever we went out to an Italian restaurant, my uncle Edgar warned us not to let the antipasto touch the pasta, or the table would explode.”
>
  “Huh,” he sighed. “Joe, I feel so sorry for the teachers you had in school.”

  “Ok, so if dark matter is not antimatter, then what is it?”

  “You really want a geeky physics lesson before you drink all your coffee?”

  “I want a geeky physics lesson never, so, no. Can you break it down Barney style for me?”

  “I’ll try. What you monkeys call ‘Dark Matter’ makes up a significant part of the matter in the universe. It is all around us, and its mass binds the universe together.”

  “Oh,” a lightbulb went on in my head. “It’s like the Force?”

  “No, you idiot! It’s matter, you just can’t see it. A planet the size of Earth contains an amount of dark matter equal to, oh, about one squirrel.”

  “Yeah,” my fist smacked the table. “I know that squirrel.”

  “What?”

  “It tore up my mother’s birdfeeders.”

  “The dark matter is not all concentrated in a single squirrel, you numbskull.”

  “You sure about that? One time, I went out to scare it away, and it tried to bite me. That thing was nasty.”

  “No! Dark matter is not like the dark side of the Force! It’s not evil, it just- Oh, why am I trying to explain this to a monkey? To you?”

  “Because in a previous life, you did a bad, bad thing?”

  “No one deserves this punishment.”

  “What about people who put pineapple on pizza?”

  “Oh, well, that’s differ-”

  “How about you skip all the nerdy blah blah blah, and tell me what this antipasto cannon does?”

  “It creates a pulse of antienergy in a beam that disrupts the shields of an enemy ship. The pulse cannon is most effective against lower-technology ships, because Maxolhx and Rindhalu shield generators can partly compensate for the dark energy disruption.”

  “Cool.” Now the coffee really was tasting extra delicious. “Now that this pulse cannon is back online, we have another big advantage?”

  “Mm, shmaybe. We are no longer at a disadvantage. All Maxolhx warships carry antienergy pulse cannons. Joe, this cannon is not a wonder weapon. It has significant issues that have to be accounted for in planning a battle. The cannon is slow to cycle, it can only shoot once every twenty one seconds. And each cannon is only good for six shots before it has to be taken offline for the containment system to recharge. The beam can be degraded as it contacts regular energy or matter, and in combat, there tends to be a lot of regular energy in the battlespace. Even backscatter from maser beams can degrade a pulse cannon’s effectiveness.”