Admiral's Throne

by Luke Sky Wachter

  While he was busy stomping the floor in satisfaction and not incidentally scattering the creature even further around, the other three hadn’t been standing idly by and the first of the next three creatures, brought into the room by the droid, took an angry swipe at the old engineer.

  “Judo-” started the engineer, only to start waving his hand around to desperately block the attack, “oh blast it all, just die, why don’t you?”

  The attacks started coming from all sides as the three creatures tried to surround him.

  Kicking and flailing his single gloved hand for all he was worth, the old engineer’s breaths became more and more labored to the point he started calculating his chances of just dropping to the floor and playing dead.

  But he didn’t figure his chances were very good, and besides that, would allow the creatures a chance to interact with the containment field surrounding the anti-matter generators. He didn’t know what would happen when these things touched the containment field and he didn’t aim find out.

  Dropping to his knees, Spalding grabbed and activated his plasma torch with his free hand and started flailing it about.

  “Back! Get back I say,” shouted the engineer, crouching down to the power generator as he realized what had at first appeared to be a flanking maneuver had instead been two of the creatures trying to bypass him and get into the generator room.

  Driving forward, the superman punched right through the creature on his right and promptly screamed as the rest of his body followed him right through the now-collapsing creature.

  “It burns!” Spalding said, the smell of smoking flesh rising up through the gashes now in his uniform.

  Seeing the other creature about to step up to the containment field, he whirled, coming up with a violent haymaker that both turned the creature into a pile of its constituent parts and knocked him off balance, sending the old engineer stumbling to the floor.

  Blinking his eyes, the old engineer looked up in time to see the swirling mass of lights that was the creature’s foot descending toward his head.

  The old engineer screamed.

  Instinctively reaching up to grab the foot before it turned his head into a bloody smoking mess, to his surprise, his hand caught and held the foot. To his further surprise, the metal mesh of the gloves also failed to destroy the creature or even appear to damage or discommode what passed for its foot.

  Which wasn’t good.

  “Help! Help!” he bellowed, spinning around on the deck like a beached whale, trying to get the tips of his feet into position to strike the creature. Unfortunately, his legs were too long and the rest of his not nearly limber enough to compensate.

  For the first time since he’d got them, he cursed his droid legs for something other than being noisy and inefficient. He wished that someone else was around to help him, even that grav-cart, before remembering he was in this whole fix because of that blasted thing.

  “I’ll get you!” he howled, squirming around underneath the foot, “I’ll find you and I’ll disassemble you into your constituent parts. You’ll be nothing left but pieces when I get done with you.”

  Over the speakers came the sound of someone clearing their throat.

  “Testing. Testing. Four-six-twelve-eight, testing!” said a familiar but far flatter and less appealing voice than the original version.

  Spalding stared up at the corner of the room in surprise and then groaned.

  “Not you again,” he snapped.

  “If you could be a vegetable, any vegetable, which one would it be?” asked the Voice.

  “I wouldn’t. I’m a carnivore. A steak and potatoes man all the way,” Spalding immediately rejected, “maybe some beans on the side but definitely steak and sour cream. I only eat meat.”

  There was a pregnant pause.

  Letting go of the creature’s foot, he rolled to the side while it was distracted and came up to his knees, his fist leading, which was good because despite his best hope-filled wishes, the energy being hadn’t been distracted at all.

  “You realize potatoes, beans and sour cream are not meat, they’re vegetables and vegetable and meat byproducts?” asked the irritating voice, “by your own definition, you’re not a carnivore, you’re an omnivore.”

  “I said I’m a meat eater, not a vegetable, and that’s final. You’re not tricking me into saying I’m an old potato again. I’m an engineer in his prime,” Spalding growled, fighting off the energy being with his super-fist, “and besides, what are you doing here? I’m kind of busy,” he gasped, another line of fire burning on his side where the last remaining creature scored another hit.

  “I have a set of coordinates for you,” said the voice.

  “Not interested,” Spalding immediately rejected, kicking out with his foot and scattering the green energy creature’s leg all across the room. The rest of it was still active for some reason but he would fix that shortly.

  “It will help you with Admiral Davenport’s invasion of the Spine. There’s a very valuable piece of tech the Empire wants to get his hands on,” tempted the Voice, “and if you get to it first, you can keep the Spineward Sectors from rejoining the Confederation.”

  Spalding glared at the ceiling.

  “You’re too late. That happened a couple of years ago, so shove off,” he said, lifting his foot up to waist level and slamming it right through the middle of the last green creature, causing an immediate collapse.

  Seeing the fight was over, Spalding—able to hear his own labored breathing and feeling his heart racing in ways a young heart like his wasn’t supposed to—stumbled over to a wall well clear of any green remains and slumped against the floor.

  “I knew this heart was defective from the very first beat,” he wheezed a complaint, “it’s a weak and cowardly heart. I’d have done so much better if they’d just taken it out and replaced it with a good strong one the last time I was unconscious.”

  “Why, because you’d never have let them operate on you if you’d been conscious?” asked the Voice.

  “Of course! Are you an idiot? You can’t trust a quack with an operation like that; it’s why I wanted them to do it while I was asleep. So I can dream about everything going right and nothing wrong. If I let them plan it out beforehand, the next thing you know I’ll wake up with some supposedly superheart, grown-from-the-top athlete in the quadrant and I’ll be in an even worse pickle than I was before!” Spalding shouted and then broke off into a coughing fit.

  “A heart modeled off a top athlete’s would seem to be a trade up,” the Voice said after a moment.

  “Bah! You’ve got no soul if you think like that. Any top athlete they cloned would probably be a runner. The last thing I need is to be saddled with the urge to run away at the first sign of danger! And that’s even if they didn’t decide I was genetically incompatible with everybody but some random female champion runner. Can you imagine it? Instead of some weakling heart too afraid to run, I’d be stuck with the heart of a woman that wants to run away!” Spalding declared.

  “That seems kind of sexist,” said the Voice.

  “Now, I’ve got nothing against women or runners. I like both. But I could never be either. I’m a man who doesn’t run. So, don’t go putting one that’s used to that in to replace my old ticker, you got it,” he glared at the ceiling.

  “Sometimes, I don’t even know why I bother,” the Voice sighed.

  “Yeah, well it’s your own fault. I certainly have nothing to do with it. Here I am minding my own business fighting off the ravening hordes of glowing green with strange feet trying to break into my anti-matter generators, with no control over what you do and you show up out of the blue with no warning,” Spalding complained.

  “When you say blue, do you mean there was a flash of light before I achieved a stable connection?” asked the Voice.

  “I’m being harassed, that’s what this is,” Spalding continued, blindly ignoring the voice, “by a voice determine
d to make me question my sanity and mental stability. Bad enough I’m stuck with these terrible dreams half the time these Spindles jump, but it’s always something new.”

  “I realize I seem to have failed to calibrate the connection properly but are you sure I couldn’t interest you in those coordinates anyway?” wheedled the Voice.

  “Blue things, green things, a gun that only shoots once,” Spalding ignored him as he continued to voice out his complaints.

  “There’s a way to empty that gun so you can fire it again,” said the Voice.

  The old engineer paused.

  “I can’t be tempted with your offers any longer. The last time you gave me a bunch of schematics, it would take me fifty years to upgrade our tech base in order to build. So shove off,” he declared angrily.

  “I don’t recall doing that,” the Voice said after a moment.

  “Yeah, well, you don’t recall a lot of things, it seems. Every visit is like the first time for you,” Spalding said, getting up and waving his hands in the air.

  “Stop this thing I’ve never heard of. No, wait! Stop the Imperials that already attacked you two years ago. I’m sick and tired of it. Not one single useful thing out of you other than hallucinations and more hallucinations,” Spalding said angrily.

  “Disturbing,” said the Voice.

  “Yes, it’s disturbing. Disturbing how dense and stupid and all over the map this is. The world is founded in concrete engineering principles, not this Alice in Wonderland nonsense,” the old engineer said bitterly.

  “Commander, I have a mission for you,” said the voice.

  “It’s Commodore!” Spalding shouted.

  “You let them talk you into a promotion!” exclaimed the Voice.

  “It’s not like that,” Spalding immediately said in a defensive voice, “I was tricked!”

  “You can’t let them get you to flag rank! You’ll never get back on an engineering room floor again,” warned the Voice.

  “They said it was a medal ceremony and handed me a piece of paper to go along with it. I had no idea what was going on until I looked at it later on in my quarters,” Spalding complained, “I mean who looks at those things during the ceremony?”

  “You’ve been had,” declared the Voice.

  “I do just fine thank you, and goodnight,” Spalding said irritably, “so not only do I not take life advice from an intercom. I am in fact currently standing on an engineering deck fixing things. Things like you! You! You!” he shouted, shaking his fist in the air and going over to stop a new creature with each new ‘you’ he said, “so there,” he finished with a final angry stomp.

  “I’m going to give you the coordinates now,” the voice said with a sigh, “you’ll just have to hope the artifact is still there.”

  “La-la-la-la,” said Spalding putting a finger in both ears as the Voice started to rattle off the numbers.

  But the trick was on the alien whack-a-mole Voice that sounded like his own, because he turned his slate onto its recording function and put one finger right next to his earlobe so he could secretly hear whatever nonsense the thing thought an old engineer like he needed to worry about two years ago. Just for reference, in case this really was some kind of other dimensional space these artifacts kept throwing him into every other jump.

  Then right after the thing was done blathering, he hurried back to the bridge. It was important he didn’t miss any of the excitement. The Admiral might find himself in need of some sound engineering advice and without him present, who’d be there to give it some watch stander? He scoffed at the very idea.

  Chapter 33

  The Bug Campaign

  Hot Cross Star System: A near Core-World-level system currently under bug threat.

  “Point Emergence!” reported DuPont.

  “Shields up,” Lieutenant Crisp-Willow said in a chipper voice. For a minute, I was saddened, remembering Longbottom’s decision to return home after the war was over. It was not that I had anything against Crisp-Willow other than her height, I just didn’t like it when anyone was taller than me, especially women.

  Then I brightened at the thought that now I was King, there was every chance I would see the former Ensign on the deck of a warship once again. We’d just have to see how retirement was treating him because if he wasn’t retired… I mentally started rubbing my hands at the thought of activating his SDF commission and returning him to MSP service.

  “Sensors are active. Waiting for returns,” reported the Officer in the Sensor pit.

  “Communications is deploying the long-range array and attempting to form a connection and query the FTL buoy network,” reported the Com-Officer.

  I looked down at the well-oiled machine that was the bridge of the Lucky Clover 2.0 and felt a swelling of pride.

  There was a clunk and the sound of someone stumbling behind and to the side of me.

  I refused to look.

  The noise was followed by something hitting the floor and the shattering sound that only well-made porcelain can give.

  Muscle twitching in my cheek, I turned.

  “Sorry there, Yeoman,” said Spalding, patting a young spacer holding a teapot with both hands, a tea saucer between thumb and forefinger and most decidedly not holding the shattered cup of tea now steaming up the smooth metal floor that surrounded my command chair.

  “Spalding,” I said.

  “Sorry, Sir. Still not at a hundred percent after that jump,” the old engineer straightened guiltily and then winced as he moved to step up beside me.

  I looked at the way the old man was holding himself carefully and looked at the Commodore with concern.

  “If you’re not feeling up to things, you can go back to your quarters to freshen up or head down to check on engineering,” I said, surprised to see the man on the bridge. He hadn’t been there during the jump and I didn’t recall hearing the blast door opening or closing.

  Oh well, nothing the old engineer did could surprise me any longer.

  While I was thinking, Commodore Spalding was swelling with outrage.

  “I spend enough time keeping this ship from total annihilation, I think I deserve a chance to see what’s going on. I’m not some wayward greenhorn that needs to go to his room to stay out from underfoot,” Spalding declared.

  “Of course not,” I soothed, “it’s just you look like you took a tumble,” I said looking at his face where he had a bunch of new heal quick skin and antibiotic cream lathered, more than could easily be explained away by even a series of shaving accidents.

  Spalding flushed.

  “He thinks I’m old now and fell down the stairs on my way up to the bridge. There’s no respect for wisdom and experience any more onboard this flagship,” he spluttered.

  “I didn’t say that,” I said irritably.

  “You don’t have to say it. I heard it in your voice. You know what the problem with this ship is? Her crew’s gotten slack,” Spalding rumbled, sounding disgusted.

  “What are you talking about?” asked our new First Officer.

  “Two years of downtime,” Spalding reiterated, ignoring the First Officer, “and not a one of you is 100% sure if you’re ready to put it all to the test. That’s why I’m here to help raise morale. But instead of locking down and buckling up for duty, instead you pick on an honest engineer who only ever worked to do his duty to ship and country.”

  “That’s enough, Commodore,” I said sternly, bringing an end to the angry tirade.

  “Sir,” Spalding said, stiffening to attention.

  “If you can find your way to an engineering console and sit there ‘quietly,’ feel free to do so. But we don’t need your wisdom the very moment we hit a jump emergence. Got it?” I said, letting a hint of a growl enter my own voice.

  “Sorry, Sir. Won’t happen again,” Spalding said, looking like a kid about to enter a candy store as he gave a quick salute and hurried over to the engineering watch section.


  I rolled my eyes.

  If it were anyone else, I’d kick them off my bridge without a second’s hesitation but I’d been through too much with the ornery old engineer. He could stay… for now.

  Turning back to the plot, I took in the arrangement of forces.

  At first, everything looked good and then the red icon that indicated an enemy fleet had been detected started flashing.

  “What have we got, Sensors?” I asked, enlarging the enemy fleet on the personal screen built into my Admiral’s Throne.

  I paused.

  Maybe my Admiral’s Throne needed to be upgraded into a full-on royal King’s Throne. I’d have to think on that later, much later, when the situation in this star system had been resolved.

  “Aye-aye, Sir,” said the Sensor Officer, acknowledging the order and taking a minute to process the information before relaying it to me.

  I waited as patiently as an officer of my rank possibly could, which meant I was busy pulling up the enemy classifications and force levels on my own personal holo-screen.

  Whoever said flag officers were used to waiting patiently for answers was either a fool or a liar.

  Finally, the Sensor Officer was ready. He cleared his throat.

  I looked back up expectantly.

  “Bugs, Sir. It’s confirmed,” said the Officer.

  “Of course, it is. What’s their Swarm strength?” I asked.

  “Hundreds of them, Sir. It’s confirmed,” said the Sensor Officer.

  I gave the head of the sensor watch a level look, one that promised I would replace him with his shift relief if he didn’t stop ending everything he said with ‘confirmed’ and start give me a hard breakdown.

  “Right,” said the Sensor Officer, looking momentarily embarrassed. He straightened professionally.

  “We’re looking at: one Mothership class, three heavy harvesters, six medium harvesters, at least sixteen light harvesters—the sensor results are still coming in,” he clarified, to make sure I understood these were just the preliminary results.