Deathtrap

by Craig Alanson

  “That’s what we were discussing before you got here,” Ross explained. “Two days and a wake-up.”

  “That,” Perkins had been about to say that was not enough time. “Will not be a problem, Sir. We’ll need to requisition some new equipment-”

  “My staff will expedite that for you, Colonel Perkins,” the Burgermeister assured her. “If that is all?” Bezanson and Ross took their cues to stand. “Not you, Emily. Please stay, I have a personal request to discuss with you.”

  “This thing is a piece of shit,” Dave admitted with disgust, tossing aside a burned-out power regulator. The thing was clearly a hand-made prototype, and had been repaired and modified many times.

  “It was working fine when we got it,” Jesse replied, his own patience running out.

  “Like a junker works just fine when you drive it off the used car dealer’s lot,” Dave retorted. “The trouble doesn’t show up until you get stuck in a bad part of town.”

  Nert stuck his fuzzy head out from under the rear of the Batmobile. “Do you wish to stop working?”

  “I wish I never saw this piece of crap,” Dave wiped his hands on a rag, which was already so greasy it made his hands dirtier than before. Looking for and not seeing another rag, he settled for rubbing the grease off his fingers into his pants. Unlike Jesse and Shauna, Dave did not have to worry about getting his uniform dirty, because he no longer wore an official uniform.

  “Hey!” Jesse reached over and wiped one of his own dirty hands on Dave’s pants. “You lucky sumbitch. These are my last clean pair of coveralls.”

  “They were your last clean pair,” Dave pointed to a big streak of blue grease down Jesse’s backside.

  “Ah, shit. Shauna is gonna kill me.”

  “Don’t worry, man. I got credit,” Dave patted a pocket, “with a hamster shop that can get all your unis clean overnight. They use some fancy smart nano cleaning powder that won’t damage the fabric. It’s where I get my stuff cleaned.”

  “Or,” Jesse’s voice was muffled as he rolled back under the front of the Batmobile. “You could loan me a set of your old uniforms. It’s not like you need them, RC.”

  “Are See?” Nert’s ears perked up with excitement. “Is that a new nickname for Mister Ski?”

  “Nah,” Jesse waved a hand dismissively. “I’m just teasing him, that’s all. RC is short for Rich Contractor.”

  “Ah, yes, because he is now a military con-sul-tant,” Nert pronounced the word carefully. “Mister Ski,” his head poked out from under the Batmobile again and it reminded Dave of a whack-a-mole game. “Do you miss being a soldier?”

  Dave looked down at his top, no, his shirt. He was not wearing a uniform. The T-shirt he wore was an old surplus coyote brown, or it had been when put into storage. The material had now faded from sunlight and too many washings, but it looked just like the AR 670-3 that carried over from the previous standard. Dave suspected that container of shirts had sat forgotten in the back of an Army surplus store, until UNEF was getting ready to ship offworld and supply officers requisitioned what they could from wherever they could.

  It was the same shirt Jesse and Shauna wore, the difference being they had to wear it, and they had other uniforms for other requirements. Dave wore coyote brown from force of habit, and because that’s what was available. He had other shirts, civilian shirts, that he saved for times when his buddies were also in civilian clothes off duty. Jesse, Shauna, Irene and Derek did not treat him any differently after he officially left the Army and became a civilian ‘consultant’. Dave felt different, felt like he was not really part of the team.

  He was no longer a soldier.

  “The pay is better,” he joked, forcing a smile. “And I don’t have to take orders from jackasses anymore.”

  “Hey,” Jesse waved a wrench from under the Batmobile. “I outrank you now.”

  “Try giving me an order, Sergeant,” Dave replied with actual humor.

  “I could use a cold drink, Civvie,” Jesse waved his other hand.

  Dave reached into a cooler and pulled a bottle from a pool of ice water. “Just because you asked nicely,” he bent down and slapped the bottle into Jesse’s hand.

  “For realz, Mister Ski?” Nert slid farther out from under the vehicle.

  “For realz?” Dave pondered the question. “I do miss being a soldier, Nert. Thing is, I’m doing the same damned thing I was before, except now I’m legally a contractor. Like I said, the pay is better.”

  “Ha!” Jesse guffawed from under the Batmobile. “You don’t care about pay you can’t spend anyway. What you like is the benefits,” he said with a leer in his voice.

  Dave knew what his friend meant. Leaving the Army and signing on as a contractor to support the Mavericks had been Emily’s idea for Dave, so the two of them could pursue or at least explore a relationship. There had been much ‘exploring’ since the day Dave hung up his chevrons and he did not regret a second of it. The truth was, he was in love with Emily Perkins and hoped she felt the same way about him. Their relationship skirted along the knife edge of several Army regulations and UNEF HQ had made their displeasure crystal clear to Emily. She had been equally clear that she had no intention of foregoing a relationship because of regulations written on another planet for another war. So far, her fame, and her popularity with their hamster overlords, had protected both of them. Privately, she had told Dave that if UNEF HQ ordered her to terminate their relationship, she would resign her commission and become a contractor working directly for the Ruhar. Was she unfairly trading on the accomplishments of the Mavericks? Hell yes, and Dave had no problem with that at all. “The bennies are pretty great,” he admitted with a grin. Then he was eager to change the subject rather than give Nert an opening to ask about his love life. More important, he did not want Nert asking about Emily’s love life. “Hey, Nert, what is the Colonel meeting with your aunt about? You hinted it has something to do with you.”

  Jesse slid out from under the Batmobile and took a long pull on the water bottle. “Yeah, what’s up with that?”

  Nert also sat up, looking sheepish and looking at his watch. “I suppose my aunt has already made her request by now. Because the cadets aboard the Toaster lost so much training time when the ship was attacked, and then being in quarantine, the Academy is delaying the start of our next session of classes.”

  “Ok, bonus! Party time for Nerty!” Dave offered a high-five, but Nert shook his head.

  “No. The Academy is counting our service after the Toaster was attacked, and on Camp Alpha, toward our ‘practical instruction’ time,” Nert explained. “Until the next session of classes starts, we are expected to seek assignments supporting active-duty units.”

  “Um, like what?” Dave asked warily. He knew what he hoped for, he also knew Colonel Perkins might feel differently. “I know. You told the Burgermeister you want to serve with us, right?”

  “Correct, Mister Ski,” Nert fairly glowed with happiness.

  “Nert, you can call me ‘Dave’ or ‘Ski’, you don’t need to throw in the ‘Mister’. If we’re in action, you call me ‘Mister Czajka’.”

  “Yes,” the alien teenager hesitated and decided using a nickname was too informal. “Dave.”

  Dave knew a ‘request’ from Nert’s aunt would be viewed as an order by Emily. Which meant Nert would be serving with the Mavericks to continue his ‘practical instruction’.

  Which meant the Mavericks would not be spending the next couple months wasting time fixing the Batmobile.

  Which meant Nert knew something.

  Dave pulled a bottle from the cooler and tossed it to their new team member. “Come on, Nert, ‘fess up.”

  Nert tilted his head and closed one eye, listening intently to the translator speaking in his earpiece. He was good at speaking and understanding English from a book, less sure about commonly-used slang. “Fess? My translator has a reference to a ‘Fess Parker’, but not-”

  “It means spill the beans,” Jesse ex
plained unhelpfully. When Nert continued his puzzled expression, Jesse added “Con-fess. You know something important. Tell us.”

  “Oh!” Nert brightened, then he blushed. “I am not supposed to tell you.”

  “Em,” Dave used his private name for Perkins. “The Colonel is going to tell us, and she’s either going to be in a good mood or a bad mood when she gets here. I’d like a heads up, you know?”

  “Ok!” It had not taken much pressure to get the teenager to talk. Glancing around and lowering his voice, he began. “This ‘Alien Legion’ thing is getting a test-”

  “Shit,” Jesse groaned. “Are we gonna like this?”

  Nert considered that question for only a moment. “Probably not, no.”

  Dave shook his head. “I’ve had enough tests already.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, I hope to be coming with you.”

  Jesse and Dave shared a look. “Ok, Nert, tell us about this thing we’re not gonna like.”

  “Well,” Nert took a breath and looked around dramatically, savoring his opportunity to know something before the Mavericks did. “We are going to a star system called ‘Tunanbey’.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Possible contact! Bearing-” Sensor officer Kel-em-yal Kobinda cut off his report, when he saw the weary and disgusted look from the duty officer in the frigate’s command chair. There had been too many possible contacts during the current mission, and none of them had developed into anything the ship needed to investigate. And, of course, as Kobinda glanced back to the display, the stupid threat analysis system flashed a notice that the contact had been a glitch in the sensor data itself, a software error that caused a false reading. “It was a ghost, again.”

  The duty officer tapped a thumb to his palm in a Kristang ‘pay me’ gesture without bothering to look away from whatever he was doing. Kobinda responded with a rude gesture the duty officer could not see and logged the contact as false. That was good, because if the contact had been real, it was too close to the vulnerable little warship.

  The Kristang Swift Arrow clan frigate We Seek Vengeance for Those Brave Warriors Lost at the Battle of Taanab was cruising, slowly and warily, through the asteroid field that ringed the star between the second and third planet. That section of the asteroid field was not particularly dense with floating rocks, being composed of a few large objects rather than many small chunks of spinning hazards. Navigation was still tricky, as the field was not well-mapped and while the Taanab was in stealth mode, it could not use active sensors or extend its own sensor field far from the hull. The largest objects, some of which were big enough for gravity to have molded them into a mostly round shape, were at known locations and drifting around the star in predictable orbits. The little Taanab was in no danger from those known hazards, even the frigate’s poorly-maintained and crappy sensors could detect sunlight reflecting off those big orbs of grey rock, and the gravity wells they created in spacetime were easily identified by the Taanab’s gravimetric sensors.

  There were two hazards the ship’s crew were concerned about. Well, really three hazards, if you include the danger of their own ship killing them because one or more critical systems failed at the wrong time. The second hazard was unmapped rocks flying around. Some rocks were mini-moons loosely orbiting the larger rocks and the ship could avoid them by remaining a safe distance from those gravity wells, except that sometimes a large asteroid passing by pulled mini-moons away from their orbits and they went spinning off in unpredictable directions. There were also debris fields created by collisions, and some of that debris was moving at speeds fast enough the frigate could not detect them far enough away to avoid being pelted by jagged pebbles. With its defensive shield active, the ship was not in danger of being damaged by small space rocks, but drifting rocks posed another hazard; that of detection. While a stealth field could render a ship nearly invisible by bending light around its hull, a space rock bouncing off an invisible object would give away the ship’s position.

  Being detected would be dangerous because of the third and most serious hazard that might be lurking in the asteroid field; enemy warships the Taanab had been sent to hunt. There were two possibilities for the ship’s crew, neither of them good. Their mission could be a complete waste of time, chasing after enemy ships that weren’t there. In that case, the Taanab might have been lured away from the planet called Feznako to weaken the defenses there, leaving that world vulnerable to a raid. Or, there were enemy warships lurking in the asteroid field. In that case, the little Taanab was screwed, for it was not capable of fighting anything more dangerous than another old frigate. And for their ship to have any chance of actually seeking vengeance for those brave but unlucky warriors who died at Taanab, the enemy frigate would have to be even more ancient and broken-down than their own ship.

  The Swift Arrow clan owned the star system that contained the habitable planet they called Feznako, and that planet was a relatively sleepy place, with neither the Ruhar nor Jeraptha having any interest in taking it until recently. The peaceful slumber of that world had been shattered when a civil war erupted across Kristang space. Suddenly, the citizens of Feznako could no longer worry about only one or two enemies, now literally every other Kristang clan or sub-clan was an avowed or potential enemy. Worse, the civil war had weakened the Kristang overall, so the Ruhar had become interested in acquiring easy territory like Feznako, if they could conquer that star system without too much trouble. With Ruhar starships known to be probing Feznako’s defenses, old ships like the We Seek Vengeance for Those Brave Warriors Lost at the Battle of Taanab, which had been parked in low orbit and flown only a few times a year, were hurriedly reactivated and pressed into service despite the well-founded objections of their crews. Going into battle was not what the crews objected to, what they feared was that, because the ship’s weapons, sensors and defensive systems had been offline for so long, technically the frigate might not actually still be a warship. Yet they were very definitely at war.

  Because the crew of the Taanab were of the Kristang warrior caste, they did not find it especially ironic that their ship was named for the Battle of Taanab, which was an ignominious defeat not because of enemy action, but because of gross incompetence and recklessness by leaders of the Swift Arrow clan. Incompetence and recklessness that was legendary to the point of being taught in officer training courses throughout Kristang society, as a shining example of what not to do. Why the battle was lost was irrelevant; the crews of those doomed ships had faced death with bravery and defiance against impossible odds, and their fate served as an inspiration to all true warriors.

  That is, warriors were officially supposed to be inspired by the useless deaths at Taanab, according to clan leaders who spent their pampered lives in heavily-protected compounds. The real-life crew of the little frigate Taanab cursed the name of their ship as a bad omen, and quietly whispered to each other that they would like to see some lazy-ass senior clan leader flying around enemy-infested space in a broken-down rust bucket of a ship.

  That was never going to happen.

  “Possible contact,” the officer at the sensor station reported quietly several hours later. His voice was low because of ancient instincts while stealthily stalking prey, even though the Kobinda knew it was impossible for an enemy to hear him in the vacuum of space. He also spoke quietly because he was tired and bored and discouraged. The current contact was the third that hour, and the seventeenth since Kobinda came on duty more than five hours ago. The first sixteen contacts had been nothing but sensor ghosts, and considering how poorly tuned the sensor gear was, the officer was grateful they had not been forced to chase twice or three times as many potential contacts. In fact, the gear had alerted him many more times than he reported, he had used his judgement about when to pass the information along to the duty officer. With a ship as old as the Taanab, the crew had to use instincts and gut feel, more than blindly following official procedures that stopped being useful when the little frigate left th
e dockyard two hundred years before.

  “Possible?” The frigate’s current duty officer happened to also be the captain, and he had just come onto the bridge. Even so, he stifled a yawn as he spoke. Boredom was bad. The gut-wrenching fear of combat was bad. Being bored while fear lurked at the back of his mind was the worst. At any moment, Ruhar ships could unmask from stealth and fire maser beams or railgun darts at the Taanab. If Captain Tubek knew which particular moment that might happen, he could better deal with the tension. Instead, he and his crew had to constantly be on full alert while absolutely nothing happened, know their mission might be a huge waste of time. “Show me,” Tubek ordered without enthusiasm, turning to look at the display to the left of his command chair.

  The frigate had been dispatched to investigate what the local fleet commander hoped was a secret enemy assembly point, where enemy raiding ships could conduct maintenance and get supplies and spare parts from a support ship. If there was a support ship. If there were any enemy warships there at all.

  That Ruhar warships were in the Feznako system was not in doubt. The diminishing number of defending Swift Arrow clan ships was evidence that the enemy presence was substantial and annoyingly persistent. Quick hit-and-run raids were understandable and expected, a sound tactic that exposed enemy ships to minimal risk while making the point that Feznako was vulnerable and forcing Swift Arrow leadership to keep valuable fleet assets tied up to defend a relatively unimportant world. Somehow, unimportant little Feznako had become a world the enemy was willing to fight over, and the number of warships available for defense was steadily dropping, due to enemy action and the inevitability of critical systems wearing out from overuse.

  The need to regain the initiative in the fight was why the local Swift Arrow military commander had ordered the frigate Taanab to the asteroid field. Sensors in orbit around Feznako had detected multiple faint gamma rays coming from the area, those rays partly masked by several large asteroids. What Captain Tubek suspected was the enemy ships had cleverly jumped in on the far side of large asteroids, so their gamma rays would not be detected from Feznako. The Taanab had jumped in far away and cruised toward the area, steadily decelerating while maintaining strict stealth. If a hidden cluster of enemy ships was detected, the worn-out little frigate was supposed to remain in stealth and transmit a tightbeam burst signal to Feznako. That signal would bring the cavalry, in the form of a single heavy cruiser and its escorts. One violent surprise attack could end the enemy threat to Feznako, at least until another clan or subclan decided to challenge the Swift Arrow strength at that location.