Communication Failure

by Zieja, Joe

  “Sir!” Tunger shouted, almost shrieking.

  “What?” Rogers shouted back, twisting in his chair to direct the full blast of his voice toward the corporal. “What is it? What do you want? The Grand Marshal here is just trying to see if I went to second grade.”

  “No she’s not!” Tunger yelled. He was standing halfway out of his chair, but the stadium seating and the narrow aisles forced him to rise to a half-squat position and remain hovering over his seat. The poor man’s legs were quivering, though from strain or fear, Rogers couldn’t tell. “She’s—”

  Tunger paused, his face contorted and his hand halfway pointing to absolutely nothing. He stopped talking entirely, then had trouble starting again. Then, for some reason, his arms went slack and he just sort of shrugged.

  “You know, sir, I’ve never been in this kind of situation before and I’m having trouble prioritizing my shocking revelations.”

  “There’s more than one?” Rogers shouted. He was starting to get a very bad feeling about all this.

  “Well,” Tunger said, but was interrupted by shouts coming from the other side of the room.

  “Alandra! Alandra, what in the name of calculus are you doing?”

  Turning, Rogers saw another Thelicosan man—a high-ranking officer by the look of his uniform, and decorated to boot—come storming from one of the doors to the assembly room. The man was dark-featured and severe, and Rogers’ eyes were drawn, strangely, not to the weapon he was holding in his hand, but to the immensely thick unibrow draped across his forehead. Behind him, Rogers could see other Thelicosan soldiers, and they didn’t look like they were dressed for a dinner party.

  “Was that one of the things?” Rogers asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Tunger said. “A few dozen armed Thelicosan troops are mustering in the hallway.”

  “Clearly. And the other?” Rogers said, surprised he was able to keep his calm.

  “Grand Marshal Keffoule is proposing to you. Those are ritualistic betrothal questions!”

  Rogers whipped his head around to Keffoule, who was staring at him with a wild grin on her face, her steely disposition totally unhinged by something approaching psychotic glee. She was also standing now, and though she was shorter than Rogers—a feat not easily accomplished—Rogers felt like a mouse looking up at a mountain lion. A soft click echoed through the briefly silent chamber, and Rogers looked down to see that some sort of instrument had been placed on the table. For a moment, he thought it was a weapon—it gleamed as though made of sharp, fine steel—but he realized soon afterward that it wasn’t a weapon at all. Though it had been polished, decorated, and well made, it was just a simple protractor.

  “What?” the single-eyebrowed officer said. “You can’t be serious! Alandra, have you lost your mind? Is this why you agreed to cross the border?”

  “It’s only half of a circle,” Keffoule whispered. “It’s missing one hundred and eighty degrees. I would have yours, Captain. Think of it—two of the most powerful officers in Thelicosa and Merida united in marriage! It would be an unbreakable bond.” She swallowed. “And there can be no other for me.”

  Everything else in the room, including Rogers, was frozen solid. Time itself stood still. The hairs on the back of Rogers’ neck were standing up so rigidly he thought they were about to fly out of the follicles and embed themselves in the wall. He didn’t know what to say.

  Wait, yes he did.

  “No, I will not marry you!” he shouted.

  The room went completely silent. Keffoule’s face dropped from giddy to flat. And Rogers really, really wished he had chosen a different code phrase for the marines.

  That Went Well

  “Wait!” Rogers said into the microphone hidden in his uniform. “Wait, no, uh, I will marry you! I will marry you!”

  “What?” Tunger shouted.

  “Really?” Keffoule shouted, her expression alight with happiness, which on her intense, round-featured face, looked utterly horrifying.

  “No, I will not marry you,” Rogers said again. Damn it! Why had he picked that as the code phrase?

  Oh, maybe because it was the least likely thing to be uttered while dealing with an enemy commander. What was wrong with this woman?

  It was too late. He could already hear chaos erupting in other parts of the ship as Mailn and the rest of the marines started shooting people and breaking things, the two tasks at which the marines were the most adept.

  But for some reason, the noises appeared to be coming from the wrong direction. Rogers wasn’t exactly very good with directions—he was an engineer, not a navigator—but he was pretty sure the hatch and bridge that connected the shuttle to the Ambuscade were in the other direction.

  So who was making all that racket?

  Keffoule, her face now hovering somewhere between crestfallen and excited, took her eyes off Rogers for a brief moment to look at Caterpillar Brow.

  “Commodore Zergan,” she hissed. “What are you doing here?”

  The dark, glowering man—Commodore Zergan—scowled at her. He looked like a wolf caught in a trap, and he holstered his pistol very quickly.

  “I thought it was prudent for you to have a security detail,” he said.

  “I said alone, and I meant alone,” Keffoule said back, her voice trembling with anger.

  Zergan, his face twisted in disgust, spat on the floor. “I didn’t know I’d be interrupting your—” His hand shot quickly to his ear as he listened to, presumably, his earpiece, and he looked over his shoulder.

  “What?” he whispered harshly. “Here?” His eyes shot up, and he gazed at Rogers.

  “It seems I’m not the only one who doesn’t care for neutral terms,” he said. Why was he smiling?

  The noises from outside the room suddenly spilled into reality. Bay doors on either side of the stadium opened, disgorging two teams into what was probably about to be a very messy tug-of-war over Rogers’ corpse.

  “Captain!” Mailn shouted. She gave a flurry of hand signals, and the Meridans spread out on their side of the stadium. Decked out in their blast armor, their faces mostly hidden by visor shields, they were an impressive bunch.

  The Thelicosans didn’t lack for flair either. Their green-and-black uniforms shone with polish—which seemed a sort of stupid thing to do for combat uniforms—and their weapons, some kind of disruptor rifle, moved as though controlled by one hand. Their positioning was swift, calculated, and disciplined.

  Of course, it didn’t help either group’s image that they were crouched quite ineffectively between stadium seats. They looked more like very, very enthusiastic sports fans about to do the wave than they did troops about to start a fight.

  “Get off my foot!” one Meridan marine shouted.

  Rogers felt frozen. What was he supposed to do in this sort of situation? He wasn’t a commander! He was just a con artist in a uniform still looking for one lousy, goddamn drink. Glancing at Keffoule, he tried to take cues from her. Rogers had a good feeling that she wanted to avoid a conflict as much as he did.

  “Hold your weapons!” Keffoule shouted, spinning around and shouting at her troops. “Commodore Zergan, you will stand down at once!”

  “Uh,” Rogers said, turning to his own troops. “Everyone just chill out, okay?”

  “But you said the code phrase!” Mailn shouted at him—and now Rogers was able to pick her out from the rest of the uniformed troops. “We thought you were about to die.”

  “No,” Rogers said. “I was about to get married.”

  “Really?” Keffoule said.

  “No,” Rogers said, turning around. “I will not marry you.”

  “I’m confused,” one of the Meridan marines said. “Is he saying he wants us to start shooting or not?”

  “Nobody is shooting anyone!” Rogers yelled over his shoulder. He cleared his throat. “Grand Marshal Keffoule, I am honored by your proposal. I think. But I can’t marry you.”

  “I cannot believe we are even having this discussi
on,” Zergan said, sneering. “I thought you were better than this. There are many Thelicosan men more worthy than this Galactic dog.”

  Rogers raised an eyebrow and was, for the first time in his life, happy he had two separate ones to raise. “You really do call us Galactics?”

  “Yes,” Zergan said.

  “No,” Keffoule said simultaneously.

  “Well, now I’m just confused.” Rogers shook his head. “Look, this doesn’t need to get any worse than it already has. Nobody has shot anyone yet that I’m aware of—”

  “I shot at someone,” one of the Meridans said.

  “I felt threatened that I might be shot,” one of the Thelicosans said. Really, even the rank-and-file troops’ accents weren’t very bad. It only sounded like they had very tiny marshmallows in their cheeks.

  “Everyone shut up!” Rogers said. “There is nothing more to do here. Let’s everyone put down their weapons and slowly get out of here. We can go back to our ships, you can drop your jamming net, and we’ll even give you some of our milk supplies to compensate for the damage we’ve caused. Everyone saves face, everyone can have milk and cookies. Okay?”

  Every person in the room seemed to think about his proposal at the same time. Murmurs came up from both sides of the room.

  “Milk and cookies? That sounds okay, I guess. Who can say bad things about milk and cookies?”

  “I’m lactose-intolerant,” a Meridan marine said.

  “I’m lactose-intolerant too. Do you have soy or almond milk?” another Meridan called.

  “Soy is bad for you. Didn’t you read that one article on the net?” a Thelicosan soldier yelled back.

  “Shut up, Thelicosan swine! I’ll eat soy if I want to.”

  Rogers tried to tune out the ramblings of two very undisciplined groups of soldiers and focused his attention instead on Keffoule. She didn’t look nearly as happy at the prospect of milk and cookies as the rest of her brood, and Zergan looked as if he could turn cookies into chunks of lead with his glare alone.

  “Well?” Rogers said to Keffoule. “What do you say?”

  The Thelicosan Grand Marshal, still standing, tapped a long, thin finger on the protractor/engagement ring on the table. She appeared to be considering his offer. Or she appeared to be considering stabbing him in the eye with the protractor. Tunger might know which it was, exactly, but Tunger was currently in the middle of a very ineffective formation of Meridan marines. And Rogers didn’t trust him to know anything, really.

  Keffoule opened her mouth to say something, then shut it again. Looking back at Zergan, she exchanged an uninterpretable glance with the officer, then gave a dejected, almost wistful sigh.

  “Perhaps I am not so upset that you arrived after all, Edris,” she said. Was “Edris” Zergan’s first name? Or some kind of pet name? Keffoule turned back to Rogers. “You are certain that this is your answer to my offer?”

  “Could not be more positive,” Rogers said, perhaps with a little too much enthusiasm. He didn’t want to insult the woman, only break her heart and embarrass her in front of a large contingent of her own troops. “I’m flattered by your request—I think—but I have other plans for my romantic future.”

  The silhouetted vision of the Viking came forward unbidden in his mind, and for a moment he lost himself in her wonderful, gargantuan features. The bitterness of their last few conversations seemed a little less pungent in this moment, for some reason. Perhaps when he returned to the ship he would make a genuine effort to patch things up with her. What had Mailn said? She thought Rogers would be good for the Viking?

  Keffoule shook her head slowly, her dark eyes boring into Rogers’ skull. “Then I am sorry.”

  Rogers had never heard a more disingenuous statement in his entire life. His hackles rose.

  “Alandra,” Zergan said, a warning tone entering his voice.

  “Why are you . . . oh,” Rogers said.

  He said “oh” because it didn’t take long to realize what was about to happen. He wasn’t sure what clued him in: the subtle gestures of Zergan to his troops to go into action, the cosmic shift of mood in the room, or the enemy commander flying over the table at him like a lion grabbing at the back of a fleeing gazelle.

  “Take cover!” he heard someone shout as he did just that, ducking below the table even as the nimble body of Alandra Keffoule sailed over him, hit the floor, and smoothly rolled to a standing position. She turned back to look at him with steely eyes, her calm, deadly poise not even remotely hinting that she might be turned to dust in the cross fire that was about to happen.

  The Meridan marines were currently squatting ridiculously behind stadium seating that was too short to hide anyone, but the brave and aggressive Thelicosans were advancing—slowly—down the seats, hoisting one leg over at a time like a gaggle of very confused geese. It was the most absurd and terrifying situation Rogers had ever been in.

  “You should have said yes, R. Wilson Rogers!” Keffoule said. “This would have been much easier!”

  “What happened to not wanting to aggravate the situation?” Rogers cried as he dove behind a supporting column. He did realize, however, that he’d yet to hear any shots being fired. Only a crazy, screaming woman attempting to do who-knew-what to him. Was this some sort of Thelicosan custom?

  “This is some sort of Thelicosan custom!” Tunger shouted.

  “Ah!” Rogers cried, spinning around. Somehow the corporal had emerged from the crowd and was squatting next to him. “What are you talking about?”

  “I wasn’t able to read too much on the subject,” Tunger said, his “thinking face” working pretty hard right now, “but I believe that kidnapping a potential mate is perfectly—”

  Something flashed in the edge of Rogers’ vision, and, before he could say “stop making your thinking face,” Tunger had collapsed in a heap on the floor. Rogers turned to find Keffoule standing over him, her eyes wild with the passion of battle. She’d kicked Tunger in the face.

  Oh, and yes, there was the shooting he’d been expecting. Whatever confusion and hesitation had held both squadrons back for the last few moments had dissipated, and the deadly, dramatic pulsing of disruptor rifles filled the room with its terrifying melody.

  And thank god for that shooting, because Keffoule, her glance quickly moving to the side for a moment, rolled out of the way and came to a stop behind another column. This put them both at such an angle that the two opposing forces were shooting to the side of them, giving them little concern that they’d be blasted to bits unless one of them tried to cross the gap.

  Making sure Tunger wasn’t dead—he wasn’t, though his lip was bleeding pretty badly—Rogers tried to figure out a way to get himself back into the safety of his own unit. They’d come here for him, and he couldn’t disappoint them by being shot or kicked in the face. But having a limp, lifeless zookeeper to drag out with him was complicating the situation a bit now.

  Keffoule’s mind was clearly working furiously as she tried to figure out how to do the exact opposite of what Rogers was trying to do without getting killed herself. Her eyes danced over the disruptor pulses that were flying between their two columns. She appeared to be chanting something. What was she doing? Why did Rogers care at this point in time? He needed to get out of here!

  Then, much to Rogers’ disbelief/horror, Keffoule stepped out into the chaotic pulses of light and slowly walked toward Rogers’ cover. Had she been timing the shots and looking for a path? Or were the Thelicosans and Meridans really that awful at their jobs?

  “Everything is math!” Keffoule shouted over the din of the gunfire. “Everything in this world is just a sequence of calculations governed by the laws of science. Come and master them with me, R. Wilson Rogers!”

  There was no way anyone could do that much mental math that quickly. The woman was clearly a demon.

  Risking a quick glance around the column to try to find a way out, Rogers saw that they were, also, that bad at their jobs. Two hundred years of not
actually having to fight wars obviously had not done very good things for small-unit tactics. The stadium seating wasn’t helping, either; none of the soldiers on either side could brace a weapon on anything steady, and they were having to quite literally shoot from the hip. One hapless Meridan marine was actually shooting at the ceiling, though Rogers couldn’t discern for what purpose he was doing so. In fact, the two sides were doing such an abysmal job of shooting each other that the only area in which anyone would absolutely, positively get killed was the space between Rogers and Mailn’s unit—the space where Rogers needed to go.

  “What the hell are you all spending so much time on the training deck for?” Rogers shouted over the noise of disruptor fire. “Do you even shoot while you’re down there?”

  As an answer, Mailn placed a round directly above Rogers’ head.

  “They’re using displacement shields, you moron!” Mailn yelled back.

  Rogers could see them now; tiny yellow, crackling planes of light were appearing in front of the Thelicosans as disruptor blasts deflected off the shields, further adding to the kill zone that was preventing Rogers from making a break for it. This was a very weird, very coincidental game of angles, in which he appeared to be the prize. A terrified part of him realized that this was Thelicosa he was dealing with—the geometric configuration had probably been very specifically calculated. Maybe Keffoule wasn’t a demon after all.

  A quick glance told him that being a demon and being a math genius were not mutually exclusive. Keffoule was busy making a slow but determined advance through the columns. At any moment she’d be on top of him, doing whatever it was she’d intended to do when she dove across the table.

  Another trio of disruptor blasts sizzled as they landed perilously close to Rogers’ vital organs, and he shrank back behind the column. Keffoule, for some reason, looked surprised and furious as she saw the blasts hit.

  “Edris!” she shouted.

  A frustrated jumble of speech, probably coming from Commodore Zergan, bubbled up from the sounds of battle, but Rogers couldn’t understand a word of it. Another blast or two hit the column behind which he was hiding.