Communication Failure

by Zieja, Joe

  “I don’t care!” Keffoule said in response to the wild-turkey-like speech coming from Zergan, dancing between disruptor pulses. Dear god, the woman could move through a thunderstorm and never get wet! He’d never seen such calculated agility in all his life.

  Rogers took advantage of the moment’s distraction to tear his eyes from the scary lady and try to see a way out.

  “I need to get Tunger out of here!” Rogers called to Mailn. One of the marines near her had been hit in the leg, and two more marines were dragging him off the battlefield, out the door through which Mailn’s troops had come. Rogers had a feeling this wasn’t going to remain a low-casualty skirmish for very long. “He’s been kicked in the face!”

  Mailn shouted some commands to a trio of marines, who broke off from the main force and slowly started making their way toward Rogers’ position. Glancing back at Keffoule, he wasn’t sure they’d get there in time—or in one piece.

  “Come on!” Rogers shouted. He started gathering up Tunger’s splayed limbs, thankful that the zookeeper kept himself light and spry. Careful to keep his body out of the line of fire, Rogers suddenly became very intimate with Tunger. He was also absolutely not using the lower-ranking man as a human shield as he heard another few blasts hit the floor near where he was hidden; it just wasn’t true.

  “He’s the enemy, Alandra!” that evil-looking Thelicosan Zergan shouted. “Why are you trying to protect him!”

  “I am ordering you to stop shooting at him, Commodore. Do not make me repeat myself. Shoot at the other Meridans all you like, but Rogers is mine. We will talk later as to why you were aboard this ship in the first place.”

  Despite not being on the receiving end of that woman’s voice, Rogers felt a tingle of fear working its way through his bones. It also could have been because she was still slowly working her way toward him, employing some really powerful geometry witchcraft to avoid being destroyed. Or because she had said the word “mine” with such obvious italics. Really, there wasn’t anything not spine-tinglingly terrifying about what was going on around him right now.

  The Meridans that Mailn had dispatched to grab him were getting close. Just a few more seconds and he’d be ready to move. Keffoule was still slowly moving her body to avoid being shot. Rogers found it difficult to take his eyes off her, if for no other reason than sheer incredulity. The way she moved was slow, much slower than one would think one would have to move to do something like dodge rifle blasts, and there was a . . . sensual quality to it. It was like some sort of ritual dance that one might see around a fire in a camp full of ancient Romany.

  Did she just wink at him?

  A shadow fell across his vision, telling him that the marines had arrived against all odds. He turned, saw the shielded faces of two men and a woman he didn’t recognize, and slowly pushed Tunger off his lap.

  “Here,” he said. “Take this zookeeper. Don’t mind the poop stains.”

  Two of them pulled Tunger away while the third provided covering fire. At least, that was what Rogers hoped he was doing. To Rogers, it just sort of looked like he was wasting ammunition by firing in random directions. But the marines all remained alive. So whatever he was doing, it was effective.

  Rogers looked away for a moment. Keffoule was alarmingly close, but it didn’t matter. Now that the marines had arrived, he could finally get out of here.

  “Alright,” he said, “let’s—”

  Turning back to look at the marines, he saw them halfway across the room, dragging Tunger.

  “Hey!” Rogers said. “You were supposed to take me, too!”

  “Get the captain, you idiots!” Mailn yelled. “The captain!”

  His heart pounding, Rogers turned around in a panic to look at how much progress Keffoule had made through the kill zone.

  Except he didn’t see her there.

  He saw her standing right next to him.

  “You should have said yes,” she said.

  Rogers really wasn’t sure what happened next, since he found himself very quickly spiraling into unconsciousness, but he was pretty sure he’d just gotten kicked in the face.

  Stick to the Schmurgle

  The Spartan, sparse accoutrements of Alandra’s stateroom allowed for a unique echoing effect as her voice, furious and commanding, bounced off the walls.

  “I cannot believe,” Alandra barked, “that you of all people would go behind my back during such a critical phase in my strategy!”

  Zergan, typically unflappable, looked a little flustered, evidenced by his inability to stand still. He paced around the room, which was really too small to pace in, so he more wobbled back and forth slowly than anything else. He seemed reluctant to look Alandra in the eye, as well he should have been.

  “Your ‘strategy’? That’s what you call it? If I’d known you were about to throw yourself at the feet of an inferior force, I might have asked him to marry me to save you the shame!”

  Alandra gave him a sharp glare. “I do not throw myself at the feet of anyone,” she said. “I’m not sure what scene you were watching, but I hardly think there was any obeisance being performed in that room by anyone. And if you hadn’t stormed the room with a bunch of armed troops, maybe it all would have gone more smoothly.”

  Any anger she’d felt previously in her career paled in comparison to what was going on inside her now. Normally reserved and calculating, like all good Thelicosans, Alandra had actually knocked all her decorations off her desk as she’d come into the room. But the amount of anger, disappointment, shame, and embarrassment she felt inside outweighed what she was displaying outside by a factor of ten. She’d never been so humiliated in her entire life. Not only had she broken intergalactic law to try to defend her homeland and regain her reputation—something that was appearing to be more of a foolhardy and unnecessary move with every observation of the Meridan fleet—she had asked Captain Rogers to marry her and had been rejected. Alandra Keffoule was unaccustomed to failure, unaccustomed to rejection.

  Rogers would come around, of course. That was inevitable and, therefore, a little reassuring. But had he simply said yes like he was supposed to—like his station demanded—all of this would never have happened.

  “If I hadn’t stormed the room,” Zergan said, finally meeting her eyes and ceasing his pacing, “the Meridans would probably have dragged your smoking corpse back to their ship as a trophy! You seem to be forgetting that we weren’t the only ones to break the agreement.”

  Alandra shook her head. “You keep saying ‘we’ broke the agreement. We did nothing of the sort! You broke the agreement, Zergan. You undermined my authority as a negotiator and commander of the fleet. Whatever suspicions the Meridans had that influenced their decision to bring their marines on board have been absolutely confirmed by your rashness. I was trying to solve this peacefully.”

  Rolling his eyes, Zergan barked a laugh. “Well, now it looks like we’re not competent enough to solve this at all. Maybe if you weren’t so love-struck—”

  “I am not love-struck,” Alandra said, biting off the words.

  “Oh really? Then why did you hide it from me?” Zergan took a step forward, his eyes aflame. “Why not let me in on your little secret?”

  “Zergan,” Alandra warned.

  “What have you been doing for the last month?” Zergan went on. “Looking at the intelligence reports of Rogers’ idiotic escapades aboard the Flagship and making smoochy faces?”

  Oh, now he was just being immature.

  “I do not make smoochy faces,” Alandra said. Why was she being defensive? There was no way anyone on the ship knew that she had, actually, done it once. But only once. And it was really quickly—it could have been confused for briefly tasting something sour.

  Remembering the reports, she felt the heat rise in her face. There was no better way to get to know anyone intimately than by having someone else intimately spy on them and then reading the reports.

  “I bet you do!” Zergan said. “Oh my Science
, I bet you look back at all McSchmidt’s reports and make smoochy faces and practice giving him your protractor, for calculus’ sake. And then he rejected—”

  She didn’t even know she was doing it. When it was over, she could scarcely believe she’d done it. But in the next instant, someone had kicked Zergan in the face, and she was pretty sure it wasn’t Zergan. He simply wasn’t flexible enough.

  To his credit, Zergan was a soldier. He didn’t sprawl on the floor, holding his face and weeping like a child the way most people did after she delivered spinning back kicks to their faces. In fact, he seemed to be trying to figure out exactly what he wanted to do as he sat there, his cheek reddening with the passing of every second. After a moment of awkward silence—during which Alandra tried to understand why she’d just done that—he settled on sneezing and standing back up.

  It was in that moment that she felt something break. It might have been Zergan’s jaw.

  But more than that, she thought it was something intangible, indescribable. Perhaps it was the bonds of trust built up over fifteen years of serving together in the most difficult assignments the Thelicosan military had to offer.

  No, it was probably Zergan’s jaw. It was very swollen.

  “I stood by you,” Zergan said quietly. “When everyone else thought you were a loose cannon. A calculator missing a key. I was there, trying to convince everyone that Alandra Keffoule could bounce back, that she could recover from anything.”

  Alandra swallowed. Why did he have to start talking about that now?

  “Edris,” she began, but Zergan, his face beginning to reach a size unbecoming an officer, shook his head.

  “You know I’ve never blamed you for my position,” he said.

  That’s because I begged you to stay where you were, you idiot, she thought, not without a little stab of guilt prickling her bones.

  “But at the very least,” he continued, “I thought, considering all we’ve been through, that I deserved a little more respect.”

  “This isn’t just about you and me,” Alandra said quietly, her normal fire subdued a bit by the winds of guilt and shame. “The threat—”

  “There was no threat,” Zergan said. “As soon as we got into this system, you and I both knew that McSchmidt’s reports were probably wrong.”

  Alandra opened her mouth to retort but thought better of it.

  “McSchmidt was an idiot,” she said.

  “McSchmidt was an idiot,” Zergan said simultaneously.

  An uncomfortable smirk passed across both of their faces, but Zergan’s quickly faded.

  “You’re right,” Zergan said. “It’s not about you and me.” He took a deep breath. “It was all about you. And now I know why you were so distracted. What else has slipped your notice, do you think?”

  That was an unexpected comment. Alandra frowned.

  “What are you—”

  A tone interrupted their conversation, letting Alandra know that Xan was trying to get in touch with her.

  “Xan, I’ve told you many times not to use that thing if we’re already in the same room.”

  Xan, who had been standing in the corner silently all this time, shrugged and put his datapad away.

  “I am a stickler for protocol, Grand Marshal,” he said, his cheeks flapping with every word.

  The sliding of the door was the only thing that told Alandra that Zergan had left. When she turned away from Xan, she saw only empty space where the man had been standing a moment earlier. What had he meant about things she had missed? She didn’t miss anything. That was not Alandra Keffoule’s way.

  He was speaking out of anger, she thought. You did kick him in the face, after all. Give him time.

  All of this was so frustrating. So . . . out of her control. What was she supposed to do now?

  “Grand Marshal?” Xan said softly.

  Alandra held up a hand, took a deep breath, and let out a therapeutic, blood-curdling shriek, curling her fingers, toes, nose, and lips as she put all the day’s insanity into one sound and let it rip through the air.

  “Better?” Xan asked.

  “No,” Alandra said. “Not really. What did you want to talk to me about?”

  “The infirmary has contacted me,” Xan said. “It appears Captain Rogers is awake.”

  Alandra skipped out of the room.

  * * *

  The world came together like pieces of a shattered kaleidoscope, each shard bringing with it another tidbit of Rogers’ memory. It took a moment for them all to form, during which Rogers thought, in alternating turns, that he was dead, that he’d been hit in the face by the Viking again, and that the Artificial Intelligence Ground Combat Squadron had been reinstituted to use him as a battering ram. When the spinning stopped and Rogers found himself firmly back inside his own body, he was troubled to find that, despite all of those things being different levels of bad, reality was worse. Much worse.

  “Congratulations on regaining consciousness!” came a voice from the machine that Rogers assumed had been monitoring his vitals. “You are entitled to one free Concussion Helper Kit, available at any of the Snaggardir’s Sundries available throughout the galaxy. Remember, whatever you need, you can Snag It at Snaggardir’sTM.”

  God, he was starting to really hate that voice.

  He opened his eyes to find himself in an unfamiliar infirmary, which he supposed was much better than a grave or open space.

  “Captain Rogers,” came the voice of a frail man standing at the side of his bed. His beady eyes stared at Rogers with an utter absence of emotion as he made unenthusiastic gestures on his datapad. “How do you feel?”

  Rogers didn’t need to see the man’s uniform to know that he wasn’t on a Meridan ship. The sign above the door that said YOU ARE NOT ON A MERIDAN SHIP was enough evidence, though he wondered who would put such a sign there and why.

  The doctor, or nurse, or executioner—he could have been any of the three with equal probability—seemed to notice Rogers’ gaze. “That’s a Rorschach blot test,” the doctor said dryly. “What do you see?”

  Rogers looked at him sideways. “That’s not a blob,” Rogers said. “It’s clearly a sign that says ‘You Are Not on a Meridan Ship.’ ”

  The doctor gave no reaction to Rogers’ refutation other than looking down at his datapad, making a few gestures, and emitting a very suggestive “Mm-hmm.”

  “What?” Rogers said. “What are you mm-hmm-ing about? That’s a sign, written in plain, easy-to-read Standard. There’s nothing even remotely blot-ish about it!”

  The doctor nodded and said “Mm-hmm” again.

  “Stop that!”

  Rogers sat up in bed, fighting the dizziness that washed over him, and tried to get a better look around the room. He was still dressed in his official uniform, though it looked more fit for a vagabond than it did for an admiral after all he’d been through, and his face really, really hurt. There was some soreness in his hand from where an IV had been removed. How long had he been out?

  The infirmary—for that was where he guessed he was instead of the brig, since he could see Thelicosan troops moving freely in the hallway—was bare bones at best, with only a few beds nearby, all of them empty. It looked more like an auxiliary treatment room than a sick ward. Was he on the Limiter? Or some other Thelicosan ship?

  “Don’t mind Dr. Eilan,” a woman’s voice said. “He sees Rorschach blots in everything.”

  Rogers turned to the doorway to find a woman he didn’t recognize. He’d thought for sure he’d be seeing the face of Grand Marshal Keffoule, waving a protractor at him or some craziness, but he found himself looking at someone who was probably a decade older than Rogers, dressed in an anachronistic-looking pantsuit. Her hair, a shimmering golden color, was pulled tightly back into a meticulously formed bun, and her angular, birdlike face gave the impression that she was about to swoop down and peck Rogers’ eyes out.

  “I do not,” Dr. Eilan said. “It’s not my fault that the interns keep messing
with my datapad’s screen saver and changing it to blots.”

  “There are no blots on your datapad,” the woman said.

  “Well, what’s this, then?”

  “His medical chart.”

  Rather than taking offense or trying to argue, the doctor simply made another notation on his datapad and said “Mm-hmm.”

  “Please make him stop that,” Rogers said.

  “Doctor, can you give us a moment?” the woman asked.

  “Mm-hmm.”

  Regardless of how dire his circumstances were, Rogers felt better when the doctor left the room.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I was afraid I was going to have to break my habit of being generally nonviolent.”

  “Generally?” the woman said, raising an eyebrow.

  “Well, I hit people every once in a while,” Rogers said, shrugging. “Sometimes you just gotta.”

  It was impossible to tell what effect this remark had on the woman, or even whether or not she’d been listening to him. Instead of responding, she stepped to the side of Rogers’ bed, pulled up a chair, and then made a point of not sitting in it at all.

  “My name is Vilia Quinn,” she said stiffly. “I am Council Secretary Advising Civilian Authority to the Colliders and Grand Marshal Keffoule, whom you have already met.”

  Rogers swallowed, remembering very distinctly the circumstances under which he and Grand Marshal Keffoule had met. In his head, he saw her in slow motion, dancing through a hail of disruptor blasts, her eyes fixed on his the entire time, a protractor in one hand, a bloody knife in the other. Actually, he wasn’t sure there had been a knife, but it did a lot to enhance the image.

  “I have,” he said flatly. “What did you say your title was? Secretary? Do you manage the Grand Marshal’s emails or something?”

  Quinn’s entire face tightened at that remark. He hadn’t intended it to be insulting, but it seemed like he’d been doing a lot of things lately that he hadn’t intended, so it should have been no surprise.