by Zieja, Joe
“We were discussing something of the utmost importance,” Quinn said.
“Oh?” Zergan said, stepping into the room. Rogers let him in. “Then I must already know about it. I don’t believe there is anything of the ‘utmost importance’ that isn’t already on my desk.”
Quinn stiffened—Rogers thought if she stiffened anymore, she might turn into a plank of wood—but didn’t respond. Zergan swaggered toward her, his eyebrow darkening.
“Surely you can talk about it with me here. Perhaps I can contribute to the discussion.”
She didn’t step back—not exactly—but there was a subtle shifting of her weight that might have indicated a bit of retreat. They locked eyes, and Rogers got the distinct feeling that he was about to be involved in something very messy.
“Alright, alright,” he said, stepping toward them and avoiding some of the spilled contents of the breakfast tray. Wow, he’d really made a mess. “Look, I don’t want any blood on the floor or anything. Secretary Quinn, why don’t you take a break, and you and I can unearth the mysteries of history later.”
Quinn looked between Rogers and Zergan, clutching her wrist very tightly. The air practically crackled with tension. Rogers also happened to just have stepped on some foil wrapping that had fallen off the tray, so maybe that had been the crackle.
Finally, Quinn broke. She looked away from Zergan and walked toward the door, passing close enough to the commodore to barely brush his shoulder. Perhaps she was tougher than Rogers had originally thought; had he been confronted with someone like that, Rogers’ first instinct would have been to run the hell away.
“If you change your mind,” Quinn said, casting a dark glance Rogers’ way, “find me.”
“Fine, fine,” Rogers said, and Quinn left the room.
Zergan, who had been watching the woman leave the room, shook his head as he turned around. His grizzled, hard face broke into a cold, wolfish grin.
“Politicians,” he said as if that explained everything. “What was she bothering you with?”
For some reason, Rogers got a hunch that he should lie, which, he reflected briefly, was not an infrequent sort of hunch.
“Would you believe she wanted to marry me instead of the Grand Marshal?” he said, then recognized that perhaps he’d made a poor joke, if for no other reason than that, in a brief flash of expression, Zergan looked like he wanted to slice him in half and use him to butter some very gruesome—but absolutely delicious—toast.
Before Rogers could try to weasel his way out of the impending beating and travel in search of said toast, Zergan’s expression changed. Was everyone on this ship bipolar, or what?
“I’m sure you’re the talk of every lady on this ship,” Zergan said, his voice low. “But that’s not what I came here to talk to you about. I feel like you and I got off on the wrong foot.”
Rogers sat in the chair that Quinn had been supposed to sit in. It didn’t set him on fire or anything—why didn’t that damn woman sit down?
“Shooting at a man tends to do that,” Rogers said. “Then again, your boss kicked me in the face, and I’m sort of starting to like her, so maybe you’re not so bad.”
That look of violence flashed across Zergan’s face again, making Rogers think. He wasn’t so dense that he couldn’t figure out when a man had the hots for a woman.
Zergan had the hots for Quinn.
Wait. No. That wasn’t right.
Zergan had the hots for Keffoule. And that meant that Rogers couldn’t trust him.
“I wanted to make it up to you by inviting you to the ship’s bar.”
Well, maybe Rogers could trust him a little bit.
* * *
The bridge of the Flagship was pretty quiet. And everyone seemed to be staring at Deet. It might have had something to do with the fact that he’d just revealed to everyone that all the droids had been purposefully programmed by someone to sow chaos and, eventually, kill everyone and take over the ship.
That had been the short version of the story, anyway. The long version included a lot of other details about operating systems, computer code, and the fact that there were still a lot of bits of information that Deet hadn’t been able to decode.
Regardless, Deet didn’t know what they were so worried about. All the droids had been decommissioned anyway. It wasn’t like they were going to wake up, become robot-zombies, and try again.
Why were they staring at him, anyway?
“Well,” he said. “Any questions?”
“Yeah,” Sergeant Mailn said. “Who is Zeus Holdings?”
Deet beeped. If he’d known that, he probably would have included it in the briefing.
“We don’t know,” he said. “And without access to the wider information network, we can’t do much research.”
“Why do they want to kill us?” someone else asked.
“Oh, did I not include that vital piece of information?” Deet said, scoring a point for himself for successfully using sarcasm in a public setting. “I don’t know. It wasn’t written in essay form in the millions and millions of lines of code I expertly analyzed to bring you this information. Sorry to disappoint you.”
“Do you think, like, the microwaves in the mess halls are going to come alive next?”
The whole room turned to look at Flash.
“What?” he said. “I cook my food in there every day. I don’t want them coming up on my six with poison lasers or something.”
And the whole room proceeded to ignore him. It was a common occurrence.
“What I don’t understand,” said the Viking, who had been pacing back and forth nervously in one corner of the bridge, “is why we’re spending any time at all worrying about a bunch of piles of scrap metal when we have an enemy fleet pretty much on top of us.”
Deet would have sighed if sighing made any sense from a mechanical point of view. He was all for using human patterns of speech, but he was still a bit far from using human body language. He waved his arms frantically in the air to indicate frustration.
“Because there’s nothing we can do about that at the moment,” he said.
“Like hell there’s nothing we can do about it,” the Viking said, taking a step toward the center of the bridge. The entire crew took a step back. The Viking had been perpetually on edge ever since the negotiations had broken down, and everyone around her had been feeling it. Literally, physically feeling it. Deet had learned shortly after his conversation with Master Sergeant Hart that the troop running through the engineering bay on fire had been set ablaze by the Viking.
“If we’re going to surrender—and we are not going to surrender—then let’s get it over with already. If not, let’s fight!”
The Viking picked up an unfortunate systems analyst and threw her at another unfortunate systems analyst. “I can’t stand this sitting around and doing nothing!”
“We can’t surrender.” Commander Belgrave spoke up. “We can’t communicate, and you broke Guff’s wrist when you used him as a bowling ball.”
The Viking didn’t say anything for a moment. She stood there, folding her arms, perhaps to force them to stop moving. Deet’s sensors detected a trembling throughout her body, which was an odd thing to see. The Viking was perpetually angry, but she was never trembling. Deet’s analytical circuits told him that perhaps this wasn’t her typical anger. The Viking looked at the floor.
“She has him,” she whispered, so low that Deet was likely the only person who heard her correctly.
Sergeant Mailn, who had been standing at the Viking’s side, leaned almost imperceptibly to one side until she and the marine captain touched shoulders. Had they been drinking? Were the ship’s inertial dampeners malfunctioning? There was no reason, other than a vestibular error, that Sergeant Mailn should have done such a thing. Deet made a note to recommend a physical exam.
“What is the giant mumbling?” Flash said.
The Viking’s eyes shot up. “She has . . .” Pausing for a moment to swallow, the
Viking unfolded her arms and took a deep breath. The trembling stopped as her voice’s volume rose. “That crazy bitch is over there with the commander of our fleet, and you morons are all talking about how sorry our lives are over here. What if he’s . . . what if there’s a war coming and we’re too busy pussyfooting around to be ready?”
“Captain,” Sergeant Mailn said softly. “It’s alright to—”
“No it’s not goddamn alright! Nothing is goddamn alright! I don’t know what military you morons joined, but I joined the one that shoots people.”
With that, the Viking suddenly made for the door, knocking over several pieces of equipment as she did so. Surprisingly, she grabbed the back of Flash’s pajama-like flight suit and began to drag him out with her.
“Hey!” he cried, his sunglasses bobbing up and down on his nose as he struggled. “What has gotten into your cranium, wingman? You didn’t even give me a chance to pop chaff!”
“Speak Standard or shut up!” the Viking said. She didn’t look back as she stormed off the bridge, dragging the unfortunate pilot behind her. The crew took a moment to stare awkwardly at the door, likely torn between feeling sorry for the pilot and cheering for the Viking.
“That concludes my briefing,” Deet said, breaking the silence. “Per our previous orders, everyone is to continue looking busy, not panicking, and not breathing a word about our dire, dire situation to anyone outside this bridge, despite the fact that we now know that every single droid on this ship was specifically programmed to kill us.”
Why were they staring at him like that? Maybe he wasn’t explaining it fully enough.
“Yes,” he continued, “not one droid on this ship is immune to the code compelling them to attempt a takeover, first through subversive means and then by violence if necessary. Anything at all to get them in command of the ship. Things like briefing the bridge and telling them exactly what to do and what not to do.”
A few of the troops exchanged glances, but for some reason nobody moved. Deet was a higher form of intelligence, so there was always a chance he was grossly overestimating them. He didn’t really have time to make up the phenomenal intellectual gap, though. He had a ship to run.
“Whatever,” he said. “You’re all dismissed.”
Slowly, awkwardly, the troops began to tear their eyes from him and return to their duties, but Deet thought that perhaps there was a tension in the air that had not been there before. For a moment he thought the electrical cable had gotten loose again—in fact, he kind of wished it had—but then he realized it was because everyone was looking at him over their shoulders. And everyone was whispering. And there were a lot of hands on disruptor pistols.
Walking over to where Commander Belgrave was sitting and making a career out of not flying a ship, Deet lowered his vocal output.
“What’s wrong with them?” Deet asked. “I’m not sure I understand the concept of morale yet, but I am almost certain that this is not the desired psychological condition of a functioning military unit.”
Belgrave leaned back in his chair and thought for a moment, perhaps taking a moment to really let everything sink in. Belgrave was so philosophical.
“Well,” Belgrave said slowly. “You know how you just told them that every droid on the ship was programmed to kill them?”
“Yes,” Deet said. “I believe I said it several times.”
Belgrave pointed at him. “You’re a droid.”
Deet processed this for a moment, then beeped.
“Oh, [EXCREMENT]. I’m going to crack and [EXPLETIVE] kill everyone, aren’t I?”
The bridge stopped again.
“That probably didn’t help,” Belgrave said.
Eureka!
It took Rogers a little while to get to the Overflowing Bathtub, the Limiter’s one and only, strangely named bar. Rogers could hardly believe that the ship had a bar at all. The Flagship didn’t even have one, and he’d always thought Meridans were a lot more focused on drinking than Thelicosans. When he arrived, however, he noticed that it wasn’t exactly a party spot. The Overflowing Bathtub was more of a cozy martini and cigar bar than a club, decked out with smooth, smoky-red wood paneling and various high-class paintings. It sort of reminded Rogers of the quarterdeck on the Flagship, but less mind-numbingly tacky.
He only saw this through the hazy glass on the outside of the room, however. Located on the same deck of the Limiter as most of the dining facilities, the bar was closed. At least, he thought it was closed. The operating hours posted on the outside of the door indicated that it should have been open—and there also appeared to be a bartender behind the counter—but when Rogers tried to open the door it gave him a red light and a very rude buzzer noise.
“I apologize for being late,” came a voice from behind Rogers, so close that it nearly made him jump. Rogers spun, probably faster than he ought to have, to find Zergan standing extremely close to him. Rogers’ hand instinctively went to his pistol holster, only to discover that his pistol holster was not where he’d put it. He’d done such a poor job buckling it that the force of his turn put the pistol squarely between his butt cheeks, which really just sort of made him look like he was scratching his hip.
“Hi there,” Rogers said, adjusting the holster. Zergan turned a discerning eye to the pistol, though if he was surprised that Keffoule had given a Meridan a weapon, he did not show it in his face. When he was done looking like he was adjusting his underwear, Rogers jerked a thumb at the locked door. “I think they’re closed.”
“Oh no,” Zergan said. He indicated that he wanted to get around Rogers, and Rogers stepped aside as the grizzled soldier swiped a keycard in front of the door control. The light went from red to green and emitted a beep.
“Congratulations on unlocking the bar!” came a familiar feminine voice. “You are entitled to—”
“Shut up, Sara,” Zergan barked, and the voice—surprisingly—cut off. He cleared his throat. “That’s, ah, the name I’ve given to that voice. You know that voice, right? It’s in everything.” Zergan leaned, rather creepily, on the word “everything” in a way that made Rogers think perhaps Zergan had been intimate with the door control.
“Uh, yeah,” Rogers said. “Sure. It seems like Snaggardir’s is all over the place, doesn’t it?”
Zergan only smiled and waved him through the now-open door to the Overflowing Bathtub. The inside looked much like Rogers had expected from the outside, with some added details. A man with a very thick mustache was behind the bar, wearing a very floppy cap that hung low over his eyes, so much so that it practically obstructed his whole face. He made himself busy working the bar, wiping it with a cloth like bartenders were wont to do, and glanced up with a quick nod as the two of them entered. The bar was otherwise uninhabited, unless you could consider several trophy-sized fish hanging on the wall drinking companions.
“Nice place,” Rogers said. “Officers only?”
“Yes,” Zergan said. “Above a certain pay grade, too. It helps give the place a certain . . . flavor.”
Rogers blanched a bit at that. Meridans had a fairly narrow social gap between officer and enlisted, but it wasn’t like that everywhere. Letting the comment slide off him—he’d been a sergeant himself until just a short while ago—he slowly cruised toward the bar. Aside from the fish, the Overflowing Bathtub was sparsely and tastefully decorated, with the exception of a large picture hanging over the bartender’s head. In an elaborate gold frame rested a painting of a naked old man sprinting away from what Rogers assumed was a bathtub, his finger in the air. Certain aspects of his anatomy gave the clear impression that the old man was moving quickly.
“So,” Rogers said as he took a seat. “How long have you been on the Limiter ?”
The stools were comfortable, sturdy things with thick, leather-upholstered padding on top. He swiveled around on his with practiced ease, almost giggling with delight. Never in a million years had he thought he’d turn around on a Thelicosan ship and think, I’m home. Rog
ers was becoming more secure in his decision not to return to the Flagship, and doing a very good job of segmenting and crushing the thoughts about betraying his homeland, his friends, and all that really complicated, deep emotional stuff.
“A while,” Zergan said, and Rogers nodded. He supposed maybe personal details weren’t a good way to start conversations with your enemy. Were they enemies? Rogers was pretty sure they were still enemies.
“What will you have?” Zergan asked. “There’s plenty of fine liquor here to suit any taste.” He let out a low laugh, two quick chuckles that made Rogers think he’d made some private joke.
As much as Rogers liked Jasker 120, the thought of consuming more at the moment made his stomach do a little “please don’t do that to me again” dance. Rogers supposed he should take it easy, unless Zergan challenged him to a duel. Then it was on.
“You pick,” Rogers said, which again resulted in that double chuckle.
“How about a real man’s drink?” Zergan said, then turned to the bartender. “We’d like two Iron Morgans.”
That certainly sounded manly. The bartender nodded, not looking up from where he seemed to be vigorously trying to get a spot out of the wood.
“Yes, surr,” he said, obviously another thick-accented Thelicosan. Rogers was getting the impression that the accent was sort of a lowbrow thing, like a sign of lower birth or something. Not that he was classist, he just hadn’t heard anyone of high status with an accent that was thick enough to warrant a translator like Tunger.
Zergan was silent while the bartender made the drinks, and Rogers followed his lead on setting the mood, watching the bartender instead of staring at a silent companion. The bartender moved with lightning precision, the sort of skill that could only come with years of slinging drinks and listening to boring people’s problems. Wondering what a “manly” drink looked like, Rogers was surprised when he started reaching for the tropical liqueurs and maraschino cherries. Further surprised when he reached for the pineapple slices and umbrellas. And even further astonished when he poured the mixtures into a pair of delicate glasses cut into the shape of kittens.