by Zieja, Joe
“And what if you don’t get the message through? What if they don’t believe you?” Rogers asked. “I drown in a giant vat of milk! What a way to go. No, Quinn, this is stupid.”
Quinn stepped closer to him, making Rogers much more nervous than a short politician should have been able to. She glared at him, her eyes fierce, and spoke in low tones.
“Listen,” she said. “There’s more at stake here than the possibility of one man drowning in a milk vat.”
“One very important man,” Rogers said.
Quinn ignored him. “I’ve uncovered information that is vital to the survival of our galaxy, Captain Rogers, and I need you to broadcast it to your home world. Once you get back, I’m going to disable the jamming net as much as I can so that you can get word back to Merida Prime. The moment that hole in the net opens up, you must tell everyone you can that Jupiter is—”
An explosion rocked the ship, causing the floor to shake and several of the holographic generators in the farm to go off. The sheep that had just passed scattered, bleating frantically as the little shepherd chased after them, sobbing. The cows mooed more enthusiastically, if such a thing could be done, and the cowboy calmly lit another cigarette.
“What the hell was that?” Rogers said.
Without answering, Quinn dashed away, her running form surprisingly proper. It looked awkward for someone wearing a suit to be moving at a dead sprint, but Rogers didn’t have time to criticize. He ambled after her, not able to keep up at all, and followed her back into the hallway, which was rapidly filling with dust and smoke and some very confused Thelicosan troops.
“What happened?” someone shouted.
“Someone crashed into the shuttle hangar!” someone else cried.
Rogers and Quinn stopped in the hallway, looking down toward the entrance to the hangar. People were filing out the door, looking a bit dazed, and amber lights on the ceiling began emitting bursts of light.
“Think it’s serious?” Rogers asked.
“I don’t know. This may sound callous, but that’s not important right now. It may be the distraction we need. I need you to listen to me.”
“Not important?” Roger said. “Are you crazy? If they punched a hole in the airlock or something, this whole ship could turn inside out. Maybe we should go talk somewhere else and, you know, abandon the idea of me getting stuffed into a milk container.”
For a bureaucrat, Quinn was incredibly fast. She slapped him in the face so quickly that he didn’t even have time to think about ducking, something that he now considered himself an expert at.
“Hey!” he said. “Why do all the women in my life feel the need to cause me physical harm?”
“If you’re as deliberately obtuse with them as you are with me, then I can hardly blame them,” Quinn hissed. “Now listen to me and listen well. There are Jupiterians on this ship. I don’t know how many of them, but Zergan is their leader. They’re plotting some kind of uprising, but I don’t have the details yet. I was stuck in Zergan’s room for half the day and haven’t had time to look through the files I stole.”
Rogers raised an eyebrow. “Stuck in Zergan’s room? Secretary Quinn, I didn’t peg you for the type of lady who—don’t slap me again!”
She stopped, her arm raised. “I was in there performing my duties.”
“Suuuuure,” Rogers said. “Duties.”
“I listened to him have a conversation with someone else, some woman I didn’t know. She definitely wasn’t on the ship, and Zergan is definitely working for Jupiter.”
“Oh come on,” Rogers said. “The Jupiterian diaspora was a long time ago. They didn’t get their own system, so they just assimilated into the other systems. That’s the way diasporas work.”
“I don’t have the details yet,” Quinn said, “but they’re big enough to be pushing all of Thelicosa into war with the Meridans, using this fleet as their tool. To me, that says they didn’t exactly go meekly.”
Rogers chewed on the inside of his lip, still wondering about the explosion that had happened in the hangar. Couldn’t he just go in there and steal a shuttle in the confusion? He wasn’t an awful pilot.
“So why are you telling me this?” he said. “Why not tell Keffoule?”
Quinn narrowed her eyes. “Sometimes I wonder what Keffoule sees in you. What would you do if someone you hated came up to you and told you that your best and most trusted friend had been plotting against you from the beginning?”
Rogers thought for a moment. “A spinning back kick to the face.”
“Right. I need you to get back to your ship and transmit everything I can get you back to your headquarters. If Zergan takes control of the ship and convinces Keffoule to wipe out your battle group, there will be no turning back from war. And that’s not the only thing. They kept talking about some sort of schedule—”
“Rogers!” someone shouted from behind him.
Time slowed down as he recognized the source of the voice. The siren’s song reached out to him from the depths of his dreams and slowly caressed his ears, whispering the sonorous tones directly into the deepest parts of his consciousness. It sounded like a gentle angel that had spent the last ten years chain-smoking cigars and screaming at people. It sounded like home.
“Viking!” he cried with every part of his yearning soul.
The hulking form of the woman he desperately loved came charging toward him, splendidly decked out in full combat gear and wielding at least two disruptor rifles, a belt full of plasma grenades, and, for some reason, a scimitar strapped to her back. A helmet obstructed most of her face, but he’d recognize that gait and voice anywhere.
Instantly, he realized he’d been a fool to think he could live without her.
Acting purely on instinct, he ran at her, his arms open, but caught only air as she sprinted past him, raised the butt of her rifle, and smashed Quinn in the jaw.
Quinn flew clear off her feet, her body arcing like a thrown stuffed animal, and landed on her back, likely suffering a second concussion as her head bounced off the hard metal floor of the ship.
“Is that her?” the Viking yelled, pointing the barrel of her rifle at the supine form of Quinn. “Is this the crazy bitch Kerfuffle or whatever? I swear, if it is—”
“No!” Rogers said. “No! Don’t shoot! In fact, you just butt-smashed the person who was trying to help me escape.”
“Oh,” the Viking said after a moment. She seemed reluctant not to pull the trigger, but eventually took her rifle away. Rogers now noticed the other two marines, neither of whom he could recognize with all their combat gear on, doing sweeps of the hallway. Thelicosan security hadn’t responded yet, thankfully, so nobody was shooting at anyone else.
“You came for me,” Rogers said.
“Even if you’re the worst goddamned commander I’ve ever seen,” the Viking said, turning around and giving some hand signals to the other two marines, “you’re my worst goddamned commander.”
Rogers’ mouth hung open. “But my tactics,” he began.
The Viking cleared her throat. “We can work on your tactics later, okay? Mine . . . maybe weren’t the best either. But we can’t work on anything in the middle of a bunch of dirty Thellies. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Rogers thought his heart was going to explode out of his chest. She came for him!
“Wait,” he said, thinking for a moment. “Did you . . . crash into the side of the ship?”
The Viking shrugged. “How the hell else was I supposed to get on board? Ask for landing clearance? Look, unless you’ve gotten used to living as part of Keffoule’s harem or whatever, I suggest we get back to Flash and—”
“Oh no,” Rogers said. “You brought that idiot?”
“I brought the only pilot stupid enough to think that crashing into the enemy flagship could be considered flashy. He’s in the middle of stealing another shuttle right now, and it should be ready. So if you don’t mind, I’d like to get out of here before people start shootin
g at us.”
Rogers nodded, agreeing that escaping while not being shot at was preferable to escaping while being shot at, and the Viking motioned for the other two marines to follow. They were interrupted by someone running at them, screaming.
“Wait! Wait for me!” came another voice that Rogers recognized. The only problem was that it came from a face he didn’t recognize. A man wearing a sort of low-brimmed chef hat came running down the hallway, yelling in an incomprehensible Thelicosan accent. It was the bartender from the Overflowing Bathtub. What the hell was he doing here? Was this about Rogers’ unpaid tab? Or the fact that Keffoule had destroyed his bar?
“Surr! Suuurr! Aie wunt ter kurm home!”
“Can I shoot him?” the Viking asked.
“Wait,” Rogers said. Something began to dawn on him, and suddenly he knew who it was.
“That’s Tunger!”
“I know who it is,” the Viking said, leveling her rifle.
“Oh, stop it!” Rogers said, pushing the rifle off target.
Tunger approached them, out of breath, and tore off his cap and mustache, casting them aside. Finally Rogers was able to see the face of the “interpreter” who had been rescued instead of him.
“You,” Rogers said.
“You!” Quinn said. Rogers turned to see that she’d recovered consciousness, though she didn’t look very happy about it. Her jaw was swollen and she was barely able to sit up straight. She wobbled back and forth precariously. “You’re the doctor!”
“What, the ‘stick to the schmurgle’ guy? No, he’s the bartender,” Rogers said, though even as he argued he knew that there was something similar about the two men.
Quinn looked at Rogers for a moment, then looked back at Tunger. Her eyes widened. “You’re the janitor, too!”
“Who is this person?!” Rogers cried.
“Take me back with you!” Tunger said without responding to any of their accusations, still breathing heavily. “Being a spy is too hard. All these facial hair changes are starting to give me eczema.” He pointed at several red splotches on his face.
“You owe this man your life,” Quinn said.
Rogers frowned. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard.”
“Zergan has been trying to kill you,” Quinn said.
“Oh really? Thanks for including that in the initial report. I might not have gone on a fruity kitten drink date with him if I had known that.”
“This man protected you while you were hungover from partying all night with Keffoule.”
The Viking stiffened almost imperceptibly.
“No, no,” Rogers said, waving his hands. “It’s not what you think. What are you talking about, Quinn?”
“Have him tell you,” Quinn said, standing up and brushing herself off. “Right now you should get out of here. I’ll do my best to start opening up the communications channels and cover your escape. You need to get that information to your headquarters as soon as possible so we can avert interstellar war. I’ll transmit whatever details I can.” She looked at the Viking. “I hope you can get him out of here alive.”
The Viking just barked a belly laugh and turned away, motioning for the other marines to follow. Tunger happily galloped off, but Rogers stayed behind for a moment.
“Thanks, Secretary Quinn,” he said.
“I didn’t do this for you,” she said. “I did this for the galaxy.”
Rogers blinked. “Okay. Well, alright. Fine. Whatever. See you later . . . jerk.”
He turned and jogged after the departing Meridans, taking a moment to survey the curvaceous, muscular form of the Viking from a new and exciting angle that didn’t involve a fist flying at his face. It was a wonderful experience, enhanced by the fact that she was lumbering down the hallway at a high speed.
“Tunger,” Rogers said, panting as he caught up. “What was she talking about?”
“Oh,” Tunger said. “Nothing. After I got on board and found my facial hair kit, I heard that guy Zergan or whatever saying something about wanting to kill you. It turned out he had a facial hair kit too. He tried to inject you with poison in the infirmary.”
Rogers remembered the doctor insisting it was time for his medicine, and now he remembered that the doctor’s beard had been a little crooked. But now that he thought about it, he realized there was no disguising those/that eyebrows/eyebrow. That had definitely been Zergan, and he’d definitely been trying to kill Rogers.
Before Rogers could ask Tunger about any other attempts on his life, they turned into the hangar, the door of which was a little crooked from the blast. Rogers could hear the shouts of Thelicosan troops coming from the other end of the hallway, probably the security detail coming to find out what the hell had just happened to their hangar. Nobody was shooting at them yet, though, so that was a plus.
“Where’s Flash?” Rogers asked as they burst into the hangar, the size of the docking bay overwhelming his senses. There must have been two hundred ships of different makes and models in there, all of them shuttles. Pilots and maintenance crews were scattered all over the place, trying to inspect ships for damage. In one corner, Rogers could see the tattered, smoking remains of a Meridan shuttle that was now unrecognizable, the gangplank twisted like a funhouse slide.
“I don’t know,” the Viking said, scanning the room while her two companions provided cover. “He didn’t say which—”
“There!” Tunger said.
Rogers looked where Tunger was pointing to see a shuttle, named the Bwana according to an inscription on the side of its hull, that was repeatedly lifting off the ground and then coming down again, creating the impression of a very excited puppy hopping up and down.
“Oh yeah,” Rogers said. “That’s him. Let’s go!”
They sprinted across the loading dock, which might not have been the best way to keep anonymous in the surrounding confusion. Several of the pilots, thankfully none of them armed, charged the Viking and very shortly found out what it felt like to be run over by a bull. One of them actually flew bodily and smacked into the side of another shuttle, doing that thing where his body slid off the side of it like an egg tossed against the wall.
“God I love you,” Rogers muttered.
“What?” the Viking said.
“I said we’re almost there!”
It was a good thing, too; he could hear the storming footsteps of what he assumed was security coming into the hangar. Shouts of panic and some confused explanations started to erupt from behind them, with the crew trying to explain to the security detail where Rogers and his coterie had gone.
“Hurry!” he shouted.
Disruptor fire started to impact behind them, and Rogers found that his pistol had miraculously appeared in his hand. Without looking, he pointed the gun behind him and squeezed the trigger several times, only to realize that he hadn’t taken the safety off. By the time he figured out where the safety was, he was already at the gangplank to the still-hopping shuttle.
“Flash!” Rogers yelled. “Stop jumping this damn thing up and down! We’re here!”
“Oh, hey, Skip,” came a voice from the cockpit. “I was just trying to see if this thing worked.”
“You’re also damn near pulling the magnetic chocks out,” Rogers said. That was why the ship had been hopping; the ship had been magnetically chocked—like all ships were supposed to be when they were in a docking configuration—so the spacecraft wouldn’t tumble from sudden inertial shifts or from an enemy vessel crashing into the docking bay. Having been a mechanic and engineer for many years, Rogers was able to see how the Thelicosan model disengaged and quickly freed the ship from its bonds.
“We’re good to go!” he shouted. Pointing his pistol at what he could now see was a very large security contingent, he fired several shots, none of which landed anywhere near the Thelicosan troops. The Viking and her two marines crouched by the bottom of the gangplank and laid down a barrage of fire, causing the approaching Thelicosans to scatter and take c
over.
“Go!” the Viking said, using her elbow to point behind her.
Tunger scrambled up the gangplank, and Rogers followed suit. The moment he passed through the threshold, the marine mini-formation collapsed, and Rogers screamed at Flash to raise the gangplank. Pulses of disruptor energy were bouncing off the thick hull of the shuttle, creating a sort of high-pitched whine as the energy dissipated.
Rogers stood in the entryway, panting, looking for a way to get to the cockpit of the shuttle, which seemed to be slightly elevated from the passenger bay. The marines, clearly done with their shooting, immediately relaxed as if nothing interesting had happened at all and buckled themselves in. Tunger practically collapsed into his chair, rubbing the red marks on his face where his various fake facial hair had begun leaving a gross-looking rash.
“Thanks,” Rogers said to all of them. “I’m going to go check on our pilot and then I can fill you in on what’s going on.”
The Viking gave him a dismissive hand wave and began going through cooldown procedures with her rifle and muttering with the other marines. Rogers took a long look at her, then moved toward where Flash was sitting. A voice, talking to itself, led him to the small two-person cockpit, which gave Rogers a flashback to the Awesome. He missed that ship.
“Flash,” Rogers said as he sat down in the copilot’s seat. “I took the chocks off. We can leave anytime.”
“Flaps up. Throttle to quarter. Lights on. Gear down,” Flash was saying. Muttering, really.
“Flaps?” Rogers said. “Flaps? It’s space! There’s no air!”
“Battery. Stabilizer. Comm channel one. Comm channel backup.”
“Flash!” Rogers yelled. “What the hell are you doing?”
Flash, looking angry at being interrupted, glared at Rogers, the reflective surface of his aviator sunglasses shining with fury. “I’m in the middle of my preflight checklist, Skip. I can’t be interrupted.”
Rogers goggled. “I hardly think this is a time for checklists.”
“I gotta do my boldface.”
“Your what?”
“The part of the checklist that’s in bold so I’ll remember it.”