Admiral's Challenge (A Spineward Sectors Novel: Book 8)

by Luke Sky Wachter

  “You are a dead man, Starborn,” cried the Captain, “stand and face me like a man in the circle, or I swear I’ll gut you from stem to sternum.”

  “Oh, aye?” the old Engineer cocked his head to the side and then, in one mighty motion, lashed out with his power-assisted droid legs aimed squarely at the other man’s unprotected torso.

  “Oof,” the Captain—beefy Tracto-an that he was—folded over like a bent metal post after a tractor had ran into it.

  Ignoring the men standing from their racks—and ignoring their blades being pulled out—Spalding stood tall and bestowed a withering look upon the men in the oversized compartment.

  “You listen to me, now, and you listen good,” Spalding leveled his finger and snarled. “When some of you boys decided it was high-time to take a swing at the Little Admiral—while this old engineer’s back was turned—and the rest of you sorry lot stood by with yer thumbs up yer keesters, instead of doing the honest job the Crown pays you for, the Chef and I got mighty offended. Sent me down here to reason with you, he did,” He finished, his voice now imbued with Murphy’s own thunder.

  “You dug your grave,” the Captain swore in a higher octave than that which his voice had previously occupied. Straightening, with a grimace of incredible pain, he threw himself at Spalding.

  Spalding leveled a second kick, but the Lancer Captain twisted to the side and pushed through the merely glancing blow, bringing his sword high.

  “I don’t care who you are!!” raged the Captain from Thebes. “You have met your end at the hands of Heptomiter of Thebes!”

  The vibro-sword came down like the Sword of Justice and, with a howl, Spalding lunged forward to meet it with his hand held proud and high.

  With a clang, the sword cut through Spalding’s hand down to his wrist.

  There was a short burst of pain before the feedback sensors built into his artificial hand shorted out. A moment after the sword came down, Spalding came forward with an overhand right that had all the momentum his power-assisted body could generate.

  “I have hands of solid steel!” the Engineer roared after connecting with the lug-head’s face. The Captain staggered back, his right cheek wobbling strangely. Reaching down to his tool-belt, Spalding pulled out the auto-wrench, “And here’s some advice before you go off to meet your maker: never mess with a man with a multi-tool built into his offhand, for he’ll surely sacrifice that infernal tool in an instant if it will give him the edge.”

  “Curse—” the Captain didn’t get any further before an upward swing with the wrench landed on his jaw, literally launching the captain into the air before he came crashing to the metal deck in a heap.

  Wiping his good hand on his trousers, Spalding turned back to address the rest of the men in this compartment. “Now maybe because some of you serve on the upper deck, and you can fight like there’s no tomorrow, you think that the ‘rules’ don’t apply to you and that you can do whatever the blazes you feel like. Ignore other departments on the lower deck, will you?! I’m here to teach you boys a thing or two about who really runs this fleet, and as Murphy is my witness it sure as blazes isn’t the Admiral who keeps these ships running—it’s me!”

  He took a moment to give Persus the stink eye. Persus shook his head, then nodded as if in agreement with the old Engineer’s actions.

  “Back on Capria, we have a code of conduct that keeps us all alive out in black of cold space. I’m here to teach it to you,” he lectured sternly, “and I’m sad to say you’re all going to learn it, or die from my tryin’!”

  A Lancer with Sergeant hashes stepped forward.

  “Don’t threaten us, engineer; you’re old, you’re sick, and you’re past your best years,” he said coldly.

  “Oh…like to join your Captain, do you? I’m sure he can tell you just how old and sick I am,” Spalding laughed maniacally.

  “Do not take our silence for respect, and do not insult us and our ways, old man,” called out the Sergeant, and a number of Lancers nodded and fell in behind him. “This isn’t Capria, half-man, and it sure isn’t the Caprian Fleet. Our ways say a man can only keep what he can hold, and if you don’t like it then you can die—along with the rest of your weak race who get in our way.”

  “Weak, is it? Oh, aye, insult me,” the old Engineer swelled up like an over inflated balloon making a savage gesture behind him, and moments later the other departmental heads stepped into the Lancer department behind him, “talk down to the man who can cut the gravity that keeps you on the floor, shut off the air you breath, and how about them tender stomachs? Have a care, or the next time you eat all that fine food given to us—courtesy of the boys and girls in the galley—you might just not live through it!”

  “Poison is a coward’s weapon, and only belongs to the weak,” the Tracto-an Sergeant said, crossing his arms and lowering his head.

  His good temper snapped and, stabbing furiously on one of his data slates, Spalding cut the gravity.

  “You stupid blighters! You test me, yet I will have you in the end,” he thundered as Tracto-ans flailed and cried out, their arms pin wheeling in the air as they tried to right themselves in a suddenly weightless environment. “Right now, all you’ve got is a bad case of the trots and are floating in the air like Ulevian Cloud Fish.”

  “Put us down and fight like a man,” bellowed the Lancer Sergeant.

  “Act like a man and I’ll treat you like one—act a child wavin’ a kitchen knife and Papa Spalding will paddle you just like one,” Spalding swore.

  “The Captain was right: you are a coward,” the Lancer Sergeant was trying to swim over to him and not getting anywhere.

  “I’m not going anywhere, lad, so if you’re in such a space gods-awful hurry then why don’t you come on down here and do something about it?” the old Engineer jeered.

  “You have dug your own grave, Evil Wizard,” cursed the Sergeant, “don’t think your magic will triumph over cold steel! You took the Captain by surprise, but when you dishonor one man in this army you dishonor them all—warriors, into your armor!” A good quarter of the men started push-swimming toward their battle-suits.

  “Got anything to say about all this?” Spalding turned to Persus.

  “I am not crazed enough to get between a Wizard and his target, but neither am I fool enough to challenge every Lancer on the ship,” Persus remarked casually.

  Spalding hawked up a gob and spat. “A fool, am I?” he fumed. “I’ll show you who the fools are in here.”

  “I prefer to enjoy the show; just try to not get yourself killed. The Lady would be very upset,” Persus said as the first knife was thrown in the old Engineer’s direction.

  “Oh, ye of little faith,” Spalding quoted, and then gave Persus a hard look, “you know, it’s a brave thing that you’re here.”

  Persus looked at him with no small amount of suspicion and growing alarm.

  “Standing by your comrades in their time of need, even when you know the sort of punishment that is about to be unleashed upon their heads,” Spalding said, and just that moment a flying blade buried itself in his shoulder.

  Persus dived behind a rack and Spalding looked down at the knife sticking into him, watching his blood trickle down his chest with growing rage.

  “Alright, I’ve had it with the whole blasted lot of you,” he thundered, pulling out the blade and throwing it onto the floor. “Call me a coward and throw your pig-stickers at me, will you? I’ll level the entire blasted Lancer department!”

  The Lancers let loose with a thunderous roar, and several men managed to climb into their battle-suits—only to cry with dismay when they failed to activate.

  Spalding opened his mouth to continue the lecture when a he saw fire an instant before his head rocked backwards, and he smelt burning flesh. Reaching up in shock, he realized he’d just been shot in the head.

  “There’s more metal than bone in this cranium, numbskulls!” he raged, incensed beyond reason.

  In response, anothe
r shot hit him in the arm and three more hit him in the legs near the joints.

  “Beg for mercy, big men,” Spalding gestured for the rest of the department heads to back up out of the room, before slashing a finger on his second tablet, activating the gravity fluctuation program he’d had built into, “it’s time for a little lesson in respect—courtesy of my son, Tiberius!”

  All of a sudden, the gravity plates came back into action full force. Men fell down to the floor with a thump and, no sooner had they groaned and started to pull themselves up to their feet—with murder in their eyes—than the plates switched polarity and they went hurtling toward the ceiling.

  Everything in the room was soon mixed together due to the rapid grav-shift. Everything from blankets and knifes, to Lancers and battle-suits, were now pinned to the ceiling. When the door to the head was opened by the flailing hand of an out-of-control warrior, the overflowing sewage spewing from the toilets soon joined the mix.

  It was a terrible sight, and the stench alone was becoming unbearable as brown matter surged up and down, coating the floor, the ceiling, and the people in the room in equal measure.

  Seeing their current plight allowed the hard-breathing and furious engineer to calm down enough to continue delivering the message—now that they were no longer capable of organized resistance.

  “Listen up: every single department on the ship runs itself until its issues become a threat to the ship at large, and then they take their little problems up before the rest of the departments before they even think about airing lower deck issues with XO. But they never—blasted EVER—take their issues up with the Captain without consulting the other department heads!” Spalding shouted, believing his point was quickly being made for him with every thump and bump against floor, or ceiling, as he manually shifted the gravity from up to down with a less-than-predictable rhythm. “And boys, if you don’t go to the captain with yer puny, insignificant problems, then you twice-as-blasted don’t go to a blazing Admiral with them!!!” he screamed, spitting fury and saliva out of his mouth in equal measure. “You disrespectful, mutinous dogs need to think twice and three times before you disrespect me, the Engineering Department, and all the other departments in this Multi-Sector Patrol Fleet,” he roared. “Because either you forgot that particular lesson, or you were just too dumb and stupid to learn it in the first place. The real reason no one jumps in this fleet unless I say ‘frog’ is because I’ve got more control over your lives in my little finger, while aboard my ships, than you lot have in your entire department!”

  He wiggled his little finger at them, not really caring if they were in any condition to appreciate the gesture or not since he was on a roll. Sometimes with recalcitrant men it was more the tone you spoke with alongside remedial punishment that made the difference in his experience.

  “I hope you all can now see that there’s a reason for the unwritten, unspoken code of conduct in this fleet. Learn it or die, rebel dogs!”

  By now, a few wild blaster shots started pinging in his direction, with a few scorching nearby bulkheads.

  “You’ve got starch, I’ll give you that,” he said, seeing the uppity sergeant with murder in his eye doggedly pulling himself hand-over-hand in his direction. Bestowing a kick to the man’s enraged face soon dislodged the blighter, though.

  The Lancer Sergeant screamed in wordless rage as he went flying back into the room.

  On the other side of the room, one particularly dogged Lancer was still trying to boot up his suit. After a minute, he finally activated it only to have the special program—which Spalding had Mike created, which his engineers had installed into as many suits as they could manage—kick in and the power-armor suddenly lost its power; automatically shutting down for a full maintenance cycle.

  “You boys disgust me. You can’t even deal with one…what did you call me? ‘Old cripple,’ wasn’t it? There’s a small scuffle with a crippled-up old man, and suddenly you’re tryin’ to get into your battle-suits? Engineering maintains those suits, you bomping idiots—of course they don’t work! Just like Engineering controls the gravity that lets you stand upright, unlike your grandpappies who were still wont to tree-swingin’,” he declared, as men floated in the air before he suddenly reversed the gravity again. “And let’s not forget the Galley provides the food you eat, and the bleeping Brigga-worshipers keep the air you need to live flowin’ through the ducts,” he declared, stabbing a button on his slate and suddenly killed the grav-program. Then, reaching into a bag, he tossed a storm of head bags into the once again zero-g environment.

  They might yet prove too dumb to live, yet too stubborn stupid to die, but only time would tell. He’d just given them their best chance to keep on living;, his conscience was clear.

  By now, the Lancers were starting to get organized. And with the gravity back to stable for more than a handful of seconds, an enraged mass of men—many of them holding blades or grabbing blasters out of lockers at the foot of their racks—started moving to the door.

  The scrape of metal on metal behind the ornery old engineer was like music to his ears, and the insipient charge stopped dead in its tracks after the first few steps.

  Looking back, Spalding observed the dismounted medium laser that Gunnery Department had dragged through the ship until it was now outside the Lancer compartment—where it was pointed inward.

  He turned back to the Lancers with a smirk.

  “Now, I’ve got a few Gunners out here behind me who would like to stop in and have a word with you about the duty your protective details owe our Captains and bloody Admiral. But I can see you still need a little time to mull things over first. So knock on the door when the leaders of this department are ready to come to my terms, or else you can all sing your hard goodbyes to the void gods of cold space and start dyin’ off by the job lots—because you’ll all be sucking hard vacuum in five minutes if I don’t get the answer I want!” he cried.

  “Death first!” bellowed the plucky Sergeant, standing up with an obviously broken arm fumbling for his blaster.

  “That can be arranged,” Spalding shouted, throwing his auto-wrench and hitting the Sergeant right between the eyes. Sometimes you just had to clear out the deadwood before new growth could spring up in its pace. “You blighters may think you belong to the Confederation, or Tracto, or maybe even the Little Admiral's personal Fleet, but you've got it all wrong!” he sneered, pulling on a head bag of his own and securing it in on his head with one savage, practiced motion.

  Moments later, there was the hiss of sudden air loss.

  “Enjoy the decompression event, lads!” he chortled, stepping back and tapping the massive laser cannon with his one remaining good hand, “because this fleet belongs to one Terrance P. Spalding, and it’s high time you learned it. The next one of you blighters thinks he can just waltz in with his buddies, kill our Admiral, and take my ships out from under me, had better have his mates put him out of his misery and toss him out the airlock before crazy old Spalding takes it into his loony, blaster-shot head to finish off the whole ruddy lot, you! You fools,” he said contemptuously. “Of all the places you would disrespect Engineers, you would do it inside a System with a massive Shipyard?”

  “We swore no oath to you,” scowled one of the men.

  “You live and die on my say-so. You only think it’s the Admiral who holds all of your lives in his hands! My name is Commander Terrence P Spalding, and with one snap of my finger-,” he reached down and goosed the grav-plates—just enough to give them the notion that he could restart the Tiberius gravity switch whenever he got the wild hair to do it.

  “In the name of MEN, shut it off—shut it off!!!” cried desperate and irate Lancer Officers, as more and more sewage spewed into the compartment until a man could hardly move without stepping in it and the hiss of escaping air grew louder.

  “Bein’ the laid-back old man that I am, I’m content to let the Admiral keep thinking as he likes regarding the knotted rope of respect in this outfit, so
you’d be wise to keep your gobs shut. But as far as all you lesser creatures are concerned, every bolt, every weld, the very decks and bulkheads of every ship in this Fleet—everything—is mine, and the next time you think you need something you’d better come on down to Main Engineering to kneel down and pray before the altar of the all-forgiving patron of Engineering, Saint Murphy Himself. Beg for his divine forgiveness, because I can tell you now that in the mood I’m in you’d do better trying to squeeze blood from a turnip.” Taking one final step back, he gave the massive medium laser a final, emphatic pat, “Because if you don’t, it’s going to take a bloody miracle from the Saint himself, reaching down with his own hands, to soften this tired old heart of mine before I’ll be answer a single one of your calls for mechanical assistance.”

  Turning, he stormed out of the compartment and locked the door behind him.

  “Put a weld on that door that they can’t break easily, Crew Chief,” he barked.

  “That was rough, Commander,” says Parkiney with a grin, “covered in sewage and exposed to vacuum? Not the way I’d want to go out.”

  “So long as they want to act like animals, they will be treated as such,” Spalding said fiercely.

  Half an hour later, when the air was about to run out in their head bags, and portable emergency bubbles and O2 canisters were set to run dry. the men inside finally realized that they weren’t going to be able to blast their way out. The oversized blast doors were usually intended to keep enemies out, not Lancers inside, but that was the real beauty of a door: it worked both ways.

  “You win, Chief Engineer Spalding,” Darius said, appearing on his screen looking grim faced and covered with unmentionable substances. “You have us penned in, our suits disabled, and we have no way to get out of here before we run out of air or freeze to death. What are your terms?”