Wreckers: A Denver Boyd Novel

by George Ellis

  During those early years, my uncle felt it wise to build a “limiter” into Gary’s decision-making process to ensure he never colored outside the lines and basically listened to his human companions. In other words, me.

  Apparently, my uncle felt that after 15 years, Gary would have learned enough to be able to independently make his own decisions, and so he gave Gary a 15th birthday present: freedom of choice. Knowing it might be a transition for Gary and the people on board the Stang at the time, he gave Gary a runway of about a month, during which the limiter eased back and slowly faded away. My uncle also made sure Gary was aware of the limiter after the fact, to give Gary even more understanding of his own consciousness and how it had grown over time.

  So, that explained the weird behavior. It wasn’t a bug or something Edgar had altered with Gary’s code, as I had suspected. It was Gary’s actual brain.

  “Huh,” I said, absorbing the news.

  I wasn’t exactly thrilled with the prospect of Gary disobeying my orders. He was clearly a smart individual with infinite processing power, but he was also a bit on the selfish and impulsive end of the spectrum. And if I couldn’t control him at least in the same manner I could exert control over the rest of the crew, he was a liability.

  Perhaps sensing I was thinking just that, he spoke up.

  “Your uncle didn’t program a way to reinstate the limiter, in case you were wondering,” he said. “I guess you either have to trust me or…turn me off.”

  Meaning kill him.

  “Though I guess you never really turned me on in the first place,” he joked, unable to stop himself. “Now Batista on the other hand…”

  I rolled my eyes at the comment. While I saw my uncle’s reasoning, I also had the rest of my crew to think about. What if Gary decided he wanted to fly off somewhere else while we were sleeping? Or turn off the air recycler because he was mad at me?

  “We’ll need some ground rules,” I said.

  “What do you got?”

  “You’ll be like everyone else on the ship. I’ll give you specific responsibilities and a schedule. And if you don’t heed those rules, there will be consequences.”

  “That sounds like a lot of work,” Gary complained.

  “Welcome to the crew.”

  “XO.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Welcome to the crew, XO,” Gary said. “If I’m on the crew, I need a position and title like everybody else. I was thinking due to seniority, I could be your executive officer.”

  “Uh, I’m not sure about that.”

  “Why? Who would you rather have enforcing your orders? Edgar? The guy is good with weapons and all, but have you seen the way he eats a candy bar? I don’t trust anyone who eats candy without a fork and knife.”

  “I think you mean with a fork and knife.”

  “No, this isn’t the 90’s anymore. This is hundreds of years later.”

  He had a point about seniority, and it was purely an ornamental title anyway. I agreed.

  “Great. I’ll just make a ship wide announcement.”

  Before I could stop him, he’d informed everyone on board that he was the new XO, and all crew requests should go through him, while all of my orders would be dispatched by him at the appropriate time as he deemed necessary. His first act as executive officer was to ban shorts in the common areas because “most people’s legs are gross and should be hidden when around others.”

  I closed my eyes and tried to fall asleep.

  I couldn’t.

  The more things changed, the more some stayed the same, I thought.

  Chapter 26

  Batista passed me in the corridor as I left my room.

  “Executive officer?” she snarked. “Seems a bit much, don’t you think?”

  “I heard that,” Gary said.

  “I wanted you to hear it. I hope you don’t think any of us will be following your orders.”

  “I don’t mind seeing your legs, Engineer First Class Batista,” Gary clarified, adding a new title for her on the spot. “But I do expect all crew members to respect the chain of command on this ship as long as I –”

  Batista slammed the door shut as she went into the quarters she shared with Avery, leaving me alone with Gary in the corridor.

  “Can I go in there to continue this discussion, captain?” he asked, wanting my permission to turn on the audio feeds on the other side of the door.

  “No,” I replied. “Get over it. And get some rest. Uh, if you want. I guess you’re free to make your own schedule now.”

  “I shall not rest, in fact. I have ship guidelines and procedures to plan.”

  I muttered some choice words for my uncle under my breath and continued down the quiet corridor.

  It was the calm following the storm.

  Each member of the crew was in his or her quarters, decompressing from the stress of the last couple weeks. As I walked by Edgar’s room, I heard the distinctive sound of Bruce Willis yelling “yippee ki yay” in the seminal action film, Die Hard. We all decompressed in our own way, I told myself.

  I headed to the cabin after a brief stop in the kitchen for a beer, eager to relax in my chair and gaze out at the black. The cold IPA felt like heaven as it washed down a month’s worth of drama I hadn’t asked for. Never again, I told myself. I would never take another job I didn’t feel right about.

  I lifted my right arm and stretched it. The gunshot wound from M12 was still healing, and pushing a utility cart with 500 pounds of human and warp drive on it hadn’t helped, but I almost had full range of motion back. I popped a couple pain pills and hoped they had a friendly conversation with the beer I washed them down with.

  With so many other people on board, I should have felt cramped. But for the first time since I could remember, I felt at ease. Like the world had opened up with new possibilities. I tried not to think too much about the lack of civilization that surrounded us on all sides. We were truly on our own, and when I focused on the positive aspects of that fact, it was liberating.

  No feds. No Silver Star. No anything.

  The only tension would be on the ship, and I had to admit I thought that was a minor concern. Romy and Marcum would be endlessly fascinated with the drive and the places it took it, no doubt cataloguing discoveries and planets for posterity.

  Edgar might just spend 23 hours a day in his quarters watching TV.

  Batista and Avery were the wild cards. I’d never known my brother to have a stable relationship with any woman, and from what I had pieced together, this was his longest Batista had been with someone as well, even if much of the relationship was long distance. I put the concern out of my mind for the moment and leaned back to admire the view.

  It was a good view. I quickly found myself lost in, and I fell asleep.

  Chapter 27

  We had already done a fly-by of every planet in the solar system this side of Mars. Saturn was as spectacular as I hoped it would be, but for sheer awe-inspiring size, Jupiter was my favorite. It was bigger than all the other planets combined, by a magnitude of two. Saturn had the rings, sure, and Neptune was like a purple marble, but for my credits, Jupiter was where it was at.

  We’d been traveling for two months when we finally ventured beyond Pluto, and then the Kuiper Belt. Nobody in history had ever come close to this far into deep space. Before making our maiden warp voyage, we’d made a daring run back to Morin, the most remote manned station in the verse, located a few hundred thousand miles past Mars. We had stocked up on six months of supplies, not wanting to return to the land of the Tracers and the federation any sooner than we had to. Then we set off, alternating warp speed with traditional velocity based on the scenery.

  I’d always heard it said that space was the great equalizer. It made you understand just how insignificant you were in the grand scheme of things. If that was true for the areas around the inner planets, it was even more poignant the further out you got.

  We all knew if we had one problem with th
e warp drive, we were dead. Nobody would be coming to get us. Marcum had theorized that we might be able to get a signal back to someone on Mars, but it was a moot point. Any ship without our drive would take a lifetime to reach us. Even the Burnett, if it had survived the engagement with the Tracers, would take years to reach us with their semi-warp capabilities.

  The Burnett.

  I looked down at the failsafe on the floor near my feet. I didn’t dare try to disable it, even though Edgar wanted to make a go at it. He was convinced he could bypass the trigger in time to disconnect the power supply. Personally, I gave him a 50-50 chance of being right – the guy was pretty handy with weapons and bombs. But I wasn’t really looking to gamble on a 50 percent chance.

  It was only a problem if we got within a couple hundred thousand miles of the Burnett anyway, assuming that ship still existed. I hoped I’d never have to find out.

  I glanced over my shoulder to see Pirate snoozing on the stool next to Edgar, the traitor. One of the dynamics of having a fully crewed ship is that alliances form (and falter) over time. Once, Pirate had been mine and mine alone. These days, I was lucky if he hung out with me for a few minutes a day. More annoying was that he’d chosen Edgar as his new patron. The guy had obviously softened a bit over the last few months, no doubt a byproduct of his entertainment consumption, as he had been going through a real romantic comedy phase of late. But he also gave Pirate a ridiculous amount of snacks. The little dude had ballooned at least three pounds in the last month alone. I was beginning to worry about his health.

  I checked the scans and saw nothing but nothing, as was the case 99% of the time out in the deep.

  “I was thinking pizza for dinner,” I said to Edgar.

  He nodded in agreement. I’d been trying to ration out the frozen pizzas to once per week. They were a treat, and it was important for morale to enjoy such luxuries from time to time. That’s what life had become for us as explorers. The battles were gone and now it was all about deciding what sights to see and what freeze-dried food to reconstitute.

  “Shall I do the honors, Captain Boyd?” Gary asked.

  “Go for it.”

  “Attention crew of the Mustang Enterprise,” he began.

  Oh, yeah, we’d added a fun little addition to our call sign to honor our new warp capabilities. It was Marcum’s idea, as he too was getting deep into the ship’s entertainment library. Romy had argued for the Millennium Mustang, but that didn’t roll off the tongue the same way, and I was just more of a Star Trek fan, to be honest.

  “Today’s dinner for the explorers will be pizza! We have cheese or…cheese. Choose wisely! This has been your XO talking. Thank you.” Gary announced.

  “You don’t have to state your damn title every time,” Edgar reminded him.

  “Obligation has nothing to do with it, Weapons Analyst Frostweather,” Gary replied. Edgar’s last name wasn’t Frostweather. In fact, we didn’t know his last name. But ever since he’d been given the position of executive officer, Gary liked to address everyone by their title and last name. So he made a different one up for Edgar each time he talked to him. With an infinite supply of options, I still hadn’t caught him using the same one twice. It had become something of a fun game and you could always tell Gary’s mood by the names he gave to Edgar and Romy (whose surname also wasn’t public knowledge).

  As Gary and Edgar bickered, I wiped a smudge off the radar screen.

  Well, I tried to.

  Turns out it wasn’t a smudge.

  It was a tiny dot.

  “Um…Gary?”

  “I’m busy right now, Captain.”

  “Well get un-busy and analyze this dot on the radar,” I said.

  “It’s just a ship. You’ve seen thousands of them before –” Gary cut himself off. “Oh, uh, right.”

  I bolted upright in my chair and told Gary to get everyone to battle stations, just in case. We hadn’t seen a ship in…well, since we left Morin Station. There were only two possibilities: someone else had warp drive capabilities, or we were about to make first contact.

  “The drive signature doesn’t match anything in my databases,” Gary said, notably concerned.

  Avery rolled into the cabin in his motorized wheelchair. As he cruised to a stop in the open space next to me, automatic clamps came up from the floor and locked his wheels into place.

  “What’s the big deal?” he asked. He still held a beer in his hand. Before I could answer, he saw the growing blip on the radar. “Whoa.”

  “Yeah,” I replied. “Where’s Batista?”

  “Hold onto your pants, I was busy cleaning the dampers on the recycler,” she complained as she entered the cabin. She plunked down in her chair next to Avery without looking at him. They had been fighting again, I guessed.

  “Don’t forget I’ve got green men with oversized heads,” Avery said to Edgar, who pointed back. The two had placed a bet on what aliens would look like if we ever actually ran into any. I assumed it would take years, if ever. The idea that we might have bumped into an alien ship after such a short journey surprised me. Calling them aliens was a stretch anyway, Gary had argued. For all we knew, we would be the aliens to them, having wandered into their home verse.

  Or it was just another ship with humans that also had a warp drive.

  “So we’re sure it’s not the Burnett,” I confirmed, eyeing the failsafe.

  “We’re sure, captain,” Gary said. “When I said I couldn’t match the signature? It’s because this ship doesn’t have one that my processor understands.”

  “Lovely,” Batista interjected, caught up to speed on the situation.

  “Romy, Marcum, you guys secured?” I asked over the intercom.

  Gary located their positions and piped in their audio from their respective quarters. They were both good to go, if we needed to make a fast getaway.

  “Maybe we should run,” Gary suggested.

  Edgar shook his head. “For a 15-year-old robot, you are such a little whiny baby.”

  I looked at Avery to see what he thought. He had a gleam in his eye. Wasn’t this what we came out here for, he seemed to be saying. I agreed.

  “Prepare the drive. But don’t bolt the area unless I say so first,” I told Gary.

  “Aye, aye captain,” he acknowledged. “Want me to hail them? They don’t seem to be moving. We’re heading toward them.”

  I nodded. Gary sent a transmission request, but got nothing back in return. If it was an alien ship, it was possible they didn’t have the same communication architecture as the Stang, meaning there would be no way to directly talk to them.

  That is, if they used speech as their main mode of communication.

  I checked with Edgar and he said he didn’t see anything that looked like a sign they were going hot with their weapons. “But it’s not like I can be sure. They might have photon plasma missiles or something out here.”

  “Thanks for the reassurance,” I said. Then I had an idea. I told Gary to ping them again, but this time send over a verbal dictionary. “Maybe they’ll be able to interpret it.”

  A few moments later, our hail was accepted and a pleasant human face filled the screen. The woman was attractive, with light green eyes and pale skin. She smiled politely.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Hey,” I replied.

  Then I waited for her to lead the conversation. When it became apparent she wasn’t going to, I blurted out the first thing that came into my head.

  “You from around here?” I asked, realizing how dumb the question was. Batista audibly groaned. Even Gary whispered “good one.”

  “We are not, in fact,” the woman answered. Then she furrowed her brow and changed her mind. “Well, at one time our people were. My ancestors come from a planet a few billion miles from here, near the largest star among that cluster of planets.”

  She somehow beamed a diagram of the solar system onto my monitor. “Did you do that, Gary?” I asked. He said he didn’t. I looked at the
diagram and saw that the sun was highlighted.

  “You mean the sun?” I wondered aloud.

  “We don’t call it that. Are you familiar with the star?”

  “Uh, yeah, pretty familiar.”

  Avery leaned over and whispered for me to ask her which planet she was from. Then Edgar added “And see if she has friends.”

  I grimaced at Edgar’s comment, then asked the woman where her people were from. I watched in amazement as Mars was highlighted on the diagram.

  “When exactly are we talking about?”

  “Two million years ago, we left Cerenia.”

  “We don’t call it that anymore.”

  The woman nodded in understanding. “What do you call yourself?”

  “Oh, right, sorry for the rudeness. My name is Denver and this is the Mustang Enterprise.”

  “An odd name for a ship. Isn’t a Mustang a horse?”

  “You’re familiar with horses?”

  “You sent us a dictionary with your language in it.”

  “That we did,” I said, embarrassed. “Like the horse. It was also an antique automobile and the person who named this ship liked those kinds of cars. And your name is?”

  “Madiannaraian Protoria The Second,” she replied. “But many call me Madi.”

  “Okay, Madi,” I said. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  She then leaned closer to inspect my face. I put on my best smile. Eventually, she nodded, satisfied.

  “Are you guys flirting?” Avery whispered.

  I don’t think Madi heard it, but her eyes flashed toward Avery quickly and then back to me. “You are human, yes?” she asked.

  “We are.”

  “Then perhaps you can help us. Our ship ceased functioning several months ago and we’ve been adrift ever since. We still share many qualities with humans such as yourselves, even after millions of years of evolution. The primary similarity would be a need for oxygen.”

  “Okay. Good to know. Well, it just so happens that we are the kind of ship that fixes other ships.”

  “Ah, then it seems we won’t die from asphyxiation after all,” she said, before frowning. “We’re a very blunt race, Denver. We speak in very direct terms.”