“Not trying yet, XO. Just considering the possibility. Are you here to tell me that dreaming big renders me unfit for command?”
The shocked look on her face told me that whatever Skippy said to her, he had not hinted she should replace me as captain of the ship. “No, Sir. You dreamed big about rescuing Earth from the Kristang, and I thought all that was bullshit until we did it.”
“Oh. Since then?”
“We have worked well together,” she began. Whatever she wanted to say, it made her uncomfortable.
“We have. Desai, I have told you before that what I value most about you as a pilot is your judgment. The same goes for your new role as executive officer. Please, speak freely.”
“Sir, I am concerned you might be pursuing this, ambitious venture, as a way to delay making hard decisions about what we realistically can do out here.”
I laughed and smiled at her. “How long did you think of a nice way to say ‘silly dream’, before you settled on ‘ambitious venture’?”
“It took a while, Sir.”
“I can see your point, XO. Can I assure you that trying to plan for capturing a senior-species warship is not simply a distraction for me? I know it sounds completely crazy, and if we can’t think of a practical way to do it soon, I will drop the subject. But, we have done so much crazy stuff out here, we have to at least explore the possibilities, Ok? Also,” I shrugged, “there is not much else we can do. Gateway is still blockaded, so we can’t even warn Earth about what’s coming.”
“Before you decided to frame the Bosphuraq- That was a brilliant plan, Sir, despite the Maxolhx not cooperating,” she assured me. “Before that, our mission was to bring people from Paradise to Avalon. May I ask why we have not returned to that mission? We can do that, while you plan for capturing another ship.”
“We’re not doing that, not yet, because that is a step we can’t pull back from. Once we tell the truth to even a small group of people on Paradise, our secret will get out soon enough. Even if we don’t tell them the whole truth, every star-faring species in the galaxy will know that humans are flying around in a stolen ship. Let’s just say I am not giving up on stopping the Maxolhx from sending a battlegroup to Earth.”
She nodded, satisfied. “Fair enough,” and she pushed her chair back to stand up. “I am not ready to give up either.”
“Thank you. Ah, it is very probably a silly dream anyway. Even if we magically,” I snapped my fingers, “could wipe out that battlegroup after it goes through the last wormhole, the kitties will just send a bigger force when the battlegroup fails to return. No way can we explain the loss of an entire battlegroup.”
“I wish I had been with you on your last mission,” she said wistfully.
“Why is that?”
“Because, then it would be easier for me to believe we can accomplish the impossible.”
We hashed over all the old and discarded ideas for capturing another ship, and discarded them again. Some of the ideas that might, just might, have worked for a comparatively low-tech ship would definitely not work against a Maxolhx ship. “So,” I mused while tossing a ball off the ceiling of my office. “We’re back to Square One. I probably don’t want to hear the answer to this question, but is there a junkyard of old, broken-up Maxolhx ships we could scavenge?”
“Well, as we know from painful experience, there are Maxolhx ships in the junkyard at the Roach Motel.”
“That’s not an option. We barely escaped from there once. Besides, those ships are all ancient. No, I meant, is there an old battle site where we could find pieces of their ships floating around?”
“No. First, no Maxolhx warship has engaged in combat for the past seventeen hundred years. No Maxolhx warship has been substantially damaged in combat for the past twelve thousand years. Being a senior species means no one dares challenge you, Joe. They don’t have to fight.”
“Shit. I was afraid of that.”
“Besides, any action to win a fight against the Maxolhx would be so destructive, there would be nothing much left of the ship for me to work with.”
“Ok, Ok, I get it. It is a stupid idea, I’m sorry I mentioned it.”
“It would have been more useful if you were sorry before you wasted my time, again. Damn it, Joe, we have had this same discussion several times now.”
“I know, I know. If I throw myself out an airlock, will that be a good enough apology for you?”
“Hmmf,” he sniffed. “It would be a good start.”
Two days later, we still had no plan for taking on the Maxolhx, or for stealing one of their ships. When I went to sleep that night, I decided the next day was the time to set course back to Paradise, and begin bringing as many humans as we could to Avalon. It was time for me to make the hard decision and stop screwing around. I do not think I had delayed making that decision out of cowardice, I just had been hoping for a miracle. Apparently, I had already used up my lifetime supply of miracles.
Sometime during the night, I got up to get a drink of water, and to brush my teeth again. The lasagna we had for dinner the previous night was delicious, it was also loaded with garlic and I could still taste it.
Somehow I managed to fumble for a cup without dropping it, and filled it at the sink. After brushing my teeth again, I could still taste the garlic. Well, everyone aboard the ship would have the same issue. Even the vegetarian lasagna had been loaded with garlic. Why, I was wondering, did garlic smell so good before you eat it, and not so good afterwards?
That thought was in my mind when I turned around, and stepped on something sharp. “Ow!” I shouted, dropping the cup and hopping around on my good foot while trying to dig whatever was embedded in my injured foot. Whatever it was came loose and clattered on the floor, bouncing off the wall and under the little toe on my good foot. “Son of a bitch!”
To avoid further damage, I stood in one position and clapped my hands hard, twice. “Aziz! Light!” I commanded, and my cabin lights snapped on. “Skippy!”
“You bellowed, Sahib?” He teased.
“I do not bellow, Skippy. What,” I pointed to the bloody thing on the floor. “It that?”
“Oh. It’s part of a cabinet hinge. It was sticky, so I had my bots working on it.”
“And they left it in the middle of the freakin’ floor?”
“Well, the first bot removed it, and determined a new part was needed, so it left to go get it. The job would have been done by morning. Joe. No one expected you to go sleep-walking at zero dark thirty, you moron.”
“Right, because you never wake me before my alarm goes off.”
“Jeez, I’m sorry. You are making a big freakin’ deal about it. Do you need to go to sickbay?”
“Depends,” I dabbed at my bloody foot with a towel. “Is Anastacia working there?”
“Of course she is, you know that.”
“Then, no.”
“Nurse Anastacia does make housecalls, but if you intend to do anything nasty with her, I am turning my internal sensors off for the night. Yuck.”
Taking a first aid kit out of a cabinet, I pressed a high-tech sort of Bandaid to my foot. “I’m handling it by myself, thank you very much.” Picking up the bloody hinge, I dropped it in the sink where I couldn’t step on it. “Crap, that was like stepping on a Lego piece. Do you have any idea what that feels like?”
“I do not have feet, but let me apply my detective skills. I am guessing it is painful?”
“Yes, Mister Wiseass. My sister used to play with Legos, and left them scattered all over the floor of my bedroom on purpose.”
“That wasn’t nice.”
“It was payback for me putting her Ken doll’s head on her Barbie doll,” I chuckled. “I deserved it. I loved making stuff with those Legos, it was great to-”
“Joe? To what? Did you hit your head? Joe?”
Staring at the hinge, I was mesmerized. I washed it off and held it up, turning it over in my hand. “That’s it, Skippy.”
“What is it
?”
“Legos. That’s the answer.”
Yes, Skippy once again thought I had lost my mind. This time, he had a better reason for worrying about me, until I explained what I was thinking. We sat up talking for hours, and I did not get back to sleep that night. Thanks to the magic of coffee, I managed not to crash before the staff meeting I called at 0800.
The senior staff was there, most of them also drinking coffee. They watched while I picked up an old coffee can, and from it, spilled Legos across the table. At my request, Skippy had the ship’s fabricators make the bootleg Legos that morning.
Adams picked up some of the toys, and snapped them together. “Sir, if this is some sort of team-building thing, the STAR team already has an exercise planned for later this-”
“No team-building involved. We will not be using Legos to build a team, we will be constructing a Maxolhx warship.”
“Sir?” Desai appeared to be regretting her earlier decision not to question my fitness for command. “You intend to build a senior-species warship, out of, plastic blocks?”
“Not exactly. We are not using Legos, that’s just how I got the idea. We are going to build our own warship, out of parts from smashed warships.”
“We can do that?” Smythe asked with, let’s say, a healthy dose of skepticism.
“It is possible,” Skippy replied reluctantly. “In the Roach Motel, I rebuilt the Dutchman from bits and pieces we found in the junkyard.”
I clapped my hands happily. “Hey, that is already an improvement. Usually, we begin a mission with you declaring everything is impossible.”
“Possible is not the same as likely, you dumwit.”
“It is still a good omen,” I insisted.
“Where are we going to find smashed warships?” Reed asked. “I thought Skippy told you there are no pieces of Maxolhx ships floating around for us to find.”
“We are not going to find them anywhere,” I said. “We are going to smash them by ourselves.”
“How are we going to do that?” It was Desai’s turn to be skeptical.
Smythe spoke before I could. “During our last mission, we smashed two Maxolhx cruisers. The first was vaporized, so that will not do for us. The second ship was damaged, but it remained intact. Enough to almost destroy this ship. Colonel, are you thinking we could run that trick again, but this time, we take over a second ship rather than making it explode?”
“No,” I wish I had a better answer for him. “The second ship surviving last time was pure luck, we can’t count on that again. Most likely, a second ship would either be so torn apart we can’t salvage it, or so lightly damaged that it would swat the old Dutchman like a fly. We need another way to disable a Maxolhx warship. More than one ship, because whatever components are damaged on one ship, we will need to recover from another. Skippy tells me that we may need a lot of Legos to make one functional, bad-ass warship.”
“So, how will we do this?” Adams leaned forward over the table, looking at me with anticipation. In her eyes, I realized, there was not just eagerness. There was pride. She was proud to be a Pirate. She was proud of me.
It was unfortunate that I was about to disappoint her. “That’s the problem. I don’t know.”
“That’s right!” Skippy announced gleefully. “Joe has wasted your time teasing you with what is only a vague, pie-in-the-sky notion, while knowing he has zero chance of making it happen. Bra-vo, Joe. I am so glad that you are captain of this ship.”
“Um,” I said weakly while Adams cast her eyes down at the table, avoiding me. “I am open to suggestions.”
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
Not surprisingly, no one had an idea for how to smash multiple Maxolhx warships, in just the right way, so we could salvage them for parts to make one functional ship. Reed had summed up the problem. “Sir, to smash the multiple warships that are going to Earth, we first need a way to smash multiple warships? Or am I missing something?”
“No.” When she said it like that, it just sounded stupid. No, it just made me sound as stupid as I was. The meeting ended with no solution, and me looking like a fool. The way Adams avoided me afterwards hurt.
At least I slept pretty well that night. Slept until 0430, when my agitated brain woke me up. I was worried that the whole Lego concept was a false alarm, a waste of time. Time we could not afford, time we needed for bringing humans from Paradise to Avalon.
Half an hour later, I was in the galley, looking for what I could scrounge up for an early breakfast. There were people in the galley, taking their turn preparing meals for the day, and I could have waited an hour to eat. But I was ashamed and wanted to avoid people, so I got a cup of coffee and dug one of yesterday’s bagels out of a bag. Did we have any cream cheese? Yes, it was next to the bag of bagels. Now the only problem was that, somehow, the Flying Dutchman had the galaxy’s slowest toaster. I don’t think it actually performed any sort of toasting function, the bread just died of sadness as it went through. I could have done a better job toasting the bread if I stuck it under my armpit for a minute.
Anyway, for toasting bagels I skipped the toaster and put them on the griddle, that worked pretty well. A couple weeks before, I tried to slice a bagel with a knife and almost amputated a finger. One of the crew pointed to an odd contraption next to the toaster, it looked kind of like a guillotine. It was a bagel-slicer, or as I think of it, a finger saver. Setting my bagel in it, I pushed down, and the blade neatly cut through the bread with a single-
“Sir?” Someone was making a fresh pot of coffee, and apparently I had been staring at the bagel slicer for a long time. “Is everything Ok?”
“Uh, yeah.” Shaking the cobwebs out of my head, I picked up my coffee cup, tucked the bagel slicer under the other arm, and walked out the door. In my office, I set the slicer on my desk and called Skippy.
“What’s going on, Joe? That was rude of you,” he scolded me. “Other people may want bagels this morning.”
“Uh huh, I’ll put it back in a minute. This,” I pointed to the slicer, “is how we are going to disable Maxolhx warships.”
“Wow. Just, wow. How about you drink that coffee, and when you’re actually awake, you call me again.”
“I am awake.”
“Ok, then you are either stupid, which is kind of a given, really. Or you have lost your mind. Listen, numbskull, even if I somehow built a really, really big bagel slicer, I do not think we could persuade the Maxolhx to fly through it. Not even if we dangled catnip on the other side.”
“You don’t need to build a really big bagel slicer, because we already have one.”
I explained.
He argued.
I argued back. After half an hour, my coffee cup was empty, and we had a plan that Skippy judged had a decent chance of working.
“I apologize, Joe,” he admitted reluctantly. “That is a pretty darned clever idea.”
“Will it work?”
“I can give you a solid ‘shmaybe’ about that. It depends.”
“A solid ‘shmaybe’ is good enough for me. We should-”
“Joe, before we get started on your latest lunatic scheme, I have a suggestion for you.”
“Uh, what’s that?”
“Bring that bagel slicer back to the galley pronto. Gunnery Sergeant Adams wants a bagel for her breakfast, and she is cursing out whichever jackass stole the slicer.”
There was silence around the conference table after I outlined my plan. It would be nice to think the silence was contemplative in nature, as people quietly processed my brilliant ideas, and their admiration for me grew.
More likely, they were trying to think of a polite way to tell me that I am a freakin’ idiot.
Katie Frey looked from one face to another, I figured she was trying to judge their reactions. “Sir, your plan to acquire a senior-species warship, involves Legos and a bagel slicer?”
“Well,” I forced myself to smile. “When you say it like that, it just sounds stupid.”
“
I do not know,” Smythe looked up at the ceiling for a moment. “Whether it is sad, or encouraging, that this is actually not the worst plan I have heard.”
“Oh.” That sparked my curiosity. “Colonel Smythe, if you don’t mind, what is the worst plan you have heard?”
“Sir, the worst plans were before I met you. Before you brought the Flying Dutchman to Earth, 22 SAS were preparing for a suicidal, futile and very likely counter-productive assault against the Kristang. Of the plans you have developed, the one I thought had the least chance of success was jumping a dropship through a microwormhole, into a cavern under the pixie factory on Detroit.”
That surprised me. “You didn’t object at the time, Smythe.”
“At the time, we didn’t have a better alternative, Sir. Might I remind everyone, that plan succeeded.”
“Didn’t you jump forward in time?” Desai asked. “That part was not planned.”
“Yes,” Smythe acknowledged. “That was due to the negligence of a certain dodgy beer can, not a fault of the planning.”
“Hey!” Skippy objected. “It wasn’t my fault that- Ugh. Ok, so maybe it was a tiny bit my fault, but I- Damn it! It was my fault. As much as it could be anyone’s fault, considering that we were doing a wacky stunt that had never been done before in the history of the galaxy, using totally inadequate equipment that never should have been used for such a delicate operation. Really, it is a miracle the DeLorean managed to jump in there. Jumping back out with a fried jump navigation system was kind of the Universe throwing you a bone.”
“You jackass,” I interrupted his monologue. “You were all enthusiastic about the idea at the time, but you never expected us to succeed?”
“Survive, Joe. I never expected you to survive. Duh.”
“Then why the hell-”
“Hey, it was a chance for me to try something that had never been done before. As you might have noticed, I remained safely aboard the Dutchman, while you monkeys flew off to perform circus tricks. Before you get all mad at me, please remember that at the time, you still had not a single clue how we could stop those two Maxolhx cruisers. So, I figured you were dead anyway. If you can stop being selfish for a moment, think of the amusement value for me, whether you succeeded or not. Big jerk,” he added under his breath.
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