My Life: An Ex-Quarterback's Adventures in the Galactic Empire

by Colin Alexander

  She stared at me, then said, “A family tie. What other kind would there be?”

  “I don’t know.” I was trying to ask if she meant a marriage and realized I could not find a word that meant “marriage.”

  Jaenna shook her head and when she spoke it was almost as though she was lecturing. “A tie is a contract between families. It is sealed, biologically, with a male from one family and a female from the other. Whatever the families contribute to this joint venture passes to the children of the union. This custom is basic to society, even if only the future of a single shop is at stake. At the level of a planetary governor like my father, a tie is immensely important. Think of all the allegiances and businesses that are affected.”

  “And what about the guy and the girl? Don’t they get a say in it?”

  “Why? This isn’t about individuals. It’s about families, about business.” Jaenna paused, but when I didn’t say anything, she went on. “In the old empire, go back a thousand years, more, male and female were equal and the female entered the tie with as much authority as her family’s contribution merited. And, no, it never mattered if you liked the partner, not even then. Why would you care? If you want love, find someone you like. It has nothing to do with the tie. The only rule is that children come only from the tie. Children are business,” she said emphatically. “But, it’s not like that anymore. Females don’t own property, they cannot run any part of the tie, even what their own family contributes. This is custom, of course, not law, so there are always exceptions but this is how life goes in the Inner Empire.”

  Jaenna let out a big sigh. “It’s probably just as well I’m so unsuitable for a tie. Could you see me doing what the rest of them do? Be an ornament? Gossip? Compete over costumes, parties and who I could take to bed? Of course, how would you know?” Her shoulders gave a convulsive twitch. “This is the truth, though. When my father hosted dignitaries, which was often, I would always be late and I would usually be in rough clothes, dirty from the woods or practice fields. I never mastered the polite conversation you’d expect from a well-bred daughter. I would question and challenge. My father says my tongue is sharper than most politicians’ knives.” Jaenna laughed, but there was no humor in it. “You see this cloak? My oldest sister, Couloura, gave it to me, but not for my pleasure. She said it would let me sit like a shadow at a party, unseen, unheard. Of course, I wore it all the time, everywhere. Father was not pleased with any of us.”

  I expected Jaenna to stay bitter but her whole face lit up when she started talking about her home. There was a much-favored pet, which sounded like a fuzzy armadillo and acted like a dog, that had tagged along everywhere. She even told me about a little, stuffed doll her mother had given her that had also been a constant companion, until a few years ago. (Do girls everywhere love their Raggedy Anns? It seems that way.) She told of watching her father’s guards drill, and of listening to tales from their commander, who had a supply of genuine war stories to tell. And then there was brother Valaria.

  “My brother is truly remarkable,” she said. ”I’m not saying this just because he is tall and handsome and looked like one of the ancient heroes in his Fleet uniform during his service. To my sisters, I am a nuisance at best and an embarrassment at worst, but Valaria always made time for me. When I was little, he used to carry me around on his shoulders. He listens to me when I want to talk about business and politics. I don’t try to fill him with flattery either, and he appreciates that. He gets enough of that elsewhere. And he is my hope for the future, my way into the system.

  “I would not play the social games, so instead I studied. There were good machines for this and there were a couple of mentors who were willing to work with me. And, over time, Valaria came to appreciate what I knew and how I could think. We would talk far into the night about the tie Father will make for him and of how to run it. That tie is crucial. In the empire, a son has no independent authority until either he makes a tie or his father dies. We also talked about how we would run Kaaran after Valaria succeeds Father, and it was always ‘we’ running the operation. Valaria is happy to have me as a secret advisor and if my role has to be secret, well, it is better than the alternatives. That is how I ended up here, though.”

  She stopped there and it was another day before I could persuade her to continue.

  “I wanted a chance to take on some real responsibility,” she said. “I had to find out if I could actually do something as opposed to talk about doing it. Valaria agreed that it was a good idea. We got our chance when Father made a deal with one of the kvenningari that brought him control of a starship base in the Outer Empire. In the marches of the Outer Empire females and males are more nearly equal than anywhere else. I was certain that I could manage the operation, better than it is currently being run. Father was dubious, to say the least, but he listened to Valaria and, eventually, he agreed. I thought everything would finally work out. Jerny, Father’s senior advisor, told me at the last moment that he would go along to help me get started. He was my first mentor and I was sure he would help me make everything work right from the outset.

  “It’s custom, that is all it is,” Jaenna insisted. “It is custom that restricts females to private life. Father is used to that, is as hemmed in by it as anyone else in the Inner Empire. But I know him. He can break with anything if he has good enough reason, and Valaria is even more willing. I know Valaria. I know my father. The justification just has to be there.”

  “You mean like showing that you can run a trading station?”

  “Something like that. Valaria said it would be enough. For my father, I’m not sure, but it would be a start. Anyway, it would be enough for Valaria and when he makes his tie, he will have real authority. And one day, he will succeed my father.”

  “In spite of which,” I pointed out, “you don’t think they’ll lift a finger to get you out of here.”

  “I told you about that,” she said. “I am worthless to them now and I have proven nothing. I do not have to like what has happened, but the decisions make sense and I can’t fault them for it.”

  Nothing had gone right after they had left Kaaran. The escort ship blew a major engine and had to be left at a Fleet base. Then, just short of their destination, the freebooter had appeared.

  “We signaled that we carried no cargo. We even offered Carvalho the opportunity to send an inspection team to verify it. What else would a freebooter want? He attacked anyway. The fight was fierce, brutal even, but it was short. Jerny, my mentor, my friend, was standing next to me when they burned him down and that was after we yielded the ship and the fighting was over. His hand was on my arm when he fell. It was then that I learned that as Tyaromon’s delegate to manage the station, I was supposed to be the prize. It is a poor joke, but I will not give them the satisfaction of seeing me cry.”

  Jaenna stopped there. Perhaps she was afraid she would cry if she kept talking about it. Instead, she demanded that I tell her about Earth.What I was able to tell her in return paled by comparison, at least to my ears. No Earthly politics reached out to the stars. While I had known many celebrities, none of them held sway over an entire world. Jaenna seemed happy with my stories, though. To her it was strange, a world out of the empire with its own unique and convoluted rules. She even listened attentively, if incredulously, to my football stories.

  All of that let me skirt the problem of what was eventually going to happen to her. While I could put it out of my mind while we talked, I couldn’t escape it afterward. There was no one I could talk to about it. The crew was counting on the same payoff as Carvalho. To them, Jaenna was cargo, just as Hvath had said. I could talk to Angel and he listened, but I always hedged when it came to telling him that Jaenna was convinced the ransom would not be paid, so he was no help. In the end, I was left to toss at night in the bunkroom hoping that Jaenna was wrong and, sometimes, wishing I was still the second-string quarterback for Dallas.

  Chapter 7

  The routine I had developed was abru
ptly interrupted one day just after the day meal. Since I ate after I returned from Jaenna’s cabin, and I tended to return late, I had only Angel for company in the deserted mess. He had taken to eating many of his meals with me, which was nice of him. Unfortunately, he had come to the conclusion, from the half-veiled comments I felt safe making, that I was eating late because of an increasing infatuation with the Little Mistress, as he continued to call her. No one woman was worth the kind of trouble that Angel was certain would come of this, not when there were plenty available at most of the trading stations we would hit, and Angel was determined to keep his friend out of trouble. I was sitting through the nth minor variation on this theme when the alarm went off. Angel was on his feet almost immediately.

  “All hands, all hands!” the speakers boomed. “Target contact is confirmed. Command orders ship in action!” The alarm whooped again, followed by orders to take combat stations.

  “Come on, Danny!” Angel shouted. “We have to get down to the Strike Force!”

  “Wait, where is that?” Angel had grabbed me by the sleeve and had started to pull me out of the mess, almost before I could protest.

  “Shit! Don’t you know?” The expression on Angel’s face was pure disbelief.

  “Not really.” That was the truth, too. No one had told me where I was to report or to whom or what my role was in a fight.

  “I tell ya, you stick with me,” Angel decided. “If nobody told you where to go, then the odds are nobody’s expecting you. Show up with me and they’ll assume that’s where you belong. Now come on, we better haul ass down there.”

  Srihani were setting up portable barricades, with weapons emplacements, at major intersections. I asked Angel what they were doing after we hurdled one of them.

  “Defensive positions. Just in case the target has teeth. The crew can man whatever positions best block boarders.” Our target was probably doing the same, I thought.

  How we managed to reach the proper attack-boat bay in time, I have no idea. Certainly, I wouldn’t have made it without Angel.

  In the dock area, I really felt under pressure. I hadn’t been wearing my shipsuit when the alarm sounded. Almost everyone else on the ship had been wearing his suit for days, and it had never occurred to me to ask why. Fortunately, I had stowed mine next to Angel’s gear. Even so, I had to skinny into the suit, get the half-armor on, clip on my weapons, and check my gear in quick time. Easy as the equipment was to use, I fumbled with everything. The weapons belt did not sit right. When I tried to hitch it up, the blaster dropped off and skidded across the deck. Then I could not seem to draw any air through the suit system. I went frantic until I remembered that the red-and-green telltales meant the opposite of what I had been used to on Earth. All of this earned me a glare from the squad leader whose job it was to have his force aboard in the minimum time possible. I wanted to shout at him as I struggled, that even one dry run through the entire drill would have saved time, but then Angel popped back out of the attack boat and pushed me in through the lock.

  The troop section of the attack boat was about as inviting as a subway car. It consisted of nothing but rows of cushioned seats that encircled the occupant in a protective cocoon. The seats protected us against sharp changes in the acceleration vector that not even the onboard gravity compensator could handle, but the effect was claustrophobic. Once in the seat, my only contact with the outside was the radio in the helmet.

  “Command, Strike Force is ready,” it said.

  “Launch Strike Force,” came the reply.

  We blasted out of that launch bay. Cushioning and gravitics regardless, I almost blacked out. I had just recovered my senses when the boat began to bob and weave like a drunken hummingbird as we charged into the complex battle.

  Most of you have never seen a space battle. Wait, let me correct that. Unless this is many years down the road, and what you are reading is a commemorative edition, none of you have ever seen a space battle. That being the case, you will probably picture our action in one of two ways. You may think of it as a contest between two sailing ships, complete with Captain Hornblower on deck directing broadsides into the enemy. Alternatively, you may see it as an airplane dogfight with adversaries swooping and turning with machine guns blazing. The reality has features of both, but it’s different from either. The principal factor to keep in mind is that of scale. Space is vast. Sensors can detect and identify an opponent long before he would be visible from the porthole, assuming your ship had portholes. Ships’ weapons have less range than the sensors, but still far greater than that of the eye. This is not unique to space, of course. Earth battleships in World War II carried weapons that could fire over the horizon at targets that could not be sighted visually.

  The second factor to remember is that the momentum (remember mass times velocity?) of a spaceship under drive is huge. Such vessels do not turn on a dime. Combining these factors turns the fight into an intricate dance with the partners on opposite sides of the floor. Maneuvering for position takes place over huge volumes of space. And forget about waiting to see the whites of their eyes before firing. This isn’t to say that you never see your opponent. The ship’s computer displays an image on the screen, constructed from the data gathered by the sensors, but that’s not the information that counts. It is the vectors and profiles supplied by the computer that determine how the action is fought.

  Physical factors aside, the course of a battle is determined by the weaponry and the defenses against them. Most ships sport three types of offensive weapons. The one which most fit my preconceived notions was the particle beam. Aiming is very much a point and shoot affair. Given enough time, beamers can cut a ship apart. However, any ship flying in the empire will mount a protective energy field projected around the ship. That’s what accounts for the slightly fuzzy image that opposing ships have on the screen. When a beam intersects a shield, the visible result is a gorgeous pyrotechnic display. A purple splash of light radiates in all directions away from the ship, the color shading to deep red as the angle of reflection increases. If the beamer can load more energy into the field than it can handle at any one point, you will see another red flare. This one will be perpendicular to the field and directed at the target. Such burn-throughs are how the beams cause damage.

  Then, there are the missiles. Each one is a miniature spaceship complete with a kamikaze computer brain, maneuvering abilities and its own defenses. These babies move at extraordinary velocities, changing vectors faster than any crewed ship can, as they turn and twist their way to the target. The business end of a missile is a high-yield nuclear warhead. If it hits its target, good-bye. No ship can survive an explosion like that. The energy shield is no good against missiles. Instead, ships defend themselves with flocks of smaller counter-missiles and beam weapons.

  But the most useful weapon is good old solid shot. Say what? Yes, just what I said. The shields provide a reliable defense to the beams and while missiles are deadly, most ships can only carry a small number because of their size and expense. So ships carry railguns. The idea is nothing new. The power of a fusion reactor, readily available onboard, is used to accelerate an object between two charged rails. Think of it as a nuclear-powered peashooter. The shot emerges from the railgun at high speed. Solid shot is cheap, easy to carry and (the old momentum equation again) packs a hell of a punch.

  Why solid shot? Napoleon’s armies stuffed solid shot into their muzzle loaders, but not long after that we graduated to high-explosive shells. Why is the empire firing solid shot out of high tech railguns? Because it’s more efficient. The empire has all sorts of high explosives available, ranging from the thermonuclear warheads the missiles carry to chemicals that pack a bang big enough to make you think of nukes. They don’t go into shot because a railgun projectile, after leaving the gun, flies in a defined path and it doesn’t take long for a ship’s computer to find a firing solution. Hit an explosive shell with a beam and it goes boom, right away. Hit solid shot with a beam and, unless the beam
er can pile in enough energy to vaporize it, it keeps coming. Shields cannot stop shot. This is the reason for the elaborate layered armor and heavy structural supports on Imperial starships. It isn’t to allow them to land on a planetary surface, although that is a by-product; it is to minimize the damage done by the descendants of the old, smooth bore cannon.

  There is one final ingredient, though for a freebooter probably the most important one. That’s the Strike Force, the boarding party—namely, myself and my mates twisting and dodging our way through space. A freebooter is in business to make money, basically by stealing goods from someone else. That’s the bottom line. It does a freebooter no good to convert his target to an expanding cloud of gas. That’s where the Strike Force comes in, the reason freebooters carry all of those seemingly unskilled extra hands. The Strike Force is launched in a number of small, ultrafast boats once enough damage has been done to degrade the prey’s defenses. The attack boats, relying on speed, maneuverability and heavy shielding, move to dock with the target. This is ticklish business. Aside from energy shields those boats don’t have much armament, and it’s only their agility and the covering fire from the main ship that prevents them from being flambéed.

  Once docked, the Strike Force cuts into the target and takes control of the ship. This produces a second touchy situation because you pretty much stop shooting when your men are on the target while the victim has no such constraint. This places a premium on speed by the attackers. Not surprisingly, Strike Force casualties tend to be high. What a wonderful job I had signed up for!

  I had plenty of time to review all of that because from the moment we left the main ship, the helmet radio went dead. I could tell by the sudden changes in acceleration that the pilot of the boat was dodging incoming shot and spinning away from beams before they could burn through, but there was not a clue to our progress. It was a matter of sitting and wondering if I was still going to be sitting and wondering a minute later.