System Failure

by Joe Zieja

  Oh, that’s right. He didn’t.

  “This is important,” Rogers said. “At least, it is to me.”

  The Viking frowned. “Like, collapse-of-the-free-galaxy kind of important?”

  “Sure,” Rogers said, nodding emphatically. “Absolutely. Yes.”

  Looking at him for a long moment, the Viking displayed one of her considering faces. Rogers always took these to mean that she was considering what kind of violence to visit on him, but lately it seemed like she was trying to control herself a bit more. She had told Rogers that she didn’t want him to think face-hitting was her only method of communication, and it really seemed like she was trying in earnest to find other ways to talk to him.

  “Not making fun of me?” she asked finally.

  “Nope,” Rogers said.

  Come on, man, he thought. Can you come up with anything more than one-word answers? How long have you been waiting for this?

  Something that felt suspiciously like a direct hit from plasma cannons sent vibrations throughout the room.

  “What the hell was that?” the Viking said, looking up at the ceiling.

  “Outgassing,” Rogers said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  The Viking frowned. “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely. I’m an engineer. So tell me about yourself.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Anything,” Rogers said. “Where did you grow up? What is your favorite food? What are your thoughts on heavy petting?”

  “What?”

  “Maybe just answer the first two,” Rogers said.

  The Viking chewed on the inside of her cheek—or maybe she had a piece of leather tucked away in there, Rogers couldn’t be sure—and shifted in her seat. He wasn’t used to her looking so uncomfortable. Maybe he’d come on too strong with the personal questions, or maybe the Viking had an itchy butt.

  “Well,” she said, “I grew up on Parivan, near the Jikkarn salt mines. Kind of a backwater town, not a lot going on. It was—are you absolutely sure there’s nothing going on?”

  She was probably referring to the light fixture that had just fallen from the ceiling; Rogers wasn’t totally sure. She might also have been concerned with the alternating red-and-amber light that had started blinking in the corner of the room. Rogers must have missed that one.

  “Positive,” Rogers said, feeling his face involuntarily contort into what may have been the guiltiest smile he’d ever given. Wasn’t he supposed to be good at conning people? “Peaceful open space out there for sure. I would know, right? I’m the captain of the ship and the acting admiral of the fleet and all that, right?”

  The Viking didn’t look particularly convinced. She put her hands on the edge of the table and made to get up. “I dunno, Rogers, maybe we should go check it out—”

  “Wait!” Rogers said, just a touch too desperately. He paused a moment to compose himself. For some reason he felt like if the Viking walked out that door, he would lose her forever. Which was kind of a silly notion: they all lived together on a contained ship in free space; her room was still only a few doors down from his own.

  Something inside him was just on the verge of being about to tell him to begin considering the possibility of telling her the truth when the door opened, and Corporal Tunger stole the chance from him.

  “Captain Rogers,” he said, thankfully in an accent Rogers could understand, “we can’t figure out who’s on Furth!”

  “What?” the Viking barked. “We’re in Furth?”

  “Yes,” Rogers said, holding up his hands. “I was just about to tell you that. Tunger, what do you mean you don’t know who’s on Furth?”

  “It’s probably better that you come up to the bridge. Since you’re the only person who knows how to fight space battles and all.”

  “What?” the Viking barked. “We’re in a space battle?”

  “Yes,” Rogers said, unable to hold up his hands any more than he was already holding up his hands. “I was about to tell you that, too.”

  The Viking narrowed her eyes and stood up. “You told me there was nothing going on out there.”

  “There isn’t!” Rogers declared, too loudly, and stood up as well, his hands now really, really held up, to the point where it looked like he was doing the wave at a concert. It probably no longer looked like the placating expression he’d hoped for. “There’s nothing going on at all.”

  “There’s definitely something going on, sir,” Tunger said. “And now we don’t know who’s on Furth.”

  “Tunger,” Rogers hissed. “I do not care who is on Furth.”

  “You probably would if you were up on the bridge with the space battle.”

  “Rogers . . . ,” the Viking warned. “Are you blowing off a space battle?”

  In the ensuing silence, there really was no denying the loud alarms going off all over the rest of the ship calling everyone to their battle stations. It seemed kind of silly, because the battle in the Furth sector had been going on for quite a long time. If there were people still not at their battle stations this far in, they were in trouble.

  Rogers dimly realized that he was not at his battle station.

  Sighing, Rogers hung his head. “Yes, I am blowing off a space battle.”

  “You swore to me,” the Viking said. “You told me I wasn’t missing anything.”

  In reality, she wasn’t missing anything. Unless they were going to get boarded, or going to board someone else, the marines were just going to stand around stroking their disruptor rifles and making everyone else around them more nervous. But more than that, Rogers had never heard anyone refer to war as something that one might “miss” in a negative way.

  He turned to apologize to her, to explain that it was just his way of trying to make sure they got to spend time together, but she was already stomping out of the room. The mesmerizing vision of her walking away from him was enough to stop his tongue in his mouth, especially when she was angry, but as she vanished from sight, Rogers knew he’d made a grave error. He’d forgotten to lock the damn door.

  “Tunger,” Rogers said slowly. “One of these days, I am going to kill you.”

  Tunger shrugged. “I’m not a tactician, sir, but I’m pretty sure you’re going to kill all of us if you don’t get to the space battle.”

  Who’s on Furth?

  “Alright,” Rogers said as he stormed onto the bridge, waving his arms like a monkey looking for something to throw. “Someone had better tell me very quickly what is so goddamn important up here!”

  The whole bridge went silent, only the beeping of consoles and random bursts of communications from other ships in the fleet making any noise. Everyone on the bridge stared at him, and there was no slow-salute thing this time at all. In fact, most of them looked pretty upset.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” the dour, serious Commander Belgrave said, looking up from his helmsman console. “Maybe the unraveling of the entire galaxy?”

  Rogers cleared his throat and felt heat rise to his face.

  “Right,” Rogers said. “Okay. Yes. Fine. Tunger said something about not knowing who’s on Furth, whatever the hell that means. What’s going on?”

  He settled into the chair on the command dais and tried to get a sense of what was actually happening. Maybe ditching a pitched battle hadn’t been a great idea; he had a lot of catching up to do in a very short amount of time. There were lots of things on screens, and things that were beeping, and people who were pushing a lot of buttons. The panic button didn’t appear to be pressed, but the THEY’RE ATTACKING US button was blinking like a pagan yuletide tree on the winter solstice. Rogers didn’t really need the THEY’RE ATTACKING US button to know that, though. There was a small group of ships making an attack run directly at the window of the bridge right now.

  “Duck!” Rogers screamed, and immediately realized how little sense that made.

  Just as he was vanishing below the thin railing of the command platform that would not at all have protect
ed him from any munition, he saw the incoming fighters get swept away by a barrage of cannon fire from the defensive systems on the Flagship. Right—of course they had defensive systems specifically designed to prevent a couple of small fighters from blowing a hole in the side of their command ship.

  Space warfare was really stressful.

  “If you’re finished with that,” Commander Rholos, the defensive coordinator, said as she moved the microphone of her headset away from her mouth. Her windbreaker, which was definitely not standard-issue Meridan clothing, looked sweaty. “I can give you an update.”

  “That would probably be a good idea,” Rogers said.

  Rholos moved around the outside of the platform and climbed up so she could stand next to Rogers. She held a datapad in one hand and a laminated card of The Art of War II: Now In Space by Sun Tzu Jr. in the other.

  Rogers wasn’t used to people climbing on his platform. He also wasn’t used to being bothered by it.

  “What are you doing?” he asked. “Can’t you just show me on all of these giant, expensive displays we have all around the bridge?”

  Rholos looked at him flatly. “They’re a little busy prosecuting a war at the moment.”

  Rogers glanced up and noticed that, indeed, the expensive displays were showing expensive images from expensive sensor arrays located all over the ships of the 331st Anti-Thelicosan Buffer Group. As was the case when he’d been fighting the now-deceased Commodore Zergan, he really didn’t understand what almost any of them meant. It looked like a lot of blue and red lines and blue and red dots to him. Though, now that he was looking at it, he realized that most of the dots and lines weren’t either of those colors anymore, but an ambiguous-looking amber.

  Holding up her datapad, Rholos began an incredibly fast, incredibly complicated rundown of the disposition of their forces in the battlespace. The words she was using were both foreign and scary, and Rogers felt himself clutching the armrests of his chair as his anxiety built.

  “Hang on,” he said, finally not able to take anymore. “I’m pretty sure we’ve gone over the fact that I have no education or practical experience in commanding a space battle, and the only reason it works is precisely because of this.” He thought for a moment. “Come to think of it, I was pretty sure none of you knew what you were doing either.”

  “We learn fast,” Rholos said. She put the datapad down. “Here’s the real problem, Skipper. Something is going wrong with the IFF. The Jupiterians have been integrated into so many different forces, it’s impossible to tell who is who. Somehow they seem to be able to avoid shooting each other, but whatever decoder they have, we don’t. Most of our ships are firing glancing blows and just trying to maneuver effectively because they’re too scared of blowing up friendlies.”

  Rogers frowned. “You’re saying they know who the enemy is, but we don’t?”

  “Exactly,” Rholos said. She pointed to the screen, and now Rogers understood why everything was colored amber. “There’s a mixture of Thelicosan and Meridan ship classes out there that seem to be fighting against us, so we can’t even isolate the enemy visually. Except for that ship right there. Starman Brelle, zoom in please.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Starman First Class Brelle, the communications tech, said.

  A button press or two later, one of the ships appeared close-up on the screen. So close, in fact, that Rogers could see right into the main viewing window of the bridge. There was a small, hand-drawn sign in the window, facing outward, that said Get Outta My Chair, Muthafucka!

  “I see,” Rogers said. “Yeah, that’s probably a Jupiterian. There’s no chance all of them have signs like that, is there?”

  Rholos shook her head.

  “Well can we at least blow that ship up?”

  Rholos looked like she was about to answer, but they were interrupted by the frantic yelling of Commander Zaz, the offensive coordinator.

  “Goddamn it, Jackal two five! That’s holding! Open your damn eyes! I’m starting to think you don’t really want this.”

  He paced in a thin racetrack-like pattern across the bridge floor, waving his laminated sheet above his head, his face redder than a ripe tomato. Coming from someone who was normally a quiet, if not aloof man, Zaz’s anger took Rogers by surprise.

  “I’m not sure I want this either,” Rogers muttered.

  “What was that?” Rholos asked.

  “Nothing.” He rubbed his eyes. “Okay, so we need to figure out who to kill before they kill all of us, right?”

  Commander Belgrave just sighed.

  “Not now, Belgrave,” Rogers said. “You just get ready to dodge all the missiles and torpedoes they’re launching at us from every direction.”

  Belgrave sighed again.

  Commander Rholos nodded. “We’re not going to be much good if we can’t start clearing up the IFF. Starman Brelle is doing all she can, but every time she thinks she’s decoded something it seems to reset itself.”

  Rogers thought for a moment. If only they had a mildly intelligent automaton who could automatically process this information, cross-check it, and take human input in real time.

  “Wait a minute,” Rogers said slowly, looking around the bridge. “Where the hell is Deet? Didn’t I put him in charge while I was romancing . . . uh, dealing with other matters?”

  Commander Belgrave looked at Rogers meaningfully. S1C Brelle waved at Commander Rholos, and she excused herself momentarily to see what was going on.

  “What is it, Belgrave?”

  “Oh,” the helmsman said. “Am I allowed to talk now?”

  Rogers put his hand on his forehead. “I feel like I never know if you are a helmsman, a philosopher, or a fourteen-year-old girl.”

  “Humph,” Belgrave said, as if to emphasize Rogers’ point. “Well, if you must know, Deet left the bridge almost immediately after we became engaged. He said something about going down to IT so he could get something off the larger network now that we’re not jammed anymore.”

  That goddamn robot is going to get us all killed, Rogers thought, completely ignoring that he should have been the one on the bridge this whole time. Then again, even if he had been on the bridge, there was a greater chance of him screwing things up than pushing them toward victory. He certainly couldn’t have decoded the IFF by himself. This sort of thing was precisely why he kept the prototype droid around.

  “Someone put IT on the line,” Rogers said.

  A few moments later, a bored, flat, female voice came across the channel. She introduced herself as an S1C.

  “Hi,” Rogers said. “This is your boss’s boss’s boss’s boss. Is there a stray robot plugging himself into random things in your office?”

  Nobody answered for a moment—they seemed to be having a muffled discussion over whether or not Deet was a stray or if he was owned by someone—but they didn’t have to. After a few seconds, Rogers heard a familiar voice in the background yelling.

  “I am not an [EXPLETIVE] stray! Nobody owns me! I am the master of my own [MATERNAL FORNICATION] destiny!”

  “Yep,” Rogers said. “That’s him. Let me talk to him.”

  “You’re on speaker, sir,” the S1C said.

  “Deet,” Rogers said. “Do you want to explain to me what you’re doing down there instead of up on the bridge where I told you to be?”

  “No, I don’t,” Deet said.

  Rogers put his hand on his forehead. “I didn’t actually mean that as a question.”

  “Then why did you ask it like one?” Deet beeped.

  “What are you doing there, Deet?”

  “This is the first time since the jamming net was lifted that I have access to the greater Meridan network,” Deet said. “I’m trying to do some research, Rogers, which you may not be familiar with since you don’t seem accustomed to doing your job.”

  Rogers ignored the barb. Why did Deet sound so snippy all of a sudden? Could a robot really be snippy?

  “I don’t know what you’re researching, but we
need you up on the bridge,” Rogers said. “We’re all going to die if you can’t help us sort out this IFF thing.”

  “For the love of all that is good,” Belgrave said, “can you please stop saying those things out loud?”

  “Shut up and fly the ship, Belgrave,” Rogers barked. “And Deet, get your metallic ass up here on the double.”

  “How can I get up there more than once?” Deet asked.

  “Expression!” Rogers yelled. “Come to the bridge!”

  Deet was quiet for a moment. Only faint mechanical and electronic noises came in through the speaker. All around the bridge, the chaos of battle seemed overwhelming. Everyone looked as though they were at the end of their patience, their talent, and their sanity. Two marines were holding back a defensive-systems technician who was frantically seeking the actual, physical panic button, the effects of which were still sort of a mystery to Rogers.

  “I don’t want to,” Deet said finally.

  The bridge seemed to quiet down a bit. For reasons that Rogers could not understand, Commander Belgrave gave him a smug smile. Was this weird self-actualization and defiance Belgrave’s fault? Rogers would keelhaul him. Which, he guessed, meant kill him if the keelhauling was done in space. Rogers might have been okay with that.

  “I’m not giving you an option,” Rogers said slowly. “I’m giving you an order. I don’t care if you think you’ve discovered some sort of consciousness inside that circuitry of yours—you are still a member of my crew. Now get back here before I have you thrown in the robot brig for dereliction of duty.”

  “Kind of like when you were just off having a date with—” Belgrave began.

  “Shut up!” Rogers yelled. “Deet, I am your boss, and I am telling you to get up here.”