by Joe Zieja
“You’re not my boss,” Deet said.
“I am your boss in so many different kinds of ways I don’t know where to start explaining that to you,” Rogers said. “I put you together from the fibers of the universe—”
“The trash pile,” Deet said.
“The trash pile,” Rogers conceded. “I rescued you from certain destruction at least three times, and I taught you how to tell jokes. I am basically God to you.”
“Fine,” Deet said. “I’m on my way.”
The line cut out abruptly, and Rogers sat back in his chair. His brain felt tired. Having a contest of wills with a droid was not the way he should have been spending his time during a decisive space battle. If they couldn’t get past this blockade and get back to Meridan headquarters, they might as well scuttle all their ships and go work for Snaggardir’s.
“Brelle,” Rogers said. He saw the young woman pop her head up over her console. “As soon as Deet gets onto the bridge, plug him into the system and have him start running whatever algorithm he can to try and clear this up.”
“Yes, sir!” she called, then vanished behind her console.
“Until then, can we like, uh, do some kind of delaying tactic where we run around in circles and neither shoot at anyone nor get shot at?”
Commander Rholos, done with whatever business she had with S1C Brelle, was halfway back to the command platform. She conferred with Zaz for a moment, who was sweating profusely as he shouted into his microphone, using terms that Rogers was pretty sure had nothing to do with space warfare.
“Sweep left, Hound five four!” he yelled. “Get into the pocket and wait for the damn snap!”
Apparently, Hound five four didn’t know what the hell Zaz was talking about either, since he promptly exploded. Recovery crews were working overtime trying to pick up all the ejection capsules. Rogers felt a grim seriousness settle over him as he looked out the window of the bridge at the eerily bright and colorful display that was modern space warfare.
Rholos approached him, uncomfortably close, and put her laminated sheet over her mouth as she spoke to him. This resulted in Rogers not being able to understand anything she was saying. When Rogers gave her a blank look, she got the picture and moved the sheet to the side.
“Captain,” she said softly. “We can’t sustain this for much longer. I’m not trying to be a doomsayer, but we’re losing ships left and right. It’s not like the battle with the Thelicosans, either; ships are being destroyed and there’s not much we can do to help them.”
Looking past Rholos out the window again, Rogers felt sick. This really wasn’t what he wanted. He cleared his throat and tried to focus.
“What about the Thelicosan fleet?” he asked. “The Colliders. Has Grand Marshal Keffoule been in touch?”
“She checked in maybe an hour ago, but it’s been mostly radio silence,” Rholos said. “I’m not sure there’s much she can do either.”
The remnants of the Thelicosan fleet that had nearly blown them all to pieces were intermixed with the Meridan fleet outside, all fighting together to try to stop this amorphous ex-culture from visiting destruction on the galaxy and getting their revenge. The whole thing was a little surreal. They still didn’t know what the Jupiterians really wanted—though anyone with any level of intelligence could probably guess—and, worse than that, they still didn’t know who was on Furth.
“Any ideas?” Rogers asked quietly.
Rholos shook her head. “If we can’t get the IFF fixed, the best thing I can come up with is just to shoot everyone.”
“That doesn’t seem very productive. What about a secret communication code that we can broadcast to only our ships?” Rogers raised his voice and repeated the suggestion to S1C Brelle.
“Not going to work, sir,” she said. “Most of those ships are stolen, including all the cryptography inside the communication systems. It’d take longer than we have to reprogram the encryption and then somehow get all of the other ships in the fleet the new codes without also giving them to the enemy.”
“Damn it,” Rogers said. Where the hell was Deet? The minutes it was taking him to get to the bridge—if he hadn’t gotten distracted and plugged himself into anything with a power outlet, the lecher—were costing them lives. There had to be something else they could do. Everyone but the Jupiterians was scared to shoot anyone. It might have been better if everyone just did nothing at all.
Rogers’ eyes widened. It would be better if everyone just did nothing at all.
“I have an idea. Brelle, get Grand Marshal Keffoule on the line. I want her to hear this.”
“Yes, sir.”
As much as he didn’t want to hear the voice of the former enemy commander who desperately wanted to marry him, it was important that they do this together.
“You’ve called me at one point six one minutes past the hour,” her voice crooned over the speaker.
That goddamn ratio, Rogers thought. Just because everything between Keffoule and Rogers seemed to line up with the Golden Ratio, Keffoule thought it was destiny that they be together forever. But Rogers couldn’t really stand to be in the same room as the cryptic, math-crazy woman for more than about one point six one seconds.
“Not now,” Rogers said. “Not ever really. We’ve been over this.”
“So you think,” Keffoule said slowly. He could hear the crooked smile in her voice, and it made his skin crawl.
“Right. I’ve got an idea, Alandra, and I’ll need your help. I’m about to tell everyone here.”
“Go on,” she said.
“Everyone listen up!” Rogers said, standing. Eyes started to turn to him. He took a deep breath and delivered his nugget of brilliance, to which he expected applause and cheers and hopefully not another promotion; the only thing above captain was admiral, and admirals were always getting hit by asteroids.
“We are going to employ my most practiced technique: sitting and doing absolutely nothing.”
The unified blank stare of the bridge wasn’t quite what he’d been going for.
“Sir,” Commander Rholos said, “The Art of War II: Now In Space says ‘inaction is the crow’s meal . . . in space.’ ”
“You and I both know Sun Tzu Jr. is an idiot,” Rogers said. “Hear me out. They know who to shoot, and we don’t, right?
“I’m getting some new ideas of who to shoot,” the Viking said.
He hadn’t even realized she’d made her way up to the bridge. How long had she been standing there, looking at him like she wanted to destroy him in not the good kind of way? Dimly, he realized the depth of his mistake by trying to keep her away from the battle, but he couldn’t deal with it right now. Apologies and bootlicking could come later. The small but deadly Sergeant Mailn, who had become the Viking’s de facto second in command despite not being an officer, had come as well, but she was already busy talking to some systems technicians about something Rogers couldn’t hear.
Clearing his throat, Rogers tried to look away from her. “If they know who to shoot, and we don’t, we simply stop shooting. I want orders transmitted to the entire fleet that everyone is to stand down and assume patrol patterns.”
“You want us to just sit here and die?” Keffoule asked, her voice thin and icy.
“No, I want us to sit here and get shot at,” Rogers said. “Shields can take a few blows if they need to, and that will give us what we need. The instant a ship opens fire, I want you to tag it manually and concentrate our fire on it until it stops shooting.”
“That might actually work,” Commander Belgrave said.
“Don’t sound so shocked,” Rogers shot back.
“They’re going to hear us transmit these orders,” S1C Brelle said. “No encryption, remember?”
“So what?” Rogers said. “What’s the worst they can do—try to camouflage themselves further by also not doing anything at all? Then we all just become floating space junk for a little while until we can really decode the IFF and get back to running the blocka
de. At least nobody dies that way.”
Despite not giving him the rousing, cheering response he wanted, everyone seemed to be on board with the idea. Without asking any further questions, Brelle started processing the order, and Zaz and Rholos started conferring quietly away from the command platform. Belgrave continued to fly the ship by pressing a button every few minutes to make sure they stayed out of the way, and the defensive systems continued to shoot out bursts of fire at incoming ships.
“Set a time for it all to happen at the same time,” Rogers called over to Brelle. “Is five minutes enough time?”
“I’ll need ten, Captain.”
“Fine,” Rogers said. “As long as we can synchronize.” He squinted at nothing in particular, thinking. They’d need a good way to keep up with what would likely be a hell of a lot of note taking. Who would be good for that kind of mindless grunt work?
His eyes fell on the Viking and for a few seconds he forgot about the battle happening all around them. He kind of wished she could too, but the fact that she had one hand on her disruptor pistol and was clenching her teeth told Rogers that he was living in a pipe dream. It took a lot of courage to actually motion her to come toward him. Whether the courage was for confronting his own demise or confronting a very angry version of the woman of his dreams, he had no idea. Probably a bit of both.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he said as she approached, “because we’re going to need some help. Bring up some of the marines to the bridge to help take notes. Marines can read, right?”
“Rogers . . . ,” the Viking growled.
“Just checking,” Rogers said. “I need them to help keep track of the ships that attack so we can mark them as enemies manually. Have them work with the defensive-systems team to get their datapads patched in so there’s no lag time between figuring out which ship is an enemy and getting that information on our datalink.”
“You want my marines to take notes?”
“I want them to help win a space battle—one that I totally swear I had no idea was going on while we were talking in the Peek and Shoot,” Rogers said. “Look, you know as well as I do that if we don’t get boarded, you’re not going to see any action. At the first indication that we’re going to see any fighting that doesn’t involve giant spaceships, I’ll let you know, alright? I promise. If that happens, you will be able to shoot so many things.”
This seemed to brighten the Viking’s spirits a bit. She didn’t say anything, but she did take her hand off her holster and leave the bridge, ostensibly to go and get some troops to help with the tracking. They weren’t signal analysts, of course, but without some automation—such as the kind that could have been provided by Rogers’ utterly useless deputy droid—they could at least help speed up the process and slow down the casualty rate.
Casualty rate. He was sitting in a commander’s chair thinking about casualty rates. What had his life become? He wished he could have deployed something like his antisalute sling that would have functioned as an anticommand sling. Or maybe he could try hanging himself in the zero-g room again. If Zergan could do it, so could he.
But then who was going to do this job? Was that what duty was? In comparison, death was lighter than a feather, duty heavier than a mountainous, steaming pile of shit.
In the following minutes, things seemed to move along just fine without Rogers’ input. Zaz and Rholos were busy coordinating the fighters and heavy ships into positions where they’d be able to respond quickly to the first aggressor they marked. Brelle was calling ships frantically and giving specific time codes for the cease-fire. Marines were filing into the bridge and talking to the display technicians to get their datapads set up for input. The Viking was desperately trying to hide the fact that she was teaching one of them how to sound out words slowly—but, to her credit, it was only one of them and he was a water support technician. Nobody could really be responsible for those guys.
“Two minutes!” called Brelle. “Orders are out and acknowledged, sir.”
Rogers shifted in his seat. He hated moments like these. They were the moments that a commander was really supposed to get the hell out of everyone’s way, but he wanted very badly to be doing something. Drinking, mostly. Where the hell was Deet? When he found him, he was going to strangle him. Well, he didn’t breathe, so maybe he’d like . . . slowly cut the power to Deet’s processors or something. He definitely should have been on the bridge by now.
“Get ready,” Brelle shouted. The bridge got very quiet. Marines dutifully held their styluses over their datapads. The water-purification guy licked the tip of his.
“Implementation in three, two, one . . . ,” Brelle called.
Suddenly war stopped. Meridan and Thelicosan ships completed their maneuvers, and the bright, colorful display of disruptor and plasma-cannon fire came to an abrupt and eerie halt. It was like someone had just unplugged the master transformer to a really twisted circus, and all the figurines and holograms suddenly died away. For a moment, it seemed that Brelle was right—the Jupiterians had intercepted the orders and were mirroring them to avoid being discovered. Ships were intermingling anew in ways that made even visual identification of them impossible.
“Well that didn’t work,” the Viking said.
“Wait,” Rogers said.
“For what?” the Viking barked back.
“There’s always that one guy . . . ,” he said, his voice trailing off as he peered intently at the screen.
Seconds later, a medium-sized attack frigate, near the fringe of the battlespace, suddenly turned and fired.
“Hut, hut, hike!” Zaz screamed, his voice cracking.
Instantly the entire force of friendly ships opened fire. Shields crackled and died, and the Jupiterian vessel was torn apart in a puff of space dust that was as good of an explosion as there ever could be in a vacuum.
“Every fleet has their Flash,” Rogers said.
“Did you call for me, skipper man?” the pilot not-very-affectionately known as Flash came over the radio. Rogers was surprised he was out there. Not because he wasn’t certified to fly or anything, but Rogers was continually in disbelief that any of the Meridan Ravager spacecraft were big enough to hold the man’s ego.
“No,” Rogers said. “You can always assume the answer to that question is no.”
Following the destruction of one of their ships, another few Jupiterian ships began to open fire as well. Marines and the communication troops began working furiously as the strategy of focusing fire on one ship at a time disintegrated. Within minutes, a cascading effect of panic wormed its way over the Jupiterian fleet. Rogers couldn’t imagine what their radios sounded like now. The battlespace display stopped showing so many amber dots and started showing green and red ones as the manual IFF made its way into the datalink.
They were going to turn this around! Rogers could feel it.
“Wait,” one of the marines said. “Damn it, I pressed the wrong button! How do I undo?”
“You can’t undo,” another marine said.
“No, not that button,” Brelle said, pointing to the wrong marine’s datapad. “This butto—”
“That’s my lunch order!”
“Why are you ordering lunch?”
“Uh, because I’m hungry?”
They were absolutely not going to turn this around! Rogers could feel it. Human error started to creep into the system as things got more and more out of control. Even with the added help of the marines, there was simply too much data to handle, and every time someone made a mistake it took ten times as long to undo it than it had to mark the ship in the first place. As Rogers fought the rising urge to have a stroke, he stared at the display to find that they only had one-third of the ships identified. It was better than nothing, he supposed, but he really, really needed—
“Deet!” someone yelled.
Rogers whipped around to find his awkwardly built droid deputy sauntering onto the bridge like there wasn’t a giant battle going on outside. His mi
smatched limbs, compiled from various components Rogers had found in the junk heap where he’d originally discovered Deet, made his gait somewhere in between a sugar-high zombie and a drunken gymnast.
“What?” Deet said. “What is everyone so panicked about?” He looked around the bridge, his horse-like head swiveling a full rotation, which always sort of creeped Rogers out. He made a few nondescript beeping noises and walked casually to where S1C Brelle was starting to sweat rather profusely.
“Are you serious right now?” Rogers asked. “I wanted you on the bridge hours ago, and you come in asking what everyone is so panicked about? What the hell were you doing down there?”
“Asking questions,” Deet said cryptically. Rogers didn’t really have time to dig into what kinds of questions might be asked by a mostly autonomous robot, and Deet didn’t seem inclined to elaborate any further.
“Well I don’t care what you were doing,” Rogers began.
“Then why did you ask?”
“Shut up and plug in. Brelle, give him the rundown.”
“Yes, sir,” Brelle said, but Deet cut her off.
“I know what’s going on.” He extended his dongle—Rogers really hated it when he called it that—and plugged into one of the many combined data/power ports on the bridge.
“Oh really?” Rogers said, getting off the command platform and making his way toward them. He felt anger rising in his throat—not just frustration, but hot, seething anger. It wasn’t a terribly familiar sensation to Rogers. He’d been irritated, annoyed, confused. He’d shouted a lot. But now he felt fury. “You really think you know what’s going on?” Marines parted for him, fear in their eyes at the wrath of their commander. “I’ll tell you what’s—”
“Done,” Deet said.
The display screen showing the disposition of forces suddenly and dramatically changed. All amber dots vanished and were suddenly replaced by accurate, definite red and blue dots indicating a perfect IFF representation of the battlespace. The bridge went totally silent.
“See?” Deet said. “Everyone had their panties in a barn for nothing.”
The bridge went even more totally silent.