by Joe Zieja
“I was just explaining to our intern here the reasoning behind our little construction project,” Mr. Snaggardir said with a smile that was a bit more genuine. For all his talk of destroying the galaxy, he did tend to dote on his niece a bit.
“Oh, that,” Sara said. She didn’t look very enthused, but she also didn’t raise any protests. Sara turned to Lucinda, smiling warmly. “We all hope it doesn’t come to that. I don’t think it will, either.” She frowned. “Although I sometimes think the general wants to make that the first option, rather than the last.”
Mr. Snaggardir and Sara shared a small laugh over that, but Lucinda didn’t find it funny. Despite practically threatening her life in the middle of the hallway, he seemed to think the discussion was concluded. Both of them started chatting about family matters before stepping into the meeting room, leaving Lucinda feeling dumbstruck and somewhat terrified.
Did she really need to be terrified, though? Everyone involved in this was treating it so casually. And Jupiter did deserve a seat at the table when it came to galactic matters. Something needed to be done . . . but blowing it all up?
Of course it probably wouldn’t come to that. It was just insurance, right? Who was she to make these sorts of decisions? She was just an intern, an employee who was in way over her head.
They literally called it the Galaxy Eater, though.
Ha-Ha, You Said “Duty”
“This is a load of bullshit,” Captain Baerbarg said. “I’ve spent my whole damn career trying to stop pirates, and now I’m supposed to give them a royal escort through space.”
The order from Meridan HQ stared him in the face from his datapad. He didn’t like taking orders from them, either, but apparently there had been all kinds of movements lately. Something had happened in every system, and now there were Jupiterians running around, pirates running around with them, and everyone else running around trying to look like they were part of the solution. It was a lot of running around.
Being the commander of a small Grandellian fast-attack squadron, Baerbarg was an expert at pirate hunting. The whole squadron boasted five ships, enough to handle most situations. His missions had been simple, short, concrete. Escort this convoy, shoot anybody who tries to jump them. Go board this pirate vessel while they were resupplying at such-and-such station, and so forth. And now he was supposed to hold the pirates’ hands so they could go save the day? What a crock of shit.
Did that mean that the pirates were now privateers instead of pirates? Or were they buccaneers? What was the damn difference? They were all thieves, and they all belonged on the business end of a plasma cannon.
“Nothing we can do about it now, Captain,” his first mate, Keila Puhl, said from her station in front of him on the bridge. Most of their small crew was off the bridge at the moment for meals, since there was surprisingly not much action going on in their sector. They were on the very edge of Meridan space, a place hardly patrolled by the Meridans, never mind the Grandellian fleet. The nearest thing to them was a newly designated refuse dump, just one or two Un-Space points away. Weirdly, the navigational charts currently showed a restricted operating zone around the whole dump. Maybe there’d been some sort of hazardous-material leak.
“Yeah, yeah,” Baerbarg said. He tossed the datapad on the side of his captain’s console, where a cold cup of coffee and half-eaten biscuit had been for the last several hours. “Nothing at all. You’re right.”
Puhl was the right kind of woman to be his first mate. He was prone to impulses; she kept him calm and rational. He was quick under pressure; she was quick to tell him that not everything was pressure. They’d made a good team these last two years. Strictly professional, of course, which meant that they’d been sleeping together regularly for most of their time together. They were Grandellian, after all.
“Hey,” Puhl said suddenly, pointing at the console next to hers. “What’s that?”
“Hm?” Baerbarg leaned forward, squinting. “New ship?”
Punching a couple of buttons at his terminal, he routed the information stream so he could see a map of the area overlaid by a disposition of forces. Despite being told to escort the pirates, they didn’t have any pirates to escort just yet, so they’d been staked out near the Un-Space point to wait. Very little was happening otherwise—blockades had restricted a lot of traffic—but someone else had just come through the gateway. Their threat warning system took a minute to make its assessment and identification.
“What are they doing out here?” Puhl said, leaning back in her chair. She didn’t look very concerned, and, honestly, she had no reason to be. Whenever Jupiterians attacked, they just came slamming through Un-Space points, maneuvering a collection of stolen ships, and started shooting right away. This one just looked lost.
The computations went through, and the computer got a good lock on the ship’s IFF, which showed it as a Meridan Patrol Fleet vessel. Sort of a paramilitary unit that was more border patrol than police, the MPF was technically attached to the Meridan Galactic Navy.
“All alone?” Baerbarg muttered. “Send them a hail, will you?”
“You got it, boss,” Puhl said, and started pressing buttons.
“Why is the registry taking so long to ID them?” Baerbarg said, starting to see if he could look up the ship’s serial number manually. As part of the IFF package it broadcast, all ships were required by galactic law to include certain information. Normally the ship’s systems would run that info through their databases quickly, but this was taking a little while to bring up the information.
“They’re not responding,” Puhl said.
Puhl didn’t sound on edge, but she rarely did. The unidentified MPF ship wasn’t doing anything threatening, but Baerbarg still felt uneasy. You didn’t just pop into a sector, do nothing, and say nothing.
“Tell the rest of the squadron to form up. Send the Queen out there to intercept.”
Puhl spun around in her chair. “Really? It’s just an MPF ship. It’s probably got something wrong with its systems, boss, like a busted transmitter or something.”
Baerbarg didn’t look at her; he was busy staring at the grainy visual display that his ships’ cameras could supply. “If they’re radios-out, they should be giving us signals,” Baerbarg said. “There’s procedures for things like that.”
“You ever known a Meridan to follow procedures?”
Baerbarg grunted, thinking. Something didn’t feel right. “Send the order.”
“You got it, boss,” Puhl said again, her tone flat.
It didn’t take long for the Queen, one of their smaller, faster ships, to respond to the order and start moving out. In the meantime, Baerbarg was ready to put his fist through his console; the network was taking an extremely long time to go through the MPF database and pull the identification of the mystery ship. Had the IFF been spoofed? Was Baerbarg not inputting the correct serial number because someone had programmed the IFF to lie? It was difficult to do, but not impossible. Usually, though, there were other signs that the IFF had been tampered with. In the past, when pirates had tried the same thing, there had always been something like a misspelled word or a large red box that popped up with the word “tampered” on it. Here, though, everything looked legitimate.
“Ah!” Baerbarg said. “There it is.”
“Found her?”
“Yeah. Kind of weird, though, it wasn’t in the main ship registry. For some weird reason it was reported as destroyed not too long ago. The whole crew is listed as KIA.”
Puhl grinned. “Well they’re going to be really happy to find out that they’re not all dead! What’s her name?”
Baerbarg couldn’t share in her humor, for some reason. He started cross-referencing reports with the serial number, looking to see if there was anything else he could find out about the ship.
“The MPS Rancor,” he said. “Says here they flew into an asteroid.”
“They look pretty good for having flown into an asteroid,” Puhl said, turning
back around to look outside.
“Yeah . . . ,” Baerbarg said.
Silently, they watched the Queen fly toward the Rancor. The other three ships formed a battle line with his ship, the Curtain Call, in the center.
“Is it . . . possible that it did actually hit an asteroid?” Puhl said, starting to sound a little less aloof now. “We might not be able to see all the physical damage, but maybe everyone on board died from the inertial impact. I’ve seen that kind of thing before.”
“What, a ship automatically navigate itself through Un-Space? I don’t think so.”
Baerbarg understood where Puhl was coming from, but he highly doubted it. Someone would have had to see the ship hit an asteroid in order to report it, unless someone did some really fancy sleuthing and cross-referenced asteroid positions with the ship’s navigational log before impact. If someone saw it collide, they’d go pick up the survivors, not just let it float around in space.
“Hey, boss,” a voice came over the radio. Baerbarg recognized it as Commander Fouffe, the captain of the Queen. “We’re right next to them, and we’re not getting any response either. I can see a lot of blast points on the hull, as well as some physical damage from debris. This thing has seen some action for sure. It’s possible that the comms were damaged. We want to hop aboard and see what’s going on.”
“You’re authorized,” Baerbarg said. “Suit up for a hostile boarding, though, okay? We don’t know what the hell is on that ship.”
Baerbarg hated moments like these, the moments when he just sat in this stupid chair and watched other people do the work. He couldn’t hear anything over the radio, either, so it ended up just being a long, awkward, tense silence that made him want to break something. In truth, most things made him want to break something. Any other time, Puhl and he would have broken each other. A couple of times.
Fifteen slow minutes passed by. No matter how many times they sent a message to the Queen’s crew, they didn’t get a response. Baerbarg generally liked to avoid clogging up their comms with requests for status reports—they were likely busy—but the hair on the back of his neck was standing up. Nobody was talking anymore, and the Queen wasn’t moving. Still tethered to the Rancor by its docking platform, it floated in space.
“I don’t like this,” Baerbarg said.
“I know you don’t,” Puhl said. She turned around to give him a reassuring smile, but it didn’t convince him. She was worried too.
“Keep sending messages. We’ll give them five minutes. Nothing on that ship should be preventing them from checking in.”
“Got it.”
Five minutes passed by at a snail’s pace, and Baerbarg had enough.
“Bring everyone up from the mess hall and tell them to get to battle stations,” Baerbarg said. “I’m issuing a—”
“Captain Baerbarg,” Commander Fouffe said. “Please desist. We apologize about the silence. We experienced a magnetic field that temporarily disabled our communications.”
Baerbarg let out a long, slow breath. “For fuck’s sake . . . you couldn’t have sent someone outside to tell us that as soon as you figured it out?”
“It was impossible to discern our lack of communications while we were inside the ship.”
Squinting, Baerbarg and Puhl exchanged glances. Something about the Queen’s captain sounded a little weird. Then again, he did just say that there was a magnetic-field disruption. Whatever that meant.
“Fine. What did you dig up?”
A long pause. “Captain, we were not equipped with shovels to dig anything.”
“What?”
Another long pause. “Please disregard. I wanted to inform you that the field disruption has fused our docking hatch to the Beta Test.”
“The what?”
“The Rancor. We will need help with decoupling,” Captain Fouffe said. He sounded tired, almost bored.
“Stand by one sec, Fouffe.” Baerbarg cut the comms for a moment.
“What the hell is going on here?” Baerbarg asked out loud.
“I have no idea,” Puhl said. “He sounds like he’s on drugs. Maybe a gas leak?”
“Maybe a trap.”
The two of them were silent for a moment as they went through scenarios in their heads. One possibility, obviously, was that the MPS Rancor had been stolen, which would explain the damage and the fact that it was alone. It didn’t explain how someone had made off with an MPF ship, or how they’d managed to convince the MPF to report it destroyed via asteroid collision. That level of record spoofing was beyond any pirate, terrorist, or thirteen-year-old recluse that Baerbarg had ever heard of.
“Should we go?” Baerbarg asked.
Puhl was quiet for a moment. Instead of answering, she seemed to be looking through some data at her console, though Baerbarg wasn’t sure what it was. If Fouffe was in trouble, he’d be using his distress word—a word that typically isn’t used in any logical context that would alert the crew that he was in danger and couldn’t openly talk about it—but Fouffe hadn’t said “dittle” even once. Maybe he was just tired?
Baerbarg opened the communication channel again.
“What’s the situation down there?” he asked.
“The crew of the Rancor has been attempting to activate their distress beacon, but have been unable to do so. Their navigational systems are operational, but communications are down. They are requesting evacuation and escort.”
Puhl was still looking through some records on her console, and didn’t look back at Baerbarg to give him any advice.
“We’re not equipped to tow,” Baerbarg said. “We can take on the crew and send a message to their closest spaceport to send someone. Are you still stuck?”
“We are unable to disengage our docking bridge.”
Baerbarg cut the comms again.
“What do you think?” he finally asked Puhl.
Puhl turned around and shrugged. “I can’t see any reason not to go,” Puhl said. “I’ve been querying the Meridan local authorities about the ship without giving too much away. Looks like that KIA report is confirmed. They seemed kind of surprised that we were talking about it.”
Baerbarg flipped the switch again. “We’re on our way. Stand by.”
“Stand by what, Captain?”
Man, Fouffe was acting weird. “Just wait a bit. We’ll be there.”
Calling the crews to their stations and preparing everyone for movement only took a few minutes. Soon they were cruising the short distance across empty space to where the Rancor, and now the Queen, was stranded. He hoped that it wasn’t some sort of software fault that was going to spread to his ship once they got there and exchanged codes, or they’d all be dealing with quarantine real quick.
Since the main hatch of the Queen was already taken up by being stuck to the Rancor, they had to maneuver their ship to connect to one of the maintenance hatches, but that wasn’t a problem. They’d interdicted and boarded pirates many times; this was like standard procedure for them all by now. Everyone went about their business quietly and efficiently, calling out status reports as necessary. Baerbarg and Puhl remained on the bridge; in this small of a crew configuration, they did most of the piloting, and the delicate maneuvers required to bring them abreast of the Queen required a steady hand.
Well, really, it required a complicated automation program. But it required a steady hand to execute it.
With docking complete, all that was left was to wait and see what came out of the ship. Because they had to use their own, smaller bridge, there weren’t any cameras that Baerbarg could use to monitor the situation and see who was behind the door when it opened. He had to rely on his crew to yell at him, which really seemed like—
Sounds erupted from the lower part of his ship, where the docking hatch was located. Things were banging around violently, followed by cursing and shouting. A moment later, all fell silent.
Baerbarg and Puhl were both already up, pistols in hand.
“Hey!” Baerbarg shouted
as the two of them moved to get down to the lower part of the ship. “What’s going on down there?”
A voice came up, accompanied by embarrassed laughter. It sounded like Veene, his quartermaster.
“It’s fine, boss! Dropped something before I opened the door. It’s just a robot. Wants to talk to you about something called ‘protocol 162.’ I think he’s an evangelist or something.”
• • •
Rogers had never had an office before. In fact, he clearly remembered conversations he’d had when he’d been a young starman first class talking about how the only people who needed offices were people who didn’t need personalities. Of course, he had his stateroom on the Flagship, but that was different. Now, while he was waiting for further orders, he’d been given a small office in Meridan Naval Headquarters relatively near Holdt’s. Bouncing back and forth between the surface of Merida Prime and the Flagship was expensive, inefficient, and probably would have made Rogers throw up a lot.
As soon as he walked in for the first time, Rogers immediately hated it. Offices were like work traps; no matter where you hid, someone could always find your office and put work in it for you that you’d eventually have to complete when you came back. Baited with a comfortable leather chair, your name on the door, and the promise of a better pension, you could never really resist stepping inside and taking another phone call about pie charts. Rogers barely enjoyed phone calls about pie.
In this case, his “work trap” was a very upset Sergeant Mailn.
“I’m surprised that you are acting like this,” Rogers said. “You never mentioned your wife before two days ago, and we went into that bar with the express purpose of getting them to fight for us. Now you’re all upset about it?”
Mailn stared at him with a flat expression. Her black eye was just starting to fade away, which was perfect, because now the other eye was black. She was starting to look like a raccoon, and Rogers was starting to have real, deep questions about the meaning of love and marriage.