by Joe Zieja
“I thought you might want this.”
“Xan, I . . . ,” Alandra said. There were so many words fighting for dominance inside her brain, like several bodies with equal but opposite magnetic charges all swirling around. She looked at Xan, her mouth slightly open, unable to speak.
Xan may have smiled. May have, because Alandra really wasn’t sure what facial expression was resulting from his off-balance face weights, and she’d just been very clear about reiterating her dislike of smiles.
“After this, Grand Marshal, we should talk.” He pressed the case toward her. “I will give you all the intelligence you desire.”
Keffoule blushed and grabbed the pistol. Poor Rogers was going to be so very, very disappointed.
• • •
“Flash!” Rogers yelled. “Get back in your ship!”
“Got a hung missile, Skip,” Flash said over the radio. “Figured I could kick it a few times, and—ah! There it goes.”
The battlespace display showed a missile launch coming from Ravager One, flying miraculously through an entire screen of enemy fighters without hitting a single one, and colliding with an asteroid that Rogers was certain had not been there a moment before. It caused the asteroid to shatter, creating hundreds of smaller asteroids.
“Hey, as far as the law of armed conflict goes,” Rogers asked Rholos, “is it legal for me to have another Ravager kill Flash?”
“Not to my knowledge, sir,” Rholos said.
The bridge was bustling with personnel arming themselves in anticipation of being boarded by the Jupiterians. The attack runs hadn’t penetrated their shields or disabled any critical systems yet, but it was only a matter of time. While they were waiting to fight face-to-face like barbarians, Rogers was firm in his belief that he couldn’t simply abandon the bridge. He also was too scared to go anywhere, and the bridge felt like a safe space for the time being. There were locks on the door and everything.
On the outside of the ship, things were not looking good at all. With the Flagship about to be boarded, command of the other system’s ships had been delegated downward. Rogers was barely able to keep up his own battlespace awareness, never mind actually coordinating anything. It turned out that the Jupes were trying to board several capital ships, though they hadn’t succeeded in doing so thus far. The boarding crews had been repelled, but that had still taken several larger battle cruisers and frigates out of the fight.
Rogers was most assuredly, definitely, positively, losing this battle.
“What are we looking at here?” Rogers asked. He scooted slightly away from the disruptor rifle that someone had handed him, which he had placed on his command chair and refused to touch.
“Another attack run or two from those fighters and they’ll be able to crack us open,” Rholos said. Despite her calm demeanor, Rogers could tell that both she and Zaz were nervous. They handled it like professionals, at least, unlike Deet, who had begun experimenting with the idea of mortal fear. Every time he saw a Jupiterian ship fly past the bridge, he tried out different kinds of screams, one of which he kept calling the Wilhelm.
“Sir!” one of the bridge technicians called from the far end. Rogers couldn’t see who it was or what their job title was, but they were yelling loudly enough for him to understand that it was important. “Someone has jettisoned an escape pod near Engineering. No idea who is on board.”
Crap. His crew was starting to break. The last thing he needed was people fleeing the ship en masse. He couldn’t honestly blame them, but he had to prevent panic.
“Has someone pressed the panic button?” Rogers called out loud.
“No, sir!”
“Good,” Rogers said. “Let’s keep that not pressed. Track the pod and we’ll pick whoever it is up later.” Assuming we survive. Actually, if there had ever been any time in the Flagship’s history when it would have been appropriate to push the panic button, this might have been it.
“Boarding crews are closing!” Rholos called.
“Damn it! Who is manning all of our defensive systems? Why can’t our big, giant cannons hit these tiny little ships before they get to us?”
“They were just hit by a bunch of very small asteroids, sir,” the defensive technician replied.
“Of course they were. How long before we have to start knifing Jupiterians with broken cookware?”
“I don’t think we’ll ever have to—”
“How long until they’re here, starman?”
“Five minutes, sir.”
Rogers swallowed. Standing atop his command platform, he looked around the bridge to see the sullen faces of his crew, many of whom were possibly about to die defending the Flagship from the boarding party. Should he just order them to surrender? Stop the bloodshed before it started? It was a viable option, but that would certainly put an end to the anti-Jupiterian momentum in one fell swoop. Rogers owed the galaxy a little more than that. Besides, other ships had repelled Jupiterian boarding parties, so maybe the Jupes were just . . . bad at it?
He had to take a chance at his enemy being really bad at fighting. They might even be worse than Rogers was.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Rogers said. “We’re about to fight the toughest battle we’ve ever fought. Well I guess we’re already in it.” Wow, he was an atrocious public speaker for someone who supposedly was an excellent con man.
“Anyway, uh, I know that not everything I have done has been exemplary, as far as commanders go. I mean I guess I’ve done a good thing every once in a while. There was the time with the droids, which was mostly an accident. But, uh—”
“Captain Rogers!” someone yelled. “New ships incoming. A lot of them. One of them is an MPD ship!”
“Oh thank god,” Rogers said. “Now I can stop talking. Reinforcements?”
There was a pause. Not the good kind of pause, like the moment before the glorious taste of Jasker 120 finally hit you. The bad kind of pause, like the unexpected revelation that something else was trying to kill them all.
“Who is it?” Rogers yelled.
“I . . . don’t really know,” Rholos said. But before Rogers could ask her how she could not read a simple IFF display, more shouts erupted from the other side of the bridge.
“Boarding crew is extending planks! We’ve got one minute, tops.”
Rogers’ console let him know that the Viking was trying to get in touch. Despite the fact that there was an unknown party in the battlespace, and that they were all about to die, Rogers picked it up.
“I’ve got platoons at the typical boarding places,” she said. “We’re ready.”
“Good,” Rogers said. “Hey, listen.”
“Hey, listen,” the Viking said at the same time.
Both of them listened, and therefore neither of them said anything.
“You first,” both of them said. Now this was just getting awkward. That and, of course, the war.
“I just—” Rogers said.
“Boarding planks out! We’re going—”
A powerful vibration shot through the bridge, taking several people off their feet and knocking down one of Ralph’s exceptional propaganda posters that Rogers had specifically commissioned for the anti-Jupiterian conflict. This particular one had a picture of old Jupiter on it, which seemed plain enough to Rogers. Underneath was a text of Ralph’s own composition, which said, in all capital letters: SPAGHETTIFICATION IS A REAL WORD AND IT MAY HAPPEN TO US ALL.
The force of the blast had sent Rogers sideways into his console, cutting the communication from the Viking and inadvertently calling up a piece of old polka music. From where in the annals of the ship’s databases Rogers had been able to call up such a tune, he had absolutely no idea.
“What hit us?” Rogers said, trying, and failing, to turn off the polka.
Nobody answered for a moment as everyone on the bridge picked themselves up and tried to reorient to the task at hand. Rholos and Zaz had both remained standing by virtue of some very quick furniture grabs, but the
same couldn’t be said for S1C Brelle, who had rolled nearly halfway across the bridge. Thankfully, the serious injuries seemed to be limited to the propaganda poster and the polka.
Rholos looked at a display in front of her and called over her shoulder. “It looks like one of the assault ships on a boarding vector got knocked off course. It collided with the hull of the Flagship near the bridge.”
It seemed like the rumbling had been too big to indicate just a small collision, but then, floating by the window of the bridge, Rogers saw the wreckage of the ship that had hit them. It must have been going unbelievably fast, too fast for a boarding configuration actually. That didn’t make any sense.
Plasma blasts began making the scenery around them turn all sorts of different colors, changing the bridge into a sort of manic polka rave. Rogers ducked instinctively—Sergeant Mailn had trained him well—but he realized quickly that the shots weren’t being aimed at them. They were coming across the bow of the ship.
“Who is shooting at the Jupiterians?” Rogers yelled.
A large piece of metal obscured the view from the bridge for a moment, allowing Rogers to see the broad side of what could have been any ship larger than a midsize fighter. As it passed by, Rogers could see the letters emblazoned on the side of the ship: RANCOR.
As he recognized the ship that was now within an uncomfortable distance of the Flagship as the one that had gotten him arrested—and, oh yeah, the one entirely populated by self-aware, human-killing droids—he felt the blood drain from every part of his body. He stumbled backward on the platform and fell into his chair, pointing wordlessly outside.
“The new group of ships is attacking the Jupiterians,” Rholos said, obviously not understanding the gravity of the situation.
“New group of ships?” Rogers said, his voice at a pitch unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.
“There are approximately fifty ships in the group that just came out of Un-Space, all moving in a coordinated fashion against the Jupiterians. The boarding party is breaking off their run and moving to rejoin their fleet to defend themselves.”
What unbelievable luck! Somehow, the droids, who had been programmed to kill any human, had chosen specifically to kill the humans who Rogers also wanted to kill! Yes, they would eventually run out of Jupiterians to kill and target him instead, but he was a master of deferring problems. How the hell had they amassed a fleet?
“They came!” Deet said, which didn’t at all fit into Rogers’ previous narrative that this had been a random, and very fortunate, bit of serendipity.
Rogers slowly looked at Deet, his jaw and fists both tightening.
“What did you just say?” Rogers asked.
“Push the attack!” Zaz yelled into his headphones. “Go, go, go! We’ve got them on the run!”
Rogers wasn’t paying attention. He was too busy staring at Deet. The war waged on outside; the polka waged on inside. Absently he reached to the side and pressed a few buttons to finally turn the music off, his eyes never leaving Deet.
“You know,” Deet said, “chaos theory is a very complicated subject—”
“Deet . . . ,” Rogers said.
“There are just so many possibilities when you consider that there may be infinite universes, all with diverging paths—”
“Deet!” Rogers yelled.
“They also may be here because I called them.”
“You what?” Rogers said, standing up. Deet was all the way on the other side of the railing of the command platform, though, and while Rogers had perfected ducking, jumping was entirely different. Or was jumping just ducking in reverse?
“I can explain,” Deet said.
“I am eager to hear it,” Rogers replied. Zaz and Rholos were working furiously now to coordinate a counterattack, pressing their advantage. Rogers wasn’t paying full attention, but from what he could tell, the droid ships were moving through the Jupiterian lines, at speeds that would have turned any human into paste. It filled him with terror.
“You see,” Deet said, “I called them here.”
“You already said that.”
“It’s just that I am having a difficult time explaining why,” Deet said. His head twitched to the side in a way that made Rogers think he was experiencing a short. “It appears I put my personal wants and desires ahead of the safety of thousands of other individuals.”
“Congratulations!” Belgrave said. “Now you’re human!”
Rogers glared at the helmsman, then turned back to the droid. “Deet, first, no, that doesn’t mean you’re human. Second, we’ll deal with whether or not I should melt you down for scrap later. You’re lucky they’re killing only Jupiterians at the moment.”
Despite his building rage, Rogers decided to focus on the immediate task of using the droid’s distraction to seize back the advantage. Fifty ships in a battle of hundreds wasn’t enough of an influencing force that it was causing the Jupiterians to scramble. Yet, for some reason, several groups were already breaking off their engagement and heading back toward the Un-Space point through which they’d originally come.
Zaz and Rholos, pacing across the bridge of the Flagship, called orders into their headsets with astonishing rapidity. For a pair of commanders who had, until recently, merely been reciting rhetoric from an obsolete manual on space combat, they seemed to be learning to improvise rather well. Rogers let the people in the war room know they were no longer under threat of being boarded, and the other systems’ fleets began coordinated efforts to drive back the Jupiterian fleet. Mailn continued to have real trouble making coordinated turns in her ship.
In what seemed like a very short amount of time, the plasma flashes were dissipating, the flashing warning lights in the bridge were slowly dimming, and Flash was sending pictures of himself already telling stories of his heroics using his hands as visual aids. Rogers sat back in his chair, sweat soaked and exhausted, wondering what the hell he was supposed to do now. The Galaxy Eater was obviously not here—was probably never here—and they now had only five days before the Jupiterian deadline. Would they really go down with the ship, so to speak? Unless the Jupes themselves had some way to hide from the complete destruction of the galaxy, like new Un-Space paths that hadn’t been charted yet, they’d crush all of humanity just to spite their historical oppressors.
Just as Rogers was planning to really dig into these deep intellectual issues,II a beep came from his console. His heart leapt as he thought it was the Viking calling him back, but he realized with a bit of disappointment that it was actually coming from Master Sergeant Hart in Engineering. He flipped the switch.
“Hey, Hart. I’m a little busy trying to win a war here, yeah? What’s up?”
“Hey, high-and-mighty asshole. You know the Astromologer?”
“Yeah, I’m familiar with him being totally wrong about everything. Is this really important right now?”
“Well, shit, Rogers. Is someone loading self-destruct codes into the mainframe of the Flagship something you would classify as important? Pretty weird, right?”
Rogers felt his stomach do a somersault. “What?”
“Yeah. That’s what the Astromologer has been up to. And that’s who popped the escape pod. He’s gone.”
Rogers swallowed. That must have been why the assault ship had come at them so fast. They weren’t trying to board; they were trying to pick up their goddamned spy.
“You want to know something weirder?” Hart asked.
“Um,” Rogers replied, not able to think of anything else to say.
“We didn’t blow up. And something even weirder?”
“Mhh.” All of the blood was draining from Rogers’ face, and he felt the Flagship spinning around him as though all the inertial dampeners had been shut off again. He really couldn’t take much more of this.
“Tunger was the one who stopped him.”
Rogers slid from his chair like a piece of spaghetti that had just a bit too much of itself hanging over the side of the pot.
“Told you he was the spy,” Belgrave said.
“Of course the freaking Astromologer was the spy!” Rogers yelled.
“Actually, you’ve got it a bit wrong, old chap.”
Rogers turned, not recognizing the voice at all, to find Tunger standing nearby. There was something different about him, however. He was standing taller, straighter. His voice had changed so much that Rogers spent a moment looking for a second person in the room. And he was also holding a disruptor pistol pointed directly at Rogers’ chest.
“You see,” the strange Tunger clone said, “I did become a spy after all.”
* * *
I. It was.
II. He was not.
A Jupiterian by Any Other Name Will Still Try to Kill You
Pistols and rifles flew out of places that Rogers didn’t even know they could come from as the entire bridge locked Tunger in its sites. Even Deet, who Rogers was sure he was going to fire out an airlock, started whirring his arms. Tunger would have shot twenty holes in Rogers by the time Deet got close enough to slap him to death, but the gesture was appreciated.
“Who are you?” Rogers asked, holding up a hand. Tunger had saved his life enough times that he owed the man time to explain himself before allowing every armed troop on the bridge to turn him into hot goo.
“That’s a bit of a complicated question,” Tunger said. Rogers could not get over the sounds that were coming out of this man’s mouth. Half of the time he could barely understand Tunger, and the other half of the time he didn’t make any sense. This person sounded like he should be on a poster for a really amazing action movie where everyone talked super classy, but then also killed people.
“I think we have some time for a complicated answer,” Rogers said. “In fact, now that we’re probably all going to get Galaxy Eaten since we don’t know where it is, it would be a great time for everyone to put down their weapons and just chat a bit. What’s the use in rushing toward the end?”