Best Destiny

by Diane Carey

  Roy Moss, unwelcome because of his age, unrespected because of his age, held in contempt for his abilities and kept around for the same reason, clung to a companionway rail behind the others, watching.

  With his elbows against his ribs as he clung to the rail, he muttered, “I’d be alive.”

  * * *

  “Fire!”

  “I can’t fire again! There’s no power!”

  “Not that kind of fire! Get the extinguishers! Hall, get out of there!”

  George Kirk pulled Veronica out of the wall only seconds before her mechanical cave flushed with smoke and sparks and flames. The gravity went crazy, and suddenly the ship was turning on its side according to the perception of any living thing inside. Open space might not care, but the crew sure did.

  An instant later Robert was there with two small fire extinguishers, literally walking on the starboard wall. He tossed one to George, and both men stood with legs braced wide as the cutter tilted under them, spraying up a snowstorm.

  Smoke billowed from a dozen cracks and three of the four peeled-back pieces of hull sheeting.

  “Sir, you did it!” Carlos squinted to read the sensors at the source—with jabs of electricity, no screen. He poked his head out of the hole he was half in, wiped away the sweat-plastered hair. “They’re disabled! It might be quicksand, but it’s our quicksand! They’re stuck, but good!”

  Victory blended with pure hatred as George tucked his chin and growled, “I’d like to stick ’em somewhere. All right, crew—we’re on a better footing, but we just gave ourselves away. They know we’re here. It’s a cockfight.”

  “You dirty son of a scarecrow, Burgoyne, I warned you! I told your dirty, smelly ass what would happen if we didn’t move out, and now look.”

  “Watch’er mouth, Moss. I’m still in command.”

  “Command the warp drive back into place, then, since you can do magic! Command the weapons on line! Command this hulk back to full power. There’s coolant foaming all over the lower level, for Christ sake!”

  “Warm up the laser!” Burgoyne shouted. “Fire at them!”

  “Laser with no coolant?” Rex Moss said through gritted teeth. “We’ll go up like a nova!”

  “Back your fat self away from me. And lookit who’s talkin’ about smell.”

  As the two powerful men thundered at each other, those of the crew still on the bridge now turned to their work, even if they didn’t have any. Nobody wanted to get dragged in, to get in the middle of a dispute. Nobody knew which one would win, and didn’t want to be attached to the loser.

  Besides, if anybody got killed, there was more for the rest of them.

  “Warp drive is forget it!” Okenga called from down inside the engineering area. “Weapons are very bad.”

  “How long?” Burgoyne called without taking his eyes off Rex Moss. “How long to fix the warp?”

  “Five day. Six.”

  “What do we have left?”

  Eager to throttle Burgoyne with bad news, the Klingon technician climbed up out of the companionway, waving at the reddish-yellow chemical smoke that puffed up before him, and leered at their captain.

  “We can crawl around like a twenty-first-century tugger, doing a hundred thousand kilometers an hour. Half of one percent of light-speed. You can get out and swim faster.”

  Still staring at Rex, Burgoyne grumbled to the Klingon, “Go take a wizz, Dazzo. Nobody asked your filthy face.”

  At the back of the bridge, Roy raised an eyebrow and murmured, “The Sharks are now snails.”

  Burgoyne shot a glare at him and spat saliva. “Get back to your goddamned shields, boy!”

  “You were so sure they were dead,” Big Rex Moss boomed to Burgoyne. Sweat broke from his enormous bulk and added to the steam in the small, hot quarter. “So sure, so sure. ‘Go aheeeeed,’ you said. ‘Smack ’em again.’ Well, we smacked ’em, and they smacked back. Starfleet people don’t roll over and kick like sailors on some merchant scow, but would you listen? Now look at us! No warp speed! No power! No weapons! You want to crawl out of here at a tenth of impulse? Go ahead, Angus. Let’s see . . . how you crawl.”

  He moved closer in the cramped bridge, his last sentence a snarl of challenge.

  Angus Burgoyne caught the serious note, the threat in that tone, and pushed out of his chair. He put his back to the viewscreen—

  And a butcher knife in between himself and his hulking crewmate.

  There had always been contention between them, always a tight string vibrating about who was the better to be in command, but contention usually faded in the light of money in their pockets and bourbon in their bellies.

  Today they had neither. And their quarry was slipping onto a dangerously equal footing.

  No one looked up. No one wanted into it.

  Except a bony boy huddling beside the shielding portal where he was working.

  Roy Moss watched his father from the side of one eye and judged the movements of Burgoyne with his pure senses. He could barely see the huge butcher blade flickering, glowing from the viewscreen’s picture of the trinary. He dared not turn, for that would be uncalculated and unwise. He might distract them.

  And he didn’t want them distracted. He had waited too long for someone to legitimately challenge Burgoyne. If it was his own father, then it brought him closer to being in charge. If Big Rex was in command, then Roy knew he would get at least some respect, if only through fallout. No, Big Rex would give him none . . . but the other malletheads might.

  Burgoyne turned the wide blade before his nose as he glared past it at his challenger.

  Cloaked in fingers of steam and crackling electrical gushers from the shattered machinery behind him, Big Rex Moss was a monument to threat. He was big, he was hot, he was every bit as muscular as he was wide, as mean as he was heavy, and he cut a dinosauric figure with the nebula’s lights and the bridge’s darkness arguing in the folds of his neck. He never blinked. He took one step at a time. Almost a sense of music. A step for every sentence.

  “We’ll drag them in,” he said. “Drag them into the Blue Zone and crush the life out. That’ll give us time for fixing this hog.”

  Bending forward to put the knife closer to Rex, Burgoyne spat, “And no profit. We drag it in, we get nothing out. That’s not wot I’m in this business fo’. But what do you know about business? You talked us into keepin’ this snot-nosey whelp o’ yours on board, gettin’ a full share of our take—”

  “That snotnose is the only reason we can go inside the Zone and come out alive,” Big Rex said. Another step.

  “He should be getting part of your share,” Burgoyne insisted, “instead of a whole share of his own. You know it’s true, that’s why you’re always kickin’ the punk around. Admit it, y’grotesque maggot.”

  Roy listened, and this time he turned to watch. He stood up slowly. Since they were talking about him, they wouldn’t be surprised if he took interest or notice if he moved himself into a better position. He enjoyed these little moments so. . . .

  Share. I should be getting their shares on top of my own. I’m the only one who keeps them in business. I’m the shielding genius. I’m the piloting genius. I’m the weapons genius. What could they do without me? Use this ship for a giant chamber pot, is all.

  Big Rex took another step. “We’re going to drag them into the Zone. We’re going to get out while we still can. We’re going to hide and repair. You’re gonna step aside.”

  That was when he brought out the Orion magnatomic pistol and pointed all twenty inches of it right at Burgoyne’s funnel-shaped head. Where he’d hidden it until now, only his folds of flesh and shabby layers of sweat-stained clothing knew. Only the chains on his wrists really cared.

  Burgoyne started to shake. His big blade wasn’t big enough suddenly.

  His lips peeled back and twitched. His lack of a chin began to wobble.

  “Put the butch down, slug,” Rex told him.

  Hatred boiling through him, Burgoyne discov
ered he had no choice.

  Roy held his breath and continued to watch without pretending not to.

  Shaking so hard his bones almost rattled, Burgoyne slowly deposited the knife on what had minutes ago been his captain’s seat. He knew it was the last thing of his that would sit there.

  At least for now.

  That was how fast things could change.

  Big Rex never flinched. He didn’t look at the knife, but waited until Burgoyne backed away from the seat.

  Then, satisfied, Rex nodded and said, “Don’t you ever pull nothing like that again on me . . . or you won’t live to hear the echo.”

  Without the slightest regard for what Burgoyne might do to Roy, Big Rex chuckled to let them know he wasn’t too mad, but that he was victorious for now. He tapped the barrel of the Orion pistol on his brow in a kind of warning, then turned and headed for the companionway.

  Burgoyne let out part of a sigh of relief—

  Only part of it.

  Because Roy Moss saw his opportunity. He lunged forward, grabbed the butcher knife, and gave it a drastic fling toward the wide target of his father’s shoulders.

  Burgoyne’s gasp of astonishment and panic was particularly satisfying to Roy, but Roy had his eye on the blade he had cast.

  The blade turned sideways and didn’t lodge, but hit hard enough at the right angle to take a slice out of the back of Rex’s neck.

  Rex grabbed his neck with his free hand and spun around at astonishing speed for a man his size.

  Horrified, Burgoyne threw his hands out before him in a gesture of innocence, sucked in a gasp to explain that he hadn’t done it—

  shhhhhhhwazzzzzz

  A scream of pure agony, a glowing pillar of heat and stench, and Angus Burgoyne was suddenly the stuff of legend. Literally—he was now a pile of black flesh flakes and scorched bones whose tendons had been incinerated, settling and sizzling on the deck.

  “Always thought cremation was the best way to go,” Big Rex Moss commented. He waved his pistol in the air to cool it, and turned away again. “All right, you Sharks! Guess who’s in charge now?”

  Behind him, his son licked his lips and smiled.

  “This one’s changing! Hey! Dad! Captain! Somebody! This one’s changing.”

  Jimmy waved and pointed frantically until Veronica Hall dropped beside him and looked at the blinking numbers, reading them through static on the screen. “They’re changing course!” she confirmed.

  “What’s the new course?” George asked. “Carlos? Have you got it?”

  “I was afraid of this,” Carlos said. He stopped and swallowed hard. “They’re trying to get back into tractor range. If they can get a grip on us, they’ll drag us right into the Blue Zone. I’d bet on it.”

  “How long?” George demanded. “At this speed, how long have we got?”

  “Well . . . I . . . wouldn’t bother to start roasting a turkey, sir.”

  “What’s that? Six hours?”

  Carlos looked at him with a quizzical frown on his face.

  “Sir,” Veronica began.

  She never got the chance to finish, because George blustered, “Well, how long does it take to cook a turkey? My wife always takes six hours!”

  “Closer to four, George,” Robert supplied. A sentimental grin tugged at his mouth.

  Carlos nodded, but it was more like a hopeless shrug. “At the very outside.”

  Hands on his hips, George stared at the deck and paced back and forth between stacked and strapped supply crates. Four hours of disabled ship and disabled enemy.

  Four hours to gain an upper hand. Four hours to maybe lose that upper hand.

  Ultimately he stopped, turned, and faced them. His eyes were slim and angry, but a roulette wheel was spinning in them. There was a competitive sting in his voice.

  “Then it’s a race,” he said.

  Jimmy looked at him and almost—almost—smiled. “Thought you said it was a cockfight.”

  FOURTEEN

  “Almost nothing left.”

  “Us or them?”

  “Both.”

  “At least they don’t have weapons yet.”

  “How do you know?”

  “They’re not shooting at us, are they?”

  “Oh . . . right.”

  “I’d be shooting.”

  The voices of his father and Carlos Florida did little anymore to comfort Jimmy as he sat on the deck, getting stiffer and stiffer and more antsy by the minute. Forced to lean back on an elbow because the pitch adjusters were still broken and the ship was still tilted, he watched as the two men crawled around the deck from one exposed outlet to another, pushing wires out of the way and splicing cables snapped by the power surge when they took their one shot.

  “We’ve got to keep them buffaloed,” George was saying.

  “Sir, we’re moving away, but at a sick excuse for sublight,” Veronica said from inside the same wall Jimmy was leaning against. He couldn’t even see her legs anymore. Only the toe of one boot showed under a mass of disconnected chip shells. “Maybe one or two percent sublight. We’re a mess.”

  “But so are they,” Carlos added.

  Jimmy craned his neck but couldn’t see where Carlos or Robert April were at all.

  The hold had gone from a neat garage carrying sealed crates to a hangar of parts and cannibalized goods. Crate lids now blocked most of his view, set aside so that any tools or parts inside could be put to use. Some had slid across the tilted deck and were crowded on one side. Edges of the lids had been torn off and were being used as knives or screwdrivers.

  “They’re dogging us at a little better than our speed,” Carlos called over a snapping of damaged circuits. “Sooner or later they will catch us.”

  From the other side of an archaeology implements crate, Robert called, “Count your blessings. It’s a good thing our propulsion’s barely working.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because our navigational shields are down, my boy.”

  “Oh . . . right. Darn, that’s right . . . ”

  “Hey.”

  Jimmy looked to his other side, where the “hey” had come from, but there wasn’t anybody there.

  “Hey, Jimmy? Jimmy.”

  He turned on a hip, then scooted away from the wall—

  And there was Veronica’s face, visible through a mailbox-size electrical-adjuster hatch.

  “Can you push a vise-grips in here to me?” she asked.

  He bent over, almost down to the floor. “I can’t believe there’s enough room for you to be in there!”

  She batted those big pale eyes and grinned. “Barely. Could you get that, please?”

  “You mean a regular old vise-grips? You don’t want the one with the magnetic controls in it, or the timer, or anything?”

  “No, I just need a grab-and-holder. You know . . . an ‘extra hand.’ Can you find it?”

  Knowing he was being teased, he mumbled, “Yeah, sure,” and got up.

  Feeling green and raw, he ended up rummaging through four crates of excavation tools. His hands were scratched and lacerated before he found what she needed, and then it was too big. Eventually he had to lower himself to asking his father where he could find what she needed, and got little more than a finger pointed at a wall rack of hand tools.

  Finally he was poking the correct grips through the tiny hatch at Veronica’s face.

  One of her prosthetic fingers caught it by its metal teeth and pulled it in. “Thank you very much,” she said.

  Jimmy got down on his stomach and peered in. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure you can.”

  He lowered his voice. “How come it’s good that we’re not going very fast?”

  “What? Oh . . . I see what you mean!” Louder than Jimmy wanted her to be talking, she asked, “Don’t you know what navigational shields are for?”

  He winced, knowing everyone else could hear her even though she was inside the wall. “Navigating, I thought.”
>
  “No, no. They’re for safe travel at sublight,” she said. “If we go much faster than this without navigational deflectors, any two molecules of space debris could slam through our hull like bullets through cheese.”

  Behind Jimmy, his father got up, stretched his aching legs, and stepped to them. “Hall, say that again.”

  “Pardon, sir?”

  “The shielding.”

  “Sir, I don’t understand. I was just explaining to—”

  “Bullets through cheese . . . ” George knuckled a lock of sweaty dark red hair over his eyes and gazed at the deck. “That gives me an idea . . . ”

  Suddenly the dim utility lighting flickered, just before they heard Robert’s gasp from somewhere in the tumble of equipment toward the aft.

  “Ouch! Oh, my lord!”

  A second later Robert April tumbled from the open ceiling where he had been working, and landed somewhere back there on the cluttered deck behind some of the crates. Several pieces of small but heavy equipment fell out on top of him.

  That sent Jim’s father plunging across the tipped deck, around the crates, shoving aside anything that was in his way.

  “Robert, what happened? Don’t move—don’t! Let me get this off you. What happened up there?”

  “Bit of a backfire, I’m afraid . . . ”

  There was a shuffle behind the crates.

  Then George lifted him to his feet. “You all right? Can you stand?”

  “Just a twist . . . that’s why I had to become a captain, I always say. I’m a country gardener when it comes to mechanics—oh . . . lord, the shoulder . . . ”

  Jimmy tensed and got up on one knee in case his father needed help with Robert. Losing the two engineers and almost losing Carlos had left them all on edge.

  But his father’s voice, when it came again, was heavy with relief.

  “Go sit down for a few minutes. I’ll do this.”

  “Oh, George, you’re already trying to do so much—”

  “Look, don’t argue with me. I’ve got ten perfectly good thumbs to work with.”

  “Mmmm . . . suppose I can’t challenge self-confidence of that caliber, can I?”