Chotek’s voice changed from condescension to disbelief. “We are in interstellar space, what good would it do for us to float around in dropships if the ship explodes?”
Chang agreed. “That does sound like a slow death. I would prefer to go quick-.”
Skippy interrupted. “If one reactor melts down,” he explained frantically, “I might still be able to salvage the other reactor, but the radiation could kill you monkeys. Get away from the ship until I know if I can fix the problem.”
To Chotek’s credit, he did not hesitate. “On the way to my designated docking bay,” he announced shakily, which I assumed meant he was already running down a passageway.
The forward part of the ship was in less chaos than I expected; people were running but no one panicked. That is one major advantage of having an elite, supremely-disciplined crew. When I got to my assigned docking bay, the big Thuranin Condor dropship was already warming up, and people were filing quickly up the open back ramp. No sooner had my feet clattered on the ramp when Skippy announced over the intercom “We’re good! No need to abandon ship, heh heh, everything is cool. I think.”
“You think?” I whispered harshly into my zPhone.
“Give me a moment, uh, yup. We’re good. No problem. Damn, that was a close one. Joe, you really should have notified me earlier there was a problem with the ship’s bots, you dumdum.”
“Me?”
“Yes, duh. I told you, I was extremely busy programming the jump drive nav system. Also, Joe, the crew’s performance on this abandon ship drill was shamefully slow. If this had been a real emergency, we-”
“If? If? Did you lose control of a reactor or not?”
“I can neither confirm nor deny any such outrageous allegations, Joe, but I am shocked and hurt that you would accuse me-”
“This is bad, Skippy.”
“Yeah, it is kind of embarrassing. We should keep this between us, huh?”
“Between us?” I looked around the rear compartment of the Condor where a dozen people were awaiting orders, from me. Silently, I gave them a thumbs up, then pointed toward the ramp. “I just ordered the whole freakin’ crew to abandon the ship. Everyone knows!”
“Well, that was bad planning. You shouldn’t have panicked, Joe. Ah, the crew got to train for emergency evac, so all’s well that ends well, right?”
I didn’t answer him other than to flip a middle finger at the front camera of my zPhone.
“Um, no harm no foul? Come on, Joe, work with me here. I’m running out of clichés.”
“Skippy,” I didn’t know what else to say. There was no point to shouting at him. “Listen, Skippy, you are overworked right now. You’re still fixing the ship, while you are adjusting to your new, uh, circumstances.” I didn’t want to say ‘reduced circumstances’, he knew what I meant. “Would it help if I call a twenty-four hour stand-down, so you can catch up on critical maintenance stuff?”
“Totally unnecessary, Joe, and doing that will delay us finding the conduit I need. The clock for Zero Hour doesn’t pause while I’m fixing the ship. Although, if you insist on a stand-down-”
“Oh, I do insist,” I replied with as much sarcasm as I could muster, as I trudged back down the Condor’s ramp feeling like a total idiot.
“Then forty-eight hours would be better.”
“Ok, forty-”
“Maybe seventy-two hours.”
“All right-”
“How about you monkeys relax, and I’ll tell you when I’m done? If you insist.”
“Deal.” The crew would not be happy about more enforced idleness, but after the latest fiasco, they would understand.
On the way back to my cabin for the shower I still needed, I passed by Adams who was picking up the last of her clothing off the floor of the passageway. “Sergeant?”
“Yes, Sir?”
“You take care of those panties. They just saved our lives.”
“Yes, Sir,” she laughed.
Hans Chotek was waiting for me outside my cabin, arms across his chest and his face red. The red was not only from anger, he was out of breath from running during the aborted evac procedure. Chang was with him, with Chang providing a calm, steady presence. “Colonel, what happened?” Chotek demanded.
“The short answer, Sir, is we got visited by the screw-up fairy.”
“What?” Chotek’s face grew even more red.
“Ah,” Chang nodded with understanding.
Chotek looked to Chang with a raised eyebrow. “Since you apparently know what that means, please explain.”
“That is an American expression, but we have similar sayings in China. It refers to a series of innocuous events that cascade onto another, until a dangerous situation is created.”
“Colonel Bishop?” Chotek turned to me.
I was still amazed that my Chinese second-in-command had used the word ‘innocuous’. Damn, he spoke English better than I did. “Chang described it close enough. Skippy had maintenance bots working throughout the ship, and that was working fine. Then his attention was taken up by programming navigation options into the jump drive, and well, he lost track of what the bots were doing. Without direct supervision, the bots working on a reactor did something wrong, or failed to do something after they did another thing. Everything was going fine, Sir, until one little thing changed, and upset the apple cart. The screw-up fairy came in and did the one thing that the system couldn’t tolerate,” I finished with a shrug.
“Is this also called ‘Murphy’s Law’?” Chotek asked.
“If something can go wrong, it will? Yeah, I guess so,” I agreed. “We are going to stand down normal ship operations for up to seventy two hours, so Skippy can concentrate on maintenance and only maintenance.”
“Plus revising my internal subroutines to function optimally under my reduced processing power and memory capacity,” Skippy interjected. “Shouldn’t take more than seventy two hours, unless, you know, it does.”
“Seventy two hours of stand-down is seventy two hours we are not devoting to our mission,” Chotek stated as if no one else had considered that fact.
“Hey, Chocula,” Skippy said peevishly, “you don’t need to remind me that we’re working on a deadline. Zero Hour is my deadline, as in literally dead if I can’t defeat the worm before then. Joe is right, I rushed into full operations too soon, and I still have not adjusted to working in a tiny corner of my substrate. I need to bring the ship up to speed and learn to work with what I have, before we can go flying off on a dangerous mission.”
Chotek looked to me, but I had said everything I needed to. Everything that could be said. Our fearless mission leader needed to find a way to deal with the facts. “Very well. Seventy two hours, please keep me informed of your progress, Skippy. Colonel Bishop, you will need to find ways to keep the crew busy in the interim. They do not deal well with enforced idleness.”
“Yes, Sir,” I grimaced. Crap, he was right. Damn it, I needed to assign someone to be the ship’s Morale Officer; to keep everyone busy and their spirits up. That was a thankless job on any ship.
“Here’s a suggestion if you need something to keep the crew busy,” Skippy spoke up unhelpfully. “Conduct emergency evac drills. The crew’s performance on this last drill was shamefully slow. It’s a good thing we didn’t have a reactor on the razor edge of exploding. That you know of. Uh, forget I said that last thing, Ok?”
All I could do was roll my eyes as Count Chocula glared at me.
Twenty four, then forty eight hours went by, and Skippy was still working on getting the ship restored to full operation, and adjusting himself to his new circumstances. There were some glitches along the way, like when artificial gravity totally cut out with less than two seconds of warning. At that moment, I was running flat-out on a treadmill, and barely managed to hold onto a railing with one hand before my flailing legs would have sent me rocketing off the belt and onto the opposite wall. That was the most serious incident, although there were others. Like at 04
34 the second morning when the crew was treated to ‘Louie Louie’ blasting out of speakers all over the ship. “Skippy! What the hell?”
“Oh crap, you heard that? Sorry.” The music cut out. “This is hopeless, totally freakin’ hopeless anyway.”
It suddenly struck me that the music had not been Skippy’s voice warbling off-key, it was the original song. “What’s hopeless?”
“Well, I was testing my processing ability, to see how well I am coping with my current reduced capacity. Even with restricted throughput, I am capable of crunching hundreds of zettabits of data through each of millions of channels simultaneously. So, I decided I would try tackling one of the galaxy’s greatest computational challenges, to test myself.”
“What’s that?”
“Deciphering the lyrics to ‘Louie Louie’ by the Kingsmen. To work up to that task, I started with Michael McDonald, he was the singer for the Doobie Brothers. That joker was not exactly the king of enunciation, if you know what I mean. After I had my fill of that crap, I tried Bob Dylan. Brilliant songwriter but, damn, what a marble-mouth singer. After revising my computational model fourteen quadrillion times, I was able to understand eighty three percent of Dylan’s songs. Except his live albums, those are a lost cause. Truthfully, even to get to eighty three percent I did a lot of guessing. When I was ready, I tried the ultimate challenge: ‘Louie Louie’.”
“And?”
“It’s hopeless, Joe. Completely unintelligible. Nobody knows what they were singing.”
“Still a great party song.”
“It is probably better with tequila.”
“The more tequila you drink, the better it sounds. Trust me, if you drink enough, the lyrics are totally understandable.”
“I will have to trust you about that, Joe.”
“Hey, how are you doing? Other than the ‘Louie Louie’ thing.”
“Ok enough,” he sounded depressed. “What matters is I will not need more than seventy two hours to bring the ship up to full operational status. As full as it can be right now, I mean. And I estimate there is about six hours remaining before I complete rationalizing my internal workings.”
“No more music waking us up in the middle of the freakin’ night?” I hoped.
“No more unexpected anything from me, Joe. The music tonight happened because I was using a subroutine that hasn’t yet been rationalized. It won’t happen again.”
I threw a pillow over my face and mumbled “Good night, Skippy.”
“Sweet dreams, Joe.”
From any display on the ship, or any tablet, laptop or zPhone, anyone could get an external view of the ship. When we had people outside in suits practicing maneuvers, or dropships were flying around close to the ship, we could access that view also.
But sometimes I wanted to see the ship, see the old-fashioned way with photons bouncing off the hull and being picked up by my eyes. Because portholes were a weak point in the ship’s structure, there weren’t many of them on the Flying Dutchman. One place that had portholes was the rear of the forward hull; the portholes there were intended for emergency use when ships were attaching to the hardpoint docking platforms. Even the proudly and stubbornly cyborg Thuranin, who liked to control the entire ship through cybernetic brain implants rather than physically touching buttons, levers and switches, understood the need for a backup control system that could not be hacked or interrupted. When starships were attaching to or detaching from a star carrier’s hardpoint docking platforms, some unlucky Thuranin was required to unplug from the ship’s network, and use his or her eyeballs to assure some idiot navigator didn’t crash into another ship or worse, the star carrier itself.
Anyway, those portholes were a good place for me to relax and get away from the crew for a while; to access them you had to climb up a tube that was sized for Thuranin. They also gave a decent view, a real non-digital view, of space, the stars and the ship aft of the forward main hull. At the top of the tube was a small, low-ceilinged platform and it was kind of a pain climbing up the cramped tube that had handholds placed too close together. I usually skipped every other handhold, and every single time I had to remind myself not to climb too quickly or risk bashing the back of my skull on the tube.
My favorite porthole was the one closest to my office, which was still a long walk. When I got there, I used the manual unlocking mechanism; the regular latch was designed to be controlled by thought through a Thuranin cyborg implant.
“I wouldn’t do that, Joe,” Skippy warned me through the zPhone on my belt as my hand grasped the handle.
“Huh? Why not?”
“Sergeant Adams is currently using the viewing platform and she is, um, not alone, if you know what I mean. She’s with that cute French paratrooper who she-”
“Ah! Damn, Skippy, I do not need details, please.”
“Okey dokey, Joe. I can tell you are sensitive about the subject. The women aboard this ship seem to find the men of the French team to be quite desirable; it may be that paratroopers are considered dashing, or when they speak French, it is-”
“Hey, I’m a paratrooper. I’m a freakin’ space paratrooper. Nobody has more spacediving time than I have. And I can speak French.”
“Joe, you know some choice swear words in Quebec-style French, that is not the same as being able to speak the language. You barely speak English. As you did not attend formal paratrooper training, you are not-”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” I didn’t want to continue a conversation about how other men in the Merry Band of Pirates were considered cooler than me. It did please me to know Adams was enjoying a normal human activity; I had been worried about her ever since I broke her out of the Kristang jail where we had all been held awaiting execution. While I was in that jail, I had slept on a cold hard floor, and food had been sparse. The women prisoners on Paradise had been treated much worse, as the Kristang soldiers could not stand the idea of a female disobeying them. Female prisoners were fed less often than men, if they were fed at all. Adams, Desai and the other women had been tortured; I had seen ugly scars on Adams’ naked back before she pulled on the uniform top I brought. Since they joined the Merry Band of Pirates, their physical injuries had been tended to by the magical medicine of Doctor Skippy, and he assured me the two women were fully healed. Fully healed physically, that is. Military psychologists on Earth had cleared Adams and Desai for duty, and I had not talked with them about what happened in that jail. Unless the aftereffects of their ordeal affected their fitness for duty, it was none of my business how they were coping emotionally. Still, it was nice to know Sergeant Adams was engaged in a normal and I assume healthy relationship. Although one thing bothered me. People had plenty of places aboard the Dutchman for romantic activities, and those lucky couples didn’t need to confine themselves to their tiny cabins and too-short beds. But common courtesy required busy couples to give notice, to avoid someone awkwardly stumbling onto them. “Damn it, I’m happy Adams is having fun, but they should like, hang a sock on the door latch here, let people know this porthole is occupied.”
“A sock?” Skippy asked, surprised. “Hmmm, they did loop a necktie over the handle, I thought that was the paratrooper being too lazy to carry it back to his cabin. Under my direction, one of my maintenance bots just picked up the necktie and is bringing it to be clean-”
“Skippy, come on, bring it back.”
“Doing that now, Joe. Wow, have I been screwing things up for a while? I had no idea hanging a sock over a door handle meant something to you humans. Your secret informal communications methods can be way too freakin’ complicated.”
“Sorry, Skippy, someone should have told you. All adult humans know what that means; you and your bots are not the intended audience. All right, I will go to the porthole on the portside deck Three. Unless that one is also occupied?”
“That porthole is currently empty Joe. There is an amorous couple in the back of a cargo hold near-”
“Don’t need to know, Skippy! I do not
need to know, thank you very much.” Was everyone on the ship other than me getting laid? That was an incredibly depressing thought. I mean, I am a healthy young guy. People talk about the Loneliness of Command, but they never mention the Horniness of Command. The woman aboard the Flying Dutchman were the only women within eight hundred lightyears, and they were all off-limits to me. That totally, totally sucked.
Thinking about that had me in a sour mood by the time I climbed up to the porthole viewing platform, even though I had not bumped my head even once in that claustrophobic tube. Remembering why I went to the porthole, I looked out and- “Damn, Skippy. This porthole is so dirty, I can barely see through it. Have your bots cleaned this thing recently?”
“Yes, Joe,” he answered defensively.
“Really?” I used the word ‘really’ in the tone my mother hated when my father did it, because it implied the other person was so dumb you had to question their actions. “It doesn’t look like it. I would have done a better cleaning job if I had spit on this porthole and smeared it around with my butt cheeks.”
“Ugh. Joe, now I will need to purge several gigabytes of memory to get that image out of my mind. Yes, Ok, fine, it has been a while since I had a bot up there to clean that porthole, and you monkeys have been getting grubby fingerprints on it and breathing on it. So excuse me if my bots have been busy with more important things, like fixing all the idiot crap you ignorant apes did to the ship while I was away on vacation. Maybe just in case something happens to me again, I should put Post-It notes all over the ship with ‘Danger Do Not Touch’. Even that would be too complicated because it requires you morons to read. Seriously, what part of me saying you humans should never, never, ever screw with major shipboard systems did you not understand?”
“We didn’t have a choice, Skippy; you left us to ourselves. And do not say I should have trusted the awesomeness to come back to us; the awesomeness would still be trapped at the bottom of a beer can if Nagatha hadn’t gone in there to get you.”
Zero Hour (Expeditionary Force Book 5) Page 4