by Drayton Alan
Chapter 10
The next few days were uneventful as the ship sped through space on its way to another mission. What that mission might be or what dangers lay ahead wasn’t information shared with the custodians. To the custodians and maintenance techs, space travel consisted of a daily grind of toilet sanitizing, plumbing problems, floor polishing, inventory taking, and spill mopping.
After a few days, Nigel returned to duty, but gone was the chatty convivial coworker of days past. He’d become a sullen, quiet, withdrawn man. He kept himself busy with his work and went back to his room at the end of his shift. Kale tried to engage him in conversation, but Nigel gave only grunts and nods in reply.
The others were concerned for Nigel but gave him time and space to work things out for himself. None of them could even guess at the trauma the man had endured. Perhaps with time, he could work through whatever bothered him. Meanwhile, his friends were there for him if he needed to talk.
Kale hadn’t given any details of the rescue—nothing about the ridiculous suit of cheese, the beautiful bride, or the crazy cracker feast. Out of respect for Nigel’s dignity, Kale had said only that he’d managed to tag Nigel during the ceremony.
With Nigel back, Kale had started practicing for The Pirates of Penzance play tryouts in earnest. There was a nice turnout and the results were posted a few days later. They passed over him for the role of Samuel. Still, they had asked if he’d be willing to help clean the auditorium after the performance. Just another soul-crushing disappointment in Kale’s career on the Cosmos.
Elsewhere on the ship, in many of the common areas, you would find small groups of officers memorizing lines and practicing dance routines for the upcoming performance. Kale steered clear of any of the cast he encountered, the first officer especially. Frakes had become obsessed with the role of the pirate king. He spoke of nothing else. He even wore the costume during his duty shifts. No one mentioned it since to bring it up meant that you would spend the next thirty minutes discussing Gilbert and Sullivan with the man. Soon the other officers were avoiding him altogether.
The captain didn’t address Frakes’s behavior either. When asked about it, he would tersely reply he was working on it. It was odd too, that even though all the other roles had been assigned, there had been no announcement who’d been chosen for the role of the pirate king.
Kale buried himself in his work, finding comfort in the drudgery of daily chores and focused on the good hard scrubbing to purge the ship’s porcelain of all its filth. He chanted the three laws of custodiotics under his breath in an effort to sanitize his memory of that sad and beautiful girl’s face.
It was during one of these seeming endless cycles of shifts, while Kale was in the shop preparing for his next job, when the Cosmos encountered an overwhelming invading force of squidmen ships. As was the usual case, the custodians were oblivious to the danger. It wasn’t until the ship rocked from the impact of weapons fire and the annoying klaxon alarms sounded that they realized they were in a battle.
For the custodian crew, battle stations usually meant suiting up in their lime green gear and preparing for a cleaning nightmare. Kale and Nigel were on duty at the custodial shop, so they got prepped. Belle and the lieutenant were in their offices working, and Idonna was off duty. A massive shudder went through the decking, knocking them to their knees.
“That aint good,” Nigel said.
The lieutenant came out of his office holding a weapon. “That boarding pod hit close, get ready for company, find whatever weapons you can and be ready.” They didn’t entrust the custodian crewmen with side arms only the officers.
No sooner than he’d said it, they heard the sound of the squidmen outside the custodial shop in the corridor. Kale ran into Belle’s office and armed himself with the vac-bot named Eddie. Eddie’s door was open, and Kale’s finger was ready on the teleport button. He rubbed his arm. Nigel pulled out a high-pressure sprayer and set the nozzle to its narrowest setting.
Belle gave orders to the computer: “Initialize subroutine entitled Emergency Defensive Protocol, latest version, on all bots in the custodial shop.”
The lieutenant gave her a questioning look, but she just shrugged her shoulders. “Last time that protocol didn’t seem very safe, Tink,” he said.
“I have been working on it. It’s much better now. Just, everyone, try not to resemble a squid man, the bots get confused sometimes. Okay?”
Kale wondered what it might take to make him resemble a squidman. Not coming up with anything, he decided thinking un-squidmanlike thoughts was his best course.
Nigel gave the pressure wand a test on a nearby plastic bucket. The narrow high-pressure stream of water sliced through it with ease.
The four of them waited in quiet determination. Perhaps the security teams would arrive before the aliens, but who knew how many other breaches the boarding pods had made on the ship. The custodian shop was low on anyone’s list of priorities.
The typical squidman ship-to-ship battle strategy was simple. The squidmen didn’t rely on powerful weapons like the Coalition. Instead, they deployed hundreds of small, shielded podlike shuttles. The tactic was to overwhelm the auto-targeting ability of enemy computers with numbers and a special random teleporting technique. This technique also meant the pods could bypass the enemy’s shields by teleporting near it and passing slowly through it. The pods were only vulnerable while they slowed to pass the shields. But since they all do it simultaneously, there are just too many targets. The weapons cannot possibly destroy each pod.
Once in range of the ship, the pods speed toward it slamming into it and adhering to the hull at strategic locations. The squid pod ships attach to the hull with a special fluid that forms an airtight seal. Then an automated plasma torch cuts through the hull to create an opening. Once open, dozens of squidmen slide from the pod, through the breach, and into the enemy ship. This makes it impossible for the internal defense forces to respond to every incursion of the enemy.
Usually the defensive forces are deployed at the strategic system centers of the ship such as life support, engineering, weapons, and the bridge. Other sections, which are non-strategic, often get no help from security. On the bottom of the list was the custodial shop. It was usually the lowest priority for the squidmen to attack too. Why they were there now, was anyone’s guess.
Lieutenant Lou didn’t expect help. He knew from experience it was probably only going to be the four of them facing an onslaught of a dozen or more fully-trained, battle-hardened squidmen marines. Only the custodians and a handful of maintenance robots, whose fighting skills were unreliable at best, could defend the shop.
Despite Belle’s best programming efforts, the robots would often mistake non-threatening objects for targets. Last time she’d tested, one robot had decimated a row of lockers and a water dispenser before she could shut it down.
The cleaning crew stood in the main shop area awaiting their fate. The door to the shop was locked, but the thin panel door was no match for the alien weapons. It pealed back and away under the plasma blasts and pressure of the squidmen attacks.
Sticky tentacles shot through the doorway and the squidmen began pulling through four or five at a time. Their gelatinous bodies could contort and squish easily into the small opening. With the door pealed back and all the squid bunched together, it looked like someone had opened a giant can of smoked octopus.
Kale knew that once inside, the squidmen could traverse the walls, or ceiling as easily as they did the floor. It would be best to stop them at the doorway. He wished he’d picked a long-range weapon.
Nigel was first to react; he blasted the high-pressure spray at the mass of tentacles and squidmen protruding through the opening. It sliced efficiently as a knife devastating the squidmen who quickly withdrew.
Nigel’s attack had been an effective deterrent, but had an unexpected consequence. The room was now filled with a half dozen thrashing blind tentacles, each capable of killing a man. A tentacle liv
es for almost an hour after separation. If it enwraps a victim it constricts until its dead. The loss of a few limbs was not a serious threat to a healthy squidmen, they can regenerate them in a few days if they survive the battle.
The lieutenant shot at the tentacles with his blaster trying to destroy them, but they were difficult targets. It took a long time.
One of these slimy detached arms latched onto a maintenance robot named Bernie. It constricted and cracked his outer shell, but robots aren’t susceptible to crushing damage. However, seeing a thing with a tentacle nearby, Reggie reacted. He slashed at Bernie thinking he looked like a squidman. Reggie’s mechanical arm smashed Bernie, knocking him over and tearing off his metal housing. Bernie squealed in simulated pain as he fought to remove the tentacle.
“No! Reggie!” Belle shouted, too late. “Bad Reggie, target the squids. That’s your friend Bernie not a squid. Not a squid!”
Reggie turned his optic sensor at Belle trying to comprehend.
With Bernie’s cover off, the loose tentacle got across his power terminals. His reactor discharged, and the tentacle cooked, making it stiff and white.
While the humans had been busy with the loose tentacles, a dozen or more squidmen came through the opening and were advancing on the ill-equipped custodians.
Nigel again maneuvered his nozzle to attack. But before he could do any more damage, the long-feeding arm of a clever squidman grabbed the sprayer from Nigel’s hands and ripped it away. The pressurized hose ruptured, and it whipped around the room smacking into people and spewing water. Nigel was knocked to the floor, but he managed to hit the kill switch and shut down the pressure unit.
Defenseless, Nigel struggled to get off the floor. But an alien dropped on him from the ceiling. Kale leaped on the squid pressing Eddie’s teleport button.
Hum-Pop!
In an instant, a large chunk of the creature’s mantle ripped away and was teleported into space. However, the clever squid now recognized the danger, so it smacked little Eddie hard knocking him from Kale’s grip. The little vac-bot struck the far wall with a loud clang!
The squidman easily ensnared both Nigel and Kale’s arms in his, the puny humans only had two. The men were held fast and the squid’s other arms were moving to strangle them. Trapped, they could only yell for help.
Belle tried frantically shouting commands to her robots to help Kale and Nigel, but the robots only attacked at random, if at all. Reggie was busy subduing a vicious-looking shelving unit where sinister vacuum hoses were stored.
The lieutenant wasn’t able to help either; he’d been backed into a doorway and was occupied fighting off several of the squid at once. They’d singled him out, because he was armed with a blaster. Every time he fired they batted his hand trying to grab the gun; he would soon be overwhelmed.
Then, seemingly from nowhere, Chopi was there. Brandishing a spray bottle of high-strength toilet bowl cleaner, he pumped the trigger vigorously and a stream of the strong alkaline fluid struck the eyes of the squid that held Nigel and Kale. The creature’s reaction was instant and extreme. Its whole body convulsed violently, gave a terrible screech, and retracted all of its tentacles. It curled into a ball, gurgling. Seeing the squid’s reaction to the spray, both Nigel and Kale ran to the supply cabinet. They grabbed toilet cleaner off the shelf and came back pumping the fluid toward the enemy. The squidmen fell back.
Just then, Frakes teleported into the room, still wearing his pirate costume. He gave everyone a smile, looked to Belle and said, “Don’t worry Mabel, I’m here to save you.”
With a single sweeping motion of his hand, he shot each of the remaining squidmen in the room. Timing the trigger perfectly. Every single one of the enemy fell dead from precisely-aimed shots. In the hallway, a squidman squealed in surprise seeing all of his friends so easily taken down.
Frakes raised his pistol to fire again, but it didn’t fire, so he threw it at the squidman who ran. The gun was drained of energy; its power clip had a capacity of eight hundred shots, so Frakes must have been teleporting all over the ship taking out the squidmen at each incursion.
Frakes grabbed Belle and gave her a quick kiss before she could react. He began singing the pirate king theme anew. Just then, a dozen more aliens entered the hallway outside the room.
He pulled the rapier from his belt and in a perfect British accent said to Kale, “Frederic, guard the fair Mabel. I shall dispatch these sea monsters and return forthwith.”
“Mabel?” Belle said.
“Frederic?” Kale said.
“Forthwith?” the lieutenant said.
Nigel just stared at the dead squid, each with a hole burned neatly between their large eyes “No one can shoot like that.”
The first officer could be heard singing merrily as he chopped his way through the invaders in the hallway, killing all he encountered. When they’d all been dispatched, he boarded one of the empty alien attack shuttles, and somehow launched it back toward the mothership.
The pod’s detachment left a huge hole in the hull. The ship’s atmosphere blew out through the opening, triggering automatic force fields to isolate and protect that section of hallway from the rest of the ship.
The five custodians, still stunned, watched as chunks of dead squidmen, and a RSWOF poster torn from the wall, was blown out through the big hole left by the departing pod.
“He thought we were characters from the play,” Kale said.
“Yeah, I guess I’m Mabel and your Frederic,” Belle said.
“He’s nuts,” Chopi said. His meaning clear for a change.
“Where is he going?” Nigel asked.
Everyone shook their head.
The Cosmos’ captain, realizing they were hopelessly outnumbered, gave the order to retreat. The ship jumped to warp, escaping the building fleet of enemy ships and leaving behind the first officer.
***
A few days later, the ship pulled into the nearest Coalition starbase for repairs. The custodians had been busy cleaning the many incursion sites on the ship. There had been dozens, and the route the ship had taken back to the base was probably plugged with the discarded remains of several hundred squidmen carelessly teleported out of the ship. The engineers were overwhelmed trying to repair and manually replicate all the damaged panels since they dare not risk using the robots. They tried using the robots again limiting them to “safe” panels, ones containing no vital systems. But, sure enough, another maintenance robot misaligned the panel placement by a few millimeters.
Intelligence reports indicated a full-scale invasion of this sector was imminent and the Cosmos’s firepower would be needed for the base to have any chance of surviving. The captain ordered all families off the ship and onto the Coalition starbase for safety.
The captain called both Belle and Lieutenant Lou, into his office to discuss the robot replication problem.
“Have you made any progress on the robot virus?” he asked. “I need them repairing my ship. That enemy fleet could arrive here at any moment and these repairs are taking forever.”
“None, sir, and we still don’t know for certain it is a virus,” Belle said. “I have attempted recreating the malfunction, but every single time the robot performs the tests flawlessly. I have been having him replicate and dissolve the same panel for the last seventy-two hours straight and he never made a single mistake.”
“He?” the captain asked her. He wore a puzzled expression.
“Oh,” Belle said. “The maintenance robot in question, sir. I use personal pronouns to make it easier to relate to them.”
“Oh yes, I believe Commander Frakes brought that to my attention. You have named them too, am I correct?”
Belle nodded, a little embarrassed.
“Now, Belle,” the captain continued. “I don’t mind putting up with your little eccentricities, because you’re one of the best. But I’m concerned that having such, um... personal relationships with the machines might affect your ability to be objective in your r
esearch of our problem. I need your reassurance, and yours too, lieutenant, that the information you’ve been sending to the Tark Industries experts won’t make me look like a damn fool.”
The lieutenant spoke up for her. “Captain, Belle has been putting in double and triple overtime working on this problem. She has been decompiling and compiling every piece of code in the robot, searching for anything that doesn’t belong. I have full confidence she’s doing everything humanly possible.”
“Very well then, but the admiral has ordered the man from Tark to come here and personally look into it. He will arrive at the station tomorrow and I will expect nothing but your full cooperation with him. Am I understood Belle?”
“Yes, sir, perfectly,” Belle said. “You are aware that I have shared every scrap of data from my research with them throughout the process. How is their being here going to make any difference?”
“Because…” The captain’s expression looked as if he was struggling with an inner decision. “I can’t disclose certain details. For now, I’m under orders not to say anything else. Just know that there is another concern that relates to your research.”
“Another concern, sir?” Belle looked him in the eye. “I don’t understand. If there is another factor that bears my investigation I need to know about it!”
“That’s all I can say. I have been assured the knowledge wouldn’t affect your research, but frankly, I’m not convinced. I can’t offer you any more than what I have already said. I’m hoping you might figure out the rest. You’re dismissed.”
It was useless to press the captain for more information. Belle would have to understand there were facts she didn’t have clearance to hear. It was frustrating to be denied security clearance, but that was how she’d wanted it. That’s the reason she’d left Tark in the first place. To get away from all the top-secret crap. Knowing stuff just makes it harder to do your job. Still, she had to wonder if the withheld information would help to solve the mystery. It was good to know the captain had enough confidence in her he would risk acknowledging a top-secret dimension to the problem existed. She could figure it out when the guy from Tark arrived; security clearance or not, she would put it together.