“Uh, Sir?” one of the Sensor Operators stood up. “I’ve got something on my screen you might want to take a look at. I’m reading three sensor contacts that just entered the inner system behind the main Reclamation Fleet. I’m not getting an IFF off them but, Sir…I think I recognize one of the ships.”
“Three ships? That’s hardly the reinforcements we’re looking for right now, but I suppose anything’s better than nothing,” I said shortly. “Let me take a look.”
“Uh…and Sir,” added the Sensor Operator, “seeing those three reinforcements, I ran a quick scan along their back trail and I’m picking up a large number of enemy warships.”
“Well, isn’t that just peachy?” I shook my head.
“Here’s the scan images I’ve got so far,” said the Operator.
Chapter Fifty-seven: The Clover Lives!
6 hours earlier
He was the very model of an old, upgraded—and extraordinarily pissed—space engineer
Spalding stomped back onto the bridge of the Lucky Clover, 2.0 version and clapped his hands together to build up some warmth.
“Alright lads, now that all the faint-hearts have had their chance to bail on us, it’s time to take her out!” he said happily.
“That’s far enough, Engineer,” barked an angry female voice.
“You!” Spalding leveled a finger.
“Commander Spalding, you are under arrest!” Glenda Baldwin declared, stepping forward with two quads of Lancers standing behind her.
“Witch!” Spalding roared with outrage.
“Lancers, restrain Commander Spalding,” ordered Glenda.
The Lancers looked at one another and visibly hesitated.
“What’s the charge, woman?” the ornery old Chief Engineer demanded, crossing his arms and glaring at her.
“I could charge you with piracy but, considering your reputation inside this fleet, I think I’ll just pin a drunk and disorderly on you and toss you in the chiller to cool out for a few days,” she fired back before turning to glare at the Lancers.
Jerking as if stung, the power-armored warriors started walking toward him.
“Piracy!” Spalding bellowed. “Stand down, men. I’m the captain of this ship! It’s impossible for me to pirate my own ship. This woman has clearly lost her mind.”
“Disrespect me all you like, but as long I’m still the Yard Manager I refuse to allow you to destroy three perfectly good warships—or rather two perfectly good ships and this limper you call a super Battleship—by using untested alien technology. Until I sign off on it, every single warship in this yard belongs to me—including this one! So any attempts to leave this shipyard without my permission are, by every definition, piracy,” she snorted.
“It’s too late, lass—this is happening whether you like it or not. You can’t stop me now!” Spalding cried.
“I already have; all outgoing transmissions have been blocked,” she said as the Lancers grabbed him by the arms.
“Sorry, Commander,” the Lancer Sergeant sighed.
“Shove off, boy!” Spalding glared at him and tried to pull free but, despite his cybernetic limbs, he couldn’t compete with their power assist.
“Can’t do that, Sir,” the Sergeant said stiffly, and up close the Commander could clearly see that he was a Rim boy.
“Afraid the Tracto-ans wouldn’t carry out your orders?” he sneered. “That why you brought these scabs along with you to do yer bidding?”
“I’ve had enough of your blather. Lock him up,” said Baldwin. “You like to tie helpless navigators to their chairs? Well I can find you a comfortable chair down in holding that I guarantee you’ll like.”
An alarm sounded behind her from the bridge.
“What now?” she snapped.
“Construction Manager, I’m reading a power build up near the Elder Tech spindles,” reported the man at Sensors, looking confused—and more than a touch fearful.
“Har har har!” Spalding threw back his head and laughed.
“What have you done now?!” Baldwin shouted.
“I told you it was too late to stop me!” Spalding said cheerfully, “I set them on a dead timer. Cut the com-channels? The only thing that’d do is stop me from inputting a reset code!” he howled with mirth. “Got too smart for your own good, Glenda.”
“Activate the com-link,” Glenda snapped and turned back to Spalding, “and you, input the override. Now!”
“Now why would I go and do a perfectly stupid thing like that?” Spalding shook his head at her sadly.
“How long until it activates?” she demanded.
“We’ve got a good thirty seconds,” Spalding grinned.
“You fool…you’ve killed us all!” she raged.
“I guess we’ll find out now then, won’t we, lass?” he said and then looked away from her he swept the bridge with a withering gaze. “I see that no one decided to take me up on the offer to leave. Well I’m sure glad the lot of you all found your spines,” he mocked.
A number of faces around the bridge turned pale and Navigator Shepherd moaned.
A short distance away from the ship, two of the three spindles’ energy buildup finally reached critical levels and the two jerry-rigged former spinal lasers—antimatter pumped spinal lasers pulled off of destroyed droid Cruisers back at Elysium—belched a large cone of fire and fury.
“I sure hope removing the focusing arrays was the right way to go,” Spalding said with deliberate nonchalance.
The console monitoring the Elder tech interface program went wild with activity.
“The jump engines just went crazy!” cried the Technician monitoring the program, “I don’t think it can handle energy—it’s gonna self-destruct!”
“I sure hope you input the destination, Navigator Shepherd,” Spalding said with sudden—albeit mild—concern.
Shepherd looked over at him with horror and then turned back to his console, his hands scrambling as the implant in the back of his head also furiously activated.
Outside the skeletal warship, the Elder tech spindles absorbed the full force and fury of an antimatter-pumped laser. Giant arcs of energy shot from the top and bottom of each spindle, reaching out to two of the others.
“Turn it off! Shut it down! I thought you said he was overloading an antimatter generator,” Baldwin cried angrily.
“He said he needed an antimatter explosion to power it! I never thought he was going to fire a spinal laser at it,” Bostwell exclaimed defensively.
“I knew it,” Spalding hollered leveling a finger at the engineering comm. rating, “it was you all along!”
“No! I just…” Bostwell stammered.
“A man can only have one loyalty: to his ship or to the yard, lad,” Spalding yelled furiously. “And you just crossed the line!”
“No, I swear! I was just following orders, Commander,” Bostwell protested.
“That’s what all the scabs said when they sent anyone—their own people even—who had failed a Cost-Benefit Analysis over to the Anti-Viral Cleansers!” Spalding declared, his voice dripping with disappointment.
Bostwell visibly drooped.
“Anyone who brings the AI’s and the Anti-Viral Cleansers into an argument automatically loses,” the Yard Manager declared. “Now I’m warning you, Spalding: shut this off or so help me, I’ll-!”
“Murphy knows what’s in your heart, lad,” Spalding said, openly ignoring the Yard Manager, “listen to the sayings of the Saint and repent yer wicked ways!”
“Energy storage temporarily exceeded device thresholds; attempting to load balance. Point Transfer in one minute,” cut in the synthetic voice of the Elder tech interface program.”
“What? I can’t shut it off!” yelped the tech at the desk as he tried to do just that.
“So much for killing us all, eh Yard-Manager-in-charge, Baldwin?” chortled Spalding.
“You fool!” exclaimed Glenda. “We could all appear in the middle of a star or be disassembled at
the atomic level!”
“I know—ain’t it great?” cried Spalding. “Here we go lads, just like I told you! Just listen to old Spalding and you can’t go far wrong!”
“Please, sir!” begged Bostwell, turning to openly beseech him.
“I can’t help you, boy. I’m already locked up in chains,” Spalding said righteously, even though he wasn’t actually in chains and only restrained by a power-armored hand at each elbow.
“You’re playing around with forces you don’t understand, Terrence. Do you honestly think that mixing antimatter and alien technology can end in anything but disaster?” she demanded.
“What I think is that we’re all about to find out,” chortled the old Engineer.
Point Transfer in ten…nine…eight…” intoned the Elder tech interface program as it started the final countdown.
“Guess it managed to load balance out the power after all,” guffawed Spalding, “good thing I changed the settings before I went out there.”
“Shut it down!” Baldwin pushed aside the tech and pounded on the console, “Abort. Cancel all functions!”
“Alight, lads—it’s time for the ride of yer lives!” Spalding exclaimed moments before the jump drive activated.
“Sweet Murphy,” Parkiney muttered under his breath.
“Let’s see what she’s got!” Spalding declared, and reality as they knew it twisted around them in a way that defied human comprehension.
Chapter Fifty-eight: In the Outer System
5.5 Hours ago
He was the very model of an old upgraded—and possibly hallucinating—space engineer
“Bahahaha!” Spaulding laughed as an older, solid looking Terrence Spalding with a great looking hairdo—and minus the cybernetics—waved a plasma torch behind him while in front a much younger, faded-looking Terrance Spalding with a lot of hardware but two natural-looking eyes and no chrome in his head. Naturally, this one had another head of great hair, and he shoved an alien-looking blaster at his face.
“This isn’t the Clover…what have you done to my ship?!” screamed the old man to his rear while the younger Spalding activated his alien weapon, causing green glowing lights to light up the sides of his weapon, “You’ve ruined her!” continued the old man.
“Hey now, I used every bolt! Every weld! Even the keel is a part of her—” Spalding started with a loud harrumph before being interrupted.
“You’re the only one who can save the ship!” shouted the faded image of the young looking Spalding with hardware.
“What do you think I’m trying to do here, part her out in an all-you-can-take, buy-one-take-one- hangar sale?” Spalding shot back angrily, more than willing to take the argument right back to these pigments of his imagination. “I am saving the ship—saving it from her!” he pointed at Glenda Baldwin, only to realize she had disappeared. “Huh?” he asked, only now starting to wonder if something was possibly amiss.
“If this is the future then you can count me out. It’s my duty to stop you and save the ship!” declared the older Spalding, swinging back his plasma torch.
“I don’t need to argue with a pigment of my imagination,” the real Spalding declared, trying to snap himself out of what had to be a case of point transfer psychosis, “that’s right, that’s all you lot are: a bunch of pigments. A mere coloration of my imagination that thinks I’ve done wrong, but the truth is that I need to get back to reality because I’m the only one who can- YEEE!” he screeched as the plasma torch swung forward, burning into his back. “Blast it all, that smarts!” he shouted, rounding on his older-looking shadow and punching him in the face.
“Don’t pay any attention to him,” shouted the younger Spalding while the older, more solid-looking version staggered back and touched his jaw a surprised look on his face, “he’s just a young whippersnapper that doesn’t know any better. What you have to remember is Andromeda—that’s the key to-!”
Real Spalding nodded along agreeably with the faded, younger-looking version of himself that still had all the hardware. After all, it was better just to play along and break himself back into reality easily.
“Andromeda?” he asked, playing along while actually wondering if maybe he’d finally gone mental as the younger, faded ‘him’ launched himself at the older version and the two other Spaldings grappled in front of the real one—or, at least, he assumed that he was the real one.
“Tell me what I have to do to save her or I won’t let you off!” cried older, solider him.
This dream was starting to make less and less sense, and now his two pigments were not just attacking him. They were even fighting with each other! As far as he was concerned this dream had gone far too long already. Did he have a severe case of transfer-induced jump psychosis, or maybe it was something worse?
He was starting to get genuinely worried.
“I’ll kill the both of you and save the future!” shouted the old Spalding as the bridge of the Clover 2.0 wavered and the screen started populating.
“Ah, looks like we made it to Easy Haven after all,” the real Spalding said with satisfaction. He was much more interested in what was really going on outside his head than inside his head anyway. He blinked as a hazy version of Parkiney popped into view, followed by Shepherd the Navigator.
“Remember: Andromeda and the space fissure! You’re the only one who can save the ship. You’ve got to double-charge the Omicron’s shields,” an increasingly faded, young-looking Spalding said, shoving his alien-looking blaster into Real Spalding’s hands. It took several attempts by the increasingly faded version of himself before the infernal-looking finally stopped passing through his hands and the real him could grip it. “Huh…I didn’t think that would work,” the other him said with surprise.
“Hey, I don’t want this,” Spalding protested, trying to hand it back. But for some reason his hands wouldn’t let go, and on closer inspection it did look rather interesting…
“Remember: as long as the light is green, the trap is clean. Shoot to kill!” declared faded him right before disappearing entirely.
“Hey now,” Spalding objected, looking around as more and more bridge crew appeared around him and the older looking him started to fade. “Do you want this?” he asked the solider version of himself.
“Will it save the Lucky Clover from this abortion you’ve cooked up?” the older him asked rhetorically.
“Well…” Spalding hesitated before deciding it was better to get rid of it—all the pigments belonged together, after all. “Sure it will!” he lied with a wide smile, thrusting out the alien handgun.
The older version of himself backed away. “I’m not falling for that! You think I fell off the turnip truck yesterday? Why, that was a good fifty years ag—” the older him faded out of existence mid-sentence.
Seeing hazy versions of the Lancers holding onto him reappear, Spalding realized reality was about to reassert itself and jerked himself free.
“Wwwwhhhheeeerrrreee aaarrreee wwweee Sppaallding?” Glenda Baldwin demanded, turning to him jerkily her voice unnaturally long and extended.
“Back off, woman!” Spalding declared, waving the alien pistol in his hand for emphasis as he stomped forward and back into reality, “We’re in Easy Haven just like we planned it!”
“There’s no ‘we’ in this, Pilgrim. You sent us to the Demon alone knows where and—” Baldwin said instinctively looked at the screen. She did a double take, “What the blazes?”
“I know. It’s great, isn’t it?” Spalding declared, waving his hands in the air for emphasis.
“Just how the blazes did we jump into the outer system?!” she cried with shock.
“Well, you said it yourself: the translation interface with the Elder tech is still a bit squirrelly,” Spalding said, not adding that he’d secretly used a point-and-click system built into the interface as a backup in case the Navigator got cold feet. It had shown they could jump in past the hyper limit. Not all the way, of course, but at least into the in
ner system. He’d figured that if they had to use his navigation plan, he was probably all alone anyway so why not try it out? How was he to know that it’d be an arrest party instead of a lone man on the rampage play? It was really their own fault anyway, he decided.
“What’s ‘our own fault anyway’?” Baldwin rounded on him. “And just whose sweet idea was it to let him loose on the bridge with a pistol!”
“Uh…” Spalding blinked and then looked down at the alien pistol still in his hands. “You can see this?” he asked with concern.
“Yes,” she said slowly, looking at him like he was an idiot that had just crawled out from under a rock.
“Umm,” he promptly hid the pistol behind his back, “right.”
He stomped up over to Shepherd and pointed up to the screen, where all the green contacts were in retreat to the Wolf-9 Starbase or already stationed there and all the red contacts were herding them in. It looked like the Imperials had a definite edge when it came to numbers.
“We may have come late to the party, but not too late to make a difference,” he said, clouting the Navigator on the shoulder. “Lay in a course for the Starbase and pass it to the helm.”
“Are you crazy?” Baldwin asked with disbelief.
“Probably,” Spalding shrugged, his hand instinctively reaching back around to touch the pistol, “but we don’t have time for that. We’ve got a battle to save!”
“With untested engines on a half-built warship!” she exclaimed. “There’s a good chance that just activating them will shake this ship apart.”
“Enough!” he bellowed before continuing in a more moderate voice. “In case you haven’t noticed, we’re definitely out of the yard now, Construction-Manager-in-charge Baldwin. This is a battlefield and we’re in a Battleship—a Super Battleship, no less! So unless you want to be charged with cowardice in the face of the enemy when the Admiral catches up to you, I suggest you sit down, snap the yap trap, and let those of us in the Battleship trade do our jobs! This ship may be half-built, but what’s been done has been done right.”
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