Mechanical Failure (20 page)

When the second reminder went off, he gathered up his things and prepared to head into the lion's den. Already he was feeling exhausted after only a few hours of work, namely because he wasn't very accustomed to doing work at all. How was he going to get out of this?

As he turned around to float over to the doorway, he noticed that at some point someone had put an entire rack of uniform jackets in his room, all with the admiral's rank on them. Some of them had floated off their hangars and were now decorating his room like tasteless drapes. To the rack itself had been attached a coarse brush. The instructions were so obvious, they needed no accompanying message or task order.

Two of each came through at that moment, anyway.

“Two strokes right shoulder,” one of them said. “Three strokes left shoulder. Turn jacket around. Repeat.”

Rogers shut his eyes tight, ignored the task for the moment, and left his room. Instantly, he was surrounded by people attempting to salute him or requiring salutes of their own because of their rank, and the vigorous physical activity/monotony actually helped Rogers take his mind off his situation for a moment. By the time he got to Klein's door and rang the buzzer, he was sweating.

The door slid open, and Rogers was treated to an opulent scene. Where Rogers' room was luxurious—albeit floating—the admiral's room bordered on ridiculous. It appeared as though Rogers had stepped into a palace on the lavish colonies of old Saturn, complete with marble floors, ornately detailed columns, and narrow swaths of soft, velvety carpet making walkways between the various spots in the room. Rogers wondered if the room's architect had come from Grandelle, the system where all the gaudy Saturnites had relocated post-collapse. Every piece of furniture, every piece of command paraphernalia and memorabilia cried out, “Leadership.” “Power.” “Authority.”

Literally. There were actual pieces of décor that said those words in giant, bold letters. In fact, it was like the whole room was
filled with military magnetic poetry. Everything was made from dark wood or gleaming bronze. Thick, bulky memorabilia from Klein's other assignments before being transferred to command the 331st were on glass shelves, each of which had their own spotlight like some kind of art museum. Rogers felt a little bit like he'd stepped out of a command ship and into some sort of shrine.

“It's about damn time,” Klein said from behind a massive thick desk. He looked more like a king on a throne than the commander of a fleet, entirely different from the impression of him on the bridge.

“Sir, you said two hours,” Rogers said defensively as he made his way through the spotless room toward the admiral's desk. He felt his knees shaking. “I wasn't able to complete my review of everything. There were a lot of orders that—”

“I didn't tell you to review the orders,” Klein said. “I told you to approve them. How am I supposed to get anything done on this ship at all if I have to review orders all day?”

You don't,
Rogers thought.
You told me to do it instead.

“Some of them were pretty important,” Rogers said, “like complaints about strange things going on with the communications array and—”

“I don't like repeating myself, Lieutenant,” Klein said. He was wearing a somewhat anachronistic pair of half-moon reading glasses and scribbling away on paper, and had yet to look Rogers in the eye. “I'm trying to keep everyone happy. When they ask me for things, I approve them. That's all. That's the goal of command.”

Rogers frowned. “I'm a little behind on my officer professional education,” Rogers said, “but is that really the goal of command?”

Klein finally looked up, the slightest raising of his eyes to give Rogers a “you're walking on thin ice” look. “Didn't I just say something about repeating myself  ? That's the goal of
my
command, and in case you haven't noticed, this is
my
ship. Now, if you're not done doing the simple task I asked of you, you can finish after you make me a sandwich. I have things to do.”

The admiral patted a book on the table with a sort of motherly affection, and Rogers noticed for the first time just how many books were lying around. The one Klein had under his hand was a notebook, in which was a whole mass of insane scribbling. At the bottom, Rogers saw a couple of words upside down and bold.

We Will Be The Fighters of Fighting. We Will. We Will Seize. We Will Fight. We. Will. We Will Be The Winning People. We Will Be Victory.

We Will Fight. We Will Win.
Those two sentences were underlined. The date on the top of the paper, Rogers noticed, was almost four standard months old.

Some of the other books stood out to Rogers.
Public Speaking in a World Where the Public is Everywhere. You Schmooze, You Lose. Saying Things that Get People to Do What You Want.

And above the admiral's desk was a large, elaborately framed document on which was written the curious epithet:

T
HIS CERTIFICATE SIGNIFIES THAT
H
AROLD
C. K
LEIN IS HEREBY INDUCTED INTO THE
S
OCIETY OF
B
URNED
B
READ, AND IS TO BE GRANTED ALL THE RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES PERTAINING THERETO
.

Underneath the signatures on the bottom was a large banner that said,
GRADUATE OF TOASTMASTERS.

Rogers' bad feeling deepened to the point where it might have been confused with severe indigestion. It was actually probably also severe indigestion. But there was definitely a bad feeling there too.

Sighing, he turned around and headed toward the small kitchenette stashed against the wall. Since Klein was so “busy,” he apparently had raw foodstuffs delivered to his room, where his previous execs had been cooking for him. Rogers wasn't exactly a master chef, but he was pretty sure he could slap some meat on a piece of bread. As he worked, he propped the datapad up next to him so he could continue reviewing—approving—the orders while he made the sandwich.

Rogers paused for a moment as he realized that this was
officially the first “working lunch” of his life. He immediately began to understand a lot of things about suicide.

The room was disturbingly silent, with only the ticking of several decorative clocks all around the room providing the background music. Rogers wasn't really sure what kind of sandwich to make the admiral, but something about the way the admiral was sitting, hunched over his desk, made him not want to ask. Tapping through several orders—anything from transfer requests to materiel movements—he finally came to one that made him pause.

“Um, sir,” he said, finally breaking the silence. “I've got an order here from the captain of the
Infuriating
about starting double shifts in order to double perimeter patrols. Are you sure you want me to approve that?”

Klein looked up, and for a moment, Rogers thought he was going to scream at him to just approve everything.

“Hm,” he said. He tapped the nib of his pen on his desk. “Must be those Theracrisans.”

Rogers blinked. “You mean Thelicosans?”

The admiral locked eyes with him, and, for some reason, his face turned a little red. “Yes, of course. That's what I meant. I'm very stressed, you understand. The Thelacisans.”

Rogers let it go.

“What do you think, Lieutenant? You're a sharp young warrior.”

Rogers hesitated. “I wouldn't call myself a warrior, sir. I'm an engineer.”

“I thought you were the commander of the AIGCS.”

“It wasn't my choice. Nor was I particularly good at it.”

“Very often, good men are propelled to greatness in ways they do not expect,” Klein said, his voice suddenly taking on the thick quality of a man behind a podium. It seemed to startle him. It certainly startled Rogers. Klein cleared his throat. “Anyway, you use your best judgment.”

Rogers' bad feeling deepened. Why in the world would an experienced fleet commander defer to a lieutenant ex-engineer
who was also a failed combat commander about battle formations? Why was he behind his desk drafting speeches? Why—

“Rogers,” Klein said, not quite barking. “What are you doing over there? Are you making a sandwich or thinking?”

“Um,” Rogers said. “Both, sir?”

“Stop whichever one of those things doesn't get me my lunch.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It has to work,” Rogers said as he finished tying two sheets together. He bounced off a piece of furniture and jetted to the other side of his room, where he lashed it on to one of the light fixtures. He checked that it was secure and took a deep breath. “It has to.”

Three days. It had been three days since his first meeting with Klein on the bridge, and every waking moment afterward—and every moment was waking, since the admiral hadn't let him get much sleep—had been consumed with messages, task orders, brushing uniforms, polishing buttons, and everything in the world that sucked. The man wasn't just a bureaucrat; it seemed as though he pursued bullshit with
relentless fervor
.

Worse, he deferred to Rogers for almost every decision. Communiqués back to Merida Prime. Patrol patterns. Cleaning schedules for the latrines. Things that Rogers knew nothing about. Rogers hadn't even gotten to hear any of the intelligence briefings to find out what was really going on; Klein kept him
too occupied with making major command decisions that were way above his pay grade. It didn't make any sense. Any admiral should understand things like the boundaries of plasma wash from ships being too close, or maintenance rotation cycles. And he
still
hadn't pronounced Thelicosa correctly once. Rogers had a sneaking suspicion that the admiral didn't know who the Thelicosans were.

In fact, given everything he'd seen, Rogers had a sneaking suspicion that Admiral Klein was an idiot.

But when Klein stood up and addressed the bridge, or the mess hall, or the engineering bay, or any place he went to strut around and talk to the troops, Rogers couldn't possibly think he was an idiot. He was eloquent, powerful, dramatic. Incredible. Every word that came out of that man's mouth when he was in front of other people was pure genius. It was when they were behind closed doors that Rogers wondered whether or not the admiral knew how to actually do anything useful.

It wasn't doing good things for his love life, either. He'd had a chance to talk to the Viking a few more times, but
every
time it seemed like anything was about to happen, like the kind of kiss where she'd hold him so tightly, it would almost be suffocating, or she'd challenge him to a wrestling match or really even simply continue standing there talking to him, he'd heard that infernal call over the loudspeaker:

“Lieutenant Rogers, report to the bridge immediately.”

He was never going to get anywhere with her. His love life was ruined. His drinking life was ruined. All of his lives were ruined.

It just wasn't worth it anymore.

“Okay,” Rogers said, looping the sheet around his neck. He squatted against the wall, ready to jump. “Okay. Three, two . . .”

He hesitated. His knees shook.

“One, two . . . ” Wait. Was he counting forward or backward? Was there some kind of protocol for killing yourself  ? Should he even be counting at all? What good was counting?

“This is stupid,” he said aloud, and reached to untie the sheet from around his neck. Dying seemed like an awful lot of work for relatively ambiguous gain, anyway. At that moment, though, someone rang the buzzer on the other side of the door. This caused his pet cat—who he'd named Cadet—to spring from the nearby nightstand and sink his claws firmly into Rogers' leg.

Rogers jumped.

The rope went taut around his throat, and for a moment, Rogers thought it was all over despite his ambivalent intentions. Instead of breaking his neck, however, the elasticity of the sheets reached its maximum, and, like someone bungee-jumping in space, Rogers flew back at the wall, squashed Cadet between his chest and the wall, and received another bite for the trouble. Despite being a little relieved to have his neck in one piece, in a small way, Rogers was angry at being outsmarted by Klein. Apparently, it
was
impossible for someone to hang themselves in zero-g.

The buzzer sounded again.

“I'm coming!” Rogers shouted, finally freeing himself of the improvised noose. He leapt toward the door and absorbed the impact with his legs, grabbing into part of the doorframe to steady himself while he made sure he was in the proper orientation to the rest of the ship. He'd fallen out the doorframe more than once by entering the gravity-bound section of the
Flagship
sideways.

“Good morning, sir!” Tunger said cheerily as the door opened. He saluted Rogers, and so did the next four enlisted troops that walked by.