Mechanical Failure (45 page)

McSchmidt grinned a crooked, weak grin. “Lying through my teeth.”

Rogers looked up at the ceiling and yelled. “Dammit! It's the not knowing. It's the not knowing that's killing me. Are you people invading or not invading? How many
THEY'RE ATTACKING US
buttons are going to light up? Why would you
do
something like that?”

“I thought it might create more confusion. It worked, didn't it?”

“No,” Rogers said, “not really. I mean, the droids were already attacking us at that point, and—”

“I'm glad it worked,” McSchmidt said.

“I just told you—”

“Rogers,” he said, croaking, his voice barely audible. “If this all turns out okay, will you tell Mailn something for me?”

“No,” Rogers said.

“Tell her . . .” His voice trailed off. McSchmidt's eyelids wilted, and his chest stopped moving.

Rogers waited a moment, then stood up. “Finally,” he said. “Now I wonder—”

“Tell her that—”

“Oh, for the love of everything sacred!” Rogers shouted. “Will you please,
please
die?”

A disruptor pulse erupting from behind him obliged Rogers' request. McSchmidt was hit in the chest, and by the resultant configuration of his organic matter, it was very,
very
clear that he was, in fact, dead.

Rogers spun to find a small detachment of droids, all armed with disruptor rifles, standing in front of him. He stared at them in disbelief, his last bottle of Jasker 120 flashing before his eyes. The droids wordlessly fixed their weapons on him.

“C
ALL FUNCTION
[
EXPLOIT TENSE MOMENT AND THEN KILL WITHOUT REMOR
—”

Something hit the side of the
Flagship
. The explosion knocked Rogers off his feet, and he never came down. The gravity generator had been destroyed, and with it, the
Awesome
. He wasn't sure if he was feeling a lump in his throat or if it was the nauseating
sensation of suddenly shifting to freefall, but he was definitely a little sad about it.

He could hear the clanking of metal all around him as the droids rammed into one another. A few stray disruptor shots made ringing noises as they put burn marks into the walls. It took a moment for Rogers to get his orientation back, but once he did, he saw a flying squadron of droids, looking—if droids could be said to look anything at all—very confused. Most of the disruptor rifles had fallen from their hands, but some of the robots were flying toward Rogers at an alarming speed, their arms warming up for some serious droid fu even as their comrades prepared to fire.

It was then that Rogers realized he'd barely noticed entering freefall at all. He'd spent a good portion of his recent life in zero gravity, thanks to Klein. And so, Rogers realized he had nothing to fear from the droids at all. Because he was a space ballerina.

He bounced off the walls, bounced off the backs of droids, swung around using their legs. More droids crashed into each other, inspiring droid fu fratricide during the last seconds of their battery life. Rogers spun through the air, feeling like he was inventing a new martial art that was way cooler than any other. The droids couldn't hit him. They could barely figure out which direction was which.

Then, miraculously, a chorus of “low battery” warnings rang through the corridor. It was the most glorious music Rogers had ever heard. He stopped his bouncing around and simply floated, staring at the droids becoming just flying chunks of metal one by one. Soon, he was the curator of a very strange floating droid graveyard.

It was over.

Finally over.

“Valiant troops of the 331st ATBG!” a voice over the public address system rang out. “This is your admiral speaking. You are
about to face an enemy that is as clever as it is deadly. Before you enter into combat in the very halls in which you live and work, you must remember that the Meridan armed forces do not bow to . . . Why am I floating?”

Rogers leaned over and switched off McSchmidt's datapad.

Finally, finally over.

Rogers stood in the middle of the bridge, watching everyone around him work. The crew had adapted to moving in zero gravity pretty well once they'd broken out their emergency magnetic boots and stopped trying to put ketchup on their food. The bridge hadn't been the site of any of the battles with the droids, so it looked more or less like it had beforehand.

Except Rogers was running the show.

Rogers keyed in the communications code for the engineering bay. “Hart,” he said. “You there?”

“What do you want?” Hart asked.

“How are the preparations for the admiral's ship going? And the repairs on the gravity generator?”

Hart didn't answer him for a moment—he was too busy barking at one of his troops. When he finished his colorful encouragement, Rogers could hear him punching at some computer terminal or other.

“Admiral Klein should be ready to go in a few minutes. He can
make his way down to the docking platform. Took us a while to find a pilot, though. Not many people for hire this far out in the system. The gravity generator—not there, you god-damn moron!
There!
The gravity generator will be done in another week or so. We need to wait on some parts to come in now that our comms have been restored.”

“Good work,” Rogers said.

“Don't give me that shit,” Hart said. “Just because you're a captain now doesn't mean I need your god-damn approval. You're still just a bad card player.”

Rogers cleared his throat and cut the communications. “Admiral?”

“I'm ready,” Klein said. “I want to thank you, Captain Rogers.”

He'd promoted Rogers to captain—the only one on the whole
Flagship
^I
—and proceeded to take up the job of full-time jaw-jacker in the form of a motivational speaker. Since Klein was departing, that meant Rogers was, in effect, the admiral of the fleet unless they transferred someone from another ship. And that was kind of scary.

“If I hadn't caused multiple executive officers to hang themselves and hadn't met you, I wouldn't have realized what real duty was. When I talked down that droid in the hallway, I realized I had another calling in life. When I saved the ship with that speech right before the AGG went out—”

“You were late with your speech,” Rogers said. “And it didn't change anything. If you haven't learned that fancy speeches aren't all that makes an admiral, I haven't done you any favors.”

“There are other people that need to hear what I have to say.”

Not really,
Rogers thought.
The people that have been hearing what you have to say just need a break.

“Good luck to you,” Rogers said, extending his hand.

Klein shook it. “Your global agility and critical battlespace effects—”

“Just go,” Rogers said.

As soon as he left the bridge, Rogers felt a huge weight lift off his shoulders. He turned to watch the empty space outside, broken occasionally by a low-relative-speed asteroid floating by with different orbital parameters from the
Flagship
. They could have blasted them out of space, of course, but having a couple of large rocks in their orbit was preferable to having millions of small ones.

Rogers looked at the communication tech. “Any reports from the other ships in the fleet?”

“No, sir. They all checked in after you gave the order for them to dismantle their droid inventory and haven't reported any problems. We're still piecing back together the sensor array after the droids corrupted all the data.”

Nodding, Rogers turned over to a video display, where he called up a screen in the infirmary that he'd been looking at pretty constantly for the last couple of weeks.

“Get that off of me!” the Viking screamed, backhanding one of the medical techs, who was attempting to attach part of a vital-reading machine. “I'm fine. You people have kept me cooped up in here for two weeks. I need to get back to shooting things or I am going to go out of my mind.”

She must have noticed that her local vidscreen had turned on, for she locked eyes through the camera with Rogers.

“Rogers!” she said. “Get me the hell out of here, will you?”

Rogers grinned at her. “How does the shoulder feel?”

“Like someone shot it with a disruptor rifle two weeks ago. How do you think it feels?”

“I wanted to let you know we're getting ready to see the admiral off and perform the funeral ritual for McSchmidt. I've asked the comm tech to tune in your vid display so that you can watch from there.”

“Fine,” the Viking said. “Fine. But when that's over, I want you
to come down here and tell these doctors to stop poking me with things before I poke them with something they don't want to be poked with.”

Rogers swallowed the comment that was in his head, opted to say nothing at all, and switched off the display.

“Alright,” he said. “Let's send McSchmidt off.”

Using the outboard cameras to give him a panoramic view, Rogers watched as a small capsule slowly floated away from the
Flagship
. From the chaos of war to the quiet, silent peace of space, McSchmidt's casket gently drifted away, leaving behind the people he'd worked with and the memories he'd shared with them. It was a time for silence, for respect, for contemplation. A time for—

“Fire,” Rogers said.

A plasma cannon blast turned McSchmidt into space debris.

“Asses to ashes,” Rogers said ceremonially. “And good riddance.”

“Good riddance,” intoned everyone on the bridge before going back to work as though absolutely nothing interesting had happened.

“Captain,” the communications tech said. “I've got a request for launch clearance coming from hangar 17. Should I patch it through?”

“Go ahead.”

“This is the FSS
Craven
, requesting permission to take off from hangar 17. Transmitting the projected course now.”

Boy, that voice sounds familiar
, Rogers thought. “Approved. Put it on the screen.”

A civilian ship came out of hangar 17, floating gently away from the ship before engaging its engines. It made a hard bank and blasted off toward the nearest Un-Space point between a couple of asteroids large enough to have noticeable gravity.

“Farewell, valiant warriors!” Klein said over the radio.

“Hey,” the pilot said, somewhat shakily. “There aren't any pirates where we're going, are there? I don't like pirates.”

Frowning, Rogers keyed in the code for engineering.

“Hey, Hart,” he said. “What's the name of the pilot you hired for Klein?”

“The name?” Hart said. Rogers heard some typing. “Dorsey. He was the only one who answered the ad.”

“Dorsey!” Rogers screamed.

“Rogers!” Dorsey screamed back over the radio. “Aahhh!”

The ship took an erratic turn, then another, starting to zigzag all over space, which, as it turned out, was not the way to carefully navigate through a pair of large asteroids. The
Craven
slammed into the side of one of them and vanished in a small cloud of dust.

Rogers blinked, staring at the spot where the
Craven
had crashed. What in the world had just happened?

“Um,” Rogers said. “Can we maybe get a rescue crew out there?”

“Not right now, sir,” came the voice of one of the techs. Rogers turned to see him pointing at his screen, but the display was too far away for Rogers to make out.

“Why not?”

“We've got bigger problems.”

Rogers frowned. “Put it on the big screen.”

The screen blipped for a moment, and then all of a sudden Rogers found himself staring at a fleet of ships that was definitely not Meridan. They had all just come out of the other Un-Space point and were now, according to the display, visible on both optical and radar sensors. There was no spoofing that.

“That's the Thelicosan fleet, isn't it?” Rogers said weakly.

“Yes, sir,” the tech said. “They've dispatched a message.”

Rogers swallowed, gripping the nearest piece of equipment as tightly as he could.

“Read it.”

“Um,” the tech said. “It says, ‘We're invading.' ”

“E
XPLETIVE,
” Deet said.

THE [EXPLETIVE] END

I
. Please see Meridan Rank and Organization Regulation MR-613 for information as to why, even though Captain Alsinbury is a captain, she's not a
captain
. Or ask your local Meridan Navy service member why they can't keep their god-damn ranks straight between the navy and the marines.

Before you write a book, you're pretty sure that the process of publishing one mostly consists of throwing a copy of your manuscript into a high-rise New York City building and someone throwing a bag of money back out the window at you. Well, I've got news for you: it's all true.