No Man's Space 1: Starship Encounter (17 page)

Banner and the pilots boarded their fighters and everyone on the bridge looked at the security camera footage to see them leave like heroes. The bridge remained silent aside from occasional impacts from the fighters.

They were unlikely to return, and nobody wanted to break the silence to show respect for death.

Banner led his fighters in triangle formation and began following the enemy. The enemy fighters shot several warning shots at Banner and his men, but they only hit a couple of our ships. Instead of annihilating us, the enemy fighters turned around and let Banner’s men herd them away.

The larger ships retreated with the fighters, and soon our space was clear of enemies.

They were still there, of course, but they’d turned their cloaking systems back on.

“Is this supposed to happen, sir?” Cook asked.

No, it wasn’t. The enemy was either playing a morbid game before annihilating us, or we were missing on something. What had made them retreat?

“Well, this is weird,” Banner said through the intercom. “Should we go back?”

“Yes, but don’t get too comfortable,” I said. “I’m guessing it’s not over.”

Banner agreed and headed back, but he noticed an unidentified flying object orbiting around the port. It wasn’t one of our defensive satellites.

“Looks like an escape pod,” Banner said through the intercom. “What’s an escape pod doing here?”

Making our lives more difficult, certainly. I don’t know why, but it stank of Lady Elizabeth’s last move to make sure that we couldn’t breathe between attacks.

Mornings always greeted me with bird songs, the scent of morning dew, and another protest aboard Aurora Port. I know I’m always complaining, but these people spent their days trying to get magical solutions to all their problems.

Now that Lady Elizabeth had appeared aboard an escape pod, things had only gotten worse. The locals hadn’t heard of her return, but someone was eventually going to leak the news. For the time being, though, we were already in more than enough trouble.

I approached the gates and tried to convince the protesters to stop. “We’ll escort everyone back to Earth if you like,” I said, “but it’s too dangerous right now. If we leave, we risk being surrounded by enemy ships and destroyed. We’re safer here.”

“Safer?” one of the men shouted. He menacingly waved a large baseball bat in the air. “What part of safe is being locked up in a can and not being allowed to leave?”

He led the others, approached the gates, and started climbing. Soon, they’d forced the gates open and approached me.

I pushed one of them back, then another, then punched a few noses, but it wasn’t enough. They held me, pushed me down, and started kicking and punching me.

Shit. Why do I always end up on the floor at the hands of bullies?

“Oi!” Banner shouted. For the first time since we’d met, he’d raised his voice over polite levels.

The men in the area froze and looked at him.

“Release him immediately,” Banner said.

And, to my surprise, they did. They actually dropped me headfirst onto the ground, but they did leave me alone. Banner kept his stern gaze on the men as they moved back and dispersed.

I don’t know how he did it, but nobody obeyed me like that. Was he bribing the locals? Giving them free beer? Or was it the color of his jacket?

This reaction explained the snobbish behavior against engineers. Or was it a self-fulfilling prophecy? Everyone thinks that engineering officers are useless, so they don’t pay attention to them, making them less capable of exerting authority over anyone.

Okay, okay. I’m just an engineer and I keep making up excuses. But it’s annoying to end up on the floor.

Banner didn’t make fun of my situation. He just crossed his arms and looked in the direction the protesters had left. “The Admiralty would tell us to save ourselves and forget about them,” he said. “It’s funny that we’re risking our lives to save men who would kill us if they had the chance.”

They wouldn’t kill us on purpose; they’d simply turned into a mob. Humanity is a complicated species: we have abilities to think deeply, but we also turn into instinctive creatures at times of great stress. The protesters had been under a despot for months, and now they wanted to ensure their survival and their return to normality. Just like anyone would do.

The days never ended. We’d locked Lady Elizabeth up in one of the North Star’s officer chambers. She’d stolen government property, but I wouldn’t be able to keep her locked up without a trial. Technically, the brig was designed for the lower crew, and officers and the gentry were always given the option to remain at home on parole. I didn’t want to give her the option to return to her room and perhaps contact spies amongst the enemy.

My men had worked on a cloaking system to hide the spaceport, but the scraps we’d gathered from the Cassock ships and the chucks we’d retrieved from orbit hadn’t given us enough clues to hide ourselves. Besides, the enemy might’ve been able to detect ships cloaked under their own systems.

Still, we kept trying. It kept us busy and stopped us from thinking that we were all doomed. We had the chance of surviving; it was more than enough for the time being.

To take a break from work and from the pressures of managing a ship and a spaceport, I’d agreed to spend a while in the wardroom with Banner for a change. We were the only two lieutenants left, and we couldn’t drink with anyone but ourselves. People don’t act naturally around their superiors, and we can’t act naturally around them either.

As I walked past the cockpit, I heard Flanagan’s roaring voice telling a story to the midshipmen. Flanagan wasn’t allowed in there, but the kids were young and inexperienced, and they sometimes needed a weathered veteran to reassure them. I didn’t have the soul of a nanny, and Flanagan was doing pretty well with them.

We’d emptied most of the wardroom’s faux wooden furniture and hidden it in a storeroom so it didn’t remind us of everyone who had fallen. We had a large dark table in the center, and several cabinets with drinks and appetizers. Don’t feel too jealous, though: the appetizers are mostly dehydrated vitamin tablets that taste and feel like eating sawdust. The drinks aren’t any better: they barely have any alcohol so that officers don’t do anything stupid like getting drunk while on service. I won’t complain about forbidding drinks before a battle, but everyone needs a good old drink after a fight.

At least I do.

Banner was waiting for me on the table. He had his gaze fixed on his cup of bourbon and swirled it gently with the tips of his fingers. He didn’t notice me until I cleared my throat.

He looked up, but his face retained a hint of melancholy, of something beyond the present moment. His mind might’ve been fixed on the past, on the losses of our crewmen. Or perhaps he worried about the future: all of us had wondered at some point if we were ever going to return home.

He served me a cup of bourbon and returned to swirling his.

“Do you know why I joined the Navy?” he began. He hadn’t, so he began his story. “My family’s one of the best connected families in the country. My father always wanted to have two sons: an heir and a spare. Then he wanted as many daughters as possible, to ensure connections to other powerful families without having to worry about providing them an inheritance or guaranteeing their positions in life.

“I was his third son,” Banner continued, “the youngest of all my siblings until my youngest sister was born. Still a mistake in one of the doctors’ test tubes. Or perhaps my mother had bribed the doctors because she wanted another son.

“I was brought up like my brothers, but I never had a place in the family dynasty. And now that my father had finally seen the possibilities of having a son, I might never go back.” He laughed into his own drink. “You know? I was just after a disagreement when I told you to go back to Earth. I couldn’t stand the thought of serving under an engineer.”

“And now you tell me because you’ve developed Stockholm syndrome,” I said sarcastically. Honestly, he didn’t need to tell me his life story, but I wouldn’t have guessed that he wasn’t his father’s favorite, or that he’d had to join the Navy because he had nothing else to do in his family.

Banner chuckled into his own glass. “Look at us. We’re saving hundreds of men we don’t care about and who don’t want to be saved. We’re risking the Navy’s men to save those who fight her. Isn’t it ironic?”

It was, but we had nothing to do about it. Our only option was to fight, repair the North Star, and survive until we got back to Earth. And we couldn’t depart the port unless we got rid of the enemy ships in the area; we didn’t want anyone to follow us.

“What do you plan to do if we go back?” I said.

“I would’ve murdered you in your sleep before getting to the Admiralty,” Banner said. “I would’ve become the acting captain, I would’ve told them a tale about my awesome fighting skills, and I would’ve earned a promotion.” He shrugged lazily. “Now I’m thinking of joining the Academy and learning to command. I’m always eager to jump into a fight, and you always keep your mind cold.”

I actually dodged fights because I was likely to lose, but that’s a different story.

We drank, we talked about life, about the simplicity of life at Earth or in the lower crew, and we wondered if Captain O’Keeffe would’ve managed to protect everyone.

Banner roared in laughter. It must’ve been the wine. “Our men are all hiding their fear, but they’re scared shitless like us. They’ve just had a few more years to practice hiding it.”

The men didn’t let us chat for too long. My engineers needed help with the cloaking system, and Banner needed to supervise the pilots.

“What do you plan to do with Lady Elizabeth?” he asked as I was leaving the wardroom.

Pray that she chokes and dies before a magistrate forces me to free her?

I shrugged. “I’ll try to get her to speak. She knows more about the enemy than she’s told us. And I don’t want her running around the ship and stealing my escape pods.”

We spent the following days working on satellite barricades. We added several concentric layers of orbiting barriers, with regions in-between to be able to fall back in case we needed to retreat.

The designs reminded me of ancient castles, with multiple rows of walls that protected the outer lands, then some of the inner village, then only the citadel. Once the enemy conquered everything and entered the citadel, the lord had no option but to fight to the death or to yield. We couldn’t yield before an enemy that didn’t talk to us, so we needed good defenses.

The port had a couple of bunkers, but bunkers are useless unless you have a large planet to hide in. Bunkers aboard a spaceport are simply a nice place to hide for a couple of hours, but they won’t last if the enemy boards the port and sweeps it.

“Don’t have much to do aside from praying,” Gupta said. He’d shown us most of our options, and we lacked the technology to fight.

I’d looked at the numbers, and they weren’t positive either. The enemy could destroy us with a handful of its fighters; they didn’t even need bombers or any of their more advanced ships. We could repel them for a while, like tiny animals who bite humans to try to avoid being caught. We’d eventually get kicked, but we were going to make it as hard as possible.

“But what about the cloaking systems?” I asked. “Haven’t we made any progress on them?”

I suspected the answer: we needed over a decade to reach the cloaking technology from the Cassocks. We didn’t have a decade and we didn’t have enough engineers. I could only hope for a miracle, and we’d already had enough miracles since I’d taken charge of the North Star.

Gupta shook his head. “We’re trying a new hypothesis, but we don’t know if we’ll finish a prototype on time.”

Banner, Flanagan, and several of the midshipmen didn’t like the answer.

“And evacuation is impossible too.” Banner spoke out loud, but he was recounting our options in his head. “If we leave, we won’t know if we’re being followed, only to find out once we’re alone and defenseless in the middle of space.”

“At least we have flying junk protecting us here,” I said. “Better than nothing. They won’t know if it’s explosive or not.”

“I haven’t heard of any captains who won wars using space junk,” he said skeptically.

Neither had I, but it didn’t mean I was going to give up. Kozinski had insisted about the lightbulb strategy: he wanted to throw lightbulbs at the enemy, hoping that some kind of explosive engineering trick would save us. I wasn’t as optimistic as him, though. The lightbulbs were staying in their rooms.

“Look at the bright side,” I told Banner. “If we defeat the enemy using space junk, we’ll be pioneers. Specialists in military space junk. We’ll be invited to give talks and conferences about the military uses of junk. In space.” It didn’t sound too convincing, but it was the best idea we had.

Banner rolled his eyes but didn’t offer any alternatives. What? Jealous of my space junk theory, Banner?

“We need more pilots and better fighters.” Flanagan approached Gupta’s screen and stared at it. Gupta flinched when he had Flanagan so close and tried to move his head as far away as possible. Both men served in the Navy equally, but nobody wants to get too close to a man who can kill someone with his bare hands.

“Can we train the locals to turn them into pilots?” Gomez asked. “Recent simulators can bring a man from zero to pilot within a few months. And can I learn to fly too? I’ve always wanted to fly a plane, but my dad didn’t even let me get close to his shuttle. Don’t know why. I just crashed it once against an asteroid, but how was I supposed to see it when it was coming from behind the shuttle?”

Wow. Did the kid ever breathe when he talked? He spoke too fast for me, too fast for everyone. We were at war; we couldn’t get overexcited about the prospect of dying. This wasn’t a videogame; we didn’t get a second try if we messed up.

“We need more pilots, better fighters, and less midshipmen,” Flanagan repeated flatly.

Gomez stared at him with curiosity, wondering if the comment was about him or about someone else. He eventually decided that it didn’t have anything to do with him, so he kept going. “We don’t need less midshipmen. We actually need more lieutenants, right? But the midshipmen aboard the Star don’t have enough seniority to turn into acting lieutenants. And we can’t sit our lieutenants’ examinations here, so we’ll only be lieutenants if someone outright promotes us, and nobody can promote us unless they’re an admiral.”

Flanagan groaned but didn’t say anything. Gomez was an annoying kid, but he was still an officer.

I don’t know what kind of idiot decided to put kids aboard spaceships to let them learn the job. They should’ve locked them up in school until they grew up and stopped being a nuisance for everyone else.

“But can I learn to fly?” Gomez insisted. “Can I? Can I? I promise I won’t crash into any ships, and I’ve trained on my simulator. I technically have more practice than many pilots, but I’m not killed if I’m hit. That’s why I’m still here.” He chuckled to himself and stared at everyone around him.

I couldn’t catapult the kid off the spaceport because the Admiralty would consider it an unnecessary display of violence. If we ever got back to Earth, I’d get in trouble for it.

“Why don’t you go and supervise the engineers, Midshipman?” I told him.

“Ugh,” he complained.

Curse him. Isn’t anyone going to obey orders without complaining?

“The engineers have smuggled chocolate into the Star,” Flanagan said. “Someone needs to confiscate it.”

“Chocolate! Really?” Gomez nodded energetically and promised to take charge of the quest immediately. He ran off.

“Don’t run aboard a spaceport!” I shouted after him.

“Yes, sir,” Gomez said. “Sorry, sir.” He turned around, paced quickly a couple of steps, and went back to trotting within seconds. As he ran away, we heard him shout to himself, “Chocolate! Chocolate! Chocolate!”

“Sir?” one of my engineers said through the intercom. “We might be onto something. We’ve tweaked one of the stolen parts from the Cassock ships and we’re ready to connect it to the port. Mind if we give it a try?”

So soon? Banner and Flanagan looked surprised too. This sounded too good to be true, but I wasn’t going to deny them the chance of saving the day.

I tapped on the intercom in my ear. “Go ahead.”

We disconnected unnecessary systems, disabled some of our power hogs, and got ready for the tests. The techies blabbered a lot of technical jargon that even lost me a couple of times. When an engineer uses so much jargon, he has no idea of what he’s talking about and he’s trying to hide it from you. It wasn’t a good sign, but I didn’t care about the theory as long as the cloaking system worked.

“Ready, sir,” the engineer said through the intercom. “Testing in 3… 2… 1…”

Nothing happened. We looked around, but there was no change. Were we invisible to our own sensors? To the enemy? We had to get a shuttle outside to scan us.

Then, the lights went out. All computers shut down and left us in the dark. Only my watch, which remained disconnected from the local Net, was still connected. I used it as a lantern to check that everyone was fine.

“Hate engineers,” Flanagan said flatly. “I really hate engineers. Permission to break a few bones in the engineering bay, sir.”