No Man's Space 1: Starship Encounter (5 page)

Cassock frigates are more impersonal than the Navy’s ships. They use metal everywhere, even for the chairs. Haven’t they heard about seat cushions? They don’t make your ass turn flat after hours of sitting down, and they’re warmer when you first sit on them. Their axial elevators follow a similar design pattern: long ladders that the men need to climb instead of pressing a button. The men need to exercise and build muscles whenever they change decks, but carrying stuff from the core to the outer deck had to be an odyssey.

The brig looked like your typical Middle Ages dungeon: damp, cold, and as dark as it could get. The constant clanking and creaking of metal added to the atmosphere.

Our men had been captured and taken there. Everyone had heard enough legends about Cassocks. We’d seen men return from the front, and we’d seen the asylums that helped them. A few hours of captivity at the hands of those savages were enough to make most men go insane. Some of our men could be dead, maimed, or wounded, and they’d been alone in a cold, damp cell thinking that nobody would rescue them.

The cells closer to us were empty. They were better lit, and the Cassocks didn’t want their prisoners seeing well enough to think. It was merely a psychological effect: we were all scared of them, so now they just needed to dump us into a cell and turn off the lights to make us shit ourselves.

The place froze my blood; I won’t deny it.

“It’s cozy enough,” Flanagan said, “I’ll give you that.”

Kozinski laughed with his classic
who, who, who
. York glared at him and glanced at me in case I disapproved their lack of seriousness.

At least someone was having fun. Perhaps they didn’t realize the possibilities of how we could find our crewmen. Perhaps they did, and it’s what scared them the most. They needed to laugh to overcome their stress.

As soon as we spoke out loud, we heard some complaints from the inner cells. A man’s desperate shouts made us look at each other and run towards him. If we found any Cassocks, they were going to pay for whatever they’d done to our men.

We ran in. It was as dark as before, but there was no sign of Cassocks.

Several of our men stood up in one of the cells. I recognized Hatfield, one of the surgeons, and several midshipmen. They approached us and leaned their hands on the old-fashioned metallic bars on the door. Hatfield wore a clean white shirt, his classic dark blue sport coat with a white handkerchief in his left chest pocket, and white dress pants. His clothes were so clean and shiny that he almost glowed in the dark. The midshipmen were generally scruffier because nobody took cleanliness as seriously as Hatfield, but nobody had harmed them.

Kozinski was the best diplomat in our team, so we tasked him with breaking the locks. It was going to take a while, and the kids started pacing around their cell.

“It’s good to see friendly faces at last.” Hatfield smiled at us with a calm and very polite English smile, as if there hadn’t been any bars between them and us and as if they hadn’t been imprisoned by the country’s most ruthless enemies. “We were just about to run out of conversation topics.”

“Conversation, huh?” Flanagan didn’t like the comment or the surgeon. He disliked most officers from the start and ended up tolerating some after a while. Luckily for me, he’d tolerated me enough to stop a Cassock from killing me. He walked along the door and hit each of the vertical metallic bars with the handle of his electric gun. They looked basic, but it was one of the most resistant alloys in the world. He turned to me. “Hear them, sir? We should’ve taken it easy and kept our asses warm aboard the Star. They were doing fine.”

Hatfield nodded politely at him. A smile of disagreement, but a smile nevertheless. Men from wealthy families can’t keep their manners from showing. Naval men didn’t appreciate excessive politeness.

“Want to be nice and proper like him, don’t you?” Flanagan shoved York aside and tried to help Kozinski open the door sooner.

York glanced at Flanagan, then at Hatfield, then at me. He was trying to find something to say that wouldn’t get him into a fight or offend anyone. It wasn’t easy at all; both the upper and lower classes were easy to annoy.

“Proper?” Hatfield raised both of his white eyebrows in surprise, marking the lines on his forehead even more. He was about 80, but he took care after himself too much for my liking, so he could’ve been over 100. Extended life expectancies made middle-aged people look young, and old people look younger than 50. “Propriety is nothing but a charade we play to consider ourselves better than those who don’t. It used to frustrate me when I was younger, and look at me now: I’m its living portrait.” He stopped to adjust the cuffs of his shirt under his jacket, but he didn’t sneer at York or treat him condescendingly. “Don’t waste your time, young man, or you’ll end up having to smile at impolite brutes instead of breaking their noses.” He nodded at Flanagan and smiled politely yet again.

Wow. It had been a virtual punch in the nose.

Flanagan didn’t react negatively. Instead, he nodded to himself and seemed pleased that the polite Englishman wasn’t soft. The crew has a curious way of demanding authority: they try to step on you when they actually want you to step on them.

The common crew had been split amongst several other cells near the officers. Some of them had burst lips and superficial wounds, but they were fine. We let them out, gathered them together, and informed them of the fates of most of the crew. The prisoners had mostly been on watch, and the Cassocks had sneaked into the North Star because nobody had stopped them. Their faces showed regret and shame. Perhaps they weren’t taking their watches seriously enough, and now most of our crew was dead.

Back in the Roman Empire, men on watch had had the responsibility of being alert to protect their brothers. Whenever someone fell asleep during his watch, his fellow soldiers beat him to death with their own hands. The Navy’s rules were similarly stern: officers executed the men who didn’t defend their ship while on watch.

I wasn’t going to blame the men for something that nobody could’ve stopped. The Cassocks had designed a system to dodge our radars, and now we owned six ships instead of one. Manning them to fly back to Earth was going to be our greatest problem.

We’d rescued a surgeon, some nurses, a few midshipmen, and close to 80 men. They were ecstatic and thanked Flanagan’s squad for rescuing them. None of them addressed me directly aside from a few midshipmen.

Why? I’d taken part in the mission as much as anyone else. I’d even faced the Cassocks directly. Was it because I was a boring engineer dressed in black?

Wait. I was still wearing a Cassock uniform splattered in blood. They considered me the acting captain, their boss. They couldn’t address me directly because of the boring naval protocol. Real officers were left alone and ignored. Engineers didn’t respect those rules and I was always part of the team, but I was starting to understand why everyone spoke about the
solitude of command
.

Was someone going to speak to me? If they kept ignoring me, I’d end up having to call home to have a conversation, and I hadn’t phoned them in years.

If nobody talked to me, the trip back to Earth was going to be very expensive for the Navy. I’ve heard that long-distance conference calls cost a fortune, and the ship pays for the captain’s expenses.

At the back of the men’s cell, amongst the North Star’s men, a man stepped slowly forward. He had a long and thick beard and a square and very martial face crowded with scars. I didn’t recognize him. He wore a white short-sleeved t-shirt and Russian-style camouflage pants. The scars on his arms and face meant that he’d spent longer than us aboard the Cassock ship.

He pointed both hands up to the ceiling and laughed nervously, then approached me and my other men and tried to put a hand through our chests. He smiled at us with empty yet watery eyes. He thought he was hallucinating.

“We’re the good guys,” I said. We were hostile towards the new Soviet states, but one of our jails was much better than living aboard a Cassock ship. “Acting Captain James Wood of the Pan-American Navy, at your service.”

“Light,” the man said with a thick accent. His eyes didn’t focus on me or on anyone. “Blinding brightness and fireballs. Infinite ships approaching in the middle of space, slowly and invisibly creeping towards us. Brutal beasts slitting our throats at night and murdering our women and children. They are coming.” He was gone, but we couldn’t leave him there.

“It’s okay, buddy,” I said. “We’ll take you with us. You’re free to leave this dreadful place.” I gestured at some of my men and told them to take him to the North Star immediately. No man deserved to spend a single minute longer aboard a Cassock ship if he’d gone through their tortures.

The man continued speaking. “Explosions, many explosions. Boom! Boom! Boom!” He gestured with his hands in the air, expanding and collapsing them as he described the events. “No more technology, no more ships, no more world. They are coming.”

“We’ve captured their ships,” one of my men told him. “They aren’t coming anymore. We’re safe.”

The man’s eyes continued staring into emptiness. “They are coming.” He continued trying to walk through some of my men, thinking they were ghosts.

Poor soul. I didn’t want to know what he’d gone through. I hadn’t heard of Cassock attacks on Russian ships, but I hadn’t heard of their cloaking technology either.

Whatever it was, we couldn’t stay there for long. We had to take command of our new fleet and leave.

Hatfield approached me and guided me aside. He gestured in the direction of one of the darker cells in the empty regions. “The crew would like to leave Mr. Banner behind instead of letting him hurt us in every way that he’s promised during our brief captivity. The man can get very creative when he tries. Perhaps you should be aware of his existence.”

Banner? I’d heard the name before, but I didn’t know him. He was one of the recent additions to the crew, but he was a
real
lieutenant. He’d gone through the midshipman route and then sat the examinations. I’d taken the poor man’s approach: going to college, graduating well, and joining a life of engines, engine grease, and metal, lots of it.

I approached Banner’s cell. He sat in the darkest corner, with his head tilted forward. His hair fell over his eyes and his arms rested on his knees. He didn’t move.

Whatever he’d gone through, it had been too much for him.

Kozinski and the others were laughing and celebrating with the men. No officer deserved to be caught in his lowest point and I didn’t want anyone to ridicule him once we got back to the ship, so I opened the door myself. Officers came from wealthy families. This was probably the first time that Banner hadn’t been treated like a gentleman.

The lock gave way easily and I entered. The door’s creak made Banner raise his head. He noticed me, scanned my uniform, and pressed his back even harder against the wall.

“No, no.” His broken voice sounded desperate and he raised a hand to stop me.

“It’s over, Banner.” I stopped walking so that he didn’t feel more intimidated. “We’re part of the good guys. We’ve let everyone out.” I signaled at my uniform. “Ignore the cassock and the blood. I didn’t have any clean jackets.”

Banner studied me once more. His eyes must’ve been more used to the dark than mine. He quickly stood up and dusted off his pants and double-breasted jacket. His face had a slight constipated expression; he didn’t like something about me. He remained polite, though, so he squared up and bowed curtly, a habit he’d carried from his days in society. “Henry Banner, Seventh Lieutenant, but you already knew that.”

And that, dear reader, is a wealthy kid’s way of asking your name.

He was the lowest-ranked naval lieutenant aboard the North Star, which placed him slightly above a midshipman. He must’ve passed his lieutenant’s examination a couple of years earlier, and he still had a long career ahead of him to get a promotion to captain. Unlike me, he’d received proper naval training and he had the contacts. He was too inexperienced to command, though.

“James Wood.” I stretched out my hand. “Lieutenant of Engineers at your service.”

Banner lowered his gaze and stared openly at my hand. A sneer formed in his face and he looked back up without shaking it. Was it because I was an engineer, or was it because being an engineer meant that I didn’t belong to his class?

He didn’t like something about me, but I knew exactly what I didn’t like of him. He was a snobbish, arrogant git, and he couldn’t even thank the man who’d arranged his rescue.

I’d seen his airs of superiority often enough to know how to act with him. I was going to act like the engineer I was: irreverent and tired of rules. I was going to make his life difficult.

“I’d have worn my black to make introductions more solemn,” I said, “but capturing five Cassock frigates is no easy task.”

His boring dark eyes widened and he moved his golden hair away from his eyes. He couldn’t believe his own ears, so I explained everything that a handful of engineers and common crewmen had achieved without anyone’s help. I dropped in that I’d led the men, just in case he’d forgotten about it.

Banner overcame his aversion towards me and congratulated me superficially, but he didn’t believe my version of the story until we reached the bridge of the frigate. While he’d been comfortably seated in a cell, I’d risked my life a hundred times to fix everything that the real naval officers had done wrong.

“We need to take the ships back to Earth,” Banner said as if he’d invented the wheel. He kept his back perfectly straight and leaned his right hand on one of the control panels. His right foot rested a couple of inches before his left, almost like a hologram taken out of a naval history textbook. Some men took poses too seriously.

Flanagan chuckled behind us. I glared at him; he wasn’t going to show disrespect for the ship’s two seniormost officers.

“It’s going to be a problem,” Banner continued, “because we have six ships and only two lieutenants. We’ll have to rely on four midshipmen, but we don’t have enough men to spare.”

It wasn’t our only problem. Our biggest problem was that the only real officer aboard a ship had no experience and had broken down when the Cassocks had captured him. The captain would’ve set an example and faced the Cassocks openly, but Banner wasn’t ready to command.

And I wasn’t ready to follow him. I’d grown attached to the post of acting captain; you know? And to the idea of surviving against all odds. Banner had been the officer of the watch when we’d been boarded. If he took command, he’d jinx it.

He probably considered himself worthier than a lowly engineer, but I’d worked my ass off for my silver laurels.

Banner’s young face kept his thoughts mostly to himself. Wealthy people were taught the arts of hypocrisy since birth. I couldn’t read him.

“We can split the task,” Banner said. “You can lead the frigates, since you’ve captured them, and I can fly the North Star back home.”

He almost made it sound tempting. Leading the Cassock ships meant that I’d command one and delegate command for the others. We’d have to fly close together and we’d be undermanned. If we were attacked and we didn’t dodge a fight, we were dead.

Commanding the North Star meant becoming acting captain. Banner would keep most of the crew and the ship, and he’d get credit for the captures even though he hadn’t played a part in them. Did he underestimate me enough to make such an offer?

Technically, I was as much of a lieutenant as him. Nobody ever expected an engineering lieutenant to take command, but I’d done well on my first attempt. I was older and I trusted my instincts. Vets hated green officers because they messed up. I wasn’t going to let a rich kid lead to death.

With a small crew, you can only beat the enemy if you have a sharper mind, so I wanted to hold onto command during our trip home. Blame my huge ego.

I wasn’t going to seize command by force, but I wasn’t going to let anyone step on me.

This was a matter of seniority.

“When did you earn your promotion?” I asked.

Banner checked his watch and typed a couple of numbers onto the holographic HUD on his forearm. “Four years, three months, and eight days ago.”

Really? I’d heard about him only three months earlier. He must’ve been one of the kids with very powerful families. The kids ended up on ships’ books to earn seniority, but they remained at home until they were powerful enough to stop most of the other officers from stepping on them. Yet another reason to avoid relying on his fitness to command.

Lucky that I’d been promoted sooner.

I’d joined the Navy with a direct promotion to lieutenant just after hitting 23. My promotion hadn’t been a typical offer for a postdoc, but several companies and governmental branches had bid for me after I’d almost defeated a Chinese genius kid at an international math contest. Officers in the naval track didn’t need to go to college, so they became lieutenants between the ages of 17 to 25, mostly depending on their contacts’ power.

I informed Banner of my date of promotion, which made me the acting captain once more.

Acting captain
. Sounds good when you say it, huh?

“I’ll take the Star,” I informed him, “and you can take five men with you aboard this frigate. I’ll send six men to each of the other ships to compensate for the midshipmen’s youth. We’ll fly out of this region in formation, and we’ll plot a course back to Earth once we’re in friendlier territory. I don’t want to stay here in case we get any other unexpected visits.”

Flanagan had remained silent, but now he approached me. “Sir, want me to arrange the trip back to the Star?”

“Do it,” I said. I glanced back at Banner and smirked at him.

Okay, I shouldn’t have shown that I liked my temporary rank so much, but I was eager to fly the North Star without following the captain’s orders. And besides, we wouldn’t have been there if I hadn’t captured five ships with a handful of men. I’ve mentioned my feat already, haven’t I? I’d keep it quiet, but it sounds too epic to let go of it.

Flanagan approached one of the intercoms on the wall and pressed it to speak. “Gentlemen, we’re leaving. Take your stuff and meet us on the bridge.”

“Why don’t you use these?” I pointed at the intercom in my ear. Everyone from the North Star wore ear intercoms to simplify communication.

“The lads take ’em off while we’re drinking, sir. Hate interruptions.”

Sure. Alcohol was more important than their officers barking orders. I couldn’t blame them; it had been a long day.

Flanagan raised his finger from the intercom and the ship’s alarms went off. Red lights started shining around us and the speakers repeated a pre-recorded message in German. The men looked at each other.

Banner covered his ears with his hands. “What does this mean?”

“The ship’s alarms have gone mad, sir,” one of the men in charge of a nearby frigate said through the intercom. We’d extended the intercoms’ reach so that they covered all six ships.

“Gomez,” I said, hoping that the kid would’ve stayed on the North Star’s bridge. “Translate.”

“Something’s happening in ten minutes, sir,” Gomez said. “Can’t remember the word.”

Banner tapped on his ear to speak. “Well use a translator, boy!”

“I can’t find it!” Gomez said.

“Look lively,” Banner said.

“Smells of self-destruction to me. The wall intercoms must have a security system.” I spoke before even thinking.

“Yes!” Gomez said. “That’s it! Destruction. My German’s a little rusty.”

Once we realized, everyone ran to the transport shuttles. I ended up on the same shuttle as Banner and Flanagan. We all wanted to pilot, so I ended up flying the ship while Banner gave me useless and hysterical instructions from the copilot’s seat. Flanagan gripped the backs of our seats and remained alert in case he needed to take the controls before either of us messed up.

We flew from the frigate at top speed, and so did the men from the other ships. We reached the North Star quickly enough, but too many shuttles had to circle it to enter the rotating hangar. Instead, I flew behind one of the engines and hoped that it would hide us well enough.

“What are you doing?” Banner said. “We need to get in.”

“He’s proving that he deserves his rank, sir,” Flanagan said with some sarcasm in his voice. “He’s an engineer and knows what he’s doing. We can’t all lock onto the outer deck’s rotational speed and enter the hangars at once, so we’re using the Star as a shield.”

Flanagan had hit the nail in the head, but his description made me sound much more capable. He was praising me to annoy Banner, but it was pleasant to hear some praise for a change.

Banner rose from his seat and stepped in front of Flanagan. He raised a finger in front of Flanagan’s chest. “I won’t take any disrespect from you.”

Flanagan returned him a half-smile. “I’d sit back down if I were you, sir.”

Was he being insubordinate, or was he telling Banner to sit down for safety reasons?

Just then, the first frigate exploded. The expansion wave hit the North Star and shook her. Our ship shook violently, but not enough to break us. We’d have been crushed if we’d been in open space.

Banner had fallen onto the floor. He brought his hand to his burst lip.

“Told ya, sir,” Flanagan said.

Banner sat back down on the copilot’s chair and got ready for the other explosions. He kept his jaw tightly clenched; he resented Flanagan. The ship’s most experienced seaman had started a war with my second in command.

It wasn’t going to end well, especially if I ended up in the crossfire.