My Life: An Ex-Quarterback's Adventures in the Galactic Empire (13 page)

I
n some respects, I was busier after the battle than during it. The Flower of Rianth, the merchanter we had attacked, had been badly damaged during the fight, but not fatally. Credit Carvalho for launching the Strike Force early and your friend, Danny Troy, for reaching the bridge quickly. Credit also the deceased former captain of the Flower, who had recognized that his crew was going to lose the battle. His challenge to me to fight for the ship, one on one, had been for show, a suicidal show at that since he had also known he would not win that duel. By doing it, he allowed his crew to pretend that he, now dead, had surrendered the ship, not they. It saved the ship —and a lot of lives.

The Flower of Rianth was still operational, making the ship itself a valuable prize. Carvalho gave precedence to transferring as much of the Flower’s cargo as possible, but once that was done he pushed both crews to repair the Flower so she could make an interstellar transit.

Yes, I did say both crews. It seemed no sooner had the shooting stopped than Carvalho took on most of the Flower’s crew. The ones who didn’t sign on with Carvalho were mostly the officers, and the reason seemed more that Carvalho didn’t need them than their unwillingness to join us.

I had a close look at the changeover because Carvalho posted me to the gang overseeing the repair work, a perk for my performance. It brought me into close contact with Ruoni, the officer who’d asked me to accept the Flower’s surrender. He was a slim, intense, young Srihani who, in spite of his youth, had served on two other merchant ships previously and had survived an earlier encounter with freebooters.

Ruoni wasn’t going to join us, as Carvalho had his own fire control and executive officers, but that didn’t stop him from managing the Flower’s repairs in expert fashion. He ignored the unsightly but purely cosmetic residue of buckled deck plates, blown out interior walls and shattered safety doors. Damage to the reactor lines and places where the ship had been opened to vacuum, those were the critical areas he concentrated on. For two days, Ruoni had his surviving engineers, plus some of Carvalho’s, laboring to patch the drive together. The merchanter personnel obviously had a far better grasp of how the thing was built than Carvalho’s people did. It took the full two days, without sleep, but I’m not sure it could have been done at all without the merchanters. They succeeded or, at least the ship was spaceworthy, although neither Ruoni nor the engineers believed that it would be good for more than a few transits.

I was supposed to watch Ruoni and make certain there was no sabotage. It was a futile assignment. I could no more have told whether the repairs were done properly than a Neanderthal watching an automobile being fixed. Perhaps foolishly, I admitted as much to Ruoni.

“It doesn’t matter.” He shrugged. “It is custom for there to be a supervisor. However, I would hardly sabotage a ship that I have to fly. There would be nothing gained by it.”

I had to agree with the logic, so I changed the subject and asked him what he planned to do after the ship docked at a station.

He shrugged again. “I have no idea. There will be another ship that needs a Fire Controller, or someone will buy this one and need to crew it. Or maybe neither, and I will rot away on a station.”

Under other circumstances, I could have become friendly with Ruoni. He was a bit dour, but his side, after all, had just lost the battle. He obviously knew how to coax maximum performance from others. An innate talent is necessary to be really good at that and Ruoni had it. He answered my questions politely, even though some of them must have sounded truly foolish, and he told me far more about the ship than he had to. It was his willingness to talk about the ship that led me to ask other questions. For instance, why had the crew changed sides so easily after their captain had died to save their lives?

“There is nothing unusual about it,” Ruoni answered, with a look that compelled me to tell him that I had not grown up in the empire. “As I said, it is not unusual. The kvenningari do it all the time. Parole and retirement, or change insignia. All sides are sworn to serve the empire, so changing sides does not violate one’s oath. It is not so different here, except that it’s not necessary to retire if your option is not to change sides.”

“How can it not be different with a freebooter?”

“Freebooters maintain that they have Imperial charters and operate under Imperial regulations,” he pointed out.

The words brought back the farcical investigation after Kolgorinn’s death. Was this the reason for the elaborate pretense? But still, “And you change sides just like that, even after fighting so hard against one another?”

Ruoni looked at me as though I was daft. “Would you sign them on if they did not fight hard?”

The question was rhetorical and the argument futile. The Imperials had come up with a convenient theory to explain away what they did. The reality was irrelevant.

“Ruoni,” I said, “the more I see of your empire, the more I am coming to believe that the idiots running my world actually know what they are doing. And that is a truly scary thought.”

It took five days of work in all, four for the repairs and one for testing, before the Flower was ready to fly again. When it was done, Carvalho called a holiday on the Flower, both for us and the Flower’s old crew, battened down anything fragile, and let the booze flow for a full day. By the time that was over the remaining differences between the two crews were submerged by the bond of a mutual hangover. There was one fight to the death between two of the Flower’s crew, which Carvalho dealt with the next day by doctoring the record the same way he’d done after my fight. When that was done, everyone was buddy-buddy and it was time to go back to work.

Carvalho put a small prize crew on the Flower’s bridge along with her own crew. The plan was to fly both ships to Tetragrammaton system, where there was a large trading station. There, Carvalho would be able to barter both the ship and the cargo we had taken.

I was going to do quite well out of it. There are as many ways of dividing the spoils as there are freebooters, ranging from those where each crew member draws an equal percentage to those where the ship as a whole owns all of it and the crew draw allowances. Carvalho’s ship fell somewhere in the middle. Fifty percent of the take, after Carvalho took out for expenses, went into the ship’s fund, which Carvalho controlled. The other half was split into shares based on rank and contribution to the fight. Since I had taken the bridge alone, I was in line for a whopping bonus.

This catapulted me to A-number-one status among the crew. The exploit itself would have been enough to make me fully accepted, the money made me sought after. Having been through such a situation once, I was alert to the reason behind the popularity. That let me enjoy it without being taken advantage of.

Much as I enjoyed the idea of having money again, even if it was Imperial credits and not American dollars, I had the feeling the moment I set foot on the Flying Whore again that Jaenna wasn’t going to share my mood. It was a good guess. Part of her reaction may have been shock at the realization that I was not dead. It would have been easy for her to come to that conclusion since she had not seen me for days. I had spent the entire time on the Flower and, while I didn’t know who was bringing her meals in my absence, it hardly mattered. Jaenna wouldn’t have deigned to ask anything of any of the other freebooters. Possibly, I was overestimating the importance of my carcass to her at that point. What can’t be overstated was the frostiness of my reception. Once she recognized who had come through the door, her face settled back into a mask.

“I see you’re still alive,” she said, with the same enthusiasm she displayed for the food.

I scrambled as best I could to repair the damage.

“Jaenna, I’m sorry about the days I was on the ship we took. It’s not as though Carvalho would have me jetting back and forth at meal times.”

When I catch foot-in-mouth disease, I get a bad case.

“Hnh. ‘The ship we took’,” she said, with a clear emphasis on the
we
. “I was right in the beginning. You’re just a murdering thief like the rest of them. Scum. I don’t know why I bother talking to you at all.”

“Better than talking to the wall.”

“Not really.”

“Now wait just a goddamn minute!”

She had really gotten under my skin.
Goddamn
does not translate into galactic, so I spliced the English into the sentence. I had learned plenty of Srihani curses, but for me, they lacked the punch of the ones I had grown up with.

“I didn’t set up this screwy empire, I’m just trying to stay alive in it. You’ve got these kvenningari, and I don’t even think I know how many, and they seem to be fighting each other all the time. What’s that supposed to be about?”

Jaenna glared at me. “It’s called the Game of Empire. The faction fights are for control of trade, stations, systems, to represent the interests of the emperor.”

“Represent the interests of the emperor? Doesn’t that mean: make him their puppet?”

“That’s a crude way of putting it.”

“But probably true. Why doesn’t your precious Fleet put a stop to the kvenningari?”

“What? The kvenningari are part of the empire, part of the Imperial system. The Fleet is to stop the freebooters.”

“Oh, I get it. The kvenningari are called Imperials and when they blow somebody’s head off and take his stuff, hell, that’s just a faction fight and that’s okay. We do the same thing and we’re the scum of space. Does that make sense? I mean, it would be nice if everyone behaved but they don’t. I don’t imagine your father keeps all those troops and weapons you told me about just because he likes watching parades. I haven’t seen anyone out here who isn’t a cutthroat at times, so lay off the murdering thief bit.”

I have heard the line that starts with “Two wrongs,” but I was frustrated. My blast definitely took her aback. She just stared at me and said nothing. In fact, she said nothing all the way to Tetragrammaton.

My problem with Jaenna a Tyaromon didn’t go away simply because she stopped talking to me. That made it worse. Our conversations had come to be very cordial, like old friends sharing a quiet evening. I really missed that. In addition, I’d come to really like her; she was in that gray zone between spunky kid and self-assured adult where her occasional backsliding to the former made her all the more likable. Her silence rubbed my nose in the reality of the situation. It made me think that she meant what she had said, that she lumped
me
in with
them
to produce a uniform
us
. It also made me think she had always believed that, even before the battle, which upset me. It made the icy friction even harder to take.

What I wanted was to be able to fix the situation, which I couldn’t do. The conflict preyed on my mind in a way that none of the new camaraderie with the crew could alleviate. Angel was the only one on the ship with whom I felt safe discussing it, so I brought it up with him. Frequently.

“Danny, this chick is driving you bonkers,” he said after our third or fourth or fifth conversation on the topic. “It was bad enough before, but now it’s getting ridiculous. What you need is to get laid.”

I said that I didn’t think so.

“Sure you do,” he said. “Look, do you see any ass on this ship? I mean real ass. No, you do not. You check almost any freebooter ship, I’ll tell you what you’ll find. No ass. Even the ones that work out of a permanent base don’t carry it around with them. Now, if you had all those ships full of badass dudes flying around with no ass and no access to any, shit, there’d be more crazy fights than there are now.

“Maybe you don’t believe me because of Orgumuni. That was my fault we didn’t get any and I’m sorry. But you just hang on, Danny-boy, until we get good leave at Tetragrammaton and I’ll show you where the ladies are. Man, do they know tricks out here!” I could have done without the catalog, but Angel was in high gear. “The best part of it is,” he finished up, “there’s no problems. No clap, no syph, none of those viruses that make you wish you hadn’t. I guarantee you, you come back from leave with me and they could slab the Playmate of the Decade out in front of you, stark naked, and you’ll just hang there like a cooked asparagus.”