Read My Life: An Ex-Quarterback's Adventures in the Galactic Empire Online

Authors: Colin Alexander

Tags: #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Adventure, #Space Opera

My Life: An Ex-Quarterback's Adventures in the Galactic Empire (9 page)

BOOK: My Life: An Ex-Quarterback's Adventures in the Galactic Empire
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Carvalho had said it like a statement, not like a question. Mere custom it might be, but there seemed to be only one answer. Not that I was complaining, under the circumstances. I got out a brief “Yes.”

“Good. Report to Quartermaster Hvath. He will see that the assignments are made.”

Apparently, that was the end of the matter for Carvalho because he gathered up the other officers by eye and led them out. That left me alone in the conference room. The sudden release of pressure made it almost as hard to assess my position as it had been before. I figured that I would be able to collect my wits while I tracked down Hvath to find out what duties I was expected to take over.

Angel was waiting for me in the corridor. He was leaning against the wall with an insouciant grin and a thumbs-up sign.

“Nice going, Danny-boy. Although, for a moment there, it looked like Gerangi had you scared.”

“Scared my ass!” Well, that’s one way of putting it. “I thought he was going to use me for a live target in the armory.”

“Oh, come on Danny. Be real. I mean, how could Carvalho keep discipline on this ship if they had executions every time somebody got killed in a fight?”

I gave Angel a rather long look in response. “You know,” I said, “I think you’ve been out here too long. You’re starting to think like them.” From his expression, I could see that he had missed my point entirely, so I gave up and changed the subject.

“What’s this business with Kolgorinn’s duties?”

Angel looked puzzled again. “Nobody’s given you any yet?” he asked.

“Nope.”

“I’ll be damned. Hvath is slipping. We better hunt him up and I’ll tell you about it on the way.”

Angel’s explanation needed some sorting out before it made sense, but eventually I got the point. Basically, the housekeeping chores for the ship were distributed among the crew, much the way one would expect on a boat, for example. They ran the gamut from unstopping the plumbing to bringing Carvalho’s dinner when he wanted to eat alone. Kill someone and you became responsible for his chores, exactly as Carvalho had said. Aside from that, it was Hvath’s duty to reassign jobs when casualties required it. Jobs could also be bartered among the crew. What gave me trouble, initially, was why the jobs existed at all. Why wasn’t everything automated?

Surely, a technology that could send starships across a spiral arm could devise a self-cleaning john. Of course, it could. What I eventually realized was that it was possible to fly most good-sized ships with no more than half a dozen crew. The capability was there. The Srihani just found it irrelevant. The Flying Whore, and all ships like her, were
warships
. Ships designed to fight sacrificed luxury for utility. The physical space, and computer attention, required for housekeeping functions could always be more profitably used for military functions. Also, there was the issue of the crew. While it was possible to fly a starship with only a handful of people, fighting a battle that way was impractical. The more decentralized a ship was, the less vulnerable it was to damage in any one area. To accomplish that decentralization required manpower. When the ship wasn’t fighting, however, that extra crew was redundant. Having chores to do occupied time and decreased the number of opportunities for starting fights. Hence, we swabbed the decks from one star to the next.

Chapter 6

T
he list that Hvath gave me when we finally found him seemed neither too lengthy nor too onerous. Hvath didn’t say he was done, however, when he stopped speaking. Instead, he came to a drawn out pause before starting up again.

“There’s one other that you’re stuck with. It’s not a very good one because it means that you won’t be able to eat at the same time as most of the crew.”

Hvath actually looked sorry about it. Kolgorinn had not been popular, most bullies aren’t, and Hvath had come up with a device to keep him away at mealtimes. Up to this point, I had taken it as a minor stroke of luck that Kolgorinn was rarely in the mess when I was eating.

“What is it?”

“You’re the one who brings the meals in to the prisoner.”

“Prisoner? You mean the Little Mistress?”

“That’s the one,” he nodded. It’s only temporary, obviously, which is good for you because I doubt you can trade it.”

I didn’t see why it should be such a problem, but Hvath was explaining even before I asked.

“You pick up the meal at the mess and bring it down to the cabin. The guard there will let you in and you take it in. Once you do, you stay until she finishes it and you see that she finishes it. She’s no good to Carvalho if she starves to death. Same reason, anything that goes in with you comes out with you. And finally, hands off! Just think of it as valuable cargo. Mess it up and Carvalho will mess you up.”

That, I thought, was clear and to the point.

The late meal that day was my first time on the job. The covered tray was waiting for me at the mess. There was a bowl of pureed something that looked like oatmeal and smelled like cabbage. Dull as shipboard food was, this was duller. The single utensil the Srihani favored had been altered. The tines were clipped short and the cutting edge had been removed, converting it into little more than a soupspoon. Whatever little potential it had for being used as a weapon was gone.

I took the tray to a corridor in the area where the officer quarters were, up near the bridge. With a single female prisoner on a ship full of male pirates, Carvalho wasn’t about to put her in the brig. Since there was no place to run to on a ship in interstellar space, it was more important to keep her isolated from the crew than to prevent her from running away. The brig, although secure, was really just a holding area. Had Carvalho used it for the Little Mistress, there would have been no place to put the rowdies while they cooled off. Instead, they’d sealed off a stretch of corridor and put her in one of the rooms. The entrance to the corridor slid open when I pressed my hand to the plate. It slid closed again as soon as I had passed through.

Seated outside the door was one very bored looking guard. Quite possibly, that was the worst duty on the ship. I waited at the door for him to leave his seat, having been told that the door to the room hadn’t been keyed to my hand.

“You got Kolgorinn?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

He shook his head, as though reluctant to believe it. “I’d have bet the wrong way if I’d heard it was coming. I wish I had seen it. Don’t worry about this job. It won’t be forever. Anyway, you’re only stuck here for the meals.”

He let me in, then closed the door between us. The best word to describe the cabin inside was barren. It was a standard ship’s cabin, but almost everything that was not an integral part of the walls and floor had been removed. A bathroom was set into the inner wall of the cabin, proof that this had belonged to one of the upper officers. Its door had been fixed in the open position. The only furniture in the cabin was the bed, a Srihani bed being like a large beanbag filled with gelfoam, and a small table next to it. The room reminded me of the modified utensil. Carvalho intended to leave no possible way for his prisoner to commit suicide.

Wouldn’t it have been easier to put a camera in the cabin? Yes, if the proper equipment had been available. The ship hadn’t been designed with internal security in mind. While the materials necessary to create such a system could, no doubt, be found on the ship, it would have required some ingenuity to put it together. Carvalho’s freebooters, educated or not, were using equipment they could manipulate but didn’t really understand. It’s not such a strange situation. After all, I didn’t need a certification in gynecology in order to have sex. It was much the same with the ship. They could fly it, fight it and repair parts of it, but jury-rigging a surveillance camera, which required creative thought, they wouldn’t even consider. It was simpler to find a way to work without one, which accounted for the strict instructions about keeping my hands off.

Given the lack of furniture in the cabin, the only place for the Little Mistress to sit was on the bed. She was there when I came in, although it would have been easy to mistake her for another piece of furniture. She sat utterly motionless, and no part of her was visible, thanks to a gray cloak that shrouded her from neck to ankle and had a deep hood that completely hid her face. All I could see, other than the cloak, was a pair of black half-boots, the type that was worn with a shipsuit. She didn’t acknowledge my entrance in any way.

I felt awkward at being ignored. How do you introduce yourself to your kidnap victim when she doesn’t greet you?

“Hi,” I said, “I’ve got your dinner.”

For all the response I got, I might as well have stood there, as silent as she. Had I waited for her to say something, I would probably still be standing there. I was there to bring her dinner, so that’s what I did. I walked the tray over to the table, put it down and pushed the table in front of her. Even up close, the folds of the hood were too deep to see her face. Having left the tray, I retreated to the door and waited. And waited.

Finally, I said, “Look, you know that I have to see that you eat it,” while wondering
how
I was going to do that.

To my immense relief, there was a fractional nod and she began to comply. By virtue of picking up the utensil and the cover, her hands became visible. Their normalness was a bit of a surprise, since that all-encompassing cloak had built up fantasies in my mind about what type of being might be underneath it. The hands, however, were Srihani. They were small, which matched my estimate of the figure under the cloak, and covered with pale, white skin. One of them brought the food from the bowl up into the recesses of the hood. When the bowl was empty, the hands disappeared again. The meal finished, I was free to take the tray back and have my own dinner.

At first, her silence didn’t bother me. In fact, I preferred it that way. I was ambivalent about holding a hostage; no matter what the empire was really like, it wasn’t her fault. By not talking to me, I figured she wasn’t going to make me feel any more guilty than I already did. I was glad for that because icing Kolgorinn had gained me a measure of acceptance from the crew, which I appreciated. Although I hadn’t fought alongside them yet, the standard by which they measured everyone, they did admit me to the social life of the ship. The humor could be a little rough, but I began to feel a part of the team.

Except, that is, for the time I spent watching the Little Mistress eat. It got old fast, standing there with nothing to do while she ate and not reaching the mess until almost everyone else was done. Guilty feelings or not, I began to wish she would say something.

The silence led me to invent conversations we could have. That was bad for me, because somewhere in each conversation would be the accusing question, “Why are you doing this to me?” No answer sounded good, even in the privacy of my head. Before too long, I really did want to talk with her, if for no other reason than to get the accusation out into the open. But she said nothing. I wondered if she was just too afraid of me to talk, my predecessor having been Kolgorinn, but my elaborate attempts at politeness and kindness met with no response. I could have turned in a different direction and spoken my lines to one of the walls for all the impact they had.

One day, I brought the late meal in and announced in the grandiose fashion I had adopted, “Dinner is served, Little Mistress.”

She said nothing, as usual, but I thought I saw a twitch of the shoulders at the phrase. Possibly, she didn’t like it. Irritating someone was a hell of a way to start a conversation, but what alternative was there? Throughout that meal, I “Little Mistressed” her to death. Outwardly, there was no more response than I had obtained by standing quietly next to the door. Still, by the time I left, even though I had been the only one talking, I was certain from her posture that I had made an impression. I decided that when I came back the next time, I would keep at it until something happened.

“Mealtime again, Little Mistress,” I said as I came through the door.

“I wish you would not call me that,” she said.

BOOK: My Life: An Ex-Quarterback's Adventures in the Galactic Empire
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