The Kruton Interface (16 page)

The sound increased to painful proportions. Everyone covered his ears and grimaced in agony.

Finally, as the ship gave a last lurch, the sound stopped.

Wanker shot to his feet. “Sadowski, did I say panic stop?”
 

“Nae, sir.”

“I just said complete stop. You didn’t have to stand on the goddamn brakes!”

“Sir, the Kruton is stopping, too. Uh-oh.” Rhodes’s eyes were glued to his scanner.

Wanker turned sharply. “Did you say ‘Uh-oh’?” Appealing to Darvona, he said, “Did he say Uh-oh?”

Darvona nodded. “He said ‘uh-oh’
.
”

“EVERYONE GRAB ON TO SOMETHING!”

The impact was not severe but was strong enough to send everyone and everything flying against the aft bulkhead.

It took a good minute for everyone to sort themselves out of the lumped-together debris and the tangle of bodies.

“Oops, sorry.”

“Just my mouth you’re stepping on, thank you.”

Wanker crawled out from underneath a pile of junk. “What… what the hell was that? Were we fired on?”

Rhodes, apparently hardier than most, was already back at his station. “Sir, this is crazy, but...”

“Yeah, what?”

“The Kruton ship ran into us.”
 

“What? Wait, I can’t bear to hear you repeat it. Rhodes, that kind of stuff doesn’t happen.”

“Except to us, sir.”

Wanker settled back into his seat. “Right. Forgot. Can we get a damage report?”
 

“It’ll take a while, sir.”

“Can anyone see how badly the Kruton ship is damaged?”

Sven said, “Sir, on my screen it looks pretty banged up. But nothing fatal.”

“It’s a miracle,’’ Rhodes said. They must have come up just short of a dead stop, maybe only a couple of meters per second velocity when they hit us. Otherwise, we woulda been vaporized.’’

“I’ve just had a fender-bender in a starship,” Wanker said, marveling. There’s got to be some sort of distinction in that.”

“Marcel? Marcel?”

Strangefinger was shaking the Proust device, which looked a bit the worse for the accident. The blinking lights were out.

“Marcel didn’t make it?” the captain asked.

“Boy, do we have a liability case,” Strangefinger said, throwing down the useless contraption. “Jameson, take a letter to my lawyers!”

Rusty pulled a giant red plastic letter A out of a pocket of his trench coat.

“Oh, a scarlet letter. That’s a nice letter to send. Yeah, mail that off, with my compliments.”

Darvona said, “Coded message in from Space Fleet!”

Wanker said, “Decode that message and put it up on the big screen.” Darvona said, “Decoding. Oops, no big screen.”
 

“For God’s sake, the small screen.”
 

“Here it is,” Darvona said. Wanker looked at his communications screen.

RED ALERT—WAR DECLARED—STAND BY FOR FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS

Wanker was momentarily stunned. “Huh?” He couldn’t believe it. This was out of the blue, out of left field, totally unexpected.

Then, with energizing impact, it sank in.

“We’re at war with the Krutons! All right, people. We’re in a shooting war now, and I am going to take a crack at turning our reputation around in one swell foop. We’re going to come about and engage the enemy in close combat. Face-to-face! Death to the Krutons!”

Strangefinger mused, “This is just a stray thought, but have you ever noticed that alien names always have Greek endings? You go a thousand light-years from Earth, you meet a strange alien race, and they’re Hellenists to a man. Don’t mind me, my bit is over. I don’t have a good line for the rest of the novel.”

“Reverse thrust! Back us up and get us clear of the wreckage!”
 

“Aye, sir!”

“Sound battle stations! Reconfigure the bridge for close combat!”

A whooping alert sounded. The armor plates, however, did not move.

“SHIT! Didn’t these damned things get fixed?”

Rhodes seemed embarrassed. “Not yet, sir, I’m sorry to say.”

“Crank them down manually!”

Strangefinger yelled, “Everyone grab his crank!”

The job of getting the armor plates down was impeded more by the junk underfoot than by mechanical difliculties. Within minutes, however, every station on the bridge was cut off one from the other and physically isolated. But not electronically isolated.

Wanker found himself in an oddly shaped chamber. It was dark. He fumbled around for the

cyberhelmet and found it after much cursing, swearing, and oath-taking. He put it on.

To his surprise, the thing was working. He was outside the ship, floating in space. He could not only see the Kruton battle cruiser, but arrayed around his peripheral vision was every single readout he needed to make his command decisions.

There wasn’t much of a decision to make, because the Kruton was a sitting duck. Temporarily disoriented by a freak accident, probably wondering what the hell was going on, his Kruton counterpart was probably still scraping himself off the forward bulkhead, if he (or it) survived the impact at all, an impact that had to have been ten times greater than the one the
Repulse’s
crew had experienced. The time to strike was now. The only question was getting back far enough to be safe from the effects of a thermonuclear blast delivered by a missile.

Rhodes’s voice came into Wanker’s ears. “Shall we arm a ship-to-ship missile, Captain?”

“No! No time! Look at the gamma-wave spike! The Kruton is arming his weapons! We’ll have to use the particle beam accelerator.”

“Sir, that old thing hasn’t been fired in years. Why, last time—”

“Shut up and turn that relic on!”

Svensen shouted, “It’s automatically powered up on the sounding of battle stations, sir!”

“Okay, then, aim the goddamned thing and shoot!”

“Huh? I mean,
sir?”

“Aren’t you the gunnery officer, Svensen?”
 

“Uh, yeah.”

“Well, shoot the Kruton ship. Shoot it. You know...”

“You mean, just go ahead and bang away at point-blank range?”

“What, you want to give him a sporting chance? Shoot already!”

“Anything you say, Captain.”

Svensen shot. A tremendous bolt of energy left the underside of the
Repulse
and caught the Kruton amidships. A brilliant explosion enveloped the latter.

Wanker was momentarily blinded. When his vision cleared again, he could not locate the Kruton battle cruiser.

“Where the hell’d it go?”

“Sir, it’s still there,” Rhodes told him. “It’s just in pieces.”

Wanker tried to focus his vision on the images that swam around his head. He checked his data displays.

“Oh, yeah. We got it.”

“We sure did, Captain!
Yeee-ahhhh-hooooo!”

“Contain yourself, Mr. Rhodes.”

But Wanker could hardly do so himself.

CHAPTER 16

Rhodes said, “Scanners are picking up radioactive debris, sir. Looks like we hit him dead center!”

O’Gandhi said, “He is being definitely dead this time, Jim!”

“Are there any other Kruton warships within scanner range?” Wanker asked.

“Not a one,” Rhodes reported.

“Splendid,” Wanker said with satisfaction. “Navigator, plot a course directly to Forces headquarters on Alpha Centauri Two. And this time get it right, please.”

Warner-Hillary said brightly, “Yes, sir!”

“Secure from battle stations!”

To everyone’s complete astonishment, the armor plates retracted neatly and silently back up into their slots in the overhead.

“Must’ve just needed oiling,” Mr. Rhodes said with a big bucktoothed, hayseed grin. “Mr. Sadowski strikes again.”

Wanker said, “All right, this is no time for recriminations. We’re in an interstellar war, toe-to-toe with the Krutons. I’ll bet even money that when this little fracas is over, there’ll be some important citations and commendations for you all, regardless of your race, your creed, or your sexual preference. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised—”

Darvona said meekly, “Captain?”

Wanker said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if at the end of this thing—”

“Captain, please?”

“What, what! What is it?”

Darvona said, “Uh.… I made a little boo-boo, too.”

Wanker’s face fell a kilometer. “Boo-boo.” Darvona nodded.
 

“Yep. I decoded the message wrong.”

Wanker gave this news deep, serious consideration. “You… decoded the message wrong.”

Darvona said, “Yeah, the coded message from Command Central? I ran the wrong de-encryption program and it came out all wrong.”

“You… ran… the wrong...”

“Deciphering program. Yes, sir. When a coded message comes in, it comes with a little thingie that tells you what de-encryption program to run on it. And I guess I read the thingie wrong.”

“Thingie,” Wanker repeated.
 

“You know, the little … thing, there.”

Captain Wanker got to his feet and approached her. “Lieutenant Roundheels?”

“Yes, sir?”

“What… excuse me for asking… but, what did the message really say?”

Darvona said, “The message reads, ‘Stop all activity and return to base immediately. Acknowledge.’”

Wanker said, “Let me get this straight. We crossed the neutral zone. We intruded on Kruton space. We blasted a Kruton battle cruiser to radioactive flinders. And we are not at war with the Krutons. Is this… is this pretty much the way YOU read the situation, Lieutenant?”

Darvona nodded. “Yes, sir. That’s pretty much it.”

Wanker clasped his hands behind his back and paced. “Let me go over that again. We were at peace with the Krutons. Then we … we … us… we
cross the
neutral zone. We
destroy,
you know, like, wipe out… a Kruton battle cruiser. All the while,
unbeknownst to us…
we are still at peace with the Krutons.”

Darvona nodded. “Yes, sir. That’s pretty much what we went and did.”

O’Gandhi said, “Oh, my gosh, we are in very deep dew, Dave. Would you be having some pills, then?”

“No. Remember that cyanide cocktail you were going to whip up?”

“Oh, I am remembering. Would pukka sahib have me fetch it for him now?”

Strangefinger said, “Wanker, my congratulations. You struck a blow for freedom. War is hell, but it’ll be a hell of a war, now that you started it.”

Wanker boiled. “I started it? You miserable, rotten … ”

“Marcel! Marcel! Come back!”

O’Gandhi said, “He’s chairman of the English Department, Dave!”

Strangefinger and Rusty were both sitting on crates near the blow tube, playing cards.

Wanker came up to Rusty. “You! Plug that damned machine in again!”

Rusty picked up the remains of Marcel by a trailing wire and honked forlornly.

“Marcel took a Fulbright and went to Dublin,” Strangefinger said. “And a good place for him.”

Wanker pointed an accusing finger at the navigator. “You! You did this! No! You all did it! You’re all against me. You’ve been against me since I came aboard this ship!”

Looking like a caged animal, Wanker sank into the captain’s chair and pulled out two shiny spheres from his tunic pocket: ball bearings. He began to fiddle with them in one hand, clicking them together.

“Ever since I’ve taken command of this vessel I’ve encountered nothing but insubordination, subterfuge, incompetence, and duplicity. I proved with geometric logic that there
must
have been a duplicate key to the galley and that the crew was constantly pilfering from ship’s stores.”

Crew and guests alike exchanged confused looks.

They all chorused: “What?”

“Never mind, never mind. As I was saying—”

Dr. O’Gandhi appeared at the captain’s side, and in a sudden burst of lucidity said, “Captain, I’m relieving you of command.”

“What the devil are you jabbering about now?”

“As chief medical officer, it is my duty to judge all personnel fit or unfit for duty. Captain, you are one sick, paranoid puppy!”

“I’m sick. Me? You insane little towel-headed pill-popper, you’re telling
me
I’m unfit for duty? Get out of here.”

“Oh, Captain, on the contrary, it is you who have been hitting the pill bottle for that last week. And you have been sequestering yourself in your quarters too very much. A veritable hermit, by gosh.”

Strangefinger came sauntering over. “You know, I wasn’t going to say anything, Captain, but your behavior has been a little bizarre lately.”