Wanker looked toward the navigator’s station. Mr. Rhodes was looking over Warner-Hillary’s shoulder. Wanker answered pleasantly, “Yes, Navigator, dear?”
“I’ve made a tiny little error, sir. Just a little bitty boo-boo.”
Wanker blanched. “Oh? What is it?”
“We’re not on our side of the Interface.”
“I hate to ask, but…”
“Sir, we’re in Kruton space.”
Wanker said in a childlike voice, “A little bitty boo-boo.”
“Oh, Captain, I’m so sorry!” Warner-Hillary wailed.
Wanker said, “Oh, that’s okay. I don’t mind dying.”
Back at his own station, Rhodes looked at his scanning scope and said, “Captain, there’s something you should know.”
“What?” said Wanker in a small voice.
“Kruton battle cruiser, dead ahead!”
CHAPTER 15
Wanker said, “Increase speed to Q-Three!”
Rhodes yelled, The Kruton will intercept us in twenty seconds!”
Wanker said, “Increase speed to…”
He suddenly remembered the graving-dock engineer’s warning.
Sadowski shouted, “Captain! We ha nae mare pouer, sir!”
Wanker said, “What?”
“It gets a wee bit weiry o’er quantum level two, sir!”
Rhodes announced, “Battle cruiser closing!”
Wanker ordered, “Increase speed to quantum three!”
Sadowski scowled at the captain. “Ha ye gane daft, ye great gawk? I ha nae mare pouer t’ gi’e ye!”
Wanker mused, “You know, sometimes I kind of like not understanding what he’s saying.”
“Oh, David, we are all going to be pushing up daisies soon.”
Wanker said, “Don’t call me David!”
Mr. Rhodes said demandingly, “Sir, what are your orders?”
Sweat was pouring from Wanker’s brow. “Or-orders?”
“Yes, sir, what should we do?”
“Uh, about what?”
“About the Kruton warship, sir.”
“Oh. That. Uh, reverse thrust and bring the ship to a complete stop.”
Everyone on the bridge looked at him.
He turned in his seat and met their gaze. “They’ve got us! What else can we do?”
Shocked, Rhodes rose to his feet. “Sir, do you mean to say we’re … we’re going to surrender?”
“We are not at war with the Affiliated Law Firms of Kruton. We have inadvertently intruded into Kruton territory. They’ve caught us dead to rights.”
Rhodes sat back down. “Oh. Just wanted to know, sir.”
“What did you think we were going to do, blast that warship out of the sky? Start a war? Reverse thrust on all electrogravitic engines!”
“Reversin’ thrust!” Sadowski said grimly.
A strange sound filled the ship, a horrendous screeching, a tearing of the very fabric of space.
“Euuwww, I hate that,” Warner-Hillary said, cringing.
“Like fingernails against a blackboard,” Darvona commiserated.
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.