RSS 2.0 FeedIssue Four-June/July 2009, Speculative Satire Fiction
Scuttle
And the characters in Star Trek thought they had it bad sometimes...
Pity stayed his hand.
Pity, plus his inability to remember whether this was Kennett's blaster he held, the faulty one with the lethal high-voltage recoil.
“Get up,” he ordered gruffly, breath still ragged. “Get up, and get off my ship!”
“Your ship, Earth-Captain Brightling?” the squat, scaly alien answered. Its shape was roughly that of a crouching human sporting an ill-fitting rubber costume bearing too many appendages, and it spoke with the stilted, slightly accented English which was the native tongue of virtually all alien races. “I think the Federation would have something to say about your proprietary attitude.”
Brightling sheathed his gun with a frisson of static. The space-crab was right. Whatever one might think of the Federation, there was no escaping the Fed's Regulation 137. No Captain of any species had authority over the representatives of another crew-species: attempting to contravene the Reg was, in principle, punishable by slow disintegration in a manner of the aggrieved species' choosing. Reg. 137 sought, thus, to maintain balance. For the most part, it worked.
For the most part.
But now … from a human crew that had recently numbered 570, Brightling was down to a dozen remaining, with no useful word from the teeming space-crabs on the others' fate. Only a dozen: four with the viridian shoulder-patches of Engineering & Artificial Climate, three whose tunics bore the vermillion of Security, three more in the carnelian of Health, Science and Continuing Education, and two others who, like Brightling, sported the heliotrope fabric signifying Command and whose names, Willessee and Li Peng, he actually recollected through, at some point in the preceding years of their voyage, verbal usage. The others he knew simply as 'Engineer' or 'Nurse' or 'Ensign', remarkably common names on a starship of over five hundred human crew, all of whom needed some ostensibly purposeful function, some vaguely useful on-ship training, some reason to ignore their true onboard role, which was both to balance, in weight terms, the large complement of space-crabs who worked in the ship's galley, kitchen, plumbing, and food-recycling areas, and to act as cannon fodder. It was well known that the tunics, save the heliotrope-badged Command garments, drew blaster fire, apparently inciting lethal rage in all violently-inclined alien races that possessed colour vision (and yes, he'd early placed a request for monochrome uniforms, not this twee colour-coded bullshit, but would the addled desk-humpers of FedCentral heed the wishes of a mere starship Earth-Captain, boldly going where none before had gone? He'd known the answer to that one, even before he'd made the request. It had been the same with his suggestion that the Saturday 19:30 to 20:30 timeslot, specified in regulations as the only period during which planetary exploration or indeed any vaguely interesting activity could occur, was a ridiculously rigid and arbitrary restriction, and one which appeared to coincide with a weekly peak in the hostility index of most alien races.). In any event, they'd begun the voyage, five years back, with a human crew of over 630, a number that had dwindled rapidly in the subsequent months, then stabilised as shipboard liaisons began to bear fruit, and had stayed steady since, hovering at around the 570 mark (and so what if several of the Engineers, the Doctors, the Security Officers, were only four, or younger? They were still crew …).
Steady at 570, until about five months back, when according to the emails he'd gotten around to checking only this morning, they'd begun to drop again, precipitously. Should he have noticed earlier? It did seem negligent on his part not to have perceived anything, excepting a general, grateful sense that the place wasn't so infernally crowded these days, but he'd put that down to improved social conditioning as the many ship's counsellors, psychologists and human-resources experts finally did something vaguely useful -- but no, apparently the counsellors et al. had been the first to go. And yes, he should have noticed earlier, at least around the two-twenty mark, say, when five junior Command cadets had vanished from a room he himself had been in at the time, but he'd never been much on detail. More a big-picture kind of captain. In his defence, he could only suggest the space-crabs had chosen their victims with particular care, for the crimes to have gone unnoticed for so long …
Hence this morning's firefight, when he'd confronted the Crab-Captain over the depletion in crew numbers. The crustaceans obviously had vast superiority in numbers, but his men had the weapons, and thereby held the edge in lethality; but the crabs had infiltrated the ship's command core, and cut all power. Engines, lighting, computers, life support, all severed. In the resulting confusion the crabs had herded him and his men here, to the bridge, and had reinstated power while a settlement was negotiated. (But how was it, Brightling wondered, that when you cut the ship's power, the shipboard gravity remained? The impossibly convenient directional gravity, which persisted when all other functions, including door control, air circulation, weapons and shielding, could be extinguished at the flick of a switch? He'd have to ask his science officer, Palfrey, about that -- if he ever saw Palfrey again. But the gravity -- it was as if someone, somewhere, was messing with the laws of physics, merely for the sake of convenience. And if there was one thing Palfrey had taught him (or had it been MacWhirtle, the engineer?), it was that you couldn't change the laws of physics -- couldn't change them, nor could you circumvent them, except in certain well-defined ways like, it appeared, the ship's internal gravity; also the speed of motion (and the ability to decelerate quickly and without fatality, from any arbitrarily high velocity one cared to envisage); the teleportation of people and objects; and, come to that, also the probabilistically implausible disparity in projectile-weapon marksmanship evinced by humans over that of all alien races, even the ones which spoke flawless English. When you pondered all this in detail as he did now, keen to escape the tension of the present standoff -- for Brightling, as you may by now have perceived, was prone to self-distraction -- it did all seem to be the slightest bit inconsistent and arbitrary. Such, it seemed, was life.)
Brightling sheathed his blaster -- no, wait, he'd already done that. He levelled his gaze at the Crab-Captain's eight beady, blackshiny eyes. Was it playing with his mind? He forced himself to meet its unblinking stare -- necessarily unblinking, the creatures hadn't evolved eyelids, which really, you'd think, wouldn't have been too much to ask. They'd evolved just about everything else. Palps, mandibles, tentacles, pincers, nameless stalks, antennae, pseudopodia -- just about any prehensile appendage you could envisage, the space-crabs possessed them. (Not, of course thumbs, which were a particularly terrestrial adaptation.) A segmented exoskeleton both scaly and whiskery; a carapace whose colour values toned from shit-brown to mahogany. Not the kind of creature in which you'd expect to discern a planet-ruling intelligence -- but then, to be fair, hairless apes, who would have thought?
He pulled the blaster out once more, examined it, and turned to the remnants of his human crew, gathered behind him here on the bridge as they faced off the patient, implacable stares of the massed space-crabs. "You. Security," he barked. "No, not you, you, beside that one. Red hair. Trade blasters."
"Sir - but why?"
"I like that one better." They made the exchange, he felt the heft of the weapon in his hands. Was this one Kennett's blaster? How would he know, unless he ordered the others to all fire before him? This one looked new, undamaged - but then Kennett's would, wouldn't it? It had only been fired once … perhaps he should have stayed with the first one: bashed, well-worn …
He couldn't wait much longer. The space-crabs were scuttling forward -- well, tacking left and right, crab-fashion, but still making forward progress, however ungainly. They'd overrun his position very soon.
Was this Kennett's blaster?
No time. One space-crab, first of all its race perhaps, made an audacious mental leap: by turning sideways, I can scuttle directly towards my prey … Brightling yelled, surprised by this bold move, and opened fire, heedless of the blaster's potentially deadly recoil. The air crackled with the sharp tang of ozone, a blue flash and the sudden aroma of well-cooked crabmeat. (A slight fingers-to-forearm tingle, but nothing worse; so, apparently, not Kennett's …) Behind him, his few remaining crew-members drew their own blasters, scalpels, spanners, and slide rules, while the massed space-crabs waited, unarmed. Battle was about to be joined.
And then time slowed, and he felt the tendrils of the crab-captain's telepathic sense enter his mind. There is no need for bloodshed.
"There is no need for bloodshed," Brightling intoned obediently.
None of you need die.
"None of you need die," Brightling monotoned.
No, I meant you … Foolish and ironically-named creature, can you not grasp even the rudiments of telepathic syntax? No matter, instruct your crew to -- look, simplest if you just repeat after me, 'We will assemble in the transporter room …'
"We will assemble …"
#
Ten minutes later, the Earth-Captain stood with his fellow human crew-members on the plastimetal baseplate of the ship's main teleporter. The space-crabs had telepathically ordered Brightling and his colleagues to disrobe and to lay down weapons and personal effects; which, under mental compulsion, they did. Brightling retained enough presence of mind to note, idly, an already very large pile of such articles, stacked like a snowdrift against the chamber wall; but, faced with a sea of pincer-wielding, mind-controlling exoskeletoned horrors, and conscious of his naked vulnerability, he forebore to raise the subject. As the scene around him began to pixellate and shimmer, signaling commencement of the teleportation process, the alien's slimy thought-patterns intruded yet more firmly, more deeply into his consciousness. Listen very carefully; few seconds remain. We are sending you back to Local Federation Headquarters on Earth, but your crew-members have over the past few months been harmlessly diverted to another planet, whose coordinates follow. Listen very carefully:
A string of numbers and vectors followed. A long string, like three ship's registration codes jammed together in sequence.
He'd never been any good with figures.
And what registered uppermost in his mind, while the digits and characters scrolled across his mind's eye, was that he was about to materialize amongst his pay-masters, sans ship, sans crew, and sans any stitch of clothing.
Sans, therefore, the merest skerrick of dignity.
Then the space-crab's voice was gone from his head, and he was explaining his identity to a stern young female FedHQ technician who, it seemed, couldn't decide where to look.
#
Blanket-draped, Brightling stood in front of FedHQ's giant vidscreen, watching in stunned fascination as the footage repeated. One minute, the FSS Bulwer-Lytton filled the screen, its running lights shining in a comforting display of normality -- the ship, his ship, he reminded himself, bracing for the image's change -- and then, with the actinic glare characteristic of a containment breach or at least a high-end special effects budget, there was a massive explosion which, in an impossibly short flash, shredded the ship to shrapnel, to dust and vapour. The noise of the explosion thundered sonorously across the vacuum of space.
"Why have they done this?" he asked, as much to himself as to the assembled brass of Earth's Federation hierarchy. None responded; they were probably thinking either of the insurmountable dent that the loss of the ship would mean to their departmental budgets, or of the best mind-invading tools with which to attempt to extract from Brightling's subconscious the location of more than five hundred of the Fed's best field operatives.
The footage began again, with the Bulwer-Lytton reassembled on the giant screen. The brass began to file out. He yearned to follow -- he did not know how many times he could watch the destruction of his ship, and still retain sanity -- but they had told him, in no uncertain terms, to wait in this theatre until they had decided on a course of action, a set of consequences. Back on the screen, the ship again exploded, and he felt again the loss of all that he had had. Why? Why had they done this?
A voice in his mind responded. The crab-captain? Still in telepathic contact, across all those light-years? Or perhaps just a residue of the alien's personality, or its memories, which had not receded when the teleport occurred. Whatever, at least it offered a sense of explanation. Merchandise, it declared to him. Your Federation outfits, you witless fool; and to a lesser extent the clumsy, gimmicky weaponry. Very valuable, unique among all of the Galaxy's races. Did it never occur to you that, as the only species in the Galaxy to adopt clothing, there was a near-inexhaustible market amongst the other sentient races for Earth-costumes as souvenirs, curios, collectibles? Against the loss of the ship -- your ship, our ship -- the profits from your cast-off clothing and gauche retro tech gadgets will more than compensate. We would, I think, have passed on some small proportion of the remuneration to you, but I grew tired of your cheap anthropomorphizing, your delusions of superiority, and your boundless capacity for dull internal monologue and fruitless, petty, parenthetical introspection. I trust that you will enjoy explaining this outcome to your superior officers …
The communication (if communication it was, rather than simply some cheap and improbable plot device) faded out, and Brightling was left alone with his thoughts. He thought of the ship's explosion; he thought, longingly, of the blankets in his now-atomised stateroom, the blankets which had been chafe-resistant, as opposed to this sandpapery Fed Central standard-issue crap; he thought of his former crewmates, marooned somewhere on a world for which he couldn't, for the moment, remember the details; he thought of the space-crabs, scurrying sideways through the ship, hateful little things, he'd done little to hide his disgust for their form; he thought of the crabs, too, in the Galactic bazaars, seeking to sell off their stolen wares -- Earth uniforms and weapons -- to the passers-by, demonstrating their usage when a curious onlooker paused to ask, What's that? What's it do? And, somehow, thinking all these things, he smiled despite himself. It was small consolation, but it brought some comfort nonetheless.
Kennett's blaster was still out there somewhere.