Communication Failure Read online

  “Ravager six-two, winchester,” one of the pilots said.

  “Ravager six-five, winchester,” another said over the radio.

  “Ravager oh-one, Uncle Chester,” said Flash.

  Rogers blinked. “Is pilot-speak a registered Galactic language, or something? What are these people saying?”

  “They’re running out of ammunition,” Belgrave said, “and Flash is talking to his uncle Chester, who is in Ravager five-five. It’s a family business.”

  Rogers didn’t want to think of what it would be like to have two pilots from Flash’s family line on his ship.

  Slowly, the brilliant lines of cannon fire coming from the Ravagers ground to a halt. Ships were still making attack runs, but nothing was coming out of them anymore. All the ships started making winchester calls, and, even though there was no noise coming through the speakers, it seemed to suddenly go silent.

  “Jammer pod six, shield down,” Commander Zaz said.

  “Woo-hoo!” Flash said over the radio. “I’ve got one Lancer left. Here we go!”

  “Flash!” Rogers called over the radio. “Wait!”

  “Sweet-and-sour deli fresh PICKLE, baby!”

  The Lancer impacted the target, and what was once a large, spiky-looking space container suddenly transformed into space waste. Rogers had kind of expected some sort of fiery explosion, despite the cognitive dissonance that told him that things didn’t really explode the same way in space as they did in the confines of an atmosphere. But he certainly hadn’t expected a rapidly expanding white cloud to billow out from the point of impact, mixed in with the debris.

  “Splash one jammer thingy!” Flash said again. “I’m an ace!”

  “What is that stuff ?” Rogers said, looking blankly at the strange white stuff on the screen. “Jamming paste? It looks weird. Can we get a read on that at all?”

  “A quick chemical scan reads high amounts of proteins, namely lactulose, glucose, and galactose,” Commander Rholos said as she pressed her hands to her ears to hear the report.

  “Translation?” Rogers asked.

  “It’s milk, sir.”

  The bridge went silent. Rogers looked out the screen to see his remaining Ravagers—they’d lost two more in the interim—flying home and getting their engines dirty with space-frozen milk deposits. Master Sergeant Hart and his crew were going to have a field day cleaning up those spacecraft.

  “Quick!” Deet said suddenly. “Someone blow up a container of cereal. And then a container of spoons! We’ve got work to do!”

  “You are really not contributing at all to this.”

  Deet beeped at him. “I am continuing to develop my joke database. This is important work.”

  “Ugh. Hey, comm tech,” Rogers said. “We’re still jammed, aren’t we?”

  “Completely, sir.”

  Another moment of pregnant silence.

  “I am going to kill that son of a bitch when he gets back on my ship,” Rogers said.

  “Sir,” Commander Rholos said. “There’s something strange going on outside the Limiter.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s best if I show you.”

  “Bring it up on the screen,” Rogers said, sitting back down in his chair. His whole body was covered in sweat; his pulse was racing. The Thelicosans had miraculously made no move to counter their attack, and even after they’d blown apart several munitions dumps and one milk container, there had still been no enemy response.

  Now, however, there appeared to be a lone figure standing on top of the Limiter. It was difficult to make out—the visual scanners only went so far—but he was holding two objects in his hands. He raised his arms and started doing strange motions that seemed like a sort of robotic dance.

  “What’s he doing?” Rogers asked.

  “I have no idea, sir,” Rholos said. “I’m checking with our Thelicosan cultural specialist to see if it’s some kind of Thelicosan war dance.”

  “We have a Thelicosan cultural specialist?” Rogers said.

  “Helurr!” came a voice over the communications system.

  “Tunger?” Rogers said incredulously.

  “Yurp! There was an open position on the roster, and all the mammals are in hibernation this time of year, so I had some free time to expand my knowledge of Thelicosan customs. It’s been very educational.”

  Rogers sighed. “Well, what do you think they’re doing?”

  “It’s nothing I’ve ever heard of, sir, but I do think they’re trying to communicate with us. It could be space semaphore.”

  “Space what?”

  “Space semaphore. It’s an ancient art of communication achieved by waving flags at each other. I think we have someone on board who knows it.”

  “Get him up here.”

  Rogers sat back and waited, looking at the display screen nervously. What were they trying to do? It was like there was someone on top of the Limiter having a controlled seizure with flags. He’d never seen anything like it in his entire life.

  The rest of the bridge was busy calming down from the operation and preparing the defenses in case the Thelicosans tried a counterattack. Zaz was busy coordinating the recovery of the Ravagers, all of whom had expended almost all their ordnance, Lancers included. What a waste of resources.

  A few minutes later, a hobo walked onto the bridge. Rogers didn’t notice him at first, but the distinct smell of, well, hobo kind of alerted him that something had changed. That and the fact that nearly everyone else started looking toward the entrance to the bridge with grotesque expressions.

  “Um,” Rogers said. “Who are you?” Then he thought for a moment. “Were you the one living in the war room?”

  “Eh?” the man said. He was probably just under six feet tall, with a long, gray beard that could have been constructed from stray squirrel hairs. His eyebrows matched his beard, but he had no hair to speak of on the top of his head. The copious amounts of liver spots decorating his pate acted as a bit of a substitute, if a little stomach-turning. His eyes were yellowed, his back was stooped, and he was wearing a Meridan naval uniform that marked him as a starman second class. Judging by his age, that meant he had held the same rank in the military for approximately thirty billion years.

  “I said who are you?”

  “Oh,” the man said. “I’m your sixteen alpha. Name’s Ernie Guff.”

  Rogers looked around the room for anyone who might have any idea what that meant. When he saw blank expressions that reflected his own, he asked.

  “Antiquated communications technician. Morse, semaphore, and handwriting.”

  “What the hell is Morse?” Rogers asked. “Why haven’t I heard of any of these things before? Why do we still employ people who know them?”

  “Another ancient form of communication,” Belgrave, who had apparently taken on the role of military historian, said. “It was developed by Philip Morris, who was also an accomplished tobacconist. He experimented with electrical signals on the side and accidentally developed a form of sonic communication while trying to design a cigarette lighter.”

  Rogers frowned. “I thought you said it was Morse code, not Morris code.”

  Belgrave gave him a pedantic look. “History distorts many things, sir.”

  “Fine,” Rogers said. “Fine. Mr. Guff, if you would please sit down right there and tell me what these people are trying to say.”

  Guff ambled over to a chair, a cloud of nauseating stench following him that reminded Rogers of the inside of some of the less reputable bars on Merida Prime. He sat down and fell asleep.

  “Hey!” Rogers said. “Someone wake him up and give him a glass of water or something.”

  Someone woke him up and gave him a glass of water.

  “Eh? What?”

  “The semaphore, Ernie,” Rogers said.

  Guff looked out the window, and for a moment Rogers thought he was falling asleep again. Then he started to speak.

  “It’s just letters. They keep repeating th
e same three over and over again.”

  Rogers waited while the old man looked very intently at the viewscreen and started to translate the strange flag dance.

  “ ‘W.’ ”

  A pause.

  “ ‘T.’ ”

  Another pause.

  “ ‘F.’ ”

  A long pause.

  “Yep,” Rogers said. “Definitely trying to communicate.”

  Flag-Waving

  Watching an old man who Rogers was pretty sure hadn’t showered for the better part of a decade peel off his rotting uniform and try to squeeze himself into a skintight space suit was pretty high on the list of things Rogers didn’t want to experience. But here he was, standing in the hatch, while an old man got naked.

  “I need you to follow my instructions to the letter,” Rogers said.

  “Was that a pun?” Deet asked. “You know, because it’s semaphore?”

  “No,” Rogers said irritably, then paused. “Maybe. It might have been. Look, that’s not important right now. Do you understand me, Guff ? We can’t have any miscommunication here. One wrong word and we start a war. Well, we start more of a war. We get more war-ish. The war-ness increases. Are you sure you can handle this?”

  The hatch, which had been built so that a single engineer could climb out to the exterior of the ship to perform various repairs, wasn’t really big enough for two men and a droid. Rogers tried desperately to dodge Guff’s movements, but he couldn’t avoid a brush or two with disaster. That disaster namely being the bare, wrinkled ass cheeks of Guff. Rogers tried not to think about the wet scraping noise they made as Guff rested against the wall.

  “I can handle this as well as I can handle a woman,” Guff said, which did not, at all, clarify things or reduce Rogers’ rising nausea.

  “I estimate the time differential between now and his previous performance of either of these duties to be approximately the same,” Deet said.

  “Eh?” Guff said, cupping his ear in his hand and stopping what he was doing. This left him with both legs of his VMU on and the rest of him still quite naked.

  “Nothing,” Rogers said, more loudly. “Please, I’m begging you. Just put the rest of the suit on so we can do the ops check and get you on the outside of the ship.”

  Guff grumbled through the rest of the procedure, Rogers temporarily suspending his policy of not touching icky things to help expedite the process. He would have to boil his hands after this.

  Damn it, he was the acting admiral of the fleet! Why was he up here in the hatch instead of one of the lower-ranking engineering troops? Belgrave had said it was something about the power and burden of command. Rogers thought they were just messing with him.

  Finally they managed to get the man’s helmet on and start testing the systems. Oxygen was flowing, the actuators inside the suit were working to allow Guff to move around in space if he needed to, and lastly, the communications unit inside the helmet was indeed working. They had been worried that all the noise-jamming going on in the battlespace would interfere with the short-range radios, but the pilots had been able to get their communications through, if in a very garbled way. Since Guff was going to be remaining so close to the ship—that is, he would be standing on it—the signal from the helmet could burn through the jamming.

  “Okay,” Rogers said. “How do you feel?”

  “Like I’m wrapped in plastic wrap,” Guff said, his voice coming through the microphone on the front of his helmet. “Which sort of reminds of me of this one crazy time with a lady on Dathum—”

  “Please,” Rogers said, holding up a hand. “Please. Don’t reveal anything to me for which I would have to have you court-martialed or for which I would have to use steel wool to clean the images from my brain. Let’s just get on with the mission. Are you ready?”

  “Eh?”

  “Are you ready?”

  “Of course I’m ready,” Guff said. “Why are you shouting?” He worked his shoulder around slowly in its socket, the movement stiff and jerky, before picking up two huge flags wound around two poles. Rogers hoped the visual scanners on the Limiter were good enough to see him clearly.

  “Good luck,” Rogers said. “And please, wait until I’ve left the hatch to open the airlock.”

  Guff put his hand on the airlock release control.

  “Stop!” Rogers said, slapping Guff’s hand away. “What are you doing?”

  “You just told me to release the airlock,” Guff’s voice crackled through his helmet.

  Rogers shook his head. “No, I said to wait until I’m gone before you do that. Are you trying to kill me?”

  Through the reflective visor of his helmet, Rogers could see a confused expression on Guff’s face. “No, I don’t know anyone named Philsby. Why does that matter?”

  Rogers stared at him. “It doesn’t.”

  He and Deet escaped the hatch as fast as they could, reentering the ship near the engineering bay and heading back toward the bridge via a few short interchanges of up-line and in-line. Deet was uncharacteristically quiet, and Rogers didn’t mind.

  By the time they got back to the bridge, his nerves had calmed a bit. It was clear the Thelicosans wanted to talk, though not nearly as clear why they were choosing such a ridiculous method of communication. They had taken the time to announce that they were invading via a short textual message upon their entry into the system; why not do the same thing now? It smelled like a trap to Rogers, but he had no idea what kind of trap would involve waving flags at each other. At least flags were better than plasma blasts.

  The bridge wasn’t very lively, now that everyone was simply waiting for communication. Rogers had issued some preparatory orders to pilots and defensive systems. If negotiations went poorly, he wanted to make sure they had ample time to at least try to run away a little bit. The whole “going down fighting” thing wasn’t very attractive to Rogers, but there was this little niggling sensation that might have been called duty telling him to make sure he took as many of the Thelicosans with them as they could before they were turned into space dust.

  “What’s the report from the hangars?” he said.

  The offensive and defensive coordinators were still on the bridge; Rogers had dismissed them for a meal and a quick nap if they wanted, but he needed them available for the foreseeable future. If Belgrave could be a bridge zombie, so could they. Rogers was starting to feel like a bridge zombie already.

  “System checks are good. We’re at sixty-five percent readiness,” Commander Zaz said.

  “Sixty-five percent?” Rogers said. “That seems a little low, doesn’t it?”

  “I’m not including all the Ravagers that were either destroyed on the previous mission or have coagulated milk bits in their engines. Engineering isn’t going to be able to get them back online for at least a few standard days; Master Sergeant Hart says they have to take the engines apart, clean them, and put them back together again.”

  “Great,” Rogers said. He thought for a moment, then tapped the button on his console for Flight Control.

  “Yes, sir?” came the voice of the on-duty supervisor.

  “Find out if we have any extra pilots available that don’t have a Ravager to fly. See if any of them know how to pilot shuttles, and tell them to get ready to fly.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What are you thinking?” Deet asked.

  “We haven’t been able to communicate with the other ships in the fleet since the jamming net went up. I’m going to do this the old-fashioned way and send runners with datapads. I don’t want anyone doing anything stupid.”

  “Like sending a squadron of fighters to charge in and blow up a bunch of [EXPLETIVE] milk containers?”

  “. . . Exactly. Exactly like that.”

  Rogers sat down in his chair, thinking and trying to block out everything that wasn’t important at the moment—namely, the fact that he was hungry and really needed a drink. The Flagship had been a dry town for far too long. Other than the
disgusting home-brewed swill that Sergeant Lopez in Engineering crafted from sulfur and death, there wasn’t any alcohol on the ship at all. Rogers missed the old days.

  “Guff,” Rogers said into the radio, “are you ready up there?”

  “Yes, sir,” came the garbled, phlegm-stuffed voice over the intercom. It was like the man had done nothing but gargle whiskey and smoke cigarettes every day for the last twenty years. Judging by how he had looked, Rogers didn’t entirely think that was improbable. Where had Tunger dug up this guy?

  “Alright,” Rogers said. “I want you to tell them hello.”

  A burst of static came through the radio, courtesy of the jamming net, Rogers was sure. After a few moments of silence, Rogers repeated his message.

  “Hello,” Guff said back, quite cheerily.

  Silence.

  “No,” Rogers said. “That’s what I want you to tell them.”

  “Oh,” Guff said. “That makes sense. Give me ten minutes.”

  Rogers frowned. “Ten minutes?”

  Deet broke in. “Semaphore was not the quickest or most efficient mode of communication, according to my limited available database research. It was mostly used before the advent of radio, and afterward only when there needed to be strict radio silence.”

  What followed was simultaneously the most boring and the tensest ten minutes of Rogers’ short life in this universe. The Flagship wasn’t designed to observe itself, so there weren’t any cameras focused on Guff; he could only hope that the man was transmitting the right message. Even if they could see him, nobody would know what the hell he was doing.

  Time flowed like a river of molasses.

  “Since we’re not doing anything important for the next ten minutes,” Deet said, “I was wondering if I could tell you something I’ve been thinking recently about existentialism and how it does, or does not, intersect with moral absolutism and droid consciousness.”

  Time flowed like a river of molasses cooled to near freezing.