Stellar Objects

Chapter 16: Why or En?

Rys awoke with the Captain hitting his chest.

"That-a-boy!" shouted Rys' captor.

"What happened?" he asked, "I don't recall---" But then it came back to him. Rys remembered rushing onto the bridge, asking the captain not to send over the cargo. He didn't even have a chance to lodge a complaint against the human female's violent outburst when a spaceship started firing its laser.

The display screen was cracked, but Rys could see the ship was still there, firing red blasts. It reminded him of a childhood game of ant-frying. He used to rush around the palace, his laser pistol in hand, hunting for ants to blast until they exploded. What fun he used to have.

"He's trying to fry us until we explode," Rys said.

Captain Nayar pushed himself into a seated position, which Rys noticed looked hard to do, and reached for the comms switch on his overturned hover chair.

"Lieutenant, come in!" he shouted. "Can you hear me?"

The device hissed with static and the ship's authoritative female replied, "Grunge and Andra are in the service tunnel, they're going to fix the main fusion artery to give us—"

"Get them out of there," ordered the captain.

"Negative, captain," came her insubordinate reply. Quite frankly, Rys was shocked at how freely females were allowed to speak on this ship. "Give them a minute and they'll get life support back, shields, everything!"

Captain Nayar shook his head. Rys offered his moral support. "You could sacrifice her, you know."

"Absolutely not," said Nayar. "First of all, that's barbaric. Second of all...she's right."

Rys huffed; clearly he was the only one on this ship of fools with standards. Still, once he got past his outrage, he was intrigued by the idea that the captain would side with someone who disagreed with him, especially a female. Maybe, just maybe, thought Rys, if I live through this there could be something new to learn in this crazy place.

The main lights flashed on. Rys felt a blast of cool, fresh air. The oxygen fans were back on and the computers lit up like a Sethmas tree.

"You see," said lieutenant Carpace. "They did it."

"Yes they did," said the captain with a smile. "Now, please, get them out of there because I'm going to vent the tubes and pretend like we're exploding."

"Gotcha," she replied.

"Rys, I need your help," said the captain.

"I've cleaned up twice today," he said. After the damage wrought by that attacking spaceship, he did not relish returning to the galley for another tidy up.

"No," said the captain, to Rys' relief. "Get to the engineer's station at the back there, and do exactly what I say. It was your idea, and you're going to blow up this ship."

Rys took his position, as instructed, but had a very uneasy feeling about sending himself, and the others, to the afterlife. He'd not prepared. He didn't have a pyramid built, and had not commissioned a sculptor to design his sarcophagus. Quite simply, he wasn't ready to die.

"Captain, I'd really rather not—"

"Kid, we're going to pretend," the captain said, climbing into the pilot's chair. "That's all, now tap in this code..."

Rys followed his orders. He tapped in something called an authorization code, and after pressing loads of keys and little icons, which he was sure someone should be paid to be doing, arrived at a screen which asked him a very simple YES or NO question:

VENT ENERGY TUNNELS

Y/N

"Why or en, Captain?" Rys asked.

"Why!!" he replied. Rys tapped the "Y" and the Ghandi shook. The captain moved the steering mechanism down and to the right. On screen, Rys saw the attacking ship whirl by, again, and again and then it was shrouded in fire.

The Ghandi was spinning, seemingly to any outsider to be exploding...like an ant.

"He's gone!" shouted Rys, after several more rotations that revealed only the flames and the emptiness of space.

The captain tapped on his glass pad and confirmed, "you're right."

Of course, I'm right, thought Rys.

"The attack ship has disengaged and left the sector!" shouted Captain Nayar. "You did it!"

The ship slowly stopped spinning and Rys followed instructions to cease the venting. 

*

Nitin climbed back into his hover chair.

He was getting too good at righting it, and hoisting himself up. Of course, he could've bought one of those new ecto-suits, the kind that let people like him walk upright again. But the suit was run by a computer algorithm that was notoriously unreliable and vulnerable to hacking. Nitin didn't want to rely on technology, or go through life worried that some kid on Titan would hack into his legs and march him into an airlock. Kids did that these days, he reminded himself.

His Lieutenant returned to the bridge, alone, reporting back for duty with a quick bow and a "Namaste, Captain."

"Where are the kids?" he asked.

"Back in the brig where you ordered them to be," she said. Nitin couldn't tell if she was being facetious. He had heard the dissent in her voice earlier, when he'd instructed her to imprison the two slaves who'd tried to escape in the shuttle. She clearly had disagreed with his treatment of the children, but followed his orders.

They're property, not children, he tried to tell himself.

"So we survived," said Shelly.

"Yes," agreed Nitin.

But she wasn't finished. "To do what?" she asked. "To roll over again, play dead?"

Shelly took Rys by the hand and walked to the door.

"Where are you going?" asked Nitin.

"To find out what we nearly died for," she said.

Nitin wheeled after them, into the corridor. "Stop," he said. "Hey! That's an order!"

Shelly stopped midway down the corridor and cupped her hands over Rys' ears. "I have my ghinaunā orders," she said, pulling her palms away from the child's, no...the slave's, head. "To keep the peace."

Nitin sighed. She was delirious with misguided purpose. Here she was, millions of miles from her base, doing a job nobody cared about. "Peace," he jeered, "in a time of war."

"I have a duty," she said.

Nitin wasn't going to be outflanked by his lieutenant. "And so do I," he shot back. "My duty, solemn to me, and yet clearly superfluous to you, is to keep me alive; everyone on this ship alive."

"Well I think bigger than myself," she said, turning to march down the length of the Ghandi, without so much as a 'thanks' for keeping them alive. He knew he should've simply turned back, returned to his lonely post on the bridge. But something niggled at Nitin.

What the Naraka was in that crate?

Naraka:  Rough translation: hmmm, best not to...it's a rude word.

Ghinaunā: Rough translation: Hell.