I dislike titles

I never title things before I write them. I always write first and then the title comes as I write. Rarely a title suggests itself right away. Much more common is for the right word or words to strike me as I write. The hardest part of blogging is titling. Faced with that blank line right away, I often sidestep it with some nonesensical or meaningless thing, as one may have noted.

What is profound this morning? I hope something is. My profundity has been lacking recently. My vision has been tunneled by recent events. I've lost perspective. It's easy to lose any time and hard to recover some times.

Consider:

She slips and trips along the strips down by the ships, as she dips chips into whips and clips the trip short to return the tips.

No, not profound. I just like to play with words.

Xylemious and lithic trajectiles possess the wherewithal to cleft my osseous tissue but compellations will interminably abide innoxious.

I found a story frag I began a couple or so years ago and never finished it...

“Look out!” I yelled, and caught myself ducking, for all the good it would have done. As the ship came over the top of us close…too damned close, it was instinct more than logic that drove me to try to dodge that which I could not dodge. “Helm, track him,” I said through clenched teeth. “He’s so close you can touch him. You’d better not let him get away.” Swinging around, I caught Gunny Wilson’s eye. “Take him out.” The words were uttered as three individual units, not a single sentence.

“Damn right, sir,” Gunny answered, and immediately was one with his weapons control panel.

Rorke snagged my sleeve and pulled hard. It was the way he always tried to ensure that he had my attention. Rorke was a good second-in-command, and a good second-guesser. Of course I gave him my full attention. At least for a few seconds. I couldn’t afford more than that.

“This is madness,” he hissed low, trying to make his comments as private as he could in the circumstance. “You should break off and leave with an intact ship. You know that he can outgun us and outrun us. What advantage do we have?”

That was it. All the time I could afford for Commander Rorke. I pulled away from him.

“Where the hell is he?” I demanded from anyone in the Command Center who could answer the question. Then I dropped my voice. “Noted and logged.”

“But ignored?” the commander pressed.

“There he is, sir,” someone called out as our ship made a turn that brought the intruder back onto our view screen.

“I want to see him at all times,” I insisted calmly, but in a hard voice. The tone I used to let any man know that to do other than I commanded might be the worst choice he’d ever made. One more glance for Rorke and then I had to put my full attention on the attack I hoped would cripple, if not destroy, the enemy. “Not ignored, but not a chance. I can’t let him get away.” Then allowing a tone of desperation to creep in, I added, “I have to do something to show them we tried. You know we’re expendable. They don’t care if we live or die. All they want is this thing stopped.”

“We’re closing the distance, sir,” Lee, the helmsman reported.

“We shouldn’t be able to,” Rorke amended. “He can outrun us. We know that.”

“He’s just drawing us in,” I nodded. “Letting us think we have a chance and then…” I trailed off.

Now my second came and stood directly before me. “And you’re going to walk into his trap? That’s suicide, sir, and it’s also grounds for me to relieve you if you don’t back off. Sir.”

All eyes in the center turned to see what would happen. Sure, I knew he was right. He was right in everything he’d said from his statement about this being madness to saying he had grounds to relieve me. But if I didn’t at least try, Command would have their own grounds to relieve me. It was the perfect no-win situation. But I couldn’t stand losing. I wanted to find the way I could win.

I looked past Rorke. “Continue closing. When we are in weapons range, put everything you have on him…and then run like hell after the opening salvo. Throw a few plasma charges in our retreat path too. Maybe they might confuse his instruments enough to buy us some time.”

“Aye, sir,” helm and weapons responded simultaneously.

“We may not be able to completely outrun, but if we can get the artificial moon between us, it might help our situation.”

“If we can get it there before he destroys us,” Rorke insisted.

“We’re going to try anyway,” I said mostly to the crew of the Command Center. Nearly all of them had gone back to their tasks as I had given orders. Yeah, they knew the score and wanted to help our chances all they could too. That’s why they lost quick interest in the showdown between Rorke and me. Thankfully. Commanding a fighter craft is hard enough without being outgunned, without having my exec questioning everything I did, and without the crew losing trust in me. That was the kicker to it. I didn’t care if Rorke questioned me or disagreed with me. But his extreme outburst in front of the crew was uncalled for. Perhaps justifiable, but still uncalled for. It was the best gift the crew could have ever given me that they’d let it go so easily.

“I know it’s a slim chance, Poul,” I said quietly to Rorke. “It’s the only one we have. We have to try. This bugger keeps coming back because he knows he can get away with it. You know someone’s going to have to take the fall because Command won’t admit their deficiencies.”

“And I’d like to go home and see my wife and kids after this mission,” he countered.

Well, I couldn’t damn him for that. I’m sure everyone on this ship wanted that. I’m sure everyone on the alien ship wanted that too. But we all couldn’t get what we wanted. I held my tongue and didn’t come back with the snide reply my mother always had for me when I was a kid…you’re old enough that your wants won’t hurt you if you don’t get them. Right, Mom. What I wanted most from you were the basic necessities of life. It did hurt when I didn’t get them.

I shook my head. That damned woman was not going to mess with my mind yet again, and especially not now.

“He’s slowing,” Lee told me.

“Okay, then we slow. Cut our speed in half.”

“But, sir, we won’t catch up to him…”

“I know,” I interrupted. “We won’t get our butts blown off of us so quickly either. You’ll get your turn. Don’t be so quick to die.”

“So you admit that is a real possibility?”

I ignored Rorke and moved around him and studied the alien ship on the view screen. Oh, she was a beauty…sleek and slim, just right for slicing through the vacuum of space. I grinned. Funny how we still held all those design ideas sacred. There was some small amount of friction…negligible. It wasn’t necessary to make a spacecraft aerodynamic, unless it operated in an atmosphere also. Still, the smooth, backswept lines were classic and beautiful to the engineer’s eye. She was dark too. Some scattered light from various stuff in orbit around our planet gleamed off the dark skin. No lights. The aliens took full advantage of all advantages.

“He’s stopped, sir.”

“Stop us.”

“Now what?” Rorke whispered behind me.

“We could talk to him.”

Poul laughed, but there was no humor in it.

“You have a better idea?”

“Yeah…blow him away where he sits.”

I turned. “We aren’t in firing range yet. We’d have to get closer. You were the one who didn’t want to do that. You wanted to retreat and let him go.”

“Look, Jim.” Oh, boy. When he used my first name, he was going to get philosophical, and I didn’t have time for a morals debate right now.

“Unless you have something practical and helpful, don’t start that,” I said quietly.

He drew himself up, looking very offended. “I was going to point out to you that if he isn’t going to just run this time, then we don’t have much choice but to fight. If he’s going to stick around a bit, we don’t know that he’s not taking intel while he’s messing with us. We can’t take the chance.”

“Mr. Lee, bring us on a parabolic path toward the alien. Half speed.”

“What are you doing?” Rorke asked.

“Playing a game. Since he is. Make him wonder what I’m up to. If I can keep him off balance enough until we get close enough to fire, maybe we might have that chance to blow him away.” Then to Lee, “But be ready to peel off and run at any second.”

“Yes, sir.”

Poul considered and then shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t have any better ideas though.”

I nodded once. No point in making a bigger deal of it than that. “Let’s go.”

The ship sat perfectly still as we moved in. Then it began to turn a bit as our craft executed its parabolic path…turning to watch us. What the hell was their commander thinking? I woulda given my left arm to know. I grinned. I could always get another left arm, just like I’d had my original one replaced after it was once damaged so badly that it couldn’t be repaired. Bionics were very advanced though and most people couldn’t tell it wasn’t my own arm.

“Jim…”

He never finished the sentence. He didn’t have to. I’d suddenly gotten a creepy feeling. The hair on the back of my neck stood out. That’s when Rorke had said my name. That’s when I saw the light being discharged from the alien craft.

“Hard to port! Full speed. Evasive maneuvers. Get us the hell out of here!”

It took little provocation on my part to get Lee to act. He had us going immediately. The change in direction and speed was so sudden that Rorke and I were thrown to the floor.

After that, I’m not entirely sure what happened next.

“You okay, Jim?”

Was I okay? I didn’t know. Something was not right. I felt pain. I was confused. However, I seemed to feel a sense of relief and then immediately wondered if that was appropriate or not.

“What happened?” I rasped out and then felt like I was in a bad drama holo.

“Take it easy,” Rorke said. “Don’t get up so fast. You look a little confused.” Then he was gone. I could hear his tight voice. “Random course changes, Lee. Keep going. He hasn’t hit us yet. Maybe we can get behind the moon after all.”

Yeah. That sounded right. Hide behind the moon. I remembered having that idea. I rubbed my head, trying to get myself back together.

“Doc’s on the way,” someone called out.

For me? My head was beginning to clear slowly. I still didn’t recall exactly what the hell was going on even though I felt a sense of urgency. That urgency drove me to pull myself up. I had to see what we were doing, and why.

Ouch! My head protested the idea of standing and it let me know it. Objects were moving in my field of view. Objects that shouldn’t be moving. Bulkheads aren’t mobile. If they weren’t moving, and they shouldn’t be, then I must be moving…right?

I felt hands grasping my arms and it was a good thing or I probably would have fallen.

“What…what’s happening?”

“Fenton, put him in his chair,” Rorke said and then I was moving, with assistance. However, I remembered enough to recall we’d been in trouble. I had no idea why, or with whom, or what kind of trouble.

“Poul…what’s happening?”

“Just sit here, sir.”

Hard to argue with that, especially when my rubbery knees wouldn’t support me, and two men were putting me into a chair.

“I think we’re going to make it, sir.”

“Just keep going, Lee. We’re almost there.”

Then everything went black.

~*~

“He’s waking up,” a voice whispered.

Yeah, I was. Was he talking about me? I could tell through my eyelids that the light was too bright. As soon as I cracked my eyes, they ached and teared and I closed them, putting a hand over my face. Then the light level changed.

“That better?”

I was able to get the eyes open this time. My slightly blurred vision cleared slowly.

“Doc?”

“Yeah, it’s me, sir. Your recall in that area seems all right.” Some little nerdy looking guy who’d been next to Doc moved back, and I guess he left.

Sickbay was never my favorite place to visit, especially when I found myself waking there. I hated the place so much that I never even
came to talk to Doc here. I always summoned him to my quarters or the Command Center. An ol’ soldier like me had seen the inside too many times, especially from my back. The first thing I began to do was take stock of myself, trying to figure out how bad, and how long the doctor was going to have me to torture.

“What happened?” I asked when I realized that my recall in that area wasn’t as good.

“Just take it easy, sir. You were lucky. The Command Center didn’t get hit badly.”

“We got hit?” I tried to sit up. Bad idea, and Doc knew it. He pressed me back down.

“Let that be a lesson to you. Now lie still and be a good boy and maybe you’ll knock a day or two off your hospital stay.”

“Hospital.”

That was a bad sign. Doc never referred to the sickbay as the hospital. Did that mean I was in a real one? I focused my eyes on the lined and pale face of our middle-aged flight surgeon. We were all pale. Comes from space duty. The most natural light we see is a couple week leave homeside two times a year. There’s the occasional planetfall and down time on an alien world and a handful of days leave at home spread out around our repair calls at home port. Pale didn’t necessarily mean sick. However, Doc Nedvac looked sick. He looked paler than ordinary.

“Doc,” I whispered. “What happened?”

He licked his lips and ran a hand through his chopped greying hair. “Do you remember the alien ship, sir?”

That connected. I did remember a large alien craft, just like all the others that had come in for hits on our planet and orbiting platforms recently. We still didn’t know who they were or why we were the object of their wrath. But we’d spotted one coming in and were going to, at least, chase it away, at best, blow the sucker up.

“Yeah.” I paused, searching the doc’s face. Too much worry there. “He got us.”

“Yes, sir. We nearly got away…but you know, they are faster than our ships.”

If I’d felt a little fluttery in the stomach when I woke, now I was sick as a dog. My stomach churned and I felt a nauseous wave break over me.

“Doc…how bad? What happened?” I picked my head up from the pillow and reached out a beseeching hand. I noticed it was wrapped in white. The left hand was gone. The left arm was gone. What the hell else had happened? What about my crew? Nedvac said the Command Center hadn’t been hit hard. If I was like this, what about the part of the ship that had been hit hard?

The doc stepped closer, ready to push me back down if I tried to sit up again. “Take it easy, Cap’n. You’re not going to help yourself any by hurting yourself more.”

Damn him. This delay tactic of his when he had bad news had always annoyed me, and I’d chewed his butt out about that more than once.

“If you want me to take it easy, start answering my questions, Mister, or I’m coming out of this bed and make you eat those glasses that never stay up…to start with.” Oh yeah, that was good. I always managed to sound the toughest when I was the weakest.

“The ship took a couple of hits. Lower side got it the worst. Engineering…” He shook his head. “Upper decks seem to be mostly just shaken up from the beating the lower decks got.”

“Shaken up?” I repeated as I held up the nub of the bit of left arm I still had.

“It’s okay, sir. You didn’t lose the arm. It was banged up enough that they had to remove it for repair or replace. Don’t know yet which it will be. Bionics is still assessing what they removed.”

Of course. I should have guessed that possibility also. I just wasn’t thinking straight, and how could I right now? I rubbed my face with the bandaged right hand, or tried to. It hurt enough that I stopped before Nedvac could reach over to stop me.

“Report,” I said firmly. “Status of my crew and ship.” Being firm was part of what you did as captain, especially when you needed information like I’d just demanded. It sure was hard as hell to do convincingly when your head hurt and you felt like you were about to puke all over yourself.

“Ship was towed to space port for assessment. After the two hits it took, the aliens decided to take off. Guess we scared them, huh?” But there was no humor on his face. “Crew…forty-seven dead.”

I closed my eyes. Yeah, I was gonna be sick for sure now. Forty-seven people had depended on me to make the right decisions and I didn’t. It wasn’t the first time I’d lost crew members, but it was never easy, and you never got used to it no matter what those old doddering, but famous, generals told you in the great lecture halls of the academy. They would give you the kind of inspiring lecture that a general was expected to give, and then when the awe and entourage was gone, the regular instructors would bring you back to reality…but even they couldn’t prepare you for a moment like this one.

“Thirty-four had serious injuries. The other sixty-two had minor or no injuries,” Doc went on dispassionately.

“Poul?”

“He’s serious, but he’s gonna be okay, Jim.”

Now I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. The doc almost never used my first name unless he had really good news or really bad news.

“How bad?” I had to figure out what the doc really meant.

“He’s mostly just banged up. You know…getting thrown around when the ship takes a hit.” The man shook his head. “Is this some macho contest that you two have going…to see who can take it the most? Never did understand why you couldn’t sit in your command chair, strapped in, instead of…”

“Shut up,” I interrupted…but quietly. My headache wasn’t up for this rant. “What about you?”

Doc formed a quirky little wry grin. “I was lucky. I was in the lift coming to the Command Center. All I had to do was hit the deck and roll.” Then the smile was gone quickly and he put a hand to his back and rubbed. “Damned medical kit. I’ll be okay though. No sweat.”

I suddenly felt very tired, like the world was about to collapse on me. I heard myself exhale noisily.

“You need to rest,” Doc said. “I know you won’t though. But eating yourself up over what happened won’t bring anyone back. I’m going to order up a sedative.”

I uttered a quiet expletive. I hated those damned drugs. I always felt worse after a drugged sleep.

“I know, but it’s for the best, sir.”

~*~

I was just as curious to hear this as the Board of Inquiry was. I had gained back all the memory of the incident that I was going to. Curiously, Commander Poul Rorke had studiously avoided me not just at the hospital, but afterwards. And since we didn’t have another ship ready to outfit, our command was inadvertently helping him avoid me as we both had to work up our separate reports and other associated paperwork to finally lay all the men and women to rest, and get the survivors evaluated for fitness for duty, or possible re-assignment. It was personally gratifying that only a couple had to be re-assigned because of post-traumatic stress disorder. Since I didn’t have complete recall of the events, I feared the worst, including losing my crew. And my command.

I’d stayed awake late into many nights trying to reconstruct what had gone wrong, but it was a no-go. I remembered beginning to chase the alien craft…and after that there was little that was clear. Mostly I remembered images and feelings. The sight of bright light coming from the ship…what was that? Common sense suggested it must have been a weapon of some sort. My intuition agreed with that assessment. I remember feeling frustrated and angry, but about what exactly? Our apparent lack of ability to get away?

I unconsciously rubbed my forehead. It was a habit I’d adopted for some reason. With a laugh I’d told myself it was like trying to bring a genie from a lamp. It never made the memories appear though.

A tone sounded and the movement of the people around me woke me from my reverie. I was the last one on my feet as the board members came into the room and filed behind a long table at the front of the room.

Five aged and venerable men, extremely top ranking officers all. And one woman. She was significantly younger and in a uniform of sorts, the company issue dress coveralls from the contractor who’d built the ship. I’d never met her, but I’d heard a great deal about her. She was one of the designers of what we lovingly called our “hunk of junk”. But more, she didn’t just sit at a desk and put theory to simulation and feed the designs to builders. “Rita Wrench” liked to walk the shop floor and see how her ideas took form and see practically why they worked the way they did. Rita McCoy was well respected in the service and she’d earned the highest praise that a woman could among male engineer co-workers. She had balls. And she wore them well. Rita had escaped being labeled that other thing that most assertive women were tagged with…bitch.

All the proper and required preliminary stuff was read and announced and checked off and recorded by the order and regulation following officers, while Rita looked on carefully, not looking overly interested or overly bored.

And then finally they began.

~*~

“No, I don’t recall,” I told the chairman of the board as he pelted questions at me. “The last clear memory I have is spotting the ship on our scopes and giving the order to begin pursuit.” Absently I rubbed my forehead. “After that I have a gibberish of images…that I’m not even sure that I can put in chronological order.” I let my hand drop. “I’m sorry, sir, but that’s the best reconstruction of events that I can give you.” I paused. “Unless you want me to tell you the tidbits I do remember.”

The slim old man was toying with a stylus. If you let his wrinkled face and white hair fool you into thinking he was a doddering old man who needed to be retired, you were a fool indeed.

“Since those tidbits, as you call them, are not very complete and by your own admission, not necessarily chronological, we’ll pass on that at the moment. Perhaps later, as other facts come to light, you might be useful to us then.” He dropped the stylus on the table and leaned back. “You may step down.”

I nodded, picked up my hat, and stood. I’d never been in this situation before. I didn’t know if I should salute the board or not. If it weren’t for Rita, the answer would have been obvious, at least to me. Saluting civilians was just not done. However, there was more brass at that table than there had been in the skin of my ship. So I saluted and then returned to my seat.

~*~

“Well, I think the best indicator of our major actions is the log and the automatically recorded video signal from the cameras on the bridge, not to mention the data recordings from all the instruments in the Command Center,” Poul Rorke told the board.

“We have studied it,” General Corsair responded. The man at the left of the table looked sour to be told how to do his job by a mere commander, a man maybe half his age. “Of course, it does not provide answers to all our questions, Commander. That is why you are here.”

“I’m sorry, sir. It was not my intention to be insubordinate. In a tense situation, I confess that I might doubt my own recall. I merely wanted the board to have facts instead of panicked remembrances.”

“Panicked?” Rita spoke up. “You panicked, Commander?”

I knew Poul Rorke well. I could tell that he hated being nailed by that question, and by a woman. Not that I was a chauvinist, but Poul was. To him a woman was only good for a handful of things and questioning him was not one of them. He squirmed for a moment. Not much, but knowing him the way I do, it was so obvious to me.

“It’s hard not to become uncertain and fearful in such a situation, ma’am,” he said evenly.

“Of course, I understand that. But you said you panicked. Is that accurate or not, Commander?”

He toyed with his dress uniform hat for a moment, looking at it. “No ma’am. I might have been…very concerned, and surprised by some of the things that happened, but I believe I was in control of myself the entire time.”

“You believe so.” Then before Poul could try to alter the picture she’d just constructed of him, Rita said, “Please answer the general’s question.”

And so for the first time I got to hear Poul reconstruct the events of that day, that moment. I could tell he was reliving the moment. I saw it on his face.

...