Page 8 of Savage Union (Brutal Universe #2)

7

TURK

I led them through the ship’s narrow corridors, navigating with the ease of long practice. The Illyrian was my first love—I knew her every corner and angle.

She might have been my love, but that didn’t mean she was pretty. There wasn’t a spare inch of wasted space and a lot of the ship’s machinery had encroached into the living areas. The ceilings on the decks were tall enough that I didn’t hit my head—but just barely—and there were plenty of places where you had to step around things to get where you were going.

I noticed that the boy was quick and clambered over and around any obstacles with no problem. Gurflug, on the other hand, was clumsy. He hit his head more than once, since he was a few units taller than I was and I heard him bang his knee on one of the circulation pipes and swear a blue streak.

I didn’t mind the swearing but it was important to have a navvie who could get to the bridge of the ship quickly and easily in case of an emergency. I said nothing but I made a mental note.

I led my two navigator candidates to the lift and turned to face them.

“This is my private lift—the Captain’s lift,” I told them. “If I hire either one of you, you’re going to be using the Gensen’s tubes to get around the ship. Understand?”

The boy—whose name I still didn’t know—nodded quickly.

“No problem, Captain Turk,” he said.

I frowned—had I told the boy my name? I couldn’t remember doing so. Maybe he’d heard Gurflug talking to me before.

Speaking of the big Galafruxian, he was looking distinctly uneasy.

“Er, how big are the Gensen’s tubes on this ship?” he asked.

I eyed him up and down.

“Big enough—though it will probably be a tight squeeze,” I told him, after making a mental assessment.

He bristled.

“I think I should be allowed to use the lift instead. The navigator is an important member of the crew—some might say the most important.”

If the boy hadn’t turned up, I would have had to agree to this—even though I didn’t want my private lift smelling like rotten fish all the fucking time. But as things stood, I had more leverage than I had before.

“Sorry,” I said coolly. “It doesn’t matter how important you think you are, the lift is private and off limits to anyone but the Captain—that’s protocol aboard The Illyrian. However…” I raised a finger. “Just this once, I’m going to allow the two of you to ride with me. Come in.”

I pressed the button which was keyed exclusively to my thumbprint and the lift door slid open.

We stepped inside the round lift, with Gurflug taking up most of the space, and I pressed the top button—the bridge was in the very topmost section of the Illyrian.

“What’s on the other floors?” the boy asked, nodding at the buttons lined up in a neat row.

“Well, first we have the cargo hold,” I told him. What I didn’t say was that the cargo hold was only used for boring, legitimate cargo which we used as a cover in case of Imperium inspectors. Our real cargo was generally stored beneath the removable steel plates of the cargo hold floor. Like many smuggling ships, The Illyrian had a false bottom which was cleverly concealed in the belly of the ship.

“And the next floor?” the boy asked.

“That’s the ship’s engines,” I told him. “As well as the quarters of our chief engineer and his assistant. They need to stay close to the engines in case of an emergency.”

Since he was listening attentively while Gurflug stared into space, I continued talking.

“The next level is the crew’s quarters, the kitchen and the galley, as well as the mess hall and the communal shower,” I told him.

“Er…communal shower?” he asked, swallowing so hard I could see his Adam’s apple bobbing.

“Yes, is that a problem, boy?” I asked, raising my eyebrows.

“It’s not a problem for me,” Gurflug stated, proving that he had been listening after all. “Galafruxians don’t take showers—it’s bad for our skin to wash off our natural coating of dirt and slime.”

The boy made a face but said nothing. I kept my face neutral, but inside I couldn’t help agreeing with him—no wonder the big bastard stunk if he never fucking showered!

“All crew members are required to take showers aboard The Illyrian,” I growled, pinning them both with a look. “Good hygiene is important when we’re all in such close quarters.”

Neither of them looked happy to learn this. Gurflug, presumably didn’t like it because he wanted to keep his slime. I didn’t know why the boy didn’t like the “everybody takes a shower” rule. He looked clean enough and he didn’t stink. Or maybe he did and I just couldn’t tell it because Gurflug’s stench was so overpowering.

“And here we are at the top level of the ship,” I said, as the lift’s bell dinged softly. “This is where the bridge is, as well as the Captain’s quarters, my ready room, and my private shower. And no, I don’t share those either,” I added, giving them both another look.

The boy nodded meekly and Gurflug just made a grunting sound. Such a fucking charmer, this guy.

We stepped out of the lift directly onto the bridge which was a round room with a vast, rectangular viewscreen directly ahead of us. There were several stations along the perimeter of the room including communications, piloting, and navigation. In the center of the bridge was the command chair, where I typically sat when we flew.

In a pinch, I could man any of the stations—a good Captain has to be able to run his own ship if there’s an emergency or he loses a crew member—so I had a working knowledge of all of them. But navigation was definitely the most difficult.

I could navigate my way around the Imperium Galaxy well enough with the use of Space Gates, but I couldn’t do Cross-Dimensional Navigation to save my fucking life. My brain simply didn’t have the capacity to see the obstacles lurking around the various stable worm holes because of the distortion field thrown by the worm holes’ gravitational fields. Someone who could see past those distortions was a rare and talented individual.

Yorrin, my pilot, was already at his station. As a Talon’teen Monk, he only piloted in order to spread the Gospel of his God, Amok the Lover of All, to the known universe. He accepted no pay for his services and always wore a baggy gray yernba skin robe and hardened leather sandals on his three-toed feet.

He was the best pilot I had ever had and the only crew member allowed to abstain from wearing the standard uniform of black trousers, black boots, and a fitted black top with long sleeves and a white collar and cuffs. That was because his hairy skin was sensitive and prone to getting rashes if he wore anything but yernba skin. And if there’s anything that smells worse than an infected rash on a Holbub, which was Yorrin’s species, I don’t know what it is.

Well, maybe Gurflug smelled worse—it was a definite possibility. I side stepped away from the big Galafruxian and took a deep breath of clean air the minute we left the lift. Being cooped up with him was going to be no joke if I gave him the navvie job—he really was going to have to shower.

“Greetings Captain Turk,” Yorrin said graciously, nodding his shaggy head at me. Some have compared his species—the Holbubs of Forkin Prime—to an animal from Old Earth called a “sloth.” I had looked up a picture once and agreed with the assessment. Yorrin was soft-spoken and calm at all times, which was one reason he was such a good pilot, especially if we got into a sticky situation and had to lose an Imperium tail. He never panicked—he just did his job and did it well.

“Greetings, Yorrin,” I said. “These two are here to apply for the navvie gig,” I added, nodding at Gurflug and the boy.

“Ah yes, greetings, my friends. May the peace of Amok be upon you.” Yorrin nodded his shaggy head at them both calmly. “I thought you only had one candidate to consider, Captain,” he said, rising from the pilot’s station. Moving in his slow, careful way, he came to stand beside me.

“I did, but then this young pup came asking for a trial,” I said, nodding at the boy. “Says he’s got no blind spots,” I added.

Yorrin’s bushy brown eyebrows shot up in surprise.

“No blind spots? That’s impossible,” he said.

“That’s what I was trying to tell your Captain,” Gurflug burbled indignantly. “And yet he insisted on letting this little snot come along.”

I studied the boy to see if he would get angry but he kept his cool.

“I can prove my claim,” he said, lifting his chin. “Ask me to plot a course to anywhere—I can do it.”

“All right,” I said. “We’ll try you both. Who wants to go first?”

“I do!” The boy’s hand shot up, as though we were in school. I couldn’t help thinking that it probably wasn’t long since he had been a pupil. He was clearly of age—but only just barely. Why, he still didn’t even have the faintest trace of whiskers on his chin—his skin looked a smooth and soft as a baby’s.

“Fine, you can go first,” I said to him.

“No— I should go first,” Gurflug demanded. “I am the senior navigator here!”

And without further ado, he wedged himself into the padded nav chair and grabbed the navigator’s helmet. He adjusted the silver band rapidly and then shoved it down over his temples and closed his eyes in concentration.

I don’t usually tolerate a subversion of my orders, but the big bastard wasn’t under my control…yet.

“All right,” I said, grimly holding on to my temper. “Plot me a course to the Triplex Cluster—that’s where we’re going.”

We watched on the viewscreen as a star map appeared along with the wormholes all marked in different hues. The distortion around them was strong—they looked like blurs of indistinct color to me. The colors ran and bled because of the distortion field, hiding any possible pitfalls or dangers in the direct vicinity of the wormhole entrances and exits.

But despite the fact that the wormholes were nothing but smears of color on the screen, it was clear that Gurflug knew what he was doing.

In just ten minutes, he had plotted a route with only seven jumps that got us from the Imperium Galaxy to the outer edge Triplex Cluster. I had to admit—I was impressed.

When he was finished, the big Galafruxian took off the nav band and looked at me triumphantly.

“There! Let’s see the little snot beat that!” he declared.

“First we have to check your route,” I reminded him.

He looked affronted.

“You presume to check my navigation?”

“Of course I do,” I growled, nearly losing my temper. “That’s what we’re fucking here for. Agatha,” I said, raising my voice to speak to the AI that ran most of The Illyrian’s computer functions. “Use the Imperium Verifier and check the route.”

The Verifier was like the central nervous system of our home galaxy—it was good for all kinds of functions but we used it most for checking Cross Dimensional Routes.

Unfortunately, when you left the edge of the Imperium Galaxy, you lost access to the Verifier. Which was why it was so vitally important to have a navigator you could trust. Once you crossed over into extra-galactic space, you were on your own and you had to trust your navvie implicitly.

“Acknowledged, Captain,” Agatha murmured in her low, feminine voice.

I’d had her programmed as a female on purpose. Sometimes on these long, interstellar voyages a man got lonely. Of course, in almost every port you visit you can find companionship, but I tended to avoid it for the most part. There are enough horrible venereal diseases out there to fill up a whole database of medical texts—I prefer not to catch them if I can help it.

We waited another few minutes for the route to go through the Verifier and then Agatha announced,

“Verification report complete. Verdict—pass. Rating on a scale of one to five—four stars.”

“What? Only a four? That’s ridiculous!” Gurflug burbled. “What justification can you give for such a low rating for my route?”

“Agatha? Justification?” I asked, frowning.

“Stage three of the proposed route takes us very close to an asteroid field, Captain,” the AI said calmly. “There is only a fifteen percent chance that it would become a problem for us, but the chance of a collision with a stray asteroid is not non-zero.”

“Ridiculous!” Gurflug declared again, crossing his slab-like arms over his beefy chest. “I have never plotted a course that would put a ship in danger—never!”

“That’s not what the Verifier said,” the boy remarked, speaking up before I could answer. He turned to me. “Captain Turk, let me have a try. I can get you to the Triplex Cluster in five jumps with a perfect five-star rating—I promise.”

“Impossible!” Gurflug blustered. “Such a thing is simply not possible!”

“Not if you have blind spots,” the boy said, smirking a little. He turned to me. “He’s skipping possible routes because he can’t tell if there’s a problem through the distortion field or not. I can do better—let me try.”

“Go ahead.” I swept out my hand in a, “be my guest” gesture.

At first I wasn’t sure if Gurflug would relinquish the nav chair and band. But at last, grumbling about “nasty little snots who didn’t know their place,” he rose and left the nav chair. He pulled the band off his head as an afterthought and tossed it back on the console, as though it wasn’t an extremely expensive piece of equipment. (It was.) I made another mental note.

The boy sat down gingerly in the chair and started to pick up the nav band. But when he went to touch it, we all saw that it was coated in slime and grease from Gurflug’s skin and hair. He made a face and looked around, clearly searching for something to clean the equipment off.

I took pity on him and pulled out the all-clean cloth I carried with me everywhere. It was a self-cleaning and self-mending piece of fabric that looked shiny blue in some lights and dull green in others. I had gotten it in on Zerkzies Alpha from a wise woman who claimed it would clean anything at all and then clean itself up afterwards. Imagine my surprise when it actually worked. I’d had it for five cycles now and I didn’t go anywhere without it.

The boy took it from me but looked up at me uncertainly.

“Er, are you sure, Captain?” he asked, looking at the slimy, greasy nav band and then at the pristine clean-cloth. “I mean, it might get ruined.” He kept his voice low but Gurflug wasn’t paying attention to us anyway. He was staring at the viewscreen where his route was still displayed and frowning moodily.

“It will only stay dirty for about an hour,” I told him. “Once I wad it up in my pocket again, it will clean itself.”

“Oh!” The boy examined the cloth with renewed interest. “What a great invention!”

“I thought so too—that’s why I bought it,” I said dryly. “Now use it so you can prove your claim. You’ve got some big fucking words to live up to, boy.”

“All right.” He quickly cleaned the muck off the nav band and handed me back the cloth. Then he settled the band over his temples and closed his eyes—the better to concentrate.

I watched the viewscreen which was momentarily blank. Then it was covered again with the same star map showing all the worm holes between the Imperium Galaxy and the Triplex Cluster as smears of color.

But the boy must have seen more than just smears. In only a matter of seconds, glowing gold jump lines began to appear. I watched in astonishment as he mapped out a route in under a minute! And there were, as he had promised, only five jumps—not seven—which would save on fuel considerably. Jumping through worm holes always drains a ship’s reserves.

As soon as he was finished, the boy took off the nav band and looked at me.

“Done, Captain. Please have the Verifier check my route,” he announced.

“Agatha? Check it,” I said to the AI.

“At once, Captain.”

The verification of the route took longer than it had taken the boy to plot it in the first place. But soon Agatha announced,

“Route passed verification. Rating from one to five—five stars. This is a perfect route.”

“What?” Gurflug bellowed, making me wince. “But that’s impossible!”

“I don’t think you know the meaning of the word,” the boy said coolly. He looked at me. “So? Do I get the job?”

“Hang on—let’s just test a few more routes,” I said. Frankly I was so surprised I was just playing for time. I’d never heard the Verifier call any path through the stars a “perfect route” before. I thought it must be a fluke—a lucky guess on the boy’s part.

“All right,” he said calmly. “Test me. Where else would you like to go?”

“Plot a course from The Triplex Cluster to the Neverending Galaxy,” I said, off the top of my head. “It’s shaped like a?—”

“I know what it’s shaped like. I have most of the star maps for the known universe memorized,” was the boy’s astonishing reply. “Let me concentrate.”

He closed his eyes and the maps on the viewscreen changed. A moment later golden jump lines were being drawn.

I was used to watching a navigator draw the lines mentally–it always looked like an invisible pen slowly and laboriously tracing one line at a time. With this boy, it was different. The lines popped up like magic, going from one wormhole to the next so fast I could barely keep track.

“Merciful Amok,” I heard Yorrin breathe and though I didn’t worship his deity, I had to agree with the sentiment. I had never seen anything like this in all my years of captaining.

Again, in less than a minute, the boy was done. And when the Verifier report came back, it was declared, “Five out of five stars. A perfect route,” once more.

Yorrin and I stared at each other and then he said,

“What about to individual planets? Can you get us from Undon in the Triplex Cluster to Hundoi Six?”

“Give me just a minute,” the boy mumbled and then he was off again, plotting at an impossibly quick pace, making the golden lines pop up on the viewscreen like magic.

Once again—a perfect route and five stars out of five. The boy really was a prodigy—I was ready to hire him on the spot! I opened my mouth to say so, but Yorrin put a three-fingered hand on my arm and shook his head.

“Captain,” he murmured. “A word, please?”

“Of course.” I nodded. Of all my crew, Yorrin had been with me the longest—I trusted his opinion.

We left the bridge and went to my Ready Room—the small lounge that served as the barrier between the bridge and my private quarters. There was a desk on one wall and two chairs sitting across from it. I often used it for interviews and one-on-one talks with crewmembers who had complaints or were fighting.

I also used it for the rare but sometimes necessary punishment sessions. Which was why there was a whipping cross and a pain whip hung on the far wall. I’ll flog an unruly crewmember from time to time, though I take no pleasure in it. I run a tight ship—I can’t afford not to, given the extremely dangerous missions the Illyrian takes on a daily basis.

I sat behind the desk and gestured Yorrin to one of the chairs across from me.

“Speak your piece,” I told him. “I’m about to hire this boy—tell me why I shouldn’t.”

“Oh, you should—you should , Captain.” Yorrin nodded in his slow, earnest way. “But he shouldn’t be the only navigator you hire.”

“What? You want me to hire both of them?” I frowned. “I don’t know if the budget will stand it.”

“You’ll have to stretch it then—you need them both,” he said grimly.

I steepled my fingers on my desk.

“Explain.”

“The men won’t tolerate an inexperienced boy as their ship’s navvie,” Yorrin said simply. “We’re putting our lives in his hands. It doesn’t matter what miracles he can work with the simulation program, I doubt he’s ever even been off Rigelis Nine. The men will know that and they won’t like it—especially Frux.”

I groaned at the mention of that name. Frux was the Union Rep assigned to The Illyrian—he was the one and only crew member I hadn’t chosen myself. Instead he had been chosen by the head of my Family—the Chieftain of Clan Savage—which meant he was completely untouchable.

Frux was a real son-of-a-bitch who knew his status and liked to lord it over the other crew members. He had silver horns—the mark of only the most trusted Enforcers—and he never missed a chance to brag about it.

He also never missed a chance to complain or cause trouble. I had been to my Chief several times, asking to have him removed, but no luck. He was some kind of distant relative of the Chief—a second cousin twice removed by marriage on his wife’s side. It wasn’t a close connection—but it was close enough to keep Frux on my ship, no matter how much I hated the fucker.

“You’re right,” I said to Yorrin. “Frux will cause a stink. But I hate to let the boy go—he’s a fucking phenomenon. I’ll never get a chance at a navvie that good again. I’m surprised the Imperium hasn’t snapped him up for one of their long-range Battle Cruisers already.”

“That’s what I’m saying—keep them both ,” my pilot said. “Let the men see for themselves how good he is. That way, when this mission is over, you can keep the boy and give the smelly one the heave-ho.”

I nodded at Yorrin’s wisdom. I knew he had nothing to lose or to gain in this situation, since he refused to take any pay for his work, wanting only to spread the good news of his deity to the universe. And he had always given me sound advice.

“All right,” I said. “There are two bunks in the navigator’s quarters anyway—they can bunk together.”

Yorrin frowned.

“Is that wise, Captain? The Galafruxian is bound to be resentful that you’re hiring another navvie along with him. Won’t he retaliate against the boy?”

“Nah.” I shook my head. “Galafruxians might be smelly bastards, but they’re also avowed pacifists. He won’t do anything to the boy. Well, except for stink him out.” I shook my head. I really had to be sure that the big bastard took a shower.

“As you say, Captain. Your word is law. I pray that Amok will bless your decision.” Yorrin bobbed his furry head and withdrew, leaving me to plot exactly how I was going to get both of my navvie candidates to agree to come on the Triplex mission…