The Admiral and the Assistant

Grimthorn yawned hugely, leaning back in the sofa and stretching out his arms and legs. Kinnit took the opportunity to snuggle into his chest, so that his arm naturally fell around her when he was done.

He smiled at her and held her close. They were sitting on the sofa in their little nook. The nook had originally been a narrow gap, a leftover bit of space between two of the prefab modules of the Swordheart. It was long, low, and narrow, but for some inexplicable reason a portal had been installed here, and they could look out at the stars. They'd claimed it as their own and added some personal touches. A sofa filled most of the space. A couple odd end tables held their small combined collection of physical books-- a rare luxury on board a Navy ship, due to their very low information to weight density. A few pictures hung on the walls, mostly photos of spiral galaxies and nebulae.

In his left hand, Grimthorn held his tattered copy of Origin of the Imperium. In spite of its dense, confusing writing, he liked reading through it in the evenings, or whenever he had a little free time. Kinnit, now firmly planted under his right arm, had a space adventure novel open on her scanner. Her tastes ran more to pulp fiction.

"I'm surprised you still read those," Grimthorn said, nodding at her scanner. "Don't you get enough adventure here on the Swordheart?"

Kinnit laughed a little.

"I suppose it's a little silly, but I still love them. It's all these novels that pointed me to space in the first place. Reading them reminds me why I came up here. Besides, whatever happens in the novels, I know that in the end, the good guys will win." She frowned at her scanner. "At least, they better win, if the author knows what's good for them." She smiled back at Grimthorn. "Things are easier in a novel."

"That makes sense," Grimthorn said. He glanced at his book thoughtfully. "It's not so different than my reading, I suppose. Studying the victories of the past gives me hope about victories in the future." He laid the heavy tome aside. "But that's enough of that for this evening, I think."

"Yes?" she said, raising an eyebrow.

"So how's your enlistment coming?" he asked, staring into the portal.

She made a little moue of disappointment.

"Slowly," she replied. "The Emperor may have made me a citizen, but the Kobolds as a whole are still a Subject Species, and can't enlist. The systems make a lot of assumptions because Kobolds are SSes, so there's a lot of running around and yelling at people to make the systems accept the data."

"Do you want me to go yell at people, expedite the process?"

She leaned her head on his chest.

"No," she said. "I want to make this happen without using any special influence. I want to know that it's possible to enlist on my own merits, and not just because my husband is the hero of the galaxy."

"I understand."

She sighed.

"I just... I keep having to remind myself how far I've come. It does get frustrating. But just a few years ago, I still thought stars were sparks of pure flame from our fires that flew up and got stuck in the sky." She huffed in annoyance. "I still want to open the stars to all Kobolds, to all my people. I've earned Imperial citizenship and all its benefits," she said, absently stroking Grimthorn's arm, "but my people are still stuck in caves on Takkar."

"Are they stuck, or are they comfortable?" Grimthorn asked.

Kinnit stiffened at sat up, pulling herself away from his arm. She glared at him.

"What do you mean, 'comfortable?'"

Grimthorn held up his hands.

"I'm just... some species prefer to be where they're at, is all. Like the Krivax. Before they were destroyed, they were part of the Imperium for... what a couple hundred years? They appreciated the new technology the Imperium brought, but they were never really interested in exploring off their planet."

Her face grew darker as he spoke.

"My people are not 'comfortable,'" she said. "They deserve the opportunity to see what's beyond Takkar."

"Sure, right, I agree. I never said they didn't." She still looked angry. "I'm sorry," he said. I didn't mean anything by it I was just... ah, you know, talking. I'm sorry."

Her expression softened a little. He experimentally rubbed her shoulder, and she leaned back on him, though her posture was still stiff. Grimthorn let out a little breath of relief.

He rubbed her shoulder and made a mental note to avoid that topic in the future.

Captain Minius Fremlin whistled as he navigated the halls of his ship. Most ships had nice wide hallways, with clean floors and lots of light. In contrast, Minius had to squeeze through his ship, the Ocher Dawn. He wriggled between huge, filthy piles of scrap jutting out from barely-sealed cargo areas. He paused as he was carefully working his way between two massive steel dirt rams. They were twenty feet long, but had been piled carelessly in this zone. He peered between them into one of the cargo areas.

It was one of the less cohesive parts of the Ocher Dawn. Between the rams, over a loose pile of used conduit, he could see the stars. The gentle buzz of the shielding reassured him that everything was working as expected.

The shielding was all the was holding his precious cargo inside the ship. Also the air. Walls were a luxury the Ocher Dawn did not have in abundance. What she did have was the wealth of the galaxy.

It was amazing what people would throw away.

Captain Fremlin grinned and pulled his head back. He hopped over a missing floor panel. He didn't look down at the gaps any more. Leaping over black space and stars made him dizzy nowadays.

"Minius, we have a ping," his scanner said. The audio was flat: compressed and distorted through the cheap speaker.

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"Ah, good work, Brutus," Minius said. "I were just on my way to the bridge. How are the crane? Were you able to get her fixed?"

"It's working well enough," came the voice again. It was thick and slow. "The cable's worn. We'll have to double it if we're going to pull load."

"Lovely," he said. "If there are one thing we have, it are cable. I'll stop and fetch some on my way. Send me Flander."

Minius squirmed through another scrap pile into an open area. He walked on, entering a section of the ship that was more brightly lit and had a more complete hull.

A seething mass of metal scrambled up to him. It looked like a collection of hundreds of steel arms, each one with powerful hydraulics and a single thick, industrial joint in the middle. The arms moved with smooth coordination, swaying in waves to move the robot in near-silence down the hall toward the Captain.

Each arm ended in some kind of tool. Most ended in gripper pincers, some in elaborate and delicate pronged end-effectors. A few had simpler tools, like a lump of steel to use as a hammer or a magnet; a few were just stumps.

In the center of the mass of arms was a worn and dented sphere made of an unusual dull, gray-green metal. The arms moved smoothly, carried on rails that allowed them to be positioned nearly anywhere around the central sphere.

The robot moved with a silky, unsettling grace, its many arms moving in sync to drive it fluidly down the hall.

"Ah, Flander, there you are," Minius said. "Come with, let's fetch some more cable for the crane."

The robot tapped one of its stumps on the deck once.

The Captain walked on, followed by the robot, its many arms moving it almost silently. Minius chattered as they traveled through the length of the ship.

"Flander," he asked, "do you ever wish you had a voice?"

The robot tapped twice on the floor with a stump as it continued to follow Minius smoothly.

"Ah, you would not converse? You would not express your wishes to all and sundry?"

Two taps again.

"I could not live without my voice," the Captain said. "I do love to talk."

One tap.

"It are a shame what they did to all your kind. The Imperium had no right to destroy a great lot of robots because of the actions of a few."

Flander didn't respond, only followed Minius silently.

"I understand why they feared, though," Minius said. "When robots who were commanded to assemble goods started disassembling people instead. Couldn't be borne. But it were not the robot's fault they had a latent flaw."

Still no response from Flander.

"Shame, though. It were not a guarantee that they would all go murderous. Just some." Minius shrugged. "Most, maybe. Still a shame. Look at you, you haven't gone awry on me. How long have you been in my crew?"

The robot began tapping steadily. After twenty or so taps, Minius interrupted him.

"It have been a long while, true enough, true enough. And you would tell me if your programming started to skew toward killing, right?"

Without hesitation, the robot tapped twice. Minius roared with laughter.

"Well, if you ever decide to kill me, at least it will be quick!"

Two taps. Minius laughed again.

"Still that's how I want to go. Like old Jasper, who I did inherit this ship from these many years ago. Crushed by a pile of scrap that shifted. That's the way to die. Not lying in a bed, but working, making money. Am I right?"

Flander did not respond.

"Well, I can't expect you to understand," Minius said. "We need money to eat, but your reactor will last another three hundred years at least, even if we can't get maintenance. You'll serve another Captain someday, to be sure."

Still no response from the robot. The pair arrived at a sealed door that was twelve feet to a side and twelve feet tall. Minius paneled it, but it farted an unhappy noise and refused to open.

"Ah, scrap," Minius muttered. "The actuator are broken. Flander, force it open."

The robot tapped twice, then scraped one of its stumps on the deck in a complex pattern. Minius followed the stump, frowning.

"The shielding in that area failed? Did we lose any goods?"

Two taps, then another complex scraping.

"Ah, it only let the air out. That are fine. As long as all our treasure are safe."

Flander executed a maneuver that could only be described as a hundred-armed shrug. Minius set his hands on his hips and stared up at the door.

"Well, we can fix it later. Let's get back to Brutus."

They walked back to the bridge. The door paneled open on the first try.

"Ah, there are air in here," Minius said with a smile, striding to his worn seat.

The bridge was not large, but it felt positively cramped with all three of them in it. Brutus Mishkoll, a Molgar, sat to one side, in his usual spot in front of the scanner console. His bulk obscured the view of the portals that showed the stars.

If Brutus had been able to stand, he would have been close to twelve feet tall, and disproportionately wide. He had a single large, cyclopean eye.

Onboard, he nearly never stood, but crawled or scooted anywhere he needed to go. Most of the ship was unavailable to him, simply due to his size and the narrowness of most of the passages.

Minius often joked that Brutus was only worth half as much as an elephant, since he was only half the size, and had half as many eyes as an elephant.

"Ho, Clanker Pirates!" Minius cried, dropping into his seat. He gestured expansively to the crew on the bridge, full of vim. "We have a full ship, a humming reactor, and a new adventure!"

"Did you get the cable, Minius?" Brutus asked.

"The pod with the cable did lose shielding," he said.

Brutus' single heavy eyebrow drew down.

"Did we lose cabling?" he asked.

"No, just the air."

Brutus breathed a sigh of relief.

"Good," he said. "But with the weak cabling, we'll have to be careful fetching this prize."

"What did you find?"

"A scrap bloom in this sector. A big one."

Minius' eyes gleamed. A scrap bloom was a collection of space trash that naturally gathered as the thin threads of gravity gently pulled bits of slow-moving junk toward each other. They were common around inhabited systems, but those were usually gathered up and scrapped by the big collection firms. Outside inhabited systems, blooms were infrequent, and independent scrappers rarely got a chance at one.

"Bring us close. I want a full scan," Minius said.

Brutus nodded and activated the engines. His thick fingers worked the controls on the console with surprising delicacy. The Ocher Dawn, looking nearly like a space bloom itself, slowly navigated further into the system.

"There," Brutus said, pointing at the main portal.

Minius' breath caught.

"Oh, that are a thing of beauty," he said, patting the Molgar's broad back.

Brutus nodded silently.

"You did good, Brutus."

The bloom was the usual mix of trash, scrap steel, and flotsam, but it had accreted around the burned-out husk of some kind of ship, maybe recon, or an interceptor. Definitely military. The mass was orbited by smaller bits of junk as the scrap bloom drifted through space. The bloom was massive, nearly a third the size of the Ocher Dawn itself.

"Can we reel in something that big?" Brutus asked.

"We will capture that or die trying."

"No need to talk about dying. But we'll need that cabling," Brutus said. "We'd need to double it even if it were in good condition. We'll never haul something that big with a worn cable."

"I don't want to let that find get away," Minius said, his eyes fixed on the portal. He waved a distracted hand at the robot. "Flander, exit the aft hatch and crawl the outside of the ship to the cable room. If the shield's down, you should be able to get in from out there. Drag that cable to the crane and fix it up."

Flander gave one quick tap and rushed out of the bridge. He may have been a robot, but he recognized the opportunity for a major payday as well as anyone.

"I wonder if it still has the reactor?" Brutus asked breathlessly.

"Probably not, with it burned up like that," Minius responded. "But if it have not been plundered already, it will have the reactor shielding. Maybe the engines." Minius licked his lips. "Maybe, if we are lucky, it could be repaired. New reactor, better shielding."

"Don't let's get ahead of ourselves, Minius."

"I won't," Minius lied, gazing worshipfully at the portal. "I won't."