The Admiral and the Assistant

Elias looked up at the sky. A playful breeze ruffled his hair and cooled the worried, drawn look on his face. The field of grass before him swayed.

He stood outside his purloined vehicle on the side of the road, feeling the wind, watching this slice of nature. He wasn't in a hurry.

Dead. Everybody was dead. The entire planet was dead. For all he knew, the entire Imperium was dead.

He'd been traveling from city to city, looking for something. He didn't know what. Some kind of direction, a purpose. Another person, maybe. Though in the last few weeks, he'd given up any hope of that.

What do you do when there's nobody left?

Food was not a problem, by and large-- there were plenty of shelf-stable packaged goods in the grocery stores he passed by. Electricity was still flowing in most areas, so even the refrigerated goods were available to him. The produce areas were best avoided, however; the carefully stacked displays had been quietly rotting for weeks now.

He didn't know what had happened, but whatever it was, it had happened fast. His earlier fears of some kind of disease seemed foolish, now. A disease didn't kill so fast that cars ran off the road, or that tools in people's hands fell to the floor, or any of a thousand other clues he'd seen.

He'd tried breaking into some emergency response stations to find clues, or to try to contact someone, but there was not much there he could work with. He didn't know how to operate the complex consoles, and the few bits of data he found were couched in dense industry terminology that he didn't understand.

Elias didn't know what had happened, but he knew why. This was some kind of divine punishment.

He'd wanted to be away from people. He'd even dreamed about owning some land. And now he had a whole planet all to himself.

He was getting everything he'd wanted, good and hard.

Elias barked a half-crazed laugh and got back in his vehicle. The capital city of Ullia was ahead of him, just visible on the horizon. He began driving.

Elias pushed into the comms station. He didn't know why he bothered any more. All the comms stations he'd come across had either shut down, or were in some kind of hibernation state. He hadn't been able to work out how to bring them up. He'd spent far too much time in frustration and anger, trying to figure out how to make the things work.

At the same time, he had to let somebody know. There had to be someone off-planet. Somewhere out there.

Every day that passed, the more his heart burned within him. He had to tell. He had to share what he'd found. The rest of the galaxy-- if there even was a rest of the galaxy any more-- had to be warned of the fate of Brolla.

The transmission station was locked, but he had a crowbar with him. It had been one of the most useful tools he'd come across.

As it turned out, most locks and doors weren't designed to prevent entry. They were just to slow down intruders enough for someone to respond. Which didn't matter if there was nobody to respond.

Just Elias, alone on his planet, tearing open doors to find more emptiness.

The transmission station was filled with the same gray ash that lay everywhere he went. He'd slowly come to the horrifying realization that the ash had been people. Over the weeks, horror had given way to a strange kind of pity, and then to acceptance.

He knelt down and dragged his fingers through a pile of ash. He drew his fingers across his face, leaving gray smears down his cheeks.

"You're with me, now," he said. "You are alone no more. Lend me your strength and your wisdom."

He stood and walked to the entrance to the control room. With a practiced motion, he drove the flat end of the crowbar in between the door and the frame. He gave it a mighty heave, and the doorjamb splintered, the thick wood giving way before his crowbar.

It swung open, as they all did eventually. He walked in.

The console was lit up. A faint background static could be heard.

Elias approached slowly, uncertainly. The comms station looked like it was up and operating.

"Share what you find." That had been the Oracle's final directive. Somebody needed to know.

He shook his head. He was doing this of his own free will. Not because the Oracle made him.

But somebody needed to know.

He sat slowly in the chair before the console. A small microphone on a stand sat on the desk. The microphone stand sported a wide button. The hiss of static continued in the background.

He carefully held down the button. A green light under the label "TX" came on.

"Hello?" he said. "Is anybody out there?" He released the button. The lights of the console blinked in silence. The static continued. He keyed the mic again.

"Is there any voice to hear?" His voice cracked. "Is there any heart to break?"

The quiet static continued.

"Brolla Emergency Response Station Oh-Seven," blared the speakers in the room. Elias cried out in fear and alarm. He spasmed in shock and fell out of the chair. "This is Naval Relay Station Four-Oh-Oh-Five, spinward arm. Say again, your transmission was unclear."

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Elias scrambled to his feet, backing away from the console.

A voice. A real voice, for the first time in weeks. Quiet tears filled his eyes, spilled down his face.

"Brolla Emergency Response Station Oh-Seven, I repeat, your transmission was unclear. Say again." The voice that filled the room was brisk, direct.

Something inside Elias broke.

Elias timidly approached the console. After a delay he pressed the transmit button again.

"I bring you tidings," he said, his voice hoarse, slow, as though carrying a great weight. "A great judgment has fallen on Brolla."

"Who is this? Please state your callsign and authorization."

"I am a wanderer. A fool. I am the last of the Brollans."

"This frequency is restricted. It is reserved for emergency services. Please disengage if you are not authorized."

Elias cackled madly. "I'm the only one left!" he cried. "All Brolla is dead! Judgment! Judgment comes for the galaxy entire!"

"Unknown transmitter, be advised that unauthorized transmission on emergency frequency is a serious crime. You will be arrested and imprisoned if you do not cease communications immediately."

"Send them!" he shrieked, spittle flying. "Send your soldiers! Send your ships! They will not stand before the judgment! All systems will share Brolla's fate! All systems will be filled with emptiness, their people turned to ash, their fields lying fallow! None will remain!"

He shrieked mad laughter and continued to rant, filling the airwaves with his dire prophecy.

The empty cargo bay was long and dim. Half the lights flickered. Small piles of junk lay in untidy heaps around the bare bay.

Minius circled their recent find, nearly capering with glee.

"I did tell you!" he crowed. "I did tell you!" He had a power spanner in one hand and a shear cutter in the other.

The chunk of scrap was nearly fifteen feet long and four feet tall, twisted and shredded. Minius was carefully extracting the engine from the Oryndrax fighter's wing.

He would dart around to one side, cut off some bit off, some shred of steel. Then dart over to another side, pull something else off.

Slowly but surely, he was exposing the Oryndrax engine.

Flander stood by impassively, next to a pile of untidy tools, watching the proceedings. Brutus stood nearby in case his strength was needed. Occasionally, Minius would peremptorily demand another tool, which Flander would hand it to him.

"It are perfect," Minius cackled as he steadily peeled away layers of wreckage. "I know it is. Brutus, go and fetch me a power conduit."

"There's no outlet here. I'll have to run conduit from nearly the aft of the ship, by the reactor."

"Sure, sure, that are fine," Minius said.

Brutus opened his mouth to object, but Minius had that look: that look that said he was brain-deep in whatever he was working on and wouldn't register a thing Brutus said.

On the upside, with so much of the scrap sold, it was easier for Brutus to get around the ship now.

Brutus crawled out the door to find some very long power conduit.

"Ah, it are loose. Flander, help me get this engine out."

Flander smoothly rolled over to the scrap. It took a couple false starts to get the thing free; things went much more smoothly when Minius stopped trying to help and simply danced around Flander while it carefully extracted the engine from the wreckage. It set the engine on the floor.

"Perfect, perfect. Now go and fetch me that gravitational focusing cone we salvaged last year."

Flander tapped once and swiftly zipped away.

Minius sat with a handheld circuit analyzer and began going over the control board on the engine.

After a while, Brutus returned, unrolling dense, three-inch-thick cabling. Even with his size, he was struggling a little to move the heavy conduit. He got it through the door, unrolled enough to reach to Minius' ad hoc workstation, and dropped the rest on the floor. He stood, stretching his back.

"Here's the power, Captain," he said.

"Perfect, perfect. Give me, oh, a twelve-volt lead."

Brutus pinched his lips and looked at the hundreds of feet of weighty cabling he'd been dragging around.

"Twelve volts? That's all?"

Minius looked up, catching Brutus' tone.

"I'll use more later, I promise. I just need to test this board."

With a sour look, Brutus fished a twelve volt shunt out of the pile of tools and hooked into the conduit. His eye slid over to Minius.

"Here."

Minius absently took the lead with a grin, all his focus on the exposed guts of the fighter engine.

"Now, if my calculations are correct..." He hooked the lead in.

There was a loud buzz, then a pop, and a cloud of stinking smoke rolled up out of the engine. Minius coughed and waved it away.

"I don't think your calculations were correct," Brutus said wryly.

"It are fine, it are fine." He keyed his radio. "Flander, while you're out, find me a control board, too. Imperial standard. And a, uhhh, a multi-tap transformer."

He smiled up at Brutus.

"Just needs a little adjustment. It are fine!"

"Now, we can test!" Minius cried. He hopped back from the contraption he'd put together. "Let's see how powerful the Oryndrax made their engines!"

"Minius, I don't understand what you've made, here. Can you please explain before you blow us all up?"

"What? Can you not tell?" He gestured at the assembly. It was bolted to the floor with a temporary mount.

"It looks like you've capped the engine with the gravity cone. And you disabled the regulator. Even without a regulator, that's only going to let a tiny amount of power out. All your thrust is going to just end up as heat. You're not going to push anything like that."

"Ah, but it are not designed to push. And it will let all the power out, just in a tiny area. Flander, fetch me that armor plate, set it up in front of my genius device."

Flander did as instructed, carefully balancing six-inch thick chunk of armor fifteen feet from the device.

Brutus' eye widened with recognition.

"It's a torch. You made that engine into a cutting torch."

"Exactly!" Minius cackled with glee. "If this are powerful enough to cut through armor, we can carve up any ships we find. We can mount it to the crane arm. No more leaving scrap behind because it's too big to tie to the Dawn. We'll cut it apart and stack it in storage!"

Brutus nodded. That would be an amazing capability. Buying a commercial torch that size was ruinously expensive; they'd never be able to afford one.

"If your contraption is powerful enough."

"Let's try! Goggles on!"

"I don't have a goggle," Brutus said.

"Then just squint your eye up real tight," Minus said. Brutus sighed and closed his eye. "I have it set for a quarter-second burn. Here we go. Three... two... one... activate!"

There was a loud roar. Brutus opened his eye and looked once the sound died. His jaw clenched.

They looked at the result of Minius' experiment. Minius himself was uncharacteristically silent.

"It did work," he said finally. Flander tapped the floor once.

"I'm glad the shielding in this part of the ship is functional," Brutus said in a choked voice.

The torch had sublimated the armor, turning it from a solid directly into a gas. The floor between the torch and the armor was buckled and warped from the heat. The wall behind the armor-- fifty feet away-- sported a new hole, two feet across. The edges of the hole glowed. The haze of the ship's shielding was visible through the hole. Beyond, the stars could be seen.

"I think I do need to find a way to turn it down," Minius said.

"Minius," Brutus said, clinging grimly to the last of his patience, "from now on, let's test it outside."