Rules and points

 The spaceship’s drives hummed as the power increased.  Sat in the command-chair on the bridge, Captain Rascal bounced gently up and down — he had the gravity on the bridge kept at a quarter of one-G especially for this — waiting for the moment that Yemoi, the navigation officer, would announce that they were ready to enter hyperspace.  His eyes glittered with excitement and his fingers, slightly short and stubby for a baseline human, gripped the arms of the command-chair as though to stop him from bouncing away from it.  Which, given that Captain Rascal was short and light and built like a jockey, was entirely possible in the reduced gravity of the bridge.

The bridge doors opened on the left side and Rascal looked casually over to see who was arriving.

“Vizile!  Get over here you old reprobate!”

Vizile, the First Officer, forced a smile onto his long, thin face.  His skin was ruddy, a consequence of being born on one of the four Fire Worlds, and his hair was jet black and he looked, to Rascal at least, like a picture of a demon from old mythologies.

“Captain,” said Vizile in a level tone that completely belied his actual mood.  “I think we should consider—“

“Engines at full power,” said Yemoi, speaking over him.  Vizile raised a red hand as though to try and stop her speaking, but she continued, “Entry into hyperspace is now possible.”

“Don’t do that yet!” yelled Vizile.  Rascal grinned at him.

“Mark!” he yelled, equally as loudly, and Yemoi pressed some buttons on the desk in front of her.  Vizile’s face spasmed as he tried to both grimace and stop himself grimacing at the same time.  It looked like the effort hurt.

“What’s the matter, Viz?” asked Rascal.  The transition into hyperspace was smooth; from the perspective of the bridge the only thing that changed was that the viewing screen greyed out.  Whatever was out there now was impossible to see as hyperspace contained no photons.  Energy exchange was mediated through some other means that was still being intensively studied.

“I think we might have left someone behind,” said Vizile.  His voice was tightly controlled and he was trying hard not to sound angry but he sounded like someone had stepped heavily on his foot and he was trying not to scream.  “I have been unable to find Merance.”

“We did leave her behind,” said Rascal.  Now that they had entered hyperspace and there was nothing to anticipate he had slowed his bounce and was sitting almost normally in the command-chair.  “Her shuttle didn’t reach us before we departed.”

Vizile rubbed a hand over his face.  His skin paled with the the pressure, only gradually reddening again as he hand was lifted.  “She was en route?” he asked.

“Maybe?  I dunno,” said Rascal.  “Is there a test for that?”

“I mean,” said Vizile, “she was travelling to us when we left?”

“Oh,” said Rascal. “Why didn’t you say so then?  Yes, she would have been about three minutes away.  But she was late, and you have to have rules, don’t you, Viz?”

Vizile drew a long breath.  He had, as he acutely remembered, sat down with the captain a few days ago to discuss having rules and obeying them, particularly with regard to using the ship’s instruments (such as the Butcher) in ways that potentially (or definitely, in the case of the Butcher) harmed the planetary life around them.  It had not been an easy, or pleasant, conversation, and he had been walking figuratively on eggshells ever since waiting to see if Rascal was plotting revenge.

“I think, Sir,” he said after a pause, “that we did discuss that rules can be treated as guidelines at certain points, and that making a point and breaking a rule can both be problematic.”

“Did we?”  Rascal grinned again and despite himself Vizile smiled back.  The Captain’s mood was oddly infectious.

“Yes, Sir,” he said.  He rarely called Rascal ‘Sir’ and was hoping that the man would notice this sooner or later.  “Yes, and I think you were making a point there, that didn’t need to be made.  Weren’t you?”

Rascal’s smile never faded or faltered.  “Not for you, old bean,” he said.  “For Merance.  She needed to learn not to be late, right?”

“I… I… suppose so,” said Vizile who wanted to sit down somewhere quietly and work this out without Rascal derailing his train of thought.  “I… I mean, we can always go back for her.”

“No need!”

Vizile’s train of thought derailed thoroughly and catastrophically.  He blinked several times, trying and failing to guess what Rascal might mean.  Finally he gave in.

“What do you mean?” he asked, his tone full of trepidation.

“She was close enough to get pulled into hyperspace with us,” said Rascal.  He started bouncing again, which Vizile considered a bad sign.  “She’s sort of following us.  She should pop out at the other end when we do.  Give or take a half-million kilometres.”

“Wha— that— how—“  Vizile struggled to find any words and he took a couple of steps backwards while his brain short-circuited in every direction there was.  Yemoi looked up from the navigation console, which was doing little at this point except showing the expected time to departure from hyperspace, and addressed the captain.

“The shuttle’s too small, Sir,” she said, and it irked Vizile just a little than the ‘Sir’ was sincere.  “It’s not got the stability to withstand hyperspace travel.  It’ll probably disintegrate when it emerges.”

“Let’s hope Merance gets into a space-suit before that happens then!” said Rascal cheerfully.

Planet of Babel

 “We called it Babel, obviously,” said Johann.  He stretched and nearly fell out of the ergonomic chair in the library of the Cheeky Monkey.  “Oops!”

“Why’s that then?”  Captain Rascal, wearing his shiniest uniform and glittering like an iceberg in strong sunlight, looked genuinely puzzled.  Vizile, his first officer, didn’t facepalm as that would have been rude, but his hand did gently, surreptitiously, make its way to his face and massage his cheekbones.

“What?” Johann looked at Captain Rascal as though expecting a punchline.  Rascal just kept smiling at him; grinning almost, and looked like he was waiting for an answer.

“He’s serious,” said Vizile after a moment’s more silence.  “You need to explain why it was obvious to call the planet Babel.”

“He doesn’t kno—“

“He is the captain,” said Vizile.  “And it’s taken the crew threatening a mutiny to stop him using the Butcher on the planet, so please humour him and quickly.”

Rascal’s smile never wavered.  Vizile and Mercanty, the first and second officers, had had to physically block access to the Technology suite, where the controls to the Butcher were located, and keep Rascal out.  Mercanty was now in sick-bay getting her scorch marks tended to, though Rascal had apologised sincerely for hitting her with the hot end of the laser pistol  Vizile was shadowing his boss, acting as an aide but in fact making sure that Rascal wasn’t going to try and turn the Butcher on.

The Butcher, short for Butcher’s Hook, was the ship’s primary observation device and worked by firing various wavelengths of radiation at a target and interpreting the reflections from it.  Rascal’s Butcher had been upgraded in some unspecified past by some unknown engineer and used longer wavelengths and more energetic waves, and seemed to have some kind of anti-cut-off switch that meant that Rascal’s Butcher seemed to take the top sixteen centimetres off whatever it was looking at.

“Well, it’s a library planet,” said Johann. He sounded slightly out of his depth having to explain what he thought that everyone should know.  “The entire planet is just one big library.  Everything down there is part of a hexagonal column, and each column has fourteen stories, and each story is split into hexagonal cells and they contain books.  It’s like the aliens read Borges.”

Rascal’s blank look and never-wavering smile struck Johann’s heart like a dagger.

“You have to know who Borges was,” he said feebly.  The colour steadily seeped from his face and he looked ten years old.  “You must know who Borges was.”

“Babel was a library then?” asked Rascal.  “Interesting.  What kind of books do they have down there then?”

Johann pulled himself together.  “Every possible one,” he said.  “That’s why it’s the whole planet, you see.  Every conceivable book you can write in the alphabet they used is there.  Imagine if you will, that Earth did this.  You would have, oh I don’t know, the library of Babel, for example in there.  In English, French, Spanish… Catalan even!”

“Russian?” said Rascal brightly.

“No,” said Johann.  “Well, maybe yes.  I mean… there would be a transliteration of it in Russian of course, but not in Russian cyrillic, you understand.”

“No,” said Rascal, his smile still perfect.  He stood up.  “So… you want to keep this library?  Without its Russian books?”

Johann forced a smile onto his face wondering if smiling gave Rascal some curious power over the people around him.  It just felt painful to him.  “We must keep the library,” he said.  “It is a valuable insight into the aliens and their psychology.  Plus it’s a whole planet given over to the storage and preservation of books.  The technology in there must be worth a fortune.”

Vizile did facepalm then, and the slap of his hand hitting his face caused Johann to stare at him in shock.

“Aha!” yelled Captain Rascal.  “I knew it!”

“Did you have to?” murmured Vizile to Johann.  He stood up and caught hold of the Captain’s arm.  “Do not—“

“Send down the excavators!” they said in unison.  Somewhere inside the Cheeky Monkey a klaxon started to blare.

“No, Captain, not the excavators,” said Vizile with the patience of a man who is used to having it tested to its limit.  “You want to return with the technology, not just evidence of it.  Don’t destroy it until you have it in working order.  Remember?”

Rascal grinned and bounced on the balls of his feet.  “Of course I do!  Belay the excavators!  Send down the Inquisitors instead!”

The klaxon’s blare ceased for ten seconds and everyone but Rascal looked relieved.  Then a new klaxon started up, an octave lower but somehow slightly louder.

“What does an Inquisitor do?” asked Johann.  The blood had run from his face again and he was trembling.

“Extracts things,” said Vizile in a low monotone.  “Effectively.  I do hope there are parts of this library you can afford to lose.”

“What!?”