Setting

Space – the current frontier.

An Admiralty Starship slices through space, disturbing the occasional stray hydrogen atom or dust mote.

Its five month mission, to boldly go where a carefully gender-balanced Diplomatic Corp, have refused to go.

To seek a strange life-form, potentially barbarous, and stubbornly refusing to join the Union.

It takes boldness and not a little stupidity to venture into this region of space.

It takes imagination and not a little stupidity to command a vessel on such a mission.

Captain Gravitas was not going to have a good day.

It began with his scheduled wake-up call. When it came through, by some quirk of the frequency, the robotic cabin hygiene-unit in his chambers switched itself on, malfunctioned and started spinning on one wheel, sending high-pitched squeals and flashing red light everywhere. He awoke startled, thinking the ship was under attack, bumped his head on the overhead hypno-light and almost knocked himself unconscious.

Instead of the programmed rustic charms of Wordsworth and the music of Brahms, his arousal was a panicked scramble into action.

Secondly, his personal steward brought in the wrong breakfast combination. On Thursday, he always had synthetic baked-beans on a bed of sliced low-fat cheese and wholemeal toast; accompanied by vitamin and steroid enriched fruit-juice and Brazilian coffee. The steward forgot the juice. This set up a sequencing dilemma for Gravitas: have the juice later, wait for it and let the other things get cold, or start all over again. He had seen whole command systems collapse because of such seemingly trivial inefficiencies.

Thirdly, Admiralty orders came through and had finally been decrypted. It was to be a diversion from their original assignment to the Denubian war-zone in order to fulfil a diplomatic duty involving the Gorfs. This was disappointing because once again their military involvement was deferred; once more they would be unable to test their new astro-blaster phased-array, large-bore, space-cannons, in actual combat. Crucially, Major Duty would again be furious because his marines would miss out on ‘land and destroy’ missions. He would have to be counselled as per regulations and Gravitas always found this management aspect of his command a pain in the arse. Counselling marine commanders always gave him indigestion. These marines were supposed to be tough, genetically primed for merciless combat, so why all the tears at missing out on killing a bunch of giant insectivores? Perhaps it was a good thing he did not have any juice this morning.

And fourthly, and potentially the most serious, his Politics and Culture Officer, Lieutenant Hubris (a Magnite and fifteenth in the chain of command) had an attack of the vapours overnight. Literally. Noxious fumes emanated from his carapace and he had to be quickly isolated. PCO Hubris would not be able to oversee the diplomatic protocols welcoming the Gorf Ambassador on board, settling his retinue into their quarters, and basically smoothing the way in that sibilant way of his, while Captain Gravitas smiled and nodded in his best ‘in-charge’ manner.

The Gorfs and Magnites were distantly related and were more comfortable with each other than with mammalian humanoid species, which their shared evolutionary history denoted as a food source.

The ship had been diverted for this highly important diplomatic mission, normally handled by the Diplomatic Corp, to deliver the Gorf in good order to a conference in which the admission of the Gorf planetary system into the Union of Solar System Republics, would be discussed for the eighth time. The delay in admission had been due to the Gorf treatment of non-chitinous sentient life-forms in their system, especially the use made of them as condiments. The Gorf political system was also not a republic, did not even have a scintilla of democratic processes. Hence the DipCorp handing this bucket of alien excrement over to Gravitas and his crew.

One thing was for sure, if Hubris was not available to handle the Gorfs, Gravitas certainly was not even going to try.

First problem of the day requiring a solution: find someone else to suck-up to the Gorf Ambassador.

Gravitas donned his skin-tight, golden command shirt, making sure no stray chest hair was visible. Leaving his cabin to the now pacified hygiene-unit to clean up, he strode down the corridors of the ship, exuding confidence with an occasional nod or smile to the crew, giving the impression that here was a commander who knew where he was going most of the time.

He found his engineer and third in command, naturally enough, in the Engine Room of the Starship. The ‘Engine Room’ was a bar catering mainly to tech-types, those who had a fondness for the arcana of mathematical formulae and engineering problem-solving, those who were not comfortable with the chaotic emotional and social swirl of the other clubs on board. There was no such thing as an engine room anymore in starships. The last one had been decommissioned decades ago and the Admiralty was still paying out compensation to the relatives of crews, suffering radiation damage to their genetic structures.

The engines were now at the rear of the ship in groups of completely sealed nacelles pointing away from the crew areas and controlled by robots remotely monitored by the engineers. They did not even need robots because the computers could handle everything, but you had to give engineers something to do or they got very narky and started fiddling with things.

Some traditions last longer than others, such as the notion of an engine room and expostulating in a broad Scottish accent around machinery. This is a requirement, whether or not you are a humanoid from one of the Scottish colonies. Aye.

Chief Engineer Tobias was discussing the virtues of the latest dark-matter harvesting drones with some of his team, when Captain Gravitas approached him.

‘We have a wee problem Tobias’, said Gravitas, joining in with the idiom at this bar.

‘Aye Captain, my Captain, that’s what engineers are for. Problem-solving is our bread and haggis. What is it?’

‘Hubris is out for the count. His carapace is still smouldering and he’s under observation in sick bay. The fool drank too much Rigelian beer again and when he tried to pass it through his ventral sphincters unprocessed, it set fire to his shell. I need someone to look after the Gorf. They have to be of senior rank, reasonably tolerant, and be able to hold onto their stomach when the Gorfs vent their digestive systems. Got anyone I can use?’

Tobias thought for a moment then his bushy eyebrows leapt upwards and he slapped his thigh.

‘Aye, of course. My exec. He’s got all the qualifications. Served in the Kellopian system wars when but a lad, helped keep those old synchronic-impetus engines going. Remember them Captain? Those old Battlecruiser engines were before the Jorgensen-Weft Drive. The stories I could tell you about them. He was also involved in the evacuation of the Kellopian colony from Caliban Prime. If you can cope with hysterical cephalopods you can handle anything. He’s mature and capable, and besides, he’s an engineer.’

Gravitas had one outstanding quality that fitted him for senior command. It was not his fair, country-boy, good looks, or his ability to think outside the rhomboid when occasion called for it.

It was his ability to make decisions without the cumbersome process of thinking.

‘Done. Route the paperwork to my yeoman of the guard and send me whatshisname at 0900 for a briefing. I’ll get the spook to sit in on it – he’s better at details than any of us.’

‘The spook’ was an affectionate term of reference for the ship’s Science Officer, one of a series of humanoid cyborgs created by vulcanologists to study extreme conditions in planetary cores but adapted to other roles because of their extreme intelligence and thick skin. The spook was nominally second in command but was unlikely to exercise any real authority because he stood outside the military-economic command structure. He functioned as a scientific and spiritual counsellor to the Captain and his executive team, on those rare occasions when their starship, the ‘Venture Capital’, engaged in pointless explorations of regions where no corporation had been before or would bother investing. Spook was also the fleet champion at Pi-dimensional chess which, given his lack of a personality, was probably a good thing.