Mister Bones

I’ve never been very good at sea shanties.

Oh, I can carry a tune, and the words are never too complicated, but I can’t seem to muster up the enthusiasm. There’s always a point, usually when the chorus comes around the second time, where I just feel silly.

Don’t really have much of a right to complain, though. The navy’s been going through cycles ever since we got to space. We had a Great War phase, lots of gunmetal gray and British accents. We ‘ve done the Roman thing a few times, ships decked out like triremes, everybody in centurion helmets. We even had a Gundam phase once, just to see if it would work. Wish I’d been there for that.

Just my luck I got the cheesy pirate theme.

Still, it’s got to confuse the hell out of the enemy. The Gwaddack Stratocracy is the most advanced military force in the sector, and last we heard they’ve got a dozen code breaker supercomputers trying to figure out what “hoist the mizzenmast” means.

We got a new liaison from the Telick Insurgency a few weeks back, a little guy named Yanup. At least I think that’s how you say it. You really need a few extra tongues to get it right. He’s pretty small, at least by our measure, and a bit fidgety. He won’t be doing much fighting. But the Telick had been beaten down by the Gwaddack for three millennia before we showed up, so they’ve got some serious field experience. Yanup can answer all those little pesky questions in life, like “what’s he shouting?” and “how do you say ‘fuck yourself’?” and my favorite, “what’s this button do?”

He sticks with me mostly. I don’t blame him. The rest of the crew mainly goes in for big mustaches, fearsome looks, and enormous jewelry, all topped off with biceps you could use to crack coconuts. Boisterous is the key word here. To a meek, constantly shit-on race like the Telick, most humans are just as scary allies as enemies. Me, not so much. There’s only so many ways to wear a striped bandana.

I don’t mind, though. When the crew’s in full shanty mode, swigging their synth-rum, me and Yanup sit by the corner and play cards. He’s getting real good. Plus, it means I can watch out for him when the real fighting happens.

We hit a big cruiser the other day. Came in firing right out of warp, took out the engines and cannons before they could blink. It was textbook. Well, as textbook as a bunch of guys cackling and slurring their R’s could ever be. We launched the harpoon cables, docked near the mid deck, and cut a big goddamn hole in the hull. Then we sent in the boarding parties.

I was in the main party. There was Captain Rigg, Salty Mike, Long Paul, and Soggy Jim. And me and Yanup, tagging along behind. Captain Rigg really got into the pirate captain groove. Tricorn hat, big bushy beard, enough gold to buy a moon, and a huge, completely tactically useless cutlass. The works. He liked to go full Blackbeard before a boarding, sticking flares in his beard where they spattered sparks down on his armor.

Terrifying is the key word here.

A Gwaddack is bigger than a human. They’re real proud of their claws and their jaws and their shiny toys, and they say they’ll die before they retreat. But send a bunch of angry, screaming, on fire humans charging down a ship corridor at them, and you’d be amazed how many of them decide retreating isn’t all that bad after all. The ones who don’t, die. Very fast.

After about twenty minutes of fun and fancy free, we realized that we weren’t seeing any Gwaddack around any more. It came a little late to Long Paul and Salty Mike, who it turned out were fighting each other. We stopped, feeling a little stupid and tried to figure out which way the bridge was. It wasn’t like we could ask for directions.

Then the speakers turned on. All the speakers, cross the whole ship. They started playing something, a voice no Gwaddack could ever make. Sort of a creaking, bassy sound, wrapped up in a hissing that settled right down into your bones. There were words in there, but I got the certain feeling that the words didn’t matter. The tone got the point across.

I looked over at Yanup. He’d managed to go from standing to full fetal position in under a second, curled up into a little scaly ball. He was more scared than I’d ever seen him, more scared than I’d ever seen anybody. “What is it?” I said. “Who is that? What’s it mean?”

“The wraiths,” he said, mouths chattering enough I’m surprised he didn’t bite off a tongue or two. He was practically going into conniptions, so I gave him a booster to calm him down. “What do you mean, the wraiths?” I asked.

“They send us the voices from hell, to let us know our death approaches,” he said. “If you hear the call of the wraiths, there is no escape.”

I shared a glance with Captain Rigg. So that was it. This was scare tactics, a strategy we were already intimately familiar with. Send out a creepy message, then send in your hardest hitter. Then let the word spread. The Gwaddack had probably been using these wraiths to keep the Telick in line for generations. No wonder Yanup was scared out of his mind.

But we weren’t a bunch of cringing slaves, no offense to Yanup. We were the crew of the Schwarzschild’s Curse, scourge of the G-423 sector. We were fighters and drinkers and singers of shanties, some with maybe a little less gusto than others. We were pirates, goddamn it, and no punk with an audio set was going to catch us lily-livered.

“What are they sending?” I asked Yanup. Even with the drugs in his system he was shaking. Or maybe because of them.

“Death made flesh,” he whispered. “The droids.”

I had time to think oh, shit before the blast door opened.

It was certainly terrifying. Then again, they’re generally made to be. Nine feet of steel and ceramic plating, bristling with weaponry. A ghostly haze where the deflector fields hung in the air. A tiny, squat head, full of tactical data designed to turn the average organic lifeform into gruesome paste.

I was no genius of alien biology, but I’d seen enough of their dead to know that it was formed after a Gwaddack skeletal structure, probably for that extra little fright factor. I guess some things don’t change no matter where you go.

It rolled up a meter, shook its various guns and hissed its weird, warbling screech in some kind of threat display. Yanup curled up even tighter and whimpered.

And Captain Rigg, slick as ice, looked up at the alien wraith, sniffed, and said, “Mister Bones, if you would be so kind?”

I stepped forward. “My pleasure, captain.”

I dropped my hologuise. My normal body boiled away in an instant. Imagine skin peeling back to show the skeleton underneath. The wraith swiveled, taking aim at the unexpected threat. Targeting systems locked, safeties disengaged, and complex machinery locked into place. But I was already moving.

The weapons were easy. I sent electric pulses at missiles as they fired. They sputtered and fizzled out, dropping to the deck like so much potatoes. Slugs hit my deflector fields and bounced off in sparking arcs. Lasers went right through the fields and couldn’t be hacked, but their targeting systems were derived from recognizable algorithms. It was simple enough to avoid their paths, skipping through the blazing mesh of light faster than the wraith could correct for. By bouncing off the walls and the roof I kept the lasers chasing after me, far away from the watching crew.

The shields were harder. The wraith had alternator fields, flickering in and out a hundred times a second. Fast as I was, I couldn’t get through a window that small. I settled for chucking a few grenades at him. Not exactly elegant, but with the deflectors being diverted to deal with the explosions, that window opened up enough for me to dart through. And then I was past the shields.

The problem with most androids is that they’ve got no inside game. You load up a bot with all the shields they can carry and never think about what happens if someone gets past them. In all this droid’s life of gleefully smacking around Telick slaves, nothing had gotten through that shield. I saw his stubby little head actually cock as his processors tried to figure out just what the hell to do.

Two punches took out the targeting. A low kick blew out his knee. He threw a punch like a preschool bully. I threw a punch like a freight train. He was death made flesh but I was Mecha-Mike Tyson, taking him apart like a billion dollar can opener. Dismember is the key word here.

I tore the head off as a finishing touch. I didn’t need to, all the vital systems were already shredded, but it was a bit of flair for the crew. And the watching cameras, of course.

Captain Rigg and the rest came forward with the usual round of cheering, back-slapping, and kicking the prone body. Soggy Jim broke a toe on the ribcage. I looked for Yanup, and found him still huddled against the corridor wall, nearly catatonic.

“Hey Yanup,” I said, “you okay?”

He didn’t answer. I walked up and poked his shoulder. “Buddy?” I said. “We need to keep moving.” Nothing. “Buddy? You wanna play cards later?”

He looked up at me, his eyes focusing from the thousand-yard stare onto my face. Then he let loose a bloodcurdling shriek and fainted dead away.

Captain Rigg looked over.

“Dammit, Bones,” he said, “Yeh fergot to put yer holo back on.”

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