Short Story Excerpt: FOR THE BIRDS

 Usually, the details of why exactly the Defender had to get involved, and the expertise of a specific member of the crew was needed, came while the ship was still gaining speed on its new heading. This time, however, the details didn’t arrive after two hours. Then a full day on the new heading. Then two days. Once the ship crossed over into unfamiliar territory, the missing details made Captain Hollis’s personal alarms ring louder than ever before.

When the delayed details finally came, he was dangerously close to being numb from the tension. According to his personal log:

 

Three lines into this assignment briefing, I started thinking I was the reason for the change of course. As soon as I saw my old friend Declan’s name as leader of the team, I got that sick certainty. Friendship debts make it impossible for me to cash in any of the favors my crew and I earned from the last few skin-of-our-teeth missions to get another ship and captain to switch places with us.

Then a paragraph later, my feelings of guilt toward my crew, who certainly deserve a longer break between crises and puzzles, turned to absolute head-twisting confusion, and then the awful suspicion that someone, somewhere, is laughing at me. And still hiding details.

Don’t any of those arrogant, know-it-all paper-pushers at HQ know how to read? Can’t they remember from one dec to the next that I and my ship don’t do diplomacy? No, correct that – we shouldn’t do diplomacy. How many brain-twisted, delusional diplomats do we have to rescue from their own arrogance and stupidity? And then instead of a little well-deserved appreciation they try to foist all their stupidity and bad choices on us instead of acting like the adults they pretend to be. Can’t they keep it straight in their bureaucratic heads that the farther my crew stays away from diplomats and ambassadors and negotiators and bureaucrats, the better for the entire Alliance? Because I’ve warned them nobody threatens my crew when they’ve risked their lives for arrogant buffoons who won’t admit they don’t know down from up. Forget the Alliance – for the universe in general.

Yet here we are, being assigned to assist a diplomatic mission.

Because despite my documented allergy to diplomats and ambassadors and people who insisted on using thirty fancy words where four simple, clear words – and too often, preferably a good right hook – will do, old friends and their requests for my help always overrule common sense and the rules of survival. My oldest friend since my first term in Basic needs me. Ambassador Declan Shay. Well, not just me. My ship. Specifically two junior members of my crew. I have to wonder, reading the specifics, if it’s just more of the Defender’s misfit luck at work here, and if they were on another ship if I wouldn’t be involved at all.

Somehow, that suspicion doesn’t give me any relief.

Because here’s the crux of the ugly knot sucking us in to tangle the Defender in another flustergating situation: I’m afraid my old school friend has finally met a culture and a negotiation he can’t unravel and untangle and find some sense in it, somewhere, somehow.

This short story is available for sale at Ye Olde Dragon Books.