The Lord Admiral’s Adjutant lay in his stolen escape craft, crashed in the ruins of some city on the planet the Hrwang fleet had attacked, the wreckage hopelessly trapped in a building burned by landing thrusters. The escape craft had no artificial intelligence in it allowing it to jump and go wherever it wanted. You could stick an artificial intelligence on a chair and it would go wherever the AI wanted to take it, but without an AI, the chair was just a chair and the escape craft the Adjutant lay in was just a hunk of ruined metal.
The vehicle was designed to survive for days in space or even survive atmospheric entry, but once it accomplished its mission, its occupants were just supposed to wait for rescue.
The designers of the escape craft assumed at least thirty soldiers would be using it. Controls, devices, everything, were scattered around the craft, stored where they fit best in the vehicle, not where they were convenient for users. For example, the control for the distress beacon that would signal for rescue sat near the hatch. Not a problem to simply activate the beacon for someone sitting near the hatch or for an able bodied soldier to make his way to the hatch on level ground and put his palm on the control.
If those things had been possible for the Adjutant with his two broken legs, his craft sitting on its side and trapped in or against the rubble of a building, the hatch positioned at the high end, and the planet’s gravity making ascent to it impossible, Hrwang soldiers would have shown up and rescued him already.
His cold calculations gave his ability to activate the beacon a low probability.
Higher probabilities were assigned to him of dying of starvation or thirst while trapped in the bottom of the craft.
Another possible outcome had him being discovered by the aliens. He didn’t know how that encounter might go.
The best opportunity for hope lay in the escape craft’s reentry being witnessed by other Hrwang. But even with a force the size of which they’d brought, the areas of patrol by each Hrwang combat craft were vast and the likelihood of one having randomly been in the right place at the right time to see him was low.
The Adjutant normally took comfort in his ability to weigh a tree of decisions and determine the likelihood of each outcome on that tree and decide which course of action would produce the desired results. His cold calculations, as he termed them, allowed him to achieve the things he desired, or that his leaders desired.
His calculations allowed him to understand that if the Fleet Admiral decided to arrest the Admiral Commander, he would be next, and he would need to flee.
They allowed him to determine the correct sequence of events to trigger to make a stack of cargo fall on a Third Under Colonel, thus silencing the man.
They allowed him to help the Lord Admiral plot, to achieve the goals the leader had set for himself when he had first learned of the existence of another inhabited world.
They also allowed him to know that with his calculating mind, his lack of feeling about the consequences of his or other’s actions, his career would entail doing things other people would find too hard or too distasteful to do. He knew he could be a weapon, and a well rewarded one, in other’s hands.
Such activities had already earned him enough to buy a small island somewhere, build a mansion on it, and do whatever he wanted there.
But it wouldn’t be enough.
He needed the action. He craved the plots and the intrigue and as soon as the Lord Admiral had approached him with the hint of an idea, he’d seized on it and developed a plan. A plan with contingencies, with many courses of action, all leading to a specific goal. Not a foolproof plan, no plan could be, but a plan with a high probability of success.
He didn’t even care what the Lord Admiral would reward him. The plan, the creation of it, the execution of it, was the thing.
His death by starvation and thirst at the bottom of an upended escape craft meant he would miss the execution of his plan. He mourned that more than he mourned the loss of his own life and the missed opportunity of becoming a Lord in his own right and buying an island.
He tried to move again, but his useless legs weighed him down, hindering instead of helping. He focused his efforts on determining how to crawl up a craft not designed to be crawled up when it lay on its side and no legs were available.
Weightlessness killed. Without regular exercise, muscles atrophied, organs shifted, and blood pooled in the wrong places.
The Lord Admiral’s Adjutant had been weightless too long and hadn’t exercised enough. His weak arms couldn’t pull him up the benches, overcome the planet’s gravity, and allow him to reach food and water, let alone the impossibly far hatch.
He found his mind wandering to small islands with mansions and women, his immense wealth making anything and anyone possible.
Dreams and pain fogged his normally calculating mind. He couldn’t even determine how long he’d lain in the bottom of the vehicle. It had become a well, the gravity of which he couldn’t overcome.
A tiny part of his mind that remained lucid told him he could cut his legs off, reducing the weight and allowing him to crawl out.
He laughed bitterly at that thought. He’d bleed out before succeeding. People had cut their own hands and feet off, sometimes even an arm, to get out of impossible situations. But no one had ever even tried to cut their own leg off. The blood vessels were too large.
The bones are already broken, the lucid part of his mind told him, making it easier to saw through flesh. He just had to make a tourniquet tight enough to prevent blood loss.
Not possible, he told himself. He would pass out in the middle and bleed to death.
He normally never felt fear, not even in life threatening situations. He calculated odds, weighed options, and evaluated probable results.
Today he felt fear.
He felt it until he felt hope.
When he heard something clang loudly against the side of the craft, with voices following the clanging, hope came to him unbidden.
Hope that it was Hrwang soldiers outside and not aliens.
Hope that rescue was on its way.
Those outside took forever. They were clearly not prepared to scale the hull of the escape craft and reach the hatch. He tried to listen to their voices, tried to make them out and determine if they were Hrwang or alien, but they were too indeterminate, too muffled, and he could only weigh his options.
What should he say to them if they were aliens?
He considered the possibilities, evaluated different responses, and calculated which ones led to his survival. Promises of reward often worked, and he thought about what rewards he could offer that an alien might believe.
Clanging continued but stopped when thudding began. He pondered the new noise and could clearly picture a man climbing up the side, pulling himself up on ropes. The Lord Admiral’s Adjutant evaluated each thud and decided only one person ascended. Probably a large man.
He had to act as wounded and helpless as possible when the man arrived. It would be his best chance to evoke sympathy in the alien who climbed the outside of the craft.
It wouldn’t be much of an act, he thought grimly.
The thudding ended with one last, large bump on the top of the craft, by the hatch. The man pulling himself up the last part.
Did the aliens have grappling hooks? Had that been the clanging? Trying to get a rope attached to something on the top so a man could pull himself up? He decided it was. The duration of the clanging meant they were desperate to keep trying or else had nothing better to do.
Perhaps they had devised a makeshift grappling hook and it took a while to catch something firmly enough to hold a man’s weight.
Persistent rescuers or desperate scavengers?
He decided to go with the latter option, the most likely one. He would promise food and water aplenty, more than could be found on the escape craft, although they could have all that, too. He would pr
omise not only food and water but shelter and security. For all of them. Not just his rescuers, but their families as well. He would promise them respite from a life of scavenging among ruins, wondering if more meteors would fall from the sky.
Confident in his preparation, he waited for the hatch to cycle open. It took long enough that it confirmed an alien stood or sat up there. A Hrwang soldier would have known how to operate the mechanism.
The unlocked hatch finally cycled open and a bright light flashed down the length of the craft and into his eyes.
The bright light spoke.
“You an alien?” it hollered down in English.
The bright light must have decided without waiting for the Adjutant’s response. He heard the gunshot just before he stopped hearing or feeling anything.
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