The Starship Captain
Captain Bryson Braxton was the only man on the ship. Were it a less efficiently designed ship, it might have been difficult. Maybe not for a graduate of Earth’s elite Space Corps, but that wasn’t important now. The starships only went one place, to Virgon, a planet which orbited Alpha Centauri. All he had to do was watch the ship’s display count down the 5-year journey between AC and Sol. There was no proper bridge, just a small room with a blank screen and the ship’s manual controls. Sometimes he’d sit in the insubstantial captain’s chair and rehearse the plan in his head.
There was an antimatter manufacturing facility on a space station which orbited Virgon where ships would dock, refuel, then exchange cargo and crew. There, the display would flicker on, and instead of landing the ship, he would ram it straight into the station. He’d lean back in the chair and imagine the fussy bureaucrats looking up to the sky and see a bright star of chaos, a beacon for the freedom-loving people of Sol, against the blue-haired Virgon freaks.
As he made his way down the ship’s empty corridors, he ruminated on his long, solitary mission. He missed his beloved Cecilia, her sparkling eyes, and her dry wit. He was aware that his eventual insanity was very nearly written in stone. Without a crew, time would crawl by at a snail’s pace. What could he do though? The heroic instinct had left the heart of the Space Corps long ago. The Interstellar Cooperation Authority had neutered mankind’s noble aspirations to colonize the universe. How could it be? Was humanity not a proud warrior race whose glorious history was baptized in blood and conquest? Still, Bryson Braxton knew of this mission’s necessity and tried to gather a small crew, but to no avail. Now he was careening into the empty void between the stars with a stolen ship, alone. Still, he had his memories to keep him company. He closed his eyes and thought of the Academy.
“Effective communication between crew members is absolutely essential to maintaining the mental health and general morale of the crew. This is a full five year journey, and conflicts between crew members should be resolved as soon as possible, before they have a chance to escalate into potential violence.” Instructor Yui was midway through her lecture on the necessity of proper conflict resolution on long voyages when Bryson Braxton interrupted her.
“What if you suspect that a fellow crew member is sending the ship’s location data to space pirates?” Yui sighed heavily and rubbed her forehead.
“What space pirates?”
Bryson interjected, “I mean, they could be hiding anywhere out there, right? We should have some sort of battle plan in case of emergencies!”
Yui drew in a long breath, then exhaled slowly, visibly irritated. “A battle plan, Braxton? We do cargo transport, there are no space battles going on out there. Carrying weapons on a five year voyage, in the close quarters of a starship, where there is no possibility of a threat, is both unnecessary and extremely unwise. Also, if someone had the resources to build a self-sustaining starship which had the capabilities of intercepting another starship traveling at near-light speed, why would they be doing piracy?”
Bryson Braxton ceased his interruptions, and Instructor Yui took that as a sign that he conceded the point. He did not concede the point. He was already making his own contingency plans. He would not be taken by surprise on account of the Space Corps’ lack of imagination.
Captain Braxton opened his eyes and knew that his time had come, or would come, once he finally made it to Alpha Centauri. He resolved, at the beginning of his voyage, to avoid checking the countdown display, except when absolutely necessary. After all, when you impatiently stare into the face of a clock, it has a tendency to freeze on you. Instead, he mournfully considered the sad state of the human race. The people of Earth were not, in fact, at war with anyone. The military wing of the Space Corps was dissolved soon after first contact, two centuries ago. The Interstellar Cooperation Authority, established to govern relations between the Alpha Centauri and Sol systems, took control over the activities of the Space Corps, turning them into glorified longshoremen.
Their partnership began when a Virgonian explorer’s ship crashed-landed on Earth. A farmer and his family showed them hospitality as they made repairs and returned to their system. Soon after, the Virgonians sent a delegation to share their culture and technology, in thanks for the farmer’s hospitality and assistance. Bryson Braxton thought that, by joining the Space Corps, he could inspire a revolt against the ICA’s betrayal of humanity’s greatest ideals. Unfortunately, none of the other cadets at the academy took him seriously. In fact, it had not been that long since he graduated from the academy. There had been an incident during his first voyage, and he was supposed to have been court-martialed. Instead, he risked everything on this one reckless mission.
To tell the truth, he was even on the outs with Cecilia. Her last note to him had been somewhat hostile and emotionally distant in tone. He fished into his pocket and pulled it out to read it again. He knew that it wouldn’t be healthy to ruminate on the letter, seeing as he had to maintain his sanity for as long as possible. Still, he couldn’t resist the temptation to open and read it again, if only to feel closer to her for a moment.
Byson,
This will be the only response I give to your numerous letters, in the hopes that you will get the point and stop sending them. We are not lovers or friends. We are barely acquaintances. We worked together during a single janitorial shift on your only voyage, which you bungled so completely that I hear you are being expelled from the Space Corps. During that shift, you were incredibly weird. You were weird to me, attempting to hold my hand repeatedly and saying you loved me. You were weird about our Virgonian crewmates, and Virgonians in general. I told you repeatedly that I didn’t care about your weird bigoted conspiracy theories about the “Virgonian Pirates”, and that it was personally offensive to me because my boyfriend is Virgonian. No one is going to go on your “mission” because no one is stupid enough to buy into your nonsense. Again, to be perfectly clear, you are to stop sending me letters. I will never even go so far as to be friendly to you in any context, let alone marry you.
Sincerely,
Cecilia
Captain Bryson Braxton continued to wander aimlessly around the softly-lit corridors of the starship. He went to the crew’s quarters in an attempt to take a nap, but he couldn’t fall asleep. His mind was caught up in self recrimination, not that he had gone on the mission, but that he was unable to wake his civilization from the fatal sleep, which the influence of cultural Virgonianism had induced. Not only that, but there were rumors that ICA scientists were on the verge of perfecting father-than-light travel. Virgon’s tentacles would spread throughout the galaxy, to countless civilizations. That is, unless Captain Bryson Braxton had anything to say about it. He felt his stomach growl. A good meal would lift his spirits.
He made his way to the galley and opened the refrigerator. Chicken breasts, potatoes, carrots and onions made up the majority of the kitchen’s ingredients. That was good enough for him though. He put some seasoning salt on the chicken breast and opened the oven. Before preheating it, he searched around inside for something. Eventually he saw it, the meat temperature sensor. He took a kitchen knife and pried it off the wall of the oven. The oven’s failsafe mechanism would not allow the chicken to be removed until the internal temperature of the meat reached 170 degrees fahrenheit. This was inconvenient because Captain Braxton's special recipe was medium-rare chicken breast.
The small-minded conformists of the Space Corps didn’t appreciate his culinary innovations. During galley duty on his last voyage, he made the same alterations to the ship’s oven in order to serve the crew his special recipe. He knew that when they tried it, they’d immediately understand the true innovative nature of the indomitable human spirit. No one in the universe had ever thought to cook medium-rare chicken breasts, and he knew that his genius would convince them to join him in revolt against Virgonian conformity. However, when the galley head inspected the chicken breasts, she refused to serve them to the crew. Of course this was the case. After all, she was one of the Virgonians, who were barely sentient, with no imagination. She inspected the oven, only to discover Bryson Braxton’s “improvements”. She asked him what happened, and he proudly revealed the secret of his special recipe.
He spent the rest of the mission in the brig for “malicious destruction of ICA property”. Now however, there was no unimaginative galley head to restrict his creative artist’s will. At the right moment, Captain Braxton removed his medium-rare chicken breast from the oven. He ate it slowly, savoring every bite. His mission would eventually break him, but for now he felt no regret.
Captain Bryson Braxton was feeling a great deal of regret. He had spent the past few hours vomiting and defecating up and down the corridors of the starship. The spotless corridors he previously walked now resembled something like a painting by Jackson Pollock. He thought to himself, I must have caught some sort of deep space virus, and now I’m going to die. He knew his mission was far from the realm of sunshine and unicorns, but he expected that his end would at least afford him some shred of dignity. He stumbled a few feet further, as he was overtaken by the vertigo which was the result of dehydration. He fell to the ground, lying in a pool of his own bodily fluids. This is the end, he thought as he finally lost consciousness.
Bryson Braxton awoke in a hospital room. He sat up in his bed, only to discover that he had been handcuffed to it. He rattled the handcuffs against the rail to which they were attached and shouted into the hallway, “You bastards! You couldn’t let me die free, could you? You had to imprison me before my formal execution! It wasn’t enough that I failed, wasn't it? You can’t stand a single person being free!” Eventually a nurse was able to calm him down long enough for investigators from the ICA to arrive. When one of them entered Braxton’s hospital room, a Virgonian, he spoke before the agent had a chance to ask her questions. She would not manipulate a confession out of him, he would give it to her on his own terms. “You have no idea how close you came.” The Virgonian investigator asked him to clarify.
“If things had gone differently, I’d have flown that ship straight into your blasted antimatter factory! The whole space station would have gone down, and your plans for universal conquest would have become dust! You may have gotten lucky today, but we only have to be lucky once!” The Virgonian investigator looked at Bryson Braxton for a moment, then left the room. She returned with a Human investigator, then told Braxton to repeat what he told her. He did as instructed. There was a moment of silence until both of the investigators burst out into a fit of laughter.
Bryson shouted petulantly, “I’m serious! I was going to do a major terrorist attack! Do you not realize that?” The investigators continued laughing for a few minutes until the Human agent was able to catch his breath.
“You know how you sound, right?”
Joe looked confused.
The Virgonian agent began to explain, “ICA ships can be disabled remotely while they’re inside the Sol system. It took all of 45 minutes for the missing ship to be discovered and the shutdown signal sent. It took another 3 hours for the signal to catch up with your ship. Even if you’d gotten out, Virgon would’ve had five years to prepare, in order to apprehend you. They cover all of this in the Space Corps training material. You know that, right?” Joe leaned back into his hospital bed. “So, no harm, no foul, then?”
The Human agent laughed. “Oh no, you’re under arrest. You stole an entire starship. That’s an actual crime.”
Joe frowned, “Then I guess I’m back to where I was, when I was awaiting court-martial.”
The Human agent was incredulous. “The ICA isn’t a military force. We don’t court-martial people. According to your file, you were just going to be discharged as a result of your extreme incompetence and egregious insubordination. It’s not illegal to be bad at your job. It is illegal to hijack a starship.”
Joe Strong looked thoughtful, “I guess you really can’t predict how things turn out. All of our best laid plans could go awry at any moment, making us the lawful prey of chaos, helpless in its jaws.”
The Virgonian agent’s face twisted in a spasm of second-hand embarrassment. She responded, “No, your plan was really stupid. Probably the dumbest plan ever conceived. Then, on top of that, you contracted salmonella on the ship. Being familiar with your file, I would guess it was probably a result of intentionally consuming undercooked poultry. If you’d made it to the Kuiper Belt, you’d probably be dead.”
Bryson Braxton looked the Virgonian agent up and down. “You seem rather concerned with my safety. Do I feel a spark between us?”
“You are aware that we discovered you in a pool of your own various fluids, right? By we, I mean I personally found you in a pool of your various bodily fluids on the ship you stole, which was also covered in those fluids.”
Joe winked, which caused the Virgonian agent to shudder. “I guess I owe you my life. I think I know how I can thank you though. I’m still torn up over my ex, but I can love again.”
“You can thank me by never, ever, ever telling me what you’re thinking.”