Conclusion of the Narrative "Captain Blood" (Part III)

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║     CONCLUSION OF THE NARRATIVE        ║
║           "CAPTAIN BLOOD"              ║
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║              PART III                  ║
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║              AND FINAL                 ║
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"Come on, guys! Just a hundred kilometers left and we'll haul it out of this dump!" Spiridon ran across the observation deck, taking swigs of beer from a fairly capacious bottle. (Three identical but empty bottles were lying in the corner.) "I'll reward you all! An extra can of stewed meat a week for everyone! Just get me that little crate!"

Visibility was good, and the crate could be seen with the naked eye. A little further and it would cross the Dump's perimeter.

Captain Blood sat in his cabin, racking his brains over a pre-launch speech. But his thoughts stubbornly kept drifting back to his ruined suit. In the end, the captain decided to dispense with the speech and simply announce the ship's launch time. Glancing at his watch, Blood discovered it was in compass mode; moreover, he realized he didn't know how to switch it back to chronometer mode, since the recent stressful days had caused him to forget the most basic things, let alone how to operate a watch.

The captain sighed and walked over to the desk, trying to recall how to turn on the cruiser's PA system along the way. Fortunately, the microphone built into the desk by Chinese specialists had only one button. After a moment's hesitation, the captain pressed it and said:

"Attention! Condition Number 1 is hereby declared, in accordance with the 1917 State Standard on Alert States! Everyone take your stations as specified in the staffing table! Pilots, conduct full-system diagnostics!" The captain paused for a moment to catch his breath. "Launch will commence," Blood looked at the watch that had turned into a compass, "when the upper half of the needle points 15 degrees off North, and the remaining part of the needle points East. Transmission over. At ease!"

The captain released the button and looked mournfully at his suit.

If there had been a working atmosphere on the ship before the captain went on the air, absolute silence enveloped the ship following his announcement.

The captain's final phrase plunged Cluster and his assistants into boundless bewilderment. They could only stare at each other, blinking like fish flopping on the sand. Shkvarka stared blankly at her reflection in a large frying pan. Flegma looked as if he had just witnessed a new species of cactus-like animal lifeform (colloquially known as a hedgehog). Both pilots remained in shock only briefly. Long years of practice had brought them to an axiom: let the brass do the worrying. After that, they headed to the bridge to prep the ship for launch. The troubles of the ship in general, and the captain in particular, did not concern only Celsius, who was snoring away in the wardroom with a clear conscience.

Having recovered from their immense surprise, the crew began leisurely taking their places. Only the captain stared blankly at his soiled uniform, wondering if there was a dry cleaner anywhere nearby to get this disgusting stain out.

Meanwhile, pilot Povorotov switched on all of the cruiser's onboard systems and cross-referenced instrument readings with reference data from flight manuals. Having verified the data and made sure that the readings did not deviate from the tables by more than 100%, Povorotov used the attitude thrusters to aim the cruiser's bow away from the center of the SDVIG. Ni-Zya checked the ignition and the spark on both nozzles of the new engine. All systems were functioning properly.

"Hey, Ni-Zya! When do you reckon one half of the needle will point 15 degrees North and the other East?" Povorotov asked the navigator.

After a few minutes of contemplation, Ni-Zya replied:

"I think soon."

"More specifically?"

"Well, maybe very soon."

"Could it be right now?"

"Well, no. Wait... wait... wait... probably right now."

"Why are you so sure?"

"Well, uh... woman's intuition."

Povorotov looked closely at the navigator.

"Right. Well then... As the captain said when embarking on his first space patrol: LET'S ROLL!"

The throttle lever hit the "114g" mark.

"'Let's roll'?" the captain managed to think before the desk he was sitting at rose up and slammed into his jaw with full force. At that, the captain's train of thought was severed.

"??????????????" — this thought crossed everyone's mind simultaneously as the ship, instead of moving in a straight line, began to spin. Unfortunately, unexpected troubles cannot be anticipated; if they could, they wouldn't be unexpected. A small but sufficient amount of debris had lodged into the left nozzle, preventing the exhaust of the high-octane, highly-ionized substance from venting out, while the right nozzle was functioning normally, which produced a rotational torque. When the exhaust finally blew the debris out, the ship's left nozzle ramped up to maximum output in a matter of seconds, and the Earth Patrol cruiser Happy Landing darted straight toward the center of the SDVIG.

On the other side of the junkyard, aboard the frigate Magarych, Captain Spiridon was unlocking the wine stores and handing out an unscheduled glass of wine to each crew member. The container had entered the dump's safe zone, and the towing process had been handed over to the automatics. The container's dimensions brought Spiridon indescribable joy. He had never hauled anything this big and this colorful before.

When the Landing's new engine reached cruise mode, both pilots stared in horror at the rapidly approaching core of the pile. At this speed, the cruiser was practically uncontrollable. "This is the end!" thought Povorotov, deciding to spend the last minutes of his life with dignity.

"Assistant Ni-Zya! Call out the distance to the target!"

Having uttered these words, Povorotov slid under the seat, senseless. Copilot Ni-Zya, retaining the remnants of her courage, began to call out the range.

"Seven parsecs..."

"Four parsecs..."

"One parsec..."

"One megameter..."

The mighty chords of a "Requiem" echoed through the ship. The intern, figuring that if you gotta go, you might as well go out to music, pulled out the most powerful synthesizer available and began playing the eternal melody.

"One hundred meters..."

"Half a meter!!!"

Everyone still conscious began singing along with the intern. The cruiser, traveling at a speed no ship had ever clocked in the known Universe, slammed into the center of the SDVIG...

The Garbage Pile had not expected such impudence. As it turned out, the Pile was some sort of insolent organism that occupied a hefty number of parsecs in space and fed exclusively on cosmic waste. Expecting no trickery from the space it occupied, the Pile had been calmly collecting and devouring trash. Therefore, the cruiser that blasted into its belly felt like divine wrath out of the blue to the pile. Offended by the whole wide world and the entire black cosmos, and resolving to wait for better times, the Pile collapsed into a single point, taking all the surrounding junk with it. Due to the Pile's actions, the Happy Landing, hurtling along at an ungodly speed, didn't vanish into a point with all the debris, but simply stopped dead in its tracks...

In the cruiser's galley, a new stainless-steel vat containing some new inedible concoction snapped its mountings and, at cruiser speed, tore through seven multi-inch bulkheads to plug the left nozzle of the new engine.

A few parsecs away from the Happy Landing, the entire crew of the frigate Magarych was glued to the portholes and scanner screens.

"Good Lord!" thought Captain Spiridon. "May thirty-three nebulae cram up my rear if this isn't a dream!!!"

"Captain, careful with that kind of language, you never know..." Bukvar told the captain.

"What language?! Fifteen bottles of rum upon my grave!!! Where is my container?!"

"Well, the whole pile vanished with your container..." Iron Stocking said to Spiridon, gesturing expressively toward where it had gone.

"I don't give a damn where the whole pile went, I need that box!!!"

Bukvar, sitting in the pilot's chair and examining the scene through the terminal, zoomed in and focused the image on the pile's former center. A ship's silhouette appeared on the screen.

"Captain!" he called out. "Look at what's in the center of the former pile—or rather, the former center of the pile."

Spiridon walked over to the screen. Staring at the ship's image, the captain turned redder and redder.

"It's them! They must have taken the whole pile and my container! All hands prepare to board! Bukvar, intercept vector! General quarters!!!"

Aboard the Happy Landing, following the abrupt stop, life was gradually returning to the crew.

Celsius was the first to come around. The day's vicissitudes had left him largely unscathed. The only thing causing him discomfort was the fact that he was completely sober. Slipping his hand into a hiding spot known only to him, he saw with horror that all his liquor reserves had been reduced to a horrific mash.

"Now why would that be?" thought the warrant officer and set off to inspect the rest of the supplies... but having taken his first step toward the first storehouse, he suddenly felt the floor drop out from under him, and not only did he lose it, but he was bound to find it again very shortly... the reunion with the floor happened a bit sooner than the warrant officer anticipated, leaving a clear imprint of his dental bite on the deck. The causes of this were the following occurrences: [1] — a broadside volley from all of the Magarych's guns toward the cruiser Happy Landing, resulting in a plasma burst one meter from the main viewport and partially melting the main bow antenna; [2] — copilot Ni-Zya waking up at the console and pulling the controls back toward himself; [3] — the left nozzle of the new hyper-velocity engine getting clogged. As a result, the bridge crew of the Magarych was utterly dumbfounded when the heavy cruiser pulled off ten anti-aircraft evasive maneuvers not seen since the Second Intergalactic War, and vanished into hyperspace on the eleventh...

...after a thirty-minute delay on the bridge of the Magarych, preparations for entering subspace were finally completed, and the Magarych dashed off in pursuit.

4

When the going gets tough, everyone bails.

— Unknown author.

"Happy Landing" managed to pull away by a few hours of flight (after all, its engines were somewhat better) and the crew had at least some time to prepare for combat operations. Blud gathered everyone on the bridge. "Everyone take your battle stations according to the muster roll! Bring systems to readiness state number 0.9! Povorotov — helm, Ni-Zya — first gunner, Nibe-Nime — second gunner, Cluster — defense and tactical strategy, all the rest at the disposal of the aforementioned."

Everyone scattered to their stations. And while everyone is preparing for the aforementioned actions (namely, combat ones), we will tell the reader about what the defensive and offensive systems of the ship "Happy Landing", installed on the cruiser by Chinese specialists, actually consist of.

Imagine a somewhat elongated flying washbasin with wings, a tail, long-range communication antennas, and a keel tail stuck underneath, designed to stabilize the ship in space.

On each side of the ship were 48 upgraded rapid-fire mega-laser cannons. In addition, above the tier of gun embrasures, there was a tier, or rather even a section, or... or still a tier of somewhat simpler cannons, but they could only blow to pieces a small planet comparable to Earth's Moon, which is why they are mainly used as anti-meteorite defense. Atop the ship on a huge swivel sits a matter and antimatter integrator. At first glance, it looks like an enormous double-barreled shotgun with cocked hammers. A few words about this contraption: it was designed in Russia at the International Underground Center for Moonshining and Yeast Processing, then stolen by an American spy and sold to Japanese specialists, where it was refined, documented, and translated (with certain tolerances) into Japanese, then it was stolen by Chinese specialists doing an internship in Japan, and some hieroglyphs acquired allegorical meanings. After all the metal parts were removed from the casing and replaced with plastic ones, Russian intelligence officer Nenadevaivalenkinanoch approached it, who stole the unit by posing as a local shaman and handed it over to resident agent Neprisheikobylekhvost; thus the device ended up back in Russia, where it was slightly modified, classified "Top Secret", given a plaque by the biggest red button saying "Not sure — do not press", a stamp on the side "Made in Russia", and a sign "Beware of vicious dog", and under the sign was a picture of a cabaret lady popular at the time. And so, as a result of the cannon migrating from one country to another, it acquired several functions that were completely absent from the manual (written in five languages: Russian, English, Japanese, Chinese, and Paraguayan (since rumors had it that Paraguayan cockroach-breeding specialists also had a hand in the cannon)). Therefore, there was a certain probability of triggering the hidden capabilities of this apparatus. That, in general, is the entire description of the armament of "Happy Landing". But let us return to Captain Blud and his crew.

"To your stations, slackers!" Blud barked loudly. "Stop running around here!"

"You're ruining my mood!" he whined, flopping into the command chair and changing his color to camouflage... Finally, when only crew members remained on the bridge and everyone else had been successfully shoved into cabins, Cluster began the report.

"Captain, we've ended up in open space, there's nowhere to hide here... Oh no, Cap, look — over there is a planetary cluster and a small asteroid belt not far from here."

"Where?!!! Where???! shouted the trainee, trembling like an aspen leaf and peering into the distance of space.

"Nah, you won't spot it like that," a lisp came from above, out of the ventilation ducts... The captain jumped, rolled behind the chair, whipped out his blaster, and... saw the kind eyes of Celsius looking at him from the hatch.

"Idiot! Offspring of a Pithecanthropus! Your grandmother's failed experiment! Mmmm... mmmm... mmmmm... khr-r-r-r, Ow-w-w-w!" yelled Blud a few seconds later.

"Now then, my dear fellow, climb down from up there," Povorotov dropped weightily, aiming a boot carefully at Celsius.

"As you were!" shouted Blud. "Stop the lynch mob! I am the one who will judge here!!!... But on behalf of the government," he corrected himself immediately.

"Why, I'd be glad to," the praporshchik answered modestly, "but unfortunately..." here he sniffed... "strange, a remarkably familiar smell"... well, let's get back to our conversation... (here Celsius observed a certain change in the crew's faces, particularly Cluster and Nibe-Nime began to shift expression and slowly turn green)... "strange, where have I encountered this smell before?" thought the praporshchik meanwhile... And then Blud looked at him and uttered in a dull, indifferent voice:

"Praporshchik, did you take off your boots?.."

"Well, what gentleman doesn't take off his boots?!" the praporshchik answered modestly...

...they say soldiers get dressed while a match burns... but one can get dressed much faster, for example, the crew of the cruiser "Happy Landing" put on full chemical protection suits while, say, just the sulfur head of a match burned... After the smell subsided a bit and one could see one's neighbor, Probirka and Menzurka were summoned on alert and given an order:

"Disinfect the praporshchik and the ship; report upon completion."

And once again we will temporarily leave the crew of "Happy Landing" feverishly clicking toggle switches, levers, switches, joints, and jaws, and see what is happening aboard "Magarych"...

"...I'll shoot you, hang you by the suspensions, exile you to the Sun!" shouted Spiridon (the thing was that during the transition to subspace he yawned, and consequently bit off a chunk of the steering wheel, which did not hesitate to travel down his esophagus acting as a piston. And now Spiridon sat hungry as a beast, gloomily squelching his backside.) "Why, from your [censored] I'll make [censored], and stop [censored] around here, or else [censored], [censored], and [censored] [censored] [censored] [censored]!

Bukvar, [censored], check the radars and find those [censored] with my container!"

Bukvar adjusted his glasses, wiped them with a handkerchief, spat lustily onto the radar screen, wiped it with his sleeve, after which he fixed his gaze upon it and reported in a joyful voice:

"Cap! Spiridon! I see them, I see them very well indeed, and they're heading towards a star cluster in the border regions of the galaxy, and over there we might lose them!" Bukvar delivered this sentence in the voice of a Pithecanthropus who hadn't had lunch in a very long time.

"Take it away and Catch up!" Spiridon ordered...

"No, first Catch up, and then take it away!" he corrected himself a moment later.

And right then Zhelezny Chulok (oh, those women...), with a cry of "[censored]", yanked the emergency launch lever toward herself all the way to the "14Gg" mark, and Spiridon flew along a short arc ending at a long yellow-and-black lever labeled "Never use", and with a loud squelch landed right on it under the label "Emergency Brake", which, however, corresponded to reality...

As a result of this, Bukvar had to test Newton's Third Law in practice, and his glasses departed this life. And Bukvar began gloomily poking his fingers into the keyboard; it must be said that the keyboard was sticky, cold, and furthermore stank. And since some keys were sticking, they had to be pried out, which naturally required leaning against other keys that had nothing to do with the matter. And so, raising a hand that was by no means majestic (simply swinging his arm), Bukvar pressed a button... The button turned out to be what is situated between a woman's biceps, but what's more, that woman turned out to be Messalina passing by! With a broad, purely Russian gesture, Messalina swung her arm... As a light billiard ball strikes the cushion and then drops into the pocket, so Bukvar crashed into the viewscreen and then landed right in Zhelezny Chulok's chair, clipping the emergency launch lever on the way. And the captain, who had just been about to express his thoughts regarding his landing on the lever, gloomily squelching his [censored], began to accelerate. And along that same short arc he made another flight, only this time instead of a lever, he slammed with his single iron tooth straight into the "identification device". Normally Spiridon inserted a key into it, but strangely enough, the device worked: a blue flash of lightning sparked between Spiridon's iron tooth and the tip of his nose, a crackle was heard, a smell of singed fur was sniffed, and the light "Combat Readiness State Number Absolute First" lit up. The crew stopped their brawling, and to the sound of wailing sirens everyone took their seats. Hands flipped toggle switches and levers, feet crushed cockroaches, and eyes stared excitedly at the viewscreen...

But let us return to "Happy Landing". All preparations for battle were already finished on it, and the folks had even achieved some semblance of coordination in what had to be done. And what had to be done was this: aim the annihilator at "Magarych" and press the RIGHT BUTTONS! The pilots somehow managed the first part, but as for what to do next, nobody knew... Aboard "Magarych", in turn, there was also a delay — they were searching for Bukvar's glasses... and right then, three kiloparsecs away from our heroes, a huge flash occurred — an enormous fleet from the WANDERING NEBULA transitioned into our galaxy. To an urgent query sent to Galactic Center, a strange reply arrived from Major Sadovnichiy: "No sweat, we'll tough it out...". Two ships and an enemy armada hung in space facing one another....

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║ AND WITH THAT, DEAR FRIENDS, THIS TALE ║
║HAS COME TO ITS HAPPY END, AS I WISH FOR║
║YOU AS WELL.                            ║
║ READ THE NEXT COLUMN !!!               ║
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