Continuation of the Novella "Captain Blood". Part II

CONTINUATION OF THE NOVELLA "CAPTAIN BLOOD"

PART II

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║            "CAPTAIN BLOOD"             ║
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║                PART II                 ║
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But, as always, nobody knew anything. Then Nibe-Nime stepped out of the ranks and muttered, "I understand something, but I can't quite understand what I understood and what I didn't understand, did anybody understand me?" Then Gradus or Celsius, with a sweet smile resembling more of a friendly pithecanthropus grin, said: "Listen here, pal, if you don't explain to us right this second what to do, you'll have as many holes in you as a good colander!" Nibe-Nime, glancing sideways at the gun, said (in English): "Well guys, although I don't understand anything, I can still tell you something..." And since nobody knew English, the following happened: Menzurka promised to give him a 6-liter enema, Probirka promised to perish from eternal ecstasy, Shkvarka promised to serve an extra-duty portion, Povorotov and Ni-Zya promised that if he didn't tell them right now what to do, they would use him as landing gear. The trainee, getting scared: "Alright, alright, I'll tell you everything right now, it seems to me... That the ship needs to be disassembled, and the shovels buried..."

With the cry "Breaking is easier than building, building is harder than breaking!" the crew rushed at the ship...

When the captain crystallized again, the ship had been dug up and assembled, and the whole crew was sitting around Shkvarka, who was treating them to another dish from the book Tasty and Healthy Food from Non-Food Items. A bit to the side sat the ship's passenger, Professor of Botany Flegma, who with great pleasure was eating his portion of the pre-flight lunch and reading his favorite book, Pistils and Stamens of the Galaxy's Border Regions and Methods of Their Reproduction.

By the time the captain got to his feet, everyone had finished lunch, and Shkvarka had retired to the ship's galley.

It takes a lot of energy to precipitate and crystallize afterward, so the captain was sluggish and said in a sleepy voice:

— Everyone take your seats on the ship, until launch there is left... — the captain looked at his watch and saw, that is, saw nothing except a juicy fig-sign. Blood sighed and continued:

— Basically, takeoff is soon.

Everyone headed to the ship to take their seats. The First Mate, who had been waiting for this moment since early morning, bounded toward the ship's computer in huge leaps shouting "GAMES..! GAMES..! GAMES..!"

When none of the crew members were left outside, Blood entered the airlock, closed the door—pinching his finger in the process—and headed to the galley to grab a bite. Fortunately for him, Shkvarka had stepped away somewhere, and the captain, at a speed exceeding that of an express train, began rummaging through cabinets, shelves, and nightstands in search of something edible. After a couple of minutes, he discovered something unrecognizable, but smelling the least foul.

Quickly swallowing what he had found, the captain headed to the bridge to take his seat, but on the way he began experiencing cramps around the area of his trouser button, and with the words: "How pleasant and fresh it smells In the house marked M and L!"* he turned into the water closet.

Meanwhile, on the bridge, the final stage of preparing the ship for flight was in full swing. Since the captain had said takeoff would be soon, Senior Lieutenant Povorotov, looking at the ship's compass, decided that "Soon" had already arrived and yanked the lever toward himself to the "14_G" mark, beside which was scribbled: "Death to all living things! If not sure — do not push!"

...Everyone managed to strap into their anti-g-force seats, except the captain, who was sitting in the latrine during launch...

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PART TWO, OR THE ADVENTURES CONTINUE...

1

Have you ever tried launching at 14g while sitting on the toilet? No? You're lucky, unlike the cap of the ship "Happy Landing", who, by an unfortunate misunderstanding, was in the latrine at the moment of launch. The captain got sucked in right up to his ears.

When the g-forces ended, Celsius, having gotten lost inside the ship, was walking down the corridor without a care in the world. Suddenly he saw a door marked "WC" and heard huffing and puffing sounds coming from within. He thought that it had been a long time since he'd visited the restroom and that it was high time he went.

Carefully closing the door behind him, Celsius pulled down his pants and stepped up to the toilet. Out of the bowl, with a cynical sparkle in them, the captain's clever and piercing eyes stared up at him. "Oh boy, mirages here too," thought the warrant officer and decided to pay no mind.

A few minutes passed before First Mate Cluster showed up, who, seeing Blood's eyes, decided he had spent too much time at the computer today. After Cluster, Povorotov entered the restroom—and hearing muffled gurgling, lifted his backside in surprise. "No, 14g was too much, my roof must have blown off from that," he thought and pressed the flush. After which, without looking back, he walked out of the restroom.

We will not bore the reader with a story of the events of the following hour. Let's just say that all the male members of the crew visited the facilities...

Finally, after the initial hours of the launch, so difficult for the crew, a quiet life settled over the ship. Everyone gathered in the wardroom. The wardroom was a magnificent sight: it was a large white hall furnished with armchairs, cots, and other furniture. On the wall hung a panel with a multitude of buttons, installed here by Chinese specialists, and in the middle of the wardroom stood a pretty white table with a round-square hole in the center. On the wall beneath the sign "Use only in extreme emergency" hung a sledgehammer.

Arriving in the wardroom, everyone sat down and, awaiting the cap and further orders, began minding their own business—namely: Cluster and Nibe-Nime were studying the panel installed by the Chinese specialists, Povorotov and Ni-Zya were enthusiastically arguing about the possibility of landing an An-24 in a sandbox, Flegma and Shkvarka were debating which was better—cannibalism or vegetarianism, Menzurka and Probirka were administering some injections to Cluster's mouse. When heavy footsteps were heard in the corridor and a voice recited, "I've had you all, what more is there to say...", everyone looked at the door in astonishment. In the doorway stood something remotely resembling a human being...

After a brief general bewilderment, Nibe-Nime said: "From the point of view of the probabilistic theory of incredible coincidences of anthropological research, this is a humanoid! And this humanoid knows our language! But who could it be?" He glanced quizzically at Professor Flegma. "Maybe you have a theory?" he asked after a short pause. "Me? Ah, well yes, of course," said the professor with a blank stare, "let's build logical chains: aha, no, hm, well, there, no, aha, aha, aha, there, everything has fallen into place!" "Before us is our unhinged cap!! Hallucinations bide their time in there..." the cap continued in the meantime.

"He needs shock therapy!" Probirka and Menzurka declared in unison, and grabbing Blood by the arms, dragged him away. They started by bringing a 10-liter enema and administering it to the cap, after which they forced him to eat a bucket of laxative, and finally, without a second thought, plugged him into the local power grid. After the electroshock, the captain finally came to his senses and crawled out into the wardroom. "You don't know me yet!!! Perhaps you only know me from my good side, but you will soon get to know me from my bad side too!!!" screamed the captain, after which he staggered away toward the bridge.

Meanwhile, Flegma was inquiring briskly of the medics how they had managed to bring Blood around, to which he received a briefing on the latest medical breakthroughs in the field of shock therapy. "How much did you give him, anyway?" the professor asked toward the end of the conversation. "Why are you pestering us?" Menzurka replied indignantly. "Whatever we had, that's what we gave him?!?!" After a short inquiry, it turned out that they had given the captain four times more than he could endure. Nobody could wrap their head around it, but soon everyone calmed down...

2

No one expected an alarm.

Everyone froze in the exact positions they were in. The ensign felt sick, dropped to the floor, and began muttering incoherently: "We're doomed, everything is going to hell, the end, disaster, we're done for."

The captain, putting on a cheerful grimace, his voice faltering yet merry, feeling his hair standing on end all over his body, announced: "Do not panic. Just don't panic." After which he shot out of the mess hall like a bullet. Everyone in the room, shouting and swearing in different languages at a speed that would make Earth's finest Galactic Cruiser envious, rushed out after the captain. Only Warrant Officer Celsius remained in the room.

"Everything is going to hell," muttered the ensign. After which, from a stash known only to him, he produced a flask bearing a colorful label: Raving Rhino Blood.

Having left the mess hall, Blood bolted to the bridge to find out what had happened. But he knew for certain that something irreparable and terrible had occurred, and if the public ever caught wind of it, he would face severe repercussions.

Ruminating in this vein, the captain burst onto the bridge. Before he could assess the situation, he found himself falling to the floor, knocked off his feet by the stampede following him. Furthermore, each of them, pretending not to notice a thing, thoroughly wiped their feet on the captain. Professor Phlegm, whose polite upbringing would not allow him to overlook the captain, helped Blood to his feet and weighty pronounced:

"If anything can go wrong, it will."

After which, pretending nothing in the world interested him, he buried himself in his favorite book.

Having tidied himself up slightly and flopped into his chair, Blood began: "Cluster—report the situation!" Cluster enthusiastically pounded the keys, and the computer printed on the screen: Ok. Awaiting questions. After that, the dialogue between the computer and Cluster went as follows:

— Give me the coordinates!
— Ask me an easier one!
— What? Want a screwdriver shoved into the disk drive?
— All right, got it, coordinates 10-24-15x.

"Cap," said Cluster, "you can't make heads or tails of this without a stiff drink!" "Yes, the main thing is not to overdo it," mumbled Gradus alias Celsius, materializing in the doorway. "The coordinates, damn your grandmother!" roared the captain, shifting his skin tone to camouflage green along the way. Cluster hurriedly read off the numbers glowing on the display.

Blood cast a brooding look over everyone and, raising his index finger, proclaimed: "We have ended up in the Great Dump, the Great Scrapheap, the Scrapheap of Diluvian Vintages and Intergalactic Garbage (abbreviated as SDVIG, the SHIFT). Times and spaces are tangled here, right and left, up and down, north and south, plus and minus, and generally everything that can be mixed up. In short, anyone who ever fell in here was never seen again by anyone..."

"Everything that begins well ends badly; everything that begins badly ends even worse," pronounced the professor and went back to his book.

Meanwhile, Blood managed to suppress the trembling in his knees and the sagging of his jaw, commanding: "Crew stays on the bridge, the rest to their quarters!" After kicking everyone out and shoving them into their cabins, the crew gathered on the bridge once more. Everyone took their seats, and Blood began:

"In principle, the Dump should be a closed oval, or even a circle, drawing in matter and reducing it to zero at the center!" Suddenly the intern, whom everyone had forgotten about, burst into tears: "Bwaaa-haaa-haaa, I don't waaaannna be reduced to ze-e-erooo! I want my mommyyyy!" "Be a man," said Povorotov, shoving a harmonica into his mouth, on which Nibe-Nime cheerfully began playing the hymn Boldly, Comrades, in Step.

...Ni-Zya was twisting the dials of the radio station, trying to contact anyone at all, but the airwaves were dead silent... Suddenly he looked up at them and spoke... Everyone rushed to congratulate him, hug him, and say he was beginning to show promise! Blood walked up to the intercom and barked: "PROFESSOR PHLEGM! REPORT TO THE BRIDGE!" Yes, dear readers, that phrase was uttered in that historic tone in which orders are given and the fates of galaxies are sealed...

Thanks to its modest initial velocity, the ship hadn't flown too deep into SDVIG. Thus, it was drifting along an elongated ellipse just a couple of parsecs from the heap's edge.

But let us leave our heroic crew for a moment and see what is happening around them...

3

Everything that had ever been discarded into Space ended up in the Heap sooner or later. Therefore, the scenery around the ship was utterly fantastic. In the immediate vicinity of the vessel, tin cans of every possible variety circled like a swarm of insects. A little further out were fragments of various starships from known and unknown Galaxies. All around, cosmic detritus drifted in abundance: meteorites, chunks of stellar matter, icy fragments of comets. But the vast majority of the Heap was just plain trash.

However, if you assumed that SDVIG and its environs were entirely deserted due to its perils, you would be sorely mistaken. On the opposite side from where the Happy Landing had drifted in, dangerously close to the Dump, hovered another ship of distinctly Earthly origin. Along its hull, the name was scrawled in uneven lettering: MAGARYCH. If you were to look up the Great Miscellaneous Encyclopedia of Moving Objects, you would find the following entry regarding the ship Magarych: "A medium-class 3X-F frigate, formerly owned by an Earth corporation, but stolen ten years ago by the notorious pirate Spiridon; currently listed on the all-galactic wanted bulletin under code XXX. This index indicates that any ship sighting the Magarych must immediately destroy it as a hazard to surrounding reality."

It should be noted that it was currently the off-season (large transport ships rarely left their spaceports), so the ship's captain, Spiridon, was engaged in an endeavor not particularly noble, yet fairly lucrative: fishing interesting items out of the Dump. Right now, the crew was busy trying to retrieve a large container adorned with very pretty stickers, which had caught Captain Spiridon's eye in the first place.

And now, back to the crew of the Happy Landing...

The professor did not keep them waiting long and appeared on the bridge about fifteen minutes later, thoroughly examining an illustration in his new book, Invertebrates of the 3rd Minor Arm of the 4th Great Nebula.

"You called for me?" asked Phlegm.

"Look out the window, Professor," said the captain. "What do you see there?"

"Hm... a tin can... a scrap of the newspaper MOOSE-Express... a pile of something dark... yes... aha... pebbles, little stones, rocks..."

"Not that, you fool!" roared the captain. "Look! Right there!" The captain was growing increasingly agitated.

"Where?"
"Right there!"
"Where, exactly?!"
"Right right there!"
"Oh, there!"
"Finally."
"Ah... why, that is a specimen of the wingless fliers from planet XX-37X, according to Galactic specifications."

The captain howled and nearly collapsed into a stupor, but with the last shreds of his willpower, he brought himself under control and spoke in a completely otherworldly voice:

"Do you see an engine outside the viewport? Or should I crack the window open so you can get a better look?"

Phlegm, frightened by the sudden shift in the captain's tone, timidly asked:

"Perhaps if we do open the window..."

The captain fainted dead away.

When Blood came to, he saw that Phlegm, with the aid of the entire crew, had finally spotted through the viewport: "Heavy Hyperlight Engine. Installation on vessels under 100 tons is strictly prohibited"—as stated on the tag that took up most of the view outside.

"So then, Professor, your task is to figure out whether we can fit this engine onto our ship..."

"But it explicitly says 'not under 100 tons'..."

"Naturally, ignoring what it says," the captain pressed on.

"I shall ponder it," replied a bewildered Phlegm.

"There's no time to ponder!" the captain snapped back into his gruff manner.

"Mounting that engine is just a drawn-out method of suicide," the insulted professor replied in the same tone.

"Splendid," rejoiced the captain. "Povorotov, execute an intercept maneuver. Ni-Zya and Nibe-Nime, prep the grapples for the engine. Cluster is appointed chief of engine integration into the ship's systems; the medics are placed at Cluster's sole and absolute disposal as assistants."

Buoyed by the hope that they might actually get out of SDVIG, the crew scattered to their duty stations. Only the professor, ambling along at a leisurely pace and engrossed in the illustration in his book, drifted off in a direction known only to the devil himself. The captain was banging his head against a cast-iron bulkhead: the Professor was definitely driving him up the wall.

The navigator of the Magarych, Bukvar, having executed a rather sloppy maneuver, closed in as much as possible on the heap. Captain Spiridon watched the colorful container with a pounding heart.

"Boarding party! Saddle up!" the captain's shaking voice echoed over the ship's comms.

"Again!" grumbled the party leader, known for operational security reasons as Iron Stocking.

"Here we go again!" groaned the junior member of the squad, the 29th Panfilovite.

And at an unhurried jog, they headed for the harpoon cannons.

Meanwhile, Spiridon continued issuing commands:

"Guns 1 through 7 grapple the upper fourth corner; distribute the remaining guns among the other corners of the container!"

Having carefully aimed the first seven guns at the upper fourth corner, Stocking fired the boarding nets. However, for some reason, eight guns went off, which wasn't part of the plan. Because of this, seven nets missed entirely, but the eighth hit the exact center of the container. As a result, the container was shoved a couple of kilometers deeper into SDVIG.

"Jackasses! Dunces! Morons! My container!"

Spiridon was clearly not in a good mood. He headed down to the gun decks to demonstrate how real shooting was done.

"Out of the way of the guns!" the captain said politely as he popped through the hatch. "Watch and learn!" he added, striding up to the controls.

Spiridon swiftly laid all 36 port guns onto the container and fired a synchronized volley. A kilometer away from the target, the energy nets began unfurling.

"Aha! See that? That's how you shoot! Take notes, greenhorns! I'll make proper pirates out of you yet!"

Meanwhile, flying in a dense cluster, the unfurling nets began tangling with each other. The closer they got to the target, the more snarled they became. A few dozen meters away from the objective, the nets balled up into a solid knot, began losing their charge, stalled out, and finally dissipated completely.

"I know how to dig it out of there!" shouted the 29th. "Let me take a shot!"

The efforts to recover the container dragged on.

On the other side of the SHIFT, intense work was underway on and around the "Happy Landing". The "Big Hyperdrive" had already been towed to the ship and cleared of debris, and Cluster and his assistants were working on connecting the drive to the ship's systems.

The gigantic task of catching the colorful container was nearing completion. On the hundred-somethingth attempt, the crate was finally snagged by boarding nets and was now slowly but surely being pulled toward the side of the "Magarych".

"Come on, darlings, easy now, let's go!" Captain Spiridon fussed. The container was already just a couple of parsecs away from the ship.

"Connection of the BHD to the ship's systems is complete," Cluster reported to the captain.

"Connection of what?" the captain didn't understand.

"The BHD!"

"Huh?"

"Well, this contraption right here," Cluster explained, and after wiping his hands on the captain's snow-white frock coat, waved a hand toward the drive.

"I see," the captain drawled, thoughtfully examining his dress uniform, which he had put on for the occasion of his imminent rescue from the SHIFT.

Still with the same thoughtful expression, stroking the soiled spot with his hand, Blood headed to his cabin to ponder his new pre-launch speech.

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