Eejit: A Tale of the Final Fall of Man Read Free Page B

activated the intercept scoop. Because even if it was a rock, it had an atypical profile and was moving at atypical speed, and why waste time deflecting it when you could grab it and see if it was worth something? They might as well use the ship systems that still worked properly.
    Then he finished going to the toilet.
    He was washing his hands when Contro buzzed him from the engine room. The call came through on – yes – workstation 19.
    “Hi!”
    “Die in a fire,” Waffa said matter-of-factly, then tapped his watch to open comms. “Hey Chief,” technically they were both Chief Officers, but Chief Engineer was considerably more prestigious – not to mention definitively Chief – than Chief of Security and Operations, which was a title somewhere beneath Sally’s Chief Tactical Officer umbrella. Theirs was a ship of Chief Officers, these days, even if hardly any of them were actually officer-trained in any way.
    “So there’s an alarm happening, huh?” Contro said cheerfully, and punctuated his question with a laugh. “Ha ha!”
    Waffa shuddered, and locked eyes with himself in the mirror before answering very steadily. “Yep.”
    “Anything I need to worry about?”
    “Only if you’re worried about the ship getting a hole bored through it by a piece of frozen star moving at a few thousand feet per second,” he said, in his brain. “Which you’re not, are you?” In reality, however, he said, “Nah Chief, I’ve already set the catchers. As soon as I get confirmation that they’ve got hold of the rock, I’ll turn off the alarm.”
    “Righto!” Contro, with what you might call a troublingly characteristic lack of social awareness, had picked up the expression from Doctor Cratch and it was a tough call as to which of the two – Contro, or the Rip – made the jolly exclamation sound more horrible. “Ha ha! Excellent job, Mister Waffa!”
    “No worries,” Waffa said, still staring at himself steadily and wondering, not for the first or fifth of two-hundredth time, whether it was somehow possible for an eejit to glitch so spectacularly that it came out looking like a little smiling man with a round face, a penchant for cardigans and the interpersonal skills of an amphetamine-addicted chipmunk. And then somehow pass itself off as human. “I’ll just–”
    “Oh! I almost forgot, there’s also a few flashing lights and stuff down here, the yellow ones on the whatsit panel, the one with the outline of the ship on it, you know the one.”
    “Yeah,” Waffa said, “those are the same alarm, they just flash in case there are people who can’t hear the siren. It means the ship’s not aborting its acceleration process, but that the countermeasures are – that the catchers are going to grab the rock and we’ll continue on our way. They’ll all go off when I turn off the alarm.”
    “Righto!”
    “Ping me back if I switch off the alarm and the lights keep flashing, though,” Waffa said, and instantly regretted it.
    “Oh! Why will the lights keep flashing?”
    “They won’t – they shouldn’t – but–”
    “What should I do to stop them?”
    “Nothing. Contact me again.”
    “Righto, so the alarm will stop but the lights will keep flashing, but what does that mean ?”
    “It doesn’t – they won’t keep flashing, the alarm and the lights will all stop together, but if the lights keep flashing–”
    “Yes I know! What then?”
    Waffa gritted his teeth. “Contact me.”
    “Can’t we just deal with it now? Why should I hang up and then call you again? Ha ha! That’s very inefficient, Mister Waffa!”
    Waffa took a few deep breaths, then continued. “Alright, Chief,” he said, “let’s do that. I’ll deactivate the alarm – the noise and the lights – as soon as the incoming bit of space debris that caused the alarm is safely in our catchers. Problem sorted. Alright?”
    “Okay then! Sounds good.”
    Waffa tapped his wrist, slumped against the toilet wall and sighed. A tall