Orpo Van Heusen did not want to be on a Coalition corvette

He also did not want to be held captive by the Khanate’s thugs.

And in particular, he did not want to have a nerve disruptor discharged into his lower back on any setting, even the lowest ‘shock’ that the round-cheeked thug behind him had just fired.

Through the red mist that danced in his eyes, Orpo struggled to keep his ears open and not throw up across the deck plating.

“Second!” barked the officer-thug, a tall and gaunt man who resembled a knife blade. “This slime will not perform his function if you kill him.” Any thoughts of benevolent grace were brutally driven out by a rifle-butt placed right where his nerves were still dancing from the electrical discharge. As Orpo sprawled out across the deck and tried not to retch, the officer continued to berate his subordinate, mixing in a few blood-thirsty threats with his blistering profanity. Once his supposed ally was properly squelched, the officer grabbed Orpo by the back of his hair and dragged him over to the engineering station, which was lit up with more red lights than a shore leave pleasure street.

“Slime will fix the fusion reactor or you will be exterminated,” he barked. “Previous crew attempted to damage it before we liberated this vessel for the Khan and spaced them. Fix the damage or die.”

Orpo stumbled forward into the engineering seat and stared at the blinking lights and readouts, tabbing through several status screens filled with errors and strobing alerts despite the blazing fire that seemed to cover his entire back. After gingerly touching several of the indicators and taking some time to recover, he turned the seat and faced his captors, each of which had a weapon of various lethalities trained on him.

“All of these controls are supposed to be monitored by the ship’s AI.” He waved a hand at a full screen of pure blinking redness. “There must be some sort of failed circuit—”

“The mechanical intelligence in this ship has been executed,” snapped the Khanate officer. “All systems are on auxiliary control.”

“Executed?” said Orpo with the intent of cautiously going further down his line of inquiry. That idea died quickly when the officer pulled a plasma arc from a leg holster and sighted down it, as if he intended on blowing a certain nosy engineer’s head off.

“Our captain melted the abomination down, then jettisoned the escape pods,” said the officer in the same cold fashion. “We will return to our clan in victory or die. No mechanical brain can be trusted to be loyal to the Khanate.”

“Without the AI, I can’t fix the reactor,” he started in clipped tones without a pause, “but I can baby it along, keep it functioning until we reach a maintenance facility.”

“You will fix it, then take your place among your crewmates in the brig,” said the officer, still pointing the plasma arc between Orpo’s eyes. “Our Khan will reward us for bringing him such valuable slaves.”

“If I fix it as much as I can without spare parts or engineering assistants—” like my crewmate your fellow thugs blew apart when you boarded our freighter “—the fusion bottle will only fail again while I’m not watching it. This time, it might not go into emergency shutdown mode. It might just rupture and kill us all. And I want to live.”

His last words were spoken with as much emotion as Orpo could force into his voice. He expected them to be his actual last words if the disgusted expression on the Khanate officer’s face was any indication, but after a few long moments, the tall man slipped the weapon back into its holster and issued his ultimatum.

“We have seized all of the engineering spares from your vessel. They will be made available to you to expedite repairs. You have an hour.”

Rather than the lethal option of telling the thug to go pound sand, Orpo turned back to his panel and regarded it with a tense urgency. “The spares from our freighter won’t cut it. The military grade magnetic containment is leaking in three places, you’ve got a dozen plasma focusers out of alignment, and the deet injectors are eroded like they’ve been run over temperature for several days. This isn’t just sabotage by the previous crew. Somebody stupid has been running this board.”

The officer’s eyes flickered to the other thug, who looked as if he were about to shoot Orpo again just out of spite, only this time with the nerve disruptor turned to lethal. The officer shifted position to place the muzzle of his rifle squarely on the round-cheeked soldier’s back and spoke with an air of command that the weapon only emphasized.

“Skull Bambar, you commanded this duty station for the last half-period. Did you damage our power source so we would be helpless against the Enemy?”

While the thug gasped for words, Orpo checked a few more relays on his chair. “Sir, it doesn’t look intentional. I’ve seen similar issues with cadets at the Academy.”

“Do you hear?” The officer prodded his subordinate with the muzzle of his rifle. “Slime defends your honor, so you have the honor of slime. Since you have fallen, you shall have no title until we reach our destination. If this one dies, you die. If this one is injured, you will be injured too.”

“When we reach our destination, will I be given the opportunity to regain my honor in his blood?” asked Bambar in what seemed to be a ritual question that was far too close for Orpo’s comfort.

“If you can pay the price, his blood will be yours to spill.” The thin officer looked at Orpo with unmistakable contempt. “An engineer will be valuable indeed.”

“I will spend all I have and all I can claim,” said Bambar. “My blood is the Khan’s.”

“Witnessed and sworn.” The officer took his rifle out from between the shoulderblades of his subordinate and turned it back to Orpo, which did not seem to be any more friendly a gesture. “Slime will repair what he can. We will watch and judge. Perform well and you will survive until tomorrow.”

---

The electrical and control systems were different than what Orpo was used to, but still close enough than he only had to consult his sleeve about half of the time. Spare parts were a different matter. The Coalition corvette had spare parts, but Bambar had done a bang-up job of melting or abusing all of them that he could get his hands on, then proceeded to install the new parts without even considering what had caused the old ones to fail. The thought of simply forcing a fusion bottle breach occurred to him several times, particularly when fighting a surge that threatened to do it for him. It certainly would kill the dozen Khanates on board, but also the thirty or so freighter crew that they had locked into the brig, friends that Orpo wished to save.

The captain of The Merry Snark had voluntarally responded to the corvette’s request for a spare part for the recycling system, but once docked, the boarding party that swept aboard was anything but Coalition. The captain and the first officer had been the only armed crewmembers, and despite the boarders having a half-dozen suits of powered armor in their assault, the two officers had somehow managed to kill five of the attackers.

The rest of the crew had been forced to watch the fate of their captain and three random crewmembers as the Khanates took out their frustrations, and from the low vibration in the deckplates while Orpo was being dragged to the engineering spaces, a torpedo had taken care of any remaining evidence of their assault.

The Coalition might not even know they had been captured. If left to their own devices, the Khanates might still manage to get their crippled corvette over the border to their own territory. It held recognition codes, weapons, and whatever they had looted from the freighter in their orgy of violence. Worse, the Khanates had to have been high-value prisoners being transported back to a core world for interrogation. Such a small victory would certainly not win the smoldering on again/off again war, but it would kill far more people than a simple freighter could hold.

The thought held him captive while Orpo programmed and bypassed, bringing the fusion reactor up to a thready half-power that still gave the occasional surge or wobble in the magnetic containment. Triggering it into overload and destroying the ship would not be instantaneous, despite the lack of an AI. An alert or even semi-alert thug with knowledge of engineering would easily be able to shoot him and still have time to shut down the reactor, which would damage it, but not destroy the ship. If the belligerent thug who had manhandled the controls up until now could keep it running at even partial power, the ship with its stolen secrets would be gone and his friends from the The Merry Snark sent into unrecoverable slavery.

Unless…

“I think I can give you three-quarters without blowing anything up.” Orpo tapped the collection of red and orange warning lights on the console screen. “That should be enough to run the drive at full, or the weapons and shields for a brief engagement, but that’s all. There’s enough harmonics because of the damaged components that I’ll have to baby it along.” He gave his Khanate counterpart a bland stare. “Provided you can keep his hands off the controls.”

Although Bambar’s hands twitched, he did not point his weapon directly at Orpo again, most probably because his superior officer would have blown him in half.

“Your value as an engineer goes up the more power you are able to produce,” stated the officer plainly as if he were declaring that liver was going to be served for lunch. “Your survival once we reach our destination will depend on how much you are worth. Consider that as you manage the engines. Bambar will watch you, and esure you do not fail.”

The thug growled, “The moment that power indicator drops below half—” The sharp jab of a rifle in his back made Bambar stop, take a snarling breath, and continue. “If the power drops, I will notify my Respectful Superior.”

“Very good.” The tall officer turned and walked away with no further comment, vanishing into the corridor with the hatch closed and dogged behind him. Bambar waited for a moment, then lifted his nerve disruptor with a practiced sneer.

Orpo turned his back and began working his way through control menus while waiting for another disruptor charge, only lethal. “I wouldn’t,” he cautioned. “The bridge is most likely monitoring our actions.”

“It would be worth the punishment,” snarled the Khanate behind him, although the reflection in the control panel showed he was reluctantly lowering his weapon. “If you deceive us, you will die in pain beyond comprehension.”

Keeping his face neutral, Orpo returned to his work. The rhythmic tremor of the drive beneath him started in a few minutes, which he checked against the power flow from the reactor and began to log. All of the ship systems were interconnected, which would be a good thing once he started on his plan. For now, all he did was map out the power flows and assign priorities, from life support to drive and weapons systems.

The Khanates loved the weapon systems of the corvette. There were already a series of blinking requests to charge them queued up on the console, so Orpo assigned a few of them power, and then a few more, until the limited power going into drive systems reduced speed to a crawl and the hull rang with the twanging pops and snaps of outgoing fire. Their captain was obviously displeased because the weapons pods went offline one at a time in a line as Orpo could imagine a furious Khanate stalking down the corridor, shouting into each weapon hardpoint until the soldier inside stopped pressing all of the colorful buttons and wasting power into empty space.

“Why are you not bringing the reactor to full power?” Bambar’s nerve disruptor prodded Orpo in the back, right in the spasming spot where the previous demonstration shot had discharged. “Tell me or I will kill you.”

“I’m setting priorities for the output,” said Orpo just as calmly as he could once his back had quit spasming. “It doesn’t matter how much power we generate if it is allocated to nonessential systems.”

“Drive and weapons,” commanded the Khanate with another painful prod of his weapon. “That is all.”

“And life support, if you wish to keep breathing,” added Orpo. “And lights, so that your compatriots do not come down here and criticize you for making them stumble around in the dark. Sensors so we do not crash into a spatial anomaly or intersect another warship, and—” He cut off abruptly at another painful jab from his captor.

“Get back to work,” he snapped. “I’ll watch.”

That would put a crimp in Orpo’s plans, but he had time. The question was how much time. The Merry Snark had been plodding between two systems a long way from the ongoing conflict, but warships had long legs, and there was no easy way to find out just where they were going without opening up the navigation files. At least there were listening posts they would have to pass, small space stations in empty space with sensitive gravitational distortion sensors. They could spot a drive bubble from a week’s travel away, even if the only thing they would notice was a small Coalition warship.

But first, he had to stabilize the fusion bottle to the maximum extent possible.

---

Several hours worth of back-breaking work later, the worst of the malfunctioning deet injectors had been replaced, two of the plasma focusers had been purged and reprogrammed to factory settings, and Bambar had discovered some of the ship’s games. While he was destroying armadas of alien ships, Orpo edged the power up another several percent and slipped the ‘balancing’ script into the focuser hardware, manually adjusting its datestamp back a few months just in case.

Right on cue, the Khanates on the bridge reacted to the increase in power by directing it to the drive, and the background whine rose. Then a little more. Then the expected brief drop in drive for just a second before it returned to the new spaceplus velocity. Bambar looked up for a moment, then returned to his game while Orpo started breathing again, watching the time indicator on his console. A little over a minute later after three other brief drive pulses gained him no additional attention, Orpo put aside the ruined deet injector he had been toying with and returned to his work.

---

Time passed in excruciating slowness. One advantage of the engineering station that Orpo found himself dozing in front of was that quite literally, everything in the ship demanded power. When individual room ‘freshers were flushed, power. Whenever one of the Khanates went into a room, life support automatically directed that much more energy to their comfort. In dribs and drabs, not trusting the equipment to write the information down, Orpo determined that there were only twenty-two humans outside of the locked brig, and that the prisoners inside had been locked out of the food delivery chutes totally. They still had water, although that was most probably due to the Khanates’ oversight than any concern, and the cells had been welded shut, so there was no chance of electronically unlocking his shipmates. At least the number of surviving prisoners had remained constant, and since the cells were welded shut, none of them were being dragged out to be repeatedly raped.

The repeated surges in the drive had kept the Khanates on edge, and after the first day, the officer from before had stormed into the engineering space only to find Orpo up to his waist in a control panel, supposedly trying to chase down an erratic connection.

“Slime will stop this incessant wobble in the drive,” he snapped, slamming one fist into the panel casing and making Orpo’s ears ring.

“You’ll have to drop to half-speed,” said Orpo, carefully disconnecting one fibre cable and threading a replacement through the supports. It had taken him considerable time to splice together from spares, but should fix at least one persistent problem. “The entire aft magnetic coupling has been stressed beyond failure limits because somebody had not watched his panel closely enough. Then when he was installing the spare, he torqued the connectors off, so we’ve got the original back in there now, and there are some melted together spots inside it, so it surges under heavy load.”

“Install a replacement!” snapped the officer.

Orpo tried to pitch his voice as sincere as possible, because the irate Khanate sounded as if he were about to put a shot right through the panel he was underneath just to kill him. And the more angry he could make the officer, the more likely he would spill some actionable intelligence. “We don’t have a replacement. As it is, this coupling should last about a week before the surges get too powerful and you’ll have to reduce speed.”

“Use a coupling from the other ship’s spares!” spat the officer.

“That’s a civilian-grade coupling. The connectors won’t fit, and even if I could cobble something together to make them match, it would take a week and I couldn’t get a quarter of the power out of this fusion bottle.”

“In a period, we will be home,” snarled the officer. He gave a brutal kick to Orpo’s exposed legs. “You will keep the reactor functional until then, or your worth shall be lessened to nothing.”

He remained silent instead of responding, other than a few anguished grunts of pain that he did not have to feign as the Khanate kicked him in the leg more times before storming out of the engineering space. Bambar took the opportunity to wander over and give Orpo a good solid kick in the leg too, just for good measure, then a second.

“You did not have to tell him about breaking the part,” he said, adding a third brutal kick that made Orpo bang his head in the narrow space he had wedged himself into.

“I had to!” Orpo braced himself for the next kick, which did not help much when it crashed into his knee. “The only other spare magnetic coupling would be in another Coalition ship, and it’s not like you can just ask for them to give you one.”

The next anticipated kick did not arrive. Instead, after some discussion over the ship’s intercom which he was too far away to catch, Orpo eventually wriggled out from under the panel to find another fierce Khanate at the engineering space hatch. Conversationally, it was a bust, because his new jailor did not speak at all other than to point the nerve disruptor when Orpo got too close.

That was perfectly fine. Orpo determined that his leg was not broken before he settled down at his console again, flipping through the colorful tabs of the management program until he found the screen he was looking for. The duplex fibre he had just threaded into the control panel allowed access to the navigation station on the bridge, with the course laid out in lazy curves to avoid other planetary systems and ending at a major Khanate world several days behind the battle lines and about eight days from their current position. There were at least a dozen other ships visible to the ship’s gravitational sensors spread out over hundreds of parsecs, but none of them seeming to be a Coalition rescue ship, which was good and bad.

All he could do was wait and hope the seed he had planted would bear fruit and the trail of breadcrumbs he was leaving would attract the right attention.

---

Over the next several days, Orpo saw several of the Khanate crew as his jailer, each of which was more taciturn and violent than the last. In order to keep his wits sharp, several ‘malfunctions’ in ship sensors were arranged, from a delivery mishap that sent several dozen packaged mealpacks into the brig cells to an oxygen sensor issue in engineering that let him crawl over the area with an appropriate set of tools. It was hard to look sufficiently concerned without breaking into a smile as he made the final adjustment to the maneuvering couch electronics, but the thought of what the barbarians had done to the freighter captain kept his concentration intact.

The surges grew more severe, even after the bridge reduced the drive strength slightly. By that point, Orpo was sleeping in his console chair with the empty remains of several disposable mealpacks scattered in the vicinity and enough deflated coffee bulbs to make walking hazardous. A low current from his sleeve woke Orpo up from a fitful doze just enough to open one eye, take in the slow-motion waltz of starship motion in the navigation screen, and become aware that Bambar had returned to the engineering space with a nasty grin and the repurposed Coalition space suit he had begun to wear after the first oxygen alert in the engineering space.

Once the other guard had departed, the Khanate turned his leering attention to an awake and alert prisoner. He sat down in the acceleration station beside the door and put his helmet in the seat next to him while waving his nerve disruptor vaguely in Orpo’s direction.

“Soon, Bambar will once again be Skull Bambar, and will have more honor than ever before.”

“How are you going to do that?” asked Orpo. He had turned his chair so he could keep one eye on the navigational screen and the other in Bambar’s general direction. The drive had been cut back to maneuvering levels and no power had been put to the shields, which was probably a good thing with the size of the Coalition escort destroyer maneuvering to a docking intercept outside, but the rest of the engineering power distribution was under control of the bridge at the moment.

“Bambar had an idea.” Bright white teeth showed in his grin, which was the first smile Orpo had seen so far from the Khanates, and hopefully the last. “Since this ship had no problem boarding your pathetic vessel, the captain begged a nearby slime ship for assistance. They will let us dock, and then our armored warriors will sweep their vessel clean of their filth. We will return to our Khan with two vessels, or perish in glorious battle. And then—” Bambar caressed his nerve disruptor and aimed at Orpo’s head. “You will take days to die for the indignity you have heaped upon Skull Bambar. Your teeth shall decorate my new necklace, and—”

“Alert,” sounded the intercom. “There is a change in the plan. The slime ship has noticed our life pods are missing, so they are sending over two shuttles. One will be empty for us to keep, and the other will have the part we requested, along with several engineers to install it.”

Bambar’s grin grew, and he adjusted a setting on his nerve disruptor. “Ah, the Khan will not need you anymore.”

“Don’t get impatient.” Orpo kept his hands in plain sight and away from the console controls. “Remember, pillage before burning. Those engineers may not be as cooperative as I am.”

After a moment, Bambar let up the pressure he had been putting on the nerve disruptor's firing stud. “Truth. They may have livers worthy of warriors. We shall see.”

“Clear the shuttle bay,” announced the intercom again. “All armored warriors are to remain back until the slime have exited the shuttle and been subdued. Then we will send them back on the same shuttle while the other warriors prepare the second shuttle and the gun positions prepare to blast breaches. They will be unarmed and defenseless, like grain before the thresher. Fight and die gloriously for your Khan.”

“My blood is the Khan’s,” repeated Bambar, his eyes narrowed and fierce.

On the navigation screen, Orpo could see the bulk of the destroyer, larger than the corvette but so much smaller than the cruiser he had once served on, settle in comfortably at short weapons range and the two small dots of shuttlecraft burning up the distance between them. It looked to be a Sheffield class from the active sensor emanations, a nasty customer in a fight with enough armor to shrug off one or two shots from the corvette before blowing her to plasma. The shuttles had to be the new Agna class assault craft and piloted by experts if the sharp maneuvers were any clue to their general level of competence. There were a few more intercom announcements as the first shuttle swept down into the docking bay and the second one paused aft, in a fuzzy shadow that the corvette’s sensors and weapons could not cover.

“If there’s any fighting, you should put on your helmet,” said Orpo calmly. “One loose round could depressurize the engineering space and kill me, but at least you have your suit.”

“I am not a coward,” snarled Bambar. Still, he dogged down his helmet with the experienced motions of a seasoned spacer and plugged his auxiliary oxygen into the acceleration couch’s fitting.

Taking advantage of his captor’s momentary distraction, Orpo lifted one finger and tapped a key on his display before returning his hands to their previous position. Deep in the acceleration couch, an altered sensor the size of a matchhead reported that the O2 being sent into the suit was actually at zero degrees Kelvin. A heater was triggered to warm the chilly flow, and since all six of the heaters had been rewired during Orpo’s supposed search for a defective environment sensor in engineering, the resulting pure oxygen forced into the space suit was heated into a near plasma, which proceeded to burn anything organic it could find.

Bambar did not even have time to scream.

Taking a brief moment to pray that his efforts over the last few day had actually worked, Orpo sprinted over to the engineering space hatch and dogged it manually, ignoring the heavy nerve disruptor that had been flung a few meters away from the burning corpse of his captor. If he was right, holding onto a weapon was going to be a very bad idea very shortly.

And if he was wrong, there was going to be a lot more death he could inflict from an engineering console than running through the corridors with a light weapon that could do nothing more than irritate a man in a suit of powered armor.

“Hull breach!” blatted the intercom. “All warriors—”

Whatever the captain was commanding was cut off abruptly as Orpo touched several more controls, chopping all power except for the motors on the airtight doors on the bridge. Another simple touch cut the lights and air, but before he could touch anything else, one outside wall of the engineering space flared into light and burst open.

He was knocked sprawling, but Orpo managed to put his hands on top of his head and hold his breath while armored figures dashed into the reactor room from the breach, heavy grav guns sweeping the corners for ambushes or hostiles.

“Clear!” called out one of the lead Coalition marines. “One hostile dead, one captured. Secure the reactor.”

“Secured!” called out another. “And… it’s shutting down?”

“I should hope so,” managed Orpo through his coughing. He had always disliked the stench of breaching explosives, despite their usefulness. “I’m Master Gunnery Sergeant Orpo Van Heusen of the New Yent defense forces, combat engineering. The crew of The Merry Snark is secured in the brig, probably hungry as hell and smelling like crap, but they should be fine. There’s twenty-two hostiles on board that I could tell. Don’t take any chances with them. They broke out of the brig and captured this ship about two weeks ago, spaced the crew, and were headed to—” He broke out coughing again, only to have the armored squad medic slap an oxygen mask over his face, which he appreciated, and a set of plasticufs around his wrists and ankles, which frankly he could have done without. And the quick search could have been more gentle, even if the searcher was wearing powered armor—

“They’ve got six suits of powered armor,” he managed.

“Primary squad is taking care of that,” said what must have been the commander of the squad despite looking identical to the rest of the armored suits. “Henway, Knock Knock, you stay here with the prisoner. Everybody else, follow me.”

In moments, the room was empty except for the smoldering corpse and Orpo’s two new captors, which he intended on treating much more respectful than the last one. They displayed respectable training, with one keeping his weapon pressed against Orpo’s chest and watching the door while the other kept an eye on the fusion bottle shutdown process, just in case.

After sufficient time for the distant snapping sounds of hypervelocity rounds to die out and the unconscious tension to fade slightly, Orpo licked his dry lips and asked the lesser question that was bothering him.

“So… Knock Knock. You’re the squad breacher, right?”

The marine nodded briefly.

“From your presence, I have to assume my message got through.”

Another nod and a female voice added, “All they told us was that the Khanates had captured the ship, and that there was some crazy fucker who found a way to get a message out. Sir. They did include your picture, but it just doesn’t do you justice at the moment.” The marine straightened up from her crouch and quit pointing the grav gun directly at Orpo. “Captain Lancer reports the ship is secure. Sixteen live prisoners.”

“Tell your Captain Lancer that he does excellent work, and pass along my compliments. Also, I’d suggest that each one of those bloodthirsty bastards be wrapped in razor wire and suspended in salt water while being transported to wherever they were headed in the first place, but I don’t think he’ll accept that. Bound and drugged at the bare minimum. Don’t underestimate them, and if you have to shoot, give them an extra in the head.”

The marine nodded, apparently passing on the suggestion. After a few more minutes, she took off her helmet, revealing a short mop of black curls and sparkling brown eyes that went well with her high cheekbones and natural dark pigmentation. She took a deep breath of the faint haze of smoke still lingering in the engineering space, then wrinkled up her nose.

“Nothing like the smell of Boomite after a mission, except you went and stunk up the room,” she remarked with a sharp sniff. “One of ours or theirs?”

“Theirs.” Orpo coughed spat to one side. “Teach him to screw with an engineer.”

“Challenge accepted,” said Knock Knock with a sharp smile, much as one might find on a shark. “On one condition, once you’re cleaned up and debriefed.” She bent down and looked him right in the eyes. “The AI on the ship is busted, you had one of them holding you at gunpoint since you were captured, and from the looks of it, you’ve been in that chair the whole time. How did you get a message out?”

Orpo pointed as much as he could by jerking his head in the direction of the fusion reactor. “If a reactor isn’t tuned right, it interferes with the gravitic drive. Communications use a high-frequency variant of that to send and receive messages, but I modulated the fusion bottle to pulse once every few seconds and sent my message by Morse code. The ship’s AI could pick out the message, if they had not melted it down. I was just hoping a passing ship would read the message and not promptly call them up to report some prankster fiddling with the fusion bottle.”

Henway looked up from the engineering console. “I don’t see any indication of tampering with the control run software.”

“I buried the code in the actual hardware,” explained Orpo. “They only kept me alive as long as they needed me, so my goal was to be needed as much as I could.”

Knock Knock burst out with a short giggle. “Oh, now I see. That’s funny as hell, Sergeant Van Heusen.”

“What?” Orpo frowned, then winced. “Oh, I’m never going to live this down, am I?”

“Live what down?” asked Henway.

Knock Knock gently patted the fusion reactor casing with one armored hand. “Sergeant Van Heusen is the first navy officer in centuries to send a distress call using a message in a bottle.”