(no subject)

[philrancid]

So I'm like totally out of my mind.

I miss someone terribly.

And instead of mooning about it in public I think i shall get the stick out of my ass and put out the story I wrote (was it last year?) on ounceofreason's suggestion, and gave to him on or near his birthday to okay for general consumption. Being the busy soon-to-be World Conqueror he is, he didn't have time for it, but he okayed its release to you, the groveling unwashed masses. His gift to The People, to keep them happy and in line.

I'll chop the story up into bits (might even call them chapters) so that your lives won't be interrupted too heavily by them.




"Holy shit. Look at how big the fucking thing is...."

"We're rich, man--whoo!!"

Jarl's voice cut in on the intercom. "Cut the shit, Benny. You know damn well we won't be able to tow half this shit back to civilization, and since we have to report where we found it, we'll wind up losing most of our money to claim jumpers." Benny's smile faded. His gaze returned to the screen in front of him. Practiced eyes started to pick promising ships by general shape and detail.

"Yeah, but, Jarl--we don't have to take whole ships. We can strip this whole fuckin' field, take the very best, and leave the shit for the jumpers. Like that Stinger over on the left edge of the field--the propulsion system is what makes that little fucker even worth our time. If it's still good, we rip it out, whole..." Stano pointed to the screen.

"Yeah--and see that AffeSchiffe? If the forward shields are still good, we can connect 'em to the auxiliary drive and triple what we can carry!" Silence for a beat, Benny nodded in approval, and the the comm clicked back on.
"You're gonna sacrifice our spare system just to tow more shit, from out here in the middle of fucking nowhere? Think we'll find a spare brain for you out there in all that sh--" Benny leaned forward suddenly, and the voice-activator cut out Jarl's derision.

"You seein' what I'm seein', Jarl?"

"No--what's that?" The sarcasm was thick, just the way Jarl liked it.

"We can stay here as long as we like, man; cutting, stripping, refurbishing. I see a lot of dupes--a lot, and we aren't even in the fuckin' field yet. We get lucky, we could build a few drones and fly back a whole fucking fleet of cash. You know we've got the reserves; since we were expecting to be gone for a few more years anyway, why not just gut this graveyard and make sure there's enough this time to get outta the game while we still have the chance?" The comm was set too high on Jarl's end; Benny and Stano heard him "hmm" quietly to himself. Last run had cost them half the crew when a rogue meteor shower had peppered the ship and fucked the stasis units on the lower decks. Rather than pay for a good crew this time out, they were running slightly better than half-capacity.

Benny snorted. Running was the right word. Speldren's boys had been waiting at the last junkyard, and they'd wanted the rest of the money for the ship, all of it this time, and hadn't wanted to hear about the loss of the crew and the fact that the ship had been crippled before the run had even started good. Stano muttered something. Benny turned an eye his way. The comm clicked back on.

"What was that?"

"I said, 'We can even cut loose those two shitheaps we've got now, since there's a lot better out there.'" Silence. Sometimes they could almost hear Jarl processing, imagining the little humming and clicking sounds it would make.
"Yeah--we'll see. I still say the Underfield Drive on that--" Benny turned and rolled his eyes at Stano, making a cross-eyed face and holding up a yapping puppet hand. Stano had to stifle a laugh while Jarl went on about their most questionable catch. He swore up and down that the Underfield Drive on the holed Abberschenz Custom they'd pulled away from a heavy meteor was reading out okay, but the two of them were still skeptical after having seen the state of the poor thing when they'd aligned the towfields. Granted, if the Drive was still in good shape, or at least the coils, it would still make good the effort they'd gone through to snare it. Pretoria's Underfields were pricey, and there were several very lucrative markets for an Abber--just the coils would pay off half of what was left owing on the ship. But the visible damage, if it went all the way through as they feared, would have reduced the Drive and its coils to so much garbage. You couldn't even sell the base metals if the coils had ruptured--the radiation interacted with the alloys, fucked up their chemical composition. But before they'd found this graveyard, it'd been their best hope of making up for ditching Speldren's boys at the shipyard.

Now that they'd found this, though, Benny could see them coming back with enough salvage that Smelly Spelly and his toughs would forget the disrespect out of sheer greed. His eyes roamed the distant field, picking out details, the sweep of fins, the curve of hulls, antenna arrays, boosters, modules, and the occasional piece of space flotsam.

"Ready the premap, Benny," Jarl's voice clicked in. Benny nodded, and began priming the three-dimensional mapping system. The ship's computers needed time to wake up and run the diagnostics for the programs. After that, Benny could fire the sensors--

"Hey, Jarl--whaddaya think, field this big...four k?" Silence for a beat, and then Jarl was back, exasperated. Benny looked over at Stano and grinned.

"You do this every time. You know that we never agree on what's right for any one field. You also know that you're seldom wrong, and you know damn well that's why I fucking asked you to do it in the fucking first place!" Benny placed a hand over his mouth, pantomiming shock at Jarl's word choice, and Stano had to fight to hold in his mirth. Still, Benny was pleased inside. Jarl may be ranting about it, but he'd just told Benny he trusted him to get the job done, and that was as scarce as free-range meat. Realizing that Jarl's silence was an expectant one, he chimed in.

"Yeah, uh, hey, sure thing, J." A few lights were in the green, and Benny set the distance for the sensors at four thousand kliks--he figured at the distance they were to the outermost portion of the field, it'd be best to get as wide an angle as he could for the extrapolation programs. Another few minutes passed in silence, and then the programs were ready, waiting for input, and the repulsion magnets were ready to fire their respective sensors. The sensors were reading back green, and Benny fired them. Outside, in the vacuum, four small sensors were forced from the outer hull of the ship, trailing their tethers. As the magnets they rested against energized, repelling them out into the void, they also activated small passive electromagnetic motors that ran the relays. Benny could imagine those little magnet motors spinning, the force of the initial pulse enough to turn them against the poles opposite, building charge and keeping the cycle going for a while--long enough for the sensors to flicker on and off all the way up to the end of their tethers. He could almost see the inside of the relays working--hell, as many times as he'd had to wind copper around replacement coils, he ought to know the damn things backwards by now. The system was old as hell, but it still worked better and was easier to maintain than some of the more modern ones. The system sensors would scan a sixty-degree arc in front of them as they flew out to the end of their cords, relaying the info from each sweep back to the extrapolators, and then when they hit the end of their tethers that would shut them off. At the lack of signal from the sensors their individual winches would kick in and draw them back.
They couldn't be used in certain conditions, and couldn't be installed them just anywhere on a ship, and they could tangle or hang--it was a pain in the ass to have to suit up and go untangle a sensor, or to have to replace an entire unit because the winches were too strong and they ripped the tether loose. Benny had the winches set to shut off at the first hint of a snag, but the downside to that was that certain space anomalies could cause the winches to shut down. Pieces of debris hitting the cord, solar winds; they had each sent Benny out in his suit to repair.

But, by the time the sensors managed to find their way back into their housing, the computers would have a premap ready. The programs took the info from the four sensors and, combined with the ShitRep, which is what Benny called the Ship Recognition Program, built an accurate preliminary three-dimensional map of the field they faced. From there the crew would try and determine the best pieces to shoot for, and where the best placement for their own ship would be. Once they had their game plan, they'd pull closer to the salvage and get to work.

"Ahh, you asshole..." Benny thumped his console. The premap was good, a nice setup, but the ShitRep was trying to pretend like it didn't know what the fuck a Russina Coursair looked like. "Jarl--you got the latest definitions downloaded for the ShitRep?"

Part of the high cost of running a salvage ship was the fact that you had to take certain precautions of you wanted to stay alive, and since premapping was one of those, and since a Ship Recognition Program was integral to a good premap, the Companies that put out the ShitReps, decided that it would be in their wallets' best interests if they were to charge for updates to the program. They also liked to release the updates with lots of new and exciting bugware, and then they wanted to charge you for patches to fix the bugs. You could find patches from pirates, sure, but God help you if you got into someone who didn't know what the fuck he was doing, as the program designers had built design-recognition into their patches, and if your program didn't sing the right tune when brought in for repairs, the company voided its warranty and revoked the usage license, leaving you to buy a whole new program from some other company. And then they'd mark it in your customer profile that you were caught with theifware, which meant you'd get charged out the ass for a new program.
All this went through Benny's head as he waited for Jarl to answer.

"Hey, J--what the hell's taking so long?"

"I was taking a shit. Yes, I ran the update."

"Did you run the patches?" Silence, an ugly one. The kind of silence that was the precursor of such ugly words as no, or I forgot. Benny chose to ignore the Jarl-ism I was taking a shit. None of the crew knew what the hell Jarl meant by that, since he was only a fucking robot, and the only shit he could take would be one he'd stolen. "J, please tell me you ran the fucking patches before we got way the fuck out here...."

"I was trying to run them when Spel's boys came knocking. We haven't had fucking time to run them since, now have we?" Benny snarled.

"Then why the fuck are you having me run a goddamn premap when you know fucking well that the fucking shitrep isn't going to run worth a fuck without the fucking patches!?" Some dim back part of Benny's brain recorded the beads of spit that were flying onto his console. "I swear to God if you tell me you forgot I'll fucking go up there and rip your fucking chips out!"

"Are you threatening me, Benny?" And there it was. Benny could see the too-perfect hand reaching for the pad that would shut him down. Jarl would unplug his console, shut off his access codes, and leave him lying here in his unit until it was time for him to die. Jarl would either make a decision, fuck him some way or other to keep him under control, or he'd come down and tear his head off. It was all in that silky purr. It had happened before. Reb Shallows had crossed Jarl, and that was what had gotten Benny his promotion through the ranks. And no matter what you said, if Jarl decided you were toast, there wasn't anything left for your ass. Behind that programming, Jarl was still a machine, and still had the ability to turn off his emotions to get the job done.

"Man, fuck you, Jarl." Benny was shaken. "You need to buy a new fucking program--this one's an asshole."

"Maybe so." Jarl laughed. It wasn't a pleasant sound, but it relaxed Benny. It was the laugh of an asshole who knew he was in control. "Maybe if we get this field played right, we'll have the money for me to get one, yeah? Right after we pay off the ship, pay off Spel and his shiteaters, and every other stinking fucking debt we've managed to get into."

This brought the argument back to familiar ground. "Would you please install the patches, Jarl? This buggy shit doesn't even recognize First Fleeters."
"What's the problem, Benny?" Patronizing him, but probably still trying to see if there was a workaround for the real problem. At least Jarl allowed himself to have mistakes.

"The three-d is okay, I guess--but ShitRep's blanking on some of the most basic shit out there."

"You're saying that the premap itself is good?"

Benny could see where this was heading. "What I'm saying is, if the ShitRep is blanking on the basics, shit I can see from here, how do we know that it's gotten any of the others right? You know these latest build versions have started tying into the actual premappers, right?"

"What do you mean?"

"You remember. I told you. The last time we ran updates, I had to patch them from inside the shell itself--that's why I got so pissed. It's a shitload of code to have to go through, and all because you keep letting us run buggy updates, which gets the original code all fucked, and makes me have to go back through, do a re-install, and then place the patches by hand--"

"Benny, have you fucked up our warranty?" The silk was back.

"No, dammit," he sighed. "It's in the manual, still unrevised as of yesterday. I always check, before we go out. You can still hand-install. And now the code ties into the fucking mappers themselves, decides what to render and what to leave, and most that gets handled by the--" A thought occurred to Benny, and it leapt past his teeth before he could bite it back.

"You know, you're pretty fucking uninformed for a goddamn robot. I thought you guys were supposed to be better brains than us...." Stano was staring at Benny in horror. Silence, the deep dead quiet of space pressed in on Benny and Stano.

"Let's just say," Jarl's voice cut in suddenly, with an unnatural calm, "that my knowledge has been installed along different parameters. Okay?" Stano leaned toward Benny, mouthing the words Are you trying to get killed? at him. Benny waved him off. "Uh, sure, J. Can we get those patches run, then?" Jarl laughed. It was a short mirthless bark.

"I've been running the fucking patches, Benny. Save data and shut down your console, if you don't want to have to re-install."

"Oh, yeah, shit--," Benny's hands flew to the keys.

"And, Benny?"

"Yeah?"

"You need to watch your fucking mouth, if you want to live to see payday."