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Aug. 14th, 2005 10:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
philrancidStano watched the machine vibrate, imagining the complex interplay of machines inside, as they fought against every single muscle of Dorvee's body, stretching her, pushing against her, making up for all the time she'd spent in stasis. Little wires were stuck into her at all sort of weird places, triggering the minute muscle spasms that would tone her up for work within a half an hour, while at the same time she fought against resistance machines and magnetic fields moved around her altering her circulation until her joints pulled back into place. It wasn't gravity, by a long shot, but with these machines, a spacer could spend a few decades without having to touch dirt somewhere.
In another seventeen hours and thirty-two minutes, the crew would be ready to eat, suit up, and hit the graveyard. Stano, Benny, and Jarl would monitor operations shipside, and direct the salvage. Jarl had taken Benny's idea to heart, and he meant to haul off the vast majority of this field when he left here, toting it through the use of remote-run drones, nets, tethers, and field reflectors--a few of the ships they could see would have either fully-functioning tow beams, or at least enough of the hardware to reflect a beam from another source. They'd use the reflected beams to create a field of soft enorgy that would drag anything inside of it along just as well as a net. Which was good, because, even if every ship out there still had its full supply of cargo netting, they'd still be hard-pressed to salvage much. Ships tend to be a lot bigger than their cargo, for some strange reason.
Stano looked up, puzzled. That was a Jarl kind of thought. Stano had never been much of one for sarcasm. He wasn't bright enough to adopt the right attitude for proper use of sarcasm. He looked over to the command pad his right hand was flitting over. He'd hit a wrong key, somewhere--that Jarl-thought thing had caught him flat-footed. He turned towards the pad, dropping the input jack he'd been testing with his left hand, and put his full attention to the command screen. He'd have to find the code fast before the computer caught up and tried to implement the wrong keystrike.
There. He corrected the missed hit, and stared for a moment. Had the comp tried that particular line... Stano shook his head. Dorvee would never have needed legs again.
Out in the field, far from the strange new ship, in the nucleus of the ship graveyard, something changed. Ships computers flickered to life, in systems that should have been dead. Diagnostics were run in ships that weren't in enough of a single piece to do so. Sensors fired, ran scans of the new ship, absorbed its information, and fed this back into fragmented operating systems that shouldn't have been able to finish initializing, much less run. All this was done in the complete silence of space, in the frozen shadows of ruined hulking metal that comprised the graveyard. The new ship was turned inward, contemplating its own workings, preparing itself for something.
In the darkness of the graveyard, the dead ships scanned, ran their programs, and fell silent. The new ship was a salvager. It would soon be coming to them.
It wouldn't be long.
While the crew grumbled and grubbed up, Jarl explained their situation over the comm, told them the plan he had to make this haul the one that put them out of the game. While the rest of the crew had been awakening, preparing, Jarl had finished running the patches, reinstalled, and Benny had prepared several excellent field maps, and the ShitReps--several of the crew reacted to Jarl's usage of Benny's word; a couple laughed, thinking the old man was loosening up, but the majority of them were wondering what Benny's status was, now. There had been dark rumors about the final fate of his predecessor, Reb Shallows--were going nuts with new information. If they stayed at this, got the preparations done well, they would be returning home several years early, and would most likely never ned to work again. The greed in Jarl's voice gave even the most hardened of the crew pause.
"Damn--he really wants out." Ricked Smalls grunted, looking at the speaker with an appraising eye. He was the most senior of the crew, now that Old Barret had died. He was a thick barrel of a gray, who claimed to come from the last worker stock Earth had sent out in the last days.
"What you mean?"
"I've heard that sound before boys, and that is the sound of a man who wants out of the game so fucking bad he can taste it. And, worse--he can see the end in sight. This field, boys--if shit starts going wrong, this field'll be the end of us." The crew laughed him off. Ricked was always grumbling about the end of things, and how this run would "do us in"--he wasn't happy unless he could think of the crew as living one step from death.
"Oi, Rick--" McGhael LocLanned drifted through the press of crew members going back to their meals as the comm shut down. He spoke with a strange accent, and could speak another language besides Basic--he was one of those odd ducks that the rest of the crew called a "clanner" or an "ethnie", because his people had kept to their old ways as best as they could in their new colonies, trying to preserve their traditions as humans from Earth. Ricked turned to face the clanner.
"What?"
"You sure about this? You really think we're buggered if the field plays wrong?"
"I swear it, clanner. The last time I heard a captain drooling like that, he fed forty-three souls to the devil before we managed to pull out. We barely had enough crew to maintain the haul back through the trade routes."
"Yeah, but Jarl, he--"
"He's a fucking chiphead, and that means he can unplug his fuckin' heart when he wants something bad enough. A chiphead--he'll kill all of us, maintain the haul himself, and take the rest of eternity getting back to the shipping lanes, if that's what it takes to get him what he wants. Fucking Chips. I hate that they ever gave 'em fucking personalities. At least then you knew you were talking to a goddamn calculator, and if you felt a goose walking over your grave, it was just because you knew that the fuckin' chipper was lookin' at you as just another warm body, just a number. You could feel him running your stats while he looked at you, that's all. These fuckin' chippers now, they try ta get you to forget it, and to me, it's like tryin'a fuck a whore with a dead dog for a face."
"Dead dag, eh?" McGhael shoved himself back a bit, snagged his foot against the tabletop to stop the float.
"That's right, clanner." Ricked looked him up and down. "Where's yer tartan, clanboy? I don't see it..." McGhael's eyes went to slits, and he slid towards the older man. There was the tearing of velcro, a blur, and he had a small porcelain blade weaving in front of Ricked's face.
"I still've me bodkin, McLannesh trash, whene'er ye need it," he snarled. Ricked grinned at him.
"If you think I'm about to get sliced up by some idiot just because I got the accident of birth by a clanner, you need to think again, Mick. You might be fast, and young, but you haven't spaced long enough to get the drop on me."
"We'll see, old man. One day you'll push too hard, and find your tether's cut." The knife went back to its sheath with a flourish. McGhael went to push away, and discovered that he had a cable wrapped around his leg, and that Ricked had had a small rivet-popper pressed against his thigh. The old-timer laughed at the look on McGhael's face, and backed away, angling at just the right second to avoid Dorvee, without even looking to see who she was or that she'd even been floating their way.
"Maybe," Ricked laughed, "maybe not." He floated out of the mess hall to get his suit on, his smile fading. Fucking clanners always stirred up trouble. It's a good thing he'd burned his tartan centuries ago. He chuckled again, as he thought of something.
"Least he's not a goddamned Raza..."
Dorvee took in McGhael's face, and decided not to greet him for the time being. He didn't look like he'd
take well to her right this moment. She instead flung herself over the top of the mess table, heading for Willits. She'd discovered something unsettling during this last downtime, and she needed to talk to Willits about it. She soared slowly over his head, rolled gracefully over, and bounced herself off the wall behind him, aiming to land just behind him. He was busy eating, his black head darting forward hungrily at each mouthful. Ever a bear for his chow was Willits. Dorvee pulled the skin back from her right index finger, revealing a wicked gleaming needle. She waited a moment, while her systems prepared the proper dosage for his body weight, and then she jabbed the inch-long needle into the muscle mass beside his neck.
"OW GODDAMN!" Willits jumped so hard at the attack that he slammed off the mess hall ceiling before he could right himself. "Bitch, what the fuck?" he howled, massaging the wounded muscle. Dorvee caught him on the rebound, and held him down. Eyes were on the two for a moment, until they registered the scene before them, recognized it, and went back to grubbing.
"You've been straying, Willits. You--"
"Bitch I ain't--"
"You gave me a rather nasty bug, Will, one that I had to burn out and replace several systems to kill. It took me most of our sleep-cycle to do it. What have I told you about human whores, Will? How many times have I told you that one day you're going to catch something I can't fix in you?"
Willits turned sullen, embarrassed. "Well, if you hadn't cut me off--"
"You know that that is the penalty for straying, Will. You also know that I'm on-line and ready for you, for anything you can think of, any time you're off the clock--as long as you stay faithful. What?" Willits had murmured something, rubbing the back of his shoulder.
"I said, she wasn't a whore. I went to Basic with her. She had kids, we were talking about old times, and it just, kinda happened. She couldn't believe how much I'd grown, and she was so fine, and..."
"Do you have her contact information? She needs to know about this, then. Especially since it's so contagious--"
"Yeah, I'll get it for you. She gonna be okay?"
"It depends on how far it's gone through her. The cocktail I've given you should be easy enough to come by--"
"She ain't got much money..."
"Do you want her and her children to die, Willits?"
He rubbed his neck again, looked at the floor. "No, but--"
"Then you will continue to do the right thing. You can be billed for the treatment--"
"That shit's gonna be expensive--!"
"You want me to kill Rei Lan over there?" Dorvee asked, pointed to the small clanner across the room.
"What? What the fuck for?"
"He'll take a percentage of our haul. A significant segment, because he's Tech. Don't worry, I'll do it
where you can't see it, and you'll never have to see the body--"
"Bitch, what the fuck--"
She poked him, hard, in his thick biceps. "How do you think I feel, hearing you try to murder some innocent woman and her children because of financial considerations? Now, let's go get this contact information before you go to work." She drug Willits up and out of the room. On her way past, a man called out to her.
"Hey, Dorvee! Where's your sister?"
"She's still in recovery. She's still rather annoyed with you, by the way."
"I told her it wouldn't work, and besides, I promised I'd pay her back. I need to get her transfer numbers."
Dorvee stopped dead. "You have the money already?"
"Yeah, shit--I had a couple interested parties willing to back my bet, and I still make a nice profit off the whole thing too."
"She'll enjoy hearing that, I'm sure. I'll tell her on my way back."
"Thanks!" Someone elbowed the man, Sled Taggert, to get him to tell the details of his bet with Morvee--it'd been the talk of the bunks, before the last sleep-cycle. He'd somehow talked her into trying some near-impossible position, and she'd pulled it off, for the most part, but some part of her internal workings had broken in the attempt, and thus she'd defaulted on the bet, making Sled a tidy sum of money, which he promised to cut her in on, to replace the busted parts.
In another seventeen hours and thirty-two minutes, the crew would be ready to eat, suit up, and hit the graveyard. Stano, Benny, and Jarl would monitor operations shipside, and direct the salvage. Jarl had taken Benny's idea to heart, and he meant to haul off the vast majority of this field when he left here, toting it through the use of remote-run drones, nets, tethers, and field reflectors--a few of the ships they could see would have either fully-functioning tow beams, or at least enough of the hardware to reflect a beam from another source. They'd use the reflected beams to create a field of soft enorgy that would drag anything inside of it along just as well as a net. Which was good, because, even if every ship out there still had its full supply of cargo netting, they'd still be hard-pressed to salvage much. Ships tend to be a lot bigger than their cargo, for some strange reason.
Stano looked up, puzzled. That was a Jarl kind of thought. Stano had never been much of one for sarcasm. He wasn't bright enough to adopt the right attitude for proper use of sarcasm. He looked over to the command pad his right hand was flitting over. He'd hit a wrong key, somewhere--that Jarl-thought thing had caught him flat-footed. He turned towards the pad, dropping the input jack he'd been testing with his left hand, and put his full attention to the command screen. He'd have to find the code fast before the computer caught up and tried to implement the wrong keystrike.
There. He corrected the missed hit, and stared for a moment. Had the comp tried that particular line... Stano shook his head. Dorvee would never have needed legs again.
Out in the field, far from the strange new ship, in the nucleus of the ship graveyard, something changed. Ships computers flickered to life, in systems that should have been dead. Diagnostics were run in ships that weren't in enough of a single piece to do so. Sensors fired, ran scans of the new ship, absorbed its information, and fed this back into fragmented operating systems that shouldn't have been able to finish initializing, much less run. All this was done in the complete silence of space, in the frozen shadows of ruined hulking metal that comprised the graveyard. The new ship was turned inward, contemplating its own workings, preparing itself for something.
In the darkness of the graveyard, the dead ships scanned, ran their programs, and fell silent. The new ship was a salvager. It would soon be coming to them.
It wouldn't be long.
While the crew grumbled and grubbed up, Jarl explained their situation over the comm, told them the plan he had to make this haul the one that put them out of the game. While the rest of the crew had been awakening, preparing, Jarl had finished running the patches, reinstalled, and Benny had prepared several excellent field maps, and the ShitReps--several of the crew reacted to Jarl's usage of Benny's word; a couple laughed, thinking the old man was loosening up, but the majority of them were wondering what Benny's status was, now. There had been dark rumors about the final fate of his predecessor, Reb Shallows--were going nuts with new information. If they stayed at this, got the preparations done well, they would be returning home several years early, and would most likely never ned to work again. The greed in Jarl's voice gave even the most hardened of the crew pause.
"Damn--he really wants out." Ricked Smalls grunted, looking at the speaker with an appraising eye. He was the most senior of the crew, now that Old Barret had died. He was a thick barrel of a gray, who claimed to come from the last worker stock Earth had sent out in the last days.
"What you mean?"
"I've heard that sound before boys, and that is the sound of a man who wants out of the game so fucking bad he can taste it. And, worse--he can see the end in sight. This field, boys--if shit starts going wrong, this field'll be the end of us." The crew laughed him off. Ricked was always grumbling about the end of things, and how this run would "do us in"--he wasn't happy unless he could think of the crew as living one step from death.
"Oi, Rick--" McGhael LocLanned drifted through the press of crew members going back to their meals as the comm shut down. He spoke with a strange accent, and could speak another language besides Basic--he was one of those odd ducks that the rest of the crew called a "clanner" or an "ethnie", because his people had kept to their old ways as best as they could in their new colonies, trying to preserve their traditions as humans from Earth. Ricked turned to face the clanner.
"What?"
"You sure about this? You really think we're buggered if the field plays wrong?"
"I swear it, clanner. The last time I heard a captain drooling like that, he fed forty-three souls to the devil before we managed to pull out. We barely had enough crew to maintain the haul back through the trade routes."
"Yeah, but Jarl, he--"
"He's a fucking chiphead, and that means he can unplug his fuckin' heart when he wants something bad enough. A chiphead--he'll kill all of us, maintain the haul himself, and take the rest of eternity getting back to the shipping lanes, if that's what it takes to get him what he wants. Fucking Chips. I hate that they ever gave 'em fucking personalities. At least then you knew you were talking to a goddamn calculator, and if you felt a goose walking over your grave, it was just because you knew that the fuckin' chipper was lookin' at you as just another warm body, just a number. You could feel him running your stats while he looked at you, that's all. These fuckin' chippers now, they try ta get you to forget it, and to me, it's like tryin'a fuck a whore with a dead dog for a face."
"Dead dag, eh?" McGhael shoved himself back a bit, snagged his foot against the tabletop to stop the float.
"That's right, clanner." Ricked looked him up and down. "Where's yer tartan, clanboy? I don't see it..." McGhael's eyes went to slits, and he slid towards the older man. There was the tearing of velcro, a blur, and he had a small porcelain blade weaving in front of Ricked's face.
"I still've me bodkin, McLannesh trash, whene'er ye need it," he snarled. Ricked grinned at him.
"If you think I'm about to get sliced up by some idiot just because I got the accident of birth by a clanner, you need to think again, Mick. You might be fast, and young, but you haven't spaced long enough to get the drop on me."
"We'll see, old man. One day you'll push too hard, and find your tether's cut." The knife went back to its sheath with a flourish. McGhael went to push away, and discovered that he had a cable wrapped around his leg, and that Ricked had had a small rivet-popper pressed against his thigh. The old-timer laughed at the look on McGhael's face, and backed away, angling at just the right second to avoid Dorvee, without even looking to see who she was or that she'd even been floating their way.
"Maybe," Ricked laughed, "maybe not." He floated out of the mess hall to get his suit on, his smile fading. Fucking clanners always stirred up trouble. It's a good thing he'd burned his tartan centuries ago. He chuckled again, as he thought of something.
"Least he's not a goddamned Raza..."
Dorvee took in McGhael's face, and decided not to greet him for the time being. He didn't look like he'd
take well to her right this moment. She instead flung herself over the top of the mess table, heading for Willits. She'd discovered something unsettling during this last downtime, and she needed to talk to Willits about it. She soared slowly over his head, rolled gracefully over, and bounced herself off the wall behind him, aiming to land just behind him. He was busy eating, his black head darting forward hungrily at each mouthful. Ever a bear for his chow was Willits. Dorvee pulled the skin back from her right index finger, revealing a wicked gleaming needle. She waited a moment, while her systems prepared the proper dosage for his body weight, and then she jabbed the inch-long needle into the muscle mass beside his neck.
"OW GODDAMN!" Willits jumped so hard at the attack that he slammed off the mess hall ceiling before he could right himself. "Bitch, what the fuck?" he howled, massaging the wounded muscle. Dorvee caught him on the rebound, and held him down. Eyes were on the two for a moment, until they registered the scene before them, recognized it, and went back to grubbing.
"You've been straying, Willits. You--"
"Bitch I ain't--"
"You gave me a rather nasty bug, Will, one that I had to burn out and replace several systems to kill. It took me most of our sleep-cycle to do it. What have I told you about human whores, Will? How many times have I told you that one day you're going to catch something I can't fix in you?"
Willits turned sullen, embarrassed. "Well, if you hadn't cut me off--"
"You know that that is the penalty for straying, Will. You also know that I'm on-line and ready for you, for anything you can think of, any time you're off the clock--as long as you stay faithful. What?" Willits had murmured something, rubbing the back of his shoulder.
"I said, she wasn't a whore. I went to Basic with her. She had kids, we were talking about old times, and it just, kinda happened. She couldn't believe how much I'd grown, and she was so fine, and..."
"Do you have her contact information? She needs to know about this, then. Especially since it's so contagious--"
"Yeah, I'll get it for you. She gonna be okay?"
"It depends on how far it's gone through her. The cocktail I've given you should be easy enough to come by--"
"She ain't got much money..."
"Do you want her and her children to die, Willits?"
He rubbed his neck again, looked at the floor. "No, but--"
"Then you will continue to do the right thing. You can be billed for the treatment--"
"That shit's gonna be expensive--!"
"You want me to kill Rei Lan over there?" Dorvee asked, pointed to the small clanner across the room.
"What? What the fuck for?"
"He'll take a percentage of our haul. A significant segment, because he's Tech. Don't worry, I'll do it
where you can't see it, and you'll never have to see the body--"
"Bitch, what the fuck--"
She poked him, hard, in his thick biceps. "How do you think I feel, hearing you try to murder some innocent woman and her children because of financial considerations? Now, let's go get this contact information before you go to work." She drug Willits up and out of the room. On her way past, a man called out to her.
"Hey, Dorvee! Where's your sister?"
"She's still in recovery. She's still rather annoyed with you, by the way."
"I told her it wouldn't work, and besides, I promised I'd pay her back. I need to get her transfer numbers."
Dorvee stopped dead. "You have the money already?"
"Yeah, shit--I had a couple interested parties willing to back my bet, and I still make a nice profit off the whole thing too."
"She'll enjoy hearing that, I'm sure. I'll tell her on my way back."
"Thanks!" Someone elbowed the man, Sled Taggert, to get him to tell the details of his bet with Morvee--it'd been the talk of the bunks, before the last sleep-cycle. He'd somehow talked her into trying some near-impossible position, and she'd pulled it off, for the most part, but some part of her internal workings had broken in the attempt, and thus she'd defaulted on the bet, making Sled a tidy sum of money, which he promised to cut her in on, to replace the busted parts.
