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Aug. 16th, 2005 09:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
philrancidDorvee shuddered and murmured the sort of things Benny liked to hear, rocking, rocking with him, even though he'd gone limp minutes ago, his head rolling loosely on his broken neck. She was broken, there was something wrong, she'd been given some sort of bad code, something that pushed too hard against her restraint systems, and she couldn't figure out what to do--those moments when she could think at all. So she straddled Benny's corpse and ground away at him dead body, the command-line code taking priority until she could try to fix the damage it'd wrought.
In desperation, realizing that Stano was nearby, Dorvee beeped out her distress signal. She heard him stop moving over in his cubicle, and the distraction was enough to get her a little more in control of herself. She started to turn towards Stano, towards where she thought he was sitting, and then Jarl's voice came over the speaker by her head. Another command-line string. She shuddered as she tried to fight the command, but this was basic to her design and programmed nature. She began to simulate a screaming orgasm. That bastard, she thought, just before the newest bit of interfering code tangled up her mind, and her body ran the first of the looping orgasms he'd just programmed her to perform.
Stano got up from his seat, his hand on the cubicle divider, his thoughts troubled. He didn't want to interfere with anything, but it had sounded like Dorvee was malfunctioning for a moment. Jarl's voice came over the speakers, said something, and Stano couldn't figure out what it was, but it had sounded a lot like Get back to work. He went back to his seat as Dorvee started gasping and screaming with simulated pleasure.
A moment later his hands were flying over the controls again, prepping the ship.
"Dammit, I can't get the ship. Rei, you're gonna have to go back to the ship. Call up one of the reserve teams. McGhael!"
"Aye?"
"Bring that cutter down here! I'll show this moldering shitheap what happens when you mess with my friends!"
"What's happened, Ricked?"
"That fucking door cut Willits in fucking half, and broke Rei Lan's arm! I'm gonna cut this whole fucking heap to scrap!"
"Cutter's on the way."
Rei Lan floated out the missing outer hatch, and after a few moments, Ricked looked up.
"McGhael, where's my fucking cutter?" No answer. He waited a minute, and then decided he'd best go see what was keeping the fool. He got to the hatch, and then he remembered the incident in the mess hall, how he'd fooled the idiot, and embarrassed him. He looked at the silent hatchway, and saw the clanner hanging there like a spider, cutter ready, to peel his suit and the top of his head off when he came outside. He shook his head at the thought, and laughed at himself. He'd never do that sort of thing while the rest of the crews were nearby, and even if he would, there was still a way around it. He grabbed his tether line, pulled in the slack, and then stood staring dumbly while the frayed end of the cable floated into the ship.
Ricked opened the main comm channel.
"Clanner, you piece of shit, there's nowhere you can run that'll be safe from me, you hear? Cut my fucking tether, will you? I'll peel you like a fucking orange." Laughter came back to him, faint, tinny over the comm.
"Come and find me, McLannesh. We'll settle out of sight."
Growling, Ricked went for the doorway, and stopped again. There wasn't any reason the stupid clanner couldn't be right outside the door, waiting, ready to burn a hole through him with the cutter. He turned to the instrument panel near the hatch, and wiped it clean. If the murderous shit was perched where Ricked thought he was, then opening the bay doors would serve him up nicely. Ricked found the key for the bay and pressed it. There was a faint vibration through the ship, and then the comm silence was broken by shrill screams, which were cut off just as quickly as they had come. He floated out of the hatch lazily, turning to survey the damage he'd done to the clanner. He found himself hearing a dry chuckle in his comm, and staring into the warmed-up channel of a cutter, aimed at his face.
"Aye, sure now you're a clever one, McLannesh, but--" the rest of McGhael's victory speech went unspoken as the bay doors slammed shut, with as much force as the hatch door inside had. The clanner was yanked backwards, and for a moment Ricked couldn't figure out why, until he fired his jets and saw that the lines for the cutter had become tangled in the bay doors. Ricked watched as McGhael slammed into the top of the ship with enough force to send sparks and small chunks of alloy from his jets, and then, suddenly one of them fired, bent at an odd angle. McGhael screamed for a second, in fear and then in frustration, as he realized that he couldn't control his pack. Ricked aimed himself for the lines of the cutter just as they went taut and brought McGhael looping back towards the hull of the ship. He thought to perhaps reach for them, cut them loose, and let the clanner float off into the field, but before he could, the bay doors swung open, for a moment blindingly fast, but then something gave inside. Ricked saw sparks and a twisted piece of metal spun off into the void, and then the doors locked up. McGhael's impromptu tether had been torn in half by the shutting of the bay doors, though, so his purpose was served. He saw McGhael speed back into view, no doubt after having crashed into the side of the ship and either having broken or shut down his jets.
"Stupid bloody clanner," he said, and waved to the rapidly-diminishing form. He turned to go back to the ship, get a new cutter. He wasn't done with this shitheap, not by a long shot, but he'd need the tools for the job, first. And he needed to think about this last encounter with the clanner. After all these years, someone'd finally managed to get the drop on him again, and he hadn't found his own way of outsmarting them--it'd been pure luck that he'd escaped with his life. That boded ill.
Dozens of voices cried out to him over the comms, but Jarl couldn't bring himself to care. Certain parts of his personality had been erased, even before this encounter, to enable him to do his job with the most ruthless efficiency, but now, after this strange coding attack, even more of his empathic programming had been destroyed. He wanted nothing more than to unplug himself from the ship, try to undo this system rewrite, but other, more basic and fundamental parts of him had been rewritten to prevent this. His left hand snaked out and turned off the manual controls for the ship, and his pilot-brain accessed the ship link even more deeply. Someone from the crews outside was trying to take control of the situation outside, calling for calm, trying to establish order. They were more than welcome to figure out how to govern themselves, Jarl thought, as the mini-drone in the cargo bay was shifted onto its loading track and prepped for launch. Most of the crew were tethered to a working platform not far from the ship, and the quickest way to send them into the field would be to knock the platform. Its operations systems were now being reformatted, and by the time the crew figured out to switch to manual, they'd already have struck the outer ships of the field.
"Crews crews crews! This is Ricked! The chiphead's fucking us! Untether, repeat, un--" Ricked's voice went silent over the comms, as Jarl cut him out of the loop with a thought. Several voices cried out questions, called for Ricked to repeat or explain himself, but unless they went and found him in person, he wouldn't be doing any talking. If the drone survived the hit with the tether platform, then he'd send it after the idiot clanner. He checked Ricked's vitals. Blood pressure: F. Jarl, blinked in surprise, his programming thrown in such a snarl by the illogical answer that his automatic personality responses came through. He quickly scanned the rest of the vitals, gathered the results, and pasted them together. There were results for signs that didn't even register, for signs that weren't part of the original program.
FUCK YOU CHIPPY, the results read. Ricked had been tampering with his suit monitor programs.
"Half pay till you fix it," Jarl said aloud, and then part of him laughed inside, at the ludicrousness of the thought, and part of him was afraid--that sort of silliness was the result of programming conflicts; serious, eventually fatal, errors in the code.
"I know you can hear me still, you shit-eater," the offending crewman called over the comm. "I knew you'd fuck us eventually, but I thought I had you well-pegged enough that I'd see it coming. Enjoy your little moment, chipper--I'm about to ram one of these junkers so far up your ass, you won't be able to tell where its BIOS ends and yours begins."
Jarl opened his mouth. To protest, to scoff, to threaten: he didn't know. His tongue came out, slowly, carefully, and then withdrew. He smiled. "They're coming for you," he said, his voice queerly flat, unemotive, and then he turned off the reception of Ricked's signal. He scanned the rest of the crews, searching for his trusting fools, the couple of workers who were so noble as to leave their Emergency Retrieval Systems intact. Finding three of them, he infiltrated their suits, peering through their eyes, reading their vitals, and listening to their voices as they watched the crew scramble to untether from the platform and scatter: an old union trick to keep unscrupulous pilots and captains from being able to pull the very trick he was about to attempt. If they got free, they'd hide in the field, maybe try to build themselves something serviceable, or salvage a distress beacon, until he got tired of trying to kill them, and left. Jarl smiled to himself.
Let them hide in the field. There were old hungers there, waiting to be sated.
The signal came, that the drone was raising from the bay, would be ready to launch in moments. Jarl took over the three suits he'd chosen.
Melton Everas couldn't hear anything besides his panting as he sped towards the tether platform as fast as he thought he could handle, which happened to be well above the work-safety protocols. He and the boys were racing for the platform, and those already there were trying like hell to get unhooked. Melton risked a quick peek up at the ship, and saw the towing drone emerge from between the bay doors. It was like some mechanical child of death, soon to scream Hell at them fresh from its birth from between cold gleaming metal labia. When his suit lurched as the rockets fired, he honestly thought that he'd panicked at the sight of the drone and hit the wrong switches. He fought the sticks, trying to right himself, and then his pack fired just so, and found himself flipping end over end, hurtling straight towards a knot of his fellow crewmen, and the tethers of others. He struck one of the other suit's jets so hard that his helmet actually broke off of its seal.
The last thing Melton heard, as all the air left his suit, his body, was a sound like thick ice cracking.
Jarl smiled as the first suit hit, scattering the thickest group of crewmen, and snarling up several tethers as well. He readjusted the suit's rockets to compensate for the new trajectories, and fired them full thrust, to snarl the tethers of the approaching crew with the tumbling members who'd just been struck. He then moved his other two suits into striking postions, opened their jets up, and figured all the possible trajectories of each strike before they'd even come within yards of occuring. He made hundreds of calculation adjustments, dozens of course adjustments, before the second suit hit, thowing an approching suit off at a wild angle. He adjusted he rockets again, to maximize forward thrust for the second and third hits, which happened almost simultaneously as two more men tried to reach the platform.
The drone launched, and another fraction of Jarl's minds steered it straight for the tether platform.
Platty raced for the workstation, but when he saw the suits crashing together, and the drone on its way, he turned off his borrowed air from the platform and pulled his minicutter out. It was hard to wrestle around and get to his tether, but he managed to find the connection to his suit. There came a flash of orange light, and the tether floated away. He turned his rockets on, not fighting the momentum he'd already built, but turning away from the platform, changing course for the ship itself. He heard snarls and curses soming in ovder the comms, screams, and the loose hiss of ruptured seals coming in over the top of the exclamations. He turned a eye towards the dozen floating bodies fouled by Jarl's attacks. A suit was snarled in several tethers, and was pulling them every which way, tying them tighter in a noose from which there'd be no escape. Something flashed in the light of the closest star, and Platty saw another suit crashing around, carefully rebounding off the strays, herding everyone in its influence into as small an area as Jarl could manage with the speeds involved. The way the two rogue suits flopped and flipped, Platty thought it unlikely that either of the crewmen inside were still alive.
The drone struck the platform, as Platty watched, drawing nearer. Sparks, metal flew off into the void, and the drone tumbled off to the two-thirty, with about a thirty-degree angle, spinning laterally. On rocket fired, then another as Jarl tried to correct its course, tested it to see if it was still working. The platform started to fall apart, turning slowly counterclockwise, tangling up the attached tethers, approaching the crew members at a moderate pace. Platty scanned the starfield, saw that a couple of his mates had managed to free themselves from the suit end, and were retreating into the salvage field. Others were racing towards the platform-bound suits, cutters out, hoping to free the rest before the situation became untenable.
That fucking chiphead, turning on us like this. Here we were, about to make the haul that would have ended it for most of us, Platty thought, and this bastard wants to kill us all, keep it all for himself. Why couldn't he have just waited for us to get some of the work done for him? That was the chiphead way, really--to make you work your ass off, do all the labor, and then they gouged you or cut you out of the deal afterwards. Not like this, this wanton killing. There wasn't any way around something like this--no union workers and reps can show up on a lost salvage field and make a boss stop killing you, no matter what sort of miracles they could perform in the work courts, or behind the scenes.
And chips usually didn't kill, if they could help it. Their logic was usually too flawless for such a human emotion, such a passionate, hungry answer for problems. The more fucked a situation became, the less emotive the chippers got. Maybe Jarl would explain it, Platty wondered idly, fingering his cutter, while I'm burning out his processors and savaging his electric guts. He finalized his trajectory, upped the thrust to cut the kliks between his suit and the ship.
The drone looped back around and struck the platform again, knocking loose a large chunk of piping, and speeding the workstation along. Platty stared.
Why in the hell was he sending it into the field?
Ricked kicked the hatch out of the way, ignoring the brittle chips of frozen flash that ticked off his faceplate as he pushed his way inside. He'd found a small First Fleet fighter, something so simplistic and shit-stupid that it wouldn't be able to work from remote, until someone came onboard and manually reconfigured its systems. He floated towards the cabin, and two short snaps from his cutter took off the bolt-hinges. He used a magnetic handle to pull the door loose of its frame, and set it and the cutter down outside the cabin. He surveyed the cabin for moment in silence, staring at the bodies strapped into the pilot's and copilot's chairs. They'd been holed. Judging from the ragged exit holes in the backs of the chairs, they'd either hit a high-speed debris field, or they'd flown into a meteorite storm. He looked around the cabin, saw that the main instrument panels were intact, and turned to fetch his cutter. He'd take out the rest of the forward windows and chuck the frozen bodies out that way, then head to the back to see if there was anything left in the drive cells. He'd have to check and see if--
A high-pitched comm-finder tone broke in through his thoughts. Something was doing an all-hail. "You are trespassing. This ship is property of--" a burst of garbled noise broke up the bot's canned speech, "and according to provisions of law, I am now authorized to remove you by all possible means." Ricked looked down the corridor to the cargo deck and saw an ancient bot, all gleaming yellow metal, gliding his way. He looked it over, hunting for the telltale glow of laser-sighting systems, or heat weapons, but there was nothing. The bot extended one spidery limb, and a wickedly-sharp-looking curved blade ratched out of the "hand". It did the same with each of its remaining three limbs and anchored itself to the wall about ten yards from Ricked. He could almost feel it scanning him, and he spoke.
"Stupid can of shit and grease, bringing a knife to torch-fight." He kicked himself towards the cutter, clearing the space between it in an instant and bouncing back away from it. He snagged its handles and hauled it up with him as he floated back into the cabin. He looked up to see the bot bulleting towards him. He kicked away from the doorway, off the the left of it, and the bot cought itself on the doorframe and hung there, glaring at him.
"You are trespessing. You are weilding a weapon in open defiance. I am now authorized to use lethal--" The rest of the pretty speech died in a blaze of sparks and glowing alloys, as the cutter bit off a chunk of the bot's sensor arrays. It pushed off from the doorframe, hard, and sped back into the cargo bay, where it would have the advantage of room to stalk and kill, and, if he didn't follow, it would find the parts it needed to refit itself. Ricked chose to follow, even though it meant most likely following the thing into a deathtrap. He cleared the doorway, thinking about the satisfying flash and silence he'd gotten as the cutter ate the thing's face. He checked his six-vertical, and saw the bot hurtling at him from above the doorframe.
He had time to think: Twice in one day!
The work platform hurtled towards the salvage field, taking a baker's dozen of the crew with it as it tumbled. Jarl's drone and his one remaining remote suit darted around, slamming the strays and loose crew around. He'd lost the other two suits through damage. One had exploded outright, the jet pack ruptured, and the other had been battered so badly that it stopped responding to commands, and was just drifting through the void, forgotten. Jarl watched as a suit hurtled toward the ship, all its systems closed down, the jets going cold, and tried to remember whether or not he'd seen one knocked this way.
Zen fester read butter plenipotentiary, he thought. His eyes widened, and his muscles spasmed, as the bad code rolled around, trying to find something else in him to conflict with, trying to kill him. High-pitched whining and grinding sounds came from somewhere inside him, but he couldn't tell if he was making them in some attempt at speech, or if they were the tired sounds of his processors and drives trying to burn up. Everything went wild in his minds for a moment, as he lost control.
The drone and the suit went looping off into erratic paths, and then their jets fell silent. They sped off into the field, crashing around, careening off the dead hulks.
Marn couldn't smell his own vomit anymore, as he struggled to right himself, to fight the pull of the tether as he twisted through space fast enough to make the starfield into some sort of sick dance-light display. He felt himself starting to level out, and realized that the drone wasn't hitting the work platform anymore. He hung for a moment, re-orienting himself, using the platform as his reference point, and ignoring the tumbling stars outside of his focus. He'd dropped his cutter, when one of the struck suits had hit him, but it'd been a glancing blow, and he'd suffered no others. He'd listened in terror as the rest of the crew were hit again and again, knocked around until most of them stopped responding, stopped sending any signal at all. He tried to slow his breathing, concentrate, so that he could get loose of the platform. He noted that he was breathing his own air, which meant that either the platform was smashed too badly to do life-support or his tether was cut, somewhere. He ran a fast diagnostic, and it read back that his cable was severed. Which meant that the only thing left to cut was a strand of plastic-coated braided steel. He tried to think of something he'd carried that he could use to break the cable with, and then shouted as he remembered his bolt-popper. He searched himself, and found it resting in its holster. He pulled it free, looked it over, and then grabbed his tether and separated the air hose from the cable. He twisted the cable as best as he could and jammed the bolt-popper's nozzle up against it and pulled the trigger. The alignment teeth flickered out, and then snapped back in.
Fuck. He'd only managed to tear it halfway through. Snarls of cable twisted free as the force of the platform's spin and speed stressed the weakened cable. He reached for the cable with his left hand, trying to steady it, and grunted in pain as the torn steel strands bit into his hand, through his glove. The glove had a self-sealing layer behind the ripstop cloth, so he needn't fear exposure to the elements, but that didn't stop the pain of having several steel needles with a temperature in the neighborhood of absolute zero sticking into his palm from ripping up through his arm.
He held, tight, anyway, to stop some of the bucking trembles that were traveling up the cable from kicking his popper loose, and he tried again. The teeth flickered out and in, and the cable let go. Marn screamed in agony as the force of his own momentum tore his away from the tether, and ripped the steel strands through the meat of his hand. His hand was lain open, and worse, he dimly felt over the roar of his rent hand that the seal over his wrist had pulled tight. There was a flash of fiery pain through his hand that rocketed up his arm, made him nauseous all over again, and he brought his hand up to look at the damage. The glove was open to the void, and stuffed with the red crystals of his frozen blood. His wrist was aching horribly now, and the only way to stop the cold from eating more of his arm was to break off his own hand, and pull the stump of his wrist back inside the seal. Sweat ran, stinging, into his eyes, and his felt dizzy. Warning lights flickered on his HUD--he was going into shock. With a savage grunt he grabbed his dead hand with his good one and gave it a savage twist. He drew in air to scream, and things went bright and flashy for a moment. He fought back the waves of unconsciousness and dug the nuzzle of the bolt-popper into the glove. His hand was shaking, badly, and then the teeth flickered in and out. He pulled the gun back, and red crystals floated out of the tear in the glove. He dug the popper back into the glove, and triggered it a few more times, trying to move it around as much as he could. He put the popper back and pulled on his dead hand, hoping he'd torn enough of it that the rest had frozen tight and would break off. A globule of weightless spittle gleamed as it rolled past his faceplate, and the pain the wrenched through his as he hauled on the dead hand was enough to make him gray out. When he came to, he saw that the hand was gone. He pulled his stump of wrist back inside his sleeve as best as he could, and used his remaining hand to pull the sleeve the rest of the way up. He opened up the glove and checked the seal, making sure that it was tight. His arm was agony.
Marn realized that his suit was going insane with vitals warnings, and through the haze of his pain he thought that the fastest way to end a lot of them would be to kill the pain. He opened his emergency kit and loaded a local anesthetic into his left arm medical bracer. He turned on the vein sensors, and the HUD flashed warning after warning at him, refusing him access to the needle-bot. He silenced them with a manual emergency override command, and then let the bot do its work. Veins were located, primed, and then Marn was dully surprised to note that he could feel the tiny prick of the needle going in, even over the roaring agony of his missing hand and frostbitten wrist.
He passed out, and when his momentum slammed him into the hull of a ship on the edge of the field, the force slapped the breath from his lungs, and he didn't replace it. His body tumbled back into the void, and empty shell now, trailing tether.
In desperation, realizing that Stano was nearby, Dorvee beeped out her distress signal. She heard him stop moving over in his cubicle, and the distraction was enough to get her a little more in control of herself. She started to turn towards Stano, towards where she thought he was sitting, and then Jarl's voice came over the speaker by her head. Another command-line string. She shuddered as she tried to fight the command, but this was basic to her design and programmed nature. She began to simulate a screaming orgasm. That bastard, she thought, just before the newest bit of interfering code tangled up her mind, and her body ran the first of the looping orgasms he'd just programmed her to perform.
Stano got up from his seat, his hand on the cubicle divider, his thoughts troubled. He didn't want to interfere with anything, but it had sounded like Dorvee was malfunctioning for a moment. Jarl's voice came over the speakers, said something, and Stano couldn't figure out what it was, but it had sounded a lot like Get back to work. He went back to his seat as Dorvee started gasping and screaming with simulated pleasure.
A moment later his hands were flying over the controls again, prepping the ship.
"Dammit, I can't get the ship. Rei, you're gonna have to go back to the ship. Call up one of the reserve teams. McGhael!"
"Aye?"
"Bring that cutter down here! I'll show this moldering shitheap what happens when you mess with my friends!"
"What's happened, Ricked?"
"That fucking door cut Willits in fucking half, and broke Rei Lan's arm! I'm gonna cut this whole fucking heap to scrap!"
"Cutter's on the way."
Rei Lan floated out the missing outer hatch, and after a few moments, Ricked looked up.
"McGhael, where's my fucking cutter?" No answer. He waited a minute, and then decided he'd best go see what was keeping the fool. He got to the hatch, and then he remembered the incident in the mess hall, how he'd fooled the idiot, and embarrassed him. He looked at the silent hatchway, and saw the clanner hanging there like a spider, cutter ready, to peel his suit and the top of his head off when he came outside. He shook his head at the thought, and laughed at himself. He'd never do that sort of thing while the rest of the crews were nearby, and even if he would, there was still a way around it. He grabbed his tether line, pulled in the slack, and then stood staring dumbly while the frayed end of the cable floated into the ship.
Ricked opened the main comm channel.
"Clanner, you piece of shit, there's nowhere you can run that'll be safe from me, you hear? Cut my fucking tether, will you? I'll peel you like a fucking orange." Laughter came back to him, faint, tinny over the comm.
"Come and find me, McLannesh. We'll settle out of sight."
Growling, Ricked went for the doorway, and stopped again. There wasn't any reason the stupid clanner couldn't be right outside the door, waiting, ready to burn a hole through him with the cutter. He turned to the instrument panel near the hatch, and wiped it clean. If the murderous shit was perched where Ricked thought he was, then opening the bay doors would serve him up nicely. Ricked found the key for the bay and pressed it. There was a faint vibration through the ship, and then the comm silence was broken by shrill screams, which were cut off just as quickly as they had come. He floated out of the hatch lazily, turning to survey the damage he'd done to the clanner. He found himself hearing a dry chuckle in his comm, and staring into the warmed-up channel of a cutter, aimed at his face.
"Aye, sure now you're a clever one, McLannesh, but--" the rest of McGhael's victory speech went unspoken as the bay doors slammed shut, with as much force as the hatch door inside had. The clanner was yanked backwards, and for a moment Ricked couldn't figure out why, until he fired his jets and saw that the lines for the cutter had become tangled in the bay doors. Ricked watched as McGhael slammed into the top of the ship with enough force to send sparks and small chunks of alloy from his jets, and then, suddenly one of them fired, bent at an odd angle. McGhael screamed for a second, in fear and then in frustration, as he realized that he couldn't control his pack. Ricked aimed himself for the lines of the cutter just as they went taut and brought McGhael looping back towards the hull of the ship. He thought to perhaps reach for them, cut them loose, and let the clanner float off into the field, but before he could, the bay doors swung open, for a moment blindingly fast, but then something gave inside. Ricked saw sparks and a twisted piece of metal spun off into the void, and then the doors locked up. McGhael's impromptu tether had been torn in half by the shutting of the bay doors, though, so his purpose was served. He saw McGhael speed back into view, no doubt after having crashed into the side of the ship and either having broken or shut down his jets.
"Stupid bloody clanner," he said, and waved to the rapidly-diminishing form. He turned to go back to the ship, get a new cutter. He wasn't done with this shitheap, not by a long shot, but he'd need the tools for the job, first. And he needed to think about this last encounter with the clanner. After all these years, someone'd finally managed to get the drop on him again, and he hadn't found his own way of outsmarting them--it'd been pure luck that he'd escaped with his life. That boded ill.
Dozens of voices cried out to him over the comms, but Jarl couldn't bring himself to care. Certain parts of his personality had been erased, even before this encounter, to enable him to do his job with the most ruthless efficiency, but now, after this strange coding attack, even more of his empathic programming had been destroyed. He wanted nothing more than to unplug himself from the ship, try to undo this system rewrite, but other, more basic and fundamental parts of him had been rewritten to prevent this. His left hand snaked out and turned off the manual controls for the ship, and his pilot-brain accessed the ship link even more deeply. Someone from the crews outside was trying to take control of the situation outside, calling for calm, trying to establish order. They were more than welcome to figure out how to govern themselves, Jarl thought, as the mini-drone in the cargo bay was shifted onto its loading track and prepped for launch. Most of the crew were tethered to a working platform not far from the ship, and the quickest way to send them into the field would be to knock the platform. Its operations systems were now being reformatted, and by the time the crew figured out to switch to manual, they'd already have struck the outer ships of the field.
"Crews crews crews! This is Ricked! The chiphead's fucking us! Untether, repeat, un--" Ricked's voice went silent over the comms, as Jarl cut him out of the loop with a thought. Several voices cried out questions, called for Ricked to repeat or explain himself, but unless they went and found him in person, he wouldn't be doing any talking. If the drone survived the hit with the tether platform, then he'd send it after the idiot clanner. He checked Ricked's vitals. Blood pressure: F. Jarl, blinked in surprise, his programming thrown in such a snarl by the illogical answer that his automatic personality responses came through. He quickly scanned the rest of the vitals, gathered the results, and pasted them together. There were results for signs that didn't even register, for signs that weren't part of the original program.
FUCK YOU CHIPPY, the results read. Ricked had been tampering with his suit monitor programs.
"Half pay till you fix it," Jarl said aloud, and then part of him laughed inside, at the ludicrousness of the thought, and part of him was afraid--that sort of silliness was the result of programming conflicts; serious, eventually fatal, errors in the code.
"I know you can hear me still, you shit-eater," the offending crewman called over the comm. "I knew you'd fuck us eventually, but I thought I had you well-pegged enough that I'd see it coming. Enjoy your little moment, chipper--I'm about to ram one of these junkers so far up your ass, you won't be able to tell where its BIOS ends and yours begins."
Jarl opened his mouth. To protest, to scoff, to threaten: he didn't know. His tongue came out, slowly, carefully, and then withdrew. He smiled. "They're coming for you," he said, his voice queerly flat, unemotive, and then he turned off the reception of Ricked's signal. He scanned the rest of the crews, searching for his trusting fools, the couple of workers who were so noble as to leave their Emergency Retrieval Systems intact. Finding three of them, he infiltrated their suits, peering through their eyes, reading their vitals, and listening to their voices as they watched the crew scramble to untether from the platform and scatter: an old union trick to keep unscrupulous pilots and captains from being able to pull the very trick he was about to attempt. If they got free, they'd hide in the field, maybe try to build themselves something serviceable, or salvage a distress beacon, until he got tired of trying to kill them, and left. Jarl smiled to himself.
Let them hide in the field. There were old hungers there, waiting to be sated.
The signal came, that the drone was raising from the bay, would be ready to launch in moments. Jarl took over the three suits he'd chosen.
Melton Everas couldn't hear anything besides his panting as he sped towards the tether platform as fast as he thought he could handle, which happened to be well above the work-safety protocols. He and the boys were racing for the platform, and those already there were trying like hell to get unhooked. Melton risked a quick peek up at the ship, and saw the towing drone emerge from between the bay doors. It was like some mechanical child of death, soon to scream Hell at them fresh from its birth from between cold gleaming metal labia. When his suit lurched as the rockets fired, he honestly thought that he'd panicked at the sight of the drone and hit the wrong switches. He fought the sticks, trying to right himself, and then his pack fired just so, and found himself flipping end over end, hurtling straight towards a knot of his fellow crewmen, and the tethers of others. He struck one of the other suit's jets so hard that his helmet actually broke off of its seal.
The last thing Melton heard, as all the air left his suit, his body, was a sound like thick ice cracking.
Jarl smiled as the first suit hit, scattering the thickest group of crewmen, and snarling up several tethers as well. He readjusted the suit's rockets to compensate for the new trajectories, and fired them full thrust, to snarl the tethers of the approaching crew with the tumbling members who'd just been struck. He then moved his other two suits into striking postions, opened their jets up, and figured all the possible trajectories of each strike before they'd even come within yards of occuring. He made hundreds of calculation adjustments, dozens of course adjustments, before the second suit hit, thowing an approching suit off at a wild angle. He adjusted he rockets again, to maximize forward thrust for the second and third hits, which happened almost simultaneously as two more men tried to reach the platform.
The drone launched, and another fraction of Jarl's minds steered it straight for the tether platform.
Platty raced for the workstation, but when he saw the suits crashing together, and the drone on its way, he turned off his borrowed air from the platform and pulled his minicutter out. It was hard to wrestle around and get to his tether, but he managed to find the connection to his suit. There came a flash of orange light, and the tether floated away. He turned his rockets on, not fighting the momentum he'd already built, but turning away from the platform, changing course for the ship itself. He heard snarls and curses soming in ovder the comms, screams, and the loose hiss of ruptured seals coming in over the top of the exclamations. He turned a eye towards the dozen floating bodies fouled by Jarl's attacks. A suit was snarled in several tethers, and was pulling them every which way, tying them tighter in a noose from which there'd be no escape. Something flashed in the light of the closest star, and Platty saw another suit crashing around, carefully rebounding off the strays, herding everyone in its influence into as small an area as Jarl could manage with the speeds involved. The way the two rogue suits flopped and flipped, Platty thought it unlikely that either of the crewmen inside were still alive.
The drone struck the platform, as Platty watched, drawing nearer. Sparks, metal flew off into the void, and the drone tumbled off to the two-thirty, with about a thirty-degree angle, spinning laterally. On rocket fired, then another as Jarl tried to correct its course, tested it to see if it was still working. The platform started to fall apart, turning slowly counterclockwise, tangling up the attached tethers, approaching the crew members at a moderate pace. Platty scanned the starfield, saw that a couple of his mates had managed to free themselves from the suit end, and were retreating into the salvage field. Others were racing towards the platform-bound suits, cutters out, hoping to free the rest before the situation became untenable.
That fucking chiphead, turning on us like this. Here we were, about to make the haul that would have ended it for most of us, Platty thought, and this bastard wants to kill us all, keep it all for himself. Why couldn't he have just waited for us to get some of the work done for him? That was the chiphead way, really--to make you work your ass off, do all the labor, and then they gouged you or cut you out of the deal afterwards. Not like this, this wanton killing. There wasn't any way around something like this--no union workers and reps can show up on a lost salvage field and make a boss stop killing you, no matter what sort of miracles they could perform in the work courts, or behind the scenes.
And chips usually didn't kill, if they could help it. Their logic was usually too flawless for such a human emotion, such a passionate, hungry answer for problems. The more fucked a situation became, the less emotive the chippers got. Maybe Jarl would explain it, Platty wondered idly, fingering his cutter, while I'm burning out his processors and savaging his electric guts. He finalized his trajectory, upped the thrust to cut the kliks between his suit and the ship.
The drone looped back around and struck the platform again, knocking loose a large chunk of piping, and speeding the workstation along. Platty stared.
Why in the hell was he sending it into the field?
Ricked kicked the hatch out of the way, ignoring the brittle chips of frozen flash that ticked off his faceplate as he pushed his way inside. He'd found a small First Fleet fighter, something so simplistic and shit-stupid that it wouldn't be able to work from remote, until someone came onboard and manually reconfigured its systems. He floated towards the cabin, and two short snaps from his cutter took off the bolt-hinges. He used a magnetic handle to pull the door loose of its frame, and set it and the cutter down outside the cabin. He surveyed the cabin for moment in silence, staring at the bodies strapped into the pilot's and copilot's chairs. They'd been holed. Judging from the ragged exit holes in the backs of the chairs, they'd either hit a high-speed debris field, or they'd flown into a meteorite storm. He looked around the cabin, saw that the main instrument panels were intact, and turned to fetch his cutter. He'd take out the rest of the forward windows and chuck the frozen bodies out that way, then head to the back to see if there was anything left in the drive cells. He'd have to check and see if--
A high-pitched comm-finder tone broke in through his thoughts. Something was doing an all-hail. "You are trespassing. This ship is property of--" a burst of garbled noise broke up the bot's canned speech, "and according to provisions of law, I am now authorized to remove you by all possible means." Ricked looked down the corridor to the cargo deck and saw an ancient bot, all gleaming yellow metal, gliding his way. He looked it over, hunting for the telltale glow of laser-sighting systems, or heat weapons, but there was nothing. The bot extended one spidery limb, and a wickedly-sharp-looking curved blade ratched out of the "hand". It did the same with each of its remaining three limbs and anchored itself to the wall about ten yards from Ricked. He could almost feel it scanning him, and he spoke.
"Stupid can of shit and grease, bringing a knife to torch-fight." He kicked himself towards the cutter, clearing the space between it in an instant and bouncing back away from it. He snagged its handles and hauled it up with him as he floated back into the cabin. He looked up to see the bot bulleting towards him. He kicked away from the doorway, off the the left of it, and the bot cought itself on the doorframe and hung there, glaring at him.
"You are trespessing. You are weilding a weapon in open defiance. I am now authorized to use lethal--" The rest of the pretty speech died in a blaze of sparks and glowing alloys, as the cutter bit off a chunk of the bot's sensor arrays. It pushed off from the doorframe, hard, and sped back into the cargo bay, where it would have the advantage of room to stalk and kill, and, if he didn't follow, it would find the parts it needed to refit itself. Ricked chose to follow, even though it meant most likely following the thing into a deathtrap. He cleared the doorway, thinking about the satisfying flash and silence he'd gotten as the cutter ate the thing's face. He checked his six-vertical, and saw the bot hurtling at him from above the doorframe.
He had time to think: Twice in one day!
The work platform hurtled towards the salvage field, taking a baker's dozen of the crew with it as it tumbled. Jarl's drone and his one remaining remote suit darted around, slamming the strays and loose crew around. He'd lost the other two suits through damage. One had exploded outright, the jet pack ruptured, and the other had been battered so badly that it stopped responding to commands, and was just drifting through the void, forgotten. Jarl watched as a suit hurtled toward the ship, all its systems closed down, the jets going cold, and tried to remember whether or not he'd seen one knocked this way.
Zen fester read butter plenipotentiary, he thought. His eyes widened, and his muscles spasmed, as the bad code rolled around, trying to find something else in him to conflict with, trying to kill him. High-pitched whining and grinding sounds came from somewhere inside him, but he couldn't tell if he was making them in some attempt at speech, or if they were the tired sounds of his processors and drives trying to burn up. Everything went wild in his minds for a moment, as he lost control.
The drone and the suit went looping off into erratic paths, and then their jets fell silent. They sped off into the field, crashing around, careening off the dead hulks.
Marn couldn't smell his own vomit anymore, as he struggled to right himself, to fight the pull of the tether as he twisted through space fast enough to make the starfield into some sort of sick dance-light display. He felt himself starting to level out, and realized that the drone wasn't hitting the work platform anymore. He hung for a moment, re-orienting himself, using the platform as his reference point, and ignoring the tumbling stars outside of his focus. He'd dropped his cutter, when one of the struck suits had hit him, but it'd been a glancing blow, and he'd suffered no others. He'd listened in terror as the rest of the crew were hit again and again, knocked around until most of them stopped responding, stopped sending any signal at all. He tried to slow his breathing, concentrate, so that he could get loose of the platform. He noted that he was breathing his own air, which meant that either the platform was smashed too badly to do life-support or his tether was cut, somewhere. He ran a fast diagnostic, and it read back that his cable was severed. Which meant that the only thing left to cut was a strand of plastic-coated braided steel. He tried to think of something he'd carried that he could use to break the cable with, and then shouted as he remembered his bolt-popper. He searched himself, and found it resting in its holster. He pulled it free, looked it over, and then grabbed his tether and separated the air hose from the cable. He twisted the cable as best as he could and jammed the bolt-popper's nozzle up against it and pulled the trigger. The alignment teeth flickered out, and then snapped back in.
Fuck. He'd only managed to tear it halfway through. Snarls of cable twisted free as the force of the platform's spin and speed stressed the weakened cable. He reached for the cable with his left hand, trying to steady it, and grunted in pain as the torn steel strands bit into his hand, through his glove. The glove had a self-sealing layer behind the ripstop cloth, so he needn't fear exposure to the elements, but that didn't stop the pain of having several steel needles with a temperature in the neighborhood of absolute zero sticking into his palm from ripping up through his arm.
He held, tight, anyway, to stop some of the bucking trembles that were traveling up the cable from kicking his popper loose, and he tried again. The teeth flickered out and in, and the cable let go. Marn screamed in agony as the force of his own momentum tore his away from the tether, and ripped the steel strands through the meat of his hand. His hand was lain open, and worse, he dimly felt over the roar of his rent hand that the seal over his wrist had pulled tight. There was a flash of fiery pain through his hand that rocketed up his arm, made him nauseous all over again, and he brought his hand up to look at the damage. The glove was open to the void, and stuffed with the red crystals of his frozen blood. His wrist was aching horribly now, and the only way to stop the cold from eating more of his arm was to break off his own hand, and pull the stump of his wrist back inside the seal. Sweat ran, stinging, into his eyes, and his felt dizzy. Warning lights flickered on his HUD--he was going into shock. With a savage grunt he grabbed his dead hand with his good one and gave it a savage twist. He drew in air to scream, and things went bright and flashy for a moment. He fought back the waves of unconsciousness and dug the nuzzle of the bolt-popper into the glove. His hand was shaking, badly, and then the teeth flickered in and out. He pulled the gun back, and red crystals floated out of the tear in the glove. He dug the popper back into the glove, and triggered it a few more times, trying to move it around as much as he could. He put the popper back and pulled on his dead hand, hoping he'd torn enough of it that the rest had frozen tight and would break off. A globule of weightless spittle gleamed as it rolled past his faceplate, and the pain the wrenched through his as he hauled on the dead hand was enough to make him gray out. When he came to, he saw that the hand was gone. He pulled his stump of wrist back inside his sleeve as best as he could, and used his remaining hand to pull the sleeve the rest of the way up. He opened up the glove and checked the seal, making sure that it was tight. His arm was agony.
Marn realized that his suit was going insane with vitals warnings, and through the haze of his pain he thought that the fastest way to end a lot of them would be to kill the pain. He opened his emergency kit and loaded a local anesthetic into his left arm medical bracer. He turned on the vein sensors, and the HUD flashed warning after warning at him, refusing him access to the needle-bot. He silenced them with a manual emergency override command, and then let the bot do its work. Veins were located, primed, and then Marn was dully surprised to note that he could feel the tiny prick of the needle going in, even over the roaring agony of his missing hand and frostbitten wrist.
He passed out, and when his momentum slammed him into the hull of a ship on the edge of the field, the force slapped the breath from his lungs, and he didn't replace it. His body tumbled back into the void, and empty shell now, trailing tether.
