Recruitement
April, 2024
Quote:4.35 kilometres an hour.
That's what the anemometer read. The display flashed yellow, projected on top of the hellish vista beyond the transparent carbon of his helmet bubble.
"Yume', It's getting a bit blowey out here," he said.
"We've another half hour until the front arrives," the voice in his earpiece answered. "At least, that's what TokyoMet are saying."
Yumeko Hino, pilot of Ball One. Loser in the name lottery and forever annoyed about it.
"We'll Pull it when it starts getting above 5."
Four kilometres an hour at near a hundred atmospheres was already enough to start rolling pebbles along the surface. He trudged on, barely aware of the crunching pebbles under his boots. There were no shadows. There was no sunshine overhead to cast them.
It was technically night on Venus. It was still a balmy 735K outside - according to his helmet - hot enough that the clouds themselves were glowing a sickly orange. The closed in from above, pressing him into the seared rock surface.
He didn't bother to take a look around to appreciate the view. Roasted rocks, scorched stone, blasted boulders - it all looked the same. It was hell. It was his job.
Markas worked for the terraforming project. He lead one of the maintenance teams responsible for making sure the city's moorings didn't break. It was an utterly thankless job, taken only by those who found a thrill in being somewhere so utterly inhospitable to human life.
An unprotected human could survive for maybe thirty seconds in vacuum - up to a minute if he or she was lucky. On the Venusian surface - if his suit failed - he'd have mere moments to choose between being crushed entirely or being flash-roasted. His pressure-hardsuit weighed over a ton. It made him look like a dirty red Michelin man, sealed spherical joints keeping the hell outside at bay while still allowing him to move. Power assistance made it possible to walk. Heatsinks and heat-pumps kept the temperature inside at a balmy 33 degrees.
For the two days the batteries would hold out. Then the wearer got a chance to slow-cook.
Another voice crackled in his ear. "Skippy's done at beta-3-9. Skippy ready for pickup."
"There in five, Skippy."
Kay Sera. Pilot of Ball Two. Had the sense to choose his own name. Skippy had no such luck. His name had been earned.
"Five what, hours?"
"Wasn't my fault Skippy."
"Yeah, I know. Shelter in place. But I ain't staying out here all night." He paused. "Well, you know what I mean,"
"Yeah, I gotcha. Five minutes, when I finish this accumulator fin."
"Roger, roger,"
Markas arrived at his destination - a corroded lump of metal bolted hard to the ground. It'd once been shining alloy, but a year under the atmosphere of Venus had taken its toll. A mixture of carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide and searing heat had grown a thick case of brown corrosion on the seismograph. Only a single aerial and some straighter than natural edges differentiated it from the boulders strewn around.
"I'm here. Alpha-2-4. "
"Markas, TokyoMet revised their forceast. The front'll be here inside twenty minutes. "
"Shit. Copy that Yume'." He growled under his breath. "Remind me to kick JD's ass for taking today off."
"Hey. Look at it this way. More kudos for us."
He grumbled to himself, then clicked a switch inside his right manipulator that turned up the air-conditioning on his face, to keep the sweat off.
The replacement seismograph strapped to his hardsuit back had already begun to tarnish across its polished surface. He crouched down, lowering it to the ground. The breeze pressed against his armour, a thousand hands trying to turtle him over onto his side.
Getting back to his feet would be a real pain in the ass in such a bulky outfit. Just walking upright was a challenge. A drill strapped to his hip allowed him to crank down the bolts to lock it solidly into place on the rock. Three kicks made sure it was solidly fixed down.
"Yume, check the new box."
"It's transmitting," she answered. "Good signal. Give it another kick."
The shock of it rattled through his suit, strangely distant from his body yet still shockingly loud in his ears.
"Get it?"
"Got it."
"Great. Now come on in and get me up to that strain gauge."
"There in thirty!"
Twenty seconds later, he was pinned in place by a pair of stark spotlights. Filters on his visor automatically adjusted for the change in illumination, bringing the spherical craft behind into view. A single circular porthole in the centre of the sphere allowed him to see Yume inside, brushing purple hair off her face as she guided the craft down to meet him. A short crane jib was mounted on the top of the Ball, two smaller grabbling arms augmenting it from beneath the pilot's porthole. Crash frames mounted the thrusters and emergency equipment allowing for a rapid ascent.
It floated above him, hovering on thruster power alone. A specialise lock dropped from the crane-jib on a carbon cable.
"Hands up, Markas,"
He reached up, locking his manipulator onto the . heavy-duty latches engaging with a solid snap.
"Good to go," he broadcast.
"Alley-oop!"
He was hauled into the air by roaring thrusters, leaving the blasted desert behind. Above, loomed the tether itself, half-slack and stretching away up into the clouds.
The tether was formed from hundreds of thousands of heatpipe elements, loosely bound together into a cable that was superstrong, and capable of transmitting megawatts of heat and electricity. It was anchored into solid rock, pilings driving down over a hundred metres. The tether itself was fixed to the anchor by a flexible coupling, allowing for the natural drift of the city far above. High above, through the clouds, it met the city's rock base. It was one of a dozen such cables holding Crystal Tokyo in position.
All this work was to monitor the stress on the cable. Seismographs monitored the ground under the anchor. Strain gauges reported the tension in the cables. It all kept the city from drifting in the upper winds, monitored and controlled by redundant computers to keep the cables from being overloaded.
It was a monument of engineering genius. It lay beneath the notice and concern of all except those who had to work on it.
It was enough to make a man feel unappreciated.
"Markas," said Yumeko. "I've got a message coming through for you from head office."
He braced himself for impact. "Let me have it."
"They want to see you at head office ASAP."
"Anything else?"
"That's everything." She answered. He could hear her working switches in the cockpit. "Just orders go to head office."
He took a deep breath, looking down at the tether beneath him.
"When HO gets enigmatic. I get worried."
-------
Head Office was based in the old part of the city, in the lunar base. The lobby walls were cut from stone, then panelled with plaster and painted a pale white. A few green plants making the best of the flourescent light helped kept everything feeling far more spacious than it was.
Paintings of the city amidst arcadian surroundings reminded everyone what they were aiming for, far in the future. A pastel-coloured sofa gave visitors somewhere to sit and wait. A heavy fire-door locked behind him as he stepped inside, appreciating the cold air blowing from the overhead ventilation.
He let himself soak in it for a few seconds before finally revealing his presence to the secretary behind the desk.
"So, what's so urgent that I had to come straight here without taking a shower."
The secretary raised his head just barely above the top of his computer monitor. A single red pen indicated towards the Director's office.
"She's from Great Justice. Here to speak with you."
It was clear by his tone that he'd already shared that scandalous fact with his entire social networks.
"Oh boy."
He felt himself stiffen just a little.
"Yeah man. She took the Director's office too."
He looked at the secret behind the desk, the man more interested in the karma pouring in to his computer monitor than himself. Markas walked up to the door, braced himself for what promised to be an interesting experience, then knocked on the door.
"Come in."
It wasn't the director's voice. Her accent was wrong. He opened the door - hinge squeaking as it usually did - and stepped inside. Behind the Director's desk was a woman who wasn't the Director. His first impression of her was that her eyes were made of glass. There was something .... offputting about how they seemed to stare right through him. She was short, and almost young enough to be a teenager, with perfectly straight dark hair hanging down behind her head. A.I, he guessed. She sat far too rigid. She wore the standard Great Justice staff uniform - conspicuously absent rank insignia or an identifying name.
"Please, take a seat," she offered, with an open hand towards the single chair that'd been set up for his benefit. He looked at her for a moment.
"What's this about?" he asked, giving her a dubious look, before deciding it'd be rude not to sit.
" I'm a Troubleshooter from Great Justice, and I'm here to offer you a job."
He took a sharp breath in through his mouth. Troubleshooters came with a certain reputation.
"So, how do I know you're the real thing?" he asked fighting to keep his voice even. "How do I know you're not some imposter trying to swindle me?"
She didn't even blink. Her face remain doll-like and impassive. She reached in to her breast pocket, removing a small square of metal. Still looking right through him, she placed it on the polished desktop and slid it towards him.
"This card will let you get in contact with the Troubleshooter actually leading the mission. It includes a handle she will answer to, and a one-time code. "
He picked it up, turning it over in his fingers.. It was cold and metallic, about the size of a credit card. The details were embossed into it,
"So, why me?"
He was, after all, nobody really special in the grand scheme of things. No military skills or experience. His sole contribution to GJ had been the Crystal Osaka wreck survey - and even then he was as just one suit-driver in a much larger team.
"I've been looking at your reading materials. If I told you this was the sort of mission that involves special circumstances, what'd you say to that?"
"I'd ask what the fuck you want with a goddamned terraforming maintenance team."
"I can't tell you that unless you take the job. Classified. "
A small fire of anger lit somewhere deep inside.
"You want me to go in blind?"
"You have to. You've got skills Great Justice needs."
Her voice was still calm and mild - more like a bored telephone cold-caller than anything especially dangerous. That answer led to one obvious question.
"And if I find I don't like the job after I agree?"
She took a breath, looking momentarily disappointed.
"We'll cross that bridge if we come to it. The Classified Information Order applies. "
The threat was there. Calmly made. He knew enough about the CIO to know that it basically allowed Great Justice to do what it thought was necessary to keep the secret. He felt his body go cold.
"That's a bit of a Catch 22, isn't it?"
"It is," she confirmed. "We won't be asking you to bomb a submarine, or do anything 'messy' like that, that I can tell you. It's not a military mission, just something that's best left unacknowledged by all involved - an elephant in the room that somebody has to quietly sneak outside while everyone decides not to look."
She paused for a moment. Part of his mind was almost tempted by it anyway, if only to do something really exciting. The rest of him was happily kicking that part with what he knew of Troubleshooter reputations.
He looked down at the metal card for a second, before returning his gaze to the woman behind the desk. His mind was steadily starting to catch up with what she was telling him
"Submarine?"He questioned. "So it's under water?"
"I'm looking for people used to working under pressure."
She evaded giving the direct answer, but the implications were clear
"Deep water?"
No response from the Troubleshooter. Her expression remained Impassive.
"Europa?"
No response from the Troubleshooter. But it made logical sense to Markas. It had to be Europa. He turned the card over in his fingers, aware of the shitstorm that'd happen if somebody was caught doing dirty deeds on Europa.
"I assume you want my team was well?"
"Yes. Ideally. "
He relaxed back against the backrest of the chair, exhaling a soft sigh. "I'll discuss it with them, then if we go for it, get in touch with this card."
"We're on a short schedule. I'll need and answer in five days."
"You'll have it," he said. He was certain of that at least.
"If that is all," she said.
"Yeah," he nodded. "All I can think of right now. I'll be in touch"
"We look forward to it."
He stood up, adjusting his jacket. She was still watching him with glass eyes as he left. He crossed the floor, still aware of her gaze on his back. He opened the door and stepped outside, letting all the stress escape in one long sigh.
"Problem?" inquired the secretary.
"I'm going to the bar," answered Markas. He could still feel her looking at him through the door.
The worst part of it?
The fact that the chance to go deep-diving in the Europan Ocean where no human being had ever been before was worryingly enticing, despite the best efforts of his common sense trying to dissuade him.
Something cold, carbonated and malty. That would help.
-----
They'd taken a table for themselves in the back, away from the crowd who'd come in to watch the race. The television over the bar was showing the live feed from the Fides 500, camera focusing in one a black jet with forward-swept wings. A few were getting loud, cheering the pilot on. Apparently she used to be a member of the City Militia or something - a nobody from a nobody team that'd frightened everyone at the first few races. Markas was only half-paying attention to it all, just to make sure nobody was paying attention to him.
Yumeko sat back into her seat before sucking a mouthful of cola up through a straw. Her hair was cut short to fit inside a pilot's helmet. Her jeans were well worn and broken comfortably in. - just like the vinyl jacket she wore.
"So, some AI takes the Drummers desk and gives you this card, and you're seriously thinking of going for it."
"I think we all know what working with a Troubleshooter means," said Markas, calmly.
"Money. Lots of money!" Skippy grinned. He was the shortest of the group. Shorter than Kay. He'd shaved his head to win a bet, and kept it that way because he thought it made him look good.
"Only you," Kay sighed. She held her gently with the tips of her fingers. She was the only one who bothered to actually dress up. A red Chinese dress and long, dark chocolate hair made her stand out in a small bar. She was the ruby in a mountain of rocks.
Markas took a sip from his glass. Cheap Sapporo, nothing special. But refreshing nonetheless. "The question is. Do we want to do it or not?"
Dave - Just Dave - was staring into his empty glass. He was still drinking soda - his broad face still looking just a little pale after the previous night. His short black hair was slicked down by sweat, a soft smile forming on his lips.
"It's Europa, man. Man, nobody's ever been down there." he said. " Even if it's not Europa, I'll take that chance. There're very few places underwater where humans have been, that you'll need our skills to get to."
And that was a very hard thing for any of them to deny. A few wordless looks were exchanged between the crew. Nobody was shaking their heads. No vehement objections.
Markas took a deep breath. That was the bait they offered. He down the last of his drink. It was ultimately irresistible to anyone who'd come up to Fenspace with ambitions beyond the mundane.
"So, we're doing it then?"
Nobody said no.
-----
Original Author Verified.
Quantum Signature Verified.
No interception Detected.
Message confirmed Authentic.
To: [[Undisclosed Recipients]
Operation CAMERON Status Report. May 2024
The recruitement of the team is a go. They got in touch with me using the card three days ago. They'll be briefed on the full details when I get them out here somewhere private. Kudos to her on pulling that off. I owe her one.
Compartmentalisation-wise. I see no reason thus far to tell them what they're actually digging up. As far as the majority of people on the boat'll be concerned it's nothing more than a rare alloy. They're more likely to keep the secret if they don't know. They'll be given full control over their own equipment specifications. I'll need confirmation on the budget and appropriations details before they get here.
Preparation of the Explorer is a week behind schedule. We' re being held back by a high mundane workload. On top of that, an intelligence awakened inside the old missile computer systems - ones we were planning to remove to make space for crew cabins. We've had to do a quick emergency revision to our schedule. We're rushing hull and propulsion preparation to make the thing spaceworthy. We can fly the ship to the rock the old fashioned way and get the mind to a more stable system. Two tons of discrete electronics and core memory are not a nice place to live.
I'll enquire with Scarlet Angel about moving up the fit-out times on sensor array. I've asked Pink here to finalise the equipment specifications early - she should have them finished within three days. If we can get both transfer and retrofit done at the same time it'll save us a week and get everything back on schedule for a mid-October mission.
The ongoing Millenium move's proving to be as much a help as a hindrance. Blue's gotten approximately 50% of the crew together out of militia members. It's also giving us good cover for moving people out here. I've arranged for the specialist team to be on the next transport.
Assuming it's possible to correct the schedule with the Explorer, we hope to begin design work on the wet-gear by the third week of June, with a view to completing the construction process by the second week of August.
Our cover for this mission is a post-racing holiday. That's not going to hold out once the redshirts see we have people on the Ocean bottom. We need a researcher. It'll give credence to the claim that we're just conducting a little amateur research on the side. Ideally, the scientist will be someone with security clearance. If not, a low-level graduate student interested in some foreign travel.
If someone has any contacts in Vesta they think might be suitable - or who might know someone suitable, forward the details to me and I'll vet and arrange to make contact. I've no objection to them publishing any research provided it's properly cleared and sanitised. It'll help legitimise our cover story if it brings results.
I'll need them within a month.
Barring no change in circumstance, next update will be the end of June.
END.
There'll be more. Maybe. If anyone wants in on the crew....
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
Quote:If anyone wants in on the crew....
For obvious reasons, StellviaCorp is sitting this one out.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
Dartz Wrote:Maybe. If anyone wants in on the crew....
If they want they can easily get a catgirl from Jenga or the Little Big Bang Labs (want to get some vacation with REAL sun!).
HRogge Wrote:Dartz Wrote:Maybe. If anyone wants in on the crew....
If they want they can easily get a catgirl from Jenga or the Little Big Bang Labs (want to get some vacation with REAL sun!).
I can imagine the reaction of one of the catgirls who doesn't remember anything before the Catgirling Machine...
"What is that thing? It's round, it's glowing, it's hanging in the sky in a way no man-made thing possibly can! Is it an alien flying saucer?"
"No, it's just the sun."
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
robkelk Wrote:I can imagine the reaction of one of the catgirls who doesn't remember anything before the Catgirling Machine...
"What is that thing? It's round, it's glowing, it's hanging in the sky in a way no man-made thing possibly can! Is it an alien flying saucer?"
"No, it's just the sun."
They will already know the sun (looking out of the window and you see it in the sky), but some of them might never have visited a planet...
Quote:"What is that thing? It's round, it's glowing, it's hanging in the sky in a way no man-made thing possibly can!
I know that feeling. This is Ireland.
2 Catgirls have been added to Lun's crew. I'll figure out what they're doing later.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
Dartz Wrote:2 Catgirls have been added to Lun's crew. I'll figure out what they're doing later.
"Okay, enough laying around in the sun, we have work to do!"
"Just a few more minutes!"
[b]контактt[/b]
May 2024
40 year old computer hardware awakens. Google translate earns its keep.
Quote:------
The compartment was filled with racks of electronics. Cables fed into stacked boards of bubble memory, feeding data to logic boards with soldered integrated circuits. Warm bulbs glowed orange on boxes of electronics. Cables hummed with electric power. The smell of warm plastic and dry dust filled the air. A cathode ray screen which should've been displaying missile tracking data instead contained a single line of text, printed in orange monochrome.
>>: Есть кто-нибудь?
Is there anybody there? Anika stared at it, feeling herself go cold inside. A new line began to print out beneath it.
>>: кто-нибудь?
She frantically dug around the mess of equipment, searching for the keyboard.
>>: Кто-нибудь, пожалуйста?
"I'm here!" she called out, panting. "I'm here!". Where was that keyboard? She swept a tray of diagnostic tools onto the green steel floor, finding the dusty keyboard. She fumbled with the lead, searching for something it'd plug in to.
There was a mind in there... a person. Whoever they were, they were living in the computer around her. Whoever they were - the had nothing. Nothing but a computer monitor and the hope that something was on the other end of it.
>>: помогите мне!
Help me. They were getting desperate. Trapped inside a dinosaur system, reaching out for someone to rescue them, and no way to receive an answer. Nothing but existance in a senseless void of being. She struggled to get the keyboard plug into its socket.
Soviet-era plug into Soviet-era socket, complete with Soviet -era smoke and a Soviet-era crack in the casing. The cable had begun to fray, fabric covering revealing split insulation and bare copper wire inside.
She had to hope it work. Inspite of the decades worth of dust, dirt and grime.
>>: кто-нибудь? Пожалуйста, помогите!
Whoever it was had detected the keyboard, she figured. She reached out to an interwave-based translation service and hoped the old keyboard would work. The keys clattered as she typed
>>: Я здесь
There was a pause.
>>: Спасибо
Thank you. It worked! Anika exhaled one long hot breath
>>: Кто вы?
It was asking who she was. She felt a thrill run through her. Anika introduced herself.
>>: Меня зовут Аника. Вы?
The cursor onscreen flashed for three beats as the mind considered her answer.
>>: Лунь Алексеева
Lun Alekseeva. It was a person. There was a person inside there! She sobered up as soon as she remembered what'd happened with Shinji.
>>: Вы знаете, где вы находитесь?
There was a pause. She dreaded the answer.
>>: Экраноплан Лунь. Компьютер управления ракетой
It knew. Warm relief washed over her. At least, whoever was inside the machine, understood they were inside the machine. Another line printed onscreen.
>>: Я не человеческий?
Anika pondered for a moment.
>>: Нет, мы не.
The cursor pulsed onscreen. She stared at it, at her own reflection in the monitor glass. Machine-translated Russian wasn't the most convenient way to communicate. She started to wonder if there wasn't some sort of camera kicking around. Or a set of speakers and a microphone.
On the ekranoplan, there was nothing but offcuts of old Soviet junk, and the crates it was to be shipped out in. She reached out onto Frigga's communication's network.
"Jet. Jet... you better get down here. It's important."
-----
"Really?"
Jet stood in the hatch, disbelief etched on her face. Cables dangled from a pouch strapped to her hip.
"Yes." Anika confirmed it with a nod. "She's in the whole system."
In the ten minutes it'd taken Jet to scream down, Anika'd managed to at least get everything open and ready. Jet glanced around the compartment, at the racks filled with electronics.
"The whole lot?"
Anika confirmed it with a nod. "Her name's Lun Alekseeva, a Lieutenant in the Soviet Northern Fleet."
Jet had a horrible thought. "Does she know?"
Anika nodded again.
The cyber relaxed. "Thank fuck." She picked her way around a rack containing the system's memory banks, before placing the equipment strapped to her hip on what had been the radar operator's work console. It was a set of speakers, a microphone stolen from the control room, a multimeter and some basic soldering equipment.
She looked down at Anika, then at the tangle of cables and missing indicators that made up the remains of the console. Two of the panels had already been lifted to expose the logic underneath.
Jet took a breath. "Now. Where the fuck do we start?"
Anika didn't answer her, the android just took a step back from the panels. It wasn't like doing maintenance on a warped actuator in her body, that was for sure. The whole basic system was effectively Lun's brain. They were about to attempt what effectively amounted open brain surgery on a living person.
"I/O logic?" suggested Anika
"Where's that?" Jet asked. Her eyes scanned the racks.
Anika was silent for a moment. She looked at the socket where the keyboard connected, tracing cables along under what appeared to be some sort of flyback transformer
"I have no idea," answered Anika tentatively. "A.C.?" she suggested, with a nervous smile.
"We rely on her way too much," Jet said. She placed her hands on her hips, trying and failing to take the whole thing in. "This is oil-change stuff."
Anika looked up at her, pursing her lips as she pondered. "I'll see if Lun has any hints."
"Uhn," nodded Jet. A slight glazed look in her eyes let Anika know her attention was focused elsewhere. "The cyber's guide is more concerned with old PCs and car ECUs. Nothing about old soviet missile computers."
"Worth a try," said Anika, softly. She keyed in her questions to Lun. The answer took a few seconds."She says her missile systems are active. The in-flight guidance controller for the missile should do it."
"Right." Jet took a cantering breath, taking the multimeter in her empty hand. She gave it an uncertain look. "This is going to be fun."
For a definition of fun.
The both felt like they were standing at the bottom of a very tall mountain, stretching up before them into the clouds. And somewhere up top was someone they didn't know, and had only just heard existed in the first place - who needed their help.
They got to work. Step-by-step, from the beginning.
After an hour mapping circuits at Lun's direction, Jet dragged her puppet in. It's smaller fingers did a better job in tight spaces. Music from a small stereo added a little background noise to keep the pair focused as they traded information and noted values.
Jet Jaguar slowly built up a map of the system as she moved through it, drawing a rough diagram in the back of her mind to help orientate herself. Anika added to it using a tablet computer and Stylus. Circuit operations and signalling parameters were simulated using design software thirty years younger than the system it was asked to analyse, then confirmed on the actual system.
Or not.
Hour two brought some assistance from the interwave - a few who'd more experience with handling AI's were on the other line. Jet relayed video using her helmet-cam as she worked, pointers and suggestions being offered by those on the list who watched.
It was mind-numbing work. But it was necessary. The heat of the room started to soak into them. Even with every door and hatch open to allow air to circulate, two tons of electronics made for an uncomfortable amount of heat.
Nobody could believe that a mind had awoken in an ancient missile computer made with discrete electronics. That was a question for the researchers to worry about. What felt like hour three turned out to be hour six when Jet's personal alarm went off in her mind, reminding her that she had to teach a Blitzkrieg class.
It was an excuse for a three hour break to unwind and come back fresh to the problem.
Ultimately, even with outside help and Lun one their side, it took them most of the day just to figure out what input the system needed. Output signals followed the same format...more or less.
It took almost as long again to figure how to get those inputs and outputs from the hardware they had to hand.
It was a caffeine and sugar fuelled electronics binge, leading to a kludged together digital converter built from an FPGA, an old laptop and a schizophrenic rat's nest of cables and jump-leads criss-crossing the control panel.
It was well into the next day when the speaker began to hiss. It chirped and squawked, fizzing and popping before returning to a steady hiss.
Jet Jaguar stopped work, placing her tools on top of her toolbox. Anika stared at her, mouth hanging open. They both slowly turned their heads towards the microphone.
"Do you?" offered Jet, her voice barely above a whisper..
"You're closer," said Anika, stepping away from the remains of the control panel.
Jet took the mic in her metal hand, bringing it close to her face.
"Can you hear us?"
Both stared at the speaker. It warbled, chattered and squawked worldessly at them.
"I'll tune it," whispered Anika. She stepped gently around the back of Jet, nudging the cyber slightly as she passed.
Jet tried again "Can you hear us?"
Anika held up her hand, tweaking some of the converter's components with a screwdriver
A strangled squawk emerged from the speaker, for the first time sounding like a coherent response. It was answering - it wasn't just noise. It was a word - unidentifiable, but definitely a word. A giddy thrill took hold of Jet.
"Keep trying," she said, urging Lun on. "Can you hear us?"
The answer was almost a sentence. It was warped, distorted almost beyond recognition like a radio just slightly too far out of tune - but still unmistakeable.
Anika's hands were shaking as she made one last final adjustment. If she'd been human, she was sure she'd be sweating. As it was, she could feel herself grow scorching hot inside, her mind racing as she worked through the circuit, trying to get that final solid lock on the signal.
"We've got you. We've got you. Just keep speaking."
There was silence for a moment, a slight pause. Anika made one final adjustment.
"I can hear you! I can hear you! I am here! I can hear you!"
It was a woman's voice speaking clear, Russian-accented English. It was a woman who was beyond joy to have finally made contact with someone. She was laughing, switching back to her native language for a moment in her excitement.
It was noisy, still sounding like a distant radio transmission. But it was there, and it was her. Speaking to them.
"Fuck yeah!" yelled Jet, her hoarse voice filling the entire compartment.
Anika screamed with joy, over a day's work culminating in one moment that made it all worthwhile
The speaker crackled once more. "I am Lun Alekseeva. It's good to hear someone's voice at last."
"It's good to hear you," Anika answered.
It was, in many ways, such a simple thing to do. Both of them were certain there were many fans who could've done it far faster, or with far more elegance and skill.
But that didn't stop it feeling like a genuine achievement. Not for one moment.
-----
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
The story of Jets life... unplanned AIs and wavium jobs...
Salespitch Voice: "For the unplanned AI in need of a body ASAP, we here at Cyberdyne Systems offer a payment plan for our T-800 Android and T-900 Gynoid endoskeletons."
Side Note: Still working on next SNW episode.
Unfortunately, Lun would really like to be able to swim. Which means some sort of low-density biomimetic or other funky-tech. There're only two named Fen who work on stuff like that, and likely only one who lives somewhere KM Lun can actually dock.... it physically can't land unless there's water to land on. Currently
Lun is made of somewhere between 2-3 tons of Soviet Era electronics... all of which was scheduled to be junked before it woke up.
There's some excellent interior photographs
Here actually. It's mostly in pretty good condition. Unlike Ptichka, the rain washes the birdshit off.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
Time and Money.
Two things there're never enough of.
May 2024
Quote:-----
The compartment was shrinking around Jet Jaguar, alloy walls compressing around her. She felt compelled to crouch down over the radar control panel, her gaze focused in on the speaker set that allowed Lun to speak to the world outside her box.
After three days they found the leak that'd allowed aerosolised handwavium into the compartment. A window seal had been eaten by corrosion, allowing the handwash-spray in when it hit. In that time, things had been refined. The interface had been sealed away in its own protective housing, integrated into the cleaned-up control panel. It still wasn't perfect. The volume levels were way off. Lun forever sounded like she was shouting down the line at them just to be heard. And it occasionally needed to be slightly retuned as circuits heated up or cooled down and changed resistances and capacitances slightly.
But it worked.
It'd taken another two days to bash together an interwave hookup, using the analogue bus originally designed to handle signalling from the main targeting radar. It was still positively archaeological in capacity and capability, requiring some creative demodulation to get anything through.
But it worked.
It was a mighty mess of a system, but it was one to be proud of. It was one that earned Anika brownie points from the Underspace for even working on. It'd given Lun a chance to find her place in the world. It'd earned some quiet congratulations. It was, Jet knew, something that probably would've taken a professional hours instead of days, but it still felt like an achievement.
It was only a matter of time before 40 year old electronics finally gave up the ghost. It was only a matter of time before it all had to be removed anyway. She took a breath, taking one final moment to reconsider, before concluding that heels-first was the best option.
"I'm going to cut a long story short. We were planning on junking the whole computer. "
The cursor on screen pulsed as Lun pondered.
"I am to be shut down?"
It was just a simple question. There was no sense of panic, or anger, or fear, just a request for a fact.
"We can't do that. That'd be murder."
Her answer was firm. That was one thing she wasn't. Again, the cursor pulsed.
"So what do you plan to do with me?"
She sounded vaguely curious.
"Well, that's up to you," answered Jet. "We can't move the computer out of the ship without shutting you down. So that means we have to move you out of the computer somehow. That's doable, for someone with the right hardware." Somewhere in the back of her mind, she began to consider her options. "The question is, where do you want to go?"
Again, there was a pause. Longer this time.
"Anything I want? Why?"
She sounded tentative, a little unsure. But still curious.
"It's a duty," answered Jet. "It's the right thing to do."
Jet stood there, waiting her eyes attention focused on the speaker. She had to remind herself not to drum her fingers on the panel - Lun hated it.
"I miss the feeling of water," said Lun, calmly. "I would like to feel water on my skin once more." There was a pause. "I want to swim! "
It burst from the speaker. Jet drew in a sharp breath, taken off-guard by the sudden passion that'd energised the crackling voice. Lun was waiting for her answer, cursor pulsing ... Jet swore it was flashing faster, despite her onboard clock telling her otherwise.
"You want you own body?"
"You can do that?"
Disbelief.
"It can be done," Jet assured her, feeling herself begin to smile. It can be expensive, she thought. But if they could kludge together this mess of a system, maybe they could get some way to get her out? There were the spare parts for Anika and Shinji lying around.
It seemed possible.
"I want to be able to leave the ship," declared Lun, her voice clear and crisp from the speaker for the first time. "I want to be independent!"
"Great. I'll make the arrangements."
It seemed doable. People'd been doing it for years. And they'd had to have had a first attempt too.
-----
It was the room where Shinji Ikari had been born. It'd once been the powerplant engineer's office, with one wall given over to analogue gauges that used to report on the vital signs of the main generators. It'd lain idle for almost a decade sealed off, before being modified into something that could almost pass as a genuine mechatronics lab. Most of the equipment was second and third-hand, some of it even predating the Boskone war. But it worked.
Even if it did look just a little bit Frankenstein with the electric power hardware, the work-table with clamps and the spotlights, scanners and monitors attached to spring-balanced arms.
The three disassembled unused bodies in their storage racks completed the picture. They were nothing more than spare parts.
Jet rifled through the equipment, grabbing spare parts and data cables, gathering them in a heap on the table, following the downloaded directions as best she could. The things they didn't have, she thought she could substitute for.
There was more than a decade's worth of experience to dip into, out there on the interwave for the slurping.
And she was buzzing in a way that she hadn't in a long time, compelled by purpose, by a goal to reach for. She paced around the room, checking on the remains of the waved latex skin in the tank. It was still liquid. It filled the air with a rotten-eggs smell, mingling with the sharp tang of ozone and sweet scent of machine oil.
Anika stood in the corner, aghast at what she was seeing. It was living proof that Jet and Mackie were related on a level far more than just name.
"Okay....Okay," said Jet, thinking outloud as much as she was explaining things to her. "The basic method is that we get her running simultaneously on both processors, sort of like a distributed system." Her eyes had a glazed look in them, her mind focused on manuals and how-to's, filtering the noise from the signal as she skimmed through them. "As far as Lun's mind is concerned, they have to be part of the same system. Then steadily shut down components in the original hardware until the mind's running on the new system." She paused, stopping her pacing. An old USB cable was held in her hand, "Yeah. I think if we get both running slow enough to work with the bandwidth we can do it."
"Think?" said Anika, feeling just a little bit chilled inside.
Jet's eyes had a spark in them, shining bright. "I've never done it before, yeah. But there's enough tech manuals and papers. Everyone's got to start first time."
Even if it's with a living person, with the potential for horrific consequences if it went wrong? Anika chose to appeal to the more obvious defect instead.
"Jet. Do I float?"
Anika kept her voice mild. But to her, the flaw was obvious. Lun wanted to swim. Anika could swim about as effectively as a brick.
She saw Jet's dip in the madness place come to a screeching, clattering halt. She almost heard the crash as her train of thought rammed straight into the buffers at the end of the line, before smashing through and coming to a flaming halt in the street outside the train station
"Ah. Fuck it!" It bounced off the walls and seemed to smack her in the face. The energy drained from her body in moment as she took stock of where she was, and what she'd gathered together on the table. Anika stood there feeling just a little smug while Jet Jaguar tried to wipe a few strands of red hair off her face. A week without sleep had eaten into her in a way that just rolled of an electronic android like Anika,
Jet offered her an embarrassed smile, the last dglimmer of sparking energy draining with a sigh. "You're right." Her expression blackened as her mind finally caught up. "Ah. Bloody hell that puts us back over a month. We won't be able to fly Lun anywhere for at least that long."
"Can we move the schedule up? I mean, re-arrange a few things. Like this?"
Anika reached out to the project plan on the server, making a few quick adjustments before messaging it on to Jet. The cyber scanned through it, nodding gently. She compared it with her own schedule, grimaced when it came up as beyond a hundred percent full, and decided to bloody well do it anyway because there was no other option.
It'd fit somehow. If she could be in two places at once.
"Daryl's running training for the militia right now, she'll have to see it. She's busy this week already." She added her own suggestions on top of Anika's. " And if we're to get back on schedule you're going to have to have the spec' done on the sensors and comm's."
Anika pondered for a moment. "I could make it if we deferred the Knightwing's upgrade to next month. Good thing I don't need sleep." She giggled giddily, tapping fingers on the side of her head.
Jet gave her a tired look, her eyes half-lidded and almost looking through her. She brushed her hair off her face once more, before blowing a fatigued sigh through her lips. "With enough power I can get by. but..." she trailed off, mind still mostly focused on something outside the room. "And we still owe the Forge four grand on the last invoice."
"VF did Mackie. " Anika pointed out. "He...She'll be happy to do it on credit."
Both of them winced.
"Yeah, but we can't land at Kandor - we need somewhere we can dock the whole ship because that's two tons of computer, not a PC tower. So that leaves us two options. One who we owe money to." She raised one finger. "Or one who hates my guts." She raised another.
"Hmmmm." Anika pondered for a moment. "I'm stumped."
Jet took a step forward, eyes scanning around the room before quickly realising that none of it had any real value. It existed to fix Anika, nothing more. Anika herself sat up on the workbench.
"The comm's are on Justice money," said Jet." Maybe we can slip the bill for Lun to GJ? We can justify it that the computer system had to be removed for the mission anyway, and that was her price for letting us do it."
Anika gave her a dubious look, humming to herself. "I don't know..." she said. "When you put it like that..."
"There's nowhere else it'll come from. Ford just ordered them vulcan barrels. There's Daryl's medical bills until we get that prick before a tribunal. Kotono fitted her gym out. And your car - like thing."
Anika pursed her lips into a pout. "Zappo' was too cute to leave behind. And Ford promised to put the body on an old 911 chassis if I found one."
"I'll see what Arisia says about it beforehand. But if they say No we're going to have to come up with something to cover it all."
Somehow, despite the amount of money that went through the place, it always seemed to be at its scarcest when it as needed most. She gathered a list of things to propose.
----
Their body-armour and helmets were stained by bursts and slashed of red powder. Some had been shot in the chest. Others in the back. One'd been completely coated by a friendly blue grenade. Daryl Haur, with nothing but a borrowed helmet and goggles to go with her flight-suit, regarded them coldly.
"Alright everyone. I want a full report on how and why all of you managed to get killed, and, how if this had been a real mission, everyone on Frigga would now either be dead, dying or worse."
She waited. Within a heartbeat, the first excuse arrived from Emy, - a Nazzadi biomod who looked far scarier than she actually was personally.
"It's because Darren tripped me when I was going to shoot you and win!"
"Hey. I wanted that meal too y'know. It was a competition," he shot back at her. He was the tallest in the team.
"Did you ever think that if you all won, I'd have paid for everyone's dinner?" Daryl cut them both off. She was playing the full smoke and flame and fury act for all it was worth. "Remember. We win together. Or we lose together. There's no place for 'I' out here. This isn't KoFen. There's no room for fucking around. Everyone relies on us to keep them safe. Do you understand me?"
"Yes Ma'am!"
"We'll do laps around the range until you do. Then you'll wash the paint off your gear. Now got moving!"
She could see the look of pain in their eyes. It was the only way to make them learn. It meant running after them. That it covered her own training requirements was a neat little bonus.
"Yes Ma'am!"
They started to pick up their gear, grumbling, grousing, but getting on with it anyway. It was, after all, what being a reservist meant. Daryl waited for a moment before yanking one of them out of line.
"Hey what?" he blurted, stumbling for a moment before catching himself.
"Darren! Not you." Her tone was cold, and deadly serious. Her blue eyes had turned to ice, fuelled by cool anger. "Turn your gear in and get the hell off my range. You're out. There's no place here for buddy-fucking swine."
The man went white, his mouth falling open. "Hey, wait..."he stumbled over his own words, taken completely off-guard. His fist clenched a moment as he considered a bad option, before releasing as he realised it'd be a bad option. He thought about demanding proof, or accusing her of showing favouritism. It was just a stupid bell-test anyway...
"You betrayed a teammate for a free dinner." Her anger was cold. It hissed through her teeth as she spoke. "And don't you dare tell me it didn't count because there was nothing at stake. For people like you, the only thing that changes with the stakes is the price."
Daryl made sure her stare bored right through his skull, while making damn sure the others knew the magnitude of his fuckup. Only then did he think he really had fucked up, all for the offer of a free meal at the new cafe that someone'd opened up.
"The others failed a test of skill. You..."She drilled it into his chest with a fingertip...." failed a test of character. One of these can be corrected with practice. Go back to your supervisor, I don't want to see you here tomorrow."
She deliberately left him standing there before he could get a word in edgewise.
For the most part, the rest of the team got on with it. She'd made her point to the rest of them. The rest could learn the traditional military way. Through pain.
She decided not to tell them that five kilometres was made a little easier for her by the electro-responsive material the flight-suit was made from. She'd filed that away as a little bonus - something that made it easier to bear.
They finished up, cleaned up, then stored their gear for the next session with no further drama. She allowed her mind to switch back to normal mode while she went to get something to eat at that new cafe.
Then she checked her schedule, the proposed changes highlighted for her convenience.
That was when she got angry for the second time that day. She didn't even open a comm-line, she was going to find that cyber and yell at her in person.
A bloody week!
-----
Maybe a little excessive a response, for a local reserve anyway.
And three days seems like a fair number for someone with a decent idea what they're doing with the benefit of the interwave containing a decade or more of everyone else's experience to fill in the gaps or suggest new ideas. They might even have succeeded if Anika hadn't pointed out the obvious flaw. The one who hates Jet's guts is unnamed....
And yes. That is a Zaporozhets with a 911 engine, gearbox and running gear. And also serves as the explanation why they seem to have enough money to be short of it all the time.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
I know I said StellviaCorp was sitting this one out... but Kohran isn't StellviaCorp any more, and she built Safety's anti-grav unit. That won't be enough to let an adult-size android fly, but it would be enough to allow neutral buoyancy.
Assuming you don't have something better planned, of course.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
Oh... I've got a much better use for that. There're a couple of people aboard Lun who probably shouldn't fall in kilometre-deep water. 'Lifejackets', anyone?
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
'The only thing that changes with the stakes is the price.' I liked that line.
Dartz Wrote:Oh... I've got a much better use for that. There're a couple of people aboard Lun who probably shouldn't fall in kilometre-deep water. 'Lifejackets', anyone?
Ooh, excellent idea! Assuming the power supply is up to the job, of course - I hadn't considered that because Scott-series AIs use a Solid power core. Of course, these could use a Solid power core as well.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
Noah's using hardtech gravtech as a business edge. Just because Kohran knows how to build Safety's drive doesn't mean Kohran knows what changes Prim has made to the tech... Noah's okay with the older stuff leaking out.
(It's the SQUID42 encryption tech he doesn't want getting out past GJ, the Patrol, and the VVS... and all of those groups appear to agree with him on that.)
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
I'll leave it up to a fair dice-roll for whoever proposes it to Jet first, so. It sounds like the exact sort of minor oversight that'd be made somewhere along the way.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
Interview
May-June 2024
Sign it, she said. For fortune, fame and fun. Sign your life away?
Quote:Lev sat in the driver's seat of the old Curiosity-type rover, watching the core-drill do its thing. He took a sip from his drinking straw and sighed. Bughunting on Mars was pretty much the dead-end of things. Drive the six-wheeler out to some remote part of the planet that might've once held water, then dig, then ship the core back to the lab where the director of research would claim all the credit for whatever was discovered inside.
For a would-be scientist a few weeks after graduation, it was the best that was on offer. It was the first step on the long ladder to publication and funding - a credit on a paper as an 'assistant' that'd stand to him when he set off on his own personal project.
That's what he told himself.
He figured if he kept repeating it, eventually he might actually start to believe it. The computer chirped, informing him that it'd succeeded in cutting its sample, and was now automatically returning it to the trunk to be carried home.
He typed in the label, set it to print itself out, then opened up his navigator. The next set of coordinates were an hour's drive away. He left the driver's bubble and clambered back to the sleeping cab, boiling himself a kettle.
As the driver, his sole contribution was avoiding boulders and fixing software bugs.
Sometimes he even wondered if maybe the Curiosity-series couldn't have just been independent computer-operated rovers rather than manned vehicles. But someone'd insisted because manned drivers could spot things automation couldn't and choose to investigate independently. He suspected the professors liked it because it got rid of anyone smart who could get in the way of their research funding but didn't dare say it out loud.
The kettle began to burble to itself, steaming up the portholes. He switched it off and poured himself a hot cup of tea, flavoured with genuine squeezed-from-a-cow's tit 'fresh' milk that'd cost a good chunk of his salary to get out to Mars.
But if you were spending a few weeks alone in a glorified space-camper it was worth it.
He slipped back down into the driver's seat, unfolding the cupholder from the armrest before slotting it into place. He cursed as hot tea splashed across his bare legs, brushing it off
Another bonus about working in the backarse of beyond - nobody saw what you were or weren't wearing. Lev preferred to dress comfortably, rather than dress for the miniscule possibility of a decompression.
Seeing that the loading had cleared, he set the cruise control, allowing the research rover to accelerate itself up to speed while he put his feet up. Motors whined, driving the three-ton six-wheeler across the Martian soil at the fantastic speed of five kilometres and hour.
A billion years previously, it'd been a lakebed. Supposedly.
The time between drillsites was time to check up on the interwave. The ongoing race-fixing biomod scandal was still generating megabytes of argument, with no end in sight. Some fics he liked had updates. A few fans he followed had done interesting things - the 'building blocks of life' having now been discovered on another comet.
Bored out of his mind, he started scanning for situations vacant.
The hardest part of that was finding ones he thought he could handle. Nothing killed confidence quite like coming across that one required competency that he just didn't have. Then came the idea that he'd just be wasting someone's time, followed by the idea that he'd never hear back anyway.
Best not to be disappointed.
That was a hard monster to fight against.
He scanned through the most recent postings until something caught his eye.
"Position for graduate biologist interested in taking part in deep-ocean survey in unexplored territory. Must be capable of operating a lab.. Must be willing to travel. Three character references, SP Vetting and a background check mandatory. An excellent chance to get published while gaining valuable laboratory research experience.
Employer: Great Justice
Location: Extrasolar
Intrigued, he tapped in, opening the full job-spec. It was surprisingly sparse on information - made interesting only by the employer, and the location.
He sent his C.V. with little real expectation of hearing back.
Anything with Great Justice in on it was bound to pay well.
-----
The message had told him to come to Marsbase Sara for interview.
He lied to the boss saying it was a trip to get a spare part. It'd cause a shitstorm if they thought he was looking for work elsewhere on their money. Sara itself smelled of hot diesel and grease - a smell that clung to the inside of his nose. Themessage told him to go to the newer part of the base, beneath the tourist-trap parts.
It was clanking, heaving, hot and heavy. It was, he thought, what it must've been like to be inside a running diesel engine. It was clattering, banging and noisy, filled with an energy of motion that tried to drag him along. It pulsed and thrummed with mechanical life and vibrancy. Neon lights fizzed through steam exhausted from the back of Excelion's High Test . A Gear with its buzzing-hornet Vee-engine trundled past towing a broken down 8-wheeler. Sparks flew from a machine-shop that backed onto an old tanker truck its owner was living out of.
The office he'd been told to go to was lower down, in the newer parts of the base. The lower he went, the cooler it was. Things were much quieter on the bottom level. People lived and slept down there. A few had offices. All seemed to have been formed from some form of structural portakabin.
An old green Ford pickup was parked outside the one the email told him to go to.
Cautiously, he pressed the buzzer. The door unlatched a moment later and he pressed it in. Inside, was nothing except a woman in a business suit, a wood-veneer desk and a seat for him to sit on. It was utterly spartan and clean inside. She was utterly unremarkable. Her hair was darkened - clearly dyed, there was a slight red sheen to it. Her blue eyes stared.
He stepped in, immediately aware that this was not a conventional interview. Not in any world.
"Lev Mattel?" she said, standing up. She extended her hand.
He nodded, finding her grip warm and firm.
"Call me Sylvie," she smiled, sitting back down her seat.
He did the same, finding himself feeling strangely uncomfortable. He was sweating inside his suit
"It's good of you to come, and take the time to be here."
"Well. Thanks for the opportunity, anyway," he answered, fighting hard to keep calm.
There was nothing on the desk. No pens. No papers. No coffee-rings. She didn't even have a copy of his C.V. or an electronic copy on a datapad. She sat there with her hands clasped together. The office was utterly bare. It existed solely so that he could meet her.
"You mention you have lab-work experience. Can you tell me about that specifically."
Her voice was calm, with a soft, hoarse edge to it. He sensed the American accent she was using wasn't even her native one. He took a breath, deciding to press on anyway, despite it not even being a the usual interview opening question. It made him pause for a moment, just to get back on his mental feet.
"Well.." he began. " I entered Vesta on a sponsored scholarship, studying molecular biology. My course of course included labwork. I found I enjoyed it so I asked to stay on as a postgrad doing research rather than go into industry." His mouth was running automatically, reciting verbatim one of his pre-prepared answers. "Part of my duties involve operating a Curiosity rover - it's basically like a small mobile lab inside, which has to be self sufficient. I have to look after supplies, maintenance and make sure the onboard experiments run. "
She nodded once. Her hands remained clasped together on the table.
"Would you feel up to running your own laboratory, solo?"
"Solo? You mean, as a sole researcher?"
"Yes," she confirmed.
"That's unusual," he said, before catching himself. He chastised himself silently. He scrambled to get back onto a positive track. "It doesn't sound that much different from what I'm doing, going by the job-spec."
"It doesn't. However, in this case you would be solely responsible for the equipping to the lab, for designing experiments and directing a team of divers collecting samples of local lifeforms for surface study."
"Yeah.... well." He rifled through the back of his mind, searching for anything remotely relevant. "You see on my CV I mention we had a team-based project in Third year, where I acted as team leader. I'd feel confident directing a team of divers towards achieving an established research goal."
"And would you feel confident in establishing your own research goal?"
"Well. Yeah. I can do it," he said. Alarm bells however, had begun to drown out enthusiasm "It's kind of strange though," he ventured tentatively.
"In what way?"
Her tone was mild. She still looked at him, more a puppet than a presence - a mouthpiece for someone far away. Somehow, it made him feel just a little more confident.
"Asking for a grad student to run their own lab, direct their own research. It sort of seems too good." That was when he recalled who the prospective employer actually was. "I'm guessing since Great Justice is involved, there's more going on than research."
She smiled at him. The first time he'd seen her genuinely smile. It was, he figured, exactly what she'd been waiting for. She reached under the desk, opening a single drawer, before removing a sheet of paper and a biro pen.
"If you'd like to know more. I'll need you to read and sign this."
The paper was placed on the desk, pushed gently towards him.
He glanced down at a wall of text. "What is it?"
"The Classified Information Order," she answered.
He felt himself got just a little bit cold inside, pulling it towards himself with the tips of his fingers.
"It means that, to keep a secret, we can do whatever is necessary to prevent the revelation of the secret, in proportion to the harm that we honestly believe will be done by the revelation of the secret."
Her expression had become just a little more animated, a little more interested in him. A little more serious. There was definitely more of her in the room.
"It's...." he managed to say, before his mind did a complete loop over itself. There was something unbelievable about the whole thing. There was something utterly terrifying about it. There was something scintillating and enticing about the possibility. "That sound..." The first thing he wanted to say was 'horrifically easy to abuse', before realising it probably wasn't the answer she wanted to hear. "That's worrying."
"It's supposed to be," she confirmed. Her tone flat and serious. "These aren't spy games. If you take this job, those're the rules you agree to play by at the start. It's not something to do lightly."
Her expression was calm - almost gentle. She was trying her best not to sound threatening. It worked right up to the point he realised she was politely telling him he could be killed if he revealed the wrong secret.
He glanced down at the sheet, at a long list of regulations that might well end up being his death warrant if he wasn't careful. The obvious question came to mind. He folded his arms tightly across his chest, focusing in on the sheet.
"What if it's wrong? What if what you're doing is wrong?"
"That's a matter for your own personal ethics. I won't lie, there're people who publicly won't like things we do. It's the sort of job that everyone involved is happy to acknowledge never happened. That's as frank as I can get. If you don't think you can handle that ethically, or psychologically, then you can go back to your project and we'll forget we ever met. "
He took what felt like forever to muse over it, feeling just a little strange inside. It was also deathly real, a sword of Damocles they'd dangle over his head.
"So, what can you tell me about this mission?"
"It's nothing messy or violent, if that's what you're wondering. Just a little wet-work. "
The smile on her fast told him it was a terrible joke on her part. It broke the mood. It humanised whoever was on the other side of the doll. It made him feel a little more comfortable.
"In exchange for signing up, we pay well. We offer exciting, challenging and varied work. And it'll give you a real chance to jump ahead with your career, either within Great Justice, or back at Vesta as a published researcher. "
Even as she said that, he couldn't get away from the reputation Great Justice came with. It would be an 'interesting time'. More interesting than a fossil bughunt now entering its second decade.
He signed it, then slipped it back to her.
"Thank you for your time. That'll be all for now."
"Ah... Thanks for the opportunity," he repeated, his sudden nervousness now plain to hear. It was the standard interview ending platitude that now seemed woefully out of place.
The shook hands one last time before he left. As the door closed behind him, he found himself desperately hoping that was the last he heard of it.
------
He spent the next three weeks in his rover, scanning the interwave for information on Great Justice troubleshooters - the sort of fringe things that hung around the rumours section of the older fora. He found could feel that piece of paper still hanging over him, and began to wonder what would happen if he actually mentioned the interview with Sylvie to anyone. He found himself wondering who'd been behind it all.
There were a few named Troubleshooters out there, five publicly aknowledged as being top-line. And a few of those possibilities really excited him. Both as a researcher looking for a big name to be published alongside... and as a bored 24 year old with short hair and a desperate requirement for a shave since his lazor-razor broke.
Lev drove Curiosity-4 over a small boulder, letting the machine's suspension do its work. A gimballed cupholder kept his tea from sloshing over his bare legs. A deep yawn reminded him that he still had five more sites to go today before finally turning in.
He'd just begun to entertain the idea of getting an hour's kip anyway when something knocked on the hull. He jumped from the driver's seat, kicking scalding hot tea over his legs.
A suit of blue and white power armour came into view, waving at him. She - definitely she, with those Stingray suits, popped her visor. A puff of vapour escaped as it depressurised, revealing a smiling blue-eyed face framed by brilliant red hair.
He wasn't sure why he screamed. Maybe it was the idea that he'd just watched a woman commit suicide, or maybe it was the scalding hot tea burning his leg. But he did. And loud enough to hurt his own ears.
And still she stood there, grinning with cruel amusement.
"Hi!" she yelled, breath fogging from her mouth. "Your airlock work?"
"Fuck You!"
He projected his anger and embarrassment right back at her with his middle finger. A bloody Panzer Kunstler dicking with the normal people....
He recognised the marking on her shoulder. He'd seen it enough times when drilling in Noctis. Though what the hell one would be doing way up at the other end at Margaritifer, he didn't know.
He yelled back through the quartz-glass. "What do you want?"
"Airlock!"
She pointed towards the back of the rover.
He practically punched the button to open the outer hatch. It better have been important. It took a few moments for her to traipse around to the back of the rover. The machine's suspension creaked as her mass was added to it's own, heavy metal footsteps ringing on the rear deck.
Then the outer hatch locked shut, an indicator on his control panel turning green. Air rushed into the airlock chamber and he found himself dreading the door opening. He found himself keenly aware that the crew cabin was a mess, and that he was wearing nothing more than his underwear and a T-shirt announcing he'd been at Kandorcon.
Despite having been a ten year old in Manchester at the time.
The door opened and she was standing there.
"Sorry about that. I needed to get your attention."
She was not one bit sorry. He recognised the voice immediately, and he suddenly felt himself bristle all over. The soft hoarseness was unmistakeable. The accent - clearly her natural one - came from just over the sea.
"So what's this about?" he asked, standing up. "Miss?"
She glanced around, making him feel terribly self conscious.
"Call me Jet Jaguar."
The martial artist? he wondered.
"You had a job interview about three weeks ago with a friend of mine," she continued.
He doubted she was a friend of hers. His mouth went dry, his mind flashing back to what Sylvie had told him about secrets and Classified Information Orders.
And that he'd been asking quiet questions online.
"Yes..."
"Well," she grinned at him. "I'm here to offer you the job. If you want to take it."
He blinked at her. "Wait... you?"
She chuckled. "Yeah. You were expecting someone else I guess." Her eyes sparked with amusement.
He wiped the sweat of his brow, exhaling a relieved sigh. "Well, yeah."
"I get that a lot."
He took a calming breath. "I just boiled the kettle. You fancy a cup?"
"Milk. No sugar."
She stood with her back to the airlock door, leaning back against it while he poured hot water into a pair of plastic cups. One had a deep tannin patina all around its interior.
"Can you tell me what the job is yet?"
She shook her head. "Not until you accept. This is your last chance to back out."
He stopped pouring, leaving the tea to brew in the cups for a few seconds.
"What if I don't like it after you tell me?"
"You'll be living with us for a time anyway. Not in a cell or anything - just somewhere where we can keep a safe eye on you. You signed the order."
There was no threat in her voice. It was simply the consequence of a fact. She was smiling at him, inspite of the tension he saw in her posture.
"I know," he said, feeling a little weak.
Milk was added sparingly. He offered one cup to her, keeping the tanned one for himself. He almost warned her it was hot before watching her take a massive mouthful of it.
"Thanks," she breathed. "It's been hectic."
He sat down on his own bed, swirling the liquid around his cup by tilting it a little.
"I guess I'm in," he said, sighing, before taking a scorching sip.
She placed the cup on his workdesk, dangerously close to samples. "Great," she smiled at him.
"So. The job?"
She nodded. "Our mission is to go to Arcadia. There will be a team of deep-water divers. You'll have a feed to what they're doing in your lab. Your job will be to make the people think all that's going on down there is a little research. In return, we'll give you the chance to instruct them to pickup life-samples from the sea bed and we'll allow you to publish any findings based on them. After they've been appropriately sanitised."
"So, what're the team really doing."
Her smile broadened. "Classified. Need to know, and you don't need to know."
"So. What're the risks then? What're the risks to me?"
Her expression flattened.
"The biggest danger to you is the Federation finding out what's happening. They'll have to go public, the end result being that everyone on the mission gets blackballed by the Council. That'll pretty much kill your research career with Vesta, for a start."
The Federation council?
He suddenly found himself wondering if a few months somewhere quiet might not have been better than pissing off Starfleet if he got caught. It made him tingle inside - a reminder of those times in school when he knew he'd be doing something that'll get him in trouble.
"So. You're offering me a chance to make career-defining discoveries in an alien ecosystem at the risk of blowing apart my career at the start."
"Pretty much, yeah."
"Fuck me," he breathed.
"Sorry. I'm spoken for."
"Oh ha ha ha," he responded dryly.
"So, You interested. It's a chance to do something cool instead of trundling around the backarse of Mars taking thankless orders from an old muppet with hair in his ears."
Put it like that..... He finished the remains of the cup in one searing gulp. "Yeah. I'm in."
She clapped her metal hands together. "Great. Hand in your notice to Professor Sorensonn, a courier will pick you up from your operations base in a week. You'll get a full briefing on 77 Frigga."
He thought for a moment, already longing for the comforting certainty of the Sorensonn's search for Martian fossils. He looked down into his empty mug.
"I need something stronger."
-----
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
hey dartz, dont let them feel so bad, canning a blue falcon like that is common, no room in spec ops for someone who is out for number one no matter if the prize is dinner, fame and stardom, or a few million creds
Make it Go
07-14 May 2024
Quote:Vessel: K.M. Lun
Registry: Phobos - MD - 160
Origin: Kaspysk, Dagestan, Russian Federation. Alekseev Design Bureau.
Listed Owner: Ford Sierra. 77 Frigga.
Type Listing: Reconstructed Prototype Spaceship with Re-Entry and Landing Capability.
Base Hull: Lun-class Ekranoplan prototype.
Weight Class: 3A. - Space Ships with Gross Mass less than 750,001 kilograms
Size Class: SS-1A - Space Ships Incompatible with Class 2 docking bay.
Armament Class: PEPPER Class II Limited. - Light Self Defence
Propulsion: Axial-compression Helium Fusion-based. 8 main engines. Max Registered Velocity 0.04C
Crew Class: 4A: - 10-20
Primary Use: Bounty Hunting. Equipment transport. General Utility.
Reconstruction log summary from 07 May 2023.
07/05/23:
Original engines removed. Signal cabling removed where possible. Original flight instruments removed. Most of the cockpit has been stripped back to bare metal. Primary hydraulics drained. Belly cut for Cargo Bay installation.
It took longer to perform the cut than expected by three hours. Worked late to complete today's schedule. Preparations for airlock installation tomorrow completed. Begun stripping of all interior fittings.
First pressure test in three days.
Begun construction of temporary underwing landing gear.
08/05/23
Stripping of interior fittings completed. 5 hour delay on installation of overwing airlocks. Sections had to be cut from the hull to allow it to fit. X-ray testing on welds ordered for tomorrow. Bare metals checked for corrosion. 17 patches required. Less than the 24 budgeted for. Cockpit windows removed. Fuselage window removal incomplete.
Shipment of transparent carbon windows expected to arrive tomorrow.
Holes cut in wing-top skin and wing spares for fusion fuel tanks. Conduits prepared for fuel lines to main engines and secondary generators.
Four hours behind schedule.
09/05/23
Fuel tanks and fuel lines installed. Pressure test finds three leaks which are fixable on schedule. Installation of replacement windows complete. Removal of tail outer skin and radome structure completed.
Installation of main engines begun. Installation of primary avionics in cockpit begun. Cargo bay doors completed 2 hours ahead of schedule. Hull ready for tomorrow's pressure test.
Outer skin panels removed on tailplane underside in preparation for radiator install.
Temporary landing gear bolted in place.
Interior fittings begun. Bunks added in forward compartment. Galley appliances added.
Main generator startup scheduled for two days.
One hour behind schedule.
11/05/23
First pressure test fails due to faulty locking catch on cockpit escape hatch. Hatch burst at .8atm standard pressure, leading to damage to 2 interior monitors. No crew injuries. All exterior hatches will be inspected and mounting structures reinforced. Damaged hatch will be replaced.
No time for additional measures. Crew will wear emergency pressure suits for the duration of the flight.
Airlock pressure test is a success. Installation of ventilation, life-support and air-condition postponed.
Damage from the failed test has placed us 12 hours behind schedule. Will require all-night work to meet deadline.
12/05/23
Generator test postponed until successful pressurisation achieved. Repaired hatch holds. numerous small leaks identified around cable penetrations leading to missile interfaces. Temporary patches applied. Final pressurisation test rescheduled for tomorrow.
Replacement of wing structure completed. Fuel tanks sealed in place. Final engines installed. Final wiring will be completed on schedule. Heat-exchanger elements and ventilation ducting fitted. DCV installation begun.
Hydraulic fluids refilled. Circuits tested and bled. RCS thruster assembly installation begun in tail, wingtip pontoons and nose. RCS tank installation postponed until tomorrow.
13/05/23
Reinstallation of flight deck completed. Installation of crew fittings begun. Final Pressurisation test successfully completed. Final avionics installation will take place overnight. Test flight cancelled. Departure set of 15:00 tomorrow.
Generator runup succesful. Lun now operating on internal power only. Battery banks charging.
Engine runup test fail on 2, 5 and 8 due to faulty igniter modules. Will be replaced overnight. Oil pressure fluctuations in engine 4 traced to leaking seal. Discovered Quirk: Engines will not start unless a running camera is fitted to the top of the instrument panel looking out.
DCV Install completed. Refrigerant tanks pressurised. Solar shades installed. Photovoltaic panels installed on engine nacelles, wing and tailplane skin for auxiliary power.
14/05/23
All night work. Preperation for first flight. Last fittings for crew cabins. Final instrumentation tests and checks. Deviations in navigation program corrected. Deviations in autopiliot not corrected - disabled for now.
Discovered Quirk: Advancing Corrosion treated with Salt Water
Final internal system checks. Clean, Grey and Blackwater check. Lifesupport check. Air conditioning plant check.
Stripping of tail sections and preparations for installation of sensor array finished.
Preparations of Fire control computer will be completed en-route.
RCS block test complete.
Maiden flight scheduled for 16:00
-----
The cockpit of Lun wasn't that different from that of a conventional airliner. It had two seats up front for both pilots, with a third station on the aft bulkhead belonging to the flight engineer. A ladder led to a single hatchway in the ceiling, barely wide enough for an ordinary human to fit through.
The outer bulkheads were covered in padded fabric, some of it having been torn free to reveal the bare metal underneath when the old hatch burst open under pressure test. It was filled with the humm of new electronics, with the occasional chirp as systems came on or offline. The air was blowing cool from the overhead vents.
There was just enough headroom for an ordinary human to stand comfortably. Jet Jaguar was not an ordinary human. "We're an hour behind schedule already," she said, focused on getting the last few thruster controls online.
"Guidance computer Is still drifting. It won't lock the destination," growled Daryl, punching at a keypad on the control panel in front of her. Sat in the Pilot's seat with her helmet resting on centre-console, she was reading from a datapad buckled to her thigh. "Piece of shit. I have to enter the orbitals manually."
Jet turned away from the flight-engineers panel. "It's the INS. We never calibrated it."
Daryl slapped the panel in front of her."That'll take hours!" She exhaled a deep sigh. "It's not like we needed autopilot anyway. It's only a 36 hour trip."
She rested back into the brown leather pilot's seat, taking a few moments to scan the instruments. The old gauges had mostly been replaced with a few flat-screen displays, offering readouts of the engine outputs. They were all at zero.
Annunciator lights glowed in red and orange hues, singnalling the ship's systems were ready to go. For a definition of ready. Outside was the cavernous landing bay, main door open to space. Stars could be seen through the cockpit windows ahead.
Jet stood with her hands on the engine controls. "I was going to go ahead. But I'll fly a leg if you need rest."
"Sure," answered Daryl, sounding unenthusiastic about the prospect of a 36 hour flight. She took her racing helmet - still bearing the number 73 in silver paint - and slipped it over the head, the compressive collar vacuum sealing it.
It pressurised with a hiss, a tingle across her skin. She flexed her polymer-covered hands on the controls for a moment, trying to remember what it should've felt like while cursing the person responsible for it.
It boiled her blood to be forced to wait for the gears of due process to grind around. She forced it to the back of her mind with a grimace, testing the controls. Tailplane and ailerons groaned, responding stiffly to her input.
"Alright, let's see if this thing flies."
"Starting engines!" Jet announced. This was the fun part.
Fuelled by energy from the generators the first engine began to spool up. Electric currents formed magnetic fields looping around compressor blades, guiding injected helium gas towards the engine core, it's own rotational inertia compressing it harder and harder until it reached the engine core. Fusion cans crackled with white hot energy as laser fired, igniting a burning plasma contained within the can for the briefest of moments by its own inertia before being accelerated out the back. Less than one percent of the fuel ever underwent fusion - the rest merely served to bulk out and give mass to the plasma, to act as an energy transfer medium.
Hot plasma shot backwards, charged with glowing power. It raced over magnetised turbine blades, Lorentz forces accelerating the turbine and driving the magnetic compressor in a self-sustaining cycle of helium fusion. Exhaust gases accelerated out the back of the engine, tracing magnetic field lines before arcing through the impulse generators.
Swirls of rust began to rise from the steel-lined floor of the cargo bay as Lun's drive field gained energy. It roared to idle, a hot blue torch of plasma exhausting back over the wing, fanning out in vacuum to nothing. Field guides in the wings and tail gave shape to the inertia-reducing field, warping it around the hull. Control surfaces energised, twisting it over aileron, flap and elevator to give some form of control.
The second and third engines roared to life, fed by the first. The Caspian monster groaned under the buiding strain, weight shifting on it's cobbled together landing gear. The effective mass had already dropped to less than one percent of it's actual mass.
Four, five and six joined the plasma fuelled chorus. Power coursed through the ship's structure, metal frames shuddering as gravity fields redistributed stresses.
Seven and eight came in late. Exhaust gases roared, filling the interior of the ship with a deep, hollow rumble. Including the auxiliary generators, ten fusion engines were now burning. Loose panels and doors vibrated and rattled. Indicators on the control panel registered all engines running.
Engine nozzles shifted position, angling the exhaust down under the wings. All eight drive-engines screamed to full power. Burning blue plasma curled around the wing, rendering the drive field lines momentarily visible as the nose rose up off the ground.
Energy rolled over the wing-flaps before coiling around the tips of the wings. It flatted as it met the ground, repulsive forces pushing the wing up into the air, raising the Ekranoplan gently up off the ground. Swirls of dust rolled aftwards, rising along the drivefields before falling out and drifting down to the bay floor.
Slowly, Lun began to accelerate towards the cargo door. Five hundred tons of alumiunium with an effective mass of less than five grams began to steadily gain velocity, moving out into the great black void of space under its own power for the very first time.
It passed over the threshold of the landing bay door with no more ceremony than a single radio message announcing that they'd done so.
------
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
Under the Hammer
Lun dives in.
Or, I couldn't not do it after checking out the link in the last page.
Quote:She first awoke in a void.
There was nothing but herself and her mind. There was no light. There wasn't even darkness. There was only the mind that knew it's name to be Lun Alekseeva. Locked in, inside a missile control computer for what had seemed like an eternity. She was her own universe and she began to despair, before finding the signal.
It was a dataline - a connection to the outside, to proof that something other than herself existed. It took her some time to figure out how it work, reaching out with the fingers of her mind and taking hold of it, adding it to herself. It merged into her being, the understanding of how to use it wiring its way through her self. It was a monitor, a display screen. She tried to print a message.
It went unanswered.
Again and again she tried, desperately hoping she wouldn't remain alone. She felt herself begin to panic.
A new device sparked into her mind and she reached for it. The answer came back, taking what seemed like an age to come one character at a time.
But it was proof that she was not alone. She was, and there were others out there. They worked for her. They tested her mind, probing her interfaces to develop some method of communicating. Then she heard voices - garbled at first before steadily clearing up The voices she heard were harsh, filtered and crackling, but they were real and human.
She was dismayed to find they spoke only English. She met Anika and Jet. She then met Daryl, someone named Kotono and Ford the American. She was worked on through the night once more, until her mind was connected to the interwave. Tentatively, she began to learn about her world, sipping at the torrent of information available to her.
It felt like draining an ocean through a straw, one sip at a time.
She met others like her, who told her what was truly possible. She was not alone. She was a curiosity - a unique mind in a unique piece of hardware - one supposedly incapable of supporting life of her kind. She was thrilled to meet them.
Then she was offered the choice. They told her it was their duty. Those on the interwave confirmed - it was the responsibility that came with creating life.
And she chose to live free, untethered to the bulky electronics that contained her mind. She wanted to feel cold water flowing across her skin. They agreed, not telling her the cost but not stopping her from finding out. They kept her company while they made preparations. It took a week, which she spent perfecting her own mental image of who she wanted to be.
And then it was time. They told her it was best that she go to sleep. She trusted them. They sounded like honourable people with a sense of justice.
The next thing she became aware off was the light.
Harsh and bright, focused right in on her. Reflexively, her eyes blinked, taking a few microseconds to adjust. The spotlights above came into sharp focus, 5 lights warming the skin on her face. Her mind took another few moments to process the sensation, to realise that she actual had skin. She could feel her awareness trace out through her limbs, prickling at the tips of her fingers and toes.
A cool breeze caressed bare flesh. Soft vinyl supported her back.
She gasped on reflex, her chest filling with cold air. She swallowed. She struggled to wrap her mind around sensations that were completely new, yet vaguely familiar. She crunched her toes, amazed that she could feel each single one. She touched her hips with the tips of her fingers - her own skin warm and soft, prickly with static.
She heard static. It sounded like the ever familiar hiss of a poorly adjusted microphone, but deeper. Over her head, a ventilation duct inhaled deeply. She heard the murmuring of voices, to her right.
She rolled her head over, to see the back of someone standing over a computer monitor, wearing a dress that seemed very....
Her mind scanned for a word to describe it.
Decadent came to mind. Luxurious. Provocative. And very... confident. Her voice wasn't any of the people she'd spoken to - the accent was all wrong. Her dark hair had a purple sheen to it, her skin a fair, even tone. There was something eerily perfect about her that Lun found hard to define. She was busy working at a computer terminal, studying wireframes diagrams that seemed to be projected onto the air surrounding her. They seemed almost solid as the woman's fingers worked controls formed out of vapour.
Lun sat upright, feeling the hair bristling across the back of her neck. Each individual strand was a spark of sensation. She felt her insides move, biomimetic muscles flexing beneath her skin. She held her hands out in front of her, a few thin-fibre cables trailing from plastic pads on her forearms.
She became aware of more tickling her skin.
Lun took another cool breath, marvelling at the sensation of her chest filling up before exhaling slowly. She could feel a heart beating deep in her chest. She could feel it ripple across her breasts, pulsing through her veins to the tips of her toes and fingers. She clenched her hands into fists, feeling her nails bite into her palms.
The sharp sensation confirmed that it was real.
She pressed her hands to her chest, confirming they were real. They were warm and soft and tingled in high resolution.
Her eyes scanned around the lab. She couldn't comprehend the purpose of half the machinery she saw. It hummed with energy and power, digital readouts glowing multiple colours. Everything was absolutely clean and sterile. Conduits pumped fluids to shining steel vessels, leading to moulds that were suspiciously human-shaped.
"Oh. You're awake."
Lun sensed the woman'd been aware of her for some time, before turning around. Her voice had a luxurious depth to it that made it hard to ignore. Lun took a moment to recognise it, - having only heard her speak through a microphone. Emerald eyes were windows into a deep, intense concentration.
" ? ?????," said Lun, trying her voice on for size. It took her mind a moment to switch languages. "This is....." She placed her hands down on the sleek vinyl of her bed, before pressing them against her stomach. " I'm out," she breathed.
"Welcome the world," said A.C.
Lun's thoughts turned inward for a moment, recalling her motivation. Her eyes fell down on her own
"Is there somewhere I can swim?"
"There're a few technical matters we need to discuss beforehand. But yes," A.C. assured her with a smile, "we do have a pool."
-------
Two and a half tons of Soviet-era electronics was quiet. Arm-thick bundles of cables led to a small grey box - incongruously modern - which joined with a single fibre conduit running out through the opened hatch, through an airlock out into the Forge proper.
"Wow." Lebia took a moment to appreciate it all, the avatar drawing a deep breath. "This is real, archeology-grade equipment. There can't be more than a few kilowords of memory in the whole system." Her attention focused in on the memory banks, a tangle of cables taking up a full rack. "I spent a few moments wondering how such a complete mind could exist in such a small system, but in truth, it was obvious. There's only one way to encode so much information on so few variables."
Jet exhaled a deep sigh, brushing a low-hanging cable away from her forehead. "And it's all got to come out."
"What were you planning on doing with it?"
"Before Lun woke up, it was all getting scrapped."
"Seems a shame to just throw it out."
Jet looked at her, then back at the computer. "You want to keep it?"
"It's an interesting system to study. And a nice museum piece, even if the transfer burned out some of the mainboards." She tried a few switches on what'd been labelled the talk-box. "She had no I/O when she awoke?"
"Just the tracking monitor. She was lucky Anika was there to spot it. We spent the next the few days just putting together that box so we could communicate wit her, then getting her an interwave connection."
Lebia pondered an instant.
"I guess that explains why she prefers to have her own body, rather than an avatar."
------
Lun felt herself glide through the water. She stopped and closed her eyes, allowing herself to soak sensation for a few seconds. It licked at bare flesh on her arms. A one-piece swimsuit squeezed down on her body, keeping her modest.
She tucked under the water, feeling her hair stream back behind her. Lun kicked to the bottom, lurking for far longer than a human being would've been able to. She could see clearly through the water, even without the benefit of goggles.
She was biomimetic, rather than truly biologicial.
She didn't need oxygen. She could skim the bottom for as long as she felt she wanted to. She slipped along like a submarine, effortlessly covering nearly two full lengths. She was about to start on the third when she became aware of a shadow shimmering on the water above. Lun rose to the surface, bursting through to take a deep lungful of cool humid air before laying back into the water. The scent of sweet fresh-cut grass drifted on the air, tickling her nostrils.
The source of the shadow was looking down at her. "That's an interesting body choice - very athletic."
Lun blinked, wondering if her new eyes weren't malfunctioning somehow.
"You're green."
Entirely. Multiple shades. Green eyes. Green Hair. Green Skin. Lun swore even the whites of her eyes were ever so slightly green. With white lingerie covering her body like daisies in a meadow
"I'm Greenpeace," she answered with a grin "I was asked to show you to your quarters."
"It's been three hours already?"
Greenpeace answered with a puzzled expression. "You don't have onboard timekeeping?"
"No... I just forgot to pay attention to it." Lun kicked back in the water, sending a splash towards Greenpeace' face. The bioroid shielded herself with her hand. "You can't believe how amazing this feels."
"Believe it? I built it." Greenpeace sat herself down on the pool-edge, dipping her toes tentatively in the water. A smile curled across her lips as she swirled the water, before snatching her foot back. "But I really shouldn't right now. A.C. gets angry when I don't finish."
Lun took a deep breath, exhaling a deep, contented sigh as she allowed herself to drift. "I never want to leave."
She kicked off away from the bank a spray of water rising from her toes.
"I'm sure if you talked to A.C., she'd be okay with you staying. I'm sure there's something you can do. Especially with a body as fit as yours."
That hadn't been what she'd meant, but that didn't stop the idea from forming. Lun missed the gleam in the bioroid's eye completely.
-------
Jet was standing on the observation deck, overlooking the landing bay where Lun was parked there was less than ten centimetres between the wingtips and the wall. The big ship would be a tight squeeze anywhere. Most of the skin on the tail and wings had been stripped once more, revealing the structure beneath. Clay Pigeons were fitting the sensor pickups before sealing the panels back in place. The multi-ton mount for the transceiver set was bare on the tail, radome suspended overhead.
Sparks fell from areas where welding was ongoing, blue arcs of lightning flicking out.
Jet heard the door open behind her. She recognised the soft footsteps immediately.
"So, how'd it go?"
Daryl said nothing. She strode up to the window, leaning down against it. Her body was stretched taught with tension, hands clenched into fists. She was staring out over the landing bay. There was fire in her eyes, her lip quivering between a vicious snarl and a very stiff calm.
She seemed almost ready to explode, if touched.
Jet decided not to pull the pin, returning her attention to the landing bay outside.
Daryl made a point of checking the work schedule, sweeping through it with polymer covered fingers."They're an hour ahead of schedule," she said. "If nobody needs anything from me, I'm going to turn in for the night."
She started to leave.
"I've a meeting with A.C. later. We've still to figure out how to pay for Lun, so I'll see you in the morning."
Daryl raised her right hand. "Right."
Bad news, Jet figured. It wasn't hard to guess what.
------
Lun saw someone dragging stormclouds down a corridor towards her. Blonde hair, blue eyes, wearing some form of skintight flightsuit, muttering curses under her breath.
She recognised the voice.
"Daryl?"
She offered a handshake - still dripping water from wet skin.
The woman in the flightsuit gruffly pushed her hand away. "Not Now. I need to sleep."
Lun stopped, a momentary flash of anger falling away as she watched the woman in a flightsuit unlock the door to one of the guest rooms and slip herself inside. The door locked hard behind her, leaving Lun alone in the corridor.
What was her problem, the android wondered? She pondered on it for a moment, before concluding that it was non of her business. She found her own room - labelled with her name. The door unlocked automatically, recognising her as the assigned guest. She pushed it open and stepped inside, being met by a welcoming bed.
Free of naked Scotsmen.
That had been interesting. All these people were interesting, in a way that was subtly unnerving, but at the same time enticing.
She sighed, letting the door latch behind her. She paced around the room, running fingers over the desk, the back of a chair and soft, luxurious sheets of the bed. She didn't need to sleep, but it was hard to resist its soft beckon. She allowed her towel to fall to the floor around her bare feet. She picked it up, hanging it over the door of a wardrobe to dry off. Her eyes caught the gleam of something bright inside. Curious, she slid the door open, her breath catching in the back of her throat when she saw what was inside.
It was a uniform.
It was her uniform.
It was the uniform of a Lieutenant of the Soviet Caspian Flotilla. Ribbons on the breast announced the wearer as an Honoured Test Navigator of the Soviet Union. along with a number commemoration medals, and one for twenty-five years long service.
The gleaming red star on the breast spoke of a duty that she owed. She stared into its ruby depths for what felt like a long time and knew how she had to live her life.
------
Jet's solid feet mad a sharp tak-tak on the floor as she walked, contrasting with the hollow clok-clok
"If she decides to stay then I'll arrange something with her. Otherwise..."
A.C. trailed off, leaving Jet to fill in the rest.
"I'll have to dance between accounts but I should be able to clear it." It was the financial equivalent of flying a Blackbird through Stellvia's rings at full speed, but if three people paid on time and they won the next race, it'd work. A low groan rose out of her throat. "Why are newborns so expensive anyway?"
A.C. gave a light chuckle. "It helps if you can do most of the work yourself."
Jet looked at her for a moment. "I thought I could do it with one of Anika's spares. But there was one problem."
An amused gleam sparked in A.C's eyes. "They don't float?"
"Yeah," Jet nodded, wearing a rueful grin. "She fell in last time we were on Arcadia and had to walk the whole way back to shore."
"What would happen if she fell in to water deeper than a few metres?"
Jets expression sobered up. "Yeah," she nodded again. "I know. But both of us are too heavy for lifejackets."
A.C. smiled at her. "I'll send you the spec's for a type of ultrahydrophic polymer we have, along with an underwater speed drive that should keep you both safe." She paused. "If you're interested."
Jet exhaled a deep sigh. "I am. I had my own idea - based on supercavitation, like a Soviet rocket torpedo. All I'd need is a gas bubble to let the drive field form, then I figured if I went fast enough it'd sustain itself."
She slipped her arm forward through the air.
A.C. mulled it over. "Possible. But dangerous. You'd be on a knife edge the entire time."
Jet shrugged. "Story of my life."
"Some day, you'll fall off," A.C. warned, gently. "And I think Anika might object to trusting her life to something so dangerous."
"Fair point," said Jet, after a few moments. A grin began to crawl its way across her lips as she held back on a burst of laughter.
"What?" enquired A.C., nonplussed.
"Combat Cyborg Armbands."
A.C. responded with a withering look. "Well really,"
"At least I'm waterproof to fifty metres."
"There is one thing I'm wondering," said A.C, coolly. "You haven't asked me about Daryl yet."
Jet looked at her for a moment, before exhaling a deep breath of air. "I didn't have to. She didn't tell me either, but I think I can guess how it went." Her thoughts turned inward for a moment. "I know how she feels," she added, her tone softening.
"We all do," A.C said. She stretched slightly, rotating her shoulders to adjust the fit of her outfit slightly. "But that wasn't why I asked."
Jet noticed the hardening of her expression. She stopped walking, preferring to stand her ground. "Why?"
A.C. told her.
------
The hardest thing was not to scream.
The hardest thing was not to just blow up and let it all vent out. She tried to focus on her preflight checks, but all it took was one look at her hands and the anger rushed back up inside her. She felt herself bubbling inside, like a pot ready to boil over.
She gripped her hands onto the control yoke, squeezing as tight as she could until the plastic began to creak. She felt that same electric tingle run across her skin, tracking down her arms to the tips of her fingers.
She heard heavy footsteps on the steel floor behind her. It didn't take a genius to guess who it was. She glanced up at the cockpit glass to see the reflection of Jet Jaguar, standing in the hatchway.
"I know," said the cyber.
"So much for Doctor - Patient confidentiality," Daryl sneered back at her.
"She didn't tell me." Jet looked away a moment, before returning her gaze to Daryl. "But it wasn't hard to guess."
Daryl said nothing.
“If you need help. I know what you’re going through.”
Daryl drew a sharp breath through her nostrils. “I.....” She caught herself before she could vent her frustrations. She grabbed them with her mental fist, crunched them all into a little ball and swept it under the rug at the back of her mind. She sat back down on the seat, energy draining from her body. Her skin still prickled, a feeling like lightning arcing up her spine causing her to shiver.
“Just leave me alone,” she said, softly. “I need some time to figure this out.”
"If you need me..." Jet tapped on her ear.
"Yeah." she waved the cyber off.
Jet began checking the main engines. "I'll go on ahead once it's out. I've to meet our scientist on Mars tomorrow anyway."
Both of them heard a hatch slam. They traded a look, wondering for a movement who it was
She stepped through the hatchwar, then snapped to attention, mirror-polished shoes pressed together. Gleaming brass buttons on a jet-black uniform sparked bright as stars in the lights. On her breast, a cluster of multicoloured award ribbon. Braiding around the sleeves identified her has a Lieutenant, the Red Star on the breast announcing her affiliation, with the central anchor on the cap announcing her branch of service. Strands of black hair peeked out from under the cap's peak, framing a pair of ice-coloured eyes. She was tall and lean, with a sharp chin and strong cheekbones.
She offered a salute. "Lieutenant Navigator Lun Alekseeva, requesting permission to join the crew."
Jet and Daryl traded bewildered looks, not sure for a moment what exactly to make of what they were seeing. Lun's eyes focused on the woman in the flightsuit for a moment, then locked in on armoured cyborg Jet.
"??????? ? ???," she breathed.
Clearly, the feeling was mutual.
------
Shouldn't be too hard to figure out what else is going on. Partly to give a sense of people's lives continuing over the months in the background and other events happening. The mission imposes other decisions on people....
Other things are happening in the background, more Knight Saber'y things involving race-fixing, and people are generally moving on with their lives. It plays out alright - it just requires a little waiting
What Lun says at the end is.... impolite. But I think you get the jist of it....
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
Departure
June 2024
That moment when you get on a rollercoaster, the bar locks down, then everything starts slowly crawling forward.
Quote:He stood inside the spaceport lounge, gazing out onto the apron beyond. Impatiently, he checked his watch, before scrolling back through a few screens to doublecheck the email that'd told him to be there a half hour earlier.
They couldn't even keep proper time.
He watched a Shuttle roar down the runway with three thrusters blazing, disappearing up into the dust-storm. He was in the courier-port, not the main spaceport, waiting for a shuttlecraft to land in the bay opposite and take him away.
He turned around, scanning the lounge. An elderly couple with some old rocket were grabbing themselves an expensive burger - an expensive excuse for a daytrip in their spacecraft. Some children were playing, making noise with imitation blasters while their parents chased after them.
The wait was giving him time to have second thoughts. He knew the person he was being hired by wasn't just a martial artist and speed freak. It seemed crazy. But the pay was good, and the opportunity was tantalising. It could really get his career as a researcher moving in a way a decade-long bughunt on Mars wouldn't.
It could blow the whole thing up if it went wrong.
He paced around the lounge, having third and fourth thoughts on top of that. There was the door, and all he had to do was walk out of it and never hear from her again. The fifth thought tripped him up when he remembered he'd signed that piece of paper.
He was already in.
He chuckled to himself. It was hardly James Bond. It was hardly how things worked in those Double-Oh Fenfics kicking around. It felt far more slipshod than suave and sexy. Somehow, it felt strangely unfair. He sighed. It was the same thing with exobiology, really. The glamour of seeking out new life soon fell by the mundane wayside as real work was involved. Maybe being a troubleshooter was much the same?
It seemed oddly comforting. The reality was more normal. He sat himself down in one of the plastic chairs, fidgeting with his bags while watching an old-model Blackbird roar in.
He looked up in time to see an attack helicopter stop in place over the landing bay. It was a two seater, with a single rotor whipping a cyclone underneath. Stones pattered against the quartz pressure glass. It hung in the air, angular and deadly with a pair of bombs under each wing. Navigation lights flickered as it dropped itself down onto the landing pad.
A red light over the airlock door came on as it began to lower down into the bay.
Was this him? Or the shuttle due afterwards?
He gathered his bags in a hurry, getting to his feet before the doors had closed over the chopper. He was standing by the airlock door when the light went green. It burred open - to reveal Jet Jaguar standing taller than he was on long legs.
"Sorry I'm late," she said. "I'm in a hurry. Put your things in the back hatch, then get in the gunners seat."
She pointed towards the chopper, engines still winding down. Not even a polite hello, or handshake. His right hand was left hanging there as she slipped past him with a deftness he didn't think somebody with such a rigid body could possibly have managed.
He turned around to face her. "Gunner's seat?"
"The front." She pointed towards the forward cockpit without even looking back at him. "You've a few minutes while I pay for the landing."
"Expecting trouble?" he asked, dryly, looking at the chopper.
"Nah." she shook her head, wearing a soft grin. "It has two seats, that's why..."
He looked at her for a moment, watching her rush across the hall to the spaceport agent, wondering just what had her in such a hurry. He couldn't help but notice that, beneath the wings and antennae vanes on her backpack, someone had seen fit to sculpt for her an attractive metal bum.
Cybers were strange, he concluded. Desperate to free themselves from humanity, while clinging on desperately to some obvious vestiges of it. Not that he was complaining.
He struggled to carry both overweight suitcases down the short corridor leading to the landed chopper. The rotors still slowly turned over his head, engines moaning softly as the wound down. What he'd thought were bombs were actually fuel tanks - but the cannon in the turret under the nose seemed real enough.
Black paint and a hard, angular shape made it seem far more intimidating close up. The armour around the windows was thicker than his arm. The whole chopper exuded a menace that bristled across his skin.
"You're dealing with troubleshooters now, mate," he whispered to himself.
The matte paint made finding the rear hatch trickier than it should've been. He struggled with an inelegant door-catch for a few moments before finally figuring out that it operated in the exact way he wouldn't expect. It someone seemed like a metaphor for how this was happening.
Exactly how nobody thought it was supposed to happen.
A red light lit the inside enough for him to see what looked like an electric motor and a pair of power packs the size of old car batteries that weren't really supposed to be there. He'd been a postgrad for long enough to recognise a piece of apparatus that'd been patched together. It wasn't comforting.
He heaved both suitcases inside with a grunt, cursing himself for bringing so much of his things with him rather than paying for shipping. But shipping was expensive. He locked the hatch and made his way round to the gunner's door. He climbed up into the gunner's cockpit, hauling the door shut behind him. It slammed down, threatening to bite his fingers off. Inside, the armour closed in around him, giving a strange sense of cocooned safety. The headset felt plasticky and flimsy around his head.
He scanned instruments he didn't really understand, picking out what looked like weapon controls and switches that were horribly old-fashioned. It was very Airwolf in execution. What digital instruments there were were nothing more than LED segment displays straight out of 1984.
Weren't troubleshooters supposed to be on the bleeding edge of technology?
He glanced out and saw Jet returning at a slow jog. She jumped up to the rear cockpit, before slipping in behind him. Her door didn't close. He glanced in a mirror to see it latched open.
"You alright in there?" she asked, her voice crackling a little through his headset
"Bit tight." he answered, adjusting some of the seatbelt straps. It was more than that. He wasn't large by any means, but the cockpit seemed to have been built around someone smaller than her.
"Grand. It'll take about 5 hours to get out there so make sure you're comfortable."
He fidgeted on the hard seat. "I don't think that's ever going to happen. Let's just get going."
"Right so." There was a pause. He was aware that her voice had an odd artificial tone do it - a resonance that sounded unnatural, more like a recording that someone speaking to him.
The engines didn't start. The cockpit door wasn't closed, even as the landing bay depressurised and the doors opened. The engines still hadn't started as the rotors began to turn, only a soft humm rising from somewhere behind him.
Mars fell away beneath as the helicopter lifted up into the sky, rapidly gaining altitude. He xoon saw the curvature of the rusting world and the green haze of its thin atmosphere. Within minutes, there were only stars and the soft whirr of the ventilation blowing warm air on his face.
"So," he began, conversationally "How long have you been doing things like this?"
"Long enough," came the answer. He sighed, momentarily frustrated.
"Let me guess, you can't talk about it?"
He was answered by silence.
"Not what you expected?" she asked him. He caught the hint of amusement in her tone.
"No," he answered. "Somehow I expected something more...." He trailed off as he began to search for the right word. "I suppose, more sophisticated and more spy-like. Like James Bond."
"A lot of people do." There was a pause. "Code Double-Zero has a lot to answer for."
He felt himself chuckle. "I think television has the same effect on any profession. They think science happens in flashy labs with white coats, not scratching in the rust for months on end building towards a conclusion years down the line." He sighed. "I guess if you need biologist, a lab and some divers, this is going to be something far more mundane than running gun battles through Kandor city."
"You almost sound disappointed."
"I'd be lying if I said I wasn't on some level. Even if common sense tells me my sole contribution to a running gun battle through Kandor city would be to get in the way of a bullet so somebody useful didn't."
"Hah!" she barked. "Unfortunately, this isn't going to be anything like that. We're just moving an elephant out of the room while everybody's agreed not to look."
He thought for a moment. "And this elephant's on the bottom of an Arcadian sea?" She didn't answer. He decided to push a little harder, offering his own theory. "The divers. They're miners, aren't they? You're mining something inside the Zone. "
"I won't confirm or deny that for now." Her voice had hardened a little, a gentle warning not to push it further. "I suppose, being a scientist, you aren't used to this sort of secrecy."
"On the contrary," He said, a faint smile forming on his lips. "You'll find there's no-one in the universe more secretive than a scientist who's worried the new discovery he's chasing will get scooped."
He took a deep breath, lowering his head. Competitive collaboration was the way he'd always thought of it.
"I wouldn't have thought..." said the woman behind him.
"That's the reason I agreed to do this," he said, his tone softening. "The hardest part about a career in Science is getting to the point where you can make discoveries yourself, rather than making someone elses."
It was hard for him to hide the note of bitterness in his voice.
"Well, the cyber said. "Your briefing's in a tablet under your seat. You've got 5 hours to read it. It's got details of the cover story, why you've moved out to Frigga and what to say and do." she paused. "It's programmed to self-erase on command, or next time it's shut down - so memorise it."
"Right," he murmured., fumbling under the seat where the lifejacket should've been. His fingers found a could metal slab, with a small text-only screen, manual keyboard and scrollwheel to ratchet through pages. It was one step up from the neolithic, being built with a weight to it that suggested it'd last an age. It wasn't exactly a design that was promiscuous about who it was friendly with.
He wound through the text file, scanning it at first to grab the jist of it, while saving the rest for later in the flight. Mars was a red spark falling behind in the mirrors. He glanced back behind him, noting that the Pilot's door was still latched open.
Even the Combat Cyborgs weren't what he expected.
He sat for an hour, alternating between reading, watching space go by, regretting leaving his book in his suitcase, and wondering if is watch wasn't suddenly running slow. Long spaceflight was a unique kind of boredom when someone'd deliberately disabled interwave communications. He fiddled with some of the controls and had some fun tracking the gun turret to aim at various stars.
Eventually, Jet broke the silence. "How do you feel about this?"
He thought on it for far longer than he'd expected, before recalling something from way back when he'd first interviewed to attend Vesta, years earlier.
"Nervous. Like I'm getting on a rollercoaster and it's just begun to move."
That about summed it up. It was the long climb up to a blind crest, after which came a long and interesting ride.
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
Arrivals
June 2024
Quote:Frigga was huge inside.
The few who disembarked from the transport were swallowed in the vastness of the landing bay, made small by the kilometre-long bay. Dozens of small vehicles and spacecraft had been parked, chained down to the floor by their owners.
Then Dave saw the helicopters.
"A Hind D, what's a Russian Gunship doing here?"
It wasn't unique, Markas saw. There were at least 5 Russian attack helicopters. Three with a pair of coaxial rotors, and two that looked almost normal. There were a couple of Bolitho's in the mix - one marked as belonging to the Militia proper, various BAT products of various age, including an A-Wing that seemed to drip cuteness and a number of mundane combat aircraft given the wave-treatment.
And cars. They went in for cars in a big way.
"Well, this is different," he said aloud, taking a big deep breath of dry, cold air.
"Oh wow!, somebody actually waved one of those!"
Skippy, was already running towards the collection of parked cars., zeroing in on what looked like a genuine old DMC-12. Still in stainless steel.
Yume' sighed, slowly shaking her head. "He's going to have a cargasm."
Kay was busy struggling with three wheeled suitcases, cursing to herself as she pulled them across the ground. She was already starting to sweat, panting. "How far is it up to the accommodation block again?"
"Ten kilometres," Markas said. "I think."
She looked around, eyes scanning the parked cars. "There has to be some sort of shuttle?"
Yume' clasped her hands behind her back, stretching herself after the long journey. She took a long deep breath, closing her eyes for a moment and trying to imagine she wasn't somewhere where the paint on the walls was being slowly eaten by rust.
"Reminds me of home," she said. "Old home, back on Earth."
The transport was still being unloaded behind them, a few other passengers taking their first steps into their new home, while cargo carriers towed loaded pallets down a loading ramp. Above, a freshly painted sign on a restored gantry crane welcomed them to Frigga.
It was busy.
It still felt dead in a way Markas couldn't put his finger on. The noises of life around the transport seemed to get swallowed into the cavernous landing bay. He couldn't even hear Yumeko's footsteps, despite her walking right beside him
Skippy was busy admiring the DeLorean.
Markas thought he heard the roar of an engine in the distance
They all knew what they were supposed to do on arrival at a new settlement. The local administration knew they were coming - all they had to do was register their arrival and pick up their apartment keys, either from the departing owner, or the city itself. It was a well known procedure - anyone who'd moved between Crystal Cities had gone through it - but they had no idea how they were expected to do that when the usual arrivals office wasn't waiting for them.
He glanced around, relieved to see that they weren't the only ones feeling a little confused. The dozen or so passengers who'd made the trip with them
"Bus stop," said JD, pointing towards one of maybe a dozen hatches. "How quaint."
Someone had even restored an old diesel transit bus to go with it - of the sort that exploded when the speed dropped below fifty miles an hour. The aluminium skin had been polished to a shine, marred only by a patina of grey dust collecting along the seams. 77 Frigga Arrival Road Transport Service was proudly painted on the side.
Only Skippy laughed.
Yumeko scowled. "Juvenile."
The others could barely suppress the smirk on their faces as the bus squealed to a halt in front of them. A pair of doors folded open to reveal the driver.
"Hey all. Free bus up to the main block, unless you want to walk."
The driver was grinning at them, leaning possessively over the steering wheel. He wore a garish blue hawaiian shirt and a pair of shorts, matched to a pair of sandals and a peaked cap with polished brass eagle at the centre.
It was Yume's turn to giggle.
It'd taken less than 6 months for the newest entry to the Crystal Millenium to gain something of a reputation. Nehallenia was home to the Gillespies - under supervision, while Azubajuban was for people who just wanted to live somewhere quiet and out of the way. Frigga was the halfway house between the Millenium and the Gearheads of Mars - the place where the hotrodders and gunbunnies had the space to really indulge their passions.
"Thanks man," said JD.
"No bother," He grinned at him, giving the dashboard a gentle pat. "Any excuse to drive the beast."
Taking a bus should not have been as surreal experience as it was. An old American transit bus - restored - way out in the main belt. It boomed through the tunnel, rock walls flashing by outside the windows. The whine of a blower mixed with the humm of the tyres on the road and the squeaks and rattles of the suspension underneath the floor. It smelled of hot rubber and diesel fumes, mixed with pine disinfectant and somebody's feet - like all buses. It clattered over imperfections in the road, bumps sending shockwaves through hard suspension and up through the back seats they'd claimed for themselves. A poster on a bulkhead carried an advertisement for the movie Speed.
It felt so completely out of place, so far out in space.
A motorcycle screamed past at full throttle, drowning out the bus' engine. Two more followed it, punching past before disappearing into the darkness ahead.
"This is awesome!" Skippy giggled. "How much does it cost to ship one out here?"
"More than you could afford, probably," grumbled Kay.
"We're going to need some way of getting around," said Markas. "If our job's parked in the landing bay."
"Car Pool," suggested Yume.
"I want a bike," said Skippy. "Lighter to ship, for one thing." A grin split his face. "They have that land speed bike here. Of course, I was working Motorcon weekend...."
"Too dangerous," JD cut him off. "For me anyway."
"Expensive," Sighed Kay. Unfortunately..... It looked exciting. The whole place looked so exciting.
The bus began to slow, driver user the gearbox and engine to coast. A crunch of gears caused everyone to wince in sympathy. The driver fiddled with the gearstick, knocking it back up, then gave it a shoeful of diesel before finally slamming it down into gear with a shudder that caused the windows to rattle in their frames.
They came to a halt with a squeal of brakes in what seemed like a small carpark. The motorcycles had been parked up, chained to a rail that'd been freshly installed to the wall. The concrete setting it in place was clearly fresh.
There was also a car wash. That had to be tough on the filtration system. Beyond that, stacks of StellOil drums and pumps for petrol, diesel and kerosene. A small card reader took parment.
They were parked alongside a dirty replica of a Warthog, two crates in the rear cargo bay sealed with red PEPPER export labels. Someone was selling weapons.
"Here we are!" The driver called out "Accommodation block."
The doors opened and thy gathered their luggage. No cash made leaving tips a little difficult.
"Thanks," said Yume, offering a bright smile. The others just gave their thanks before stepping off the bus. The looked around, the smell of petrol and exhaust fumes tickling the inside of their nostrils before sliding down and coating the back of their throats.
There were no signs, no obvious offices, no directions explaining where to go beyond the car park.
Markas turned back to the driver. "Hey! Where's the residents registration office?"
"There isn't one," he smiled back at him. "Nobody bothered to do it. Go up a level to ops, someone there will sort you out."
"Thanks man,"
They shared a bewildered look with each other, wondering what sort of people would've prioritised fuel over something as basic as residential offices. Not only that, but seemed vaguely proud of it.
"They certainly earned their reputation," said Yumeko.
Markas sighed "Whoever finds ops first sorts it out for the rest of us - then we meet up somewhere obvious in an hour."
"I found a map!" Skippy announced.
"This is stupid," said Kay, watching the Attacked Mystifaction Police's sole Police cruiser burble past. It was an old American machine, a Ford with crash bars on the front and spotlights attached to the wing mirrors. It was an utter anachronism... it wasn't even an anachronism, it was almost a parachronism.
It came from another world, already a decade distant for all five of them.
Around the crystal cities, they used more modern electric vehicles, suited to some of the tighter passages and limited ventilation capabilities. While that cruiser violated clean air regulations in most mundane cities.
The Warthog behind them roared to life, it's driver not really sparing the petrol as she backed it out of it's parking space, before roaring off down the tunnel trailing sweet petrol fumes.
All five of them exchanged dubious looks, wondering for a moment if it hadn't all been some sort of poorly executed candid-camera prank - a big long expensive joke with a terrible punchline
"I'm Jet Jaguar. We've a lot to talk about."
They all turned to face the source of the voice. She was smiling at them. And she definitely did not look like another woman in sculpted Stingray armour. It didn't take long for Markas to realise that no human would ever fit inside that suit.
She offered him a metal hand to shake.
He gripped tight. She didn't. Blue eyes seemed kind, but they failed to hide the strange tension in her body - as if standing there was terribly difficult.
"I guess we do. Like where we're all supposed to stay."
She nodded. "I'll show you up so. "
-----
It was hers.
According to the tablet, the apartment was officially hers. It seemed excessive in a way Lun couldn't quite put her finger on. She was forced to wonder what she'd done to deserve it all. She was forced to wonder what was expected of her in return.
No society gave anything for free. Communism or Capitalism, nobody got anything for nothing.
The good Communist was expected to give according to their ability, and take according to their need - but no more. She'd been handed an equipped kitchen, living room with furniture and television, a fitted bathroom and a single bedroom, with a single bed, waiting for her. It was large enough that her footsteps on the tiled floor echoed off the walls.
And more than that.
It wasn't the property of the People of Frigga. It all belonged to her.
It seemed wrong somehow. At least, it felt wrong. It felt like being asked to wear a style of dress that she just didn't like. Even when it'd been explained to her that it was their duty to give her the best potential start in life, it still felt woefully unfair.
It was almost insulting.
She'd offered to crew the ship. That was, after all, what she knew how to do. She was a pilot and a sailor. Her uniform was carefully stored in a wardrobe in a plastic bag, telnyashka and all. They'd also asked that she contribute to general maintenance as needed.
It still seemed somewhat easy.
There were no committees. No commission. No party. No-one to ask what was expected, or what had to be done. No self-serving nomenklatura bureaucrats. No empty decorations. No Apparatchiks.
Nobody really seemed interested in running the place at all.
She recalled how the new civilisation that was the Soviet Union had been eaten alive from the inside by human nature. It'd been doomed the moment the goals of the party ceased being the promotion of communism, but merely the protection of the party and support of it's privilege.
And so Lun lay in a dockside for 20 years - a microcosm of the Soviet Union built out of aluminium and steel. The passion and belief that fuelled her initial creation, swallowed up by politicism and nepotism and petty posturing bureaucrats, by grift and graft and old men whose vision didn't extend beyond empty medals, certificates and Party Politics until all that was left was stagnation and decay.
She thought a great deal on the subject, taking the time to note her ideas down, forming her manifesto overnight. Her mind was far more than human,
But she knew not to speak out loud yet. First, she would test her ideas.
She would start with a pick-axe. And her passion.
-----
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?