<![CDATA[Drunkard's Walk Forums

<![CDATA[Drunkard's Walk Forums - Fiction]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/ Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:24:38 +0000 MyBB <![CDATA[Feed My Sheep]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=13226 Sat, 12 Jan 2019 21:04:53 -0500 Chessybell]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=13226 Jesus replied, "Blest are you, Simon son of Jonah! No mere man has revealed this to you, but my heavenly Father. I for my part declare to you, you are 'Rock', and on this rock I will build my church, and the jaws of death shall not prevail against it."

Matthew chapter 16, verses 17-18.

Jesus came forward and addressed them in these words: "Full authority has been given to me both in heaven and on earth; go, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations. Baptize them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Teach them to carry out everything I have commanded you. And know that I am with you always, until the end of the world!"

Matthew chapter 28, verses 18-20.

A third time Jesus asked [Peter], "Simon, son of John, do you love me?" Peter was hurt because he had asked a third time, "Do you love me?" So he said to him: "Lord, you know everything. You know well I love you." Jesus said to him, "Feed my sheep."

John chapter 21, verse 17.

Karen slid out from under the console. "Well Abbot, all systems green. We will be able to take off on schedule."

The Abbot nodded. "I will be sure to inform the brethren."

She smiled, and extricated herself from the console sling. No one had been certain if they could create inertial dampers, so everything had been designed to do without.

Just as well really, she thought to herself. Getting four spacecraft built had been bad enough, trying to also fit them with dampers would have been infeasible at best.

Leaving the main building, she made a beeline for the guesthouse. It wasn't long before she was swarmed by children, eyes alight with excited questions.

"Are we going to fly?"

"Are we going to go to space?"

"Are we going to go to mars?"

"Are we going to leave the solar system?"

Karen laughed. "We're going to be flying until we leave Earth's atmosphere, we will go to space, we won't go to mars or leave the solar system. We are going to enter a high earth orbit and stay there until we complete Redwall, and then we'll move into Redwall and the monks will go orbit Jupiter."

The children stared at her in delight. Before they could think of any more questions, Martha came over. "There you are! Shouldn't you be in class? Off with you, and stop bothering Karen!"

They ran off, hopefully to find the schoolmaster, and Martha watched them go. "I do hope the dibbuns didn't bother you too much, they've been chattering about nothing but whether we would take off."

"Oh, they were no trouble," Karen said. "You're using dibbun already, Martha?"

Martha gave her a look. "Karen, this is Loamhedge Abby and we have plans for building Redwall. I figured I might as well get started early."

Karen shrugged. "Good point. I'm going to make sure I've got my things stowed away properly."

Martha nodded in acknowledgement, and the two women went on their ways.

Karen entered the guesthouse and went up to her room. She made a quick check around the room for any loose objects.

Bed covers? Snugly tucked under the mattress, which itself rested directly on the floor. Check.

Books? All tightly packed. Check.

Clothes? All folded and packed into boxes. Check.

Mary grotto? Disassembled and packed. Check.

Growth light? Packed. Check.

Aloe Vera plant? Pot covered around plant and secured to the window bracket. Check!

The last thing to do was to pack away her alarm clock. Once that was done, she checked the time. Two hours to take off.

As she left the guesthouse, she took a moment to gaze at the structure of Loamhedge. How the bell tower formed the central spire, the flying buttresses that shaped the currently inactive force field, the wall that formed the outer edge of Loamhedge, and the Gothic-style stonework. It was strange to think that they had only been able to use the Gothic style - or perhaps not. It was a style of rising towers and stones reaching for the sky, after all. What could be more natural then for those stones to break free from Earth and climb into the sky?

Karen shook her head to clear it. This was no time for philosophy, there was still work to do. After all, they would only get one shot at this.

It was thirty minutes to take-off, and the Abbot was leading them all in prayer.

"... Dear St. Christopher, you have inherited a beautiful name, Christ bearer, as a result of a wonderful tradition that while carrying people across a raging stream you also carried the child Jesus. Teach us to be true Christ bearers to those who do not know Him. Since you have been chosen to be the Patron Saint of all travelers, we humbly implore your powerful intercession for the blessing of safe journeys. Protect all who often transport those who bear Christ within them and intercede for us to Jesus and guard us with your prayers. May we travel safely in space and carefully follow the pathways of life until we reach our goal in heaven and may we then join you and all the Saints in praising God forever and ever. Amen."

The congregation then arose and went to their work. Karen went into the basement of the main building, to the control center of the mechanical aspects of Loamhedge's mission.

Twenty minutes to take-off. She slid the launch sling into the console and fastened herself in to run the final flight checks. Above her, the Abbot organized the community as they prepared to take off.

Fifteen minutes to take-off. Karen switched on the comm link to the Vatican. "Saint John, this is Loamhedge calling, confirm all systems are go, we can leave at any time."

"Copy that Loamhedge, stand by for take-off."

"Standing by." Karen stopped talking, but did not switch off the comm.

Ten minutes to take-off. "Loamhedge, this is Saint John calling, switch to comm all."

"Switching to comm all."

Five minutes to take-off. "Loamhedge, this is Saint John calling all comms, do you read me?"

"Loud and clear." Karen listened to the take-off controller call the three Jesuit spacecraft.

T-minus twenty-five. Reactor online.

T-minus twenty. Force field active.

T-minus fifteen. All primary space systems online.

T-minus ten. All back-up and secondary systems online.

T-minus five...

Four...

Three...

Two...

One...

Lift-off! Loamhedge's main drive roared to life as she activated it, pushing her back into her seat. She felt the acceleration of the ship as it parted with the Earth and headed skyward to space. An outside observer would have knocked off their feet by the seismic shock of it ripping free, buffeted by the wind of its passing, and thoroughly awed by the sight of the stones reaching higher and higher into the sky they yearned for. They would be somewhat less impressed with the shower of loose dirt it trailed in its wake.

"All ships, this is Saint John, confirm take-off and switch to comm single."

"This is Loamhedge, take-off confirmed." Karen put her hand on the switch, but did not immediately switch to comm single.

"This is Saint Francis Xavier, take-off confirmed." That was one...

"This is Saint Isaac, take-off confirmed." Two...

"This is Father Marquette, take-off confirmed." Three. That was all of them. She switched to comm single.

The transfer orbit went smoothly, and she soon had it settled in the intended orbit. She switched off the comm and went outside the building to take a look at the new surroundings.

She looked up at the force field, and stopped dead in her tracks. "Well, that wasn't what what happened last time."

"What isn't?" asked Martha.

Karen pointed up at the force field. "It wasn't opaque green when we tested it, it was a transparent iridescent gold. Looked a bit like a golden bubble."

Martha looked up and saw that the force field could have passed for the sky on Earth if it wasn't green. "It's very pretty."

Karen nodded. "Working properly too. It's not a problem, just a mite odd."

Matthew chapter 16, verses 17-18.

Matthew chapter 28, verses 18-20.

John chapter 21, verse 17.

Karen slid out from under the console. "Well Abbot, all systems green. We will be able to take off on schedule."

The Prime Minister of Canada looked up from the report in shock.

"The Pope did WHAT!?"

The woman who had delivered the report took a moment to reply. "He permitted the launch of religious communities into space."

"Really?"

She nodded. "A Benedictine monastery and three Jesuit missions." She paused for a bit. "It is possible that more were launched when those took off, but those are all that could be confirmed."

"How?"

"I imagine they used Handwavium."

He nodded, and went back to reading the report. His eyes went wide again. "What's this about 'unaffiliated lay people and clergy'!?"

She took a deep breath. "It seems that everyone directly involved with this went along for the ride, including immediate family members and three bishops."

"Why?"

"I don't know, something about setting up an archdiocese out there."

"What?"

She shrugged. "Our source said that they were going to 'provide proper spiritual care to Catholic Fen and spread the Good News to all who seek'."

He looked at the report again. "They launched an actual monastery!?"]]> <![CDATA[Ninja vs Supers]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=13060 Tue, 18 Sep 2018 19:34:03 -0500 firvulag]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=13060
http://www.fenspace.net/index.php5?title...pers_cover

Oh well, it's not like it was set in the future when I started writing it... Wait... no... damn it.]]>
http://www.fenspace.net/index.php5?title...pers_cover

Oh well, it's not like it was set in the future when I started writing it... Wait... no... damn it.]]> <![CDATA[HARD FEN Making HARD DECISIONS While HARD: A Story Fenspace Prefers To Forget]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=1938 Sun, 06 Jul 2014 18:14:00 -0500 JakeGrey]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=1938
Huh. You want to hear my story? Every Fen's got one, there's not much special about mine. I wasn't really happy on Earth for one reason or another, so I acquired a bit of handwavium, built a ship and left.

Well, okay, it's a little bit more complicated than that, but...

Oh. Oh.

Now there's something special about that story, alright, and not in a good way. I don't really like telling it, and I dare say most Fen wouldn't like hearing it, if they knew enough to ask in the first place.

Classified? Hah! Not hardly; the Convention doesn't have an official secrets act, and they couldn't enforce one if they did. It's more of an unspoken mutual consensus to pretend the whole ghastly fiasco never happened. I can't speak for the laws Earthside though, I'd make some discreet inquiries about that before publishing if I were you.

I don't like the term "mundanes". Never did, even before... Well, we'll get to that.

I guess I'd best start at the beginning. You might want to place your order before we start, this is going to take some time. Oh, thanks. I'll take a double Bruichladdich, no ice.

So...

I'm old for a first-generation Fen. Born 1970, fan of Doctor Who before John Barrowman got his Equity number, actually witnessed the first really serious Trekie/Warsie flamewar on Usenet. In 2007 I was gloomily contemplating the inexorable onset of forty with depressingly little to show for my time on Earth to date.
I'd left the Royal Air Force in 2005 after a Taliban sniper took a sizeable chunk out of both my shin bone and my helicopter's no-claims bonus (I doubt that poor farmer ever got the rotor-blade out of his living room wall), returning home with a limp, a modest disability pension and no idea what to do next.
Flying was out of the question indefinitely, possibly for good if my leg didn't heal well enough, and at the time I wasn't sure I even wanted to go back to it. I was tired of feeling rootless, of spending so much time abroad that I didn't really have a home to come back to but at the same time rarely getting to see anything of the world past the airfield perimeter fence.
But on the other hand, it was pretty much all I knew how to do; certainly the only thing I had formal qualifications for, although I was a fair hand with computers and vaguely remembered most of what I learned from weekends and summer holidays helping Dad fix cars.

Eventually I ended up splitting the difference. I got a six-month gig as a technical advisor for a small developer making third-party DLC -though the term hadn't been coined back then- for Microsoft Flight Simulator, put a card in a newsagent's window offering computer repairs and bought an ancient and non-running Vauxhall Senator on the cheap with the intention of putting it back in order. (It ended up being a bust, the chassis was too badly corroded to get it roadworthy again, but I sold off the still-useable bits on eBay and turned a small profit.) I made enough money to rent a dilapidated but characterful ground-floor flat in an old Victorian townhouse, and bought myself a decent computer for the first time in years. I became a regular at a nice local pub, found the time to go to a couple of conventions and generally made the most of having more leisure time than I'd had since I was a teenager.

It didn't take long for boredom and restlessness to set in, but before they could become unmanageable, two things happened. The first was that my godfather died and left me a small cottage with two acres of land, a large collection of mechanical bits and pieces and a pretty considerable sum of money. The second was handwavium.

I'd heard... Well, I can't go into detail because some of these people are still Earthside, but suffice it to say that scientists working for defence contractors tend to see an ex-serviceman wounded in the line of duty as trustworthy enough to bend the rules when it comes to classified information, especially when they've had a few beers. I'll tell you this much, though: I have it on good authority that the stuff existed in some form well before 2006. I expect we'll find out more some time in the next five years or so thanks to the thirty-year rule.

Anyway, the wild stories had begun showing up on the message boards by then, and I knew enough to realise there was a grain of truth in them. Vague plans began to form in my mind.

Now, you haven't asked about my faction yet. Personally, I think of myself as a generalist for the most part; I'm not picky when it comes to reading or viewing material, especially when I'm making a long cargo run. But my first real fandom... Well. Ever heard of a game called Elite? The original space trading sim, killer app for the BBC Micro...

[sigh] You really are young, aren't you? Okay, bit of background.

In the early Eighties, the educational programming wing of the BBC started getting interested in computer science. There'd been some piecemeal efforts before, usually an offshoot of the maths or science department, but now that home computing was becoming a thing they wanted to offer something hands-on.
Now in those days, there was no common standards for much of anything: Many manufacturers had their own fork of BASIC, and even on those that didn't you couldn't be sure your homebrew program would work on a competitor's machine. In order to have something that they knew would work with all their software and coding exercises, the Beeb put out an invitation to tender for a custom-designed computer for the home and classroom market. The winning bidder was a company called Acorn Computers and their design was christened the BBC Microcomputer, or BBC Micro for short.
They were expensive bits of kit, but pretty powerful for their day; they were some of the first desktop computers aimed at the home-user market with LAN capability and the ability to add an auxillary processor, for one. It also had the ability to download code from a TV signal, but it only worked properly if you had absolutely perfect TV reception and was generally more trouble than it was worth. They were a huge success in Britain and a more modest one in continental Europe, but they never took off in the US because the display hardware didn't adapt well to NTSC displays.

But anyway, Elite was the game that drove most of its non-educational sales. You know the basic formula: You start out in a very basic spaceship with a bit of cash and a huge open gameworld to explore. There are several ways of making money both legal and otherwise, occasional pirates, police who'll come down on you for anything illegal... It was the original sandbox game. And, like a lot of my generation, I was absolutely hooked on it for most of my teens.

We never became an established faction for a number of reasons. The game didn't have much of a plot, so there was no convenient polity to name ourselves after, and the nature of the game is such that the faction tends to appeal to loners and individualists. It's also partly because British Fen tend not to be in a position to home-build; we're one of the easier European countries in which to acquire a handwavium license, but with our airspace being rather crowded the authorities tend to get a bit tetchy about amateur space programs. Either way, I'm the only bloke I know who's managed to build himself a ship directly based on that 'verse.

And that's where my godfather's barn full of junk comes in.

His name was Greg Sanderson, and he was an old friend of my dad's and a lifelong bachelor who didn't get out and about much. Bit set in his ways, you know? He was a great fan of science fiction and something of a radical in his politics, and I'm pretty sure he was hoping to make it to Fenspace himself.

Anyway, the house was up in the Scottish Borders, a tumbledown little two-up-two-down affair with a bathroom added on some time in the 50s. It was permanently cold and damp, the wiring was such a haphazard mess that I had to pay an electrician twice his usual rate to set it to rights, the boiler was older than I was and hadn't been serviced since before I learned how to masturbate... The list went on. I spent just enough money to keep the place from being actively hazardous for human occupancy and decided to sell up as soon as I'd inventoried the barn.

Well, that was a revelation alright. I knew about the old Beech King Air fuselage and the jet engines, but I wasn't expecting... Well, I've still got the list on my palmtop somewhere...

* 200 square metres of sheet steel
* Four hundred gallons of aviation fuel in a galvanised tank
* Eight hundred metres of copper wire
* One air compressor, broken
* Four expensive electronic paintball guns
* Five thousand 17mm ball bearings (exactly the right size to be fired through said paintball guns)
* One 4.5-inch gun barrel, ex-Royal Navy
* One fully functional septic tank system, apparently designed for a seagoing yacht, new and in boxes
* One 200-litre water tank, also intended for a seagoing yacht
* One Ferranti Blue Fox aircraft radar set, broken
* One Webley revolver, .38 S&W (which was only marginally legal in the UK at the time, being a 'trophy of war')
* One hundred and fifty .38/200 revolver cartridges (which most definitely wasn't legal!)
* Five tonnes (approx.) of miscellaneous scrap metal.
* Twelve litres (approx.) of handwavium, base strain, in an old oil drum at the back of the barn

As you might imagine, the handwavium was one of the less surprising items in there, although I couldn't begin to imagine where Greg got it or how he even heard of it in the first place. Perhaps he didn't put it there at all; some people do claim it just turned up in the workshop one day and they only found out what it did by accident. At any rate, if he got any 'wavetech operational before he died then I never found it.

Well, I suppose that made the choice for me, didn't it? There was nothing much tying me to England; my parents had emigrated to Spain some years ago, my brother David was currently somewhere in the Yukon finding copper ore for one of the multi-nationals, and I'd written the very idea of marriage off as more trouble than it was worth a long time ago.
And I'd always wanted to travel, hadn't I?

The first thing I did was buy a secondhand laptop and a pre-paid mobile phone that could be tethered, both for cash. This was before the Snowden Documents hit the public domain of course, but you soon got a good picture of what the SIGINT people were capable of just from being part of operations that acted on the information they acquired, and it wasn't a great leap of reasoning to imagine they'd be on the lookout for anything connected to handwavium as well as terrorism.

(I had Snowden as a passenger once, you know; I was on a regular run to Ganymede at the time, and he'd just bought a house in Serenity Valley. Nice chap actually, even if he enjoys his status as a hero among Fen a bit too much for my liking. But anyway.)

Once I'd got some nicely untraceable hardware, reinforced by a few software tricks upon which I shall not enlarge here, I started reading every Beginner's Guide to Handwavium I could lay hold of and hanging out on the forums picking up tips from those who'd gone before me. After reading some of the safety warnings, I made some discreet inquiries with a relative in the construction industry about where to obtain some protective clothing rated for dealing with asbestos contamination. The supplier he found me only did bulk orders, but I figured they'd be worth a fair bit to other Fen and bought a batch of a hundred.

My first 'wavetech project was small and simple, a used 486 ThinkPad I bought off eBay for about twenty quid. I soaked it in a small amount of the base strain overnight, and the results were encouraging. It turned glossy metallic green and shrank to the size of a netbook, but when I tried various CPU benchmarking tools the ones that didn't glitch out completely came back with estimates of 4GHz. It also sprouted some USB ports and a DVI cable plug.

I put the used handwavium in a separate container and fed it a load of the scrap metal, along with a complete set of Traveller sourcebooks and a thumb drive containing copies of everything even vaguely Elite-related I could lay hold of: Copies of the first two games and the open-source remake, along with their manuals, and a load of fanfiction and the tie-in novella that came boxed with the original game. For a bit of extra flavour I threw in a couple of Arthur C. Clarke paperbacks and a pirated copy of Star Cops. (Yes, I'm aware of the irony, but it's not out on DVD.) This version would be used for the engines and flight control systems, and I'd stick to the base strain for the hull and life support.

Of course, before I got to that point I had to design the ship... Although I already had something in mind.

In the original Elite, it's known as a Cobra Mk3, and it's the ship you start off with in a new game. It's sort of low slung and wedge-shaped, not much aerodynamic lift but even less drag. I figured I'd have to modify it considerably but it seemed as good a starting point as any, if only because it was a simple enough shape to weld together. So I bought myself a copy of X-Plane, imported the model of the Mk3 from Oolite into the "PlaneMaker" utility and began the long and tedious process of hammering it into a workable aircraft design.

You might well argue that this wasn't really necessary, but like all good career aviators I'm naturally inclined to err on the side of caution. I didn't trust... Well, no that's probably the wrong word. I didn't want to rely on handwavium completely. One of the early pioneers I spoke to on the old Starbase 1 forums told me that he reckoned the stuff can't actually break any physical laws, it just knows all the loopholes, including -especially- the ones we haven't found yet. How true that is I have no idea, but it is well-established that aero- and hydrodynamics are one area where handwavium has almost no effect. (I'm told that a reader poll by the Annals of Improbable Research ranked the process of finding this out "The 4th Strangest Thing Ever Done With A Wind Tunnel In The Name Of Proper Science". I have no idea what the top three were and I don't especially want to.)

The end result of several weeks of fine-tuning was a sort of flying-wing design with a small vertical fin, still fairly blocky and angular but now capable of gliding a few miles if something went wrong while hopefully being within my capabilities to weld together. I invested in a copy of AutoCAD, a correspondence course in how to use it and set to the project with a will.

As far as I know, my ship was the first 100% scratchbuilt Fen craft to be laid down, even though the Epsilon Blade and the Toy Box were in service well beforehand. Construction took me most of a year, the first quarter of which was spent refreshing my knowledge of welding at evening classes.
The hull structure is fully monocoque, made of two layers of 1.5cm steel plate with self-sealing foam in between. (One part base-strain handwavium, one part my homebrew strain, eight parts cavity wall insulation material. Worked better than I dared hope.) I'm fairly sure I could have left it un-'waved and still made orbit if I'd been able to find a windscreen tough enough for the job, but ordinary plate-glass had to suffice in the interim.
Internally, the ship was fairly spartan. I'd crammed a bunk and a desk in around the cockpit with a tiny head and galley immediately behind it, and squeezed two tiny passenger cabins into the awkward corners between the engine nacelles, the cockpit and the cargo bay; I didn't plan on taking passengers often, but there wasn't much else useful I could do with the space and I figured it couldn't hurt to have the option.
The cargo bay itself was about twelve metres long by four wide by three high, not huge but enough to get a worthwhile amount of stores aboard. I toyed with but ultimately abandoned the idea of shaping it to accommodate an ISO-standard shipping container; the aerodynamics went wonky when I tested it in X-Plane and in any case it would have been awkward as all hell to load and unload. Still, I could get standard-sized pallets in there, and the hydraulic loading ramp I acquired from a scrapyard would do the rest.

I left the 'wavium application until last. The two old jet engines, the instrument panel from the King Air and the radar set were immersed in the special blend I'd made, and as an afterthought I tossed a spare unit insignia for my old squadron in to add the final touch. I mixed the same stuff half-and-half with the base strain for the broken compressor, an air-conditioning unit and a couple of old radiators, and used pure base-strain and a quite ordinary household paint roller for the outer hull. I left it overnight to cure, and went inside just in time to hear about the Guacoamole Incident.

Ugh... I swear to all that's holy and many things that aren't, if I ever lay hands on the reckless bloody fool who cooked up that little stunt I'll administer at least five pints of their own concoction in enema form, gift-wrap whatever they turn into and dump their sorry arse outside the Hoover Building. Not only was it a gross violation of other people's bodily integrity of a severity easily comparable to rape, it sent the United States into its stupidest and most counterproductive moral panic since Joe McCarthy's day. Damn good argument for a handwavium license if you ask me, at least if there was a snowball's chance in hell of enforcing one.

But anyway, we were a little bit saner about it in Britain, at least to the point where I was able to call in a favour from a man I'd served under in Iraq who was now rather senior in the Ministry of Defence. In return for turning over my handwavium stockpile -less a few hundred millilitres as seed stock- and giving the backroom boys from QuinetiQ (don't ask) a detailed briefing on what I accomplished with it, he furnished me with an IFF code and some other registration paperwork to make my use of UK airspace at least marginally legal so long as I promised to be extremely circumspect... and give him a lift Fenside once he collected his pension and his gold watch in a year or so. (He worked for Reaction Engines until he got fed up with Spacefleet and their "damned ridiculous Renaissance Festival take on the Fifties", as he put it to me, and I think he's somewhere in the Belt now. I'll email him your details if you like, I dare say he's got some good stories about the Experimental Handwavium Station.)

That... didn't work out quite as well as I'd hoped, at least partly thanks to a major lapse in my usually fairly good judgement of character. But the full scale of that lapse didn't become obvious until some while later...

But we'll want another drink for that. My shout this time?

* * *

So, if you knew enough to come and talk to me, you're probably familiar with the name of Frank Berquart. Even at that stage I wouldn't have called us friends, but we did correspond a lot over the year I spent building my ship. He could be abrasive and condescending at times, and I really didn't like his attitude to non-Fen, but that wasn't uncommon; like many first-generation Fen, he had a rough go of it growing up as the only nerdy kid in one of the less salubrious bits of the rural United States. He had a good deal to be bitter about, and I tried to reach out to Frank and others like him because I thought they had it in them to be something better.

Either Frank didn't, or I didn't do a good enough job of looking for it. But at least I tried, right?

Anyway, all his attempts at getting hold of something waveable had been stymied and he was getting desperate enough to consider doing something foolhardy, so eventually we struck a deal: He'd buy me certain items that were more easily obtained in the US, and in return I'd pick him up from a nearby airfield and give him a ride as far as New Yavin. This was all before the December 30th deadline so it was entirely legal: I even filed a flight plan, describing my ship quite truthfully as an "experimental long range utility aircraft".

Yes, I do mean guns. I wasn't harbouring any illusions about a new era of peace and brotherly love coming to pass through the power of handwavium.

Many people tend to draw a slightly rose-tinted picture of those freewheeling early days. Don't get me wrong, it was an incredibly exciting time to be alive with all kinds of possibilities opening up, but... Well, it's not like the Boskonians popped into existence fully-formed in 2012. This was before the Sailor Armed Militia was more than a concept, before FTL comms equipment was readily available... Hell, it wasn't until WorldCon in '09 that we had a formally agreed distress frequency. Once you were out of radar range of a station or settled body you were pretty much on your own. And space may be big, but if you know roughly what time a particular ship left Point A, what speed and/or acceleration it's capable of and that it was headed for Point B then you can narrow the search area down considerably.

(One of the first really effective anti-piracy measures, incidentally? Port control services locking down manifest information on encrypted servers so that it was nigh-impossible to target specific ships. I once met an allegedly reformed ex-pirate who claims he jacked it in when he hit a freighter he thought was carrying flatscreen TV sets only to find it full of baby formula.

Of course nowadays they're organised and professional enough to get the information by data-mining instead, but c'est la vie.)

Anyway, the practical upshot of all that is that I wanted something more impressive than a .38 revolver older than I was in the hopefully unlikely event of the 114mm coilgun not being enough to prevent my ship from being boarded in the first place.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure I hold the record for the biggest gun fitted to any prewar Fen craft. I don't advertise this fact because I don't consider it something to brag about, and in any case I prefer not to have pirates targeting me specifically because I'm so well-armed I must be carrying valuable loot, but it's all on the PEPPER database and everything so it's not like it's a secret.

Things have been tightened up considerably now that handwavium is de facto decriminalised, but at the time it wasn't strictly speaking illegal for a private citizen to own a multi-stage coilgun capable of launching projectiles with enough force to put a concrete blockhouse to some trouble; for better or worse, lawmakers in this country tend not to restrict or outright ban weird and exotic weapons -or potential weapons- until after someone goes out and commits a violent crime with one. Nevertheless, my test firing was conducted well out to sea.

The paintball guns turned out to be more trouble than they were worth, incidentally: I think Greg had intended to use them as secondary weapons but the rate of fire and muzzle velocity were marginal at best in atmosphere, and when I put the test-rig in a vacuum chamber (aided and abetted by a fellow aspiring Fen studying at the University of Manchester) it experienced what British aerospace engineers call "rapid unplanned disassembly", costing me £5,000 for the damage to the equipment and several bottles of good scotch as an apology to the lab assistants who had to repair it.
I did find a good use for the ball bearings though. Combined with an accelerometer, a small pyrotechnic charge and a hollow steel casing they made for good canister shot.

But anyway, the ship's armament won't really become relevant 'til some years later. Back to my first face-to-face encounter with Frank.

I hadn't done a long-range flight test up until that point, and neither had I pushed the throttle much beyond 25% or tested the button conspicuously marked TURBO on the collective while in flight. (A ground test of the turbo button proved that it caused an 'afterburner' effect that appeared to function as an acceleration drive. Rather a powerful one, in fact; I found one of the barn doors a quarter of a mile away. This was before handwavium's innate safety features were widely known or documented, I might add, so the safety cover on the button was taped shut until further notice.) But I did have enough data to calculate that I'd just make my destination field on a full tank.

The main engines are a constant-speed type, powered by ordinary Jet-A and electrical energy from a couple of solid handwavium crystals. They're fairly standard reactionless thrusters capable of a respectable 7% of c in space, while the turbo button activates some kind of fusion torch that will get my ship up to a theoretical maximum of 21%, but I can't exceed 15% without draining my fuel tanks well below my preferred safety margin.

Performance in atmosphere turned out to be a bit less impressive by Fen standards. Cruising speed is around six hundred miles an hour, or just over the speed of sound, but when I really pushed the engines I got her up to about a thousand... at which point the vibration was so violent I couldn't read the instruments anymore, and when I made the mistake of lightly touching the rudder I got an unwanted refresher course on recovering from an asymmetric stall. I pencilled in eight hundred as the Never Exceed Speed and settled in for a long run.

On arrival, I had a brief and rather awkward discussion with US air traffic controllers that ended with no less than four F-15s escorting me as far as the small airstrip in Colorado where I was due to pick up my passenger. Their pilots were perfectly friendly though, and quite embarrassed about being ordered to hassle me like this when I was still within the letter of the law.

The airfield was some tiny grass-strip place in the arse-end of nowhere, to the point where they had to borrow a sheriff's deputy to check my passport because this was the first international flight they'd had in years. He looked like he was expecting me to suddenly manifest a biomod or pull out a death ray or something, but he signed the necessary paperwork without demur. I had a brief argument with the refuelers about whether they were insured for possible handwavium contamination ("For what I'm paying for my liability cover you'd bloody well better be!", I think my exact words were), ordered a pizza and settled in for my mandatory crew rest period.

I was just on the point of turning in for the night when someone started pounding on the hatch. Frank wasn't due until the morning, so I ended up grabbing my revolver and running aft in my dressing gown, torn between alarm and annoyance.
To my utter astonishment, I found myself face to face with a shivering and terrified catgirl in a soaking-wet hoodie clutching an overnight bag, who immediately begged me for a ride somewhere, anywhere in Fenspace.

Once I got her calmed down a little and into some dry clothes, she told me her name was Barbara, and that she'd treated her Gender Identity Disorder with handwavium after being refused insurance cover for it. The process was an overall success, but her roommate had taken it rather badly and called the police. Barbara'd managed to get away ahead of the hue and cry, and had been headed to the airfield hoping to 'borrow' a plane and make a run for the border when she saw my ship.
I made a quick phone call to Frank and got an ETA; the Greyhound he was on was due in around 2AM. I explained the situation and told him to cancel his motel room and come straight here in case we had to leave in a hurry. He agreed quite happily, apparently finding the whole idea rather exciting, and confirmed that he'd got the items I'd requested... more or less.

I'd specifically requested a couple of Browning High-Powers because they were the only pistol I'd had any range time with, unless you counted the few surreptitious rounds I'd fired into an old dartboard behind the barn to make sure the revolver actually worked. Beyond that, I wasn't very specific beyond "a couple of shotguns, preferably 12-gauge, and a rifle that's decently powerful but won't make me look like a militia nutbag".
Apparently Frank's local gun dealer had some sort of promotional deal going in anticipation of some cowboy action shooting event, which is how I ended up with a lever-action and a coach gun. They even came with a free ten-gallon hat! But they were modern replicas chambered to take modern ammunition, and I've always been quite fond of Westerns, so I was actually pretty pleased. I was almost disappointed that he'd managed to score a fully contemporary Ruger Mini-14 (albeit with wooden furniture) with a scope instead of a Henry rifle.

And yes, I did wear the hat, but I don't have the gravitas to pull off the look.

Anyway, Frank launched into another one of his rants about 'mundanes' and how we Fen could be running the planet in ten years if we dropped a few big enough rocks, then tried a couple of hilariously ill-advised Pick-Up Artist tactics on Barbara until she up-ended her coffee in his lap. He retreated to his cabin to sulk when I laughed at him, and I didn't see him again until takeoff the following morning.

The police did eventually turn up looking for Barbara, but I refused to give them access without a warrant and to my mild surprise they didn't make an issue of it; I guess they figured she'd be somebody else's problem soon enough.
Then I realised I only had two pressure suits. (Made from a pair of old RAF flight suits complete with helmets and an emergency O2 bottle, which under the influence of my homebrew 'wavium became mechanical counter-pressure suits with full-face helmets and enough air for about six hours.) We solved this problem by shutting Frank in his cabin with a fully hardtech "oxygen candle" and a CO2 scrubber and sealing the door with duct-tape.

Funnily enough, yes, this was Barbara's idea. Frank had made a very tactless remark about her pre-biomod medical condition after overhearing me talking to the cops and she wasn't in the best of moods with him. Neither was I, for that matter, seeing as he laughed off my attempt to give him a little word of advice about what is and isn't okay to call people. (My mum's Indian, born to first-generation immigrants, so I dare say you can imagine my views on the subject.)

Oh well, in about six hours we needn't ever see each other again.

The transition to space was smoother than I expected, though I had to throttle up abruptly at the tropopause. After that, it was a simple case of identifying the radio beacon for New Yavin and putting it into the autopilot.

Frank was in another one of his moods after I cut the tape on the door, which didn't bother me in the least, so Barbara and I got to know each other a bit better over a mug of tea. I learned she'd been a pilot for a small commuter airline until the economy took a shit, that her parents were divorced and her father had taken her diagnosis rather worse than her mother. She was also down to about fifty dollars until and unless she could get in touch with her bank manager.

Well, I was starting to ponder the issue of long-distance runs and fatigue; I couldn't exactly set the autopilot and go to bed, could I? But there was the thorny issue of British law to deal with: Getting her a visa was going to be all kinds of inconvenient when her passport was in the name of Robert White, assuming the US didn't outright revoke it. And I really couldn't afford to bend the rules if I wanted to keep my relatively unfettered access to European airspace...

Well, that could wait. I was in space, I was flying my very own homebuilt spaceship and I was going to have some fun!

We dropped Frank off at New Yavin, by which time he was in a much better mood. He bade us farewell and dashed off to cash in the two kilos of high-quality weed he'd brought with him. I wasn't sure if I should laugh or feel a bit sorry for him, because I doubt he made a profit. Me, on the other hand...

Now, basic hydroponics are pretty easy even with pure hardtech: Some troughs full of potting compost, some sun-lamps, a drip-feed system -which can be as simple as a low-powered water pump and a couple of dozen metres of plastic tubing with pinholes every couple of centimetres- and a dilute solution of ordinary fertiliser in fresh water will do the trick. But it doesn't scale past plants you can grow in an ordinary Earthside greenhouse without a much more elaborate setup that requires a lot of money, expertise and above all space. And root crops or fruit trees need really deep soil; they didn't become really practical to cultivate until someone got a crater on the Moon glazed over and pressurised, and they stayed quite pricey until prefabricated buckydomes hit the market.

The practical upshot of which is that I just about quadrupled my money selling four tons of King Edward potatoes and one ton of coffee beans, and made a decent profit from the hazmat suits to boot.

I remember the conversation Barbara and I had in vivid detail. I was carrying a good-sized duffel bag stuffed full of small bills, and I saw Barbara looking at the Situations Vacant board by the exit to the hangar with a rather mournful expression; there were plenty of jobs posted, but I guess not many of them called for a couple of hundred hours in a Bombardier CRJ.
"So," I said, "is there anywhere in particular you want to go?"
"I dunno," she replied sadly.
"Well, how about we start at the Moon and work our way out? You can show me how good a pilot you are too."
She was quite taken aback. "You really wanna hire me?"
"That's going to depend on a lot of things," I replied. "Not least how good you are at your job. But I'm sure as hell not leaving you stood here in the clothes you stand up in. You're Fen now, Barbara. And I guess I am too, even if I'm not a wanted felon in my home country. And this far from home, all we Fen have is each other. Now let's go find somewhere you can call your mother and I can call my friends in high places."

* * *

We managed to get Barbara's immediate financial situation sorted quickly enough once her mother understood what had happened. (And I have to say, the old girl took the whole business with truly commendable sangfroid!) The simplest method proved to having her bank manager wire her savings to my own account after I handed her the equivalent in hard currency.

Unfortunately, we also found out that the US government had indeed cancelled her passport and issued an arrest warrant; the only reason her account hadn't been frozen was at the credit union where she banked was founded and run by old-school liberal activists with ties to the ACLU and the NAACP, who were contesting the demand in court and telling any reporter who'd listen precisely what they thought about their nation's lawmakers. (Techdirt has a good writeup on the subject, including an interview with the chairman of the board of trustees. You might find it useful background material.)

Well, that complicated things a bit.

There isn't a whole lot of unskilled employment in Fenspace, and good old hardtech Earth is catching us up on this one. We Fen might be a lot more flexible about formal qualifications compared to employers in North America or Western Europe, but if the job doesn't entail at least some skill and training then a 'waved forklift or robot arm can probably do it faster and for longer shifts, and cheaper too if you don't wake up an AI. And furthermore, at that early stage most of the factions had yet to get around to organising some sort of formal public assistance program for refugees or the otherwise unlucky. I didn't think she would've starved once her money ran out -Fen really do look out for their own- but it didn't seem like much of a life in the long run.
Besides, she'd been through hell backwards and didn't have many friends she could call upon out here apart from the guy who supplied the handwavium she used for her biomod, who was allegedly somewhere on the surface of Mars in a 'waved camper van. I couldn't leave her to sink or swim like that.

So, after a very long conference call with someone from QuinetiQ's legal department (I don't know why they have an immigration law specialist on staff and I don't intend to ask) and a mid-rankng civil servant from the Home Office, a deal was struck: If Barbara would consent to a thorough medical examination, she'd be granted indefinite leave to remain. She wasn't exactly keen on the idea for obvious reasons, but agreed on the condition that the tests take place in a civilian hospital with the absolute bare minimum of security present.

With that out of the way, and the New Yavin ATC beginning to make urgent noises about a lack of parking, we made good our departure.

The first week was all a bit of a blur for me. We went all over the Moon and then on to Mars, where we both got hilariously smashed on the first batch of Martian whiskey served at Callahan's. I think we went to have a look at Ceres afterwards, but I was suffering from a hangover of such epic proportions that I was sorely tempted to roll the dice on a biomod so I don't remember much of that day. Apparently Barbara was one of the lucky ones who didn't trade all her alcohol tolerance for the ears and the tail, in fact it seemed to have given it something of a boost... Or maybe I was just getting old.

I'd like to say I spent this time marvelling at the amazing beauty of the cosmos, but to be perfectly honest the view stopped being awe-inspiring after prolonged exposure. It's pretty, but it's... Well, I wouldn't call it dead, but it's static. Fixed. You'll see almost the same thing every time you look out of the window. Compare and contrast with the average Fen settlement.

What can I say? I find people more interesting than places, and places more interesting than the emptiness between them.

Anyway, after seven days of wandering around the solar system playing tourist, we returned to the surface to get Barbara's visa sorted out. She had her medical (an MRI, X-rays and some blood work) done at Dorset County Hospital; apparently they were the only ones with a gap in their MRI machine's schedule at short notice. The administrators were a little irked about this, but I smoothed most of the ruffled feathers by donating some 'waved toys for the children's ward.
And yes, if it's not a foregone conclusion, she did get the job. Barbara had plenty of long distance fixed-wing experience, something I was seriously lacking at the time, but despite having no previous rotary-wing hours she took to my ship's largely helicopter-like controls quickly. She also had a marvellously dry sense of humour and was generally good company on a long flight, and had an innate knack for making really good coffee.

We repeated the fruit and vegetable runs a couple of times, but other people with larger and better-equipped vehicles were starting to catch on to the idea and in any case it was extremely repetitive, so we switched to general cargo hauling. We were a bit of a specialty outfit, bigger than the literal hundreds of 'waved cars and pickup trucks whose owners would take on some packages for beer money but not quite up to intermodal container runs like a few enterprising Fen were getting into. We ended up doing a lot of house moves after signing on with Hermes Universal Deliveries, because we had just enough room to fit a couple or young family and all their worldly goods aboard and the speed to get them to pastures new before the kids could start rioting from cabin fever.

Oh yeah. I think we might have been the ones to get the ball rolling on the ghost story about "The Big Deal". Enough of the details match that it could be an exaggerated version of our experience, anyway.

It was... early 2009, I think. We were on a run to Port Phobos with six tons of mixed cargo, when suddenly we pick up a very faint modulation on the radio at 121.5MHz, the Aircraft Emergency Frequency back on Earth. An automated distress beacon. We warm up the radar and slowly scan back and forth until we pick up a tiny contact a few degrees off our heading, and alter course to investigate and hopefully render aid.

What we found was close to what the ghost story describes: A shipping container with windows on one end and engines at the rear, badly damaged. (No name painted on the side though.) But nobody responded to our radio calls, so I got suited up and made my way over with the first-aid kit... And a pistol, because something really didn't sit right about this.
I managed to get the airlock to cycle, and found the ship totally deserted. There were bunks lining the walls for at least a dozen people but only two of them were made up. I found food on the stove in a sort of open-plan galley area towards the stern; it was cold, but hadn't spoiled. Otherwise, there was a certain amount of disorder -cupboards hanging open, a couple of items knocked off shelves- but nothing that suggested forcible boarding or any kind of fight. As near as I could tell, the crew had been taken off by another craft along with their personal effects and simply forgotten to turn the beacon off.

We towed it to Phobos and reported the incident to ATC, but in those days the sharing of information on accidents was somewhat piecemeal so we never did find out who the owners were or what happened to them. At any rate, they never came forward to reclaim the ship, which was far beyond economic repair anyway; turns out it'd been hit by something about the size of a beer can, probably some other craft's jettisoned refuse, and the engines were in so many pieces that the dockyard team couldn't even tell if they were acceleration or constant-speed. It was still airtight and the galley and the plumbing worked fine when hooked up to external power, so I donated it to the Port Lowell YMCA. It's probably still there.

All in all, things were going great. Fenspace was an amazing place to live and work; the sheer energy and vibrant human spirit in those new colonies was like nothing I've known before or since. That I was making a good living from a varied and inteesting occupation just made it even better.

Guess who popped up and nearly ruined everything for me?

* * *

I'd had occasional contact with Frank over the years, mostly by email. He was doing odd jobs and working towards building a ship with some buddies, and occasionally he'd put some work my way, usually someone Earthside looking for passage to one of the L5 stations. His people skills hadn't improved much, but Fenspace seemed to agree with him and he sounded happy enough.

But... Well, some of those fares made me decidedly uncomfortable. Some of them were quite clearly either Turnerites or other far-right crazies; one of them spent the trip handcuffed to a chair in the hold because he kicked off when Barbara told him to get his own coffee, and another I outright refused to take because he was stinking drunk and toting a loaded Armalite. Others weren't quite as blatantly sketchy, but once you got talking to them... Christ. I hadn't heard of Men's Rights Activism until then, and I could have happily gone my whole life not knowing it existed. And the ones who weren't hanging with that crowd all had massive chips on their shoulders over the treatment of people into geeky pastimes by mainstream culture on Earth.

I was starting to get a little annoyed with Frank about this, but in all fairness they did usually behave themselves. But the last straw came in 2011.

It seemed like an ordinary enough gig. Party of five, pickup at a little-used airfield near the US/Canadian border, destination Moonbase Alpha. I'd done a thousand of these runs, often for people who were in some kind of trouble and wished their absence to go unnoticed by the TSA. That was fine by me. The message board through which I conducted these transactions did their best to screen out anyone on Europol or the FBI's wanted lists, and as far as Convention policy is concerned, you start with a clean slate when you make it Up unless you're wanted for war crimes or human trafficking.

(I'm not 100% comfortable with that, to be honest. But if the US insists on vetoing every attempt at a comprehensive multinational extradition agreement through the UN and threatening economic retaliation against countries seeking a bilateral one then I'll be damned if they get to have their cake and eat it.)

But this job went sour fast, and damn near got Barbara and I killed in the process.

We arrived about twenty minutes before the agreed time, and I went over to the tterminal building -if you can call a collection of prefab sheds such- to pay the landing fees and get a weather report. When I entered the office, the very worried-looking airport manager pulled me aside and explained that my passengers had already arrived, but that he'd overheard some things that made him suspicious. The nearest police station was a good twenty miles away and there was no on-site security (we'd had to touch down elsewhere to sort out transit visas), so could I please verify that the sole adult of the group had guardianship or power of attourney?

Sole adult. Yeah, this didn't quite jive with the information I'd been given. Deeply suspicious and extremely displeased, I marched into the 'departure lounge' (which was more of a waiting room) to demand an explanation.

It was as bad as you're probably imagining. Four girls, all biomodded and not one of them a day over fifteen years old, with some obnoxious-looking guy in a cheap suit and sunglasses. When questioned, he claimed to be their 'agent', and was escorting them to audition for an 'independent movie' being shot on one of the asteroids to take advantage of the lack of all those tedious rules and regulations. It wasn't hard to guess the rest.

I nailed him with a good solid jab to the solar plexus, broke his nose with my knee as he doubled over and told the airport manager to call the cops. They turned up pretty damn fast when they realised what was going on, especially once Barbara coaxed the girls into giving us their names. They were all US nationals, and there was an Amber Alert out for one of them; the rest were runaways kicked out by their parents for biomodding. Child Services turned out as well, and figured out the remaining details pretty quickly.

The moment that still haunts me was when one of them said she knew damn well what she was being groomed for, but she went along with it because she had nothing to lose. She couldn't go to the police or she'd be stuck in some prison camp and treated like a terrorist or a lab experiment.
The social workers and the police had a long whispered conference, and eventually told me to load the kids onboard and go. I suppose the mess I made of that sleazy bastard's face was considered sufficient evidence that I was on the up-and-up, and it's not like they had any better options at that point. So we loaded up, took off and made for space...

You'd think that'd be the end of it, but nope. Just as we were taxiing to the runway I spotted a couple of SWAT helicopters from the other side of the border, and the radio immediately lit up as the US cops tried to invoke right of hot pursuit. I throttled up and left them to argue the toss with the Mounties.

And then, ten minutes later, a couple of F-16s started shadowing me and demanding I follow them. I replied that that I was still in Canadian airspace, my aircraft was not legally airworthy over US territory and that I was pretty sure they didn't actually have any legal standing to even be here right now, so would they kindly sod right off.
They responded by launching a Sidewinder at me. I dumped flares, jammed the throttle as far forward as I dared and started frantically dodging and weaving while hollering for assistance on the distress frequency. Someone in the Canadian Forces picked it up, and they must've done their research because they told me I was cleared hot, so I powered up the coilgun and put a round of grapeshot downrange.

I'd only tested the coilgun a few times, and never fired it at a live target until then. The effect was... pretty spectacular. The back end of one of the F-16s pretty much disintegrated from a glancing hit, and the other caught the outer edge of the spread pattern and lost a wingtip.

Both pilots lived, though the one whose aircraft took the brunt of the shot messed his back up pretty badly when he ejected. I'm glad of that, even if they were trying to kill me.

There was one hell of a row afterwards. It turned out that the Illinois State governor had turned out the Air National Guard on his own authority and told them to bring me in as an accessory, and the first NORAD heard of this was when Canadian radar saw them cross the border. The Canadian government was furious at the violation of their territory, and the British consulate had some rather acerbic things to say about it as well, even though they weren't exactly overjoyed to find out about the coilgun. The only reason it didn't blow up into something much worse than an angry exchange of official letters was that all parties concerned wanted to screw the lid down on the incident before it got into the media. The FCC, FAA and the equivalent Canadian acronyms put out a statement saying the message was a practical joke, and everyone but the hardcore conspiracy nuts believed them.

Me? I wanted to file it under "shit that never happened" as much as they did. Even if I am the first Fen to score a kill in combat with an Earthside military, which I sincerely doubt, I don't happen to think it anything to be proud of. I'd had my fill of killing and destruction before I ever came to Fenspace and if I never have to fire that fucking coilgun in anger again so long as I live I'll die a happy man.

Sorry. It's a sore subject, especially around the anniversary of...

Well, that's the story you've come to hear, isn't it?

* * *

As you might imagine, I was bloody furious with Frank. I called him up by voicelink because email wasn't satisfying enough and gave him an almighty hair-dryer about his dubious friends and the clusterfuck I'd been dragged into on his account. He was frantically apologetic and swore up and down he hadn't had a clue what the guy was really up to... And the funny thing is, I think he was telling the truth.

Frank actually seemed to like me, insofar as he liked anyone outside the toxic little echo-chamber he'd sequestered himself in with his buddies; after all, I'd helped him get to Fenspace when nobody else had. Or maybe it was pure pragmatism on his part, recognising me as a valuable asset who shouldn't be expended lightly. Either way, he didn't strike me as having much acting ability, so I'm pretty sure he really was duped by that porn guy. (He's still in prison, by the way. The US Department of Justice can probably tell you where if you want his side of the story.) Still, we parted on the understanding that the next time he had a correspondent ask him to recommend a good charter pilot, he was to send them to someone else.

Anyway, feeling slightly better for having it out with Frank, I made best speed for the Moon Kingdom Memorial and radioed ahead to request the Sailors Armed Militia meet me at the landing pad.

There were rather a lot of them waiting for us, all ostentatiously armed and accompanied by a lady who introduced herself as Ms. Curtis and explained she'd been a social worker before going Up. That was more qualified help than I dared hope for, so I showed her through to the galley and messroom and busied myself making tea while she talked to the four girls.

Yeah, you can see where this is going, can't you? I genuinely did not catch on until they'd left, and I saw her pause in front of the cockpit window to put on her official tiara.
It was just after three o'clock in the afternoon and we had several other pickups to make that day, but my professionalism has its limits. I put Barbara in charge and went in search of a bar.

Mercifully, the next few months were relatively uneventful. Work was plentiful, with a second wave of colonisation happening in the Belt and on the moons of Jupiter and a number of new orbital stations springing up. I did a few removals for the first inhabitants of Island One around that time, and I have to say Mal Ford... or Fjord, or... Just how do you pronounce that? Anyway, I found his well-publicised and very unflattering remarks about the place thoroughly inaccurate: The reality considerably worse!

Which isn't to say it was all smooth sailing. Lots of would-be Belters started going out there and not coming back. Some of that was likely people coming to mischief through negligence or just bad luck, but stories were circulating of organised gangs pouncing on newly-settled rocks to loot supplies, or worse. Settlers started getting better armed and more jumpy, especially when the gangs started using distress calls as bait.

It was against that backdrop that I got another email from Frank, offering me quite a bit over my usual rate to collect himself, a couple of buddies and their gear from an asteroid a short distance from 1186 Turnera. It didn't have a catalogue number, as far as I could tell; presumably Frank's party had located it by chance and not bothered to report the discovery.

Now, that wasn't incriminating by itself; uncharted asteroids are only a navigation hazard if you're flying without radar at close to the Limit, and if you're dumb enough to do that you deserve to get yourself killed, so the only real reason to file the paperwork is the bragging rights. But the location gave me a very uneasy feeling. I only took the job out of a mixture of morbid curiosity and a faint hope that I could use whatever influence I had with Frank to keep him out of trouble.

I was honestly expecting him to have fallen in with the nuttier end of the Separatist fraternity; he had exactly the right combination of persecution complex, intellectual snobbery and questionable people skills to feel right at home with them. But the thing about most Separatists is, they might talk big about how space is the ultimate high ground and all that but they rarely go beyond "civil disobedience"... which generally means making a bloody nuisance of themselves, blatantly mishandling handwavium and generally giving Fen a bad name. (Being opposed to a licensing regime is one thing; I may disagree, but it's a defensible position. But we have rules about how to store and transport the stuff because Extremely Bad Things happen when it gets spilled all over people, okay?)

Frank was... Well, a lot more proactive.

The rock he'd set up shop on was pretty small, about three quarters of a mile in diameter. A couple of 'waved shipping containers clung to one side, and as we moved closer to look for a landing site, I realised with a growing sense of dread that there were half a dozen engines embedded in the rock's surface. Big engines, big enough to potentially push something that size up to a good four or five percent of c.
There was no good engineering reason to build yourself a ship that way. If you needed lots of interior volume then you could buy up and 'wave a container ship for a lot less than what it'd cost to hollow out a rock that size. And why the hell would you strap so many engines to it? Even with a constant-speed drive, it'd steer like a drunken three-legged cow at the best of times; at full speed it'd be a danger to itself and the entire solar system.

As the airlock cycled to admit our passengers I was still telling myself it couldn't be as bad as it looked. Maybe Frank had twigged that whoever designed the thing was a thundering dolt, or worse, and hired me because he wanted out?

Yeah. Wishful thinking.

"Tom, old buddy!" he boomed cheerfully. "Good to see you again. This is Earl and this is Brad. So, can we get going soonish? I set the final countdown on the engines and..."
"What the fuck are you doing out here, Frank?" I demanded.
"Eliminating a threat to Fenspace," he replied, bold as brass. "Look, I realise it's gonna make kind of a mess and all, but do you have a better idea?"

And he launched into a long-winded rant about 'mundanes' and their culture and how it was repressing original thinkers and disdainful of truly worthy pastimes and... Christ almighty, he even threw in something about how the marginalisation of geeks was responsible for his inability to get a woman to have sex with him. Basically, geek culture gets a bum deal so let's genocide everyone who's not a geek.
"It's drastic," he concluded, "but sometimes the world needs men who are hard enough to make the hard choice."
"Like cold-blooded murder?" I replied, surprising myself with how calm I sounded.
"Yep," he said chirpily, sounding pleased that we were on the same wavelength.

And I guess a hard man did make a hard choice that day, because I drew my sidearm and I shot him dead. One of his buddies had a pistol of his own and almost nailed me, but Barbara got him with the coachgun just as he was squeezing the trigger and the shot went high. The other went completely to pieces and begged us not to kill him, so we tied him up and left him in one of the passenger cabins while we ran hell-for-leather to the container where the control systems were located to try and find a way to shut off the countdown.

Frank was pretty thorough, I'll give him that much. Everything was controlled by a hardtech desktop PC: We couldn't enter a command abort the countdown because he'd bunged up all the free USB ports with Superglue and he'd rigged the engines to trigger when the thing turned off, so we couldn't just smash it or yank the Ethernet connection. There was presumably a second system waiting to implement the command, but when we traced the cable it led through a heavy steel hatch that'd been welded shut too thoroughly to crack open in time. I was about ready to lift off and shoot out the engines and to hell with the potentially useful evidence it'd destroy in the process when Barbara pointed out that those engines had to run off something.

It was surprisingly small, a fuel oil tank about the size you'd expect for a farmhouse. It was 'waved pretty thoroughly, but the fuel lines weren't; I didn't even need the plasma torch, just a hacksaw for the hoses themselves and a crowbar to force the valve. The tank must have under a hell of a lot of pressure, because when I finally got it open the damn thing shot me backwards like I'd been fired from a cannon, and the safety tether turned out to be more elastic than we'd imagined and... Oh, I'm sure it seems funny to you, but I ended up in hospital! Cracked ribs and whiplash from the harness, then a broken collarbone, a dislocated shoulder and a concussion from being slammed back into the asteroid.

So, that sucked.

Barbara managed to raise a Belter ship, and they got word to Juno City and then the Convention. The Sailor Armed Militia were dispatched to casevac me, go over the asteroid with a fine-tooth comb and question the surviving conspirator. A search of Frank's body turned up a remote that would have started the rock's engines instantly if he'd managed to grab it in time, which exonerated me of any potential murder charges.

I didn't tell them I'd been so damned angry at that point that I never even noticed he was reaching for something in his pocket, and they didn't ask.

I had to testify to a Convention sub-committee in Crystal Kyoto. I don't remember much of what was said -I was pretty thoroughly dosed up with painkillers- but Haruhi's closing statement is still perfectly clear.
"I can tell you don't want thanks for killing Berquart. I can tell you don't want to be called a hero. But a lot of people owe you their lives, Tom. Never forget that."

There's been a lot of unkind things said about that girl, before and since, but she's alright in my book.

I don't know how much the Convention told the Outer Space Affairs bureau in New York directly, but a mostly accurate version did the rounds on the Interwave after some Belters sent the rock into the sun. They were kind enough to leave Barbara's and my names out of their statement. It would've been quite a nine day wonder in the media if the first evidence that the Sammies had a corruption problem hadn't been surfacing about the same time, and then there was SOS-Con and the war...

Basically, we had more immediate and pressing problems. But it was one of many events that forced us to acknowledge the existence of a darker side to Fenspace, and the need for an organised effort to bring it under control while we still could.

We never did find out how much of a connection this incident had to the Boskone faction itself. The survivor didn't know much; he claimed to have been hired as a camp cook while Frank and several other like-minded individuals worked on turning the rock into a missile, and that he didn't know for sure what they were doing until Frank's little motive rant. Everyone else had left in their own craft before we arrived, and the names and descriptions were circulated on the Interwave to no avail. A couple of them were confirmed killed or captured in the war, but the rest seem to have vanished into thin air.
As for our remaining witness, the part about his being hired as a cook was true enough according to his old flatmate in Port Phobos, and in the absence of any witnesses to contradict the rest of his story the Sammies let him go. I can't tell you where he is now, I'm afraid; he gave the name Thomas Baker, which was probably an alias. Last I heard he was working in a Brubek's on Venus somewhere.

As for just how much damage the rock would've done? Someone ran the numbers and reckoned that at full speed it would've shattered the planet entirely. The debris would have wiped out every orbital station and probably most of the moonbases as well. The survivors would have numbered a couple of hundred thousand, of which a third to one half would then have starved before we could bring enough agridomes on stream.
It's very unlikely that we could have prevented a total Boskone takeover of what was left of Fenspace in those circumstances. Earth and its satellites were the one region they didn't dare raid for fear of forcing NATO or the Chinese to take a side. Without that secure rear and the steady flow of arms and volunteers from the surface, we never could have got a real army organised before we were overrun.

Does that mean Frank and his buddies had help? Good question. For the most part, with certain well-publicised exceptions, the Boskones are not genocidal lunatics; I mean, dead people can't buy smack or pay protection money and it's kind of hard to pimp them out, right? The only one of the leading lights who's batshit enough to consider this a remotely good idea is Agatha Clay, but huge fuck-off explosions aren't really her style.
We do know the 'wavetech on those engines was far too complex a job to have been done on-site, though, and that there's no record of them doing business with anyone in the civilised regions of Fenspace; it wouldn't have been terribly hard to figure out what they intended to do.

My hypothesis is that they had the work done at Boskone Two on a purely commercial basis. According to 'Baker', two or three of the group were pretty wealthy, and I had a hazy idea Frank himself came from money as well. Maybe they didn't put two and two together, maybe they thought it was an extortion scheme, maybe the money was just so good that they chose not to ask any questions. I suspect anyone who could tell us for certain isn't inclined to talk.

I still wonder why Frank called on me of all people to lift him off the rock before it launched. Was he looking for my approval, some sort of endorsement or validation of his actions? He must have known I disapproved of his grudge against anyone not Fen, so I can't imagine how he'd have expected that from me; whatever Frank might have been, he wasn't stupid. Unless some part of him wanted me to stop him? Perhaps he just didn't know anyone else with a ship who'd take his money.

I guess we'll never know now.

If I regret anything at all, it's not staying in better touch with Frank; I couldn't have prevented him from falling into bad company, but I might have been a moderating influence or at least seen warning signs in time to stop him sooner. But damn it, he was a grown man of twenty-five when I dropped him off at New Yavin all those years ago. He should have been old enough to know better.

But I don't feel guilty about killing him. I took neither pride nor pleasure in it, and I still wish it could have been avoided, but it had to be done.

This place will be closing soon, and I should be getting home. One for the road?

Alright. Here's my card; do you mind emailing me a preview copy for a quick fact-check in the cold light of sobriety? Alright, thanks.

Oh, and here's a pull-quote for you: 'If you hear someone talking about Hard Men making Hard Decisions and they mean it, you have to stop them. At any cost.'

It's kind of a Fen joke. Long story.

G'night.

THE END]]>
Huh. You want to hear my story? Every Fen's got one, there's not much special about mine. I wasn't really happy on Earth for one reason or another, so I acquired a bit of handwavium, built a ship and left.

Well, okay, it's a little bit more complicated than that, but...

Oh. Oh.

Now there's something special about that story, alright, and not in a good way. I don't really like telling it, and I dare say most Fen wouldn't like hearing it, if they knew enough to ask in the first place.

Classified? Hah! Not hardly; the Convention doesn't have an official secrets act, and they couldn't enforce one if they did. It's more of an unspoken mutual consensus to pretend the whole ghastly fiasco never happened. I can't speak for the laws Earthside though, I'd make some discreet inquiries about that before publishing if I were you.

I don't like the term "mundanes". Never did, even before... Well, we'll get to that.

I guess I'd best start at the beginning. You might want to place your order before we start, this is going to take some time. Oh, thanks. I'll take a double Bruichladdich, no ice.

So...

I'm old for a first-generation Fen. Born 1970, fan of Doctor Who before John Barrowman got his Equity number, actually witnessed the first really serious Trekie/Warsie flamewar on Usenet. In 2007 I was gloomily contemplating the inexorable onset of forty with depressingly little to show for my time on Earth to date.
I'd left the Royal Air Force in 2005 after a Taliban sniper took a sizeable chunk out of both my shin bone and my helicopter's no-claims bonus (I doubt that poor farmer ever got the rotor-blade out of his living room wall), returning home with a limp, a modest disability pension and no idea what to do next.
Flying was out of the question indefinitely, possibly for good if my leg didn't heal well enough, and at the time I wasn't sure I even wanted to go back to it. I was tired of feeling rootless, of spending so much time abroad that I didn't really have a home to come back to but at the same time rarely getting to see anything of the world past the airfield perimeter fence.
But on the other hand, it was pretty much all I knew how to do; certainly the only thing I had formal qualifications for, although I was a fair hand with computers and vaguely remembered most of what I learned from weekends and summer holidays helping Dad fix cars.

Eventually I ended up splitting the difference. I got a six-month gig as a technical advisor for a small developer making third-party DLC -though the term hadn't been coined back then- for Microsoft Flight Simulator, put a card in a newsagent's window offering computer repairs and bought an ancient and non-running Vauxhall Senator on the cheap with the intention of putting it back in order. (It ended up being a bust, the chassis was too badly corroded to get it roadworthy again, but I sold off the still-useable bits on eBay and turned a small profit.) I made enough money to rent a dilapidated but characterful ground-floor flat in an old Victorian townhouse, and bought myself a decent computer for the first time in years. I became a regular at a nice local pub, found the time to go to a couple of conventions and generally made the most of having more leisure time than I'd had since I was a teenager.

It didn't take long for boredom and restlessness to set in, but before they could become unmanageable, two things happened. The first was that my godfather died and left me a small cottage with two acres of land, a large collection of mechanical bits and pieces and a pretty considerable sum of money. The second was handwavium.

I'd heard... Well, I can't go into detail because some of these people are still Earthside, but suffice it to say that scientists working for defence contractors tend to see an ex-serviceman wounded in the line of duty as trustworthy enough to bend the rules when it comes to classified information, especially when they've had a few beers. I'll tell you this much, though: I have it on good authority that the stuff existed in some form well before 2006. I expect we'll find out more some time in the next five years or so thanks to the thirty-year rule.

Anyway, the wild stories had begun showing up on the message boards by then, and I knew enough to realise there was a grain of truth in them. Vague plans began to form in my mind.

Now, you haven't asked about my faction yet. Personally, I think of myself as a generalist for the most part; I'm not picky when it comes to reading or viewing material, especially when I'm making a long cargo run. But my first real fandom... Well. Ever heard of a game called Elite? The original space trading sim, killer app for the BBC Micro...

[sigh] You really are young, aren't you? Okay, bit of background.

In the early Eighties, the educational programming wing of the BBC started getting interested in computer science. There'd been some piecemeal efforts before, usually an offshoot of the maths or science department, but now that home computing was becoming a thing they wanted to offer something hands-on.
Now in those days, there was no common standards for much of anything: Many manufacturers had their own fork of BASIC, and even on those that didn't you couldn't be sure your homebrew program would work on a competitor's machine. In order to have something that they knew would work with all their software and coding exercises, the Beeb put out an invitation to tender for a custom-designed computer for the home and classroom market. The winning bidder was a company called Acorn Computers and their design was christened the BBC Microcomputer, or BBC Micro for short.
They were expensive bits of kit, but pretty powerful for their day; they were some of the first desktop computers aimed at the home-user market with LAN capability and the ability to add an auxillary processor, for one. It also had the ability to download code from a TV signal, but it only worked properly if you had absolutely perfect TV reception and was generally more trouble than it was worth. They were a huge success in Britain and a more modest one in continental Europe, but they never took off in the US because the display hardware didn't adapt well to NTSC displays.

But anyway, Elite was the game that drove most of its non-educational sales. You know the basic formula: You start out in a very basic spaceship with a bit of cash and a huge open gameworld to explore. There are several ways of making money both legal and otherwise, occasional pirates, police who'll come down on you for anything illegal... It was the original sandbox game. And, like a lot of my generation, I was absolutely hooked on it for most of my teens.

We never became an established faction for a number of reasons. The game didn't have much of a plot, so there was no convenient polity to name ourselves after, and the nature of the game is such that the faction tends to appeal to loners and individualists. It's also partly because British Fen tend not to be in a position to home-build; we're one of the easier European countries in which to acquire a handwavium license, but with our airspace being rather crowded the authorities tend to get a bit tetchy about amateur space programs. Either way, I'm the only bloke I know who's managed to build himself a ship directly based on that 'verse.

And that's where my godfather's barn full of junk comes in.

His name was Greg Sanderson, and he was an old friend of my dad's and a lifelong bachelor who didn't get out and about much. Bit set in his ways, you know? He was a great fan of science fiction and something of a radical in his politics, and I'm pretty sure he was hoping to make it to Fenspace himself.

Anyway, the house was up in the Scottish Borders, a tumbledown little two-up-two-down affair with a bathroom added on some time in the 50s. It was permanently cold and damp, the wiring was such a haphazard mess that I had to pay an electrician twice his usual rate to set it to rights, the boiler was older than I was and hadn't been serviced since before I learned how to masturbate... The list went on. I spent just enough money to keep the place from being actively hazardous for human occupancy and decided to sell up as soon as I'd inventoried the barn.

Well, that was a revelation alright. I knew about the old Beech King Air fuselage and the jet engines, but I wasn't expecting... Well, I've still got the list on my palmtop somewhere...

* 200 square metres of sheet steel
* Four hundred gallons of aviation fuel in a galvanised tank
* Eight hundred metres of copper wire
* One air compressor, broken
* Four expensive electronic paintball guns
* Five thousand 17mm ball bearings (exactly the right size to be fired through said paintball guns)
* One 4.5-inch gun barrel, ex-Royal Navy
* One fully functional septic tank system, apparently designed for a seagoing yacht, new and in boxes
* One 200-litre water tank, also intended for a seagoing yacht
* One Ferranti Blue Fox aircraft radar set, broken
* One Webley revolver, .38 S&W (which was only marginally legal in the UK at the time, being a 'trophy of war')
* One hundred and fifty .38/200 revolver cartridges (which most definitely wasn't legal!)
* Five tonnes (approx.) of miscellaneous scrap metal.
* Twelve litres (approx.) of handwavium, base strain, in an old oil drum at the back of the barn

As you might imagine, the handwavium was one of the less surprising items in there, although I couldn't begin to imagine where Greg got it or how he even heard of it in the first place. Perhaps he didn't put it there at all; some people do claim it just turned up in the workshop one day and they only found out what it did by accident. At any rate, if he got any 'wavetech operational before he died then I never found it.

Well, I suppose that made the choice for me, didn't it? There was nothing much tying me to England; my parents had emigrated to Spain some years ago, my brother David was currently somewhere in the Yukon finding copper ore for one of the multi-nationals, and I'd written the very idea of marriage off as more trouble than it was worth a long time ago.
And I'd always wanted to travel, hadn't I?

The first thing I did was buy a secondhand laptop and a pre-paid mobile phone that could be tethered, both for cash. This was before the Snowden Documents hit the public domain of course, but you soon got a good picture of what the SIGINT people were capable of just from being part of operations that acted on the information they acquired, and it wasn't a great leap of reasoning to imagine they'd be on the lookout for anything connected to handwavium as well as terrorism.

(I had Snowden as a passenger once, you know; I was on a regular run to Ganymede at the time, and he'd just bought a house in Serenity Valley. Nice chap actually, even if he enjoys his status as a hero among Fen a bit too much for my liking. But anyway.)

Once I'd got some nicely untraceable hardware, reinforced by a few software tricks upon which I shall not enlarge here, I started reading every Beginner's Guide to Handwavium I could lay hold of and hanging out on the forums picking up tips from those who'd gone before me. After reading some of the safety warnings, I made some discreet inquiries with a relative in the construction industry about where to obtain some protective clothing rated for dealing with asbestos contamination. The supplier he found me only did bulk orders, but I figured they'd be worth a fair bit to other Fen and bought a batch of a hundred.

My first 'wavetech project was small and simple, a used 486 ThinkPad I bought off eBay for about twenty quid. I soaked it in a small amount of the base strain overnight, and the results were encouraging. It turned glossy metallic green and shrank to the size of a netbook, but when I tried various CPU benchmarking tools the ones that didn't glitch out completely came back with estimates of 4GHz. It also sprouted some USB ports and a DVI cable plug.

I put the used handwavium in a separate container and fed it a load of the scrap metal, along with a complete set of Traveller sourcebooks and a thumb drive containing copies of everything even vaguely Elite-related I could lay hold of: Copies of the first two games and the open-source remake, along with their manuals, and a load of fanfiction and the tie-in novella that came boxed with the original game. For a bit of extra flavour I threw in a couple of Arthur C. Clarke paperbacks and a pirated copy of Star Cops. (Yes, I'm aware of the irony, but it's not out on DVD.) This version would be used for the engines and flight control systems, and I'd stick to the base strain for the hull and life support.

Of course, before I got to that point I had to design the ship... Although I already had something in mind.

In the original Elite, it's known as a Cobra Mk3, and it's the ship you start off with in a new game. It's sort of low slung and wedge-shaped, not much aerodynamic lift but even less drag. I figured I'd have to modify it considerably but it seemed as good a starting point as any, if only because it was a simple enough shape to weld together. So I bought myself a copy of X-Plane, imported the model of the Mk3 from Oolite into the "PlaneMaker" utility and began the long and tedious process of hammering it into a workable aircraft design.

You might well argue that this wasn't really necessary, but like all good career aviators I'm naturally inclined to err on the side of caution. I didn't trust... Well, no that's probably the wrong word. I didn't want to rely on handwavium completely. One of the early pioneers I spoke to on the old Starbase 1 forums told me that he reckoned the stuff can't actually break any physical laws, it just knows all the loopholes, including -especially- the ones we haven't found yet. How true that is I have no idea, but it is well-established that aero- and hydrodynamics are one area where handwavium has almost no effect. (I'm told that a reader poll by the Annals of Improbable Research ranked the process of finding this out "The 4th Strangest Thing Ever Done With A Wind Tunnel In The Name Of Proper Science". I have no idea what the top three were and I don't especially want to.)

The end result of several weeks of fine-tuning was a sort of flying-wing design with a small vertical fin, still fairly blocky and angular but now capable of gliding a few miles if something went wrong while hopefully being within my capabilities to weld together. I invested in a copy of AutoCAD, a correspondence course in how to use it and set to the project with a will.

As far as I know, my ship was the first 100% scratchbuilt Fen craft to be laid down, even though the Epsilon Blade and the Toy Box were in service well beforehand. Construction took me most of a year, the first quarter of which was spent refreshing my knowledge of welding at evening classes.
The hull structure is fully monocoque, made of two layers of 1.5cm steel plate with self-sealing foam in between. (One part base-strain handwavium, one part my homebrew strain, eight parts cavity wall insulation material. Worked better than I dared hope.) I'm fairly sure I could have left it un-'waved and still made orbit if I'd been able to find a windscreen tough enough for the job, but ordinary plate-glass had to suffice in the interim.
Internally, the ship was fairly spartan. I'd crammed a bunk and a desk in around the cockpit with a tiny head and galley immediately behind it, and squeezed two tiny passenger cabins into the awkward corners between the engine nacelles, the cockpit and the cargo bay; I didn't plan on taking passengers often, but there wasn't much else useful I could do with the space and I figured it couldn't hurt to have the option.
The cargo bay itself was about twelve metres long by four wide by three high, not huge but enough to get a worthwhile amount of stores aboard. I toyed with but ultimately abandoned the idea of shaping it to accommodate an ISO-standard shipping container; the aerodynamics went wonky when I tested it in X-Plane and in any case it would have been awkward as all hell to load and unload. Still, I could get standard-sized pallets in there, and the hydraulic loading ramp I acquired from a scrapyard would do the rest.

I left the 'wavium application until last. The two old jet engines, the instrument panel from the King Air and the radar set were immersed in the special blend I'd made, and as an afterthought I tossed a spare unit insignia for my old squadron in to add the final touch. I mixed the same stuff half-and-half with the base strain for the broken compressor, an air-conditioning unit and a couple of old radiators, and used pure base-strain and a quite ordinary household paint roller for the outer hull. I left it overnight to cure, and went inside just in time to hear about the Guacoamole Incident.

Ugh... I swear to all that's holy and many things that aren't, if I ever lay hands on the reckless bloody fool who cooked up that little stunt I'll administer at least five pints of their own concoction in enema form, gift-wrap whatever they turn into and dump their sorry arse outside the Hoover Building. Not only was it a gross violation of other people's bodily integrity of a severity easily comparable to rape, it sent the United States into its stupidest and most counterproductive moral panic since Joe McCarthy's day. Damn good argument for a handwavium license if you ask me, at least if there was a snowball's chance in hell of enforcing one.

But anyway, we were a little bit saner about it in Britain, at least to the point where I was able to call in a favour from a man I'd served under in Iraq who was now rather senior in the Ministry of Defence. In return for turning over my handwavium stockpile -less a few hundred millilitres as seed stock- and giving the backroom boys from QuinetiQ (don't ask) a detailed briefing on what I accomplished with it, he furnished me with an IFF code and some other registration paperwork to make my use of UK airspace at least marginally legal so long as I promised to be extremely circumspect... and give him a lift Fenside once he collected his pension and his gold watch in a year or so. (He worked for Reaction Engines until he got fed up with Spacefleet and their "damned ridiculous Renaissance Festival take on the Fifties", as he put it to me, and I think he's somewhere in the Belt now. I'll email him your details if you like, I dare say he's got some good stories about the Experimental Handwavium Station.)

That... didn't work out quite as well as I'd hoped, at least partly thanks to a major lapse in my usually fairly good judgement of character. But the full scale of that lapse didn't become obvious until some while later...

But we'll want another drink for that. My shout this time?

* * *

So, if you knew enough to come and talk to me, you're probably familiar with the name of Frank Berquart. Even at that stage I wouldn't have called us friends, but we did correspond a lot over the year I spent building my ship. He could be abrasive and condescending at times, and I really didn't like his attitude to non-Fen, but that wasn't uncommon; like many first-generation Fen, he had a rough go of it growing up as the only nerdy kid in one of the less salubrious bits of the rural United States. He had a good deal to be bitter about, and I tried to reach out to Frank and others like him because I thought they had it in them to be something better.

Either Frank didn't, or I didn't do a good enough job of looking for it. But at least I tried, right?

Anyway, all his attempts at getting hold of something waveable had been stymied and he was getting desperate enough to consider doing something foolhardy, so eventually we struck a deal: He'd buy me certain items that were more easily obtained in the US, and in return I'd pick him up from a nearby airfield and give him a ride as far as New Yavin. This was all before the December 30th deadline so it was entirely legal: I even filed a flight plan, describing my ship quite truthfully as an "experimental long range utility aircraft".

Yes, I do mean guns. I wasn't harbouring any illusions about a new era of peace and brotherly love coming to pass through the power of handwavium.

Many people tend to draw a slightly rose-tinted picture of those freewheeling early days. Don't get me wrong, it was an incredibly exciting time to be alive with all kinds of possibilities opening up, but... Well, it's not like the Boskonians popped into existence fully-formed in 2012. This was before the Sailor Armed Militia was more than a concept, before FTL comms equipment was readily available... Hell, it wasn't until WorldCon in '09 that we had a formally agreed distress frequency. Once you were out of radar range of a station or settled body you were pretty much on your own. And space may be big, but if you know roughly what time a particular ship left Point A, what speed and/or acceleration it's capable of and that it was headed for Point B then you can narrow the search area down considerably.

(One of the first really effective anti-piracy measures, incidentally? Port control services locking down manifest information on encrypted servers so that it was nigh-impossible to target specific ships. I once met an allegedly reformed ex-pirate who claims he jacked it in when he hit a freighter he thought was carrying flatscreen TV sets only to find it full of baby formula.

Of course nowadays they're organised and professional enough to get the information by data-mining instead, but c'est la vie.)

Anyway, the practical upshot of all that is that I wanted something more impressive than a .38 revolver older than I was in the hopefully unlikely event of the 114mm coilgun not being enough to prevent my ship from being boarded in the first place.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure I hold the record for the biggest gun fitted to any prewar Fen craft. I don't advertise this fact because I don't consider it something to brag about, and in any case I prefer not to have pirates targeting me specifically because I'm so well-armed I must be carrying valuable loot, but it's all on the PEPPER database and everything so it's not like it's a secret.

Things have been tightened up considerably now that handwavium is de facto decriminalised, but at the time it wasn't strictly speaking illegal for a private citizen to own a multi-stage coilgun capable of launching projectiles with enough force to put a concrete blockhouse to some trouble; for better or worse, lawmakers in this country tend not to restrict or outright ban weird and exotic weapons -or potential weapons- until after someone goes out and commits a violent crime with one. Nevertheless, my test firing was conducted well out to sea.

The paintball guns turned out to be more trouble than they were worth, incidentally: I think Greg had intended to use them as secondary weapons but the rate of fire and muzzle velocity were marginal at best in atmosphere, and when I put the test-rig in a vacuum chamber (aided and abetted by a fellow aspiring Fen studying at the University of Manchester) it experienced what British aerospace engineers call "rapid unplanned disassembly", costing me £5,000 for the damage to the equipment and several bottles of good scotch as an apology to the lab assistants who had to repair it.
I did find a good use for the ball bearings though. Combined with an accelerometer, a small pyrotechnic charge and a hollow steel casing they made for good canister shot.

But anyway, the ship's armament won't really become relevant 'til some years later. Back to my first face-to-face encounter with Frank.

I hadn't done a long-range flight test up until that point, and neither had I pushed the throttle much beyond 25% or tested the button conspicuously marked TURBO on the collective while in flight. (A ground test of the turbo button proved that it caused an 'afterburner' effect that appeared to function as an acceleration drive. Rather a powerful one, in fact; I found one of the barn doors a quarter of a mile away. This was before handwavium's innate safety features were widely known or documented, I might add, so the safety cover on the button was taped shut until further notice.) But I did have enough data to calculate that I'd just make my destination field on a full tank.

The main engines are a constant-speed type, powered by ordinary Jet-A and electrical energy from a couple of solid handwavium crystals. They're fairly standard reactionless thrusters capable of a respectable 7% of c in space, while the turbo button activates some kind of fusion torch that will get my ship up to a theoretical maximum of 21%, but I can't exceed 15% without draining my fuel tanks well below my preferred safety margin.

Performance in atmosphere turned out to be a bit less impressive by Fen standards. Cruising speed is around six hundred miles an hour, or just over the speed of sound, but when I really pushed the engines I got her up to about a thousand... at which point the vibration was so violent I couldn't read the instruments anymore, and when I made the mistake of lightly touching the rudder I got an unwanted refresher course on recovering from an asymmetric stall. I pencilled in eight hundred as the Never Exceed Speed and settled in for a long run.

On arrival, I had a brief and rather awkward discussion with US air traffic controllers that ended with no less than four F-15s escorting me as far as the small airstrip in Colorado where I was due to pick up my passenger. Their pilots were perfectly friendly though, and quite embarrassed about being ordered to hassle me like this when I was still within the letter of the law.

The airfield was some tiny grass-strip place in the arse-end of nowhere, to the point where they had to borrow a sheriff's deputy to check my passport because this was the first international flight they'd had in years. He looked like he was expecting me to suddenly manifest a biomod or pull out a death ray or something, but he signed the necessary paperwork without demur. I had a brief argument with the refuelers about whether they were insured for possible handwavium contamination ("For what I'm paying for my liability cover you'd bloody well better be!", I think my exact words were), ordered a pizza and settled in for my mandatory crew rest period.

I was just on the point of turning in for the night when someone started pounding on the hatch. Frank wasn't due until the morning, so I ended up grabbing my revolver and running aft in my dressing gown, torn between alarm and annoyance.
To my utter astonishment, I found myself face to face with a shivering and terrified catgirl in a soaking-wet hoodie clutching an overnight bag, who immediately begged me for a ride somewhere, anywhere in Fenspace.

Once I got her calmed down a little and into some dry clothes, she told me her name was Barbara, and that she'd treated her Gender Identity Disorder with handwavium after being refused insurance cover for it. The process was an overall success, but her roommate had taken it rather badly and called the police. Barbara'd managed to get away ahead of the hue and cry, and had been headed to the airfield hoping to 'borrow' a plane and make a run for the border when she saw my ship.
I made a quick phone call to Frank and got an ETA; the Greyhound he was on was due in around 2AM. I explained the situation and told him to cancel his motel room and come straight here in case we had to leave in a hurry. He agreed quite happily, apparently finding the whole idea rather exciting, and confirmed that he'd got the items I'd requested... more or less.

I'd specifically requested a couple of Browning High-Powers because they were the only pistol I'd had any range time with, unless you counted the few surreptitious rounds I'd fired into an old dartboard behind the barn to make sure the revolver actually worked. Beyond that, I wasn't very specific beyond "a couple of shotguns, preferably 12-gauge, and a rifle that's decently powerful but won't make me look like a militia nutbag".
Apparently Frank's local gun dealer had some sort of promotional deal going in anticipation of some cowboy action shooting event, which is how I ended up with a lever-action and a coach gun. They even came with a free ten-gallon hat! But they were modern replicas chambered to take modern ammunition, and I've always been quite fond of Westerns, so I was actually pretty pleased. I was almost disappointed that he'd managed to score a fully contemporary Ruger Mini-14 (albeit with wooden furniture) with a scope instead of a Henry rifle.

And yes, I did wear the hat, but I don't have the gravitas to pull off the look.

Anyway, Frank launched into another one of his rants about 'mundanes' and how we Fen could be running the planet in ten years if we dropped a few big enough rocks, then tried a couple of hilariously ill-advised Pick-Up Artist tactics on Barbara until she up-ended her coffee in his lap. He retreated to his cabin to sulk when I laughed at him, and I didn't see him again until takeoff the following morning.

The police did eventually turn up looking for Barbara, but I refused to give them access without a warrant and to my mild surprise they didn't make an issue of it; I guess they figured she'd be somebody else's problem soon enough.
Then I realised I only had two pressure suits. (Made from a pair of old RAF flight suits complete with helmets and an emergency O2 bottle, which under the influence of my homebrew 'wavium became mechanical counter-pressure suits with full-face helmets and enough air for about six hours.) We solved this problem by shutting Frank in his cabin with a fully hardtech "oxygen candle" and a CO2 scrubber and sealing the door with duct-tape.

Funnily enough, yes, this was Barbara's idea. Frank had made a very tactless remark about her pre-biomod medical condition after overhearing me talking to the cops and she wasn't in the best of moods with him. Neither was I, for that matter, seeing as he laughed off my attempt to give him a little word of advice about what is and isn't okay to call people. (My mum's Indian, born to first-generation immigrants, so I dare say you can imagine my views on the subject.)

Oh well, in about six hours we needn't ever see each other again.

The transition to space was smoother than I expected, though I had to throttle up abruptly at the tropopause. After that, it was a simple case of identifying the radio beacon for New Yavin and putting it into the autopilot.

Frank was in another one of his moods after I cut the tape on the door, which didn't bother me in the least, so Barbara and I got to know each other a bit better over a mug of tea. I learned she'd been a pilot for a small commuter airline until the economy took a shit, that her parents were divorced and her father had taken her diagnosis rather worse than her mother. She was also down to about fifty dollars until and unless she could get in touch with her bank manager.

Well, I was starting to ponder the issue of long-distance runs and fatigue; I couldn't exactly set the autopilot and go to bed, could I? But there was the thorny issue of British law to deal with: Getting her a visa was going to be all kinds of inconvenient when her passport was in the name of Robert White, assuming the US didn't outright revoke it. And I really couldn't afford to bend the rules if I wanted to keep my relatively unfettered access to European airspace...

Well, that could wait. I was in space, I was flying my very own homebuilt spaceship and I was going to have some fun!

We dropped Frank off at New Yavin, by which time he was in a much better mood. He bade us farewell and dashed off to cash in the two kilos of high-quality weed he'd brought with him. I wasn't sure if I should laugh or feel a bit sorry for him, because I doubt he made a profit. Me, on the other hand...

Now, basic hydroponics are pretty easy even with pure hardtech: Some troughs full of potting compost, some sun-lamps, a drip-feed system -which can be as simple as a low-powered water pump and a couple of dozen metres of plastic tubing with pinholes every couple of centimetres- and a dilute solution of ordinary fertiliser in fresh water will do the trick. But it doesn't scale past plants you can grow in an ordinary Earthside greenhouse without a much more elaborate setup that requires a lot of money, expertise and above all space. And root crops or fruit trees need really deep soil; they didn't become really practical to cultivate until someone got a crater on the Moon glazed over and pressurised, and they stayed quite pricey until prefabricated buckydomes hit the market.

The practical upshot of which is that I just about quadrupled my money selling four tons of King Edward potatoes and one ton of coffee beans, and made a decent profit from the hazmat suits to boot.

I remember the conversation Barbara and I had in vivid detail. I was carrying a good-sized duffel bag stuffed full of small bills, and I saw Barbara looking at the Situations Vacant board by the exit to the hangar with a rather mournful expression; there were plenty of jobs posted, but I guess not many of them called for a couple of hundred hours in a Bombardier CRJ.
"So," I said, "is there anywhere in particular you want to go?"
"I dunno," she replied sadly.
"Well, how about we start at the Moon and work our way out? You can show me how good a pilot you are too."
She was quite taken aback. "You really wanna hire me?"
"That's going to depend on a lot of things," I replied. "Not least how good you are at your job. But I'm sure as hell not leaving you stood here in the clothes you stand up in. You're Fen now, Barbara. And I guess I am too, even if I'm not a wanted felon in my home country. And this far from home, all we Fen have is each other. Now let's go find somewhere you can call your mother and I can call my friends in high places."

* * *

We managed to get Barbara's immediate financial situation sorted quickly enough once her mother understood what had happened. (And I have to say, the old girl took the whole business with truly commendable sangfroid!) The simplest method proved to having her bank manager wire her savings to my own account after I handed her the equivalent in hard currency.

Unfortunately, we also found out that the US government had indeed cancelled her passport and issued an arrest warrant; the only reason her account hadn't been frozen was at the credit union where she banked was founded and run by old-school liberal activists with ties to the ACLU and the NAACP, who were contesting the demand in court and telling any reporter who'd listen precisely what they thought about their nation's lawmakers. (Techdirt has a good writeup on the subject, including an interview with the chairman of the board of trustees. You might find it useful background material.)

Well, that complicated things a bit.

There isn't a whole lot of unskilled employment in Fenspace, and good old hardtech Earth is catching us up on this one. We Fen might be a lot more flexible about formal qualifications compared to employers in North America or Western Europe, but if the job doesn't entail at least some skill and training then a 'waved forklift or robot arm can probably do it faster and for longer shifts, and cheaper too if you don't wake up an AI. And furthermore, at that early stage most of the factions had yet to get around to organising some sort of formal public assistance program for refugees or the otherwise unlucky. I didn't think she would've starved once her money ran out -Fen really do look out for their own- but it didn't seem like much of a life in the long run.
Besides, she'd been through hell backwards and didn't have many friends she could call upon out here apart from the guy who supplied the handwavium she used for her biomod, who was allegedly somewhere on the surface of Mars in a 'waved camper van. I couldn't leave her to sink or swim like that.

So, after a very long conference call with someone from QuinetiQ's legal department (I don't know why they have an immigration law specialist on staff and I don't intend to ask) and a mid-rankng civil servant from the Home Office, a deal was struck: If Barbara would consent to a thorough medical examination, she'd be granted indefinite leave to remain. She wasn't exactly keen on the idea for obvious reasons, but agreed on the condition that the tests take place in a civilian hospital with the absolute bare minimum of security present.

With that out of the way, and the New Yavin ATC beginning to make urgent noises about a lack of parking, we made good our departure.

The first week was all a bit of a blur for me. We went all over the Moon and then on to Mars, where we both got hilariously smashed on the first batch of Martian whiskey served at Callahan's. I think we went to have a look at Ceres afterwards, but I was suffering from a hangover of such epic proportions that I was sorely tempted to roll the dice on a biomod so I don't remember much of that day. Apparently Barbara was one of the lucky ones who didn't trade all her alcohol tolerance for the ears and the tail, in fact it seemed to have given it something of a boost... Or maybe I was just getting old.

I'd like to say I spent this time marvelling at the amazing beauty of the cosmos, but to be perfectly honest the view stopped being awe-inspiring after prolonged exposure. It's pretty, but it's... Well, I wouldn't call it dead, but it's static. Fixed. You'll see almost the same thing every time you look out of the window. Compare and contrast with the average Fen settlement.

What can I say? I find people more interesting than places, and places more interesting than the emptiness between them.

Anyway, after seven days of wandering around the solar system playing tourist, we returned to the surface to get Barbara's visa sorted out. She had her medical (an MRI, X-rays and some blood work) done at Dorset County Hospital; apparently they were the only ones with a gap in their MRI machine's schedule at short notice. The administrators were a little irked about this, but I smoothed most of the ruffled feathers by donating some 'waved toys for the children's ward.
And yes, if it's not a foregone conclusion, she did get the job. Barbara had plenty of long distance fixed-wing experience, something I was seriously lacking at the time, but despite having no previous rotary-wing hours she took to my ship's largely helicopter-like controls quickly. She also had a marvellously dry sense of humour and was generally good company on a long flight, and had an innate knack for making really good coffee.

We repeated the fruit and vegetable runs a couple of times, but other people with larger and better-equipped vehicles were starting to catch on to the idea and in any case it was extremely repetitive, so we switched to general cargo hauling. We were a bit of a specialty outfit, bigger than the literal hundreds of 'waved cars and pickup trucks whose owners would take on some packages for beer money but not quite up to intermodal container runs like a few enterprising Fen were getting into. We ended up doing a lot of house moves after signing on with Hermes Universal Deliveries, because we had just enough room to fit a couple or young family and all their worldly goods aboard and the speed to get them to pastures new before the kids could start rioting from cabin fever.

Oh yeah. I think we might have been the ones to get the ball rolling on the ghost story about "The Big Deal". Enough of the details match that it could be an exaggerated version of our experience, anyway.

It was... early 2009, I think. We were on a run to Port Phobos with six tons of mixed cargo, when suddenly we pick up a very faint modulation on the radio at 121.5MHz, the Aircraft Emergency Frequency back on Earth. An automated distress beacon. We warm up the radar and slowly scan back and forth until we pick up a tiny contact a few degrees off our heading, and alter course to investigate and hopefully render aid.

What we found was close to what the ghost story describes: A shipping container with windows on one end and engines at the rear, badly damaged. (No name painted on the side though.) But nobody responded to our radio calls, so I got suited up and made my way over with the first-aid kit... And a pistol, because something really didn't sit right about this.
I managed to get the airlock to cycle, and found the ship totally deserted. There were bunks lining the walls for at least a dozen people but only two of them were made up. I found food on the stove in a sort of open-plan galley area towards the stern; it was cold, but hadn't spoiled. Otherwise, there was a certain amount of disorder -cupboards hanging open, a couple of items knocked off shelves- but nothing that suggested forcible boarding or any kind of fight. As near as I could tell, the crew had been taken off by another craft along with their personal effects and simply forgotten to turn the beacon off.

We towed it to Phobos and reported the incident to ATC, but in those days the sharing of information on accidents was somewhat piecemeal so we never did find out who the owners were or what happened to them. At any rate, they never came forward to reclaim the ship, which was far beyond economic repair anyway; turns out it'd been hit by something about the size of a beer can, probably some other craft's jettisoned refuse, and the engines were in so many pieces that the dockyard team couldn't even tell if they were acceleration or constant-speed. It was still airtight and the galley and the plumbing worked fine when hooked up to external power, so I donated it to the Port Lowell YMCA. It's probably still there.

All in all, things were going great. Fenspace was an amazing place to live and work; the sheer energy and vibrant human spirit in those new colonies was like nothing I've known before or since. That I was making a good living from a varied and inteesting occupation just made it even better.

Guess who popped up and nearly ruined everything for me?

* * *

I'd had occasional contact with Frank over the years, mostly by email. He was doing odd jobs and working towards building a ship with some buddies, and occasionally he'd put some work my way, usually someone Earthside looking for passage to one of the L5 stations. His people skills hadn't improved much, but Fenspace seemed to agree with him and he sounded happy enough.

But... Well, some of those fares made me decidedly uncomfortable. Some of them were quite clearly either Turnerites or other far-right crazies; one of them spent the trip handcuffed to a chair in the hold because he kicked off when Barbara told him to get his own coffee, and another I outright refused to take because he was stinking drunk and toting a loaded Armalite. Others weren't quite as blatantly sketchy, but once you got talking to them... Christ. I hadn't heard of Men's Rights Activism until then, and I could have happily gone my whole life not knowing it existed. And the ones who weren't hanging with that crowd all had massive chips on their shoulders over the treatment of people into geeky pastimes by mainstream culture on Earth.

I was starting to get a little annoyed with Frank about this, but in all fairness they did usually behave themselves. But the last straw came in 2011.

It seemed like an ordinary enough gig. Party of five, pickup at a little-used airfield near the US/Canadian border, destination Moonbase Alpha. I'd done a thousand of these runs, often for people who were in some kind of trouble and wished their absence to go unnoticed by the TSA. That was fine by me. The message board through which I conducted these transactions did their best to screen out anyone on Europol or the FBI's wanted lists, and as far as Convention policy is concerned, you start with a clean slate when you make it Up unless you're wanted for war crimes or human trafficking.

(I'm not 100% comfortable with that, to be honest. But if the US insists on vetoing every attempt at a comprehensive multinational extradition agreement through the UN and threatening economic retaliation against countries seeking a bilateral one then I'll be damned if they get to have their cake and eat it.)

But this job went sour fast, and damn near got Barbara and I killed in the process.

We arrived about twenty minutes before the agreed time, and I went over to the tterminal building -if you can call a collection of prefab sheds such- to pay the landing fees and get a weather report. When I entered the office, the very worried-looking airport manager pulled me aside and explained that my passengers had already arrived, but that he'd overheard some things that made him suspicious. The nearest police station was a good twenty miles away and there was no on-site security (we'd had to touch down elsewhere to sort out transit visas), so could I please verify that the sole adult of the group had guardianship or power of attourney?

Sole adult. Yeah, this didn't quite jive with the information I'd been given. Deeply suspicious and extremely displeased, I marched into the 'departure lounge' (which was more of a waiting room) to demand an explanation.

It was as bad as you're probably imagining. Four girls, all biomodded and not one of them a day over fifteen years old, with some obnoxious-looking guy in a cheap suit and sunglasses. When questioned, he claimed to be their 'agent', and was escorting them to audition for an 'independent movie' being shot on one of the asteroids to take advantage of the lack of all those tedious rules and regulations. It wasn't hard to guess the rest.

I nailed him with a good solid jab to the solar plexus, broke his nose with my knee as he doubled over and told the airport manager to call the cops. They turned up pretty damn fast when they realised what was going on, especially once Barbara coaxed the girls into giving us their names. They were all US nationals, and there was an Amber Alert out for one of them; the rest were runaways kicked out by their parents for biomodding. Child Services turned out as well, and figured out the remaining details pretty quickly.

The moment that still haunts me was when one of them said she knew damn well what she was being groomed for, but she went along with it because she had nothing to lose. She couldn't go to the police or she'd be stuck in some prison camp and treated like a terrorist or a lab experiment.
The social workers and the police had a long whispered conference, and eventually told me to load the kids onboard and go. I suppose the mess I made of that sleazy bastard's face was considered sufficient evidence that I was on the up-and-up, and it's not like they had any better options at that point. So we loaded up, took off and made for space...

You'd think that'd be the end of it, but nope. Just as we were taxiing to the runway I spotted a couple of SWAT helicopters from the other side of the border, and the radio immediately lit up as the US cops tried to invoke right of hot pursuit. I throttled up and left them to argue the toss with the Mounties.

And then, ten minutes later, a couple of F-16s started shadowing me and demanding I follow them. I replied that that I was still in Canadian airspace, my aircraft was not legally airworthy over US territory and that I was pretty sure they didn't actually have any legal standing to even be here right now, so would they kindly sod right off.
They responded by launching a Sidewinder at me. I dumped flares, jammed the throttle as far forward as I dared and started frantically dodging and weaving while hollering for assistance on the distress frequency. Someone in the Canadian Forces picked it up, and they must've done their research because they told me I was cleared hot, so I powered up the coilgun and put a round of grapeshot downrange.

I'd only tested the coilgun a few times, and never fired it at a live target until then. The effect was... pretty spectacular. The back end of one of the F-16s pretty much disintegrated from a glancing hit, and the other caught the outer edge of the spread pattern and lost a wingtip.

Both pilots lived, though the one whose aircraft took the brunt of the shot messed his back up pretty badly when he ejected. I'm glad of that, even if they were trying to kill me.

There was one hell of a row afterwards. It turned out that the Illinois State governor had turned out the Air National Guard on his own authority and told them to bring me in as an accessory, and the first NORAD heard of this was when Canadian radar saw them cross the border. The Canadian government was furious at the violation of their territory, and the British consulate had some rather acerbic things to say about it as well, even though they weren't exactly overjoyed to find out about the coilgun. The only reason it didn't blow up into something much worse than an angry exchange of official letters was that all parties concerned wanted to screw the lid down on the incident before it got into the media. The FCC, FAA and the equivalent Canadian acronyms put out a statement saying the message was a practical joke, and everyone but the hardcore conspiracy nuts believed them.

Me? I wanted to file it under "shit that never happened" as much as they did. Even if I am the first Fen to score a kill in combat with an Earthside military, which I sincerely doubt, I don't happen to think it anything to be proud of. I'd had my fill of killing and destruction before I ever came to Fenspace and if I never have to fire that fucking coilgun in anger again so long as I live I'll die a happy man.

Sorry. It's a sore subject, especially around the anniversary of...

Well, that's the story you've come to hear, isn't it?

* * *

As you might imagine, I was bloody furious with Frank. I called him up by voicelink because email wasn't satisfying enough and gave him an almighty hair-dryer about his dubious friends and the clusterfuck I'd been dragged into on his account. He was frantically apologetic and swore up and down he hadn't had a clue what the guy was really up to... And the funny thing is, I think he was telling the truth.

Frank actually seemed to like me, insofar as he liked anyone outside the toxic little echo-chamber he'd sequestered himself in with his buddies; after all, I'd helped him get to Fenspace when nobody else had. Or maybe it was pure pragmatism on his part, recognising me as a valuable asset who shouldn't be expended lightly. Either way, he didn't strike me as having much acting ability, so I'm pretty sure he really was duped by that porn guy. (He's still in prison, by the way. The US Department of Justice can probably tell you where if you want his side of the story.) Still, we parted on the understanding that the next time he had a correspondent ask him to recommend a good charter pilot, he was to send them to someone else.

Anyway, feeling slightly better for having it out with Frank, I made best speed for the Moon Kingdom Memorial and radioed ahead to request the Sailors Armed Militia meet me at the landing pad.

There were rather a lot of them waiting for us, all ostentatiously armed and accompanied by a lady who introduced herself as Ms. Curtis and explained she'd been a social worker before going Up. That was more qualified help than I dared hope for, so I showed her through to the galley and messroom and busied myself making tea while she talked to the four girls.

Yeah, you can see where this is going, can't you? I genuinely did not catch on until they'd left, and I saw her pause in front of the cockpit window to put on her official tiara.
It was just after three o'clock in the afternoon and we had several other pickups to make that day, but my professionalism has its limits. I put Barbara in charge and went in search of a bar.

Mercifully, the next few months were relatively uneventful. Work was plentiful, with a second wave of colonisation happening in the Belt and on the moons of Jupiter and a number of new orbital stations springing up. I did a few removals for the first inhabitants of Island One around that time, and I have to say Mal Ford... or Fjord, or... Just how do you pronounce that? Anyway, I found his well-publicised and very unflattering remarks about the place thoroughly inaccurate: The reality considerably worse!

Which isn't to say it was all smooth sailing. Lots of would-be Belters started going out there and not coming back. Some of that was likely people coming to mischief through negligence or just bad luck, but stories were circulating of organised gangs pouncing on newly-settled rocks to loot supplies, or worse. Settlers started getting better armed and more jumpy, especially when the gangs started using distress calls as bait.

It was against that backdrop that I got another email from Frank, offering me quite a bit over my usual rate to collect himself, a couple of buddies and their gear from an asteroid a short distance from 1186 Turnera. It didn't have a catalogue number, as far as I could tell; presumably Frank's party had located it by chance and not bothered to report the discovery.

Now, that wasn't incriminating by itself; uncharted asteroids are only a navigation hazard if you're flying without radar at close to the Limit, and if you're dumb enough to do that you deserve to get yourself killed, so the only real reason to file the paperwork is the bragging rights. But the location gave me a very uneasy feeling. I only took the job out of a mixture of morbid curiosity and a faint hope that I could use whatever influence I had with Frank to keep him out of trouble.

I was honestly expecting him to have fallen in with the nuttier end of the Separatist fraternity; he had exactly the right combination of persecution complex, intellectual snobbery and questionable people skills to feel right at home with them. But the thing about most Separatists is, they might talk big about how space is the ultimate high ground and all that but they rarely go beyond "civil disobedience"... which generally means making a bloody nuisance of themselves, blatantly mishandling handwavium and generally giving Fen a bad name. (Being opposed to a licensing regime is one thing; I may disagree, but it's a defensible position. But we have rules about how to store and transport the stuff because Extremely Bad Things happen when it gets spilled all over people, okay?)

Frank was... Well, a lot more proactive.

The rock he'd set up shop on was pretty small, about three quarters of a mile in diameter. A couple of 'waved shipping containers clung to one side, and as we moved closer to look for a landing site, I realised with a growing sense of dread that there were half a dozen engines embedded in the rock's surface. Big engines, big enough to potentially push something that size up to a good four or five percent of c.
There was no good engineering reason to build yourself a ship that way. If you needed lots of interior volume then you could buy up and 'wave a container ship for a lot less than what it'd cost to hollow out a rock that size. And why the hell would you strap so many engines to it? Even with a constant-speed drive, it'd steer like a drunken three-legged cow at the best of times; at full speed it'd be a danger to itself and the entire solar system.

As the airlock cycled to admit our passengers I was still telling myself it couldn't be as bad as it looked. Maybe Frank had twigged that whoever designed the thing was a thundering dolt, or worse, and hired me because he wanted out?

Yeah. Wishful thinking.

"Tom, old buddy!" he boomed cheerfully. "Good to see you again. This is Earl and this is Brad. So, can we get going soonish? I set the final countdown on the engines and..."
"What the fuck are you doing out here, Frank?" I demanded.
"Eliminating a threat to Fenspace," he replied, bold as brass. "Look, I realise it's gonna make kind of a mess and all, but do you have a better idea?"

And he launched into a long-winded rant about 'mundanes' and their culture and how it was repressing original thinkers and disdainful of truly worthy pastimes and... Christ almighty, he even threw in something about how the marginalisation of geeks was responsible for his inability to get a woman to have sex with him. Basically, geek culture gets a bum deal so let's genocide everyone who's not a geek.
"It's drastic," he concluded, "but sometimes the world needs men who are hard enough to make the hard choice."
"Like cold-blooded murder?" I replied, surprising myself with how calm I sounded.
"Yep," he said chirpily, sounding pleased that we were on the same wavelength.

And I guess a hard man did make a hard choice that day, because I drew my sidearm and I shot him dead. One of his buddies had a pistol of his own and almost nailed me, but Barbara got him with the coachgun just as he was squeezing the trigger and the shot went high. The other went completely to pieces and begged us not to kill him, so we tied him up and left him in one of the passenger cabins while we ran hell-for-leather to the container where the control systems were located to try and find a way to shut off the countdown.

Frank was pretty thorough, I'll give him that much. Everything was controlled by a hardtech desktop PC: We couldn't enter a command abort the countdown because he'd bunged up all the free USB ports with Superglue and he'd rigged the engines to trigger when the thing turned off, so we couldn't just smash it or yank the Ethernet connection. There was presumably a second system waiting to implement the command, but when we traced the cable it led through a heavy steel hatch that'd been welded shut too thoroughly to crack open in time. I was about ready to lift off and shoot out the engines and to hell with the potentially useful evidence it'd destroy in the process when Barbara pointed out that those engines had to run off something.

It was surprisingly small, a fuel oil tank about the size you'd expect for a farmhouse. It was 'waved pretty thoroughly, but the fuel lines weren't; I didn't even need the plasma torch, just a hacksaw for the hoses themselves and a crowbar to force the valve. The tank must have under a hell of a lot of pressure, because when I finally got it open the damn thing shot me backwards like I'd been fired from a cannon, and the safety tether turned out to be more elastic than we'd imagined and... Oh, I'm sure it seems funny to you, but I ended up in hospital! Cracked ribs and whiplash from the harness, then a broken collarbone, a dislocated shoulder and a concussion from being slammed back into the asteroid.

So, that sucked.

Barbara managed to raise a Belter ship, and they got word to Juno City and then the Convention. The Sailor Armed Militia were dispatched to casevac me, go over the asteroid with a fine-tooth comb and question the surviving conspirator. A search of Frank's body turned up a remote that would have started the rock's engines instantly if he'd managed to grab it in time, which exonerated me of any potential murder charges.

I didn't tell them I'd been so damned angry at that point that I never even noticed he was reaching for something in his pocket, and they didn't ask.

I had to testify to a Convention sub-committee in Crystal Kyoto. I don't remember much of what was said -I was pretty thoroughly dosed up with painkillers- but Haruhi's closing statement is still perfectly clear.
"I can tell you don't want thanks for killing Berquart. I can tell you don't want to be called a hero. But a lot of people owe you their lives, Tom. Never forget that."

There's been a lot of unkind things said about that girl, before and since, but she's alright in my book.

I don't know how much the Convention told the Outer Space Affairs bureau in New York directly, but a mostly accurate version did the rounds on the Interwave after some Belters sent the rock into the sun. They were kind enough to leave Barbara's and my names out of their statement. It would've been quite a nine day wonder in the media if the first evidence that the Sammies had a corruption problem hadn't been surfacing about the same time, and then there was SOS-Con and the war...

Basically, we had more immediate and pressing problems. But it was one of many events that forced us to acknowledge the existence of a darker side to Fenspace, and the need for an organised effort to bring it under control while we still could.

We never did find out how much of a connection this incident had to the Boskone faction itself. The survivor didn't know much; he claimed to have been hired as a camp cook while Frank and several other like-minded individuals worked on turning the rock into a missile, and that he didn't know for sure what they were doing until Frank's little motive rant. Everyone else had left in their own craft before we arrived, and the names and descriptions were circulated on the Interwave to no avail. A couple of them were confirmed killed or captured in the war, but the rest seem to have vanished into thin air.
As for our remaining witness, the part about his being hired as a cook was true enough according to his old flatmate in Port Phobos, and in the absence of any witnesses to contradict the rest of his story the Sammies let him go. I can't tell you where he is now, I'm afraid; he gave the name Thomas Baker, which was probably an alias. Last I heard he was working in a Brubek's on Venus somewhere.

As for just how much damage the rock would've done? Someone ran the numbers and reckoned that at full speed it would've shattered the planet entirely. The debris would have wiped out every orbital station and probably most of the moonbases as well. The survivors would have numbered a couple of hundred thousand, of which a third to one half would then have starved before we could bring enough agridomes on stream.
It's very unlikely that we could have prevented a total Boskone takeover of what was left of Fenspace in those circumstances. Earth and its satellites were the one region they didn't dare raid for fear of forcing NATO or the Chinese to take a side. Without that secure rear and the steady flow of arms and volunteers from the surface, we never could have got a real army organised before we were overrun.

Does that mean Frank and his buddies had help? Good question. For the most part, with certain well-publicised exceptions, the Boskones are not genocidal lunatics; I mean, dead people can't buy smack or pay protection money and it's kind of hard to pimp them out, right? The only one of the leading lights who's batshit enough to consider this a remotely good idea is Agatha Clay, but huge fuck-off explosions aren't really her style.
We do know the 'wavetech on those engines was far too complex a job to have been done on-site, though, and that there's no record of them doing business with anyone in the civilised regions of Fenspace; it wouldn't have been terribly hard to figure out what they intended to do.

My hypothesis is that they had the work done at Boskone Two on a purely commercial basis. According to 'Baker', two or three of the group were pretty wealthy, and I had a hazy idea Frank himself came from money as well. Maybe they didn't put two and two together, maybe they thought it was an extortion scheme, maybe the money was just so good that they chose not to ask any questions. I suspect anyone who could tell us for certain isn't inclined to talk.

I still wonder why Frank called on me of all people to lift him off the rock before it launched. Was he looking for my approval, some sort of endorsement or validation of his actions? He must have known I disapproved of his grudge against anyone not Fen, so I can't imagine how he'd have expected that from me; whatever Frank might have been, he wasn't stupid. Unless some part of him wanted me to stop him? Perhaps he just didn't know anyone else with a ship who'd take his money.

I guess we'll never know now.

If I regret anything at all, it's not staying in better touch with Frank; I couldn't have prevented him from falling into bad company, but I might have been a moderating influence or at least seen warning signs in time to stop him sooner. But damn it, he was a grown man of twenty-five when I dropped him off at New Yavin all those years ago. He should have been old enough to know better.

But I don't feel guilty about killing him. I took neither pride nor pleasure in it, and I still wish it could have been avoided, but it had to be done.

This place will be closing soon, and I should be getting home. One for the road?

Alright. Here's my card; do you mind emailing me a preview copy for a quick fact-check in the cold light of sobriety? Alright, thanks.

Oh, and here's a pull-quote for you: 'If you hear someone talking about Hard Men making Hard Decisions and they mean it, you have to stop them. At any cost.'

It's kind of a Fen joke. Long story.

G'night.

THE END]]> <![CDATA[[Fic] Ghost Story.]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=1936 Fri, 25 Apr 2014 01:10:00 -0500 Dartz]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=1936
It doesn't even need to be a Fenspace story, you probably could replace Jet and Ford with anyone.

------------

"This is one back from the Race to 400. If you don't know what that was, it was when myself, Ford and the Highway Star went up against Ben Rhode's Lunatic Fringe at Bonneville. We filmed a lot of it, so most of the interesting stuff's on the internet…but that's not everything. Because most of it was boring. And other things, well....

We arrived in San Diego, and promptly got delayed by customs and immigration for a few hours, then spend another few hours getting the bike released. I go off to buy a truck to haul all our gear while Ford's dealing with the paperwork. Having a TSAB stamp on the bike doesn't mean a thing to San Diego Port. Now, what Ford thinks of as a truck-and-trailer and what I think of as a truck-and-trailer were two completely different things. And while our budget might've bought a decent enough F-150 and a simple two-axle tow-trailer, what I bought was a smoking old Peterbuilt good for the scrapheap. The frame was being held together by paint and rust alone.

It broke down twice on the drive out of California. Which meant driving straight through the night to make it up to Bonneville on time. It didn't help that we had to cross the top of Arizona before turning North to Bonneville in Utah. Our truck wasn't allowed in Nevada because of all the leaded fuel we had in the trailer.

It was getting well beyond midnight local time and the Peterbuilt seemed to be behaving itself at long last. Ford had dozed off and I was driving it. The radio was on and, despite it being cold and dark outside, it was still warm and cozy in the cab.

Until I start hearing something scratching behind the cab. It's like claws or something. A big fat rat wiggling it's way out from a rust-hole somewhere. I glance in the mirror beside me, to see a shadow dart back behind the cab.

I have just enough time to wonder if I really saw it before there's this big rush of escaping air, and all the truck's brakes lock solid on.

She just looks at me and says "What'd you do?"

"Wasn't me," I say. "It lost air pressure."

Fucking piece of shit truck.

Both of us get out, and sure enough we see one of the lines between cab and trailer has come loose. Only, it hadn't come loose. It'd been cut, right in the middle - like someone had come up to it with a knife.

The obvious answer is a sharp stone or something thrown up by the wheel, even though they were both. We're both two tired to car.

Ford ties the remains off so the actual tractor will still have air, while I head back towards the end of the trailer to pull the locked air-brakes off.

And it's dark back there. It feels like I walk forever, like I could've walked to Mars. Ford's back in the cab and she might as well be on another planet, while I'm passing by feeble orange running lights. The stars are hiding themselves behind the clouds, a thick blanket closing down over the desert. The darkness seems to swallow the truck's own lights, pushing me in towards the trailer.

It's unnerving. It feels like I'm being watched, from somewhere beyond the red-glow of the trailer's back lights. It feels almost like we're islanded in a closed off sea of darkness, the universe ending only meters from the truck. It'd a profound, cloaking black, like staring into the bottom of the ocean.

Swallowing a sense of Claustrophobia, I crawl under the trailer, pushing back against the brakes before locking them off. It's hot under there, hot and dry. A smell begins to prickle inside my nose, one that sets my heart racing and has my skin crawling.

And I have no skin to crawl.

It's a reminder of a screaming death. It carries an echo of terror, of horror, of shameless pity and what amounted to a mercy killing. It carries tears to me eyes even as I fight back against it

It's the smell of burned body. I can pick it out immediately, even though I wish I couldn't. It's a dry, acrid smell - worse than scorched pork and hair - that seems to crawl down the back of my throat and suck all the moisture right out of my body and it's just hanging in the still night air, mingling with warm rubber tyres and hot metal.

I was under the truck, on my hands and knees, unable to move, paralysed in the moment. I can feel the heat from the flames on my face and all I can think about is that I don't want to die like that too, that inside my armour I might live long enough to feel my face melt off before I start to roast. All I could do was ball up and hope it passed over…

The truck's horn blows deep and loud and it shocks me right out of it. If not that then the wallop of my head hitting steel. Even for me, that hurt.

It's then that I realised I'd long finished what I was doing. The brake-parts were sitting in the road. And in my chest, my heart was racing, a shot of adrenaline fizzing through my veins. I scrambled out from underneath, scratching up my knees and palms.

Out in the still night air, the darkness pressed in, taking the breath from my throat. I could feel something lingering over my shoulder before it vanished. It felt more like a rat skittering away, just outside the reach of my senses. The fog of fear began to ease, leaving a faint nausea in the pit of my stomach and powder-dry taste on my mouth.

Even as I jogged back to the cab, I began to write it off.

I still near rip the door open to get inside. When I drop into the driver's seat Ford asks me what kept me.

I tell her that I got a little hung up but I still don't want to hang around. It's a relief that the big Detroit Diesel engine manages to start on the first try, for the first time, even if it's only running on eleven cylinders, one turbo and some of it's own piston rings.

I just dump out of there trailing thick clouds of soot, while Ford's insisting that something's spooked me.

I admit it's a minor panic.

Which is right when the same rat- scratching starts all over again behind us. It makes the hair on the back of my neck bristle. I check both mirrors and see nothing but a flickering shadow that's gone before I'm even certain it was there.

Maybe it was just paranoia.

Ford's half awake beside me, looking in the passenger mirror.

"Something came off the back of the truck." she says, and I look at her for an explanation.

"I just saw something bounce off the road into the desert. A red-reflector or something." She shrugs her shoulders. No big deal. Nothing unsafe.

And that's when things start to make sense. Loose truck part for the scratching. A one-in-a-million bounce from a Stone-chip for the air-line, or the same loose part flapping around. Hot brake dust mingles with fatigue and a lack of tea to cause a mild flashback.

All in my stupid head.

I actually start laughing. She tells me to shut up because some people still require sleep.

We make it to Bonneville on time and it's not even worth a 'no-shit-there-I-was', just another pain-in-the-arse episode from a jallopy-truck. It isn't until I think to check for what fell off that I'm given pause for thought.

I compare mental images to be certain and sure enough, everything's that's supposed to be attached is still fitted. No missing reflectors… nothing. All I find are some scratch marks in the dirt behind the cab that could've been made by Ford fixing the air-hose.

There's a logical explanation for it all…enough to make me feel foolish… but thinking about that night still makes me shiver a little inside.

The morning we were due to drive back to SD to ship the bike home a car was found abandoned on the same road by a State Trooper. It was a complete Marie Celeste. Someone had stopped to change a flat tyre and instead just walked off somewhere, leaving their tools on the road, along with the spare tyre. The car's ignition was still on, though the battery had drained.

They just vanished. The four-state search turned up nothing. Swallowed by the desert night.

And I still have to wonder how exactly a stone managed to not only make it up between the trailer and cab, but fly in at just the right angle to cut a heavy-duty air-line clean through. If it was a loose part that cut the line, why was nothing missing?

And then, what exactly did Ford see coming off the back of the truck?

---------
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?]]>
It doesn't even need to be a Fenspace story, you probably could replace Jet and Ford with anyone.

------------

"This is one back from the Race to 400. If you don't know what that was, it was when myself, Ford and the Highway Star went up against Ben Rhode's Lunatic Fringe at Bonneville. We filmed a lot of it, so most of the interesting stuff's on the internet…but that's not everything. Because most of it was boring. And other things, well....

We arrived in San Diego, and promptly got delayed by customs and immigration for a few hours, then spend another few hours getting the bike released. I go off to buy a truck to haul all our gear while Ford's dealing with the paperwork. Having a TSAB stamp on the bike doesn't mean a thing to San Diego Port. Now, what Ford thinks of as a truck-and-trailer and what I think of as a truck-and-trailer were two completely different things. And while our budget might've bought a decent enough F-150 and a simple two-axle tow-trailer, what I bought was a smoking old Peterbuilt good for the scrapheap. The frame was being held together by paint and rust alone.

It broke down twice on the drive out of California. Which meant driving straight through the night to make it up to Bonneville on time. It didn't help that we had to cross the top of Arizona before turning North to Bonneville in Utah. Our truck wasn't allowed in Nevada because of all the leaded fuel we had in the trailer.

It was getting well beyond midnight local time and the Peterbuilt seemed to be behaving itself at long last. Ford had dozed off and I was driving it. The radio was on and, despite it being cold and dark outside, it was still warm and cozy in the cab.

Until I start hearing something scratching behind the cab. It's like claws or something. A big fat rat wiggling it's way out from a rust-hole somewhere. I glance in the mirror beside me, to see a shadow dart back behind the cab.

I have just enough time to wonder if I really saw it before there's this big rush of escaping air, and all the truck's brakes lock solid on.

She just looks at me and says "What'd you do?"

"Wasn't me," I say. "It lost air pressure."

Fucking piece of shit truck.

Both of us get out, and sure enough we see one of the lines between cab and trailer has come loose. Only, it hadn't come loose. It'd been cut, right in the middle - like someone had come up to it with a knife.

The obvious answer is a sharp stone or something thrown up by the wheel, even though they were both. We're both two tired to car.

Ford ties the remains off so the actual tractor will still have air, while I head back towards the end of the trailer to pull the locked air-brakes off.

And it's dark back there. It feels like I walk forever, like I could've walked to Mars. Ford's back in the cab and she might as well be on another planet, while I'm passing by feeble orange running lights. The stars are hiding themselves behind the clouds, a thick blanket closing down over the desert. The darkness seems to swallow the truck's own lights, pushing me in towards the trailer.

It's unnerving. It feels like I'm being watched, from somewhere beyond the red-glow of the trailer's back lights. It feels almost like we're islanded in a closed off sea of darkness, the universe ending only meters from the truck. It'd a profound, cloaking black, like staring into the bottom of the ocean.

Swallowing a sense of Claustrophobia, I crawl under the trailer, pushing back against the brakes before locking them off. It's hot under there, hot and dry. A smell begins to prickle inside my nose, one that sets my heart racing and has my skin crawling.

And I have no skin to crawl.

It's a reminder of a screaming death. It carries an echo of terror, of horror, of shameless pity and what amounted to a mercy killing. It carries tears to me eyes even as I fight back against it

It's the smell of burned body. I can pick it out immediately, even though I wish I couldn't. It's a dry, acrid smell - worse than scorched pork and hair - that seems to crawl down the back of my throat and suck all the moisture right out of my body and it's just hanging in the still night air, mingling with warm rubber tyres and hot metal.

I was under the truck, on my hands and knees, unable to move, paralysed in the moment. I can feel the heat from the flames on my face and all I can think about is that I don't want to die like that too, that inside my armour I might live long enough to feel my face melt off before I start to roast. All I could do was ball up and hope it passed over…

The truck's horn blows deep and loud and it shocks me right out of it. If not that then the wallop of my head hitting steel. Even for me, that hurt.

It's then that I realised I'd long finished what I was doing. The brake-parts were sitting in the road. And in my chest, my heart was racing, a shot of adrenaline fizzing through my veins. I scrambled out from underneath, scratching up my knees and palms.

Out in the still night air, the darkness pressed in, taking the breath from my throat. I could feel something lingering over my shoulder before it vanished. It felt more like a rat skittering away, just outside the reach of my senses. The fog of fear began to ease, leaving a faint nausea in the pit of my stomach and powder-dry taste on my mouth.

Even as I jogged back to the cab, I began to write it off.

I still near rip the door open to get inside. When I drop into the driver's seat Ford asks me what kept me.

I tell her that I got a little hung up but I still don't want to hang around. It's a relief that the big Detroit Diesel engine manages to start on the first try, for the first time, even if it's only running on eleven cylinders, one turbo and some of it's own piston rings.

I just dump out of there trailing thick clouds of soot, while Ford's insisting that something's spooked me.

I admit it's a minor panic.

Which is right when the same rat- scratching starts all over again behind us. It makes the hair on the back of my neck bristle. I check both mirrors and see nothing but a flickering shadow that's gone before I'm even certain it was there.

Maybe it was just paranoia.

Ford's half awake beside me, looking in the passenger mirror.

"Something came off the back of the truck." she says, and I look at her for an explanation.

"I just saw something bounce off the road into the desert. A red-reflector or something." She shrugs her shoulders. No big deal. Nothing unsafe.

And that's when things start to make sense. Loose truck part for the scratching. A one-in-a-million bounce from a Stone-chip for the air-line, or the same loose part flapping around. Hot brake dust mingles with fatigue and a lack of tea to cause a mild flashback.

All in my stupid head.

I actually start laughing. She tells me to shut up because some people still require sleep.

We make it to Bonneville on time and it's not even worth a 'no-shit-there-I-was', just another pain-in-the-arse episode from a jallopy-truck. It isn't until I think to check for what fell off that I'm given pause for thought.

I compare mental images to be certain and sure enough, everything's that's supposed to be attached is still fitted. No missing reflectors… nothing. All I find are some scratch marks in the dirt behind the cab that could've been made by Ford fixing the air-hose.

There's a logical explanation for it all…enough to make me feel foolish… but thinking about that night still makes me shiver a little inside.

The morning we were due to drive back to SD to ship the bike home a car was found abandoned on the same road by a State Trooper. It was a complete Marie Celeste. Someone had stopped to change a flat tyre and instead just walked off somewhere, leaving their tools on the road, along with the spare tyre. The car's ignition was still on, though the battery had drained.

They just vanished. The four-state search turned up nothing. Swallowed by the desert night.

And I still have to wonder how exactly a stone managed to not only make it up between the trailer and cab, but fly in at just the right angle to cut a heavy-duty air-line clean through. If it was a loose part that cut the line, why was nothing missing?

And then, what exactly did Ford see coming off the back of the truck?

---------
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?]]> <![CDATA[Deleted]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=1935 Tue, 11 Mar 2014 04:22:00 -0500 Ross Van Loan]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=1935 <![CDATA[Shegomania, Chapter 20 : A Stitch Back in Time 3 : Mad for Du (season 0)]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=1934 Wed, 12 Feb 2014 04:40:00 -0500 Ross Van Loan]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=1934 bouquet?”

Dr.--unofficially--Drakken smiled what he hoped was a disarming smile. “Yes, as quickly as possible.”

She moued, very prettily as far as Drakken was concerned. “To whom?”

He handed the black jumpsuited woman an envelope of creamy seed paper.

Drakken was fairly sure that if she were truly put out by him this conversation would have truly ended with the trivial nature of the cargo. Ramona Wandblume had the reputation of dealing only in small exotics & valuables : she wouldn’t even consider thinking about couriering a collectable figurine less than two hundred & fifty U.S dollar-equivalent credit units. The dual facts that she had neither stormed out, nor reamed him out, but had agreed poutingly suggested that he had a beachhead from which to conduct further operations.

Wandblume opened the envelope, shook out the card into a palmy palm. Her eyebrows shot up once she hit the punchline.

“They’re lovely, dumpkof!” She smacked him across the head with a mixed assortment of hardy zero-gee blooms.

“Couldn’t you just have asked me out, like a...” She caught herself which was another sign that she was relaxed. Flower bedecked Dr. Drakken was elated : the evolving assignation was enthralling.

“...Normal guy?” He threw his blue arms skywards with a risible, vivacious bark of laughter : “What fun is normal?”

“None at all!” She brushed a sprig of baby’s breath off of his shoulder. “Vhat took you so long? I vasn’t exactly being subtle six months ago!”

“Between being Fen still-in-the-wrapper and never before really having any girlfriend experience, I would have missed a Vegas display of dating interest!”

“Vell then, time to start exposing you to girls...that did not come out vell?”

Dr. Drakken, was poleaxed for three point five seconds ; then giggling his guts out on moonrock : “It was a bit awkward,” He managed, bootstrapping himself off of the floor and out of a potentially mood killing explanation. “ but I know exactly what you meant!”

“Gut! Ve vill begin vith coffee und see.”

She dragged him into the fantastically convenient coffee shop, Lollygags.

Sweeping her eyes across the cozy little booths, faux pleather--doubly fake!--arm chairs, diode candles & plasteak wood decor, Wandblume declared : “A bit stiff, but It vill do!”

Drakken’s assessment was very esoteric: “Wow, Moon Boodle’s!”

The mustachioed man, listlessly polishing the same glass over and over, behind the bar intoned moodily, “More like Moon Boondoggle’s, sir.”

Sure enough the place was emptier than church on a Saturday night.

“Moon vas?!”

As they took their seats in a booth both slightly larger and more fun than a confessional, Drakken exposited : “Before I turned blue I was set upon weekend vacationing as H.G. Wells’ Victorian mad scientist, Professor Cavor. This,” He spun about slowly encompassing the establishment’s ersatz appeal in a out flung swing of arms. “is exactly like the secret Eidolon Sanctum room in Boodle's Gentlemen's club* where my slightly altered variant of Well’s scientist meets with the cream of society to ensure the Victorian space program!**

There was a glister in Ramona Wandblume’s eyes that fought and lost against the slightest of scowls as she watched her date’s waltzing reverie unfold : they was the outward manifestations of her inner verdict regarding his geek gusto. She found it as perplexingly sexy now as the first time she had met him six months previously.

Drakken only enhanced her consideration of him through a bit of banter with the barman.

“It’s like this all of the time?”

“All of the time, sir.” Drakken was beginning to see less of a man and more of a bipedal bar tending Eeyore.

“This must be the only not bright orange bubble-tea establishment on the whole of Luna!”

“I reckon so, sir.” Drakken was now fairly confident that the listless laborer sported a detachable pink ribboned tail blocked from view by the dark fake wood and actual brass of the bar.

“Tapioca is not a beverage!”

“Yes, sir.”

“I, my good man, can not in good conscience let such an excellent establishment go by the wayside!”

This was said with such ardor that, even in the eyes of Eeyore, a fragile flickering of faith fired faintly.

“That would be appreciated, sir.”

Wandblume strongly suspected that it wasn’t just bluster on the part of the slightly maddening man that was attaining approval in the metaphorical atria of her affections.

She was correct.

*****

*Boodle’s exists : the Eidolon Sanctum does not.

**More than a slight alteration of H.G. Well’s, The First Men in the Moon. ]]> bouquet?”

Dr.--unofficially--Drakken smiled what he hoped was a disarming smile. “Yes, as quickly as possible.”

She moued, very prettily as far as Drakken was concerned. “To whom?”

He handed the black jumpsuited woman an envelope of creamy seed paper.

Drakken was fairly sure that if she were truly put out by him this conversation would have truly ended with the trivial nature of the cargo. Ramona Wandblume had the reputation of dealing only in small exotics & valuables : she wouldn’t even consider thinking about couriering a collectable figurine less than two hundred & fifty U.S dollar-equivalent credit units. The dual facts that she had neither stormed out, nor reamed him out, but had agreed poutingly suggested that he had a beachhead from which to conduct further operations.

Wandblume opened the envelope, shook out the card into a palmy palm. Her eyebrows shot up once she hit the punchline.

“They’re lovely, dumpkof!” She smacked him across the head with a mixed assortment of hardy zero-gee blooms.

“Couldn’t you just have asked me out, like a...” She caught herself which was another sign that she was relaxed. Flower bedecked Dr. Drakken was elated : the evolving assignation was enthralling.

“...Normal guy?” He threw his blue arms skywards with a risible, vivacious bark of laughter : “What fun is normal?”

“None at all!” She brushed a sprig of baby’s breath off of his shoulder. “Vhat took you so long? I vasn’t exactly being subtle six months ago!”

“Between being Fen still-in-the-wrapper and never before really having any girlfriend experience, I would have missed a Vegas display of dating interest!”

“Vell then, time to start exposing you to girls...that did not come out vell?”

Dr. Drakken, was poleaxed for three point five seconds ; then giggling his guts out on moonrock : “It was a bit awkward,” He managed, bootstrapping himself off of the floor and out of a potentially mood killing explanation. “ but I know exactly what you meant!”

“Gut! Ve vill begin vith coffee und see.”

She dragged him into the fantastically convenient coffee shop, Lollygags.

Sweeping her eyes across the cozy little booths, faux pleather--doubly fake!--arm chairs, diode candles & plasteak wood decor, Wandblume declared : “A bit stiff, but It vill do!”

Drakken’s assessment was very esoteric: “Wow, Moon Boodle’s!”

The mustachioed man, listlessly polishing the same glass over and over, behind the bar intoned moodily, “More like Moon Boondoggle’s, sir.”

Sure enough the place was emptier than church on a Saturday night.

“Moon vas?!”

As they took their seats in a booth both slightly larger and more fun than a confessional, Drakken exposited : “Before I turned blue I was set upon weekend vacationing as H.G. Wells’ Victorian mad scientist, Professor Cavor. This,” He spun about slowly encompassing the establishment’s ersatz appeal in a out flung swing of arms. “is exactly like the secret Eidolon Sanctum room in Boodle's Gentlemen's club* where my slightly altered variant of Well’s scientist meets with the cream of society to ensure the Victorian space program!**

There was a glister in Ramona Wandblume’s eyes that fought and lost against the slightest of scowls as she watched her date’s waltzing reverie unfold : they was the outward manifestations of her inner verdict regarding his geek gusto. She found it as perplexingly sexy now as the first time she had met him six months previously.

Drakken only enhanced her consideration of him through a bit of banter with the barman.

“It’s like this all of the time?”

“All of the time, sir.” Drakken was beginning to see less of a man and more of a bipedal bar tending Eeyore.

“This must be the only not bright orange bubble-tea establishment on the whole of Luna!”

“I reckon so, sir.” Drakken was now fairly confident that the listless laborer sported a detachable pink ribboned tail blocked from view by the dark fake wood and actual brass of the bar.

“Tapioca is not a beverage!”

“Yes, sir.”

“I, my good man, can not in good conscience let such an excellent establishment go by the wayside!”

This was said with such ardor that, even in the eyes of Eeyore, a fragile flickering of faith fired faintly.

“That would be appreciated, sir.”

Wandblume strongly suspected that it wasn’t just bluster on the part of the slightly maddening man that was attaining approval in the metaphorical atria of her affections.

She was correct.

*****

*Boodle’s exists : the Eidolon Sanctum does not.

**More than a slight alteration of H.G. Well’s, The First Men in the Moon. ]]> <![CDATA[Shegomania 19 : A Stitch Back in Time 2 : Of Majesties & Mads (season 0)]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=1933 Fri, 07 Feb 2014 03:07:00 -0500 Ross Van Loan]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=1933
“Ojisan, who taught you flying?”

Still holding on to the strut as if it was as significant to his bearing as was his skeleton, he weakly wagged : “An English billiards master!”

He further confounded the catgirl’s nonplussed expression with : “Any carom you can walk away from...” He experimented with relying entirely upon his own inner framework by letting go of his external spine ; found that independent standing was possible ; began to explore the possibilities of mobility ; shambled unsteadily away from the perilous possibilities of space and towards the safer sanctuaries of station interiors.

By the time he staggered into Crystal Hiroshima’s bridge he almost looked his not-that-old cyan-self. Not enough so that Tanith Curtis didn’t notice : “Another hard landing?”

He flashed a weak variant of his usually enthusiastic grin. “Another soft crash.”

Tanith smirked; managed to make it pretty. “It’s a good thing that you choose to fly a submersible : I don’t think a Dodge Dart or a Chevy Cavalier could stand up to your...skills.”

He returned the smirk ; crossed back over into the preserve of one hundred percent Dr. Drakken ®. “Maybe a Mazda made of neutron-degenerate matter : got one kicking about?”

“Made of what?”

“Unobtanium.”

“That’s not even on the Periodic chart!”

He mimed wrenching a steering wheel around in classic Hollywood exaggerated fake driving motions. “Exactly! There’s nothing tough enough to survive my driving.”

Tanith gave blue skinned Mad tailor a solicitous stare. “Then you better hire a chauffeur before you really crash and I end up short an decent tailor, a passable environmental systems specialist & a fantastic friend.”

That candid consignment of concern cracked Drakken’s carapace of comedy. He considered his comrade with a seldom seen semblance of seriousness. A tear or two might even have been secreted by ducts located within ocular orbits.

“For a friend.” He wasn’t choked up...well not beyond the capacity of speech.

Curtis hugged him ; felt the emotional shift commencing through his body before Drakken’s forebrain was cognizant of it. She decoupled the clutch just in time to see the facial manifestations of synaptic epiphany.

“That’s the longest that I’m going to see you ever looking serious.”

“Absolutely!” The grin was back ; wider, a smidge, than before.

She returned the grin. She couldn’t help it : he was infectious.

“What are we grinning about?”

“There is someone.”

His breathiness sparked off a lambent glimmer in Tanith’s dark eyes.

“You’ve met someone.”

“ I’ve almost met her : a freelance courier, Ramona.”

“Well get out there and finish meeting her, idiot!”

Drakken looked taken aback at such an uncomplicated & plain plan ; then the grin resurfaced.

“Is that an order, my queen?”

“Think of it as an stipulated suggestion!”

“Your Majesty!” Being an essential being of melodrama, Drakken’s bow was somehow gracious & honest whilst still being full-on-Shatner-Stratford-style.

“From anyone else that would be of have been the single most brazenly insincere flourish ever perpetrated within the bounds of my august presence!” She almost managed to keep her face majestic & composed as she uttered this twaddle. Almost.

“ Get out of here, fool!” She said, fondly.

"What about our meeting?"

"This is more important!"

With a livelier step than when he arrived, Dr. Drakken ® withdrew. ]]>
“Ojisan, who taught you flying?”

Still holding on to the strut as if it was as significant to his bearing as was his skeleton, he weakly wagged : “An English billiards master!”

He further confounded the catgirl’s nonplussed expression with : “Any carom you can walk away from...” He experimented with relying entirely upon his own inner framework by letting go of his external spine ; found that independent standing was possible ; began to explore the possibilities of mobility ; shambled unsteadily away from the perilous possibilities of space and towards the safer sanctuaries of station interiors.

By the time he staggered into Crystal Hiroshima’s bridge he almost looked his not-that-old cyan-self. Not enough so that Tanith Curtis didn’t notice : “Another hard landing?”

He flashed a weak variant of his usually enthusiastic grin. “Another soft crash.”

Tanith smirked; managed to make it pretty. “It’s a good thing that you choose to fly a submersible : I don’t think a Dodge Dart or a Chevy Cavalier could stand up to your...skills.”

He returned the smirk ; crossed back over into the preserve of one hundred percent Dr. Drakken ®. “Maybe a Mazda made of neutron-degenerate matter : got one kicking about?”

“Made of what?”

“Unobtanium.”

“That’s not even on the Periodic chart!”

He mimed wrenching a steering wheel around in classic Hollywood exaggerated fake driving motions. “Exactly! There’s nothing tough enough to survive my driving.”

Tanith gave blue skinned Mad tailor a solicitous stare. “Then you better hire a chauffeur before you really crash and I end up short an decent tailor, a passable environmental systems specialist & a fantastic friend.”

That candid consignment of concern cracked Drakken’s carapace of comedy. He considered his comrade with a seldom seen semblance of seriousness. A tear or two might even have been secreted by ducts located within ocular orbits.

“For a friend.” He wasn’t choked up...well not beyond the capacity of speech.

Curtis hugged him ; felt the emotional shift commencing through his body before Drakken’s forebrain was cognizant of it. She decoupled the clutch just in time to see the facial manifestations of synaptic epiphany.

“That’s the longest that I’m going to see you ever looking serious.”

“Absolutely!” The grin was back ; wider, a smidge, than before.

She returned the grin. She couldn’t help it : he was infectious.

“What are we grinning about?”

“There is someone.”

His breathiness sparked off a lambent glimmer in Tanith’s dark eyes.

“You’ve met someone.”

“ I’ve almost met her : a freelance courier, Ramona.”

“Well get out there and finish meeting her, idiot!”

Drakken looked taken aback at such an uncomplicated & plain plan ; then the grin resurfaced.

“Is that an order, my queen?”

“Think of it as an stipulated suggestion!”

“Your Majesty!” Being an essential being of melodrama, Drakken’s bow was somehow gracious & honest whilst still being full-on-Shatner-Stratford-style.

“From anyone else that would be of have been the single most brazenly insincere flourish ever perpetrated within the bounds of my august presence!” She almost managed to keep her face majestic & composed as she uttered this twaddle. Almost.

“ Get out of here, fool!” She said, fondly.

"What about our meeting?"

"This is more important!"

With a livelier step than when he arrived, Dr. Drakken ® withdrew. ]]> <![CDATA[Shegomania, Chapter 18 : A Stitch Back in Time (season 0)]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=1932 Sat, 18 Jan 2014 04:05:00 -0500 Ross Van Loan]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=1932
“Gah, I’m surrounded by ‘Eighties action figures!”

He had to do something about all the senshi costumes that crinkled, ill-fit & flashed cheap fabrics constantly within the sphere of his new existence.

He sought the Lunar leader.

“I’m hanging a tailor’s shingle.”

Tanith Curtis attempted to smooth down an all together too rigid, too shiny and far too plastic looking skirt as she navigated around her cluttered office desk to offer her guest a enthusiastic, firm handshake.

“Real clothes? You don’t know how sick I am of our Hallowe’en wardrobes! What do you need to start?”

“What don’t I need?”

She made a call.

“Bev, can you make a shopping run with...”

“Van Loan,” Van Loan offered.

The voice on the other end of the speaker phone sounded more than a little dubious : “I’m pretty busy down...”

“He’s a dress maker!”

“I’ll be right there!”

That’s how he met the second boss lady, Beverly Hayakawa. A Stellvia & Greenwood shopping excursion commenced : he acquired fabrics from the latter, the tools and resources for jewelry design from the former. Feeling a little giddy at the most that he had ever been in hock at any one time, Van Loan was return moon-shuttled by a

future-wardrobe enthused Hayakawa.

“True tiaras! I can’t wait!”

****

It was with his new found goal and his new found stock that he discovered that there was more to his recent ‘Waviation than just turning blue. On some fundamental level, he fabricated outfits that were well beyond his official ken. Oh, if he concentrated he could make perfectly acceptable outfits ; but if he released his consciousness in favour of...muscle memory? generational genetic recall? voodoo?...he was the Carl Fabergé of costuming!

It was nice when the membership expanded into the realm of the ‘action girl’. Van Loan, now established Fen, Dr. (unofficial) Drakken, welcomed the enrichment of the costuming orders : seifuku & magical girl outfits, while his rye & churned cream, tended to fall within the dual spectrums of repetition & perversion. The one he was finessing now fell well within the gravitation of the far pole of the latter ; but at least by extension of this wanton fabric abandon it was far from a routine build. Holding up the ‘wide belt’ & scant-more-than-pasties top, he informed the outfit, “Your owner is a naughty, naughty girl!”

“Do you always harangue your outfits?” The wry comment originated directly from his six o’clock blind spot.

He jumped, but only a scant three feet : hardly a start at all. “Only the very vulgar variety.” He replied, rapidly re-stuffing his metaphorical heart, and other major & minor organs into his chest cavity.

“yes, it is a filthy, filthy getup : exactly what I ordered!” The über pneumatic satirical sass enthused. (sass: (noun) A brash, bumptious, brazen being) She held it up against the plentitude of her physique. “Umm, how is this supposed to stay...attached?”

Van Loan handed her the complimentary case of spirit gum.

“What’s this?”

Trying his best to remain somewhere within the bounds of professionalism, Van Loan found himself applying considerable amounts of adhesive to equally considerable amounts of a girl who was far less of a Lorelei than she immediately let on. For his troubles, Van Loan received an ample sum and an equally bounteous quantity of gratitude for gallantry.

After the lass had left, Van Loan poured himself a double of his very best single malt. He hoisted the weighty Scotch glass in a self-toast:

“To the girl I don’t have to be professional with!”

He proceeded to salve his soul with the honeyed silk of a twelve year old Cardhu. ]]>
“Gah, I’m surrounded by ‘Eighties action figures!”

He had to do something about all the senshi costumes that crinkled, ill-fit & flashed cheap fabrics constantly within the sphere of his new existence.

He sought the Lunar leader.

“I’m hanging a tailor’s shingle.”

Tanith Curtis attempted to smooth down an all together too rigid, too shiny and far too plastic looking skirt as she navigated around her cluttered office desk to offer her guest a enthusiastic, firm handshake.

“Real clothes? You don’t know how sick I am of our Hallowe’en wardrobes! What do you need to start?”

“What don’t I need?”

She made a call.

“Bev, can you make a shopping run with...”

“Van Loan,” Van Loan offered.

The voice on the other end of the speaker phone sounded more than a little dubious : “I’m pretty busy down...”

“He’s a dress maker!”

“I’ll be right there!”

That’s how he met the second boss lady, Beverly Hayakawa. A Stellvia & Greenwood shopping excursion commenced : he acquired fabrics from the latter, the tools and resources for jewelry design from the former. Feeling a little giddy at the most that he had ever been in hock at any one time, Van Loan was return moon-shuttled by a

future-wardrobe enthused Hayakawa.

“True tiaras! I can’t wait!”

****

It was with his new found goal and his new found stock that he discovered that there was more to his recent ‘Waviation than just turning blue. On some fundamental level, he fabricated outfits that were well beyond his official ken. Oh, if he concentrated he could make perfectly acceptable outfits ; but if he released his consciousness in favour of...muscle memory? generational genetic recall? voodoo?...he was the Carl Fabergé of costuming!

It was nice when the membership expanded into the realm of the ‘action girl’. Van Loan, now established Fen, Dr. (unofficial) Drakken, welcomed the enrichment of the costuming orders : seifuku & magical girl outfits, while his rye & churned cream, tended to fall within the dual spectrums of repetition & perversion. The one he was finessing now fell well within the gravitation of the far pole of the latter ; but at least by extension of this wanton fabric abandon it was far from a routine build. Holding up the ‘wide belt’ & scant-more-than-pasties top, he informed the outfit, “Your owner is a naughty, naughty girl!”

“Do you always harangue your outfits?” The wry comment originated directly from his six o’clock blind spot.

He jumped, but only a scant three feet : hardly a start at all. “Only the very vulgar variety.” He replied, rapidly re-stuffing his metaphorical heart, and other major & minor organs into his chest cavity.

“yes, it is a filthy, filthy getup : exactly what I ordered!” The über pneumatic satirical sass enthused. (sass: (noun) A brash, bumptious, brazen being) She held it up against the plentitude of her physique. “Umm, how is this supposed to stay...attached?”

Van Loan handed her the complimentary case of spirit gum.

“What’s this?”

Trying his best to remain somewhere within the bounds of professionalism, Van Loan found himself applying considerable amounts of adhesive to equally considerable amounts of a girl who was far less of a Lorelei than she immediately let on. For his troubles, Van Loan received an ample sum and an equally bounteous quantity of gratitude for gallantry.

After the lass had left, Van Loan poured himself a double of his very best single malt. He hoisted the weighty Scotch glass in a self-toast:

“To the girl I don’t have to be professional with!”

He proceeded to salve his soul with the honeyed silk of a twelve year old Cardhu. ]]> <![CDATA[Shegomania, Chapter 17 : No androids ifs or bots (Season 2)]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=1931 Fri, 06 Dec 2013 04:50:00 -0500 Ross Van Loan]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=1931 An eerily white ceramic bonded alloy ribcage was levered upwards out of her torso, grotesque salon doors to an arcane anatomical apparatus of pink polymer musculature, burnished nitinol plated organ systems, ersatz colour coded endocrine, exocrine and nerve matrices, the gold wink of an anodized spine at the nodes of neck and pelvis ; and, lower down, the uncanny analogues that were usually more euphemistically referred to as plumbing than they were in this particular...casing.
Dr Drakken, referencing an enormous Grey’s Anatomy, nodded appreciatively at each positively identified body system analogue. That is until his eyes fell upon the box. “Is that a...?” He flipped to a page of the medical tome, looked triumphant, before melodramatically heaving the book out of his scramble to get a closer look.
Twenty complained, “Boss, you’re in the shoot!”
“What’s what?!” Kohran sounded a trifle miffed.
Drakken didn’t actually put his head within her torso, but he came close as he scrutinized the structure. “You’ve got an appendix!”
“I do?”
“You do! Your physical structure parallels biology down to the vestigial tissue level...at least in your GI tract. This is fantastic!”
“But I’m not a biologic!”
“I know, but your body has at least one analog of evolutionarily scaled time!”
They both were quite in the scientific moment until Twenty, off-hand tentacle waving in irritation, barked, “Boss!!”
“Sorry, Twenty!” He stepped out of Twenty’s camera field.
“and where there’s one...”
“...There may be others,” Drakken finished for her.
“Fascinating! I may possess multiple evolutionarily obsolescent traits!”
“You might even have a coccyx!”
‘Tesla’s coils’, he thought, ‘the Transhumanists are going to go ape!’
****
Her dermis and epidermis reapplied, Kohran Li reviewed the images of her layout.
“Well this has certainly been...revealing! That’s a really good shot, Twenty : I love the way you bring out my photoreceptors!”
“ Thanks! I’d blush, but I don’t have your subcutaneous capillary load!” Twenty’s carmine oculus was focussed on his boss as this addendum was dropped with a diminutive dollop of dolor.
It wasn’t lost upon Drakken. “If you want capillaries, you’ll probably also be wanting feet.”
“And everything else?” The cyclopean eye socket was doing that dewy puppy dog thing that shouldn’t have been possible given the inflexible structure of Twenty’s ‘eye’.
“Everything!” Drakken threw an arm around the choked up casing.
“Oh, Boss!” Twenty was the very happiest smart bomb.
****
Drakken displayed the selected images of Li to his wife.
“The closeup of her cranium will be the cover shot, and this full body shot will be the central June pullout. What do you think?”
“I think I’d better remind you about flesh before you go running off with a toaster!” She scattered the pictures with a casual swipe , and stalked towards him with anything but a casual intent.
“You think they’re ho...”He didn’t get to finish, but he really didn’t seem to mind.]]> An eerily white ceramic bonded alloy ribcage was levered upwards out of her torso, grotesque salon doors to an arcane anatomical apparatus of pink polymer musculature, burnished nitinol plated organ systems, ersatz colour coded endocrine, exocrine and nerve matrices, the gold wink of an anodized spine at the nodes of neck and pelvis ; and, lower down, the uncanny analogues that were usually more euphemistically referred to as plumbing than they were in this particular...casing.
Dr Drakken, referencing an enormous Grey’s Anatomy, nodded appreciatively at each positively identified body system analogue. That is until his eyes fell upon the box. “Is that a...?” He flipped to a page of the medical tome, looked triumphant, before melodramatically heaving the book out of his scramble to get a closer look.
Twenty complained, “Boss, you’re in the shoot!”
“What’s what?!” Kohran sounded a trifle miffed.
Drakken didn’t actually put his head within her torso, but he came close as he scrutinized the structure. “You’ve got an appendix!”
“I do?”
“You do! Your physical structure parallels biology down to the vestigial tissue level...at least in your GI tract. This is fantastic!”
“But I’m not a biologic!”
“I know, but your body has at least one analog of evolutionarily scaled time!”
They both were quite in the scientific moment until Twenty, off-hand tentacle waving in irritation, barked, “Boss!!”
“Sorry, Twenty!” He stepped out of Twenty’s camera field.
“and where there’s one...”
“...There may be others,” Drakken finished for her.
“Fascinating! I may possess multiple evolutionarily obsolescent traits!”
“You might even have a coccyx!”
‘Tesla’s coils’, he thought, ‘the Transhumanists are going to go ape!’
****
Her dermis and epidermis reapplied, Kohran Li reviewed the images of her layout.
“Well this has certainly been...revealing! That’s a really good shot, Twenty : I love the way you bring out my photoreceptors!”
“ Thanks! I’d blush, but I don’t have your subcutaneous capillary load!” Twenty’s carmine oculus was focussed on his boss as this addendum was dropped with a diminutive dollop of dolor.
It wasn’t lost upon Drakken. “If you want capillaries, you’ll probably also be wanting feet.”
“And everything else?” The cyclopean eye socket was doing that dewy puppy dog thing that shouldn’t have been possible given the inflexible structure of Twenty’s ‘eye’.
“Everything!” Drakken threw an arm around the choked up casing.
“Oh, Boss!” Twenty was the very happiest smart bomb.
****
Drakken displayed the selected images of Li to his wife.
“The closeup of her cranium will be the cover shot, and this full body shot will be the central June pullout. What do you think?”
“I think I’d better remind you about flesh before you go running off with a toaster!” She scattered the pictures with a casual swipe , and stalked towards him with anything but a casual intent.
“You think they’re ho...”He didn’t get to finish, but he really didn’t seem to mind.]]> <![CDATA[Shegomania, Chapter 16 : Vom Trauung (season 2)]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=1930 Thu, 28 Nov 2013 01:35:00 -0500 Ross Van Loan]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=1930 Brynhildr Wandblume, escorted up the aisle by a father Wotan trying desperately not to look tickled by his role and thus comporting himself in a grandly godish fashion, reflected on the event as her marital metals reflected the event that it was so much cooler than the mundane marital method that would have gone down if her wedding hadn’t been co-opted by the Patrol. Certainly her volks wouldn’t be nearly as in to it as they were in their roles as Germanic gods. As the pair’s promenade proceeded beneath a gently swaying canopy of heraldic guidons, the slow build majesty of Fugue State’s rendition of Das Rhinegold’s Prelude swelled electric guitar and ondes Martenot throughout the hall.
Before the sword stabbed Yggdrasil stood the Weld ethereal in flowing white Galadriels--cutout cleverly inserted--and down and to the side, cyan Siegfried, his tartan Highland clan...well his parents, anyway ; and his best, deeply hooded & cloaked, mystery-man.
At the tree alter, at the final dying thrum of the martenot, the Weld commenced to prove that she was an exceptional love weld with an impromptu service incorporating a neat synthesis of all the patchwork paramilitary pomp.
“Marriage isn’t a scrap, a fracas, a battle. It is a war. A holy war. A crusade. A glorious struggle to preserve, to survive, to hold fast to the one truth that has brought you to this hallowed moment : that singly your lives were incomplete, partial, cursory, weak ; but together you will be fulfilled, total, thorough, unassailable.” The weld flung her arms outwards to embrace the assembled. “And that not only applies to the lives of Ramona & Donald but also to those of the Wandblume & Van Loan tribes. For a wedding is more than the binding of couples : it is the uniting of tribes : It is the inking of treaties : It is the forging of alliances : it is the fortifying of families. marriage is the true weaponized potential of love!” She considered the main participants with an ethereal gaze worthy of Cate Blanchett.
“ Are you, Ramona Wandblume prepared for general bliss alongside your martial counterpart?”

“Ja, ich bin!”
Are you, Donald Van Loan prepared to be Ramona’s ever faithful biumvir?”
“Etiam!”
Assuming that both replies meant ‘yes!’, the Weld continued : “Then by the power of the Love of the Cosmos, I hereby weld your two lives, your two pneumas, your two selves into the greater whole of the beautiful mutuality of matrimony! Seal the pact with the traditional osculations!”
It was quite the kiss.
***
Ramona’s baby sister, all adorable six years of her packed into the cutest Rhine maiden outfit ever thrown together in six hours, strew flower petals along with an almost equally adorable nix Pitchy as the newly welds paraded under the saber arcade of a Prussian hussar honor guard to the tune of Fugue State’s stately Metal rendition of the Wagner’s Treulich geführt.
***
The reception was a mad mishmash of Oktoberfest & Robbie Burns Day. Schnitzel & haggis fed the guests ; schnapps & single malts watered them ; alpine horns, bag pipes and Fugue State entertained them. None of it would have been possible without the considerable resources--human resources that Vendor had at her disposal. Her operatives, with the exception of Starling and Lecter--she’d been busy enough with the Doe, and he’d been busy enough keeping her out of too much trouble ; and now they were actual wedding guests--were the waiters, bartenders, disc spinners, and caterers.
The only significant role outside of Vendor’s control was the best man. He he had emerged unbidden exactly at the moment, six hours ago, that Vendor had realized that all of her attempts to secure best men had come to naught. It was very odd, but then the Fen normality baseline was insane in the Dane membrane. So she ran the stranger, who never once removed his deeply hooded hood, through the best man test ; he passed with the sort of knowledge that only a lifelong friend or family member could possess ; and Vendor hired him for the key role. And as she watched him perform, she was damn glad that she had...even though she still had no idea who he was.
Strider, the name Vendor had granted him, was, indeed, the best man. He commenced the revelries with a fantastically astute and pithy periodic tabulation of the groom that was as hilarious as it was touching. The maid of honour, an eleventh hour whisked-away Teachers’ college friend of Ramona’s, turned in a competent performance but even A. Lincoln & O. Wilde would have found the best mystery man a hard act to follow.
Then he was seemingly everywhere ensuring the fulfillment of his duty as the couple’s champion until at exactly the time that consensus had been reached regarding his de-hooding, he was nowhere to be found. He had vanished ; completely, concisely and compendiously.
Van Loan, busily agitating the dual antennae zones of Black Betty, his prized theremin, in concert with Fugue State’s speed waltz variant of the Blue Danube, was oblivious to the exit of his baffling benefactor.
The two fathers who had been deep in boisterous agreements regarding the virtues of pils over pale ales, hockey over football and hand tools over power tools leant as a unit in the direction of the newlyweds sitting across from them at the table of honour to direct the final potentially parentally perplexing problem : each queried his particular offspring with almost exactly the same terse question.
“Blue?”
“Grün?”
Within Ramona’s purse and Donald’s pocket the simplest gag imaginable had been prepared exactly for this inescapable moment. With a dramatic flourish, both he and his wife uncovered streaks of pink skin tone underneath the obviously blue & green makeups with pocket hankies. With this final bit of clarification clarified, the obviously totally relieved patriarchs returned to the process of extending the new forged family knowledge base.
Donald whispered in Ramona’s ear, “I learned that trick from Jack Nicholson!”
She looked a trifle confused but it didn’t mess with her relief of having cleared--for now--the onerous task of attempting to explain ‘Wavium mutation to family that had already borne more than a few familial shocks.
***
That ‘night’, in the midst of Converse Cowpoke , Ramona figured it out : “The Joker! You learnt it from...” She couldn’t quite finish the thought for the activity.
A trifle breathlessly, Van Loan, below and mostly horizontal, giddily replied, “Ja, Herr Witzbold!”
The chemistry was superb. ]]> Brynhildr Wandblume, escorted up the aisle by a father Wotan trying desperately not to look tickled by his role and thus comporting himself in a grandly godish fashion, reflected on the event as her marital metals reflected the event that it was so much cooler than the mundane marital method that would have gone down if her wedding hadn’t been co-opted by the Patrol. Certainly her volks wouldn’t be nearly as in to it as they were in their roles as Germanic gods. As the pair’s promenade proceeded beneath a gently swaying canopy of heraldic guidons, the slow build majesty of Fugue State’s rendition of Das Rhinegold’s Prelude swelled electric guitar and ondes Martenot throughout the hall.
Before the sword stabbed Yggdrasil stood the Weld ethereal in flowing white Galadriels--cutout cleverly inserted--and down and to the side, cyan Siegfried, his tartan Highland clan...well his parents, anyway ; and his best, deeply hooded & cloaked, mystery-man.
At the tree alter, at the final dying thrum of the martenot, the Weld commenced to prove that she was an exceptional love weld with an impromptu service incorporating a neat synthesis of all the patchwork paramilitary pomp.
“Marriage isn’t a scrap, a fracas, a battle. It is a war. A holy war. A crusade. A glorious struggle to preserve, to survive, to hold fast to the one truth that has brought you to this hallowed moment : that singly your lives were incomplete, partial, cursory, weak ; but together you will be fulfilled, total, thorough, unassailable.” The weld flung her arms outwards to embrace the assembled. “And that not only applies to the lives of Ramona & Donald but also to those of the Wandblume & Van Loan tribes. For a wedding is more than the binding of couples : it is the uniting of tribes : It is the inking of treaties : It is the forging of alliances : it is the fortifying of families. marriage is the true weaponized potential of love!” She considered the main participants with an ethereal gaze worthy of Cate Blanchett.
“ Are you, Ramona Wandblume prepared for general bliss alongside your martial counterpart?”

“Ja, ich bin!”
Are you, Donald Van Loan prepared to be Ramona’s ever faithful biumvir?”
“Etiam!”
Assuming that both replies meant ‘yes!’, the Weld continued : “Then by the power of the Love of the Cosmos, I hereby weld your two lives, your two pneumas, your two selves into the greater whole of the beautiful mutuality of matrimony! Seal the pact with the traditional osculations!”
It was quite the kiss.
***
Ramona’s baby sister, all adorable six years of her packed into the cutest Rhine maiden outfit ever thrown together in six hours, strew flower petals along with an almost equally adorable nix Pitchy as the newly welds paraded under the saber arcade of a Prussian hussar honor guard to the tune of Fugue State’s stately Metal rendition of the Wagner’s Treulich geführt.
***
The reception was a mad mishmash of Oktoberfest & Robbie Burns Day. Schnitzel & haggis fed the guests ; schnapps & single malts watered them ; alpine horns, bag pipes and Fugue State entertained them. None of it would have been possible without the considerable resources--human resources that Vendor had at her disposal. Her operatives, with the exception of Starling and Lecter--she’d been busy enough with the Doe, and he’d been busy enough keeping her out of too much trouble ; and now they were actual wedding guests--were the waiters, bartenders, disc spinners, and caterers.
The only significant role outside of Vendor’s control was the best man. He he had emerged unbidden exactly at the moment, six hours ago, that Vendor had realized that all of her attempts to secure best men had come to naught. It was very odd, but then the Fen normality baseline was insane in the Dane membrane. So she ran the stranger, who never once removed his deeply hooded hood, through the best man test ; he passed with the sort of knowledge that only a lifelong friend or family member could possess ; and Vendor hired him for the key role. And as she watched him perform, she was damn glad that she had...even though she still had no idea who he was.
Strider, the name Vendor had granted him, was, indeed, the best man. He commenced the revelries with a fantastically astute and pithy periodic tabulation of the groom that was as hilarious as it was touching. The maid of honour, an eleventh hour whisked-away Teachers’ college friend of Ramona’s, turned in a competent performance but even A. Lincoln & O. Wilde would have found the best mystery man a hard act to follow.
Then he was seemingly everywhere ensuring the fulfillment of his duty as the couple’s champion until at exactly the time that consensus had been reached regarding his de-hooding, he was nowhere to be found. He had vanished ; completely, concisely and compendiously.
Van Loan, busily agitating the dual antennae zones of Black Betty, his prized theremin, in concert with Fugue State’s speed waltz variant of the Blue Danube, was oblivious to the exit of his baffling benefactor.
The two fathers who had been deep in boisterous agreements regarding the virtues of pils over pale ales, hockey over football and hand tools over power tools leant as a unit in the direction of the newlyweds sitting across from them at the table of honour to direct the final potentially parentally perplexing problem : each queried his particular offspring with almost exactly the same terse question.
“Blue?”
“Grün?”
Within Ramona’s purse and Donald’s pocket the simplest gag imaginable had been prepared exactly for this inescapable moment. With a dramatic flourish, both he and his wife uncovered streaks of pink skin tone underneath the obviously blue & green makeups with pocket hankies. With this final bit of clarification clarified, the obviously totally relieved patriarchs returned to the process of extending the new forged family knowledge base.
Donald whispered in Ramona’s ear, “I learned that trick from Jack Nicholson!”
She looked a trifle confused but it didn’t mess with her relief of having cleared--for now--the onerous task of attempting to explain ‘Wavium mutation to family that had already borne more than a few familial shocks.
***
That ‘night’, in the midst of Converse Cowpoke , Ramona figured it out : “The Joker! You learnt it from...” She couldn’t quite finish the thought for the activity.
A trifle breathlessly, Van Loan, below and mostly horizontal, giddily replied, “Ja, Herr Witzbold!”
The chemistry was superb. ]]> <![CDATA[Shegomania, Chapter 15 : She-Doe (season 2)]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=1929 Mon, 23 Sep 2013 23:17:00 -0500 Ross Van Loan]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=1929 She lit a second stogie off of the meteoric end of her own, and passed the newly lit one to Wandblume.
The pretty planes of her face and pneumatic swells, picked out in the firelight, hitched as the tip of the cigar flared. in time to a fit of coughing.
“You inhaled?” Mikuru’s voice, tinctured with laughter, wafted from the zone of glow.
Wandblume’s somewhat affronted response was, “It’s all just smoking, isn’t it?”
“Hardly! You don’t inhale cigar smoke : it’s more alkaline than cigarette smoke and is absorbed in the mouth.”
“Lights!” Mikuru’s voice, taut and terse, brought on an illumination, spastic and endlessly garish. It was all rotating disco ball glitter, flitting gel filtered spots, black light strips, and sputtering strobes that lit the stage upon which Wandblume sat looking across at a Mikuru lit like the final twenty minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
“I’m tied to a brass pole.” It was a statement of fact.
“Yes! Yes, you are!” She relit the end of Wandblume’s stogie with the prerequisite wooden match until it achieved the cheery red bellows flare of a well and truly lit cigar.
Wandblume expelled an aromatic plume of cigar exhaust. “Cuban?”
“It’s a L-5 Figurado Torpedo : something about zero gee is extra kind to tobacco plants.”
They puffed away what would have been peaceable plumes of smoke had it not been for the laser light disco show of Lazarus Long’s, the premier peeler club of Fen.
Wandblume took in the club’s eclectic mixture of Heinleinian decor spanning the Fifties to the Eighties--19s, that is. “Not exactly Patrol SOP, I imagine.”
“No, not the official standard operating policy, but it’s de rigueur for Patrol POP : Party Operating Policy. We swing all our best in-house dos here.”
“Huh, what else do you hold back from John Q Fen?”
“Besides the final digit of pi and the actual location of Guelph, Ontario, Canada...” She looked thoughtful as she decapitated two more stogies with her sinister looking guillotine-style cutter. “...nothing more important than the alien origins of the Big Mac.”
Wandblume grinned as she accepted the fresh cigar from her captor. “Never trust a person who isn’t capable of being fatuous!” They lit and puffed.
“So, it seems a little under-populated and under-Chippendaled for a Doe.”
“I was beginning to wonder when you’d bring that up.” Mikuru picked up a clunky Fifties styled microphone next to her chair ; spoke into it. “Execute.”
The establishment began to fill with two types of people : employees who were not surprised to be there ; guests who were very surprised. Wandblume noted the guest list with the arch, “Apparently I have quite the dossier.”
“You are half of that outré Venusian celebrity relationship, Vandblume. It doesn’t take master spycraft to concoct your Doe guest list.”
Wandblume raised her cigar in salute to the discombobulated looking president of her fan club, Suki Mashin. That was all it took for the quick-witted Suki to figure out what was really up : she was elated so quickly and completely that her expression of only seconds before seemed but a mistake of faulty memory.
“Wait, did you kidnap your guests too?”
“Please, we in the Patrol don’t kidnap : We enforce civic duty.”
Wandblume grinned around her torpedo. “What, is my Doe jury duty?”
Mikuru returned the combustable object distorted grin. “For your sentencing!” was her laconic response as she removed herself from the stage to became just another forced guest of someone else’s arrangements.
The establishment filled, the DJ marshaled her vinyl, dancers costumed the prerequisite Village People archetypes, servers hovered.
Wandblume was not overly surprised to find Jodie Starling presiding as the red herring MC. Starling proved to be an efficient Alpha minion for everything including providing the target of visible responsibility for mass party napping : she garnered a generous load of laser-looks from people who were not having so much fun as to forget that they had been whisked away to have it. Mikuru, meanwhile, was merely party attendee Number 42.
"For those of you still unsure of why you're in Fen's finest fleshpot, Lazarus Long’s, it's my job to shed light upon your predicament." Starling was in her glory working the crowd like a combination Mata Hari & Abraham Lincoln.
"Not having the time for the niceties of RSVPs & fancy envelopes, I had very little choice but to fall back on the time tested method of shanghaiing the lot of you ! However, you'll be relieved to hear that the terms of your release are as straight forward and as simple as helping to make Ramona’s Last night as a Wandblume the best night of her unmarried life!" With that she flourished in a cut cowboy clad in clingy cowhides.
The crowd reacted with a complex cascade of apoplectic joy that made Mikiru absolutely glad that she was utilizing a minion MC. Starling, being directly in front of all of that strong emotional energy, quickly began to feel less of a facilitator and more of a catspaw. As the throng ogled the gyrations of the thong, Starling gave herself a dose of her own speechifying :
‘Well, Startling, you’re got two ways to survive the night : entertain some of these angry folks into pardoning your offenses and make the others forget your offenses. I’m a pretty good talker; for the rest, we’ve hardly ever touched the Black Ops budget : surely one Doe bar tab will vanish unseen into all that cash!’
***
The premises weren’t exactly destroyed, but they, like the people within it, were a happy shambles. Starling, weaving on her feet and sporting a happy-hat traffic-cone and swagger-stick riding crop (she couldn’t exactly remember where she had attained the crop but the cone had been a prop of the construction stud, Hard Highway!) under her arm she surveyed the after-party wreckage with the aplomb of George Scott’s Patton.
“Veni, vici, Hrrk...” She stumbled over and heaved into the real clay pot of an ersatz coconut palm. “...vomitus!” She slurred sluggishly, before succumbing to a boozy snooze against the terra cotta potta.
Still lashed to the club’s mainsail, Femdysseus dreamt of the siren song of too many Buttery Nipples, chiseled abdominals, and of her own warmed posterior.
***
The Patrol’s Party Emergency Recovery Team’s job was considerable but far from beyond the talents of its masterly members. They had cleaned far bigger shindigs than this. Still, it was an imposing after-Doe.
“Gatsby, help me with these knots. Starling really tied this well-nigh bride!”
“ Cukes & bergs, Kurtz, everything in stride!”]]> She lit a second stogie off of the meteoric end of her own, and passed the newly lit one to Wandblume.
The pretty planes of her face and pneumatic swells, picked out in the firelight, hitched as the tip of the cigar flared. in time to a fit of coughing.
“You inhaled?” Mikuru’s voice, tinctured with laughter, wafted from the zone of glow.
Wandblume’s somewhat affronted response was, “It’s all just smoking, isn’t it?”
“Hardly! You don’t inhale cigar smoke : it’s more alkaline than cigarette smoke and is absorbed in the mouth.”
“Lights!” Mikuru’s voice, taut and terse, brought on an illumination, spastic and endlessly garish. It was all rotating disco ball glitter, flitting gel filtered spots, black light strips, and sputtering strobes that lit the stage upon which Wandblume sat looking across at a Mikuru lit like the final twenty minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
“I’m tied to a brass pole.” It was a statement of fact.
“Yes! Yes, you are!” She relit the end of Wandblume’s stogie with the prerequisite wooden match until it achieved the cheery red bellows flare of a well and truly lit cigar.
Wandblume expelled an aromatic plume of cigar exhaust. “Cuban?”
“It’s a L-5 Figurado Torpedo : something about zero gee is extra kind to tobacco plants.”
They puffed away what would have been peaceable plumes of smoke had it not been for the laser light disco show of Lazarus Long’s, the premier peeler club of Fen.
Wandblume took in the club’s eclectic mixture of Heinleinian decor spanning the Fifties to the Eighties--19s, that is. “Not exactly Patrol SOP, I imagine.”
“No, not the official standard operating policy, but it’s de rigueur for Patrol POP : Party Operating Policy. We swing all our best in-house dos here.”
“Huh, what else do you hold back from John Q Fen?”
“Besides the final digit of pi and the actual location of Guelph, Ontario, Canada...” She looked thoughtful as she decapitated two more stogies with her sinister looking guillotine-style cutter. “...nothing more important than the alien origins of the Big Mac.”
Wandblume grinned as she accepted the fresh cigar from her captor. “Never trust a person who isn’t capable of being fatuous!” They lit and puffed.
“So, it seems a little under-populated and under-Chippendaled for a Doe.”
“I was beginning to wonder when you’d bring that up.” Mikuru picked up a clunky Fifties styled microphone next to her chair ; spoke into it. “Execute.”
The establishment began to fill with two types of people : employees who were not surprised to be there ; guests who were very surprised. Wandblume noted the guest list with the arch, “Apparently I have quite the dossier.”
“You are half of that outré Venusian celebrity relationship, Vandblume. It doesn’t take master spycraft to concoct your Doe guest list.”
Wandblume raised her cigar in salute to the discombobulated looking president of her fan club, Suki Mashin. That was all it took for the quick-witted Suki to figure out what was really up : she was elated so quickly and completely that her expression of only seconds before seemed but a mistake of faulty memory.
“Wait, did you kidnap your guests too?”
“Please, we in the Patrol don’t kidnap : We enforce civic duty.”
Wandblume grinned around her torpedo. “What, is my Doe jury duty?”
Mikuru returned the combustable object distorted grin. “For your sentencing!” was her laconic response as she removed herself from the stage to became just another forced guest of someone else’s arrangements.
The establishment filled, the DJ marshaled her vinyl, dancers costumed the prerequisite Village People archetypes, servers hovered.
Wandblume was not overly surprised to find Jodie Starling presiding as the red herring MC. Starling proved to be an efficient Alpha minion for everything including providing the target of visible responsibility for mass party napping : she garnered a generous load of laser-looks from people who were not having so much fun as to forget that they had been whisked away to have it. Mikuru, meanwhile, was merely party attendee Number 42.
"For those of you still unsure of why you're in Fen's finest fleshpot, Lazarus Long’s, it's my job to shed light upon your predicament." Starling was in her glory working the crowd like a combination Mata Hari & Abraham Lincoln.
"Not having the time for the niceties of RSVPs & fancy envelopes, I had very little choice but to fall back on the time tested method of shanghaiing the lot of you ! However, you'll be relieved to hear that the terms of your release are as straight forward and as simple as helping to make Ramona’s Last night as a Wandblume the best night of her unmarried life!" With that she flourished in a cut cowboy clad in clingy cowhides.
The crowd reacted with a complex cascade of apoplectic joy that made Mikiru absolutely glad that she was utilizing a minion MC. Starling, being directly in front of all of that strong emotional energy, quickly began to feel less of a facilitator and more of a catspaw. As the throng ogled the gyrations of the thong, Starling gave herself a dose of her own speechifying :
‘Well, Startling, you’re got two ways to survive the night : entertain some of these angry folks into pardoning your offenses and make the others forget your offenses. I’m a pretty good talker; for the rest, we’ve hardly ever touched the Black Ops budget : surely one Doe bar tab will vanish unseen into all that cash!’
***
The premises weren’t exactly destroyed, but they, like the people within it, were a happy shambles. Starling, weaving on her feet and sporting a happy-hat traffic-cone and swagger-stick riding crop (she couldn’t exactly remember where she had attained the crop but the cone had been a prop of the construction stud, Hard Highway!) under her arm she surveyed the after-party wreckage with the aplomb of George Scott’s Patton.
“Veni, vici, Hrrk...” She stumbled over and heaved into the real clay pot of an ersatz coconut palm. “...vomitus!” She slurred sluggishly, before succumbing to a boozy snooze against the terra cotta potta.
Still lashed to the club’s mainsail, Femdysseus dreamt of the siren song of too many Buttery Nipples, chiseled abdominals, and of her own warmed posterior.
***
The Patrol’s Party Emergency Recovery Team’s job was considerable but far from beyond the talents of its masterly members. They had cleaned far bigger shindigs than this. Still, it was an imposing after-Doe.
“Gatsby, help me with these knots. Starling really tied this well-nigh bride!”
“ Cukes & bergs, Kurtz, everything in stride!”]]> <![CDATA[Shegomania 14 : It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Stag (season 2)]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=1928 Fri, 23 Aug 2013 00:13:00 -0500 Ross Van Loan]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=1928 “... You schee,” He stabbed Zucchini at the band members : “itsch rheally schimple! Mushic ish schience, UND,” he channeled his inner Rotwang, “schience IST mushic!” He chomped his organic pointer.
“Ohhhh, Deep!” The bottle-blonde pixie Japanese drummer, Suki2-- Suki Suki to her friends-- enthused so intently that one might suspect irony if one did not know Suki Suki : her only affection was her hair.
“You play, then?” The question, lobbed with an inquisitive twinkle, emanated from the most bewilderingly beautiful intersection of physical traits that belonged to the Lead Guitar, Asada Strangelove. Her genetic heritage could only be expressed as Transcendent Pan-Racial : she was a Teutonic Indian Meso-American African intersect that was somehow impossibly gorgeous. Her ice blue almond eyes further tapered with elegantly applied Elizabeth ‘Cleo’ Taylor makeup and separated by a decidedly Roman nose, dilated with pleased humour. Even her rich and oddly burred voice seemed distributed across the tracts of many lands.
“Ab-shou-utely!” Enthused Van Loan. “I have a collhection of shur-a...Schera...heh, I might be a thad dhrunk!” That was good for a group giggle. Van Loan took a deep breath, collected his scattered, wandering wiles ; and enunciated : “I co-llect and play ther-e-mins!”
“Ther-a-whats?” Khimera Chang, five-foot-four Japanese Second Guitar was floored by the fact that there was some sort of musical instrument that had escaped her knowledge.
Asada winked at Van Loan : “Radio frequency modulated tones utilizing the heterodyne principle.”
“Oh!” Chang decided to accept that nugget of esoterica with a pull off of her Shirley Temple.
Asada addressed the decidedly even more green than Wandblume final member of the band, Dazzle Ardent. “Think we can incorporate a theremin into Der Rock Ring des Nibelungen ? “
The punk Orion, all spiky raven hair, piercings and dark eyes grinned roguishly ruby lips. “You’d think that my Moog would be up to it, but I couldn’t get a decent theremin out of it if I fucked Apollo himself!”
“Leave it to Dazz to express herself so colourfully!” The dry comment dropped by the ebon Kenyan bassist, Aerial Cypher, was almost as rich as the full bodied notes she could trick out of her Gibson. “A theremin in the band would be the cat’s ass! I say give him a go!”
Van Loan bowed, lost his footing ; planted his forehead in the corn chip guacamole.
Asada surveyed the band. “All in favour say, ‘Awesome!’
The reply was loud, unanimous and affirmative.
“We’ll audition you during our gig at your reception, tomorrow night.”
“Huzzah! I’ll bhreak out Blhack Bhetty : she’s my scherious rhock’n out ghirl!” van Loan poured out a round, even managing to fill at least fifty four percent of the targeted tabled tankards.
A resounding toast of, “Rock on, Wagner!” sloshed a sizable strobed spray of luminous suds as the dance floor lighting commenced. The band, a unit, steered the man of the hour towards the dance floor.
****
Wandblume was in the midst of amassing suitable table settings at the The Island’s Holy Matrimony! emporium when she abruptly found herself surrounded by a black garbed tactical team. A fancy black doily in one hand, and a swath of green taffeta tablecloth in the other, Wandblume looked positively piqued at the interruption.
“Rain check, boys! I’ve got a marriage to plan, attend, receive & honeymoon! She held up her wristwatch wrist. “Come back in, say, twenty four hours and whisk me away.”
The squad leader, feminine under the bulky ‘Sam Fishers’ touched her throat mike.
“Vigil, Vendor reporting : the Jade consignment’s secured.”
Wandblume snorted. “Jade. Cute.”
“Vendor, delegate consignment delivery.”
The fact that Wandblume could actually hear the command chatter confused her. It seemed like terrible unit protocol until it became patently obvious to her that she was meant to hear the conversation : it was Mikuru of the recently spanked Patrol.
Vendor snapped up her helmet’s smoked visor, a bemused expression clouding her pretty puss.
“Delegate, Vigil?”
“You’ve got a wedding to prep, Vendor! Jade, brief her!”
Wandblume sniggered, handing over her samples to the chagrinned looking Vendor. “Black, green & blue colour scheme for forty guests in a fifty square meter hall. Here’s the guest list for place setting tags.” She fished a PDA out of a pocket, added it to the items in Vendor’s hands. “Don’t make it too paramilitary!” Chuckling, she presented her hands for cuffing and her head for bagging. “Okay, Mikuru, time to spank the Doe!”
****
“Good day for a martial wedding!” Vendor, pushing a cart piled high with sundry articles, exited from the store directly across from Holy Matrimony! She sang a bit of this store’s advertising campaign as she headed towards Space Truck’n cargo rentals : “Survive with taste, outlive the waste, entrust the taste of Jim Bob’s!”]]> “... You schee,” He stabbed Zucchini at the band members : “itsch rheally schimple! Mushic ish schience, UND,” he channeled his inner Rotwang, “schience IST mushic!” He chomped his organic pointer.
“Ohhhh, Deep!” The bottle-blonde pixie Japanese drummer, Suki2-- Suki Suki to her friends-- enthused so intently that one might suspect irony if one did not know Suki Suki : her only affection was her hair.
“You play, then?” The question, lobbed with an inquisitive twinkle, emanated from the most bewilderingly beautiful intersection of physical traits that belonged to the Lead Guitar, Asada Strangelove. Her genetic heritage could only be expressed as Transcendent Pan-Racial : she was a Teutonic Indian Meso-American African intersect that was somehow impossibly gorgeous. Her ice blue almond eyes further tapered with elegantly applied Elizabeth ‘Cleo’ Taylor makeup and separated by a decidedly Roman nose, dilated with pleased humour. Even her rich and oddly burred voice seemed distributed across the tracts of many lands.
“Ab-shou-utely!” Enthused Van Loan. “I have a collhection of shur-a...Schera...heh, I might be a thad dhrunk!” That was good for a group giggle. Van Loan took a deep breath, collected his scattered, wandering wiles ; and enunciated : “I co-llect and play ther-e-mins!”
“Ther-a-whats?” Khimera Chang, five-foot-four Japanese Second Guitar was floored by the fact that there was some sort of musical instrument that had escaped her knowledge.
Asada winked at Van Loan : “Radio frequency modulated tones utilizing the heterodyne principle.”
“Oh!” Chang decided to accept that nugget of esoterica with a pull off of her Shirley Temple.
Asada addressed the decidedly even more green than Wandblume final member of the band, Dazzle Ardent. “Think we can incorporate a theremin into Der Rock Ring des Nibelungen ? “
The punk Orion, all spiky raven hair, piercings and dark eyes grinned roguishly ruby lips. “You’d think that my Moog would be up to it, but I couldn’t get a decent theremin out of it if I fucked Apollo himself!”
“Leave it to Dazz to express herself so colourfully!” The dry comment dropped by the ebon Kenyan bassist, Aerial Cypher, was almost as rich as the full bodied notes she could trick out of her Gibson. “A theremin in the band would be the cat’s ass! I say give him a go!”
Van Loan bowed, lost his footing ; planted his forehead in the corn chip guacamole.
Asada surveyed the band. “All in favour say, ‘Awesome!’
The reply was loud, unanimous and affirmative.
“We’ll audition you during our gig at your reception, tomorrow night.”
“Huzzah! I’ll bhreak out Blhack Bhetty : she’s my scherious rhock’n out ghirl!” van Loan poured out a round, even managing to fill at least fifty four percent of the targeted tabled tankards.
A resounding toast of, “Rock on, Wagner!” sloshed a sizable strobed spray of luminous suds as the dance floor lighting commenced. The band, a unit, steered the man of the hour towards the dance floor.
****
Wandblume was in the midst of amassing suitable table settings at the The Island’s Holy Matrimony! emporium when she abruptly found herself surrounded by a black garbed tactical team. A fancy black doily in one hand, and a swath of green taffeta tablecloth in the other, Wandblume looked positively piqued at the interruption.
“Rain check, boys! I’ve got a marriage to plan, attend, receive & honeymoon! She held up her wristwatch wrist. “Come back in, say, twenty four hours and whisk me away.”
The squad leader, feminine under the bulky ‘Sam Fishers’ touched her throat mike.
“Vigil, Vendor reporting : the Jade consignment’s secured.”
Wandblume snorted. “Jade. Cute.”
“Vendor, delegate consignment delivery.”
The fact that Wandblume could actually hear the command chatter confused her. It seemed like terrible unit protocol until it became patently obvious to her that she was meant to hear the conversation : it was Mikuru of the recently spanked Patrol.
Vendor snapped up her helmet’s smoked visor, a bemused expression clouding her pretty puss.
“Delegate, Vigil?”
“You’ve got a wedding to prep, Vendor! Jade, brief her!”
Wandblume sniggered, handing over her samples to the chagrinned looking Vendor. “Black, green & blue colour scheme for forty guests in a fifty square meter hall. Here’s the guest list for place setting tags.” She fished a PDA out of a pocket, added it to the items in Vendor’s hands. “Don’t make it too paramilitary!” Chuckling, she presented her hands for cuffing and her head for bagging. “Okay, Mikuru, time to spank the Doe!”
****
“Good day for a martial wedding!” Vendor, pushing a cart piled high with sundry articles, exited from the store directly across from Holy Matrimony! She sang a bit of this store’s advertising campaign as she headed towards Space Truck’n cargo rentals : “Survive with taste, outlive the waste, entrust the taste of Jim Bob’s!”]]> <![CDATA[Shegomania 13 : Of Polymer Mad-ons & Wedding Party Shegoth Strikes (NSFW) (season 2)]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=1927 Tue, 13 Aug 2013 23:39:00 -0500 Ross Van Loan]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=1927 She sidled up to Wandblume ; conversationally mentioned : “There’s a Love Faction Weld poking about the Whoopee Widget booth.”
Carmine. Carmine surrounded by the coolest yet most fluster inducing assemblage of toys : Death Star Ben Wa sets--both Death Stars! ; gold boarding torpedo personal massagers ; Agonizer nipple clamps ; Gigeresque Kegel exercisers : it was a panoply of Geekgasms.
Indeed, there was a very well executed Cutie Honey with the heart-choker sigil of a Love-Weld poking through a barrel of paraphernalia.
Van Loan couldn’t help himself. “Well, Carmine’s certainly a growing concern.” He gingerly picked up a stainless steel whatsit. “This is Cronenberg enough that I don’t want to know what or where it’s for!” He returned the object with the delicacy of a demolitions expert.
Wandblume chimed in. “Ah, that’s a...”
“La la la, I’m not engaging my aural units! Anyway, we’re here for her, and certainly not for anything priapic or vulvar!” He actually made the point with a waggling rod of pink rubber simulacrum. He tossed the sinlinder at its place in the display, misjudging its elastic potential. It bounced, fairly leaping into the cardiac-cutout of the rather startled Cutie Honey.
“And it’s in the bunker.” Wandblume’s wry golf-commentator exposition continued as she walked over to pluck, as primly as was possible--not that possible--the offending random rocket from the Love-Weld’s impressive décolletage. “That’s a two schwing penalty for Dr. D.” She lobbed the faux wang into the barrel of its brethren ; winked at the befuddled, pneumatic senshi.
“And we haven’t even be introduced yet! Ramona Wandblume, and that’s,” She poked a thumb back over her shoulder, “the guy you’re going to veld me to.”
Van Loan assessed the still stupefied senshi that Wandblume hand led back to him. “Is she going to be...viable?”
“She’ll be fine, won’t you, honey?”
The Weld nodded, scantly.
“See? She’s conscious, responsive and tractable!”
The Weld squeaked : “Tract-a-what?”
“Willing, Süße...Sweetness. You are?”
The nod was a little stronger. The deer was almost clear of the headlights.
“Right!” enthused Shego. All we need now...” She actuated her well nigh invisible throat mike : “Irae, expedite wedding party retrieval!”
The crystalline gloomy Welsh response sounded almost instantly in her ear bud :
“Cake, Mum.” Wandblume was almost certain that was Slanglish for ‘On it.’ Almost.
Van Loan went from mildly embarrassed to roundly rocked in record time. “Holy Tesla’s coils! Ramona, are you going to kidnap your parents?!”
“No, doof, our parents plus any target of opportunity immediate family members as my girls can grab. You do want our volks here for the wedding?”
***
The frilly black UD4L dropship deployed a frilly black line down which rappelled (repelled?) a frilly black figure. Pitchy touched ground ; unclipped from the line ; unslung her Einheit, Sichel Mond ; proceeded up to the front door of the neat, night shrouded Bavarian A-frame. Behind her, the angular assortment of intakes, airfoils and a slowly yawning rear cargo ramp, settled gracefully onto the end of the metaled driveway. Pitchy reached up on black frilly tiptoes, and pressed the doorbell. The girl, classically Bavarian right down to the golden pig tails, who answered the door was almost exactly the same height and age as Pitchy. "Ja?" She eyed Pitchy with obvious little-girl distaste before being startled by being addressed not by the little-girl-goth but rather by the excellent Frankfurt German of her scythe.
Leaving the door wide open, the girl ran back into the house. “Mutter, there’s a talking axe with a creepy little girl at the door!”
***
One intervening ocean over to the west, and six hours day-wards, a troop variant ornithopter whirred to a dragonfly landing in the sizable riverside backyard of a Colonial Georgian perched in the nominal countryside south of the sleepy federal capital of Canada.
“Honey, our son’s getting married!” The svelte sixty-something brunette yelled down the basement stairs. The sound of power tools ceased abruptly replaced with a manly baritone bellow.
“What was that, dear? You couldn’t have said my worthless kid’s getting hitched? To what? A life-sized replica of Mr. Splack?”
“It’s Spock, dear ; and I’m pretty sure it’s to a girl!” She turned to Dies Irae who was desperately trying to keep her cool : it was patently obvious exactly where her Mistress’ fiancé got his operatic penchant from : genetics.
Dies Irae, sometimes Penelope Winterbottom, replied with the almost Swiftian, "She's very she, sir!"
“I must be having a stroke! This can’t be happening!”
“No dear, you sound fine ; and yes, dear, it is!”
“The engagement can’t last!”
“About that, darling!” Penny wasn’t really surprised to see a sly little grin tug at the wife’s lip. “They....”
“They who!?”
“Two pretty girls, sweetie, with orders to...escort us immediately....”
“Kidnap?!” A very impressive solid tread sounded down in the gloom at the bottom of the stairs. “I don’t care how pretty or how good the news, I’m not letting anybody....” A robust hulk of a man, bearing only a mild mead-gut and wielding a cordless drill with a truly daunting drill bit, blustered out of the basement.
“...Really pretty!”
Mrs. Van Loan thumped him across the back of the head, and Penny’s self-control fractured into shivers of most goth-less giggling. Both parents stopped, stared at Penelope Winterbottom.
“Sorry,” she gasped between giggles, “You two are exactly like your son’s relationship!” She mostly recovered her sangfroid. “You’ve got to pack! We’ve only got another twenty minutes before NORAD scrambles!”
“What the blazes does that even...”
“Pack fast, Babe : the Indians are inbound!” She grabbed her hubby’s hand ; led the charge to the master bedroom’s walk-in closet.
Nocturne Raven mused : “That was duck soup. Wonder how Pitchy’s doing?”
***
Two frilly black figures loaded four squirming frilly black sacks into the back of one frilly black UD4L.

]]> She sidled up to Wandblume ; conversationally mentioned : “There’s a Love Faction Weld poking about the Whoopee Widget booth.”
Carmine. Carmine surrounded by the coolest yet most fluster inducing assemblage of toys : Death Star Ben Wa sets--both Death Stars! ; gold boarding torpedo personal massagers ; Agonizer nipple clamps ; Gigeresque Kegel exercisers : it was a panoply of Geekgasms.
Indeed, there was a very well executed Cutie Honey with the heart-choker sigil of a Love-Weld poking through a barrel of paraphernalia.
Van Loan couldn’t help himself. “Well, Carmine’s certainly a growing concern.” He gingerly picked up a stainless steel whatsit. “This is Cronenberg enough that I don’t want to know what or where it’s for!” He returned the object with the delicacy of a demolitions expert.
Wandblume chimed in. “Ah, that’s a...”
“La la la, I’m not engaging my aural units! Anyway, we’re here for her, and certainly not for anything priapic or vulvar!” He actually made the point with a waggling rod of pink rubber simulacrum. He tossed the sinlinder at its place in the display, misjudging its elastic potential. It bounced, fairly leaping into the cardiac-cutout of the rather startled Cutie Honey.
“And it’s in the bunker.” Wandblume’s wry golf-commentator exposition continued as she walked over to pluck, as primly as was possible--not that possible--the offending random rocket from the Love-Weld’s impressive décolletage. “That’s a two schwing penalty for Dr. D.” She lobbed the faux wang into the barrel of its brethren ; winked at the befuddled, pneumatic senshi.
“And we haven’t even be introduced yet! Ramona Wandblume, and that’s,” She poked a thumb back over her shoulder, “the guy you’re going to veld me to.”
Van Loan assessed the still stupefied senshi that Wandblume hand led back to him. “Is she going to be...viable?”
“She’ll be fine, won’t you, honey?”
The Weld nodded, scantly.
“See? She’s conscious, responsive and tractable!”
The Weld squeaked : “Tract-a-what?”
“Willing, Süße...Sweetness. You are?”
The nod was a little stronger. The deer was almost clear of the headlights.
“Right!” enthused Shego. All we need now...” She actuated her well nigh invisible throat mike : “Irae, expedite wedding party retrieval!”
The crystalline gloomy Welsh response sounded almost instantly in her ear bud :
“Cake, Mum.” Wandblume was almost certain that was Slanglish for ‘On it.’ Almost.
Van Loan went from mildly embarrassed to roundly rocked in record time. “Holy Tesla’s coils! Ramona, are you going to kidnap your parents?!”
“No, doof, our parents plus any target of opportunity immediate family members as my girls can grab. You do want our volks here for the wedding?”
***
The frilly black UD4L dropship deployed a frilly black line down which rappelled (repelled?) a frilly black figure. Pitchy touched ground ; unclipped from the line ; unslung her Einheit, Sichel Mond ; proceeded up to the front door of the neat, night shrouded Bavarian A-frame. Behind her, the angular assortment of intakes, airfoils and a slowly yawning rear cargo ramp, settled gracefully onto the end of the metaled driveway. Pitchy reached up on black frilly tiptoes, and pressed the doorbell. The girl, classically Bavarian right down to the golden pig tails, who answered the door was almost exactly the same height and age as Pitchy. "Ja?" She eyed Pitchy with obvious little-girl distaste before being startled by being addressed not by the little-girl-goth but rather by the excellent Frankfurt German of her scythe.
Leaving the door wide open, the girl ran back into the house. “Mutter, there’s a talking axe with a creepy little girl at the door!”
***
One intervening ocean over to the west, and six hours day-wards, a troop variant ornithopter whirred to a dragonfly landing in the sizable riverside backyard of a Colonial Georgian perched in the nominal countryside south of the sleepy federal capital of Canada.
“Honey, our son’s getting married!” The svelte sixty-something brunette yelled down the basement stairs. The sound of power tools ceased abruptly replaced with a manly baritone bellow.
“What was that, dear? You couldn’t have said my worthless kid’s getting hitched? To what? A life-sized replica of Mr. Splack?”
“It’s Spock, dear ; and I’m pretty sure it’s to a girl!” She turned to Dies Irae who was desperately trying to keep her cool : it was patently obvious exactly where her Mistress’ fiancé got his operatic penchant from : genetics.
Dies Irae, sometimes Penelope Winterbottom, replied with the almost Swiftian, "She's very she, sir!"
“I must be having a stroke! This can’t be happening!”
“No dear, you sound fine ; and yes, dear, it is!”
“The engagement can’t last!”
“About that, darling!” Penny wasn’t really surprised to see a sly little grin tug at the wife’s lip. “They....”
“They who!?”
“Two pretty girls, sweetie, with orders to...escort us immediately....”
“Kidnap?!” A very impressive solid tread sounded down in the gloom at the bottom of the stairs. “I don’t care how pretty or how good the news, I’m not letting anybody....” A robust hulk of a man, bearing only a mild mead-gut and wielding a cordless drill with a truly daunting drill bit, blustered out of the basement.
“...Really pretty!”
Mrs. Van Loan thumped him across the back of the head, and Penny’s self-control fractured into shivers of most goth-less giggling. Both parents stopped, stared at Penelope Winterbottom.
“Sorry,” she gasped between giggles, “You two are exactly like your son’s relationship!” She mostly recovered her sangfroid. “You’ve got to pack! We’ve only got another twenty minutes before NORAD scrambles!”
“What the blazes does that even...”
“Pack fast, Babe : the Indians are inbound!” She grabbed her hubby’s hand ; led the charge to the master bedroom’s walk-in closet.
Nocturne Raven mused : “That was duck soup. Wonder how Pitchy’s doing?”
***
Two frilly black figures loaded four squirming frilly black sacks into the back of one frilly black UD4L.

]]> <![CDATA[Shegomania, Chapter 12: Mad Men & Die Deutsche Frau (out in the midday [con]) (Season 2)]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=1926 Wed, 31 Jul 2013 04:51:00 -0500 Ross Van Loan]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=1926 “Solar powered so long as the triple As hold out.” He quipped, as he completed the final, Fabergé touch. The goddess of Nerds, Arete, had preserved his privacy just long enough to complete sun-gal’s tacky-tiara touch-up : then in trooped the so nearly fast friends as to be only one step removed from being conjoined : creepy as one was still trying to pry the pants off of the other.
“Hey, Hon, Carmine’s brought her calendar entry.”
Van Loan removed his hat of manifold optics, a delighted smile ludicrously lighting his cyan physiognomy.
“ Our first actual entry?"--Hayayama wasn’t scheduled for her ultra-nude photo shoot until Solar Noon two days hence--"Sugoi! Give it up, Carmine!”
Her jade eyes were lit with a roguish spark unnoticed by the expectant and rather credible Van Loan as she handed him a steel case twenty-two centimeters long by fourteen centimeters wide.
Van Loan released the twin set of clasps. “There’s something familiar about this design, but I just can’t place it.” He swung the casing open ; grinned his ‘oh, shiny!’ grin.
   “A 20.3 centimeter replica of the Genesis Device! Fantastic collectable! ” Van Loan picked it up ; the look on his face when the tactile sensor enabled the unit’s vibratory feature was inner-thigh slapping funny.
Carmine, the Carol Marcus of this particular instrument, smirked ; Wandblume spit-took her Mountain Dew into the tank of mock-Reagent being prepped for fluorescing .
“Oh, eight inches.” He turned it over in his hands, a slight frown descending upon his features.
“It only has the one setting?”
Carmine did her best, “KHHHHAAANNN!” : the device leapt into full strobe-lit vapor-venting and, of course, max-tilt trembling. Van Loan did a startled little jig that had both women howling in helpless fits of hilarity. Then he too collapsed in laughter.
“I......never thought...... that I would hear......myself say this but ; Best! Vibrator! Ever! Carmine, you’ve got yourself a whole month : which one would you like?”
Carmine tried to look serious. “One of the cold, lonely ones.”
Wandblume snorted : “When a girl has to throw an extra log in the fire?”
Carmine tittered : “Another honest expression falls prey to euphemism!”
The giggling-guffaws repossessed the lot of them.
****
‘Twas the second day of ConClave and all through the fortress legions of mech-mice stirred : sometimes even combining into larger mass-mouse mess-managing machines. They scooted and scampered about the floor and scuttled through walls of the convention waging their never-ending war against their nemeses, Clutter & Shambles. The con-goers, around whose feet the mice wended and weaved, had their pet name for the animalized janitorial staff : they dubbed them Howards.
Van Loan was presiding over the panel, The New Madatomy, held in the Luigi Cozzi Chamber. A Hipster--he was done up in the very retro-now denim craze : he looked like Farmer in the Dell gone loco-- in the audience addressed the panel members.
“But isn’t Mads not only a pejorative but also the sole bailiwick of loner nutbars and psychotics like Agatha Clay?”
Van Loan meta-rolled his eyes, which is to say he rolled them only in his mind. ‘Ah, that explains what he’s doing here : biding his time until he can unleash his brilliant observations upon the Unenlightened.’
“Up to six months ago your statement would have been...conventionally accurate : Mads were classified as being isolated, bitter excommunicates of their various scientific fields. Since then, however, I have been...cultivating an interlink, a network, a community where, before, none had existed.”
“You mean to form a bund of Mads?”
‘There it is!'’thought Van Loan. ‘Now is it just lone Hispster posturing, or....”
The room grew still as a churchyard as the battle was finally joined.
***
The new pods were deep and black enough that the only things to escape their depths were the voices of their owners, and the odd flash of eyewear.
The chair on the left swiveled with an electric whirr to face the slight ocular twinkling within the gloom of the other chair.
“Bund? Yayoi, isn’t he being a bit abstruse?”
“ Umbra is a Hipster, Mikuru. Besides, it’s a very smart room : the message is clear enough.”
“Yayoi, you really think he’s mustering a power base?”
“Mikuru, of course not : he’s not the type.”
“Yayoi, then why the HUMINT asset?”
“Setting up her rump.”
“Oh, are we being unforgiving?”
“I prefer retributory, dear : it sounds more just.”
“And ass-covering” Mikuru mumbled.
Yayoi’s pod, in the process of turning back towards the display, paused briefly. “You say something, dear?”
“Yes, I’m sure we’ll catch her ass!” Within her chair, she winced : ‘Oh, that was an awful recoup, girl!’
“Red Cheeked, dear.” Both chairs went back to watching the unfolding time-lapse drama of the panel.
***
Van Loan confronted his accuser with the scene-chewing gravitas of a supervillain. “Uncovered my Master Plan, have we?” The first chuckle was so convincingly dark that the panel members on either side of Van Loan looked a tad uncomfortable. The audience gasped ; in the very back, Wandblume face-palmed.
Hipster cracked a snide smile. “Feel like monologuing?”
The second chuckle wasn’t dark at all : it was patented Van Loan. The panel guests relaxed into their seats ; the audience leant forward in anticipation ; the Hipster, caught by the sudden reversal, took a step backwards ; Wandblume’s palm cracked a blue eyed gap in between middle & ring finger.
“How about a good expounding, instead?” Van Loan paused, squared his papers on the podium ; pitched them into a flutter of foolscap. “ There are exactly two things in life that I’m serious about : Shego and fun!”
The crowd sniggered. A wag shouted: “Are those two factors mutually exclusive?”
Wandblume, sashaying to the panel table, momentarily borrowed Van Loan’s thunder as she kissed him, assiduously ; cuffed him, cursorily. He took the very good & the hardly bad at all with what he thought was charming equanimity : to everyone one else, his was the the aplomb of a puppy.
She redirected her beau’s microphone flex to respond to the wit : “Haven’t you been listening? Today’s word is Inclusivity!”
The room loved that. Hipster sketched a sardonic bow ; exited, impervious to a gentle gauntlet of gibes.
“Great panel, babe! What was the subject again?” His beam, doting-jaunty-screwball, did that thing to that part of her brain that found this particular eccentric nerd hot ; and that translated to seriously weak knee syndrome.
She procured a perch of Van Loan lap. “Us, dummkopf!”She smooched him again.
At about the twentieth second into the buss-duration, a series of polite coughs & various other social cues ended the sweet tangential arc. “You’ve got a panel to helm, Liebling.” Shego decoupled from Dr. D ; was about to make her way out to the con-floor when another member of the panel audience, a svelte blonde beauty in a tan Sam Browne belted min-skirt affair, launched one final panel-breaking interrogative bombshell : “ Why aren’t you two spliced yet?
The linebacker with silver discs for eyes sitting next to her had that long-established look of the dutiful but uncomfortable boyfriend.
Wandblume considered Van Loan : the audience considered the couple ; Batou considered his shoes ; Starling rephrased the question : “ I’ve sat stakeout on you two...”
At the utterance of ‘stakeout’ the room once again went quiet with the exception of Starling who was far too locked into a verbal-inertial roll to be able to assess her tactical position. Not so, Batou : with a briefly shocked look replaced by resolute determination, he slung his girl over his shoulder and made for the exit. She continued, equally resolute to impart her intimate grasp of the couple’s wedlock potential.
“...long enough to know that you two should have formalized Player Two status six months ago!”
The poleaxed expression on Van Loan’s face vanished two microseconds before the one on Wandblume’s face ; the Crowd, however, looked shocked, stirring towards riled.
Wandblume, always the more socially tuned of the two, brought it all back from the bitchy brink by dramatically P.A.ing her Man, “Do you promise to forever be crazy about me?”
“I do!” Van Loan looked so radiant he was probably emitting on the 0.1µm through 5.0µm wavelengths. “Do you promise to be mad about me forever?”
“I do!”
“There’s got to be someone on this station that can make this stick!” He turned to the audience. “A free lifetime ConClave membership to the Fen who can find us our clerical substitute!”
The room emptied in a rush.
Batou looked mightily relieved.
Starling looked almost as happy as the almost completely married couple.]]> “Solar powered so long as the triple As hold out.” He quipped, as he completed the final, Fabergé touch. The goddess of Nerds, Arete, had preserved his privacy just long enough to complete sun-gal’s tacky-tiara touch-up : then in trooped the so nearly fast friends as to be only one step removed from being conjoined : creepy as one was still trying to pry the pants off of the other.
“Hey, Hon, Carmine’s brought her calendar entry.”
Van Loan removed his hat of manifold optics, a delighted smile ludicrously lighting his cyan physiognomy.
“ Our first actual entry?"--Hayayama wasn’t scheduled for her ultra-nude photo shoot until Solar Noon two days hence--"Sugoi! Give it up, Carmine!”
Her jade eyes were lit with a roguish spark unnoticed by the expectant and rather credible Van Loan as she handed him a steel case twenty-two centimeters long by fourteen centimeters wide.
Van Loan released the twin set of clasps. “There’s something familiar about this design, but I just can’t place it.” He swung the casing open ; grinned his ‘oh, shiny!’ grin.
   “A 20.3 centimeter replica of the Genesis Device! Fantastic collectable! ” Van Loan picked it up ; the look on his face when the tactile sensor enabled the unit’s vibratory feature was inner-thigh slapping funny.
Carmine, the Carol Marcus of this particular instrument, smirked ; Wandblume spit-took her Mountain Dew into the tank of mock-Reagent being prepped for fluorescing .
“Oh, eight inches.” He turned it over in his hands, a slight frown descending upon his features.
“It only has the one setting?”
Carmine did her best, “KHHHHAAANNN!” : the device leapt into full strobe-lit vapor-venting and, of course, max-tilt trembling. Van Loan did a startled little jig that had both women howling in helpless fits of hilarity. Then he too collapsed in laughter.
“I......never thought...... that I would hear......myself say this but ; Best! Vibrator! Ever! Carmine, you’ve got yourself a whole month : which one would you like?”
Carmine tried to look serious. “One of the cold, lonely ones.”
Wandblume snorted : “When a girl has to throw an extra log in the fire?”
Carmine tittered : “Another honest expression falls prey to euphemism!”
The giggling-guffaws repossessed the lot of them.
****
‘Twas the second day of ConClave and all through the fortress legions of mech-mice stirred : sometimes even combining into larger mass-mouse mess-managing machines. They scooted and scampered about the floor and scuttled through walls of the convention waging their never-ending war against their nemeses, Clutter & Shambles. The con-goers, around whose feet the mice wended and weaved, had their pet name for the animalized janitorial staff : they dubbed them Howards.
Van Loan was presiding over the panel, The New Madatomy, held in the Luigi Cozzi Chamber. A Hipster--he was done up in the very retro-now denim craze : he looked like Farmer in the Dell gone loco-- in the audience addressed the panel members.
“But isn’t Mads not only a pejorative but also the sole bailiwick of loner nutbars and psychotics like Agatha Clay?”
Van Loan meta-rolled his eyes, which is to say he rolled them only in his mind. ‘Ah, that explains what he’s doing here : biding his time until he can unleash his brilliant observations upon the Unenlightened.’
“Up to six months ago your statement would have been...conventionally accurate : Mads were classified as being isolated, bitter excommunicates of their various scientific fields. Since then, however, I have been...cultivating an interlink, a network, a community where, before, none had existed.”
“You mean to form a bund of Mads?”
‘There it is!'’thought Van Loan. ‘Now is it just lone Hispster posturing, or....”
The room grew still as a churchyard as the battle was finally joined.
***
The new pods were deep and black enough that the only things to escape their depths were the voices of their owners, and the odd flash of eyewear.
The chair on the left swiveled with an electric whirr to face the slight ocular twinkling within the gloom of the other chair.
“Bund? Yayoi, isn’t he being a bit abstruse?”
“ Umbra is a Hipster, Mikuru. Besides, it’s a very smart room : the message is clear enough.”
“Yayoi, you really think he’s mustering a power base?”
“Mikuru, of course not : he’s not the type.”
“Yayoi, then why the HUMINT asset?”
“Setting up her rump.”
“Oh, are we being unforgiving?”
“I prefer retributory, dear : it sounds more just.”
“And ass-covering” Mikuru mumbled.
Yayoi’s pod, in the process of turning back towards the display, paused briefly. “You say something, dear?”
“Yes, I’m sure we’ll catch her ass!” Within her chair, she winced : ‘Oh, that was an awful recoup, girl!’
“Red Cheeked, dear.” Both chairs went back to watching the unfolding time-lapse drama of the panel.
***
Van Loan confronted his accuser with the scene-chewing gravitas of a supervillain. “Uncovered my Master Plan, have we?” The first chuckle was so convincingly dark that the panel members on either side of Van Loan looked a tad uncomfortable. The audience gasped ; in the very back, Wandblume face-palmed.
Hipster cracked a snide smile. “Feel like monologuing?”
The second chuckle wasn’t dark at all : it was patented Van Loan. The panel guests relaxed into their seats ; the audience leant forward in anticipation ; the Hipster, caught by the sudden reversal, took a step backwards ; Wandblume’s palm cracked a blue eyed gap in between middle & ring finger.
“How about a good expounding, instead?” Van Loan paused, squared his papers on the podium ; pitched them into a flutter of foolscap. “ There are exactly two things in life that I’m serious about : Shego and fun!”
The crowd sniggered. A wag shouted: “Are those two factors mutually exclusive?”
Wandblume, sashaying to the panel table, momentarily borrowed Van Loan’s thunder as she kissed him, assiduously ; cuffed him, cursorily. He took the very good & the hardly bad at all with what he thought was charming equanimity : to everyone one else, his was the the aplomb of a puppy.
She redirected her beau’s microphone flex to respond to the wit : “Haven’t you been listening? Today’s word is Inclusivity!”
The room loved that. Hipster sketched a sardonic bow ; exited, impervious to a gentle gauntlet of gibes.
“Great panel, babe! What was the subject again?” His beam, doting-jaunty-screwball, did that thing to that part of her brain that found this particular eccentric nerd hot ; and that translated to seriously weak knee syndrome.
She procured a perch of Van Loan lap. “Us, dummkopf!”She smooched him again.
At about the twentieth second into the buss-duration, a series of polite coughs & various other social cues ended the sweet tangential arc. “You’ve got a panel to helm, Liebling.” Shego decoupled from Dr. D ; was about to make her way out to the con-floor when another member of the panel audience, a svelte blonde beauty in a tan Sam Browne belted min-skirt affair, launched one final panel-breaking interrogative bombshell : “ Why aren’t you two spliced yet?
The linebacker with silver discs for eyes sitting next to her had that long-established look of the dutiful but uncomfortable boyfriend.
Wandblume considered Van Loan : the audience considered the couple ; Batou considered his shoes ; Starling rephrased the question : “ I’ve sat stakeout on you two...”
At the utterance of ‘stakeout’ the room once again went quiet with the exception of Starling who was far too locked into a verbal-inertial roll to be able to assess her tactical position. Not so, Batou : with a briefly shocked look replaced by resolute determination, he slung his girl over his shoulder and made for the exit. She continued, equally resolute to impart her intimate grasp of the couple’s wedlock potential.
“...long enough to know that you two should have formalized Player Two status six months ago!”
The poleaxed expression on Van Loan’s face vanished two microseconds before the one on Wandblume’s face ; the Crowd, however, looked shocked, stirring towards riled.
Wandblume, always the more socially tuned of the two, brought it all back from the bitchy brink by dramatically P.A.ing her Man, “Do you promise to forever be crazy about me?”
“I do!” Van Loan looked so radiant he was probably emitting on the 0.1µm through 5.0µm wavelengths. “Do you promise to be mad about me forever?”
“I do!”
“There’s got to be someone on this station that can make this stick!” He turned to the audience. “A free lifetime ConClave membership to the Fen who can find us our clerical substitute!”
The room emptied in a rush.
Batou looked mightily relieved.
Starling looked almost as happy as the almost completely married couple.]]> <![CDATA[Shegomania, Chapter 11: A Mad for All Seasons (Season 2)]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=1925 Sat, 20 Jul 2013 23:01:00 -0500 Ross Van Loan]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=1925 One booth over bearing the banner ‘Deep Clear’, Van Loan delicately poked an esoteric device at chest-high empty air. “You know what’s challenging?”
Wandblume was too busy signing glossy and not all-together modest full-sized posters of her alluring anatomy shoved towards her by an ogle of black and green appareled Otaku to be able to really attend to Van Loan’s conversational cue. Also , to preserve her cool, villainous reputation with her attendant squee-club she played it aloof with her darling geek of a man-child : her reply was the maximally curt interrogative ‘Mmmm?’
He continued as if he actually had her ear as opposed to what he did possess of her attention, the tiniest fringe of the peripheral sight of her lovely left eye.
“Repairing Deep Clear is very challenging!” The tool, a black and chrome thing of keen tines, sinister pistol grips, and delphic diodes, growled softly in time to the heartbeat-flicker of a scarlet LED. “That’s...” He depressed a stud on the grip ; the tool extended a barbed probe, as if it wasn't already scary looking enough.
‘Mmmm!” She executed her flamboyant signature, what Van Loan called the Double-D W, and followed it up with cursive scrawled boilerplate expression number thirty-four (To my #1 minion!). The fan, parted from his lucre, departed ; was replaced by another from the throng. She, a redhead--the cascade of red-gold locks looked fantastic against the well executed green & black leather that encased a yummy female hull--had actually ponied up the ridiculous amount of cash needed to purchase a one-off specialty photo-op with Shego incarnate.
“Twenty, be a smart bomb and snap us!” She threw an arm around the redhead’s lower primary gimbal mounting ; drew her in for a pose somewhere in between amiable & authoritarian. That brought a hushed, reverential silence as, posters momentarily forgotten, the throng stood spellbound. Fortunately for Van Loan, he was far too immersed in his transparent task to suffer the stroke inducing sight of his partner’s revenue-stream shenanigans.
The photographer sauntered in on his tripod harness assemblage. A camera was tentacle grasped in the position traditionally taken by the heat-ray apparatus.
“Got it.” Twenty depressed his stud on his pistol gripped device ; the redhead, flushed in face if no longer in pocketbook, brushed her mouth by Wandblume’s ear, murmured something ; strode away on legs as long as the lunar day to possess her prize poster already projecting from the printer.
“...got it!” Van Loan torqued his tool three quarters of a picometer clockwise ; an 8-bit victory theme sounded midair to prove the validity of this seemingly addled action.
‘Finally stole some thunder!’ Van Loan thought as eyes turned to take in the highly unusual almost sight of a successfully repaired invisible super-computer. However, three hundred million years of reptile brain-stem stimulation beat out four hundred years of enlightened prefrontal cortex empiricism. The after image of vaguely naughty girl/girl photography & slightly screened secondary sexual titillations totally and soundly shellacked science.
“Good try, lover.” Shego favoured Drakken with a sincere smirk. “Maybe you should try bearing some blue...” She returned to adroitly dashing off poster scrawls. “I know! How about a Mads take on the beefcake firefighter calendar?” That got more than a few gently joking comments and snorts from the fan-mass. Van Loan's response was almost a classic full-blown Dr. D Declaration except that it was abruptly intercepted by The Look : his right eyebrow Spocked, his left cheek--face!-- twitched, and his eyes momentarily trained on a focal point way-out. ‘Uh oh, his Eureka tell.’ Wandblume dryly wondered just what in the sixty-two--five? seven?--Jovian moons it had to do with buff, nearly nude fire-fighting beefcake. Was he really....
“Brilliant, Shego! I shall call it...” He raised his sinister index in his Muse taxi-hailing manner. “...Mads : Technology & Advancement!”
The swarm scoffed but Wandblume knew better. Her mind paraphrased Macbeth : ‘something wacky this way comes!’ She went back to her John Hancocking but with a certain halfheartedness as the truer portion of her could hardly wait to succor the only man who really mattered : certainly not the cash-bearing clowns for whom she entertained a mere professional curtesy.
***
Following business hours, after all but the redhead and Mads had been either air-locked off the palm-station or packed away in the capsule-hotel one deck below the ConClave hall, they had moved from the belowdecks con-space to the main-deck condo-space ; were enjoying Van Loan’s very own brand of coffee made of his very own brand of coffee bean, Dr. D’s Blue Asteroid.
The redhead, Carmine Palisander, had paid the premium, and being a likable, lovely and luminous lady she was invited to stay longer than the legions. The Mads were guild and a considerable part of ConClave’s programming.
Van Loan had been spieling : “So you see, it’s both fun Geekery and amusing parody.” He gestured towards Shizuka Hayama with his mug ; inertia slopped three millimeters of brew onto the faux black onyx floor. “Out of your dermis,” A robotic mouse wended its way skillfully across the floor, sucked up the spill ; scooted into a party orbit with only the faintest ozone hum. “you’d be both an Objet d’Geek as well as a technological dressing-down of more traditional renderings of the under-clad Feminine.” The mug executed another dramatic vector shift ; the mouse again intercepting the scant spillage.
“I’d get to ditch this,” Hayayama’s hands eloquently delineated her feminine frame, “and go Au Natural Android?” There was a light in her eyes that wasn’t likely programmed.
“Keep the glasses.” suggested Wandblume, who up to this point in the conversation was waging a largely subtle & mostly successful holding action against the cooly determined Carmine. “It’ll screw with those particular fetishists.” She went back to waging the ongoing Cold-Sultry-War with a guerrilla tactics style of bustling and drink refreshing. Van Loan, too focused upon future days to really notice the present, wondered, 'Why's she 50s wifing?" Then the conversation deviated into really heady and distracting territory.
“What about the jumpsuit?” Carmine eyed Hayamaya’s superlatively simulated secondary sexual sign that she was turned on : it wasn’t difficult to notice given the next-to-nothing-neoprene of the bodysuit. “Why wear it if you’re not happy with your frame?”
“Because I possess less of the illusion of self-determination than you do.”
‘Oh, oh, Van Loan thought, ‘I better head off this ‘All Intelligence is Artificial’ argument before it pirates my show!’
Before he could act his more larcenous half intervened for almost exactly the same reason. She put a hand on both ladies ; the one on Carmine being in a tad of a riskier locale than the one resting companionably upon Li's shoulder.
“We all flirt, sometimes even with disaster.”
Kohran tried not to look too relieved that Wandblume had rescued her from her own synthetic kisser : ‘Did I really say that out loud?!’ Her verbal recovery was suitably jocose : “Fashion disaster, in my case!”
“Am I one to judge?” Wandblume winked at Shizuka, and struck one of her cheesier half unzipped poster poises.
“I am.” Carmine murmured, a sultry sparkle in her eyes that were decidedly not trained upon Li.
They shared a good group chortle ; Van Loan recovered the initiative.
He was too focussed on what he was going to say to the group to notice that Wandblume’s actions and words had considerably more meaning than defending her squeeze’s podium.
“Most of the calendar entries wouldn’t be quite so...overt : I require a collection of your...” The cup traced a drippy arc including all of the Mads as well as Carmine Palisander, a mechanical engineer capable of following the tangential wanderings and odd trajectories of the Mad minds in the living room.   “...inventions minus their casings : naked as the day they were built with every servo, diode & resistor visible! The innermost machine-intent revealed, exposed! For Science!” The spill-y spiel finished, Van Loan punctuated his pitch with the firm tabling of what coffee remained within the confines of his mug.
Kohran simulated a thoughtful inspiration with the comic irony that certain specific mammalian attributes were brought to the fore ; flung her barely covered arms galactic north northwest, and decried, “You have your Mz. May!”
“Wunderbar!” Van Loan’s mock German was both a recognition and a fond poke at his sig-other. “Our first month, and almost certainly our cover shot! Now all we need is your naked achievements to complete this most Geeksome project!”
***
Later, in the chamber of ablutions, Van Loan squeezing toothpaste onto his brush, queried Wandblume, engaged in ceramic fluid venting, regarding her earlier episode of peculiar un-Shego-ish behaviour.
“What was with all that fidgeting and roaming earlier, hon?”
“Oh, nothing much : Carmine wants a three-way.”
Van Loan’s application of dental purée seriously exceeded his immediate needs.
“With us?!”
“Well, more with me, but she knows that I come with you, so she’s willing to pay the piper.”
Van Loan’s face went from astonished to resolute, as did his body language, in a speed un-clock-able by science : “Well I’m not! I will not risk what I have with you for the urges of anybody!”
Seated upon the china throne, Wandblume tried to be Shego-esque about it all : she really did, but it didn’t work. She indecorously launched herself at Her Man.
“Ewww!” His performance wouldn’t have convinced the audience at a professional wrestling event as he cradled his emotional girl.
“How about a shared cold shower, just for good measure?”
She nodded, vigorously.
]]> One booth over bearing the banner ‘Deep Clear’, Van Loan delicately poked an esoteric device at chest-high empty air. “You know what’s challenging?”
Wandblume was too busy signing glossy and not all-together modest full-sized posters of her alluring anatomy shoved towards her by an ogle of black and green appareled Otaku to be able to really attend to Van Loan’s conversational cue. Also , to preserve her cool, villainous reputation with her attendant squee-club she played it aloof with her darling geek of a man-child : her reply was the maximally curt interrogative ‘Mmmm?’
He continued as if he actually had her ear as opposed to what he did possess of her attention, the tiniest fringe of the peripheral sight of her lovely left eye.
“Repairing Deep Clear is very challenging!” The tool, a black and chrome thing of keen tines, sinister pistol grips, and delphic diodes, growled softly in time to the heartbeat-flicker of a scarlet LED. “That’s...” He depressed a stud on the grip ; the tool extended a barbed probe, as if it wasn't already scary looking enough.
‘Mmmm!” She executed her flamboyant signature, what Van Loan called the Double-D W, and followed it up with cursive scrawled boilerplate expression number thirty-four (To my #1 minion!). The fan, parted from his lucre, departed ; was replaced by another from the throng. She, a redhead--the cascade of red-gold locks looked fantastic against the well executed green & black leather that encased a yummy female hull--had actually ponied up the ridiculous amount of cash needed to purchase a one-off specialty photo-op with Shego incarnate.
“Twenty, be a smart bomb and snap us!” She threw an arm around the redhead’s lower primary gimbal mounting ; drew her in for a pose somewhere in between amiable & authoritarian. That brought a hushed, reverential silence as, posters momentarily forgotten, the throng stood spellbound. Fortunately for Van Loan, he was far too immersed in his transparent task to suffer the stroke inducing sight of his partner’s revenue-stream shenanigans.
The photographer sauntered in on his tripod harness assemblage. A camera was tentacle grasped in the position traditionally taken by the heat-ray apparatus.
“Got it.” Twenty depressed his stud on his pistol gripped device ; the redhead, flushed in face if no longer in pocketbook, brushed her mouth by Wandblume’s ear, murmured something ; strode away on legs as long as the lunar day to possess her prize poster already projecting from the printer.
“...got it!” Van Loan torqued his tool three quarters of a picometer clockwise ; an 8-bit victory theme sounded midair to prove the validity of this seemingly addled action.
‘Finally stole some thunder!’ Van Loan thought as eyes turned to take in the highly unusual almost sight of a successfully repaired invisible super-computer. However, three hundred million years of reptile brain-stem stimulation beat out four hundred years of enlightened prefrontal cortex empiricism. The after image of vaguely naughty girl/girl photography & slightly screened secondary sexual titillations totally and soundly shellacked science.
“Good try, lover.” Shego favoured Drakken with a sincere smirk. “Maybe you should try bearing some blue...” She returned to adroitly dashing off poster scrawls. “I know! How about a Mads take on the beefcake firefighter calendar?” That got more than a few gently joking comments and snorts from the fan-mass. Van Loan's response was almost a classic full-blown Dr. D Declaration except that it was abruptly intercepted by The Look : his right eyebrow Spocked, his left cheek--face!-- twitched, and his eyes momentarily trained on a focal point way-out. ‘Uh oh, his Eureka tell.’ Wandblume dryly wondered just what in the sixty-two--five? seven?--Jovian moons it had to do with buff, nearly nude fire-fighting beefcake. Was he really....
“Brilliant, Shego! I shall call it...” He raised his sinister index in his Muse taxi-hailing manner. “...Mads : Technology & Advancement!”
The swarm scoffed but Wandblume knew better. Her mind paraphrased Macbeth : ‘something wacky this way comes!’ She went back to her John Hancocking but with a certain halfheartedness as the truer portion of her could hardly wait to succor the only man who really mattered : certainly not the cash-bearing clowns for whom she entertained a mere professional curtesy.
***
Following business hours, after all but the redhead and Mads had been either air-locked off the palm-station or packed away in the capsule-hotel one deck below the ConClave hall, they had moved from the belowdecks con-space to the main-deck condo-space ; were enjoying Van Loan’s very own brand of coffee made of his very own brand of coffee bean, Dr. D’s Blue Asteroid.
The redhead, Carmine Palisander, had paid the premium, and being a likable, lovely and luminous lady she was invited to stay longer than the legions. The Mads were guild and a considerable part of ConClave’s programming.
Van Loan had been spieling : “So you see, it’s both fun Geekery and amusing parody.” He gestured towards Shizuka Hayama with his mug ; inertia slopped three millimeters of brew onto the faux black onyx floor. “Out of your dermis,” A robotic mouse wended its way skillfully across the floor, sucked up the spill ; scooted into a party orbit with only the faintest ozone hum. “you’d be both an Objet d’Geek as well as a technological dressing-down of more traditional renderings of the under-clad Feminine.” The mug executed another dramatic vector shift ; the mouse again intercepting the scant spillage.
“I’d get to ditch this,” Hayayama’s hands eloquently delineated her feminine frame, “and go Au Natural Android?” There was a light in her eyes that wasn’t likely programmed.
“Keep the glasses.” suggested Wandblume, who up to this point in the conversation was waging a largely subtle & mostly successful holding action against the cooly determined Carmine. “It’ll screw with those particular fetishists.” She went back to waging the ongoing Cold-Sultry-War with a guerrilla tactics style of bustling and drink refreshing. Van Loan, too focused upon future days to really notice the present, wondered, 'Why's she 50s wifing?" Then the conversation deviated into really heady and distracting territory.
“What about the jumpsuit?” Carmine eyed Hayamaya’s superlatively simulated secondary sexual sign that she was turned on : it wasn’t difficult to notice given the next-to-nothing-neoprene of the bodysuit. “Why wear it if you’re not happy with your frame?”
“Because I possess less of the illusion of self-determination than you do.”
‘Oh, oh, Van Loan thought, ‘I better head off this ‘All Intelligence is Artificial’ argument before it pirates my show!’
Before he could act his more larcenous half intervened for almost exactly the same reason. She put a hand on both ladies ; the one on Carmine being in a tad of a riskier locale than the one resting companionably upon Li's shoulder.
“We all flirt, sometimes even with disaster.”
Kohran tried not to look too relieved that Wandblume had rescued her from her own synthetic kisser : ‘Did I really say that out loud?!’ Her verbal recovery was suitably jocose : “Fashion disaster, in my case!”
“Am I one to judge?” Wandblume winked at Shizuka, and struck one of her cheesier half unzipped poster poises.
“I am.” Carmine murmured, a sultry sparkle in her eyes that were decidedly not trained upon Li.
They shared a good group chortle ; Van Loan recovered the initiative.
He was too focussed on what he was going to say to the group to notice that Wandblume’s actions and words had considerably more meaning than defending her squeeze’s podium.
“Most of the calendar entries wouldn’t be quite so...overt : I require a collection of your...” The cup traced a drippy arc including all of the Mads as well as Carmine Palisander, a mechanical engineer capable of following the tangential wanderings and odd trajectories of the Mad minds in the living room.   “...inventions minus their casings : naked as the day they were built with every servo, diode & resistor visible! The innermost machine-intent revealed, exposed! For Science!” The spill-y spiel finished, Van Loan punctuated his pitch with the firm tabling of what coffee remained within the confines of his mug.
Kohran simulated a thoughtful inspiration with the comic irony that certain specific mammalian attributes were brought to the fore ; flung her barely covered arms galactic north northwest, and decried, “You have your Mz. May!”
“Wunderbar!” Van Loan’s mock German was both a recognition and a fond poke at his sig-other. “Our first month, and almost certainly our cover shot! Now all we need is your naked achievements to complete this most Geeksome project!”
***
Later, in the chamber of ablutions, Van Loan squeezing toothpaste onto his brush, queried Wandblume, engaged in ceramic fluid venting, regarding her earlier episode of peculiar un-Shego-ish behaviour.
“What was with all that fidgeting and roaming earlier, hon?”
“Oh, nothing much : Carmine wants a three-way.”
Van Loan’s application of dental purée seriously exceeded his immediate needs.
“With us?!”
“Well, more with me, but she knows that I come with you, so she’s willing to pay the piper.”
Van Loan’s face went from astonished to resolute, as did his body language, in a speed un-clock-able by science : “Well I’m not! I will not risk what I have with you for the urges of anybody!”
Seated upon the china throne, Wandblume tried to be Shego-esque about it all : she really did, but it didn’t work. She indecorously launched herself at Her Man.
“Ewww!” His performance wouldn’t have convinced the audience at a professional wrestling event as he cradled his emotional girl.
“How about a shared cold shower, just for good measure?”
She nodded, vigorously.
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