Emerson Fortier
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Chapter 38 - Nought But Spit
🕑 Added 2022-10-09 17:01:02 +0000 UTCAgate leaned forward in his chair aboard the Mama’s Teets, trailing little blue sparks that whirled around him like bees or glowing moths, with him the flame.
“What about the fence?” He asked. “Once we’re off the ship, how are we getting paid?”
Feiruhn clasped his hands and rocked back in his chair. “In some ways that is the most delicate part of the whole operation.” He said. “I’s spoke to the system ambassador on the station. He’s heavily monitored, so, I’s didn’t really speak to him. Asked through a proxy. I’s sounded him out about what we’d get if we was to, hypothetically, bring him some piece of one of the elementals running around on Massu. He warned me against sending an expedition to a living planet, but he’s said we could pretty well name our price. I’s said there might be some floating around in a container in one of the dust clouds, and he seemed to get a bit more serious. Took my rep to a black room and gave him instructions for getting it to a particular vessel in drydock with the kind of protections makes it dangerous for the Governor to try messing with, and hard for the guild to catch up with if theys wants to keep material from going off world. Said it’s also an integrated vessel, which means a piece of the system is inside, and knows what’s going on around it. We bring him the goods, and the system will know who brought it. Pays out in System Credit which can be used for leveling or converting into other currencies when it hits the banking systems. We’ll be able to withdraw on Elleppu, and you’ll be able to collect on Mubra, once the ambassador gets the integrated vessel home.”
“That’s a lot of trust to put into an AI representative.” Hao Dong commented.
“System representative.” Feiruhn replied. “In my experience, that means they’s a lot more opportunistic than others. Once its on that ship, the System owns it. We’ll have our reward, and he’ll have a quest to get it back to integrated space, with a reward that will probably make ours look like a small one. He may not be expecting the quantity we’re going to bring, but that will only amplify his greed.” He nodded. “I’s trusts him.”
“Trust in mankind’s good intentions,” Agate said, as though quoting, “but where your life is concerned, rely on their greed.” He nodded. “That is satisfactory.”
“It just leaves the matter of getting on board and getting away with it.” Shockstick said. He manipulated his construct and the silver ship shrank in the projection until it was just a dot against a drifting mass of dust and tumbling stones, pricked here and there by the lights and structures of the industry moving within.
“Why don’t you outline the problems for us.” Agate told him.
“Sure, sure.” For all his augments, the little creature’s voice still came through his absurdly large nose, giving it the same nasal growl as Izzi and TC.
“Plan is easy as I understand it,” the goblin said, “get our human bomb on board and threaten to blow him up if the captain doesn’t hand us the goods, or at least stay out of the way while we do what we’re going to do. We leave, leave the bomb with the ship, drop the shit off with the system ambassador, then boost to our hidey holes and disappear until we can get out with Feiruhn’s smugglers. The bomb does his thing with the void and the not dying in it. He flies back to the station while a fucking guild captain stares daggers at him, and we all get away safe and sound before he decides to split the remaining stones into rubble to find the people that did this to him. You’ll note the size of the stones he’s shifting now.”
Everyone watched on the display as a chunk of rock that made even the ship look small, moved under the rippling force extended by the silver ovoid.
The Talyaya flipped his construct in his hand and nodded down at them while mechanisms in his eyes buzzed. “I miss anything?”
“Just all the problems.” Agate replied.
“Oh, right.” Shockstick grinned showing sharp little teeth, a few of them replaced by what looked like technomancer’s renditions of fangs. “Here’s the big ones. Starters. This right here.” He waved to the image in the middle of the room showing the ship and a sphere of the void large enough to make cubes of stone a hundred yards to an edge look like grains of sand. “This is the guild ship’s no fly zone. I tested it, and it’s foolproof. No sneaking by on a the back of a drifting asteroid, no hiding in a laser burst, or a coms black out. Everything in this sphere is tightly controlled. You see how it’s moving those rocks? Well it’s doing the same thing to everything else in that sphere it doesn’t have strict control of, except its holding it still. Get too close, and the thing just stops you. Holds you there while you boost like you never put G-well in your tanks to begin with. So flying up to the thing is out.”
He dialed through some images on his construct and tapped on one, changing the image at their center to show a small disc of a ship moving towards the ship.
“Fortunately that’s the easy part. Governor’s got a couple of reps on the station and their ships have passes to fly anywhere they want without monitoring. We’ve foxed their pass before on jobs, but I doubt the guild ship is just reading tags, so we’re going to have to steal the real deal this time around and fly up on official governor business, in an official ship. This is our ship.”
The image zoomed in and they watched as the black plate reached the silver surface of the ovoid. Tendrils extended from the rippling silver surface to pull the black plate in, but they all got a good look at the thing before it disappeared.
“Rep Ship four eighty ninety one. Belongs to some Kispuhru rep for the Governor, mostly gets used for hauling bodies between penal colonies for the misbehaved.”
“People like us.” The smart Kabi rumbled.
“Sure.” Shockstick said. He waved his hand, and time swung backwards on the display. The ship reversed itself out of the liquid side of the ship until it stood before it’s own reflection with twisting arms of silver reaching towards it. “Only we ain’t been caught.”
They stared at the ship for a moment.
“Point is.” The goblin went on eventually. “That this thing’s one of the only rep ships big enough to haul a few tons of goods and built to load it. The rest make the Teet’s look small, and that isn’t going to cut it if we want to get our load on properly.”
“Or off.” Zihan offered with a grin.
The lucky Kabi snorted and scrolled further on his construct. Shockstick shook his head.
“Biologicals.” He said.
“Hey now, you’ve still got skin.” The smart Kabi pointed out.
The goblin’s mechanical eyes swiveled to him. “Not down there.” He said. “Not anymore. I’ve transcended man. Left breeding for the short sighted.” His eyes buzzed as the lenses adjusted in their sockets.
Zihan laughed. “What?”
The goblin waved a hand and turned back to the display. He manipulated his handheld construct and the projection fell away again until they could see the entire ship.
“So the plan gets more complicated. We gotta steal this from it’s hangar on three, then whip it around through and get at the ship before the Governor throws the all alarm switch, all that to get our bomb-boy onto the bastard and stay alive.”
“Is that doable?” Feiruhn asked.
“With the restrictions on the Governor while the Guild Ship is off station?” The Talyaya shrugged. “We’ll have around an hour between stealing the ship and the Governor throwing the alarm. Under normal circumstances we’d have around twenty minutes before the signal gets from the dock to the hub and then out to the other rocks, but the governor has its primary at One right now, which triples the number of handoffs that have to happen before the alarms get flipped. There will be alarms of course, but they’ll be behind us while the signal is still getting to the Governor, and we’ll ride that signal transduction all the way to the ship before it has any idea we stole the damn thing.”
“And you’s can do that in twenty minutes? Get there, I mean?”
Shockstick waved a hand. “Sure.” He said. “Easy flying. I need to I can even shave off a couple of minutes doing some of the tighter stuff through the rubble, but we don’t need to do that. I can make the flight in fifteen through one of the troughs. Shouldn’t be an issue.”
“What will be an issue,” Agate said, “Is getting through the ship once the captain knows that we aren’t welcome guests.”
“Which is where I come in.” Zihan said. He laced his fingers together as though cracking his knuckles then stretched and smiled. “Here it was beginning to sound boring.”
Agate gave him an unimpressed look. “You’ll be busy.”
Zihan dropped a spark into the bottle at his fingertips and there was a flash of green from within. He pressed at the top of the bottle and the whole thing buckled like it was made of wet clay while the paper label on its front smoked and curled away. “Not so busy I can’t open a few doors for you.” Zihan said as as he molded the glass.
Agate shook his head. “If you think you can hold the ship hostage and manage the doors at the same time, you’re deluding yourself.” He said. He glanced at Shockstick. “Do we have anything on the guild ships? Schematics? Diagrams?”
“Not much.” Shockstick said. He touched one glass eye and twitched a dial along the outside. “Got some really old schemas. Maybe a few centuries old now, but these sorts of things don’t change much with time. Cosmetic changes, mostly. Fashions change, but tech remains the same, mostly. Let me get it out here.” He fiddled with his display until the projection of the tangle floating in the center of the room disappeared, replaced after a moment by a semi-transparent outline of an absurdly complex construct.
“There’s the ship.” Shockstick said through his nose. “Or what it might be inside. What you don’t see here is the flesh-steel, though you can see the control nodes here, and here.”
Parts of the construct floating in the air between them flashed, two spheres at the heart of it, surrounded by what might have been thick metal plates and more incomprehensible machinery.
“This isn’t just the ship.” Agate said, looking at Zihan. “This is the captain himself, an extension of him, like a limb, or a set of organs, and it will all be controlled from this, brain, of a ship at the center of the ship itself.”
Zihan nodded and hummed a confirmation. He stuck his fingers into the molten glass in his hand and stretched it like putty until it stuck from the body of the glass in a curve.
The smart Kabi stared at the glass as Zihan applied more heat.
“How big is this, relative to the body of the ship?” Agate asked.
Shockstick buzzed, then the projection shrank until it was the size of a hand, surrounded by a sphere around ten times its size. “It’s big.” Shockstick said. “But not that big. There are probably G-well tanks on board as well, and the cargo, obviously, but we’re not going to know the lay out until we get on there, and even then, the walls are made of flesh-metal. They can just move with us inside them.”
“So, it’s complicated.” Zihan said as he pinched another handful of molten glass out of the back side of the bottle.
“A maze that moves around a core, with the cargo somewhere on the outside.” Agate watched Zihan shape the glass with a faint look of distaste. “Are you paying attention?” He asked.
Zihan pinched the top of one of the bits of glass then pressed two holes into it and turned the bottle, now a crude glass bird, towards the Kabi. He put his head in his palm and looked at Agate. “The most.” He replied.
Agate tapped at the arm of his chair, each impact trailing a finger of smoke as his blue fire charred the material. He stopped when he saw the smoke and regarded it for a moment.
“We’ll be counting on you to keep us alive.” Agate said eventually, turning to Zihan. “If we make it half way through the outer layer of flesh-steel in the rep-ship then we’ll still be hundreds of yards from either the center or our destination, with layers and layers of machinery and flexible regenerative steel still between you and the man who owns that ship.” He looked at the goblin. “Where is the captain in this diagram.”
Shockstick manipulated his display again and the image fell towards them, slowing as a section buried behind tanks and armored walls began to flash.
“Says this is the hookup.” He said. “Schematics are old, so, it’s showing cogwork converters and spinal taps, but I’m not sure we can count on that. I’d expect anyone running a guild ship to have one of the newer augment systems. Nutrient bath with full on cabling. Probably nothing more than a brain and a spinal cord left of what he used to be. Maybe a head, if our captain was feeling sentimental when he made his transition.”
Shockstick licked his lips. “Give my left nut to take some of those augments.”
“You’ll get them on Mubra.” Agate told him.
“Repulsive.” Hao Dong grated
“Death is repulsive.” Shockstick replied. “And my kind doesn’t have the option for cultivation.” He tapped at his control and the display fell towards the blinking portion of the map. “Imagine becoming a void ship.”
“Which is precisely the point.” Agate said. He turned back to Zihan. “The ship itself is little more than an extension of the captain. You might be able to blow holes in the hull, and torch the fleshmetal, but if you can’t cut through to the armored heart of the ship, to this core, the captain will have no reason to take you seriously. To threaten him, you’ll have to be at the heart, or so close enough that it knows you can kill it before it could kill you. Which won’t leave you much time for burning holes in doors.”
Zihan toyed with his glass bird, remolding bits of it to add details like wings and a comb.
Agate watched him.
“We’re going into the dragon’s mouth, with the intention of stealing his dinner.” The Androgyn told him. “The whole thing falls apart if you cannot keep the captain playing nice.”
Zihan hummed agreement, trimmed a feather then glued the bit of spare glass to the developing bird’s back.
“I’d like to know that you take this seriously.”
Zihan lifted the bird, now much closer to a rooster, if one drawn by a child, than the amorphous avian it had been at the start. He turned it side to side to examine it, sighed, and tossed it behind him where it snapped into three pieces on teh floor.
“What what whole bit about greed and trusting your life to it?” Zihan put his cheek in one hand and studied Agate across the length of the Teet’s deck. “Once I’m on that ship, we’ll all be in the same pan.” He fished in a pocket of his overalls, pulled out a smoke and lit it with his thumb. “I’m not anymore interested in dying than you are.”
He puffed smoke into the projection where it whirled and glittered where in flickering laser light.
“Then I will just have to trust.” Agate said. He turned to Feiruhn. “But we’ll still need an infiltration specialist to open the doors.Someone capable of handling AI’s.”
“Didn’t you have one?” Feiruhn asked. “For that last project we did.”
Agate grimaced. “We did.” He said. “She’s gone now though.”
Hao Dong cleared his throat. “Found her in her apartment before we got together for this, still jacked in. Had her brain melted by a hostile AI. Looked like she tried hacking past one of the governor’s safeguards and didn’t make it. I didn’t look long. Thought the place might be bugged, so… I left her there.”
An uncomfortable silence followed.
“There will have to be a test.” Agate told Feiruhn. “To make sure anyone we hire won’t meet the same fate.”
Feiruhn nodded. “I’ll throw together a list.” he said. “I’m sure we can find someone.”
The Lucky Kabi grunted in the silence that followed then tapped the Smart one’s shoulder and showed him something on his display.
“What?” The smart one asked.
The lucky one just grunted again, waved the device.
“So she’s hot.” The smart one said. “Have you been listening to a word that’s been said?”
The lucky Kabi looked up and around at the others who’d all shifted their attention to him. “What?” He grunted. “You think I’ll come up with a better plan?”
Hao Dong snorted a laugh.
“This is the best we have.” Agate said. “If anyone doubts it, now is the time to speak their piece.”
“Steal a ship to sneak onto another ship while the whole station throws up an alert.” Hao Dong said. “Put a gun to the head of a captain’s been flying longer than most immortals have been around, then sneak away and hope some smuggler can get us out alive while a system rep high tails it for integrated space with our goods.”
“Any luck they’ll think we’re on board.” Agate said.
Hao dong snorted, spat. “I don’t see how it could go wrong.”
“You want to quit?” Zihan demanded.
Hao Dong tilted his head towards him and gave the other cultivator a crooked smile. “Not in a million years.”
