Two-Bit Switch did not often come to the Third Ring’s understreet. In his misspent youth, Takioro’s dingiest and most deplorable neighborhood was the closest thing Two-Bit could call home. Unpleasant memories – of the filth, the people, the cold nights spent shivering in slime – kept him away, years later, like an unlucky charm.
One of the few things that could compel Two-Bit down here, however, was the need for a top-notch feedcaster. As far as top-notch feedcasters went, Sifer was the absolute best in Two-Bit’s budget.
The Zibbian paranoid and propagandist had hung up his shingle in an abandoned kiosk in the understreet’s cleanest corner. Sludge of myriad and unnatural colors pools on the ground, steaming and sizzling and best avoided. Derelicts and degenerates are commonplace here, shambling about like zombies, dangerous to approach, dangerous to ignore.
The nearest business to Sifer’s little kiosk was Cleaver Cheevo’s EZ Organ Extraction, down at the end of the street, where customers enter with corpses and leave with wads of cash.
The current calamity that afflicts the understreet was a sudden rash of flooding. Some water main somewhere must have ruptured recently, sending a coursing river down all the main sewer lines. Here, at the twisted end of the understreet, there’s only a babbling green brook that runs down the middle of the pipe, ferrying garbage and occasionally worse to clog the drains.
The Depot-Commissioner had made encouraging noises about “teams of repairmen” and “top priorities” but no one was fooled. The Third Ring’s understreet was nobody’s top priority.
It made very little difference to Two-Bit Switch. He wasn’t sticking around.
Fresh from an invigorating weekend at the palatial estates of Gella Borsk, Two-Bit Switch was hard at work on his new passion project. There were many, many hands to shake, favors to call in, arrangements to arrange. Borsk’s information was invaluable, precisely what Two-Bit needed to turn this vain fantasy into an actionable plan, but the sheer legwork involved would be staggering.
He would need to take work in the interim, Two-Bit knew, particularly now that things with Nabdres had dissolved. A few months out of the business, he’d probably return to freelance jailbreaking and take a contract or two. Once he’d earned a comfortable amount of scratch, he could return to his true love – planning this impossible caper.
Sifer was an essential cog in that caper. Perhaps there was some bad blood in their recent history, a few scores left unsettled, but Two-Bit Switch was confident that, with the right application of charm and greed, he could convince the Zibbian to partner up.
Originally designed to be a ticket booth for the aborted driftrail the understreet had been designed for, Sifer’s hacknest would have been completely unrecognizable to its original designers.
It was covered, floor to ceiling, in a thick foliage of cords, cables and conduits, hanging like vines and coiling like brambles. A dozen consoles and more monitors are littered about the place, allowing the six-tentacled ambidextrous Zibbian to work multiple jobs simultaneously. The kiosk is cluttered with kitsch; geeky memorabilia appearing as toys, figurines, stickers and keychains, hanging, dangling, posed and posted on every flat surface available.
Two-Bit Switch made a gesture towards one of the stools. “Mind if I has a squat?”
“The second-minute these’re gone,” Sifer informed him, popping a bakebug into his open beak, “Switch-you are too.”
“I’ll jabb quick, then,” Two-Bit decided, sliding onto the stool. Steepling his fingers, he opened his mouth, prepared to make his pitch, when something – the sound of swanky music and the shape of bodies writhing on one of Sifer’s screens – stopped him dead. “Are you vizzing porn?”
“Watching? Bloom no.” Sifer seemed genuinely disgusted by the very thought. “Contract job-work from some Qhemite porno nobody-who. Trying to boost watch-traffic for a coupla her watch-videos in the Horong Sector-space. Switch-you ever seen Two Girls, Eight Arms?”
“Can’t say as I have.”
“Couse Switch-you haven’t. Switch-you’re not some stink-Ruuvian perv-bucket.” Tentacles typing, eyes scrolling through spreadsheets, he cued Two-Bit with a few fingers. “Sifer-I’m listening.”
“Gotta another mish job for you,” Two-Bit explained, unable to completely take his eyes from the smut on the screen. “Hank some custom coding done.”
Sifer made some sound out of his siphon, something Two-Bit Switch must interpret as a whistle. “Ain’t done coding in a comet’s age-time. Practically retired from that blowhole-shit.”
“Practically snoozed,” Two-Bit argued, “ain’t the same as snoozed snoozed, though, innit?”
“Depends,” stipulated Sifer, crunching another bakebug in his beak with a sickening sound, “on thing-what Switch-you’d have Sifer-me coding.”
“Real jig job, ball it up for me,” Two-Bit assured him. “I hank a virus cooked up.”
Sifer’s laugh was a wet squelching sound that originated in some unseen bladder somewhere. “Course Switch-you fucking do.”
“What?” Two-Bit objected, honestly a little irritated.
“Switch-you couldn’t afford a virus-bug, first thing-problem.” Brushing sugar-coated and segmented legs off the tips of his suckers, Sifer returns one tentacle to a keyboard while another goes digging around in the bakebug package for more goodies. “Virus-bugs cost triple.”
“Triple?” Two-Bit was aghast. “Where’d you prod that from?”
“First,” the Zibbian explained, gesturing emphatically with a gripped bakebug, “a virus-bug’s gotta be tailored, very specifically, to the mainframe-system you-rhetoric’re trying to infect. That means study-research and study-research means time-hours and, from Sifer-me, time-hours cost double.” He concluded this thought by snapping the bakebug in half with a clack of his beak.
“Okay–”
“Second,” Sifer continued, repeating his gesture and dusting Two-Bit with sugar flakes and insect bits, “virus-bugs are very dangerous to cook. Sifer-I gotta take extra chance-precautions to ensure virus-it doesn’t linger on any of my network-systems and that takes time-hours and, from Sifer-me–”
“Time scores triple, yeah, yeah,” Two-Bit rushed him along with a circular gesture. “We understand, you’re very shrewd, blah blah.”
“So, unless Switch-you’re prepared to pay–”
“Not on the spot,” Two-Bit Switch was forced to admit, keeping his cool as best he can. “Not upfront. I should make the point,” he made the point with small shrug, “that this’s for a very good cause.”
“Sifer-I’m sure,” Sifer agreed bitterly. “Switch-you’re known for your charitable deed-works.” He tossed the rest of the bakebug into his beak and spun partially about, to better concentrate on some new task on some new machine. “What’re Switch-you trying to infect?”
Two-Bit Switch took his time to withdraw his Attaché, place it on the counter and summon up the hologram, knowing that this reveal would be very important. Still clacking away on keys, it took Sifer a double take to notice the hologram and register what that hologram actually showed.
The skeletal outline of a capital cruiser spun a slow circle above Two-Bit’s Attaché. Indicational branches sprouted from various points along its body, containing little bursts of technical data. Its designation appeared in a small text box in the hologram’s lower corner, revealing the ship for what it was.
“That’s a Consortium cruiser-ship,” realized Sifer as he studied the hologram.
“It is,” Two-Bit Switch affirmed. “That’s the GCF Acquisition. Consider this an example of the gantine I’d like to infect.”
“Why,” Sifer questioned him, keeping his tone neutral, “would Switch-you like to infect a Consortium cruiser-ship?”
“‘Cause I’m fixing,” Two-Bit explained, a mischievous smirk playing on the corner of his face, “to fuck with the Gitter Consortium.”
As inhuman as those eyes were – their pupils a straight black bar through a speckled iris – Two-Bit s
wore he could see straight through them, could picture Sifer’s thoughts as clearly as the Zibbian felt them. All the cephalopoid’s hacktivist hackles were standing fully erect, Two-Bit knew, at mention of tangling with the imperious Gitter Consortium.
In the freecaster community, there was no greater boogeyman than the Gitter Hegemony. They ruled their small corner of space with even more impunity than the Endless Imperium, stretched too thin across too many worlds. They wielded information like a weapon, controlling the flow of facts and the narrative behind their every action. This was pure anathema to the radical freecaster collectives, who practically deified the free exchange of ideas and information.
There was no mystery greater, no injustice more vile, than the poorly-kept secret of Gitter’s true source. All in the galaxy, save the true rubes, knew the planet Gita to be a front, none more so than the freecasters. Try though they might, they could never uncover any other solid explanation for the spice’s source. There were as many theories as there were freecasters, scattered through the galaxy, but they all acknowledged that the truth was still out there.
In the same way that a potted Gitter sapling was the holiest of all booty for a buccaneer, so too was the Consortium’s dirty secret the holiest of leaks for the freecaster community.
Sifer attempted to look skeptical but his inner excitement still shone through. “Are Switch-you after the–”
“I think I might be,” Two-Bit confirmed, nodding.
Retrieving another bakebug from the package, the Zibbian make a casual gesture towards the hologram. “Whaddya need?”
“What I hank,” Two-Bit started to elaborate, considering the hologram that spun between them, “is basically mayhem.”
It took ten minutes or more to explain all the precise specifications to Sifer and for the pair of them to argue, back and forth, about cost and feasibility and who was being a jackass. Two-Bit wanted to first lay out everything he was after before the Zibbian objected but he knew, three seconds in, that was never gonna happen. At every turn, the freecaster would tither or snort or just plain interrupt Two-Bit, to explain why that was a stupid suggestion and how stupid was Two-Bit for suggesting that and here was Sifer’s idea, much smarter and much more expensive.
The first thing Two-Bit wanted was for every alarm aboard the ship to go haywire, screaming and screeching all at once. This was a major mantle-ache for Sifer, considering all the separate subsystems he would need to trigger but he supposed it was technically possible.
The second thing Two-Bit wanted was the ship’s airlocks to open and close at random intervals. Sifer took great joy in complaining about this one, bemoaning the intense security protocols that ensconced airlock controls and how arduous they could be to circumvent.
The third thing Two-Bit wanted involved overloading the various coolant pipes aboard the ship, causing them to vent caustic coolant everywhere. This was actually pretty doable, Sifer said, and shouldn’t be a problem.
Next came the real tricky shit.
When Two-Bit explained that, in the midst of all this chaos, he required all the ship’s security holos to be voided and swapped with a series of dummy recordings, Sifer was more bemused than annoyed. When Two-Bit also explained that, in the midst of all this chaos, he needed one straight shot from the ship’s cargo bay to the munitions depot, he was more annoyed than bemused.
In the end, it wound up costing Two-Bit Switch quadruple, considering how blooming unusual the commission was, something even the jabberhead couldn’t really contest.
There were a number of stipulations. It would need to be back-burnered, considering Sifer’s current schedule. The actual virus would need to be uploaded manually, rather than remotely. Lastly, Two-Bit was required, by the binding legal agreement of spit-into-the-hand-handshake, to compensate the Zibbian for any damages his equipment may sustain as a result of cooking him this virus.
Arduous as this process might have seemed, Two-Bit Switch took it as a small victory that they were still dithering, long after the box of bakebugs was empty.
“Chagged we agree, then,” Two-Bit sighed, as the negotiations were winding down.
“It is a distinctly strange pleasure-joy doing business-deal with Switch-you,” Sifer acknowledged, the closest thing to a compliment the anti-social Zibbian ever made.
“Now, for the other thing.”
The Zibbian stopped typing with all six of his tentacles. “What other thing-now?”
Two-Bit steepled his hands and braved the pitch, anticipating the worst possible reaction. “That’s the first virus I hank.”
“The first virus-code,” Sifer speculated slowly, “implies there are multiple virus-codes Switch-you need Sifer-me to make.” The Zibbian shifts his entire posture, turning all tentacles to better face Two-Bit, like he intended to use each to strangle him individually. “Are there multiple virus-codes Switch-you need Sifer-me to make?”
Two-Bit was suddenly a little squeamish. “Two counts as multiple, yeah?”
“Bastard-you could have lead with that,” Sifer suggested, “maybe?”
“If I had,” Two-Bit made the point, “I wouldn’t still be squatting here, would I?”
Blowing a bunch of blustery air through his siphon, the Zibbian facepalmed, a very strange gesture when made with six tentacles. “What do asshole-you wanna infect with the second virus-code?”
Two-Bit grit his teeth. “Bloom near everything.”
CHAPTER 14
Jag lands hard enough to break both his femurs. The coils in his harness, however, completely absorb the impact, leaving both the ranger’s legs unharmed and intact Dust billows away from his point of landing, the earth scorched black by the heatblades beneath his booted feet. As he rises, the servos and components in the exoskeleton grind and whir. Once upright, Jag scans his surroundings.
The flying vee formation is coming to ground all around him, maintaining their rank perfectly. A chevron of soot marks the spot where the spice ranger troop, in unison, made landfall. For everyone but Jag, this is a routine op, a milk run without any special significance. For Jag, this excursion signifies his very first touchdown – in his entire career as a Stargazer – on the arid surface of Gi.
Plus, it had been at his word. Jag thought he’d seen something.
The harness automatically unholsters his chambered weapon; the same KZ647 Domino Heavy-Auto every other ranger carries. The rifle is swung, guided by whining servos, over his shoulder to drop, primed and ready to fire, into his open hands. His ray shield simultaneously kicks to life, ballooning outward from the projector in the center of his chest.
His rigorous training drops Jag to a knee and he assumes a ready position, covering the flight’s southwestern flank. His rookie status places Jag at vee’s outer edge but inside, he’s roiling with anxiety.
He isn’t sure what he’s spotted. He prays to all the moons he hasn’t halted the whole flight for nothing.
One look at this horizon and he’s suddenly worried it was all a mirage, that he’d imagined the entire thing. There’s not a thing in sight, nothing to break the perfectly flat horizon from southeast to southwest. It’s all the same snow white expanse of desolate dirt.
The actual heat on the planet Gi is something no lecture or simulation could possibly prepare one for. Even through the protective membrane of his shield, Jag can feel the sun’s oppressive rays, threatening to bake anyone alive who lingers too long on this hell-scorched plain.
This only makes him pray all the harder that he’ll turn around see something, something worth all the trouble, but Jag waits on the word of his commander.
“Crex, Jag,” the Commander drawls in their head-comms, “visual report.”
“Not a thing, Commander,” Crex, the goody-two-shoes, instantly reports.
“Dry as a bone, clean as a whistle,” Jag adds, a moment later. “All clear.”
“Stand down, then, rangers,” comes the order and Jag relaxes, his harness depressurizing in response. He rises from his crou
ch and, trying not to look eager, spins to regard the rest of the flight. The press of their bodies, however, is such that he can’t get visual confirmation there’s even anything there, not until Maw next speaks.
“The moons…?” he remarks, the flight’s gatecrasher, over the comm.
“Bogey of some kind,” relays Wad, the Commander’s wingman. He stalks forward a few steps, Domino trained dead ahead. “Scanners’re still processing. Doesn’t appear organic.”
Coz, further back in the formation, is skeptical. “So, it’s a blooming rock, or what?” Under his heads-up-display, Jag flushes a little, his fear realized.
“If it is,” the Commander replies, revealing nothing from her tone, “it’s a recent arrival. I’ve flown these flatlands a few hundred times – there ain’t no rock supposed to be here.”
At ease, Jag is technically at liberty to break rank and come closer. The pistons in his harness hissing, he jogs a little closer, straining to see past his clustered comrades. Indeed, Jag can see the bulky shape, the same one he spotted from the air, somewhere ahead of his comrades, glistening faintly in the noontide sun.
“Scanner’s,” reports Wad slowly, “reading metallic? A thermosteel composite, this says.”
“Gotta be an equipment malfunction,” Spar is certain. “Thermosteel? On surface?”
“Could be wreckage,” opines the Commander. “Off the climatic field. That’s the case, oughta take the time and tag it for incineration. Wouldn’t want nobody–”
“Commander,” Wad informs her, data streaming across his visor. “It’s a driftcart.”
A sudden thrill shivers through Jag. There’s a moment of silence here, as bewildered rangers exchange glances. Without another word, the Commander orders an enveloping advance with three succinct motions of her wrist. On her mark, the spice rangers drop back into formation and sweep a wide perimeter around the lump of metal, rifles ready. Given a better look, Jag is forced to agree with Wad’s analysis – that’s inarguably a driftcart.
Patinaed in a thin layer of desert dust, Jad can still recognize the boxy frame, the steering levers and the vehicle’s front grill. At first glance, it appears long derelict, slumped awkwardly on the sand. Its paint is chipped and faded, worn away by the planet’s hostile conditions. The grill’s catch is actually propped open, spilling out a small hillock of loose sand.
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