by S E Zbasnik
Orn silenced his pestering as guilt washed over her, the first he'd seen. Placing his good hand onto the toy tool bench for keeping errant children distracted, he lowered himself onto the chair. His feet kicked above the floor in circles. As he watched his boots swirling he asked, "So what'd you do with your sword?"
She smiled nostalgically, "I sold it. Space ships don't come cheap."
"Neither do flight technicians," Orn said bitterly, his boots banging into each other.
"Of course not," she said finally grabbing onto the sticker and gritting her teeth, "you're at least twice as expensive as a pilot. You actually know how to fly the damn ship." Chewing down a scream, she ripped the sticker free, getting a layer of skin with it. No longer sticky, the paper fell to the floor.
Orn didn't look at her, instead he watched the sticker's tumble. A whole lot of his accusations remained unvoiced, half evoked, most a jumbled mass of emotion and "How could you?!" but he let the main matter drop. Smiling to himself, he knew he did have one major sticking point should the question of a raise come up again.
The door jangled as the portal apertured open letting in an orc carrying a greasy bottomed bag and the smell of rancid onions. She tossed the bag to her secretary and glanced at the full waiting room. "I seem to have very unexpected guests today, Molik," she patted her full stomach and belched as the captain disentangled from her chair.
"I am Tuffman Variel, and I require your assistance," she said and reached out to Monde who was rifling through his bag.
"Copier Zet," the Orc said, yanking a work apron off the door hook and sliding it over her neck horns. "What seems to be the challenge?"
Variel took the charred remains of their long dead inertia injector into her hands and held it before Zet's face, "I need a copy of this."
The mutilated husk easily fell into the gargantuan mitts of the orc as she turned it about trying to get a feel for exactly what the hell it was, "Your grandmother's favorite chunk of space garbage?"
"It was an inertia injector for my ship," Variel responded, growing more dejected as the orc tried to find the proper "this side up" angle.
"Did you start a plasma fire in your engines to get a good vid? I cannot even find a connecting joint, the whole thing fused in on itself."
"We, I need you to create a new one."
The orc's orange eyes blinked quickly as she mushed her jaw in and out, "You want a copy of this chunk of matter?"
"No, I need you to create a working version of this unit."
Zet shook her head slowly, still pawing over the wreckage that looked like it should be smoldering, "Gonna take a whole lot of plink to rebuild something like this from scratch."
"I have some prints, images, and..." Variel's voice softened as she reached onto her tiptoes to inch towards the orc's auditory nerves, "a bag full of griffin eggs."
Zet's pupils dilated at the mention of the delectable and highly sought elven delicacy of hollow chocolate eggs stuffed with a small figurine and fortune. The orcs praised the shape and sweetness of the confection, and especially appreciated the crunchy center. "Molik, destroy all my appointments and seal the doors." The secretary scuttled off to his console, pushing the "destroy" button, while Zet turned over the black pile, "I'm creating!"
"Move closer and stop twitching!" the harsh voice echoed through the back of the copy shop as Variel hunched over a dimensional simulation stretched across a table. She held her palm steady as Ferra scanned over the design she and the orc worked on as the human played projector.
"Rotate the injector 30 degrees to the left," Ferra ordered and Zet slowly spun the floating mass with her fingers while lifting a set of lenses off her nose. Another three pair still remained in place to peer through the layers of holographic matter to the components inside. Occasionally, she'd describe what she saw for the bossy pointy eared one on the other end, but Ferra grew impatient and demanded someone hold a lens up for her.
And that was how Monde wound up crouching below his weakening captain, a series of colored glass rounds slipped between his fingers. At first Zet would smile and ask him to drop one color or add another, but once the elf figured out the system she'd bark out orders, not in the mood to wait for the orc mating dance.
"Good, good. Stop!" The rotating ceased as a wandering eyeball tried to get a closer look, "Zoom in."
"Gods," Variel complained. But, nodding to Monde, the pair slowly slid closer, the captain climbing across the inventing bench, her supporting elbow knocked into a cup filled with discarded excess matter.
"Good enough?" she asked the calculating eyeball, Ferra must have her own PALM millimeters from her nose.
"It'll have to do. Okay, the injector's third coil is too loose, it'd rupture if put under strain."
Zet said nothing punching a few more lines of code into their design, but Variel noticed the peer's look. This elven eyeball was crazy. "What kind of strain are we talking about?" the captain asked her engineer.
"Escaping from the event horizon of a quasar," Ferra answered, her eyeball slipping up to project a bit of forehead, the pores like craters against the wall.
Orn kept his own eyeballs adhered to the vid screen with Segundo, this one hooked up to a few more channels than the "family approved" waiting room. He'd shuddered at the blood vessel popping sight of his beloved's macroscopic eye and promptly turned away, asking someone to warn him when it was safe.
"And why would we need to escape the event horizon of a quasar?" Variel's own hand bounced up and down in her perturbance, the artificial zoom causing the other end to shake dramatically.
"With your record I prefer being prepared," Ferra responded, injecting another anti-space sickness round into her neck to combat the captain's erratic movements. She'd be lucky to have a liver left by the time this was done.
Zet caught the disagreement between the one in charge and the one holding onto her payment and paused in alterations, "Do I keep the new schematics?"
Variel nodded, and clapped harder onto her bouncing hand. Who in the hell thought sticking a computer screen in your hand was a good idea? "Do it," she muttered, girding things she'd thought were long dead the hour back when this torture began.
"Okay, give it another 360 rotation, with power fueling through the circuits. Orc, the green lens!" Ferra wasn't trying to make many friends today.
Monde grumbled, but yanked out the red, so only blue and yellow remained. As their simulation spun, simulated inertia in the form of sparkling sand clumps dumped through the injector port and transformed into a cool liquid. The storable inertia. It looked rather beautiful, a shimmer of energy becoming potential until it could be reapplied as kinetic or some kind of sandwich spread. Mages had an interesting approach to fooling the laws of nature at times.
Ferra grumbled, "The lag time is 0.3 seconds slower than the old one, but it'll do. Print it out and get that thing back to the ship."
"Oh thank any and all Gods," Variel crumbled to the floor, dragging her PALM with her as she landed on her butt. The image of Ferra flipping through a few settings and ending the comm flashed against the table's underside before the captain could properly shut off her end.
Orn turned away from a pair of orcs tossing a giant roll of cheese at each other (High art for the spikers) to spy his captain slowly rising off the ground, dragging her limp hand with her. "If you had the eye-scan, you wouldn't be squeezing the liquid of life back into your hand."
She gripped her hand hard and shook it, shutting her eyes from the pain of the return of blood, acrid over its dismissal. "If I had the eye-scan, I'd have gone completely cross eyed when your wife started in on paint swatches."
"You should try tool shopping with her."
"When will the part be printed?" Variel struggled to her feet with some assistance from Monde as he carefully placed the glass lenses down.
"I am transferring it to the copy machine. It should be finished injecting in twenty shakras." Zet tapped a few keys and swiped at the wall sized monitor jus
t as the main occupant of the room heated up.
Variel glanced to the only other orc in the room as Monde did the calculations, "It's around a half hour."
"I'm starving," Orn whined from the corner, tossing the remote back to the kid. "I'll take Third here and see if we can't scrounge up something that won't take a bite back."
"Is that really such a smart," Segundo began to argue, but Orn swept him up into his charismatic wake and pulled the kid out of the workshop, into customer service, and out to the wild streets of the Market.
"We will never see either of them alive," Monde muttered.
The time passed relatively peacefully, soothed by the copier's hum, chirp, and occasional curse of Zet as the damn thing jammed again. Variel kept poking at the projection model in boredom. it looked like a series of old sewage piping jammed together by a bored child left alone at the hardware store. To think something so simple could cause so many damn problems, though the same could be said for the Knights. She glanced over at her resident orc expert as he checked through his bag. He was given the entire stock of eggs, which were extracted from a rather irate dwarf, but they let Zet believe Variel carried them for safety reasons.
Monde tried to keep to himself, sequestered in the corner flipping through a few old medical journals he picked up somewhere that still used paper, but every once in awhile his eyes would skirt up to watch Zet. Anyone else and Variel would quietly excuse herself to let nature take its course, but adjusting to the male orc mindset was not an easy one.
"How longer shall you be visiting our colony?" Zet feigned polite conversation to Variel.
"Not long after we get this part. It was an unexpected side trip." She watched Zet, noting all the equipment that -- when hurled with the notorious upper body strength of a full grown female orc -- could maim or kill a lone human. But Zet made no threatening moves, tidying up some things, and in general feeling incredibly out of place as outsiders watched over her shoulder as she worked.
She scrubbed down a plastic filler and replaced a cap before asking the human, "You wear a deep coup?"
Variel folded her arms, she never got used to this part, "Yep."
"And yet you are the one still walking. My congratulations."
Any other species would have ripped her out of the shop, tied her up to something flammable and lit the entire thing before she could get out a last request. But for the orcs, a sign you survived their weapons put you one step closer to their kin. She was just grateful the other cut was covered by her pants.
A jangle announced the return of Orn and the second. The fresh scent of something dipped in oil and yanked out after it stopped screaming followed, as did a high buzzing sound. Variel stepped around the utility screen moaning, "You did not get a nest of live bumblers did you?"
She froze as a flying mech, barely larger than her fist, bumped into the back of Segundo's head and turned its red eye to face her. Her fingers searched for the pistol, but she was too slow as a scanning sensor beamed out from the eye taking a copy of her face with special attention to the scar.
"We brought back a new friend," Orn said proudly, the closest thing to sugar in orc space dribbling down his chin. It also caused a mild numbing in all other species aside from inorganics; trolls started to melt.
"I can see that." The little mech finished scanning and began to emit a low howl. "And hear that. What the hell is it?"
"I dunno, but it's adorably inept. I found it staring down a statue for five minutes." Orn reached into the bag already nearly see through from the leeching grease, and handed his angry captain a pile of food on a stick. "I got you your favorites."
"Which one?" She brought a small section to her mouth's side and nibbled away at the batter.
"All of 'em on a big stick!" Orn laughed. He must have had a grand ol' time out hobnobbing with the lower stratus of orcs. "And good ol' Seggy here is like catnip to orcs."
"Oh?" she asked as the fried stick of everything crumbled in her mouth, delightfully tasty even as her tongue was about to scream from sensory overload.
Segundo smiled lopsidedly and tipped his head to the side as if playing coy. "I simply spoke to them about the various attraction sites on Samudra and how easily one can rent an atmo shuttle or paddle boat."
"I...see?" Variel glanced towards her pilot who was holding in a laugh that could knock a poor little pig's house down. The captain sized up the skinny technician tossed into her care by happenstance for the first time. Tall, by human standards, with lanky everything. Oh, a cruel smile overtook her face which she tried to hide with her food stick. Of course the orcs weren't listening to a word he said, they were admiring his alien -- but beautiful for strict orc standards -- form, and he being a he didn't have a bloody clue.
Well, at least Orn was there to keep it from getting into a major ovary fight. But as she watched over the dwarf's head shake and small laugh under his breath she realized he must have been encouraging the damn kid. Oh, she'd have to bribe those stories out of him later. Assuming there was a later.
Their little flying mech finally stopped howling and returned to buzzing about Orn's head as if he were its mother. Gods, there was a good chance it thought it was. Orc technology relied upon a bonding process most humans preferred to explode rather than understand.
Monde stepped through the screen, curious and a bit hungry, and eyed up the flying drone with concern. "Did you have any extra food?"
"'Course, couldn't let our Doc go hungry." Orn yanked out the only vegetable he could find in the mix, a bit like an artichoke on steroids, and tossed it to their orc.
He caught it and sighed, "A knife is necessary to break into this."
"Cap has her gun, she could shoot it open for you."
As the flying drone began to rise up, circling for a new victim, Monde sighed and muttered to himself, "Luckily, I brought a scalpel." He disappeared back to find his bag, but froze as their copier appeared, wiping a large amount of black ink off her hands.
"I see you've met our little People View," she said nodding towards the flying drone that turned its eye on her and began another scan. Monde slipped into the protective screen of the door, but remained in earshot.
"People View?" Variel asked, her own concern about cataloging and tracking equipment taking precedence over the fact this was an orc world and she'd already been found out. A five year habit was a hard one to break.
"Some data collection company sent a bunch out into the city to catalog every face and their preferred travel routes. Helps to develop better security systems."
The pair of not quite outlaw's jaws dropped at that, while Segundo scratched his chin in thought.
"And you, you just put up with it?" Orn stuttered. "No cries of freedom in the streets, people building barricades, making flags out of their underthings?"
Zet turned her head in confusion like a spiky puppy, "Why would anyone be concerned? It is simply taking stock of its people."
"But it can find you, at all times, at all places, if you're doing something really not...so good, then it could," Orn stuttered for an explanation, terrified of this world his sticky fingers found themselves in.
"It doesn't care about right or wrong, it's just a machine," Zet knocked the drone about like a bumbling pet, "like your bread warmer, or your grenade launcher."
"Right, yep, I keep that grenade launcher right next to my blender in case I'm in the mood for explosive juice," Orn said inching back slowly.
Zet watched the dwarf curiously, never certain what to make of the small folk, and then turned to the captain, "Your part has finished and is being sand blasted as we currently talk."
"Right," she motioned to Monde who slipped into the back room to get his case, "We agreed that was five eggs."
The copier's massive arms folded across her chest, smearing the work apron with the ink, "For over an hour's work building a prototype model..."
"Six eggs, then."
"You bring dishonor to me human," Zet flashed her teeth, "and it is
a very long ride out of this city with dishonor hanging over your heads."
Segundo gulped loudly, and Orn shifted at the threat, but Variel waved it off, sticking her head deeper into the lion's mouth. "Six eggs and whatever's left in Orn's lunch bag."
The dwarf sunk even lower as the orc's gaze turned upon him; the full fury of generations bred to protect their children from the worst a planet lovingly dubbed hell could conjure. Zet growled, her fury incapable of forming coherent words.
"All right, all right. Seven eggs," Variel acquiesced, "But that's cutting my own cheek."
"Thank you, kindly," Zet cheered up immediately, letting the rage vanish as quickly as it came. A loud bong resonated from the back and she smiled, "The sanding is done." She pushed past the doctor to retrieve her sale.
Monde held out seven of their ten eggs to the Captain, who scooped them onto the counter, still in their bright red boxes.
"What were you doing?!" Segundo shrieked as blood returned to his brain. "That orc could have torn your arms off and drunk your blood!"
Variel giggled at that, "It's all bravado, chest thumping, half the fun of making a sale is in letting that controlled rage slip. If I'd given her a fair deal from the start then she probably would have broken a leg or five."
The blood drained out of Segundo again as his tan faded to a ghostly pallor. Orn patted him on the back, "You said you wanted to see the galaxy, kid. Consider this the backstage tour."
Zet appeared, carrying the now white mass of pipe structures Ferra assured them would get the ship flying out of this system and somewhere safe until the Crests found something else to pick over. She dumped the part into Variel's hands and glanced over the eggs sitting pristinely on the counter.
"You can open them to make certain," Variel said, tossing the part back to Orn. He grumbled but accepted it. Ferra'd demand a report on the state of the thing. He fired up his PALM getting the 'battery low' flash.