by S E Zbasnik
"Sod that! There's bastards on my ship!" Ferra grabbed onto Variel's collar, and yanked herself forward even as her limbs began to go numb. "And you got a way to get 'em off, haven't you?"
Variel blinked slowly and glanced a worry back to the assassin before returning to Ferra, "You're in no condition to..."
"I'm in any condition you need me to be," she nodded her head towards a back stockpile mostly of leather and steel aprons. "There's a corset hidden in there; cinch me up tight and I can at least hobble."
"Why do you have a corset?" Variel asked as Ferra released her. She dug through the pile and, sure enough, a slightly tattered blue and black griffin bone corset lay at the bottom.
"It's a long story," Ferra said, hoping the dulcen didn't catch sight of it. She'd only intended to borrow the piece from Brena, but then Orn got a bit yanky and she'd never had time to fix it proper.
"I have no idea how to operate one of these things," Variel said, holding the corset upside down and trying to slide her fingers through the laces.
"I can tie it off," Taliesin said, stepping forward and properly extracting it from her hands. He undid the few knots she accidentally put in it. "You will have to help her stand."
Variel clasped her hands around Ferra's slim body and asked, "Ready?"
Ferra gritted her teeth and nodded, biting her tongue as the captain lifted her to her dead feet. The morphine cut down a lot of the pain but tears still burst as she rose up. Taliesin quickly slipped the shaped fabric around her front, doing his best to not make contact with her flesh. This was going to take a lot of explaining to Orn. Actually, probably best to never mention it to anyone. Ever.
As he yanked carefully on the strings, trying to not cinch it up too tight to cause more damage, Variel kept everyone distracted with embarrassment by asking, "You're rather skilled at that, eh Sin?"
The elf did not look up from his job, but shifted on his feet, "Many dulcens use corseting as part of holy days. Some require assistance getting into them."
"Into or out of?" Variel...flirted? She didn't just flirt with him, did she? The drugs must be warping my brain, Ferra thought as she shook her head trying to clear it. The captain was a beacon of utter business, any hint of banter lost to the ether as Taliesin stepped back from his work.
"It is on, but she will still be in pain until they can be properly repaired."
"Good enough," Ferra muttered as Variel helped her to the only chair in engineering, stolen from the barber shop of all things. The elf cranked the rise in the chair as she got down to the nuts and bolts, "What the hell is happening on the ship?"
"WEST is looking into it, but I think she plans on vacuuming out most of the air. That would require..."
"Near total collapse of the environmental systems. The safeties would never allow it." Ferra continued, "Unless she shut off WEST's control and broke through about a billion stop gaps on the bridge."
"That's where she is," Variel said, and finally admitted, "Orn is with her."
"He don't know a damn thing about evading environmental safety protocols." Realization hit Ferra and she grabbed Variel's hand, almost pleading, "You have to save him. Get to him before she realizes that he's useless to her."
"I know, but the ship..."
"Sod the ship," Ferra said, throwing her hand up. Variel glanced to the assassin who blinked in surprise. In all her life, she never thought that anything would come before Ferra's ship.
"I'll get to Orn, but I need you to do all you can to stop her from cutting off the air and to get us back into flying shape," Variel said nodding toward that cursed injector.
"I can do some damage, but I'll need help," she looked back at the assassin and grumbled a bit under her breath. Trapped in engineering with a dulcen was not her idea of a good time.
"Variel?" he asked, aware of what she'd face alone against the Knight.
"Stay here, help Ferra," at his continued gaze she reassured. "No one knows the bridge better than me, I've got a few tricks."
No more morphine for me, Ferra thought, before looking to the captain, "Promise me you'll bring my rat bastard of a husband back in one piece."
Variel bowed and said, "I swear it," before jogging back to the grating.
"Well, elf boy," Ferra said, starting to rise as he hooked an arm around her shoulder. "Let's get to work."
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Miss Grabby spun Orn back around as she dangled something just out of his reach, blathering on about duty and honor and how she could sell his kidneys for a profit. Like he hadn't priced dwarf kidneys before. "I'll keep telling you what I told you before, then told you now, and will tell you in the future: I don't know a damn thing about the gas exchange on the ship. Gas exchange in my bowels, however..."
The Knight spun him away, disgusted. She hammered on the half working console, batting away at a constant stream of "Will you take a moment to register me?" screens popping up. Orn tried to silence his rising gorge at another turn about in the chair, glad she didn't punch him across the jaw. The last few times began to sting.
"They say the definition of insanity is to repeat the same action expecting a different reaction," Orn told the wall, but Sovann ignored him, as she'd been trying to do for the past hour banging out commands to long dead or dormant systems. Half the ship was wired backwards; some from an old left handed engineer, others from a Ferra who wasn't about to put in the work to fix the problems. It was easier to train everyone else to work around it.
"So we just keep sitting here then, okay," Orn sighed. "Got any good vids on you?" He'd been chattering to keep her as distracted as possible but it didn't seem to be working. Whatever she was trying to do seemed to be taking hold as the old screens he wasn't certain of their function turned red and shut off. Never a good sign. It seemed like she was trying to crash the ship by crashing the computer, one system at a time.
"Milad, report!" her voice barked through the slowly shunting comm line.
"No body yet, Sir," his voice was static, cutting in and out across a persistent and angry buzzing.
"Is there a problem with this line?" Sovann asked, "I'm getting a lot of interference."
"It's not the interference," her guard said, "I knocked over a fly aviary."
"Gas the whole room," Sovann said, not caring about how she'd destroy months of food for the few people she'd captured. Of course she probably wasn't going to be replacing all of the systems she'd head butted her way through.
"Yes, Sir," he said, ending his sentence with a slap against flesh.
Sovann batted away another register screen, then paused, her fingers pulling it back and tapping against the red banner. It flashed momentarily as if it accepted her request and then vanished into a line of code. "Knight-Commander to Engineering. Engineering, do you read? Hello? Damn, who'd I send down there?"
"Oh, always a good sign when you can't remember your own minion's name. No way that makes you some cackling, lava-lair villain. Nope, nope, nope."
"Silence dwarf, or I shall silence you!" She bumped against her sword's hilt, still sheathed but not for long.
"Silencing!" Orn said. As she turned back he renewed his efforts to try and dislodge his hand. Damn thing was always slipping off when he wasn't careful, but now it was stuck fast trapping him to his own chair.
"Engineering?" she flipped a few buttons and opened up ship wide communications, "Crests of the Jaguar, do you hear me?" After light flipped up, she added quickly, "Not you Milad."
Stepping away from the open comm, she mumbled to the dwarf, "Your captain is more resourceful than I anticipated."
"That's her, captain resourceful. Got it on a name placard and everything."
"I see," Sovann must have studied hard in the 'don't give away your plan' module of evil 101. Instead, she shut down the open comm line and flipped off every switch she breathed life into earlier. The console before him dimmed until only the soft glow of stars and the planet below illuminated their intimate kidnapping session.
&nb
sp; "This is all very romantic, but I don't go in for the homicidal human type. You're just too tall for me," Orn babbled, still struggling against his restraints.
Sovann's snake smile glinted in the falling lights as she yanked off the last button, killing the bridge stone dead. "It's been a real pleasure, Mr. Dwarf, but I am afraid you are no longer of use to me." She fished a can out of her uniform's back pocket and yanked on the tab.
A plume of gas erupted from the top, the spurts stuttering into a constant stream. She tossed it below his feet and it bounced under the console, quickly skittering out of his limited reach. She waved a chipper goodbye while slamming the bridge door shut, sealing him in. Smoke clawed into Orn's eyes in the air tight room as the heavy gas quickly replaced the limited oxygen the bitch cut off.
He bounced his hands hard against his chair's backing, trying to get the release to catch. "Come on, you," he coughed, "piece of overpriced shit. Break off or I swear I'll sell you to a handless proctologist!"
Perhaps it was the threat or the gas increase shorting out the electrical current, but his bad hand rotated and thudded to the floor, a lone crumpled fist. Orn yanked his sore arms forward, his only remaining hand searching for the "vent" button. He inched forward, the gas stinging his eyes like a needle mouthed brain eater as he fumbled across the panel. It should be that button, right there, just a few inches away from his...Gasping lungs forced his brain to open his mouth and all it got was an influx of smoke. Orn slipped into a coughing fit, his questing hand rising from the console as he tried to bat away the invisible enemy strangling the air from his body. His head floated above itself, watching the slow death of one Orn Lidoffad, flight technician, and all around waste of his parent's ambition. Well, it could have been worse, his fleeing brain thought. Not sure how, but regrets on a death chair are overrated.
He shook his head, one final fight against the enveloping blanket of death, when a hand clamped onto his face and fitted an emergency breather over his nose and mouth. Oxygen, glorious brain-fueling oxygen stampeded out the gas in his lungs and the hand in the fog released his head to reboot the silenced bridge.
The door opened and the fog trailed out revealing his lighthouse in the storm. Variel reached down and grabbed up the mostly spent gas can. She inspected it at first, before the heat overtook her fingers and threw it down the corridor. Yanking her own breather off, she called out, "WEST, you there?"
A lone panel beeped, having played dead the entire time, and WEST's gloriously outdated face appeared. "She's made a complete mess of my systems," it complained, sifting through data. "A command subroutine inside the ventilation system? Why not store your socks in the crisper drawer while you're at it?"
"WEST, can you fix the damage she did?"
"Of course...probably. Given enough time, I can, sure. Why the hell not?"
"Comforting," Variel muttered, and turned back to her pilot as he started to yank off his mask. "Hey, you got a lung full of that stuff, take it easy."
But Orn pulled it down, letting his mouth resume its preferred state of always flapping. "Cap'n," he choked out, his vocal cords inflamed as if someone jammed a bottlebrush down his throat and gave it the good scrubbing it was always begging for.
"Alive, I know, long story," she said flippantly as if her resurrection were just a footnote.
But Orn shook his head, he wasn't so surprised to see her up and moving about. He suspected it'd take the destruction of certain artifacts scattered across the universe to properly end her. "No, Fer..." his voice faltered as he tried to ask about his wife.
"Oh, she's safe. Locked in engineering with Taliesin trying to get the engines powered to run for it," Variel said, trying to get the bridge to the same state. But it was going to take time, time she couldn't waste while a Knight prowled her corridors.
Orn half chuckled, half coughed at that. She must love that, getting to boss around the dulcen on her turf. They may have to rescue the elf boy when this was over. "That bitch, she..."
"She's trying to cut off ventilation," Variel answered, just praying she hadn't touched navigation. "Ferra's making certain she can't do just that."
"My wife'll do it," Orn said to himself.
Variel turned to him, and smiled lightly, "Aye, she will, but we need to be ready to blow past this Drake when she does."
Orn shook his head, "'S not out there."
"What?"
"While you were being dead," he leaned back, trying to fight off the gloming headache, blinking his watery eyes. The gas suffocation took a greater toll than he'd feared. "She sent them on, Orc planet, blah di te blah."
"But they'll be back," Variel said stubbornly. "And we best give them nothing to track but a few floating bodies."
"Aye aye, Sir," Orn said, saluting with his stump. He followed her eyes to the missing limb and began to search for it.
Variel grabbed his errant hand first, holding the gloved spider up for him to reattach. He nodded a thanks, trying to force enough juice through his implanted servos to the hand so it'd stick. If they were gonna fly he was gonna need it. "If you think this makes up for..."
"Let's save the heartfelt apologies for when we get the slime lickers off the ship," Variel said.
Orn smiled, rotating his shoulders as he set about rescuing his bridge, "I'll hold you to that."
"I wouldn't have it any other way," she glanced to some sensor data as WEST pulled off a bit of magic, and began to bring life back to her ship. "She's moving quickly." She turned towards her still ragged pilot and asked, "You think you can handle getting the old girl back to working order on your own?"
Orn tapped the console softly, and then a bit harder, getting the panel to light up, "Probably, if no one else tries to gas me. Why? Where are you going?"
"I have someone to kill," she said, vanishing out the bridge door.
Variel tore through the cupboard, tossing away half beaten toasters, half toasted beaters, and a cake stand no one ever used. It glistened in cracked green crystals as it bounded against the table legs, failing to properly shatter. She tossed a few mixing bowls after the cake stand and finally faced an empty cupboard.
The mess hall lights dimmed and flickered, then all of the Elation twitched as if someone walked across her grave. "Ferra?" she called to her PALM, open to the scrambling crew fighting for their home.
"On it!" Ferra shouted into her own hand before turning to the beleaguered elf sweating through his restrictive attire made worse by the apron she insisted he don. "No, counter-clockwise. Keep turning it that way and we'll be cleaning elf bits off the ceiling."
"What's going on?" Variel asked uncertainly.
"Yes, like that, towards me, but STOP! Okay, slide in the panel like I showed you."
"You never showed me," Taliesin said, gripping a slot of circuitry as if his life depended on it.
"Shove it in anyway," Ferra answered, clinging onto a standing pole as she tried to inspect her assistant's work from a couple meters away.
"Ferra?" The captain's concerned voice was background noise as the engineer waved the assassin on.
Gripping both sides, Taliesin inserted the panel right side up into the slot he created with far more force than should have been needed. His fingers twitched nervously as the panel hummed and heated up, but no death sparks lashed out. The environmental console sprang to life, whining and fussing like the spoilt brat it was.
"Good," Ferra said as if rewarding a small animal. To the captain she added, "Well, that slice of centaur shit won't be turning off gravity or oxygen anytime soon."
"How?" Variel asked, afraid of the answer.
"Your elf boy fused the entire system. No one can turn it off without the applicable use of a battering ram."
The captain let 'your elf boy' pass. "And if we need to ever turn off gravity?"
Ferra thought for a moment, then answered, "I know a place to get battering rams relatively cheap."
The captain pinched her nose, "Just get the engines up. Your husband is rousing
the bridge controls as we speak."
"Orn's doing an entire manual restart BY HIMSELF?!" she shrieked into her hand. "Elf boy, get your leather ass to the other side, now! Go, go, go!"
Variel shook her head, knowing and fearing just how much fun her engineer was having. "Keep me updated," she said before silencing her PALM. Folding her hand into a fist, she punched through the false panel of the cupboard and yanked out the one thing she knew she'd need.
It was strange to have it back in her hand after all these years, but they said wielding one was just like stabbing a bike, you never really forgot. Kicking the rotating cake plate out of the way, she rose, reading herself to confront the slice of centaur shit herself.
Sovann gripped the squirming kid about the neck. The orc gave up a bit of a fight as she picked her hostage. Surprising from the males, even more that it was over such a waste of human flesh. He cried again, begging her to not kill him. She was tired of the games this measly little crew played and decided it was time to call.
Tossing the whimpering squirt all but pissing down his tattered uniform, he landed in the middle of the shuttle bay where she tried to kill that captain fast becoming a burr in her side. "Get up," she said to the kid. He slowly gathered his wobbly legs beneath and Sovann pointed her sword at him. "Up, damn it!"
Segundo tried to swallow a whimper. She stepped closer to him and ordered, "Onboard computer, open a channel."
"The onboard computer you are trying to contact is no longer available, you RAM-less, solar powered flash light!"
Sovann rolled her eyes even as she pointed the end of her unstoppable blade at Segundo's paper thin chest. "To the captain of this rickety barge, I have one of your crew at the end of my knife. Reveal yourself and he need not wind up on the hilt of it."
A laugh broke across WEST's various interfaces, hard as flint and uncaring as a solar flare. "What makes you think I'd sell my own life for his?"