Soundless Conflicts

by S. Walker

  He nodded, still chewing with a crunchy sound that was a bit bothersome to hear. "All the time. Had an accident a long time back, industrial ore grinder gave me a love tap. 'Bout pushed my head in, still got the scars. See 'em?" He turned sideways, one finger hooked into his collar to show a stunning amount of pink scar tissue climbing his neck. A moment later he was back, amicably chewing. "Spent a coupla months in the mining station's crit unit starin' at walls, stuck in mah head. Needed the chip to get me back with the livin' again."

  "Wait, the mining Corp paid for it? Were you insured, or under contract...?" It was the only thing that made sense. She was trying to imagine some Lower Management type paying out the entire yearly profits of the facility on a single person and just couldn't do it.

  "Nah. Just an indent worker. We all were, I was just the best at makin' the equipment run. Kept it all in safety spec, saved a lot of guys from blowing up or hurtin' themselves with the crappy gear they gave us. Even got one of those awards yer wearing right now." He pointed.

  She looked down. "Which one?"

  "The green one, wi' the gold cred on it."

  "You got the Exemplary Budget Surplus award as a mining technician? I had to lay off a city's worth of indents and up an entire system's yearly quota by five percent to get this!" It wasn't just unfair-- it was miserably, ruinously ego destroying. Janson wasn't even bothered.

  "Must 'ave been expensive equipment." For the first time since she'd known him, he frowned. It was like storm clouds gathering on distant mountains. "Layoffs, eh? All them indentured workers?"

  Jamet was still fuming, mentally indexing every award she owned. How many did she share with some common worker? Was there an audit or a query that would tell her? "Yes. Why?"

  "What 'appened to 'em all? The ones you let go."

  That caught her wrong footed. "What? I'm not sure." Wait, this had been in the award citation. "They were relocated, I think. Contracts put on the open market. Probably ended up on an Agro farm facility, something like that."

  He leaned on the table. The table creaked in response. "Like Emilia's family, eh?"

  There was a warning there, plain as day and written on the big man's face. Jamet backpedaled smoothly. "I doubt it was the same one."

  "Mm." He took another burnt baked good, dunked it. "She hates you, y'know. Well, not you you," he waved it at her, drops pattering on the table. "Jus' Management, in general."

  Guilt struck, followed rapidly by outrage. "Should I care? It wasn't me."

  "Probably not. But you're here, they're not. What's it called? Convenient target?"

  "That's not fair."

  Janson nodded agreeably. "Nope."

  "And Paul? Now you'll tell me he's got a vendetta against the entire Corp. Should I be watching for a knife in the back because I'm co-CEO?" She glared.

  "Nah. Paul's a Colony guy, used to date a Middle lady. They broke up, he won't let go."

  That was dangerous territory, bringing up memories that weren't even old enough to have solid scars yet. Come on, someone whispered. We can do it. Together. Trust me. Jamet shuddered from head to toe, angrily covering it by reaching for the tray of burned goods. She grabbed the nearest and defiantly bit into it. Then bit again, with more effort until a piece came off.

  She crunched. Janson smiled and crunched with her. There was a long moment of strangely nice comradery as they abused tooth enamel together.

  "Engineer Janson?"

  "Yeah?"

  "This is truly fucking awful."

  He grinned. "It gets better."

  And damn it, she wasn't sure if he meant the cooking, the ship, or her.

  Chapter 4

  On The Job Training

  Lieutenant Jamet pushed back from the table, leaving Janson (and his burned culinary effort) to enjoy each other's company. But she stopped at the hatch, struck by a thought. "Engineer?"

  "Yes'm?" He was brushing crumbs off his beard with both hands.

  "You have," she mentally backtracked her previous encounter. "Three roles on the Kipper?"

  He held up fingers, grin firmly in place. "Four, ma'am. Always forget the last, no' much need for equipment issue on the regular."

  Jamet nodded. "This crew is ridiculously tiny. But, and this sounds crazy-- are you chipped for all of them? Every system?" She rushed that bit because of course he couldn't be, it was just a terrible suspicion, no one could possibly-

  Janson nodded easily, beard bobbing up and down and his burned tray in one hand. He eeled out of the small chair, headed for the recycler. "Yeah, got 'em all in my head all the time. S'not bad, though it's a right bastard when all the maintenance cycles come at the summat time."

  There was a painful pressure going on somewhere at the end of her arm. With a start, Jamet realized she'd gripped the hatch toggle so hard a nail was folding backward. She hissed and let go, shaking it out absentmindedly. Four different ship systems. Four chips, each the cost of an entire station's monthly profit margin. Each purpose-grown, implanted and tuned for months to work with paired automation controls. Just... given away to a glorified indentured worker from some mining facility.

  Then the other shoe dropped. She felt sick. "Everyone. All of you."

  Janson shoved the tray into the recycler, then started picking up boxes of ingredients and shoving them into compartments. "What's that?"

  "You're all chipped. That's the only answer. There's no other way a ship this size could run with so few. Engineering is your role, which means Paul Noscome is..." she struggled for a moment, remembering the argument several hours ago. "Environmental and Medical. And something else." Burned out stars, who the hell could afford a medical chip system? Even among billion-credit procedures distilling an entire medical education into a subsystem was rarified amounts of money. "And Emilia Rounds is Communications, and I would guess Infrastructure?"

  "Yes'm. She's got Nutrition, too." He dusted both hands off, sending a cloud of flour and blackened bits everywhere.

  Jamet snorted. "She's the cook? Wait, then why are you..." She gestured around the room.

  "Eh, hobbies. Told you earlier, might not ah caught it. S'alright, lieutenant." He jammed both hands into his overall pockets and started ambling for the opposite hatch. "Also she hates th' job, says we're all 'grown up idiots'," he said this in a singsong that wasn't even close to the short technician's actual voice. "An' figures we can fend for ourselves. 'Scuse me, ma'am-- ah got rounds to do."

  An entire chipped Nutritions specialist, billions of credits in custom tech, thrown away because an irate dwarf disliked the job. Jamet felt stabbed in her fiscal-minded soul; that was just wrong. "As you were," she muttered, receiving another casual two finger salute from the big Engineer. She turned away at the same time he did, both hatches closing in sync.

  She stood in the corridor for a minute, thinking through implications. The hierarchy here was a mess, untenable, social status and lines of authority cross-purposed into chaos. Her entire career, from the Academy straight into Corporate service, was built entirely on rigid up-and-down niches. She'd started Middle Management, from Middle parents and-- except for one brief, magical quarter that ended in betrayal-- expected to die Middle Management. One knew their place and it was well marked out by the things one could afford. A whole backstabbing social scene revolved around showing off what they could afford, daring creditors and accounts alike to be the talk of the social networks.

  But here... here she was, socially speaking, the bottom of a waste recycler. If status was credits then every single crew member here ground her into solar dust just by existing. A posting on Kipper itself, just from the monstrous cost of it, should have been the ultimate keynote for any social profile. But Jamet had never even heard of it. Not a whisper. When the assignment offer came through for a Cruiser-- typically small, routinely system bound and unglorified-- she'd never have taken it without staring into the face of indebted prisoner status.

  Jamet turned, walking slowly up-ramp towards the bow with her face
screwed into thought. There were two kinds of authority, she'd found: Social and positional. In Corporate life they were often tied inextricably together: Stilts she stood on to walk right over the faceless crowd of indents, proles and contracted workers. Those unlucky masses never crossed into her life socially, and couldn't afford to make the jump without resources equal to the position she'd been born into.

  She navigated emergency bulkheads distractedly, left then right, transferring laterally towards quarters. "This is just... just impossible." Then frowned, angrily correcting herself while glancing around for witnesses. "I meant incredible." She did not have a verbal tic.

  But what did she have? Position. She was co-Command Executive Officer, nominally still Middle Management (even if her entire authority amounted to a single ship). By rights she should have automatic respect, the awe and jealousy of the crew, underlings positioning for favors and whatever crumbs might come their way. Except not a soul gave her due deference; the exact opposite, in fact. Aside from Janson they seemed to regard her as an inconvenience at best. Although she wasn't ruling out the big Engineer playing some sort of deeper game-- friendly on the outside while offering poisonous nuclear-burned muffins at every turn.

  Well... no. That might be too far.

  Frustrated and out of her depth, Jamet slapped the hatch release to her room and then jumped in terror as a white maintenance drone nearly ran her over. "Dam- ah! Holy stars," she gave way, angling to the bulkhead as the oblong, tool-encrusted machine floated by. Gyros and an internal gravity drive kept it suspended in mid-air, cameras pointed in every direction with manipulator arms tucked neatly beneath. It paused once to aim a lens her way, then flashed status lights and moved silently off.

  Jamet slid in behind it, firmly locking the hatch. "What in the name of profits was it doing- oh." She blinked at the bulkhead near the door where a brand-new display shelf now existed. She'd forgotten the request, but apparently Janson hadn't. Another point in favor of the big man not secretly being a social backstabber.

  But now she was alone (again), somehow with an even more confused picture of this assignment than before (even worse). All thoughts led in one inevitable direction, a single outlook every Middle tried their level best never to contemplate. There was no help for it, no delegating or pushing things to subordinates, no dodging or playing job title roulette.

  She was going to have to be good at her job.

  Dropping heavily onto the couch, she spent a long moment with elbows on knees, head down and depressed. "This. This has to be the lowest point, right here." Which wasn't fair, really-- barely a week ago her inbox had been nothing but bright red past due notices and indentured debt judgments. But career wise this was a bad point.

  But at least she knew where to start: The Academy was very clear on that from the first intro class. Feeling like she was lifting several tons of weight, Jamet reached for the console and dropped it onto her lap, tapping the display to life and running her wrist ID over the sensor.

  She checked the official mission orders first; by regulation those were supposed to be the stated purpose of every single trip. Unsurprisingly it was completely blank, a complete lack of any scope of authority, reason for action or boundaries. Which was completely unheard of: Even the broadest CN orders imaginable still had some vague line about patrolling or 'fiscal security', a range of systems and an end date for authority.

  Theirs were completely blank. She was currently co-CEO of a vessel that cost more than some system development budgets, had an enormous arsenal, was completely autonomous and reported to no one. Terrifying on multiple levels.

  It was also a dead end. What the hell was the Kipper doing? "Well, so much for the easy way. Time to slog through details. Ugh."

  A tap and two swipes later the ship log was on-screen. Fifty million lines of it, with cross-references to system snapshots and measurements. She cut it to just the last solar quarter, scrolled backwards and then flopped sideways to start reading. Boots hit the deck one at a time, followed by her uniform jacket going over the console's charging area. She really needed some sort of chair, or at least a set of coat hooks.

  Console in hand, she flicked the display onto the ceiling and started at the top.

  "Filter by voyage history, with map." It sprang to life: A solid red line zigzagging across Corporate space, every stop marked with a callout and system name. It was a mix of planet-bound stations and deep space enclaves of every type, with occasional stops at Corporate Headquarter worlds for some systems. But not all-- Jamet noted none of the interior, established system HQs got a visit. In fact the Kipper seemed to deliberately avoid heavily established systems and trade routes, only transiting through before angling off toward the outer reaches. The investment sectors. "Well that's... not normal. Are these diplomatic trips? Check ins?" A bolt of fear went through her. "Fiscal Enforcement? Filter voyages by length of stay, color coded."

  System information dimmed, leaving just the line of the Kipper's path behind. It was shaded now, white to red, with longer stays going deeper colored. A few spots slid toward a bright carmine, but the only dark spot on the entire trip was the system they'd just left: Eblett, the site of all her Corporate triumphs and the place she'd rocketed straight off the Management ladder. Kipper spent a solid two weeks there, in contrast to barely three days at the longest stay before.

  Jamet frowned, eyes flicking over the list of stops. She narrowed the list with both hands, then pushed it to the left and used a single finger to pull informational callouts on each one. They stacked neatly on the right side, a single line trailing to the map to indicate position. Something looked odd, but it took a moment to come together: It was the system names.

  Corporate invested in launching new systems, mostly for resource extraction but occasionally for colonization. On a star map it looked like a big blob, lopsided and expanding in every direction at different rates. Easily hundreds of systems, tending into thousands. With that many names and purposes it became a lazy shortcut to just assign a number scheme after the name to designate what was going on in any one place. If a new mining startup began the first CEO on site could name the system whatever he or she liked, then attach the number three on the end to denote resource extraction. So 'Catolyte' would become 'Catolyte-3' and everyone would know instantly what they were about.

  As a system developed-- if it developed-- Corporate usually ended up planting a regional headquarters there and the number eventually dropped off. Her personal stomping grounds used to be Eblett-2 (biological growth and agricultural farms) before losing the number some several hundred years ago.

  Jamet frowned, eyes locked on the ceiling and chewing her bottom lip. "It's all threes." She scrolled the list up and down, checking. "Every single system they've been through that isn't an HQ is for mining and resource extraction." Did it mean something? Maybe?

  She wiped the results, falling back to the log. "Filter for- hmmm." What could cross reference a system stop to show what went on? "Filter message traffic, inbound and outbound. Cross with system visits."

  The display shifted, the navigation line disappearing from the left. A series of boxes took its place, each one showing communications traffic associated with thin lines connected to the system names on the right. Jamet browsed for a minute, then wiped the whole display with an annoyed wave. "Waste of time."

  She wiggled her toes and thought for a second. What else did one do at every layover? What would she do every time there was- "Oh!" she facepalmed, then grabbed air toward the icon for the system logs. "Cross navigation with crew and supply purchases, color coded."

  Jamet fist pumped. "Yes!" There it was: Massive purchases at every stop, validated through ship's logs and certified with Corporate Navy funds. Not just the local Navy, either: Account codes were painfully short, some less than six digits. These were the original sequential Corporate banking accounts, started stars-only-knew how long ago and bloated beyond mortal comprehension by centuries of resource pillaging. Her own personal c
redit accounts (zeroed out and marked for garnishments) were up in the twenty digit ID number range. But not these. These IDs were tiny. Ancient.