Family Matters

by S E Zbasnik

  The computer thought for a moment and slipped into its waiting screen -- a moon orbited around a pink planet that only existed in its fevered processors. When it came back, a small hand appeared on screen and pointed 45 degrees to the left. "It's over there."

  All three heads followed to where, sure enough, the red and white lights flashed in the universal symbol of "please don't hit this or you're going to have a lot of Constar customers very angry with you."

  "WEST," Variel threatened her insane computer, wishing she could override it instead, "the children will each be given a puppy!"

  "Connecting with it now," the computer chirped, adding some ancient whirring noises so they'd see just how hard it was working.

  Orn twiddled with the drawstring on his shirt and mumbled, "It might be best if I make the call myself. Hackers can get a bit flighty about uninvited people phoning them up at home and all."

  A small part of Variel knew she should ask her pilot point blank what was going on, but the rest of her was too exhausted. "Fine, go ahead."

  She cuffed her husband around the collar and drug him from the bridge. He cried out for a moment, thrown off by a strength he never really knew she possessed, but gave in and let his own legs follow. Variel glanced towards the finger she did break, swelling into an eggplant both in color and size. "That should get fixed."

  "Will you kiss it and make it better?" he taunted, but Variel only smiled to herself.

  "I'm certain you're going to love our doctor."

  "Oh, is it that feisty blond elf? Or the amazonian dark one with the vacant eyes?" Marek grinned as he shielded the broken finger bone from the rest.

  "You'll just have to see," Variel said leading him towards the med bay.

  Red lights rimmed the lookout tower above the shuttle bay. Another bolt plunged to the floor, slowing strangely in the adjustable gravity field until it landed with a soft, metal clang. Variel was nearly invisible as she sat with her legs curled up to her chest, leaning out of the darkness of the narrow stand to watch each dropped bolt hit the ground. Only Marek sat fully in the emergency lights, scrounging for another bolt to send to its doom.

  His splintered finger crashed into a piece of standing equipment and he cursed, shaking the padding up and down, "You coulda warned me."

  "Sure, but it wouldn't have been as much fun to watch you piss yourself."

  "Excuse my Gaul, but you let a fucking orc on your ship to do things to bodies. Does it know what you did for a living?"

  "He does. In fact, he was probably the only one to know before," she glanced out at the bolt graveyard her husband was building. "And he's a perfectly capable medic, you didn't need to scream like a little boy and wave your arms about as if he were a demon."

  "Says the woman who, in my panic, said, 'Monde, tear his arms off.'"

  "It shut you up, didn't it?"

  Marek grumbled, tossing another bolt down. He couldn't elucidate why the quiet thud of the bolts entertained and bothered him, but it was hypnotic. Wrong gravity was infectious. "I was at your funeral."

  "I know," Variel said, watching another bolt she'd have to pick up later fall to its doom.

  Marek glanced back at his wife who looked so small crumpled up on herself. This was probably the barest he'd ever seen her. The years certainly didn't tear down the armor she built around her heart. "Course you do. We filled the box with rocks. Your Mum wanted to get some from the river, smooth and far too expensive. I substituted for those holey puce ones people keep in gardens. Cheap. What do rocks care where they're buried? They're rocks."

  Variel was probably supposed to be angry that her false body was made of pumice "puce" stones poured into a pine box, but that wasn't her. Whatever memory everyone gathered to morn was someone else, someone who died bravely defending the cosmos from whatever the commandant read at her funeral. She stubbornly kept on living.

  "Did you know your mum was there? Even brought her new wife. Boy does she hate me."

  She smiled -- her mum was cozy as cinnamon and soft as fresh dough. Variel never had the courage to ask her on those few Soulday visits how in the hell she ever wound up with her sterner than steel mother. Some things were better left in the past, like all of it. "Why are you here?"

  Marek dropped another bolt, the hefty body thudding into the coffin, "Did you fail to connect your new ears? I told you. We're married, for better or worse."

  "You had five years to snag down another Crest, plenty of women looking for a promotion. Or you could always..."

  Marek curled his face up, "Gay for Stay?" then he remembered who he was talking to and tried to wipe the disgust off.

  "I meant get a job. Something that didn't involve convincing all your neighbors to buy fifty cases of protein space bars a week."

  "'Spose I could have." Marek ran out of bolts, instead his fingers twisted about their fallen brother, wadding up the padding, "but it turns out when you're the widow of a famous knight, the accolades pour in. Flowers, letters, hot dishes. I didn't have to order take-out for three months. And the women," he whistled, "fake up a few tears and they're eating out of your crotch in the blink of an eye."

  "Right, I'm remembering why I never talked to you," Variel rubbed her head. She'd take a dead night of nothing but Orn and his vast record collection of classic dwarven slate songs over two minutes with her husband.

  "Was I that bad of a husband?" he sounded sincere as he stared into her recognizable eyes, trying to find a moment of pity in her black heart.

  "Yes," Variel sighed, "but I was just as bad of a wife."

  He snorted, and nodded his head, "You can say that again. In all that time I don't think you cracked the stove once."

  "I couldn't, you filled the oven with unsellable protein bars," she snickered at the memory of having a closet of the damn things topple onto her. Oh, she'd burned red then, but with enough distance and time it was almost forgivable. Marek laughed at it too, one of dozens of get rich quick schemes he'd wasted his allotment on. But it did keep him out of the house and away from the admiral's wife.

  Variel opened her mouth, "Remember when..." then her PALM buzzed. "It's probably Orn," she said as she opened it. Only a few words of text answered back. "Got answer, meet me on bridge. Come alone." It was very curt for her pilot, but he'd been acting strange the whole day. As she looked to her husband she amended they'd all been understandably acting strange the whole day.

  "Orn wants to talk." As Marek dusted off his silver pants, she added, "alone. He probably needs me to cash a check his butt wrote. I'll find you when I have an answer," she said, rising to her feet.

  Marek's hand slipped into his pocket, making certain the key was still secure then he waved to her as she climbed to the ladder, "I can use the time to acquaint myself with my new ship."

  "There are still plenty of airlocks," Variel cursed at him from midway down the ladder.

  "But I have the key," he twisted the knife in, reveling in the hostage situation.

  "Who says I need a key?" Variel muttered to herself. She had yet to discuss this problem with Gene but all she needed to do was gesture at Marek and he'd be off the ship before he could roll his eyes.

  As she slipped out of the sealed bay into the dark halls, the red tract lighting called up along the floor guiding her path. Emergency lights put one in mind of dwarven ships, jut add the scent of cracking coal and over heating bulkheads and you'd have a dwarfy home away from home. Variel wiped her hands on her pants, trying to remove the bolt grease, when a few clattering noises came from the galley. Gods, all anyone on this ship seemed to do was eat. She started for the kitchen, her eyes straining in the hellish light, when a black form dotted out some of the running emergency lights.

  "Are you alone?" the shadow asked.

  Variel glanced behind her, finding only darkness. Marek would shine like the star of Maru's crown in his ridiculous get up. "Yes, I was off to talk with Orn."

  "I am the one who sent the message."

  "Taliesin, now's not rea
lly the best time..."

  The elf stepped away from the wall, his dark form all the more haunting as the whites of his skin appeared a demonic red, "Do you trust him?"

  "Orn? Hell no."

  He narrowed his gigantic eyes, "You know of whom I speak. We have discussed the situation and the engineer believes she can rescue enough of the systems to limp us to a nearby planet. Disposing of the body shall be of little problem."

  "Wait, what?" Variel inched closer to her trained killer. He didn't lean back, "You're all talking about this, behind my back?"

  "You appeared to be keeping him busy, distracted. Lady Lidoffad has concocted a plan to remove the locks slowly, mimicking his use of the minor key until the final parts can be broken off with brute force. The djinn seemed to agree with..."

  "Stop! Stop planning how we're going to kill a man, toss his body into the turbines, and then get them up and running to chop up the evidence."

  Taliesin blinked slowly, he hadn't anticipated this response, "I do not understand. Is he not as much of a threat as the knight you dispatched was?"

  "She was trying to kill us. All he's done is made us late for an appointment."

  "Ah." That cursed ah was back as Taliesin lapsed into dulcen silence. Entire epic novels, tomes large enough to crush rats were woven inside a dulcen's silence. Their greatest play consisted of one man waiting for himself. "Do you, are you... do you care for him?"

  "Oh for the gods' sake," her head fell into her hands, "now? You want to do this now? No, I do not care, like, or can even stand to spend more than a minute with Mister Marek Yates. He is a gangrenous boil upon my side I can never lance. I would rather consume large quantities of tongue arachnids than speak with him. There is, has been, and will never be anything of an intimate nature between us. The very idea makes me vomit in places I didn't think could spew bile."

  Taliesin listened to her words, carefully running them through his filter. Elves loved to code messages into every sentence they uttered. Why waste five to share what you need in one? The human need to state and restate the same idea endlessly took a lot of adjusting, "Then, why are you working for him? Why are you letting an obvious challenge to your sovereignty continue?"

  "Because he's a boil of my own making."

  "I do not..." Taliesin frowned, unable to put to words his tumultuous concerns.

  Variel wished she could thud her forehead against a wall for five minutes. A case of the green cowled monster rearing its head never entered her mind. Most of her dalliances were too short and shallow for jealousy to come creeping in -- she'd just pull into another port when things got serious. All of the dead woman's ones were already aware of the existence of her boil. Everyone on a Crest ship knew who was married for love or promotion. The promos quickly became a rotating list of who-schelpt-who, while the lovers were left out of the fun.

  "I wouldn't expect you to understand," Variel settled on, hoping a little condescension would wipe the stain away.

  Taliesin's sharp eyes burned at that, "I am elven, I do not have trouble comprehending the existence of a first marriage."

  She leaned away from his burst of anger. "That isn't my point. Starting anew, building a fresh life by burning your old one to the ground isn't easy..." Variel turned her gaze to her shoes, unable to take in the glower, "I threw myself into the new life, this life, trying my best to act as if having no friends, no family, no connections was the way of it."

  A mist formed around her eyes as she remembered that first Soulday locked in a small storage bin with only a mute djinn for company, trying to heat up a tin of faux-beans on a stolen camp stove. Loneliness couldn't compare to the crushing despair of the realization that there wasn't a person out there who would care one whit for Variel Tuffman. It was the closest she came to breaking, a half typed letter floating on her missive-board to her old friend Trae. "I'm still alive" sat in her draft's folder for three months. Then she found the Elation for cheap, met Orn and Ferra, and her past melted like butter in the sun.

  "Pasts are hard to kill when they unbury themselves," Variel said, her shield shimmering into place, "I'd rather get it all in one go; Marek, the MIA, everything that hints to the possibility of Terrwyn yet drawing breath."

  Taliesin nodded slowly, his head dropping down. She tried to tap him lightly on the shoulder, but the head wouldn't rise to look at her. Resigning herself to having to do the wrong thing, she turned around to find her boil.

  "What are you afraid of?" the elf's voice cut through her sinew even as it dropped to the floor. She paused, but didn't look at him, "Every moment you begin to open your soul, you snap it shut like an overprotective guardian."

  Variel shrugged her shoulders, there was no argument she could give, and walked away from the breaking assassin.

  "I have good news, slightly less good news, and a whole lot of news news," Orn's chatter cut across the cold kitchen as he spun in his chair. WEST beeped in an arrhythmic fashion to punctuate the dwarf's speech.

  "Start with the good news," Variel said, crossing her arms. She'd been expecting nothing but the bad variety all morning.

  "I got in touch with my old hacker associate."

  "And he's willing to do it," Marek interrupted trying to speed up the reveal. He'd been trying to ignore his ration of crumbled ants over sugar blasted cereal with the hope steak and eggs would magically appear, when he was rescued from the excitement of space travel by the dwarf summoning his wife.

  Orn didn't need to bother to glare at the outburst, the others managed it just fine. Keeping everyone out of her personal life was an evaporating dream for Variel as the elves inserted their pointy-eared selves into every meeting. Despite their parting words, she was somewhat hopeful to find her assassin leaning against the sink with his sister.

  "No, she is not, but she'll hear you out," the dwarf clucked at the human. "She insists upon a meeting, somewhere public, low profile but unremarkable. I suggested a Half 'n' Half, preferably in a station somewhat near our limping ass."

  "I see," Variel said, "And what's the not so good news?"

  "She doesn't come cheap," Orn admitted. His connections could get an audience, they weren't about to get anything pro-bono.

  Variel glanced to her husband, "I don't suppose you have anything to your name other than that wad of tinfoil strapped across your chest?"

  Marek grunted as the others chuckled, perhaps a bit louder than the lazy jibe warranted. "Depends on how much we're talking."

  The captain returned to her pilot to catch Orn rubbing his aching shoulders. He spent hours piggybacking from one comm buoy to another, breaking through someone's personal PALM radio, and finally having to crosslink with a drive-thru window. Half the time he spoke to his contact, he got back "And would you like cheese with that?" It was not a good morning and looked as if it were about to turn into a very bad day.

  "She wouldn't say, it'll all come out in the meeting. And don't go blaming me for this. Hackers are insanely paranoid. Being hunted by every species that ever bothered to rub two microchips together will do that. But she's good. At hacking, I mean." The dwarf deliberately didn't look at his wife, who was trying to claw bits of grease out of her hair and paying only half attention to the problems outside engineering.

  Variel sighed, dropping her head as she weighed the insanity of Orn's plans against the weightless pile of nothing she had. "I hesitate to even ask, what's the news news?"

  "We're by the station Rune. Cozy place, dwarven owned, but it's got a few 'tall sections.'"

  "Orn..."

  "And apparently it's also under gnome revolt."

  Variel's head fell back as she gazed up at her ceiling still stained with ancient tomato sauce, "You have got to be...could today go any worse?"

  "I dunno," the pilot shrugged, "You got any children you abandoned to a witch in the woods?"

  "Ha," Variel tried to rub away the mounting pressure behind her temples but only got more in response, "Marek and I will make for the coffee shop."

&nbs
p; "I have to go too, to felicitate the deal," Orn muttered. "Or so she said."

  "I am coming as well," Taliesin cut in.

  Variel peered at him through her splayed fingers, "Fine, great, anyone else coming. Ferra?"

  "Traipse about on a sabotaged space station so those fuzzballs can unionize? Sounds great, but I have so much to not do here."

  "Monde? Brena? WEST, we could download you into the toaster and bring you along!"

  "I think the captain's cracked," Orn whispered to his wife.

  "Cracked? She's split in two," Ferra answered before lifting her voice to stop Variel actually trying to shove their computer into the onboard bread burner. "Rune's a wyrm jump away, but I need my engines operating first."

  Marek tapped his fingers against his chin, "And what incentives do I have to be agreeing with any of this?"

  Variel snarled at the husband less than an hour earlier she defended, "If you don't, that hulking mass of djinn will string you up by your ankles and drag you behind the ship."

  Gene puffed up a bit of smoke and flexed his arms thicker than most small children. Nodding to himself, Marek muttered, "All right, okay, good, yeah. We'll do the gnome thing." Then he screamed and dashed behind his wife as the giant took one step forward.

  "Unlock the engines, you chartreuse spleened coward," she cursed at the man cowering behind her.

  "And how will I know you won't be whisking us off to some pirate fortress to sell my body off to the highest lord?"

  "Who'd want to buy that?" Ferra asked, eyeing up the silver paunch.

  "Pirates," Brena answered back, fascinated by the exchange, "whatever those are."

  "There's no such thing as space pirates," Variel said, holding out her hand for the key, but Marek still refused.

  "Bandits however, ooh boy, you do not want to cross them." Three sets of eyes glared daggers at the dwarf, "What?"

  Marek weighed his options. He was surrounded, out maned, out gunned, and out of his depth; but he was also the only one there who really knew the captain and how to make her bleed. "Swear it."

  "Swear what?" Variel lifted an eyebrow, bemused but in the mood to go along with whatever his feeble mind concocted.