by S E Zbasnik
He passed the plastic dome to her, a few of the hastily stuck dragon stickers flecking under his claws. She patted his hand and removed the helmet, slotting it into its rightful place. The computer greedily chirped out that 'all systems were nominal, more or less.' Good time as any to test the onboard comm system, "Orn. Can you hear me?"
"What? Yes, fine. You sound like you sucked down a bottle and a half of helium ale, but otherwise it's good," the dwarf's voice sounded demonic as the pitch wobbled.
She tried to retract her arm to fix the problem, but the suit cursed her out for breaking a seal. Fine, she'd just have to deal with sounding like Tiny Tinny for a trip. It wasn't the end of the galaxy. "Are you done docking the airlock?"
"You could look out a bloody window and see."
"Is that an obstinate yes or a recalcitrant no?"
"Yes, it's good, done. Get over there before we all die a fiery death. Orn out!"
She shook her head inside the helmet, her dreaded nose already beginning to tickle, and watched the grumbling assassin shrug. "Whatever's bothering him is a problem for another day," she said. Taliesin nodded slowly, as if he'd had more to tell Variel but wasn't able to due to certain other parties hogging up all the air.
"Are you locked in place, Marek?"
"I dunno," he said, his eyes searching through a shielded visor. He accidentally hit the reflective mode, and Variel saw only herself stuffed up like a child on his first snow day reflected off the helmet. She shifted towards him, the magnetic boots making up for what would be a lack of gravity. Inside a false gravity field it just made every step she took excruciatingly challenging. She'd never hear the end of it from Monde.
Variel shifted one of Marek's gloves to the right, thumped on his chest panel twice, slapped a bit of tape onto a gap in the thigh and lifted the fallen visor. His green eyes collapsed back in shock from first the appearance of his wife, then the reassuring tones of a dulcet computer on its third nirvana session. "It told me 'All is well.' What's that mean?"
"You will meet a fair haired stranger in three days and sire ten fat sons with him," Variel said pushing open the first lock in the door to space.
"Ha ha, you're so hilarious," Marek muttered as she hooked her padded arm through his and tugged. He trailed behind, his legs wobbling like a newborn calfs with each magnetic step.
As the door cracked, Variel led her husband inside, shoving him with a kick. She had to seal this first door before opening the second one to the outside world of whatever passed for atmosphere on another's ship. For a moment she paused at her assassin tapping his claw against WEST's abandoned panel and softened.
"Don't worry, Sin. If this fails, we can always sell Marek's body to science," she called to him before locking the door in place.
Her hand retracted from the panel as the door opened, revealing the airlock of the hacker's ship. Marek bumped into her for the fifth time, his visor having once again slipped down over his eyes.
The walk between was mostly uneventful, like climbing down a drainage pipe that clanged with every step. Ship to ship transport wasn't done so crudely unless there was an emergency or someone insisted the old ways were the best and clogging up shuttle bays with transport vehicles was a waste of MGC! You young kids and your fancy flying mechanics. In my day we walked through space, up hill, both ways.
Variel waved her hand at the second airlock door and the one behind them closed. Her husband waddled around, trying to work the thick mitts so he could lift the broken helmet. "Screw this," he muttered, and he cracked the seal on his helmet and lifted it up.
"No, wait!" Variel shouted but her husband either couldn't hear her over his own stupidity or didn't care. He coughed in the low oxygen, but their hacker friend must have anticipated him being a moron as the levels rose quicker than normal.
She shook her head as he shrugged both shoulders. His laissez-faire attitude was the best bet for getting them decompressed in the span of ten minutes. "You're an ass, you know that?"
Marek lifted a hand up to his ear and mouthed, "What was that? I can't hear you."
Yanking the helmet out of his hands, she jammed it back onto his head and turned it so hard something snapped inside. He wasn't wiggling out of that without assistance, "There's this thing called a quarantine. Might want to look into it the next time you expose yourself to gods knows what contaminants."
"I know space regs," Marek clucked, as cocky as ever. "They won't let people onto any ship unless it's been decontaminated."
"In case you forgot, we aren't exactly in Crest space. People do whatever people want here."
A dark thought crossed Marek's brow as old scare reports of ancient viruses dug from the bodies of derelict ships and passed to a crew of scavengers played through his mind. So many of the reenactments ended in cannibalism. He didn't think he'd have the stomach to swallow an orc and rock creature.
"Ah," Variel said, raising her finger at a comforting ding, "the pressure's equalized. We can go in." She waved at a small camera embedded in the panel, noticing the lack of manual override from outside and found it odd. While it was a good way to keep anyone from forcing their way onto your ship, you just had to hope you didn't wind up outside when you discovered you locked the keys inside.
The last door cracked, the hatch rolling counter clockwise, and it leaned open. Variel whistled as she surveyed the sight before her. She hadn't been able to make out much of anything of the ship coming in below them, and nothing of it on the walk over, but this hacker's delight was a literal sphere. Walkways circled all around the edge of the glittering ball, well guarded by railings, and in the midst of it all burst the pure MGC engine unguarded and unobstructed by the old safety stuff that kept her ship from collapsing in on itself.
"Gorgeous."
"I think I'm gonna vomit," Marek muttered, trying to raise his hand to his lips.
Variel leaned over the railing, "It's a long way down."
"Don't do that!"
"Do what? This..." she taunted, holding onto the metal rail and twisting to the side. Her husband grumbled some more and tried to calm the rise of bile before it blew all over his helmet.
She leaned back from the endless drop, which she suspected would end in a small gravity release from the safety regulators and her being suspended unharmed in midair. But she didn't see a reason to tell Marek that. It was more fun to watch him squirm. A clomping of feet broke her concentration from the beyond her mechanics keeping the vibrating engine suspended above their heads. She glanced down the sloping walkway to find a pair of metallic heads rising to great them.
"We've got golems," she said in a cheerful mood. Then her smile dropped to awe as the heads rose and kept rising. They were golden and streamlined, shaped more like a troll's head than the typical vague attempt at something with a few eyes and a nose. Rather than waste time adding false features, gears ticked round and round inside the golems hollow casings. There were four in all, each as tall as Gene, with even more gears cranking about in their guts, and all glowing a familiar red that transformed to the greens of reserved MGC.
"Oh, Orn's gonna be pissed he's missing this."
"What? What am I missing?"
She whipped her head around searching for her pilot skulking behind, but only her husband stood there covering his eyes with his hands as if that would help. "Orn? Where are you?"
"Sitting my ass in the pilot's seat because I'm 'No damn use' in engineering unless someone 'needs an extra arsehole.'"
Ferra must have found someone else to do her bidding, and judging by Orn's theatrical pout it was someone the dwarf didn't approve of. "Then how can you hear me?"
"Your suit's hooked into the comm line, everyone can hear you. Ancestors, you do not shut up Cap."
"Sonofa..." she tried to wiggle a few more wires, and got a spark along her buttons. "Is it still working? Testing..."
A beat passed before the dwarf's voice returned, "Do I say yes or no? I forget."
Variel sighed, "When were thes
e suits last inspected?"
Orn tapped his foot against the console, the noise echoing in the confined space of their heads, "Dunno. When did we last have a spacewalk?"
"You mean when did we last have an effective spacewalk."
"Oh, right," Orn snorted, remembering how funny that hired muscle looked as he clung helplessly to the hull before the blast of a passing ship yanked him off. Later they learned he'd been planning on snagging the ship into his ogre service, so it all worked out in the end.
"Add it to the list," she said glancing up at the mechanical golems standing perfectly still waiting for an official instruction.
"Assuming we survive," Orn answered back.
Variel ignored him, wishing she could switch off the intercom. Instead, she motioned to Marek, trying to get his attention, but her husband glared up at the whirling gears inside the nearest golem, the silvers and golds flickering in the passing light. "Hey, dumbass!"
"What?" Marek shouted.
"What?" Orn repeated.
"The dumbass I'm married to," she amended, "Can't you kill this on your end, Orn?"
"Probably."
Variel sighed, "Marek, focus. We still have a job to do." She walked up to one of the golems and, weighing her options carefully, said, "Take me to your leader."
Orn's groan reverberated through her skull, but she brushed it off. The command worked as the two back golems inverted themselves. Elbows and knees snapped backwards and the feet grew out of the heel until the golems could easily begin their descent down into the bowels of the ball.
The other two golems didn't move, their lack of eyes staring straight ahead. Marek pointed at the remainders and asked, "What's with them?"
"Guards. Come on, our escorts are making a break for it," Variel chased after the two leading golems.
Marek reached one finger out and poked the crystal clear casing of one. It didn't react, only the continual chug of gears answered back. "Must be defective."
"Mar-ek!" Variel called like a mother organizing her ducklings.
He walked down the incline, his head turned back to watch the two still stone dead golems but neither shifted a micron as the human vanished down after his wife.
The trip through the ball grew less awe inspiring with the pass of each deck and the average necessities of ship life: engineering, life support, galley, waste disposal. All very important, all unexciting to anyone who spent more than two months starside. Marek kept stopping at every door, poking his fingers into things he shouldn't and dashing across walkways connecting the decks. One of the escort golems re-inverted itself and followed after the human. Lowering its arms below his armpits, the golem lifted Marek up and rejoined Variel. His legs kicked impotently in the air, but eventually he gave in to the golem-handling. He was getting used to it.
Finally, after walking what felt miles, the golem stopped before an unmarked door. Its mate dropped Marek to his fuzzy slippers, and Variel, lifting her fist to the metal hatch, knocked twice.
"Come in." It was the teapot voice, a bit less tinny than before.
She cracked open the door and poked her head into the room. Low lights circled around the edges, reds highlighting the ceiling while blues took over for the floor. Monitors, some as big as a bed, others smaller than a PALM screen, lined along the walls. They didn't flash piles of 1's and 0's in that neon green she'd been expecting. Most were of surveillance footage, the screens jumping from frame to frame.
A ca-thunk broke through the room, and a desk lamp lit up the smiling face of a woman seated in a chair. Her face was strange, as light as Ferra's, with the huge eyes of an elf done up in a lavender color Variel'd never seen in nature. But the body, wide and short, was that of a dwarf. A smile pulled the tiny false elven lips up and up, until thicker lips broke through.
The woman waved, "Hello."
"Your hand's the wrong color," Variel said, pointing to the dark appendage waving in the stark glow of a desk bulb.
"Damn, did I leave it on?" Their hacker pushed a few keys upon her board and the face shimmered like the kitsune's morph suit. Classic dwarven features appeared, the typical dark skin, the wider nose, and the jaw you could crack skulls with. "New technology, supposed to be used for burn victims or anyone needing facial reconstruction. Only the elves found out about it, raised a stink, and now it's black listed for being possible 'spy equipment.' They thought they destroyed them all too." The smirk was back, now the proper sized lips to follow them. "Did you like the eyes?"
"They were very purple," Variel said.
"Yeah, I call it 'Mary Sue.' Oh right, I'm Vida, by the way."
"Vari..."
"You don't need to bother," Vida said, turning back to her screen for a moment. She wasn't used to interacting with people outside of masquerading incognito as beverage supplies, that much was clear. Vida poked a few more times at her board, then zoomed in on the screen with her fingers. "Ah, done," then she returned to the two humans cluttering up her workstation. "You can take those suits off. It's safe, had the golems scrub it down not two days ago."
Marek grimaced, but Variel began unlocking her suit, and placed her helmet upon a flat surface that projected an image of jumbled elven worlds when she got near it. He grabbed onto her glove as it broke from the arm restraints, "What the hell are you doing? Not five minutes ago you yelled at me for that."
She glared at him and yanked the glove out of his hands, "You know when you go to someone's house and they ask you to remove their shoes? This is nothing like that." Variel stretched her arms, glad to be free of the constraints. She'd still have an imaginary fan blowing in her ears for the next half hour. People said you could hear the stars if you held a shell up to your ear, usually the kind of people you had to feign a heart attack to get away from.
"Captain Variel, or is it Terrwyn for now?" Vida asked, turning back from her main computer of choice. Her chair was no ordinary swivel desk type from a knockoff dwarven outlet store on the edge of the Ring. It was surrounded by a ring of black metal, each surface lighting up with her touch, that she could rotate around her to reach every inch. The wheels only sort of touched the ground as it bounced along, evidently it had its own small gravity source synched up to her ship. Thick cushions molded around her head and back, comfy even after long days stuck at the console. And there were no less than three different cup holders of varying size. Orn would plotz himself over it.
"Variel, if you please. I have to say, your ship is a marvel. Is that a Cyberton 58?"
Vida smiled, "You noticed? Had to trade in five good favors to get my hands on one."
"Impressive, seeing as how they were all destroyed in the Primean War."
Vida nodded her head to the side, "That's nothing, the real trick to maintaining a constantly shifting gravity field is in the particles. Liquids are the worst. Took me weeks of calibrations before I could keep tea from beading up and splatting against the walls."
"I'm sure this is all very interesting techno babble about nothing important," Marek butted in, "but we're here to do a job."
Variel glared at him, shaking her head as she mouthed 'You're the worst fucking businessman.' But Vida licked her lips and nodded, "Right, first things first. The 'Corn?"
Reaching into a pocket holster, Variel extracted out a gun. Vida didn't raise her hands, but she did turn her head to the side, curious where this was going. "Sorry, we didn't have time to package it," Variel mumbled as she unscrewed the hidden panel to reveal the glittering dust below.
"May I?" Vida asked, raising her hand for the gun but not rising from her chair.
Variel shrugged and placed the stash inside the hacker's waiting hands. The dwarf dipped one finger into the dust and watched it shimmer in the light, prisms refracting around the buildup of MGC in the air. It was dangerous for her to keep the stash anywhere near the buildup of energy in this room, it'd have to be moved soon. Vida pushed a button on her chair and a gap opened. With a small silver knife, she knocked all the drug into a processing unit. Hal
f heartedly, she tried to close the gun's handle, catching a bit of her white glove in it.
"What the hell are you doing?" Marek shouted.
"Sorry, they get in the way sometimes," Vida said sliding off her elbow length gloves and finishing off screwing the gun back together.
"Not you," he glared to the only one who could get them out of this situation.
Variel paused mid-stride to pick up her old pistol and folded her arms, "What's your problem?"
"First you give her the drug, then you give her your only gun?"
She rolled her eyes and said under her breath, "Who says it's my only gun."
Vida smiled and twisted the pistol in her hands as if it were a water gun. "Am I such a dangerous criminal? You're certain I'd pop pop you right in the head?" she asked as she lifted the gun and pointed it at Marek. He stopped glaring at his wife and opened his mouth like a fish. Slowly his arms rose. "Perhaps you are right," Vida laughed and pulled down on the trigger. Two bangs clattered through the air and Marek dropped down onto his knees.
Variel laughed at him as he poked at his chest and stomach, trying to find a new hole. "There's a dampening field in place. It's why the air tastes like baking soda."
"It cuts off all communications as well. I pray your shipmates do not get too jumpy if you are not heard from for an hour."
"It'll be fine," Variel said, picking up the cold gun out of the hacker's hands and returning it to her pocket. "I have to say, I didn't expect the sound of shots fired. Every other dampening field I've been in kills weapons stone dead."
Vida smiled, "A little special edition. You'd be surprised how often one has to fake their own death at times. Though, perhaps you wouldn't."
She was starting to like this dwarf, "I'm surprised by you."
"By my resourcefulness, my army of antique gear golems, or my dashing good looks?" Vida said her list with a straight face as she called down a spreadsheet from above her chair. It did glow a neon green in a field of black, some things are classic for a reason.