by S E Zbasnik
"Actually, I thought you'd be a troll."
The dwarven fingers paused in their hunt for data and she shook her head, "Everyone always expects a troll. One species figures out how to build an economy off of scamming everyone else in the galaxy and suddenly the only way you can be any good with computers is if you're a Dwarven Prince in big need of assistance so he can wire much money to your account."
Vida sliced through a few lists narrowing down her prey with each bat of her fingers, "Trolls are great if you want to drain the retirement accounts of old elven ladies who want to support some dryad sapling across the galaxy, but for real finesse you need an artist."
"All right, artist," Marek said, his leg still shaking from his imaginary swan song, "paint us a picture of my dead wife."
"Already on it," Vida said, not turning to face the humans. "Your basic Crest security system is composed of three elements: Who, What, and Where. Rerouting through an Arda mainframe isn't too hard...long story how I got my mitts on that one. Gorgeous countryside there, nothing but volcanic ash as far as the eye could see."
Marek nudged into his wife as they gathered behind the hacker and she turned to him, shrugging. Far as she knew, hackers punched in a bunch of 1's and 0's until something magical happened and they had access to all the nuclear codes in the armory. Gods, she needed to stop watching such shitty movies with Orn.
"What is a bit trickier," Vida continued in her discussion, as the screen transformed before them into cryptic runes, the preferred coding language of the dwarves and, oddly, goblins. "Any changes in the MIA databanks are handled fully by human hands, an old system which apparently you Bears don't trust to mechanoids. Moving someone from one column to the other rests fully on the who."
"Okay," Variel said, trying to lead the hacker on to whatever magic she intended.
"Today, humans, we are going to play the part of one Colonel John Smith."
"John Smith?" Marek scoffed. "That's the stupidest name I've ever heard."
"That may be, but he's decorated with four more medals than you'll ever have, gum wrapper," Vida said, her dark eyes scanning the human behind her chair from the reflection in the data. "Saved a moon from impacting with a colony world, stopped a ring of gnome slavers, and rescued a kitten trapped in a tree."
"Sounds like a man of the month," Marek muttered.
"And the best part is, he isn't actually real," Vida said.
"He's got you beat on all accounts," Variel nudged her husband in the ribs.
"I tried having a few insiders scattered across the galaxy but they got too messy, panic attacks, blackmail; and assassins can be rather expensive."
"Open your legs and their services are quite reasonable, I hear."
Variel punched into her husband's side. He'd been so proud of his quip as he watched the dwarf's reflection he was unprepared for the attack. Wind rushed from his traitorous lungs and he stumbled to his knees.
Vida rose up a few inches out of her seat to look behind her as the human gasped for breath. "Thank you," she said as she returned to her job. "It's far more fun creating lives for my insiders. I had to kill one off a few months back, nasty accident with a hacksaw and his wife's third husband. Now," she pulled over to her main computer, the screen a pristine white, "to pull up the ether site."
She clicked on a mark in the history journal and the all too familiar Bear symbol roared off the page. It'd been years since Terrwyn Yates logged onto one, entering in her own reports, field requests, and checking to see if the bastards had paid them this month or not. "Gods," Variel said, "I can't believe they kept that stupid animation. It's just as cheesy as it was ten years ago."
Vida rolled her eyes as she clicked through the rudimentary menu system designed by a man who hated everyone and everything in the universe. Most people would rather face down a root canal performed by a drunk ogre than use a Crest site. Searching for a lost or improperly linked file was a scientifically known link to utter madness. "You should see the other ones. Tiger has a pair of cat eyes following your hand around the screen."
She flipped through the old log-in screens, three in a row, all welcoming Colonel John Smith with a cheery wave from an iconic knight as it bobbed the sword. "All right, here we go," Vida looked back through her routing programs to make certain it was all running smoothly, and searched through the lists of the lost soldiers still out in the universe somewhere.
"Is this just Bears?" Variel asked, the names impersonal and aloof in a tiny sans serif font as each scrolled past. Only an address and their last possible location gave any hint at the lives these words lived.
"No, all Crests keep the records sealed together. I assume to decrease productivity."
Variel thought she saw the name "Sovann: Jaguar, Last seen on the Orc Colony New Dawn" but it could have been her own guilty conscience playing tricks on her. She'd been on the other side so often, watching friends or families scrolling through the missing to find a scrap of hope, yet it never occurred to her that the Knight she'd killed only two months ago could have anyone looking for her. Hoping for her. Maybe after this was done, she could ask Vida to switch the Jaguar over as well.
"Here we go," the dwarf crowed, having to flip back and forth through the vast Y's. "Terrwyn Yates, dead 5 years then missing in action 2 months." She turned to the captain and smiled, "Not bad for a half a decade necromancy," Variel grinned but her eyes didn't feel it. Her gut churned, probably in pain from the protein meal or because she refused to sit down and rest.
"Now to move you over to the dead pile and hit...shit."
"Hit shit?" Marek asked.
"Shit! Shit! Shit!" Vida banged on the keyboard each time, getting an error sign, "Shiting shit shit, you piece of coprolite software formed from the anus of a derelict mine!" She snapped off her computer and dashed back to her data streams, trying to cover her tracks. Losing Colonel Smith would be terrible, she didn't have time to plan a fake funeral.
"What? What is it?" Variel asked, "Did you do it?"
"No, of course not. They have a level five lockdown on your name. A level five! What in the hell did you do?" Vida asked, stopping momentarily to turn to gaze at the human all her records turned up as 'As dangerous as a Knight can get.'
Variel looked bewildered, if Sovann's body hadn't been discovered, then...even if she had been found and they'd linked it to the Elation, the Jaguars wouldn't bother trying to unlock a long dead Bear Crest. They'd come out in their Dragons and blow the cruise ship out of the sky without a thought. Something else was going on, someone was watching her.
"So, what now?" Marek asked, eyeing up his wife with a new wary eye. Whatever terror vibes the hacker was sending off were finally catching up to his pea brain.
"I cover my tracks with sand and get the hell out of Crest networks for a few solar periods," Vida said slamming off her Arda router with a heavy bang of her fist.
Variel rubbed her forehead raw. All that, everything she did, every time she held back from pounding the shit out of her smirking husband's face was for nothing. Her ship was in danger of imploding, or exploding, or shitting rainbows for all she knew, and Terrwyn Yates remained alive.
But it was Marek who grabbed onto the chair's back and spun the dwarf around until he could look down at her. "Oh no."
"There is no 'oh no,'" Vida said, not breaking her concentration. "There is no option. I cannot kill Terrwyn Yates."
"You took our payment," Marek said, trying to crack his knuckles but only twisting his thumb, "you owe us a death."
Vida tried to break her chair free from the idiotic human's grasp, her fingers hauling down upon the hydraulics until the motor screamed. Then she paused, an idea floating up through her brain. Yes, yes, it could work. It should work. There wasn't any reason it couldn't work. Waving off the lurking form of the gum wrapper, she called up her stream, shifting the dwarven runes to the lumpy code of the elves.
"What are you doing?" Marek asked, his eyes shifting towards the door. He expected a dozen of
those golems to come and toss them out the airlock.
"Giving you the death you deserve," Vida answered back as a twisted smile pulled at her lips.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
If the engine room was the heart of the Elation and the bridge the head, the server and computer storage would be the spleen or perhaps lower half of the small intestine. The spleen room was dark, crowded, and hotter than an orc in heat.
"Pass me the green handle!" Ferra shouted as her arm flailed around a ripped open sheet of metal. The phrase "Intelligence Inside, Probably" was half scratched off from a rather angry robot when they stopped supporting its software.
"They appear to all be green," Brena answered back, her voice sharper than normal as she wiped the back of her hand against her forehead and smudged an elaborate eyebrow design, giving herself a unibrow.
Ferra popped up from her spot, anger rising as she stretched to keep one hand upon a very important piece that could explode if she let it go, and froze at the sight of the dulcen. Brena had pulled a kerchief from somewhere out of her dress and wrapped it around her hair. In the spare leather apron with the flowers on it and the makeshift headdress, she looked like a peasant elf fleeing from the harsh conditions of the fields to try a life at smithing. The tennen tried to bury a laugh, but a snort slipped and her jammed foot jiggled causing the equipment to whine like a hog stuck in a chute. "Shit," Ferra cursed herself then turned to the peasant elf. "The one shaped like a half eaten doughnut with a goblin jaw up the side."
Brena reached into the bag she'd been instructed to guard and removed a tool, "You require the MGC lever."
She deposited the tool into Ferra's gloved hand and the engineer couldn't hide her surprise, "You know what one of these is?"
"Oh yes, many of these make appearances in numerous vids. Usually as torture devices to scrape the information out of an enemy before the clock reaches midnight, but the names remain the same."
Ferra opened up the locked jaws with one finger as she eyed up the bard smoothing down her apron as if she were ready for a ball, "Riiight. Okay, now I'm going to count to three and throw this switch. The lights will probably go out, hopefully gravity will not. When that happens I need you to push the reset button. It's oval shaped and on the panel you called Mr. Cheese."
"Oval shaped Mr. Cheese," Brena said to herself, standing up on her toes as she felt around the conduit covered in cheese stickers. It was a habit of the previous IT guy; every time he unwrapped a slice of cheese he'd slap the sticker on the panel. Due to it being located within viewing range of one of the first artificial intelligences, an entire computer religion was created around the mighty God of Cheddar. Sadly, the computational cheese religion turned sour after a few centuries.
"Did you find it?" Ferra shouted, her leg cramping as she twisted about like a pretzel.
"I believe so."
"Stamens, what the hell am I doing?" Ferra asked herself. The drippy tennen had been at the bottom of her list to help -- somewhere in the range of one of Monde's med bots or asking WEST to do brain surgery on itself. Orn stormed out, throwing a hissy fit about her 'tone.' The djinn couldn't fit inside the room, never mind the cramped insides of the machine. Doc blew her off with a wave of his hand saying that he needed to stay sharp in case someone came in with extreme burns or electrical damage. And the other dulcen was moping over something.
"Okay, on the count of three. One..." The panel began to slip from her fingers, sliding back into the place she fought for ten minutes to drag it out of, "THREE!" She yanked back on the bolt, popping free half of the electrical systems on the ship. Total darkness fell across the tiny room. Ferra paused, unable to see anything, and afraid one slight jolt from her body could rip out days of work. Days they didn't have. It was all up to the dulcen. Seeds give life to them all.
"Did you do it?" Ferra asked, but she didn't get an answer. "Hello? Sky sniffer? You didn't pass out or something did you?"
As she asked with a rather rude epithet, the lights flickered and a handful rose at the end of the narrow room highlighting the door. It was enough for Ferra to untangle herself from the vengeful innards of the ship's brain. She removed one of the lanterns from her bag of tricks and turned it on, regretting she forgot the thing before climbing head first into the computer.
Out of nowhere a dark head dropped off from on top of the cooling tower. Ferra fell back on her ass as Brena looked down, twisting her head in curiosity, "Was that proper?"
"Scaring the shit out of me? No, not really."
"Oh, I am sorry. I pushed the button as you instructed."
"Yeah, thanks. Good job pushing something."
"Though you could use work on your counting skills."
Ferra narrowed her eyes, but shook off the spite burning in her mouth. She needed the elf, whether she wanted to admit it or not. "What are you doing up there?"
"The backstroke?"
"What?"
Brena swung her legs around and dropped lightly to the ground, "It is an old human joke, I believe."
"About humans doing the backstroke on top of computer equipment?" Ferra asked while threading her suturing equipment. Calling the computer the brain of the ship wasn't entirely metaphorical at times.
"They are a strange species at times. Their humor is very crass."
"It's nothing but kick to the testicles jokes, and 'pull my finger,'" Ferra agreed.
"Yes," Brena nodded her head slowly, before turning to the elf upon the ground, "What are testicles?"
That gave the engineer pause. There were a lot of things she'd taught other elves over the years, sheltered lot they could be; the sight of a gargoyle chiseling out its young, a quad of gnomes conversing amongst themselves telepathically, or the sight of her husband consuming his typical sugar based dinner could drive them to ask impersonal questions and oodles of embarrassment. But some things were better left to others. "Hex it," she said to Brena as she stood up, wiping grease stained hands across her backside.
"What do we need to accomplish next?"
Ferra fired up her new weapon, it sparked at the edge as another gear stretched the gnome gut in a suturing motion. "Time to break the hold. Can you unlock the panel behind your head?"
Brena poked at it. She assumed at first glance that all the metal was decorative, perhaps the previous owner had a love of chrome cabinets, but with each passing moment with Ferra she discovered a world previously unimaginable. Tubes of varying colors and liquids sizzled through locked cabinets above their heads. As the MGC coolant leaked, Ferra snatched a leather cap out of her box and jammed it onto Brena's head.
The dulcen smiled to the engineer and slightly curtsied in thanks. Ferra only pointed back at the panel out of her reach. Now, what did she say? Poke two fingers into one side, smash your fist in the middle and lift. Ah! Perfect. Brena thought as she removed the stubborn panel revealing a glass aquarium hidden behind. It glowed an eerie blue as small globs of grey matter floated in patterns. Some would cross back and forth then break apart to form tiny spinning circles around each other.
"It's beautiful," Brena said, gesturing to the brain fish dancing in their habitat.
"It's not supposed to do that," Ferra said. "This is real bad." She pushed aside the dulcen and, standing on her tiptoes, reached into the tank. Removing one of the floating gray blobs, Ferra inserted her tool into its guts. Brena flinched, but the blob didn't writhe in pain or try to flee. It flopped open and exposed circuitry hidden inside the grey matter. Ferra increased the flame and started to solder some of the broken bits into place.
"That is fascinating," Brena said as she watched the master at work. "What are they?"
"Neurons, sort of. Great big globs of greasy grimey computer guts," Ferra finished her work and let the suture close up the tear she made into the skin. "Part organic, part cybernetic. It's old technology back when people thought that the organic body did a better job of computing rather than the thing designed for it."
"It's beautiful."
"It's absolute bollocks," Ferra muttered, yanking another one out. "The blasted organic part dies off every few dozen years and you have to clone new ones. But..." she shook her head slowly, "it is also kind of pretty in a useless sort of way."
Brena smiled to herself, sitting back on her heels and watching the engineer work. Unbeknownst to anyone else on the ship, she'd often grab her notebook and sit in the corner to watch Ferra curse into panels and threaten the computer with a heavy decontamination run if it didn't behave. Sometimes she'd fully forget her special quills and wait there quietly in the shadows, observing.
"What's up with you and the books?"
"Pardon?" Brena broke from her revere, afraid the tennen had been reading her unscrubbed mind. She did not suffer the same unfortunate effect of an easily blushing orange cheek as her brother, but she still felt the rise of something in her gut. It was odd to feel shame; it'd been so long.
"Your notebook, you drag around paper. How do you even get paper?"
"It is an old bard trick to focus ones mind by staring at a blank page. A blank screen invites interaction, discourse, but the blank page is only there to absorb what it reflects back."
"Does it work?"
"'It is absolute bollocks,'" Brena quoted, getting a small chuckle from Ferra, "But it was my mother's idea and, I suppose, I am not ready to give it up yet."
"Ah..." Ferra said dropping the last of the brain fish into place. She knew when to not open a shuttle of gnomes, and switched the subject, "That should be it, now to push that reset button."
"The one on Mr. Cheese?" Brena asked, pointing to the top and reaching with her long arms to haul herself up.
"No, I've got it," Ferra said, her gloved finger pressing into the small panel below the brain fish. A jolt of electricity zapped through the aquarium. For a moment all the gray matter stopped swimming as they hovered properly in place...then the water turned red.
"Oh shit!" A klaxon blared. "Oh double shit!" and all the brains floated to the surface.