by A. D. Bloom
14
His projection of the Chief’s torso now floated above the Ops console. It didn’t seem to bother Timms much to see the image of the Chief like that, with bundles of control cables thick as her thighs and arms coming out of her pelvis and her shoulders. But he wasn’t worried about Lt. Timms seeing it.
The rest of them were outside, finishing up with the capacitors, the emitters, and the control leads. They could see him through the dome over the bridge if they wanted to. So could Horcheese.
He’d ripped open the control consoles on the port and starboard side used for firing the emitters and rigged cables and control conduits from all of them leading to the command chair at the center of the bridge. It looked like the empty center of a spider’s web, waiting to be filled. That’s where the Chief would go, of course. They'd plug her in like an organically-based control concatenator.
The straps… He’d forgotten to rig them to hold her limbless torso. As he picked his way through the web, gently pulling himself along in the null-gees, his helmet highlighted the figures of his fellow reds outside, out on the ring. Rampone jetted across with Wambach on his shoulders. They headed for one of the new emitter towers where Komora waited.
The swirling atmo behind him went pale and then bright and whited out. Tig’s vision flashed like a bomb went off behind his eyelids for what felt like seconds. Then, when he blinked and he could see again, what he saw was Komora and the knuckledragger blown apart into pieces by another freak capacitor discharge. Tig squeezed his eyes shut tight until he saw stars and when he opened them again, Komora was where he’d been before, jetting across the gap from one part of the ring to the other. He was fine.
When that flash happened again behind his eyes, he saw Parker screw up her landing and smack right into one of the emitters during the locally-controlled power-up test. It made her suit pop like bugs pop on the zapper. "Parker!"
"Yeah, what." She’d made the landing just fine, of course. She turned to look at the bridge with one hand on her hip. "What? You need your ESys to help with the control systems and the local hookup on the bridge?"
"No…"
"So what is it?"
After the next flash, he saw the capacitors blow out, exploding along the ring in series... a set of random failures happening one after the other… some unknown result of being wired into his new control system. It didn’t matter that it seemed impossible. Of course, it seemed impossible. He thought it couldn’t happen, but it could… it could...
"Tig?"
Horcheese was right. He had no idea there would be radiation in the debris field to block the inventory signal. He had no idea there would be residual charge left over in the capacitor section from the atmo. No matter how much he knew, how sure he thought he was, there was always something he didn’t know about or something out of his control. It would always seem impossible until it happened. He'd never even know about it until people died.
"What the fuck, Tig?" Parker’s voice was thin and far, far off. He could barely hear it over the rushing sound in his ears, inside his head. It was like a waterfall and pumping blood and a drumbeat all at the same time and it drowned her out completely in a few seconds. The dirty yellow clouds outside turned dim gold and then, just dim. All he saw in the second after that was light and dark. Then that sound, that inescapable sound in his head got louder until it shook what little he could still see into a blur. The darkness that came next felt like a mercy.
*****
"He’s fine. Needs to eat something maybe. Nothing wrong with him," Rampone said. "He just freaked the fuck out. That’s what his suit’s medical log says." Rampone pushed off and flew for the hatch. "Gotta finish up out there."
"Don’t tell the Chief." Those were the first words out of Tig’s mouth when he realized he’d gone away somewhere and come back and he was once again on Tipperary’s bridge. "Don’t tell Horcheese I lost it like that."
"Too late," Parker said. "She saw you through the dome. You went all limp and then all twitchy. Looked pretty stupid."
He spased when he figured out they’d set him in the command chair. He nearly tore out two or three of the bundled connections he’d laid just trying to get out of it as fast as he could. He clung to a handhold in front of the chair.
"The fuck’s wrong with you?"
He said, "The Chief is right. I don’t know what I’m doing."
"Yeah, you do."
"But aren’t you worried, Parker?"
"Did you check it? Is it set up right?"
"Yeah, but…."
"No but. There’s no but in that. If you checked it and you’re sure, then you’re sure. Period. Sure is sure. If you say it’ll work, then I trust you."
"But there’s things that can go wrong… things there’s no way to know about. It’s happened twice now. Horcheese is right. How do I know that won’t happen again?"
"The Chief isn't always right, Tig."
"I don’t. I don’t know. The things that went wrong… the radiation in the wreckage and the way the capacitors got charged by the atmo... I didn’t even know those were things that could go wrong... I can’t say I know what I’m doing. I don’t. I can’t do this. I can’t be responsible when it goes wrong. I’m going to tell Burn this was all a bad idea. "
"Great. You want to be responsible for doing nothing? For sitting here on our asses? You claim we can do this. And we have to. It’s the only chance for Hardway and the battlegroup. You know what happens if we don’t hook up with Admiral Ming and drive to the Squidies home systems like we planned? We could lose. The whole war, I mean." He shook his head no at her. "Tig Meester, the rest of the reds are going through with this because Burn ordered them to, but I’m doing it because I believe if you say we can do this, then we can do this. Now lets get this rig squared so we can see if it really works."
"And if it doesn’t?"
"It’ll probably happen so fast, we won’t even know." Parker grinned after she said it, but Tig didn’t.
"Stick around. Here. On the bridge. When Horcheese comes."
"You need a chaperone or something? Or do you need your ESys specialist to help your hook her up? If that’s it, I need to hear your dumb, grease-eating MSys face say it."
"I need my partner to assist me."
"Thank you. I’ve got to go. I’ll be back."
"What? Where? Why?"
He knew before he looked. He didn’t even have to see the Chief's shadow this time. Horcheese was fully through the hatch and clinging to a handhold near the NAV console before he turned and saw her. His hands trembled.
"Stay there," she said. "I’m just checking what coordinates Timms laid in here. He said he mapped in the specific point he picked for us to breach space based on tidal shifts in local stellar gravity." She flew from the NAV console to Ops and stopped halfway. The Chief grabbed a handhold in front of the command chair. "Is that where I’ll be sitting?"
"Yes, Chief."
"You’re not planning on removing my ass, too, are you?"
"No, Chief."
"Good. I need something to kiss goodbye if this doesn’t work."
He knew he was supposed to laugh at those jokes, but he’d never felt more humorless in his life. She said, "Look, Meester, I know when I was wrong and it’s important that you know it, too. What I said before. Outside. You remember?"
"Uh-huh."
"I had no right to blame you for any of what happened. You gave us options we didn’t have. It’s not your fault it didn't work out perfectly. What happened wasn’t anybody’s fault but mine and Burn's. We’re the ones in command. We sign off on a plan and make the final decisions and in the end, the responsibility for what happens is ours. If it's anybody's fault, it's mine. Suddenly she looked like she was somewhere else. Her milky eyes looked unfocused for the very first time. A moment later, she was back. "Burr was my fault."
"Who?"
"Burr. Stupid Burr. A cherry who wouldn't listen. You never met him."
Past tense means he's de
ad, Tig thought.
"I know I came down on you too hard, Tig. I come down on all the cherries hard. I don't want to see any more of my people get killed."
But there would always be more. Even he knew that. Tig pushed off towards the Ops console where she hovered. "Chief, how is anyone supposed to do this job knowing about all the things we've never even heard of that can go wrong. People die when those things happen."
"For one thing, Meester, most people go by the book. They don't improvise as much as you do. But improvisation is what you're good at, so you better well get used to the fact that it involves big risks and unknowns. Is this what you lost your shit over?" She squinted at him for a moment. "Now, you sound like a whiny bridge officer. I’ll tell you exactly what I tell them when they feel the pressure." She inhaled and paused. When she let the breath out, she laughed softly then, apparently at herself, shaking her head. It was just the same way people look when they find something they've lost only to discover it had been in plain sight, right in front of them.
"What. What is it... What's funny."
"The XO, Ram Devi told me this six months back...back when the Squidies burned up my favorite cherry, Burr. Didn't much want to listen, I guess. Wasn't ready. It's like this, Tig: You make the best decisions you can with the information you have. Then, you recognize that nobody can control the risks out here. Then," she said, "you never forget that fact. If you do, you’ll end up blaming yourself for a whole lot that isn’t your fault and then, you will fuck up and create problems that clearly are."
"But..."
"Nobody can control the risks. None of us can. Not you, not me. Not Burn. Not even Staas Company VP and Privateer Admiral Harry Mud-Fucking Cozen. We do the best we can and then a little better than that and that’s the best we can do. That’s the best anyone can do. Period."
For ten seconds or so, Tig tried to let it sink in, but it wouldn't. "Will Raleigh make it?"
The Chief shocked him then. She laughed at that question so hard her eyes teared up. "Is Raleigh going to make it? Fuck, no, cherry. He died." Tig’s head swam a little hearing that and the sound in his ears, the rushing waves came back. It was willpower alone that kept him conscious.
She said, "Now, Tig Meester. Now, that you look like you’ve got the proper attitude, it’s time to earn your pay. Interface me with Tipperary. Let’s see what those magic hands can really do."
15
He gripped the underside of her artificial arm and felt the ropey, synthetic muscle fibers stretching. The RealSkin was hot under his hand. Tig tried to forget the quasi-living coating over Horcheese’s artificial limbs had been originally designed for sex-dolls. The seam between it and the her own, human skin was almost imperceptible, even when the muscles contracted like they did now. He put his other hand, his left hand, on the back of her shoulder and felt the difference in the flesh. Genuine human skin never feels exactly like you’d expect it to, not predictable like the artificial stuff.
"After I release my arms, you’re both going to rotate counter clockwise," the Chief said, "Ready?"
"Yeah."
"No," Parker said.
"Here, we go." Her eyes rolled back in her head like some kind of ecstasy, and all the resistance that had kept her arm from rotating into hyper-extension now disappeared. He pulled up with his right hand and pushed down on her shoulder with his left while Horcheese’s closed lids fluttered and inside, pieces of her augmented skeleton moved to release the limb.
The Chief's arm detached in his hands along the seam he’d spotted between her new and old skin. The muscles underneath all went limp. He pulled the limb out on a line perpendicular to the seam. Both sides of the connection were synthetic materials, of course and on the inside, the bundles of fibers that had severed their connections in flat planes didn’t look like real muscle. Someone had thought to make them pink though. They could have chosen any color they wanted. At the core of the limb, where bone should have been, was a fat, titanium nub, a simple, physical connection with a single, half-flange. It was studded with micro-ports.
"Oh god," Parker said as Horcheese’s now-removed left arm contracted into a default position. Horcheese’s right arm did the same in Tig’s hands. It was strong. He couldn’t have stopped the arm from bending to an acute angle if he’d wanted to and he barely got his fingertips free from between the forearm and bicep.
Horcheese sounded like she was talking them through a workaround for the 151s. "The ports to the actual neural interface processors are located on the torso side of the connection. Same with the ones for the legs."
"And we’re going to rig all this into there?" Parker glanced at the web of control system conduits and concatenators around them, all pointing at the command chair. "Tig, are you sure they’ll translate such an obscure input?"
"I said I was sure."
"The neuro-interface input/output system is adaptive," Horcheese said. "It’s meant to be used with a variety of limbs and protocols. It doesn’t care what it gets or from what machine, it just translates it to something my brain can work with."
"Rare gear," he said. And he meant it as a compliment, but it didn’t feel like it landed as one. He took the left arm from Parker and put both the limbs in an empty case for a plasma cutter.
The places on her torso where the artificial limbs attached were pink ovals, lumpy with contracted fibers and at the center of it all was the titanium bone and the expected set of ports for the neural interface processors that did the fantastically complicated and nuanced task of translating between machine language and the language of the human neurological system.
"Gonna need some steady hands," Parker said, staring into the ports on the Chief’s left shoulder. It was easier for her than looking at the Chief's eyes right now.
Horcheese’s nostrils flared as she breathed deeply. Her chest rose and fell. One of her breasts fell to the side and she looked so knowingly helpless without her arms then, that Tig couldn’t look at her face either. He kept his eyes in the ports on her right shoulder.
"The ship can fly itself to a transit point on autopilot, but that’s about it. So I’ve slaved the control systems that the burnt out CDCS wouldn't handle and scripted them to operate on what you’re going to perceive as muscle impulses for your arms and legs. Reactor power up / down... right leg, capacitor charge and release... left leg. Your control will be limited... flaring the reactors, controlling the capacitor discharge, except, of course you’ll have a very fine degree of control over the NS191 particle emitters. That’ll be controlled through the pathways for your arms and hands. You should be able to coordinate them with particularly effective control."
"What’s that going to feel like?" she said.
"I’ve tried to make it as natural as possible for you so we can leverage the familiarity you had with your old arms and legs like your prosthetics do. Some of the feedback will be spoofed visual stuff, projected in front of you, but a lot of it will be scripted for haptic translation based on what you’re used to feeling and doing."
"How many ports again?"
He said, "Me and my partner have 184 total ports to rig," he said.
"That’s a lot of work. Stop yappin’ and get my legs off."
Three hours later, Chief Evelyn Horcheese sat strapped into the command chair with 184 control conduits fanning out from the interface ports at her shoulders and pelvis. Where the limbs should have been that reached out to her world there were only bundles of colored control conduits extending off into the web around her. It was impossible to say the Chief looked helpless now. Her limbs weren’t missing. Now, her body extended all the way to the reactors and super-capacitors and particle emitters that would open the transit and breach space. Chief Horcheese was the control system now. If he’d mapped the input right, then the ship would feel like part of her body.
He said, "I’m flipping the switches one set of systems at a time so you can...uh…"
"Quit hesitating. Hook me into the critical systems. Give me reactor control
and let me get the feel of the capacitors and emitter systems." He tried to make it feel as natural as possible when he was scripting the feedback and he thought he’d done a good job, but he didn’t expect the reaction he got. The Chief's eyes shot open wide like he'd put some kind of fear into her. "It feels like I have arms and legs," she said. "Like I never lost them."
"I spoofed the neural feedback using your own signature motor impulse patterns from your artificials," he boasted before he saw the moisture in her eyes. It felt more real than the prosthetics, and he wasn't sure if she liked it. "I had to do it that way. We’re not just using your neural interface as a control nexus, but utilizing you as the control mechanism so we need to leverage the full, intuitive degree of control you’ve developed over your own limbs. This will be easier on you than any other way I can script it."
"Yeah, a lot easier," she said. Somehow, he could tell she was wiggling imaginary toes. "Feels just like the real thing." She shook her head and exhaled. "What the eff are you waiting for?"
"Right. Extend your feet." He gave her a moment to push outward with the limbs that currently existed only in her mind. "Feel that?" he said.
"Like…. like round stones under my feet. Big ones."
"Those are haptic representations of the four reactors. You’ll need to manage their output. To top off before discharge."
"They’re warm."
"That’s a spoofed sensory representation of how hot they’re running. They’ll burn your feet when they’re about to overload. Take your feet off them, and they’ll shut down. Press down, they’ll run harder. Go ahead and try it out. You’re still running through a simulator."
"The emitters," she said. "The capacitors. Hook ‘em up. Hook me in for real."
"Closed fist to hold the juice in the capacitors and open hand to release the energy. Easy. Your job is mostly timing and managing adjustments to the streams after the initial firing. It’ll feel like sand running through your fingers. Open them wide to allow more flow, squeeze down to stop it between your fingers and snuff the emitters. Micro adjustments for the NS191s demand finesse and that’s why you’ll be controlling those systems with your hands."