Free Radicals

by S E Zbasnik

  The computer’s bots gestured to the wall, then powered down.

  Ferra rolled her massive pink eyes, almost colorless in the harsh glow of the yellow lantern, “If’n you don’t answer me right now I am authorized to pull out all of your processors, one chip at a time.”

  “You are not,” WEST broke its silence.

  “Wanna risk it?” Ferra dared as she picked up a pair of needle-nose pliers from her apron’s pocket.

  “What do you require?” the voice turned sweet.

  “What the fuck happened? Circuits are fried that should be untouchable.”

  The computer wheeled its eyes on the display, the only part of the ship’s electronics still running, which told both of them this was somehow WEST’s doing. For being a machine, it above all else favored surviving. “It was preferable to the other option.”

  “Which was?” Ferra asked, folding her arms.

  “Allowing a cripple pulse to transform this ship into a cheap doorstop.”

  “Cripple pulse?” Ferra looked to the doctor whose idea of cripple was vastly different from whatever the two engineers were discussing. “What cripple pulse?”

  WEST’s face vanished from the display and a series of lines, a bit like the output from an electronic myocardial probe, washed across. Ferra rose from the panel and ran her finger across the lines, zooming in on a few, then swiping them to the left.

  “Is it bad?” Monde asked, placing the lantern down upon the floor.

  The elf leaned back in thought, flicking her fingerclaws against her work apron in thought, “You know how having all oxygen drained from the body can be bad?”

  The orc smirked at the layperson description of common decompression, “Yes.”

  “This is about ten times worse,” another blip on the line readout caught her attention, “Oh, wait, twenty times worse.” The elf returned to the open wound in her ship and sutured up the panel.

  “I am surprised you are not giving into your anger.”

  Ferra turned to him, the lantern held in one hand, a wrench as thick as her wrist in the other. A fire blazed in those desaturated eyes as she said, “Oh, I’m going to give into my anger all right. I’m going to give into it all over the skull of the treeplugger that did it.”

  Monde nodded his head quickly, “Right, okay, good.” Despite having nearly a foot and twice the body weight on her, the scrappy elf terrified the orc.

  He stepped away from her warpath as she shouted, “WEST! Join us on the bridge!”

  “Fine,” was all the computer said before letting its display fall dead.

  Ferra led the pair through the dead ship, the lantern swaying in her hand as if she were plumbing the depths of a ghost vessel. It didn’t matter what manner of horror lurked on the edges of the haunted dark of space, nothing could terrify the same as the woman whose ship hung by a tendril of life. The light landed momentarily upon an abandoned pile of sweet wrappers on the edge of the table. Orn’s chair was tipped back, as if he abandoned the galley in a rush.

  His wife didn’t respond while she moved quickly through the passage towards the bridge. A lone cleaning bot beeped in the hallway, most of its brushes ripped off; but the remaining bristles clawed against the chalk drawings WEST scrawled along the wall. Ferra didn’t respond to its bleating, only walked around it and then handed the lantern back to Monde.

  He cradled it as she cracked the door seal on the bridge. It gave in far too easy for what should be an emergency lockdown, but she either didn’t care or already knew how un-air tight each module on the ship was. Grabbing back the lantern, she walked onto the bridge and lit up the dead command console.

  It was less a console and more a desk, bulky even by a century past standards, the guts of it framed in lucite during an era when people believed they wanted to watch their electronics work. After a few customers overreacted to the image of a mouse or two gnawing away at unimportant wires, they were wisely encased back in suitable metal.

  Ferra slammed the lantern onto the desk and stood next to Orn’s vacant chair. “WEST!”

  Red lights blipped around the sleeping giant, a few daring to flash green before returning to their emergency slumber. One of the panels on the sides of the bridge lit up properly, the soft white light foreign in the hellish pit that would remind most dwarves of home.

  “We are arrived,” the computer’s voice graveled from below a speaker stuffed with candy wrappers.

  “Bloody hell,” Ferra muttered, “It thinks it’s a king again. Your hind ass, do you think you could open up these windows?”

  “For my loyal subjects, anything their puny hearts desire,” WEST muttered as the retractable dome raised over the far too numerous windows dotting the nose of the ship. Shuttering was standard procedure when docking, mostly so no one walking through the bay would catch a glimpse of a half naked Orn singing and dancing on the bridge. The universe was grateful for their diligence.

  As the windows rose, smoke curled around the edges of the screen. Ferra shouted, “What the…WEST, is the ship on fire?”

  “No.”

  “Where’s the smoke coming from?”

  “The station is on fire.”

  “This is problematic,” Monde said, searching through the thick sheen tumbling across the shielded not-glass. More red lights flashed from deep in the hazy bay, their own overhead fluorescents low. Nothing was visible through the plumes of flashing smoke. “Anyone else suspecting a gargantuan tentacle to lash out of the fog?” the orc asked, getting a gruff snort from the elf.

  She was searching through the structure of the pylons, looking for evidence of wreckage. A few broken beams gaped through the fog. Twisted shards of metal were inverted and yanked back upon themselves like a piece of taffy, the ends still burning hot from a flame. “WEST, any casualties?”

  “None reported.”

  “Injuries?” the smoke parted a moment as an air current batted away at it, revealing little moving through what should be a busy space port.

  “None reported.”

  “With that much destruction,” Ferra said, turning back on her headache, “I’m supposed to believe no one’s gotten hurt?”

  “I do not know.”

  “You said there weren’t any,” she cursed, shaking her head at Monde.

  “No, I said there were none reported because there are none. There are, in fact, no reports.”

  “No reports? That’s impossible, automatic sensors would relay the data to buoys, and order in clean up…Oh fuck.” Ferra poked at the console, trying to raise the comm line.

  Monde would have inquired what she was attempting, but he could tell by the twitch along the muscle of her jaw it was best to remain invisible for as long as possible. The elf poked at the holographic buttons, then some of the real ones with a force reserved for smashing grasshoppers.

  “Transfer some of your power to the data panel,” she said absently, then turned her head. Monde pointed at himself, uncertain what she asked for, but her ire returned to WEST.

  “It will not work. We are certain of that.”

  “Do it or we will download your brain to a child’s My First Golem and we will leave it in a daycare.”

  The wheel eyes of WEST’s face rolled straight off the screen at the impotent rage, but then vanished as the panel below Ferra lifted to partial life. She flicked at the switches again and, summoning her professional voice, said, “Hello. Anyone in the vicinity of Whisper? Can you hear this?”

  Only the radioactive static of space answered back, a few pops cracking the line. As her finger let go of the button, the panel fell back to silence and WEST’s face reemerged, smugger than ever, “We told you.”

  Ferra waved her wrench at it, but didn’t openly attack. WEST was the only chance they stood. “This is not possible,” she said, and glanced to the ceiling. Monde followed and spotted a strange burn pattern right over the dwarf’s chair, possibly left from the time he was nearly gassed by an insane knight. Or Orn was lava roasting on the bridge
, both were probable options.

  “You will have to excuse my ignorance, but what is occurring?” Monde asked, his eyes flickering back to WEST, who doctored a tiara across its graphical head.

  Ferra tapped her foot in a familiar technique to bide time as she translated the technical language in her head to that of an amateur. The orc called it “speaking to rocks.” “All comms are out across the station. It’d be one thing if it was the narrow band the PALMs operate on. Put enough tinfoil in a microwave and you can short that out. But to knock out a deep space SOS system, that’s science-fiction fantasy. It requires…” her mouth slackened as her eyebrows met, a memory dredging from the back of her skull, “Sepsis.”

  “The comm line is infected?” the doctor asked, trying to stay on track.

  “Sepsis is a fevered dream by a mad man from…a while back,” she said, easily avoiding the century or five drop to give away her age. Elves were notorious for diving backwards, somersaulting over barbed wire, and grappling into the air to avoid ‘What is your age’ questions on surveys. “It’s not a virus or infection of the data line.”

  “Then it is poorly named,” Monde said, his mind filled with images of fan ports leaking computer pus.

  Ferra ignored him, her fingers trying to bring a bit of life into nearly useless sensor data, “Engineers don’t give much of a shit about the name, that’s marketing’s department. Point being it’s not a common technique for blocking data. There’s no DDoS, no bombardment, it moves the comm lines out of our space into the wyrm.”

  “That…is that possible?”

  “Last I heard no fucking way. The mage who thought it up set up a few demonstrations. When he flipped on the switch, the rabbit with the PALM chip exploded, then imploded. Then exploded again. He was drummed out of the EMC by people coated in hasenpfeffer intestines.”

  Monde’s grey coloring turned a beautiful crimson as he contemplated the gory site. He could handle the dangling organs of most species but any animal violence churned his own insides. It would be considered a weakness in his species were he not male.

  Ferra ignored her companion’s distress as she poked at the few bits of data Princess WEST was doling out, “The only useful thing is, if this really is Sepsis, then it will leave an obvious trail.”

  “Oh, how so?” Monde feigned interest in matters about five feet over his horns and rising.

  “Only it could cause a wyrm pinch in the middle of a space station…ah!” Sure enough, her fingers circled around the blue plume of someone cracking into non-space nestled about 562 feet off their starboard bow. Somewhere near the pretzel place.

  “That number is so small,” Monde said. “Are you certain?”

  “Until I see it with my own eyes, no, but you couldn’t have a proper wyrm pinch in the middle of the food court. This is tiny, like a microblack hole that someone’s wheeling about.”

  “Tiny black hole, right. Like a wyrm pinch, but small,” the doctor repeated, as if he’d studied quantum philosophy.

  Ferra signed out of the bridge and sealed the controls to the best of her ability. Only the captain or her husband were getting in now. She paused, trying to gather her thoughts and strength. Her voice was barely audible as she whispered, “Orn, you better fucking be all right.” Then she raised her voice and looked at Monde, “Okay, we stop Sepsis, we get comms back, we call everyone and see what the shit’s going on. But we’re gonna need a little bit of help.”

  Yanking back up the lantern she dashed for the galley, Monde trailing behind her through the dead ship. She stopped before the unused dishwasher and removed what looked like a highly illegal hacking device and inserted a few wires into the locking scanner. The doctor didn’t ask as she watched the dancing line, her fingers fooling the sensors until the dishwasher popped open revealing a pair of submachine guns and one scarred pistol. A few other bric-a-brac glared under the UV light of the sanitizer but Ferra skipped over it, uncertain what it was all for.

  “I was under the impression only the captain could unlock her private arsenal?” Which they’d seen far too much of lately.

  “Wouldn’t be much use if she were knocked unconscious or kidnapped and we needed to mount a rescue. You need your engineer to be able to unlock any lock on the ship in case of emergencies,” Ferra explained as she inspected the ammo batteries, most of the numbers making little sense to her. She got the charge one and that was good enough.

  “And the captain is aware that you can do this?” Monde led her into a round of questioning that could be his own undoing.

  Ferra shrugged her shoulders and said, “She probably suspects I can. Here,” she passed him the pistol, a favorite of their captain who’d be very sore if something should happen to it, he was quite certain.

  His fingers gingerly picked up the weapon designed for foreign fingers and Ferra paused, “Er, uh, I know your kind aren’t big on the killing and this may get messy, doc.”

  Monde slipped his larger fingers around the butt of the gun, his claws easily meeting against his thumb as a cold response burrowed out of his throat, “I may be male, but I am still an orc.”

  “I meant more the doctor part. They’re always going on about saving…never mind,” she closed the dishwasher and slotted the submachine gun into her tool pouch, then she dropped another wrench from out of the spoon canister into her pile. “Right, let’s go find that fire golem.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Orn clicked off his hand in impudent and impotent rage, “Thanks Cap. Real useful there, warning us about something but failing to say what that something is.”

  The squirrely elf didn’t respond as she paced about the front of the store, her borrowed gun still held in “ready to mow down anything that steps through the shattered door” mode.

  “Ain’t ya gonna ask me about Party-23?” he said to Brena, then gestured towards the goblin acting like he hadn’t been peering over the dwarf’s shoulder. “How about you, Snouty?”

  “My designation is Dabore, not,” the thin shoulders trembled as horror crawled up the red spine, “‘Snouty.’”

  “Would you prefer Snooty?”

  “We should not be speaking so boisterously,” the elf said, her better eyesight peering through the smoke. “Is there a more secure location sequestered away from the front windows?” she asked Snouty.

  The goblin raised one eye flap, probably wishing it had eyebrows to arc and huffed, “As if I’d allow vagrants near my safe.”

  Orn grinned, showing his teeth, “Afraid we’ll cut ya down and nick all your precious baubles?”

  Snouty blinked, “I’m impressed you even know the word bauble much less can use it in a sentence.”

  “We can’t all be annex bred,” Orn sniffed, stepping closer to the standoff goblin. He could easily reach out and yank the bag of bones up by his glittering finery. Well, not so much up. More of a lateral move; maybe down. He could certainly yank him down.

  Brena’s flat voice said something in the distance but it fell into the background as Snouty beamed his black eyes upon the dwarf, daring him to try something. When Orn’s mouth opened, a shrill voice shouted, “Will you shut the fuck up!”

  Two grown men turned to the girl laying across the counter, the bloody sweater pulled up to her waist. She couldn’t see the extensive damage to her legs, but she should have been able to see her toes if they were attached. Orn shook his fist at the goblin, but made the zipped up lip motion.

  Brena returned to her vigil, as if she wasn’t easily spotted from kilometers away in her shiny getup. After a few minutes of dwarf and goblin raising the tension levels, she asked the crowd, “Very well, Orn. How do you know of Party-23?”

  “Well, funny you should ask that, my dear fruit fly.” The elf didn’t respond to his jab. Contrary to most advice given on the battle ground of the schoolyard, that encouraged his bullying, “I wasn’t much past a bug’s knee when I ran face first into the slobbering madness that is Party-23. A team of humans smashed through a dilapidated dwarven
refinery repurposed into one o’ them art districts. They claimed it was theirs by right of conquest or some bullshit. The standoff lasted all of five minutes when the potter smashed his head right into the crotch of their leader. Rather pathetic, really.”

  “I see…” Brena said. “They do not sound like the type to cause this destruction, only to lay claim later.”

  “This was 30 years ago. They’ve upped their skills a bit since then, even won a few fights. Say this for humans, they work fast when crazy or money’s involved. They say Party-23 is actually the secret arm of the Intergalactic Army, out causing trouble to distract us from their real plans.”

  The elf had the decency to not respond the same way others typically do when he’d bring up the IgA. Most would smile uncertainly and look for an exit. Captain would shout, “Not that conspiracy shit again.” Brena only blinked slowly and said another of her, “I see’s.”

  “And you are about to inform us of this imaginary government’s secret plans,” the goblin butted in, his fingers flailing to an imaginary beat. They were a twitchy people by nature, and so skinny because they couldn’t stand still for longer than a minute before their skin started crawling away.

  Orn turned a baleful eye upon Dabore and muttered, “That’s just what they’d want me to do.”

  Snouty sneered, but Orn caught the minuscule eye roll of the elf. She buried most of her emotions deeper than the core of a planet, but every now and again a glimmer broke through. The dwarf swore one day he’d get an actual laugh out of her. Her brother was a lost cause.

  The teenager sighed lightly, ragged pain evident in her voice. They’d asked the goblin for medicine, but he insisted once again that this was a jewelry store, despite his ample supply of medicinal alcohol. Brena suggested the girl try that, but Orn wasn’t about to get tossed before a clan court accused of buying for a miner’s daughter.

  “How about you, young one? You want to hear the government’s secrets?”

  Eyes colder than when he yanked her from the wreckage turned to him. Orn sucked in a breath as her lips, pale despite a thick coating of makeup, quivered, “She’s dead, isn’t she?”