Ciarente's Fiction

Different

noreply@blogger.com (Ciarente Roth) — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 05:27:00 +0000

DR. V. AKELL > It sounds as if you feel you are getting back to normal, in a way.

DR. N. TOIN > No. I don’t believe that’s accurate.

DR. V. AKELL > Why not?

DR. N. TOIN > To get back to normal would require me to have been normal at some prior time.

DR. V. AKELL > You don’t consider yourself to have ever been normal?

DR. N. TOIN > No.

DR. V. AKELL > Why not?

DR. N. TOIN > I am a statistical outlier in a number of regards, Dr Akell. I am more intelligent than 97.8% of the population. I am a recognized expert in my field, and it is not a small one.

DR. V. AKELL > You are not normal because you are exceptionally intelligent.

DR. N. TOIN > Among other things, yes.

DR. V. AKELL > Are there ways in which you are normal?

DR. N. TOIN > I don’t know how to apply that word to myself.

DR. V. AKELL > Why not?

DR. N. TOIN > I’ve never understood what it means.

It’s only when they start being streamed into vocational classes that her brothers and sisters discover there’s something wrong with her.

Nolikka’s ten.

There’s something (weirdo) wrong with her.

Until now she has just been Noli, how she is is just Noli, like Tanyo is Tanyo and Yanis is Yanis. They were too few and too familiar with each other to make comparisons, to discover normal. Now they have classmates and even friends from other groups and so they have normal too.

And Noli is (mutant) apparently, not normal.

Selected into science for a reason, she applies her intellect to the problem, realizes she needs to know what it is that’s wrong with her before she can design a remedy. Asking isn’t fruitful, although it does provide some new data: politely asking your crèche-mates what it is that makes you a freak is creepy. Nolikka tries the same question on a supervisor, but all that gets is the lie that there’s nothing at all wrong with her, the advice not to worry about what the other kids say, and a general shunning for a few days when the supervisors assign extra scut duty to the two of her brothers and the sister who have been most forthcoming about Nolikka being retarded.

Nolikka continues to worry about what the other kids say, despite the supervisor, although not about being retarded: she is well aware her marks in every subject are well above expected norms for her age. Eventually she badgers her closest sibling, Tanyo, into the reluctant revelation that Nolikka stares at people too much, when she talks to them, when they talk.

Nolikka stops looking at people. New data: not looking at people is also creepy. She spends several weeks timing the amount of eye contact her peers make with each other while conversing, and then trains herself to mimic their patterns. Someone comments that Toin musta taken a ‘normal’ pill or something.

Nolikka considers her initial efforts at behavior modification a success.

DR. V. AKELL > You adapted your behavior to meet the standards of those around you.

DR. N. TOIN > Yes.

DR. V. AKELL > How did you feel about that?

DR. N. TOIN > I don’t understand the question.

Don’t take that tone with me, you fucking Callie chatte –

pain unimaginable pain unendurable red jagged red pain redredred

Mend your fucking manners, bitch.

And she does, she mends everything about them, every intonation in every word, mended

broken

to meet perfectly the expectations of those who hold the trigger to her collar.

DR. V. AKELL > It seems to me as if you’re saying that you believe that you’re better able to imitate accepted behaviors as a result of those experiences.

DR. N. TOIN > Shock collars are excellent incentivization devices.

DR. V. AKELL > I understand you mean that sarcastically.

DR. N. TOIN > Was that unclear?

DR. V. AKELL > Not at all. But I am aware you can’t read responses through someone’s expression, and I wanted to be clear in turn.

DR. N. TOIN > I was aware that you understood my meaning.

DR. V. AKELL > Do you mind if I ask how?

DR. N. TOIN > Your involuntary nasal exhalation.

DR. V. AKELL > My – I snorted?

DR. N. TOIN > Yes.

DR. V. AKELL > I didn’t realize.

DR. N. TOIN > It was not loud.

DR. V. AKELL > Are you always able to gauge other’s responses through those kind of clues?

DR. N. TOIN > Not always. However, it has been my experience that others find my communication of meaning through intonation easily comprehensible.

DR. V. AKELL > But not vice versa.

DR. N. TOIN > No.

DR. V. AKELL > Does that frustrate you?

DR. N. TOIN > I endeavor to be patient with the inadequacies of others.

DR. V. AKELL > I understand you mean that sarcast-

DR. N. TOIN > I know.

DR. V. AKELL > Did I snort again?

DR. N. TOIN > Yes.

Further streaming follows, narrower specialties, drawn from an even wider pool.

Nolikka’s fifteen, and she’s learned to mimic normal, although she’s still not entirely certain what exactly that is.

Mimicry without comprehension is possible, but it takes a great deal of concentration, and as the work gets harder and the entrancing equations more all-encompassing, she forgets from time to time. Stares too hard, answers too precisely, or not at all. Fortunately, though, it seems to matter less, now: the novelty of normal has worn off and being chosen for the Advanced Science Educational Facility is an explanation her brothers and sisters can accept. She’s not a weirdo anymore, she’s Noli the nerd and it’s said with affection. Mostly affection, she believes, although interpreting the emotional register of remarks is not always easy for her.

And what does it matter how it’s said when she can spend all day puzzling out the rules that run the atoms that orbit each other at the heart of stars?

DR. V. AKELL > You’ve spoken of observing changes in your interactions with others in recent weeks. Is that one of them?

DR. N. TOIN > Yes.

DR. V. AKELL > And it concerns you?

DR. N. TOIN > The effect it may have on others concerns me.

DR. V. AKELL > Any specific others?

DR. N. TOIN > Social interactions covers a broad spectrum.

DR. V. AKELL > It does, yes, which is why I asked.

Toin!

Every circuit of her brain is immediately fully occupied tried to parse the tone of that voice, angry? impatient? Spirits and Ancestors, let it be pleased or at least indifferent. Spirits and Ancestors, let it not bring pain.

Toin!

She learns to read that voice as clearly as algebra, and no matter how the exhaustion of sleepless nights on her cold, thin pallet shreds her concentration, she never, ever, lets herself slip.

DR. V. AKELL > Let me put it this way. Your hypothesis seems to me to be that without constant reminders of your experiences, your acuity at understanding meaning will atrophy?

DR. N. TOIN > Yes.

DR. V. AKELL > Were you less happy when your understanding was less acute?

DR. N. TOIN > I was a different person. The question is meaningless.

DR. V. AKELL > Happiness is not meaningless.

DR. N. TOIN > It is difficult to quantify.

DR. V. AKELL > I’m interested in your description of yourself as a different person, since you also seem to be describing these changes you see in yourself as a return to an earlier mode of being.

DR. N. TOIN > Perhaps I have changed back into that person.

DR. V. AKELL > Or perhaps you did not so much become a different person as the same person with an overlay of your experiences.

DR. N. TOIN > Does that make a difference to my decision?

DR. V. AKELL > Not if you assume that the overlay completely obscured what was beneath it.

DR. N. TOIN > To assume is to make an ass -

DR. V. AKELL > Yes.

It’s harder and paradoxically easier to mimic normal after her accident.

Nolikka’s eighteen, and she’s blind.

It’s much, much harder to work out what responses people are expecting from her when she can’t gauge their expressions, but she does her best with what she can glean from voices, intonations, hesitations, and mistakes seem to matter less now, with a reason they can see right there on her face.

They can see it, although she can’t. It amuses her, although she keeps the joke to herself when she learns it is considered odd. It is also odd, or even eccentric, that she refuses the reconstructive surgery.

The doctors can’t believe she doesn’t want to see as they see again.

Nolikka can’t explain to them the things she can see now.

She is confirmed odd and eccentric, but she is in graduate studies now and thus part of a community of the odd and eccentric. She has friends, even some close friends, although some of those relationships fracture and cool for no reason Nolikka can see. These inexplicable occurrences bring equally inexplicable sequelae, an irritating inability to concentrate, chest and abdominal pain, the at-times-irrepressible urge to weep. The wife of her senior supervisor, known to all the students as “Mrs Professor Ren”, gives Nolikka advice such as there’s plenty more fish in the sea. Despite Mrs Professor’s nonsensical statements, Nolikka finds that her symptoms abate after these conversations.

It’s normal to feel sad, Mrs Professor tells her, and the word unknots inside Nolikka in a dark, dull blue. Named, she can untie it, coil it around her hands and store it away while she works.

Nolikka is grateful to Mrs Professor for teaching her about sad, although the meaning of normal still eludes her.

DR. V. AKELL > Your strong association of emotion to color and shape is unusual. Did you have the same association before your accident?

DR. N. TOIN > No.

DR. V. AKELL > How did you perceive your emotions then?

DR. N. TOIN > I didn’t experience them.

DR. V. AKELL > Not at all?

DR. N. TOIN > I have no recollection of analogous feelings.

DR. V. AKELL > How did you feel when your crèche-mates, your siblings, teased you for being different?

DR. N. TOIN > I endeavored to change my behavior.

DR. V. AKELL > That’s an action, not a feeling.

DR. N. TOIN > I don’t know of another way to answer your question.

Grey, devouring, black-streaked grey, rolling over her, a suffocating wave that she cannot swim through, a wave that will kill her, will kill her, will –

Nolikka names loneliness, names it and folds it and puts it away. Names the sickly yellow tint of fear so she can crush it into a ball like discarded flimprint and shove it out of sight, names the dull blue ache of grief. The small white-hot disc lodged behind her solar plexus, though, that she is careful not to name.

She needs it, its energy, its focus, its strength. It can fill her, leave no room for the enfeebling, terrifying colors of misery and despair.

The closest she allows herself to come is anger. But anger is dull crimson, and this is not. This is –

She will not say it. Named, it will lose its power.

And she will lose herself.

DR. V. AKELL > Can you name it now?

DR. N. TOIN > Yes. Rage.

DR. V. AKELL > Was that the first time you felt it?

DR. N. TOIN > Yes.

DR. V. AKELL > Do you still experience it, now you have named it?

DR. N. TOIN > From time to time.

DR. V. AKELL > So identifying the emotions associated with these images is connected to managing them, not eliminating them.

DR. N. TOIN > Yes. They become less intense.

DR. V. AKELL > Are there other emotions – images – you are reluctant to identify? Different ones?

DR. N. TOIN > Yes.

DR. V. AKELL > Are you afraid of them?

DR. N. TOIN > No.

DR. V. AKELL > Are you afraid of lessening their intensity?

DR. N. TOIN > Yes.

DR. V. AKELL > Have you considered that it may be the result of your deliberate strategy to contain painful feelings, this lessening? You spoke of crushing, or folding them away.

DR. N. TOIN > I don’t understand your question.

DR. V. AKELL > Perhaps if you named these other images, you could nurture them, strengthen them. They might grow in intensity, not shrink.

DR. N. TOIN > I had not considered that, no.

DR. V. AKELL > Will you take time to consider it? Dr Toin?

DR. N. TOIN > I believe our time today is up.

Oxygen

noreply@blogger.com (Ciarente Roth) — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 07:18:00 +0000

Charlie wasn’t the only one in the class. It’s a thing, cops studying law through night school. The ones who don’t try it, talk about it, and the ones who don’t talk about it at least think about it, think about all those hours spent in courtrooms watching lawyers screw up their perfectly good case and knowing they could do it so much better if they just had the chance.

I’ve taught enough of them to know the type, and besides, I’ve dated a cop or two in my life. Well, or three or four, really.

Look, I have a type, all right? Is that a crime?

Anyway.

Charlie wasn’t the only cop in my first year Introduction to Trial Practice class, but he was the only one to stick it out. Sharp enough in class, middling marks on assignments, which was understandable once I knew he had a couple of small kids at home. He was quick enough to tell me about them, too, not so much making excuses as politely letting me know he was off the market, or off the market where I did my window-shopping, at least.

Like I said, I have a type.

He got through first term, and it was somewhere in the middle of Criminal Law Theory that I started to notice a few things about Charlie that didn’t fit so well with the law-school-at-night-cop that I had him pegged as. For one thing, he didn’t live on station. I saw him a couple of times after class going into the Interbus hub, and not the system shuttle either, the inter-system exchange. Now, I ask you, what law enforcement official has the disposal income to commute intersystem for a night class – even if most of it is by correspondence?

I would have assumed he was on the take, but Charlie – he didn’t seem the type. Not that you can tell, always, but his suits had the shiny patches of long wear on the elbows and ass, and when he brought food to class it was sandwiches, not takeaway. So I figured that whoever was the other parent of those kids he carried pictures of on his datapad had money, and plenty of it.

Cia, he said she was. Not my wife or my partner, just her name, but the way he said it – you know how it is with some guys, they fall hard and that’s it, mortal lock, for life. He said her name like it was code for oxygen. Not that he talked about her much, or about anything much. Just kept himself to himself, did the work, came to class, let something slip sometimes in the chit-chat during break.

Kept coming, too, term after term, plodding through the work, Advanced Criminal Practice, Interjurisdictional Procedure, Principles of Evidentiary Admissibility … scraping through, sometimes barely, but by enough for his name to wind up on the list of students who’d accumulated enough points to graduate and maybe get into a real law school somewhere, or at least get something to hang on their wall, a nice holoscroll with their name and the course on it.

Charles Etay, Certificate of Legal Studies, his would say.

We have a proper graduation ceremony for them. It’s just about the only thing about the school that is proper, truth be told. Not that the students aren’t smart, some of them anyway, or the teachers dedicated – for this salary, let me tell you, you’re either dedicated or too crap to get a job elsewhere and we have a mix of the two – but we’re not exactly Pator Tech, or the Republic University.

We’re affordable, is what we are, when you get right down to it, and we run our classes at hours that let people with jobs get to them.

But we have a proper graduation, so the students who’ve managed to stick it out can show off to their uncles and aunts and the rest of their clan or culturally-appropriate extended family grouping. Even hire a good hall, up on C Deck, with a view over the station undock and the students from first year catering studies circulating with food and drink afterwards.

I was glad for Charlie that he’d gotten through, even if I was a little sad to see him go. Face like that brightened the scenery in any classroom, after all. Certainly brightened the scenery in the hall as all the soon-to-be graduates milled around in their ceremonial robes or best clothes or some combination of the two, too nervous to stand still and craning their necks to see where their family and friends were sitting so they’d look in the right direction when the visiting dignitary of the day handed over the scroll.

It always makes me tear up a little, yeah I’m a sentimental old fool, I know, seeing them all together like that, not the best and brightest youth of the Republic but the ones who didn’t quite make the cut or came back here as adults or didn’t get their shit together and get serious about education until after formal schooling was done, but not giving up, no. Studying nights, working days, two jobs some of them, scraping together tuition by skipping meals, all to get here, today, bare-chested Brutor men and fur-trimmed Sebbies, a Vherry girl with a feather headdress and another in a shimmering nano-mesh that had to be the most expensive piece of clothing she owned for all the pattern kept glitching on the shoulders.

And Charlie, in his well-cut, well-mended Gallente suit.

I always check especially to see where the students are looking out into the audience, because there’s always one or maybe two who aren’t looking, who know there’s no-one there to cheer for them. I make a special fuss for them myself, all the teachers do, when they cross the floor.

So I was looking to see who had someone to look for, and that’s why I was looking at Charlie when it happened.

At first, I just figured we’d scored a bigger wig than the usual bigwig for the ceremony, when the security guys came in. They had that look, not casual muscle or rent-a-guards, that serious professional look that goes with a career looking out for someone whose life is worth a lot and whose death would do more than leave a family grieving. Out of the corner of my eye I could see people turning to look, staring, curious about who exactly this was all for.

But I was looking at Charlie, and he wasn’t even the slightest bit curious. He relaxed, and gave that almost-not-quite-a-smile of his, like it was exactly what he’d been hoping to see.

It still took me a minute to work it out. I think it was how large the group was that came in next that threw me, too many of them too close in age and too different in heritage to be a family group. No, it was an entourage, and so I was still thinking V.I.P. when I picked out the handful who moved oblivious through the rest of them, knowing that people would get out of the way and move the furniture and damn well cut a door in the wall if it was necessary.

Two Caldari were the ones I marked out first, maybe husband and wife, the man looking a bit vague and distracted, the woman looking around with sharp interest and a grin. And then a Gallie woman, a little kid on one hip and the other hand steering a determinedly-independent toddler along.

When she looked our way and smiled with recognition, the coin dropped. Charlie’s Cia had money, all right, she had the kind of money that makes you need round-the-clock protection by professionals, and why he was working at all in that case, let along working and doing night-school, was beyond me, if he didn’t need the salary and he had a woman who looked like that at home.

She gave him a puzzled look, not angry though, and when he replied with one of those Gallente shrugs she just laughed, and shrugged herself, and kept on steering the toddler – her son, their son – towards the seating. Charlie watched them as if everything had come right with the world when she entered the room, with his world anyway, and I tell you, if a man like that had ever looked like that at the sight of me crossing a room …

But there you go.

I looked back at Charlie’s woman, partly because I couldn’t look at him looking at her like that much longer without starting to hate her and myself as well, right as she turned to take her seat.

And I saw the glint of jewels and metal on the back of her neck.

Charlie’s Cia was a caspuleer.

The V.I.P. came in around then, in another little bustle of security, noticeably smaller than the one surrounding Charlie’s family, and no fucking wonder is it, given who or what was in that family. I got busy lining all my students up and making sure they were in the right order so Harbuko Ardreas didn’t get Nia Reyspander’s certificate, and then the first one was off and across the floor and you wouldn’t think it would be possible but I did forget about Charlie and his capsuleer for a while, in all the cheering and whistling and hooting and stamping for each student. One Brutor woman turned and did a few steps of an impromptu war dance on her way back across the stage and got a standing ovation from the whole audience, and then every student had to get a standing ovation, even the tiny old Vherokior man who was so embarrassed by it he fled back to his seat at a sprint. Even the V.I.P., one of the higher-up academics from a real university, got into the spirit and yelled and clapped like the rest of us as the students, my students at least until the ceremony was over, took their holoscrolls with as much pride as if they were graduate degrees from Pator or Caille.

And why shouldn’t they, after all? I’d bet a year’s meager salary that there wasn’t a student anywhere in the Cluster who worked harder, all things taken into account, than mine.

When the registrar called out Charles Etay I looked back at his capsuleer, I couldn’t help it.

She was staring at him crossing the stage like he had suddenly turned bright purple or taken off all his clothes or something, and then as he got about halfway there her face lit up with – I don’t know, exactly. Happiness, yes, but something else.

Comprehension. And, I could have sworn, relief.

And then she was on her feet, before he even had the scroll in his hand, smiling and clapping with tears streaming down her face, and that was the cue for everyone else to be on their feet too, so Charlie got his certificate in the middle of so much hollering and applause I doubt he could even hear what the V.I.P. said to him.

He took the holoscroll and made his way off the stage, past where I was standing, and by the time he had, his capsuleer had scrambled out of her row and come running down the side of the hall – causing, I have no doubt, a certain amount of professional consternation among the hard-eyed men and women on her security team. She was still crying and smiling at the same time as she threw herself at him, arms around his neck.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I head her ask. “I would have – ”

Then she pulled back and looked at him, and maybe she heard the words that had come out of her mouth or maybe there was something she saw in his face, because she stopped herself right there.

They looked at each other for a moment, one of those looks when there’s no-one else in the room even if you’re in the middle of a crowd, not that I know from personal experience but I’ve seen it happen, once or twice.

Then she put her arms back around him, and said his name.

Like it was code for oxygen.

Scars

noreply@blogger.com (Ciarente Roth) — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 13:59:00 +0000

She has no scars.

They could have added them, of course, to this body, but it did not occur to Nolikka to ask, any more than it had occurred to her to ask to have them removed from the other, and so her young clone skin is as smooth and unmarked as her nephew Corin’s had been the first time she had held him, a soft, squirming eighteen-month old armful.

In a way, it bothers her less than her hair, since cosmetic grafting to ensure her very-recently-commissioned jump-clone would have hair as long as she was used to was something else that had not occurred to her. The ends tickle the back of her neck and her ears, and even worse, Director Roth has made her aware that the color differs from her own. After nearly twenty years of wearing her hair the length and style it had been the last time she had been able to see her own reflection in a mirror, Nolikka finds it disconcerting to be unable to imagine what she looks like. In that regard, at least, the lack of scars is not a problem: she incurred them many years after the accident that destroyed her eyesight and has never known how they altered her appearance.

But her hair is a purely cosmetic matter. The patch of numb skin just above her highest capsule connection where the collar’s neural interface burned out the sensory neurons is not even visible, let alone cosmetic: only her own fingers, carefully maneuvering the protective cover into place when she has finished flying, know about this daily reminder of years of random agony, and fear of random agony. The tightness in the skin of her throat when she turns her head to the left is due to scars she can feel with her fingertips, and so assumes others can see if they look, but it is also a reminder of the constant misery of untended sores, and the pull in the muscles of her forehead every time she frowns one of Gallente boots, and fists.

For what it is worth, Val had said, and I am far less qualified to advise you on this than you are to decide for yourself …

I don't know that you need any reminders of that time.

Once, Nolikka would have agreed with him, without hesitation. Once, she would have said that she needed not only no reminders, but to have the memory of those years erased from her memory as cleanly as data was erased in a full reformat.

But that was when she had scars.

Without them, she has found herself more quick to speak, more confident in holding her ground. She does not feel the memory of the collar lodged above her collarbone, too tight to force words past, at every raised voice, at every thought of No. Without her scars, she finds herself lost in the thread of a discussion or the intricacies of an equation for hours, unaware of the body that houses her mind until she reaches the end of the line of thought and finds her muscles cramped, her hands shaking with hunger.

This is the self she remembers, from before. This is the self she knew as herself for almost all the years of her life, and part of her welcomes it back, with all its limitations.

But …

But.

It is not the self that was herself when she first heard a smooth taupe ribbon of a voice attached to the name Captain Night wind through the laboratory. It is not the self that was herself when that voice offered her a home, a haven, on the Utopian Ideal, nor the self she was when they stood side by side before the steward, hands linked by symbolic red tape, and said the words that made them partners in a new enterprise. Not the Nolikka Toin he eats lunch with daily, nor Nolikka Toin he sends carefully-considered traditional flower arrangements to.

Not the Nolikka Toin she was when her impulsive, intrusive question received not rebuff, but the quiet answer Val.

This is the self she knows best; but that is the Nolikka Toin he knows, the Nolikka Toin who is a colleague, a friend, a partner.

Just how important that has become to her is only now fully apparent, in the sharp grief she feels at contemplating losing it. She has felt loss before, of course, many colors of it: the sickly iridescent green of betrayal, the dull blue ache of bereavement. This loss, though, she can already tell, this keen grey pang, will sink into her like the blade of a knife.

Today, Nolikka Toin has no scars.

But one way or another, that is a temporary condition.

Thresholds

noreply@blogger.com (Ciarente Roth) — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 13:38:00 +0000

((co-written with Silver Night))

She is
flying
free She
is in the stars free
tasting comets
building worlds She is
not
is
is not
swooping through the rings of a planet and smelling the tart yellow lelen notes of the ice tumbling past her
is
falling through the heart of a blue star
is there

is here

everywhere

diving to the threshold of infinity

is is not
is

fraying away into the equations she dives through, shedding skins and scales and feathers
is
honed down by the friction, by the fractions, a narrow knife that used to have a name, effortlessly slicing through impossibility and putting it together again in new and beautiful patterns that she can see, she can see them all, she can see everything …

Flares coruscating off the surface of stars and moons and planets and interstellar dust, the orange of orbits and the tangy apple taste of gravitational flux and –

Kresh.

A pale, iridescent smell, sharp, out of place. It belongs with … with …

The pieces of herself that knows what it belongs with have flown away into the looping numbers and symbols that dance and spin and beckon her back to them. For a moment

An hour
A year

She is distracted by them and follows, turns, loops through and around them and sets them to new shapes, more beautiful than before, more beautiful than she has ever seen, until that shimmering scent catches at her again and she reaches out to drag the memory free, cold crunching beneath her feet and kresh and a high blue note in the air that goes with the tiny points of chill settling on her face.

It’s snow, that smell. He tells her so, his arm steady beneath her hand as the delightfully treacherous footing threatens her balance. His voice weaves through the strangeness around her, warm familiar deep taupe, telling her what he can see, telling her what she can see.

It should not be here, that kresh. She had forgotten it along with everything else.

She did not put it here.

The mystery is even more fascinating than the dance of the numbers and she turns and dives after that thin thread of molecular patterns, weaving down through a tumbling wave of blue and green navigational points, until she reaches –

Kresh, and ship-scrubbed air, and shapes that might be a desk, chairs. And wrapping around it, a warm brown ribbon backed with gold, a voice, a voice she knows
Knew
Knows.

She reaches out and clutches at a passing opalescent trail that remembers voices, clumsy communication through sound, hears -

Yes, she would tell him, but there’s no words inside her, nothing but the numbers, and so she spills them all around her positive integers.

“ Do you know where you are?”

It is boring, that is where she is, this tiny space redolent of a place she knows she ought to remember, when right outside there are stars waiting for her to unpack the secrets at their heart.

He can come. Of course he can come. Anything is possible, here. She can show him, can show him all of it. If he will only come with her …

No. He will not leave this room, the walls buttressed against the glorious tumult outside. He is talking to her, slow and clumsy as he shapes equations, formula. She recognises the interaction of neurons, of groups of neurons. Then more, fluid dynamics, electrical interactions, the mathematics of biology. A body, is what he is showing her, she remembers the concept, a cage for consciousness, limiting thought to the sluggish connections between neurons.

Now something else. Electrons neutrons resonance … yes, she knows those equations, has seen them spilling through her fingers every day in the lab.

Not like this, though. She would never pass this beyond concept, a shield running high and hot and burning out every piece of its hardware.

Words. More words. It is important to him, that she can grasp, these two pictures, the body, the shield burning itself and the ship it protects to ashes.

She tries to understand, picks up the looping equations from his mind and mimics them. A heartbeat. The transfer of oxygen to the bloodstream. Weight. Height. She pulls threads she had lost from the storm outside the walls to make sense of it.

Incomplete.

He wants more from her. Wants … she has not answered his question. He wants …

She reaches for more traces of herself.

And comes up empty handed.

Tries again, mining the endless streams of data that pour unceasingly from the infinite horizon for something that fits into the gaps, anything that fills the gaps.

For the first time she can remember – and now she realises how little she can remember – she is afraid.

There. She recognises what he is showing her, almost, like a familiar melody in a different key. The hand that rests on his arm is her hand and knowing that she can identify another trailing strand in the whirling kaleidoscope around them, the amber richness of expensive fabric beneath her fingers, the warm solidity of the arm beneath … She knits the memory in to herself, finds another, adds that … a voice she recognises as her own, heard through other ears, the orange tang of ozone from a shield simulator …

Thread after thread spin into her hands, called home from the brilliant turmoil around them, fitting together, making a seamless whole, fingers hand wrist arm … a body built of memory but for the first time she can feel the faint tingle of information coming from the pod-interface as it monitors her flesh and bone self inert in its bath of goo.

A hand extended toward her, as illusory as her own. “Nolikka?”

She takes it, or imagines she does – but it is as warm and solid as if it were real, and it incontrovertibly belongs to the man who has come here to find her when she could no longer find herself. “Val.”

There is so much relief in the interface between them she can’t tell how much is hers and how much his. She holds onto his hand tightly. There are words, his, hers, about what happened, and she tries to concentrate on them, because wordsare how the woman she is trying to remember how to be communicates, but they are less important than the strength of the hand holding hers, the warmth of the concern still echoing around them.

Words. She shapes them, forces meaning into their confinement, boxes and borders to keep her here in this imaginary form. “Thank you for -

Thank you for

finding

me saving

thank you for

no-one else ever

looking for

thank you

“- for finding me.” Perhaps he understands: there is a strange doubleness to her senses in places, shapes and colours that are new and unexpected, that do not come from her own perception, but –

“I can see you," she blurts suddenly, magenta astonishment. “Not how I see, but - Is this what you look like? In the world?”

Everything

a million

infinities

numbers perfect numbers

shaping

shaped
shaping

every
thing

Nolikka puts her free hand on the door control, and Silver covers it with his.

The door opens.

“Now?” she asks.

“Now.”

Hand in hand, they step together over the threshold to the world.

Delusion

noreply@blogger.com (Ciarente Roth) — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 04:24:00 +0000

((written by Stitcher, Silver Night and myself. ))

The agent currently going by the name Alain Manenault had been staring at his knees for what felt like hours. There was little else to do, when one was securely manacled to a chair, which was in turn bolted to the floor next to an equally securely anchored steel table, in a square room with only one very solid door. When finally it opened, he was grateful for the chance to raise his head even if the fatigue and lack of food made it feel leaden, twice its usual weight.

He hadn't been entirely sure who his interrogator would be. The Invelen woman, he had supposed. Or the Roth woman's grim-faced, grey-eyed bodyguard Alpassi, maybe.

What he got was a lean Civire man in comfortable white fatigues and a grey T-shirt. Full beard, shavetail haircut, blue eyes that glimmered like glacial ice even in the dim, ruddy lighting of a Minmatar station.

He went on the offensive as the door closed, a ReAw marine stood at ease to protect it.

“And just who the hell are you supposed to be?” he asked.

The Caldari man sat down opposite him, setting a slim hard-copy dossier in front of him as he did so.

“The Yulai convention forbids the cruel and unusual treatment of prisoners.” he said conversationally, by way of an answer.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I figure angry Intaki blondes aren't that unusual, but just to be safe I thought it best if somebody not directly involved in today's incident handled this interview.” he treated Menenault to a weak smile that radiated insincere concern. “You look terrible.”

“So you're the good cop then?”

“I can be whatever kind of cop you like, Agent... just for the record, what is your name?”

“Alain Manenault.”

“Your real name.”

“Alain Manenault.”

“I see.”

A note was scribbled in the margin of the dossier.

“Official record begins, twenty-three hours forty-one, fourteenth of December YC113.” the Caldari intoned solemnly. “Subject: known though unidentified FIO officer impersonating corporate personnel, responsible for security breach and hostage scenario as detailed in attached briefing files and in violation of the CONCORD Pod Pilot Act of YC one-oh-five, perpetrated against Re-Awakened Technologies Inc.”

He fixed “Alain Manenault” with a long, cool stare.

“Alain Manenault. Born on the Eleventh of September, YC seven-zero, aboard the Scope development studio at Deninard VIII, Moon one.” He recited, staring straight across the table and apparently not bothering to consult the notes. “Graduated MSc in mathematics from Caille University in YC ninety-two, winning a Bronze Guillard Prize for excellence in the field of chaos theory. Was accepted into the LeTrise graduate fast-track program and spent the next twenty-two years working for CreoDron, assigned to the Electromagnetic Physics department of their station in Aydoteaux, under Masalle Ambrette. Retired to pursue a better-paid position working for Re-Awakened Technologies Inc.”

The interrogator paused and tilted his head on one side fractionally. “Curious history for a man who would then do something so foolish as to kidnap one of his corporation's capsuleers and torture him with a shock prod in an attempt to extort information from the CEO. I would go so far as to say that it's not the history of such a man.”

When “Manenault” didn't respond, the officer merely shrugged and leaned back in his chair.

“What could you possibly hope to gain?” he asked.

“You've seen the recording.”

“Indeed I have, and it makes you look like a paranoid psychotic. One who's in denial over his good friend's dementia, it seems.”

“I knew Jorion Roth well, right up until shortly before the Debreth incident. I'd have known if he was coming unhinged. He wasn't.”

“And yet he tortured his daughters extensively. I've seen the scars myself, Agent.”

The corner of Manenault’s mouth twitched up. “The interrogator's job is to build trust. Lying isn’t a good strategy.”

“I am not lying to you, agent.”

“Invelen was. That Sansha podder with the funny callsign was.”

“Were they?”

It was a flat statement of scepticism, not a question. The agent treated it as if it were.

“They were, and you know it.”

“Do I?”

“You're going to look me in the eye and tell me the same damn thing Invelen did?”

“I know full well that you have a social adaptation chip, Agent. I know full well that it reported to you the last time I said this that there was no evidence that I might be lying, but I will repeat myself – Jorion Roth did terrible things to his own children on Debreth. I have witnessed the physical and psychological scars of that event myself.”

He sat back, leaving “Manenault” to desperately hunt his cybernetic memory for any hint of falsehood.

“Would you like some food?” He asked, pleasantly, after a slight wait.

“Screw you.”

“I'll take that as a no. So, to return to my original question, Agent... what did you hope to gain by assaulting our pilot?”

“I want to know what was done to Jorion, and how it can be un-done.”

“And what proof do you have that anything really was done to him?”

“Please. You don't expect me to buy Invelen's gas about a convenient degenerative condition do you?”

“Please answer my question, Agent.”

“The whole story stinks like a month-dead fedo!”

“That's a subjective valuation based on prejudice. I'm asking what proof you have. Hard evidence.”

“Why, so you can destroy it? Suppress it?”

“Just answer the question, Agent.”

“No. This is a waste of time.”

The bearded man with the blue eyes nodded. “Clearly.” he agreed. “If you actually had anything tangible to go on, you wouldn't have done something so remarkably stupid.”

“Excuse me?”

“I mean, kidnapping a capsuleer and torturing him with a shock stick? That takes balls that could tank a doomsday, but it's not exactly the most sensible thing I've ever seen a man do. Indeed, you blew your cover to attempt it. What did you think could possibly be worth that?”

“No comment.”

“See, I have a theory. I think you really are just working a coincidence up into a conspiracy through confirmation bias. I think that you've spent too long in a futile hunt for the evidence you need to prove that your friend didn't lose his mind naturally and you finally got desperate. You 'owe' Jorion Roth? What did he do, save your life?”

“No comment.”

“That's a 'yes' if I'm any judge. So, the guy saves your life, sadly drops out of the crazy tree and hits every branch on the way down, and you can't accept that somebody who'd do that for you would turn into the monster who nearly killed both his little girls.”

“No comment.”

“You're as delusional as he was. He saw Sansha in his daughter's brain so in he went with needles and saws and microcontrollers. You saw a monster violating your friend's mind, so in you came with a shock stick and a half-formed plan about getting a confession out of a woman who had nothing to do with it. Sad, really.”

Manenault didn't dignify this with a response beyond producing his best glare, which apparently glanced off without causing any real damage.

The man stood and picked up his dossier “Thank you, Agent whatever-your-name-is, you've been most illuminating. I'll be sure to inform your employers that we don't intend to press charges as you're clearly mentally unaccountable for your actions. End record.”

He turned to go. The door was open and he was half across the threshold when the Agent called after him.

“Why didn't you tell us about Jory?”

“I'm sorry?”

“Jorion. Why hold him at a secure facility and not tell us about his condition? Assuming it's true.”

“I believe Captain Night already gave you the reason, Agent. To quote him: “We had hoped to avoid this exact sort of situation.”

“Your corporation cracked secure FIO cyphers and code phrases and spent months impersonating an officer who had gone MIA in order to avoid inconvenience? I don't buy it.”

“Thank you, Agent Doe, this interview is over.”

“My name is Du Viers. Agent Rober Du Viers, serial 921849-Epsilon.”

“Thank you, Agent Du Viers. That will make it easier for me to contact your superiors.”

In the moment before the door slammed shut behind him, Du Viers finally noticed the gleam of metal at the nape of his interrogator's neck.

*******

“Not bad.” Amieta Invelen had been leaning against the wall outside the interview room, drinking something hot and brown out of a metal mug. Pilot Hakatain had handed his dossier to her the second he left the room, and was busily shrugging on a black sleeveless jacket.

“Rating my performance?” he asked.

“Nice working getting the name,” Invelen said. “Might be able to get a bit more out of him, if we lean a little.”

“I doubt it,” Hakatain said, taking the dossier again

“Don’t sell yourself short.”

“I’m not.” Hakatain’s voice held neither pride nor modesty. “I won’t get much more from him because he doesn’t know much more. I'm certain of that.”

“Meaning?”

“Du Viers had an intensely personal motive for coming here. He has no solid evidence to back up his accusations against Cia or this corp, and he defied orders to do it. We know for a fact that he has precisely nothing with which he might convince his superiors to launch a more serious investigation of ReAw. Taken together, that's more than enough material to discredit him and see him relegated to desk work for at least the next five years. He's defused, and hopefully so is the Roth situation for now.”

He looked sidelong at Amieta. “Of course, the bigger problem is that he's more-or-less right, isn't he?”

Amieta sipped her tea, “About what?”

“If Jorion really did have that kind of degenerative condition, it would have been simpler, cheaper and more permanent to hand him back over to the FIO and let them worry about their brain-damaged former agent. And you were... not quite telling him the whole truth and nothing but back in the hangar, weren't you?”

“He was a danger to himself and everyone else for months even before the Debreth breakdown. Hell, he thought he was someone else entirely for a while there - and the FIO was happy to let him run loose. You're assuming they wouldn't just have said 'thanks' and sent him back to 'work'. Forgive me if we didn't decide to entrust Cia and Cami's lives to their competence. We released him once he was far enough along he wouldn't be a danger even if they did.”

“Sounds plausible. But this thing's top of the range.” Verin said, tapping the “third eye” spot on his forehead where social analysis cybernetics were traditionally implanted. “You don't give me much to work with, but unlike Du Viers I'm not speculating without evidence, Commander.”

Something whined into life inside Amieta's hand, though her grip on her coffee mug remained loose and relaxed. “You're free to believe that. What's your point?” she asked.

“No point. I'm certainly not going to shed a tear knowing the bastard's been... unfortunate. Cia may not quite be a sister to me, but I sure don't have any room in me to forgive anyone who'd do that to her.” He pulled a cigar from a slim steel case in his pocket, already trimmed, lit and smoking as the device registered his hand approaching the dispenser. “And I'm definitely not about to share my speculations with her.”

“Then you’ve learned something,” Amieta said evenly. “After the last time you decided to ‘share speculations’ with Cia. Putting her through that again would be … bad.”

“Mmm. Her sister, taking her dad and going into his head with knives and needles and turning him into a Jorion Doll.” There was an edge to Hakatain's otherwise reasonable and understanding tone. He stared philosophically into the glowing mess at the end of his cigar. “That would, indeed, be bad.”

Invelen said nothing, but the mug issued a slight creak as it deformed a little in her grip.

Verin glanced down at it, then back up to her face. “I understand and agree with what you're doing. But the day's going to come eventually where the deception can't be maintained any longer. Do you suppose you'll be able to go to bed that night feeling good about yourself?”

Amieta glanced through the door's one-way glass to where Du Viers was studiously contemplating his own knees again. “The ‘deception’ is in your head, Pilot,” she said, and turned a steady gaze back to Hakatain. “And I sleep just fine.”

Electric Myths

noreply@blogger.com (Ciarente Roth) — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 03:32:00 +0000

((written with Silver Night ))

It is a familiar discomfort, the instant before the interface overrides physical sensations of enclosed and liquid and replaces them with the familiar chill of vacuum and faint tingle of the docking clamps. Unpleasant, but necessary and tolerably brief: in the space of a breath Captain Silver Night is no longer aware of the flesh and bone body now inert inside the capsule, feeling instead the steel skin and nanite interfaces of the Electric Myth.

It has been a while since he wore this ship, or even one like it, and Captain Silver Night takes a moment to let the drake’s 14 tonnes of metal, her kilometres of wiring and thousands of control systems become familiar again.

It only takes a moment. Information pours through the neural connections to the ship and the pod interface translates them into a form a pilot’s brain can absorb and assimilate, can assess and control. Neurons fire in response, awakening old connections, opening pathways. The Myth goes from being an old memory to a comfortable home in seconds, and seconds later is neither memory nor home but simply himself.

Then, as simply as he would raise his voice to be heard across a room, Silver opens a comm-link to Lab One, where the neuro-engineers and the medtechs are standing by.

His words are carried directly to their comms, synthesized there to audible frequencies. It is an illusion that he 'speaks', although since the commands that initiate the communication are triggered by the same neurological impulses as speech, it is in a sense an illusion Silver himself shares.

They tell him they are ready.

He gives the order to proceed.

Silver can tell when they initialise the link. It is, at first, one more connection among many: live, but dormant.

The camera drones show him that the medics checking that everything is in order before proceeding, moving around Dr Nolikka Toin with quiet efficiency.

Silver sees her nod in response to a question, and the word comes from the team leader: they are ready.

The link goes live. For a moment, nothing -

For a moment, nothing, and then suddenly Nolikka is cold in a way she has never been cold before, a deep absolute cold that she knows immediately is both lethal and harmless. Something is keeping her still, a light restraining touch that holds her to the chair, no, that is not the chair, that is not me -

Is me -

Is not -

For a moment, nothing, and then a flash of something gone so quickly Silver has barely time to register numbers, colours. Gone, then back again, looping in strings that move so quickly he can only grasp at fragments, e(fx/pi) = cosin {y - J} ...

Cold and empty – vast, pervasive emptiness, like nothing she has ever felt, like nothing. Nolikka recoils. She can feel the room around her, the chair she's sitting in, hear the techs moving and the whirring of the machinery. At the same time, there is that huge silence, huge enough to absorb all of it and still be as empty as before.

Something is beeping, and someone says her name. One of the doctors. They are asking if she’s all right, if she wants to stop.

She is not all right.

She does not want to stop.

I am still here. In this chair.

It’s input. Just input.

It’s like something vividly imagined, or half-dreamt - but it isn't my imagination, or my dreams. The cold and the emptiness begin to take on detail, and they aren't just cold and empty. First she discerns the feel of the shields - familiar and strange at the same time. They wrap around the ship, and she can feel the lights sweeping across them like a gentle, warm mist.

Chaotic, random – a nonsense of shifting colours and swirling strings of symbols, dancing around and alongside the visual feeds from the Myth’s camera drones and those aspects of the ship’s input translated to images for the capsuleer’s convenience.

Silver instinctively damps it down to little more than a flickering pastel blur, the familiar reliable feeds from the ship coming reassuringly clear again.

Something in the pale flicker catches his attention, a repetition, no, an echo, perhaps, too dim to make out clearly. Cautiously, he allows the input feed to strengthen and brighten. There – no, there – a string that almost makes sense, looping and repeating, the equations describing …

Geometry.

At the thought, the ship’s computers respond, sorting, filtering, interpreting. The patterns in the data come clearer, their complex strings describing shapes that have no meaning to the computer but are familiar to the pilot. A chair, a room … indistinct figures moving …

Through the feed from the drones, he hears a technician asking Dr Toin if she’s all right to proceed, and at the same moment the collection of numbers that delineates one of the blurred figures grows a wreath of long, looping formulae, tinted in shades of teal and grey, rotating gently before dissolving into the background.

Now he can see whole sections of the mosaic that do not connect to the others. At a thought, the computer isolates them for him, brings them forward for closer study. They seem different to the others, almost tentative, thin trails of silver and grey across black emptiness. As he studies them, though, they grow in confidence, sprouting branches of equations that web together, developing tints of the palest gold. The computer can find no equivalent in its databanks, presents him with an amorphous shape that bears a passing resemblance, but only that, to a fish.

But it is not a fish. It is 14,010,000 kilograms with a volume of 252,000m3 , it is 526 m and 2812 with a recharge rate of 750 seconds.

He is looking at the Electric Myth, shimmering now with the wash of light over her shields, looking at his ship as Nolikka Toin sees it, or more precisely, looking at what she is seeing in what he sees, in the buffered transfer from the pod systems.

The drake is not an exceptionally beautiful make of battlecruiser.

Usually.

“Captain Night?” It is an illusion that she speaks quietly, a little hesitantly, an illusion that she is speaking at all, doubled as the pod interface translates input into direct activation of the auditory centres of the pilot’s brain as he floats, deaf and blind by ordinary senses, in the pod. “Can you hear me?”

“You're coming through loud and clear, Dr Toin.”

The voice comes from everywhere and nowhere, and Nolikka starts to turn to find it, as she always does, a habit of the sighted she re-learned when a colleague confessed he found its absence unsettling.

The gentle tug of wires attached to her scalp and the hand of a technician on her shoulder reminds her that she is not hearing Captain Night, that he is not there.

No, she corrects herself. He is not in the room with me.

She can tell from the information pouring through the link, buffered though it is, that regardless of his physical location, Captain Night is nonetheless very much there.

And everywhere. Everywhere on the ship. Everywhere in the ship.

And she does not have to struggle, out of politeness, to pin a voice to a physical location, to turn with the mannerisms of those who see in ways she does not and cannot see in the way she can.

“I can see the ship,” she tells him. Her own voice runs in trails of translucent pearl along the lineaments of the Myth. “Does it work the other way, too?”

Does it work the other way?

Yes, is an honest answer, and Silver gives it. But it is not an entirely complete answer, as the numbers and figures pouring through the link change and shift, taxing even the ship’s computer’s ability to keep up.

“I can understand a bit of what’s coming in,” he tells her. “I get an echo, too, of what you see from me. You are feeling the ship?”

“Yes.” The ship again, shifting gently in shape and perspective, with new colours twisting through it now, a faded opal, a bronze. “The shields, the … hangar? Is that the hangar?”

“Yes. Right now it is mostly just the docking clamp, and the lights coming in from outside. A little comms chatter.”

“Is that what that is? It tickles.”

“Try ignoring a priority channel for a while – it becomes an itch.”

A moment’s silence, and then: “I don’t think I can. I mean, I don’t think it cares that I am.”

“No, I suppose not.” She can sense the ship, Silver reminds himself, but the ship cannot sense her. “There aren’t any priority communications right now, anyway.”

“Can you – could you undock the ship? Is it safe?”

There hadn't been any plans to undock, but there is something in the shifting tones of the opalescent formula that wind around the ship as she speaks, and Silver finds himself saying, “Assuming that no-one has been terribly incompetent in the modifications, and I don’t see any evidence of that, it should be.”

Undocking prep has been second nature for so long that Silver finds he could not remember what it had been like the first time. Other things about that first flight, but not the exact feeling of the docking clamps release, the ship’s passage through the brief darkness of the exit, and then –

Light everywhere, or lights, too many to even imagine counting, far away and close and every distance in between, each with their own unique warmth brushing against her skin. Other things too, heavy, large, moving, everywhere around her, as far as she can see. They pull, each of them, pull her in different directions. The station right behind, and another, bigger and further away, and feeling like she might be falling into both of them. Nolikka tries to make sense of them, snatching after one and then another, near or far, she can no longer tell –

Too much, too much.

Or not enough.

She can’t tell.

“Dr Toin?” That is familiar, for all she knows she has never heard Captain Night’s voice like this before, hearing without sound. Nonetheless, she knows his voice in the middle of the chaotic strangeness, its colours steady, its contours familiar.

“Yes.”

“It helps if you address them one at a time. They fit together, but it helps to see each as a separate part, first. This was part of what they did during my training.”

She tries: she starts with the biggest, the math running interference between her and the physical reality as he explains. Piece by piece she puts things where they go: the station, the nearby planets. Then the mass behind them breaks into two, one tiny and fast and heading right at her and then gone and it all falls apart, but she can see that the computer is filtering, helping her - that Captain Night is helping her, and she begins to rebuild, to organize what's coming in into something comprehensible. The great bulk of the planets turning their way through lazy orbits, some with moons dancing attendance as they go. Great sweeping arcs of fragmented rock. Smaller things, their geometry angular, made by people and not by millennia of natural forces. And –

“Is that the – “

3564 k 239,200 km 0.02084 l V – 19.03 z = 0.012 in red and gold and every shade between, weaving together and brightening until they all but eclipse everything else. The star.

“Can you feel the pull of it?” Silver asks.

"Yes!” And she can, he can see the gravitational fluxes weaving through the equations. “And the - that's more than light, isn't it? The rest of the spectrum, is that what it is?"

"Yes. It hits the shield like a wind," Silver brings the ship to a stop outside the station with a few thoughts, "Nothing like directed fire, of course."

"No, it doesn't - it's not unpleasant. It's like sunlight. I mean - it is sunlight." Her voice is uncertain. The mathematics in her mind are not.

"Would you like to go closer?"

Dr Toin's reply is almost shy, "Can we?"

"Of course." Silver aligned the ship, "Brace yourself. The first time in warp is ... memorable."

Nolikka feels the ship spooling up, like the echo of an adrenaline rush, and then she is – they are – falling towards the star, everything around rippling and falling apart. She tries to make it make sense, but it’s too fast. The star grows and grows at the end of a spinning tunnel of formula she has known for a long time but only now understands as they distort and bend space around her and -

Something else.

Not as big as the star, but big. A planet. A planet right in their path.

Mass and velocity and momentum and x0_1 + v0_1*t = x0_2 + v0_2*t and everything adds up to -

The Myth slides through the warp tunnel towards the star, the system’s third planet looming larger as their course intersects its orbit. Silver can see it looming larger in Dr Toin’s numbers, recognises the equations she is solving for time in colors shading now to vibrant orange.

“We aren’t in the same place as everything else,” he tells her. “Dr Toin? The ship is not in normal space.”

And then they are through the planet and he is getting no sense at all through the link, only fragments of numbers shorting out in a static of white.

“Dr Toin?”

“Dr Toin? Dr Toin, can you hear me?”

The meditechs are talking to her, then to each other. Nolikka hears them, ‘hears’, too, Captain Night’s voice –

The planet is past. People are still talking. She is still hearing them.

They are not, after all, dead.

“I’m all right,” she tells the people in the labs, her voice thin and grey to her own ears, and starts painstakingly putting the universe back into order.

“Did we go … through that planet?” she asks Captain Night through the link.

“Our route, charted in normal space, did. We didn’t, exactly.” He pauses. “It is a bit different, knowing the equations and actually experiencing it, though.”

The comm link does a good job of conveying the mild amusement in Dr Toin’s ‘voice’. “It is a bit different. Yes. Is it like that every time?”

“Yes. You get … not used to it, exactly. But it doesn’t keep quite the same impact.”

Equations describing catastrophic deceleration float past in a cluster of bubbles that give him the inexplicable impression of laughter. “I thought it would feel fast.” The dry amusement returns. “And the sun is very large.”

“Just warm, here, though” Silver reassures her. “We are not so close it is dangerous.”

Dangerous.

Captain Night explains that getting

too close to the sun would escalate the warmth into discomfort and pain, the stresses of the ship shared with the pilot.

It’s what people say, that capsuleers feel their ship, but now, feeling as if the solar wind is ruffling her hair, Nolikka thinks she may actually understand it for the first time.

Some of the information is ‘uncomfortable’, Captain Night says. Usually things you shouldn’t ignore.

Being shot, for example.

She has designed shields for a half-dozen classes of ship, thinking of the lives within the steel skin, imagining her equations wrapping protection around their fragile home, but as for the first time she feels the shield hardeners come online, Nolikka realises that for a capsuleer, they are more than an abstract security, that a shield failure would hurt even if the hull was never breached.

That is a responsibility she is not sure she wants, but the thought slips away as Captain Night demonstrates the microwarpdrive, less like running than like a dream of running.

The medics interrupt, and Nolikka realises she has been hearing the monitors beeping for several minutes now, somewhere behind the soft surf of the sun’s radiation and the echoing loops of the planets and their moons.

Time to stop, they say.

Captain Night drops them out of warp near the station, and she adjusts quickly, the equations resolving much more easily, already starting to become familiar. One last burst of exhilarating speed as he punches the microwarpdrive on approach, and then the docking protocols take them into the welcoming embrace of the station.

Cold again, empty cold, and then someone touches a switch.

And she is –

The link goes dark, and in an instant the spinning shapes of numbers and symbols dissolve. The pearl of mathematical light representing Dr. Toin has gone silent. The Myth is familiar once more, no longer wreathed in shimmering equations, no longer mapped and charted by the shifting web of Nolikka’s perceptions.

There is the ship, the kilometres of corridors and wiring, the myriad connections and sensors and systems.

And that is all.

The link goes dark. The subtle mysteries of the Myth are closed to her once more. She is sitting in a chair in Lab One, feeling the tug against her scalp as technicians detach the equipment, hearing the pale blue rustle of their movement, feeling the walls and corners of the single room around her.

And that is all.

“Dr Toin?” Something small and solid is placed in her hand: a comm unit. “Captain Night for you, Dr Toin.”

It should not feel unfamiliar to have to lift the comm to her ear to hear him, but it does. “Captain?”

His voice, though, his voice is still familiar, and that surprises her enough to lose what he is saying for a sentence or two, until she catches the dark taupe thread of his words and understands scheduling and further testing and additional data …

Understands that he is asking her when the next test should be.

A time and date are agreed, and Silver sends the details to his schedule.

“Until next time, Dr Toin.”

“Until next time, Captain Night.”

Human Comfort

noreply@blogger.com (Ciarente Roth) — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 11:58:00 +0000

The garden is colder than the rest of the ship.

Out there, temperature, humidity, airflow, are carefully calibrated for human comfort, health and efficiency.

In here, other species have priority. Flat-leafed jief, creeping flat across the ground; eyet, with its long curved thorns and faintly sour scent; tufted wyas shedding sweet pollen with every eddy of air; and a dozen neighbors, all natives of the same world, a planet where the season is only just turning to spring. In deference to their origin, the garden echoes that far-away weather, the air still sharp with the memory of snow, striking a chill through the light fabric of Nolikka Toin’s uniform.

If she goes to the door and asks for a jacket, one will be brought, of that she has no doubt: Captain Night has granted far more extravagant requests without hesitation.

Nolikka stays where she is, sitting on the prickly jief, arms wrapped around her legs and head resting on her knees.

If I ask for a jacket, I’m sure he’d have one brought.

But I will still be cold.

The chill of the air is nothing next to the slick green lump of ice lodged beneath her ribs, pressing up into her chest until there is room for only the shallowest of breaths, until her heart has no room at all to beat.

She kept on running.

A noise escapes her, despite her best efforts, and Nolikka presses her forehead harder against her knees. The edge of it, that she kept on running, but only the edge. There is worse there, blurred and distorted within the thick, toxic ice. If she lets it melt, the poison of it will turn her blood to acid.

She can hear them both: Hara’s voice as thin as beaten gold, Captain Night’s with the traces of Ishukone that thread the taupe ribbon of his words with samite.

I fell, Hara says. You kept on running.

The same words as Captain Night.

Almost.

Four is almost the same as five.

You fell, Dr Toin.

She kept on running.

One of them is lying.

She wants it to be him. An inconceivably cruel and inexplicable lie, but capsuleers are, aren’t they? Inconceivably and inexplicably cruel. No need to seek a reason.

The reports are unequivocal.

One of them is lying and she wants it to be Captain Night with the same clear blue desperation she had wanted the groundless equivalence on the fourth page of her senior thesis to create its own justification.

It didn’t.

And he isn’t.

She escaped while the mob was ... while you were being captured. She was never caught.

I'm sorry.

Nolikka touches the scar on her forehead, the thin ridge of skin that her memory of those moments has hardened into. When did Hara first tell that lie? When she reached the ship and they asked where I was?

Impossible to say I left her behind.

That is the first thing coiled and waiting in the ice. She could have told them what she saw. She could have told them where to look.

Instead she hoped for two years that I would never come back to contradict her.

The ice shifts and swells. Nolikka drops her hands to the rough tufts of the jief and digs her fingers into the spongy mat of plants until she can smell the faint bitter purple of bruised leaves. She kept running. A moment of panic, it happens. A moment …

But two years?

She rubs the scar again.

She must have been horrified to hear we’d been found.

And so relieved when she found out I didn’t remember anything.

So she could tell me, as well …

In that thin golden voice where Nolikka still cannot hear the lie: I fell. You kept running.

But the lie is there.

That is what Hara sounds like, when she lies.

And knowing that …

The past shifts, kaleidoscopes, a thousand moments, a thousand thousand words changing color through the prism of new understanding. That was a lie, and that, and that …

Whispered words the color of honey against the soft grey of night-shift’s hush. You mean more to me than anything, Noli. We’ll always be together.

Locking together in a new pattern, tinted the dull umber of humiliation.

Was she laughing at me when she said that? At how easy I was to fool, how eager to believe?

Laughing as she said it, safe in the knowledge that I couldn’t see?

A handful of jief comes loose in Nolikka’s grip. How could I be so stupid as to let her make such a fool of me?

How could I be so stupid?

Something stirs sluggishly at the heart of the ice, a half-glimpsed hideous shape the sweet lime green of rot.

If I didn’t know that she –

How do I know they aren’t all –

“Stupid, stupid, stupid!” Her own voice startles her and she presses both hands over her mouth before any more words can escape, words that might crack the ice and let the creature inside loose. The sap from the jief burns her lips. Nolikka catches hold of the small discomfort as hard as she can, adds the sting of split knuckles and grazed palms that came from somewhere inside the dull maroon storm that broke over her when she understood what Captain Night was telling her. I hit something.

Hit someone, too, vague recollection of the satisfying meaty thud of her fist hitting flesh.

Nolikka is terribly afraid it may have been Captain Night who she hit.

Fine thank you for all that he’s done.

She remembers, then, that he is waiting, that she is keeping him waiting, just outside, if you need anything.

Nolikka does not want to face him. Does not want to face anyone, but most particularly not Captain Night, surely now regretting his kindness and wishing her anywhere but on his ship.

If she could sit here in this garden until the suns burned out, shivering a little in a climate that cares nothing for human comfort, she would.

But sooner or later, someone will come.

And if she must face them, Nolikka would rather do it on her terms.

The door hisses open as she reaches it. Outside, the air is warmer, with the blank grey smell of well-maintained ventilation systems.

“Dr Toin.” Nolikka cannot hear disdain, or mockery, or regret, in Captain Night’s voice, but she is painfully aware that she can no longer trust that what she does not hear is not there.

She makes her voice confident. "I should get back to the Myth. Back to work.”

"Are you-" Captain Night hesitates. "Of course. I was headed back there myself, if you don't mind the company."

"I would appreciate it." A rustle of cloth as he moves closer. "I should have paid closer attention – I’m not quite sure how I got here."

“A ship this size can be quite a maze,” Captain Night says gently. “What do you usually do? If you are lost?”

Her usual answers are ready. I can access maps … the technology of my assistance device is quite sophisticated … I get lost much less frequently than you no doubt expect, less frequently than someone who can see.

All of it quite true. Nolikka takes a breath and tells a different truth, instead. “I choose a direction,” she says. “And just keep going.”

“Then, shall we?”

“Yes.” She puts out her hand, and finds his arm already there. “Yes. We shall.”

Difficult

noreply@blogger.com (Ciarente Roth) — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 14:50:00 +0000

She is being difficult.

She has been difficult before.

Back then, there was a small solid sphere of certainty at the center of her mind that she could balance on when the doctors said Really, Ms Toin, you are being unreasonable.

How do you expect to live up to your potential without treatment?

There had been no words for her to explain, not then, but she had kept her balance and refused to sign the consent forms, until after a month, two months, six, when her research papers were being passed around not just her faculty but some of the highest levels of Ishukone R&D, the doctors had stopped asking.

But Nolikka has nothing to balance on any more.

Dr Toin, these anxieties are understandable, but they are irrational. Part of the symptoms we want to treat.

She folds her hands together, wrapping her fingers tightly around the silk taupe ribbon of the fourteenth cosin pi function in the last repeating sequence of Ititeola’s theorem, and tries to find words. They don’t understand how her mind works. She doesn’t understand how her mind works. How can they be so sure that their wires and chemicals will do exactly and only what they say?

Maybe she will get better by herself. She wasn’t this bad before the shuttle docked at her new home station and she walked off into a wall of senseless noise and smells and strangers. Hasn’t she earned the chance to try and get better by herself?

The words stop in her throat, lodge hard and painful just below her larynx, caught on the edge of the collar that is no longer there.

Your colleagues deserve your best, don’t they, Dr Toin? And to be able to work without disruption?

And your neighbors? There are young children in your residential complex.

Your counselor thinks, and we agree, that you would benefit from a course of anti-anxiety medication. These are Zainou Biotech’s latest line. They’ll help you through this.

There is only one right answer to that.

Yes, sir.

She takes the pills every morning and every evening.

The doctors are right. The chemicals smooth down the jagged edges of the noise of the station, dull the random leaps and stabs of her pulse at an unexpected noise behind her.

And the doctors are wrong. The chemicals smooth down the delicate complexity of the numbers streaming through her mind as well, leaving her with nothing but anodyne loops and swirls.

She stops taking the pills.

A week later she is back in the room.

You have to take your meds, Dr Toin, for them to work.

This is what we call clinical non-adherence. It’s a symptom of your condition.

Your counselor thinks, and we agree, that you would benefit from closer supervision of your treatment.

There is only one right answer to that.

Yes, sir.

The AIMED will test her blood every morning and evening, they tell her, will monitor the chemicals in her blood. If she stops taking the pills again, they will know.

We have a responsibility to you, Dr Toin. The corporation has always been your legal guardian in the case of incapacity.

We’re adjusting your medication regime.

Your counselor thinks, and we agree, that you’re not competent to decide your own interest at the moment.

Continued non-adherence will leave us with no choice but to get a corporate order for more aggressive treatment of this disorder.

There is only one right answer to that.

Yes, sir.

Back at the laboratory, Nolikka rests her hands on the touchpad and waits for the glorious rainbow of spinning equations to spring to life.

And waits.

Ititeola’s theorem slips through her fingers like smoke and is gone.

A week later she is back in the room.

Your section head says you haven’t made any progress on your current project. How are you sleeping? Any changes in appetite?

Your counselor thinks, and we agree, that you would benefit from a course of anti-depressants. These are Zainou Biotech’s latest line. They’ll help you through this.

There is only one right answer to that.

Yes, sir.

The new meds don’t bring back the numbers dancing behind her eyelids and coiling through her fingers like Hara’s long braid once did, but they dull the sharp edges of the starless void she lives in. They let her sleep, sleep too long, sometimes. They let her eat, if she remembers to.

A week later she is back in the room.

There is no shame, they tell her, in needing to take a step back for a while.

You’ve been through a lot.

There is only one right answer to that.

Yes, sir.

There are many jobs on a station that need mathematics. Nolikka is given one of them, in maintenance, tracking and calculating the replacement timetables for the hydrocylers.

The numbers lie inert beneath her fingers as she adds, subtracts, multiplies. They have their secrets, she knows.

These days they keep them.

A scientific paper causing a minor academic stir is published. Her name is there as one of the contributors. She gets a courtesy copy in hard-text.

The tinny voice of the text-aide on her wrist sounds out the equations and the formulae.

Even on her fifth re-reading, she cannot understand it.

For a week, it lies on the bench in her one-room residence, until one day, for no reason she can remember, she picks it up and wraps a courier-band around it. The text-aide stencils the words she wants in the addressee field.

Captain Night, Utopian Ideal, via Re-Awakened Technologies, Gulfonodi, Fittakan, Molden Health, Minmatar Republic.

She leaves the rest blank.

Strangers

noreply@blogger.com (Ciarente Roth) — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 03:41:00 +0000

It’s a familiar voice, a familiar, precious voice, every shift in intonation and clipped vowel anticipated.

It’s the voice of a stranger.

“You were gone a long time,” the stranger says, the stranger using Hara’s voice, Hara’s beloved golden voice, that once whispered secrets in the night’s grey hush like honey pouring from a jar. “It’s been a long time, Noli.”

Nolikka Toin hears her own voice reply, and her own voice is a stranger’s as well, falling out of her mouth like cold white pebbles and clattering into the silence. “I wasn’t gone. I was a prisoner. I thought about you every day, Hara. Didn’t you think about me a little?”

“Of course.” Hurt. Wounded, even. The silence thickens and deepens until it’s the color of blood and the sound of her thundering pulse. Past it, Nolikka hears: “Of course I did. You know how I feel about you.”

“I thought I did. You’re married.” She can barely hear herself, the thin grey thread of her voice winding through the storm of deep maroon enveloping her.

Hara’s words, though, Hara’s words cut through the storm in jagged gold flashes. “It’s how it is, Noli, you know that. It was just a phase, everyone goes through it.”

A phase. Her throat is so tight the words will choke her. Warm salt on her lips surprises her until she realizes tears.“I’m 37 years old, what sort of phase do you call this?”

“Noli, suuli, don’t cry, don’t – ”

Hands on her arm then. Her skin crawls and her stomach turns. “Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me.”

The hands on her arm fall away. “Suuli, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so – ”

“Sorry, spirits fuck you’re sorry, how sorry do you think I am?” The room is too small. Hara is too close. There is no air, just the roiling storm inside her. “Do you know what they – do you know what – ancestors choke - ”

“Please don’t cry. Please don’t.”

And it breaks.

She is on her feet. “Don’t you dare tell me not to cry, don’t you dare!” Out. Now. The door is somewhere to her left. Her feet catch on the coffee-table as she tries to get to it. Her palms burn on the carpet and the shock of the fall jars the sobs loose at last. Hara is trying to help her up and Nolikka jerks away, slams into the wall and kicks out. A yielding impact beneath her foot, a grunt. “Get away from me, get away, get away!”

The door. Open. Space. Air.

Hara’s stranger’s voice fading behind her.

Fading into the cacophony of all the strangers’ voices that fill the station.

Conversations On The Utopian Ideal: Thirty

noreply@blogger.com (Ciarente Roth) — Fri, 27 May 2011 11:45:00 +0000

Sergeant Helmi Alpassi submitted to the security scan at the entrance to Captain Night’s hangar stoically.

It’d be pretty fucking hypocritical of me to complain about getting checked for chips and jacks, after all.

She was less resigned to leaving her sidearm in the security locker there, but that was procedure they insisted on back at Pilot Roth’s hangars too and she had no reasonable justification to refuse.

And it wasn’t as if she was appreciably less deadly without her weapon as with it.

Still, options are nice things to have.

Pilot Roth, of course, had no weapon to turn over. She passed through the checkpoint with a polite, if slightly absent-minded, smile for the marines, accepted back the small parcel she had brought with her, and headed for the docking umbilical. An ensign was waiting at the top to escort them through the Utopian Ideal’s corridors, and not, this time, to the officer’s mess or the office of either Captain Night or Commander Invelen, but into an unfamiliar part of the ship where the occasional open door revealed scientific equipment and terminals that looked as if they’d be at home in the most up-to-date research facilities in the Cluster.

The ensign stopped. “Dr Toin’s lab is just along here, sir,” he said.

“Thank you very much,” Pilot said warmly. “Helmi, why don’t you wait here while I – ”

“No,” Helmi said.

“I’m quite sure,” Pilot said, in the dry tone she used when she thought she was being a woman of the world, “that I’m not in any danger from one research scientist, Helmi.”

One research scientist with spirits’ know what going on in her head after two years collared like a dog in a kennel. Helmi considered giving Pilot a brief explanation of what a person could do in the mindless panic of post-traumatic anxiety, illustrated with a couple of colorful examples from her own personal barracks-room experience, then looked at Pilot’s soft blue eyes and settled for: “No.”

Pilot sighed. “Fine. Just don’t scare her, Helmi. I don’t think she’s had a very good time of it.”

Helmi nodded. I won’t scare her.

If she doesn’t scare me.

That seemed, to Helmi, to be about fair.

She expected the door to lead to another sterile grey laboratory with banks of monitors and machines, but her first impression of the room beyond it was color. Reds and pinks, golden tones shading into orange, spilling around the room in shapes that seemed vaguely familiar from long-ago classes, strings of numbers and symbols that swooped and spun and had Helmi’s heart-rate ticking up a little in the half-second before she identified holoprojection and cut in the optical filters that damped it down to a pastel blur.

At the center of that blur was the object of Pilot’s visit, clear and sharp now in contrast to the haze in her dark blue insignia-less uniform. ID confirmation spooled across Helmi’s retinas as her internal neocom made a facial recognition match, Dr Nolikka Toin, Corporation: Ishukone, Rank: Restricted, Posting: Restricted, Age: 37, Hair: Brown, Eyes: N/A, Height: 178 cm, Weight: 50 kg.

That last Helmi assessed as being out of date, as Nolikka turned at the sound of footfalls and the holoprojection stilled. Incarceration will do that to a person.

Do other things, too.

Still, the woman didn’t seem about to fly off the handle, tense though she was, and so Helmi moved aside and let Pilot through the door after her.

“Hello,” Pilot said, her soft Gallente accent softer than usual. “Dr Toin? My name’s Cia, Cia Roth. I’m, well. Ami’s sister, among other things. I brought you – I brought you some things.”

“Ms Roth. Sir,” Nolikka said, her voice clear but without any weight to it, a voice, Helmi thought, neither used to giving orders nor having to raise itself to be heard. “Thank you.”

“You don’t have to ‘sir’, me,” Pilot said. “I’m not – in your chain of command, is that the term?”

“Yes, Ms Roth.” The scientist didn’t relax from her at ease posture, not as straight-backed as Helmi would have liked to see from anyone under her command but not bad. For a techie.

Pilot set the bag down on the nearest bench. “I’ll put them – I’ll just put them here, shall I? It’s just some – some things I’d want, if I were …” She paused. “Um. Just some things.”

Nolikka looked a little baffled, as well, Helmi thought, she might. Perhaps it was the done thing in the Federation to give scented soaps and handcream to people recently escaped from slave labor factories. I’m sorry about your illegal imprisonment and abuse. Have some lavender water!

Helmi wouldn’t know.

“And this is, um. My friend Helmi,” Pilot said.

“Hello,” Helmi said neutrally.

“Sir,” Nolikka said.

“Do you have everything you need?” Pilot asked.

“Yes, Ms Roth. Thank you.”

“Do you mind if I … ” Pilot pulled a stool out from under the nearest bench, and perched herself upon it, even as she went on, “Do you mind if I sit down? It’s a long walk from the lock to back here.”

“No, Ms Roth, I don’t mind.”

Which was, Helmi judged, a lie. A good one, told with a straight face, and no betraying flicker to the voice, but a lie nonetheless, polite courtesy from a woman who wanted nothing more than for them to leave her in peace.

But Pilot hears what she wants to hear.

“How are you holding up?” Pilot asked.

“I’m well, thank you, Ms Roth.” Nolikka’s voice was inflexionless.

Pilot toyed a little with the bag on the bench. “I remember, for me … it was such a relief that it was over. I couldn’t feel anything else through the relief for a while. And when I did, it seemed so … inappropriate.” She smiled, as if Nolikka could see her. “It was over, it was past, I’d been fine. So why … ?”

There was a small silence, and then the scientist asked softly, “For you?”

Pilot shrugged. “It was different, for me. Not so long. Not for … the same reasons. I’m not pretending to know how you feel. But …” She toyed with the bag again. “After, the first thing I wanted, well, after I slept for about twenty hours, was to be clean. A bath with bubbles, and nice soap, and all the things that … just weren’t part of what had happened. I thought you might …”

“Thank you,” Nolikka said, and this time Helmi thought she meant it.

“But not,” Pilot said with a little wry twist to her lips, “Not what you were wanting?”

“I don’t want for anything, here,” Nolikka said. “But thank you.”

Pilot looked around. “Silver said you’ve been doing some exceptional research.” Nolikka looked slightly baffled, and Pilot went on, “Captain Night. He said your work is extraordinary.”

A faint hint of color in the scientist’s cheeks, then. “He’s too generous. I am quite out of the loop on latest developments.”

“I’m sure you’ll catch up,” Pilot said, studying her. “Have you thought about what you’ll do? When this is over?”

“When this is over,” Nolikka said blankly.

“Will you go back to Ishukone? Do you have family there?”

“I have a sister,” Nolikka said, and paused. “Go back to Ishukone? Of course.”

“Of course,” Pilot said gently. “Besides your sister?” At the other woman’s expression of incomprehension, she prompted, “Someone special? You’d like to see again?”

The answer came with the speed of pre-prepared fiction. “No. No-one like that.”

“I see,” Pilot said softly.

From the expression on that pretty Gallente face, Helmi thought that Pilot did see, even if what she saw was not what she'd been looking for.

And for once, heard what she didn’t want to hear, too.

Conversations On The Utopian Ideal: Twenty Nine

noreply@blogger.com (Ciarente Roth) — Thu, 26 May 2011 05:42:00 +0000

((co-written with Silver Night))

The room was full of colours. Pouring out of the holoprojector in a cascade of swirling equation which danced around each other and merged and reformed, following the gestures of the slender scientist who stood at their heart as a squadron of fighters follows their target, they stained the utilitarian grey of the Utopian Ideal’s laboratory a thousand bright and changing hues. Dr Nolikka Toin flicked her fingers at one number and beckoned to another and the images spun and changed and rained rainbow sparks on the floor and then hovered on the palm of her hand. Colours flared and faded: blue and indigo, blurring into purple and then flushing deep red a little further on; orange and gold always rotating around each other, each shading towards sunset pink at one end of their orbit before recovering their original hue as they looped back towards the centre of the room.

The ship’s sensors picked up the splash of the projections against the walls and ceiling of the laboratory. Because the ship was not simply a ship at that moment at time, but a ship with pilot in pod, the sensors filtered their input, focused it, translated it from data to a faint tickling and fed it to the human intelligence controlling the carrier. Instructions came back, seeking more detail, more input, and the ship responded, activating monitors and isolating feeds. The ship’s computers were capable of testing the equations that swirled around the laboratory.

The ship’s pilot was capable of appreciating them.

Incomplete, the computers judged, reached a dead-end in the line and stopped.

The ship’s pilot followed the leap past that gap to the numbers spinning on the other side.

New instructions reached the ship, and obediently, it withdrew the neural links connecting it to the pilot and subsided into somnolence as the pilot slid through the decanting chamber and into the briskly efficient embrace of what the crew called the de-gooing room. Moments later, he was dressed and walking the corridors of the ship that was now, once more, simply a ship, just as he was now once more, merely a man.

At least, as much as any pilot who had killed millions and spent billions could be merely anything.

This pilot, Captain Silver Night, paused in the corridor a few meters short of the door of the laboratory, and sent a polite comm inquiry to the scientist within. Captain Night wishes to know if a visit would inconvenience Dr Toin. Not that the Captain of the Utopian Ideal needed permission to enter the laboratory or any other room on his ship, of course. Some things, however, were done whether strictly required or not – and Silver was quite sure that Dr Nolikka Toin had not been in a position to refuse entry to her workspace for quite some time.

After a moment, an equally polite response came back: Dr Toin would welcome such a visit.

The equations had stilled their dance by the time Silver opened the door, hovering around the head of the woman who stood at their heart, staining the dark blue of her insignia-less uniform and the dull grey of the collar around her neck with splashes of vivid turquoise and green, stippling her spacer’s-tan white face with indigo and violet.

“Dr Toin,” he said. “I noticed you were working late. I hope I am not interrupting.”

“Not at all, sir. I am …” A flick of her fingers sent the symbols around her spinning lazily, and she gave a small smile. “A little stuck.”

Silver studied the rotating figures, f(x14) = a_0 + ∑ - (n=1 ) ^ ∞ µ (aπd) - ∫ cos (f (xϬ)) dx + b/n / sin (4 ﻑ /7θ) floating past his face in bright blue and dusky yellow. A faint electro-magnetic field prickled against his skin. “At the transition between Tahvulen’s paradox and the Mondmuggar equivalencies. Have you considered inverting the Elerouc transform?”

Nolikka’s smile grew wider. “Excellent idea as that is, it turned out to lead me nowhere. Or, to infinity, which in this case is identical.”

“Perhaps your colleagues in Ishukone will have a more useful suggestion, then. When this is over.”

“Yes, sir. And – is there …” A hand crept to the thin circlet of metal at her neck, inactive now but still intact as the nanites ate their way busily through the explosive booby-trap inside, and she stopped.

“Any word on when that will be? It’s my understanding that both S.C.I.D and Republic Justice are both all but ready to move. Lieutenant Etay’s colleagues have taken your deposition, I believe?”

Nolikka’s fingers tightened on the collar and the colours around her dimmed and dipped. “Yes, sir.”

Silver frowned slightly. “Is there something about that I should know, Dr Toin?”

“That you should … I don’t, I – ” She stammered to an anxious halt, the holoprojections fading to the palest transparency and then vanishing completely, leaving her a lonely figure stranded in the middle of a blank grey room. Questions without ‘right’ answers, Dr Akell had warned him, pose intolerable dilemmas.

“Please, take a seat, Dr Toin,” Silver said gently. “There is one just to your left.”

As she located the stool and perched on it, he came a little further into the room, drawing out another seat with a deliberate scrape and sitting down himself. “I noticed you’re using Isida’s convergence operation to bridge the medium and low frequency harmonic interface. I was under the impression Dr Sihorah’s work had superseded that.”

Nolikka’s expression cleared and her grip on the metal collar around her neck loosened. “Sir, I still find Sihorah’s proofs unstable past one-ten of max power.”

“That’s … suboptimal for real-world application,” Silver said, and the corner of Nolikka’s mouth twitched up.

“It’s an elegant theorem,” she said. “But unfortunately a brittle one as well.”

Silver paused, and then with careful precision, said, “You have spoken to a number of representatives from S.C.I.D. and Republic Justice, as well as my own officers, over the past week. Is that correct?”

“Yes, sir,” Nolikka said readily.

“These interviews have taken a considerable amount of your time,” Silver said. “Have you found them fatiguing?”

“Sir, a little, sir. But they need to know as much as I can tell them, sir, I understand that.”

“That is, unfortunately and regrettably, the case, yes,” Silver said. A query to his internal NEOCOM sent a search program burrowing through logs and records: Nolikka Toin, Doctor: interview {with} Saernal Taerild, Colonel {or} Demen Jadat, Sergeant {or} Supreme Court Investigative Division (any) {or} Republic Justice Department (any): time/location/duration/doorlogs/personnel present.

The results returned quickly. The information they contained was also, in Silver’s opinion, suboptimal.

“The personnel from S.C.I.D. here today kept you for quite some time,” he said evenly. “Without breaks, according to the ship’s records.”

“Yes, sir,” Nolikka said.

“If they feel the need to speak to you again, one of my officers will be present,” Silver said. “Sergeant Jadat, perhaps. To prevent a repeat of that – or any other failing in manners.”

“Yes, sir,” Nolikka said, and there was unmistakable relief in her voice. I will, Silver thought, be explaining a few things to Lieutenant Etay’s colleagues.

“Dr Toin,” he said. “You are a guest aboard my ship. As such, I consider a discourtesy to you to be one done to me. And I take … a dim view of bad manners. Rest assured I will be making my opinions known to the officers you have dealt with. And their superiors.”

“Captain Night, sir.” For a moment, head bent, Nolikka could have passed for any officer on the ship, brown hair with threads of early grey tied austerely back, spacer-pale skin in sharp contrast to the dark blue of the Ideal uniform. A Deteis tube-bred crèche-child, one of many, spick-and-span and always on call.

Then she lifted her head and the thin circlet of her collar caught the light that did not reflect at all off the opaque white of her eyes, and she was not one of many, not at all.

“Sir,” she said again, and stopped.

“You may speak freely, Dr Toin,” Silver encouraged.

“Sir. They said, the Fedo officers, they said …” Another pause, and the rest of her words came in a breathless rush. “About the rest of the operation, when I go back there, for cover, with the people going inside, they said.”

“That will not happen,” Silver said mildly. Explaining more than a few things, perhaps. “Dr Toin. You have my word that no operational plan that requires your presence will be approved. You have my word that you will not leave this ship except by your choice.”

Nolikka said quietly, “I don’t want to be the cause of any problems for you, sir.”

“I am not the one who will have problems,” Silver assured her. “Believe me. Remember, I am a capsuleer.”

“Yes,” she said. “That makes things different for you, doesn’t it? I’ve never seen a capsuleer pilot before, I don’t … quite know how things are for you.”

“That’s an – ” Manners stopped him there. Odd choice of words for a blind woman.

Nolikka smiled. “Interesting way to put it? I can see you, Captain. I just don’t see what you see.”

“What do you see?” he asked.

“What do you see?” she said, turning the question back on him.

Silver considered. “You are … thirty-seven years old, one hundred seventy two centimetres tall – ”

“Which you got from my personnel file.”

“Which I got from your personnel file,” he acknowledged. “Deteis, from the Ishukone tube program, brown hair, wearing a uniform with no insignia. Your eyes have been damaged by radiation exposure and there is a scar on your forehead that may or may not be related to that. No jewellery.”

“Except my necklace,” Nolikka said, tapping a finger on the control collar.

“No jewellery,” Silver said again, and there was a small moment of silence between them, not uncomfortable.

Nolikka broke it, her voice soft. “You’re taller than I am. I don’t know what colour your hair is but your voice is the same colour as the fourteenth cosin pi function in the last repeating sequence of Ititeola’s theorem. And younger than you are. A clone?”

“Yes,” Silver said.

“You’re used to talking to people, but not so much with them. You keep secrets as if it’s second nature. You risk your life for strangers and you could have been a serious mathematician if you’d put the time in. Still could be, I think.”

“Not strangers,” Silver corrected. “Ishukone.”

“Ishukone,” Nolikka said, and smiled. “I’m right about the math, though. And you’re in love with your X.O.”

“That,” Silver said, “is not correct.”

“No?” Nolikka said. “Your voice changes when you talk to her, even giving orders.”

“You are hypothesising ahead of your data, Dr Toin,” Silver said.

She laughed a little. “You asked what I saw. Is any of it right?”

“I am,” Silver allowed, “taller than you are.”

Nolikka laughed again and leaned back, reaching up one hand to brush the equations once more circling lazily above her head, dark blue and green in a slow and sinuous orbit. Silver recognised old, old formulae, long ago established as the mathematics that ruled the speed of light and the pull of gravity wells, rotating leisurely around each other as they traced an elliptic loop around the woman at their centre, and realised he was watching the quiet background hum of her thoughts, different from and yet not entirely alien to the steady stream of data that passed beneath the surface of his own mind when the neural interfaces connected him to a ship.

The stately dance slowed further, the equations shedding complexity and reducing down to strings of simple equivalencies.

“You should get some rest, Dr Toin,” Silver said. “I can have an ensign show you to your quarters.”

The symbols coiled themselves around her wrist and curled into the palm of her hand. “Thank you, Captain. That’s kind of you,” she said gravely, and then smiled, closing her hand around the holograph until the light was just glimmer between her fingers, so faint it could have been entirely his imagination. “But I know my way.”

Equal

noreply@blogger.com (Ciarente Roth) — Sat, 21 May 2011 07:33:00 +0000

((co-authored with Silver Night))

The numbers stream past her fingers in a river of light and sound, whispering their secrets to her, dancing at her command. Arranged and rearranged the symbols resting on her left hand equal the ones circling her right. They separate and recombine and make new patterns in the darkness behind her eyes, spin into all the shapes of space. There, Nolikka Toin tells them, and there, and there.

They obey her, beautiful in their asymmetrical perfection, obey her as she must obey –

The treacherous thought slips in and the numbers wobble. Nolikka fights to bring them back into line but she’s lost the balance of it and they spin sideways and away, slipping out of her control like everything else is out of her control, racing towards the vanishing point …

She hits the keys to save what she’s done and takes a deep breath. Don’t think. That’s the key, mad as it is for someone whose very life depends on her ability to think better and faster than others. Don’t think about where you are, about what you’re doing. Just the numbers. There’s nothing but the numbers, after all, in the end.

As she’s about to try again, a voice stops her. “Dr. Toin! Over here.”

Nolikka doesn’t have a name for that voice, doesn’t have a name for most of the Gallente accents in this place she’s in for those hours of the day she can’t find a way back to the numbers. She knows it, though, male, middle-aged, belonging to a man who smells of hair-gel and cheese and too much cologne. The voice is in charge and she can’t afford to hesitate, turns and walks across the laboratory towards it, sidestepping work-tables and colleagues who are, as always, in exactly the same place as they are every day.

“This gentleman,” Too Much Cologne says, “has some questions for you, Dr. Toin.”

People there, she can tell, not just one, not just this gentleman. Their breathing and the small sounds of movement make a slow surf of dark waves behind her eyes, in front and to the right of her. Then a voice, a new voice, male, tall. Expensive, Nolikka thinks, not knowing why, hearing it as a taupe ribbon shot through with silk, slipping tautly though her fingers, the standardized accent of a newsreader that was standard to no-one at all with only the occasional depth of the vowels betraying …

Ishukone.

She loses the thread of his words, scrambles after it, makes sense of his question and finds that his question makes sense. Answers it without thinking, and finds him with her at the end of her explanation with another question pointed directly at the gap in her hypothesis.

For a few moments she forgets even Ishukone in the sheer exhilaration of another mind, a mind whose thoughts she isn’t intimately familiar with after two years of close confinement, a mind that follows hers and understands.

Words are inadequate. “It's easier to show you,” she says. Let me show you what I see. Please. “ I have the simulations – ”

“Of course,” Expensive says.

She hurries back to her workstation, hearing him follow her, other footsteps, she didn’t care who, it didn’t matter. Keystrokes bring up her simulation, the electro-magnetic charge of the projection pricking against her skin. “This is the current mass-manufactured version.”

“I’m very familiar with it,” Expensive tells her. She believes him.

Nolikka reaches up to run her fingers over the field, every number in every line of it as familiar to her as Haraila’s face had been. “You can feel the resilience, but ultimately it’s a go-no-go solution. Go ahead. Go ahead and touch it.”

She feels the shift and give in the projection as he does, and smiles. “Wait a moment now.” The numbers answer her, change their faces and join hands in a new dance of new equals. The tingle of the charge against her skin changes colour and she feels her equations move them both back a little, firmly but politely. There’s no excuse for bad manners, Noli, Hara had always said and she has taught the numbers that, for Hara, to remember.

“Interesting,” Expensive says, and Nolikka hears the hint of Ishukone again and falls hard out of the equations and back into her hungry, collared self.

Stupid, stupid, she chides herself. You planned and waited and prepared and almost lost your chance because someone asked you about your work. Head-in-the-clouds is right.

He has more questions for her. She has answers, some, not all, because his questions are good ones and she knows they’ll make her work for the missing answers tomorrow and the next day until they were there and clear and vivid in her mind.

Not now, though. Not now.

Nolikka clears her throat, makes her voice as casual as she can, and asks, “Is that an Ishukone accent I hear?”

Mistake.

Pain, every nerve in her body firing distress signals at once, crackling red light behind her eyes. Beyond comprehension, beyond bearing except she has no choice but to bear it, crushing even her thought of no, no, no into a white-hot black hole of agony.

Then gone. The edge of the workbench is hard beneath her hands. Sparks crackle and blaze in her head, neurons still firing at random, and she sucks a breath, another, tries to remember who and where she was and then does and tries to forget again.

A rich dark taupe ribbon unfurls in her head, the threads of silk gone to a burnished samite, and says “I’m sorry, you’re mistaken. It’s Korama.”

Which makes no sense. Because what is there in Korama but Ishukone?

I’m sorry, you’re mistaken, that’s right.

Or.

Yes. But I don’t want the others here to know.

Hope, then. A small sharp bubble of light in her mind. Not a coincidence, that Expensive is here, with his clever questions and the trace of home in his voice.

He has more questions. Nolikka forces herself to focus against the residual flicks and jerks of the collar, testing him with her answers now, pushing past the concepts into the strings of numbers beyond them. Expensive follows her, and she takes another deep breath and another chance.

“These are the equations I mean,” she says, and touches the keys that will bring up a screen of data she can’t see. Can’t see, but knows, nonetheless, because it’s her numbers there, a string of familiar formula and, seeded in among them, carefully segregated from the strings to prevent automated checking from noticing, numbers and letters that didn’t belong.

Not in shield tech, anyway.

On a docking registry, though, there they’d belong, telling any reader that the Otanuomi Blue was in port.

“I understand,” Expensive says. “This is exactly the kind of thing I’m looking for.”

Nolikka touches the keys she knows will blank the screen, hope acquiring sharp edges that make it painful to look at. “This is cutting edge work, Mr ... ?”

“Captain,” Expensive says. “Captain Night.” Which is not the right name for that voice, which is not the soft grey of a sleeping station or the cold sable of a sky empty of sun, but perhaps, Nolikka thinks, it’s just exactly as true as Korama is.

“Captain Night. These simulations represent years of research,” Nolikka says. “Years.”

“I know,” Captain Night says. “Of course, the proof will be in the final tests.”

Proof. “I'm not sure how much more proof I can provide you at this stage, in a laboratory, Captain.” I could run for the door and make them cut me down in front of him, that’d be proof. Is that what he needs me to do?

It surprises her, realising how much she doesn’t want to die. But if it would get the others out … She is Ishukone, and so are fully half of them. And she had been Lead Project Scientist, and that should still mean something to her. Is that what you need me to do?

“Of course,” Captain Night says. “We will need plans to go to full scale testing. That's why we're here. To see if we can't get the tech working out in the wild in the near future, as it were.” Wait, that was, Nolikka is almost certain, parsing plans and near future.

Wait.

Captain Night excuses himself, says something about hammering out details, and she hears his footsteps receding.

Nolikka waits, straining to hear the voices at the other end of the room, too far away for anything but a low blur of conversation, until –

Pain.

And gone again, almost immediately, leaving her shaking and gasping and then an instant later pain and then not and then again, and again. Her thoughts scatter and fracture, I did something … they know … what was it …, muscles spasming as nerves fired at random. Her name, Too Much Cologne is calling her name, and she has to go, not to go will mean more punishment, that Nolikka knows even as jagged flares behind her eyes break apart every other chain of thought she tries to put together until there’s red and red and redredred and nothing else in all the world.

“Temporary side effects,” Too Much Cologne is saying as she gets closer. “With no effect on productivity, of course.”

“So I would hope,” Captain Night says, and the silk behind the ribbon of his voice has gone completely.

“Dr Toin, you'll be going with Captain Night,” Too Much Cologne says, “to examine the setup of his manufacturing facilities and make sure there's no impediment to our moving forward with production.”

There is one right answer to that, one answer that won’t get the collar triggered. “Yessir,” Nolikka says.

“His staff will ensure your focus on the task at hand as we do here.” Too Much Cologne’s voice leaks fake bonhomie over Nolikka like a broken sewer and for a moment she thinks fear and nausea combined will have her vomiting on his shoes. “Can't have you scientists day-dreaming the day away, can we?”

“ We also want to ensure that to the degree it is practical,” Captain Night says, “that the production version of the technology is compatible as possible with our setup, so you'll need to make sure and take note of our processes.”

One right answer to that, too. And the answers have to be right. Her muscles are still jumping and twitching and nerves scream with memory. “Of course, Captain.”

“I don't want Captain Night to have any complaints about you, Dr Toin,” Too Much Cologne says. “I’d take a dim view of that.”

"Some of these research types just require a firm hand, I've found.” Nolikka wonders if she imagined it before, the trace of home she heard before, the depth she had been so certain lay behind Captain Night’s smooth announcer’s tones. It’s not there now. “I'm sure she'll do splendidly."

They talk about money. After a few moments Nolikka understands that she’s being bought, that Captain Night is haggling over the price he’ll pay for her, with nobody being so coarse as to say so out loud. Perhaps this is the plan, she thinks.

He’s either lying now, or he was lying to her before, and Nolikka doesn’t know him well enough to tell whether this is his real voice or the other was.

Doesn’t know him at all.

Except he understands her equations.

And she has no choice.

She goes where she is told, until they reach the door that none of them are able to pass and her feet stop without her willing them too. A hard shove in the small of her back sends her forward, off balance, bracing herself again pain that doesn’t come. Her shoulder hits the wall and she is suddenly in a space she doesn’t know, when every step for the past two years has been familiar to the point of monotony. She can’t move with the knowledge of it, can’t breathe. A hand takes her arm and tugs her along and she stumbles forward.

“No trouble out in the station, Doctor,” Captain Night tells her. “Mr Erquilenne is a talented amateur. We are not.”

There is one right answer to that as well. “Yes, Captain.”

Outside, then, strange voices around her, spaces wider and then narrower and then wider again. Smells, noises, the colours behind her eyes are a senseless cacophony but the hand on her arm keeps her moving. Then a quieter place, metal echoing beneath their feet, a cold oily smell that she remembers. It equals hangar. They are moving up an incline that vibrates beneath their combined footsteps. Boarding ramp.

A smaller space. A hiss and click behind her and a change in air pressure.

“Excuse me,” Captain Night says hurriedly, and all the burnished low notes are back in his voice. Fabric rustles, footsteps, a door closing, and Nolikka realises he is gone.

A Gallente voice says neutrally, “Are we secure?”

Nolikka turns her head, trying to tell who she’s there with, how many. Another voice, a woman’s, Ishukone clear in more than the vowels, saying “If we aren't, we're fucked.”

Someone addressed as Colonel is ordered to run a scan.

Nolikka is alone on a ship with an unknown number of strangers and one of them probably has the trigger to her collar and she sees whitewhitewhitewhite as voices talk past her.

No. To her, now. Names that she can’t match to any of the bodies around her, acronyms that mean nothing, something about –

The Federation.

She gives them her name and her rank and her ID number.

It didn’t work last time.

Gives it again, or thinks she does, in the middle of whitewhitewhitewhite, and a door opens and closes and Captain Night says “That isn't necessary, Doctor.”

There’s no reason for her to feel safer, no reason at all, when he’s just bought her like a trained furrier, but he understands her equations and on a certain level that’s everything she needs to know. Whitewhitewhitewhite recedes and she can hear that there’s just four other people near her, none of them too close.

“I want to apologize for activating your collar earlier, too,” Captain Night says, a faint hint of shrip carried to her on his words. No mistaking the Ishukone now, for all the polished non-accent that lies over it. “This is my ship, and you certainly are not a prisoner. We could use your help freeing the others, though.”

“Captain Night, sir,” Nolikka says, because That’s all right is untrue and Thank you is nowhere near enough and neither of them equal the numbers balancing themselves behind her eyes. “Korama, sir?”

“Dr Toin,” Captain Night says with formal courtesy, almost as if it is not his ship but her laboratory. “How would they know? Commander Invelen and I are both Ishukone. Whatever else we might have become since then, always that.”

There’s a name, then, for the woman with the smoker’s rasp. I knew they’d send someone, Nolikka thinks, and realises she’s spoken aloud when they try and tell her that no, they’re not sent by Ishukone.

That the corporation had no intention of coming for her, that’s too much, that’s whitewhitewhitewhite again and voices washing over her in long rolling waves with an undertow to suck her down to darkness. She surfaces enough to ask to send word to her sister and Captain Night tells her that it might be best to wait until they have all the others in hand as well. Which means no, and the waves take her down again.

A question brings her back up to where she can breathe and think and hear. The dynamics of the fluctuations in the lower spectrum under sustained laser exposure, and the numbers dance for her. She follows them to the answer and Captain Night asks another, the strands of his voice no longer drawn tight against her grip but resting gently on the palms of her hands. Another answer, another question, leading her through the well-known steps of long-familiar formulae to the quiet certainty at their heart.

“The flaws in the design that you put there,” Captain Night says to her then “They were subtle, but it was still a dangerous thing to do.”

There had been a time when Nolikka had not even understood that who and what she was might not be equal, when violating the implacable accuracy of her equations and endangering the lives that might one day depend on them was outside all comprehension.

Before.

She is suddenly, deeply ashamed. “Yes, sir. I thought about the crews of the ships, sir, I did.”

He corrects her. “Dangerous for you, Doctor. A brave thing.”

Forgiven.

Absolved.

Strong hands, disorientingly cold and unyielding, help her to a chair. There is food, so rich she spins back and forth between hunger and nausea. There is a new voice, one Commander Invelen says belongs to a medical officer. Hands touch her, impersonally gentle, and then are gone. Captain Night is talking to the Gallente about our course going forward. Between one mouthful of food and the next she is suddenly so tired that the words fuzz apart into meaningless spirals and Nolikka lays her head down on the table and watches them without comprehension.

Time skips and jumps. Captain Night is talking to her, and she is answering, with no idea of what either of them are saying. She is standing, walking, a cool metal hand guiding her, smelling tobacco and machine oil.

She is lying down. A blanket settles over her. A door closes, and then it is quiet, quiet enough for her to hear her own heart beating, its slow and steady pace accommodating the susurration of her breath.

She counts and divides and multiplies and watches the long and simple string of symbols that describe the rhythm in her chest spin out in a slow and gracious orbit, until everything inside her equals their steady tempo and they draw her with them into the gentle velvet dark.

When This Goes Wrong ...

noreply@blogger.com (Ciarente Roth) — Tue, 10 May 2011 04:58:00 +0000

"Of all your fucking appalling ideas, farmboy, this one takes the prize for une assiette pleine de merde."

Lieutenant Charles Etay shrugged a little, having, Capitaine Elienne Desorlay thought sourly, clearly developed an immunity to even my best glare.

Fortune me forniquer.

"What's your better idea, Eli?" Etay asked. "Go back and knock on the front door? Say 'Excusez-moi, s'il vous plaît, je vous ai entendu gardent esclaves ici.' Like that?"

"Better than getting podders mixed into it." Eli shook the last cigarette out of the crumpled pack. "This one especially."

"Because ...?"

"Don't play dumber than you are, Charlie," Eli snapped. "You think he's all post-Sansha and reformed? Really?"

"Now you sound like Proleque."

"And baiser vous with a splintery stick too." She found her lighter and set fire to the cigarette with more vigour than was perhaps necessary. "You think about how our careers are going to look when this gets back home?"

Etay looked down. "I have," he admitted quietly.

"And?"

He paused, and then looked back at her, eyes a little narrowed against the smoke drifting into his face. "I can't just leave them there, Eli."

Merde.

She flicked ash at him for the small, vindictive pleasure of seeing him flinch. "When this goes wrong, farmboy ..."

The corner of his mouth twitched up. "You'll say I told you so?"

Eli snorted. "You'd better believe I will," she said. "If we both live long enough, you'd better believe I will."

Avec grandes cloches sur le dessus.

If I get the fucking chance.

After

noreply@blogger.com (Ciarente Roth) — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 14:23:00 +0000

Nolikka Toin was running, and then she wasn't.

The bit in between never did come clear.

A lot of the rest came back. Slowly, but it came back.

One morning she woke from a dream about swimming with a million fish turning and diving in perfect concert, and found the memory, clear and hard as a pearl in the palm of her hand, of Haraila swearing like a dockhand as the calm voice of the newscaster talked about Noir, about Malkalen, about war.

That was the first time she had anything in between brushing her teeth at the basin, shrip-flavoured toothpaste sharp on her tongue, and the crushing pain as they showed her how the collar worked.

She'd been told about the war, of course. It was why she was there, the pallet thin between her spine and the concrete floor every night, scooping the scant mouthful of sour casein meal from the bowl they dropped in front of her every morning, shuffling with the others to the laboratory.

Remembering it didn't make it feel any more real, even if now it was something she'd heard on the news rather than something someone had told her. War. Ships firing on each other and exploding in the deep dark of space.

Insane.

But here she was.

Haraila swearing and the recall order and the noise breaking out all around them in the corridors as they ran for the ship, voices raised, Gallente accents ...

Running.

And then not.

Lying in the dark with a headache making spots of light pulse and dance behind her eyes. A man saying Lie still. They hit you. Do you remember?

Not that she could tell it was dark, of course, except she could. She'd always been able to, although neither she nor the doctors could ever explain.

The man - Oinola, he said his name was, a doctor - thought it was the blow to the head. Nol was too dizzy and sick to correct him.

He swore at their guards ... their wardens. Called them war-criminals, told them You've blinded this girl.

She heard the dull slap of the shot and the heavier thud as he fell.

No-one else spoke.

Useless, one of them called her, and Nol felt the gun come up. A surge of terror got words past the thickness of her tongue.

Her name.

Her rank.

Her speciality.

Not, most definitely not, useless.

The gun went down.

The guards put the collars on them, after that. And showed them all what the collars could do.

Time passed, measured by bowls of gruel, by cold nights, by loosening clothes and stinging sores. In the laboratory, though, time didn't pass. In the laboratory Nol could disappear into the equations and the harmonics as she always had, could slip away from the guards and the cowed whispers of the others who, like her, had not been quite fast enough to reach their ships before the captains blew the docking clamps and lit out for safer space.

She tried, when she could, to bend things just a little, just enough so there would be some small, fatal problem down the line. It was hard, though. She wasn't always Caldari first and scientist second.

There had been a time when those two things were a perfect complement.

Before she had been running, and then not.

Not after.

Cross Jurisdictional Issues

noreply@blogger.com (Ciarente Roth) — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 08:52:00 +0000

"This had fucking well better not be another fucking F.I.O. mindfuck," Capitaine Elienne Desorlay said sourly, grinding her cigarette out beneath her heel.

Lieutenant Charles Etay glanced at her, the corner of his mouth twitching up. "One way to find out."

Eli grunted, and followed him up the steps to the entrance of the S.C.I.D. office. Office was a little grandiose, perhaps, for what was two rooms and three people crammed up the side of a Republic Justice administration building, but law enforcement agencies had their priorities, and so this was a Liaison Office, not a Liaison Converted Stationary Storage. And it was there to deal with Cross Jurisdictional Issues, not Potential Political Clusterfucks.

Thirty seconds into the meeting and Eli was sure this wasn't another F.I.O. mindfuck. Sixty seconds in and she was starting to wonder if she might not have been better off if it had been.

Fed stations in the Republic, jurisdictional headache number one. Still, that was one reason why she and Etay were there, that and his pretty podder girlfriend and all her ISK, and why there were little converted stationary cupboards tucked away here and there throughout the Republic and the Federation and no doubt the State and Empire too although if Fortune loves me I'll never find out.

Usually the stations took care of their own problems, with a little help when necessary from whatever their native law-enforcement might be. In this case, on the particular Gallente station in question stuck like a pimple on an asteroid in the ass-end of Metro low-sec, that would be S.C.I.D.

Except the Republic Justice Liaison Broomcloset out there had come to the conclusion, and the S.C.I.D. Liaison Stationary Cupboard here obviously agreed, that the S.C.I.D. officers there were compromised.

Bought off, that meant. And Republic Justice wouldn't normally give a flying fuck at a rolling peshorky if a Fedo station couldn't keep its officers on the straight and narrow, but the Republic was a tiny bit sensitive about some issues.

Like slaves.

Even if they are Caldari.

Eli kept her mouth shut until the meeting was done, let Etay do what little talking there was to do. Not much. S.C.I.D. and Republic Justice had done most of it beforehand, that was clear. She and Etay were there to be told what someone snug behind a desk had decided they were going to do.

Go in without backup, where we can't trust our own people, where we can't flash tin to get out of trouble without getting in worse, and find out what's the truth behind these rumours of Caldari on a Gallente station ...

With collars around their necks.

On the sidewalk outside, however, was a different matter. "Fortune fuck me sideways, you fils de putain de merde," she snarled. "This is on you, farmboy, you and your pretty podder who thinks she can change the Cluster to suit her fancies. Look at us! Stuck out here in the cul of the Republic and about to get ourselves killed cleaning up some political shitstorm, or killed for cleaning it up if Fortune fucking smiles on us."

Etay put his hands in his pockets and smiled at his shoes. "Don't hold back," he said mildly. "How do you really feel about it?"

Eli swatted his arm, hard enough to make him wince and make her swear with the sting of her palm. "Get us out of this. Get your podder to pull some strings and get them to send someone else."

"Mmm," Etay said, and Eli could tell from long experience that her partner meant no by that, meant that's a line I won't cross, meant I'm not going to be moved on this one. "If they're right, Eli, this is pretty ugly. Those people ..."

"Fuck 'em, they're Callies, I'm not looking to get shivved in an alley for a pack of people who'd like to shoot me as soon as see me."

"Eli," Etay said patiently. "I'm Caldari."

She snorted. "One of your ancestors got cunt-struck by a piece of Callie tail back in the hither-and-yon, doesn't make you fucking anything. Don't even try that shit. You don't even drink fucking tea!"

"Still," Etay said. "Still. They're people. And Repub Juice can't sent anyone themselves. You heard them, the station is almost entirely Fed hires. Minmatar agents would stick out like sore thumbs."

"Oh, and you won't?"

He gave her his best sunny choirboy smile. "You just said I wasn't Caldari."

"Farmboy," Eli said, and stopped. You could be the purest Gallente off the Crystal Boulevard and you'd still catch every eye in every crowd.

Oh, fuck it. Dying in bed surrounded by fat, happy grandchildren was never more than a pipe dream, anyway. Not for someone like me, anyway.

And certainly not for pretty boys who catch the eye of pretty podders.

She lit a cigarette. "Fine. Fucking fine. Let's go. Save your ancestral cousins from their probably just deserts, or whatever. We live through this one, farmboy, though, you will talk to that girl of yours." She exhaled a gust of smoke, and whatever Etay had been going to say was cut off in a fit of coughing. "Doubt she wants you dead, Charlie, whatever else I think about her. Doubt she wants you dead."

Yet, anyway.

Yet.

The Consultation

noreply@blogger.com (Ciarente Roth) — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 07:26:00 +0000

"Do you know why you're here?"

Capitaine Elienne Desorlay took out a cigarette and lit it, ignoring the wrinkled nose of the man across the desk. "We'll ask the questions, M'ser Proleque," she said on a gust of smoke.

Beside her, Lieutenant Charles Etay coughed politely. "What my partner means to say," he said smoothly, "Is that we're eager to hear how we can assist the F.I.O. in this matter of ...?"

Tomas Proleque ran his hand over his bald head. "You can assume I'm more than immune to your provincial good-cop bad-cop routine," he said, and genial as his tone was Eli felt the hair lift on her arms. "And you should assume that the last thing, the very last thing, Capitaine Desorlay, that you want, is for me to answer your questions."

Eli couldn't bring herself to nod. She drew on her cigarette instead, started at Proleque through the smoke, and waited.

Been waiting all Fortune-fucked day, after all.

Called back to the Fed on five minutes notice for a consultation, that had been the first sign something was wrong. S.C.I.D. didn't spring for interbus tickets when a comm call would do.

The only reason to haul us over here is so we're in arm's reach when they decide they don't want us leaving again.

That hadn't been good, no.

Discovering that S.C.I.D. had yanked them back to hand them over to the F.I.O. with a bow on top, just about ...

Eli had been searching her memory for what she or Charlie might have done that had the F.I.O. sniffing after them for the hours they'd been cooling their heels in a blank grey waiting room. The Eletta business, maybe, had been the best she could come up with.

Until Proleque looked at her, looked at Etay, and smiled. "You know Ciarente Roth," he said.

Fortune fuck me and fuck him and especially fuck all podders everywhere, good and hard.

I knew that girl was trouble.

Etay made a mild, non-committal noise, and Eli was impressed despite herself by his restraint.

Proleque's smile widened. "Captain Roth is not the subject of today's discussion, Lieutenant Etay. Nor are her children. Your children." Unspoken, That could change hung in the air. "I simply need to know how her father is doing."

Her ... "Father?" Eli asked. Well, clearly, she had one, Eli, good thinking there.

Had one, has one ... a father the F.I.O. care about.

"I'm afraid I can't help you," Etay said. Proleque opened his mouth to speak and Etay went on, his slightly raspy voice mild and even. "I've never met the man. I don't think I've heard Captain Roth mention him more than once or twice."

"And what did she say?" Proleque was equally mild and even. Nonetheless, the air in the room seemed to chill a little. Eli felt as if she was watching a particularly fierce mindclash match, the opponents testing each other's weakness. And the first mistake will be the last.

"That he was travelling," Etay said. "That they were estranged. That she didn't know where he was and didn't care to find out."

Travelling.

F.I.O.

Travelling.

Deep undercover, more like.

Or ...

Dead.

Proleque looked at something on the screen of his terminal, touched a key. Probably his shopping list, Eli thought. Trying to make us think he has some sort of incriminating transcript. She might be provincial but police-work had its universal patterns. "Has he been in contact with her?"

"She hasn't mentioned," Etay said blandly.

Proleque looked at the screen again. "That wasn't what I asked."

Don't lie for her, Charlie, Eli willed him. She's safe from men like this. You aren't.

Nor am I, for that fucking matter.

Etay shot his cuffs and folded his hands on one knee. "I don't believe he's been in contact with her, no."

"Why?"

Etay smiled, very slightly. "Estranged."

Proleque matched the smile. "Do you know why?"

"It's not something we've discussed."

"Again, you answer a question I haven't asked," Proleque said. "Do you know why Captain Roth and her father are estranged?"

"I don't, no," Etay said, and Eli felt her heart sink as she heard the flat note of a lie in his voice.

"Would it surprise you to learn that it is due to her membership of Sansha's Nation?" Proleque asked genially.

"It would surprise me to learn that Captain Roth is a member of Sansha's Nation, yes." There was no inflection to Etay's voice.

"But not that her father objected to such an allegiance?"

Etay smiled, bland and sunny. "I imagine many fathers would."

"But you still say you have no knowledge of Captain Roth's contact with her father," Proleque said.

"I have no knowledge that Captain Roth has had any contact with her father," Etay corrected. He smiled again. "Does M'ser Roth say they have?"

"M'ser Roth - " Proleque said, and stopped. Eli saw the faintest flicker in his gaze, and knew, and felt Etay know beside her as well.

The match was over. And farmboy wins.

"You've misplaced him, haven't you?" Etay asked kindly.

Like he's slipped down behind the couch cushions, Eli thought, and then, on a fresh chill, they haven't 'misplaced' him.

They think the podder has.

And ...

Not by accident.

Wish You Were Here.

noreply@blogger.com (Ciarente Roth) — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 15:51:00 +0000

Tomas Proleque looked at the screen in front of him, frowning.

The message blinking on his screen wasn't, on the face of it, any reason for a frown. A bet laid on the fourth match in a mindclash tournament, for fifteen ISK, on Kurstan Ardmugar to win in twenty two minutes or less.

Tomas frowned, nonetheless.

Frowned, and reached for his comm handset, and punched in a number and then a code.

He had to wait a moment before the call went through. Even a section manager in the F.I.O.'s Anti-Piracy Division doesn't get automatic clearance to the division head's private line.

A click, a familiar voice. No need for introductions, not on this line, with this code.

"I think we've got a problem," Tomas said, instead of Hello.

He glanced back at his screen, and his frown grew deeper. There was absolutely nothing wrong with that message as a response to a recall signal. None of the signals that the message had been sent under coercion - a bet on an odd numbered match, for example. Agent wishes to stay in place, the message said to anyone who knew how to read it. Cover not compromised, intel forthcoming.

Except that this was the fifth time this particular agent had refused recall and the last two times had been orders, not suggestions.

Tomas rubbed a hand over his head, the habit his wife blamed for his baldness, and sighed. "I think we've got a problem," he said again. "With Jory."

Flash Flood

noreply@blogger.com (Ciarente Roth) — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 16:29:00 +0000

((co-written with Stitcher))

Helmi Alpassi knew that she'd originally been tapped to train into Pilot Roth's personal security detail because Sarge had known she could keep her head when it mattered.

Had known it from the first moment they met, after all.

And if there ever was a moment not to panic, Alpassi, this is fucking it.

"Pilot, Lieutenant Etay," she said calmly, "if you'd come to the front of the house with me now, the shuttle is on approach."

Charles Etay was carrying one of the babies in a safety-capsule. Amieta Invelen had the other. Helmi couldn't tell which was which and really didn't give a shit, so long as the total number of babies equalled two and they were each in the most expensive and sophisticated piece of protective child-transport equipment available in the Cluster. Helmi had picked those capsules herself, after a lot of research.

Finding out they were tested by dropping them out of a second story window with an actual child in them had sealed the deal.

Still, she would have preferred them to be carried by her people, would have preferred all the civilians to be hoisted up and hauled at speed to the assembly point, really.

If speed had been an issue, Pilot's feet wouldn't have touched the ground. But the shuttle won't be here for another three minutes anyway.

And Pilot was prone to panic. Helmi knew that part of her job description was making sure Pilot felt safe, as well as was safe.

So she let Etay carry one of the twins. And she didn't take Pilot's elbow to hurry her along, even when Pilot paused and said something about flowers and the nursery.

"I'll make sure they're packed," Invelen said reassuringly, and Pilot started moving again. Helmi scanned the sky, looking for spikey sansha shapes, saw none, saw ...

The sky.

It was wrong in a gut-wrenching way, the familiar off-black interstellar dust clouds of New Eden as seen from Debreth at sunset shifted towards an ugly yellow-green, like a gathering storm of forces Helmi didn't want to guess at. The Intel suddenly went from an intellectual threat to a real and immediate one. Adrenaline pulsed her implants to a higher pitch, burning copper on her tongue.

And on the horizon, burning rain. Five stars, moving as stars shouldn't, glowing like a banked furnace in the fading light as they twisted and writhed, shedding speed. Almost hidden behind the wind, the banging of the air as it raged impotently against this supersonic violation swept across the valley, echoing like a distant battle.

Nothing so clean and wholesome as thunder and lightning rode on the winds of this storm.

And the floods it brought were not the kind Debreth was build to withstand.

Implants on her retinas read the friendly, so that's fucking something IFF broadcasts from the falling constellation as it shed the last of its speed in one low looping bank over the river and swept in towards the estate.

A surface-to-orbit shuttle painted in the livery of Re-Awakened Technologies Inc settled in the wide avenue as three of the remaining ships – angular Caldari gunships bristling with weapons - screamed overhead, their hulls bearing a blue starburst on bare gunmetal. The fifth, much larger ship settled in to a relative stop above the Roth estate and the grounds thrummed with the subsonic rumbling of immense graviton pads keeping the staging platform aloft. A percussive blast rattled the windows as explosive bolts blew along its flanks and four humanoid giants, armoured and massive, dropped from the flanks of the the thirty meters to the ground and landed in a blast of pneumatic gas. Within a second their guns and sensors were tracking the skies as they fanned out, covering the grounds.

Only a moment behind them were the ropes, ten of them, and before those ropes had even finished uncoiling to the ground, the first of the troopers was on it, her arrestor hook buzzing harshly as it slowed her descent. She hit the ground and rolled, moving aside with only a heartbeat to spare before the next trooper, and the next after him hit the deck, rolled and bustled to cover, each claiming three drones from the swarm that swept from the dropship's bays. Almost-white painted ceramic hardsuits, each with that blue starburst splash and a mirrored visor covering the face, Kaalakiota assault rifles. Airtight, nanite-proof, damn near bulletproof, but still light and clean-lined enough to allow the soldiers to move with grace and ease in Debreth's low gravity.

The flurry of activity swept towards the little knot of people on the lawn, parted around them, and left them untouched, except for the wind whipping their hair.

One of the troopers, the first one out, jogged towards them, heading unerringly for Pilot Roth. No rank insignia, Helmi noted, just a blue sunburst, and the words Hakatain Dynasty Holdings and A. Sihayha. I.D. confirmation spooled across her retinas and Helmi stopped the instinctive reach for her sidearm before it was more than a flicker of muscles as Captain Hakatain's personal bodyguard tapped the side of her helmet to clear the faceshield, saw a corresponding flicker in the other woman's eyes.

"Captain Roth," the woman said. "Chief Aato Sihahya. Captain Hakatain sends his regards."

Pilot - surreally, given the circumstances - extended her hand and said with a smile, "I'm very pleased to meet you. I hope you had a safe trip?"

"Safe enough, ma'am," Sihahya said, returning the handshake with a gauntlet that could probably have crushed Pilot's hand flat if she wanted. "With your permission, we'll see to the defence of your estate and the town in your absence."

"With my ... " Pilot's voice trailed off, and Helmi suppressed a sigh. One day she'll learn that she's in charge.

Her mouth was open to translate Pilot-speak into marine, one more part of her job, Pilot Roth appreciates your offer and certainly extends all the permissions you need to carry out the protection of the Roth property and surrounding area, when Pilot surprised her.

"Thank you," Pilot Roth said, quietly but clearly. "That would be appreciated. Please do anything you feel required."

One day turns out to be today, Helmi thought, as Sihahya saluted and re-opaqued her visor with a brief nod to Helmi. Either the the Ancestors are with us, or the world is about to end.

Or both.

"Pilot, we need to be getting you on the shuttle," she said. Invelen was already moving. Helmi herded Pilot and Etay up the ramp as armoured forms set up defensive positions around them, mostly missing the flower-beds.

One baby started wailing, then the other. Pilot tried to comfort them as Invelen secured the capsules but the twins refused to be consoled and their piercing screams were a counterpoint to the rumble of the shuttle engines as it lifted off. Helmi linked her optical implants into the shuttle's external cameras and watched as two of Hakatain's gunships escorted the shuttle into high atmosphere, then stalled into a graceful backwards dive towards Debreth again as the shuttle raced towards its rendezvous with the Feather.

As the gunships shrank to invisibility against the blue-green globe below them, Helmi let the connection fade. Spirits watch over you, she wished the men and women they were leaving behind.

And Ancestors sharpen your aim.

Welcome To The Future

noreply@blogger.com (Ciarente Roth) — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 14:53:00 +0000

Section F - F-for-Freedom, F-for-Future, it said right there in big letters over the section ring seal - was the part of the station which housed returnees from the Empire, the State and the Federation until they'd found jobs and clans and homes.

And it stank.

Too many people for the space, for the waste services, the air-cyclers, Capitaine Elienne Desorlay thought.

She'd seen the ads on the holo, back in the Federation, a tall Brutor woman whose deep brown skin picked up the colours of the Minmatar flag on the wall behind her, her faintly-accented Gallantean vibrant with hope and promise. Come home, children of the Republic! Home to lives of freedom, the lives of your ancestors.

Eli snorted at the memory. If your ancestors lived on tubes of casien protein, maybe, ten-to-a-room in the bowels of a space station with the perpetual hum and thud of the biomass processors on the other side of the wall.

Still, it doesn't smell as bad as it did last time.

Or maybe I'm getting used to it.

She lit a cigarette anyway, sour local Republic tobacco but better than nothing, as Lieutenant Charles Etay hitched the knees of his trousers and crouched by the body lying against the wall.

Eli was pretty sure it was a body, although without the medtechs' identification of the stained and crumpled rags wrapped around oozing meat as human, she would have had her doubts.

She exhaled a lungful of smoke. "Well?"

"No ID," Etay said, turning to look up at her. "Might not have had any before the beating."

"If he's registered with - he?" Etay nodded confirmation and Eli went on, "Registered with Resettlement, they'll have his DNA on file."

"If he was registered. And if they'd gotten around to testing." Etay looked back at the body. "Dental, maybe. If there's anything left of his teeth."

"If he ever saw a dentist," Eli said. "Fortune fuck me, it's not like his own mother would know his face."

"No," Etay said soberly. He rose to his feet with the easy grace of the young and strong, the fils de putain de merde, and adjusted his cuffs. "Morgue services'll have a better idea, but what do you think? Four of them? Five?"

Eli dropped her cigarette and crushed it with a toe. "At least. Fists and feet. But I don't see much blood on the walls, not that you could tell in this shithole."

"Somewhere else, then?"

"Could be. Or else ... more than five. A lot more. Packed in around him."

Etay put his hands in his pockets and looked at the walls assessingly. "Splashes on them, not the walls."

"Yeah." Eli shook another cigarette from the pack. "A lot more than five. Fifteen, twenty. More."

"Five is a gang," Etay said thoughtfully. "But twenty, Eli. Twenty is a mob." He tilted back his head to look up at the walls rising on either side of them, vanishing somewhere twenty stories up into the clouds gusting from the over-worked envirosystems. Heads disappeared from sight as he did, windows banged shut. "Mobs don't come from nothing. Inter-tribal? Some sort of feud?"

"No reports of anything like that," Eli said. "Not that I've seen. Some shoving in the lines at supply, name-calling. Big jump from that to this."

Etay looked around the grimy alley with its grisly contents, and then slid Eli a sideways glance, one eyebrow raised. "Such a big jump, someone would have seen it, non?"

Four hours later Eli lit her last cigarette and thought sourly, 'Non' is just about fucking right.

Someone had seen something, she would have bet her pension on it, more than one someone, too, but those witnesses, whoever they were, weren't talking. Not just the usual 'no love lost for the long arm o f the law' either. She flicked ash down-wind.

The closest they'd gotten to an answer had been We take care of our own from a skinny Sebbie woman with the fish-belly pale skin of a life-long station dweller, the words spoken with the flat contempt of someone who'd long ago lost faith in the tender mercy of those in authority to take care of anyone but themselves.

"Something that never got reported, maybe," Eli said aloud, and Etay nodded. "Could be some tribal thing even, for all we know - "

She felt a tug at her sleeve and turned fast. Just a kid. A snot-nosed Vherry kid of indeterminate gender, pulling on her arm with fingers black with dirt.

"That's bad for you," the child said solemnly, pointing at her cigarette. "It'll make you die. We learned in school."

"That's you told," Etay murmured, the corner of his mouth twitching up.

Eli gave him her best glare, the one that had sons and husband backing towards the door when she used it at home, and Etay ducked his head and got very interested in his shoes. Eli turned the glare on the kid, but the miniature Minmatar was made of sterner stuff.

"It is, though," the - boy? girl? - insisted. "Bad for you."

"I'm Gallente," Eli said. "It's different. But yes, it would be very bad for you. I'd have to arrest you."

Etay, the salaud, was laughing at her, almost soundlessly but I can fucking well tell. Eli put a hand on her hip, showing the child the ID pinned to her belt. "See? Republic Justice. So beat it before I put you in jail for loitering."

The kid moved back, just out of arm's length, and stopped there. "Are you here because of the Sansha?"

That sobered Etay. "No," he said, and Eli shook her head as well. "The Fleet and the capsuleers will make sure the Sansha never come here, okay?"

"No," the kid said patiently. "Not the ones out there. The one here."

Etay hitched up the knees of his trousers and crouched. "What one here, hmm?"

One skinny little arm lifted, and one filthy finger pointed, past Etay, back down the alley to the temporary barrier already beginning to sag on one side, marking the place the body had lain.

Eli looked, then looked back at the kid. "How do you know he was Sansha?"

A shrug that said as clearly as DNA testing that the kid had some Gallente blood was her only answer.

"Did someone tell you he was?" Etay asked, and got a nod. "Who? Do you remember?"

Another shrug. "Everybody," the kid said. "Everybody was saying it."

Etay met Eli's gaze over the top of the child's no-doubt lice-ridden head. "Everybody was saying it," he said quietly.

Words. Words and fear, at first. Until more and more people hear it, repeat it, and then it's words and fear and fists and feet.

And some poor bastard is little more than a smear on the sidewalk.

Etay produced a bar of sweetened gelatine from a pocket, and offered it to the child. "Do you know who it was, who was saying it?" he asked. "Names?"

With a shake of his head, the kid snatched the bar and bolted.

Eli burned her cigarette down to the filter with a final drag. "You have to hold it out of their reach," she said. "For future reference."

Etay didn't smile. "We should make sure they check the body for any extras," he said, getting to his feet.

"You know they're not going to find any, farmboy, don't you?"

He looked at his feet, golden hair falling across his forehead and hiding his face from her. "I know. But we should make sure they check."

"And you know we're never going to get a name, or names, don't you? Who ever it was, they're local heroes now."

"Defending against the Sansha threat," Etay said quietly.

Eli shrugged. "Welcome to the future, farmboy," she said. "This isn't going to be the last time someone's suspicions get some poor fucker lynched. Anyway, it could be worse."

Etay raised an eyebrow at that.

Eli shoved him towards the exit, towards off-shift and home and a bottle of wine and some cigarettes from the Fed that don't taste of armpit. "He could have actually been a Sansha," she said. "Think about that, why don't you?"

"They've never set foot on a station," Etay said. "Cia said that."

"That she knows of," Eli said. "That she knows of, farmboy."

Etay let her herd him along. "The capsuleers are driving them back."

"Until they get bored," Eli said. "Oh, I know, I know, your pretty girl podder will put her ship on the line to save the innocents, you've said, more than once in fact you've said. They're all like her, are they? You know they aren't, and one day you'll realise she isn't like that either, not really. Podders, Charlie. Not people."

Etay looked down at her, and then back the way they'd come.

"Maybe they aren't," he said quietly. "Maybe not. But Eli - can you honestly say, today, that being people like the people back there who kicked a man to death because someone whispered 'Sansha', can you honestly say that people is always something worthwhile to be?"

Conversations on the Utopian Ideal: Twenty Eight.

noreply@blogger.com (Ciarente Roth) — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 21:56:00 +0000

((co-written with Silver Night))

Captain Silver Night waited at the foot of the docking umbilical, watching the small woman - the word came to mind unbidden - waddle towards him. Ciarente should, of course, have taken a passenger transport platform rather than walk the length of the hangar, and he knew his crew would have offered her one at the security checkpoint. Knew, too, exactly what she would have said, the same response she gave when he offered to take her place in the labs at HQ or overseeing a production line. Relax, Silver. I'm pregnant, not crippled.

Reaching him, a little breathless, she smiled. "Hello, Silver. How are you?"

"I'm well, Cia. How are you?" He started towards the ship. "Shall we?"

Tired, he thought an honest answer to his question would have been, judging from the blue shadows beneath her eyes and the pinched look to her face that the warm smile couldn't quite hide. But -

"Fat," Ciarente said instead, with a laugh, and then nearly overbalanced as the umbilical sloped upwards. Silver offered his arm, and Ciarente tucked her hand through the crook of his elbow, leaning on him lightly. "Ooops. Fat and with a centre of gravity that changes daily. I find it hard to believe that there's still more pregnant for me to get, but they assure me it'll happen."

"Well, you're most of the way there, from what I understand." They crossed the airlock threshold and Silver hesitated, considering the distance to his office. " I think ... " Security station, no, medical staging, no, non-com break-room .... "I think this should be suitable.

Ciarente, of course, had an apologetic smile for the non-commissioned officers who accurately read their Captain's expression as a suggestion that elsewhere would be a better place for them to be at the moment. And if she walked the length of the ship and went into premature labour she would no doubt apologise to medical for the inconvenience.

Sinking awkwardly into a chair, Ciarente smiled and said as if she could read his mind, "I'm not going to suddenly have the babies on B deck just from walking to your office, Silver."

"Shall we not take the risk, nevertheless?" he said.

Ciarente laughed. " All right. It's your ship, after all." She folded her hands over the swell of her stomach. "And I admit, although I'll deny it in public, my ankles are starting to complain a bit at the extra weight."

"Not so very much longer," Silver said. "And there's nothing wrong with taking it easy, when you can. Tea?"

"Yes," Ciarente said. "Yes, tea, thank you. And yes, time's been passing. It's ... getting to be time for me to think about names, perhaps."

"Oh?" Silver poured for both of them.

Ciarente picked up her cup and spoke to it, rather than to him. "Verin told me it's traditional, Caldari tradition, to chose an ancestor's name. It's not so different, where I come from. A grandparent, a great-grandparent. Someone you want to remember, maybe."

"I suppose it is somewhat common in many places," Silver said.

"Camille," Ciarente said with fond exasperation, "Camille thinks I should name my daughter Camieta. But I ... I've been thinking more about boy's names."

Silver sipped his tea. "Oh? Like what?"

"People it's important to remember. Important to family." Ciarente picked up her cup again, and put it back down, tapping the rim gently with one finger. "I haven't talked to Ami about it yet, Silver. I don't want to ... blunder in, I suppose."

"Blunder in?" Silver asked. "I'm afraid you're going to have to tell me a little more than that, Cia."

Ciarente looked down at her stomach and told it in a whisper, "I thought, perhaps, well, I wouldn't, of course, I know reminders can be painful, but I got the idea, and it seemed like the right thing, and I ..."

"Cia?" Silver prompted gently when she stopped.

"I was thinking about Jan," Ciarente said quietly, and then hastened to add, "But of course, not if, I haven't even mentioned it to Ami, it's a stupid idea, isn't it, I - "

"Cia," Silver said. "I don't think it's a stupid idea at all. Yes, reminders can hurt, but it's also good to remember."

"You think?" she asked hopefully.

"I think he would have been honoured, Cia," Silver said. "It would have made him very happy, I think. Having a niece and nephew."

"All right," Ciarente said, and smiled. "I'll talk to Ami."

Silver nodded, and sipped his tea. "Speaking of Ami. She and I discussed things, yesterday."

"Oh," Ciarente said, and went quite still. "Silver, are we - how secure are we, here?"

"Secure," he assured her.

"All right," Ciarente said quietly.

"I think Amieta is right," Silver told her. "A great deal has changed."

"Yes," Ciarente said. "That's what she said to me, and I suppose she is right, it has. I ... I just need to know that you're sure, I guess. That it's the right decision, for you. Not because of me, or what Ami said, or ... but that it's what you want."

"I'm sure, Cia."

"I don't want to put you in a position where ... I don't want it to be just because I'm ... a mess, about things."

Silver realized with alarm that Ciarente's eyes were filling with tears. Hastily, he offered her a handkerchief. "That isn't it at all, Cia. I would like ... to be able to have holos on my desk and spend holidays together without worrying about being seen."

Ciarente gave him a watery smile. "Like normal people? I know. I've felt that way, too, sometimes. But ... we're not, Silver. Are we?"

"Maybe a little at a time."

"Yes." She rested her hands on her stomach again. "It would be nice. Not to have to wait until my children are old enough to be able to keep secrets, to tell them who you - oh!"

"Cia?" Silver rose to his feet, making the comm connection to Medical with a thought. "Are you all right? Cia?"

"Give me your hand," Ciarente said urgently. "Quickly!"

"Do you need medical?" Silver asked, leaning over to offer her his hand.

Ciarente shook her head, taking his hand in hers and pressing it firmly against her stomach. "No. Wait. Just wait - there!"

Silver felt a vibration against the palm of his hand, faint but unmistakable.

"Did you feel that?" Ciarente asked softly.

"Yes," Silver said as softly, and felt the movement again, as if in response to his voice.

Ciarente's fingers tightened over his. "That's my daughter, on the top there," she said. "They can hear us, you know. I guess we sound like - when you're swimming underwater and people are talking by the pool, I suppose. But they can hear us." She smiled at him, tears sparkling on her eyelashes. "Say something to her."

"What ... " Silver cleared his throat. "What should I say?"

"Tell her hello," Ciarente said gently, and when he hesitated: "It's all right. Go on. Tell your - "

He saw her lips start to shape the word and forestalled her. "Don't - " say that. An automatic, reflex response. Never say it, not aloud, no matter where, no matter when. Never say it.

"Of course," Ciarente said, the ghost of a sigh. "I'm sorry."

Her smile was apologetic, but Silver thought he could see sadness there as well. He looked at his hand, both of Ciarente's now folded over it, felt the quiver in her skin that told of a new life moving, growing, listening to his voice. All three of them, he thought. Right here beneath my hand.

He would bury who he was and who he cared about behind an alias, behind a million secrets and a thousand locked doors, if that was what was best for them.

Or shout it from the hangar gantries, if that was.

Or say -

"Hello," Silver said hesitantly. "Camieta. Jan. Or whoever you're going to be. I'm - " He paused, and Ciarente squeezed his fingers. Silver took a deep breath. "I'm your uncle. Most people call me Silver. Most people do. But my name ... my name is Val."

Entirely True

noreply@blogger.com (Ciarente Roth) — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 03:45:00 +0000

Avolier Girane paused at the gate to the DeGrace house, straightening his tie and smoothing a palm over his hair. Of course it was impossible to imagine Lorraine DeGrace, or Lorraine Roth as she is now, living anywhere other than the DeGrace's ancient house on the broad terraces above the river, but the restrictions on private vehicles in the old part of town did mean that guests were forced into a closer encounter with the public transport system than a councillor like Girane was used to.

Satisfied that he was at least presentable, Girane made his way up the path between the manicured shrubs. The door opened as he approached, and he recognised one of Lorraine's sons, the polite one, Michel or Marc I think, doing duty as a doorman, offering to take Girane's coat with a smile that made his resemblance to his father all the more marked.

And there was the father himself, topping up another guest's glass with a wink and a laugh, Lorraine DeGrace's folly they used to say, until Jorion Roth, spacer, became Jorion Roth, capsuleer.

"Bon soir, Avol, you're well?" Jorion draped an arm around Girane's shoulders and drew him further into the room. "I'm glad you could make it tonight, I'd hate to get sent back upstairs without a chance to see you. Pesellian's well? He's not here tonight?"

Jorion's smile was, as always, infectiously warm. Pesellian always said it never reached the man's blue eyes, but Pese's always been jealous of every man better looking than he is, which is why he refused to come tonight and left me to make his excuses. Girane paused, vaguely aware that though the thought was entirely true, it didn't quite feel like the entire truth, and then realised Jorion was waiting for a reply. "I couldn't drag him away from the lab, I'm afraid."

"Ah, scientists, eh? My eldest, Cia, she's the same." Jorian gestured toward the back of the room, where a plump girl was moving among the guests with a tray of canapés. "Lorraine had to drag her down here by the ear, or close to it. She's been accepted to the Ecole de Physique, you know, we couldn't be more proud, but a girl her age needs more in her life than the books, non?"

Girane nodded agreement and took a glass from a tray offered to him by a younger girl, one with a far stronger resemblance to Lorraine. And there was Lorraine DeGrace Roth herself, her eyes and smile as bright as the gemstones around her neck, pausing to kiss her husband's cheek before extending one slender hand to Girane.

"Avol," she said fondly. "Such a pleasure. Is that darling man of yours brewing up some sort of elixir of eternal youth in his laboratory? Because I swear you look younger every time I see you. Therese has gotten you a drink? And - Cia, don't stand there dreaming while Avol is hungry."

With a murmured apology, the older Roth daughter held out her tray, wearing an echo of her mother's bright smile. "M'ser Girane, how nice to see you again."

Girane contemplated the potential damage to his waistline in each pasty-wrapped parcel on her tray, but Lorraine's cook was famous in society circles, and rightly so, and he couldn't resist. The girl smiled again, and began to turn, and Girane hastily cast about for a topic of conversation that would delay her and the tray she carried. "Jorion said you're studying to be a physicist?"

"Oui, M'ser," she said, politely but a little distantly. "Perhaps less useful than Dr Aurelim's work on tuber yields, but it interests me."

"Oh, you know Pese's latest?" Girane discreetly took another pastry.

"Great potential, perhaps not here but in places with more marginal conditions," Cia said, almost the exact words from Pese's Science Merit Citation, and entirely true, although with no mention of the military applications, not the entire truth. The girl gave him another bright, Lorraine-DeGrace-smile, and said, "You must be very proud of him, M'ser. Please, do try the ones on the left. They're cheese, quite delicious."

"Oh, well, if you insist." She was right: they were quite delicious. He said so, and Cia's smile broadened, genuine warmth in her eyes for the first time, as if she'd been somewhere else until them and briefly stepped inside herself. Fortune, she's almost pretty, Girane thought with surprise, and then, "Did you make them?"

Cia nodded, flushing a little, and lowered her voice to say confidingly, "The secret is the - "

A loud curse behind her made them both turn. Doetre Tumame, past and most say future mayor, was hopping on one foot, swearing, the crumpled child's model of a sharp-edged space ship on the floor an eloquent explanation.

"You stupid cow!" a shrill voice declared. The owner of the voice, a small girl with startlingly ginger hair, glared up at Tumame. "You ruined it! Why don't you look where you're going, you - "

"Camille," Lorraine DeGrace said, and cast a laughing glance around the room. Children, the glance said, inviting complicity from all the parents there, what can you do?

""Well, she should!" the girl said furiously. "That took me and Cia ages and - "

"Then you should have taken better care of it, cherie," Lorraine said. "Now pick it up and take it to your room."

"Not until she says sorry!"

Lorraine lost her smile. "Camille! That is not an appropriate tone to use. If you are looking to be -"

Whatever Lorraine thought Camille was looking to be was lost as the tray Cia had been holding hit the floor with a crash. She stared down at it and then looked up with a bright smile. "Fortune," she said. "I'm so sorry, everyone, I really am a butterfingers."

"Oh, Cia," Lorraine said with a disappointed sigh.

The girl flushed a dull red and bent to gather up the spilled food, murmuring apologies.

Jorian put a hand on his wife's shoulder and said genially, "Well, I think Cia has announced it's time to move into the dining room, everyone. Mayor Tumame, let me offer you my arm, I trust Camille's Drake hasn't caused permanent injury? They are quite a sturdy little ship, we pilots call them flying bricks for a reason."

The tension in the room lifted as the guests followed Jorian and Tumame towards the dining room. As the staff set out a first course of delicate white fish and lemon butter, even the former mayor forgot her injury.

Girane would not even have remembered Jorion and Lorraine's youngest and least well-behaved child, except, leaving the house full of excellent food and better wine, he heard a child's voice from the shadows beneath the hedge at the front of the property.

"I don't care, Cia! I am running away and you can't stop me!"

The eldest daughter's voice sounded somehow softer and warmer in the darkness. "But I will be lonely when you've gone, cherie. And sad, without you."

"You're going away anyway, to college!" Camille said sullenly.

I am eavesdropping, Girane thought, with a faint, guilty thrill. Still, it's always useful to know what one can about a family like the DeGraces. As a councillor, it's almost my duty to.

As a justification, it had the benefit of being entirely true. Girane stepped further into the shadows as Cia said gravely, "Only a little way away. And I have to, to get a good job so I can get a house of my own."

"Of your own?" Camille asked. "With just, like, you?"

"Mmm. There might be room for one more, cherie. If you wanted."

"We could be running away together!" the child said excitedly.

A faint rustle of clothing. "We could. If you weren't running away now, that is."

"Oh." A small foot scuffed gravel. "Maybe I could wait, for you. If you didn't take very long."

There was a smile in Cia's voice as she said, "I promise I'll be as quick as I can, how about that?"

"Okay. I guess I can wait, if you're quick. Ow, don't squeeze, Cia!"

The girl laughed quietly. "I can't help it, you're too squeezable. Hey, since you're not running away, do you want to help me fix your ship?"

"It's too smashed," Camille said sadly. "That stupid lady has big feet! She should watch where they go!"

"Yes, she should," Cia agreed. "But I bet it isn't too smashed. I bet we could fix it, with maybe some replacement bits."

Camille sighed. "Then it won't be the same, with new bits."

"No, it'll be like a real spaceship. They get fixed all the time, you know," Cia said. "And new parts get put on them when they're too broken."

"Really?" Camille asked.

"Uh-huh. So your ship will be even more real, if it's been fixed up after a collision."

Camille said hotly, "Mama should have made the stupid lady 'pologise, not me, Cia! That wasn't fair! It was on the table and everything, she knocked it down with her big fat backside, I saw!"

Girane had to stifle a laugh, thinking Tumame is rather broad in the beam, as Cia said quietly, "Well, maybe Mama didn't see."

"She should have been on my side anyway! She's my mama!"

"Mama can't help being Mama, Cami. Don't be mean about her. And I'm on your side, hmm? How about that?"

"Okay. Cia?"

"Yes, cherie?"

"Can we go and fix my ship now?"

Girane stepped back out of sight hastily as feet scuffed and bodies moved in the shadows. "If you've finished running away."

"I have," Camille said, as the two sisters joined hands and started back to the house.

Then as they passed the shadows where Girane stood, she added thoughtfully, "Well. For now, anyway."

Perhaps it was that carefully considered qualification that stuck like a grass seed on Dry Day to Avolier Girane's memory. Certainly, when he heard that Jorion Roth had fallen victim to some sort of cloning accident, he wondered first, not about the man's beautiful now-widow but about the eldest and the youngest of his children. When the Roth family left Debreth, suddenly and completely between one day and the next, Girane found himself thinking For now without quite knowing why he did.

And when, some time after that, Ciarente Roth called upon the town council to explain that sometimes Air Traffic Control regulations were made to be broken, Mayor Avolier Girane surprised his fellow councillors almost as much as he surprised himself when he found himself agreeing with her.

She was a DeGrace, he explained to them later, even if this pilot fellow she wanted them to recognise as a hero was Caldari. There had always been DeGraces in Debreth, even back before the first of the nine bridges had been built. Humouring her, especially now she was a capsuleer pilot and richer than Fortune's right hand, was an entirely prudent thing to do.

Eventually he won their agreement. Fines were cancelled, a statue commissioned, a public holiday gazetted.

After all, what he had said was entirely true.

And in the end, Girane thought to himself, standing on First Bridge on the first Debreth annual holiday to celebrate capsuleer pilots, watching Ciarente Roth watch Captain Night make a gracious speech thanking Debreth for the honour, in the end ...

No-one knows the entire truth, in the end, except perhaps Fortune.

Who keeps her own counsel.

Even, he thought, joining in the general applause, even from capsuleers.

Love and Crime

noreply@blogger.com (Ciarente Roth) — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 12:26:00 +0000

"Charlie, you're a fool." Capitaine Elienne Desorlay hunched her shoulders against the draft whistling out of the ventilation duct, gaze steady on the door at the end of the alley. "This exchange program - that no-one's ever heard of before - just happened to pull your name out of the hat right when your capsuleer conceived more than a fancy to have you closer to home?"

Lieutenant Charles Etay, his thick coat more than a match for the breeze, more podder bribes, shrugged. "A job is a job all the same."

"A job that's a podder's grace and favour, for you to lose as soon as you lose her fancy?" Eli snorted, fumbling in her pocket for her cigarettes. "That's not a job, farm-boy. That's a polite way of offering to turn you into her putain.."

That got her no more reaction than a faint smile. "Such a way with words, you have," Etay said, leaning forward to cup his hands around her lighter as the draft made the flame flicker and dim.

"Oh, and how's it going to be, then, you tell me, when she tires of your pretty face?" Eli drew on the cigarette and when it lit, puffed smoke in Etay's face. "When you tell her no when she wants to hear yes? When you think yours when she's thinking hers?"

Etay took a step back and turned to watch the door again. "There's a job there. There'll be one here, if I need it." He shrugged a little."Do you think this asshole's going to show?"

"He'll show," Eli said with flat certainty.

"He's got to know we'll be watching his girl," Etay said. "The smart thing would be to -"

Eli flicked ash downwind. "You're forgetting something."

"I am?"

"One, he's a criminal. And crime makes you stupid," Eli said, holding up her thumb.

"Well, that explains a great deal," Etay said mildly.

"And two," Eli said, raising her forefinger to make the shape of a gun, "He's in love. And love, farmboy ..." She aimed at him. "Love makes you dumber than dumb."

Etay glanced sideways at her, long lashes half lowered over his limpid gaze, the breeze ruffling his hair into artless disarray, leaning against the wall as if he belongs on the cover of a holo, not that he knows it, which is almost more annoying, Fortune fuck him. "I recall you saying something along those lines once or twice before."

"A pretty girl crooks her finger, and a silly boy goes running. And then discovers he can't go wandering off again so easily."

Etay laughed soundlessly. "You think Cia plans to keep me chained up and captive?" he asked. "To father the rest of her children?'

"Stranger things have fucking happened, farmboy, most of them in podder's hangars."

Etay took a step sideways as a passer-by obscured his view of the door. "She's not like that, Eli."

"Oh, not like that, not like that, says the man so head-over-heels in love with her he can't see her any more clearly than he can the shadow behind the sun." Eli burnt the cigarette down to filter on a single ferocious inhalation and dropped it. "Fortune fuck me, and Robert just finished repainting the bathroom."

"Painting the ... " Etay stopped, eyes steady on the end of the alley. Not a stupid boy, no, Eli thought. Just a foolish one. "Eli ..."

"Someone has to keep an eye on you, farmboy. Someone with a clear head."

The corner of Etay's mouth that Eli could see twitched upwards. "And you're volunteering?"

"Partners, remember?" She took a wide step around him as a face familiar from the squadroom holoboard showed at the end of the alley. "So you tell your pretty podder mama-to-be that this exchange program needs to have room for your senior partner. Flutter your eyelashes at her, or something."

"Eli ..."

She jerked her chin towards their target. "You going to argue with me or you going to make this arrest?"

Etay's head turned, his eyes narrowing, and he reached for the PRD on his belt. Cop trumps love-sick fool, Eli thought to herself.

For now, anyway.

For now.

Unlucky

noreply@blogger.com (Ciarente Roth) — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 16:23:00 +0000

He was hungry.

He'd been hungry for a long time. There was food, rotting, stinking food that sometimes made him vomit, but food nonetheless, in the cans scattered here and there, but he was usually chased away from it by those larger and stronger.

Or if not larger and stronger, then at least with others to help them hunt away strangers and claim the food for themselves.

He didn't have others.

He was alone.

That was worse than being hungry. Being hungry was a constant pain that gnawed at his belly and burned his throat and made him almost too weak to walk, sometimes, but being alone was Wrong.

It wasn't his fault. He'd just been unlucky, or that's what he tried to tell himself when the feeling of Wrong got so bad he couldn't uncurl himself.

He hadn't always been alone. He'd had a pack, too, once. Not a big one, but a good one. He hadn't been hungry, or cold, or chased, then. He'd had a good leader, even if it was a Big, a leader who always made sure there was food, and fresh clean water that hadn't been pissed in, and had kept strangers out of their home. It hadn't been a big home, but it was big enough for their pack, just him and his sister and Packleader.

Packleader hadn't been able to talk properly, of course, being a Big, although it tried sometimes, making noises with its mouth. He'd learned how to understand what it wanted when it made those noises, or some of them, anyway, and that made Packleader happy.

But then one day Packleader had started to smell wrong. It had laid down in its sleeping place and stopped moving. He and his sister had tried to wake Packleader up, had licked all its fur the wrong way round, but Packleader didn't wake up, and after a while Packleader started to be cold and smell even more wrong, and that's when he'd known that Packleader had stopped being there and had turned into food, even though nobody had bitten it on the back of the neck the way you did to turn something into food.

That was the first time he'd known what it was to be hungry.

He'd pulled on the metal thing where Packleader kept the food, even though that was a Badboy, Wrong, thing to do and it made him want to dig a hole and hide, doing it. He and his sister had drunk water from the bowl in the waste place, beside the dirt Packleader always put there for them to use, even though drinking water from that bowl was another Badboy thing.

They'd been thirsty. He didn't think Packleader would have wanted them to be thirsty.

They ate the food from the metal thing until it ran out. Then he'd tried to find more food for them, but their home only opened when Packleader made it and neither he nor his sister had been able to make it work. They'd waited for another Big to come and bring food, but no Big came, and they got hungrier and hungrier. His sister's fur began to fall out, and his mouth hurt and bled all the time. One day his sister wouldn't get up from her sleeping place.

That's when he decided they had to eat Packleader.

It was an awful, Wrong, Badboy thing, but he couldn't think of anything else.

Packleader was enough food for a while longer, but he'd started to worry about what they'd do when it was gone by the time they heard the home opening one day and some more Bigs came.

They didn't bring food, though. And they didn't want to be part of the pack. They put their paws over their noses and made loud noises with their mouths and when they found Packleader those noises got so loud they hurt his ears.

Then one of them rushed at him and his sister and even though he'd never seen a Big in fighting posture he could tell instantly that's what it was. His sister told him to run and got in between him and the Big. The home was still open and he'd run for the outside. Before he got there he looked back to make sure his sister was following him and just as he did the Big lifted one foot and brought it down hard on her. There was a crunching noise.

He'd learned that day you don't need teeth to bite someone on the back of the neck.

He ran, and kept running, until the Big stopped chasing him and longer, until his paws were so sore he couldn't bear to put them on the ground, and then he crawled into the smallest place he could find and curled up and cried, for his sister, who was now food, for Packleader, and for himself, who was Wrong, and Badboy, and alone.

The next morning was the first time he was hunted by another pack.

No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't find a pack that would let him be part of them. If he'd been younger, maybe, or older, the Packleaders wouldn't have cared. Or if he'd been stronger and large, he could have fought a Packleader and taken their pack for himself. But he wasn't strong, or large. He was the right size to sit on a Big's legs when they were resting, which had been just the right size for his old Packleader, but was just the wrong size now. And no Bigs wanted to be his Packleader, even when he showed them how he could chase his tail as if it was a scurry-food, and pretend to be surprised when he caught it, which had always made his old Packleader happy.

It didn't make the other Bigs happy. One even kicked him, hard, but he remembered what happened to his sister and when he saw the Big's paw go up he dodged, and the kick only hit his side and leg. It still hurt, even though it didn't turn him into food, and it never stopped hurting, so he couldn't run much anymore.

After than he stayed away from all the Bigs.

So he was hungry, all the time. And hunted. And alone, which was worst of all.

Right now, though, he could smell food.

He crept out of the hole where he'd been hiding from the other packs and tried to work out where the smell was coming from. His nose told him it was somewhere in the Bigs that hurried by, near the big fast metal things, and he wanted to cry. He couldn't go out there, among all of them, with their kicking paws and loud noises, especially not near the big fast metal things. He'd seen others get too close to those things and suddenly become flat and food.

He was so hungry, though.

And what if they did kick him? What if he did turn into food? He was alone, and Badboy, and Wrong.

And hungry.

He crept out, just a little way, to see and smell better, belly low to the ground. None of the Bigs paid any attention. The food smell moved away and he followed it, carefully, as fast as he could. He couldn't walk very fast, since the Big had kicked him, and the smell got further away, and he wanted to cry again, but then it got much closer really quickly and he realized that the Big carrying the food had stopped.

He looked at it. It wasn't a very big Big, the same size as his old Packleader, and it was with another little Big who was part of its pack. They made noises with their mouths at each other while he watched them. The smallest Big smelled sad, but the Packleader smelled like it was in fighting posture, even though its paws were on the ground.

He couldn't see any food, but it was there all right. Sometimes Bigs carried food in the outside-fur they had to make up for not having much proper fur. He guessed this one was doing that.

He really, really, didn't want to be kicked again.

He really, really wanted something to eat.

He crept forward, watching the Big's paws, and nosed it the way he used to nose his old Packleader to tell it he wanted food.

The Big looked at him. It didn't kick him.

It didn't give him any food, either.

He nosed it again, and even though Bigs couldn't talk, he tried explaining to it that he was very hungry, and Goodboy, and could he please have some food?

Both Bigs looked at him and made more noises with their mouths, not loud noises, though, and their paws stayed on the ground. While they were looking at him he showed them how he could chase his tail and pretend to catch it, except his side and his leg hurt too much and he fell over on his rump. It was horribly humiliating, but he got up and tried again. He even pretended he'd meant to fall over, and did it again on purpose, even though it really hurt.

The Bigs made more noises. They didn't kick him.

They didn't give him any food, either.

He started to cry. He couldn't help it. He put his nose against the Big who was the Packleader and tried not to make any noises with his crying.

The Packleader Big put its paw inside its outside-fur and then it was holding food. It gave the food to the other Big and the other Big got down close to him on the ground and held it out in a paw.

It was real food, fresh, food that tasted of food. He tried to eat it politely, but he was too hungry. When he was finished he headbutted the Big's hand the way he'd used to with his old Packleader, to show he was grateful. The Big smelled sad again, when he did that, but it rubbed his head with its paw and gave him more food, and made noises to the Packleader.

The Packleader made noises back.

The Packleader didn't smell sad. It didn't smell happy, either.

It didn't smell angry, though. Just ... a little bit like it was thinking about whether to dig a hole and hide, or get in fighting posture and bite someone on the back of the neck.

Not him, though, he didn't think.

He nosed it again.

This time the Packleader got down close to him and made more food appear in its paw. He took it and ate it the very politest way he knew how. This was a good pack, he could tell, even if the smaller Big was sad. There wasn't any kicking. The noises they made to each other weren't loud.

And they had a lot of food.

The little Big did something to its outside-fur, and took it apart. The Packleader took the piece, and tied it to his neck. It held on to the other end.

It held on to the other end.

He stopped being alone, and Wrong. He had a pack.

He butted his Packleader's paw with his head and waited for it to tell him what to do.

Then something terrible happened.

One of the fast metal things came very very close and stopped and his pack went right up next to it.

He tried to tell them how dangerous it was, but they were Bigs, and he couldn't make them understand. The little Big climbed inside it, and then his Packleader did, and they ignored him, even when he danced the Danger Dance right there next to the metal thing.

His Packleader pulled the thing tied around his neck and made noises at him.

He wanted to run, more than anything. The metal things were dangerous and Wrong and even being this close to one made him want to dig a hole and hide.

But his pack was inside it. He couldn't run away and leave them in danger.

He had to at least try to protect them.

His Packleader pulled the thing around his neck again.

He closed his eyes and jumped.

Human

noreply@blogger.com (Ciarente Roth) — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 07:03:00 +0000

"No," Capitaine Elienne Desorlay said flatly. She opened the drawer of her desk and for an instant her hand hovered over her sidearm before she reached past it for the crumpled pack of cigarettes. "No fucking way."

"They'll dock you," Lieutenant Charles Etay reminded her mildly, "If you get another citation for smoking in the squadroom."

"My business," Elienne said, patting her pockets for a lighter. Shit. It's always in that one pocket ... She hoisted herself up to fit her fingers in the front pocket of pants that had been shrinking in the wash more and more lately. Got you, you putain de merde. "Not yours."

"Partners," Etay said. "What's yours is mine, remember? And I can't afford the fine. I'm going to be - "

"So you fucking said," Elienne snapped, flicked the lighter and saw their supervisor heading towards them. "Merde."

"Have an orange instead," Etay said, producing another of his increasingly-frequent fruit miracles from a jacket pocket.

"Gift from your fucking podder?" Elienne asked sourly.

Etay smiled at her, sunny and unperturbed. "From the podder I'm fucking, yes."

Elienne stuffed the unlit cigarette and lighter in her pocket. "And didn't anybody ever tell you not to wade without your waterproofs?"

"Mmm, well," Etay said, turning the orange slowly between his hands. "Everybody knows pod pilots can't be natural parents."

"So you just assumed..." Words failed her for a moment, and then returned in a string of obscenities that turned heads even in the squadroom.

Etay didn't try to interrupt, peeling the skin from the orange as Elienne gave him the full force of her opinion of his intelligence, parenthood, upbringing and general character. By the time she'd run down into fuming silence, he had a neat pile of peel on the edge of her desk and a heap of translucent crescents in the palm of one pale, long-fingered hand. He offered one to her, the sweet, sharp scent stirring some dim image in Elienne's mind, a feeling like memory but one that connected to no place or time she'd ever known. She took the fruit without conscious thought, a broken fingernail ripping the thin membrane and sending a trickle of juice running down her wrist.

"I assumed, oui," Etay said as Elienne stuffed the piece of orange in her mouth and licked the last trace of juice from her hand before it could disappear up her shirtsleeve. "I know. When you assume you make an 'ass' out of 'u' and - "

Elienne cut him off. "You made an ass out of you, farmboy, leave me the fuck out of it. I wouldn't fuck a podder with my worst enemy's dick, let alone get her en cloque. And you think she was assuming she wouldn't end up avec un polichinel dans le tirrior?"

That got her another sunny smile. "Do you think it's a plan to sue me for child support?"

She snorted. "Be serious." Even with the worst will in the world it was hard to see how a capsuleer could be out for Charlie's money. He makes less than I do, for Fortune's sake, and I make two fifths of one tenth of fuck-all.

Charlie ate another crescent of orange. "I am serious," he said. "I'm serious about everything. You know that."

"Yeah, everything and nothing," Elienne said. "Charlie. This has gone far enough. She's a podder."

"She is a podder, yes," he conceded. "And she's going to be the mother of my child."

"Mother?" Elienne closed her eyes, decided The Super can go fuck himself, and fumbled the now-crumpled cigarette out of her pocket. "Look, farmboy. Whatever the fuck a podder turns into when it reproduces, it isn't a mother. A mother is a human thing, it's ... " She lit the cigarette and burned it a quarter down with one ferocious draw. "Take it from me. I've had three. Stretch-marks and hemorrhoids and tit-rot and all the rest of it. Waking up at one in the morning, and again at two thirty, and again at four, all of you hurting like poison from how tired you are, and still loving that little, screaming, stinking creature more than you ever knew there was love in you, even while you want to put a pillow over its face so you can get some sleep. Human, all of it, hard and ugly as it is. That's not something that belongs in a podder's world." She ashed the cigarette into Etay's pile of orange peel and drew on it again. "You've been fooling yourself that this podder feels for you like you feel for her, and now tu l'as mise en cloque and you're talking about the mother of your child but Charlie, she's a fucking starship, not a mother, and whatever comes out of her in nine month's time - "

"Six months," Etay corrected her mildly.

"Whenever the fuck, she won't be a mother and it won't be your child. If it's even a child."

His expression was grave, and for a moment Elienne thought she'd finally got through to him. Then he quirked one eyebrow. "You think it'll be a shuttle?"

No such fucking luck.

She shook her head, and stubbed out her cigarette on the sole of her shoe. "Charlie. This isn't a joke. It isn't a crush, anymore, yours or hers."

He offered her another piece of orange, and when she made no move to take it, set it carefully on the edge of her desk, ends upright like Tomas had used to make the smiles in his drawings. "I know that."

Elienne shook her head. A podder gets a pretty plaything, stops taking his calls when she gets bored, never thinks about the wreck she makes of a man's heart. That's a heartbreak.

A podder gets a pretty plaything and takes a fancy to breed another. What does she do when she gets bored with her toys and her poor pretty boy's fantasy that he's got something to do with her life and her child?

More than a heart's going to get broken, here.

She picked up the piece of orange and bit into it, sweet and tart at the same time, and sighed. "What am I going to do with you, farmboy?"

Etay studied the heap of peel and cigarette ash for a moment, apparently giving her question serious thought, and then reached out and swept it all into the trash bin by the desk and gave her his sweetest, sunniest smile. "Tell me more about your hemorrhoids?" he suggested.

Elienne tried to glare at him, but as always, she couldn't keep it up. No wonder that Fortune forsaken podder picked him for a diversion.

Sweet, pretty, silly farmboy. Thinking about a little voice calling him 'Papa', about first steps and milk teeth and all the rest of the holvertisements.

Poor stupid fool.

This is How It Is Not

noreply@blogger.com (Ciarente Roth) — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 11:23:00 +0000

This is how it is not.

You can forget.

Whole minutes, hours, sometimes almost the whole day, you can forget.

Things are very much as they used to be, after all. Your quarters with the gaily colored blanket knit your mother's youngest brother knit for you when you first left home spread carefully over the bed, your office with all the books you've been meaning to read for about two years now on the shelves and the familiar copy of Iuenan's famous holo of the Salaajo dancer on the wall, the hangar with the perpetual faint tang of machine oil and freeze-burned metal, the mess with bowls of apples on every table ...

Things are so very much as they used to be, you can forget that they aren't how they used to be, won't ever be how they used to be, not ever again.

You even look the same, no suddenly grey hair or new lines showing in the mirror. No dark shadows beneath your eyes telling the world of nightmares, because you're a professional and you're not about to ignore what you know is best practice. Exercise, healthy food, meditation, plenty of water, sometimes pills, mild ones only, when absolutely necessary, scrupulously logged with two of your colleagues from Pilot Roth's medical staff. Your eyes are bright, your skin clear, your clothes no tighter or looser than they were a year ago.

You look perfectly healthy, in the mirror, so perfectly healthy that you can forget that you aren't perfectly healthy, won't ever be perfectly healthy, not ever again.

This is how it is not.

You do your job as well as you used to, listen and question and follow the thread of the half-hinted revelation, offer a glass of water or a box of tissues when they're needed but not when they'd break the flow words from the patient sitting across from you. You ask how they feel about what they've told you, offer patience and kindness and at just the right moment the gentle nudge that steers them towards why they're really there. Never judging, never shocked, you're the calm face that makes it possible to put words around what's unspeakable, giving them the confidence that whatever it is that gnaws away at their heart in the darkest hours of the night, it can be faced and tamed and brought to heel. They don't know that it's a lie, and so for them it isn't one.

You lie so well that for hours at a time you can forget that you know the truth now: that some beasts can never be defeated and some dark hours never end.

This is how it is not.

You can let a door close behind you without running through a calming exercise to keep your shrieking nerves from flooding your system with enough adrenaline to drop you hard into dark so black I can't tell if my eyes are open and someone screaming and they can't, they can't, they can't do this, it's a mistake, a mistake ...

You can glance casually around a room without bracing yourself in case you see a slightly-above average height man with a stocky build and light brown hair, a man just close enough to memory for your treacherous subconscious to do the rest and put you on my back and the hangar floor is cold and the weight of him is making it hard to breathe and there's nowhere that I still belong to myself now, not a single place, not even inside myself ...

You can go out without double checking the watch with the alarm that lets you know when you have to be back to take the needle from the box and stick it into the vein in your forearm, the vein pocked and pitted now with the only external marks of the constant battle between the poison and the nanites in your blood.

This is how it is not.

You can unwrap the neat package of words you've put around what happened and how you feel about it, the shiny coating that proves to the colleagues whose patient you are just how well you're dealing with what happened, how professional you've been, how much insight you have into your own case.

You don't find yourself kneeling on the shower floor with the warm water sluicing tears and snot from your face, sobbing Mumma, mumma until your throat is so sore and swollen a wave of panic breaks over you the vitoxin, the nanites have stopped working ...

You don't wake to sodden, stinking sheets, and sneak out to haul them to the 'cycler yourself so the ensign assigned to linen duty on your floor won't know that the crew's psychologist wets her bed every night.

This is how it is not.

You can see a way for you to live through this, imagine a future, not necessarily a good one but some sort of future, at least, with you in it.

This is how it is not.

You can forget.