COMBAT SALVAGE 2165 (16 page)

The places on her torso where the artificial limbs attached were pink ovals, lumpy with contracted fibers and at the center of it all was the titanium bone and the expected set of ports for the neural interface processors that did the fantastically complicated and nuanced task of translating between machine language and the language of the human neurological system.

"
Gonna need some steady hands," Parker said, staring into the ports on the Chief’s left shoulder. It was easier for her than looking at the Chief's eyes right now.
 

Horcheese’s nostrils flared as she breathed deeply. Her chest rose and fell. One of her breasts fell to the side and she looked so knowingly helpless without her arms then, that Tig couldn’t look at her face either. He kept his eyes in the ports on her right shoulder.

"
The ship can fly itself to a transit point on autopilot, but that’s about it. So I’ve slaved the control systems that the burnt out CDCS wouldn't handle and scripted them to operate on what you’re going to perceive as muscle impulses for your arms and legs. Reactor power up / down... right leg, capacitor charge and release... left leg. Your control will be limited... flaring the reactors, controlling the capacitor discharge, except, of course you’ll have a very fine degree of control over the NS191 particle emitters. That’ll be controlled through the pathways for your arms and hands. You should be able to coordinate them with particularly effective control."
 

"
What’s that going to feel like?" she said.
 

"
I’ve tried to make it as natural as possible for you so we can leverage the familiarity you had with your old arms and legs like your prosthetics do. Some of the feedback will be spoofed visual stuff, projected in front of you, but a lot of it will be scripted for haptic translation based on what you’re used to feeling and doing."
 

"
How many ports again?"
 

He said, "Me and my partner have 184 total ports to rig," he said.

"
That’s a lot of work. Stop yappin’ and get my legs off."
 

Three hours later, Chief Evelyn Horcheese sat strapped into the command chair with 184 control conduits fanning out from the interface ports at her shoulders and pelvis. Where the limbs should have been that reached out to her world there were only bundles of colored control conduits extending off into the web around her. It was impossible to say the Chief looked helpless now. Her limbs weren’t missing. Now, her body extended all the way to the reactors and super-capacitors and particle emitters that would open the transit and breach space. Chief Horcheese was the control system now. If he’d mapped the input right, then the ship would feel like part of her body.

He said, "I’m flipping the switches one set of systems at a time so you can...uh…"

"Quit hesitating. Hook me into the critical systems. Give me reactor control and let me get the feel of the capacitors and emitter systems." He tried to make it feel as natural as possible when he was scripting the feedback and he thought he’d done a good job, but he didn’t expect the reaction he got. The Chief's eyes shot open wide like he'd put some kind of fear into her. "It feels like I have
arms and legs," she said. "Like I never lost them."
 

"
I spoofed the neural feedback using your own signature motor impulse patterns from your artificials," he boasted before he saw the moisture in her eyes. It felt more real than the prosthetics, and he wasn't sure if she liked it. "I had to do it that way. We’re not just using your neural interface as a control nexus, but utilizing you as the control mechanism so we need to leverage the full, intuitive degree of control you’ve developed over your own limbs. This will be easier on you than any other way I can script it."
 

"Yeah, a lot easier," she said. Somehow, he could tell she was wiggling imaginary toes. "Feels just like the real thing." She shook her head and exhaled. "What the eff are you waiting for?"
"Right. Extend your feet." He gave her a moment to push outward with the limbs that currently existed only in her mind. "Feel that?" he said.
 

"
Like…. like round stones under my feet. Big ones."
 

"
Those are haptic representations of the four reactors. You’ll need to manage their output. To top off before discharge."
 

"
They’re warm."
 

"
That’s a spoofed sensory representation of how hot they’re running. They’ll burn your feet when they’re about to overload. Take your feet off them, and they’ll shut down. Press down, they’ll run harder. Go ahead and try it out. You’re still running through a simulator."
 

"
The emitters," she said. "The capacitors. Hook ‘em up. Hook me in for real."
 

"
Closed fist to hold the juice in the capacitors and open hand to release the energy. Easy. Your job is mostly timing and managing adjustments to the streams after the initial firing. It’ll feel like sand running through your fingers. Open them wide to allow more flow, squeeze down to stop it between your fingers and snuff the emitters. Micro adjustments for the NS191s demand finesse and that’s why you’ll be controlling those systems with your hands."
 

She said, "I’m going to need some practice."

An hour after the Chief's first, fumbling attempts to build up a capacitor charge off the reactors and fire the emitters, Burn came to
Tipperary’s
bridge to witness them test fire a live burst. Lightning played over
Tipperary’s
battered capacitor ring as the charge from the reactors built. Tig kept his face like stone waiting for it all to fail or for something unexpected to kill one of them. Then, Horcheese pulsed the emitters just five times each within an infinitesimal fraction of a second and collided five sets of three heavy nuclei streams moving close to light speed. The collisions happened right on target, within a margin of error on the subatomic level.

"
That looked good," Timms said from the NAV console.
 

Burn nodded. "Is it going to be safe at full power when we breach space?"

"
That’s a joke right?" Horcheese spoke from the center of a spider’s web. "I’ve got to collide hyper-accelerated particle streams a thousand meters from a ship I can now feel has four reactors on the brink of meltdown, leaky, seeping capacitors, and particle emitters that are a hell of a lot less precise than anyone knows. I swear, firing the NS191 emitters feels like trying to snap with numb fingers. And even if I do this perfectly, according to Timms, there’s a chance I might still blow myself up before I can breach space. Is it safe? Hell, no, it’s not safe."
 

Burn said, "
Are you ready to do this?"
 

"
Of course." Horcheese’s eyes looked up out the dome at the cloud layer waving above. "There’s still an invisible Squidy out there that wants to kill us, but if we waste any more time here, it won’t matter if we make it or not because
Hardway
and the convoy will be gone. Time is up. Timms already laid in coordinates for the Algol-Mizar transit."
 

Burn made for the hatch and almost kicked Rampone and Wambach as they came up.

Horcheese groaned, "Does everyone have to see me like this?"

Burn said, "Wrong direction, y'all. You’re riding in the salvage junk with me. Only ones that stay on
Tipperary
are Chief Horcheese and Lt. Timms."
 

"
We’ve got to stay," Tig told her. "To make sure the interface and the control concatenators hold together. What if something needs to be fixed?"
 

"
That’s right," Parker said.
 

"
If the cherries are staying, we’re staying," Rampone said.
 

Horcheese looked like she was trying to stare him down with those milky opal eyes and it didn’t work. "Pick me an’ Wambach up and throw us off the ship if you want to be alone with the cherries. You know we ain’t gonna be that much safer on the junk anyway and at least here, we can do something."

The Chief petitioned Burn, but Burn shook her head. "He’s right." Before she exited out the hatch, she said, "I’ll let the Lancers know it’s time to hunt a Squidy."

16

"Lancers, this is 1-1, invert and give those LiDAR arrays a nice view of the stars." Jordo rolled his Bitzer over to put the upper layers of the planet’s atmo behind him.

"Is this one of that cherry’s ideas?" Holdout said. "The guy who wired the Chief into
Tipperary
?"
 

"No, this is one of
my
stupid ideas." This Squidy had played him twice. It was Jordo's turn to get clever now.
 

"Lancer 1-1, this is
Tipperary
," Horcheese said in his ear. He tried to imagine her wired up on the breaching ship’s bridge and what it feels like to have a 375m-wide ass. Shoulda’ wired her up into a Bitzer, he thought. Let her have some
real
fun.
 

"
We are at point beta and rising steady," she said. "The junks are ascending on either side. Lancer 1-1, tell me how it’s looking up there."
 

"
Tipperary
, it’s all clear skies up here."
 

*****

The cloud layers blurred past as
Tipperary
ascended through the planet’s jawbreaker layers on its rise to low orbit. "Clear skies?" Wambach said. He hovered over Tig at the Ops console. "The Lancers said 'clear skies'. Is that code or something?" Nobody answered Wambach’s question. "Explain to me again how this works? I don’t get how this is going to let us see the stealthed Squidy. How is this better than looking out the porthole?"
 

Parker said, "We’ve got a daemon running across all the flight computers that’s comparing input from the LiDAR arrays of all five fighters and the junks and
Tipperary
."
 

"
Yeah, but he’s stealthed. None of us can see him."
 

"
None of us can see him alone, but if we look together, maybe we can."
 

"
Give up on Wambach," Rampone said. "When he doesn't get it, he really doesn't get it."
 

Parker didn’t give up that easy. "We compare the images of the background stars as seen from all the various craft. The stars are so far away and we’re so close together that there’s almost no parallax between our views. The stars should look just about the same to all of us."

"
So?"
 

"So, if something much, much closer were lensing energy around itself to hide like the stealthed Squidy warship, then our individual fighters would see the lensed stars on
it
differently because we’re so close. There would be significant parallax between our views. That kind of difference will show up if you’re looking for it."
 

"
But we don’t see anything yet," Wambach said. "Clear skies."
 

Rampone made imitation alien transmissions into his mic over comms.

"
Thirty seconds to exposure," Tig said.
 

"
Give Wambach the Ops console," Rampone said. "You watch the Chief. You got one job now." He meant making sure nothing interrupted the Chief’s control of the ship's capacitors and emitters. Nothing had crapped out yet, but Tig kept his face like stone, expecting something he never expected to fail at any moment. "Chief?"
 

"
Everything’s holding," she said. "Time to pick up some free charge off the atmo."
 

"
She’s taking the capacitors offline from the reactors," Parker confirmed.
 

Chief Horcheese’s head hung back on the command chair and she stared up through the dome at the jagged rivers of raw electrons and plasma burning in the atmo as those crackling tendrils whipped at them from all directions, drawing line after line from the clouds to
Tipperary’s
ring-shaped bow. Each of them lasted a ten-thousandth of a second, but each one burned itself on his retina so that in only a few moments of looking up at that dazzling display, his vision was a network of slowly fading veins of blindness.
 

He looked away, but Horcheese stared right up into it with her milky artificial eyes wide open. All her concentration was turned inwards, focusing on the translated feedback from the ship.

*****

Jordo didn’t know if it was charge flux from the pinch and all that applied artificial gravity, or maybe
Tipperary
was just lucky, but on the way out the top layers of the planet’s clouds, every bolt for 50Ks in either direction sought the breaching ship out with hair-thin, mycelium threads like burning capillaries, all feeding her with zap to store. It was like watching a flashing blue star rising in the clouds.