Family Matters

by S E Zbasnik

  "No, the fish broke up. One tried to eat the other."

  Marek started to rub his forehead when he stopped -- a terrible habit he picked up from his terrifying wife, "Just...what do you use now?"

  "A conspiracy site about the existence of a Kobold Overlord behind some secret galactic government bullshit. You know it?"

  "Oh gods," Variel muttered to herself, "I do." As Marek glanced at her in shock, she waved her hands, "Long story."

  But the dwarf who'd been at the bottom of too many uniform boots in his lifetime huffed up. They'd been assured the owner of the site, a nutter who blathered on in increasing font size about how all the major species governments were run by a trio of masked kobolds that lived in forests, had no clue the traffic underground used it.

  "I'll link up and find you on there Karten," Marek said.

  "'Kay...my username's FistIronStrong," the dwarf eyed up the human crossing her arms and not going for anything sharp. "And Marek, don't ever call me again." He shut off his end before the human had a chance to respond.

  Variel grabbed onto her husband's hand and ordered it to hook up with the ether. Her fingers poked at his lifelines as she gazed at where an old poster advising employees to wash all hands and tentacles rested before his PALM projected the site across it. "There, this should be what your friend was talking about."

  "He's not a friend," Marek said, grateful to have his hand back as she stepped away from her work gawking at the garish color screen splayed across her wall.

  "I don't care."

  Marek poked a few more of his lines, trying to find access to the forum. There was always some sign-in/register bunk he had to fight his way through. He'd used so many false names over the years it was hard to remember them. At the final sign in screen, he jumped up on his tiptoes and stuck out his tongue to prove he wasn't a robot in disguise.

  "How did you know about this site?" he asked as non-confrontational as he could manage while still tipping to one side and flapping his free hand. These captcha's grew more outlandish with every year.

  "It's Orn's," Variel said shaking her head at the font blaring about Underwater Microbe Bots That Steal Your Blood! The guy wasn't without creativity. "And I am going to have a very long talk with him when all this is over."

  "It's, uh, going to take awhile," Marek said pointing to the lists of topics in the mostly empty message board, of which none were properly spelled. "Unless you wanted to stick around and watch my sexy ass work."

  Her eyes nearly popped out of her head at the barrel roll. "Getting your veins filled with as much poison as your body can stand, you mean? That counts as work in your world."

  "You always were such a judgmental bitch. No one could stand up to your moral compass of laying down one's life for the good of Gods and Kingdom."

  Variel snorted, "And sneaking through the dark underbrush of the ether to score the next hit makes you oh so edgy instead of some nearly forty-year-old man clinging to an adolescence he's too terrified to leave?"

  "At least I'm not still clinging to my dead mother's skirts by laying waste to hundreds of people."

  Marek cringed as the words left his body. He'd been a Sword Wife long enough to know that you never order around anyone that outranks your spouse, you don't sleep with the admiral's wife, and you never ever ask a soldier how many people they'd killed. Naturally, he'd failed at all three rules. Some on the regular.

  Variel could have put her fist through the wall, she could have grabbed him by the collar and tossed him into a makeshift brig where the djinn tortured him day and night until he broke. She could have even gotten in his face and snarled the way she did with Karten. But she shook her head slowly, as if his spiteful words were so far removed from her it was like being beaten with padded weapons.

  "I'll leave you to your small life," she said exiting the galley.

  Marek nibbled on his lips, for a brief moment thinking about racing after her and apologizing for his rash words, but it passed as soon as it came. It would take a good man to own up to his shit, and he never claimed to be one.

  Ferra ran her fingers across the fresh chrome plating, polishing it up for the third time. It was her pet side project -- a small engine that, in theory, could run on bursts without needing MGC. Wyrm pinches were out of the question, but it handled nearly the speed of light. Her biggest problem was adjusting for the time dilation. The last time she ran it, the test chicken came back in an egg.

  Most of Ferra's room consisted of tools for her project. She'd cleared out all of the bed and toiletry space to put up shelves and hefty toolboxes decked out in stickers of her favorite brands. Craftself blended with Shirley, Honeysoso and a small movie poster for Kronos. A small desk lamp lit her workspace cluttered with scraps of ideas etched upon the walls in chalk. The bottom of the lamp consisted of a tiny man being abducted into an oblong space ship hovering near the light source. An anniversary present from Orn.

  She rubbed her greasy hands off on a towel, cursing herself again for yanking out the sanitizer, but she needed the power source for the plasma screen. Walking clear across her room and into Orn's for their shared bathroom was too much work most of the time, so she just smeared the grease across whatever scrap of fabric was available and got back to work.

  The door to the Lidoffad's shared room opened. A whoosh sound Orn added as a touch of ancient nostalgia lifted Ferra's head out of her thrice reconstructed inertia injector. The captain stood at the threshold gripping onto the frame and terrified to cross into the danger zone. But, she spotted her engineer hunched over her toys and -- holding her breath -- dodged around piles of things the Life Determination Department would be investigating in a week or less judging by the way a pile of socks croaked like a bullfrog.

  Variel never said a word when Ferra carted an acetylene torch up to what was the pilot and engineers shared room and proceeded to provide the two more space. Having "lived" with Marek for four years, she knew all too well the importance of alone time. Though, Variel preferred to keep a planet or two distance between her and her spouse. As long as Ferra didn't cause any major decompressions in the hull, the engineer was free to do to her room what she wanted.

  "What's dropping?" Ferra asked her captain as Variel staggered around Orn's stack of ancient magazines that sounded dirty. He had almost the entire collection of A Little Prick: gnome needlework and knitting.

  "I heard through our grapevine you have an idea on how to get this ship up and running."

  Ferra stood, her project forgotten, as she traced back through her last bravado, "Sort of. What's a grapevine?"

  "Human idiom," Variel said, "Tal...someone told me you'd been insinuating you had a way to yank off the lockdown without fully crippling the Elation."

  The elf snorted, "It was just shop talk, deep spacing it. Monde and the fruit fly twins were all hanging out in engineering so we could talk shit about your husband. No offense."

  "I hope at least some of it was offensive," Variel said, "otherwise why bother?"

  Ferra smiled; the human and elf weren't ever about to become best-friends-forever but they had a strong working relationship that didn't end in anyone with a plasma spanner jammed in between two vertebrae.

  "Surely you know of some way around the lawyer's kill codes," the captain prodded.

  "Perhaps," Ferra steepled her fingers, a move that would look classic villain on anyone other than the five foot nothing blonde-haired, cream-skinned elf. She was the picture of demure and lady-like until you switched over to video, then it was best to hide before the 'sweet elf' ripped your face off. "Any other ship and it'd be impossible. You'd have to sever off nearly the entire deck containing the AI, the infested engine, and possibly one of the backups. It's a self replicating piece of shale. Unless you stab at its heart it'll come back with a vengeance, sometimes for the life support systems out of spite."

  "Please tell me there's a but coming."

  "Why? Things not going so well with your blushing groom?"

  Var
iel had expected a near constant poking from Orn, but he'd kept most of it under his hat. He probably marked it as one of those things that would equal instant death if he pushed too hard. But getting it from his wife...well, some days Variel wasn't so surprised that the two wound up in wedded bliss. "The cockroach in bad music video clothing is trying his hand at crime and failing spectacularly."

  Ferra laughed, "Orn said something about a Pegasus drug..."

  "Unicorn," Variel said.

  "Ah, that would explain why he kept prancing about with one of his sugar sticks stuck to his forehead. And you think your true love can actually snag such a highly illegal prize?"

  "If I did would I be asking if you can yank his lock off?"

  "Well, the one bright source for us is the redistributor. On any other ship it's fully automated, handled by the onboard computer that's never been convinced it's a giant chicken."

  After a particularly bad trip through an ion storm weeks back, WEST in its pique of madness threw a colossal fit and tried to dump all the frying oil and thyme out the airlock. Then it cried over its unborn children in the fridge's door. It took Variel tossing bits of dried corn to distract the computer long enough for Ferra to reboot it to something not barn affiliated. A hedgehog is considerably quieter at least.

  Ferra snatched up one of her chalk pieces and started to sketch on the walls. A few lines represented the redistributor, a piece made up of so many smaller parts it was said to contain the heart of the universe, as well as all those twist ties loaves of bread come with that are invariably lost to the ether. "But the Elation designers never fully integrated it with the computer. Perhaps one of them was an augur."

  "So that's why you could rescue some of WEST's brain," Variel nodded.

  "At least enough for it to try and drown you all on the station, yes."

  "Orn?"

  "No, all he did was shriek 'Water!' and hide under the table. It was the assassin, actually. He can be rather chatty when the subject of your husband comes up."

  "Ah," Variel said, mentally redoubling her need to get the source of bonding for her crew off this ship as soon as possible.

  "Point being, if I could slowly replace the functioning parts of the redistributor with dead zones while also moving the vital functions to a sort of dialysis machine for the time being I might be able to flush the virus."

  "How much of the ship would we lose?"

  "Hard to say," Ferra's chalk threw up a few calculations that ended in a large question mark. "I've never done anything like it, at least not while the thing wasn't in dry dock and not plugged in. Somewhere between 10-100%?"

  "A hundred percent?"

  "It's the MGC balancer. If it gets out of whack in the switch over, we pinch an unstable wyrm and half the ship falls in, or all of it...and the pinch can never open it back up. Or the gravity well folds in on itself. It'd never have the energy for a black hole, but our bones could still be crushed at the bottom of the ship. You know, little things like that."

  "And if I ask you to do this, is there any way you can promise me with enough time you can avoid all those bad bone crushing things?"

  Ferra tapped her chalk against the bulkhead, "I could lie if it'd make you feel better."

  "Run the calculations and mock up your dialysis machine, just in case my better half doesn't come through."

  "Aye aye, captain," Ferra said, nudging a chalk mark on her forehead with her salute.

  "We're doomed, aren't we?" Variel muttered, knowing she couldn't seriously threaten the lives of her crew for her own mistake, but fearing she couldn't take another minute of her husband without smearing his body across the bulkheads.

  Ferra tapped her boss on the shoulder and smiled, "Probably."

  Marek refreshed his hand for the fifth time. He hadn't heard a thing after his old gambling buddy signed off with the promise of a private message soon. Soon came and went. Eventually was tapping its toe and getting impatient. Never was quickly pulling into the station. He yanked on the band around his midsection trying to stretch it out. There hadn't been much of a plan the day he spotted one of those sleazy lawyers on tv talking about intestinal mesh mod lawsuits or Have you ever suffered a headache after taking a banshee antacid? You might have a case! But he needed someone to rant to, someone to listen to the man facing the loss of a lifestyle he became accustomed to.

  Widowhood suited Marek, more than he could have imagined. Women who'd have crossed the street to avoid him would coo as he called up the picture of his brave wife's service photo and wiped away a tear over her loss while playing up how he feared he'd never love again. He even kept the old braid in his pocket, ready to pin back up at a moment's notice. Neighbors, other service members on furlough, even kindly old grannies in the Crest soldier neighborhood would drop by with so many casseroles he didn't have to attempt cooking for months after the funeral. Each Soulday there was still a basket of cookies on the doorstep and a plate of eggs for the spring Alem. Then the red envelope arrived at his door.

  When the black one came, it was tucked under the arm of an ancient, high-ranking fusspots Terrwyn insisted he never ever speak to. One shook his hand, the other thumped him hard on the back as they passed over the scroll. He unraveled the thing to find some squirrely text almost unreadable under his poorly trained eyes. His wife's name, filled out in gold, claimed up most of the end of the scroll's real estate. The black caps on the soldier's heads, onyx from rare use against the setting sun, told Marek all he needed to know. He'd have to fake his way through a funeral.

  But with the red envelope, there was no one. No ceremony. No soldiers standing outside his door to tell him how bravely someone he cared for gave her life for the kingdom. It was taped to the door with a small "please sign and return" sheet. His fingers shook as he called the lawyer's number, the thick paper trembling over the call.

  They promised they'd find him compensation in some form and they'd tracked down an old account, one of the many Terrwyn kept in hiding from him. He never cared about her accounts as long as he got the agreed percentage of allowance, and she was good for that at least. Most of his dead wife's money passed back into either his coffers or to her Mum, but there was some account laying rotten and almost untraceable through dwarven banks and back into troll hands. It'd taken a few weeks, but eventually it all led back to this rank ship out in the desolate middle of nowhere. As if Marek wanted a damn thing to do with space or anyone putzing around in it. People were created to live with ground beneath their boots, not stars. It was the proper thing.

  "If I am not interrupting your machinations..." the lilting voice caressed across his cheek and he turned to find one of those elves standing in the doorway. Her tiny nose twitched in an adorable way as she intruded upon his personal space. She picked at a set of pearl-like beads dangling off her dress' top bit.

  Marek smiled wide, "Of course not, please join me. I'm afraid I never quite caught your name."

  "Brena," she said settling her well skirted backside down into one of the rickety chairs. Her thin fingers tented on the table.

  "I'm Marek."

  "Yes, I know."

  He laughed, and nodded his head, "Of course you do, of course you do. You're a high elf, yes?"

  "We prefer Dulcen, but yes. I am surprised you could tell. Most humans are unable to spot the obvious differences."

  "It's obvious in your grace, and charm, and lovely blend of coloring."

  Brena blinked slowly, "You have just described any number of elves, dwarves, gargoyles, ogres, and some trolls. As well as most non-corporeals who can manifest a form beyond smoke."

  He blinked at her brush off of his compliment but didn't back down, "Right, I'm gonna have to keep an eye on you."

  "That would be quite a stretch for your optic nerves. But to my point," Brena opened up her journal and extracted a digital quill from her thick now all black hair, "I am researching various courting and coupling rituals."

  "Oh, are you now?" Marek lifted in his seat, inching toward
s her.

  "My questions involve the marriage and/or joining practices of your species."

  "Oh..." his puffed up chest somewhat deflated. "There's itchy clothes, expensive and bland food in tiny portions, and everyone talks about how beautiful it all is despite it being a carbon copy of every other wedding."

  "I see," Brena tapped her quill against the empty page. "But, if I may, could you describe your own conjoining with the Captain? I may require the setting of a military wedding and would love some first hand knowledge."

  "Would you?" Marek said leaning closer to Brena who was focused on her writing. When she lifted her head again she blinked slowly at the man close enough she could taste his breath.

  A heavy bang reverberated through the galley as the other female elf -- the short, ivory-skinned one -- tossed one of her mechanical tools into the sink. "Don't mind me, just washing up," she said, nodding towards the sink as grease vanished into the air with the whirring of sanitizers.

  Marek knew he needed a new tactic with the two elven beauties he had trapped for the moment, and he sat back in his chair. "It was...the day that altered my life," he began failing to notice the gagging sounds from beside the sink. Brena jotted something down in her book as he began to unravel the tale.

  "I stood before the five families in my finest-"

  "Five families?" Brena interrupted just as he was about to describe the only contribution he cared about for the festivities.

  "Every true wedding has the five families: your parents, your intended's parents, the stand ins for the lord to the realm, the priests of Lartran and Ameldia, and the cowled man and woman to represent the future." Marek couldn't have sounded more condescending as he described the incredibly goofy traditions the humans shaped from their ancient cave tradition of gathering everyone up and saying, "Hey we're together now, so no mooching in on my territory. We cool?"

  But Brena jotted it all down with fervor. "Thank you, that does explain the excessive use of dark, hooded cloaks embroidered with flowers I found upon inspiration boards. Please continue."