The Proteus Bridge

by M. D. Cooper

  There was another bonus to the location, and that was the constant flow of humans who loved to sit at the fountain, or often walked past on their way to other parts of the market.

  Lacking the speech capacity of their Grey Parrot brethren, the corvids experienced the Link as a swirl of images reinforced by emotion, a shared dream that allowed them to see into the minds of people passing by at a level that was below conscious communication. Two people discussing a trip to the bazaar might remember their previous visits through the images and sensation of memory—or even the images created by imagination—while also painting the conversation with the emotions of anxiety while on a date, concern about finances, or dread at not finding the right gift.

  While the humans were caught up in their surface communications, the ravens plainly saw their underlying emotions.

  Being mischievous birds, they immediately understood the benefit in their location.

  A man eating his lunch beside the fountain could be chased away easily by a single raven croaking, “Fired! Fired!” or “Unloved! Unloved!”

  The raw blast of a raven’s croak only added to the populace’s unsettling experience of realizing they were being harassed by telepathic birds.

  At first, the squawking harangues were met by surprise and often fear. Then, more adventurous—and self-confident—people approached the fountain, realizing they could communicate with the ravens by focusing on certain memories or scenes.

  One teenage girl was able to get the ravens excitedly shouting happy words like, “Rainbow!” and “Puppy!” only to have one of her classmates receive “Cheater! Cheater! Cheater!”

  Factions arose among the vendors in the bazaar, who were growing tired of losing anything shiny from the booths, including the bolts that held canopies together, while others experienced increased business as word spread that mind-reading ravens had taken up residence at the Night Park Fountain, which had previously been nothing but an eyesore.

  Station Administration, the local TSF sub-station, and finally several local crime syndicates squared off in the debate about what to do about the ravens. However, everything came to a halt when a nest appeared, filled with speckled eggs.

  Crowds gathered to monitor the nest. Vendors and visitors to the market became aware that most of the ravens were paired off in couples. This made the ravens seem less like a wild horde, and more like colonists in the wildlands of Cruithne.

  The couples focused on the eggs that were now appearing daily, while the unmated birds demonstrated impressive feats of intelligence to secure items for additional nests. Parents brought their kids down to the Night Park fountain to see the ravens, which completely changed the character of the grey market bazaar.

  Musicians and candymakers materialized to cater to families. The Station Administration scheduled community events. Link forums documented the best insults from the various ravens, while others named the birds and followed their activities.

  Visiting the Ravens became a local pastime, as locals and tourists alike came down to the Night Park fountain to endure the ravens’ never-ending roast. Some visitors were heckled ruthlessly, while others were offered small gifts of shiny bolts, bits of fabric, or filament from important network nodes.

  No one remembered when the first grey parrots appeared at the fountain. The pair may have been pets abandoned by their owners when they left Cruithne, or—as legend suggests—they were freed by the mischievous ravens, who travelled throughout the whole asteroid, and even poorly secured ships at the docks.

  After the parrots came several breeds of songbirds, and a tall rooster with red and purple feathers that patrolled the base of the fountain, accepting bits of food from visiting kids with a regal flick of his comb.

  No one would have admitted it at first, but the birds of the Night Park fountain provided Cruithne, and especially the bazaar, a respectability that neither had ever had before. If the birds chose to settle on Cruithne, then it couldn’t all be bad, right?

  The age-old image of a pirate with a parrot on their shoulder had transitioned to spacer mythology, giving the fountain the feel of Santa Claus’ North Pole workshop, and the addition of the songbirds and wise-looking, judgmental ravens simply rounded out the fantasy.

  Eventually, the fountain was more Cruithne than Cruithne had been before, and the birds were there to stay. If they stole an augmented eye or called someone a biting name, well, that was now good luck, and many a spacer and wannabe pirate made the pilgrimage to visit the fountain, tossing in ancient coins and other shinies to please the birds.

  Stars above, every spacer knew they needed all the good luck they could get before their next trip into the black….

  PART II:

  CRASH CRASH CRASH

  THE HUSTLE

  STELLAR DATE: 03.21.2956 (Adjusted Years)

  LOCATION: TSF Storage Yard

  REGION: Cruithne Station, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol

  Eleven (or so) years later…

  Ngoba Starl and Riggs Zanda crouched in the service alcove as the security drone shot by, scorching the walls around it with orange heat beams. Ngoba felt the rush of warmth and realized it had barely missed his face.

  As soon as the blocky thing was past, wiry Ngoba rolled into the tunnel and came up on one knee. He had about two seconds to steady the shoulder-fired missile launcher before the drone spotted him with its rear sensors.

  “Ngoba!” Riggs hissed. “Safety!”

  Ngoba dropped the heavy tube to glare at his friend. “I got the safety. That’s the first damn thing I—”

  The drone whirled at the sound of their voices, its bulk filling the tight corridor like a cubic sea anemone. Two lurid red sensors in its front panel glowed like angry eyes.

  “Aim!” Riggs shouted. “Ngoba, aim!”

  Ngoba ignored his friend’s frantic instructions and squeezed the blast tube against his neck. His fingers scrambled over the blocky trigger mechanism before he found the right combination of buttons and mashed on the controls. A rumbling whoosh filled the tunnel, followed almost immediately by an explosion that sent orange waves of flame rolling back toward Ngoba. He smelled burning hair and figured he was going to lose his beard and eyebrows. He vaguely remembered dropping the missile tube.

  * * * * *

  Lying on his back, ears ringing as he squeezed his eyes closed against the stinging smoke, Ngoba Starl wondered if he’d made a mistake somewhere.

  They’d definitely fucked up recently. His best friend Riggs Zanda had absolutely made a mistake with the cargo hold’s security system, activating the overwatch and its angry drone, which must have been surplus TSF, from the amount of death-making hardware it had been packing.

  Before that. Long before that.

  Was it his fault he’d been born on Cruithne Station, the asshole of the universe? Was it his fault he lived in a junked freighter they called the TSS Squat with a bunch of half-starved orphans, doing work for a cruel woman they called Mama Chala? And was she cruel, or did she just have high standards, as she liked to say? Was it his fault they weren’t old enough for the surgery needed for Link implantation, so Riggs had to hack like a savage?

  Unable to hold his breath any longer, Ngoba coughed. His throat burned.

  Rolling onto his stomach, he tried to peer through his eyelashes, eyes still stinging like he’d been dunked in acid. He pulled at his beard, thick for a seventeen-year-old, but still natty. He still had his curly hair, too, though his hand came back covered in dust.

  “Riggs,” Ngoba whispered. “You all right?”

  “No,” came a whimpering response. “I can’t believe you used the missile launcher.”

  “What are you talking about? What was I supposed to do?”

  “You realize the overpressure alone could have blown the cargo block off into space? What would we do then? We’d be sucking hard vacuum.”

  “I told you when I brought the missile that I might fire it.”

  “Might is a long way from pulling the trigge
r.”

  “I aimed it land-side. Nothing was getting blown out into space.”

  “Overpressure, Ngoba. Overpressure. You need to learn about this shit if you’re going to live to see twenty.”

  Ngoba shook his head, feeling more stubborn the longer the conversation continued. “You knew I was going to fire the missile.”

  Riggs sneezed. “Your missile shit all over me. That happened, too. I’m covered in propellant.”

  “Serves you right.” Ngoba wheezed a laugh but only started coughing again. “Do you hear the drone? I can’t see anything.”

  “It’s dead.”

  “You’re sure it’s dead? How can you see anything?”

  “I don’t have to. Its control frequencies are all cold.”

  “You can see that?” Ngoba said, letting his head fall against the warm concrete. The floor was gritty through his beard.

  “I can see it right here. Just like I knew the thing was coming after us. If I hadn’t warned you about the drone, we’d be dead right now.”

  “So you triggered the defensive perimeter, waking the drone so it could attack us, but I should thank you because you warned me in time?”

  “How doesn’t that make sense?”

  Riggs groaned. “We better get back down there. We need to get something out of this job.”

  “You think we have time?” Ngoba asked “The overwatch system will have notified somebody.”

  “Didn’t you send the vacuum breach alarm?”

  “Yes, I sent the damn alarm.”

  “Then they’ll think it’s a meteorite strike or a drunk pilot or something.”

  “I wish we had damn EV suits,” Ngoba said. “We’re too close to the edge of the ring here.”

  “It’ll be fine. The ring is held on Cruithne with jizz and spit and the gravity created by all us assholes.”

  “I like that,” Ngoba said. “ ‘Held on by jizz and spit’. I’m going to use that, brother.” He pushed himself to his knees. The smoke was starting to clear, and he was able to make out bits of the drone scattered all down the corridor in front of them, mixed in with broken pieces of concrete from a collapsed section of the ceiling.

  Riggs shook his head, and his hair became slightly more brown, dust filling the air around him. He coughed. He had narrow green eyes in a squashed head that reminded Ngoba of an oblong lemon.

  “Come on,” Ngoba said.

  Without waiting, he turned to jog back down the narrow service corridor toward the airlock to the attached shipping container, their target. He was surprised to find they had only run about a hundred meters from the explosion. It had seemed like a full kilometer when the drone was howling behind them.

  Riggs pushed past him at the airlock to check its control panel. Ngoba watched over his short friend’s shoulder as he flashed through control menus until he had access to its administration protocols. This was where they had been standing before, when the door slid open to reveal the red eyes of the attack drone.

  Ngoba tensed as the door slid open a second time, even though he knew there was nothing left inside that could hurt them.

  “Quit breathing down my neck,” Riggs complained.

  “Quit taking your sweet time about this. We’ve probably got private security on the way.”

  “I turned off all the external reporting.”

  “Just like you turned off the overwatch security system, yeah?”

  Riggs growled as a breath of cold air blew back over them. With the door open, he stepped into the cramped interior of the shipping container.

  “Wait here,” Riggs said, craning his neck to look around. “It’s too tight in here for both of us to go poking around.”

  “Good sign,” Ngoba said. “Lots of freight.” He patted himself down, feeling for rips in his shirt and pants. He only had one set of clothes and he took a lot of pride in his appearance—something the other squatters all teased him ruthlessly for.

  “Dammit,” Riggs cursed from inside the container, hidden by cargo crates.

  “What is it?”

  “This damn thing is full of expired flour.”

  “No,” Ngoba said, blinking. “You said the manifest showed protein substitute.”

  “I know what it used to say.” Riggs barked in pain as he hit his head on something inside the container.

  “That makes no sense,” Ngoba said. “Why would somebody set up an attack drone to guard a bunch of flour? Are you telling me I carried that missile all this way—wasted Chala’s missile, dammit—for a bunch of flour?”

  “Shut up, Ngoba. I’m looking. It was all cover for the weapons drop, but the regular contents should match the manifest.”

  “You better look harder.”

  Disregarding Riggs’s command to wait at the airlock, Ngoba pushed his way into the container, squeezing between the haphazardly stacked crates. His breath blew in front of him in white clouds. Inside, he found Riggs crouched next to a wide crate with its lid hanging open.

  “This was it,” Riggs said as Ngoba climbed up beside him. “This was the drop point. This should be full of Mars Protectorate handguns.”

  “Does the crate have a control panel? Any access records?”

  Riggs shot him an irritated glance. “Do you see an access panel? It’s a dumb crate.”

  Ngoba moved the lid, listening as the hinges squeaked. He stared into the empty crate for a minute as he started to shiver, a reminder they were standing in an uninsulated metal box, with hard vacuum a few meters away. Something about the bottom of the crate didn’t look right, so he leaned in to tap it.

  “It’s got a hollow bottom,” he confirmed.

  Riggs shook his head as if he didn’t understand, so Ngoba shouldered him out of the way and reached down into the crate with both hands. He pressed on one side of the crate’s bottom and laughed when it moved easily. Pulling the alloy plate to one side, he found two pistols lying on their sides.

  “That’s it?” Riggs complained. “Two crap handguns?”

  “Have you looked at them? How do you know they’re crap?”

  “They’re crap. We’re screwed. Mama Chala's going to kick us out of the squat.”

  Ngoba pulled the pistols out of the crate and let the false bottom fall back into place. A little cloud of dust floated up as it fell. He handed the second pistol to Riggs and turned his over in his hands. It was a Terran Space Force standard-issue pulse pistol with no bio-lock.

  “These are pretty good, Riggs,” he said. “I’d rather have one of these than that missile tube.”

  Riggs shrugged. “You take it. I’m trying to figure out what we’re going to tell Mama Chala. We can’t show up with just these things. We'll be popping zits off her back for days.”

  “Because we don’t listen,” Ngoba said automatically, mimicking one of Mama Chala’s speeches.

  “Because we don’t listen,” Riggs agreed. He sighed.

  Ngoba slapped his friend on the shoulder. “Come on. If we’re going to get fucked, we might as well get it over with.”

  “That’s the thing. I don’t want to get fucked.”

  “Then find us a new score so we’ve got some currency for rent.”

  “This was the only thing I could find.” Riggs slammed the lid of the crate closed and collapsed back on his heels, shoulders slumped. “We’re screwed, Ngoba. We’re going to go back there, and she’s going to tell us we’re too old, we’re not kids anymore.” He shuddered. “Or she’s going to make me snuggle with her. I know she’s going to.”

  Ngoba put his hand on his friend’s shoulder and pushed the second pistol into his hands. “I’ve got your back, Riggs. Don’t worry about that. We’ll find someone a little more age-appropriate to harass you. How’s that?” He grinned, but his friend ignored him.

  Riggs looked down at the pistol. “I guess we could roll a tourist down in Night Park.”

  “You know I don’t like doing that. Bad karma.”

  “All your good karma’s going to kill us,” Rigg
s complained.

  Ngoba jammed his pistol into his belt and climbed to his feet. “At least we’ll be mostly good people. You let me talk to Mama Chala. I’ll explain the situation.”

  “No snuggling,” Riggs said. “I’m not going to do it.”

  “No snuggling,” Ngoba agreed. “Hey now, how about this? Let’s catch some Crash before we head back. That’ll get your mind off this mess.”

  “We don’t have any money to bet. Nobody’s going to take contraband TSF hardware.”

  “We don’t need to bet, my friend. We enjoy Crash for the pure spirit of the sport.”

  Riggs groaned. He held the pistol up as if he expected Ngoba to take it back, then finally pushed it into his waistband as well. “This thing pokes me,” he complained.

  “Builds character,” Ngoba said. “Come on.”

  DREAMING OF PARROTS

  STELLAR DATE: 03.21.2956 (Adjusted Years)

  LOCATION: Crash Games Hangar, Night Park

  REGION: Cruithne Station, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol

  The Crash field was in an old hangar down by Night Park. Ngoba and Riggs had to wind their way among the stalls and crowds that filled the park’s bazaar, taking the long way around to avoid the fountain in the middle where the grey parrots hung out, cursing at passersby.

  “Squawk! Hey, dummy,” they heard in the distance. “Hey, hey, dummy!”

  Throughout its long history as a sanctuary for smuggling, various entrepreneurs had tried to start more respectable tourist attractions on the station. Because, Ngoba figured, even pirates end up with families eventually. Most ventures had failed; from the amusement parks that were now red-light districts, to the theme restaurants that had become burned-out drug dens.

  The fountain at Night Park had somehow continued to exist on its own momentum, maybe because it was protected by the huge, open-air bazaar and provided one of the few open spaces where people could eat, but mostly through the protection of the grey parrots and their raven underlings, who harangued anyone they didn’t like, sang to children, squawked puns and stole crumbs from picnicking families.