Against A Rock

by Kalin Ringkvist

  Mahran came to the back of the room and saluted. “Master Floreina…“

  “I saw that you had some free time,” she said. “We should chat…” And she motioned toward the exit.

  He nodded.

  They walked, taking a lift toward the higher, cleaner decks.

  “Master Floreina, I owe you an apology,” Mahran said as soon as they were alone, heading toward a vacant seating area in the forward observation lounge.

  “Well, that’s okay,” she replied. “Because I owe you an apology first… because I know I didn’t handle that situation very well. I should have laid it out for you when you first came to me. I should have told you the truth and explained to you that it was unacceptable, but instead I was afraid that you would act irrationally, so I deceived you… and that was wrong of me, so I apologize.”

  Mahran smiled and took a sudden breath. “Thank you, Master Floreina. And I apologize too… for everything you already know about… you were right… and I knew it all along… I’m sorry about everything I said.”

  “It’s in the past,” she replied. “Lets forget about it now, and go back to the way things were before.”

  “Deal.” He nodded.

  “I got your brother all situated on the outside,” she told him. “I’m sure he’ll send a letter for you in a few days.”

  He took a deep breath. “Thank you, Master. I honestly appreciate that.” But he closed his eyes and smiled only momentarily.

  “Is something else wrong?” Floreina asked.

  Mahran turned toward the window. A swirling orange gas giant loomed before them. “A few more slaves died yesterday,” he said.

  “Hows that?” she asked. “I just got back from the station.”

  “The captain ordered them into the warp drive plasma chamber for standard cleaning and diagnostic procedures before all the plasma had been drained. They got radiation sickness and died a few hours later.”

  “Oh,” Floreina replied. “I don’t understand… how could they not have known…”

  “The engineering commander tried to talk her out of it, apparently, so it sounds like they did know about the plasma… sounded like Allihence didn’t care… or something… I’m not really sure…” He leaned his head against the window, his eyes drooping. “…it just made me think about how ungrateful I was… and made me want to apologize, so I’m glad you came down this morning.”

  “Well,” Floreina replied. “I’m glad you’re not mad anymore… because I might have more special work for you…”

  ______ ______ ______

  “Okay, I’m going to remove the implant now and it’s going to fall away from your consciousness. It’s going to seem very strange for a minute.”

  All she heard before the shift of consciousness was a subtle pop as the surgeon disconnected her personal computer. Her vision snapped white. The floor zoomed and descended, and all she could think of was the movement and texture of the tiles as she stared over the end of the operating table.

  She came back to recognize a sudden void. Her mind was a wandering wave of disconnected thoughts and pointless emotions without a processor to help organize, record priorities and memories, maintain goals, manage self-doubt, and illuminate self-deceptions.

  “How do you feel?” asked the doctor.

  “Well…” she replied. “I can still think and talk… it’s been a long time since I felt this… opened up…”

  “That’s normal. As long as you can talk and still understand what’s going on…”

  “It feels like when I was a kid…”

  “Are you ready for the upgrade?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “Absolutely.”

  She vaguely felt the computer slipping into its slot though the numbness at the back of her head. A moment later she felt the connections, vaguely at first, like a thought you can’t quite grasp or a distant emotion from a forgotten movie. But after several seconds it grew into a wave of inexplicable emotion, agony and joy, humiliation and pride, success and defeat, melding into one mysteriously unique sensation.

  A soft moan crackled pleasurably through her vocal cords and her toes curled uncontrollably.

  The implant played with her connections, sending waves of test data; changing, experimenting and enhancing with every passing millisecond. The sensations continued to grow and Floreina floated away into the moment and allowed the implant’s operating system to grow clearer in her mind. For a long while, she simply felt the systems as they communicated with her, the new options and applications presenting themselves one by one as they came online. She grinned as the sensations became more precise, quickly surpassing the capacity and complexity of her old implant.

  “Everything processing?” the doctor asked.

  “I think so,” she replied. “Impressive…”

  “Oh, yes, a premium system,” said the doctor. “The tests are coming back, and looks like the implant's calling everything okay from its end. If you’re confident, then we can just give it a few more minutes to make sure there's no connectivity issues before sealing the skin. Then we begin the software upgrades.”

  Floreina heard the doctor selecting options on his computer screen, monitoring the mental embedding process through a direct connection.

  “Looks like you’ve got a list of software to install today,” said the surgeon. “This is going to take a few hours… full operating system upgrade, hand-to-hand combat routines, 3-D environmental tactical processing, character and movement analyzation… lie detector… background event processing, conversational assistant, structural decision making, automated thought recording, new medical interface, rear-camera interface… and a personal firearm targeting system.”

  …And of course, the programs the doctor did not know about such as the hacking modules, code decryptors and liar’s assistant. That software would be purchased from a less reputable dealer.

  The doctor took a deep breath. “That’s quite a list… I also see a muscular nanite interfacing system? You planning on getting muscular nanite enhancements?”

  “Yup,” she confirmed. The interface system wouldn’t be much good without them, she added silently.

  “You planning on getting in a lot of fights?” he asked.

  “I like to keep my options open,” she replied.

  “I see that you’ve specified that everything be fully compatible with pod technology. You planning on becoming a capsuleer any time soon?”

  “Like I said, I like to keep my options open.”

  ______ ______ ______

  The crosshairs flashed, one after another, paper thin, yet clearly visible. The targeting routine constantly practiced calculating distance and trajectory, bouncing from one head to another as she walked toward her quarters.

  Meanwhile she received constant information and analyzations of every body that walked into her view… estimated weight, strength potential, and level of current focus. The combat assistant could even give estimates of training levels, based on how the subjects carried themselves, or search for concealed weapons based on clothing bulges.

  For weeks her mind had been a constant flurry of system testing. Even now, as she punched the code into her hatch, the sweat-soaked t-shirt clinging to her back after her martial arts training, her combat systems were still comparing notes.

  And then a flash caught her attention; a notification through her remote mental connection. Her wallet had been updated. She made a connection to the financial readout, and entered her password to check her balance.

  He had told her it would take months, and it had only been six weeks. She felt a weight lifting, but deep down she had known he would come through for her.

  Viotro was Amarrian and Amarrian loyalties ran deep.

  She gazed at the numbers in her mind. One million ISK.

  ______ ______ ______

  Floreina dragged herself hand-over-hand through an emergency access tube near the bridge, toward a little-known section behind the main pod interface control room, just
ten meters behind Captain Allihence’s pod. The tube climbed at a forty-five degree angle, which made for more difficult movement than the air vents on the station. However, Floreina was able to use the opportunity to experiment with the controls for the nanites stationed throughout her muscles, providing tendon strengthening and oxygen processing. It almost seemed as though she could feel them, like a million tiny tingles throughout her body.

  She pulled herself upward, playing with the nanite settings, tweaking them to give her just the right level of assistance to strengthen instead of overpower.

  But she could practice her cybernetic improvements later she decided as she arrived at her destination: a small computer access panel built into the side of the crawlway. She propped her feet against a ridge and leaned against the incline to look up at the access panel.

  Just for a moment as she removed the panel, she thought back to her slave’s attempt to kiss her in the other access tube months earlier. The visions that had gone through her head at that moment were probably nothing like Mahran had intended; he knew nothing of suburban home ownership or raising children in a house with a yard, in a situation where you need to worry more about education and happiness than you do about dying in a firefight. Mahran knew little or nothing of these peaceful pockets in New Eden, nor the vast difference of human feelings that could be experienced there. He would never guess that Floreina imagined herself there from time to time, a completely different person; a wife and mother instead of a career-driven gunnery commander.

  Viotro had asked her to marry him, suggesting the same possibility… a three bedroom house in suburbia on one of the thousands of terraformed worlds.

  No one would have guessed that such a life had been a real possibility.

  And now she had the option of starting over. She could retire tomorrow if she wanted… lead a comfortable life…

  So why was she now crawling through a secret access tube toward the central pod-interface controls with the intention of exploring options of sabotage?

  She could walk away from it all… to a land of peace and comfort and safety… and as one portion of her mind considered the idea, and even longed for it, the part of her that continued unscrewing the access panel and preparing hacking algorithms considered it an eloquent but ironic joke.

  It drifted from her mind as she pulled the linkage cable from the access panel and plugged it into her head.

  She anchored her feet in place for a long wait as the hacking routines went to work.

  She passed the time by watching recordings collected from her senses, mostly old glimpses of her dad. The recordings only went back to her fourteenth year when she’d had her first visual processing chips installed. Records before that were third-person.

  In the end, she clung to the inside of the tube for nearly two hours before finally gaining access. She crawled to the end of the corridor and removed an access hatchway to drop into a dark control room.

  The instruments, being of Ishukone construction, looked foreign at first, and even the construction materials were much darker than the soft gold of the rest of the ship.

  But while the physical controls and readouts were relatively foreign, the mental connections would certainly have standardized outputs. She wasted little time before plugging herself in.

  She poured through ship schematics, her specific target being the five booster slots and their chemical dispersal procedures. However, the booster slots were not her only reason for being here. She also had a very non-specific purpose of finding out more information about Allihence and her Abaddon… perhaps something to be used against her… or perhaps the exact opposite, something to show her that Allihence was not worthy of sabotage and vengeance after all.

  As she scanned blueprints, something caught her eye, something large and out of place; a room, located several bulkheads behind the back of the slave barracks, tucked below the engine core, but well shielded from warp drive radiation. Seats for about fifty people surrounded a cage structure on a slightly raised stage. Access was available only through a small hatch on the outside of the ship.

  So Floreina halted her scan for the entry systems for Allihence’s booster slots and began exploring anything she could find around the strange mini-arena, finally finding some security feeds in a recycle bin that someone had forgotten to permanently delete.

  She opened a video file and was struck with a hardening in her stomach. She gagged and stumbled forward, regurgitating a tiny chunk into her mouth, and felt the data line pull tight, tugging at her implant.

  Her consciousness flashed, but she caught herself. The connection popped its safety release and detached.

  The emotional suppressants kicked on a few hundred milliseconds too late, and despite the revulsion, she flipped them off again. She spit angrily and collected herself.

  Floreina plugged back in and went straight to the same video, and watched again as a man hung in the middle of the cage by a thin line around his neck. Desperately he clung to the wire with both hands as he kicked frantically at another man, also hanging in the same predicament, just a meter away.

  And people were watching, twenty or thirty of them, cheering for one man or the other. Floreina scanned the crowd, her facial recognition placing faces to names.

  Among the crowd were several of her fellow officers. The others were mostly wealthy blueprint salesmen or slave dealers. One look at the people saw that the two victims were Minmatar and every one of the spectators were Amarrian.

  She watched as the two fought to the death, the winner was cut down, and as he lay on the floor, his opponent was dragged off, the blood streaking across the floor. The winner was showered with flower petals, and beautiful women fed him nutrient water and lathered cream upon his neck. Allihence spoke over the loudspeakers, congratulating, and assuring that he would be rewarded for his success with custom dinners, high quality Vitoc, and prostitutes. “For one month,” continued the Captain. “then next month, we do this all over again with a different theme.”

  But a part of Floreina was not horrified. Instead it seemed like some kind of joke. This couldn’t be real. It was far too cliché. This was what so many abolitionist groups were screaming about, and they had always seemed insane and delusional. Surely this must be some kind of fraud meant to slander Allihence or the Amarrian people. The abolitionist groups would stop at nothing, even falsifying evidence…

  But the evidence was buried so deep within the ship’s core computer system… if terrorists had that kind of access there would have been much greater consequences.

  So she explored, searching the system recycle bins, finding another video of a slave on display in the cage, devoured by a slaver hound, as well as other bits of information, such as visitor lists.

  If Floreina was searching for a blackmail avenue or an excuse for mutiny, it looked like she had found it.

  ______ ______ ______

  “You’re out of your mind, Floreina.”

  “I just want to talk to them,” she replied.

  “These are not people you want to get involved with,” Viotro insisted. “They’re ruthless… at least against their enemies, as long as they can justify it, and any kind of slavery is going to seem like justification to them.”

  “Are you worried I’ll get you into trouble?” she asked.

  He chuckled. “Yeah, that too. For sure.”

  “You think I’ll give away your position within the trade? I’ve got an implant that can help me from saying anything stupid. We won’t even talk about you.” She stared at her ex, smiling, sitting attentively on the front of his couch in her pink flowered sundress.

  “You’re talking about mutiny here?” he shook his head. “Am I understanding this correctly?”

  “Yeah… sort of… like a secret mutiny.”

  He put his head in his hands and stared at the floor. “And you want to enlist the help of the abolitionist group… I think you need to stop and think long and hard about this.”

  “I already hav
e.” She leaned back, relaxing into the cushions. “I came to the conclusion that I need more information. I’m going to visit the so-called booster modification expert, and see what kind of technical advisor he would make. I’ve met with a couple trustworthy Amarrian neuro surgeons. But even still, it’s all just speculation at this point.”

  He shook his head. “I can’t run any risk of them finding out where my loyalties lie.”

  “Aren’t you retiring now?”

  “These people can be vicious, and if they find out I’ve been working for the Amarrian slave trade, they’ll hunt me down… the work dealers like me do is very important to managing escaped slaves and the Amarrian public image. Exposing me could expose others as well.”

  “I know,” she assured him. “But I won’t put any of that in danger.”

  “No… I think I’m going to need to refuse this request. I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

  She scoffed. “I don’t believe this… tell me again, Viotro, how is it that you can afford to retire? Buying a half a million ISK home with cash? How much did you make for yourself off the booster?”

  He sighed. “Three million after paying the mule and mercenaries.”

  “And I got, what?… one million. If you’re not going to do a simple favor for me, maybe I should ask you for another million so we can split the profit, seeing as how I put in just as much risk as you did…”

  He groaned for a long second, but finally conceded. “Fine. Okay, I’ll tell you how to contact them, but I’m gonna cry if they shoot you in the head. They’ll know who you are before you get in the door.”

  “I know,” she said. “Thank you, honey.” She hugged him. “Do you still want to go out dancing tonight?”