Free Radicals

by S E Zbasnik

  Despite his common sense, the elf asked, “Then why are you always attacking each other?”

  Orn peered up at the elf, which was quite a bit of distance to cover, “You’re a young one still, ain’t ya? We don’t attack, we traverse our differences with an exchange of heated words.” The elf crinkled his face up, his tiny nose almost fading into the glass cutting cheekbones. Orn sighed, “It’s like…say the difference between you killing a right bugger versus you sparring with the captain to keep sharp.”

  The elf blinked quickly. He did not know anyone was aware of their sparring, though it was kept as innocent as possible thanks to no one else on the ship in a mood to maintain their body beyond existence. “You fight with your wife so you can more easily fight with others?”

  Orn laughed, “Not at fucking all, but close enough.”

  Taliesin squished his cheeks up into his eyes with his fingers and tried to find a moment’s calm in the thundering behind his temples. The dwarf took to critiquing the outfits of the passing shoppers, but the assassin didn’t listen as he weighed his rising bolus of envy. It was true that he and Variel were not and could not be officially known. And even if there was not a fear of his sister answering the news with a call to a Path Father and then the use of a weapon, the captain herself would rather chew glass than let Orn find out. And they never discussed what was the acceptable limits of their arrangement if say a dryad offered the free services of a pleasure palace. But…

  “See them two making googely eyes at each other,” Orn’s chatter cut through as he pointed to a pair of goblins seated beside each other on a noncorporeal bench. The invisible shields made it appear as if they were performing a balancing mime trick. One laughed rather dramatically as the other goblin inched a hand up higher along a shoulder sliding in closer.

  Orn nodded knowingly, “MGC may make the galaxy run, but that shit’s universal.”

  Taliesin dropped his hands, a decision in his head before he’d properly weighed all the terrible outcomes. His feet turned him around, and his long gait guided him back towards the Red Sash district.

  Orn turned from the goblins that were tapping fingers now and watched the elf retreating with purpose. “Told ya, single and free’s the way to be. Oh, and figure out what a Djinn Sandwich is!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  A pin-precision ratchet bounced against the exposed circuits of the heaving ship as the computer grunted. “Does it hurt if I do this?” Ferra asked, her work clothes long since soaked through with a combination of grease, sweat, and watery pudding.

  “Yes,” WEST, the onboard computer responded. It was less a helpful assistant and more a sphinx curse they couldn’t solve.

  “What if I do this?” the engineer asked as she flipped around the microtool and jabbed at the signal corrector that’d been flashing a disconcerting blue on her diagnoser.

  “Ouch! Even worse than before,” WEST whined, the androgynous voice pitching high as it tried to mimic emotions.

  “Uh-huh.” Fer sat back from the exposed panel and smeared the sweat on her brow with more pudding. How the entire box managed to explode inside the veins of the ship was anyone’s guess, but she suspected it had something to do with the mad computer and her husband. It always came back to her husband.

  Another cleaning bot, a squat box with bristles rimming the sides, bumped into her back. Its approach to handling the pudding disaster was to run into the vanilla landslide, then back out, then back in until the pudding charred across the plugged up exhaust fan. To hell with artificial intelligence or emotional response, the true gold ring for robotics was programming some common sense into these things. Not that many organic lifeforms could achieve such a victory either.

  “Okay, WEST,” Ferra asked the computer peering over her shoulder from one of his peeping panels, “what if I do…” she paused as she blocked her arm from its ocular screens. “This?” She waved her elbow up and down while bumping the handle of her tool into her aproned arm.

  “Yes! Please stop! It is pure agony!” WEST shrieked, the synthesized voice crackling as it threw in some pity static.

  “Uh-huh, right,” Ferra climbed out of the open panel and rose to her haunches. She tried to wipe some of the escaped pudding off her knees, but the cleaning bot was already running into her and trying to help. Nudging the thing with her foot until it toppled over, she rounded on the insane computer, “You’re a hypochondriac nut bag.”

  WEST rolled one of his animated wheel eyes while the other remained stationary, weighing its options, “There is pus leaking from my ventilation shaft.”

  “It’s pudding, and that was your own damn doing!” Ferra shouted at it, yanking the static protection cap off her head and stuffing it inside her apron pocket. The yellow pudding almost matched the hue of her pale hair, but not the texture as she yanked off a glove and tried to clean herself off hours after the explosion took place. When a pop had reverberated through the floor and yellow goo oozed from the grates, she knew her husband was somehow at fault as he beat a retreat after Variel on a delivery run.

  Oh he’d pay for it later, and far worse than if he’d stayed around. Ferra’s anger didn’t cool, if left unchecked it reached a critical reaction and exploded with a nuclear fury that could destroy entire solar systems. “I don’t care if your memory is clogged, I’m not fixing you until all this pudding is gone,” she cursed at the computer.

  “But…”

  “All of it!”

  WEST weighed its options, and -- accepting defeat -- booted up every single bot in its arsenal. The spot welder for space walks rose from the closet beside the embarkation room, information to burn the pudding with its plasma torch downloading into a simple brain. Ferra didn’t care as long as it didn’t torch the whole ship. Still trying to remove the pudding from her hair, she lifted up her “To Do List.” Most of it was typical maintenance she ignored until they were spaceside and bored out of their minds, or it exploded. She flipped past all the burned out light bulbs and landed on “Could you please consider repairing a fuse located at junction 68564-N in the med-bay? Thank you.”

  She chuckled. Monde must have slipped it in. Variel’s were a bit more brutish and a lot less coherent, “Something’s not working proper in the room, fix that.” Ferra could ask for clarification from her boss, but she waited until she got the “Why haven’t you fixed the sanitizer in the starboard bathroom, yet?” It was a system that worked.

  Yanking up her toolbox and stuffing back in her green handled wrench, she walked towards the med-bay. Their ship, the Elation-Cru, had once been a cruise ship. Possibly a cruise ship of the damned, it was hard to see anyone willingly shelling out money to vacation on this thing, but humans were a strange species. The med-bay was less a hospital clinic and more somewhere for people to get their stomachs pumped after gorging at the buffet, splinters removed after a jousting match, and unexplainable alien viruses cured just before the last passenger became a flesh eating ghoul. She passed through the waiting room, most of the chairs turned up from the last cleaning crew and never returned, the dust of the new passengers thick on their bottoms. A few remained in place, drug towards the door so faces could peer in through the porthole.

  Ferra pushed it open, leaving a pudding print behind. She cracked her knuckles, trying to figure out where the hell this junction would be. Calling up the schematics in her PALM, long outdated since she got onboard, a female voice droned from out the office door.

  “The CDT is lifted below the tertiary adjunct, but beware any impacted BD of a Siren’s embedded tooth.” The jargon washed over Ferra as she squeaked open the partially closed door, her tiny nose poking into the darkened room.

  An old screen flickered in the dark while a harsh floor lamp cast light upon the back and hands of the only person filling the room. His grey fingers deftly swooped through a suturing motion as the imaginary needle shimmered outside the projecting field.

  “Friend of yours?” Ferra asked, leaning against the wall.

&nbs
p; The screen paused as the female orc was arm-deep inside a siren’s throat. The grey face of Monde turned towards the ship’s engineer. His pupils engorged in the low light as the double lids flickered back to adjust the picture of Ferra in the med-bay light. Orcs were terrifying to anyone who didn’t get out much, a line of horns trailing down the male’s skull as he shifted his pronounced underbite flanked by ripping teeth. Monde popped a single headphone out of his auditory hole and let it dangle off his workbench. With the connection severed, the photonic vision of a diced up siren vanished back to the nether world.

  “I did not hear you,” Monde said, wiping down his clean hands out of habit.

  “Obviously,” Ferra responded, tilting her head. Some days she feared the only thing she shared in common with her husband was a smart mouth.

  “Do you require my aid?” the doctor asked, his orange eyes clearly not looking back at the woman on the screen. Ferra felt she’d less walked in on someone honing their skills and more the back room of an adult shop. Orcs were confusing.

  “I came by to fix your fuse,” the elf said, gesturing towards the operating theater with her favorite spanner.

  Monde shifted his jaw around more, the nonexistent lips smacking as he digested her logical answer. He slipped out of his coat, the sky blue of the medical world dangling limply across his arm as a tasteful sweater vest joined the world. “It is this way,” he said and led Ferra into the proper med-bay.

  “WEST, raise the lights please,” Monde said as he stepped beside the surgical table he sold his secret to get.

  “Our onboard maniac is a bit busy at the moment,” Ferra started but the lights did lift above the orc.

  “Thank you,” Monde said as the elf huffed.

  “Bastard never listens to me the first time.”

  Monde didn’t respond as he leaned down, his fingers running across a plug in the floor. “The power hasn’t flowed properly since the lockdown.”

  Ferra snorted at that. She was still chasing down problems after Variel’s not-husband put them all through a near death experience for his own selfishly stupid reasons. If she ever saw that wad of foil again, they’d be unable to identify the body.

  “When I plug something in, it will work for a minute and then power off.”

  The engineer crouched down beside the orc, a small screwdriver dropping into her hand. As she unbolted the cover plate she asked, “Anything else.”

  “After I unplug it, a blue volt shoots out of the ground,” Monde said, shrugging as if it were a minor inconvenience and not something that could kill anyone else on the ship.

  The engineer slipped into repair mode, her eyes upon circuits possibly older than the dulcen twins. But the problem seemed relatively simple, a few fried wires and there’d be no more deadly sparks shooting out of the floor. “What’s with the siren vids? Career change?”

  Orcs didn’t blush, but Monde shifted on his toes and coughed in the back of his throat, “Not precisely, no. Given the amount of trouble our captain gets us into it seems prudent to be prepared in the event…”

  “A siren crashes through our windshield and needs her voice lock repaired?” Ferra finished, the smile evident in her words even with her back turned.

  “Anything is possible,” Monde said diplomatically.

  Ferra laughed at that as she screwed back on the cover plate. “Hand me something to test this,” she said as the doc placed a plug in her hand. Crossing her fingers, she shoved it in and turned her head to follow the cord. A plate rotated around inside a small oven. Ferra looked up at the orc who lifted one shoulder.

  “I enjoy small snacks at times.”

  Rising off the floor, Ferra said, “Now to wait a minute and see what happens.”

  Monde folded his arms in a protective manner around his chest as only the sound of the rotating oven filled the room. His mouth mimed speech a few times before asking, “You are not going to say a word about the vids to anyone, will you?”

  Ferra shook her head. She knew he wasn’t concerned about Variel, or the dulcens, and certainly not the djinn finding out. No, he needed to make certain Orn wouldn’t ride his ass about it until the end of time. “If I told my husband every secret I know he’d probably be dead and buried in an asteroid field.”

  Monde nodded solemnly, accepting her hidden word.

  “She seemed very imposing,” Ferra said, checking her PALM clock. 30 seconds gone.

  The orc sighed, “Yes, she is.”

  “Organics,” WEST chirped up.

  “Don’t you have pudding to clean up?” Ferra asked.

  The computer lapsed silent for a moment as it chose to ignore her, “There appears to be a bogey approaching our position.”

  “We’re docked on a space station,” Monde said.

  “It’s messing with us. Trying to get out of CLEANING ITS MESS UP!” Ferra shouted to the computer.

  WEST paused a beat before answering, “I shall return to your menial tasks, but do not say I did not warn you.”

  “Fine, fine, go. Get to work,” the engineer said as she waved her insane computer on. The countdown on her PALM began to flash. 5…4…3…2…1

  A bing reverberated from the oven as Monde’s tea stopped rotating. Ferra smiled, “Well, looks like that’s all…”

  The lights all across the deck fell, leaving the two in darkness penetrated only by the weak screen on Ferra’s palm. She sighed, pointing her hand towards her toolbox. Working in near pitch black was second nature to a spaceship engineer when the lights and power could blow at any moment.

  “Fixed,” Ferra finished her thought as she grabbed up her tools. “If anyone comes looking for me, I’ll be in the power supply room,” she peered through the porthole at the darkness down the hall where no light pierced it, “for the next decade or so.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A gaggle of coutured intellectuals wafted out of the darkened art house; the desensitizing scent of orc spices and silver nitrate trailing them. Three paused beside the sign advertising the finished festivities, the print fading to microscopic size as the poster information traveled to the edge. One of the males, a siren, stroked the hard won fur along his jawline as he overtook the conversation.

  Giggles escaped from the young centaur of the group, a female the others spoke over as she danced upon her hooves trying to stretch cramped legs. Tiny art houses were not designed with the quadruped in mind. The final of the group was the sponsor of the evening, a quicksilver. Rare to find outside their nebula of space, but he’d set up shop on Whisper and lorded upon the non-corporeal artisans for nearing a decade. It seemed a lifetime to all but the elf silently watching the group from the door.

  The quicksilver shimmered, a puff of blue blooming from its midsection as the translucent form shifted to an easy stance. Both the siren and centaur relaxed, succumbing to the pull of the quicksilver’s calming influence. They were a proactively empathic species. Most could only stir up the vaguest of emotions in corporeals, but there were tales of more powerful quicksilvers sowing mayhem in their wake.

  Grinning widely, the voice lock on the siren popped as he suggested the three find a small place to acquire hot beverages and discuss the performance in depth.

  Brena sighed internally. She could follow, perhaps she should. They were her friends of a sort. The invitation to attend this exclusive gathering would not have been extended to just anyone, but that was in the ether where she could hide behind a well curated phrase, an expertly wielded emotion tag, and the whetted self confidence of an elf. In this land of real life her facade fell apart.

  It took others time to catch on; a longer pause before she’d laugh, a failure for the eyes to follow a smile, how a frown never pulled upon her forehead. She could fake it and practiced often in her chosen field, but here in her downtime it seemed far too exerting. The dulcen watched the three waltz off towards the NC cafe, a microscopic bubble of jealousy fighting through her medicated fog.

  Her body took the other path, wandering a
way from the chemical packers district towards the commercial areas of the station. A gloved finger scrolled through her PALM, trying to sort messages. Most were the same. A few requests she “Play for a really great cause. It’s amazing exposure so we won’t be paying you anything.” A few more creepy images of Troll kneecaps, and another rejection regarding her in progress epic song. Her finger stopped over her brother’s name. She was about to press it to see what Taliesin got himself into when a shadow stepped into her personal space.

  Brena closed her hand and looked down from her six feet at a human. It was surprising to find one on Whisper; they rarely ventured outside their zones and seemed to have a deep seated fear of the non-corporeals bordering on a phobia. She placed a hand upon her hip and stared upon the human. As a species they were difficult to tell apart, with mushy facial features that blended together, but this one reminded her of the small nacks that invaded the home prior to every rainy season. A good dose of poison or putting down a few traps took care of the problem.

  “Are you an elf?” the human nack asked.

  She blinked slowly, her yellow eyes burning into his as she placed all of her spite into the answer, “Yes.”

  “‘Cause I thought you might be an angel,” it spat out as it shifted its mouth up into a strange twitch.

  “I do not know what that is,” she responded.

  Rather than let her continue her path, the nack attempted the uncouth and placed his hand upon her upper arm, his greasy fingers smudging up lace older than his grandfather’s grandfather. “We could get to know each other better.”

  She shifted her eyes to the side to glare at the fingers pinching into her arm, then back to the human trying desperately to pursue her despite his being both the wrong species and gender. “I believe I know all I need to about you.”

  “You elves are all ice, but I can melt that cold exterior,” the nack whined, showing teeth as if it were about to bite her finger.