THE SPACE NAVY AU (18+)

You sigh and pull on your horns again, leaning back in your chair. Empress save you all from bright-eyed young radicals, though of course she won't...

"Think of it like this, Kadros," you say diplomatically. "Your manager gets to take a shot at your matesprit. But you have the chance to advise them which gun to use. Do you waste your chance saying 'don't do a violence!' or do you point them towards the pea-shooter rather than gravity sling?"

You tap the laptop. "Maybe you'll save everyone and maybe you won't, in your timeline. Maybe you'll be the biggest hero in a thousand parsecs and your bulge will drag on the bloody deck. But in the meantime if you can make the people you're going to save a little more comfortable while they're all waiting around for your salvation, I'd advise you to go for it."

 

"That's an option you have. You're royalty. Even if I could live with myself by handing the killer a smaller caliber weapon, i'm not in a position to. At best I'm the one who gets handed the gun, refuse to fire, and then we both die." You shake your head, gesturing to the computer. "I'm impressed, please don't think I'm not. This is good. In this timeline, where none of you started thinking there was anything wrong with this business until you were already out here, maybe it's the only thing you can do." A vague wave toward the helm end. "20% less torture. One in ten rapists gets a scolding and has to buy a new child to fuck."

Okay, maybe you're a little bitter. "Sorry. I'm sure Galley would enjoy a quick death. The fact that all Helmsmen are suicidal in the first place is beyond your power to address."

 

"Your very gracious condescension is noted and appreciated as such," you say, a trifle acidly, and go to tuck the laptop away. "Well, if you can't do anything with what resources I have to offer, I suppose we're at an impasse. Is there anything else I might be able to help you with before I send you on your morally superior way?"

 

You frown; this is going very badly somehow, and you don't know how to get it back on track. "How are these resources for me? I'm not captain of a carrier, I can't confiscate helmsmen off passing freighters. I'm not ever going to be in that position, that's what I'm trying to tell you. I need to get out from under the government's thumb so my matesprit can live, so we can all not die. I need to know how to get off planet without getting shot down, and so forth. Do you have patrol schedules for the home system? Maybe they're the same, maybe they're not." You give a hands-up shrug, feeling helpless. Dammit, you were kind of hopeful for a minute, before it all went gritty realism, and you don't have the emotional resilience for this right now.

 

"Oh! Well, then, now we're talking," you say, and sit back down, opening the laptop. "We'd chew each other's tails off all night if I let us get bogged down in philosophy, but plans of action, I can manage. I suppose I assumed that you'd be following your counterpart's career path, end up First Mate somewhere you could leverage a little power. But piracy, hmm. Piracy..."

You gesture impatiently for the kid to come sit on the arm of your chair so he can see your screen as you dig up the relevant information. And if he judges you for the way you still have to drag a clawtip along the longer pieces of text, sounding the words out under your breath, you can just fight down the embarrassment like a big boy. You're a Captain, after all, and he's a pretentious little grub with delusions of galactic peace. You've got nothing to apologize for.

 

"We've been saying piracy, but we're more likely to be scavengers, at least at first. Until we can get enough volunteers on the new pain-free helmsrigs Pancho and Sigs are working on. Made from troll and lusus psion cells, not horrorterror -- or I guess, just enough horrorterror that it feeds on emotion, but this one feeds on all emotion, not only pain and fear. They were testing it on kittens and the kittens didn't mind."

You hand him your phone, showing one of the pictures Pancho sent you.



(pls pretend the cat is colored green and the helmet has some high tech nonsense attached thanks)

 

You pause.

"Hold up," you say. "Explain the thing about horrorterrors, would you?"

 

"Ah, well. The thing about helm tissue is, if you leave it alone in a warm lagoon for long enough, it regrows, like a starfish regenerating a whole body from one arm. And what it grows into is not shaped like a friend."

All you have from your adventure with K'thun is some blurry security footage from fixed cameras on the ships, because you weren't in the habit of bringing micro drones everywhere yet, but it's enough to show him the grasping alien wrongness of the thing as it tries to eat the Carla.

 

"Well, that's fun," you say faintly. "And you said it eats fear? Is that the adult version or does normal helm wire do that as well?" You rub at your thigh, where the metal of your prosthesis joins what's left of your flesh.

 

"We didn't really get to do a lot of science on it, so we don't know how old it has to be, or how big, before it starts messing with your mind. Or whether midblood psychic resistance applies, though it didn't go after me or Pancho, and Galley was able to mostly fight it. Elusca got hit hard. She's an indigo empath. Um. And Galley's mood stabilized a lot once we got him off his helmscolumn, but that doesn't prove anything, since it was damaged and he had chronic infections and so on." You spread your hands. "Pancho and Sigs did their experiments on cultured tissue. It's not like we could keep the whole hairball around to play with. We dragged it over a reef at about 40 knots." You make explody hands and a splorch noise.

 

"Hm. I want any data you have-- shipwrights might already know this about helmsrigging but it wouldn't hurt to pass some extra science around for the rest of us that have to deal with the stuff. And if the wiring tissue turns itself into some kind of fear-parasite when it degrades, it'd definitely explain why the stuff I was infected with just wouldn't lay down and die." You rub your leg again, feeling an odd combination of nauseated and relieved. It'd explain a great deal of the last couple sweeps.

 

You're making an appalled face. "You got infected with the stuff? My you got a prosthetic primed to indigo and it almost killed him. How did you survive helm tissue?" The body horror of it gives you shivers.

 

"In case you hadn't noticed, I'm a bit rubbish, as royals go," you say wryly. "Obviously I can't be denied the resources to which my blood entitles me--" this is said in the ponciest possible accent, "--but sabotage is fair game, isn't it? I tried to throw my weight around to get a better leg when I was too young to know how to vet the trolls I'd be letting at my insides, so I got a troll who did the connecting tissue done up in entirely the wrong shade of pink. We pulled the wires as soon as we could, but the tissue, as you said, regenerates itself, so the trace cells that were left behind kept regrowing. It's been a rather unfun stretch of sweeps since then, managing it, but your Pancho's a genuinely excellent person, and helped me get it sorted out."

You pat the lean stretch of your torso, a bit ruefully. "We only just got shut of that mess a few perigees back, I'm still half-starved. Wish you'd dropped in after I'd gotten myself back up to fighting weight, you'd be a trifle easier to keep in line."

 

You let that last bit go, because the alternative is getting distracted by inappropriate flirting again. "I'll have to ask her how she got the stray cells out. That sounds like the kind of thing we'll need to know."

And speaking of things you'll need to know, you've let yourself be distracted from the information he was giving you. You apply yourself to it more seriously. It's pretty good stuff. The scheduling of patrols and the specific ships tasked with it probably differs hugely between your timelines, but the routes and regions where all this is arranged is strangely informative. "Why are there so many deployments to uninhabited bits of space?" you frown.

 

"Oh, that," you say. "Funny-looking, isn't it? There's a couple unsavory reasons, like admirals fucking around with each other, or trades of goods and services with species we're not supposed to have those sorts of relationships with. But mostly it's because other civilizations have different methods of faster than light travel than we do, so a lot of these areas that are useless to us are extremely valuable transit hubs to them, and disrupting them puts an absolute whopper of a wrench in their gears. The bits you're looking at only look unhabited because of how much space there is in space, if you zoom out and draw thicker lines, see, they're practically railways--" you show him how to apply the filters, and the way different species form different sorts of transit webs around the galaxy. Some burrow their way through wormholes, some teleport from gravitationally resonant spot to spot, some use solar sails to power themselves through absolute void, some explode unused suns and cannonball their way along to wherever they're going, some scrunch up realspace behind them and scoot along like ice chips on a tilted table. Every technology has its own predictable pattern of limitations, every technology has its own cost, every technology can be anticipated and disrupted.

Except helmsmen, who are free as birds and a million, billion times faster.

"I say," you say, as something occurs to you. "If your lot are planning on legging it straight out and away from troll society, you might not want to do it in a trollish fashion at all. Maybe you could look into the more mechanical forms of hyperspace travel. They're a lot more expensive and a lot less efficient-- Trolls are absolutely the best, fastest, and most flexible when it comes to getting our soldiers where and when they need to be, if you don't mind a carrier Captain's bragging-- but if you're just planning on slouching about doing your own thing, you don't exactly need the kind of maneuverable dominance a psionically powered ship commands, do you?"

 

You’d been thinking the same thing as he explained. “Except for brief bursts to escape threats, which is where the psionic booster whatsit comes in,” you agree consideringly. “I don’t suppose you have documentation on alien drive systems?”

 

You chew on your lip for a second, raking over your thinkpan. You don't, but....

"We don't have any sort of technical specifications," you say, "but I think there should be an archive of warnings on which species' spacecraft behave in what ways, and how to steer around them, so as not to, for instance, get your First Mate alternate realitied, just as a wild random example. Do's and don't, sort of thing. I can get that for you and it'd at least give you a starting point for further investigation, what?"

 

You nod eagerly. “Definitely. And there are some aliens you can trade with, right? Sort of on the down-low? Do you have translation apps for those?”

 

You grimace. "No. I don't know if there's any such thing. You'd need translaterrorists, or for some of your group to start training as one, to get access to actual alien languages, or, or if there's-- databases? I don't know, we're a carrier, we're not supposed to have any contact with them directly other than running away very fast. I don't think there's anyone aboard who would know how to actually speak with aliens--"

You pause, abruptly. "Murfey," you say, and thump your forehead lightly with your fist. "Murfey would know, he's got alien sex toys."

 

You blink a few times, but that’s all; apparently you have gone beyond your ability to be surprised. “Of course he does. He’s not rebellious, he just keeps forgetting that rules are a thing.”