Six days twenty-two hours, thirty-seven minutes. Gaz marked the time as Nathaniel spoke to her over comms. “I suggest a mercenary company or a specialist group out of one of the Cluster security forces.”
“Security forces?” The infoNet broadcast had said nothing about security forces, implying to Gaz that these anarchists and outcasts entirely eschewed such forces. “I was not aware the cluster maintained such structures.”
“Oh no, these aren’t official. Mercs and specialists often work out of the cluster to avoid MilCAS and other Loop Nation regulations.”
“There is no way for me to pay them.”
“You mean you have no way to pay them.”
Gaz performed a review of her time spent aboard The Pillar of Man. “I would estimate you’ve lost at least a week of labor to me.”
“Way more than that, if we’re playing op-cost games.” He chuckled over comms. “But I don’t play those games, Gaz. My time is valuable, sure. But that is exactly why I am the only one who gets to decide how I spend it or how valuable it is.”
What did she say to that? “I…”
“Please, it’s important to me that you give me a chance to share what I have with you and yours.”
At that point, Gaz’s primary processors hit redline and she pulled a bank of coprocs in to assist. “I don’t understand.”
“And that’s fine. You don’t really need to understand.” He flashed a data packet to her. “You just need to accept I am happy to aid you.”
The data packet included three different mercenary companies, two of them flew routes at the edges of the Cluster, happy to participate in security operations related to newcomers. Apparently the Nelissan Arm flagship skipping into the cluster wasn’t unique.
Felina’s Void Sharks were the group who managed to blow up and then scavenge the Nelissan arms ship when it translated in. They weren’t the largest mercenary company by a large margin, but they possessed a small fleet of uniformly modern ships. Unlike the other companies, Felina made sure her fleets were constantly upgraded. Gaz wondered if they’d managed to pull the skip-engine off of the Nelissan Arms flagship intact as she said, “why three companies when it’s clear Felina’s is the most likely to help us?”
“Because I don’t want to funnel you into one avenue without giving you the option. Besides, have you checked the flags for her company?”
“Flags?” Gaz redirected internal processors to full review of the file. “Oh.”
Felina was a maverick among mavericks. The file was filled with notes about her eccentric fees and suggestions that the other mercs who worked in the Cluster avoided her out of a mixture of fear and distrust. Of the three mercenary companies Nathaniel sent Gaz, the Void Sharks had the lowest reputation by far.
“Does this mean we can’t trust them?”
Nathaniel didn’t answer right away. “Yes and I no I suppose. They’re wealthy in terms of materials, manpower, that sort of thing. But they need the work, which means they’re hungry.”
Gaz could put together the rest. Someone like Felina might betray Gaz if she saw an opportunity to satisfy her hunger. “What’s the reputation of the false Root clerics?”
This time he sent Gaz logs from cluster-level reputation review. With no central authority managing the reputation system, the cluster relied on a communitarian system of checks and confirmations. After receiving the ten-point rep bump from the Root Clergy, Nathaniel had initiated the review. It had only taken a few weeks, but at the end, the cluster determined the false Root clerics should be treated as a separate organization. He’d effectively bankrupted them within the cluster, all because they’d been cheating — somehow — and using the actual Root clerics’ rep. “How did that happen?”
“The logs don’t say, but only someone with bursar authorization can initiate a rep transfer. In other words, the Root clerics have a highly placed defector who transferred their loyalties.”
“You put a stop to that.” It wasn’t a question. The false Root clerics had been on a mad selling spree since losing their reputation marks in the cluster. Without means to pay, they couldn’t trade for essential goods or services. So they’d been hemorrhaging wood, breathable air, and even manpower to the other groups in the cluster. Based on the transaction record — the public parts anyway — the false Root clerics had transferred thousands of tonnes of matter to the rest of the cluster in a little under a year. And their reputation still hadn’t peaked over 30. “Interesting.”
“Right, the good news there is that the false Root clerics are not nearly as wealthy in terms of reputation than they were. Which also means they are less likely to have the means to hire Felina’s crew out from under us.”
“Us?”
“One of the factors I think you misunderstand is that I am not pleased with this group.” Humor leaked into Nathaniel’s voice. “They made me party to their fraud. I haven’t paid the original Root clerics back in rep, but I intend to clear a personal debt with them. If that means spending rep and time fixing the mess I contributed to, so be it.”
Strange notions of debt and ownership must have floated through Nathaniel’s head. As far as Gaz was concerned, it was because of his astronomical wealth. His reputation was over 80, close to what the authentic Root clerics now had. “Let’s initiate contact with Felina and see what she wants in terms of payment.”
The Pillar of Man dwarfed the Void Shark’s flagship by at least two orders of magnitude. Outside of the cluster, where ship sizes were more or less standardized, Gaz would have designated The Pillar of Man as a Dreadnought class ship. Only dedicated military ships and massive civilian generational vessels were larger. The Void Shark’s flagship, “The Megalodon” would have been a destroyer class ship.
It had a flat, wide nose with an ovular opening at the front. Other ships might have used it for mass collection or as a way to prevent stellar collisions. But the scans showed a massive energy weapon in that nose. It was the source of the red killing light which had obliterated the Nelissan Arms missiles and later their power stations. The rest of The Megalodon tapered back from the nose and bristled with weaponry. PDCs, railguns, and phased pulse weapons made up most of the armaments with both drone deployment stations and missiles along the lateral sections of the ship.
Calling up the name in the local Net, Gaz discovered that the ship was designed to resemble an ancient, long extinct eponymous shark. Based on the scans, part of the ship past the nose could bend and flex. Why it would do that was beyond Gaz’s ken. She set a coprocessor to investigate that while she watched the ship match The Pillar of Man’s trajectory.
Felina herself was anthrocyborg. When she appeared on comms she did so with tufted cat ears, puffy cheeks, and fangs. White and black stripes trailed down the sides of her body. Her legs had an inverted knee structure and fur covered most of her, with her face being the primary exception. She spoke in purring tones and welcomed The Pillar of Man’s commerce.
As a way to open bargaining Nathaniel had offered to install one set of cyberbrain upgrades. She’d jumped at the offer, with the understanding that she wanted to negotiate all further deals herself.
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Nathaniel joined Gaz in the skiff ship which docked with The Megalodon. Gravity flipped almost orthogonally when their skiff connected to the other ship, asserting the hull’s exterior as “down”. Oftentimes captains set the grav planes to a flat section of the ship, some the underbelly, sometimes an arbitrary midline through the entirety of the vessel. Axial gravity was something of a novelty. Not that Nathaniel or Gaz would have trouble with it.
The airlock opened to admit them and Gaz stepped into a completely different world. Bones, scales, and the preserved heads of strange creatures hung from the walls. Like an ancient, primitive people had invaded this place and decorated it according to their superstitions. It was certainly different.
Alaya would love this.
Gaz leaned against the metal wall for a moment as she indulged in a recorded memory of Alaya, this one of the young woman waking up next to Gaz on a recent mission. The way she stretched and fluttered her eyelids always brought a smile to Gaz’s lips.
No one met them as they followed a marker trail through the ship. A few hundred meters away from their entry point, the walls opened into an aquarium. From where they stood Gaz’s optics could neither detect the surface of the water nor its floor. In order to miss the massive, atavistic shark swimming through the water, Gaz would have had to disable a host of her sensors.
It was a megalodon. Based on her scans, it was fully organic. She couldn’t be certain, but there were no detectable nano-systems in the shark, nor was it hybrid cyborg creature. Several passes across the window, the creature showed off its sides and the fins which let it slide through the water. Could it be smart enough to be vain? Was it really showing off? Hard to sure about that, but the shark’s behavior was far outside of Gaz’s experience or the records she had access to. She hadn’t even known genegineers had resurrected that living fossil. As far as she could tell, no one did.
They left the aquarium behind after almost two hundred meters of open wall. The amount of salt water in that aquarium beggared the imagination. How much of the ship’s systems were devoted to making sure the aquarium’s tank remained the correct concentrations of minerals? Impossible to tell without a deep scan, which would have been rude as guests.
Knowing that the ECM team aboard The Megalodon could have easily tapped their short band comms, Nathaniel and Gaz remained silent as they stepped into the guest area where their path led.
A shaggy rug with irregular edges covered the floor in this cylindrical room. Shields made from sharkskin lined the walls at regular intervals and there figures dominated the opposite section of the room
One of them, sat upon a throne which itself rested in the fossilized maw of a giant shark - surely a megalodon. In person, Felina’s cat-like appearance was unmistakeable.
Next to her stood a gigantic creature with greyish-blue skin. He was bigger than Jaree or McRory, maybe bigger than both of them combined. His bulky limbs supported an almost barrel torso marked by a lighter patch which ran from his groin to his chin. The face itself looked like that of great white shark, filled with rows of triangular, razor-sharp teeth. Gaz instinctively scanned him only to find the anthrocyborg had an ECM field too strong for her sensors to penetrate.
It was the biggest danger flag Gaz had encountered since the false Root clerics.
The third figure was the smallest of the three and also an anthrocyborg. She — the small breasts under her plumage suggested gender to Gaz — had a rainbow-colored beak for a mouth with green feathers running down from the top of her head to her back. Her legs resembled typical avian legs, though much bigger than anything outside of an ostrich. Like the great white shark next to her, she had a belly covered with white feathers instead of green. Unlike the great white shark, her form wasn’t protected by a heretofore un-discovered ECM field.
“Welcome, master Technomancer and mistress cyborg to our ship.” The bird-like cyborg bowed her head, beak almost touching the rug at her feet. “The great Felina and the crew of The Megalodon invite you to sit and refresh yourselves if you so desire.”
At her words a hatch opened under the nearest shield and a drone emerged bearing a small platter on its top. Most of the goods on the platter were bits of baseline food, things Gaz would not have minded sampling: cured meats, roasted vegetables, and even fresh fruit drizzled in honey. Alaya would have been beside herself with glee. What caught Gaz’s attention was the small square stack of variously colored cubes on a square plate. Those were cyborg sensory cubes. Baseline humans *could* eat them, but they would find the flavor and texture bland, if a little chalky. Someone with a full cyborg chassis however would find the cubes more flavorful and culinarily unique.
She scanned the stack of cubes before she plucked one off the top. Hesitating before popping it into her mouth, Gaz met Nathaniel’s eyes and waited for him to nod before she popped the cube in. It melted into its constituent parts, sending a wild symphony of flavors and sense impressions through Gaz.
The first thing she felt was a slight chill, as if sitting down to eat right in front of a ventilation outlet. It cooled the surface of her skin and prickled her lips. From a taste perspective, it reminded her of frozen fruit out of a cup. But this bite of fruit contained a melange of flavors, from orange to blueberry. Her second bite transferred her to a smokey room filled with shadowy figures on the edge of her vision with a massive, roaring fire in the center of the room. This bite had the texture of medium rare meat, from traditional bovine steaks to heavier oxen and deer. Savory and dark, the flavor infused itself into Gaz’s brain as she finally redirected her primary processes back to Felina and the rest of the room.
Sampling the borg cube only required a few microseconds and the gustatory experience continued as the bird-cyborg spoke.
“Felina is pleased with your offer of cybernetic enhancement, master Technomancer.” Her feathers rose up, as if she were fluffing them, and she said, “you otherwise request our services?”
Nathaniel indicated Gaz with his left arm as he chewed on the morsel of food he’d just popped into his mouth. He managed to swallow and said, “my associate and I have a difficult mission for your crew. We wish to attack the false Root clerics and their base…”
Gaz could not help but note the irony here. They’d gotten in trouble in the first place because they’d offered to steal the starseed from its legitimate owners. Now they were hiring a mercenary crew to steal it back.
Felina and the others waited in silence as Nathaniel made his request. At the end, he sent data records containing the formal request to Gaz and to the others.
All three cyborgs remained silent as they stared at Gaz and Nathaniel. Glad to have the food, Gaz popped another borg cube into her mouth and delighted in the candy-shop scene which greeted her. Raiding candy to sample the range of deliciousness made waiting for Felina to answer much easier.
“We must review your offer and request. You have six days?” The bird woman spoke for the others still. Despite her lack of ECM field, the bird woman’s identity was still hidden from Gaz.
“We have six days to complete our task without failure.’ Nathaniel added, “we must have time to bring the starseed to its proper owners.”
“Are there other considerations we should know of?” Her voice was melodic, as if Felina had spent extra funds making sure her spokes-bird had a beautiful voice.
This time Gaz spoke up, looking over the arrangement Nathaniel had sent. “There are three people aboard the cluster and a ship we would like to retrieve if possible. And we must not destroy the Root.”
It was the only provision of the Root cleric’s demands which made Gaz nervous. So far their track record with keeping the stations they assaulted intact was… zero. Actually lower than zero since they’d accidentally blown up a few stations as collateral damage.
The bird-cyborg nodded again with her hands clasped together under her soft white belly feathers. “Mistress Felina will have an answer for you within four hours. How long do you need to perform the cybernetic upgrades?”
“A few hours at most.”
Gaz had set herself into a low-response mode, so she didn’t exhibit her surprise at his answer. Nathaniel could have completed a full cyborg conversion in under an hour. That he gave a longer timeframe suggested he’d make Gaz help.
Felina stood and motioned to the bird woman. “Aura here is the subject I would like enhanced.” The bird-cyborg, Aura, kept her head bowed as Felina pointed at Gaz. “There’s no way a Technomancer with Nathaniel’s reputation got himself involved in trouble with the Root clergy. Why are you interested in this mission?”
Gaz had already prepared an explanation. “The false Root clerics tricked me and mine into stealing from the true order. I seek to redress the balance.”
Whiskers twitching, Felina narrowed her eyes. “Sorry, not good enough.”
This time Gaz reacted with visible surprise. “Why?”
“Give me a better reason and I might give you four hours of consideration.”
Though unprepared to justify her need, Gaz spoke from the heart. “The woman I love is trapped with the false priests. I want her back.”
Even Nathaniel blinked in surprise at her declaration. Aura and the shark-man were both taken aback. But Felina’s nose wiggled and her whiskers lay flat against her cheeks, like she was scenting the air testing Gaz’s honesty. Seemingly satisfied she said, “then I accept this mission. We will meet back in four hours to discuss payment and formalize our arrangement.”
Felina stood from her throne and left through a doorway which appeared next to her. The shark-man followed while Aura remained behind.
She said, “would you prefer I accompany you back to your ship or would you like to make use of our facilities?”
Gaz would have guessed Nathaniel preferred his own operating theater, but he actually paused as if considering her offer. “I think I would like to have you come aboard The Pillar of Man. Is that acceptable?”
“Of course, Master Technomancer, I am at your service.”