Im squid superconduct
Home of the Thunder Ponkeys
2012.08.28 23:18 Home of the Thunder Ponkeys
Will anyone read this?
2016.04.18 21:40 DrDengue Sex Lives of Earthlings
Welcome to the companion subreddit for the as-yet nonexistent podcast, “Sex Lives of Earthlings.” The exploration of evolution and the diversity of life on Earth is inextricable from the way organisms mate and reproduce: the flow of genetic information.
2017.02.09 16:14 RSQSWMR869 So Others May Live- Brotherhood of the Fin
A community for the oxygen-deprived, salt-encrusted, Guardians of the Sea. A place to meet, reunite, share sea-stories, and mentor future amphibians. This place has been created by and for U.S. Coast Guard Helicopter Rescue Swimmers, but openly welcomes all brothers and sisters who have completed the crucible which earns them the honor to risk their own lives "So Others May Live." Hell! We'll even let you Navy Squids join in the fun!
2024.01.23 23:52 WistfullySunk A list of 300+ fictional bands
I made a post a few days ago about the possibility that EKT was performed by a fictional band in a TV show or movie. Not long after, I happened to come across a Tumblr blog that was doing a "best fictional band" poll for fun. To prepare for this event, the owner of the blog requested suggestions from their followers and used these to compile a document listing 328 fictional music acts.
I saved a copy of their list and crossed off about 75 bands I am certain didn't perform EKT (because I'm familiar with the band and/or its source, or I know for a fact the source media is exclusively written/drawn and has no audio, or the source came out later than October 7th, 2021*). There are several more bands I'm 75-99% sure aren't it (because I'm partially familiar with the source, or the source only slightly predates the first posting of EKT, or the source is too famous to plausibly hide a lost song in) but I erred on the side of not eliminating them for the moment.
The full list, including my cross-outs, is pasted below. If people comment ruling out additional bands, I will edit this post to cross those off as well. I know it's unlikely anything will actually come of this—but I thought it was a unique, interesting resource and I wanted to share just in case!
(*I personally don't think the 1999 filedate is reliable enough to definitively rule out media from the early 2000s. IMHO, anything from before EKT's initial posting is a technically possible source—though very recent sources are less likely, given how little Carl92 remembers about the recording and the fact that a post-1999 source would still mean the file had to exist long enough for some of its data to end up corrupted.)
EDIT 1/4/2024: Thank you so much to everyone who helped me cross something off! I've kind of given up on crediting people in the OP at this point, but I really appreciate everyone who participated in this thread.
***
"BEST FICTIONAL BAND SUBMISSION LIST" by Tumblr user best-fictional-band-poll:
submitted by WistfullySunk to everyoneknowsthat [link] [comments]
I saved a copy of their list and crossed off about 75 bands I am certain didn't perform EKT (because I'm familiar with the band and/or its source, or I know for a fact the source media is exclusively written/drawn and has no audio, or the source came out later than October 7th, 2021*). There are several more bands I'm 75-99% sure aren't it (because I'm partially familiar with the source, or the source only slightly predates the first posting of EKT, or the source is too famous to plausibly hide a lost song in) but I erred on the side of not eliminating them for the moment.
The full list, including my cross-outs, is pasted below. If people comment ruling out additional bands, I will edit this post to cross those off as well. I know it's unlikely anything will actually come of this—but I thought it was a unique, interesting resource and I wanted to share just in case!
(*I personally don't think the 1999 filedate is reliable enough to definitively rule out media from the early 2000s. IMHO, anything from before EKT's initial posting is a technically possible source—though very recent sources are less likely, given how little Carl92 remembers about the recording and the fact that a post-1999 source would still mean the file had to exist long enough for some of its data to end up corrupted.)
EDIT 1/4/2024: Thank you so much to everyone who helped me cross something off! I've kind of given up on crediting people in the OP at this point, but I really appreciate everyone who participated in this thread.
***
"BEST FICTIONAL BAND SUBMISSION LIST" by Tumblr user best-fictional-band-poll:
2wink - ensemble stars!! music(Ruled out by u/shusagii and u/LimeNutella)3MB/Three Man Band - WWE(Ruled out by u/dickasmoke, u/Adorable_Tension2562, and u/Deadisred3)30 Seconds to Math - Randy Cunningham: 9th Grade Ninja4*town - Turning Red- 64K - Loading Ready Run
A Band - My Hero Academia- About Gardens - ROGUEMAKER
Actually, I'm not really sure yet - the Dork DiariesAKATSUKI - ensemble stars!! music(Ruled out by u/shusagii and u/LimeNutella)ALKALOID - ensemble stars!! music(Ruled out by u/shusagii and u/LimeNutella)Alvin and the Chipmunks - Alvin and the ChipmunksThe Archies - Archie Comics- ARGONAVIS - From ARGONAVIS
- The Ark - I Was Born For This
ABXY - Splatoon(Ruled out by u/LovliBea85)Arno van Eyck - Disco ElysiumAshley O - Black MirrorBackflesh - iCarly(Ruled out by u/Look-Complete and u/Seallbay)- Bad Luck - Gravitation
The Band With Rocks In It - Discworld- Barbie and the Rockers - Barbie franchise/1987 film “out of this world”
The Barbusters - Light Of Day(Ruled out by u/JohnVirginia1977)- Barden Bellas - Pitch Perfect
Barry Jive and the Uptown Five - High Fidelity- Beck - Beck (anime/manga)
Beef - Phantom of the Paradise- The Beets - Doug
- Belle (Suzu Naito) - BELLE/ Ryuu to Sobakasu no Hime
The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton - The Mountain GoatsThe Bettys - Phineas and FerbBig Fun - Heathers (Movie)- Big Map and the Boogie Beat Fiends - Shiftylook's Mappy cartoon
Big Mountain Fudgecake - King Of The HillBig Time Rush - Big Time RushBikini Bottom Super Band - Spongebob Squarepants- Billy and the Boingers (also Deathtöngue) - Bloom County
Billy Joe Cobra - Dude, That's My Ghost!The Bird Brains - Spongebob Squarepants- Birds of Prey - Drawtectives
- The Beeples - Oxventure
Black Stones (BLAST) - NANAThe Blues Brothers - The Blues BrothersBobby Benson's Baby Band - The Muppets(Ruled out by u/kerminopiggy)Bottom Feeders - Splatoon(Ruled out by u/shusagii and u/LimeNutella)- The Boyds - H. R. Pufnstuf
Boys In The Sink - Veggietales(Ruled out by u/sammys_babydoll)Boys Who Cry - Spongebob SquarepantsBoyz4Now - Bob's BurgersBoyz 12 - American Dad(Ruled out by u/iconiccowboy)- Brian Slade - Velvet Goldmine
- Brozone - Trolls Band Together
- Buckaroo Banzai & The Hong Kong Cavaliers - Buckaroo Banzai
- Bunk Bed Junction - No Straight Roads
- Butthole Ricochet - Dungeons & Daddies
- Captain Geech and the Shrimp Shack Shooters - That Thing You Do
Caramella Girls - Carameldansen- CHAM! - Perfect Blue
Cheetah Girls - Cheetah GirlsChip Skylark - Fairly OddParents- The Chi-Mos - King Dork (book) /Frank Portman
Citizen Dick - Singles(Ruled out by u/Adorable_Tension2562)The Clash At Demonhead - Scott PilgrimThe Commitments - The Commitments(Ruled out by u/Adorable_Tension2562)Connect 3 - Camp RockCool Tapes - Homestar RunnerCorroded Coffin - Stranger Things(Ruled out by u/sammys_babydoll)The Country Bears - The Country Bear JamboreeThe Country Trio - The Muppets(Ruled out by u/kerminopiggy)The Covey - Ballad of Songbirds and SnakesCrash & The Boys - Scott PilgrimCrazy:B - ensemble stars!! music(Ruled out by u/shusagii and u/LimeNutella)- The Crescendolls - Interstella 5555/Daft Punk Franchise
- Crucial Taunt - Wayne's World
Cuttlefish - iCarly(Ruled out by u/Look-Complete and u/Seallbay)Daisy Jones & The Six - Daisy Jones & The Six(Ruled out by u/rowan_damisch)Damp Socks - Splatoon(Ruled out by u/shusagii and u/LimeNutella)- DCMC - Mother 3
- De Bois Band - & Juliet
- The Deadly Dees - Kirby & The Forgotten Land
Deathmøle - Questionable ContentDeep cut - Splatoon(Ruled out by u/LovliBea85)- Deep Hollow Hollerers - Night in the Woods
DETHKLOK - MetalocalypseDedf1sh - Splatoon(Ruled out by u/LovliBea85)- Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeros - Space Opera
Dewey Cox - Walk Hard- Dingoes Ate My Baby - Buffy The Vampire Slayer
Disaster Area - The Hitchhikers Guide to the GalaxyDJ Crazy Times - Kyle GordonDJ Octavio - Splatoon(Ruled out by u/LovliBea85)- DJ Stylbator - Samurai Jack
Double Face - ensemble stars!! music(Ruled out by u/shusagii and u/LimeNutella)Dr Teeth and The Electric Mayhem - The Muppets(Ruled out by u/kerminopiggy)The Drama Brothers - Total Drama- Drive Shaft - LOST
- Dude-itude - Sonic Boom
DUJOUR - Josie and the PussycatsDumpty Humpty - Danny PhantomEddie & The Cruisers - Eddie & The Cruisers(Ruled out by u/Adorable_Tension2562)Eden - ensemble stars!! music(Ruled out by u/shusagii and u/LimeNutella)Eleanor Forte - SynthVEmber McLain - Danny Phantom- Evar Orbus & The Galactic Jizz-Wailers/The Max Rebo Band - Star Wars
- Exorcism Placenta Ventagram - Monster Camp
- The Ferry-Frog band on the Frogland Ferry - Over The Garden Wall
- Fig and the Cig Figs - Dimension 20 Fantasy High
- Figrin D'an & The Modal Nodes - Star Wars
fine - ensemble stars!! music(Ruled out by u/shusagii and u/LimeNutella)Fingerbang - South Park(Ruled out by u/iconiccowboy)- Fire Bomber - Macross 7
Fist Pump - the Regular Show- Flame - Flame
- The Flaming Creatures - Velvet Goldmine
The Floors - iCarly(Ruled out by u/Look-Complete and u/Seallbay)- Fran-Shou-Shou - Zombie Land Saga
- Freefonix - Freefonix (2008 cartoon)
The Frogtown Hollow Jubilee Jug Band - Emmet Otter's Jug Band Christmas- Full Moon (Koyama Mitsuki) - Full Moon Wo Sagashite
- Gallifrey Academy Hot Five - Doctor Who
The Gavinners - Ace Attorney franchise- Gem & The Scotts - Secret Life SMP
Geri and the Atrics - the Muppets(Ruled out by u/kerminopiggy)- Gillion & The Tidestriders - Just Roll With It
- Girls Dead Monster - Angel Beats
- Given - Given (Manga/anime)
- The Glen Close Trio - Dungeons & Daddies
The Good Ole Boys - the Blues BrothersGorillaz - Gorillaz- Grifters Bone - Magnus Archives
- The Grubbels - Hiveswap
Hannah Montana - Hannah Montana (TV show)- Hard Core Logo - Hard Core Logo (movie)
Hatsune Miku - Vocaloid- HEARTSTEEL - League of Legends
Heaven Seventeen - A Clockwork OrangeThe Hectic Glow - The Fault In Our Stars- Hedwig and the Angry Inch - Hedwig and the Angry Inch
- Hello Happy World - Bang Dream
- Hello Peril - Always Be My Maybe
Here Comes Treble - The OfficeHex Girls - Scooby DooThe Hissfits - Monster High- Hi I'm Ron - Dungeons and Daddies
- Ho-kago Tea Time (After School Tea Time) - K-ON!
Holt Hyde - Monster HighThe Hottest Sex Imaginable - Letterkenny- I Madrigalisti Moderni - Amici Miei (Movie)
- Iron Weasel - I'm In The Band (Disney TV Series)
- Indie Cindy & The Lo-fi Lullabies - Lemon Demon
The Indigo-Gos - Legend of Zelda: Majoras MaskInk Theory - Splatoon(Ruled out by u/LovliBea85)- Imagination Movers - imagination movers
Jem & The Holograms - Jem & The HologramsJohnny Casino and The Gamblers - GreaseJosie & The Pussycats - Archie (Comic)Josie & The Pussycats - RiverdaleThe Juicy Fruits - Phantom of the Paradise- Julie and the Phantoms - Julie and the Phantoms
Kathleen Turner Overdrive - High FidelityK/DA - League of Legends(Ruled out by u/Odd_Meeting_3959)Kelpie G - Spongebob Square pantsKessoku Band - Bocchi the RockKevin and the Zits - The OfficeKevin Gnapoor - Mean Girls- Killer Boy Rats - Horrid Henry franchise
Knights - ensemble stars!! music(Ruled out by u/shusagii and u/LimeNutella)- Lacus Clyne - Mobile Suit Gundam Seed
Lady Parts - We Are Lady Parts- The Last Days - The Last Days
- Leather Patrol - Carpenter Brut
- Lemonade Mouth - Lemonade Mouth
- Leningrad Cowboys - Leningrad Cowboys
Leo/need - Project Sekai/Colourful Stage(ruled out by u/Look-Complete)- Lincoln Hawk - Gossip Girl
Limozeen - Homestar RunnerLittle Chrissy & The Alphabeats - Sesame StreetLittle Jerry & The Monotones - Sesame Street- Little White Lie - Little White Lie
- Little Zombies - We Are Little Zombies
- Liv Rooney - Liv and Maddie
Loded Diper - Diary of a Wimpy Kid(ruled out by u/SillyMonkeyShit)Lolirock - Lolirock (Show)- Los Pulentos - Pulentos (2005)
The Lost And Found - the Lost and Found book series by Cathy CassidyThe Louisiana Gator Boys - the Blues Brothers- Love Burger - Can't Hardly Wait
Love Händel - Phineas and FerbLumberZacks - Milo Murphy's Law- Mad Gear & The Missile Kid - Danger Days, My Chemical Romance
- Mae's Band - Night In The Woods
Marceline and the Scream Queens - Adventure TimeThe Mary Janes - Spider Gwen- Maxwell Demon & The Venus In Furs - Velvet Goldmine
- The Mechanisms - The Mechanisms
the Mesopotamians - They Might Be Giants songThe Mexican Funeral - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective AgencyThe Mighty Boosh - The Mighty Boosh (TV Show)Milkcan - Um Jammer Lammy- Minmay - Robotech
The Misfits - Jem & The HologramsThe Monkees - The Monkees (from the TV show)- Mongolian Chop Squad - Beck (anime/manga)
Mordecai and the Rigbys - The Regular Show(Ruled out by u/Drillucidator)MORE MORE JUMP! - Project Sekai/Colourful Stage(ruled out by u/Look-Complete)- Mouse Rat - Parks & Rec
Mucous Membrane (John Constantine) - DC Comics- The Multiplayers - The Multiplayers (DSMP fanfiction)
Muppet Orchestra - The Muppets(Ruled out by u/kerminopiggy)- The Muse-O-Tronics - My Babysitter is a Vampire
- The Mystery - Satisfaction
Mystik Spiral - Daria- Mygo - bang Dream
- Narcotica - the Wolves of Mercy Falls/Maggie Stiefvater
- Needy Beast - Hatchetfield
New Directions - Glee(ruled out by u/dickasmoke)- Nick Lightbearer and the Make Believes - We Happy Few
Nightcord at 25:00 - Project Sekai/Colourful Stage(ruled out by u/Look-Complete)- Nirvanna The Band - Nirvanna The Band The Show
Octoplush - Splatoon(Ruled out by u/LovliBea85)- Old Gods of Asgard - Alan Wake
- ok, kids - Andre and Karl
Off The Hook - Splatoon(Ruled out by u/LovliBea85)- Pain Diamond - Buddy Thunderstruck
- Paranmaum - Linda Linda Linda
- The Partridge Family - The Partridge Family
- Pauline Phoenix - Dead End: Paranormal Park
The Penguin Band - Club PenguinPentakill - League of Legends(Ruled out by u/Odd_Meeting_3959)- The Phantom Riders - Lord Huron Lore
Phineas and the Ferb-Tones - Phineas and FerbThe Philosophy Majors - Steven Universe(Ruled out by u/Seallbay)Phoenix - Phantom of the ParadisePink - Pink Floyd's The Wall- Pink Slip - Freaky Friday
Plankton and the Patty Stealers - Spongebob Squarepants- Plasmagica - Show By Rock
- Priss and the Replicants - Bubblegum Crisis
- Proto Zoa - Zenon Sweep
- Quartet Night - Uta No Prince Sama series
- Ra*bits - ensemble stars!! music
The Rainbooms - Equestria Girls- Rainbow Dream - Rainbow High
The Randy Disher Project - Monk- The Rats (and Curt Wild) - Velvet Goldmine
- The Relentless - American Satan
- Rex Manning - Empire Records
- RIP - Ruby Gloom
The Risky Fix-Ins - Buzzfeed Unsolved FranchiseThe Riverbottom Nightmare Band - Emmet Otter's Jug Band Christmas- Roselia - Bang Dream
- The Royal Three - Rainbow High
The Runaway Five - Earthbound- The Rutles - All You Need Is Cash
RYUSEITAI - ensemble stars!! music(Ruled out by u/shusagii and u/LimeNutella)Sadie-Killer & The Suspects - Steven Universe(Ruled out by u/Seallbay)Sadgasm - The Simpsons(ruled out by u/dickasmoke)Sasha and the Sharps - Amphibia- SCÄB - Home Movies
- Scarlett and the Shakers - Papa Louis game franchise
School Of Rock - School Of Rock- Seatbelts - Cowboy Bebop
Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - The BeatlesSev'ral Timez - Gravity FallsSex Bob-omb - Scott Pilgrim vs The World- Sexual Chocolate - Coming To America
- Shallow Gravy - The Venture Bros
Shark Puppy - Steven King's IT- Sharon Apple - Macross Plus
- Shallow Gravy - the Venture Bros
- Sing Street - Sing Street
Sloshy - Homestar Runner- Smokes For Harris - “Play Crack The Sky” fanfiction series, Panic! At The Disco RPF (?)
Sonic Death Monkey - High Fidelity- Soundcheck - Odd Squad
Spider-Band - Spider-Punk (comics)Spinal Tap - This Is Spinal TapSquid Sisters - Splatoon(Ruled out by u/LovliBea85)Squid Squad - Splatoon(Ruled out by u/LovliBea85)The Stardew Valley Band (assorted names) - Stardew Valley- STARISH - Uta No Prince Sama series
- Star Waver - Star Wars: Visions Tattooine Rhapsody
- Steam Powered Giraffes - Steam Powered Giraffes
Steven & The Stevens - Steven Universe(Ruled out by u/iconiccowboy)Steven & The Crystal Gems - Steven Universe(Ruled out by u/iconiccowboy)- Stillwater - Almost Famous
- The Stiff Dylans - Angus, Thongs, and Full Frontal Snogging
Studio Killers - Studio Killers (animated band)(Ruled out by u/iconiccowboy)The Soggy Bottom Boys - Oh Brother Where art thouThe Sultans of Swing - Dire Straits(ruled out by u/dickasmoke)- Sunset Curve - Julie and the Phantoms
The Superconducting Supercolliders - Designations Congruent With Things (Pacific Rim fanfiction)Sweet Cap'n Cakes - DeltaruneSwitch - ensemble stars!! musicTaranchula - Homestar RunnerThree Arm Sally - John Dies At The End- The Three Lights - Sailor Moon
The Tiki Room Birds - Walt Disney's Enchanted Tiki RoomTrapnest - NANAThe Treblemakers - Pitch PerfectTrickstar - ensemble stars!! music(Ruled out by u/shusagii and u/LimeNutella)The Troubletones - Glee(ruled out by u/dickasmoke)True Damage - League of LegendsTurner - Performance (1970)Turquoise October - Splatoon(Ruled out by u/LovliBea85)- TwaüghtHammër - Breaking Bad
Two Cock Shakur - LetterkennyUtau Hoshina - Shugo Chara (anime)The Undead - Phantom of the ParadiseUNDEAD - ensemble stars!! music(Ruled out by u/shusagii and u/LimeNutella)Valkyrie - ensemble stars!! music(Ruled out by u/shusagii and u/LimeNutella)The Vampire Lestat - The Vampire Chronicles- Vitaly Chernobyl and The Meltdowns - Snow Crash
Vivid BAD SQUAD - Project Sekai/Colourful Stage(ruled out by u/Look-Complete)The Wiggles - The Wiggles- Wild Azur - Kirakira precure ala Mode
Winslow Leach - Phantom of the ParadiseWonderlands x Showtime - Project Sekai/Colourful Stage(ruled out by u/Look-Complete)- The Wonders - That Thing You Do
Wyld Stallyns - Bill & Ted franchiseWet Floor - Splatoon(Ruled out by u/LovliBea85)Weird Sisters - Harry PotterYes Boy Ice Cream - NeopetsYoko & the Gold Bazookas - Splatoon(Ruled out by u/LovliBea85)Your Favourite Martian - Your Favourite Martian/Ray William Johnson /youtube/Web seriesZiggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars - David BowieZombie Gaga - Monster Highμ's (muse) - Love Liveω-3 (omega-3) - Splatoon(Ruled out by u/LovliBea85)
2021.08.15 01:52 crumjd Big Love (Gremlins - One Shot)
Based off one of the ideas here: https://www.reddit.com/HFY/comments/n7vape/a_gremlins_wishlist/
__________________________________________________________________________________________
“How much have you drunk?” Vance asked, “You’re in love with a kaiju?”
“I thought you, at least, would understand! You’re always crushing on the oddest girls,” Richard sounded annoyed.
“What?”
“The old lady, the cyborg, the…”
“Dude! That's wrong, and like, offensive. First, she was 10 years older than me…”
“Fifteen.”
“... and you’re being super ableist right now.”
Richard rolled his eyes, “A circular saw is not a prosthetic.”
“Whatever. Neither one of them was fifty times as big as me.”
Richard took a long pull on his drink and then gave Vance a knowing look. “You know, it’s not the size of the being, it’s the size of their heart that matters.”
“She probably doesn’t even have a heart!”
“Oh, who’s being a speciesist now?”
“No,” Vance shook his head, “I mean literally. Most Kaiju don’t have hearts, you know. It’s the square cube law, you can’t just scale up a human heart and expect it to do something useful. How do you not know that? Aren’t you an engineer?”
“Electrical,” his face melted into a soft and dopey grin. “It’s one of the things we have in common. She’s in the ship's engineering division.”
“Right. Ok. Fine. She also looks nothing like a human. I mean, the locals seem like a decent race, but they have tentacles in some strange places.”
“Mmmmm, tentacles.” Vance really thought Richard wasn’t faking his enthusiasm.
“The smallest one of which would crush you! I don’t want to belabor this, but she’s 50 times your size! Listen, do they even have the concept of romantic love? That’s not a universal concept, you know. I was in this one colony where every few months they’d just park the ship in deep space and the entire crew would mindlessly bang. Afterwards no one ever said anything about it. I’m not sure they had memories of that time.” Vance winced at the memory, “The colony was pretty nice, but I had to leave. Giant aliens just… All over the place… Nasty.”
“They have romantic love just like us. And I’m going to romance her. Where is that bartender? I’m dry over here.”
“Yeah, suddenly I’m feeling like I need another drink. OK, but Mr. LoveConquersAll what are you going to do about the Dragon? Hmmm? We aren’t an acknowledged colony and I fully believe he will shove you out an airlock if you get us spotted. That man must have had a bad experience. Probably how he got the scar.”
Richard blew out a long sigh and his face fell. It was a testament to how thoroughly the colony’s leader had earned his cognomen that a man who didn’t see any obstacles in the object of his affection out massing him by several orders of magnitude did worry about the Dragon. “I’m gonna have to lay the groundwork subtly at first.”
“You’re gonna have to learn to breathe space, loverboy. Bourbon over here! Or, you know, whatever it is we’re calling the paint thinner made with the giant corn stuff.”
* * *
If a name could be translated the being of Richards affections would have been known as Willow. At least she was named after a similar plant that was viewed in a similar way by their society.
Willow was feeling scared. She'd known she'd learn a lot by joining the crew of a starship as an engineer. What she hadn't anticipated was that she'd learn by doing and what she'd be doing would be keeping the air breathable, the gravity on, and the engine capable of moving them all through the vast inhospitable void. It wasn't, all in all, the sort of job where you really wanted to wonder if you had that quite right. But, with nearly every assignment she received, that was exactly what she wondered.
So if her phalanges shook just a little as she reached out to open the email containing the week's assignment roster no one could blame her. And, anyway, no one could see her. She was alone. "Alone" was about the maximum capacity of her cramped quarters.
This week, however, the assignments came as a pleasant surprise. The ship's engineering staff was going to be spending nearly the entire week running calibrations. Moreover, they were doing it because the Chief engineer, a grumpy old stone-shell who apparently practiced some obscure religion that held giving complete answers to questions to be anathema, thought things were running too well. The assignment notes detailed how the engine was kicking out 110% power, the environmental systems were somehow filtering out smaller particles than they'd ever been designed for, waste heat was down to 85% of expected, and the computers were all suddenly so fast that their benchmark programs were crashing.
Scanning it all, she found a truly unexpected sense of optimism bubbling up in her spleen. That was until she hit the last item. "Atmospheric scrubber consumables? Oh chitin fungus! Why couldn't that have started working perfectly without any maintenance? Why couldn't the unfertilized drone who designed it have realized that a two meter wide access hatch doesn't provide any meaningful access!"
Oh well, she thought, at least she had nearly a week of peace to psych herself up for the unpleasant task and it was something any idiot could do.
* * *
At another meeting the next day another set of engineers argue.
"No, I get the value of your idea. Stop trying to sell me on it! We make it easier to service the scrubber consumables and we get rid of those dips in system performance then a whole wish-list of goodies open right up. I understand. Stop selling it. My complaint is how the hell do you propose we install a whole new system without someone thinking 'hmm, where the hell did that come from?"
Richard grind at his own boss who is also old, crusty, and apparently attended church with Willow's supervisor. "That's why we've got to do it this week! I know for a fact that they've got a junior staffer changing the chemicals five days from now. If we get this slide system in by then, she'll discover it, assume she just didn't know any better the last time she used it, and we won't have any problems."
The bald and gnomish head of engineering threw up his hands, "Until she tells her boss!"
Richard gave him a deeply cheeky grin. "Oh, sure, yeah. That might be a problem. Except, wait, what would you do if you sent me out to do the fiddliest task on the ship and I came back 10 minutes later and said, 'All done boss.'"
"I'd check up on your slacker ass is what I'd do!"
"Right, so we walk back to the site of my presumably uncompleted work and I say, 'Here it is,' and I pull a mechanism out from the wall that you've never seen before and show you how I did it so fast. At that point I bet you'd just admit you had no idea about the existence of a vital part of your own ship and that you'd been taking dozens of times as long to do the task. You certainly wouldn't just pretend that was how it was done all along and never breathe a word about doing it any other way, " Richard grinned again.
There was a long pause.
"Shit, well don't just stand there! Get down to the Kaiju machine shop and put the parts you need into their system for overnight fabbing!"
* * *
Willow made her species’s equivalent of a sigh. It wasn't quite the heavy exhalation of breath a human would have used, but it still conveyed the same sense. Then she pulled the hatch to the atmospheric recycler's consumables tank open and hefted the consumables tank extraction tool preparing to fish out the tank.
Of course, that was really just a grand name for a long thin bit of metal with a hook at the end that you could, with great care, use to draw out the tank. Without great care and not inconsiderable luck you could use it to get the tank just a bit out of place at which point it would shift, get wedged in place, and potentially drop whatever it still held all over the machinery making a huge mess and turning what should have been a five minute task into a two hour one.
"Here goes nothing," she mumbled to herself and started to reach down into the machinery.
Only she didn't get very far. Her little hook clunked against something.
She muttered a phrase that would have sounded a bit nonsensical if directly translated, but that was considered a foul curse by her people. Something had gummed up the works. She was definitely going to spend most of her afternoon trying to clean out a stupid little mechanism at the bottom of a long narrow hole. She set the extraction tool aside and pulled out a hand light instead shining it down into the recessed compartment.
"What the…" There was something hooked through the eyelet of the tank, but it wasn't gunk. It appeared to be some sort of thin rod, much like the extractor tool, that came up and hooked to a mechanism near the top of the access shaft. She ran her phalanges over the mechanism. It was dusty and gunked up with chemical splatters, but after a bit of cleaning she realized it appeared to be a sort of lever arrangement that would shift the rod, and presumably the tank, toward her.
Shaking her head, she worked it a couple of times. With a smooth ‘click’ the tank unseated itself and slid up the shaft allowing her to snag it with barely any effort. And then the job was done in record time. She spent a bit of time staring at the empty tank, the recess, and the little lever system. Had that always been there? How hadn't she known? Why hadn't anyone told her?
She sighed again. It was probably the crew's way of messing with the new guy. Still, she'd figured out the trick and a job she'd been worried about the entire week was done. She should be happy!
She fixed the access hatch back into place and hurried off to let her boss know the tank was topped off. If he reacted somewhat oddly she didn't notice.
* * *
"Wait! You watch her sleep! That's creepy, no, wait check that it's really strange. I mean, creepy too, but mostly strange. If a guy is watching a girl sleep it's because she looks kind of cute and vulnerable then. Giant bug-squids never look cute or vulnerable, so what the hell are you even looking at?"
Richard looked over at Vance raising a single eyebrow, "You've really put some thought into the advantages of watching girls sleep, haven't you?"
"Oh stop it. You can't turn this around on me. You're the one watching giant bug girls sleep. I've gazed lovingly at sleeping girlfriends in the past. That's normal."
"Yeah! They look so sweet; eyes softly closed, hair slightly mussed, cyborg attachments in low power standby glowing a soft amber rather than the usual burning red."
Vance glared, "Bug girl."
"Hey! Bug woman; bug lady!"
"Well, if she's a ladybug then I suppose it's all good." Vance took a deep breath, "Why the hell am I even here?"
"This," Richard said. Then jumped backwards out of the atmospheric vent they'd been standing in. He'd already fixed a repelling line and that changed the jump from a suicidal plunge into a rapid descent, but it still seemed like an odd way to answer the question until he landed dozens of meters farther down the wall on the room's climate control panel and rapidly made some adjustments. Vance felt airflow kick on around him as Richard made his way back up the wall.
"OK? And you're showing me…"
"Just look at her now!"
Down below, Willow had started to toss and turn. That she was no longer sleeping peacefully was obvious even to Vance who was aggressively disinterested in the sleeping habits of giant chitons females.
Richard explained in more detail, "A few mornings ago, Willow was complaining to herself about how she never gets a good night's sleep on the ship and she wished she knew why. I figured it out! It's the environmental systems. Whenever they kick on she's disturbed. They all are. I worked out that the fans are actually letting out an ultrasonic tone that resonates with the crew's shells. Probably half the crew is missing out on sleep and then trying to work grumpy and distracted."
Vance nodded slowly, "I take it you think we can fix that somehow."
"Actually, yes. The fans wouldn't do that if they were balanced and lubricated and I found data using the Interpal system on a colony where they…"
* * *
Willow woke up, stretched, and reflected on how wonderfully rested she felt. Shipboard life was really starting to agree with her. There had been a period when she'd wondered if leaving home had been the worst mistake of her life, but now it was as though she was sort of moving into sync with the vessel. She'd notice an issue and then it would just kind of fix itself. You heard stories of engineers having that sort of relationship with their ship, being able to fix things with just a tap of a hammer or some such, but until now she hadn’t really believed it.
Her species didn't whistle. That would have taken soft mouth-parts. But, by the same biological token, they were great at humming and Willow found herself striking up a little tune as she began to get ready for the day. In fact, her melody flickered to a slightly jauntier level when she realized that the irritating squeak that had come with her door opening and closing was gone. Honestly, at this point the ship worked almost better than devices planet-side.
Her good mood lasted until she made it to the ship’s cafeteria. Setting scale aside, the room looked much like what any human would have recognized from school. A table was a table across the universe. The decorative touches could vary, and surely no society other than the Victorians had covered up table legs for modesty, but it was difficult to imagine a land based creature that wouldn’t find a flat surface of some height handy for setting things on. Chairs varied more, of course, but in this particular case they were recognizable if exotic.
Another thing that would have been recognizable to any human were the Jr. High lunchroom politics of the social gathering. Willow walked into the room, grabbed herself a tray of food from the automated dispensers, and then looked around for friends or acquaintances to share her meal with. She didn’t see anyone she knew particularly well in the room. The ship wasn’t that large, so most of the beings around her were familiar, but they were people she passed in the corridors, not individuals she’d really spent time getting to know.
She was about to resign herself to sitting alone when she caught sight of a truly familiar beak. Sitting in the back was one of her fellow engineers. He was another new hire. Despite their similar station on the ship, the two hadn’t really clicked. They hadn’t had much opportunity. As neither one was really skilled in onboard operations they both needed to be paired with more senior members of the staff in their duties. As they’d both learned the ropes and gained more latitude the other engineer had begun to seem distant and they still hadn’t gotten the time to talk.
Well, Willow thought with the optimism only gifted to the young and foolish, now was the time to correct that. Surely they could be the best of friends if they got the chance to really meet one another! Thus buoyed by a complete failure to grasp the totality of her situation she crossed the room with a spring in her step that sent tremors like a minor earthquake into the deck plaiting and dropped into a chair at the otherwise unoccupied table.
“Buzz! How are you doing?”
The second young engineer’s name was not Buzz in a human sense. It was a buzzing of the rigid mouth-parts that oscillated in ways the human brain was poorly suited to tracking into frequencies the human ear was poorly designed for perceiving. But if a human, perhaps a bizarrely lovelorn one, were observing, for example from an air vent near the ceiling, it would have done as well as any other combination of sounds for a designator.
Buzz mumbled something into his food. Willow didn’t really catch it, but it didn’t sound that happy. It contained the word “great” but also “can’t be” and “as you” before dissolving into the crunching of aggressively masticated breakfast food.
“Oh, um, sorry to hear that?”
There was an awkward silence as Buzz continued to chomp angrily at his food.
Willow ate a few bites of her own food. Pushed a bit more of it around on her tray and then ventured, “If you’re feeling poorly I’d be happy to talk.”
That, at least, got a reaction. Buzz jammed the last of his food onto his radula in an even uglier display than one normally gets while watching a creature without flexible lips eating, crunched it just far enough to not lose the whole mess, and then angrily answered, “I do not want to talk. I want to get to work. Some of us have to, you know, do work to succeed.”
With an abrupt jerk he stood and marched away. Willow was too stunned to say anything or even think about following.
* * *
Because he couldn’t have kept up with a being that had something like a 25 meter long stride under his own power Richard had to use a Zipper to reach the engineering bay before buzz. The Zippers were a handheld device that used a quirk of the superconductive wiring in the ship to create an electromagnetic wave. They then surfed along on top of it. In principle, it was similar to the operation of a MagLev. Then again, in principle, the operation of an old time hand pumped rail car is similar to that of a steam locomotive. Both lack the niceties of seats, walls, or any feeling of safety.
It was not a ride Richard enjoyed, but he was stationed in another air vent when Buzz stomped into the engineering bay. The alien was muttering under his breath, or at least Richard supposed it was meant to be under his breath. To the human, Buzz was perfectly audible.
“...look bad. And not just make me look bad, but then act like it’s nothing. ‘Oh, we haven’t gotten to know each other! Oh, we should become best friends because we’re both new to the ship!’ Well, maybe if you want to be friends you should explain why everything you touch turns to gold while I’m left looking like a complete idiot!” Buzz’s rant was muffled for a little bit as he bent over and got into one of the foot lockers to retrieve tools he would apparently need for his shift. It took him longer than it probably should have and involved more banging than Richard would have thought getting tools would normally entail.
When he finally stood up he seemed to have come up with an idea of some sort because his tone had changed to something somewhat smug and self satisfied. At least that’s how the translator painted it, but the program was solid enough that it was typically reliable for tone. “...and why not? Not as though I’d be hurting anyone. It wouldn’t get that far! The whole point is I’d fix it. Sure, it’ll take a bit of the gloss off her, but she’s glossy enough for any two people. That’s why I’ve got to do this. Don’t need to be held to some unreasonable standard. Why not?”
High in the air vents Richard bit his lip. This wasn’t good. Unless he was hallucinating one of the ship’s worst engineers was planning on sabotaging the already creaky vessel. That couldn’t end well, could it?
Richard knew he had to tell someone. Unfortunately, he also couldn’t take his eyes off Buzz. In a well established colony that wouldn’t have been a problem, just make a call. Unfortunately mobile communications was one of the last things to go up in any colony that wanted to stay hidden. No matter what size hand is holding the device a radio signal is a radio signal. Every intelligent life form knows how to detect radio waves and most use them to their own ends. There are ways around that. Colonies mostly eventually subvert and supplement the ship’s computer system’s to the point that the official IT administrators never notice a city’s worth of data flowing right under their noises. But that take’s time.
So began a hectic day of Richard blasting through the air vents while hoping he could stop at a short range data drop, and hoping even harder that Buzz didn’t blow the ship out of the sky with his scheme. There was way too much use of the Zipper.
* * *
“HE DID WHAT!?” For such a gnomish man the head of engineering could really project. Everyone winced and a couple of the human crew stepped back.
“It’s actually smarter than I would have given him credit for.”
“How the HELL is rigging the ship to blow up the next time we fire the guns smarter than ANYTHING?”
Richard shrugged, “We barely ever fire the guns. I sort of assumed he was going to misaligned the grav emitters or screw up the atmospheric scrubbers,” A second wince went around the room. “But I don’t even know why we have that crappy old cannon. We couldn’t stand off a lifeboat from a real warship. At best they’d annoy a pirate. Maybe it could be used for a bluff. I don’t think it’s ever used for anything other than test firing and that’s infrequent because the ammo isn’t cheap.” The ship’s computer had the details and as soon as Richard had seen what Buzz did he’d checked them.
The chief engineer let out a snort that managed to convey simultaneous irritation and relief. It was an impressive sort of nasal sound. “Well, at least we can fix this idiocy before it gets us killed.”
Should anyone doubt the universe has a sense of humor, albeit a cruel one, that’s when the alert klaxon went off.
* * *
Not being able to run thousands of times more data over the Kaiju network than it was originally designed for was not the same thing as not being able to hijack it at need. The colony IT department had created a stream of what was happening on the bridge so as Vance, Richard, and a dozen other engineers shot through the ship’s airways they could hook into that and get audio, or even HUD video of the ship’s captain arguing with a pirate.
“...recording of your hostile overtures has already been transmitted to the local authorities. And, I repeat, this ship is armed. There is nothing but death for you here.” Vance had to respect the captain. She said that with enough conviction that you’d think the ship was packing something other than a single light cannon that had been outdated 30 years ago when it was first installed.
“How are the evacuations going,” The voice over the command channel was the colony commander. He could have been asking for the weather.
“Not fucking great!” Whoever answered him was not so calm. “We have people all the hell over and I doubt most of them even know what’s going on. Residential is at the boat now and the biggest of the work crews have at least been contacted, but we very much need to not blow up!”
If the captain really sent the firing command she’d rip about a quarter of her ship’s hull off and totally annihilate their engine, comms, and life-support. Unless the pirates were up for a humanitarian rescue, everyone on the ship was going to die slowly. So as much of the colony as possible wasn’t going to be on the ship anymore. They’d launch a remote maintenance droid at the pirate ship and, with luck, a lot of luck, they could gain access to that vessel. Vance would never know if that particular desperate plan worked. He was hauling ass as hard as he could right into the blast radius.
“...overwhelming fear of, what, a single missile from your LN-39 Short Range Low Yield auto cannon. A fine old gun. I bought my five year old one for his birthday. He hunts vemblits with it! Stand down and let us take your cargo. There is no need for you to die today.”
“Never without a fight. I was a Spacer before I retired.”
A private channel from Richard crackled open, “Do you think she means that? She really sounds like she means that.”
“You’re supposed to sound like you mean a bluff,” Vance snapped back, irrationally annoyed with his friend. There was no way the love sick goof could have understood the sort of domino he was pushing over when he started making this easier for Willow, and all of the other engineers had agreed to his plans, but still…
“This discussion is fruitless. Our shuttles will be approaching you shortly. Choose to survive.”
The feed in his HUD shifted to a view of the captain. It was not encouraging. She was leaning forward so intently that her body language transcended species barriers. “Let me know when we’ve got a good angle on them”
“Shitshitshit! I think she means it.”
“We’re almost there. Is the vent clear? Distraction in place?” The leader of the group of engineers that included Richard and Vance asked over their team network.
“Clear! Ready!”
Vance hadn’t liked this part of the plan at all. It wasn’t as though the ship’s air vents lead directly to the sabotaged cannon tube so the repair crew somehow had to get out of the air vents, cross a gunner’s compartment that generally got used as a storage closet, and then gain access through a maintenance hatch. And they didn’t have time to do it in a remotely rational fashion.
Vance’s stomach jumped into his mouth as the gravity in the gunner’s compartment, and incidentally the air vent, cut out. Then it felt as though someone tried to yank his arms off as the pulse the Zipper was riding met an opposing force bubble. He just barely managed to hold on as the ventilation duct spun around him. There was a flash of a grate five times as tall as a man rushing toward him and he braced certain that there’d been a miscalculation and he was going to slam into one of its huge bars like a bug splatting on a windshield.
Fortunately, someone had done their math perfectly and he was thrown free of the air ducts and into the open space of the gunner’s compartment. The room was huge. Hiding inside the walls, flying through the air vents, and living in hidden buildings humans made for themselves, it was easy to forget the sear scale of a kaiju ship. Even this small cramped room felt like the largest artificial space he’d ever occupied, and he was flying through it.
The little comms net between the engineers went nuts. Someone, or more likely a couple of people were screaming in what sounded like genuine terror. At least one other voice was whooping with wild delight. Fortunately, their chief had kept his head well enough to repeatedly bark the order, “Guidance systems! Everyone active your glide controller! Get ‘em on.”
Of course, that ideaOh, yes, Vance thought with a strange sort of detachment, no one had assumed their crew would suddenly know how to fly. He was wearing a very tight vest with a... something strapped onto the back. He had no idea what the small component had originally been for, or even if it had been a human or kaiju part, but it had wings and a navigational computer. That was good! Because It looked like he was going to slam into the wall if he continued on his current path and he had no idea how to fix that.
He clenched down on the button in his hand that activated the thing. It responded by deploying two wings with enough force he was sent tumbling even more erratically for a moment. Then it started moving and adjusting those wings and his flight path stabilized and banked, sending him toward the maintenance hatch for the ship’s single gun. Beside him the other engineers formed up like a flock of geese when their own wings deployed. The hatch they were now all arrowing toward was closed, but there was a plan for that as well.
It was computer controlled and mechanized; it could be hacked remotely. Unfortunately, there was a chance the crew of the ship would object to having little tiny people fly into their only weapon in the middle of a fight. Vance liked to think humans had a pretty good reputation with the crews that knew about them, but that was a stretch. Fortunately, everyone in the room was already pretty distracted by the sudden floating and they were about to have another thing to pay attention to.
“Where is my distraction,” the lead engineer demanded. “Our balls are hanging out here!”
“I don’t have any balls!”
“Jannet’s tits are hanging out!”
“Are not!”
The connection to the team that had dropped off at a slightly earlier electrical junction was getting a little fuzzy, but the report from the team working there was clear enough. “Hold on! I got… OK, eyes on target, now!”
The lights in the room flickered out and then the lights in the hall flared like a flash-bang going off as an artificial electrical surge overloaded them. If any of the crew was still paying attention then surely their eyes were at least dazzled. The maintenance hatch began to slide slowly open, and the team shot down, through, and landed right as the gravity blinked back on.
For a Kiaju space the interior of the gun's maintenance hatch was relatively small. It plunged 20 or so meters back and was perhaps 30 meters wide by 30 meters deep. The back side wasn’t quite so regular though. It was exposed to at least some of the machinery of the launch tube. There were some mechanical components, the physical systems that armed the device mostly, and some electronics. Both had been damaged and instead of just arming the device it would set it to such a high degree of sensitivity that the act of launching it would cause it to detonate. At a rather dramatic stretch it was the sort of damage that could have occurred when someone was doing work on the system, and Willow had worked with the device once, but Vance thought Buzz would have been caught even if he hadn’t managed to put the whole ship in critical jeopardy.
A babble of voices broke out as the engineers surveyed the damage.
“Broke the electronics and the mechanical…”
“...get up there if…”
“..fix this in time! Holy shit, don’t…”
“...cross wire the…”
Vance didn’t say anything, he just stared at the mess in front of him with a feeling in his stomach as though he was falling. The destruction a Kiaju could manage was stunning, and there was no way they could fix the it in the time they had left. How long would it be until the captain ordered the gun fired? Surely no longer than a few minutes. This would take an hour at least, and that was assuming they had the parts.
“Listen! We don’t have to fix it! We just need to break it badly enough it won’t fire,” Vance didn’t recognize the speaker but the statement brought him a flair of hope. “Cut the wire there, there, and crack that chip. There’s redundancy, but we can have it done in five minutes if we move.”
Of course, they didn’t need to fix the system! Attacking the pirates had always been a stupid play. It would be better for the crew if the ship didn’t fire; in that case the pirates would likely let them live to get robbed another day. He started to sprint to one of the wires that had to be cut. On a human scale it was more like a cable, but most of the effort would be in getting up high enough to work on it.
A hand grabbed his arm. “We don’t have five minutes!” Vance turned backwards and found the terrified face of Richard staring wide eyed at him. “I’m still on the bridge feed. That lunatic has a target. They’re just waiting on the optimal angle. It’s two minutes out.”
“Hell, well maybe if we…”
“What,” Richard snapped. “Learn to fly?”
“Gravity! The guidance packs…”
“Are unpowered! They only glide. Think!” Richard whacked his own head with his open palm then he grinned like a maniac, “I can get us the time… maybe… RUN!”
* * *
Richard watched Vance pivot and race off without asking another question or saying another word. Vance was a good friend. He should probably say that out loud if they lived long enough.
Richard toggled the channel on his comms and asked, “Control?”
“Here.”
“I need a connection to the kaiju comms network destination crew member Willow, her ID is…”
“Everyone onboard knows this. Why do you need to talk to her? I’m not jamming up the comms for some strange dying confession of love.”
“She’s an engineer and I know her well enough to persuade her to help,” Richard practically growled. There wasn’t time for this. In the corner of his vision he still had the feed open to the bridge and he could see everyone beginning to tense as the point at which they’d fire drew close.
“You’ve got a text channel open,” Control informed him, making no additional complaint.
“What’s my ID?”
“You’re going to come through stamped as ‘System’ and there’s really no time to change that.”
“I can work with it.”
Richard bit his tongue and wasted about five precious seconds wondering how he should approach this. He decided to be direct and sent, “I need you to send a reset to the breaker at 49-8.” There was a chance Willow would just follow instructions. She was junior after all and the ID on the message would make him look official. He had a backup plan if she asked questions but…
“Who is this? If I reset 49-8 the ship’s weapon won’t fire and we are in the middle of an engagement.”
Shit, he’d been hoping for a bit less knowledge and a bit more blind obedience than that. Time to enact the longshot plan. “This is the ship,” he sent.
“The what?” The reply was almost instant and even as a short text confusion dripped from it.
“This is the actual physical ship. There is no time to explain, but you must realize I am an extraordinarily complex artifact and I am aware that you have FELT our recent connection.”
“I’ve felt something, but what you’re asking is mutiny!”
“No, you’ll save everyone. The weapon is rigged to explode.” His eyes flickered to his video feed of the bridge. Everyone was leaning forward as though they wanted to reach through the view screen. Well, everyone except for the ship’s helmsman who’s station also controlled the ship’s weapon. He had a confirm dialog sitting in the center of his screen and every fiber of his attention was riveted to it. “We only have a few seconds!”
“Backups will just trigger.”
“It will give me time. Please.” The helmsman had started to move his enormous manipulator appendage.
“Fine.” The power in the room flickered out.
* * *
“I love you man. Not, like, love love, you know. That’s all Willow still. But like bro-love. Right?” Richard slurred to Vance somewhat drunkenly.
Saving the colony from certain doom was good for one’s bar budget, Vance reflected. He hadn’t needed to buy his own drinks for weeks. It was a shame the drinks weren’t better, but in the Gremlin colonies one fermented what one had. Typically that meant alien crops that didn’t really match up with any Earth-side beverage.
The power outage had been enough, just barely enough, for the engineering strike crew to get the guns disabled. That had kept the captain from blowing the ship sky high, or antagonizing the pirates.
That second part had proved valuable as the pirates had used a distinctly catch and release approach in their robbery. They’d taken about a quarter of the total value of the ship’s goods by grabbing the most easily transportable items before fleeing. On their way out the door they’d forced the crew to totally power off the main generators resulting in a multi-hour cold start procedure before the ship could get back under way. They’d also damaged the main transmitter so any report of the incident would need to be hand delivered. No crew member had been killed. It was a smart approach to piracy, really, because it wouldn’t provoke quite such an aggressive response as a bloodier shake down would have.
The members of the colony who thought they understood the ship’s finances thought the ship was likely to survive. Even with an ordinary run the loss would have been manageable and with the tuning the colony had already done on the ship’s systems they might squeak out a tiny profit on the remaining cargo.
Of course, the captain had been livid and the malfunction of the ship's weapon had been thoroughly investigated. But that was almost positive. An extensive review of camera footage had revealed Buzz to be the source of the damage and he had only very narrowly avoided getting spaced.
That thought reminded Vance of the other party central to the little drama, “So Willow is still your one and only?”
Richard sighed, briefly overcome by love. “Forever and for always.”
“And she didn’t get into trouble?”
“Nope! Before the biggin’s managed to look anything over a team went in and made sure some of the damage we did could have caused the power fluctuations in the lights and gravity. That managed to cover up Willow’s breaker flip as well.”
“And she never said anything to any other crew member?”
“Well no, I told her not to and she’s loyal.”
Vance nodded. Then he thought about that a bit more. “Wait? You’re still talking to her? As the ship itself?”
Richard shrugged, “It’s working. She thinks I'm some sort of, I dunno, AI that has developed in the system. We can talk for hours.”
Vance considered that for a moment and then shook his head. Not his problem.
Well what did you think of that? I grabbed that idea because I wanted something of a challenge and it certainly was a challenge. It was rather a lot to fit into a short story because I needed to establish the 'romance' which I felt worked best with some humor and then I wanted a bit of action as well. In retrospect it might have been better to entangle the human / alien relationship and the action. Poor Willow could have been under the thumb of some evil alien villain and Richard might have helped like that. Then again, that idea might have been done to death. Thoughts for next time I guess.
submitted by crumjd to HFY [link] [comments]
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“How much have you drunk?” Vance asked, “You’re in love with a kaiju?”
“I thought you, at least, would understand! You’re always crushing on the oddest girls,” Richard sounded annoyed.
“What?”
“The old lady, the cyborg, the…”
“Dude! That's wrong, and like, offensive. First, she was 10 years older than me…”
“Fifteen.”
“... and you’re being super ableist right now.”
Richard rolled his eyes, “A circular saw is not a prosthetic.”
“Whatever. Neither one of them was fifty times as big as me.”
Richard took a long pull on his drink and then gave Vance a knowing look. “You know, it’s not the size of the being, it’s the size of their heart that matters.”
“She probably doesn’t even have a heart!”
“Oh, who’s being a speciesist now?”
“No,” Vance shook his head, “I mean literally. Most Kaiju don’t have hearts, you know. It’s the square cube law, you can’t just scale up a human heart and expect it to do something useful. How do you not know that? Aren’t you an engineer?”
“Electrical,” his face melted into a soft and dopey grin. “It’s one of the things we have in common. She’s in the ship's engineering division.”
“Right. Ok. Fine. She also looks nothing like a human. I mean, the locals seem like a decent race, but they have tentacles in some strange places.”
“Mmmmm, tentacles.” Vance really thought Richard wasn’t faking his enthusiasm.
“The smallest one of which would crush you! I don’t want to belabor this, but she’s 50 times your size! Listen, do they even have the concept of romantic love? That’s not a universal concept, you know. I was in this one colony where every few months they’d just park the ship in deep space and the entire crew would mindlessly bang. Afterwards no one ever said anything about it. I’m not sure they had memories of that time.” Vance winced at the memory, “The colony was pretty nice, but I had to leave. Giant aliens just… All over the place… Nasty.”
“They have romantic love just like us. And I’m going to romance her. Where is that bartender? I’m dry over here.”
“Yeah, suddenly I’m feeling like I need another drink. OK, but Mr. LoveConquersAll what are you going to do about the Dragon? Hmmm? We aren’t an acknowledged colony and I fully believe he will shove you out an airlock if you get us spotted. That man must have had a bad experience. Probably how he got the scar.”
Richard blew out a long sigh and his face fell. It was a testament to how thoroughly the colony’s leader had earned his cognomen that a man who didn’t see any obstacles in the object of his affection out massing him by several orders of magnitude did worry about the Dragon. “I’m gonna have to lay the groundwork subtly at first.”
“You’re gonna have to learn to breathe space, loverboy. Bourbon over here! Or, you know, whatever it is we’re calling the paint thinner made with the giant corn stuff.”
* * *
If a name could be translated the being of Richards affections would have been known as Willow. At least she was named after a similar plant that was viewed in a similar way by their society.
Willow was feeling scared. She'd known she'd learn a lot by joining the crew of a starship as an engineer. What she hadn't anticipated was that she'd learn by doing and what she'd be doing would be keeping the air breathable, the gravity on, and the engine capable of moving them all through the vast inhospitable void. It wasn't, all in all, the sort of job where you really wanted to wonder if you had that quite right. But, with nearly every assignment she received, that was exactly what she wondered.
So if her phalanges shook just a little as she reached out to open the email containing the week's assignment roster no one could blame her. And, anyway, no one could see her. She was alone. "Alone" was about the maximum capacity of her cramped quarters.
This week, however, the assignments came as a pleasant surprise. The ship's engineering staff was going to be spending nearly the entire week running calibrations. Moreover, they were doing it because the Chief engineer, a grumpy old stone-shell who apparently practiced some obscure religion that held giving complete answers to questions to be anathema, thought things were running too well. The assignment notes detailed how the engine was kicking out 110% power, the environmental systems were somehow filtering out smaller particles than they'd ever been designed for, waste heat was down to 85% of expected, and the computers were all suddenly so fast that their benchmark programs were crashing.
Scanning it all, she found a truly unexpected sense of optimism bubbling up in her spleen. That was until she hit the last item. "Atmospheric scrubber consumables? Oh chitin fungus! Why couldn't that have started working perfectly without any maintenance? Why couldn't the unfertilized drone who designed it have realized that a two meter wide access hatch doesn't provide any meaningful access!"
Oh well, she thought, at least she had nearly a week of peace to psych herself up for the unpleasant task and it was something any idiot could do.
* * *
At another meeting the next day another set of engineers argue.
"No, I get the value of your idea. Stop trying to sell me on it! We make it easier to service the scrubber consumables and we get rid of those dips in system performance then a whole wish-list of goodies open right up. I understand. Stop selling it. My complaint is how the hell do you propose we install a whole new system without someone thinking 'hmm, where the hell did that come from?"
Richard grind at his own boss who is also old, crusty, and apparently attended church with Willow's supervisor. "That's why we've got to do it this week! I know for a fact that they've got a junior staffer changing the chemicals five days from now. If we get this slide system in by then, she'll discover it, assume she just didn't know any better the last time she used it, and we won't have any problems."
The bald and gnomish head of engineering threw up his hands, "Until she tells her boss!"
Richard gave him a deeply cheeky grin. "Oh, sure, yeah. That might be a problem. Except, wait, what would you do if you sent me out to do the fiddliest task on the ship and I came back 10 minutes later and said, 'All done boss.'"
"I'd check up on your slacker ass is what I'd do!"
"Right, so we walk back to the site of my presumably uncompleted work and I say, 'Here it is,' and I pull a mechanism out from the wall that you've never seen before and show you how I did it so fast. At that point I bet you'd just admit you had no idea about the existence of a vital part of your own ship and that you'd been taking dozens of times as long to do the task. You certainly wouldn't just pretend that was how it was done all along and never breathe a word about doing it any other way, " Richard grinned again.
There was a long pause.
"Shit, well don't just stand there! Get down to the Kaiju machine shop and put the parts you need into their system for overnight fabbing!"
* * *
Willow made her species’s equivalent of a sigh. It wasn't quite the heavy exhalation of breath a human would have used, but it still conveyed the same sense. Then she pulled the hatch to the atmospheric recycler's consumables tank open and hefted the consumables tank extraction tool preparing to fish out the tank.
Of course, that was really just a grand name for a long thin bit of metal with a hook at the end that you could, with great care, use to draw out the tank. Without great care and not inconsiderable luck you could use it to get the tank just a bit out of place at which point it would shift, get wedged in place, and potentially drop whatever it still held all over the machinery making a huge mess and turning what should have been a five minute task into a two hour one.
"Here goes nothing," she mumbled to herself and started to reach down into the machinery.
Only she didn't get very far. Her little hook clunked against something.
She muttered a phrase that would have sounded a bit nonsensical if directly translated, but that was considered a foul curse by her people. Something had gummed up the works. She was definitely going to spend most of her afternoon trying to clean out a stupid little mechanism at the bottom of a long narrow hole. She set the extraction tool aside and pulled out a hand light instead shining it down into the recessed compartment.
"What the…" There was something hooked through the eyelet of the tank, but it wasn't gunk. It appeared to be some sort of thin rod, much like the extractor tool, that came up and hooked to a mechanism near the top of the access shaft. She ran her phalanges over the mechanism. It was dusty and gunked up with chemical splatters, but after a bit of cleaning she realized it appeared to be a sort of lever arrangement that would shift the rod, and presumably the tank, toward her.
Shaking her head, she worked it a couple of times. With a smooth ‘click’ the tank unseated itself and slid up the shaft allowing her to snag it with barely any effort. And then the job was done in record time. She spent a bit of time staring at the empty tank, the recess, and the little lever system. Had that always been there? How hadn't she known? Why hadn't anyone told her?
She sighed again. It was probably the crew's way of messing with the new guy. Still, she'd figured out the trick and a job she'd been worried about the entire week was done. She should be happy!
She fixed the access hatch back into place and hurried off to let her boss know the tank was topped off. If he reacted somewhat oddly she didn't notice.
* * *
"Wait! You watch her sleep! That's creepy, no, wait check that it's really strange. I mean, creepy too, but mostly strange. If a guy is watching a girl sleep it's because she looks kind of cute and vulnerable then. Giant bug-squids never look cute or vulnerable, so what the hell are you even looking at?"
Richard looked over at Vance raising a single eyebrow, "You've really put some thought into the advantages of watching girls sleep, haven't you?"
"Oh stop it. You can't turn this around on me. You're the one watching giant bug girls sleep. I've gazed lovingly at sleeping girlfriends in the past. That's normal."
"Yeah! They look so sweet; eyes softly closed, hair slightly mussed, cyborg attachments in low power standby glowing a soft amber rather than the usual burning red."
Vance glared, "Bug girl."
"Hey! Bug woman; bug lady!"
"Well, if she's a ladybug then I suppose it's all good." Vance took a deep breath, "Why the hell am I even here?"
"This," Richard said. Then jumped backwards out of the atmospheric vent they'd been standing in. He'd already fixed a repelling line and that changed the jump from a suicidal plunge into a rapid descent, but it still seemed like an odd way to answer the question until he landed dozens of meters farther down the wall on the room's climate control panel and rapidly made some adjustments. Vance felt airflow kick on around him as Richard made his way back up the wall.
"OK? And you're showing me…"
"Just look at her now!"
Down below, Willow had started to toss and turn. That she was no longer sleeping peacefully was obvious even to Vance who was aggressively disinterested in the sleeping habits of giant chitons females.
Richard explained in more detail, "A few mornings ago, Willow was complaining to herself about how she never gets a good night's sleep on the ship and she wished she knew why. I figured it out! It's the environmental systems. Whenever they kick on she's disturbed. They all are. I worked out that the fans are actually letting out an ultrasonic tone that resonates with the crew's shells. Probably half the crew is missing out on sleep and then trying to work grumpy and distracted."
Vance nodded slowly, "I take it you think we can fix that somehow."
"Actually, yes. The fans wouldn't do that if they were balanced and lubricated and I found data using the Interpal system on a colony where they…"
* * *
Willow woke up, stretched, and reflected on how wonderfully rested she felt. Shipboard life was really starting to agree with her. There had been a period when she'd wondered if leaving home had been the worst mistake of her life, but now it was as though she was sort of moving into sync with the vessel. She'd notice an issue and then it would just kind of fix itself. You heard stories of engineers having that sort of relationship with their ship, being able to fix things with just a tap of a hammer or some such, but until now she hadn’t really believed it.
Her species didn't whistle. That would have taken soft mouth-parts. But, by the same biological token, they were great at humming and Willow found herself striking up a little tune as she began to get ready for the day. In fact, her melody flickered to a slightly jauntier level when she realized that the irritating squeak that had come with her door opening and closing was gone. Honestly, at this point the ship worked almost better than devices planet-side.
Her good mood lasted until she made it to the ship’s cafeteria. Setting scale aside, the room looked much like what any human would have recognized from school. A table was a table across the universe. The decorative touches could vary, and surely no society other than the Victorians had covered up table legs for modesty, but it was difficult to imagine a land based creature that wouldn’t find a flat surface of some height handy for setting things on. Chairs varied more, of course, but in this particular case they were recognizable if exotic.
Another thing that would have been recognizable to any human were the Jr. High lunchroom politics of the social gathering. Willow walked into the room, grabbed herself a tray of food from the automated dispensers, and then looked around for friends or acquaintances to share her meal with. She didn’t see anyone she knew particularly well in the room. The ship wasn’t that large, so most of the beings around her were familiar, but they were people she passed in the corridors, not individuals she’d really spent time getting to know.
She was about to resign herself to sitting alone when she caught sight of a truly familiar beak. Sitting in the back was one of her fellow engineers. He was another new hire. Despite their similar station on the ship, the two hadn’t really clicked. They hadn’t had much opportunity. As neither one was really skilled in onboard operations they both needed to be paired with more senior members of the staff in their duties. As they’d both learned the ropes and gained more latitude the other engineer had begun to seem distant and they still hadn’t gotten the time to talk.
Well, Willow thought with the optimism only gifted to the young and foolish, now was the time to correct that. Surely they could be the best of friends if they got the chance to really meet one another! Thus buoyed by a complete failure to grasp the totality of her situation she crossed the room with a spring in her step that sent tremors like a minor earthquake into the deck plaiting and dropped into a chair at the otherwise unoccupied table.
“Buzz! How are you doing?”
The second young engineer’s name was not Buzz in a human sense. It was a buzzing of the rigid mouth-parts that oscillated in ways the human brain was poorly suited to tracking into frequencies the human ear was poorly designed for perceiving. But if a human, perhaps a bizarrely lovelorn one, were observing, for example from an air vent near the ceiling, it would have done as well as any other combination of sounds for a designator.
Buzz mumbled something into his food. Willow didn’t really catch it, but it didn’t sound that happy. It contained the word “great” but also “can’t be” and “as you” before dissolving into the crunching of aggressively masticated breakfast food.
“Oh, um, sorry to hear that?”
There was an awkward silence as Buzz continued to chomp angrily at his food.
Willow ate a few bites of her own food. Pushed a bit more of it around on her tray and then ventured, “If you’re feeling poorly I’d be happy to talk.”
That, at least, got a reaction. Buzz jammed the last of his food onto his radula in an even uglier display than one normally gets while watching a creature without flexible lips eating, crunched it just far enough to not lose the whole mess, and then angrily answered, “I do not want to talk. I want to get to work. Some of us have to, you know, do work to succeed.”
With an abrupt jerk he stood and marched away. Willow was too stunned to say anything or even think about following.
* * *
Because he couldn’t have kept up with a being that had something like a 25 meter long stride under his own power Richard had to use a Zipper to reach the engineering bay before buzz. The Zippers were a handheld device that used a quirk of the superconductive wiring in the ship to create an electromagnetic wave. They then surfed along on top of it. In principle, it was similar to the operation of a MagLev. Then again, in principle, the operation of an old time hand pumped rail car is similar to that of a steam locomotive. Both lack the niceties of seats, walls, or any feeling of safety.
It was not a ride Richard enjoyed, but he was stationed in another air vent when Buzz stomped into the engineering bay. The alien was muttering under his breath, or at least Richard supposed it was meant to be under his breath. To the human, Buzz was perfectly audible.
“...look bad. And not just make me look bad, but then act like it’s nothing. ‘Oh, we haven’t gotten to know each other! Oh, we should become best friends because we’re both new to the ship!’ Well, maybe if you want to be friends you should explain why everything you touch turns to gold while I’m left looking like a complete idiot!” Buzz’s rant was muffled for a little bit as he bent over and got into one of the foot lockers to retrieve tools he would apparently need for his shift. It took him longer than it probably should have and involved more banging than Richard would have thought getting tools would normally entail.
When he finally stood up he seemed to have come up with an idea of some sort because his tone had changed to something somewhat smug and self satisfied. At least that’s how the translator painted it, but the program was solid enough that it was typically reliable for tone. “...and why not? Not as though I’d be hurting anyone. It wouldn’t get that far! The whole point is I’d fix it. Sure, it’ll take a bit of the gloss off her, but she’s glossy enough for any two people. That’s why I’ve got to do this. Don’t need to be held to some unreasonable standard. Why not?”
High in the air vents Richard bit his lip. This wasn’t good. Unless he was hallucinating one of the ship’s worst engineers was planning on sabotaging the already creaky vessel. That couldn’t end well, could it?
Richard knew he had to tell someone. Unfortunately, he also couldn’t take his eyes off Buzz. In a well established colony that wouldn’t have been a problem, just make a call. Unfortunately mobile communications was one of the last things to go up in any colony that wanted to stay hidden. No matter what size hand is holding the device a radio signal is a radio signal. Every intelligent life form knows how to detect radio waves and most use them to their own ends. There are ways around that. Colonies mostly eventually subvert and supplement the ship’s computer system’s to the point that the official IT administrators never notice a city’s worth of data flowing right under their noises. But that take’s time.
So began a hectic day of Richard blasting through the air vents while hoping he could stop at a short range data drop, and hoping even harder that Buzz didn’t blow the ship out of the sky with his scheme. There was way too much use of the Zipper.
* * *
“HE DID WHAT!?” For such a gnomish man the head of engineering could really project. Everyone winced and a couple of the human crew stepped back.
“It’s actually smarter than I would have given him credit for.”
“How the HELL is rigging the ship to blow up the next time we fire the guns smarter than ANYTHING?”
Richard shrugged, “We barely ever fire the guns. I sort of assumed he was going to misaligned the grav emitters or screw up the atmospheric scrubbers,” A second wince went around the room. “But I don’t even know why we have that crappy old cannon. We couldn’t stand off a lifeboat from a real warship. At best they’d annoy a pirate. Maybe it could be used for a bluff. I don’t think it’s ever used for anything other than test firing and that’s infrequent because the ammo isn’t cheap.” The ship’s computer had the details and as soon as Richard had seen what Buzz did he’d checked them.
The chief engineer let out a snort that managed to convey simultaneous irritation and relief. It was an impressive sort of nasal sound. “Well, at least we can fix this idiocy before it gets us killed.”
Should anyone doubt the universe has a sense of humor, albeit a cruel one, that’s when the alert klaxon went off.
* * *
Not being able to run thousands of times more data over the Kaiju network than it was originally designed for was not the same thing as not being able to hijack it at need. The colony IT department had created a stream of what was happening on the bridge so as Vance, Richard, and a dozen other engineers shot through the ship’s airways they could hook into that and get audio, or even HUD video of the ship’s captain arguing with a pirate.
“...recording of your hostile overtures has already been transmitted to the local authorities. And, I repeat, this ship is armed. There is nothing but death for you here.” Vance had to respect the captain. She said that with enough conviction that you’d think the ship was packing something other than a single light cannon that had been outdated 30 years ago when it was first installed.
“How are the evacuations going,” The voice over the command channel was the colony commander. He could have been asking for the weather.
“Not fucking great!” Whoever answered him was not so calm. “We have people all the hell over and I doubt most of them even know what’s going on. Residential is at the boat now and the biggest of the work crews have at least been contacted, but we very much need to not blow up!”
If the captain really sent the firing command she’d rip about a quarter of her ship’s hull off and totally annihilate their engine, comms, and life-support. Unless the pirates were up for a humanitarian rescue, everyone on the ship was going to die slowly. So as much of the colony as possible wasn’t going to be on the ship anymore. They’d launch a remote maintenance droid at the pirate ship and, with luck, a lot of luck, they could gain access to that vessel. Vance would never know if that particular desperate plan worked. He was hauling ass as hard as he could right into the blast radius.
“...overwhelming fear of, what, a single missile from your LN-39 Short Range Low Yield auto cannon. A fine old gun. I bought my five year old one for his birthday. He hunts vemblits with it! Stand down and let us take your cargo. There is no need for you to die today.”
“Never without a fight. I was a Spacer before I retired.”
A private channel from Richard crackled open, “Do you think she means that? She really sounds like she means that.”
“You’re supposed to sound like you mean a bluff,” Vance snapped back, irrationally annoyed with his friend. There was no way the love sick goof could have understood the sort of domino he was pushing over when he started making this easier for Willow, and all of the other engineers had agreed to his plans, but still…
“This discussion is fruitless. Our shuttles will be approaching you shortly. Choose to survive.”
The feed in his HUD shifted to a view of the captain. It was not encouraging. She was leaning forward so intently that her body language transcended species barriers. “Let me know when we’ve got a good angle on them”
“Shitshitshit! I think she means it.”
“We’re almost there. Is the vent clear? Distraction in place?” The leader of the group of engineers that included Richard and Vance asked over their team network.
“Clear! Ready!”
Vance hadn’t liked this part of the plan at all. It wasn’t as though the ship’s air vents lead directly to the sabotaged cannon tube so the repair crew somehow had to get out of the air vents, cross a gunner’s compartment that generally got used as a storage closet, and then gain access through a maintenance hatch. And they didn’t have time to do it in a remotely rational fashion.
Vance’s stomach jumped into his mouth as the gravity in the gunner’s compartment, and incidentally the air vent, cut out. Then it felt as though someone tried to yank his arms off as the pulse the Zipper was riding met an opposing force bubble. He just barely managed to hold on as the ventilation duct spun around him. There was a flash of a grate five times as tall as a man rushing toward him and he braced certain that there’d been a miscalculation and he was going to slam into one of its huge bars like a bug splatting on a windshield.
Fortunately, someone had done their math perfectly and he was thrown free of the air ducts and into the open space of the gunner’s compartment. The room was huge. Hiding inside the walls, flying through the air vents, and living in hidden buildings humans made for themselves, it was easy to forget the sear scale of a kaiju ship. Even this small cramped room felt like the largest artificial space he’d ever occupied, and he was flying through it.
The little comms net between the engineers went nuts. Someone, or more likely a couple of people were screaming in what sounded like genuine terror. At least one other voice was whooping with wild delight. Fortunately, their chief had kept his head well enough to repeatedly bark the order, “Guidance systems! Everyone active your glide controller! Get ‘em on.”
Of course, that ideaOh, yes, Vance thought with a strange sort of detachment, no one had assumed their crew would suddenly know how to fly. He was wearing a very tight vest with a... something strapped onto the back. He had no idea what the small component had originally been for, or even if it had been a human or kaiju part, but it had wings and a navigational computer. That was good! Because It looked like he was going to slam into the wall if he continued on his current path and he had no idea how to fix that.
He clenched down on the button in his hand that activated the thing. It responded by deploying two wings with enough force he was sent tumbling even more erratically for a moment. Then it started moving and adjusting those wings and his flight path stabilized and banked, sending him toward the maintenance hatch for the ship’s single gun. Beside him the other engineers formed up like a flock of geese when their own wings deployed. The hatch they were now all arrowing toward was closed, but there was a plan for that as well.
It was computer controlled and mechanized; it could be hacked remotely. Unfortunately, there was a chance the crew of the ship would object to having little tiny people fly into their only weapon in the middle of a fight. Vance liked to think humans had a pretty good reputation with the crews that knew about them, but that was a stretch. Fortunately, everyone in the room was already pretty distracted by the sudden floating and they were about to have another thing to pay attention to.
“Where is my distraction,” the lead engineer demanded. “Our balls are hanging out here!”
“I don’t have any balls!”
“Jannet’s tits are hanging out!”
“Are not!”
The connection to the team that had dropped off at a slightly earlier electrical junction was getting a little fuzzy, but the report from the team working there was clear enough. “Hold on! I got… OK, eyes on target, now!”
The lights in the room flickered out and then the lights in the hall flared like a flash-bang going off as an artificial electrical surge overloaded them. If any of the crew was still paying attention then surely their eyes were at least dazzled. The maintenance hatch began to slide slowly open, and the team shot down, through, and landed right as the gravity blinked back on.
For a Kiaju space the interior of the gun's maintenance hatch was relatively small. It plunged 20 or so meters back and was perhaps 30 meters wide by 30 meters deep. The back side wasn’t quite so regular though. It was exposed to at least some of the machinery of the launch tube. There were some mechanical components, the physical systems that armed the device mostly, and some electronics. Both had been damaged and instead of just arming the device it would set it to such a high degree of sensitivity that the act of launching it would cause it to detonate. At a rather dramatic stretch it was the sort of damage that could have occurred when someone was doing work on the system, and Willow had worked with the device once, but Vance thought Buzz would have been caught even if he hadn’t managed to put the whole ship in critical jeopardy.
A babble of voices broke out as the engineers surveyed the damage.
“Broke the electronics and the mechanical…”
“...get up there if…”
“..fix this in time! Holy shit, don’t…”
“...cross wire the…”
Vance didn’t say anything, he just stared at the mess in front of him with a feeling in his stomach as though he was falling. The destruction a Kiaju could manage was stunning, and there was no way they could fix the it in the time they had left. How long would it be until the captain ordered the gun fired? Surely no longer than a few minutes. This would take an hour at least, and that was assuming they had the parts.
“Listen! We don’t have to fix it! We just need to break it badly enough it won’t fire,” Vance didn’t recognize the speaker but the statement brought him a flair of hope. “Cut the wire there, there, and crack that chip. There’s redundancy, but we can have it done in five minutes if we move.”
Of course, they didn’t need to fix the system! Attacking the pirates had always been a stupid play. It would be better for the crew if the ship didn’t fire; in that case the pirates would likely let them live to get robbed another day. He started to sprint to one of the wires that had to be cut. On a human scale it was more like a cable, but most of the effort would be in getting up high enough to work on it.
A hand grabbed his arm. “We don’t have five minutes!” Vance turned backwards and found the terrified face of Richard staring wide eyed at him. “I’m still on the bridge feed. That lunatic has a target. They’re just waiting on the optimal angle. It’s two minutes out.”
“Hell, well maybe if we…”
“What,” Richard snapped. “Learn to fly?”
“Gravity! The guidance packs…”
“Are unpowered! They only glide. Think!” Richard whacked his own head with his open palm then he grinned like a maniac, “I can get us the time… maybe… RUN!”
* * *
Richard watched Vance pivot and race off without asking another question or saying another word. Vance was a good friend. He should probably say that out loud if they lived long enough.
Richard toggled the channel on his comms and asked, “Control?”
“Here.”
“I need a connection to the kaiju comms network destination crew member Willow, her ID is…”
“Everyone onboard knows this. Why do you need to talk to her? I’m not jamming up the comms for some strange dying confession of love.”
“She’s an engineer and I know her well enough to persuade her to help,” Richard practically growled. There wasn’t time for this. In the corner of his vision he still had the feed open to the bridge and he could see everyone beginning to tense as the point at which they’d fire drew close.
“You’ve got a text channel open,” Control informed him, making no additional complaint.
“What’s my ID?”
“You’re going to come through stamped as ‘System’ and there’s really no time to change that.”
“I can work with it.”
Richard bit his tongue and wasted about five precious seconds wondering how he should approach this. He decided to be direct and sent, “I need you to send a reset to the breaker at 49-8.” There was a chance Willow would just follow instructions. She was junior after all and the ID on the message would make him look official. He had a backup plan if she asked questions but…
“Who is this? If I reset 49-8 the ship’s weapon won’t fire and we are in the middle of an engagement.”
Shit, he’d been hoping for a bit less knowledge and a bit more blind obedience than that. Time to enact the longshot plan. “This is the ship,” he sent.
“The what?” The reply was almost instant and even as a short text confusion dripped from it.
“This is the actual physical ship. There is no time to explain, but you must realize I am an extraordinarily complex artifact and I am aware that you have FELT our recent connection.”
“I’ve felt something, but what you’re asking is mutiny!”
“No, you’ll save everyone. The weapon is rigged to explode.” His eyes flickered to his video feed of the bridge. Everyone was leaning forward as though they wanted to reach through the view screen. Well, everyone except for the ship’s helmsman who’s station also controlled the ship’s weapon. He had a confirm dialog sitting in the center of his screen and every fiber of his attention was riveted to it. “We only have a few seconds!”
“Backups will just trigger.”
“It will give me time. Please.” The helmsman had started to move his enormous manipulator appendage.
“Fine.” The power in the room flickered out.
* * *
“I love you man. Not, like, love love, you know. That’s all Willow still. But like bro-love. Right?” Richard slurred to Vance somewhat drunkenly.
Saving the colony from certain doom was good for one’s bar budget, Vance reflected. He hadn’t needed to buy his own drinks for weeks. It was a shame the drinks weren’t better, but in the Gremlin colonies one fermented what one had. Typically that meant alien crops that didn’t really match up with any Earth-side beverage.
The power outage had been enough, just barely enough, for the engineering strike crew to get the guns disabled. That had kept the captain from blowing the ship sky high, or antagonizing the pirates.
That second part had proved valuable as the pirates had used a distinctly catch and release approach in their robbery. They’d taken about a quarter of the total value of the ship’s goods by grabbing the most easily transportable items before fleeing. On their way out the door they’d forced the crew to totally power off the main generators resulting in a multi-hour cold start procedure before the ship could get back under way. They’d also damaged the main transmitter so any report of the incident would need to be hand delivered. No crew member had been killed. It was a smart approach to piracy, really, because it wouldn’t provoke quite such an aggressive response as a bloodier shake down would have.
The members of the colony who thought they understood the ship’s finances thought the ship was likely to survive. Even with an ordinary run the loss would have been manageable and with the tuning the colony had already done on the ship’s systems they might squeak out a tiny profit on the remaining cargo.
Of course, the captain had been livid and the malfunction of the ship's weapon had been thoroughly investigated. But that was almost positive. An extensive review of camera footage had revealed Buzz to be the source of the damage and he had only very narrowly avoided getting spaced.
That thought reminded Vance of the other party central to the little drama, “So Willow is still your one and only?”
Richard sighed, briefly overcome by love. “Forever and for always.”
“And she didn’t get into trouble?”
“Nope! Before the biggin’s managed to look anything over a team went in and made sure some of the damage we did could have caused the power fluctuations in the lights and gravity. That managed to cover up Willow’s breaker flip as well.”
“And she never said anything to any other crew member?”
“Well no, I told her not to and she’s loyal.”
Vance nodded. Then he thought about that a bit more. “Wait? You’re still talking to her? As the ship itself?”
Richard shrugged, “It’s working. She thinks I'm some sort of, I dunno, AI that has developed in the system. We can talk for hours.”
Vance considered that for a moment and then shook his head. Not his problem.
Well what did you think of that? I grabbed that idea because I wanted something of a challenge and it certainly was a challenge. It was rather a lot to fit into a short story because I needed to establish the 'romance' which I felt worked best with some humor and then I wanted a bit of action as well. In retrospect it might have been better to entangle the human / alien relationship and the action. Poor Willow could have been under the thumb of some evil alien villain and Richard might have helped like that. Then again, that idea might have been done to death. Thoughts for next time I guess.
2021.06.08 07:27 Neechee92 Looking for Resources for SQUID's
I'm doing some undergraduate research on Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices (SQUID's) and experiments with them. Can anyone point me to some resources that discuss SQUID's from an introductory level upward ("introductory" with respect to SQUID's, not with respect to physics as a whole)? Every paper or textbook I can find seems to be written for someone familiar with SQUID's already.
submitted by Neechee92 to AskPhysics [link] [comments]
2015.05.01 06:38 SplitReality FYI from the NASA Spaceflight Thread: EM Drive critiqued by user squid
I was looking in the NASA Spaceflight Thread and thought this was interesting. User squid is currently throwing cold water on everything (at least for now). His main criticism is that if this effect is real then we should have seen it before in our own electronics and in space.
User WarpTech had the following reply to squid's assertion that the tests were flawed.
submitted by SplitReality to EmDrive [link] [comments]
When they are running the RF cavities in the LHC at CERN (far larger, superconducting, far higher power), why don't they try to tear themselves off their mountings?He has also questioned one of the underlying theories of what is going on. User Mulletron has taken issue with this and playfully says he will respond latter with a rebuttal.
...
Astrophysical processes create electromagnetic fields orders of magnitude larger than what could conceivably made in the laboratory. Why don't we see any interaction in these vastly larger fields, or any "spacetime bending"?
I'm going to wallop you in the morning. :D Hope you know what you're attacking me for (what I've been advocating which isn't QVPT BTW) You might want to make sure you have your facts straight. This is your head start.Finally squid is unconvinced that the experiments actually show an unexplained effect and offers up some alternative explanation for the force seen.
In my personal opinion, in order of likleyhoodUpdate:
- Buckling of the structure due to thermal or electromagnetic stresses
- Lorentz forces from the current being carried to the device
- Noise in electronics (there should be an error budget, and steps should be taken to minimize crosstalk, which is HIGHLY NONTRIVIAL when dealing with large RF powers). Signal to noise of (eyeballing) ~10 is pretty bad for such a huge claim.
- Magnetic interaction between cavity and vacuum chamber wall
User WarpTech had the following reply to squid's assertion that the tests were flawed.
Go back and read the entire thread, you'll find they already did most of what you suggested. Their Rig has been tested and has not been falsified.User matthewpapa has confirmed that one of the tests that squid wanted was in fact actually done.
They already subbed the test article for a power resistor.Presumably this test used a resistor in place of the test equipment in order to run power through the equipment to see if the same results were obtained.
2014.02.19 20:47 Yunkin Managing the Urge to Quit.
I know this is a common topic on the thread and in grad school in general but I can't help but feel that everything I am doing is running around in circles and what I am doing is complete bull shit. I am currently at a mid level Physics PhD program working on thin film superconductive devices, namely SQUIDs and logic devices. Like most grad students I am overworked, I'm the senior student, I have three different small projects I'm trying to work on, plus I'm on a fellowship where I help teach physics at a local high school two days a week. With the mounting pressure I get from my advisors I don't know how to keep up anymore. Whenever I talk to them I come back with five more thińs to add to my to-do list or I have to redo something I did a month ago because he just got around to looking at things and decided it wasn't quite good enough. As a result I'm working all the time. I'm constantly angry and my fiancé broke down this past weekend because she hates that I'm not around and if I am I'm exhausted or working on something else. I honestly can't take this anymore. I originally came to grad school to go into industry and now I'm thinking that if take my masters I can hopefully get a decent job I like but I don't even know where to look anymore. I have a weird set of skills and being a physics major I am not really an engineer. But I don't know if I can be here much more. I just need an outside perspective or advice. Sorry for keeping it long.
submitted by Yunkin to GradSchool [link] [comments]
2013.01.22 20:46 quadroplegic SQUID method question
Hi, everybody. I'm setting up a SQUID in my laboratory, but none of my fellow grad students know how to use one. I think we're mostly clear, but I do have a question about the pick-up coil. Does it need to be superconducting too?
Also, and this is a long shot--does anybody have a step-by step paper that details the setup and testing of a SQUID?
Thanks!
submitted by quadroplegic to Physics [link] [comments]
Also, and this is a long shot--does anybody have a step-by step paper that details the setup and testing of a SQUID?
Thanks!