Mind Over Ship

plunged into it.

“Pilot advise course correction,” the instructor said. “Pilot acknowledge.”

But PUSH did not acknowledge or alter course. Instead, the mentar sped up the simulation a hundredfold, and the starship was captured by the planet and pulled into its dense atmosphere. The holoscape POV stayed with the ship the whole way down displaying its spectacular, fiery destruction.

I’m bored, the mentar said. The instructor made a curt slashing motion to kill the holoscape, leaving them in an empty storage container. The warm, stuffy air reeked of electrical ozone. Without uttering a word, the instructor opened a steel door and left. After a moment, Veronica decided she’d better follow her. They walked through the deserted warehouse to the office where the instructor removed her headset and lowered her large frame into a complaining office chair.

Veronica didn’t push the matter and instead waited for her to speak first. Eventually, the instructor made a fist and offered it. Veronica pressed her own pygmy knuckles against the instructor’s, and the instructor said, Have you given this enough thought?

Of course, Veronica replied, hoping she showed more confidence than she felt. He’s young and rebellious. He’ll grow out of it. Reset the maneuver and try again.

She withdrew her fist, but the instructor did not. Her row of knuckles hung in the air until, reluctantly, Veronica returned her own. Was there something else, Captain?

Yes, sir, there was. If you think I’m only referring to that little tantrum in there, you should review the recordings I flagged for you. He defies my every instruction. All he wants to do is fly. He won’t hear about propulsion dynamics, life support, biostasis, or mechanical fabrication. All of the critical skills are “boring,” except perhaps for celestial navigation, and that only so he can find more planets and stars to crash into.

Veronica pressed her reply a little harder, Then by all means, Captain, teach him how to find more planets and stars to crash into!

In Their Place

When she awoke to a misty dawn, she forgot for a giddy moment where she was or what she was supposed to be. She lay enfolded in ethereal wings of dazzling blue feathers. She snuggled in them for warmth and realized she could flex them and that they were her own. She lay on a mat made of split reeds. Downy feathers covered her breasts and concealed the painful bruises where Fred had carelessly pecked at her. She felt with the tip of her talon and counted eighteen bruises, including those on her throat and cheeks.

Fred lay next to her. He was also winged — fletched in golden brown. The feathers covering his back were bloodstained where she had clawed him in her passion.

Mary leaned over and, minding her beak, kissed his finely feathered cheek.

He grunted.

“I’m getting up.”

He grunted again.

Mary stood on the edge of their platform and looked down. She could not see the ground through the tangle of undergrowth. The entire space was awash in green from the forest canopy above.

She jumped and, only as an afterthought, spread her arms. Her wings caught the air, snapping fully vurt, and she clumsily, much too fast, glided to an awkward landing. She came to rest next to the giant trunk of their tree. When she approached the tree, the hatch outline lit up.

As soon as Mary entered the tiny lock, all her feathery raiment fell away and vanished, and she was an ordinary nude woman. All the bruises were gone too, and with them their discomfort. Such a game! At the outer hatch, she gathered her wits and made a mad sprint to the bathroom, where the gel shower was already pelting in anticipation, and she leaped into the stall and frantically scrubbed the simsock mastic from her body. The trick, when leaving the null lock wearing vurt mastic, was to try to remove it before the nits had a chance to recolonize you. Otherwise, as they burrowed through your skin, they invariably dragged bits of mastic with them, and although the nits were supposed to be hypoallergenic, the simsock certainly wasn’t.

When Mary was finished and toweling herself off, the autodoc on the wall dispensed her a paper thimble of salve to apply to her wrists and ankles, and though it made her hair greasy, to the spot on the crown of her head.

“WAIT!” MARY SAID, scratching her ankle. “What did I just say? I said take the tray with you.”

“Yes, myr,” the nuss said. The young Capias woman crossed the room and lifted the tray of dirty plates and glasses. But Ellen told her to put it back.

“Let the ’beitors clean it up, Mary. I’m not paying this nuss to wait on you like your own personal maid.”

Mary flushed with embarrassment.

“For that matter,” Ellen went on, turning her gaze to include Georgine, “I’m tired of the overall unfriendly tone around here lately. It’s starting to grate on my nerves. I don’t like it.”

Labor Relations

That morning, the municipal morgue crew was assigned to Roaming Mop Up Duty. Riding to the first call-out of the shift with the ROMUD crew in the omnibus, Fred went out of his way to be friendly. But the johns seemed unsure how to act around a russ in johnboy overalls. And the ROMUD crew leader, another john, was even a little hostile.

Their first call-out was to the McLaughlin Traffic Well, the site of an early-morning wrecker attack. The traffic well was a modest one, four square blocks in area and twenty munilevels high. It contained a pair of multilane up- and-down spirals that served a half-dozen intersecting skyway traffic lanes. The floor of the well was a ped plaza crosslink that was suspended between two gigatowers. It was littered with about twenty fallen vehicles. The bus had broken in two. Its wheels, doors, seats, and passenger crash pods were scattered about the plaza among wrecked limousines and cars.

Wrecker gangs had hacked the city’s traffic control system to cause a series of midair collisions in the well. Stricken vehicles hit more vehicles on their way down, starting a chain reaction of multilevel carnage. The wreckers waited at the bottom of the well with scavenging mechs for cutting up and carting away the debris, especially the good bits: titanium fan blades, Rolls-Royce motors, control subems. By the time Fred’s morgue crew arrived, the wreckers were long gone, the police and HomCom had secured the well, and crash cart ambulances were attending to the injured, of which there were few. Falling twenty munilevels was perfectly survivable, and even the bus’s disintegration was a designed-in safety measure to protect the passenger crash pods. The only casualties of the bus crash — the only fatalities in the entire attack — were two plaza pedestrians crushed under the bus and found by triage spiders. As soon as the ROMUD crew removed the remains, the HomCom could release the site to a brigade of street-cleaning scuppers that was waiting behind the barricades.

THE SECOND CALL-OUT was much more hazardous. It involved a rare four-stage NASTIE and required the ROMUD crew to suit up before entering the hot zone, which comprised the upper floors of the residential gigatower Port Hallow. Apparently, the microscopic nanobot had drifted into the arcology through a central sunshaft and migrated into an interior apartment before going active. By the time the bloomjumpers arrived and managed to quench it, the bot had grown a millionfold, dissolved parts of ten apartments on three floors, and penetrated many other neighboring ones to prospect for resources.

When the morgue crew arrived, the bloomjumpers were still there in force mopping up hot spots with their grease guns and preparing the pearl for removal. Fred, who was a certified bloomjumper, himself, who probably had a higher HomCom rating than any russ at the scene, was drawn to the pearl, which lay in the fire-gutted former living room of what had recently been a luxury apartment. The pearl was a killing machine that the opportunistic