Companion #683

It was extremely Monday. Spizz, a junior mechanic for the Port Authority of the Big Blue Rock, was late to work at the main repair docks, and had to get to her work site under her own power instead of catching the ferry.

She shot through a mechs-only airlock and coasted towards the ungainly ship that she was stripping for salvage, a plume of propellant trailing behind her.

By the time she got there, her human colleagues had gotten all the good hover packs, and she was stuck with one with a busted gyroscope. She’d be compensating with her own attitude adjusters all day, and would need to top up at the Companion maintenance bay at the end of the day, where she would be subject to the inquisitive nagging of her mentor, a Companion that had been in the thick of Human civilisation since they had departed from Old Earth.

All morning, Spizz clambered over the fraying hulk, grading scrap for fixing, recycling or disposal, finding reservoirs of valuable coolant and Sejonite, laying beacons and tags for the simple automata that would do most of the brute force work dismantling the ship.

It was midmorning and the crew was taking a break when they heard the alarm. It was a big, blaring, full-dress security alert—one of the carriages for The Adventures of Blackbeard was off its course, and headed their way!

Piss****er, thought Spizz.

As one of the Returned, Spizz had spent aeons in empty space. When she came back to human space, along with her fellows and their descendants, she was welcomed, celebrated. Decorated by school children.

Now, though, strange beings like her often felt the need to prove themselves. To show that they really wanted to be part of the society of the Nebulas. This was even more important, given the repeated attacks, hacks, and infiltrations of the Searchers.

So, Spizz dove through the airlock of the shelter module where she had been hanging out with their colleagues as they sipped their breaktime tea. She activated the shields housed in her bowler hat, and, to all outside observers, appeared matte-black—invisible against the darkness of space.

As she passed behind the errant carriage, she extended a delicate but surprisingly strong telescoping arm, caught one of the power-vanes, and reeled herself in.

She did not radio into the Port Authority, because if this ship had managed to go awry, it had obviously been hacked. Further, she was breaking every regulation in the book.

What she did do was gently, gently touch a finger to the carriage’s metal skin, which allowed her to send electrical pulses through and get a head count.

About a dozen humans and one weird acting Companion. It had the registration tags of one 2649, Robo Blackbeard, but he was acting all funny.

Double piss****er, thought Spizz.

All RB’s emanations were wrong. His thoughts, normally parseable to any Companion, were encrypted. And he was vibrating on an unusual frequency. In short, all the signs indicated that he’d been compromised by the Searchers.

Spizz quietly groped along the bottom of the craft and found an emergency airlock, which she slipped into with a mechanic’s security override. She then burst into the carriage cabin, lifting a sticky, gum-stained carpet over her head.

Yup, there were the humans—students and teacher, all wearing emergency oxygen masks.

And there was the taken-over Robot Blackbeard, eyes full of malice. The Searcher lurking inside pinged her, and she cursed the air blue in reply.

Then they started fighting, which looked to an outside eye like a bright little electrical storm, but was full of hacks and counterhacks, a whole little war at light speed.

The teacher pulled a sidearm and fired an electrical pulse at both of them, which knocked Spizz out for a full second. While she was incapacitated, the Searcher pulled off her right arm, which would have looked horrifying to the children but, of course, did not hurt at all. While it was focused on this task, she rebooted her systems. She released the latches in her arm and the Searcher, suddenly pulling too hard, fell back against the bulkhead. Then she raised her left arm, and bared a high intensity laser. Not wise for indoor use when lots of pure oxygen was around, but she wasn’t thinking straight.

Just in the nick of time, the Searcher got his electrical shields up, then, realising the defence would soon be overwhelmed by the laser, made a dash out the airlock and disappeared.

Spizz was then standing there in front of a riot of confused children, having broken every rule in the book. As sparks came out of her arm, they cheered. She could hear the harbourmaster, my boss, and my mentor pinging. They would have to get in line—her first order of business was to pilot this carriage back to safety.

It turned out that nobody was mad—her violations were spectacular, but a Searcher hack sending an entire dockyard into disarray and threatening children was far worse. So, Spizz was given a commendation, a raise, and a ribbon-cutting reopening of the ride, alongside the Mayor. And, a new nickname—Captain Hook.