13 Degrees of Separation (35 page)

Jake asked Mairi what life was like in Senka. She sipped at
her energy drink, red eyes studying him until he squirmed. Finally she
relented, popped the straw out of her mouth and sat back. She quietly told him
about the people there, how they etched a living out of the barren rock. It was
tougher every year, and the population dropped. With fewer people skills were
lost. “We scraped by.”

“But what about the pirates?”

“What about them? When they came around we hid. See, after
they tore us up we relocated our bases. Then when a ship comes through they
signal a relay beacon. Someone will strip it and then if we're interested in
trade we set up a meet. Otherwise they get nothin and they move on.”

“Oh.”

“It's the only safe way now. The pirates are a pain in the
ass.”

“I'd say they loot, pillage and then burn?” Taylor Warner
asked. “Typical model?”

Mairi nodded. “Sometimes,” she said with a shrug. “If they
find you. We hid. Dig deep, keep quiet. Use relays to bounce signals, never
lead anyone back to a base.”

“Ah.”

“For some reason they aren't at all interested in the
hardware, oh tugs like the bitch yeah, but they are more interested in metal
and fissionable stockpiles.”

“Oh?”

“Why kill a flock when you can sheer the sheep and then let
them go to grow more wool?” Rasha asked, coming into being beside her husband.
“After all if you kill the sheep then you have no more.”

“True,” Taylor responded, catching her hand with his and
then rubbing her virtual fingers with his own.

“You know about pirates?” Mairi asked.

Rasha cleared her throat, and then nodded to the girl.
Taylor grunted and turned, smiling. “Yeah. I... we are officers in the Naval
reserve.”

“AI officers?”

“We're not AI,” Rasha said, looking up to the girl.
“Whatever gave you that idea?” she asked.

Mairi squirmed under her intense gaze. “I just thought...
um,” she looked to Jake for help.

“We're cybers. People, organic people who are permanently
hooked up to the system. Sort of Organic AI I suppose,” Taylor explained.

“And Clio?”

“Oh no,” Rasha laughed. “She's an AI.”

“Oh,” Mairi responded in a small voice.

“We had our lives. Our son John is the executive officer of
the Kiev  221,” Taylor said, smiling proudly.

“Just as his father was chief engineer,” Rasha murmured,
hugging her husband.

“John?” Mairi asked, now lost. “I, um... John, I thought
Savo called the admiral that.”

“John Henry Warner. He was named after the admiral.”

“Now I'm lost,” Jake said, shaking his head regretfully.
Taylor snorted.

“We knew John before the Xeno war. John saved each of us. I
vowed if I ever had a son, I'd name it after him,” Taylor explained. Finally
Jake nodded.

“You could say the admiral is his godfather. We always
did,” Rasha explained.

“Oh.”

“If you scraped by, how'd you get the cred's up for a
ticket?” Jake asked. Mairi turned a glare on him. He squirmed. “If you don't,
um, mind me asking.”

“I had the money several times but well, let's just say my
mother can't handle money worth a damn,” Mairi growled. She sighed and ran her
hand through her hair as the Warners looked at her with sympathy. “I... let's
just chalk it up to salvage okay? I was so pissed at Irons getting out of Senka
so easily it got stuck in my head. I backtracked to where Io 11 picked him up
and...” she shrugged. She didn't want to admit that Dig's tug and body had
helped pay for the cost of her mother as well as the bitch.

“Oh,” Jake said and nodded. “Cool. Admiral Irons said
something about salvage here?” he asked looking at the Warners. “Is that
something we'll be doing?” he asked.

Taylor shrugged as his wife rubbed his shoulder. “I doubt
it. We might get lucky but there aren't that many ships around. The few we have
found have already been picked up.”

“Like the Phoenix,” Rasha replied.

He looked over his shoulder to her and then nodded.
“Right,” he agreed, meeting her eyes for a moment and then turning back to the
small group. “What we're going to do is well, repair existing ships, make
robots, and tugs, along with platforms and sublight craft.”

“Okay.”

“And of course expand the yard,” Rasha replied. She rolled
her eyes. “That alone will be a lifetime process if we follow the admiral's
plan to the letter.”

“Why the frack are we doing Tribecca? Isn't this going to
set us behind with the yard?” Mairi demanded.

“Sure it will,” Gwen replied. She'd been brought on board
to design the power collection and transmission system.  She'd said she could
do it in her sleep. She'd roughed the design out using off the shelf equipment
in a few hours, and had a running prototype to showcase and test the next day.
Of course Riff had complained she hadn't gotten any sleep in that period and
had been irritable as all frack until she'd gotten some sack time. Gwen of
course had ignored his comment as unworthy of her response.

“The thing you've got to understand kid, is that the
Tribecca contract is a
paying
gig. With it we get to test out the truss
system, show it to others, and show others what we can do. And it's a paycheck
that keeps giving and giving. We'll keep adding to the system over time,
boosting the power,” Riff rumbled.

“There's no such thing as a free lunch, it still costs,” 
Mairi complained. Ralph looked over to her and snorted. She shrugged.

“True. But we'll get back to the yard. Just give it some
time. Besides, what do you care? If you're in your precious tug that is all
that matters right?” Savo asked, poking Mairi.

Mairi snorted, batting his hand away. “Yeah, so why build
the yard at all then?”

“Cause it'll give us bigger pay checks down the road. Lots
of them,” Ralph replied.

“Okay...” Mairi said. “Sounds good, but what will they use
to pay for it?”

“Creds, trade, we don't care,” Clio replied.

“As long as it's legal we don't,” Rasha amended. “Though I
worry about that.”

“True, but think of all the ships that will come here for
our services,” Taylor replied, smiling. “They will be putting a lot of income
into the local market. We too will do that. We'll get paid, and we will spend
our money on food and resources in turn. It's an economic engine.”

“I'm more worried about the pirates. We can't build a
warship?” Jake asked, looking at the naval officers.

Taylor shook his head, his wife followed suit a beat later.
“No,” Taylor said with regret in his voice. “No, I'm afraid not.”

“Suddenly I think it was safer in Senka,” Mairi said.
“Can't hide with this damn station,” she growled. Jake nodded.

...*...*...*...*...

Mairi started noticing things missing around her apartment.
She was tired, and unsure if it was her fatigue making her blind to the
obvious, or if her mother had cleaned. Neither sounded good, and the latter was
pretty much a fairy tale. She hunted around for the tablet and then gave up.
“Mom?” she called over her shoulder, looking under the coffee table.

“Yes honey?” her mother asked.

“Where's the tablet?” she asked, sitting on her haunches.
Not there.

“Um... I don't know. Did you check the seat cushions?” her
mother called. Mairi checked, and didn't find it. She grunted in irritation as
her mother came out of her room.

“Well dear, I don't know what you did with it. It'll turn
up eventually,” Olga said. She adjusted glittering bangles on her wrists. She
was wearing a red silk dress. She smiled.

“Nice,” Mairi said, wondering where her mother had gotten
the credits for the thing. Slutty, definitely. She wondered what Harif would
look like if she turned up in something liked that. Her mother adjusted her
hair and then posed. “Nice mom. Going out?”

“Yes dear, don't wait up for me,” her mother said, picking
up her purse. She strutted out of their quarters. Mairi watched her go, shaking
her head.

Suspicious of her mother, she turned and used the wall
screen to check her mother's account. What her mother didn't know was that it
was a joint account since that was the only way Mairi could deposit an
allowance into it. It was a pain in the ass using the tiny remote, but she
managed to find the website and log in after a few minutes.

She flipped through the data, looking at the withdrawals
and deposits. Then her eyes turned to the deposits. Since when? Her mother
wasn't working... one recent deposit caught her eye and she swore. A deposit
from a pawn shop for a tablet. “Damn her!” she threw the remote down in
disgust. She swore, pacing for a good hour before she realized it wouldn't do
her any good.

...*...*...*...*...

The next morning she found the tablet on the kitchen
counter. She snorted. Her mother had either gotten the money to get it out of
hock or she'd decided to conveniently 'find' the 'lost' tablet to keep Mairi
from getting too interested in where it went. She'd lied to her, that was for
sure. She was up to something, most likely something she didn't want Mairi to
know or worry about. Uncle Edgar had had it out with her once over something
like this back in Senka. Something about taking things that weren't hers, using
them for collateral, and then using the money to gamble. If she won she paid
the loan back and got the item back. More often though her mother lost. She
then had to scramble to find a way to cover the debt or lose the item.

Whatever was going on Mairi vowed to have a 'chat' with her
mother when she came home later that night. That was
if
she wasn't too
tired from working. She grabbed an energy drink, a couple of power bars, a can
of tuna and a fork and stuffed them into her pockets. She turned and left the
apartment at a trot.

...*...*...*...*...

“To many chiefs, not enough Indians. And neither side know
what the hell we're doing. Green all around and it shows. None of us have done
this before,” Savo said in disgust. They were still having teething trouble
with the Tribecca solar project. They were working on a shoe string budget,
with no room for error. Fortunately the design was simple in robust, it was
getting it all in place that was proving a challenge.

The basic design was a flat truss platform. The truss
platform was two meters in depth, made up of triangles for rigid strength. On
the side facing the sun solar panels were attached, arranged as close to each
other as possible. It was all plug and play, even the ion RCS thruster packs to
keep the panels oriented toward the sun. They would need to be periodically
refueled, another expense they hadn't quite counted on.

Solar wind was already pressing against the structure,
slowly pushing it out of its planned orbit like a giant solar sail. They were
burning through fuel faster than they had planned and the project was only half
complete. Savo had made a lot of comments about how if Irons had been on hand
he would have thought of a way to fix the problem.

That had nettled Harif, who had thought he could fix the
problem. Even Mairi was stumped, the only way she saw to fix it was just to add
larger fuel tanks for the ion thrusters and make regular servicing runs. But
the board wanted something simpler, a quick long term fix.

They were starting to learn there weren't quick fixes
however, sometimes you just had to grin and bear it. Take for instance the problems
with Tribecca's end. They had been chasing after the Yard Dogs, even
threatening litigation if they fell behind. So far Petunia had kept to the
schedule, burning through shift after shift to get the job done. But now they
had received a call stating that the microwave ground station was falling
behind and Tribecca was considering calling the entire project off. When news
of that had reached the board they'd called an emergency meeting.

“We need Irons. We need John here, now. He knows how to get
shit done,” Savo said again. He was fairly sure John would have done something,
even if it meant donating something to get the project back on track.

Things were finally picking up but the station and the
corporations were fighting back. Clio warned him that there had been ten cyber
attacks on the security systems of the bay and warehouse since 9am that
morning. It was only a matter of time before someone tried to hack the bar and
their quarters too, If they didn't already. Harif and Jake were busy isolating
the systems into protected servers. That would cut Clio and the Warners off
though, at least for the next several days until they could engineer a back
door for them to use.

“Well, we don't have him. We'll have to make do with what
we've got.”

“Then we need someone like him.”

“His plan...”

“That's just it. We're not even following the damn plan!
We're screwing around, exercises, various ideas, so called training,” he waved
an impatient hand. “But not what we're supposed to be doing! Building the damn
yard!”