Grealis Grealish Gralis Gralus Grayless / Gradeless / Carmean & others Ireland to the Eastern Shore of Maryland Dorchester & Caroline Co MD Hyde & Beaufort Counties.![]() Giga. Noto. Saurusby Tracy Canfield. The stereopsis module clicked open in Wren’s fingers. Today, though, she was down to a disassembled Kviks. Well, a knockoff Kviks. Wren unclipped a cable and my view of the bench sank to 2. D as my eyes automatically switched to my backup visual processor.“Okay, Buffalo, here goes.” She waved theatrically. Her fingers were grubby, but her burgundy nail polish was unscratched. With a flare, the new Kviks. The workshop had developed a red tint, though, like a bootleg romcom dribbling over the ansible from seventy light- years away. I tried to recalibrate off my memories of Wren’s dark skin, but it didn’t help.“Don’t tell me,” she said. ![]() Might need a software patch.”She drummed her fingernails on the bench. Your operating system is . Wren squinted past me at the screen. I have the parts to connect to the repair base computers directly, but I never enable them. Get breaking news and the latest headlines on business, entertainment, politics, world news, tech, sports, videos and much more from AOL. Comunidad orientada a la traducción de subtítulos de Cine Asiático, Anime y Series Asiáticas (Doramas), además de cultura y música del lejano oriente. I’m too much of a machine as it is.“Someone called the Plasma Push wants clearance to land.” Wren’s gaze flicked back and forth across the display. Had Ypsilanti Rowe ever heard of them, that’s what she meant.“Base broadcast,” said Wren. Otherwise you can dock at the Flotsam.’”The Plasma Push replied with a flash of torpedo tubes.“Guess he doesn’t like their two- drink minimum,” said Wren. Base defense had been hard enough back when there were three of us. I held my guts shut with one hand and vaulted easily into the gunners’ chair –Wren had set up her repair shop on an asteroid where gravity was less of a law and more of a gentle suggestion. The incoming torpedo was still half a klick out, so I spared a precious half- second to fire off an automated alert to the sheriff. I didn’t expect any help from that quarter, but the record would show that we’d asked.“I’ll handle the Push,” said Wren. She was hoping to knock out its computer systems and salvage it. How much would we get for a high- end armed cruiser like that? There might be flashier tech in the Drift, but the Push would bring in good cash, even after the sheriff took his cut. Maybe enough to hire a professional programmer from out in the Intersolar to code up some custom optical drivers for me. But right now I had other worries. I latched my targeting ring onto the torpedo and squeezed the bars, blasting out high- impact rounds. ![]() I didn’t want the chair’s control ports – or need them. I have Ypsilanti’s memories, fresh as the day he stuck his head in the braincaster: Orbital Patrol flight school and freelance piloting through the roughest parts of the galactic arm. Plus my own fifteen years scavenging the Drift. I stole a glance at Wren’s sly smile. My drives had plenty of room for one memory more. I hated to turn back to the screen. Closer, closer – and then the attacking teardrop split in three. My false- green bullets obediently wiped away the center target, the chunk of the torpedo that had stayed on the original course. That one would be a dummy – the warheads were on the daughter torps. I snapped my guns to spray. The Kviks. Wren’s mechanics had loosed an artillery barrage from the gun battery in the spinward bay. With luck, even civilians like them could keep our airspace too hot for the Plasma Push to land. The Push could still bombard us from above, though, until and unless Wren and I brought it down. Wren’s own burster shots were still only halfway to the Push. She fired off a second wave. I want this jackass’s hide. Ammo costs money.”“Don’t you worry,” I said, but I was worrying a little myself. The torpedoes were closing in on the base, and our domes wouldn’t hold up to a direct hit. I didn’t care about air, but I did care about Wren. My autonomic modules wouldn’t switch on my synthetic sweat glands in the cool workroom air, but my hands were tight on the firing bars. I raked my shots across the torpedoes’ course. ![]() The combat display chittered. A new dot was streaking into range – a second warship. Some bizarre model I’d never seen, a mass of chrome bubbles never meant to taste atmosphere. It didn’t even have viewports. The sheer strangeness of it confirmed what the combat screen’s plot of its course was telling me: it was straight out of the Drift.“Wren, I guess even jackasses have friends. And this guy’s from the wrong side of the tracks.” The Drift was a Darwinian stew of wild AIs, endlessly devising new tech and building new ships to battle each other. Fortunately for everyone, they stayed there. Or they had, until, apparently, now. Too bad there wasn’t time to blast out another message to Sheriff Thibodeaux. The hell with capturing the Push. Let’s just stay alive.”My bullet spray wiped one warhead off the display, and I turned my guns on the second. This close, the torpedo’s jammers were fuzzing the base sensors. The target jittered on my screen.
I instinctively switched to cameras and zoomed in. The display couldn’t keep the tactical overlay synched, and the torpedo was barely a gray smudge against the starfield. In a few seconds, it would smash into the base. I had one shot. I dialed up the precision fire controls. The smaller caliber wouldn’t have the punch to knock the warhead out altogether, but if I could lead it just right . My atmospheric sensor bleeped a warning. The world reappeared, and I fired. My bullets trimmed away the torpedo’s fins and sent it spinning into the dead rock beyond the base walls. I felt the slam of impact.“You got it!” Wren whooped. Had that Drift ship scared it off? If so, they weren’t working together. I wasn’t sure if that was good news or bad. The Drift ship hadn’t fired. My screen showed a data squirt, but it wasn’t a standard ship hail, just a series of plaintext words: clip clock block solder light to tendon guard cover cushion keep keep safe. I’ll have some mechanics come up and warm our gun chairs for a few hours. I think it’s time for a visit to the sheriff’s office.”Everyone told Iron Jill she should’ve named the Flotsam the Corkscrew. Same delivery every time. I never knew whether she was joking – I think her emotion chips were burned out. The Flotsam was a vast spiral of metal and forceformed concrete, cruising among the miscellaneous scavenging ships that comprised Tramptown. It was too big and balky to be called a ship; the Flotsam’s engines were barely big enough to spin up a gentle half- Earth gravity that comforted visitors from the Intersolar and discouraged the locals from brawling. The Flotsam’s bulky backbone was probably built to house starships while they were under construction, but long before my time, Jill towed it out of the Drift and set up shop. The only habitable section was the domed bar inside one end of the vast tube. But the Flotsam was more than a watering hole; salvagers came here when they didn’t feel like attending the Tramptown Baptist Church but still needed to see someone besides their own shipmates. Automated trade shuttles brought in what we couldn’t rig up for ourselves – like snacks from the middle of the food chain instead of the sludgy bottom, or Kviks. Iron Jill could even afford decent ansible bandwidth to the Intersolar. Someday the Flotsam would be the nucleus of a real town. It was purely logical that Sheriff Thibodeaux would set himself up in the back room. Nothing to do with the Flotsam having the best stills in Tramptown. Of course not. Thibodeaux’s office reeked of fried seaweed and mustard; he obviously didn’t take his meals with the common salvagers. He clinked his shot glass onto the magnetic coaster installed in his desktop.“Nothing comes out of the Drift except salvagers,” he grunted, “so what makes you think that’s suddenly changed?” The counter app I’d coded on the fly popped a 3 into my visual display.“Look at my logs if you don’t believe me.” Wren leaned her elbows on Thibodeaux’s smart desk. Thibodeaux snorted at Wren, like her communicator had warbled some embarrassing cyborg boy- band ringtone, and poured himself another shot. Thibodeaux had turned up in the Drift last year with an armed ship and an intriguing proposal. He’d heard Tramptown was getting big enough for a sheriff, and he wanted the job. He ran unopposed – truthfully, most of us had been thankful for the chance to give that authority to someone without a stake in any of Tramptown’s long- running feuds. Wren tapped her wristpad against Thibodeaux’s desk. Logfiles and photos scrolled by under the grease stains.“That’s a Silverback- model cruiser,” said Thibodeaux. Wouldn’t mind flying one myself, if people would get better about paying their ten percent into the law enforcement budget.”He sipped his whiskey. Now, about this ship you say came out of the Drift . My first. Wren tightened the pads around my head. I closed my eyes as Ypsilanti, and opened them as me. Silver threads had appeared in her black braids, and her smile was tight. I noticed the roundness of her face before her pregnant belly.“You hear me okay?” she said. Another, less welcome memory bubbled up – Prentiss ambushed by the Drift ship Absolute Magnitude, gasping, metal tendrils wrapping his throat. My recording program blinked: Wren and Thibodeaux’s conversation had shifted to a new subject. I replayed the last few seconds.“You still keeping Ypsilanti’s cyborg around?” said Thibodeaux’s recorded voice. I switched my attention to the here- and- now.“Buffalo works for me,” said Wren, matter- of- fact. I didn’t think Thibodeaux picked up on it. Thibodeaux looked me over appraisingly. I’d liked it better when he ignored me.“So Ypsilanti abandoned this cyborg. That means that if you plan to hang onto it, you’re salvaging it, and you owe me ten percent of the value.”“God damn it,” said Wren. Every couple of weeks you come nosing around my base, checking whether I’ve picked up anything I owe you on, even though you and I both know it’s been years since I went into the Drift – and even though Buffalo’s lived, uh, been in Tramptown since before you got here. My mechanic business is a full- time job and then some, but there you are, clomping around with your scanner and your spreadsheet.
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