Conflation —Part 2
Apr. 13th, 2006 12:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
secret_historyGreetings and salutations, dear readers! You can thank ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
toughlovemuse for this (or blame her, as the case may be), but I've finally got my act together enough to write a second installment of Conflation. There was a writing jam this evening, and I finished what I started at work, as well as about 500 words of the third installment. I still don't know where the story is going, but I guess that'll just be part of the excitement.
Here goes!
*****
2- Plan
“This is suicide.”
“You know, for someone of your genotype, you’re being awfully negative.”
“I’m not being negative, I’m being realistic. And you know perfectly well that this has nothing to do with genotype: you can’t program experience. What you’re proposing is nothing short of suicide. If I had a veto, I’d be exercising it right now.”
“But you don’t have a veto, so the point is moot.”
“More’s the pity.”
“I won’t insult your intelligence by playing the ‘no-one-forced-you-to-sign-on-with-us’ card...”
“Thank you.”
“Nonetheless, I would like to point out—”
“—I thought you weren’t going to insult my intelligence.”
“Fair enough.”
“I still think it’s suicide.”
“Everyone’s got an opinion.”
The argument was an old and familiar one, even if the details were new. Vanya considered any mission a waste of time if it didn’t provoke an argument with his second-in-command. Unofficially, Vanya considered Marianna to be his second-in-command, and she accepted that was the way of things. Vanya was the real leader of their small outfit. Officially, when they were asked, Marianna would describe herself as an equal partner in business. It made things easier all around. Talk of hierarchy and chains of command made people wary for different reasons: fringers didn’t like it because it was too redolent of the Imperium, and the Imperium didn’t like it because the idea of anyone else maintaining a strict discipline that wasn’t their own at that wasn’t under their direct control made the uneasy. So Marianna, like the rest of Vanya’s crew, was officially his partner.
Today, Vanya saw, she was wearing a threadbare powder blue sweater that brought out the blue in her eyes and hugged her figure flatteringly. She was small and dark, with skin the colour of cherrywood and curly black hair that she kept cut short around her ears. The fact that she was wearing her lucky blue sweater spoke volumes, and in fact told Vanya far more about her state of mind even than the argument they were having: it meant that she was honestly worried about the outcome of this mission. Of course, she’d never let on that she considered it a lucky sweater, and of course vanya had never let on that he knew about this little superstition of hers. There was no point. The fact remained that she would wear it whenever they were starting a difficult or dangerous job, and it hadn’t escaped his notice. More significantly, she’d worn it after Soraya had died, and when Jarod had been shot.
He rose to a crouch in his seat, squatting on his heels and resting his forearms on his knees, a pose he knew annoyed her because of its precarity. Or maybe just because it got the seat dirty. He was never entirely comfortable when things were stable, himself included. He’d held the conviction for a long time that, if circumstances were volatile enough, then that put the chances on his side that would enable him to then control the outcome of any given situation. Marianna had told him he was full of shit to say he believed that, since all logic and reason dictated the opposite, and perhaps he had been full of shit when he’d first declared this as his credo; but by now he’d repeated it often enough to anyone who’d listen as well as to himself that he was pretty sure he actually believed it. Pretty sure. He believed it to the extent that he could believe anything, that is. He knew better than anyone else how easily his beliefs could change, malleable in the extreme as they were, subject even to the most momentary of his whims. That was the way he liked it.
“So what’s wrong with this job?” He hadn’t meant to give her the satisfaction of asking for her considered opinion, but then he wasn’t exactly known for his self-restraint, and he did really want to know. Damn. Now she’d be smug for weeks, supposing they even lived that long, which, given the job ahead of them, was no sure thing. The thought of dying without having the last word in this argument, of dying with her being right after all, dammit, depressed him utterly. Accordingly, he pushed the thought away.
“Too many variables,” Marianna was turned away from him, staring at a screen with a look of displeasure on her face, although he wasn’t sure if it was a result of the reading she was taking or mere contrariness about the job at hand.
“Variables are my specialty, you know that. Besides, the beauty of this plan is its simplicity. The core is sound, and that makes your precious variables mere details that we will simply work around.” He waved emphatically with both hands to illustrate his point, then lost his balance and flailed to keep upright as the ship performed a complicated manœuver, ruining the effect of the gesture.
“The devil is in the details,” she quoted sourly, poking at the screen with a slender finger.
“Marianna, I don’t bore you with tired clichés from my homeworld. Kindly pay me the same courtesy.”
“Clichés exist for a reason, Vanya: they’re based in reality. Anyway, your homeworld is too small to have developed any clichés of its own.”
“That’s not the point.” Vanya had regained his poise and thus his usual equanimity. He waved dismissively at her. “You could have voiced all these objections when the the whole crew took a vote on this, you know.”
“As I recall, I did voice them. Vehemently. We voted three to two in favour of going ahead with the job, mostly because you promised Jarod a stop at that expensive brothel at Lassig Station when the job was done. Even if we hadn’t, you still would have imposed it on us.”
“True enough.” Vanya grinned unrepentantly. This was why he was the captain: because he liked being in charge.
They lapsed into silence as Marianna switched off the autopilot. They’d have to go in dark after this, once they were a few hundred kilometers away from the station. Vanya settled more comfortably on his heels to watch Marianna as she piloted skillfully along the course they’d decided on a few hours before, negotiating every manœuver with precision and grace, although that had a lot to do with the ship herself. When he’d first acquired the Starburst, she had been called the Magellan, and had looked every bit as impressive as she was, and she was a very impressive ship indeed. Every inch of her had gleamed in the lights of the docking port, her lines sleek streamlined to maximise her efficiency, her weapon ports cunningly worked into the body to conceal them from approaching enemies. Vanya had taken the beautiful Magellan and refitted her until she was unrecognisable even to her previous owner: gone was the uniform expanse of shining metal, replaced with rust and patches of cheap metal, gone were the aerodynamic lines. Instead, the ship looked like she was on the verge of coming apart at the seams. Her engines leaked plasma on good days, and sometimes coolant on bad days. She was filthy, ungainly-looking, and generally as unprepossessing a vessel as any that navigated in the sector. She might in fact have been the most unprepossessing vessel for several sectors in any direction, although Vanya had never bothered to test that theory.
Of course, she could also outfly any vessel in the sector, could pass through Imperium space virtually undetected, and the leaks actually sprang from carefully-constructed pockets on the outside of the engines, designed to fool any but the most attentive and observant onlooker. It wouldn’t pass a rigorous inspection, but Vanya played his cards close to his chest, and always made sure that his ship never attracted the undue attention of customs officials or anyone else who might have the power to order an inspection, and he made sure that his papers were always beyond reproach. He pretended to be furious every time someone made a joke at the expense of his precious Starburst, but in fact he himself had been the one to start the most commonly-repeated joke that the ship’s name came from the fact that looked like it had been caught in a supernova at some point in the near past.
They were flying well under the radar now, to coin an old expression he’d always rather liked. Mostly he liked it because no one had ever heard of it except in old texts and so it annoyed Marianna when he used it. They were flying under the radar, and as far as he could tell, it was working: nothing was coming over the passive com system, no pre-recorded Imperium message demanding that the identify themselves and the reason for their presence near an Imperium space station without a previously-forwarded flight plan approved by the relevant subsection manager, no Imperium vessels coming to fly alongside of them and force them to land anywhere they didn’t want to land. Nothing. This was easier than slicing butter with a hot knife.
Vanya laced his fingers together behind his head and smiled a grim smile of satisfaction. The hard part was over. Now all they had to do was dock at Salmig Space Station without being detected, board it and disable all its generators. The rest would just do itself.
*****
toughlovemuse for this (or blame her, as the case may be), but I've finally got my act together enough to write a second installment of Conflation. There was a writing jam this evening, and I finished what I started at work, as well as about 500 words of the third installment. I still don't know where the story is going, but I guess that'll just be part of the excitement.Here goes!
2- Plan
“This is suicide.”
“You know, for someone of your genotype, you’re being awfully negative.”
“I’m not being negative, I’m being realistic. And you know perfectly well that this has nothing to do with genotype: you can’t program experience. What you’re proposing is nothing short of suicide. If I had a veto, I’d be exercising it right now.”
“But you don’t have a veto, so the point is moot.”
“More’s the pity.”
“I won’t insult your intelligence by playing the ‘no-one-forced-you-to-sign-on-with-us’ card...”
“Thank you.”
“Nonetheless, I would like to point out—”
“—I thought you weren’t going to insult my intelligence.”
“Fair enough.”
“I still think it’s suicide.”
“Everyone’s got an opinion.”
The argument was an old and familiar one, even if the details were new. Vanya considered any mission a waste of time if it didn’t provoke an argument with his second-in-command. Unofficially, Vanya considered Marianna to be his second-in-command, and she accepted that was the way of things. Vanya was the real leader of their small outfit. Officially, when they were asked, Marianna would describe herself as an equal partner in business. It made things easier all around. Talk of hierarchy and chains of command made people wary for different reasons: fringers didn’t like it because it was too redolent of the Imperium, and the Imperium didn’t like it because the idea of anyone else maintaining a strict discipline that wasn’t their own at that wasn’t under their direct control made the uneasy. So Marianna, like the rest of Vanya’s crew, was officially his partner.
Today, Vanya saw, she was wearing a threadbare powder blue sweater that brought out the blue in her eyes and hugged her figure flatteringly. She was small and dark, with skin the colour of cherrywood and curly black hair that she kept cut short around her ears. The fact that she was wearing her lucky blue sweater spoke volumes, and in fact told Vanya far more about her state of mind even than the argument they were having: it meant that she was honestly worried about the outcome of this mission. Of course, she’d never let on that she considered it a lucky sweater, and of course vanya had never let on that he knew about this little superstition of hers. There was no point. The fact remained that she would wear it whenever they were starting a difficult or dangerous job, and it hadn’t escaped his notice. More significantly, she’d worn it after Soraya had died, and when Jarod had been shot.
He rose to a crouch in his seat, squatting on his heels and resting his forearms on his knees, a pose he knew annoyed her because of its precarity. Or maybe just because it got the seat dirty. He was never entirely comfortable when things were stable, himself included. He’d held the conviction for a long time that, if circumstances were volatile enough, then that put the chances on his side that would enable him to then control the outcome of any given situation. Marianna had told him he was full of shit to say he believed that, since all logic and reason dictated the opposite, and perhaps he had been full of shit when he’d first declared this as his credo; but by now he’d repeated it often enough to anyone who’d listen as well as to himself that he was pretty sure he actually believed it. Pretty sure. He believed it to the extent that he could believe anything, that is. He knew better than anyone else how easily his beliefs could change, malleable in the extreme as they were, subject even to the most momentary of his whims. That was the way he liked it.
“So what’s wrong with this job?” He hadn’t meant to give her the satisfaction of asking for her considered opinion, but then he wasn’t exactly known for his self-restraint, and he did really want to know. Damn. Now she’d be smug for weeks, supposing they even lived that long, which, given the job ahead of them, was no sure thing. The thought of dying without having the last word in this argument, of dying with her being right after all, dammit, depressed him utterly. Accordingly, he pushed the thought away.
“Too many variables,” Marianna was turned away from him, staring at a screen with a look of displeasure on her face, although he wasn’t sure if it was a result of the reading she was taking or mere contrariness about the job at hand.
“Variables are my specialty, you know that. Besides, the beauty of this plan is its simplicity. The core is sound, and that makes your precious variables mere details that we will simply work around.” He waved emphatically with both hands to illustrate his point, then lost his balance and flailed to keep upright as the ship performed a complicated manœuver, ruining the effect of the gesture.
“The devil is in the details,” she quoted sourly, poking at the screen with a slender finger.
“Marianna, I don’t bore you with tired clichés from my homeworld. Kindly pay me the same courtesy.”
“Clichés exist for a reason, Vanya: they’re based in reality. Anyway, your homeworld is too small to have developed any clichés of its own.”
“That’s not the point.” Vanya had regained his poise and thus his usual equanimity. He waved dismissively at her. “You could have voiced all these objections when the the whole crew took a vote on this, you know.”
“As I recall, I did voice them. Vehemently. We voted three to two in favour of going ahead with the job, mostly because you promised Jarod a stop at that expensive brothel at Lassig Station when the job was done. Even if we hadn’t, you still would have imposed it on us.”
“True enough.” Vanya grinned unrepentantly. This was why he was the captain: because he liked being in charge.
They lapsed into silence as Marianna switched off the autopilot. They’d have to go in dark after this, once they were a few hundred kilometers away from the station. Vanya settled more comfortably on his heels to watch Marianna as she piloted skillfully along the course they’d decided on a few hours before, negotiating every manœuver with precision and grace, although that had a lot to do with the ship herself. When he’d first acquired the Starburst, she had been called the Magellan, and had looked every bit as impressive as she was, and she was a very impressive ship indeed. Every inch of her had gleamed in the lights of the docking port, her lines sleek streamlined to maximise her efficiency, her weapon ports cunningly worked into the body to conceal them from approaching enemies. Vanya had taken the beautiful Magellan and refitted her until she was unrecognisable even to her previous owner: gone was the uniform expanse of shining metal, replaced with rust and patches of cheap metal, gone were the aerodynamic lines. Instead, the ship looked like she was on the verge of coming apart at the seams. Her engines leaked plasma on good days, and sometimes coolant on bad days. She was filthy, ungainly-looking, and generally as unprepossessing a vessel as any that navigated in the sector. She might in fact have been the most unprepossessing vessel for several sectors in any direction, although Vanya had never bothered to test that theory.
Of course, she could also outfly any vessel in the sector, could pass through Imperium space virtually undetected, and the leaks actually sprang from carefully-constructed pockets on the outside of the engines, designed to fool any but the most attentive and observant onlooker. It wouldn’t pass a rigorous inspection, but Vanya played his cards close to his chest, and always made sure that his ship never attracted the undue attention of customs officials or anyone else who might have the power to order an inspection, and he made sure that his papers were always beyond reproach. He pretended to be furious every time someone made a joke at the expense of his precious Starburst, but in fact he himself had been the one to start the most commonly-repeated joke that the ship’s name came from the fact that looked like it had been caught in a supernova at some point in the near past.
They were flying well under the radar now, to coin an old expression he’d always rather liked. Mostly he liked it because no one had ever heard of it except in old texts and so it annoyed Marianna when he used it. They were flying under the radar, and as far as he could tell, it was working: nothing was coming over the passive com system, no pre-recorded Imperium message demanding that the identify themselves and the reason for their presence near an Imperium space station without a previously-forwarded flight plan approved by the relevant subsection manager, no Imperium vessels coming to fly alongside of them and force them to land anywhere they didn’t want to land. Nothing. This was easier than slicing butter with a hot knife.
Vanya laced his fingers together behind his head and smiled a grim smile of satisfaction. The hard part was over. Now all they had to do was dock at Salmig Space Station without being detected, board it and disable all its generators. The rest would just do itself.
