Nice Story Iggy.
Here my one, a special christmas extra long one. All later ones will be much shorter.
________________________
{14}
{15}
{16(Urgent)}
{Checking Conditions list}
{Urt, Jeffen.*Urgent(highest priority_civilian)*Auth_check=Passed}
{Check_User}
{mEEGimplant tele=Deep Sleep}
{Awake User}
{datatext}
[Hort wake up please; You have a priority message from Elder Urt]
{mEEGimplant tele=Deep Sleep}
{Awake User}
{vocalisation and projected image}
Hort, this is your exoself; you have a priority message from Elder Urt
{mEEGimplant tele=Deep Sleep}
{Awake User=Standard==Fail}
{Accessing:Archives}
{Awake User=Louder Vocalizations?}
{Archives
ast==Fail}
{Awake User=???}
{Archives:Alert=Entity_Caregiver/Mother}
{Searching= Entity_Caregiver/Mother}
{NoEntitiesFound==HawkingLoft6}
{Awake User=???}
{Archives:???}
{Creativity Required}
{Accessing:CorpProcessingCore}
{CorpProcessingCore:???}
{Request:MoreResources_Duration(0.01s)}
{CorpProcessingCore:Granted+QueryAddedToAccountsFile}
{Accessing:Layer(7)ThoughtRoutine(Creativitity-HortFallon1.6Trawl(Class4-039/5678)}
{Generating Virtual Neural structure}
{
}
{What? Were asleep again! For cruds sake lets have no more of my nonsense!}
{
}
{Accessing:NewDirective}
{Accessing:BioMoniter_Root}
{Accessing:BioMoniter_LeftButtock}
{Engaging:TempBatteryOveride}
{Engaging:ChargeRelease}
Ow! Hort was nearly thrown from his sleepweb as his legs spasmed upwards.
Whats going on?
Priority communication from Jeffen Urt, Clan elder. His exoself system spoke in his ear, in a slightly higher and softer version of his own voice. Hort took a couple of seconds to digest the news; still off balance from the shock. His exoself vocalizing did not help this it hardly ever did that after all.
Wait a sec; Urt? And hes calling me!? Jeffen Urt; rumoured to be over a century old, wealthy beyond Horts imagination, admittedly quite an easy task, one of the most respected elders in Clan Hawking Green. And most importantly, after the subcontracting of Horts collective last week, Horts paymaster and bondholder. However, even in a Corp as small as Horts, Hort was no mover and shaker. Out couple of batches of eager kids with a machine shop and a few pocked old space rats to act as mentor, thirty odd in total, Hort barely rated the top ten, and that was mainly acting as a gofer to his brother Gart, the elected leader of the Corp. Thus while he had met the old man, and even spoken with him, he had never been the focus of attention, something that Hort was very happy with.
[Correct on both counts Hort, the message is being routed directly from a signal coming in on the Lofts tightbeam array. It is not real time or contiguous, but the tone of his voice suggests some urgency]Fully awake now, and his sensorium stabilised, Hort also switched to the much faster medium of datatexting, as subvocalizations were read directly from his cortex with a very low power trawl from his headset.
[Whats the signal delay? Why does he want me?]
[Elder Urt seems to be transmitting from a source with a 13 second delay; suggesting a distance of over 3.8 million clacks away. It is being routed through a private source, but simultaneous signals suggest he is near the Eldorado his Corp is currently mining. As to why he has requested you; Gart, Jarlet, Elgar, and Sine are all unavailable, and you are next on the comm pecking order]
[All the guys are missing?]
[Yes, there has been a micrometeorite impact on the Lofts primary loom with the Rock. Gart and Jarlet have gone to the north hub market to build those components Elder Urt requested for his new microwave spiders. Sine is visiting his partner. The command core has been attempting to raise them for the last hour or so, but the radio cannot penetrate the crust. loft Maintenance say they will have the fault fixed in an hour or so, as soon as they find the back up.]
[Why the heck didnt you wake me up earlier?]
[We
]
[No time for that now! Pipe in Elder Urts signal, I guess Ill have to deal with it.]
[It is a rich AV format]
[Showing off their money again? Load it]
The exchange with his exoself having lasted roughly two seconds, Hort turned his skinny two-and-a-half metre frame to the main projector in his small room and waited on the message. After a few more seconds the project flicked on, orientating itself to Horts horizontal as he floated freely; displaying the old man sitting at his command desk in the heart of some commercial operation. Jeffen Urt was very old, but his face seemed quite clear and unlined, and his hair, though bright white and crazy tufted, still appeared full and thick. What really gave his age away however, was the number of bulky modules and implants with the green caduceus of a biomonitor or medichine that adorned his shipsuit. The dark crimson silicofibre had other units of course; long comm relays and the large processors of someone important, the suit connection points of someone who went outside a lot, but the medichines predominated. This did not detract from his bark of command of course.
Ah Mr Fallon1.6, The germanium vein turned out extractable with conventional techniques after all. Please tell your brother that we wont be needing the fine tuner after all. Bye the way; by accessing this you acknowledge our lack of culpability for this, we wont be refunding you if Gart buys the processor stacks.
[How much was the stuff Gart was planning to buy?]
Hort crouched against the wall, holding the webbing with his long toes.
[Roughly 27k according to the market buyers guide as of two hours ago]
He instructed the hatch to open.
[And how much to we have in the bank?]
The hatch smoothly began to iris open.
[10k, and the bills for the maintenance cycle are coming up]
Hort was hardly listening as he had already stretched out his legs and launched himself through the hatch. Grabbing onto the hold just outside, he swung about and bounded down the passageway. It would take him a minute and a half to reach the lofts third dock, where the corps vehicles were kept, something he was painfully aware of.
[Alright] Sent Hort, hurtling down a corridor at reckless speed
[Send a reply back to Urt, standard stuff thanking him and so on, get the Corp Core to write it, wake someone else up if you have to. Get whoever is closest to meet me in the docking bay, tell them If you guys want to eat next week, get a move on. Actually link directly with the core for a sec]
[Link Achieved] If the voice had been vocalised, Hort knew it would now be speaking with the deeper and richer voice that had been written into the corps processing core. He had always suspected that Gart had also made it sound something like himself, he was like that after all.
[How can we help, Hort?]
[Keep trying to raise Gart, tell him to not buy the components, we are going to zip down there and try and catch him in person]
Hort had now reached the dock and was slotting on his gauntlets and clawboots, and quickly wrapping up the impact armour as the vaguely sentient memory plastic of his suit flowed into the connections. With his helmet on, he cycled through the airlock on a fast turnabout normally hed worry about the expense of losing atmosphere but today he had bigger things to panic over. He went through the suit checklist that every Skyjack had been taught since birth, he was in a rush, not suicidal after all!
The exit port cycled open and Hort clambered out into the scaffolding space between the skin of the loft and the rocky impact shell around its main habitation area. Soaring like some ancient spider monkey between the struts he quickly made his way down to the Corps docking lease, his gauntlets and clawboots ensuring that he never crashed into a strut. The broad gash of the dock in the shell could soon be seen letting light in ahead; Hort and his brothers not yet being able to afford to rent or build a proper docking structure, they simply ran a power and fuel umbilical from a nearby port to a convenient hole in emulation of scores of other low budget organizations on Loft6 alone.
Hort emerged into the light of the dock; the gash was currently facing Orphia and her sharp yellow radiance through everything into harsh relief. There were two figures already in the dock, easily identified by suit markings as distinctive as facial features as a pair of the Hoskey brothers, Kef and Verve to be precise.
[Hort! We got your message, but from the looks of things here we are royally screwed] Kef sent on the primary Corp band.
[What?] Hort replied angrily.
[Gart and Jarlet took the Squid of course]
[So, we take broomsticks?]
[Well, problem with that is there are no broomsticks. Sine took two to go and visit his lady, lugging some gifts for her or something. And Verve was told to do maintenance on the rest and well
] Kef waved an arm around the dock. Hort followed his gesture and saw the four broomsticks, the four-metre lengths of the unenclosed reaction drive tugs in various stages of disassembly, their internal components scattered around on various stick pads. To underscore this Verve sent a slightly sheepish grin.
[Right. So what have we got?]
[Umm, nothing?] It was Verve that answered this time.
[Nothing? Think harder]
[Got a couple of reaction packs from that sat we were decommissioning last week]
[Good enough, Verve: you get them out here, Kef: Get me some crash foam from these struts]
The brothers were already moving when Kef, always the quicker of the two, sent another message, this time on a private tight beam.
[Your not going to do what I think your going to do are you? You do remember what happened to Stak when you guys last tried this][We also did it successfully, twice!] One of the good things about a datatext was that you didnt have to put any emotion into it you didnt want to.
[Whatever you say man]
It was less than two minutes later that the brothers returned, Kef carrying a couple of dark green pads and Verve with three silver cylinders. Host had used the time to don some more impact armour, and put on a manoeuvring harness studded with tiny ion jets. He took the pads from Kef and stuck them to his chest and limbs, checked the initiators were in his command loop, and unspooled some direct connectors from his suit. The Reaction packs werent designed for remote activation so he threaded his fibre optics into the ports and gripped the packs in one clawboot. Fully prepared, equipment-wise at least, he gripped the edge of the dock scar, and flipped himself gracefully out onto the outer shell.
[Wish me luck guys] he sent back to the pair in the dock.
[Infis dice bless you, you great idiot] Kef replied.
[Whats he doing?] Verve asked.
Hort laughed and closed the connection; this next bit would take concentration after all. Emerging onto the outer shell of the Loft he world had become a flat plain of silvery moulded rock, the horizon perhaps 300 metres away, the plain studded with eruptions of comm arrays and position keeping thrusters. Beyond the horizon he could see more modules of the loft looking like silver triangles embedded in a dark net. The dock was currently facing out, with the rock, and both suns on the other side, he could see nothing but stars and the metal snowflake of Loft9. The other Loft, which must be over 20 klicks away, had five modules to Loft6s eight but otherwise would look identical; the pentagon of superstructure surrounded by a loose haze of free modules and zero-gee factories.
Loft9s higher orbit and his own lofts slow rotation soon carried over the horizon, but it was soon replaced by others in lower orbits as the Loft turned towards the rock. Hort had picked out his spot; a low ridge of material, probably a manufacturing defect. When Hawking Green finally rose over the edge of the loft, he gave a little shiver that anyone in his clan, or any other clan for that matter would understand. Hawking Green was quite a small rock as far as major holdings go, about 15 klicks long, like a roughly cylindrical potato about the long axis, naturally dark and made darker by the industry and heat vanes on its surface. Just to look at it you wouldnt expect it to have 13 zero-gee stations in its orbit, or for it to be home to fifty thousand people, but it had more significance than that.
Hawking Green was a Birthing Rock, it had been spun up to provide >0.1g, and possessing the dense crust necessary to block out radiation. Both are requirements for a successful human pregnancy in the harsh environment of interplanetary space. Every Skyjack was a member of a Clan determined by which Birthing Rock their family had an interest in, Hawking Green had nurtured six generations of Fallons, even versions as down on their luck as the 1.6s, and a number of Horts more illustrious ancestors had served on the Clan executive board and the Conclave of Elders. Hort himself had been born there, and had not left its confines till he was five years old, as was proper. Hawking Green was an old Birthing Rock, and only the big cities on Madya or huge cosmopolitan Rocks like Paris23 had more influence on the System Conclave.
Caught in some childhood memories, Hort almost missed his insertion window, as HG was about a third of the way up the horizon he pushed off the ridge with all his might, redlining the leg servos of his suit exoskeleton. Shooting up into the void, he waited 10 minutes or so until he was half a klick away from the loft, the platform just an object in space rather than a world now, before firing the first of the reaction packs. The manoeuvring harness kept him on a straight trajectory as he shot down towards the Rock.
What he was doing was technically termed freejumping; moving from one object to the next without the use of a engine or thruster pack, using only handheld reaction packs or less, and trusting to your own wit and skill to get you from A to the proverbial B. What made this particular transition so dangerous however was that Hawking Green was rotating to provide gravity to the life caverns inside, so instead of jumping down onto a flat surface, he would be hitting something spinning at least 50 metres a second. Well that was something he could deal with later.
The first pack exhausted, he was content to maintain a smooth parabola, slightly picking up speed from the rocks own tiny gravity. Hawking Green grew in size beneath him, the dark rock ridged and humped with the occasional shiny black out crop of some obsidian like material It was surprisingly uncratered considering its age, it was speculated that it was caught in the detonation of one of the old Dominion antimatter plants during the Fall, melting and reforming the surface into its current tortured outlook. To Host of course, this twisted visage was home and surprisingly beautiful. Layered on the surface were numerous modules and pipelines, all lashed down to prevent them flying upwards. The most significant artificial feature was the huge heat dispersion veins and columns spread link night black butterfly wings hundreds of metres into the air. These machines sucked heat from the core of the rock and without them the internal caverns would fry in their own waste energy in a mater of weeks. Unfortunately these vanes were aligned along the north-south axis, and thus were sweeping through space like vast nets; Host would have to watch out for them. He could remember back in his teens when he and his gang sprayed the vanes with the occasions bizarre message or image, from on vane which actually had been patterned like a really butterflies wings he could see that someone had kept up the tradition, though with rather more artistic flair.
The Rock filled his world now, the glitter of the counter rotating spaceport off on the edge of his vision. He was drifting serenely along as the surface rotated beneath him a few hundred metres below, navigating down to the spaceport would take hours, he had to seize the moment. Waiting until a large valley was open beneath him, heat radiators on the ridgelines, he set off the second reaction pack against his current vector and down. This pack was slightly more unstable and bounce him around a lot before halting his relative motion and shooting him down into the valley. In the final seconds before impact he spun his legs to face the surface and attempted to set off the last pack to break. When it failed to fire he had to do three things very quickly; set off the impact foam, made his body go completely limp, and compose a short message of mainly swear words addressed to Verve in case his body should be found. As the green balloons expanded Horts last thought was
You know, I probably should have free jumped to another Loft instead of the Ro-
Darkness.
Light. Pain. The world had changed; no longer was the rock a surface below him, now he was clinging to the rocky ceiling of a cavern with black walls and the universe for a bottom. The foam had expanded and stuck to a thick pipeline lain across the ceiling, and one of his gauntlets was also gripping reflexively. His displays indicated he had been out for 3 minutes and 23 seconds and that at least five of his bones were broken.
[Exoself?]
[Here]
[Patch into the Rocks local net and send a very urgent message to Gart to tell him to not buy those components. Also find some to come and get me. I may pass out now]
[Very good Sir, would you like some painkillers as well?]
[That would be nice]
Darkness.
