Uncertainty, low Earth orbit
The proximity alert was ringing.
Damnit.
Why does it always ring when I'm in the shower?
I shoved the coffin lid of the sonic shower open - I hate those things, but the Uncertainty doesn't have room for a regular one, or a large enough water supply for that matter - yanking the amp plugs as I went along. It's annoying when your shower doubles as a sound system, and even more so when it starts ringing in the middle of taking a bath.
"Four-eyes, what the hell is it this time?!"
There is no such thing as a normal AI. Never has been, and as long as we don't try and make one the hard way, there likely won't be. As an example, the first registered artificial sentience was one owned by a Japanese Fan who used to set his laptop onto some handwavium and use it in lieu of a battery when he wanted to play his h-games. Guess what got Quickened?
Just one of the reasons why governments were still mostly poking and prodding at the stuff while whatever fen had gotten their hands on it ... weren't.
Though when the flatscreen monitor on the cabin's bow-wards wall flickered with an image from the mast-mounted camera I remembered exactly why I disliked staying in parking orbit around Earth these days.
#Good morning, friend in God, can we interest you in an issue of the Watchtower?#
I hit mute, and gave the white SUV displayed a glare.
"What're they fielding?" I asked after a moment, during which I grabbed and downed a mug of chilled mocha.
"Pathetic. Baseliners, almost all the way. We shall feast on their blood!"
"Uh-huh, Tee. Whatever. Give 'em an overcharge and hijack their sound system."
"Conquest!"
The relative motion indicator I'd cobbled together out of a rangefinder and laser pointer gave a fair reading that they'd stopped, and what I could make out through their windshield showed they didn't have a clue of what was going on after Tee hacked himself in through their navigational deflectors.
I hit my commo pannel, and slotted a flash drive labeled with various 'hazardous materials' warnings.
"Good morning, asshats. As a registered citizen of the Principia Universalis I find your actions to be offensive and a violation to the Discordia Accords. This is your mandatory warning."
Then I hit the Big Red Button and made sure the camera was set to record onto storage, rather than to the usual void-buffer.
Stranded in space, because Tee was still holding their drive, the big white SUV sat and shuddered. Then the frantic armwaving started. Hmm. An hour or two of bombardment should do it. A blend of Barney, Fen reading Vogon poetry, and various other entertaining snippets was enough to convince even these guys to piss the hell off.
"Burn, mortals! Burn in your pathetic shells! Bwhahahahaha! Suffer the fires of hell!"
"Yeah, whatever," I grumbled, getting a grilled cheese sandwitch from null-storage. "Eh. Might as well check the agenda. What've I got on my planner today, Trigon?"
Handwavium comes in all sorts of different shapes and sizes, ranging from simple black cubes to a weird sort of guacamole-like ooze.
What?
Yeah, once upon a blue moon an associate got drunk enough to think switching the stuff with our dip was a good idea. The less said about that and its results, the better, though for some reason I seem to have come out of it the way I'd been when I'd come in.
The chunk that I called my own above all others was sitting smugly underneath the Uncertainty's table, humming away softly as it fed the drive-sails and pretty much everything else on board that required power.
It really was amazing. Such a little thing, and so much potential ... some used it better than others, though.
Speaking of which ... I shot a look at the navigational holosphere - formerly a disco ball, now hanging from the cabin ceiling - and grinned.
Energy sails are nifty ... or, you know, for me anyway. I don't know if anybody else has gotten these results. They don't really allow for a lot in the way of maneuvering in the same way that the baseline handwavium gravitics do - changing their vector is a bitch and a half, for example - but for pure acceleration they're worth their weight in gold. Still, getting too close too anybody with them online is asking for trouble.
That's mainly why we didn't lift any old sailboat/freighter relic and try fitting it with those when Hermes Universal Deliveries was considering upscaling our little flotilla of associates with something that could carry bulk.
We were still mostly in the business of subcontracting those big jobs to people who've got the patience to maintain something big enough to pull them off, but we'd gotten our own hauler somewhere along the line.
And if I was reading the manifests right, it was heading for Phobos for some reason. I queried its Majordomo for a manifest, and found its cars loaded down with the sort of stuff you'd expect to be delivered for a ...
...
Oh, frag. I'd been wondering why I'd gotten so little mail in the past week.
"Trigon."
"Hmph."
"My mail. Now."
"First, it's 'hold all communications'. Then, it's suddenly 'my mail'. Humans. Make up your damn minds, worms."
Well, there it was. Huh. Been a while since I'd last gone to Convention, though seeing as this time I was at least heading in the right direction, more or less ...
Ah. Why not? There were no express deliveries going on that weren't being handled already.
I plotted the appropriate course adjustments into the 'helm', then reconsidered. I'd be there early if I really punched it, but what was I supposed to do with my time then? Terraforming wasn't really my cup of tea, you know.
Meh. Might as well try the long way around.
I hit the commo, and called up the space-train.
"Uncertainty here. Hullo hullo, Galaxy Express. I'm reading you've got some free space on you. Mind giving me a piggyback ride to Phobos, Maetel?"
In most ways, the Uncertainty was everything I could have hoped for. Small, nimble, capable of going veryveryfast and with just enough space there to cram in basic amenities and a bit of cargo. Alright, so it got cramped sometimes, but it was a lot better than a sedan where that was concerned.
And sure, my little nest egg the periodic cuts from Hermes made up meant I could basically trade up for something bigger in a perfectly legal way, but the boat had a bit of sentimental value as well.
Unfortunately, it was a boat, and as such it was a bit iffy to land when most landing docks in Fenspace were little more than glorified parking lots.
It was hard to wrangle an actual docking slip for something of the Uncertainty's size - they were mostly there if one of the big movers decided to come a-calling - and I didn't like to resort to blackmail and threatening to withhold Dew deliveries on people to do so. That was the other, arguably bigger, reason as to why I was in the process of pulling a docking-in-transit with one of the two hangar-cars the Express usually pulled along on pretty much any sort of job.
Mast and keel folded, the former telescoping down to a more manageable size, and after a few minutes worth of remembering just why I hated landings I had the converted pocket-cruiser and smallest existing energy-sail ship in Fenspace slipping into the hangar-car's Catcher's Mitt class smallcraft docking unit.
And no, I couldn't just let Trigon do it. I'm borderline insane, not suicidal. Yes, his docking skills suck that badly.
Why do I keep him?
Eh. There's no really easy answer to that. Maybe I'm a glutton for punishment, or it's just that he keeps me on my toes ... nah. See, Trigon's almost as much of an ass as I can be, with positively diagnosed megalomaniac tendencies - if you believe the net's gaggle of psych tests floating around - being the least of his malfunctions, but he's the best weapon I've ever run across. Nothing else that doesn't run on a mainframe a few dozen meters long and appropriately wide can just reach out and take systems out from under other people. That makes dealing with his quirks more managable, though most of the time the deal isn't quite as clear-cut as I make it sound.
Not that I don't need to get the occasional bit of rest from my so called 'partner'.
I shucked the VR headset and shoved it back into its alcove, doing the same for the manual controls - a couple of jury rigged trackballs and assorted scavenged components from video game controllers - told Four-eyes not to burn anything down, and depressurized cabin space, stepping out onto the ship's aft deck a moment later.
I made sure to check that the reason why I was so leery of leaving him along with the ship was still locked down.
It was.
Good.
Then I was too preoccupied with somebody pinning my arms down ...
... oh, right.
I made a mental note to no do the hermit thing for so long next time, because it took me a moment to register that it wasn't, in fact, an attack, but a hug.