It's Life But Not As We Know It

Posted on Sun Nov 12th, 2023 @ 10:10am by Alden Loxley & Cooper O'Reilly & Daiyu & Spencer Wainwright & Jacy Wright

Mission: Oh, Give Me a Home on The Range
Location: Ezra - Blue Cloud Ranch
Timeline: 18 November 2517 - Late - After 'You Broke The Ship!'

Most of the time, Alden was pretty easygoing, amicable, receptive to others' opinions and keen to make things roll along smooth-like with everyone on board literally working together. Current events, however were conspiring against his mellow demeanour and definitely edging him towards somewhere south of cranky.

A tearful and awkwardly unpleasant rapid exit by Kindra onto a fast ship sent from Madrassa added to the myriad of recent stresses. The shooting at his ship, his mum's injury, and whatever the fuck Drake and Niska were up to away on the Skyplex. Not a great couple of days, and, pushed to the limits of what a man can handle with very little sleep and a lot of things turning in his mind, Alden Loxley had ignored all the warnings from his new engineer, his old friends and his new allies. He'd proceeded forward based on nothing more than exhausted curiosity and stubborness and he'd spent some time hooking up this new piece of kit.

It felt... not right exactly... Maybe more that so many things were going wrong that surely the Verse would give him this one. The piece of tech they'd found - Morgan and Jacy - fit perfectly in the missing link between the comms wires Alden was so horribly familiar with now. Damn it, he had to fit it in there just to see if the world ended or it all became clear.

"How about now?" Alden called to Morgan, the pilot sat in the cockpit chair of the still-being-mended Echo, while its captain lay underneath the floor panels below his feet. "Anything?"

"There's some pretty lights..." she said, not lifiting her head from where it rested, perched atop her closed hand. This was boring work, and not to mention, Alden's attitutde had made her wonder if he knew what she had done, that she had stolen from him.

"Pretty lights?" Alden sounded frustrated, his words followed by a thumping sound and some muffled cursing as he bumped his head on something down there, out of sight. "On which system? What colour are they? Blinking on and off or sitting steady?" He was testy, neither knowing what he expected them to see or feeling confident they were making any progress at all.

A faint echo wandered verbally down the comms pipe from engineering and it wasn't Spencer's voice, or any voice that Jacy or Morgan recognised. Beneath the floor, it was too muffled to be distinguishable by Echo's irritated captain as the patch words carried through the ship secondhand and quietly muffled by their indirectness.

"... authorisation code.... command.... five.. four..."

There was some yelling from Spencer's end of the comm and then the unknown voice ceased completely. No lights now. Just the conversation between engineer and... Daiyu?

Meanwhile down in Engineering, Spencer heard a feminine voice spark from out of nowhere (or more likely inside the housing above his head some place) and the words. "Connecting.... connecting... please respond with your desired code..."

Spencer perked up in surprise. He'd been laying on his back as he focused on recalibrating the intake manifold in preparation for adjusting the horizontal axle that kept the central engine balanced while spinning that he almost didn't notice the strange voice. It was disembodied, sure, and for a second he thought he was imagining it.

The voice continued speaking. "Please confirm authorisation code... validating voice command.... five.... four...."

"Voice command?" Spencer muttered, his voice trailing off as he reasoned why he would be hearing this. And then, realization struck. "GORRAMIT!" Instantly, he dropped his tools and shimmed quickly out from under the engine. "Shut it off!" he cried out. "SHUT IT OFF!" He had to make it to the power couplings, which just so happened to be blocked by a pile of tools and the chest they should have been in.

A pair of blood-red high heels clacked onto the deck of the engine room. "You mean this, dahling?" Daiyu popped her hip out to one side, giving a full view of her scarred leg as the slit in her red cocktail dress flared open to her upper thigh. "Allow me." She gave the first power coupling a yank, then a second, and a final third before it came free. She stuck the tip of the cigarette holder in her mouth and used both hands to pull the second power coupling free.

The countdown terminated. "Shan liàng de." Shiny. Daiyu puffed a stray bang out of her face and stuck the cigarette holder back to her lips. It was conspicuously free from an actual cigarette. "Anything else I can do for you, mistah?" she asked Spencer.

Spence had seen a lot of things in the 'verse, and somehow the sight before him was unlike anything he'd encountered before. At least, not one he'd seen in an engine room. Spence blinked twice, trying to rationalize the sight before him, but he simply just couldn't. "Uh. Um. What?"

"What's wrong, mistah? Pussy cat got your tongue." Daiyu strut up to Spence and blew a smokeless breath into his face. "Lucky pussy." After favoring him with a wink, Daiyu made her way out of the engine room.

Under the floor beneath the bridge, Alden unhooked the mystery piece of tech as soon as Spencer's yell to 'shut it off' had come screaming through the ship. He brought it with him as he crawled back up and into the bridge proper, dusted off his head and pulled himself up and into view of both Morgan and Jacy.

"So, do we have a doomsday device or something useful? Guess we should have set it up in isolation..." Alden asked in general with a concerned quirk of his eyebrows as he took in those two faces - Jacy and Morgan physically present - then a frown played across his brow as he weighed up the device and realised the extra voice was out of sync with his expectations. "Spence - that Daiyu?"

Spence's voice spoke back, "I reckon it is. She's dressed mighty fancy while the rest of us are fixin'."

"Captain Alden, did ya know your new mechanic was such a bluenose when ya hired him?" Daiyu had made her way to the bridge fairly quickly despite the high heels. Now she was striking a pose that might have been seductive if not for the precarious balancing act she was holding with wobbly knees. "Staring at an ankle is free but touching costs extra. And then's only as I like ya, see?" She nibbled at the end of her empty cigarette holder and made eyes at everyone on the bridge.

"Real fancy indeed," noted Alden, his facial expression caught somewhere between surprise and confusion. He rallied, slower than he might have wanted as Daiyu addressed him and then hit her with a broad, familial smile. "I make a point not to question folks on their private personal preferences," he answered her. "but Spencer here is right, most of us are working on fixin' Echo up right now." Alden stood up and took in the full red-dressed vision before them all. His question was asked with kindness and curiosity. "And it looks to me like you're fixin' to try out being Kindra, that 'bout right, Daiyu?"

At first Daiyu wilted with a guilty look, but she quickly pulled back into character. "No, dahling. Kindra was so sweet as to give me this dress because she said I was so fabulous in it." She spread her hands wide and smiled at the ceiling as if sunlight were beading down on her. "But don't let that sour your puss. I can show you things that will make you forget all about Miss Kindra." Her face turned slightly askance as she tossed a wink to Aldren and whoever else was watching before seductively touching the edge of her empty cigarette holder to her very ruby lips. "But make it quick. I have appointments to keep. A lady is always in demand, as you know."

With a soft sigh and the remnants of his warm smile, Alden nodded. "You do look very fabulous," he concured. "But what we need right now is..." He turned to face the inbound engineer who seemed to have followed Daiyu's trail.

Rather than wait too much longer in the engine room, Spence navigated back up to the cockpit where all of the action was currently playing out. He arrived just as Daiyu winked at Alden. He halfway wondered if the young girl had any personalities that were good for fixin' things. If she was half as good with repairs as she was as trying to seduce the Captain, then perhaps she might provide a decent pair of hands here. They certainly seemed slender enough for those tight spaces.

The greasemonkey cleared his throat, hoping it might provide a timely interruption. "Where's that doomsday device at?" he asked.

"Right here," Alden answered, indeed grateful for the distraction. He showed the hard drive sized piece of kit to Spence, while keeping a firm hold on it. His gaze locked with the engineer's and he gave a moment's side-eye to Daiyu then focused back on Spence. "Clearly it's meshing in with other nodes within Echo," Loxley noted. "Least that's what I figure. But there's nothing on board that I know of that can do more than bark warning tones at us. Whatcha reckon we're looking at here - any ideas?"

"Tracker," Daiyu said plainly, her tone shifted to nearly erudite. "Hardwiring a wireless processor onto a freighter would be a redundant measure due to the trivial computer system's minimal memory capacity and subpar Cortex connectivity. The only thing it could be is a tracker." She blinked hard several times. "What? Why are you staring at me?"

He had been staring, so Alden didn't bother to deny such, and his face lit up with an sympathetic smile as Daiyu protested said attention. He held his hands up, palm out in admission of guilt and spoke clearly and calmly. "Well, I wasn't expecting such a technical response to my direct question, I spose," he admitted, sincerely. "But I'm rightly impressed you're giving one, Daiyu. You have some schooling in tech, then, right?" Alden asked outright, no shocked tone accompanying his query.

"No..." Daiyu looked uncertain, especially in light of the skepticism on Alden's face. "I don't know. Maybe..."

As for the tracker theory, Loxley wasn't so sure. "My take on this is that it'd be a lot smaller and less obvious a piece of kit if it were meant to be used as a tracker," he looked from Daiyu to Spence now. "But I've been wrong before." Alden smiled, wryly. "More than plenty times," he added. "I guess I'm thinking the connectivity implies a more... inclusive kinda answer to our tech riddle."

Spence had remained quiet during the conversation as he had approached Alden for a closer look at the box. "It's no tracker," he mumbled, brushing a hand on the surface, looking for vents, cracks, and connections. "Trackers are usually hidden near points of ingress. Cargo doors, airlocks.. anywhere an onlooker can get to quickly and quietly. Only someone with access can plant a device like this up here."

The greasemonkey looked up at Alden and said, "Not that I think any one of us did it. I don't think that." He pointed at one of the connections, "This type of connector? It's only used for certain tech. Things that talk to each other, all hardwired. I know Fireflies pretty well. Tech like this... it ain't standard on them."

"If it isn't talking to someone outside the ship, then who's it talking to?" Daiyu asked. Suddenly she felt very vulnerable in her red cocktail dress. She cast a wary eye at every corner and doorway for hidden people.

"That would be me," said a female voice from Echo's main comms console.

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