A tired Piotr asks over the top of the carbine he’s pulled apart at his work bench. Looking away from his view screen, turning the fine tuning knobs on his micrometer dial indicator Brian looks up through the haze over the dark blue mezzanine to the massive board room window thirty meters above them. There looks to be a lot of heated discussion going on, angry pointing, arms flung in the air, people throwing papers and a general sense of chaos. “Looks like a real shit show.” Quips Brian. Setting down his guage blocks next to his pin removal set, Brian swings his monitor out of his way and shouts over the general din of the bull pen. He steps away from his bench a few feet and waves emphatically. “Magdalene! Hey, Magda!” He catches her attention and shouts while pointing up towards the window. “What’s got them so fucking randy all of a sudden?” The other armorers in the bullpen take hardly any notice of Brian. The dull roar of conversation, drills and pneumatic tools dominate the space. Turning to look up at the window, her short red hair all a frizz in the dry air, she sets down her tools and scrambles over to Brian’s bench. Piotr takes notice of Magda’s approach, and fixes his hair, and leans against his bench to ‘put out the vibe’. Skittering across the hard floors in her clunky boots, her tool belt rattling with emphasis Magda pulls up sharply to Brian’s bench. Breathing hard she leans in conspiratorially. “Oh-ho! You haven’t heard? Seems we’ve got ourselves a mole. What’s worse, the pesky buggers done given our fire teams and tankers brain worms!” She almost burps out the information in one breathless gulp. “What da’ fuck?” Barks Piotr. “That’s bull shit – no one could get a mole in here. We’re on top of each other twenty four seven. We’d know. No, no. We’d know if we had a sneaky fucker around here doing dirty shit. The Company has us so closed in you can’t take a shit without HR going over the weight, colour and stink of it in your personnel files. No. No way!” Piotr is red faced and irritated. A little of his star crossed lover sheen rubs off his face. Where he was happy and eager to hear Magda, now he’s put off and irritable. “Yeah – I’m with Piotr here. No way anyone of us working hand in glove with the fire teams would intentionally fuck them.” Brian says. Glancing up over Magdelene’s shoulder to gaze at the large window to think out loud. Brian speaks again. “We have no real idea of what we’re up against. We’ve all heard the bat shit crazy disinformation our spies were made to report back. It’s all fucked. Wackado bologna. The only reason the admiral would never pull out our spies prior to the assault is if he felt they’d all been made. Which, with the nonsense they sent back has to be the case. Has to be.” Piotr lets out a deflated puff of breath. Magdalene retorts. “Suit yourselves boys, but it’s brain worms I’m fucking telling you!” With that she turns on her heel and marches back to her side of the bull pen. Piotr comes around from his side to stand within arms length of Brian. “Hey man. I’m sure Mimi’s ok. You know. That mountain of a woman can take this on. I’m sure it’s nothing.” He rests a hand on Brian’s shoulder for a brief moment. Then makes his way leisurely back to his work station. “Yeah. Yeah sure. Thanks Piotr.” Brian’s face is one big worried crease.
In the boardroom thirty meters above several high ranking officers look as though they are about to come to blows. Brian is left feeling like his whole future is resting upon his shoulders. With his relationship with Mimi on his mind Brian’s mind races to think of something constructive to do. Mimi’s whole life could potentially hang in the balance. She was always prepared. Mimi always had a plan.
He pulls his keyboard out from under his dirty bench top and starts to pull up some of the spec sheets saved locally aboard the Righteous Chord on the new nanotech incorporated programs they were to install. Screen after screen of blue code on a black field scrolls by, as Brian’s eyes cut across the data in a mad search for a clue. Sweat begins to bead upon his brow. The noise and muffled chatter of the bull pen fades away to nothing. Clicking through the entire series of programs and check lists is going to take some doing by himself. “Piotr, can you do me a favour?” Asks Brian in a raspy whispered yell. “Sure, but what?” Replies Piotr almost immediately. “Well, you’re a better programmer than I am, do you have any scripts you can run to find anything dodgy in the set up files for these Nanotech protocols and procedures?” Reaching to turn his monitor around so that he can tap on his screen while he talks to Piotr. “I mean, I can… but the QA for all this stuff was strenuously vetted before it got to us. Not sure what you’re looking for?” Piotr exclaims. “I don’t know. Like a trap door, a trojan horse, some deviation that we have locally that’s different from the originals. Something like that.” Says Brian. “Well now, that is something that I can do – easily. If I make an image of the code, page by page, and run a visual check against the original we can see if everything lines up or not. Look here. I’ll make ours blue, the originals yellow, and anything not green could be our fucky little friend. Yeah? See. Look fields of green here man. Not this program.” Piotr is at once elated, and deflated. “Ok, but that’s just the one program, we have like thirty of these things in the directory. Can you do all of them and let me know if you get any discrepancies?” Replies Brian in hushed tones. “I’m on it.” Says Piotr.
Part Nineteen: Ghost of the Dirty Starling.
Greatwall Studios Graphic Design 