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“Can you feel it? That static buzzing in the air?”

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The man is positively vibrating with energy, he is so excited. People under duress tend to fall into one of three categories, all out terror, unbridled excitement, or total apathy. My friend here is a category two, I’m more of a three who swings into a category one when I’m trying to get any sleep.  My man Encino here is an adrenaline junkie, and he’s so excited to go kill some ‘bad guys’ that he seems to be able to walk on air he is so elated. Big dude, but didn’t quite hit the mark to pilot his own walking tanker unit. So he balked at the chance to be a Fire Team leader while sulking, and instead is our squads heavy. In size and savagery. You need a jar, or a chest cavity opened, he’s your boy. Not an ounce of fat on him, and no self doubt either. He’s a real menace when the Mississippi leg hound in him takes full effect. He doesn’t have many close friends, let’s put it that way, but he’s a hulking, useful idiot. My role, unofficially that is, is to guide his worst, yet most squad beneficial tendencies towards our targets and goals. Wind him up, point him in the direction where his carnage suits our needs, then collect him afterwards.

“That’s the static charge coming off of the rail guns, if I have my ship board weapons load out correct. We’re placed directly behind the port side battery, and there’s a slug loader located directly underneath our dormitory. That lump, dump, bap bap bap, we here is them testing the auto loader, and switching between round types. The heavier the slug the harder we feel the spring loaded arms collapse into place.” I said, knowing full well that Encino isn’t really listening to me.

He’s staring out the view port from our common room lounge watching the welders doing EVA’s while attaching additional guns and armor plating to the hull. The shielded torches they are using spew white phosphorus out a ceramic nozzle, and occasionally sputters and splatters of weld material pop off and float around like angry fire flies. The wash of the phosphorus lights up the hull for several meters even in the inky blackness, and you start to get a sense of just how massive some of The Company’s vessels really are. Those brilliantly bright spots are scattered all over the hull, at least from our vantage point. The scale is immense, and terrifying. This ship, The Dirty Starling is humongous. A real behemoth of man made ingenuity. Encino is standing with his broad nose pressed firmly against the clear concrete glass, his breath shooting waves of condensation radiating out from his face every few seconds. He is visibly excited, and bumping the glass with every breath he takes. Flecks of spittle splash the glass each time he talks.

“Could you imagine being a pilot?” Encino says, his voice muffled due to his face being pressed against the glass. “The big ships aren’t all that much fun to pilot, the navigators do all the heavy lifting anyway.” I say, now that I’m comfortable in my own lounge chair, and I can tell that Encino is here to stay for a while. No need to stand needlessly while I babysit him. Taking my seat I look around the room to make sure we won’t get any surprise visitors.

I occasionally have to wave off both men and women that swing by from other squads or departments who come to look at him when he isn’t paying attention. Sure he’s handsome. But, he’s big, mean and not what you’d call a gentle lover. That big dumb grin of his seems to pull anyone not using their brain into his orbit of any sexual orientation you can imagine, and then I have hours of paper work to file on his behalf. I’ve made it known he’d be more inclined to enjoy fucking a raging bull moose than a typical human, but that grin, and his muscles lure them in anyway. I can only unfurl so many human pretzels in my life time. The only acknowledgement from Encino on the matter was a surprise “I really hurt him.” He said, once, over breakfast when reaching for an apple.

Outside in the vacuum the welders are walking over the kilometers of hull plates looking for any signs of weakness and damage. As the flotilla wide count down clocks draw nearer to zero, the pace of the work increases. Tiny single person vehicles scuttle about, holding weapons, or beams or instrumentation clutched in their extendable arms. The pilots have one hand in a haptic glove which allows them to perform some very minute actions with the claws, or other tools on the end of the arm. Imagine a tuna can flying fat sides forward and back, with a torso sized bubble out the front, and a massive multi tiered arm mounted below it. The back is all thruster cones and a rack for spare tooling for the arms. Cameras and lights fill the rest of the space on the small squat crab unit. That’s our boy Encino’s dream vehicle. To mill about space in a rickety old crab unit, fixing stuff and exploring the exterior of any large vessel. All the while dressed for EVA, because those crab units don’t have any life support in them. Step in and go! Handy if you’re rated for the appropriate exterior working gear. I mean, you could potentially use out fight suits in it, but you couldn’t weld anything as that 5000 degree phosphorus would bleed right through the material in seconds. All of the low level pilots onboard the Dirty Starling have their welders guild licences. Those orange and black tuna cans are pretty nimble when they want to be. I think they are ugly as all get out, but to Encino, that shit’s The Tits.

The PA system crackles to life drawing me out of my reverie. “This is a flotilla wide announcement. We have T-Minus six hours until we commence Operation Scouring Pad. Please meet at your designated muster stations when we reach T-Minus two hours. Your station chiefs will see that you are prepped, dressed and loaded into the appropriate transports, based on waves, and objectives. This message will repeat…”

The crackle dies down as the volume of the message drops a few percent after each repetition. A large flashing blue and orange light let’s us know that we can still tune in to the flotilla wide communications channel directly from our wrist biometrics to hear the message or read it if need be. The machine shop guys usually need to read them while the shop is so uncomfortably loud.

“You know what the favourite part of my day is.” Encino asks me as we walk side by side to our muster station together. “That brief second when I catch the smell of my neck ring going over my head. It smells like the beach near where I grew up.” He smiles at this. He doesn’t follow it up with anything else. All I can think about is how after three months the battle is only a few hours away, and I need to take a shit.

Part Thirty Eight: Ghost of the Dirty Starling.

When you stop and think about it,

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Knowing all twelve of the largest space faring vessels that have ever been constructed by humans are now gathered together here, waiting to attack a secret base built into a dwarf planet come over sized asteroid, you might think it would look pretty remarkable. You would think so, but you would be wrong. These ships are arranged at about one to three kilometers apart, the visual to the naked eye is less than stellar. Now on the radar screens and the HUD on the bridge, when you have name plates, and trajectory over lays, and drive ploom signatures and the specs of each ship associated with its distinct silhouette, now you get something approaching a spectacle. But all the average person sees is a slight glint in the far reaching blackness, that moves against a field of stars. It’s nothing to write home about, believe you me.

I could do without all of the proximity alarms going off randomly all day and all night, as the manoeuvring thrusters keep us in place relative to one another. The one kilometer distance is perfect for non disrupted communications, but hell on the ships warning systems. The targeting computers are likely to fry themselves unless their sensitivity is turned right down. Which makes a sneak attack a real threat, so the watches are set with greater overlap, and at no point is it ever allowed for more than forty five percent of the active crew to be asleep. Even less so for the infantrymen and the pilots. They rest in shifts with just one third asleep at any time.

Tensions are high, and oh boy!, there goes that fucking alarm again. The blaring klaxons, and whining targeting alarms grate on all of our nerves. Every shift we meet at our muster stations prior to doing anything, and those that will be fighting as boots on the ground are running their training exercises daily to remain razor sharp. All we do is train, prepare and wait while the clocks count down to armageddon. Sleep comes in fitful spurts and tempers are fraying at the edges. Discipline onboard the ships is tight, with no wiggle room whatsoever.

The walking corpse corps are ever ready day or night. They have been cordoned off in a cargo bay, along with the decanted walking tankers. The armorers swarming them like ants making all of the last minute fixes or upgrades requested by the – assets, let’s call them. The shedding of their humanity was this whole thing, that nobody speaks about now that it’s all over. Some people found it hard to adjust. A few marriages and families were served a pretty harsh reality when they woke up to find their loved ones are now a human imitation made up of microscopic machines working in tandem. Memories, futures, love lives all poured down the toilet, along with spoiled lungs, kidneys and the intestines themselves. It… was unpleasant.

Now that we are finally here, or there abouts, a flurry of inter flotilla activity has taken hold. With a week left roughly before the Jolene Roger shows up, the Dirty Starling and the Righteous Chord are all hosting different strategic planning sessions with Admiral Garneau, or his esteemed advisor Gerald at the helm. The traffic between the larger vessels is rather heavy, with the smaller away ships currying personnel and materials between vessels in the fleet. Last minute repairs to sensor arrays and hull plating to add extra armor taking priority above all else. It’s a good gig if you’re a low level pilot, scurrying about doing deliveries and interacting with other crews from around The Company’s interstellar interests.

As the long tense days wear on the largest vessels in the fleet disgorge their contingent of smaller, fast flying personnel carriers and the even more maneuverable fighter craft. Tugs and their single driver counter parts with extendable arms and working claws litter the field of view as they build all new protective measures onto the hulls of the behemoths in the flotilla.

News has spread throughout the flotilla that the Jolene Roger has a new toy to add into the mix for the war ahead. Lots of talk about what it could be. The admiral has been close lipped, refusing to address the gathered soldiers and crew until the last possible moments prior to the attack. This has caused a few minor incidents, but nothing that a few hours of extra labour, or a night or two in the brig couldn’t cure.

There were a few moments of panic as a slew of smaller meteors made it past the turned down sensitivity of the proximity alarms, which stunted the targeting lasers too. But the vibration of the rat-at-at-tat and the following pings of dust ricocheting off the hull brought about an even higher resolve with the radar watchers, and the sentry programs. It broke the tension, in a fashion, and let them know that they were protected even when they weren’t looking. Something, that should not have been possible.

– – – –

In a tiny office buried in the back of the physical paper archives, a tall beautiful woman named Gemma is rifling through deeply redacted coffee stained, dust covered reports from centuries prior. Her boss, and in some form or another, the head of her family, from fifth cousins by marriage, had pointed her in the direction of a secret stash of files that probably hadn’t seen the light of day in a couple hundred years. Spending a few days buried in the room looking through bankers box after bankers box of manilla folders, she finally found a stack that dealt with the horrific incident involving Margot’s Fever. A tragic event that killed hundreds, involved insurgents, as well as a tragic misfire by a potentially incredible new engine type, which was to bring us closer to the stars. We spent a whole month on it in school, and they teach entire courses on it in university. The memorial deck on Torus Station is pretty touching. Eerie but moving all the same.

If she thought it took her a long time to find this group of boxes, it’ll take her a week more just to dig up the psychiatric interviews with Margot’s Fever’s former captain. A man who claimed that the vessels witnessed split second phase out of our reality and then back again, had actually taken ten years on the far side of time in our solar system, and in which time he met, befriended, and was educated on the specifics of never before seen technology by a metal box of navigation goo, which he said called itself ‘K’ and then later on Kelvin. All of which was hidden from the public, and was provided in the exact same format as the files which helped to create the Fore E’s engine in the first place. An interesting pickle. Or so Gemma thought.

Part Thirty Seven: Ghost of the Dirty Starling.

Dancing cheek to cheek.

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Back at it again with another installment of Monday. Glad to be here, happy to live to see another week come through. What does this week hold in store? I personally don’t know. April fools is on Friday, so perhaps we’ll see those pre pandemic comedy bits that someone always used to fall for. My favourite was charging your iPhone in the microwave after a new iOS update. That made me chuckle. Or drilling out the missing head phone jack, another classic. Who can forget spaghetti noodles growing on trees from several decades ago. Or the whale that blew up on the beach in California. That wasn’t April fools day, but it was funny nonetheless. BOOM – SPLATT! Ha, ha. Classic.

It is currently minus eleven (-11) Celsius outdoors, so I’m not to keen on doing much outside today. And to think by Thursday it’ll be positive fifteen (+15) what a wild fluctuation in temperatures. Spring is weird here in Canada. Early days yet. One day we’ll go from hovering around fifteen degrees and then it’ll peak into the thirties and stay there, and we won’t even be in to summer yet.

Anybody have something fun planned for this week?

“Any news on the war front?”

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Asks the grizzled old man seated at a comically large desk empty of anything except a pen and a few sheets of multi coloured paper. The office secreted in the depths of Torus Station, is well adorned with rich fabrics and expensive artifacts, if sparse. The tall and slender woman standing before him is watching him through cold slate grey eyes. “Yes – sir. And what we know so far is not encouraging. It seems that The Company having let that old bastard Garneau lead a personal war over a vendetta is working about as well as we had come to expect from a guy who spends seventy five to ninety percent of his time in stasis, so that he could try to bring a sense of peace, calm and continuity to humanity. The ego on this guy. Fuck me.” She spits in disgust.

“Yes, yes, Gemma my dear girl, I am well aware of your feelings toward my youngest son. He wanted glory and to command from a place of visibility, while we chose to live in the shadows, and the comfort of anonymity.  He’s a fool, but I can’t have him killed. So we let him run afoul of that demented doctor to test his mettle. If he comes back we can control him since we know so much about his goings on within the flotilla. And if he dies. Well then. He’s dead, and we can moved passed this debacle finally, with our hands clean.” He harrumphs in his typically gruff manner.

“Yes sir.” She smiles warmly at the old man. “Now you said you have news. Spill it, I’m rather busy Gemma.” He leans back into his over stuffed leather wing backed chair. The springs creaking under his movement. “Long story, short version then, yes? Right. The nanotech integrated soldiers, mainly the heavy weapons Fire Teams and all of the Walking Tank units caught some kind of brain bug that gave them all irreparable brain damage, and they thought they were all lost. To which your son’s best friend decided to convert them to 100% nanobot automatons, and they woke up, and are now operational, but are no longer human. They don’t eat, or sleep, or communicate verbally anymore. I guess using all of the same batch of nano bots to repair every single one of them created this hive mind between them. Scary good as a fighting force, fearless, and savage. But not human, and the rest of the crew has noticed the shift.

Also – side note. Due to the 100% uptake in the nanobots they have taken to horrific displays of shedding their biological materials. Talk of them shitting out shriveled and wasted organs. The stench is a thick all encompassing miasma aboard each ship until the last one is finished. They do it wherever they are, at any time. I hear it’s a total horror show to behold. The scrubbers and recyclers are being over loaded, and a few regular crew have gotten sick from the decaying body matter. Morale is not high.” She says while wiping her forehead, and tucking a loose strange of her dark hair behind an ear.

“Secondly, the admiral had lost faith in the nanotech integrated teams and almost immediately called on captain Morgan to jump start her Jackal Protocol. Those massive Bison drones she’s so proud of. Anyway – she purportedly had almost sixty crew members injured on purpose to fill the ranks of her fighting force, and they are taking to it slowly. Promising results from the subconscious training regimen, but less so when entirely awake, though I have reports that it’s starting to gel. Oh, also – the captain is suspected of having her more perceptive crew murdered for piecing two and two together.” To this the older man raises his hands to rest fingers interlocked on top of his head. “Did she now. I knew she had ambition, but that’s a bit much.” He coughs out the words. “Hm. Yes, a bit much.” She repeats in response.

“Also, our intelligence suggests that they have picked up a new Ghost Crew member during the resupply at the Mars Six Sub-Orbital Aerial base, but have not updated their HR directory to say who it is. Which seems odd? Do I need to notify anyone of this? That seems rather widely outside the norm.” She smirks with a raised eyebrow. “No, no, you know what, let it stand. Keep an eye on it. Let’s see if we can trace it back before anything comes of it.” He laughs conspiratorially. “Yes sir.” She says.

“Lastly, our spies at UB313 have said that this will likely be a blood bath, as the, as you said, demented doctor has a fair few surprises in store for the admiral and his fleet. Whom are due to arrive at their rendezvous point in a matter of hours from now.” She finishes her statement and cracks her knuckles, and rolls her shoulders. “Mm… well, keep watching. Find out what you can about our mystery Ghost. And let me know when the fighting starts. Is there anything else?” He says while stifling a yawn.

“Actually yes there is. We’ve noticed a signal from out beyond Pluto and Charon that has a encrypted message in it. It appears vaguely human in origin. But something seems off about it. From what we can tell two names repeat a lot. Just the letter ‘K’ and the name Kelvin.” She says. The man freezes in his spot. “Did you say Kelvin?” He sputters. “Yes, it’s here on the report sir.” She pulls a sheet of paper out of a group and softly lays it down on the desk infront of the older man. Looking down at the paper the man’s face drains of colour. “Well fuck me. He was telling the truth.”

Part Thirty Six : Ghost of the Dirty Starling.

Hey! You know what’s a terrible idea?

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Attempting to router our a custom sized pocket freehand without using a template of guide. Guess who took that moment to sneeze – hard mid router? Yeah you guessed it me. The fit is ok, a tad wonky and oversized in places though. Wood filler and painter’s tape to the rescue – again. I hot too impatient. Should have taken the extra fifteen minutes to set it up, or shut’er down to come back to it the next day, fresh and unhurried. Idiot.

Sunday funday today. Though if I’m being honest I am social interaction’ed out. Took my kids to an indoor/outdoor party for one of their friends, and half of us were masked (which I’ll take!) And they ran and played for three hours straight, while us dad’s chatted the whole time. Then after 90 minutes of downtown my eldest had a playdate with her friend, outdoors for just shy of another two hours, where I again spent that time chatting. Whoa! I am done talking for a while. That was part of why I was rushing my project, I thought the afternoon play date was canceled due to cold awful weather, but I was wrong. So I wanted to finish strong them go. But that pressure made me rush, and we were late getting there, so not a shining moment for me.

We are back to low single digit temps that feel like they are below zero. But now with moisture and humidity in the air, which makes it feel even colder and the wind is biting at this point. Once we start to average 10- 15 degrees throughout the day I will be much happier. And can then start to tackle outdoor maintenance projects. Windows, gutters, driveway all need a good power washing. In April the patio set goes up, and kids toys come out of storage. I have a 10x10ft gazebo to build this year. Which has been stored in a box for I can’t recall how many years. Going up this year! Plus all of the tree and shrub pruning material needs to go to the farm, or get burned in our neighbours fire pits. They raid the pile for kindling because it’s so dry and old. AC unit gets uncovered, and the bikes come down out of the rafters and need to be oiled, inflated and the seats adjusted, and a good wash. The mower needs to be tended too prior to grass cutting season begins again.

So once the router plate is finished and mounted, I can turn to the two adjustable saw horses, and then the rigid metal flattening sled, and I think this current crop of jigs is just about done. I have an acrylic plate to make my palm router more stable across bigger gaps, but I hope I could knock that out in an hour or so.

Getting crafty with it.

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You can add a router table/platform to my list of nearly completed wood working projects for this week. I built a platform that will slot into the gap between the rails of my table saw guides. It still has some work to go on it, but the frame is cut, glued and screwed, ready to cut out the center hole, and router in a pocket for the plate to nest into. And when I care to, I can add a router to it, and work on a wide flat infeed/outfeed surface. I will need to create a router specific guide for it. Maybe just a sacrificial wood piece that can go over the router but still use my table saw guide as a starting point. Should make life easier.

Add that to the growing pile of shop infrastructure projects completed this week. A wheeled cart, a hand tool cubby, and now a router table. I also modified my 8 foot long track for my circular saw so that I can hang it vertically, instead of laying flat behind a bunch of tools where it was a real hassle to retrieve. Score! Easily accessible tools and work aids! Noice.

Only a week or so ago, I build a mini rack to house my new coarse Kutzall Wood Rasp Set. Pretty swanky, cut exceptionally well too. My friend is a big fan of the Shinto brand of Rasp. Looks mean, with rows of shark teeth. Not that the Kutzall isn’t aggressive in nature, like a mad sea urchin, with spikes of doom.

Now we are back to the weekend, after a busy and strangely broken up week. Lots to do today, so take care, and be well.

Busy work in the wood shop a.k.a. The Garage.

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Started off on Wednesday with the school closure due to inclement weather, and had my eldest help me tear down my jointer table, and the old, heavy, unsteady planer stand on rickety old plastic rollers.

Then yesterday, after what felt like an ineffective interview with a potential new design client I built myself a 24″ deep, by 39″ wide, and 16.5″ high wheeled cart to house both my jointer and planer, so I can store them under my table saw. I was fortunate enough to be able to reuse some of the wood from the prior jointer stand to reinforce the new joint venture. Added a low shelf to put paddles and spare Allen keys on, and I’m good to go.

May find I want to bolt the items down, but I’m not sold on that yet. I used the better part of three two by fours, one two by six, a two by two foot piece of half inch ply wood, and a 39x24x.75″ piece of MDF for the top. Various 3″, 2″ and 1.5″ wood screws were used. I had a set of swiveling caster wheels already, two that lock, and two that do not. I have about 3/8ths of an inch gap before the top most part of my planer will hit the lowest part of the saw. I though a half inch would work, but I’m ok going just a bit tighter than that. Looks ugly but it works for me. Plus it got started and finished in about 2 or so hours. Lots of pre-drilled holes, and repeat cutting. Braced both top and bottom for the weight.

And today I build a six panel cubby for my drill, impact driver, staplers, 2 sizes of pin/Brad nailers and a heat gun. Works like a charm, and used up scraps left over from the jointer/planer cart. Win – win! That is 26″ wide, 13″ high, and about 11.5″ deep. So not huge, but not small either. I should have added a seventh cubby spot, but I was more concerned with not having to fight to pull items out of each cubby, so I got generous with my spacing. Could have been more conservative, but it works, is labeled, and everything fits as intended. Plus now I can get rid of a handful of plastic cases that I had to dig through everytime I wanted a tool. If you needed more than one you could be certain they would fall off a bench or get knocked over, and I’d have to go looking for oil bottles, Allen wrenches and any extra caps or guards that were stored in each case. Ugh. What a pain. But, no more! Out in the open, easy to reach from the bench. This also opened up some space on one of my other carts, so bully for me!

I was going to wait and use my new Dado stack to build the cubby for tools, but I didn’t feel like waiting for the new table saw cover to arrive, which will be in two weeks time. It would have been more professional looking, for sure. But it was to help me stay organized not be a showcase for any sort of wood working talent. That’s also why I used miss matched scraps that were three or four different colours. And some of it was particle board, mdf, and plywood. Not a glorious item to behold.

I would like to make a router bit holster in the near future, because I have several bits now, and they are all in boxes, bags, or cases and not easy to get to. If I can get them out in the open, and build my 12×12″ router base from clear acrylic I’ll be able to do more custom pockets and mortising. Which reminds me i need to build my router table at some point. I have the plate ready to go. Always more to do than expected. But once i get these things done, i have them at my finger tips for when i actually build something of consequence. The router sled for flattening is on my to-do list too.

If I refinish anything or start my hickory slab coffee table, I’ll be sure to take photos as I go, since that will require a fair few operations, jigs, and tools.

Let me tell you what kind of person I am.

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I’m the kind of person who hates having an appointment in the middle of my day, because I can feel it looming over me. So I don’t like to start anything prior to the appointment in case I forget about it, or turn up late. So in most instances I sit and wait, minute by minute until the appointment arrives. I hate that. So today I forced myself to run some errands, which took 45 minutes, possibly 50 to complete, that on any other day, I would have had to rush to complete after my appointment was done. But now those three things are done, and I have a full hour left to sit and wait. The waiting always makes things worse. I wasn’t nervous about it all week, or last night, or this morning when I woke up, but now it’s filling me with anxiety and bubble guts. Argh! Hate that. Oh well c’est la vie.

So day 100! Woohoo! Milestone for sure. Did you catch yesterday’s back to back chapter entries for the interconnected series Ghost of the Dirty Starling? Fun stuff. Those Bison drones sound gnarly, and a tad volatile. Hmmm… foreshadowing perhaps? Or just another side trip I can make later on if need be? Good to give yourself off ramps occasionally, I believe. I was going to do something funny with Norman and Gerty, but changed my mind. I like the self serving killer for hire in a tutu. I also liked the fact she knew enough about murder to do her gloating afterwards too. None of this providing your captive with extra precious seconds or minutes to formulate a plan or escape out of sheer luck. No sir! Gun’em and then gloat. Like a good little hitman – hired gun, contract killer etc etc..

I might be fortunate enough to pick up some bakery bagel display unit design work today or in the near future. Which is great. I kept in touch, once every six months since Jan 2020, with all of the folks I freelance for, and recently those connections have become active again, as people feel as though the pandemic is coming to an end. I have thoughts on that, but I am also a huge fan of the work coming in as well. Work in, and invoices out, this is good for business.

Had my oldest child help me with some cleaning in the garage. I had to tear down some tables and stands I had for equipment. I have a larger table saw now, so I need to recover some space by placing my jointer and my planer together on a low lying wheeled cart, so it can be tucked under the rails of my hybrid saw. I can’t have that space go to waste anymore. I have completed projects eating up space, which I need people to collect, or accept delivery of. It’s all bought and paid for, and I knew I would have to hold on to it all, but now it’s getting on a bit, four plus months later, and I would like to not have to maneuver around it any more. It’s not a huge deal, but it aggravates me. I’m not working with 40,000 square feet here people. Think, tall single car garage stuffed to the gills with house hold stuff, Christmas  lights, bikes and wood working tools. Not a pretty sight to behold.

If I had the money, and paid work, I would use a dedicated dust collection system, and air cleaner, rather than my ShopVac. But it’s nice and compact, and I can store it under tables and shelves with ease. But the dust means you have to work in a mask at all times. Not a real problem,  since I use a fair bit of Walnut, and you want a mask for that stuff anyway. I have my eye on a hickory slab waterfall coffee table I want to make later this Spring/Summer/Fall. Could be a real looker if I take my time with it. I have the angle iron I need for a rigid router sled to flatten the slabs. I am looking forward to it a lot! I will also venture to build adjustable leveling saw horses to hold said router sled. So those will be fun to build too.

“Come on shit birds, let’s take it from the top… again”

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Roars the captain of the Jolene Roger into her microphone. Captain Morgan is sweating profusely under the strain of her training regimen. Teaching sixty newly haptic integrated soldiers to use her patented Bison drones is taking more time, effort and patience than she is willing to fork over. “For fuck sake people, formations, remember the formations. If you collide those fusion reactor cores will lose their magnetic seal and you’ll all go up in a cascading failure. We’ve been over this every day for seven weeks now. Stop trying to drive it, and become it. The Bison drone should feel like an extension of yourself, it’s not a fucking demolition derby car.” She shrieks, her earphones ringing with feedback from the over taxed mic.

The sixty member group are not living up to her dreams and there is significant resistance to the haptic systems link to the soldiers neural networks. Namely, they don’t use nanotech to a high enough degree for her liking. Her original plans only required an eight percent uptake in nanotech to fill in the gaps between stimulus and reaction time, but she may have been too conservative. She is resisting upping the limit as her spies on board the Righteous Chord and The Dirty Starling are sharing some horrific news regarding the Fire Teams and Tanker crews. So they’ll have to get better on their own, as she can’t risk losing her team to some unknown nano sickness, and thus risk losing her favoured spot with Admiral Garneau.

At the back of the war room commanding officer Gonzalez is over seeing the technological side of things. Keeping an eye on the engine spec’s, and watching that no one crosses over into another’s engine ploom, and melts themselves in six thousand degree Celsius plasma jetting out of the rear rocket booster packets located at the aft of each drone. Her thick black hair now streaked through with grey, and her once plump face now sallow and ashen. Except for the deep purple black puffy bags under her eyes. She is as mystified by the lack of progress as her captain is. All sixty souls scored so well in the subconscious training program. Reaching the required ninety percent efficacy with the gear to be able to go live with the actual physical drone. Every single person has seen at least a twenty percent drop in proficiency with the Bison drones. As a massive glob of sweat clings to her eye ball, she toggles the direct comm’s to captain Morgan.

“This isn’t getting us anywhere. We have to think about putting them back inside the tanks again. We’re missing something important. Some crucial step that the tank offers, and reality lacks.” Croaks Gonzalez with a grimace  knowing her captain is not going to take her repeated suggestions with the tone they are meant. “Say that again and I will float you out of this cargo hold, along with the old man you’re so sweet on. Get me?” Captain Morgan hisses through her headset. “Yes ma’am.” Chirps Gonzalez meekly. “We don’t have enough tanks for all sixty drone pilots as it is. We don’t have the time, nor the resources to build more anyway. We’ll be at the rendezvous point in two weeks time. This HAS to work as intended. A waking, remotely operating fighting force that doesn’t rely too heavily on nanotech.” Captain Morgan growls through gritted teeth.

Out along the port side of the ship the teams of Bison drones are running their attack patterns, and tossing around asteroid chunks like a giant game of robot hot potato. Every so often two or more Bison drones get too close together and the proximity klaxons blare inside the war room, and the pilots all grimace and swear and lose track of their formations, and then paint jobs get singed, and sensor arrays get ruined as drive plooms turn everything to slag.

The saving grace of captain Morgan’s patented design are all of the plug and play off the shelf pieces that can be pulled off and replaced in mere minutes and not days. The onboard armory dry dock for the Bison drones looks like a massive barn full of cattle head stocks.

With the fifth near miss that could detonate the whole fleet of Bison drones captain Morgan calls in to CO Gonzalez and has her direct them in to the maintenance docks. A lengthy debrief is slated for an hour after the last of the drones has docked, and the pilots logged out of their remote command station. With a weary smile CO Gonzalez walks over to the pilots to chat with them. Ushering them into the showers and then following them to the cafeteria for a hot meal. The conversation is light, and the morale is low among the pilots. In the middle of her meal a soft ping emanates from her wrist communicator. A private message addressed to captain Morgan from someone named Gertrude from the Sanitation Department. As the message notification flashes with a tiny red flag, Gonzalez clicks on the message to read it. The captain has just forgotten to turn off her message forwarding while instructing the Bison drone pilots. Not uncommon for Gonzalez to read and respond to high priority messages for the captain. Being next in line, there isn’t much that she isn’t privy too. A moment later the message prompt turns green and Gonzalez can read the message in full, and toggle through the attachments. The message itself was short, it just stated that the priority trash was taken care of. There were six attachments, each one an identical image of a wrist communicator. No, not quite identical, the registration numbers, singular to each unit was different. “What the fuck is this?” Gonzalez whispers to herself. A moment later a response from the captain comes through, along with a transaction id number. “Is this what I think it is?” Gonzalez says with a sinking queasy feeling in the pit of her stomach.

Part Thirty Five: Ghost of the Dirty Starling.

Standing alone in the bowels of the sanitation department

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Gertrude is talking away animatedly to a closed bay door to the Jolene Roger’s tertiary recycler as a soft puff of acrid smoke drifts by up towards the whirling air scrubbers. The sub basement to the vessel is where only a select few ever bother to tread. Although the department is among the cleanest aboard, the distaste people have towards waste water treatment and the recycling of all other materials on board makes the brown jumpsuit wearers somewhat of a pariah among the crew. Once Gertrude took off her tutu, and started to prowl the ship with her trash cart she might as well have been invisible, with all of the non-attention she could attract. Hence her being rather chipper about outsmarting the three would be attackers from the ship’s largest bar and dance club. Feeling rather smug about how well her drunk girl passed out on the floor of the bar by the toilets on the last night in port had worked. She managed to engage her target in one swift motion to knock him out, and roll on top of him to provide them both cover. The moaning and gyrating had been a last second decision that really paid off, a stroke of genius really, Gertrude would have to remember that if she makes it back from UB313 alive.

Looking at the stainless steel doors polished to a high sheen, Gertrude is leaning now against the door running her fingers lazily up and down the frame while chatting amicably. “You should have seen me Norman, it was straight out of a Hollywood block buster. I see the three guys watching you, so I set my trap, right? Yeah – I wait for my moment and then pounce! Bam. Dude, you should have seen your head go. Crunch – right into the space between the floor and the bottom of the pillar. I didn’t mean to tug you down so hard. But I had to subdue you for it to work. My plan that is. Ha. If your drunk ass had of done anything except lie there under me those goons would have discovered my ruse for sure! My ruse? My scheme? My master plan. No wait, scratch that, none of this is cool, let me start over again…” hops Gertrude from the door at the tell tale sound of approaching footsteps on the open grate flooring. “Gerty! You down here again? – you and your dramatic monologues eh? Is there a show coming up that I don’t know about Gerty? I do love your stage plays. A Street Car Named Deserea was my favourite!” The older man says. “Desire.” Gertrude responds. “I’m sorry?” Repeats the older gentleman in his own immaculate brown jumpsuit. “The street car is Desire, not Deserea.” She smirks at the older man. “Oh yeah. Ha! What a goof I am. Is there a show Gerty ?” He half begs half pleads with a huge smile on his face. Gertrude loves to see her fans, especially when it’s one of her bosses boss. “I’m just practicing right now, but you’ll be the first to know when we reengage with entertainment again Jules.” She smiles sweetly at him through her giant brown eyes, her white toothy grin shining brilliantly. “That’s the ticket.” He snaps his fingers, and points at Gertrude. “Oh – right. The reason I came down here. There seems to be a puddle of medical waste in the hall. I guess the med tech’s aren’t double bagging their stuff again. If you can clear that up and just dump it straight into the recycler, you can take the rest of your shift off to work your monologue. I liked ruse, it felt authentic, and ‘of the moment’ as you like to say.” Quips Jules over his shoulder as he walks back out of the way from the recycler input doors. “Not a problem Jules!” She shouts in a sing song fashion.

Taking a beat to make sure the foot steps are receding into the background Gertrude takes a good long look at the polished doors. After a pause she says. “Ha. Norman, you almost had me there! Sneaking blood onto the floors, nice try.” Walking to her cart she grabs a mop and a thick yellow bag and some absorbent pads. Wiping up the bulk of the puddle, placing the soiled pads in the bag, and then mopping up the glistening pink spot on the floors she whispers to herself. “Almost got me Norman. Almost.”

Taking the cart and the mushy plastic bag back to where she was recounting her story to Norman she opens up the bay doors again. The interior is totally empty. Reaching half way in she plops the yellow bag of blood and soiled pads into the center of the chamber. Leaning out and closing the safety doors she pushes the green button beside the floor station terminal and with a whisper soft whir the unit drops its load into the incinerator. A minute puff of acrid black smoke drifts by Gertrude’s face as it hangs lazily in the air, like a grey haze. Only to be pulled softly towards the softly whirling air scrubbers above.

Gertrude sighs to herself and says. “That’s why I do my monologues after the fact Norman. Those three goons were lazy thugs, they were tactless. I have style and grace. Captain Morgan will pay me handsomely for disposing of you after asking too many questions.” Smiling daintily to herself Gertrude takes her cart back to her allocated storage space, and wanders off into the upper decks of the Jolene Roger. The engines have kicked on, and she can feel the added weight pulling on her through the soles of her feet from the thrust of the boosters.

Part Thirty Four: Ghost of the Dirty Starling