Concordia Veil - Cockpit
When she heard the heavy footsteps outside the door, Sienna looked back over her shoulder from her slumped posture in the pilot's seat, watching the hatch for a second, dreading what she knew was coming. With a spiteful snort, she shoved the controls off of her and slumped down further, lifting one of her legs free and delivering a sharp, angry kick to the lower edge of the astrogation console before letting the heel of her boot come to rest on it. She leaned to the side and propped her elbow up on a display screen to her right, resting her temple on her fingertips as the giant Nepleslian squeezed into the cramped space and confronted her. At his question, she scoffed again.
"What the hell do I have to explain?" she retorted, still sounding incredibly angry, but clearly trying to mask it before the man who claimed her as adopted family. "Ain't nobody around here worth a quarter their weight in shit."
Oreza frowned. "Sienna Audrey Shelton, you have a lot to explain" he replied, his eyes burrowing in on the young woman. "Your treatment of your crew is unacceptable. You have not treated a one of them with anything resembling respect, let alone a kind word, but instead berate and insult them and now you are threatening to murder your navigator." He explained. "You want to know why they are not cooperating?" He asked rhetorically, "You treat them like scum. You have no idea how to handle your crew or the proper way to command, so you yell at them and threaten them like a tyrant." he went on, "And now you threaten to kill. Are you a murderer Sienna?" He demanded, "Is this what you became while I was gone, is this what your mother and father taught you to be?"
He let that sink in for a moment before he spoke again, "Now, explain yourself" he instructed, his voice still in a level calm.
Sienna didn't change her lounging, defiant posture, in fact she kept her face turned away and never gave her first mate any indication whatsoever that she was interested in what he was saying. "You're seriously not pulling the paternal speech on me, are you?" she scoffed. "I didn't hear you complaining when I told you to toss Vel."
"You had best stow that attitude fast!" Oreza said, slamming his fist into the back of her chair hard enough to make a lot of noise and get her attention, but not enough to cause damage. The young captain was tossed forward, losing her perched position, less from the force of Oreza's blow to the back of her seat then from utter shock at the unexpected display. It was only due to the cramped quarters of her seat that she didn't whirl around and deliver a blow of her own aimed straight at the older man's nose, but instead, she opted to turn and face him, reaching up to grab the handlebar overhead and pull herself up, stepping one leg up onto the seat as she turned and glowered back with gritted teeth.
"You bet I am, Sienna," Oreza continued. "You want to act like a spoiled brat who's upset when they do not get their way, then that's how you better get used to being treated. Your behavior is unacceptable, you are single handedly alienating and mistreating the people you hired to work on this ship. They do not deserve this treatment and you are damn lucky I am the first person to confront you about this. I am sure another would rather put a bullet between your eyes at this point."
Her arms still over her head, tighly gripping the rail from which she partially hung, Sienna glared back at the grizzled old soldier, seething. "I shouldn'ta hired them in the first frackin' place!" she snapped back at him, her own voice raising now. "I could do half of what the rest of those idiots are supposed to do with my goddamn eyes closed! You want to talk about how I was raised, Oreza!? How dear old mommy and daddy taught me to be!? I was raised by a fracking pair of ghosts, old man! Whatever lessons they had for me they spent on whatever stupid bastards they conned into fighting their war of the week!" The young woman leaned forward a little, getting a bit more in Oreza's face. "Then you doddered off to fight in your own dumb-ass war, leaving me to fend for myself. And I'm alive because I'm damn good at it, and I didn't need nobody else to hold my hand along the way." She sneered up at the huge man, nearly spitting her last sentence. "So frack you for sitting here telling me I'm outta line."
Oreza stood there, unimpressed look on his face as Sienna lashed out. "Are you finished?" He asked, his eyes locked with hers. If she was expecting him to cower or back down from her, she was mistaken. If he was akin to anything, it would be an unmovable mountain.
It took a moment for Sienna's wound-up fury to subside, all the while the young woman's eyes burning as she glared up at him, never once backing off, nor succeeding in intimidating the older man. True to Oreza's patient steadfastness, it passed like a storm, and Sienna scoffed once as the cold, aloof mask slowly grew over her features, once more concealing the fiery side of her that so rarely saw the light of day, yet seemed to be exposed more and more with every passing day of late. Relaxing her challenging posture, the young captain, her leg still propped up in the seat, slid back to a slightly more comfortable position, hanging partially from her grip on the overhead bar, but held her firm gaze on the older man. She didn't say a word, but it was clear that she was in fact finished, although it wasn't certain whether or not she was entirely convinced she had made her point.
Someone knocked on the cockpit door, but neither of them so much as blinked in response. "Are you ready to listen now?" Oreza asked.
Sienna only raised her eyebrows in half-interest, clearly more concerned with getting whatever Oreza had to say over and done with than with actually listening. "What do you want?" she asked flatly.
Oreza let out a breath before speaking in a much calmer tone. "I need you to understand that as captain of a ship your actions and the way you act and treat the crew sets the morale, affects how people do their jobs, how loyal people will be to you," he said. "Just because you hired them does not mean they will snap to every command you give and obey your every whim if you treat them like rubbish. No one wants to be treated badly and do it long enough everyone on this ship will leave as soon as they are given a chance to, or worse, try to remove you from the picture sooner," he said. "You will find that if you treat your people right and get off their backs, give them some room to work, they will get their jobs done and do them well. You need to know when it is time to stand back. If you just bear down all the time and threaten them you will fail at command."
The captain's face looked only slightly more than bored through Oreza's entire speech, and by the time he was through, Sienna was simply staring back up at him with one eyebrow raised dubiously, her hands still lightly grasping the handrail overhead. "Yeah, that's a pretty thought," Sienna replied in a sardonic drone, "but I rode along on a Yammie warship for well over a year. I've seen how that 'warm and fuzzy' shit turns out." She straightened up a little, bending her elbows as she lifted her torso higher, but kept her grip above her head, and never took her eyes off of his. "If they don't like the way I treat 'em, then they don't eat outta my hand. If they wanna leave, then let 'em. I don't give a damn."
Oreza frowned. He was not getting through. She was as stubborn as her father. "So, you think you know better than everyone else, just because you scraped together enough money to buy a ship and observed the command style of an alien ship run by a crew of genentically engineered children?" he asked.
Sienna let a single sarcastic chuckle slip out. "Now you're making sense," she snipped.
"You are not listening to one bloody thing I am saying," Oreza growled. "You're as much a fool as your parents are!"
That comment caused Sienna's eyes to instantly flare wide open, flashing with a sudden bolt of unbridled rage. There was a resonating smack as the captain's open hand cracked hard against the big Nepleslian's jaw, leaving a pulsing red welt where she had struck him. In the blink of an eye, Oreza's giant paw snatched her wrist before she could pull it back, holding it fast in place, seemingly undaunted by the surprisingly well-struck and solid blow. The two held one another's burning, unyielding eyes for a few seconds in silence before Oreza continued.
"I am disappointed in you, Sienna," he snapped back at her. "You have absolutely no idea what you are doing and it shows. You think you can run this ship all by yourself? Good luck when you cannot even pay attention to what is happening right under your nose. You are not ready to command a ship and if you keep carrying on the way you are you never will be."
With a furious snort, Sienna yanked her hand from Oreza's grip, her jaw clenched tightly and her fists balled up into quivering rocks. The banging on the cockpit hatch became louder and more insistent, and Six Four's droning, muffled voice was audible through it. "This one needs to ask the captain a question, as well as perform its primary function!"
Oreza's head whipped around to look over his shoulder, and both Nepleslians barked in resounding unison: "SHADDAP!!!"
The two of them looked slowly back at one another when they heard no reply for a few seconds, each one staring into the other's stone-cold eyes as if they were one step away from a violent showdown. After a long, extremely tense pause, Sienna's shoulders slumped slightly, and she turned away, dropping back into the pilot's seat below him. She propped her foot up on the console once more and rested her brow in her hand, covering her eyes. She wasn't about to say it aloud, but the bearlike ex-soldier had her beaten. Amelia had pulled a fast one on her, and it didn't matter that she had been suspicious all along. She hadn't known exactly what the astrogator had up her sleeve until it was too late. Now it seemed that she'd made an enemy unwisely. She still wanted to beat Amelia silly, of course, but she was starting to understand what Oreza was saying. She didn't like it, but she got it.
She sighed a long, heavy sigh. "Call Amelia and tell her to get her ass back in here with the survivor," she said in quiet defeat. "This show is yours to run now. I'm done."
Oreza could see the defeat in the slump of her shoulders and the end of her firey responses. He watched in silence for a moment. There was no gloating in this victory. Oreza knew Sienna had taken a pretty big blow, one she needed, but not one that was easy to take.
"It will get taken care of," he replied, any sense of anger or hostility was gone from Oreza's voice. Another pause, then the Nepleslian turned and unlocked the cockpit hatch, opening it and stepping through, making sure to seal it behind him. He knew she needed some time alone and undisturbed by the others.
Sienna remained at the controls, not saying another word or even bothering to look back as her first mate left, only remaining with her forehead resting on her palm.
================
A few minutes later...
Crash had been listening to the whole conversation, and recording it. Slowly and softly It spoke using Its true voice. "You know those children tried to erase me and my culture from the face of the universe? Amelia claims they didn't succeed but I'm not sure I believe her.... They were doing a pretty good job of it when I settled in to snooze here on this ship."
The young captain glanced up from under her hand, the burning anger on her face now partially quenched by what appeared to be exhaustion, as she stared with unfocused eyes out through the canopy glass, as if the disembodied voice speaking to her was coming from an incorporeal body hovering in the blackness of space before her. "What the frack are you, anyway?" she asked tersely.
"I'm me..." The tone never changed nor the voice; Crash was for once not playing games or screwing with someone. "I'm a spiderbot that found refuge on a new ship that was supposed to be shipped of a far off planet and left. I was Space Case Crash McKill. I used to be a quite successful data retreival bot in the data-webs for a few years. Before that I was a pilot flyling ships al over the place, but that was back in my first body. Was a Mate to a caring individual, a spawn of two lovely beings." The tone changed and a tiny bit more of a humor creeped in, "And who are you Miss Cranky Bottom?"
"Do I look like I'm in any mood for cutesy names right now?" Sienna replied, and although her body language and tone of voice sounded much more tired than angry, her sharp, impatient intent was clear. Her eyes moved around the cramped cockpit, looking for any sign of the voice's physical presence. "Assuming you can see me at all, that is," she added with a touch of bewilderment.
"I can see you just fine, the ship's internal sensors are working just fine, and if it wasn't for them I could use the ship's nav and ident sensors to bounce off of the hull there and reflect back to get a semi-ghost image of you. I can feel your pulse and heart rate and I can tell from the temperature systems that you are a bit warm, my guess you have been overworking yourself. But I'm not a doctor, I don't really get how you work unless I had a connection to the data-webs again." There was a pause as Crash let her digrest the information It just gave. "But none of that tells me who you are... What you are is a tired, heart pounding, warm female that seems to be hating the universe itself."
A look of exaggerated exasperation moved across Sienna's face as she slowly lowered her forehead into her palm once more. She sighed again as the realization took hold. "You're another goddamn Freespacer," she said with a groan, as much to herself as to Crash. "And you're in the ship's computer." A lot of things over the past several days were starting to make sense to her now. It hadn't been Amelia's incompetence that had caused the constant deviations in their courses, nor had the computer been as faulty as she'd believed. She'd been dealing with a sentient being all along, and didn't even know it. "Well," she continued, clearing her throat softly, and looked up again. "I don't know why you're bothering to ask me who I am, since you've no doubt been watching us all along. I own this ship now. And you obviously know it better than I do. So if I tell you I'm not going to try to open fire on that shuttle, will you unlock the controls?"
"Well yes... Put in the code, I like bunnies." Crash chittlered a little, the ship's computers synthesized the sound perfectly. Heck Sienna probably had heard the sound randomly through out the ship at times. "I ask because I really don't believe you are one to be like you are showing today. I saw how well you treated my ship and brought it back to a running state. As for you owning it, I won't argue with you over it, as long you don't hurt Amelia. Even though she tried to kill me a few times, I think she is a nice person. And I would hate to see her harmed." Crash's voice didn't sound threatening, just someone concerned for a person's well-being.
An unamused, quiet groan rumbled in Sienna's throat as she rolled her eyes again, barely able to believe she was about to type such an absurd code into any computer console, let alone her own. She complied anyhow, and as promised, one by one the panels began to brighten again, and status indicators changed back to green across her board. A little good news, finally, she thought. The chittering sound that she'd mostly ignored until now only further confirmed everything that was starting to fall into place. Moving her hands over the various consoles before her, she ran a few basic diagnostics to reassure herself that she wasn't being tricked again, then leaned back into her seat and looked around for the source of the voice again, although she really wasn't sure why she bothered. "So you and Amelia are buddies now, huh?" she asked.
"She is my pet..." The voice was matter-the-fact as it spoke.
Sienna's eyebrows raised slightly. "Your... pet," she said, inflected more as a confirmation rather than a question. After a brief pause, she shrugged and shook her head dismissively. "Whatever, fine. So what exactly is it you want from me?"
"You told Amelia that you would find the stuff on her list. That would be a good start, as much as I don't mind being in the computer all the time, I like that spiderbot. It's grown on me. Past that, please don't try to or have anyone else try to kill me. It was funny the first time, the second it was a bit irritating. You don't want to be like that Yammi scourge that is washing across the stars now do you?"
"I ain't about to promise anything, but I'll make a deal with you. If you stay out of my way when there's work to be done, I'll see what I can do about getting that spiderbot of yours put back together. And if you're gonna hang around here, you're gonna pull your weight." Sienna ran a hand through her hair, then rubbed her forehead. "One more thing," she added. "You wanna know who I am, here's lesson one. Don't waste your time pulling that patriotism bullshit on me. It won't get you anywhere."
"Ok fine, you don't want to be an Ass doja?" Crash chittered again before continuing, "Well I can fly this ship far better than you ever could dream to. Not that you don't have skills, but how many processes can you handle at one moment? Not that it matters. I can fly this ship, I got it here, with out bumping any of that debris out there."
Sienna paused, slightly intrigued, and pondered for a moment. The digital consciousness did have a point. "...All right," she conceded, "I can't argue with that." She leaned forward slightly, raising a finger as she looked around as if speaking to a poltergeist of some sort. "But no more stunts like that when I say to do somethin' different, unless the ship is in danger." Her eyebrows raised further, although this time it was much more the expression of a demand. "Agreed?"
"Well, if i'm going to be flying this ship, I would like a share."
The captain frowned. "What the hell does an AI want with a share?" she asked incredulously.
"Why would someone who will die in just a few decades care about their share?" Crash responded not going into the many reasons for funds being useful.
"Because I have less time to spend it, if you wanna talk semantics," the captain retorted.
"Semantics are quite fun to talk about, like I said I was a data-reteival spider... But what I really retrived and hunted for was this." Crash popped a few Volumetric screens up with various random strange porn vids. "See, semantics are fun."
Glancing down at the vidscreens that flickered and changed their displays to the scenes that varied from confusing, to embarrassingly interesting, to downright randy, Sienna's eyes bulged. "Ugh!" she exclaimed, ripping her eyes off of the scenery that Crash, for no reason known to her, had shown her, and defensively raised her hands between her face and the consoles as if that would somehow ward off the images now burned into her retinas. "God dammit, fine, fine!" she snipped, not having any desire to try and figure out just what point this entirely-too-weird Freespacer was driving at. "Whatever! I'll cut you in at six percent," she said.
"Fifteen, or I'll I'll show you what Kitty Princesses do on their down time... With their crews!"
"Suck my ass, fifteen!" Sienna exclaimed incredulously, still shielding her face from the screens, and trying not to listen to the various carnal sounds blaring through the speakers.
"I have Vids on that too if it'll help," Crash said helpfully.
"Eight," Sienna snapped.
"Ten and I will copy the vids to your Datajockey that made your heartrate increase."
The captain opened her mouth to protest, but after a moment, closed it again and gritted her teeth. "Fine," she reluctantly hissed. "But you keep it to yourself, or I'll wipe the whole damn computer with you in it. Now turn that crap off!"
With a data pulse the screens popped out of exsistence before new one popped up with exterior images of the cargo bay doors. "Fine then yeah sure I can station keep just fine. Though if you took a moment to notice the cargo bay doors are aligned to the derrelict's. So all you had to do was push the stuff right into the cargo bay, strap it down and then boost out of here." There was a moment of silence before It spoke again, "And please don't tell anyone of me.. It's bad enough you and Amelia know... I still have to think about my life here..."
Sienna sighed in relief, slumping back down into her seat, and shook her head. Oreza was right, everything had gotten out of control so fast. Rubbing her temples with her fingertips, she closed her eyes and composed herself again, clearing her throat softly as she tried not to focus on what the devious Freespacer had just shown her. "Well and good," she replied after a moment. "But next time, frackin' clear it with me first. I get jumpy when my ship starts moving without me in it."
"Well I'll try but if you keep popping off for an adventure all the time, then you're going to have to deal with the one on scene making quick calls. Hell the location you had parked this at, had a large chunk of engine cone fly through..." Crash hadn't mentioned it to Amelia either, no reason to freak the Meat out.
At first, the captain started to argue, but then thought better of it, and simply left the matter as it was. "Do you really think you're gonna stay hidden here forever?" she asked, changing the subject.
"Until I can find somewhere else to hide from the genocide. Not much of a life but think I can out last their empire if I stay low enough." The voice started sound sad, the ram and the processor started spinning up to full speed as Crash thought back to Its life before going into hiding.
Sienna's brow creased slightly in thought. The Freespacer was genuinely convinced that Yamatai was still hunting his kind to extinction. As much of a pain as this Crash had the potential to be, she couldn't ignore the advantages of having an AI monitoring and flying the ship. And as furious as she was with Oreza for his posturing, she knew that he was far more experienced in holding a crew together than she was. Perhaps there was hope for this disaster of an operation yet.
"Still no promises," Sienna replied, not bothering to try to correct Crash's belief. "But I'll see what can get worked out. Just don't add to my already extensive list of B.S. to deal with, all right?"
