Chapter 3. "Miserable and Stunning"
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
...Interrogator shook the last splatter off the tip of his baton, before wiping it passably clean on his coat. The stain blended in well with the others. "How's it coming?"
After a moment, one of the masked techs grunted, pulling himself out of the deck hatchway pried open aside the server housing. It was quite a drop, and a tight fit to boot; Daria didn't envy anyone crawling down there.
"Hard restart successful, sir..." the tech responded—to be specific, they'd physically pulled the power tap to the Venom Lab's deck, then just stuck it back in. The oldest maintenance procedure in the book, after a simple smacking—"...but we lost at least a day's worth of data—I'm sorry, but there was no way around it."
"That's what backups are for. Don't waste time fretting." Daria quipped, nasally—the stench from the test chamber was getting noticeable...or maybe she was just imagining it. She wasn't sure which would be worse.
That damn klaxon sounded again—it been coming and going, but without any pattern—and this time, it was followed by a faint rumble. Another faint rumble. Enough to shiver the deck under Daria's boots, this time.
She gritted her teeth. "Damnit, I know I felt that one..." There were a few murmured agreements in the lab—not that the confirmation did anything to help her foul mood.
Spindoctor tossed her head at the terminal station. "Do we have commo up, yet?"
"Yessir, attempting now, sir" said the tech at the console. He sounded nervous—completely unreasonably, of course, with the computer's corruption now purged.
Hell, the Interrogator even let him out of the headlock once it had been confirmed onscreen.
The tech pattered away at the keyboard; windows and text flashed up on the monitor, too fast for Daria to bother following.
He shook his head. "Public address and phones are still booting—" tap, tap "Vidcom is working, sir, but only on manual."
"Try the bridge."
"Aye, sir."
The video feed lit up almost at once—probably using the Interrogator's command codes then; the higher ranks' calls traditionally never as much warning as a ring—better to catch people off guard...
Daria blinked. It looked like it was their turn, this time.
"This is live?"
"Uh...yessir, that's—"
"Venom lab to bridge," Spindoctor cut in, stepping aside the terminal, keying the microphone.
"Uhm, sir, you have to use the—"
"Oh, sure, now you remind me" Picking up the scavenged headset plugged into the monitor, replacing Deming's lapel piece, she held it by one earphone, repeated herself into the mike. Nothing.
"This is Spindoctor to bridge, respond." Pause.
"Cash reward and a full pardon to anyone who responds."
Still nothing. Well, that settled it.
"Where..." there was a gulp, "where did everyone go?" Deming mumbled, around a cigarette, from behind Daria's shoulder.
She said nothing, just scanned the picture again.
The command deck, like most examples of Cobra ergonomics, managed to be both dreary and flashy. The camera now centered on the spot between the two banks of command-and-control stations, studded with glowing screens and buttons in dark metal. The officer-on-watch's stand was betwixt and ahead of them—no one had sprung for a Captain Kirk chair.
Not that anyone was there to enjoy one—the bridge was deserted.
A few odd specks of static traced across the screen, but there was little sign of damage or commotion.
A Cobra-logoed mug had overturned on the Officer on Deck stand, spilling pale-edged crema over a chart. The mug was still steaming, quite visibly.
"Can you switch angles—pan around or something?"
The tech ayesirred again, hit a few more keys.
The screen view began to swivel left, a few degrees a second. Still no signs of life...or the aftermath of it...on the bridge, nor any damage, aside from the strange, flitting static.
There was something about it, though. "Off"...
She'd almost put it together when the damned klaxon went off, again, accompanied this time by a glow of red light in the room onscreen, save for an expanding blue sliver at the edge—the camera had panned over 100° now, and the windscreens were just coming into view, the sky outside still bright enough in the dimming twilight to show—
—Oh HELL.
Someone screamed "BRACE!" It might have been her.
The klaxon blared, but was cut off quickly, drowned out by a titanic moan grinding through the spine of the ship. The deck shuddered, and badly, but didn't pitch—not like Daria had feared. She risked a glance at the monitor again.
Still intact—aside from the spray of snow rushing in through the broken clearview screen, but the Bifid wasn't breaking up on the mountainside.
By force or sheer luck, the ship was visibly clearing the pass it'd plowed towards. The last crags of rock receded from the edges of the window, and out of sight. The grind cut off a few seconds later.
Safe again...or for the moment. But the alpine vista in the dying light, already dim enough to lose any sight of the horizon in the gloom and cloud, didn't look like it promised to be any kinder.
"We're not dead." The Interrogator said, tonelessly.
"No, but we'll be scraping sherpas off the keel for awhile." She shook her head, slightly, with a sigh. "...if we have a keel left, anyway."
Not dead, though. Not yet...
"Find me someone out there who's still alive."
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
"...so either someone in the 'island' saw a bad screen by chance, went nuts, and started goin' to town—"
"—or they all just saw what was starting to happen, and bailed out. Like rats."
"That'd be SOP. 'Don't burn up with the machine'—I can't say I'd blame 'em..."
"Yeah, sure. And they hit the silk over the 'roof of the world,' at night, into the snow. And left the boatload of slavering ghouls for us to deal with. Great call for everyone."
"Sir!"
Daria peaked back over her shoulder.
"'You find anyone important?" Maybe someone who can steer this hulk, who isn't holed up by lunatics?
"We've made contact with Shutterbug, director, sir."
So she wasn't dead? Daria hadn't dared to hope. If that much had gone right... "Status and location?"
Keys tapped. "Production hall, block...11," the tech answered, "Plate room. She's barracaded in."
Aaand..back up the creek. "patch her through."
Klack-klick-klack
The figure that appeared, jaundiced by the pale lights in the lab, dressed somewhere between a Geographic correspondant and a street luger; a blonde wearing a severe 'dutch' braid, the broad beak of an overbite, and a familiar eyeing of smug suspicion cutting up from under a heavy brow.
She'd slung the big CineAlta back on her shoulder to fiddle with a glove...though she'd kept the stupid newsie cap.
Spindoctor learned towards the monitor. "Glad to see you made it, Helga."
Onscreen, Shutterbug's expression seamlessly turned to a "Ya, and what of it, four-eyes?" as she flexed her fingers into her brass knuckles.
"Just sit tight for now, all right? I may need you to sacrifice yourself later." Daria said.
The woman's image blinked, once, very slowly, and raised her gauntlet to an "a-okay" sign with an exaggerated smile...which just as quickly melted into a scowl as the palm dropped down, clutching, to mid chest...
"'Huh,'" the Interrogator piped up. "I didn't know she was Italian..."
Daria rolled her eyes. "Very nice. Spindoctor out."
The collision alarm wailed again, presently. But this time the hammering that followed, if lacking the violence of earlier blows, was far more unsettling; it had come sheer laterally, from the starboard.
Daria found her head starting to swim; the Bifid's deck had settled back to a noticeable bowward list.
"Maybe we clipped a rotor." Daria said, wincing. Maybe it wouldn't be an issue until after they made a nice snowy crash into Everest. Yeah, that's the ticket. Keep thinking positive.
Like, maybe, if they couldn't find someone to get them out of the besieged inner keep, they could hope the rest of the ship would act like a gigantic crumple zo—
The phone rang.
It brought everything to a weird stop. The phone, the actual corded old thing wall-mounted on the bulkhead behind a workstation.
The console tech stood, peered at the label over the flashing red extension light. "'Says 'magazine,' sir."
She was puzzled a moment...then Daria's eyes lit up.
"Funny, there shouldn't even be anyone from—"
Spindoctor brushed him aside. "It's not. Get back on the cameras." She paused, after picking up the receiver, "—if it's not under 'magazine,' check the listing for the 'paper warehouse.'" She pressed the phone to her ear. "Ahoy."
Another pause, then she nodded. "Glad to hear you guys made it."
"Image feed up, sir."
Daria sidled over to the terminal, looking for herself.
The picture was the washed out monochrome of near-infrared. It was dark in the cavernous chamber; the ship's former ordnance storage department was deeply buried in the bowels of the armored keep, and at the lowest level of the freight elevator.
There was a good handful of figures on the screen. Ink Vipers, eyes twinkling like cats at the camera. One of them had a phone.
"...a little surprised, though, that this is the first we're hearing from you...something important enough going on down there to keep you out of the loop?"
The Viper with the phone hemmed, visibly, as Daria listened. Daria glanced to Deming, pointedly, to clarify.
The woman looked a bit uncomfortable. "Well, ahm, sir, we—there's been a few—"
"Makeout spot. Got it." Spindoctor said, flatly. "Anyone got a gat down there?"
She paused, frowned. "A gun, Viper. Is anyone armed? Personal construction equipment, even?"
She waited for the reply—and sighed, grumbling. Shoulders slumped.
Interrogator buzzed, "That bad?"
"Not if you like trying to kill people with a forklift."
Olé, she thought. Better than nothing—maybe they could use one for an "end run." Not much protection for a passenger, though...maybe they could use some cargo as a mantlet. Like on of those reams of blank—
It all fell into place.
Got it. She said as much, out loud.
"Start loading backups on the elevator—crossways to the keel, top heavy stacks, as close to the front of the platform as it can lift."
She listened to the reply from the magazine...and smiled. "That's almost exactly the idea. Only need it once, though—don't let it start until I give the word." She dropped the phone to the surprised tech at his terminal.
"So is anyone in the lab still standing, Interrogator?"
"You wound me—there are enough left..."
"My most abashed apologies. Now I need someone run down to the Tiger Cages—" she pointed past the dark of the test chamber, towards the inner door "—see if you can scrounge up a couple of things..."
The klaxon had started up again. "...and don't hurry or anything."
She kept moving, mentally, letting the details flow, working out the implementations. It helped keep things clear, steady her nerves. The plan of action, the roles to play in it.
And very quietly, it was keeping her from having to think about what she was having to plan.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
It took twenty minutes, maybe two or three altogether putting it together, the rest of it just getting the pieces of the scheme in place. Getting people in position. Waiting.
There had been four more collisions. Nothing catastrophic, yet, but during the last couple, the interior lights had started flickering. A small malfunction, sure, but to start up on a rugged old battle wagon like the Bifid, not a good sign...
The band assembled on the deck outside the Venom Lab entrance...eleven, standing, and twice that many on freight platform approaching up the lift shaft.
Maybe four actual guns between them. And thirty-to-one numbers against. With a deadline.
One of the remaining guards was talking. Openly, if barely above a mutter. "Hey...anyone see that old movie...wit' the meteor that crashes into the airliner, makes all these dead guys on board come back to life and start—"
She cut her eyes at the man, sharply, over her epaulettes. "Unless it suggests a new battle strategy and has one hell of a happy ending, I don't want to hear about it."
The man shrank. "Uh...never mind."
There was a little pause before a different voice piped up, softly. "Why would there be a bunch of dead guys on an airliner?"
Daria's teeth ground. "Shutterbug, status."
The radio headset squealed. Audio feedback and some brassy thwak sounds not quite overlaying the chilling background cacophony.
The agent's voice dripped back in. "Oh, just aces here, boss. The 'Sheena' act's really packing 'em in. Hold on—" there were a few more thwaks, and a pained howl. "...f I end up losing this finger, I'm going to take it outta someone's face!"
"Just stick to the plan. You're no good to us as a casualty."
"Got a real funny way o' showing it, sister..." there was a distinct crunch, and some marginally human shrieks. "...ste it and like it you rat f-"
Spindoctor let the grisly audio play for a few more seconds, then lowered the speaker below head level.
"Now that you've heard that," she addressed her little troupe, "let's talk about conservation of heroism for this op."
There were murmurs as she straightened her glasses.
"We need to get people to the bridge who can puzzle out the conn well enough to fly us to safety. That's the only way of getting off this bird alive. I checked." That part was probably mostly true—no sense encouraging anyone to run off to double check for themselves... "That means if anything happens to one of them, you try and save them...and only them. Anyone else gets dropped. There's just no time."
She caught a couple of worried glances exchanged as she watched faces, but to her surprise, not that many.
Many or most were taking it rather well...probably, as she thought, sadly, because it was a better deal than most snakes usually got...
Behind her, the moan of the elevator crested, then cut out with a bang as the platform reached the lab deck.
The motors stopped, anyways. The eerie groan of straining metal continued. Shifting, and never quite dying out.
An Ink Viper stepped off the platform, staring at his watch. "Thirty-eight seconds, sir. Timed like you asked...should be the same going down."
The alarm started to go off again as she nodded—it wasn't enough warning, this time.
The blow to the ship was faster, briefer, but more violent than any preceding—a swift kick more than a hammer blow. The lights flashed, and Daria nearly stumbled.
The sound of tortured steel bayed from the elevator platform. Buried in the noise, Daria heart a sharp ring—metal sheering off.
Maybe something small. But that wouldn't last, though. She was sure.
She looked over her crew again. Quiet, now, now, and mostly face masked. But she could see the eyes...
No time. She pulled on a glower. "Cobras, we take this on our terms. Into positions."
But, as much as it would have helped, she couldn't do it...she just couldn't give the battle cry.
Boots had started scraping across the deck, and Spindoctor took her place in formation.
She stopped in the center of the platform. A score of maniacs in front of her, a scanty rearguard behind, mostly scientists and printer's devils at her flanks, and below her, ten storeys down and a thousand strong...
"I...don't suppose you could give the rest of us some last minute pointers on skull-cracking?" she asked.
"It's really not the kind of thing you can teach." Interrogator replied, apologetically.
Naturally.
She motioned to the hooded goon at the control keypad. "Down, please. Lobby."
She went back to the radio, just as the machinery started up again. The platform was moving; her stomach dipped.
"Helga, we're rolling out. You've got thirty seconds."
She raised her voice. "Get ready."
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
"Ten seconds"
Helga kicked back off the side of Block 11, smacking at a few ghouls who'd managed to get too close with her free hand before she swung out, completely out of reach.
She'd given almost enough spare 'oomf' to the chain for it's lsat pendulum swing across the aisle—it should be her last trip over the shambling mob. Or so's the plan.
Practically the whole lot had grouped beneath her on the walkway between the last pair of press blocks that flanked the deck. She tucked up her boots ahead of the grasping wave of claws. Some plan!
She'd had enough of this. So had her fists—her free hand was going numb. What was left of it, anyway.
"Eight seconds"
She pivoted midswing, jackknifed at the hips, legs out and straight ahead—as her boots reached metal she started running. Sideways, weight and momentum suspended on the ceiling cargo chain.
"Six seconds"
...closing on the rear edge of the block, she found as much purchase she her soles could, and made a final long-legged push—a horizontal leap sailing back over the gap towards the rear of the hall.
There was screaming clatter below her. The mob was shoving in pursuit...
"Three seconds..."
The upper threshold approached...and slowing. She'd misjudged the aim. Just. Cripes...
No time. She let go of the chain before the swing slowed completely. Made her best jump. Too high up, too far, too fast...damni... The howling was coming down the hall quickly, at her heels...
Her right hand fingers brushed metal, barely feeling the pressure. She clutched for a hold as she swung her good arm forward. Her bad hand daubing red as it slid, down, and she felt the bones in her palm—
Shutterbug's nose grazed the lip of the frame over the big door, an instant before her hands reached it.
The shock wrenched her shoulder, but she'd stopped.
"Two seconds...one..."
She checked the way she'd come; most of the insensate pack was still walled between the press blocks she'd been swinging between from the hoist for the past five minutes. The rearmost edge—the one facing her, now—had fallen, spilled over. The freaks had fallen over each other trying to get to their bait.
A nice, tight grouping. Beneath her, she felt the blast doors rumbling open.
Someone sounded the battle cry.
The tired smirk widened. Criminey. Some plan!
Below, there was a ripple of sharp snaps as the last cargo straps broke. Metal creaked.
...and eighty thousand pounds of reeled cotton rag spilled out.
The list of the deck might have helped, but the momentum of the sheer bulk of the one ton spools was more than enough.
Helga tucked her legs up instinctively as the avalanche tumbled out—the cargo doorway was tall, and the spools were stacked high...some of them, she saw, were bouncing surprisingly high.
High, fast, and downrange—towards the shrieking mob still clambering over each other.
Forget hammer and anvil—this was a hammer hitting a hammer.
The thundering drumroll was overpowering—drowned out all the other noise of the hall.
Even the shrieking...Helga barely noticed when it cut off, abruptly, mostly because it was accompanied by a sudden, very brief muffling of the hellish thundering...
She glanced up, to see for herself. And winced.
Efficient.
But...damn! Not all-encompassing. Nothing much had survived the...smear between the press blocks, but that hadn't been all of them.
The rest—more 'territorial,' or just slower, maybe—were still scattered across the hall and the machines.
Sure as hell coming out of the woodwork now, weren't they...
Her grip on the ledge started to slip, a little. Cold sweat did that.
But there was a renewed yell from the elevator. A new rumbling started up. Phase two, Shaka? She held on just long enough, puffing a hair ribbon out of her eyes, till the expected forms rolled into the threshold beneath her, at the edge of her vision, framed by a harsh sparkle and an arcing clatter from the deck plates.
Just long enough to place her mark...and she let go.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
"COBRAAA!"
Slave Master himself caught Shutterbug mid-whoop, in a twirl, setting her down on the new "train" dragged behind the formation's shields...
High-weight cotton rag. Pushed, five abreast, in rolls spooling almost two miles of the stuff. Thick, practically clothlike...
The living Maruta keepers craned into the narrow gaps between the files, skipping the megafauna-something-or-other prods over the advancing deck one handed.
...and very non-conductive.
The prow of the formation reached the slick spot between the first pair of machines. They met the first picket of the screamers. Charging, berserk.
They were swamped by the front of electrified flooring. Their noise ended, or shifted pitch in shuddery pain.
The group was picking up speed. Some of the gibbering wrecks driven before them, some just bypassed. The rest they just plowed through.
Daria, behind the center roll, saw it jolt, hopping in course a few inches, then settle down.
Her path went bumpy for a spell. Dust shaking off the roll got into her nostrils. Crisp, with a rotten-egg after vapor.
The splotch on the roll got smaller over the revolutions, like a tumbler of a slot machine.
She heard shooting to her side—the few armed guards were leapfrogging on the tail of advance.
There were really too few to—not now. No time for it...
The ozone was building up, mixed with wisps of smoke. She dragged her breaths down, raggedly. Not even daring to cough.
They were running the gauntlet at a "seven minute mile," and she was making it on adrenaline. She needed every 'edge' she could muster...
A volley of fire streaked overhead, singing. A pulse hit a form Daria hadn't seen, looming off an approaching block. The shot caught the thing only as it leapt, and it flopped, burning on the bare lane between the rolls next to Spindoctor. Too close.
Her boot brushed against the poor thing's smoldering hide. Too close.
She pushed it out of her mind, 'checked the markings of the row the group was passing. The same machine block the jumped had—
Block six! Halfway down the hall, already? Maybe another forty seconds...
She missed it, when it came. So did everyone else—it must have been lying in wait, perhaps retaining some shred of intellect. She would kick herself later, but at the time—
She barely heard the screaming, but the feral bay brought her eyes front...face to face with the raw-fleshed maw of a thrashing hulk clambering over the top of the rolling drum ahead of her. Her heart skipped; part of her mind was babbling about how It must have vaulted from the deck, and the thing had bashed away the Ink Vipers pushing the roll. The men fell, though the reel kept turning. Nothing could have stopped it fast, but if it started slowing...
The thing on top was already getting a better footing, not merely keeping pace, but making forward progress.
Unthinking, Spindoctor closed the distance in a bound, and shouldered into the roll like a juggernaut. Harder than she'd thought; the impact was almost numbed, nerves stunned.
The jolt of new speed threw the attacker off balance, and it scrambled to find purchase from being dragged under.
A second swipe past Daria's face caught hard, inches above her eyes. The claw around her hair brought a needle stab of pain from her skin, spurring an involuntary burst of fury. She shoved harder.
The grip tightened, if anything. She felt a fast damp growing at the roots of her hairline.
She could've sworn she heard someone bellow her name—and a close, faint fibery tearing she could hear echoing to the base of her jaw, backed by the thundering approach of heavy bootsteps, and the sudden clangour of coiled metal...
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
The tissues of the human head and scalp bleed very readily; Daria had been reminded of that back in Driver's Ed, a decade before, during a classically disquieting film strip.
Biologically, it was not surprising. The brain consumed a lion's share of the body's resources to begin with, heartily gorged on the body's blood supply, but with the unfortunate side effect that a localized infection could spread quickly and badly to the delicate gray matter. .
But like any good cub scout knew, there was an easy, natural mechanism to clean out an injury; let the blood itself flush out the flush wounds out of germs and dirt, the sources of infection as naturally deadly as an injury itself.
In short, and simply put, blood flows freely to protect the brain.
It makes an impression...
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
Dec 30th, 2009.
"...for conspicuous and audacious merit"
The inscription on the back of Spindoctor's Silver Serpent of Valor was mirrored in a later line of the medal citation itself, kept in the lid of the snakewood box, next to a print taken from the dock security video after the crippled Bifid put into port at the Nepal dig.
The mob of survivors descending the cargo ramp was hardly parade quality—almost all of them, coming off the line, had been dirtied with ink or grease to begin with, but a good number had been splattered with deepening red...but none more than Daria herself, though the bright shock of scarlet than had flown over half her scowling face like a devillock was all her own.
The color and contrast of the picture had been adjusted, to boot, to enhance picture quality, when it had been submitted with the report. It had the unexpected side effect of making the blood lacquered on the crew blaze like embers in the dark.
Daria smiled, thinly. The photo belonged on the cover of a Bob Howard novel. Heh. And she'd told her own mother that she'd gotten her hair caught in a fax machine accident at "The Office"...
She ran a bare finger over the main contents of the case, stopping where the dulled metal connected to the patina scaled inlaid wood of the grip.
Gently, she pried the trophy out of it's velvet depression, hefting it one-handed. It was heavy, but it fit into her palm like a glove.
The designer, an uncharming fellow in MARS' employ named Scrap Iron, called it the "Gorgon." Something inspired by the cylinder design—it was, he's vaingloriously proclaimed at Daria's promotion ceremony, the pinnacle of revolver development.
It had sure as Hell taken her by surprise, almost more than the promotion to full "bird" subcommander.
For all that the head of Cobra Intelligence, Spindoctor's nominal boss, had ranted and torn her hair out over the Bifid disaster, it seemed that Destro had really liked getting that ship back.
Always a marvel how the coils of power knotted themselves...
In the office's solitude, she broke a small rule of safety and slipped a finger under the guard, over the duel trigger setup.
Teflon coated, multi-caliber "universal" cylinder, automatic action—Agatha Christie, you is vindicated—gas-sealed...
She popped the lower reload lever, and swiveled open the stumpy barrel mounted under the main, exposing the base of the "little" 20-gauge Tungsten quadrangle shell.
She shook her head. She'd had to look up half the features on the new gun. All she'd done was put a request in to the armory for a better anti-equipment weapon. She hadn't expected something she'd have to read an encyclopedia to comprehend.
A lot of things had gone over people's heads in this case, though...that was Destro's death-mask MARS insignia on the butt—Hell, the pommel—of the Gorgon, not a Cobra quartermaster mark.
Well. Always good to know who's favor you've managed to curry. There was an old adage that percolated through the ranks of Cobra: "No friends—only convenient alliances."
She straightened her arm, checking the tritium sights. Very convenient.
Presently, there was a basso purr from her workstation. New mail—pretty good time, if it was what she was waiting for. Good time, or a really depressingly simple reply.
She clicked up the BIOK client again—having to enter a password or three this time. Automatic Security Protocols. Jackpot.
The new message was the reply from her intended. She opened it, entered her portion of a cypher key, and saw the wall of gibberish onscreen quickly flitter into text...
To: Spindoctor
From: CrystalBall
Sastimos,
I have received your data outline, and acted accordingly.
The craft of metaprobability analysis is still very young, and as such is unquietingly more Cassandra and Pythia, but as much as anything is written in the stars (rf. "Narrative Causality"), the clean odds for your scenario are as follows:
•8.81% Serendipidous encounter of undeployed OPFOR elements (1-4), leading to cover exposure (79% contingent)
•10 ± 1% SIGINT leakage leading to OPFOR investigation, leading to 50±30% cover exposure.
•9±2% Serendipidous encounter by civilian noncombatants (1-3; gaussian peak of age range 11-19), leading to 60% successful apprehension or termination of incursors, leading to 30% successful escape or evasion of captives, and 77% triggering of outside investigation and loss of cover (in all cases).
•21±16.7% Mission failure due to internal misadventure, malfeasance, equipment failure, etc (contingent on deployed assets)...
There were a couple of others—relatively low probability complications that tended to compound into likelyhood for these kinds of ops...nothing astonishing, but good to have actual numbers on.
What was next, though...
However, I'm afraid there was something strange in the results. A family of anomalous contingencies kept appearing in the runs; I assumed problems with input factors or initial settings but there was nothing to be debugged or removed without breaking the setup.
I thought there was a ring of something to it. Might be. Distilling the anomalies back into something I could work back to brought up something solid, but vaguer than I like, or can puzzle out.
Data follows. I might do better with more information, though I know you don't hold out. Maybe you can make better sence of it, but the whole thing feels unclean. Good journey.
39 ± 29 % odds, [compound] that...
Daria stared at the screen a minute, blinked, re-read. She got it. It all started clicking.
She kept her eyes on the screen, but had stopped seeing it.
Spindoctor swore once out loud, paused, then repeated it. Had to happen sooner or lat...she kept herself from slamming her first into her armrest—or the screen—with what was honestly lessening difficulty. Her feelings didn't leave; but they went cold very rapidly.
She let them congeal for a minute while she got her thoughts together. It didn't take long; Spindoctor's fine brain never really stopped. Part of it had started murmuring about possibilities before she'd finished reading the message...
Daria unclenched her fist, digging the fingernails out of her palm, and snatched up the telephone headset. The blue LED flicked on under her thumbnail as she got it to her ear. Idly, a voice in the back of her head mused about how she must be starting to look like her moth—
The voice on the line answered. "Fred," said Daria, "get ahold of Overkill for me." She listened, then grimaced. "Ah, no. The other one. The first one."
While she was waiting on Fred, she popped on a Misfits/Stingers "Best Of" compilation on her computer. She leaned back in her chair, as the music welled up. The art display on the wall was fading from Nighthawks to Repin's Ivan the Terrible. She picked up the gun again, opened the cylinder, ejected the 9mm rounds already loaded, and pulled out the "special" replacements in the snakewood case.
A voice burbled on Spindoctor's headset. "Overkill," she nodded, absently. Slowly, carefully, she'd started loading the replacements into her weapon. "I have a proposition for you..."
The long cased Remington Maximums slipped readily into the waiting cylinder.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
Author's notes: Starviper's "Silver Serpent of Valor" mentioned above, there. Plus one or two more horrible crossover character references. Anyone spot 'em? :)
Another funny thing—when I originally started planning this story, although all the dates are the same, it was set a year or so in the future. The schedule slipped so much that I actually ended up writing a section of the above on the exact date when events were supposed to be taking place, at about the same hour, too. That was an...unusual feeling, I have to say.
Daria and associated characters are © MTV networks; GI Joe and associated characters are © Hasbro; all other characters are the property of their respective owners.