War Stories - Settle In, Not Down

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War Stories :: OOC Talk :: Fan fiction :: Settle In, Not Down

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Topic: Settle In, Not Down (Read 170 times)

Del
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Joined: Feb 2006
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Settle In, Not Down
« Thread Started on Apr 8, 2006, 11:58am »

The bunk was hers now. She’d helped Lavena move her belongings to Quinn’s room with little talk or ceremony. The fiery little mechanic was obviously upset and trying to hide it, but that was Monty’s problem to deal with, not Del’s. She just tried to be as courteous about it as possible. Now there she was, finally alone in a room that, yet again, was just four walls and an unfamiliar smell to her. This was what she had wanted, though, the uncertainty, the brilliant random dice-roll of a traveler’s life.

Del opened up her rucksack and began unpacking its contents onto the bed. One stack for shirts, one for the two other suits she carried, one for various unmentionables. She looked around and found a thick wire stretched across the wall above the bunk. When Lavena had been in here, it had held a long strip of fabric to warm up the room. Del needed no such things to feel at home here. She had no desire to feel at home anywhere. It woul be a good place to hang clothes to dry.

From a side pocket sewn into the lining of her bag Del took a solid rectangular metal box as long as her hand from the base of the palm to the tip of the middle finger. It hinged open, revealing a tightly-rolled scroll of silk and a spray of white silk peach blossoms.

Peach trees were inefficient on planets that hadn’t been extensively terraformed, their relatively low output of fruit and the many years they took to reach maturity not worth the water they pulled up from the ground. Peaches could be found in tins all over the ‘verse, but they came from trees in the Core.

Del took a dull metal button out of the box and stuck it to the metal wall of her bunk two feet over a small shelf. She gingerly unrolled the scroll and latched the string at the top over the magnetic button, smoothing the hanging end down towards the shelf. The scroll was a handsome ink portrait of a distinguished-looking middle aged couple, the man steady with a dark moustache and neatly-trimmed sideburns, the woman a willowy sort who still bore a hint of the exotic beauty she’d been in her youth. The ink painter had caught the light in her eyes of some slight mischief.

Del closed the metal box and set it upside-down on the shelf, exposing a small hole bored into the metal. She placed the wire stem of the peach blossom in the hole so it stood up at an angle and the blossoms draped gracefully in front of the bottom edge of the portrait.

The bunk was full of little shelves and nooks, most of them built into what had been a bare, utilitarian space with extra ship materials. The bunk was built for two people but from the way it had been re-configured, only Vena had lived here for a long, long time. It made a slight frown crease Del’s lips. She hadn’t meant to invade life on this ship or to change anything permanently. She just wanted a hard-to-trace ship that needed the work and a few weeks of good company while she delivered all of Gerald Becker’s worldly goods to his only son.

Feeling around the unused bunk, Del found a little cavity about the size of a fist tucked between the bedframe and the metal of the bulkhead---very hard to reach without long, slender fingers. Perfect. She put her ear to the door for a moment to assure that no one was about to enter unannounced, then reached for her Barrister’s cloak on the bed. Hidden carefully in the luxurious lining were two felt pouches filled with sealed glass ampules of an oily, bright red liquid. One of the pouches also contained a glittering hypodermic needle, a long strip of silk webbing, and several dozen self-contained antiseptic swabs enriched with an anti-scarring agent. Both pouches were quickly and furtively hidden in the hard-to-reach spot.

Del then went about putting away her less needful belongings, finding spaces for her clothes, her toiletries, the handful of beat-up, honest to Buddha paper books she carried, her electronic law library cube. She turned towards the bed then paused and went back to the shelf to pick up the library device, an overgrown back sugar cube.

Del pressed her thumb to one of the sides, indistinguishable from the other 5 except to someone who’d been using the tiny machine for years. It performed a three-part scan of her thumb---first for her fingerprint, then for the microchip implanted deep within the flesh, then for a steady heartbeat. After all, anyone who’d try by force to crack an attorney’s records wasn’t above cutting off whatever part of her body triggered the cube.

“Voice activation on,” she said softly. “Hello, di di.”

That was a little joke only Del understood. She called her library cube “little brother” because it was helpful and tirelessly reliable unlike her actual younger brother, Gideon. Gid was a research neurosurgeon on Osiris and the only thing he had in common with Del’s minicomputer was that he was rather square and rigid. When she’d resigned at her law firm to come out to the Black, he’d tried to have her scanned for a brain tumor.

The black cube clicked twice and answered her in a smooth tenor voice, “Hello, Del. What would you like to know?”

“Voice journal, new entry.”

((Continued here: http://bdwarstories.proboards79.com/inde....read=1144518436 ))

« Last Edit: Apr 8, 2006, 12:48pm by Del »

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