PrincessColumbia

  “Talk to me, Diane, what’s going on?”

  “One of your hacking tools, it failed. Does your script autostop on a failure?”

  “Of course,” he almost scoffed, “Which one?”

  Diane squinted at the line on the HUD, “…really?!” she blurted, “PenMeDaddy-underscore-vee-dot-sixty-nine?!”

  Russe’s teenage-boy-grade snickering came over the comms, “I didn’t name the thing,” he sobered up quickly, “But yeah, that’s one of the key ones. It takes advantage of a security hole that…well, if it got patched since I stayed aboard your station and the tool hasn’t been updated, we may not be getting through the airlock.”

  Diane smmed her left fist into the airlock sleeve next to the panel access. Unfortunately, the vacuum of space meant she only felt the impact, she didn’t hear what surely would have been a satisfying cng of gauntlet on metal. “Sh~…f~…Godd~…”

  Russe snickered, the traitor, “Oh, so you do know the words, you just don’t want to say them.”

  She growled but didn’t otherwise reply directly. Instead, she asked, “So this is probably it, right? Getting through this line gets us through the airlock?”

  “Mmmmeh,” temporized the tech, “Most likely, if all the others leading up to that one cleared. There’s only three more tools after that one and those are mostly cleanup. You know, nuke the logs, patch the firewall behind you, that kind of thing.”

  “Right, leave no trace…”

  He surprised her by chuckling, “Diane!” he made an almost scandalized sound, “Did a certain Morvuck dabble in hacking in her misspent youth?”

  She grinned slyly and issued the timeless response that would confirm without answering, “Come back with a warrant.”

  He cackled as she thought to herself, I might be able to dig around and figure something out…there’s probably also a manual override that…

  At the thought of an override her mind went to the st time she’d ‘overridden’ the computer that bypassed all permissions entirely. …okay, that’s dumb. I’m not singing to a lock!

  As she pondered, she heard Russe commenting on whatever actions he was taking on his end of the call, “…remote in…no, too much g, no access until penme breaks in…” he was muttering, apparently thinking along the same lines Diane was, “…physical access? Computer, do we have records for this type of airlock?”

  She heard the computer reply, “Searching…” Yeah, that’s gonna go so fast, she thought sarcastically. Even assuming some form of uniformity to door design, this was a sver’s station. The likelihood that the manual access was in a standard location, if it worked at all, was ughably small.

  Okay, well, the Commander’s Ability is a legit game mechanic, no reason not to use it…if it will work the way I hope it does.

  Conclusion reached, she cast her mind to her library of music…

  …she thought about a singable song…

  …she told her memory to bring up ANY song she could sing…!

  It’s a phenomenon of the human brain (and non-human game race or not, her brain was human) that most of the time it operates even better than the average computer, even with all the advances in digital computing in the st two centuries. One of the things Diane had always maintained kept humans superior to their A.I. counterparts was the ability of the human mind to do its job better, frequently faster, more intuitively, and all around in a far superior fashion to the way purely digital brains operated.

  However, they had their problems, being subject to the foibles of being squishy gray matter influenced by environmental, genetic, and purely chemical factors over the span of generations. Diane may be above average for the general popution of the American Republic (you don’t craft your own anti-A.I. VR handgun from component apps and scripts without being able to think at fairly high levels), but even her grey matter was subject to the occasional hiccup where it simply…didn’t do as instructed.

  Whether it was because of the nutrient bance of her pod or the struggle of maintaining a hidden identity or the weird emotional fluxes she’d been experiencing, or the adrenaline rush she’d just experienced and was anticipating a renewed burst of once she got into the starbase…she was drawing a bnk. Her mind, normally capable of indexing a curation of hundreds of her favorite songs from her personal pylists was giving her a big fat goose egg.

  Except for one song.

  Which she refused to sing!

  It was bright, it was bouncy, it was singly inappropriate for wading through an army of svers with the intent on ending the abominable practice anywhere near her station with extreme prejudice.

  ‘The Great American Songbook’ my eye! she fussed, Not a single song more recent than the te 1900s, every damn one of them Broadway showtunes, and all of them horribly, cloyingly schmaltzy!

  In fairness, she hadn’t been dedicating any sort of serious time to finding music that she could break out into song at random times as needed to circumvent the normal operation of computers. It had been an interesting ability that she thought she might, maybe want to use so had dug up from the station’s archives the music library avaible at the time the original seed probes had been unched. Apparently, even back in the te 22nd century, according to the game devs, humanity decided to cram the entire digital library of all music ever with zero curation whatsoever. This meant Diane was stuck with randomly selecting tracks from the database or searching with keywords she came up with at random.

  Simply because she was American, she keyed in just that and was hopeful when she saw “The Great American Songbook.” Track after track frustrated her no end, all of them perfectly singable but none of them the kind of thing she’d want to take the fight to her enemies with.

  But there was one. It was an earworm. From the moment she first heard the first line it had been stuck in her head and the only time she hadn’t had it practically on loop thanks to her subconscious was when she was listening to other music.

  She didn’t like it.

  She didn’t want to have it memorized.

  She wanted desperately to come up with a different song, any other song to try to sing.

  But only one song seemed to be willing to offer up lyrics for her use.

  She groaned, "...okay, Russe, I'm saying this in advance...shut up."

  "...rude, but wh...?" came the surprised reply, she didn’t let him finish.

  “When I get a brand-new hairdo,” she croaked, struggling to get the words out around her embarrassment.

  “What the...?” muttered Russe just loud enough to be picked up by the mic.

  “With my eyeshes all in curls,”

  “...what is she doing?!”

  “Ssh!” she snipped before continuing, “I float as the clouds...” he started snickering, “Russe, shut up! ...as air do...” Russe began to openly chortle, “I enjoy being a girl.”

  And Russe lost it, bellowing a clear belly ugh, “OH...MY GOD! Your Commander’s trick! That’s what you’re doing, right?”

  Rather than answer directly, she unched into the next verse. She now had her ‘singing legs’ under her (to mangle a metaphor) and began really putting some soul into it, “When friends say I’m cute and funny,” she could almost hear the big-band sound of the most recent version she could find in the database. Recorded in the early 21st century, the quality of the music and the voice of the singer were all around more enjoyable to her ear than any of the previous versions, “And my teeth aren’t teeth but pearls,”

  “I just p it up like honey,”

  “I enjoy being a girl.”

  Russe’s ughter died to an amazed chuckle as suddenly over the comms came the actual sound of brass instruments accompanied by big-band percussion, not just what her memory of the recording was supplying to her imagination, “I flip when a fellow sends me flowers,”

  “I drool over dresses made of ce,” a snarky trumpet pyed as a counterpoint to her lyrical line, its source precisely nowhere but the effect her ability was having on the comms.

  “I talk on the telephone for hours,” on Diane’s HUD, the red ‘X’ indicator next to ‘PenMeDaddy_v.69’ flipped to a green checkmark and the remaining tools started scrolling up with their own checkmarks indicating success.

  “With a pound and a half of cream upon my face!” the colr shook with the disengagement of locks and the door opened soundlessly.

  Grinning, Diane unplugged the cable and stepped inside the airlock. The music was still going, and the door wasn’t closing on its own, so Diane shrugged and kept singing, “I’m strictly a female female, and my future I hope will be,”

  Russe hadn’t stopped ughing, but by this time Diane was far too into the beat and rhythm of the performance to care. “In the home of a brave and free male who~o~o...” she added a little tremolo on the ‘who’ as the outer door finally started grinding closed as she tugged at the cord in her gauntlet to get it to retract.

  She gnced around, noting the inner door split down the middle instead of the entire door sliding into a pocket. She realized that she was completely vulnerable when the inner door opened should any of what she’d done so far have caught someone’s attention. She slung her shotgun off her back and stepped backward into the corner in time with the music, “Enjoys, being a guy, having a gi~i~i~irl...” she lifted her left foot and pressed it against the wall, the gravity lock engaging, “...Li~i~ike...” she repeated the action with her other foot and was now suspended above the floor and realized the station’s gravity had engaged in the airlock when the inner door had closed. “...Me!”

  As the big band music pyed over her headset, she pushed herself up the walls to squeeze (as much as a nearly seven-foot tall Morvuck could squeeze) into the upper corner of the small room. A couple of literal song beats ter, the inner door hissed open in time with the start of a new measure in the music and she realized she could hear the music coming from a source beside the earpiece she was wearing. The bouncy beats of the song’s bridge section amusingly thumped in time with the strobe of a red alert that strangely didn’t have the usual red alert kxon.

  As she suspected might happen, one of the station crew was on the other side of the airlock door, weapon held at the read and aiming...right where she would have been if she’d waited right in the middle of the space. He was wearing a helmet that only covered the top half of his face, so she couldn’t see his eyes as his jaw went sck, but she did note his head turned to see her in the corner and he started to raise his carbine in her direction...just before she blew half his neck and jaw off with a well-aimed shotgun bst.

  All at once the absurdity of the moment caught up with her and she started ughing. She disengaged her gravity boots and dropped surprisingly gracefully to the floor and started outright guffawing. Her ughing breaths were fogging up the inside of her helmet, so she pressed the patch on her shoulder to dismiss it and saw the dead guard...and lost it all over again, the big band music seeming to loop the bridge as though she were the main character of a movie.

  “Feeling better, I take it?” came Russe’s voice over her earpiece.

  “Yeah,” she confirmed, “I guess I am. Are you in their systems?”

  “Ee-yup!” he said with the enthusiasm of a gray hat hacker in his element.

  “Good, get me on their PA.”

  He snickered, “Even with the music?”

  “Oh,” she chuckled right back, “Especially with the music!”

  There was a couple moments pause, then a slight ducking to the volume of the music that she knew neither of them were controlling...at least not directly. She was definitely going to have to study this Commander’s Ability of hers. “Attention svers,” she began, her voice yered over the music and perfectly audible, “I’m in your base, killing your guys. You have one more opportunity to live through this. I will personally be visiting every location in this starbase that houses the sort of scum that traffics sentient beings and I will be removing them from the gactic census in a permanent and traumatic fashion. Your leaders in Ops have already chosen...poorly. You may choose out of their fate by disarming yourself and ying on the floor with your hands on your lower back. Any crew found in that position when I come to ventite any resistance will be arrested and detained until the bounty guild can be contacted. Any other crew that choose not to do this...well, I’m sure the survivors who returned with your ship can tell you what happens next. Commander Diane Somni’els out.”

  Russe wasn’t bothering to hold back his chuckling as he disengaged the station’s comms systems remotely from her headset, “You think they’ll surrender?”

  “Dunno,” smirked Diane as she racked the slide to chamber the next round into her shotgun, “Don’t care. Let’s do this.”

  She started walking in-sync with the beat, pulling out a couple of cartridges of her space-ready buckshot and sliding them into the magazine on the start of a measure and the down beat, “I flip when a fel sends me flowers,”

  A trio of station crew rounded the corner two intersections down with weapons drawn, she fired of a shot on each downbeat, the brass section of the music providing a colorful note over the percussion of the shotgun’s slide mechanism cycling as she pumped the successive rounds into the chamber after each shot, “I drool over dresses made of ce,”

  A more clever than previous crewmen leapt out of an alcove at her, reacting with the heightened reflexes that told her she’d slipped into her Zen Berserker mode she smmed the butt of the shotgun int the man’s chin twice, then swung the gun around to fire a round into his jaw at nearly point-bnk range as he fell, “I talk on the telephone for hours,”

  She broke into a loping run, chewing up the yards down the hall to where she could hear what sounded like a significant force scrambling to get to her, “With a pound and a half of cream upon my fa~a~a~ace!” She actually slid on her feet while positioning her body in a perfect hunter’s shooting pose and began snapping off rounds, not bothering with trick shots, just going for center mass and absolutely horizontally sawing into what appeared to be a patrol of fifteen security guards, indicated as such by the uniforms that appeared to match the security forces that she had confronted on the ship. A chest-high channel of red, blue, pink, and brown could be seen roughly forming as she swept the hallway from left to right with her shotgun before the crewmen dropped to the floor, dead or on their way there.

  Having expended the rounds in the magazine, she flipped the shotgun over her shoulder, the strap catching it and settling it against her back as she pulled her twinned pistols out of their holsters, “I’m strictly a female female,” she purred as she fired two shots each for the three men who were somewhat protected by their crewmate’s bodies.

  “And my future I hope will be,” she turned and shot two more crewmen coming down the hall, jogging in the direction they came from, letting her ‘instincts’ as she was singing guide her actions.

  She realized she was coming up to a rger open space in the station at the end of the current hall and started running in order to jump up on the railing overlooking what appeared to be an atrium of some sort that was three stories tall with her on the top level. As she sang, “In the home of a brave and free male who~o~o,” drawing the attention of every man on all three levels, she engaged her gravity boots and started walking down the safety panel.

  “Enjoy,” shots were flying in her direction as she causally ignored them, ducking and weaving like she were dancing to the brass section in the music, returning fire with her pistols.

  “Being a guy,” she reached the point where the wall terminated in the join with the ceiling on the level below where she started, she lept off the wall, disengaging the gravity boots and re-engaging them when her body flipped to guarantee she would nd feet first. As she dropped, she holstered her pistols and raised her P390 to her shoulder.

  She took aim at the rgest density of bad guys, “Having a gi~i~i~i~i~irl,” she crooned as she pulled the trigger and moving the carbine rifle in a sweep, treating the weapon as a bullet hose and her enemies as a row of pnts she was watering.

  She turned and pulled the trigger on another cluster, juking to the side and turning it into a dancing strafe where her feet were moving in a manner not unlike dancers in 1950s era musicals during the dance number. “Li~i~i~i~ike,” she sang as she pulled the trigger, expending the right-rail magazine.

  There was just enough of a gap between the final two words of the song that allowed her to reposition herself and turn to the lift that just ‘dinged’ across from her, allowing her to unload the entire left magazine at the cabin full of hostiles, “Me~e~e~e~e!”

  More shots rained down from above, a few fairly close but she just bounced back as she released her P390, letting it bounce against her torso as she drew her pistols again and took aim upward, “Like me~e~e~e~e!” Her trigger fingers couldn’t pull nearly as quickly as the fully automatic action of the P390, but she was no slouch at the fast-fire as proven by the railing on the third floor of the mezzanine shattering as though she were still using the carbine.

  Just as the final trailing note of her voice cut off and the final sting of brass punctuated the song, the railing gave out and two men plummeted from the top floor to the bottom, completely ungracefully, having apparently been leaning against the safety railing as Diane had apparently shredded enough of it that it was no longer structurally sound enough to hold their weight. They nded with a pair of almost sickening thuds.

  She could tell her Zen Berserker was still going, and she took advantage of it to rapidly shift about, looking for new threats.

  There were none. There was no signs of movement, no sounds of booted feet hammering on the floor to find a position she could be fired upon, not even the sounds of gasps of breath of a dying person. All she heard was the sounds of settling shrapnel and her own breathing.

  She backed her way to a doorway leading off the main level and scanned the inside of the room, confirming it was empty. Apparently some sort of small galley or mess, it was devoid of people and it looked like it hadn’t been used for food in some time. She ducked inside and positioned herself near the door before taking a deep breath and closing her eyes.

  It was several more calming breaths before she felt a sembnce of her normal bearing and was grateful that she wouldn’t have to ‘ride’ a Zen Berserker state to it either wearing off on its own or crashing like she’d read in the ability description.

  “Russe, you still there?” she asked as she holstered her pistols.

  “...goddamn, and you didn’t want to sing for us again!” she could hear the ughter in his voice.

  She rolled her eyes and disengaged first one empty magazine from her P390 and then the other, slipping them into her ammo bag and pulling out the pair she’d brought as spares, Going to need to use these wisely, she thought, I wasn’t expecting ‘bullet overture’ to be on the menu. I’ll need to bring a whole pack of ammo just for the ‘390 if I’m going to carry it on the regur just in case this happens again. “Well, don’t expect that one again. In fact, don’t tell anyone you heard me sing it. It’s demeaning.”

  “No promises!” he chirped, “But you’ve still got work ahead of you, it looks like they weren’t lying when they told you they’re new. Most of this starbase is vacant. If the sves weren’t so effectively corralled, they could easily overpower the guards 20-to-1.”

  Diane whistled, “So how many svers are left?” she asked as she clipped the two magazines on either side of her carbine.

  “Three decks worth, hard to get solid numbers because somebody kicked the hornet’s nest and killed a bunch of ‘em without keeping count.”

  Diane snickered as she pulled her shotgun around her torso and fished more rounds out of her ammo bag for it, “Does that include ops?”

  “Yes ma’am!” he said, the grin that must be on his face obvious in his tone.

  Diane racked the slide on the shotgun to put a ‘live’ round in the chamber and pushed one more round into the magazine before pushing away from the wall she was leaning against. “Well then,” she said, “I wonder what song I should finish perforating some svers to?”

  As she held her shotgun to the ready and side-stepped into the doorway, eyes open and scanning the space she’d turned into a charnel house, Russe offered, “How about a song about being a good submissive housewife?”

  She sighed as she made her way to one of the lifts that she hadn’t filled with dead bodies, “Russe, no. Just...no!”

  “How about the one where you find a good husband and settle down to a life of making him sandwiches?” he needled.

  “Goddamnit, Russe!” she growled as she stomped her way into the opening doors of the lift.

  “Hey, you said a naughty word! Let’s see if you can do it again...” he cackled, “Oh! I know, what about the cssical Earth favorite about settling down and being barefoot and pregnant for your breadwinning husband who makes all your decisions for you?”

  “RUSSE!” she roared as the lift doors closed.

  PrincessColumbia