He gripped the underside of her artificial arm and felt the ropey, synthetic muscle fibers stretching. The RealSkin was hot under his hand. Tig tried to forget the quasi-living coating over Horcheese’s artificial limbs had been originally designed for sex-dolls. The seam between it and the her own, human skin was almost imperceptible, even when the muscles contracted like they did now. He put his other hand, his left hand, on the back of her shoulder and felt the difference in the flesh. Genuine human skin never feels exactly like you’d expect it to, not predictable like the artificial stuff.
"After I release my arms, you’re both going to rotate counter clockwise," the Chief said, "Ready?"
"Yeah."
"No," Parker said.
"Here, we go." Her eyes rolled back in her head like some kind of ecstasy, and all the resistance that had kept her arm from rotating into hyper-extension now disappeared. He pulled up with his right hand and pushed down on her shoulder with his left while Horcheese’s closed lids fluttered and inside, pieces of her augmented skeleton moved to release the limb.
The Chief's arm detached in his hands along the seam he’d spotted between her new and old skin. The muscles underneath all went limp. He pulled the limb out on a line perpendicular to the seam. Both sides of the connection were synthetic materials, of course and on the inside, the bundles of fibers that had severed their connections in flat planes didn’t look like real muscle. Someone had thought to make them pink though. They could have chosen any color they wanted. At the core of the limb, where bone should have been, was a fat, titanium nub, a simple, physical connection with a single, half-flange. It was studded with micro-ports.
"Oh god," Parker said as Horcheese’s now-removed left arm contracted into a default position. Horcheese’s right arm did the same in Tig’s hands. It was strong. He couldn’t have stopped the arm from bending to an acute angle if he’d wanted to and he barely got his fingertips free from between the forearm and bicep.
Horcheese sounded like she was talking them through a workaround for the 151s. "The ports to the actual neural interface processors are located on the torso side of the connection. Same with the ones for the legs."
"And we’re going to rig all this into there?" Parker glanced at the web of control system conduits and concatenators around them, all pointing at the command chair. "Tig, are you sure they’ll translate such an obscure input?"
"I said I was sure."
"The neuro-interface input/output system is adaptive," Horcheese said. "It’s meant to be used with a variety of limbs and protocols. It doesn’t care what it gets or from what machine, it just translates it to something my brain can work with."
"Rare gear," he said. And he meant it as a compliment, but it didn’t feel like it landed as one. He took the left arm from Parker and put both the limbs in an empty case for a plasma cutter.
The places on her torso where the artificial limbs attached were pink ovals, lumpy with contracted fibers and at the center of it all was the titanium bone and the expected set of ports for the neural interface processors that did the fantastically complicated and nuanced task of translating between machine language and the language of the human neurological system.
"Gonna need some steady hands," Parker said, staring into the ports on the Chief’s left shoulder. It was easier for her than looking at the Chief's eyes right now.
Horcheese’s nostrils flared as she breathed deeply. Her chest rose and fell. One of her breasts fell to the side and she looked so knowingly helpless without her arms then, that Tig couldn’t look at her face either. He kept his eyes in the ports on her right shoulder.
"The ship can fly itself to a transit point on autopilot, but that’s about it. So I’ve slaved the control systems that the burnt out CDCS wouldn't handle and scripted them to operate on what you’re going to perceive as muscle impulses for your arms and legs. Reactor power up / down... right leg, capacitor charge and release... left leg. Your control will be limited... flaring the reactors, controlling the capacitor discharge, except, of course you’ll have a very fine degree of control over the NS191 particle emitters. That’ll be controlled through the pathways for your arms and hands. You should be able to coordinate them with particularly effective control."
"What’s that going to feel like?" she said.
"I’ve tried to make it as natural as possible for you so we can leverage the familiarity you had with your old arms and legs like your prosthetics do. Some of the feedback will be spoofed visual stuff, projected in front of you, but a lot of it will be scripted for haptic translation based on what you’re used to feeling and doing."
"How many ports again?"
He said, "Me and my partner have 184 total ports to rig," he said.
"That’s a lot of work. Stop yappin’ and get my legs off."
Three hours later, Chief Evelyn Horcheese sat strapped into the command chair with 184 control conduits fanning out from the interface ports at her shoulders and pelvis. Where the limbs should have been that reached out to her world there were only bundles of colored control conduits extending off into the web around her. It was impossible to say the Chief looked helpless now. Her limbs weren’t missing. Now, her body extended all the way to the reactors and super-capacitors and particle emitters that would open the transit and breach space. Chief Horcheese was the control system now. If he’d mapped the input right, then the ship would feel like part of her body.
He said, "I’m flipping the switches one set of systems at a time so you can...uh…"
"Quit hesitating. Hook me into the critical systems. Give me reactor control and let me get the feel of the capacitors and emitter systems." He tried to make it feel as natural as possible when he was scripting the feedback and he thought he’d done a good job, but he didn’t expect the reaction he got. The Chief's eyes shot open wide like he'd put some kind of fear into her. "It feels like I have arms and legs," she said. "Like I never lost them."
"I spoofed the neural feedback using your own signature motor impulse patterns from your artificials," he boasted before he saw the moisture in her eyes. It felt more real than the prosthetics, and he wasn't sure if she liked it. "I had to do it that way. We’re not just using your neural interface as a control nexus, but utilizing you as the control mechanism so we need to leverage the full, intuitive degree of control you’ve developed over your own limbs. This will be easier on you than any other way I can script it."
"Yeah, a lot easier," she said. Somehow, he could tell she was wiggling imaginary toes. "Feels just like the real thing." She shook her head and exhaled. "What the eff are you waiting for?"
"Right. Extend your feet." He gave her a moment to push outward with the limbs that currently existed only in her mind. "Feel that?" he said.
"Like…. like round stones under my feet. Big ones."
"Those are haptic representations of the four reactors. You’ll need to manage their output. To top off before discharge."
"They’re warm."
"That’s a spoofed sensory representation of how hot they’re running. They’ll burn your feet when they’re about to overload. Take your feet off them, and they’ll shut down. Press down, they’ll run harder. Go ahead and try it out. You’re still running through a simulator."
"The emitters," she said. "The capacitors. Hook ‘em up. Hook me in for real."
"Closed fist to hold the juice in the capacitors and open hand to release the energy. Easy. Your job is mostly timing and managing adjustments to the streams after the initial firing. It’ll feel like sand running through your fingers. Open them wide to allow more flow, squeeze down to stop it between your fingers and snuff the emitters. Micro adjustments for the NS191s demand finesse and that’s why you’ll be controlling those systems with your hands."
She said, "I’m going to need some practice."
An hour after the Chief's first, fumbling attempts to build up a capacitor charge off the reactors and fire the emitters, Burn came to Tipperary’s bridge to witness them test fire a live burst. Lightning played over Tipperary’s battered capacitor ring as the charge from the reactors built. Tig kept his face like stone waiting for it all to fail or for something unexpected to kill one of them. Then, Horcheese pulsed the emitters just five times each within an infinitesimal fraction of a second and collided five sets of three heavy nuclei streams moving close to light speed. The collisions happened right on target, within a margin of error on the subatomic level.
"That looked good," Timms said from the NAV console.
Burn nodded. "Is it going to be safe at full power when we breach space?"
"That’s a joke right?" Horcheese spoke from the center of a spider’s web. "I’ve got to collide hyper-accelerated particle streams a thousand meters from a ship I can now feel has four reactors on the brink of meltdown, leaky, seeping capacitors, and particle emitters that are a hell of a lot less precise than anyone knows. I swear, firing the NS191 emitters feels like trying to snap with numb fingers. And even if I do this perfectly, according to Timms, there’s a chance I might still blow myself up before I can breach space. Is it safe? Hell, no, it’s not safe."
Burn said, "Are you ready to do this?"
"Of course." Horcheese’s eyes looked up out the dome at the cloud layer waving above. "There’s still an invisible Squidy out there that wants to kill us, but if we waste any more time here, it won’t matter if we make it or not because Hardway and the convoy will be gone. Time is up. Timms already laid in coordinates for the Algol-Mizar transit."
Burn made for the hatch and almost kicked Rampone and Wambach as they came up.
Horcheese groaned, "Does everyone have to see me like this?"
Burn said, "Wrong direction, y'all. You’re riding in the salvage junk with me. Only ones that stay on Tipperary are Chief Horcheese and Lt. Timms."
"We’ve got to stay," Tig told her. "To make sure the interface and the control concatenators hold together. What if something needs to be fixed?"
"That’s right," Parker said.
"If the cherries are staying, we’re staying," Rampone said.
Horcheese looked like she was trying to stare him down with those milky opal eyes and it didn’t work. "Pick me an’ Wambach up and throw us off the ship if you want to be alone with the cherries. You know we ain’t gonna be that much safer on the junk anyway and at least here, we can do something."
The Chief petitioned Burn, but Burn shook her head. "He’s right." Before she exited out the hatch, she said, "I’ll let the Lancers know it’s time to hunt a Squidy."