Cohost writing prompt: @make-up-a-starship-pilot — Starship pilot who is staring down the bill for missile replenishment and regretting every choice that got them here
Uma Henley walks across the dusty spaceport, long coat flapping, and into the port office. "Hey, Cal," she says. "Lifting off in a minute; how much do I owe you for the water refill?"
The Portmaster scratches under his chin. "Well," he says, hesitant. "Henley — something I gotta ask. Don't go off half-cocked, now, okay? New batch of wiregrams came through. I gotta ask."
"Ask what?"
He looks supremely uncomfortable. "Y'ever heard the name Rebecca Haight-Slough?"
She looks at him, expression ratcheting shut. He raises his hands a little.
"What's the bounty, now?" she says.
"Ten mil," he says. "Ten mil."
She moves with slow deliberation, pulling out a packet of smokes, tapping one into her hand, placing it between her lips. "You know how that ten million bounty happened?" she says.
"I don't know shit," he says, keeping his hands where she can see them, and she sniffs, twitches something that nearly resembles a grin.
"So once upon a time, the Navy start to outsource a load of maintenance," she says. "And this newly-minted, bright-and-fresh little technician with a newly-minted, fresh-and-bright engineering degree turns up for her first day on the job. They point her at a controller cabinet on a Navy missile boat and go, 'You'll have to wait for the Rayguntheon diagnostic unit we've just requisitioned for you. Two days,' and little Rebecca Haight-Slough goes, 'Fuck that noise, fellas, everyone knows they rebadge those DXUs from the chipset manufacturers, I've got one right here!' and she plugs it in and hits SCAN."
Henley takes the unlit smoke from her mouth and taps it on the table a couple of times, eyes far away, then puts it back.
"The thing about those rebadged DXUs," she says, "is that apart from rebadging them and marking them up ten times, they also flashed them with custom firmware that patched out the SCAN function. Because Rayguntheon cut enough corners it practically reinvented the wheel by accident; the chipsets in all the control boxes were knockoffs, and the knockoffs were, technical term, buggy as shit. So the scan sets them all in DX mode and starts querying them, which they don't even implement, and everything starts going Undefined Behaviour."
"So this is about a busted Navy ship?"
"This," Henley says coolly, "is about a missile fire control box initiating an unsanctioned launch event."
"It launched a missile?"
"It did not," Henley says, "launch a missile. It launched all the missiles."
Cal's face screws up, trying to imagine. "Dang," he whispers.
"The missile boat was in a newly-opened state-of-the-art Naval drydock facility," Henley says. "For'ard launchers pointed straight at the broad side of a ship of the line. Couple minutes later, the twelve billion's worth of missiles that just popped off are a fucking drop in the bucket of the itemised fucking disaster. Rebecca Haight-Slough peed herself a bit." She pats her pockets for a lighter. "Or that's what I heard. And then she wrote a report, real quick, that said 'the only way this could possibly have happened is if Rayguntheon are using counterfeit chipsets in everything instead of the true blue Interstellar Business Monopoly bill of materials they're explicitly charging the Navy for, and that means they're also exposing the Navy to great honking supply chain attacks by foreign powers'."
"You can't light that in here," Cal croaks. She holds the lighter and narrows her eyes.
"I haven't," she says. "Anyway, what happened next was, probably, something like: the Navy phoned Robert Military-Industrial Complex and said hey, are you maybe embezzling a shit-ton of our money? And Robert Military-Industrial Complex said, is that any way to talk to a golf buddy? What sounds more likely, that, or one lone technician sabotaged your little shooty-boat because she's a sinister bleeding-heart socialist spy? And the Navy said: glad we solved that, thanks Bob!"
Henley moves, then, and leans over the counter, picks up the wiregram and holds up the shitty printed picture alongside her face.
"Now, if you think that looks a mite like me, Cal," she says, "you might want to consider that Rebecca Haight-Slough woulda been on the run from that for eleven years by now. You never know what kinda unspeakable violence and paranoia she'd be capable of."
"I never thought shit!" Cal whines.
"In your life, probably," Henley agrees, and digs out a grubby fold of cash, peels a few plastic sheets off and slaps them on the counter. "For the water," she says, pivots on her heel, and stalks out into the dusty sun, wiregram still in hand.
"Thank you for not smokin'," Cal mutters after her receding back.