FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Finding the Prian's Worlds proved to be harder than he'd expected. When he'd been inside the Valkyrie class ship's system it had contacted him, so he hadn't had to look. Now, he was discovering they handled things differently, and that was causing him some difficulties.

Every ship in space funneled their communications through a handful of communication nodes, and those nodes were identified as theirs to make finding them easier. Prian's Worlds didn't do that. The Prians took owning a *city* ship literally and gave each of their citizens a node, identified to them, instead of the ship.

Without having that he could use the names he knew to get in, The Lady Prian, Olirian Prian, or Baran Prian, but he was sure that if he did a search for them, plenty of programs would notice it. The wealthy too extra care in protecting themselves. The one other person he knew, which should still be there, Mary, wasn't coming up in any of his searches. A little surprising, but there was a chance that as a passenger, she wouldn't be given a communication node.

He was left have to look for the ship on the net the hard way. Using its physical position to map its position on the net. Physical space and Net space didn't match. Net space was configured around nodes and the larger, more powerful, nodes were markers by with the rest of the net aligned itself, while physical space used... well, reality.

But it was possible to map out a conversion algorithm using communication delays between nodes. It couldn't be done for the entirety of the net, it was too vast. As vast, if not vaster than the universe. He'd read stories of computers driven insane when given the task of creating an accurate map of the net in relation to real space.

He didn't need to map the whole of the net. He knew where the Priam's World had been only a few months ago, and a ship that size couldn't move fast. He also knew the physical location of a few hundred communication nodes close enough to serve his purpose. Corporations generated their own communications nodes because it gave them more control over what flowed through them, and during his time at Luminex he'd compiled a list of them as part of having to coerce those corporations.

He sent programs to all of them to analyze communication data for the last six months, time delays between nodes would tell him how far they were from the stationary node. Of course those delays couldn't be noticed by people. He'd read somewhere that the delay to communicate from one end of the universe to the other was under a picosecond. It was why he had programs doing that.

He had them look for large clusters of communications. They'd find a lot of them, each city on each planet would register as a cluster, but while planets did move in space, in relation to a ship they did so at a crawl. He had them eliminate the planets and he would be left with only--uh, he had twelve clusters.

There were twelve ships out there the size of cities. Who were those people? Or rather, how was it that he'd never heard of them before?

Fortunately they were far apart from one another, and only one had been to the rendez-vous location to retrieve Baran. Why send a shuttle when you can bring your entire city with you?

He entered the ship's system without sending his usual volley of programs. Golly had pointed out how he tended to always send the same programs, and he'd been in this system before. He hadn't tripped any alarms then, but they would have noticed his passage in the interim.

He was in a message center belonging to Harim Malawat. He had a dozen messages waiting from prospective wives. He sheathed himself in camouflage and moved about the system, looking for any of his code. This system was large, so he limited his exploration to the parts he'd been to before. None of his code remained. They had a good coercionist.

He fought the urge to talk. He didn't want to engage the system, he wanted to slip in, do what he wanted, and slip out. He found the directory and was surprised not to find Mary there either. She had been here, hadn't she?

He navigated his way to the records and located those from when they brought in the escape pod she and Baran had been on. Baran had been brought on board, and the system had been updated to reflect that. Mary was escorted out of the pod and the system identified her was 'Mary, prisoner 5326.'

Okay, he hadn't expected that. He'd thought Lady Prian would be grateful for Mary's part in bringing her brother back, give her something of a reward and grant her passage to where ever she wanted to go. He hadn't expected her to pull a corporate move on Mary and take advantage of the fact that she was in a bad situation to--what? Corporations would for her to work for them, but what could a city ship need with a biochemist?

Well, only one way to find out. Now that he knew how the ship identified her it was easy to locate her, and he immediately found out why he hadn't found her on the net. She didn't have access to that level of communication. She was restricted to internal comms. He routed his communication through four other households on the ship before the external one registered. Normally he'd go for a large number of them, to make tracing him difficult, but here he preferred going for something more discreet.

He pinged the comm in the room she was in. Then pinged it again when she didn't answer.

"I've told you before," she growled. "I'm working on it and going to be ready whenever I'm done."

"Hi?" He accessed the room's camera. She was in front of a console. He accessed that, but he couldn't work out what she was doing.

She sighed. "What can I do for you?" she sounded resigned.

"It's Alex."

"Alright, Alex, what can I do for you?"

He set programs to monitor his surroundings. This might not be as quick as he'd expected.

"Mary, it's Alex. I was on Baran's ship. Me and Tristan were exposed to the virus, you made the cure."

"You son of a bitch! It's your fault I'm stuck here. You made it sound like I'd be able to get back to my life after these people got Baran back."

Alex bit down on the apology. Yes, he was sorry things hadn't worked out, but that was giving him leverage.

"I didn't know they would do that," was all he said.

"Right, you expect me to believe that you didn't tell them to chain me to a workstation and make them drugs and medications and whatever else they wanted. How much did they pay you for my life?"

"I take it you want out?" he felt bad for her, horrible. She'd been kidnapped by Baran because she'd copied the virus he wanted to her memory buffer. And then she'd been held prisoner by his family after that.

"What do you think? I just being here, working all the time on stuff they want. Without ever being able to leave these chambers."

"In that case, I have a proposition for you." A program sent a warning. Sentries were approaching. She shifted position and created a new link of households.

"--and if you think I'm going to trust you after you did this to me."

"I see," he said, not even bothering to work out what she'd said while he'd been distracted. "Then you aren't interested in leaving?" She was silent and he glanced at his programs. All quiet here.

"What do you need?"

"I need a medic."

She scoffed. "Really? What none of those merc medics want to work with you and your boyfriend? Don't they trust you?"

"I didn't ask any of them yet." He buried the pain he felt as the mention of Tristan. Was he okay? "You're the first one I thought of."

"Why?"

"Because I know you more than any of them."

"We barely talked for a few minutes."

"Which is more than I've talked with them. And it seems to me that by helping me, you'd be helping yourself."

"You set this up. I just know it. You told them to hold me so you'd be able to get me to agree to this."

He forced his voice to stay neutral. To act like he didn't particularly care about this conversation. "I didn't know *this* was going to happen. I didn't know our home would be destroyed and Tristan would be kidnapped. I'm putting together a team to rescue him and I thought of you as our medic. If you aren't interested, I'll find someone else. Like you said, there are plenty of mercs with medical training."

"What do I get out of it? You going to put into another cage for when you need me again?"

"I didn't put you in this one. It was all the Prians' doing."

"Sure," she said sarcastically, "what do I get if I help you?"

"You get to leave that ship."

"What else?"

"Transport to where you want."

She was silent. "I want a new identity. A clean one."

"Alright."

"Really? Just like that?"

"What?"

"I expected you to drive a harder bargain."

"I want you to help me, why would I argue about things I can easily give you?" Two of his programs warned him of approaching sentries. "Mary--" no three, now four of them. "--I've got to disconnect, they've noticed my presence. It'll take a few months to reach you, just sit tight until then."

He erased his programs and disconnected. He didn't breathe easy until he'd done a full scan of his computer. If his program had missed one of the sentry and they made it onto here...but no, everything was clear.

Mary had been the last one he'd needed. Now all that was left to do was get them to talk to one another so he could put out the unexpected fires before they were all on the same ship.