Third variation
....huh. Because I can't stop poking, I tried a fusion of the previous two ficbits - OC proper names, with human gendered pronouns (to reduce the reading difficulty).
Wow. I can honestly say I hate this version. Apparently my brain says "either up the alien ante and roll around in it, or leave well enough alone!" =P
I include it here for comparison, but yeah... gender normalizing it for human perspective really leaves something to be desired.
The message came in on the mid-shift databurst, floated very properly on the deep register harmonics of somber mourning that had tinged all communication lines in the last half auhn. The layered polytonality that characterized all of the Oligarchy's official communiques made it fall sharp, however, the vibrations meshing in ways that shivered unpleasantly through Szovand's receptors and left ungrounded sour notes flickering beneath his armor plates.
He listened to it twice, once as he unpacked and methodically sorted through the burst, and again as he transferred the message to an uplink chit, multiple data streams routed with the ease of long practice even as the notes of that one particular message set up acrid dissonances that ground his mandible plates on edge. He was, he thought dimly, relieved that it had come in during his own shift and not that of a subordinate.
He would admit, privately, that he was dismayed that it had.
The databurst held a message for him as well, sealed not with the expected heavy triad of notes that signified the Custodians, but with the simple, pure murmur of his Eldest's personal tag and grouped under the portion of the burst reserved for personal messages. Normally he would have filed it for later - Szovand didn't make a habit of exercising his position as the premier communications officer onboard the Victory as an excuse to retrieve his own personal messages any faster than the general databurst was disseminated to the rest of the crew. In the wake trail of the first message, however, he copied it to his private banks and scrubbed the original, even as he pinged the helm board with the glyphs for urgent and duty, underscored with the chord notation of the Oligarchy.
To his left, Diomv jerked sharply upright, readout clouded oculars darting curiously towards Szovand for a moment. The ping that came back was affirmative, with the clear bell tone of systems awaiting contact. Szovand wasted no time in disconnecting his own uplinks, smoothly transferring the comm board controls to the other station. His hands and systems, which had been through the motions countless times, performed the necessary commands by rote as he turned a tiny few subroutines inward, pulling up the message that had been addressed to him.
It was, on the surface, nothing more than a lone note's loving and slightly plaintive message to their distant harmonic array, expressing an acceptable degree of loneliness and fond feelings for the rest of the array kin. There was a brief and carefully neutral bit - even personal communications weren't entirely secure - about Cha'are's current assignment with Science Magnate Xhais, reminding Szovand, as though he were likely to forget, that the next duty rotation wasn't for two keracycles and that Cha'are wouldn't be able to secure leave until then.
There was nothing at all remarkable about it except for the timing and the fact that Szovand knew his Eldest hated stating the obvious and there was nothing else in the missive except the obvious. As he disconnected the ship hardline, palming the uplink chit and pushing himself away from his station, he spared the attention to rip the message apart to its component binary and ran the result simultaneously through six separate encryption keys that his harmonic array typically used amongst themselves.
In the time it took him to cross the Victory's command center five of the encryption keys came up blank, leaving only a short, blunt note in the deepest key his array used, something that only Szovand or one of Cha'are's array sibs could have read.
Chamber and Oligarchy preemptive. Records compromised; null data.
Underscoring it, like an admission of failure, was the tonal notation for sincere apology. Szovand ventilated deeply through his core, absorbing the soothing, unceasing ship song through the deck plating beneath his feet, and took the last steps to his target.
The Dynate didn't look up from the control board he was bent over, his oculars over bright with data from the softline channel he was conversing on, but Szovand had no doubt his own presence had been tracked since he had deviated from his duty station. He waited, patiently at attention, until the Dynate signed off, glancing up with a low ventilation that rang on an inquiry note. "Yes, Specialist?"
Szovand's rank was, very properly, undertoned with the notation of the communication division and his own grade; delivered in the deep harmonics of the Dynate's voice it never failed to send small shivers through his frame, forcing him just a little more upright, a little more to attention. He welcomed it right then, as it overwrote the sour feel of his duty. "Message received," he informed his superior, extending the chit.
The Dynate said nothing, only straightened and accepted the uplink. Szovand could tell the moment the other mech accessed it; there was nothing readily apparent from even one step further away, but Szovand was close enough to see the telltale flicker of the other's oculars. The Dynate betrayed nothing, neither in posture or face, but for half a brief klik something echoed through the narrowband of their adjacent energy fields, arcing from the Dynate to Szovand. It was a wild, raw, overlapping of notes, an angry and injured discordant crash that only barely trembled through the space between them but was still strong enough to vibrate painfully into Szovand's core before his superior ruthlessly cut it off. The silence that followed was unnaturally thick with the dampened sensation of suppression.
Szovand, glad of the facial shield and vocal regulator that his position required of him and which hid nearly all of his own reactions, stood his ground and waited. He watched as the Dynate played the message through once more without an iota of reaction, and continued to watch as one of the Godhead leaders of their people crushed the uplink chit between two sharp taloned fingertips, grinding it to carbon dust in the time it took Szovand to cycle one ventilation. When he spoke, the Dynate's voice was steady, without a trace of those first awful notes in the even tone. "Are there any other communications?"
"Negative," Szovand replied. The regulator, designed to keep a communication specialist's vocalizations cleanly clear of their own inadvertent intonations in the relays didn't allow him to vary his pitch by more than half a note, but he dropped the last part of the word as low as he could to convey the unspoken - nothing of use. Nothing that could be reported from null data, but the very fact that there was no data bore its own message.
The Dynate exhaled a neutral note, dismissing the specialist with a sharp flick of his talons. "Return to your station," he said aloud. "Send a reply ahead - message received and acknowledged." Szovand retreated with a deep bow but the Dynate had already turned away, voice echoing across the command deck in the sharp, implacable notes of the impending battlefield. "Diomv, take us to the nearest bridge with a connection to Zhyrtri, full speed. We're needed at home."
Crossposted from Dreamwidth. ::
bunnies - Feed a bunny
Wow. I can honestly say I hate this version. Apparently my brain says "either up the alien ante and roll around in it, or leave well enough alone!" =P
I include it here for comparison, but yeah... gender normalizing it for human perspective really leaves something to be desired.
The message came in on the mid-shift databurst, floated very properly on the deep register harmonics of somber mourning that had tinged all communication lines in the last half auhn. The layered polytonality that characterized all of the Oligarchy's official communiques made it fall sharp, however, the vibrations meshing in ways that shivered unpleasantly through Szovand's receptors and left ungrounded sour notes flickering beneath his armor plates.
He listened to it twice, once as he unpacked and methodically sorted through the burst, and again as he transferred the message to an uplink chit, multiple data streams routed with the ease of long practice even as the notes of that one particular message set up acrid dissonances that ground his mandible plates on edge. He was, he thought dimly, relieved that it had come in during his own shift and not that of a subordinate.
He would admit, privately, that he was dismayed that it had.
The databurst held a message for him as well, sealed not with the expected heavy triad of notes that signified the Custodians, but with the simple, pure murmur of his Eldest's personal tag and grouped under the portion of the burst reserved for personal messages. Normally he would have filed it for later - Szovand didn't make a habit of exercising his position as the premier communications officer onboard the Victory as an excuse to retrieve his own personal messages any faster than the general databurst was disseminated to the rest of the crew. In the wake trail of the first message, however, he copied it to his private banks and scrubbed the original, even as he pinged the helm board with the glyphs for urgent and duty, underscored with the chord notation of the Oligarchy.
To his left, Diomv jerked sharply upright, readout clouded oculars darting curiously towards Szovand for a moment. The ping that came back was affirmative, with the clear bell tone of systems awaiting contact. Szovand wasted no time in disconnecting his own uplinks, smoothly transferring the comm board controls to the other station. His hands and systems, which had been through the motions countless times, performed the necessary commands by rote as he turned a tiny few subroutines inward, pulling up the message that had been addressed to him.
It was, on the surface, nothing more than a lone note's loving and slightly plaintive message to their distant harmonic array, expressing an acceptable degree of loneliness and fond feelings for the rest of the array kin. There was a brief and carefully neutral bit - even personal communications weren't entirely secure - about Cha'are's current assignment with Science Magnate Xhais, reminding Szovand, as though he were likely to forget, that the next duty rotation wasn't for two keracycles and that Cha'are wouldn't be able to secure leave until then.
There was nothing at all remarkable about it except for the timing and the fact that Szovand knew his Eldest hated stating the obvious and there was nothing else in the missive except the obvious. As he disconnected the ship hardline, palming the uplink chit and pushing himself away from his station, he spared the attention to rip the message apart to its component binary and ran the result simultaneously through six separate encryption keys that his harmonic array typically used amongst themselves.
In the time it took him to cross the Victory's command center five of the encryption keys came up blank, leaving only a short, blunt note in the deepest key his array used, something that only Szovand or one of Cha'are's array sibs could have read.
Chamber and Oligarchy preemptive. Records compromised; null data.
Underscoring it, like an admission of failure, was the tonal notation for sincere apology. Szovand ventilated deeply through his core, absorbing the soothing, unceasing ship song through the deck plating beneath his feet, and took the last steps to his target.
The Dynate didn't look up from the control board he was bent over, his oculars over bright with data from the softline channel he was conversing on, but Szovand had no doubt his own presence had been tracked since he had deviated from his duty station. He waited, patiently at attention, until the Dynate signed off, glancing up with a low ventilation that rang on an inquiry note. "Yes, Specialist?"
Szovand's rank was, very properly, undertoned with the notation of the communication division and his own grade; delivered in the deep harmonics of the Dynate's voice it never failed to send small shivers through his frame, forcing him just a little more upright, a little more to attention. He welcomed it right then, as it overwrote the sour feel of his duty. "Message received," he informed his superior, extending the chit.
The Dynate said nothing, only straightened and accepted the uplink. Szovand could tell the moment the other mech accessed it; there was nothing readily apparent from even one step further away, but Szovand was close enough to see the telltale flicker of the other's oculars. The Dynate betrayed nothing, neither in posture or face, but for half a brief klik something echoed through the narrowband of their adjacent energy fields, arcing from the Dynate to Szovand. It was a wild, raw, overlapping of notes, an angry and injured discordant crash that only barely trembled through the space between them but was still strong enough to vibrate painfully into Szovand's core before his superior ruthlessly cut it off. The silence that followed was unnaturally thick with the dampened sensation of suppression.
Szovand, glad of the facial shield and vocal regulator that his position required of him and which hid nearly all of his own reactions, stood his ground and waited. He watched as the Dynate played the message through once more without an iota of reaction, and continued to watch as one of the Godhead leaders of their people crushed the uplink chit between two sharp taloned fingertips, grinding it to carbon dust in the time it took Szovand to cycle one ventilation. When he spoke, the Dynate's voice was steady, without a trace of those first awful notes in the even tone. "Are there any other communications?"
"Negative," Szovand replied. The regulator, designed to keep a communication specialist's vocalizations cleanly clear of their own inadvertent intonations in the relays didn't allow him to vary his pitch by more than half a note, but he dropped the last part of the word as low as he could to convey the unspoken - nothing of use. Nothing that could be reported from null data, but the very fact that there was no data bore its own message.
The Dynate exhaled a neutral note, dismissing the specialist with a sharp flick of his talons. "Return to your station," he said aloud. "Send a reply ahead - message received and acknowledged." Szovand retreated with a deep bow but the Dynate had already turned away, voice echoing across the command deck in the sharp, implacable notes of the impending battlefield. "Diomv, take us to the nearest bridge with a connection to Zhyrtri, full speed. We're needed at home."
Crossposted from Dreamwidth. ::
bunnies - Feed a bunny