Pirate Empress Snippet 4

So, I pooped myself out from scrubbing this morning, we've got company coming and staying for the funeral next week. Fun.
Anyway, I was checking my mail this morning and found an email from Rea, PE is in! So, I'm going to settle in, go through her edits, finish adding the TOC and stuff, then send it off to Goodlifeguide.

Oh, she got a kick out of it like everyone else.... grin.

On to the snippet!

Chapter 3

Doctor Nutell looked up to the flickering lights with a frown. Things were bad, he knew it, but he didn't know just how bad it was. He'd insisted all communications be cut when they had heard about the cyber-attack. That had protected them from the worst of the ravages of the attack but the information vacuum had been a problem.

Recently Major Eichmann had come around. The base was a black site, offline to the main network and therefore protected. Despite his entries the staff had managed to get some audio and video screens working. They had contradicted the intelligence officer's assertion that all was well.

Which hadn't helped with morale.

Half of the support staff had upped and quit. Some had deserted in the middle of the night, fearful of retaliation. He'd done his best to quell the panic. It was a daily process to sooth the staff. They knew that any panic would get to their subjects and that was a problem.

He checked on Doctor Milgram. The eugenics and brainwashing psychologist was one of the best in the business. Rumors of the fall of the department of Purity and Enlightenment had him on edge though. Not that the doctor was unprofessional enough to let it shade his work. He was gently guiding Mara as she in turn taught a class of the latest subjects.

Mara was a find but they had realized that Selkies were the real treasure. The blue skinned woman was the closest to human they had but she lacked the full innate gift that the other water dwellers had in piloting and navigation. That was why they had recently shifted focus off of her production and onto the selkie production line.

But, only after they'd made some tweaks to make the selkie less... abnormal and more human.

Most of the merfolk and picean production lines were run out since the recent shift. The last classes were in the simulators now. He'd thought that the piceans would have bred more like fish, with eggs and such but that hadn't been the case.

He frowned as he played with his lower lip.

His biggest problem was supplies. They were not immune to the problems outside. They had enough supplies for several more weeks before things got dire. He hoped the powers that be sorted out their troubles soon enough. He had a lot more work to do and it was very promising indeed.

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Mara kept herself from glancing at Doctor Milgram for support as she gently guided her class in piloting. They were really too young to do the job, but the doctors insisted that they could learn. And they were, but the kids resisted to some degree, they just didn't have the focus of older trainees. And some of the staff had recently come down harshly on them when they failed to be attentive.

She knew something was wrong, but no one was saying anything, least of all to someone like her.

She was no longer being drugged; a lot of the clouds had lifted. She'd remembered bits and pieces of her history, including the fact that Sydney and Anita had come with her from somewhere else.

They were some of the last; all of the menfolk had been reassigned to other duties. She had overheard Doctor Milgram as he had firmly told Sydney to mind her own business when she'd inquired about them. That was unlike the doctor too.

“Okay class, we're going to start the next sim. I want you to focus, swim as if your lives depended on it, because they very well could someday...”

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Doctor Milgram frowned pensively as he watched the class. He had done the tours of the various crèche. He didn't like that some of the staff had left. You didn't do that with patients. Some like Jane had hung in there though. When he'd asked her she'd just shrugged it off.

He didn't have anywhere else to go. He'd heard the rumors of the coup and Purity and Enlightenment getting gutted. He was hoping his time with Doctor Nutell would make him indispensable in his current occupation. Something told him that the doctor wouldn't hesitate to throw him to the wolves to save his own skin though.

Really, there was no place to run. Where would he go? What would he do? Wherever he went eventually II would find him. It didn't matter. For the moment, only the work did.

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Irma Algresi ran a hand through her tousled hair and then waved to frustrated clerk. “If it's gone just set it aside. We need to focus on what we can reconstruct,” she insisted.

The clerk sighed and then nodded, setting the folders aside.

She'd never understood why the Inspector General's office had insisted on paper backups of some documents. They'd been redundant and as a cost saving feature she'd pitched stopping the practice. She was now glad she'd been overruled. At the time she'd thought cynically that it had been because as an Assistant Deputy IG accountant she'd stepped on someone's toes. Probably the printer or someone who was making money warehousing all of the documents.

Now she was glad. To a degree.

By going back through the documents they'd been able to reconstruct some of the deleted files. Clean computers had been provided by the IT department, not as many as she'd requested, but a couple. She had a pair of techs working to rebuild their accounting files. It was a daunting task.

The weird thing was that one or two other government departments were calling on them for the data. Apparently, IG's insistence on a paper trail was the only way they could rebuild the records in some cases. She had every record double checked.

She was one of the few department heads to stay at her post. Really, it wasn't like she had anywhere to go. Her flat? When she went home she only saw bad news on the few channels still working. Rioting was happening everywhere. It was scary. At least her work had armed guards who had no intention of letting the chaos and self-immolation touch their offices. She'd taken to camping out in her office on the battered couch whenever the reports of the rioting said they were near.

She hoped someone did something soon. For the moment all she could do was focus on her little world and try to bring order to chaos.

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