The Privateers

And where the hell was Biggles, when you needed him last Saturday

Virgil poked his head into the door leading to the Silk Road's cockpit; this was a civilian freighter, so by all rights, he should have expected anything. What he was not expecting was an array of equipment that was at least three centuries old, if not more. The pilot and co-pilot's seats were covered over with brightly colored alpaca wool in a dizzying array of colors. In front of them, their controls were a pair of bamboo swagger-sticks coming out of the floor, polished and capped with metal thimbles, stamped with an insignia that Heidegger did not recognize, but bore a crown, wings, and the initials "RFC."

The control consoles were a pair of old keyboards; these, Virgil did recognize. They had the look of buckling-spring mechanical models, black caps with centered divots on top, legends so worn that it was amazing they were still readable. The one on the right, in the main pilot's station, was so well-used that the space bar was developing a small hole in the center, from decades upon centuries of skin oils rubbing it down. He wondered why they'd still be typing so much, when he observed the central monitor, a big, thick cathode tube - at least 21 inches, diagonally - that was emitting a faint high-pitched whine, and displaying the text, marcus@silkroad ~ $_. All of this was set into a dashboard that looked like it was made of mahogany, or some expensive dark wood. It couldn't be real wood, could it? He almost didn't want to touch anything.

"Where's your radar?" Virgil asked, feeling like his Coalition Navy uniform was too modern to be here.

The pilot, a tall man in a heavily waxed beard, wearing a pair of brass aviator goggles and a leather flight jacket covered in squadron patches of years gone by, stepped past him through the doorway and sat in one of the seats. He quietly tapped in radtty and pressed Enter, and now on the screen was a crude facsimile of a radar reading, comprised of an array of tiny hyphens, brackets, and upper case I's. A tiny rectangle, glowing bright amber, skimmed over the screen, row by row, about twice a second. Virgil watched as a letter X slowly jaunted across it, corresponding to another Coalition patrol fighter cruising by. Perhaps this met travel regulations. It would be difficult to parse in a fast-moving dogfight, but the whole point of his patrol group being here was so that a civilian freighter wouldn't need to fight.

"How about comms?"

"Not a problem," the pilot replied, pressing Ctrl+Alt+F2 and tapping out ttyscribe. The monitor read out a stream of unreadable debug strings and verbose logs, finally settling on, /dev/vidcomm1 - Live communication transcript ready. He snatched what looked like the microphone of a CB radio from the side of the monitor, keyed it up, and spoke - as the monitor accurately transcribed - "Hello, this is freelancer Biggles, seven four hotel victor, merchant freighter Silk Road."

"Neat trick. Didn't think you could do that with tech that old."

"You don't want to know how many adapters that needs," said Biggles. "Does this pass your inspection?"

"Honestly? This more than passes. This is damned impressive."

As Virgil stepped through the docking umbilical back into his own patrol ship, he wondered if this would have some far reaching effect on him. As a pilot of the Solar Liberty Coalition, everything was provided for him, the latest of the latest, and if it ever went wrong, it was replaced. He'd thought it was very wasteful. Especially if the old things could be made to work as well as the new things.

He couldn't help but be jealous. Maybe the next time shore leave came up, he'd go visit a junkyard. Those seats did look very comfortable. Gimlet would get a kick out of it, he was sure.