Nibs Wirewhistle's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Nibs Wirewhistle had two hours until dawn, and the storm outside had turned Roothaven's message exchange into a snarled mess. The big display above his station scrolled a list of undelivered calls so long the bottom entries kept slipping off. Nibs was orange, small, and running on three nights of bad sleep. Last Tuesday he had patched a merchant's call to the wrong district, and he could still feel Mrs. Fentwick's look from the records hall the next morning. If he cleared this backlog before the exchange master arrived, the head operator title was still possible. If he didn't, the complaints would bury him. He plugged, pulled, and rerouted as fast as his hands allowed. Halfway through a farmer's line to the grain office, he heard the hum shift. Three seconds later the line dropped, right on schedule with the small warning only he could hear. He swore and jacked into a backup jack before the caller noticed. But the board kept adding faster than he cleared. Then he looked at the tangle of cables feeding the main relay tower and had an idea that would either save him or finish him. In a crate under the desk lived a small clan of shaggy, puppet-limbed critters the night crew fed scraps to. They chewed anything with insulation. Nibs pried the crate open and tipped it toward the bundle of storm-fried lines running to the outer tower. "Go on," he whispered. "The frayed ones. Just the frayed ones." The fuzzy little goblins swarmed the cables. A purple one chewed through a scorched wire; a green one snapped a sparking junction clean off. Each broken line forced the board to reroute through the healthy trunks, and the backlog started shrinking. Nibs worked the panel with both hands, catching every rerouted call, hearing each drop three seconds early and saving it. The scrolling list shortened. Then it shortened again. When the last entry cleared, the sky outside was still dark, and Nibs sat shaking in his chair with fur tufts stuck to his sleeves. He had cleared the backlog. He had also chewed apart a quarter of the exchange's outer cabling with unauthorized animals, and the morning shift, and Mrs. Fentwick, would walk in to find the evidence in less than an hour.