by Ramy Vance
Chapter Thirty-One
“I’ve looked over the captain’s notes.” Occy upturned his bag and shook it. Clusters of caramel corn drifted free, surrounding the boy’s slim figure in a cloud of sugar. He grinned and bounced forward, snapping at the candy like he was bobbing for apples. Nearby, Baby roused from her nest, sniffing curiously at the air.
“They all look right to me,” Occy said after swallowing. “We have about thirty-eight hours before the white hole becomes too unstable for us to navigate.” He lifted one long tentacle and used it to flick a drifting kernel of corn across the lounge. It bounced off the side of Sphynx’s head. Sphynx shook himself sharply, glaring.
Occy laughed and snapped up another piece of corn. “It’s great. Try it!” Then he looked back at the hull schematics displayed across the large screen in the lounge. “Since all the droids returned with adequate materials, it’ll take about twenty-two hours to make all the necessary hull repairs. Then another twelve hours to the wormhole, and we’ll make it through with time to spare.”
“Twelve hours?” Toner straightened. “It only took us an hour to get here from the hole.”
“Yes.” Occy frowned as he studied one of the comm speakers overhead, where the silent, invisible sixth crew member lurked. “I saw that.”
“What is it?” Jaeger asked. She didn’t like the troubled look on the boy’s face.
Occy chewed another lump of caramel corn and swallowed it before answering. “It was stupidly dangerous to make that trip so quickly with the hull breached like it is.”
“Virgil?” Jaeger turned a sharp look to the speaker. It was silly, but she’d come to think of the ever-present speakers as the AI’s face. She needed something to glare at, after all.
“Yes?” In the close quarters, the sound bounced intimately, making it feel like a mild-mannered investment banker was standing over Jaeger’s shoulder. Jaeger glanced from the electronic speaker to the troubled octopus-boy.
“Continue,” she demanded.
Virgil made a noise eerily close to a human sighing. Could AIs sigh? she wondered as the computer began to speak. “The ship survived transit as predicted.”
“Survived transit?” Toner’s eyebrows crept up his skull.
“Yes,” Virgil said irritably. “In case you hadn’t noticed, you’re on a dangerous mission into unknown territory. Every transit comes with associated risks.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Jaeger saw one of Occy’s tentacles stretch out behind him and curl, almost shyly, around a cabinet handle. It pulled the specially designed drawer used to keep things from floating away open and reached inside, rooting around for a slice of stored deep-dish pizza.
Occy himself frowned at the schematics, lips pursed as he listened to the evasive AI. “I double-checked the numbers,” the boy said. “The sub-light jump we made from the hole into the system would never have been a problem under normal circumstances, but with our hull as damaged as it is, the risk of critical collapse fell well outside of standard acceptable ranges.”
Occy drifted, bent over backward to frown upside-down at Jaeger. His tentacle waggled the pizza slice in front of his face like a supplicant making an offering. Occy opened his mouth to take an absent bite. “You didn’t know?”
Jaeger’s lips drew to a tight line as she stared at the silent speaker. She shook her head.
Occy’s frown deepened. For all his youthful appearance, there was the weight of vast understanding on his brow.
And pizza grease smeared across his chin.
“The AI copilot should have briefed you on all of the increased risks before making the trip,” he said.
Jaeger nodded silently, too furious to speak. Yes, her ship had made the journey intact. That wasn’t the point. The point was that she couldn’t trust her own damned AI to do its due diligence.
She would have to take a harder look at Virgil’s core coding, and soon.
Occy slurped down the last of his slice noisily. In the corner, Sphynx winced, ears twitching at the sound. The catman had curled itself in the corner and was silently watching the debriefing, big eyes round and twitching. Most of the tuna steak Jaeger offered him drifted rejected near Baby’s nest.
Baby lifted her face and sniffed. The water bear made a quiet gasping sound, and the tuna vanished into her face-hole, sucked in by Baby’s vacuum.
“Well,” Occy decided, “I can handle informing you of the transit risks now. It’ll take twelve hours to make it back to the wormhole safely.”
Jaeger nodded slowly. “That’s fine,” she murmured. “Now that the droids are running, most of the repair efforts are automated. That gives us about a day to calibrate the shields for wormhole travel and get some rest.”
“Mon Capitan!” Toner exclaimed. “She puts some R and R on the schedule?”
“You’ve been doing nothing but R and R since you punched a dinosaur to death,” she shot back.
Sphynx stirred in his corner. “What is my assignment?” he whispered.
Jaeger bit her lip. “We don’t know what we’re going to find on the other side of the wormhole. We’re going to need a whole slew of contingency plans for all different scenarios. Work out some basics and meet me in Ops in twelve hours to review and practice the maneuvers.” She had to admit that she didn’t entirely trust whatever plans the creature might produce, but it didn’t seem wise to allow Sphynx to idle around with nothing to do.
Lord only knew what kind of trouble Sphynx and Virgil could get into if the two were left alone for too long.
Jaeger stood on the curved floor of the command center, staring at the sealed access tunnel to the observation deck. She sighed. The encounter with the saucer had left the observation deck chock full of all kinds of weird and possibly dangerous radiation, enough to make the ship’s auto-sensors kick in and seal it off.
It was also on the bottom of the priority list for the repair droids.
“It’s too bad,” Toner offered, seeing her wistful stare. “It was a cool little hangout.”
“Yes.” Display screens covered large sections of the command center walls, and with a little finagling, Jaeger managed to pull up wide, sweeping feeds from the Osprey’s exterior visual sensors. All around them, the silent images of starfields slipped past, drowning the control center in deep, shifting shadows.
It felt fake to Jaeger, but it was better than staring at the inside of a tin can. It had the added benefit of distracting the ever-present security cameras.
The original soundtrack to Pirates of the Caribbean—the first one, of course—played softly in the background.
“God.” Toner sighed, sinking back into the harness like a makeshift hammock. “I wish I was stoned.”
“Me too,” Jaeger agreed without thinking. Then she gave a small laugh. “Do we do that?”
“Guess so.” Toner folded his arms behind his head, the light of shifting stars sliding across his cold blue eyes. His foot bobbed slowly in time with the music. “We must if we’re both jonesing for a hit.”
Jaeger had found a blank notebook and pencil in her quarters, on top of the stack of fleshed-out journals. She hadn’t yet worked up the courage to browse through her diaries. Not yet. They were waiting for her, there—what might be an entire autobiography, all spelled out in her unfamiliar handwriting.
She was terrified that she would pick up and read the diaries, and nothing would happen. They would feel like they had been written by a stranger, telling unfamiliar stories and confessing unfamiliar, meaningless thoughts.
Those journals were, in other words, a potential existential crisis waiting to happen, and she couldn’t risk having a personal meltdown right now. Not with the clock ticking. She tapped the pencil against paper, silently debating what to write.
Something rustled, and she looked up to see Toner fingering a scrap of old, crumpled paper. He caught her gaze and held it up. “This is your handwriting, right? The note telling me to meet you in the generator conduits?”
Jaeger nodded.
“Why?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re part of the command staff.” He sighed, putting the note away. “Your name on the door and everything. I was just some general crew member, though. Why were you passing me notes? And why on paper? Why not through the comms?”
Jaeger shook her head, irritated. “I don’t remember. You know that.”
Toner fixed her with an appraising look. It went on long enough to make Jaeger uncomfortable. She shifted her weight in her harness. “What?”
He flashed her a little grin, his teeth brilliant white in the shifting light. “I can think of only one reason why a member of the command staff wants to keep a tryst with a grunt on the DL.”
Jaeger slapped her pencil against her empty notebook and threw her head back with a sigh.
“Whaaaat?” Toner drawled, his grin widening.
“We were not involved. You tried to eat me.”
“You can’t hold that against me.”
“I absolutely can!”
“Fine.” Toner settled back in his harness, still chewing on that easy grin. “It’s almost like you got a problem with vampires.”
“If by problem, you mean a sense of self-preservation, then yes, Toner, I have a problem with vampires.”
“Racist.”
Jaeger gasped. She made furious, wordless gestures to her tightly curled dark hair and her bronze skin, which Toner pointedly ignored. “It’s okay.” He patted his pocket and the hand-written note inside it and dropped her a wink. “We all get curious for a taste of the exotic from time to time. Nothing to be ashamed of.”
Jaeger lifted her pencil and pressed the tip against the blank paper hard enough to make it snap. She gritted her teeth and scribbled out a rough message with the shattered stub. “I can think of another reason to send messages over paper instead of comms,” she growled.
Toner watched her scribbling with interest, his amorous ambitions fading.
I don’t trust Virgil to prioritize our best interests, Jaeger wrote, and I don’t trust that the comms channels are entirely private.
She thrust the notebook into Toner’s chest and watched him study the words.
Then he plucked the pencil out of her clenched fist and started to scrawl. She was not at all surprised that his handwriting was awful.
You think it’s listening in?
She nodded.
Toner considered this, then gave a conciliatory shrug.
I want to take a look at its core programming, Jaeger wrote, but I’m afraid it may try to protect itself from tampering or examination. I don’t want it to know we’re suspicious of it.
Toner tilted his head back, frowning as he considered the starfield around them. After a long pause, he took the pencil and wrote a single word that sent a shiver up Jaeger’s spine.
Mutiny?
She shook her head firmly. It was an open-ended question, and she didn’t know if he meant to imply that Virgil was planning a mutiny or…something else. Either way, it was not a word she wanted to think about, in any context, right now.
If Virgil is sabotaging our efforts, she wrote, we may not get back through the wormhole at all. I need to see its core programming. I need to know what is motivating it.
Toner stared at her handwriting, prim and neatly slanted, compared to his big spidery scrawl. Then he looked up at one of the silent comms speakers mounted overhead as if expecting to see a tiny robot body staring back at him, accusingly.
Finally, he sighed and tucked the notebook into his jumpsuit. He had found a spare somewhere, and for that she was glad—the action on the planet had shredded his last one, and she didn’t need to see him lurking around the ship in tatters like some haunted house monster.
He lifted his voice into that stage-trained boom and spoke as if for the benefit of an audience that might or might not be listening in. “How do we know we don’t have any?”
“Have any what?” Jaeger was confused.
Toner mimed toking off an invisible cigarette. “Bud! Blessed herb? Wacky tobaccy? Weed, Captain.” He met her disapproving stare, and his grin returned as he disentangled himself from his harness. “Where there are humans, there are drugs. I bet there’s a stash on this ship somewhere.”
Jager opened her mouth to curse his short attention span when he took her gently by the arm and turned her toward the access tunnel. “Let’s go find it.” Then he leaned forward and spoke into her ear, softly enough to make the hair on the back of her neck go rigid.
“Come on. There’s something I want to show you.”
Captain Percival LeBlanc.
Jaeger stared at the words on the door, waiting for them to make sense.
It didn’t happen.
Toner stood beside her in the far end of the command crew quarters, watching as she stared at the hatch, her lips moving wordlessly.
Hesitating, Jaeger reached forward and pressed her hand against the door’s access panel.
It didn’t activate.
Some of the strength drained out of Jaeger’s legs, and she slumped forward, supporting herself against the wall with a hiss. “Goddammit.”
She pressed her forehead to the wall and squeezed her eyes shut. She didn’t need this. She didn’t need this added heap of confusion on top of everything else. Her hands balled into fists.
“How long have you known?” she asked quietly.
Toner rubbed the back of his neck anxiously. “I…noticed that while you were on the observation deck doing star wizardry stuff.” When she took a long time to answer, he went on: “Maybe Percy was the captain before you. Well, of course, it was the captain before you, Captain, but I mean—maybe they hadn’t found the time to change the name on the plate, you know?”
“Maybe,” she forced herself to say. “Maybe until very recently, I was first mate. Then something happened, the crew abandoned ship, we fell through a wormhole, and I got a field promotion.”
She did not like the way the truth kept slipping beneath her every time she started to feel like she was finding her footing.
Her unread journals waited in her quarters.
Her quarters that were far too small to belong to a captain.
She also understood why Toner had wanted to show her this. If she was only very recently made captain, then she might not have full captain’s privileges in the system. She might not even be able to access Virgil’s core programming. If Virgil realized that her authority wasn’t as absolute as they had assumed, a power struggle might turn into an all-out power war.
Either way, there should be access code records and privileged files in the captain’s quarters.
She rubbed her temples with a sigh and slumped to her knees beside the access panel. For comfort’s sake, she had taken off her utility belt. Now she held a hand out to Toner. “Multitool.”
Toner handed her his, and she got to work prying off the access panel.
Once again, she found herself hacking through doors.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The ship’s security system should have been up Seeker’s ass with a microscope the moment he parked his boat in one of the docking cradles in Tribe Six’s port wing fighter bay. It had been luck that their shuttle hadn’t docked near where he was hiding.
Luck…or something else was going on.
Either way, Seeker had docked in one of the many, many empty cradles far enough away from anyone else that he felt secure enough to take a nap.
He’d need to be in fighting shape if he was going to explore this derelict boat and spy on her inept skeleton crew.
It was a good thing he had infiltrated Tribe Six when he did because shortly after he closed the fighter bay door behind him, the ship jumped into sub-light speed. He would never have been able to keep up with her on his own.
That had been several hours ago. He had left his fighter in standby mode, ready to flee at a moment’s notice in the unguarded bay and gone to ground in the guts of the port wing.
Tribe Six was unnatur
ally quiet. The long, empty, lifeless corridors confirmed his suspicion that she was running on an impossibly thin skeleton crew and virtually abandoned. The automatic lighting flickered on around him and faded back to darkness as he passed through the halls, but the ship otherwise seemed oblivious to his presence.
Where are the security systems? he wondered again. Why hasn’t the AI confronted me?
He found a darkened administration hub between two large cargo bays, dug a granola bar and water bottle out of a supply cabinet, and made himself comfortable in front of one of the darkened interfaces. There were magnetic soles on the bottoms of his boots, but he’d elected not to activate them. The ship’s crew might be inept, but they couldn’t be entirely deaf, and the thunk-thunking of mag soles up and down the corridors would make too much racket. Instead, he towed himself through the passageways on arm strength.
He ripped a chunk off the granola bar and grimaced at the sickly-sweet chocolate-raisin-peanut crap. Sugar. So much sugar, all over the damn place.
His vape had run out of charge, too. He had to jiggle it a bit to make it fit into one of the interface ports, but eventually, the charging light flickered on. That was good.
He forced himself to swallow the bar, chugged the water, then activated the interface and pulled out his codebook.
“All right,” he muttered to the ever-silent ship’s computer. “Let’s see what’s got you all fucked up.”
Seeker found, to his surprise, that he understood computers. Not that he was a particular genius, but that he was comfortably familiar with the ins and outs of the staggeringly complex operating system and AI overcode.
He chewed on a second granola bar—Blueberry Morning. Did they have anything not loaded with sugar? He wanted more beef jerky—as he browsed the thousands of indexes, his fingers moving over the keypad on some deeply-trained muscle memory. A few minutes of romancing the security overlay, typing in the right sequence of dummy override passwords scrawled in the back of his codebook, and the entire heart and soul of the ship was laid bare before him.
