“I’ll keep that in mind. Are you always in the ship?”
“Negative. I am, in fact, not in the ship right now. The internal telemetry monitors the ship performance and behavior in order to report anomalies. Discovering you at the controls was unanticipated. Is Lex aware you are operating his personal vehicle unsupervised?”
Michella fixed the hair that had been dislodged. “I borrowed it.”
“Borrowing it implies permission was requested and received.”
“I got his permission yesterday,” she said sharply. “Or do I need a permission slip?”
“My apologies. It was merely my intention to ensure this ship—which is simultaneously Lex’s most prized possession, an occupational necessity, and a work of Karter’s design—is not being misused without prior authorization. May I ask your motivation for this unaccompanied journey?”
“No you may not. It is a private matter.”
“As you wish. Do you require any further aid regarding the operation of the ship?”
Michella wanted to dismiss the AI, who despite her vocal limitations had at the very least mastered an accusatory tone. But the truth was, Ma was a much friendlier user interface than the array of controls before her.
“Is there a way to set the autopilot for a specific point in space?”
“Please direct your gaze to the large display screen just beside your left knee. There you will find detailed instructions on how to set and operate the autonav functions.”
Michella glanced down to find a user manual loading.
Ma continued. “I have also enabled voice control with natural language parsing set to full. Lex prefers shorthand for his controls, but this should allow you to operate the basic ship functions without utilizing a glossary of terms.”
“Oh. Okay, good. I don’t suppose you can tell me if all of this flailing about has gotten the attention of the authorities for reckless flight, can you?”
“I detect no reports or alerts from the local transit authority or law enforcement.”
“Good. Thanks for the help.”
“I endeavor to be of service, as always. Would you indulge me in a bit of informal social discourse before we discontinue communication?”
Michella sighed. Talking to a machine, even a very human machine, was a bit of a waste of time in her view. But there was such a thing as gratitude.
“What did you have in mind?”
“I notice in Lex’s calendar that there have been repeated cancellations and rescheduled appointments of late. I also notice that there is a meal scheduled for eight tonight. You are indicated to be his guest. Are you aware of this appointment, and is it your intention to force another rescheduling?”
“Just how much access do you have to Lex’s personal information?”
“I am on his VIP list and am privy to most of his social postings. Are you aware of this appointment, and is it your intention to force another rescheduling?”
“Yes, I am aware, and no I’m not planning on missing it.”
“The current time within the region for which the appointment has been made is 5:35 p.m. This leaves only two hours and twenty-five minutes, including travel time, for your intended activity. What activity are you pursuing?”
“Work,” she said. “I’m doing work.”
“It was my understanding that your presence on Operlo was a part of a sabbatical.”
“You can work while on sabbatical,” she snapped.
“I see. Work that involves leaving the planet’s surface in an interstellar spacecraft seldom fits within the indicated time window. Are you confident you will be punctual for your appointment?”
“Yes,” she said flatly.
“Seven of the last ten events that Lex scheduled and you confirmed were canceled due to either your delinquency or a last-minute conflict. This suggests social engagements with Lex hold a low priority for you.”
“That’s not true. It’s just that the kinds of things I have to do can’t be scheduled and can’t be rescheduled, and Lex’s stuff can. Lex understands.”
“Certainly. May I gently suggest that, in this instance, you do not rely upon Lex’s understanding?”
“He’s just high on the fame again. He’d never admit it, but he loves being in the spotlight again. This is just him showing off that he’s got the connections to get into a fancy restaurant.”
“In my observation, Lex has not demonstrated a predilection for high cuisine.”
“It’s not the food. It’s the exclusivity. He’s trying to impress me.”
“Is this undesirable to you?”
“I’ve got more important things to do.”
“Please explain the distinction between your activities being ‘more important’ and the previously denied claim that Lex’s activities hold a lower priority.”
In the absence of a face to glare at, Michella glared at the screen with the manual. “I’ve really got to go, Ma. Thank you very much for all of your help.”
“You are welcome to it. If you require aid, Lex’s communicator has highest priority, real-time access to my systems. I will answer and render any aid required.”
“Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind. One more favor?”
“What do you require?”
“Don’t tell Lex where I am, and please respect my privacy. There are things Lex doesn’t need to know.”
“Of course.”
Michella closed the connection and flicked her fingers across the user manual Ma had set up for her. It definitely wasn’t the help screen she’d found in her admittedly hasty search when the ship had first started malfunctioning.
“Ship, please display navigational targets at the following coordinates.” She flipped open an old-fashioned paper pad and read out a lengthy orbital definition.
“Permission to adjust heading and direct external scanners?” replied the ship’s control system.
For a moment Michella thought Ma had simply ignored her request and reopened the connection. It wasn’t until she realized the voice was much less nuanced that it dawned upon her that the ship’s system used one of the three voices Ma used.
“Granted,” Michella said.
The ship smoothly shifted and actively scanned. The cockpit window display populated with dozens of numbered points of light. One was significantly larger than the rest.
“Give me more detail on number 12.”
The other points vanished, and the remaining one filled the display. It was a distinctive-looking space station. Rather than the spindly network of interconnected struts that many such orbital stations tended to be, or the giant rotating rings of more remote stations, this one looked like a somewhat squashed satellite dish pointed at the surface of the planet. Michella wasn’t sure if she was looking at an image of the station or some sort of sensor reconstruction, but it was of a high enough resolution that she could see that the planet-facing portion of the ship was just as heavily shielded as the space-facing portion. That was a bit like heading out during a rainstorm with an extra umbrella pointed downward.
She glanced to her notes again. “Initiate docking sequence in primary docking bay, er… Primary Docking Bay 3. And provide the following access code.” Again she read out a painfully long sequence of numbers.
“Acknowledged.”
The ship slid smoothly through space to the destination.
“Ship, the SOB has stealth capabilities, correct?”
“The SOB is capable of running at low- or zero-EM and low- or zero-thermal-emission mode and has a low reflectivity for most active or passive EM wavelengths.”
“Do I need to activate those features?”
“Affirmative.”
“Activate the stealth stuff.”
“Acknowledged.”
A few of the screens subtly changed their values, and the engines shifted to a notably less intense hum, but otherwise there wasn’t much indication that the ship was effectively “sneakin
g.”
She shrugged. “I guess if it was obvious it wouldn’t be stealthy.”
The ship made short work of the distance between her poorly planned exit from the atmosphere and the space station. When she was in range, her com system lit up with a request from the station.
“Docking request received. You’re not on the register for today,” blared an overamplified male voice.
“We spoke yesterday. This is regarding the VIP tour?” she said.
“The what? … Oh! You’re the one with the… hang on.”
A small indicator popped up on the com system screen indicating the current message was no longer being recorded on his side.
“Michella Modane, right? Did you bring the rest of the bribe?”
“We discussed a VIP tour,” she repeated.
Generally speaking, it was unwise to confirm that you were party to a bribe, even if it was ostensibly off the record.
“Right, right. Yeah, come on in. Dock 3. I’ll keep you off the logs.”
The ship accelerated a bit, and a glittery collection of points matching the navigation scan’s findings caught the light of Operlo’s powerful star. She muted the communication microphone.
“Ship, can you please magnify the nearest objects as we pass them?”
“Acknowledged.”
A flickering white box traced itself around the nearest glittering satellite, and a digital zoom showed it in greater detail. In many ways it looked like the space station in miniature. A large, sturdy dish pointed down. The whole surface of the device had the blue-tinted black sheen of high-quality solar collectors. A few other smaller dishes pointed in the direction of other satellites, and a somewhat larger one pointed in the direction of the space station. She saved an image of the satellite.
“This is just interview-type stuff, right?” the man said. “And you’ll hold on to it until the official announcements? Any information you get comes through me. I mean, a greased palm is one thing, but if any stuff gets out there before they unveil this place, they’re going to know where it came from and I’m not trying to lose my job.”
“You show me where the line is, and I promise not to cross it.”
It was a lie she’d gotten very good at telling.
“I don’t have you on sensors yet, but I’ve got your transponder. That’s weird,” he said.
“My ship’s pretty low profile. The better to avoid showing up on surveillance and leaving you with too many questions to answer.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. You’re talking to the guy in charge of surveillance.”
“Really? Even the docking stuff? They’d leave that to an outside vendor? And a new one at that?”
“Hey, don’t ask me why they put me in charge of this stuff. They had to swap out some inside positions for outside ones, and this was one of them. I think I’ve got you on proximity now. Let’s bring you in.”
The ship shuddered a little as a tractor beam caught the SOB and started guiding it toward a large port on the perimeter of the station. A heavy-duty door irised open to reveal a shimmering energy wall. She thought she had a good read on the scale of the station, but without anything else to serve as a point of reference, it was difficult to be sure. As she drew nearer, it seemed to get bigger and bigger. What at first she’d assumed was a port just large enough for Lex’s smallish ship now loomed larger and larger. By the time she reached it, she found it was large enough for something triple the size of the SOB, if not larger. This was one hell of a space station.
The tractor beam pulled the SOB inside. One force field, then the other, cycled in an impressively speedy implementation of an air lock. The docking bay was sized for construction vehicles, but as the automated docking program controlled her thrusters and eased her around a bend, she found some smaller bays properly sized for ships like hers.
Michella triple-checked the air-pressure sensor before popping the cockpit and, to her dismay, discovering there wasn’t any gravity in the space station either.
“Does no one care about gravity?” she griped.
She looked around. The place was still completely pristine, like it had never been used. Actuated cameras poked down from little ceiling-mounted pods, but their flashing indicators were notably dark. The surveillance system had indeed been shut off.
Michella adjusted her outfit. Like everything else about ventures like these, what she’d chosen to wear was carefully calculated. She needed to look like she was at least somewhat savvy, or else she wouldn’t be able to earn enough respect to get genuine answers. To that end, she’d worn a GolanaNet branded jumpsuit. It would handle maneuvering in a space station well enough. It would even make her look vaguely like she belonged aboard. The presence of a news network’s logo would serve as evidence that she was not misrepresenting herself, and also inspire anyone who might be fired for letting a reporter aboard to help keep her hidden.
On the other hand, a little bit of assumed ignorance and naivete was handy as well. It would lower their guard. Thus, she’d come equipped with a large, much-abused over-the-shoulder purse. It was a bit ungainly and ragged, with a zipper that never quite shut. Just wrong enough for a space station to suggest she didn’t know what she was doing, and just “girly” enough to convince the misogynistic throwbacks that generally staffed criminal organizations that she wasn’t a threat.
For a woman in territory as dangerous as this, even wardrobe was part of the game.
“Michella Modane,” remarked the voice from the communicator.
She turned to find her liaison holding tight to the nearest of a sequence of handholds that Michella realized to her dismay she was going to be depending upon to get around. He wore a jumpsuit made from something that appeared as though a uniform designer had tried their very best to make plastic look like canvas and had almost succeeded. A complex harness strapped a bulbous pack to his back. He tapped some buttons on the back of one glove, and the pack hissed and spat with jets of air to propel him toward her.
“I’m still kind of surprised this is happening. I always sort of wondered how you got the dirt you always report. Never figured it was bribes to nobodies like me.”
“Bribes aren’t standard operating procedure for the news world,” Michella said.
“Sure, sure,” he said, grabbing her wrist to drag her from the ship to the wall so she could navigate the narrow corridor leading away from the bay. “I just hope you’re not hoping to find any dirt here. There’s not much to find.”
She gripped the rail he guided her to tightly. “No, no. This is just a behind-the-scenes thing. This place has been hanging in the sky over Operlo for months, slowly coming together, but no word on its purpose. People barely acknowledge it exists. That gets a reporter’s nose itchy.”
“I’ll show you what I can, but honestly, I’m small potatoes around here. Like I think I said yesterday, I’m not even sure what this place is for. I’m just supposed to make sure the comings and goings are tracked. Or not tracked, in your case.”
“You let me worry about what I get out of it. Just answer what you can and show me anything you think would interest the news-watching public. I’ll fill in the color.”
She followed him to a claustrophobic office of sorts, a walled-off section of the docking bay in the corner overlooking its operations. It had a huge, thick window. Holographic displays overlapped one another, showing a montage of security feeds.
“This is the surveillance center. That’s the console where I would be marking down your arrival if not for the arrangement. Here we’ve got the twenty-five top-priority camera feeds, on rotation. They’re run through an automatic-tracking and motion-recognition whatchamacallit. Computer thing. Took me a while to work out how to poke holes in the surveillance without making it obvious I did it. But, you know. You get a job, you get good at it.”
Michella’s old-fashioned note-taking wasn’t well suited to zero-g. She had the proper pen for the job, and her pad had a
handy strap to hold it in her grip, but without more practice in a zero-g environment taking notes she wasn’t comfortable without a free hand to steady herself against the wall. She awkwardly hooked an arm through a rail and held herself still with her elbow rather than switch to voice recording or one-handed text entries. She looked over the controls and readings. There were a good deal more bits of information than a simple security system would need.
“Is that reading barometric pressure?” she said, indicating one of the screens. “And humidity?”
“Uh… Probably?” he said. “That whole bank of controls wasn’t in my briefing. This place isn’t fully operational yet. As systems become useful, I get new briefings. It’s all about speed, I think. The boss lady is seriously worried about delays. Hard deadline for three weeks from yesterday for full operation.”
“And how close are you?”
“Beats me. That’s need-to-know stuff, and I’m like ten rungs too low on the ladder to need to know.”
She leaned closer to the controls he’d admitted ignorance about. “These are navigation- and communication-corridor markers,” she said.
“Oh, sure. Yeah, we’re patched into all that stuff. I guess they’ll be routing communications through this thing. I’m not a local, but I guess they’ve been limping along on a system that wasn’t half as good as they need for the race crowds.”
She tilted her head and flipped back in her pad. “You said you’re on a three-week deadline?”
“Three weeks from yesterday.”
“Then this thing isn’t going to be operational in time for the first big race.”
He scratched his head. “I guess not.”
She marked it down. “Tell me about this screen. It looks like you’re tracking wind speed? Is that via surface stations?”
#
For the better part of an hour, Michella’s guide worked his way through completely uninteresting factoids about the station and his lowly role in it. Any questions she asked that actually interested her were met with either ignorance or the wall of a nondisclosure agreement. That was no problem. A journalist’s job isn’t always about turning up the piece of information she’s after. When you’ve talked to enough people tasked with keeping secrets, you soon learn that sometimes if you can’t find what you’re after, you can find the shape of the holes they’re cutting in the truth. If you get a good enough picture of the jigsaw piece they’ve left out, you may find there’s only one thing that fits into it.
Indra Station Page 5
