Riston stopped breathing as ze felt the precariousness of the moment. There was no way the captain didn’t sense it, yet she calmly closed what she’d been reading, shut down the displays around her chair, and rose to her feet. The few people standing between her and the door stepped aside, clearing a wide path that led straight to Cira.
Chest aching, Riston watched Erryla’s steady approach. It took zem a second to realize ze hadn’t been breathing since they stepped onto the bridge. When ze finally exhaled, it felt like zir lungs rattled against zir ribs, but ze kept still as Captain Antares stopped less than a meter away.
“Ensign, that was good work.” Erryla spoke clearly and with enough volume to be heard by the rest of the bridge. Cira began to tremble. “And Riston, I’ve been told it’s only because of how well you know the ship that Cira was able to reach deck twelve in time. Thank you.”
“Oh, umm…” Riston’s breath caught. At this rate ze might pass out from lack of oxygen if ze didn’t calm down. How could ze, though? Everyone was watching. Only Meida, standing nearby and grinning with pride, gave zem anything good to focus on. Taking strength from her, Riston squared zir shoulders and nodded once. “Absolutely, sir. Anything I can do.”
“Hmm.” Erryla’s dark brown eyes scanned Riston from the toes of zir beat-up boots to the ends of zir wiry hair. “You know, I almost believe that.”
Sound rippled through the room. It was neither a laugh nor a sigh of relief, but it signaled a release and the crew began to go back to their tasks. Within seconds, the buzz of overlapping conversations took over the room and attention shifted away from Riston. It should’ve made it easier to settle down, but now ze was essentially alone with Cira and the most powerful woman on the ship—the woman who currently controlled the course of Riston’s life.
“Ridiculous voyeurs,” Erryla muttered, a flicker of fond exasperation appearing on her face. It grew into something stronger when Cira laughed softly at the joke, and she drew her daughter into a hug, murmuring something into Cira’s ear before stepping back. Cira followed. With only one glance at Riston and a small but genuine smile, Erryla returned to being The Captain, her daughter and heir apparent trailing behind.
Cira looked back once, and her smile was probably supposed to be encouraging, but all Riston saw was Cira leaving. Alone, Riston barely kept zirself from pressing into the solidity of the wall. Zir hands shook and anxiety settled in zir stomach. Should ze leave? Thankfully, Meida approached before Riston felt too adrift.
“Breathe, Riston. It won’t look good for our hero of the moment to pass out,” Meida said under her breath, a sympathetic smile on her weary face. Her long dark hair was piled in a messy knot on top of her head, her uniform was stained in spots and hopelessly wrinkled, and the shadows under her eyes were bruise-dark, yet she still smiled at Riston while they both stood on the bridge—the actual bridge—of Pax Novis. “And before you protest, you’re the reason Cira had the chance to keep that woman from escaping. Therefore, hero.”
“If you say so, sir.” Riston did breathe easier, though, and Meida’s obvious approval made zem stand tall. Ze still wanted to change the subject. Just about anything else would do. “It seems like we missed a lot while we were gone.”
“Some,” Meida acknowledged. “My engineers are still scouring the hardware and software to find every node of the drive installation so we can do a clean purge. Other progress is minimal. Elevators are back online and life support is reengaged on decks one and two, but those have been our biggest wins so far. We almost have access to sensors, and we’re close to being able to bring the regular lights back up—we think. That alone will be good for morale.” She sighed and glared up at the ceiling. “I’m beginning to hate the color blue.”
Riston tried to smile. “I don’t blame you. Blue hasn’t been my favorite for a long time.”
“Ah, yes.” Meida glanced at Riston with a crooked, apologetic tilt to her mouth. “I’m sure you’ve been doused in emergency lights more than once.”
“And once was enough, yet somehow…” Ze waved zir hand in a vague gesture that encompassed the entire situation and translated to here I am again.
Expression settling into somber regret, Meida placed a hand on Riston’s shoulder and gently squeezed, but she said nothing. What was there to say? No, really. What could Riston say? There had to be something, because the expanding silence would consume zem if it got too big. There was only one question that ze could think of, though.
“Where are my friends? Are they—”
“Captain!” The call came from the center of the middle tier—the long-range sensor station. All other conversation cut off as the officer reported. “We have three incoming vessels. Two are pinging with transponders from Pavonis and one from Orionis.”
“Are they broadcasting?” Erryla asked.
“Probably, but if they are, we can’t see it,” the officer on comms responded.
The captain nodded. “Cira, go to comms and walk them through how you used the emergency systems as a workaround. See if you can do the same to get us talking to those ships.”
“Oh, damn,” Meida muttered. “Erryla’s danger senses are pinging.”
“Is she usually right?” Riston asked.
Through clenched teeth, Meida said, “Yes.”
“They wouldn’t attack, not a Pax ship.” Pax ships were off-limits. That was a fact, like gravity and orbital rotation.
“After what we’ve been through, I can’t take anything as a surety anymore.” Then an officer called Meida’s name, and she hurried across the room.
No one glanced at Riston after that. The incoming ships had consumed everyone’s attention, and the organized chaos of the bridge drew Riston inexorably in. It was hard to see detail on the displays, but ze could listen. Relay sensors. Paxis protocols. Comm blocks. The conversations overlapped in strange ways, leaving Riston struggling to pull data out of the flood.
“What did you do?” The sharp tone snapped Riston’s focus to a station on the third tier.
“I…I didn’t do that.”
A look passed between the two, both faces gleaming ghostly in the blue light, and then they simultaneously shouted, “Captain!”
“Shields and deflectors have just gone up, and every weapons system on Novis is active and locked on the incoming vessels.” The first officer turned, and Riston finally recognized Farran Badri, the chief of security. “None of the ships are in range yet, but this isn’t good. Nothing I’ve done has shut it down.”
Eerie silence settled as everyone waited for orders. Riston eased down a few steps, trying to see around Farran’s shoulders to the screen. The bright warnings were hard to miss. They should have been red, but the blue emergency lights mutated them into a strange shade of purple.
“A manual workaround may be the only solution. Can we post a team at every gun?” Erryla asked Farran.
“At this point?” She shook her head. “I think we’d have to pull from Meida’s teams working on the seek-and-destroy hunt through the tunnels and systems.”
“I can go.” The words burst out in the breath of quiet that followed Farran’s pronouncement. Riston almost flinched when every head snapped toward zem, but Erryla’s curious expression encouraged zem to continue. “If you need people, I…I can go.”
“I’ve filled the comms team in on everything, so I can go, too,” Cira offered. “It’d be one less team you have to pull from somewhere they’re needed more.”
To Riston’s amazement, Erryla only hesitated a moment. “Fine. Go to the forward portside gun control. We’ll send crew to the other five.”
“Yes, Captain.” Cira ran for the door, dodging the other officers.
Riston was there, but the door was still closed. It needed an ID swipe to get out. Cira’s practiced motion activated the door, and a few running strides brought her across the security office where she repeated the gesture at the exterior door. Riston followed her out and down the hall to the port elevator. They slipped
inside as soon as the door began to open.
“Lasalia said they didn’t want to hurt anyone,” Riston said once the elevator was in motion. “Do you think they’d actually fire on those ships?”
Cira looked over, her eyes narrowed. “Do you think anything she told us was true?”
The door opened and Cira sprinted out. Riston followed, but zir mind was spinning. Strangely, yes. Ze hadn’t believed every word Lasalia had said, but there’d been something true in that statement. Maybe it had been in her face when she’d said it. Riston had believed and ze’d probably been wrong.
No one intending to keep people safe aimed guns at them.
Four sharp turns ended in an ID coded door. Cira slowed just enough to wave her arm at the sensor in the wall to open the door. It brought them into the straight stretch of the forward port extension, and they ran headlong down the corridor. The recesses of the ship might be Riston’s home, but the corridors were Cira’s. She moved with an absolute confidence here that Riston could only wish for, not even slowing when the bulkhead door sectioning off the forward compartment loomed ahead. Midstride, she swiped her ID past the reader next to the door. It had barely begun to open when Cira turned sideways—still moving fast—and slipped through. Riston tried to copy her movements and nearly scraped the skin off zir ear. Inside, ze had to swerve fast to avoid slamming into the bank of vac suit storage lockers. Ze was still trying to regain zir balance when ze rounded the last corner and finally faced the door to 5FP-W1—deck five’s forward, port weapons control center.
Even with an incoming threat—or maybe especially then—access to gunnery stations wasn’t as simple as swiping an ID. Riston caught zirself on the opposite wall and watched as Cira scanned her ID, entered an access code into the panel next to the door, and waited for bridge approval. It didn’t take long.
Forward weapons control was a small room, no more than two meters by three. One whole wall was display capable and a chair sat in the center of the space. A smaller backup control panel extended from the far wall. Cira dove into the main chair and tapped her wrist to the arm to claim control of the system. Riston bypassed it all and slid to the floor under the backup console where several access hatches were hidden. The mechanics of the weapons were behind this wall in the space between the room’s wall and the outer hull of the ship. Getting into the space wasn’t easy and moving once there was harder. The passage was exceedingly narrow, but ze could stand and look around. The blue emergency lighting extended here. That combined with the glow from some of the other control nodes allowed zem to make some sense of the space. There was a lot, and ze was only making sense of a small portion of it. So far.
“What’s the comm status?” Riston shouted into the main room.
“Text updates only,” Cira called back. “Visual and audio haven’t come back yet.”
“How much time until the ships are in range?” Ze crouched next to a panel and exposed the inner workings of the turret’s rotational controls. The hull bulged outward at this point to contain the gyroscopic controls allowing gunners to adjust azimuth and elevation. This was where moving parts would be easiest to reach and therefore sabotage. Possibly.
A frustrated curse echoed in from the main room. “Estimates are less than ten minutes.”
Ze wished they’d stopped to get tools before they rushed down here. Levers, slides, gears, control nodes, it was all laid out in front of zem, and all ze had to work with were two flesh-and-blood hands. From Cira’s ever more frequent curses, she wasn’t having luck, either.
“Cira, switch!” Riston shouted as ze scrambled back to the main chamber.
“Why?” she demanded.
“Because you have a hand that isn’t made of bone and is less likely to be pulverized,” ze snapped as ze came back into the room. “And I don’t have anything else to work with.”
“Oh.” Cira looked down at her hands as though she had forgotten one was different from the other. “Right. Computer, grant full access to all systems to all personnel in the control room.”
“Access granted,” the computer’s neutral tone confirmed, and the words were like a spring that popped Cira out of her chair. She slid toward the low crawl space as she was clear, but she turned toward Riston before she disappeared under the console.
“Communications are almost up, and instructions are coming in on the display to the right.” Cira looked at the chair, the screen, the open hatch, and finally back at Riston, fear in the lines around her eyes. Then she unlatched her wrist cuffs, the ones with the embedded holo-controls and the official Pax interface chip, and tossed them to zem. “Good luck.”
“You, too,” ze said. There were only four minutes and six seconds left before the ships would be in weapons’ range, and it was getting less likely by the second that they’d shut the guns down in time, but Riston would stop trying when ze died. Not a moment before.
It was easy to snap her cuffs around zir wrists, but the control chair suddenly seemed monstrously tall. Ze felt five cycles old again, shorter than the other children and struggling to keep up. When ze finally moved, each step felt weighted until the moment ze stepped onto the footrest and settled into the sloped, cushioned seat. This wasn’t just being tolerated; ze was being given actual power on the ship ze’d grown to love so desperately.
Ze placed shaking hands on the control panel and touched the sensors to reactivate the cuffs. The wall of screens contained a multilayered, multicolored barrage of information, but even though Riston had been focusing primarily on astronavigation, ze’d also worked through the basic training for every other position on the ship, including gunnery sergeant. It only took a few seconds for zem to acclimate and remember.
On one section of the screen was a three-dimensional grid, and Pax Novis was a white, seemingly stable block in the middle of it. Three smaller shapes approached, two from directly ahead and one from astern to port. All the vessels should’ve been outlined in green for peaceful ships since none had activated their weapons, but they were all marked out in red. Nothing ze tried disengaged Novis’s weapons lock or refocused it. When ze tried to fix the targeting lasers on a small asteroid, all ze did was bring the turret system one step closer to firing.
A sharp tone drew Riston’s attention to a new window. At first it was just a black box, but then colors flickered and an image appeared—Mika sitting at Adrienn’s desk. Shadows moved on the blue-lit wall behind her like dark ghosts. It proved she wasn’t alone, but her small, tired face was the only one that appeared on the display.
“Riston, this is our fault. We’ve been trying to fix the system, but we’ve been doing it in pieces.” Mika’s voice shook, and she spoke so quickly Riston had a hard time following at first. Riston’s own hands were trembling as ze switched from single channel audio to a wider band—ze needed Cira to hear this. “Regaining control of some systems changed the programming in others. I found the original code for the weapons system, and it was meant to fire warning shots first—just to get people out of range again—but I don’t think that’s what it’ll do anymore.”
“What will it do?” Riston’s throat tightened around a fresh wave of fear.
Mika ducked her head. “The guns are aiming for the engine cores. These aren’t military ships, Zazi. One’s civilian cargo, one’s a passenger transport, and one’s search and rescue. Their defenses can’t protect them from Novis’s arsenal. Even an indirect hit may cause a reaction and blow the whole ship.”
Then Meida swung into view of the camera, her dark eyes focused and intense. “Emergency system tricks won’t work this time. Tell Cira she’s got to shove it into maintenance mode or physically break something to keep it from firing.”
“Something?” Cira practically growled, and metal clanked from inside the wall where she was working. “That’s so helpful. Thank you.”
But it was. Maintenance mode. Ze’d been trying to turn it off or switch targets, but both actions were probably barred explicitly by Ghost’s code. Maintenance,
though. There was a chance—though a small one given how deviously intelligent all the other sabotages had been—that whoever programmed this virus didn’t think about maintenance as a workaround. Riston closed half the menus and notifications on the screen to clear away distractions and focused on a specific set of submenus. Beginning with control menus and status options, ze searched for a workaround that’d do what Meida suggested and knock the system into maintenance mode, cutting off its ability to fire.
Maintenance mode unavailable.
Error reporting. Scheduled repairs. Ze moved steadily through to be sure ze didn’t miss anything. It was unacceptable. Missing something meant ships blown into dust and lives lost. Too many lives lost.
Maintenance mode unavailable.
The message flashed again and again, all but mocking zem. Something clanged from inside the wall where Cira was working. Nothing on the display shifted. Whatever she’d done wasn’t enough. Nothing was enough. Ghost’s programmers hadn’t missed a trick. Shifting the guns into maintenance was just as impossible as switching targets or shutting down, and the countdown was now measured in seconds, not minutes.
“Cira,” Riston warned, “we’re almost out of time. Tell me you have another brilliant fix.”
She screamed, a furious howl that sounded torn from her throat. There was another clang and a screech like bending metal that had Riston leaping out of the seat.
“Cira? Cira!” Ze slid across the room and dove for the hatch. “Are you okay?”
In the cramped space between walls, Cira was braced between one surface and the other with her cybernetic hand thrust into the turret’s gyroscopic controls. Her silver hair seemed to glow in the blue light, and the gleaming strands quivered as she panted for breath. Every line of her body seemed taut with strain. Sweat beaded on her skin. Before Riston could say anything else, she shifted her weight and pulled, straining with desperate effort against something inside the weapon’s mount. Another throaty scream overlapped a vicious groan. It ended in a sharp, echoing clang as Cira slammed back against the wall with a piece of broken, twisted metal clutched in her cybernetic hand.
Pax Novis Page 32
