Noa jumped up and hurried to meet him before he reached the table. “I want to speak to you,” she said and tugged at the sleeve of his coat, leading him away from the table.
“It’s not a mutual want,” he growled.
“Just shut up and listen to me.” She turned to face him. They were in the middle of a tiny patch of clear area, as far away from tables as they could get. People at the tables nearest them would still be able to hear them if they strained to listen. Noa’s friends could not.
Haydn wore a resigned expression.
“I want you to come with me to the Bridge tomorrow,” Noa told him.
He laughed.
“I’m serious. I’ve spent hours trying to read a basic physics text and all I got out of it was a headache. I have to hold my own in Bannister’s workshop and I can’t keep coming back to you for phrases to parrot. I need to understand what I’m saying. While I’m catching up, I want you in that room, answering the tough questions.”
Haydn’s grip on the glass tightened. “I can’t go on the Bridge,” he said flatly.
“Sure you can. I’ll explain to Magorian.”
Haydn shook his head. “Think, Noa,” he said, his voice gruff. “You really believe that Bannister and all his cronies don’t know exactly who I am? I won’t get past the front gate.”
Noa frowned. “You’re just the son of a Caver. Leuthar and Ottman are actual Cavers and they have sat with the Captain and given her advice for years.”
“I’m the son of the Caver.” The bitterness dripped from his voice.
Noa crossed her arms. “I think you’re just afraid to try.”
Haydn laughed again, but not before she saw something in his eyes. A hurt. Maybe, fear.
“If you go on the Bridge,” she said, “If you step into the workshop, you’re going to be visible in a way you have been avoiding for…I don’t know how long. Years, I’m guessing, because your Forum profile is pretty empty. You won’t be able to hide in a room where people like Bannister have to listen to you speak. They will know who you are and that means you’re going to have to prove you know what you’re talking about. It won’t be me speaking your words and taking all the risks that you’re wrong. It won’t be me who looks stupid. It’ll all be on you and I don’t think you can take the pressure.”
Haydn’s face grew hard. His jaw flexed. “You know nothing about me.”
“I know more than you find comfortable, is the problem. I was right, this morning. You like playing the martyr.” She saw Lizette moving through the tables, heading for theirs. Noa looked back at Haydn. He was still radiating fury. “I want to hear about Lizette’s day. Come and join us if you want, Haydn. Just don’t sit in the chair next to Peter, okay? That was Daniel’s chair.”
His lips parted in surprise. He glanced at the table, where Ségolène was pulling up a chair from another table next to hers, for Lizette to use. The chair between Peter and the one that Noa usually used was sitting with the seat tucked under the table, the straight back pushed up neatly against it.
Haydn closed his eyes and looked away.
“Yeah, well,” Noa said. There was nothing else to say, so she went back to the group. When she was seated once more, she looked around.
Haydn had gone.
Cai pushed her green tea closer to her, his gaze on Lizette as she spoke.
Noa pushed the tea to the other side of her and ordered a shot of whiskey, instead.
* * * * *
“It was such a waste of time,” Lizette said despondently, staring into the last quarter inch of the third glass of wine they had pressed upon her. “Dennis never came back and I couldn’t make sense of the damn AI code, even though it was all just like the legacy code I learned originally. It’s just…jumbled.”
“Noa knows just how that feels,” Peter said, glancing at Noa with a smile. “Ask her about her afternoon.”
Noa grimaced. “The words all made sense on their own…well, most of them. Some of them were strange. Put them all together and it was completely obscure.”
Cai lifted his head from his reading board. “Maybe it is like Noa, for you,” he told Lizette. “Maybe a single command makes sense to you. When it all is put together, it appears to be nonsense because you don’t understand the concepts.”
Lizette shook her head, her clips clicking. “No, I know this stuff. I do. I can look at legacy code without an interface. It’s like reading a book to me. Honestly. It’s that clear. Only this…isn’t.”
Noa gripped Cai’s arm, an idea striking her. “Cai, that book you showed me, months and months ago. The one with the funny writing. Pull it up.”
Cai frowned, staring at her.
“You know the one I mean.” She leaned closer to him and whispered, so that Lizette and the others couldn’t hear.
Cai’s puzzlement vanished. He smiled, as he tapped through the board. He held it out to her.
Noa glanced down at the book, as saw it was the one she had meant. She held the board out to Lizette. “Read that aloud.”
Lizette turned the board around and looked at it. A frown formed between her perfectly arched brows. “That’s not Terran.”
“It is, actually,” Cai said and took the board back. He tapped some more. “Try this one.” He held the board out to her again.
This time Peter and Ségolène both leaned over her shoulder to look.
“It’s not Terran, either,” Ségolène said.
“It feels as though, if I concentrated hard enough, I might be able to make sense of it,” Lizette said. She handed the board back. “What is it?”
“The first book, the one that made no sense at all—that was Middle English.”
“English?” Lizette said.
“One of the original Terran languages,” Cai said. “It changed over time, from ancient dialects, to old English to Middle English to Modern English. Then it evolved again into Terran, borrowing big chunks of other languages, as it did throughout history.” He held up the board so they could all see the mis-formed letters. “There are words in there we still use, if you look for them. Once you know what you’re looking at.” He pointed. “That is the letter ‘s’.”
“It looks nothing like an s,” Peter said. His tone was absent. He was staring at the board, fascinated. “It looks like an ‘f’.”
“If that is an ‘s’, then is that word is…savior?” Lizette said and looked at Cai.
He nodded. “Even modern English speakers had to sort-of translate Middle English to understand it.” He tapped the board and another text replaced the first. This one had normal letters, but didn’t make sense either. Except it was almost like standard texts.
Cai tapped the board with his fingertips. “This is what I guess we should start calling Middle Terran. It’s a flight log from Year Five of the Endurance.”
Noa nodded. Her guess was right. She looked at Lizette. “It’s not simply a matter of understanding the code. You have to understand the Terran the code is using, too.”
Lizette leaned forward. “Cai, come with me to the Bridge tomorrow. You can interpret. Dennis is going to build a user interface so we don’t have to read code all the time, only what we’ll get is what that looks like,” she said, pointing at his board. “You can read it and tell us what the AI is saying.” Then her face fell. “If he comes back,” she added.
Noa thought of the way Lizette had been saying the coder’s name, the warmth in her voice and eyes. She suspected that Dennis would be back.
* * * * *
The next morning, Noa, Lizette and Cai all travelled by train to the Arena end of the Aventine and headed for the Collina Gate.
“Well, look at that,” Cai murmured, as Haydn Forney straightened up from his lean against the wall next to the opening of the Gate road and watched them approach.
The dirty coat was gone. In its place, he wore a shorter jacket. His shirt and pants were clean and his shoes, too. He’d even shaved, although his hair was still a shaggy mess. He’d brushed it,
though.
Noa’s heart thudded and squeezed and she fought to keep her expression calm.
Haydn was watching her. “I’m not doing it for you,” he said as soon as they were within hearing distance. “I’m doing it to prove my father is an idiot.”
“Doing what?” Cai demanded.
“He’s going to help me in the workshop,” Noa said.
Lizette snorted. “They’d sooner spit on you than talk to you.”
Haydn didn’t tense up or get defensive. There was a troubled look in his eyes. “That’s what I said.”
“Oh,” Lizette replied. She glanced at Noa.
“Let’s just get there and see,” Noa said. She stared walking again. Haydn fell in beside Cai, as they walked along the Collina.
When the Bridge gate appeared around the very gentle curve of the road, Haydn spoke once more. His voice was soft. “I’m also doing it to make sure they don’t get anything wrong.”
Cai glanced at him. “Your ego couldn’t stand it if they did?”
“My conscience couldn’t. That’s why I’m here.”
Noa thought he was saying it to her, even though he appeared to be speaking to Cai.
Cai glanced down at his feet. “Daniel wasn’t your fault.”
Haydn let the silence build. Then, “It depends on how you look at it. From a short term perspective, no one could have predicted the failure of the force fields and that the ship would be holed and that Daniel would be in the way.”
“In the long term?” Cai asked curiously.
“I’m my father’s son. What I believe is diametrically opposed to what he believes. He has spent his life working to convince others that what he believes is true. I, on the other hand, have known for years how real the risk was that something exactly like this would happen and I stayed silent. If it is true that children imbibe the skills and attitudes of their parents, then why did I stay silent? I have the same ability for rhetoric my father does. I could have campaigned just as he did and made everyone think about the world beyond the Endurance’s hull. Then this might not have happened.”
“So now you’re going to make sure it doesn’t happen again?”
“I can’t stop it if it does. All I can do is make sure people are as safe as they can be while they try to fix this.”
Cai shrugged and the silence built again, as they drew closer to the gate and the guards who watched them draw near.
Weeks later, Noa realized that was the moment when Cai started calling Haydn by his first name. She only realized in hindsight because it was the last quiet morning any of them had.
Chapter Nine
It took Cai, Lizette and Dennis three weeks to set up a working interface for the navigation AI to speak to them, then hours and hours of Cai translating the output into coherent modern Terran.
After the interface was established, the three of them moved into a corner of the big conference room, which had become headquarters for the project. They worked on separate terminals, although Dennis had set his up right next to Lizette’s. The two of them glowed with happiness, although they barely looked at each other most of the time.
Lizette had been frank about what happened, while the five of them sat around the tables in the Midnight Garden and listened with rapt attention.
“He pulled me aside, so Cai wouldn’t hear,” Lizette said. “Then he apologized and told me I was right. He was a complete jerk. That it bothered the hell out of him that anyone besides official sanctioned coders could possibly know something that he didn’t. So that made him egotistical, too, and he didn’t like that about himself.”
Their working relationship had progressed smoothly after that. After four days, Lizette asked Dennis out and he had breathed a deep sigh of relief and kissed her. “Thank the stars,” he muttered. “I thought I had fucked up permanently.”
“You did, but I can work with your flaws,” Lizette assured him.
They had seen very little of Lizette at the Midnight Garden after that. Ten days later, Lizette moved into Dennis’ roomy Aventine apartment. She turned up at the Garden with Dennis holding her hand. He was reserved, yet respectful, even though he was a coder, sitting among a group of mechanical engineers. He held Lizette’s hand as often as he could reach it.
Haydn had been there that night, as he was most nights. Lizette had tapped him on the shoulder. “You should take my apartment. Get a decent night’s sleep.”
His eyes narrowed. “I don’t like to be pinned down,” he said evasively.
Noa kept her mouth shut. She knew why he didn’t want a registered address.
Lizette shook her head. “No, you don’t understand. It’s my apartment. It’s a single slice, Haydn. No assigned roommate. I won’t change my registered address, so everyone will think it’s mine. You’ll still be anonymous.”
Hayden dropped his gaze to the glass in front of him.
Noa wondered how much everyone really knew about Haydn. She had not told them about his homelessness, only they were all Capitolinos—the underside of life on the Endurance was part of their lives. They understood much without discussion.
Hayden didn’t accept the apartment that night. Neither he nor Lizette spoke about it again in front of anyone. Yet Haydn’s grooming improved after that and he no longer looked so tired and defeated.
After Cai had learned how to speak with the navigation AI, he and Bannister began a conversation with it, with the goal of determining the status of the ship and its position along its charted course. After two days of that, Cai had pulled Haydn into the conversation, tearing him away from Noa and Paderau Zingle’s work on the suit schematics.
Four days later, Magorian called everyone into the Captain’s office for an update.
There were eight of them, which made even the Captain’s large office feel cozy. Some sat, some stood. Magorian, as usual, stood to one side, his shoulder brushing the wall. Sometimes he leaned against it and yet still looked elegant.
“Cai, you say there has been progress?” he said.
“I’m listening,” Captain Owens assured him.
Cai gripped his board in both hands. It was his first time being in the same room with Captain Owens. Everyone was looking at him. Noa could almost feel his nervousness.
“I’m teaching the AI modern Terran, which means everyone will be able to talk to it, eventually,” he said. His voice shook.
“The Navigation AI, you mean?” the Captain asked.
“Yeah…yes. The Navigation AI.” He cleared his throat. “Only, that’s not really the point. The point is, I think we’ve figured out why the ship was holed.”
“Which is why we’re here,” Magorian said gently.
Cai nodded. Noa could see him draw in a hasty breath. “In a perfect world, the Endurance should have continued on to Destination without issue. Only, two things have happened that her designers didn’t anticipate.” He put the board down and rested his hands on it. “It’s a guess. We’re pretty sure we’re right and the metal engineers will be able to confirm it later, once we can go outside the ship, but we think…” He cleared his throat. “We think the exterior hull is weakening, which is disrupting the force field. That’s how the asteroid got through.”
Bannister frowned. “The structure is weakening?”
“No, the metal itself. I had to look it up. The AI referred to something called metal fatigue. Before plasteel was developed, the ancient metals could weaken over time, if they were subjected to repeated stress. Even their strongest alloys would deteriorate.”
“The exterior hull is not plasteel?” Captain Owens asked, sounding astonished.
Cai shook his head. “I…we…are pretty sure it’s a polymerized steel alloy with a high iridium content. It was the most advanced metal they could make, back then.”
Bannister sat forward. “Even if it is a metal alloy, so what? It’s not under stress. Once the inertia from the original acceleration phase was over, it just had to sit there.”
Cai nodded. “That’
s what the designers didn’t take into account. The metal generates its own force field, using the magnetic properties of the alloy as a generator and source of power. The force field has been successfully fending off debris and dust particles and more for five centuries. Each tiny collision has impacted the field. The designers didn’t allow for the force field itself being stressed, which has weakened the metal.”
Captain Owens shook her head. “It sounds as though we should be grateful the metal has lasted as long as it has.”
“It should be replaced with plasteel,” Noa said. “If we grow the right type, it will be far stronger than any alloy and plasteel can generate a magnetic field if there is enough of it in one place, which there would be on the hull.”
Bannister laughed. “Replace the entire ship?”
Noa’s throat closed in. “Why not?” she asked, her voice strained.
“It’s an impossible task, is why not,” Bannister shot back. “We can’t even build a pressure suit and you’re proposing we replate a three kilometer long by a kilometer wide vessel? Out in the vacuum?”
“While you’re adding up the problems,” Haydn said, “don’t forget the radiation that will fry everyone’s brains, the lack of water and gravity, the heat, the cold and the rest of the whatever holed us in the first place, that are still out there.” He was standing in the back corner of the room. Noa could only see the corner of his shoulder from where she was sitting.
Magorian looked at Haydn, frowning.
Noa saw Haydn’s shoulder lift in a shrug. “I mean, while you’re being negative, you might as well get it right.”
Captain Owens looked as if she was trying not to smile. “I think that for now, deciding to take on a job that could prove to be a generation’s worth of work is premature.”
“It’s just time,” Noa said. “Why wouldn’t we do it? The time will pass whether we do the work or not and replating the ship will protect everyone.”
“While putting the people who do the work at high risk,” Captain Owens replied. “That is not a decision I will take lightly, nor will I make such a decision ninety seconds after I have learned of the issue.”
Junkyard Heroes Page 8
