Star Man 1: Star Bourne

by I. G. Roberts

  This same Trooper later reported to me how Anne seemed to be very relieved at the news I was OK. Once she was satisfied about my welfare she asked them to provide an escort for herself and Lady Conti to my location because we needed to meet. They agreed so she and the Lady were soon making their way to my office with their escort checking every part of the route before they were permitted to move into it. By now, I was beginning to become a little concerned because the Troopers were being spread far too thinly for my comfort but reasoned once Anne and Conti arrived here with their escort, a single squad of Troopers could just as easily guard all of us. The remaining Troopers could then begin moving around and securing the remainder of the ship. While I waited, I checked our other prisoners again and found they were still behaving in a perfectly normal manner, seemingly oblivious to the drama playing itself out around the rest of the ship. By then, it was nearing the start of first shift so we needed to decide soon whether we were going to let work parties loose or keep the ship under lock down. Once again, I had quite serious concerns about leaving those prisoners who we were using to assist with ship repairs with nothing to do, it seemed to me doing so was likely to be a recipe for trouble.

  Soon, Anne and Conti arrived safely at the Captains office where I had ensconced myself during this emergency. When they did, I noticed that Conti was looking more than a little frightened and started to apologise to her but she quickly reassured me she was not upset with me, especially now she knew I was protecting her from the escapees when I initiated the lock-down. I explained to both Anne and Conti what we were doing to secure the ship and explained where we were in that process right then.

  As the Troopers moved through the ship over the next hour, they found another two dead crew members and four more who’d sustained some quite serious head injuries but were otherwise still alive. All of these crew had been stripped so at least we now knew where the escapees obtained at least some of the uniforms they were wearing when we captured them. It seemed the escapees had been very careful not to get any blood on the ship uniforms they were trying to obtain as outside of the two crew who were stabbed and cut on the bridge, all the other victims had either been strangled or bludgeoned. As soon as they were found, the injured crew were immediately taken to medical for treatment. The crew who the Troopers thought were dead were quickly transferred to stasis pods for later examination by the medical staff in case the Troopers misdiagnosed their condition.

  Now the ship was again secure, our most pressing priority was to find out whether anyone among the crew, the passengers or the more trusted prisoners had actually deliberately assisted in the escape. We really could only do this by carrying out a full interrogation on the people we’d just taken into custody and by examining the footage from the ships surveillance cameras looking for suspicious activity.

  In the end, the apparent mutiny was discovered and all the overt perpetrators secured within about an hour and a half from the time I was originally summoned to the bridge. Now all we needed to do was work out if any of the crew, passengers or more trusted prisoners were complicit in the plot. The only other possibility I could think of was that the prisoners had simply been able to overpower the guards somehow and then worked out a way they thought they could capture the ship. Part of that investigation required us to analyze all the surveillance camera footage, especially the video from in and around the brig to see what events had taken place to enable the prisoners to escape in the first place.

  Shasi told me the storage for the cameras ran on a forty-eight-hour loop in order to limit the storage required. Given the number of cameras on the ship, and the number of frames per second each camera captured, even the three-dimensional storage devices used in the Federation would have completely filled the ship by this stage of Destiny’s voyage if all data was retained. As it was, the forty-eight-hour loop took up nearly one percent of Destiny’s total data storage capacity.

  For security reasons, a majority of the people in the crew thought the cameras were only on a twelve-hour loop, I could see no reason to inform anybody who was not already aware of the reality that it was any different. I immediately saved and secured all of the surveillance footage for the previous forty-eight hours to two separate and distinct areas in secure storage so it would not be inadvertently overwritten or otherwise lost. That done, I asked Shasi to nominate a team to carry out the necessary investigations. I had to admit, there was something about this whole set of circumstances that smelled, something quite simply did not make any sense to me at all. Among other things, I could not understand how the guards in the brig were overpowered. While I was talking to Anne and Shasi, I noticed Conti glance at me from time to time with an odd look on her face. It was a look I really couldn’t interpret beyond thinking she was starting to look completely spooked so I filed it away for later consideration, thinking I might need to do something to help her. By now, I was beginning to feel quite hungry again, as well as tired.

  I saw Anne and Shasi watching me as I struggled to make sense of what was happened when Anne said, “Sir, you really need to go back to bed. Shasi told me you only had a couple of hours sleep before this situation blew up and we really need you rested for what lies ahead.”

  I thought to protest her comment but realised she, no they, had made a completely correct assessment of my current level of awareness and fatigue. As I considered matters, even I realised I needed sleep badly.

  I replied, “You know, my first thought was to argue with you. But you are basically correct in your assessment, I am feeling pretty much exhausted, the tank is empty. Mind you though, I am also a bit hungry so I’ll stop by the mess for a light snack before sleeping.”

  The three of them nodded before Shasi called a couple of Troopers over to escort us to the mess and then my quarters. Those same Troopers were also tasked to stand guard outside my quarters while I slept, at least till they were relieved by replacements of course. Till we knew exactly what happened, how the prisoners escaped, who, if anybody, in the crew assisted them, Shasi was not willing to take any chances with my safety. She and Ani planned to have two Troopers on the bridge and two in engineering as well as ensuring Anne and I both had a security detail with us at all times. I tried to protest this last point but Shasi informed me it was not negotiable. I could see she meant it, as far as we knew, Anne and I were currently the only ships officers left and the Troopers could not allow us to be unnecessarily put at risk. She then added that both Anne and I should be armed at all times as well. I grumbled in a good natured way about being the Captain and still not having a say in what was happening to me. The others all just laughed at my complaints.

  This time, my sleep wasn’t interrupted at all. Anne left orders, with corroborating orders from Shasi, Ani and Eri to let me sleep till I woke naturally. When I finally did wake and had a shower, I really did feel so much more rested and ready to start the day than I had for several days now. Once again, the insanity of this voyage was interfering with my ability to find time for adequate sleep. I left my quarters and made my way up to the mess with my security detail in tow. I quickly ate before making my way to medical so I could check on how the people there were progressing.

  I found Eri who told me she’d had to place one of the crew who was bought down from the bridge in a stasis pod because he was simply too badly hurt for her to be able to repair the damage on our ship. She told me he was going to need a better medical facility and supplies than she had available to her at the moment. The rest were currently sleeping but she thought they would be well on the way to recovery in about a week or two. I stayed in medical for a short while, talking to Eri to see if there was anything I could do that would make things a little easier for her or for her staff or patients. She replied that the only thing I could really do was to finish what I’d started as soon as possible. She needed me to get the ship, and the rest of us back to a place where a decent medical facility was available so the people she was currently unable to help, could receive the treatment th
ey needed.

  I was still talking to her about the progress of her patients sometime later when Anne paged me to see where I was. She told me our investigation team had made some progress in the investigation while I was asleep and I should meet her and Shasi in the Captains office when I was ready. I told Eri about the message from Anne before excusing myself to go up to the Captains office. I asked her to let me know if there were any changes to the status in the medical bay. With all the sick and injured we seemed to have, the medical bay really needed to be kept running. When I arrived at the Captains office, both Anne and Shasi were already there waiting for me, both with very concerned looks on their faces.

  As I moved to one of the more comfortable chairs, I said, “You both look pretty serious. Am I in trouble for something or do you have bad news for me? Would you like to enlighten me on what the investigation has turned up so far? How bad is it?”

  Shasi was the first one to reply, “Yes Captain, we have found that the prisoners almost certainly had help to escape from the brig. The two people who were injured on the bridge were wounded using a knife. It was a knife that could only have been given to them by someone from the crew or at least someone who had free access to certain parts of the ship. These knives are not widely distributed around the ship and as far as we can tell, none of the escapees, or even our other prisoners were ever near any of the places where these knives are kept, someone had to have given them one.”

  After that, she paused for a second, then said with a grin, “By the way, you are not in trouble, at least not with us.”

  I smiled at her smart-ass comment then asked, “Do we have anybody looking at the available surveillance footage yet? Have they found anything there?”

  “Yes Sir”, replied Shasi, “someone is looking at the surveillance footage now, but they haven’t been able to find much yet. We had about forty-something hours of material to work through on each camera. It could take us quite some time before we have any useful data.”

  “What search parameters are they using? Which cameras are they looking at first?”, I asked.

  “I’m not sure, wait a few seconds while I check for you”, she replied.

  She made a call using her implant, she seemed to be quite preoccupied for about thirty or forty seconds while she talked to whoever was on the other end of the connection.

  After completing her call, she said, “They are not looking in any particular order Captain. I think they thought they had to look through all of them anyway so the order didn’t really matter given we’d already secured the ship.”

  I thought about what she told me for a minute before replying, “I would have to say, I’m a little concerned about this assumption that we’ve stopped this mutiny and completely secured the ship. You’ve already told me you think they had outside help. If they have, we need to find who supplied the help and then make sure this isn’t repeated. We need to find whoever it is, we need to arrest them, and we need to keep them in a secure location till this cruise is over. Right now, this lack of knowledge about who, how and why, is disrupting the ship’s routine not to mention damaging morale. We really need to be looking at things in a much smarter way than we have been till now. I think we should start with the cameras positioned around the brig, in fact I think we should start with the cameras in the brig itself. I expect this should allow us to identify the precise time when they made their move and that knowledge will, in turn, significantly reduce the amount of surveillance footage we need to look at. I also think we should use the time I was paged to the bridge as point zero in the time-line. Start from there and work backwards in half hour increments. That way, we can narrow down the exact time of the escape. From there, we can find when somebody last visited them.”

  Shasi was nodding as I said all this and as soon as I finished talking, she contacted the people who were currently working on the surveillance footage to relay my instructions. I think our problem was the people we had available to carry out the investigation were really not investigators, at least they were not professional investigators. They were thinking in a very linear fashion so when we asked them to look at this large amount of video data, they simply started at the beginning with the intention of working through every camera. Clearly, doing this was going to take a very long time to finish, time we really could not afford. I thanked Shasi for relaying the information to her people.

  When we had the investigators working again, I told Shasi and Anne what Eri had told me about the people who were injured during the escape and the subsequent attempts to take control of the ship. They then began to give me a report on the bridge crew who were on duty when the pirate escapees barged onto the bridge. The pirates actually threatened the bridge crew till they eventually forced them to page me to the bridge. It seemed the pirates saw me as being the key to taking control of the ship. I found this news incredibly disturbing and said so. Nobody should ever be allowed to be the single point of failure; we really need a far more robust command structure than I have seen since I have been on FNS Destiny. Neither Anne nor Shasi responded to my comment, instead they simply continued with their report, appearing to ignore my response.

  As Shasi and I approached the bridge, two of the bridge crew heard us coming and started an argument with the pirates to try and give me some warning. Thankfully, and I know I am being a little selfish in saying this, Shasi realised something was wrong quickly enough that she was able to drag me back and slam the hatch shut while the pirates were still distracted by the argument with the bridge crew. The two crew members who started the argument, ended up bleeding on the deck, stabbed using the knife our investigators identified as originating from among FNS Destiny’s equipment.

  By now, the Troopers had already completed their interrogations of the two uninjured crew they rescued from the bridge. These two were checked by the medical staff and then been released to their quarters for rest. The Troopers told me these two really were decent loyal members of the Federation Navy, though probably not as brave as some others, at least not in a hand to hand situation like the one they’d found themselves in on the bridge.

  When I considered everything that had happened on this cruise, the trials all the crew were subjected to, I really couldn’t fault either of them. Different people have different thresholds and the pirates simply found those limits for these two. From my perspective, I was willing to categorise them as normal people who were simply out of their element and unable to cope with the specific set of circumstances they found themselves in. The other two, the ones who were injured I considered to be particularly brave ones, perhaps with different stimuli, they would have cracked and the other two may have been the heroes. In the end, it didn’t matter, we were able to put down the mutiny, now we needed to ensure the ship’s security.

  I made a note for me to find a way to recommend the two injured bridge crew for some kind of bravery award. Before I could put together such a recommendation though, I would have to find out what bravery awards, if any, were available in the Federation, criteria for selection, how to make a recommendation and whether a recommendation from me would even be considered. Even if the authorities ignored my recommendation, I imagined, no I hoped that having a recommendation like this on their records would look good for them in the future. I thought I should talk to Ensign Fraser about it later when things settled down a little more, perhaps if I couldn’t make the recommendation, she could instead.

  My mind was wandering when Anne pulled it back into the here and now by telling me our investigation team just found the point in the surveillance footage when the prisoners broke out of their cells. I considered this to be good news. We could now start putting together a sequence of events leading up to the point where the break out was discovered by Shasi and I. I asked Anne to commend the people who found this with a ‘well done’ because this really was a breakthrough in our investigation. When I looked at the time stamps, I realised there was nearly half an hour between the actual breakout and me being paged to
the bridge. This must have been when the pirates were busy acquiring the ship suits and weapons they had when we recaptured them.

  The three of us started discussing this delay between the actual escape and me being paged when Lady Conti made her appearance, asking for some information on the progress of our investigations. As I watched her speak, I could see she really was badly spooked by what happened. She looked exhausted and had dark circles under her eyes. Clearly, the significance of events had finally hit home for her. I already knew she was a brave person but I think the idea of being a captive of the pirates once again was simply too much for her to handle right then so she lost the plot a little. I certainly didn’t think any less of her for being frightened. Shasi rose and gently took her by the elbow before guiding her out the door. Ensign Fraser and I looked at each other, both puzzled at what we’d just witnessed. We waited for a couple of minutes but when they didn’t return immediately, we continued planning the next steps in the investigation.

  About half an hour later, the two of them came back. Conti looked much calmer, more in control of herself this time.

  She turned to me and said, “I apologise for my behaviour earlier Captain. I don’t know what came over me but I seemed to have had a mild panic attack. Shasi has settled me down and I promise this will not happen again.”

  I quickly replied, “Conti, an apology is not required. Believe it or not, I really do understand what you went through. Might I suggest you let someone take you down to Medical. They may be able to help you sleep and that might make things a little easier for you, give you time to process recent events and come to terms with what’s been happening. Also, if you need to talk to someone, I am happy to do so but right now, we have to deal with the investigation. If you like, we can set a time for later today. Just come and see me, or if you prefer, ask Ensign Fraser to make the appointment for you.”