The entire time, uniformed characters on the other side of the quarantine glass asked questions -- lots and lots of questions, which I refused to answer. I did give them contact information for both Meerschaum and United Humanity, which they were inclined to ignore in favor of their own military interrogation protocols -- this was a Fleet vessel after all.
There were also some self-important types aboard, from the Route Management Authority, who acted all intimidating -- but they didn't even know what to ask.
||||||||||
twenty-seven
* * *
"What have you done to us?" Christmas demanded, and I really thought he was going to dash at me. He stood in the companionway to the cockpit, hands bunched at his sides, eyes radiating fury.
But Barney and two of his people were just climbing in from the airlock behind, and they made for an impressive trio -- especially since they were all visibly armed, holsters strapped outside their pressure suits.
"It's not what you think," I replied, the moment my helmet was off, trying to nip any rash acts in the bud.
Behind us, in the opposite direction down the companionway, Dieter stuck his head out from Engineering. He must have wondered what the commotion was all about, but he cursed when he saw us standing there. The engineer jumped back into his room, and re-sealed the hatch with a metallic klump. I stepped over and hit the comm button next to it.
"Dieter! Don't smash anything we need! This isn't what it looks like!" But he didn't reply. "Dieter!"
"Hi," Stinna said to the newcomers, as their own helmets came off, her expression unchanged from the last time I'd seen her; from every time I'd seen her.
"Hello," Barney replied with a friendly smile. "I'm Barney."
"Don't you come any closer!" John shouted then, from his seat at the table, as if he'd just noticed them. He jumped to his feet, looking terrified, wild-eyed, manic. He held a plastic spoon in his hand in a threatening manner. The armed group complied: they didn't approach and they didn't draw their weapons. They didn't even laugh, which I thought was kind.
"There's a story to this," I said. "Just calm down, everybody, and let me explain."
"You sold us out!" Chris challenged, finally taking those menacing steps my way, but I kept him at arm's length, holding my helmet out between us. He swung with all his might and missed, then kept trying. He was scary when his dander was up!
"I did not! They want to help!"
"Are they with UH?! Because if they're not UH, they have no reason to help us...and you...brought them...here...!"
"Quit doing that, would you?! They want the spy ring, not us! They can help Mavis, and they can help the ship."
"Team wouldn't help us!" Chris railed, then slipped on some trash and fell to his knees. He popped right back up again, though, and finally got a clip in on my face, right over the eye. It stung, but he hadn't really connected, and, anyway, I'd been a super-jerk to him all this time, so he owed me at least that much.
"Enough!" Barney snapped, and finally came forward, pushing Chris back like he was ragdoll. The big man held out one hand to keep my ML at a distance, and placed the other on the sidearm at his hip. That gesture got through to Chris at last, and he just shook his head, stepping back bitterly, hands raised.
"Put 'em down," Barney told him. "We're not here to hurt or arrest anyone, and we're not with Team. We just want to talk."
"You collect the garbage on Centerline Avenue," Stinna said then, still unmoved. "I've watched you."
Beside her, John remained ready to defend his life, deadly spoon shaking in his hand, eyes round and darting, sweat beading on his upper lip.
"I do," Barney confirmed, the warm smile back in place, his hands dropping peacefully to his sides. "You must be Stinna. Ejoq told me about you."
"He wasn't supposed to. He's kind of a butthead."
"Hey!" I complained. "No name-calling."
"If you're not Team, then who are you?" Chris demanded, though he looked at me while he spoke, fury evident.
That was as good an opening as we were going to get, so, while I removed my pressure suit, I explained.
Christmas threw up his hands over me never having suspected my roommate was a cop. I pointed out, heatedly, that I never claimed to be some kind of spy or operative or whatever, so he could take all his judgements and stick them some place intimate. He tried to get at me again over that, but once more Barney intervened -- though this time, throwing a frustrated glance at me, as if it was my fault!
"Would you get Dieter out of there, please?" I asked peevishly, pointing back down the companionway. "This isn't helping."
Our Mission Leader called him via ship comm, and over the engineer's personal device, but he picked up neither.
"Sorry, but he's hyper-vigilant about the engineering tech aboard," I explained. "It's all classified, and no one else is allowed to see it."
"Well, where's your captain?" asked one of the other people, a dark woman in her thirties or so, that Barney introduced as Joenne.
She was StaSec's remnant cyber-neural tech consultant -- on record as a doctor of sports medicine specializing in nerve regeneration and associated therapy at the big med center aboard station. She had done some cyber-neural work on the side for Station Security, though, before Team had rolled in, but that relationship had been obfuscated before the dismantling of Mylag Vernier's police force. She'd become close friends with several people at the hospital, and on the force, who'd lost their jobs in the big change-over. Doc Joenne didn't bear much love for Team as a result. It was this woman who had built a brain pattern of the prisoner who'd tried to kill me -- though, since her time was very limited, it still wasn't ready. When I inquired about the prisoner himself, Barney just said the man was alive and healthy, his ruined elbow patched up for future reconstructive procedures.
I showed the doctor Mavis' sleep pod, which was rolled closed at the moment. Those things didn't have any windows in them, but there were big readout/interface panels, and she spent quite a while checking over vitals and such. She'd never seen a unit quite like this before, she revealed, but didn't think there'd be any problems thawing our captain out.
Chris had been talking to Barney the whole time, and, since my roommate was easy to talk to, he'd somehow managed to put the ML at ease. They were even laughing when I came back. Their glances made me wonder what or who was so funny, and my ears burned. The other StaSec guy just stood in a corner, where he could see everyone, looking interested and detached at the same time. John had backed to the opposite side of the Common Room; he still looked scared, but had finally put down his mighty tool of destruction.
"So, technically, you're working for Ejoq now?"
"That's how it will read on the reports, when we finally have to start making them to somebody," my roommate replied. "We'll be undercover assets of Admin Security. Maybe you guys will have to be, as well. If you want to avoid military prison, with your professional reputations intact, it's going to require someone with a little juice to make it all stick."
They looked at me again, and both burst out laughing. It was a very hurtful day.
I got a call then from R&D. I took it in Gunnery, door closed, audio only. It was Ghazza.
"Can you come in? There's been developments with Hull Design."
"I'm in the middle of something. I can't really get away right now. Can we do this later?"
"Only if you trust me with your career decisions."
"What's that mean?"
She sounded amused.
"Hull Design is still going ahead with the takeover of R&D -- they'd come too far along to just abandon it, I guess. But they were getting some mighty push-back from the other Sub-D's, not just ours. Most of that fell on deaf ears, but not everything. GenDis will be remaining autonomous. And we just got word that Weaponry is being spun off into our own section, fully on par with them! From this point on, R&D will only have three Sub-Departments: Hull Design, Power Generation and Distribution, and Weaponry. Each of us
will be independant, but working together. How on earth did you do it?"
"Pure charisma. Okay, I can be there in, say, ninety minutes?"
She said that would be fine, and rang off.
When I came out, the doctor had Mavis' bed opened up, and was plugged into her cranial dataport.
"Anything?"
"Well, diagnostics come back green, so it's not hardware-related. And I'm not seeing any neural damage, or inflamation that could account for coma-like behavior, so I don't think it's organic either. It has to be something in her power-suspension routines. She has the factory-settings for that in her head, burned on to some restoration cache. If internal diags detected any code-rot, that should have kicked in and replaced the faulty strings with copies of the original code."
"Why didn't it?"
"I don't know."
"Is it a bug?"
"I don't know," she repeated.
"Well, what about..."
"Let me find the problem, okay?"
Her tone was perfunctory, so I said thanks and went on ahead.
By this time, Dieter's behavior was annoying everyone.
Chris went back and banged on the door to Engineering, but it hurt his fist. He returned and grabbed John's favorite cup, first looking at the man and barking, "Shut up!"
He clomped at the hatch with the open end of it, very hard several times. It made a lot of noise which Dieter could not have missed. Still no reply.
"If he's destroying proprietary hardware and IP in there," I observed, "then we're stuck."
"Are you sure you can't over-ride the lock and open that door?" Christmas called to Stinna.
"Yes."
We waited for an explanation, but she apparently thought that was one.
"They designed this ship from the ground-up with preservation of patented technology in mind," John spoke loudly. At some point, he'd calmed down, and was now back in his place at the table. We trooped to the Common Room. He had a diagram of Shady Lady floating in front of him, and he pointed out highlighted areas as he spoke. "Engineering is on it's own control and electrical circuits, and draws power from inside itself. It's like a vault."
"That's just stupid," I spat, feeling very annoyed. "What if he's had a heart attack or something in there?"
"Well, Mavis could open it -- ship's captain has override capabilities for all systems."
"I guess we'll have to wait," Barney put in, looking like the only person okay with doing so.
"Don't you have work today?" I asked him, but he shook his head.
"I called in...pulled a groin muscle at practice last night. It's really killing me."
"We had practice last night?"
"No." He looked at me like I was a strange animal. "You really aren't trained at this, are you?"
"I think I have something," the doctor called from the companionway, and we all filed over, even John and Stinna.
"Right here," Doc Joenne explained, showing us lines of computer code on the display panel of the bed, all meaningless to me. "And again, here, in the variance assessment application."
"What is it?" Chris asked, as lost as I was.
"Malware," both John and Stinna said together, looking at the screen.
"Why didn't you see it before, when you went over all this?"
"We didn't go over it all," John answered simply. "That would be impossible to do by eye. It would take years."
"We were looking at the firmware source code," Stinna added with a shrug.
"No, this came from a high-level intrusion script," the doctor stated. "Someone deliberately put it there, and I'm guessing it wasn't the captain, herself."
"How hard would it be for someone to do that to her?" I asked.
"Depends on the circumstances. If the cyborg is the careful type, it could very hard. Wireless intrusions are easy enough to guard against, but working with strangers, or the general public, can be risky -- especially other cyborgs. But, really, anyone with malicious intent is a threat."
"But she didn't work with strangers," I said pointlessly, because maybe she did. Maybe one in particular.
We all looked at each other. I didn't want to say it, because that would it make it real.
Stinna didn't have a problem going there.
"I think it was Dieter."
"But...why...?" Chris mumbled, looking very confused.
"Mavis must have seen something in Engineering," I supplied, imagining it now. "She didn't recognize whatever it was, or she'd have questioned him right then and there. But Dieter couldn't take the chance that she'd keep thinking about it, so he infected her code and stranded us."
"We were already stranded, from the damage," our ML said.
"Were we?" I pressed. "Has anyone else seen this supposed damage? Dieter played the Classified Hardware card from the very start. The only other person who got a look at what was going on in there is lying in a coma."
"But we were definitely hit in the fight," John argued. "I saw all the initial damage assessments by the computer."
"Of course we were. But maybe it wasn't as difficult to repair as we were led to believe. Maybe the ship has been ready to fly for some time now."
"It explains why he won't come out," John agreed.
"Actually it doesn't," I pursued. "He has nowhere to go, and neither do we, so what could he hope to accomplish, sitting in there like a petulant toddler...?"
But then I trailed off.
"What?" Barney asked.
"An emergency escape hatch!"
"What hatch?" Chris asked, confused.
"Alliance shipbuilding regs for commercial vessels -- and this one still counts -- state that Engine Rooms located near an exterior bulkhead have to have at least one secondary escape airlock. Big ships will have a bunch of them, but even something Shady Lady's size would have to comply with the law."
Barney heard that, and immediately turned away, calling someone on his personal comm. He spoke for several seconds, then stepped back, looking grim, but offering nothing.
"We would get an alert if someone opened a door," John stated, like it was a law of physics.
"You don't think he could run a bypass on that? Because I've known engineers who could do it in their sleep."
"But we placed passive sensors all around the ship," Chris added. "We know when anybody is out there."
"We didn't place them there -- he did," I countered, and, for the first time, SS1 and SS2 looked balked. That was half-way to being an emotion, so it was impressive to see on Stinna, anyway.
"There's no door like that on the schematic," John remarked, still refusing to believe it, and he made to go back and point this fact out.
"Nothing's on the hologram for Engineering," I stated flatly. "It's classified, remember?"
"But exterior imagery in the library doesn't show one either."
"It wouldn't if it's classified!" I snapped, because the repetition was pissing me off. "We've been played! From the very start, he's had another agenda. At the beginning, he was probably just going to pass our long-range sensor data over to someone else, but when we were attacked, he saw an opportunity. Remember, Shady Lady's automated damage assessments didn't indicate starjump was knocked out. Dieter told us about that later. He said it would fail in mid-jump, based solely on his own professional assessment -- which no one else could go in and confirm."
"Except Mavis," Stinna stated, looking at our captain.
We all did the same.
"Can you bring her out of it?" Barney asked the doctor.
"Sure," was the simple response, and she highlighted the guilty code strings on the monitor, and hit delete.
A moment later, Mavis just opened her eyes.
She appeared confused for a bit, then turned her bald head to stare at us, the bright blueness of her artificial oculars startling and reassuring at the same time.
"Is the date I'm reading accurate?"
"Yep," I told her, smiling -- feeling very happy, in fact.
She was quiet for
a bit, assessing the familiar and unfamiliar faces standing over her.
"Well...there's nothing like a good night's sleep," she commented at last. "What did I miss?"
* * *
I had to get to R&D, so I could only stay long enough to give the captain a quick hug. We all did, those of us in her crew. Unexpectedly, Stinna held onto her for a long time, crying like a baby, though never saying a word. It was awkward in the extreme, and therefore, completely in-keeping with the young woman.
Barney intro'd himself and his people, and started to explain, but Mavis held up a hand and looked my way.
"I need a report from you, Ejoq."
"I know. I'll give you one. Right now, I have to go, or it'll look weird. We don't want to look weird."
The irony that comment placed on her face made me laugh, and I put on my helmet.
Once outside, I took a moment to stalk around to the anterior of the ship, deep in shadow. I popped on a tight suit lamp, and looked for signs of the emergency airlock. The hull was covered in the black plates that made Shady Lady so hard to detect, and nothing seemed obvious at first. I finally noticed one particular plate that could easily have been covering a human-sized hatchway. On the station hull right below it, were some subtle scuff marks, as if from booted feet, coming and going.
I called the others inside to report what I'd found, and then went back aboard the station.
When I got to R&D, the place was in a tizzy, people bustling back and forth -- some of them running across the big bay with hardware and print-outs. Jake threw daggers at me from behind his desk, shouting, as I passed by, "This is all your doing!"
The Team kids were busy in the Weaponry office, packing up equipment and supplies again. They looked really excited (except for the three that had put in for transfer -- I heard later that Floy had refused to cancel those for them, the traitors). Ghazza and Floyeen were meeting with Project Management in the big conference room, but the kids told me I was supposed to join them when I arrived. This, I did immediately, though stopping first to grab a joe from the galleyette -- and to get more angry commentary from CPM06 Jacob Hammerhülse, who stomped out of his office, following me, as I passed by.
Risk Analysis (Draft 04 -- Reading Script) Page 40
