by Smith, S. E.
“Chase it out into the open and shoot it with weapons?” Jamie suggested.
“Chase it with what? It destroyed our bot.”
“We could send a weapon into the duct,” Borage said, “if there was a way to get a tracker put on the saboteur. Unfortunately, since it’s just a machine—we believe—surrounded by a lot of other machinery, it’s hard to find with sensors alone, especially when it’s hunkered down and not moving. I believe that’s the case currently. I can’t find it with any of our sensor equipment, and I was able to earlier.”
“I wonder if the EMF pulse is the only kind of attack it’s capable of,” Kor said. “That probably wouldn’t bother a living creature. Though it looks like it might have scorched your robot with a little more than electromagnetism.” He waved to its charred carapace.
“A living creature?” Sparks asked. “It’s not like we have a rat terrier to send into the ducts and catch it. You know the captain keeps refusing to let Sergeant Tick get a hunting dog to help him track.”
“We have the rest of the quashis,” Chanda said.
“How does that help?” Sparks asked.
“They would be small enough to get anywhere the saboteur can get. Maybe we could convince them to go back into the ducts and find a friend. That could work, especially if we only took one out. You’ve seen how they’re pack creatures and clump together.”
“It could get fried if it clumps on to the one in there,” Jamie said.
“Maybe not,” Chanda said. “The fake one came out of the same box as the others. I bet it’s programmed not to bother them. Before it could get out and get to work, it had to fit in and make us believe it was one of them. It may even trill.”
“What would the point be of sending one of those fluff balls in there?” Sparks asked. “It’s not a terrier that’s going to grab the other one in its mouth and shake it to death. Do they even have mouths?”
“Between their legs,” Kor said.
“They have legs?”
“Short ones.”
“Between their legs is a weird place to put a mouth.” Sparks’s eyes glinted, and Kor imagined some dirty joke popping into his head.
Fortunately, Chanda spoke again before it came out.
“You said you could fire a weapon if a tracking device was planted on the fake quashi,” she said. “How about we get one of them out, place a tracking device with sticky sides on it, put it in the duct, and hope it finds its buddy and rubs up against him. It. If we’re lucky, the tracking device will stick to the fake creature. Then we can lure the real quashi back out with apples, and you people can send a weapon into the ducts to get the saboteur. Something with a small charge so you don’t harm your own equipment. This could work. It’ll be just like using a tracking device to launch a Trandoorian Mega Rocket down the asteroid sewers in Deep Space Hunters.”
“A what in what?” Sparks asked.
“I’ve played it.” Kor grinned at Chanda, though he could barely make her out in the dim lighting—only a few panels glowed in the room. “I’m not the engineer here, but I believe it would be possible to apply an adhesive that was stronger on one side of the tracking device than the other, so it would be more likely to come off if the two quashis bumped.”
“It would be just as likely to come off on the wall,” Sparks muttered.
“We’ll put it on its head,” Chanda said. “Er, its front. Hopefully it’ll shove its front up against another one. But not the side of a duct.”
Sparks grumbled under his breath.
“What have we got to lose?” Kor thought they should try it, especially since nobody had suggested anything else.
A clunk came from the distance, followed by a grinding noise.
“A lot,” Sparks muttered. “A lot.”
* * *
“I hope you’re ready for this, Roberta,” Chanda murmured to the quashi, stroking her blue fur as she headed back to Engineering, glad the lights had come back on.
Nerves teased her stomach. What had seemed a brilliant plan twenty minutes earlier—or at least a plan that could potentially work—now seemed far more likely to get her furry friend killed. What if the fake quashi attacked Roberta? What if she became lost in the ductwork and couldn’t find her way back out?
Chanda hadn’t intended to choose the one quashi she had named—and grown attached to—but as she’d stood before the cages, she’d realized Roberta was the only one she knew would traipse across a room and climb objects for apples. And the creature seemed bright. Chanda didn’t know about any of the other ones.
An uncertain trill came from the quashi. Chanda didn’t know if it was because Roberta sensed her concern… or because she had stopped petting it.
“If you don’t want to do this, girl, let me know,” she said, returning to petting the quashi as she walked.
“Girl?” came a voice from behind her. “You’ve decided I was right? Or you’ve learned how to identify their sexes?”
Chanda turned to wait for Kor to catch up. He carried his medical kit, and she wondered if he was contributing a “wad” again as part of the attack on the saboteur. But if the fake quashi was all computerized with machine bits, she couldn’t imagine what a doctor might bring to use against it.
“It’s cute, fluffy, and trills,” Chanda said. “I’ve decided that you’re right and it’s likely a girl. Or at least girlish.”
“Boys can’t trill?”
“I don’t know. Do you want to demonstrate?”
She didn’t think he would, but Kor paused, considered, then made a throaty noise that mixed a hum and something a choking frog might make. He raised his eyebrows.
Chanda shook her head. “Whatever that was, it wasn’t a trill.”
A questioning trill came from the quashi.
“Roberta agrees,” Chanda said.
“Huh.”
She pointed at his medical kit as they continued walking toward Engineering. “Did they ask you to help out again?”
“To supply an adhesive for the tracking device. And yes, I agree with your unspoken question. It’s rather amazing how often I’m being asked to assist with this entire quashi situation.”
“You feel it’s beneath you?”
“Mostly I feel unqualified to handle it. Though I don’t mind that it’s let me… ah, that you’ve been assisting too. That we’re assisting together.”
Chanda cocked her head, surprised to hear him stumble over words. Somehow, seeing a man as big and fearsome-looking as he was flustered was odd.
Kor rolled his eyes. At himself? “I mean, I like having an excuse to spend time with you,” he said. “And your excellent selection of shirts.” He waved toward her chest—today, she wore a blue Star Marauders T-shirt.
“Oh.” Chanda bit her lip to keep a silly smile from bursting out. She started to say more, that she liked spending time with him, too, but the door to Engineering opened, and Commander Borage walked out.
“Ah, there you are,” Borage said, looking more at Kor than Chanda. He did shift his gaze toward her—and Roberta—and press his lips together in what was either skepticism or disapproval. Maybe both.
“We’ve only been gone fifteen minutes, Commander,” Kor said.
“Yes, but I missed you terribly.” Borage stepped aside, waving them through the door. “Sparks managed to give himself an electrical burn while fixing damage that our furry intruder caused. New damage.”
“People only miss me when they’ve hurt themselves,” Kor murmured to Chanda as they stepped inside.
“I think I’d miss you if you were gone a long time.” She smiled at him.
“What counts as a long time? More than fifteen minutes?”
“Maybe a little more.”
“But surely less than three days, right?”
Borage cleared his throat as he walked in after them and frowned at their silly banter. “Jamie and I are ready for your adhesive any time, Doc.”
“Right.” Kor patted Chanda on the back before vee
ring to the side where Sparks was clutching his hand and scowling at a holographic display.
Borage went to a work table where Jamie hunched, assembling something that looked like a miniature rocket launcher. She glanced back at Chanda and Roberta and waved to a corner of the table.
“There’s your tracker, Chanda,” Jamie said. “We get to see if your idea works.”
Her expression wasn’t as skeptical or disapproving as Borage’s had been, but Chanda heard her mutter something about a Plan B to Borage.
Chanda frowned and stroked Roberta. “We’ll make Plan A work, won’t we, girl?”
She couldn’t tell if the responding trill denoted agreement or that Chanda was petting the quashi in just the right place. Either way, she decided to find it encouraging.
She walked over and picked up the gray disc-shaped tracking device. Looking more like a token to operate an old-fashioned laundry machine than a high-tech piece of equipment, it didn’t have any hooks or an obvious way to attach itself to something else. Not yet.
Chanda walked it over to Sparks and Kor.
“Do her first,” Sparks said, nodding toward her.
“Er, what?” Kor asked.
“I think that was dirty.” Chanda smiled, amused that Kor never seemed to think along those lines. Hadn’t he ever been a lecherous soldier before turning doctor and monk?
“I mean, figure out how to stick the tracker on the fluff ball before worrying about my hand,” Sparks said. “It’s chewed through more wires since you left, and we’re worried it’s angling toward something critical. It’s started moving around quickly back there, like it knows we’re aware of it and is determined to finish its mission.”
“How intelligent is this thing?” Kor asked.
“Hard to say. It hasn’t come out and challenged Commander Thatcher to math games yet.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t see through this.” Kor waved at the quashi, then opened his kit.
Chanda looked worriedly at Roberta. If their enemy was intelligent, would it realize she represented a threat? When she hadn’t before when they’d all been in that box?
Her throat tightened at the idea of her plan resulting in Roberta being killed. Or worse. Yes, there were a lot more quashis back in the shuttle, but this was the one Chanda had been working with, and she felt an attachment to her.
Roberta tipped sideways in her arms, as if to settle in for a nap, and rested an antenna on Chanda’s wrist.
Chanda bit her lip. Maybe this had been a mistake. Maybe—
“Ready?” Kor held up a tube of gel.
“That’s the adhesive?”
“No.” He leaned over the quashi with the tube open, a silvery gel oozing from the tip, but paused. “We decided to put the tracker on the front, right? Do you know which end is the front?”
Chanda pointed toward the end with the two antennae.
“Ah, that makes sense.” Kor squeezed some of the gel onto Roberta’s fur, then used his finger to smear it around.
Chanda arched her eyebrows. The quashi stopped trilling, but she couldn’t tell if Roberta was truly disturbed or just wondering what this crazy doctor was doing to her.
When Kor was done, a large patch of her fur lay flattened to her body, a sheen of gel glistening on it. He took the tracker from Chanda’s hand, then wrapped a band around it, the outside sticky. It took some artful maneuvering for him to apply it to the quashi without getting a finger stuck between the tracker and the animal in the process.
“It won’t stick that well to the gelled fur,” Kor explained. “I’m hoping it’ll find the fluffy and dry fur of the saboteur a lot more appealing.”
“Ah.”
“Now, you just have to convince it—her—to butt heads with the intruder. Or bodies, I guess.” Kor stepped back, holding her gaze.
Did he expect her to telepathically command the quashi to do that? As if she could. She was hoping for luck here, and she knew it.
Still, Chanda murmured to Roberta as she headed for the open duct where Jamie knelt again, a tablet in hand. “Find your fake buddy, please? And be careful in there. Nuzzle him a bit, and then get out.”
“You’ve decided the mechanical one is male?” Jamie asked.
“It’s thuggishly breaking things. It must be male.”
“Should we be insulted?” Borage asked from behind them.
“Possibly so,” Kor said.
Chanda had no more words of advice for Roberta, so she bent to one knee and set her inside the duct. The quashi sat motionless, aside from one antenna. That antenna lifted up and quirked back and forth before it dropped back down even with the other one.
“I’m impressed so far,” Borage said after a few seconds with the quashi doing nothing.
“Shall I give it a nudge?” Jamie asked, lifting a tool.
“Go find him, girl,” Chanda said. “It won’t take long, and then I’ll have an apple slice for you.”
Both antennae lifted this time. Then the quashi flowed into the dark duct. Chanda’s fear for Roberta returned, and she remembered the blackened robot that had lumbered out of the duct earlier.
“They don’t understand us, do they?” Jamie looked at Chanda, then back at Kor.
“The encyclopedia article didn’t mention much in the way of intelligence,” Kor said.
“She may have learned the word apple,” Chanda said.
“And knows what she has to do in order to get one?” Jamie asked.
“I don’t know.” Chanda gazed into the duct, but Roberta had disappeared into the darkness. All they could do now was wait.
8
Kor paced, tapping his medical kit and glancing at the display hovering over Jamie’s tablet. She and Chanda still knelt in front of the duct, watching the quashi’s meandering crawl into the dark recesses of Engineering. The sensor program they had pulled up would have had no trouble following the animal’s route even without a tracker, thanks to its heat signature. Kor and the others should have realized sooner that the saboteur wasn’t a real quashi.
“Is it getting any closer to the saboteur?” Borage asked. “Or just taking the tour in there?”
A beeping came from his station. He cursed and turned back toward it. “Now what?”
Kor looked over, feeling he should help, but he wouldn’t know how. He was useless here in Engineering now that he’d done his job of sticking a chip onto an animal. All those years of medical training for that moment…
“I think she’s getting close,” Jamie said, poking a finger into her display. “Look, I’ve combined the tracker data with the motion sensor.” She pointed to two different blobs, blobs that were now close together.
A snap-crunch came from somewhere deep within the machinery behind the bulkhead. Kor shifted uneasily as Borage cursed again.
“Get that weapon ready,” he called over his shoulder.
“The tracker hasn’t been placed yet,” Jamie said.
“I don’t care. Somehow, it’s eating through the plating of the housing for primary life support.”
“What?” Kor asked sharply.
Borage ran to a locker, yanked it open, and pulled out a laser rifle. He also grabbed a toolkit. “If it gets through the housing, I can yank out the tank and should be able to see it.”
“The tank for what?” Kor asked.
But Borage sprinted past him without replying. He ran up a ladder onto a catwalk, then disappeared over the top of a bank of machinery.
Kor worried Borage might need help—or that the saboteur would have the power to evade his fire and attack him—and almost jogged after him. But Jamie spoke, making him pause.
“I think they’re right next to each other,” she said.
Chanda leaned over her shoulder, and Kor couldn’t see the display.
“The tracker stopped moving,” Chanda said.
Kor came up behind her so he could see.
“The tracker is showing as right by the back of the life support system,” Jamie said. “Your qua
shi may have tagged it already.”
“Is that Roberta?” Chanda pointed to a blob that had started moving surprisingly fast.
“Uh, I don’t know what else it would be, but—”
“I see the hole it made,” Borage yelled, his muffled voice barely reaching them. “But the intruder hasn’t come into the unit yet. Can you fire the duct rocket now? Stop the creature before it gets into the unit? The auxiliary life support system is still offline from its earlier visit.”
“Shit, it’s not choosing random targets, is it?” Kor asked.
Jamie grabbed the miniature rocket launcher off the deck.
“Wait.” Chanda grabbed her wrist as Jamie started to arm it. “Roberta is still in there. It’ll hit her.”
“There’s no time to wait.” Jamie glanced in the direction Borage had gone.
A shot fired, the buzz of an energy weapon.
“I hit it!” Borage’s voice floated down. “But it’s still moving. It jerked out of my sight, back into the duct. Hurry and use the rocket. I bet it’s going to try to make another hole, get in where I can’t see—” Thuds and clanks ended his sentence.
Kor hoped Borage was responsible for them. Their intruder couldn’t be returning his attack somehow, could it?
“Borage?” Kor called. “You all right?”
“Come on, girl,” Chanda yelled into the duct at the same time. “I’ve got your apple for you.” She waved the browning slice in the air in front of the exit.
Jamie, her thumb on the trigger that would arm the self-propelling rocket, glanced at the display on her tablet.
“Is she coming?” Chanda demanded.
“I think so. She slowed down.”
“Because she’s injured?”
Jamie twitched a shoulder.
“How much of an explosive is in that rocket?” Kor eyed the baton-sized launcher. It was small and compact, but that didn’t mean much. A mini grenade had the power to take out half the ship.
“It’s concentrated and won’t explode,” Jamie said. “Sparks and I made sure it would just take out what it hit and not damage the surrounding machinery.”
