by Sarah Zettel
“Oh yeah, that’s the reg,” agreed Schyler, and Dobbs couldn’t decide whether his tone was bemused, or just confused. “Unless I decide to throw you out of there,” he added.
At the moment, Dobbs guessed, he was trying to decide who was annoying him worse, Yerusha or the greens.
“Are you refusing to cooperate with security?” Green Woman asked Yerusha pointedly.
“Am I being arrested?”
“No, but you are being stupid.” Green Man took a step forward. “Do you think anybody’s going to stop me if I just haul you out of there?”
“I do.”
Everyone in the hanger spun around. Resit stalked out of the corridor, burgundy skirt billowing around her ankles in lazy waves. She stopped right between the security greens and the entrance to Pasadena, then turned on her heel to face the greens. “I’m Zubedye Resit, ship’s lawyer for the Pasadena,” she said smoothly. “‘Dama Yerusha is under contract to Katmer Al Shei of the Pasadena Corporation, which makes her my client.” She paused to let the entire speech sink in. She folded her arms and tapped her fingers impatiently on her forearm. “Why are you pursuing my client?”
“Not bad, considering she just got here,” whispered Lipinski to Dobbs.
“Slow lawyers get eaten young,” Dobbs replied seriously.
Green Woman looked like she was forcibly swallowing something unpleasant. “Shouldn’t you be praying or something?”
Resit smiled. “It’s only time for the Salatul Jumu’ah, the Friday sermon. That’s optional for women.” She flipped open the flap on her bag and pulled out a film and her pen. “I believed I asked a legal question.” She squinted at Green Woman’s badge and wrote down the number. “Do you really want me to request that the recording of this conversation be transferred to your superior immediately?”
Green Man gave his partner a dirty look. “‘Dama Resit, we just want ‘Dama Yerusha to come to the security module to answer some questions about the … decompression event.”
“They couldn’t talk to me in my hospital bunk either,” said Yerusha to Resit. “They were hauling Freers out of there left and right.”
“Must have been interesting to see,” remarked Dobbs.
“Oh, that it was.”
Resit shot them both a “shut up” glance. “You have the authorizations on hand, I hope?” She tucked her own film away and held out her hand to the greens.
Green Man handed over a pair of films. Resit scanned them. “This does not give you the authority to pursue, detain or forcibly enter.” She handed them back. “I think we all have a complaint to register now.” She gestured towards the hatch to the station corridor.
“You’re not… ” exclaimed Green Woman.
Resit’s grin showed her teeth. “Oh, but I am. Shall we?”
Green Woman’s face flushed darkly. Green Man pointed up at the station camera and she swallowed again. Side by side, they headed towards the station airlock.
“Talk to her, will you?” said Resit to Schyler before she followed the greens out.
Schyler touched his forehead in salute. Then, he turned towards Yerusha and extended his hand. “I really wouldn’t try that again.”
Tucking the wafer case awkwardly under her arm, Yerusha accepted his hand and let him pull her easily to her feet. “Thanks.” She wiped at the sheen of perspiration that had appeared on her forehead. Dobbs knew she’d been right. Yerusha was not in any shape to be up and about. “I’m not about to let security shove me around, Watch. I’m under orders to you, not them.”
“I don’t care what you try to pull with security. I mean with Resit.” He jerked his thumb towards the airlock.
“Oh, marvelous,” Yerusha twisted her neck sharply and Dobbs heard a joint crack. “Another one who doesn’t like Freers?”
Schyler smirked. “Another one who doesn’t like unnecessary wirework. Filing a complaint on your behalf is not going to make her evening, I’d be willing to swear to it.” He stopped and took a good look at the blister on Yerusha’s arm. “Do you want to sit down someplace comfortable?”
She shook her head. “I’m fine.”
Schyler looked her up and down. “You’re lying,” he said bluntly. “All right. Since you acknowledge my command, you are ordered to get back to the hospital and have them do something about this.” He waved towards her bruised face and arm.
Schyler pursed his lips. “Lipinski, will you walk her down? I want there to be somebody who can holler for Resit if any other greens decide to pick her up.”
“Sure, no problem,” said Lipinski to the wall. “I’ve only got the whole data hold to reconfigure.”
“And you need to pick up the parts you ordered,” Schyler finished for him. “Good. That works out fine.”
The look that passed between the two men was one that Dobbs decided she would have to learn to read.
Lipinski left with Yerusha and Schyler turned slowly, thoughtfully to Dobbs.
“And you are?” he inquired.
“Evelyn Dobbs.” She touched her forehead in salute. “Master Fool for the Pasadena.”
“Oh, you’re our Lennox C.” Schyler shook her hand. “Impressive entrance.”
She beamed. “Takes years of special training.”
“I suppose,” he said, favoring her with the same calculating look he’d used on Yerusha, “that I don’t need to tell you that Resit really does not like Freers.”
“I got that feeling.” Dobbs nodded. “But thank you.”
Schyler leaned against the Pasadena threshold and rubbed his clean-shaven chin thoughtfully. “I hate to say this, Master Dobbs, but I think we’re really going to need you on this trip.”
Dobbs bowed. “‘Let a fool be serviceable according to his folly,’” she quoted. “I am also, by the way, checking in.”
“I thought you might be.” He crossed the Pasadena’s threshold and waved for her to follow him. “Might as well formalize at least one of you.”
“Thanks.” Dobbs climbed aboard the ship that would be her home for the next eight months.
She had studied the plans when she had received the contract. The Pasadena followed the standard layout for packet ships. It was two bulbs held together by a long drop shaft. The larger bulb held the bridge, the berths, the kitchen, the shielded data hold and much of the life support. The smaller bulb held the engines and the reactors. The fuel and air tanks were strung on the drop shaft like rings on a pole.
Like the station modules, the shaft meant every deck was a hoop. Schyler led her around the curving corridor. This deck, which was probably the data-hold, was stark, with only labels and green memory panels to break up the white, ceramic walls.
Schyler took her into a briefing room. An oval table surrounded by enough chairs for Pasadena’s entire sixteen member crew took up most of the space. The wide wall at the far end was one solid memory board. Schyler settled into the nearest chair and used his pen to activate the table space in front of him. He wrote his authorization across the main screen and added CREW CHECK IN after it. The table absorbed the text and lit up two palm readers next to the active space.
“I’ll need your pen,” said Schyler.
Dobbs handed it over and he slipped it into the socket in the side of the table. Dobbs, familiar with the standard, Lennox-approved check-in procedure, pressed both hands against the palm readers that lit up in front of her. The table copied the contract from her pen. Then, it confirmed that the fingerprints that activated the pen were the same as those pressed against the reader and printed ACCEPT in front of Schyler. It did not speak, though, which surprised her.
Schyler saw her eyebrows arch. “Owner prejudice,” he said. “Neither Al Shei or Tully particularly likes the machinery to talk back.”
“Must frustrate the AI.” Dobbs lifted her hands off the reader and stuffed them in her pants pockets. “They don’t like being mute.”
Schyler shook his head. “There’s only two AIs on board this ship, and neither one of them lives in
the hull. There’s Resit’s boxed law firm, and the Sundars’ medical advisory.”
Dobbs raised her eyebrows as far as they’d go and waggled them. “Al Shei doesn’t like machines that think either?”
“No, she just doesn’t like it when they try to think too much.” Schyler extracted her pen. “Partly it has to do with being such a mechanical engineer. Partly it has to do with flying with Lipinski for ten years.”
“That’s right.” Dobbs re-pocketed her pen. “He was at Kerensk, wasn’t he?”
Schyler nodded and Dobbs sighed. Most settlements and stations depended on artificial intelligence to run the power and production facilities that made life away from Earth possible. Twenty-five years ago on the Kerensk colony, one over-programmed AI bolted from its central processor and got into the colony network.
Panicked officials shut the computer networks down to try to cage it. Never mind the factories, the utilities, the farms. Just find that thing before it gets into the water distribution system and the climate control. Before it starts to make demands. Before it starts acting too human.
Electricity and communications went down and stayed that way. Before three days were out, people froze in the harsh cold. They began to starve. They drank tainted water. They died of illnesses the few working doctors couldn’t diagnose on sight.
When the colony did try to power up again, they found their software systems shredded to ribbons. It could have easily been human carelessness, but the blame was laid on the AI.
“Fifteen thousand, three hundred and eighteen dead,” said Dobbs to the table top. Not one of the worst AI break-outs, just one of the more recent.
Schyler’s brow wrinkled. “You too?”
Dobbs hooked one finger around her Guild necklace. “I was born there.” She’d been totally incapable of reason when the disaster happened, but she still carried it with her. The ideas of the screams, the desperation, the hundreds of useless, pointless deaths. All of it caused by one rogue AI, by a creature that found itself suddenly alive and didn’t know what to do about it. She could understand Lipinski’s fears, and why he would be infuriated by Yerusha, who actually wanted to try to reproduce such a phenomena, even under controlled circumstances. He knew about violence that could ignite between frightened, ignorant, wildly different beings. He possibly knew that, even better than she did, and from the look she’d seen on his face, he was less than willing to forgive the stranger for wanting to stay alive.
Schyler clucked in wordless sympathy and changed the subject. “You’re all set.” He got to his feet. “Your clearances will be listed on your cabin boards when you get settled in. You can bring in thirty-five pounds of personal effects. Sorry about that, we’re trying to run a little light this trip. Do you want to see where you’ll be?”
“Thanks.” She let her necklace go and put a smile back on her face. “I’d actually — ”
The left-hand wall beeped, cutting off her sentence. “Tully to Pasadena,” said a man’s tired voice.
“Schyler, here.” Schyler tilted his head up.
“Can you let me in?” Dobbs tracked his voice to the intercom patch below the left-hand memory board. “There’s some stuff I still need to get out.”
Schyler leaned both hands against the table. “I’m not on my own in here, Tully.”
“Thirty seconds, that’s all I need. Just left some stuff in my cabin.”
Schyler pressed down harder. With the light gravity, Dobbs thought he might actually lift himself off his feet. “You’re checked out, Tully. I can bring what’s left… ”
“Come on, Tom. Thirty seconds.”
Schyler leaned back and let his hands drop down to his sides. “I’ll be right out. ‘Bye.”
He turned to Dobbs with a worried look. “I’m going to have to give you the tour later… ”
Dobbs waved her hand dismissively. “I’m a Master Fool, I’ll find my way around.” She spun on her toes and marched straight into the wall. “Ow.” She clutched her nose and staggered backwards. “Eventually,” she said, rubbing the offended appendage.
Schyler gave her a grin that might have become real if she’d had a few more minutes to work on him.
Dobbs let Schyler escort her out the door. She stepped out of the bay and didn’t give Marcus Tully, who was fidgeting by the elevator doors a second glance as she got into the lift and picked her floor.
As the lift began to sink, Dobbs remembered that when she had left the cafe, she had intended to try to find out what was really going on with the co-owners of this ship.
That, she fingered her necklace, may take longer than I thought.
Chapter Two — Launch
“Port Oberon to Pasadena, prepare for transfer to docking trolley.”
Yerusha looked out the window above her station boards and watched the trolley slide into place underneath Pasadena. The camera displays on either side of the window showed the flat-bed cart reaching out its waldos and grabbing ahold of the Pasadena’s side just before the docking clamps retracted into the skin of the station.
Yerusha had been glad to see that Pasadena sported a real window. Cameras were fine, and virtual reality was very useful, but she never felt quite comfortable flying without a direct look at what was actually between her ship and where she was going.
The trolley began to tow them out of the docking ring. The slight jerk buffeted her gently against her straps. The gravity was so light she barely retained any sense of up and down. On the displays, the curving walls of the modules fell behind as trolley trundled towards the pinnacle of the station. The landscape became nothing but silver panels sliding away underneath the black dome of vacuum.
If she squinted at the top of the left-hand screen, she could see the shining edge of Oberon, just barely visible beyond the station. Titania though, was somewhere on the other side of Uranus’s blue-grey bulk.
She was glad. She didn’t want to see the Free Home right now. She just wanted to get through the next two years.
“Port Oberon to Pasadena. Thirty seconds to release.”
“Thanks Oberon.” Yerusha chided herself for daydreaming. She had a job to do and starboard Watch Commander who didn’t seem as though he was a great believer in second chances for Freers.
Doesn’t matter, she reminded herself. For now, you are Pasadena.
Yerusha rested her hands on her boards. The flat keys glowed with the designations she had written across them, including the OVERRIDE key. That one would cancel out all the programs she had labored over for the past two days and would let her command the engines directly if anything unpredicted happened on course to the jump point.
The ship had been slow to learn her writing and short-hand because there was no AI running the internal systems. Al Shei was obviously almost as paranoid about humanity’s progeny as Lipinski was. Yerusha shook her head. With attitudes like that surrounding her, it was going to be a long run, that much was sure.
The Pasadena slid out from under the module rings and the gleaming panels that the view screens showed came to a halt. Out of the window, she saw the silver-white curve of the station and just a glimpse of the ghostly globe of Oberon.
“Three to release, Pasadena,” said the Port voice. “Two…one…release.”
The trolley opened its clamps and Yerusha watched Port Oberon and the stark, white moon fall away from the Pasadena.
She knew that the relative motion was the ship’s. Pasadena was falling away from the station, from Oberon and from the sun. Without any acceleration pressure to tell her otherwise, though, her mind believed what her eyes saw. As the minutes ticked by, Port Oberon dropped back, becoming an elaborate silver mobile surrounded by moth like ships that darted between the spindly arms of cranes and the bloated hulls of the fuel tanks. All of them hung against the backdrop of Oberon’s white and black speckled surface. The moon itself was nothing but a cardboard circle suspended in the limitless black pool that made up the universe.
“Pasadena this is Port Oberon we h
ave you at a eight clicks at five minutes, fourteen seconds. Hour 15:24:16. Mark.”
“Marked, Oberon.” Yerusha checked the clock at her station automatically. The clock showed both the length-of-flight time and time of day. The Pasadena’s flight clocks had to be in synch with each other as well as with the outside, but not just for timing torch bursts for sub-light navigation. Navigation past light speed was impossible. To change direction, they would have to drop down to sub-light, change the ship’s flight angle and jump again. The trick was, if they made a mistake in their calculations, they might not know which system they were making their correcting jump from, and it might take days to work out where they were, much less where they were headed, if they were able to do it at all. Ships did disappear for want of good timing.
“In sync, Pilot?” came Schyler’s voice from her right hand. The bridge was laid out so that all the vital stations were on one side of the drop-shaft. The other side held the back-up boards, the conference station and the virtual reality simulator. During her shifts, Yerusha would don the VR gear and run through flight simulations, looking for ways to cut down the run time and fuel consumption, as well as bringing herself up to spec on just what the ship she was flying could and could not do. If an emergency course change were called for, Schyler could put on the gear and run through the programs she fed in from her chair, using full-blown simulations of Pasadena.
“In sync and on line, Watch,” Yerusha replied in her best doing-my-job voice. From Schyler’s station he could call up a display of exactly what she saw, but safety and approved protocol called for a direct check.
To Yerusha’s left sat the pilot’s relief, only other member of the bridge crew on duty at this time. He was a round, little man named Cheney who had Asian eyes and had let himself go almost completely bald. This was his third run with Al Shei as a pilot’s mate, he’d told her. He had described each trip with the single word every shipper with more than one working synapse wanted to hear. Uneventful.
