by DC Bastien
"I appreciate the gesture, Biann," Mes said. "It has been very... lonely in isolation. The virus was somewhat dormant, as it could not find any way to access the systems it had been programmed to. It is why I have been able to maintain a level of independence."
"You gonna be able to do this?"
"I believe so, Captain. The virus does not distinguish between different propulsion, navigation, or communications relays. It simply attempts to access - or control - them."
"So now you've got tiny little engines and a short-band radio, what does the virus want you to do?"
"It is broadcasting our location. It does not realise the frequencies it is using are being blocked. I believe it means to relay information until it receives specific instructions. It is - how did you Humans term this - a 'Trojan horse'?"
"Makes sense. After all, we could be manipulated, instead of destroyed," Avery mused.
"So, you worked out where it is reporting back to?"
"It is sending its communications in a specific direction. That would be the closest Whale-line."
Avery snapped his fingers. "Whales!"
Vadim turned to face him. "Yes. Whales."
"We forgot! They were acting all crazy, but then being nearly-killed distracted us. Whales! It was bugging me last night, but I couldn't put my finger on it til now."
There was a moment where everyone thought about that, then - to Saidhe and Loap's surprise - Vadim grabbed Avery by the shirt and kissed him quickly on the lips. "You're a goddamn genius at times."
"If I was a genius, I wouldn't have forgotten," he snorted, but he was grinning.
"We don't know for sure that it's linked to the Whale issue," Loap said, slowly. "But it is a troubling problem we never resolved."
"Kre, Biann, can you look up the two we bumped into? Find out anything they have in common. I want to know if they have the same sire, or dam, if they were born near the same sun, if they crossed paths ten months ago... anything and everything. Crunch me that data."
"Aye-aye, Captain."
"Loap, you follow wherever that virus is broadcasting its signals to. Even if it's to a relay station somewhere, we do what they don't expect. We go where it's talking to, so you and Saidhe talk to Mes."
"Aye-aye," Loap replied.
"What are we going to do?" Avery asked.
"Come up with some legal trickery."
"You think we can defeat them with legalese?"
"Worked on Lineon."
"We barely got out alive."
"The key word there is 'barely'. It still worked. They are using the Ur as a shield, so they understand law. They're also trying to keep themselves hidden. So if we out them... maybe it screws their plans up enough to stop them."
"That's a big if."
"It's more than we had yesterday."
"...fine. But our failsafe still has to be Ail-Za."
"If we've got nothing else, then Ail-Za and the central Ur-court will get our deadlocked messages. Come on... it's just getting exciting!"
***
"The two Whales were from different parents, according to the registry," Kre said. "They were conceived within six months of one another, but birthed in different areas. So we pulled up their known paths..."
The Sianar lifted a paw, and the information on her tablet was displayed three-dimensionally above the table, with a red and a blue line. To represent time, the lines were most saturated at the ends, finishing in large, fat dots. "We plotted the parents' paths just prior to conception, and following... but as you can see there are no real points of correspondence. They do fly into some of the unmonitored space, where either there are no habitable or resource-heavy systems for bipedal life to make use of, but that happens with all Whales."
"With you so far," Vadim said.
"But then we added in the path of the two Whales we knew about. Both of them were young, as you know... and... well." She gestured over her tablet, and two more lines - one orange and one purple - which started with similar fat dots, and which looked like normal migratory patterns. At least until they went into the uncharted zone.
"Wait... get rid of the parent lines," Vadim asked.
Kre gestured, pulling the red and blue out of the air.
"Put in more... well. Gentle curves, or paths to known early feeding grounds... put in some hypotheticals where they should have gone after leaving the dark areas."
Biann gestured. She'd apparently already seen the same thing, because she had it ready to layer up. Dotted lines carried on the slow, sine-waves or straight lines the Whales usually preferred. Nothing like the sharp course divergence, headed straight to the Lineon sector.
"Right. And if you put in them travelling at normal cruising speeds on the course we know they took... where would they be compared to when they hit us?"
Another gesture, and a little flashing ball where the impacts had been, coupled with dots much further back on the line, barely out of the dark zone.
"So the insane speedy happened straight after they'd been there, in the black... interesting, isn't it?" he asked.
"That's why we called you here. We suspect that if something happened to them, then it happened there."
"Also the perfect place to hide your cunning plans." Vadim nodded, and licked his lips. "Right where no one will go. Okay. You've both done great work."
"Would you like us to project further? We could work out which young Whales had entered the dark zone at the same time, or had travelled faster than was usual?" Kre offered. "If no one was thinking to look for this, then unless anyone else got caught in one, we might be the only ones to notice."
"That would be great. Especially if you can make some form of early-warning system. I'd like to not get totalled on a Whale. Once is enough."
"Right on it," Biann chirruped.
***
[Ashroe: I can't believe I forgot to put more of that in earlier.]
[Sianor: You can always edit more in if you need to.]
[Ashroe: I did, a bit ;) But I think it works like this, too. You can tell me if you think I dropped a ball there.]
[Sianor: Although why didn't more Whales go for them?]
[Ashroe: All in due time! That part, at least, was deliberate.]
[Sianor: You know you're not supposed to keep things from your co-author.]
[Ashroe: Hey, even co-authors deserve plot twists.]
[Sianor: Grrrr.]
[Ashroe: Not much longer now, anyway.]
***
"It appears that by following the broadcast... that we are headed towards the dark zone, Captain," the pilot told him.
"Well, ain't that surprising," Vadim replied. It was not a question, it was a statement. It was far too much of a coincidence, and he didn't believe in real coincidences. Not when they were this big.
"It will be hard to conceal ourselves going in," Saidhe said. "Even attached to a Whale going that way. We'd have to turn everything off and run on shielded emergency power to even hope to remain undetected."
"That would mean turning the virus' broadcast off, too, and by extension Messenger," Loap added. "But we can turn everything back on if we can't find anything out by drifting dead."
"Hmm. What if we played completely dead?"
"...meaning?"
"Meaning... what if we bust ourselves up a bit. Hung on for dear life. Made it look like we'd lost all our self-propulsion, and that we were just floating Whale-stuck?"
"It... could work," Loap said. "It would mean, of course, we'd need a long time to restart our engines and systems. We would never be able to make a quick escape."
"You really think we can escape if they don't want us to? They can send Whales nutso. All they have to do is kamikaze run on us, and we're smush."
"In that case it's a wonderful idea."
"It does mean EVA, Captain," Saidhe pointed out.
"Have you got two suits?" Avery asked.
***
"I think that's the last data-set," Kre said, one claw rubbing behind her
ear. "It appears there were twenty young Whales. They all went to Lineon over a period of three months."
"Nowhere else?" Biann asked.
"Nothing else shows up as faster than it should be. They seemed to accelerate to about the same speed, get to the Lineon sector, then..."
"Then what?"
"...two were reported as lost juveniles. One is marked as sick. The others all seem to be... missing."
"Missing?!"
"Yes," Kre said, and pulled her findings up. "Whatever's going on, they were goaded to Lineon to the point of exhaustion. I would not be surprised if they all died as a result. The energy requirements of such a journey, when still young and forming... it seems to be devastating."
"Why in the world would anyone want to kill Whales?"
"They must have thought that getting whatever they were transporting there quickly was more important than their lives."
"But... Whales don't do anything but help people!"
"I know. People can be selfish. Apparently shaving a minimum of two weeks of travelling time off was worth it."
Biann kicked the table. "That's just horrible. Being mean to anyone is bad, but something that can't even defend itself, or never did anything but let people hitch lifts... that's just the lowest of the low."
"You have to wonder what they were sneaking in. Perhaps the equipment or... 'people' to replace the ones they needed to take control of the Ur? I assume they needed to displace quite a few beings for it to work."
"You told me once I'd find my violence," the Hleen said. "I think I just did."
***
"Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. Hailing anyone who can hear us. This is the Mission. We're a cargo-ship, designation HL-Karos-14. We suffered an AI failure and were hit by debris. We're hooked to this Whale, and have no propulsion. Requesting any assistance, I repeat, any assistance. We have been adrift on this Whale since leaving Alpha Lyrae. We have fuel, but our engines are damaged. Life-support functional. We are not a danger. There ship has no weapons. Two souls aboard. Mayday, Mayday, Mayday."
Saidhe finished the recording, and set it to loop at a regular interval. "Done."
"Good. Right. We should prepare to be boarded."
Saidhe took one last look at the panel, then nodded.
***
Chapter Twenty-Seven - Mission: Conclusion
The Messenger puttered along. Only the most basic of systems were running, pumping air and strip-lighting in. The bridge controls were functional, but dormant. The engines were utterly off-line, and the connections ripped out. It was a primitive disablement, and would only take moments to fix, but combined with the deliberate char on her hull and the non-essential wires and cabling that had been pulled to trail out... she looked in poor state.
She also still looked like the Mission. Which was recorded as belonging to Vadim's alter ego, and which was now flagged up as connected to trouble.
At first, the ship was ignored. It hugged the Whale, but nothing more. It looked like it was simply waiting for someone to save it.
Eventually, when the Whale was deep enough in, another ship joined it. It was unlike any ship on Ur-record. It flew up and hooked to the Whale alongside the Messenger, dwarfing the other vessel. It had banks of guns on either side, which it had trained on her.
There was no communication. There was simply a docking protocol, which the ship - in emergency status - accepted.
Air transferred, vacuum left.
Footsteps. Footsteps and people who walked around the ship. Scanners that looked for signs of life. Scanners that probed, and poked. Things were plugged into ports, and diagnostics run.
No AI. Like the message. If there was an AI, it was missing.
No pilot. No Captain. No crew. Only two souls declared, but no sign of them, even expired.
Signs of inhabitants having been here, though; signs of crew. Clothing. Food. Toys. Nothing more. Nothing of interest. Scrap. Salvage.
The ship left.
A second ship arrived, larger than the first. This one opened underneath. Piston-legs that lowered it over the smaller vessel. Swallowed it whole.
The ship flew off with another in the belly.
Vadim clicked his EVA suit, and the helmet whirred back into the cradle, freeing his head. He rolled his shoulders, feeling cramped from clinging to his ship's hull.
"Well, that went well."
***
When the next group came onboard, prepared to salvage what they could, they entered the airlock and heard the sounds of laughter. There was a hurried discussion, before the consensus was to investigate. The group cautiously made their way towards the noise, only to find two Humans, two Hleen, and a Sianar... apparently playing poker.
"You're lucky this isn't the strip-version, because I'd have taken every single bow-string from your pretty little head," Vadim crowed, leaning into Saidhe's personal space.
"Oh, shut up," she said, pushing his face away, smushing his nose under her palm.
"Hey, guys," Vadim said, sitting back and waving his hand of cards to them. "You want to come get slaughtered? They called me Quick-Paw for a reason at the training Academy."
"They did not call you Quick-Paw. You called yourself Quick-Paw. We called you Thick-Maw."
"That's just because you were dropped on your heads as children," the Captain countered.
"This ship was empty," the faceless man - or reasonable facsimile - said.
"That's the thing about spaces. They don't stay the same," Vadim said, with a little smirk.
"What is happening here?" the man-shaped thing asked.
"Poker," Biann told him. "You're pretty slow, aren't you?"
Vadim carried on dealing. "You guys got a leader, or you one hive mind, or you got some other form of self-government we petty mortals don't understand? Money?"
They didn't even have guns. The figures just stared in shock.
The Captain was having far, far too much fun. "Look, I hate to break it to you, but we're just the scouts. Still. We've come to negotiate. You understand negotiation, right? You know what that means?"
"We... did not expect you."
"Evidently not. Tell you what, you guys want to mosey on back to High Command, take a couple of us with you? And a few of you..." he gestured with his gun, "...stay here. As collateral. Sounds fair to me."
"...yes."
"Twinkle, Sparkle, you're in charge of keeping them here. Kre, Avery, you come with me."
***
Vadim, Avery and Kre all went armed. It probably wouldn't help if they were going to a hugely populated area, or if the Bankers who were guiding them back to the command alerted them ahead of time, but it would make their heroic sacrifice a little more bloody if it came to it, or buy them a few moments.
The Bankers did not speak to one another, not aloud, but they were clearly distressed. Vadim watched as their body-language shifted from the impassive still, to jerky and nervy. Maybe it was for their benefit, maybe not.
They walked through the corridors of the larger ship. It was blank, metal panels. No adornment or directions on the walls. Sometimes the walls were broken when they turned into doors, or more corridors, but they looked as faceless and indistinguishable as the ones they had left. Only the little lights the three had attached to their belts glowed against the dark, but the Bankers didn't seem to care.
Eventually, they came to a room. Why this room, and no other, Vadim didn't know. It was - to the Human eye - empty.
"Nice and cosy place you got here."
"Why did you come?" asked one of the Bankers who had walked them here.
"You the boss?"
"Why did you come?"
"I want to talk to the one in charge. El Capitan. The honcho. The big cheese."
The Bankers stared at them. Or, it would be a stare, if they had eyes that anyone could make out.
"We came because we know what you're up to," Avery said. "We know you're seeding unrest. Meddling with inter-species unity."
"Why did yo
u come?"
"Are you stuck on repeat?" Vadim asked, and tapped a finger onto the blank plate of the Banker's face.
"You have not explained."
"We came to get you to stop, dumbass."
