by Alex Lamb
‘A threat, perhaps?’ he suggested. ‘We must have some kind of leverage that will work.’
Sam slashed the air with his hand. ‘The last thing we need is Mark having reason to suspect us. He’d go looking for ways to break our grip and that would be bad. There are things stashed in the memory core of this ship that nobody should see. Exactly the sort of shit that could make this situation even worse.’
‘Like what?’
‘Never you fucking mind. Shit for handling contingencies. Shit you don’t even want to know about.’
At times like this, Ash found Sam a little frightening. When he was badly stressed, ominous-sounding things leaked out.
‘That’s it, then,’ he said. ‘It’s over. We’ll just have to let him in on what’s happening and get his support.’
Sam looked disgusted. ‘Are you crazy? Mark’s in love with the Earth. What are you going to tell him? That we’ve arranged for it to be bombed by alien robots and that we’ve fingered his stepdad for the blame? He’d head back there as fast as he could. This whole thing would go into meltdown and we’d be strung up on the nearest gibbet. The fact that this is a last-ditch effort to prevent all-out fucking war would go straight over everyone’s heads. If we were lucky, we’d live long enough to watch the first bombs start dropping.’
‘So we lie to him,’ said Ash. ‘We make something up.’
‘Like what?’ said Sam. ‘Oh, by the way, Mark, we didn’t tell you before but we know all about those aliens and kept it from you for nice reasons. And unless you go to this weirdy-ass-looking star system we found, we’re all going to die. So pretty please. And don’t ask any questions, there’s a good chap.’
Ash flushed. He didn’t like being mocked and wished he had a decent suggestion to offer. He couldn’t think straight with the promise of a Nem swarm breathing down his neck.
He squeezed his eyes shut against the hideous mess they were in. He’d argued about the plan with Sam when it was first explained to him. Leaving warp trails for the Nems was so easy; why hadn’t they just initiated the attack on Earth the moment the Ariel Two passed through the Penfield Lobe? That way, Will would have still been too far away to abort the attack and the outcome in the home system would have been the same. But no, Sam said. It was essential that Will side with them in the aftermath. Ash had never understood why, and now they were paying for that folly.
Sam punched the wall. ‘I should have killed Mark already.’
‘I don’t think you mean that,’ said Ash.
Sam gave him a long, cold look. ‘Why not? When the stakes are this high, nobody’s sacred. Not even the son of Superman.’
‘And what are we supposed to do if we arrive at Snakepit and Mark’s dead?’ said Ash. ‘How much help would we get from Will then?’
They both knew this was the major downside of Mark’s involvement and the reason they’d already gone to such precarious lengths to unseat him. Mark’s safety was supposed to act as leverage to secure Will’s cooperation. Instead, he’d become a liability.
‘I know the fucking risks!’ said Sam. ‘And believe me, if I can avoid killing him, I will. We’ll have to bide our time. All that time that we don’t have. Right now, we need to play nice and win back his trust because he’s holding all the cards, even if the self-indulgent little shit has no idea what game he’s playing.’
Sam snapped his fingers. A decision had apparently been made.
‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘And keep your mouth shut unless I tell you otherwise.’
Sam opened the door to the privacy chamber and led Ash out into the garden-lined companionway that ran through the centre of the science section. They followed the curving corridor to the hatchway that led to the diplomacy zone beyond. From there, Sam ducked through the door to the med-bay where the coma-storage berths lay. Ash quickly followed. Sam shut the door behind them and pulled up the room controls on the wall.
‘Give me Citra Chesterford,’ he told the room.
‘Her sedative is set to run for another ninety minutes,’ the med-bay reminded him. ‘If she’s woken—’
‘I don’t care,’ Sam snapped. ‘Override code Shah Nineteen.’
‘Of course, Overcaptain Shah.’
The coma-bed where they’d put Citra to recover slid out of the wall. The ship now had two conveniently spare – one for each dead Spatial.
‘Recorders off,’ said Sam. ‘Splice in surveillance cover pattern “WindowTwitcher”. And give the patient a stimulant.’
Citra’s eyes fluttered. Sam quickly took her hand and laid a gentle restraining palm on her shoulder.
‘Citra,’ he said softly. ‘It’s Sam. Don’t try to move too much. Your body’s still full of sedative.’
Citra blinked and looked up at him with horror in her eyes.
‘Where are we?’ she said. ‘Why are we under gravity? Did we get Yunus?’
Sam shook his head. ‘I need you to stay calm and quiet. We’re headed for Nerroskovi.’
Citra squeezed her eyes shut. Tears pressed from their corners.
‘The others don’t know I’ve woken you,’ said Sam. ‘They put you out when the ship started moving. But I have to tell you what’s going on.’ His face was imploring. ‘I wanted to send a shuttle back to the surface. Your husband and I may have been at odds in our work but I never would have wished something like that on him. I can’t imagine how you’re suffering now. I swear to you that I would have got him out if it had been up to me.’ He sighed. ‘I knew Mark wouldn’t do it. That’s why I pressed for control. But since Mark broke my priority override, we’re all essentially his captives. There’s no chance of mounting a rescue for Yunus while he’s in control. He’s made that very clear.’
Sam’s gaze turned sadly to the floor. He drew another deep, ragged breath, as if steeling himself. ‘I want you to know that Ash and I will do everything we can to fix this and get Yunus back,’ he said. ‘In the meantime, if you want to help, please keep quiet about this visit. We’ll be doing what we can. I just came to tell you that you have friends, that’s all. The politics are behind us. You’re not alone on this ship.’ He squeezed her hand and started to walk away.
‘Wait,’ said Citra.
Sam paused.
‘How did Mark break the override?’ she said. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Neither do we. By every Fleet-legal procedure, it should have worked. But it’s as if Mark knew things would go bad at Tiwanaku and planned it this way. I don’t have to remind you that he was hand-picked for this job by Will Monet. Or that before this he was on probation flying heavy lifters in the North Atlantic Disaster Zone. It worries me that Monet has stood against your husband’s research for years, Professor. There’s no way of knowing what he and Ruiz have in mind for the rest of us.’
The misery in Citra’s expression curdled into loathing.
‘We all appear to have walked into something deeper than we ever anticipated,’ said Sam. ‘Maybe some kind of attempt by Will to regain his celebrity? Who knows?’
Citra’s mouth became a cold, thin line.
‘You realise I’m telling you all this in the strictest confidence,’ Sam urged. ‘Mark can’t know we suspect him. Given a chance, Ash and I may be able to do something with the computers to force a change. But if Mark gets wary and acts first, we’ll lose any advantage we have, which could be disastrous for all of us. If there’s dissent among the crew about Mark’s role, it can’t come from Ash or me. Do you understand?’
‘Perfectly,’ said Citra. A light of anger had come on in her eyes. ‘You can rely on me, Overcaptain Shah.’
‘Please,’ he said with a kindly smile, ‘call me Sam.’
Ash hid a shiver. He found it chilling just how easily Sam played her. Yunus and Citra had been allowed on the mission because they were considered adequately predictable, but even so, it disturbed him. As they
left the ship’s biologist staring grimly at the med-bay ceiling, Ash couldn’t help but wonder if he’d notice Sam pulling the same trick on him.
9.2: MARK
Mark stood on a virtual beach and skimmed stones out across the placid water, struggling for calm. He kept the beach as a subdomain of his personal sensorium space and retreated to it from time to time when he needed to centre himself. There had never been a time such as this.
Waves lapped the pebble shore before him. An afternoon sun shone through a high haze of cloud, giving the sky an opal sheen. A moist, salty breeze tickled his imaginary skin. And none of it did him a blind bit of good.
Everyone was glad to be out alive, no doubt, and within hours they’d reach the rendezvous star. All they had to do then was wait for the other two ships to show and plan how they were going to break the bad news to the rest of IPSO.
But whichever way Mark turned over the events of the last day his mind, he hated them. He tried to think of something he could have done differently but was at a loss. Ash would have been hopeless under those conditions. Ash’s social skills exceeded those of every other Omega from the programme, but he was a Fleet protocols reliably followed under trying conditions kind of pilot, as one assessment report had put it, not a born improviser. Sam had been way out of line trying to pull overrides on him. There was absolutely nothing in the mission profile that gave him the right to do that.
Even so, the fact that the override hadn’t worked was going to look bad. So what if Will Monet had been responsible? The man had been a law unto himself for decades. People weren’t even going to bother pointing the finger at him. It was Mark who’d be left looking shady. And Mark who’d have to answer for it in the court case if they went after his interface again. Presuming, of course, that the human race lasted that long.
Mark skimmed a last stone across the water, brushed off his hands and jumped back to his home node. Icons and documents hung around the walls of the cave like a time-locked snowstorm. Mark grabbed the link for his personal security system and dived through it. If he was going to be held accountable for the patch Will had given him, he should at least find out what the hell it did.
Mark’s security subsystem resembled a deep, dark forest. He’d decided long ago that the more he made his virtual environment match the kinds of spaces people had evolved in, the more efficient he’d be. He hadn’t been proved wrong yet. A short hike through the underbrush revealed a new kind of pinkish vine growing on the tree for each subsystem in his interface. Its surface looked greasy and metallic, at odds with the rules for the visualisation around it.
Mark reached out and touched one. It dissolved into a hovering mess of quasi-sentient program diagrams before coalescing again. Will’s handiwork, without a doubt.
Mark followed the vines out of his interface hardware, down into the Gulliver’s metaphor-space. When viewed through the correct filters, the tinkering became obvious. It must have spread like a disease from the first moment he plugged himself in. The cavernous forest-space of the Gulliver’s command system was lousy with the stuff. Will had infected him with kudzu of the mind.
Mark groaned. He grabbed a handful of the digital weed and yanked. The vine dissolved in his hand again, this time triggering a readme.
‘Good luck, Mark,’ said a shivering avatar of Will, who popped into existence standing next to the tree. ‘I’ve tried to include everything you might need. There’s a hackpack, traffic blockers and analytics, an autonomous self-monitoring kit, viral templates and a complete submind support armature …’
Mark felt a surge of anger.
‘What about a packed lunch?’ he shouted. ‘Did you remember a fucking packed lunch? Or how about a letter for teacher to get me out of sport-sim, you asshole!’
Not only was this a gross intrusion into his own private mental space, but Will had fouled up the whole command hierarchy. No wonder Sam’s overrides hadn’t worked. Mark would be surprised if the ship responded to anyone else as captain ever again.
While Sam clearly shouldn’t have intervened, this had to be the most embarrassing way possible for it to have played out. Mark rubbed his eyes. He’d need to trace all this stuff down and make sure it hadn’t done any damage.
But first, he knew he needed to take ownership of this situation and try to square it with his passengers before the Ariel Two showed up. He jumped back to the helm-arena and clicked his fingers for a comms icon. It was time for an all-hands meeting.
Mark sat in his chair in the lounge, brooding and waiting for everyone to file in. Sam appeared first, climbing down the ladder with a heavy tread. Mark braced himself reluctantly for another fight. He felt more exhausted than angry. He dearly hoped Sam wasn’t going to start with more shouting.
To his surprise, Sam faced him with a sheepish expression.
‘I want to apologise,’ he said, before Mark could open his mouth. ‘I lost my head at Tiwanaku. I shouldn’t have tried to invoke an override. You were right, it was a mistake. I should have let it go after that vote failed the other day. It’s simply that I’ve trained with Ash and know what he can do, whereas you were an unknown. I hope you understand that I was just trying to keep us all alive. No hard feelings?’ He thrust out a hand for Mark to shake.
Mark regarded the hand warily. It was tempting to put it all behind them, but he wasn’t sure he trusted the gesture yet.
‘That’s quite a turnaround,’ he said.
‘It is,’ said Sam. ‘But I’ve had some time to think about it, and frankly, I’m embarrassed about the way I reacted back there. I was mentally ready to find a sect cover-up, not that, whatever that was. It threw me off. And while you might not be my captain of choice, there’s still no excuse for breaking Fleet rules. As it was, the ship threw it back in my face. I intend to be a lot more cautious in that regard moving forward. And I welcome your input. As it turns out, I could use the guidance. It happens to all of us from time to time, you know. Even Fleet executives make mistakes.’
Mark took Sam’s broad, warm hand and shook it, even though it felt weird doing so.
‘Apology accepted,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry things got as complicated as they did. I overreacted. That drone-shrapnel manoeuvre was dangerous. I should have just dropped it.’
Sam waved it away. ‘It’s in the past,’ he said. ‘We’re all alive. And besides, as you said, now we have extra research material.’ His face cracked into an ironic smile.
‘I guess,’ said Mark, relaxing a little.
The others started to file down the ladder, Ash first.
‘Thank you for coming,’ said Mark as they assembled. ‘I felt like we all needed to touch base.’
He glanced around at them. Sam still looked apologetic and Ash embarrassed. Zoe’s and Venetia’s faces bore similar expressions of haggard concern. Citra, though, regarded him with thinly concealed loathing. There was so much venom in her gaze that Mark was surprised the Casimir-buffers in the wall behind him weren’t crackling. He felt a renewed surge of guilt.
He cleared his throat. ‘This is a difficult time for everyone, but we’re going to do what’s been asked of us. And that means following the mission profile and rendezvousing with the other ships at Nerroskovi.’
Citra looked unmoved.
He addressed her directly. ‘Please believe me, nothing hurts me more right now than the fact that I couldn’t send that shuttle down for Yunus. Our mission profile forbade us from interacting with the Photurians in the event of conflict. That’s what the other ships are for. And it was my duty to protect everyone on this ship. I hope you understand that.’
‘I call again for the removal of Mark Ruiz from his position as captain,’ Citra said coldly.
Mark blinked at her vitriol. Her gaze drilled into him like a welding laser.
‘Citra, we’ve been over this,’ said Venetia quietly. ‘Why would you want to go there again?’
Zoe folded her arms uncomfortably.
Citra raised an accusing finger to point at Mark’s chest. ‘Worst of all, that man is only here for some nepotistic reason we don’t even understand. Monet put him aboard and we know he’s got some kind of agenda. We heard as much from his own lips. When Sam tried the override control, command should have gone straight to Ash and we all know it. He’s a lifter pilot, for crying out loud. And we have someone more highly trained with a better record sitting right in front of us. How much more proof do we need that something is badly wrong here? Monet has some sick, desperate plan, and this man is a part of it.’
Mark’s nostrils flared. The mention of Will had put his hackles up. He’d called them together with the intention of discussing their software problem but now he didn’t feel like admitting anything at all. He felt certain Citra would use it against him.
‘Citra,’ said Venetia slowly, ‘Sam shouldn’t have tried for control in the first place. I’m not blaming him – we were all a little freaked out back there – but it wasn’t Fleet-legal.’
‘Does that matter?’ said Citra. ‘It still should have worked.’
Venetia glanced across at Mark. ‘Can you tell us why it didn’t?’
Mark threw up his hands. ‘I’m here to do a job,’ he said defensively. ‘Maybe the control SAP recognised a dangerous transfer of authority and blocked it on safety grounds. The onboard ethics on this ship are all run by Vartian software, not Fleet code. Zoe, do you know its priority pattern?’
