by M. D. Cooper
Earnest broke into their conversation.
“The estimate?” Captain Andrews asked aloud.
“Damn, that’s fast,” Sera said.
Earnest signed off and Sera gave a soft laugh. “I can’t believe it was you guys that named that star. Do you realize it stuck?”
“I suppose I had better send that message to the FGT,” Sera said and rose from the table. “Plus it’s been a really long day.”
Everyone agreed that they had dallied long enough and that there was work demanding their attention and the meeting broke up. In the corridor, Tanis stopped Sera.
“Any chance I can sit in on your call to the FGT?” Tanis asked.
Sera grimaced. “Look…I know your curiosity burns eternal, but I have to do this alone.”
Tanis’s expression soured. “A lot is riding on your prediction.”
“Earnest says my FTL specs are good. Even if I can’t hold up my end of the deal, you can get out of here and fly to the edge of space and make a colony where no one will find you,” Sera replied coldly. “It’s what you want, right? To get away from everything? To hide and hoard your technology and not share it with humanity?”
She could see Tanis was taken aback by the vehemence of her statement. Joe and Flaherty both watched with raised eyebrows, sharing a look between them.
“Send your message then,” Tanis said coldly. “But you should know that it would be a lot easier to relate to you if you weren’t hiding so much.”
“C’mon,” Joe said, taking Tanis’s arm. “There’s a lot you need to do.” He looked over his shoulder to Sera and Flaherty. “It was nice meeting you, I imagine you’ll want to get back to your ship. The nav NSAI can guide you.”
With that he whisked Tanis away, leaving Sera and Flaherty standing alone.
“Well that was unexpected,” Sera said with a sigh.
“It really wasn’t,” Flaherty replied. “I’m surprised she didn’t give that to you with both barrels in the meeting with the captain.”
Sera looked at him in surprise. “Really? I didn’t think it was bothering her that much.”
“On the way here, she had no way of knowing what she was up against, so she compartmentalized her worry about her people and focused only on the task at hand—you remember compartmentalization, right?” Flaherty said with a frown. “Now that she’s back here, the two and a half million lives on this ship are her biggest concern, and you are her biggest unknown. To Tanis you’ve become the definition of risk in human form. The fact that you saved her life is likely all that’s keeping her from kicking you off the Intrepid.”
Helen added.
Sera stared at Flaherty and Helen’s virtual presence in surprise.
“You know why it’s so hard for me. I don’t want to go down that road.”
“You’re already going down that road,” Flaherty said. “You’re taking me and Helen with you, I might add, but I swore on my life that I would keep you safe. You need to grow up and take charge of your destiny. The first part of that is coming clean with Tanis…and your crew for that matter.”
They walked in silence past Priscilla who didn’t speak, but sent a greeting into their minds. At the end of the corridor they boarded a maglev car and gave it their destination.
Flaherty chuckled.
The rest of the trip back passed in silence. The maglev eventually stopped at a large station labeled “A1 Docking Bay”
The corridor to the bay itself was short, and when they arrived, there was a corporal waiting for them with a groundcar.
“Ma’am, Sir, I’m to take you to your ship,” she said.
“Glad to hear it,” Sera replied. “It looks like it’s a kilometer away.”
“A bit more,” the corporal, Nair by her uniform’s tag, said.
The groundcar took off and Sera closed her eyes for the trip, working up what she would say in her message. Before they arrived, she was interrupted by a call from Cargo.
Cargo thanked her and Sera accessed Priscilla via the return path from her last greeting.
Sera smiled to herself. Every now and then an advanced intelligence would detect that Helen was no regular AI. It was interesting to be privy to the meeting of those minds.
Sera opted out of the conversation. No other intelligence had ever made that observation of Helen, and, as much as she wanted to see how Helen handled it, the conversation was bound to begin flowing so fast that she wouldn’t be able to follow it.
Suddenly she was Linked with Captain Andrews, and she focused her attention on him.
the captain said.
Sera sent him a mental chuckle.
Captain Andrews laughed in response and closed the connection.
Ahead, Sabrina came into view, tucked in a corner behind a massive pile of equipment; she checked in on Helen and found that her AI was still in a deep conversation with Priscilla. She’d never considered it before, but she wondered if her and Helen’s secret would finally get out. The thought was both exhilarating and terrifying. She put that thought from her mind as the groundcar pulled up to her ship.
She thanked the corporal for the ride and approached the throng of bios.
“Hello, I’m Captain Sera. I’ve been informed you’d like to do an inspection of my crew and any possible health issues?”
An officious looking man, there was always one in every group, pushed through the other bios, seven in total.
“Yes. I’m Dr. Philips. We demand that we be allowed to inspect your ship and its cargo to ascertain any possible health concerns. The fact that you have been allowed access to the Intrepid without being screened first is unconscionable. You could be spreading some sickness against which we have no defense!”
“As I understand it, we were screened when we first boarded the Andromeda,” Sera said with a smile. “Some very impressive systems you have on this ship of yours.”
“Well, not physically examined, though, and your ship could be harboring contaminants.”
Sera sighed. “Don’t you think that if there were some highly communicable and deadly sickness rampant amongst us that Tanis would have caught it?”
“Not necessarily…” the man said as he looked around her, seeing only Flaherty. “Where is Mrs. Richards anyway?” he asked.
“Don’t you mean General Richards?” Sera asked.
“Yes, yes, Priscilla won’t tell me where she is. We should check her too.”
“I believe she is taking a few hours of personal time with Joseph,” Sera said.
The man blanched and Sera had to suppress a smile. He nodded to one of the bios with him. The man grabbed a case from the pile near the airlock and dashed toward their groundcar.
He looked at his other associates. “I suppose there is no point in us suiting up. We’ve probably already been contaminated and that may just concentrate it.” He then turned back to Sera. “You will grant us access to your ship now.”
The man was really starting to get on her nerves. She swished her head, tossing her hair over her shoulder, and placed her hands on her waist. The desired effect was achieved; the man took a moment before his eyes returned to hers, at which point her glower was severe, causing him to flinch.
“What’s the magic word?” Sera asked.
“What?”
“The magic word, what is it?”
“Magic?” He grew flustered and Sera’s glower twitched, threatening to turn into a smile.
Everyone else in the group looked exasperated with Dr. Philips. One of the women leaned over and smacked him in the shoulder. “It’s please, you dolt.”
“Oh, er, please.”
Sera’s glower disappeared and she beamed. “Cargo,” she said over the Link and audibly for the bios benefit. “Assemble the crew in the galley so these medical folk can check us over to make sure we’re not carrying the plague.”
With that she slipped past the bios, Flaherty following, and stepped through Sabrina’s airlock. The bios quickly picked up their equipment and followed her down the freight deck’s main corridor. Perversely, she took the ladders and enjoyed hearing them struggle to pull their equipment up after her to the crew deck.
Cargo, Cheeky, and Thompson were already in the galley and Nance indicated over the ship’s audible comm that she would arrive in a minute. Three of the bios set up their equipment while two began taking air and surface samples from around the wardroom. Dr. Philips was overseeing everything while casting dark looks at the bowl of fruit on the table.
Flaherty walked to the coffee machine and poured himself cup full of their strongest black brew before sitting down beside Thompson. He looked like he was considering putting his feet up on the table, but Sera shot him a look that contained an entire paragraph about how she felt about feet on her maple and walnut table.
“So how’d things go in your big meeting Captain?” Cargo asked, ignoring everything going on around them.
“Very well, they’ve begun implementing the grav systems they’ll need to make FTL transition.”
“That going to take long?” Thompson asked. “I don’t relish sitting here in this exceptionally large target—even though it is amazing—while we wait and see if one of those folks out there decides to end the party and send an RM our way.”
“Don’t worry. Helen is helping them modify the spec for this ship. It’s going quite well. I wouldn’t worry too much about RM’s. Apparently there have been no small number of missiles sent this ship’s way and it’s still here.”
“For real?” Cheeky asked. “That’s got to be some story.”
“Who’s Helen?” Dr. Philips asked.
“Don’t worry yourself,” Cheeky drawled. “She’s an AI. She won’t spread any germs.”
“Fine,” Dr. Philips sighed. “I want to inspect your cargo as well.”
“Once you clear Thompson here, he can show you around. You’ll not open anything without his permission, and if a door’s locked, it stays locked. Our environmental systems are the same ship wide, so you don’t need to look in every corner to find out if anything is amiss.”
Dr. Philips looked unhappy, but accepted that. “Where’s your last crew member?”
Sera smiled as Nance stepped into the wardroom. “Here she is.”
Nance was in her full getup. Her isolated air supply was hooked up and her facial filter totally sealed. She held several sealed containers with what Sera assumed where her blood and tissue samples.
“What is this?” Dr. Philips asked, clearly alarmed. “Is she sick? Is it contagious?”
“Yes, very, we usually don’t let her out, but you demanded that we all assemble,” Sera said, working to retain a straight face.
She glanced across the table at Cheeky who was snickering behind her hand.
Dr. Philips followed her gaze and scowled at Nance.
“This is serious. Give me those,” he said and snatched the samples from Nance.
“This is Nance. She’s our bio,” Sera said with a grin. “Apparently she feels about you the same way that you feel about us.”
“She’s right, you know, Mark.” One of the women in the group said to Dr. Philips. “At least some of the diseases they have may require biological specifics that we haven’t evolved to allow for yet, while everything that we have in our systems they can probably catch.”
“And none of which occurred with Tanis, I’d like to remind you,” Sera pointed out. “Our basic nano is that good at least.” Nance sat at the table, her back ramrod straight. “Besides,” Sera continued. “She always dresses like this; it’s not really that much of a statement about your chances of infecting her, but of anyone’s.”
The Intrepid’s medics took Thompson’s sample first, then Dr. Philips took one of his party with the super and left to go over the ship. Sera turned to Cargo.
“Bridge and all crew quarters are sealed, right?”
“It’s not my first inspection.” Cargo smiled. “Gonna make ‘em say please for every little thing.”
The woman who had come to Nance’s defense smiled at them as she took samples from some of the foodstuffs in the wardroom. “Don’t blame Dr. Philips, he’s just ferociously bored. He spent the whole time on Victoria out of stasis, he did it with the firm expectation of waking to a colony next time. It’s starting to wear his personality thin.”
Sera laughed. “That much is apparent.”
The woman smiled. “I’m Terry, this is Anne and Sam.” She gestured to the woman and man
still with her in the wardroom who nodded in response. “We just got thawed last week. It’s hard to believe we ended up in the ninetieth century?”
“Alive and well,” Cargo replied with a smile.
“They’re not going to let us settle that moon down there, are they?” Terry asked.
“I’d say the chances of that happening now are between zero and nil,” Sera agreed. “The Intrepid out-values it about a million to one, but newly terraformed worlds are very rare in this region. Bollam’s World is in the midst of a heavily settled space; they have no expansion available, so this is their only option.”
“So where are we going to go then?” Anne asked.
“Once we get your ol’ girl FTL capable, we’ll head out to rendezvous with the FGT. They’ll set you up with a nice colony well out of the way.”
A quick check informed Sera that Helen and Priscilla were still lost in a deep conversation. Great, this was going to give her a headache whether she paid attention to it or not. She asked Helen at least to keep the blood vessels in her head from swelling.
“FTL?” Terry asked. “So that rumor was true.”
“You bet,” Sera replied. “We provided the details for the technology. If your Reddings are all history says they are cracked up to be, then the Intrepid should be ready to make the jump in less than a week.”
Terry blushed and the other two looked guilty. “Here you are doing all of this for us and we’re treating you like some sort of quarantine violators. I’m really sorry about that.” She looked over at Nance. “If you don’t mind, I wouldn’t mind seeing the environmental systems on this ship after we’re done here. I used to be a bio on some small transports. I’d like to see what’s changed in the last couple of thousand years.”
Sera was surprised that Nance nodded in agreement.
A half an hour later the inspection was over. The preliminary examinations showed that Sabrina posed no threats and Terry promised to see if there was anything that the crew of the Intrepid could inadvertently pass to them. Dr. Philips wanted to take more samples, but his med techs managed to convince him that they should spend time reviewing what they knew to catch any possible issues fast. If anything suspicious turned up they would do a more thorough investigation later. The way Terry winked at Sera when they left, she was certain that nothing would come to Dr. Philip’s attention unless it was a truly serious problem. She also set a time to come back and see the environmental systems with Nance.
