by J. Boyett
Maybe she'd even been privy to certain conversations between Dobbler and the captain, and might be in a position to say whether, for example, the captain had asked their resident computer genius and juvenile delinquent Dobbler to hack into the AI and sabotage the seals, so as to buy Farraday some time to go in and risk his life and the whole crew's in a crazy quest to administer the Weed to the werewolf, probably as a quick injection. That dose would have had to have been donated by someone like Ensign Fiquet: they'd gone through all Dobbler's possessions, and she was certain there wasn't any left in his quarters or duty station, at least.
Farraday wouldn't have been able to tell anyone that was how he'd gotten the werewolf under control—it wasn't like he could broadcast that he was borrowing illicit drugs from the ensigns who'd smuggled them aboard, then pardoning them for the favor. Instead, he'd have to make up a story about how the werewolf had suddenly recognized him, thanks to the submerged but present spirit of Jennifer Summers: an inspiring story that could set were-studies back for years, if it became widely believed.
Just thinking about it made her want to go grab the fraudulent bastard and toss him in the brig herself. She realized she was grinding her teeth and forced herself to stop. It was hardly in keeping with the bucolic setting.
She looked again at Ensign Fiquet, who was nervous but managing to stay still and collected, and she kept thinking.
The ensign was not merely an ensign but an ensign-adept, one of those awkward combinations that had become common ever since the Thaumaturgic Revolution. She had to stick close to the doctor and the witch, and at times they needed her help in order to function together for certain spells and so forth. Magic was largely a state of mind, and if Blaine put Fiquet in the middle of something as psychologically grueling as the overthrow of the captain, it could hinder her performance in Sickbay. Considering that they were cruising through largely unknown space and could at any moment face an attack by the Provisional, that might have dire consequences.
As for Dobbler, now that they knew about the Provisional's sabotage of their astronav databanks, it looked like they had an immediate need of his computer expertise after all.
If she voiced these things out loud, she'd have to act on them. If she explicitly aired her suspicions to Fiquet and others, it would be unthinkable not to then investigate them and take whatever action the findings warranted. Sick as it made her, that might not be worth it.
And if she spoke to the captain about it face-to-face, she'd lose it. She knew she would. She'd wind up saying something that would make it well-nigh impossible for them to relate the way a captain and his XO should.
But he ought to know she knew. And that she'd be watching him. Otherwise, who knew when he might pull another such stunt?
She sighed, and said, “All right, Ensign. The next time you see Captain Farraday, please feel free to tell him we had this little talk.”
Ensign Fiquet stared at Blaine as she got to her feet. She was plainly unwilling to risk saying anything without being given permission, and Blaine saw no reason to give it to her.
As Blaine was parting the curtain of branches, she paused. “Seriously. It really is nice here.”
She left the ensign but, instead of going straight back to her quarters, decided to stroll around the garden. Maybe she would find a nice isolated corner where she could nap under the artificial sun. Now didn't seem the time to worry about whether that would be commensurate with the XO's dignity. After all, they'd survived the recent danger and seemed to have no immediate threat on the horizon—that was enough to constitute a good day. Besides, it looked like they were all going to be living together a good long time. And they'd been together a year already, anyway—it was safe to say they knew each other.
EPILOGUE
Once his shift was over, Farraday left the bridge under the command of Roy Miller and returned to Sickbay.
Jennifer was still sleeping off the stress of her few days as a werewolf. Farraday sat at her bedside, holding her hand. If there had been crew members about, he would have dispensed with the hand-holding—not that he would have been fooling anyone, but one should make at least some concessions to propriety. Carlson and Walsh had left him alone with Jennifer, retiring to the consultation room for some obviously made-up reason. That Fiquet girl was off-duty and out somewhere, hopefully being discreet.
He let himself be lulled by Jennifer's full steady breathing, trusting that Carlson and Walsh were right and she'd be fine when she eventually woke up. Even though there were plenty of troubles ahead—even though they were in plenty of trouble now—the relief of having Jennifer alive, along with the rest of the crew, finally stilled that bubbling rage he'd been trying to keep a lid on since Cygnus VI.
Though they hadn't gotten off scot-free, he reminded himself, his mood momentarily chilled by the guilty memory of Eban thrashing in the next room. Apparently the fact that Jennifer's scratch hadn't been poisonous enough to fully infect Eban wasn't such a mercy, after all—whatever liminal state he was in, it didn't automatically go into remission when he was moved away from a full moon, the way full-blown werewolfism did.
Farraday gently brushed a lock of Jennifer's hair back from her forehead. It was lank and greasy still with werewolf oil. She needed a shampoo, he thought with a smile.... Now that they knew the Provisional had managed to scramble their astro-charts bad enough that they couldn't always be certain whether or not they'd come out of hyperspace in the vicinity of a moon, they'd have to take the precaution of locking Jennifer up in the brig every time they were about to arrive at a system. His certainty that Jennifer would understand didn't make him feel any better about the idea.
But all that could be worried about later. For now his breath quickened and his chest swelled with pride, happiness, and justification, as he recalled the moment in the Tubes when he'd injected that needle into Jennifer's neck. There should have been no way for him to keep her from ripping his throat out, when she'd leapt at him that way; she'd been way too fast for him. Add to that the fact that he'd frozen, that he'd been unable for a second to jab the needle into her furry neck, horrified by the thought that Carlson's and Walsh's theory might be wrong, that the Weed of Wonder might kill Jennifer the same as any other tranquilizer would. In that moment he'd regretted not having consulted Walsh and Carlson about it, regardless of the promise he'd made Fiquet not to rat her out to the pair and expose her for having partaken of the Weed and even saving a tiny sample of it, not because she'd wanted to use it again but because she was waiting for a safe time to destroy the evidence of her lapse. There would have been no point in consulting Walsh and Carlson anyway, they only would have told him that they had only vague theories about the Weed and that his gambit was unsafe.
Anyway, the only reason he'd survived was that Jennifer had frozen, too, and for slightly longer. She'd paused at the end of her lunge, staring at him with the yellow slits of her eyes. Like she'd been waiting for him, like she'd wanted to give him the chance to regain control of himself and jab her.
Why give him special treatment? There was only one possible explanation: Jennifer was still in there, regardless of what Carlson and Walsh and anybody else thought. He was right, and he'd find a way to prove it.
He knew that discovery hadn't been worth risking the whole crew. He knew that not even saving Jennifer had been worth that, and that he should have done as Blaine wanted, but he would never admit it. What would be the point? Regardless of duty or ethics, he knew that, under the same circumstances, he would behave the exact same way again.
He squeezed her hand. “Because I love you,” he whispered, even though nobody could hear, not even her.
AFTERWORD
Thank you so much for reading—I hope you had fun with this, and will join me for more.
If you enjoyed yourself, I can't tell you how grateful I would be if you left a review on Amazon, on Goodreads, or wherever else you like.
And again, I hope you'll come sign up for my mailing list at www.
jboyett.net
Thanks again!
AN EXCERPT FROM IRONHEART
In Ironheart, miners out at the edge of the galaxy meet a woman who cannot possibly exist—but does....
Madaku grabbed a doctor as they left for the little shuttle. There was one or two in every room of the ship—anyone could have grabbed it, but since it was a machine it fell more or less under his purview. The all-purpose, multi-species diagnostic and treatment tool weighed less than a kilo. He mag-clamped the gray metal rectangle to the thigh of his suit; it caused no encumbrance or noticeable weight, and once it was attached he stopped noticing it.
The three men took the little shuttle over to Ironheart, while Willa stayed aboard the Canary. Madaku, Burran and Fehd were all from worlds with strong patriarchal traditions, so there was an aspect of leaving the damsel behind while they went forth into possible, theoretical danger. Mainly, though, it was standard procedure to leave the intuiter behind when an away team went out. That way, if something happened, the pilot could have the ship primed to go by the time the team returned. Once every ten thousand times or so, something did happen that the hardware and AI’s couldn’t handle on their own.
Ironheart was a formidable name—Madaku didn’t recall having ever heard of a ship called that. As for the Canary, that was a traditional name for mining ships. Madaku didn’t really know how the custom had begun. He thought a “canary” was a type of bird, and he knew that back in prehistory mining had probably been a dangerous and gloomy affair, in which humans had to break through layers of rock largely via muscle power and then spend large amounts of time in the subterranean dark. He thought of birds as pretty things, and imagined that naming a mining ship Canary had originally been a way to celebrate the bright and joyous ease that technology had brought to the mining process; but he really didn’t know. Undoubtedly the history of the name was all right there in the Registry. He’d always meant to look it up, but had just never bothered.
The shuttle darted through the vast silence. The three men watched Ironheart loom larger and larger till it filled the viewport.
“Look how beat-up it is,” said Fehd. “All that pitting and scarring.”
“An old ship,” murmured Burran. “Madaku, how much of that damage was inflicted here in the system?”
Madaku was already scanning to see whether the molecular traces left by the space rocks that had beaten the ship’s hull matched those of XB-79853-D7-4’s cloud of moons. “It looks like a lot of them do match,” he said. “Between those matches, and the cold radiation trace, I think it’s safe to say it’s been here a long, long time.”
They were already suited up in preparation for the vacuum they expected to find inside the derelict, but they hadn’t yet popped their visors closed. Fehd bounced on the balls of his feet, excited about his scavenge. “Hopefully the bodies won’t be too gruesome,” he said.
The shuttle’s autopilot found Ironheart’s airlock and pulled them up to it. The men waited to see whether the derelict’s circuitry was totally dead, in which case they would force the airlock open, or whether their presence would wake up an AI. (The AI that had been running for untold centuries might be decayed or insane, its mutative function having run out of control during all that time—the mutative function generally led to useful innovation only if it was periodically shepherded, instead of being left to run rampant. But there should be subprograms that had been lying dormant all this while and that would reboot upon being informed of the Canary crew’s arrival.)
The Ironheart’s AI subprograms came to. The shuttle’s AI requested access, but Ironheart didn’t want to give it. So the three men settled in to wait out the computers’ fight.
But after thirty seconds Burran and Fehd raised their eyebrows at Madaku, who was following the progress of the hack on his tablet. “Must be some pretty weird code they’ve got,” said Burran.
“I don’t care how weird it is,” said Madaku. By itself the Canary’s AI might have been no match for Ironheart’s, but the hyperdrive link in Madaku’s tablet connected back to the Registry and gave them its encyclopedic knowledge of all computer language and code ever uploaded, from which they should be able to extrapolate all codes in existence. “There must be examples in the Registry of something at least analogous enough for the AI to figure it out.”
“Especially if it’s so old,” put in Fehd.
“So why aren’t the doors opening?” said Burran.
Madaku shook his head in wonder at the readouts. “Looks like this code was rewriting itself and mutating in isolation for a long time before it went to sleep.” Then, as if he were arguing with himself, or scolding himself for his own gullibility, he said, “I don’t care how long it’s been mutating, whatever it was originally extrapolated from must still be in the Registry. Our AI should have found the source code just from this one’s deep architecture, and should have back-engineered by now.”
Burran gave the other two a significant look. “Maybe it’s been mutating in isolation a long, long time.”
Fehd and Madaku fell silent, vaguely unsettled.
But all computers ultimately ran on math, and no matter how exotic the notation and cognition patterns at the base of this program’s architecture, the brute-force computing power of the Registry was ultimately invulnerable. But even once the deep logic architecture had been deciphered, the door didn’t open. Madaku said, “Its mutative rate is off the charts. Now our AI’s problem is just keeping up. Its workarounds cease to be applicable less than a nanosecond after they’re devised.”
It wound up taking more than another full minute before the Ironheart airlock clanked open. As they made their way through the passage tube over, Fehd said, “We’ll get a good amount of credits just for uploading that exotic code into the Registry.”
Madaku was too disconcerted to reply. He didn’t think the other two men appreciated the magnitude of this code’s exoticism—there was no record in the Registry of code with such a fast mutative rate. It had been luck that had allowed the Canary’s AI to come up with a workaround that it was able to apply in the nanosecond before the Ironheart code shifted enough to make the workaround obsolete. Madaku wasn’t confident he would ever be able to program translation software that would allow him to establish stable communication with Ironheart’s systems, software that mutated at the same rate and in tandem with the other ship’s AI.
There was no artificial gravity in the derelict. That was no surprise. But, as they were shining the flashlight through the gloomy crypt of the docking bay, Fehd exclaimed, “Hey, we’re pressurizing!”
The other two could already see that, in the readouts displayed on the insides of their visors.
“Pumps still work,” marveled Madaku.
Burran said, “Whoever they were, maybe they abandoned ship and hoped to come back someday, since they didn’t take their surplus atmosphere.”
“Or maybe something killed them all of a sudden and their atmosphere leaked out over eons,” said Madaku.
Burran nodded. “Though there doesn’t seem to be a leak, so far. I guess we’ll find out.”
“This is human-breathable air, right?” asked Fehd, an exploratory hand floating up toward his helmet toggle.
“For crying out loud, don’t take your fucking helmet off,” said Burran. “You know good and well it’s impossible for the scanners to check for every single thing in the galaxy that could possibly kill you.”
Every once in a while Fehd got pissy, when he felt his dignity as ship’s captain was being impugned. “You can never be sure of everything,” he snapped, floating upside-down relative to his comrades.
“No, but you can at least wait till we’ve checked with more than these rinky-dink prelims.”
Madaku stayed out of it. He knew where Fehd was coming from—“rinky-dink” was hardly a fair description of modern preliminary scans, and he shared the captain’s urge to remove the helmet. The odds were a million-to-one against the sensors missing something deadly to humans. But
, technically, Burran was right that they should guard against the millionth chance.
Another reason Madaku stayed out of it was that the ship was more interesting than the bickering. As he was panning across with his flashlight, the lights began to flicker on, and soon the place was adequately though dimly illuminated. Ironheart, it seemed, had a fairly vigorous welcome-home program, and it made Madaku a little nervous to see the ship’s computer doing so much before the Canary’s AI had entirely learned to communicate with it. Given the apparent decay of the AI when seen from without, he was taken aback that everything aboard seemed to be working so well.
They were in a large room, across from an open doorway leading out into a corridor. Dust motes were swirling in the still-flickering, bluish fluorescents now that the atmosphere had returned. This room contained many plastic and metal crates, of various sizes. They were stacked in racks that held them immobile in the zero-G. Although the stacks were neat, the crates’ varieties of sizes and materials gave the room a jumbled, cluttered feel. All the crates had code scramblers engaged, and since the Canary’s crewmen were civilized it never occurred to the men to hack through that curtain of privacy, not before confirming absolutely that this was a derelict. Fehd put his hands on some of them, as if he could learn something by touch. He was practically licking his lips at the thought of what riches those crates might hold. Then again, they could just as easily contain shipments of underwear for a species long-dead, and then where would they be?
