Apparent Brightness (The Sector Fleet, Book 2)

by Nicola Claire

  I blinked. The captain leaned down and peered over my shoulder. I felt hot air on the side of my neck; my hair fluttered as he let out a startled breath.

  i care for no man on earth, and no man on earth cares for me

  “What the hell?” the captain said succinctly.

  The screen blanked and then was replaced with direct access to the code for the console. We watched as a corrupt line was located, erased and then rewritten. The console chimed, the main screen flickered one last time, and then the viewscreen flared to life; steady and glowing.

  “Fixed,” I said, unnecessarily.

  The captain stood up; a strange look on his face.

  “My ready room, Chief. Brecht, you have the bridge.”

  “Aye-aye, Captain.”

  I disconnected the handheld’s wires, and closed the panel on the station and then got to my feet.

  The captain had already left the bridge. I followed behind warily.

  Eight

  Ah, Putain!

  Noah

  “Charles Dickens,” I said.

  “I’m sorry, sir, you’ve lost me,” Camille replied.

  “Ever read A Tale of Two Cities, Chief?”

  “Not core reading material in France, sir. Ours was Dumas’ Le Comte de Monte Cristo.”

  “Yes. More’s the pity,” I muttered.

  “Dickens, sir?”

  I started pacing. My hand ran through my hair; I almost starting pulling on the end of the strands. This was one hell of a peculiar situation.

  “The computer,” I said, “just quoted Dickens to us. A Tale of Two Cities, to be precise.”

  i care for no man on earth, and no man on earth cares for me

  “That is…strange,” she said.

  I sank down into my chair and rested my elbows on my desk, clasping my hands together before me.

  “I’d value your opinion on this,” I advised.

  Camille remained silent.

  “OK,” I said. “So, the saboteur is likely to be English, then.”

  “Possibly,” she agreed. “Although, how hard is it to locate a copy of A Tale of Two Cities in the onboard library?”

  That’s what I liked about Camille; she always thought outside the box. Never took anything at face value. For an engineer, that was an unusual gift. But I’d long ago realised that Camille Rey was far from usual.

  I nodded my head. “But why quote it?” I asked.

  She shrugged in that gallic way of hers.

  “I can only speculate,” she offered.

  “Then speculate.” I needed something to go on here, and I was coming up blank.

  “To confuse us. Throw us off the scent. If the saboteur is someone we know and could recognise, perhaps quoting literature will make us suspect the wrong people.”

  I nodded. It was a good speculation. The saboteur could be someone who favours calculations over words, but by quoting a famous novel, they make us think otherwise.

  “Of course,” Camille added, “they may expect us to think that way. To suspect them of subterfuge. If we know them, then they surely will know us. And our quirks.”

  “Speak for yourself,” I muttered. “Captains don’t have quirks.”

  “Oh, you’ve got quirks. Sir.”

  I rolled my eyes at her.

  “So, speculation gets us nowhere,” I said.

  Camille smiled. It was one of her soft smiles. The one she reserves for poor lost souls who don’t know any better.

  “There is never a time where speculation is not warranted, Captain.” She sobered. “Another system malfunctioned,” she announced quietly.

  “Where?”

  “Officers’ mess galley. The refrigeration unit. We lost some meals, but managed to salvage most of those scheduled for the coming week.”

  “This is getting serious.”

  “It was already serious, sir. They’re in the Chariot’s computer system. The system that potentially controls every aspect of this ship.”

  “You said everything was separated. To protect against cross-contamination.”

  “It is. But…”

  “But what, Chief?”

  “But they’re doing things I would not have thought possible.”

  Camille leaned forward, her face lighting up with excitement and enthusiasm. I knew she wasn’t excited about the sabotage per se. But Camille did love an engineering mystery. Anything that challenged her mind excited her. For a second, I was jealous of the Chariot’s computer system.

  Oh, to have Camille Rey excited about me.

  I shook my head.

  “They’ve managed to create some sort of algorithm that responds to stimuli far faster than I have ever seen the Chariot respond before,” she said, her eyes flashing. “The main boost thrust,” she added as if that explained it. “And then, they’re rewriting code in such an elegant manner. Even I would be hard-pressed to write better code than what the saboteur is coming up with. It is quite exquisite.”

  She was quite exquisite.

  “Go on,” I said because I could listen to Camille all day.

  “The tactical console,” she said. “The hack was poorly done, but the code that corrected it; I have never seen the like before. Simple but neat. Code can be elaborate or convoluted, and sometimes it can be perfunctory. But rarely is it done with such grace.”

  Only Camille Rey would call computer code graceful.

  “But what’s the point, Chief?” I asked. “Why hack something and then fix it? Why go to the trouble of threatening our perishables and then not carrying through with the threat?”

  “The saboteur likes vegetables.” She said vegetables like the French sometimes did; each syllable separated musically. Camille was becoming stressed.

  From excitement to angst. Gotta love the French and their penchant for emotional volatility.

  “None of this is making sense, Camille,” I said.

  “I know. I know,” she conceded. Then proceeded to call the saboteur every French swearword known to the universe.

  “I can understand you,” I pointed out.

  She offered me a very French glare.

  “Putain!” she said with energy.

  “Listen,” I started, just as my comm chimed. I glanced over at my desk’s viewscreen and saw the message was from the mayor. “Damn.” My turn to swear.

  “Sir?”

  “The civilians are getting antsy,” I offered. “And apparently you’re needed on Deck H. Habitat Three is experiencing malfunctions in the cabin hygiene units.”

  “How many?” Camille had already stood from her seat.

  I held up a finger and commed the mayor. Jean-Claude’s face appeared on the screen.

  “That was fast,” he said by way of greeting. “I thought I’d have to queue up for at least an hour to see our venerable captain.”

  “The hygiene units?” I pressed.

  “No ‘hello’ today, Noah?”

  “Jean-Claude. How many?”

  “Well, let me see.” He bowed his head while he read something. “I’ve half a dozen complaints, but there seem to be more coming in as we speak. Perhaps something is affecting the entirety of Habitat Three? There’s another one. And another. Good Lord, Noah, what is happening?”

  I looked across my desk toward Camille. She didn’t look excited or enthusiastic now. She looked concerned. Her bottom lip firmly between her teeth, her forehead furrowed slightly.

  “I’ll get a team together,” she said. “But I fear, by the time I get there, the saboteur will have fixed it already. And there will be no breadcrumbs to follow.”

  Other than another obscure Dickens’ quote.

  I nodded my head. “See to it, Chief.”

  She offered a distracted salute and walked from the room. I returned my attention to the mayor.

  “You better come on over for a chat, Jean-Claude.”

  “Shall I bring the Williamine?”

  I shook my head. “We’re gonna need to be sober for this.”

/>   “Ah, putain!”

  Nine

  This Was Bad

  Camille

  Every single hygiene unit on Deck H was malfunctioning. Water was everywhere. Flooding the bathrooms, the cabins, and in one case, even coming out into the hall. Civilians were milling around in the central hub and outside their cabins. Some demanded to know what was happening. Others simply watched on with a mixture of bemused and worried eyes.

  I could tell which passengers had a modicum of engineering know-how; they were the ones who looked concerned.

  “How’s it going in here?” I asked as I entered yet another malfunctioning cabin.

  “Same problem as the first dozen, Chief,” MacBride said. “As soon as I hook up the handheld comp, the system rewrites itself, and the corrupted code gets wiped.”

  “But that doesn’t happen until we attach the electrodes?” I confirmed.

  “Yep. Seems to need the direct contact, but it’s not as if the handheld’s rewriting the code. I’ve had this baby since year two of ESA training. It’s got some special features I developed myself. But as much as I hate to admit it, I’m not this good. The code that’s overwriting the corrupted line; it’s gorgeous, Chief. Never seen anything like it.”

  I hadn’t either. The saboteur was extremely talented. It irked me. I let out a disgruntled sigh.

  “Any strange messages?”

  “Yep, captured this one for you.”

  MacBride handed me his handheld. He’d managed to screengrab the message; which I was sure had vanished in the system by now.

  “Screengrab,” I said. “Hadn’t thought of that. Well done.”

  “Enjoy it while you can. That’s the third grab I’ve managed. The first two have already been wiped.”

  I glanced down at the handheld’s screen, a sense of urgency thrumming through my veins.

  for you, and any dear to you, i would do anything

  I arched my brow.

  “The first two messages said the same?” I queried.

  “Yep. Seems he wants us to know he cares.”

  I cocked my head at MacBride. I’d hardly call flooding more than one hundred cabins as showing his caring side. If, in fact, the saboteur was male.

  I tapped the handheld against my thigh, trying to reason this out. The saboteur was growing reckless. But every single malfunction was fixable. In fact, it seemed the saboteur was fixing them whenever we arrived. As if trying to show off.

  But then there was Daniels’ station in engineering. That could hardly be compared to making a few cabins flood. Had they made a mistake then? With Daniels? Or was this all some elaborate plan to run us ragged, so the next time main boost thrust threatened to fail, we’d be spread too thin to fix it.

  Engineering, the mess hall, tactical on the bridge, and now a habitat’s hygiene system. None of this made sense.

  I handed MacBride his handheld back and went to check on the rest of my team. Sanitation had arrived and was doing a good job of cleaning up after us. Not that we’d caused the water leaks. I wasn’t so sure, though, that the civilian population didn’t blame us for this. I heard several people bad mouthing the ESA.

  I ignored their jibes and steadily worked through those engineers facilitating the correction of code in each cabin. I could hardly say they were fixing the error because they weren’t. The Chariot’s computer was, via the saboteur.

  for you, and any dear to you, i would do anything

  What did it mean?

  I shook my head and entered the final cabin. An image of La Basillique du Sacré Cœur stared at me from across the pay-for-passage berth. A Frenchman lived here. I stood stock still staring at the reminder of my home, unable to look away from the iconic image displayed on the gel wall. It glowed. My heart ached.

  Was someone really trying to stop us from reaching New Earth? These silly malfunctions didn’t seem the work of an evil saboteur. But engineering certainly did, and the galley came close to upsetting our precisely planned meals. We could produce more perishables, but everything was on a schedule, and disturbing it would have consequences. But not consequences that would stop us reaching New Earth.

  And then I heard the raised voices. The pay-for-passage passengers who questioned our ability to run a vessel of this size. We’d already lost Vela. Anderson Universal was seen by most as the grandfather of space travel. They’d created FTL flight. They’d created the AIs that calculated the jump points, allowing us to traverse more of the universe than we could ever have hoped to do with just main boost thrust. They created the gel walls and the wrist comms and the many, many other things that made our lives bearable locked up onboard a spaceship, hurtling through the vacuum of space.

  And this sector fleet was without an AU vessel. Without its grandfather.

  Noah was going to have to address this. Convince the civilians that we had everything in hand. But so far, we’d been chasing after this saboteur. One step behind him all the way. We needed to get proactive, not reactive. But how did we guess where he’d strike next?

  “MacBride,” I said, walking back to the cabin he was in. “I’ll leave you in charge here. I’m heading back to engineering.”

  “Sure thing, Chief.”

  “Comm me if you get another message.”

  “You got it.”

  I turned around and walked toward the central hub lifts, all the while being scrutinised by the civilian population. They outnumbered us. Vastly. Even here on this one deck, we would have no hope of resisting them should they decide to revolt. What revolution would gain them, I did not know. It wasn’t as if this was the 1790s in France.

  Vive la révolution!

  I shook my head and entered the lift, pressing the screen to direct it to Deck D. I hadn’t been lying when I told the captain that I had not read A Tale of Two Cities. But I had heard of the book and had an understanding of what it had been about. And, I thought, as worry swept through me, I believed it had been a commentary on the nobility’s arrogance during the 18th Century. Which led to La Révolution.

  Not a pleasant thought. The saboteur was indeed sending us messages. I just had to figure out what they all meant.

  I entered engineering finding a skeleton crew. After acknowledging those present, I crossed to Rat’s domain, entering to the sound of swearing and the scent of burned electrical wires. Smoke wafted up from his desk, sucked away by the air filtration system. There was an extinguisher standing at the ready beside his left hand.

  “Rat,” I said, making him jump.

  “Chief! Do you have to sneak up on me?”

  “Get your nose out of your experiments and pay attention, then. Or should I knock? On the engineering door? You know, the door to engineering of which I am in charge of.”

  He rolled his enlarged goggle covered eyes at me and then pushed the goggles onto the top of his head.

  “What can I do you for?” he asked.

  “Tell me why it’s smoking in here for starters.”

  He waved a hand in front of his face, attempting to dissipate the smoke somewhat.

  “Tried to solder a wire to a junction that’d bypass the Chariot’s computer when it tries to write a never before seen line of code.”

  “You want to stop it fixing things?” I asked.

  “Well, when you put like that.” He shrugged. “It shouldn’t be doing it,” he added in a disgruntled mumble.

  No, it shouldn’t, I thought. But it was faster than us, and I was disinclined to prevent it from fixing major problems like the main boost thrust spooling down.

  Rat placed his soldering iron on the desk to the side. The motherboard in front of him continued to smoke gently; a tendril twirling up towards the ceiling.

  I followed it with my eyes, expecting to see it getting sucked out through the air filtration system.

  It took a second for my brain to catch up with what it was seeing, and then an alarm went off out in the main room of engineering.

  “Chief!” Crewman Mason shouted.

&n
bsp; I spun on my heel and raced out of Rat’s room.

  “It’s…” the crewman started.

  “The air filtration system,” I finished for him, feeling dread pool in my stomach.

  This was bad. Very bad. The alarm was joined by another. And then another. The entire room bathed in emergency red.

  Ten

  I Sat Back And Waited

  Noah

  “You mean to tell me,” Mayor Jean-Claude Lambert said, “that Habitat Three is not an isolated incident?”

  “No,” I said, succinctly.

  “What are we looking at here, Noah? Ship-wide malfunctions?”

  “Possibly.”

  “But you can fix them? Camille can fix them, can’t she?”

  “She’s doing her best.”

  “Noah,” Jean-Claude said, “this is not reassuring.”

  “You’re saying the chief’s best is not good enough?”

  “You know damn well what I’m saying, Captain.” Damn it; we’d switched to honorifics. “What the hell is happening to the Chariot?”

  I sighed, ran a hand through my hair, and sat back in my seat as if I could put space between me and my next words. Or me and the mayor once he heard them.

  “We have a saboteur,” I said quietly.

  The mayor was not so inclined to be quiet.

  “We have a what?! When?! Where?! How bad is this?!”

  “Bad,” I admitted. “Main boost thrust was tampered with. And the explosion in engineering…”

  “That was the saboteur? You said it was a faulty wire or something.”

  “Faulty motherboard, I think I said, and it was. Just not a naturally occurring one.”

  “Jesus Christ,” he muttered. “But why?”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it? It doesn’t make sense. Naturally occurring malfunctions could be understood. We’re travelling through space in a way we have never travelled before. This is all new. Things we haven’t even imagined could transpire. But sabotage? That has an entirely different, and yet familiar, ring to it.”