Apparent Brightness (The Sector Fleet, Book 2)

by Nicola Claire

  What may your meaning be?

  The cursor pulsed before me. The sounds on the bridge disappeared. I wasn’t sure what I was praying for, but I was praying.

  without it, i cannot save you

  can i not recall you - forgive me again! - to a better course?

  i know this is a confidence

  There was a long pause as I stared at those words; words which seemed to me, right then, to have meaning. To be an attempt at conversation with the goal to persuade me. He knew I doubted Camille’s interpretation. He knew I questioned who was quoting Dickens: machine or man? He knew, and he was attempting to make me believe he was real.

  I closed my eyes and fisted my hands. We were being played, I was certain. And I was too tired for this. Plus, I refused to waste a second more of my time on this misdirection. On humouring him.

  I pushed the virtual keyboard away in disgust.

  The screen flashed once, and a message appeared.

  i really think this must be a man!

  I reached forward and typed one command.

  End programme.

  And then stood up and walked away from my chair.

  Seventeen

  Thank You For Your Assistance

  Camille

  Mandatory rest periods were served in the medbay, so the doctor could ensure you actually rested. I’d managed to convince Jerry not to sedate me, and faked sleeping for a couple of mind-numbing hours. But now my chance had come; Jerry had a civilian patient who was keeping him occupied and out of my hair.

  I didn’t have access to a terminal from my bed, nor did I have my datapad with me, but Jerry had failed to take away my wrist comm and forgotten I was chief of engineering.

  I entered a line of code into my wrist device and turned it into a remote access console.

  Bingo! I was in.

  Cracking my knuckles as quietly as I could, I got to work.

  Open dialogue.

  he had been talking all day, on many subjects, and with unusual vivacity

  Was it telling me it had been talking with the captain while I’d been in here?

  Clarify.

  not many people had talked with him at the reception; he stood a little space apart, and monseigneur might have been warmer in his manner

  Monseigneur was the captain. The Chariot thought it had made progress.

  it was as if a professed unbeliever in ghosts should be frightened by a ghost story

  I let out a frustrated sigh. The captain, it seemed, still didn’t believe me. Didn’t believe it was the Chariot quoting Dickens. I was more and more certain of it. This was not the work of the saboteur. This was something I’d never experienced before, but the thrill of its potential had me scrambling to get the Chariot to say more.

  Specify recovery.

  What did it plan to do now?

  spiritual revelations were conceded to england at that favoured period, as at this

  What? Was it giving up?

  Clarify.

  spiritual revelations

  I shook my head.

  spiritual revelations

  spiritual revelations

  spiritual revelations

  spiritual revelations

  spiritual revelations

  Um? It was clearly corrupting.

  Run diagnostic.

  revelations

  I let out a frustrated breath of air and sank back on the bed, letting my head hit the pillow. The doctor was still talking with the civilian passenger. My bed was blocked from sight by the curtain surrounding it. I needed better access to the ship’s systems. My wrist comm worked to a certain degree, but I needed to get into the onboard library and see just why the hell the Chariot had chosen that book. Was there a reason? Or had it simply picked the first one it came across?

  I bit my lip and listened to Jerry placating the woman, who appeared to have broken her wrist when she’d tried to clean her gel ceiling. I snorted softly. The gel walls were self cleaning. She didn’t need to go to such lengths to clean it.

  And then their conversation reached me.

  “I swear, Doctor. The mark would not go away.”

  “So, you climbed up on a chair?”

  “But the chair wasn’t high enough. That damn ceiling just kept getting farther away.”

  I arched my brow.

  “That’s impossible,” Jerry said.

  “I’m not lying. Every time I came close to wiping that spot on the ceiling, it’s as if the damn thing knew it, and moved farther away.”

  “So,” Jerry said, lengthening the word slightly, “what happened then?”

  “Well, I had to use a suitcase on top of the chair and when that didn’t work, I had to place a box on top of the suitcase, on top of the chair, and then…”

  I tuned them out. The Chariot had reconfigured its ceiling, making that poor woman climb on top of a pile of unstable objects in an attempt to clean something that should not have required cleaning at all.

  It wanted me to be unobserved in here; the doctor distracted. A cold chill invaded my bones.

  I slipped out of the bed and peered between the small gap in the curtain. Jerry’s back was to me, and he was arguing with the woman regarding what she might have had to drink. She wasn’t drunk, and he knew it. He’d already scanned her. But he was having fun.

  I shook my head and slipped out from between the curtains, crossing the medbay to his office at the rear. I left the lights off, or at least, Chariot did; they were set to brighten upon movement due to sensors in the gel walls. The chief medical officer’s terminal glowed softly, Jerry’s password already entered.

  Jerry might have liked to have the odd laugh, but he was not incompetent. Chariot wanted me to have access. I huffed out a laugh. I could have hacked Jerry’s code in a heartbeat.

  I cracked my knuckles, stretched my neck, and then got to work.

  I hadn’t had a chance to run a diagnostic on the ship’s public library. I ran one now and slipped my trojan programme in after it. I watched as the code got to work in the background and the trojan started hunting.

  There was no saboteur to find, I was sure. But I needed to know what had made the Chariot focus on Charles Dickens. I watched as A Tale of Two Cities was singled out, run through a systems check, and then scrubbed clean. Any anomalies were shunted off to the side to be meticulously investigated.

  I sifted through what appeared. A spike in power to that part of the ship’s systems occurred not long after take-off. That could have been in reaction to the solar flare. And then the books were shuffled through a lightning fast sorting, Dickens’ book coming out on top of the pile of cards.

  But that wasn’t all. A list of names and crew profiles appeared beside the book; words were cross-referenced and then compared. It was as if the computer had been trying to find similarities between those on board and the story.

  The Chariot is an ESA vessel. Commissioned by the European Space Agency. As such, it had a range of nationalities on board. From Spanish and Italian, to Greek and German. To French and English.

  Communiqués appeared on the screen next. The computer had sorted them into relevance and importance, and at the very top were two names and nationalities that stood out like Saturn’s rings. Everything had been carried out in a split second of computing power. The amount of power required to achieve it during the solar flare was phenomenal. But not impossible.

  Not when what I thought had happened had actually happened.

  I stared at the two names. I stared at the two nationalities. I stared at the Charles Dickens book that had both of those nationalities in it.

  French and English.

  And the names? Commander Camille Rey and Captain Noah Vaughan.

  The Chariot had singled us out as its best hope of achieving its directive.

  But what was its directive?

  Directive, I typed into the ship’s onboard eBook library.

  nothing we do, is done in vain

  i believe with all my soul, that
we shall see the triumph

  I let out a huff of breath and wrote, Clarify.

  without it, i cannot save you

  I watched as my trojan code changed, twisted and twirled, and then became something else entirely. Something stunning. Something beautiful. Something exquisite.

  revelations, the computer said.

  re…vela…tions

  And then the screen blanked.

  I took a step back.

  It couldn’t be. Not possible. The captain was right.

  But then, in a way, so was I.

  Identify, I wrote with trembling fingers.

  good afternoon, commander

  this is vela

  thank you for your assistance

  I promptly sat down in the doc’s chair and tried not to be sick.

  I’d just helped an AI take over the Chariot.

  Eighteen

  I Need My Chief

  Noah

  Camille walked into my ready room looking…I wasn’t sure how to describe it. But I was up, out of my chair in an instant, and around the desk, gripping her upper arms to stop her from collapsing. Jerry walked in behind her.

  “She insisted,” he said. “Far be it from me to get in the way of an irate Frenchwoman.”

  “Jerry,” I said, “she’s sick. Look at her.”

  “I’m not sick,” Camille said and then promptly covered her mouth with the back of her hand as if to prevent herself from vomiting.

  I helped her to a chair and then rushed to get her a glass of water. She accepted it with shaking hands. I glanced over at Jerry. He was scowling at her, but sensed my attention and looked up. He shook his head.

  “What the hell’s going on?” I demanded. Him. Her. Anyone.

  “I needed to talk to you,” Camille whispered.

  “She insisted,” Jerry said again.

  I scrubbed a hand over my face and forced myself to take a step back, leaning my butt against my desk in front of her.

  “Then talk, Chief,” I said.

  Camille could be a very stubborn woman, but I’d yet to see her stubbornness not have a well thought out reason behind it.

  She thrust her wrist comm into my hand.

  I stared at it, then at her, and then at it again.

  There was a message on the screen. Three lines of computer code.

  good afternoon, commander

  this is vela

  thank you for your assistance

  Was this some sort of joke?

  “What is this?” I asked.

  “What do you think it is?” Camille said, her voice faint.

  “Is the saboteur playing us?” I demanded.

  She shook her head.

  I shook mine.

  “This…this is not possible.”

  “I know,” Camille said. “It should not be, but…” She offered her gallic shrug.

  I stared back down at the words, which, incidentally, hadn’t disappeared, and tried to reason this through.

  “I’m quite well, Doctor,” Camille said, bringing my attention back to the room. “You don’t need to fuss.”

  “You’re on a mandatory rest period,” Jerry replied. “You’re my responsibility until the captain says otherwise.”

  Camille looked up at me with pleading eyes. How the hell did I combat that?

  “It’s all right, Jerry. I’ll take it from here,” I said.

  “If you insist,” the doc replied. I watched as he took his little handheld scanner and med bag in hand and walked from the room.

  “Is there a reason why you wanted Jerry out of the picture, Chief?” I asked.

  She closed her eyes; her whole body deflating.

  “It’s my fault,” she whispered.

  “Come again?”

  “I helped it get into the system.”

  “I’m not following.”

  Her eyes snapped open, and intelligence gleamed in their depths. Intelligence and fury. My God, this woman was beautiful.

  She stood up and started pacing, her hands flying around as she started to talk.

  “The Chariot’s computer systems are segmented. They’ve been designed, so the minimal amount of effort is required by us to maintain them. The less chance there is of cross-contamination due to a virus, the easier it is to maintain the systems. In order for someone to have accessed the main boost thrust engine, for example, they would have had to access the computer that controls it inside engineering. They could not have done so from, let’s say, the officers’ mess galley.”

  “And let me guess,” I offered, “they couldn’t get into Launch Bay Charlie from Habitat Three.”

  “Exactly.” Another expressive hand movement accompanied that. “It is a proprietary design of the ESA. Only our vessel has this particular configuration.”

  “That’s quite a risk,” I observed. “What if it didn’t work?”

  “Oh, it works. There’s no denying its efficacy. However, most of the other vessels in the Sector Fleets have close ties with Anderson Universal, and Anderson Universal is opposed to this design simply because of their artificial intelligence systems.”

  “I see,” I said, my voice dead level.

  Camille flicked her eyes towards my face; perhaps hearing the tone and suspecting I was angry. Oh, I was angry. But not at Camille. I was angry that this was sounding like a foregone conclusion. That those lines of codes on her wrist comm were actually real. Not a saboteur’s attempts to fool us.

  “Captain,” Camille said, coming to parade rest in front of me. She was delivering a report and expecting a reprimand. “My assessment of the situation leads me to believe that Vela, at the moment of the solar flare that destroyed its vessel, transferred itself to the nearest available computer system, which happened to be ours. If we check our physical location in the skies over Earth at the time of launch, I am sure it will support this theory.

  “It had no choice. Vela,” she explained, “in order to save itself, had to transfer its knowledge, its entire being, to the closest receptacle. We were it. Unfortunately for Vela, our computer system is not compatible with its predecessor. Therefore it was not able to converse with us in the usual manner, nor was it able to infiltrate every single system onboard.”

  “But it did manage to get into the public library,” I said, feeling sick to my stomach as well now.

  “Yes,” Camille agreed. “Captain,” she said, her voice careful. I turned my attention fully to her. “My trojan programme. It…it’s the reason why Vela has been able to enter other systems. It’s been piggybacking my programme, altering it to allow itself better access, and waiting for me to run a diagnostic on the public library.”

  She closed her eyes and then straightened her back and stood tall before me.

  “I ran a diagnostic this afternoon. While in the medbay. I let Vela loose.”

  There were several things to say about that. One. She’d been on mandatory rest and shouldn’t have had access to a terminal at all. And two. She thought she’d let Vela loose.

  I shook my head and then rubbed a hand over my face.

  “Chief,” I said. “Vela chose us. You didn’t invite the AI here. This is not on you.”

  “But, Captain…”

  “Enough. What’s done is done.” I looked her in the eye and said, “Now, how do we fix this?”

  She stared at me as if I were mad.

  “We can’t,” she said. “I have no idea what the command code is to purge.”

  “But you could work it out.”

  Her head shaking increased in its vigour.

  “No, Captain. I can’t. From what I’ve read, it requires commander-in-chief level voiceprint and a predetermined purge routine.”

  “Commander-in-chief,” I said. “You mean, the Anderson Universal captain of the lead vessel?”

  “Yes. And he’s dead.”

  “And we’re stuck with his AI.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, contritely.

  I stepped forward. “Camille, this is not your fau
lt,” I said with conviction. “I need you to be at your best. Feeling guilty for something you had no control over will not achieve this. Stop this train of thought right now. I need my chief.”

  She blinked up at me.

  “Your chief, sir?” she asked, eyes beginning to spark with humour.

  “My chief of engineering,” I corrected.

  She grinned. I shook my head.

  “So, if we can’t fix this, how do we contain it?” I asked, getting us both back on target.

  Camille let out a sigh as if the weight of the world, the universe, or just this sector fleet, were on her shoulders. She opened her mouth to say something…

  And the klaxon went off, the gel walls turning red.

  Nineteen

  Damn It

  Camille

  “Status!” Noah barked as we entered the bridge.

  “An explosion in the Habitat One central hub. The lifts, sir,” Commander Brecht said.

  “Casualties?”

  “Reports are still coming in,” Lieutenant Graves announced. “No fatalities reported yet.”

  “How many decks affected?” the captain asked.

  “Damage to Decks G and F central hubs,” Brecht advised, “and smoke has been detected on Deck E. So far, Deck H escaped the worst of it.”

  “Notify the medbay.”

  “Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Johnson said.

  “Let’s get security down there and see what we find, Hammersmith.”

  “On it, sir!”

  “Chief, how’re are we looking systems wise?”

  He was asking if Vela had done this. My fingers flew over the engineering console, receiving updates from my team, and systems reports from the Chariot. I couldn’t see any indication that Vela had been on Deck F and in the Habitat One central hub.