Black Box

by Ivan Turner

“I guarantee it,” Rodrigo promised.

  “It had better,” he said, changing his expression and his tone, putting his figurative nose against hers.

  To her credit, she kept her cool. It wouldn’t do to have a brawl in the middle of the hangar bay. Sound had a tendency to travel through the bulkheads.

  As Boone turned and left, he caught the grin on Alraune’s face as she leaned up against a few boxes. She was the cat and he was the mouse that had been protected at the last minute from a serious beating and eating.

  The Game of Telephone

  It was just dumb luck that had put Jack Tunsley outside the hangar bay when he’d seen Boone go in. Normally, he tried not to take notice of what the other members of the crew were doing. At least, not when it didn’t concern him. But Boone had this determined look on his face that was so out of the ordinary that it just couldn’t slip by. The corridors of the Valor were short and narrow. Each deck boasted a railroad design that had a person walking the same passage to reach every room. But the hangar bay had three approaches. Since it pushed down to the outside, a large ramp forming the exit for each of the vehicles and crew, it was situated centrally. There was only one interior entrance but the room still formed a peninsula on the bottom deck, corridors surrounding it. Like the others on board, those corridors were short but their bends gave Tunsley just enough cover from Boone that he went unnoticed. Based on Boone’s expression, he probably would have missed the engineer at two paces.

  Curious, Tunsley approached the hangar bay entrance once Boone had entered. Listening at the door, he could hear murmured voices, then Rodrigo’s raised but not in anger. Jack Tunsley’s often dormant curiosity had been aroused. He whipped a screwdriver out of his belt and began to furiously poke at the intercom. The plate came off easily and he had enough sense to know exactly which two wires to cross to change the flow. Pressing the talk button now gave him the ability to listen. He finished just in time to hear Boone say, “…transfer?”

  He listened with growing alarm as the hints of conspiracy became clear. While there was no indication of what it was they were going to do, it was clear that they were doing it without the captain’s authority. Whatever one might say about Jack Tunsley, he was a loyal officer and duty bound. What he couldn’t believe, what had him so startled that he almost forgot to disengage the intercom before slipping away from the door, was that Rodrigo was a part of it. Boone came out of the room a moment later but Tunsley didn’t look back. He was in full view but from Boone’s perspective he could just have been walking down the corridor. Either way, the Infantry Officer didn’t even acknowledge Tunsley. His footsteps echoed down the passage and away from the engineer’s position.

  Frozen with indecision, heart racing with adrenaline, Jack Tunsley leaned against the wall and tried to sort out the pieces. He’d only heard Rodrigo’s and Boone’s voices but he knew there were others in there. Rodrigo had used the word us. Who else would be with her? MacDonald, for sure. Probably most of the other foot soldiers. At least the veterans. If the fighting force of the Valor was going to mutiny that left a pretty weak force on the side of the captain. Any one of the soldiers could take any four of the rest of the crew.

  What about the officers? Boone’s allegiance was obviously to himself. Whether or not Rodrigo had been leading him on, he’d decided that the quick route off the Valor was the way to go for him. Why anyone would want to get off the Valor, Tunsley couldn’t figure. He loved working for Beckett. Boone had such a hard time because he had the wrong attitude. He needed to let himself go a bit more. Of the other officers, he figured that Rollins and Dorian were probably okay. Cabrera could go either way as long as she didn’t have to deal with any violence. Ukpere and Applegate were new to the ship so Tunsley didn’t know anything about them. Tedesco was also a wildcard but there were hard feelings between her and the captain. Whether it would spark into mutiny was tough to tell. He had too little information. If there was anyone he could trust, though, he knew it was Rumple Hardy. In many ways, Hardy was just like Tunsley himself. He’d never been able to find a fit anywhere else. Then he’d come to the Valor and discovered that her captain had spot after spot for people just like him.

  The High Road

  Boone headed straight for Computer Control. Rodrigo could tell him to do nothing but that didn’t mean he was going to listen. They could say what they wanted about him, but he would not compromise his loyalty to the Space Force, no matter how badly it had treated him. His duty was to his captain.

  Odelle Feliciano was on duty in Compcon when Boone arrived. He didn’t know her that well. She was a rookie, quiet. When she’d first come on board, Boone had pegged her as a washout. She looked much older than her twenty three years, with a short haircut and all too many greys coming in. There were crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes and her fingers were twisted from too many hours at a keyboard. Still, she had a sweet smile and silky voice. She seemed like a nice kid.

  “Can I help you, Mr. Boone?” she asked as he stepped through the door.

  Shaking his head, he said nothing. He was still rattled by his encounter in the hangar bay. Under no circumstances did he feel that he had not barely escaped with his life. Rodrigo hadn’t wanted to kill him. If she had, he’d be dead. But the threat was there in the way Alraune had moved into position to block his exit. It had been there in Tedesco’s eyes as well. Whatever they were doing, she was afraid of discovery. Boone represented a danger that worried her enough to want him dead.

  Sitting at the second station, Boone began calling up the first files to help him with his investigation. Feliciano watched him curiously for a moment, then turned back to her station. Glancing at her out of the corner of his eye, Boone wondered if she was in on it. It would be foolish for him to believe that the conspiracy ended with Rodrigo and her squad, especially if Tedesco was involved. Feliciano wasn’t armed and she would be no match for him in a fight, but he stayed aware of her anyway. One of the first things a soldier learned was not to underestimate the enemy. Feliciano didn’t have to overpower him. All she had to do was send a signal to Tedesco and he would be marked for death.

  If there were any answers to be had, they would lie in the reports filed by Rodrigo and Bonamo regarding their expedition. Despite popular belief, Boone read all of Rodrigo’s reports. As one of his primary antagonists, he’d always felt it necessary to keep abreast of whatever libelous things she might write about him. She often hinted at his incompetency, but very seldom said anything outright. He hadn’t gotten around to reading her latest report, but was surprised by it. It was so tame. If that didn’t send up a red flag, nothing would. Unfortunately, Rodrigo’s bland report didn’t contain any information. It reported the incident exactly as he he’d heard it. With little hope of insight, he went on to Bonamo’s report. When he finished reading it, he was left with more questions than answers. He leaned back in the chair and folded his hands behind his head. Feliciano glanced at him, then glanced back at her instruments.

  Boone definitely did not trust her.

  Suddenly, he realized that he couldn’t trust anyone. Not anyone. If Rodrigo was against the captain then absolutely anyone could be. If the orders truly had come from the Admiralty, then there wasn’t a person on board who wouldn’t be duty bound to follow them.

  Including William Boone.

  He was about to give up this mad investigation and go straight to Hardy when he discovered a file in the trash that shouldn’t have been there. It was a text record of the sensor log. The reason it caught Boone’s attention was that he had never seen one before. Way back during his training, the computer techs who had taught him about the machines had talked about sensor dumps. In the event that someone attempted to delete or move any sensor logs, an immediate text backup was made and dumped randomly onto the system.

  Opening the file, Boone began scanning through the contents. A creepy feeling crawled up his spine and he turned to see Feliciano looking over his shoulder again. She turned away quickly wh
en he looked at her.

  “Get out,” he said.

  She jumped at the sound of his voice. “Sir?”

  “Go. Now.”

  “Sir, I’m still on for another hour.”

  He told her one more time, this time injecting that tone of voice that officers had always taken with him. She hesitated, but didn’t say anything. They looked at each other for a moment before she stood up and stepped out into the passageway. Boone watched her until she slid the door closed, then went back to the sensor dump. Without the watchful eyes of mutinous crew members, he was able to freely open the file and scan its contents.

  A sensor dump didn’t exactly look like a readout. Boone had never seen one in this format before and it took him a few minutes to get his bearings. As a text file, it was simple characters without the benefit of having actual words. Many of the characters were format indicators. They alluded to deleted video or spatial coordinates. Once he had a handle on it, he began to code a macro that could interpret the text and give him the information he needed. Even after he had parsed the whole file, it was still a dirty mess, but there were just enough chunks of comprehensible text for him to figure out that something had entered the atmosphere shortly after the Valor had made planetfall. He was able to extract a trajectory and pull a longitude and latitude for the something’s landing site. When he put those numbers into the computer and had the GPS software correlate them with an actual location on the planet he discovered that the thing, whatever it was, had touched down right where the Einstein was supposed to have landed two hundred years before.

  Boone suddenly had a sinking feeling in his gut.

  He quickly checked the logs and determined that these sensor readings had never been reported. Someone had covered this whole thing up, but why? Was this part of what Tedesco and Rodrigo were hiding? The only thing Boone could think of was that a Ghost ship, a second Ghost ship, had come after them. What if the Ghosts were responsible for murdering the Einstein crew? What if everything they thought they knew about the Ghosts was a lie?

  Though a fool he was, William Boone was no fool. He immediately pulled up the data dumps that the orbital satellite had been feeding the Valor ever since being launched. It had been programmed to take pictures of the Valor, herself, as well as the Einstein’s landing site, and much of the surrounding area. Most of those pictures showed the tops of trees and giant fern like plants. The ones of the Valor were clear. The ones of the other landing site were also unobstructed. Boone was astounded. Of all of the images of which he might have conceived, he would never have believed what was clearly on the screen in front of him.

  Copying everything quickly to his reader, he shut down the windows, covered his tracks as best he could, and left the room.

  Walker Log #4

  I have left the remainder of my crew behind so that I might have the chance to launch the black box and send warn the Earth. Maybe, in a hundred years, someone will find it and know the fate of the Einstein and her intrepid crew.

  Alice Roberts

  Geoff Markakis

  Gil Mendez

  Marcia Thomas

  Jude Leaventhall

  Danielle Smith

  Roger Rhodes

  Nicholas Walker

  Perhaps I shouldn’t have waited. Was I so wrong to want to retrieve the bodies of my comrades? Geoff said it. He said we should just go. I suppose that an enemy with the technology our enemy has shown could have just blown us out of the sky as we’d launched, but he was right. We should have tried to escape.

  Now it’s too late.

  They’ve blown the outer hatches and boarded the ship from both ends. They had me dead to rights and left me. Maybe they thought I was dead. When they left though, I got to my feet and locked myself in the cockpit. I only needed time to finish this log, to warn humanity and to ask why.

  I don’t know who these (garbled) are. I don’t know why they would want to destroy us. I only know that they have succeeded.

  March 27th, 2056

  Colonel Nicholas Walker

  A Spectacular Collision of Events

  Beckett had pieced some of it together. He was sure that Rodrigo’s left hand would fit neatly into the imprint on the Locklear which meant that she had killed Cummings. The only question left was the most important one? Why did she do it? If Cummings had fired first, as Bonamo suggested, then she could have done it in self defense. But then why fire off three volleys into the trees? Why did she have a laser pistol in the first place? Unless…

  “Bonamo,” Beckett called across the clearing. The shadows were really beginning to take over now and it was becoming harder and harder to see the young man only fifteen feet away. “How many times has this gun been fired?”

  Bonamo didn’t even have to inspect the weapon. “There’s no way to tell, sir. Locklears were capable of discharging any amount of energy, regulated by the constant depression of the trigger. You could theoretically empty a clip with one shot. Of course if you didn’t know what you were doing, you’d also melt the gun.”

  Like this one here, thought the captain.

  “But I think there were three blasts, sir. It’s tough to distinguish one blast from another because of the way the beam is charged, but I could swear I detected two pauses.”

  Unclipping a portable light from his belt, Beckett began to scan the area where Rodrigo had allegedly pursued the sniper. The others watched him with fascination and then with alarm as he disappeared into the darkening foliage. It wasn’t safe for any one of them to go off alone. But Beckett had the advantage of suddenly knowing exactly where everyone was at the moment. He tracked Rodrigo as best he could, losing the trail, doubling back, making a mess of things, and then finding it again just when he thought he would have to give up. If his theory proved correct, he didn’t know how he’d be able to reconcile it in his mind.

  The others called out to him once or twice and he called back to reassure them that he was okay. Burbank once suggested that it was reckless to be out after dark in a hostile environment, but Beckett was reasonably sure that nothing hostile was about. Not yet anyway.

  Finally he came upon his destination, the scene of the crime. The real crime. There in a clearing even smaller than the one in which Cummings had been killed, lay two bodies. The furthest away was a man, his body having been thrown back several feet by the force of the beam that had burned a giant cavity into his chest. The flashlight, as strong as it was, did little to permeate the blackness of this alien night, but it was enough to see by. The second victim was a woman. She lay as she had fallen, almost as an afterthought, the top of her head sliced cleanly off by a laser beam. In his years of service, Beckett had dealt with his share of death. Gruesome though it had been, the sadness of this cloaked him.

  Rodrigo had done this. Why?

  He called back and the others joined him quickly. Night had almost completely enveloped the area and the forest was bathed in a soft purple light. Beckett switched off his flashlight and breathed in the memory of a simpler time.

  He had more answers now, yet still more questions.

  “Who are they?” Cabrera asked, looking down at the bodies in disgust.

  “Gil Mendez and Danielle Smith,” Beckett answered. “Crew members from the Einstein."

  “The Einstein?” asked Burbank. “But you said that was a farce.”

  “These bodies aren’t fake.” What a mess! This wasn’t about him at all. This wasn’t some elaborate scheme to strip down Ted Beckett. These people had been murdered for a reason.

  “But how did they get here?” Burbank asked. “Did we go back in time?”

  It was all so simple. “They came forward,” Beckett said. “Their drive activated a time warp and they ended up here. There was no sign of them at the landing site when we flew over it because they hadn’t even arrived yet.”

  “Begging your pardon, sir, but that doesn’t make sense," Bonamo said. “Didn’t you give orders to monitor the atmosphere for Ghost ships? A clunker like the
Einstein would have given off a signal that would have had our instruments screaming.”

  That was true. But it would be up to whoever was monitoring those instruments to inform the captain. That could have been anyone in Navigation or Engineering or in Compcon. It could have been anyone in Infantry. Or it could have been all of them. The Admiralty had sent them out there to find and murder Colonel Walker and his crew. The Black Box had told them where and when. What else had it told them? Which parts of that log had been omitted when it had been re-recorded?

  “Anabelle did this,” Beckett whispered to himself.

  “Is she even capable of this?” Cabrera asked in disgust.

  Beckett knew the sergeant very well. He had served as her subordinate and as her superior. He knew her inside and out. “Yes.”

  “My God. Why?”

  Beckett gritted his teeth. “She was under Admirals’ orders.”

  There was a long pause then as they all stared at the bodies on the ground. Finally, Beckett turned away.

  “We need to get back,” he said abruptly, realizing that the confrontation to come would be bloody and divisive.

  “Wait,” Bonamo said, putting a hand in the air. It was clear by his posture and the angle of his head that he was listening for something. No. He was listening to something. Because they could all hear it now. The whine of an engine was slowly approaching.

  “Air bikes?” Burbank asked.

  “Shhh!” Bonamo admonished.

  But Burbank was right. The sound was coming from air bikes. More than one of them.

  “Two of them,” Bonamo said. “For sure. And they’re moving slowly.”

  “Then they’re pacing the rumbler,” Beckett said.

  Cabrera looked from one soldier’s face to the next. She didn’t know what it meant.

  Beckett did. Hardy had been right about a conspiracy. They hadn’t been sent there to study history. They’d been sent there to make it. Beckett looked at the burned out laser still in his hand. It was as if they were following a script. But who had written the script? And why? Always why?