Echoes of Starlight Page 6

  He sat down on a stool in front of the VAT dispenser and watched as his thermocup filled. “Marti how did they get into the cargo module without tripping the alarm?”

  “That is a good question, Captain,” it said.

  “Why the hell didn’t you see them hauling things out of there?”

  “My systems seem to be functioning normally,” Marti said. “I have no record of either of them being in the cargo interconnect corridor.”

  “You’ve got optics in there. Were they working?”

  “Yes. I have a continuous record from those areas,” it said.

  “They had to have shut them down somehow,” he said as he took his cup and walked back out to a table. He would have taken a chair, but he needed to pace so only sat his cup down. “Wouldn’t that have pinged you?”

  “The first visual record I have of the incident is after they transported their hardware to the MedBay.”

  “It didn’t just appear there,” he said.

  “Agreed. It would be possible to spoof the broadcast system that carries the optic data, but I do not detect any evidence of a point where they interrupted the signal.”

  “Is it possible that they didn’t do that? Could they have accessed your memory files directly and deleted the records?”

  “That is extremely unlikely,” it said, almost managing to sound indignant at the implication. “However, as I anticipated this question I have conducted a complete diagnostic of my logic system. I am unaltered.”

  “If you have no record of them breaking into the payload, and we know they’ve done it, then one of those two possibilities has to have happened,” he said.

  “Undeniably, this is true,” Marti said. “I am working to find where the breach occurred.”

  “Where were the handlers while this was going on?” he asked. “Nuko had posted them to guard Pruitt at least.”

  “In their quarters. Crewman Wolfe had just completed a double shift and Crewman Chandler was sleeping. We determined that I would monitor the corridor outside Mr. Pruitt’s stateroom and alert them if he left for any reason. They had both been on duty for eighteen hours out of the last day-cycle when the passengers retired for the night.”

  “So it wasn’t just the cargo interconnect that they spoofed, it was the passenger deck too.

  “Yes, Captain,” Marti said.

  “I am just going to take a guess here. You also didn’t see them setting up their gear in the MedBay either?”

  “I was unaware of their activity until Engineer Pascalle alerted me.”

  “How does that happen?” he said. “Were you asleep?”

  “I do not sleep,” it said. “However, discovering that I apparently have holes in my perception is a decidedly unsettling realization.”

  Humans have them too,” Rene said, walking up and joining the conversation. “We get used to them.”

  “I am aware of this concept, although holes in my perception could adversely affect the safety of the ship,” the AA said. “Because of this I am continuing my diagnostic self-examination at a circuitry level.”

  “Good, if you hadn’t said that, I’d have ordered it,” Walker said. He stopped pacing and circled back to his cup. “Who is watching them?”

  “Billiam just hit the deck,” he said, leaning forward to look down into the captain’s cup. He wrinkled his nose and stood back up. “Damn, is the VAT broke again?”

  He shrugged and winced as he picked it up and took a swallow.

  “I told him to keep them an eyeball lock until you made a decision on what to do,” Rene said as he took the cup and set it down on a different table. Downwind.

  “Excuse me, Captain, we need a power hookup in the MedBay,” Kaycee said from across the deck. “Is there any chance you can get Rene to drop us a cable from somewhere?”

  “No.” He shook his head and looked at his engineer to make sure he understood that was an order. “Absolutely, no way.”

  “Without it we can’t get the nuclear-imaging multiplexer working,” she said, coming across the room, apparently with the idea that she could negotiate.

  “I don’t care, I said no,” he said. “You commit a crime that you’re going to get me buried for, and then you want me to compound it by helping you?”

  “You’re being unreasonable Ethan,” she said. Her smile only fed into his determination.

  “Unreasonable?” he hissed. “Do you even have a clue what you’ve done? I should lock you up and pray that they vent your ass for it and don’t blame me.”

  “She’s right, Boss, maybe you are overreacting a bit here,” Rene said. “The damage is already done, and the only way you’re going to come out of this on the other end is to let it play out and hope she can swing enough water to justify it.”

  “Are you serious?” he asked, shooting a skeptical eye at the engineer.

  He nodded. “I think we’ve got no choice but to go all in and hope for the best. If they can prove it’s safe on the surface, then maybe, if FleetCom arrives before Leigh has a complete apoplectic seizure, they might be able to mitigate things on your behalf.”

  “A word please … alone.” The captain turned his back on Kaycee and walked across the room, pulling Rene along by his arm. When they were far enough away not to be overheard, he lowered his voice and shook his head. “You do realize that if I say yes, and let you get them hooked up, it moves you from simply being a witness to a crime, to being a full-on accomplice. Right now, you’ve not crossed any lines, and I might have a chance to argue for leniency when they bring me up on charges. But if we go along at all, we’re both going to be in the shit over it. You for doing it, and me for letting you.”

  Rene stared off over Ethan’s shoulder for several seconds as he chewed over what that might mean. Finally he nodded. “I’ve served with you now since you leased the Olympus Dawn. You’ve been one of the best captains I’ve ever had, and I hope to work with you a lot longer. The problem is that if you don’t let her prove that you’ve not jeopardized the cargo, then you’re going down for it. That’s what will end your career.”

  “It’s probably over even if she does,” Walker said. “At the very least CSL will jerk my lease and I’ll lose the ship.”

  “That might happen,” he said, nodding. “I’m willing to face taking the shot with you, if it will help them pull the skunk out of the bathtub.”

  “That’s a big jump into some damned stinking water,” the captain said.

  “I know, but we’ve got to stick together in this. If we don’t, what’s the point?”

  “Here’s the problem,” he said. “What good does it do if she proves that we’re clean of contamination? You know she’s only doing it to justify going back down there. I can’t let that happen.”

  “Fine. You and I both know that,” Rene said, “but it keeps the two of them working and distracted until FleetCom gives you an answer. That shouldn’t be too much longer, yes?”

  He nodded. “Another fifteen hours or so.”

  “And they will at the least be sending a ship to investigate?”

  Again Walker nodded. “Probably, but I don’t know.”

  “Then the more she can figure out before their reply gets here, the easier you make the job for them,” he said. “That has to be worth something.”

  “That’s not going to be enough to justify violating a transportation contract,” the captain said. “FleetCom’s not willing to take a position that goes against a Triple-C most of the time.”

  “Maybe not, but who knows? FleetCom does operate on a different set of priorities, and it certainly can’t hurt to have a ten ton elephant who owes you a favor,” Rene said. “In the end, it’ll all depend on what’s really happening on Starlight.”

  Ethan glanced back over his shoulder at Kaycee. She was staring at him with her arms crossed and drumming her fingers on her bicep impatiently. “Frag it all to frakking hell,” he whispered.

  “I’m willing to risk it,” Rene said. “We’ve always been in this
together, and if I get messy trying to pull your ass out of the fire, then I think I can at least live with the fact that I did it for the right reasons.”

  Closing his eyes, the captain nodded. “Do it.”

  He turned around and stared at the doctor for a minute. “Before you get back to work Doctor, I need a word with you.”

  “Of course,” she said, pitching her head to send Rene toward where Elias stood watching from a distance.

  “I want you to understand one thing,” he said, sitting down at the nearest table and waiting for her to join him. “You have just ended my career, and probably that of my engineer.”

  “I will do my best to put in a mitigating word for you both,” she said. “I‘m sorry that this might land you in trouble. That wasn’t my intent.”

  “Probably not, but there’s no doubt that you’ve done it anyway,” he said. “I just want one concession from you.”

  “As long as it doesn’t mean I can’t do my work,” she said.

  “If you don’t want to be spending the rest of the time you’re aboard the Olympus Dawn locked up, you do not do another end run around me. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”

  “Yes, Captain,” she said. Her eyes said she meant it sincerely, but he doubted he could trust her.

  “I hope I can figure out how to keep my Triple-C from demanding I escort you through an airlock and then follow you out,” he said. “I’ll try to buy you time so that you can figure out what you need to know, but like I said last night, she does have the authority to relieve me of command and order your arrest.”

  “Do you think she’ll do that?” she asked, looking like she might be finally starting to take him seriously about what Leigh could do.

  “I cannot guarantee what she’ll do when she comes down pissed,” he said. “Any possibility is on the deck at this point.”

  “I get that—”

  She stopped abruptly as the Triple-C appeared out of the lift. Chaos exploded in the next instant.

  “Now you can see what I mean,” the captain said as he stood up and turned to face the Valkyrie queen.

  Chapter Eight:

  “Is the ship mine now?” Nuko said as Ethan came through the door onto the ConDeck and threw himself into the seat behind his console.

  He shot her a face full of frustration heavy enough that she flinched.

  “Oops sorry,” she said.

  He let out a long slow breath and shook his head. “You don’t know how close you came to nailing that one hard.”

  “Nojo?” she asked.

  “I’ve listened to her quoting legal scripture until my brain went flat,” he said. “I’m really so far down the screw-hole right now and she made sure I know she’s got the torque to put the twisty end right through me.”

  “Seriously, all this is over them breaking the seal on the load?”

  He nodded. “In her mind it’s not trivial at all. I’ve been fighting all afternoon to keep her from having you lock me up.”

  “I wouldn’t do it,” she said. Her eyes told him she meant it.

  “Yes, you would, because I wouldn’t let you throw your career away trying to defend me.” He wanted to pace but forced himself to stay in his chair. “Rene’s misguided sense of loyalty might have already done that to him, and I won’t be responsible for taking you both down with me.”

  “What? How?” she asked, turning her seat to face him.

  “He helped Kaycee and Elias get their stuff hooked up,” he said. “Legally it makes him an accomplice after the fact.”

  “Accomplice?” She frowned as she tried to make that fit into her understanding. As a cargo pilot with a Shipmaster 4 license, she didn’t have the same training that his Shipmaster 9 certification required, so it didn’t make sense to her. “Is she really this bent, because the doctor cracked her own cargo open?”

  “Yah. The truth is that the cargo is owned by Smythe Biomedical. I don’t know if Kaycee is a shareholder in the company, but even if she was, she doesn’t have the right to access the content,” he said. “It’s probably a civil matter on whether they choose to prosecute her for attempted piracy, but since they didn’t list her as the Cargo Steward on the manifest, she didn’t have the right to open it up. Once a payload is loaded to a ship, other than with a warrant, the only persons who can open it are the Triple-C and the Cargo Steward.”

  “Right, I handle that end of the paperwork all the time when I’m loading,” she said. “The steward is the representative of the cargo itself.”

  “Exactly,” he said, nodding. “The problem is, they didn’t want to list Kaycee on the manifest in case we were boarded.”

  “There’s something that valuable in the load?”

  “I don’t know. I just drive,” he said. “But Leigh told me they chose to leave it sealed, so there is no connection between the payload and the passengers.”

  “Does she plan on locking them up too?” Nuko asked.

  “So far, no. I spent the last seven hours letting her scream at me, so she vented enough pressure not to explode and make a bad situation worse,” he said. “By the end of it I managed to get her to agree to wait until FleetCom responds. It’s fortunate for me that we’re hanging in a situation that is squarely between the internal piracy laws, and the civil laws. After much shouting, she saw the wisdom in waiting for one system to make a decision, before she brings the other one into it.”

  “That’s a skinny wall to be hiding behind,” she said, frowning and glaring at the back of her hands.

  He nodded. “She’s filing a formal report, but she agreed that she won’t implement anything until after we hear back.”

  If she’s filing another report, that will sit stinky with CSL.”

  “Actually, she held off on the first one,” he said. “She knew I was trying to do the right thing, even if she thinks I frakked it up. She was planning to wait, and that’s how I got her to hold off on taking action on this one for the time being.”

  “That’s probably a plus.”

  “Yah maybe, but I’m thinking it’ll just make it bite harder when she packs it all up in a big open reprimand.” He shrugged. “It could be the beginning of the end, anyway. It probably is for me.”

  They sat in silence as they both stared out the window at an electrical storm exploding over Starlight’s northern polar region. It arced and danced in slow rolling waves of lightning and he couldn’t help thinking how it looked like his life felt at the moment. Flashing. Angry. Rapidly becoming dangerous, and out of control.

  Nuko got up and stretched. “What is it they unpacked? Looked like a snake ball in the MedBay when I was getting firstmeal this morning.”

  “It still does,” he said. “Biomedical gear mostly. Some of it I recognize, but some of it is totally beyond me. She’s done scans on the three of us that went down, and on Angel and Billy.”

  “Why’s she scanning them?”

  “Something about a baseline calibration,” he said. “She wouldn’t say what it was she was looking for, just that when it finished she’d have a complete assessment of any foreign crud we might have picked up, regardless of any crud being recognizable or not.”

  “That’s got to be a pretty thorough test then,” she said.

  He nodded. “Probably, but it only took a few minutes.”

  “I know she’s a doctor and all that, but has she explained why they’re bringing all this fancy med-gear to the ass end of humanity?”

  “I asked her about that while she was scanning me, and all she’d say was that she was a research doctor of some kind, and it was specialty equipment that they needed for their hospital,” he said. “Apparently they’re bringing in 500,000 new colonists for some mining project here and they need this gear to do the upgrades.”

  Nuko twisted her face into a caricature of skepticism.

  “I only know what she told me,” he said. “Stinks funny to me too, but with the shit storm today it’s hard to tell one bad smell from another.”

 
“Nuko Takata, please report to my office,” Leigh Salazar said over the open com.

  “I’m on the ConDeck. Let me lock down my station and I’ll be right there,” she said, shaking her head. “She knew where I was. She didn’t need to broadcast that on ship wide.”

  “She’s probably making sure we all know she’s going through the formal process,” he said. “I expected she’d want to talk to you sooner or later. It just means she hasn’t finished her report. Or that she’s changed her mind about holding off and is going to have you take me out of the chair.”

  “That is a correct assessment, Captain,” Marti said.

  “Which?” Nuko asked as she leaned over her seat and logged out of her console.

  “She has not accessed the deep-comm system at this point, and I can therefore assume she has not completed her report.”

  “Damn it. I don’t want to do this,” she said.

  “If she hasn’t finished, odds are she’s not going to order you to relieve me,” Walker said. “If she decides to do that, she’ll wait until she has her paperwork in place and do it by the book. Hopefully that will take her a while.”

  “I can’t believe she’ll ruin your career because you went down to the surface once,” she said. “It seems like such a trivial thing.”

  “She might have let the excursion go if that was all there was, but the problem with civilization is that it makes laws and then uses them to amplify the miniscule to the point of absurdity.”

  “It’s still wrong,” she said as her control console shut down.

  “No it’s not wrong, it’s just hard,” he said. “I did violate company policy and to some extent broke the law too. Regardless of how justified it seems, I didn’t do what I should’ve done, because I thought it was right to do the wrong thing.”

  She wrinkled her face and stuck a finger in her ear and wiggled it like she was trying to shake his words around to make sense out of them.

  “Ok that sounded twisty, but you know what I mean.” He winked at her. “I’ll pay for this however it works out, and if I’m lucky, there might be enough mitigating circumstances to keep me from being in it too deep. If not, then it will run where it has to run.”