by Ramy Vance
The AI went quiet for a long moment before the sexless voice said, “I do not know. It is not in your files. My accessible files list one Captain S. W. Jaeger. That is all I know.”
“So…you assumed I’m Jaeger.”
“In my defense, Captain, so did you.”
Jaeger stared at the AI interface. A list of files and command prompts flickered down the cracked screen.
Then she reached into the first aid cabinet for the second bottle of water. Her fingers found a pouch of painkillers, and she grabbed that, too. “All right.” She popped the pills and chugged the bottle. “It’s just you and me. You call me captain. What do I call you?”
“My program designation is J.102.alpha3.Virgil.v1.02.1/backup.”
Jaeger cocked her head. “Let’s go with Virgil.”
“As you wish.”
Jaeger closed her eyes and waited for the fast-acting painkillers to beat back the thrumming headache. Then she pulled herself closer to the interface.
“Virgil.” She started pulling open storage cabinets along a lesser-damaged section of wall, looking for anything useful. “We both have concussions. Great. Tell me what we have to work with. Give me an overview of your functioning and nonfunctioning systems.”
“Evaluating. One moment, please.”
While the computer ran a status report, Jaeger dug through cabinets of ruined circuit boards and torn wires. The sight of all that wreckage stabbed at her. She felt like a mother goose who’d returned to the nest to find her eggs smashed. She might not remember her name, but deep down, she knew this was her ship—and something had hurt it badly.
It’s okay, baby, she silently promised. I’ll fix you.
“Basic life support systems functioning,” Virgil reported finally. “Including temperature and oxygen regulation, bio scanners, and some equipment scanners. Engines and generators functioning at zero-point-zero-one percent capacity. Hull damage along starboard wing is substantial, but it looks as though the repair droids managed to dispatch and seal all breaches. Hull is currently stable.
“Grav-spin generators offline. Primary and secondary weapons offline. Shields offline. Internal security measures unreliable. Spacefaring functions, including astrography and long-range scanners, nonfunctioning. Communications arrays nonfunctioning.”
Jaeger pulled open the last and least-scorched cabinet in the row. A yellowed ops manual was clipped to the interior wall, bundled beneath the blessedly comforting sight of a slim personal computer tablet. Jackpot. She snapped the comp neatly to her utility belt.
“What is our location?” She flipped through the manual and felt her heart beat faster. Ship schematics. God bless the builder who knew the value of a good, old-fashioned hard copy.
“Unknown,” Virgil said. After a pause, it added: “That’s what astrography nonfunctioning means.”
“Your communication and comprehension functions must be damaged, too,” Jaeger muttered as she glanced through the overview schematics. The ship was a midsized vessel, big enough to ferry a couple of hundred crew, maybe three hundred at most, not that any were around to shed some light on what was happening.
Running through the schematics, she saw an array of science equipment that made her heart flutter: CRSPR technology, scanners, replicators. All state of the art…
How do I know that? she wondered. I guess somewhere in the back of my head is a lot of stuff swimming around. She continued to read through the inventory, and the scope of it made Jaeger’s heart flutter. Oh, baby, she thought. You are gorgeous and deadly. And something beat you the fuck up.
She forced herself back to the immediate task and looked up at the AI interface. “Give me our last known location. Status report. Mission statement. Anything. Were we in a battle?”
Virgil hummed faintly. “Unknown.” This time it sounded sheepish. “Ship’s log files are damaged. I shall attempt to repair them. For what it’s worth, our status seems stable, and my limited scanner functions aren’t showing any activity in this sector of space.”
Jaeger shook her head and shut the manual. She stuck it to her belt between the personal comp and multitool. She’d have to find that engineer and buy him a drink.
“I saw that we vented all of our primary coolant,” she said.
“That is correct. Wear on the pumps suggests some hull damage caused a critical spike in coolant pressure.”
“Now it’s critically low. How long until the generators start to overheat?”
“At the current rate of energy consumption, six hours.”
“Six hours? That’s it?” Jaeger glanced over the flashing generator status screens. “Even at low coolant levels, that’s damned fast. What’s drawing that much power?”
“Most of the draw is coming from designated life support systems in the No-A sector.”
Jaeger shook her head. She didn’t recognize the strange sector name from her brief perusal of the schematics. “That doesn’t make sense. The systems shouldn’t be running if they don’t sense life forms there to support.”
“That is correct.”
“Run a bioscan. Who’s aboard? What’s their status?”
As the computer ran another scan, she busied herself powering up the personal comp. By the seconds-long loading and powerup screen, she figured it was an older model, but at least it was undamaged and had a full battery. It contained more detailed schematics, as well as several gigs of troubleshooting files. It was an expanded version of the yellowed user manual clipped to her belt: invaluable for a lonely mechanic trying to fix a big boat all by her lonesome.
“Bioscan complete,” Virgil said. “Three hundred seventy-eight thousand life forms confirmed.”
Jaeger laughed weakly. “Come on. I don’t care how many ants and maggots hitched a ride in the food stores. Tell me how many living humans are on board.”
“Non-human bio-sig filter already applied. Three hundred seventy-eight thousand distinct human bio-signatures confirmed.”
She closed her eyes, feeling her headache threatening to return. “Run the scan again.”
“Three hundred seventy-eight thousand distinct human bio-signatures confirmed.”
Jaeger didn’t think Virgil had taken enough time to run that second scan. “Your scanners must be glitching. That’s not physically possible. Not if you stacked the bodies like cordwood and crammed them in every pressurized cargo bay and corridor.”
“I have no further information at this time.”
Jaeger grabbed the last water bottle from the first aid cabinet and clipped it to her belt. An old nutrition bar lay wedged behind it, and she snatched that as well. She snapped the cabinet doors shut and pushed herself toward the access corridor. “I want you to devote all of your resources to maintaining basic life support and diagnosing the problem in the coolant lines. Any remaining processing power you have, use to repair and access the ship’s log.”
“Where are you going?” Virgil asked.
“Well.” Jaeger pulled herself into the tunnel. It was straight, five meters long and two meters wide, lined with pipes and wires. There was a ladder running along the wall, one she barely needed to touch to push herself forward. It took her eyes a moment to adjust to the dim emergency lighting once she was away from the command center. “I can’t trust your scanners. I need to start assessing our status with my eyes.” Ahead, the corridor ended abruptly in a sealed door. The locking mechanism blinked red.
“Virgil?” She glanced around and noted a small speaker wedged between two support struts overhead. “You there?”
The voice crackled and blared with feedback as the damaged speaker activated. “I am, Captain.”
Great. Jaeger eyed the electronic lock. “Can you override the mechanism and open these doors?”
“Negative. There are broken circuits in the lock that will require physical re-routing.”
Jaeger winced. “You’re sure life support is functioning throughout the ship? I don’t want to hack the door open only to vent all my atmos
phere into a depressurized chamber.”
“Since you don’t trust my scanner readings, Captain, I fail to see what difference my opinion would make.”
The screeching feedback made Jaeger scramble to cover her ears. “Okay, you know what? I’ll figure it out myself. You work on that coolant diagnostic.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“And fix that goddamned speaker.”
“I’ll add it to my list, Captain.”
Jaeger hesitated before lowering her hands. Once she was sure the speaker wouldn’t screech again, she wedged her multitool into a support strut and activated the flashlight. She clipped her computer to one of the ladder rungs, accessed the door schematics, and got to work.
Apparently, they didn’t teach the finer points of door mechanics wherever Jaeger had gone to earn her captain’s knot. It took the better part of an hour, and several burnt fingertips, to teach herself how to disconnect and reconnect the circuitry. By the time she won the battle, and the mechanism made a defeated whine before disengaging, she was exhausted, hungry, and in desperate need of a piss.
What’s more, she’d managed to disengage the lock only. The auto-functions were still unresponsive. She had to shove her multitool into the door frame and wrench the unreasonably massive door to one side and could only get it to slide open half a meter before it stuck fast.
“Look on the bright side,” she murmured as she wriggled through the crack. “Next time you have to hack open a door, it should only take about half as long.”
She would have to be faster next time. According to her schematics, there were six more corridors between her and the generator bay—and she had no way of knowing how many of them had also sealed tight.
Although the air was bitterly cold, she was sweating when she wriggled free of the jammed door and drifted at the center of another cylindrical chamber. This one was the size of a four-car garage. Storage lockers and workstations covered every centimeter of the curved wall—the various necessities of spacefaring life.
She saw an exercise bike mounted overhead beside an incongruously old-fashioned wooden bookshelf. The shelves all had plastic panels installed across them. Rows of tattered paperbacks drifted free inside their cages. A dog-eared Regency romance drifted past Jaeger’s face, the dark-eyed cavalier on the cover glowering at her with bedroom eyes.
A row of caged hydroponic culinary plants formed a ring around one side of the chamber. She felt another pang of sadness to realize that the tiny clusters of ripening cherry tomatoes would probably freeze and die on the vine.
Sealed hatches dotted the walls, painted with plain white symbols. Storage. Storage. One larger hatch, labeled S. Jaeger. She stopped and stared. Then she pressed her hand to the biometric scanner pad on the hatch. She was surprised when the hatch clicked and the lock deactivated but not at all displeased.
“Do you have time for exploring?” Virgil asked as Jaeger pulled herself into the quarters.
“Ignorance is costly. I need to know who I am.”
The quarters were smaller than she would have expected for a captain. A double-wide bed lined one wall, taking up half of the cramped space. The untucked corners of sheets drifted like ghosts in the darkness. Storage locker doors lined one wall, a large viewer screen in standby mode the other. That was all.
Jaeger hesitantly poked the viewer screen, afraid of what she might find, and was absurdly relieved when it crackled to life. It showed her a short list of playable files.
Videolog4.5.41.2
Videolog5.6.41.3
Videolog2.1.41.4
Even with the countdown to generator meltdown ticking behind her eyes, she selected the first file and hit play.
Soft afternoon light filled an old farmhouse porch. Wind knocked at the chimes hanging beside a wicker porch swing. A screen door slammed, and the camera swung around. Two shapes emerged from the shadows of the farmhouse, one of them a petite, bronze-skinned woman with a close crop of curly black hair.
The other, clinging to her hand with chubby fingers, was a round-faced girl in denim overalls and a smile wide enough to split the sky. The girl looked into the camera and waved frantically, laughing. Her eyes were big and golden.
Jaeger had seen them before and not so long ago. She'd seen them in the mirror.
Suddenly struggling for breath, Jaeger slammed her finger onto the pause button and spun away from the screen, clapping her hand over her mouth. She felt nauseous. She felt elated. Her heart fluttered, urging her to turn back and play the rest of the video. Every part of her longed to stay lost in that little girl's beautiful round face.
That was dangerous. Coming in here was a mistake. She could sit here in these darkened quarters staring at videos of that girl until the generators failed and the stars themselves grew cold. She could sit here and die watching videos of a child she couldn’t remember.
“Shit.” She sniffed and scrubbed her nose across the cuff of her flight suit. She pushed herself up the ladder, kicking to get away from the dangerous rabbit hole of memory. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“Captain?”
“Never mind, Virgil. Never mind.” Casting frantically about for a distraction, she added, “I really have to pee.” There, between the tiny galley kitchen and hydroponic garden, was a long hatch with a funnel-shaped icon. She couldn’t remember her name, but she could remember the universal sign for space-toilet.
Jaeger pressed her feet to the support strut stretching the length of the chamber and pushed, launching herself to the lavatory. She shoved open the hatch and wedged herself into the coffin-sized head. It took some extra finagling to manage her flight suit flaps and the suction funnels in zero-gravity, but once all the important bits were aligned, she let herself relax as her bladder went about the lazy business of disposal.
These must be the communal living quarters, she decided. This shared common area could comfortably house about six command staff, with each crew member having his or her private sleeping bunk. Once she got the grav-spin generators powered up, the centrifugal force would mimic gravity, and the curved wall would become the floor.
She studied the galley kitchen by the dim emergency lighting. It was pristine; no loose dishes floating above the water tank, no cabinet doors hanging slightly open, no leftover cornflakes drifting above the counter.
No kitchen shared by six people could be so clean.
“Virgil? You copy?”
A distant squawk of static and a muffled voice came from a speaker mounted to the central strut. Thankfully with no feedback this time.
“I’m here.”
“What else can you tell me about the ship’s manifest? Anything about the crew at all? Command staff?”
“Nothing on file, Captain.”
Jaeger grunted and glared at the bookshelf dangling over her head, willing herself to recognize any of the paperback covers drifting behind that clear pane. Were they all her books? Or did she have a crewman who enjoyed trashy bodice-rippers? She chewed her lip. “This is damned frustrating.”
“Four hours and forty-nine minutes until the generators overheat.”
“Yeah, yeah. Hold your horses. I can’t piss any faster. My body isn’t designed to function in zero-G. I’ll be able to work better once I finish because I’ll be less distracted.”
“The human body is ill-suited to space travel, especially in these conditions,” Virgil agreed. “I suggest you pass command authority to the AI.”
“What?” Jaeger wasn't entirely sure if she was done with her business or not but didn’t have any more time to waste. She disconnected the suction hose and re-sealed her flight suit. “You want me to put you in command?”
“You must tend to the demands of your fragile body. I am prone to no such distraction.”
“Hey, Virgil?” Jaeger kicked the wall and soared across the chamber. She landed beside another hatch painted with a wardrobe gear sign and wrenched it open.
“Yes, Captain?”
“How’s that coolant line diagnosi
s going?”
There was a moment of humming silence. “There appears to be a physical obstruction blocking access to the secondary coolant tanks, preventing them from draining into the system as intended.”
The equipment locker held spare flight suits and accessories. Jaeger grabbed a thermal hood and zipped it to her neckline. She pulled it over her head. It fit awkwardly over her medfoam bandages but immediately brought some feeling back to her numb ears and cheeks. Basic life support only meant that the ship could produce enough internal heat to keep her from freezing to death—not that she would be comfortable. Her breath fogged the inside of her thermal screen.
“Physical obstruction in the coolant lines, right.” Jaeger toggled on the infrared filter. The chamber around her became a sea of cold blue-green steel dotted with points of warm yellow heat. She turned it off. “Can you fix it?”
“Not without a functioning repair droid,” Virgil admitted.
“Okay. Then power up the repair droids.”
There was a long pause. “Repair droid backup batteries have insufficient power to perform the necessary functions.”
“Then recharge the batteries.” Jaeger tugged on a pair of exo-gloves. The metal lattice integrated into the fabric would double her gripping strength—and hopefully, keep her from melting off any more fingertips.
“That is…not currently possible.”
“Oh no! Why’s that?”
“The generators are currently running at zero-point-zero-one percent capacity. There’s not enough power to recharge drone batteries.”
“Then crank up generator output.” Jaeger grabbed a set of magnetic soles stuck to the cabinet wall. She doubled over and pressed the clunky pads to the bottom of her boots.
“That is….not possible.”
“Why not?”
“Insufficient coolant pressure,” Virgil grumbled.
“Insufficient coolant pressure!” The magnetic soles clamped snugly over Jaeger’s toes and heels. She activated them with a flick of the finger. “And you can’t repair the coolant lines yourself, can you?” The mag soles hummed to life, pulling her sharply downward. Her feet touched the deck and stuck fast.