[pause] Also, you’ve been paying attention to the updates on Botran and Pax Feris, right? I’m getting worried, Erryla. Botran may be incompetent, but he has a solid crew under him. It’s been more than a week, and no one has heard from anyone on board. The only reason people aren’t calling for a search party is because—and you didn’t hear this from me; I’m not even supposed to know—Feris has pinged off several sensors in the shipping lane and they seem to be on course. It could be a massive communications failure, but they were just in dock for maintenance and upgrades last Terra-Sol cycle. For once, I don’t think whatever’s happening is Botran’s fault. I’m actually concerned for the poor fool. [grimaces] Did you ever think I’d say that? I sure didn’t. Anyway, I know between you and Meida, you have a cousin, aunt, uncle, or ex on just about every ship in the fleet, so I wanted to see if maybe you’d been able to reach anyone on Feris. Let me know if you hear anything.
Chapter Four
Cira
Terra-Sol date 3814.243
Cira checked their position against the four closest pulsars, plugged the new data into the calculations, and adjusted their course. For the umpteenth time. Days like this, she seriously wondered why she’d pushed so hard to take the PCCS’s officer exams at fourteen.
“If you can pass, I’ll make you an ensign,” Erryla had finally agreed after a full Terra-Sol cycle of her daughter’s pestering and her wife’s amused smirks. “But you know how slowly promotions become available. If you become an ensign now, you’ll still be one when you’re twenty. You think school is boring? Try repeating the exact same function for so many shifts only the computers can keep count.”
Cira had grinned, knowing she’d won. “But at least it’ll be necessary repetition.”
However, her mother had, unfortunately yet unsurprisingly, been right. She got what she’d wanted and seriously regretted her past self’s decisions on some days. Four cycles later, she was an ensign with no hope of a promotion unless she left Pax Novis. And that wasn’t going to happen. Even if she didn’t have to stay to watch over her stowaways, she loved this ship and her family too much to leave, not even for rank. The boredom was awful, though, especially when she was stuck on navigation, her least favorite. Astronavigation calculations were mind-numbing, despite how good at them Cira was. Or maybe because she was so good at them. There was no challenge anymore. Star charts and flight paths and sensor reports and more, all of it looking ahead by light-years. It left her feeling disconnected. Security was better—at least then she felt linked to the crew.
At least Halver—Commander Liddens, rather—was in charge of the bridge today. Cira loved her mother, but working directly under Erryla was always stressful. Too much pressure to be perfect. Perfection was the only way Cira knew to validate the chance her mother had taken by promoting her so young. Nepotism existed throughout the PCCS ranks, but Cira didn’t want any of those complaints to land in Captain Antares’s inbox.
Halver was still her commanding officer now, though, so she bit her tongue every time she she felt the urge to hint at what Riston had revealed about Halver and Malcolm. That sort of teasing was for another time and another place entirely. Unfortunately. Sometimes maintaining the reputation for being old beyond her cycles and eminently responsible really sucked.
Boredom settled in even before she’d finished with her navigational adjustments, so Cira started poking through the most recent news feeds and alerts as soon as her inputs had been accepted. Mostly it was more of the same—shortages, blockades, battles, and lists of the dead. Then she noticed a flag on a days-old PCCS alert, something meant to keep the message near the top of the feed.
Pax Feris has missed her latest check-in with the Pax Class Governing Council. If any PCCS has had recent communication with Captain Adriano or any officer on board Pax Feris, report in to Control immediately.
Cira blinked at the display. The message hadn’t changed since last week, and that was the problem. It meant everyone on Feris had been out of communication for at least ten days.
“What’s got you frowning so hard?” Halver leaned forward in his seat, elbows braced on his knees and his attention on Cira. “I know nav bores you, but it’s not that bad.”
“No, it’s— Here.” With a few swipes of her fingers on the holo-controls, she sent the alert to Halver’s display. “I thought it was funny at first. Not so much now.”
A second later, a frown spread across his face, too. “He still hasn’t checked in?”
It was worse than that. “If they flagged it, no one on the ship has.”
Halver hummed, his fingers moving across controls and his display quickly shifting through multiple programs and systems. Halver was handsome, his black hair always perfect, his smile usually wide and happy, his brown eyes expressive, and his body perfectly honed to fill the fitted black, gray, and white on-board uniform. He could be almost annoyingly boisterous and impulsive at times, especially when on shore leave, but there was a reason he’d risen to the second-highest rank on the ship before he turned thirty. He was driven when it counted and damned smart. In moments like this, Cira could maybe get an inkling of why the crush Shadow noticed had developed in the first place; Malcolm needed someone to loosen him up a little bit, and Halver needed someone who could appreciate his professional side as much as, or more than, his goofball antics.
Just like Riston’s sense of humor balances out your tendency to take everything too seriously? The thought rose faster than she could squash it, and she ducked her head, lips tingling as she remembered the brief kiss she’d impulsively pressed to zir cheek. Maybe she had more in common with Halver than she’d thought. She’d always known she was asexual—well, always from the moment she knew the orientation existed—but she’d spent a long time wondering if she was aromantic as well. The fact that she’d always looked at the relationship her mothers had and quietly yearned for something just like it for herself, fractious though it could be at times, was what had kept her from a firm declaration. Moments with Riston, however, were different. Warmth had swept through her when ze revealed zir present, and it had filled her to the point of bursting with it until she had to do something. Rare though they were, impulses like those were some of the few real signs that she fell somewhere other than aromantic on that spectrum.
A few minutes later, Halver recaptured her attention with a flick of his fingers. Sensor logs now covered half of the bridge’s main display, and he sat back, his hands resting on the arms of the chair and his eyes never leaving the screen. Sixteen different PSSC Control relay sensors spread along one of the main shipping routes had logged the passage of Pax Feris. Passive identification only; no return response recorded.
“At least we know they haven’t exploded,” Cira hesitantly offered.
“And I honestly don’t know if that makes it better or worse,” the commander said, gesturing at the screen. “Everyone not working on a priority task, dig into this. See what you can find out about their last port and recent past. Use every source and system we have access to. I want a report for the captain before the shift rotation.”
The bridge crew immediately switched gears. Cira was already in several of the programs and files she needed. In her periphery, she could see three of the other five officers joining her. Only the lieutenants on helm and security remained locked in to their own systems and duties. Cira and the other three dug through records—both internally through PSSC Control and in the broader intersystem archives. When anything that might be relevant was found, they flicked it up to the main display. Soon, none of the normal sensor readouts or course projections could be seen; the entire front wall of the bridge was filled with reports from PSSC Control, security logs from Pax Feris’s last port of call, news feeds, message captures, and more. With a sharp gesture, Halver organized them into chronological order.
Terra-Sol date 3814.217 — News-feed report: Rationing on Raasora Sparks Riots
Terra-Sol date 3814.222 — Pax Feris Cargo manifest PCCSF-814.22
2.62.1998 logged with PSSC Control from Raasora Station, Draconis System
Terra-Sol date 3814.224 — News-feed report: Anti-War Group Claims Credit for Theft of Military Medical Supplies on Raasora
Scattered among the other details were Pax Feris’s daily communications summaries. There weren’t any details, just a simple breakdown of incoming signals, outgoing messages, and passive receiver pings. For the last ten days, there had been hundreds of incoming signals, dozens of receiver pings, and zero outgoing signals. The ship hadn’t just gone dark; it had all but fallen into a communications black hole.
Halver grunted and his hand moved. The information on the screen shifted again, this time organized by type. Another wave. It organized by where it was tagged on the system’s map.
Cira tilted her head as though examining the data laid out on the screen from a different angle would create clarity. It didn’t. “What exactly are we looking for?”
“I was hoping there’d be something suspicious in the records.” Eyebrows furrowed, he reorganized the data again. “I’ve met Botran, and he’s an arrogant ass, but he’s not this inept.”
Cira had met Botran, too, however briefly, and arrogantly inept had seemed like a perfect description. Then again, she’d heard nothing but snark from her mothers about the man for cycles before she met him. Her teachers always had told her to be wary of confirmation bias.
“I don’t see anything here to hint at foul play,” Halver admitted. “Maybe there was a massive comm failure after they left port.”
“Maybe.” But Cira had a hard time believing it was that simple. “I’ll package this and prep it for the captain.”
Nodding, Halver hit a few points on his holo-controls. The main display reverted to the standard operations view—a real-time overview of their flight path and every object, celestial and man-made, within several million klicks of their position.
It didn’t take much focus to collate the data, so her eyes strayed to the course projections instead. Although she wouldn’t be able to see it even if the ship had windows—Novis traveled too fast to offer good views of anything—the ship was passing a debris field from an old battle, one so unimportant it wasn’t even in the history databases. Remembered battles were always tagged with names, dates, and links to whatever memorial survivors had constructed. This spot on the map had nothing. Dozens or hundreds, maybe even thousands, of people had died here, and no one even remembered the names of the ships that had been carrying them through the black.
The Novis’s most common routes took them past dozens of these debris fields—some marked and remembered and honored, others utterly forgotten—but it was the nameless ones that pulled at Cira’s heart. In a way, they reminded her of her stowaways, forgotten and abandoned. At least the debris was sometimes picked clean by scavengers and scrappers who collected the broken metal and undamaged parts to resell on the quadrant’s thriving black market.
Death. Destruction. Slow decay. Sometimes, it seemed like those were the only certainties the Milky Way contained. Sometimes, it also seemed like the only reason she needed to keep risking her life for all her stowaways—the galaxy needed every single ounce of good that humanity was capable of producing.
Cira pushed those thoughts aside and focused on work. Distance traveled, power consumed, velocity, speed, stability and mass of cargo, gravitational pull of nearby celestial bodies, paths of comets and placement of asteroids—all of it had to be considered and constantly updated to ensure traveling at super-luminal speeds wouldn’t end with a ship full of holes and a dead crew. Hours later, when the door finally opened and the bridge crew for gamma shift strode in through the security office, it felt as though numbers, equations, and star maps swam in front of her eyes. It took an effort of will not to rush through the transitional report, but soon enough she was free. And this time it truly was freedom. Except for two quick stops she had to make, the next sixteen hours were hers. She could go to the garden deck and laze under the ultraviolet lights, visit the recreation deck and organize a game of mag ball, or even spend the whole time sleeping. The last was especially appealing. She never seemed to have enough time to sleep.
First, though, she needed to check in with Mama. Most of the officers from her bridge shift were heading to the port elevator to go up to the recreation deck or the garden; Cira turned starboard to go deeper into the inner workings of Pax Novis.
While deck six might be the mind of the ship, engineering was the brain and the heart. It was also on one of the largest levels on the ship, at least in terms of height. Cira always had a split second of vertigo walking out of the elevator near engineering; she’d spent too much of her life on a spaceship to be comfortable with wide open spaces, even ones that came with walls and a roof. Only deck eight with its copse of six-to-nine-meter trees was grander than engineering. The garden needed the space for the plants that helped scrub their air and produce oxygen for them to breathe, but on this deck, the reason for the massive scope was the drives. They pushed Novis exponentially faster than the speed of light, and they took up a lot of space. To make up for what would otherwise be wasted area, each room included ladders and walkways that gave access to the heights of the deck. This was especially true inside the engine room itself, which only a small portion of the crew could access. The engines were separated from the rest of the ship by two thick blast-resistant barriers, and each required an ID scan before they would open.
Cira waved her wrist ID past the sensor. The door swooshed open and then it closed behind her as soon as she was safely through. Only after it had slid shut could she repeat the process at the second blast door at the end of the short hall.
The outer hallways of the deck had been empty, but engineering itself was buzzing with activity. Three teams were calling numbers back and forth across the two levels as they calibrated the sensor and communication arrays, and a fourth team seemed to be running a full diagnostic on the cabling running between the engines and the power cells one deck below. It took Cira a few moments of searching before she spotted her mama bent over a display table on the other side of the primary control room. This wasn’t really her mama, though; this was Lieutenant Commander and Chief Engineer Meida Dalil-Antares. Cira had learned a long time ago that each of her parents were truly two people, the one she got to see in the privacy of their quarters and the one they showed everyone else when duty called. With the way Meida was staring at whatever information was running across its surface, Cira knew she was fully locked in to duty mode. The black uniform she wore fit Meida’s slender frame well, and the rank markings somehow seemed like adornments when she wore them. Her long, wavy black hair was piled on top of her head, and her lips were red from chewing on them while she thought. Erryla called the habit endearing, but Cira winced every time Mama pulled her bottom lip between her teeth. How could gnawing on herself like that possibly help her think?
“You’re ignoring Ma again,” Cira said when she stopped at her mother’s side. “The captain sent me a message hours ago, asking me to come down here in person to tell you to your face to answer her damn calls.”
Meida snorted, the sound surprisingly harsh from such a delicately built woman, and in that instant, she switched modes, easily becoming Mama instead of Meida. “I’d answer if I thought she was going to listen to me this time. And now I’m mad at her for using you as a go-between, too. She’s not going to like the conversation we have tonight.”
“Good thing I was already planning on sleeping tonight instead of hanging out with you two.” Cira hated it when her mothers fought, but she’d learned over the cycles that it was inevitable; the two women were too stubborn to communicate any other way sometimes.
“Yes, love. Sorry. It might be best to give us a couple days, at least outside of duty shifts.” Meida’s nose scrunched slightly as she glanced apologetically at her daughter, but her fingers continued to dance through command prompts on her display. “Speaking of, you’re here with me next, right?”
“Yes,�
�� she said with a smile. Rotations in engineering and medical had become her favorite in the last Terra-Sol cycle. Soon, she’d have to pick one or the other as her concentration. Adrienn and Meida were each, of course, lobbying for their own field of study. “I’ve been thinking about ways to adjust the array’s input and minimize the losses we’ve been seeing when the energy is transferred into the power cells.”
Meida’s hands stopped moving. “Someone beat you to it.”
“What?”
“I know!” Saving the work she’d been doing, Meida closed the program and turned toward her daughter. “No one had any ideas the last time I asked, but someone must’ve had a moment of genius, because the conversion issue has been nonexistent for the last three days.”
“Someone had a moment of genius? You say that like you don’t know who it was.”
“I don’t.” Meida frowned and glanced at the closest officer. “One of them tried to take credit at first, but they flubbed it when I made them explain how they worked the patch into place without upsetting the balance in the output. The rest of them didn’t dare step up after that, because none of them could answer the question, either.”
“Specters?” Cira asked, only partially teasing.
“I’d actually been hoping you’d fixed it, but since that’s clearly not the case.” Meida shrugged, her frustrated frown deepening. “At this point, it has to be specters, because if not, Novis is gaining sentience, fixing herself, and on her way to putting me out of a job.”
Or Mika—Tinker, as Riston always called her—had been down here playing with things she shouldn’t be. It was hard to keep the realization off her face, so Cira turned to the display. “Show me what they did, at least. I want to see if I was right.”
Meida took Cira through the adjustments one by one. Some were the same as what Cira had come up with. Others were deceptively simple, and equally brilliant, changes Cira doubted she’d ever have considered. Envy warred with frustration and pride as Meida waxed poetic about the genius of the solution. Cira yearned for this kind of innate aptitude at something—anything except astronavigation. She was also angry at the risks Tinker had taken, both for exposure and for damage, by coming down here and messing with crucial systems. Both feelings were small and hollow compared to the pride swelling in her chest.
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