Pax Novis

by Erica Cameron

  Tinker did this! she wanted to shout. She’s not even twelve, and she has one of the most gifted mechanical minds I’ve ever seen, and we have her on this ship.

  It was hardly any consolation at all to be able to say, “I was partially right,” when Meida finished breaking the solution down.

  “That’s better than some of my staff. Most understood the solution as soon as we looked at the chain of commands link by link, but others are making me reconsider the decision that brought them into my engine room.” She cast another harsh frown at her officers.

  Intimately knowing what it felt like not to live up to either of her mothers’ exacting standards, Cira glanced over and quietly said, “Not everyone can be you, Mama.”

  Meida turned back to Cira, her smile wry. “Apparently someone can, they just also happen to be hiding from me, for whatever reason.”

  “Maybe it’s one of the crew kids and they think they’ll get in trouble if they admit they messed with a primary system.” Cira’s suggestion was the truth, even if she knew Meida would assume she was talking about one of the crew’s offspring.

  “Because they would be,” Meida insisted. “I just, you know, would probably offer them a job as soon as their punishment was over.”

  Cira wished that were true in Tink’s case, but there was no way around the PCGC laws and regulations regarding illegal passengers. At least because Tink and the others were minors, the chances of them being executed were low. However, there was no way any captain or councilmember, no matter how compassionate, would agree to grant citizenship to a stowaway.

  Meida’s head cocked, and her eyes lost focus. This was the look she got when she listened to messages broadcast through the ship’s secure channels. Whole-ship communications were usually sent through the speakers placed strategically throughout Novis, but anything meant only for a specific subsection of the crew came directly through each individual’s inner-aural comm. Whatever this notification was, it was clearly something meant only for the command crew.

  A second before Cira was about to leave Meida to deal with whatever the captain needed, Meida sucked in a sharp breath and cursed. Cira froze. Mama almost never cursed.

  “This just came in.” Meida flicked her fingers across her holo-controls, and the display on the table changed. At first, Cira thought it was the same message she and Halver had been looking at on the bridge, but no. There was an additional paragraph at the bottom. The update, highlighted in red and marked with warning symbols on either side, made Cira’s stomach drop.

  Pax Amitis has not been in contact with PCGC, PSSC Control, or any other PCCS for the past two days. No distress calls have been reported by any ship in any system, and no beacon has been activated. No vessel in the area has so far logged any explosions or new debris fields in either Pax Amitis’s or Pax Feris’s last known locations. Both ships are still registering on passive relay sensors along their projected flight paths.

  “Captain John?” Cira couldn’t believe it, but this was a communiqué directly from the PCGC and meant for the command crew’s eyes only. Many of the news feeds she read through every week tended toward the alarmist, reacting like the spin of the universe was about to collapse. She had never seen an internal alert from PCGC do the same. If anything, they tended to understate, to hold back until they had data from multiple irrefutable sources. If they were doing that now…if this was an understatement…

  “This isn’t supposed to go beyond the command crew yet, but your mother and I never have been very good at keeping secrets from you.” Meida’s voice was quiet, pitched low to keep it from carrying to any other ears. “The assumptions we were operating under before are pretty much void now. Botran may be unsuited for command, but John isn’t. And he reached out to your mother and me recently. He was worried about Botran’s sudden silence.”

  “Halver was, too,” Cira murmured, her eyes locked on the alert. “He had us digging through public records today, looking for anything that might explain Captain Adriano’s quiet.”

  “And?” Meida prompted when Cira stopped.

  “We didn’t find anything.”

  Meida sighed. “Not surprising considering what their current working theory is.”

  “What?” Cira’s gaze snapped up to Meida’s face and then down to the table again. Finally, she noticed there was more to the update.

  The previous theory was ongoing communication issues caused the sudden silence from Captain Adriano and his crew, but in light of the silence from Pax Amitis, this conclusion has been called into question. A new hypothesis has been put forward. Some believe this is an attack on the PSSC, a covert, possibly self-mutating virus that has infiltrated our systems. Despite the treaties in place across the quadrant to protect PCCSs and their crews, there have always been factions who oppose our existence. They have tried, unsuccessfully, to move against us before. We believe this might be their next attempt. It is possible they hope isolating our ships from PSSC Control and the PCGC will make them more vulnerable. We are working on locating this possible virus and creating a patch to protect other ships from infection. We are also in contact with ambassadors and agents from every system in the quadrant to request military backup and protection for all PCCSs.

  A virus. An actual attack. On her home. It wasn’t missiles, plasma charges, or those awful condensate bombs, but it was an attack all the same, something intended to maim her ship.

  “Do you think they’re right?” Cira wanted the answer to be no.

  “It makes a dangerous amount of sense. It’s been decades since anyone has tried anything.” Meida bit her lip and pushed a loose strand of black hair behind her ear. “People are nothing if not persistent in their pursuit of three things—”

  “Power, power, and proof they’re right,” Cira finished. “How would cutting off our communications help someone gain any of those, though?”

  “That, love, is a question for your other mother.” Meida sounded as weary as her one-shouldered shrug looked. “I know engines and mechanics, not tactics and strategy.”

  It was a question Cira would definitely be asking her other mother as soon as they had time away from the crew. For now, she tightened her grip on the edge of the table until the metal groaned faintly under the pressure of her cybernetic fingers, and she read the last bit of the alert.

  Lastly, four PCGC quick-run ships have been rerouted to intercept both vessels. PCCSs Sustis, Auxis, Sanctis, and Benvis will investigate, and more details will be released as their veracity is verified.

  Any individual with information on either ship is hereby ordered to report in to PCGC immediately on a secure, high-priority TDC channel.

  “I know we were planning on dinner tonight, but I don’t think it’s going to happen.” Meida reached out and ran her hand over Cira’s cloud of crimped silver-gray hair.

  Cira looked up at Mama, giving her a small, forced smile. “I guessed that as soon as I saw your eyes go distant. Those sorts of alerts are never good news.”

  “You’re a good girl, love.” She cupped the back of Cira’s head and pulled her closer to give her a kiss on the forehead. “Now go. You need the break, and I have a lot of work to do.”

  Trying, and failing, to squash the anxiety taking root in her chest, Cira made herself hold Meida’s gaze. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help, Mama.”

  “Oh, I’m sure the captain will claim you for one of her jobs well before I get the chance to,” she said with a rueful smile. “Which is why you should take the time off while you have it.”

  Yeah, because it’s going to be so easy to relax now, Cira thought. No way am I going to be plagued by nightmares of viruses forcing ships to break apart piece by piece. Trying to keep that fear off her face, she kissed Meida’s cheek and left engineering.

  Chest thrumming with tension, Cira got on the elevator and hoarsely announced, “Deck six.” She wanted to see Ma, to walk straight up to Erryla with open arms, cling like she’d done when she was little, and be
g her to make everything okay. The vague foreboding that had settled over Cira when the new alert came in dug deeper with every breath, like it was feeding on oxygen and using it to grow branches and thorns, and this wasn’t a dread she could unload on Meida or Erryla, no matter how much she wanted to. It was also far too dangerous to contact Riston now, not with everyone keeping such a close watch on their communications systems. That left only one person on the Novis crew for her to talk to. Thankfully, when she walked into the med bay, the nurse smiled and waved her toward Adrienn’s office.

  Adrienn took one look at her face when she walked in and rose to zir feet, deep lines of concern etching into zir face. “What is it? Do I need to prep a bed?”

  She shook her head, trying to calm down and get her thoughts in coherent order. “I was with Mama when she got the alert.”

  “Ah.” Adrienn sat back down, pulling zir lip between zir teeth to fiddle with zir lip ring. “I was going to talk to you about getting the kids to the meeting place for a checkup, but now…”

  “I’m afraid to even send Riston a message,” Cira admitted. She had to, though, because ze needed to know about Tink’s meddling in engineering. It was like a second crew existed inside the visible one, and she’d somehow made herself their captain. Thankfully, if that was true, it meant she had Adrienn to act as her second-in-command and Riston as her executive officer. There were definitely far worse teams to have at her back. “Everyone will be looking for a virus, and that means a constant watch on every system. I’ll have to use the emergency signal to get zem to meet me in person.”

  Ze shook zir head, thin lips pressed into a hard line. Gaze rising to the screen on the wall, ze studied the map displayed there and all the color-coded lines tracking the flight paths and projected paths of Pax Feris and Pax Amitis. “What do you think is happening?”

  Nothing good, Cira thought, but she couldn’t bring herself to say the words.

  Saying them felt too much like making her fear real.

  Official PSSC Internal Correspondence

  From: PSSC Control

  To: Captain Botran Adriano and all officers, PCCS Feris

  Terra-Sol date 3814.243 at 2820

  Attention, crew of the PCCS Feris: this is contact attempt number seventy-three. Respond immediately. The captain and all command crew officers have been held in dereliction of duty pending an investigation into the circumstances of the ship’s continued lack of contact.

  Message Status: Receiver Error; please check receiver ID and try again

  --------

  Official Internal Correspondence

  From: PSSC Control

  To: Captain John Litico and all officers, PCCS Amitis

  Terra-Sol date 3814.243 at 2820

  Attention, crew of the PCCS Amitis: this is contact attempt number seven. Respond immediately. The captain and all command crew officers will soon be held in dereliction of duty pending an investigation into the circumstances of the ship’s continued lack of contact.

  Message Status: Receiver Found; Receipt Unverified

  Chapter Five

  Riston

  Terra-Sol date 3814.243

  Something was wrong. The footsteps Riston heard when ze was close to a hatch—any hatch on the ship—were hurried. Conversations were happening in either whispers or shouts. Tension that bordered on anxiety seemed tangible, a buzz in the air that vibrated against zir skin until ze itched with it. The feeling was only made worse by how little information ze had on why the crew was so on edge. Cira normally messaged them when something important happened, just so they didn’t accidentally run afoul of a sudden shift in the crew’s routine, but so far zir comm had stayed stubbornly silent.

  Impatience, worry, and the persistent itch drove zem to wander down to deck three, where Novis’s general and crew storage rooms were. If Cira needed to talk to zem and couldn’t send a message, this was where she’d leave a sign. Even knowing that, the sight of the small black R written on the inside of a maintenance hatch made zir heart jump. Ze hadn’t expected to find anything. She’d never used the emergency signal before.

  How long had it been there? More importantly, what the hell had gone wrong?

  Taking the long way up grated at zir patience, but it was probably a worse idea than usual to be careless today. Ze traveled as quickly as ze could while keeping zir passage silent. The trip up to deck twelve still took far too long.

  Twenty minutes. Riston crawled and climbed and scraped zir shoulders against walls in spaces too small for zem to comfortably fit through.

  Thirty minutes. Ze shivered through sections of the ship that hadn’t felt a blast of heat from life support since the full maintenance check a Terra-Sol cycle ago.

  Forty minutes. One deck away—one measly deck—ze crouched in the dark waiting for a group to split up and go to their damn rooms instead of lingering in the hall talking. It was zir own fault. This path dead-ended, and ze’d forgotten. Worse, going backward wasn’t an option because someone had entered the shafts a few turns back and was working on something back there. The only way forward was to wait for the way to clear and stroll across the hall like ze belonged there to the service hatch on the other side.

  It was moments like this Riston wished harder than ever that ze really could belong here, that the uniform ze wore meant just as much as the ones covering the group in the hall. But if wishes were oxygen, no one would ever need a vac suit in space, ze thought bitterly.

  Finally, they moved on, and Riston was able to finish the journey. Nearly seventy-five minutes after finding the tiny R nine decks below, ze arrived. Ze pulled zir tablet out of zir bag and stared at it, wondering if ze should message Cira to let her know ze was here. But no. There must be a reason she hadn’t messaged zem for this meeting. Ze’d have to wait for some other sign that it was safe to come out.

  Bam. Bam-bam. The pattern vibrated through the door two and a half hours later. It jolted Riston out of a fitful doze, and ze stared at the flat metal surface with wide eyes. That had sounded like someone slamming a metal pipe against the door. Or maybe like a girl knocking with her cybernetic arm. Tentatively, ze pressed the latch and opened the door.

  Cira was waiting for zem, and yet this wasn’t the Cira ze’d gotten used to. The girl who had nearly blushed at receiving a gift and impulsively kissed zir cheek was nowhere to be seen. Standing before Riston was an overstressed officer of the PSSC.

  “Tink’s been messing around in engineering,” she announced as soon as their eyes met. Normally expressive brown eyes were hard and ringed in worry lines, and both hands—flesh and cybernetic—were trembling faintly. Her typically pristine uniform was mussed, and she was breathing as though she’d run the whole way here. “She can’t do that. I’m not sure it’s even safe for her to be listening through the air vents in the area anymore. Meida is suspicious. She’s down to either ghosts or Novis growing an independent mind as her possible explanations, and when she eliminates those, she’s going to start looking for an actual person again.”

  “What about her crew?” Riston asked as ze forced zirself to step fully into the room and closed the door. Pax ships had the best minds in the system because they either raised and taught them or stole them from the rest of the quadrant.

  “Tink’s too damn smart for her own good. She came up with a solution to a power problem that none of the engineering crew could solve. Stars, some of them couldn’t explain it even after they had it laid out in front of them.” She shook her head, her silver hair swinging. “Meida already doesn’t believe any of them came up with the idea.”

  “I’ll talk to Tinker and make her see sense.” The conversation was already overdue—Riston hadn’t had a chance to talk to her about the toolbox ze’d found yet. It was weird, though. If she’d been spending her time down in engineering messing with the power systems, what would she have needed to do all the way up here? Not that it mattered. What was important now was finding out exactly how bad the situation had become. Tink fixing a pow
er glitch would never account for the tension he’d been feeling on the ship or for Cira resorting to worst-case-scenario emergency signals. “What else happened?”

  It only made zir anxiety worse when Cira dropped her gaze and rolled her right shoulder. Tension tended to affect the seam where machinery met muscle first, and Riston had noticed a long time ago that when Cira adjusted and stretched that side of her body, the news she dropped on zem was always bad. “Look, I can’t tell you why, but the situation for all PCCSs is becoming dangerous, and everyone is on alert.” She finally met zir eyes again. “Teams are watching for anomalies in every system on the ship, which means you have to go back to how it was in the beginning, at least until things calm down.”

  Riston stiffened, even as ze nodded. The first few months on the ship had been claustrophobia inducing. Ze’d been so scared of discovery ze’d found a dark hole to hide in and almost never came out. It had been awful, and returning to it sounded worse. From the frown on Cira’s face, she knew exactly what she was asking.

  “I’ll let you know when the situation changes and you can breathe a little easier.” There was a hesitation before she added, “You know I wouldn’t ask for this if it wasn’t important.”

  “I know.” And ze refused to be responsible, even in part, for bringing the wrath of anyone down on Cira’s head. The others were just as devoted, so ze had no problem promising on their behalf, “We’ll do whatever we need to.”

  “Good.” Yet Cira still seemed uncertain. “And despite everything, I’m also kind of proud of Tinker. She’s…” Blatant admiration warmed her eyes. “The girl is something special.”