by Allen Stroud
“I feel sick today, but I came here because I’m terrified,” said John Marlin, twenty-five – an unemployed San Franciscan who was diagnosed with cancer a year ago. “Politicians have the best healthcare in the world; everyone deserves the same.”
Many demonstrators expressed outrage at the approval of additional funding subsidies for colony expansion on Mars and independent corporate ventures into the asteroid belt when basic subsistence incomes were under threat in Earth’s poorest nations. “Wasn’t the idea that going into space would make life better for us down here?” one man said. “Instead, they’re living like kings while we rot!”
A spokesperson for…
* * *
“Captain on the bridge!”
There are two people up here – minimal crew for the transit. The metal shutters are down, and the lighting is low. Jacobson looks tired. I’m surprised to see him still in his chair. He should have been relieved by now. Or has he already had a break and come back? I make a mental note to check the duty roster.
“Situation update?”
“We’re on course for the Hercules intercept. Resonance drive is engaged.”
“Any problems?”
“One or two. A full briefing is on your screen.”
I strap into my chair and start reading. Bogdanovic has finished his work in corridor six, and Le Garre’s investigation has started. She’s left me a series of interview requests, which I approve. They’re mostly for people who were near where Drake was during the course correction.
“What’s our ETA for Hercules rendezvous?”
“Four hours, Captain.”
“How’s she doing?”
“Listing a few hundred miles starboard of her approved course. Her position suggests a drive shutdown rather than a lockout. Duggins has updated his briefing.”
“Have you slept, Ensign?”
“I did try, Captain, but—”
“You’re relieved. Get three hours rest. We’ll call you when things get serious.”
“Okay, I’ll give it another go.”
Jacobson unclips himself and heads out. I look over to the engineer’s post. Ensign April Johansson is sitting there, staring intently at her screen. I can hear noise coming from her headphones. I’m not sure she’s even heard me come in, but that’s typical of her. I’ve never met anyone so single-minded. Her Fleet profile has a write-up from her former XO about her not paying attention, but really her problem is the opposite: you give her a job and she forgets everything else.
I tap my screen and send her an alert. It pings right in front of her, and she immediately looks up and over to me. “Sorry, Captain Shann, I was listening to the transmission update.”
“Best fill me in on that, Ensign.”
“About thirty minutes ago, I initiated a broad range receive protocol so we could listen to any stray comms traffic from the Hercules or any other objects in the vicinity.”
I frown involuntarily. “We’re a long way out to pick up that kind of stuff.”
“I thought it was worth a try, Captain.”
“Okay, did you find anything?”
“Yes, Captain. Something strange.” Johansson unclips the headphone from her right ear. “Want me to send you the recording?”
“Yes, please do.”
The file appears on my screen. I open it up and listen to the first few seconds. There’s a lot of static, and some strange interference almost like music, but here and there I catch what sounds like a male voice speaking fragmented words. “You think this is a transmission from the Hercules?” I ask.
“I can’t tell,” Johansson replies. “The resonance drive affects our ability to receive a clear signal, but I’ve applied a few filters to clean that up. What I can make out are two clearly distinct voices. They sound like they’re talking to each other.”
“A conversation?”
“Yes, Captain, that’s what it sounds like.”
I’m staring at the screen. It’s pretty incredible that we’re picking up anything that isn’t directed at us at this distance, and we definitely wouldn’t be picking up interior communication from the Hercules, so a conversation means one of two things. Either someone on the freighter went outside to fix something and was talking to the bridge…
…or there’s another ship in near-field range to them.
“Have you checked the charts and course plot information?”
“Jacobson did just before you relieved him, Captain. There’s no other ship due out this way for six days.”
“Must be someone outside then – an EVA, or a background echo?”
Johansson nods. “That was my thought, Captain. I’ve been listening back and forth, trying to isolate a sentence or two to confirm what we’re listening to.”
Background echo is something that we’ve been dealing with ever since humanity started looking out into the universe. Broadcast signals have been bouncing back toward Earth since the 1930s, when radio transmission first became widespread. There’s a swirling mass of three centuries of noise out here, which we have to filter out of any communication we’re receiving. Usually, this wouldn’t be an issue since targeted messages have a tight beam and set of handshake protocols, but here, we’re listening in, trying to pick up anything we can, so all of those factors are part of the equation.
“These freighters usually have eight crew – two shifts of four, with three the minimal operational complement. If there was an emergency, they’d wake everyone. You think they’d try taking a walk outside to repair a drive shutdown?”
Johansson shrugs. She looks tired. Clearly, she’s been at this a while. Her pale Norwegian face is almost ghostly in the low light. “Drive repair isn’t my area, but I guess a two-person EVA would work if they have two specialists on board.”
Interplanetary freighters are big, more than a kilometre in size. That’s much bigger than the Khidr. While we have a larger staff and all sorts of different equipment to assist and repair other ships, the Hercules will operate mostly on automated systems with a tiny team. Any extravehicular activity, like an emergency repair, would stretch them thin. She’s a huge cargo container, with engines at the back and a home for her crew in the front. Her typical journey would be back and forth on the same runs, which makes the classified message I read earlier all the more intriguing.
I’m half tempted to leave the bridge and start trying passwords on the data archive right now, but there are others who need a break more than me.
“When is your shift change due, Ensign?” I ask.
“In three hours,” Johansson says. “I had the extra work with the doctor, clearing up what happened. We haven’t rostered that in yet.”
“Oh yes, you helped out with Drake.” I’ve turned my seat, and I’m looking at her now. I remember the floating cloud of blood and worse. Even if she’s had similar experiences before, a sight like that is traumatic. “Do you want to take some time?”
Johansson shakes her head. “No, I just want to find out what these signals are.”
I stare at her for a few moments. She’s clearly affected. The work is a distraction. I suspect she’ll only dwell on what’s happened if I send her away.
“Did you know Drake well?” I ask.
“I knew Jonathan, if that’s what you meant?”
I let the matter drop. “I’ll start analysing the last section of the file,” I say. “If I find any words I can isolate, I’ll shift them to your screen.”
“Thank you, Captain,” Johansson says. Her pinched expression relaxes, and she turns back to what she was doing, popping her earpiece back in.
“No problem,” I say, knowing she can’t hear me, and turn back to my own screen.
* * *
An hour later, Keiyho has joined us and I’ve isolated seventeen potential words. Three of them are in a sentence. I think I can hear �
��…please don’t…sir…” I group everything up and send it to Johansson’s screen.
“Thanks, Captain,” she says.
A message alert flashes on my console. I open it. Le Garre is awake and wants a conversation in her room. I unstrap myself from my seat.
“You two carry on here,” I say. “I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”
“Of course, Captain,” Keiyho replies.
Le Garre’s quarters are close to the bridge. I go past the entrance to corridor six. It’s still sealed. She must have found something.
I press the announcer, and the door slides back a moment later. Music spills out into the corridor, some sort of atonal twenty-second-century ambient-synth that reminds me of the strange interference we picked up. Le Garre is in a chair at her desk. Her gaze is fixed on the screen in front of her. She has her hair scraped back into a bun. She looks tired as well, but there’s a focus to her that suggests she’s coping. She turns to me and raises her eyebrows.
“Captain?”
“Major. What have you found?”
“A few things.” She picks up a portable screen from the table and hands it to me. “Drake is stored away in the cargo hold. We’ve photographed and recorded everything from the scene.”
“Give me the headlines.”
“Well, the straps weren’t cut or burned through,” Le Garre says. “It looks like someone triggered them to release.”
“You mean an override?”
“I mean the emergency remote command. You remember the safety briefing?”
I try to cast my mind back six years to my basic astrospace training. “There’s a remote trigger for any harness. It can be operated from the bridge or from a portable handheld device. Shuts down the whole system.”
“Yes, apart from the magnets in our suits. They retain charge and connection.”
“Duggins said they would have been enough to hold Drake in his seat on their own. Unless there was a lot of failure. Some kind of physical or electrical shock?”
“Or the electromagnetic system in the chair was switched off as well,” Le Garre says. “I’ve asked Duggins to check.”
I nod. “I’ve approved your interviews. Start when you’re ready.”
“Will do,” Le Garre says. “Time for this may be an issue. My shifts might need to be covered.”
“Yes, I understand. Johansson’s had the same problem. We’ll work it out. You going to be on hand for the rendezvous?”
“When is it?”
“Three hours from now.”
Le Garre sighs. “I’ll need to be.”
“Did Duggins brief you?”
“Yes, he’s spoken to most of the crew. With the updated information from Jacobson, he anticipates a shutdown, so his plan is a restart operation.”
“How many people does that need?”
“Two on the outside, four on the inside.”
“Something the freighter crew could do then?”
“Possibly.” Le Garre glances at the screen again. “That wasn’t why I messaged you, Captain.”
“No, I guessed that. What’s the issue?”
“Once I start the interviews, the crew are going to get nervous,” Le Garre explains. “They’ll already be talking, but this will spook them. It’ll confirm we’re thinking someone killed Drake. It’ll let our killer or killers know we’re thinking that too. We need to make a plan for their next move.”
“Get ahead of them, you mean?”
“Yes.”
I run a hand through my hair, feeling it as it floats in zero gravity. “There’s still a chance the system failed, or the command was issued by accident. We need to get someone to quietly go through the execution routines on the bridge consoles.”
“I can get Travers to do that,” Le Garre says.
I shake my head. “No, it should be you, me, or Duggins. We were all there.”
“You don’t trust Travers?”
“Not with this. Not yet. I’m on shift. I can access the command history.”
“Okay.” Le Garre shrugs. “But we know who was on each station. My hunch is that we’re looking for a remote device.”
“Yes, but we need to rule things out.”
“Agreed.”
“The next step is the weapons lockers. We need to meet with Keiyho and authorise deployment of low-ballistic firearms to the officer group.”
“Morale is going to suffer,” Le Garre warns.
“Then we keep it quiet. And bring Keiyho into the group,” I tell her. “He was on the bridge too.”
“You trust him?”
“I will, as soon as we’ve cleared the console command history.”
“So, we authorise firearms after that?”
“Yes.” I chew my lip and hesitate a moment before making a decision. “We need to meet up again before we reach the Hercules. I need to brief you all on some classified information I received from Fleet.”
Le Garre raises an eyebrow. “From Fleet? Interesting. Will it help?”
“I don’t know; it’s an encrypted set of data that I haven’t looked at yet. Seemed to have been sent automatically too. I’m authorised to share it with the senior crew. I think we should all view it together and see if it’s useful.”
“We do that when we meet with the others?”
“Yes, I think that works best.”
“Okay, Captain.” Le Garre stifles a yawn and nods toward her bed. “Between now and then, I’m going to try to get some sleep.”
“Good idea, you’ve earned it.”
“Thank you.”
* * *
I’m back on the bridge, lowering myself into my seat. Johansson hasn’t moved. She’s still at her station, listening to the audio recordings, but Keiyho nods to me as I settle in. “Nothing to report, Captain,” he says.
“That’s good to hear,” I reply.
“Indeed.”
My screen has gone into power-save mode. I swipe a finger across it, and the desktop restores, only it’s not the same as before.
I frown. “Hey, has anyone been at my station?”
Keiyho raises his head and looks at me. “No, Captain, why?”
I’m staring at the isolated audio files. I’m sure there were six. Now there are five and they aren’t where I left them on the bottom of the screen. “It doesn’t matter,” I mutter to Keiyho.
But I’m lying. It does matter. A lot.
I key up the command history. I find the missing audio file. It’s the one with the three words. It was deleted twenty minutes ago.
When I wasn’t here.
I scroll down the list, all the way back to the burn. There’s a whole series of entries during the course correction. Commands issued from my console that deactivated four different acceleration seats across the ship. A cross-reference check with the crew report shows three of the chairs were unoccupied, one of them wasn’t.
Drake’s chair.
I didn’t issue these commands. I couldn’t have issued them during a course correction under five gravities. I wouldn’t have been capable of doing so. No one could. They had to have been preprogrammed and set to go.
Routing them through my console was clever, but whoever did it had to have known someone would check. Why they’d move and listen to the audio files is anyone’s guess.
Maybe I’m following a trail of breadcrumbs that have been laid out for me?
“Captain, I think I’ve got something,” Johansson says. Her chair swivels around toward me. “I’ve isolated twenty-six possible words from the recordings. One of them sounds like ‘Hercules’.”
“Send it to me.”
“Aye, aye.”
The file appears on my screen. I listen to it. I can’t be sure but think I can hear what Johansson has heard. It can’t be coincidence, can it?
Can it?
Chapter Five
Johansson
“…please don’t… sir…”
I’m listening to the message fragment the captain sent me. I’ve found thirty other words now, all parts of sentences. Nothing that I can link together.
Apart from this.
I’ve been a military communications and audio specialist for two years after I completed my basic astrospace training. At the end of this tour, I’ll be sitting my second lieutenant exams. This is a long way from where I grew up in Bessaker, a stone’s throw from the North Sea. I doubt anyone there thought I’d end up here.
I need a good endorsement from the captain so I can get a good posting. This is my opportunity to impress. That’s why I volunteered to keep working on the problem. I find I can’t sleep with something left unfinished. It’s certainly an unusual situation, and the task in front of me suits my skill set. I’ve always loved working with sounds. I was a synth beat junkie when I was a child, making tracks late into the night and whenever I could skip school.
They don’t need composers in the military. Audio engineers and communication specialists, though, they’re a priority. There isn’t much difference in running SETI tracking, reprocessing audio data dumps, communication line control and all the rest. Just different priorities with what you’re trying to do. The task still requires you to be sat in front of a screen, listening to sounds.
I’m a detail person. That helps in this line of work.
The captain is moving toward the door, leaving me and Keiyho to look after the ship. It’s a standing order that two members of the bridge crew remain on duty at all times. I’m exhausted, but I’ve agreed to stay. I can’t let this go.
Keiyho is difficult to read. He’s from Kyoto, the other side of the world to me. I’ve tried to get to know him – to impress him maybe? But I can’t tell whether I’ve succeeded or not. If I ask for something, he reacts with the same shrug and humourless half smile that he gives everyone, apart from Captain Shann. There’s a little inclination of the head Keiyho gives her. That’s a Japanese tradition, left over from the bowing that used to be popular in their society – totally impractical in zero gravity.