A Path in the Darkness

by M. D. Cooper

  Priscilla was still ensconced in her pedestal, her customary array of holo displays surrounding her as she managed hundreds of humans interfacing with the ship’s nets. At the edge of the room Amanda sat at a small work station.

  Tanis knew how Amanda felt. She’d been used and had hurt her shipmates. There was no worse feeling than knowing you had done things that there was no way to take back. The only thing she could hope for was time showing her that no one held it against her.

  Well, almost no one, a few unfavorable opinions had been expressed on the solution boards. One conversation had gotten so out of hand that Bob ultimately stepped in.

  Having a god-like AI explain how he had altered his Avatar’s brains so they could no longer be subverted quelled the conversation. Though it spawned a few new ones.

  “Good afternoon, Colonel,” Amanda said with a wan smile as Tanis approached.

  “Colonel?” Tanis asked. “When have you ever stood on rank?”

  “Sorry.” Amanda’s mouth twisted. “I don’t know who hates me right now; I’m trying to be extra cordial.”

  “I can promise you, I do not hate you, I’m not even mildly upset with you,” Tanis gave Amanda a warm smile.

  The off-duty avatar gave her a searching look.

  “I don’t understand, my abilities were used to attack you—five of your Marines died as a result!”

  Tanis stepped through the holo displays and crouched in front of Amanda, taking her hands.

  “None of us are perfect. We all get thrust into situations where we make the wrong choices, or have evil thrust upon us. If I were to condemn you for your failures, I would have to first condemn myself for mine.” Tanis gave a warm smile. “Life is hard enough without us beating ourselves up.”

  “Thanks Tanis,” Amanda said. This time her smile managed to reach her eyes.

  “You coming or what?” Abby barked as she walked by. “Let’s get this done so I can get back to work.”

  “Duty calls,” Tanis said softly as she rose.

  “We have a much less appealing name for her than duty,” Amanda whispered with another smile.

  Tanis walked down the hall to the conference room where Abby was already in full swing.

  “I need to double my engineering staff pronto, or we won’t be able to fire the engines in time to course correct for New Eden.” Abby was almost yelling. “If we could take the time to get control of the machine shops again and build more bots it wouldn’t be a problem, but the AI fried most of their control systems. Human hands are the fastest way to fix things now.”

  Tanis slid into a chair as unobtrusively as possible, not that she expected it to help much. Terrance and Abby were glaring at one another while Earnest twisted his hands and the captain looked extra stoic. Sanderson looked like he just wanted the yelling to stop.

  “Major!” Abby directed the full force of her personality at Tanis who decided not to correct the engineer regarding her rank and did her best to maintain a neutral expression. “When are you going to lift your ban on more people coming out of stasis? I need at least two hundred more engineers yesterday!”

  While Abby spoke she sent Tanis a projection over the Link, showing the time it would take to repair the engines, get the lithium processed and course correct.

  It wasn’t new data, Abby had been sending her updated projections nearly every hour for days. The window to fire the engines and course correct was down to six days.

  “Out of the frying pan and into the fire,” Tanis sighed.

  “I think we already did that,” Earnest said. “What’s after the fire?”

  “I don’t want to know,” she grimaced. “OK, we haven’t found anything to cause alarm at the moment, other than the fact that Jessica Keller’s presence confirms that we can’t trust our roster of who is here. However”—she nodded at Abby—“we’ve vetted your list and each one is personally known to at least three other people currently out of stasis. Based on the data we have now, there’s no reason other than raw paranoia not to bring them out of stasis.”

  Abby looked surprised and relief washed across Terrance’s face. Tanis could tell that he had been backing her up, but was running out of arguments in the face of drifting in the dark forever.

  “Well”—Abby stood—“there’s no time to waste, then.” She glanced at Earnest and the two left the bridge conference room.

  Captain Andrews spoke first. “Do you really believe that it is safe to thaw more crew?”

  “No more or less safe than the alternative as best I can tell. We have the ability to screen the number of people she wants to pull out, and we’ll have to do it eventually, so now’s the best time. To be honest, the thing I really wonder about is why Myrrdan dumped Jessica here.”

  “I followed that story back in Sol,” Terrance looked concerned. “They suspected him of killing over ten thousand people, didn’t they?”

  “Give or take a few hundred,” Tanis agreed. “Why did he dump her here? Why not just kill her? Also, if he could bypass all of our checks on the crew and colonists, then who else is here on this ship? Is it possible that even he is here?”

  “That has been on my mind as well.” Captain Andrews nodded. “There are a lot of places, and ways to hide on this ship. We should assume that either he is here, or he has secreted away more surprises for us.”

  Bob added.

  “Thank you, Bob,” Captain Andrews said.

  “Do you think it makes sense to keep Agent Keller thawed?” Terrance asked.

  “Angela and I have had a lot of conversations about this—”

 

  Tanis ignored the jibe and continued, “I think that if Myrrdan is here and has something planned, he wants Jessica to be here to see it. He wants to play the game against her. It’s SOP for this sort of guy.”

  Angela added.

  “Either way, having her out and about is the best way to draw him out if he is thawed. If he’s not thawed then we don’t have anything to worry about at the moment.”

  Terrance laughed. “We still have plenty to worry about.”

  “Touché.” Tanis nodded.

  She looked at the remaining command crew around the table and asked what she was certain was on everyone’s mind.

  “We’re more off course than Joe’s initial plan called for. The time and the fuel we have are both tight. What if we can’t fire to correct for New Eden?”

  “Hilda and I have been going over that,” the captain said as he brought up a holo display of the ten light years of space surrounding Estrella de la Muerte.

  The Intrepid’s position was denoted by a small green dot near the star’s red one. A white line stretched out to the edge of the holo without intersecting any systems.

  “You can see here that we’re not pointed anywhere near New Eden; it will take a very long and hard burn to correct our course. Even correcting for Epsilon Eridani is not significantly better. If we can’t get this burn done in time, we’re looking at Kapteyn’s Star or Gilese 229,” Andrews said.

  He gestured and the holo updated to show that a burn to correct for Gilese needed to happen within six weeks, while a burn to correct for Kapteyn’s could happen any time in the next two years.

  Tanis sighed. “Well, at least we have options.”

  “Options that add a hundred years to our trip.” Terrance ran a hand across his eyes. “This trip just keeps getting more and more complicated.”

  Tanis found herself wondering, not for the first time, why Terrance was really on the Intrepid. His argument for building the new center for human commerce and power sounded good until one considered how much power he had wielded back in Sol. He was a man who lived like a god. Why travel across human space to live like a god somewhere else?

  Perhaps, under it all, Terrance was j
ust as sick of where humanity was going in Sol as everyone else on the Intrepid.

  “That’s going to be a long detour, isn’t it?” Tanis asked. “We’ll have to decelerate, stock up, and then boost back out.”

  Captain Andrews nodded. “Obviously Kapteyn’s is the preferred location because it’s much closer. It’s more massive too so it will make for a better slingshot when we boost out toward New Eden.”

  Tanis brought up the system’s entry. “Not inhabited at all? That’s surprising.”

  “Why colonize a red dwarf when there are places like New Eden cropping up?” Terrance asked. “I certainly wouldn’t fund a mission there—even with its two super-earths.”

  “We have something else to go over.” Andrews leaned back in his chair and smiled at Tanis. She saw that Sanderson and Terrance were looking at her and smiling as well.

  “Uh… What’s up?” Tanis asked with a nervous smile.

  “We’ve been talking about the ship’s command structure,” Andrews began. “We’re in a situation here that wasn’t supposed to happen. Other than duty crews everyone was to have been in stasis during the trip. Now we have a mixture of crew and colony all doing crew work. We are also missing a first mate.”

  Tanis furrowed her brow. What the captain was saying was true, but there were several pre-vetted scenarios on the books for how to handle this re-org.

  “We have to be honest with ourselves,” Sanderson said. “This mission may play out very differently than originally planned. Even if we don’t have to divert to Kapteyn’s Star we’re going to have a lot of colony and crew out of stasis working together for years. Back in Sol it was easy—everyone was hired by the GSS or on loan like the TSF until we passed out of the heliosphere.”

  Tanis nodded. “And if we do divert to Kapteyn’s the trip will get so long that I bet a lot of crew won’t care to go back to a Sol system where everyone they know has died of old age.”

  “You’re correct,” Andrews said. “As a result we’re enacting the colony’s charter now on the Intrepid and treating it as a sovereign nation. This will create a single crew and colony entity that will persist until the Intrepid heads back to Sol.”

  “Have you worked out the details?” Tanis asked with a frown. She was annoyed that her input hadn’t been sought and wondered how this new structure would get in the way of her investigation.

  “We have,” Andrews said. “We didn’t bring you into it because, honestly, you were doing something more important at present.

  Andrews waved his hand and holo refreshed to display the ship’s new organizational structure.

  The captain was still the ultimate authority on the ship, also holding the title of Governor. Below him there was an executive officer—a transition from the civilian first mate structure of before. Under that person there were department heads and divisional officers. The security force of the Intrepid was re-designated as a police force, using much of the proposed structure for the New Eden colony, and an official military branch was created with a Marine and space-force division.

  “I’m curious about the nature of the department of defense,” Admiral Sanderson said. “Does it report through the XO to the captain? If so, I imagine that will be strange as the secretary of defense will outrank the XO.”

  Tanis wondered why he would think that, but from his tone she suspected he already knew the answer and was planting the question.

  “We are going to have a number of situations like that throughout the ship’s new organizational structure,” Captain Andrews said. “They weren’t uncommon with the GSS/TSF split we had before we left Sol. There may be adjustments we’ll need to make, but here are the assignments as we see them now.”

  Tanis’s mouth fell open when she saw her assignment. “I think you have it wrong… Maybe these two are switched,” she said while pointing at herself and Admiral Sanderson on the chart.

  “No mistake, General Richards,” Sanderson said with a rare smile. “I expect to spend as much time as possible in stasis—I’d like to actually live a few decades on New Eden—the XO is going to spend a lot of time out of stasis. You’re the right confluence of age and experience for the job.”

  Tanis was stunned. General.

  Angela said privately.

  “You’ve also proven an unwavering dedication to the ship,” Terrance added with a nod.

  “Thank you,” Tanis said, reeling both from the promotion and the responsibility. Other discussions regarding rank and placement took place and Tanis noted Terrance’s rather interesting title of Secretary of Colony Affairs—which meant his placement was still ambiguous.

  Other than him, everything was quite clear. Abby was the Secretary of Engineering, Admiral Sanderson was the Secretary of Defense; below him Ouri was the police commissioner, Joe held the position of commandant of the space force and Brandt was commandant of the Marine Corps—both were promoted to Colonel. There was a secretary of health and of education and Bob was noted as the Secretary of the Intrepid—something that went without saying.

  After the meeting, Tanis stood in the SOC beside Admiral Sanderson. All of the military and security personnel out of stasis were present physically or virtually while at their posts.

  There were nods of understanding as she described the new organizational structure; when she announced that she had been designated the ship’s XO applause and cheers broke out.

  Tanis felt herself flush and gave an embarrassed glace at Sanderson who raised his hands for quiet.

  “It’s not all good news.” His delivery was entirely dead-pan. “I’ve been designated as the Secretary of Defense, which means you all have one less layer of protection between me and you.”

  Joe laughed and called out, “We’ll just go to your boss.”

  Tanis gave him a mock scowl. “There will be none of that, you. The purpose of this re-organization is to have a clear chain of command. However, Secretary Sanderson will be spending much of the trip in stasis to preserve his old bones. At those times, Ouri will be acting secretary and will report to me.”

  “Just like old times.” Ouri smiled.

  BECOMING > HUMAN

  STELLAR DATE: 3241802 / 08.27.4163 (Adjusted Gregorian)

  LOCATION: ISS Intrepid

  REGION: LHS 1565, 185 AU from stellar primary

  Tanis stood in the lobby outside of Earnest’s laboratories.

  While Abby made Engine her domain, Earnest spent most of his time here, at the very rear of the dorsal arch, with walls of windows facing out over the back of the ship.

  The scale of the Intrepid never ceased to amaze Tanis. The fact that Earnest and his wife worked on the same ship, but were typically over sixteen kilometers apart, fascinated Tanis each time she thought of it.

  There was a time in human history when a person may have never traveled more than sixteen kilometers from their home in their entire life. Now a starship encompassed a larger space.

  “Even scuffed and bruised she’s beautiful,” a voice said from behind Tanis.

  She turned to see Earnest standing behind her. The man spoke about the Intrepid like a darling child. There was passion and emotion in his voice that never came out at any other time.

  While Abby viewed the Intrepid as a magnificent structure that she must maintain, Tanis could see that Earnest viewed it as a work of art, more his grand opus than even the creation of picotech.

  “She’s the most beautiful ship I’ve ever laid eyes on.” Tanis nodded in agreement. “I thought so from the very first moment I saw her.”

  Earnest looked her in the eyes, something he rarely did. “I know, I can tell that about you. You care for her like I do.”

  He looked back out the window for a moment and then turned, calling over his shoulder, “Come to my lab, I need to have a look at what Angela did to you.”

  Tanis followed him through an inner reception area and into a large laboratory filled with equipment and tables.
>
  She was surprised to see that the room was clean and well organized. Earnest had always seemed so scatterbrained that she assumed his workspace would be chaos embodied. Now that she saw it, she realized that there was no way the creator of the Intrepid, with its clean lines and attention to detail, could be designed by someone sloppy.

  “You know that the license on your flow-armor expires in four months,” he said.

  “Yeah, a year earlier and I would have been dead when Collins shot at me.”

  Earnest grunted. “Hmm… I wonder about that.”

  Tanis wondered what he meant, but let the comment go and instead asked, “So what can be done, can you remove it from me?”

  Earnest gestured to an examination table and Tanis climbed onto it.

  “Of course I can, I can rebuild you from a single stem-cell on up if I need to, but we don’t really have that sort of time. Ideally, I’d like to see if I can simply reverse what Angela did and flow it back out of your body the same way it went in.”

  “So it’s going to hurt,” Tanis said.

  “Yes,” Earnest replied simply.

  Tanis lay still and cleared her mind as Earnest sent a batch of his nano into her body. Her internal systems alerted her to the intrusion and showed the signature of the invading machines. Tanis approved the bots and her internal defenses—both organic and artificial—stood down.

  Earnest brought a holo display up over her body and linked it to Tanis. She brought it up in her VR so she could see it with her eyes closed.

  The scientist made soft humming sounds as he looked over the data. He pulled several other scanning instruments over her body to gather more readings. As he worked, the holographic image of Tanis’s insides became more and more detailed.

  She had a rudimentary understanding of her internals. Her time in the TSF had layered modification over modification, requiring her to read long manuals on how to care for and manage herself.

  Most of the time Angela took care of her body, but Tanis also knew how to directly triage problems with any of her implants. It was important to be prepared for a time when AI was offline or incapacitated.