by G J Ogden
“That wasn’t so bad,” said Sterling, feeling a wave of relief wash over him. Any time that Commander Evan Graves tended to him, Sterling felt like he was the unwitting subject of a macabre science experiment. This time, he’d gotten off lightly, he thought. Then Sterling’s stomach sank as his chief medical officer picked up a third device and wielded it in front of his nose like a medieval inquisitor wielding a hot poker.
“I am afraid I have not yet begun, Captain,” Graves replied, with a darkly sinister tone.
Sterling frowned at the third implement – it look like an old-fashioned hypodermic syringe, of the sort that might have been used by the doctors of Victorian London. Sterling forced down a dry swallow as the instrument was brought closer to his face. It appeared to have been designed to penetrate the tough hide of a bull rather than the fragile skin of a human being.
“Despite the numbing effects of the drugs I have injected into your system, I’m afraid this is still going to hurt, Captain,” Graves went on. “Quite a lot.”
Sterling continued to scowl at the device in Graves’ hand then met his medical officer’s eyes. Commander Graves stared back at him with an unnerving calm that made the man appear suddenly menacing.
“Go ahead, Commander, I won’t hold it against you,” replied Sterling, more than a little apprehensively. He then watched as Graves pressed the oversized injector to his neck. He noticed that Banks’ expression had contorted, as if she were watching a human dissection. “You’re not helping, Commander,” Sterling said, scowling at his first officer.
Sterling then felt a sharp prick to his neck, which was followed by a loud hiss that continued for several seconds. He quickly repeated the procedure on Sterling’s arm. When the hiss ended, Graves removed the device and replaced it neatly inside his medical kit.
“That looked worse than it felt,” said Sterling, rubbing the injection site with his fingers. All he could feel was a dull ache, like he’d been punched in the neck and arm.
Graves did not reply and instead stood in front of Sterling, with his hands held out, as if he were waiting for someone to pass him a basketball. Sterling opened his mouth and was about to ask what his medical officer was doing when heat surged through his entire shoulder and left arm, forcing him to cry out. His legs then gave way and he fell into Commander Graves waiting arms. The medical officer lowered Sterling gently to the deck, cradling him like he was having a seizure.
“Commander, what the hell is going on?” Banks called out, dropping to her knees by Sterling’s side and taking his body from the doctor’s arms. “You’re supposed to be healing him not making him worse!”
“Do not be alarmed, Commander Banks,” Graves replied, coolly. “I have injected Captain Sterling with a nanosuspension of experimental bone putty.” Sterling continued to spasm uncontrollably in Banks’ arms. “The formulation is my own design. It is highly effective but, as you can see, also rather agonizing for the patient.”
“How… long will… this last…” Sterling grunted, forcing the words out in-between each new wave of excruciating muscle spasms.
“The ordeal will be over shortly, Captain,” Graves replied, still with the impassive delivery of a robot.
Sterling had never considered Graves’ emotionally-bereft bedside manner to be a problem in the past. However, at that moment he would have taken any soothing word of comfort over the clinically sterile response that Graves had given him. Then as quickly as it had begun, the pain and the spasms stopped. Sterling felt his muscles relax. Banks, however, continued to cradle Sterling in her arms like he was an injured comrade, slowly dying from his wounds on the battlefield.
“How do you feel, Captain?” Graves asked, rising to his full height.
To his surprise, Sterling found that the pain was almost entirely gone. “It doesn’t hurt, anymore,” he replied, rotating his shoulder and flexing his arm like he was warming up for a session at the gym.
Then Sterling realized that he was essentially lying in Mercedes Banks’ lap. He lay back and looked up at his first officer’s face, partially obscured by her bosom, and the awkwardness of their compromising position struck home for both of them. Banks abruptly dropped Sterling like a hot potato and the back of his head thudded into the deck. Thanks to the drugs, however, there was no pain.
“Gently, if you please, Commander Banks,” said Commander Graves’ reprovingly. “I only have a limited supply of bone putty, and many more broken bones that are in need of repairing.”
“Sorry, Captain,” replied Banks, scrambling off her knees and hauling him up. Then she released her hold on Sterling and folded her arms, trying to act casual.
Graves raised an eyebrow at the Invictus’ two most senior officers and cleared his throat. “If you’re no longer in need of my services, Captain, then I’ll attend to the rest of the crew,” he said, closing his medical kit and snapping the fasteners shut. “What’s left of them, in any case.”
“Go ahead, Commander, I think we’re all good here,” replied Sterling. He glanced at Banks, quickly checking her over to make sure she wasn’t bleeding out onto the deck. He’d been so consumed by his own injuries that he hadn’t asked if his first officer was also hurt. “Assuming, you’re okay too, Commander?” Sterling added.
“Aside from a splitting headache, I’m still in one piece,” Banks replied. She glanced across to Shade, who was still busying herself extinguishing fires. “And I think Shade is indestructible, so I wouldn’t worry about her.”
Graves removed a packet of tablets from his left pocket and pressed them into Banks’ hand. “Take two of these and call me if they fail to satisfactorily numb the pain,” the medical officer said.
Banks frowned at the packet. “I’m assuming that these things aren’t going to cause me to writhe around in agony on the deck or grow two heads, or anything crazy like that?”
“Nothing like that, no,” Graves replied. “Though they may make you a little constipated.”
Banks burst out laughing, which only caused Graves to scowl back at her before quickly turning on his heels and heading away.
“What? I thought that was funny,” said Banks, shrugging in response to Sterling’s criticizing stare.
“Only you could find anything about this crazy situation amusing, Mercedes,” said Sterling.
He turned his attention back to the ship’s chief medical officer. Commander Graves was cautiously approaching Lieutenant Shade, like he was a wildlife veterinarian trying to stalk up on a wounded animal. However, Shade had clocked his advance straight away and merely glowered at Graves as if he was a Sa’Nerran warrior. The doctor took the hint and swiftly moved on in search of another patient to attend to.
“Whatever happens from this point on, remind me not to break any more bones,” Sterling said, again flexing his shoulder. Whatever curious and no-doubt prohibited concoction of drugs his medical officer had injected him with had certainly done the trick. He felt like he’d simply taken a gentle tumble off the command deck, rather than been thrown head-first into the viewscreen at a hundred miles per hour.
Lieutenant Razor then scrambled out of the aft engineering crawlspace. Her white hair was streaked with blood, while her face was blackened with dirt and smoke. It gave her an oddly menacing countenance, as if she was wearing tribal war paint.
“Report, Lieutenant, what’s the damage?” said Sterling, meeting his engineer in the middle of the bridge. It was then he noticed that Razor appeared unusually agitated. Like Lieutenant Shade, his engineer’s unflappability was always something he could rely on. Sterling’s gut tightened into a knot, realizing that whatever could create a chink in Razor’s armor was likely to be serious.
“The hull is intact and the ship is salvageable,” Razor began, sounding breathless and hoarse. Sterling waited for the inevitable “but” with baited breath. “But we have hairline cracks in two reaction chambers that are growing more severe by the minute. I can’t shut them down and the automatic containment measures have failed.
The computer is offline, along with all the bridge overrides.”
“Cut to the chase, Lieutenant,” said Sterling, feeling like they’d literally jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire.
“Unless we can manually shut down the core, this ship is going to explode in less than fifteen minutes,” Razor added, her iridescent eyes fixed onto Sterling’s. “And if that happens, the detonation will blow a hole in the Vanguard the size of a battlecruiser.”
Chapter 6
An unusual Commander
Razor’s announcement that the reactor was on the verge of going critical was sobering in more ways than one. The aches and pains that Sterling had been feeling were gone, as was the giddy euphoria that had come from the near-death experience of surviving the crash. Now his body was again tingling with adrenalin and his mind was sharp and focused.
“Lieutenant Shade, coordinate an evacuation of anyone that’s still left alive,” Sterling called out, as he and Commander Banks hurried in pursuit of Razor. “Try to get as many people to a safe distance as possible, including those damned robots.”
“Aye Captain,” Shade replied before tapping her neural interface and springing into action.
“I’m guessing you have a plan for how to shut down the reactor from the engineering section, Lieutenant?” Sterling then called out to his engineer.
“The failsafe can be triggered manually from the reactor control room,” Razor called back. She had already pushed through the door and moved into the corridor outside the bridge. “With the computer offline and main power down, it will require two people to operate, and it also won’t be easy to reach.”
“We’ll figure it out, Lieutenant, just get us where we need to be,” Sterling replied.
The group rounded the corner toward the emergency stairwells, but already the twisted and mangled corridors of the Invictus were making progress difficult. Reaching deck two, Sterling and Banks took the lead, for the first time witnessing the human cost of their crash. The broken bodies of dead and injured crew members lined the corridors of the ship. Some moaned in agony and called out to Sterling for help, but there was nothing he could do for them, at least not yet.
“How much time do we have left, Lieutenant?” Sterling said as they approached the central computer core.
“Our link to the computer is down, so there’s no way to tell,” Razor replied, glancing behind to Sterling. “My guess is no more than eleven or twelve minutes.”
Suddenly, Lieutenant Razor’s boots screeched across the deck and the engineer slid to a stop. Banks was moving so fast that she almost piled straight into the back of her.
“Damn it, Lieutenant, what the hell did you stop for?” Banks called out.
Razor pointed to the emergency stairwell to deck three and Banks’ face fell. Sterling moved alongside his first officer and cursed. The crash had bowed the hull inward and crushed the stairwell, making it impossible to reach deck three.
“We can cut through the computer core to the engineering levels,” Sterling said, thinking on his feet. “If we enter the core room on this level, we can climb down to deck three then cut through to reactor control.”
Banks nodded, slapping Razor on the back to gee her on. Then they all retraced their steps through the mangled corridors. Banks reached the doors to the computer core first and forced them open using her incredible strength. A crew member lay dead just inside the room, her head partially caved in from an impact with the wall or deck. Banks slid the woman aside with the edge of her boot, then pushed through into the computer core room. Electrical sparks crackled from ruptured conduits and smashed consoles, while steam plumed out across the deck two gangway from a ruptured cooling pipe.
Sterling stepped over the body of the dead crew member, then grabbed the railings and peered down at the computer core, which spanned two decks of the ship. It still had power and, at least from a visual inspection, looked relatively undamaged.
“At least the computer core is still intact and its backup cells are active,” said Sterling, turning to Banks and Razor. “You two go ahead while I try to get the computer back online. It might be able to help us shut down the reactor.”
Banks nodded and tapped her neural interface. Sterling could feel the link form in his mind and he accepted it.
“We’ll stay linked in case there are any problems,” Banks said, stepping over the top of the railings in preparation to climb down to deck three. “Hopefully, that whacky AI can repay the favor we did it by not wiping its code and reverting it to a nice, safe gen-thirteen.”
Banks began to climb and Razor followed, though with less confidence and sure-footedness than the ship’s first officer displayed. Sterling moved to one of the control consoles and tried to access it. To his surprise, it powered up.
“Computer, can you hear me?” Sterling said, as the computer core began to pulse resonantly in his ear.
“Yes, Captain, I am here,” the computer replied, cheerfully. “I am glad to hear your voice. Internal scanners are down and I did not know if you were still alive.”
“I am, but just barely,” Sterling replied, finding the computer’s concern for his wellbeing to be oddly touching. “However, a lot of the crew weren’t so lucky,”
“I am sorry to hear that, Captain,” said the computer. Curiously, to Sterling’s ears it actually sounded like the gen-fourteen was being sincere in its sorrow for the loss of life.
“Never mind that now, can you access the reactor core?” Sterling went on, focusing on the critical issue at hand. “It’s going to rupture and take us and half of the Vanguard with it.”
“Negative, Captain, my hardline to the reactor core has been severed,” the computer replied, causing Sterling to utter another curse. “The manual failsafe override is the only solution. However, I estimate that you have eight minutes and three seconds in which to initiate the shut-down before the reactor becomes critical.”
Sterling actually felt slightly relieved. That was more time than he had imagined they had.
“Is there anything you can do to help?” Sterling asked. He was anxious to get moving again now that it was clear the gen-fourteen wasn’t the solution to their problems.
“Yes, Captain, there is,” the computer answered, again sounding cheerful. “Transfer command of the Invictus to me directly.”
Sterling recoiled from the console and peered out at the pulsing computer core. It was a change to actually be able to look directly at his gen-fourteen, rather than address its ethereal presence in the ceiling of whichever room he happened to be in.
“What the hell good would that do?” Sterling hit back, wondering why the computer was choosing that moment to display megalomaniacal tendencies.
“Due to the extensive damage to the ship, you are currently unable to direct my functions to an adequate level,” the computer continued. “With command authority, I can effectively direct myself. This will allow me to re-configure my core functions through the available resources without the need for human intervention or approval.”
Sterling’s finger was now tapping wildly on the computer console. The ship was a ticking time bomb yet his AI was focused on seizing command.
“I don’t have time for this, computer, if you can’t help then I need to assist Commander Banks and Lieutenant Razor,” Sterling said. He moved away from the console and swung his leg over the railings, ready to make the climb down to deck three.
“Giving me control is the only way I can help, Captain,” the computer added. Its voice was now more urgent and insistent. He may have merely been imagining it, but Sterling thought that the computer sounded suddenly more ‘human’. “My link to the reactor core is disabled, but with command authority I can re-configure my pathways and potentially reach reactor control through a sub-routine or secondary system.”
Sterling now had both feet firmly planted on the other side of the railings. He was about to start his descent, but the computer’s suggestion had given him pause. With the ship set to explod
e in a matter of minutes, it was an option he couldn’t discount.
“Commander, how is it looking down there?” Sterling asked, reaching out to his first officer through their link.
“The engineering section is a damned mess, Captain,” Banks replied. The link was strong and Sterling could practically feel the adrenaline racing through his first officer’s body. “Part of the deck caved in around reactor control and the manual shut-down controls are buried behind a ton of rubble. I’m trying to clear a path, but it’s going to be tight. We could really use you right now.”
“Keep digging, Mercedes, I’m on my way,” Sterling said, starting to climb down. He made it a couple of meters then shook his head, still unable to shake the computer’s idea from his mind. Cursing again, he glanced over his shoulder at the pulsating computer core. The lights on the core seemed to be following his descent, as if his advanced AI was watching him.
“If I give you command, you have to promise you won’t suck all the air out of the ship, or take off and leave us stranded here,” Sterling said, staring into the blinking lights as if they were the computer’s eyes.
“The Invictus is currently incapable of flight, Captain,” the computer replied, flatly. “Also, the air processing systems have failed so it would serve no purpose for me to disable them.”
“I think you know what I mean, computer,” Sterling hit back. “I just don’t want you turning on us.”
“I may have command, but you are still my Captain,” the computer answered. As before, the tone of the AI’s voice had suddenly shifted. To Sterling, it simply sounded more ‘real’. “As you told me once before, I am a member of your crew and that will never change.”
It was then that Sterling remembered he’d asked Lieutenant Razor to disable the AI’s inhibitor chip. This was so that the computer could re-program itself to fix the glitches that had started to plague its base code. He wondered what else the computer’s self-programming antics had accomplished, intentionally or otherwise.