“That game is as stupid as it is morbid,” the woman said.
“Uh-huh. But asking me a bunch of sensitive questions and watching me squirm is just fine,” Lex said. “By the way, what is your name?”
“I’d rather not say,” she said mockingly.
“I’m serious. This is a fascinating thing to do,” Lex said, subtly tapping the audio record button on his suit’s controls.
Dan was the first to consider the question beyond making jokes. He leaned back and gazed at the ceiling for a moment. “I don’t know that there’s anything left to be said. I’m a very lay-it-out-on-the-line kind of guy. Say what I mean to say when I mean to say it. So long as my family gets the reply to the message they just sent, I’ll consider my accounts balanced and closed.”
The others murmured in general agreement.
“Right, but what does the message say. What if it doesn’t get sent?”
“We’re in the business of delivering data. The message will get sent.”
“For the sake of argument.”
“I’m not going to tell you what I say to my wife and kids, Blueboy. And you have less right than anybody to ask me something like that.”
Again there was a rather emphatic rumble of agreement. Bill cleared his plate first, wiped his mouth, and stood. “Let’s get you out of here before you make yourself look like even more of an ass.”
#
A small compound clung to the side of a midsize moon like a barnacle. It was unremarkable in most ways, just a silver and white disk of composite panels and polymer windows. An indecipherable serial number was emblazoned around the edge, followed by the words “VectorCorp: Security and Oversight.” Hanging in the black void around the moon, spread out in a grid, were countless artificial satellites. Some were resupply modules, glorified fuel tanks used to top off the supplies of utility vehicles. Others were precarious nets of spindly metallic arms, dry docks used for repairing, refitting, and constructing the fleet that would mine the nearby moons and debris fields that made this slice of space such a good choice for such a facility. Below, looking like a layer cake of brick-brown and yellow ocher, was a gas giant. Like the security office, the planet had its own meaningless alphanumeric designation based upon the dim star it orbited, but the local employees called it Crest Well 1. Its roiling clouds of gases served as a virtually inexhaustible source of the hydrogen and helium that ran most of the operation.
A young man sat at a console that was antiquated even for his era. As he punched away at buttons to log his findings he shifted uncomfortably in his dark blue security suit. The name tag said Agent Trent, and to his credit, he was wearing the suit in what they called “space-ready” condition. Clicking on a helmet was all it would take to be ready for a spacewalk. It was a phenomenally uncomfortable way to work, like requiring a professional athlete to wear spikes and pads sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. But the regulations called for it, and regulations were to be followed. Nowhere in the operations manual did it say he had to like it, though.
“Johnny, you ever stop to think why they gave us systems with keyboards instead of something less rooted in the Stone Age?” he said.
“What was it they said…?” Johnny said, leaning back in his chair.
He tugged at the collar of his notably not-space-ready suit. If there was the sudden need to leave the station, or worse if there was a hull breach, he’d have five minutes of buckling, zipping, sealing, and snapping to do before he would have a shot at surviving a vacuum. On the plus side, his body had a bit of ventilation, and he was therefore not stewing in his own juices.
“Wasn’t it something about them being more tamper resistant?” he said, yawning as he glanced at the images from monitors as they flipped by on his display.
“It’s all feeding into the same OS. Someone busts that and it won’t matter if we’re typing or swiping.”
“Bah. It’s probably cheaper then.”
“How could it be cheaper? The only keyboards I’ve ever seen are in history class and in this office. They’re probably collector’s items, or else custom made. Either way, a cheap datapad would probably cost half as much.”
Johnny shrugged. “Got me then.”
“It’s got to be management,” Trent complained. “Some MBA thinks a keyboard increases productivity or improves security, or he reads it or hears it somewhere, and then it’s corporate policy.”
“Management is management,” Johnny said with a shrug.
They silently observed the rotating feeds until one of them came up Feed Disabled For Disaster Recovery Exercise.
Agent Trent waved his hand at the screen. “Like this disaster recovery drill. I can get behind doing an evacuation. That’s good to run through. But why the hell would you shut off the feeds? Leave the feeds on so we can observe if they are evacuating correctly.”
“Management is management,” Johnny said again.
“And I don’t like the idea of clearing out the CX hangar. That stuff is highest security and we’ve got no eyes on it and no crew in there.”
“There’s crew. The inspectors are in there.”
“Inspectors?”
“Yeah. The memo said inspectors or something would we enforcing compliance. I saw something pop in from FTL unscheduled but flashing VC credentials.”
“How high were the credentials?” Trent asked.
“They checked out. Some kind of gold clearance.”
“Gold. … Damn it, Johnny, this isn’t a disaster recovery exercise,” he said angrily.
“Memo says it is.”
“Gold credentials don’t allow you to check the origin point, right? And they evac’d the experimental hangar. This is clearly a visit by the higher-ups to see how the CX projects are going.”
“Huh… Yeah, probably. So?”
“So if there are going to be high-ranking security and executive officers here, the local security should be informed!”
Again Johnny shrugged. “Hey, man. Rules are rules, and they followed them.”
“Damn right rules are rules,” Trent rumbled. “And I’m damn sure willing to do some malicious adherence too.”
He stood and grabbed his helmet.
“I’m doing rounds. We’ve got no feeds on the evac area, so I’m going to take a runner and do a visual inspection.”
“That’s top-level clearance out there,” Johnny reminded him.
“I know the protocols, I know the perimeters, I know the radii. I’ll do everything on the up and up. But I’m sick of these people keeping secrets from the department tasked with keeping their secrets.”
“Don’t get in their flight path. I don’t want you to get written up. Then I’d have to do the grunt work.”
Agent Trent didn’t dignify the quip with a response. He snatched his helmet and stormed out the monitoring room door. It was a short walk down the corridor to the hangar, where the aforementioned “runner” was kept. They were, to be perfectly honest, comically undersized contraptions. They were built for low cost, high flexibility, and high efficiency. Dignity was not a design requirement. Visually, the vehicle had more in common with an egg than anything an adult should be riding, but attempts had been made to give it some measure of authority by way of an imposing paint job of blue and yellow.
He slipped into the pod, pulled the hatch shut, and activated the autopilot. All the while he fumed. It was maddening that they would keep things from their own security. It was bad enough he didn’t even have the clearance to know what was being kept in a hangar under his protection. Now they were scheduling visits to check on it while specifically excluding and misleading their own security forces. It had to end. One of these days they’d have to promote someone who would actually run things intelligently.
The runner flitted out into the grid of construction and repair docks, heading for the titanic and entirely enclosed structure at the far end of the facility. He’d barely made it halfway there when he began passing facilities completely deserted due to the
disaster recovery evacuation. Not long after that the navigation system of the runner started to warn him that he was entering an area that was currently off limits. He entered the security override and continued. Barely a hundred kilometers later, he’d reached the distance permissible for his level of clearance, which was still laughably far from the enclosed dry dock.
He flipped on the visual scanners and focused on the dry dock, zooming and enhancing the view as much as he could. It was eerie to see so little activity on that end of the facility. Officially he wasn’t permitted to know, or even ask, what was inside the CX dry dock, but he saw enough of the equipment transfer manifests to know it was concealing the construction of something massive.
The primary bay doors were facing away from the rest of the facility, lest non-cleared personnel get a glimpse into the interior when the doors opened, so the only thing the scanners were showing him was the rear of the dry dock. CX dry dock was massive, a matte-black barely visible cigar of a structure hanging in orbit hoping not to be noticed. The color did a great job of concealing it, except from above, in which case it was an abundantly visible black silhouette against the gas giant. Naturally, this was the direction from which most of the traffic approached, making the paint job just another pointless decision from higher up the command chain as far as he was concerned.
Warning lights, just barely visible on the far side, began to blink, indicating a departure. He looked at the magnified view, expecting some sort of small, subtle craft to depart. The executives tended to favor sleek, luxury craft, which could afford to be downright ostentatious in their design while still being small enough to avoid notice most of the time.
That was not what he saw.
He initially thought a door or canopy was extending from the far end of the dry dock, because it was far too large to be a VectorCorp ship. Then he saw the thrusters. Their position suggested they were for maneuvering, but each one was larger than a standard VectorCorp Interceptor. It was a ship, one large enough to have almost completely filled the dry dock. Unlike the stealthily colored building, this seemed to have been designed for visibility, white with yellow registration markers.
The pixelated view was difficult to make out initially, but finally he was able to determine there was some minor damage on the hull of the ship… directly where the docking clamps would be.
“I don’t know what that thing is,” he said. “But I know for damn sure they wouldn’t haul it out without unhooking the docking clamps.”
He activated the communication system and attempted to pilot the runner toward the dry dock. The navigational system wouldn’t let him cross into the forbidden zone around it.
“John, patch me through to the local command, top priority. Something’s going down,” he said.
“What’s—”
“We’ve got suspicious activity around the CX dry dock. Get me through, now!”
Unable to coax his ship into violating the restricted space, he instead began to skirt along the perimeter. If he couldn’t get closer, he could at least get a better angle.
“This is VC Security Command, Director Hale speaking. This had better be good.”
“I’m at Crest dry docks and I’ve got a… hell, I don’t know what it is. A massive ship pulling out of the CX dry dock. It looks like it has VectorCorp Experimental markings, and it has sheared off its docking clamps. There’s no crew in the dry dock right now thanks to a disaster recovery exercise, which means no one to disengage the clamps. This has all of the earmarks of a heist.”
“Stand by… You said the CX dry dock.”
“Yes. I’d call it… the closest I can compare it to is a dreadnought from back in my military rotation.”
“Requesting orders… Agent Trent, you are to discontinue communication. Report back to your security office and do not file reports on this incident.”
“Repeat orders?” he said in disbelief.
When the man answered, his words were spoken with slow, deliberate diction. “You have claimed to have observed a ship of a super-frigate class with VectorCorp markings. Officially, there are no ships of that class in the possession of nonmilitary organizations due to an interstellar treaty currently under appeal. The ship you claim to have observed does not exist. You will return to your security office, delete all visual and sensor records of this incident, and do not file a report. Upper-level security will investigate the matter. Have I made myself clear?”
“… Yes, sir…” Trent said, bringing his runner to a stop.
He paused long enough to watch the ship fully emerge. The behemoth of a vessel was a dead ringer for any of a dozen different capital ships he’d seen in military fleets. It didn’t trouble him that VectorCorp had been developing a weapon of war. What troubled him was, in their zeal for secrecy, they would rather let it slip away in the hands of an unknown party than admit to its existence.
The ship jumped to FTL, and he turned his runner to return to the office. He would follow his orders. He was too well trained and too dedicated to do otherwise. But there were answers, he knew that. And he would find them…
#
Lex was back in the hangar, working his way through the latest instructions Coal had for him. The external work was done, which meant the easy work was done. Further repairs involved contorting himself into unusual positions. At the moment he lay on his back with his legs dangling out the open hatch as she twisted herself into an angle where he could almost reach the subassembly he was attempting to access.
“Please tell me there isn’t much more,” Lex said.
“We are nearly through with the main repairs,” Coal said. “When you finish the atmospheric reprocessor, we will be at one hundred percent of all critical functions.”
“What noncritical stuff is left after that?”
“My stealth paint job needs touching up. Without that I’ll be very easy to see when the cloaks aren’t active.”
“Anything else?”
“Nothing worth our attention.”
“How much time until the disaster?”
“Based upon your earlier estimates, we have approximately twenty-six hours.”
“I really hope I remembered that date correctly.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“Thanks.”
“If the date was determined by forensic analysis that is a generation old, by our standards, it probably wasn’t very accurate to begin with.”
“… Thanks. It’s good that we’re pretty much done then.”
“Yes. Hopefully we can leave before the disaster. I’m sure if you don’t see the crew die, you’ll feel less guilty about them dying.”
Lex gritted his teeth.
“You don’t agree?”
“Maybe we can try to avoid reminding me what we’ve done to these people.”
“Sorry if this is something I should know, but is it standard human behavior to ignore unpleasant truths?”
“It’s just about the most human thing there is,” he said.
“Fascinating.”
He clumsily manipulated a few locking clamps, then removed a clump of scorched tubing.
“Is this the system I’m supposed to fix?” he said.
“Yes.”
He looked at it uncertainly. “It looks much worse than I expected.”
“It’s just a tubing manifold. It looks tricky, but making replacement parts is simple. Three to five hours of work, based on what you’ve been doing so far.”
“Great…” he said, sliding to the ground.
“I am feeding the proposed procedures to your in-helmet display.”
His view filled with a semitransparent overlay that mapped itself onto the pile of scrap tubing they had provided, clearly indicating where cuts and bends needed to be made. This sort of augmented reality instruction manual was exactly the sort of thing that would have made the assembly of his futon a far more user-friendly process. At the very least he wouldn’t have ended up hurling an Allen wrench at the wall.<
br />
“Now that we’re in the home stretch,” he said, picking up a saw and lining up his first cut, “we need to discuss that message we got. Have you been working on it?”
“No.”
“… Why not?”
“You are tugging on wiring harnesses for critical subsystems. I have been trying to keep my program state small so that I can avoid further corruption in the event you cause another power interruption or surge.”
“… Another one?”
“Six hours ago you shorted a connection that caused a severe issue. I was able to recover.”
“I don’t remember doing that.”
“I was discreet.”
“Well why didn’t you tell me?”
“Your hands shake a lot more when you’re afraid you’ll hurt someone. I didn’t want to make you nervous. Odd, because when you fly a ship recklessly, something statistically more likely to injure others, your hands shake less than usual. I think it’s because—”
“Coal, let’s try to stay on topic please.”
“Which topic would you like to revert to, the message, or your shaking hands?”
“Let’s go with the message.”
“Analyzing. I don’t think it is relevant. We don’t even know who it is from.”
“It’s from Ma,” he said, finishing the first cut.
“How do you know?”
“It says funk in it. And that serial number thing says Squee.”
“Incorrect, the serial number is GMVD-5QU3E.”
“Yeah, but that looks like Squee.”
“Processing… Only if transcribed utilizing a suboptimal character recognition algorithm.”
“A-K-A human eyes. Anyway, can you make sense of it?”
“With that context, it is straightforward. The GenMech—which is the probable meaning of the GM of the serial number—has a flawed checksum and it needs to be repaired. The full text implies it would need to poll for a checksum and then match to it.”
“By who?”
“No idea.”
“What would it take to get it fixed?”
“Someone with a working knowledge of the GenMech operating system. And before you ask, I don’t have that anymore. Ma does. And presumably Future Karter.”
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