by E. R. Mason
Chapter 6
Tuesday morning began late. I'd neglected to set a wakeup call on my terminal. I had been distracted. I rubbed at the bristle on my face as thoughts of the day past flooded my mind. Oddly, no matter how I added it all up, I came out feeling pretty good with just a little bit of guilt on the side. It had been a day to mark time by, a day of premier exploration, disaster averted, and unexpected encounters.
I pushed myself out of bed, went to the terminal and called up my personal duty roster. My shift was supposed to begin at 08:00. It was 08:15. I had informal security audits of several Engineering areas scheduled for 09:00, but that had been on the calendar from before our encounter with the alien ship. We were probably well underway by now, and those inspection areas would be bustling with activity from the jump to light. Besides, I had an appointment with Doctor Pacell, a medical appointment which for once needed to be kept. A continental breakfast would have first priority. I stuffed my blanket away, hit the button to put the bed up, grabbed a clean gray-black flight suit and headed for the shower.
On my way to the mess hall, I stepped into the corridor and crashed into someone traveling at a high rate of speed in the opposite direction. Clayton Pell, the ship's internet loner, was wearing a pair of music-video optics, the wire-frame type with tiny, button-sized, tinted lenses. You can see through the image projected into your eyes by MVOs, but charging down a hallway while using them is not recommended. He had to grab onto me to keep from falling down and then began profusely apologizing.
Pell is an odd character who is more a ship's ghost than a real crew member. He haunts many of the seldom used access corridors within the habitat module in a never-ending quest to keep the internet working. When you try to log on to your personal computer terminal and the ship's icon cursor freezes solid, you call Pell. Although everyone inevitably gets to know him he has never been close to anyone that I know of, which may be part of the reason everyone calls him ‘Pell’ as though it were his first name. He is unusually tall and lanky with stilty legs that end in size twelve shoes. He has short-cropped, sandy-blond hair except for the bald spot in the middle, and a sandy-tan face that reflects a quiet personality. He has an unusually long, narrow neck partly covered by sandpaper skin, and big hands he keeps well manicured. Pell seems to have a blind spot for rank. He inevitably fails to notice or acknowledge it, and because even the highest of ranks so fear not having the network, no one ever challenges him on it. It takes an event such as crashing into someone in the hallway to get him talking. His only real weakness for social intercourse comes on occasions when he unfolds his electric guitar to join in impromptu blues/jazz sessions that sometime take place in the cafeteria.
"I'm really sorry, Adrian. I wasn't paying attention. I've been chasing the net for the entire third shift. It's acting up like I've never seen it."
"Funny, I haven't noticed anything."
"Yeah, well, staff terminals are logging on all by themselves, files are disappearing and reappearing, and people are getting cut off in the middle of email. Every time I get there the damned thing has cleared. We've got some kind of noise getting in the system somewhere. I've seen it before, but never this bad. I sure hope it's not bleeding in from the engine sensors. I sure don't want to go crawling around way back in the damn tail tunnels. They woke me up around 01:00. I'm gonna give up and try to get some sleep. If it's still going on when I wake up, I'll just have to start all over again."
"Better you than me, Pell. I've had my share of adventure."
"Yeah, so I heard. Hey, take a look at this music. It's really something." Pell peeled off the light-weight optics he was straining to see me through and handed them over. It was not my thing, but you must remain on good terms with Pell. I looked them over and carefully put them on. The music instantly cut in slightly too loud, giving me a tingling sensation behind the ears where the transducers touch skin. It was an ancient-styled blues band. An unshaven man with bifocal-style glasses was bending strings on an old-fashioned electric guitar that had a cord and tuning keys. He wore baggy looking brown work pants, and big, brown, heavy work shoes. He kept lifting his left foot slightly off the floor as he wrapped himself around his instrument. His voice was raspy and pitch-perfect. I could see Pell nodding enthusiastically at me through the image.
"It's Clapton, can you believe it?"
I took off the optics and handed them back. "Sorry, never heard of him, Pell."
"Clapton, ...you know. He brought the blues into the twenty-first century. Studied under the best blues players in the world. They're taking all these old videos and converting them to surround-sight. You get to see the real masters as though they're right in front of you. It's incredible. It just kills me."
"Well, if you keep speeding down the hall wearing those things, it just might."
"Yeah, sorry about that. I'm half asleep. Well, I'd better get where I'm going. See you later." He hooked the optics frames back over his ears and headed off, clanking along the grated section of corridor floor that led to his stateroom. I smiled to myself, shook my head and headed for the mess hall.
The Commissary is one of those cartoon-like places that are designed in fine detail by architectural engineers who were born to care about cost and efficiency and nothing else. They lie in bed at night entertaining fantasies about ground-breaking designs in food dispensation. They design plastic rooms, with no detail, and no sharp edges as though the room was intended to prevent five-year-olds from harming themselves. They generally top it off with a picture of a boat on the wall to show the depth of their symbolism, which it does.
Unbeknownst to them, as soon as the mess hall is activated, it is completely taken over by a strange group of space-bound eccentrics who use it for a dozen different things for which it was never intended. They are the people who become walking outhouses on Halloween, Santas at Christmas, gigantic bunnies on Easter, off-key karaoke singers and flat comedians backed by too frequent, synthetic rim-shots during thinly-populated talent nights.
Understandably, Halloween is the favorite. On that particular evening, if you come to the mess hall, you are likely to be served brain salad by someone dressed in a big black helmet with the sound of heavy breathing.
There are no seasons in deep space, but there are seasons in the mess hall. It snows there in winter, flowers bloom in the spring lasting through the summer, and pine needles and corn stalks are gathered in the fall. R.J. does not really need to slay his invisible windmills in the cause of preserving humanity. The atypical people, who stalk designated human prey relentlessly, dragging their captured victims to the galley under false pretense only to bellow choruses of happy birthday to them while forcing them to blow out tiny, flaming sticks stuck into oversized pastries bearing their names, will do that for him.
Feeling lazy, I took an elevator up one deck and stepped out into the wide corridor which leads to the mess hall. A little alarm of awareness suddenly went off in my head. I stopped and listened. The faint echoes of dishes and trays could be heard clamoring in the distance, but other than that there was nothing; no sound at all. The plan had been for us to back away from the alien craft at 03:00, bring her around and make the jump to light thirty minutes later. But there were no waves of superstructure vibration coming off the walls and no subsonic resonant drone from the Tachyon drives.
We weren't moving. I hastened my pace.
To my surprise, the place was packed and noisy. It should have been nearly empty with the first shift people all at their stations. Instead, they were here celebrating another unexpected break in routine. Even more surprising, they were not dressed in regulation duty wear. That meant they knew they would not be called to their positions anytime soon. They sat around the hall drinking coffee, eating late breakfast snacks, and talking cheerfully around the colorful plastic tables looking like a bunch of tourists on holiday. I searched over the heads for a sign of R.J. until an arm suddenly jutted up over the cro
wd. To my dismay, he stood partly up and called, "Hey, Buck, over here!"
There was sporadic laughter from points around the room as though too many understood the reference. It was impossible to judge just how red my face became, though I am certain it conveyed an adequate betrayal of guilt. I weaved my way through the masses, nodding sarcastically, and joined him at his table.
"R.J."
"Yes, oh grand marshal of this fortuitous gathering?"
"Later, I will kill you."
He blurted out a laugh and pushed an empty mug and coffee dispenser at me. I poured and eyed him threateningly.
"Nira was in here earlier. She looked very refreshed."
"R.J., keep your voice down. So, what about Nira?"
"Oh, just thought you'd like to know she was doing well, that's all."
"Is there no damn privacy on this ship at all? How do you know about Nira?"
"Apparently she bumped into a nurse's aid while sneaking back into sickbay last night. When asked where she had been, she laughed and claimed to have paid a little visit to a Mr. Buck Rogers. Of course, we all have no idea who that could be."
"Oh my God."
"I'm sure it was heavenly, my amorous friend."
"R.J., it never happened."
"It makes me wonder why you've never been married."
"R.J., it never happened."
"Of course not."
"So why aren't we underway? What the hell's going on?"
"Oh yeah, you're gonna love this one. Guess who fucked up last night? I mean, really fucked up."
"No guessing games, please. It's too early."
"How 'bout if I give you a big clue. It was Space Operations' favorite daughter."
"Brandon? The child-queen of the analytical group? What did she do?"
"Like I was telling you last night, the scanners they took on board that ship really didn't pick up too much. What they did pick up seems almost undecipherable. Except for one thing: star charts. One of the scientists in ole', or should I say young, Maureen's group happened to notice a pattern in the alien gibberish that reminded him of star charts. Ms. Brandon, who is always anxious to validate Space Ops' undeserved confidence in her, decided it was the big break she needed to crack the code. The latest mapping we've done hadn't yet been imported into the analytical computer base, so Ms. Maureen races down to Navigation and uses her rank to bully the engineer on duty into letting her have access to the ship's main nav computer. She inputs her alien star segment into the database and tells the computer to find a pattern match. The host computer goes away to do the job and never comes back. Whatever happened, it wiped out our entire nav database. The whole system had to be completely powered down and then rebooted. They're replacing the optical storage mediums with backups to get it back. And that my friend, is why you see this jovial crowd of first shifters celebrating around you rather than being at their posts."
"Absolutely unbelievable."
"The nav engineer who allowed Brandon into the host computer is believing it, all right. He's suspended from duty until a hearing can be scheduled."
"And Maureen Brandon? What about her?"
"Well, the fact I've heard nothing at all leads me to believe it's as bad as it gets. There hasn't been any notice of a temporary replacement for her or anything, but I do know she spent most of the remainder of third shift in the conference room with a few department heads and Security officers who had been awakened during their sleep shift. You would have been in on it except you were on the EVA, and they thought you needed your rest. Little did they know...."
"R.J...."
"I was lucky. They kept me up all night using the job continuity clause. I was updating documentation on my laptop when Brandon took off without saying a thing. Otherwise, I'd probably be getting my own special hearing for allowing procedures to be broken. So now they are saying we won't be ready to go light until sometime around the beginning of second shift. 17:00 is what's being advertised right now. Because of everything that's happened, we haven't even pulled away from that alien piece of crap. It gives me the creeps. And, we have one extremely disgruntled CO on board right now. Nobody else better screw up."
"Jesus...."
"He had no part in it. He will not be at the hearing."
I sat back, sipped the hot, black coffee, and felt a pang of sympathy for Maureen Brandon, probably now the former head of the Analysis group. In her overzealous desire to advance her cause, she had taken too big a risk and ended up temporarily stranding us. It is one thing to jeopardize one's self in the quest for knowledge, and quite another to endanger an entire ship's complement. Brandon had not only put us aground but her own career as well. I looked around the room at the laughing faces and ongoing debates. At the table nearest us, an attractive red head who I didn't know was complaining to her friend, a short-haired brunet with very red lipstick, about her mother's ongoing involvement with "The People's Committee to Reform Population Controls." She kept referring to it acrimoniously as the "PCRPC." Her friend kept taking in coffee and nodding and was given no opportunity whatsoever to contribute to the one-sided debate.
Opposite us, three men I knew pretty well were dressed in the dark green-black flight suits the coops always wore. They were the ‘forever-standing-bys’. The flyers designated to pilot the small scout ships carried in the belly of the Electra, vehicles almost never used on star charting tours. The three were in a heated debate.
"That's bullshit, Mick. The word 'Disclosure' don't even exist in the history books. It was the Tach-drives. That's when first contact happened. Right at the turn of the century. Ain't no magic about it. Once you got an AmpLight-E engine to get you up to the speed of light, and a compatible Tachyon drive to kick in and collapse you through it, all of a sudden you’re a hazard to the whole damned universe. A planet of bureaucrats that don't know what the hell they're doin'. They had to make contact then.”
The two men sitting across the table from him seemed to disagree.
"Come on, Raul. You really think the government didn't know there was loads of intelligent life out here until some bald guy with slanty eyes showed up to mention it? What about the ruins on the dark side of the moon? And all the other stuff? You really think that went unnoticed? The government was leaking shit for years before first contact. They were scared shitless about what was gonna happen when word got out. Look what did happen! Fuckin' clergy jumpin' out a' windows. Whole religious sects committin' suicide. Loonies runnin' around everywhere. Sure the word 'Disclosure' isn't in the history books. Disclosure was a long series of leaked government secrets until extraterrestrials became common knowledge. You agree with me, don't ya, Skip?"
"I agree those were bad years. I lost two grandparents during that time. Some people needed to believe we were only-children. What pisses me off is that nothing had changed, only that we knew."
Raul spoke again. "Well, we still don't know nothin'. That's all I'm sayin'. We know there are lots of other races out here, but all we ever deal with are the ones mostly like us. The super races are still the fuckin' ghosts they always have been. Shit, Earth is an amusement park to some of 'em and a huntin' ground to others. They manipulate us without us even realizin' it. We don't know nothin', I tell ya'. We shouldn't a' fucked with that ship out there.”
R.J. lost interest. "So how's your memory this morning, Adrian?"
I had forgotten about that. I searched the shadowy back part of my mind and found the unsettling little mnemonic black hole was still there. "My memory was just fine until you had to go and ask about it."
"Have you talked to the Doc yet?"
"It's my very next stop. One does not see the Doctor until one has ingested an adequate amount of pre-examination caffeine."
"Still don't remember a thing about the airlock, then?"
"Which airlock is that?"
R.J. did not laugh. He sat and stared back at me as though he suspected something he was not ready to discuss. It irritates
me when he does that, mainly because he is usually the most deviously accurate suspector I've ever met.
"So were there any other interesting developments on the data from the alien ship, since you were on it all night?"
R.J. drew little circles on the table top with his coffee cup, while staring thoughtfully into it. He looked up at me and shook his head. "If Brandon's little trick had worked, they might have had a big piece of translation to go on. As it is, they can't seem to get to first base. But I'll tell you what bothers me. It's the little things going wrong around here. We come across a large, abandoned spacecraft dead in space with the power systems still running. We take a look inside and find most of what appears to be data storage mediums wiped clean. We bring back a little piece of data and download it into our system and suddenly one section of our computer base is wiped clean. We've got a veteran EVA expert who has partial memory loss. Starting to see a commonality there? And now I'm hearing there are problems popping up on the ship's net. I don't like this little island of space we are stopped in, Adrian. It would make me most happy if we were plummeting merrily along on our way at a few times the speed of light."
"Hey, no problem; 17:00, right?"
"I hope so. I really hope so."
Chapter 7