by Ron Collins
Duty or not, he was physically incapable of having this conversation.
“What do you say we take twenty and hit the observation deck?” Torrance said.
“I don’t suppose I can be court-martialed for following a direct order, can I?”
“Never put anything past Interstellar Command.”
Malloy snuffed. “Interstellar Command.”
Torrance shrugged. “It’s no worse than Solar Command, right?”
“If you say so.”
“Let’s go.” Torrance stood.
The two walked down the corridor.
“Are we really going to get a walk-through?” Malloy asked as they waited for a lift tube.
“That’s what I understand. The admiral wants the entire crew to see what next-generation spacecraft look like, so I think it will happen.”
Malloy nodded. “Must be nice.”
“What’s that?”
“To be on a ship so fast you don’t have to carry your family along with you just to see them grow up.”
Torrance glanced at the lieutenant. Like many of the crew, Malloy didn’t have much family left, and none of that aboard the ship.
“Thinking about someone in particular?”
“No,” Malloy said. “Not really. But I can’t help wondering what it’s like back home.”
The comment struck Torrance.
Ever since the launch, he hadn’t actually been thinking of home at all. He hadn’t thought about his parents or Adrienne or anyone else in the Solar System. His entire existence had been absorbed by the signals from Eden. Who made them? What would those creatures be like?
He glanced at the lift tube indicator and realized then exactly what his conversation with Romanov had actually meant.
He wasn’t to explore the issue.
He wasn’t to look at the data. That data, in fact, wouldn’t exist.
Those questions he had been pondering would have no answers.
Pondering?
No. He had not been pondering these questions. He had been poring over them, obsessing, focusing on them to the exclusion of everything else. This was how he was. Torrance Black did not like story lines with cliff-hangers. He found answers to things. It was why he was good at what he did. He enjoyed the game of bait and chase. The tough work of drilling into details that caused others to lose interest just pushed him harder. Torrance had been so focused on these questions that he hadn’t fully considered the ramifications of Captain Romanov’s orders.
But now he realized that Sunchaser’s arrival was both the fulfillment of a dream and a harbinger of loss. The conflicting ideas left him numb.
He wasn’t looking forward to leaving the Centauri system.
For a moment, Torrance was nearly overcome with the need to tell Malloy about his theory of life on Eden, but he snapped out of that quickly. Malloy was connected to the rest of the crew, and he was a talker. Torrance couldn’t risk what could happen if Malloy spread it.
At best, Romanov would crap all over his rank, and at worst…well, Torrance didn’t want to think about Security Officer Casey. Government officers made him break out. Just the idea of what Casey might do if he found out about the Eden files sent waves of paranoia crawling over his back.
The tube arrived. The door slid open, and they stepped into a compartment with four other people.
“Observation bridge,” they all said as the door slid shut.
They shared sheepish glances. The observation bridge was twenty layers up. The sense of added gravity came as the lift rose with a frictionless grace that made Torrance smile.
Every system on this ship was his.
He liked things to run smoothly.
A woman behind them continued a conversation she had clearly been having before the lift picked up Torrance and Malloy. “Executive President Mubadid can’t keep the combined congresses in line on this asteroid thing,” she said.
“I think she’s on her way out,” the man beside her replied.
“Good riddance.”
“How can you say that? She’s the one who pushed this mission.”
“She’s also the one who gave half the asteroid belt to miners.”
“It’s just a bunch of rocks.”
“The asteroid fields are a natural treasure.”
Torrance cleared his throat to interrupt.
It wasn’t his way to press himself on people outside his command, but he was feeling a different sense of lightness this morning, and the words slipped out almost before he thought them.
“We’ve got a Star Drive spacecraft off our bow, folks,” he said. “What do you say that we not trash the moment, eh?”
The two grew quiet.
Malloy’s lips gave a playful uptick.
This one, Torrance knew, would circulate through the crew before third shift. He felt good about that. Despite the enclosed feel of the liftpod, the muscles along his neck relaxed.
He wasn’t surprised that the two were arguing, though.
Sunchaser brought the crew everything from fresh fruit to new technology—but mostly it brought news from home that wasn’t two and a half years old. So most of the crew was now drunk on information, and—unlike Torrance, who preferred to take time to absorb any situation—they wanted to talk about it.
The most popular bits of news were holo-vids of Sunchaser departing on the first Star Drive flight ever. The clips showed the craft lighting its engines, then streaking out of sight leaving an image behind that was half ghost, half firework rocket. They showed its scientists collecting data from Barnard’s Star on that maiden voyage, then returning to base.
But the news also included stories about everything from a three-year drought that had struck Asian rice fields, to political issues like the use of the asteroid belt and the clamor over the United Government leasing Europa’s mineral rights to DelpCo Energy, which planned to turn Jupiter’s most famous moon’s icy landscape into a transport refueling station.
Torrance was amused to hear the Chicago Cubs had lost the Solar Series after New Zealand’s Karen Lashley hit a grand slam in the top of the eighth to take the seventh game 12-10.
The lift came to a stop, and the door slid open.
Torrance had read Excelsior’s spec sheets. He had seen news clips and video segments, and pored through the program’s technical directives. He had devoured every white paper on multidimensional matter transfer he could find.
But nothing could have prepared him for this.
Sunchaser filled the entire observation panel.
Goosebumps spread over Torrance’s arms, and a shit-eating grin smeared itself all over his face.
She was built in three portions: a sleek central fore-cabin that housed the inner workings of the Star Drive itself, and two smaller pods behind and below it—one housing the crew, the other holding the bridge and operational offices. The entire package looked like a bi-leveled delta wing, and seemed to split vacuum even as it was sitting still.
“It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” Torrance said as he came to the window.
Everguard’s crew filled the observation deck. They stared and pointed, speaking as if they were in a museum.
“We did it, eh, LC?” Malloy elbowed him.
Torrance put his hand on the lieutenant’s shoulder.
“Yeah, Karl. We did it. We really did it.”
A bay door slid back from the middle of Sunchaser’s central cabin, and a voice piped over Everguard’s shipwide intercom.
“Shuttles Azure and Black preparing for rendezvous, Everguard.”
A shuttle nosed from Sunchaser’s bay.
“Roger, Sunchaser. We are prepared to receive visitors.”
A cheer rose.
CHAPTER 9
UGIS Everguard
Ship Local Date: May 16, 2204
Ship Local Time: 2255
In order to be sure Silvio was there, Torrance checked the duty roster before returning to the Signal Processing Lab.
Torrance could hav
e done the file manipulation at any time, but he had something else on his mind now. With the exception of Captain Romanov, Silvio Nivead was the only person on the ship who could suggest Torrance had an interest in life on the second planet. He wanted to find out if maybe Silvio could be made to see the value of keeping that bit of information to himself.
So he arrived at the lab late in the shift.
Silvio was standing at a multidimensional holographic display, studying what appeared to be an interleaved pairing of emissions from the three stars in the system.
“LC, long time no sees.” His grin was big and gap-toothed.
“I couldn’t stay away,” Torrance replied as he took a workstation.
“We have to stop meeting this way, my friend.”
“But then what would I have to look forward to all day?”
Silvio’s laugh was more of a bray.
“What brings you down?” he said. “Taking more orders?”
“Orders?”
“You’re the pizza guy, right?” the cheeky bastard said.
Torrance laughed despite himself.
“Maybe we should call you LC Supreme, eh? Or do you prefer LC Pepperoni?”
“I’m more a sausage and onions guy myself.”
“Lieutenant Commander Sausage and Onions.” Nivead shrugged. “Doesn’t have the same ring.”
“Story of my life.”
Torrance got to work typing commands.
“Abke,” he said to the shipboard computer at the same time. “I need you to retrieve emissions files A-Planet-1 and A-Planet-2 I was previously studying. Also grab all the residual elements and reports I pulled in the early morning of local date May 6 of this year.”
“Time period?”
“Let’s say 0230 to 0530,” he replied.
“Files retrieved.”
He finished keying in commands that would package those files into a sub-block. Then he renamed that sub-block and stashed it in the trash system where he could find it later.
“Please delete all analytics and roll back all source files to previous state.”
“Analytics deleted.”
“Thank you.”
“Which discard protocol would you like, sir?”
“Standard,” Torrance said.
Standard protocol would mean the files would be held in process and shredded with all others at the end of the day as the scheduled maintenance bots fired. It gave him an hour to pull the sub-block, which should be enough time.
“No more pizza?” Silvio said.
“Turns out there’s no delivery in this area code,” he quipped back.
“Sons of a bitches,” Nivead replied. “Isn’t that always the way?”
Torrance got up and went to Silvio’s station, examining the multicolor display. “What are you working on?”
Silvio stared at Torrance, clearly trying to see what the LC had up his sleeve.
“I’m just interested,” Torrance said, hoping he didn’t sound too defensive.
“Not many folks who say that actually mean it, Squanto.”
Torrance peered into the mix that the projector had created as a column of multihued lights.
“Looks like frequency patterns.”
“Good eye, LC.”
He checked the system settings. They were arranged to show Silvio the interplay between the spectral densities of each star’s metallic elements as their orbits progressed. Despite being the largest of the three, Alpha Centauri A was the least metallic at at only two times the the mass of Sol in non-hydrogem or helium compounds. Alpha Centauri B carried nearly two and a half times Sol’s mass, and tiny Proxima was somewhere in the middle.
“Metallicity games?” Torrance said.
“Playing with a theory,” Silvio replied. “We got lots of time for that down here, you know?”
The time scale of the model moved forward, and the patterns shifted.
Torrance wasn’t sure how to take Silvio’s comment.
“What’s the theory?”
Silvio laughed. “A wild-haired idea about where the three came from. Nothing to be too excited about. You know how wild-haired ideas are, right, LC?”
Torrance gave him an inquisitive glance.
“Yes, Silvio,” he said. “I think we both know how wild-haired ideas are.”
“Like pizza delivery in space, right?”
Torrance nodded then, understanding that Silvio Nivead was telling him that his secret was safe as long as Torrance played straight with him, that guys like Nivead had less use for government security officers poking around their stuff than Torrance did himself.
Perhaps he shouldn’t have worried, but Torrance got the idea that under Nivead’s rugged shell there was another factor playing. Silvio was a sharp guy, a guy who knew how things worked but whose career had been stalled from the very beginning by a combination of things outside of his control. By now his reputation was built thick with sarcasm, but Torrance wondered if, at one time, the engineer had greater ideas about how his life would end up—if perhaps he had wild-haired visions of himself doing something bigger than sitting late-shift on Everguard.
He spent another five minutes actually enjoying the process of letting Silvio explain his idea. Then Torrance left the processing lab and returned to his quarters where he most definitely did not use his private access or his systems security privileges to access Everguard’s digital trash system. Nor did he extricate the sub-block that he had earlier renamed, or scrub certain registries to remove record of his actions. And when he wasn’t complete with those tasks, he most certainly did not ever place that sub-block into a set of newly renamed files in his own personal and secure memory space.
When the sub-block was not extracted, and the files were not open, Torrance didn’t then spend the next three hours playing with their contents. And when he was finished with that, he almost certainly did not create a white-noise file from the emissions stream from Eden that he then looped endlessly as he fell asleep.
Anyone who said such a thing had happened was merely partaking in a wild-haired game.
At least, that’s what he would say.
If anyone ever asked.
What is beyond doubt, however, is that Torrance did wake up early the next morning, bleary-eyed but oddly invigorated. And after he showered he cleaned up the data path he might have left, storing away files, running an atomic-level cleanse routine, and closing his private system—locking it under both his personal and his systems keys.
Just to be safe.
CHAPTER 10
UGIS Everguard
Ship Local Date: May 17, 2204
Ship Local Time: 1800
Torrance had never liked parties.
He could handle them well enough, he supposed. He could talk with anyone, and people seemed to laugh at his jokes. But he never really saw the point. Parties were superficial. They took him away from things he would rather be doing—which right now meant figuring out how to dig through the Eden files he had placed into his private memory space. Beyond that, parties left him feeling uncomfortable, like he was lacking in some way.
So, as usual, the celebration was in full swing as he entered the observation deck, a shade later than the norm.
The place looked like a gaudy combination of a high school mixer and a political convention.
Music from a real quartet played in the background.
An upside-down sea of silvered ribbons hung from the ceiling, glimmering blue and purple with lights that were attached to the wall by jaunty arms that made them look like they were robotic eyeballs of some kind of mechanical spider. The ribbons moved with the room’s ventilation, and made the place feel like a postmodern star factory created by a computer that had been programmed to merge the dreams of Pollock and van Gogh.
The crew milled about beneath the field of light, talking and drinking, huddling in cliques that pretended they were not cliques. The jumbled drone of their stories formed a wall of white noise that vibrated in the pit of h
is stomach. The enclosure was thick with the aroma of steamed vegetables and stewing meats, and warm with the heat of bodies. The admiral’s table sat at the head of the room, raised on a platform and draped in white cloth.
Open bars lined the back of the hall.
The observation deck’s screen remained open, so the thrill-inducing presence of Sunchaser alongside the now-archaic Everguard stood in silent testimony that the galaxy, and maybe the universe, was now theirs.
The wormholes were set.
The last seven and a half years of their lives had been a success, and now the crew was celebrating.
Yes, Torrance thought, the party was in full swing.
“Hey! Here he is!” Malloy called.
Torrance felt a slap on his back.
Like Torrance, Malloy wore his dress whites with silver piping. Unlike Torrance, however, his collar was open, the tips turned out and downward. His gloved hands held a box wrapped in white paper with silver ribbon. He turned and motioned to people at a table across the room. Torrance recognized his team.
“Come on!” Mallory’s voice boomed. “I found him.”
His crew gathered around.
“What’s all this about?” Torrance said.
“We’ve got a little something for you, LC.”
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“You’re not getting off that easy,” Malloy replied. He waited until the gang had settled.
“My friends,” he called, “we have come to bury Torrance Black, not to praise him…er…praise him, not to…ah, whatever.”
The gathering laughed, their cheeks flush with champagne.
Malloy spoke again. “In all sincerity, I want to take this time to say that Lieutenant Commander Black has been a fine man to work for during this launch. He kept his head, and he kept us focused. And unlike most the folks who give the orders around here, we all know he can do real work.”
The team cheered at this, and Torrance actually smiled.
“It was his idea to look for outside influences a second time—without which, I should remind everyone, we would probably still be in the command center looking at schematics.”