Under Shadows

by Jason LaPier

  She nodded once. “Gone.”

  A moment later, Jax and Lealina were rushed back out of the bridge by an unseen force, one that told them they were in the way while a commander was managing a battle. They were ejected from the terrible enclosure of the prisoner transport and onto the cold sand, into the dark night.

  “Door Five!” Lealina shouted over the bursts of gunfire above. She pointed at the hull of the ark.

  They jogged through the sand toward the door a few dozen meters away. A wiry figure in a long black coat was bent before an open panel while another much wider figure looked on.

  “Freezer?” Jax said as they approached.

  The wide one whipped around to point the yawning black barrel of a massive weapon at Jax, whose hands shot up into the air.

  “The fuck is this domie doin’ here?”

  Freezer turned, then stood and put his hand on the gun to encourage the other man to lower it, somewhat unsuccessfully. “It’s okay, Wide-Mouth. This is Psycho Jack. You never heard of Psycho Jack?”

  The weapon lowered as the big man’s face broadened with recognition. “Oh, yeah, Psycho Jack.”

  “Jax,” Lealina whispered. “Why do people keep—”

  “I’ll tell you later,” he whispered back. Then louder, he said, “Did you get the door open?”

  Freezer spun back to the door and slapped the panel shut. The door slid open and he presented it with open hands, like he’d performed some kind of magic trick. The door began to shudder and froze about half-way up.

  His hands went down to his hips. “Well, we can get in at least.” He looked at Jax. “Missed your chance to pop this baby open.”

  Jax decided not to admit that actual hacking wasn’t in his repertoire. He gestured at the door. “Let’s go. We need to find out what’s wrong with the life support.”

  “Wait out here, Wide Mouth,” Freezer said, then scooped up a small brown bag and ducked through the door.

  Jax and Lealina gingerly stepped past the big man. Jax had to get on his hands and knees to get under the half-open portal.

  When he stood back up, Freezer was gesturing in the thin corridor that was dimly lit by red emergency lighting. “I didn’t want him to get stuck,” he whispered, nodding at the door. “Just trying to spare his feelings. He’s self-conscious about his size.”

  “Didn’t you call him ‘Wide Mouth’?” Lealina said.

  Freezer’s head tipped to one side. “That’s his name.” He looked at Jax, then pointed his bag at him. “Where’s your kit?”

  Jax stared at his own empty hands. “Um, I don’t have one.”

  Freezer frowned, then wiped away the expression with a shrug. “Come on, we should start with the control room. Supposed to be at the front.”

  They jogged down the corridor, which ran straight along past a few other hatches. Freezer spoke up as they went. “There wasn’t a code on that door,” he said. “It was locked, but not by a person. The system had it on lockdown. Some kind of safety thing.”

  “How did you get it open?” Jax said.

  “Had to bypass the circuit, make it think the signal was coming through clean.”

  “Control,” Lealina said, and they looked ahead at the labeled door at the end of the passage.

  As they approached, the door slid open with an electric swish.

  Inside the control room were several black monitors mounted to walls full of switches and lights. The room was awash in yellow light, much brighter than the red they’d just come from. There were several mounted chairs at various consoles, and two very startled Earthlings.

  The man and the woman both stood, nearly falling over their own chairs. They stretched almost as tall as Jax, but despite their joint efforts to rise to full height, they both swayed and dipped, grabbing equipment around them to stay upright.

  “Who da hell are you?” the woman said.

  Jax felt stunned for a moment. His mind was trying to process several things at once, thanks to a seed planted by Dava. She’d called the Earthlings “her people”, and that hadn’t registered with Jax. Looking at this man and this woman, whose skin was so dark, he hadn’t seen anything like it since Moses. There had been just a few other black-skinned members of Space Waste when Jax was there; but not many. And if Dava had lost Moses, then that was one less in her life.

  Why this mattered was another thread vying for attention in his mind, and he couldn’t help but remember what it was like to live on Barnard-4. Everyone, literally everyone other than the occasional tourist or exchange student was tall, thin, and had blank white skin, just like he did. It was something he never thought about – never – until he’d left that planet. Until he’d left those domes and was forced to visit other parts of the galaxy, to see the variety of humanity spread throughout it, he hadn’t appreciated what it meant to have a people; even if it was a people he was done with. He never intended to go back to Barnard-4, but it would always be there, there was no doubt about that. Those people would always be there, domes full of people that wouldn’t look at Jax twice.

  Lealina pushed past his stunned state and stepped into the control room. “We’re here to help. My name is Lealina Warpshire. We got a message that said your life support is failing. And we haven’t had any communication since then.”

  The two Earthlings looked at each other, and after a pause, both slumped in relief. “I’m Isella,” the woman said. “Dis is Amar.”

  “Everythin’ is broken,” Amar said with a feeble wave of his hand. Their accents were strange, with letters like “g” and “r” frequently missing from their speech. “Da attack damaged owah life support. We thought it was best to land on the surface, because it already sustains life. But da landin’ was bad for us.”

  “Took out our comms,” Isella said. “Took out a buncha sensahs.”

  “Me and Isella were woken first. But in the attack, the process locked.”

  “So everyone else?” Lealina said, her voice trailing off.

  “Still alive,” Isella said. “But half-woke. And we can’t get them out.”

  “They’re all sealed up,” Amar said. “They got oxygen to them now, but it’s real low. If we don’t get them out …” he said, his voice cracking.

  “Let’s take a look,” Lealina said, reaching back to grab Jax’s hand and tug him toward the Earthlings.

  Isella slumped back into a chair. “Here,” she said, motioning to the chair next to her. “I’ll bring up the messages.”

  “Messages?” Jax said as Lealina shoved him into the chair.

  The screen before him was a mess of cartoonish icons and free-floating squares of scrolling text. Each of these boxes had a title at the top. He took a breath and tried to focus on each.

  LIFE SUPPORT MONITOR

  WARN – Life support alert: pod oxygen supply at 8%

  WARN – Life support alert: pod oxygen supply at 7%

  WARN – Life support alert: pod oxygen supply at 6%

  INTERNAL ENVIRONMENT CONTROL

  INFO – Attempting to vent internal environment to external environment.

  ERROR – External Environment Clearance exception raised: an internal communications error occurred.

  WARN – Exception raised while attempting to unlock vent control.

  INFO – Life support alert re-enqueued.

  INFO – AI subsystem exiting.

  INFO – Life support alert message received from queue.

  INFO – AI subsystem attempting to resolve alert.

  INFO – Attempting to vent internal environment to external environment.

  ERROR – External Environment Clearance exception raised: an internal communications error occurred.

  EXTERNAL ENVIRONMENT SUBSYSTEM

  ERROR – unable to read external sensor F3

  ERROR – unable to read external sensor F4

  ERROR – unable to read external sensor F9

  ERROR – unable to read external sensor S3

  ERROR – unable to read external sensor
A3

  ERROR – unable to read external sensor A6

  ERROR – unable to read external sensor P1

  ERROR – unable to read external sensor P3

  ERROR – unable to read external sensor P8

  ERROR – unable to read external sensor P9

  ERROR – unable to read external sensor T3

  ERROR – unable to read external sensor F3

  ERROR – unable to read external sensor F4

  “What are all these sensors?”

  With a few taps from Isella, another window sprang to life. “They’re listed here,” she said. “It’s pretty much anything related to human safety: gas mixes and levels, temperature, radiation levels, levels of known toxins.”

  “Oh, I get it,” Freezer said from over his shoulder. “F is fore, S is starboard, A is aft, and P is port, T is top.” He cocked his head. “Must be they don’t bother with bottom when you’re going to crash land on that side.”

  “This one,” Jax said, pointing at the box labeled Internal Environment Control. “It’s looping.”

  “Yep,” Freezer said, leaning close enough to make Jax flinch and angle slightly to one side. “It’s a halting problem.”

  “A halting problem,” Jax said slowly.

  “Damn thing keeps trying to correct the alert, but it’s not handling this clearance exception from the other subsystem. That kicks the alert back into the queue and starts the process all over again.” He leaned back. “Can we run this venting thing manually?”

  Lealina leaned into Jax. “Exception?”

  “Programmer lingo for ‘error’,” Jax whispered.

  “We tried that,” Amar said at Freezer’s question. “All we can do is trigger the venting process. We still hit the same clearance exception.”

  “Maybe the sensors are just out of whack,” Lealina said. “Can you reset the system somehow?”

  “Turn the whole thing off and then back on again,” Isella said. “Yeah, we tried that too. Twice.”

  “Three times if you count when it rebooted after the crash landing,” Amar said.

  “Hang on,” Freezer said, once again leaning far over Jax’s shoulder. He stabbed at the box labeled External Environment Subsystem. “Notice a pattern here, Jack?”

  Jax squinted at the box. The errors repeated “unable to read external sensor” over and over, scrolling up the screen whenever a new one appeared, a rate of a few every second. The words blended together and he focused on the identifiers of the sensors. “The threes,” he said finally. “F3, S3, A3, P3, T3.”

  “Radiation,” Isella said. “The threes are for radiation levels.”

  “They have the same sensors on every side of the ship?” Lealina said.

  “Right, of course,” Jax said nodding. “For redundancy. The chances that a crash landing would take out all five are probably pretty low.”

  “The attack took some of them out,” Isella said sourly. Jax glanced to his right and caught her eye. She was biting her tongue; he could see that. She wanted badly to demand who attacked the unarmed ark and why, but she was putting the problem of saving lives before anything else. Her composure was likely one of the reasons she was the first to be awoken.

  Jax looked back at the looping messages in the control system, the “halting problem” as Freezer had called it. “Fucking engineers,” he muttered. He’d seen this kind of thing before. “They had five-way redundancy. This error was never expected to get hit, so they called it an internal error. The system is throwing up its hands and saying, ‘I’m stuck, try again.’”

  “Fuck it,” Freezer said. “We just need to call the venting code directly. This whole process is just a wrapper, doing some validation against the sensor subsystem. We need to bypass that and go straight to the raw function.”

  “How do we do that?” Jax said. Freezer was already over his head and the speed at which he talked made Jax’s lungs feel tight.

  “It’s probably a reserved function,” he said. “We just have to write up a quick module to access it.”

  “You can do that?” Amar said.

  “Sure. You know the programming environment? COMPLEX? Or Qubidense? Or K-LANG? Probably COMPLEX.”

  COMPutational LEXicon was the only of those that Jax knew anything about, since it was the programming language he had to use in his job as a life-support operator back on Barnard-4. It felt like an entire lifetime had passed since then.

  Freezer leaned in to the point where Jax thought he might be making a move to dislodge him from the chair and take over. Jax put a hand up. “Hold up, Freezer. This ship is from Earth,” he said. “Those languages were all invented in the domes.”

  “Shit, you’re right,” he said in a rare moment of slowed-down speech. “No one uses Earth tech anymore.”

  Jax knew the last statement was an excuse, a justification for the sudden ignorance that had crashed down upon Freezer. The kid was a master hacker of all things in the modern galaxy, but had no opportunity – or reason – to learn anything about old-world technology.

  “I just wish I could see the logic behind this sequence,” Freezer said. “There have to be some data ports into this system somewhere. If I could connect my rig, I might be able to get a look at the code. Even if I can’t reverse-compile it, I might be able to get something out of the bytecode.”

  “There is a physical maintenance port,” Amar said. “We have cables.”

  “Good, let’s try it,” Freezer said.

  “Any cable they have isn’t going to fit your kit,” Jax said.

  “I have a signal modulator.” He dug a small black box out of his bag. “I can cut any cable and stick the wires in here and then figure out what level of voltage to use and what kind of signal to send on each wire.”

  He gave Jax a look, as though waiting for his permission. It was a strange moment when Jax realized this cocky young hacker was deferring to his judgement. “Good idea,” Jax said. “Worth a shot, at least.”

  Freezer’s face brightened slightly, and he turned to wave Amir into action. The two of them went off to another part of the cabin to rummage around in storage cabinets.

  Jax went back to the screen in front of him. “Is there a way to see all the sensors in one place?” He didn’t like the partial story they were getting from the log messages.

  “Yeah,” Isella said.

  She reached over him and tapped at the screen, flicking through icons until another box opened. This one showed a simple table, each row representing a sensor, its current state and its recent history represented by a tiny trendline. She scrolled up and down the list.

  Jax noticed one of the columns showed placement, internal versus external. “Can we filter to just see internal?”

  She tapped and applied the filter. “See, all the internal sensors are fine.”

  “Safe on the inside, unknown on the outside,” Lealina said. “It doesn’t surprise me the system is keeping the tubes from opening.”

  “But it’s not safe inside,” Jax said. “The O2 is dropping.”

  “If it goes low enough, I think the stasis process kicks back in,” Isella said. “That will make a little oxygen last a long time.”

  “Better to put them back to sleep than let them go outside and be cooked by radiation,” Lealina said with a nod. She had grown cold and matter-of-fact, and Jax recognized the focus he’d seen in her in past crises. For some reason, her calm made him more anxious.

  Freezer and Amar rushed back to the space just on the other side of the console. They busied themselves with popping panels and connecting up Freezer’s device.

  “If I can get into the bytecode, maybe I can see the logic behind the sequence,” he said, mostly to himself as he tapped at the small interfaces of his rig.

  The statement struck Jax as repetitious, but it was this repetition that made Jax understand a little more. The sequence Freezer was talking about was to initiate the tube opening, to check the sensors, and then to continue the tube opening. If they could so
mehow get the sensor check to pass, or skip it altogether, then all would be okay.

  “I’m in!” Freezer said. His excitement drained away almost immediately. “Ugh, what a mess this code is. I wish I knew what the programmers were thinking. There’s probably all kinds of docs back on Earth.”

  Jax stared at the screen, then turned to Isella. “Help!”

  Her head slid back on her neck. “What’s wrong wichu?”

  “Documentation,” he said. “Help text. A manual. A user guide. Is there anything like that on here?”

  “Oh,” she said. Again she reached over, this time pulling up a box labeled Ark System Guide that displayed a table of contents and a search box.

  Jax took over. He searched for anything to do with the stasis system and the sensor subsystem. There was a lot of basic explanations of these systems and their general maintenance and operation. There wasn’t much in the way of troubleshooting (“try to restart unresponsive subsystems”) or emergency procedures. Then he typed in the exact message from the log: Attempting to vent internal environment to external environment.

  The page that came up was sparse on explanation, but displayed a flow chart. “Look!” Jax said. “If there is an internal sensor with a critical warning, then it skips the external sensor check. That means the unexpected error doesn’t get raised, and it goes straight to opening the tubes.”

  He took a moment to revel in the discovery, but felt weightless as he realized he didn’t know what to do with it. The rest of them hushed with the same feeling of knowing this was important, but unable to capitalize.

  “Radiation,” Lealina said, her quiet voice a gunshot through the stillness. “We need to flip the radiation. If it’s too great inside, then the broken sensors on the outside don’t matter.”

  “Great,” Freezer said. He looked around aimlessly. “So you just need to find a massive source of radiation, and point it at a sensor. They’re probably all over this ship.”

  “The primary thruster core,” Amar said.

  “Jettisoned,” Isella said quickly. “As soon as we entered Barnard space.” She looked around at the hanging faces. “It’s a one-way trip.”