Dr. DuVernay stared so firmly at the Captain that he was forced to look away.
"Right," he said. "She's absolutely right.”
"Very well," said Asher with a curt nod. “Now, if the two of you don't mind, I'd like to address your crew as a whole."
Captain Grisham nodded, letting out a deep breath he'd been holding. "Of course. Let me switch our meeting onto the intercoms."
Asher shook his head. "I’d prefer that you bring them in."
Grisham nodded again. A summons went out across the ship, ordering all crew members to the command deck. Some of them took longer to arrive than others. Everett was stumbling drunk, mumbling something about enjoying his last few hours of life. And the mechanic, Darwin Bradger, was in his bedclothes and rubbing his eyes furiously. Tira wondered how he possibly could have fallen asleep while all this was going on.
Up on the dais, Asher moved in close to Grisham and reached out as though to grip his arm, although all that happened was that Asher's hand fuzzed and warped a bit.
"Did you want to say anything before I started?" the Commander asked.
In response, Grisham took a step back and gestured forward. He was still annoyed, still feeling doubtful, and he was at least competent enough to know that Asher would give a much better pep talk.
The Commander moved to the edge of the dais, looking out over the assembled crew. The bridge crew had moved down among them. Darwin was coming awake, with the help of a cup of coffee that was every bit as dark and sludgy as the grease under his fingernails. Even Everett was sobering a bit, watching the Commander rather than trying to stare down the shirts of the nearby female crewmembers as he would normally be doing this time of day.
"You all know what we've gotten into," Asher said. "But if anyone has any questions, I'll answer them. Whatever you want to know."
Everett's hand shot up. Asher was aware of the man and his reputation, so he was slightly hesitant in pointing to him.
"Are we gonna die?" Everett asked, reaching up to muffle a burp.
Asher's face twitched slightly toward an expression of sadness, but quickly snapped back to the usual stoicism.
"We've lost eight good people already," he said. "They gave their lives in lieu of ours. The chances that we'll lose anyone else are quite slim. I won't lie and say that we're guaranteed to survive though. There's still a small chance that the Phantom's Paradise will run us down but I’m cautiously optimistic at this time. Does that answer your question?"
Everett shrugged, moving back through the crowd. Everyone parted to let him through. For a moment Tira thought he was going to try and leave the command deck, but instead he sagged into a random seat and let his head sag back.
"Any other questions?" Asher asked.
One of the evening crew, a stout woman named Harlsen, came forward.
"Are we going home?" she asked.
Asher shook his head. "No. Our planning and analysis dictated that making a run for Earth would give the Phantom too much time to catch up to us. We'll be heading for the moon, where a military base will be able to give us support. It's the best option. Right now our first priority is survival. Once we're safe, we can start figuring out where to go from there."
Next, a tall, dark fellow called Rilles came forward.
"Will we be getting paid extra?" he asked. "Hazard pay or a bonus or something?"
"That's not up to me," Asher replied, looking slightly annoyed. "I know us escorts won't, because hazard is in our job description. As for all of you... that's another thing that will have to be figured out once we're back in safe territory. Anything else?"
"Yeah," Darwin said. "What the hell are we doing? Specifically, I mean. It kind of seems like we’re just spit balling here to be honest.”
Asher nodded. "That's why your captain asked you all here. We want to be as transparent as possible and make sure you’re all up to speed. With some losses of our own, we were able to temporarily disable the Phantom, giving us just enough time to make it to the moon. Theoretically speaking..."
That caused a storm among a few of the crewmembers. The most vocal among them was Tobias, the strange propulsion tech, who quickly stormed to the front of the group.
"Theoretically?" he spat. "You mean you don't know?"
Asher shook his head. "As I said in response to Mr. Everett's question, our survival is a high probability rather than a guarantee."
"But theoretical is a funny word to use," Tobias continued. "Does it mean you've been consulting with Maestro?"
Another storm briefly raged, as the rest of the crew grew privy. The only ones who didn't seem to care were Everett, still seemingly unconscious, and Darwin, who just sipped his coffee and stared blankly into space.
"Calm down, you're wasting your outrage," Asher said, raising his voice just enough to surprise them into silence. "Yes, Maestro did act as the calculating power behind these strategies. But it was the human crew who carried them out. And before you go getting your britches in a wad about the Maestro system just know that we’d all be dead without her. I know putting our lives in the hands of an AI system isn’t exactly standard protocol but it’s our best chance for survival."
Tobias and Rilles shared a look, shook their heads, and faded back into the crowd.
"You can harp on about Maestro all you want," Asher belted across the room. "But the proof is in the pudding. If not for her suggestions, we'd all be dead right now. At the very least, you would have lost your cargo. Along with your next paycheck. It's easy to fear the unknown, especially in these circumstances, but so far I'd say Maestro has been a treasured member of our crew."
"It was her idea to make a run for it?" Harlsen asked.
"Yes, it was. Along with the hit my Ace landed on the Phantom,” Asher explained. Asher fought back a smile as Lobo, who was standing across from him, busted out a few more celebratory air humps.
"What's the plan. What do we do from here?" Darwin inquired, coming out of his sleepy trance. "What can we do to help?"
"Man your stations," Asher told him. "Do what you have to do to keep yourselves sharp. Sleep if you must. For now, we can pretty much continue on as usual. As hard as that may sound right now. We're on full burn, no shields or anything. Top acceleration toward the moon. We're close enough to it that we won't even have time to reach top theoretical speed. Should take about four hours to get there, maybe four and a half by the time we land. When we get close enough, we'll start to decelerate a bit. And then we'll send out a distress call. If we don't, the military may react unfavorably. As in, they may shoot us out of the sky."
"That makes me feel better," someone sarcastically called out from the crowd.
"What do you want from me, a lollipop?" Asher snapped. "If we do get shot, they'll just be doing their jobs. It is far from protocol to come into their space as hot as we'll be coming, believe me. We can send a radio packet ahead, but right now we're going so fast that we'd beat it to them. We just need to do our jobs and try not to worry about the rest. In many ways, our fate is not in our own hands. Good news is that the pirates will also have to contend with the military. I’m hoping they'll realize the danger and turn around. Right now we’ll have to play it by ear."
There was a collective sound as everyone let out a sigh. And then there was heavy silence, laying oppressively over the command deck.
"One last thing," Asher finally said. "The Eclastica was never meant to maintain its top acceleration for this long. The ship’s systems will be strained. Things may start to go wrong. Which is why you all have to stay sharp. Take care of yourselves, and by God don't let your ship fail. We're almost there. That's all for now."
CHAPTER 15
◆◆◆
Four and a half hours. It seemed like forever to Tira. It seemed like a time frame she would never make it through. Already she seemed to feel the flow of time thickening and decelerating around her until it became as interminably slow as amber, holding her inside itself for eternity.
Asher asked
her to keep an eye on Grisham for a little while. So that was what she did at first, finding excuses and reasons to stick around. She worked under the pretense that, as the psych officer, she needed to be available in case any of the strained bridge crew needed to talk with her. But all the while she was watching Grisham from the corner of her eye.
For the most part, he just sat at his terminal and did what he probably did most days. Watching ship functions for a minute or two, then switching through various camera feeds in various rooms to make sure no one was slacking off or in need of assistance. Every now and then, he would ask one of his bridge crew members a question. Or one of them would ask him something, and he'd come up with an answer.
In between these activities, he would pull up audio logs and listen through his earpiece with a look of intense concentration on his face. The names of the logs were just scrambled letters and numbers, nothing to hint at what they were.
Tira was curious. She wanted to know what he was listening to, for no greater reason than that Grisham was something of an enigma. Then she realized that figuring out what those audio logs were could be seen as part of her job duties as it relates to monitoring the mental and physical stability of the Captain. So, she typed out a request to Maestro to see if her oldest friend could help her.
"I have access to unencrypted audio log stored within the Eclastica's hardware," Maestro discretely responded. "Including a few that Grisham did not bother to encrypt. I could let you listen to some of those."
Tira asked if there was any way for her to hear exactly what was coming through Grisham's earpiece.
"I don't have the clearance to do that," the AI replied.
"You do now," Tira said quietly.
After reciting a few more random words, she was able to clear the request. In a moment, she heard the hijacked signal from Grisham's earpiece.
It was some woman's voice. By the sound of it, she was probably in her late thirties. A few years older than Grisham himself.
"...for the long journey," she was saying. "We've already done just about everything, so I thought this time I could just tell the story of the first time we met..." She paused, laughing, and there was a sound of crinkling plastic or paper. Perhaps she was looking at photos. "It was a rainy day in April. I ducked into a cafe, and I saw this miserable bastard sitting alone in the corner, looking like his world had just ended. That was a hard day for you. Your father had just died and..."
Feeling suddenly ashamed, Tira said, "That's enough."
The feed cut off. Tira lifted her data slate and navigated through its screens until she found Captain Grisham's file. The man never came to her with any complaints or questions at all, probably because he thought any sign of weakness would earn him a demotion, so Tira rarely had a cause to read over his information.
He wasn't married, but he had apparently been engaged in a four-year relationship with a woman whose age matched up to the voice on the audio log. Before that, there was nothing about any relationship at all. The file was unbiased and didn't use any colorful language, but it seemed to paint a picture of a man who had been quite lonely, perhaps even quite unhappy. A woman had finally entered his life, perhaps giving him the strength to finally strive toward his goal of becoming a captain. It also helped, of course, that Grisham's uncle worked for the company and had quite a bit of sway.
Tira looked at Grisham again, in a slightly new light. She saw him, for the first time she realized, as a human. She understood him, why he was so afraid, why he guarded himself so thoroughly. These revelations didn't make her like the man a whole lot more. But they did make her feel sorry for him.
Aside from a few pivotal outbursts, the Captain was seemingly holding it all together. Much more so than Tira would have guessed in the beginning. Still, she knew she would have to continue to monitor him.
The doctor wanted to hope for the best, as things were going according to plan at the moment but there was a certain disquiet within her, a sense of unease, that things weren't quite right and that they were far from being out of danger. Logically, she knew that it was probably just an after effect of fear. A bit of shock that she wouldn't be able to get over until all this was behind her. Yet all that logic didn't make the feeling go away.
Grisham was fine for now, at any rate. It was time to stop waiting around on the command deck. She turned and went into the hall, walking slowly toward her office.
She took a deep breath and let it out. By now, she thought an hour must have passed. She looked at the time and realized it had only been twenty minutes. How was she ever going to make it through this?
Suddenly, though, she got very busy.
There were several people waiting outside her office, including Tobias. She let them in and sat down somewhat reluctantly to take their complaints, fearing that she would have to continue to defend the bridge crew's usage of Maestro.
"What seems to be the problem?" she asked.
"I'm afraid," Tobias acknowledged.
The others nodded, mumbling their agreement.
"Afraid of what?" Tira asked.
It was a simple question. Seemingly easy to answer. Tobias opened his mouth quickly, ready to reply, but suddenly froze. It took several seconds for him to form the words.
"Afraid that things will change," he said.
Tira nodded. "Things already have changed. We're no longer acting along ordinary lines. This is a desperate and unique experience, and by necessity we've had to alter our methods and the way we interact with one another. I think that might be what you're really dreading, the idea that your life is no longer normal and predictable. You're not afraid of death, not at this moment anyway. You're afraid that more chaotic things will continue to happen, that we will continue to spiral into the unknown. Do you think that's true, Tobias? Is that what you're really afraid of?"
He thought for another moment, and nodded without a word.
"I'm afraid too," Tira said. "So is the Captain, and so is Asher. Even Maestro is probably afraid, in her own way. She’s no different from us in a lot of ways. Her AI was designed to mimic the thought patterns and emotional responses of a human as closely as possible. Did you know that?"
They all shook their heads, staring at her like small children listening as their teacher read them a story.
"Maestro is fundamentally the same as a human in the way her mind works," Dr. DuVernay said. "Her faculties may be maximized in every way but that doesn’t make her intrinsically different from us. Some people are savants; they can remember everything that's ever happened to them, and on which day. Other people can make staggering calculations inside their heads nearly as fast as a computer. Others can learn entire languages in just a few days. The only difference between those people and Maestro is that their minds are organic and hers is digital. To put things into better perspective, I’ll ask you a question, Tobias. If some big brained science officer had created the plan for our current course of actions would you feel the same way that you feel now?”
“No,” Tobias admitted after a moment of thought.
“And why is that?” Dr. DuVernay asked.
“The science officer would be human. I’d expect them to have our best interest in mind,” Tobias answered.
“And therein lies the problem,” Dr. DuVernay pointed out. “You have to understand that Maestro’s mind is also, on a fundamental level, human. Everything that she is capable of can be done by humans. Incredibly smart humans, but humans nonetheless. It’s true that her mind and intellect were created rather than naturally born but you can’t forget the fact that she was created by us, and her mind was modeled after the human mind. It’s not like she’s an alien or some nefarious entity that was created by some non-human lifeform. Just like us, she wants to keep living. It's absolutely in her best interest to bring this ship safely to the moon, and that is what she's trying to do. She's part of the crew, and her goals are the same as ours."
Everyone was nodding. Even Tobias. To Dr. DuVernay’s delight she could
tell that her calming words had seemingly melted their frenzy away. At least for now, their initial sense of panic when they learned their lives had been moved into the hands of an AI was gone.
She talked with Tobias and his fellows for a little while longer, switching from philosophical discussion to simpler things. They spoke of home, told the stories of their lives in condensed form. They talked about what they missed most, about their favorite foods, about all the things they still had left on their bucket lists. By the end of it, each of them had almost forgotten the mess they were in. And then an alarm came in on Tobias's slate; apparently there was a problem in the propulsion hold.
"Isn't there anyone else down there?" Tira asked.
Tobias nodded. "Yeah, but it's all hands on deck when something like this goes wrong. Propulsion is pretty important, especially now." He got up and left, his smile fading to a strained grimace.
The others filtered out soon thereafter, their quiet time done. Tira was sad it was over, partially because it had been such a good killer of time. But she felt a lot better now. She felt like herself, like a woman with a life and a future beyond the events she was currently experiencing.
She moved to her terminal and made sure to save the recording of this conversation. It contained a lot of useful psychological information. Not just about Tobias and the others, but about herself as well.
While the recording was saving, and being analyzed by one of Maestro's passive algorithms, Tira kicked back and shut her eyes. She put her feet up on her desk, and realized that this was the first time she had actually relaxed since going to bed last night. It felt entirely too good, and she felt herself slipping into a muddy dream world. Drool gathered at the corner of her mouth. She felt it, cooling and wet, but she didn't care. The edge of the desk dug uncomfortably into the backs of her ankles, but she didn't care about that either. Her eyelids were too heavy and her limbs were buzzing with a lovely sort of warmth.
Darkside Dreams - The Complete First Series Page 14