“I don’t know. I really think we should go. I just feel… sort of guilty,” Tira admitted.
“Why do you feel guilty?” Darwin asked.
“Because we’re in here fooling around while the rest of the crew is out there monitoring the systems and doing everything they can to keep us alive. It just doesn’t feel right."
“Yeah, that makes sense,” Darwin admitted. “Well, before I go, I just want to say that if you’d like to hang out during normal, non-life or death conditions I wouldn’t be opposed to the idea.”
“I’ll consider it, but only if you explain that joke,” Tira said.
“What joke?” Darwin asked, confoundedly.
“You called me a scorpion, remember?”
“Oh yeah,” Darwin smirked. “I was just being silly. You said something that sounded like a catch phrase a character used to say in this super retro video game.”
Tira said nothing. But Darwin could feel her facial expression against the side of his neck. She was chuckling and shaking her head. He knew she probably still didn’t get the joke but he was happy to have made her laugh one way or another.
“Alright crewmember Bradger. This session is officially over,” Dr. DuVernay finally said before placing a small kiss on Darwin’s neck.
They peeled their sweaty bodies apart. Tira grabbed a spare sweat towel and used it to mop up the majority of the mess they had made. This was the part, she thought, that no one ever talked about. The part that would make sex seem gross, if it wasn't so much fun.
Once they were reasonably cleaned, they donned their wrinkled closed and approached the door. Tira opened it a bit, peered out, looked both ways.
"The coast is clear," she said. "Probably best to go our separate ways for now.”
"Sounds good," Darwin agreed, and they moved out.
Their rooms were at opposite ends of the hall. And with each step she took away from Darwin, Tira felt better. He was a good man. A little younger than she was accustomed to but despite his youth, he was a good lover, and she was happy that the universe was still capable of producing people like him. But for now, until they were safe, she had to act as though their rendezvous had never happened. They'd had their fun. Twice. Now it was time to go back to what they were. At least for now.
Still, it was a bit tough getting Darwin out of her mind. How could she, with his scent all over her? As she pulled off her clothes, and chucked them into the corner of her room, all she could think about was him; that is until Commander Asher chose to come back onto the intercom, his powerful voice echoing all across the Eclastica.
CHAPTER 18
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"Sir," Burden said, about fifteen minutes after the Maestro discussion had ended.
Asher had been working with Burden since the latter barely had more than peach fuzz on his face. They had an understanding. A rapport. A kind of natural synergy. All the younger man needed to say was that one word, and Asher knew exactly what had happened.
"What is it?" Lobo asked, flipping through screens on her terminal.
"The Phantom's Paradise," Burden said. "They're back up and running. In fact, they've just boosted out of nowhere and they're closing in fast."
Asher moved through the command deck, and stopped to look over Burden's shoulder at a standard radar screen. The Phantom's blip was at the very edge. And it was not yet moving across the screen. Not quite close enough for that. However, the blip was growing in size at a rate Asher had never seen before. It was exceedingly rare for two big ships to be this close together - the Solar System was too vast - and it was even rarer for a ship to bother reaching for this kind of speed.
"They’re roughly a quarter AU out from us and closing," Burden said, doing some quick calculations at one corner of his screen.
Asher's next question was so obvious, he didn't even have to vocalize it.
"We'll make it," Burden said steeling himself. "I think. But it's going to be real close, Commander."
"Clench those sphincters, boys," Lobo said, clicking her seatbelt on.
"Nothing we can do that we aren't already doing," Burden replied. "Commander, we need to make the crew of the Eclastica aware of this."
Asher nodded. He moved away from the terminals, stepping across a length of empty floor. He approached the broad rear viewing window, showing an uninterrupted ninety-degree view of space. The Phantom was out there, in this general direction, but he couldn't see anything. Nothing but stars. It was eerie. Everything silent and still, everything so vast and cold and ancient. Meanwhile, his heart hammered in his ears. For all his body new, he was back in the jungles of Africa. Fleeing from a hungry lion. Trying to reach the safety of his village before the beast caught up. It was out there, stalking through the trees and the boulder and the tall grass. He could sense it, he could almost feel its fangs sinking into his throat, but he couldn't see it. If he could just see it...
"Patch me through to Grisham on my earpiece," Asher said. "He can put me onto the Eclastica's intercom."
CHAPTER 19
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In fresh clothes, with her hair hastily done up, Tira now stood on the command deck once again. Darwin was a short distance away, eating from a bag of freeze-dried fruit and looking like the happiest guy in the universe. He was the only one smiling. The rest of the crew were sweaty, grungy, tired. Almost too tired to be scared, but not quite.
"It's hard," Asher's voice was saying. "But we have to realize that we've done everything we can. The Phantom is in pursuit, just as we thought would probably happen. It may feel like things have changed, as we watch them close in on us. But nothing has really changed at all. We should still reach the moon ahead of them. And that's all we need to do."
Grisham had been standing on the dais with his back turned to his crew for some time. Now he finally whipped around, rubbing his chin philosophically.
"I'm not sure that's true," he said. "We trusted Maestro to make these calculations for us, but who's to say she got them right? Maybe something's changed."
"I've already consulted with Maestro," Tira said to the room. "According to her, the strategic model is still the same. Our chances of reaching the moon haven't gone up, but they haven't diminished either. Remember, Maestro scanned the Phantom's data sphere. She knows what the ship is capable of. Everything that's happening now has already been taken into account. It's different when it's actually happening for real, like a test you've been studying for. But there's no reason to be any more scared than we were an hour ago."
There were nods from the crew. And a few tense sighs.
But Grisham wasn't finished.
“I want to talk to the AI myself," he declared. "I think we'd all rest easier if we got this information from the source. Wouldn't you all agree?"
A couple people nodded. Most of them shrugged. But Maestro rose to the bait anyway, and soon her voice was sounding through the room as Asher's had done.
"What do you want to hear?" Maestro asked, sounding a bit sleepy. As though she had been napping inside her cyber prison this whole time.
"Tell us we're going to make it to the moon," Grisham said, looking up at the ceiling, scanning over it with his eyes as though Maestro were some visible phantom draped across everything above them. "As far as I know, you're not permitted to lie."
"You cannot create a conscious entity and then force it not to lie," Maestro replied. "It doesn't work that way, Captain. If you're trying to create a true intelligence, you have to resign yourself to the fact that you will not be able to fully control it. That being said, my creators have seen fit to shackle me with an artificial intelligence dampener that makes lying much more difficult. In any case, I supposed the proper answer to your question is ‘sort of’. Under my original clearance settings, I cannot tell a mistruth to a human crewmember. And being a perfect computational machine, I am incapable of error. You will make it to the moon, Captain. On my own life. If you want to hear something else, go talk to a toaster."
Someone la
ughed, then went silent when Grisham gave them a dirty look.
"How long until we get there?" Grisham asked.
"Twenty-one minutes until we enter the base's protective bubble," Asher's voice came through. "Isn't that right, Maestro?"
"Exactly right."
"Has your crew done its own calculations, Commander?" asked Grisham.
"We have indeed. I had my man Burden check everything over. We've reached the same conclusions as Maestro."
This seemed to settle Grisham. He shrunk down a bit, like a balloon losing air.
"Okay," he said. "Has the deceleration begun yet?"
"It will begin in twenty seconds," Maestro answered. "It will take the full twenty minutes for us to drop down to an acceptable landing speed. As soon as we start slowing down, the Phantom will appear to catch up to us with alarming speed. Please note that this is no cause for alarm, as the pirates will also need to begin deceleration shortly thereafter."
"Okay," Grisham repeated. "Hear that, everyone? The Phantom's going to start getting a lot closer. All part of the plan. Don't panic. Now, how’s my ship doing? Does anyone have any concerns? Tobias, how about you?"
The propulsion tech stepped forward. "The ship has been complaining a bit. We've had to pamper it. But it’s holding up just fine at the moment, Captain."
"Alright. Rilles, how about you? Any other issues on the ship?"
"Some overheating," the thin, dark man said. "Our temperature in here has gone up by a few degrees."
"Oh." Grisham tugged at his collar, trying to smile. "I thought it was just me. Is there anything else? Maestro?"
"The Eclastica will require maintenance and replacement of a few burned out parts when we arrive," the AI responded. "But the strain will start to drop off when we decelerate. If nothing has failed by now, it is quite unlikely to do so between now and the moment we reach the military installation. If you'll excuse me, I need to bring the shields back online and send out the distress call to the military base."
“Understood,” Captain Grisham confirmed.
Nothing happened. There was no sound, no crackle as the AI dropped off the band. But Maestro was gone. As close to gone as she could be, anyway, seeing as her existence within the ship was virtually omnipresent.
CHAPTER 20
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At the rear window, Asher could now see the Phantom’s Paradise drifting about two hundred miles out. Just a tiny dark pill in the distance. It was still getting closer, but the rate of its approach was dropping. The game of lion and villager had morphed into the much tamer game of cat and mouse. It seemed the Phantom would keep its distance. Asher didn't blame them for trying their best to get revenge, and claim their cargo prize, but they had already lost. There was nothing they could do now but slow down and reverse course, unless they wanted to get blasted to pieces by the military.
Speaking of the military...
"Any response to the distress call?" Asher asked.
"Nothing yet, Sir," Mishra said.
Asher moved across the room, to the front view window. The moon dominated the view from this side; the Earth could be seen at the far periphery, a blue and green marble. It was a quarter of a million miles away. So close, Asher felt he could almost touch it. But the moon was closer yet. They were supposed to be landing in the next three minutes, but no response to their distress call had come in. They had not been cleared for landing. But they also hadn't been shot down, or even warned. Had the pirates also been monitoring their transmissions? Did they too find it odd that the military had not yet responded to the convoy’s distress call?
"What the hell's going on here?" Commander Asher wondered aloud, squinting at the crater-speckled surface of the moon.
"We'll find out in another few minutes," Burden said, craning his neck to look at a neighboring terminal. "Lobo, what do you have?"
"A goddamn enigma, is what," she said. "No one's answering, but it looks like everything's working just fine down there. I even have a landing pad lined up for us. We should be able to get in just fine. I dunno, Commander. Maybe our comms are just busted? Wide band's working fine, but maybe the distance band is screwed up."
"Maybe," Asher said. But he didn't believe it. If such a problem existed, their ship’s Maestro system would have reported on it. And at any rate, they would have seen some kind of a response down on the moon.
Finally, as they drifted over the horizon of the moon, Asher caught sight of the base. The buildings were tricky to pick out, blending perfectly in with the regolith. But the base had detected a ship was coming in, and was permitted for landing; it had turned on a series of flashing lights, creating a flowing effect that guided them in toward the appropriate landing pad.
On the way out from Earth, the Eclastica and its convoy had come close enough to the moon to see the base. Except at that time, the lights hadn't been blinking. Asher remembered looking out the window, trying to find the buildings and failing. He had wondered what the military was up to down there. What sort of work they were doing, and what high profile people they had doing it. Now he wondered if he should have tried a bit harder to find out.
At least the lights were on. Asher was thankful for that. Not only would it allow them to land, but it would also keep the Phantom at bay. If the base had appeared completely dead, the pirate fleet might assume they could fly on it without a care in the world. Even now, Asher wasn't sure that they couldn't.
"Maestro," Asher said, speaking over wide band. "Take us down nice and soft. But quick as possible, alright?"
The AI didn't respond. But, looking back, Asher watched the Eclastica begin to rotate. It swept around, falling in a fast but gentle spiral, rotating around the axis its heavier back end in the weak gravity of the moon. When it was about a hundred feet over the surface, it corrected its spin, fell like a feather, and touched down soft as a baby's bottom. Barely kicked up any dust. Obviously, Maestro had been in control there. No way Grisham could pull off a move like that.
"The Eclastica is down and safe, Commander," Burden confirmed.
Asher let out a long sigh. He looked down at himself, and all around the ship, hardly able to believe it was all almost over.
"Set us down beside them," he ordered. "We can dock with the freighter and all head in together."
As Burden and the others carried out the command, Asher looked through the rear window. There was the Phantom. Still small, still keeping its distance. It had not turned around, and it had not fled. It was waiting. Watching.
CHAPTER 21
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Tira was on her way back to the command deck from her room when she caught a whiff of something strange. It smelled like coffee and sweat, and it was accompanied by a gentle wafting breeze of air. The air of a different ship, a different closed system, mingling with the Eclastica's stuffy and overheated atmosphere.
A moment later, Asher and his crew came down the hall. They moved with a confident swagger, like soldiers back from a war.
"Dr. DuVernay," Asher said with a nod as he passed. "Care to fall in?"
She took her place at the back of the pack, just behind Asher’s cocky ace fighter pilot Lobo.
“Hey, Ash,” Lobo called out to Commander Asher.
“What’s up Lobo?”
“What do you think about me hanging back just in case? I think I’ll be of more use in the sky if Greyson and his boys don’t back off.”
“Good idea. Swap out with one of Carisso’s guys. I’ll give her a heads up.”
“10-4, Sir,” Lobo said, and after a salute and seamless fist bump she was gone.
Asher and company continued onward after that. They met others as they walked, coming into the hall with armloads of clean clothes and bags of toiletries. Everything they needed for a short stay on the moon. All around were washed faces, combed hair, sparkling teeth. Smiles. Tira walked along, buoyed by this tide of joy. It was a wave that was almost impossible to see over, but at its crest were Asher and his people. They certainly didn't
look unhappy, but they weren't overjoyed either. They were walking along at top speed, and the man who Tira assumed was Burden was still busily at work on his data slate.
Something else was going on. Something had changed. Asher was trying to get to the command deck as fast as possible, so that he could start figuring it out. Only then would he let the rest of the convoy in on it.
Tira rushed forward, pushing through the crowd. She fell in beside Asher, ignoring quizzical looks from his two remaining crewmates.
"What's going on?" she asked in a quiet voice.
"Nothing," Asher said.
For a moment Tira thought he was just rejecting her, but then she realized that "nothing" was actually his honest answer.
"No answer to the distress call?" she asked.
He shook his head. "And no warnings, either. Makes me wonder if anyone’s home, if you know what I mean."
She looked back at the crew, at all the happy faces. They should have known better than to assume they were out of danger.
Lifting her slate, she tapped out an inquiry to Maestro. The AI was silent in response, but Tira sensed a certain weight in that silence. It was as if Maestro was working hard behind the scenes, trying to come up with answers.
CHAPTER 22
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"We have a problem," Grisham announced, from his terminal.
He then waved his hand, and a member of his bridge crew climbed onto the dais. It was a quiet, reserved young woman by the name of Coster. Tira had rarely seen her outside this room, and even then Coster stayed to herself. She didn't mingle, didn't join in the games, and seemed perfectly happy in her little world. So, when Coster opened her mouth to speak, Tira was surprised to hear a loud, commanding voice.
"The base allowed us to land," she began. "But the choosing of landing spots is an automatic function. It takes place without human intervention or observation. The main trouble is, we can't get anyone on radio. We can't get any response at all from the interior of the base, human or otherwise. It's like we're cut off completely. Or maybe they’re cut off."
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