"I don't mind that, under the circumstances, but is there even room for two of you back there?"
Dieter shook his head, looking serious. "No. It's such close quarters, we'd just be in each other's way. I'll need permission to remove certain classified parts and systems outside the confines of Engineering, though -- even on my own, I won't be able to work around that stuff once I start disconnecting it."
"You'll have it," she assured him. "We'll log and tag everything, and put it under sheets. If Meerschaum wants to complain later, we can at least say we did what we could to secure their patents. Ridiculous crap, I know, but none of us want legal troubles back home, on top of everything else."
This was true enough, and we all nodded grimly, the shared specter of lawyers and lawsuits hovering like vultures.
"So," Chris concluded, after Dieter had closed his conference link, and we were left looking at each other, "we have no idea if Team knows where we are?"
"Comm is almost recalibrated," Stinna called from the Common Room, having apparently been following our conversation to some extent. "It's in the last cycle of the reset."
"After that," John injected (cut her off, more like), "We'll be able to do near-realtime decrypts. We've had the cipher system running code family analyses on the older stuff all this time -- weeks of samples to pull from. I think we have a fast crack in place now."
"How long until it's up?" Chris asked them.
"Fifty-two minutes." "About an hour, maybe," came their simultaneous replies. They glared at each other.
With this, everyone was current, so we broke up the meeting. I grabbed a fakesteak and powdered coffee before retiring to Gunnery. Without sensors in place yet, I was just a blind archer back there, which wasn't a common element in battlefield dominance. Realtime feeds were coming in, but they still looked a mess. They needed calibrations and library linkages for which I neither had direct access to perform, nor the required expertise.
Opticals looked okay, but, on their own, they weren't adequate for attacking at distance. Jaybird (or pieces thereof) wasn't in view anyway, no matter where I looked.
After this, I wasted time trying to spot the fighters that had been scrambled from the testing zone, using long-range telecopics, light-amp filters, and probable-course projections, all without luck.
Others were more fortunate in their endeavors.
"Yes!" John crowed triumphantly after a time, sounding tinny in my speaker-mics. "We have communications! Have at it, folks -- all channels are back up. And decryptions are down to just three seconds!"
Everyone chimed in with thank-yous and good-jobs, and you-guys-are-the-bests, and then hunkered down, looking to see what the locals were saying. For my own part, I dialed in to the Team freqs, and listened for the fighters, still annoyed about missing them with opticals. Though we'd cracked those codes early on, it required effort to put the chatter into context. I listened for a long time, running dialog filters on all the overlaps and cross conversations, and finally got a sense of what had been happening out there, while we'd been sitting here, more-or-less stunned.
"Looks like that big flash put everybody's eyes out," I offered on the open channel. "The fighters had to break off pursuit, and head back to Liquidator using only system maps! They haven't even arrived yet."
"Seems like they've had communications up for some time," Chris put in. "Before us, anyway. I'm getting regular back-and-forths all across the board, but there's a weird Doppler on some of the signals, like they're being relayed."
"The station is acting as a switchboard," Stinna finished. "It got comm repaired right away."
"They would have the people and expertise for a quick reset," Dieter confirmed.
"The monitoring drones throughout the entire star system are offline, too," John put in.
"So we can assume they're no longer tracking us?" asked Mavis, clarifying.
"They can't even track each other," SS1 replied, sounding amused at the thought.
"With our stealth system more-or-less intact," I stated, "and their sensor drones all down, I'd say we're clear of any danger."
That was received well by all, and it felt very good to say.
"I'm putting us into an elliptical solar orbit, ranging from eighty to about a hundred and twenty million kilometers," the captain announced. "A circular one would be best for stealth purposes, but getting there would be a reaction mass bill I don't want to pay."
"You might want to keep the stern in shadow," I offered, and she agreed.
"We've got a good while before we'll be desperate for an atmo recharge," Dieter announced. "Shady Lady was designed for long-term missions. I can have eyes on the actual starjump system in...oh, I don't know. About a week, maybe."
"Would it be faster going at it from the outside?" Mavis inquired.
"Sure, but I'd have to strip off a section of the hull, and still gut several systems along the way. That would reduce our stealth capacity, and create a movement flag out here. I'll do it that way if you want, but it seems risky."
"Too much so," she agreed. "The long way it is. Okay then...get to work, everyone."
We all acknowledged, then Chris immediately called me on a private channel.
"I want to bury the hatchet. Can we do that?"
He looked and sounded conciliatory, but not sheepish. He wasn't the type to let regret dominate his behavior, or to wallow in mistakes, and I doubted that embarrassment was an emotion he was much familiar with either.
"Sure. I know I can be frustrating to work with sometimes. I'm sorry for that."
"Don't be," he conceded. "You were right, and I was wrong. We'd be dead now if you hadn't been doing your job. Your foresight is a big feature of my incident log."
That was a nice thing for him to say, and I relayed my appreciation. But it really wasn't why he called.
"I'd like to put a new project together. You and me -- Mavis too, if she's game. I want to figure out what caused that big flash there at the end. I want to put a considered conclusion into the report. Was it Jaybird's freejump engine failing in a spectacular fashion? I want to know. Do you think we can work on some sims together, covering the final few seconds of the fight?"
The question felt weird, almost forced. He didn't have to ask me. He could have just ordered it, since it was well within mission params -- but maybe that would have undermined the olive branch. (Or maybe I was just unwilling to let go of a good grudge.)
It was an intriguing idea anyway, so I agreed. With half of us more-or-less twiddling our thumbs at the moment, it would be an active contribution to the mission -- one we wouldn't have time to pursue later on. And I was curious, myself. A call to the captain piqued her interest enough that she agreed to sit in on the project when not overseeing the rest of ship repairs.
We couldn't make use of the Tri-D for this, obviously, since John and Stinna had a mountain of labor before them, and needed its comprehensive display functions to manage the sensor re-alignments efficiently. The pop-up holo on my wristcomp definitely wasn't up to this kind of challenge, so we just used personal displays: retinals for me, while Chris wore some expensive-looking vidglasses.
He worked from his bunk with a portable datablock and control deck. I worked from Gunnery, using its dedicated simulation capabilities. I compiled scenario after scenario, which I then piped over to Christmas for his input. Together we started building a sim. Mavis jumped in once or twice, and actually clarified several important points about Shady Lady's position and movement during the fight.
We worked for a solid shift, and produced a rough draft that didn't reveal anything new. It contained only base data, though. Since we were crafting this thing entirely from scratch (something I'd never done before on a simulation this size), there were thousands of fine points that needed inputting by hand. It would be a slog, but at least we had a direction to go in now.
In order to be as productive as possible, considering our limited workforce, Chris and Mavis agreed that, as an entire crew, we
had to pace ourselves. If we had some people working, while others were trying to sleep, it would only cause fatigue-related mistakes later on, and escalate tensions. They declared a shift-and-a-half work day across the board. We were to labor at our individual projects side-by-side, and then stop at the same time, so it could be quiet for everyone.
Mavis didn't seem to actually need any sleep. I noticed her once, though, up in the cockpit a few days later, in what appeared to be deep meditation: unmoving, palms up, blue thumb and index fingers meeting and forming rings. It went on for about an hour.
Chris had a great head for project management. This shouldn't have been too surprising, but with his focus, I avoided all my usual rabbit holes. He managed to push me away from elements that weren't detail-related, and curtail my tendency to chase interesting variables over hill and dale. Staying on task over the course of days can be a struggle when you're switching from an abstract or general analysis of the information landscape, to the mind-numbing job of data entry.
Adjust this field by one-point-eight.
Put that setting into self-referral mode.
Turn the other mode to its fourth option variable.
It was an endeavor filled with fuzzy details and precise calculations all at the same time; and he was right in there, swinging away at the labor, keeping us both on our toes. We managed real progress after a few days, and I was frankly impressed by his diligence. I still didn't agree with a lot of his mission-relevant choices thus far, at least a few of which were responsible for the position we found ourselves in, but in those tedious hours, focused as we were on that sim, I grew to understand Meerschaum's faith in the man's organizational and task leadership skills. I didn't necessarily share that faith (which said more about me than him, perhaps), but I could certainly see why he'd gotten the job.
Between imaging sim layers, and pre-setting scenario sub-routines, we chatted about the project, the mission, and about Meerschaum. We exchanged views on the industry as a whole, and traded droll recruitment tales. In short, we killed time while letting our gestures and keyed inputs and voice commands paint a picture, bit-by-bit, of what exactly happened in the final micro-seconds of the fight. As the Sensor Specialists were able to fit it in, they ran specific searches for obscure data points for us. These, too, got plugged into our sim patterns.
As ordered, Dieter knocked off work when the rest of us did, but he couldn't give details of his progress to anyone but Mavis -- managed, I assume, via private channels. He did, however, report that he was working to schedule, which sounded hopeful. At one point, he had the captain help him shift out some big pieces of machinery that I only got quick glimpses of before they were lashed down in a corner of the airlock, and covered with a fitted tarp. They weren't anything I could identify at a glance -- just crazy assemblages of wires and metallic parts. Although we all knew the rules, Mavis once again re-iterated that this stuff was entirely off-limits.
In the down time, which we'd begun to refer to as the evening, we all sat around the Common Room, eating and talking, before going to sleep.
Dieter turned out to possess a wealth of bad jokes and shaggy dog stories that Stinna always had to have explained to her. John revealed a secret talent for music. He supplied Dieter with a 3D pattern one day, which the Engineer took back to the printer in his restricted little department. A while later, he came out with a random pile of plastic and metal parts, along with some extruded cables of varying thicknesses. No one could make head or tail of it except John, who immediately assembled it all into a cheap little guitar. It was quite ugly, since Engineering only had obnoxious green and pink plastics on hand, but it was solid and could be tuned, and that's all that mattered. I was impressed, anyway.
After this, SS1 spent the evenings crooning out romantic ballads and short funny tunes of a consistent style I was unfamiliar with, in a fine raspy tenor no one had suspected of him. We all enjoyed it to no end (even Stinna clapped along, though usually off-beat). We had no booze or recdrugs aboard, but it got to be like a party every night, and I quickly gained a reputation for concocting the most foul Vaussermin and powdered juice mocktails that anyone aboard had ever tasted. It was a pleasant, convivial sort of existence for a week or so.
Then reality returned with a vengeance.
OOOOOOOOOO
One of the lawyers for UH chimed in.
"Can you tell us how you became Chief of...what was it you said?"
"AdSec Chief will do. I guess it started with the repairs that Shady Lady needed."
"All the way back there?"
"It's a long story."
The people across the table all leaned together in little bunches, muttering and whispering confusedly, and giving me irritated looks. They eventually chose not to pursue that line of inquiry further.
"What evidence led you to conclude there was an enemy surveillance network in place?" Emaross asked instead, sounding perplexed by this point as well. "The prisoner hasn't been interviewed or debriefed yet, due to the nature of his injuries. He's scheduled for extensive therapy and rehabilitation, but we're told he might not turn out...well, as quite the man he used to be."
"I'm still in the middle of Route Management Authority debriefs concerning the mission, and my assigned interviewers all warned me not to go into detail here. Those debriefs count as legal testimony. This meeting does not. I might find myself in trouble if I inadvertantly say something to you folks that's compromising, or in contravention to my interview statements."
The RMA had been asking all the questions you'd expect: when, where, what, who, and why, and most pressingly, who else. My interregators were pros. I was doing my best to cooperate, except where non-disclosure agreements came into play, at which time I would simply state I wasn't legally allowed to answer. They weren't always inclined to let that slide, and would often get right in my face and scream.
They even dropped some veiled threats of physical coersion, though nothing explicit that I could use as a loophole in the discretion contracts. Threats of violence would invalidate those NDA agreements, but that might well have opened up a political can of worms. The interviewers were very careful not to do that accordingly, so I was careful, too.
OOOOOOOOOO
eight
* * *
"You can't give us any more details than that?" I was too frustrated to keep it out of my voice. "I might be able to help, for crying out loud!"
Dieter just shook his head stubbornly, and replied, "You know I can't. The damage to starjump is critical and unfixable. Without replacement parts, we are stuck here."
"What about the rest of the damage?" Chris asked through a sour face that looked like I felt. "Can the other sections be repaired?"
"The other sections are repaired," he said. "There was severe damage to a few things, but I had print schematics for those, and manufactured replacements. Starjump, though, has several key components that are not in the print database. They also contain materials we don't have in raw supply. Mavis has been given the complete report, so if you won't take my word for it, ask her."
"It's true," she confirmed, her unblinking gaze shifting from one to the other of us in the Common Room. She rested them on me a moment longer than the others, probably because I'd gotten loud. "The damage lies in an area of the system that's directly covered by the NDA that both of us signed. We can't tell you anything other than the fact that it's fried. My engineering skills aren't anywhere near where Dieter's, obviously, or even yours, Ejoq, but his report is pretty clear: there's no fixing it."
"And no replacing it, either." Chris stated, repeating their words, and putting a period on any more debate (I had just opened my mouth to argue). "So what are our options?"
This question got nothing but silence, as we all pondered the problem. It went on for a long time, until Stinna spoke up, in her usual blunt fashion.
"We have to turn ourselves in," she said, as if she was speaking about a minor point of detail.
The rest of us looked at her
like her head had just fallen off.
"Well, that's never going to happen!" John laughed.
"They already tried to kill us!" Chris added with a snort, still perplexed by her obtuseness. "They're much more likely to blow us out of space, than accept any surrender."
"It's my idea," she said, staring at us all like we were too stupid to follow. "Come up with one of your own before you make fun of it."
But no one had anything, so the mirth died as fast as it was born.
"Let's look at this as if it were a simple problem," I stated, after a time. "I know it's not, but run with me for a moment: we need to leave. This ship has broken parts, and can't jump. We either find another ship to stow away on, turn ourselves in, or somehow find the parts elsewhere in-system."
"I saw a newsvid once about starjump hobos," Mavis proclaimed, looking revolted. "They have to hide in tiny crawlways and live in their own filth for the duration of the flight. Nope. Not going to happen."
"And starship security in this system will be far better than it would be for some tramp freighter on a remote highdock," John put in. "I doubt we'd even make it."
"Okay," I said with a nod, "so that leaves, um, giving up..." and I frowned at Stinna, who just stared back, "...or we try to get the parts we need. Didn't I see the logged transponder ID for a big parts supply ship in the traffic report last shift?"
"Yeah," John replied, waving for a dropdown, and bringing up the relevant data. It showed an exterior view of a boxy M'lotre Class Large Container Ship, which went by the name of General Store.
"Those guys would have what you need, wouldn't they?"
Dieter just shook his head.
"Not a chance. Our starjump is heavily modified to mute it's graviton expression. They're not working on stealth tech here. Basically, we won't find parts for this drive anywhere other than Meerschaum itself."
Risk Analysis (Draft 04 -- Reading Script) Page 9