"If I get those numbers wrong," he'd explained, when we met up outside the closet, "the new parts might be unstable. Despite the term, there's a drift factor to jump equipment locked in a steady-state. If we'd gotten the parts in a timely fashion, it wouldn't have mattered, but those variables might have changed by now. I could have Mavis get them, maybe, but I want to be sure it's right."
So I acted as lookout, just like usual, and his exit from the station went smoothly.
After that, I decided to take a walk through the companionways, keeping my comments generalized and generic so that hypothetical eavesdroppers would be unimpressed. It gave him time to get up there and settled. I stopped off at a little coffee kiosk at the corner of Centerline Avenue and a small alleyway. It was the one whose ads I seen before coming aboard. It had a real human behind the counter -- something of a rarity in the modern coffee world. I got a double-shot espresso, and it was very good. I made a mental note to hit the place again on my way to work, and grab joes and pastries for the group. That always won points.
"How are things in Maintenance?" I put to the engineer, this being the first chance we'd had to chit-chat. Dieter, like the others, now hovered in my eye-view as a disembodied head, the blurry background behind him implying he was sitting in Engineering. He nodded easily, looking half out of it, like always.
"It's boring work, but everyone's nice. My supervisor is a real hoot. Keeps me laughing all day."
"And the rest of you guys are holding up?" I put to them.
"We heard that mystery signal again," John put in, bringing up a waveform that I was apparently supposed to recognize by sight, and pointedly not answering my question. "You remember the one that was auto-logged during our trip in? I can now state for certain that it originates on the station. I wasn't expecting it, so I didn't get a closer fix. Maybe next time, though. It's kind of cool because it's not a cipher I've seen before. I don't even recognize the code family."
"It's Papal, I told you," Stinna injected, sounding irritated. (Or not.)
"And I told you there isn't anything close to it in the database."
"Well, I saw something like it once before. And it was from Churchspace."
"Yeah," John replied, side-stepping the argument, and looking back to me with a certain measure of misery. "It's just one big party up here."
"Cabin fever," Chris affirmed.
"Mavis?" I asked, looking at her, because she had frowned then.
"I just want to get out of this star system. Dieter, how's it looking?"
He shook his head.
"Until it starts getting regular supply runs again -- and specifically iridium raws -- General Store won't be able to refabricate those propagators for us. We're in the queue, but nothing is being processed. I have the updated information now, and I'll amend my order, but if we're really stuck here, I'll keep having to do it again and again."
That was sobering, and depressing.
"Picking them up once they are ready will require some thought, too" he continued. "I had to replace an air circulator over by the entrance tube to the ship yesterday. They finally have that automated security in place, but StaSec hasn't pulled back the uniformed officers. It's tight as a drum. Oh! And word is that a new security assessment might be on the way -- possibly Alpha Grade, which will cover the entire station."
Chris looked surprised at that, as did the rest of us.
"You're just full of good news today! We haven't read anything about that from intercepted communications."
"Well, nobody's said anything overt, but we were told to have all access codes, pass keys, and entrance logs, for every system under our care, ready for review. I think it's meant to be a surprise inspection when it comes."
"Does that mean trouble for you, Ejoq?" our ML asked.
"No, it shouldn't. Brand will handle them."
"Brand?"
"Our Admin Coordinator. He's keen on results, and has enough pull, I think, to keep the hounds at bay."
"Anything to report about that? The investigation?"
"Well, I like the lab equipment," I replied evasively, because I knew what he really meant.
"Don't be cute. C'mon."
"Nope. Don't ask. Nothing's changed."
"Nothing...? What do mean, nothing's changed?!" Our ML looked a lot like he always did whenever he got mad at me. The mere fact that it was familiar made it no less upsetting.
"I'm bored, too," Stinna commented then, in reference to...I don't know what.
"The only reason I'm out here is to help with our little problem, if I can," I countered, keeping my voice light, and smiling at some lady passing by who I had seen at the pub once or twice but hadn't actually met. "I'm not here to do anything else. Sorry."
"I can't believe this! Captain, do you believe this?! It's the chance of a lifetime! It's a career-maker for all of us, and he refuses to take it!"
"That's his right," she pronounced, though her tone seemed to indicate she'd take a different tack, herself, if in my shoes. "He's working without a cover identity, remember. When all this is done, he'll have to live with the consequences."
"Thank you," I injected, but Chris just cursed and broke his connection. He must have immediately started stalking around the table, because he suddenly thrust his face into Stinna's pickup.
"This isn't just about you, Ejoq! It affects us all!"
"Hey!" Stinna complained, and pushed him away.
I looked at the captain, and tried to smile. I even laughed nervously a bit. "I don't mean to cause problems."
"You never do," she replied, still frowning. "You're not going native, are you? Should I be worried?"
I dropped my attempt at mirth then, and looked her in the (virtual, mechanical) eye.
"No. You should not."
I held her gaze for a long moment, giving it a serious amount of my focus as I walked -- so much so that I almost bumped into a couple in front of me. Mavis was returning the look with at least as much attention, until finally nodding.
"What I do want, though," I stated, deliberately breaking the unpleasant spell, and glancing over at the engineer's face, "is to find some way to openly meet with Dieter here on-station. If we strike up a public friendship, we can get together later on, if or when we need to, without rousing suspicion."
That was an idea everyone still on the chat seemed to like, but his schedule was not the same as mine, and the Maintenance post he worked out of was on the other side of the station, from both my quarters and my job. He stated that he would be coming back aboard right away, just as soon as he had submitted the updated information, so I turned a corner and headed back toward the closet.
We kept talking, and, after a silly amount of schedule haggling, he finally agreed to pop into Samples to grab a bite to eat before his next work shift, later in the day. That would be after work for me. I wanted Barney and his gang to meet him, too, so that everyone knew everyone, and no one would find it odd to ever see us together.
"Well, that's it then," the captain concluded. "Time to step this up. We're on the losing side of the waiting game, people: we need to get out of here...before we never do."
||||||||||
He was still shouting, fighting with me and with the wires, fully panicked, blood floating from both ears. His face, sitting above his face, reacted as if it were still attached. Stupidly, I yelled for him to shut up and shut it all down, but he didn't hear me, or couldn't.
I grasped his arm.
He tried to shake me off, but he was webbed by data cables, and was taking care not to dislodge any more of them. Some of these ran to his head, while several led to gadgets he wore on his flight suit. A few lines even ran inside his clothes, to ports in his torso.
He swung at me again, but the explosive decompression, the loss of the left temple cable, or just the shock of being boarded in mid-jump had seemingly thrown off his hand-eye coordination. He missed me entirely again and again, though I was floating right next to him, and his fingers were curled in
a strange way. After a bit, he gave up his attack, and reached to plug the errant cable back in, but he couldn't grasp the wires.
"...tttop...!" he slurred, his physical issue apparently extending to his tongue. I tried to hold him still, and was shouting the whole time that he had to calm down. He reached for something in a thigh pocket, fumbling at the fastener. In turn, I grabbed the other dataline connected to his missing face, and yanked it out. He bellowed once, a quick, hooting grunt, then just stopped fighting.
On the panel in front, red lights flashed on.
WARNING -- COORDINATE CALCULATIONS INCOMPLETE
WARNING -- NAVIGATION MISALIGNMENT IN PROGRESS
WARNING -- COMPENSATING
Over and over it flashed.
There was an alarm buzzer to accompany this that didn't stop until I located a physical toggle for it among the mess of display panels, dials, switches, and sliders.
He sat there in a full-body spasm, as if trapped in an arctic chill. His lidless eyes, set deep within that gray, featureless space, were like billiard balls, all round and shiny -- yet he seemed see nothing.
I spoke his name and shook a shoulder. I waved a gloved hand in front of his faceless face.
He only shivered.
||||||||||
fifteen
* * *
It was finally clear that we in SpecSign had reached an impasse.
We'd yet to deconstruct the actual battle, because the group as a whole had no idea what I, as an individual (specifically, the individual responsible for half the battle), knew about what, exactly, was used against Jaybird. An inspection of the prototype's wreckage would have been illuminating in this regard, but that part was going slowly. The largest hull fragments had been tossed into multiple, fast, opposing, and highly oblique solar orbits by the explosion. Recovery of any pieces would be a very involved job. Until that happened, it would be entirely too uncanny for me to guess the exact systems involved. I couldn't do more than allude to a range of possible weapon types, which was not at all satisfactory to VP Bailey.
As dictated by her, our ultimate purpose was to either eliminate or confirm the administrative and/or pilot errors that led to the confrontation. We were to also look for any overt signs of technical problems with the experimental hardware that might have contributed to the event. The urgency of her insistence was growing as the facts in our daily reports waned.
Questions about the weaponry aside, there were yet other roadblocks. The decision to attack the Intruder (as it had come to be called) with a prototype vessel began to bother everyone else as much as it had been bothering me. To put it simply: we didn't know what the managers on duty at the time of the incident had been trying to achieve, nor what the pilots thought they were doing. Live feeds from inside the test ship, covering the lead-up to the confrontation, as well as the fight itself, were nowhere to be found in the data packages we were given. We weren't even getting any reports from R&D, regarding the state of the hardware at the time in question.
The fact that someone had believed it was a good idea for a test vessel to engage a completely unknown element like the Intruder was a colossal failure in logical thinking. If it appeared that the order came from Mylag Vernier administrators, then a station management purge would almost certainly follow (and it was probably going to happen anyway, as soon as Team took the reigns). If it came from the pilots themselves, then a shake-up of R&D would happen, since the test personnel were considered assets of that department (and, again, that was possibly the plan, either way). And if was the fault of Special System Control, a lawsuit of epic proportions was in the offing.
Digging through transmission logs and submitted reports from observing engineers and emergency response vessels in position at the time showed no new information -- though they did serve to highlight some very significant information gaps in the official reports. Our group had authority to dig into this, but station Admin and R&D had both gone into tight-lip mode. It was seriously frustrating, as even VP Bailey was hitting brick wall after brick wall at her level of clearance.
Senior management, back on Interstar Station, might have been able to break through all this stalling, but we would have been kissing our own jobs goodbye if we admitted that we couldn't do them.
Why did they risk an attack with the single most valuable vessel in space -- the one ship they absolutely could not afford to lose? This was the one part of the incident that had never made sense.
Getting comprehensive information out of the sensor swarm (especially regarding the critical areas of gravity channeling and cone formation) required a level of logistical orchestration that was simply beyond anything R&D could put into play, or Orbital Control. Not even Team was set up for such a thing -- Liquidator had been a mere observer, after all. The specific capabilities of the freejump design demanded a whole new approach to the problem, and, by its very nature, it covered a truly massive area of the star system.
Special System Control (or SSC) was a project-specific interdisciplinary group here on station (a private contractor, actually) that had run the actual test flights. It required a huge level of oversight and coordination (to say nothing of resources) to manage the drone swarm within the relevant orbits of the test runs -- so much so that an entire branch of the project had been turned over to these specialists to do exactly that. In order to get the most accurate sensor readings possible, the flight program had to be conducted in a very specific way.
SSC had been given the requisite authority to see that the ship was flown when, where, and how it needed to be, so as to generate the very best results. SSC was made up of scientists, administrators, engineers, and sensor specialists, none of who were pulled from the established hierarchies of Admin or R&D. Upper Management had deemed it prudent to put outsiders in this position -- a dispassionate company, unconnected with either the design or development of the project. In theory, this would garner nothing but accurate assessments of the generated data, since no one in SSC had a stake in the success or failure of the freejump tech itself.
To say it rankled Admin and R&D that command and control of the actual test runs was out of either of their hands was an understatement. SpecSign's review of intra and inter departmental memos and reports represented a mosaic of very bad blood.
SSC had apparently come to see the project administrators, as well as the designers themselves, as little more than gangs of small-minded control freaks. R&D saw both SSC and Admin as faceless mobs of incompetent data crunchers and bureaucrats, who brought nothing of value to the process. And Admin, for its part, seemed to blame everyone and everything but itself. By the time Shady Lady -- the Intruder in question -- had arrived on the scene, the atmosphere between these three sections had become so poisonous, so utterly dysfunctional, that it had filtered out into the station at large; much of the day-to-day workings of Mylag Vernier had become laced with various shades of passive aggression.
Idle talk on my own time, with Barney and his buds, only confirmed this impression. Though unconnected with either drone oversight or the engineering team, the Vipers were, nonetheless, quality sources of station scuttlebutt. Between classified reports, some careful pondering, and the anecdotal observations of outsiders, I came to the conclusion that the project had, for some time before the incident, been riding for a fall. The only question of any note that remained was who had given the actual order to move in and attack. Gunnery questions of mine aside, that was the only one that mattered, because right now, everyone associated with this incident was under the microscope, and Interstar wanted a solid target for its wrath.
As a private contractor, SSC was especially hard to reach for comments and queries. We had zero pull with them, and even laying allegations of obstruction and contract violations at their feet went completely unheeded. They remained silent, and, if anything, seemed ready to pull up stakes and bug out at the first opportunity.
When it came down to it, none of the camps were adding any useful commentary, despite extensive d
ebriefings by special Team and management investigators that were occurring simultaneously with our own review (transcripts of which were cc'd to us as a matter of course). All sides denied all errors and all wrong-doings, while pointing fingers at all their perceived enemies.
It would have been a joke, except that I had killed two people. I was extremely angry: someone -- either the pilots, themselves, or parties as yet unknown here on the station -- had put the ship in harm's way for no good reason.
The incident displayed a level of incompetence that was frankly appalling, and I, for one, felt driven to find the answer. Brand and the others seemed to pick up on my passion, and I like to think they found it a little inspiring.
The better part of a week had passed by now, and I worked late every day. Outside of a few social excursions here and there with the Vipers, and the increasingly bizarre image in my head of a stealthship docked surreptitiously to the skin of Mylag Vernier, my thoughts were predominantly on Jaybird.
"We need new sources of information," one of the Team gunners in our group stated at last.
Brand swept the room with his arm, encompassing the machines filled with data, and SpecSign in general.
"This is all there is," he said with bitterness.
"No it's not," another one argued. "It's just all we've been given."
"We have everything the other investigating groups have, including Team," Brand replied, but his tone was that of someone who agreed.
"Then Team doesn't have it all either," Kwon Ti stated firmly.
He'd done a great job of maintaining his chilly aloofness, and spy-guy aura, but a few cracks had begun to show by this point -- including a humorous tirade one day about the quality of available toiletries on-station. We all nodded now, because he was right, and not just about the bathroom products: SSC, Project Admin, and R&D had all closed ranks. Outside investigations were being so stonewalled it was like kissing a mountain.
Risk Analysis (Draft 04 -- Reading Script) Page 19