The Jovian Run: Sol Space Book One

by James Wilks

  She expected murmurs, questions, maybe even outrage, but there was only silence. The crew looked around at one another, but no one spoke. “We have also learned that the other ship out there has been blocking our coms and feeding us false chatter from Mars. Evelyn, would you like to add to this?” She looked pointedly at the woman, and all eyes turned to her.

  Evelyn stepped forward and spoke, gesticulating as she did so. “I looked through your past coms traffic to see if I could isolate the transmission signature that was broadcasting, still is broadcasting, the faked chatter. It’s complex enough that it carries a signature, and I found a match in your ship’s archives. It’s a ship called the Doris Day.”

  This time there was a good deal of murmuring. Ian cursed loudly, then looked apologetically at Charis and John. Gwen looked around, seemingly somewhat confused, and John tried to pacify her.

  Staples raised her voice to be heard. “We believe,” she began, and the discussion subsided, “we believe that the pirate ship was attempting to abduct Herc and Evelyn, our two passengers.” The slight smudging of the truth came easily. The captain saw no reason to place all the weight on the woman’s shoulders, and from where she stood next to Jang, she looked grateful for it. “Whoever hired the pirates is also responsible for our mole, for the person who uploaded the virus into our mainframe. Now there is no further threat from this virus. Evelyn has assured us that the virus completed its task and then shut itself down. Our mainframe is clean.”

  There was more muttering at this. Staples distinctly heard the words relief and traitor.

  “Furthermore,” she pressed on, “we believe, against all expectation, that it was the Doris Day that saved us from the pirates by destroying their ship.”

  “Why?” Yoli asked. “Why help us? Vey has always been a bastard. He’d never help us.”

  “We don’t know that either, but I suspect that he’d do whatever was required if he were being paid. It is possible that Vey will attempt to abduct Evelyn as well.”

  “Wait,” John spoke up, shifting Gwen away from his face so that he could speak more loudly. “If they want her too, why take the risk with missiles? Couldn’t they have killed the people they wanted?”

  Dinah caught her captain’s eye, and Staples nodded for her to speak.

  “Thank you, sir.” She turned and addressed John. “I believe I can answer that. The captain asked me to check the stasis tubes. They were each carrying a transponder.” She walked forward and placed a small blue disc with a sharp point, about the size and shape of a large thumbtack, on the table next to Piotr’s sandwich. “That’s the transponder I found attached to the satellite we picked up right after we left Earth.” She placed two more seemingly identical discs on the table. “Those are the transponders I found buried in the machinery of the stasis tubes.” Before people could begin speaking, she continued. “The missiles that destroyed our attackers were already in motion when I saw them, but that doesn’t mean they were accelerating from their origin point. In fact, if they had been, I suspect that I never would have had time to get away. I believe they had been launched by Vey’s ship, then powered down when they reached us, waiting for the right circumstances.”

  “Which were?” Charis asked.

  “One: the ability to destroy the pirate ship without destroying us, and two: the condition that they still read that the stasis tubes were on board our ship. The fact that Bauer’s tube was so close to the hull breach that it was pulled out into vacuum and destroyed by the explosion is not something that could have been anticipated.”

  Staples waited a minute to let all of this sink in. There were voices and discussion, but mostly, the crew was silent as they processed. Finally, she continued. “I’m afraid there’s more. As all of you know, Parsells and Quinn attempted to attack our passenger.” She knew her chief engineer well enough not to compliment her on her role in the prevention of that attack in front of the crew. “We… I decided to incarcerate them until we could bring them to trial on Cronos. Since then, someone has attempted to murder them.”

  Except for Jang, Jabir, and Evelyn, those standing traded looks and gasps, and those sitting made similar noises. Staples heard Yoli say “good” and saw Ian nod in agreement. She had not expected any sympathy for the men, and indeed she had little herself. “Doctor, would you like to report on their condition?”

  “Yes.” Jabir took a step forward and leveled his gaze across the room. “The effects of the hypoxia are more extreme in Mr. Quinn’s case than in Mr. Parsells. I expect that patient Parsells will fully recover in time, though his lungs and eyes will need surgery and prolonged therapy if they are ever to be as they were. Patient Quinn has suffered permanent brain damage. He is conscious, but I estimate his IQ to be somewhere around forty-five. I do not think he remembers much of his former life, and many of his day-to-day abilities are gone. He can no longer read or write, and it is quite likely that he will forget his own name from time to time. Make no mistake. Mr. Quinn may be alive, but his life is over.”

  The discussion that came from this was confused and varied, and Staples did not blame them. Quinn and Parsells’ intended crime was a heinous one, but she was not convinced it was one that warranted near brain death.

  “Do you think that those assholes are the ones who infected the mainframe with the virus? Could they be the traitors?” It was Yoli again, her dark eyes staring at her captain intensely.

  Staples nodded. “They could be. We were on our way to ask them that when we discovered the vacuum pump attached to their cell. I still intend to have that conversation with Parsells when he is recovered enough to do so. In the meantime, we have some problems. We may have a saboteur on board. We definitely have a murderer on board. The fact that they did not succeed, or fully succeed, does not change their intention. I know that some of you think that those men got what they deserved. Frankly, I am inclined to agree with you, but that is not for us to decide. We are none of us judges. Mr. Templeton will be conducting an investigation. This is not,” she paused for effect and tried to meet the eyes of every one of her crew members before she finished, “how we solve problems on this ship.”

  “What about our other problem?” It was Ian this time. “What about that other ship out there that’s keeping us cut off?”

  “That,” Staples replied, “I am happy to report, is one problem we do have a solution to.”

  “So how exactly is this going to work?” Templeton asked. He sat in his customary seat next to his captain in the cockpit, and the other three chairs, astrogation, pilot, and coms were occupied by Charis, Bethany, and Evelyn respectively.

  The befreckled woman sitting in Yegor’s old chair swung around, her safety belt keeping her snug in her seat. “I don’t know how far your rival ship is behind us, but they can’t be too far because they’ve been making course corrections to stay in our wake since we left Mars. Otherwise you would have seen them. Now that we’re turned around, facing in-system, they must have dropped back to keep off our radar. The improved coms suite won’t help us with that. It’s a lot easier for them to follow us than for us to see them following us.”

  “Ships leave all sorts of radiation trails through space if the engines are thrusting,” Charis expanded without looking up from her console.

  Templeton nodded. That he knew. “But, now that we’re facing them and our coms and radar are up, we’ll see them coming if they try to make a move. They ain’t going to sneak up on us.”

  “No, they can’t,” agreed Evelyn. “The good news is that they’re far enough back that it takes them a while to detect our course corrections. If we turn hard, we should be able to get free of their rebroadcast field and pick up authentic transmissions from Mars.”

  “And what exactly are we hoping to learn?” Templeton prompted.

  “First and foremost, we want to be sure that no one has been trying to contact us about…” Staples gestured to the ship, the crew, and the events of the last few days, “…all of this. We could report it,
but I don’t see what good that would do right now, and, assuming they intercept it, I’d rather not tell Vey everything that’s been going on here. I’m also hoping to hear from a friend of mine. I can only hope that she put her message on repeat when she didn’t hear back from me.”

  “Fair enough. Nothing good comes from being cut off from the core systems,” he replied, and was silent for a space. After a minute, he looked at his watch and said, “It’s time. The crew should be ready.” He tapped his panel. “Dinah, are the engines ready?”

  “Yes, sir.” The engineer’s voice was clear through the speakers. “I feel safe giving you two Gs for an hour, but no more.”

  “That should be enough,” Evelyn chimed in.

  Staples looked over at Charis. “Do it.”

  Two hours later, Templeton and Staples sat at the small table in her quarters. Her body was a bit sore from the hour at two Earth gravities. They had certainly been through greater thrusts, and recently, but after several days of weightlessness followed by a few days of less than half Earth normal gravity, the extra weight had been a strain. Of far more concern to her was the surface on the table in front of her. Templeton was pouring over his own, looking through the general transmissions that swept through the Sol system, radiating out from the core. Staples had breathed a sigh of relief when she received the message from her friend currently using the name Jordan. After running the decryption program that she had been given when they first worked together on Earth, the woman’s message appeared on the surface.

  “Any big news from Mars?” She eyed the dead plant sitting on the corner of the desk.

  Templeton shook his head. “Nothing to write home about, so to speak. The usual political chatter…” he sorted through the data with a finger on the touch screen, “some guy had an EVA suit accident on Mars…ups and downs on the stock market. What’s your friend say?”

  “Two things. I can’t say that either is a surprise, but they’re both important. First, she did some digging into Parsells and Quinn for me. They were prison guards, but they had a bad reputation. Violence towards prisoners, beatings, that sort of thing. It looks like they almost beat a man to death three months ago.”

  Templeton was shaking his head vehemently. “None of that came up on the background check. I called their direct superior!”

  “Apparently, that was part of the problem. Jordan says that Quinn and Parsells were going to be fired over the incident. Their superior, one Tyrone Martin, tipped them off, so they quit before they could be canned. He also convinced the prison to drop the charges when the witnesses recanted their statements.”

  Templeton’s expression was dark. “That’s the bastard I talked to.”

  “I guess even bastards look out for their friends. You couldn’t have known, Don. Sometimes the system doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to.”

  “How did your friend find this out?”

  “After two years, I’ve learned not to ask.”

  “Is she going to do something about it, now that she knows about this guy Martin?”

  “She didn’t say, and I’d rather not conjecture.” She paused for a moment. “Check that. I think I’d rather not know.”

  “So what’s the second piece of news?” Templeton inquired. Staples surmised that he hadn’t finished castigating himself up for hiring two sadists, but she decided to press on for now.

  “The satellite we found, the Yoo-lin mark VII? It went missing less than two days before we left Earth. There’s no way that it could have gotten that far on its own, especially once we consider that it was barely moving when we found it. Someone stole it out of orbit and then left it in our path.”

  He grunted. “Three guesses on who that was.”

  “The question is not who did it, but who hired the Doris Day? Why hire a ship to steal a satellite, drop it right in front of us, fight us for it, then follow us all the way out to Cronos Station, blocking our coms along the way?”

  “Don’t forget helping us fend off a pirate attack.”

  “That too,” Staples agreed.

  “It just doesn’t make any goddamn sense.” Templeton’s frustration was apparent.

  “No, it does. We just can’t see it yet. We’re missing something.”

  “What?”

  Before she could answer, there was a knock at the door. The captain looked at her first mate quizzically, but he just shrugged. He stood up and went to the door. When he opened it, Dinah Hazra stood with her feet slightly spread and her hands behind her back. She wore her usual black tank top and cargo pants, the latter looking newly pressed. Her hair was freshly shorn. Templeton stepped to the side, and Staples stood up to face the other woman.

  “Dinah. How can I help you?”

  “May I come in, sir?”

  “Of course.” Templeton stepped back, and Dinah entered stiffly and closed the door behind her.

  She stood for a moment in silence, and the other two looked at her expectantly. “Sir, I am here to confess to the attempted murder of Parsells and Quinn.”

  “What?!” Templeton nearly yelled. His voice filled the small room. Staples regarded her steadily.

  “Would you like me to repeat myself, sir?” Staples saw that Dinah was affecting her middle distance stare at nothing in particular.

  “Yes, I damn well would!”

  Dinah opened her mouth to speak, but Staples cut her off. “I’m sorry, Dinah, but I don’t believe you.” Her voice was calm and even.

  “I am confessing, sir.” Her face was inscrutable.

  “Okay, let’s play this out then,” she replied. “Why did you attempt to kill them?”

  “I was angry at them for attacking our passenger.”

  “If you wanted them dead, you would have killed them when you defended that passenger. You could have easily done it, don’t tell me otherwise, and if you had killed them then, you could have claimed self-defense.”

  “It did not occur to me to kill them then. I only decided to do it afterwards, sir.”

  “Just like it didn’t occur to you to tell me you were going to jump in an EVA suit and start cutting power cables on a pirate ship?” She did not wait for an answer. “But fine, let’s say that you somehow became angrier after the attack than you were during it. Why not kill them conventionally? You have access to every weapons locker on this ship, and it is abundantly clear that you could kill them even without a weapon.”

  “Something could have gone wrong, sir. They might have escaped from the room.”

  Staples looked at Templeton, who still wore a look on incredulity on his face. “I think we all know you better than to think that you couldn’t handle two semi-conscious, severely beaten men. So again, why not kill them conventionally?” Her voice carried the air of an inquisitor asking questions to which she already knew the answer.

  The engineer’s eyes strayed for a bit, then assumed their blank stare again. “I didn’t want to get my hands dirty.”

  “You love getting your hands dirty!” Templeton objected. “You’re an engineer for Christ’s sake!”

  “Dinah, I’ve seen your work dozens of times over on this ship in the last two years. You are a consummate professional. You may indeed love getting elbow deep in grease, but I’ve never known you to do a sloppy job. The hole in the door where the vacuum pump was attached was cut with a torch. Badly. The angles were so poor that whoever attached the hose had to use half a roll of duct tape to get a clean seal. That’s not your work.”

  “I was in a rush, sir.”

  “A rush job and a bad job are not the same thing. We also know, all three of us, that you would never leave a job half finished. Even if I believed everything you’ve said here, which I don’t, by the way, there’s no way that you would not have stayed to ensure that the job was finished.”

  Dinah stood stock-still and stared at her invisible point on the far wall.

  “Dinah, it’s a noble gesture, but I need to know: who are you protecting?”

  A moment of sil
ence passed. “Please accept this as my confession to attempted murder, sir.”

  Staples heaved a great sigh. “Fine. Don, please call Mr. Jang here with his sidearm.” Templeton looked at her in disbelief, but she met his gaze evenly. “Trust me.”

  Piotr Kondratyev opened the door to his cabin and blew out a great sigh. It was a mess. Clothes were draped over the chairs, on the floor, and on the bed. He was a terrible house-keeper, and he could never be bothered to keep his room organized. This dereliction of tidiness was made far worse on a space ship that regularly underwent periods of weightlessness. He never got around to folding and placing his clothing, dirty or clean, in the dresser provided, and so every time the ship lost gravity, it would float about his room at random. Now that the ship was under thrust, most of it lay where it had fallen, and he stepped over a pair of slacks and kicked a stray shoe out of the way as he headed to the back of the room and the restroom beyond. Paradoxically, he had always been meticulous about his kitchens. His knives, pots and pans, and other utensils and tools of the trade were obsessively placed in the order he preferred, and he could not abide anyone disturbing that order, but all of his resources were spent there, and so he had few left for his living space.

  Upon reaching the restroom, he opened the door and began to rummage through the drawer beside the sink. The vial he was looking for, a small tube perhaps ten centimeters long and about half full of a clear liquid, lay amongst his beard trimmer, toothbrush, and various other sundry toiletries. At a glance, it might have passed for a bottle of cologne or some other beauty-related product. He picked it up and placed it in his pocket. He then knelt down and opened the cabinet. His hand felt around inside, up around the basin of the sink, until it fell upon the taser he had liberated from one of the obscure weapons lockers in one of the seldom-used holds of the ship. He ripped the tape away that secured it and placed it into his other pocket as he stood up. He regarded his reflection in the mirror briefly; the man he saw was trapped and unhappy, desperate but determined. He nodded once to himself and strode through the door.