by Audrey Faye
“Time for your silver bunny suit,” Deijia said.
“It’s just for a couple of minutes,” Amanda replied. “Do I really have to?”
“You know the deal. Keep the rads out of your nads. You might need them sometime, if we find a decent place to live. Let’s just be glad there’s no EVA for this one.”
From a closet she found the correctly sized suit and pulled it on. The metallic fabric was designed to provide some protection against radiation for travel outside the main hull of the ship.
“Dancing in the stars!” Amanda exclaimed, and struck a pose. It was almost enough to take her mind away from the revelations of just a few minutes before. But there was no avoiding it. Deijia deserved the truth.
She turned to face him. “Tau, there’s something I need to say.”
He took a step closer and held both of her hands. “It might not be the right time, Mandy. We have kind of a lot going on right now. You know, a ship to repair, a virus to hunt down, a star system to explore. But soon.”
Of course he misunderstood. Maybe that was good. Did she really want to tell him a secret that would make him hate her forever?
Not now.
“Soon,” she said, and turned to the control panel on the wall. “Please open the nose hatch,” she instructed.
Above them, the circular door dilated.
“Why do you say please?” Deijia asked. “Do you think you’re going to hurt the computer’s feelings if you don’t?”
“Never know when they’ll take over,” Amanda said. “Can’t hurt to be polite. And besides, that makes it easy for the machine to know it’s a command.” For a precious few moments with Deijia, she could pretend.
She started to climb, while Deijia stayed below as safety watch for the confined space entry. Another silly procedure. If there was anything wrong with the air, or if there was any other hazard, the ship would already have warned them.
Up in the nose of the ship, a small maze of passageways greeted her. She knew the way, and easily found the small port holding the sensor. She pulled a locking bar out of the way and snapped the sensor out of its housing, replacing it with the new one. Easy peasy.
Deijia waited just a few meters away, around three corners and down one ladder. Amanda burned to tell him, to unburden herself.
So why was she going so slowly?
At the top of the ladder, she held out the old sensor. “Catch!”
The sensor fell slowly in the low gravity, and Deijia caught it easily. Amanda came down the ladder and took off her bunny suit.
“Let’s see if the new sensor made a difference,” Deijia suggested. “Just link to my virtual and we can look together.”
“No!” Amanda almost shouted. “You know the link gives me headaches.” In addition to her existing issues with the link, she now had another reason to avoid it. The updated version was guaranteed not to allow unguarded thoughts to spill over from one person to another, but Amanda still wasn’t going to touch it with a three meter pole.
Deijia shrugged. “Sorry I asked, I should have known better. How did you pass the certification tests for the link, anyway? I’ve never seen you use it.”
“I just had to power through. Kind of like in grade school when they force you to write cursive, until they assume everyone’s got it and then they move on.”
“Except handwriting is a useless anachronism. Seriously, the link is that hard for you?”
“When I do it for a few minutes, it’s just uncomfortable. Then it gets worse and worse. Like I need to move but can’t, or have an itch but can’t scratch it. Or there’s a grating noise drilling into my brain but I can’t exactly hear it. Each of the exams was two hours – you remember. And I couldn’t stay in the link that long.”
“What did you do?”
“I kept failing.”
Amanda remembered the summons to Noel’s office, three months before launch. She was going to be washed out. Sent home in disgrace to Earth.
She had walked into the office, seeing it was surprisingly spare. Noel, a desk, and about eight displays. He was about to give her the bad news, she was sure.
“Bowen,” he had said. “The link tests. You’re not making it through them. You need to.”
“Is there any other way? I don’t need the link to do my work.”
“You’ve got to tick the box. There’s a standard, and you need to meet it. Can you do that for me?”
“I’ll do my best, sir. I’m allergic, and it’s really, really tough.”
There, she had said it. The unproven and immeasurable malady, dismissed by experts as hypochondria. An excuse for lack of attention span, or laziness.
Amanda thought it would be the last straw. Instead, Noel seemed to focus and see her as a person for the first time. “Listen, Bowen. I’m not supposed to tell you this, but if you can get through the link tests, you’re in! I want you to be on one of the ships.”
There was no way. With nothing to lose, she had asked the cynical question. “Is this your last-chance motivational speech for people who are about to fail out?”
Noel gave her a puzzled look. “I guess you really have no idea how exceptional you are. Breaking our training scenarios. Providing wrong answers that turn out to be right, so we have to revise everything. Let me be clear, Bowen – the entire purpose of the call for candidates was to find people like you. So do this one thing. Pass the link tests. Tick the box. Now tell me again – will you do it?”
It had been a revelation. In her life up until that moment, she had never believed she would be valued, or even really noticed, for her devotion to the things she cared about most.
“I will!”
And she had. By the end of the last exam, she had wanted to cut her skin entirely off to stop the sensations. A helpful proctor had wrapped her hands in towels and taped them up at some point. But she was through. And she was in.
“Wow!” Back in the present, 42 light years from Earth, Deijia was suitably impressed by the story. “I guess I’ll check out the new sensor by myself, then. It’ll just take a second.”
Deijia went zombie, his face flickering and twitching. After less than a minute he returned to her. “Get this: No difference. The new sensor is giving identical readings to the old one. It can’t be glome distortion – if that’s something that even exists. So the problem must be in the software. That’s a scary thought – it’s a software bug or that virus. Either way, we’ve got trouble.”
Amanda knew the answer. It was a virus.
“I thought this would be our clean start,” Deijia went on. “Just us, the shiny denizens of the shiny new ship Rubicon. But somehow we’ve managed to bring along the baggage of home, whether it’s a virus or the fear of it – which might actually be worse.”
Amanda was seized with an inspiration. The past was beyond her reach. Only one thing remained.
“Maybe it’s not too late,” she said. “It’s still just us.”
She raised her right hand and said the words. “For as long as the expedition may last, whether on ship or planet, I will represent the highest standards of honesty and responsibility. I will protect my shipmates, always working with them and not against them. In any place we find ourselves, we will care for each other.”
Deijia shook his head in wonder. “Wow, you remembered all the words. Do you recite it every morning over breakfast?”
“Don’t you think it matters?”
“Not sure how it will help us fix the astrogation system.”
“I’ve got a plan for that, too,” she told him. “I’m going to rewrite it from scratch.”
“The whole system?”
“Just enough to compare and see where the differences are. Then we should be able to tell exactly what values the virus is changing. That might help us catch it.”
She could see Deijia putting on his thinking cap. “But the virus could have changed reference values, like the actual positions of the stars as determined from Earth. It’s not only the program that
might be vulnerable.”
“I’ll check the positions,” she assured him.
“Against what? There’s no paper here on board, and anything else could have been changed.”
Amanda tried to understand the question. “Why would I need paper?”
Deijia stared at her for a moment until realization dawned. “You mean – you know them? You know the position and distance of stars from Earth?”
“Just the first fifty light years or so. Don’t you?”
Amanda chose not to mention that when she was fourteen years old she had made a scale model of the Sun’s neighborhood. It had resided in the ceiling space of her room, providing the setting for hundreds of imagined interstellar adventures. When she had left for college, her mom had reclaimed the space for a guest bedroom.
“It’s lovely, sweetie,” her mom had said. “But we can’t have visitors bumping their heads on Sirius.”
Deijia slowly shook his head. “I’ll brief the captain on the sensor and tell her what you’re up to. You have fun – I know you will.”
They headed on to their separate destinations.
Amanda was failing to concentrate on her analysis. It should be so straightforward – just math. But she couldn’t even put together the most basic sequence of the symbols that had been her companions for so many years.
She was such an idiot.
Johan had assured her that the only purpose of his plan was to help in negotiations with Noel, for a deeply important cause. She could hear Johan’s voice in her head, from their meeting the year before. “People are starving, and he’s spending trillions to send a dozen ships to – somewhere. Nobody even knows where. But you can help.”
“Will you harm the program?” she had asked.
Johan had a way of making her feel small. “So many people suffering, and you only care about your space camp.” Space camp – a cutting reference to her chances of making the grade and being selected for the actual voyage.
“But don’t worry,” he had been filled with assurance. “We just need a little more information so we can drive a good bargain. We want a fair deal – for every trillion he spends on his boondoggle, he invests a trillion down here. And then we’re partners instead of adversaries. He’s got money coming out his butt, so he’ll totally go for it.”
Johan knew how to close the deal. “I know you have the courage to do this,” he had said. “It makes me proud to know you.”
There was only one person who could convince her of such an absurd narrative. That person was – herself. Desperate to believe, she had tied logic into triple knots.
She found herself wondering if Johan had known everything that would happen.
It was time to stop making excuses. For Johan, who had used her. Who had always used her. And for herself.
And now, what should she do?
The honorable thing was to turn herself in. Do what she should have done more than a year ago, if she had not been so selfish. So cowardly. If she had come clean at the start, the Mare Nubium shipyard would still be in existence. Human exploration of the stars would be continuing, and preparing to accelerate.
In all of history, had one person ever made a decision with worse consequence?
But if she confessed now, that would make things even worse. How much of a burden would she cause as a prisoner, consuming precious resources? As the settlers and crew took on the challenge of establishing their lives in a new world, it was the last thing they needed.
There was only one answer decency would allow.
In the short term, she would stay at her post, helping the ship and the mission as well as she possibly could. She had a job, and she was good at it. She could make up, in some small part, for the harm she had caused.
Then, when things were more settled, when they had less need for her, she would do the right thing.
How could she function now, when her shipmates needed her? It seemed impossible.
She remembered the link exams. When she had felt every fiber of her being scream out to release the link, somehow she had stayed in.
She could see this through. For as long as necessary.
Slowly, doggedly, she began assembling the symbols. One cell at a time, creating the formulas she needed. Checking and double checking each. She ruthlessly squashed any thoughts that were not of calculation and logic. She would solve the astrogation problem for her shipmates. And do anything else that needed doing.
Estwing suddenly walked in the open door of her workspace. “Bowen, what are you doing off the network?” he demanded. “You can’t do that.”
“I’m rewriting a version of the astrogation program,” she said. “If a virus is causing problems with our main version, I can prove it by running a clean one and getting different results.”
“Stop it. I can’t have anyone running unsecured.”
“But unless I stay in a separate environment, I’ll never know–”
“Back online,” he said.
“You’re just being paranoid.”
“Paranoid? Somehow a virus got on this ship, and there is no way it could have happened. Mare Nubium, that place was a sieve. Thousands of people coming and going, no central security. No surprise about the infection there. But this ship – I personally set up everything. If I’m paranoid now, it’s because my best wasn’t good enough.” His sense of failure pervaded the office.
Then Estwing closed the door and took a seat across the table.
He was always meticulous with his grooming, as with everything else, but shaving was an eternally losing battle for Estwing. After ten hours on shift, his face was a dark forest from which the next worry prepared to emerge.
“And – I need a word, about something else.”
Everything she had so painfully loaded up in her forebrain was draining away, Amanda lamented to herself. “What?”
“I’ve been thinking about the decision to thrust for orbit. It was such an unneeded risk.”
“It was fine! We gained a year.”
“But it could have been the end of us. Sheer impatience. I guess I should expect that from you, but the Captain went along with it. What was she thinking?”
“Maybe you can explain something to me, Commander. If you’re so risk-averse, why did you volunteer for the most insane trip in human history?”
He sighed. “It will be wasted on you, but I’ll try. Taking on a dangerous endeavor, that’s fine. I’m here, as you mention. But having decided to do it, we need to figure out the best way to take each step. The only way to do the most dangerous thing is to do it carefully.”
“But the thrust is in the past. Why does it matter now?”
“Here comes the next thing. The captain is going to send out eight of our best probes for over a year. To set up the phased photonic array, to transmit messages back to Earth.”
“And you disagree.” Amanda still had no idea what Estwing wanted from her.
“It’s the wrong choice. You heard Noel. We need to do what’s best for us, right here, and those probes could be useful for any number of purposes. But more to the point, we could send out the probes for the array any time we want. She’s insisting on launching the probes in the next hour, before we go into orbit. To save a little fuel.”
Amanda had her own reasons she hoped to never hear from Earth again, but she wasn’t about to share them with Estwing.
“So provide your input. That’s how it works. For what it’s worth, I agree with you, and I’ll say a word if the captain asks me.”
“If she asks? That’s the problem. Waiting around to be asked. Everyone needs to stand up and make sure she knows it’s a mistake to deploy the array so quickly.”
Stand up? What was Estwing suggesting?
Amanda squared herself. “Commander, let me make something clear. I will be happy to provide information to the captain. Opinion, if that’s called for. But beyond that – I swore an oath.”
“Of course. To protect everyone aboard. And we’ll follow it.”
“Listen. Antoine. I know how much you care for the safety of the ship. You see a risk and you have to run over and stomp it out.”
“It’s my job. Security and Risk Management.”
“More than that. It’s your nature. You know what we call you, right?”
“I’m already sure I don’t want to know,” he replied.
“Mother Hen – that’s your moniker.” Amanda managed not to laugh.
“What!?”
“We say it with love. Is that any consolation?”
“You–” Estwing pointed his index finger directly at her, “need to connect that computer back to the network. If you have a problem with that, you can take it up with the captain. No matter what name you call me, I’m running security, and you’re going to do it my way.”
Amanda sighed and folded up her computer, then followed Estwing out of the small office.
As Amanda arrived back at the bridge, the place was abuzz. It had been expected that glomes would be found, but now they had the first sighting anywhere outside Earth’s solar system. It was at the edge of detectable range for their instruments, just over 50,000 kilometers away. The glome was no hazard as long as they stayed beyond a 10,000 kilometer radius, and the Rubicon’s course took it comfortably farther away than that.
She wistfully imagined what might be found beyond the new glome. Someday, when the probes had fulfilled all their expected other uses, the plan was to send one into each glome they discovered in this system. If enough probes went into enough glomes, one of them might return eventually to Earth.
Once it was verified that their course would safely miss the glome and its spatial envelope, a discussion resumed. Settlement scenarios on the planet were being floated, and set aside.
“There is another choice,” Mayor Blum said. “Orbit. Using the flex spaces we can triple our available living volume.”
To Amanda’s surprise, nobody on the bridge made a ribbitting sound after the nickname for the expandable habitats.
Captain Hunt sounded exasperated. “You can’t be serious. We could have done an orbital colony at home. And we’d still be able to talk to the other four billion people. Visit, even.”