I stared at the tiny bit of debris he’d been looking at through the microscope. To the naked eye, it was simply a black, burned chunk of plastic. Only under the scope could you detect anything other than singed polymer and copper wiring. And even then, it was debatable that what I was looking at could be called scraping.
I didn’t bother to ask Rat if he was sure. Rat was always sure.
“Sabotage,” I said, my voice sounding dull.
“Told you it was bad, Chief.”
I ran a hand through my hair. My heart thundered in my chest. I willed it to slow; willed my breathing to settle.
“This doesn’t leave this room,” I told him. He nodded, making his goggles jiggle alarming on top of his head. “Back up your findings and isolate them from the computer.”
“Isolate…?”
“Isolate them, and lock them away for safe keeping.”
“You don’t want me to send you a report?”
“No.” I didn’t want anything going through Chariot’s computer right now. I feared we were not in complete control of the computer and therefore not in complete control of the Chariot.
The saboteur was.
I strode from Rat’s domain, determination and anger fuelling each step, and pressed my wrist comm, activating a channel to the captain.
“Chief,” he said over the tiny speakers a second or two later. It was a relief to hear his steady voice.
“Your ready room, sir,” I advised.
“I’ll be waiting.”
I grabbed my datapad as I passed my station, handed over engineering to MacBride and stepped out into the main corridor. Then forced myself to walk at a normal speed to the central hub lifts, all the while contemplating beating the shit out of whoever had done this and taking way too much delight in seeing them suffer.
I’d never thought of myself as a particularly bloodthirsty person, but the image of Daniels’ station exploding, of his face full of shock one second and blood and body matter spread across the gel floor the next, had me wanting to kill something. To pummel it more surely than I’d pummelled the punching bag in the gym the night before.
I flexed my still bruised hand rhythmically and walked towards the captain.
God help the man if he tried to dissuade me; now was not the time for British restraint.
Six
Novels, Poems Or Relationships
Noah
Camille was stunning in her fury. I’d always admired that about her; her ability to allow her temper full reign. She didn’t baulk at showing emotion, and woe betide anyone who stepped in her way. If she were angry, she’d raise her voice. If she were happy, she’d have the loudest laugh in the room. If she were sad, everyone around her felt sad, also. No one could be unaffected by Camille Rey.
“Saboteur,” I said, repeating her earlier assessment. “That makes sense,” I added. Camille raised her expressive eyebrows at me. “The missing communiqués.”
Camille hadn’t overlooked them; she’d been trying to find an answer to their sudden disappearance. She may not have come up with a solution, but she had located a potential reason as to why.
We were being played.
“What do you think their endgame is?” I asked.
“It seems self-destructive,” she said. “If you sabotage the Chariot, you sabotage yourself. Why would you risk your own chance of arriving at New Earth?”
I shook my head. I didn’t have an answer for her that made sense. “Can it be contained?” I asked, instead.
“So far, only engineering and the communications system have been affected.”
“I seriously doubt we’re going to be that lucky. There’ll be more.”
“Not unless the saboteur has access. All of the Chariot’s systems are self-contained, to avoid any potential cross-contamination should it develop a virus in any one compartment. To gain access to the engineering computer, for instance, you have to have access to engineering itself.”
She did not look happy about that. I pitied the idiot who had tampered with the chief’s domain. And then I decided they deserved everything the Frenchwoman would throw at them.
“As for communications,” she went on. “Unfortunately that can be accessed through any officer level comm device. The only saving grace we have is that they must have officer clearance. Therefore, we can assume that they’re ESA.”
I swung my seat away from my desk and stood up, starting to pace. I felt like my body was on fire, little pinpricks of electricity coursing through my frame. I couldn’t sit still and talk about this. I had ants in my pants and fire ants in my brain.
Camille watched me with a contemplative look on her face. Perhaps I was showing a little too much emotion. But this was Camille, and we were in the privacy of my ready room. I allowed myself a little leeway.
“One of our own,” I growled, still pacing.
“It narrows the list somewhat,” she agreed.
“Camille,” I said, pain evident in my tone.
“I know,” she offered. We were a family. We’d been a family for the past five years, training for this mad dash across the universe. Working simulations and testing systems and practising, practising, practising until we could function as a cohesive unit without having to think about it.
This was our family.
The civilians were add-ons. Had it been one of them, I could have…perhaps not accepted, but at least assimilated their involvement. But this…this felt like a personal betrayal. I may not know every single name of the officers onboard, we had over one hundred and fifty, but I recognised their uniforms, their rank insignias, the ESAS logo on their chests.
I stopped pacing and wrapped a hand around the back of my neck, staring at my parents’ meadow. I didn’t even know if they were still alive. We’d been instructed to cease communications with Earth the moment we passed Mars. We’d passed Mars within an hour of taking off thanks to Anderson Universal’s proprietary Faster Than Light propulsions systems. The ESA could still track us through the solar system, but once Neptune was behind us, they too would have lost the ability to follow our progress. Or communicate with us.
Earth was on its own, and so were we.
I sank back into my seat, feeling more desolate than I had since we’d launched and lost Vela.
“Captain?” Camille said softly. “Are you all right?”
“Forgive me, Chief,” I said. “It seems to have all caught up with me.”
She hesitated, and then she slipped out of her seat and rounded my desk, leaning her butt back on it and facing me. She reached forward and rested her hand on my arm.
“I would have been disappointed if it hadn’t. Though, I must admit,” she said, “I thought perhaps you’d hide it better. You English and your stiff upper lip.”
“You must be rubbing off on me,” I said, slipping my arm out from under her fingers, and turning my hand to grasp hers tightly.
She gripped me back just as firmly, our gazes connected, my heart beating altogether a little too swiftly.
I cleared my throat and leaned back in my chair, disconnecting us. Camille smiled softly, understandingly, and then pushed up from my desk and returned to her seat on the other side. I stared at where her arse had been resting and secretly decided I’d not have that section of the desk cleaned for some time.
I started to laugh. She smiled. Then chuckled. And then we were both laughing, and I wasn’t sure either of us knew why.
“OK,” I said, sometime later. “We need a plan of attack. Who can we trust?”
Camille offered me a pitying look and then shook her head. “I trust Rat. Midshipman Russo,” she corrected. “He found the evidence that suggested sabotage.”
“That does kind of exempt from being the saboteur,” I agreed.
“I’d like to say I trust MacBride,” Camille added. “But that is more wishful thinking than honesty on my part. I have no reason to distrust him, though. The situation muddies the water somewhat.”
“Yes.”
/> “No one has been in engineering since we took off other than my team,” she said quietly.
Damn.
“Do we have an estimate of when the sabotage occurred?”
Camille looked slightly mollified. “No, but the potential for sabotage prior to takeoff does increase the possibility that someone other than my team did this.”
“See if your crewman can determine a timeline for us and we’ll take it from there. For now, we keep this between the three of us. I, too, am unable to vouch conclusively for my flight crew on this.”
I hated this. I hated that it made us suspect good men and women. That it painted a black mark over every officer’s head. If we started doubting each other, then we’d start to fall apart. Five years of bonding or not, no one could stand up to that type of scrutiny.
Camille nodded her head and stood up. She’d made it to my ready room door before I spoke.
“Chief,” I said.
“Yes, sir?” She looked at me over her shoulder, her mind already on the next task and the one after it, I was sure.
“I trust you,” I said. “With my life. With the lives of those on this ship, in this fleet.” I shrugged. “It probably didn’t need to be said, but there you have it. I’m feeling rather inclined to share my feelings right now.”
Camille rolled her eyes at me; such expressive eyes.
“You seriously need to find an outlet for your emotions, Captain. Might I suggest writing romance novels in your spare time?”
I sputtered. “Romance novels?”
“Perhaps poems. An ode or two?”
“Chief,” I said.
“Yes, Captain?”
“Go back to engineering. You’re beginning to annoy me.”
“A pleasure as always, Captain,” she said, grinning, and slipped through my ready room door.
I stared at it for a moment longer and then reached out and touched my desk. Camille Rey was a brilliant engineer and an even more spectacular woman. Was it any wonder, then, that I was in love with her?
If only life had turned out differently. There was no time left for romance; novels, poems, or relationships. We were fighting for our lives in more ways than one.
I reached forward and uplifted my datapad; the one Camille had transferred all of her evidence to and separated from the Chariot’s system, and I started to read.
It wasn’t romantic in the slightest, but it was a mystery.
Seven
Aye-Aye, Captain
Camille
The bulk food storage refrigerator in the galley attached to the officers’ mess was ten degrees above what it should have been. But the temperature on the door panel read -6°C; exactly what it was supposed to. Just not what it actually was inside the storage bay. Some of tomorrow’s meals had already started to deteriorate. A bacterial test had come back positive on several food packages.
We’d be eating reconstituted space rations at this rate.
“Can’t give you an answer, Chief,” MacBride said. He was lying on his back, his head inside the refrigerator’s innards, a flashlight sticking out of his mouth making his words hard to make out. “The thermometer is accurate. And there’s nothing to indicate a malfunction between that and the door panel. I haven’t had a chance to check the panel for errors yet.”
“I’ll do it,” I said, stepping over his supine form and prying off the access cover to the LED panel.
“You don’t have to get your hands dirty, Chief,” MacBride offered. “As soon as I’m done here, I’ll give you a full report.”
I didn’t say anything. What could I say? I don’t trust you? I have to oversee this and report to the captain in person? Reports will only get lost in the Chariot’s systems?
I shone a light on the terminal junctions inside the panel and then ran a diagnostic from my handheld computer; I’d ensured it was separated from the Chariot before I got here. Hooking into the panel would bring it back online, but I was ready for that. I’d written code to syphon off any interference and quarantine it on the device in a section of the unit’s programming that had been placed behind titanium strength firewalls.
There was no way the Chariot could circumnavigate those.
I watched as the handheld computer ran through its diagnostics and found the junction that had been tampered with, and then stared stunned as the Chariot fixed the problem and then proceeded to download the entire cache from the handheld, including my super secure firewall protected section, with the newly acquired information regarding the error in the panel and how it had been tampered with.
I took a step back from the fridge.
“Anything?” MacBride asked, sliding out from inside the refrigerator.
I shook my head. But the motion wasn’t in answer to MacBride’s question. He took it as such though and shrugged.
“Damned if I know, Chief,” he said, starting to pack up his tools. “Temp’s back to normal though, and what hasn’t spoiled should still be all right. I’ll go write up my report.”
“Yes,” I said, unable to stop staring at the handheld still attached to the panel.
MacBride left the storage room without a backwards glance. I sucked in super-chilled air and rubbed my arms and then stepped back up to the panel.
First order of business was to query the unit. I left it attached and waited for the computer to self-diagnose.
A message appeared on the handheld’s screen.
nothing that we do, is done in vain
I stared at the words, trying to comprehend them.
Clarify, I wrote on the command line.
i believe, with all my soul, that we shall see the triumph
What the hell?
Clarify, I wrote again.
The messages disappeared. I spent several minutes trying to locate them, but they’d been erased from the system in a way even I couldn’t uncover. Whoever the saboteur was, they were familiar with code. They were more familiar with the Chariot’s computer than me, I thought angrily.
I disconnected the handheld, rechecked the temperatures via the panel and manually from inside, and then closed the food storage bay and locked it. I was chilled to my bones when I stepped out of the galley, and it wasn’t all because of the refrigerator’s sub-zero temperature.
I’d made it halfway back to engineering when my wrist comm chimed. I’d been so deep in thought that I hadn’t even registered the crewmen who’d passed me and saluted. I vaguely acknowledged those closest to me and pulled over to the side of the hallway, activating the comm request.
“Commander Rey,” I said into the device, too discombobulated to check who had commed me.
“Chief?” the captain said, peering at me suspiciously from the small screen attached to the device. “Everything in order?”
“Yes, Captain. No, well…” I glanced around the hallway; crewmen had started giving me strange looks as they passed. They were no longer bothering to salute me.
“I see,” the captain said. “Well, I need you on the bridge; you can give me a report when you get here.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “On my way.”
“Oh, and Chief? Have you got your handy-dandy toolkit with you?”
My steps faltered. I stared down at the wrist comm and looked the captain in the eye.
“I’ll be there in less than five minutes, sir.”
“Good,” he said. “Vaughan out.”
The wrist comm went dark. I picked up pace, hugging my handheld to my chest and dodging pedestrians, my handy-dandy toolkit, as the captain called it, securely fastened to my right thigh. The words the computer had displayed flashed before my eyes as I stepped into the lift. I didn’t bother to acknowledge the officer inside.
First, we had the main boost thrust tampered with, then a terminal set to explode in engineering. Now a refrigeration unit in the officers’ mess hall galley and something on the bridge causing the captain alarm. The situation was escalating, and I didn’t have any answers to give Captain Vaughan.
&nb
sp; It was with a heavy heart that I entered the bridge and saluted the captain. He half-heartedly saluted back.
“Over here, Chief,” he said, his voice subdued.
I glanced around the bridge and catalogued those officers on duty. I knew them all. Had drowned my sorrows with them all. Could the saboteur be one of them?
I shook my head and came abreast of the captain. He was staring down at the tactical console. The tactical officer, Lieutenant Graves, one of the captain’s former countrymen, stood off to the side looking worried.
I glanced at the captain and then looked down at the console.
The screen was flickering, as though the power was being interrupted somewhere along the line. I looked around the rest of the bridge, but every other console I could see was bright and steady. I crouched down and opened up the panel beneath the console, checking the junctions and wire connections there.
“Power’s fine,” I said absently as I moved onto another junction. “Motherboard looks in order.”
I connected my handheld, well aware that it had been online and tampered with by Chariot’s computer already. But I didn’t have anything else on hand, and really, I expected the exact same thing to happen should I attempt to section off a secure portion of the device again.
I stared at the small screen as it ran a diagnostic. I could have tried to run one from the console itself, but with the flickering screen, I’d have had trouble deciphering the diagnosis. It took a few seconds, and then the handheld beeped.
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