When he went to Cara’s room, she had already turned out the overhead lights. In the dim glow from the corridor strip-lighting, he saw only the outline of her back as she faced the wall.
“You all right, Cara?” he asked.
She shrugged, her narrow shoulders moving the blanket a little.
Andy crossed the room to sit on the edge of her bed. He smoothed some stray hairs out of her eyes and felt tears on her cheeks.
“I’m still here,” he said.
“I know,” she said, so softly he barely heard her.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Cara didn’t answer.
“Where do we live?” she asked finally, voice quiet. It was their old ritual.
“We live on Sunny Skies, duh.” He failed to put the goofy note in his voice.
“No, Daddy,” she said, still staring at the wall. “We live in Rabbit Country.”
“Rabbit Country?” he asked. “There are no rabbits in space.”
“We’re the rabbits,” Cara said. “Ears up and ready to run.”
“Ears up and ready to run,” he agreed.
Andy waited. She wasn’t pulling away from him, just keeping to herself. He put his legs up on the bed and leaned back against the wall, stroking her hair again.
He didn’t remember falling asleep but found himself waking in the dark some time later. The corridor door had closed automatically at some point, leaving the room dark. Cara had turned on her side and was breathing evenly but had managed to twist out of her covers.
Standing slowly, with stabbing pains running the length of his body, Andy found the edge of the blanket and pulled it up until Cara was covered again.
He checked the Link, and found that Alice had a report for him. He stood in the dark for a minute, listening to Cara breathing, then bent back down to kiss her forehead.
“Good night, sweetheart,” he murmured, then straightened to find his way to the door and the dim corridor outside.
Chapter Four
STELLAR DATE: 07.25.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Sunny Skies
REGION: Greek Asteroids, Jovian Combine
Sitting in an alcove off the habitat airlock, Andy spread the battered EVA suit across his knees and applied patching liquid to the visible holes. He would need to run a full systems check later for micro-tears and any other damage he could fix on his own before he took it into vacuum again. For now, it would work in the rest of the ship, where he only needed the suit for warmth in the unheated, zero-g sections of Sunny Skies. It was cheaper to keep the air in those sections a breathable mix than to dump it all to vacuum, but he couldn’t waste fuel on heat.
There had been a time when the whole ship had served as a zero-g playground for the kids. Then money had gone from elusive to actively avoiding him.
Checks complete, Andy stood and pulled on the suit. He slowly fit its outer harness around his waist and shoulders, awakening new jabs of pain with each movement. The suit smelled of sweat and something moldy he didn’t want to think about. If he had to admit it, the kids filling the suit with cleaning foam had been more help than prank.
Pulling the battered helmet over his head, he ran a quick diagnostic check on the suit, noting the slow loss of inner pressure, as well as the fractured lower left section of his faceplate, which now showed information in jittery snowflake-shaped blobs of color.
He mounted the ladder into the airlock and climbed slowly, feeling out the pains in his arms and legs, until he reached the top and hit the activation controls. All the way up, the magnets in his right glove kept sticking, twisting his wrist when they wouldn’t release properly. He had to stop using that hand altogether.
Below him, the hatch slid closed and the world shifted, sending stomach bile into his throat. His inner ear swooned. Andy squeezed his eyes closed and gripped the ladder, forcing himself to breathe deeply until the sick feeling subsided.
The upper hatch opened and he pulled himself into the zero-g section of the ship.
Alice’s list had come back with significant damage to the hull. The drone had checked most of the systems on the outer hull where damage would be obvious. It was still checking interior spaces where debris had penetrated the outer skin.
Andy groaned. It would take him at least a week to work through the major repairs. After that, there was a second list of burn-outs where outer connections had either grounded-out or been destroyed completely. Scanning the list, which was bad enough, he guessed at other areas he should check for secondary damage.
As usual, it was a miracle Sunny Skies continued to fly. For having been built as a recreational craft, Sunny Skies carried a confusing set of redundancies, like a yacht built for preppers. Not that he was complaining, but the ship constantly surprised him with little bits of added tech from its long history.
Andy grabbed a handhold and propelled himself along the wall to the nearest junction of corridors. He needed to go down two levels to the main cargo bays.
He doubted any damage from the debris field could have penetrated the center of the ship—at least the interior scans hadn’t indicated atmosphere loss from puncture wounds—but he was worried enough about the integrity of the cargo to check. This shipment was a collection of random crates with a complicated manifest that meant he needed to check every container for discrepancies. He didn’t want to discover any serial numbers had mysteriously changed mid-flight.
Ahead of him, the corridor lights sensed his presence and flickered alive—except for a few sections where they didn’t and he floated through the dark.
In the cargo area, he floated in the doorway waiting for the lights to activate throughout the long room. There were two wide airlocks in the chamber that could open to allow transport drones to enter and pull the crates out. The openings were big enough that any malfunction meant he’d be in vacuum before he knew what hit him.
As he waited for the systems check, Andy wondered if he had always been such a pessimist, or if becoming a parent had done this to him. Only it wasn’t pessimism so much as thinking through everything bad that could happen in any given situation. Tim might be playing next to the stove with a pot boiling over his head. In one future, everything was fine. In another, his face was covered in third-degree burns. With these possibilities playing out in his mind continuously, Andy didn’t know if he was crazy or simply overly prepared.
Brit had been better at living in the moment, not worrying about what might happen. She had seemed to have the ability to read anxiety in Andy’s face—even before he realized it was there—and respond with something simple like a smile or a word. She’d helped him. Had immediately made him feel more calm. He hadn’t realized she was doing it until the effect was gone. Now he had to recognize the swell of worry and pause his thoughts, redirect toward something productive.
In combat, he’d never needed to worry. All possibilities had been played out in front of him and he’d chosen a path between them. Even if he thought of the kids as red space—a sector occupied by enemy combatants moving with their own intentions and capabilities—he seemed to lack the ability to separate his feelings for them from his rational decision-making toward problems, resulting in a mess of indecision.
As a pilot, he knew what steps to take to control his weapons system in the necessary manner to defeat the enemy, just like during hand-to-hand he’d pivot his hips in a throw, following it with a throat strike, or any number of other steps to assure his enemy’s defeat. As a father, he could only look in their watching eyes and hope he was doing the right thing, mind quailing.
Hope is not a method.
“Focus on what you have, not what you don’t have,” Brit used to tell him, and now he repeated the words as a mantra, listing what he had like stacking bricks in a defensive wall.
“We have the ship,” he told the display panel, its data tickling his Link. “We have the cargo. We have fuel to Cruithne. We have our health.”
The panel blinked yellow, sending him waiting signals that the wo
rried part of his brain interpreted as uncertainty. The manifest slid past his thoughts, broadcast IDs on the crates matching the expected serial number in the cargo list. When the panel lit up green, it was like a shot of happiness. He nodded, acknowledging the report.
The manifest file closed and he was about to leave the bay, when another message from the monitoring system came over his Link. There was a supplemental report. Somewhere in the bay was a group of crates that had come in separately from the main cargo shipment.
Andy frowned. He didn’t remember authorizing a supplemental shipment. How had he missed this? Had the kids distracted him during load-up?
He scanned the new list quickly, then ran it against the original manifest to see if anything had changed. The tokens from their respective origins all matched, so unless the tracking software had been hacked, everything was where it was supposed to be.
Why hadn’t the supplemental appeared until now? It seemed dumb for a smuggler to hide something on Sunny Skies; a ship with only nominal chances of reaching its destination. It was cheaper to just pay for the ride since, by law, Andy owned anything put on his ship without either his express permission or a shipping contract.
He pulled the location data for the extra crates over his Link. The face shield display tried to highlight locations across the room but most of the icons were lost in the fractured section of the shield, resulting in a meaningless but pretty shower of colors.
Grumbling to himself, Andy pulled up a schematic of the bay and noted the various locations of the extra crates. Of course, they were under other crates. Whoever had slipped them aboard must have done it during the regular loading process, probably running their drones right alongside the approved ones.
Didn’t the system check entrance tokens on the drones as they dropped cargo? He was going to have to verify that at Cruithne. If the ship wasn’t scanning security tokens for anyone coming on board like it was supposed to, he could have stowaways all over Sunny Skies.
Pulling himself along the wall, he reached the first set of cargo crates and launched over them, pushing himself along with his good magnetic glove. Most of the crates were standard two-meter squares. Those had been stacked in the middle of the bay, with odd-sized crates along the outer edges.
There were three crates that didn’t belong. The first two were squares buried in the middle of the main stack. From the top of the pile, all he could do was verify their locations and attempt a Link connection with their limited onboard firmware. These crates didn’t appear to be monitoring anything but the dates they had been locked, which was several days prior to their arrival on Sunny Skies. The firmware could send false data, though.
Since he couldn’t see inside, Andy couldn’t do anything with the stowaway crates but mark them as quarantine so Cruithne loaders wouldn’t pull them off with the rest of the cargo.
He found the third crate near the outer edge of the stack, a long flat chest marked with old TSF stencils. Andy floated, staring in surprise because he knew exactly what it was. Out of caution, he still queried the crate and it came back with the information he expected: Armory, High Terra, TSF. He had seen these types of crates thousands of times during mission load out and weapons issue.
Pushing off the crate behind him, he moved down beside the flat crate and activated his mag boots on the bay floor to anchor himself. He knelt and felt at the latches on the front of the crate. It didn’t have a security token and opened when he activated the lock.
The lid lifted on smooth arms, revealing a collection of grenades, pistols and what looked like a multi-mode light combat rifle.
A bead of sweat ran down the middle of Andy’s back. He hadn’t seen this kind of hardware in nearly eleven years, not since Brit had told him she was pregnant and they had decided together to leave the TSF. He held his hands over the rifle, remembering exactly how to activate it, its targeting and firing procedures, even field stripping and light maintenance, all ground into him during the part of his life he’d spent as a soldier, and then as a pilot. It had been most of his life, really. He’d joined the TSF at seventeen to get his neural implant and had left at thirty-three, a father.
Andy realized he was frightened to touch the rifle. Why? He could hold it as easily as he might one of his children.
It wasn’t the collection of weapons that frightened him; it was their presence. How, and why, were they here? Why would someone smuggle this aboard Sunny Skies unless they meant to use them at Cruithne Station?
Andy’s earlier thought about stowaways hit him like a hammer.
Pulling the lid closed, he positioned his hands under the crate until he could leverage himself against the floor and raise it into the air next to him. It was awkward in the zero-g but he had plenty of experience wrestling crates in the bays. Balancing himself with the flat crate, Andy pushed off toward the bay’s access door.
The weapons were going into one of the many hiding places throughout the ship. Then he’d need to do a complete sweep of the non-inhabited area, starting with the engines. If anything happened to the drive systems, they were dead.
At the door, Andy looked back at the looming stack of crates in the room. He would sweep the ship, but he had a feeling that whoever meant to use these weapons could very well be hiding in the two other crates. They’d have to be in some kind of stasis, but it was possible. The onboard system could be hiding their true function.
In an ideal world, he would have drones to move the crates inside the bay. But he didn’t, which meant he had to wait until they arrived at Cruithne—another thirty days from now—to get at the unauthorized crates.
Chapter Five
STELLAR DATE: 07.25.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Sunny Skies
REGION: Approaching Asteroid Belt, Jovian Combine
Pausing to catch his breath in the corridor, and figure out the best way to maneuver the crate back up two levels to a storage locker just outside the habitat, Andy found himself staring at its dull gray surface, flooded by memories from the color that used to rule his world.
Some people joined the Terran Space Force just to get the standard neural implant. Andy was one of those people. As a teenager, he’d grown to hate the idea of life without the Link. His father had always promised him that when he was old enough for the implant, the money would be there. Andy should have known that wasn’t true.
Looking back, he didn’t blame his dad. It couldn’t have been easy trying to raise a family in the sprawl of Jerhattan. He had grown up in a town called Summerville, just outside Charleston. Andy’s family lived in a high-rise with its lower three stories sunk in sluggish green water from an overflow of the Summerville river. They were squatters, but he hadn’t known that when he was Tim’s age. He’d loved swimming in the warm water, chasing oil slicks or thin streams of bubbles from cars and low buildings drowned long ago.
His dad, Charles, spent days hustling for basics to keep their mom, Sibine, and little Andy and Jane in clothes and shoes. They were an odd pair, his mom and dad. Even without a Link, his dad had some supernatural ability to read people and deals that went beyond mere information. His mom had been disabled at an early age in an accident she didn’t like to talk about and, Andy realized now, must have been too poor to repair.
Sibine could barely walk but she had a Link, and took it upon herself to become their teacher. His mom taught them practical skills like cooking from scratch, fishing and sewing to repair their clothes. (He recalled vividly the smell of her homemade pickles.) She also taught them history, civics, philosophy, physics and chemistry. His strongest memory of his mother was her medium-distance gaze as she pulled information from her Link to explain one of his obnoxious questions.
Sure, he’d had his intermittent access to the Link network through various terminals and public connections when he could steal time, but it wasn’t anything like having the world’s knowledge at the edge of his thoughts, removing the need to memorize anything. Maybe that was why some childhood memories
stood out so starkly. They were the pillars of his mind.
He also remembered the first time he realized someone was speaking down to his father for not having a Link. Andy might have been nine or ten, old enough to start paying attention to how adults talked to each other.
They’d been in a convenience store and the woman behind the counter had expected payment via credit connection. His dad had offered to pay cash.
Now, Andy understood that his dad had been trying to offer the cash before the auto transaction link tried and failed. Charlie hadn’t been fast enough.
The pale woman had squinted at his dad and then snorted a laugh.
“You’re dumb, aren’t you?” she asked.
‘Dumb’ meant a lot of things to the local poor back then. Mainly it was a throw-back to when a person really was blind and mute. Not having the Link might as well have been those things.
He remembered the barest instant of a flat, angry expression touching his father’s face, before his lips spread in a broad smile, showing his naturally good teeth, something the woman lacked.
“Smart enough to see how lovely you are,” he had said, in a way that actually sounded like he was complimenting the woman. Charlie pulled a hand through his hair and leaned forward, blue eyes flashing, and set the bills on the counter. “I like to keep my business local,” he said, voice warm. “Cash good for you?”
The woman had stared for a second, then nodded and took the bills.
“Keep the change,” his dad had said, still smiling warmly.
Without a Link, his father was present in a way that most people weren’t. He also liked to say that he was fine with his own memory and didn’t want to rely on the Network to know what to think about something.
Andy had heard all that but he’d never forgotten the woman’s look of superiority. When he was old enough for the operation, he’d repeatedly asked his dad when they were going to make the appointment—until Charlie had finally admitted there wasn’t any money. Andy had started looking for other options immediately.
Lyssa's Dream - A Hard Science Fiction AI Adventure (The Sentience Wars - Origins Book 1) Page 3