Excelsior

by Jasper T. Scott

  Alexander stopped the recording and played it back to watch, trying to imagine how Catalina would react when she saw it. She’d cry when she saw how sad he looked and sounded. She’d also probably throw something at her holoscreen when she got to the part about him giving her permission to move on. That part made him wince, but it had to be said. Maybe she wouldn’t like to hear it now, but in five years or ten… it might just ease her conscience. He meant what he’d said about waiting for her, though. If he hadn’t cheated in the last ten years that he’d spent in OCS and guarding Earth from orbit, then he wasn’t about to give into temptation now. Besides, if their love was meant to last, it would, but not if he preemptively sabotaged it.

  Alexander sighed and sent his recording to Hayes. Just as he pressed send he heard the door chime. Probably Korbin, he thought.

  “Come in!” he said, gesturing for the door to open.

  As it slid open, McAdams appeared standing there. She took a few steps forward, crossing the threshold. “Hello, Captain,” she said, smiling brokenly at him and swaying on her feet.

  Alexander took one look at her and hurried to assist. She looked terrible. She may as well have written damsel in distress on her forehead.

  “What’s wrong, Lieutenant?” He could smell the liquor on her breath as he drew near. I should have set a two-drink limit, he thought. “Come, sit down,” he said, taking her by the arm to guide her through his office to the attached sitting room in his quarters.

  She stumbled and fell against him. Before he realized what was happening, her lips smacked straight into his, wet and cold, and tasting like martini. He pushed her away a second later.

  “Lieutenant! What do you think you’re doing?”

  McAdams had a dreamy look on her face, but it vanished promptly with his rebuke. “I—I thought—” she shook her head. “Never mind. I’m sorry, sir!” she replied, saluting awkwardly and turning to leave. Alexander watched her stumble toward the door, his eyes wide with shock.

  “Hold on, McAdams. Not so fast.”

  She stopped, and reluctantly turned back to face him. “Sir?”

  “What is it exactly that you thought?”

  “That you were flirting, sir.”

  Was I? He wondered as a frown hardened his lips. “I’m sorry if I gave you that impression, Lieutenant. I was just being friendly.”

  “Yes, sir. I apologize, sir,” McAdams replied, hiding behind a blank expression. “May I go, sir?”

  “Where’s your metabolizer?”

  “I… lost it.”

  “Go get another one from storage on Blue Deck and get some sleep. Also, I want you to schedule a meeting with Commander Korbin. We’re all struggling to cope, but there are some things you can do to make that easier. Above all, stay positive, and don’t forget to send a message to your family via Lieutenant Hayes. You read the mission brief?”

  McAdams nodded.

  That depressing news was probably what had brought her to his office in the first place. Maybe she’d thought he would be equally depressed from writing the brief. “Dismissed, Lieutenant,” Alexander said.

  “Yes, sir,” McAdams replied, saluting once more.

  Alexander watched her go. He chided himself for noticing the provocative way her hips swayed as she left. His manhood rebuked him for turning her away, but his heart and mind gave a silent cheer.

  With a sigh, he made a swiping gesture to shut the door, and then he turned and headed for his quarters. It was time to get cleaned up and hit the rack for a few hours’ sleep.

  He’d need to be back on the bridge soon to see if Earth had responded to their probe, and then it would be off to the G-tanks and seventy days of forced rest. Come to think of it, that was probably what had pushed McAdams over the edge of proper conduct and into his arms. There was a sizable risk that some of them either wouldn’t wake from the coma, or that something would happen to them and their ship while they were traveling through the wormhole. That was enough to make anyone behave recklessly, let alone a born gener like her, who’d grown up knowing that the only way she could die was by some unforeseen accident.

  Alexander breezed through his sitting room and sleeping area to the attached wash station. He was just about to peel out of his combat suit (finally!) when his comm band vibrated against his wrist and trilled at him. He raised the band to eye level and accepted the call.

  Lieutenant Davorian’s face appeared projected above the band. He’d taken over from Williams as the Officer of the Deck (OOD) so that Williams could join the latter half of the wake being held in the lounge. “Sir,” Davorian said.

  Alexander nodded to him. “Is something wrong, Lieutenant?”

  “I’ve been reviewing the mission logs, sir. There’s something you need to see.”

  “I’ll be right there,” Alexander replied, already heading for the exit.

  After just a few minutes Alexander was clinging to the ladder beside the helm, some twenty feet above the bridge deck. Davorian pointed to a few lines of a system diagnostic report that he had brought up on the ship’s main holo display.

  “What am I looking at, Davorian?”

  “You remember the faulty thruster controls that made us leave Orbital One at greater than regulation rate?”

  Alexander nodded.

  “I’ve isolated the cause. Someone altered the ship’s engine code.”

  “What? How did they do that?”

  “They included it as part of a firmware update. You see those two lines? They’re not supposed to be there. Based on the code, I’d say the intention wasn’t to destroy the ship, just cripple it with competing thrust vectors. That didn’t happen because I caught the problem early and reset the entire navigation system to the last known safe settings.”

  “So someone tried to sabotage the Lincoln.”

  “That, or it was a serious oversight.”

  “Who’s in charge of firmware updates for the nav systems?”

  “The chief engineer.”

  “McAdams,” Alexander said, his eyes widening suddenly.

  Chapter 6

  “So my new chief engineer is a spy. Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “Not necessarily. She isn’t supposed to write the code, but she does have to give it a final check. She might have missed seeing the problem.”

  “What are the odds of that?”

  “With an experienced chief, it’s not likely, but she’s new and she’s a junior lieutenant, so it’s a definite possibility. Someone might have simply taken advantage of her inexperience.”

  “So if we have a saboteur on board, it could be any one of the ship’s engineers.”

  “Or someone else with the security clearance to make ad-hoc changes to the ship’s code.”

  “Like who?”

  “You. Commander Korbin. Me. Anyone else on the bridge.”

  “No one else had the necessary clearance?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “When was that firmware update initiated?”

  “About an hour before launch.”

  “And who was on board at the time?”

  “Everyone but you, sir.”

  Alexander blew out a breath. “Great.”

  “What do we do?”

  “Well, we don’t want the saboteur to know we’re on to him.”

  “Or her,” Davorian replied.

  McAdams. It was tempting to blame the gener, but statistically she was a lot less likely to be involved in deviant behavior. Unless she was a Confederate spy, in which case it made plenty of sense. Confederates were all geners to begin with, so it would explain why one of them was hanging out on his ship in the first place.

  “Right—or her,” Alexander agreed. “We’re going to have to lay a trap.”

  “How’s that, sir?”

  “Opportunity. Give the saboteur the perfect chance to do something else, but this time make sure we’re watching for it.”

  “What makes you think they’ll try again?”


  “Now that the whole crew knows we’re going to spend the trip in G-tanks, the only way to stop us from reaching our destination is to try something again before the doc turns us into sleeping goldfish.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “Have McAdams join Lieutenant Hayes on the bridge for the next watch. That’s in…” Alexander checked the time on his comm band. “Fifteen minutes. Tell her to get her entire engineering staff on that shift with her. Tell her I want her to check over all the Lincoln’s critical systems before we hop in the tanks. Meanwhile, you’re going to set up the Lincoln to block and sandbox any further software or firmware updates until we’ve both had a chance to look at them.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Keep me posted.”

  “I will, sir.”

  As Alexander descended the access ladder back to the bridge deck, he thought about the possibility that Davorian was the saboteur. If so, leaving him alone at the helm was a very bad idea. Then again, if he were the saboteur, he hardly needed to feed bad code to the engines in order to cripple the ship. He could have done that long ago just by misfiring the engines.

  That meant he could scratch two off the suspect list—himself (obviously), and Davorian. No, three, he decided. Williams had the first watch after setting Condition Green. Left all alone on the bridge for a couple hours, he could have destroyed the ship by now, too. That left the remaining five members of the bridge crew and a dozen engineers as suspects.

  Alexander frowned. It was hard to suspect any of them when he knew them all so well, but there were a bunch of recent transfers—McAdams being one of them, and no doubt some of the enlisted engineers, too. He gestured for the bridge doors to open and then walked back down to his quarters.

  He headed for his wash station once more, sighing as he went. As if they didn’t have enough concerns what with traveling through a wormhole to another galaxy, open war back on Earth, and the survival of the human race resting on a successful outcome of their mission.

  Alexander thought about all of that as he stripped out of his combat suit, shaved, and showered. The more he thought about it, the less sense it made. Why would the Confederacy even want to sabotage their mission? Not like their survival wasn’t equally at stake. It would make a whole lot more sense for them to simply steal information from the mission and use it for their own purposes.

  Who else might have had a motive to stop the Lincoln from reaching Wonderland?

  Assuming the purpose of that code wasn’t to destroy the ship, but just to damage it, then any one of the crew would have had a good motive. They’d all been chosen to make sure they had strong ties to Earth, so none of them really wanted to go. Hell, even he had a good motive for that kind of sabotage.

  Hopefully whoever it was would fall into the trap he’d laid, but if they weren’t trying to destroy the Lincoln, then sabotaging the engines wasn’t a good idea now that they were so far from Earth and flying down a wormhole with who-knew-what kinds of navigational hazards.

  A part of him couldn’t help but hope whoever it was would find some way to turn the ship around, but the duty-bound captain in him won out and forced him to think about alternative forms of sabotage.

  What would force them to turn the ship around?

  Something Commander Korbin had said after the battle came to mind. She’d been talking about the supplies they’d lost and that they had no choice but to turn around. That was before she or anyone else had realized just how critical those supplies were. Now that the crew knew they going to be gone for years, supplies were more important than ever. Especially food.

  “Shit!” Alexander said. He brought his comm band up to his lips and said[ Security handled by CMAA and MAA force: https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20101010182225AAB2IXv ]

  [Chief-master-at-arms. Security officers have the MAA rate.], “Call Lieutenant Stone.” As the ship’s Chief Master at Arms, Stone was in charge of shipboard security and his master-at-arms force (MAA force).

  “Sir?” Stone answered.

  “Get a detail of MAs down to the storage decks. I want at least one man on each deck. Have them check over the supplies and make sure everything is in order.”

  “Yes, sir… What should I tell them to look for?”

  Alexander debated telling Stone anything. He was also a suspect, but if he was responsible for the sabotage then even ordering him to post guards on the supply decks would be enough warning for him to lie low. Likewise for his MAs. “Tell them to look for sabotage, but keep quiet about it. I don’t want the whole ship to know what we’re up to.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Soon as you’re done, meet me in the CIC.”

  “Not the bridge?”

  “No.” He didn’t want McAdams or her engineers to find out what he and Stone were doing, just in case his hunch was wrong and they were busy sabotaging the ship’s engines again.

  “See you there, Captain,” Stone replied.

  Alexander nodded. “See you.”

  *

  A dim blue glow radiated from the CIC’s main holo display, which was currently displaying seven separate holo feeds from the MAs’ helmet cams. It was hard to watch all the feeds at once, since he and Lieutenant Stone were the only ones in the CIC.

  The room’s PA system crackled. “Ramos here. I think I might have something…”

  “What is it, Ramos?” Stone asked.

  Alexander’s heart thudded in his chest as he scanned the associated feed. He squinted at the small window, trying to pick out details. Then Stone enlarged the feed, temporarily minimizing the others. The petty officer who’d reported was looking down the sights of his rifle, the barrel swinging back and forth as he scanned everything in sight, checking points of cover where there might be an ambush waiting. Every now and then his viewpoint strayed to one of the food crates at the back of the room, dead ahead. Alexander could see that the lid was cracked open. That had to have happened after the battle around Lewis Station or else the Lincoln’s combat maneuvers would have distributed the contents of the crate all around the room by now.

  Ramos crept up to that crate and reached out to lift the lid.

  “Watch for booby-traps,” Stone warned.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Moving slower now, the pilot pressed his helmet to the crack between the lid and the crate and activated his helmet lamp to get a better look.

  Alexander caught a glimpse of a group of metallic cylinders lying beside each other at the top of the crate. There didn’t appear to be any wires running between the lid of the crate and those cylinders, so it hadn’t been rigged to blow when opened.

  Withdrawing, the MA lifted the lid and peered in again for a closer look.

  Stone took a sharp breath. “Those are hypervelocity rounds. They’re all wired together with detcord.”

  “It’s a bomb, sir,” Ramos confirmed.

  “Whoever planted it had to have access to munitions storage on red deck,” Alexander decided.

  “Think you can disarm it?” Stone asked.

  “I don’t know. Let me take a look…”

  “Careful.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Alexander watched as Ramos removed the lid and scanned the contents of the crate. There was no timer, at least not one that they could see, but there was a comm band wired to the munitions.

  “Looks like its rigged for remote detonation,” Ramos said. “I should be able to disable it by turning off the comm unit.”

  “Assuming it’s not booby-trapped,” Alexander said. “Hold on, Ramos.” Turning to Stone he said, “We might be able to find out who the saboteur is if we leave that comm unit on.”

  “Time is critical here, Captain,” Stone said. “We don’t know when our saboteur is going to detonate.”

  “No, but we can’t afford to detonate his bomb for him, either. Even if it’s not rigged to blow, he could just plant another one later.”