“Sounds dirty.”
She rolled her eyes.
“The point is, he’s improved it, sir.”
I stared at my chief of engineering and tried to think.
“That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever,” I finally announced.
“This saboteur makes no sense, sir.”
She sounded tired. I checked my watch. It was late. Or extremely early; whichever way you wanted to look at it. And if Camille had been finding it difficult to sleep as much as I had for the past few nights, then she would be dead on her feet.
“Get some rest, Chief,” I said, stifling my own yawn.
“You too, sir.”
“I need it. Not sure if I’ll get it, but…”
“We’ll both count sheep.”
I smiled at her; wanting nothing more than to have her lying beside me and doing just that. Counting sheep.
I almost said it. I almost offered to help wear her out in another manner, in a way that would leave her sated and floating and blissfully sleepy.
But I was on the bridge, surrounded by the third shift flight crew. And she was in engineering, surrounded by her team.
“Perhaps we’ll think of something by morning,” I offered.
“I’ll certainly try, Captain.”
“Me too.”
She looked at me; her face shining brightly on the viewscreen. Tendrils of soft blonde hair framing her delicate bones. Her cheeks pale, her lips rosy. Those soulful brown eyes staring right into me.
“Goodnight, sir,” she said.
“Goodnight, Camille,” I offered.
The screen went blank, and the bridge appeared darker all of a sudden. I stretched, stood from my seat, and bid my farewells to the flight deck.
I’d made it as far as the door to my quarters when the klaxon went off.
The orange alert on the gel floor was instantly replaced with red.
I turned on my heel and ran back to the bridge. It looked like neither of us would be counting sheep.
Fifteen
I Really Needed To Read A Tale Of Two Cities
Camille
The explosion had taken out Launch Bay Charlie. We had a hole the size of a passenger shuttlecraft in the side of our vessel. The captain and I stood side by side in the observation room; separated from the vacuum of space by ten-inch thick polymer and glass.
“Why the launch bay?” the captain said.
“He knows we’ve come within long-range scans of the Sector Two Fleet,” I offered.
“And suspects we’ll use a shuttle to reach them?” he queried.
I shrugged. “It’s possible he thinks we could, especially if the Chariot is dead in the water.”
The captain scowled at the scene through the viewing pane.
“Lieutenant Hammersmith?” he called, without taking his disgruntled gaze off the launch bay.
“Yes, sir,” she replied from over our shoulders.
“Increase security to all essential areas, and include patrols on Decks A through E.”
“Yes, sir,” she spun to a console and started issuing commands.
“The habitats, sir?” I asked.
He looked distraught but quickly quashed it. His face returning to that inscrutable mask.
“We don’t have enough men,” he said simply.
I couldn’t imagine what was going through his mind, right now. How much guilt he would be feeling. But securing the essential services onboard always came before the civilians. Even though the added security was ultimately for them.
His wrist comm chimed. He glanced at it and made a growling sound. I’m not sure I had very heard Noah Vaughan make that sound before.
“I have to take this,” he said, indicating the comm. “The mayor.”
I offered an understanding smile.
“You’ve got this, Chief?” he asked, nodding towards the launch bay. Or what was left of it.
“We’ll get it secured, sir.”
“And the diagnostics? You’re still running them elsewhere?”
“I’ve pared them back, sir. But as we’re spooled down right now, it might be a good time to run some of them in the background.”
“Only those that don’t affect security and getting this launch bay secure,” he commanded.
I gave him a look that hopefully conveyed the right message. He sighed.
“I know,” he said. “Something about grandmothers and eggs?”
“Yes, sir.”
He took one last long look at me and then said, “Take care, Chief.” He was gone before I could reply.
“How do you want to do this, Chief?” MacBride said off to the side.
“Let’s see how accommodating the Chariot’s commuter is, shall we?”
“I think I’d rather the bots handle the repairs than get suited up and go in there.”
“Where’s your sense of adventure, Lieutenant?” I asked. “This is what we’ve trained for.”
“Forgive me, Chief. But I trained as a motorcycle mechanic, initially. It was only after the sun started frying us that I decided a more specialist training might be required.”
“No Harleys on a space-faring vessel?”
“Main boost thrust doesn’t much look like an internal combustion engine, ma’am.”
“No,” I agreed. “It doesn’t.” I looked out into the bay, past the scorched gel flooring and the twisted alloy bulkheads, and took in the debris floating in space. Stars winked at us through the hole in the side of the Chariot. I could see one of the other vessels in our fleet some distance away, but I couldn’t make out which one it was.
I didn’t envy the captain his job in explaining this to the rest of the fleet. We weren’t an Anderson Universal craft. We hadn’t started out as the lead vessel. Some of those in the fleet still resented us taking on that role.
Hell, even I resented it a little.
“OK,” I said. “Fire up the bots, MacBride. I’ll have a chat with the Chariot.”
“Aye-aye, Chief.” He took off to the hallway outside the launch bay, heading towards the access terminal for the closest repair bots.
I cracked my knuckles and stared down at the console before me.
“Let’s see if you’re feeling chatty,” I muttered.
I entered a command to access the launch bay controls. The launch bay hadn’t just been physically attacked; it had also had its programming corrupted. A mess of ones and zeros stared back at me. I started detangling the mess, slowly and methodically piecing it back into something recognisable. The saboteur had done a brilliant job of making this launch bay inoperable.
I could seal the hole. Make it airtight again. I could even, eventually, have the shuttle repaired. But using this launch bay as it was designed to be used was not looking likely. Without the correct access commands, the doors wouldn’t open when required. The containment field that kept atmosphere inside the launch bay while the shuttles came and went through the bay doors would continue to malfunction, as well. In essence, the launch bay had just become a cargo bay, with limited access in or out.
I never did like being thwarted by machinery.
A particularly stubborn line of code eluded me for several long minutes, and then as if the sun had dawned, it blossomed into a flower before my eyes. Command lines converging and separating, petals spreading, pollen floating away and touching on everything around it.
I watched, stunned, as the Chariot’s computer corrected the corrupted code and turned it into something truly magnificent.
Parameters, I wrote on the command line.
a wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other
I scowled at the Chariot’s reply. The saboteur’s reply? Just what was he trying to tell me? That I was a mystery or that he was a secret? I shook my head and flexed my fingers, then entered another command.
Origin. Sometimes a blunt code was a good code.
i hope you care to be reca
lled to life?
Huh.
The repair bots entered the launch bay. I watched them set to work on the hull breach and bulkhead damage through the viewing pane.
Was the Chariot referring to repairing the launch bay and bringing it back to life? Only one way to find out, I supposed.
Define parameters, I wrote on the command line beneath its question.
I might like the fact that the computer was fixing the launch bay, but I sure as hell did not trust it.
courage, dear miss!
courage!
business!
the worst will be over in a moment
I pulled back from the console. The Chariot was telling me to be patient and to trust it. I would have laughed if the situation hadn’t been so bizarre.
Clarify, I wrote next.
don’t be afraid to hear me
don’t shrink away from anything i say
Well, that was a little on the nose, wasn’t it? I stared at the words on the screen and lamented the captain had been right. I really needed to read A Tale of Two Cities. The saboteur was determined to quote from that book. To use Dickens as a conduit in which to speak. It made little sense, but we’d already established that he was psychopathic.
I glanced up at the repair bots; they’d returned atmosphere to the launch bay by reinstating the containment field. A containment field I’d been certain we couldn’t have repaired if we had tried.
I looked back down at the console and the last message from the saboteur.
Why destroy something so completely that repair of it is unlikely and then go and fix it yourself?
I stared at the words on the screen for a very long time until something shifted inside.
The Dickens quotes weren’t from the saboteur.
The Chariot had come to life.
Sixteen
End Programme
Noah
“Say that again, Chief?” I said, staring up at Camille from my command chair.
She’d burst onto the bridge with fire glinting in her eyes, the words spilling off her tongue even before she’d saluted me.
“The saboteur is not Dickens, sir,” she said. “I mean to say; it’s the Chariot which is quoting A Tale of Two Cities at us, not the person sabotaging our vessel.”
“And you arrived at this conclusion, how?”
“Why blow the launch bay up and then fix it? Why corrupt the air filtration programme and then rewrite it? Why improve on my trojan code?”
I held a hand up to stall her; Camille could get very carried away sometimes.
“We’ve been over this already,” I said. “He’s testing us. Looking for weaknesses to exploit.”
“I don’t think so, sir,” she said, shaking her head and making her hair fly. “I’ve been back over my notes and observations, and that first line of code I found is not from the book.”
“So, that would support the theory that he’s human, not robotic.”
“Again, sir, I beg to differ.”
“Differ away, then, Chief,” I said, resigned to the discussion now.
“That original code - the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few - happened while we were being fried by the solar flare.” While Vela was, in any case. I didn’t correct her. I was fairly certain she’d chosen her words with care. “Once we escaped Earth’s atmosphere and were no longer in danger of any further unexpected flares, the computer started quoting A Tale of Two Cities.”
“Still not seeing the argument here, Chief.”
She sighed as if I was being obtuse. I wasn’t. Well, not intentionally. But I still didn’t understand her reasoning here.
“The error in the Chariot’s coding happened during the solar flare,” she said. “The message originated prior to the damage. The quotes are a consequence of the damage. I think the computer received some sort of…electrical jolt or something, that’s, well, that looks like it might have…made the computer…come alive?”
The last was said in a question.
I stared at her. She bit her bottom lip. Hardly my genius engineer standing before me. She knew there were holes in her argument. Huge fucking gaping holes.
“Captain,” she said, almost pleading. “It’s not the saboteur.”
I sucked in a fortifying breath of air.
“OK,” I said calmly. “Say you’re right and the Chariot was damaged during the solar flare. Computers don’t come alive, Camille. They just don’t.”
“Well, maybe not alive; that’s a poor choice of words, really.” She waved her hand in the air between us as if to wipe that phrase away; clean the slate; pretend she hadn’t delved out of engineering parameters and into some sort of fantasy story.
“Yes,” I said in agreement, watching her closely.
“And code can’t simply rewrite itself,” she added. “I know this.” Yes, she did, but I got the feeling she was trying to convince herself of that fact. “However, the messages aren’t random; they have meaning. I held a conversation with it.”
“With the Chariot? While it used quotes from a Charles Dickens book?”
I know I sounded doubtful, but damn it! I was. Camille was not acting as the engineer I had come to expect on this. She was reaching for something that simply could not exist.
Why? Was she under that much strain that she was cracking? Had I overlooked something? Should I have stood her down, forced her to rest? We’d both been operating on barely any sleep. I knew I wasn’t the hottest plasma gun in the armoury right now. And Camille had been fixing damage all over the ship since we’d launched, not to mention writing delicate code that held the potential to save ten thousand lives.
No wonder she was losing it.
“He told me to trust him,” she said.
“‘It’, Chief,” I corrected. “If we’re saying the computer is conversing with you, it’s an ‘it’ not a ‘he’. But if we go back to the saboteur as the quoter, then, yes, ‘he’ told you to trust him.”
She blinked at me.
“You don’t believe a word I’m saying,” she announced, sounding stunned.
“I’m trying here, Chief,” I replied carefully.
“You doubt my sanity right now,” she added, beginning to sound irritated.
“We’re all lacking sleep,” I said quietly.
She erupted into a torrent of French that made even my ears pink. The entire flight deck stopped what it was doing and just stared at her; mouths open, eyes wide. Eventually, she ran out of steam. But the damage had been done.
“Commander Rey,” I said, feeling sick. “Stand down.”
Her face paled.
“Captain…I…”
Damn it, Camille! Why did you have to do this on the bridge? Why not my ready room where I could protect you?
“Report to the medbay,” I said, my voice thick. “You’re relieved of duty for the next twenty-four hours. Mandatory rest period starting now.”
“Yes, Captain,” she said, sounding small. She took a step away and then stopped.
Her shoulders were hunched, her head was hanging. She sucked in a breath of air and turned to look at me. I saw the betrayal in her eyes; the knowledge that I had let her down.
“Will you at least consider it?” she asked quietly.
“I always consider everything you say, Chief,” I offered. “Always.”
She smiled; it damn near broke my heart at how tragic it looked. And then she left the bridge, security standing outside in the hall, thankfully none the wiser. That would really have put the cat amongst the pigeons if they’d been in here and insisted on escorting her to Jerry.
I leaned back in my chair and stared at nothing for a few minutes, and then I brought up my command console and entered a command to the Chariot.
Identify, I wrote.
It was a last-ditch effort to see if it would “converse”. Camille couldn’t be right about it coming alive; it had to be the saboteur. Or failing that, a second person we had yet to identify.
But who o
n board this ship could write code that Camille described as exquisite?
I rubbed a hand over my face and waited for the computer - the person - to reply.
it had more than once happened that the judge in the black cap pronounced his own doom as certainly as the prisoner’s
Huh? Could that be construed as conversational? It was certainly judgemental. And, strangely, apropos. Was the person quoting Dickens watching us? Watching Camille and me?
Clarify, I typed in next.
we are quite a french house, as well as an english one
He was watching us. And reading my bloody mind, it seemed. And was that an observation regarding Camille’s and my differing opinions? Did he disagree with one of us? With me?
Clarify, I tried again.
answer the questions put to you, and make no remark upon them
Ah, hell. He wouldn’t be pushed into further clarification.
My fingers flew over the keyboard.
Define parameters, I commanded.
i would not ask that word, to save my life
He was conversing with me. Bizarrely, but conversing all the same. Refusing to answer questions he deemed unnecessary. But was it the computer or was it a person?
Directive, I typed.
Just what the hell was his intention here?
the wheels turned so suddenly that they were lucky to save their skins and bones
What. The. Hell? What did that mean? Was he referring to our lucky escape from Earth? Vela’s demise and our survival? It had been close. We’d been lucky. Without Vela’s sacrifice, we wouldn’t be here.
But I still didn’t understand any of this.
Frustrated beyond measure and desperately wanting there to be some truth to the chief’s words - believing she was burnt out was not a welcome thought, despite her unrealistic interpretation of what was happening here - I typed in a line from the book.
Apparent Brightness (The Sector Fleet, Book 2) Page 8