by Dan Thompson
“That Winner gal makes a mean omelet,” he said. “You should get one in the morning.”
Carlos pushed back from navigation. “All yours, Mr. Mosley.”
Richard took the seat and made a minor adjustment to the display. “All right. I think I’m all set.”
Michael looked around at the lonely bridge. Carlos had already headed aft. “You’re sure you can handle it?”
“Yeah, I’ve pulled night shifts like this before. Vivian can bring me my lunch and dinner from the galley, and when I hit the head, the tachyon capture rates on her display will alert me to anything significant before it’s a problem.”
“Then you have the conn, Mr. Mosley. I’ll see you in the morning.”
He thought about hitting the gym himself but decided he would rather try for the morning. He wandered back to his cabin and sat down on the bed. If the sail profiles required additional clearance, he could probably open them from the computer in his office. Failing that, he could probably open them up via the security around Malcolm’s Chessman files. But then there was also the stack of Peter’s journals waiting for him in his closet, not to mention the mysteries of the anonymous locksmith and why Winner really wanted the gym to herself.
Before he could decide on any one avenue to pursue, he had stretched out flat and fallen asleep in his uniform on top of his blankets. It had been a long day.
Hector Reyes fashioned a second earplug out of toilet paper and shoved it into his right ear. Technically, this interfered with his ability to hear any alarms at the environmental station, but he could still see all the displays. Plus, if he had to listen to that damned sitar music for another hour, he was going to drill out his own eardrums.
At least it was not as bad as the banjo.
Hector had as much appreciation for the classics of the twenty-second and twenty-third centuries as anyone, but these were never meant to be played on the banjo. It was like trying to adapt Teral’s Eighth Chorale to a set of drums and a tuba.
He had tried to ask politely. He had suggested that Dieter play something more modern, perhaps one of the folk songs popularized by Ragier and Malanie over in Catai. That had been all right for a while, but then he tried what he called a bluegrass reinterpretation of it, and that apparently meant even more banjo.
At least the sitar notes had some richness. The banjo was twang, twang, and more twang.
He checked over the displays again. Everything was in the green, and all the filters were at 90 percent or better. He strained to listen through his earplugs, and heard what he believed was a mandolin, which despite Dieter’s fervent efforts, was never meant to be a jazz instrument. The first thing he was buying when he got to the shops on Rapoen was a set of isolation headphones.
Michael leaned forward to look at the picture of Elsa Watkins on the monitor. She did not look much like he remembered her. She was younger, of course, as this was a picture from early in the Caspian war, around the time Michael was born. But she was also a redhead, with green eyes and a cute rounded nose. The Elsa he had known as Captain Jana Lewis had had darker skin, jet black hair and a more pointed nose. Malcolm’s caption below the picture read “Elsa Watkins, original photo, 3379. Pupil offset 6.3cm. Iris-Maxilla 3.2cm, Zygomatic radial 6cm. All other measurements fungible by current surgery techniques.”
He sat back and shook his head. He realized he was not going to spot Elsa by her passport photo, but he had never even thought to consider surgical alteration. Yet the more he thought about it, the more he realized how necessary it must have been. Certainly there were billions of people within the Confederacy to hide among, but facial recognition software was fairly standard. Iris patterns were sometimes used for identification as well, but appropriate contact lenses could fool those systems.
He looked around his little office and through the door into his cabin. The crate of Peter’s journals was still sitting in his closet, untouched. One of Malcolm’s old uniforms still hung there as well. Was this how Malcolm had spent all those days in transit, building and reviewing his “chess” files?
It was almost noon on the ship’s clock, so he shut down the terminal and walked to the bridge. Carlos was sitting at the navigation console, humming an odd little tune.
“Winner’s serving lunch,” he said. “Do you want me to cover for you?”
“I’d like that very much, Captain.”
Michael sat at the left-hand pilot’s station and pulled up the navigation displays as Carlos departed. They were two days out of Taschin now, and shipboard life had settled into a comfortable routine. Carlos had learned the feel of the Sophie well enough that Michael had become redundant on the bridge. He had spent some of his time down in engineering talking shop with Dieter, but after a while, Dieter’s discordant sitar notes drove him out.
He had spent most of this morning going over Malcolm’s files, and he had finally found the access for enabling the mysterious sail profiles he had found that first day. In truth, it had been active all the time, doing background analysis on all the incoming navigation data but at a far greater level of detail than navigators would ever need. The only thing that had not been enabled was the bridge display.
He had to log in with his own account to activate it on the pilot’s console, but there was nothing active at the moment. He scanned back through the log and found a pair of entries from two hours before. The most recent was a wake detection, much like what he had seen aboard the Blue Jaguar. Ships riding along the tachyon winds left a disturbance behind, a little like an ocean-bound ship leaving its mark in the water it traversed. It listed the ship as a twin-sail and gave the heading and approximate distance as a few light-days. It was all consistent with a freighter moving on the Nasar-Renier route.
The other log entry was an upwind sail detection. This was not something he had seen on the Jaguar. According to Malcolm’s files, it was an analysis of the wind shadow of some other tachyon sail. Sails absorbed or altered the path of a few tachyons as part of their function, and according to a very densely written report in his files, it was possible to spot these changes against the background pattern of wind and thereby discern information about the sail.
Given how chaotic the winds had always looked to Michael, he had his doubts that this was even feasible, but here was the evidence. Two minutes before the wake detection, there were a pair of readings as this freighter moved across the leading and trailing edges of a tachyon disturbance from even further upwind. Again, it noted it as a twin-sail configuration, but it also noted its course and speed, and gave it a 38-percent chance of being the Hamilton James.
Still, both of these reports were theoretically impossible. At least, that was the official civilian view, but it was clear from his time on the Jaguar that wake detections were a common tool of predatory pirates, and he assumed, the Navy as well. This must have been what Commander Collins had meant when he said the Sophie was special.
“I do believe you are needed in the galley, skipper.”
Michael jumped at the voice and turned to see Carlos coming onto the bridge with a half-eaten sandwich in his left hand. “Sorry, what?”
Carlos sat back at his console. “Hector is in serious need of rescue.”
“Rescue?”
“You’ll see. Besides,” he said, waving his hand at the display before him, “I’ve got this.”
Michael stood. How could someone need to be rescued in the galley? Better to find out sooner rather than later. He made his way aft and found the galley with only Winner, Hector, and one of the passengers. It was Mr. Parker, the salesman, and he was talking to Hector.
“And it’s not merely lymphatic calcification,” the man said, his hands waving about with even more excitement than his voice held. “Renal, biliary, even pancreatic. Our latest hydrosonic pulse scalpel can break up accretion nodules before they’re even visible to other, more conventional imaging systems.”
Hector glanced at Michael with pleading eyes. “That’s very interesting, but—”
As the salesman went on, Michael understood exactly what Carlos had meant by Hector needing to be rescued. He put on his best command voice and said, “Mr. Reyes, there was a brief nitrogen spike on the portside sensor a few minutes ago. Can you check it out?”
“Certainly, Captain,” Hector said, rising from his seat. “My apologies, Mr. Parker, but duty calls.”
“Oh, but of course,” he replied. “Perhaps we can continue this at dinner.”
Hector smiled weakly. “Yes, perhaps.”
Michael turned away before he could get pulled in to whatever the conversation had been. Winner was on the kitchen side of the buffet line holding an empty plate in readiness. “What will it be, Captain? We have ham, turkey, a little roast beef, four cheeses, and two kinds of rolls.”
He looked it over. “I think I’ll finish off that roast beef, and throw on some pepper jack, and if you have it, a little horseradish.”
“Horseradish, sir?”
“Why not?”
She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “I have a very spicy casserole coming for dinner, and I wanted to get everyone’s stomachs settled first.”
“I think I’ll risk it.”
She turned to get it from the cabinet. “No problem, sir. Enjoy the heartburn.”
He took the sandwich, saw Mr. Parker still at the table reviewing some notes, and decided to make a quick exit. “I’ll be in my office,” he said to no one in particular.
Once there, he made quick work of the sandwich and glanced around for what to do next. He could return to Malcolm’s chess files, but he had spent all morning on them. He spotted the crate of Peter’s journals in his cabin’s closet, but he was not ready to dig into those yet.
But it did make him wonder about his mystery locksmith. That was not the kind of thing that would have escaped Malcolm’s notice. Given all the pranks Michael had attempted growing up, he was convinced Malcolm had been omniscient, or at the very least, all-seeing. In fact, he suddenly suspected, Malcolm truly had been all-seeing, at least on board the Sophie.
He opened a search window on his terminal. “Ship security, surveillance.”
It was the third item listed, but it was there: video logs. He opened it up and found sixteen video feeds. One showed him sitting in his office. He turned his head, trying to point it toward wherever the camera was. The only thing in that area was a small CO2 sensor. It had a horizontal grill and a small dark window beneath it. The window showed a dim green light to the left. He knew from one rather harrowing experience that if that light turned red, they were in trouble.
But the light only used about half of the space. He stepped around his desk and angled his monitor so he could still see the array of videos. He reached out toward the sensor and waved his hand, seeing it grow to fill the screen in the usual fish-eye proportions.
Sitting back at his desk, he turned his monitor back to where it could not be seen from the open door. On other feeds, he could see the crew and passengers moving about, but the one with his own image was the one he concentrated on. Near the visual edge of that feed he could almost see the corner that the crate had been in. Surely anyone working on it would have been visible.
He pulled up the properties of the feed and looked for an archive. Sure enough, it was dumping into a log. He opened that log and rewound through the time index, looking for the time of their liftoff two days before, but it stopped abruptly twenty-four hours earlier. He shook his head and cursed silently. If only he had thought to check the day before, he could have watched it happen. He made a mental note to look into storing a longer window of video, but let it go for now.
The other fifteen feeds were scattered throughout the ship, including three that appeared more than anything to be attached to the landing gear tucked safely away in the undercarriage of the ship. The rest were all common and crew areas, ranging from the bridge and engineering stations to the galley and crew lounge. There was only one cabin under surveillance, and that was Dieter Merkel’s, which had once been his own cabin. Even in the relative dark, he could make out the shapes.
Malcolm’s omniscient nature now seemed less mysterious. Every time he had lied about studying or stayed up late watching a movie, the truth had been there for Malcolm to see. He shook his head at it. Given how often that had happened, he was surprised he had been called on it so infrequently.
He glanced back at the live videos. Carlos, Dieter, and Hector were all at their stations. Two of their passengers were in the lounge playing cards, while Mr. Parker was still in the galley reading his own papers. Winner was moving down the hall from her cabin and turning toward the gym.
Michael opened the gym’s feed to full-screen. It was a little grainy at that size, but it was still a good view of the entire room. He had been wondering why she really needed the gym to herself, and now it looked like he was going to find out. He leaned forward in anticipation, but as soon as she secured the door and took off her uniform jacket, he started feeling guilty.
“I wouldn’t want a man walking in on me,” she had said.
He saw her in her tank top with that taut, wiry build and started wondering if she worked out in the nude or something. He shook his head and reached forward to turn it off, but hesitated as she walked right toward the camera. She stopped directly in front of it and pulled something out of her pants pocket. It looked like a playing card, and as it expanded to fill the screen he saw it was the queen of spades. It shifted a little to the right and up, and then it remained still, filling and darkening the entire display.
He looked up at his own CO2 sensor and realized what she had done. She had tucked the card into the horizontal grill, holding the card in place. On a lark, he pulled up the log and rewound to the previous afternoon. It was there as well, with her pulling it out only when she had put her jacket back on.
He shook his head. Whatever she was up to in there, she was showing more smarts than he had his entire life on board. He had not spotted the camera until he was watching himself through it. She must have seen it the first day.
Chapter 9
“A good captain should be seen by his crew as all-seeing, all-knowing, and all-powerful, but always remember that you are, in fact, blind, ignorant, and weak.” – Malcolm Fletcher
MICHAEL HEADED TO BED after dinner, leaving Carlos to hand off the watch to Richard. He would make sure to get up early in the morning to check in with his exec before the shift change. For tonight, he decided it was time to take a look at Peter’s journals.
There were eighteen in all. The first was dated back in the late ’60s and went on until 3371. He skimmed through it but did not read much in any detail. Peter had been attending the academy on Callista Prime. There were complaints about professors, excitement about summer internships on various S&W ships, a few girlfriends, but nothing serious. All in all, he gave the impression of someone coasting through without much thought to plans or consequences.
Michael shook his head. He was trying to imagine Peter as the responsible captain Hans had made him out to be, but he seemed like a foolish kid. Michael was three years younger than the Peter that had penned these pages, and he was already captaining his own ship. He understood that responsibility. Meanwhile, Peter was merely a rich kid with a trust fund.
He set that one down and picked up the final book, but it cut off four months before Peter’s death. He was disappointed, but he could hardly be surprised. Peter must have been shipping these off to secure storage as he completed them. Even if he had not, Michael knew he was never going to find the entry that read “The Reilly is opening fire, and now I’m dead.”
He flipped through this one, scanning but not really reading. There were port calls, minor struggles with his crew, a few words about Sophia and a surprising number about t
he infant Michael. He ignored those as they mostly dealt with babbling and diaper accidents. Then he saw Malcolm’s name. The entry was dated September 18, 3380, six months before Peter’s death.
We had another run-in with Malcolm Fletcher on station yesterday. I suppose he was dropping off cargo and rearming the Hammerhead. Every time I see him these days it’s a little frightening. He’s never far from the front, and I thought Arvin was still far enough back to be safe. It was only for a few minutes at the dockmaster’s office, but he passed on a warning. Some of the Navy’s privateers have gone rogue—a few even signing up with the other side. I’d heard rumors before, but I have to grant Malcolm this. If he says it’s true, it’s true.
I wanted to grab him for dinner and get more information. The Navy has gotten so tightlipped about the status of the war, it’s hard to know what’s actually happening or what ports to avoid. I figure Malcolm is out in the thick of it, and he’ll know.
Sophia said no, so that pretty much killed it. She said it wasn’t fair to Malcolm. She said it was too painful. I feel for the guy, too, but he seems to be handling it like a grownup, and he’s got information we need. I don’t know. Maybe he said something to her once. Maybe he hurt her. He doesn’t seem like the type, but I wasn’t there.
I tried to catch him this morning on my own, but the Hammerhead pulled out overnight, no destination listed. We’ve got contracted cargo for Ballison, so that’s where we’re headed next, but sometimes I think we ought to pull out of this entire sector and head for the other side of the Gemini basin. I don’t mean only the Kaiser. I mean the entire S&W fleet. It’s one thing for me to risk it, but I’ve got crew just trying to make a living. At the very least I should ship Sophia and the kid home, but she won’t hear of it.
What’s stopping me? I hate to say it, but a lot of it is that I don’t want to go back to Callista and tell Dad I chickened out. He pulled his runs through the Wakimi insurgency, and to hear him tell it, he never blinked. I wish Hans were here. He’d know what to do, or at the very least, I could face Dad with him at my side.