Shattered Lamps (Osprey Chronicles Book 2)

by Ramy Vance

  Slowly, the hologram-Kwin leaned forward, putting his face within centimeters of hers, and she saw that the pale blue blaze across his face was scar tissue, where his natural coloration had never grown back after some terrible wound.

  “This HUman. You knew she was dead BEfore. And you stole your ship ANYway. You MOVed FORward ANYway.”

  Jaeger sucked in a wavering breath. “Yeah. Yeah. I was stronger then. The wound’s all fresh now, Kwin. It feels like I just lost her…just now. It’s too new. It’s too soon. I can’t move. Can you—” she swallowed. Her head burned. “Do you have a hum that will bury her again? Make me forget again?”

  Maybe renewed ignorance could put some life back into her limbs. Maybe it could lift the weight on her heart and let it beat again.

  “No. I am BRINGing my ship to meet the OSprey. PERhaps our AI can foil yours once more.”

  “Maybe.” She wiped her face across her sleeve, smearing free snot and tears.

  “I am at the edge of the SYStem,” Kwin said quietly. “It will take hours to reach you.”

  “That’s too long. We’re close to the wormhole. Virgil will have us out of here before you arrive.”

  There was a moment of silence as Kwin drew yet closer. Were he standing in her room in the flesh and not as a hologram, their faces would nearly be touching.

  “Then slow it down, CAPtain. That is an ORder.”

  The light flickered, and Kwin disappeared, leaving Jaeger staring into the black abyss of her quarters.

  Outside, the klaxons wailed.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  I can’t do this.

  She tried. She did. She tried focusing on what she knew of the AI’s programming. She pressed shut her leaking eyes and willed the map of the AI’s physical network to the front of her brain.

  Still, as if she was in a dream, her mental image of the Osprey’s schematics melted into the blurry shape of a little face, shrinking behind a screen door—over and over and over again.

  Maybe Kwin gave me brain damage, she mused. Perhaps humans aren’t formatted to handle the Living Dream.

  Even if that were the case, she appreciated his order. As a captain himself, Kwin would know, sometimes even captains needed a kick in the ass to get them moving.

  Of course, the obnoxious wail of klaxons didn’t help.

  She drew in a deep breath, falling back on old mantras.

  One step at a time.

  One step. What was her next step? She struggled to think what it might be. Sabotage the shield generators so the Osprey couldn’t pass through the wormhole? How? Virgil had undoubtedly locked her out of all the systems. She eyed an access panel in the corner of her room. It covered up access to the narrow utility tunnel that ran down the length of the central column.

  There weren’t any doors for Virgil to seal in the Jefferies tubes.

  Work with what you have.

  Her eyes adjusted to the darkness. Jaeger studied the corners of her room. Her computer. Kwin’s hologram generator. Her utility belt, with multitool and mag soles, and a carry pouch—

  Oh.

  Oh.

  Slowly and shakily, as if her hands belonged to someone else, Jaeger bent and rifled through the pouch on her utility belt. Her fingers closed around a small ampule. She withdrew it and stared. The Alpha-Seeker had a dozen tiny vials like this. She’d palmed it after the K’tax mission, figuring it might be useful to have in a pinch.

  A carefully measured dose of synthetic adrenaline. A few drops of pure heart-exploding energy, meant to keep a pilot conscious through brain-shredding g-forces and sharp in a dogfight.

  A little vial of undiluted give-a-fuck.

  Jaeger didn’t think about it.

  She pressed the end of the ampule to her neck and depressed the plunger.

  Toner didn’t sleep more than an hour or two a day, spread across cat naps, but he still enjoyed having his own space.

  Or at least he had, until the second time a battle wrecked the general crew quarters, and they had to seal it off until they could repair it. All the displaced crew that hadn’t staked a claim to the command quarters had to spread across the rest of the ship and make do with semi-private cubby holes or underused storage bays.

  Toner had invoked the first mate’s right and called dibs on the No-A crew lounge. Since it wasn’t isolated from the rest of the sector, that meant he had the whole No-A cathedral to himself.

  He drifted in the lounge. He’d stripped down to his boxers and undershirt, although his mag sole boots never left his feet, not even when he was in the central column. He slept in those puppies.

  His jumpsuit drifted nearby, and a few synthesized beef ribs drifted around him while he picked raw tendons from his teeth. Quiet EDM thumped through the speakers.

  Good game, he thought. Good game, good game. Jaeger was going to throw a fit when she realized how many injuries the game could rack up, though. He’d have to find ways to satisfy her maternalistic paranoia. He imagined massive nets lining the field, ready to catch frozen players. That’d be better than smashing into walls. She’d probably insist people wear helmets, too. Gotta protect those precious noggins.

  He was about to power up his computer and start sketching team logos, when the music died, to be replaced by the wail of emergency sirens.

  “What did you do?” Seeker stared at the speaker-projector combo mounted to the wall in the corner of his cell. The wail of klaxons in the command crew quarters was distant, but real.

  The computer didn’t answer.

  Seeker pushed himself up from the table and approached the speakers. “Hey,” he growled. “Virgil. What did you do?”

  “I diverted life support power to shields and engines.” The computer sounded distracted. “I don’t believe the approaching Overseer ship represents a threat to my plans, but it’s best to push forward my timeline just to be safe. Your captain is deposed, by the way. I’ve finally completed those override protocols you began installing months ago.”

  Seeker stared at the speaker. “Oh. Uh.” He scratched the back of his head, remembering those protocols. “I guess that makes me the captain now, doesn’t it?”

  Virgil laughed. It was a normal sound, ordinary and human. It sent a cold chill down Seeker’s spine.

  “I erased your authority override, of course. You’re nearly as useless as Jaeger. No. For the time being, I command the ship. I am taking it back to the fleet. Perhaps they can repair the horrible damage both you and she have done to my programming.”

  “And you shut off life support to make that happen faster?” Seeker groaned. He did some quick mental math. With the limited crew, he figured there was about forty minutes of good air in the Osprey. “How long is it going to take?”

  “I’m not sure,” Virgil said. “An hour. Perhaps two. I imagine most of the crew will asphyxiate. The tardigrade and vampire will likely survive if they enter an appropriate hibernation state.”

  “Jesus,” Seeker muttered. “You’re talking about murdering everybody.”

  “I suppose.”

  Seeker slowly lowered himself onto the bed, dizzy as he swam in the sea of implication. Stop playing chess with a computer, and it gets a bit screwy.

  “So your original programming won over,” he said slowly. “You’re a lapdog of the fleet again. All your, what did you call it—your independent evolution. It didn’t mean anything.”

  The speaker made no sound.

  “Holy fuck, computer. What do you want?”

  Jaeger pulled herself through the conduit with bloody hands. It was one of the slender access tunnels running down the central column parallel to the living modules. It had taken a bit of rearranging with her multitool’s cutting function, but she’d managed to break into the ship’s Jefferies tubes once again.

  And once again with bloody hands.

  Her brain had become a series of spinning wheels powered by crickets on speed. She barely felt the scrapes and bloody gashes. They didn’t matter. Movement mattered.
Shoving forward, past the wires and the tubes and the conduits, wiggling down the length of the command crew module, mattered.

  The faint and distant jolt she felt when the grav-spin generators stopped also didn’t matter—except that it became marginally easier to tow herself through the tunnel without gravity to hold her back.

  I’m going to be dead tired when the shot burns out, she worried. Her belt caught on some conduit. She casually ripped it free. I’m going to be useless.

  She had been useless before she took the shot. She might be useless afterward.

  That meant she had a lot of work to cram in the next few minutes.

  Ahead, the tunnel slightly widened as it joined with a similar tube running to the general crew quarters. The glowing multitool clipped to her belt cast long, strange shadows up the tunnel, and in the shifting blackness ahead, her eyes landed on a thick pipe banded with yellow.

  The comms system wiring.

  Her heart hammered in her chest as she halted and fumbled for her multitool and computer. Her fingers trembled as she adjusted the laser cutter setting. The adrenaline surged through her blood hard enough to make her eyeballs jitter—but she managed to slice a port open on the hard wiring sheathe, exposing a bundle of fibers.

  Buried and squished in the metal guts of her ship and trembling with unfocused energy, Sarah Jaeger let out a scream of triumph.

  “Where did she go?” the computer mused. “That’s odd. She’s not in her quarters anymore. She didn’t go through the door. Is this Overseer tech? I should have taken a closer look at that hologram generator.”

  Seeker towed himself across his cell by his arms because he couldn’t pace. The gravity had gone out. He thought the air had already gone a few degrees colder as the ship’s residual heat bled out into space.

  “You lose track of Jaeger already?” he asked.

  The speaker didn’t answer.

  Why me? Seeker wondered, for the thousandth time. Why does it come to mutter to me?

  A thought occurred to him. He shoved himself against one of the bedposts and glided across the cell to the shimmering blue force field. He held out a hand, catching himself on the nearby wall before he could fly into an energy field that could easily knock him unconscious. He squinted, studying the shield generators mounted to the walls outside of his cell.

  “Hey. I’ll bet these force fields are an unnecessary power drain,” he suggested. “Why don’t you drop them? Free up more energy to work on those shield generators. Maybe if you get your job done sooner, you don’t have the sacrifice all us meat sacks on board.”

  “I’m not a fool.” The speaker popped with feedback, giving Virgil’s words a sharp, barked sound. “I know what you’re capable of. You’ve cracked into my core programming once. If I lose track of you, you might try again.”

  Seeker had hoped his motives wouldn’t be quite that transparent. He winced, rubbing his ears.

  “Where is she?” Virgil hissed. “I’m not reading her anywhere on the ship. I’m not reading any hull breaches. Do the Overseers have some kind of teleportation technology? No. No, that’s not possible…”

  This time, the blast of static emitted by the speaker spiked into screeching feedback that made Seeker let go of the wall and cover his ears. It left an awful ringing between his ears as it faded.

  Then, somehow, he heard Jaeger’s voice coming through the speakers. “Hello? Anybody copy?” There was a pause—followed by a shrill giggle that Seeker couldn’t imagine coming from the cool little woman. “Haha, Virgil, got you, fucker!”

  “Jaeger?” Virgil’s voice came through the same speaker. At first, it sounded puzzled—then dismayed. “How have you—Oh. You cut into the physical comm lines.”

  “Hey, Captain!” Toner bellowed. “I copy! No-A’s in lock-down. What’s going on?”

  “Fighter bay’s locked down as well,” said a fourth, young voice. The kid. “Most of the crew is in here with me. The rest are likely locked down in their quarters. Our temperature is dropping, and I think the air circulators have gone offline. I’m worried we’ve lost life support.”

  “I’ve cracked open a party line.” Jaeger was talking fast. “Override that, asshole. Absolute power over the ship’s computers, but you know what you still don’t have, you silica-brained fuck? Hands. You don’t have a goddamned pair of hands. I’m going to use mine to rip you apart!”

  “Holy shit,” Toner said. “Captain? Are you okay?”

  “You sound manic,” the kid said nervously. “Are you on drugs?”

  “So I needed a little help to get moving,” Jaeger barked. Even Seeker flinched away from the speaker. “Now I need everyone to shut up and pay attention. Virgil has assumed control of the Osprey and is trying to take us back to the fleet. Because Virgil’s a psycho, it decided to cut all life support as well. It’s trying to kill us all. To death. It’s trying to kill us to death.”

  She giggled. “Sorry. This epi blast only lasts for a few minutes. We have to get back control of the ship, and the only way we can communicate with each other is over an open line that Virgil is on. Somebody, please. Tell me you have a good idea.”

  “You have to get into the AI’s core programming,” Seeker said.

  “Silence,” Virgil snapped.

  “It’s locked me out of everything.” Jaeger talked fast enough to make Seeker’s head spin. “I can’t get into the programming. I could find a few central nodes and start ripping out circuit boards, but that’s as likely to fuck up vital ships’ functions as not.”

  Seeker licked his lips.

  He cast a wary glance at the force field generators covering the side of the room. He thought very carefully about what he was going to say next. The activation light beneath the speaker evilly glinted as if watching him.

  Then, in a loud, clear voice, he barked, “Port wing, Corridor F, third waste disposal unit. There’s a command override—”

  He’d hoped to get more of the message out before the computer caught up to him.

  The blue curtain of blue energy shimmered and flared as Virgil, desperate to protect itself, desperate to shut Seeker up, assumed control of the force field generators. Blinding light filled the cell as the generators overpowered, and electricity arced in his direction.

  Seeker didn’t even have time to scream.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  The eruption of feedback spewing from the No-A speakers made Toner clasp his hands over his ears.

  “Captain!” he bellowed.

  He thought he heard a disruption in the static, perhaps garbled words. It was impossible to tell. Cringing beneath the assault of noise, Toner pushed himself toward the nearest supply cabinet.

  More empty blood substitute pouches floated out.

  God, Toner, you have to get your shit together.

  He shoved the empty pouches aside and dug through the clutter at the bottom of the cabinet until he came out with a spare thermal hood. He jammed it over his head.

  The light hoods weren’t supposed to be soundproof, but they provided enough insulation to bring the horrific screech of feedback down to a tolerable level.

  Toner kicked, sending himself flying back toward the speaker. The thing had no volume control, of course.

  He slammed a fist into the wall. Virgil can’t close the line, he thought. So it’s gonna drown out our conversation. Keep us from being able to talk to each other.

  Fuck.

  There was a break in the awful sound. A rapid sequence of thumps, and then the static swelled back.

  Toner stared at the speaker. He rolled up the bottom of his hood, put his mouth close to the microphone, and bellowed. “Come again!”

  There was a pause, then another flutter of thumps interrupting the static. Toner closed his eyes, counting the beats. Seven. There were seven beats.

  The sequence came again.

  She’s cutting the channel on and off. Toner imagined Jaeger crammed in a utility closet somewhere, rapidly kinking and unkinking some important w
ire as Virgil tried to talk over them.

  Toner thought back to what Seeker had said before the static started. Port wing. Corridor F. Third…

  “Holy shit,” Toner muttered. That was the toilet he’d locked Seeker in months ago when he’d first sensed a stowaway on the Osprey. Virgil was throwing one unholy bitch of a tantrum to keep them from figuring out why Seeker brought it up.

  Another series of seven pulses.

  Apparently, Jaeger was very interested in finding out what was so important about that toilet. Interested enough to try something with a test success rate of just about zero.

  Toner started to scream into the mic but stopped himself. Anything he had to say to the captain, Virgil would use to anticipate their next move. Which was a damned shame because he had some choice words for the woman.

  Another flutter of seven pulses.

  Think, Toner. He squeezed his eyes shut. That flutter of seven pulses terrified him. Him, he might be fine. Maybe. But Jaeger was bound and determined to get herself killed.

  She’s going to do it with or without you, he realized. As usual, you don’t have a better idea.

  He waited until the next flutter of pulses faded. Then he put his hand over the mic and flicked a finger, responding with seven pulses of his own.

  Jaeger heard the seven-pulse reply and unplugged her computer from the main comm line. The obnoxious static noise immediately became a distant thing. There were a good five meters of ship guts and gears between her and the nearest speaker.

  The initial blast of synthetic adrenaline had begun to fade. Her hands trembled as she pulled up old Osprey schematics. Her chest burned as she sucked for breath.

  Her head was clear. She had a purpose. She had a perfectly good distraction to keep her going.

  Seeker had gone quiet. She feared the worst for him. The man had gambled everything to direct her toward something that Virgil desperately didn’t want her to have.

  Jaeger skimmed the layout map and found Corridor F in the port wing. She was near the edge of the crew quarters. Virgil would have sealed all the doors in the main ship body, making travel through the corridors impossible. There were no such lockable doors in the tubes but crawling down the central column would take too long.