“You mean the paranoia that didn’t have a command-control interface between my datachips and the actual navigation system?” she asked dryly.
“Well, they’ve buttoned that up now,” Rainer admitted with a sly grin. He handed her the new tablets. “These should mount and play nice with the sandbox, and the navigation clone hooks into the engine sandbox. The sandbox is already set up to shard and distribute computing load. Just point it at these.”
She didn’t take the tablets. “This is more than avoiding red tape. We both know that Command will have a kitten if you give me access to your system, even if you’re claiming it’s a walled garden.”
“Still don’t trust me?”
“I trust you exactly zero.”
“Try for at least a few percent.”
“This makes me trust you even less, if that is possible. You’re up to something and this isn’t about red tape.”
Rainer pushed the tablets towards her. “Don’t pull CPU cycles and nobody will come asking.”
She had nothing better to do except sit around and wait to go insane, and if Bennett found out that Rainer’s modifications had a fatal flaw, he’d be all over it in the worst, most non-productive way possible. She didn’t trust Rainer, but she trusted Bennett to be a complete tool, so that meant siding with Rainer.
Like it or not, she was on NightPiercer now, so her fate was tied to the ship’s fate. She’d also been on the shuttle and was likely the only qualified pilot outside of Rainer who could parse raw nav and telemetry data.
If there was something wrong with NightPiercer’s powerplants then she wanted to help solve the mystery. Being able to do something had been why she’d chosen to be a navigator.
She may also find proof Rainer had tried to kill her.
And if he hadn’t…?
Slowly, she accepted the tablets.
“Obviously, we won’t be discussing this outside these quarters,” Rainer said.
“Obviously.”
“I need the report as soon as possible. Don’t send it over the network and don’t mention it over comms.”
“And you wonder why I don’t trust you.”
“I can leave you to watching boring documentaries and juggling my socks.”
She held the tablets out of range. “Hell no. If your engines are the problem and will blow us all to hell, I’m going to find it. But I won’t promise I won’t rat you out to Command. If they’re flawed, you’re not getting a chance to quietly fix it. I’m going straight to Captain Tsu.”
“As long as you don’t go straight to Bennett, be my guest,” Rainer said with a smirk.
“You may have doomed all of us, Rainer,” she said angrily. “And for what? Was it worth it? Did you really have to just piss all over your grandfather’s design to prove who was the big wolf? Those engines aren’t pushing us through the galaxy. There’s nowhere to go except back to Earth.”
Without another word he took his own tablets and left the quarters.
“Not sorry I hit a nerve,” she said darkly. She brewed herself a cup of tea and plunked herself down to go through the myriad of files.
Which were woefully disorganized.
Eventually, she made sense of his file naming conventions and how he had everything lumped together, and found his engineering logs and notes. This was his sandbox, so it made sense that it had never really been intended for anyone else to see or use.
He had Hade’s original designs for the original engines, and Hade’s original logs, including exhaustive documents on the development of the powerplants and design of the ship.
“Whoa,” she said, resisting the urge to get sucked into the logs. Rainer’s own notes were scrawled in elegant, precise handwriting and interspersed with beautifully drawn designs and sketches. They might have been pretty, but they were a scattered mess.
“Show me why you modified these engines. What was the goal?” she asked herself, digging around to find some kind of design proposal. The Captain had to have sanctioned something like this.
She located several drafts of Rainer’s presentation, and the goal had been simple: increased efficiency and more stable current flow and powerstate, reducing wear and tear on the ship’s circuitry and fiber. The increased efficiency meant more available power to drive fabrication of necessary parts and even provided a marginal increase to the gravity system, increasing the ship’s artificial gravity from .91G to .93G. A tiny, but incredibly important improvement. Increased efficiency, speed, acceleration, reliability, parts fabrication? Those were nice. But getting an additional .02 of gravity? That was life-changing.
They’d known since the 1970s that prolonged spaceflight changed the human body, and not for the better. Even a few weeks in space had effects. As artificial gravity tech had developed, the observed changes minimized the closer they got to 1.0G. But long-term AG studies hadn’t been possible before Exodus, and Generation Zero discovered within a few years that complex Earth life knew the difference between AG and the real thing. The human body could survive in artificial gravity, but with major caveats.
NightPiercer had launched at .91G, and another ship, the Haven, had launched at .75G. Within a generation Haven had become a ghost ship as the crew died of aortic ruptures, bone fractures, brain aneurysms, spinal cord ruptures, retinal tears and bleeding and outright disintegration, chronic muscle tears, and a strange concussion syndrome caused by overproduction of cerebral-spinal fluid. Other ships had reported similar problems but at lesser severity.
There had been no correlation with how the gravity was generated. The more AG there was, the less deleterious the effects, but the effects remained.
Even adjusting for the radiation everyone received, the only explanation was the body somehow knew the gravity wasn’t “real” and some critical detail was missing. Intense physical exercise at least five days out of seven (and better six out of seven) was absolutely necessary, making any injury or illness or pregnancy risky. Average life expectancy had dropped from nearly eighty-five to sixty, with death usually coming by some kind of AG-related cardiovascular failure or radiation-related cancer. Being immobile or dehydrated could turn deadly within days unless extreme, and intense, steps were taken.
Less than .824G seemed to be fatal within fifteen years. Rainer figuring out a way to get another .02 increased survivability by years.
No wonder they’d been willing to let him do the upgrades.
The improvements, even in concept, had loaded the starboard front spars for reasons Rainer had not exactly been able to tease out. His engine designs redistributed hull stress, but not in an unacceptable way, except it did seem to put more pressure on that one particular part of the ship when the generator disc was at low rotation and during initial acceleration.
There was a flight simulation program to test the shuttle’s flight characteristics. She loaded up the navigation data and set the simulation to run off her tablets. Then she turned on a documentary while the little chimera chewed on the numbers for two hours.
Except the simulation crashed right when the shuttle crashed.
“Yeah, we were out of our flight envelope.” So much for thinking that would just work. The programs weren’t that clever. The data off the shuttle was likely incomplete as well, or screwed up, because so many sensors had been exposed to the void of space or set on fire or snapped. She pulled up the massive dump of Telemetry data and tried to find whatever data Telemetry had had on the shuttle as it’d come in.
Very little, as it turned out. Telemetry wasn’t in the business of traffic control, but watching for objects that might collide and keeping track of Jupiter’s temperamental behavior. But what there was did match (more or less) what she’d seen, except it could not confirm the angle of the shuttle.
“Still working?” Rainer asked as he came in the door many hours later.
“I’m trying to figure out why the simulator can’t parse eighteen seconds of the flight,” she said, distracted by reading through his logs.
“It can’t?”
“Crashes.”
“Crashes out of memory?”
“Out of envelope.” She knew how to handle a stupid memory overflow. “I can run the simulation until the point of explosion, then restart it eighteen seconds later with data it doesn’t like but will tolerate. I’ve got to bridge that eighteen seconds. The computer insists we should be dead.”
“That’s why I need your superior organic brain to figure out this failure mode.”
She sighed. Rainer could forgo the awkward flattery. “I’m working on it. Go shower. I’m ready for dinner and to get out of my fish bowl.”
0/0 = Undefined
She tucked the tablets under her arm. Not a chance she was leaving them lying around for just anyone to find, even in Rainer’s quarters. She brushed her palm over the tight roll of hair against her skull in a nervous, practiced habit.
The officer’s deck was extremely quiet, but as she walked towards the lift, another body emerged from one of the cabins. A man, close-cut black hair, wearing four stripes on his shoulders.
“Lachesis,” he greeted her as she froze.
“Captain,” she said, struggling to make her tongue work.
Senior staff and command staff always made her nervous. Old habits of stay out of sight, don’t act like an idiot, don’t let them hear you growl. Be perfect, be flawless.
Tsu noted the three tablets she was carrying, all of them chained together by the gizmo, and how tightly she held them. “Where are you headed?”
“Down to Engineering,” she said, throat drying out. There was really no reason for her to be going to Engineering that she could share with the Captain.
He held out a hand. “May I see it?”
“The—this?” She pulled at the gizmo.
“Yes.”
She plucked the daisy chain free and handed it to him, heart beating hard. He turned it over and examined it with the eye of an Engineer. “So I’m told it lets you chain several tablets together to combine their processing power.”
“Yes.”
“How’d you come by it? It’s not part of standard Ark kit, is it? Because if it is, I’d like to get the schematics for it. It could be incredibly useful.”
“It was, um, just something one of the junior engineers in Tech put together in his spare time,” she explained.
“And how’d you come to possess it? Sounds like something he could have sold for a lot of credits.”
She pursed her lips. She’d already told Bennett, and apparently the First Officer hadn’t told the Captain. She sighed in defeat and admitted, “I won it. In a poker game.”
“What did you have to wager?” Tsu handed it back to her.
“My hair.” And it’d also been a game of strip poker, and she’d been down to the last of her underthings. But Tsu didn’t need to know that part. She’d wagered her hair to keep her panties on. It’d been a stupid bet, but she’d wanted the dongle and figured she could regrow her hair.
Tsu gestured for her to walk with him. She fell in next to him, grateful he was a human and couldn’t smell how nervous she was. “Are you and Rainer settling in after your rough start?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ll take that as no.”
“The Commander has a particular set of charms. He’s something of an acquired taste, I imagine.”
“You’ve been keeping a very low profile, we’ve noticed.”
“It seemed prudent,” she said.
They entered the lift. Tsu pressed two buttons: one for Engineering on Deck 70, the other for the bridge on Deck 12. He said, “Quite.”
A sideways look at the Captain revealed nothing. On Ark she’d never seen the Captain outside of telecasts or at a great distance. On NightPiercer she was making strained small talk.
“I suppose I made a very bad first impression,” she said as the lift descended.
“And second.”
“That one wasn’t pure spectacle in the marketplace at least,” she said, knowing she should shut up, but NightPiercer’s paranoia was stupid and she wasn’t taking the blame for all of it. Gribbons had beat the crap out of her. Maybe he hadn’t enjoyed it, but he sure as hell didn’t feel bad about it.
They really thought she would have plunged the entire damn ship into Jupiter and killed thousands of people. She wasn’t a monster.
“Rumors are also circulating about it,” Tsu said. “A number of alarms were triggered. Impossible to keep quiet.”
“It was a gross misunderstanding,” she said as she stared at the wall of the lift and prayed for Deck 12 to arrive sooner than later.
Tsu didn’t reply. Deck 12 arrived, and the doors slid open. “Good day, Lachesis.”
“Captain.”
Deck 70 finally arrived, and she found her way to Rainer’s bay. The massive bay was one of several shuttle bays and cargo bays, but this one was dedicated to the two modified shuttles and massive works of fabrication. One modified shuttle sat in its spot ready to go back out. A few large tanks with crews crawling over them, someone else welding something, large items hanging on massive hooks from the ceiling, people scurrying back and forth and shouting directions at each other.
The shuttle was in a number more pieces than she remembered. The stripped down hull lay sadly on its side, its battered tail raised wearily to the ceiling, while many parts lay on tarps on the bay floor. The tailplane had been gutted and the power core removed, but the two sad nacelles and cracked disc were still there.
Rainer worked in the carcass, wearing a butcher’s heavy leather apron, sleeves rolled up and wearing thick leather gloves as he yanked at something. Three assistants were on hand, cataloging each piece and taking notes and helping him wrench and yank and move things around.
One of the assistants jumped in front of her before she got within twenty feet of the carcass. “You can’t be in here!”
“Excuse me?” she asked the stocky wolf waving his hands in her face.
“You can’t be in here.” He pointed back the way she’d come. “You can’t just wander into this bay... whoever you are.” He looked her up and down, looking for clues on her blank uniform as to who she was. “Go tell whoever sent you to make an appointment and send someone else with short hair. No long hair allowed. Not even bound up!”
“I—”
“Go,” he ordered.
She groaned inwardly and raised her voice, “Rainer, call off your hound!”
Half a dozen heads whipped around. A few people cursed. Rainer yanked out of the belly of the shuttle.
“You need to leave!” The man grabbed her and pushed.
She shoved back. He grabbed her harder, and she snarled and saw a flash of fear in his eyes as she shoved him off her.
“Stop!” Rainer’s voice froze everyone as they bolted towards her like a pack prepared to smash her into the ground.
Lachesis growled, braced for the pile-on.
Rainer pulled off his heavy leather gloves and clapped them into one hand. “Lachesis. What brings you to my humble kingdom?”
“Ohhh shit,” the woman on the right said to the guy who had been trying to wrestle her.
She held up the three tablets, too angry to form coherent words.
“Everyone,” Rainer said. “This is my wife, Lachesis. Lachesis, these are some of my core crew. I trust them to not annoy me. Although they’re doing a good job annoying you.”
“They are protective, aren’t they,” she said darkly.
“They know I hate to be bothered when I’m working. And that I have a very strict policy on long hair in my section. No exceptions. You, however, may be the exception. There always has to be an exception that proves the rule. This is Simone, Juan, and that is Xav.”
Xav wiggled his fingers at her. “Hi.”
“Lachesis was Crèche on Ark, and her dying art is Navigation. She’s also a qualified pilot. Did an excellent job landing the shuttle as you can see,” he glanced at the wreckage, “as in, we survived.”
> “Dying Art? More like Dead Art on this ship,” she said, unable to not sound bitter. “And that’s the last shuttle I probably ever piloted.”
“But it was a great landing,” Xav offered hopefully, peering up at her and eyeing the tattoo on her neck. He did not have a tattoo.
She growled at him. He cowered behind Simone.
“You were Crèche?” Simone asked, clearly knowing the Commander’s extensive history with Crèche.
“I’m not especially interested in making small talk. But yes, Livestock. Sheep. Before I got packed off as some concubine to bear the Commander’s spawn if I don’t kill him first.”
“Her bad mood is my fault,” Rainer told the crew, not hiding a grin. “She’s angry at me. It has nothing to do with you. Unless it does have something to do with Xav?”
Of course it had nothing to do with Xav. She’d already forgotten the wolf existed. “You wanted to know when I had something to talk about. Well, here I am. Or do you want it to wait?”
“Let’s talk.” He nodded his head to the side to indicate they should go stand by the carcass and pulled off his comm. “Everyone go find something else to do for ten minutes.”
She pulled off her comm as well. He held out his hand, took it, and then tossed both of them to Simone. The three crewmen moved off to go do something else involving sweeping up scraps and organizing tools.
She moved off with him, distressed at how close he was, the way he looked down at her and waited, quiet and still. He said, voice low, “I’m sorry about Xav. They do throw people out. Otherwise I’d be bothered every five minutes by everyone’s not-emergencies.”
“I’m getting used to everyone on this ship kicking me around,” she said. NightPiercer was her new pack, and she was low in the order. Being the Commander’s wife offered only as much protection as Rainer could wield. It was so old-fashioned! But she didn’t dare say that, and she didn’t dare talk about pack hierarchy or pecking order. Not allowed, even if Rainer would understand her point.
“You do have a knack for putting yourself into the middle of a fight,” Rainer said. Then, he added, “I admire the trait.”
NightPiercer Page 17