“Of course not.”
“Would there be a time where you might see rape as an effective tool to get what you need?”
“No, but I see what you’re saying.” He pushed himself back into his chair and thought about it for a minute. There was the time he let Quinn threaten that window washer to get answers out of him, but he was a pirate. And he’d like to think it wouldn’t have gone that far.
“Wouldn’t it be more like looking into a window while someone was showering? It’s still an invasion of privacy, but not quite the same thing.”
She tilted her head to the side and stared at him. He knew from her face that she might have picked up on something he’d prefer her not to know. “That’s a fine moral distinction,” she said. “It is valid as long as the person being looked at doesn’t resist. As soon as there’s force involved, it’s a completely different reality. Then it becomes a matter of consent.”
“So, I am assuming this means you won’t do it?”
She locked eyes with him with such intensity that he couldn’t look away. He squirmed in his seat. “No, I didn’t say that,” she said. “I do have a couple people who are capable and would be willing, but I wanted you to understand the magnitude of what you’re asking.”
“I have to know—”
“If you can trust him?”
He nodded. “And if it wasn’t him, we have to figure out who else it could be. If we don’t know who was behind it, we’re not safe out here.”
She got up, walked over to her bag, and pulled out some kind of comm unit. It looked a lot different from any he’d seen in use anywhere. She tapped a message into it and then brought it over and sat it on the table between them.
“It’s a tele-amplifier comm,” she said, answering his unspoken question. “A TAC works like a standard comm transceiver, except that it broadcasts a signal that only telepaths can receive.”
“I’ve never even heard of that,” he said.
“You’d have little need to know about it,” she said. “It’s based on the interface that makes Shan Takhu technology work. We try to keep them extra secure.”
“I’m sure,” he said.
The unit blinked, and she picked it up and held it to her head behind her right ear. Her face looked like she was listening to something, but there was no sound. After almost a minute, she frowned and tossed the TAC across the room into her bag.
“Problem?”
“You’ll be relieved to know it wasn’t him,” she said. “When he came back clear, we went ahead and peeked on everyone.”
“So, who is it?”
“Unfortunately, the problem is that it wasn’t any of your crew.” She looked down at the table. “Or my people either.”
“Then who the frak could it be?”
Looking back up, she made solid eye contact again. He could tell she was serious, and it also felt like she was more than a little frightened. “It looks like we’re not alone out here.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Ethan had spent the last several hours trying to convince himself that there was any other explanation. He sat alone on the ConDeck staring at the sensor images, looking for something they’d missed.
There was nothing but space for several light years in every direction.
When he couldn’t take staring at the empty screens any longer, he paced the corridor for a while before he headed to the engineering decks to kick his thoughts around with Rene.
“Are you absolutely sure it was sabotage?” he said, walking up behind the engineer and startling him.
He’d been sitting and reading something intently, oblivious to the fact that he wasn’t alone. “What? Oh, yah, no doubt.”
“Why?”
Walking over to the main console, he called up a file on the main screen. It was an optic feed from inside the power distribution center of the habitat module. “That’s the access crawlway for the interlink junction to their power distribution node. What you’re seeing is the surveillance feed that goes directly to their engineering console. Everything coming from their reactor goes through that conduit.” He tapped the screen where the junction was just visible as a glowing tube of plasma. A set of schematic diagrams opened on a second screen. Readout values showed for all the critical sensors. They were all green.
“I see it. So, what makes it sabotage and not just a component failure?”
Rene tapped the screen, and the image went into motion. The numbers on the side also began changing. A time index scrolled along the bottom of the image, counting down almost three full minutes as Ethan watched the glow pulsate. It looked typical for a high-power plasma conductor.
Abruptly the image of the plasma quit pulsing and stayed at the same intensity. The screen looked like it had locked up, but the chrono was still ticking off seconds. He glanced at the other readout, and the numbers were still changing. They remained steadily in the green, so everything was still in spec. They showed the PDN was still doing its job. Only one of them flickered briefly into yellow, but it dropped back to the normal range in under a second. Ethan glanced at the engineer to confirm it was significant. Rene nodded.
Almost a minute later, all the indicators on the diagram went red and about half of them dropped to black a split second later as the sensors quit working. Snapping his eyes to the surveillance image, it remained unchanged. It hung that way for almost a full second before it jumped and captured the last of the flash as the conduit blew out. And then it failed as well.
“Was that an optic glitch?” he asked.
“No there’s a slight irregularity on the security line. It looks like the feed was overwritten from an outside source,” Rene said, sliding his finger up from the bottom of the screen to show the signal data from the line. “The override lasted ninety-six seconds.”
“What caused it?”
“Someone didn’t want to be seen while they were doing the deed,” he said. “The anomalous out of spec flash you saw on the sensors was when whoever did it was hands on the conduit.”
“What did they do to it?”
Rene called up another image. “This is a micrographic scan of the remains of the conduit casing itself.” He zoomed in on a section of the fragment until the torn edge filled the screen. It looked scorched and shredded. He pointed at a small area. “If you look here, you can see an area where a cutting laser was used to score the outer surface of the conduit. It wasn’t obvious at first, but there’s linear crystallization that could only be done from the outside, and it has to have been done after the PDN went operational.”
“Why do you say that?
“If it had been a manufacturing defect, it would have blown within minutes of the power coming online. Someone has to have done it and then run like hell. There is no way plasma at 100 kilo-torr pressure would not have ruptured it within a minute.”
Ethan looked back at the system sensor screen and slid the time index back to the moment the readout flashed. Forty-seven seconds before it exploded.
“The joint where the PDN interlink connects to the conduit is the point of highest dynamic pressure,” Rene said. “It was also the only place that a single point would disable their whole system. It was a very sophisticated takedown, but there is no doubt from the crystallization that it was intentional.”
“That’s nothing you could do with a handheld cutting laser is it?”
He shook his head. “The only thing we’ve got on the ship with that kind of dexterity is Marti’s Gendyne automech. Its fine manipulator arm has that level of resolution, but even then, it would be tough.”
“My Gendyne was offline in its stowage rack,” the AA said, sounding almost defensive. “I was inhabiting my Humanform body and observing the training session on the middeck.”
“Nobody’s accusing you,” Ethan said.
“It wouldn’t have been possible anyway,” Rene said. “The crawlway is too small to get Marti’s Gendyne body in there. It’s even cramped for a small human.”
“So
, someone got in, did an impossible cutting job, and then somehow out before the plasma exploded the junction and killed them.”
The engineer nodded. “That pretty much sums it up.”
Ethan walked over to the railing overlooking the lower levels of the engine room. He turned around and leaned back against it. “What if I suggested that it wasn’t anybody on either ship that did it?”
“You’d be hard-pressed to convince me that it wasn’t somebody on this ship,” he said, shutting the screens down and shaking his head.
“Kai suggested we're not alone.”
“Not alone?” He walked over and put his hands on the railing beside the captain. “I think it’s more likely she’s putting sidewise ideas in your head to keep you from going cold and turning around.”
“Maybe you’re right, but I have to ask, is it possible we’ve been boarded?
“Are you out of your frakking mind?” He snorted, dismissing the idea out of hand. “It’s not possible to jump onto a moving target traveling at 5000 times the speed of light.”
“She knows it wasn’t any of our crew that did it,” he said.
“Right, unless she’s psychic, there’s no way she could know that,” Rene said. “Look I know they’re plussers—”
“You do?”
He shrugged. “I asked Ammo what pushed Kaycee sidewise, and she told me about them. But this isn’t a tri-vid horror story. They aren’t mind reading monsters bent on human domination.”
“You’re right, but just humor me,” he said. “Can you find anything that might correlate to when the incident occurred? Something, unusual maybe?”
“Unusual is an understatement.” He shook his head. It was clear that he didn’t believe there was any way it could happen, and no amount of discussion would convince him otherwise.
“Just run an analysis of all the ships’ systems around the time when it happened and see if you can find anything that correlates.”
He laughed. “All ship systems? That’s no small task. It would help to know what you want me to look for, other than the fantasies of a hyperactive imagination.”
Ethan sighed. “I don’t know. Anything irregular.”
“I guess I’ve got time to be thorough, we’re a month from nowhere, and I don’t have much else to do unless something else breaks.”
“I’m sure Kai’s got some talent in her crew you can tap if you want the help.”
The engineer’s eyes got wide, and he shook his head. “I sure as hell don’t want to hang out with the hormone crowd. I have the last good air in the ship, thank you very much. I intend to keep it that way, too.”
“Have it your way.” The captain laughed but as he turned to leave, he noticed a hammock hanging between two bulkheads.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“It has to be there somewhere,” Ethan muttered as he stared at the sensor display. During the nightshift, Ammo and Marti had come up with several improvements to the system, including something she called wide-base interferometry.
He had no clue how it worked other than that the two ships’ AA had somehow linked their sensor hardware and increased the resolution by orders of magnitude. Where they’d been able to scan ship-scale gravimetric distortions to a range of four light years before, now they were seeing close to eighty. It was stunningly high resolution and would have served even top tier science vessels well.
As soon as he took over the deck and sat down in his chair, he noticed the area of distortion behind the Olympus Dawn had virtually vanished. Marti explained that even though there was still a field wake, the two ships had overlapping fields of view, and that eliminated their blind spot.
Unfortunately, that was where he’d expected the saboteur’s ship to be hiding, and when they finally got a good view of it, there was nothing there.
He was debating whether he should be disappointed or relieved when Rene came in grinning. He looked exhausted.
“What’s up?” Ethan asked, watching the engineer flop into his workstation at the back of the ConDeck.
“I might’ve found something,” he said, logging into his console and calling up files. “It doesn’t prove that we were boarded, but there was definitely something that happened just before the conduit blew out.”
“Show me what you got.” Ethan twisted to look at the display. The optic image of the crawlway where the sabotage happened superimposed over the deep space sensor images. It was the same information that Rene had showed him the day before, plus several new data streams.
The small chrono that gave them a time index started moving forward. It was counting down to zero from almost five minutes. “The optic feed is there to tie everything together to a common base reference. At one minute, fifty seconds watch the top readout.”
“What am I looking at?” he asked.
“That’s the power levels for the gravity plating in the ship.”
“In the ship?” He glanced over his shoulder at the engineer. “Not the habitat container?”
Rene nodded. As the timer countdown reached the time, there was a sudden leap in power. Like a spike. “Fifty-nine seconds later the optic shuts off.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know, but just keep watching, and notice the lower graphic too. It shows a steady reduction in sensor line current across the interface to the habitat module.”
Ethan stared at the displays trying to count down the seconds. The flash of yellow on the data screen caught his attention. Mission accomplished. Five seconds later, there was an inverted spike in the gravity plating and the sensor current bounced back to its normal level. “What the frak?”
The time index marched down until the conduit blew out and life-support failed in the cargo module. The files reset and started the show over.
“What the hell could cause that?”
“I have no clue,” Rene said, stopping the feed and clearing the images so the external sensors came back up on the main screen. “I haven’t tried to figure that part out yet. You only told me to find something unusual that correlated. I think that qualifies.”
“You’ve got to have a working theory,” Ethan said.
“Not really. All I can say is that something odd disrupted the power flow to the artificial gravity. It’s possible that the drop in interface power was caused by some kind of tool being used to do the sabotage itself, but that’s purely conjecture since whatever it was, started the minute of the first impulse and then continued until the second one.” Rene got up and walked over to the copilot’s station and sat down, leaning to the side and resting his chin on his knuckles.
“The spike before and after are unexplainable. The gravity plating is one of the most stable systems in the ship.”
“How big a pulse was it?” Ethan asked.
“The fluctuations are so minuscule that if we weren’t looking extremely close, we’d never have seen it. There is a corresponding power bounce on the primary reactor, but it’s even smaller, because it’s spread across the entire grid.”
“If we see it everywhere on the system, then it’s tough to explain away as an error in instrumentation.” The captain nodded. “Does this prove we’ve been boarded?”
Rene shook his head. “It doesn’t prove anything except that there was something other than just the sabotage going on.”
“It does look like someone opened a door. Twice.”
The engineer shrugged then nodded. “Or opened it, held it open while they worked, and then closed it behind them. But it still might have been coincidental.”
“In case it’s not a coincidence, can we rig an alarm that would alert us if there’s another surge like this?”
Rene scratched his chin for several seconds. “Cando.”
“Obviously, you’ve got something else on your mind,” Ethan said as he watched Rene chewing on his lower lip.
He nodded. “I don’t want to keep pointing at Pruitt, but he has more than a passing knowledge of Shan Takhu technology. Maybe there’s somethi
ng he knows how to do, that’s not in my playbook.”
“Kai ruled Elias out.”
Letting out a slow hissing breath, he leaned forward in the seat. “You said that, but how?”
“Do you really want to know?” Ethan asked.
The engineer stared at him and then dropped his head. “Probably not,” he shrugged.
“It’s alright, trust me. The less you know the better you’ll sleep at night,” he said. “I just need you to make it happen and let me know when you’ve got it ready.”
“Can I take a nap first?” He glanced up at the captain and apparently read his face well enough to know better. “I guess not.” He pushed up from his seat and headed toward the door.
“I’ll let Nuko know what we’re watching for and once you’ve got that alarm set up you can send them the specs.”
Pausing at the door Rene nodded. “And while you’re at it, ask Pruitt if he has any ideas. I have a gut full of acid that says even if he isn’t responsible, he knows what it is.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Ethan sat a double watch on the ConDeck for the sixteenth day in a row. He’d kept himself in exile on the top two decks of the ship. It had been quiet, with only a few minor incidents between his new handlers and the plussers to disrupt the routine. Or maybe it was more accurate to say between his new handlers and the fog bank of chaos that enveloped the majority of the ship.
Only Ammo seemed unfazed by the plussers presence, and because of that, Ethan designated her as liaison to Kai. It also gave him an excuse to avoid interactions that often left him feeling awkward, or worse. He knew that if he could just lie low and endure, he’d be able to get through this with his sanity mostly intact.
Even though it wasn’t essential that anyone be on the ConDeck, just sitting at the command station made him feel like he was still in charge of something. He and Nuko kept an almost continuous comm channel open between the ships, and it had become his lifeline. Just knowing they were both going through the same problems with their passengers, kept them both afloat.
Wings of Earth- Season One Page 75