Maybe it hasn’t. Helen had done her job, fulfilled the mission requirements. The payload had been released into its near-final orbit, even as the Golfball had begun to fail around her. Despite all those successes, all those boxes being checked off, there was no getting around the fact that Ted was now in the ICU. That was going to have to be explained and dealt with.
He’ll be fine, she told herself. Ted’s in the best hands. THAT was the one thing she could be sure of in all this mess.
Helen almost stopped short at the sight of two armed XERMo agents flanking the door to the conference room. Everyone knew that a chunk of Line Drive’s funding came from government backers, but she was surprised to see their reps out in uniform. They’d taken up position outside the room where pizza and dry cupcakes had commemorated successful first contact with the Golfball just hours before.
They didn’t stop her, didn’t even look at her as she approached the door and tapped the handle. The NFC chip embedded in her wrist exchanged a word with the lock and the doors swung open in response.
Inside, every member on the Golfball mission support team had self-segregated into little protective groups. Helen paused and took a read of the room before focusing on Dr. Ivester and the XERMo liaison, Dr. Frederic Tate, having some kind of discussion. Tate was already too far into his sentence to stop talking but Ivester waved Helen into an empty seat. She wasn’t the only OP in the room. Mira and Bright, the team slated to take the second shift, looked surprised to see her but made space for her at their table. Both were wearing pre-mission sweatsuits in Far Reaches blue. Mira had her thick yellow hair pinned up at the back and Bright had long ago opted for a buzzcut to keep his frizzy black mane under control. It had looked exactly the same every day for the two years Helen had known him.
“What the hell happened?” Bright whispered, careful not to take his eyes off the speakers at the podium. The factionalism was palpable, every team broken up, like to like. Everyone would be looking to be sure their piece of the project didn’t catch the blame.
Helen shook her head and drew her fingertips across her lips in a zipping motion to signify that she wasn’t allowed to say.
“Shit,” Mira whispered. The team exchanged worried glances.
Tate finished whatever conversation he was having with Ivester and stepped back, conceding the podium to the CTO.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I know you are all deeply concerned.” Ivester was not the tallest person at the front of the room, but when he was speaking it didn’t seem to matter. He had a reputation as someone utterly unable to recognize the potential for failure. Tate was scowling in the background, but Ivester was speaking to his own people. He had their trust.
“I want you to know that, so far, the mission to build a jumpgate out at Otlyan23 is proceeding on schedule . . . ish.” Ivester grinned at the bastardization of the last word. “But we have encountered an unexpected variable. Since you were all on task when the Golfball went live, you’re already in the know. Or most of you are.” He hesitated, gaze lingering on Helen for a moment. “You’re all going to be pulled off the primary thread of Line Drive to help take care of this new variable. We need a smaller, more agile team to research what happened today. You’re going to have to be able to move quickly and make decisions with limited data.”
The chattering started, whispers and questions among the different groups. The boundaries of the protective factions dissolved as team members fist-bumped and high-fived across the gaps.
This is being spun as an honor, now we’re all “elites,” working to save the day. The thought came unbidden. Without Ted within arm’s reach, Helen found herself doing double duty, focusing on reading the room, reading the reactions of the assembled OPs and NAVs. Helen had been an OP long enough to understand management spin. Such things almost always ended in a contract being terminated.
“Regrettably . . .” Dr. Ivester had to raise his voice to let the other shoe drop. “Being part of this new team means sequestrations.”
That . . . that’s an unprecedented step. Far Reaches had the right to sequester a team. It was in everyone’s employment contracts, it wasn’t that unusual a move. Everyone would be given temporary housing on the Far Reaches campus to limit the opportunity for leakage either to press or corporate rivals. But as far as Helen knew it had never been dropped on a team this way. There was usually a warning, a run-up. You usually knew a sequestration period was coming weeks in advance.
The room fell silent but when the chattering started up again it was more excited than upset. For the singles or those without extended families, like Helen and Ted, it was less of a hardship. For those who lived off campus it could be a strain. But an on-campus stay meant bonus pay and lots of little perks, like maid service and real coffee, for the duration.
Ivester held his hands up and the room quieted, although a little more slowly this time. Helen didn’t take her eyes off the podium. Tate was looking antsy, the “someone’s about to get fired” kind of antsy.
“I want to commend you all for what appears to be a very successful mission in the face of . . . well, unexpected difficulties. The uncertainty of working in deep space always seems to bring out the best in our people.”
Applause.
“Second, you all will be happy to know that Theodore is in ICU and is being cared for by Launch City’s finest. We will provide your team with updates on his condition as we know more.”
Helen felt relieved at the confirmation. Mira nudged her with an elbow and gave her a thumbs-up.
The reactions from the collected Far Reaches personnel told Helen that they’d begun receiving their instructions. She fished in her pocket for her own communication pad, the screen lighting up at her touch. Insight icons blossomed all across the bottom edge of the glass.
“Information is being sent to your team leads,” Ivester continued. “All communications regarding this matter are to take place over your secured team chats on Insight only. Don’t write anything down, don’t even ask a question out loud once you leave this room. Your families have been notified using the secure key-phrase you gave us when you signed up.”
There was an audible groan from the back of the room and a smile pulled at the corner of Ivester’s mouth. “For those of you who have been lax in keeping your personal information up to date, HR wants to have a word with you.”
The roomful of laughter helped to relieve the tension.
Helen’s own communication pad was trying to get her attention. While Ivester kept talking, she shifted her focus to the alert icon that glowed red.
“You’ve all been moved to basement level III. Please collect your teams and get any gear you need from your workstations. Remember, no conversation regarding these actions outside of the team comms.”
Helen popped the icon with a fingertip and scanned the first few lines. Her instructions were different, very different. She’d been moved to the no-fly list, pending review. Of course. Her screen flickered and across the top a line of text appeared, “ACCESS RESTRICTED.” She barely had time to read the words before her access went offline, leaving her with a useless brick in her hands. She took a moment, pretending to read the screen, hoping Mira and Bright wouldn’t notice she’d been cut off. When they moved to stand, she placed the tablet, face down, on the table. Losing access to company communications didn’t speak well for what was coming next. She didn’t need the rumor mill to get going.
“Operator Vectorovich.”
She looked up to find Ivester staring at her from across the room. The chatter of the various Line Drive sub-groups breaking up and heading out dimmed for a minute. Ivester gestured to the tablet on the table in front of her. Bright gave her a friendly pat on the shoulder as he and Mira got up to leave.
Helen flipped the pad back over and Ivester’s next words printed themselves out across the screen in her hand, Insight to Insight.
“We need
you for a full debrief. Right now.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Helen dropped the whiteboard marker onto the table. With her Insight still severely limited, she had no access to any mission resources. No photos, no data, only her own memory. Every minute, every minute she stayed in the grip of the mood-kicking drugs meant more time recovering. Every minute spent in debrief meant another minute she had to put off finding out how Ted was doing. The only tool she had was focus and she used that to set both those problems aside for the moment. If she couldn’t deal with the fallout, she was never getting back out to a waldo. And if she couldn’t get back out there, she’d never figure out what happened.
The double bind grated, lurking under the surface, but it had its place on the checklist she kept in her head. She’d deal with those issues when she got there.
And your drawing skills are trapped back in fifth-year art class, she thought sourly, pulling her attention back to the wall covered in doodles and arrows.
The full twelve square feet of the presentation wall was covered in whiteboard panels linked to Far Reaches’ computing system. It would record everything she’d laid down. Every list, every sketch, would be chewed up and translated into a digital form. The analysis team could pore over it at their leisure later.
Ivester and three other engineering leads sat in judgment at the back of the conference room. The space was one of the bigger, theater-style ones, the kind with tiers of seats so everyone in the room got a good view. Helen felt more like she was on trial than conducting a debrief.
Every part of the surface had been covered in details, the clean panels sliding down to within arm’s reach. Helen flogged her memory, working around the holes and stutters until it dissolved into incomprehensible noises and a tremble in her hands. Helen edited that last part out by simply dropping her arms to her side and giving a shrug meant to conceal her unease. A bit of post-mission nerves was not out of the ordinary, she’d dealt with it before.
“That’s not one of ours,” Ivester pointed out. It was a “gotcha” moment, his tone gave it away. Helen turned to regard the sketch. One of the weird eenies she’d seen through the waldo’s electron lens, re-translated through her shitty drawing skills. She’d been trying to give an overview of the shapes and forms of the empty shells. Each shape meant a different kind of eenie with a different kind of job. She wasn’t sure how he could tell from the ink on the wall, but he’d picked up on something.
“You mean a mutation?” The XERMo engineer, tall and dark-skinned with somber blue hair and an air of perpetual suspicion, got to her feet and trotted down the stairs for closer look.
That one’s Finch. Helen recalled the engineer’s name with effort. Working without access to Insight meant she had to pay a little extra attention to match faces and names, using a muscle she’d not needed for a while.
“Maybe.” Ivester stared, cold grey eyes unblinking, eyebrows drawn down into a line behind the glasses. “Something’s wrong there, it doesn’t fit any of our key design elements.”
“A competing design? You think we might be looking at sabotage? Someone else’s tech got on board your Golfball?” Finch selected a black marker and redrew the outlines, making the weird hexagonal shape easier to understand.
“There are high-res snaps coming down the pipe,” Helen pointed out. “You can get a better idea from those.”
“Unfortunately, no,” Ivester said. “Since you hit the eject button, all the data coming back has been corrupted, out of sync. We’ve given it over to James to fix, but it may take some time to sort it all out. Time we can’t afford to lose, hence the ‘Helen Vectorovich Variety Show.’” He gestured at the braindump covering the walls.
Helen nodded. James was Far Reaches’ artificial intelligence, the “big gun” insofar as data analysis was concerned. Without Insight, she couldn’t look through any of her own personal files to see if they’d been corrupted as well.
“Memory,” Dr. Finch, still peering at Helen’s notes, said offhandedly, “tells us what’s important. It tells us where to look, where not to waste our time looking. You’re an operator, that gives you a different perception than we have, a different focus. You shouldn’t have even bothered with the eenies until you got to that point on the checklist. That suggests what you saw was so far out of line with your unconscious expectations that you broke protocol to run the electron micrograph.” She gestured broadly at the multi-legged stick figures and seashells now outlined in black marker.
“There wasn’t really a protocol to break at that point,” Helen protested weakly.
“I think this is worth a deeper look, Nate,” Finch said over her shoulder to Ivester. “If Animus or Beyond Blue managed to sneak a couple of their eenies into the delivery, that would explain a lot of things. It also makes it much less likely that you’ve got an eenie overrun situation.” Finch turned her attention back to the assortment of engineers at the table.
There were maybe a dozen companies competing with Far Reaches. Animus had a long history of industrial espionage, but Beyond Blue was a genuine contender. The rival firm preferred to sell themselves on bleeding-edge discovery rather than reliability.
“I don’t see it,” Ivester countered. “Animus uses a different constant. Everything is built on top of a base-ten design standard. If Operator Vectorovich is even vaguely correct, then we’re looking at a base-three or maybe a seven.”
The specifics went over Helen’s head, but she understood the “constant” referred to the way the eenies could build off one another to create larger structures. It suggested the eenies she’d seen were something the engineers hadn’t seen before. It suggested she might not have been wrong about the Golfball being “eaten” as opposed to failing to initialize. She felt a glimmer of relief through the stillness of Doc’s drug cocktail.
“Why the hell would anybody use a base-seven?” Finch didn’t quite sneer, but it was clear she thought the idea silly. “That’s just adding extra work. No offense to your drawing skills, Ms. Vectorovich, but what you’re seeing, Nate, is probably due to the medium, not to the source.”
“But . . .” Ivester stopped himself from rolling over the other engineer’s objections. “Okay, fine, I agree that we need to drill down on this as our starting point.”
Helen’s glimmer of hope got stronger. Sabotage meant that she was off the hook. Exigent circumstances. She had already known the mission problems were well out of her control, but having this, having some concrete proof would make a difference in how everything could play out. It was just one more babystep back to her coffin and from there, back out into space. Ted’s going to be thrilled to hear that.
“If one of our competitors sabotaged Line Drive, that’s actionable. We can go after them and negotiate for forgiveness on the milestones with Tate until we can get this fixed.”
As Dr. Finch rejoined the engineers at the rear table, the conversation coalesced among them. Helen found herself on the outside, apparently forgotten. She found a more comfortable position, butt on the edge of the desk, feet braced against the railing. She desperately wanted to sit down and close her eyes for just a second, but she didn’t want the higher ups to catch her at it. Normally you didn’t pull an operator out of recovery right after a mission exit, but whatever put Ted in the ICU had broken a great number of “normalies.” Helen settled herself to wait for things to calm back down. Once the emergency measures were over, she could get a handle on what she needed to be doing to get back into the mission rotation. Let the big dogs sort out the whats and whys, she advised herself.
“Why didn’t the security eenies catch this?”
Ivester still wasn’t convinced they’d found a solution; Helen could read it in his expression. She wasn’t sure why not, why he wasn’t jumping at the ready-made solution that Finch had latched on to. It wasn’t like he already knew the answer, but something wasn’t adding up for him.
“Maybe that�
��s why it’s built on base-seven.” Finch shrugged. “Something we haven’t seen before, might not know to look for.”
“Okay, take point on figuring out where that eenie came from. Get everything you can from the mission downloads. Start with Helen’s observations. Dave . . .” Ivester turned to the younger, yellow-haired engineer to his right. “I want you to go over every bit of the mission development chain. Identify every point where a foreign eenie could be introduced; I want to know how those could have made it into our payload.”
“Can you let my team loop in with Dave?” Finch asked. “I want all the images as we get them un-fucked.” Finch held up her Insight, framing Helen’s sketches in the screen, snapping pictures.
“Done. When we get what we can from the datastream, you’re first on the list. In the meantime, I have to start the rest of the team prepping for the second run.”
Helen had been watching the professional banter of the scientists and nearly missed Ivester’s mention of a second run. On the other side of Doc’s chemical cocktail, something stirred in Helen’s memory. A sense of dread that didn’t quite strike home, not yet.
“After you figure out what happened to Ted, right?” Helen asked the room. It was an effort to raise her voice to get them to remember she was present, but it had to be done.
“A second run is already on the books. We’ve got to recapture that asset,” Finch pointed out tartly. “Right now there’s nothing to show this wasn’t an accident.”
“Which team is going on the second run?” Knowing who was going mattered. She had to remind herself it mattered. More side effects from Doc’s cocktail.
“We want a fresh set of eyes, so Mira and Bright are next up, based on your pre-mission assessment,” Ivester said. Helen had worked with Keller to develop the pilot rotation and, no argument, Mira and Bright were a good team. Following the original mission rotation schedule, she’d be back up again in a week. If they treated this like a one-off, then the mission would continue, uninterrupted. She just had to get through the checklist of “mandatory operator recovery items” in time.
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