Nucleation

by Kimberly Unger

  “Is what going to be a problem? You getting your NAV killed, or is there something else I’m missing?” Beauchamp smiled. Helen resisted the urge to slap her. She hadn’t expected confronting Beauchamp would expose that Ted-shaped hole again. The reminder that she was missing a piece, a complementary soul, burned in the back of her mind. Do not lose your shit or she wins.

  “I don’t know what you said to that rookie NAV to get him to throw the training mission, but he’s going up for review.” Helen cast a glance as the two or three rookies at the table. “If you’re coming for me, then git gud, don’t burn the newbies because you’re afraid to lose.”

  Her words had some impact at least. Glances were exchanged around the edges of the cluster of OPs and NAVs at the table. Good. If she could at least sow some doubt, then she might not have to put up with Beauchamp coming at her from the side. The OP rotation could be cutthroat, as missions were assigned based on skill, experience and seniority, in that order. Helen had two out of three over Beauchamp. In order for the younger OP to move up in the ranks, Helen had to come down. Ted had been the one to handle the Flight Ops politics. Helen had made sure every mission came out a success. It had been a perfect pairing, but now Helen was vulnerable and it looked like Beauchamp was using that to her advantage. Beauchamp’s not the only one who has to git gud.

  “I’m not responsible for Yoshi’s actions,” Beauchamp replied. “He’s an inspired NAV, even if he is just starting out. I’m sure his review will sort out in the end.”

  “You really couldn’t care less, could you.” Helen eyed her would-be rival. “What’s your goal here, Cat?” The two or three younger OPs and NAVs in attendance had begun to drift away as their Insights notified them of the shift change. Beauchamp got lazily to her feet and closed the distance between them. They were near enough in mass for it to be a fair fight, if it came to that. But Helen’s goal wasn’t a physical confrontation. She needed to call Beauchamp out, publicly. She needed to put the other OP on notice with witnesses so that any future issues between them would get a second or third look.

  “Goal? Just watching you fail is goal enough. Why the hell are they even letting you re-qualify after Ted?”

  “It was a glitch in the quantum Feed.” The defense was out before Helen could stop it. Shit. Beauchamp blanched at the words. Helen pressed her momentary advantage. “Look, I’m not interested in a nasty competition. If you want me out, fine, we’re both OPs, we can stay the hell out of each other’s way and let our records do the talking. If this is more personal, then tell me what your problem is and we can have it out like adults.”

  Something wasn’t right. Helen expected Beauchamp to rise to the challenge. She was expecting a fight, one way or the other. Instead the other OP looked vaguely ill.

  “No problems. Excuse me.” Beauchamp walked off without another word. She left Helen standing there.

  “Excuse you? We’re not done, Cat!” Helen called after the other OP, but she’d pulled out her Insight and was headed for the door with a singular focus.

  What the actual hell was that?

  Puzzled, Helen watched the other OP make her way across the commissary. She had come spoiling for a fight and instead Beauchamp just turned tail and ran.

  Or something. Helen examined the faces she could recognize in the crowd. She hadn’t heard Beauchamp’s Insight ping, hadn’t seen anyone signaling. Something had set her off.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Helen curled up in the comfortable chair in Hofstaeder’s treatment office and stewed. The medical end of this latest “debrief” had taken an hour out of her day and she still hadn’t been cleared to get back in a coffin. Worst of all, they’d left her in the pink room, the one that smelled like cleaning supplies. She hated the smell; it reminded her of childhood at the Crèche.

  Beauchamp said you were a loose cannon, Vectorovich. The NAV’s comment rattled around the inside of her head. Words that, according to Hofstaeder, didn’t show up on the mission recordings. There was always the possibility that Doc was lying, but it didn’t seem likely. She’d already bent the rules to allow Helen back into a waldo and made a deal with Keller to keep the operator in the queue for the Line Drive missions. There was no reason for her to be clever. Hofstaeder could simply sign an order keeping Helen out of the coffins and none could gainsay it.

  There was always the possibility that Helen hadn’t heard those words from the NAV at all. That some part of her subconscious might have filled in the gaps while she’d been struggling to get the waldo back to solid ground. That didn’t feel right either, but she couldn’t discount it entirely. Helen hadn’t bothered to make a private record, since it had just been a training mission. It would be her word against the recording, and while she knew the mission data would bear her out, the fact that bits were missing had her rattled.

  A mistake you won’t be making again.

  Presuming she wasn’t in the early stages of some kind of mental break, that left deliberate sabotage. Helen turned that idea over in her head, tickled its underbelly to see how it moved. Direct sabotage by one operator against another wasn’t unheard of. It was a much more common occurrence at smaller companies like Distant Sun or Animus. Helen had spent her first couple years as an OP for Animus fighting tooth and claw for her missions. While the Far Reaches ranking system wasn’t perfect, it kept infighting to a minimum. What if Beauchamp had made a deal with the NAV to screw up the mission, to keep Helen out of the coffins? It would open up a seat on the Line Drive project. Helen was the only OP on the rails, the only vulnerable spot.

  Yes, but why? This is a lot of work for what? Fame? Access? First in line for Chef’s waffles? Competition was one thing; the slights and psychological tricks used to get a performance edge over another OP were common. Beauchamp had tried for placement on the Line Drive project a year before but hadn’t made the cut. Waldos like the spider model were new units, custom-tailored to the needs of the Line Drive project. Beauchamp hadn’t been able to get up to speed quickly enough. That’s cold. Do you really think she’s capable of that kind of backstabbing? Even for an operator as ambitious as Beauchamp, deliberately scuttling another OP to get access to their mission lineup was a brutal move.

  I signed up to ride waldos, not play private detective. Ted had been much better at the internal politics, keeping track of who had an issue with whom. Helen keenly felt the empty space her NAV had left behind. She couldn’t afford to trust someone else to solve this problem. She was going to have to dig into this herself, figure out if Beauchamp was truly gunning for her and what to do about it.

  Helen had sunk so deep into her own thoughts the knock at the door surprised her. She swung her feet off the arm of the chair, straightened up into some semblance of professionalism despite the ache in her spine and bruises on her elbows and knees. She closed her eyes for a three-count to re-center herself before she responded.

  “Come in.”

  “Ah, there you are. Is the queen of kill switches done with you yet?” Keller’s voice bounced off the office walls. Helen popped her eyes open, startled to see he’d snuck in through Hofstaeder’s office door.

  “I’m waiting on something. Not sure what,” Helen answered truthfully.

  “Can’t be too important then. Let’s get a move on.” Keller stepped in, and with exaggerated care, closed the door behind him.

  “What? Where to?”

  “I take it they didn’t keep you in the loop?” Keller pushed the hall door open and glanced down the hall like he was checking for security.

  “Nope. Still dealing with the fallout from my ‘training mission.’” Helen bracketed the phrase with air-quotes.

  “That’s going to have to wait. They bumped up the reconnection mission to the Golfball, and the countdown’s already started.”

  Keller shoved the door open wide and waved her over. She followed him out through Hofstaeder’s office, only to find t
he Doc herself striding down the hall in their direction.

  “What the hell, Keller? Already?” The idea filled her with dread; the feeling crept in and pooled like ice water in her chest.

  “It’s not a full-blown run, they’re just going to reconnect to be sure you launched the payload. I’ll cover with Hofstaeder. I promised you could be there, remember?”

  “I did launch the damn payload. They shouldn’t be doing this,” Helen said sourly. The dread colored her mood, dampened her natural curiosity. Whatever had put Ted in the hospital was still an unknown. They wouldn’t take another run at it unless they had figured out the cause of that feedback. She tried to convince herself that maybe something new had come down the line while she’d been on mission, but that thought rang false. Far Reaches was like any other company, perfectly capable of risky decisions when money was on the line. Perfectly capable of finding an operator or a NAV willing to take that risk.

  “They’re not getting any telemetry off it yet, and the PR fallout means they need to confirm it’s out there. Just go, I’ll meet you at the Fishbowl.” Keller gave her a light shove in the right direction, then turned and trotted to intercept Hofstaeder. The physician didn’t bother to raise her voice, just set her arms akimbo in a resigned gesture and waited for the department head to approach. Helen paused a long moment, the checklist in her head in conflict with Keller’s instruction. She turned and jogged down the corridor towards the operations center. She hated working in the dark, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that a big piece of something was missing.

  It took her only a couple of minutes to get to the Fishbowl. The operations gallery served as the central command hub for remote operation missions. There were ten such “fishbowls” in the building, all identical. Each command space paired with a viewing gallery for trainees, press corps, investors, school fieldtrips, any group that might have a valid reason to observe an operations team in full flight. Line Drive had its own, dedicated gallery, identical to the others, but with more locks on the doors and more chairs in the gallery.

  “Control, this is Operator Bright, personal identifier K45Y-T7M4, we are live, we are live, we are live.” Nick’s voice came over the speakers loud and clear as the door to the Fishbowl opened on Helen’s approach. She threaded her way through the empty rows of seats to the glass wall at the front of the room. They’d all been full when Helen and Ted had made their run. Ivester wasn’t risking an audience this time.

  Beyond the windows lay the control gallery for Line Drive. Banks of screens covered every available flat surface. The space held half a dozen experts, including Dr. Ivester, all discussing the incoming data as it sheeted across the walls. At the center of it all sat the NAV in a reclining chair, surrounded in a half-dome of smaller screens and communications equipment. An OP’s entire nervous system connected through the coffin directly to a waldo. In contrast, the NAV was one step removed, hooked in with a brain-only connection handled by a delicate tracery of a helmet. Helen had never driven a NAV’s chair, but she could imagine the frustration of only being able to give instruction, rather than take direct action.

  Watching someone else finish the job she started was painful, but Keller was right. She needed to see it through.

  “Confirmed, begin protocols.” The NAV was fully helmeted, so Helen couldn’t get a look at the face, but it sounded like Mira. No surprises there. The younger NAV was a risk-taker, prone to making big decisions quickly. Ted’s death was an outlier, a one-in-a-million event. Barely a risk worth mentioning to someone like Mira.

  Helen activated the touch panels on the gallery walls to get a direct look as the NAV computer reached out and shook hands with the Golfball. The mission details spooled out before her eyes. First order of business would be to see if the Golfball could still receive a signal. Next up was to see how much of the Golfball and the spider waldo remained intact. She got a good look at the current range of suspicions, ranging from “OP error” . . . Thanks assholes . . . through “asteroid strike” and “eenie programming malfunction.” So they were shotgunning the information collection, trying out a few theories all at once from the get-go.

  That’s a relief.

  Helen pinged Mira through the Insight to let her know she was watching, common courtesy, and got an upraised middle finger in reply. Ivester took note of the gesture and turned to glance at the mirrored surface of the glass. Helen held up a hand to acknowledge the look, though she was pretty sure he couldn’t see her. The images started to come in every second or so as Bright, from his coffin two floors down in the Mortuary, began to test the remains of the waldo that Helen had abandoned.

  “I’m getting red icons all over the board. Whatever went wrong with the waldo, it’s not gonna make this trip an easy one,” Bright said.

  “Follow the protocols,” Mira barked back.

  It was weird being on the receiving end of things. Helen could watch, but she couldn’t act. It was like wearing a pair of mittens while trying to play the piano. She began to pace along the glass wall that separated the gallery from the Fishbowl, eyes on the glittering data as it poured across the screens. The view from inside the waldo, the memory of her view, resolved itself in her mind’s eye.

  “Did you say gone?”

  Helen pulled her attention back at the disbelief in Ivester’s tone. She’d missed whatever had triggered it.

  “Affirmative.” Bright’s response was confident enough.

  “I can verify that. Two of the waldo’s legs aren’t registering with the system.” Mira backed up her OP, throwing the feedback data onto the big screens for all to see.

  Bright continued his report. “Looks like an active issue, guys. Whatever the primary team walked into, it’s still going on.”

  “We didn’t account for this being an ongoing problem,” Mira said quietly.

  “Yes, we did,” Helen murmured to herself. She tapped the glass wall and singled out three dual-purpose tools, quietly reflecting them back to Mira. The NAV didn’t acknowledge the help, not in front of Ivester, but quietly added them to her bag of tricks.

  “Okay, Bright, let’s start ticking off boxes,” the NAV called out.

  “Affirmative.”

  This was a smash-and-grab, so running all of the startup checks and corrections wasn’t as important. The Golfball, like all remotely driven ships, carried traps designed to catch random eenies for quality control. The goal was to grab a few that had gone rogue so they could be deconstructed, their code examined.

  “Control, the trap is dead on this end,” Bright spoke up. “I’m showing a dead icon. No signal, not even a warning light.”

  “I’m seeing incoming code,” Mira responded. “The trap is still alive, but it looks like the lines connecting it to the Golfball’s main interface are offline. I can see it, but you can’t.”

  “So much for doing this the easy way then,” Bright quipped.

  “There is no easy in space,” Mira reminded him tartly.

  Every pair had their ebb and flow, it was the kind of thing that developed quickly between a good NAV/OP team. The back-and-forth made communications easier and kept both parties focused and on task. Mira and Bright were no exception. It threw into sharp relief the absolute incompatibility Helen had just experienced on her training mission. It reminded Helen just how long it had taken to find a NAV that she could really work with.

  “All remaining systems check out. Hey, Mira, you ever see what happens when a fish dies in one of those big saltwater tanks? All the other fish start nibbling off the extremities first, you know, the fins and the eyeballs. That’s kind of what it feels like with the waldo here. The core architecture is all firm, but all the outlying stuff has gotten eaten away.” Bright kept chattering as new and different information started coming down the Feed.

  “Haven’t we had this chat about your icky metaphors before? Stick to direct observation, Bright.”


  “Fine, but I’m just saying if any of the eenie behaviors were prototyped off of a goldfish, you might want to look there first.”

  Mira’s response could best be characterized as a full body eye-roll. Helen stopped the laugh before it reached her lips. No distractions now.

  “Operator Bright, please move to protocol three of four and proceed.”

  “Affirmative. Hey, are you guys seeing all this dust?” Bright asked and redirected one of his cameras for a closer look. On the other side of the window, Ivester threw another sharp glance in Helen’s direction.

  Helen closed her eyes, took a deep breath. Dust, dust, something about the dust.

  “Confirmed, but focus on that next. First we need to get to the traps.”

  “I’m going to recommend examining the dust more closely on the next go-round,” Bright stated. “Primary team mentioned it in their report, but I think we underestimated the volume.”

  Helen flipped through the list of protocols she and Dougal had put together and with a silent motion of her fingertips popped a new one up on Mira’s screen. Helen couldn’t see Mira’s face, but the shift in her shoulders said she’d got the instruction.

  “Affirmative, Bright. Analysis suggests we take that one next.” Mira’s fingers played across her touchscreens as she rolled Helen’s suggestion into her protocol list and passed it down the link to Bright. While a mission was active, at least, OPs backed OPs. Helen knew Mira would accept the suggestions with good grace as long as it didn’t impede the mission.

  “Great, moving to containment.” New images began appearing, one after the other. Bright switched cameras for better magnification. There were places where the image was choppy, showing holes where the damaged sensors couldn’t pull in enough data.

  Having been there, plugged into that waldo, Helen could “see” the damage in her mind’s eye, could tell exactly what sensors were offline. Her memory filled in the gaps, the location of this button or that. The images that were coming back painted a rosier picture. It was as if those cameras had been deliberately turned off to conceal some of the damage.