Ellis found himself gazing out of the viewport. There was almost nothing to see, only the merest hint of glow from above, and the rest just gluey darkness. Even the stars were hidden from him, up above the ammonia. But out there, somewhere in the murk, was a raging storm front as big as a planet. When it arrived, it would bring light — sunlight as it scoured the cloud layers above and below, and an army of lightning strikes. There would be no missing it. When the storm was ready for them, it would announce itself.
All the better, then, not to be around when it did.
Copper’s compression worm was not an instant success. Ellis watched it fail nine times before it successfully retrieved a file. Even on the tenth time, it was able to snatch just a piece of data before the pulse killed it.
But it was a start. Information had been downloaded from the data core. It might only have been a fragment of a backup of a mission log, but it represented a breakthrough. If Ellis could have given Copper and his team a few hours downtime as a reward, he would gladly have done so.
He couldn’t. There simply was no time. He could feel the storm coming.
Instead, he set Copper’s people to work. Over the next hour, thousands of worms infiltrated the data core, splitting files wherever they could find them, compressing the split chunks, and hauling the encoded fragments into protected areas. A dozen laptops logged into these areas between pulses, uploading and recombining the data. There was no orderly plan for the worms, no priorities or targeted areas. At the rate Copper’s people were working, it was all they could do to keep replicating the worms and sending them, wave after wave, into the ship’s memory.
There were casualties. If a pulse arrived before a worm had completed its task, the worm and anything it was interacting with at the time was lost. But with a success rate of over ninety percent, and more technicians working to recreate the lost data as the missing files became apparent, Ellis realized that he was almost starting to hope.
The first data he asked to see was footage from Apollo’s internal security cameras. Major Kyle Deacon was still missing, and no trace could be found of the man. Although he loathed to admit it, Ellis knew there was a very good chance Deacon’s disappearance was not unconnected with the ship’s plight.
The footage was uploaded into a laptop. Once this was done, Ellis thanked Copper and his team for their efforts so far, told them to keep at it until they dropped, and then took the laptop away with him. This wasn’t something he wanted to view in public, at least not yet.
He didn’t want to see it alone, either.
Ellis was in his cabin, connecting the laptop to the ship’s power grid when Meyers keyed open the hatch. She raised an eyebrow. “Is that wise?”
“No alternative. These things are taking longer to charge all the time. The power feed won’t be constant, but if the battery’s charging between pulses it shouldn’t take the laptop down when the lights go out.”
“Beats swapping batteries, I guess.” A small assembly line of battery chargers had been set up in one of the maintenance bays, with runners to make sure the various laptops and PDAs being used all over the ship stayed fed. “What have you got?”
“Internal cams.” He moved his seat aside and dragged a second one over with his ankle. She dropped into it and peered at the screen. “That’s the mess hall.”
“I know. Hold on…” Ellis clicked out of the viewer application and brought up a list of available files. “Deacon left the bridge at, what, oh-three-fifty?”
“Yes sir.” Meyers looked at him quizzically. “Colonel, you don’t think —?”
“I’m not thinking anything, Major. But Deacon went missing just before all this happened, and no-one’s got a damn clue where he’s hiding. So yeah, forgive me if I’m interested as to where he went.”
“Sir, Deacon wouldn’t —” She stopped as he glared at her. “Sorry.”
“Don’t second-guess.” He tapped the screen. “If the answer’s anywhere, it’s here.”
She said nothing. Ellis went back to studying the files. “There, that’s the bridge cam file. Let’s start with that.”
He dragged the file onto the player. There was a faint whir from the laptop, and then the footage sprang to life; an instant of blurry color and then a jarring, static-riddled freeze-frame of black. “Goddamn it.”
“Sir, that’s the end of the file. All the recordings must have defaulted to the point they crashed out.”
“Right.” He squinted at the player’s controls for a moment, then found the rewind and started to scroll the footage back. The bridge appeared, four times. There were four cameras installed there, and their output had been pasted into a two by two montage.
Ellis watched people move in jerky reverse for a few seconds, then saw Deacon appear in the helm seat. “Okay, got him.”
He let the footage roll on. The internal cams were of quite high resolution, but there was no sound. Audio files were in a different section of the data core. In normal circumstances the pictures and sound would have been married and enhanced for playback, but all Ellis had right now was raw footage. He hoped it would be enough. “There he goes. Oh-three-fifty-two.”
“Marked. So now we need the entry corridor? What the hell does that come under?”
“These filenames are hard to- Hold on, I think this is it.” There were only two cameras in the corridor, but both showed Deacon leaving. Meyers marked the time again, and they moved to the next area.
Slowly, file by file, they tracked Deacon through the ship. The data core was in the forward part of the main hull, ahead of the bomb bay. The most direct route to it from the bridge was via the deck that ran over the bay, and that was where they saw him, with each camera they accessed. He didn’t deviate, didn’t slow down, didn’t make a detour into any other part of the ship. He simply left the bridge and headed directly for the core.
He never made it. Between one pair of cameras and the next, somewhere above the forward edge of the bomb bay, he simply vanished.
“Doesn’t make any damn sense,” Ellis muttered. “What’s off corridor nine?”
“Nothing he could get to without being picked up on another cam.” Meyers frowned. “Maybe there’s a storage cupboard down there or something… Sir, can you run those last two again?”
Ellis brought up the last two files. As he did so Meyers leaned across to take control of the laptop from him. He let her get on with it — she seemed more at home with the player application than he was.
She quickly brought the two pieces of footage up together. On the left side of the screen, Deacon stood frozen, paused between frames. On the right was the place he should have appeared once he had left the field of the first camera.
He didn’t. Just as before, when the player was activated, he walked out of the first camera’s view and never entered that of the second.
Meyers paused the player, scanned back a few frames until Deacon’s back reappeared. “What’s this?”
Ellis squinted at the screen. “What?”
“This shadow.” She took Deacon back a few frames, into shot again. “It’s not there now, but as he goes forward…” She sent him on, one frame at a time.
There, at the very edge of the screen, just as he stepped out of view, part of the wall darkened. Something had obscured the light. “A pulse?”
“No, the timing’s wrong. Sir, I think someone was down there with him.”
“No-one else is on the cameras.”
“I know. I’m not sure how, but whatever caused that shadow must have been right in front of him.” She stood up. “Sir, we’ve got to go down there and look.”
“Agreed. But I need you on the bridge.”
“Colonel —”
“Major, I know you and Deacon were friends. But I need you keeping an eye on that storm. Don’t worry, I’ll find him.”
She hesitated for a moment, then gave in. “All right. But please let me send a team of marines down to meet you there.”