"All right," Festina said, "let’s get to the bridge and see what the captain can do about this mess. Havel," she called, "do you need any help?"
"No, Admiral, not right now," came a reply from the other side of the computer bank. "Eventually we’ll have to carry the patient to sick bay…"
"I’ll send you some stretcher bearers," Festina said, "but I don’t know if sick bay is any better than here. Captain’s Last Act will have killed all your medical equipment."
"Oh dear, yes," Havel said. "Then maybe, ha-ha, it’s best if we stay away from the infirmary. The place is swarming with Analysis Nano, and without the ship-soul controlling them… well, the eager little devils may get out of hand. There was a case on Morrikeen where a clinic’s power went down and every last nanite decided to give the attending physician a blood test. Sucked the poor fellow dry, ha-ha."
"Ha-ha indeed," Festina said. "And here I thought our only alternatives were freezing to death or starvation. I love it when new options thrust themselves forward." She made a face. "Come on — let’s find the captain."
Forging Forward
It turns out a starship has many many doors… which Sergeant Aarhus claimed were not doors at all but hatches. Festina said I could still call them doors; she reveled in the use of anti-nautical terms, because it vexed the ship’s normal crew. (She called regular crew members Vac-heads, which may or may not have been because they spent their lives sailing through vacuum.)
Many of the hatch-doors were closed, and most were exceedingly stronger than the one Lajoolie had broken. The biggest doors were designed to remain secure despite vast extremes of air pressure; so thick, even I had no chance of smashing through. Fortunately, such violence was not required — though the doors no longer opened automatically, they contained Cunningly Concealed Mechanisms that allowed manual operation via wheels and cranks. Once Festina showed me how these devices worked, I got to turn all the wheels… which I did most prettily, ensuring our party’s speedy progress toward the bridge.
We were not the only persons desirous of making contact with the captain. As we moved forward through the ship, numerous crew members peeked out of doorways, saw who we were, and joined our company. The newcomers did not speak; I do not know if they were intimidated by my beauty, Festina’s rank, or Uclod’s orangeness, but they seemed as shy as woodland creatures, keeping their distance yet mutely following.
This muteness struck me as foolish. If I had not already known this darkness was the result of a complicated computer tragedy, I should have been asking, "What happened? What happened?" But then, I was not such a one as greatly revered machines. Perhaps these humans were so cowed by the demise of their ship, they had plunged into grief-stricken mourning.
Or perhaps they were not so much wallowing in sorrow as silently giddy with excitement. It is Eerily Thrilling to walk through soundless corridors when your only illumination is a tiny wand of silver, and the blackness stretches for lightyears in all directions. You feel that anything could happen… and even if there is danger afoot, it will be vastly preferable to lying on the floor with a Tired Brain.
Having a perilous adventure is always better than comatose safety. Always, always, always, always, always.
In The Halls
I did not know how many hatches stood between us and the bridge… but I could tell when I opened the last. As I pushed back the great thick door, I saw light on the other side and heard voices talking in subdued tones. Five crew members had gathered in the corridor to listen to a sixth person: a dark-skinned man in a powder blue suit.
He stood slightly apart from the others as he spoke to them, and he held a glow-wand just like Festina’s. At the moment I opened the hatch, he was gesturing with the wand, pointing in our direction. The waving light made shadows leap along the corridor walls in a manner delightfully creepy. However, the man stopped waving as soon as he saw our party.
"Admiral!" he said — in a voice not loud but fervent. "I don’t suppose you know what happened?"
"A saboteur," Festina told him. "Hacked the ship-soul into committing Captain’s Last Act. I’m afraid the ship is…"
"EMP’d to rat-shit from bow to stern," the blue-suited man finished her sentence. "That’s what Captain’s Last Act means." He gave Festina a rueful smile. "At my court-martial, you’ll testify I didn’t do it, right, Admiral?"
"Of course, Captain… if any of us lives that long."
I looked at the man again. This must be Captain Kapoor, who spoke to us earlier on the intercom. He did not impress me much as a Figure Of Authority: he was shorter than I, with thinning black hair and a poorly shaped mustache. I am not well-informed on the subject of mustaches — my own people do not grow true hair, we merely have the suggestion of hair as part of our solid glass skulls — but if I were to possess a mustache, I would endeavor to carve it with bilateral symmetry instead of letting it become an unkempt blob of fur that appears to be sliding off the left edge of one’s lips.
Still, this Kapoor man did not seem totally foolish. He had happy crinkles around the edges of his eyes as if he must laugh a lot… and for all the tension that filled the air, he did not seem snappish or stressed. Indeed, one could argue he was altogether too blase about the situation, considering that his ship had been disastrously incapacitated in the depths of Unforgiving Space.
"I suppose you’ll be wanting a status report," he said to Festina. "Well, Admiral… the status is that everything’s Gone Oh Shit."
Many of the crew members looked confused at his words. I, however, knew that "Going Oh Shit" was an Explorer expression meaning dead, dead, dead. It derived from the fact that many Explorers blurt out, "Oh shit," just before some terrible calamity befalls them. I suppose Kapoor used the phrase to show Festina he was familiar with Explorer vernacular… which means the captain was sucking up to the admiral, but I thought he did it most charmingly.
"Everything’s gone?" Festina asked. "What about communications?"
"Especially communications," Kapoor answered. "Those systems have all kinds of top-secret crypto built into them: not just for encoding transmissions, but for switching bands a few hundred times a second, so we’re never broadcasting in one place very long. And then there’s the—" He stopped and threw a reproachful look at those of us who were not navy persons. "Ahem. I’m sure you know, Admiral, Hemlock has all kinds of gadgetry for keeping our messages secure, and one hundred percent of it is classified. Captain’s Last Act makes certain no such equipment can be salvaged. Nothing but melted plastic and defunct biomass."
"But that can’t be your only broadcasting stuff," Uclod said. "At the very least, you must have a Mayday signal, right? Something that runs off batteries and doesn’t get vaporized when everything else goes pfft. Civilian vessels have to carry at least three Mayday boxes in case of emergency. So a navy ship must surely…" He stopped; his eyes narrowed, glaring at Kapoor. "You don’t have a working Mayday?"
"Of course we do," the captain replied defensively. "Just not a good one. The Outward Fleet doesn’t likedistress calls that can be heard by absolutely anybody — it’s bad publicity to advertise how often navy ships break down. Even worse, the laws of salvage say the first person to find us gets to claim the whole cruiser. The Admiralty doesn’t want a civilian vessel, or even worse an alien, tracking us by our distress signal, taking our ship in tow, and dragging Royal Hemlock home to use as a lawn ornament. So… our Mayday only broadcasts to other navy ships."