'I thought of telling her,' Ty confessed, 'but I couldn't face the idea of her hatred.'
Corso chuckled. 'Keep saying things like that, and I might end up mistaking you for a human being one of these days.' Once he was back inside, Ty slept for a solid ten hours before waking with aching muscles and skin that had become infuriatingly itchy from pressure sores. He dragged himself into the lab's minimal toilet facilities, turned on a tap and watched a ball of water form at the end of the nozzle. Once it was about the size of his fist, he pulled it free and pushed his face into it, gasping at its icy coldness against his skin. He felt like he hadn't slept at all.
It was time to take a look at what the cameras he'd positioned around the lab had recorded. But first he was going to fix himself a drink.
Ty could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he had ever touched alcohol, but some compulsion born of fatigue and grief, as well as the fear of what he might find when he reviewed the video feeds, made it easier to break what had until now been a habit of lifelong abstinence. Before long he was heading for an echoing, empty mess hall not too far away, where he breakfasted on freeze-dried crackers and reconstituted yoghurt. Once he had finished eating, he wandered through the kitchen area until he found the liquor cabinet he had spotted previously and randomly picked out a few squeeze-bottles of wine of indeterminate vintage and quality.
He broke the plastic seal on one of them, loaded the rest into a shoulder bag, then took a few sips from the open squeeze-bottle, careful to keep his thumb over the seal to prevent it spilling out in the zero gee. He grimaced at the taste, but kept drinking until a comfortably mellow feeling had begun to permeate into his tired limbs and his brain.
Back in the lab, Ty loaded the video feed and ran it from the beginning, watching himself go round the lab to check the cameras were properly networked before he sat down at the console and began typing some notes.
He fast-forwarded the feed an hour, and saw himself still thoughtfully typing or else pulling up data from the stacks.
And there was still another thirty hours of video to go through.
He sighed and fast-forwarded again, watching himself stand up and propel himself over to the far side of the lab, where a dedicated stack system maintained a real time back-up of all the experimental data gathered so far.
Ty frowned: this was something he definitely didn't recall doing. The only reason ever to use the back-up stack at all was because something had gone wrong with the primary system: and there had been no such issues that he could recall.
He switched views so that the feed from another camera allowed him to look over his own shoulder at the screen positioned above the back-up unit.
He leaned forward as the view zoomed in, and beads of sweat prickled his forehead when he saw nothing on that screen but seemingly unintelligible garbage. It no longer felt like he was actually watching himself; this was someone else looking out at the world through his own eyes – a monster hiding inside his own head.
He left the video feed running and headed over to the back-up stack to run a quick search. But he couldn't find any clue there as to just what he'd been staring at so intently: the data had either been wiped or hidden. Nonetheless, he spent the better part of the next hour running increasingly aggressive queries that got him nowhere.
Eventually he gave up, turning back to the console where he had left the video running, and froze.
His own face – somehow inhuman in its lack of any discernible human emotion – filled the screen. The eyes were wide and blank, as if staring off at some infinitely distant horizon. It seemed the monster had found the camera he had hidden in a recess to one side of the stack system, and crouched down to take a close look at it.
Ty moved over quickly to forward the video feed another hour. Nothing changed: the monster was still crouching next to the stack-unit, staring directly into the lens. Its slack-muscled features betrayed all the warmth and compassion of a reanimated corpse. He – no, it – must have been standing there during all that time, just staring into the lens.
Ty knew he was being sent a message here. No wonder he felt like he hadn't been getting any sleep; because he hadn't.
He slammed the console with his open palm so hard that it stung. The video feed blanked, but he could still see his own traitorous face reflected back at him in the smooth black glass.
He snatched his gaze away, suddenly sober again, and now filled with a terrible, skin-crawling chill. He hunted about for the hidden cameras and soon discovered most, but not all, were missing. He repositioned the undamaged ones in places where he hoped they might be harder to find, then he took a seat, opened another squeeze-bottle and began drinking with grim determination. At first, the others didn't notice his condition when Ty arrived in the airlock bay for his next shift on the hull.
That was fine by him, since he felt wrung out after spending the night vomiting into a vacuum hose, and tiny gold-plated hammers still pounded with an unwavering rhythm against the inside of his skull. Conversation was certainly not something he was looking forward to, but it looked like he would once again be working with Corso and Lamoureaux, who usually spent most of the time just talking between themselves.
The two men were standing almost head-to-head, already deep in discussion. Ty paused by the entrance, where they couldn't yet see him, and listened quietly.
'So you think we can still recover more data?' Corso was asking.
'The Mjollnir has a lot of inbuilt redundancy,' Lamoureaux replied, keeping his voice low – but sounds tended to carry easily inside the frigate. 'There's a chance we can recover the rest of the lost data from the surveillance systems.'
'You mean the overflow buffers?'
'No,' Lamoureaux shook his head, 'we've got everything we can from them. But some of the core stack arrays can act as virtual buffers in an emergency. So it's possible there's still…'
Lamoureaux glanced to one side, spotted Ty and fell immediately silent. Corso turned and scowled when he saw him.
But Ty didn't care, and he headed for one of the suit racks, his mind suddenly racing with possibilities. Over the next several hours, he had plenty of opportunity to mull over the brief snatch of conversation he had overheard.
Memory overflow buffers. He guessed they were talking about the data lost during the catastrophic systems failure around the time of Olivarri's murder. Clearly there was a way of recovering at least some of that data. And what else might be hidden in those buffers?
Later, on his way back to the labs, Ty once again stopped off at the mess hall, an idea forming in his head. One bulkhead was dominated by a display of ceremonial weapons: a dozen long knives of the type used in challenge fights were arranged in a circle, their blades all pointing inwards.
It took a little effort, but he managed to prise one loose, then concealed it inside his jacket and returned to the labs. He found several messages waiting for him, including a new shift-schedule put together by Willis, who had taken over that particular duty following Nancy's death.
He activated the back-up stack system, and dug deep into its operational guts. He felt a flush of triumph when he traced the files he had seen on the video feed to a virtual buffer located in a linked stack in an entirely separate part of the ship. What those files might actually be was a question he couldn't yet answer, but a lot of time and effort had been taken to hide them somewhere neither he nor anyone else might think to look.