“David?” Griffin asked, sounding a bit queasy.
“Come on. Let’s get power back up and running.”
I was holding my breath.
As my eyes adjusted to the dark, a soft glow emanated from the hallway. The power core, just on the other side of the cargo bay, was painted with phosphorescent green lines. We headed for the dim light like moths, careful as we stumbled through the hushed twilight. I could just make out the rumors of cargo crates and gas canisters walling our path.
“One of us should have been in there waiting,” I said, chiding myself. Halfway through the cargo bay a crate fell over with a bang, sending me out of my skin.
“You okay?”
“I’m fine. Just stupid, so stupid.” It was nothing, right? But the voice in my head said something different. We were being followed. The target had a weapon. We would have to fight.
We entered the power core and flipped our systems back on one at a time, utilizing mechanical breakers unaffected by EMFs. The ship rebooted and came back to life, airflow and light and white noise returning in a gentle whoosh of pleasing, sensory awareness. There was no spy behind us. Just paranoia. We were safe for now.
Griffin sighed, then wiped the front of her jumpsuit with open palms, clearing it of chunky puke.
“You alright?” I asked.
She nodded and produced a moistened towelette to clean up the rest.
My watch vibrated. IT’S HAPPENING AGAIN. OUR TELEMETRY DATA IS BEING BROADCAST UPON STARTUP. URGENT. TAKE CARE OF IT NOW.
I checked the communications log and two questions came to mind.
One: How had the Captain known this was happening?
And two: Why was there no record of the event?
A minute later the ship again flashed red, alarms blaring.
I dug into my pocket and removed Liberty’s earpiece. “Hit probability?”
She whispered back, “Sixty percent.”
“Keep me posted.”
Our luck was running thin.
Griffin and I returned to weapons control, preparing for the ship to fire again. The red alert ended, only to be taken up seconds later.
“Eighty percent,” Liberty reported. “Forty. Thirty…”
Chance was getting higher on the onset. Sixty, then eighty. How were they calculating our location? Was it just dumb luck? Or were we indeed broadcasting important navigational data?
I checked the communications log again. No sign of forward transmission. They had to be craftily using old data. Any information beamed ahead would take nearly an hour to reach the Razor and be made use of.
I pointed. “Griffin, Power Core.” She rushed off, hand raised to her mouth. I hated it for her.
The red alert ended, our threat narrowly evaded. A bead of sweat stung at my right eye. Yellow lights came on.
“Firing,” XO called over the intercom.
The weapon’s room fizzled and the power went out. There was a ten percent chance of this happening, statistically, yet it had happened twice in a row. Griffin was fast with restoring power.
My watch vibrated again: ANOTHER SIGNAL. THE COMPUTER CORE. CHECK THE COMPUTER CORE. NOW!
I furiously searched the communications log once again and found nothing. How was the Captain catching this anomaly and I couldn’t? Was he pre-cognitive? Unlikely.
I returned to the power core, cursing. Why hadn’t they put these two sections together?
An idea struck me. “Griffin, you know Sage language pretty well, right?”
Poor kid was wiping her mouth off with a fresh towelette. “Not as well as Kelly, but sure, I’ve done my fair share of coding in Sage.”
“Tell me, is it possible that when the ship’s data is being transferred onto a disc image and backed up to chemical storage, that a slightly different copy can be sent back when it returns? Can the image be tampered with somehow?”
“I don’t understand what you’re asking.”
I tried again to formulate my idea, talking it out with my hands as if that would help. “Can instructions be kept on the chemical hard drives so that when the ship resets, lines of code will be executed and immediately deleted, along with the cache, so no one would know that they ever existed?”
Her brows crinkled. “I suppose. But why? It would be really hard to do, being that those drives are basically fixed in read only. Let’s see, maybe you could add something into the chemical drive’s BIOS. Make it part of the self-check system. It runs a whole series of commands on startup to ensure, say, life support isn’t killing us, habitat keeps rotating, communications are calibrated, telemetry is linking up and we’re booting properly. Basic settings.”
“That’s it.” I grabbed her by the shoulders and grinned. “That’s it! The BIOS. If anyone comes looking for me make something up. There’s something important I have to do.” I lowered the maintenance core’s ladder and began climbing. The spine of the ship flashed red, alarms echoing. Between the ocular flares I swore I saw something blurry and white move about fifty feet ahead. I narrowed my eyes to check again. The way was clear.
“Sir, where are you going?”
“Don’t tell anyone.”
“I can’t do this alone!”
“Yes, you can.”
“But…”
“Look, Griffin, I’m sorry. I should have apologized sooner, but I’m sorry. I was way out of line with César.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. “No, you weren’t. It all makes sense in a way. It’s okay. I’m sorry too.”
“Do you know who retaliated against me?”
Her lips compressed into a line as she thought about it. “I, well, this isn’t really a good time. I don’t want to implicate anyone, because I’m not totally sure. I have a guess, but I’m scared to say.”
That would just have to wait for later. “Look, you can do this on your own, I have faith in you. César is watching over us.”
“Okay.” She wrapped her arms around her belly and nodded. “Go. Do what you have to do.”
“Don’t tell anyone, but I have to do something to save the ship.” I entered the maintenance core and closed the hatch.
I might not have been able to save César, but I could damn well save the rest of us. The target might’ve been one step ahead, but I was closing in fast. My blood began to pulse with the promise of revenge. It felt good, like a filthy, bathtub brew made of drain cleaner and hate I knew better than to inject.
“You’re mine, you little bastard, all mine.”
[15]
Like a bullet roaring down the barrel of a rifle, I shot myself through the maintenance core while unexpectedly plunged into darkness. Three for three. Something wasn’t right. In my mind’s eye I could see Griffin running in the dark between sections, desperate to restore power while forcing away her acute nausea. From the sour smell in the air I realized some of her puke had found its way onto my jumpsuit.
Robbed of all sight, the top of my head cracked against the bulkhead. I crumpled into a ball of weightless meat and waited, caroming off the rotating walls heading God knows where. It was all I could do. I had a rare moment to think, and added an additional inquiry to the list of things I needed to check once inside the computer’s core.
Power came back on, lights flickering like an ill toddler waking up from a hard nap. I’d drifted quite a ways in the wrong direction, ending up nearly two sections down. I took hold of a handle and threw myself in the opposite direction.
Moments later I floated up beside a series of black and grey boxes studded with clear tubing and colored bulbs—chemical storage. To prevent total data loss during power overloads the result of firing our rail guns, these boxes were where everything was backed up until restart. EMFs weren’t kind to old style magnetic, or even solid state storage systems, but chemical hard disks, while expensive and limited in lifespan, were wholly unaffected by the intense electromagnetic fields produced when firing our weapons.