Liberty nodded. “Excellent.”
“We’re about to bring weapons up and run a test.”
“Goddard,” Captain Liberty Fryatt, not Lib, turned to address me. “See that test through.”
“Yes, Ma’am.” I tipped my head, saluted, and was off. I was starting to get used to this, Liberty being Captain and all. I liked it—a lot.
I puffed on the vape pen as I made for the back of the ship, blowing smoke into my path. It helped to calm my nerves, giving me something to focus on other than my fears. Several simple things happened in slow motion. I saw a small group huddled together in Crew 1, their heads bowed in prayer. Doc patted me on the back and gave me a thumbs up. Devins wished me good luck. Higgins gave a salute and smiled.
“Give ’em hell, Goddard,” Brix said, sliding on his soft suit.
“Only because you said so,” I told him.
“Damn right.”
“Sir! Get your suit yet?” Griffin asked as I entered weapons storage and control, my station for the remainder of our engagement.
“Yeah, thanks. It’s over there by the wall.”
“Time to get suited up?”
“Not yet, we have plenty of time before we’ll need them. The cabin will remain pressurized. Where’s Kelly?”
She hopped up on a metallic box and shrugged. “Passing out a couple more suits and he’ll be done. Five minutes, no more.”
“You seem a little chipper, all things considered.”
“Maybe.” She cocked her head to the side and winked. “But like you said once before, it’s just another alarm.”
I narrowed my eyes at her but said nothing. She was being brave and I didn’t want to take that away. “By the numbers, Griffin.” To business.
“Yes, sir.”
I held up my watch, wrist in. “Bridge, you there?” The screen before me displayed the same information as the bridge’s, only that mine had a third status window. Inside the frame it showed the icons of all twenty-five nuclear batteries full with green light. They were ready to go.
“Copy, Goddard,” XO called back.
“Standby for firing test.”
Griffin hopped down and began working, fingers skittering across the keys of the controls like a pianist. “Engaging counter rotation. Locking armature. Releasing fire control to the bridge.” She pressed the release button and frowned. “Releasing fire control to the bridge.” Nothing happened. She pressed the button again and again, harder each time. Her face screwed up and turned white. “Releasing… Goddard? Sir?”
I hit the button, having the same result, and felt sick. No response. Not even an error message. Not even the satisfying click of a tactile button.
“Something wrong?” XO buzzed from my watch. “Kelly, just put the suits over there…”
“Not sure, sir.” I fought it best I could, but my wrist was trembling. “It’s not letting us release the firing control.”
“Can we control weapons from there?”
I flipped a couple switches, trying to reroute manual control to the weapon’s room. We’d done this during training exercises, but never combat. No luck there either. I couldn’t even get to a command prompt from our interface. Nothing would work. It was as if the system was locked up, a kernel failure or stop error, not just a lock out.
“Shit,” I mumbled.
Griffin scrubbed her lips with finger tips. “What’s wrong? Bad hard disk? Ram sticks go out? A full diagnostics will take hours. Too long.”
“We need to get into the core right now. I hate it, but we’re gonna have to do a hard reset. That’s all I can think to do. Maybe one of the drivers has gotten corrupted, maybe an old firmware copy loaded during a power cycle. I have no idea, and we don’t have the time to fuck around with it.”
She raked a hand through her hair, random, sweaty strands sticking up on end. “Alright, but I might have a way around it. I’ve got some backups on my tablet.”
“XO,” I spoke into my wrist. “We’re going to have to do a hard reset on the weapons. Despite yesterday’s clear test, they’re not working. As it stands right now we can’t fire a thing.”
“Copy that. Work fast. We have forty minutes till show time. I don’t wanna show up on stage just to get shot in the face.”
A number appeared on my watch, counting down the minutes.
I took a pull off the vape and climbed into the spine of the ship. All systems had tested fine yesterday, so why go out now? Nearly ten years this ship had been in the void, traveling from world to world with hardly an issue but for regular maintenance. Now the computer was on the fritz? The weapons were out? Most modern, solid state systems could last for decades without issue. Something wasn’t right. This was far too convenient.
We entered the spine of the ship and the pull of gravity vanished.
“Here.” Griffin floated ahead to the weapon’s computer, a grey box with a bank of open ports on its side. “Let me jack in. I think I can reinstall the weapon’s drivers manually.” She unclipped her tablet and plugged direct, not wasting time with pairing or short range wireless beam dropping. Eighty gigabit wired feeds were far more reliable anyways. “Wait, what’s this?” She pointed at the far side of the computer’s box.
A length of optical cable was running away from the box, back towards the aft of the ship, carefully hidden between the various multicolor pipes. I followed its trail, floating from one section to the next.
I shouted back at Griffin, “Oh, shit.”
She spun around and let go of her tablet. It floated into the wall, tethered by its cable. “What? What is it? What’s wrong?”
“Someone’s linked the systems. It’s jacked into the information network and secondary chemical storage.”
“Oh, shit.” She began to work frantically, taking the tablet back into her hands. She flipped through various screens, browsing for the files she needed while also speaking verbal commands.
With hackers having access to computers capable of more processing power than fifty of our ships combined, brute force attacks via the Sol Net were a real threat. It was for this reason we kept our systems both physically and virtually separate. Only in extreme emergencies, when more than three fourths of our crew were dead or incapacitated, were we even allowed to interconnect these systems, and only then by cable. Someone had done this and tried to hide the evidence. There was a good chance that this had been done weeks ago, but was so carefully hidden we’d missed it in our final safety sweep the day before. Whoever had done this, had to have been the one to plant the code I’d found in the chemical storage bios. The target was real. Really real. It wasn’t the former captain.
“Who could have done this?” she asked, then began banging her tablet against the box. “Work, damn it. Work!”
“No time to figure that out. What do we do to fix it? You’re the computer expert.”
“I… I’m not sure. Let’s see, first, let’s disconnect the linking cables so no further changes can be made.”
“Good idea.” I reached around the information network’s box, trying to free the cable. RJ-90 was a particular challenge to unclip without a screwdriver, which for some reason I didn’t have. Come to think of it, many of my tools were missing. The cable’s release clip was a narrow slit in which leverage needed to be applied upon a razor’s edge to free them of their ports. Female maintenance members often found this kind of work easier than males due to their fashionably longer fingernails. Their nails gave them all the leverage they needed without having to carry extra tools on them.
“Fuck!” Griffin shouted, punching the bulkhead beside the weapon’s box. “I can’t get this cable out, my nails are too damn short.”