“We found it, Captain Desjani,” the systems officer reported, his voice sounding oddly distant across the voice-powered emergency circuit. “The worm tried to induce core overload failure, but our safety backups managed to crash the core first.”
“Do you have any idea why Lorica’s safety backups didn’t manage to save her?” Desjani asked.
“I can only guess, Captain. Operating systems are hugely complex, so every ship’s operating systems are subtly different even when they’re supposed to be identical. Lorica’s safety backups may have been just enough dissimilar to add up to a critical difference. Or maybe the attempted overload instructions came during the right portion of the millisecond when our backups were watching for something like that, but not when Lorica’s were. I don’t want to imply carelessness by the dead, but it’s possible that Lorica’s systems people hadn’t tweaked their safety backups recently enough. There’s just no telling, and we’ll probably never know since I assume there’s not enough left of Lorica to tell us anything.”
Desjani closed her eyes momentarily, her lips moving in a brief prayer. Geary understood how she felt. Dauntless’s survival had been a near thing. “Are you certain,” she demanded of her officer, “that there’s nothing else lurking in the systems?”
“We’ve found nothing else, Captain.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“Yes, Captain! I mean, no, Captain! If there were any other worms, we’d have found them. I’d bet my life on it.”
Desjani’s lips curled upward at the edges in a humorless smile. “That’s exactly what you’re doing. Make certain that worm is completely eliminated and keep looking for other threats in our systems. Notify me when you and the chief engineer feel comfortable with restarting the power core.”
“Yes, Captain. Estimated time is another fifteen minutes.”
She slumped back in her command seat, then looked around the bridge. “At ease, everyone. It’ll be another fifteen minutes. Be ready to hit the deck running when the power comes back on.”
Geary stared at the nearest bulkhead, lacking the welcome distractions of dealing with the immediate problems Desjani and her crew had to address. “We have to find the people responsible for this,” he finally muttered to Desjani out of frustration. “This time they’ve succeeded in destroying one of our ships.”
“But why Lorica?” Desjani asked in a very quiet voice. “Do you have any idea?”
“Yeah.” Commander Gaes, Lorica’s commanding officer, had been the one to warn him about the first worm in the fleet. She’d known something, and apparently that something had been too much for whoever was behind the worms.
Desjani nodded, watching Geary. “Gaes went with Falco, but since Lorica rejoined the fleet, she’s been a supporter of yours. Her contacts with dissident officers must have been useful to you.”
“They were. Apparently I wasn’t the only one to think so.”
“We’ll get the ones responsible for this, Captain Geary,” Desjani promised. “Someone will know who did it and they’ll surely talk now.”
He wasn’t so certain of that. Worms designed to directly destroy Alliance ships would have aroused protests if knowledge of them had been spread to more than a very few people, and those few people were now aware that exposing themselves would guarantee firing squads. They waited silently after that. With everything except emergency systems down, the few working lights dim, the bridge began to feel claustrophobic. Geary wondered if the temperature was getting as warm as his imagination insisted, whether the air was becoming fouler. He knew emergency backups would power essential functions for much longer than it had been since the core crashed, though, so Geary made an effort to relax and look unconcerned.
“Power-core systems have been scrubbed,” the welcome report finally arrived. “The worm responsible for the shutdown is confirmed gone. Request permission for restart of power core.”
“Do it,” Desjani snapped. A few minutes later the lights on the bridge brightened, and the vent fans hummed a little stronger. Less than a minute after that, the displays reappeared floating in front of everyone. “Get us back where we belong,” she ordered the maneuvering watch. “We probably drifted a little out of position relative to the other ships. Take station on Daring and we’ll reassume guide duties for the fleet.”
The reappearance of his displays helped a lot. Geary had been fighting down an irrational worry that more ships had been lost, and he just hadn’t been told. Now he could confirm that only Lorica was gone. As if that was good news. Checking the reports from the ships closest to Lorica when she’d exploded, Geary grimaced. “No survivors.”
“If there had been survivors, they would have had to have ejected their escape pods prior to the core overload,” Desjani pointed out. “They wouldn’t have survived for long after that once the rest of the fleet realized what that implied.”
She was right, of course, but that didn’t help much. Taking a deep breath, Geary called up a communications window and broadcast to the fleet. “This is Captain Geary. Dauntless and everyone on her are safe. We’re investigating the cause of the core overload on Lorica and the core crash on Dauntless. Anyone with any information regarding either incident please forward it to me immediately.”
Investigating. A big word for something unlikely to produce any results. If the ones responsible for this worm were as diligent as they’d been with earlier worms, there’d be absolutely no identifiers that could be used to trace the worm back to its origin. Knowing that, Geary had to restrain himself from walking to the nearest bulkhead and punching it in aggravation.
Instead, he brought up his message queue, not expecting to see the answers he needed but still looking for distractions. Geary frowned as he noticed all of the high-priority messages already blinking in his queue. They must have all been put into the fleet net while Dauntless’s systems were down, meaning they wouldn’t be answers to his request for information. It would take forever to get through all of them, and most were probably just variations on “what happened” and “are you all right?”
Then he stopped and stared.
One of the messages was tagged as being from Lorica.
“Captain Desjani, can you confirm the time of Lorica’s destruction for me?” Geary asked. She gave him a puzzled glance, clearly wondering why that information was important at the moment.
“Our own power core did its emergency crash at 1412. According to system records we received from the rest of the fleet, Lorica blew up at… two point seven seconds past 1412.”
Geary checked the message again. “I have a message in my queue from Lorica with a transmission time of 1415.”
“Sir?” Desjani stepped over beside him, leaned over Geary’s shoulder to view his display, then tapped some controls next to his hand. “The fleet communications net sees the message as having been received for transmission after 1414. It was sent on the next full minute.” She straightened and glared at her communications watch. “How could the communications system see a message as having been received from Lorica well after that ship was destroyed?”