Amid the torrent of noise, she heard Gregorovich say, sounding almost too calm, too cultured: “Fair winds on your upcoming sleep, my Conciliatory Confessor. May it relieve some of your fermenting spleen. When next we cross paths, I will be sure to thank you most properly. Yes. Quite. And remember to avoid those pesky expectations.”
“Thanks. I’ll try,” she said, trying to humor him. “The queen of infinite space, eh? But you haven’t—”
A cackle from the cacophony. “We are all kings and queens of our own dementia. The only question is how we rule. Now go; leave me to my method, atoms to count, TEQs to loop, causality to question, all in a matrix of indecision, round and round and reality bending like photons past deformation of spacetime mass what superluminal transgressions torment tangential tablelands taken topsy-turvy by ahahaha.”
2.
Kira pulled off the headphones and stared at the deck. A frown furrowed her brow.
Moving carefully in the zero-g, she went back out to find Hwa-jung waiting for her. “How is that one?” the machine boss asked.
Kira handed over the headphones. “Not good. He’s…” She struggled to find a way to describe Gregorovich’s behavior. “He’s really off. Something’s wrong, Hwa-jung. Really, really wrong. He can’t stop talking, and a lot of the time, he can’t seem to string together a coherent sentence.”
Now the machine boss was frowning as well. “Aish,” she muttered. “I wish Vishal were still awake. Machines are what I work with, not squishy brains.”
“Could it be something mechanical?” Kira asked. “Could something have happened to Gregorovich when we were on Orsted? Or when you disconnected him from the mainframe?”
Hwa-jung glowered at her. “That was a circuit breaker. It would not have caused any problems.” But she continued to scowl as she tucked the headphones into a pocket. “Stay here,” she said abruptly. “There is something I will check.”
The machine boss turned and kicked herself down the hall and around the corridor.
Kira waited as patiently as she could. She couldn’t stop thinking about her conversation with Gregorovich. She shivered and hugged herself, although she wasn’t cold. If Gregorovich was as bad as he seemed … keeping him in cryo really might be their only choice. An unbalanced ship mind was a thing of nightmares.
There were, she thought, many different types of nightmares in the galaxy. Some small, some large, but the worst of all were the ones you lived with.
Kira wanted to tell Falconi about Gregorovich, but she forced herself to wait on Hwa-jung.
Nearly half an hour passed before the machine boss reappeared. She had grease on her hands, new scorch marks on her rumpled sleeves, and a troubled expression that did nothing to ease Kira’s worries.
“Did you find something?” Kira asked.
Hwa-jung held up a small black object: a rectangular box the size of two fingers side by side. “This,” she said with a tone of disgust. “Bah! It was clamped to the circuits leading into Gregorovich’s sarcophagus.” She shook her head. “Stupid. I knew something was off when the lights glitched like that in Control when I pulled the breaker.”
“What is it?” Kira asked, moving closer.
“Impedance block,” said Hwa-jung. “It stops signals from traveling through a line. The UMC must have installed it to help keep Gregorovich from escaping. None of my checks showed it when we came back on the Wallfish.” She shook her head again. “When I pulled the breaker, it caused a surge in the box, and the surge ran into Gregorovich.”
Kira swallowed. “What does that mean?”
Hwa-jung sighed and looked away for a moment. “The surge, it burned the little wires going into Gregorovich. The leads are not connecting properly to his neurons, and the ones that are, aish! They are firing wrong.”
“Is he in pain?”
A shrug from the machine boss. “I don’t know. But the computer says many of the broken leads are in his visual cortex and the area of language processing, so Gregorovich, he may be seeing and hearing things that are not there. Ahhh.” She shook the small box. “Vishal will have to help with this. I can’t fix Gregorovich.”
A sense of helplessness unmoored Kira. “So we have to wait.” It wasn’t a question.
Hwa-jung nodded. “The best thing we can do is put Gregorovich into cryo. Vishal will look at him when we arrive, but I do not think he can fix him either.”
“Do you want me to tell Falconi? I’m going to see him.”
“Yes, tell him. I want to get Gregorovich frozen. Sooner is better. I will go into cryo after.”
“Okay, will do.” Then Kira put a hand on Hwa-jung’s shoulder. “And thank you. At least now we know.”
The machine boss grunted. “What help is knowing, though? Ah, what a mess. What a mess.”
They parted, the machine boss pulling herself into the ship mind’s holding room while Kira returned to Control. Falconi wasn’t there, nor was he in the ship’s now-defunct hydroponics bay.
Slightly puzzled, Kira sought out the captain’s cabin. It didn’t seem like him to be in his room at a time like this, but …
“Come in,” he said when she knocked on the door.
The pressure door creaked as Kira pushed her way in. Falconi was sitting at the desk, strapped into his chair to keep from floating away. In one hand, he held a drinking pouch that he was sipping from.
Then she noticed the bonsaied olive tree pushed to the back of the desk. The leaves were tattered, most of the branches broken, the trunk tilted against the side of the pot, and the dirt around the roots looked as if it had been overturned: small clumps floated loose under the lid of clear plastic that covered the top of the pot and surrounded the trunk.
The state of the tree caught her by surprise. She knew how much he cared for the plant.
“So? How’d it go?” Falconi asked.
Kira braced herself against the wall before delving into her report.
As she talked, Falconi’s expression grew darker and darker. “Goddammit,” he said. “Fucking UMC. They had to go and make things worse. Every fucking time…” He drew a hand across his face and stared at an imaginary point somewhere beyond the hull of the ship. She couldn’t recall ever seeing him so angry or tired. “Should have trusted my gut earlier. He really is broken.”
“He’s not broken,”said Kira. “There’s nothing wrong with Gregorovich per se. It’s the equipment he’s hooked up to.”
Falconi snorted. “Semantics. He’s not working. That makes him broken. And I can’t do anything about it either. That’s the worst part. The one time Greg actually needs help and…” He shook his head.
“He means a lot to you, doesn’t he?”
A crinkle of foil as Falconi took a sip from his drinking pouch. He avoided her gaze. “If you asked the rest of the crew, I think you’d find that Gregorovich spent a lot of time talking with each of us. He didn’t always say much in groups, but whenever we needed him, he was there. And he’s gotten us out of some real tight spots.”
Kira planted her feet on the deck and allowed the Soft Blade to anchor her there. “Hwa-jung said Vishal might not be able to heal him.”
“Yeah,” said Falconi, letting out his breath. “Working on ship-mind implants is tricky stuff. And our medibot isn’t rated for it either.… Thule. Greg wasn’t even this bad when we found him.”
“What will you do if we get into a fight with the Jellies?”
“Run like hell if it’s at all an option,” said Falconi. “The Wallfish isn’t a warship.” He pointed a finger at her. “And none of this changes what Gregorovich did. It wasn’t some impedance block that caused him to mutiny.”