Wincing at Light

<– Chapter 3 / Chapter 5 –>

The interior lock was on the second subsurface level, fully ten meters deep in the bitter stone mantle of Archae Stoddard. The halogen lighting system glared off polished concrete floors, metal banded shipping crates and line upon line of raw steel girders and curving, reflective walls. The circular shape of the Persia Station’s interior–it was essentially a giant canister punched into the planet’s crust–caught the ambient lighting and focused it with a renewed and virulent intensity. Most of the technicians roaming the loading bay wore the polarized goggles usually reserved for outdoor use.

Brett didn’t have any goggles, so he shielded his eyes by squinting, then tried pressing his hand against his forehead like a frozen salute. The partial shadow deflected some of the glare, but not enough. His sleep-swollen eyes felt as though they would burst.

He hadn’t even brushed his damned teeth. His entire mouth felt like a damp strap of leather.

There was some satisfaction in Ilam’s arrival minutes later. He looked at least as bad as Brett felt, maybe worse, and Brett wanted to say to him, I recognize those puffy eyes from my mirror this morning. But there wasn’t enough humor in it to justify the energy it would take to open his mouth. Ilam had the good sense to halfway meet his gaze of greeting and curse before stumbling away.

Someone in the night, Brett thought, had transplanted a sausage for his brain. Undercooked, no less. He could almost feel it squishing around up there, softening, the fat liquefying, turning to puddled grease, getting ready to run out his ears. He was too old to be staying up into the wee hours playing cards with a gaggle of idiots. And probably should have been responsible enough to realize it.

“What are you doing here?” Djen growled from behind him.

Brett didn’t turn to face her. It was too much of an effort. On the other hand, he wasn’t sure he wanted to see her expression anyway. It was certain to be full of vitriol, probably with a pH-balance to match the acid in her voice. She stomped around to face him.

“I asked you a question, Commander,” she said. Her eyes flared dangerously. She already had strapped into her environmental suit. Her helmet was slung between her forearm and him, carried like a stack of school books.

“I heard you,” he said, disappointed by the muzziness in his speech. He should have attempted to warm up his tongue before trying it out in competition. “At least you got the rank right, if not the tone.”

Her face hardened, but she settled back on her heels, accepting the reprimand.

“You’re not going with us.”

“I am going with you.”

“I won’t allow it,” she snapped. “The duty log has been finalized.”

He shrugged. “I changed the log.”

“Then change it back, or change it to help Nathan and Stivetts on Two if you really just want to go outside.”

“Nathan and Stivetts don’t need any help.”

“Neither do we, Commander. The repairs on Nine shouldn’t be any more complex than those on Two.”

“But Two is less than two kilometers away. Nine is better than thirty. They won’t encounter the same weather risk.”

“We don’t need you.”

“And I can pull my weight. I supervised the loading of the MUT this morning.”

She stabbed at him with an accusing finger. “You sat on that crate in the corner while the techs loaded the MUT.”

“That qualifies as supervision.”

“You almost fell flat on your face when you dozed off. I saw that because I was supervising. I was the one with the clipboard. You’re staying behind.”

“Sorry, I’m not.”

“This is a simple operation, Commander. Out to Nine and back again. We’ll be back before noon. It doesn’t merit your attention.”

“And I have the prerogative to observe any operation I see fit.” Brett remained firm, though it hurt his head to do so. Just listening to her yammer on hurt his head. He wanted to rub at his temples, but knew that would look like he was reconsidering.

Djen seemed to sense as much, and her fists tightened up against the helmet’s faceplate as if she believed she could fracture the plastisheen. He wondered if she might break her teeth from grinding them. But he was within his rights as station commander, and she knew it. There was nothing she could do to prevent him.

She hissed at him. “You slept in your clothes.”

It was intended as an insult, he supposed, an indication that he wasn’t fit for the duty he’d allocated to himself. “I worked late.”

“You worked on cigarettes and whiskey from the smell of you.”

“I did not. I only consorted with people who did.”

Djen rolled her eyes. “You sat up and played cards with Ritter on the obs deck. My God, Brett!”

“I was investigating and, I might add, successfully repelling the encroachment of an insidious, potentially debilitating advance by the lunatic fringe.”

He crossed his arms over his chest, hoped he appeared imposing.

Djen suddenly quirked up one side of her mouth. Because she had allowed it, the tension between them evaporated.

He didn’t care why she relented, only that it made his head hurt a little less.

“So you won,” she said.

“I certainly did.”

“And what did your fortune say?”

He almost flinched. “You know about that?”

“The whole station knows about that, Brett. Your Chief Theoretical Engineer and Xenohydrologist posts bits and pieces of the previous day’s reading on the bulletin board in the rec room every morning.”

“Well Christ, no wonder he finds success in most of his readings. The bastard is skewing the results.”

Djen patted his arm in consolation. “He says that it’s all in fun. You shouldn’t think of it any other way.”

“You might not say that if you’d seen him after he lost.”

“I wish I had seen it.”

She finally spared him a warm grin and generous eye contact without that spark of rancor. Brett answered it with a sort of tight-lipped grimace. It was all he could manage. She kept her hand where it rested, a companionable hold on his forearm, as though it was a form of apology.

She was a striking image, he thought, standing in the interior lock as the technicians shuffled the equipment back and forth to the mobile utility transport. She in her e-suit, with her boyish hair poking in wild curls and shining, pretty eyes full of excitement, her helmet clutched jauntily to her side. Her mouth firm, her lips held just slightly open as though breathing in something of his presence. Or perhaps exhaling a fragrance of her hidden self as an offering of understanding as she turned to face the threat of the outside world. It was an almost heroic picture.

Brett shrugged off her hand. “I’m going with you.”

“Damn it,” she said, letting it fall.

“Manipulative little bitch.”

“Chauvinistic, overprotective bastard.”

“I know you can do this job. It’s not your ability that I doubt. My complete and utter faith in your ability has nothing to do with why I’m going along on this expedition. I swear.”

“What, you’ve had a premonition?” She sounded bitter, disgusted with him, but in an almost playful way.

“I won the card game, didn’t I?”

She didn’t answer him.

“Get suited up, Brett,” she said. “I’m pulling us out of here in forty-five minutes, with or without you.”

Instead, he went in search of coffee.

#

He had just settled himself into one of the narrow chairs in the commissary, his steaming cup of coffee in one hand and a dubiously chocolate sprinkled doughnut in the other, when Ashburn found him. Ashburn was a dour man, tall and thin, but compact. He gave the impression of corded muscle, tightly wound. He was a sapling bent by strong winds, ready at any moment to snap back, vicious and erect. He was also the Station Security Officer. The only one, making him both Security Chief and data entry clerk and head investigator and anything else in between. Persia Station was a fully manned, thirty-two person duty site, and for the most part, even one sec-o was too many. Brett didn’t hold this against him, only wondered at times to himself exactly what it was that Ashburn did to occupy his time.

“Need your input,” Ashburn said without greeting. He slapped himself into the seat across the table. Brett could see that he held a considerable sheaf of loose papers. “We’re having a problem with the Cassandra system.”

Brett sighed. “Give it to me gently. And slowly. It’s too early in the morning for situations.”

“For the last couple of weeks, Cassandra has been sending out security notifications to my office terminal. These are generated status reports, you understand, based on periodic station diagnostics she’s programmed to run and analyze.”

“Disaster protocols?”

“No, sir. Breaches, clearances, file transfers. Those types of things.”

Brett sipped at his coffee, burned his tongue. “And this involves me how?”

“She’s reading unauthorized personnel in various sectors. Not like document storage or webnet hacking, but organics. She thinks we’ve been invaded.”

“By little green men, eh?”

Ashburn frowned at his levity. “Look, boss, I’ve followed protocols. I’ve scanned the station top to bottom six times. All the compound theoreticals. Carbon-based, silicon-based, nitrate-based. You name it and I’ve looked for it. I thought maybe we could have picked up a rodent from the last year-freighter, but Cassandra would’ve read that within the first couple of days, assuming one of the little bastards could find a way to survive without atmosphere in one of the holds. I’m getting nothing.”

He knew what Ashburn was saying, though the sec-o wouldn’t come right out with it. It wasn’t a possibility anyone liked to consider. Brett glanced casually around them, made certain that they wouldn’t be overheard. The only other people in the commissary were halfway across the room, and both of them were openly dozing over their powdered eggs. Still, he lowered his voice.

“You’ve run diagnostics on your equipment?”

“Of course.”

“Preliminary diagnostics on Cassandra?”

“She checks out as far as my clearance will let me look.”

“Have you noticed any other anomalous behaviors? Heard anything from the crew?”

Ashburn shook his head. “The logons are working, the data seems to be intact. No one is complaining about her. It may be an isolated failure. Corrupted programming or a bad cell, something fairly small that doesn’t show up on the reports.”

“Have you gone over the environmental numbers?”

“First thing every morning, and twice before bedtime. Station integrity looks good. That’s why I’m chatting this up over coffee instead of screaming you out of bed, boss.”

“You think it’s a ghost,” Brett said.

“No. I think it’s a system malfunction, but a limited one. The security scans are wrong, plain and simple. As long as we don’t get ourselves invaded until it gets fixed, we’ll be fine.”

He said this with absolute assurance, but there was an uneasiness in his tone, and Ashburn shifted his eyes to look just below Brett’s nose.

Brett said, “You think I should talk to her.”

“Just to see, you know. If you get nil results, we can rest easy, but I’d sure like to get one of the programming teams to do a full access diagnostic. Only, of course. . .”

Brett finished his thought. “Only you know the storms have wiped out comm for the next week. We can’t get full access to her cells until Mission Comm HQ issues the passcode. Tell me again that you think the environmental systems are five by five.”

“They are.”

His coffee had cooled, but he found he no longer needed it. Brett carried more adrenaline than he needed suddenly, and that left him plenty awake. “All right. I’ll talk to her this morning, jump her through some hoops. I’m on exterior detail until early afternoon, so I’m going to re-route command function to your id until fourteen hundred while I’m in there. That’s not much more clearance than you’ve got, but it might give us a clue if you get lucky. Do the full diagnostic on the whole system while I’m gone, including the admin functions from my areas.

“In the meantime, program in a twelve minute environmental scan cycle. If the pressure, the atmospheric levels, or even the mean station temp deviate by more than five percent, you order everyone into e-suits and get me on the horn. And keep a special an eye on the ambient chemical mix. That’s the most complex environmental sub. If she’s going to fail, it’s going to be there first, and you don’t want to find out that she’s screwed the nitrogen up to eighty some fuck percent before you noticed it. Understand?”

“I understand,” Ashburn said, nodding. It was a plan of action, and that seemed to give him the confidence he needed. It was, after all, no longer his ass that would be in the trap if something went wrong. “I’ll have to bring James in on the programming and some of the data analysis.”

“Just James,” Brett said. “Tell him and keep him locked up in your office until I get back. If he gets loose he’ll yammer it to–what is her name, the little blond in anaerobics?”

“Merisa.”

“Right, her. And she’ll have a full panic spread through the station by mid-morning. Keep a clamp on him.” Brett pushed himself to his feet, screeching the chair along the concrete floor in his hurry to rise. “We’ll crunch the numbers again when I get back and then decide what else needs to happen. Anything else, Ashburn?”

The sec-o rubbed a flat hand across his chest, then pointed his finger at Brett’s untouched doughnut. “If you’re leaving, can I have that?”

<– Chapter 3 / Chapter 5 –>