5.0

Keep walking before they see us!” Boz coded. Her cybernetic voice echoed in his implants.

She grabbed him by the elbow and marched him across the intersection to the other side. Ravi shook her off.

“What was that for?” Ravi coded back, making no effort to hide his irritation. “We haven’t done anything wrong! We have every Archie-damned right to be here!”

“And they have every Archie-damned right to haul your ass over and start asking questions. Do you really want to explain to your boss, and the Captain, what we’re doing here?” She grabbed him by the shoulder. “Also: that’s Vasconcelos around there, Ravi. ShipSec. The man suspects everybody. You think he’s here for giggles? You think you can walk around that corner, tell him you’re on the path of some, like, phantom babe, and he’ll just let you go home?”

“Yeah, well, maybe you have a point.”

“Damn right I do!”

“But we don’t actually know why they’re here. Maybe it’s just a coincidence.”

“You believe that?”

Ravi hesitated a moment; shook his head.

“Good. I was worried all that engineer stuff was making you soft in the head.” Boz’s eyes twinkled with sudden mischief. “Let’s see what they’re up to.”

She reached into her jacket and pulled out BozBall.

“Boz!”

“What?” Boz’s arms widened in a mockery of innocence. “It’s not as if I can just go hack their chips, is it?” She ignored the alarmed expression on Ravi’s face and dropped the little drone to the floor.

BozBall sprouted legs and hit the deck plates without making a sound. Turning back into a sphere, it rolled quietly around the corner.

A little yellow light flashed on the inside of his eyelid, followed by a long string of letters: Boz’s key.

“Are you coming?” she asked.

Ravi’s stomach was tying itself in knots. Images of disgrace and expulsion floated across his mind.

Followed by that of a girl who couldn’t be.

“Sure,” he sighed. “Who wants to be an engineer, anyway?”

He picked up the key and turned it.

Boz’s hyperactive mind was bubbling away beside him, a constant stream of barely shielded data sloshing in and out of her implants. His biological vision faded into the background, replaced by the view from BozBall. A distorted, wide-lens representation of Chen Lai, and Vasconcelos, and the Captain loomed in the distance. BozBall rolled quietly closer.

“Stop!” Ravi whispered, aloud.

“But we’re too far away to hear anything.”

“How close do you think you’re gonna get before someone notices a freaky-bright, yellow-and-black ball rolling across the deck?”

“I’m sure BozBall knows what it’s doing.” Boz didn’t sound entirely confident. Alerted by her tone of voice, Ravi cursed himself for not noticing. There were no coded links between BozBall and its creator. Once again, the little machine was operating entirely on its own.

“You can’t stop it?” He fought to keep his voice from rising in panic.

“Not easily. It’s . . . well, it’s a teeny bit like a LOKI. Once you let it go, it pretty much does what it wants.”

Ravi was too horrified to reply. He listened to his heart thumping instead.

BozBall was climbing now. Ravi could imagine its legs skittering up the side of the corridor. He could only pray that the skittering was quiet.

From the feed, it looked like Boz’s dangerously independent drone had found a niche in the wall and settled into it. The view from the camera steadied.

Chen Lai appeared to be doing most of the talking. BozBall was still too far away to hear anything, which spoke well of the LOKI’s innate sense of caution but did little to satisfy Ravi’s growing sense of curiosity. Whatever Chen Lai was saying, neither the Captain nor Inspector Vasconcelos looked happy to hear it.

Chen Lai produced a screwdriver from his pocket and bent down over the deck plates. Ravi didn’t need BozBall’s mikes to hear the high whine of an electric motor. With Vasconcelos’s help, Chen Lai pulled up a deck plate and laid it carefully to one side. All three officers peered down into the exposed void.

Chen Lai said something more, shrugged his shoulders. Vasconcelos shook his head in violent disagreement. The Captain said nothing but looked worried.

Ravi could feel the bile rising in his throat. The Captain never looked worried about anything. Even when there was something to worry about. Boz must have picked up on it too. The chitter-chatter of data rattling through her implants had slowed to a crawl.

BozBall, meanwhile, continued its snooping. It watched Chen Lai disappear underneath the deck, followed by the Captain, while Vasconcelos stood watch. They were gone for several minutes. When they returned, their humor had not improved in the slightest. After some further conversation, Chen Lai replaced the deck plate and the three officers walked off—in the direction of Boz MacLeod’s little black-and-yellow spy.

Ravi froze. The stream of data inside Boz’s head came to a complete halt.

BozBall froze too. Whatever brain Boz had endowed it with understood its only hope lay in being as inconspicuous as possible. No mean feat, given its strident bodywork.

“We need to go,” Boz coded. “They’re coming our way.”

Faced with the dueling realities of the BozBall feed and his actual eyesight, Ravi stumbled a little as he followed Boz farther along Phoenix and away from the intersection. His cousin dragged him into a narrow gangway that dead-ended in front of a battered-looking storage unit. In the dim light of the night-cycle, they were practically invisible.

BozBall, in the meantime, had held its ground. It watched in silence as the Captain and Inspector Vasconcelos marched past, tight-lipped and distracted, their faces distorted by the wide angle of the drone’s lens. Chen Lai, walking a step or two behind them, glanced briefly in the LOKI’s direction.

And stopped. Ravi looked on, heart in mouth, as the engineer stretched out an oddly foreshortened arm toward Boz’s very illegal device. The lens darkened as the engineer’s hand swallowed it up.

Suddenly, without warning, Chen Lai jerked his arm away, swearing. Light flooded the lens again.

BozBall was moving. It had dropped to the deck and was rolling away from the officers just as fast as it could go.

“Get it!” yelled Vasconcelos, breaking into a run. The others followed.

But BozBall was too swift. It quickly outpaced them, turned down a couple of narrow gangways, climbed a wall and disappeared inside what Ravi guessed was some open ductwork. Only then did it come to a halt. Had BozBall been human, it would have been panting heavily. The view from its camera was shrouded in black.

Ravi cut the link.

“What just happened?”

“Wasn’t that just awesome?” Boz’s eyes were luminous with reckless energy. “Did you see how the algorithms kicked in the moment Chen Lai grabbed it? The way it balanced flight and fight? The smoothness of the transition? It was so . . .”

“Boz!”

Boz tried hard to look serious and responsible.

“BozBall has some defense mechanisms,” she explained. Her voice trembled with ill-contained enthusiasm. “Its algos interpreted Chen Lai’s grab as an attempt to capture it. So, it, er, electrocuted him.” She rolled over Ravi’s garbled expressions of horror just as quickly as she could. “Nothing much. Just a quick zap so he’d let go. Then it just ran away and hid. Which it did, like, perfectly!”

She was beaming again, her smile like a small sun. Her happiness, as ever, was irresistible. Ravi, despite his best efforts, was unable to hold on to his irritation.

“Maybe we should go see what they were looking at,” he suggested.

Boz insisted they wait a few minutes, in case the officers returned. Satisfied they had the night-dark corridors to themselves, Ravi unscrewed the deck plate that had caused their seniors so much consternation.

The two of them peered into the hole they’d made. A narrow access shaft, just wide enough for a fully grown man, stared back at them. It dropped vertically into the gloom. A series of grubby rungs stuck out from one side.

“Doesn’t look like much,” Boz said, shrugging. “Let’s see where it goes.”

She stepped onto the rungs and started climbing down before Ravi had a chance to protest. He allowed himself a small sigh and followed her down.

The air got very cold very quickly. The rungs themselves were coated with droplets of water. He could see little puffs of his own breath and worried that the moisture would be lost forever, unable to make it to the filters for recycling. They were very close to the outside of the ship now. There were no more decks down here. They were dropping into a twilight world of pipes and chambers and thrice-redundant machinery, all dedicated to one purpose: keeping everyone in the habitat wheel alive. Ravi pulled up the schematics, but it was easy to see they were wrong. And not because someone had built over the original, either. This was an error in the original specs, a prelaunch cock-up. The lines painted on the insides of his eyeballs showed a shaft that dropped all of three meters, less than twice Ravi’s height. This one was much deeper. Ravi took another step down.

“Ow!” Boz yelled.

Ravi had stepped on her head. She was standing in the middle of a fair-sized chamber, scoping everything out. Ravi hopped down beside her and immediately felt it in his knees. He was noticeably heavier than normal. Down here, comfortably below the last of the decks, the wheel was making turns for more than one g.

A stream of letters and numbers scrolled across his eyesight.

“Did you see that?” Boz asked. There was a trace of anxiety in her voice. And no wonder.

“Yes. Best not to hang about.”

The radiation warning had been stark. By Ravi’s reckoning, they were only meters away from the outer hull, and the shielding here was thin, either worn down by the passage of time or because people were never meant to be here.

There were doorways in the chamber wall. Old doorways, each one stamped with the baroque curls of the ship’s original logo. And stenciled with a warning.

AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

KEEP OUT

Mute lines of switches clung tight to the instrument panels beside each door. Ravi and Boz exchanged puzzled glances. Ravi reached out with his implants, tendrils of coded data curling about the doorways, looking for a way in. He shook his head in bemusement.

“Dead as a dust cloud. It’s like they’re not even here.” His glance returned to the instrument panels. “I think you have to operate them . . . manually.”

He stretched his hand out toward the nearest bank of switches. Boz batted it away.

“Don’t.”

“Why not?” His hand was stinging from the force of Boz’s slap.

“The doors may be dumb, but those switches are not. See? They’re keyed to someone’s fingerprints: probably the Captain’s. Touch ’em, and Archie knows what’ll happen.” She looked around speculatively. “Poison gas, maybe.”

Ravi wasn’t sure if she was joking about the poison gas. But she was right about the switches. He felt briefly embarrassed. The switches were clearly biometric, and he’d missed it. His father, if he’d been around, would have tanned his hide. He thrust the thought away, angry at himself now, for being embarrassed. His father had been a criminal. Only criminals noticed such things.

Like Boz.

Another radiation warning flashed against Ravi’s eyelids. Boz’s, too.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said.

Ravi nodded and started climbing, the excess radiation dropping away like cast-off clothing as he did so. But as he scurried up the rungs to the warmth and safety of the decks above, something else began to bother him. Boz, who had no training in such things, hadn’t noticed. But he had. It was the radiation. Not all of it was interstellar.

Some of it was coming from the other side of those doors.