ADEM

Eight days from Nov Tero

Adem whistled as he wiped down the table and cleaned up what little mess he had made in the kitchen. He felt good. The adrenaline rush of the emergency, followed by the long cool down of the ship-wide diagnostic and the cooking, had left him tired but strangely chipper. The conversation with Hisako hadn’t hurt, either.

He locked the kitchen door and smothered a yawn. It had been nice putting his aerospace design skills to use, too. Adding the x-ray emitter to the probe had saved him from spending hours in a vacuum suit, and he had several other improvements to The Midnight Special in mind. Adem checked his pocket for his reader and headed for his–

Adem cursed and patted down his other pockets. He’d used the reader during the diagnostic, and he remembered carrying it up to the workspace, amongst an armload of tools. He had dumped them on his workstation before coming to the kitchen with Hisako.

Chipper took a beating as Adem retraced his steps. He shaded his eyes as he approached the door of the workspace. The Hajj corridors were comfortably dim, but Hisako had set the lighting in the workspace several degrees higher. Adem had lost track of the number of times he’d gone from dim hallway to dark, unoccupied workspace only to be blinded when the automatic lights came on.

The precaution was unnecessary. The workspace was already occupied.

“What’s up?” Mateo said. He was sweating and elbow deep in a damaged power converter.

“I’ve left my reader. What are you doing?”

Mateo swabbed his forehead with his sleeve. “Eh, couldn’t sleep so I figured I’d try to get a little ahead.”

Everyone on the drive team was going to be cranky-tired come morning. Adem made a mental note to ask his mother for a donation from her special coffee stash. The team deserved the treat and might need the additional caffeine. He stepped to his workstation and searched the day’s detritus. The reader was there, half-buried under a scanning unit and a set of sockets. He slipped it into his pocket.

Mateo was still busy with the converter. It was probably just busy work, but Hisako had said something about rigging up some power buffer before the next jump. Adem woke the screen on her workstation, curious in spite of his fatigue. An index of files came up, but he didn’t recognize it. It wasn’t the one Hisako had prepared for the drive team. Adem scanned the names of the files, rubbed his eyes, and read them more closely. He opened one of them. “Holy sh…” He caught himself before he drew Mateo’s attention.

The index had everything, from the procedures for deactivating UA tamper protection to full schematics and repair instructions for their tech. Every piece of technology the United Americas had taken to their graves was there. Adem’s hands were shaking. He inspected another file. Mass-grav trouble-shooting and repair! A parts list for the fusion engines! A how-to for food assemblers!

Adem’s exhaustion vanished, overwhelmed by a mixture of hope and grief. A thousand years in survival mode had left humanity scratching amongst the ruins of technology it didn’t have time or resources to rediscover. The knowledge in the database could change life on all the worlds. Why hadn’t Hisako shared it? Did she not understand what it meant?

He took it all, copying the decrypted files to his reader and, when that filled up, uploading them to his password-protected corner of the Hajj computers. When he was finished, he returned to the index. The date and time of access were listed alongside the files. He ran his finger down the list to see which ones Hisako had been looking at last.

Adem’s hand floated to his mouth. What did Hisako want with the operations manual for the most powerful weapon in human history?