Chapter Four

Cira

Terra-Sol date 3814.243

Cira checked their position against the four closest pulsars, plugged the new data into the calculations, and adjusted their course. For the umpteenth time. Days like this, she seriously wondered why she’d pushed so hard to take the PCCS’s officer exams at fourteen.

“If you can pass, I’ll make you an ensign,” Erryla had finally agreed after a full Terra-Sol cycle of her daughter’s pestering and her wife’s amused smirks. “But you know how slowly promotions become available. If you become an ensign now, you’ll still be one when you’re twenty. You think school is boring? Try repeating the exact same function for so many shifts only the computers can keep count.”

Cira had grinned, knowing she’d won. “But at least it’ll be necessary repetition.”

However, her mother had, unfortunately yet unsurprisingly, been right. She got what she’d wanted and seriously regretted her past self’s decisions on some days. Four cycles later, she was an ensign with no hope of a promotion unless she left Pax Novis. And that wasn’t going to happen. Even if she didn’t have to stay to watch over her stowaways, she loved this ship and her family too much to leave, not even for rank. The boredom was awful, though, especially when she was stuck on navigation, her least favorite. Astronavigation calculations were mind-numbing, despite how good at them Cira was. Or maybe because she was so good at them. There was no challenge anymore. Star charts and flight paths and sensor reports and more, all of it looking ahead by light-years. It left her feeling disconnected. Security was better—at least then she felt linked to the crew.

At least Halver—Commander Liddens, rather—was in charge of the bridge today. Cira loved her mother, but working directly under Erryla was always stressful. Too much pressure to be perfect. Perfection was the only way Cira knew to validate the chance her mother had taken by promoting her so young. Nepotism existed throughout the PCCS ranks, but Cira didn’t want any of those complaints to land in Captain Antares’s inbox.

Halver was still her commanding officer now, though, so she bit her tongue every time she she felt the urge to hint at what Riston had revealed about Halver and Malcolm. That sort of teasing was for another time and another place entirely. Unfortunately. Sometimes maintaining the reputation for being old beyond her cycles and eminently responsible really sucked.

Boredom settled in even before she’d finished with her navigational adjustments, so Cira started poking through the most recent news feeds and alerts as soon as her inputs had been accepted. Mostly it was more of the same—shortages, blockades, battles, and lists of the dead. Then she noticed a flag on a days-old PCCS alert, something meant to keep the message near the top of the feed.

Pax Feris has missed her latest check-in with the Pax Class Governing Council. If any PCCS has had recent communication with Captain Adriano or any officer on board Pax Feris, report in to Control immediately.

Cira blinked at the display. The message hadn’t changed since last week, and that was the problem. It meant everyone on Feris had been out of communication for at least ten days.

“What’s got you frowning so hard?” Halver leaned forward in his seat, elbows braced on his knees and his attention on Cira. “I know nav bores you, but it’s not that bad.”

“No, it’s— Here.” With a few swipes of her fingers on the holo-controls, she sent the alert to Halver’s display. “I thought it was funny at first. Not so much now.”

A second later, a frown spread across his face, too. “He still hasn’t checked in?”

It was worse than that. “If they flagged it, no one on the ship has.”

Halver hummed, his fingers moving across controls and his display quickly shifting through multiple programs and systems. Halver was handsome, his black hair always perfect, his smile usually wide and happy, his brown eyes expressive, and his body perfectly honed to fill the fitted black, gray, and white on-board uniform. He could be almost annoyingly boisterous and impulsive at times, especially when on shore leave, but there was a reason he’d risen to the second-highest rank on the ship before he turned thirty. He was driven when it counted and damned smart. In moments like this, Cira could maybe get an inkling of why the crush Shadow noticed had developed in the first place; Malcolm needed someone to loosen him up a little bit, and Halver needed someone who could appreciate his professional side as much as, or more than, his goofball antics.

Just like Riston’s sense of humor balances out your tendency to take everything too seriously? The thought rose faster than she could squash it, and she ducked her head, lips tingling as she remembered the brief kiss she’d impulsively pressed to zir cheek. Maybe she had more in common with Halver than she’d thought. She’d always known she was asexual—well, always from the moment she knew the orientation existed—but she’d spent a long time wondering if she was aromantic as well. The fact that she’d always looked at the relationship her mothers had and quietly yearned for something just like it for herself, fractious though it could be at times, was what had kept her from a firm declaration. Moments with Riston, however, were different. Warmth had swept through her when ze revealed zir present, and it had filled her to the point of bursting with it until she had to do something. Rare though they were, impulses like those were some of the few real signs that she fell somewhere other than aromantic on that spectrum.

A few minutes later, Halver recaptured her attention with a flick of his fingers. Sensor logs now covered half of the bridge’s main display, and he sat back, his hands resting on the arms of the chair and his eyes never leaving the screen. Sixteen different PSSC Control relay sensors spread along one of the main shipping routes had logged the passage of Pax Feris. Passive identification only; no return response recorded.

“At least we know they haven’t exploded,” Cira hesitantly offered.

“And I honestly don’t know if that makes it better or worse,” the commander said, gesturing at the screen. “Everyone not working on a priority task, dig into this. See what you can find out about their last port and recent past. Use every source and system we have access to. I want a report for the captain before the shift rotation.”

The bridge crew immediately switched gears. Cira was already in several of the programs and files she needed. In her periphery, she could see three of the other five officers joining her. Only the lieutenants on helm and security remained locked in to their own systems and duties. Cira and the other three dug through records—both internally through PSSC Control and in the broader intersystem archives. When anything that might be relevant was found, they flicked it up to the main display. Soon, none of the normal sensor readouts or course projections could be seen; the entire front wall of the bridge was filled with reports from PSSC Control, security logs from Pax Feris’s last port of call, news feeds, message captures, and more. With a sharp gesture, Halver organized them into chronological order.

Terra-Sol date 3814.217 — News-feed report: Rationing on Raasora Sparks Riots

Terra-Sol date 3814.222 — Pax Feris Cargo manifest PCCSF-814.222.62.1998 logged with PSSC Control from Raasora Station, Draconis System

Terra-Sol date 3814.224 — News-feed report: Anti-War Group Claims Credit for Theft of Military Medical Supplies on Raasora

Scattered among the other details were Pax Feris’s daily communications summaries. There weren’t any details, just a simple breakdown of incoming signals, outgoing messages, and passive receiver pings. For the last ten days, there had been hundreds of incoming signals, dozens of receiver pings, and zero outgoing signals. The ship hadn’t just gone dark; it had all but fallen into a communications black hole.

Halver grunted and his hand moved. The information on the screen shifted again, this time organized by type. Another wave. It organized by where it was tagged on the system’s map.

Cira tilted her head as though examining the data laid out on the screen from a different angle would create clarity. It didn’t. “What exactly are we looking for?”

“I was hoping there’d be something suspicious in the records.” Eyebrows furrowed, he reorganized the data again. “I’ve met Botran, and he’s an arrogant ass, but he’s not this inept.”

Cira had met Botran, too, however briefly, and arrogantly inept had seemed like a perfect description. Then again, she’d heard nothing but snark from her mothers about the man for cycles before she met him. Her teachers always had told her to be wary of confirmation bias.

“I don’t see anything here to hint at foul play,” Halver admitted. “Maybe there was a massive comm failure after they left port.”

“Maybe.” But Cira had a hard time believing it was that simple. “I’ll package this and prep it for the captain.”

Nodding, Halver hit a few points on his holo-controls. The main display reverted to the standard operations view—a real-time overview of their flight path and every object, celestial and man-made, within several million klicks of their position.

It didn’t take much focus to collate the data, so her eyes strayed to the course projections instead. Although she wouldn’t be able to see it even if the ship had windows—Novis traveled too fast to offer good views of anything—the ship was passing a debris field from an old battle, one so unimportant it wasn’t even in the history databases. Remembered battles were always tagged with names, dates, and links to whatever memorial survivors had constructed. This spot on the map had nothing. Dozens or hundreds, maybe even thousands, of people had died here, and no one even remembered the names of the ships that had been carrying them through the black.

The Novis’s most common routes took them past dozens of these debris fields—some marked and remembered and honored, others utterly forgotten—but it was the nameless ones that pulled at Cira’s heart. In a way, they reminded her of her stowaways, forgotten and abandoned. At least the debris was sometimes picked clean by scavengers and scrappers who collected the broken metal and undamaged parts to resell on the quadrant’s thriving black market.

Death. Destruction. Slow decay. Sometimes, it seemed like those were the only certainties the Milky Way contained. Sometimes, it also seemed like the only reason she needed to keep risking her life for all her stowaways—the galaxy needed every single ounce of good that humanity was capable of producing.

Cira pushed those thoughts aside and focused on work. Distance traveled, power consumed, velocity, speed, stability and mass of cargo, gravitational pull of nearby celestial bodies, paths of comets and placement of asteroids—all of it had to be considered and constantly updated to ensure traveling at super-luminal speeds wouldn’t end with a ship full of holes and a dead crew. Hours later, when the door finally opened and the bridge crew for gamma shift strode in through the security office, it felt as though numbers, equations, and star maps swam in front of her eyes. It took an effort of will not to rush through the transitional report, but soon enough she was free. And this time it truly was freedom. Except for two quick stops she had to make, the next sixteen hours were hers. She could go to the garden deck and laze under the ultraviolet lights, visit the recreation deck and organize a game of mag ball, or even spend the whole time sleeping. The last was especially appealing. She never seemed to have enough time to sleep.

First, though, she needed to check in with Mama. Most of the officers from her bridge shift were heading to the port elevator to go up to the recreation deck or the garden; Cira turned starboard to go deeper into the inner workings of Pax Novis.

While deck six might be the mind of the ship, engineering was the brain and the heart. It was also on one of the largest levels on the ship, at least in terms of height. Cira always had a split second of vertigo walking out of the elevator near engineering; she’d spent too much of her life on a spaceship to be comfortable with wide open spaces, even ones that came with walls and a roof. Only deck eight with its copse of six-to-nine-meter trees was grander than engineering. The garden needed the space for the plants that helped scrub their air and produce oxygen for them to breathe, but on this deck, the reason for the massive scope was the drives. They pushed Novis exponentially faster than the speed of light, and they took up a lot of space. To make up for what would otherwise be wasted area, each room included ladders and walkways that gave access to the heights of the deck. This was especially true inside the engine room itself, which only a small portion of the crew could access. The engines were separated from the rest of the ship by two thick blast-resistant barriers, and each required an ID scan before they would open.

Cira waved her wrist ID past the sensor. The door swooshed open and then it closed behind her as soon as she was safely through. Only after it had slid shut could she repeat the process at the second blast door at the end of the short hall.

The outer hallways of the deck had been empty, but engineering itself was buzzing with activity. Three teams were calling numbers back and forth across the two levels as they calibrated the sensor and communication arrays, and a fourth team seemed to be running a full diagnostic on the cabling running between the engines and the power cells one deck below. It took Cira a few moments of searching before she spotted her mama bent over a display table on the other side of the primary control room. This wasn’t really her mama, though; this was Lieutenant Commander and Chief Engineer Meida Dalil-Antares. Cira had learned a long time ago that each of her parents were truly two people, the one she got to see in the privacy of their quarters and the one they showed everyone else when duty called. With the way Meida was staring at whatever information was running across its surface, Cira knew she was fully locked in to duty mode. The black uniform she wore fit Meida’s slender frame well, and the rank markings somehow seemed like adornments when she wore them. Her long, wavy black hair was piled on top of her head, and her lips were red from chewing on them while she thought. Erryla called the habit endearing, but Cira winced every time Mama pulled her bottom lip between her teeth. How could gnawing on herself like that possibly help her think?

“You’re ignoring Ma again,” Cira said when she stopped at her mother’s side. “The captain sent me a message hours ago, asking me to come down here in person to tell you to your face to answer her damn calls.”

Meida snorted, the sound surprisingly harsh from such a delicately built woman, and in that instant, she switched modes, easily becoming Mama instead of Meida. “I’d answer if I thought she was going to listen to me this time. And now I’m mad at her for using you as a go-between, too. She’s not going to like the conversation we have tonight.”

“Good thing I was already planning on sleeping tonight instead of hanging out with you two.” Cira hated it when her mothers fought, but she’d learned over the cycles that it was inevitable; the two women were too stubborn to communicate any other way sometimes.

“Yes, love. Sorry. It might be best to give us a couple days, at least outside of duty shifts.” Meida’s nose scrunched slightly as she glanced apologetically at her daughter, but her fingers continued to dance through command prompts on her display. “Speaking of, you’re here with me next, right?”

“Yes,” she said with a smile. Rotations in engineering and medical had become her favorite in the last Terra-Sol cycle. Soon, she’d have to pick one or the other as her concentration. Adrienn and Meida were each, of course, lobbying for their own field of study. “I’ve been thinking about ways to adjust the array’s input and minimize the losses we’ve been seeing when the energy is transferred into the power cells.”

Meida’s hands stopped moving. “Someone beat you to it.”

“What?”

“I know!” Saving the work she’d been doing, Meida closed the program and turned toward her daughter. “No one had any ideas the last time I asked, but someone must’ve had a moment of genius, because the conversion issue has been nonexistent for the last three days.”

“Someone had a moment of genius? You say that like you don’t know who it was.”

“I don’t.” Meida frowned and glanced at the closest officer. “One of them tried to take credit at first, but they flubbed it when I made them explain how they worked the patch into place without upsetting the balance in the output. The rest of them didn’t dare step up after that, because none of them could answer the question, either.”

“Specters?” Cira asked, only partially teasing.

“I’d actually been hoping you’d fixed it, but since that’s clearly not the case.” Meida shrugged, her frustrated frown deepening. “At this point, it has to be specters, because if not, Novis is gaining sentience, fixing herself, and on her way to putting me out of a job.”

Or Mika—Tinker, as Riston always called her—had been down here playing with things she shouldn’t be. It was hard to keep the realization off her face, so Cira turned to the display. “Show me what they did, at least. I want to see if I was right.”

Meida took Cira through the adjustments one by one. Some were the same as what Cira had come up with. Others were deceptively simple, and equally brilliant, changes Cira doubted she’d ever have considered. Envy warred with frustration and pride as Meida waxed poetic about the genius of the solution. Cira yearned for this kind of innate aptitude at something—anything except astronavigation. She was also angry at the risks Tinker had taken, both for exposure and for damage, by coming down here and messing with crucial systems. Both feelings were small and hollow compared to the pride swelling in her chest.

Tinker did this! she wanted to shout. She’s not even twelve, and she has one of the most gifted mechanical minds I’ve ever seen, and we have her on this ship.

It was hardly any consolation at all to be able to say, “I was partially right,” when Meida finished breaking the solution down.

“That’s better than some of my staff. Most understood the solution as soon as we looked at the chain of commands link by link, but others are making me reconsider the decision that brought them into my engine room.” She cast another harsh frown at her officers.

Intimately knowing what it felt like not to live up to either of her mothers’ exacting standards, Cira glanced over and quietly said, “Not everyone can be you, Mama.”

Meida turned back to Cira, her smile wry. “Apparently someone can, they just also happen to be hiding from me, for whatever reason.”

“Maybe it’s one of the crew kids and they think they’ll get in trouble if they admit they messed with a primary system.” Cira’s suggestion was the truth, even if she knew Meida would assume she was talking about one of the crew’s offspring.

“Because they would be,” Meida insisted. “I just, you know, would probably offer them a job as soon as their punishment was over.”

Cira wished that were true in Tink’s case, but there was no way around the PCGC laws and regulations regarding illegal passengers. At least because Tink and the others were minors, the chances of them being executed were low. However, there was no way any captain or councilmember, no matter how compassionate, would agree to grant citizenship to a stowaway.

Meida’s head cocked, and her eyes lost focus. This was the look she got when she listened to messages broadcast through the ship’s secure channels. Whole-ship communications were usually sent through the speakers placed strategically throughout Novis, but anything meant only for a specific subsection of the crew came directly through each individual’s inner-aural comm. Whatever this notification was, it was clearly something meant only for the command crew.

A second before Cira was about to leave Meida to deal with whatever the captain needed, Meida sucked in a sharp breath and cursed. Cira froze. Mama almost never cursed.

“This just came in.” Meida flicked her fingers across her holo-controls, and the display on the table changed. At first, Cira thought it was the same message she and Halver had been looking at on the bridge, but no. There was an additional paragraph at the bottom. The update, highlighted in red and marked with warning symbols on either side, made Cira’s stomach drop.

Pax Amitis has not been in contact with PCGC, PSSC Control, or any other PCCS for the past two days. No distress calls have been reported by any ship in any system, and no beacon has been activated. No vessel in the area has so far logged any explosions or new debris fields in either Pax Amitis’s or Pax Feris’s last known locations. Both ships are still registering on passive relay sensors along their projected flight paths.

“Captain John?” Cira couldn’t believe it, but this was a communiqué directly from the PCGC and meant for the command crew’s eyes only. Many of the news feeds she read through every week tended toward the alarmist, reacting like the spin of the universe was about to collapse. She had never seen an internal alert from PCGC do the same. If anything, they tended to understate, to hold back until they had data from multiple irrefutable sources. If they were doing that now…if this was an understatement…

“This isn’t supposed to go beyond the command crew yet, but your mother and I never have been very good at keeping secrets from you.” Meida’s voice was quiet, pitched low to keep it from carrying to any other ears. “The assumptions we were operating under before are pretty much void now. Botran may be unsuited for command, but John isn’t. And he reached out to your mother and me recently. He was worried about Botran’s sudden silence.”

“Halver was, too,” Cira murmured, her eyes locked on the alert. “He had us digging through public records today, looking for anything that might explain Captain Adriano’s quiet.”

“And?” Meida prompted when Cira stopped.

“We didn’t find anything.”

Meida sighed. “Not surprising considering what their current working theory is.”

“What?” Cira’s gaze snapped up to Meida’s face and then down to the table again. Finally, she noticed there was more to the update.

The previous theory was ongoing communication issues caused the sudden silence from Captain Adriano and his crew, but in light of the silence from Pax Amitis, this conclusion has been called into question. A new hypothesis has been put forward. Some believe this is an attack on the PSSC, a covert, possibly self-mutating virus that has infiltrated our systems. Despite the treaties in place across the quadrant to protect PCCSs and their crews, there have always been factions who oppose our existence. They have tried, unsuccessfully, to move against us before. We believe this might be their next attempt. It is possible they hope isolating our ships from PSSC Control and the PCGC will make them more vulnerable. We are working on locating this possible virus and creating a patch to protect other ships from infection. We are also in contact with ambassadors and agents from every system in the quadrant to request military backup and protection for all PCCSs.

A virus. An actual attack. On her home. It wasn’t missiles, plasma charges, or those awful condensate bombs, but it was an attack all the same, something intended to maim her ship.

“Do you think they’re right?” Cira wanted the answer to be no.

“It makes a dangerous amount of sense. It’s been decades since anyone has tried anything.” Meida bit her lip and pushed a loose strand of black hair behind her ear. “People are nothing if not persistent in their pursuit of three things—”

“Power, power, and proof they’re right,” Cira finished. “How would cutting off our communications help someone gain any of those, though?”

“That, love, is a question for your other mother.” Meida sounded as weary as her one-shouldered shrug looked. “I know engines and mechanics, not tactics and strategy.”

It was a question Cira would definitely be asking her other mother as soon as they had time away from the crew. For now, she tightened her grip on the edge of the table until the metal groaned faintly under the pressure of her cybernetic fingers, and she read the last bit of the alert.

Lastly, four PCGC quick-run ships have been rerouted to intercept both vessels. PCCSs Sustis, Auxis, Sanctis, and Benvis will investigate, and more details will be released as their veracity is verified.

Any individual with information on either ship is hereby ordered to report in to PCGC immediately on a secure, high-priority TDC channel.

“I know we were planning on dinner tonight, but I don’t think it’s going to happen.” Meida reached out and ran her hand over Cira’s cloud of crimped silver-gray hair.

Cira looked up at Mama, giving her a small, forced smile. “I guessed that as soon as I saw your eyes go distant. Those sorts of alerts are never good news.”

“You’re a good girl, love.” She cupped the back of Cira’s head and pulled her closer to give her a kiss on the forehead. “Now go. You need the break, and I have a lot of work to do.”

Trying, and failing, to squash the anxiety taking root in her chest, Cira made herself hold Meida’s gaze. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help, Mama.”

“Oh, I’m sure the captain will claim you for one of her jobs well before I get the chance to,” she said with a rueful smile. “Which is why you should take the time off while you have it.”

Yeah, because it’s going to be so easy to relax now, Cira thought. No way am I going to be plagued by nightmares of viruses forcing ships to break apart piece by piece. Trying to keep that fear off her face, she kissed Meida’s cheek and left engineering.

Chest thrumming with tension, Cira got on the elevator and hoarsely announced, “Deck six.” She wanted to see Ma, to walk straight up to Erryla with open arms, cling like she’d done when she was little, and beg her to make everything okay. The vague foreboding that had settled over Cira when the new alert came in dug deeper with every breath, like it was feeding on oxygen and using it to grow branches and thorns, and this wasn’t a dread she could unload on Meida or Erryla, no matter how much she wanted to. It was also far too dangerous to contact Riston now, not with everyone keeping such a close watch on their communications systems. That left only one person on the Novis crew for her to talk to. Thankfully, when she walked into the med bay, the nurse smiled and waved her toward Adrienn’s office.

Adrienn took one look at her face when she walked in and rose to zir feet, deep lines of concern etching into zir face. “What is it? Do I need to prep a bed?”

She shook her head, trying to calm down and get her thoughts in coherent order. “I was with Mama when she got the alert.”

“Ah.” Adrienn sat back down, pulling zir lip between zir teeth to fiddle with zir lip ring. “I was going to talk to you about getting the kids to the meeting place for a checkup, but now…”

“I’m afraid to even send Riston a message,” Cira admitted. She had to, though, because ze needed to know about Tink’s meddling in engineering. It was like a second crew existed inside the visible one, and she’d somehow made herself their captain. Thankfully, if that was true, it meant she had Adrienn to act as her second-in-command and Riston as her executive officer. There were definitely far worse teams to have at her back. “Everyone will be looking for a virus, and that means a constant watch on every system. I’ll have to use the emergency signal to get zem to meet me in person.”

Ze shook zir head, thin lips pressed into a hard line. Gaze rising to the screen on the wall, ze studied the map displayed there and all the color-coded lines tracking the flight paths and projected paths of Pax Feris and Pax Amitis. “What do you think is happening?”

Nothing good, Cira thought, but she couldn’t bring herself to say the words.

Saying them felt too much like making her fear real.