Flight Year 9
Yirella was already yawning when she and Dellian walked into the hibernation compartment. There was something about the place that was simply restful: its size, the quiet efficiency of all the sarcophagi-like suspension chambers, the reduced lighting, and a temperature several degrees below the rest of the Morgan. She suspected this was the way temples and churches had felt on old Earth.
They went into the washroom together and undressed, smirking as if they were back in the senior year on the Immerle estate.
‘We had last night,’ she said coyly.
‘I know.’
Being together for the last fourteen months had been good. Everyone who’d been revived for the Captain’s Council had been active while the fleet accelerated up to relativistic velocity.
Yirella had relished contributing to all the review-group meetings about the Signal from Lolo Maude, speculating on what had happened and where the original Strike mission had gone – if it had. The Morgan had constructed new sensor arrays to study the K-class star, but that had added nothing to their knowledge. All they had were assumptions and guesswork, which put her in her element.
Outside of the meetings and official watch duties, she and Dellian had treated the time like the holiday they’d never had on Juloss. So much so that, during the last month, she’d found herself resenting the approaching day when they’d be back at point-nine lightspeed. The interlude had given her a chance to relax in a way she never had before. From their perspective, the goal they were heading for was so remote it could be comfortably ignored, giving her a degree of freedom that was unique in her experience. Limited freedom, maybe, but the Morgan had centuries’ worth of music and drama and literature on file that she could dip into whenever she wanted, and it had Dellian, who for once wasn’t stuck in an eternal cycle of fitness routines and combat training sessions. It was like finding out what being human was actually like – a year of living what they’d always been promised.
By the time they stood beside his suspension chamber and she kissed him goodbye, she was struggling with a tangle of emotions.
‘See you in a heartbeat and three years,’ he said tenderly.
‘That’s a date.’
Yirella refused to look back as she walked over to her own chamber. A medical technician was waiting for her. ‘I can manage,’ she said, slightly irritable, as sie offered her an arm.
There was the inevitable moment of coffin fever as the transparent lid slid shut. On the other side of the glass, the med tech gave her a thumbs-up, and she nodded, taking an apprehensive breath. Slim robot arms slid out of the padded sides of the chamber and carefully plugged umbilical tubes into her abdominal sockets. She closed her eyes and activated her neural interface.
The little biotech unit hadn’t been removed after she’d helped with Dellian’s treatment. She’d told Alimyne it would help her work, designing the neutron star civilization, allowing her to access and direct the G8Turing formatting routines a lot faster than through a standard databud. Alimyne had reluctantly agreed.
And she’d been right; it had proved incredibly useful in crafting the directives that the seedships would use as a foundation for the neutron star civilization they were to birth. But it also gave her a much greater access to the Morgan’s network than a databud. Combined with the override routines Ainsley had provided her, she had a level of control over the ship that would have alarmed Dellian had he known.
Yirella used her direct link to load a simple instruction into the suspension chamber management routines and closed her eyes, smiling faintly as the umbilicals fed the preliminary sedative into her body.
*
Consciousness arrived easily. Yirella’s body recognized it as if she were waking up in the morning rather than recovering from hibernation, but then it had only been three days. She felt refreshed and roguishly thrilled by what she was about to do. First she checked that the compartment’s monitoring routines were ignoring her; the overrides she’d loaded had created a blind spot around her chamber. No alerts had been triggered.
The umbilicals unplugged, and the lid slid back. While she showered she reviewed the ship’s status – particularly the location of the active-duty crew – then finally reviewed the other illicit procedure she’d begun. Two decks down, a biologic initiator had spent three weeks producing a human body. The cyborg didn’t have a full range of organs, just basic modules that could sustain the biologic muscles that overlaid a carbon skeleton, which in turn had been dressed in very realistic skin.
And it was ready.
Her routines scouted the route up to the suspension compartment, creating a safe passage. Yirella walked the cyborg up carefully.
She was dressed and ready when it entered the washroom, carrying a case of additional remotes the initiator had produced for her. Looking at the perfect replica of herself was the strangest sensation. She didn’t know if she should run or smile in admiration.
This part of the plan was always going to be the most ambiguous, because she and Ainsley didn’t know quite what they were dealing with. One version – the original idea – had the initiators producing a batch of insect-sized remotes packed with sensors that she could control while resting in the chamber. It certainly had the least risk. Then the Morgan had detected Lolo’s Signal – a random factor that could never have been anticipated. Her year off everything – worrying, plotting – made her reluctant to hand everything over to remotes. She wanted to be more involved, telling herself she could do a better job than any sensor, that she needed to be in the room. So she’d designed the cyborg.
Her doppelgänger lay back down in her suspension chamber, and the lid slid back up. That way, any of the duty crew performing a routine visual check – which was a mandatory once-a-day inspection – would just see her resting in there as normal.
It was a long way around the Morgan’s life-support section from the hibernation compartment to the captain’s private quarters, and several decks higher. Yirella took it carefully, deactivating the monitors section by section, constantly checking the position of any crew in the corridors so they didn’t come across her. Three and a half hours later she was outside the door. She ran one final review of the quarters to make sure Kenelm wasn’t inside. It seemed to be clear – unless of course Kenelm was using routines every bit as sophisticated as hers. After all, if she was right, sie had been on the Factory when Ainsley was made.
Yirella hesitated just for a second, then sent an override code into the door mechanism. It unlocked silently, and she walked in. Kenelm’s private quarters were made up of eight rooms: a formal reception room, a lounge, an entertainment room wrapped around an interactive stage, a dining room, a spa, a bedroom, a washroom and a study. Lights came on as she stood on the threshold. The small sensor remotes clinging to her clothes extended their insect legs and clambered down onto the floor. They spread out, and she closed her eyes, riding them, multiple images flowing into her brain through the neural interface. It allowed her to pervade every room of the quarters at once, examining the structure and fittings simultaneously.
There were no independent sensors active, and no Kenelm sleeping on hir bed. Sie really had gone back into hibernation a day after Yirella, as scheduled. Yirella allowed herself to exhale and got to work. The remotes carefully recorded the layout of each room: the way everything had been left when Kenelm went for suspension, the position of all the loose items, even the way the chairs were oriented. It might have been excessive caution, but she didn’t want Kenelm to know someone had been snooping.
When everything was mapped, the obvious place to start a forensic-level analysis was the study. She dispatched the majority of the remotes there while she sat down in the dining room. Kenelm certainly had some of the best food extruders in the fleet, and after three days on fluid nutrients oozing into her via the umbilicals, she was ravenous.
Five hours later the remotes had examined and explored every square millimetre of the study and everything in it, even scanning for hidden alcoves or passages. Yirella stood in the middle of the room, looking around with the results splashed inside her head. Network cables seemed to be woven everywhere beneath the decking and walls. Power cables were bright fizzing lines; the ephemeral outlines of systems and sensors glimmered like fading holograms. She was here in person because she knew intuition was something that couldn’t be enacted through remotes. But now, it turned out that staring suspiciously around the study wasn’t the mystery-busting breakthrough in real life that it was in all the books she’d accessed.
She wasn’t sure what she was going to find, but the study certainly didn’t contain it. Her principal fear was that anything that might verify that Kenelm had a hidden agenda would be contained in deeply encrypted files buried somewhere in the Morgan’s network. Given how much data was stored in the ship’s memory cores, they would be almost impossible to find unless a genten ran a full content analysis through each individual file – a task that would likely take centuries.
The remotes were directed into the formal reception room. After all, wasn’t it Saint Yuri who said the best way to hide something was in plain sight? She frowned. Or was that Saint Callum?
The bedroom was next. When the remotes finished that, she lay down for a short rest . . .
Lounge.
Dining room.
Spa.
By the time the remotes scampered en masse into the entertainment room, Yirella had been in the captain’s quarters for nearly two days – eating, sleeping, fretting. The antique book she was flicking through almost dropped through her fingers when the remotes told her they’d completed their scan. Everything was normal. Nothing was out of place, nothing was hidden behind false panels, there were no concealed alien gadgets.
‘Shit.’
She got up and slid the book back into the shelf with all the others after a quick check of the images she’d taken to confirm it was in the right place. Kenelm had twenty volumes detailing the complete history of Falkon’s terraforming process. They’d been printed on that planet, according to the title page. Her hand rested on the spine. She didn’t move it away.
Kenelm clearly valued the books. And why not? They were important, a part of their heritage.
But why these?
Her brief flick through a few pages showed her they were spectacularly dull scientific papers. Even the illustrations were boring: bacteria, genetic sequences, three-dimensional graphs, a clone tank, laboratory equipment, assessment team expeditions, skyscraper-sized biologic initiators, orbital geological surveys.
She remembered Saint Yuri’s story, how he doggedly followed Saint Callum’s desperate hunt for his wife, Savi. How every good detective understood that people could be defined by what they considered important.
‘What am I not seeing?’ she asked, and pulled out volume one.