to be fun.
In preparation for the meeting with the Triumvirate, Joro was changing in the “official” cabin connected to her office. She reserved the space for staff meetings, for quick naps, and for when she was not in the mood for family drama, though those times were fewer with Paolo close to graduation and, she admitted, Tomika having left home for her tour in the Ring.
She was relieved that she successfully compartmentalized Paolo’s Technician induction ceremony, not feeling close to saying goodbye. She went through the same cycle of stress and worry when Tomika was picked for the Technician program, but while she was certain Paolo would come back, she was worried that when Tomika left for the Ring, she might not return or keep in touch. Joro knew her daughter was her own person.
Sucks to be right.
She let Landfall intrude on her thoughts. Captain Charles Devereaux would soon enter necessary codes into the ship’s databases from books stored in a safe in the Captain’s office. In response, locked files throughout the ship would open in sequence over the next three years, and the Burners would use those instructions to prepare Salvation for landing, though the ship would never itself land.
The daunting nature of the complexity ahead, in Joro’s mind, helped explain why the Burners were getting the files in sequence. Thousands of chores needed to be completed in a specific order, big and small. For instance, prepping and test-flying the fleet of dormant shuttles in hangars attached to the exterior of the Ring would take almost two years alone, if everything went as planned.
There was also the lack of trained bridge Crew to guide the ship. Joro could think of a few people in the Back who would love to take on the challenge, but there was the ancient prohibition against intermingling the three sections of Salvation. The secret she kept from Charles’s father was that she was frustrated with Joshua’s inaction and, in her opinion, his dereliction of duty in favor of tradition. Her frustration grew to the point that she consciously disregarded tradition and began training Burners to take over as helmsmen and navigators.
Her decision was not immediately popular among her Assistant Engineers, but they were persuaded for the same reason she initiated the classes: they were running out of time to prepare for Landfall. Many things before and during the landing needed to work perfectly the first time. This required intense preparation with no shortcuts, and they all knew they needed to do everything in their power during this time to improve their chance of success and minimize disaster.
Chief Assistant Engineer Barrett surprised her by agreeing: “Everything we’re doing, now and in the future, will be a waste of time if we don’t have a trained Crew on the bridge as soon as possible.”
Joro hoped she could convince the new Captain to agree to take on her students. Three years should be enough to train and station those desperately needed personnel if he was flexible and things went as planned with the unlocked files.
But things never go as planned.
Joro ignored the voice in the back of her head as she sat at her desk, its surface cluttered with pads and tablets. The top one was the annual assessment from the Senior Assistant Engineer on whether to activate the ship’s artificial intelligence module.
The AI system was deactivated soon after the first mutiny when they learned the mutineers used it as a tool to organize the mob and identify parts of the ship that were vulnerable to attack. It also opened doors and passages that the Captain at the time locked in a defensive move, and it took the ship’s internal defense systems offline—notably, the knockout gas system. The Captain at the time ordered the AI system shut down with the caveat that its use be evaluated every year.
The ramifications of his decision affected the ship across a range of functions, but most notably with navigation. Salvation’s rudimentary systems could and did maintain the direction of travel, and it successfully extrapolated the ship’s course to avoid navigational hazards like stars, gravity wells, and other dangers to the relatively fragile ship. But beyond that, the navigation systems were limited, and they refused manual course corrections to planets they passed that could also sustain human life.
For good or bad, Salvation was engaged in a three-thousand-year mission decided by its Original Builders, who were long dead.
Joro smiled as she read the report because she read it all before. The writer used the same verbiage and language she used when she was responsible for the report before her ascension to her current position, though this version’s most notable difference was the caveat that Landfall was coming. The writer made a persuasive argument for activation, noting that the humans could use all the help they could find.
Joro wasn’t convinced. She held more faith in her humans than the Original Builders seemed to hold in theirs. Her teams worked hard and well together, and they believed they were the solution to everything on the ship.
She almost clicked Denied before she remembered that the new Captain might want a say in the matter, considering Salvation was his ship. His father couldn’t be made to care about the AI module, but maybe the new one was different. She clicked Recommend Disapproval and forwarded the report to the Captain.
This was one of thousands of tough decisions to be made in the next few years and like it or not—and she could admit to herself that she did not—those decisions ultimately rested with the Captain. Joro did not trust captains. From her experience and from reading the ship’s history, they did either not enough or too much, and she was not about to let anyone barge in and tell her how to do her job. Joro was protective of her Engineers and their families, no matter how frustrating they could be.
Her main reason for not yet reaching out to this Captain was his history of behavior in the Back.
Is he still a drunk? Is he still busting up bars like he did at Madam Chang’s place—twice, in fact? I’m going to find out today.
She dug out another pad that was keyed to her identity and idly scrolled through the Astrogator’s report. From all sensors, visual and otherwise, the solar system ahead met all the criteria for human life to the best of their knowledge. The report contained caveats from top to bottom with the usual cautions, notably that they could not know if their new home was already inhabited by an intelligent race. There were no detectable artificial electromagnetic emissions to signify advanced lifeforms, but humans hadn’t generated those until a few hundred years before they left Earth.
To the best of our knowledge.
The interesting part of the report, Joro thought, was the Oort cloud between them and the system ahead. Much too large to be called an asteroid field, it was composed of billions of boulders and asteroids of assorted sizes. The Astrogator hypothesized the cloud might be blocking any possible emissions, plus it prohibited their sensors from doing a deeper dive on the five planets there. They couldn’t be sure about much of anything until Salvation was closer.
It’s almost like the cloud was placed between our destination and Old Earth, yet somehow the Original Builders still felt it was a viable destination. How did they know? Why did the Original Builders send us to a system that couldn’t be determined to sustain human life? It’s likely we’ll never know the answer if it isn’t in one of the Captain’s locked files.
In the old space-fiction stories Joro read as a child, the brave explorers sent probes ahead to scout out the planet, but the irony here was that Salvation was the swiftest vehicle in Earth’s history. Launching their fleet of artificial scouts was problematic. Relatively speaking, the probes could and would keep pace with the ship, but their Engineers were unsure what would happen when they accelerated the probes so they could leave the ship and go on their mission. It was possible the probes would break apart from the stress of ignition and change in course. Their consensus was it would be better to slow the ship down before launching probes, but that presented a whole different set of problems to ship operations.
Joro scrolled through the report. Conversely, the ship’s speed saved them from the mutineers’ bomb when it was ejected from the airlock. Even though the bomb was activated and in the process of igniting, the milliseconds it took to travel through the airlock and outside the ship’s immediate vicinity was more than enough time for it to be behind the ship when it exploded harmlessly.
Joro tried not to shudder at the thought of the consequences if Charles Devereaux’s reaction time were a few seconds slower as she returned her full attention to the Astrogator’s report.
Can we send a reinforced shuttle ahead instead?
She picked up a second tablet that contained water consumption and rationing statistics, but when her door buzzed, she set it aside. Thankful to be saved from what in her opinion was the most boring report on Salvation, she called, “Come.”
She sighed internally when her mother entered the room. “Joro, sweetheart.”
“Hi.” Joro quickly scooped up the pads and tablets around her office. Pointing her chin at an open chair, she dumped the debris at the meeting table in the corner. “Have a seat.”
“Thank you.”
“When was the last time you were here, Mother?” Joro flopped into the chair beside the Head Teacher, thinking it was bad manners to talk to her across her desk.
“Your promotion, of course. Never invited back.”
“You don’t need one, Mother.”
“You are the Engineer. Your time is valuable. I will make an appointment next time.” Shona must have seen Joro’s blood pressure rising, as she quickly held up her hand. “Forgive me. My old ways.”
Joro took a breath. “We do push each other’s buttons, don’t we?”
“Perhaps because we installed them.” She looked around the office and peered into the bedroom through the open door. “That is larger than the one at your home. Are you going to move up here with Padmus and Enrique when Paolo leaves?”
“I like the distance from my day job, Mother.”
“Except you don’t really get away, do you?”
“I learned from the best.” Joro pointed at the older woman.
“Fair enough. I can only say I thought I was doing the right thing at the time.”
“Mother, you can do the guilt thing anytime and anywhere, like at your birthday party next week. I told you I would be there. Why are you really here?”
“Have you heard from Tomika?”
Joro’s heart jumped. “No. Have you?”
“No. Why haven’t you tracked her down?”
The question disarmed her. “Tomika is her own person, Mother. She’ll come home when she is ready.”
“You’re sure of that?”“Yes.” No, but what else can I say?
Shona sighed again. “I think of her every day, and I’ve been tempted more than once to cross the Ring and find her. She should come home.”
“Let her have her adventure, Mother. She’ll grow up soon enough.”
“Before Landfall?”
“Yes.”
Shona gave a stiff nod. “Thank you, Engineer, for listening to my concerns and taking them seriously.” She stood quickly, revealing her anger to her daughter.
She still hasn’t said what she really wants to say. I’ll have to pull it from her. “Mother.”
“Joro.” The older woman paused and took a deep breath. “Do you trust anyone? Is there anyone you let in?”
The Engineer felt her face flush and briefly considered lying, but this was her mother. “No. I can’t.”
“Why?”
Joro tried to form the words, but she couldn’t tell her mother of the vicious inner battles among the Assistant Engineers, each with an ego the size of stars, and how she was a compromise candidate between the Traditionalists, who favored staying with Salvation, and the Progressives, who looked forward to building a new life off-ship. She couldn’t tell her own mother how both camps watched her every word and action, ready to swoop in with a forced vote if she revealed her favored philosophy.
And Joro certainly couldn’t tell anyone that she privately believed she was the best Engineer to find a middle ground between the two factions and bring everyone safely to their destination.
So Joro did the only thing she could. She said nothing, and that infuriated her mother even more.
“Fine,” the Head Teacher snapped. “I’m sorry. I lied. Tomika is not why I’m here.”
“What?” Joro pushed down her worry. “Are you well?”
“It’s not me. It’s you. Joro.”
“Mother?”
“I kept my silence because you think you’re happy, but you’re living a lie with Padmus and Enrique. You can do much better.”
“Mother…” Joro put a warning growl in her voice. She knew her mother wasn’t referring to her polyamorous relationship. All things considered, hers was fairly normal for the Back, especially with men outnumbering women three to two. Almost every combination of relationships could be found in the Back if Joro took the time to count them.
“I don’t mean that. I mean specifically Padmus and Enrique.”
“I don’t understand.”
Her mother sat back down and leaned forward, almost touching her. “Enrique is a toy, Joro. Your toy. You’re a child with a plaything. He will be gone from your life before you know it because you don’t take him seriously.”
“That’s not—”
“What’s Enrique’s middle name, Joro? Where did he get the scar on the back of his left hand? What was the name of his high school sweetheart?” Her mother sounded more irritated than usual. “You don’t know, do you?”
Dammit!
“And there’s Padmus. He’s the safe choice since grade school, your perpetual backup plan whenever you needed a favor. You think you know each other’s secrets, but that’s not true. You know his moods and secrets, but you’ve never really shared yours, have you, especially since your promotion. That’s because he’s always been there and will always be there. You care for Padmus, but you do not trust him.”
“Why are you saying this now?” Joro didn’t bother to keep the anger out of her voice but couldn’t say at whom she was most upset—her mother or herself.
“You have a difficult duty ahead, daughter. Our entire race depends on you. You need a partner you can trust, one with great strength who you can join with when needed. And right now, that person does not exist in your life. If they do, I don’t know if you’re brave enough to share your burdens with them. So, I worry. I worry about you, and I worry about everyone on Salvation.”
Shona took her daughter’s hand and held it tightly. “Since I am being honest, I also ask that you stop being mad at me. I have no idea what crime I’ve committed, but I’ve paid for it for twenty years now. Please stop.”
Joro almost protested when her mother released her and walked to the door. She couldn’t remember the last time her mother held her hand. “Mother.”
“Yes?” She didn’t turn back.
“Who is my father?”
“He requested privacy. That secret is the custom of our people.” Shona pointed at the stack of pads and tablets on the desk. “But you are the Engineer. You have access to all the files on our computers, even the secret ones. If anyone can find their father, it would be you.”
Her mother left the room quickly, not turning to see the stunned expression on her daughter’s face.