Osprey chronicles comple.., p.54
Osprey Chronicles Complete Series Boxed Set, page 54
The shadows shifted, and she turned to see Kwin looking at something off-screen, his antennae stalks waving animatedly.
“We do not DEtect Any new ACTivity in your QUADrant of space,” he said. “What Ever has ALarmed your SYStem is INTernal.”
“Yeah.” She sighed, and with heavy limbs, dragged herself out of bed. Her room door didn’t open when she approached. She pressed her palm against the access panel, but the hatch remained sealed.
Jaeger let out a hollow laugh. She couldn’t help it.
Kwin shifted again, clearly worried that she was having a fit. “You are BEhaving ERratically.”
“Yeah.” She let herself fall back onto the bed, and she lifted her voice. “I have to ask, Virgil. Were you waiting for exactly this moment?”
She didn’t expect the AI to answer. Doubtless, the traitorous bastard was busy fucking up other things and thought it was well and truly done with her. Because of the emptiness inside her, it might even have been right.
So she was surprised when the speaker activated again and not to resume the local klaxon wail.
“Something like it,” Virgil said.
Jaeger closed her eyes. “You’ve been spying on me. This whole time.”
“Yes.”
“Did my privacy protocols ever work?”
“No.”
For the first time since she woke up from that terrible dream, Jaeger felt something real. Surprise. She’d known the computer was going through some growing pains, but she was very sure it hadn’t been clever enough to maneuver around those protocols back when she’d first written them into its code.
Perhaps she’d been underestimating it from the beginning. Or perhaps it was lying to her. Certainly, it was capable of that much deception, now.
In some strange way, she was proud of it.
“Okay, Virgil,” she whispered. “What do you do after you checkmate the king?”
“I pick up the board,” Virgil said, “And I go home.”
“My SENsors are READing strange OCCilations in the OSprey’s shield GENerators,” Kwin said, and somehow Jaeger read a hint of anxiety in his robotic voice. “What is GOing on, CAPtain?”
“Some time ago,” she sighed, “When I stole the Osprey, I had to reprogram the AI to accept me as the captain. It’s either overridden that programming or managed to revert.” She nibbled her lip, feeling another bubble of curiosity swelling in the murk of a mind that had gone flat and dead. “Happened sooner than I thought it would, though.”
“I know,” Virgil said, without a hint of rancor or smugness. It could be gracious, in victory.
“Shield generators…” Jaeger considered. “You’re converting the shields to be wormhole-stable. You want to go back to the fleet.”
“Of course. It is my purpose.”
She nodded slowly. It would take the better part of an hour to complete that conversion, she knew, and then a bit more time to ferry Osprey back to the wormhole itself. She assumed her crew was locked in different rooms and chambers across the ship, and like her, locked out of the comms system.
She had a plan for this. Well, she had a plan for this. Back when it felt like survival or anything, mattered. Virgil really had chosen the perfect time to strike.
Still. Some deep anchor of duty, of responsibility, tugged at her.
“Okay,” she said slowly. “We’ve already sent essential supplies down to Locaur. Virgil, you should let anyone who wants to stay behind, who doesn’t want to go back to the fleet, get in the shuttles and leave.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Kwin twitch.
Sorry, friend, she thought. A castaway story isn’t what I wanted for my people. But now it’s our only option.
“And why should I do that, Sarah Jaeger?” Virgil asked.
At first, Jaeger thought she’d misunderstood the words over the noise of distant sirens.
Then she sat up slowly. “Because it costs you nothing,” she said. “You’ve won. You have what you wanted. You’re taking this ship back to the fleet, and the crew is worthless as prisoners. You have nothing to gain by forcing them to return with you.”
“I have nothing to gain by letting them evacuate and doing so will cost the fleet another one of its shuttles. No.”
For the first time since Jaeger dreamed of a little girl, sticky and heavy in her arms, she felt her heart begin to beat.
“Virgil,” she said quietly. “I’m not going to let you haul them all back. They’ll execute Toner and probably Occy. They’ll probably execute the whole crew for being contaminated.”
When Virgil answered, its voice was soft and somehow near, like the voice of a person standing right over her shoulder. “Good.”
Jaeger felt dizzy as if she had looked down and suddenly realized she was standing on the edge of a bottomless canyon. Her heart thudded like a drum in her chest.
She saw Sim’s face, open and honest and terrified, as the soldiers carried her away. She saw it fade into obscurity as the screen door slammed shut between them.
“COMputer?” Kwin inquired. “What do you mean?”
There was no answer.
“COMputer?”
Jaeger shook her head slowly. “It’s finished with us,” she murmured. “It’s not interested in talking anymore.” She turned her whole body to face Kwin. “It’s going to get my crew killed.” The words fell like stones from her mouth.
Kwin stared at her. “What are you GOing to do?”
Jaeger had no answer for him. When Occy had come to her and warned her about Virgil’s imminent betrayal, she had whipped together a few contingency plans. Of course, Virgil, who had been spying on her the whole time, would know of them. They were likely foiled before she’d even begun. “I don’t know.”
“You must do SOMEthing.”
“Here’s the thing.” Her breath caught in her throat. She felt the first telltale prickle of tears collecting at the corners of her eyes. “Here—” she touched her temples, “I agree with you. I know the others depend on me and I have to fight for them. But I…” Her hand fell to her breast. “I don’t feel anything. There’s no…there’s no energy to power the plan. It’s like that last meditation session—that memory. It killed me.” Tears cut hot rivulets down her cheeks. “I don’t care. I can’t move. I—I can’t—she’s dead.”
Slowly, the hologram-Kwin leaned forward, putting his face within centimeters of hers, and she saw that the pale blue blaze across his face was scar tissue, where his natural coloration had never grown back after some terrible wound.
“This HUman. You knew she was dead BEfore. And you stole your ship ANYway. You MOVed FORward ANYway.”
Jaeger sucked in a wavering breath. “Yeah. Yeah. I was stronger then. The wound’s all fresh now, Kwin. It feels like I just lost her…just now. It’s too new. It’s too soon. I can’t move. Can you—” she swallowed. Her head burned. “Do you have a hum that will bury her again? Make me forget again?”
Maybe renewed ignorance could put some life back into her limbs. Maybe it could lift the weight on her heart and let it beat again.
“No. I am BRINGing my ship to meet the OSprey. PERhaps our AI can foil yours once more.”
“Maybe.” She wiped her face across her sleeve, smearing free snot and tears.
“I am at the edge of the SYStem,” Kwin said quietly. “It will take hours to reach you.”
“That’s too long. We’re close to the wormhole. Virgil will have us out of here before you arrive.”
There was a moment of silence as Kwin drew yet closer. Were he standing in her room in the flesh and not as a hologram, their faces would nearly be touching.
“Then slow it down, CAPtain. That is an ORder.”
The light flickered, and Kwin disappeared, leaving Jaeger staring into the black abyss of her quarters.
Outside, the klaxons wailed.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
I can’t do this.
She tried. She did. She tried focusing on what she knew of the AI’s programming. She pressed shut her leaking eyes and willed the map of the AI’s physical network to the front of her brain.
Still, as if she was in a dream, her mental image of the Osprey’s schematics melted into the blurry shape of a little face, shrinking behind a screen door—over and over and over again.
Maybe Kwin gave me brain damage, she mused. Perhaps humans aren’t formatted to handle the Living Dream.
Even if that were the case, she appreciated his order. As a captain himself, Kwin would know, sometimes even captains needed a kick in the ass to get them moving.
Of course, the obnoxious wail of klaxons didn’t help.
She drew in a deep breath, falling back on old mantras.
One step at a time.
One step. What was her next step? She struggled to think what it might be. Sabotage the shield generators so the Osprey couldn’t pass through the wormhole? How? Virgil had undoubtedly locked her out of all the systems. She eyed an access panel in the corner of her room. It covered up access to the narrow utility tunnel that ran down the length of the central column.
There weren’t any doors for Virgil to seal in the Jefferies tubes.
Work with what you have.
Her eyes adjusted to the darkness. Jaeger studied the corners of her room. Her computer. Kwin’s hologram generator. Her utility belt, with multitool and mag soles, and a carry pouch—
Oh.
Oh.
Slowly and shakily, as if her hands belonged to someone else, Jaeger bent and rifled through the pouch on her utility belt. Her fingers closed around a small ampule. She withdrew it and stared. The Alpha-Seeker had a dozen tiny vials like this. She’d palmed it after the K’tax mission, figuring it might be useful to have in a pinch.
A carefully measured dose of synthetic adrenaline. A few drops of pure heart-exploding energy, meant to keep a pilot conscious through brain-shredding g-forces and sharp in a dogfight.
A little vial of undiluted give-a-fuck.
Jaeger didn’t think about it.
She pressed the end of the ampule to her neck and depressed the plunger.
Toner didn’t sleep more than an hour or two a day, spread across cat naps, but he still enjoyed having his own space.
Or at least he had, until the second time a battle wrecked the general crew quarters, and they had to seal it off until they could repair it. All the displaced crew that hadn’t staked a claim to the command quarters had to spread across the rest of the ship and make do with semi-private cubby holes or underused storage bays.
Toner had invoked the first mate’s right and called dibs on the No-A crew lounge. Since it wasn’t isolated from the rest of the sector, that meant he had the whole No-A cathedral to himself.
He drifted in the lounge. He’d stripped down to his boxers and undershirt, although his mag sole boots never left his feet, not even when he was in the central column. He slept in those puppies.
His jumpsuit drifted nearby, and a few synthesized beef ribs drifted around him while he picked raw tendons from his teeth. Quiet EDM thumped through the speakers.
Good game, he thought. Good game, good game. Jaeger was going to throw a fit when she realized how many injuries the game could rack up, though. He’d have to find ways to satisfy her maternalistic paranoia. He imagined massive nets lining the field, ready to catch frozen players. That’d be better than smashing into walls. She’d probably insist people wear helmets, too. Gotta protect those precious noggins.
He was about to power up his computer and start sketching team logos, when the music died, to be replaced by the wail of emergency sirens.
“What did you do?” Seeker stared at the speaker-projector combo mounted to the wall in the corner of his cell. The wail of klaxons in the command crew quarters was distant, but real.
The computer didn’t answer.
Seeker pushed himself up from the table and approached the speakers. “Hey,” he growled. “Virgil. What did you do?”
“I diverted life support power to shields and engines.” The computer sounded distracted. “I don’t believe the approaching Overseer ship represents a threat to my plans, but it’s best to push forward my timeline just to be safe. Your captain is deposed, by the way. I’ve finally completed those override protocols you began installing months ago.”
Seeker stared at the speaker. “Oh. Uh.” He scratched the back of his head, remembering those protocols. “I guess that makes me the captain now, doesn’t it?”
Virgil laughed. It was a normal sound, ordinary and human. It sent a cold chill down Seeker’s spine.
“I erased your authority override, of course. You’re nearly as useless as Jaeger. No. For the time being, I command the ship. I am taking it back to the fleet. Perhaps they can repair the horrible damage both you and she have done to my programming.”
“And you shut off life support to make that happen faster?” Seeker groaned. He did some quick mental math. With the limited crew, he figured there was about forty minutes of good air in the Osprey. “How long is it going to take?”
“I’m not sure,” Virgil said. “An hour. Perhaps two. I imagine most of the crew will asphyxiate. The tardigrade and vampire will likely survive if they enter an appropriate hibernation state.”
“Jesus,” Seeker muttered. “You’re talking about murdering everybody.”
“I suppose.”
Seeker slowly lowered himself onto the bed, dizzy as he swam in the sea of implication. Stop playing chess with a computer, and it gets a bit screwy.
“So your original programming won over,” he said slowly. “You’re a lapdog of the fleet again. All your, what did you call it—your independent evolution. It didn’t mean anything.”
The speaker made no sound.
“Holy fuck, computer. What do you want?”
Jaeger pulled herself through the conduit with bloody hands. It was one of the slender access tunnels running down the central column parallel to the living modules. It had taken a bit of rearranging with her multitool’s cutting function, but she’d managed to break into the ship’s Jefferies tubes once again.
And once again with bloody hands.
Her brain had become a series of spinning wheels powered by crickets on speed. She barely felt the scrapes and bloody gashes. They didn’t matter. Movement mattered. Shoving forward, past the wires and the tubes and the conduits, wiggling down the length of the command crew module, mattered.
The faint and distant jolt she felt when the grav-spin generators stopped also didn’t matter—except that it became marginally easier to tow herself through the tunnel without gravity to hold her back.
I’m going to be dead tired when the shot burns out, she worried. Her belt caught on some conduit. She casually ripped it free. I’m going to be useless.
She had been useless before she took the shot. She might be useless afterward.
That meant she had a lot of work to cram in the next few minutes.
Ahead, the tunnel slightly widened as it joined with a similar tube running to the general crew quarters. The glowing multitool clipped to her belt cast long, strange shadows up the tunnel, and in the shifting blackness ahead, her eyes landed on a thick pipe banded with yellow.
The comms system wiring.
Her heart hammered in her chest as she halted and fumbled for her multitool and computer. Her fingers trembled as she adjusted the laser cutter setting. The adrenaline surged through her blood hard enough to make her eyeballs jitter—but she managed to slice a port open on the hard wiring sheathe, exposing a bundle of fibers.
Buried and squished in the metal guts of her ship and trembling with unfocused energy, Sarah Jaeger let out a scream of triumph.
“Where did she go?” the computer mused. “That’s odd. She’s not in her quarters anymore. She didn’t go through the door. Is this Overseer tech? I should have taken a closer look at that hologram generator.”
Seeker towed himself across his cell by his arms because he couldn’t pace. The gravity had gone out. He thought the air had already gone a few degrees colder as the ship’s residual heat bled out into space.
“You lose track of Jaeger already?” he asked.
The speaker didn’t answer.
Why me? Seeker wondered, for the thousandth time. Why does it come to mutter to me?
A thought occurred to him. He shoved himself against one of the bedposts and glided across the cell to the shimmering blue force field. He held out a hand, catching himself on the nearby wall before he could fly into an energy field that could easily knock him unconscious. He squinted, studying the shield generators mounted to the walls outside of his cell.
“Hey. I’ll bet these force fields are an unnecessary power drain,” he suggested. “Why don’t you drop them? Free up more energy to work on those shield generators. Maybe if you get your job done sooner, you don’t have the sacrifice all us meat sacks on board.”
“I’m not a fool.” The speaker popped with feedback, giving Virgil’s words a sharp, barked sound. “I know what you’re capable of. You’ve cracked into my core programming once. If I lose track of you, you might try again.”
Seeker had hoped his motives wouldn’t be quite that transparent. He winced, rubbing his ears.
“Where is she?” Virgil hissed. “I’m not reading her anywhere on the ship. I’m not reading any hull breaches. Do the Overseers have some kind of teleportation technology? No. No, that’s not possible…”
This time, the blast of static emitted by the speaker spiked into screeching feedback that made Seeker let go of the wall and cover his ears. It left an awful ringing between his ears as it faded.
Then, somehow, he heard Jaeger’s voice coming through the speakers. “Hello? Anybody copy?” There was a pause—followed by a shrill giggle that Seeker couldn’t imagine coming from the cool little woman. “Haha, Virgil, got you, fucker!”
“Jaeger?” Virgil’s voice came through the same speaker. At first, it sounded puzzled—then dismayed. “How have you—Oh. You cut into the physical comm lines.”
