Double Share (28 page)

Juliett grinned. “Well I was actually talking about the Bumble Brothers, but is there anything new on the triangle?”

“Nope. Nobody seems to know who the new boy is. They’re keeping it pretty hush-hush. But Bayless and Simon were spitting and clawing in the gym. There’s trouble in paradise, I think.”

Charlotte looked over her shoulder at me and Juliett followed her glance.

“What, sar?” Charlotte asked. “You look startled.”

Juliett added, “Yes, was there some other gossip you were interested in?”

“What happened with Mr. Apones and Mr. Mosler after they left the gym?” I asked.

“Mosler convinced Apones that he shouldn’t say anything to Mr. Burnside so they went down to engineering berthing and harassed Ballantine until she kicked Mosler in the jewels and threw him off her bunk.” Belatedly she added, “Sar.”

“How do you know this?” I asked.

“Mr. Wang, there are twenty eight people on this ship. At any given point in time, a third of them are trying to sleep, a third of them are working, and the other third is just trying to amuse themselves until we get to port. How in the world can you expect to hide anything?”

“But who told you? How do you know?” I asked.

I was familiar with rumor nets, but Charlotte D’Heng was obviously rated spec one in rumors.

“I would have expected with only twenty-eight on board, it would be easier to slip into corners and hide.”

“Well, obviously some stuff gets away, sar. But the big things sorta fall out pretty easily. Somebody sees something and tells somebody else, who adds it to what they know and passes it on. At the end of the day, we have a good idea of what happened. The details might be a bit sketchy but we know, for example, that Apones and Mosler attacked you in the gym—or tried to. You did something to stop it and they got out when VanDalon and Cottonwood came in.”

I sat back in my chair, trying to get a grip on what had just happened. I couldn’t count on this level of surveillance, but my preconceived notions about how much anybody in the crew was aware of were being challenged.

“What makes you think they attacked me? Or tried to?” I asked after a couple of heartbeats.

Charlotte gave me a look that was straight out of Pul-Lease 101.

“Sar? We’re pretty sure you wouldn’t have attacked them,” she said slowly and succinctly. “Ispo Factoid, they must have attacked you.”

“Ipso facto,” I corrected automatically, while thinking.

“You sure, sar?” she asked.

“Yeah. Ipso facto. That’s right, but I think you actually meant prima facie, but never mind the Latin.”

I took a deep breath and started over. “What makes you think anybody was attacked?”

Juliett and Charlotte shared a look containing the despair that all crew feel when faced with the absolute denseness of officers.

D’Heng turned back to me and said, with no small degree of derision, “Sar? It was Apones and Mosler. The three of you were in the gym…alone…without any witnesses. Are we supposed to believe that you played parchesi?”

This little spitfire was so unexpected, she just tickled me to no end.

“Do you know what parchesi is, Ms. D’Heng?” I asked.

“Well, sure!” She was quite positive about it.

“What is it then?” I asked.

“Well, it’s a kind of a game that you play on a board…with dice…” her voice petered off a bit and then she finally added, “Okay, so no I don’t.”

“You’re pretty close. Only thing you’re missing is that it’s a long, boring game where you try to move little pieces around the edges of the board and then be the first one to get all your pieces all the way around and into the middle. A very tedious, frustrating game.”

“So, it’s a lot like being a spacer, sar?” Juliett said with her tongue so far into her cheek it was in danger of becoming disjointed.

“Quite, Ms. Jaxton, quite. They assigned it to us at the academy to teach patience, but back to Mr. Apones and Mr. Mosler. Why do you call them the Bumble Brothers?” I asked Charlotte.

“Because when they’re together, they’re so busy trying to impress each other, they bumble around and bump into walls. There’s a certain faction of the crew that thinks that when they get together, the sum of their IQs is actually less than each taken separately.”

“They seemed to be doing a good job of harassing Ulla Nart—” I began.

“Yes, they’re not exactly friendly puppies, sar,” Juliett said.

D’Heng added, “They’re stupid animals. Even stupid animals are dangerous. They raped that one girl—Stewart—and they did a number on your predecessor, Ms. Jaffee. We call them the Bumble Brothers, but we don’t take them lightly.”

“Anything else I should know about them?” I asked.

The two women traded glances again. Juliett nodded slightly and Charlotte turned back to me.

“Sometimes they do things for Mr. Burnside,” she said quietly.

“What kinds of things?” I asked.

“He calls them his enforcers, and when they get into that enforcer thing, they leave the Bumble Brothers behind and become laser focused, sar.”

Juliett added, “They stop thinking for themselves and just follow the first mate’s instructions. That’s when they get really dangerous.”

I thought about what they’d said for a good two ticks, letting it filter through.

“Thank you, both,” I said. “Let’s get this place cleared away. You two have studying, and I’ve got some tinkering to do.”

In less than half a stan we’d finished the midwatch clean up and swab down, and the two women pulled out tablets and began studying. I sat down at the systems console and pulled up an overlay of the ship’s intercom and loudspeaker system.

One of the things that got my attention when talking with Mel was that I couldn’t be sure that my tablet wouldn’t be broken in any scuffle. Therefore, using the tablet was too risky. I needed some other way to record. The tablet had a microphone, but if the device got broken before the really incriminating activities happened, then I’d be out of luck.

The tablet was also tied to ShipNet and could triangulate its position within the ship. Every place in the ship had an intercom for safety purposes. If I could get the tablet to track me as I moved around and trigger the intercom’s microphone. That might allow me to capture the audio into a file on a system drive, that way I’d have a full-time watch dog listening around me where ever I was.

I dug into the intercom controls and started looking for a way to remotely control a particular microphone. I flipped through several sub programs looking for the specific coding structures and data identification fields for the bridge microphone. I thought that if I could figure out how the bridge microphone worked, and if I could figure out how to control it, I could just copy that to any other intercom on the ship. As I zeroed in on the bridge controls, I spotted exactly where I would need to modify the control code to use it as a bug.

The modification had already been made.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY-ONE
D
IURNIA
S
YSTEM
2358-
A
UGUST-11

Once I knew what I was looking for, locating the network of intercom connections became easy. There were the typical redundancies built into any ship’s system, but over and above that, it was a clean machine. The industrial strength code looked like production grade. There were signatures and sign-offs noted in the appropriate places on the system maintenance logs.

People call the device I looked at a microphone, but technically it was a digital audio transducer. It grabbed the sound waves from the air using a standard mechanical diaphragm, but instead of turning those vibrations into variations in electrical energy like a classic microphone, it used a small sensor in the intercom unit to measure and encode those variations digitally. The system then routed the signals to several data hubs around the ship. Those hubs existed in key places like nerve ganglia around the body. Each had a redundant connection path and could be reached in at least two ways. Even the main data paths between the fore and aft nacelles had a parallel redundancy built into the keel of the cargo container. When the can locked in, it closed the loop on a secondary path, which permitted data to flow from bow to stern even if the main data backbone was cut.

Each intercom had a button for the bridge and a button for engineering central. In case of emergency, which was really all the devices were intended for, pressing the button would cause a buzzer on the bridge or engineering to go off. The bridge unit and the engineering units were more complicated and had the ability to buzz any intercom on the ship using a number pad. The main issue was that you needed to know the number. Tablets provided much faster and more reliable communications from individual to individual, but the CPJCT safety regulations required these intercom systems, and so they were on every ship.

I turned my head from the console and looked at the bridge intercom on the aft bulkhead. I wondered if anybody else were listening. Turning back to the system’s display, I began teasing out the codes that linked the speakers with the system. These were supposed to be very simple systems and reliable even during significant shipboard failures. Press to talk, release to listen, digital routing independent of other data sensor streams. I’d actually been in a situation where they had failed but only once. Of course, on that occasion practically everything else had failed as well and we almost died, but almost doesn’t count.

Just before the change of watch, I found what I had been looking for. The sound system spooled into a data array. Any or all of the intercoms could be triggered to record. When turned on, they’d record into a time stamped storage device which would identify the location of the audio transducer and the time the recording was made.

Somebody had already wired the entire ship for sound.

There was a lot I didn’t know, and I didn’t really know who to ask. From the records in the system, the function had been installed when the ship had been built, or at least during one of the authorized maintenance periods. The file names, dates, and provenance traces were all correct. They certainly were a lot better looking than what I was planning to do, and appeared to be a planned function in the ship’s infrastructure.

I wondered if it was just the
Billy
or whether every ship had built-in bugs and only the captain knew about them or something.

The chrono display on the bottom of my terminal clicked over to 05:30 and I realized I’d been sitting there focused on the systems display for almost five solid stans. I noticed Juliett and Charlotte behind me, and they were being much quieter than normal. I cleared the display, kicked my daily backups, and then stood up as nonchalantly as I could.

“Anything wrong, sar?” Juliett asked.

Charlotte sat at the spare console looking at her tablet, but apparently not actually reading anything. They both held themselves very still.

“Not that I know of, Ms. D’Heng. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, I don’t know, sar,” she said with a drawl that meant I was about to get zinged. “You’ve been sitting at that console without really looking up since about double-naught thirty. When Charlotte brought up fresh cups of coffee after her rounds at 03:00, she handed one to you, and your reply was—and I quote—‘Thanks, hon.’ You then put the coffee on the desk and haven’t touched it since. I suspect it’s quite cold now.” She paused deliberately before adding, “Sar.”

While Juliett rattled off her little speech, Charlotte looked up as if to see what I would say.

“I must have been really distracted. My apologies, Ms. D’Heng, I meant no disrespect.”

“Disrespect, sar?” she seemed confused.

“For calling you ‘hon,’” I clarified.

“Oh, not to worry, sar. It’s much better than what I get called by some others,” she said with a grin. “You
were
distracted,” she added with emphasis on “were.”

They both just sat at their stations, staring at me.

“What is it?” I asked.

“That’s all, sar?” Juliett asked. “Just ‘I mean no disrespect’? Nothing is wrong with the ship? You’re okay, aren’t you?”

“As nearly as I can tell, the ship is fine,” I said. “I am too. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to say.”

The two of them shared that long-suffering look that I was getting used to seeing between them.

Juliett said, “Well, pardon my saying so, sar, but in the thirty odd standard days we’ve been underway and we’ve been standing watch, I’ve never seen you not finish a cup of coffee. You’ve also never zoned out so completely that you would have failed to notice Ms. D’Heng strip out of her ship suit, turn it wrong side out, and put it back on.”

Startled, I looked back at Charlotte’s suit. “Her suit isn’t wrong side out,” I said, confused.

Juliett grinned. “No, but you had to look to make sure, didn’t you, sar?”

“Ms. Jaxton, I think he’s busted.”

“I think so too, Ms. D’Heng.”

I couldn’t help it. I snorted in laughter.

“Okay, you got me. I was playing in the ship’s systems and got sucked in. Nothing’s wrong with the ship. It’s for a little project I’m working on for Mel—er—Ms. Menas.”