Fatal Boarding (10 page)

Dern had paused to watch the whole affair.
He quickly decided Bates was finished. He clutched his damaged arm
and turned to Frank. A new face-off began. I expected Frank to have
his hands full. To my surprise, he stood his ground and held up one
hand.

"Hey, Dave, it's me, Frank. I’m on your
side. I was at your wedding, remember? You remember that time we
were at that stupid convention and we ended up getting blasted out
of our mind on bad tequila? You remember that don't you, Dave. We
were sick as dogs the next day. Your wife locked you out of the
apartment. I had to put you up, remember Dave?"

Dern teetered and swayed with a blank stare
on his face. For a moment, I feared he might go over the side, but
as he collapsed Frank stepped forward and gently caught him. We
stared at each other for a moment in disbelief, and then carried
our spent comrades to the access elevators. I handed my
semiconscious package off to a security guard who had taken the
elevator up to meet us.

There had been damage to the AmpLight
control area. A service technician had already climbed back to the
second level and was beginning to wipe blood spots off of the face
of several panels. There was scarring on panels where Bates club
had dragged along them. As I surveyed the damage, I noticed
something peculiar on a status display. A red, ‘off-line’ indicator
was flashing by the core heater control panel. At the operator
control station, the readout showed the system was in manual mode.
The vertical temperature gages were dropping toward inert status. A
little prickling rush of fear flushed through me. Without the core
heaters at temperature, the amplight engines would not operate. A
reheat of the system could take weeks. I called to the technician
below.

"Hurry up and look at this"

The technician was still shaken from the
violence. He had a crew cut of light-red hair, a wide face, and
hardened features. He scrambled up the ladder and trotted over
beside me. "Is the core heater system off-line?"

"Holy jeese... When did they do this?" He
started tapping madly at the keys. He called up the heater
schematic, and became even more concerned. He turned on the catwalk
and called to an engineer on the ground floor, "Smitty, you'd
better get up here, fast. We've got a cool down in progress on both
AL's. They're down to forty-seven percent."

For a moment everything going on in the
post-combat confusion came to a complete halt. Everyone on the
floor stopped and looked up fearfully. Three engineers broke into a
mad scramble to join us on the second level. I had to hurry to get
out of the way. As they began nursing the system back to life, I
quietly left with my overloaded bag of misgivings, and headed for
sick bay.

Chapter 11

Frank and I took turns at a sink in a small
washroom adjoining the treatment area in sickbay. I had the most
blood so I got to go first. I washed my face and stared at him in
the mirror as he waited his turn.

"You know both of them pretty well, I take
it."

"They're both AmpLight propulsion experts.
I've known them a long time. That is, right up until a few minutes
ago. That wasn't them you saw. Completely out of character. Doesn't
make sense at all."

"Maybe the stress of being temporarily
marooned is getting to them."

"No way. Those guys get a kick out seeing
how close they can get to shock diamonds. Ever been in a test
chamber when they're running a miniature main engine at full
thrust, Adrian?"

"Can't say I've ever had a desire to."

"You wear a 90 pound fire suit with a hood
that has a ten inch thick visor. When the thrust reaches one
hundred percent or higher, little shock diamond stars form within
the jet. Sometimes they'll escape the stream and go bouncing around
the chamber like a loaded bomb. Those two guys you just saw live
for that kind of shit. They know they can get our engines to
ignite, eventually. They're less concerned than anyone about being
stranded."

"I don't get it. They were friends?"

"Absolutely."

"Makes you wonder, doesn't it?"

"What'd you mean?"

"I mean, who else do we know of that has
done something completely out of character around here?"

He looked at me with a widening stare. I
could see the thought process switching into high gear inside his
head. There was a moment of realization, then of relief, then of
gratitude and wonder. "What the hell is going on?"

"Well, whatever it is, it doesn't affect
computers exclusively, does it. Or, on the other hand, you could
say that the brain is a very sophisticated kind of computer,
couldn't you?"

Before he could respond, we were called back
into the examination area. Doctor Pacell looked tired, and
distressed. He did not wait for questions. "Well, I suppose it
could be worse. I'll need to see the video from the main
engineering monitor cameras so I can track how all the injuries
occurred and maybe catch potential problems I've missed. Dern is
the least serious. He has a broken left upper arm and elbow. The
nose bleed isn't serious. No other physical problems. He's sitting
in the recovery room in a daze. He looks like someone who's just
awakened in a strange place. He's not sure what happened.”

"Bates on the other hand has a serious
concussion. From what I can tell he must have taken the pipe away
from Dern to get hit that badly. He's got some hemorrhaging in the
left eye, but I don't think it will result in any loss of vision. I
don't understand why he isn't unconscious. He'll have to be kept in
intensive care for a while, but he should recover. He's mumbling
something about his mother leaving him at a work farm for orphans
one weekend when he was growing up. There haven’t been work farms
for orphans anytime in this century. Both these patients will be
kept under close observation. I have no idea what brought this on.
Where either of you injured?"

We shook our heads.

"Was there an argument of some kind?"

"We'll assign an officer to investigate this
thing, Doc. Is there anything else we can do for you, right
now?"

"One thing, Mr. Tarn, Commander Tolson has
asked me to speak to you privately on an unrelated matter. Do you
have a minute?"

Frank waited. Doctor Pacell led me to his
private office. More children's pictures on the wall. A few real
books on a single book shelf. Awards and certificates framed and
hung conspicuously. He sat behind a wood grained desktop, with a
gray-white computer terminal on one corner. He tilted chair back
and rubbed his face with both hands. "This tour was supposed to be
dull and quiet."

"That's what they told me, too."

"There are other things going on here in
sickbay that you haven't heard about yet."

"Oh boy."

"Yes, they are disturbing things. Beginning
with second shift yesterday, I started getting complaints from
people about nightmares. At first I thought it was just
coincidence. There were three reports from the second shift people.
Then this morning I had six more. Three in the middle of the night,
then three more from people who had just gotten up to begin duty.
They all seemed to suffer similarly vague dreams about being
assaulted or trapped. It's much too much to be coincidence."

"So, do you have any ideas?"

"Not yet, but I'll be working on it. I'll
start doing auto analytical ECGs on the people who come in to make
reports. I will not publicize this. The power of suggestion can
cause these kinds of things to escalate. But I'll keep you informed
on everything that happens."

"By all means."

"And there's one other thing. You'll find
this particularly interesting. I had one of the janitorial services
people come to me complaining about a brief case of amnesia. He was
on his way to pick up trash from the officer's area compactors and
the next thing he knew, he was riding up and down in an elevator.
Somebody shook him out of it. He was there on their way up, and
still there on their way down so they realized something was
wrong."

"He was just standing there, completely out
of it?"

"As far as I can tell. Tolson has the full
report. It's probably in your private security E-Mail file by now,
that is if they trust the net enough to use it. I keep expecting
Pell to show up here with terminal frustration. His group has been
chasing internet ghosts for the past two days. Fortunately there
has been no problem with any of the sick bay systems."

"I've got a 23:00 staff meeting, Doc. I may
need to come back and talk to you more about this."

"Anytime. By the way, I'll see you at that
meeting. My presence has been requested, also."

"Lucky us."

"Maybe we are ...so far."

After a quick trip to my stateroom for a
change of flight suit, I managed to make the meeting with five
minutes to spare. To my surprise, a large crowd had gathered
outside the open doors. I gently forced my way through and found
every chair taken. In a room with a maximum capacity of 30, there
were at least fifty people hoping to attend. Captain Grey and his
upper tier group were already seated. Conspicuously absent was the
head of the analytical group, Ms. Maureen Brandon. Grey seemed not
only fully prepared to allow the insurgence, but completely at ease
about it. Tolson was watching him closely for cues. I squeezed
between chairs to lean against the back wall, sandwiched in between
two people I did not know. There was a strange lack of conversation
taking place. The atmosphere felt tense.

Grey waved one hand and the lights dimmed. A
flow chart of the main engine control system illuminated on the
wall screen. So many people pushed their way in to allow the doors
to close, not everyone could see. Grey slouched in his seat and
ignored the crowd. "Okay Paul, have you at least isolated a
specific area of failure?"

Paul Kusama, the chief propulsion engineer,
stood. His graying-black hair somehow went well with the bags under
his eyes. His flight suit was wrinkled and the sleeves partly
rolled up. He looked tired. "Exactly the opposite, Captain. We have
proven that the failures have occurred independently in seven
different areas. This is not a problem that can be made to repeat.
The good news is that all of the failures have been in computer
subsystems only. We have installed the Systems Interface Test Unit
all the way back at the point of origin in the tail section where
the engines interface, and we do not fail at that point. So, we
have no reason to believe that there are any related problems with
the AmpLight drives themselves. We believe we could do a hard core
manual start of the engines if we had to, bypassing all of the
on-board computer systems to do so."

"But we would have no way to resonate the
AmpLights with the Tachyon Drives, so there would be no way to go
to light speeds, is that correct?"

Before Kusama could answer, a symmetry
control engineer took the question, though I could not see exactly
who was speaking.

"We have not had a problem with Symmetry
Control, Captain. It's possible we could remain on standby and
enable the system during manual acceleration. The worst that would
happen would be that everything went auto abort, and the entire
engine cluster shut down."

"Okay, then, what's the status on the
Tach-Drives?"

"There have been no problems with any
Tachyon-Drive systems or subsystem, Captain. We are on line as far
as we can tell. It is odd that the AmpLight systems fail so
regularly, while our equipment experiences no problems at all."

"Grey stared into infinity, and squeezed his
chin with one hand.”Okay, does anyone have anything else on the
main drives?"

Silence.

"Mr. Davis, let's have your run down on
thruster control, then."

The projection at the front of the room
switched to a block diagram of the maneuvering thruster control
systems. Davis rose and wiped a hand over the small crop of
red-brown hair on his balding head. He reached for a long, yellow
pointer and tapped the end of it at a section of diagram labeled
‘command initiation’.

"We have an isolated area of failure,
Captain. We can program new thruster sequences into the data
processor and they compile into thrust control code, but the actual
interlocks controller will not accept the commands. We have proven,
however, that we can manually initiate thruster firings. We
actually did that on an aft and a starboard thruster for 2
milliseconds each and it worked. The system still thinks it’s
supposed to be holding us at station keeping, so afterward it
automatically puts us back into our original position, but we have
proven it can be done."

Grey sat for a moment and looked around the
room as though he expected someone else to speak. No one did. He
exhaled as though the entire affair was tedious. "Does anyone else
have any input for the general group?"

Silence.

"What we are going to do is set up for
another attempt tomorrow at 07:00. If necessary, we'll force the
thrusters to back us away and then set up for a hard start of the
AmpLight Drives. We'll put some distance between us and this sector
of space, and then stop and take another look at our situation.
Everyone make the necessary arrangements for that. If anyone has
any problems, I want to know, immediately. If there's nothing else,
that's it for the main group. Let's break down for the departmental
meeting."

For a moment, it seemed as though no one was
willing to leave. Finally, the doors slid open and a slow, silent
exodus began. Gradually the line of staff dwindled down to nothing.
Grey turned and surprised me by pointing for the doors to be
closed. As I did, Tolson looked back and motioned me to one of the
two empty chairs at the center table. I took a seat next to
Erin.