Prodigal (29 page)

The thought of sleep—and the return of his dreams—chilled Nathan even more than staying here in the core. He made a clumsy attempt at evasion.

“What about the run?”

“It’ll wait,” the captain said. “We’re not going anywhere.”

“I don’t know, Lauren. Maybe we should—”

“That’s an
order,
Commander.”

And the comm clicked off, ending the discussion.

Nathan unbuckled himself. After taking a few minutes to decompress, he swung his legs over the side and dropped onto the deck. He steadied himself before he could stand on his own, caught between his wired state and somatic intoxication. He made it all the way to the hatch before another idea popped into his head, making him grind to a halt.

You’re just tired,
he told himself.
You know it won’t make any difference.

In spite of that, Nathan turned back—staring into the empty space occupied by the virtual display, wondering if he should even bother.

If not,
another part of him answered,
then it won’t hurt to look.

Nathan dragged himself back to the console. He plopped down on the edge of the chair, then punched up the NavCon system log. He still wasn’t sure what that would prove—it was just the one contingency he hadn’t tried.

The log kept a record of every event that took place within the NavCon subsystem. Since it resided in its own memory space, the bug Nathan had seen—assuming it existed—wouldn’t have altered the contents of the log itself. That meant there would be a record of the incursion.

Either that, or you’re just plain crazy. And right now, crazy ain’t looking so bad.

He narrowed the search field down to the last five minutes, closing in on the exact time of the disturbance. Stopping there, he pondered the list for a few moments, trying to get a feel for the sequence. It was numbingly complex, with events piling on at a dizzying rate.

All right,
he thought, and rubbed his hands together.
Truth or dare.

He scrolled through each event, examining them one at a time. Nothing appeared out of the ordinary as he went further and further, which gave Nathan cold comfort—but also a raw sense of relief that mounted with each passing line. One line, however, grabbed him from the periphery of his sight. Slowly, he scrolled back up so he could see the entire entry, terrified by the implications of his find—and startled at how he had almost missed it:

04.18.72 04:32:58.208 STEALTH MODE CONFIGURATION ENABLED
—
Internal / External Port 77524
—
Open Packet Relay Traffic
—
Initiate Data Transfer

“Son of a bitch,” he whispered.

Nathan quickly recalled the port diagnostic on another screen. He got the same results as before—no inclusions, no clandestine streams—even though the NavCon log had just told him that foreign data had moved in and out of the system. Fear displaced the drugs in his bloodstream as Nathan fully realized what confronted him. Even now, the crawler could be hemorrhaging—or rewriting itself in the image of some viral aggressor.

And any bug that could do
that
was a killer.

Hands moving in a blur, Nathan dumped the diagnostic results into a separate buffer and synced them to the time line of the NavCon log. Running through all of the events, he waited for the list to build, simultaneously searching for any indication of how much data had sneaked through. The console beeped at him when it happened across another entry, this one less than a tenth of a second after the initial hit:

04.18.72 04:32:58.210 PACKET TRANSFER COMPLETED
—
Internal / External Port 77524
—
417TB TOTAL

He mouthed the words, unable to speak them.

I don’t believe it.

Yet there was no denying it. Over four hundred
terabytes
had injected itself into the matrix while he watched, and barely caused a stir. More than that, the crawler had absorbed every bit without raising a single alarm—or revealing a single flaw.

Nathan immediately killed the Directorate downlink. Hands trembling over the console panel, he purged everything he had collected during the run.

That has to be it,
he told himself.
That has to be the source.

But he had to make sure.

Eyes darting back through a thicket of entries, he kept searching. When he found it, the passage didn’t seem real—especially since what it said was utterly impossible:

04.18.72 04:31:24.813 PORT HIJACK DETECTED
—
Internal / External Port 77524 Source
—
SIG Hyperband
—
Address 100756E267BZ722QT47

SIG. Standard Interface Group. With a local address…

Carried on a wireless hyperband frequency. There was no question.

The bug, whatever it was, had originated
inside
the ship.

Nathan fumbled for his comm, opening a channel.

“Captain!” he signaled—

—and then doubled over in agony.

Nathan toppled from the chair, slamming into the deck. He might have screamed—he couldn’t tell from the jagged pain inside his head, so extreme that it demanded explosive release. Ripping the comm from his ear, he came away with a handful of blood but didn’t care. Convulsing across the floor, he kicked against bulkheads and equipment but couldn’t escape. Every avenue promised only more pain, which shot down the length of his nervous system and engulfed his entire body. Nathan felt like he was on fire.

“NO!!!!!”

The echo of his cry died the same instant as his pain. Curled into a fetal position, clutching the sides of his head, Nathan trembled.

“…Straka…hear…please…”

Cold steel pressed against the side of his face, thrumming with the power of the ship’s engines and softening the broken call that squeaked out of his forgotten comm.

“
Answer
me, goddammit!”

Nathan heard Farina clearly that time. He scooped up the comm and placed it back in his ear.

“Lauren—” he croaked.

“Nathan!” the captain shouted. “What happened? Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I think so.” He coughed. “There, uh…I think I had a little problem.”

“Don’t move. I’m alerting sickbay right now.”

“It’s okay, Skipper,” Nathan said, strength returning to his limbs. He pulled himself up, slowly regaining his balance. “I can make it there myself.”

“Don’t be a hero, Nathan.”

“Wouldn’t think of it.”

“All right,” Farina said, seeming to take him at his word—though the loaded pause that followed spoke otherwise. “I’ll meet you in a few minutes.”

“I’ll be there.”

Nathan removed the comm, slipping it into his pocket. He then wandered back toward the console, approaching the displays warily. The NavCon log still floated in the imaging mist, broken by the occasional static discharge. It seemed exactly as Nathan had left it, innocuous reams of text concealing the monster beneath. All he wanted to do was close the log and distance himself from what happened, but he needed to back up what he had found. The captain was about to face some tough decisions—and Nathan needed to provide her with answers.

Gingerly, he tried the console panel. It responded normally. He then entered a few other key combinations and got the same result. Swiping over the sections of the log he wanted to copy, Nathan used the last incriminating entry as a starting point and worked backward. But as the text highlighted itself in bright blocks, he noticed that something had changed. The event, as he had seen it, didn’t exist anymore. In its place was another line:

04.18.72 04:31:24.813 DIAGNOSTIC PORT SCAN COMPLETED
—
Source SIG Local Core Console
—
User NSTRAKA
—
Result NOMINAL

“No,” he said in flat denial. “No way.”

Nathan ran the log back up to the first two entries he had discovered. Instead of a data transfer over a hijacked port, he found only a routine exchange between subsystems. The wording was
almost
the same—but the meaning entirely different.

“NO!”
he shouted, pounding on the console.

The display went dark.

Nathan hung his head and sobbed. His frustration quickly gave rise to anger, which built into a violent fury. He smashed the console with his bare hands, slicing his fingers into a bloody mess and singeing his skin with hot sparks.

Drawing back, Nathan held his wounded, throbbing hands up in front of his face, coughing from the acrid smoke that now filled the air. He scarcely remembered doing it, much less being so enraged.

What’s happening to me?

He fled the core and headed down to sickbay.

“The first rule of medical care,” Gregory Masir announced, “is never to let the patient know how stupid he was to inflict his own injury.” The ship’s doctor sprayed skin composite up and down the length of Nathan’s fingers, not making much of an effort to be gentle. Masir had even forgone anesthetic, making some cheap excuse about drug interaction with the stims left in Nathan’s system. “It’s bad for business.”

The treatment stung like hell. Nathan didn’t want to give Masir the satisfaction of showing it, but still winced as the doctor worked him over.

“I thought the first rule was to do no harm.”

“Perhaps in the Territories,” the doctor laughed, “but I’m a field doctor. They teach us how to be tough.”

“I can tell.”

“Don’t be so high-and-mighty, my friend. I’m not the one who cracked two fingers assaulting a harmless piece of computer equipment.”

“I guess you had to be there, Doc.”

“Indeed. I would like to have seen that.”

“So would I,” Lauren Farina said as she strolled into sickbay, looking worried. “What happened down there, Commander? You didn’t say anything about getting into a fistfight.”

“It’s not as bad as it looks, Skipper.”

“Let Greg be the judge of that,” she ordered. “For my money, you look like shit.”

Farina put on a brave front, but Nathan knew his captain better than that. Although her uniform was fresh and crisp, and her hair pulled back neatly in regulation style, the rest of her struggled to hang on. Dark circles saddled her eyes and her skin had taken on a sallow sheen. She looked even more exhausted than Nathan imagined.

“You’re one to talk,” he said. “Everything okay?”

“Nothing a little rack time won’t cure.” She squeezed his shoulder, then turned to Masir. “So what’s the story, Doc?”

“He’ll survive,” the doctor said. “I fused the broken digits and gave him something to think about. He’ll be fit for duty—as soon as he gets some rest.”

“Any idea what caused the episode?”

“Commander Straka informed me of his symptoms,” he explained with a shrug. “Normally I would ascribe such a thing to a seizure, brought on by a combination of stimulants and extreme fatigue. However, given the level of pain he described, I wondered if perhaps another factor could be involved.”

“Like what?”

Masir walked over to the other side of the bed, where he swiveled a mediscreen display around so that the captain could see it. He then punched up a deep imaging scan of Nathan’s body, highlighting the main pathways of his nervous system.

“The biometric implant,” he said, zooming into the area near the base of Nathan’s skull. “Every Directorate crew member is required to have one before they are allowed to serve on board any space vessel.” Masir pointed out a microscopic object between the second and third cervical vertebrae. “Since the implant is powered by neural impulses, it’s typically injected into this region here, where the device affixes itself to the spinal cord. From there, it monitors all vital bodily functions and can also serve as a locator in the event of an emergency.”

Nathan already knew about the implant. He accepted it as a fact of life, as did most spacers, but seeing it on the screen right now gave him the creeps. He rubbed the back of his neck, touching the point where the device had gone in.

“In
extremely
rare cases,” the doctor went on, “the implant has been known to generate a feedback pulse—which, under the correct circumstances, can cause brief periods of discomfort.”

“Discomfort,”
Nathan scoffed. “That’s one way to describe it.”

“Theoretically, it’s possible,” Masir said. “And in the absence of other clues, it seems to be the only explanation.”

Nathan had his doubts, but didn’t say anything. Farina noticed his hesitation, however, and immediately homed in on it.

“Something else on your mind, Commander?”

“I don’t know,” Nathan confessed, knowing that if he brought it up, there was a more than even chance Masir wouldn’t let him leave sickbay. On the other hand, he had a duty to report in full what had happened—and he knew his conscience would eat at him until he did. “Just a couple of things I can’t explain.” He turned to Masir. “Doc, could an implant malfunction cause any other side effects? Besides pain, I mean.”