The Jovian Run: Sol Space Book One (20 page)

              “Did you check their references?”

              He sighed. “Yes,” he admitted with reluctance.

              “Did you conduct the background checks?”

              “Yes.”

              “Then it is not your fault. You might have recommended them, but I made the final call to hire them. Either these men have avoided trouble through luck, or… I don’t know what, but they were bad before we ever met them. I need you to accept that. ‘There is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.’ You couldn’t have known.”

              “I feel like we just had this conversation an hour ago, but in reverse.” He shook his head, still holding onto the idea. “They rubbed people the wrong way from the moment they came on board. Looking back, it seems pretty obvious.”

              “They’re hardly the first people to rub people the wrong way on this ship. Remember when Dinah first came aboard?” She smiled a bit, hoping it would be infectious, but his face remained stoic.             

              “Still,” he persisted. “I should have… I don’t know, should have kept a closer eye. If Dinah hadn’t happened by… I just don’t want to think about it.” His eyes were fixated on his hands in front of him. There was a small fleck of blood, either Parsells’ or Quinn’s, stuck under a fingernail despite the fact that he had washed his hands three times. Once the doctor had stabilized them, he and Jang had moved them one at a time to Medical and then finally to the makeshift cell.

              “You know, just as well as you know that Dinah didn’t leave them alive by accident, that Dinah didn’t ‘happen by.’  But we’ll come to that when I talk with her.” She gathered herself and took a deep breath. “We’re not going to perform any ‘ship justice.’  We’re not barbarians. When we get to Cronos Station, we’ll turn them over to the authorities and present our evidence. We’ll stay as long as we have to in order to testify. Let’s hope the wheels turn faster than they do on Earth.”

              Templeton didn’t say anything for a minute as he thought this over. “All right. Will this make you rethink converting a few of the empty crew quarters into a permanent brig?”

              She shook her head. “No. I don’t run a prison, and I don’t want cells on my ship. If we need to make due by converting a room from time to time, then we do, but no cells. In my experience, people rise to the expectations you set for them. If we expect criminals, that’s what we’ll get.”

              “We didn’t expect these guys.”

              “No we didn’t, but there it is.” A few moments passed. “I know you want more, Don. I know you’re angry. I am too. These men, members of my crew, attacked a passenger on my ship. A guest.” She gestured towards a stack of cased books on her wall. “You know, a number of ancient texts have a lot to say about the importance of hospitality. I don’t think we’re doing a very good job. In fact, I’m beginning to wonder if anyone will ever hire us again.” He opened his mouth to object, but she held up a hand to silence him. “Let’s just get through this job first. We’ll see what comes after that. After all, we’re still ten days out.”

              “Hey Bethany?” Evelyn called out as she entered the hydroponics bay. “Are you in here?” She scanned the room, the long rectangular space nearly overgrown with various flowers, vines, and vegetable plants. The misting spray had recently ended, and the haze that hung throughout the room gave it even more of an impression of a jungle in a can. A few seconds passed without a response. Just as she was turning to go, a voice issued from some corner of the captive forest.

              “I’m here.” It was unmistakably Bethany’s high thin voice, and Evelyn wondered if the young woman had answered when she first asked and she simply hadn’t heard it.

              “Where?” the redheaded woman asked. She wandered into the room and pushed aside several leaves with her left hand as she moved.

              “Here.” Bethany’s small frame and jet black hair came into view as she stepped out of the foliage.

              “Hey, there you are,” Evelyn said cheerily. “Listen, I think you gave me a dud.” She held out the object in her right hand. It was the lilac Bethany had given her a few days before. The purple flowers had faded to brown, and the entire plant was bent over as if made of rubber. Bethany seemed to forget her shyness for a moment and took several strides forward to look at the plant. She touched it gingerly, stroking it lightly as the other woman held the potted plant out in front of her; a few petals drifted away from their home and down to the floor.

              “It’s only been two days!” Bethany’s voice was raised. “What did you do?” She voice carried a hit of accusation as she looked up to meet Evelyn’s brown eyes with her own.

              “I didn’t do anything. I just watered it like you told me.” Evelyn’s voice was devoid of defense.

              Suddenly, Bethany appeared to become aware of how close she was standing to her, and she looked back down at the dead flower, blushing fiercely. She gently took the plastic wrapped planter from Evelyn, being careful not to touch her sparsely freckled hands, and carried it away. “I’m sorry,” she said, though Evelyn couldn’t be sure whether she was apologizing for her accusatory tone, the death of the plant, or just as a matter of reflex. “I’ll get you another one.”

              “I’m worried I’ll just kill that one too. I usually do pretty well with plants, but maybe lilacs aren’t my thing.” Hands on her hips, she inquired, “Have anything else?” in the manner of a curious shopper.

              Bethany nodded. “I have a few roses.” She put the lilac down on a small table bolted to the wall, then moved into another row and was lost in the green again. “I heard what happened. Are you okay?”

              Evelyn heaved a sigh. She was getting that question a lot, of course, but it was nice to know everyone cared so much. “I am. It was scary, but I didn’t get hurt. Thank God for Dinah.”

“Dinah’s amazing.” The reverence in the pilot’s voice was clear. A moment later, she emerged again with a miniature purple rose bush suspended in a plastic sealed pot. “They’re really pretty.” She handed it over to Evelyn, then added, color burning her cheeks, “It’s perfect for you.” Then she beat a hasty retreat to the jungle, and Evelyn smiled an adoring smile and headed for the door.

              Later that evening, Staples sat in the captain’s chair looking out at the still-receding sun. It was hard to believe that after everything that had happened, they were still on their way out. She looked forward to the moment when they would enter Earth’s atmosphere again and be able to breathe unprocessed air. Charis was monitoring the trajectory of their new course to Cronos, and Evelyn had assured her that coms would be functional shortly. The matter of Yegor still plagued her. After nearly two years on the ship, she did not want to believe the man had betrayed them, had betrayed her. Even so, the pirates had attacked when they were most vulnerable, and that was difficult to ignore.

              Evelyn’s energy level had been increasing over the last ten to twenty minutes as she had been working, her movements changing from steady to abrupt. Staples hoped that her increased excitement meant that she was close to finishing. It was hard not to watch her. Even if, as she suspected, the woman had had surgery to make herself more attractive, that did not change the fact that she was gorgeous. Of course, as plastic surgery had become more prevalent, safer, and cheaper, it was not unusual to see perfectly symmetrical faces that conformed to all the textbook definitions of beauty, but there was an openness, an approachability about the computer scientist’s looks and manner that was impossible to deny.

              Finally, Evelyn detached her surface from the main console, turned around, and spoke. “Captain, can I speak to you privately?” Charis looked up from her work, but didn’t say anything. Staples considered telling her it was fine to speak in front of the other woman in the room. She certainly trusted her navigator, but she decided to indulge her guest.

              “Sure. We can retire to my quarters if you like.”

              Evelyn stood up and tucked the surface into a holster on her belt to free her hands for the climb down ship.

              A few minutes later, Evelyn followed Staples into her quarters and closed the door behind her.

              “What’s up, Evelyn? Were you able to get coms working?”

              “I did that half an hour ago.” Her eyes were wide, and Staples frowned but said nothing as she waited for the explanation. “Since then, I’ve been examining an anomaly I found in the coms and radar data.”

              “Well, it’s been offline for days. That’s to be expected.”

              “No.” She shook her head and produced the surface from her belt. She woke the screen to show the captain a great deal of data and charts that meant very little to her. “It’s from before Yegor took down the coms system to install the new suite from the satellite.”

              Staples’ eyes narrowed and she inclined her head. “Explain.”

              The redheaded woman drew in a breath, searching for layman’s terms. “So I was looking at the data that the radar and coms were recording. I wanted to review everything that the ship had monitored and recorded since we left Mars. I was using it as a baseline to measure against the upgraded systems. I was looking through it in condensed form, just at a glance. Nine days of data in about two minutes. That’s why I noticed it.”

              “What?” She stood a few paces from the other woman, and though the chair was next to her, she had no desire to sit. That sinking feeling had entered her gut, the same one that had come over her when they had most recently faced off with the
Doris Day
.

              Evelyn looked at her levelly, hoping to convey the gravity of what she was about to say. “Minute to minute, even hour to hour, everything looked normal, but when I looked at it all together, it was obvious: your radar data was has been faked since sometime in your - our- seventh day out. It’s like a business that lies about their income to get around paying taxes. From year to year, it all looks legitimate, but when you look at the big picture, patterns emerge. Once I noticed that, I looked more carefully at the coms data. That’s been faked too, and almost from day one.”

              Staples’ stomach dropped another few inches. “How is that possible?”

              “My current theory? You have two different problems here, and two different causes. I think the false coms are coming from another ship, one that’s been following you and rebroadcasting an edited version of Martian chatter.”

              Staples nodded slowly as understanding began to dawn. “We’ve suspected that there’s another ship out there. The missiles that destroyed the pirate ship, as we told you, were not fired by us. If they were right behind us and far enough back, we wouldn’t have seen them. That also explains Jordan.”

              “Jordan?”

              “I was expecting a message from a friend on Mars within a few days of leaving for Cronos. I never heard from her. I suspected that something might have happened to her, but then, she’s a tough cookie, so that didn’t make much sense.” She pursed her lips in frustration. “Whoever is following us must have intercepted the message and kept it out of the rebroadcast they sent on to us.”

              “Could they have read it?”

              “Maybe. It would have been encrypted, but any encryption can be broken given enough time, or so I’m told. What about the radar on day seven?”

              “I hate to say it, but this is the more disturbing part. The radar went down because of a computer virus in your mainframe. Someone on this ship uploaded it sometime during the seventh day after we left Mars.”

              Staples sat down in the chair. “You’re saying that even if Yegor hadn’t taken the coms and radar offline, we still wouldn’t have seen the pirates coming.”

              Evelyn nodded and sat down across from her. “That was exactly what the virus was designed to do. It was feeding false data to the radar systems, showing them empty space. Like the coms jamming, I only noticed it because of the regularity of its reporting. It’s actually an amazing virus. I’ve worked with them before, but I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s highly advanced. It slipped past your firewalls without them even noticing.”

              “You sound impressed,” Staples said despairingly.

              “I am.”

              “If it was so impressive, why didn’t it do more damage?” She was leaning forward now, her hands on the sides of her head.

              “Because it wasn’t programmed to. It could have taken out your engines, your navigation, probably even life support. This virus could have left
Gringolet
a floating hunk of metal, one full of frozen and suffocated bodies, I might add. If it didn’t do it, it’s because whoever wrote it didn’t want to hurt you.”

              Staples understood. “It’s the same reason that the pirates used stunners. Whoever wanted you off this ship was determined to do it without killing anyone.” She paused and took a breath. “So let’s go through this. There are, by my count, two parties at work here. One is following us and blocking coms from Mars. The other hired, or blackmailed, or threatened someone on my crew to install a virus in our mainframe, a non-lethal virus, so that non-lethal pirates could sneak up on us and abduct you. And when those pirates tried, the first party, our mysterious ship, fired missiles at them and destroyed them. I suppose it need not be said that they don’t share our second party’s concern for the sanctity of life.”