The Jovian Run: Sol Space Book One (21 page)

              “This brings back to our earlier question. Why me? Why do I matter?” Evelyn’s brown eyes were wider than ever, and she looked quite frightened.

              “I don’t know, but I mean to see you safely to Cronos station. It may be that the other ship, the one that’s tailing us, will also make an attempt to abduct you.” She spoke clearly and slowly for emphasis. “I am not going to let that happen, Evelyn.”

              “Thank you. Plenty of people might use me as a bargaining chip, if they thought that’s what I was. I suppose I should offer to give myself up and all that to save the ship.”

              “No.” She sat back and regarded her gravely. “We don’t do that. No one is going to be handed over.”

              “Thanks.” She sniffed a bit and her voice shook. “I didn’t want to go. I’m not much for the martyr bit. This is… this has been pretty terrible, but you’ve been great to me.”

              Staples was aghast. “Evelyn, two of my crew members tried to rape you.”

              “Dinah told me you didn’t know them. You just hired them.”

              “That’s true; we did.” She paused for a moment while she pondered. “And that makes me think that perhaps we should have a little chat with them about computer viruses and pirate attacks.”

              The other woman nodded, and they stood up to go.

              Staples, Evelyn, Templeton, and Kojo Jang climbed down the ladder built into the corridor floor to the hallway at the bottom of the ship. Jang reached the floor first, and he was the first to hear the sound. As the others joined him in standing near the ventral stern of the ship, he looked at them quizzically.

              “Do you hear that noise?”

              “What?” Templeton asked.

The dominant sounds were those of the engines and reactor, especially this close to the rear of the ship, but Staples thought she could detect a lighter, higher engine sound. “I hear it.” She squinted with concentration. “It sounds like a motor.” Suddenly, her eyes widened and she took off at a run down the corridor. Jang sprinted after her, and Evelyn and Templeton brought up the rear.

The captain rounded the corner and the end of the hallway that contained the door to the quarters where they had locked Quinn and Parsells came into view. She could see the source of the sound. A small vacuum pump was set up beside the room, and a hose snaked out of it and to the door. The hose, she could just see, was held in place by heavy duct tape.

“Call Jabir!” Staples shouted as she dashed forward. Jang was right behind her, and Templeton jabbed his watch to put the call through to the doctor.

When she got to the door, she frantically seized the hose and tried to yank it away from the door, but the tape and the negative pressure of vacuum inside it held it firm. Jang had the presence of mind to kneel down quickly and turn off the small pump, but still the hose would not come free. Jang and his captain gripped the sectioned blue hose and together they pulled hard.

The tape came away from the door and there was the sound of a miniature windstorm as air flooded back into the room. Staples struggled with the lock while Jang peered through the two centimeter hole that had been crudely cut in the door.

“They’re unconscious,” he stated matter-of-factly, “but they’re both breathing.” He stood up and moved away as Staples ripped the door open, the air having equalized enough to provide only a small bit of resistance.

Breathing hard, Templeton jogged up to them and looked around the security chief’s form and at the two unconscious and bandaged men in the room. “Doc’s on his way.”

The four of them stood still for a minute. “First rule of sabotage?” ventured Templeton.

“As the first rule in assassination? Kill the saboteurs?” Jang questioned.

Staples did not answer. Evelyn stared at the two unconscious bodies, not entirely sure how to feel.

Chapter 13

“It’s long past time for another ship meeting,” the captain said as she faced the crew. They were in the mess hall again, and people were lined up against the walls or sitting at the tables. Templeton and his captain stood next to one another at the far end. As she surveyed the crowd, she saw a crew of faces she knew well. Charis and John stood off to the right, a sleepy Gwen in her father’s arms. Dinah stood at parade rest nearby. Bethany lurked in a corner, peeking out from behind the doctor. Piotr sat at the table with an uneaten sandwich in front of him. Next to him were seated Ian and Declan. Yoli sat as well, resting her injured arm on the table. Jang, the ever grim security chief, leaned against the wall near the door, eyes sweeping the room. Evelyn Schilling, the seeming source of all their trouble and a person the captain felt duty-bound to protect, stood her hands behind her back near the bald and gaunt man.
One of these people
, Staples thought,
has betrayed us
.

              “I want to be very clear about what is going on. I want you to know that I considered not telling you everything. There’s a good chance that this will upset and disturb you, but I believe that you deserve the truth.” She took a deep breath, then plunged ahead. “You all know that the coms and radar were down when the pirates attacked. That was because of Yegor’s work with the new coms suite. We have since discovered that someone planted a computer virus in the mainframe since we left Mars. That means it has to be someone on this ship.”

              She expected murmurs, questions, maybe even outrage, but there was only silence. The crew looked around at one another, but no one spoke. “We have also learned that the other ship out there has been blocking our coms and feeding us false chatter from Mars. Evelyn, would you like to add to this?” She looked pointedly at the woman, and all eyes turned to her.

              Evelyn stepped forward and spoke, gesticulating as she did so. “I looked through your past coms traffic to see if I could isolate the transmission signature that was broadcasting, still is broadcasting, the faked chatter. It’s complex enough that it carries a signature, and I found a match in your ship’s archives. It’s a ship called the
Doris Day
.”

              This time there was a good deal of murmuring. Ian cursed loudly, then looked apologetically at Charis and John. Gwen looked around, seemingly somewhat confused, and John tried to pacify her.

              Staples raised her voice to be heard. “We believe,” she began, and the discussion subsided, “we believe that the pirate ship was attempting to abduct Herc and Evelyn, our two passengers.” The slight smudging of the truth came easily. The captain saw no reason to place all the weight on the woman’s shoulders, and from where she stood next to Jang, she looked grateful for it. “Whoever hired the pirates is also responsible for our mole, for the person who uploaded the virus into our mainframe. Now there is no further threat from this virus. Evelyn has assured us that the virus completed its task and then shut itself down. Our mainframe is clean.”

              There was more muttering at this. Staples distinctly heard the words
relief
and
traitor
.

              “Furthermore,” she pressed on, “we believe, against all expectation, that it was the
Doris Day
that saved us from the pirates by destroying their ship.”

              “Why?” Yoli asked. “Why help us? Vey has always been a bastard. He’d never help us.”

              “We don’t know that either, but I suspect that he’d do whatever was required if he were being paid. It is possible that Vey will attempt to abduct Evelyn as well.”

              “Wait,” John spoke up, shifting Gwen away from his face so that he could speak more loudly. “If they want her too, why take the risk with missiles? Couldn’t they have killed the people they wanted?”

              Dinah caught her captain’s eye, and Staples nodded for her to speak.

              “Thank you, sir.” She turned and addressed John. “I believe I can answer that. The captain asked me to check the stasis tubes. They were each carrying a transponder.” She walked forward and placed a small blue disc with a sharp point, about the size and shape of a large thumbtack, on the table next to Piotr’s sandwich. “That’s the transponder I found attached to the satellite we picked up right after we left Earth.” She placed two more seemingly identical discs on the table. “Those are the transponders I found buried in the machinery of the stasis tubes.” Before people could begin speaking, she continued. “The missiles that destroyed our attackers were already in motion when I saw them, but that doesn’t mean they were accelerating from their origin point. In fact, if they had been, I suspect that I never would have had time to get away. I believe they had been launched by Vey’s ship, then powered down when they reached us, waiting for the right circumstances.”

              “Which were?” Charis asked.

              “One: the ability to destroy the pirate ship without destroying us, and two: the condition that they still read that the stasis tubes were on board our ship. The fact that Bauer’s tube was so close to the hull breach that it was pulled out into vacuum and destroyed by the explosion is not something that could have been anticipated.”

              Staples waited a minute to let all of this sink in. There were voices and discussion, but mostly, the crew was silent as they processed. Finally, she continued. “I’m afraid there’s more. As all of you know, Parsells and Quinn attempted to attack our passenger.” She knew her chief engineer well enough not to compliment her on her role in the prevention of that attack in front of the crew. “We… I decided to incarcerate them until we could bring them to trial on Cronos. Since then, someone has attempted to murder them.”

              Except for Jang, Jabir, and Evelyn, those standing traded looks and gasps, and those sitting made similar noises. Staples heard Yoli say “good” and saw Ian nod in agreement. She had not expected any sympathy for the men, and indeed she had little herself. “Doctor, would you like to report on their condition?”

              “Yes.” Jabir took a step forward and leveled his gaze across the room. “The effects of the hypoxia are more extreme in Mr. Quinn’s case than in Mr. Parsells. I expect that patient Parsells will fully recover in time, though his lungs and eyes will need surgery and prolonged therapy if they are ever to be as they were. Patient Quinn has suffered permanent brain damage. He is conscious, but I estimate his IQ to be somewhere around forty-five. I do not think he remembers much of his former life, and many of his day-to-day abilities are gone. He can no longer read or write, and it is quite likely that he will forget his own name from time to time. Make no mistake. Mr. Quinn may be alive, but his life is over.”

              The discussion that came from this was confused and varied, and Staples did not blame them. Quinn and Parsells’ intended crime was a heinous one, but she was not convinced it was one that warranted near brain death.

              “Do you think that those assholes are the ones who infected the mainframe with the virus? Could they be the traitors?” It was Yoli again, her dark eyes staring at her captain intensely.

              Staples nodded. “They could be. We were on our way to ask them that when we discovered the vacuum pump attached to their cell. I still intend to have that conversation with Parsells when he is recovered enough to do so. In the meantime, we have some problems. We may have a saboteur on board. We definitely have a murderer on board. The fact that they did not succeed, or fully succeed, does not change their intention. I know that some of you think that those men got what they deserved. Frankly, I am inclined to agree with you, but that is not for us to decide. We are none of us judges. Mr. Templeton will be conducting an investigation. This is not,” she paused for effect and tried to meet the eyes of every one of her crew members before she finished, “how we solve problems on this ship.”

              “What about our other problem?” It was Ian this time. “What about that other ship out there that’s keeping us cut off?”

              “That,” Staples replied, “I am happy to report, is one problem we do have a solution to.”

              “So how exactly is this going to work?” Templeton asked. He sat in his customary seat next to his captain in the cockpit, and the other three chairs, astrogation, pilot, and coms were occupied by Charis, Bethany, and Evelyn respectively.

              The befreckled woman sitting in Yegor’s old chair swung around, her safety belt keeping her snug in her seat. “I don’t know how far your rival ship is behind us, but they can’t be too far because they’ve been making course corrections to stay in our wake since we left Mars. Otherwise you would have seen them. Now that we’re turned around, facing in-system, they must have dropped back to keep off our radar. The improved coms suite won’t help us with that. It’s a lot easier for them to follow us than for us to see them following us.”

              “Ships leave all sorts of radiation trails through space if the engines are thrusting,” Charis expanded without looking up from her console.

              Templeton nodded. That he knew. “But, now that we’re facing them and our coms and radar are up, we’ll see them coming if they try to make a move. They ain’t going to sneak up on us.”

              “No, they can’t,” agreed Evelyn. “The good news is that they’re far enough back that it takes them a while to detect our course corrections. If we turn hard, we should be able to get free of their rebroadcast field and pick up authentic transmissions from Mars.”

              “And what exactly are we hoping to learn?” Templeton prompted.

              “First and foremost, we want to be sure that no one has been trying to contact us about…” Staples gestured to the ship, the crew, and the events of the last few days, “…all of this. We could report it, but I don’t see what good that would do right now, and, assuming they intercept it, I’d rather not tell Vey everything that’s been going on here. I’m also hoping to hear from a friend of mine. I can only hope that she put her message on repeat when she didn’t hear back from me.”

              “Fair enough. Nothing good comes from being cut off from the core systems,” he replied, and was silent for a space. After a minute, he looked at his watch and said, “It’s time. The crew should be ready.” He tapped his panel. “Dinah, are the engines ready?”

              “Yes, sir.” The engineer’s voice was clear through the speakers. “I feel safe giving you two Gs for an hour, but no more.”

              “That should be enough,” Evelyn chimed in.

              Staples looked over at Charis. “Do it.”

              Two hours later, Templeton and Staples sat at the small table in her quarters. Her body was a bit sore from the hour at two Earth gravities. They had certainly been through greater thrusts, and recently, but after several days of weightlessness followed by a few days of less than half Earth normal gravity, the extra weight had been a strain. Of far more concern to her was the surface on the table in front of her. Templeton was pouring over his own, looking through the general transmissions that swept through the Sol system, radiating out from the core. Staples had breathed a sigh of relief when she received the message from her friend currently using the name Jordan. After running the decryption program that she had been given when they first worked together on Earth, the woman’s message appeared on the surface.

              “Any big news from Mars?” She eyed the dead plant sitting on the corner of the desk.

              Templeton shook his head. “Nothing to write home about, so to speak. The usual political chatter…” he sorted through the data with a finger on the touch screen, “some guy had an EVA suit accident on Mars…ups and downs on the stock market. What’s your friend say?”

              “Two things. I can’t say that either is a surprise, but they’re both important. First, she did some digging into Parsells and Quinn for me. They were prison guards, but they had a bad reputation. Violence towards prisoners, beatings, that sort of thing. It looks like they almost beat a man to death three months ago.”

              Templeton was shaking his head vehemently. “None of that came up on the background check. I called their direct superior!”

              “Apparently, that was part of the problem. Jordan says that Quinn and Parsells were going to be fired over the incident. Their superior, one Tyrone Martin, tipped them off, so they quit before they could be canned. He also convinced the prison to drop the charges when the witnesses recanted their statements.”

              Templeton’s expression was dark. “That’s the bastard I talked to.”

              “I guess even bastards look out for their friends. You couldn’t have known, Don. Sometimes the system doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to.”

              “How did your friend find this out?”

              “After two years, I’ve learned not to ask.”

              “Is she going to
do
something about it, now that she knows about this guy Martin?”

              “She didn’t say, and I’d rather not conjecture.” She paused for a moment. “Check that. I think I’d rather not know.”