128: CODE

Captain Kae Jin’s wheelchair is properly outfitted, and the astronauts hold the funeral for their dead the next day. I don’t want to go, and nobody asks me to. Nobody asks any of us replacement crew to. They gather in Pod Launch Ring 2 to send their dead among the stars, the same pod launch ring I first used to exit the ship way, way back when I’d just woken up. The rest of us stay in our ‘inhabited’ rings, and while it’s the exact same people I’ve been living with since the Sands debacle, the ship somehow feels lonely and empty. I go room by room and check the atmospheric analysers just for something useful to do while, a quarter of a ship away, a handful of heroes mourn a great loss they never expected to bear.

The ship is changing around us. The Habitation Ring is more, well, inhabited than ever, with people who moved in this week but have hung things up and laid equipment out with twenty-year-long habits. Many of our little workarounds for monitoring the ship have been replaced with better, more professional ones devised by highly trained and well-practiced experts. The old swing in Recreation and Medical Ring 1 has been rehung, the kitchen layout in HR1 has been changed, and new towels hang in new places in the shower area. For the first time since discovering the flowers painted in HR1, I feel like a trespasser on the Courageous.

This isn’t the first time we’ve made space for newly awoken people; every time somebody wakes up, the ship changes around them. But normally, it’s somebody new integrating into our system. Even Captain Sands, as overbearing and stubborn as he was, had to integrate into an existing crew. These people have been doing this four times as long as we have; over half of their adult lives. This ship was their space long before, and for much longer, than it’s been ours. For the first time, I really feel like a placeholder.

It’s not that they’re doing anything to indicate that, not deliberately. Captain Kae Jin commands the full trust and respect of her crew, and if she wanted to take over ship’s operations completely, she could; she’s made no attempt to do so, leaving the day-to-day operations to Captain Klees, who’s more used to the current situation and also not in a fight against the effects of chronostasis for his own organs.  The others haven’t made any attempt to impose or throw their weight around, either; when Xanthe found that Tinera was using their old bedroom, they moved into a different one without comment, and while the astronauts might go to each other for advice and go to Captain Kae Jin for orders instead of Captain Klees, it’s clear that this is more a matter of familiarity and decades-built trust than any intentional statement. (It’s fair; we do the same thing. I go to Captain Klees instead of Kae Jin for my orders, and to Tal instead of Asteria with my computer questions. It’s perfectly normal.) But intentional or not, I can’t help but feel like an interloper in their home, a jarringly unfamiliar face taking up space where a familiar face should be.

And I can’t help but reflect, darkly, on their primary laboratory technician, whose eyes were my exact shade of brown and as such won’t be joining her in the stars today, but instead sit carefully preserved in storage, awaiting a good surgeon and a fully kitted operating theatre. There probably will be a time, hopefully soon, where at least a tiny piece of my face isone of those familiar faces.

Anyway, I find myself spending even more time than usual in Greenhouse Ring 1, since none of their gardeners survived. It doesn’t feel entirely ours – the astronauts visit often, just to be present in a green space – but it’s more like it than anywhere else. The trees are old and the bees are old, but most of the other plants in the greenhouse ring were planted by me and mine. Very little of it holds the mark of their twenty years. Of course, the greenhouse ring is also the furthest back of our occupied rings, so this also means that I’m the first person to notice their return.

The airlocks between rings are too small for everyone to use them at once, and it’s Asteria and Xanthe who come though first, apparently locked in some kind of argument.

“Four AI backups, Xanthe. Four copies of Cory’s rudimentaries on carefully shielded drives with no physical leads in them and no airwave transmission capability, and I verified ever one of them after we were in space. Somebody on this ship wiped them in transit, you understand? It wasn’t me, and Harrian was the head comptech. He’s the only reasonable suspect. I was close to him too, okay? But Harrian and Richard were traitors.”

“Richard… listened to bad advice, probably his sister. But there’s no way that Harrian would put us at risk like that.”

“Well, somebody did. And since somebody told Cory what brains ke could take, Richard had an accomplice on our crew.”

“It could’ve been you, for all I know!”

“I wish. I’d be a tankload less confused if I was a spy.”

“Could’ve been Vadro, or Byr. Or one of these new crew.”

“Captain Reimann’s IT techs would have no reason to wipe the backup drives. The only reason to do that is if you want to make sure nobody can kill your weird brain experiment and replace it with a clean install, and they thought they’d have control of the ship until it reached the planet. Besides, Keiko’s notes don’t make any mention at all of them being her allies. No; it was someone on our crew to make sure that nobody replaced the experiment in progress, had to be. The idea of it being the newbies makes no sense at all; they killed Cory and we’re still experiencing problems over it. I’m sure they would’ve loved to have a clean backup, wiping the drives is the opposite of helpful to them. I’m sorry, Xanthe, really I am. But Harrian lied to all of us.”

“You’re certainly willing to jump to some uncharitable conclusions about people you love based on not very much evidence.”

“I’m not jumping to – ” the pair notice me and stop speaking. Xanthe stares for a minute, and storms off.

“Sorry about them,” Asteria says. “They didn’t mean to accuse you of wiping the AI backups and possibly dooming us all to death in space as part of some sinister brain-stealing plot. It’s the adrenalin overdose talking.”

“I don’t know you guys very well, but I think it’s probably the part where you accused their beloved dead friend of endangering the ship and lying to them for 20 years, immediately after his funeral?”

“… Yeah, okay. It’s probably that.”

“I think Captain Kae Jin thinks I’m some kind of spy anyway, so.”

“In Kae Jin’s defense, we were instructed to memorise a picture of your face and told you were a danger to the mission who nearly knifed the project CEO.”

“That was one time!”

Asteria shrugs.

“Do you think I’m some kind of spy?”

They shrug again. “I think that at this point, this close to the planet and with the ship in this condition, we’d be hard pressed to find anyone aboard who doesn’t share the goal of landing alive and having a stable colony. So, to be perfectly honest, I don’t give a shit. Dor Delphin himself could come back from the dead and I’d hand him a broom.”

“Yeah, do you guys know what was up with him?”

“Probably less than you do. We had no idea any Delphins were aboard until you guys told us. I’d never even heard of Delphin Synthetics.”

“I guess you probably don’t have too many foreign companies on Mars, huh.”

She shrugs vaguely. “Hopefully their synthetics are good, since our lives will probably depend on the dome canvasses we’re carrying. I’m not looking forward to the headache of balancing the consumption of canvas, which determines the size of our livable space and therefore our population,  with the time it’s going to take to set up canvas manufacturing and repair facilities, a timeline also dependent on population.”

“And population determines the urgency of other systems,” I add. “Wake up too many at once to get production online and not only do we need more space and therefore more canvas, but also food production becomes a much higher priority before we can even think about materials production. And unless the existing colonies dragged full production facilities with them, which I doubt because if they intended to beat us here all along then they were travelling much lighter than us, they’ll be in sore need of canvas by now and putting a minimum bar on canvas consumption to keep them alive.”

“If only they would fucking talk to us so we could have some idea of what they need.”

“If only.”

“And crew will have to stay up here until the ship’s empty. Depending on population restrictions, it could take many years to have space down there for all the remaining colonists. The real logistical trials begin when we reach orbit.”

“New logistical trials. We’ve had plenty of real ones already.”

Asteria glances about the ship. “Yeah, that’s true.” She scowls. “You know what pisses me off the most?”

“Oh, there are far too many options to guess.”

“That sabotage code sent from the planet.”

“Why? I mean, Cattail was surprised we were out here, so it’s unlikely the colony sent it. It was automated, right?”

“Presumably. We mocked up a dummy version of the sabotage code on an unconnected drive; I can’t understand the code any better than Tal can, but we plugged the code sent in and it tells the systems not to kill us all. So like, even if someone in the colony did send it – and you’re right, Cattail’s surprise suggests it’s automated – they sent the one to not kill us.”

“So… why does that piss you off the most?”

“Because it shouldn’t have worked! That code could’ve been all kinds of things! It was almost definitely going to be telemetry data. Some device sent ahead of a spaceship, to send a signal when it receives one from said ship? It could have been positioning data to ensure that the Courageous’ automatic systems knew accurately where the planet was. It could have been a payload of initial supplies that you guys, not being trained for this, didn’t know about, signalling that it had landed safely. It could have been a weather monitoring satellite informing the ship that it’s operational and ready to take measurements once the ship is in orbit to aid in payload drops. It could have been anything!”

“Do we have any of those thi – ?”

“No! Everything we brought is on the ship! But you guys didn’t know that! You lost a lot of information when the AI failed; those things could’ve existed and you wouldn’t know. ‘It’s a secret code to kill or spare us’ is the absolute last thing that should have occurred to you!”

“But it was a sec – ”

“Yes, it was! So far as we can make out, it looks like the system sends a code when passive navigation says we’re in range of the star. If it doesn’t get a response, it waits one quarter of a Hylaran year and does it again. It’ll do this up to four times, and if it doesn’t get a confirmation signal for any of them, triggers the sabotage systems and kills the crew. Receiving a signal stops the process. That’s definitely what the code was for, but it really shouldn’t have been. You guys being right is just… encouraging sloppy science.”

“So receiving the signal makes us safe from further sabotage problems?”

“Tal and Denish disabling the sabotage systems makes us safe from further sabotage problems. There are functions in the code that suggest there might be a code to also sabotage things – that is, the probe can respond with a code to kill us instead, although I don’t see why since not responding does the same thing – but that might be wrong. The code’s a complete mess, very little of it is functional and most of it looks to do completely different things but doesn’t actually lead anywhere, so far as we can tell. It’s much more complicated than it needs to be. We think it’s to hide it in a mess of other systems.”

I open my mouth to respond, only to be cut off by the Big Giant Head alarm.

Asteria frowns. “What’s that – ?”

“We’re getting a radio signal of some kind.”

“Well, finally! What are we standing around here for?”