103: SABOTAGE

We all gather at one of the picnic tables, cups of coffee in hand. Denish begins his explanation without preamble.

“The engine was damaged on Day 789. 32 days later, Senior Engineer Ovlo Astur declared it irreparable. This is the first thing that did not make sense.”

“He lied?” Tinera asks.

“No. I also checked the engine. Captain Sands helped design that engine, and he checked it when he woke up, and whatever else can be said about Sands, he definitely wanted this ship to succeed. Neither of us could find a way to repair it, and that is very odd, don’t you think? We are using ancient keyboards on this ship so that they can be repaired. We have spare parts for coffee machines and spare everything to build the colony with. The engine is the most critical part, and they missed a way it could be damaged? There should be materials to build entire new engines aboard! It is the worst thing to fail! But there isn’t. Many ways that the engine could be damaged, could be repaired. But not this way. And this is the way it was damaged. If it was damaged further this way, it could stop working entirely; Ovlo was able to stop that, but there was no way to fix it. It is very strange. I was thinking about this for a long time, before Tal came to me.”

Tal nods. “I was poking around Amy looking for digital files from the crew. Y’know, medical records, diaries, activity history, whatever; anything that could help us with all this mad science stuff. I mean, we knew that Captain Kinoshita and her cronies were in on it, right? And the scientists died in some experiment where they thought they’d figured out the DIVR thing, so I thought maybe there might be electronic records, because what scientist wouldn’t keep those? So Amy’s a total mess, and she is NOT being helpful, right, and I’m poking around in some random subsystem that Sandra of Signus put into place that I thought might lead to some sort of record but it turns out she just had custom preferred lighting options; I wonder if the crew fought over that? Because hers were programmed but not implemented, right, which means either they said ‘no’ or Kinoshita switched them back after Sandra died, so – ”

“The sabotage?” Captain Klees asks gently.

“Right. So, I want to know if Signus’ lighting preferences were ever implemented, right, because I’d run out of good TV dramas to watch so why not. And following this lets me into a record of minor subsystem alterations for stuff like lights and temperature and humidity and stuff, y’know, normal comfort stuff, and I’m looking through when people altered these settings over the course of the journey – ”

“Why?” Tinera asks.

“I dunno, why not? And there’s a strange transmission to the aft engine systems on Day 789. It’s not a known setting, not a light or anything, just an undescribed code sent to the engine systems.”

“The code was sent about four minutes before the engine damage occurred,” Denish continues. “There are a few ways in which the damage could have happened. One of them is that the engine was pushed far past its safe capacity for a few minutes.”

“I checked,” Tal adds, “and the code for running the engines is a lot more engineer-ey than what I usually deal with, but I chased up what that specific code does and it does seem to disable those safeties. But the increase in engine power doesn’t make it into the engine logs. The crew would’ve felt the acceleration for a few minutes, but looking at the data, there’s no record of it; you can’t tell precisely what happened without digging into the code.”

“So it was very much deliberate,” Captain Klees concludes.

“I don’t think so.”

“That hardly sounds accidental!”

“Oh, the capacity for sabotage is absolutely deliberate. But I think it was triggered accidentally. This is all code that I wasn’t supposed to have access to; no one is. I found it because I’m amazing, and because Amy’s security was shot to hell in both directions, but it’s supposed to be send when certain onboard conditions are or aren’t met, but I don’t know what those conditions are. I couldn’t get into that part. There’s some other signal that triggers the signal, or receiving it stops the signal from being triggered, maybe, like a dead man’s switch. Anyway. I stripped that code out for our fore engine, because if we lose power on that thing we’re fucked – ”

“So this can’t sabotage the engine we’re using right now?”

“ – That’s right, I’ve safeguarded that engine. But I’m not sure what condition tripped the sabotage, or whether it was supposed to. It wasn’t on a timer, it wasn’t manually entered. I think somebody fucked up the coding and it tripped when it shouldn’t, or the code misread something… I don’t know.”

Denish nods. “It was a strange place to trip such a code. Impossible to know if the crew would turn back, still being that close to Earth. If they wanted the crew to turn back, it would have tripped sooner – if they didn’t, it would have tripped later. The fact that it tripped right then, means it was probably a mistake.”

“We don’t know whether this engine sabotage was part of the whole mad science plot,” I say slowly. “But either way, if the sabotage was tripped unintentionally, then that means that Kinoshita’s people didn’t intend for a forty year journey when they set this all up.” That says… what about their timeline? Maybe something important. Maybe not. I’ll look into it later.

“To be clear,” Captain Klees says, “there was code put intentionally in the computer that could break both engines in an irreparable way, and we don’t know the trigger conditions. The fore engine is now safe and we think the aft engine sabotage was probably triggered accidentally.”

“Yep.” Ke grins. “Which brings us to the carbon monoxide. Aspen was right; that’s a weird thing for Amy to have. Like, I’m sure it has plenty of industrial applications, but why was it even plugged into the atmospheric systems? And it was hidden way up in a vacuum-insulated container up in fuel storage, nowhere near the other environmental gases. Otherwise Captain Sands would’ve found it and removed it when fixing the life support systems.”

“I had to crawl along ventilation piping through the centre of the ship to find it, looking for anything connected to the pipes,” Denish grumbles. “Very unpleasant to do. Big tanks, enough to flood all the rings if necessary.”

“And you’ll never guess what I found in the code!” Tal grins brightly. “I mean. You probably will. It’s not hard to guess.”

“Same sort of code as for the engines, right?” Sam says wearily.

“Yep! Receives some sort of input about conditions and floods the rings. Which is interesting in its own right, right? Because why add carbon monoxide? If you want to kill everyone, why not just lock open every airlock on the ship, including the externals? Why not blow it up? Why not make it so that the ship disengages every ring at once and just falls apart in space?”

“Well that one’s easy,” I point out. “It’s because not everyone is you, Tal. It sounds like they put together one bit of ‘if this, output this’ code and slipped it into things with low enough security that the computer wouldn’t have any unexpected checks and balances.”

“As for blowing it up, there is no way that somebody could smuggle something like that aboard,” Denish points out. “Blowing things up in space is bad. And you would need a very, very big bomb to blow up a spaceship like this. Easier to break critical systems, and easier to smuggle CO into fuel area. CO is already aboard for the colony, and it is used in putting the engine parts together. A giant bomb? Much harder.”

“But can’t a spark just blow up the fuel?” Tal asks, frowning.

Denish chuckles. “You watch too many pre-Neocambrian movies. This is spaceship, not ancient petrol car. Fuel does not just ‘blow up’. And old fuel would still need oxygen to do that anyway.”

“They knew enough about the engines and fuel systems to know how to disable said engines and know they could hide carbon monoxide in the fuel area,” Captain Klees concludes, “as well as make sure the right engine repair parts would somehow not be aboard, and have the pull to get that much CO in there. But they couldn’t, or at least didn’t, sabotage the more complicated and secure computer-controlled systems. So we have a group with someone moderately tech savvy but probably not involved in the project’s AI security, an engineer who’s probably intimately involved in the design of the ship, and someone with pull in supply and logistics. That’s interesting, I suppose.”

“Interesting but useless,” Tinera points out. “All of these people are dead back home by now.”

“Or aboard,” I say thoughtfully. Captain Sands had been an engine designer for the javelins. He wouldn’t have been involved, obviously – nothing that he did suggested that he knew of or expected such sabotage – but he must have been recruited as a counter-agent for a reason. Maybe the Tarandran spies had found that engine designers specifically were involved in this Antarctican thing, and aboard, and chosen someone with a similar knowledge set to figure it out.

Tinera shakes her head. “That doesn’t make sense. That would be suicide.”

“Under certain conditions, yeah. But we don’t know what those conditions are.” I bite my lip. I’m on the edge of something. Tal had said that the ship had code to destroy the engines and asphyxiate the crew conditionally, but didn’t know what those conditions are. “Tal did suggest a dead man’s switch. If the sabotage only triggers if the conspirators aboard, in chronostasis, are already dead…”

“What, like ‘we make it to the colony or no one does’?” Tinera snorts. “What kind of utter dick would do something like that?”

Sam starts counting off their fingers. “Someone who wants to be a space king on a new planet. Some religious or moral extremist group who want to set up their perfect utopia. The kind of person who thinks that colonies established by slave labour are a great idea and that their workers should be kept in line with kill switches in their hearts. People who just generally have something wrong with them, like you’d expect to accrue on a ship being flung off into space away from humanity. Anyone who – ”

“Okay, okay, point,” Tinera grumbles.

Captain Klees nods. “Denish, Tal, I assume you’re already…?”

“Always on the lookout for code that can kill us, Captain.” Tal points to kes own eyes. “Have been since I killed Amy, and we’re not dead yet.”

“By the time we get to Hylara, every feature on this ship that could kill us will be manual.” Denish nods stiffly. “I safely break down ships for a living, Captain. Do not worry. We will arrive in pressurised box with big rocket on one end like pre-Neocambrian astronauts.”

“It is so depressing that that’s reassuring,” Captain Klees mutters.