you.” Captain Smith’s tone was very satisfied indeed. “I’ll leave you to your work.”
“Thank you, ma’am.” To his surprise, Maduabuchi realized he meant it.
* * * *
He spent the next half-shift combing through comparative astronomy. At this point, almost a thousand years into the human experience of interstellar travel, there was an embarrassing wealth of data. So much so that even petabyte q-bit storage matrices were overrun, as eventually the challenges of indexing and retrieval went metastatic. Still, one thing Howards were very good at was data processing. Nothing ever built could truly match the pattern recognition and free associative skills of human (or post-human) wetware collectively known as “hunches.” Strong AIs could approximate that uniquely biological skill through a combination of brute force and deeply clever circuit design, but even then, the spark of inspiration did not flow so well.
Maduabuchi slipped into his flow state to comb through more data in a few hours than a baseline human could absorb in a year. Brown dwarfs, superjovians, fusion cycles, failed stars, hydrogen, helium, lithium, surface temperatures, density, gravity gradients, emission spectrum lines, astrographic surveys, theories dating back to the dawn of observational astronomy, digital images in two and three dimensions as well as time-lensed.
When he emerged, driven by the physiological mundanities of bladder and blood sugar, Maduabuchi knew something was wrong. He knew it. Captain Smith had been right about her mission, about there being something off in their voyage to Tiede 1.
But she didn’t know what it was she was right about. He didn’t either.
Still, the thought niggled somewhere deep in his mind. Not the green flash per se, though that, too. Something more about Tiede 1.
Or less.
“And what the hell did that mean?” he asked the swarming motes of data surrounding him on the virtual displays, now reduced to confetti as he left his informational fugue.
Maduabuchi stumbled out of the Survey Suite to find the head, the galley and Captain Peridot Smith, in that order.
* * * *
The corridor was filled with smoke, though no alarms wailed. He almost ducked back into the Survey Suite, but instead dashed for one of the emergency stations found every ten meters or so and grabbed an oxygen mask. Then he hit the panic button.
That produced a satisfying wail, along with lights strobing at four distinct frequencies. Something was wrong with the gravimetrics, too – the floor had felt syrupy, then too light, with each step. Where the hell was fire suppression?
The bridge was next. He couldn’t imagine that they were under attack – Inclined Plane was the only ship in the Tiede 1 system so far as any of them knew. And short of some kind of pogrom against Howard immortals, no one had any reason to attack their vessel.
Mutiny, he thought, and wished he had an actual weapon. Though what he’d do with it was not clear. The irony that the lowest-scoring shooter in the history of the Howard training programs was now working as a weapons officer was not lost on him.
He stumbled into the bridge to find Chillicothe Xiang there, laughing her ass off with Paimei Joyner, one of their two scouts – hard-assed Howards so heavily modded that they could at need tolerate hard vacuum on their bare skin, and routinely worked outside for hours with minimal life support and radiation shielding. The strobes were running in here, but the audible alarm was mercifully muted. Also, whatever was causing the smoke didn’t seem to have reached into here yet.
Captain Smith stood at the far end of the bridge, her back to the diamond viewing wall that was normally occluded by a virtual display, though at the moment the actual, empty majesty of Tiede 1 local space was visible.
Smith was snarling. “…don’t care what you thought you were doing, clean up my ship’s air! Now, damn it.”
The two turned toward the hatch, nearly ran into Maduabuchi in his breathing mask, and renewed their laughter.
“You look like a spaceman,” said Chillicothe.
“Moral here,” added Paimei. One deep black hand reached out to grasp Maduabuchi’s shoulder so hard he winced. “Don’t try making a barbecue in the galley.”
“We’ll be eating con-rats for a week,” snapped Captain Smith. “And everyone on this ship will know damned well it’s your fault we’re chewing our teeth loose.”
The two walked out, Paimei shoving Maduabuchi into a bulkhead while Chillicothe leaned close. “Take off the mask,” she whispered. “You look stupid in it.”
Moments later, Maduabuchi was alone with the captain, the mask dangling in his grasp.
“What was it?” she asked in a quiet, gentle voice that carried more respect than he probably deserved.
“I have…had something,” Maduabuchi said. “A sort of, well, hunch. But it’s slipped away in all that chaos.”
Smith nodded, her face closed and hard. “Idiots built a fire in the galley, just to see if they could.”
“Is that possible?”
“If you have sufficient engineering talent, yes,” the captain admitted grudgingly. “And are very bored.”
“Or want to create a distraction,” Maduabuchi said, unthinking.
“Damn it,” Smith shouted. She stepped to her command console. “What did we miss out there?”
“No,” he said, his hunches suddenly back in play. This was like a flow hangover. “Whatever’s out there was out there all along. The green flash. Whatever it is.” And didn’t that niggle at his thoughts like a cockroach in an airscrubber. “What we missed was in here.”
“And when,” the captain asked, her voice very slow now, viscous with thought, “did you and I become we as separate from the rest of this crew?”
When you first picked me, ma’am, Maduabuchi thought but did not say. “I don’t know. But I was in the Survey Suite, and you were on the bridge. The rest of this crew was somewhere else.”
“You can’t look at everything, damn it,” she muttered. “Some things should just be trusted to match their skin.”
Her words pushed Maduabuchi back into his flow state, where the hunch reared up and slammed him in the forebrain with a broad, hairy paw.
“I know what’s wrong,” he said, shocked at the enormity of the realization.
“What?”
Maduabuchi shook his head. It couldn’t possibly be true. The ship’s orientation was currently such that the bridge faced away from Tiede 1, but he stared at the screen anyway. Somewhere outside that diamond sheeting – rather smaller than the lounge, but still substantial – was a work of engineering on a scale no human had ever contemplated.
No human was the key word.
“The brown dwarf out there…” He shook with the thought, trying to force the words out. “It’s artificial. Camouflage. S-something else is hidden beneath that surface. Something big and huge and…I don’t know what. And s-someone on our ship has been communicating with it.”
Who could possibly manage such a thing?
Captain Peridot Smith gave him a long, slow stare. Her razored eyes cut into him as if he were a specimen on a lab table. Slowly, she pursed her lips. Her head shook just slightly. “I’m going to have to ask you stand down, Mr. St. Macaria. You’re clearly unfit for duty.”
What!? Maduabuchi opened his mouth to protest, to argue, to push back against her decision, but closed it again in the face of that stare. Of course she knew. She’d known all along. She was testing…whom? Him? The rest of the crew?
He realized it didn’t matter. His line of investigation was cut off. Maduabuchi knew when he was beaten. He turned to leave