Fatal Boarding (7 page)

"R.J., it never happened."

"It makes me wonder why you've never been
married."

"R.J., it never happened.

"Of course not."

"So why aren't we underway? What the hell's
going on?"

"Oh yeah, you're gonna love this one. Guess
who fucked up last night. I mean, really fucked up."

"No guessing games, please. It's too
early."

"How 'bout if I give you a big clue. It was
Space Operations favorite daughter."

"Brandon? The child-queen of the analytical
group? What did she do?"

"Like I was telling you last night, the
scanners they took on board that ship really didn't pick up too
much. What they did pick up seems almost undecipherable. Except for
one thing, star charts. One of the scientists in ole', or should I
say young, Maureen's group happened to notice a pattern in the
alien gibberish that reminded him of star charts. Ms. Brandon, who
is always anxious to validate Space Ops undeserved confidence in
her, decided it was the big break she needed to crack the code. The
latest mapping we've done hadn't yet been imported into the
analytical computer base, so Ms. Maureen races down to navigation
and uses her rank to bully the engineer on duty into letting her
have access to the ship's main nav computer. She inputs her alien
star segment into the database and tells the computer to find a
pattern match. The host computer goes away to do the job and never
comes back. Whatever happened, it wiped out our entire nav
database. The whole system had to be completely powered down and
then rebooted. They're replacing the optical storage mediums with
backups to get it back. And that my friend, is why you see this
jovial crowd of first shifters celebrating around you rather than
being at their posts."

"Absolutely unbelievable."

"The nav engineer who allowed Brandon into
the host computer is believing it, all right. He's suspended from
duty until a hearing can be scheduled."

"And Maureen Brandon? What about her?"

"Well, the fact that I've heard nothing at
all leads me to believe it's as bad as it gets. There hasn't been
any notice of a temporary replacement for her or anything, but I do
know she spent most of the remainder of third shift in the
conference room with a few department heads and security officers
who had been awakened during their sleep shift. You would have been
in on it except that you were on the EVA, and they thought you
needed your rest. Little did they know..."

"R.J..."

"I was lucky. They kept me up all night
using the job-continuity clause. I was updating documentation on my
laptop when Brandon took off without saying a thing. Otherwise, I'd
probably be getting my own special hearing for allowing procedures
to be broken. So now they are saying that we won't be ready to go
light until sometime around the beginning of second shift. 17:00 is
what's being advertised right now. Because of everything that's
happened, we haven't even pulled away from that alien piece of
crap. It gives me the creeps. And, we have one extremely
disgruntled CO on board right now. Nobody else better screw
up."

"Jesus..."

"He had no part in it. He will not be at the
hearing."

I sat back, sipped the hot, black coffee,
and felt a pang of sympathy for Maureen Brandon, probably now the
former head of the Analysis group. In her overzealous desire to
advance her cause, she had taken too big a risk and ended up
temporarily stranding us. It is one thing to jeopardize ones self
in the quest for knowledge, and quite another to endanger an entire
ship's complement. Brandon had not only put us aground, but her own
career, as well. I looked around the room at the laughing faces and
ongoing debates. At the table nearest us, an attractive red head
who I did not know, was complaining to her friend, a short haired
brunet with very red lipstick, about her mother's ongoing
involvement with "The People's Committee to Reform Population
Controls". She kept referring to it acrimoniously as the "PCRPC".
Her friend kept taking in coffee and nodding, and was given no
opportunity whatsoever to contribute to the one-sided debate.

Opposite us, three men I knew pretty well
were dressed in the dark green-black flight suits that the coops
always wore. They were the ‘forever-standingbys’. The flyers
designated to pilot the small scout ships carried in the belly of
the Electra, vehicles almost never used on star charting tours. The
three were in a heated debate.

"That's bullshit, Mick. The word
'Disclosure' don't even exist in the history books. It was the
Tach-drives. That's when first contact happened. Right at the turn
of the century. Ain't no magic about it. Once you got an AmpLight-E
engine to get you up to the speed of light, and a compatible
Tachyon drive to kick in and collapse you through it, all of a
sudden you’re a hazard to the whole damned universe. A planet of
bureaucrats that don't know what the hell they're doin'. They had
to make contact then.”

The two men sitting across the table from
him seemed to disagree.

"Come on, Raul. You really think the
government didn't know there was loads of intelligent life out here
until some bald guy with slanty eyes showed up to mention it? What
about the ruins on the dark side of the moon? And all the other
stuff? You really think that went unnoticed. The government was
leaking shit for years before first contact. They were scared
shitless about what was gonna happen when word got out. Look what
did happen! Fuckin' clergy jumpin' out a' windows. Whole religious
sects committin' suicide. Loonies runnin' around everywhere. Sure
the word 'Disclosure' isn't in the history books. Disclosure was a
long series of leaked government secrets until extraterrestrials
became common knowledge. You agree with me, don't ya, Skip?"

"I agree those were bad years. I lost two
grandparents during that time. Some people needed to believe we
were only-children. What pisses me off, is that nothing had
changed. Only that we knew."

Raul spoke again. "Well, we still don't know
nothin'. That's all I'm sayin'. We know there's lots of other races
out here. But all we ever deal with are the ones mostly like us.
The super races are still the fuckin' ghosts they always have been.
Shit, Earth is an amusement park to some of 'em and a huntin'
ground to others. They manipulate us without us even realizin' it.
We don't know nothin' I tell ya'. We shouldn't a' fucked with that
ship out there.”

R.J. lost interest. "So how's your memory
this morning, Adrian?"

I had forgotten about that. I searched the
shadowy back part of my mind and found the unsettling little
mnemonic black hole was still there. "My memory was just fine until
you had to go and ask about it."

"Have you talked to the Doc yet?"

"It's my very next stop. One does not see
the doctor until one has ingested an adequate amount of
pre-examination caffeine."

"Still don't remember a thing about the
airlock, then?"

"Which airlock is that?"

R.J. did not laugh. He sat and stared back
at me as though he suspected something he was not ready to discuss.
It irritates me when he does that, mainly because he is usually the
most deviously accurate suspector I have ever met.

"So were there any other interesting
developments on the data from the alien ship, since you were on it
all night?"

R.J. drew little circles on the table top
with his coffee cup, while staring thoughtfully into it. He looked
up at me and shook his head. "If Brandon's little trick had worked,
they might have had a big piece of translation to go on. As it is,
they can't seem to get to first base. But I'll tell you what
bothers me. It's the little things going wrong around here. We come
across a large, abandoned spacecraft dead in space with the power
systems still running. We take a look inside and find most of what
appears to be data storage mediums wiped clean. We bring back a
little piece of data and download it into our system and suddenly
one section of our computer base is wiped clean. We've got a
veteran EVA expert who has partial memory loss. Starting to see a
commonality there? And now I'm hearing that there are problems
popping up on the ship's net. I don't like this little island of
space we are stopped in, Adrian. It would make me most happy if we
were plummeting merrily along on our way at a few times the speed
of light."

"Hey, no problem, 17:00, right?"

"I hope so. I really hope so."

Chapter 7

It is best not to miss doctor appointments
onboard a starship. It must be that since upper management is
strictly required to complete their regular checkups, they vent
that frustration by making certain the rest of us comply, as well.
Per the doctor’s orders from yesterday’s EVA debriefing, I headed
for sickbay.

It is very tempting, though frowned upon, to
use service and cable tunnels to get you where you want to go.
Usually you cannot access all the areas on one level without first
traveling up or down a number of other decks. If you are in the
bridge conference room for example, on deck six and you wish to
visit the communications center on deck eight, you must start by
taking an elevator or stairwell to deck five. It has always
bothered me that it becomes necessary from time to time to stop and
consult the floor plans that are located on etched panels at the
end of each corridor. Although I doubt anyone has ever actually
seen him do it, I am certain the Captain himself also consults them
periodically.

A design so disposed to necessity rather
than accommodation can sometimes make security's job very
difficult. We are responsible for the rescues. During serious
accidents, teams dispatched throughout the ship can become lost
themselves, especially when there is structural damage to the ship.
If the environmental system sensors are down, the threat is even
greater. Rescue personnel cannot always be sure it is safe to open
a sealed pressure door. They have only short range hand scanners to
tell them what lies beyond. Add the loss of gravity to the
situation and you can have a real carnival on your hands.

I made my way up and around and over and
down, and finally arrived at sick-bay, a multi-room facility which
takes up a sizable hunk of level three. The attendant in the
reception area was a slightly overweight lady named Patricia. She
has the Aunt Bea appearance with matching persona, someone who
seems totally unsuited for space travel, that is right up until you
and everyone else comes down with some form of space sickness and
you go to her only to find she’s still at the top of her game. She
nurses you back to the best you can be and leaves you fearing that
you are not entirely the superhero you thought. I firmly believe
people like Patricia were put here to make us aware that those
first intuitive impressions of people we so pride ourselves on,
generally suck.

"Oh yes, Mr. Tarn. We've been expecting
you." She escorted me through double swinging doors to a
combination office-exam room. I sat in a white plastic chair next
to a metallic-white desk with a nasty looking computer with dozens
of spidery looking suction cups attached to a cable harness that
hung over the edge. There was an examination table with thin white
paper covering it in the center of the room, and a picture of
daisies drawn by a child on the wall beyond it. Cummings assured me
the doctor would be right in. To my great relief, the silly little
smirk left with her. Moments later Doctor Pacell came charging in
wearing the standard white lab smock, an electric clipboard held
low in his left hand. He is a very wholesome-looking man, blond
hair, blue eyes, slightly tall, and deceptively friendly. He is one
of those physicians who can get you to admit things he’s already
figured out about you. The problem is, he’s too much of a real
person. He’s someone you could get to know on a personal level very
easily. We do not like our doctors to be that human. We need to
think they are secretly in touch with God.

He plunked down in his chair and flipped one
page on his chart, and spoke without looking up, “So has it come
back to you at all?”

“I wish I could say it has, but no, nothing,
but I feel fine.”

“Tell me something, when this first hit you
out on the gangway, why didn’t you abort the EVA right then?”

“The others had already started in. It would
have been very awkward to cancel out at that point. Once we
regrouped inside, there was too much happening too fast to think
about it."

Doctor Pacell stared at me for a moment. He
exhaled and tapped one finger on his desk. “Well, like I said
before, I need to know immediately if any of it starts coming back
to you. Stress is a likely candidate, maybe not the entire cause,
but perhaps a catalyst. What we do now is, we continue with the
scan studies and give you some time for recall. I'll want you back
here for a brief interview tomorrow, same time. Meanwhile, no work
restrictions. I wouldn't worry about this too much. Anything
serious and we'd have found something by now."

"Well, I'm glad to hear that much,
Doctor.”

He folded his hands in his lap and smiled.
"By the way, I want to thank you for the physical therapy you
provided to one of my patients last night."

"...What?"

“Oh don't worry; I just want you to
understand that people under my care don't really leave my sick bay
without my knowing and without my approval, even though I might let
them think that. Your particular therapy wasn't against medical
advice. It was actually prescribed."

I considered my options for denial, and
decided they were a lost cause. "Doctor is there no privacy on this
ship at all?"

"Oh, I think there is, Adrian."

"Then why did half the people in the mess
hall already know about the incident you just mentioned?"