Jay Lake - Last Plane to Heaven

“Just don’t ask questions.” Chillicothe mimed a pistol with the fingers of her left hand. “Some answers are permanent fatal errors.”

He couldn’t help noting her right hand was on the butt of a real pistol. Flechette-throwing riot gun, capable of shredding skin, muscle, and bone to pink fog without damaging hull integrity.

“I don’t know,” he mumbled. “Where I grew up, green light means go.”

Chillicothe shook him, a disgusted sneer chasing across her lips. “It’s your life, kid. Do what you like.”

With that, she stalked out of the observation lounge.

Maduabuchi wondered why she’d cared enough to bother trying to warn him off. Maybe Chillicothe had told the simple truth for once. Maybe she liked him. No way for him to know.

Instead of trying to work that out, he stared at Tiede 1’s churning orange surface. “Who are you? What are you doing in there? What does it take to fake being an entire star ?”

The silent light brought no answers, and neither did Patrice’s Scotch. Still, he continued to ask the questions for a while.

Eventually he woke up, stiff in the smartgel. The stuff had enclosed all of Maduabuchi except for his face, and it took several minutes of effort to extract himself. When he looked up at the sky, the stars had shifted.

They’d broken Tiede 1 orbit!

He scrambled for the hatch, but to his surprise, his hand on the touchpad did not cause the door to open. A moment’s stabbing and squinting showed that the lock had been frozen on command override.

Captain Smith had trapped him in here.

“Not for long,” he muttered. There was a maintenance hatch at the aft end of the lounge, leading to the dorsal weapons turret. The power and materials chase in the spine of the hull was partially pressurized, well within his minimally Howard-enhanced environmental tolerances.

And as weapons officer, he had the command overrides to those systems. If Captain Smith hadn’t already locked him out.

To keep himself going, Maduabuchi gobbled some prote-nuts from the little service bar at the back of the lounge. Then, before he lost his nerve, he shifted wall hangings that obscured the maintenance hatch and hit that pad. The interlock system demanded his command code, which he provided with a swift haptic pass, then the wall section retracted with a faint squeak that spoke of neglected maintenance.

The passage beyond was ridiculously low clearance. He nearly had to hold his breath to climb to the spinal chase. And cold, damned cold. Maduabuchi figured he could spend ten, fifteen minutes tops up there before he began experiencing serious physiological and psychological reactions.

Where to go?

The chase terminated aft above Engineering, with access to the firing points there, as well as egress to the Engineering bay. Forward it met a vertical chase just before the bridge section, with an exterior hatch, access to the forward firing points, and a connection to the ventral chase.

No point in going outside. Not much point in going to Engineering, where like as not he’d meet Patrice or Paimei and wind up being sorry about it.

He couldn’t get onto the bridge directly, but he’d get close and try to find out.

The chase wasn’t really intended for crew transit, but it had to be large enough to admit a human being for inspection and repairs when the automated systems couldn’t handle something. It was a shitty, difficult crawl, but Inclined Plane was only about two hundred meters stem to stern anyway. He passed over several intermediate access hatches—no point in getting out—then simply climbed down and out in the passageway when he reached the bridge. Taking control of the exterior weapons systems from within the walls of the ship wasn’t going to do him any good. The interior systems concentrated on disaster suppression and antihijacking, and were not under his control anyway.

No one was visible when Maduabuchi slipped out from the walls. He wished he had a pistol, or even a good, long-handled wrench, but he couldn’t take down any of the rest of these Howards even if he tried. He settled for hitting the bridge touchpad and walking in when the hatch irised open.

Patrice sat in the captain’s chair. Chillicothe manned the navigation boards. They both glanced up at him, surprised.

“What are you doing here?” Chillicothe demanded.

“Not being locked in the lounge,” he answered, acutely conscious of his utter lack of any plan of action. “Where’s Captain Smith?”

“In her cabin,” said Patrice without looking up. His voice was a growl, coming from a heavyworld body like a sack of bricks. “Where she’ll be staying.”

“Wh-why?”

“What did I tell you about questions?” Chillicothe asked softly.

Something cold rested against the hollow spot of skin just behind Maduabuchi’s right ear. Paimei’s voice whispered close. “Should have listened to the woman. Curiosity killed the cat, you know.”

They will never expect it, he thought, and threw an elbow back, spinning to land a punch on Paimei. He never made the hit. Instead he found himself on the deck, her boot against the side of his head.

At least the pistol wasn’t in his ear anymore.

Maduabuchi laughed at that thought. Such a pathetic rationalization. He opened his eyes to see Chillicothe leaning over.

“What do you think is happening here?” she asked.

He had to spit the words out. “You’ve taken over the sh-ship. L-locked Captain Smith in her cabin. L-locked me up to k-keep me out of the way.”

Chillicothe laughed, her voice harsh and bitter. Patrice growled some warning that Maduabuchi couldn’t hear, not with Paimei’s boot pressing down on his ear.

“She tried to open a comms channel to something very dangerous. She’s been relieved of her command. That’s not mutiny, that’s self-defense.”

“And compliance to regulation,” said Paimei, shifting her foot a little so Maduabuchi would be sure to hear her.

“Something’s inside that star.”

Chillicothe’s eyes stirred. “You still haven’t learned about questions, have you?”

“I w-want to talk to the captain.”

She glanced back toward Patrice, now out of Maduabuchi’s very limited line of sight. Whatever look was exchanged resulted in Chillicothe shaking her head. “No. That’s not wise. You’d have been fine inside the lounge. A day or two, we could have let you out. We’re less than eighty hours-subjective from making threadneedle transit back to Saorsen Station, then this won’t matter anymore.”

He just couldn’t keep his mouth shut. “Why won’t it matter?”

“Because no one will ever know. Even what’s in the data will be lost in the flood of information.”

I could talk, Maduabuchi thought. I could tell. But then I’d just be another crazy ranting about the aliens that no one had ever found across several thousand explored solar systems in hundreds of light-years of the Orion Arm. The crazies that had been ranting all through human history about the Fermi Paradox. He could imagine the conversation. “No, really. There are aliens. Living in the heart of a brown dwarf. They flashed a green light at me.”

Brown dwarfs were everywhere . Did that mean that aliens were everywhere, hiding inside the hearts of their guttering little stars?

He was starting to sound crazy, even to himself. But even now, Maduabuchi couldn’t keep his mouth shut. “You know the answer to the greatest question in human history. ‘Where is everybody else?’ And you’re not talking about it. What did the aliens tell you?”

“That’s it,” said Paimei. Her fingers closed on his shoulder. “You’re out the airlock, buddy.”