J Mauldin - Final Solution

“Eyes ahead,” I whispered, and picked up the pace. “Their job, our job.”

“Right.” She followed reluctantly.

We entered weapons storage and control and went straight to work. This was the single most cramped section of the ship, and that was saying a lot. It took a host of equipment to fire our two hundred megawatt rail gun, and what little space we did have, was home to two closet size cells we used as our brig.

“Bridge, you there?” I muttered into my wrist.

“Copy, Goddard,” XO replied.

“Standby for firing clearance.”

“Standing by.”

“Griffin, checklist.”

She nodded and went to a brightly lit control panel. “Engaging counter rotation, locking armature. Releasing fire control to the bridge.” A loud click echoed throughout the section as a series of motors engaged, vibrations felt throughout the ship’s structure.

I inspected the status display of our two-stage nuclear batteries. They glowed from their positions in the halo surrounding our Coke can’s chest. Most of the icons were solid, their green lines reaching to the top. The ones already spent were displayed in red. I checked for any abnormalities, batteries that showed low wattage or improper amperage. This had to be done each and every time to ensure a damaged capacitor wouldn’t reduce us to dust when we fired.

We were a go.

“Directing battery’s power into the main rail conduit,” I said, choosing the next one in line. “Redirected. Running polarity test.”

Griffin called back, “Rail one, negative. Rail two, positive. Test cycle complete. Good to go.”

“Bridge, you’re safe to begin firing sequence.”

“Copy, Goddard. Lieutenant Fryatt, load projectile onto magnetic field.”

Griffin leaned her forehead against the bulkhead, worry growing in her expression. “César and I did this so many times.” She paused, uneasy chuckles escaping her chest. “He said it made him feel like a mad scientist. Something about this stuffy section transported him into a fantasy of Nikola Tesla’s lab. I told him I sure hoped it wasn’t like that place. We’d have electricity arcing dangerously all around the room. He’d laugh at me. I’d laugh at him. He’d make some off color comment about how I’d looked good exercising, or how he wanted to plug his RJ-90 cable in my female slot. Told me it had better bandwidth than the other cables aboard. What an idiot.”

She sighed. “We even had costumes picked out for the Valles Rojo Summer Festival…” Her face fell to her feet.

Liberty’s voice boomed over the intercom. “Final proximity sweep clear. Firing in five, four, three…” The section began to crackle as the battery’s energy was released in an intense burst. The lights of the ship dimmed for an instant, then went back to full.

“No outage,” Griffin said in surprise.

“No outage.”

The yellow lights turned off and came back on.

“Goddard,” my watch crackled. “Standby for repeat fire.”

“Affirmative.”

Griffin slumped onto the floor, head in her hands. “He was a genuine guy.”

I put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. “He was.” The moment to apologize had come. “Jane.”

“Yes, sir?”

“I—”

My damned watch screamed, “Goddard, we have a firing solution.”

I let out an exasperated breath, threw a few switches and glanced over the battery display. “All set, sir,” I reported back a bit more tersely than I had intended.

The rails powered up and fired, plunging us into darkness. The whines of generators and cooling fans spun down, making our military-grade sensory deprivation experience complete. Outage.

A gentle whisper came from the dark. I shook my head and focused on the task at hand.

“David?” Griffin asked, sounding a bit queasy.

“Come on. Let’s get power back up and running.”

I was holding my breath.

As my eyes adjusted to the dark, a soft glow emanated from the hallway. The power core, just on the other side of the cargo bay, was painted with phosphorescent green lines. We headed for the dim light like moths, careful as we stumbled through the hushed twilight. I could just make out the rumors of cargo crates and gas canisters walling our path.

“One of us should have been in there waiting,” I said, chiding myself. Halfway through the cargo bay a crate fell over with a bang, sending me out of my skin.

“You okay?”

“I’m fine. Just stupid, so stupid.” It was nothing, right? But the voice in my head said something different. We were being followed. The target had a weapon. We would have to fight.

We entered the power core and flipped our systems back on one at a time, utilizing mechanical breakers unaffected by EMFs. The ship rebooted and came back to life, airflow and light and white noise returning in a gentle whoosh of pleasing, sensory awareness. There was no spy behind us. Just paranoia. We were safe for now.

Griffin sighed, then wiped the front of her jumpsuit with open palms, clearing it of chunky puke.

“You alright?” I asked.

She nodded and produced a moistened towelette to clean up the rest.

My watch vibrated. IT’S HAPPENING AGAIN. OUR TELEMETRY DATA IS BEING BROADCAST UPON STARTUP. URGENT. TAKE CARE OF IT NOW.

I checked the communications log and two questions came to mind.

One: How had the Captain known this was happening?

And two: Why was there no record of the event?

A minute later the ship again flashed red, alarms blaring.

I dug into my pocket and removed Liberty’s earpiece. “Hit probability?”

She whispered back, “Sixty percent.”

“Keep me posted.”

Our luck was running thin.

Griffin and I returned to weapons control, preparing for the ship to fire again. The red alert ended, only to be taken up seconds later.

“Eighty percent,” Liberty reported. “Forty. Thirty…”

Chance was getting higher on the onset. Sixty, then eighty. How were they calculating our location? Was it just dumb luck? Or were we indeed broadcasting important navigational data?

I checked the communications log again. No sign of forward transmission. They had to be craftily using old data. Any information beamed ahead would take nearly an hour to reach the Razor and be made use of.

I pointed. “Griffin, Power Core.” She rushed off, hand raised to her mouth. I hated it for her.

The red alert ended, our threat narrowly evaded. A bead of sweat stung at my right eye. Yellow lights came on.

“Firing,” X O called over the intercom.

The weapon’s room fizzled and the power went out. There was a ten percent chance of this happening, statistically, yet it had happened twice in a row. Griffin was fast with restoring power.

My watch vibrated again: ANOTHER SIGNAL. THE COMPUTER CORE. CHECK THE COMPUTER CORE. NOW!

I furiously searched the communications log once again and found nothing. How was the Captain catching this anomaly and I couldn’t? Was he pre-cognitive? Unlikely.

I returned to the power core, cursing. Why hadn’t they put these two sections together?

An idea struck me. “Griffin, you know Sage language pretty well, right?”

Poor kid was wiping her mouth off with a fresh towelette. “Not as well as Kelly, but sure, I’ve done my fair share of coding in Sage.”

“Tell me, is it possible that when the ship’s data is being transferred onto a disc image and backed up to chemical storage, that a slightly different copy can be sent back when it returns? Can the image be tampered with somehow?”

“I don’t understand what you’re asking.”

I tried again to formulate my idea, talking it out with my hands as if that would help. “Can instructions be kept on the chemical hard drives so that when the ship resets, lines of code will be executed and immediately deleted, along with the cache, so no one would know that they ever existed?”