“So now you know?”
Startled slightly, I looked up from where I was slumped in the VIP seat on the bridge, reading another technical manual. I’d actually heard fleet officers call it the J.A.F.O seat once or twice. Just another fucking observer. I'd felt like that a lot, I was a passenger on this ship, when I was used to having some sort of role to fill in engineering. I wasn’t used to being just an observer, or just a passenger.
I found the helmsman, or Be’Tsar in giobhioni, Toftri Prexiu, looking over his shoulder at me. “About the contagion?” he prompted, when I didn’t respond right away, “you know about it being a bioweapon, and what it does to us?”
I set the data tablet down and gave him my attention. “Yeah, Commander Jophixa finally read me in last night.” I rubbed my eyes, “The thought of that kind of action by an enemy is just horrifying. Earth history is full of warmongers that have done some horrible things, including bio-warfare, but this? All because they are so xenophobic they want to wipe out anything different than themselves? Just...unimaginable.”
Toftri turned back to his console to tap a few buttons, then turned his seat around to face me directly, “You can understand why it was hard to talk about now? A lot of us are still in shock,” he explained, “coming out of stasis after 3500 years, with there having been no further communication from Fleet Command? And so many of us have died in stasis? We don’t even want to acknowledge what we’ve lost, let alone explain it to an outsider.”
I raised an eyebrow at him, and for the first time it struck me that Toftri might be remarkably young for one of his species. In the flurry of getting the Elegance prepped to disembark, I hadn’t really gotten to interact with many of the crew at the station. Those that I had spent any real time around were, I think, well into adulthood. Now that I looked at Toftri closer, however, this slender, cobalt blue haired giobhioni had a sort of “fresh” air about him. Like someone just out of adolescence.
“You seem to be handling it, better than I’d expect.” I said, trying to broach it delicately. “Excuse me if I’m off base here, but you seem younger? It’s surprising to see a young person handling such trauma so well.”
“It shows huh?” he said with a lopsided smile, “I thought maybe you hadn’t noticed. Yeah, I was the youngest on the station when we were ordered to go dark. Only a year out of the academy, and the station wasn’t even supposed to be my posting! I was only there to be picked up by the ship I was assigned to. I’m lucky to even be here right now.”
I stood up and moved over to sit at the station which, in a Commonwealth Fleet ship, would have been assigned to a tactical officer. Hopefully they don’t have some regulation against me even parking my ass here, I thought, making sure to keep my hands firmly in my lap and nowhere near the console. “Yeah, damned lucky. Good way to look at it. Not struggling with the situation at all then?”
Glancing over at me as he turned back to his console, he shrugged “I’m an orphan,” he explained, “and was the odd one out all my life. Even in the fleet, I didn't have any friends that hadn’t already been taken by the contagion. I’d already dealt with my trauma before I even finished at the academy.”
He sighed quietly, “I’m guessing that’s why the Commander chose me for this assignment. I’m a decent pilot, and she figures I’m least weighed down with baggage at the moment. My head will be more in the game, so to speak”
“Makes sense.”
His console began beeping insistently at that moment and he turned back to it, fingers dancing over its surface for about forty seconds, a frown on his face. “Something wrong?” I asked, concerned to see this usually confident young man directing such a look at the ship’s controls.
“Hang on…” his fingers continued their dance across the glassy surface of the helm console for another few seconds before he visibly relaxed again. “The wave form emitters, they are what set up the resonance that level out and channel the hyperspace eddies, went out of alignment for a moment there. It happens sometimes, when we push a ship’s speed for an extended time. It’s not terribly hard to correct, but it requires focus.”
“Ah. I’m still trying to understand the basics of the science behind the whole concept.” I told him, “It’s been hard to focus on it with everything else going on. It’d be so much easier if I could at least call ahead and warn someone before we got there, but with our comms systems not meshing, I just have to wait. The waiting is driving me crazy.”
Toftri chuckled, “Waiting in these situations is always a bitch. But if you want, I can help try to keep your mind off it, maybe talk you through some of the simple stuff?”
“That’d be great! Way better than sitting there staring at the textbooks for hours.”
So for the next several hours, Toftri ran me through the basics of Giobhioni hyperdrive concepts and fundamentals. He wasn’t an engineer of course, or a science officer, so he couldn’t answer some of my more technical questions, but as a helmsman, he had to have fairly decent familiarity with the basics to handle certain adjustments to the ships quantum envelope, which was what the waveform emitters shaped in order to form that laminar flow of hyperspace energies.
“So, by quantizing the EM emissions from the reactor, and attenuating them with signal waves that match resonance with the hyperspace currents…” he was saying at one point, when my brain caught up to something in the process.
“Wait, hold up!” I said excitedly, standing up quickly and starting to pace, “Are you telling me that an integral part of your hyperdrive process is quantizing electromagnetic emissions and manipulating them?”
“There is a lot more to it than that, but yes?”
“I could have sent a message home DAYS ago!” I let out a string of curses, then looked up at the ceiling, a habit I was still trying to break “Stacy? You busy?”
“I’ve always got time for you, sweetcheeks, you know that!” she responded over the bridge’s PA system, her own habit was to answer me out loud if I talked to her out loud. “Did your beautifully wrinkled brain have an idea?”
I ignored her flirting, I’d make it up to her later. “Why was I told it would take months to get things set up for me to get a message off to the Commonwealth due to our tech being so different, when the tech needed is already right here on the ship!”
Silence, then “What?” from both Stacy and Toftri at once
“The drive emitters! They are designed specifically to manipulate quantized EM fields! That’s basically what Commonwealth comms work off of! If I’m not wrong, we might be able to use them the next time we drop out of hyperspace to contact the closest starbase!”
“Thomas, we can’t interfere with the drive systems! We need those to get to commonwealth space!” Stacy stated plainly, “I know the wait is driving you crazy, the work to interface the systems, and we don’t have the components for your gear…”
“But we have my EVA suit!” I exclaimed, “haven’t you people ever been stuck in a situation where you’ve had to MacGyver unrelated tech together to make it work? How long would it take the ship’s minifac to whip up one of those EM quantizers?”
Toftri was still staring at me in shock, but Stacy responded, starting to catch my excitement, “About 3.23 of your hours Thomas. I’ll set it to build right now, but I expect some personal attention later! You owe me more stories about Boudya!” she paused, then added, “I just have one question.”
“What is it?”
“What’s MacGyvering?”
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
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Four hours later, I was in my quarters, having spread out a drop cloth over the small coffee table in the “lounge” area, and was busily dismantling sections of my EVA suit to get access to the comms circuits. I hated to be making some of the destructive modifications I was doing to it, but I was hoping I could maybe talk to Commonwealth Fleet Command, or even the Guild Council to pay for a replacement suit. It was a long shot, but hey, I was warning them about a possible plague here after all!
Stacy would be helping me once I was ready to interface the two pieces of tech that were never intended to connect to each other. I was feeling rather anxious about that part, getting a more hands on experience with actual Giobhioni tech. I might have used some of their scrap parts to repair the O2 scrubber in the suit - was it really that short a time ago? - but this was a fully functional bit of gear that was used as part of their hyperdrive normally.
“I go get a bit of rack time and I wake up to you doing engine repair on your kashtri. Are men from all species like this?”
Normally, I probably would have jumped out of my skin at Jophixa speaking so out of the blue right behind me, but I think I was either becoming so numb to danger, or just used to how Void Damned Quiet Giobhioni were. Instead, I held up a screwdriver, “Are you here to give me a hard time, or to help?” I asked, not even looking up. “I’ve almost got all the panels open that I need to access comms connections, then it’ll just be a matter of figuring out if I can directly interface these two beasties, or if I have to come up with some kind of adapter interface. I know you’re not an engineer, but an extra set of hands would still help!”
I saw her walk gracefully over to sit across from me, dressed in her perfectly pressed and polished uniform. “I don’t have long till I have to relieve Be’tsar Prexiu at the helm. He needs to get some rack time in before he starts miscalculating field adaptations.” she reached over and picked up the tablet to look over the notes I’d scribbled down, along with the sketches of wiring diagrams, “You really think this is going to work? Those field adaptors weren’t meant to work at anything approaching long range.”
A giddy chuckle escaped my throat. I’d been feeling so damned useless for so long, or so focused on mere survival, that my technical nature being let out to play felt like that time I’d been slipped Sarcacian nectar while out with Boudya. I felt high as a kite! But unlike that time with the nectar, my mind was clear, not foggy and distorted. “Never be 100% sure of anything, my dear emerald skinned Commander Badass! First rule I was taught about engineering! Failure is always an option!” I pointed the screwdriver at her, grinning madly when I glanced up and saw her eyebrows raised in surprise. “You always need to expect failure, and plan accordingly! So, if this doesn’t work, we still have plan A. We’re still in transit to the nearest starbase, and I’ll tell them when we get there.
“In the meantime, I can focus on this instead of going stir crazy, I get a little hands on time with your tech, and there is, I think, at least a 75% chance this will work!”
“You know I just adore you Tommy-cakes,” Stacy chimed in, “but I still think you’re padding that probability. It’s more like 69%”
“Shush you, and don’t think I didn’t notice what you did there. Who’s the one with the experience in making random abandoned tech work? Eh? This stuff isn’t even old or damaged, and I have damned manuals!”
Jophixa was shaking her head, a bemused expression on her face. “You two sound like an old bonded couple sometimes, I swear. Or a pair of horny younglings. Or at least Stacy does. And you!” she pointed at me, “better not call me ‘your dear’ anything, let alone ‘Commander Badass’. However you describe my skin colour.”
“Whatever you say Commander Badass,” I replied under my breath, and got back to work.
It ended up being a very good thing that Stacy seemed so smitten with me, or maybe she just really had that much patience. Giobhioni tech really was that much different than what I was used to, that I had quite a bit of problems managing to get my suit interfaced with it. There were times in that 12 hours of work that I felt like I was 12 years old again, learning the basics of astronautics, feeling like I’d never understand all the aspects.
But Stacy was patient with me, cracking jokes and flirting outrageously whenever I got so frustrated I felt like ejecting the whole thing, including myself, out an airlock. If she had a flesh and blood body, I’d have given her a huge hug, and yeah, probably a big wet kiss just to see if it’d shut up her flirting for a bit.
At the end of that twelve hours, however, we were pretty sure we had a comms unit that would let me contact Tyromi Station, even if it would require us dropping out of hyperspace for it to work. Stacy ran through some numbers, and was almost certain that even attempting to transmit would disrupt The Elegance’s flow dynamics, which would be, according to her, “disastrous”.
We weren’t due to drop out of hyperspace for a course check for another two hours after we’d finished getting everything linked up. That meant I couldn’t even test the set up to make sure we got everything right for another two hours, and that wait drove me absolutely crazy. At first I was pacing back and forth in my quarters, but then I got stir crazy and began pacing throughout the ship. At one point, Jophixa threatened to lock me in the ship's tiny brig if I made a circuit of the bridge one more time!
Military types, geesh. How do they do it?
“Seriously Thomas,” Stacy admonished me as I passed by the hatch to the engineering bay for the 14th time. “You need to relax! Why not go back to your quarters and watch one of those visual recordings in your personal storage marked private? Come on handsome, I’ll watch them with you and talk dirty in your ear, make it even better.”
“Stacy! We talked about that. My private files are private! You don’t go rooting around in them without permission.”
She let out a peel of giggles in my ear. “Gotcha! Seriously Sweety, I haven’t peaked in that folder since you lectured me about privacy last time. But it got you to stop fretting and listen to me! I’ve been trying to get your attention for the last ten minutes.”
Grumbling to cover my embarrassment, I leaned against the bulkhead, “Well, know that you have my attention, what did you need it for?”
“We’ll be dropping to normal space in just under two minutes. Commander Jophixa wants you on the bridge with ‘that contraption’”
“Finally!” I blurted out, and ran down the corridor to my quarters to grab the Frankenstein comms unit, Stacy’s laughter ringing in my head.
The trio of Giobhioni on the bridge made no comment when I stepped onto the bridge. The Commander merely pointed me at the tactical console, telling me wordlessly to set up “the contraption” there. Now is the time for self control Thomas, I told myself, don’t rush this or you might fuck it up and not get another shot. Taking a deep breath, I set the unit down beside the seat, and turned it on.
I’d already pre configured it to scan for comms traffic from Tyromi Station and attempt to hail their Command and Control center, so as soon as it powered on, it should only be a short time before…
“This is Captain Anderson of Tyroli station, who am I speaking with?”
The voice was gruff and irritated, but I’d travelled enough to know that was typical of Command and Control staff, especially when dealing with comms traffic that were outside the usual. “Captain Anderson! I’m so glad I was able to get through to someone!” I replied to him, all my relief at hearing another human voice surely had to be plain in my tone. “My name is Thomas Aacen, retired salvage engineer. I have urgent information I need to pass on to someone in Fleet security! Is there any way you can patch me through to someone? This could be a matter of security for the entire sector.”
“Uh huh.” I could almost hear the eye-roll in his response. “And you are transmitting this over an insecure channel? You know what? Nevermind, not my problem. Transferring you to the Fleet Security office.”
There was a beep, and an automated voice said “Please stand by.” I glanced over at Jophixa, who was frowning like if that station commander had been in her chain of command, he’d have gotten one hell of a chewing out. Unfortunately, I’d encountered many people in important positions that behaved just like him, so I was used to it.
Five minutes later, we finally heard another voice come over the comms, this one a stern female with a slight gravelly edge to it. “Mr Aacen? Are you still there?”
“Yes, I’m here, but I think the commander of the ship I’m on is getting a bit anxious to get back into hyperspace. Our comms situation is in a bit of a pickle at the moment, and we can only open a channel when we drop to normal space.”
“I apologize for the wait, I was in an important meeting. Tell your commander I hope Tyroli station can help get their comms situation sorted out when you arrive here.” She said, “being out of contact is never a good thing, regardless of the situation. I’m Commander Mancini with Fleet security, I understand you have information for me.”
“Yes Ma’am,” I told her, “I was on a salvage operation under one Johnathan Barstol not too long ago, salvaging a derelict alien ship of unknown origin out beyond the edge of surveyed space. Due to some misadventure, I was left behind and had to be rescued by the commander of the ship I’m now on. During the time before I was rescued, however, I learned that the alien ship was extremely dangerous, and should be quarantined under the tightest of measures. Nobody, and I emphasize, nobody, not even a drone should be allowed on that ship and certainly not allowed to return from it. This could be for the security of the entire quadrant of the galaxy Ma’am. I cannot overemphasize this at all.
“I don’t want to give more information regarding this without being on a secure and encrypted channel, and due to our comms issues, we have no way to secure our comms. Please relay this information. I only pray I’m not too late, and Barstol hasn’t arrived in a settled system already.”
The channel went silent, and a glance back at Jophixa again showed her scowl had deepened so much I worried she’d prematurely age herself by that single scowl alone. Finally, Mancini came back on the line. “Thank you for the information Mr Aacen, I will indeed pass it along to the relevant branches of Fleet Security, don’t you worry.” Then she paused once more, but only for a moment before continuing, “Incidentally Mr. Aacen, I have a notice here from the Salvager’s Guild that says they would like a word with you ASAP in regards to the disappearance of one of their senior council members? A Miss Boudya Mend’nasa, I believe it was.” I blinked, at a loss for words, Boudya is missing?
“You are also wanted by Commonwealth Financial Securities Enforcement for questioning in regards to the whereabouts of your sister. She also disappeared recently, conveniently mere days before CFSE issued a warrant for her arrest. Interesting coincidence that. I’m sure you’ll cooperate and surrender yourself to the nearest Commonwealth Security detachment as soon as humanly possible, will you not?”
I couldn’t find words. My mind had completely shut down in shock in fact. If both Boudya and Jesse were both missing, and there was a warrant out for Jesse’s arrest, that means Barstol had released the fake blackmail information he had used to get me to work with him. I’m going to kill him!
“Am I to be arrested then?” I heard my voice come from the PA system. Stacy must have sensed my shock and decided to fill in while I recovered, Stars bless her.
“Arrested?” the commander replied, “why would you be arrested, do you have anything to do with your sister’s activities against her employer? No, we just need to ask some questions. If you’ve done nothing wrong, and come in for questioning right away, you’ll be released again in no time at all! If you run, however, I’m sure it’ll be seen as some sort of complicity with your sister's actions. Just come in as soon as possible Mr Aacen. Mancini out.”
The channel went dead, my brain finally clicked back into gear, and I began to swear up such a bluestreak, I think I was pulling Giobhioni words straight from my implant subconsciously.
Things just got so much more complicated.