Fool's War

Chapter Three — Faster Than Light

Dobbs watched the clean, white side of the unnamed tanker fill the square of her view screen. The tanker would top off Pasadena’s fuel and reaction mass and send the ship on to the jump point. The Pasadena gave itself a final nudge sideways. Far away, Dobbs heard a faint clang reverberate through the hull as the two ships hooked together.

Dobbs, fastened to her desk chair by her freefall straps, found herself admiring Yerusha. The woman’s skills were certainly not over-billed. Hooking up with a re-fueling tanker could be a rough ride if one or the other of the pilots weren’t spot-on with their calculations. As a result, it was standard operating procedure to have the crew strapped into their seats during re-fueling.

Usually time in her straps made her restless. She had never quite mastered the art of sitting still. This time though, Dobbs was glad of the chance to think.

She had been right, this was going to be an interesting assignment, and not just because Lipinski and Resit were resistant to the idea that they might have to get along with Yerusha. Al Shei’s mood had her engineers tip-toeing around, and on the bridge, Schyler wasn’t doing much more than grunting out orders when necessary. Dobbs had spent the last six hours bouncing between the two departments, but her best efforts were yielding minimal results.

It didn’t take a whole lot of looking to see that there was something more than an intercom malfunction operating in the background. Just a little more looking showed that that something was probably Marcus Tully.

She glanced toward the door and then toward her screen where the view was totally blotted out by the tanker’s side.

Now might be the best time to get some research going, she thought, and then rejected the idea. The refueling would take awhile, but not as long as her researches, and if she was caught out of her straps for some reason, Schyler would give her a good going over. It was one of the strange double-standards for a Fool. Technically, Fools could get away with anything, but they had to be extremely careful not to be caught getting away with anything serious. If they did, their reputation for foolishness would change to one for stupidity, or, worse, untrustworthiness. Neither was something any Fool could afford.

Research would have to be done later though. She needed a full bio on Marcus Tully, and another on Jemina Yerusha. The file downloaded into the ship’s book was next to useless. Like Schyler and Al Shei, Yerusha was holding something back. It might be something totally unrelated to whatever was marring the mood of senior crew, but it was there all the same.

Dobbs chuckled and shook her head ruefully. What’s this ship run on? Hydrogen and boron or secrets and mysteries?

She’d spent a chunk of the previous evening in the galley with the Sundars. Like Fools and Chief Engineers, a ship’s galley crew never really went off shift. Harry Dalziel, the steward, was the one on official active duty. He split his time between the kitchen and the laundry. At the same time, Baldassare poured over films detailing the menus and cross-referencing them with the inventory the ship carried versus the inventory he need to acquire at the next stop. Chandra had brought their AI box in from the sick bay and perched it on the corner of the central counter so she could update the crew health records from the notes she’d made during the day.

“Actually, most of Al Shei’s crews are as straightforward as you could want to serve with,” said Baldassare. “She and Schyler don’t have much use for the brooding type who takes to the stars to forget.”

“Or to dodge the greens,” added Chandra. “Recent circumstances notwithstanding.”

“Ah, Grandmother Chandra, I see through you.” Dobbs waggled her finger at Chandra. “You’re talking about Yerusha, but are too polite to name names.”

Chandra snorted. “Hardly. Yerusha may be a problem child, but the greens are not a problem for her any more than they are for any other Freer with a loud mouth.”

“Isn’t that redundant?” remarked Baldassare.

“When did you join the Fool’s Guild?” asked Dobbs.

“The day I was born, girl, the day I was born,” he answered amicably.

“What I was saying,” cut in Chandra, “is that everybody is here because they want to be, not because they have to be. It makes all the difference.”

“It does depend on what you mean by ‘have to be,” mused Baldassare. “Al Shei does have a way of finding people who really need her. Tully, Schyler, Lipinski…”

“Lipinski?” Dobbs’s eyebrows shot up of their own accord.

Baldassare nodded. “Lipinski needs a place he can work without interacting with AIs. He was actually an apprentice on a comm-crew when Kerensk went down. It hit him hard, and I don’t think he’s had much help getting over it.”

“Which explains his problems with Yerusha. He can’t think much of a people who think independent AIs are close to gods.” Dobbs sipped her tea. As long as humans had sailed in ships, no one knew more about crew dynamics than the galley crew. It made them a Fool’s natural allies and Dobbs was always careful to cultivate their friendship. She was glad the Sundars were so amenable.

“At bottom, Lipinski is a reasonable man,” said Chandra. “Loud, but reasonable. He’ll work around it, especially if he’s prodded.”

Another faint clang shook Dobbs out of her reverie. On the screen, the tanker fell away against the blackness.

“Intercom to Pasadena. Secure from refueling,” came Schyler’s voice through the speaker. “Four hours to jump.”

Dobbs snapped the catches on her straps and folded the chair back into the wall. Part of her training at Guild Hall had been how to live optimally in confined spaces. She had draped swaths of green and blue painted faux silk across the walls to help soften the corners. She had mounted her two flexible memory boards on opposite walls from each other. One of which showed a starscape, the other of which showed a sunny day in the green hills of Ireland. She had never been there in the flesh, but she liked to look at it. On the wall next to the desk hung a full length, faux-glass mirror. Like Al Shei, she had piles of pillows in the corners of her cabin, fastened down with velcro to keep them from floating around during free-fall. The overall effect was an airy, comfortable one and Dobbs was quite pleased with what she’d been able to accomplish with her thirty-five pounds.

“So, prod I shall.” Dobbs struck a pose in front of her mirror. “Until the very rivets of the Pasadena ring with the mighty shouts of accord between Jemina Yerusha and Rurik Lipinski!” She shook her fist toward the ceiling, took a good look at her reflection and laughed.

Maybe I should put in a call to the Guild, though, she thought, turning away from the mirror and smoothing her tunic down. Not due to report in for another week, but maybe I should get an advisor on for this run. She opened her night-drawer and put her juggling scarves inside. She took out a flattened spray of paper flowers and tucked them into her right-hand pocket. Four shiny gold coins went into her other pocket. It was important to rotate her props on a regular basis to preserve the element of surprise. She decided against the knotted chain of colored handkerchiefs that she carried up her left sleeve. That particular display did not seem to go over well with this crew.

She hooked her finger around her necklace and contemplated the flat, black box in the bottom of the drawer that held her private communications equipment.

In the back of her mind, she heard Amelia Verence chiding her. “Dobbs, you have got to learn the balancing act,” said her tutor and sponsor, “the Guild is a safety net, an information resource, and a back-up, but they can’t do your job for you. Master of Craft means you’ve mastered working on your own.”

“You’re right,” she said aloud to the memory. “I just wish I knew what about this run is making me feel so…young.” She shoved the drawer back into the wall. “Enough stalling, Dobbs,” she told herself. “Time to go to work.”

Lipinski first, she thought as she breezed out into the corridor with her professionally cheerful expression fixed on her face. Yerusha she could tackle later, after they’d made the jump past light-speed.

Dobbs took the stairs down to the comm center. Pasadena was a clean ship, but the inside of the comm center gleamed. All transmissions were captured using the center’s main boards outside. Then, they were screened to verify that they contained only what they were contracted to contain and nothing else. After that, they would be transferred into their prepared storage space behind the sealed hatches of the data hold.

The repair benches, transmission boards and duty stations were all to one side. The other side had its own hatches, sealing the main storage facilities away from the rest of the ship. One of the repair benches had its lid closed and the red lock-light was shining, indicating somebody was doing some secure work. Dobbs filed that fact away for later.

Odel, Lipinski’s relief, sat at Station Three, the coordination board. He glanced up with one round black eye as Dobbs stepped through the hatch.

“If you really want to be here,” he whispered, “you are a bigger fool than you look.”

Dobbs snapped her fingers. “That’s what I forgot to do. Work on that dimensional relativity control.”

Odel snorted. “Fine, take your own chances when the bodies start flying.”

“Bodies? Linear!” Dobbs rubbed her hands together.

Station One, the main transmission station, was a standard board and chair set up. Lipinski sat on the deck next to the chair. One of the repair hatches was open in front of him and he bent so far inside it that his long nose was almost touching the exposed wiring. Above him, Yerusha leaned over the station’s memory boards.

Yerusha glanced up as Dobbs moved past Odel, but Lipinski didn’t. He plucked a pair of tweezers off his belt and reached into the circuits. He pulled a chip out of its socket and replaced it with a fresh one.

“Now?” he asked Yerusha.

Yerusha prodded the board with one finger. “No response.”

Looks like the intercom wasn’t the end of our problems, Dobbs sighed inwardly. What is going on?

She thought about the sealed work bench, and then about the infamous and dubious Marcus Tully trying to retrieve something he’d left behind, and a seed of real worry planted itself in her mind.

“So, why aren’t they running a diagnostic?” she whispered out of the corner of her mouth to Odel.

He looked up at her mournfully. “The system ate the diagnostic.”

Dobbs let her eyes go round. “Ate?” she mouthed silently.

Odel nodded.

“If this ship had an AI, we wouldn’t be having this problem,” muttered Yerusha. Odel squirmed visibly. It didn’t take more than that glance to see he wished an emergency would crop up that he could respond to. Dobbs remembered Lipinski’s boast about being hell on apprentice comm crews.

“If this ship had an AI,” Lipinski stuck the original chip back in its socket and shifted his weight to pluck out the next one, “we’d have a whole new set of problems. Now?”

Dobbs lifted up onto tip-toe and with exaggerated steps picked a path to stand behind Lipinski. Yerusha just watched with a resigned air. Dobbs folded her hands behind her back and leaned over the Houston.

“It’d be much the same,” he said to the chip, “as having someone in the hold who doesn’t belong here.” Dobbs’s shadow blocked his light. He rolled his eyes up. “Two someones. Who spend a lot of time poking into things that aren’t their job.”

Dobbs wiggled her fingers to wave hello at him.

“The piloting system is my responsibility,” countered Yerusha. “All of it.”

“And internal communications, which are going straight to hell…” Lipinski set the chip back into its socket and began following a single silver tracing along the dull green surface of the circuit wafer. “Are mine. All of them.”

Dobbs’s mind raced. The boards in the comm center were connected to the bridge because the Houston needed to know exactly where the ship was in relation to the pick-up coordinates when the ship was doing a fly-by data-grab. If he didn’t, he would not be able to activate the capture programs in time to catch the data being transmitted to them. A few dozen kilometers could make the difference between a clean capture and a load of garbled and incomplete data.

With both of them here and on the edge, that link must be off. Completely down, or worse, off by a deceptively small amount.

“Now?” asked Lipinski, reaching between the wafers with the tweezers again.

“Nothing,” reported Yerusha.

“So what in Settled Space is screwing them up like this!” He yanked his head out of the hatch. Dobbs jumped backwards. “Huh? What?” he demanded of Yerusha. “This ship was in order until we got underway. I checked. I know these crashing, burned out, chewed and regurgitated boards like I know my rosary. This should not be happening!”

“Still wishing you could crawl in there?” Dobbs asked cheerfully before Yerusha could respond to the outburst. She peered into the repair hatch at the layers of circuit wafers.

“Can’t fit.” Lipinski rested his weight on his heels and stared at the wafers, brooding. “You might be small enough though.” He tucked his tweezers back into his belt pocket. “You want to pop in there and find out what’s wrong.”

Dobbs pulled back from the hatch and shook her head. “I already tried. Way too cramped for me. You’ve got it filled to the gills.”

Yerusha was, apparently, in no mood to let things slide. “If…”

“Wishes were fishes we’d all cast nets,” said Dobbs brightly. “Or so I’ve heard.” She put her head to one side and twiddled her thumbs pensively. “Although I don’t see why, such a mess to clean them and the smell, phew!” She coughed violently and waved her hand in front of her face.

Yerusha stared at her, possibly trying to work out all the references. As dedicated a Freer as she seemed to be, she had probably never even seen a live fish, let alone caught one.

It did, however, apparently make her forget what she was about to say.

Lipinski was also staring. “Dobbs,” he said quietly. “You’re in my light.”

She skipped backwards until her shadow fell across the unoccupied floor and bowed. She gave Yerusha a wink and an “oh well,” gesture and took her leave. As the hatch closed behind her, she willed them both to use their brains and not their tempers. They both must know that with only three hours until they made the jump, this was a dangerous fault to be left uncorrected. As such, it was no place for her clowning.

Lipinski’s hard voice echoed in her ears, This ship was in order until we got underway. This should not be happening!

You’re right, Houston, but it is, which leaves a big, burning question.

The sound of a hatch opening drifted up the shaft. Dobbs looked down automatically, and saw Ianiai’s black-haired head and stuck-out ears. She stuck her fingers into her teeth and whistled shrilly.

The sound echoed all around the shaft. Ianiai looked up and Dobbs leaned over the rail, waving. He made a gesture which, from the scowl on his face, wasn’t meant to be polite, and swung himself over the railing onto the support staples. He hitched his belt to the rail for safety.

Uh-huh, Dobbs trotted down the stairs to the galley. The off-shift reliefs are on and in foul moods. This is not a good sign.

The galley deck was quiet. Following the entire corridor around, Dobbs couldn’t hear any of the exercise equipment working, or any voices from the recreation rooms. She poked her head into the kitchen. Cheney was gulping a coffee beside the urn. The only other person in evidence was Dalziel, the steward, watching a cleaning drone scour the floor.

Dobbs ducked back out into the hallway. She briefly considered taking herself down to engineering to see if she could wheedle any information out of Al Shei but decided against it. One of the tricks a Fool had to learn was when to leave the crew completely alone.

I’ll bet my master’s rank that now is one of those.

She took herself back up the stairs to the berthing deck.

However, she thought as she entered her cabin, without accurate information, I can’t do my job either.

She locked the hatch and set the entrance light to red, indicating she did not want to be disturbed. She unfolded her desk from the wall and laid her first two fingers on the activation key. The board switched on, setting the keys glowing.

Dobbs sat down in the real chair and pulled her pen out of her belt pocket. She tapped it against her palm while she eyed the board thoughtfully.

Prepare to accept search and recovery program, she wrote across the main board.

Ready, responded the desk.

She plugged her pen into the desk’s socket. After a long moment, the desk wrote Program loaded.

Dobbs retrieved her pen.

Is Al Shei’s pen active in the ship’s system? she wrote.

Active.

Timing is everything, thought Dobbs. She wrote. Program D1 procedure name Tunnelling. Locate and copy data on search target.

She stuck her pen back into the socket and sat back.

If Al Shei had known what Dobbs was doing, she probably could have shoved the Fool out the airlock without any of the crew blinking. Some of them probably would even have helped. Schyler, for instance.

All computer systems had security measures that prevented someone from tapping into an active pen from a remote terminal. The Fool’s Guild had invested years in designing a search-and-recover program that could work its way around most of them. Dobbs was a couple of updates behind, but since the Pasadena under Al Shei was noted for quiet runs and a trustworthy crew, she didn’t expect to have any trouble getting through.

Then, the desk beeped.

Unable to complete request.

Dobbs straightened up. She pulled the desk’s pen out of its holder and wrote Explain.

Inadequate configured pathway space.

“Inadequate!” She swore. “Lipinski, I was kidding about the place being full…”

Then the desk wrote, Request complete. Information loaded into desk.

Dobbs sat very still for a long moment. Then she wrote, Load D1 security program and seal desk.

Program loaded and desk secured.

Dobbs pulled her pen out of the socket and shut the desk down. She folded it away and sat for a long time, doing nothing but stare at the walls.

Now, what, she thought, over and over, could have caused that?

After the better part of an hour, she still did not like any of her answers.

This was the moment. Al Shei’s heartbeat quickened even though she was doing nothing but sitting at her station. This was where it all came together, the planning and the scrambling and the inspection and the programming. No matter how well travelled their route, this was where they left known space behind and went on alone, powered and protected by the tiny world that they had made for themselves.

As always, she was torn between an almost childish excitement, and a bitter-sweet memory. Last night, in Asil’s journal he had said, “I am having Muhammad point out all your stars to me, Beloved, and when he goes to bed, I shall tell each one to remind you of my love.”

His voice ran strong through her mind, even as she heard Yerusha’s voice from the intercom. “Four minutes to jump.”

“Four minutes,” Al Shei answered. Yerusha and Lipinski had managed to fix the timing fault without killing each other. Al Shei decided to take that as a good sign for the rest of the jump.

The clock on the board turned over the seconds. She checked the pressure monitors on the pipes carrying the reaction mass from the tanks to the accumulators.

The Pasadena ran on magnetically confined fusion. Her mind’s eye stripped away the shell of metal and ceramic between her and the tanks and she saw the stream of boron 11 pellets rattling down the pipes into the midline injector where the electric arc fired, vaporizing the pellets and letting the electrostatic fields shoot the ionized gas through the gleaming gasdynamic mirror chamber. An upstream injector fired a thin stream of precious, and expensive, anti-protons down the long axis of the mirror chambers, providing energy and muons to spark the fusion reaction. The plasma ignited into a bright fury.

Resit once asked her what it was like to think in equations. Al Shei had looked at her blankly. Equations weren’t what you thought in. Equations were what you spouted off for the professors and the inspectors. She thought in pictures, in video sequences. If you did this and this and this, then that would happen.

The heated gas, already supersonic, speeded up as it expanded into the traveling-wavencoils that compressed the plasma in an annular magnetic field which was passed from coil to coil down the length of the traveling-wave tube.

Ancient physical principles applied over and again. Energy built and built until it had to be used up or thrown off.

“Plasma flow redirected,” reported Javerri, just as Al Shei’s board traced a new route for the burning river.

Now the plasma would not be vented out the Pasadena’s aft nozzle to push the ship forward. It would run upstream into the homopolar accumulators. It took a massive push to kick the ship into fast-time space, and another to bring it back into real-time. The accumulators stored up the power to make that jump.

“Jump threshold in five… four… three… ”

“Torch out,” called Ianiai.

“Bismillahir,” murmured Al Shei. In the name of Allah. In her imagination, she saw the bright blue flame beneath her feet wink out.

“… Two… One. Now.”

Al Shei’s hand came down on her station’s central key. A barely perceptible vibration

filtered through the deckplates. Her imagination supplied an accompanying rumble.

The accumulators fired. A small weight pressed against the center of her chest like a balled-up fist, and it was over. Now light was straining to catch up with them. Now the view screens showed nothing but the curving silver refraction wall that would stay in place until they got where they were going.

Despite an unfamiliar impatience scratching at her insides, Al Shei checked her boards carefully. “Station One reports all normal and in synch,” she called out. Once she had satisfactory replies from her crew, she undid her straps and stood up.

“Relief!” Ianiai gave her his mocking salute. In no mood to banter, Al Shei just gave him a warning glare as he took her seat. Her silence brought him up short like no verbal warning would have and he immediately turned his attention to the boards.

Al Shei started up the stairs toward the data hold. Footsteps sounded above her. Schyler was descending from the bridge. He gave her a small wave, but he was too far away for her to see his face. She could not, however, picture a smile on it.

He waited for her one step above the hatchway.

“The moment of truth?” he inquired, attempting to sound light-hearted. His tone fell very flat.

“I doubt it.” She stepped through the hatchway into the corridor. “Not the way Lipinski works.”

“He’s glacial, I’ll admit it. Slow but nothing can get out of his way.”

“We hope.” Al Shei palmed the hatch reader for the comm center.

Lipinski was on his own in the center. If Al Shei had set her relief shaking with a quiet glance, Lipinski had probably set his running with a thunderous shout.

Whatever had happened, there was only Lipinski bent over the work table with a needle-thin tracer in his hand, talking to whatever didn’t move away, as usual.

“Could’ve managed to burn just a little more off and made it really hard for me, couldn’t you? Why do half…”

“Is there anything there at all?” Al Shei came to stand by the table.

Lipinski lifted the tracer away from the ruined surface of the wafer stack. “Not a lot.”

Lipinski hadn’t been exaggerating. The stack’s delicate etchings were marred by wide, black patches that made Al Shei think she should be smelling charcoal.

“So, what can you tell us?” She leaned both forearms on the bench and folded her hands.

“It’s not a regular stack.” Lipinski laid the tracer back in its pocket in the workbench drawer. “It’s for storing binary data.”

“Binary?” Al Shei felt her eyebrows arch.

Lipinski nodded. “Straight ones and zeros. Yes and no. On and off. Very blunt. If you know what you’re doing, you can work some pretty fancy programs and data storage with it, but if you try to let any binary programming loose into a regular fuzzy logic stack, you’ve got the proverbial bull in a china shop. Fuzzy boards work with gradations and percentages. Binary data is all or nothing.”

“Can you tell what happened here?” asked Schyler quietly. He had his hands jammed in his pockets. From the bulges in the fabric, Al Shei guess he also had them balled into fists.

Lipinski looked at the wall as if taking its measure and then looked back at Schyler. “Tully stored some binary data, transferred it somewhere, blanked the stack and then burned it with a pin laser.” He pushed the bench drawer shut. “Then, my guess is, he expected me to take them to recycling. When I didn’t, he apparently came looking for them.” He jerked his chin toward Schyler. “Thanks to Watch’s sticking to the rules like he’s been vacuum welded, Tully did not get them.”

Al Shei’s jaw began to work itself slowly back and forth. When she spoke, her voice was much harsher than she’d intended.

“Why didn’t he just trash them?”

“Ah.” Lipinski raised one finger. “I expect that’s because they were still important. I expect that he was storing the binary data in those reconfigured boards I had to deal with back in port. Then, he transferred the data into one or more of the chips on these three stacks, probably where it’s most covered in carbon, and I expect he’s annoyed because I’ve got it and he doesn’t.”

“And I expect,” Al Shei straightened up, “that my oh-so-clever-and-honored Houston can find that data for me.”

Lipinski gave her the ghost of a smile. “If you give him enough time, ‘Dama Engine, I expect he can.”

“Then I expect he should get a torch burning under it.” She touched her fingers to her forehead in salute. Lipinski nodded and hunched over the board, completely absorbed in the problem before Schyler even had the hatch cycled open.

“This just keeps getting more and more interesting, doesn’t it?” he remarked at the hatch closed.

Al Shei didn’t say anything. She walked up about ten steps. She heard his footsteps following her, dull thuds bouncing off the near-by wall.

She turned to face him. “Have you made any progress at all in finding out where whatever is on those boards came from?”

Schyler shook his head tiredly. “I’ve been glued to the system logs and analyzing every comma and semi-colon for double meanings. Tully may have left stolen goods on board, but he didn’t leave any records to go with them.” He cycled the stair hatch open. “I’ll need some credit so I can made some fast-time calls as soon as we reach The Farther Kingdom. I’ve got some friends who might know something.”

Al Shei nodded. “I’ll dig it out for you.” Inwardly, she sighed. Guess what, Uncle Ahmet? I’m doing something for the family this trip after all.

Schyler met her eyes again. “There’s an additional possibility we need to consider.”

“Oh?” Al Shei laid her hand on the railing.

“We’ve been having an unholy lot of comm system trouble already this run,” he said. “Maybe what Lipinski is tracking isn’t entirely stored on those stacks.”

Al Shei sighed and rubbed her forehead. “I thought of that.” Confidential data, particularly military data, often had viruses built into its structure that were meant to get out and wreak whatever system had tried to steal it. “If he’s left a virus in here, I’m not just going to denounce him in front of my sister, I’m going to string him up by his thumbs.”

Schyler shrugged heavily. “Well, maybe Lipinski was right. Maybe it’s just that our new pilot is a saboteur.”

“I’m not sure which would be worse.”

A hatchway cycled closed beneath them. They both stiffened automatically. Light, quick footsteps raced up the stairs.

Al Shei and Schyler both pressed themselves against the wall as the Fool breezed past them. She stopped on the galley landing just above them and crouched on it. Al Shei looked up and down the stairway, trying to work out what she was running from.

In her hands, Dobbs held what looked like a fat spring. It must have been fairly loosely coiled, because she had no problem laying one end on the landing and one end on the next stair so that the spring made an arch from one to the other. Then, while Al Shei was still trying to sort out what was going on, Dobbs flipped the end on the landing up and over the end on the stair. The spring’s own momentum repeated the motion. With a soft “ching, ching,” noise, the spring began walking down the stairs.

All Al Shei could do was stare as the thing ching-chinged past her with the Fool practically on its heels.

Dobbs grinned at them. “Linear, isn’t it? Northern American toy from before the Fast Burn. I’ve got a bet on with Javerri that I can get it to walk all the way from the bridge to engineering.” She skipped down the next couple of stairs. “This is the dry run,” she explained, before turning her attention to the walking spring. “Come on! You can do it! Mary Mother of God, I don’t believe what I’m seeing! Come on! You’ve got to be able to do better than that!” She sounded amazingly like Lipinski, but hopping sideways down the stairs she looked like some manic circus clown.

Schyler tried to stifle his laughter but it came out as a snuffling wheeze. Al Shei allowed herself to smile.

“She’s got that thing rigged,” she remarked softly. “She must, or it’d be walking into the walls. Javerri’s taking a sucker bet.”

“And she’ll chase Dobbs twice around the berthing deck when she catches on, and I do believe, Mother, that our Fool will be sure she catches on.” He shook his head. He was still smiling. Al Shei realized he had no idea of what had just struck her.

“All right,” she said to him. “You’ve got an hour left on your shift. If you don’t get back on station, I’m going to have the Watch Commander review your record.”

He took a deep breath. “Right.” He ran his hand through his hair, which, Al Shei noticed with a start, was beginning to thin on top. “I’ll see you at dinner.”

“Right behind you.”

They climbed up the stairs, all the while hearing the Fool’s shouts of encouragement to her walking spring. When they reached the berthing deck, Al Shei left Schyler and opened the hatchway. In the corridor, she passed Javerri and Brand, the third-shift bridge watch, probably on their way to breakfast. She waved to them but passed them without another comment.

In her cabin, Al Shei sat in the desk chair. She’d left the day book recorder on the desktop.

She picked the palm-sized rectangle up and turned it over in her fingers. On its own, her mind drifted back to their last night together before she’d left on this run. They’d spent the day with the children on the monorail, looking out at the regrown wilderness beneath the last set of blast mountains. Then, with Muhammed and Vashti finally tucked into bed, and all of Bala house still and quiet around them, they’d gone into the tiled courtyard to sit beside the fountain and let the moon shine on them through the plexiglass ceiling.

“Has it lost its charm for you?” Asil asked, wrapping his arm around her shoulders.

“What? Marriage?” She unwrapped her hijab and bared her face to him. “Only when Vashti pitched a fit over not being allowed a second ice cream.”

“I meant the Moon.” He nodded up at the silver crescent. “You’ve been up there so many times, seen how dead and dusty it is. Doesn’t that spoil nighttime for you?”

She followed his gaze and smiled. “No, actually, it makes the wonder greater. All that dead dust is silver light for us. All those suns,” she swept her hand out, “are life for their worlds, and beauty for us. It’s all alive and complex and beautiful beyond description.” She glanced at him and saw the grin that spread all across his face. “And you are laughing at an engineer’s attempt to wax eloquent.”

“I am not.” He dropped a serious expression into place that lasted all of two seconds before the smile crept back. “All right, maybe I am.” He brushed her bare cheek with his finger. “But I am also basking in the glow of my wife, who is so beautiful, she is like a second moon in the sky.”

He’d bent to kiss her then, and everything else faded away.

Name of God, Beloved, Al Shei thought toward Asil’s memory. I hope this has all worked out by the time you hear about it. She shut the recorder into the drawer.

“Intercom to Dobbs,” she said to the wall.

After a moment, the Fool’s voice came through. “Dobbs here, Boss.” Al Shei could still hear a faint “ching-ching” in the background.

“I’d like to see you in my cabin, ‘Dama Fool. Immediately.”

The “ching-ching” silenced. “On my way, Boss.”

“Intercom to close.” Al Shei pictured Dobbs setting her spring carefully into one of her multiple pockets, sealing it thoughtfully, and then taking the stairs two at a time.

In less than three minutes, a knock sounded on the cabin hatch. Dobbs breezed in and bowed elaborately.

“At your service, ‘Dama Al Shei,” she said as the door shut behind her. She folded herself up to sit cross-legged on the floor. “What may your Fool do for you?”

“She may tell me how much she overheard,” said Al Shei.

Dobbs laid her hand on her breast and screwed a wounded look onto her mobile face. “Eavesdropping? Me? I am hurt, I am outraged, I am…” Al Shei didn’t let her eyes flicker. Dobbs lowered her hand. “Potentially out of a job,” she finished.

Al Shei tugged at her tunic sleeve. “I only heard the hatch cycle once. You must have been on the stairs when we started talking.”

Dobbs looked up and for the first time, Al Shei saw her wearing an absolutely straight face. “Have to watch that,” she said. “As to what I heard, I heard all of it.” She spread her hands. “If you’re worried I’m going to use it as a matter for joking…”

Al Shei shook her head abruptly. “That kind of fool, I know you are not.” Her English became awkward as old, uncomfortable memories tugged at her for attention and she wished she could drop into Arabic.

Al Shei fiddled with her sleeve for a minute, then let her hand fall away.

“For the life of me, I still don’t know why my sister fell in love with Marcus Tully, but she did. But because I understood what it was like to want something that most of the family disapproved of, I never tried to talk her out of the marriage.

“It took awhile to patch things up, with our grandmothers and uncles, but Ruqaiyya’s always been good at that.” Al Shei paused, remembering her younger sister standing at the low supper table with her head bowed and her hands folded in a completely demure and humble attitude, yet, somehow, at the same time managing to deliver a lecture on family loyalty to Uncle Ahmet of all people. Name of God, how she’d admired Ruqaiyya’s nerve!

“I was working a passenger shuttle at the time. Earth, the Moon, Mars and back again. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t what I wanted. Asil and I were already saving to build our own ship, but even on a Chief’s salary, it was going to be slow going. I was starting to think little Vashti would be at University before we had enough.

“Then, about two years after her marriage to Tully, Ruqaiyya came to see me, at Port Armstrong, no less. She had a business proposal from Marcus, who, she said, was nervous about sounding me out.”

Ruqaiyya had been so earnest as they’d talked over bulbs of thick, sweet, coffee. She’d told Al Shei at length how Marcus admired her skill, her practicality, the way Al Shei and Asil had arranged their disparate lives to make their marriage a warm, working, reality.

Al Shei had looked at the reflection of the overhead lights in her coffee and felt ashamed at herself for wondering what all this was leading up to. She’d felt even worse when she asked.

Al Shei cleared her throat. “Ruqaiyya told me that Marcus’ business partner had defaulted on his obligations at Phobos Point, leaving Marcus holding the bag, and the Pasadena, which he couldn’t afford to operate solo. He wanted to ask me to go in on a time-share arrangement with him, but he knew, she said, that I didn’t think much of his business sense…” Al Shei waved the rest of the sentence away.

“Ruqaiyya knew I’d been looking for this kind of chance for years. She knew I couldn’t take the kind of ties that crewing a corporate ship lays on you, and she knew how un-holy expensive independent shipping is. Merciful Allah.” She gave a short, mirthless laugh. “One little mistake and you can keep a whole hundred-wafer stack at the Bank busy tallying your deficits.

“Ruqaiyya also knew that, in spite of myself, I was already drooling of the idea of being my own Chief Engineer.

“So, I promised I’d talk to Tully and I sent her home. Then, I got on the wire to Phobos Point security to find out what had really happened to Tully’s partner. Not,” she added quickly as Dobbs’ right eyebrow raised a single centimeter, “that I thought Ruqaiyya had lied, but I was very willing to believe that Tully hadn’t told her the whole truth.”

She’d sat at the board for hours, dealing impatiently with the realities of negotiating a bureaucracy over a real-time link with a four-minute delay.

“What I found out, eventually, was that Tully’s partner had tried to crack the Intersystem Bank Network and divert a whole load of bond sale data to a friend of his, using Pasadena’s catch-and-drop facilities to do it. There were traces on the try before it was even halfway started. Of course, all they pointed to was Pasadena, not the actual cracker.

“Tully turned his partner in to save his skin, and to keep the thing from blowing up so big that his in-laws got notified, or, worse, so that some far-sighted security team decided to warn their compatriots in Settled Space to keep an eye on Marcus Tully.” She shook her head again. “That would really put a lock on his future plans.

“I took leave from the shuttle. I went home and spent a week talking the whole thing over with Asil. Then, I went to Tully and laid down my conditions.

“Asil would be our chief accountant. Tully could hire someone to keep tabs on him if he wanted to, but all the money would go through Asil. Each partner would have the ship a maximum of eight months and would have complete control over whatever profits they made during that time. They’d also have complete responsibility for any new debts they managed to incur. Our crews would be separate. Our logs would be separate, and if he was ever officially charged with breaking anybody’s laws, the Pasadena was mine.” She sighed at the memory of Tully’s eyes. Despite their bright blue color, they’d seemed dark then, as though he was a cornered rat looking for a way out that didn’t exist.

“After he agreed to all that, and agreed to have it recorded and sealed,” Al Shei ran her hand along the smooth desk top, “I said to him ‘don’t ever forget what you did to your partner, because I’d do the same to you, in a picosecond.’

“I thought it would hold him down,” she murmured to the wall over Dobbs shoulder. “I thought that and the fact that he knew I’d tell Ruqaiyya if I found out anything that was a grade one fire hazard, would keep him from trying anything irredeemably stupid. Apparently, I was wrong.”

“Pray forgive your humble Fool.” The unwavering look in her eyes made a joke of her subservient tone. “But why do you choose to honor her with this confidence?”

“I wanted to see if it still sounded like it made sense,” said Al Shei. “If I had missed anything when I set this deal up.”

Dobbs licked her lips thoughtfully. “Do you know about Nasrudine?”

Al Shei smiled. “Once there was and there was not, the wise fool Nasrudine,” she recited. “One day, Nasrudine came to a friend of his and said ‘Congratulate me! I am a father!’ ‘Congratulations!’ said his friend. ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ ‘Why yes,’ said Nasrudine. ‘How did you know?’”

Dobbs chuckled. “Another time Nasrudine was selling donkeys. He would go to market every Friday with a fine donkey which he would sell at an outrageously low price. Finally, one of the donkey merchants came up to him and said ‘Nasrudine, how are you doing this? I force the haymakers to give me fodder for free. I make my slaves work without pay, and still I cannot sell my donkeys as cheaply as you sell yours.’

“‘Well, Friend,’ says Nasrudine, ‘you are going about this all wrong. You are stealing fodder and labor. I’m just stealing donkeys.’”

Despite herself, Al Shei gave a short laugh. “Are you saying I stole the Pasadena?” she asked, not really expecting a serious answer.

“I’m saying, Boss, you might want to consider how long you are going to let Marcus Tully steal labor and fodder. Particularly when you know he’s going about this all wrong.”

Al Shei opened her mouth and closed it again.

The emergency alarm shrilled through the room a split second ahead of Javerri’s voice.

“Intercom to Al Shei!”

Al Shei was on her feet in a split second. “Al Shei here. What’s going on, Javerri?”

“We’ve got a situation with the fusion mix. The readouts say we’re pouring in deuterium.”

Al Shei didn’t even pause to say anything to Dobbs. “I’m on my way. Intercom to close.”

She just strode out the door, straight across the corridor and through the hatch. She grabbed the stair railing and started running down.

Pasadena ran on fusion reactions. The hydrogen-boron reaction required a very high temperature, so they used deuterium-tritium for brief periods to warm the reactors and generators when a cold start was required. The problem with deuterium-tritium reactions was that occasionally you got a deuterium-deuterium reaction which produced fast, energetic neutrons. Deadly radiation. The radiation was absorbed by the lithium jacket around the reactor, but the jacket could only absorb so many neutrons before it became radioactive itself.

If a delivery valve had accidently gotten open and deuterium pellets were pouring into the reactors, there would be a massive number of deuterium-deuterium reactions, producing more radiation than the jacket could hold back. The jacket, and the valves, would begin to overheat. The bombardment of neutrons would make the metallic surfaces brittle, and burn through the ceramics. If the Lithium began to boil, it would add its own reactions to the stew and the heat and decay would build even faster. Her imagination all too easily painted a picture of tiny, glowing pellets slicing through the suddenly delicate shielding like sleet.

What those pellets would do to her crew was not something Al Shei was allowing herself to think about. She especially did not allow herself to think about what would happen if the engines broke down during the jump. They needed power to stop. Without enough power, the jump wouldn’t end until Judgement Day came and the recording angels opened their books.

The cargo platform was waiting at the galley deck. Al Shei swung herself on board and grabbed the railing.

“Engineering. Emergency override, Katmer Al Shei.” The ship identified her voice and the platform started to sink toward Main Engineering.

“Intercom to Shi’mon and Ianiai.” Her voice rang off the walls.

“Shi’mon here.”

After a much longer moment, and in a much sleepier voice, “Ianiai here.”

“Emergency call. Report to Main Engineering, now.”

On the other side of the hatch, Javerri stood elbow-deep in the right-hand wall. Good, thought Al Shei. Alert the chief, check the wiring, then panic.

The look she turned on Al Shei said that step two was almost completed.

“Can’t find an instrumentation fault, Engine,” she reported in a voice as hollow as her eyes.

“What’s the reading from the compartment?” Al Shei yanked out her pen and stabbed at the main menu to call up the valve displays from the engine room.

Javerri double-checked her boards. “It’s the same thing all the way down the line. The D-2 valve is stuck all the way open and we’ve got an infusion of twenty grams per second.”

Might as well be twenty kilos. Al Shei flicked through the menus and felt her brows draw together. Javerri had read it right.

The hatch cycled open. Shim’on ducked through, the hem of his prayer shawl flapping behind him.

“Ianiai is right behind me,” he reported breathlessly.

“Good.” Al Shei crossed the deck to the equipment locker. As she outlined the situation, she pulled out a bright yellow containment suit and began stepping into it. “You’re with me. I’m going down into the engines to get that valve closed.” The hatch opened again and Ianiai, still rubbing his eyes stepped through. “Javerri, bring Ianiai up to speed.” She yanked on her gloves. “You two will monitor the situation from here. Shim’on, your job is to be my back-up. If I get hit too hard by the radiation, your first priority is to get the valve shut, then you worry about getting us out of there. Understood?”

Shim’on paused in his suiting up long enough to nod at her.

Al Shei locked the helmet in place. Javerri opened her mouth, closed it without saying anything and took her place at Station One.

Al Shei strode back into the drop shaft with Shim’on right behind her. She took the stairs as fast as she could manage in the thick boots. The tools on her belt slapped against her thighs.

The spiral stairway ended at the hatch to the engine compartment. Al Shei’s mind’s eye showed her the engine compartment full of thin wires of golden light strung across the room like a manic spider had been set loose in there. Each one was ready to slice straight through her as soon as she walked into it. The suit should protect her, and Chandra should be able to take care of any minor radiation injuries. If she didn’t have to stay down there too long.

“Bismillahir rahmanir,” she said. In the name of Allah, the most Merciful.

She took a deep breath and opened the hatch.

The main engineering compartment was a sculpture in bright, white ceramic panels. Al Shei descended the ladder beside the bulge of the main coolant pipe. Below her feet hulked the housings for the reactors and accumulators. Each was a conglomeration of mounds like sand dunes in a barren desert. The only color was the glowing display panels on each one. Readouts for fuel consumption, power output, and structural integrity. She glanced between the toes of her boots and saw nothing but green.

Good. Things haven’t gone too far.

Al Shei reached her foot out toward the nearest staple and with hands and feet swung herself over to the ladder beside the D-2 pipe. As big around as her torso, it ran straight into the largest housing on the floor. The valve stuck out of the pipe’s smooth side. It was a spoked wheel that would have been recognizable to a steam-boat captain six hundred years ago. She hitched her belt to the ladder and checked her radiation badge on her wrist. Still green. Good. If this thing was well and truly jammed, she might need help down here. If it were welded open from heat and pressure, she’d need help then too. Preferably from Allah and all His angels.

She peered at the display above the valve and her eyes widened in surprise. The numbers shone bright green. The display said the flow was non-existent, and the pressure was zero, exactly as it should be, and that the valve was tightly shut.

Just like it should be. She looked at her badge. Still green. She turned her head and surveyed the sterile, white room. All around her shone green stars.

“Intercom to Engineering,” she barked toward the wall. “Javerri, what are you reading up there?”

“Same thing,” her voice came back. “Massive D-2 flooding, increased radioactivity throughout…”

Al Shei cut her off. “I’ve got a bunch of green readings down here.” She grabbed the valve wheel and turned it toward the CLOSE label. It wouldn’t budge. She eased it in the other direction and all at once a bright red WARNING wrote itself across the display.

She locked the valve back at once. “And I got set of completely closed valves, all the way down, and a green radiation badge.”

The walls fell silent.

“Intercom to Watch and Houston,” Al Shei called out. “Conference room now. We’ve got a problem. Intercom to FTL and Ensign, I want a download of the readings we’re getting up there. Shim’on, get down here and compare them with the readings we’re getting on the direct displays. Keep everything on film and bring it to the conference room. Stay suited up, just in case.”

She unhitched her belt and started climbing back toward the main ladder.

It would have been easier if it was the valve, she bit her lip as she started up toward the hatch. At least then we would have known what we were dealing with.

The conference room was already filled when she got there. Schyler had a list of the defective systems and their corresponding diagrams up on the main memory board. From the looks on their faces, everyone had already had a chance to study the display.

Al Shei let the hatch cycle shut behind her and seated herself at the foot of the table. She nodded to Schyler.

“So,” he tapped the memory board with one knuckle, “we already know we have a problem, and that it’s growing worse. As of now, we are on emergency duty until we have it cleared out.”

Al Shei looked at each face in turn, waiting for a challenge, waiting for someone to say they had already found a solution. No one so much as blinked, not even Dobbs sitting quietly in her corner.

“All right,” Schyler went on, “all section chiefs are to work double shifts. Work out a relief schedule so there’s someone attending to routine at all times while you’re out hunting. I do not want any system left unmonitored. I do, however,” he stabbed the table with his index finger, “want this cleared up before we make the Farther Kingdom delivery.”

“You know the one about the needle in the haystack?” inquired Lipinski.

Schyler nodded. “If you’ve got a suggestion, I want to hear it. Otherwise, I want a schedule worked out and I want all efforts coordinated through me.”

“I’ve got a suggestion,” said Yerusha.

Schyler faced her. “Which is?”

Yerusha’s face was absolutely dead-pan. “You could let me hatch the AI stack I’ve got into the Pasadena’s system. We’d get a dynamic picture and intelligent help.”

The blood drained from Lipinski’s face. He leaned forward, mouth open. Schyler glanced at Al Shei and waved Lipinski back.

“Thank you for volunteering, Pilot. We’ll save that as a back-up option. I don’t want to lose the loading time.”

Somewhat to Al Shei’s surprise, Yerusha didn’t try to argue. Good, maybe she was cooling off.

Next came some of the usual wrangling about resources and priorities and coordination. There wasn’t much, though, because they were all very aware of what this latest incident meant. If the instruments were reporting false disasters, they might have lost their ability to report real ones.

Schyler laid down the last coordination order and broke the meeting so the chiefs could alert their teams and work out their individual schedules.

Al Shei let the crew filter past her. The last one out the hatch was Dobbs.

“In case Schyler hasn’t mentioned it, you’re also on emergency duty,” Al Shei told her. “If we’ve got a virus running loose, things might get worse before they get better. I am going to need you to help keep us from overload.”

Dobbs bowed. “God gave them wisdom that have it, and fools, let them use their talents.”

Lipinski was waiting by the stairway hatch when Al Shei came out. He had regained some of his color, but he still looked sick.

She knew what was coming before he even opened his mouth.

“You’re not going to let her hatch that thing, are you?”

Al Shei sighed and pressed her fingers against her temple. “I might.”

“We have got an unidentified dynamic system fault and you’re willing to chuck an AI in there?” he was trying to whisper and not managing too well. “A Freer AI?”

Al Shei let her hand drop. “If you don’t want the AI hatched, Lipinski, you find out what’s causing our problems.” She drew herself up to her full height. “Get a lock on this paranoia, Houston. You’re running the risk of disrupting my ship.”

A strange light came into his eyes. “She thinks she can use that thing to catch a human soul. That’s blasphemy in your book too.”

Al Shei took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She reminded herself firmly about Lipinski’s unparallelled skill and commitment. She reminded herself how, as a young man, he had helplessly watched his whole world die around him.

“My book also says ‘tolerate patiently what unbelievers say and part from them in a polite manner.’” She cycled the hatch back. “And I believe yours has a few things to say about faith and trust in God.” She looked him straight in the eyes. “I’ve been doing some talking too. I said to Resit at the beginning of this run that you were a reasonable man. I do not want to have to say to her I was wrong.”

She watched his face shift as tone of her statement sank in. He straightened his shoulders. “You won’t.”

Al Shei let out a silent sigh of relief. “Thank you, Lipinski.” She let him precede her up the staircase.

When Al Shei returned to her cabin, Resit was kneeling on her prayer rug. Al Shei realized, with a small wince, that maghrib prayers must have just finished.

The look her cousin gave her was without reproach, however. “You’d better do two sajdatus sahw for forgetfulness,” she said mildly. “You haven’t made prayer once today.”

“There you’re wrong, Cousin.” Al Shei dropped wearily into the desk chair. “I’ve been doing nothing but pray for the last three hours.”

“I heard the alarm, of course.” Resit unfolded her legs and stood up. “Do you want to tell me about it, or should I read the report from Watch?”

Al Shei pulled out her pen and activated the desk. “Read the report, would you? I’ve got to get my ducks on a new schedule.”

“Uh-huh.” Resit draped her prayer rug over her arm. “Anything I need to be immediately worried about, then?”

“Not immediately.” Al Shei did not turn around. She pulled up the engineering schedule for the next three days and stared at it.

“You know, I get nervous when you don’t look at me,” Resit remarked. “Tell me, should I start drafting up a call-in on Tully?”

“Yes,” said Al Shei, quietly. “That you should do.”

“Then that’s what I’ll do.”

Al Shei heard the bathroom door open and close.

She forced herself to concentrate on the schedule. After the first attempt at reorganization, she realized that she hadn’t left herself any time to sleep. She had to blank everything out and start again.

Finally, she wrote TRANSMIT across the boards. Her gaze strayed to the drawer where she’d put the day book recorder. She stared at it for a moment, thinking about the next run, when Asil would be hearing this. What would the ending be? Would he know already that it had all worked out? Or would he be sitting silently listening to how she had slid so far down they’d be years digging themselves out? For a moment, she missed him with such appalling force that her throat closed around her breath.

“Only one way to make sure it doesn’t come to that.” She stood up and strode out the door.

Hours later, Al Shei forced herself back into her cabin. There hadn’t been any more system failures, but there hadn’t been any progress toward finding the cause of their troubles either. She prayed long and intensely, reaching for a peace that didn’t come, made her day book recording and, at last, lay down on her bunk beneath her emerald green coverlet.

Al Shei lay on her side and listened to the soft hum of the ship around her. Usually, it lulled her. It was the sound of everything behaving as it should. Not tonight. Tonight, the gentle sound was a disguise, covering up an unseen problem. Pasadena was haunted tonight, and she had no idea how to draw the ghost out.

Al Shei rolled onto her back and threw her arm across her face, pressing her eyelids shut. She let herself imagine Asil lay beside her. She conjured up the memory of his scent, the heat of his body, the sweet sensation of his arms around her, loosely embracing her in sleep. She felt his warm, comforting weight against her as her breast rose and fell in long, contented breaths. His lips brushed lightly against her cheeks as he pulled her closer in his dreams.

Dreaming of her husband’s dreams, Al Shei managed to fall asleep.