A Path in the Darkness Read online

  Tanis felt the solitude pressing around her ease back as she settled into a duty station. The holo interface sprang to life around her and she brought up the previous month’s logs.

  They were blank for the last month.

  “Well that complicates things,” Tanis muttered.

  Angela responded.

  “Are the habitation cylinders still spinning?” Tanis asked.

 

  “Speaking of 0g,” Tanis said. “We’ve still got grav here in the crew areas.”

 

  “So you’re thinking sabotage as well.” Tanis said.

 

  “It’s gotta be Collins,” Tanis said. “I can’t imagine either Gollee or Amy Lee being involved.”

 

  “So we’ve got two things we need to do. We need to get to Bob, and get him control of the engines or we’ll be having a really bad day.”

 

  “What’s the time on that?” Tanis asked.

 

  “We better get moving then.”

  Tanis left the bridge and worked her way back to Bob’s primary node. Hopefully, it was intact and he had run the preservation procedures. With luck he would be fully activated and they could begin repairing whatever damage had severed him from the ship.

  On their way she stopped at the officer’s mess to see if it showed signs of use and to check for any clues. This room wasn’t quite as Tanis remembered it. In the intervening forty years, someone had decorated it.

  The previously white walls were done in several vibrant, yet tasteful colors and several new couches were also arranged throughout the room.

  The serving area in the rear was stocked with fresh food and Tanis helped herself to a glass of water and a cold sandwich—she suspected it would be a while before she got to eat again.

  Peeking into the walk-in refrigerator she stopped and deployed a series of nano probes. Around one of the racks, she saw a pair of feet. The probes took stock and fed the view to her HUD. It was Gollee; judging by the pallor of his skin, he had been dead for some time.

  Angela said.

  Tanis disagreed. There was always a chance they could bring him back. It was not too far above freezing down where he lay; it was possible to bring people back even after a day if the conditions were right. She crouched down beside the ensign and saw what the probes missed. There was a large hole in the back of his head. No, they wouldn’t be bringing Gollee back.

  Angela said.

  “So it would seem. I’ll move him to the freezer and then we can continue.”

  Tanis hauled the ensign’s inert form to the freezer and set him down gently. He’d been a good chess player. She was sorry they hadn’t had the opportunity to know one another better. Closing the freezer door, Tanis took a deep breath and determined to pay back whoever had done this in like kind.

 

 

  Less than ten minutes later they were at the entrance to the ship AI’s primary node. The entrance was a narrow corridor that was normally alive with scanners and holo readouts. Beyond that was a large, cube shaped space where the node resided. Tanis attempted to deploy probes, but found she lost contact with them the moment they entered the corridor.

  Angela reported.

  “I’d wondered about that,” Tanis said. “Well, here goes nothing.”

  She stepped into the corridor and immediately regained communications with her nano. They had stayed on course and were surveying the AI node. Tanis emerged from the tunnel and into the space the AI occupied. It was similar to the communications nodes she had visited on Callisto not long ago, albeit somewhat smaller.

  The room was perhaps twenty meters per side. A catwalk ran around its center and while most of the power fed via conduit, communications between nodes and the ship were largely wireless, sent down ES waveguides that transferred comm through the ship. The node appeared to be offline at first, but the nanocloud reported that it was actually active, just running on backup power.

  “You’re here.” The words were audible. Though she had never heard it aloud, it was the same timbre Bob’s voice always had in her mind.

  “You’re alive!” Tanis said. “Angela and I were quite worried.”

  “If you can call this alive, then I suppose I am,” the AI replied. “I’m crippled and trapped within this node. I have no external net access and a dampening field is blocking my control of nano beyond the node.”

  “We noticed that.” Tanis nodded. “I think we can find the emitters and remove the field, but we need to know what happened. Where is everyone, how did all of this happen?”

  There was a pause...just a second or two, but an eternity for an AI.

  “I’m not entirely certain. Since the event I’ve been running through my logs and have found that there have been some gaps for some time. Almost as though parts of my sensory input had been altered to not pick up certain events, or certain people’s movements.”

  “So you were blinded,” Tanis said.

  “In some respects, yes. I don’t know if the sabotage was set up during those times, or if some of it had been in place since we left Sol. What I do know is that the timing was perfect. At first I thought it was a viral attack, but it quickly became apparent that it was physical. Only someone who knew my systems with fair intimacy could have done this. Earnest and Abby built in many redundancies and they were all circumvented.”

  Angela asked.

  “There was an attack made by servitors, but I managed to repel them with nano once they entered the node. I also have some limited feeds throughout the ship, comm paths that, while damaged, still have some bandwidth. I believe whoever has done this is trying to flee the ship via one of the stellar pinnaces. If they depart after our first orbit of the local star they’ll have enough velocity to reach Sol in roughly one hundred years. I believe that is their plan.”

  “We need more people,” Tanis said. “I can’t go to the shuttle bays… which one is it?”

  “Starboard A3.”

  “And deal with whoever is there and leave you unguarded. They could mount a physical attack here.

  “I’ll be safe,” the AI said. Laser cannons lowered from the ceiling, and several armed servitors appeared on the catwalk, most likely the ones that had tried to attack the node. “I’m conserving power in case I need to use these systems.”

  Angela said with concern in her tone.

  An audible chuckle filled the room. “I’ll be certain not to shoot myself in the foot. Go, find whoever this is, and stop them. We need to know if they have anything else planted on the ship before we begin to repair—and there isn’t much time for that either.”


  Angela said.

  “Unfortunately no, I barely managed to wake you. I’m also uncertain who I would wake if I could. I don’t know who to trust. Amanda or Priscilla would normally make that choice.”

  Tanis nodded. “Well, for starters we could wake one of those two, but I think the best bet is to wake Joe.”

  There were others in the stasis chamber who could perform the required, but she had her own reasons for wanting Joe.

  “You go to the shuttle bay. I’ll send a preprogrammed servitor with a message for him.” The servitor would lose contact with Bob once it was beyond the node, but the task was a simple one, which it could perform autonomously.

  Tanis passed the new access codes to the stasis chamber. She left the node and began the trek to the starboard A1 shuttle bays.

  The Intrepid was a colony ship, with all the supplies and equipment to establish humankind on a distant world. As such, the ship was equipped with a fleet of smaller vessels intended to gather resources within the destination star system and establish an economy. Amongst the complement were several pinnaces capable of the trip back to Sol.

  Tanis’s quarters were only a small detour and she decided to stop there and gather weapons and armor. There was no telling how many people she would be up against and the stasis suit she was still wearing afforded virtually no protection.

  The personal seal over the door to her quarters showed no signs of tampering and Tanis removed it before forcing the panel aside. Even with the best filtration systems a fine layer of dust covered everything in the room, a tangible sign of the four decades she had been in stasis. To her it had been only an hour or two since making the bed and straightening her things; for some reason, seeing the passage of time here again brought the feeling of solitude to the fore.

  Focusing on the task at hand, Tanis pulled off the stasis suit and slid into the base layer of her flexi-armor. It fit like a second skin, a second skin that could stop kinetic rounds. She retrieved a fresh canister of reactive material and held it to her chest; waiting for the base layer to finish initializing. A ready symbol flashed on her HUD and Tanis pressed the cylinder into a now glowing circle on her chest.

  The clear liquid flowed out across her body, even covering her face in an all but invisible layer. The armor could absorb weapons fire from particle beams to ballistic firearms. Once the armor completed its startup routine she pulled out her shimmersuit. This top layer would render her invisible, even her scent and the sound of her movements would be masked.

  Once the shimmersuit was in place, Tanis wore over five millimeters of armor and camouflage. She opened her personal weapons locker and retrieved the two slim blades hanging on the inside of the door. Each slid into sheaths on her forearms that would hide them from view. Next was a pulse rifle and pistol that she snapped together and slung over a shoulder. A final check of the armor and comm control systems and Tanis stepped into the hall, her body fading from view.

  Anyone seeing her move through the silent and dark ship would have only witnessed a pistol and rifle floating through the air. However, even that wouldn’t occur as Angela had the nanocloud roving far and wide. They would get plenty of advanced notice if anyone were nearby.

  The A3 dock was on the lower half of the command and crew areas of the Intrepid. From her current position it was a kilometer aft, two kilometers starboard, and half a kilometer down. With the maglev trains and tubelifts offline it was going to be a long haul.

  Releasing a stimulating combination of chemicals into her bloodstream, Tanis launched into a smooth lope, topping out at just over sixty kilometers per hour.

  Angela warned.

 

 

 

  Tanis halted at an intersection she didn’t recognize. Neither she nor Angela had the ship’s entire layout stored in local memory. There was no reason to because no one expected the ship to ever be entirely offline. Aside from being uncertain about the route, there was another problem: the ship was designed to be traversed via maglev train. It was entirely possible that there would be no way to get to the dock from here.

  Angela added her two cents to Tanis’s thoughts.

 

  Tanis considered the options and took a right. Several turns later she arrived at a large environmental transfer station. Conduits ran into massive induction pumps and then to their ultimate destinations.

 

 

  Tanis walked to a railing that surrounded a series of large pipes which ran down through the decks. Switching her vision to IR she could see that they were still cooling and cast enough light to make out a catwalk twenty meters below.

  She took a moment to gauge the distance and leapt over the railing into empty space. The catwalk rattled when she struck it and the lower half of her armor locked up, absorbing the impact.

  “Handy stuff,” Tanis commented.

  Below was another catwalk, and she repeated the process until she was on the same level as the A3 docks. The catwalk at that level led through an environmental administration area and then into a general ship corridor. Angela supplied a possible map of their location, though it was extrapolated and could be inaccurate.

 

 

  Tanis worked her way through the corridors using her sense of direction—and a cloud of nano scouting ahead—to ferret out the path to the docks. It was slow going and the isolation was starting to make her see things.

  Her thoughts returned to the endless blackness outside the ship, the knowledge that there were no habitats or worlds for light years, no repair yard to call, or tug to pull them away from the red dwarf she knew was outside the ship, ready to swallow it.

  The closest humans beyond the Intrepid were seven light years away in the Epsilon Eridani system, they might as well have been on the other side of the galaxy.

  Tanis wondered if that is where the saboteurs were intending to travel. Some of the larger ships in dock A3 were equipped with stasis pods; with a good pilot at the helm they could make the trip to EE in under thirty years.

  She couldn’t imagine anyone wanted to travel there. It was all dust cloud miners, not a single terraformed world in the system.

  After another twenty minutes the first set of probes radioed back images of cargo storage areas. They had to be nearing the dock and Tanis picked up the pace, turning her focus to what she would do to whoever was behind this.

  Before long her nano located the dock, they confirmed Tanis’s suspicions: a Triton Class Pinnace was on the launching rails, powered up and ready to launch. Though there was no visible activity on the dock, Tanis approached cautiously all the same.

  She wished for some backup, and her thoughts flashed to Joe; she imagined he must be revived by now, most likely with Bob, getting updated on the situation.

 

  Angela replied.

 

 

  The corridor terminated at the dock with both airlock doors wide open. Normally that wouldn’t be possible, but with the entire ship essentially offline there was nothing to stop it.

  Angela said.

 

 


  Tanis didn’t think so either, she was just thinking aloud… though it wasn’t a thought Angela should have been able to overhear.

  Tanis pushed the implications of that from her mind and crouched low, holding the pistol and assault rifle near the deck. It wouldn’t do to have whoever was out there see two guns floating in the air.

  Out on the dock there were several pallets of refined ore, ready for the space station that was to be constructed once the ship reached New Eden. They would make good places to hide her weapons while she surveyed the area.

  Creeping slowly along the deck she reached the pallets and tucked the weapons under a strap. Tanis then pulled herself onto the ore and surveyed the dock. There still weren’t any signs of people, but the pinnace’s passenger ramp was lowered. Tanis decided to enter the ship. She could send a nano probe, but it was possible that the vessel’s sensors would pick up its signal. She pulled her nanocloud in tight and jumped off the pallet.

  The ship’s ramp was only twenty meters away; Tanis kept her approach slow and steady when she heard a noise to her left. She resisted the urge to duck behind something, relying on her shimmersuit’s ability to render her entirely undetectable.

  It was Collins and another man she didn’t recognize; they were carrying a bundle between them. Tanis realized how often she relied on the Link for data about the ship.

  They rounded a pallet and Tanis got a better look at the bundle they carried.

  It was Amy Lee.

  “God dammit, why couldn’t we just leave her back there?” the unidentified man asked.

  “Because I don’t know if she managed to get a signal off and I need to find out. It will affect where we can go,” Collins replied between grunts.

  Tanis knew that Amy Lee had a number of strength modifying mods. While she looked like a slim woman, just under 180 centimeters, she likely weighed over 120 kilograms.

  “You told me we were going to Tau Ceti,” the man said.

  “Well, if she got a signal off, then we’re going to Epsilon Eridani.”

  “What a shit hole.”

  “It’s a shit hole with transports to Sol.” Collins gave the man an aggravated look.