Home: Interstellar: Merchant Princess (14 page)

Mom left us for a while,
Meriel thought,
and came back with the sim-chip
.
She must have stopped at the alt-bridge to program the chip. The shortest path there would take her past the next room—the infirmary, where the pirates had slaughtered the adults. A dark cloud filled her vision, obscuring the passageway. She closed her eyes and blinked rapidly.
No, not now
, she thought.
Stay here. Don’t freeze up, girl. Think. What do you need to do
?
If her mother had gone that way, the pirates would have captured her.
No, Mom left through maintenance-1 and welded the hatch closed after she returned
.
So the kids and I had to leave through cargo-2.

She turned to take another route, but her link buzzed: the security sweep. The next compartments were too far away. She jumped into the infirmary and then into a closet without looking around, and then she turned off her headlamp. The light in the room came on, allowing her to see through the louvers of the closet door, and she groaned.

It was still there, the blood covering the deck and splattered on the walls. They had not cleaned it; they had only removed the bodies and devices to log as evidence. She closed her eyes, but it did not help; flashbacks filled in the scene for her.

“It’s not real,” she said aloud. “It’s not real.” The heavy copper smell filled her nose, and stars appeared in front of her eyes again. Nausea reached her throat, and to relieve the symptoms, she massaged the veins of her left wrist using two fingers of her right hand. It did not work, and she grabbed a service bag from her hip and opened her visor to retch. The cold shocked her, and she inhaled only the N
2
/Ar environment. She gasped for breath, which shut down the nausea symptoms, and closed her visor again, but there was no oxygen left within it. After inserting her last canister, she took a deep breath and ran the safety drill.
Half the reading plus half the reserve:
ten plus three minutes. Ten plus three
.

Near suffocation engaged her mind fully again. The incessant drills they ran as kids pulled her back from the flight response. Just like the kata, the drills helped make her next steps automatic—biological—so that conscious thought was unnecessary. She still breathed too fast, so she took a few slow breaths.

Able to breathe again, Meriel prepared to leave the closet when the lights went off. Before she opened the closet door, a beam of light cut through the room, and she heard a new sound: the skittering and clicking of a security spider. If it found her, that would be enough to get her arrested and kill her dreams. Nick did not tell her there would be spiders aboard the ship. That was unaccountably sloppy, and she made a note to complain.

She ducked below the louvers of the closet door as the light beamed through them. The spider scraped the door, testing the handle, but Meriel held it tight from the inside and held her breath. A probe from the spider snaked through the louver and felt its way around but could not reach the handle.
The probe is a sniffer, not a camera: it cannot tell for sure that I’m here.
The stars appeared in front of her eyes, and the nausea returned.

A part of her just wanted to let go, to let the spider tranq her. She took a shallow breath.
Is this really worth it?
All this just so the kids can have a chance at something more than a spacer’s funeral
?

Yes
.

The spider withdrew the probe, the beam moved on, and the skittering sound went away. Meriel could breathe deeply again, but she could not stay hidden in the closet after the spider left. She had to move or risk running out of air—but where?
Mom was away when we heard the escape pod eject
. Meriel turned and jumped to the evac bay and ePod berths.

No one believed that the parents had attempted to escape using an ePod, especially with the kids still aboard, so the empty ePod berth was another mystery. The ePods were rather useless anyway. They couldn’t jump and had few survival rations, so survivors had to depend upon someone being nearby to hear their EM screamers. Unless you were already near a station or a busy shipping lane, an ePod was a casket, and you would be buried alive. Many spacers chose not to use them after hearing graphic tales of what rescuers had found inside them.

On the empty ePod hatch, Meriel found another four-leaf clover symbol and open circle drawn within it. Drops of blood, long dried, were spattered below it.
An ePod will not eject without at least one living person on board, but all the crew was accounted for—adults killed and kids safe. What happened
?

The suit O
2
alarmed again, and Meriel was running out of time
.
Alt-bridge, that’s where she went next
, Meriel thought. She took the long way to the cold locker next to the galley, but the door was locked. She opened her suit and used the key on her necklace to open the hatch to the coldest, most functional room on the entire ship, the only room without ornamentation or any other sign of the children who flew her, and in this room their lives were saved.

Unlike the other compartments, someone had cleaned and polished the alt-bridge and emptied all of the drawers below the console. All signs of habitation had been removed, along with the gum and other detritus typical of places where kids have landed for a few milliseconds.
I need to find something,
she thought, shaking her head.
But what do I expect to find that trained investigators missed
?

She booted the nav computer. The OS was still there, but no data or apps.
Why would they wipe the apps? Police would not need to do that.
She sat at the console.
Nothing. Fifteen days left and nothing. What did Mom do
?

Meriel put the chip into the nav computer. A few of the nav lights blinked, and the chip ID flashed on the console. A message popped up on the screen. “Invalid coordinates. Cannot process.” So the OS recognized the chip ID. It was not physically damaged, but the data was corrupted. As Nick said, the chip must have been tampered with intentionally.

The O
2
alarm sounded again.
Two minutes plus three. Just enough time to get out.
She hesitated, knowing that if she left now, she would have nothing. She reached out to remove the chip and saw a blinking light at the base of the chip slot and a tiny blinking icon on the display. “Click,” she said, and a message popped up.

“Backup incomplete. Continue verify?” the display said.

Did Mom pull the chip out early
?

“Yes,” Meriel said.

“Thank you, Meriel,” the console replied, and Meriel smiled.

“Verify invalid. Recopy?” the console asked.

Recopy
?
That meant the copy buffer might still contain data. The copy buffer was part of the operating system, and the OS was not wiped. An image of her mom’s data might still exist in the copy buffer, and no one would know unless someone inserted a chip with the correct chip ID.

“Verify invalid. Recopy?” the console repeated. A recopy would wipe out all similar files on the sim-chip. If it saved the old, a recopy still might wipe out anything that the computer did not associate with another file. That might wipe out just about everything except the file names, but she did not have another chip or the time to get one.

“Archive old. Recopy,” Meriel said and crossed her fingers.

“Thank you again, Meriel.” The copy icon came up and spun. Meriel’s suit O
2
now blinked red and beeped continuously. She was out of air and sucking dust.
Zero plus three, zero plus three,
she repeated to herself.

“Countdown from three minutes,” she instructed her suit.

“Copy complete,” the console said. Again, there was not enough time to verify. She removed the chip and stuck it in again to check its integrity.

“Jump destination: Enterprise,” the console said. “Initiating jump prep.” Lights on the console winked, and the computer behind the smoked plastaglass wall lit up.

“Negative! Abort jump!” Meriel said. Her mom had loaded a self-executing nav program.

“Countermanding. Idle,” the console announced and dimmed its lights. “Continue validation?”

Yes or No
? Meriel watched the suit’s countdown clock. She had less than a minute’s worth of air. “No,” she said, gasping for breath as the rebreather only scrubbed out the CO
2
now. The chip could be trash, but she was out of air. She’d have to take a leave from the
Tiger
to get another shot at this.

She scrambled to the air lock and tried alternative O
2
cylinders but found only empties. She struggled for air and dropped to her knees, looking back to the alt-bridge, but there was no time left to go back and validate the chip. She hit the exit-request button on the air-lock door and lunged inside and then opened her helmet and gasped for air that flooded the lock. Unseen by Meriel, a small iris blinked at her, the iris of the camera on the security spider that had tucked itself into a dark corner of the air lock.

After wiping the warm-suit to remove hair and sweat and contaminate any DNA samples she might have left, she jumped back toward the maintenance shuttle to return to the station. At the turn of a corner, she noticed two other maintenance personnel behind her jumping in her direction. Meriel approached the shuttle dock, expecting the air-lock door to open, but the door remained shut and did not acknowledge her ID.
Did the ID dissolve already
? she wondered. The others approached quickly. If the door did not open for her, they would know she did not belong there and alert security.

The security ID
. Nick had not cleared the ID this far, and she had not reset it after leaving the
Princess
. Meriel hurriedly pressed the wound on her wrist, and it blinked yellow under the skin, but her wrist started to bleed again. She turned her back to the approaching workers and watched her wrist blink yellow.

“Hey, newbie,” someone behind her said. “Having problems?” Just then, her wrist blinked blue, the door opened, and she turned.

“No,” she said. “Just not in a hurry to get back home.”

“Let me know if your boyfriend needs a sub,” one of them said and laughed.

“Sure,” Meriel said.

“Better have that looked at,” the other said pointing to the blood soaking her shirt cuff.

“Will do.” She dripped with sweat and breathed too fast as she entered the shuttle, gripping the hand-hold to steady her shakiness until the artificial gravity settled them onto the deck. With gravity restored, the blood flowed preferentially downward to the edge of her cuff and a small drop fell to the floor of the shuttle unobserved. The three rode to the Enterprise red-zone dock in silence.

Leaving red-zone as fast as possible was imperative, but she would not make it to the exit like this, clammy and faint. She walked quickly to the bathroom across the hall. Once inside, she splashed cold water on her face and washed the blood from her shirt cuff. She held onto the sink to steady herself, but that did not help, and she ran into a stall and threw up.
God, what am I doing here
? she thought. When she could walk, she went back to the sink and wiped the mess off her coveralls, but they still reeked.

Maintenance and security personnel entered the bathroom. Pretending to clean her coveralls, Meriel put her head down, grabbed a wipe, and rubbed the stain.

“Phew,” one said. “What sewer did you crawl out of?”

“Drunk tank,” Meriel said.

“I suggest burning those blues.”

Meriel left the bathroom and walked out of red-zone to green, recycled her maintenance coveralls and the service bag, and hurried back to see Nick. This time when she pressed the wound on her wrist, it did not flash.

***

The watcher clicked his link and activated a tight-beam laser from the security station to a shuttle just docking.

“What is it now, Bob?”

“She’s here,” Bob said.

“It’s been quiet for years. How do you know?”

“The spider got a holo,” the watcher said and transferred a video of Meriel exiting the
Princess
.

“Damn. Is she still there?”

“She left.”

“Take care of it.”

“She’s still too visible, and the timetable is too close,” Bob said. “Our job is just to keep this quiet for a few more weeks.”

“Make her disappear before it gets worse. Now. One more step and it’ll be out of our hands and…and more aggressive forces will intervene.”

***

When Meriel approached Nick’s door, her link displayed “G2445rt,” which was the same address but one level higher. She took a people mover to an office complex with a stunning android secretary in a much nicer part of the station. It was an office suitable for corporate clients requiring specialty security services. However, the
rt
suffix indicated a service entrance around the corner of a neighboring shop where garbage would be picked up. Meriel did not question his paranoia, and Nick opened the door with a worried look on his face as soon as she appeared.