Lost Planet 02 - The Stolen Moon (3 page)

“Captain wanted me to secure them and get them somewhere safe. I was taking them up to the armory.”

Forquera shook his head. “Armory's no good—Poliski's team is out doing a sweep of the ship to check for any signs of external incursion.”

“You think this could be an outside attack?” asked Parker. “I highly doubt it.”

Chase's blood went cold. Parker had told him that it was impossible to hack the ship from the outside, but maybe someone had found a way. Parker didn't know everything, after all.

Forquera's eyes flickered briefly to Parker. “Take them to the brig. All the cells are empty right now.”

“No,” said Chase firmly. He'd spent time in that brig before and had no interest in revisiting it.

“Take us to the engine room,” said Parker. “I can help fix the problem.”

“The bridge—” Maurus started.

“Absolutely not,” said Forquera.

“Engine room. Engine room. Engine room,” said Parker, like an obnoxious parrot.

“Enough!” barked Forquera. The communicator at his belt beeped, and he looked down at it. “Lieutenant, just make sure they don't get in the way.” He turned and continued into the hallway after his men.

As soon as the door closed behind Forquera, Parker crossed his arms. “Engine room.”

Maurus sighed. “Please, don't make this hard. You know I'm still under extra surveillance right now.” After Maurus was framed for orchestrating the Trucon disaster, Captain Lennard had publicly cleared him of any involvement with the plot, but because he had learned along the way that Maurus actually had covered up his past involvement with the Karsha Ven rebel group when he joined the Fleet, Maurus's return to the
Kuyddestor
had come on the condition that he let himself be monitored.

Parker snorted. “We know nobody's surveilling you right now, there's no power. Besides, Forquera never explicitly said
not
to take us to the engine room.” He prodded Chase toward the stairs that headed down toward the engine deck. “Look, Chase is going there, and oh no, there's no way you can stop him. Better keep up so you don't lose track of him.”

Chase took a halfhearted step down the stairs, giving Maurus an apologetic look.

Maurus had the flat expression of someone who was about to give in. “If they yell at us to leave, there won't be any objections.”

Parker grinned. “They won't ask me to leave. I'll be quiet as a ghost.” He gave Chase another prod and then jogged down the stairs ahead of him. “Hey, is it true that Colonel Forquera used to be a smuggler before he joined the Fleet?”

“Where did you hear that?” asked Maurus sharply.

Chase's head snapped to attention. Parker had never mentioned this to him before.

“Just some talk I overheard.”

“Do you believe all the gossip you hear?”

“Well, if it walks like a Horga, and talks like a Horga…”

Chase frowned at Parker's back. How many other things had he heard about and not shared?

“He wouldn't have been allowed to join the Fleet if he was a smuggler,” said Maurus. After a long pause, he added, “I heard he raced in the comet-chaser circuits. So, yeah, he probably ran with some pretty sketchy people, but I doubt he did anything illegal.”

“Or maybe he just didn't get caught,” said Parker with a sly smile in his voice. “I heard you can still get into the Fleet if you lie about your past.”

“Shut up,” said Chase. That last comment had been a dig at Maurus.

“Yeah, Parker, give it a rest,” mocked Lilli.

“Did anyone ever tell you you're really annoying?” said Parker.

“Enough,” said Maurus in a firm voice. “Move aside. I'll take the lead here.”

They had reached the bottom level of the starship, the engine deck. The engine room itself was located in the rear half of the ship, but someone had tossed phoswhites on the ground down the length of the hall to light the way. They walked past soldiers prying open doors with crowbars, while other soldiers jogged by them, passing information to one another in urgent tones.

The door to the engine room had been jimmied halfway open, and in the dimly lit space behind it, shapes moved among the shadows. Maurus squeezed inside and pointed for everyone to stand along the back wall.

The engine room was technically an entire suite of individual chambers, but when people referred to it, they meant the big, circular room that ran around the engine core. At any given time there were at least a dozen engineers seated at the consoles and walking briskly from room to room. Chief Engineer Kobes practically lived there full time, reviewing calculations and barking orders. Chase had met him on a few occasions and was always somewhat intimidated by the stout, perpetually grumpy older man.

One of the consoles in the room was glowing, and a group of engineers including the chief stood clustered around it. “We were running a standard system upgrade on the navigation controls, but instead of performing a concurrent reboot like it always does, it crashed the entire mainframe,” said Chief Kobes loudly.

“How soon until you get it back up?” crackled a deep voice from a handheld communicator held up by one of the engineers.

“We've had to reboot the whole mainframe from scratch. We're scrapping the update and reverting to the previous version. The reboot time is short enough that there won't be a lapse in any of the life-support systems. All electrical power should be back shortly, although navigation and propulsion might take up to half a day to get fully back online.”

Parker stepped forward with a loud, attention-getting cough. Maurus snatched at his arm, but Chief Kobes had already looked up. “Who's back there?”

Maurus spoke up in a hurry. “It's Lieutenant Maurus, sir. Captain sent me to secure these young passengers and take them somewhere safe. Engine room was closest. We'll keep out of your way.”

But Parker was already walking past him toward the console, ignoring Chase hissing his name to try to get him to stop. “If it's just a system update that crashed the entire mainframe of the ship, then why are the emergency lights out too? Those should be on a separate network.”

Kobes squinted at him for a second. “That's not my biggest concern at the moment. Power will be back up shortly.”

“Doesn't it seem kind of strange to you that
all
the lights went out? That would have to override multiple safety redundancies.”

“It's a giant starship with a lot of integrated systems, kid. Glitches happen.”

“I want a look at that code you were updating with,” Parker said.

A growl fit to match his bulldog face came from the back of the chief's throat. “I don't have time for this. Lieutenant, get him out of here.”

Muttering apologies, Maurus grabbed the back of Parker's shirt and shoved him toward the door, waving for Chase and Lilli to follow. When they were back in the dark hallway, he hissed, “Is that what you meant by quiet as a ghost?”

Parker twisted out of his grip. “They're making a mistake. I don't think this blackout was an accident.”

Chase's pulse spiked. This was it, the attack he'd been expecting for the past three months. “We should go to the captain and tell him before things get worse. What if we're already under attack? Would we even know if we're being surrounded right now?”

Maurus stopped and raised his hands. “First off, if this were an attack, the best thing to do would be to let the Chief and his crew get the mainframe back online as quickly as possible. Not pester him about technicalities.” He glared at Parker. “The second best thing, Chase, is to keep a cool head and not overreact. The captain and the rest of the bridge team have things under control. You saw that Colonel Forquera and his team were sent out to look for possibilities of external incursion. The ship's already on high alert. But you heard the Chief, it was very likely just a problem with a system upgrade. If there's something else wrong with the ship, the engine crew will find it.”

Parker shook his head. “They won't be looking for sabotage. They can't expect retaliation for something they don't know about.”

“And when this is over, you can investigate the blackout to your heart's content,” said Maurus. “But for now, you let the crew do what they were trained to do. They've got the ship under control. You do your part and be a respectful passenger.” As if to emphasize Maurus's words, dim blue lighting flickered on overhead. “And there's the emergency lighting.”

“Only fifteen minutes too late,” retorted Parker, before he turned and headed back to the stairs.

Maurus saw them back up to their rooms on the soldiers' level, where Parker went straight to his desk and checked the connections on his computer before trying to power it back up. The air and regular lighting had kicked back on while they were walking up the stairs. Chase stood behind him, still shaken from the blackout and trying to formulate the question he'd resisted asking in front of Maurus. “Is it possible … with all the hacking you've been doing, piggybacking on the mainframe…”

That made Parker look up from his screen. “Are you serious? You think
I
caused the mainframe to crash?”

“I know you're good at what you do, but this isn't a house or a cruiser, it's a humongous complicated starship. Maybe you did something by accident.”

Parker narrowed his eyes. “A starship's core is nothing more than a great big computer. Sure, it's a computer that makes engines fire and produces gravity and maintains life support, but at the basic level it's still just a very complex computer. That's all. And I know computers better than anyone.” He turned his back on Chase and tapped his finger on the desk, waiting for his console to start up.

Chase paced in front of the bunk, restless. As usual, there didn't seem to be much he could do to help. “So what should I do?”

“I don't know,” muttered Parker. “Do anything, for once.”

Chase stopped. “What's that supposed to mean?”

Parker turned around with the irritated expression that Chase knew meant he was being distracted from what he really wanted to do. “It means you spend every day sitting in this room or you mope around the ship, lurking in the officers' lounge or mooning over a videofeed of the captain. You don't actually
do
anything else.”

Chase's mouth dropped open slightly as Parker spoke. “What do you want me to do then, just forget about everything else and make a new life here while I wait either for you to find something on Asa or the Fleet to hunt us down and wipe us out? Should I find some buddies to play a dumb game with? This isn't a home—it's a refuge! And I'm not moping around all day. I have my sister to watch over.”

Parker rolled his eyes and turned back to his computer. “Your sister is fine, let her be. Just relax and try to live your life for a while, okay? Find something you like to do and do it.”

“I don't even know what I like to do,” Chase muttered.

“Ugh, Chase, come on,” groaned Parker.

But there really wasn't anything Chase could think of that he wanted to do besides look for Asa and defend himself and the others against potential Fleet attacks. How could he possibly concentrate on anything else? “What can I do to help find the hacker?”

Parker sighed. “Nothing, honestly. Just let me look into the blackout. You heard Maurus. It was probably just a ‘glitch' anyway.”

“You don't believe that,” said Chase.

Parker didn't turn around. “Nope. I'd bet my life on it. I just hope I don't have to.”

 

CHAPTER THREE

Rather than sitting in his room pointlessly watching Parker click on a screen and stressing himself out more by looking for clues in computer code he had no hope of understanding, Chase went out to the hallway to walk off his nervous energy and see if he could learn anything from being out around the crew. The officers' lounge was empty, but that came as no surprise. He'd been walking for fifteen minutes before he realized he'd completely forgotten about his appointment with the ship's medical officer.

Now he stood outside the empty quarters of Dr. Bishallany one floor down on the civilian level, apparently too late. Or maybe the appointment had been canceled—he hadn't bothered to check his messages before leaving his room. After trying the notification key a second time, he stepped back to leave.

The door slid open, but instead of the slight, balding form of Dr. Bishallany, standing before him in the doorway was a girl with long, honey-colored hair who looked about his age. A girl he'd never seen before.

Chase stared at her.
Say something, you dope.

She waited a moment, raising her eyebrows. “Can I help you?”

“Who are you?” he asked, blurting out the first thing that came to mind.

She crossed her arms. “I'm Dr. Bishallany's daughter. Who are you?”

“I'm … Chase.” Since when did Dr. Bishallany have a daughter? She didn't look anything like him.

The girl leaned against the doorframe. “What do you want, Chase?”

“Um. I'm here to see the doctor?” He said it as if he were asking a question, and then gave himself a mental kick in the pants.

She shook her head. “These are his private quarters. Medical offices are on the third level.”

“Yeah, I know.” Chase squinted at her. “I, uh…”

Behind her, the slope-shouldered doctor hurried toward the entrance. “Chase, hello there. This is my daughter, Analora. She just got here a few days ago.” He placed a hand on his daughter's arm. “Chase takes his sessions down here, my dear. I'm sorry, Chase, I should have sent you a message. There were some injuries caused by the blackout, and I'm heading up to the medical bay right now to help out. We'll have to reschedule our appointment.”