Suicide Run

“Single Burleson,” Zoya said.

  “Why is that a problem?”

  “Single point of failure loses the ship and the crew. Even with a good mean time between failures, the number of ships in space will almost guarantee regular losses.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I’m still not following,” Zoya said.

  “Single point of failure. They’re trying to solve a growth problem with engineering and they’re overlooking the larger problem because it’s been there all along.”

  “Single point of failure?”

  Natalya nodded. “Where do they collect all the data?”

  Zoya shrugged. “Bowie, isn’t it?”

  “That’s what we’ve been led to believe.”

  “I still don’t get it,” Zoya said.

  “The problem is getting all the data in and out of Bowie in a timely manner, right?”

  Zoya nodded. “Nearly exponential growth putting more demand on their distribution network than they can accommodate.”

  “What if that’s not the problem? What if the real problem is a single point of failure?”

  Zoya’s eyes widened. “If the hub fails, the wheel breaks.”

  “So why aren’t they addressing that?” Natalya asked.

  “Maybe they are and we’re not aware of it,” Zoya said. “It’s not like these are amateurs cobbling together a network out of bits and pieces they found in a closet.”

  Natalya paused and let that sink in a moment. “Possible. We weren’t given any options when we made our run, though.”

  “And Dorion keeps talking about getting the data back to Bowie,” Zoya said. “If we could do anything, what would we do?”

  “The new boats are a good idea,” Natalya said. “Fast, specialized, long legs, and hard to see.”

  “Relatively low cost,” Zoya said. “Exchanging pilots to keep the ships flying even when the pilots are tapped out makes them cost effective.”

  “So, what if there were regional hubs?” Natalya said.

  “How does that help the single point of failure?”

  “If every hub has the same data, no single hub failure could kill the network.”

  “How do you reconcile them? Don’t you still have the same problem you have now?” Zoya asked.

  Natalya let the question play in her brain while she took another slurp of coffee. “No,” she said. “Now Dorion needs to have every ship dump their data here. If the collectors had a hub closer to their operating region, they wouldn’t need such long legs. The ships assigned to that hub could service each node without the long jumps between nodes.”

  “We didn’t have that many long jumps,” Zoya said.

  “We also don’t know how indicative that route was.”

  “True.” Zoya nodded. “We’re back to reconciliation.”

  “That could be done easily with a few ships dedicated to humping the data once a day.”

  “Is a day frequent enough?” Zoya asked.

  “What’s the gap now? It’s got to be at least three days based on the schedule we flew.”

  “It solves another problem,” Zoya said after a few moments.

  “Which one’s that?”

  “Places where there’s more growth can get more ships. As the demand density builds in a region, the mechanisms would be in place to allow the infrastructure to scale up. First with more ships and eventually with a dedicated hub.”

  Natalya nodded. “I like this. It’s a better solution than what they’re doing now.”

  “If that’s all they’re doing,” Zoya said, a cautionary note in her voice.

  “It doesn’t answer the question about Pittman and who’s trying to kill the project.”

  “Follow the money,” Zoya said. “Who gains if the project fails?”

  “Or who lost out because they didn’t get the project for themselves?” Natalya asked.

  “Like who’s trying to hurt it just enough to replace Pittman?”

  Natalya nodded. “Downs has a pretty fat cushion of credits to skim and it sounds like he’s already grabbing his slice. What if he had the whole project to skim from and nobody looking over his shoulder?”

  “Could be a lot of golden eggs out of a goose like that,” Zoya said. After a moment, she said, “We need to talk to Dorion.”

  Natalya raised an eyebrow. “What if it’s Dorion?”

  Zoya shrugged. “Have to start somewhere. Pittman would be my first choice but she slammed that door in our faces.”

  “Let’s go talk to Dorion, then. What’s the worst that can happen?”

  “I don’t even want to think about that,” Zoya said with a mock shudder. “We’re kind of exposed.”

  Natalya paused. “I was thinking the worst thing might be he’d fire us.”

  Zoya snorted. “I guess I’m a pessimist. My thought was more fatal.”

  Natalya nodded. “Well, he could space us, I suppose, but he doesn’t strike me as the type.”

  “We know an awful lot. Can they let us go?”

  “We signed the nondisclosures and we’re bound by them. We break that contract and High Tortuga can get retribution pretty easily,” Natalya said.

  “What’s to stop them from getting it anyway?”

  “Nothing, I guess.” Natalya paused on her way to the cockpit. “So we better make sure we’re more valuable alive than dead.”

  Chapter 21

  CommSta Bowie

  2366, May 11

  DORION MET THEM AT the lock. His face could have broken asteroids. “What the hell, Regyri?”

  Natalya stood in the hatch and stared him down. “Which part? The part where that ship is a death trap? The part where it’s been sabotaged? Or the part where Alison Pittman is being set up to take the fall for the failed project?”

  His hard-rock face dissolved into disbelief. “What? What are you talking about? Pittman had me on the blower for half a stan complaining about you two insulting her and how she had to kick you off the station.”

  “Some people just can’t deal with reality,” Zoya said.

  “You wanna come have a cup of coffee or would you prefer to broadcast this up and down the docks?” Natalya asked, stepping back out of the way.

  Dorion shot them both a poisonous glare as he mounted the ramp and entered the ship.

  Zoya keyed the lock closed while Natalya led the way to the galley.

  “All right,” he said, leaning against the bulkhead. “Spill.”

  Natalya started prepping the coffee maker, looking over her shoulder at him. “First, the plans you showed us don’t match the ship.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “I mean that the plans you have are for a different ship than the prototype they wanted us to test.”

  “You’ve been there a week and this is the first I’ve heard about it.”

  “Pittman heard about it within a stan of our arrival,” Zoya said. “We’re just the hired help. Don’t you two talk?”

  “What’s different?” Dorion asked.

  “The most important change is that there’s only one Burleson drive,” Natalya said, punching the button to start brewing.

  “Is that a problem?”

  Natalya leaned against the opposite bulkhead and crossed her arms. “It’s a showstopper in terms of viability, but the larger point is that you don’t know the prototype for the ship you’re betting the station on doesn’t match the one they’ve told you they’re building. Doesn’t that bother you?”

  “I’m sure they have valid reasons,” he said. “Why is it a showstopper?”

  “Burlesons fail. Not often but when they do, it could cost the ship. That’s why every jump-capable ship has two. Even the Peregrine,” Natalya said. “You’re investing in a network to make it more reliable, not less. Sidestepping the issue of lost ships and pilots, you’d also lose the data and your business depends on that data. How much of it can you lose and still maintain your reputation?”

  Dorion paused at that. “Did they say why?
”

  “Cost,” Zoya said. “They spun some floss about the second drive adding a few percentage points to the cost. I doubt that it would stand up to a stiff breeze, let alone a forensic audit.”

  “Wait? Forensic audit? Who said anything about a forensic audit?”

  “If I were your boss, I’d insist on it,” Zoya said. “That whole project is rotten.”

  “Back up. Start at the beginning.”

  Natalya sighed. “The prototype is actually pretty sweet. The chief engineer on the project may be criminally inept, but the ship itself could be the answer to part of the problem you’re trying to solve.”

  “Who’s the chief engineer?”

  “A structural engineer named Anthony Downs,” Natalya said.

  “I know Downs,” Dorion said, his brow furrowing in a frown. “Structural engineer, right. Helped us set up this place.”

  “Pittman is working through her books to find out how much he’s skimming,” Natalya said. “But he’s way over his head in terms of ship design.”

  “I’d bet he didn’t design it,” Zoya said. “I suspect he just took the base design the original team gave him, fired them all, and started skimming off the top while his cousins and in-laws provided the parts at the low, low price of twice retail.”

  His eyes all but bugged out of his head on stalks. “You’re making some pretty serious accusations. Can you prove any of this?”

  Zoya held her hands up, palms out. “I’m not accusing anybody of anything. I’m just saying somebody with skin in this game needs to take a real hard look at what’s going on over on Pulaski.”

  He looked at Natalya. “What’s this about Pittman taking the fall?”

  “She’s flailing. She’s been there five months and still didn’t know that Downs was buying parts from his family,” Natalya said. “She’s probably an excellent administrator who’s used to dealing with well-structured problems of information flow. She has no idea who’s blowing smoke up her pants or who’s dealing from the bottom of the deck.”

  “It’s worse than that. She doesn’t seem to believe that it’s even possible,” Zoya said. “She kicked us off the station when we suggested that she needed to check into her inventory processes to see how badly she’s being robbed.”

  Dorion frowned and bit his lower lip. “Maybe she’s in on it.”

  Natalya felt her eyebrows trying to crawl into her hair at that. “I thought you were on her side.”

  “I’m not on anybody’s side,” he said, biting off his words. “I need those ships because I need to get this network service issue solved. I need them now but I’m not going to get them for weeks yet. I was counting on you two to get that shakedown done and here you are. Banned from the yard. On Pittman’s shit-list. Spouting tales of incompetence and sabotage? Who do you think you are?”

  Natalya pulled three cups from the rack and let him stew. She poured his coffee and handed him the mug before filling the other two. She paused to take a sip of hers before turning back to him. “I think we’re the small-ship experts you hired to help you figure out how to use those new boats. If you don’t want our expertise, we’ll be happy to butt out and leave you to it.”

  Dorion’s brows met over his nose with a tectonic furrow. He took a sip of coffee without taking his eyes off Natalya. “Uh-uh,” he said. “You signed a contract. You don’t get to walk away just yet.”

  Natalya shrugged. “You’re the boss. You tell me. How do you want it?”

  He swallowed his coffee and glowered into the mug. After several long moments he asked, “Why do you think Pittman’s being set up?”

  “They started development on this ship, what? Two stanyers ago?” Zoya asked.

  “Something like that,” he said, dipping into his coffee again.

  “It took them a stanyer to come up with a design and then all the original engineers left,” Natalya said.

  “That would have been about the time they started building the prototypes,” he said. “What of it?”

  “Who ordered them off? Where did they go?” Natalya asked.

  “Their work was done. They moved on. What does it matter?” Dorion asked.

  “Their work was just starting,” Zoya said. “They had a theoretical design and just as it’s about to be tested, they’re removed.”

  “That’s not normal,” Natalya said. “Who changed the design? How did they change it?”

  His eyes narrowed. “I’m not sure I’m following.”

  Zoya sighed, the exasperation clear on her face. “You can’t just slop a design on the page and expect it to work. No designer I know would do that. No competent engineer would walk away just as the building starts. What if they miscalculated? What if they measured wrong? What if—any number of things that might need a correction in order to make the ship work?”

  “Why all of them?” Natalya asked. “Fine, reduce the overhead, but removing all the designers? That smacks of coverup.”

  He leaned his head back against the bulkhead and seemed to stare at the overhead for a few moments. “Sabotage?”

  “The ship was sabotaged,” Natalya said. “Somebody jimmied the computer rack to short out the long-range against the display subsystems.”

  Dorion straightened and looked at her. “That’s a pretty strong accusation. Can you prove it?”

  “Not at the moment,” Natalya said. “We don’t even know when it might have been done, but it had to have been done on purpose.”

  “It’s a new ship. Maybe a tolerance was off?” he said.

  “It was a piece of conductive scrap lodged between the card racks in such a way that it shorted out two cards,” Zoya said. “The system would only fail if both display and long-range get used at the same time. Long-range doesn’t usually get started until you’re away from the station. Everything needs display.”

  “Why couldn’t it be an accident?”

  “Some things are just too improbable to be credited,” Zoya said. “Stick a piece of conductive material between two powered cards, they generally sizzle for a split second and die. This particular piece of conductive material managed to connect just enough of the two cards to make them both overheat without failing immediately. I only caught it because we were running pre-launch diagnostics on the ship and I spotted the temperatures spiking.”

  He stared at her. “So you pull it out and keep going, right?”

  “The original test pilot’s checklist didn’t include systems testing,” Natalya said. “He wouldn’t have found the problem until his ship died around him someplace between stations.”

  Dorion stared at her for several long moments. “What the hell were you two doing out there?”

  “Pittman gave us carte blanche to test the ship any way we wanted as long as we agreed to give it a shakedown run,” she said. “We found a lot of things out of whack. Connections not solid. Components missing. Normal stuff that you’d think would have been caught but wasn’t.”

  “I was running a full systems diagnostic suite because I wanted to find the underlying sensors for the various ship functions,” Zoya said. “The whole ship was rigged with idiot lights instead of actual data displays.”

  Dorion’s head twitched once. “Let me get this straight. You were trying to revise the pilot’s systems access before you’d take it out?”

  “Yes,” Zoya said. “It’s not safe to operate as it sits. It still wouldn’t have been safe but with decent instrumentation, we could have evened the odds a bit.”

  He shook his head. “So you two decided you know better than the team of engineers who put the ship together?”

  “We don’t know the team of engineers who put the ship together,” Natalya said, exasperation spitting onto the deck. “That’s the whole point. The ship we saw has fatal flaws. Flaws any ship designer would have spotted. Do you, by any chance, have the first draft design?”

  He paused at that. “Maybe,” he said. “I’d have to check my archives.”

  “Somebody must have it, and
I’d like to see it,” Zoya said.

  “I’m still not seeing the point of sabotage and trying to kill this project,” he said. “What makes you think that’s happening?”

  “Who gains if this project fails?” Natalya asked. “If the new ships don’t take over the network, who wins?”

  His head shook back and forth slowly. “Nobody wins.”

  “What about the chartered ships? Won’t they lose their contracts when the new ships come online?”

  “No,” Dorion said. “We’ll still need them. We’re only rolling out a few of the new ships until we see how well they work.”

  “Pittman is planning for a thousand,” Zoya said. “That’s a lot of ships.”

  “She also thinks they’re going out for weeks at a time,” Natalya said. “You two really need to talk more.”

  “Well, we may have to revisit that,” Dorion said, sipping from his coffee.

  Zoya and Natalya shared a glance.

  Zoya sighed.

  “All right, boss. What’s our next assignment?” Natalya said. “We may as well make as much as we can before this blows up.”

  He stared at them for a full tick. “We need those ships,” he said.

  “You need a solution to the correct problem,” Zoya said. “The ships are a piece of it, but they’re not the answer.”

  His lips flattened over his teeth. “Can you just trust us to know our own business?”

  Zoya shrugged. “I’m not convinced. How are you going to scale this solution when you’ve got another thousand stations to service?”

  “That’ll take decades,” Dorion said.

  “High Tortuga has been running this network for over two centuries,” Natalya said. “They’ve always kept it all in-house. Banking, communications, data. All under one roof. Everybody in the company is happy to spin off this subsidiary?”

  He shook his head. “I’m not that naive.”

  “Who gains if it fails?” Natalya asked again. “You keep saying nobody, but somebody has a vested interested in seeing it doesn’t come to fruition.”

  “Or wants to be in control of it when it does,” Zoya said. “That would explain Pittman being set up.”

  “Who was supposed to be in charge?” Natalya asked. “Who led the design team originally?”