I slipped my hand into my pocket and flipped the safety off.
“Move!” Larson roared at the Captain. His humiliating defeat at the shuttle bay was visible in his gritted teeth, his flaring eyes.
“No”, said the Captain quietly, firmly, and turned his back to him.
It happened very fast, no more than a few seconds. Paralyzed by confusion more than by fear, we watched as Larson stepped forward and put the muzzle of his weapon to the base of the Captain’s neck. There was a click, a buzz, and the Captain fell to the floor, with a wisp of smoke curling up from his neck. Then Larson stepped over him and pointed the muzzle at the temple of the Captain’s head. Click, buzz, the body jumped and lay still.
The flight crew leaped upon the agents, and lines of blue light shot in every direction. At the same instant, I lurched forward and withdrew my gun. Pointing at Larson, I felt the frustrations of a lifetime concentrated in this one burning moment. Larson now saw me and raised his gun to shoot me down, but in his panic, he misfired and then the weapon clicked and clicked and did not buzz.
I heard a voice cry out, “No, Neil!”
I had closed my eyes for a second. Larson would now die, but reflexively, I could not watch myself kill a human being for the first time in my life. I pulled the trigger. There was a tremendous bang, and my eyes flew open.
There, standing between me and Larson, was Dariush with his hands raised toward me. For a moment, he looked me in the eyes, and seemed to nod as if he understood, and then he collapsed. Now Larson was fully exposed.
I blew a hole in his chest. A surprised look crossed his face. Blood spurted from the wound, and he fell to the floor. I was astonished. I had never quite thought of him as a real person—he was made of polyplast; he was made of paper. Now I knew that he was flesh and blood like me.
Then it hit me like a hammer blow that I had just shot Dariush. I dropped to my knees and crawled to him, desperately hoping that the wound was not grave. But he was dead.
*
What did I do then? The DSI agents had been disarmed. There was no more danger. The Captain was dead. Larson was dead. Dariush was dead. Two pools of blood were spreading across the floor.
Did I weep? Did I cry out to God for help? Did I beg him to rewind the tape and record a different scene?
I did none of this. Instead I rose to my feet, and in a fit of insane rage I aimed at the ship’s control consoles and fired bullets into them, one after another until the chambers were empty.
Why did I do that?
I do not know.
With shaking hands, I found a few more bullets in my pocket, and inserted one into the chamber. I put the muzzle to my temple. I pulled the trigger, but someone had grabbed my arm, and the bullet whizzed past the side of my skull and shattered a computer screen. Then my arms were pinned behind my back, and the gun yanked from my grasp. Silence fell upon the room. Those of us who were still alive stood there panting.
*
The remaining DSI agents on board were locked away in their own departmental prison, six people in all. The prison was found after a lengthy search, since the prisoners had not felt inclined to give directions to it. It was a maze of rooms and chambers occupying a wing of Concourse D, an entire annex unto itself. There was no reference to it in the ship’s indices of services, nor was it outlined in the floor plans as illustrated in the Manual. The diagram of rooms in that area was a deception, a blanked-out zone with a few representative inner wall lines and the whole of it designated as “departmental administration”. The room layout proved to be, in the concrete, quite different. It had a dozen detention cells and a medical section as well. I wondered if David had died in it.
Both Larson and the Captain were buried in space. Though I was hardly fit for human company, I attended Dariush’s funeral, if funeral it was—a memorial service of some kind. I could barely stand to be there—me, his killer—but I owed him at least this. All those who were not in prison attended. Dariush had chosen that in the event of his death his body be kept in deep freeze until its internment on Earth. Before it was committed to the ship’s morgue, several cleaning and cooking personnel and some flight staff knelt before the casket and prayed, among them our young Hispanic ensign. The majority stood back with bowed heads. They were still doing it when I left abruptly, unseen by any eyes. I returned to my room and code-locked the door behind me.
I spent the next week absolutely alone. I did not respond to knocks. I did not look at my e-mail. I had no means to do away with myself, other than by starving myself to death, and this I tried without success. I ate nothing and drank only a little water. Sisyphus redux. Inheritor of J. Robert’s mantle. Einstein’s Pinocchio. I want to be a real boy. Real boys create and destroy worlds. Real boys create and destroy themselves.
*
It was the Commander who pulled me out of my deadly plunge.
He came to my door one day and knocked. Lying prone on my bed, I did not respond. He knocked again and again. Finally, he shouted loud enough for me to hear him through the walls: “Dr. Hoyos, it’s the Commander. I understand why you want to be alone. However, I need your help.”
Still, I would not open the door.
“Sir,” he continued, “I have the override code for your door, and I could open it from outside. But I wish to respect your privacy. Won’t you give me a moment of your time?”
I whispered “Open” in Spanish, and the door disappeared.
The Commander entered my room.
“I know how you feel”, he began. “We’ve all suffered a severe trauma. The Captain was my closest friend. Now I am in command of the Kosmos, and I have to ask you to help me. We’re in serious trouble.”
I got up and went into the bathroom, avoiding looking at my face in the mirror. I bent over and put my lips to the tap, taking a long drink.
“What kind of trouble?” I croaked.
He brought me up to the command center on KC. When we entered the flight deck, staff members were standing or seated before consoles, but any who looked up and recognized me merely gave a solemn nod or looked away, or tried not to see me at all.
The Commander and I halted before the Captain’s consoles. There were three main ones within arm’s reach of his chair and half-a-dozen others within a roll of the chair. What they were exactly I could not guess.
“We have considerable physical damage, as you can see”, he said by way of opening. “There is likely some systems damage as well. This poses no immediate threat, since as far as we can tell the ship is flying true to course, which it will do all the way to Earth.”
“What’s broken?” I asked, looking around at the several consoles with blast holes in them and shattered circuit modules visible within.
“These three main ones are sub-controls of the ship’s master control system—a component of the main computer, in other words. To put it in laymen’s terms, this central one is for the nuclear / anti-matter propulsion engines, basically for stop and go. The one beside it is for maneuvering in zero gravity, connected to the auxiliary propulsion engines for changing course. This one over here is for the acceleration and deceleration controls that lower the forward and aft tubes for braking or speeding up.”
“Can it be fixed?” I asked.
“We’re hoping, and we have seven years to try to do it. The end of that period is when deceleration must begin. Deceleration is a long process. Are you following me?”
“I understand the process. You’re saying that if we can’t begin deceleration at the appointed time we’re going to overshoot Earth’s orbit.”
“Yes, that’s the main problem.”
“Are the reactors destabilized?”
“No, they’re fine. And thankfully, the propulsion engines had already shut down before the . . . the incident. We’re now coasting through space, you see, maintaining a constant speed. But when we approach the deceleration point, we’ll need propulsion functional in order to initiate reverse thrust, a series of micro-bursts that gradual
ly increase over a five-month period.”
“And you’re getting no response from test commands?”
“That’s right. All kinds of circuits are down, and, to be honest, most of us here on deck have only a general concept of how they operate. We understand the buttons and buzzers, so to speak, but not how the neurons are connected.”
“Do we have any electronics engineers on board?”
He shook his head. “They were all down at the temple that day, wanting to see the aliens’ ship come alive.”
“How many nuclear engineers?”
“One.”
“Anti-matter people?”
“None, but they wouldn’t have been much help anyway.”
“Computer technicians.”
“Two are aboard, but they weren’t the people in charge of checking and troubleshooting the main system. They both are very good at what they do, programming and code analysis and the like, and in a pinch they can do some hard-wiring. But there are limits to their knowledge. Compartmentalization of skills and responsibilities was standard practice during the voyage. The people who could have fixed this are dead.”
“In the explosion on Nova, you mean?”
“Yes. Add to the situation the fact that plenty of original design went into the making of the Kosmos, much of it protected by security clearance. There were secret protocols as well, none of which we’ve yet been able to locate, let alone hack into.”
“So the technicians don’t know what to do.”
He nodded and exhaled. “We thought you would be able to tell us a few things. Anything might turn out to be a help. After all, you designed the ship.”
“I came up with the mathematics and the integration of the branches of physics involved, not the actual hands-on mechanics of it.”
His face fell.
“But I’ll take a look and see what I can do.”
I stared at the blast holes I had made in the consoles. I could hardly believe I had done that. But I had done it, and now I would have to pick up the pieces.
“There were a lot of people firing guns that day”, said the Commander.
I glanced at him.
“It was a confused situation”, he went on. “You may have saved some of the crew’s lives. Those DSI agents looked fit to kill. Indeed, they killed the Captain.”
He was being very kind. Yes, I had killed Larson, and yes, maybe this had given the crew enough time to overcome the agents. But I had also killed Dariush. I had shot the albatross, and then gone on a rampage that could well turn out to be the end of us all.
He seemed to know my thoughts, and doubtless this was because the truth of the matter was in everyone’s thoughts.
“DSI weapons damaged some of the consoles”, he said.
“Give me a few days to think about it”, I said at last. “I need to do some brain work. We’ll have to search the main computer and familiarize ourselves with how it works. There may be a trail to the master design of the ship’s commands. There are other options, which we can discuss after we try a few things.”
“Excellent!” he said, brightening.
“Does KC have a master fail-safe control?”
“Yes, but it’s damaged too.”
“You say there’s been no alteration of course.”
“None.”
“That means there’s no damage to navigation control.”
“We’re hoping that’s the case. The N console was hurt but not as badly as others. It was done by an e-charge, not by a bullet. It doesn’t mean we’re guaranteed control of navigation at the other end of the voyage, but for now we’re on the straight and narrow.” He paused. “Look, Dr. Hoyos, can I suggest that you move up here to one of the KC apartments? It would be good if you were close at hand. Then we wouldn’t have to break down your door every time we need a light bulb changed.”
It was an attempt at humor, and a generous one it was. But there was no humor left in me.
“Thank you”, I murmured. “I’ll stay where I am for the time being. The silence helps me think more clearly.”
He looked dubious. “Well, then, can I suggest you start taking your meals with us again. The cafeteria on deck A at the usual hours. It’s where everyone is eating these days. Would you consider it?”
“You should throw me in prison.”
He looked embarrassed. “No one’s going to throw you in prison. You shot the man who shot our Captain. Let’s leave it at that.” So we left it at that.
I returned to my room with much to ponder. I no longer wanted to kill myself. That would come later, after we were back on Earth. In the interim, I would help get us all home, and I would testify against DSI during the hearings, and I would do my best to convince the government that another expedition to Nova was the worst idea in the known universe. That was enough to live for.
*
We worked endlessly on the main computer during those first years. One of the technicians was an analyst, and he was also, by his own admission, a hacker. He wasn’t the genius that David had been, but he worked his way deep into the system’s quantum memory, and during the second year, he found our trail. There came a day when it led to where we had hoped it would lead. I won’t try to explain this “thing”, this zone or component or coded digital mystery. It would take a very long book to describe how it worked, and even then computer specialists would have a grueling task reading it and understanding it. In short, it was a layout plan for the circuitry of the entire ship. That sounds simple enough. But one would have to know the nature of this circuitry to realize how brilliant and how nearly impenetrable it was. For example, there were three tiers of fail-safe codes for every main system, including propulsion / anti-matter, internal functions, gravity, navigation, etc. It had been designed in such a way that if one fail-safe failed, the second cut in and took over. If the second failed, then the third took over. If the third failed, well then, we were cooked. No one had anticipated a man firing a bullet into a fail-safe over-sight console, the Über-fail-safe of the multi-faceted fail-safe system. That is just one of the things I had accomplished on that fatal day. I had blasted a little hole through the ship’s immune system, and now we were very, very ill, perhaps terminally.
Discovery of this “zone”, however, was only one step in piecing together how the ship operated and how the malfunctions could be corrected. We checked through every computer terminal in the public libraries, hoping to find a wayward back alley that would lead us deeper into the main memory and show us the connections to connections to connections. We word-searched endlessly and came up with nothing. Hacking deeper into the system produced no results.
Throughout several months, every room in the Kosmos was ransacked in the hopes that we would find a back-up system that bypassed the main computer with its defunct fail-safes. There were thousands of rooms, each with its max that had to be checked, the private ones as well as those of the myriad bureaucratic desks, plus the larger maxes in the administration offices of various departments. It was a hacker’s free-for-all. We even picked our way through the medical clinics, and I spent one whole day deleting my personal medical records from the files of Drs. Sidotra, Arthur, and the director of Medicine (DDM had died at AS-VT).
I also took pains to go through the computers in the head office of DSI. My personal dossier in the latter was most interesting—and the most sordid. This alone I preserved as evidence, since it showed clearly that my psychotic demise had been carefully planned. There was a file on David Ayne as well, but it had been scrubbed clean, leaving a simple biography and the final notation, “Death by accident, Mundus Novus.” I checked to see if Pia had a personal dossier, and indeed she did (I was to learn that 675 people had security dossiers, with Skinner and Larson exempted). Fastidiously collected were Pia and Paul’s love e-mails to each other, which I left unread. There was a record of her faithful dispensing of the anti-psychosis drug. Somehow they had also come across her protest letter to the Captain early in the voyage. Penned at the botto
m of the copy was a note: Typical superficial alarm response. Otherwise reliable. No further action required.
I checked into Paul’s file. There, I found a long history of security investigations (unbeknownst to the observed man), and, again, copies of the love notes. There was also a psychological assessment (aggressive Alpha-male) and a letter from Larson to Skinner in socio-speak, referring to the head of Navigation as Potentially troublesome—further surveillance recommended. Then I checked Xue’s and Dariush’s dossiers, and in both there were documents tracing their involvement with our early anti-surveillance revolts. The investigation had been closed on both men with the summary notations: Dupes of Hoyos or McKie, involvement ceased. No further action required. Other than this, there were brief biographies and academic accomplishments.
Behind the department’s bureaucracy section, we found the section where surveillance had been gathered. It was a room with digital recording modules and seats for a dozen staff members. It wasn’t difficult to get through the security gates, a matter of hacking a simple access code, and opening up the files for what looked like every max on the ship. Residences were listed by individual sub-code numbers. For example, mine was R-B-124. I listened to an hour of my solitary mutterings, snores, and sneezes, etc. Fast-forwarding through days and months and years, I came across nothing but eccentric innocence. My e-surfing had been meticulously recorded, mainly research in the fields of astronomy and poisonous snakes. David had done what he said he had done.
I typed in Xue’s room code and heard human breathing and occasionally some whispered Chinese words that may or may not have been prayers. His surfing had always been in the realm of physics and oriental poetry.
Stron’s file was vastly more colorful, but, like those of the other conspirators, it revealed nothing particularly damning.
Then I selected random room numbers of people I didn’t know. Nosey, unethical, but I was curious to know how far DSI had gone. It produced everything from the intimate to the banal:
A tap of a key, a woman’s voice: “. . . so I said to her, if you bat your eyelashes at him one more time, I’ll tell him what you’re really like.”