3-1
“Here we go,” Trevor said. She already had the system tuned to the satellites in Daion space and was keying in the final code needed to start the sweep.
“Oh, wow. You’re really good at this,” Leo complimented. He watched her fingers ticking quickly on the controls. “My grandpa kept a couple of consoles this old when I was little. I learned satellites on this stuff.” She tapped a final tick and a progress bar appeared at the bottom of the screen of readouts. “You really don’t think of Daions as being other, do you?” It was a question, but she said it like a statement. Her fingers remained busy on the pressure pad and touch screen, pulling up more options and initiating a background scan so the sweep would be monitored for interference once it started, keeping her eyes busy so she didn’t have to look at him while she was talking to him. Leo hadn’t known the old equipment had the ability to monitor and verify itself; he wasn’t that far into reading the user manual. “I guess not. I mean, people are just people, right? Coalition history is only one version of what happened back then,” he said, completely absorbed in what she was doing and not really listening to what she was saying. “I’m not talking about in the broad, historical meaning. You – yourself – you really don’t see Daions as being other, do you?” Her hands stilled on the controls as she waited for his answer. He looked down at her fingers, his grip tightening on the back of the seat she was sitting in as he assembled the thoughts of his own truth into something he could verbalize. “I can’t see someone as other from having lived inside the same glass jar with them. You know my parents never grew up with anything, and what they could afford after having us kids was more of the same amount of nothing. We’re lowest caste. We got by, but it meant we lived the same caste and class and in the same Central World purlieus as a lot of displaced Daions. I even got standard education with a few in my school and classes. To my family, me getting a scholarship that paid for my Academy education was a really big event. Me coming out here on explorations as Analyst even more of one. I mean, I wear this uniform and suddenly I don’t have security vidcams following me through markets. “Back at home, though, without my uniform, I’m still lowest caste. I worked the entire time I was in Academy so I could afford to eat and rent a room to sleep in because the scholarship only paid for direct school costs. It’s just buckets on buckets of bolts that Daion survivors were scattered around Coalition space as lowest caste rather than being granted access, rights, and free passage back to their home sectors carried on a big apology. That treaty of equality or agreement or whatever it was… it might as well have been written with water on a hot stone. If Coalition had ever actually honored it, Daion descendants would have returned to their homes on their worlds rather than getting to the point right now where they’re disappearing from my parents’ purlieu and going… away, I guess. They’d be living on Daion worlds and this mock-up ‘exploration’ wouldn’t even be here, in Daion sectors, pretending we’re looking at uncharted worlds. We wouldn’t be here. We shouldn’t be here.” Trevor was breathing heavier than he could understand when he finished what felt to him like ranting. Her bottom lip was firmly pinched between her teeth and her eyes were searching his face. Her expression stayed pinched even when her lip popped free of her bite. “You really mean that?” she asked quietly. “Well…” He paused and did a quick internal scan. “Yes. I firmly believe what I just said.” “Would you still believe it knowing I was an eleven month gestation? And that my kids will have eleven month gestations?” she asked. Leo looked at her in confusion. Standard gestation for Coalition babies was ten months. Something in the early forms of space hibernation, during the historical phase of utilizing Advanced Cryo before the technology for over distance travel was developed, altered the genetics of those first explorers way back when explorations were one-way trips. Because of the altered genetics, Diaons had longer gestations for pregnancies. It was theorized as being a main part of the reason for their immune systems being stronger. Suddenly it all clicked. Trevor had talked about her transient family life and they’d both laughed about her grandfather’s distrust of modern technology despite being a shipside installer. How tightly knit her shipside family and community was. The strange celebrations and slang they had. All those things she’d easily passed off as differences in shipside verses landside cultures because Leo had only lived landside until his assignment to Dockland. “You’re Daion?” he asked. He kept his voice to a murmur because they hadn’t bothered to close the door and, although this specific room was usually unused, this part of the ship wasn’t. Even trying hard, he also couldn’t keep the note of hopefulness from sneaking into the question. “You’re asking that like you have some kind of fetish,” she stated. “What? No!” He held up both hands as if trying to ward away her words. “It’s just… never mind. This would sound so bad outside my head.” “Sounding like a bolt has never stopped you before,” she reminded him. “True,” he agreed, straightening up and shoving his hands into his pockets. “Don’t let sounding like a bolt stop you now, Leo. It’s currently just a fact about you,” Trevor said. Leo nodded reluctantly. “All right... I guess what I was thinking, and it’s going to sound bad, but you being Daion are makes ‘us’ easier for me,” he said. “I mean, my family isn’t much in the galaxy. You were, and remain, way above my class. You’re this awesome, smart enough to be honors level, beautiful woman from middle castes, and I’m the lowest caste scholarship winner who starved and barely slept for six years while working full time on nights, taking extra classes to keep my points up, and surviving on the hope I’d get to wear this uniform one day. I only got the scholarship because my mom’s work runs a lottery and I met the requirements to enter the draw. I won my scholarship out of a corporate lottery. It’s the only way anyone from my caste gets into Academies,” he explained, folding both hands into a ‘thumbs up’ and tapping the ends of his thumbs into his chest. “We might be the same caste if you publicly admit, I guess, but when it comes to class you and I aren’t in the same one at all,” he added with a shrug, his hands falling to his sides.
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2-5
The hallway at the base of the wide ladder up to the bridge was lined with brightly lit privates, single work stations available for anyone to use, the broad windows into each giving the hall an illusion of being wider. Leo and Trevor stepped behind the thin transglass of the first empty one and rolled the hanging door closed. It was a neutral space to work in. Otherwise they’d have to go to one of their cabins and…
The silence in the private was almost thick enough to have a flavor when Leo walked further in to stand behind the desk with Trevor. She was already working on the report. It only took a few minutes to draft a summary Captain could use, but they both hesitated on saving it to her shared folder. “The worst that could happen is we’re right and there’s some kind of strange Daion defensive threat someone else will have to deal with,” Leo said. His hands were stuffed into his pockets and his stomach was twisting at the thought of sending the summary. For some reason, it felt true about the stall tactic, but calling it a threat felt… “Daion defense systems were set up for defensive reasons. They were never the threat,” Trevor stated quietly. “I know, right?” Leo agreed. The quickness of his reply startled Trevor into looking at him. He didn’t notice, though, because he was staring at the screen and rereading their summary. “A whole civilization was wiped out due to not following proper first contact protocols, and the survivors abused and then othered so badly that now they’re dying off or hopefully going into hiding,” he said. “All because of the crass assumption that recent evolutionary divergence must mean resilience against the same viral infections. Everything built back then meant to protect Daions from coming into contact with Coalition populations is treated like some big threat now, as if they’d been aggressors and are now doling out posthumous offensive strikes. I keep thinking we need to word this summary differently so it doesn’t even hint at snippets of Radical conditioning, but other than recommending Coalition leave the planet alone…” His voice trailed off and he shrugged, shoulders slumping further down after the motion was complete than they had been before. “Maybe we should recommend that?” Trevor asked carefully. Leo scoffed a single laugh and cocked half a smile at her. “If there’s a weapon on that planet, or even the potential of one, Senior Coalition is going to want it. Our recommendation of leaving planet seventy-four alone would be deleted by the first member to read it.” “You’re right,” she admitted, her posture slouching to match his. “Unless it is just a useless, latent defense. Something set up in the final days in preparation that Coalition ships would come back one day and meant to stall scanners and give remaining Daions time to evacuate?” “That” –he stopped after the first word of starting to argue, her idea sinking past his initial theory and deeper into the history he knew– “that actually sounds more like something Daion culture would have developed.” He took his hands out of his pockets so he could cross his arms at his chest. It was his usual pose when thinking. “Dockland’s new control systems didn’t replace or corrupt the below decks operation room. The system linking to the old satellites predating modern NavCom still works fine. I bet we could do a search and be able to see if there are any active, automated evacuation or launch preparations occurring if we use the consoles down there.” “How do you even know the below decks system is active?” Trevor asked. “You’ve been avoiding me fairly often the past couple of weeks so I’ve had a lot of spare time,” he admitted without looking at her. He held his arm over the desk to transfer the file to his smart and then swiped his hand through the holoscreen to close the comp. “Come on. I’ve only ever seen Lastin in there and right now he’ll be sleeping. He’s the one who showed me how to run the satellite console. If there are satellites around planet seventy-four, we can do a sweep and add any findings to our summary. It’ll only take an hour.” Trevor was still at the desk when he rolled open the door. “Or I can go myself and save the file to your personal to review before saving for Captain,” he mumbled toward the floor. “Only someone using an old satellite system wrong would think it takes an hour,” she said, coming around the desk. “Obviously I need to set up the sweep.” He smiled at the floor. This conversation was the most she’d said to him in the past week, and calling him incompetent with the antique system was the closest she’d been to getting mean in the past month. He led the way down to the below decks control room. The consoles were a much previous generation to the old control system recently upgraded out of the bridge. Equipment down here was thick, clunky, and closely packed, each panel for the satellites hummed after being turned on, and all of them actually required physical touch and pressure to operate. Everyone on the crew was fairly certain the reason Captain hadn’t upgraded this room was because it was now a Coalition Historical Site and there were laws against disrupting those. Even the floor in here was covered by old fashioned sterilpoly tiles, cut to fit with glue in the seams, instead of the usual spray-in-place sterilpoly flooring that was everywhere else in Dockland. Trevor sat in the rigidly affixed seat in front of what Leo thought of as Satellite Viewing and Control and flicked on the switches to power up the panels. She was smiling about using the hands-on equipment, and chuckled as she pointed to the transglass screen providing a progress bar for how long remained until the system became completely live. A ridiculous four seconds passed before the screen flickered and the panel menu options appeared on the backlit display. “Imagine living in a time where this was considered top-notch technology,” Trevor mused, shaking her head at having to use a combination of a remote, pressure sensitive pad on the console top and the touch activated transglass screen to navigate the menu options. Every selection she made had an audible tick noise, as if the visual highlight of selecting the option she wanted wasn’t verification enough of the choice. After setting up commands for what they needed, she still had to use the manual keypad, switches, and pressure pad to finish approving and initiating the commands. Honestly, Leo loved the old equipment. He wasn’t adept at using it, but had found the laughably clunky handheld which contained the control room’s user manual – and had an actual glass screen, not even transglass – tied to one of the other consoles. And that didn’t mean tied as in the usual meaning of being linked; it was actually locked in a case welded to a physical chain which stopped the handheld from being taken further than one meter away from the console. The whole below decks control room was like stepping into an interactive museum simulation, except all the equipment for operating the outdated satellite system was functional and remained part of an old, refitted ship deployed as a scanner on exploration.
2-4
Leo looked at the screen in his hand, supposedly showing the latest scan he and Trevor had completed. He scrolled to the top of the report. It had the first date and time of being submitted to Captain, and the second date and time of having been submitted to Coalition Oversight.
The handheld was system linked, so Leo swiped out of the report and opened the ship’s system to look into recent archives. The original report saved in records was uncorrupted. The copy of the report saved in Captain’s backups was also uncorrupted. Trevor had been reading over his shoulder and tapped the corner tab of Captain’s backup copy to see the file transfer details. The file size after transfer was less than half of what it should have been, and the time in transfer was almost three seconds longer than usual. Trevor used the handheld she was holding to look up the copied report and found zero anomalies in the details. The original report from five cycles ago was uncorrupted. “Well?” Captain asked when they both stopped going through the information at hand. “You go first so mine makes sense,” Trevor said. She and Leo each walked around opposite sides of Captain’s desk so they were standing on either side of her, taking turns leaning forward as they explained the quick findings to prove the transmission to Coalition had been corrupted and not any of Dockland’s systems. “How did this even get caught?” Trevor asked when they were done. “The report came up as a redundancy error after being submitted and we were advised to re-preform the scan. We’ve had to do it before, but never for you two. When I queried the advisory, the bolt from Senior Coalition who just spoke to you requested a secure holovid to inform me three other ships had been affected for a similar shift offset so far. But only in our exploration group, none of the others have reported a clustered disruption.” “And you said it’s only affecting the ships in line for scanning planet seventy-four?” Leo asked Captain. She nodded agreement. “What’s wrong?” Leo asked Trevor. Looking at Captain had put Trevor in his line of sight on the other side of her, and the handheld Trevor held was shaking. Leo hesitated in reaching around Captain when Trevor quickly hunched, dropping the handheld onto the desk and shoving her hands into her pockets. “Go ahead, Analyst. Not having a relationship registered isn’t the same as keeping it a secret,” Captain said to Leo with half a smile. “I’m fine,” Trevor argued. She wasn’t able to glare at Captain, and likely didn’t want to anyway. Glaring at Leo would have meant looking at him. Her tone dropped the temperature in the bridgeside and her eyes could’ve burned holes into the desktop, though. “Really? You’re fine?” Captain asked, dropping sarcasm like tossing lead-acid batteries into low orbit. “Say ‘planet seventy-four’ without clenching a fist,” she added. “Your behavior the past month has been noted and for the past two weeks flagged as out of normal for you, Analyst. Both by monthly mental health reviews and by crew observations.” Trevor hissed out a quick breath as if she’d been punched. The accusation in the glare she threw at Leo felt like a punch. “Wrong target. He hasn’t said a thing. But in case you forgot, you usually have onboard friends and they’ve been worried enough about you to talk to me.” Captain’s glare was sterner than anything Trevor could plate because grandmothers who also earned exploration-red Captain’s stripes on their shoulders had a lot of practice at that kind of thing. “I’m fine,” Trevor stated through gritted teeth. “Maybe it’s a latent Daion defense?” Leo asked quickly. It was a desperate attempt to get Captain’s attention off of Trevor. Trevor didn’t like anyone but close friends and family seeing her upset, and being centered by a person in authority because of being upset would only make things worse for whatever was going on inside her head. “What?” Captain asked, spinning her chair so she could stare in confusion at Leo. Her mind mostly likely still focused on Trevor’s behavior and so his question made no sense. “The altered reports. I was doing some reading about the history of planet seventy-four before Trevor and I were called here, and Daions went fully defensive at the end of the plague. There have been other defense systems that exploration scans have triggered unknowingly. Maybe this one is latent rather than assertive?” “How do four altered reports grow into a defense system in your mind?” Captain demanded. Leo swallowed. The theory he’d thrown out there was only half an idea wrapped up in a gut feeling, and the gut feeling was only the caring one about getting Captain’s attention off of Trevor. “Well, delays and stall tactics could be something to give a longer preparation time for an assertive system to start or… something?” Leo finished vaguely. Captain stared at him, waiting silently for an intelligent theory to come out of his mouth. “I mean, I’m just saying so far the corrupted reports have only affected ships after they’ve communicated the forty-eight hour notification of scan completion to Coalition, right? We’ve all gotten the response with solar system coordinates and planet location per solar order for planet seventy-four. A passive system that monitors communication regarding this Daion world could be capable of interrupting transmissions –” “And potentially corrupt with misleading reports as a delay tactic to provide time for a large scale planetary defense system to power up,” Captain interrupted to finish the sentence. She leaned back in her chair and stared up, folding her hands in her lap. “Well. This line of thought is more ominous and precarious than anything I’d wanted to deal with on this shift,” she told the ceiling. “Was there any consistency in the shifts used to make the corrupted reports?” Leo asked. “The only consistencies were each corrupted report being from within the past eight cycles, and replacing the most immediate completed shift.” “So all the corrupted reports were copied from among the earliest scans for the planets we’re each at,” Trevor added. “Exactly,” Leo agreed. “I’d assume from that, the delay was meant to pick the maximum believable separation between reports.” “But then it’s not a Daion defense system,” Trevor stated. “Whoever did this needed to know ships would be required to repeat scans, so this had to be set up after Coalition started maintaining redundancy checks. That means this was set up after the fiasco with Coliander.” Trevor shook her head to the negative as she spoke, the half-formed idea Leo had suggested taking up residence in her own thoughts and not making sense. “Coliander’s Captain sure destroyed the best way for having a cycle off work without anyone in Senior Coalition noticing,” Captain lamented, sharing a quick grin with the crew members standing on either side of her. “Did you two know those redundancy checks run for every new report and go through verification against every report filed since the RedunSystem was implemented? Senior Coalition is even paying for people to manually submit older reports so they can catch data previous to RedunSystem initiation being submitted. But you’re right, the RedunSystem has only been operational for twenty-something standard years, and Daion worlds were depopulated long before that.” “But the corruption is still only affecting ships given lists with planet seventy-four. So… if it’s not Daion, what else could it be?” Leo asked. “I’m trying to figure that out,” Captain said. “Give me something short and in writing. Summarize our thoughts on this in a way I can support as Dockland’s position during more communications with Senior Coalition,” she ordered. “The only recommendation I have right now is for Coalition Oversight to include planet seventy-four in their canned response to more ships in our exploration group, and maybe a couple of ships from other explorations. If the clustered disruption spreads to those ships for their next ReadScan reports, we can start theorizing about some kind of possible Daion defense system. Anything you two can think of to add, include it in your summary.” She nodded to herself and waved a dismissal at them. “Oh, and,” she said, stressing the ‘and’ so much that both Leo and Trevor stopped and looked back from half-way to the door. “You two should probably register before we recall at the end of this exploration. There is zero way of ensuring you get assigned together if you sign up for the next exploration and you’re not registered.” “File saved,” Leo said quickly, sliding in the agreement before Trevor could say something he wasn’t prepared to hear. |
AManda FLIEDERA weekly blog updating on Fridays with quick personal blurbs about me, as in what's going on during my life as an Author and mom, and that doles out my short stories and novellas in bite-sized parts for everyone to read for free! Archives
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