5,001 - A Science Fiction Romance Short Story

Copyright © Tracy
Cooper-Posey

Master Engineer Caelen Williams is the most
sought-after contractor aboard the closed-system marathon-class
vessel
Endurance,
a generation ship at least four hundred
light years away from its destination. Captain Lakewood, leader of
the space-faring city, demands she resolve a life-threatening
issue—the ship is losing water.
Caelen’s former lover, Devar, was wrongly persecuted by Lakewood’s
people but for the sake of everyone aboard the
Endurance
,
Caelen tries to solve the riddle of the draining water and learns
that Devar is not the only one who may have been
manipulated….
This is a short science fiction romance story, for
fast reading and enjoyment.

The end began when Caelen got a call
from a frantic staffer on the Bridge itself. It was right in the
middle of the Rebels game against the Crimson Crunchers. The Rebels
were being slaughtered as usual because the Crunchers were an
Esquilino team, but the Rebels had shown some amazing spirit. They
had come
so
close to scoring, more than once. The
possibility that they might actually get a goal kept Caelen
hovering near the screen and sometimes stopping work altogether to
watch when the ball floated toward the Rebels’ end of the tank.

She barely paid any attention to the
call, until she realized where it was coming from. “Now?” she
asked, glancing at the game. “It’s the middle of the night...sir.”
The honorific felt odd in her mouth.

The staffer assured her that now wasn’t
soon enough, making Caelen mentally tack on a fifteen percent
mark-up to her hourly rate. She packed her tool kit into Scrub,
loaded him onto the platform she had built on the back of her bike
and locked him in despite his rabid protests that he could, too,
hold on by himself. She glided out onto the Artery. Traffic was
light because of the tankball game, which meant she could open up
the bike. She reached the Bridge end of the Endurance only twenty
minutes after the call.

She presented her wrist to the sentries,
who scanned her ID with deep frowns, as if she might be trying to
crash the Bridge. She mentally snorted at the idea, but kept her
face as grave as theirs and nodded her thanks as they dropped the
shield and let her through. Then she had to back up and go through
the pantomime all over again to get Scrub through.

Finally, the only thing that moved them
was her disinterested shrug. “Tell the Captain I won’t be making
the meeting. I can’t work without my tools.” She headed back for
her bike, parked across the corridor.

They grudgingly dropped the shield and
glared as Scrub rolled past. He looked up at them with the little
tilt of his head that said he was smiling. “Have a nice day!”

“Scrub, be quiet,” Caelen ordered.

“I’m just being polite.”

She gave him her best don’t-mess-with-me
look and he straightened up and looked ahead.

A flunky was waiting anxiously for her a
little further along the wide corridor, and hurried her through
more passages that gleamed pristine white and were completely
empty. The sterile feel would have told her she was in the Bridge
section, even without the sentries. The whole way, the nervous
little man explained how to behave with the Captain. “The first
time you address him, you must call him by his full name. Then you
can use ‘sir’. Don’t try to shake his hand or touch him in any
way--”

“I hug all my clients.”

He looked worried all over again.

Caelen rolled her eyes. “I’m
kidding.”

“Master Engineer Caelen Williams only
handles tools,” Scrub added in a stiff voice.

Was the majesty of their location
affecting Scrub? He’d used her full name and title, like he was
trying to make a subtle point, which would be lost on their guide,
who was too nervous to care.

Ahead, four sentries stood at attention
outside a door. The corporate flag hung to one side of them and the
ship’s seal was on the door. The guards stepped away and the door
slid aside with them.

Caelen walked onto the Bridge and looked
around curiously. This was the first time she had seen it for
herself. There were tours, of course, but she’d never bothered.

The room was smaller than it looked on
screen. It was almost perfectly square, with the wall to her right
covered in one big screen, showing the view ahead of the
Endurance--black space, the same familiar star patterns and nothing
else. The view hadn’t changed in years.

Opposite the screen was the Captain’s
chair, behind a console. The cameras were always set up in front of
the console, so the seal and the corporate logo could be included
in the frame. From where she was standing, though, Caelen could see
the Captain’s manual overrides. They looked clunky and
old-fashioned, but then they wouldn’t have been updated since the
Endurance left old Terra. There was no need. Besides, Captain
Lakewood wasn’t a pilot and wouldn’t know what button to press in
an emergency.

Lakewood was sitting in the famous
chair. Both he and the chair were smaller than she expected.
Lakewood rose to his feet. “This is her?” he asked of the seven men
ranged behind him.

“Captain Lakewood, may I present Master
Engineer Williams,” the flunky next to her intoned.

“Hiya, Captain,” Caelen said.

Lakewood blinked. He was used to
adulation and fawning respect. He was the only person on the ship
ever to be awarded two children, and he had made a vast fortune
teaching people his method for shaping their lives to better
qualify for a child. He’d turned that fortune into a small empire
stretching over every district except the slums of the Capitol. The
Blues United, the premier Esquilino team, had sponsored Lakewood’s
last three campaigns, which had locked in his bid for the Captain’s
chair.

Caelen gave Lakewood a friendly smile.
“I heard the Blues lost by two goals tonight. Too bad, huh?”

Lakewood’s face turned an interesting
shade of red. “You’re a Palatino?” His voice was hoarse.

Caelen snorted. “Not likely. Didn’t your
people brief you?”

One of the attendants cleared his
throat, then leaned closer and whispered into Lakewood’s ear.

Lakewood jerked like he’d been shot. “A
Capitolino
?”

Another attendant stepped up into the
Captain’s line of sight. He glanced at Caelen and she thought there
was apology in his eyes. “Sir, Williams is a master engineer and
has worked on ship systems her entire career. She is the very best
at what she does. We need her expertise, regardless of her
political affiliations.”

Caelen waited them out. She didn’t want
to be here in the first place. If her residential address was such
a drawback, then in a few more seconds she’d be asked to leave.
Fine by her. She’d bill for time and inconvenience and move on to
the next job.

Lakewood looked like he was going to
personally kick her off the Bridge. Then the first attendant
whispered in his ear again. Lakewood nodded and glared at her. “Our
options are limited at the moment. Minister Grand assures me that
you would not risk your professional reputation by disclosing
anything that you learn here. I, in turn, trust Minister Grand.” He
glanced at the aide, Grand, who nodded.

Then Lakewood sighed. “We appear to be
losing water.”

Caelen frowned. “The Bridge?”

“The whole ship,” Grand said.

She laughed. “That’s not possible. The
Endurance is a closed-system marathon-class vessel.
Everything
is recycled. It’s not possible to lose water.
We’re more likely to gain water than lose it.”

“Which makes the reports we’ve seen all
the more alarming,” Lakewood replied with soothing overtones. “We
would like you to look at them and tell us why we’re losing
water.”

“Your reports are wrong,” Caelen
replied. “Someone is trying to scare you.”

Grand stepped forward. “These are legacy
reports.”

Caelen thought that over. The data
systems and reporting that had been built into the original AI
couldn’t be tampered with, unlike all the coding the AI had built
since the Endurance launched. Then she realized that she was being
drawn into the mystery despite her reluctance. “I’ll find and fix
your problem, for twenty-thousand credits.” She nearly stuttered
just speaking it aloud.

Lakewood threw up his hands. “That’s
outrageous!”

“Fine.” She shrugged and headed for the
door and heard a hasty, whispered conference happen behind her.

“Wait!”

She looked over her shoulder, a meter
from the door.

Lakewood looked furious. Grand pressed
his hands together and twined the fingers. There was stress behind
his grave features. “We will pay you ten percent now, the balance
upon resolution of the issue.”

Caelen turned to look at them, moving
slowly to give herself time to think. If they were willing to pay
that much, then this was serious. Which mean it was true, the ship
was losing water. Which meant if she
couldn’t
fix this, then
it wouldn’t be just her reputation that would crack apart. It would
be her whole life. She hadn’t wanted the job in the first place.
She
really
didn’t want it now. So she nodded, looking as
grave as them and added the kicker. “I want full access to the
Bridge data river. I’ll analyze it from home.” She waited for the
screams of protest.

Lakewood sighed again and turned
away.

Grand nodded. “We’ll have it shunted to
your server within the hour.”

Shaken, Caelen looked down at Scrub.
“C’mon. We’re leaving.”

Scrub must have been worried, too. He
didn’t say a word.

Caelen directed the spatula to her
letterbox and as it lifted her up and along the square faces of the
apartment wall, up to her level, she tiredly returned to
considering the nagging data anomalies she had uncovered in the
last ten days. She had hoped her trip down to the back end of the
Capitol to acquire unslaved server modules would clear her head at
the same time, but the facts were just too overwhelming.

The platform stopped with its front edge
up level against the bottom of her apartment face. She palmed the
door and let herself in, digging the modules out of the secondary
pocket in her jacket. “Scrub!” She secured the door and moved
through the narrow apartment to the back corner. As she approached,
Scrub opened the door for her and she stepped through to the other
side. He secured the door and melded it.

“Any thoughts, while I was gone?” she
asked and handed him the modules. Scrub rolled over to the open
bays and deftly started installing the modules.

“I want to say you don’t make sense,”
Scrub said. “The conclusions are nonsense.” He closed the bays and
Caelen brought the heads-up displays on-line. Now the extra-large
laboratory felt crowded as the virtual screens jostled for space.
The extra processing power meant Caelen could display most of the
anomalies and their streams all at once.

“Every data blip is undisputed,” Scrub
said. “The Bridge data river is as close to pure legacy data anyone
can get anymore.”

“This is the ship we’re looking at,
basically,” Caelen murmured.

“The logic you’ve followed based on this
data isn’t wrong,” Scrub said. “And I cannot think of an
alternative conclusion than the one you’ve drawn. That means you
have to be right.”

“Someone has been manipulating the data.
Someone has been messing with the ship.” Caelen rubbed at her
temples. She might be right, but she didn’t like it. “There’s no
code changes. These are all physical changes to records. So it’s
not the ship’s AI that is doing it. But no one else has access to
the legacy data, so it
has
to be the AI.”

“Which it can’t be,” Scrub said
stoically, as he poured fresh coffee and rolled over to her with
the cup.