Children of a Dead Earth Book One (19 page)

True.

Captain Mahama pushed off and floated to Feng's alcove. “Commander, why didn't you say something before now?”

“You think we haven't tried? Read the old court cases, it was brought up a half dozen times over decades. We always lost. The civilian court always sides with biological parents. It's not like back on Earth. After a century of that, we just gave up and did what we had to.”

Benson listened intently. It made a sad sort of sense. Any child that went to a gay couple would be a license that didn't go to a “normal” couple. It was easy to support someone else's rights when it didn't mean giving up anything in return.

“That's why you altered his personal files. You erased any mentions of your relationship to keep it secret after he died.”

Feng nodded sadly.

True.

“Does your wife know?” Mahama asked.

“No, it would kill her inside. I love my wife, and our son. I just… needed more. Edmond was always pushing me to force changes, but I always told him to be patient, that it wouldn't matter once we reached Tau Ceti. ‘Keep your head down,' I said. But he was braver than I was. I thought he finally gave in to the pressure. I've been blaming myself for days without even being able to grieve, with you breathing down my neck the whole time accusing me of killing him! Do you have any idea how hard it's been?”

“How hard it's been?” Benson tried to contain his temper, but it was difficult. “You've been interfering with my investigation from the start! Now I've wasted three days chasing you down. If you'd just told me the truth in the first place I'd be three days closer to catching the real killer.”

“I tried to get you to look somewhere else, but you wouldn't listen.”

Benson's eyes rolled. “Jesus man, I'm a cop, not a crewmember. If you tell me not to look in the box, I look in the box to see what you're hiding. Now Edmond's killer has had three days to cover their tracks. They might even get away with it now, doesn't that matter to you?”

“Of course it matters!”

True. Feng tried to continue, but emotion overwhelmed him as tears erupted from his eyes.

Mahama put himself between Benson and his first officer. “All right, you have your answer, detective. This debriefing is over.”

“But he admitted to obstruction of justice.”

“And he will answer for that, later. But right now, he's staying put at his post. I can't afford a major shakeup in the chain of command just days before we Flip. We'll deal with his punishments administratively once we're safely inserted into Tau Ceti G orbit. Not before. Now, you're going to turn around and get back to work. This is a dead end.”

“Someone with command level network permissions either killed Laraby, or helped,” Benson said gravely. “Your BILD system can find them by the end of the day.”

Captain Mahama was incensed. “Are you quite mad?”

“Well, how else do you explain the altered security logs?”

“That's not the point!” Captain Mahama physically shoved Benson out of the alcove and into the middle of the room. “Ten minutes ago you were lecturing me that it was illegal. Now you expect me to run my crew through it looking for a needle in a haystack! I only agreed to use it now because you came with a warrant. I'm not about to run innocent people through that monstrosity without
some
sort of due process, and frankly I'm deeply concerned that you would even suggest it!”

Benson bumped up against the ceiling next to the door. The captain's words hit home. He could hardly believe how quickly the switch had flipped in his brain. It scared him.

“Of course you're right, captain. But if I can dig up enough evidence for another warrant?”

“I'll
think
about it. You're dismissed.”

Benson saluted, and the lights went out.

Total darkness enveloped the conference room for several agonizing seconds, until amber emergency lights sprang into action, outlining the exit. Alarms screamed from the walls all around them.

Benson, Captain Mahama, and even Commander Feng stared at each other blankly for a long moment amid the pulsing yellow emergency lights and blaring alarms.

“
M
ain power's down
,” Mahama said.

“Down everywhere, or just this room? Wait… My plant's lost connection.”

“Mine too,” the captain said. Feng also nodded.

Benson's internal warning bells went off. The whole thing smelled of an ambush. Behind him, the manual handle of the door span ominously. Benson pushed off from the ceiling, trying to put a little distance between him and whatever was trying to come through. Was it an attack? Did they already get through Korolev?

“Stay behind me, sirs.” He pulled out his stun-stick and leveled it at the hatch.

“Does that still work if the network is down?”

Benson shook his head. “No idea.”

The three of them watched in mute horror as the handle squeaked and span before finally coming to rest. The door swung open ponderously and clanged against the bulkhead. Benson tensed as a darkened figure emerged, but the next flash of amber emergency lights revealed Korolev's chiseled features. His eyes quickly locked onto Benson's stun-stick as he reflexively threw up his hands.

“It's only me, chief!”

Benson's tension eased. “Dammit, man, announce yourself. You scared us half to death.”

“Sorry, sir.”

Benson tried to peek around the young constable and saw that the bridge beyond was just as dark as the conference room. The power outage had hit the whole module, maybe more.

“Status, constable?” Mahama asked politely.

“Main power's out, looks like it's shipwide. They're asking for you on the bridge, sir.”

The captain nodded and pushed off from the wall. Feng followed like a scolded puppy a moment later.

“You let him go?” Korolev asked once they were alone.

“He's not our man.”

“Are you sure? I thought you had him dead to rights.”

“Trust me, I'm sure. C'mon, we'd better go see what's happening.”

Benson followed Korolev out, then span the hatch shut. The dozens of holographic displays that had filled the air were gone, replaced by dim backup lighting and the rushed, confused conversations of the bridge crew. Captain Mahama had returned to her place in the eye of the storm.

“I need an engineering status report,” Mahama said testily.

Like everyone else on the bridge, he was used to getting a constant stream of data on the ship's operation through his plant. But with the network down, everyone was busy digging through screens and trying to remember how to navigate the user interfaces. Everything was taking ages longer than it should.

The shaky answer came from an ensign who could do little to conceal the nervousness in her voice. “We've restored emergency power to secondary systems, but both main cores are down, sir.”

“Both?” Mahama nearly shouted the question. “Get Director Hekekia on the line.”

“Yes, sir.” The ensign dug through the menus on her screen, trying to remember how to connect the call. It took a few moments as Hekekia had to be tracked down and brought to an intercom panel.

“Go ahead for Hekekia,” he said, through the bridge's hidden speakers. The connection was audio only.

“Hekekia, it's Mahama. I just heard a nasty rumor that both our reactors are down.”

“It's no rumor, captain. We're flat-lined.”

“They're independent systems, that's not supposed to be possible.”

“Tell it to the reactors. They've lost magnetic containment.”

In the not-too-distant past, “lost containment” and “reactors” appearing together in the same sentence would have caused an immediate panic, followed several days later by a whole pile of people sick and dying from radiation poisoning.

Happily, the Ark used third-generation fusion reactors. Fortuitously enough, they'd been perfected in the decade before Nibiru showed up and started eating the Oort cloud. Without containment, the hundred million degree cloud of Helium-3 plasma simply cooled off and ceased to do anything dangerous.

“
H
ow long until
we can restart?” Mahama asked.

“No idea. I need to figure out what the problem is first.”

Mahama rubbed her eyes. “How's our capacitor charge?”

“Thirteen percent, sir.”

“What?” Mahama's voice boomed across the bridge, sending shocks through the assembled crew. “Eighty percent is the safety limit. How are we below a
quarter
charge?”

“We discovered a cascading short in the recharging system this morning. It had been causing the capacitors to discharge. We just got done patching it up less than an hour ago.”

How convenient
, Benson thought, but he kept quiet. A shared glance with Korolev confirmed that the same thought had occurred to the younger man.

“How much time can we get out of what capacitor charge we do have?” Mahama asked.

“Well, none, sir.”

“What do you mean, ‘none'?”

“We need whatever's left to restart the reactors once they're fixed.”

Mahama slapped herself on the face. The reactors needed a huge jolt of energy to get their magnetic constriction bottles squeezing down hard enough to convince the Helium-3 to fuse and start making power. On the few occasions they'd had to be shut down for maintenance, only one was taken offline at a time, leaving the other available to jumpstart its twin.

For the whole time the Ark had been in space, not one second had passed when one of them wasn't running. Until a few minutes ago.

“Options?” Mahama asked. The question was met with embarrassed silence as everyone came up empty of ideas. “C'mon people, give me something to work with. A stupid idea is better than no idea.”

“What about the habitats?” a nervous ensign ventured.

“Explain,” Mahama said.

“Well, they're spinning awfully fast to maintain artificial grav. There's a lot of energy locked up in their angular momentum.”

“And? Keep going.”

“Why don't we use it? Reverse the habitat's drive motors from spinning them to recharging the capacitors?”

Mahama's face brightened with the possibility. “Hekekia, can you do that?”

“Stand by.” The entire bridge held its breath while he went through the calculations.

“Yes, but it'll require an EVA and four hours to make the conversion. I could do it in less, but we're still down the EVA pod that idiot broke.”

Benson hoped no one remembered who “that idiot” had been. He was not so fortunate.

“Another victim of our detective's crusade,” Commander Feng mumbled just loud enough for it to carry through the entire sphere. Accusing eyes glared back at him.

“Well, I didn't see any of you clamoring to do it,” Benson shot back at them.

“Is Benson on the bridge with you?” Hekekia barked. “Don't let him touch a bloody thing!”

Mahama looked down, (or up, or over, depending on one's perspective) as if he had only just noticed Benson's presence.

“Detective, what are you still doing here?”

“Trying to figure out what's going on, same as you. And before you grind the habitats to a halt, ask yourselves if you really want fifty thousand people floating around like panicking parade balloons.”

“They'll have warning, chief, and if everyone has followed the preparation schedule, most everything in the habitats should be tied down by now anyway.”

Benson thought about his own apartment, where the only things that were properly secured had been bolted down by the builders. Some quick exchanges between crewmembers showed he wasn't alone.

“I think you'll find a significant percentage of the population has procrastinated on that particular preparation, sir.”

“Then that's on them!” Mahama fumed. “We're running on batteries up here, chief. Our superconducting magnets are down around command and engineering. We're all getting extra rads of cosmic background radiation as we speak. But more importantly, we don't have power for our Vasimir thrusters or navigational lasers. We're deep inside Tau Ceti's Oort Cloud doing fifteen thousand KPS, and if any rock or splinter of comet much bigger than a pebble hits us in the next four hours, it'll go right through our ablative shield and straight through half the ship. Bigger than a peapod and we could lose her entirely. Facts I would have assumed your recent experiences would have made you more sensitive to.”

“Captain,” Hekekia interrupted. “I've just got a revised estimate from one of my techs. We're going to need at least twenty percent capacitor charge to restart one of the fusion reactors. We're already too low, and we're going to be burning at least a percent for every hour of emergency power.”

“Can we get enough recharge out of the habitats to get back up to twenty?”

“Maybe. I don't know where to begin making an estimate for that. And this whole thing assumes we don't burn out the drive motors or roast the bearings in the first place.”

“But it's our only chance, yes?”

The line went quiet for an uncomfortably long time. “The only one I see.”

“That settles it, then. Hekekia, pull the trigger.” Mahama looked down between her feet. “As for you, detective, coordinate with Chief Bahadur. We'll make the announcement shortly. Get your constables ready to disperse any crowds and prepped for rescue operations for anyone who floats off when the gravity goes away. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.” Benson saluted, then shoved a stunned Korolev towards the exit. The first door slid shut behind them, leaving them alone while the outer door cycled.

“Did you hear all that, chief?”

“Yes, Pavel, I did.”

“What are we going to do?” Korolev was a ball of nervous energy mixed with indignant righteousness. Benson imagined it to be what small dogs looked like.

“You're going to follow the captain's orders and get Avalon ready for micro-grav.”

“Weren't you listening, sir? We've been
sabotaged
! Somebody isn't happy just killing one person anymore, they tried to whack everybody! And they would have done it if these floaters hadn't gotten clever.”

Benson reached out his legs to brace against the far end of the entry chamber, then pushed Korolev up against the side for a little bulkhead counseling. The impact stunned the younger man enough to jar him loose from the growing fury that was threatening to overtake him.

“I
know
that, Pavel. And if we don't get the power Hekekia needs to relight the reactors, they may still succeed. We need to help the crew right now to have any chance. It's all that matters right now. Are we on the same screen?”

Frightened, Korolev nodded. “Yes, chief. But… nobody said anything. They acted like damaged capacitors and the reactors failing at the same time was just a damned coincidence.”

“Because they're not cops, son. They're crew. They live in a little bubble where they see all and control everything. They don't see the million little ways people figure out to cheat the system. We see it, because that's our job. We don't believe in coincidence because we're the cynical assholes who have been dragged through the muck long enough to know the truth: they don't control everything. Sometimes I wonder if they control anything.”

“But…”

“But nothing.” Benson let him go. “They'll figure out it wasn't an accident soon enough. Engineering will find some cables cut or a sensor blowtorched, whatever. Until then, you are going to follow the captain's orders and coordinate with Bahadur in Shangri-La. You're going to find Lieutenant Alexopoulos and tell her to deputize the lightbulb jockeys and their jet packs to grab any strays who float away. Got that?”

“Yes, sir. But… those were the captain's orders to you.”

“Very astute, constable.”

“Well, then what are you going to be doing?”

“Trying to see in the dark.”

Korolev frowned. “That's the only answer I'm going to get, isn't it?”

“Yep. Is that a problem?”

Korolev's spine stiffened. “No, chief.”

“Good.” The light over the outer door turned green before it slid open. “Let's get to it.”

T
ravel was immediately curtailed
. Constables with biometric hand scanners were brought up to secure the locks to the command module, which had gone into automatic lockdown when the plant network failed. The doors had to be operated manually.

The lifts only went down, and only because they recaptured much-needed energy as they fell. Movement between the modules was effectively shut off, save for any hearty souls who felt like climbing the kilometer tall ladders from the deck to the hub.

Meanwhile, Benson requisitioned a case of hand torches from the lockup in Bahadur's stationhouse, (he'd fill out the actual requisition forms later) and took a little detour back down into Shangri-La's basement levels to search out the Unbound for another little chat with

Mr Kimura.

Something Kimura had said in their first meeting jumped out at Benson during Feng's interrogation. When Benson asked if Feng had ever visited the Geisha, Kimura laughed and said Feng “has no need of our women.” He'd assumed it just meant Feng was faithful to his wife, but now his real meaning was clear. Kimura knew about Commander Feng's romantic preferences.

What else did the man know that he hadn't been forthcoming about?

With the miserly trickle of emergency power engineering was allowing, Benson knew Kimura and his people would be running around in complete darkness. But more than that, they would be caught entirely flatfooted by the coming micro-grav.

The lift doors opened into the dark and quiet of Shangri-La's basement levels again, but somehow it managed to feel even darker and emptier than it had the first time. Maybe that was just a reflection of Benson's mood.