Jackson Kez - Space Diplomat Ch. 04

"Of course," Jackson said. "Just ask Ace for anything you need. Once we get out of Sela airspace I'm going to take a nap, Ace can handle that part of the flight by herself."

"Sure, sure," Vera waved her hand dismissively, too tired to continue the conversation. She stepped back toward the hatch leading down and stared daggers at it. "I hate ladders so much," she grumbled.

Jackson hit the accessibility switch to engage the lift platform. The ladder retracted into the wall with a series of clanks. From the lower deck, a small platform rose up with a faint hiss.

"Thank you," Vera said, mumbling. She stepped onto the platform and it descended. The trip down took just long enough to be awkward, and neither knew quite what to do as he watched her sink out of view.

"Well... bye," Vera said as her head dipped below the upper deck.

They both laughed. Once Jackson heard the guest quarters door open and shut he returned to the captain's chair. Watching the terrain pass by, he stared out of the front viewport. Genoria was a heavily forested world, with abundant wildlife, but also vast stretches of dry mesa and rocky desert. Such areas were apparently where he'd find the Rhorak, who thrived in the open spaces and tall spires. They had no technology that would emit signals his ship could find and no traditionally detectable life signs to scan for, so even knowing where they lived didn't guarantee first contact.

"Leaving Sela airspace now, Captain. Scanners show all clear."

"Thank you, Ace. It's nap time," Jackson said, stifling a yawn. He let go of the manual controls and stood up, stretching. "Wake me if things get bad, or when we're 15 minutes out from landing. And see if you can scan Yucce's information for some relevant details to help me find the Rhorak. I need to know how to approach them, and if there are any individuals I should seek out first."

"Understood, Captain. Sweet dreams."

The door to Jackson's personal quarters opened with a soft hiss. Jackson walked inside and immediately unbuttoned his shirt. He peeled it off and tossed it in the fresher. His jacket that had been tucked over his arm when he left Yucce's home was nowhere to be found, it had gotten lost along the way. Oh well, he had plenty of formal jackets. Now would be a good time for his favorite shirt, he mused. Too bad it was in the cottage back in the capital.

The door slid shut behind him automatically. Jackson removed his pants, wincing as he bent down and felt the soreness in his thighs. Between all the sex and the running, he was definitely getting enough exercise. He scooped his pants up off the floor and removed his tablet and the last hydration pill, placing them both on the nightstand next to his bed. The bed itself was against the rightmost wall, big enough for Jackson to sleep comfortably but not well suited for entertaining company. There hadn't been any of that kind of company on his ship before, the fact he was thinking about it all hammered home what strange days these were.

His quarters had a small table with just one chair, though there were three others folded up in the storage closet sunk into the back wall, and a distinct lack of decor. Jackson always tried to stay in local lodgings, and his interior design chops were, in a word, nonexistent, so he hadn't bothered trying to personalize the space beyond the default. His one concession was a single, artificial rose on the table. A gift from his mother when he graduated from the academy. He should really call her more often. Shipboard communication could go faster than light, but at his current distance from home, the delay would be at least 7 minutes. Too long for a call, better to send her a recording.

"Ace, next time I'm not busy, remind me to record a message for mom."

A single beep signaled an affirmative response. Ace did that when she sensed Jackson wasn't looking to chat, and as usual, she was right about his mood.

Jackson tossed his pants into the fresher and sealed the compartment, thumbing the activator. It whirred to life, cleaning his clothes for another day of wear and tear. This model even folded his outfits neatly, which was the only reason Jackson's wardrobe ever looked tidy. Totally naked for the third time that day, he stepped into the cramped restroom and opened the scrubber. Jackson hated scrubbers.

He stood inside the confining, elliptical capsule and shut the door behind him. Jackson squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his palms into the pair of small recessed alcoves. With a barely audible high-pitched whine, the scrubber beams passed over his body. Quickly and efficiently they rendered him warm, clean, and styled, his hair parade-perfect. The whole process took about 60 seconds, hardly enough time to relax or enjoy a drink. A shower beer sounded really good right about now, but you couldn't have a scrubber beer. The high-energy beams shook the can so hard beer went flying everywhere, and then the scrubber just evaporated it. Jackson had tried it once, on a dare. Never again.

He picked out a pair of boxers from the limited selection of clothes that remained on his ship, slipped them on, and collapsed on top of his bed. Tension drained out of him, like it seeped into the bed itself, and he let out a long, contented sigh. He didn't even get under the covers, Jackson shut his eyes and in moments, drifted off to sleep.

Jackson dreamed, vague and surreal. Strange shapes twisting and shifting, in all the pastel colors of the Sela. Fragments of dialog, impossible to understand. Everything got darker and darker, fading away as he felt himself tumbling. Someone shouting for him, someone who needed him. Then white light rushed up from below as he plummeted toward it and...

Red everywhere. Jackson jolted awake, his eyes snapped open as his body shocked him out of slumber. Jackson squinted, trying to focus. Why was everything red? And what was that voice saying?

"Jackson, wake the hell up!" Ace. She was yelling for him. Not in a barely remembered dream, but right now.

He leapt to his feet, training taking over as he realized the source of the red tint. Warning lights. Emergency. The worst kind.

"I'm up, I'm up," Jackson said. He grabbed a flightsuit from his closet, a one-piece jumper that he climbed in and zipped up in a few seconds. Much faster than wrestling with pants and a shirt. Muscle memory had him scoop up his tablet from the nightstand and cram it into a zippered pocket.

"Status report!" Jackson yelled. He opened the door to his quarters and ran for the captain's chair.

"Ship status critical. Multiple systems compromised. Attempting to correct."

"Malfunction? Sabotage? Give me something, Ace!" He dropped himself into the captain's chair, a dull thump of protest coming from the cushion beneath him.

"Unclear." Ace's calm tone contrasted sharply with the situation around him. "We appear to be suffering cascade power failures in all systems. Total reactor collapse is imminent."

"Fuck," Jackson swore. He pulled up the engineering panel on the arm of the captain's chair and flipped through until he found power management. It wasn't great. The medbay had its own power grid, and with only himself and two other people on the ship, he could shut off life support and they'd have at least an hour of breathable air. Unless the Sela used oxygen much faster than humans. No time to figure that out. His fingers danced across the panel, shutting down systems until all that remained was low-power flight, Ace's program, and the medbay's internal network.

The bridge had a backup generator that would keep its systems running so he could continue to troubleshoot, but the cabin went dark, and the doors wouldn't open either. Well, except the door to the escape pod, that one didn't need power to operate. On low-power flight the ship could stay in the air and keep gliding, but any sort of maneuvering was out of the question, including landing. He'd bought himself some time, but not much else.

Jackson breathed a sigh of relief. Then his tablet chirped. It was Vera, calling from her data jewelry. He put it on loudspeaker.

"Jackson? Everything is dark and I'm stuck in my room."

"Yeah, something is wrong with the ship." Jackson swiped through several status screens on his captain's panel, looking for information. "Ace," he called out, "diagnostic and repair, now."

She beeped an affirmative. No voice synthesis on low power mode.

"How can I help?" Vera asked. He could hear the fear in her voice, but she seemed determined to do whatever she could to help. Jackson made a note that she was very good in a crisis, and he was glad to have her with him.

"Can you force the door? There's a manual pneumatic override in a recessed wall panel—"

Jackson heard a crashing sound from the lower deck and winced.

"Got it! What next?"

No time to ask what Vera had done, much bigger problems to worry about. "Great, nice work. I'm gonna have Ace send you instructions via my tablet," as he spoke he connected his tablet to the captain's chair interface. "Ace, I need you to walk Vera through a full power grid diagnostic. It looks like the problem began in the landing gear circuits, start there."

An affirmative beep from Ace, and his tablet began typing messages of its own accord, sending them to Vera.

"Is Tinoqa okay?" Vera asked. Jackson heard the sound of a panel being pried open from below and knew she had gotten to work.

"The medbay has its own backup generator, that'll keep her stable. More than enough time for us to fix this..." he left 'or crash' off the end of the sentence, but Vera probably knew what he meant.

Vera didn't reply, but he could see her diagnostic progress on the captain's panel. It looked like the disruption had started in the landing gear when they were retracted after liftoff, but hadn't tripped any of the internal alarms until a few moments ago.

"Jackson?" Vera again. She sounded worried.

"Go ahead." He flipped through the diagnostics, looking for what she might have seen.

"I... the ship is..." Vera struggled to find the right word. "It's crystallizing."

"What?" Jackson didn't see anything that significant on the ship's status. He pushed himself up out of the chair and toggled the flashlight on his flightsuit. A beam of white illuminated the cabin. "Ace, ping me if I need to run back up here."

She beeped an affirmation, and Jackson moved fast, running to the hatch into the lower hold. With the ladder retracted, he didn't want to bother waiting for the lift. The fastest way was to lower himself over the edge and drop the remaining distance. He landed with a thud. Vera had cracked a couple of the emergency glow-flares, and they lit the whole lower deck with an eerie blue glow. Jackson saw Vera crouching by an open access panel, surrounded by various tools she'd pulled from a maintenance locker. He jogged over to her.

Jackson glanced at the guest cabin Vera had been trapped in. The door looked like it was forced open with an industrial pneumatic jack. The frame dented in the middle on both sides, and the plate of the door itself distorted outward. It looked a bit like a halfway-peeled banana, the heavy steel effortlessly pried aside. Did Vera do that? Sela were a lot stronger than humans, but... Jackson could wonder about that later.

Sparkling crystals caught the light from his flightsuit, casting shimmering spots all around. As he knelt down next to Vera, he saw the wires and circuitry had been almost totally coated. Jackson fought the temptation to reach out and touch it.

"What the hell is this stuff?" Jackson asked. "Have you ever seen this before?"

Vera scowled at the crystals, not even looking at Jackson as she answered, "Nope, this is weird. It looks... like a Rhorak? The way the light refracts... here, scoot this way," Vera moved to the side to give Jackson space to shift his position.

As his flashlight panned across the crystals they cast a blur of kaleidoscopic colors on the casing around them. Jackson saw diminutive, distinct fractal patterns in each fragment. "Wow," he said. Despite the urgency of their situation, he had to admit it was an incredible sight.

"Yeah," Vera said, her tone dour. "That's Rhorak silicate."

"Is it alive?" Jackson asked, wondering if this was more of a stowaway than a saboteur.

"I don't think so," Vera shook her head, she picked up one of the maintenance scanners and showed him the temperature reading. "It's cold. Rhorak generate some body heat, though not as much as you. I mean," Vera blushed, "not as much as a human."

Jackson nodded, deciding not to respond to the comment about him.

"I don't know what this is," Vera said, "and I don't know if we can stop it. It must be feeding off the ship to grow this fast, but... Rhorak don't do that." Vera toggled through the scanner's various readings as she spoke, frowning at each unhelpful result. "Their biology is a mystery, they never seem to eat or take in any energy from their environment, so it's hard to say... hang on."

She flipped back to the previous scan. Jackson saw it was the portable electron microscopy setting. The scanner returned a preliminary elemental composition, and it showed carbon-based organics.

Seeing Vera's confused look, Jackson asked, "I'm guessing the Rhorak don't have those?"

"It's so much worse," Vera said, her voice quiet, "these are... molecules like this... it's basically DNA, but for us. For a Sela."

"I don't understand."

"I think this is a bioweapon," Vera said. "I had heard—," she looked at Jackson with a sheepish grin, "okay, actually I listened in on a conversation between Yucce and Amasa about something like that. Sorry for the history lesson here, but you need to know why this is so bad. We once used what we call non-sentient reflexives, or NSRs for short, as the basis of some technologies. It's basically like a... like a muscle with no brain attached, but you can make it twist and move via electrical impulses. Only, instead of a human muscle which can only tense or relax, it's a piece of Sela, so it can do almost anything."

"That's..."

"Awful? Horrifying? Repulsive? Yeah, it is." Vera looked away. "We stopped, or at least I thought we stopped, when we found out they could still feel pain. And if they got big enough, they'd develop a simple consciousness. We didn't realize it until we started using NSRs for large-scale devices and one of them begged us to stop. That was when we realized that even small mechanisms existed in a state of constant stress and discomfort."

"Oh no," Jackson's blood ran cold. Apparently when Yucce had said Sela never enslaved each other, she wasn't including this dark chapter of their history. "I don't..." Jackson put one hand on Vera's back. "I'm sorry." He didn't know what else to say.

Vera looked at him, and he could feel her sorrow. Perhaps worse than that, her disappointment. Jackson knew how much she wanted the Sela to do better. To be better. And now they had proof of the opposite.

She sighed. "It makes sense. NSRs were capable of incredible things, and the concepts we learned from designing computer systems around them is why our electronics are so advanced, even though we don't use NSRs in them anymore. The problem," Vera stopped and took a deep breath. "The problem," she repeated, "is that they need food. It's a lot cleaner than burning fossilized hydrocarbons, but you still need to give them something for energy. if you combined an NSR with the Rhorak's metabolism..."

"It would be self-sustaining." Jackson finished for her. "But," he rubbed his chin as he spoke, "if that's what this is, why does it need to draw power from the ship?"

Vera's data jewelry beeped and a message from Ace popped up, text only. "Suggestion: perhaps it draws power not out of necessity, but as an attack." Vera read the message out loud.

"That makes sense," Jackson said, "so this looks like sabotage and a lot of it. I'm guessing somebody attached this thing to the landing gear while the ship was in the starport... Hey Ace?" Jackson leaned over to speak into Vera's data jewelry, even though Ace could hear him from anywhere. "Do you have records of anyone approaching the ship besides us?"

Another beep, another text message. Jackson leaned even closer to read it, looking over Vera's shoulder at the holographic screen her necklace projected into the air. Peering down at the necklace gave him a great view of her chest. He tried, and failed, not to stare.

Vera read it aloud, which was for the best as Jackson couldn't concentrate on the words. "Negative. No recorded approaches, and no suspicious sensor blackouts either."

"Ugh," Jackson groaned. He rotated himself so he could lean back against the wall next to the open panel, tilting his head up and staring at the ceiling. "I don't know how much you've picked up, but it seems like Luminalia wants me dead, and wants it to look like the Rhorak did it. If the Stellar Alliance finds this stuff in the wreckage," Jackson gestured to the crystals along the power circuit, "it'd be hard not to assume that the Rhorak were responsible."

Vera sat across from him, crossing her legs. She put one hand on his knee and gave him a light squeeze. Jackson felt a pang of worry at the coldness of her touch.

"Well it didn't work," Vera said, "you're not dead, so what do we do?"

"I'm thinking," Jackson said.

"So think out loud," Vera said, scooting a little closer, "I know you're used to working alone but we've got two heads and an AI here, so let's use them."

"Right, sorry." Jackson took a deep breath and let it out, slowly. "Okay, so the first question is, do we make them think the plan worked? Stellar Alliance escape pods are well shielded and hard to detect until you turn on the transponder, so if we don't do that, they should think the ship went down with all of us still aboard."

Vera nodded. "But that won't last, because if they check the wreckage they'll see the escape pod launched. And," Vera hesitated, "what about Tinoqa?"

"We'd have to bring her out of stasis to put her on the escape pod. She might not survive. Which brings us to the other option: we try to land the ship. That means firing up the engines again and dealing with this," Jackson pointed at the crystals, "and it's riskier. If this keeps spreading it'll shut off power altogether and it could even make the escape pod a no-go, in which case we're definitely going down with the ship."

"Neither option seems great," Vera said, "is there any way to make a portable stasis module?"

"I don't know, but that's an interesting idea."

Vera's jewelry beeped, and she looked down, reading the message aloud. "From Ace. She says we can make a pair of injections, one for stasis, one to bring her back. It'll give us eight hours. If we don't revive Tinoqa by then..." Vera didn't read the rest of the message. She didn't have to.

"Okay, that's something. Ace, give us an ETA to where we can launch the escape pod and have it touch down close to the Rhorak."

Another beep. "Fifteen minutes," Vera said. "Ace also says we need to shut her down, she's picking up minor activity in the crystals and thinks it's related to her program running."

That meant Jackson would need to pilot the ship manually. At this point that was just maintaining the glide, mostly adjusting for wind, but if anything went wrong he'd be on his own. Well, not totally on his own.

"Ace, I don't like it, but I understand," Jackson said, "Send us what we need to make the stasis injection, then transfer yourself into a datacore, you're coming with us." A transfer was risky, but Stellar Alliance AIs weren't able to copy themselves, or subdivide to be in multiple places at once. Self-replicating AI had been a doomsday scenario for a few species.

Ace beeped an affirmative, sending the data to Vera. Then she shutdown as the transfer started.