Mystery on Icecat
In the bowels of Icecat 3, the Landing Compound, Joe Tucker sat at his computer booth in his room and played at the nets. Broadcast was marginal that evening, but what do you expect from the spacer boys?
Like everything else on Icecat complex, Broadcast was controlled by the Spacing Compound, Icecat 1. At least as long as they remained joined. When they split, each Compound ran its own systems, and 3 was far better than 1, which tended to be dry and minimal. So, Tucker resigned to his fate for the length of the trip and amused himself every night, blasting pirates with levelers on his big screen with the boys.
The goal was to get them faster than Smitty, the pirate master, could dish them out, but careful not to wipe out Granger because Granger was on his team this week. How original. He wasn’t doing too bad—he was coming up on pirate ship 3, zeroing in for the kill, blasting as he went. Annihilate you. You history. Jack was laughing on audio at Joe’s antics, and the rest of his boys were cheering. Here it comes, it comes— But suddenly, the com beeped. Christ, they’ve done it again.
He pressed engage, stretching with one hand while continuing to blast with the other. If he could hold his course—
“Eugene?” he yelled to the com across the booth.
They had an appointment around eight in the gunnery. But it was only sixish.
“Tucker, this is your captain. Turn off the nets.”
Damn! It was the captain. Tucker jumped, missed his aim, and Pirate 3 survived. He turned off the game’s audio, shutting out the boys.
“Yes, Sir. Tucker here, Sir.”
“Have you visited Nav today by any chance?”
“No, Sir. I haven’t made it over the bridge today, Sir.”
Brilliant. Cover all bases. Main Nav was in Spacerland over the bridge. So was Med Center, home to a particular pair of female medics with whom Joe had a disagreement that the ladies felt strongly enough to take to the captain. Something about disobeying orders and two-timing. Again. Joe had gotten a lecture on it and was still smarting from its unfairness. He had been truly innocent the first time.
Meanwhile, Pirate 3 poured out the catmen by the boatload.
“I meant your Nav.”
“My Nav? No, Sir.”
Something was happening. Landers’ Nav was nearly inactive as they were piggybacking the Spacers’. The captain knew this.
“Did I forget something, Sir?”
Tucker’s attention was fully caught now.
“No, but go look and see if you find anything unusual.”
“Excuse me, Sir, but have you lost us?”
In piggyback, the Landers’ Nav was overwritten and monitored from the Spacers’. It was the beauty of it, the worry of it. They only had to run the longhaul programs once. But also, some spacerboy on rotation could make a tiny slip, and Lander Compound could end up in God’s wasteland and figure out the equations to recover from there. So one worried. But why couldn’t the captain see for himself?
“No, you’re still with us. Go do it and report back. And, Tucker, priority, shut the game off.”
The catmen that poured out of Smitty’s pirate ship were eating Tucker’s men, anyway. His personal buggy had already been pronounced dead.
“Sir, what am I looking for?”
“Check the computers. Mainly the independent. But also anything else you can find that looks unusual.”
“Yes, Sir, Tucker out.”
He tapped the off button and disengaged the game. He put his access codes in and linked his computer to the Nav’s independent. He wasn’t supposed to be able to do this, but he’d rigged it. If the captain found out, he’d court-martial him on the spot. But what the hell?
He didn’t find anything wrong or remotely unusual there. He accessed all the other computers—the slaves—in sequence but found nothing there, either. So he got up and went off to the nav room. He found it completely quiet. He went to the independent and messed with it for a while. But all diagnostics came OK, which meant it wasn’t a system error.
Not having a clue what he was looking for, he checked for whatever popped into his head—mutations, SD (space disease), that sort of thing. Big Mama came up clean.
He checked the slaves next for SD and mutations. It couldn’t be anything else since the independent came up systems clean. Nothing. From there, on to the memory modules, Bertha and Sweet Rosie, but they, too, were perfect. So what the hell? Chief Spacerboy was losing his marbles.
He found the com and beeped the Bridge.
“Bridge,” a spacer answered.
“Tucker here, give me the captain.”
“Tucker,” the captain’s voice cut in, “anything?”
“No, Sir, nothing. Everything’s clean.”
His report fell into silence. It made him feel obliged to elaborate.
“Maybe it would help if I knew what I was looking for, Sir.”
“Fine. Get over here on the double. I’ll show you. Captain out.”
Tucker replaced the com and spent a moment thinking what all this meant. The bridge just summoned him. That was not only not standard procedure but also very unusual. When he got there, he was more than a little apprehensive. He had no doubt whatever the spacers messed up was about to get pinned on him, one way or another.
“Tucker reporting,” he told the first spacer he ran into on the Bridge.
The spacer escorted him to the captain, announced him, and left.
The captain was bent over a couple of spacers’ shoulders at the nav controls and completely ignored him. So he stood there for a while, uncomfortable and getting increasingly apprehensive by the second. If they continued like this, he’d miss dinner.
“Tucker,” the captain finally said, “don’t just stand there. Have a look.”
The captain made room for him, and Tucker looked over the spacers’ shoulders. Christ! What the hell was that? He couldn’t believe his eyes. The ship had shifted course.
“Could that surprise be genuine?”
Better believe it.
“You know what that means?”
“Yes, Sir, we’ve shifted our orbit by 3.2 by 4.2 by 7.”
“3.2284 by 4.1590 by 6.9999, to be exact. You know how?”
“It was a skip from our previous orbit, Sir, as if… to avoid—”
He shoved Jeffrey boy’s arm aside and crowded beside him. He got a look but ignored it. Much to the spacer’s shock, Tucker started to punch keys on the entry pad before the poor man had time to react.
“Tucker!” the captain objected.
But it was getting really interesting.
“To avoid that,” Tucker concluded, pointing at the empty space he had conjured up on the screen.
He pushed the entry pad back at Jeff, who was indignant. On the screen was a completely empty space where they would have been had they followed their intended course.
“Ah, but the correction was a little short,” he realized in pure fascination. He turned to the captain, “By 1.2 by 1.4, to be exact, Sir.”
Captain had this bizarre look on his face.
“There was another deviation before this one. 1.2113 by 1.3924. How did you know?”
He still looked at him weird. What? Was Tucker supposed to worry? He did.
“Captain, I didn’t do it, Sir. I can’t imagine any of us did it.” He meant the landers. “Why would we do it, Sir?”
“You tell me. It wasn’t done here.”
“Have you checked for mutations, Sir? There’s a new strain—”
“We’ve checked for mutation.”
“Space disease?”
“Tucker. We’ve checked it all.”
“What about these viruses, Sir? They lay dormant until they get data that are too spicy to chew. Then they start digesting any other viruses they can find, even the good ones.”
Damn it! He hadn’t checked for that either.
“Let me have another look.” He shoved Jeffrey again, gripped by a sudden intense interest in that particular piece of empty space.
“Enough,” the captain interrupted, reminding him where he was.
This was not Tucker’s bridge and, indeed, not his nav. He got a lot of unfriendly stares at that moment, not to mention Jeffrey had been ready for him that time.
“Yes, Sir.”
“Go do some homework now that you know what it is. I want the one who did it. No cover-ups.”
“But, Sir, it could be a virus.”
In which case, nobody did it; it just happened. As a matter of fact, the more Tucker thought of it, the more sense it made. They sort of skipped this specific spicy piece of space. It had to be it.
“Dismissed.”
“Yes, Sir.”
Nobody escorted him off the Bridge except for spacer stares. Oh hell, he was glad to be off it, anyway. The roles would reverse soon enough. Just wait until we land. Then who’s freeloading?
He was late for dinner and getting pretty hungry, but he went to have a quick look for viruses in the computers, anyway. He didn’t find any. Bertha and Sweet Rosie came clean, too, where the effects of this kind of attack would also show. That was why it scared him so bad—it could conceivably wipe out the independent and the memories.
Everyone was pretty much done with dinner when Tucker got to the officers’ mess. He got many comments from the guys as he walked across the room to the food warmers at the end. Smitty wondered aloud what the captain wanted from Tucker while Granger and Petals laughed and chewed at the same time.
He piled a healthy helping of whatever the fake meat goo was, some potatoes, veggies, and bread. At least those were recognizable for what they were, unlike agro’s latest meat imitator experiments. They actually grew plants. He didn’t know why they bothered to simulate meats.
He located Eugene and Shadow sitting together across the room. They’d finished dinner and were talking. He started to go their way but changed his mind and looked for another table.
“Tucker,” Eugene called him.
Great. Tucker made an ass of himself again, pretending he didn’t see them and all that garbage. But he always felt so uncomfortable around Shadow anymore.
He didn’t exactly know why. Shadow was the only non-Terran on the ship—she was Yandar, from the planet Yand somewhere in Ursa Minor. The rumor mill said she had hopped a couple of galaxies to board Icecat. They had to wait for her for what they thought would be a good couple of years, but she showed up out of the blue. They said Yandar had witches and wormhole masters.
But if she could traverse the universe like that, what did she need from us? Allies, idiot. She was the Yandar ambassador they were ‘escorting’ on a top-security mission, also important to the Terran brass.
Regardless of all that mystery, or was it because of it? Tucker was utterly fascinated with her. He and Shadow started it out pretty good, got along fine, and hung out together. He got pretty infatuated with her. For a little while, he entertained ideas they could get something going. But she started hanging with Eugene, and they were getting weirder and weirder.
It was this thing with the guns. If they weren’t playing with them, they were talking about them. Eugene was Lander’s First Gunner and had always been a gun nut. But since he took up with Shadow, they’d gone wild. You could always find them in the gunnery. So, Tucker got more and more alienated. Then there was Janice—and Karla—and things got pretty distant between him and the ambassador. That didn’t mean his pulse didn’t jump and make him do stupid things every time he saw her.
He went to their table, sat down, and began inhaling his food.
“Hey, Tucker,” Eugene said, oblivious to Tucker’s predicament. “You wanna hear what I did to the computer?”
“Huh?” What the hell?
Tucker choked on his food and almost had a heart attack while Eugene laughed as if something was hilarious. Shadow smiled out of a corner of her mouth. She was grooming a fingernail with a wicked blade—one from her personal collection. Then Tucker realized Eugene was talking about the gunnery’s simulator.
“You should see what I did to the computer, Tucker,” she added.
Tucker was all ears.
“So, what did you do?”
“I bypassed the short trigger,” Shadow replied.
“Yeap. That’s right,” Eugene jumped in to emphasize.
He was really smug about it as if it meant anything to Tucker. Tucker couldn’t beat the damned thing at level 6, the one before last that Eugene had the most annoying habit of calling slowpoke.
“Yeah? And? Did you beat it?”
“Yeap!” Eugene bragged.
“Christ, how fast did it go anyway?” Tucker asked, aware of Shadow’s half-crooked smile, seemingly directed at him, mocking him.
“Twice, at least. It’s kinda self-accelerating without its short guards. But not fast enough for your buddy,” Eugene beamed.
Shadow chuckled.
“Or your lover,” she added for shock value.
“Jeees,” Tucker told Eugene, ignoring Shadow as best he could. “You’ll have to demonstrate that, buddy.”
Shadow laughed. “I’ll demonstrate you, buddy, eh, Tucker?”
Wicked female. Tucker felt his ears redden but ignored that, too, as best he could. But Jees. While Tucker spent his time blasting pirates on the nets every night, Eugene and Shadow blasted pirates in the gunnery’s simulator with real guns. Night after night after blessed night for the past two years.
“As soon as you’re ready. Eat up,” Eugene encouraged him.
That reminded Tucker he wanted seconds. Shadow got up and left without a word. Great. Another blow. He couldn’t help but stare at her as she walked away.
“What’s wrong with you?” Eugene asked him.
“Nothing. Let’s go kill some pirates.”
But as they walked toward the sim room, the thought of messing with Shadow again gave him a headache. Eugene noticed and began to tease him, but Tucker gave him a look, and he subsided. Couldn’t deal with her just now. With Eugene, either. With her with Eugene. Aghh, was he jealous of his friend now?
He went to his room, to his rigged computer terminal, and delved into searching for the elusive virus or whatever calamity had plagued them. A couple of hours passed without finding anything, and Tucker was getting tired. His eyes ached. His mind wondered.
The fifth time he caught himself thinking of Shadow, cursing at Shadow, yelling for Shadow as if she were there, he threw his entry pad against the wall. Thankfully, these things weren’t too fragile. But it was no use. What am I doing wrong? He asked himself again and again. He was definitely doing something wrong, but about what? The virus, or Shadow?
What did she say to him at dinner? What was it precisely?
He jumped to his feet and tore out of his door. ‘You should see what I did to the computer—’ How could he have missed that? How could she slip like that? She, who would not spare you the time of day? You could almost call it intentional. It rang in his head, ‘… to the computer—’ How blind can a man get?
He ran to Shadow’s quarters in Landerland. He wanted to catch her at it. He had access to any room in the Third Compound, being its commander, and the ambassador’s was no exception. He burst through her door. She wasn’t there.
Of course. Shadow kept a room on Icecat 2. Tucker ran—this time for real—to the Second Compound, over Bridge 2, into Icecat Two’s belly, past the Science Compound, the Agro Labs, and halfway into the Med Complex. Was he too late? And he had no access to anything in Icecat 2.
He could always knock. Or kick down.
But her door was unsecured. It yielded under the general code, surprising Tucker. Had he been wrong? She sat in her com booth beyond the bed. Of course, of course, of course. She worked it from the 2, not from the 3. Tucker would have found the 3.
She turned a surprised look to him but none too worried. He grabbed her by some loose cloth and dragged her from her chair. He shoved her violently against the wall. He disabled her free arm with his other hand, pushing it, too, violently against the wall.
“Hey, what—” she started.
“Don’t hey and don’t you what me. What in the name of the void have you done to the nav?”
“Nothing. Tucker! Leave off!”
He shoved her onto the bed and crushed his weight on top of her, forcing her arms over her head. How unbecoming her station and rank and all that. She could not possibly move had she decided to struggle; he had her pinned.
“Tell me, Ambassador,” he blasted in her ear. “Huh? What. Have. You. Done. To. The. NAV!”
She had gone utterly still under his body, but he was raging too much to quit. For the first time in those long two years of voyage, there was absolutely nothing between them. Only a couple of layers of spacer-lander garb. He had finally breached the space, like in his dreams, those embarrassing, unwanted dreams of him loving Shadow.
Suddenly, he became very aware of Shadow’s body beneath his own, icy-hot, bony. Ice and fire and bones. Too many bones. He started to sweat. Sweet Mother of the Child, was it this it’d been all about, the stress, the enmity between them? He had imagined her soft in his arms, fragile, vulnerable, but she was none of that. She was all hard, bony, and stiff, but her fire burned him. There was no doubt he wanted this ice, this stiffness, this thing that Shadow was. Mercy!
He marginally relaxed the grip on her forearms. Move Tucker, walk away. She hadn’t resisted him through all of this; why? He heard the metal click. Christ.
“You want to die, Tucker?”
Her voice was a quiet hiss. The blade against his thigh was barely colder and harder than Shadow’s flesh...
