Accelerating Universe: The Sector Fleet Book One Read online

  And then I pushed up out of the command chair and turned to face them.

  “We’ve barely left Earth’s orbit,” I said. “And already we’ve hit a hurdle. Hazards will lie in wait. Will we let them creep up on us again?”

  “No, sir,” the entire flight deck replied in sync.

  “Torrence,” I said. “You have the bridge.”

  “Aye-aye, sir.”

  I walked toward the single door that led out into the single corridor accessing the bridge. The Sector Two lead vessel Pavo may not have been a military ship, but she was equipped like one. Access onto and off the bridge was given to a select few. The doors that slid open as I exited were titanium enriched, triple-locked, and over four inches thick.

  I tapped the gel coating framing the exit on the way out and headed toward the more populated but no less elitist area of the main deck. Unlike the bridge, the mayor’s offices were in complete darkness. Not even safety lighting illuminated the murals on the walls. I didn’t need the light to tell me the image of the Great Barrier Reef that swirled in all its natural glory in the gel itself was there, though. The mayor had commissioned it especially. And had taken great pride in showing me that he had.

  Pavo was a privately leased vessel. One of eight in our Sector Two Fleet alone. Each ship had its own quirks, its own expensive additions, but none of them had an artificial intelligence weaved into its construct. There were only four of those to go around, so the mayor in charge of each AI-controlled ship held a certain elevated position over all of the rest of the Sector Fleet vessels.

  No individual Sector Fleet was officially above another, but Mayor Cecil believed ‘his’ vessel the flagship of all the Sector Fleets.

  I had yet to decide why.

  “Pavo,” I called as I stood still on the threshold of the mayor’s dark offices. “Lights, please.”

  “Certainly, Captain.”

  “Why were they out?”

  “I am running ship-wide systems checks.”

  “I thought you said all systems were operational.”

  “They are, Captain. But that launch was…close.”

  The lights came on and stopped me from voicing something I might have regretted in present company. The mayor sat in a chair in the middle of the reception area, facing the hallway to the main deck, and therefore to the bridge. He held a glass of whiskey in one hand - I’d bet my left nut it wasn’t a Jameson - and a datapad in the other. He did not look amused in the slightest.

  “I asked that thing three times to raise the lighting,” he snarled.

  “Systems checks,” I offered, well aware he’d heard Pavo speak over the comm.

  “What the hell happened, Jameson?”

  “A solar flare. An unexpected one.”

  “No such thing. We’ve had those flares charted for the past eight years. We’ve got the science down pat. Mistakes like that can’t happen.”

  “It seems one did. Pavo compensated. He also assisted the Corinthian.”

  “He? You mean it.”

  “I mean Pavo, sir.” It was irrelevant to me whether someone called Pavo an it, he or a she. But to my mind, the robotic voice did sound faintly masculine, so I went with a he.

  I smiled at the mayor. It was my don’t-mess-with-me smile. The one that said challenge accepted.

  I’d been butting heads with Mayor Cecil since well before our launch window had been confirmed.

  Cecil stared at me with flint steel eyes that matched his salt and pepper hair. I had better things to do than hold a staring match with an overstuffed and overpaid civil servant.

  Of course, there was nothing civil about Samuel Cecil.

  “I think you may have forgotten who pays your wages, Captain,” Cecil announced as he took a casual sip of his whiskey.

  “I am well aware of who has leased this ship,” I replied steadily. “And I am told Mr Archibald is also well aware of the terms of that lease.”

  “Yes, yes. You are the captain. A ship must have only one, of course. But don’t think you can operate without oversight. Money still makes the world go around, you know.”

  “Would that be the world that is at this very moment burning? Its sun rapidly progressing through the various stages of catastrophic failure? Its imminent explosion a mere footnote to those few who could afford to flee? And a constant reminder of their mortal existence to those poor bastards left behind?”

  “Such poetry,” Cecil sneered. He pointed his near-empty whiskey glass at me. “But you forget yourself, Captain. Money is still a commodity much sought after on board this vessel. And those who control it, control everything.”

  I held his cold stare for a few seconds longer and then asked, “Is there anything else, your Worship?”

  He downed the last of his whiskey. I wondered briefly just how much of our storage bay had been given over to single malt. I decided I’d get Pavo to do an inventory.

  “I want a report on my desk by 0800,” the mayor said; his back now to me as he poured himself another drink. “Make sure you detail exactly what you did during and after the incident.”

  Incident? I bit my tongue. That incident had nearly caused a launch failure. We’d missed our window, and still, Pavo had managed to save us. Which until that moment I hadn’t fully comprehended.

  “Did you hear me?” Cecil snapped.

  “0800. Detailed.” He was going to kill me with paperwork.

  He narrowed his eyes at me. This time my grin was an order of magnitude higher than my previous don’t-mess-with-me.

  This time it clearly entered don’t-fuck-with-me territory.

  I spun on my heel and headed back to the bridge. I had a damaged ship to deal with. An unsettled crew and passenger list. And an AI that I was fairly certain had acted outside of its protocols.

  Two

  Failure Was Not An Option

  Ana

  “Please report to the medical bay, Ms Kereama.”

  My head snapped up and glared at the rounded ceiling where the disembodied voice seemed to have come from.

  I made a grunting sound and returned my attention to my elderly aunt’s arm. When the ship launched, we’d both been sitting on our beds. But no one had explained to us that lift-off would be so violent. Aunt Mara had been thrown to the floor and now had a scrape down the length of her right forearm.

  Thankfully, every cabin on board the vessel had been given rudimentary medical supplies; I’d found ours in the minuscule ensuite bathroom we shared, and I was now wrapping up her brittle, paper thin skin in a crepe bandage. Maybe the speaker in the ceiling wanted me to take Aunt Mara to the medbay?

  “Please report to the medical bay, Ms Kereama. Your assistance is required immediately.”

  “Is that thing talking to you, Ana?” my aunt asked.

  “Damned if I know, Auntie.”

  “Hush now. No swearing. It might be listening.”

  “Who...?”

  “I am listening,” the speaker in the ceiling announced. “I am also concurrently carrying out twenty-two conversations throughout the ship and running forty-four systems checks simultaneously.”

  “Overachiever much?” I muttered. Then leaned forward to whisper to my aunt, “Is it the ship purser?” But that didn’t make sense. Why would the ship purser be carrying out systems checks?

  Aunt Mara chuckled. “It’s the AI that runs the ship, aroha. Pavo they call it.”

  “Like the ship’s name?”

  “I guess it’s named after it.”

  I shook my head as I finished up with Aunt Mara’s arm. She’d be bruised, but nothing was broken. I looked up into her withered face and wondered again how she’d last on this journey. Ten years ago, flight through space had been in the realm of science fiction only. A dream we’d all harboured as we’d faced our planet’s end. Then out of nowhere, private companies like Virgin Galactic suddenly announced they’d mastered interstellar flight capabilities. A Hail Mary at the ninth hour.

  We’d celebrated for weeks unti
l they’d all, one by one, explained to a desperate humanity, that seats were numbered and only those rich enough to afford a berth could expect salvation.

  I’d accepted the inevitable. Spent my fair share of time sprawled drunkenly under the bar at my nearest watering hole along with hundreds of others in my neighbourhood. Then ten days out from Pavo’s launch window, my aunt turned up at my door.

  “Please report to the medical bay, Ms Kereama. Doctor Medina is expecting you.”

  “It really is speaking to me, isn’t it?” I said.

  “I think so,” my aunt agreed.

  “But why the medbay?”

  “We always knew you’d have to work for your passage, Ana. Why not the medbay?”

  My aunt had been granted free passage for sentimentality reasons. I’m sure, otherwise, she would not have met the criteria for boarding. She was old. In her seventies. Hardly a fitting example of what would be needed to rebuild humanity. But she’d been the favourite nanny of the man who had leased this vessel. And what Mr Archibald wanted, Mr Archibald got.

  I could hardly complain. I was her chosen companion. Her plus one. I wasn’t lying passed out under The Jolly Roger’s bar along with the rest of my friends. But I hadn’t been entirely honest when I’d filled out my bio for the flight; a requirement that had gone into sufficient detail to let me know acceptance on board would be subject to certain genetic triggers and not my preferred position as my aunt’s favourite niece.

  “How does it know?” I whispered.

  “Know what?” my aunt said in normal volume.

  “I am aware of your previous experience as a Royal New Zealand Army medic,” the AI said.

  I bit my lip and stared at the gel-coated floor. This was not good. Not good at all.

  “You’re wrong,” I said. “You’ve made a mistake.”

  “I do not make mistakes. And your assistance is required. Please follow the blue arrows to the medical bay.”

  A pulsing blue light appeared beneath my feet and then started to form an arrow heading toward the door of our cabin. I jumped back as if avoiding standing on the freaky illumination would somehow make this all go away.

  “Ana,” my aunt said firmly. Her nanny voice. “You must help. This is how you will pay your way.”

  “I thought maybe the kitchens,” I muttered to myself. Not the medbay. Never the medbay.

  “What is wrong?” Aunt Mara asked. “You were a good paramedic.”

  Until I wasn’t.

  I shook my head, my eyes threatening to tear up, my hands wringing.

  “Aroha,” my aunt whispered, pulling herself up from the bed and gripping my hands in her gnarled ones. “You can do this. You must.”

  I looked into old eyes; eyes that had seen so much of our world. Had seen the good and the bad and the oncoming end. Aunt Mara never questioned her good fortune on gaining a berth on board Pavo. She’d simply turned up on my doorstep and told me to pack. Of all the relatives in our whanau, she’d picked me.

  “Why me, Auntie?” I asked.

  She didn’t pretend not to understand. She squeezed my hands and simply said, “Because I knew you could do it. That you would do it. That failure was not an option.”

  I shook my head. She didn’t know me. She didn’t know what I’d done. How coming back from that was an impossibility. The disappointment that my favourite auntie did not know the real me left me feeling bereft. The knowledge that she wasn’t aware of what had happened made it possible to breathe.

  “Because,” Aunt Mara added, “you deserve a second chance.”

  I stopped breathing. She looked me straight in the eyes and held my unblinking stare.

  “You told them,” I accused. She had known. Of course, she’d known. Aunt Mara knew everything that happened to anyone in the family.

  “No, aroha,” she said. “I had hoped you would.”

  I shook my head.

  “Please report to the medical bay, Ms Kereama. There are exactly twenty-three passengers from Habitat Two in need of medical aid. Doctor Medina requires your assistance.”

  “There has to be someone else. A nurse maybe.”

  “There is no one on board within the pay-for-passage class with your medical expertise.”

  I laughed. It was bordering on hysterical.

  “I did not make a joke,” the AI announced in its robotic monotone.

  I laughed a little harder, muttering, “And in the paid-up class?”

  “That would be inappropriate.”

  “You mean none of the lawyers and celebrities and crooked real estate magnates want to get their hands bloody?”

  There was a lengthy pause, and then the AI said, “Yes.”

  I looked at my aunt. She shrugged her shoulders. The blue arrow on the ground flashed a little faster.

  I wasn’t sure I could do this. Could face this all over again.

  “Twenty-three passengers today,” the AI said as if it could read the uncertainty in my facial features. “Who knows how many tomorrow, Ms Kereama.”

  “You just had to go and hit all the guilt buttons, didn’t you?”

  “I did not hit any buttons. But I am currently carrying out nineteen systems checks, and they do require buttons of a sort to be pushed.”

  I stared at the gel-coated ceiling and smiled. An AI with a sense of humour. Who’d have thunk it?

  “I think I might like you, AI,” I said.

  “My name is Pavo,” it replied. “Are you ready to follow the arrows now?”

  Was I? No fucking way.

  Would I? Of course, I would.

  Failure was not an option.

  Not anymore, anyway.

  Three

  Follow The Blue Arrows

  Ana

  The hallway, or whatever you called it on a spaceship, was empty. Everyone assigned to their cabins for lift-off at a guess. Or the AI, Pavo, was directing them via similar blue arrows as mine to different parts of the vessel. Like a massive chess game where an artificial intelligence played with our lives.

  “So,” I said glancing up at the ceiling. There were no speakers that I could see and no camera lenses. But I’d bet my left tit there were eyes on me at present. “How many assistants does the good doctor have?”

  “I thought I’d made that clear, Ms Kereama,” Pavo said. “You are the only qualified pay-for-passage passenger fit to assist Doctor Medina.”

  “I think you overestimate my qualifications, Pavo,” I muttered.

  “I do not overestimate anything, Ms Kereama. I am aware of your service record in its entirety.”

  I stared at the ground and followed the blue arrows like a good little soldier.

  “There was nothing you could have done,” the AI said in that maddening monotone.

  I shook my head. Receiving compassion from a machine. I really had hit rock bottom.

  “You had a 16.66% chance of success at the time. The odds were not in your favour.”

  I ground my teeth together and said nothing. Humans didn’t think in percentages. At the time, I’d known nothing but desperation. I’d made a choice, and I’d failed. It didn’t matter if there’d been a 90% chance of success. Or even a 99.99% chance. By attempting to save my sergeant’s life, I’d doomed the rest.

  The medbay doors lit up in blue as I approached them. Just in case I hadn’t been aware the arrows had pointed toward them. My steps faltered, slowed, until the pulsing blue light felt as though it was connected to my rapid heartbeat.

  I couldn’t hear anything from inside the medbay itself. But in my head, I heard gunfire and mortar exploding and the screams of soldiers.

  The doors opened and stayed open. A yawning maw filled with imagined teeth. I could hear the voices inside now. The moans and soft crying. The raised voice of someone in charge. The distinctive beep of life-saving machinery.

  “Pavo!” A male voice said. “Where is my goddamned nurse?”

  “Ms Kereama is standing outside the medbay doors, Doctor Medina,” Pavo announced f
or all to hear.

  “What bloody good is she out there?” the doctor yelled.

  “I believe she is unable to step over the threshold,” the AI replied.

  “Of all the asinine things you could possibly say, you pick that?” Indistinct muttering followed. Then a head appeared around the still open doors to the medbay. Male. In his fortifies at a guess. Dishevelled brown hair sticking out at odd angles. Black rimmed glasses sliding down a long nose. “You the nurse?” the doctor asked.

  “I...”

  “Then get in here. People are hurt.”

  “I’m...” He disappeared. The doors stayed open. The arrows pulsed.

  “Pavo,” I whispered.

  “Yes, Ms Kereama.”

  “I can’t do this.”

  Silence.

  “I do not understand,” the AI finally said. “Simply put one foot in front of the other.”

  I huffed out a breath.

  “It’s not that easy.”

  “I cannot detect an injury that would preclude ambulation.”

  I blinked.

  “Do you require assistance?”

  If I did, I was at the right place. I shook my head.

  “Twenty-three passengers, Ms Kereama,” the AI said.

  “Nurse!” the doctor yelled from inside the infirmary.

  “I’m not a nurse,” I whispered.

  “You do not need to be to help,” Pavo said.

  I blinked away tears before they could fully form and took a step and then another. Until I found myself in a room marginally larger than Aunt Mara’s and my cabin. A brief turn of my head and I’d counted four beds. Several more patients were lined up against the wall.

  “Four beds for a ship with over one thousand passengers,” I said, stunned.

  “Yes,” the doctor snapped. “Not my suggestion.”

  His eyes met mine.

  “What took you so long?” he asked.

  “Oh, you know, had to fight my way through the crowd to get here.”

  “A comedienne. Just what the medbay needs.”