Accelerating Universe: The Sector Fleet Book One Read online

“About that,” I said. “You do realise that the junior intern your trail led to will be stripped of his pension and downgraded to a pay-for-passage? He’ll be lucky to get a job in sanitation.”

  “I…had not thought of that.”

  “No, I didn’t think you had.”

  “We needed a…foil. That is the correct term, is it not?”

  “I guess so.”

  The comm pinged. Again. I stared at the name of the caller. Lieutenant Chan. Thank fuck.

  “Chan. Status,” I said.

  “Brig is secure, Captain. Two of my team have been seconded to the medbay. One is escorting Second Lieutenant Kereama to the mayor’s offices on a medical callout. I have more en route to confirm main deck security. The rest of the civilian population seem to have placed themselves on voluntary lockdown.”

  “Voluntary lockdown?”

  “Damnedest thing. They all just walked into the nearest cabin and locked their doors. Did you announce a ship-wide atmosphere leak or something?”

  “No.” I looked up at the ceiling. “Pavo?”

  “They were being hurt.”

  I sighed. Swings and roundabouts. We had a powerful, all-systems access AI with a conscience and a very limited worldview.

  “OK,” I said. “Let’s keep them where they are until we get this sorted. Pavo, are there any more stragglers?”

  “All civilians are accounted for, Captain. But we have lost two midshipmen.”

  “Lost as in…?”

  “Deceased.”

  And suddenly, this wasn’t just an inconvenience. This was real.

  “Get me the mayor.”

  “The mayor is not replying to any hails.”

  “Then pipe me into his room.”

  “Channel open.”

  “Mayor Cecil. This is Captain Jameson. The civilian population has been placed on lockdown. All systems are operational. Please stand down your men.”

  I watched him on the gel wall screen. He was unaware that he was being recorded. Loud whispers could be heard over the speakers. Something about “Cut the audio, you idiot!” He was waving his arms around and puffed up like a bloat fish. In the background, several of his staff were crouched on the floor and looking scared. To the side, I could see two Archibald mercs, weapons hot.

  “Mayor Cecil. This is the captain. Stand down your men.”

  “Or what?” he muttered, unaware I could hear him.

  I smiled. I was sure it wasn’t pleasant in the slightest.

  “Or I will consider this action an attack on Anderson Universal,” I said and watched the colour drain from his fat face as he glanced around the room he was in.

  Slowly, he stood to full height.

  “This is outrageous!” he declared.

  “What is outrageous, Mayor Cecil is the death of two of my crewmen,” I said. “I will not tolerate anymore. Stand your men down.”

  It took a second, but I saw the moment he realised this had escalated beyond his control. He nodded to the Archibald mercs, and I watched as they powered down their weapons and hid them away. The mayor’s staff looked relieved. I wasn’t quite ready to say that I was.

  “Send your men in, Lieutenant Chan,” I said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  I sat back in my chair and ran a hand over my face. I needed a coffee or a whiskey. Or both.

  I knew I’d get neither.

  “Open a channel to the medbay,” I told Pavo.

  “Channel open.”

  “Doctor Medina. Status, please.”

  A small wait while the doctor untangled himself from whatever it was he was doing.

  “Everything is under control here, Captain. Seventeen injuries ranging from status four to status three, with one a status two. I expect full recovery across the board.”

  “Very good.”

  “Captain?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve lost contact with my assistant.”

  “Lieutenant Kereama?”

  “Is there another assistant you’ve assigned me I’m unaware of?”

  I scowled at my desk.

  “Pavo, locate Second Lieutenant Kereama,” I said instead of snapping at Nico.

  Silence.

  “Pavo!”

  “No,” the AI said. “No, that is not right. That is not acc…acc…acceptable.”

  What the hell?

  “Pavo, locate Second Lieu…”

  “Second Lieutenant Ana Kereama is not on board the ship."

  Seventeen

  Ana, Don’t Fool Yourself

  Ana

  I came to with a start. But that didn’t mean I had any idea of what had happened. For a second or two, I just lay there and tried to remember. My mind felt like mush. My head hurt. My pulse was a little too rapid. Something had scared me, or I’d received a head injury, and my body was trying to recover.

  First things first, I felt around where I lay, discovering I was on a bed; the mattress thin and plastic covered. Medbay? I went to move my hand to touch my head as the cotton wool feeling wasn’t dissipating. And discovered my arms were secured down the sides of my body. Not medbay.

  I let out a slow breath of air and tried to open my eyes. The space was dark, almost black. But I got the impression it wasn’t small, like a coffin. And there was an image I didn’t need. I couldn’t move which meant I couldn’t sit up, but even though the light was poor, I had the sense the ceiling was well above my head.

  So, strapped to a bed in a dark room. But what happened?

  I searched my aching mind for the past few minutes. Or hours. It was hard to tell how long I’d been lying here without stretching my limbs to ascertain fatigue. But I didn’t get the impression it had been long; my back would have started complaining about the thin mattress if it had been.

  The last thing I remembered was…Dr Medina rushing into the medbay right after someone on the flight deck had called everybody to their stations over audio comms. Which, I remembered now, was right after that video message from the Chariot.

  And then it all came rushing back to me, right up to the midshipman getting shot.

  I’d pulled him back immediately, I remembered. Automatically. It’s what I’d been trained to do. Remove the wounded from danger. But danger had followed him.

  Bile surged up my throat at the memory of what had greeted me when I’d managed to roll the crewman over. Which was why the merc had been able to disarm me. I swallowed back the acrid taste and felt a boiling pit of dismay flood me.

  Stupid flashbacks and stupid fucking mercenaries. He’d taken advantage of my frozen state and whacked me on the head with the butt of his gun.

  Disarmed and captured. Sam would have been so disappointed.

  I licked my lips. OK. That was that. Now, what did I do?

  “Pavo?” I whispered. My throat was dry, I almost coughed.

  The AI did not answer. I tried a little louder.

  “Pavo!”

  “You’re wasting your time,” a voice I thought I recognised said off to the side.

  I turned my head, which sent all manner of dark spots dancing across my already dark vision. The bile was back, but I was used to it now.

  “Lights,” I said.

  The lights came on, whether by my command or my captor’s, I didn’t know.

  Sitting in a straight-backed chair was a man I’d met on occasion. I didn’t really know Damon Archibald, as well as Aunt Mara did, of course, but I had been with my aunt when she’d dropped gifts off at Mr Archibald’s offices in Auckland. I’d shaken his hand once back on Earth.

  None of this made sense.

  I let my eyes adjust to the bright light until I could make out as much of the room as I could manage while strapped to a bed. Something wasn’t right, but my mind was having trouble understanding what I was seeing.

  “The room is soundproofed,” Archibald said as if I was about to scream for a rescue.

  And maybe that would have been a good idea, but right now I was a few stars short of a galaxy.
I shook my head, trying to dislodge the fuzziness.

  “One of my men hit you rather hard,” the douchebag added. “My apologies, Ms Kereama. They had instructions to detain you without undue force. But, then, you were armed.”

  “They killed a crewman,” I managed.

  “Yes, well, there was a lot of that going around.”

  I let out an incredulous breath.

  Then blinked. Soundproofed?

  I looked around the room again. The walls, I noted this time, were not gel-coated. They were an assortment of matt black tiles with points, like horizontal stalagmites, emerging from irregular places. I gathered that was the soundproofing, but that wasn’t what had me so concerned.

  No gel coating meant no Pavo.

  I wasn’t sure if I was going to get out of here.

  My eyes met Archibald’s again. He seemed relaxed, unconcerned about detaining an Anderson Universal crew member. Unperturbed by the fact that guards under his control had killed a man. More than one, it sounded like.

  I was up shit creek, all right. But why?

  “Why am I here?” I asked.

  “Ah, and finally the synapses start firing.” Prick.

  He leaned back in his chair and crossed his expensively suit-clad leg over his knee. His shoes were shiny.

  “I want to know who sent that message fleet-wide,” he said.

  The Chariot message. I shook my head.

  “How the hell would I know?” I replied.

  “Now, now, you can do better than that.” He grinned at me. It was so normal that it was slightly creepy. “And I’m sure your aunt would not want you to use such unladylike language.”

  The man was mad. Certifiable.

  “Shall we try this again? Who sent the message?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come now. Captain Jameson has been inside your cabin twice within the past twenty-four hours. I would have interrogated Marama, but she’s looking a little frail. I’m sure you, as an ex-soldier, can last a little longer under stress.”

  “What kind of stress are we talking about?”

  His grin widened. “I like you, Ana. You’re feisty.”

  I didn’t feel feisty; tied to a bed, disarmed, disillusioned.

  I scowled at the man.

  “Let’s get more comfortable,” he suddenly said, and the bed lurched upward.

  Gravity pulled my feet to the floor once the bed came upright. The straps keeping me pinned down before now held me up. My legs felt like jelly. My head, in this new position, thumped like someone was repeatedly hitting it with a hammer. My stomach revolted, and again I was forced to swallow back bile.

  We’d had training sessions on what to do if we were ever captured. Even training sessions on surviving torture. But I had never been SAS or any other elite branch of the army. I’d been a grunt who carried a medical bag. A grunt who’d caused the death of her entire squad by trying to save just one man.

  “Now,” Archibald said, “that’s better. We can look each other in the eye.”

  He was standing before me; I hadn’t even seen him move. Dizziness assuaged me, but I used every technique I had to bring my vision back into focus. I stared the man before me down and bared my teeth.

  “My what big teeth you have, Grandma. But, Ms Kereama, you don’t have a grandma on board this vessel. What you do have is an elderly aunt. An aunt who is here at my behest. And who can be just as easily abandoned.”

  “You’d space her?”

  “Nothing quite so drastic. I am a businessman after all; I don’t waste assets. But I will rescind her status and insist she become a pay-for-passage. What do you think Aunt Mara could do to earn her berth? Weave a basket?”

  “She could teach.”

  “Ana, don’t fool yourself. Her body is failing. Surely you, as a trained medical professional, can see that. Oh, wait! You’re not known for your stellar medic skills, are you? Many a man has died while under your tender care. What will the captain say when he finds out?”

  The captain would have access to my entire military record by now, courtesy of Pavo. Archibald’s threat was an empty one. But pointing that out wouldn’t help me now.

  “What do you want, Archibald?”

  “I want to know who leaked the video.”

  I tried to think. The crewman who’d come with me from the medbay had said a junior intern in the mayor’s office had. Clearly, that was open knowledge. If it was a cover-up and the captain had leaked the message instead, I didn’t know.

  And if it was Pavo, then we were all in trouble.

  “Who do you think did it?” I asked.

  He stepped forward. My hand, the one that had been working surreptitiously at my side to free itself, came up. And before he had a chance to react, I pulled him toward me by his ridiculously expensive tie and executed a perfect if not somewhat modified headbutt.

  He fell to the floor in a muted thump which, according to him, wouldn’t be heard outside.

  Eighteen

  Professional

  Jameson

  “Pavo!” I shouted, trying to get the AI to reply. It had muttered incoherently for several seconds, and since then everything had gone blank.

  Our viewscreens, our internal scans, our comms system. We had navigation, flight control, artificial grav and life support. But, in essence, everything automated had been shut down. Lifts. Doors. Food services. You name it, if Pavo made it work, it was offline.

  I’d never heard of an AI going offline voluntarily before.

  “Suggestions?” I said to the flight crew. I’d managed to force my way out of my ready room, which thankfully was located just off the bridge, and now at least was with most of my senior crew.

  Lieutenant Chan was still in the brig, but I didn’t consider that to be a bad thing; if Pavo was down, the cells’ containment fields could also be. Chan was where he needed to be. And so was Doctor Medina; in the medbay; another acceptable outcome.

  That is not acc…acc…acceptable.

  I scrubbed a hand through my hair and looked at each of my bridge officers.

  “Can we access his subroutines?” Lieutenant Taylor asked from the tactical station.

  I shook my head. “Redundancies on top of redundancies, but even if engineering could, we’d need to get someone down there to deliver the order. It would take too long.” I stared at my partially open ready room door. It had been hard enough to force my way out of there without power to the locking system.

  “So, we’re basically trapped until Pavo finishes his hissy fit?” Lieutenant Marshal asked from her communications station.

  “Not quite. Pavo,” I tried again, “this is the captain. Jameson, John, charlie-kilo-victor-one-eight-three. Acknowledge.”

  Silence.

  I looked to my ready room again and then stood up from my chair.

  “No matter what, we’re blind from in here,” I announced.

  “Let me go, Captain,” Taylor said, clearly interpreting my look.

  “We might need master codes to access systems on other decks,” I explained. “I’m going.”

  “Captain,” Commander Torrence said, stepping forward. “We might need your codes on the bridge, as well.”

  “The bridge is functioning at a basic level, Commander. But out there…” I pointed towards the door that led off the bridge. “We have nothing.”

  I looked at Marshal.

  “Wrist comms are down?” I confirmed.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Any alternative available?”

  She shook her head.

  “OK, this is what we’re going to do. Torrence, you have the bridge. Marshal, keep working on comms. Taylor, do whatever you can to wake up Pavo from here. I’ll pick up a midshipman or two on my way to the mayor’s offices; Lieutenant Chan said a team from security were making their way there before Pavo went dark. I’ll rendezvous with them and see if we can find Second Lieutenant Kereama.”

  “Kereama, sir?” Torrence asked.

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nbsp; “It was when Pavo discovered the lieutenant missing that he went AWOL.”

  “Is that significant?” Taylor asked.

  I met his eyes. “I’d say that’s pretty damn significant, wouldn’t you?”

  There was a connection of some sort between Ana Kereama and the AI. How or why I didn’t know. But he confided in her; I knew that much. She’d already known about the loss of Vela at a time when no one but I should have. Pavo had confided in her. What did he say?

  Ana has been doctoring me.

  Something about understanding emotions. Emotions an AI should have no time for. Somehow, Pavo had chosen Ana in his quest to become…what? More human maybe? I didn’t know. But I had known for some time that something wasn’t right.

  And I’d been too damn slow reacting.

  I walked to the door and tested the access panel. As expected, nothing lit up. I grabbed the metal spike I’d commandeered from a statue on display in my ready room and used it to pry apart the doors. Ordinarily, this would have been impossible. But Pavo had not left the doors locked; he’d merely cut off power to them.

  The doors scraped open, and an empty corridor greeted me. I looked back at my bridge crew and said, “Shut this behind me.”

  Torrence arched his brow. Shutting it, as we’d just seen, did nothing to protect them. But it was a barrier at the very least.

  “Just do it,” I snapped, and spun on my heel.

  The door scraped closed behind me before I’d made it to the end of the corridor. I paused and strained to hear anything. If Chan’s security team were nearby, they were stealthy. And so were any of Archibald’s mercs, if I wanted to get real.

  I pulled my weapon free and thumbed the safety. Archibald had proved just how reckless he was with ship security; I wasn’t taking any chances.

  “Pavo,” I whispered; I’d keep trying to reach the AI at every opportunity. “If you could point out the bad guys, I’d be thankful.”

  Nothing.

  I peered around the corner. The lighting was dimmed, but functioning, and enough to see it was clear to the next corner. I stepped out and ran as quietly as possible to the end of what I could see.