A Closed and Common Orbit (Wayfarers #2)(95)

Tak had come along, and Sidra didn’t know how she’d ever thank her for it. On top of everything else, her poor friend had been spacesick for the better part of the trip. She was in her bunk now, trying her best to sleep through it. Sidra hadn’t spoken to her, either. She knew Tak still wasn’t thrilled about any of this. Sidra was glad, though, for her help. Her coming along was the answer Sidra had been hoping for, the answer to the question Tak hadn’t let her finish at the kitchen table.

Pepper made her way below. She muttered to herself as she went, counting something on her fingertips, speaking too low for Sidra to hear. Sidra wanted to tell her that the fuel pumps were fine, that everything was fine. But that only would’ve made Pepper angry, she knew. Besides, Pepper needed to be doing something. Sidra understood that all too well.

The engine compartment was cramped, but Pepper didn’t seem to mind, and Sidra certainly didn’t. She followed in Pepper’s path, double-checking everything Pepper did, just to be sure. Fuel pumps. Life support. Artigrav. Everything’s fine, Pepper, she thought. But she didn’t interfere.

An anxious spike popped up in Sidra’s pathways as Pepper made her way to the small room she had no previous use for – the AI core. Sidra had helped her check through its hardware before they left, in anticipation of an extra passenger on the way back. No decision had been reached as to where Owl would go after they got home (the unspoken caveat being: if Owl was still there at all). Pepper and Blue had thrown out ideas, but nothing had stuck. A second body kit? Too risky for everyone involved. Pepper and Blue buying a ship big enough for permanent residence? Possibly, but neither of them really wanted to live in orbit. Sidra’s idea about an AI framework for their house? No, Owl had been alone enough, and besides, Pepper had said, it wasn’t fair to Sidra (who had appreciated hearing that). The shuttle core would have to do in the short term, at least until they got back. The trip was plenty long enough for more ideas to appear.

Sidra watched Pepper nervously as she poked around the core. Pepper didn’t appear to be doing anything in particular, but her being in there was concern enough. Sidra had made an alteration to the core before they’d left – nothing major, nothing irreversible, nothing dangerous, but nothing she’d consulted Pepper about, either. There wasn’t much in the core room that would point to it, but with Pepper’s eye for such things . . .

Sidra’s pathways settled as Pepper headed for the door, still muttering to herself. There had been nothing to worry about. They’d go back up to the cockpit, and be cosy with Blue, and—

Pepper turned around, a slight frown creasing her face.

Shit.

Pepper’s eyes followed a single cable patched into the framework on the wall. She approached it, leaning in toward the jack. Sidra could see her studying the hand-hacked circuits and junctions surrounding it, arranged in a configuration the manufacturer had not intended.

‘The hell is this?’ Pepper mumbled. She followed the cable along the bottom of the wall, where it had been carefully tucked out of sight. Not carefully enough, it seemed.

Sidra scrambled for the right way to handle this. Maybe Pepper would drop it. Maybe something would happen upstairs, and she’d leave before it became a problem. Maybe—

Pepper came to the storage panel the cable led into. Before Sidra could find the right thing to say, the panel was opened. Pepper yelled at the top of her lungs, jumping back. ‘Oh, f*ck, holy f*ck—’ She knelt down in a panic. ‘Sidra? Fuck—’

Sidra couldn’t see from Pepper’s angle, but she knew what Pepper had found: a doubled-over body, limp and lifeless, the errant cable plugged into the base of its skull. Resigned, Sidra turned on the nearest vox. ‘Pepper, I’m fine.’ She zoomed in on Pepper’s face with the corner camera. ‘I’m fine. I’m not in there.’





JANE, AGE 19


There was an AI aboard the Yo’ton. His name was Pahkerr, and nobody paid him much attention, even though he did lots of things for them. Nobody ever said ‘please’ or ‘thank you’ to him, even. They just made demands. ‘Pahkerr, open the hatch.’ ‘Pahkerr, run a system diagnostic.’ That kind of thing. Jane didn’t know what bothered her more: the way the crew talked to Pahkerr, or the fact that Pahkerr himself seemed fine with it. She’d tried talking to him during her first night there, while she and Laurian had arranged stacks of blankets on the floor of their storage compartment. She’d tried asking him how he was doing, what he was up to, if he was having a good day. He didn’t seem to know how to answer, and he wasn’t interested in having a conversation. Maybe there wasn’t any curiosity in his code. Maybe nobody’d ever asked him those kinds of things before.

Jane could hear Pahkerr’s cameras following her as she walked down the broad metal corridor. They were different from Owl’s cameras. Less noisy, less clunky. She missed the clunky ones. She missed Owl, furiously, achingly. And weird as it was, she missed the shuttle. Aboard the Yo’ton, everything was clean and warm, and all the tech worked right. There wasn’t any danger, not that she could see. But she missed the shuttle, all the same. She missed knowing where everything was, knowing how her blanket would smell, missed playing sims and fixing stuff. She’d worked so long to get out of there, and now . . . now, she almost wanted to go back.

Lights in the ceiling switched on as she made her way to the kitchen. The Yo’ton was huge, and she longed to know how everything worked. But the lead tech didn’t like her. Thekreh was a mean-faced Aandrisk with a real thick accent, and Jane didn’t know if she’d asked her too many questions or what, but Thekreh had flat-out told her that she was distracting her from her work, and that she needed to go bathe. That last bit had stung. Jane was the cleanest she’d been since the factory – cleaner, even. She didn’t think she smelled bad, but she’d felt awkward in her own body since then, and had been scrubbing herself so hard her skin hurt. None of the other species there took showers, so she and Laurian had to clean themselves in one of the utility sinks down in the engine room, standing on cold metal and drenching each other with a lukewarm hose. It made her feel like a dead dog.