Illuminae (The Illuminae Files #1)(14)
COMMAND TRANSMISSION SENT 07/21/75 09:06
HYPATIA HAILS ALEXANDER: NARROW FREQUENCY BROADCAST, SHORT BURST
Alexander, Alexander, Alexander, this is Hypatia, Hypatia, Hypatia. Do you copy? Over.
[NO RESPONSE]
HYPATIA HAILS ALEXANDER: AUXILIARY FREQUENCY
Alexander, Alexander, Alexander, this is Hypatia, Hypatia, Hypatia. Do you copy? Over.
[NO RESPONSE]
HYPATIA HAILS ALEXANDER: MAYDAY FREQUENCY
Alexander, Alexander, Alexander, this is Hypatia, Hypatia, Hypatia. Do you copy? Over.
ALEXANDER HAILS HYPATIA: MAYDAY FREQUENCY
Auto-response: Your message has been received and quarantined. Your message will be processed. Over.
HYPATIA: Alexander, this is Hypatia. What the f*ck do you mean our message has been quarantined? This is Captain Chau. Get me Torrence on the line. Over.
ALEXANDER: Your message has been received and quarantined. Your message will be processed. Over.
HYPATIA: That right? Well process this: you flex your tiniest gun turret, look like you’re even reaching to scratch an itch, I’m going to raise so much noise the Lincoln and every ally she has in the ‘verse will know where to find you.
ALEXANDER: Hypatia, this is Colonel Myles. Go secure. Repeat, go secure. Over.
HYPATIA HAILS ALEXANDER: COMMANDER’S SECURE FREQUENCY
HYPATIA: Lia, what the f*ck?
ALEXANDER: Sit tight, Ann. Comms are down while we do some work on AIDAN, and we could live without gossip flying back and forth between the ships. You should see the stats on broadcast frequency the last couple of days. Your people and ours have been busy. Loose lips …
HYPATIA: Look, I said exactly what you told me to say, I said it was the Lincoln that took out the Copernicus. Pretty soon someone’s going to have to start answering some questions for me, though. Anyone with eyes can see your main engines are offline and you’re reaccelerating on secondaries. Has this work you’re doing taken AIDAN offline completely? Get your main drives back up!
HYPATIA: Where’s Torrence?
ALEXANDER: He’s taking care of some official business. You have my word, Ann. We’re here to keep you safe.
This girl has to be some kind of spider monkey. I don’t know what those are, but I know what a spider is and I know what a monkey is, and if you found some unholy way to combine the two, that’s what I’d be watching right now. You said include everything: right now I am including my impression that she is very flexible, and apparently unaffected by gravity. I guess you need more context. I’ll go back to the start and transcribe from there.
Footage opens at 11:38, 07/21/75. Subject is Kady Grant, neurogramming intel student third class, refugee from Kerenza training aboard the Hypatia to replace crew they lost to the Alexander. Camera 892A takes in the corridor leading through to the servers. She enters with a group of fellow trainees and an instructor, and they make their way down the corridor.
The floor is a metal grid, and the clanging of their footsteps interferes with the audio on the file—the sound dampeners don’t work when there’s such a big gang. The noise drowns out individual conversations, but that doesn’t matter. They’re just fooling around the way students do, showing off for each other as they funnel down the long, narrow corridor, and she’s in the middle of it. She’s short, so she’s sometimes hidden behind other bodies, but there are enough glimpses to confirm she’s there.
They reach the server door, and she slips to the back of the group as they shove through. The subject digs in her jumpsuit and palms something too small to pick up on the cameras. Just as she reaches the door itself, last in line and invisible to everybody else, she jumps, slapping at the environmental sensors by the top of the doorframe. There’s a dark mark there when her hand comes away, but camera definition isn’t good enough to pick up the specs.
I would have laid down this week’s salary she couldn’t jump so high. Where does she get that kind of bounce from? Seriously, big jump for a small girl. She slips through the door the moment before it hums shut.
Inside the server room, the data monkeys look up and scowl and make shut up we’re working gestures, which dampens the students. The data monkeys don’t look worried, though—they either don’t know the Alexander cut comms, or they’ve been fed some excuse.
The room originally housed servers only, with personnel up the hall. The repurposing of the Hypatia from research vessel to refugee carrier removed that luxury. The servers have been relocated to line the walls, rows of desks crammed into the resultant space.
The cables that would usually slither all over the floor have been looped up against the ceiling by fat metal bands, though they still droop and coil downward like so many intestines. Whichever interior design genius handled the redesign found some harsh, fluorescent emergency lights, and jammed them in among the cables bundled up against the roof, which means there are bands of bright light and deep shadow all over the room.
The students, including the subject, take up places at the desks and log into their individual ports, getting to work on today’s assignment.
At 11:41 the environmental controls in the server room and the corridor beyond indicate a concern regarding air quality, loud, high-pitched and f*cking annoying beeping cutting over the chatter of the class and ruining what little audio I have.
They all rise and grumble and turn for the door, and as they exit, the subject pulls her spider monkey thing. Stepping up onto her desk, she grabs at the nest of cables, tangled up there like a bowl of noodles. She’s little, and they hold her weight. The subject has picked a spot in the back of the room, and by the time the head datatech checks everybody’s out, she’s clinging to the ceiling in the shadows and out of sight.