Yirella used her direct link to load a simple instruction into the suspension chamber management routines and closed her eyes, smiling faintly as the umbilicals fed the preliminary sedative into her body.
*
Consciousness arrived easily. Yirella’s body recognized it as if she were waking up in the morning rather than recovering from hibernation, but then it had only been three days. She felt refreshed and roguishly thrilled by what she was about to do. First she checked that the compartment’s monitoring routines were ignoring her; the overrides she’d loaded had created a blind spot around her chamber. No alerts had been triggered.
The umbilicals unplugged, and the lid slid back. While she showered she reviewed the ship’s status – particularly the location of the active-duty crew – then finally reviewed the other illicit procedure she’d begun. Two decks down, a biologic initiator had spent three weeks producing a human body. The cyborg didn’t have a full range of organs, just basic modules that could sustain the biologic muscles that overlaid a carbon skeleton, which in turn had been dressed in very realistic skin.
And it was ready.
Her routines scouted the route up to the suspension compartment, creating a safe passage. Yirella walked the cyborg up carefully.
She was dressed and ready when it entered the washroom, carrying a case of additional remotes the initiator had produced for her. Looking at the perfect replica of herself was the strangest sensation. She didn’t know if she should run or smile in admiration.
This part of the plan was always going to be the most ambiguous, because she and Ainsley didn’t know quite what they were dealing with. One version – the original idea – had the initiators producing a batch of insect-sized remotes packed with sensors that she could control while resting in the chamber. It certainly had the least risk. Then the Morgan had detected Lolo’s Signal – a random factor that could never have been anticipated. Her year off everything – worrying, plotting – made her reluctant to hand everything over to remotes. She wanted to be more involved, telling herself she could do a better job than any sensor, that she needed to be in the room. So she’d designed the cyborg.
Her doppelgänger lay back down in her suspension chamber, and the lid slid back up. That way, any of the duty crew performing a routine visual check – which was a mandatory once-a-day inspection – would just see her resting in there as normal.
It was a long way around the Morgan’s life-support section from the hibernation compartment to the captain’s private quarters, and several decks higher. Yirella took it carefully, deactivating the monitors section by section, constantly checking the position of any crew in the corridors so they didn’t come across her. Three and a half hours later she was outside the door. She ran one final review of the quarters to make sure Kenelm wasn’t inside. It seemed to be clear – unless of course Kenelm was using routines every bit as sophisticated as hers. After all, if she was right, sie had been on the Factory when Ainsley was made.
Yirella hesitated just for a second, then sent an override code into the door mechanism. It unlocked silently, and she walked in. Kenelm’s private quarters were made up of eight rooms: a formal reception room, a lounge, an entertainment room wrapped around an interactive stage, a dining room, a spa, a bedroom, a washroom and a study. Lights came on as she stood on the threshold. The small sensor remotes clinging to her clothes extended their insect legs and clambered down onto the floor. They spread out, and she closed her eyes, riding them, multiple images flowing into her brain through the neural interface. It allowed her to pervade every room of the quarters at once, examining the structure and fittings simultaneously.
There were no independent sensors active, and no Kenelm sleeping on hir bed. Sie really had gone back into hibernation a day after Yirella, as scheduled. Yirella allowed herself to exhale and got to work. The remotes carefully recorded the layout of each room: the way everything had been left when Kenelm went for suspension, the position of all the loose items, even the way the chairs were oriented. It might have been excessive caution, but she didn’t want Kenelm to know someone had been snooping.
When everything was mapped, the obvious place to start a forensic-level analysis was the study. She dispatched the majority of the remotes there while she sat down in the dining room. Kenelm certainly had some of the best food extruders in the fleet, and after three days on fluid nutrients oozing into her via the umbilicals, she was ravenous.
Five hours later the remotes had examined and explored every square millimetre of the study and everything in it, even scanning for hidden alcoves or passages. Yirella stood in the middle of the room, looking around with the results splashed inside her head. Network cables seemed to be woven everywhere beneath the decking and walls. Power cables were bright fizzing lines; the ephemeral outlines of systems and sensors glimmered like fading holograms. She was here in person because she knew intuition was something that couldn’t be enacted through remotes. But now, it turned out that staring suspiciously around the study wasn’t the mystery-busting breakthrough in real life that it was in all the books she’d accessed.
She wasn’t sure what she was going to find, but the study certainly didn’t contain it. Her principal fear was that anything that might verify that Kenelm had a hidden agenda would be contained in deeply encrypted files buried somewhere in the Morgan’s network. Given how much data was stored in the
