Flick.
Astern, in engine room one, several of Jumoke’s acolytes were replacing the rat’s nest of sensors and cables accumulated over the many DED test flights with a tidy array of permanent instruments.
Flick.
Stacked and heaped halfway around the dome, packaged in assorted crates, cases, canisters, satchels, cabinets, racks, and tied bundles, an exterior camera showed her yet more supplies remaining to be loaded. Geometry and simulations be damned, it seemed impossible that all this stuff could fit aboard.
Flick.
Mid-ship, in cargo hold two, workers had removed several deck plates to run cable bundles and liquid helium lines to the cold-sleep pods. Dana tried to forget that cold-sleep pods were meant for medical emergencies, and for intervals measured in hours, not years. She tried and failed.
Across the hold, out an interior hatch, at an oblique angle down the central corridor, and into an open equipment closet, she glimpsed mechanics at work doubling life-support capacity.
Flick.
At Dana’s elbow, someone cleared his throat. She turned. “What?”
“Captain, we’ve got an anomaly,” the mechanic said. Jerry Tanaka, she thought his name was.
Blake should be directing this three-ring circus—only he had done just that nonstop for three days running. She had had to order him to get some sleep, and still not gotten him farther than a borrowed cot in the foreman’s shed, still inside the dome. That he could nap amid this din, even wearing earplugs….
“Captain?” Tanaka pointed at a many-colored cable bundle stretched taut between the bulkhead and the back of the unbolted copilot’s flight console.
“Hold on,” Dana told Tanaka. In a crouch, Dana got a better view behind the console. “Specs, display mode off. Camera mode on. Ten X zoom. Marvin, what do you know about this?”
Marvin was among the first of the mission retrofits, networked into every sensor and control across the ship. Marvin’s program resided in an anachronism: entire freaking deck-to-overhead, two meters wide, racks of computing equipment. That much circuitry allowed for massive redundancy, and so, in theory, resilience against even multiple failures. Its storage capacity was into the zettabyte range.
Unlike Dana, Marvin could handle many camera feeds at once, even while sifting through huge databases. Marvin didn’t think, not in the human sense, or show initiative. It did follow directions, match patterns, find correlations, draw inferences, and, with reasonable accuracy, speak and interpret spoken language.
“I see it,” Marvin said. “That cable bundle is nowhere in my files. The logo and string of digits I see pressed into the insulation of the yellow wire suggest a manufacturing batch from eighteen years ago.”
If the undocumented whatever had been installed new, that meant two owners prior to the university’s purchase of the ship. At a word from Dana, Hawthorne would doubtless sic half the government on hunting down both prior owners. She was tempted for perhaps a nanosecond, but what was the point? She would never trust the ancient memories of anyone sloppy enough to mod his ship without updating its records.
“Tanaka, figure out what that is before you touch it,” Dana directed. “Open the console if you must. Trace signals through the ship. Marvin can help. If you need other resources, tell me.”
Because once they started to snip mystery wires, the checkout time for this latest overhaul would expand to….
Dana had no idea, beyond way longer than she could afford.
“Yesterday, Mr. Tanaka,” she ordered. He got back to work.
“Specs, resume security-camera scan.”
Flick…flick…flick….
“Specs, pause.” Dana pressed the intercom button. “Cargo hold one, I’m seeing crates for both shuttles stowed all over.” And intermixed, which was worse. “Keep the crate sets together, one shuttle to each side of the exterior hatch.”
“We’re arranging things to get the snuggest fit,” a worker answered, sweat soaking his tunic and trickling down his face and neck. “Your way would reduce packing density.”
“Understood, but at the other end”—an eventuality Dana didn’t dare to find fantastical—“when we’re ready to assemble a shuttle, it won’t do to first have to rearrange half the contents of the hold.”
And with every nook and cranny of the ship to be filled, shift the contents to where? The memory flashed of a fifteen-piece sliding number puzzle she had played with as a little girl—only this puzzle involved hundreds of pieces, in an endless array of shapes and sizes.
“Marvin, what do you think?” Dana asked.
“There is an enormous number of ways to pack and unpack so many items. Are the shuttle crates the only cargo to which you will want optimized access, or are there others? I have ideas about staging items through the crew quarters, but I will need your confirmation.”
While she and Marvin talked, another crate of shuttle parts got stowed in the deep recesses of the cargo hold. Dana hit the intercom again. “Cargo hold one, am I not making myself clear?”
The worker said, “To accommodate your suggestion, I’d have to unload and repack most of—”
“It wasn’t a suggestion,” Dana snapped. “Do it.”
Flick…flick…flick….
Blake shuffled onto the bridge, yawning. Dark, puffy skin pouched below his specs. “What’d I miss, Dana?”
“The opportunity to sleep,” she told him. “Blake, go back to bed. I’ll handle things for another…few hours…”
“What?” Blake asked.
An exterior camera showed her a cloud of red dust. “Specs, freeze on camera twenty-six.”
“Specs, camera twenty-six,” Blake repeated. “Got it.”
“Too localized for a dust storm,” Dana said, tapping her headset. “Security officer. Do you see incoming vehicles?”
“Yes, Captain. It’s nothing.”
“And you are?”
“Lieutenant Anderson, Captain, ma’am.”
Anderson: a freckle-faced militia officer fresh out of OCS, little more than a boy. Any conspicuous security presence would have undermined the cover story of a university-sponsored Titan mission.
Dana asked, “Who’s coming, Lieutenant?”
“Supply trucks. Nothing to be concerned about.”
“No trucks are due for hours,” she reminded him. Because more trucks inside the dome could only get in the way.
“They radioed ahead with the proper codes,” Anderson insisted.
Blake had zoomed the outside camera. “Is it just me, or do
