Chapter 84

Chapter Eighty-Four

A terrible, deafening ringing worse than any alarm Connor could imagine tore him from sleep. It must be the end of the world, the collapse of the universe—

Or it could be a hangover.

He sat up, and the room went askew around him.

Definitely hung over, he thought.

Ugh. His head throbbed, and his breath could melt plastic. Sometime during the night, someone had glued rotten sandpaper to the roof of his mouth.

No. That was his tongue.

And the alarm was his cabin door ringing.

Connor slid off his bunk, thankful for once it was just him. He hated being a sloppy drunk, and apparently the dehydration from the last couple days and some bad decisions had made him exactly that.

He tried to call out that he was coming, but his throat was too dry. A few sips of water from the sink got his tongue to quit sticking.

It wasn’t fast enough to avoid another booming ringing of the hatch bell.

Someone wanted him dead. They were trying to make his head explode.

One foot in front of the other, he told himself as he made his way to the hatch. It opened with a deafening swoosh and clank.

Elise backed away, mouth wide. “Oh.”

His breath, he realized. Then it dawned on him that he was in nothing but his underwear. “One second.” That came out slurred.

At some point during the night, he’d thrown his T-shirt on the floor. He pulled the shirt on, then found a pair of shorts. Those wouldn’t help with his breath, though.

He waved her in as he headed for his sink. “Sorry.”

She kept her back to the bulkhead as she slid past him. The grimy woman in the tattered jumpsuit was gone, replaced by someone who looked clean but soft—more than a little out of place. “Bad night?”

“Apparently.” With a toothbrush scraping around in his mouth and globs of toothpaste foam falling into the sink, he wasn’t sure if the word came out right.

“You, um…you said something about having some work for me?”

“I did?” That didn’t come out right at all. He pulled the toothbrush from his mouth and spat. “I did?”

“On the way back here. Yesterday? We were talking about how I paid my way through college doing computer work on—”

“—on long haul freighters.” He remembered now.

“Merchant ships, but yeah.”

“Just a minute.”

Connor finished brushing his teeth, then pulled on his sneakers. He needed synthcaff, aspirin, and one of the pills Lem had created to deal with hangovers.

After stopping by the bathroom to pee.

Elise was quiet and patient the entire time, saying nothing after the long wait outside the bathroom, or when Connor nearly spilled his drink while trying to take the aspirin and hangover pill.

But when he opened the comm room hatch, the archaeologist balked. “In…there?”

“It’s our comms room.”

“I—I get that. I recognize the equipment.”

“You do? It’s ancient.“

“You’d be surprised what those freighters have to get by with.”

He entered and took Gregor’s seat. “Close the hatch, please.”

She made a sour face but entered and did as he’d asked. “It’s cramped.”

“I’m sorry. I won’t be in here long.” He set his synthcaff down and tapped on the interface until the computer system powered on a display. “Here’s the problem: I’ve been locked out of my account. The profile’s corrupted, apparently.”

“I can’t fix that.”

“I know. But Gregor—he was our communications expert—was working on something for me. Something…sensitive.” Connor knew Gregor’s credentials were still good and used those. “It’s sort of a back door, I guess. His privileges are elevated as part of his job.”

“What…?” She pressed her lips together. “Can I say no?”

Connor turned around to get a better look at her. She was scared. “Yes. Can I ask why?”

“You’ve got some weird dynamic going on, you and this Selen.”

“She’s the captain, I’m her lieutenant.”

“Yeah, so if you needed your profile repaired, that’s her job.”

He took a sip of the cooling drink, then finished it off. The aspirin and Lem’s pill were helping. Next would come water. “Things are definitely complicated.”

“That’s what I mean. I don’t want drama.”

“Will you hear me out?”

Elise crossed her arms over her chest. “If I have to.”

“Please?”

“Fine.”

“So, I took the data cores from those old ships and yours. I wanted to know what was going on when thing fell apart.”

The archaeologist relaxed slightly. “Okay.”

“I asked Gregor and Lem—he’s the android…our medic?—to make backups of the data cores. Just backups. I didn’t want to lose any of the data.”

“That’s easy enough.”

“It should be. But when they tried to do that, the ship’s computer flagged the devices as corrupt and deleted everything.”

“What?”

“I…I didn’t believe them at first, but Lem said that’s what happened.”

Elise pointed to the chair. “Can I…?”

Connor got up.

Immediately after sitting down, she adjusted the interface and shifted the chair, only wrinkling her nose in disgust once or twice. Then her hands flew across the interface—typing and swiping as quickly as anyone but Toshiko.

As the archaeologist typed, she glanced over her shoulder. “The files on data cores are huge. They’re also distinctive.”

“Okay.”

“Even if they’ve been deleted, they’ll leave a trail…assuming your people really did make a backup.”

“They did. They wouldn’t lie—”

“There!” A series of lines scrolled past on the display. “Your backups.”

“Can you recover them?”

“Well, they’re deleted. I know of utilities to reconstruct them. An older system like this, it’ll take time.”

“But you could do it?”

Elise bit her lip. She typed a few commands, and more lines scrolled past. “Apparently.” Then she leaned forward. “That’s odd.”

“What?”

“Well, I can still reconstruct them, but it’s going to be a while.”

“Longer than normal?”

She nodded. “Something tried to completely wipe them out.”

“Something? You mean Gregor or Lem?”

“This says it was a system process. Did either of them have access to your profile or your captain’s?”

“No.”

“Then it was your ship system.” The young woman shrugged. “That’s about as weird as you get. It’s like you have a rogue application running.”

It also was exactly what Gregor and Lem had implied.

Once again, that sick feeling came over Connor as he remembered the way Gregor had appeared so defensive and hurt. He hadn’t done anything wrong.

Connor backed up to the hatch. “I’m going to leave you to this, okay?”

“Sure.”

“Don’t tell anyone else about it. And cover your trail, if you can.”

Elise frowned. “Okay.”

He let himself out and hurried back to his quarters. A rogue process had deleted the files, not Gregor or Lem.

But why?

That was the next thing Connor would have to have Elise figure out.

If he could get her to trust him.