“Nice to see that Drax thinks of everything,” Tito said.
“Except how to avoid having his AI overridden,” Jeff muttered.
“We’re missing people,” Tim pointed out. “People who are essential to running the ship.”
“Um, Mother? Who else is awake on the ship right now, aside from the four of us?”
“No one.”
“Much, much, much worse,” Tim groaned.
“Where are the people who are on the ship but not in this room?” I asked. “And are we supposed to leave Charlie here?”
“It would be much safer for him to be in this room, yes.”
“I don’t trust this,” Jeff said. “At all.”
“I can’t blame you. I don’t trust it, either.” Hugged Charlie tightly. “I don’t want to leave anyone in here, though.”
“I strongly recommend you leave your young son,” Mother said. “Frankly, if what you fear is what I can do, I can harm him if he is with you or not. I would prefer no harm come to him, however, and that can only be certain if he is in a safety chair as the others are.”
Jeff grunted but took Charlie from me and strapped him into the chair between our two girls. The chairs had headrests that kept heads from bobbing from side to side, and they were tilted back just enough to ensure that heads wouldn’t bob forward. So I wasn’t too worried about leaving Charlie here. You know, other than worried about leaving everyone here while we trotted around the Ship That Became Sentient.
“And the answer to my other question—where are the people who aren’t in this room?”
“I will tell you how to find them. All other personnel are in Engineering.”
“Not in Weapons?”
“No. It would not have been safe for them to have been there, so they were not.”
“One small favor,” Jeff muttered.
We kissed Jamie, Charlie, and Lizzie on their foreheads, Tim did the same to Alicia, and Tito stroked Rahmi’s head, then we all headed off.
Mother gave us directions to Engineering, though Tim knew the way. But we let her do it as a test, to be sure she wasn’t leading us into a trap.
As it turned out, she wasn’t, at least not that we could tell. We found almost everyone else that we’d thought were on board—in a room similar to the one where all the others had been, only with “Essential Personnel Warp Room” emblazoned above its door, all in the same chairs that were clearly crash couches, and all asleep. They weren’t alone, either—there were a lot of people in this room who shouldn’t have been here.
“What the literal hell are Hacker International doing here?” I asked everyone.
Hacker International consisted of five guys who were all the tops in their various fields of computer, hacking, language, and other Awesome Geek Skills. They’d been hired by Chuckie to do dirty work for the government, but I’d taken them away from all that. They now lived in the Zoo portion of the American Centaurion Embassy Complex and worked for us, for the good of everyone.
I’d known their ostensible leader, Eddy Simms—aka Stryker Dane, he of the bestselling Taken Away series of books about alien abduction—almost as long as I’d known Chuckie, since he’d become friends with Stryker when Chuckie and I were still in high school.
Through Stryker I’d met Big George Lecroix, who was originally from France, Dr. Henry Wu from China, Ravi Gaekwad, aka Ravi the Geek, from Pakistan, and Yuri Stanislav, nicknamed Omega Red since he was from Russia and this was apparently how hackers thought. Yuri was also blind, but he was the only one who worked out, possibly because he didn’t know how out of shape and unimpressive his compatriots were in the physical department.
That hadn’t stopped Jennifer Barone-Gaekwad from falling for Ravi and marrying him, however. Jennifer was the sister half of a brother-sister A-C field team, and while I was surprised to see her and her brother, Jeremy, here, having them along was a really good thing for us. If, you know, any of these people were ever going to wake up.
“At least Chernobog is still where she’s supposed to be,” Jeff said. “Well, I hope.”
Chernobog was the world’s top hacker, thought to be a myth. But we’d found her and, due to things that had happened during Operations Infiltration and Defection Election, she’d flipped to our side. She was under “house arrest” with us, but she was an old lady—I thought of her as our Official Grandmother En Residence—and she liked that she could have anything she wanted without leaving her top of the line computer setup. I doubted that she was going to like that her fawning acolytes weren’t with her, but hopefully that just meant she’d try to find us with a lot of urgency.
“How is Mother moving people around against their will?” Tito asked softly, voicing the question I’d tabled earlier.
“Yeah,” Tim added. “Because there’s no way Chuck or James came into this room willingly, directive lights or no directive lights. They both would have and should have tried to get to the command deck. Just like the rest of my team and Brian, all of whom are here napping instead of helping, which is not like any of them, ever.”
Noted that I didn’t see Siler, Buchanan, or Wruck, let alone Algar and the least weasels. Which really needed to become the name of a band. Wasn’t sure if I hoped that Team Tough Guys were hanging with Ard Ri Al, but definitely hoped they were doing something, anything, that would help us in this situation. Not that I had a clue what any of that anything would be.
Waited a moment, but apparently Tito’s question and Tim’s follow-up comments weren’t something Mother was going to answer without prompting. “Mother, how are you moving everyone and putting them to sleep? The ones that didn’t follow your visual aids.”
She didn’t reply. Tim muttered about 2001: A Space Odyssey and I remembered why I hated that movie my dad had forced me to watch because it was supposedly brilliant.
Decided to get pissed because I’d been holding that back for far too long and being angry was a lot better than being afraid.
“Look, Mother, I don’t know what the hell you think you’re doing, but all those children, let alone all the adults with them, and all the adults here, didn’t just all spontaneously find these rooms, nor did they all follow blinking lights, nor did they all doze off without assistance. And that means you’ve drugged my children, my family, and my friends, and if you think that means I won’t give it my all to figure out how to shut you down for good, then you have another think coming. Play nicely with us, and we may choose to play nicely with you. Don’t, and I can guarantee that while I might not be part of Hacker International, I know far more about how to shut you down than you think, and I’ll do it in a heartbeat if you continue to be coy, play ridiculous mind games with us, and put everyone in this ship and all of my solar system at risk.”