Once he was satisfied with the navigation numbers, Hiro searched and tidied the helm thoroughly. Tablets, a jacket, and some trash had been displaced when the grav drive went offline, but clues were not to be found.
He did discover an empty stainless-steel mug that had gotten wedged under the console. He wondered if he had gotten so sloppy; drinking liquids from a mug was a bad habit to develop in space. The cloning bay’s consoles were protected against liquid damage, but the helm was not. Zero-g incidents plus liquid plus computers equaled a bad situation. He didn’t even want to think of what would happen if the captain found Paul drinking near the mindmap servers. He imagined another scene of carnage.
Still under the console, Hiro saw a blinking green light. He got farther under and lay flat on his back so he could better reach the underside of the nav computer.
“Bingo, motherfucker,” he whispered.
A drive had been inserted, something he was fairly sure wasn’t supposed to be there. This was his computer, after all, and he clearly remembered the tour as if it were a few hours before.
He popped back up to his terminal and searched to access the drive, but he didn’t find it anywhere. So it hadn’t been what had overridden the autopilot and possibly IAN himself.
Near as he could tell, the device was just a storage drive. That wouldn’t have been powerful enough to damage the ship. Why was it plugged in, hidden away here?
He should tell the captain. This might be important information. A sardonic voice surfaced, telling him that they were all suspects here, including the captain, and he shouldn’t tell her anything.
If they all started acting like that, they might as well fall on one another like rabid dogs right here and now, he told the voice firmly.
The captain needed to know about it. Paul would best understand it. Wolfgang would demand to know whatever the captain did. That left the necessity of keeping it secret from the doctor and Maria. Because they were the biggest threats? He rolled his eyes.
You’re not what you present to them. Don’t be so quick to write them off as harmless, not now. He sighed, knowing he was right.
Then he pulled the drive out and pocketed it anyway.
Spymaster Teapot
Generations ago, Maria Arena decided that cloning gave her the perfect opportunity to study everything she’d ever been interested in. “There’s not enough time” was no excuse to a clone. Time was all she had, and she used it as well as she could to study every esoteric thing that interested her.
While studying the cultural influence of food, she had written her master’s thesis on tea. Tea had changed the world, and if inanimate objects suddenly became sentient, Maria was sure that the teapots that resided in most world leaders’ offices could inform the most effective coup ever.
Unless the teapots were spymasters. Then they would destroy the world from the inside.
She felt betrayed when her admittedly quite liberal adviser made her edit the thesis to remove her projections about the eventual anthropomorphic teapot overthrow of the world. He had calmly given her the address of an adviser for the creative writing department, and she finally demurred. She had been disappointed, but kept a copy of the deleted section with her private files, as was her habit.
Her love of food, both the history and the actual consumption, had made Maria suited to take the lowly position of junior engineer, which meant “Jack of All Trades,” which included ship’s cook. If running a food printer could be called “cooking.” Although the stress of waking up compounded with the stress of the murdered bodies around them all was considerable, the captain had been right that the team would need sustenance, and she needed to get the food printer running as soon as possible.
Like the cloning bay, if the kitchen itself had held physical evidence of any crime, it had been obliterated by the grav drive mishap. Cups and plates were everywhere. It seemed most of the dirty plates had been dumped to the recycler.
She’d clean up later. Food was the priority. She approached the food printer. A massive machine, it had the capability of synthesizing any food it had the opportunity to grab the molecular structure of. This meant that it, like Hiro’s autopilot, worked almost entirely on its own. Also, IAN could override it. If he ever woke up.
She poked at the console, and the machine whirred to life, lights coming on inside and the input pad lighting up. She tried to access the logs, but those came up empty like all the rest had. The saboteur had even killed the food printer logs. That was cold.
She tried to program a simple cracker, the “hello, world” of printed food. The printer started up and began weaving the molecular threads together to make food. Only it wasn’t a cracker.
The printer was making what looked like an herb sprig, green and lush. She frowned. She waited for it to finish and brought it out.
She didn’t recognize it. It definitely wasn’t basil or oregano. She sniffed it but couldn’t place the scent.
Another try, this time a protein: chicken.
It was quickly apparent that the printer was going to make another herb. Or rather, the same herb.
Maria took it and studied it. The leaves were small, almost fernlike. She opened her mouth and held it just beyond her lips, considering tasting it. She remembered the vomit floating around the cloning bay and thought better of it. She found the intercom button on the wall and signaled the medbay.
“Doctor?” she asked. “Are you there?”
“Go ahead, Maria,” Joanna replied.
“We have a problem with the food printer.”
“I’m not sure what I can do to help,” Joanna said, sounding annoyed.
“It looks like I was poisoned,” Maria said. “The food printer won’t synthesize anything except for an herb. All food data has been overwritten, like all the logs.”
The doctor swore. “Bring it down and I’ll add it to the tox screen. Bring me a sample of water as well.”
“Got it,” Maria said.
She gathered the samples, including some of the food that didn’t make it into the recycler, tidying the kitchen as she went. Her stomach grumbled at her, and she looked longingly at the machine where it sat on the silver countertop, connected to vats of protein Lyfe and water. She knew they had a backup food printer, but it would take hours to set up. She wasn’t sure the crew had patience for that.
She wasn’t sure they had a choice.
Paul had moved to the server room to try to figure out what was wrong with IAN. His shaking had stopped for the most part, and the dry heaves had passed. On Earth he would have been hospitalized if he felt like this, not put to work immediately, he thought bitterly. But they needed IAN, for the ship and for answers.