“I wish we had a proper morgue,” Wolfgang said. “We’re assuming that someone poisoned Maria. She didn’t do it to herself. She figured it out and tried to warn the others. The killer found out and started killing. Then…Hiro hanged himself? What if Maria was the one who attacked the captain?”
“Even if Maria had been the aggressor in that battle, I would have attempted to save both of them,” Joanna said, shaking her head. “She would have been in the medbay having a system flush if that were the case. What if Maria killed us all, poisoned herself, and then hit the resurrection switch—but that doesn’t explain the captain.”
“Or Maria’s stab wound. Perhaps Hiro killed us all in different ways and then hanged himself because he felt guilty,” Wolfgang said.
“Unlikely,” Joanna said. “There’s the gravity to consider, and why would he kill himself when he knew that Maria had hit the resurrection switch?”
“The time line still isn’t solid,” said Wolfgang.
“We’re closer than we were,” she said, making more notes. “We have more data.”
“But we still don’t know who attacked the captain,” Wolfgang said, pulling the sheets over the bodies once more. “So we’re essentially back where we started, with new mysteries.”
“I guess we need to start interviewing people,” Joanna said.
“Starting with each other,” Wolfgang said, raising a white eyebrow at her.
Joanna shrugged. “All right. Let’s see if Paul can get any more info from the computers, or Hiro from the navigation system. Then we can talk.”
After eating, Maria offered to help Hiro in the helm, since he had helped her. Unfortunately she had less experience with space navigation than she did food prep, so she mainly waited for him to need her help.
Maria looked over Hiro’s shoulder, her black hair tickling his ear. “So we are heading…where?”
He pushed her away gently and rubbed his ear. “We’re off course by nine degrees. I could get us on course and accelerating again, if I could get IAN on our side.”
“I am on your side,” IAN said. “For example, how’s this for information: I’ve discovered that if anything happens that I determine is catastrophic enough, I’m programmed to turn the ship around and return to Earth. That is what I am doing.”
Hiro’s jaw dropped. “Oh no, no no, we can’t go back at this point. If we go back we’ll be put to death for sure. This is our only reprieve, IAN, if this mission fails, we’re all dead.”
“Not necessarily,” IAN said. “There will be a trial.”
“Are you kidding me?” Maria asked. “A trial to determine that we failed in our mission and need to forfeit all clone rights to our lives and our property. It’s a foregone conclusion. We have to have another option, IAN. Please.”
“Well, I don’t have all the data from the last twenty-five years yet. If I can recover some of it, then I can determine otherwise and put us back on course. But for now, we are slowing down.”
Hiro met Maria’s eyes. She shrugged. He rubbed his ear again. “He’s promising to be more compromising than my grandmother was. She was a mean old tyrant.” He looked up some more information on his terminal.
Maria watched, then sighed. “What now?”
“Now I’m looking for login information, encryption keys, anything to indicate who messed with things. I’m only finding my own logins, and those are recent. Whoever did all this just erased every log. They covered their tracks perfectly.”
“You know the only person who has the qualifications to do that much sabotage is Paul,” Maria said, her voice low.
“Who are you afraid is listening?” he replied in a stage whisper.
She made a face. “No idea. I don’t know who to trust.”
“Yeah, but have you seen Paul? He doesn’t look like he could step on a roach to make it crunch,” Hiro said. “He’s a mess since he woke up. And Wolfgang didn’t help today.”
“Paul isn’t the only person on board with computer programming skills,” IAN added. “But that information is classified.”
“Then why did you bring it up?” Maria asked, exasperated.
“I wanted you to have all the information that you are allowed to have,” IAN said.
“Except who that person is,” Hiro said.
“Yes.”
He shook his head and focused on Maria again. “Do you remember much about Paul? I mean, did you know him aside from the mission?”
“I met him same as you, right before the reception on Luna. Our last memories.” She sighed, and then leaned over his shoulder again. “So where are we anyway?”
Hiro touched a button on the screen and it zoomed out, showing Earth and Luna on the far left of the screen, with Artemis on the far right. A line with small pips marking different points ran between them.
“This has been our twenty-four year path,” he said, pointing at Luna and tracing the line that originated there. He poked another part of the screen and a tiny ship (enlarged so as not to be completely dwarfed by stars and planets) appeared and began travel down the line. It crossed one of the pips and a date popped up. “Here is where we should be now.”
“So where are we instead?” Maria asked.
Hiro pushed another button and a red line appeared, leaving the moon and running closely parallel to the white line, but beginning to diverge and curve away. “That happened yesterday,” he said.
“So I got poisoned, you hanged yourself, Captain de la Cruz was in the medbay, the grav drive got turned off, and everyone else got cut up, and then IAN decided to turn us the hell around and go home.”
“Everyone got cut up except Paul. He just got choked,” Hiro reminded her.
“It doesn’t look like we’re too far off course,” she said, looking at the tiny red divergence. “If we can convince IAN to get us back on track, we should be all right.”
“You’re looking at a four-hundred-year path. Going off course for two days isn’t going to appear as much of anything, but it is something to worry about. Accelerating again, heading the thousands of miles to get back on course, that all takes energy and time.”
“I thought we were radiation-charged?” Maria asked.
“To maintain the ship’s speed and power to run it, we use an Andrews-Zurbin sail, sort of a combination solar and magnetic sail. It changes depending on which energy source is most plentiful,” Hiro said, nodding. “But it takes a lot of power to accelerate and decelerate.”
“Wonderful.”
“The biggest issue is that we’re very carefully timed to reach the planet. We’re hitting a moving target. If we started up right now and got back on course, when we arrive, the planet won’t be here anymore.” He pointed at the screen where their destination was, a tiny blue dot. He zoomed in to show the solar system of Artemis and ran his finger along a time line, increasing it a few days. “It will be over here.”
“Honestly that sounds like more of a challenge than a deadly problem, easier than half the other things we’re dealing with. You’re forgetting the very real risk of IAN getting a ghost ship to the planet all by himself. Artemis or Earth. Doesn’t matter.”