Yerusha glanced up as Dobbs moved past Odel, but Lipinski didn’t. He plucked a pair of tweezers off his belt and reached into the circuits. He pulled a chip out of its socket and replaced it with a fresh one.
“Now?” he asked Yerusha.
Yerusha prodded the board with one finger. “No response.”
Looks like the intercom wasn’t the end of our problems, Dobbs sighed inwardly. What is going on?
She thought about the sealed work bench, and then about the infamous and dubious Marcus Tully trying to retrieve something he’d left behind, and a seed of real worry planted itself in her mind.
“So, why aren’t they running a diagnostic?” she whispered out of the corner of her mouth to Odel.
He looked up at her mournfully. “The system ate the diagnostic.”
Dobbs let her eyes go round. “Ate?” she mouthed silently.
Odel nodded.
“If this ship had an AI, we wouldn’t be having this problem,” muttered Yerusha. Odel squirmed visibly. It didn’t take more than that glance to see he wished an emergency would crop up that he could respond to. Dobbs remembered Lipinski’s boast about being hell on apprentice comm crews.
“If this ship had an AI,” Lipinski stuck the original chip back in its socket and shifted his weight to pluck out the next one, “we’d have a whole new set of problems. Now?”
Dobbs lifted up onto tip-toe and with exaggerated steps picked a path to stand behind Lipinski. Yerusha just watched with a resigned air. Dobbs folded her hands behind her back and leaned over the Houston.
“It’d be much the same,” he said to the chip, “as having someone in the hold who doesn’t belong here.” Dobbs’s shadow blocked his light. He rolled his eyes up. “Two someones. Who spend a lot of time poking into things that aren’t their job.”
Dobbs wiggled her fingers to wave hello at him.
“The piloting system is my responsibility,” countered Yerusha. “All of it.”
“And internal communications, which are going straight to hell…” Lipinski set the chip back into its socket and began following a single silver tracing along the dull green surface of the circuit wafer. “Are mine. All of them.”
Dobbs’s mind raced. The boards in the comm center were connected to the bridge because the Houston needed to know exactly where the ship was in relation to the pick-up coordinates when the ship was doing a fly-by data-grab. If he didn’t, he would not be able to activate the capture programs in time to catch the data being transmitted to them. A few dozen kilometers could make the difference between a clean capture and a load of garbled and incomplete data.
With both of them here and on the edge, that link must be off. Completely down, or worse, off by a deceptively small amount.
“Now?” asked Lipinski, reaching between the wafers with the tweezers again.
“Nothing,” reported Yerusha.
“So what in Settled Space is screwing them up like this!” He yanked his head out of the hatch. Dobbs jumped backwards. “Huh? What?” he demanded of Yerusha. “This ship was in order until we got underway. I checked. I know these crashing, burned out, chewed and regurgitated boards like I know my rosary. This should not be happening!”
“Still wishing you could crawl in there?” Dobbs asked cheerfully before Yerusha could respond to the outburst. She peered into the repair hatch at the layers of circuit wafers.
“Can’t fit.” Lipinski rested his weight on his heels and stared at the wafers, brooding. “You might be small enough though.” He tucked his tweezers back into his belt pocket. “You want to pop in there and find out what’s wrong.”
Dobbs pulled back from the hatch and shook her head. “I already tried. Way too cramped for me. You’ve got it filled to the gills.”
Yerusha was, apparently, in no mood to let things slide. “If…”
“Wishes were fishes we’d all cast nets,” said Dobbs brightly. “Or so I’ve heard.” She put her head to one side and twiddled her thumbs pensively. “Although I don’t see why, such a mess to clean them and the smell, phew!” She coughed violently and waved her hand in front of her face.
Yerusha stared at her, possibly trying to work out all the references. As dedicated a Freer as she seemed to be, she had probably never even seen a live fish, let alone caught one.
It did, however, apparently make her forget what she was about to say.
Lipinski was also staring. “Dobbs,” he said quietly. “You’re in my light.”
She skipped backwards until her shadow fell across the unoccupied floor and bowed. She gave Yerusha a wink and an “oh well,” gesture and took her leave. As the hatch closed behind her, she willed them both to use their brains and not their tempers. They both must know that with only three hours until they made the jump, this was a dangerous fault to be left uncorrected. As such, it was no place for her clowning.
Lipinski’s hard voice echoed in her ears, This ship was in order until we got underway. This should not be happening!
You’re right, Houston, but it is, which leaves a big, burning question.
The sound of a hatch opening drifted up the shaft. Dobbs looked down automatically, and saw Ianiai’s black-haired head and stuck-out ears. She stuck her fingers into her teeth and whistled shrilly.
The sound echoed all around the shaft. Ianiai looked up and Dobbs leaned over the rail, waving. He made a gesture which, from the scowl on his face, wasn’t meant to be polite, and swung himself over the railing onto the support staples. He hitched his belt to the rail for safety.
Uh-huh, Dobbs trotted down the stairs to the galley. The off-shift reliefs are on and in foul moods. This is not a good sign.
The galley deck was quiet. Following the entire corridor around, Dobbs couldn’t hear any of the exercise equipment working, or any voices from the recreation rooms. She poked her head into the kitchen. Cheney was gulping a coffee beside the urn. The only other person in evidence was Dalziel, the steward, watching a cleaning drone scour the floor.
Dobbs ducked back out into the hallway. She briefly considered taking herself down to engineering to see if she could wheedle any information out of Al Shei but decided against it. One of the tricks a Fool had to learn was when to leave the crew completely alone.
I’ll bet my master’s rank that now is one of those.
She took herself back up the stairs to the berthing deck.
However, she thought as she entered her cabin, without accurate information, I can’t do my job either.
She locked the hatch and set the entrance light to red, indicating she did not want to be disturbed. She unfolded her desk from the wall and laid her first two fingers on the activation key. The board switched on, setting the keys glowing.
Dobbs sat down in the real chair and pulled her pen out of her belt pocket. She tapped it against her palm while she eyed the board thoughtfully.
Prepare to accept search and recovery program, she wrote across the main board.
Ready, responded the desk.
She plugged her pen into the desk’s socket. After a long moment, the desk wrote Program loaded.
Dobbs retrieved her pen.
Is Al Shei’s pen active in the ship’s system? she wrote.
Active.
Timing is everything, thought Dobbs. She wrote. Program D1 procedure name Tunnelling. Locate and copy data on search target.
She stuck her pen back into the socket and sat back.
If Al Shei had known what Dobbs was doing, she probably could have shoved the Fool out the airlock without any of the crew blinking. Some of them probably would even have helped. Schyler, for instance.
All computer systems had security measures that prevented someone from tapping into an active pen from a remote terminal. The Fool’s Guild had invested years in designing a search-and-recover program that could work its way around most of them. Dobbs was a couple of updates behind, but since the Pasadena under Al Shei was noted for quiet runs and a trustworthy crew, she didn’t expect to have any trouble getting through.