Seeing her sway on her feet, DD met her halfway, put his polymer-coated arms around her waist, and hugged her close. Her tears now flowed in full streams. “It’s all right, DD. You tried. Don’t feel guilty that you couldn’t stop him.”
“Would this be a good time for me to tell you good news, Orli?” DD said.
She sniffled and laughed, but it was an odd almost hysterical sound. “Yes, now would be a good time for that.”
“You instructed me to stop Tom Rom. You told me to find any way. I was not able to fight him physically. So I found another way.”
Orli stared at the compy. “What did you do?”
“Earlier, you had me download the full module of starship engine design and principles. While Tom Rom was in here with you, I accessed his ship’s engines from outside and made several important modifications to them.”
Orli blinked. “You… sabotaged his ship?”
“According to my context database, ‘sabotage’ has negative connotations. I believe what I did was a good thing. Once he took off, a silent timer was activated that will build a feedback loop in the exhaust system and pipe the heat back into his ekti-reactor chamber. Once the process begins, he cannot stop it. I believe I succeeded in locking his diagnostic sensors so they will continue to display optimal readings, regardless of the actual measurements. The overload should be well under way by the time he detects anything out of the ordinary.”
Orli felt dizzy. Her head pounded, and she hoped she wasn’t hallucinating. “What will that do? Will it shut down his engines? Strand him in space?”
“No, Orli, it will cause the engines to explode. His ship and everything aboard will be sterilized. Including the plague vials.”
Orli couldn’t believe what she had heard. “So the explosion will kill him?”
“That would be the obvious consequence of the ship vaporizing.”
“How did your programming even allow you to consider that? Your core routines don’t allow you to harm a human.”
“It was an extreme conundrum, Orli, but I ran an analysis of the situation. My core programming forbids me to harm a human. These strictures also require that I not allow a human to come to harm through my own inactions. In the end, I was able to apply context. If I allowed Tom Rom to escape with viable samples of a disease that is known to be one hundred percent fatal to human beings, I concluded that my inaction would result in far more deaths than my action would. I did the calculations and I made the proper choice.”
Orli went back into her piloting chair and collapsed into it. She felt as if her bones had turned to water.
DD came to stand beside her chair. He looked concerned, even shy. “Did I do a good job, Orli?”
She laughed with relief. “Yes, DD. You did a good job.”
ONE HUNDRED AND FOURTEEN
TOM ROM
Tom Rom never patted himself on the back to celebrate his own success. He did a job and took satisfaction in his work, glad that he had not let Zoe down. He would never let her be disappointed in him.
After returning to his ship on the crater floor, he stripped off his environment suit and quickly set the glass sample vials in a temporary bin on the counter inside the self-contained isolation chamber. The glass tubes had been sterilized, of course, and he would do the full isolation lockdown during the flight back to Pergamus.
First, though, he had to get away from the asteroid with all possible speed. He didn’t trust that woman. There was something about Orli’s eyes, the determination on her dying face. She was desperate enough, resourceful enough that she just might do something unexpected. Her ship’s damaged engine was dismantled, and once he left the asteroid she couldn’t come after him—at least not soon enough to catch him. She had nothing.
And yet…
He guided his ship out of the asteroid field and set course for Pergamus, where he would make sure that the repairs and upgrades to his ship were completed this time. Back at the research facility, he would happily endure the many hours of successive decontamination procedures so he could spend time with Zoe. Finally, he would stay long enough that they could have a meal together, talk about life, maybe about their past, maybe about their future.
Tom Rom would say little, and even Zoe would keep the conversation to a minimum, but they would be together—just as they had been in their last few years of caring for the dying Adam Alakis at the watchtower station on Vaconda. At least he would provide genuine companionship, a small reminder to help Zoe hold on to her humanity.
When he was safely on course with the autopilot secured, he went into the isolation chamber to inspect the sample vials. Orli Covitz’s blood looked as red as any normal blood, but he knew it was swarming with deadly microorganisms, possibly the last specimens of their kind in existence. Zoe and her research teams would be ecstatic. Within a few days he would be back at Pergamus.
The ship sailed on… but something didn’t feel right. He knew the ship’s vibration. His instincts were attuned to its lifeblood, its rhythms, the unscientific feel of its systems. He returned to the cockpit and studied the control panels. According to readings from the engines, the exhaust train, the power blocks, the numbers were exactly as expected. Before takeoff, he had done a cursory check out of habit and noted no anomalies.
Now he sat perfectly still, let his eyes fall half closed, and walked backward into his memory, trying to recall precisely what the readings had said. It was an exercise he had learned long ago.
His breaths were shallow, his focus complete, and at last he remembered the numbers. They were exactly the same as what showed now. All of them. Very unlikely. There should have been some variation between takeoff and now, hours later.
He touched fingertips against the control panel, drew deeper breaths as if trying to connect telepathically with his ship. There had been slight differences after the temporary repairs he had made on Vaconda, as if the engines were a fraction out of tune… but the vibrations felt different and were increasing in intensity.
He pressed his hands flat on the panel and thought he sensed the vibration jumping. The sound of the engines was too loud, but the diagnostic screens read exactly as they should. Exactly—like a textbook. He purged the diagnostics, reset the sensors, and took new readings.
That’s when he discovered an overload was imminent.
Automated alarms rattled through the cockpit. He muted them immediately so he could concentrate. The ship’s systems were damaged. The exhaust train was dumping massive amounts of thermal energy back into the reactor, and the containment was nearing collapse. Temperature spikes had already caused several systems to fail.
His fingers flew over the controls, trying to shut down or at least reroute the failures, but the ship’s controls were nonresponsive. The damage was already too great. The overload was building to critical levels.
His mouth went dry, and he froze with just a moment of indecision, which was completely unlike him. This could not possibly be the result of normal damage.
Sabotage.
Somehow Orli Covitz had rigged an overload in his engines… but she had never left the Proud Mary. How could she possibly… ?
The compy must have done it.
Seconds after understanding what was going wrong, he concluded that he would be unable to stop it. Overload and vaporization would occur in less than two minutes.