Ajit appeared in the doorway from his bunk.
“Yes,” Kane said. “Move the ship.”
“But these are the coordinates the minicap will return to!”
“It’s not coming,” Kane said. “Don’t you listen to anything I say, Tirzah? The uploads didn’t make it. The third minicap is days late; if it were coming, it would be here. The probe is gone, the uploads are gone, and we’ve got all the data we’re going to get from them. If we want more, we’re going to have to go after it ourselves.”
“Go after it?” I repeated, stupidly. “How?”
“I already told you! Move the ship closer into the core so we can take the readings the probe should have taken. Some of them, anyway.”
Ajit said, “Moving the ship is completely Tirzah’s decision.”
His championship of me when I needed no champion, and especially not in that pointlessly assertive voice, angered me more than Kane’s suggestion. “Thank you, Ajit, I can handle this!”
Mistake, mistake.
Kane, undeterred, plowed on. “I don’t mean we’d go near the event horizon, of course, or even to the probe’s first position near the star cluster. But we could move much closer in. Maybe ten light-years from the core, positioned between the northern and western arms of Sag A West.”
Ajit said, “Which would put us right in the circumnuclear disk! Where the radiation is much worse than here!”
Kane turned on him, acknowledging Ajit’s presence for the first time in days, with an outpouring of all Kane’s accumulated frustration and disappointment. “We’ve been hit twice with particles that damaged the ship. Clearly we’re in the path of some equivalent of an asteroid belt orbiting the core at this immense distance. It can’t be any less safe in the circumnuclear disk, which, I might remind you, is only shocked molecular gases, with its major radiation profile unknown. Any first-year astronomy student should know that. Or is it just that you’re a coward?”
Ajit’s skin mottled, then paled. His features did not change expression at all. But I felt the heat coming from him, the primal rage, greater for being contained. He went into his bunk and closed the door.
“Kane!” I said furiously, too exhausted and frustrated and disappointed in myself to watch my tone. “You can’t—”
“I can’t stand any more of this,” Kane said. He slammed down the corridor to the gym, and I heard the exercise bike whirr in rage.
I went to my own bunk, locked the door, and squeezed my eyes shut, fighting for control. But even behind my closed eyelids I saw our furious shadows.
After a few hours I called them both together in the wardroom. When Kane refused, I ordered him. I lifted Ajit’s statue of Shiva off the table and handed it to him, making its location his problem, as long as it wasn’t on the table. Wordlessly he carried it into his bunk and then returned.
“This can’t go on,” I said calmly. “We all know that. We’re in this small space together to accomplish something important, and our mission overrides all our personal feelings. You are both rational men, scientists, or you wouldn’t be here.”
“Don’t patronize us with flattery,” Ajit said.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to do that. It’s true you’re both scientists, and it’s true you’ve both been certified rational enough for space travel.”
They couldn’t argue with that. I didn’t mention how often certification boards had misjudged, or been bribed, or just been too dazzled by well-earned reputations to look below the work to the worker. If Kane or Ajit knew all that, they kept it to themselves.
“I blame myself for any difficulties we’ve had here,” I said, in the best Nurturer fashion. Although it was also true. “It’s my job to keep a ship running in productive harmony, and this one, I think we can all agree, is not.”
No dissension. I saw that both of them dreaded some long, drawn-out discussion on group dynamics, never a topic that goes down well with astrophysicists. Kane said abruptly, “I still want to move the ship.”
I had prepared myself for this. “No, Kane. We’re not jumping closer in.”
He caught at my loophole. “Then can we jump to another location at the same distance from the core? Maybe measurements from another base point would help.”
“We’re not jumping anywhere until I’m sure the third minicap isn’t coming.”
“How long will that be?” I could see the formidable intelligence under the childish tantrums already racing ahead, planning measurements, weighing options.
“We’ll give it another three days.”
“All right.” Suddenly he smiled, his first in days. “Thanks, Tirzah.”
I turned to Ajit. “Ajit, what can we do for your work? What do you need?”
“I ask for nothing,” he said, with such a strange, intense, unreadable expression that for a moment I felt irrational fear. Then he stood and went into his bunk. I heard the door lock.
I had failed again.
No alarm went off in the middle of the night. There was nothing overt to wake me. But I woke anyway, and I heard someone moving quietly around the wardroom. The muscles of my right arm tensed to open my bunk, and I forced them to still.
Something wasn’t right. Intuition, that mysterious shadow of rational thought, told me to lie motionless. To not open my bunk, to not even reach out and access the ship’s data on my bunk screen. To not move at all.
Why?
I didn’t know.
The smell of coffee wafted from the wardroom. So one of the men couldn’t sleep, made some coffee, turned on his terminal. So what?
Don’t move, said that pre-reasoning part of my mind, from the shadows.
The coffee smell grew stronger. A chair scraped. Ordinary, mundane sounds.
Don’t move.
I didn’t have to move. This afternoon I had omitted to mention to Kane and Ajit those times that certification boards had misjudged, or been bribed, or just been too dazzled by well-earned reputations to look below the work to the worker. Those times in which the cramped conditions of space, coupled with swollen egos and frenzied work, had led to disaster for a mission Nurturer. But we had learned. My bunk had equipment the scientists did not know about.
Carefully I slid my gaze to a spot directly above me on the bunk ceiling. Only my eyes moved. I pattern-blinked: two quick, three beats closed, two quick, a long steady stare. The screen brightened.
This was duplicate ship data. Not a backup; it was entirely separate, made simultaneously from the same sensors as the main log but routed into separate, freestanding storage that could not be reached from the main computer. Scientists are all sophisticated users. There is no way to keep data from any who wish to alter it except by discreet, unknown, untraceable storage. I pattern-blinked, not moving so much as a finger or a toe in the bed, to activate various screens of ship data.
It was easy to find.
Yesterday, at 1850 hours, the minicap bay had opened and received a minicap. Signal had failed to transmit to the main computer. Today at 300 hours, which was fifteen minutes ago, the minicap bay had been opened manually and the payload removed. Again signal had failed to the main computer.
The infrared signature in the wardroom, seated at his terminal, was Ajit.
It was possible the signal failures were coincidental, and Ajit was even now transferring data from the third minicap into the computer, enjoying a cup of hot coffee while he did so, gloating in getting a perfectly legitimate jump on Kane. But I didn’t think so.
What did I think?
I didn’t have to think; I just knew. I could see it unfolding, clear as a holovid. All of it. Ajit had stolen the second minicap, too. That had been the morning after Kane and I had slept so soundly, the morning after Ajit had given us wine to celebrate Kane’s shadow-matter theory. What had been in that wine? We’d slept soundly, and Ajit told us that the minicap had come before we were awake. Ajit said he’d already put it into the computer. It carried Kane’s upload’s apology that the prelim data, the data from which Kane had constructed his shadow-matter thesis, was wrong, contaminated by a radiation strike.