The Ship of the Unforgotten - Chapter 13, Pt. 2

“He must have his reasons. We all do,” Dann replied.

“For leaving home forever? I guess so. You have to be a little crazy to do that.” Jackson smirked. “So why’d you do it? The thrill of a new world? The adventure of a lifetime? The allure of the new final frontier?”

“Something like that,” Dann evaded. He had no real dark secrets in his past; he’d grown up fairly well-to-do. Better than well-to-do, actually. His parents had been pretty stinking rich, to be honest. And he’d been horribly bored for his whole life because of it. Anything he’d wanted, he’d gotten, with one exception—a challenge. So when he’d been eighteen he’d moved out and refused his parents’ money, enlisted right away, and worked hard to get the most menial posting he could on the Dawn Rose. He simply could not imagine a life more different than what he’d known than literally pioneering the birth of a new human home world.

He wasn’t eager to advertise his past. There was no real reason to avoid it now, save for habit, but he’d always feared being called out as having used his family’s influence to secure a spot on the ship, when the fact was he’d to fight them many times to stop them from getting him pulled. It had taken a long time for them to come to terms with his decision. It hadn’t been entirely easy for him either, but he’d known it was the right decision. “Definitely the challenge of the unknown. Guess I got my wish, didn’t I? Be careful what you wish for.”

“You got that right.” Her eyes flicked ahead of them. They were still quite some ways away. “I hate this place. It feels like …”

“Ghosts,” Dann finished at her silence. “It feels like it’s full of ghosts.”

“Yeah,” she said. “The biomes may have wolves and bears and bugs and snakes and piranhas and who knows what else, but I think I’d take that any day over this.”

The emptiness of the central hall was wearing on them all. Cobb was scowling at his own thoughts in the back, while just behind them Rose and Pvt. Pixton were engrossed in their own conversation; the techie and the android, naturally.

“Don’t these things move any faster?” Jackson exclaimed, calling everyone’s attention to her. Dann could sympathize, he was getting impatient too.

“We’re getting there. I’d say we’re, what, fifteen minutes from it now?”

“What’s got you in such a hurry all of a sudden?” Cobb called up from the back. He sounded less pissed off than he had earlier. Moody, Dann thought.

Jackson glowered at him but didn’t reply.

At long last they pulled the tram to a stop outside the doors that led to the stern of the ship. This end looked much as the other hand, right down to the rail tracks leading back down the edge of the biome on this side, as well as the ring of track to access the o secured it in place and passed through. They used the numerous hand-holds in the relatively narrow corridors to help them navigate the zero-g work area and worked their way to the outer edge where the computer core was kept.

“Weird place to put this place,” Dann commented as they entered the large chamber where racks upon racks of hardware sat. The air had a chill to it he’d not felt anywhere else on the ship so far. “Wouldn’t it be easier to get power to it closer to the engines?”

“Too much heat’s a problem for computers, especially ones this powerful,” Pixton said, without a trace of a stammer. To her, this was home. “They built the server farms as close to the sub-artic biome as possible without actually being in it. They share one of the thinnest, most heat-conductive bulkheads in the whole ship.” Her eyes were wide with excitement as she looked around at the servers and data caches and terminals that filled the space. “Rose! Let’s get started.”

Pixton sat at the sysadmin’s main terminal and began punching in commands on the secure access screen. Within moments, Rose Dawn announced, “Access is restricted, Pvt. Jennifer Pixton. Command authorization required.”

“Of course it is,” she mumbled, then punched in another code on the secure terminal.

“Code accepted,” Rose Dawn responded. “Final authorization?”

Rose looked at Cobb. “You’re the highest ranking officer, Lt. Cobb.”

Dann could have sworn Cobb looked a little green at that, but he nodded soberly. “Authorization granted by order of Lt. Frederick Cobb, acting captain of the UTS Rose Dawn.”

“Authorization granted.”

Pixton grinned and her fingers flashed over the screen. Within seconds, secondary displays were lighting up across the room, giving the onlookers a view into what she was doing. Initially most of it went over Dann’s head; most of his experience with computers had been online games and the endless social games that were a daily part of early 21st century life. The very idea that a computer was something you had to travel to a specific room to find and access was weird and antiquated for him, though he understood that he’d only been exposed to the consumer end of things and that there was always the need for something bigger than you could fit in a pocket somewhere in the world.

“Well, the computer systems check out just fine,” Pixton announced. “I’ll be able to open parts of the network up to mobile access so we don’t have to come back here for everything. There are some command structures that are local only though.”

“Uh, sure,” Cobb said. “That sounds good. We’ll have phones again, like back on Earth?”

“Yeah, and even the shipboard version of the ‘net, though it won’t be as interesting with just us on it.”

Dann grinned. “There’ll be a whole lot less spam though. And if we catch a spammer, we can space ‘em. I like this place already.”

Jackson glared. “Can we have a little less joking around? We’re aboard a ship of the dead here. Can you find what we need or not? What happened to everyone else? Who survived?”

“S-sorry,” Pixton mumbled, fingers back on the screen, exploring the network of databases with ease that was mind-boggling to the uninitiated. “Here,” she said, dumping a series of maps to the displays around the room. Walls lit up with representations of the ships in various forms. 3D wireframes of the ship popped into being along the walls, with one particularly impressive one appearing right in the middle of the room, projected by laser light onto the ambient dust content of the air. Dann, Cobb and Jackson all stepped out of the floating projection.

The holo-ship was ghostly, the bulkheads picked out in dim grey-white at a reduced transparency so they could see the interior. The interiors were rendered in low detail, simple colored representations of terrain in the biomes, though Rose or Pixton could crank the detail level up any time they wished. The main point of interest on the virtual ship was the sea of red dots that filled the biomes, clustered in the various cryo-bays in the biomes, and the one cryo-bay just outside the bridge, off the ship’s core.

A few bright green points caught the eye; potential survivors. They looked to be randomly scattered throughout the biomes, though the distribution was far from even. There were some bays that contained several survivors, and many many more that contained none at all. Then he noticed something that grabbed his attention immediately; a large blob of green concentrated in what looked like the sub-arctic biome. “Hey, what’s this one? Look at that, there must be close to a dozen in there!”

“I’ll be damned,” Cobb said, some of the stress gone from his bearing.

“Pixton? What is that place?”

Pixton’s fingers were dancing madly. The projection zoomed in, focusing on the interior of the cryo-bay. She pulled up as much data as she could about it, which wasn’t much. Representations of the individual pods appeared with their red or green lights. Names began appearing on the pods. None of the names indicated rank. “Sorry, this is all I have right now … wait …” Pixton said, “That … t-that’s the children’s creche.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. A dozen green was wonderful, but there were still several dozen red.

Jackson was studying the names voraciously, consuming them with her eyes. Suddenly she dropped to her knees, gasping “Renata! Oh, Renata, you’re alive! You made it, my baby!”

The others, all save Rose, went wide-eyed. There were very few parents aboard the Rose Dawn, the expectation being that most people would be too busy working to establish the colony and make it habitable to have a lot of time to raise children immediately. That would have to wait a few years until they were more settled. To have both a mother and child survive …

The Ship of the Unforgotten - Chapter 13

If the biomes were meant to represent the outdoors in as beautiful a way as was possible aboard ship, then the central core was a study in contrast. While it wasn’t exactly ugly, it was definitely oriented toward the functional.

There was no artificial gravity in the core. The tram continued to work by virtue of having the tracks sunken into the “walls” and gripping the frames of the tram cars above and behind the wheels with magnets just enough to keep the cars and passengers (who were advised to hold on) from floating off into the interior.

The inner space was a wide open tube, and actually was pretty usable as a recreation area. As long as one was careful to avoid colliding with passing trams or other passengers and crew, flying in zero-g was—or would have been, rather—encouraged as a recreational activity. View ports to either side of the tram provided views “down” onto the biomes far below them. From the tracks and looking up, they could see the biome on the opposite side of the ship, a sight both comforting and somewhat disconcerting. It would look almost like they were orbiting a world if it weren’t for the features being a bit too close and distinct.

The tunnel they’d taken had come up the biome’s side nearest the bridge; the main computer lab was closer to the engines, at the other end of the ship. The trams were considerably faster than walking or running, but it would still take them a good hour to cross to the other side.

“Make sure you hang on,” Cobb said to them all, “or at least make sure that if you go flying off, you’ll reach a bulkhead instead of goin’ parallel to the tracks. It’s a long way across and nobody’s set up the catcher lines!”

Catcher lines were a safety feature, rubbery elastic cables that were supposed to be strung within the core so that anybody who lost their direction—which happened often, even to experienced spacers—could catch themselves instead of drifting for hours. Of course on a fully populated ship someone was likely to notice them and catch them, but under the circumstances, they didn’t have that assurance.

Everyone kept a firm grip on the car frames after that. They passed the time filling pvt. Pixton in on what they’d seen and learned so far. She was astonished at the huge amount of overgrowth in the rain forest biome. “That sounds wonderful! I could use a few hours at the beach,” she said wistfully. “Maybe a few days …”

“We don’t have time to laze around like civvies,” Cobb growled from the last car. Dann, startled, looked back at him. They were only halfway to the far end, and he looked impatient.

“I didn’t mean—” Pixton started.

“It’s okay, pvt. Pixton,” Rose said. The two were seated together in the middle car. “We know what you meant. It’s fine, and once we’re sure everything’s working the way it should, there are very good reasons for you to spend time recuperating after being frozen for 500 years.” She said the last with a pointed look at Cobb.

“Cobb is really starting to piss me off,” Jackson said in a low voice pitched just for Dann, and maybe for Rose’s android hearing. “If he doesn’t lay off soon …”

“Maybe he needs a way to let off steam,” Dann replied, just as low-voiced.

“He’d better find one before one finds him.”

The Ship of the Unforgotten - Chapter 12, Pt. 3

“And so you need a member of the crew to bypass those restrictions?”

“You’ve got it, private.” Rose smiled reassuringly.

“And there’s nobody else left who’s better qualified?”

“I’m afraid not. You’re the most senior survivor left.”

Pixton had gone very pale at the news; all of them had at first, Dann was sure. But she shook it off with admirable resolution, putting on a brave face and managing a smile—though Dann noticed she seemed to be looking just about anywhere except at the sea of red lights on the pods around them. “Okay then. Why not… I guess the worst has already happened, right?”

“Right. So what do we need to do?”

“Well … I don’t think there’s anything in here we can use beyond basic terminals, right? We’re going to need something that’ll accept higher security clearances than these will.” She started pacing around the room, eyes to the ceiling, lost in thought and idly chewing a fingernail. “I’d say we need to get to the core of the ship if we want any meaningful access. I wish I knew the layout of the ship better. I know there are secure terminals in the ship’s main computer lab, but that’s such a long trip to make with … what’s the state of the ship? Is everything still shut down?”

Dann nodded. “We’ve spent most of the last several days just getting to you through the biomes, so most of the ship is still in flight condition. We do have some tram cars out of storage though.”

She brightened. “Well, that’s something! We could try the bridge consoles, but I’m not 100% sure even they would have the kind of access we need. The bridge is a shorter trip, though.”

The others all looked around at each other. “Well, we’re kind of stuck here. It’s not like we have pressing business right now. I think we can afford to give the bridge a try, and if we have to backtrack to the core, we backtrack to the core.”

“Let’s get going then,” Cobb said.

They backtracked through the confines of the maintenance tunnel to where they’d left the tram. “We’ve been flying for almost 500 years… it’s amazing all this stuff still works!”

Rose looked over at her and smiled. “I have been running regular maintenance along with a whole fleet of maintenance bots for the past few centuries, you know. It’s not like the ship or equipment has been abandoned.” The smile slipped. “At least, not until recently. That’s something else we need your help with. The maintenance routines have gotten spotty over the last twenty years. Because of the timing, I suspect a connection between that and the problem with the cryo-pods.”

The computer tech blanched a bit and glanced around at the systems surrounding them, noting the dust buildup. “T-twenty years isn’t so much I guess, compared to the 500 we were out, right?”

“Well, we will want to verify that all the essential systems’ maintenance cycles are up to date as quickly as possible, but none of the systems we’ve encountered so far that are behind have been critical ones, so let’s just get this checked out as quick as we can.”

“If it’s all the same to you then, I-I think I’d prefer to go straight to the computer lab. If the bridge doesn’t have what we need, that’s more time w-wasted.”

Dann nodded and Cobb grunted agreement. “It’s settled then. C’mon, let’s get going.”

They boarded the tram and drove as quickly as possible core-ward in silence.

The Ship of the Unforgotten - Chapter 12, Pt. 2

“This is her,” Dann called out. They gathered around, and Rose initiated the revival procedure, then fetched a set of clothes for the computer tech.

Roughly an hour later she was thawed out and had recovered from the initial shock of reawakening. She was dressed and wrapped in a robe, slowly sipping water. It was always hard to get a real sense of what someone “normally” looked like, Dann found, but Pixton had an exotic quality that showed through even the emaciation of cryo-sleep. She was of mixed blood, and had the skin to prove it; she was maybe a touch or two lighter than café-au-lait, with full lips, and eyes that suggested asian ancestry somewhere in her genetic background. Not uncommon in early 21st century Earth history. Dann thought she’d probably be very beautiful once she’d had a chance to properly recover.

“T-thank you, Rose,” she said, taking more of the water. She looked up and around at the others. “Y-you aren’t my section leader, sir,” she said to Cobb. “What happened to Lt. Mendoza?”

Cobb sighed. “Yeah … about that, private …”

“You’d probably better finish more of that food ‘n water before we fill you in, Pixton.” Jackson said flatly.

Pixton looked around at them, eyes widening; Dann nodded slowly as she looked his way. “Um … okay.” When she’d gotten through about half the water and most of the food, Cobb looked up.

“It’s what happened to lt. Mendoza that brought us here to revive you, pvt. Pixton … and not just him, I’m afraid. Are you feeling up to the news now?”

She did look a bit stronger after the food and water. “As ready as I’ll ever be, I suppose … you’re not filling me with much confidence though, sir.”

Dann, Jackson and Cobb exchanged looks. Dann spoke up. “Lt. Mendoza didn’t survive the trip out here, Pixton. And … he’s not the only one.”

“That’s awful! What happened? Some problem with his cryo-pod?” She looked at the one she’d just vacated with a shiver. And then her eyes drifted around the room, noting all the red lights. “Um …”

“Yeah.” Jackson said. “They’re all dead. All but maybe 50 of us.”

“50!” Pixton was shaking her head. “Out of the whole ship? That’s thousands dead! How’d this happen?”

“That’s what we were hoping you could help us with,” Cobb said. “We can’t access the computer’s logs of the event. We know it happened about twenty years ago, but beyond that, we’re stuck.”

Pixton calmed down a bit and wrinkled her brow. “But with Rose here, it should be a breeze to access—”

“No, I’m afraid the lieutenant is correct, pvt. Pixton. Even I can’t access the information we need.”

“But … what can I do that you can’t? You are the computer!”

“And because I’m the computer, I have certain safeguards built in that I can’t bypass.”

The Ship of the Unforgotten - Chapter 12

Lt. Cobb and Jackson were just getting the first car rolled out onto the tracks when Dann and Rose [ed. —Forget the ‘Rose Dawn’ thing, that’s just going to confuse me, she is Rose and the ship’s main core Rose is Rose Alpha] rejoined them. Once the wheel clamps were off, it was a relatively simple job. The wheels were solid rubber tires around small, heavy metal hubs. The tram cars took power and guidance from the rails, keeping them on a predictable path.

They were awkwardly lifting the light-weight vehicle over the tracks by hand. The tram cars were relatively light-weight vehicles, but cumbersome and much easier to handle with three than with two. They’d just about wrestled the first into position when Jackson’s foot slipped on the rail and she stumbled, just catching her grip on her end of the car. Cobb’s end twisted in his grasp and knocked his head against the car side; he cursed as they let it fall into place. He glowered at Jackson. “Private! Watch your step, you just about dropped that thing on me.”

Jackson’s eyes widened in startlement, then narrowed just a touch as she nodded at the lieutenant. Cobb stalked back to the main room.

“We’re going to need a couple more of these on the tracks,” Dann said, a bit cautious. “How about I give you a hand with these ones?”

“Sure,” she said sourly. “Hey. You ever worked with that jackass before?”

“No, different teams. He … seemed okay when we met up with him first.”

She grunted non-committaly. “Not for the last few. At least he hasn’t started handing down orders yet.”

“Let’s just get this taken care of. Maybe he’ll ease off once we’ve got some answers.”

“He’d better.”

The two of them wheeled out the next car— “I don’t know why he insisted on doing it the hard way,” she groused—then placed it on the rails behind the first. That done, they found Rose had moved the third car herself; the three of them got it on the rails and short order. There was no sign of Cobb.

“You said we’re getting in through the ventilation shaft, Rose?” he asked.

“That’s the plan, yes.”

“I’ll grab some tools. And then I’ll go find the lieutenant,” Dann offered.

He grabbed what they’d need from the tool bins in the supply room, then headed back up the corridor. A quick look around the main floor showed no sign of him. He climbed back up to the metal mesh walkway. It was darker up there, but Dann spotted the lieutenant standing with his back to the room in the darkest corner. He was bowed forward, head in his hand.

“Sorry about earlier,” he said. His voice was strained.

“It’s Jackson that needs to hear that,” he said. “We’ve got the rest of the cars set up. You ready to go, sir?”

“In a moment. I’ll join you in a moment, private.”

“Sure, see you in a few, then.”

He returned to the others. “He’ll be back in a minute.”

“Suits me,” Jackson said. She set herself up in the front car. Dann climbed in beside her.

The controls were just about as simple as you could get; accelerator, break, steering wheel, and one switch to turn the headlights on. Dann hit the light switch. A bright, pale yellow/orange light lit some of the darkness ahead in the tunnel, just before the main tunnel lights clicked on. They weren’t terribly bright, but they lit up more of the tunnel than the car’s lights did. The combination left them with a span of tunnel light almost as bright as the simulated daylight.

Rose hooked the front of the second car to theirs and folded away the steering wheel, which disabled the controls in that car. She then did the same to the third car, attaching it to the second. She took a seat in the second car.

Cobb rejoined them without a word, then took a seat in the rearmost car. Cobb and Rose both nodded to him; he nodded to Jackson. She stepped on the accelerator.

The vehicles moved with impressive smoothness down the track. They were electric, and so they were virtually silent, giving off only the faintest of humming sounds and the crunch of a wheel over the odd long-dead bug.

Dann shifted in his seat; the butt of his pistol bumped the frame of the car, sending echoes bouncing through the tunnel. It was kind of eerie just how quiet it was, he thought.

Every so often they passed doors that hadn’t opened in decades. Two decades, in fact, he reflected. After the longest ten minutes of his life, Rose finally spoke up. “We stop here. The maintenance shaft is through that door.” Like the rest, it hadn’t seen use in a long time.

They stopped the tram. Dann braced himself for a horrible scream of unlubricated hinges, but to everyone’s surprise, the door opened smoothly, with only a light scraping against the floor of the tunnel. Everyone looked at Rose.

“That’s unusual. Accessing … the maintenance schedule … very strange. It has changed repeatedly over the last twenty years. I can’t tell what’s causing the changes. Maintenance here has been irregular, but the last repair bot performed work less than a year ago.”

“That’s good news,” Cobb said. There was a lightness to his voice that surprised Dann. He hadn’t heard that tone in several days. “C’mon, this pvt. Pixton is waiting for us in there.”

He lead the way into the maintenance tunnel. He was a big enough man that he had trouble moving; the maintenance accesses were small passages packed with conduits for air, power, water, and in this part of the ship, nutrients for the biomes above. He had to duck down, and often had to turn sideways when he started running short of space through tighter areas.

“How far does this thing go?” he called back at one point, shortly after smacking his head against a low pipe.

“About two hundred more meters, Lt. Cobb,” Rose replied. Cobb’s reply was inaudible, but the context was clear as glass.

They continued on in relative silence, finally reaching the cryo-bay. There was a recessed maintenance room behind the ventilation cover they needed to open up; the sloped floor led down to a crawlspace beneath the cryo-bay where technicians could service the cryo-pod conduits.

Cobb was fishing around his pockets, a look of consternation plastered over his face. Dann pulled the tools needed to remove the vent cover from his own pockets and handed them over. “Here, sir, I grabbed these.”

Cobb took the tools—a wrench, a clawed hammer, a pair of pliers—and went to work removing the bolts and prying the vent’s grating out of its mooring. In short order he had it removed and set aside; they moved on into the cryo-bay.

The interior was pretty familiar to all of them by now; it was all but identical to the others they’d seen. One lone green light stood out amid the sea of red-lit pods. Dann brushed a layer of dust from the name plate; it read Pvt. Pixton, Jennifer.