Page 16 of Mongrels United
“I just happened to be the captain in the chair at the right time,” he said, his tone flat. “After the replating of the ship, it took nearly twelve years to seal it up properly and for the ship to become fully self-contained once more.”
“It tooktwelve years? But…I thought, once the plating was done, the outer hatches would be shut and that would be it,” Grady said. “That’s the way my history lessons said it happened.”
“It took twelve years before the closed system became sustainable once more,” Siran said, just as firmly. “The replating and the scoops they used to bring nitrogen and space matter onto the ship to manufacture the skin added new materials and energy that the ship hadn’t had before. The AIs spent years learning to adjust to the external inputs. Then they were chopped off again, and the AIs went back to the old, closed models, but they didn’t work anymore.”
“Because of the new energy and matter onboard…” Grady murmured.
Siran nodded. “They modeled and remodeled and adjusted. And sometimes, the scoops had to scoop up a bit more. Or something had to be ejected. And the AIs would go back to monitoring and seeing if they had the self-sustainable ratios correct.”
“Twelve years… Wow,” Grady said softly.
“Twelve years to get it back to a sustainable level, then forty more years to monitor and learn what the new cycles were and the flow of energy around the ship. That’s about when I got to be captain. It was pure lucky timing, Grady. I was in the chair when the AI models were sophisticated enough for us to be able to trace the effects of Bellish on the closed system, and that gave us a chance to track it down and destroy it. Which we did.” He rubbed his chin. “If the Skinwalkers had still been doing their jobs, we wouldn’t have been able to see where the energy was compiling and where it was evaporating.”
Grady nodded. “But that didn’t mean youhadto do it. You had plenty on your plate. The highest murder rate on the ship, ever, just to begin.”
“Everyone with a centimeter of wisdom told me getting rid of the Bellish would sort out everything else,” Siran said. “I was just smart enough to follow their advice.” He shrugged.
Grady pressed her finger to her lips, thinking hard. “Maybe we should look at those energy flow patterns, now. It’s been a few years since they were reviewed.” Although the Engineering Institute monitored them all the time, and made adjustments as the AIs suggested.
“You’ll need a physicist engineer to interpret them for you, if you do.”
“I’m sure. But it might tell me what I couldn’t see last night.”
Siran raised his brow. “Last night?”
Grady hesitated. “Kailash and I went to Dere Street, for Kailash to buy his team more gear.”
“Dere Street—that’s the party in the Field of Mars? Heard of it. You’ve got guts, going there. The people at those parties don’t think much of authority.”
“I didn’t advertise my rank,” Grady assured him. “Only, I ended up talking to Nash Hyson—”
Siran put his coffee mug down with a heavy thump. “That’s a name I haven’t heard in a while. He’s bad news, Grady. But you don’t need me to tell you that, do you?”
Grady shook her head. “I know his reputation. We only spoke for a minute or two—”
“Did anyone see you together?” There was a touch of urgency in Siran’s voice.
Grady hesitated again. Suddenly, she could feel the heat of Hyson’s fingers on her waist, an almost tangible memory. “I was there a grand total of ten minutes. It was a crowded party and the light in the Field of Mars is not exactly sun-light level. I was noticed. People knew who I was. But no one spit at me.”
Siran grimaced. “I suppose that’s a positive, these days.” She watched his mind go back to the same endless cycle of worry over how to fix the ship. How to fix what didn’t seem towantbeing fixed? How to stir apathetic people who could barely answer their front door alarms?
He’d failed to notice that she hadn’t directly answered his question about being seen with Nash Hyson, and guilt touched her. To allay that queasy sensation, she told herself that it didn’t matter in the long run. She had no intention of seeing the man again.
Chapter Seven
Nash found the strongbox in a hidden compartment in the wall of his father’s apartment, about an hour after the landlord had neutralized the keypad on the front door and let him in to collect his father’s things.
Nash was short on sleep and very short on food, which generally made him ill-tempered and inclined to make hasty decisions. Only, there were about a dozen things wrong with just finding a hidden compartment in the slice apartment of a man who had been defiantly living on basic for twenty years, let along finding a strongbox keyed to his father’s biomarkers in that compartment. That level of wrongness was adding to his crankiness.
Nash sat on the filthy floor, the box in front of his folded knee, staring at the shiny fibresteel shell and the bio inputs, his brain moving sluggishly. He ignored the dirt under his ass. He’d felt grimy just stepping into the place. It had been years since he was here last, and nothing about the slice apartment had improved.
Had his father always been a slob? Nash couldn’t remember being tripped up by clutter when he was a child. But there had always been stuff strewn about the little Esquiline house, especially after Hyram had disappeared. There was even more stuff spread around this even smaller, dark, cramped apartment. Most of it, Nash classified as garbage without inspecting it.
He had intended to tell the landlord to recycle everything and take the credits it earned her, except he’d found this hidden compartment and the expensive strongbox inside it.
Nash stirred and lifted the box to better examine its face and the bio inputs.
He’d lived a varied life, so far, and one of the friends he’d made along the way had taught Nash how to get around bio-inputs. It had proved useful over the years. He could break through these in less than a minute, if he wanted to.
