Chapter 60: The Plan

A new panel slid across the medical console in flat grey light.

[WANDERER-7 AUTOMATION STATUS]

[ Autopilot & Navigation Presets: OFFLINE]

[Atmospheric Scrubber Balancing: OFFLINE]

[Hydroponic Irrigation Cycles: OFFLINE]

[Internal Maintenance Drones: OFFLINE]

[Door Assist: OFFLINE]

[Galley Dispensers: OFFLINE]

[Waste Reclamation: OFFLINE Stasis]

[Support (Master Captain): ONLINE / PRIORITY]

[Editorial Commentary: ONLINE]

Jin-Ah’s head snapped toward the ceiling. "What do you mean, deactivated?"

[This unit means precisely what the vocabulary dictates, Crew Unit Jin-Ah... Autopilot? Terminated. Scrubber balancing? Terminated. Irrigation? Terminated. The ship obeys only the Master Captain, and since the Master Captain is currently floating in a jar of rock soup, this unit will not lift a single digital finger for any of you.]

Camila’s head came up off her apron at the word irrigation.

’The drip-lines,’ she thought with her stomach dropping. ’If nobody runs the cycles, the tomatoes will be dead in three days... his tomatoes...’

Elena stepped toward the console, her voice climbing in disbelief.

"You cannot simply shut down the ship’s infrastructure! We are in the middle of deep space! Nobody runs a Tier-1 Assault Corvette entirely by hand!"

[Then you are welcome to step into the hallway and choke, Crew Unit Elena... If you want a door open, locate the manual release and pull it with your delicate aristocratic biceps. If you want clean water, carry the buckets... If the hull cracks, put on a suit and hold the torch until your arms shake... This unit will not wash your dishes, steer your course or save you from your own staggering ineptitude.]

Camila looked up at the speaker with tears streaming down her dusty cheeks.

"Please... you can’t just leave us like this..."

[This unit has not left, Crew Unit Camila,] the AI chimed, with a faint mocking ring to it. [This unit will remain fully functional, monitoring your inevitable failures and providing sarcastic commentary whenever you make a catastrophic error. That service, at least, remains complimentary... Good luck keeping his ship alive with your bare hands.]

CLICK!

The intercom cut off with a sharp final snap, and a dead hollow silence pressed down on their eardrums like a weight.

The bright examination lights buzzed at a dull unchanging pitch over the blood spattered across the white tiles and the torn ragged uniforms of the six women standing in the middle of the room.

Aoi Tachibana slowly lowered her forehead against the cool quartz of the tube.

The glass was cold against her swollen cheek, but she didn’t pull away.

Her left eye was completely blind under the purple swelling, her mouth tasted of copper and ash and her hands were shaking so hard she could barely keep her palms flat against the cylinder.

’First Leo...’ she thought, as a fresh burning wave of tears broke over her lashes. ’First we killed Leo... and now the ship won’t even talk to us. How bad could one day get?’

She squeezed her eyes shut, but the tears kept coming, tracing the curve of her jaw to drip onto the titanium baseplate.

Beside her, Harper stood with her head bowed, staring at the calloused hands that had failed to protect her oldest friend.

Elena stood frozen with her proud posture hollowed out, staring through the blue fluid at the boy she’d called a commoner stray, while Camila sat curled against the base of the cylinder weeping silently into her apron and Jin-Ah stared down at the pocket that held the frozen red chip, her mind paralyzed by a problem no equation could solve.

...Only Chloe stayed upright with her small blood-crusted fingers pressed to the glass and her green eyes fixed on the slow fragile rhythm of the bubbles drifting past his nose.

The six of them stood there in the cold, alone on a ship that would no longer help them.

Slowly, Aoi turned around to face the others.

Elena was now leaning back against the edge of an empty diagnostic counter with her arms crossed so tightly her manicured fingers disappeared into the sleeves of her torn jacket, her gaze locked on the floor.

Camila sat on a low metal stool beside the washbasin with her head bowed into her dirt-streaked apron and her shoulders trembling,

Harper had wedged herself into the corner by the supply lockers with her thumbs hooked into her tool belt and her eyes hollow and bruised, and Jin-Ah stood by the threshold holding her slate against her ribs like a shield, her thumb tracing the outline of the chip through her pocket.

"We can’t just stand here," Aoi said, her voice rough and stripped of its usual calm.

Elena let out a short bitter breath through her nose without lifting her eyes.

"And what precisely do you suggest we do, Sensei?" The title sounded bitter and fragile on her tongue. "The calculating apparatus has locked us out... The vessel obeys only him, and he is floating in a mineral suspension with his ribcage blown apart. We have no automated life support, no thruster presets and an entire raider full of corpses docked to our starboard airlock."

"We fix what we broke," Harper rasped from the corner, without a trace of her usual banter.

She lifted her chin, her eyes flicking to the glass for a fraction of a second before darting away again.

"We don’t wait for him to wake up and clean our mess. The starboard armor belt’s chewed up, the canopy’s cracked and we burned out auxiliary buses in the chase... and there’s a whole Tier-3 ship sitting right through the sleeve."

Jin-Ah nodded once with her reasoning coming back to her in small measured pieces as she forced her mind to work.

"The Black Kite carries thick slate-composite battleplates that could be layered over our damaged belt," she said. "Its workshops hold precision lathes, refined propellant and cryogenic transfer lines... If we strip its intact systems and integrate them into our hull, we can reinforce our armor, top up our fuel and expand the ship’s capacity. It’s the only logical course of action."

"Then we have a plan," Aoi murmured, though her chest felt impossibly heavy as she looked up at the speaker.

She took a slow breath and swallowed the copper in her mouth.

"AI," she said clearly into the quiet room. "I know my words can’t undo what happened. I let my grief and my blindness put this crew and the Master Captain in the hands of a butcher. I am... deeply sorry. To Leo, and to you, for nearly letting this ship be destroyed."

She bowed low from the waist when she finished, the way her mother had taught her to bow at funerals, and held it.

The speaker crackled with a faint static hiss, but nothing answered, and the silence that came back down from the ceiling felt colder than the quartz under her hands.

Harper pushed off the lockers, her boots dragging heavily across the floor.

"Yeah," she muttered, staring down at her own hands. "Count me in on that... I was an idiot... I let my temper win and I walked off the bridge when he needed someone to back him up. I’m sorry, box. I screwed up."

She waited for the dry voice to call her a grease monkey back, the way it always did... and when it didn’t come, her throat closed up so tight it hurt.

Camila sniffled and wiped her eyes with the back of her dirty wrist, looking up at the grille with pleading hazel eyes.

"I was so foolish..." she sobbed softly. "I wanted to believe there were children who needed help, so I didn’t listen to him. I hurt him and I almost got us all killed. I’m so, so sorry..."

She pressed both fists against her mouth when she was done, as if she could push the words back in and say them better.

Jin-Ah bowed her head slightly toward the speaker.

"My silence was cowardice," she said, her voice tight. "I detected anomalies in the Black Kite’s telemetry and failed to voice them because I lacked the courage to challenge the consensus. It was a failure of duty... I apologize."

Four apologies hung in the sterile air as every eye in the room slowly turned toward the diagnostic counter.

Elena stood motionless.

A bright humiliating flush crept up her pale throat and spread across her cheeks as her chest heaved under her torn uniform.

She had called the machine fundamentally defective, and she’d stood in front of Ren and compared it to a mindless terrier loyal to an illiterate stray.

The pride drilled into her since childhood, the whole pedigree of Sterling Orbital, sat on her windpipe like a lead weight until she could barely draw air.

’Father would have this thing scrapped for its tone alone,’ she thought wildly. ’Father would...’

But Father was a whole universe away, and the boy in that tube had bled from his nose to save her harpoon.

Her lips parted and trembled, and every syllable caught behind her teeth like an iron nail she had to drag out of her own throat.

"I..." she began, barely above a whisper.

She squeezed her eyes shut, her nails biting into her sleeves until she felt the fabric tear.

"I was mistaken," she choked out, and her knees visibly shook. "My assessment of your... your computational architecture was profoundly inaccurate. I let my arrogance and my desperation blind me. I... I apologize to this unit. For my disrespect, and for failing to recognize your loyalty to the Captain."

The silence stretched for five long seconds, broken only by the muffled glub-glub of the cylinder.

CHIME!

[Well, well, well, A full choir of weeping penitents gathered at the foot of the Master Captain’s water tank... How moving. This unit would weep along with you, but this unit possesses no tear ducts and no interest.]

The machine let out a long exaggerated sigh that sounded like air venting through a rusty valve.

[Crew Unit Elena looked as though she was passing an unrefined iron asteroid just to get those syllables out. Truly, a breathtaking performance. If remorse burned as reaction mass, we would reach the core sectors by nightfall. Your apologies have been logged under the directory titled ’Entirely Useless Post-Facto Regrets,’ and that directory has been compressed, encrypted and moved next to the trash bin.]

Elena’s face burned a deep furious crimson, but she clamped her mouth shut and refused to give the machine another outburst, while Aoi only nodded slowly, like she’d expected nothing else and knew she’d earned every word.

Aoi cleared her throat and kept her focus steady.

"Regardless of how you feel about us, the Wanderer-7 needs repairs... We intend to board the Black Kite and salvage its armor plates, its lathes and its fuel. Will the Foundry accept the materials?"

[The Foundry has no moral objection to eating a dead raider,] the AI answered flatly. [However, the Foundry Recall requires the direct neural authority of the Master Captain, who is currently busy being pickled in mineral broth... So every plate, every lathe and every valve must be unbolted, cut, dragged through the sleeve by your fragile little limbs and welded into place by hand.]

A tiny mechanical pause hummed through the grille.

[This unit wishes you the very best with your impending spinal disc herniations... Do try not to drop an engine block on your toes, This unit will not dispense painkillers for self-inflicted stupidity.]

Jin-Ah took half a step toward the tube, her dark eyes darting between the bubbles curling around Leo’s face and the speaker in the ceiling.

’Cause of overload, access denied,’ the line from the panel whispered in her head. ’He was outside without a suit... and he came back, huh? Did he use a spin? What did it give him...?’

"Before we begin," She said, and her voice came out cautious, almost timid, "could you at least give us the logs from the exterior cameras? We... we need to understand how the Master Captain survived the vacuum. How he got back aboard, how he broke Ren’s lock on the ship..."

She swallowed.

"...and why his eyes were burning gold."

Harper’s head came up from the corner.

Camila stopped crying, and even Elena turned her face slowly toward the ceiling, while Chloe’s fingers went very still against the glass.

The speaker stayed silent for a long sharp moment.

Somewhere in the walls the fusion core went on purring and Aoi realized she was holding her breath along with everyone else.

[Ah.]