plug was loose? Although that shouldn’t matter; the wired connection was a redundancy. He tapped his film to cycle through subsystems. One after another came back: NO CONNECTION.
“Hello?” he said.
Systems began to blink back on: Life, Command, Engineering, Comms. Something popped in his ears.
Jackson said: “Intel? Life?”
“I’m here.”
“I temporarily lost comms. Now I’ve got nothing on my board.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“Life?”
“I’m here,” Beanfield said. “But no board.”
His board fizzed to life. “Systems are coming back up. I’m running diagnostics.”
“Which systems?” Jackson said. “Tell me what we have.”
“All of Life function. All Engineering. Half of Comms. Weapons coming up now. Armor . . .” He eyed it, in case it was about to change. “Armor is down.”
“Repeat that?”
“Armor at zero percent function.”
“Give me a scan. I want eyes on our surrounds.”
“Roger that. Weapons starting to come online, by the way.”
“What happened?” Beanfield said. “Did they attack us?”
“Hive was a bomb,” Jackson said. “Detonated when we hit it. Some kind of hinky percussive wave.”
He watched the sensing subsystem come online and begin to sift through surrounding space. When numbers began to return, he sucked in his breath. “We have hostiles.”
“How many?”
“It’s reading fourteen thousand.”
There was a short silence. “Could that be a glitch?” said Beanfield.
“Could be. Yes.”
“Verify it, please,” Jackson said. “Because that would be a shitload of hostiles.”
“Yes.”
“I still can’t see anything. How long are you getting until contact?”
“Six minutes. They’re a long way out and we’re slowed down. Verified. Hostiles are real.”
“Fourteen thousand?”
“Sixteen thousand now. More have entered sensor range.”
“We need Armor, Gilly.”
“Understood. I’m investigating.”
“Weapons are functional, though?” Beanfield said. “So we’ll neutralize them before they can reach firing distance, yes?”
“Correct. Ship AI is functional and Weapons are online.” He blinked. “Wait. Weapons are down.”
Beanfield inhaled.
“You said we had Weapons,” Jackson said.
“We did. I’m sure . . . they’re coming up now.” Earlier, he had seen Weapons scale up into the nineties. Now they were at half that. He kept the readout onscreen and watched its components light up green, one after another. When it reached PLASMA CANNON MAJOR, everything flipped back to red. “We have a problem. Weapons are caught in some kind of loop. They’re coming up and going down again.” He checked sensors. “Five minutes to contact.”
“Am I going to get my board back?” Jackson asked. “If not, I’ll come to you.”
“Uh,” he said. He was tracing the failure path of the plasma cannon back through subsystems to see where it was going wrong. The crazy thing was they didn’t even need the plasma. It was a superweapon that took an hour to charge and was wasted on anything smaller than a planet. They had never used it. But the ship performed diagnostics on each component as it came online, and when it tried this on the plasma, it was causing some kind of error cascade that killed everything. He found a similar effect in Armor and followed it back to a particular core bank: a hunk of computing power that constituted roughly one-thousandth of the ship’s brain.
“Intel?”
“I think I see the problem. Core bank nine-nine-six is corrupt.”
“Can you take it offline?”
That was exactly what he needed to do. The ship could work around a failed core bank. It simply had to know that it needed to. It should have detected the fault itself, but he could force it. “Not from here. I have to go to Engineering.”
“Go. Life, release Anders from confinement. I’m relocating to Intel.”
He unstrapped and hit the door’s tactile panel. The door didn’t move at first and then there was an extremely mechanical whirring of a kind he’d never heard it make before. Just when he thought he was going to have to use his bare hands, it juddered open. He ran through the corridor,