Re-Coil - J.T. Nicholas Page 0,99

right the ship so that the security force could come crashing onto the bridge. If I failed in that, it wouldn’t matter how many coils Korben stacked. We’d fall in the end.

I found myself before the pilot’s chair, not really conscious of the last few strides it took me to get there. I moved with urgency but not haste. What I had to do wasn’t overly difficult—mankind had possessed low-grade artificial intelligences before spaceflight became commonplace. And we’d always harbored a fear that our creations would rise against us, popularized more through fiction than fact. As a result, most systems had some measure of override, some ability to restore manual—which was to say, human—control. So the task before me wasn’t difficult. But it was complicated. And hasty work made for poor results.

I spared the pilot’s station only a single glance as I dropped down to the deck before it. It should have been showing the various astrogation readouts and course and navigation data. It wasn’t. Instead, it showed an emergency lockout screen. Which was as expected. If Bliss had left the pilot’s station—or any other station, for that matter—alone, regaining control would have been a matter of a few keystrokes. But the stations were, of course, wired into the ship’s computer, which, in turn, had been hijacked by Bliss. I doubted the engineers had considered this specific scenario: an external artificial intelligence that infiltrated via nano-virus and co-opted the ship’s systems. But they had considered the notion that the ship’s own rudimentary AI might go haywire and act against the crew, including locking them out of their stations. And they’d built in fail-safes.

Score one for paranoia.

I moved with the efficiency of long practice, pulling a multi-tool from my web gear even as I shifted from a crouch to a supine position, sliding under the pilot’s station and staring up at the underside of the console. I was aware of Korben’s silent struggle in my peripheral vision just as I was aware of how the silence on the comm had taken on an expectant, almost ominous, note as those aboard the shuttle made their own preparations and then, with no other options, waited. I was aware that if Korben faltered, I was dead. I did my best to ignore that fact as I used the tool to start removing the screws on the bottom of the console.

It always struck me as odd, even anachronistic, that the access ports to the consoles were held in place with an inclined plane wrapped helically around an axle, but the simple machines were called such for a reason. A more “modern” mechanism would have required some level of computer or wireless control, which would have defeated the purpose of this particular panel. I had the covering removed in seconds and was staring up into the innards of the console. It was organized chaos, a mix of fiber-optic cables, circuit boards, and solid-state electronics that stretched far beyond my understanding. I could identify the most valuable bits—and did so, almost by reflex—but I didn’t know how it all fit together, how it all worked. Fortunately, for the task at hand, I didn’t need to.

The manual override was a function that had been built in to each and every station shipboard. It wasn’t, however, one that the designers had thought would actually be necessary. So instead of a simple switch, I found myself looking at a series of old-school jumpers, physical bridges that had to be moved from one set of contact points to another. Sarah, I need the schematic.

My AI obligingly threw the schematic into my field of vision, overlaying it perfectly with the mess in front of me. She carefully highlighted the jumpers I needed to change and displayed a destination configuration for each. It reduced the complexity of the task before me from high to monkey see, monkey do. I switched the configuration of the multi-tool, changing it from a powered screwdriver to a pair of long-nosed, tweezer-like pliers and got to work.

It took roughly two minutes. For me, it felt like an eternity. I knew that if I dropped one of the jumpers, we were in trouble. Not that there weren’t ways around it—I could have opened another panel, used the jumpers from a different console. But we didn’t have the time for it. In the silence of vacuum, I had no idea how Korben was faring, nor could I spare the time and attention to look. I knew I wasn’t dead yet,