Destiny's Choice (The Wandering Engineer) Read online

  “Hey if you're going to be back here you have to wear a hair net. Full body net for you fuzzballs,” an annoyed cook said coming in behind him and brandishing a ladle. The cook had a stained white uniform on and a chef's hat.

  The chief shook his head and looked over to the two lionesses who were covered in a head to toe hair net nearby. The two females were cutting the tubers and looking extremely annoyed at the menial task. They didn't look at all comfortable about their dress either, or it could be the human style stool, it probably dug into their buttocks after a while.

  Come to think of it, it could be the company. Or the predators cutting up herbivore food. He wasn't sure, and didn't care in any case. “Looks like a freaking burka. Thanks but no thanks.” He shook his head. “Admiral you wanna blow this pop stand?” he asked, jerking his thumb to the door.

  “I thought you'd never ask,” Irons said with feeling. One shift was more than enough of this. He'd had enough of this chicken shit years and years ago as a boot and as enlisted. He got up and took his apron off. “Let me wash the starches off and I'll join you Chief.”

  “Um, yeah, good idea. I'll be in hyper. We've got a problem.”

  “A harmonic. I know.”

  The chief froze then shook his head. He glanced over his shoulder as Irons made his way to the sink. “I keep forgetting you of all people would,” he winced. “Sorry that didn't come out right. I'll meet you in main engineering.”

  “No problem,” Irons said, washing his hands. He used the lye soap to get the sticky starch residue off his hands and forearms. Technically he could have let the nanites clean him up, but he wanted to conform as much as possible. Besides, it felt good.

  “Seriously, that was the best they could find? Peeling potatoes?” the chief muttered watching as the Admiral came into engineering country a few minutes later. He caught a few of his crew giving him dirty looks. A few were shooting rather ugly looks toward the Admiral. He sighed.

  Even though they knew that Irons was innocent they were still pissed at him. He wasn't sure why. Irons had done nothing wrong. Sure there was a stigma attached to running, and that whole nasty accusation was going to haunt him. But he'd proven it untrue damn it!

  For some it was the AI and the Admiral's intrusion that bothered them. Sprite's little flick had cut a few people to the raw, they didn't like to be forced to watch something they didn't want to watch. They didn't like it that she'd taken control of the ship and forced everyone to watch it. Even though she'd been right about it.

  He looked over to the slightly overweight assistant. Harry was bald as a new born human baby's hiney. He was a nice guy, a bit stuffy sometimes but he got the job done which was more important in Bailey's eyes than anything else.

  “This fat bald guy is my assistant. Harry. For some damn reason someone with more humor than sense names a bald guy Harry,” the chimp grinned as he waved airily in Harry's general direction.

  “Cute chief, real cute. Prejudice comes in all forms, and is usually undeserved,” Harry said, shaking his bald head. “I'll have you know I was named long before I went bald and I think you had something to do with my going bald. All the hair pulling out incidents.” He nodded politely to the Admiral.

  “Speaking from experience?” Bailey asked. “Look Admiral can you take a look at the systems? Or better yet ask ah...”

  “Sprite? Or Proteus?” Irons suggested, clearly amused. He shrugged.

  “Yeah, sure, what ever you want to call her. It. Um...”

  “Okay, I'll be over here,” Irons said waving to an unoccupied console. Bailey nodded as he left. Irons looked around, noting the clean but utilitarian space. Engineering country was about getting the job done, about making sure everything worked and keeping it that way. To see the space clean and relatively neat was good. It meant some of the crew and especially their officers had an eye for detail. He wondered how much of an eye.

  Harry watched him go and pursed his lips. He looked around, seeing the other looks. Then he looked at his boss. Bailey was also taking in the looks and didn't look happy. Damn it all, he had a good crew but they couldn't see past their noses sometimes.

  He was one of the few people original to the ship. A descendant of generations of chimps, with the occasional black sheep of a gorilla or gene morphed human tucked away in his genome somewhere or another. Maybe even an orangutan judging from his late cousin Quebert.

  The simian chief grimaced. “I don't see what their problem is, he dumped the entire thing on the net for all to see,” he said shaking a hand out and throwing them up. “Damn it...”

  “Still doesn't make it true,” Harry said shaking his head. Bailey eyed him. “Hey, you and I both know a vid feed can be faked. But yeah, after he saved our asses I'd say giving him the benefit of the doubt is in order. Besides, he's got quiet a lot of evidence in his corner anyway.”

  “True,” Bailey grimaced. He hadn't anticipated the faked vid angle. Skeptics took all kinds and apparently denied even the best evidence. “I just wish I knew why they rushed us out of drydock to run him out of town. We needed more time to nail down the hyperdrive. That alone tells me he's on the level. I should never have signed off on this.” He really wasn't happy about it. But for some reason the powers that be had pressured the captain and the pressure had rolled down hill as it always does. Do they ever bother to listen to engineers? Of course not! And when they don't and it breaks who get's to fix it while they bitch and whine cause it broke down? Why an engineer of course! He winced, connecting the thought to Irons suddenly. Maybe he had a lot more in common with the big guy. A lot more than he initially thought.

  “Bubble gum and bailing wire. Which is probably why they figured it was okay to get rid of us. They figured he'd pull a rabbit out of his hat and fix anything that breaks. I bet they pulled us out just so they could get him out of Pyrax come to think of it.”

  “Rabbit... “ Bailey shook his head in confusion. “Where the hell do you get these human metaphors,” he sighed then paused. He frowned, not liking where his thoughts were leading. “I just had a thought.”

  “And not a good one seeing it from where I am,” Harry snorted.

  Bailey waved a dismissive hand. “Yeah. I was just thinking, maybe chasing us out with him isn't such a good thing after all. Like oh, say if they did it to get rid of him? Permanently?” He gave Harry a look.

  “Um, with all due respect, isn't running him out of..” His face cleared and then his brows knit as he caught on. “Oh. Oh.. Yeah. That'd suck for us as well.” He sucked in a breath looking around the compartment. Yeah, that would suck. He for one had a lot to live for.

  “Yeah. Which could explain our computer problems. And this harmonic.”

  “Maybe. But don't rule out good ole' Murphy yet boss. He's all likely to get all put out and bite us in the ass if you do.”

  “Clever. You think that one up on your own?” Bailey snorted. He pointed to a console. “Get with the bridge. See if they can dial down our hyper speed, it should smooth the ride out.”

  The Admiral felt Sprite access the Wi-fi node and traffic packets started flowing back and forth. He noted and set aside the thought as he studied the piping in the ceiling and walls. He'd have to run a level three diagnostic on the drive, something that was hard to do when it was in use...

  Sprite got a feel for the engineering subsystems as the handshake protocol cleared and she entered the net. Engineering was a separate system from the main for obvious reasons. She tended to avoid it since she didn't want to mess with anything running. She had pulled in her horns a day before entering hyper, making sure she hadn't damaged anything in the process. That could be thought of as a bad thing. But she saw something she didn't like right away, a program that was coiling around different systems and the coils were scattering ominous black files like shed scales. It hadn't been there before and it definitely didn't belong. Only each... shit!

  “Macro Virus!” Sprite spat out. He felt his entire bandwidth max out in a sudden torr
ent. Defender fully activated. All three AI jumped into the net. “Admiral jack in NOW,” Sprite ordered.

  “Shit!” Hastily he looked around. “Where is it, the nav?” He spotted a jack near Bailey.

  “It's a nasty bugger. Primitive, sabotage, but it just found out we're onto it,” Sprite said, trying to get a feel for it before she went to war. She felt the others rising, getting ready. Good.

  “Crap.” He lunged for a jack near the chief's station knocking Bailey aside.

  “Hey what gives?” Bailey asked startled. His brow knit in confusion.

  “Virus,” Irons ground out, jacking in. Bailey's eyes went wide as the Admiral's hand morphed and then plugged into the universal port. He glanced at a now concerned looking Harry and then back.

  “Virus?” he asked dumbly.

  “In the navigational suite. Sprite just opened a can of worms and now it's trying to kill us.”

  “Shit oh shit...” The chief looked around. His eyes found the big bald assistant right away. “Harry boot the back ups!”

  “No don't! The virus over wrote them with a rabbit. It's done the same for all the third tier back ups. It looks like it started there and worked it's way out since those systems weren't in use. It's been tweaking the sensors, substituting it's own version of reality. That's why you are getting the harmonic, you are about to get some nasty cross shear,” Sprite said over the intercom. “If you open the back ups it will swarm.”

  She was afraid it might already be too late. The virus had the edge, it was already in the systems it wanted to infect and it probably had some sort of hardware, some sort of flash chip somewhere it was calling home. She sent out search bots for it.

  “Shit,” Harry swore, hand on the switch. He looked at it and then paled. The engineering staff looked up at the overhead. “What the hell do we do?” Harry asked looking around. His eyes locked onto the Admiral.

  “Working on it,” Irons ground out. He could feel Proteus and Sprite battling. Defender had thrown firewalls up to protect him.

  “Admiral, do me a favor, get someone to make a back up navigational system offline right now. I'm doing what I can to put firewalls around the critical systems but this thing is embedded in the core itself,” Sprite told him directly.

  “Not good,” Irons grimaced. “We need to isolate critical systems from the net and make sure they stay clean. Sprite is trying to track down the virus's kernel now.”

  “But it sounds like it's in the core, How the hell did it get there?” Harry grimaced in thought and then began to swear vilely. Bailey looked at him.

  “An idea?”

  “Yeah, that computer upgrade we got but didn't need. The one that kept us in drydock a week,” Harry spat out. He turned and lunged to the door.

  “Pull it fast then...” Bailey said as Harry rushed out.

  “He hopefully knows what he's doing,” Irons said eying the chief.

  “Harry? Yeah, he does,” Bailey nodded. “Best assistant I've got.”

  “Good. I suggest the bridge be alerted. I'd suggest an emergency break out but we're too far into this gravitational wave to break the harmonic for hours.”

  Sprite was too busy working to care what the organics were talking about. Proteus was beside her, tearing into the virus. Unfortunately every time they thought they had it cornered a new head popped up and started spitting rabbits all over the system.

  “It's gotten into life support,” Proteus reported.

  “Which sucks for the organics, but they can suffer a couple of hours until they flat line. Until then let's see if we can nail this thing down,” Sprite shaped a virus bot module then copied it a million times and sent it out. She threw up a firewall at the remaining uninfected systems and then began filtering packets to and from them. Net activity slowed to a crawl.

  “That is doing almost as much damage as the virus is. You've slowed processor speed by ten percent.”

  “We've got to kill it.”

  “If processing speed drops further it could delay critical functions. Or lock them up all together,” Proteus warned.

  “Don't tell me, tell it!”

  Harry lunged through the computer room door and knocked a veraxin computer tech aside. The tech danced on his stilted legs, not happy about the overbearing human in it's midst. It buzzed angrily at the intruder, considering whether to call security before it realized who the intruder was. Humans all looked alike! M'rak thought angrily.

  The room was large but filled with computers. It was warm despite the AC running full blast. Warm was not good for electronics. No time to think of that now. He tore into the files, finding the last changes then started pulling cards.

  “What are you doing?” the veraxin demanded, getting back to it's feet. It gave an angry buzz as it brushed off it's vest with it's lower hands.

  “Virus. Now pull the A bank. All of it,” Harry said, looking for the right bank. It was around here... damn it where was it?

  “Virus?” The veraxin's eye stalks moved in circles. “So? The anti-virus software will isolate and kill it.”

  “Not if it's in the damn core itself! In the anti-virus module!” Harry snarled suddenly realizing where it was. His eyes found the label he as looking for. He pulled a bank then tossed it aside and moved to the next.

  The veraxin blocked his path. “Get the hell,” he paused seeing cards fall to the floor. “Oh. Or not,” he said sheepishly as the veraxin finished pulling the last card.

  “May I ask how we discovered this virus?” the alien asked, turning it's rear pair of eye stalks to Harry.

  “The Admiral's AI caught it. They were tracing it but I remembered that sleazeball and the upgrade we got a couple of days before we left dock. You know, the one we didn't want or need? That didn't do anything?”

  “Interesting. Of course this is all supposition without evidence,” the veraxin chittered. His mandibles twitched. “We only have the Admiral's word that this virus exists. It could be a manufactured crisis to get back into our good graces.”

  Harry grimaced. He ran a hand over his bald scalp. “To tell you the truth, I don't know.”He shook his head. “I just don't know. But I know where we can find out the truth,” he said. He pointed to the computer cards. “I think we should take these apart. In an isolated system of course. Do a code comparison.”

  “Ah,” The veraxin's head stalk bobbed in an approximation of a nod. “Good idea. I'll get on it.” His pincers picked up a card.

  “I think Chief Bailey will want in on this as well. Just a soon as we sort out the mess.” He waved to the pile of cards and ripped wiring. “Document everything you find.”

  “The human Harry Chambers did it,” Proteus reported a few minutes after the big engineer had rushed out. His avatar was spread out, looking a great deal like a silvery spider web as the AI tried to hold the ship's systems together with it's presence alone. “The virus kernel has been pulled from the net.”

  “Which of course just leaves the shadow it created in the RAM and buffers... got it,” Sprite said smugly.

  “Isolated it's fingerprint?” Proteus asked. “How?”

  “The parent. It's a shadow clone. I dissected one of it's op files and then did a code search of suspected files.” She shot him the file through their shared link.

  “Commendable. And I have... the other,” Proteus reported after a moment.

  “Ah. So that's that,” Sprite said with a shrug.

  “Not quite. I for one am not going to rest until I am sure this system is one hundred percent clean. Are you?”

  “Well, when you put it that way...”

  “We also have to repair the damage it and we inflicted...”

  Irons stared off to the bulkhead as the group around him looked nervously at each other and their controls. After a moment he smiled slightly. The group's tension eased explosively.

  “They got it. Harry too. Harry and a veraxin pulled the core. It was inside the anti-virus module.”

  Bailey didn't like the sound of
that. “Cute. Hidden where you would least expect a virus to be,” Bailey scowled. He was leaning forward over his console, glaring at everything and nothing. “Between you me... and well... everyone here.” He waved to the crew. “You think that's it?”

  “Proteus and Sprite aren't sure and are going to take their time scanning every bit in the system,” Irons responded slowly. “Chief I'd recommend an eyes on diagnostic of every critical system and a hard look at any suspicious upgrades or packages you've had in the week or two before we left,” he said thinking hard and fast. He was now wondering to what lengths they would go to destroy this ship... did they have a back up?

  “Packages?” a voice asked from the doorway. The group looked up to the captain and the chief of security. “What's going on? I only caught that last bit. Sabotage?”

  Bailey nodded, thoroughly incensed. “Yes captain. It looks like it. We had some shifty goings on while you and I were in that meeting before we left dock.”

  “The one the councilor called us to then canceled after having us cool our heels all day in his waiting room?” the captain asked.

  “Yeah,” Harry said coming in behind him. “I remembered some shifty guy came and insisted on rebuilding our system,” he scowled. “I wish I'd had the time to check the system over after he left. Hell, I wish I'd thought of it,” he shook his head.

  “Why didn't we hear about this before?” the security chief asked, eying Harry and then Bailey.

  Bailey looked at his assistant who looked a little sheepish. “Cause I got busy and forgot about it,” he grimaced. “Boss man came back and well...”

  “We got right into the rebuild of the hyperdrive since I was pissed and wanted to make up time,” Bailey said. His simian face grimaced. “Yeah, I remember now,” Bailey shook his head then slapped his chest. He didn't even wince when his hand hit his breast pocket filled with screw drivers. They were hard but he didn't care. The pain made him feel alive. That was a good thing right now.