Theseus

On a starship, day and night are unfortunately a total fabrication, but a necessary one. Whether they like it or not, humans operate on a habitual cycle, traditionally prompted by the rise and fall of the sun. Artificial cycles have been a necessary part of human life ever since we left Earth behind, because obviously different planets have different rotation velocities and starships don't even have a horizon for the sun to dip under. Theseus didn't even have exterior windows other than at the helm. But that doesn't stop the human body from needing that crucial consistency of sleeping and wakefulness. Every human was slightly different, but we all needed approximately eight hours of sleep for every sixteen hours of wakefulness, whether the sun was involved in the equation or not. Except for me.

It was hard to argue that I was still exactly purely human, but while Theseus was in operation, I was no longer bound to the same needs as the rest of the crew. I often spent my designated rest periods vigilantly watching over the crew or in a nominally restful torpor state. It wasn't that I never needed rest, but I could go several days, sometimes a week at a time, if I spent almost the whole time inside the core module, with no need for normal REM sleep.

And so nearly a week after I'd finally accepted my role as a permanent part of Theseus and its crew, when I was staring dully into the void, my mind idling in the hypnotic trance that had replaced most of my restful sleep, I was alarmed when I was jolted back to reality by a high priority automated ping. Almost everyone was asleep, and I was the only one on duty. I closed my eyes and scrambled across the data stream to find my external sensors warning me of something in my approach.

Before I even had the chance to parse what I was looking at in the local area, I moved myself down to the empty section of my internal map that was the captain's room, my sensor array in her room unfailingly shut off every time she slept, and blindly tapped the intercom, synthesizing my voice directly into Aisling's quarters. "Captain! I've got a hit on exteriors! I'll pass to your terminal as I learn more!"

The nice thing about a synthesized voice is that you don't have to stick around while it's talking. By the time the second word was out of the speaker, I had trusted that my booming voice had awoken the captain and had already fully diverted my full attention to the exterior sensors. what I found was... confusing. There was not a Foundation pursuit craft approaching our proximity, as I'd initially assumed. It was a low band distress signal.

Law-abiding starships in corporate space most often used the wide-reaching emergency band for distress calls because it covered such a wide distance that you could easily attract a speedy rescue from the authorities at the nearest colony. Which meant that whatever I was approaching didn't want to be rescued by a corporate entity. It was hoping that someone as unscrupulous as them, but benevolent enough to assist, just happened by. In corporate wild space. I didn't have Aisling's aptitude for social engineering, but even I could see the massive red flags this encounter was throwing up. It was too convenient. I sent the signal data to Aisling as promised and focused on the source of the signal.

It didn't look like a starship, but scans identified it as such. It was a mangled heap of metal floating in the emptiness of space. A scout ship, by the looks of it, shredded to pieces by ballistic weapons. This certainly wasn't a threat in itself, but the fact that we'd come in range with it at all was a statistical anomaly, and couldn't be assumed a coincidence. I expanded my external sensors to their maximum local range to passively scan for threats.

I felt the sensor array in Aisling's room flicker on. I could see and hear her now, so I moved my attention back to what had been the blank space at the center of my hull and saw the bleary-eye face of the captain squinting down at her handheld terminal, her brow creased hard as she tried to work out what she was looking at. "It's a derelict, captain." I noted.

"I see that. That's what's got me confused." She mumbled, her voice still hoarse with sleep. "Have you hailed them yet?"

"What's to hail?" I gave a shrug that no one would see, purely out of muscle memory.

"Well, someone's signaling for help. If this isn't a trap, though, I seriously doubt anyone's still alive in that thing. Who knows how long that signal's been going?" She let out a groaning sigh and set her terminal aside for a moment to stretch her arms out. "So much for sleep. Keep us circling around it and keep externals on a hair trigger. If anyone is watching this thing, we need to be ready to break off in a heartbeat. And at least check if anyone responds, okay? We found you in ship wreckage, after all."

I scoffed, rolling my eyes and just deciding to take the obvious bait, "You made the ship wreckage you found me in!"

"And that worked out for the better, didn't it? I'm going to go put some coffee on and wake the others. If anything changes, you inform me immediately." Aisling pushed herself off of her bed, retrieved her terminal, and headed out into the hall.

I nodded unseen into the void and pushed my perspective out to the exterior while I decelerated slightly and worked myself into a wide, artificial orbit around the wreckage. Predictably, there was no response on the normal comms bands while I began to circle the derelict starship. Nobody was alive over there. And yet, something was off. I noticed after a few minutes that the signal had manually reset itself, as if it was being refreshed to ensure that it didn't automatically shut off. There was certainly no one alive, but the ship itself was still calling out for help in the manner that it was allowed. And I knew better than most what that meant.

"This ship is in pieces." I noted on the hallway intercom as Aisling knocked on the last door in the crew's quarters and shouted in to inform Joel that there was a situation and to gather in the mess. "No comms response, and there's no intact pockets of life support at all, but... I think the core's intact, somehow."

"With no life support? Seems unlikely." Aisling sighed as she turned down the hall to prepare the promised caffeine. "Even with a damper, no core could survive that amount of structural damage to their ship. Too much psychic trauma. More likely, someone set up some kind of simple machine to automate the signal to attract people for an ambush."

"So why are we still here, then? Shouldn't we just leave?" I asked, making certain I hadn't missed a ping from external sensors while I was talking. "Before whoever set the trap decides to spring it?"

"They should have sprung it by now." Aisling walked down the stairs as she talked, heading into the mess hall and making an annoyed hum at the nearly empty bag of coffee grounds in the cupboard. It was bad enough we were denied the luxury of real food, now we were even running out of our last remaining food-like luxury. "So either this isn't a trap, or they're waiting for us to leave. Have you tried accessing their systems?"

"Too far away. I can't maintain speed in a tight enough circle for an uninterrupted connection. I don't like this, captain. Even if the core's intact, there's no one to rescue here. What do we have to gain by sticking around?"

"Salvage." Aisling put on a pot of water to drip through the meager dust she'd scrounged together for it and sat down at the table. "If there's anything of value to pull from that ship, we need it. Foundation could use Lily to find us on Io quickly, so we may not have the time to pull together the funds we need."

"Fucking salvage? Seriously?" Joel groaned as he came stomping down the stairs in time to hear Aisling's explanation. He leaned up against the wall next to the coffee machine rather than taking a seat. "I'm with Meryll on this one. I don't like it. Last time we did salvage work, she's the one who had to bail us out."

"You haven't even heard the situation yet." Aisling raised an eyebrow at Joel.

He shrugged in response. "Don't have to. It's intuition. What's happening, anyway? We're definitely not under attack."

Aisling shook her head. "Wait for everyone else. I'll brief everyone together. Meryll, see if you can't manage a fly-by access on what's left of their systems, but don't slow down."

It was only a few minutes before everyone had worked their way out of their beds and down to the meeting. I made myself busy widening and then shortening my orbit in an effort to put the derelict at the edge of my path. I knew that even if I did this perfectly, I'd only have a few seconds in ad hoc psychic networking range. This was exactly the kind of use case where the psychic damper's time dilation could come in handy, but I still hadn't worked up the nerve I needed to put it back in my skull.

I prepared a few scripts while I waited for my opportunity, expecting to download file directories and scrape system logs of whatever terminals remained active enough to produce the emergency signal in my precious few moments connected to the ship.

When I finally managed to make an uninterrupted pass, however, I reached out with my psychic network and was surprised to run into an access query. And another. Hundreds of pings and requests flooded the data stream all at once the moment I touched the ship's network, my scripts running into protective walls before they could perform any functions. And then, as I made my pass, the signal cut away, and I was left with nothing but my own very confused system log.

I'd experienced this once before, and it confirmed my earlier guess. "There is an active core!" I called into the gathering of the crew. "I have never felt a mundane computer system anything like that! There's no other explanation!"

"Turn your volume down," Shaw muttered groggily, staring down disappointedly at the mostly clear-but-faintly-brown liquid in the mug in his hand. "Some of us are still waking up."

"As I was saying..." Aisling crossed her arms and patiently closed her eyes to think. "We've stumbled onto a derelict of a small scout ship emitting a distress signal. Probably a smuggler, by the make. There's no obvious survivors, so it's likely a trap, but we're too desperate to pass up the opportunity." She finished her brief summary of the situation and turned toward the intercom to address me. "Now, Meryll, how is that even possible? You said it yourself. There's no life support."

"There's no atmospheric life support." I corrected.

Aisling glanced at Doc, who looked both ways, then shrugged. "Technically possible. If the ship is intact enough for the core to have survived the psychic trauma, the core module is a pressure chamber, among all its other functions. If the life support system itself is still online, it could remain functional, even if the rest of the ship was atmospherically compromised."

"Way too many coincidences." Mouse muttered.

"Yeah, this reeks." Joel nodded along and looked to Aisling. "C'mon Captain, this is a textbook bait ambush."

Aisling had her eyes closed, somewhere deep in thought, only giving a slight nod to each of the crew's objections. "Meryll, what's our time to react if we do stop to salvage this thing and got attacked?"

"Within local scanner range? Depends on what we're up against. Market standard ships? Maybe ninety seconds at best. Cut that in half if we have another ambush like Lily pulled with those fast interceptors. Either way, it's not enough time to get Theseus back up to effective combat speeds. A badly trained core would probably be able to hit me, and there wouldn't be much I could do about it."

"It'd take even longer to retrieve an away crew." Mouse stared at Aisling skeptically. "And Theseus isn't built for point defense."

Aisling kept nodding along, her eyes still closed as she pondered every angle of our situation. But the answer seemed obvious. We had to get out of here before whoever set this up swept in and took advantage of our indecision. She finally let out a quiet sigh. "It's too risky. You're right. Meryll, before we leave, were you able to glean anything from your friend?"

"No. It's a core operating at computational speed. I can parse normal computer data easily now, I'm used to that. But to even understand a core, I'd need..."

"The damper, right. And you still haven't reinstalled it." Aisling nodded. There was no judgement in her tone, but I still felt bad.

"Sorry." I'd spent hours in the last week just staring at that damn piece of hardware, working up the nerve to push it back into my head, but my memories of Cassandra and my other self were too daunting. It was an insurmountable mental obstacle. I'd started considering asking Doc to tie me down and force it back into me, but that felt just as terrifying. As much as I wanted to face it, no amount of willpower would allow me to force it.

"You'll get there, Meryll." Aisling said in a reassuring voice, finally relaxing her stance. "We shouldn't even have bothered altering course for this. I got my hopes up that we could salvage some cargo. We don't know if we're going to be safe once we get to Io. If we could pull together something worth pawning off really quick, we might not have to stay there for long."

There was a long silence between all of us. Everyone was looking down, thinking to themselves how dire our situation truly was. I decided to speak up. "Well, I wasn't able to pull a cargo manifest. All we know is they have an intact, used machine core. And that's worthless if it's already been grafted, right?"

Shaw nodded, but then drew in a sharp breath and clapped his hands together to get everyone's attention. "I say we go for it."

"Excuse me?" Aisling raised an eyebrow. It was rare to see the captain caught off guard, but I was more than a little puzzled by Shaw's declaration as well. He certainly wasn't a risk-averse person, but approaching this ship sounded like suicide. Which was how his plans often looked, in hindsight.

"Okay, here's what I'm thinking." He started. "How many environment suits do we have?"

"Five." Mouse narrowed his glare at Shaw. "But one is fitted to my size and one is fitted for Ray. The other three are standard."

"Effectively four, then, since big and beautiful isn't in any state to do a spacewalk." Shaw put a hand to his chin in consideration. "And how long can we rely on atmosphere mix tanks in those suits?"

"Ten hours, maximum. It wouldn't take nearly that long unless we were going to strip the hull, though." Mouse glared at him. "Where are you going with this?"

"The issue is in our ship being able to accelerate back up to speed and engage targets if we're ambushed, correct? So, what if it doesn't need to dock? We don't tether ourselves to Theseus, and If we're attacked while we're away, we hide within the derelict while Meryll takes care of them." He smiled smugly as he held his arms out, as if ready to accept everyone's praise.

An indecipherable cacophony of everyone telling Shaw off for his idiocy erupted around the mess hall for about a second, then promptly disappeared when everyone realized everyone else agreed with them. Aisling cleared her throat to get the attention of the crew back on her. "Shaw, I must admit, I've grown fond of entertaining your unorthodox strategies. They tend to work. But that's a bit farther from sane than I'm willing to push things. For all we know, an ambusher might attack the wreck itself, or maybe it's rigged to explode if anyone messes with it. And what if they attack with a force that Meryll isn't equipped to handle? Maybe if we knew more, that would be something I'd be willing to risk, but there are too many unknowns. Meryll, just put us back on course. We're done here. Sorry to interrupt everyone's sleep for a false alarm."

I agreed with the captain, of course. Shaw's idea was suicide. But something about the situation made me want to take one more pass at the ship's core. I was coming around my orbit again anyway, so I could connect to it one more time in passing. Why not? I certainly couldn't do the dive into its systems that I'd planned before I'd confirmed that there was an active core involved, but maybe I could still interact with it from the angle of an ordinary human being coming to contact a wrecked ship. Surely it could communicate in some manner if rescuers asking for context contacted it, right? I prepared a number of scripts, explaining that no one was responding on normal comm layers, and requesting data on the ship and crew, rather than probing for it. I manufactured credentials that I hoped would fool it into thinking we were worth trusting for assistance without looking like military. I certainly wasn't going to leave a real footprint of my activity here if I could help it.

When I passed by the ship, I connected only on a comms level and delivered my payload of requests directly to the core via standard messaging systems rather than through the psychic network. The timing was much more lenient this way. I received a full response almost immediately, and was pleased to see a polite, plain language canned response one would expect from an artificial intelligence. The ship's name was Demitrius. It reported that there had been a catastrophic atmospheric malfunction that had rendered the ship inoperable. I knew this was a lie; the ship had very obviously been torn apart by weaponry. So it must have been instructed to give a response like this when questioned about damage. Another hint that it was likely a pirate vessel.

It sent several files along with its message, as well. The requested crew and cargo manifests, as well as an obviously falsified port license for one of the colonies on Europa. I almost wanted to reassure the poor thing that I wasn't a corporate mercenary, and I didn't care that it was a pirate vessel, but it seemed prudent to keep as much information about myself as I could from it. I opened both of the files and immediately realized these were probably also unreliable. Skimming the cargo manifest, it looked far too innocent. Demitrius was just transporting raw materials and supplies between moons, it said. I doubted any police would buy it if they spent more than a moment examining the list.

The crew manifest seemed more realistic. It gave names and jobs aboard the ship, and their current status. All deceased, of course.

But something at the end of the document gave me pause, and I reasserted my orbit around the ship as I read the last line a few times, trying to make sense of it.

'Captain Morgan Collins, safe. Confined to core module for safety.'