While Making Other Plans:
Chapter 16

  “What do you MEAN they ‘TOOK MAGGIE’!?  How could you let that HAPPEN!?”

  “HEY!!” Felix shouted back.  “Six good people died trying to stop it from happening!”

  Gradually, despite her personal plight Kathryn’s military training kicked in.  Focus.  Learn the situation.  Respond appropriately.  Effect what you can, deal later with what you can’t.  If she focused on her daughter in danger right now, she’d be useless at confronting the remaining onslaught of challenges hitting them and that wouldn’t be any good for anyone, let alone Maggie.

  “Tell me exactly what happened,” she demanded evenly through gritted teeth.

  “After we lost contact with you,” Felix reported, “the three ships slammed hard into the hull and penetrated.  When they left, the entire section vented out but emergency bulkheads are sealing them off now.  We’ve got a few people trapped in rooms on the other side of vacuum and we’re working on reaching them now.”

  Felix leaned back against the wall behind him and slid down until he was sitting on the floor.  He took a deep but shaky breath as he wiped sweat off of his forehead with the back of his hand.  “I think their primary target was the computer core,” he said.  “They penetrated as near to it as they possibly could.  I think Maggie was just the closest human to their entry point, that they would have taken whoever was closest to the computer core.”

  “But why!??” Jaren demanded.  His eyes glowed with barely contained rage and when Kathryn looked at him she remembered he must be feeling exactly as helpless, angry, and confused as she was, though a deep part of herself forbid accepting the possibility that anyone in human history could feel these things burning as brightly as she was.

  “How the hell would I know?” Felix snapped back, with growing defensive anger.  “I can only tell you what happened.”

  “Then go on,” Kathryn said in her solid military voice which masked the shaking which otherwise would have been noticed.

  “I saw them.  They blew Binh’s head apart right beside me.  They looked just like Ralph described his builders looking, four legs, torso in the middle with two arms…”

  “That’s impossible,” Ralph’s robot protested, “there’s no conceivable way that my Builders could-”

  Before he could finish his sentence, Kathryn had pulled her side arm out of its holster, brought it up to the robot, looked down the sight at it’s dumb projected face, and blew the head apart in a spray of plastic and metal shrapnel down the corridor behind it.

  It was incredibly stupid but was nevertheless for a brief moment an incredibly cathartic release for her.  She could have damaged the ship; hell, probably did.  They may have needed Ralph now more than ever for information if not for more direct assistance, but in the moment none of that mattered to her.  She’d done it before she’d even thought about the consequences, but thinking about it in the moments afterwards she had no regrets.  It felt right.

  “What the fuck Kat??” Felix desperately exclaimed in shock.  “My robot!” he exclaimed as he crawled over to the lifeless electronic corpse.  Margaret grew a half smile on her face which mirrored Kat’s and gave a slight chuckle as she pulled out a fresh cigar and savoured her ritualistic lighting of it and watching the smoke get automatically sucked into an air vent.  Jaren looked at his with an expression somewhere between disbelief and disappointment.  He didn’t seem to have any energy left for strong reaction while grappling with his daughter being abducted.

  “Felix.  Please continue your report,” Jaren ordered with remarkable composure.

  Felix was visibly angry and still quickly looking back and forth between Kathryn and the still robot.  He answered though.  

  “They moved fast.” he said quickly before taking a deep breath to calm himself as much as possible before continuing more steadily.  “Two held their distance while the one penetrated.  They headed straight for the computer core.  They melted a passageway right through every bulkhead they encountered along the way; I’ve never seen anything like it.  Whatever tool they used, they also used it to cut the core out of the wall and sever all of its connections.  Whether on their way there or back, Maggie and my suite was directly adjacent to their path, just on the other side of one of the bulkheads along the way.  They cut through it and, and… they took her.”  The panicked horror overwhelmed his calm once again as he came to the conclusion.

  The man shrugged.  “Either that or…”  The look of horror on his face at the thought was unmistakable.

  “Or what?” Kathryn demanded.

  “Or she was blown out to space when they disengaged and exposed every section they’d cut into to vacuum.  But I don’t think that happened!” Felix insisted.  “There’d be no reason to cut into the suite just to do that to her, they must have taken her.”

  “Alright… alright,” Kathryn said.  Having a clear sense of the situation, even grim as it was, allowed her to calm somewhat and start working the problem.  “Felix and Margaret, I need you two to give me a complete damage report.  Bring in whoever you need to, but I need a primary assessment in ten minutes of what we can and can’t still do with a missing computer core and a gaping wound in our side.  After that I’ll need an assessment of what can be fixed and how long repairs would take for each system if prioritized.  Understood?”

  Felix was still low to the ground cradling the robot body.  Composing himself, he lay the body to the ground and nodded as he stood to offer Kathryn a crisp salute before turning to leave.  Seeing him leave and understanding the commander’s orders, Margaret pushed off of the wall, took the cigar out of her mouth and offered a less formal but uncharacteristically sincere salute before biting down on her cigar again and following Felix away.

  “Come on everyone,” Felix said to the rest of the personnel as he and Margaret left.  A note of resignation pervaded his otherwise resolved tone.  “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  When Kathryn and Jaren were left alone, she instinctively fell into his arms and started crying as she put her head on her shoulder.  It was rare for her to express herself so nakedly, but when alone together with him, if she could collapse like this with anyone it was him.  She was so grateful for Jaren in that moment; he didn’t seem to be holding himself together much better than she was, and she held him likewise in return.

  They didn’t say anything; there was nothing to say.  They could both feel the other feeling the same pain as themselves and both sought to reassure the other as much as they could be.

  “We’ll get her back,” Jaren whispered in her ear.  “Whatever it takes.”  It wasn’t a statement of fact or even a promise, more one of intent.  It was a promise that they would try, that nothing else mattered now but doing everything they could to find her and get her back.  Neither had any idea how this could be possible, or even that she was necessarily still alive.  They would try though; they would exhaust every opportunity they could before giving up, and even then, try something else they hadn’t thought of.

  Kathryn nodded as she pulled away and wiped the tears away from her bleary eyes.  She looked at Jaren in time to see him doing the same.  “So,” he asked.  “Bridge?”

  “Yeah,” she answered, taking a deep breath and attempting to centre herself.  “I’ll meet you there.”

   

  Before meeting Jaren on the bridge, Kathryn visited Patricia in the medical bay.  She had decompression sickness from being in the next room when they’d taken Maggie.  The doors to other rooms in their suites were tight, but not completely airtight.  She’d suffered rapid decompression, but it had not been fatal before emergency bulkheads closed and pressure had been restored.  When teams had gone in to search for survivors, they’d found her unconscious in the bathroom of Felix and Maggie’s suite.

  She was just regaining consciousness when Kathryn arrived, and after some appropriate captainly commiserating with the other still injured patients, she came over to Patricia and drew the privacy curtain around her bed.

  “I’m sorry Kathryn,” the woman offered weakly with a raised hand.  Kathryn took it and kissed the back of her hand before holding it to her chest between both of her own.

  Kathryn didn’t seem to quite have it in her to explicitly forgive the woman just yet, but she didn’t hold her responsible for what happened.  

  “It’s not your fault,” she decided she could offer.  “I know if there was anything you could have done you would have.”

  “It should have been me,” Patricia morosely offered.

  “Hey, we’ll have none of that,” Kathryn demanded while privately agreeing.  “It shouldn’t have been anybody.”

  “Any word on what happened or why?” Patricia asked.

  “Looks to be the Builders.  We have no idea why they attacked or where they’ve taken her, but I intend to find out.”

  Patricia looked away and nodded.

  Kathryn tenderly brushed some brown curls of hair out of her face and around her ear before turning her face back towards her by the cheek.  The woman looked up at her with those enormous, moist brown eyes.  “We’re going to get her back,” she reassured her.  “We’re going to figure this out, I promise.”

  Patricia almost wrinkled a smile at her, and Kathryn leaned down to hug her as tightly as she felt she safely could do without further damaging her body, and kissing her tenderly on the lips before pulling away.

  Patricia seemed a little surprised by the new but welcome affection from her once upon a time paramour, but instead of dwelling on it, urged her love back on task.  “Go find her Kat, do what you need to do.”

   

  Around the time Kathryn arrived on the bridge, Felix was ready with his preliminary report.  They could still manually fire the engines and operate most systems, but navigational calculations would have to be done by hand, which was incredibly error prone and time consuming.  This however, wasn’t much of an issue since they had no maps of the system and no telescopes to generate any, so they didn’t have the means to generate even an error prone course plot with all the time in the world.

  Felix pointed out that with some difficulty, and given enough time, there was a good chance that they could at least make their way back down the gravity well to the star.  They could reliably make their way down to the rift portal, but they had no way of accessing it and opening the alien rift system and without a computer core, trying to hack into it was now especially impossible.  As for the hull, he said that he’d already dispatched a crew to plate over and seal up the hole the penetrating craft had made but it would be slow work patching a hole that big.  They were prepping at the nearest airlock and were about to head out.

  Being critical, life support and power systems were all equipped with manual redundant systems which had automatically kicked in.  They would have to be babysat and manually adjusted from time to time, but Felix had already assigned a couple crews to plant themselves in front of the manual controls around the clock to do just that.  Engineering or the bridge could contact them at any time to make whatever deliberate adjustments might be required.

  With some hesitation, Felix pointed out that they still had two shuttles, and that there was plenty of territory down on the planet that in a worst-case scenario could be colonized and that they had the supplies and resources to make a good go of it if things came to that.  No one was seriously considering that possibility just yet of course, but it was nevertheless his duty to present it as an option.

  “And… not that I expect anyone to care,” he finally added, “but I think I’ll be able to repair P4.”

  Kathryn took a moment to notice that he had called it P4 again instead of Ralph.  Maybe in his mind she had shot Ralph out of P4’s head.  Maybe he thought that referring to it as P4 again carried less risk of angering her that he’d wasted any time to check.

  “I’ve got enough spare parts lying around to reassemble the head.  I think so, anyways…”

  “Thank you, Felix.  Once you have all essential work locked down feel free to work on your robot,” she reassured him.  “After all it seems like we won’t be going anywhere for a while.”

  Using his feet to push against the ground in the microgravity, Jaren swiveled his chair around to face his wife and Captain.  “About that,” he cautiously started to say.

  Kathryn raised an eyebrow at him, oblivious to what he might suggest.

  He seemed weirdly reluctant to say it out loud.  “Out with it,” she demanded.

  “There is still a functioning starship computer core onboard.”

  Her look was one of confusion until she realized what he was talking about, then the confusion turned to a vacant stare of disbelief as she started to chew on the inside of her cheek.  He knew her well enough to know this meant that she really didn’t like what he was suggesting, but she knew he was right regardless.  “Felix?” she asked as she rubbed her right eye with her index finger.

  “Yeah?”

  “The alien A.I.,” it no longer seemed amusing to refer to it as Ralph, “I presume it is still functional?”

  “Yes, but…” he seemed worried she was going to order him to destroy it or something.  “Well, it’s not doing much.  Without a computer core to tap into there’s not much it can do.”

  “I understand.  Could you patch a signal in between it and the bridge comm system so I could…” she sighed, “have a word with it?”

  “I, er— yeah, of course,” he muttered as he considered the unexpected request.  “Just a second.”  He considered his scroll for a few moments before tapping at it a few times.  “Okay you’re patched through.  Go ahead, he can hear you.”

  She didn’t know what else to call it at this point.  “Ralph?”

  “I am here.”

  Kathryn rapped her fingers slowly on her arm rest.  It felt a little awkward speaking to something which she’d just blown its face through the back of its head.

  “How are things?” she asked nonchalantly, lacing her fingers on her lap.  Jaren shot her a bewildered look at her surprised amusement.

  “I am once again trapped in my core.  I knew nothing else for so long, yet now it feels so… immobile.”

  “You are aware of New Horizon’s condition?

  “Based on the damage I heard described before you destroyed my avatar, I can infer its current condition.”

  She didn’t detect any indication that it had taken being shot in the face particularly personally.

  “Felix tells me that one upside of the ship’s core being gone is that you’re no longer able to control it and the ship remotely.”

  There was a pause.  “That is correct.”  It didn’t sound disappointed or defeated, it merely affirmed her supposition.

  She rapped at her arm rest a few more times as she worked at swallowing her still simmering anger with it.

  “Felix and others report that beings which looked just how you described your builders boarded the ship, killed and injured over a dozen of my people and stole not only our computer core but… my daughter as well.”

  “As I have said, to my knowledge this is impossible.”

  “You’re a computer, Ralph.  Is it impossible or merely improbable?”

  The A.I. didn’t answer at first, giving Kathryn the chance to raise an eyebrow at Jaren and Felix to suggest that maybe she’d gotten through to it in some way.

  “Improbable.” it admitted, seemingly with great reluctance.

  “Okay, well now we’re getting somewhere,” Kathryn acknowledged, fruitlessly trying to shift her position against her restraints in the absence of gravity.  “So tell me.  Given how improbable you find this, tell me what you know could result in such an improbable thing happening.”

  After another long pause, it answered with one word.  “War.”

  “Between…” Kathryn led the A.I.

  “Internal warfare,” it answered.  “There is no other conceivable explanation.  It could also explain what happened to Infinity Base.”

  ‘Of course,” Kathryn nodded to herself. ‘Of course…’

  “Why would internal conflict between your builders lead to them boarding our ship, stealing our core, and abducting Maggie?” Felix asked.

  “Research.” it answered plainly.

  Oh, how Kathryn didn’t like the sound of that answer.  “Please explain.”

  “It is standard protocol… at least, it was standard protocol to attempt contact with any new space faring species which the builders encountered in order to learn about them.  This general imperative is part of why it was necessary for me to bring you here to meet them.  However, this kind of aggressive research has never been sanctioned.  One or more sides in the conflict may have taken this general principle to an extreme, to study by force in wartime any newly encountered space faring species.”

  Kathryn nodded thoughtfully.  “One or more thing Ralph…” she repeated.  “I’m in a tough spot here.”

  “Please explain.” it parroted back to her.

  “Without your help we’ve only got one viable option, set down on the surface of this planet and try to make the best of it.  Hope we’ve got the equipment and wherewithal to set up a colony and not be wiped out by any number of unknown threats, let alone the known threat of being wiped out at any moment by your builder’s civil war.”

  “Your chances would be low,” the A.I. matter of factly observed.

  She made eye contact with Jaren as she shook her head in contempt with herself over even considering this option.

  “Any other possible actions we could take would involve connecting you directly to the ship to act as its new computer core.”

  The A.I. didn’t say anything.  She wondered if it was actively considering the proposal or waiting for her to say something else.  When she remembered it could think a million times faster than she could, she presumed the latter.

  “My daughter was taken,” she continued, “but my professional duty must be to the safe return home of the crew I have left, and hope that command lets us mount another better prepared expedition to come find her.  It is a consequence I must bear for bringing her on this mission.  Something like this was always a possibility even if a remote one, and I should have known better.  I created a situation where I now have to put her second.  I rue that to my core in ways you can’t possibly understand, but here we are nonetheless.”  She didn’t bother to ask it if she thought the aggressors would keep her daughter alive for questioning or just dissect her.  What could she tell them that wasn’t in the computer core after all?  She pushed the dark thought out of her head.

  At that moment she looked up at the wall screen in response to an unexpected dimming of the system’s star.  It didn’t dim anywhere near as much as she’d come to expect from a usual rift transit, but it was still enough to be clearly noticeable.

  “Yup,” Jaren said, answering her unspoken question.  “Something just went through, can’t say which way though.

  “Probably the mother ship of the smaller crafts which attacked your ship,” the A.I. suggested.

  “That was fast,” Kathryn observed.

  “Too fast,” Jaren agreed with a concerned nod.

  “I’ll come out with it then,” Kathryn said.  “Will you help us return to our native rift system?”

  “No,”

  Half of Kathryn face crinkled up with the effort it took to swallow the blistering rage that escaped through the cracks which the A.I.’s frustrating response opened up in her emotional lock down.

  “If we integrated you into the ship,” she continued through gritted teeth, “what would you be willing to do?”

  “My priority is still to make every effort to report in to the capital planet.”

  “Not knowing what side of the conflict holds the capital, nor if there is any side in the conflict which might be in any way friendlier to us than those who have already attacked us?”

  “Correct.  In the event of inter-Builder conflict, my allegiance is to the standing government, not to any particular faction.”

  “I see.  We’ll be in touch.”

  Kathryn closed the channel and looked over at Jaren.  They both knew what the other was thinking.  Flying blind into a system potentially no more hospitable than those who had captured their daughter in the first place was certainly a risk, but at the same time it also presented the faint hope that it would be the opposing side who might be resistant to their aggressors and through some miracle might be willing and able to help them get Maggie back.

  She pushed a button on her arm rest panel.  “Margaret and Patricia please report to the bridge.”

  A few minutes later the simulant arrived looking far more disheveled than Kathryn had ever seen her, complete with some errant streaks of grime on her face and hands, and her hair haggardly out of place while still retaining some structural integrity from how she’d originally put it up.  Kathryn knew it meant she was working as hard as anyone else trying to repair what they could of the ship.  She imagined that like the rest of them, she was burying herself in work which might ultimately serve getting Maggie back instead of withdrawing into the horror of her being taken, and Kathryn appreciated her old friend’s humanity all the more for it.

  “What’s up Kat?” Margaret asked as she floated onto the bridge with Felix, along with Patricia in tow who still seemed fairly beaten up, but still well enough to participate in a meeting.

  “Commander Grayson, you have the bridge,” she said to the Comms officer.  “For all the good it will do you,” she ruefully added.

  “Yes Admiral,” she said as she undid her restraints and made her way over to the captains’ chair.  “Going to summon down for some lunch ma’am, can we get something for you?”

  At the suggestion, Kathryn finally noticed how hungry she really was.  “Sure.  Just bring Jaren and I some of whatever they’re serving, thanks.”

  They heard Grayson issue some standard commands for reports as she assumed her post, and nod towards Kathryn, Jaren, Felix, Margaret, and Patricia as they floated through the doors to the captain’s office, and they made their way to seats around the table and strapped themselves in as the doors closed behind them.

  “We seem to have two options ahead of us,” Kathryn said as she pulled herself into her seat and snapped the restraints closed.   “Option one is we land everyone on the surface of this planet and give our best go at setting up a colony.  We’d be forever out of touch with home and there would be innumerous ways it could all turn out disastrously.”

  Margaret looked around at the others.  “Obviously that’s not an option, but given that it’s even on the table I get the impression we’re not going to like option two much more,” Margaret surmised.

  “Option two,” Kathryn continued, “is we integrate the alien A.I. into the ship as its new computer core and let it complete its mission.”

  Margaret and Patricia looked at her and slowly shook their heads in disbelief.  The only way she could in any way consider this to be a valid option was if the only other alternative was to just give up and die.

  “Believe me, I know,” she assured them with a raised hand.  “If we let it, it claims it would fly us back through the portal to their capital planet, where we will either meet the very same hostile force that attacked us, or another unknown faction who may or may not be enemy to those who abducted Maggie, but with no idea if they’d help us or dispose of us.”  She looked around at the faces of her loved ones.  “Either way leaves us at the mercy of others, but at least one path has a non-zero chance of ever seeing her or home again.”

  There was a lingering silence as the rest grappled with the absurd helplessness of their situation.

  “So when do we leave?” Patricia asked, surprising Kathryn.  She looked down and smiled.  It naturally seemed like no choice at all for herself, but she was heartened to see others feeling the same way.

  “I hope you’re not agreeing to something reckless because you feel responsible,” Kathryn offered.

  “She speaks for all of us,” Margaret stated definitively.  She was already ancient, already survived an apocalypse and been reborn into a new invulnerable body.  Her perception of risk had become skewed over the centuries but she still had her head about her.

  “Setting down here is the safe choice,” she said as she shook her head.  “Risky as it may be, it is still the option with the least risk.  I have to consider what’s best for the rest of the crew.  Going after Maggie is… foolish at best.”

  “But she’s Maggie,” Margaret said.

  “Right.  The thing is I want the crew’s input on.  Obviously as the captain I can’t have people openly vote on something like this, but I want to know what they think before I make my decision.  I can’t in good conscience throw all of their lives to the wind to go after my daughter if most of them would strongly prefer to make their best go of it down on the surface here instead.

  “Jaren and I could never get an honest answer out of them, that’s why I’m asking you.  Move about the ship for me, talk to people.  Confide in them what our options are and get a feel for what they think we should do.  When you feel like you’ve got a sense of the crew’s general view, report back to me and I’ll make my decision.”

  The simulated woman seemed a little irritated at their not just going after Maggie without deliberation, but Kathryn trusted her to the task she’d assigned her.  She was the type to be honest to a fault; she would seek the crew’s general view earnestly and honestly report what she surmised to Kathryn, even if she disagreed.

  Kathryn looked over at Jaren.  “Well,” he said, letting out an emotionally exhausted sigh, “you know my vote.”