Lost Flyght – Chapter 26

My stomach sinks as we approach the Amagi’s airlock hatch, and a red light blinks above the door. ‘Access denied.’

I tip my wristlet and call for Carlos. “We’re here. Come, let us in.”

“Okay, Captain. I have to let you in one at a time on lockdown. To make sure nothing gets in but you and nothing gets out.”

“This seems complicated,” I say to Jinzo. “Is it really necessary?”

“I trust Carlos. If he feels like lockdown is necessary, then it is.”

Entering the ship is a complicated process of opening one airlock door, securing it, scanning the airlock interior, opening the other door, and permitting one person to enter the airlock, be scanned, and repeat. I go first, and Skylar and Yan Martinez greet me on the other side.

“So, what’s the situation? What are we talking about here?” I ask, leading them to Carlos’s den of technology.

The den is where all of this started. We should begin our search there.

The room is so different from how I left it. Carlos has a new spot to sit on the opposite wall of where he originally was. New servers and other equipment are installed and powered on, but many panels aren’t lit up. Cables hang from their fronts like limp noodles.

“So, this is where it all started. What’s going on in here now, today?”

Skylar shrugs. “We installed equipment for the AI, but Carlos has left it unplugged. He said it was the most expensive equipment of the ship rehab, and so we shouldn’t plug it in until everything else was fixed.”

“Hmmm, that seems smart.” I pause and listen as my eyes take in everything new in here. Wait. “Something is different about the sound in here. Do you hear that?”

I’ve always prided myself on my supersonic hearing. My mother thought she could keep secrets from me in her office, but I could hear her doing business from a floor away. We never had expensive room controls like the wealthy do, so I was privy to so much my parents never knew about. I also could hear when a sink or toilet was leaking, or find sheep when they had gone missing. The acute hearing was good for some situations, bad for others.

A buzzing vibration sound, metal on metal, is coming from the new AI server stacks. I peer into the cabinets. Loose screws roll along the tops, pushed by the pulse of the ship.

“Yan, did they finish installing the servers?”

“Yeah.”

“Then why would they leave loose screws in the stacks?” I wave him over next to me.

“They wouldn’t… Son of a bitch,” he breathes out. He leans back and looks at the front of the panels, touches one, and it falls off.

We jump back as it clangs to the floor.

“Fucking hell.” He peers into the machine. “Circuit boards are missing in here.” He turns to me, pointing at the guts of the server. “It wasn’t like this yesterday.”

Skylar turns to me. “A computer virus didn’t do this.”

I back away from my spot. “Look around. See if anything else has been messed with.”

We take a quick inventory while we wait for everyone else to make it through the airlock. When Yan is done, we’ve cataloged several servers missing parts, and two have had their cables severed.

Carlos arrives, takes one look at our faces, and pales. “What happened?”

Yan shows him all that’s wrong, and Carlos looks like he’s been touched by a ghost.

“Someone’s been here. Recently,” I say, grasping his arm. “You need to call up the logs and figure out who’s been in and out of the Amagi.”

He shakes his head. “No one has been. I swear. I’ve cataloged everyone who’s come and gone from the ship for the last twelve hours. This?” He waves at the servers. “This was fine four hours ago when I was in here last.”

“Where have you been for four hours?”

“In the engine room.”

“Then we go there next. Lock and seal this room. Only you can come and go.”

“Yes, Captain.” I watch him lock the room and amend the security protocols so that only he can go in there.

My instincts are screaming, and my skin feels stretched tight. Something is very wrong, and it’s time I figured out what.

“Skylar,” I say, dropping my voice. “Do the same with the bridge, okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah, sure.” She runs off to secure the bridge.

“What are you thinking?” Carlos asks me.

I’m not sure, so I start with the usual suspects. Has Athens sent someone in here to sabotage us? Maybe it was the military? Gus’s mom asked about what’s on the ship. Has she had operatives here, right under our noses?

My eyes jerk to Yan. Can I trust him?

He’s an unassuming guy, kinda lazy and overweight, but a spy? No. I can trust him. Most of these problems occurred when he wasn’t here.

Next, we make our way to the engine room. Jinzo and Ken join us there.

“Marcelo is coming through now. Gus is assisting,” Jinzo reports.

What if it’s Jinzo? My scalp crawls as I remember the time he and I fled from the people following me at Ossun Orbital Station. I questioned then if he was a spy, and I suspected he was after me for the seeds.

“What’s wrong, Vivi?” His fingers graze my elbow, and I step out of his reach, turning to hide my face. Do I trust him?

Doubt swirls around me like a violent storm. Who do I trust?

“Wait.” I bring my hands to my face and press on my eyes and cheeks. “Wait.”

I can’t let my trust slip, and my sanity crumble. That’s what ‘they’ want, whoever ‘they’ are. They want me doubtful and thrown off course.

I gather Business Vivian and Captain Vivian together, introduce them, and tell them to get to work.

Turning around, I scan the engine room. “What in here could be damaged, keep us from flying but not lose life support?”

Jinzo blinks at me.

“Come on,” I egg him. “Humor me.”

Cold dread falls over Jinzo’s face, weighing his cheeks and pulling his lips into a frown.

“I don’t need to humor you. Life support is tied to a different system for safety’s sake. Holy shit. The fuel lines. They damaged the fuel lines.”

“Okay, see? Now we’re getting somewhere.” I point straight at him.

“Wow.” His eyes glass over. “When I replaced them, I just thought they were old.”

“What else, Carlos? Why were you in here this afternoon?”

“He was replacing the motherboards on the computers that load balance the engines,” Jinzo explains. “They fried two days ago.”

I look into his eyes, and I see honesty there. He’s proven to me on more than one occasion I can trust him. I love him, for sure.

Someone is trying to undermine that. Someone is sowing the seeds of distrust. Someone is trying to harm my network!

“Everyone back up,” I command. “Give Jinzo some space to inspect the engine room.” I turn to him. “Look everything over right now and make sure it’s all in order. Carlos has been in here, though, so I think it’s fine.”

“Um, sure, Vivi. Why am I —”

I grasp his arm. “Just do it. Process of elimination.”

We crowd in the doorway, not letting anything in or out until Jinzo is done. Then we seal the engine room with added security. Only Jinzo can go in there.

“What now?” Skylar asks. I lead everyone through the ship to the auxiliary cargo bay, my home office. “We can’t fly until the Amagi is working one-hundred percent,” she insists. “We fix one system, another breaks. It’s maddening.” Skylar is at my heels all the way up the steps. “We can’t figure out why.”

I blaze through the aisles of my grow room and marvel that nothing here has spoiled or failed in the time I’ve been gone. I’m a competent farmer. I may even be an excellent farmer. But I am far from perfect, yet this is perfection.

One more thing to add to the list of weird occurrences.

“Yan, thoughts?” I let my eyes linger on the Rio plants.

“Not sure, Captain.” He folds his arms over his chest. “None of the systems are connected. If they were, we could trace back and see if something faulty is causing these problems. But as you’ve seen, some problems are in the systems, some are physically broken. There’s nothing that connects them.”

“What about Ai? What did you find in her logs?”

“Same things. System failures with no apparent cause. At first, it was small things, like datapads locking up or canceling decryption.”

“Could those have been a virus of some sort?” A breath of wind strokes my cheek, and my plants sway in the manufactured air currents of the Amagi’s system.

Yan sucks his teeth. “I don’t think so. Everything’s been too random.”

“Hmmm, what could it be?” I hum as I walk along the rows of plants. Lettuce, basil, and the beginnings of tomatoes — all growing strong.

I turn and make my way down the next row. “It has to be something we’re missing. If it’s not a computer virus, and we haven’t logged any intruders, then what are we missing?”

My steps grind to a halt at the Rio plants. Wait.

Fiddleheads are growing again in the lettuces. How?

Oh… Oh, shit.

Bile rises in my throat. Panic. I’m on the edge of panic.

Because the pieces of the puzzle are coming together.

I snap my fingers at Skylar. “Remember the last time we got fuel, and you said that our numbers were off, that we consumed more fuel, air, and water than we usually do?”

“Yeah, but…”

Gus and Marcelo join us, having finally made it through the airlocks.

“Carlos, remember how your datapad kept erroring out every time you looked away from it?”

“Yeah?”

“And you told me when the fire happened that you suspected something was wrong. You had a feeling, right?”

“Right.” His skin pales.

I pace back and forth, and everyone watches me, their heads swiveling.

“Frogger. Where’s Frogger?”

Jinzo jerks his thumb over his shoulder. “Back on the home ship. At the kennel. Lia has been watching after him. She’s been taking cooking classes and then going to play with him every day.”

I cross the space between Ken and me and grasp him on the shoulders. “Frogger has been acting strange. Just sitting in the galley, staring at a spot in the corner.”

Ken’s face shifts from puzzled to wide-eyed. “He only did that when something had died in our apartment.”

No. No. No.

“Vivi,” Ken says, his voice cracking, “when I took the empathy plant, I felt something… someone not trustworthy on the ship.”

My hands shake as I cover my eyes and remember talking to Darmit Hoggard’s men in the Rio jungles. They said they had taken Tomu, then Ed Dantès, out on an expedition and he had just disappeared.

He had just disappeared.

Right after interacting with a fern plant.

We thought no one disappeared.

But it turns out that all you have to do is eat some fiddlehead ferns, and you can disappear right before someone’s eyes.

“He’s here.”

“Who’s here?” Carlos asks.

I point at Marcelo. “Close and lock the door right now.”

He doesn’t question me but strides across the floor to the door. It swishes closed with a beep.

I turn and let my eyes sweep over the room. “Tomu is here.”

Skylar gasps. Jinzo’s mouth drops open, and Gus nods. Ken looks around, hoping to spot Tomu. Marcelo puts his back against the door.

“He’s on this ship. Right now.”

“Captain?” Carlos looks at me like I’m nuts.

“It’s the only thing that makes sense.” I start to tick the points off on my fingers. “He disappeared when we were tracking him. We used up more fuel, air, and water like we had someone extra on the ship. Someone we hadn’t accounted for.”

I walk over to the invisibility ferns and pluck one from the growing tray.

“These are growing again. I didn’t plant them. And Gus witnessed me eat these and turn invisible. It nearly killed my entire digestive tract, but it worked. He’s been planting them, keeping himself invisible. I bet…”

I stop to laugh.

“I bet that motherfucker knew Ai would catch on. That’s why she failed. He set her on fire.” I point to Carlos. “Remember how she called for help? Oh, poor Ai! When we get out of here, you should check Ai’s logs for radiant heat abnormalities. The fern made me cold, but I was still warmer than the air. We shouldn’t have been looking for error codes. We should’ve been looking for strange readings she was picking up.”

Skylar shudders. “He’s been here the whole time?”

“I think since we went to Rio the first time.”

“Vivian.” Ken’s voice is wondrous. “I can’t believe you figured it out. How did you figure it out?”

“We thought he was long gone, but I had a feeling I wouldn’t be rid of him that easily.” Tears fill my eyes even as I try to shrug and be nonchalant. “I have doubted you, doubted Jinzo, doubted everyone. But no one in this universe wants to hurt me more than he does.”

I sniff up and wipe away the tears. How are we going to find him now? If he’s in this room, he knows we’re looking for him.

“Fan out. Make a wall. We’ll move from one end of the room to the other and clear it. Then we’ll move onto the next.”

Everyone gathers at the far end of the bay. We all link up, hand to hand, across and around the growing trays, and pushing forward, we clear the room. He’s just as tall as me. Invisible or not, he couldn’t hide from us.

“Okay, good. One room down. Just because he’s invisible doesn’t mean he can’t be found. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t eat or pee or shit or sleep.”

We’re careful as we leave the auxiliary cargo bay to not let anything in and then seal the door behind us.

“Think, everyone. Where could he be?”

Carlos’s face lights up. “I know!” He drops his voice down. “Room eleven. The one with the faulty lock.”

“The one you said sometimes works and other times does not? The one you thought was shorted out?”

Carlos nods, his head bouncing up and down eagerly.

Gus turns towards the crew quarters, and we follow him. “Eleven is next to my room,” he says, plowing forward.

When we get to the door, it’s closed and locked.

“Is there a captain’s override or something?” I ask, pressing the door’s open button. Nothing happens.

“Yes, if the AI were working,” Carlos says, running his hand over the doorframe. “Here. Jinzo?”

The two pry off a panel over the handle area of the door.

“Right,” Jinzo muses, looking inside. “The door controls are this one?” He grabs a bunch of wires, pulls two apart with a flash of sparks, then touches two wires together. The door jerks open with a click.

I immediately regret it. We all grimace and take a step back.

“Ugh. I’m going to vomit.” Skylar covers her mouth with her hand.

The stench is palpable. Enough to make my head swim.

We slowly work our way into the room. I spot empty cans of food rotting away on the desk. Dirty sheets on the bed and on the floor. In the bathroom, the toilet is so full, I’m sure it hasn’t been flushed in at least a week.

I hear him before I see him, the short pant of someone sick and weak. A shimmer of movement captures my eye, and I focus on the floor at the end of the bed.

“Tomu,” I say, and then I hear moaning. “Don’t. Move.”

I edge closer, and Gus follows right at my elbow.

“Jinzo, get something to tie him up.”

“Vivi,” he says, his voice full of disbelief.

“Do it.”

I squat down right in front of Tomu. Now that I know what I’m looking for, I can see the outline of him. This last dose must be wearing off because I can also hear his stomach growling. He’s going to be in pain and on the toilet soon enough.

I lean closer. “Thought I wouldn’t find you?”

He laughs, the mirage of his chest jumping up and down. “What gave me away?”

I tilt my head to the side, hoping I can catch a facial expression. Anything. “Lots of little things. You weren’t careful enough.”

“I’ve been here for weeks. It took you longer than I thought. I always knew you were a little dim.”

Gus reaches forward and takes Tomu by the upper arms.

“Yes, yes. I’m stupid and good for nothing, yet you always had wonderful things to say about me when I bailed you out of jail and didn’t tell our parents.” I sigh, trying to let go of the hurt. “You’ve done quite a bit of damage to my ship. But!” I lift my finger into the air. “Not enough. In fact, you were a wee tad overzealous. If you had just been more subtle, you would have succeeded. You were never one for subtlety, though.”

I look right where I’m sure his face is and wait. I wait for another barb or poke at my expense.

“I couldn’t let you get anything back, Vivian. The Reformers taught me better. Women have been in control for too long. You don’t deserve it.”

Tomu is a Reformer? It was bad enough listening to Devos Tite talk this shit over dinner, but hearing it from a blood relative? No.

I stand up over him. “You don’t deserve to breathe, Tomu. Much less exist. Jinzo?”

Jinzo comes forward and feeling around for Tomu’s hands, he ties them up and loops the bindings across his chest.

“Gus, take him to a clean room. Keep an eye on him until he reappears. And be careful. He’s trained in martial arts, though I doubt he has much energy to do anything.”

“Yes, Vivi.”

“I’ll go with him,” Ken offers.

It’s strange watching them escort out someone half-visible.

“What now?” Jinzo asks once we’re out in the hall, and the door is closed.

“We get someone to clean up that room, we finish repairs, and then we’ll figure it out.”

At least now, we have a fighting chance.