“No, that’s not it,” I said.
“Explain,” Tellez said.
I shrugged. “I didn’t get that vibe from either of them.”
“And how is your vibe sense in general, Daquin?”
“It’s all right.”
“What’s your vibe about me?” Tellez asked.
“You have a quirky sense of humor,” I said.
“His vibe sense works just fine,” Bolduc said.
Tellez shot a look at Bolduc, who ignored it. “Why would anyone vacation on Huckleberry anyway?” she said. “We’ve been to Huckleberry. A lot. There’s nothing there worth a vacation.”
“He said he wanted to hike the Connecticut mountains,” I said. “Whatever those are.”
“I hope he packed a jacket,” Han said. “The Connecticuts are a polar range, and it’s winter for Huckleberry’s northern hemisphere.”
“He had several trunks,” I said. “His aide Vera complained that he brought three times the clothing he’d need. There’s probably a jacket or two in there.”
“Let’s hope so,” Han said. “Otherwise, he’s in for a disappointing vacation.”
But as it turned out there was no vacation at all.
* * *
I looked up from my chair and saw Captain Thao and Lee Han looking down at me, Thao with a severely pissed-off look on her face, and my first thought was, Shit, I don’t even know what I did wrong this time.
My second thought was to be confused as to why I was seeing her at all. I was third pilot, which meant I got the shifts where the captain was usually not on deck; she was usually sleeping or tending to other ship duties when I was in the pilot’s chair. For the three days I’d been piloting, XO Han sat in the command chair while I sat in mine, and we did a whole lot of nothing—the course from Phoenix Station to our skip point was plotted for us by Phoenix Station and all I had to do was make sure we didn’t drift for one reason or another.
We hadn’t. I could have napped through all of my shifts and it would have had the same effect.
We were twelve hours out from skip. At that time the captain would be in the chair, Bolduc would be piloting with Second Pilot Schreiber assisting, and with any luck I would be asleep in my bunk. Having the captain on deck now meant something was out of whack; that she was standing over my chair said maybe what was out of whack had to do with me. What it was I had no idea. Like I said, we were exactly where we needed to be for the skip. There was literally nothing I could have been doing wrong.
“Yes, ma’am?” I said. When in doubt, be ready to take an order.
Captain Thao held out a memory card. I looked at it, stupidly. “It’s a memory card,” I said.
“I know what it is,” Captain Thao said. “I need you to help me with it.”
“All right,” I said. “How?”
“You worked on the piloting systems as a programmer, yes? Lee tells me you did.”
“I did several years ago,” I said, glancing over at Han, whose expression was blank.
“So you know how it works.”
“I haven’t worked on the code for the most recent versions of the software, but it’s built using the same language and compilers,” I said. “I wouldn’t have a problem catching up on it.”
“The piloting system has the ability to accept encoded commands, yes? Destinations can be plugged in without openly revealing what they are.”
“Sure,” I said. “That’s a standard feature. It was put into military piloting software so if a ship or drone is captured, it’d be harder for whoever captured it to find out its destination. We don’t usually use the secure mode on trade ships because there’s no point. We have to file courses with the Colonial Union anyway. They know where we’re going.”
“I have an encrypted destination on this memory card,” Thao said. “Can you tell me where it is?”
“No,” I said. “It’s encrypted.” And then I realized that it was entirely possible that last comment came out in my “condescending nerd” voice, so I quickly added to it. “What I mean is that I would need the encryption key for it. I don’t have it.”
“The system has it,” Thao said.
“Right, but the system doesn’t tell us what it is,” I said. “The point of the secure mode is to let the navigation computer and only the navigation computer know where the ship is going.”
“Could you crack it without a key?”
“The encryption?” I asked. Thao nodded. “How much time do I have?”
“How long until skip?”
I checked my monitor. “Twelve hours, twenty-three minutes.”
“That long.”
“No,” I said. “If you gave me a month I could maybe do it. Or if I had passwords or biometrics or whatever it was that let whoever gave you that memory card into the encryption system in the first place.” I motioned to the card. “Was that encrypted on the Chandler?”
“No.”
“I would need more time than we have, then, ma’am.”
Captain Thao nodded, moody, and looked over to Han.