Redshirts: A Novel Part 7

"When I came to the Intrepid, I told Q'eeng that at the Academy we had trouble replicating some of the work you guys were doing on the s.h.i.+p," Dahl said. "Now I know why. It's because you weren't actually doing the work."

"Are you done, Ensign?" Collins said. She was clearly getting tired of the inquisition.

"Why didn't you just tell me all of this when I came on board?" Dahl said.

"What are we going to say, Andy?" Collins said. "'Hi, welcome to the Intrepid, avoid the officers because it's likely you'll get killed if you're on an away team with them, and oh, by the way, here's a magic box we use for impossible things'? That would be a lovely first impression, wouldn't it?"

"You wouldn't have believed us," Ca.s.saway said. "Not until you were here long enough to see some of this s.h.i.+t for yourself."

"This is nuts," Dahl said.

"That it is," Collins said.

"And you have no rational explanation for it?" Dahl asked. "No hypothesis?"

"The rational explanation is what the Dub U told us," Trin said. "The Intrepid takes on high-risk missions. More people die because of it. The crew has developed superst.i.tions and avoidance strategies to compensate. And we use advanced technologies that we don't understand but which allow us to complete missions."

"But you don't believe it," Dahl said.

"I don't like it," Trin said. "I don't have any reason not to believe it."

"It's saner than what Jenkins thinks," Mbeke said.

Dahl turned to face Mbeke. "You've talked about him before," he said.

"He's doing an independent research project," Collins said.

"On this?" Dahl asked.

"Not exactly," Collins said. "He's the one who built the tracking system we use for the captain and the others. The computer system AI sees it as a hack and keeps trying to patch it. So he's got to keep updating if we want it to keep working."

Dahl glanced over at Ca.s.saway. "You said he looked like a yeti."

"He does look like a yeti," Ca.s.saway said. "Either a yeti or Rasputin. I've heard him described both ways. Both are accurate."

"I think I met him," Dahl said. "After I went to the bridge to give Q'eeng the Box data about Kerensky's plague. He came up to me in the corridor."

"What did he say to you?" Collins asked.

"He told me to stay off the bridge," Dahl said. "And he told me to 'avoid the narrative.' What the h.e.l.l does that mean?"

Mbeke opened her mouth to speak but Collins got there first. "Jenkins is a brilliant programmer, but he's also a bit lost in his own world, and life on the Intrepid has. .h.i.t him harder than most."

"By which she means that Jenkins' wife got killed on an away mission," Mbeke said.

"What happened?" Dahl asked.

"She was shot by a Cirquerian a.s.sa.s.sin," Collins said. "The a.s.sa.s.sin was aiming at the Dub U amba.s.sador to Cirqueria. The captain pushed the amba.s.sador down and Margaret was standing right behind him. Took the bullet in the neck. Dead before she hit the ground. Jenkins chose to at least partly disa.s.sociate from reality after that."

"So what does he think is happening?" Dahl asked.

"Why don't we save that for another time," Collins said. "You know what's going on now and why. I'm sorry we didn't tell you about this earlier, Andy. But now you know. And now you know what to do when either me or Ben suddenly say that we're going to get coffee."

"Hide," Dahl said.

"'Hide' isn't a word we like to use," Ca.s.saway said. "'Perform alternative tasks' is the preferred term."

"Just not in the storage room," Mbeke said. "That's our alternative tasking place."

"I'll just alternatively task behind my work desk, then, shall I," Dahl said.

"That's the spirit," Mbeke said.

At evening mess, Dahl caught up his four friends with what he learned in the lab, and then turned to Finn. "So, did you get the information I asked you for?" he said.

"I did indeed," Finn said.

"Good," Dahl said.

"I want to preface this by saying that normally I don't do this sort of work for free," Finn said, handing his phone over to Dahl. "Normally something like this would have been a week's pay. But this s.h.i.+t's been weirding me out since that away mission. I wanted to see it for myself."

"What are the two of you talking about?" Duvall said.

"I had Finn pull some records for me," Dahl said. "Medical records, mostly."

"Whose?" Duvall asked.

"Your boyfriend's," Finn said.

Dahl looked up at that. "What?"

"Duvall's dating Kerensky," Finn said.

"Shut up, Finn, I am not," Duvall said, and glanced over to Dahl. "After he recovered, Kerensky tracked me down to thank me for saving his life," she said. "He said that when he first came to in the shuttle, he thought he'd died because an angel was hovering over him."

"Oh, G.o.d," Hester said. "Tell me a line like that doesn't actually work. I might have to kill myself otherwise."

"It doesn't," Duvall a.s.sured him. "Anyway, he asked if he could buy me a drink the next time we had sh.o.r.e leave. I told him I'd think about it."

"Boyfriend," Finn said.

"I'm going to stab you through the eye now," Duvall said to Finn, pointing her fork at him.

"Why did you want Lieutenant Kerensky's medical records?" Hanson asked.

"Kerensky was the victim of a plague a week ago," Dahl said. "He recovered quickly enough to lead an away mission, where he lost consciousness because of a machine attack. He recovered quickly enough from that to hit on Maia sometime today."

"To be fair, he still looked like h.e.l.l," Duvall said.

"To be fair, he should probably be dead," Dahl said. "The Merovian Plague melts people's flesh right off their bones. Kerensky was about fifteen minutes away from death before he got cured, and he's leading an away mission a week later? It takes that long to get over a bad cold, much less a flesh-eating bacteria."

"So he's got an awesome immune system," Duvall said.

Dahl fixed her with a look and flipped Finn's phone to her. "In the past three years, Kerensky's been shot three times, caught a deadly disease four times, has been crushed under a rock pile, injured in a shuttle crash, suffered burns when his bridge control panel blew up in his face, experienced partial atmospheric decompression, suffered from induced mental instability, been bitten by two venomous animals and had the control of his body taken over by an alien parasite. That's before the recent plague and this away mission."

"He's also contracted three STDs," Duvall said, scrolling through the file.

"Enjoy your drink with him," Finn said.

"I think I'll ask for penicillin on the rocks," Duvall said. She handed the phone back to Dahl. "So you're saying there's no way he could be walking around right now."

"Forget the fact that he should be dead," Dahl said. "There's no way he could be alive and sane after all this. The man should be a poster boy for post-traumatic stress disorder."

"They have therapies to compensate for that," Duvall said.

"Yeah, but not for this many times," Dahl said. "This is seventeen major injuries or trauma in three years. That's one every two months. He should be in a constant fetal position by now. As it is, it's like he has just enough time to recover before he gets the s.h.i.+t kicked out of him again. He's unreal."

"Is there a point to this," Duvall said, "or are you just jealous of his physical abilities?"

"The point is there's something weird about this s.h.i.+p," Dahl said, scrolling through more data. "My commanding officer and lab mates fed me a bunch of nonsense about it today, with the away teams and Kerensky and everything else. But I'm not buying it."

"Why not?" Duvall asked.

"Because I don't think they were buying it either," Dahl said. "And because it doesn't explain away something like this." He frowned and looked over at Finn. "You couldn't find anything on Jenkins?"

"You're talking about the yeti you and I encountered," Finn said.

"Yeah," Dahl said.

"There's nothing on him in the computer system," Finn said.

"We didn't imagine him," Dahl said.

"No, we didn't," Finn agreed. "He's just not in the system. But then if he's the programming G.o.d your lab mates suggest he is, and he's currently actively hacking into the computer system, I don't think it should be entirely surprising he's not in the system, do you?"

"I think we need to find him," Dahl said.

"Why?" Finn asked.

"Because I think he knows something that no one else wants to talk about," Dahl said.

"Your friends in your lab say he's crazy," Hester pointed out.

"I don't think they're actually his friends," said Hanson.

Everyone turned to him. "What do you mean?" said Hester.

Hanson shrugged. "They said the reason they didn't tell him about what was going on is that he wouldn't have believed it before he had experienced some of it himself. Maybe that's right. But it's also true that if he didn't know what was going on, he wouldn't be able to do what they do: avoid Commander Q'eeng and the other officers, and manage not to get on away team rosters. Think about it, guys: all five of us were on the same away team at one time, on a s.h.i.+p with thousands of crew. What do we all have in common?"

"We're the new guys," Duvall said.

Hanson nodded. "And none of us were told any of this by our crewmates until now, when it couldn't be avoided anymore."

"You think the reason they didn't tell us wasn't because we didn't know enough to believe them," Dahl said. "You think it was because that way, if someone had to die, it would be us, not them."

"It's just a theory," Hanson said.

Hester looked at Hanson admiringly. "I didn't think you were that cynical," Hester said.

Hanson shrugged again. "When you're the heir to the third largest fortune in the history of the universe, you learn to question people's motivations," he said.

"We need to find Jenkins," Dahl said again. "We need to know what he knows."

"How do you suggest we do that?" Duvall asked.

"I think we start with the cargo tunnels," Dahl said.

CHAPTER SIX.

"Dahl, where are you going?" Duvall said. She and the others were standing in the middle of the Angeles V s.p.a.ce station corridor, watching Dahl unexpectedly split off from the group. "Come on, we're on sh.o.r.e leave," she said. "Time to get smashed."

"And laid," Finn said.

"Smashed and laid," Duvall said. "Not necessarily in that order."

"Not that there's anything wrong with doing it in that order," Finn said.

"See, I bet that's why you don't get a lot of second dates," Duvall said.

"We're not talking about me," Finn reminded her. "We're talking about Andy. Who's ditching us."

"He is!" Duvall said. "Andy! Don't you want to get smashed and laid with us?"

"Oh, I do," Dahl a.s.sured her. "But I need to make a hyperwave first."

"You couldn't have done that on the Intrepid?" Hanson asked.

"Not this wave, no," Dahl said.