105: DOR

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“Antarctica?” I ask. “Our resident fatcat’s family fortune is tied up in research labs in Antarctica?”

“Does this mean that Captain Sand’s nonsense conspiracy theory that you told us about was actually right?” Tinera asks.

“It couldn’t be. It doesn’t make any sense. There’s no reason for a secret space race, there’s no profit in colonisation this far from Earth.”

“Well, something’s going on. This can’t be a coincidence.”

“Wait,” Sam says, “I thought this guy was just going out here to build a space colony he could rule over or something because he’s a rich weirdo?”

“That’s what we assumed he was doing.” Lina’s hands flutter in agitation. “But I suppose we were wrong. Tinera’s right; this can’t be a coincidence.”

“Antarctica doesn’t have a space program,” I insist. “They do have a lot of secrets, but you can’t keep a space program secret. And they’re not located to launch – ”

“Delphin Synthetics is Texan, on paper,” Tal reminds me. “Antarctica doesn’t need a space program to have a space program. Texas has a space program. They use the space elevators, like everyone else.”

I scowl, and drink down the remainder of my mead.

“Wait,” Captain Klees says, “I’m confused. Aspen, you said that Sands was here as a potential agitator to stop any Antarctic interference in the Javelin Program because this program is in competition with the Antarctic program, right? But if Dor Delphin and all this mad science on board is connected to labs in Antarctica, then… doesn’t that suggest this is the Antarctic Program? Because that makes no sense.”

“The legal ownership of the Javelin Program is extremely clear-cut,” Sam says. “It’s an international project with public international ownership. There’s treaties bound up in it. There’s no reason for Antarctica to secretly fund it or whatever because they can’t secretly own it. No one would recognise their claim if they tried anything.”

“It’s possible,” the Friend muses, “that Captain Sands was given the wrong information by mistake. He was recruited by the Tarandran government, right? Or some secret service with ties to it, it doesn’t matter; the point is, they had partial information, that they got while spying. It’s possible that they misinterpreted what they’d heard, and that Antarctica’s supposed space program that the Javelin Program was built to fight was indeed the Antarctic peoples preparing for the Javelin Program itself… but like Sam said, why secretly get involved with a program that they can’t own or make any real claim to?”

“Maybe it’s not about secretly controlling the colonisation project or anything,” Tal says. “That would indeed be pointless and stupid. But all the stuff we’ve seen that might have Antarctic fingerprints on it isn’t about colonisation, is it? It’s about the ship. Maybe Amy was their project. Maybe the actual colonisation doesn’t matter.”

“They release the Kleiner array,” Denish says thoughtfully, “and they prepare to try their experiment when somebody starts the Javelin Program. Maybe they subtly push for the Javelin Program. Tarandran spies misunderstand, think they’re planning their own colonisation project, and tell the relevant powers, so the Javelin Project is pushed ahead at high priority to race this nonexistent Antarctic program. Sands is recruited on this false information, the Antarctic research project is successfully put on the ship, Dor Delphin comes along… maybe that’s it.”

“Why, though?” I ask. “He’s not supposed to wake up until we get to Hylara. Sands wasn’t supposed to wake up until we get to Hylara, either. And why run such an experiment in space in the first place, knowing Earth will never see the results, or at least won’t get them for over a century? There’s no reason to do any kind of research out here unless it’s for the sake of the Hylara colony. Anything that isn’t about terraforming Hylara is pointless. Why would they do that? Why put an agent on board who’ll be asleep for the whole project? I assume that Dor’s some kind of scientist or something or there’s no reason to send him for something like that at all, but… why do it like this?”

“There is one way to find out,” Denish says quietly.

The room goes silent for several long seconds.

“No,” Tinera says. “We’re not… we’re not actually considering waking up and asking – ?”

“No,” Captain Klees says firmly. “We aren’t. The last thing we need is to go waking up more unstable elements. What are the chances that Dor would react at all well to being woken up out here? Almost nil. This ship has had more than enough desperate, angry or paranoid people causing deadly chaos.”

“Argh, this mystery is going to eat me alive,” says Tinera. But she’s not arguing.

“Let it,” Captain Klees says. “This isn’t information that we need right now, not at such risk. None of this matters until we get to the planet, so there’s no reason to wake anyone up until we’re much closer. What we need to be doing right now is staying alive and actually preparing our strategy for what to do when we get to the planet.”

“Surely we can wake the survivors of the first crew?” Sam asks. “They were trained to deal with that step.”

“I don’t think we should wake anyone at all until we absolutely, one hundred per cent have to,” I say. “Dead man’s switch.”

“You think that the ship sabotage thing is connected to the vitals of one of the crew?” Tinera frowns. “Surely it’d be Dor. Or an onboard sabateur, or something.”

“Most likely, if it’s a dead man’s switch at all. But it might be a crew member. There were conspirators on Sienna Kae Jin’s crew, remember? At least two of them – Richard Rynn-Hatson, and whoever told the AI which chronostasis pods he’d managed to engineer before his death.”

Captain Klees nods. “We have to wake the initial crew eventually, when we near Hylara, to plan and initiate landing and colony development procedures. That’s a two crew job and we’re going to be massively understaffed; we’ll need all the people who are actually trained for it. But we should leave that as late as possible. I don’t want more socially unstable elements on this ship, I don’t want us to have to worry about this wreck keeping more active people alive than we absolutely need, and I want Tal and Denish to have as much time as humanly possible to root out any further problems before we go waking people, just in case. This mystery is going to have to slumber awhile.”

I finish my lunch and head for the computer terminal in the Habitation Ring, since people usually use the medbay one for important work. One consequence of restricting ourselves to just a few rings is the sudden lack of computer terminals. Both Network and Engineering rings, which each have more computer terminals than a full javelin crew can use at once (in case some break and can’t be repaired, I have to assume?) currently have no atmosphere, which leaves us a little underequipped.

The one in the Habitation Ring is free, though. I check the atmospheric analyser mounted to the wall next to it, confirm normal air, and look up Dor Delphin.

Waking him up is probably a bad idea. But maybe I can still learn something from the file.

Dor Delphin, male, age 37, from Texas. No religion. Not a convict, obviously. No recorded implants, mild allergy to olives, with a reproductive suppressant that’s a fancier and more expensive model than most of the people I’ve looked at. As for his profession, he… hmm. That is a very extensive science education. Heavily rooted in robotics and biomedical research.

I check his leadership priority, out of curiosity. 946th. Huh. I would’ve expected him to be first. He’s well under Sands. He’s… wait a minute.

I check a few people directly above and below him in priority to confirm; yep, he’s lowest ranked in leadership priority out of the entire ‘leadership group’.

I check his priority as a replacement scientist and as a replacement doctor; both groups that he should rank fairly high in, given his education. He’s 4,958th in priority for both positions. Same as engineering, despite his robotics degrees. I check all the other ship positions – 4,958th in all of them.

Given the 42 chronostasis pods for crew, that’s the lowest possible ranking. Dead last in priority for every position except captain, where he’s dead last in his specific group.

Dor Delphin wanted to make absolutely sure that he wouldn’t be woken prematurely.

Why not, if you’re powerful enough to get away with it? Why not buy your way out of the possibility of being roused early for extra duties? Maybe multiple passengers did that, for all I know.

I wish we were waking him up early. Just to see the look on his face.

There’s not a huge amount more that’s useful in his file. His science background suggests that he probably is here for Antarctica Mad Science-related reasons instead of the deluded Space King reasons we’d assumed, and the fact that he’s clearly taken efforts to sleep all the way to our destination no matter what suggests that whatever Antarctica is doing messing about with the ship, they clearly didn’t intend to stop it from reaching its destination. But again, why? What advantage is there to interfering with a javelin ship, if the plan isn’t to stop the project? Hylara is too far away to be of any use to Antarctica, the timeframes are too long, none of this makes sense.

Unless it is for deluded space king reasons? Is all of this Dor Delphin’s pet project, for his own personal colony, with no use to Delphin Synthetics or Antarctica? No. too complicated, too expensive, too much new, advanced science, to invest in one family member who’s going to fly off to the stars and never be seen again. Isn’t it? I don’t know how finance works or how much money Delphin Synthetics has. Maybe that is it. Maybe Dor Delphin just thinks that proper AI would be really cool and human brains could do it, and there was nobody to tell him ‘no’.

We’ll know when we get to Hylara, I suppose.

I have work to be doing, anyway. We’ve gotten an infestation of Hwaseonge Hnmang dandelions again, those fast-growing soil rejuvinators invented to terraform Mars. They sprung up after we all moved to the front of the ship and condensed two greenhouse rings into one, probably because the mass transplant overtaxed the soil, but everything’s properly established again and it’s my job to go through and clear them out so the ecosystem can develop properly.

I’ll never get used to dirt-based gardening, no matter how many years I’m separated from Arborea. But I’m making an effort to. With the low colonist viability, there’s a very real chance that I might be one of the people in charge of establishing agriculture on Hylara. There’s a chilling thought.

We’ve all been looking into the processes and procedures of setting up base on Hylara, something none of us were trained for, but that will become our problem rather sooner than any of us would like. Just setting up the base is a logistically complicated process. The Courageous cannot, obviously, land on the planet, nor is building a rocket that can repeatedly leave the planet again an easy process. Setting up on Hylara means safely dropping everything to the ground from orbit, all packed into pods in the three pod launch bays, with no options to return in the case of mistakes. It means dropping the right resources and the right people at the right time to get planetside domes and life support systems set up to support the chronostatic colonists, coordinating the activity on the ground and in the javelin to get everything and everyone down at the rate where they’re needed and won’t die or break anything important. That is… not a simple process. At all. Merely getting the pods to land close enough to the colony to be accessible without risking them destroying anything is a whole complicated issue. Just getting the stuff on the ground in the first place.

The two astronaut crews were trained to do this. They each had their own specialities in the terraformation process, and the plan was for Reimann’s crew to revive Kae Jin’s crew in orbit, giving them a team of 42. After analysing what specific conditions they were working with on the ground and choosing a landing site, a landing team would descend to take control of the actual terraformation process, and be supplied by the crew still aboard the ship, until everything was on-ground. The remaining crew aboard would then set the Courageous to head off into space (and thus avoid any unpleasant future possibilities of the ship falling out of a decaying orbit onto anything important) and drop down in the last pod, joining the 5,000 colonists that they had given so much of their lives to shepherd here.

We’re significantly lacking in a lot of things. Colonists. Training. Astronauts. But most of Captain Kae Jin’s crew is still alive in chronostasis. So while some things are beyond our ability to delegate – Sam will have to actually pull us into orbit, for instance, and has been spending a lot of time learning how to pilot the ship – once we arrive, we will at least have some crew who know what they’re doing able to take charge.

All we can do now is learn what we can and hope that there are no more nasty surprises.

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