Captain's Away! Chapter Thirty-One
"Troubleshooting"
Captain’s Away! is a long form, weekly serial. New chapters come out every week (more or less). Comments and suggestions welcome as we go along.
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Previously in Captain’s Away!
Yolande and Bertrand Doucette are refugees after escaping the destruction of two space stations in the opening salvos of an interstellar war. Their son, Alain, is missing and presumed dead, for which Yolande blames Bertrand, and their daughter Marie-Josée is comatose for reasons they don’t understand. Yolande and Bertrand have just been rescued by an Akkadian starship called the Beausoleil.
Unbeknownst to them, the mind of their daughter Marie-Josée has been transferred into the body of the captain of the Beausoleil by means of an ancient technology. To save herself, and maybe everyone else, Marie-Josée must pose as the captain of the Beausoleil. Meanwhile, Yolande and Bertrand attempt to settle in with the rest of the refugees, in part by attending an emotional meeting of the survivors in the ship’s theatre.
Chapter Thirty-One
“Troubleshooting”
Bertrand wilted at having been called upon. He could not answer and Bastien damned well knew it. Yolande glared at the man. There was a moment of awkward silence before Bastien moved on. Sympathy for her husband washed over Yolande.
She placed a hand on his knee.
Pleasantly surprised by his wife’s gesture, Bertrand cupped her hand in his. Did it mean that she had forgiven him? He didn’t know. He didn’t care. It felt promising. That was all that mattered. He found his attention wandering while the others talked. Thanks to L’Akkadie Nouvelle he had some idea what was going on in the galaxy. This was only possible because journalists were out there collecting information and disseminating it via L’Akkadie Nouvelle and its rival feeds. Now here he was, in a unique position. He had a story too. And what a story! He’d already written, recorded and edited most of his account so far. He was determined to let the rest of the galaxy know what was going on.
His story involved exploiting his family’s personal tragedies, but he’d long since steeled himself to that. He always wrote the truth, however painful. It was what you did. Audiences related to that. Done up properly stories like that leapt right off the page.
There was the question of how to get it to L’Akkadie Nouvelle via the aethercom. Right now, he only had access to the feed going one way—to the Beausoleil. To get his (let’s face it, award-winning) piece to L’Akkadie Nouvelle, he would require access to the outgoing aethercom feed.
He would cross that bridge when he came to it.
First, he needed to finish the story. Just a few more details to bring it to life. Mentally, he reviewed what he had so far. It had all begun that morning on the Evangeline, obviously. In the lifepod with Yolande, Alain, and Marie-Joseé. And the events on the Northumberland. When Alain… and Sebastian…
Bertrand found that he was trembling. He couldn’t help it. Out of nowhere he was on the verge of tears. He hadn’t cried this whole time. Why should he? It wasn’t necessary. Alain would turn up. Marie-Josée would get better. He had faith. Or did he? Doubt crept in. Bertrand had seen the destruction with his own eyes. How could Alain still be alive? There had been nothing of the Northumberland left. Even if Alain was still alive, how could they possibly find him? By now the Beausoleil was light years away.
He held the tears at bay. Not here, not now. Although trapped aboard this ship with all these people there never would be a good time to cry.
Yolande glanced at her husband and saw that his eyes were moist. “You okay?”
He blinked a couple of times and smiled at her unconvincingly.
She squeezed his hand. He squeezed back and opened his mouth to speak but, as usual, no words came out.
Yolande met her new boss first thing the next morning. She didn’t really feel up to it, but Lieutenant Commander Chin had asked for her help himself, and she needed the distraction. Chin was a dapper man in his late thirties with a thin, elegant moustache. They stood together in the ship’s maintenance shop before a holo of schematics displaying the abstract symbols representing the aether drive architecture. Pretty sophisticated stuff.
Chin didn’t beat around the bush. “We originally thought the power distribution system was failing but now we don’t know what to think. All we know for sure is that the aetherium shields aren’t working properly.”
The Beausoleil had been within the aether for days. Presumably they would be in the aether for several more days before they got where they were going, wherever that was. The Beausoleil needed to be properly shielded. If not, the aether would eventually drive everyone on board crazy.
“I already have a crewman on this,” Chin said, “but we could use a fresh pair of eyes. The Beausoleil will bring you up to speed.”
Chin strode away.
“Ship,” Yolande said.
The Beausoleil’s avatar appeared. “Yes, Mrs. Doucette?”
“Call me Yolande, please. How bad is it?”
“Bad, Yolande. The shields aren’t working well at all. Soon you’ll begin to feel the effects of the aether. Two more days of exposure will result in permanent psychological damage. Another week and everyone on board will be certifiably insane. At that point the damage will be irreversible.”
The Beausoleil was being factual but dramatic. Yolande had confronted several similar challenges in her career. Ninety-nine percent of the time such challenges were satisfactorily resolved. It was that pesky one per cent that you had to worry about. Yolande had no doubt that the maintenance crew of the Beausoleil (if not the Beausoleil herself) would resolve the problem in plenty of time. Very likely she wouldn’t even have a chance to contribute to the solution.
“Okay. Show me everything I need to know.”
It took Yolande less than an hour to familiarize herself with the affected systems. The Beausoleil had already performed several thousand self-diagnostic routines that had led nowhere, the reason humans were now involved. After reviewing the results of the ship’s tests, Yolande began her own troubleshooting. Arriving at one reasonable theory that she wasn’t embarrassed to share with someone else, she reported it to Chin, who led her to the other crewman working on the problem, Thomas Bouchard. Bouchard was a scarecrow of a human being in his late twenties whose uniform didn’t quite fit and who obviously didn’t care about that. Yolande suspected that his unruly auburn hair might once have been a shocking red. He listened intently to what Yolande had to say.
“Of course, you’ve probably already thought of that,” she told him afterward.
“I have,” he admitted. “But you’ve only been working on this for what, an hour? It took me an entire day to get to where you are.”
“Thanks to the Beausoleil I didn’t have to repeat your work,” Yolande replied modestly.
“Yes, the Beausoleil,” Bouchard said ruminatively.
Yolande knew what he was thinking: that the Beausoleil should already have fixed the problem herself. Still, there were many reasons machine intelligence might not be able to resolve such a problem. That was a part of the reason maintenance technologists still existed. Sometimes the nature of the problem inhibited machine intelligence from being aware of the problem. This was why you always checked cognitive systems first (to the extent possible; much about the nature of machine intelligence remained obscure).
Also, machine intelligence generally lacked creativity. This was a well-known limitation. Yes, the Beausoleil could make a trillion calculations in the blink of an eye, but such calculations were predicated on pre-existing knowledge. Only human brains possessed the necessary creativity to solve the thorny problems. This was why you didn’t see machine intelligence making art (well, that and because doing so was strictly forbidden in most jurisdictions, at least since the last robot rebellion).
“Between the two of us we’ll have this licked by the end of the day,” Bouchard predicted confidently.
Yolande did not doubt it.
They did not have it licked by the end of the day. Or by noon the day after that.
Yolande’s initial theory—that there was a problem with the “handshake” between two implicated systems—didn’t pan out. The two technologists methodically tested every component they could access. All functioned properly. This was unfortunate but not serious. True, the longer they operated without fully working aetherium shielding the harder it would become to think straight, making it even harder to fix the problem, but they still had plenty of time. And even if they did run out of time it just meant that the Beausoleil would have to shift to normal space so they could tackle the problem safely there.
They told the Lieutenant Commander the bad news.
Chin shook his head. “Not good enough. We need this fixed by the time we get to the Void.”
The Void. That changed the equation, and not in a good way. Yolande was shocked to hear that the Void was their destination but maintained her composure.
“Of course, that is strictly confidential,” Chin told the two of them.
“Of course,” they replied.
“How long ‘til we get there?” Bouchard asked.
“Twenty-four hours,” Chin said.
“That might not be enough time. Look. We should shift to normal space. We’ll have a much better chance of fixing this there.”
“We will not be shifting to normal space,” Chin said firmly.
Yolande wondered why. Perhaps it wasn’t safe to shift to normal space. The universe was vast, mostly empty, but there did exist objects such as stars, planets, black holes and so on into which one might shift if one wasn’t careful, with predictably disastrous results. But that wasn’t it.
“We’re in a rush,” Chin said. “Which means we won’t be leaving the aether anytime soon. We need to fix the problem before we reach the Void.”
“And if we don’t?” Bouchard asked.
“Then we cross the Void without shielding. And you know what that means.”
Yolande knew all too well. She wondered whether Chin was already suffering from “aetherium delirium,” as it was commonly called. “It would be suicide to negotiate the Void without shielding.”
Chin smiled mirthlessly. “Then you’d better fix it by the time we get there.”
Yolande glanced at Bouchard to gauge his reaction.
“You heard the man,” Bouchard told her. “We have twenty-four hours.”
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This has been an installment of the ongoing serial Captain’s Away! A Strange Dimensions book.
Also by Joe Mahoney: A Time and a Place
An unlikely hero travels to other worlds and times to save a boy who does not want to be saved in this unique and imaginative adventure, by turns comic and tragic.
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