Starship Engineer

Chapter 71 The Aftermath

Cleaning up the mess in engineering was my first concern when I woke after a short three-hour nap. I was in utter shock at the mess as no one had cleaned anything, and no one even thought to assign the cleaning bots to start. It looked like a war zone. The dog bots were in pieces, limping or completely unidentifiable. I commed Gabby to come and pick up the pieces and salvage what she could. At least she hadn’t included blood synthetic in the upgrades.

Most of the terminals were destroyed and it took me a while to schedule replacements and repairs for the bots from my PerCom since it was inefficient. Damian and I had been focused on getting the ship back into subspace as quickly as possible after the incident. The body of the invader was not far away. It looked like the bots had restrained her hands and legs and the marines had fired dozens of shots at her head till the helmet integrity failed. Similar to what I had done to the combatant stuck in the foam on the command deck.

Damian showed up just as tired as I was but ready to work. I was running checks on the sub-space engines. Damian had been drugged to unconsciousness by the woman in engineering and was just released from medical. My PerCom beeped…well not released, he just left medical on his own. Doc was messaging me to keep an eye on the old man. Together we got the engineering bots to work on the minor issues we had glossed over. Gabby came over and told me only 8 bots were functional, 3 more could be repaired…the other nine were destroyed…all by one woman. Zed, Gabby’s dog, was moving among the debris and if I didn’t know better I would say he appeared sad, nudging the parts with his nose trying to get them to move.

With the engineering work mostly done, I got a stevedore bot to grab the dead woman and bring her to Doc. I wanted Doc to strip her armor and check their bodies for anything illicit. Jane Doe was stuffed with advanced tech from Abby’s report. I wanted all three sets of armor scanned for danger and then brought to my lab. Maybe I could learn something from them. Hopefully, the marines had at least cleaned up the command deck.

I went to my quarters to change and Julie manifested in marine combat armor and was furious. She had been locked in a loop and unable to access any of the ship systems during the incident. The team of invaders had wiped all security footage during their attempted takeover of the ship. The only thing Julie could find in her archives was Henry going to their shuttle in the lower cargo bay and bringing two crates to their suite on deck 7. The time Henry was in the cargo hold though showed no activity in the bay. It was like Henry had retrieved the crates from another storage area with no cameras. Foolish Henry. When I finished with engineering I told Damian to get some sleep. He just waved me off planning to work until he was satisfied. That was something I would do so I let him go at it. I commed Abby to meet me in the conference room.

A short time later I sat across from Abby at the table. Abby looked miserable and ten years older. Damian commed me before we could begin. He was headed down to the cargo bay to search the shuttle. Abby jumped into the conversation and sent Buckie and Francis to help him.

Sitting across from Abby I was dressed in a fresh uniform, cleanly shaven, and wearing a neutral scent. I sat tall as we looked at each other. She didn’t look good and poured a glass from an ice pitcher. I asked Abby what went wrong with her security procedures. She took a few deep breaths before speaking and got her spine back. The first and biggest error was we had not scanned the shuttle. The shuttle was coated in a skin that prevented the deep scanners from working. Abby had locked the shuttle down and didn’t plan to let the passengers access it during the trip. Henry, used his crew codes, to get to the cargo bay and retrieved the suits and weapons for them. They also managed to spoof all the security cameras so the marine monitoring them was not suspect of the activity. Before Damian had been knocked out he had alerted Abby…which was the only reason we had a response. The old engineer was definitely an asset to the crew. If the spider bot at the bridge archway hadn’t been activated they would have succeeded in taking the ship.

Their combat armor was just too advanced. One of them was worth ten of her marines in straight-up combat armor. If the wolf bots had not been able to restrain the one in engineering we would be having a very different conversation. The one on the bridge had actually exploded the spider bot, releasing the foam en masse and trapped herself. Julie had been neutralized too easily by an advanced hacking program. They could have scrubbed Julie from existence but put her in a loop in case they needed her. The hacking suite that compromised the ship AI, Julie, was down in my lab for study later. The hacking device had passcodes on it and Nero thought it was very advanced but didn’t dare attempt to break the encryption.

Abby detailed another half dozen errors she had made. When she was done she offered that Francies might make a better security chief than her. I cocked my eyebrow. I hadn’t thought of replacing Abby. Abby was a drill instructor for marine combat so ship security was slightly outside of her wheelhouse. I asked her why Francis was a better choice. She went into detail about his qualifications and yes he was more qualified. It was hard seeing Abby…so broken.

I asked Abby if we should stop taking on passengers. I was doing it because it was something the ship could do and took suspicion off of the Void Phoenix carrying advanced technologies and gave us relatively free travel anywhere. Abby gave it a lot of thought before saying she thought the ship should continue as a passenger ship. She added Francis would make sure the ship would safe in the future.

I told Abby that she was still going to be my security chief. If she lacked the knowledge to be effective then she better pick up that knowledge as fast as possible. She could promote Francis from ship detective to whatever position she needed him to help her. She seemed to be getting some of her mojo back as I expressed my confidence in her. We talked for another hour about what changes needed to be made. Finished, Abby looked better and more motivated. She would recover in time I thought.

I walked tall onto the bridge. I was implementing the lessons I had learned even in these difficult circumstances. The entire bridge crew was present. I spent twenty minutes explaining everything that had happened. They had heard most of it but I answered their questions as well. After the questions I had the bridge crew give me updates. Elias, the co-pilot, was taking over the navigation duties from Henry. Everyone else gave me succinct responses. I complimented them on their efficiency and said I would be counting on them in the future.

I returned to my cabin to check in on Celeste and Amos. They were doing well. Two steward bots tended them. I needed to upgrade my new bots programming to help Eve take care of the children. After thirty minutes in my quarters, I went to the robotics lab and updated the bot's programming with a basic steward personality and programming for child care. I then spent nine straight hours finishing Eve. It was a labor of love from me, making everything as perfect as possible for her and making her the best version of herself to watch Celeste. It was also a distraction from the loss of crew. I almost removed her kill switch but stayed in my hand.

When Eve was reactivated it had been almost three days. She ran internal diagnostics, cocked her head slightly, and asked if she missed anything important in the last 67 hours and 11 minutes? I just cracked up laughing and fell on my seat and started crying. I don’t know where the emotion came from but it was therapeutic.

Eve was conversing with Julie when I finally recovered. I needed to be stronger than this. I told Eve that Celeste and Amos would be moving to my quarters and the new steward bot would help her with the children. Eve said Julie would help too since I had a hologram emitter in my quarters. This remark caught me slightly off guard but Julie probably had hundreds of courses to draw on for stimulating young minds so I said, ‘great’, maybe not with as much enthusiasm as I should of.

We all returned to my quarters and Gwen was there helping the two steward bots. Gwen had rushed to engineering but didn’t participate in retaking it since she had no combat armor. Gwen was now getting ready for her flesh replacement surgery. She had opted for a faster recovery time by going into an immersion tank for the next twenty-one days right after the replacement surgery. Reconnecting the nerves and integrating the new capillary system was very delicate work. I told her I would try to visit her every day in VR as she was going to be mostly immobilized and unconscious. She stayed in with me that evening.

The next day I checked the ETA to the Ragnhild system. Five days 12 hours. The ship was slower in subspace by 7%. Nothing I could do about it until we made port. In a fresh uniform, I spent an hour on the bridge. From my captain’s chair, I worked on creating emergency scenarios for the crew to practice. I wanted to start making it a habit to spend time on the bridge every day. Next was the dreaded staff meeting.

To everyone’s surprise, I was fully attentive and asked numerous questions as the departments reviewed their reports. Engineering was still cleaning things up and we should be able to fabricate most of the needed parts we didn’t have. Two of the new terminals would need to be replaced in port but overall we escaped without much harm considering the intensity of the firefight.

The funerals for the dead crew members would be in a day. The passengers were not told what actually happened. Suruchi just gave them some bullshit engineering issue that caused us to drop from subspace. It might hurt any reviews the passengers filed about our ship’s safety and reliability but it was better than the truth. Abby had two updates for me. She had combed through the remaining passengers and found inconsistencies with the male passenger that was at the captain’s dinner. His tickets had been transferred to him and his companion last minute. She would like to question him which Suruchi and I said was fine. The other issue was Jane Doe. Abby felt she had given up too easily. Both Abby and Francis were suspicious that either she had an out when we reached Ragnhild or something more sinister. She was currently in a lot of pain from Doc removing her implants and PerCom but she remained alert and didn’t show her pain.

I nodded. We needed answers…she was more than a simple pirate with all her advanced equipment. Abby said Damian had not been able to break into her shuttle as well. I told everyone I would talk with Jane Doe. First I needed to get as much information as possible. That meant examining the combat suits, shuttle contents, and their quarters. Francis already had the belongings from their quarters in secure crates. It was time to break out my inner Sherlock. I commed Francis and said, ‘Come Watson the Game is Afoot!’