Moral and Orbital Decay: Mission 14 (Black Ocean) by J.S. Morin

Author:J.S. Morin [Morin, J.S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Space Opera
Publisher: Magical Scrivener Press
Published: 2017-05-04T22:00:00+00:00

Seething a sigh, Hiroko rolled up her sleeves and picked the side opposite the one Kendra hooked her fingers on. Between the two of them, a minute’s effort slid the door wide enough to squeeze her through.

“What’s going on?” Hiroko demanded.

“Can’t say for sure, ma’am,” Kendra replied, brushing a stray lock of hair from her eyes. “But have a look out there.”

Hiroko followed her assistant’s pointed finger and gasped. The station was tumbling end over end.

“Find someone from operations. Get me answers. Ancestors protect us; what has just happened here?”

# # #

Roddy paced. There wasn’t room for a human to pace, but he was making do with laaku-sized footsteps. His species was optimized for close-quarters pacing. Today, he needed it.

Here wasn’t the place to be.

Yomin was busy, or at least she was doing her best to pretend she was. She was mostly into long-range operations, the kind where nothing plugged into anything else. She did her best work running algorithms and sitting back to watch the results. By contrast, Roddy did his best work on systems that were all hardware, no software.

Archie was the man for this job.

“I know I can split my attentions between your incessant questioning and the task at hand,” Archie groused. “But this whole endeavor would pass in a pleasant silence if the two of you could just shut up.”

“I didn’t say anything,” Roddy protested. “I would have kept saying nothing if you didn’t accuse me of saying things.” Without beer, arguing with a robot wasn’t something Roddy was equipped for.

“Slap, slap, slap with those gloved feet of yours. Back and forth. Forth and back. Give it a rest,” Archie snapped.

It was never a good sign when a hacker got rattled. Breaking into layer after layer of the stations systems had gotten them access to passenger manifests. If they were to be believed, there were wizards on this floating rock-collector besides the one they’d brought and the one they were looking for. As far as pinning down a location for any of them, Archie was coming up dry.

“Just let him vent,” Yomin advised. She looked at Roddy with one eye covered by streams of backward data that faced only her direction.

Roddy turned and threw his upper hands in the air. “Fine. Just find Rai Kub so we can get off this death trap.”

There was something about seeing the maintenance logs of a place in as grave disrepair as YF-77 that gave Roddy the willies. He was certain that he could construct a whole, smaller space station out of this one’s malfunctioning systems.

“Just give me a moment,” Archie scolded. “Once I get the maintenance requests matched to the station’s automated error reporting system, I’ll—”

The access room suddenly went dark.

Yomin’s datalens turned blank.

Archie slumped forward and crashed into the exposed guts of the terminal.

“Archie!” Yomin shouted, heedless of the fact that they were hiding from station personnel.

“Bullshit,” Roddy muttered. He dug into a pocket and lit a glow-rod that he kept around for Mort’s antics. Months after the

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