Sex, Serendipity, and Salacia Station by Jessie Pinkham

Author:Jessie Pinkham [Pinkham, Jessie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: JMS Books LLC
Published: 2018-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

Mick met with Kevin for dinner as planned. The other man rushed in at the last minute saying, “They’ve put me to work here.”

“Would this have anything to do with the external communication system randomly freezing? Because it took me twice as long as usual to put my orders in today.” Orders had to get in on time or the station would run out of food. It wasn’t like Neptune was on a lot of delivery routes.

Kevin nodded. “Yes, the external communication system was a priority. What’s for dinner tonight?”

“I recommend the lamb chops.”

As they loaded their plates Kevin explained, “I’m working with Jonah Buchanan to get to the bottom of this problem. He really has too much work for one person.”

“Yeah, Pyotr had to leave in a hurry and it takes time to get someone out here.”

“Imogen is confident that she’s ruled out any hardware problems, and we all agree it’s a software issue. It doesn’t make sense, though. The upgrade was minor. It shouldn’t cause all these problems.”

“Sure, that’s what tech people always say. I don’t care what it should do, I care what it is doing.” Currently it was making Mick’s life more difficult. The delay in ordering had messed up his schedule and he’d run around the kitchen frantically trying to make up for it, not to mention working over an hour and a half late. He’d like to see the problem fixed as soon as possible for the benefit of his stress level.

“Okay,” said Kevin as they sat, “on your end, I guess that’s fair. On my end, whether it should or not is important. It gives us a starting point.”

“That makes sense.”

“I’m starting to suspect it’s not accidental.”

“Like a virus?” There was an alarming possibility. After all, Salacia was essentially a hunk of metal in space, not even near any hospitable planet or moon. If things went bad people could die, and Mick for one quite enjoyed living.

“No, it’s not a virus. It’s hard to explain without getting into computer jargon. If this is malicious, it’s far more sophisticated than any virus.”

Mick frowned. “I wouldn’t put anything past some of the extreme anti-space groups. Those Earther types get crazy. A few months ago they hacked into one of the major European banks to ‘make money disappear the way it does when we waste it on space exploration.’”

“I hope they were caught and charged.”

“A couple people were. More were probably involved and last I saw the investigation was ongoing.”

“It could be Earthers,” agreed Kevin. “Or it could be someone’s idea of a prank.”

Possible, but Mick thought Earthers were a much more likely culprit.

“It’s impossible to tell, and right now I can’t even be sure this is a deliberate act. We’ve fixed the worst of the symptoms, if you will, but we still don’t know the underlying cause. I promised to be back first thing in the morning.”

“I get around computers just fine when it comes to using them,” said Mick, “but all that back-end stuff with codes and scripts is lost on me.

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