I hurriedly compose another message to Olarte.
One more thing. I don’t need a reply to my previous messages to you. If you do reply, watch how you word it. I forgot inbound messages aren’t necessarily private. I’d rather our personal business not end up being used as wank-fodder by our comms officer. *wink* Miss you so much and can’t wait to see you again. Captain says there’s an inbound tow, but it could be several weeks away. Love you.
I scramble the message and send it, bouncing it off a hyper-com portal buoy, all while praying Olarte is fast on the uptake.
I don’t need them caught up in this, too. One more worry on my plate.
I suspect getting me and McMurtry out of this alive will be difficult enough as it is. I’m hoping the fact that we’re still alive means they haven’t unscrambled and read my outbound messages yet.
Which brings me to another point of inquiry. I pull up my nav terminal and start running what will to anyone else hopefully look like a regular systems scan, nothing different than anything I’ve done countless times before. Part of my job. I have to figure in the ship’s systems’ energy usage when calculating jumps.
I can’t see anything like what McMurtry showed me on his com unit. In fact, as I study the setup, I realize there are a few subtle changes I hadn’t noticed before.
Like I can’t seeanyof the life pods on my scan.
I mean, I can see they’re there and attached, but I can’t view their status beyond that, where before, I could. I just never thought to look at them any closer until now. There’s always a trace amount of energy being used by the pods to keep the systems inside them charged and on immediate standby.
Now? I can’t even see that.
This is new, since after the—
Oh, shit.
After the communications system overhaul and retrofit we received during our first visit to Pfahrn.
I pull up a disk image from the first jump I ever made with this ship. I routinely save them before and after every jump so I can compare data for my calibrations for every jump. I’m afraid if I pull one up from right before the “retrofit” that it might raise a flag. I don’t know what kind of logs the captain now has access to.
I skim through it, looking through the jump drive stats, like I’m reviewing things there, then play back the full systems scan from the start of that jump.
Sure enough, there are the detailed life pod readouts.
Which no longer show up on my scans performed after the “retrofit.”
Do I need to keep using the air quotes? I think we’ve established that was bullshit. It also explains why it didn’t make any sense to me, at the time.
Creating a secure, scrambled message, I add the two images to it and send it to Olarte with a message to hang on to those for me, as well.
Then I lock down my terminal and head to Engineering to find McMurtry. He’s standing at the master terminal, three of his techs busy at work. I catch his eye and tip my head toward the direction of his private cabin. Fortunately, he doesn’t need me to detail what I want.
I follow him and he locks us in. There, I pull out my com unit and type a short message.
We don’t know who is listening now. We can’t risk turning off the com system like I did in the galley. It’s awfully suspicious the captain showed up right then. We might need to pretend we’re involved with each other again so no one gets suspicious.
He reads it and nods.
I delete that and write more.
Whatever they did happened during the communications sys overhaul on our first trip to Pfahrn.
He reads what I wrote and nods.
I erase the message and type again.
I compared system images from my first jump on board. They shut off viewing life pod stats and energy consumption. That’s how they hid the interference signal from you.
Another nod from him, accompanied by a scowl.
I erase it and write another message.
