“Of course we did,” Kodiak says, laughing. “We’ve been lifting code from you for decades. Fédération is incredibly easy to steal from. Your encryption is cute. You might aswell have gone with ‘password1234.’”
“I’ll be sure to let mission control know that once we have the comm fixed.”
Kodiak shrugs. “We’ll figure out new bypasses, I’m sure. You all should just give up now.”
“Never!” I pronounce, striking the screen with a flourish to start the test.
Rover is motionless by the portal, waving its little gripper arms at me. It’s like a crab on the beach, guarding against the people going by: small, vulnerable, powerful, invulnerable. “Rover,” I say deliberately and slowly, as if I’m dealing with a wary stray, “Kodiak is going to remove some of your tracks. You will be fine.”
It stays there at the doorway, arms whirring, rocked by waves that don’t exist. “OS, send Rover away from here,” I say.
No answer.
“Okay, Rover,” Kodiak says. “Guess I’ll be examining your tracks right in front of you.”
Kodiak gets down on his belly, face to the floor. When he shines his headlamp directly at the wall, the covering goes translucent, revealing ribbons of metal just beneath the polycarb. The thin coating leaves the surface smooth, but still allows Rover’s magnetic undercarriage to draw electricity. The tracks lattice the entire ship—there’s no ripping them out without ripping out the ship’s walls. The bestwe’ll be able to do is to block Rover’s access points. “Be right back,” I say to Kodiak.
I head back to theEndeavor, grab my portaprinter, and set it up to begin constructing a polycarb lip over the doorway of the blind room. Of course Rover could melt the lip away if it wanted to, but that would mean actively undoing our wishes. If Kodiak is right that OS is unwilling to take that step, then we might have privacy here.
All this activity is clearly making Rover curious. It transfers to the walls, examining the portaprinter as it applies layers of molten polycarb over its tracks. While it observes the portaprinter, Rover makes tinny little beeps. They sound like the robot versions of involuntary gasps.
Neither interferes with the other. It’s like we’ve created our own mini cold war.
I realize I’ve heard these very sounds before, on a mountainside with Minerva while she told me about her mission to Titan. “Kodiak,” I say, “do you know if the developers incorporated any warbot tech into the Rover system?”
“No idea. Warbots are a Cusk invention, and you’re our resident Cusk.” He looks up from his console and rubs his hands. “Come over here, we’re about to get your result.”
He taps the screen excitedly. “Here’s a segment of your current DNA, and here’s that same nucleotide segment from the dried blood sample.”
I eyeball the numbers. “They look mostly the same. Like we thought.”
“Yes. Mostly.” Kodiak scrolls through the data. His eyebrows knit. “That can’t be right.”
“What can’t be right?”
“Look at this—99.902 percent of the bonds in the dried sample’s DNA have broken. Breakage is normal—DNA has a half-life of around five hundred and twenty years. Measuring the amount of decay is one way to determine the age of a sample.”
“Okay, so how old does this make this blood?”
Kodiak looks at me flatly.
“What? Something weird? Before the ship even took off?”
“Weirder than that. This is around the same percentage we’d get if we sampled a mummified pharaoh from ancient Egypt.”
I chuckle. “Well, something went wrong.”
“That much is clear by now,” Kodiak says. “I’ll run the sample again. It might have been cross-contaminated. Or OS might have tinkered with the results to mess with us.”
“I would not do that,” comes my mother’s voice from the other side of the door. I lock eyes with Kodiak. His eyebrows rise.
“OS,” he says, without shifting his gaze from me, “whatcan you tell us about the blood sample?”
“It is dried blood. Your testing showed you what I see as well: there is a close correlation to Ambrose’s DNA.”
“Can you tell ushowmy blood got on the panel?” I ask.
“I cannot. I have begun printing a new panel to replace the one we lost. In seventy-nine days, we’ll pass near a second asteroid going close to our approximate speed and direction. I suggest we net it, to mine the hydrocarbons that will help support our excessive polycarb use, since you insist on using the portaprinter lavishly. We can also use the asteroid’s ice to replace the trace water vapor that has continued to escape the ship each day.”
