“I can only provide information on wreckage that has functioning sensors and that send out pings to my systems.” Jolene sounded snippy.
“Yeah. Fine. What parts?”
“Stern weapons array. Port weapons array. Starboard weapons array. Ship personnel backup WIMP systems. Ship personnel quarters. Redundant WIMP/MPP propulsion and power system. Redundant AI backup system. There may be other ship wreckage within that radius, but if so, they are no longer capable of sending out pings.”
“Jolene. Send me coordinates for all wreckage that still sends out pings, on or within one klick of the property. Pinpoint them on a 3-D map.”
Jolene did. The wreckage appeared on a screen. It was all near the current position of the small expedition team, but all the wreckage’s vertical coordinates were closer to sea level than we were.
“Bugger. They’re in the crack.”
“Affirmative.”
Other things came clear to me, as if a low-lying fog shrouding my brain began to blow away.
“Ohhh. The crack in the ground was made by the back half of the ship crashing directly above an old mine. Correct?”
“Affirmative.”
And theSunStar’sAI had known all this for over a decade. And we hadn’t known. Or . . . Or.
Other things began to resolve out of the fog of my brain.
When I first arrived here, there had been no mayday alert going out on theSunStar’s EntNu comms system. It was only when Mateo had been healed and put back in his suit that he had gone searching through the junkyard and had discovered the spaceship. Like, right away. Mateo hadfigured outhow to get inside a space-going warship within hours. He hadn’t needed to disable any automatic alerts or distress signals; they had already been off. I had assumed Pops was the one who had turned it all off. But what if it hadn’t been my father? What if someone else had been here? And then Jolene’s comment about pings burrowed through my brain.
“List all forms of pings and alerts that went out when theSunStarwas in distress, when theSunStarcrashed, and”—my unease spread—“any that continue today.”
On the screen, the invading team pulled the man to safety. Debris crashed from the lip into the massive crack in the earth, an avalanche of boulders and rock. The man said he had crapped his pants. Everyone else thought that was funny.
Jolene said, “My programming broadcast maydays through standard EntNu channels until mayday was disabled at two minutes, forty-seven seconds post-crash landing. PAN-PAN was sent out on standard EntNu and radio waves. PAN-PAN was disabled at two minutes, fifty-two seconds after crash-landing. SOS was sent out on automatic recurring radio-wave broadcast. SOS on primary AI was disabled at three minutes, four seconds post-crash. SOS from AI backup continues, with limited range due to massive particle and WIMP particle emissions.”
“Bloody damn,” I whispered. EntNu was the engineering hardware and tech that comprised the instantaneous communication system based on Entangled Dark Neutrinos, particles that passed through anything and didn’t seem to be bound by unimportant things like gravity or matter or the speed of light. EntNu had been discovered in 2025 and it had been used extensively by the military during the war, in space. It worked for any currently measurable distance, and there was no way, no reason at all, that it should have been turned off.Ever. Especially not at two minutes, forty-seven seconds after crash landing, with the crew all away safely and no deaths to report.
And PAN-PAN should never have been sent. It was the international standard urgency signal that declared a vessel had an urgent situation, but not an immediate danger to the crew’s survival or to the vessel itself. The ship had been crashing, which seemed like a pretty immediate danger to me. And someone sent a PAN-PAN along with a mayday?
And part of the SOS was still going.
“Can you disable the SOS?”
“Thatiswithin my capabilities, Darlin’.”
Definitely annoyed.
“Can you disable all forms of emergency transmissions, including automatic pings?”
“Disabling emergency transmissions is within my capabilities.”
More annoyed.
I waited. Nothing happened.
“Have you disabled emergency transmissions?”
“Negative.”
I wanted to bang my head. “Why not?”
“Ship AI, CAIT, current moniker Jolene, does not have an order to disable all transmissions.”
