The yellow bar jerks up and stays up.
“It’s a spike,” I say.
“Exactly,” Nysus says with satisfaction. “Something was drawing down on their power. Elevating their usage stats by at least ten percent, higher always than their previous high. And consistently, until the last diagnostic.”
“What would cause that?” I ask.
“I have no idea!” Nysus sounds thrilled to have a mystery to solve. Oh, to have the mental capacity to enjoy finding one of life’s unsolvables—like why my brain is broken and seeing dead people all the time—instead of being defeated by it.
I shove that thought down. “What else?”
“The noise dampeners,” Kane puts in.
“Right, right,” Nysus says. He slides his hand across the screen, wiping away the yellow bar graph and substituting a similar one, this one in a serene blue.
“So if you look, the noise dampeners are operating at near the high end of their capacity for the first six months of the voyage,” Nysus says. “Not great, but fine. Minor fluctuations only when the speed increases or decreases.”
“At the time, the engines were larger than anything else previously built, and CitiFutura was trying a new alloy for the outer hull,” Kane adds. “They probably didn’t know how the engine noise would interact with the alloy. I suspect it was louder than they anticipated. Upgraded dampeners would have helped reduce some of the ambient clutter for the passengers, but even without the upgrade, the passengers shouldn’t have been experiencing anything too intrusive. If anything, only the crew and the folks on the lower level might have noticed louder vibrations.”
“The cheap seats,” I say. “So not a priority, I’m guessing.”
Kane nods. “Exactly.”
“But then at the same time as the additional energy draw, we have this,” Nysus jumps back in. He swipes his hand across the screen, and the serene blue becomes a bright sea of red.
“The dampeners are redlining,” I say.
“Maxed out, well beyond manufacturer specs,” Nysus says. “But,and here’s the interesting thing,Aurora’s speed hadn’t changed. There’s no reason for the dampeners’ usage to jump like that.”
“Could the dampeners be responsible for that ten percent increase?” I ask.
Nysus chokes on a laugh. “Dampeners? Taking ten percent fromtheseengines?” He shakes his head. “Half of that, less, would have fried them completely. No way.”
“So what am I looking at here, then?” I ask, trying to swallow my frustration.
“We don’t know, I haven’t figured it out yet,” Nysus says, again sounding delighted.
“All we can say for sure is that something changed right before the end of their journey,” Kane puts in.
“Okay, great, good job,” I say, not sure what else to add. And I need to stop putting off what I came here to do. “Kane—”
Nysus and Kane exchange a look.
“What?” I ask, that creeping sense of dread returning. Increasing, rather, as it never left.
“There’s one more thing,” Kane says. “But it’s a little… disturbing.”
More or less disturbing than the ghost of a dead woman under my bed, grabbing at my fucking ankle? Because I think that might have to be my new benchmark.
A hysterical laugh bubbles out of me before I can stop it, and they both stare at me. “Sorry. It’s just this whole thing”—I wave my hand to indicate our surroundings and the ship at large—“is kind of disturbing. Don’t you think?” I’m not going to drop my experience on both of them like this. I need to talk to Kane privately, let him decide if he wants to communicate my… being indisposed.
“Right,” Kane says after a moment. “It’s the captain’s personal log.”
I straighten up immediately. “You got in?”
“Not exactly,” Nysus says. “It looks like the ship’s log and her personal log have been wiped, and really well. By the captain herself or someone using her code.”
“Even in the black box?” I ask.
