Chapter 68
Murphy confined himself to his cabin while the rest of the crew made preparations for the mission ahead.
The Baktun had proven itself a worthy opponent, deploying weapons they had never seen before.
They had barely survived the last encounter.
There was no telling what other techno-tricks the mystery ship had up its sleeve.
He had no interaction with the crew save for the knock on his cabin door preceding meal deliveries.
Clearly nobody wanted to talk to him. And who could blame them?
No doubt the scuttlebutt about him had flown fast and furiously.
If he hadn’t been so stupid, they wouldn’t have anything to gossip about.
Juan, Max, and Linda were his ranking officers, but also faithful friends.
Though they would never say anything to damage his reputation he still felt overwhelmed with shame for having been played by Linlin and guilt for letting his friends down.
The only genuine kindness shown him so far came from Maurice, the ancient ship’s steward. When he delivered Murphy’s evening meal, he whispered with a knowing smile, “This, too, shall pass, m’lad” before departing.
Murphy’s aching fear was the very real possibility Cabrillo would fire him when the mission was over.
He loved his work on the Oregon, but the thought of losing his incredible friends was eating him alive.
Worse, he couldn’t be at the weapons station deploying his unmatched skills to protect his friends.
If any of them were killed in the upcoming combat, that would be on him, too.
Like many other high-IQ individuals, Murphy was plagued with an inability to stay still.
Some people called it attention deficit disorder.
One school counselor informed his mother that her gifted son was “on the spectrum.” All Murph knew was that his intense curiosity couldn’t rest without trying to solve the next puzzle his brilliant mind was always searching for.
And now that he had time on his hands, he decided to pick at the splinter that had been festering in his mind ever since he and Eric had cracked Eidolon’s code.
He just couldn’t shake the idea that a premium hacker like Eidolon with his trickster-god reputation would be content with burying a simple ASCII-coded message inside of a mundane steganography matrix.
Murphy’s nagging intuition told him that there must be another code-within-the-code and he was determined to find it.