Day 6
Day Six
(age twenty-four)
It occurred to Kelli only back in the hangar, boarding the Wildfire and climbing back into the study, that there were other ways she could have stopped the heist.
Rowan hadn’t had a weapon on him, or at least not that she’d seen.
Ting had tools, not guns, and Ting felt sorry for her.
There had been no particular reason for her to fear what they’d do if she resisted.
She’d pretended she was going along with them because of the blackmail, but there was no actual reason to be afraid of the blackmail, since she’d already told Baz the worst of it herself.
So why hadn’t she done anything? Kelli could have punched them and bit them the way she’d used to bite teachers.
She could have leapt out of the hyperloop and run for it.
Maybe Rowan and Ting ran faster, but they couldn’t chase her without causing a commotion.
She could have found the community standards enforcement office, or put her work computer into emergency alert mode, or just raced through the streets shouting, help, help! Thieves!
But she hadn’t done any of those things. She’d meekly gone along with everything Rowan wanted to do. She’d trusted Baz to sort it all out for her.
Why had she done that?
Well, it didn’t matter. Baz would catch them in the hangar; she’d already known that was the easiest way to do it.
It might be different if they were on Io, in one of those big multilaunch pads already open to the sky, but the facility on Ganymede was like Callisto’s, with tunnels to taxi through, paperwork to submit, automated checks to do.
Rowan would turn on the comms to confirm he was ready for launch, and ground control would say, Vessel Blue Bolt, there is a pending security alert regarding your planned trajectory and crew. Please stand by to be boarded.
Kelli numbly curled up in her sleeping bag, tightening the straps. She waited.
A now-familiar thrum rose beneath her. The smallest engine, the one they used for taxiing. They started to move.
Wait, why were they taxiing? Were they going to the launch pad? They shouldn’t go to the launch pad if they were being boarded.
Kelli squirmed and loosened the straps, not all the way, just enough that she could reach into her pocket for the pink crescent. She stared at it in dismay.
Baz had never replied to her messages. They were all there, nestled up nicely in the Sent folder. There were no read receipts, but Kelli couldn’t tell if that was because he hadn’t read them, or if this brand of pink crescents just didn’t do read receipts in the first place.
Baz, she typed desperately, we are in the hangar. If your security team wants to catch us in the hangar, they have to move now. Baz are you listening?
But the message wasn’t going to send unless she plugged it into Rowan’s workstation, here in the study, the way she’d done the first two times.
Which would be really suspicious, because everyone was supposed to be nestled up in their sleeping bags now.
And even then, it would only work if the Wildfire were plugged in to the local internet, which it probably wasn’t, now that they were taxiing.
It would take ages for the signal to propagate to the station on Ganymede that periodically tight-beamed a pack of messages back to Callisto.
What if it had never been plugged into the local internet?
What if it wasn’t built to handle interplanetary communication in the first place?
What if none of the messages had ever actually sent, except for the one that she’d sent back in her apartment, or maybe not even that one?
What if the Sent folder was an illusion?
What if Baz actually had no idea where Kelli had gone?
She hesitated, feeling with her fingers for the zipper that would open the sleeping bag.
Should she make a run for it, right here, right now?
Vault out of the study, race up the ladder to the cockpit, and hope Ting or Zhaleh didn’t get free from their own bags and tackle her first?
Crawl like a madwoman into the cockpit where Rowan was doing those preflight checks, and scream herself hoarse until the ground control AI noticed something was wrong, or bash her hands indiscriminately over the controls, or . . . ?
She’d taken too long thinking.
The main engines went on in one big rush. The force of acceleration threw Kelli down into the soft, firm surface of the sleeping bag. The ship shook, earthquake strong; by now, the motion was almost familiar.
They were leaving Ganymede. They were up in the air already. Kelli’s limbs had the weight of lead, but she’d already loosened the straps more than was strictly advisable, and she tried and failed to shield her head from the shaking as she was thrown back and forth.
If Baz wasn’t listening, then what in the whole solar system was she supposed to do now?
But there was one thing she did know she wanted to do.
When she was floating again, she unzipped the sleeping bag, rubbing her head where it had bumped too hard against the inside of the bag, and bobbed out into the middle of the study.
She took the data chip from her pocket. Then she plugged it in to Rowan’s display screen.
She opened up Orlando’s character kernel.
There were all the words she’d written, more or less in the shape she remembered, plus or minus some forgivable edits for style.
There were all the updates from the episodes and the fan feeds.
These were partly in code, but it was still just letters in plain text; more of a shorthand.
An experienced supervisor, like Kelli, could puzzle it out.
So she puzzled.
She scrolled down slowly, squinting at the code and mouthing out the words that most likely corresponded to each abbreviated jumble of letters.
The first parts were information she knew already, which made the task easier.
They were summaries of what Orlando had done, first on the Rising Adventurers episode that introduced him, and then on each subsequent episode of Ship of Fools—why he’d done it, how he’d done it, how the other characters had reacted.
This was pleasant to read, like a familiar bedtime story, but it wasn’t what Kelli was looking for.
She found her real quarry a few pages down, in one of the periodic updates that summarized reactions on the fan feeds.
Orlando’s most distinctive quality is his innocence, said the code when she’d puzzled it out.
Despite his tendency to cheat, steal, and fight, Orlando rarely suspects that another character is lying.
He expects betrayal only from enemy pirates and those who have proven themselves untrustworthy in the past. His childlike openness to the world leads him to go out of his way to help strangers, especially outsiders, whose surrounding communities cannot or will not help them.
Surprisingly often, this tendency pays off; it lends the show a refreshing quality which attracts younger viewers, pairing well with his childlike sense of mischief.
However, fans anticipate that sooner or later, Orlando’s openness to the strange and unlikely will lead him into a double cross he can’t easily charm or trick his way out of.
“Oh,” Kelli said dully. There it was.
She supposed she should have already known.