CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
JAI
After leaving the storage facility, I moved quickly but cautiously along the hallway towards the front of the ship.
I was travelling largely along the ceiling, as a strategic move.
Under normal circumstances, I’d be using the railings that ran along the sides of every single passageway in the ship.
Anyone who spent a serious amount of time in space knew perfectly well that a power failure could result in the loss of simulated gravity, and the railings were a basic safety feature.
But that also meant that the pirates would be expecting me – or anyone else hunting them – to be moving along at what would normally have been about waist height from the floor.
They were less likely to be paying attention to whatever was happening on the ceiling, and with the dim light and my grey suit, I might be lucky enough to escape their notice.
Or at the very least, their surprise might buy me a half-second advantage going into any battle.
What it also meant, though, was that I had to plan each jump perfectly, and execute each landing with precision, since there was nothing for me to hold onto if I misjudged a movement.
This early into my journey, I was making little more than a cursory examination of the hallways as I reached each corner.
It was most likely that the pirates had retreated towards the bridge, except for the ones who were searching for the missing crew members.
With the obvious shut-down of the engines, they would have headed straight for engineering.
If the crew were smart, they’d have laid some kind of ambush to attack the pirates as they came looking for them.
Either that, or they’d have to do some very fast and coordinated running away in order to out-manoeuvre the pirates.
But while I wished them all the success in the galaxy, their fate was not my current focus.
I floated silently along a hallway, then grabbed onto a doorframe just before I reached the end, bracing myself against the two sides.
Doors on this ship were set into a slight depression in the walls, giving me a hand-width sized shelf to use as a stability port while I planned my next move.
By bracing my hands on one side and my feet on the other, I could maintain enough friction against the wall to keep me from drifting away.
I was about to make my next jump when a faint vibration against my arm got my attention.
All of our comms had been set to silent, but we still needed to know if there was an urgent incoming message, and the vibrations were quiet enough to go unnoticed.
I glanced down, surprised to see an encrypted message that had ostensibly come from my master.
Why would he be messaging me? He knew what I was doing, and that we had little other option for reclaiming the ship. Unless there was some danger he’d become aware of that he needed to alert me to?
Making sure to secure my position in the doorway, I opened the message. It was immediately obvious that it was some kind of code. The message read: Dimari number. Home number. Family number. Arrival day. This will open your eyes.
My immediate reaction was to curse the lack of time we’d had to learn to work together. I didn’t know nearly enough about my master or the Alliance military to be figuring out cryptic clues in the middle of a life or death mission.
I let the wave of frustration pass, then shook my head to clear it. I could do this. Whatever this was. I’d completed some of the best military training in the galaxy, and part of that training was to know better than to just give up the instant something unexpected happened.
Firstly, I should try having a little more faith in my master. That didn’t come naturally, given how long I’d spent expecting him to be an asshole. But Aiden Hill was not the horrendous man I’d been anticipating, and I needed to remember that, now more than ever.
Secondly, he knew, as well as I did, that we’d run exactly one mission together before today, so he would be perfectly aware of how ill-prepared we were.
So he’d be going out of his way to make this as obvious as possible.
He also knew that I was trained to operate in some of the most dangerous and unexpected circumstances imaginable, so he’d be assuming that I was capable of figuring this out.
All I had to do was put together everything I knew about him, and everything he knew about me, and then the answer should become evident somewhere in the overlap.
I read the message again. It appeared to be a sequence of numbers that I had to figure out from the clues provided.
That was fair enough, but once I knew what the numbers were, I then needed to know what to do with them.
That, presumably, came down to the last phrase; This will open your eyes.
The most obvious answer was that my master meant metaphorical eyes, rather than physical ones.
So what did I currently need to see the most?
I was in the middle of a stealth operation in which I needed to either sneak past the pirates, or ambush them…
Oh! Of course. I needed to see the ship. Or the pirates, or perhaps some sort of electrical signals my master would be sending to me. Did that mean the map on my comm? No guarantees I’d pick the right option first go, but it was the most logical choice.
I opened the map function, seeing nothing out of the ordinary.
It still displayed the schematic diagram of the ship, exactly as it had before.
But if my master was trying to send me some sort of covert data, there would likely be some kind of encryption involved.
I tapped on the ‘augmentations’ option… and grinned in satisfaction when a box popped up that read ‘code required’.
There was a box where I could enter six digits.
Six? But there were only four clues. How could four clues result in six digits? I stayed still, pondering the question. Four clues, six digits. And I hadn’t even begun to work out what those four clues meant yet.
There had to be an obvious answer to this, and I tried to look at it from my master’s perspective.
He had stayed with the other soldiers, and they would be gathering weapons and putting ad hoc strategies together to try and increase our chances of success.
Who would he be working with? The other Alliance soldiers, and the Alliance crew of the…
Of course. Alliance script was different from Eumadian script.
The encryption would be expecting Alliance digits.
I knew nothing about the Alliance number system specifically, but I did know there were a vast array of different number systems across the galaxy.
Some were base four, some were base eight, some were base ten.
Some used a different symbol for each number while others used sequences of digits to represent one number.
Our comms and translators translated all those numbers into something the recipient could understand, but it was entirely possible that the answer to the four clues, when translated into Alliance script, could result in six digits.
I’d have to figure out the answers, then have my comm translate it into the Alliance equivalent.
I turned my attention to the first clue.
Dimari number. Dimari didn’t have numbers.
We had names. My name was Jai, which meant nothing in particular…
unless that was actually a number in Alliance Common?
I tapped ‘Jai’ into the language program and asked it to translate the word from Alliance Common.
No result.
What other number could a dimari have?
Hm… I was the second dimari that my master had adopted. Did that mean the first answer was two? I’d have to try it and see if it would work.
Second clue. Home number. That meant my master’s home, presumably, and I knew from scanning it with my comm that the number displayed on the front of his house read seventeen.
Third clue. Family number. Once again, families didn’t have numbers, and even if they did, I didn’t have a family.
I huffed at myself in annoyance. Stick with the most obvious answers, I reminded myself.
These clues were cryptic, but not without context.
My master was my family, or near enough as mattered, and there were three of us who lived together.
Okay, so the third number was likely three.
The final clue was arrival day, and that seemed the most obvious of all.
I’d arrived on this planet on the fifteenth day of the month.
I had a brief thought that perhaps he’d meant the day he’d taken me home, rather than the one that I’d arrived on the planet, but if that was the case, he was more likely to have called it something like ‘bonding day’.
I was still working on the assumption that he would be trying to make things as obvious as possible.
None of the clues were anything that the pirates could have known about, so they all fitted within the context of keeping important information out of their grasp.
I tapped the sequence into my language translator, asking it to translate it into Alliance script.
It spat out a sequence of unfamiliar symbols – sure enough, there were six of them – which I copied and pasted into the awaiting box in the map program.
Code incorrect. Two attempts remaining.
Damn it. The problem now was that I didn’t know which of the answers was wrong.
All right, the answer I was least confident about was the first one – dimari number.
I’d guessed that my master meant that I was the second dimari in his house, or that he had a total of two dimari, but he’d already referenced our household with family number.
So maybe he meant something different with the first clue.
But what other number could be associated with dimari?
And which dimari did he mean? There were four other dimari who worked on the base, in addition to Kade and myself, and over a hundred on the planet in total.
Exactly how much did he expect me to know about that in a grand total of one week of being here?
Well, that was the key, wasn’t it? I’d been here for exactly one week, and I’d spent most of that time with the other dimari who’d come with me in the.
.. In the crate. Of course. There had been eight dimari in the crate, including me.
I changed the first answer to eight, then re-translated it and entered it into the code box.
Access granted. Establishing connection.
I muttered a quick thank you to no one in particular, and then watched as a series of green dots lit up the map.
There were a large cluster of them around the storage area where we’d been held prisoner, and a scattering of them throughout the front of the ship; the Alliance personnel, and the pirates.
A whole raft of implications flooded through my mind about what I could do with this information and how it would revolutionise the way I fought this battle, but before I could really process any of that, my emotions suddenly went haywire, and I felt my chest heat and my throat tighten.
My master had done this for me, I thought frantically, as my world metaphorically span.
My master had sent me this information. He’d allowed me to go off on a solo mission, for all his misgivings about it, but then, rather than leaving me to my own devices and simply expecting me to get the job done, he’d reached out and sent me the tools to make my chances of success far, far higher.
Like a switch flipping in my chest, I felt my heart clench, and a wave of euphoria hit me.
My master was wonderful. He’d proven, in the only way that was currently possible, that I was not alone out here.
My hands shook, and I very nearly slipped out of the doorway as I reeled from that revelation.
My master would not abandon me in the middle of a mission, no matter how convoluted it was to send the support I needed.
Okay, Jai, get a grip, I scolded myself. This mission was far from over, and there was plenty of danger left to face.
I turned my attention back to the map, and the new scattering of green lights dotted all over it.
This ostensibly meant I now had visibility of every person on the ship, but I had no way to tell the difference between enemy and ally.
I hastily activated the tracking function and tagged everyone who was in the storage area, turning their icons orange instead of green.
That way, I could keep track of all the Alliance personnel, in contrast to the pirates.
It wasn’t foolproof. It was possible that a couple of the pirates were still in the rear of the ship, while a handful of the original crew were still lurking about the ship in an unknown location.
But that would give me perhaps a ninety per cent likelihood of correctly identifying anyone I ran into.
The next problem was that the Alliance teams had no way of identifying me. Would anyone have thought of that? And if they had, what sort of message could I send them, without inadvertently giving away any information to the pirates.
Presumably, the pirates didn’t have access to this version of the map, or it wouldn’t have been encoded.
So if I could get my master to notice something odd about the way I was moving, he could tag me the same way I’d tagged them.
I sent the brief message bouncing ball to my master’s comm, then proceeded to push myself across the hallway to the opposite side, then back again, then again, three times, four times, five…
My comm gave a very slight vibration and I checked the message that had just come in. It read simply, Yes.
Right, then. He knew where I was, I knew where they were – more or less – and that meant it was time to go kill some pirates.
I zoomed in on my own location on the map, looking for the quickest way to the bridge that would send me past as few pirates as possible.
Forward almost all the way to the front of the ship along this hallway, then left, towards the centre of the ship.
As I’d been taught during my training, I set aside my emotions, refocused my attention on the mission, then pushed off the wall and resumed my fast but cautious journey down the hallway.