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Kai Yong Fan sat down to be closer to the level of Cutter. Beetle slugs, even when standing at their tallest, reached just barely a meter in height.
“What do you need, Chief Engineer?” she asked.
She kept the impatience out of her voice – she knew Cutter would never waste time.
“The errant pod is accelerating still. Remote signal to slow it is not working – likely from damage. Require skilled intercession to speak to survivors, see if damage can be repaired. Must stop pod’s acceleration.”
It was practically a novel from the being, and Kai understood the significance immediately. With the current velocity of the pod it’d be hard to catch as it was; if it contined to burn its engine it would only get harder. A jump to go catch it was possible, but they could not possibly do that for another ten hours.
“I have some specialists who can handle this,” Kai told Cutter. “I’ll get them on it right away.”
“Good. Will continue to monitor communications. Must learn extent of damage.”
Cutter dashed away, and Kai brought up her list of Response communicators. Technically many of them were under Eboh’s command in Communications, but they were specialists for Response situations.
All of them were busy at the moment, in the midst of talking to others. She looked to see if she could slip this pod in sooner, but it was impossible to predict with any accuracy how long they might be on their current calls.
She checked her own itinerary.
As head of Response, she had a lot to do behind the scenes; it was not as directly active a role as most expected, at her current level she was largely a bureaucrat. She did not issue direct commands once the Response forces were deployed unless there was a major shift in tact. The numerous Coordination Dispatchers handled direct comms, and their commander handled moment-by-moment decisions with only occasional input from her.
She had the time. And she still was rated to do this.
“Pod number 57, this is the Craton. Please respond with your status – of yourselves and your pod.”
There was three seconds of light lag to the pod – which meant they were already nearly a million kilometers away.
Six seconds later, the reply came.
“Craton, this is Lily Brogan,” the call came back. “I’m not in great shape, but I’ve got some nano meds so I guess I’ll survive until pickup. When will that be? As for the pod, uh . . . I don’t see any signs of damage in here. But I know I’m off-course. What can I do to help you help me?”
“Ms. Brogan, we’re trying to get help to you as soon as possible. I need you to activate the medical drone on your pod and have it scan you and any other passengers so we can understand your medical situation. Tell it to connect to your radio to send us that data. I also need you to use the pod’s internal check-up system on the console to tell me its status. It doesn’t seem to be able to communicate with us, so if there are any errors, please tell me exactly what they say.”
She sent the message, and as she did so she saw Cutter scurrying over to her again.
“Abnormal signal structure in last message from Ms. Brogan,” the being said. Their voices rarely carried intonation, but something about the beetle-slug seemed alarmed.
“I noticed some dropped packets – it’s not distance or interference from debris?”
“Ruled out. It is an issue with pod modulator.” Cutter considered. “Physical damage to pod is a logical conclusion.”
“I have instructed her to tell us of any errors on the console,” Kai said. “Since we cannot talk to the pod itself, she can at least tell us what it knows internally.”
Cutter leaned back onto his slug-like tail, lifting all of his sets of limbs off the deck and running them together in a wave.
He was clearly lost in thought.
“Something not right. Learn all you can of pod status,” he asked. “I must study signal further. Structural aberrations. . . are disturbing.”
Lowering himself back onto his full set of legs, he scurried off.
Kai could only wait now, for Lily Brogan to follow the orders and report back.
In the meantime, she looked into the personnel logs, to learn everything she could about Lily Brogan. She was a drone tech, but Kai hoped she had more training. Whether she lived or not might depend on it.
Other Terrestrial 