Ascending - James Alan Gardner [78]
He lifted his large foot and pointed toward the woman in brown, whose hands were now covered in foam that bubbled from her own skin. “Speaking of being eaten up inside,” the Pollisand said, “this woman has thirty grams of Modig ripping her apart. You might want to deal with that before she dies of shock.”
“Damn!” Festina said. Raising her voice, she called, “Ship-soul, attend. Tell Dr. Havel we have a severe case of Modig poisoning in the main computer room.”
“Aye-aye, Admiral,” a metallic voice answered from the ceiling.
“Hurray,” Aarhus muttered, “the computer is still online.”
“Don’t celebrate too soon,” the Pollisand told him.
The sergeant winced. “Why?”
“You’ll see in seventy-two seconds.”
“God damn it,” Festina said, “quit being a know-it-all, and tell us something useful. What did this woman do, and how can we stop it?”
“You can’t stop it,” the Pollisand replied. “And what this woman did—by the way, her name is Zuni, if you care, which you don’t, or you wouldn’t need a complete stranger to introduce you to someone who’s been under your command since the day you inherited this ship—but no, let’s not waste time on civilities which are only the bedrock of society, what this woman, Zuni, that’s still her name, even if you don’t care about it, did…” The Pollisand took a breath. “What Zuni did was write a program she believed would let her override the captain’s commands.”
“Which explains why she put the system in master mode,” Aarhus said. “If her program worked, she could set our course straight back to New Earth…and prevent anyone from changing it.”
“But the program didn’t work,” the Pollisand told him. “Zuni didn’t test it first: she just wrote it and ran it. Which clearly shows that possessing a head isn’t the same as using it. (Not that I’m bitter.) What kind of programmer is so divorced from reality she thinks she’ll get complex software right the first time? Especially when she’s hacking the ship’s most important security settings—”
“Look,” Festina interrupted, “we’ll discuss Zuni another time. Just tell us what the program did.”
“It went out of control,” the Pollisand said. “Romped off on its own, overwriting basic system code. She tried to rein it in from the console, but it had already stomped part of its own control settings; that’s when she popped open a tube of Modig powder.”
“Why was she carrying a vile red poison?” I asked. “Was she a secret assassin?”
“No,” Festina answered, “it’s navy policy to have some Modig available—precisely for situations where you’ve got a runaway computer and can’t shut it down.”
“It is better to turn off the power switch,” I told her, “or to adjust the machine’s mechanisms with an ax.”
“Zuni didn’t have an ax,” the Pollisand said, “and the way to turn off a power switch on this ship is to ask the computer to do it—which doesn’t work if the computer is already fucked up the snout. Anyway, Modig is standard issue for last-ditch emergencies, and Zuni had been immunized against tiny exposures…but she should have known better than to scoop it up with her hands and smear it into the circuits. No immunization can protect a human from that much contact. Why would my poor Zuni do such a thing?”
“We’ll ask her at the court-martial,” Festina said. “Right now we have to figure out what’s been damaged, what the runaway program did…”
The Pollisand’s eyes flared brightly. “I can tell you that. It overrode the safeguards on Captain’s Last Act.”
“Oh shit!” Festina and Aarhus said in unison.
“What is Captain’s Last Act?” I asked.
Festina’s face looked pained. “If a crew is forced to abandon ship, it’s the final command a captain gives…to make it impossible for outsiders to learn military secrets if they capture our equipment. Captain’s Last Act means—”
The room lights suddenly went out.
“Doing some drastic Science thing that breaks all the ship’s machines?” I asked.
“Good guess,” Festina