Infinity Beach - Jack McDevitt [134]
“Are we sure we can do that?”
“I can take a wrench to it if I have to.”
The return trip remained somber. Kim kept their bedroom door closed, for whatever good that might do. It was, she complained to Solly, like sleeping in a haunted house. The days passed without incident, but Kim knew the thing was there, drifting through coils and corridors, just outside the range of vision. Occasionally, she caught glimpses of it, the eyes sometimes formed of light from a lamp, of steam from a shower. There were movements in the dark, the sense of a cold current brushing her ankle, the sound of whispering in the bulkheads. Even the murmur of the ship’s electronics occasionally sounded malevolent.
If Solly picked any of this up, he said nothing.
Unavoidably, the sex became infrequent. When it did occur, it was distracted, stealthy, hurried, as though there were others in the ship who might happen on them at any moment.
The spontaneity drained away. During what she had already begun to think of as the good old days, encounters might begin and eventually be consummated anywhere in the ship. Now, wherever they might start, they concluded behind the closed doors of their sleeping compartment. After Kim had put on the light and inspected it.
She felt exposed and vulnerable when they were both asleep. But when she broached the subject to Solly he looked so dismayed that she did not push for a watchstanding system.
He must be thinking of her as a frightened child, wondering what sort of relationship he’d got himself into. But she felt like a frightened child. Were their places reversed, had it been Solly who was seeing things in empty corridors, she would certainly be rethinking the relationship. She feared she might lose him over this, and that might be the worst of it. But she couldn’t help herself. There was a hazard, and Solly didn’t entirely believe her.
She grew resentful, of Solly, and of her own fears. And she acquired an unrelenting hatred for the thing that had taken up residence with them. She waited, and literally prayed, for it to show itself in some substantive way.
Solly’s efforts to get the AI back online produced no discernible results. Occasionally there were nonsense voice responses, asserting that passengers should prepare for acceleration, or that the food preparation system was suffering from an overload and needed a new conduction unit. It suggested course changes and adjustments in mission parameters and wished them good morning at all hours.
“We need somebody who knows what he’s doing,” Solly grumbled, but he never stopped trying.
Without Ham, he had to get his hands dirty on occasion. He found himself performing routine duties such as managing power flow adjustments. Because some systems had gone down with the AI, he wasn’t necessarily alerted when malfunctions happened, nor was there a system to tell him the nature of the problem. So when internal communications crashed, he needed several hours and a lot of crawling around on hands and knees to locate and replace a faulty relay. Self-test procedures run regularly by the jump engines developed an aberration that periodically set Klaxons sounding throughout the ship. He couldn’t figure that one out at all and simply shut the alarms down, hoping the engines wouldn’t develop a fatal flaw in the meantime.
Solly commented that he was learning a lot this trip.
Kim helped wherever she could, which wasn’t often. Electronics was not her forte, but she asked questions and she too was learning.
The closest they came to a serious problem arose during the third week when the Klaxons sounded one night at three A.M.,