Last Plane to Heaven by Jay Lake Page B

were jiggered into coming to Tiede 1 to provide cover, and I don’t know what for.”
    â€œNot me!” Maduabuchi blurted.
    â€œI know that.”
    The dismissal in her words stung for a moment, but on the while, he realized he’d rather not be a suspect in this particular witch hunt.
    His feelings must have shown in his face, because she smiled and added, “You haven’t been around long enough to get sucked into the Howard factions. And you have a rep for being indifferent to the seductive charms of power.”
    â€œUh, yes.” Maduabuchi wasn’t certain what to say to that.
    â€œWhy do you think you’re here ?” She leaned close, her breath hot on his face. “I needed someone who would reliably not be conspiring against me.”
    â€œA useful idiot,” he said. “But there’s only seven of us. How many could be conspiring? And over a green light?”
    â€œIt’s Tiede 1,” Captain Smith answered. “Someone is here gathering signals. I don’t know what for. Or who. Because it could be any of the rest of the crew. Or all of them.”
    â€œBut this is politics, not mutiny. Right…?”
    â€œRight.” She brushed off the concern. “We’re not getting hijacked out here. And if someone tries, I am the meanest fighter on this ship by a wide margin. I can take any three of this crew apart.”
    â€œAny five of us, though?” he asked softly.
    â€œThat’s another use for you.”
    â€œI don’t fight.”
    â€œNo, but you’re a Howard. You’re hard enough to kill that you can take it at my back long enough to keep me alive.”
    â€œUh, thanks,” Maduabuchi said, very uncertain now.
    â€œYou’re welcome.” Her eyes strayed to the data arrays floating across the screens and in the virtual presentations. “The questions are who, what, and why.”
    â€œHave you compared the observational data to known stellar norms?” he asked.
    â€œGreen flashes aren’t a known stellar norm.”
    â€œNo, but we don’t know what the green flashes are normal for, either. If we compare Tiede 1 to other brown dwarfs, we might spot further anomalies. Then we triangulate.”
    â€œAnd that is why I brought you.” Captain Smith’s tone was very satisfied indeed. “I’ll leave you to your work.”
    â€œThank you, ma’am.” To his surprise, Maduabuchi realized he meant it.
    *   *   *
    He spent the next half shift combing through comparative astronomy. At this point, almost a thousand years into the human experience of interstellar travel, there was an embarrassing wealth of data. So much so that even petabyte q-bit storage matrices were overrun, as eventually the challenges of indexing and retrieval went metastatic. Still, one thing Howards were very good at was data processing. Nothing ever built could truly match the pattern-recognition and free associative skills of human (or post-human) wetware collectively known as “hunches.” Strong AIs could approximate that uniquely biological skill through a combination of brute force and deeply clever circuit design, but even then, the spark of inspiration did not flow so well.
    Maduabuchi slipped into his flow state to comb through more data in a few hours than a baseline human could absorb in a year. Brown dwarfs, superjovians, fusion cycles, failed stars, hydrogen, helium, lithium, surface temperatures, density, gravity gradients, emission spectrum lines, astrographic surveys, theories dating back to the dawn of observational astronomy, digital images in two and three dimensions as well as time-lensed.
    When he emerged, driven by the physiological mundanities of bladder and blood sugar, Maduabuchi knew something was wrong. He knew it. Captain Smith had been right about her mission, about there being something off in their voyage to Tiede 1.
    But she didn’t know what it was