Destination Europa: Chapter 12

Log Files

Jul 19, 2024

Previously, Quill decided to take a stand and join Demas’ protest against SymbioNor’s treatment of the Martian employees, while grappling with the discovery that his nephew Cal is probably in hospital back in Ransom City. On returning to his cabin, he realised someone had sneaked in and taken some of his things…

Quill poured the bottle of pills back out onto his bedspread and counted them again. His heart was racing, and the air in the cabin felt over-pressurized, like the weight of the whole Solar System pressing in through the thin shell of the ship. He counted them a third time, gathering them in clusters of ten. No mistake. There were exactly thirty-five Fiducezol pills left, almost twenty fewer than there should have been.

Oh, Lord. Lord, from the depths! What’s happened? What’s happening? Quill sat down on his bunk and stared at the slim green torpedoes lying on his bedspread like the torn petals of a strange flower. Seized with a sudden fear that someone else might come in, he scooped the pills back into their white plastic bottle and stuffed it under his pillow. I need to get rid of them. Should I flush them down the toilet? But might the water cycling system detect them? Better not. He tried to slow the suck and shrink of his lungs, the pump and push of his heart, the blasting and sparking of his synapses. Calm, Quill, calm. Let’s think about this rationally. Who could have done something like this? Who would even know I had the stuff? Safira? Demas? But I never told any of them. Is someone trying to incriminate me? If so, why take the stuff at all, why not just report it? Is Jörg trying to get back at me for dissing Eastern Lightning? Or is it an opportunistic kleptomaniac who just wandered past and rifled through my drawers on the off-chance of something good? And why take my t-shirt as well? It doesn’t make sense. Lord, it makes no sense at all.

It was not quite 21:00. Quill turned on the privacy lock on his cabin door, then sat on the floor slumped against the door. When he eventually went to bed a couple of hours later, he could only get to sleep once he’d pulled the laundry basket against the door and stretched a bungee cord from the foot of his bunk to the leg of the desk. It wasn’t much of a burglar trap, but he hoped that if anyone attempted to break in during the night, they would trip and wake him up.

Quill woke early after an uneasy sleep. I should never have taken the stuff. Damn it to hell. But who would know I had it? And what do I do now?

He lay in bed for a long time, thinking about it. The more he thought, the odder it looked. No-one other than Rob and a few other Alliance co-workers, back on Mars or Earth, would have known he had Fiducezol. On the ship, it was strictly regulated, loyal FSS citizens only. For someone to know he had a stash, they must have accessed his optics. In his own cabin, his designated private space. He sat up, a knife of fear slicing through him. Only Security could do that for individual living quarters, as far as he knew. But surely Security could only do that with some kind of warrant. Oh Lord, they’re onto me. They know I’m with the Alliance. They must do. What other explanation is there?

He got dressed, fumbling with his clothes. I need to talk to someone. But who can I talk to? Is there anyone I can trust?

“That doesn’t make any sense, Dr. O.”

Tark looked at him steadily. She thinks I’m losing it. Paranoid. Going spacey.

“I know. But I swear, that’s what happened.”

“Leaving aside the question of why you were taking that • in the first place” — Quill had told her he had illegal Fiducezol but not why — “what possible reason could there be for someone to steal it? Instead of, I dunno, just dobbing you in?”

“I know.” He looked miserably around Tark’s cabin. He’d never been in there before, but it was the safest place he could think of to talk to her. Anyone monitoring him would need an extra warrant to access her private space. He had checked FSS law on optical and audio feeds before asking her if they could talk.

“And your t-shirt…” Tark drummed her fingers on the edge of her bunk, where she was sitting. “Are you sure you just didn’t drop it on the way from the laundry or something?”

“I can’t be 100% sure. But I’m pretty sure. Like 90%. Well, maybe 80 or 85%.”

“Right.” She exhaled slowly. She’s going to tell me to get a grip. See the doc. “You know what, Quill? If it wasn’t for the other stuff, I’d say you were just going spacey. You’re stressed, you’ve got family stuff on your mind, things aren’t so good with Mars and the FSS right now. But we’ve got a bunch of other weird things going on too.”

“But all of them could have really simple explanations.”

“True. Or there could be something more complicated going on. I don’t think we can rule that out.”

Quill took a long deep breath. “Thanks, Tark.”

“For what?”

“For taking me seriously.”

She just nodded, then cleared her throat, eyes looking into the middle distance with the look of an engineer in the midst of calculation. “I guess going to Security and asking them to review optics for your cabin isn’t the best way forward.”

“No.” Quill shook his head. He couldn’t very well report the theft of what he wasn’t supposed to have, and he didn’t want to draw the scrutiny of the ship’s small Security team.

Tark drummed her fingers on the bunk again. “Well, why don’t you check the laundry for your t-shirt, just in case? Let’s follow up on the things we were going to look at anyway. See where that takes us?”

Quill nodded. He felt suddenly, desperately weary. I’m not even sure if I can trust Tark. Can I? I think I can. I have to trust someone.

“I’m going to the Farm,” he said at last.

A message arrived from his father as he climbed the ladder to the laundry on Deck 10. Quill hastily pushed into the laundry, empty apart from Kiran Singh unloading clothes from one of the machines. He nodded at Kiran and leaned against a washer, feeling slightly light-headed, the message waiting light blinking in the corner of his eye. I don’t know how much more I can take.

His dad’s message was short and to the point. Text only, to save bandwidth. Hi, son. Not sure what you mean about Cal. Archie and Kath and the boys are all fine, as far as I know. I had Marty over last weekend but Cal had that cold that was going round. Is there something I should know about? Are you alright, son? Hang in there, OK?

Quill read it several times then closed the message. That tells me absolutely nothing, really. Other than that whatever is happening, Archie hasn’t told Dad. Or maybe Dad just isn’t telling me. The O’Neill love language again. Great.

“Alright, Quill?”

Quill looked up at Kiran, who was on his way out of the laundry with his bundle of clothes.

“Alright, Kiran.” Quill straightened up. “Hey, you haven’t seen any t-shirts lying around, have you?”

“In here?”

“Yeah. I’ve lost one, somehow, came to look for it.”

“Sorry, mate.” Kiran shook his head. “I’m sure it’ll turn up.”

Quill nodded. He made a perfunctory search of the laundry after Kiran left, quickly checking the empty machines, but there was no sign of anything left behind.

The laundry was immediately aft of the Green Ring section of the Farm, so that the grey water from the washing machines could be recycled straight into the plants. Perhaps I could put the rest of my Fiducezol through the wash. Dissolve it in the hot water of the machines, then it’ll go into the plants. Probably undetectable. Quill brightened up a little as he made his way down to the Blue Ring and forward to the Farm.

Bowen was in his office, examining a small heap of pale brown powder on a watchglass. As Quill entered, Bowen licked the tip of a finger, dipped it in the powder then tasted it cautiously.

“What’s that?” asked Quill.

Bowen looked round, his eyebrows wrinkled in a quizzical expression. “Something of an experiment. Dried shiitake powder. For the galley. I’m trying to breed a new variety to express a meatier flavour. Want a taste?”

Quill shook his head. “You ever find your strawberry thief?”

“Nope.”

“Still trying?”

“Nope. Can’t see how.”

Quill ran a hand through his hair. I should get a haircut. “Can I try something?”

“What?”

“I, uh, I was wondering if I could look through some of your logs. For the produce and that. Just to look for, I dunno, anything weird.”

“Why?” asked Bowen. “You just bored or what?”

“I just feel like, well, like there’s something off. Something weird going on.” Don’t say any more. You don’t know who you can trust. And even if Bowen is trustworthy, he might spill stuff to Safira.

“And you called me paranoid,” said Bowen.

Quill remembered something from a previous conversation. “Hey, was Safira able to help you? When you were trying to figure out the strawberry thing?”

Bowen’s gaze flicked to one side and back. “Not really. Hey, forget I said that, OK?”

“What’s the mystery?” Quill tilted his head to one side as he looked at his friend. There’s definitely something fishy going on with Saf.

“Nothing,” said Bowen. He sounded firm but turned to poke at his mushroom powder rather than look Quill in the eye. “A man can get some, uh, moral support from his girlfriend now and again without it being a mystery, right?”

Moral support, my foot. Quill opened an interface and flicked through to the Farm records. He had used data logs from the Farm and other sub-systems often enough through the course of the voyage, as input for student exercises as well as for refining the Europa habitat plans. But this time, drilling down into the reams of data for each section of the Farm, without any idea of what he was actually looking for, it was hard to know where to start. It would have been easier to ask AiLeifr to process the logs and look for anomalies, but he dared not attract the ai’s attention to what he was doing. Let’s go from outside to in. He took a deep breath and opened the directory for the Blue Ring potato section.

Oxygen production. Water consumption. Nutrient consumption. Light parameters. Germination rates. Growth. Florescence. Yields. For the first hour or so, the steady rolling of numbers and charts soothed like cooling balm. Quill skimmed the sea of data, eyes half-blurred, allowing it to ground him. King Edward. Kerr’s Pinks. Finnish Purple. He mouthed the names to himself, enjoying their poetry. At the end of the potato section, he stood and stretched. This is going to take forever. I don’t have forever. Maybe Tark can do some of it? I’m in the swing of it now, though. He looked at the photos above his desk. I should send Archie another message. Lord, please take care of Cal! How many days now? 1908? 1908. Wait a minute, what day is it? Oh crap, it’s Sunday. I should be worshipping right now. But this can’t wait. Lord, forgive me.

He worked through the onion section, then garlic, then opened the tomato section. Almost lunchtime. Just this directory, then lunch. Wait a bit, what’s this? Quill blinked, his eyes dry and blurry, and re-focused. There was something odd about the modification times of several of the log files reporting yields for the tomato plants. Last modified 01:34. 01:35. 02:27. 02:28. 02:29. Who harvests tomatoes at one in the morning? Quill looked more closely at the metadata. The other files had all been completed at various points during the work day, with no other timestamps later than nine in the evening. An insomniac? When he checked the modified by tags, he found them marked Rock. Joseph Rock, the Junior Botanical Officer. Does that tell me anything? He checked some of the other files. They were mostly logged either by Rock or by MacDonald, the Senior Botanical Officer, other than a few tagged with Bowen’s name.

Quill pulled out of the tomato directory, and skimmed through to find the logs for the strawberries. Joe Rock was the last guy to leave the Farm that night. He found the file for the month’s yields. Last modified time 00:47, six days ago. The night the strawberries had been taken.

“Impossible.” Bowen shook his head. Around them, the bustle of people going in and out of the mess ebbed and flowed, and the smell of curry gusted out every time the door opened. “Impossible. I talked with Joe last week. He, uh, he was with someone that night.”

“His girlfriend?”

Bowen nodded. “He started dating one of the terraformers.”

“Doesn’t mean he couldn’t tweak the files in the middle of the night.”

Bowen waved his hands in protest. “Come on, bro! Who’s going to interrupt that for that? ‘Excuse me, darling, I just got to log some tomatoes?’”

“You have a point,” admitted Quill.

“And that’s not protocol!” Bowen went on. “We log the yields on the spot. For accuracy.”

“Being with his girlfriend is the perfect excuse, though. I mean, can we corroborate?”

“Feel free,” said Bowen, after a tiny pause. “But I ain’t going to be the one to do that.”

Quill nodded. I don’t think it’s Rock anyway. Or even if it was him nicking stuff from the Farm, it can’t have been him in my cabin. There’s no way he could access my optics and know about my pills. What does that mean? Did someone use his name to hack those files?

Another knot of people passed them on their way into the mess, and another wave of sound and odour spilled into the corridor. Quill felt suddenly unutterably weary. I’m no further forward. Cal’s ill. I don’t know if Priska’s OK or not. I can’t trust anyone. He slumped against the wall of the corridor and closed his eyes for a second.

The ping flashed like a beacon against the darkness of his eyelids. SymbioNor: Urgent. Quill opened his eyes. He could tell that Bowen had received a message at the same time. Quill blinked the message open.

Habitat Engineer Aquilla O’Neill, you are requested to attend a meeting with Personnel Officer Solveig Lund at 1500. Meeting location: 5-G-B2. Priority 2.

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