Ch. 002| The First Arrival Report

Vale paused for a beat at the door of Captain Nova's office.

The door was open. From the corridor he could see a back, a knot of hair, and a document on the desk. The document was mirrored on the glass panel set into the desktop, face down, illegible.

But he could read the red line beneath the glass clearly enough — it was already running.

Before he went in he did one thing: he shifted the empty coffee cup to his left hand, so his right could slip into his right pocket and touch the corner of the encrypted touchpad. The touchpad held every pulse reading from hour 7:43 to hour 7:57, Janus's two "I don't know" replies, plus a single line Voss had just sent up from 14B: "I'm not sure."

Those three words — "I'm not sure" — Voss had never written in a report before.

He went in.

Nova didn't watch him come in. She was looking at the projection in front of her — a single page, titled "First Arrival Report Notice," in a typeface unlike any other document on the Daedalus. The seal of the United Colonial Bureau sat in the lower right corner.

Vale stood in front of the desk and didn't sit. The coffee cup — empty — was still wedged between the first and middle fingers of his left hand.

"You have two choices," Nova said. She finally looked up. "Lift the lockdown and come with me to the broadcast bay now to sign the arrival report. Or stand there and let me revoke your security officer code."

"I want to explain."

"You explain, I listen. The clock starts now."

She touched the desktop once. A red line surfaced in the lower right of the projection, running from zero toward 120. A hundred and twenty seconds.

Vale looked at the red line.

"Captain Nova. Kepler-942c, thirty-seven kilometers below the surface. Period seventy-two seconds. Amplitude narrowing, period narrowing. Janus can't estimate a false-positive rate."

"I've already read your file," Nova said. "Lieutenant, last time you saw a strange signal on deep radar, you escalated it within thirty minutes. That time it was a degraded battery. This time you didn't escalate — you locked it down. To me it's the same misjudgment, just running the other way."

"It's not the same misjudgment," Vale said. "That time I broadcast outward thirty minutes early. This time I'm holding an internal record back twenty-four hours."

"A difference the United Colonial Bureau won't be able to see."

"We're not talking to Earth right now."

"We are talking to Earth right now." Nova turned the projection a few degrees so he could see it. "This document was sent to the ship by the United Colonial Bureau two months ago, classified tier three — the first arrival report must go out within twenty-four hours of arrival."

Vale read the page through.

When he finished, he looked up.

"Why twenty-four hours?"

"Because Earth didn't ask us to send it. It's a sealed contract we signed before we ever launched." Nova pulled the projection apart, and a second document surfaced. The United Colonial Bureau seal sat in the lower right corner again, but this one was titled "Daedalus Sealed Contract," with a red "SEALED" bar across it.

"Four years ago, before the Daedalus launched, the command tier signed a 'Mission Performance Clause' with the United Colonial Bureau. Article Seventeen — within twenty-four hours of arrival, the ship's broadcast bay must complete the act of issuing the first arrival report. The timestamp of that act gets written into the ship's automatic contract log, which simultaneously triggers the contract beacon."

"Contract beacon?" Vale said.

"A closed channel, separate from ordinary messaging," Nova said. "It carries no data, no report — only two status codes, SIGNED or DELAYED. It's a faster-than-light experimental technology the Bureau only developed fifteen years ago. The power cost is so high it can't transmit a full sentence, but it can reach a screen in Earth's council chamber in real time. The report itself takes forty-one years. The status code doesn't."

"And what they see in the council chamber is just those two codes?"

"Right. SIGNED and the motion passes. DELAYED and the motion goes into risk review. The tenth colony ship is on the agenda at hour 28. If the Daedalus's contract beacon reads DELAYED before hour 24, the tenth ship doesn't launch."

Vale spun the empty coffee cup half a turn between his fingers, then gripped it again.

"They're using the Daedalus as a foot in the door."

"Right."

Vale didn't speak until the red line hit sixty seconds.

"Captain Nova."

"If the thing thirty-seven kilometers down is a living mass — with a heartbeat, a heartbeat that's accelerating, a scale we still can't estimate — then the 'arrival successful' report we send out is a forged certificate of acceptance. What the United Colonial Bureau receives forty-one years from now will be four words: 'He got it wrong.'"

"And if the thing thirty-seven kilometers down is a degraded probe, then the 'heroic security officer' who refused to sign is just the second entry on the résumé of the man from two years ago. What the United Colonial Bureau receives forty-one years from now will be five words: 'He got it wrong again.'"

Nova dismissed the projection. The red line vanished.

"Lieutenant, your explanation time is up," she said. "I'll ask you one question, you answer. If your answer holds together, we keep talking."

"Ask."

"Do you have a single piece of evidence that would make the United Colonial Bureau accept 'delaying the report.'"

Vale paused a second in front of that question.

Janus's light panel, on the watch face on his left wrist, blinked up two low lines of text.

Pulse four hundred fifty-five complete. Period 71.87 seconds.
Volkova has reached 14B. Dr. Voss has reached 14B. Volkova is listening.

Vale turned the watch face to the side of his body, an angle Nova couldn't see.

"No," Vale said.

"No." Nova repeated it. "Lieutenant, you're asking me to delay the report on the strength of 'no.'"

"I'm asking you to delay the report on the strength of 'no,'" Vale said. "Because this 'no' weighs far more than the 'yes' from two years ago."

"Why?"

"Two years ago I had four words, 'suspected biological rhythm' — the probe threw them up on its own. I believed those four words, and I lost," Vale said. "This time what I have is 'I don't know,' from Janus. Janus doesn't say 'I don't know.' Janus issues ten thousand decision recommendations a day, every one of them with a probability distribution. One 'I don't know' from it is worth those four words from two years ago."

"You're using an AI's 'I don't know' as evidence."

"I'm using the first time an AI has ever said 'I don't know' as evidence."

Nova's fingertip stopped on the desktop, and her light panel lit one cell. She didn't look at the cell that lit, but Vale saw it.

She was running her own query against Janus — how many times Janus had said "I don't know" across these four years of the voyage.

Vale guessed she wouldn't like the answer she got.

Nova pushed her chair back a centimeter, eyes still fixed on Vale.

"Lieutenant, do you know I have a daughter on Earth?"

"I'd heard."

"She's three. She won't remember me. She's waiting for the next colony ship. The next colony ship is the tenth ship's motion, and it opens at hour 28 after we arrive."

"Her father died four months ago," Nova said. "My daughter lives with her uncle now. The best decision that man ever made was sending her — she was still a teenager then — to the aerospace academy fifteen years ago. The best decision I ever made was getting my daughter onto the priority list for the next colony ship. When I say the next part, I'd rather you didn't interrupt — the priority list is conditional, and one of the conditions is that nothing goes wrong on this mission of mine."

Vale didn't interrupt.

"'Goes wrong' meaning I fail to sign the arrival report, or I sign it late," Nova said. "Regardless of whether the reason is 'the security officer held the lockdown.'"

Vale didn't answer.

"We're on the same ship, but we're not on the same side," Nova said. "I came here to get my daughter's motion for the next ship to pass. You came here —"

She paused a beat.

"— you came here to get the hundred thousand people on this ship safely down to the surface."

"Right."

"And now your 'hundred thousand safe' is in conflict with my 'motion passes,'" Nova said. "I'll give you a way out. I won't revoke your security officer code. But you cut the lockdown from twenty-four hours to eight."

"Eight hours."

"Eight hours."

Vale shifted the empty coffee cup to his right hand.

"In eight hours I can't produce a biological confirmation," Vale said.

"Then you can't."

"I can offer twelve."

"Ten."

"Twelve."

Nova didn't answer.

She sat back in her chair. The posture was her costing it out — faster than Vale.

"Twelve," Nova said. "But twelve hours from now you give me a conclusion, no more stalling. If it really is a living mass, the arrival report gets a footnote: 'Unconfirmed anomaly present on the planet surface, under review.' If it's not, the report goes out as originally planned, the lockdown record is wiped, and you won't get a second 'premature notification' hung on you."

"Deal," Vale said.

"But, Lieutenant."

"Here."

"If you can't produce an answer twelve hours from now, the report still goes. When it goes, you won't be in the command tower. You'll be sitting in your quarters watching. And after the report is sent, I'll sit down with you and we'll have a good long talk about what to do with you next."

Vale nodded.

Nova called the projection back. The red line reappeared, but this time it started at zero and ended at twelve hours.

"Go," Nova said.

Vale turned and walked to the door.

He paused at the door for a beat.

"Captain Nova."

"Here."

"Your daughter is three this year," Vale said. "My son is twelve this year. One of us is wrong, and when he's fifty-three he'll get a message from the United Colonial Bureau. If you're wrong, the message is 'a hundred thousand people on a ship are gone.' If I'm wrong, the message is 'his father held up the next colony ship.'"

Nova looked at him.

"Lieutenant, you're saying this to soften me up."

"No," Vale said. "I'm saying it to tell you that the decisions we each make, we each have to answer for them — to someone."

"I answer to the United Colonial Bureau."

"I answer to the red-letter footnotes Janus runs three times a day."

Vale walked out of the office.

In the corridor he turned left. A third line surfaced from Janus on the watch face:

Volkova has heard the second voice.

Vale stopped.

Volkova's reading: a response signal.

He'd finished that cup of coffee less than twelve minutes ago.

He dropped the empty cup into the recycling chute by the wall, turned left, and kept walking toward 14B.

【Ch. 002 End · the Daedalus, Nova's Office】