Chapter 8 - The Chase

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”

—H.P. Lovecraft

Luca's hands went numb around the communicator. The understanding landed like a punch. Something on their ship had been running the whole time, something they'd never even thought to check.

"Dad, I –" he started, but the transmission cut out in a burst of static. "Fuck." He stared at the dead comm unit.

He slammed his hand against the console and immediately regretted it. The bridge fell silent except for the hum of electronics and the distant vibration of the engines. Everyone was looking at him, waiting for their captain to figure out what the hell they were supposed to do next.

"Dad thinks we're being tracked," Luca announced. He was too fucking tired for games, but at least the headache was finally subsiding. "Something on the ship that's been running continuously since we launched. Something that wasn't affected by any of the sabotage."

Ryan ran his hands through his sandy hair, leaving it sticking up at odd angles. "Tracked how? By whom?"

"The same assholes who sent those shuttles after us," Luca said. "The ones who sabotaged our systems in the first place."

Zoe looked up from her navigation console. "So we find it and we kill it."

"Easier said than done," Danny muttered. He shoved aside two coffee mugs and spread the ship's electrical diagrams flat across the bridge table. Danny in engineer mode was a different person, all focus and no blinking. "Could be anywhere. Hidden in any component."

"Let's think about this logically," Emily said, moving to the table. "What systems have been running without interruption? What hasn’t gone offline since we boarded?"

Luca started pacing, his boots clanging against the metal deck plates. The sound helped him think, gave him something to do with his hands while his brain came up empty. "The reactor stayed online after we started it up."

“After we started it,” Ryan said. “It can’t be it.”

"Too obvious," Chris said, shaking his head.

"Communications?" Joey suggested.

"Went offline twice," Zoe replied immediately. "Remember? We lost contact with the platform completely for hours."

“That wasn’t us, that was them,” added Emily. “Think it’s outside the ship?”

“Don’t… Em… why?” Luca groaned. “Can you not?” He rubbed his face. “It has to be inside the ship.” Because if it wasn’t, they’d have to go EVA… and that was dangerous as fuck.

Ryan grabbed the maintenance log sheet from under the electrical diagrams and held it up, squinting at Danny's handwriting. "Life support cycled off and on multiple times. Navigation was down for thirty minutes during the electrical fire. Main thrusters were completely offline until we fixed the transformer."

Nothing fit because every system on the ship had crapped out at least once. So what the hell was Dad talking about? Something that never failed on a ship where everything failed.

"Think, you dumbass," Luca muttered, pacing harder.

Emily was already rattling off possibilities. "Fusion backup batteries stayed online. Emergency lighting never failed. Hull integrity sensors... what about those?"

"Wait," Danny said, loud enough to stop everyone. He was staring at his tablet, his freckled face pale in the blue glow. "Wait, wait, wait."

He looked up. "The gravity generator."

Luca stopped pacing. It was the gravity generator.

"That's been running this whole time," Danny continued, straightening as he talked. "Constant gravity. Never fluctuated, never even hiccupped."

"I never even thought about it," Emily said, shaking her head. "Gravity is... there. Background. Invisible."

Danny spread the large papers across the table and traced a finger through the ship's technical diagrams. "The gravity generator has distributed emitters along the central spine of the ship. Superconducting coils generate a controlled graviton field through quantum flux manipulation."

"English, Danny," Luca said, though he was already moving to look over his shoulder. Half the words hadn't registered. The other half sounded made up.

"Sorry." He grinned. "The gravity system is spread throughout the ship, but it all feeds back to a central core. The Subspace Field Resonator, we call it the Grav Core. It's like the brain of the whole system."

He highlighted a section in the middle of the electrical diagrams, a complex schematic that looked like a three-dimensional spider web. "If someone wanted to hide a tracker, somewhere it would never be found, somewhere it would have constant power and perfect integration with ship systems, this would be it. Shielded from internal systems, but with access to the exterior of the ship."

"Where is it?" Luca asked, studying the diagram.

"Below Engineering, sublevel D," Danny replied. "Deep in the ship's belly, beneath the cryoplant, adjacent to the GravCon CPU bank. It's buried under about fifty layers of other critical systems."

Chris leaned over to get a better look at the schematic. "How do we get to it?"

"Maintenance shaft from the engineering deck," Danny said, tracing a route with his finger. "It's not going to be comfortable. The whole area is designed for automated maintenance, not human access."

Luca stared at the diagram. Danny was right. They'd never once questioned gravity because it was just there, background noise so constant nobody thought to check it.

"Alright," Luca said, and the captain voice came out before he had time to second-guess it. "Zoe, you stay on the bridge. Keep us navigating through this asteroid field. Emily, maintain radio contact with the extraction team."

"Extraction team?" Ryan asked, raising an eyebrow.

"You, me, and Danny. We're going down there to find that tracker and rip it out." He turned to Chris and Joey. "You two search the backup systems. Fusion batteries, emergency power cells, anything else that might have stayed online."

Everyone moved. Nobody argued. That part still caught him off guard sometimes.

If they were wrong about this, if the tracker was somewhere else, they were flying blind with a target painted on their hull.

Ryan and Danny headed out of the bridge, already discussing the best route to the maintenance shaft.

Emily waited until the others cleared the bridge before stepping closer. She smelled like recycled air and coffee, and Luca's brain helpfully decided to notice that instead of focusing on the crisis.

"Luca, let them do their job. They know what they're doing."

"This is my job too," he said, quieter than he meant to. "There's a tracker down there. We don't have time to second-guess every decision from up here."

She held his eyes for a second longer than necessary, then nodded.

Someone had placed a device on his ship, and that couldn't stand.

---

Luca pulled on his work gloves as they reached the hatch. Danny knelt beside a wall panel, pulling up the detailed schematics on his tablet.

"Engineering sublevel D," Danny announced, his voice echoing slightly in the narrow corridor. "Access is through this maintenance shaft. Should put us right next to the gravity control systems."

Ryan grabbed the heavy wheel that secured the hatch and started turning it counterclockwise. "You know," he said, grunting with effort, "when I signed up for this mission, I thought I'd be fixing engines and maybe jury-rigging some exotic alien technology. Nobody mentioned crawling through the bowels of our own ship like a fucking gopher."

"Could be worse," Luca said, checking his flashlight and radio. "Could be crawling through alien ship bowels."

"That would be cool," Danny muttered, adjusting his gloves. "Puts things in perspective, doesn't it."

The hatch opened with a metallic clang that made Luca flinch. Below them, a narrow ladder dropped into darkness, its rungs swallowed well below the reach of their flashlights. The air rising from the sublevel hit his face like opening an oven, and the hum of machinery below vibrated in his molars.

"Ladies first," Ryan said with a grin, gesturing toward the opening.

"Fuck you," Luca replied, but he was already swinging his leg over the hatch rim. "If I fall and break my neck, you're explaining to Emily why I became a pancake."

"Deal," Ryan said. "I'll tell her you died heroically, saving the ship from certain doom."

"Don't forget 'devastatingly handsome,'" Luca called back as he started down the ladder. "That's important for the official record."

Danny followed him down, his tablet secured in a protective case strapped to his belt. "You know what's crazy?" he said, his voice echoing in the shaft. "We're literally swimming through an artificial gravity field right now. The emitters are all around us, manipulating spacetime itself to keep us pressed against the ship's decks instead of floating around like idiots."

"Thanks for the physics lesson, professor," Ryan called from above them. "Very reassuring to know we're surrounded by spacetime manipulation while crawling through a metal tube."

"It's perfectly safe," Danny protested. "The field strength is calibrated to exactly one standard gravity. The worst that could happen is…"

"Don't," Luca interrupted. "Don't finish that sentence. Every time someone says 'the worst that could happen' on this ship, something explodes."

"This way," Danny said, consulting his tablet and pointing down the tunnel. "The Grav Core should be about fifty yards through here."

The flashlight beam caught more pipes and wires, the same tunnel repeating itself. The tunnel was spotless, which somehow made it worse. Luca felt like he was being slowly digested.

"How you doing back there, Ryan?" Luca called over his shoulder.

"Peachy," came his muffled reply. "Enjoying the view, captain. Spacious accommodations."

His radio crackled. Emily's voice cut through the static. "Luca, how's your progress?"

"We're in the maintenance tunnels," Luca replied, pausing to catch his breath. "Should reach the Grav Core in about ten minutes."

"Copy that. Zoe says we're still on course through the asteroid field. No contacts on sensors."

"Good. Any word from Chris and Joey?"

"They're checking the backup power systems on deck two. No luck so far."

Luca crawled on, taking Danny's directions through a maze of tunnels that all looked exactly the same. Heat built as they neared the gravity systems. Sweat soaked through his collar despite the ship's environmental controls.

"Question," Ryan said from behind him. "If we find this tracker thing, what's to stop whoever planted it from just having another one somewhere else?"

"Nothing," Luca admitted. "But at least we'll know we found it. Maybe Danny can figure out who made it, where it came from."

"I can try," Danny said. "Most tracking devices have manufacturer signatures and component markings. If I can get a good look at it, I might be able to trace it back to its source."

The tunnel ahead opened into a wider space, and Luca could see the blue glow of the gravity system's monitoring displays. The vibration in the walls was stronger here, a constant thrumming he could feel in his teeth.

"Almost there," Danny said, dropping his voice. "The Grav Core chamber should be just ahead."

Luca crawled faster, eager to get out of the cramped tunnel and into something resembling open space. His shoulders burned from the crawl, and his knees had given up protesting the metal grating.

The gravity core looked like a chest freezer someone had bolted into the floor of a spaceship. Waist height, brushed steel, thick conduits and coolant lines clamped to every surface. For something that literally bent spacetime to keep them all from floating into walls, it was profoundly boring to look at.

Luca pressed his palm to the nearest panel anyway. It hummed under his hand, cold enough that a faint static charge pricked through his glove. Okay, maybe it was less boring up close.

Danny was scanning the various control manifolds and sensor arrays. "The tracker would need to interface with the feedback sensor array," he muttered, more to himself than to them. "Somewhere it could monitor the core's operational status and piggyback a signal onto the gravity field fluctuations."

He stopped at a control manifold on the far side of the chamber, pointing to a cluster of sensors and monitoring equipment. "There. The GravCon feedback sensor array. That's where I'd put it."

Luca followed his pointing finger and immediately saw the problem. The sensor array was housed behind a narrow panel, barely wide enough for a person. The opening was maybe eighteen inches square, surrounded by sharp-edged circuitry and humming power conduits.

"You've got to be kidding me," Luca said.

"It's the only way," Danny replied apologetically. "The sensor array is designed for automated maintenance. No human access was ever planned."

Ryan was already unpacking his toolkit, pulling out a collection of small tools. "This is why they pay you the big bucks, Captain. Time to earn that hazard pay we're not getting."

Luca knelt beside the service hatch and looked at the opening. The space beyond was dark except for the faint glow of lights. He could see the sensor array deeper in the housing, a collection of circuit boards and monitoring equipment that looked impossibly delicate and expensive.

"Radio check," Luca said, activating his comm unit. "Emily, you copy?"

Her voice came through clear, and something in his chest loosened that he hadn't realized was tight. "Copy, Luca. How's it going down there?"

"We found the sensor array. I'm going in to look for the tracker."

"Be careful," she said. "Take your time."

He wanted to say something back that wasn't stupid. Nothing came to mind, so he just clicked the radio twice.

Luca squeezed into the service hatch. The metal edges scraped against his bodysuit, and heat from the nearby power conduits pressed in around him. His flashlight swept across circuit boards and monitoring equipment packed in tighter than it had any right to be.

"Easy," Danny called from behind him. "The sensor array is directly ahead of you, about three feet in. Look for anything that doesn't belong, anything that looks like it was added after the original installation."

He pushed deeper with arms extended, the flashlight clenched in his teeth. The space was so narrow he couldn't turn around, couldn't even lift his head without hitting a circuit board. Sweat ran down his face. His breathing echoed back at him.

"I see it," Luca said, his voice muffled. There, attached to one of the control manifolds, was a small black box about the size of a book. A faint red light blinked steadily on its surface, and he could see thin wires connecting it to the ship's sensor array. "Black box, red light. This has got to be it."

"Can you reach it?" Ryan asked.

Luca stretched forward, fingertips barely touching the edge of the device. The angle was awkward, and he had to work his shoulder deeper into the housing to get better reach. Sharp edges of exposed circuitry scratched against his arms, and the heat blurred his vision.

"Almost... got it," he grunted, fingers finally closing around the tracker. The device was warm to the touch, and he could feel a faint vibration through the metal housing. "Ryan, pass me that small pry tool."

The tool appeared in his peripheral vision, Ryan's hand extending it as far as he could reach. Luca took it and carefully worked the edge under the tracker, feeling for the connection points that held it to the ship's systems.

He applied gentle pressure to the pry tool, feeling the tracker's connections give way one by one. The red light blinked faster, accelerating its steady pulse. With a satisfying click, the device came free, trailing a few severed wires.

"Got it," Luca said. He let out a long breath. The tracker felt heavier than it looked, dense with electronics and circuitry. "I'm backing out."

A faint, metallic sound clinked somewhere behind them, echoing down the tunnel. Luca froze, the tracker still clenched in his fist. Danny’s light wavered across the walls; Ryan’s pry tool slipped from his numb fingers and tinked against the grate.

They all held their breath. Luca swallowed. “Did…you hear that?”

No one answered.

They weren’t alone.