Tagrale - Desolate Stars

Chapter 2-1

2

“s**t!” shouted Jenna. “s**t, s**t, s**t!”

She kicked the wall of the corridor, which achieved absolutely nothing.

Damn it. Everything was going against her today! It had taken her another twenty-five minutes to complete her preparations, then something which should have been obvious struck her… she had no idea where the hard reset would be.

She knew where it was on the Vision, but even that decrepit old ship which she’d owned for years had only needed a hard reset once. That had been done while the Vision was docked and under the supervision of her engineer and friend Paula Kisling. Jenna had never imagined needing to do it on the brand new Hind.

She gave the wall another kick, wincing at the throb in her foot. Alright… she had to think it through. It wouldn’t be anywhere easy to get to, that was a given. It wasn’t the type of thing you wanted to leave just sitting around.

So it would be buried within the systems hardware of the Hind. That didn’t help a lot. Every starship had a lot of systems hardware, and it was spread through the ship to provide double redundancy, or even triple for the most critical systems.

She didn’t know the exact method of carrying out the reset either. It would be in the online systems documentation, but she was locked out of that along with most of the rest of the ship. Another dead end.

Frustration threatened to boil over again but she forced herself to close her eyes and take several long, deep breaths. She needed to think! If a system reset was ever needed when a ship wasn’t docked then it meant the ship’s systems were either suffering massive failures or had been badly compromised by an attacker. Either way, there was a fair chance the online documentation wouldn’t be accessible. Which meant there had to be a record of what she needed somewhere else, and somewhere that could be accessed in the most dire of emergencies.

Of course! The handbook! Every ship had one, but even when the Vision had been slowly crumbling around her trip by trip she’d never had any need to use the handbook. She couldn’t remember ever even checking it existed. She couldn’t think of anyone who’d had to use a ship’s handbook. Doing so would be an admission that the situation couldn’t get any worse. Hell, most times the ship would end up destroyed before things were bad enough to use the handbook.

Alright, so she needed the handbook to find out where to carry out the hard reset… but where was the handbook? They were always on the bridge, she remembered that much. Somewhere near the pilot’s chair, wasn’t it? Maybe. It was a start at least.

She set off toward the bridge, trying to remember if she’d ever even seen a handbook. She didn’t think so. Which brought another worry… if everyone knew that no one ever looked at the handbook wasn’t there a good chance someone had decided to just not bother with it? Why spend time and effort on something which no one was ever going to look at?

She reached the bridge and went to the pilot’s chair. It wasn’t anything special. Comfortable, yes, much more comfortable than the old and heavily used chair aboard the Vision. But with no obvious storage areas that could contain the handbook which she hadn’t already been aware of and rooted through.

She spent the next five minutes poking, prodding, pulling, and even kicking the chair. All to no avail. Part of her was ready to take the chair apart. Another part was telling her she couldn’t find the handbook because it didn’t exist. She was becoming pretty certain that was the case. If she didn’t need it so desperately then she’d have given up, but damn it she did need it.

She slumped down in the chair and stared at the console in front of her. Could it be located in there somewhere? It seemed unlikely. The top was covered in controls and displays. From experience aboard the Vision she was certain the section leading down to the floor would be packed full of wiring and circuitry. There had definitely been no handbook there in the Vision, nor space to keep it.

Why couldn’t they have a big sign somewhere pointing out where the handbook was? No, that wouldn’t work. She knew pilots well enough to understand that the space would quickly be cleared and used to house something more useful. Like snacks, or drinks, or just rubbish.

Alright. Think. She didn’t know where the handbook was. Most people wouldn’t either. So how could they find out? Ask the systems? How would that work if the systems were down?

Then again… did the people who built ships consider such circumstances likely or even possible? Her experience suggested they tended to have a blind eye where anything catastrophic could impact on their precious designs. Why plan for that when we know it won’t ever happen? A great view if you only designed the ships, not so good if you had to fly them.

She shrugged. What did she have to lose? She entered the query. To her surprise a reply came back immediately, one flagged as public — which meant anyone with access could get the reply.

The Handbook is located in the usual location, on the underneath of the pilot’s seat. Access is provided via a recessed button.

Under the seat? She stood up again and looked at it sceptically. Well, it might be able to hide a small book or data tablet beneath the padding. She’d not quite got to the point of ripping the padding off the seat. Now she just had to find the release.

She started by feeling and looking underneath the seat, then worked her way around the sides and over the top. Nothing. She carried on with the painstaking search on the seat itself, but without much hope. Surely she’d have noticed a release if it was right where she’d been sitting?

There was nothing. No release, no sign of a storage area and nothing else she could think of to try. She checked the data again and saw the same thing. On the underneath of the pilot’s seat.

Was she being dense and missing it? Was it not really there? Did she need to take her toolkit to the seat and open it up the hard way?

That didn’t feel right. The entry didn’t sound as if it was trying to mislead. It was very clear that the handbook would be under the chair.

She stepped back, studying the pilot’s seat. Could it mean under the arms? That seemed unlikely. But what else was there? The column that ran down was solid metal and thin, much too thin to contain anything major, and it was secured to the floor…

The floor! She slapped her forehead in frustration at her stupidity. Of course! The floor! That was underneath the chair. The wording of the clue was… well, it was typical of the wording shipbuilders used. Don’t say one word and makes things clear when you can use one hundred and make things a lot more confusing.

She felt around on the floor in front of and around the pilot’s chair. The flooring was hard wearing but soft which made finding any indentation more difficult, but finally she felt something.

She pushed at the button she’d found, finding that it was recessed slightly into an indentation in the floor. To stop it being activated accidentally by someone standing on it, she guessed.

A section of the floor beside the pilot’s seat rolled smoothly to the side, revealing three very large and very heavy looking books. She pulled the first one out. It was even heavier than she’d thought, heavy enough that she had to strain to lift it. She shook her head. This was what people were supposed to turn to in an emergency?

The first problem was what to do with the huge tome. She didn’t want to risk putting it down on the console — just because most of the commands were locked out didn’t mean they all were. Besides, it might even be heavy enough to damage something.

She looked around the bridge, but already knew there wasn’t anywhere with enough space to put the handbook down. Finally she shook her head again and put the heavy book down on the floor. She pulled out the other two volumes and put them down next to it, then sank to the floor herself.

Madness! What were people supposed to do if the ship’s gravity or flight was unstable? They’d be thrown around the bridge and so would the books. No wonder she’d never heard of anyone using a handbook — if they’d ever needed to the ship had probably been destroyed before they’d got as far as even opening the damn things.

The three books all had deep blue covers with a white number in the top right corner, running from one to three. Other than that they were completely plain. Jenna wondered whether anyone had ever opened them before.

As she lifted the cover of volume one she knew they hadn’t. She could feel the spine bending for the first time, the first page lifting slightly with the cover before falling back. And the smell… the smell dragged her straight back to her childhood.

Printed books were a luxury when all information could be retrieved digitally, but they were a luxury Jenna’s parents had been keen on. The thrill of opening a book for the first time, of knowing no eyes but hers had ever looked upon the pages, came over her again.

And vanished almost as quickly as she took in the densely packed text that began on the first page. At least it was an index of some kind, but there were hundreds of items even on that first page. No title, no introduction, no helpful hints. Just what turned out to be a few dozen pages of headings and page references.

She ran through it quickly, relieved the headings were at least in alphabetical order, but found nothing listed under reset, hard reset or system reset. She wracked her brains for other possible headings, checked them and still came up blank. Finally she admitted defeat… she was going to have to read each and every heading. All however many thousands of them.

She just hoped whichever i***t had given the section she needed an obscure title had picked one which was early in the alphabet…