Lockout

CHAPTER FORTY

Aboard Pangia 10 (0320 Zulu)

“Nothing new happening up here!” Carol yelled, and Dan nodded as he sat on the floor of the electronics bay, glancing at the passenger who had been invaluable in helping solve an impossible riddle.

Frank nodded, too, his smile quite thin, the tension starkly transmitted by the tightness of his facial muscles. Small talk was difficult in the constrained space with the noise levels of cooling fans and slipstream, and Dan averted his gaze back to the strange cabinet, determined to give it a few more minutes before deciding precisely where they were in the process. The satcom antenna leads were dangling loose where he’d left them nearly a half hour before. No further orders could be received from anywhere as long as those two halves were disconnected, if there had indeed been any external control to begin with.

But that same nagging feeling that he hadn’t thought this through enough was rising again, the same feeling he had when playing chess and a gleeful move to place his opponent in check was about to turn out to be premature—the opponent poised to take advantage of the one move he’d failed to consider.

Why am I assuming there is a person on the other side of this nightmare? Dan thought, wondering if the personification of a nemesis wasn’t obscuring some larger truth. Why would anyone or any entity do this to us?

Carol’s head had disappeared from the hatch, and Dan found it suddenly unsettling to not see her there. He had all but ignored the beauty of her auburn hair cascading down through the hatch, so great was his forced discipline to concentrate on the nightmare at hand. Nothing wrong with concentrating! We’re in trouble. No time for thinking sex-related thoughts, although she was a very attractive woman. But here he was facing an uncertain future, his mind suddenly grasping for relief—something good to think about—and Carol’s femininity triggered a moment of regret that he’d paid far too little attention to his love life in the past few years.

My alleged love life, he thought, triggering a random pain that echoed back to his teens and threatened to open doors of longing he’d long since tried to nail shut. He forcibly switched off those thoughts and turned his mind back to the life-threatening dilemma at hand.

There’s always a reason for anything that takes time and money, and whoever built this thing obviously has a huge investment in it working. But to do what? Kill us?

Dan looked at the cabinet again. Obviously designed to switch off the cockpit and hand the control to… someone? What if, he mused, it was a two-stage deal? First, remove control from the cockpit, then stage two, switch the active control to someone on the ground through satellite interface? What if only stage one had occurred, and that had been an accident?

And what if someone below was trying to “fix” that mistake right now and reverse stage one?

The two disconnected ends of the satellite communications antenna were suddenly mocking him, and Dan called Frank out of his brief reverie as he pointed to them.

“Follow my logic. We disconnected and nothing has changed for a half hour. That proves we weren’t under active control, so it should be okay to reconnect, especially if someone below accidentally triggered this thing and might try to use a satcom signal to reverse their mistake.”

“So… reconnect?” Frank asked.

“Yes. Why not?”

“How much time do we have?”

“Before what?”

“Before running out of gas.”

“Maybe two hours. Maybe a bit more.”

“Then we should do it quickly,” Frank said.

“Agreed,” Dan replied, adjusted the gloves, and grabbed the two ends, screwing them back into uniformity.

When the job was complete, Dan sat back, aware Frank was looking at him.

“What?”

“That was precisely my question, Captain. What do we do now?” Frank asked.

“We start experimenting again and yanking relays, as fast as we can.”