"Ignition stable, mark."
Sam's voice came up the bridge intercom at 0623 in a timbre that was not her ordinary speaking register. The mark was a beat shorter than the stable. She had been working the propulsion console for forty-three minutes and her voice had moved into the close-throated register she used when the next word she said could be the last one before a problem became a crisis.
Jacob was in the copilot chair to my right. He had his hands flat on the armrests. Selmak was below the surface and would, by Jacob's pre-flight protocol, stay there for the entire flight.
"We're flying, Drew."
Jacob's voice. Not Selmak's.
I did not answer.
The strategic display in front of me switched from green-flat to amber-pulse as Prometheus crossed the threshold into low orbit at 0641. AURORA-7's strategic-layer was running clean. ATHENA-3's tactical-layer was running at eighty-seven percent baseline, the load-shortage I had noticed since the third-moon scan two days ago not yet resolved. The two AIs were on parallel rails. The cadence behind AURORA-7's voice in my skull had the half-degree settling she did when she was holding back capacity for the next ten seconds rather than spending it on the previous ten.
Hammond's voice came up through the SRD office feed in my earpiece. Brief. Director. Brief is clean.
"Acknowledged."
The first maneuver sequence executed at 0709. Three vector changes, a controlled deceleration, a re-vector at the apoapsis of a small elliptical pattern Sam had designed at three a.m. last Friday. The ship handled.
Then at 0734 the shielding seam developed a harmonic.
I felt it in my molars before AURORA-7 named it. The frequency was high and thin and it came up through the deck plating of the command chair and lodged in the bone behind my teeth. The strategic display flickered amber-to-red on the propulsion telltale at 0734:03.
AURORA-7's voice in my ear cut at a register I had not heard from her since the colony assault.
Director. Serrakin-substitute shielding harmonic resonance detected, 4.7 kHz, propulsion at one hundred and eight percent rated and rising. Recommend Pilot-Through tier two, twenty-three-token burn, eleven-second window. ATHENA-3 cannot interpret the resonance signature.
I did not look at Jacob. I did not look at the propulsion telltale.
"Do it."
Engaged.
The token-burn arrived in my central cortex as the warm pressure I had felt at the chair contact under the ice two months ago. AURORA-7 was now flying Drew-through-Sam at tier two, the AI piloting the human piloting the engineer at the engineering console, the chain operating in real time at the bandwidth ceiling my sync could carry. The fan whine at one point two kilohertz in the bridge was loud. The harmonic in my molars was louder.
Sam's voice came up at 0734:11.
"I have it, sir."
I did not pull the Pilot-Through.
The next eight seconds were Sam locking the harmonic manually at the engineering console with no AI assist. AURORA-7 was still in my cortex, ready to run her predictive correction the moment Sam's lock failed. The lock did not fail. The harmonic stepped down at 4.7 kHz to 3.2 kHz at 0734:14 and to 1.8 kHz at 0734:16 and to nothing at 0734:18.
"Sam has it," I said.
Pulling.
The token-flow disengaged. The warm pressure went out of my cortex like a hand letting go of a forearm.
"Resonance locked. Propulsion at ninety-six percent rated. Holding."
Hammond's voice in my earpiece. One word. Acknowledged.
I looked, finally, at Jacob.
Jacob's hands were still flat on the armrests. He had not moved them. Selmak had not surfaced.
"Good fly," I said.
"Good fly, Drew."
We were home at 0817.
The shielding seam at the hangar bay carried a faint scoring where the harmonic had stressed the joint metallurgy past tolerance. Tarn was on the platform before the dock clamps had engaged. He read the seam with his hands. He signed off on a revision spec at 1430 — the substitute plate would be re-engineered with a Tarn-specified harmonic damper, the revision would take seventeen days, Prometheus would fly with the existing seam under restricted flight envelope until the damper was in place.
Sam came off the ship at 0852 with two coffees and her hair loose at the back where she had pulled the comm bud. She did not stop at the rail. She walked to where I was standing with Hammond at the corner of the hangar. She gave one of the coffees to Hammond. She handed the other to me.
"Sir," she said.
"Major."
"Captured the harmonic frequency. Filed the lock pattern. ATHENA-3 wants the data when she's ready."
"She'll want it tomorrow."
"I'll have it on her console by oh-six-hundred."
She walked off. Hammond watched her go.
"Mr. Ramsey."
"Sir."
"Eleven-hundred debrief in my office."
"Yes sir."
Hammond's office at 1100 was darker than the SRD office because the blinds were half drawn against the morning sun off the parking lot. Hammond was at his desk. I was in the visitor chair two over from his. There was no third chair because there were no other attendees.
He let the silence sit for fifteen seconds.
"I had my hand on the veto, Mr. Ramsey."
I counted to four.
"I know, sir."
"Next time I won't."
"I know, sir."
He nodded once.
He picked up a pen and signed a memo on his desk that I did not read. He pushed the memo across the desk toward me. The memo was the formal post-flight authorization extending Prometheus's operational status under the restricted flight envelope until the harmonic damper revision was complete. I read it. I countersigned. I pushed it back.
"Anything else, sir?"
"One thing. Major Carter's engineering credit on the resonance fix. I want it on the formal record."
"Already drafted, sir. Walter has it on his desk."
"Good."
"Sir."
I stood up. I had my hand on the door when Hammond spoke again.
"Mr. Ramsey."
"Sir."
"The IOA precursor inquiry. Two of the names on the inquiry committee just signed off on the Prometheus authorization at the second-tier briefing this morning. The flight bought you seven months."
"Yes sir."
"You bought yourself seven months. I just got out of the way."
He did not look up.
I closed the door behind me.
I was in the corridor between Hammond's office and the SRD office at 1102 when I realized I had counted Cordesh's worst-case position automatically during the resonance crisis.
The realization came up sideways. I was walking. AURORA-7 had cycled back into the cool register. The corridor was the same corridor it had been at 1059, the lighting unchanged, the airmen at the second checkpoint unchanged. The realization arrived as a small piece of memory I had not consciously stored: at 0734:09, in the second between AURORA-7's eleven-second window and my do it, my central cortex had run a parallel calculation that was not Sam-related and was not Jacob-related and was the projected casualty position of one Cordesh, currently on long-haul Tok'ra patrol two sectors out, against the worst-case Prometheus-loss propagation in three theaters where Cordesh's cell would be exposed.
The calculation had taken zero point two seconds.
The calculation had completed.
The calculation had registered the soft-amber pen-mark on Cordesh's name from last night and weighted the cell's exposure accordingly.
I stopped in the corridor.
Drew.
"Yes."
The calculation was clean. The mark is structural in your operating model now.
"I know."
Director.
"Yes."
I logged it.
I stood in the corridor for a long count. The realization was that I had crossed a line I had not noticed crossing — the line where the names on the soft-amber list were no longer reminders I checked at the end of the day. They were variables in the math my mind ran at zero point two seconds during a resonance crisis.
I started walking again.
Walter was at his station outside my office.
"Sir."
"Walter."
"Major Carter's engineering credit memo is on your desk. Sergeant Siler has the Tarn revision spec for your signature by close of business. The Tok'ra liaison-rotation update is at line three of the inbox. Ms. Fraiser is asking whether you can be at her house at nineteen-hundred."
I looked at him. He held the inbox print-out.
"Tell her I can."
"Yes sir."
I went into the office. I closed the door. I sat at the desk. The Raytheon pen was on the blotter. The territory binder was in the safe. The soft-amber pen was in the drawer.
I picked up the Raytheon. I signed the Carter memo. I read the Tarn revision spec. I signed it. I drafted a response to the Tok'ra rotation update.
At 1158 I put the pen down. I sat with my hands flat on the desk for a count of ten. AURORA-7 settled at the back of my skull at the cool register.
The strategic display through the open door held the amber-pulse it had held since Prometheus had come back into atmosphere. The pulse was the operational rhythm of a fleet asset on restricted flight envelope. The fleet now had one ship. The math had a price tag on it. The price tag had a soft-amber column in it that I could feel without looking at the binder in the safe.
I stood up. I walked to the door.
⚜ ━━━━ ROYAL PROCLAMATION ━━━━ ⚜
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