Blood Impulse

Part 31.1 - NIGHTTIME COUNCIL

18 hours later, Hyperspace, Battleship Singularity

It was the dead of night. Even for sailors with no terrestrial sun, there was such a thing. At least, the day shift crew tended to think so. The rest of the crew also quieted down during the late hours of ship time, so it seemed universal. Of course, the ship was fully staffed during all hours, presently now by the so-called graveyard shift, but this watch tended to be quieter than the rest. The most experienced officers – those that made up the day shift including Galhino, Robinson and Gaffigan – would be summoned if trouble arose, but the ship was always scheduled to cross dangerous territory during the so-called 'day' hours.

Some people liked the quiet of the night shift, but Zarrey didn't favor it. He tried to work his hours during the noisier parts of the day. However, the graveyard shift was good for one thing: during some fraction of it, Admiral Gives usually slept. It was the only time that Zarrey's small committee could meet without fear of being caught. And Zarrey, despite his own insistence that what they were doing wasn't wrong, would really like to avoid getting caught.

"Alright," he yawned, "let's get going. I'd like to go back to bed." This was the third night his inquiry committee had met at this time, and he admitted, with nothing to show for it, it was becoming tedious. Tonight, the constant FTL maneuvers the ship was undertaking as they traveled toward the Mississippi Sector were magnifying the misery.

Gahino looked tired and cranky. She'd forgone her uniform and draped a fluffy lavender robe over thin satin pajamas which looked severely out of place among the masculine decorations of Zarrey's quarters. By the lopsided state of her hair, she'd been roused from a deep slumber. Malweh didn't look much better off in a set of gray workout clothes that hung baggily off her round figure. Of the four of them, only Alba was in regular dress, and somehow, the kid looked fresh as a daisy. It must be the glory of his youth, Zarrey decided, lounging in his own sleeping clothes.

"I'm still digging through the computer's files, Colonel." Maria Galhino crossed her arms. "It's going faster now that the computer's up and running, but it's hard to check for anomalies when I don't know what I'm looking for." Ever since they had decided to look into the Admiral's secretive habits, she had been working with the ship's central computer. It had the largest database of any on the ship.

Galhino had already warned him in the form of a complaint that her work with the computer was eating significant amounts of time without much success. Still, the mention of the central computer reminded him of the day's earlier drama. "Why was the computer brought back on line early? Did anyone figure that out?"

"Definitely not for the lame excuse he gave you on the bridge," Galhino huffed. "He lied straight to your face. I was studying the location data for the Mississippi Sector, and no one else has accessed it since the meeting. The only information I could coax out of the computer's access records was that a slew of files were duplicated to an external drive. There's no way to know exactly which files without the authorization codes of the one that did it."

Malweh eyed Galhino with thinly veiled annoyance. She wasn't fond of the sensor officer. Sure, Galhino was talented, and loyal enough, but she was too confident to listen to anyone else or admit she was ever wrong. "They were educational files. Taken from the encyclopedic memory servers." She watched Galhino's eyes narrow, as if challenging her to prove it. "We couldn't access the encyclopedic memory of the computer without bringing it fully online. That's why repair priorities got shifted. He pulled that data to give to Amelia."

"And how, exactly, do you know that?" Galhino said, glaring at Malweh. Their contempt for each other went both ways. She found Malweh loudmouthed and obnoxious.