Every single hygiene unit on Deck H was malfunctioning. Water was everywhere. Flooding the bathrooms, the cabins, and in one case, even coming out into the hall. Civilians were milling around in the central hub and outside their cabins. Some demanded to know what was happening. Others simply watched on with a mixture of bemused and worried eyes.

I could tell which passengers had a modicum of engineering know-how; they were the ones who looked concerned.

“How’s it going in here?” I asked as I entered yet another malfunctioning cabin.

“Same problem as the first dozen, Chief,” MacBride said. “As soon as I hook up the handheld comp, the system rewrites itself, and the corrupted code gets wiped.”

“But that doesn’t happen until we attach the electrodes?” I confirmed.

“Yep. Seems to need the direct contact, but it’s not as if the handheld’s rewriting the code. I’ve had this baby since year two of ESA training. It’s got some special features I developed myself. But as much as I hate to admit it, I’m not this good. The code that’s overwriting the corrupted line; it’s gorgeous, Chief. Never seen anything like it.”

I hadn’t either. The saboteur was extremely talented. It irked me. I let out a disgruntled sigh.

“Any strange messages?”

“Yep, captured this one for you.”

MacBride handed me his handheld. He’d managed to screengrab the message; which I was sure had vanished in the system by now.

“Screengrab,” I said. “Hadn’t thought of that. Well done.”

“Enjoy it while you can. That’s the third grab I’ve managed. The first two have already been wiped.”

I glanced down at the handheld’s screen, a sense of urgency thrumming through my veins.

for you, and any dear to you, i would do anything

I arched my brow.

“The first two messages said the same?” I queried.

“Yep. Seems he wants us to know he cares.”

I cocked my head at MacBride. I’d hardly call flooding more than one hundred cabins as showing his caring side. If, in fact, the saboteur was male.

I tapped the handheld against my thigh, trying to reason this out. The saboteur was growing reckless. But every single malfunction was fixable. In fact, it seemed the saboteur was fixing them whenever we arrived. As if trying to show off.

But then there was Daniels’ station in engineering. That could hardly be compared to making a few cabins flood. Had they made a mistake then? With Daniels? Or was this all some elaborate plan to run us ragged, so the next time main boost thrust threatened to fail, we’d be spread too thin to fix it.

Engineering, the mess hall, tactical on the bridge, and now a habitat’s hygiene system. None of this made sense.

I handed MacBride his handheld back and went to check on the rest of my team. Sanitation had arrived and was doing a good job of cleaning up after us. Not that we’d caused the water leaks. I wasn’t so sure, though, that the civilian population didn’t blame us for this. I heard several people bad mouthing the ESA.

I ignored their jibes and steadily worked through those engineers facilitating the correction of code in each cabin. I could hardly say they were fixing the error because they weren’t. The Chariot’s computer was, via the saboteur.

for you, and any dear to you, i would do anything

What did it mean?

I shook my head and entered the final cabin. An image of La Basillique du Sacré Cœur stared at me from across the pay-for-passage berth. A Frenchman lived here. I stood stock still staring at the reminder of my home, unable to look away from the iconic image displayed on the gel wall. It glowed. My heart ached.

Was someone really trying to stop us from reaching New Earth? These silly malfunctions didn’t seem the work of an evil saboteur. But engineering certainly did, and the galley came close to upsetting our precisely planned meals. We could produce more perishables, but everything was on a schedule, and disturbing it would have consequences. But not consequences that would stop us reaching New Earth.

And then I heard the raised voices. The pay-for-passage passengers who questioned our ability to run a vessel of this size. We’d already lost Vela. Anderson Universal was seen by most as the grandfather of space travel. They’d created FTL flight. They’d created the AIs that calculated the jump points, allowing us to traverse more of the universe than we could ever have hoped to do with just main boost thrust. They created the gel walls and the wrist comms and the many, many other things that made our lives bearable locked up onboard a spaceship, hurtling through the vacuum of space.

And this sector fleet was without an AU vessel. Without its grandfather.

Noah was going to have to address this. Convince the civilians that we had everything in hand. But so far, we’d been chasing after this saboteur. One step behind him all the way. We needed to get proactive, not reactive. But how did we guess where he’d strike next?

“MacBride,” I said, walking back to the cabin he was in. “I’ll leave you in charge here. I’m heading back to engineering.”

“Sure thing, Chief.”

“Comm me if you get another message.”

“You got it.”

I turned around and walked toward the central hub lifts, all the while being scrutinised by the civilian population. They outnumbered us. Vastly. Even here on this one deck, we would have no hope of resisting them should they decide to revolt. What revolution would gain them, I did not know. It wasn’t as if this was the 1790s in France.

Vive la révolution!

I shook my head and entered the lift, pressing the screen to direct it to Deck D. I hadn’t been lying when I told the captain that I had not read A Tale of Two Cities. But I had heard of the book and had an understanding of what it had been about. And, I thought, as worry swept through me, I believed it had been a commentary on the nobility’s arrogance during the 18th Century. Which led to La Révolution.

Not a pleasant thought. The saboteur was indeed sending us messages. I just had to figure out what they all meant.

I entered engineering finding a skeleton crew. After acknowledging those present, I crossed to Rat’s domain, entering to the sound of swearing and the scent of burned electrical wires. Smoke wafted up from his desk, sucked away by the air filtration system. There was an extinguisher standing at the ready beside his left hand.

“Rat,” I said, making him jump.

“Chief! Do you have to sneak up on me?”

“Get your nose out of your experiments and pay attention, then. Or should I knock? On the engineering door? You know, the door to engineering of which I am in charge of.”

He rolled his enlarged goggle covered eyes at me and then pushed the goggles onto the top of his head.

“What can I do you for?” he asked.

“Tell me why it’s smoking in here for starters.”

He waved a hand in front of his face, attempting to dissipate the smoke somewhat.

“Tried to solder a wire to a junction that’d bypass the Chariot’s computer when it tries to write a never before seen line of code.”

“You want to stop it fixing things?” I asked.

“Well, when you put like that.” He shrugged. “It shouldn’t be doing it,” he added in a disgruntled mumble.

No, it shouldn’t, I thought. But it was faster than us, and I was disinclined to prevent it from fixing major problems like the main boost thrust spooling down.

Rat placed his soldering iron on the desk to the side. The motherboard in front of him continued to smoke gently; a tendril twirling up towards the ceiling.

I followed it with my eyes, expecting to see it getting sucked out through the air filtration system.

It took a second for my brain to catch up with what it was seeing, and then an alarm went off out in the main room of engineering.

“Chief!” Crewman Mason shouted.

I spun on my heel and raced out of Rat’s room.

“It’s…” the crewman started.

“The air filtration system,” I finished for him, feeling dread pool in my stomach.

This was bad. Very bad. The alarm was joined by another. And then another. The entire room bathed in emergency red.