C10 Coverup (Patreon)

I'm flying! Perhaps another dozen or so Executioner's Gambit scenes and we'll have a new draft!

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Tori rubbed her face. “Okay, we need paper and pen.” The captain handed her a tablet, but she hesitated. “I’d rather use something we can toss in the recycler, so there’ll be no evidence left behind.”

“I’m already planning to dispose of this one,” said Gutassi. “That’s the tablet with the radiation images, the one that Doctor Amhela used to research.”

“Fine,” she said. She set the computer on the desk and pulled up a seat. The other three hovered around her. Pulling up a blank page, she said, “First, let’s deal with the emergencies. Why did we shut down the trinity yesterday?”

“To keep Troykintrassa from contacting Krakuntec,” said Captain Gutassi.

Tori glared at him for a long moment. “What plausible excuse do we have,” she asked a second time, “for shutting it down while the commissioner was still here?”

The captain looked properly shamed for a moment before he returned to his pacing. “Well, the commissioner ordered us to take it offline.”

Engineering Chief Onaha frowned. “Ordered us?” she asked. “Knowing full well he’d be stuck here until it came back online?”

“Commissioner Troykintrassa was so pissed that the reactor was underperforming,” the captain suggested as he paced, “that he insisted that we start the rebuild immediately, and that he would supervise the entire process, personally. He said that if a single screw went missing, he’d toss the whole engineering team out an airlock.”

Tori leaned back slightly. “Okay, that’s an admittedly ‘krakun’ way of handling a problem, but then the rebuild didn’t happen, and he overrode the trinity controls, taking it back online.” She let the words hang in the air for a moment before adding, “Why?”

The officers stared at their paws for a while. Eventually, Druka asked, “Because he got sick and wanted to go home?”

The captain shook his head. “I don’t like that. We shouldn’t admit that he was feeling sick. That gives the investigators too much truth, too many things to dig into. We can’t let them suspect he was poisoned.”

“I don’t like anything about this lie,” said Tori in frustration. “A rebuild takes even longer than seventeen hours, but the trinity was down for exactly that much time—not to mention that you haven’t rebuilt it, so it’s still underperforming. A newborn cub could see through this sham.”

“So, what should we tell them, Tori?” asked the engineering chief.

“Well,” she said, “simple lies are better than complex ones. How about, ‘The commissioner was pissed about the reactor and ordered it rebuilt. We brought the trinity offline to start work on it, and that pissed the commissioner off even more. He didn’t want to get stuck here. So, we scrapped the rebuild plan, waited until we could bring it back online, and he left.’ Can we conceal that he did the override?”

“I believe so, but it’ll be trickier without Computer Chief Nija,” said Gutassi. “I can tell them that it was a communication problem. I meant to take it offline once the commissioner left, and some junior officer thought I wanted to start immediately.”

Tori frowned. “The fewer we bring into this, the better. You overreacted. You ordered it offline without waiting. You pissed the commissioner off.”

Gutassi’s ears hung low. “But I wouldn’t have,” he said. Everyone glared at him, so he quickly backed off. “Fine. The commissioner was a lot scarier than his nephew. I panicked. Happy?”

“Not even remotely,” grunted Tori. “Okay, next order of business: We have to start that rebuild now. We screwed up by starting it early, so we should have restarted the process the moment he passed through the gate—and that was seven minutes ago. Besides, we must be offline before they realize that the shuttle is going to crash. Once they know there’s going to be an investigation, they’ll expect us to stay online, and we desperately need that time to get rid of evidence.”

# # #

“I want to start with a little environmental terrorism,” Tori casually told the engineering chief.

“Terrorism?” coughed Onaha.

“Yeah, if Krakuntec sends someone out to investigate, then I want them to hate it here,” said Tori as she tapped down the corridor with her cane. “I want them to be so eager to go home that they’re not going to dig very deep, just a slap-dash job to get out of here.”

“Okay, I love it,” said the engineer with a grin. “How?”

“If krakun like it hot, then we set the environmental controls as cold as we can stand. If they hate the smell of bleach, then we sanitize all the decks with it,” explained Tori. “They like bright, we go dim. They like dry air, let’s get a mist going. Smoke, noise, anything, so long as we can reasonably declare that systems are acting up, and we’re working on a fix.”

“No sulfur in the air, a rumble too low for us to hear, maybe infrared or ultraviolet light?” Onaha snapped her fingers. “We keep six gravity generators perfectly phased on the commissioner’s stateroom so it will feel light and airy for them. If we misalign them, it’ll feel like a lump in their stomach or a tightness in their shoulders.”

“Perfect,” said Tori, “so long as it’s plausible. It must not look like we’ve done it on purpose.”

“I’ll get right on it.”

“No, assign someone you trust,” said Tori, “because this is a huge problem that I want you focused on.” She pointed her cane at roughly belly-level, the door’s rough edge was jagged and melted from being welded shut and then cut back open.

“It’s aluminum,” explained the chief, running a pad across the surface. “We grind it down, buff it up, make it look good as new.”

Tori turned to her. “No, that’s the problem,” she said. “If the door is old and dusty, but this one spot is shiny and clean, then you might as well circle it with spray paint and set up a neon sign that says, ‘hiding something’,”

The older gal stroked her chin. “We could tell them someone backed a runabout into it, dented the metal, had to be repaired.”

Tori thought for a moment before shaking her head. “No, too risky. Have someone actually do it. Dent it good. Wreck an actual runabout in the process,” she said, “and don’t neglect the paperwork. If someone gets so much as a bruise in the crash, send them to med bay, document the accident, injuries, repairs, and everything. Then, make the whole team sit through a boring refresher course on safety so it never happens again.”

Onaha scowled. “You’re just trying to make my guys hate me.”

“Good,” grunted Tori as she hobbled into the commissioner’s stateroom. Over her shoulder, she added, “If they curse your ancestors every day for a year, then that means they lived to do so.”

“Would you rather I do it myself?” asked Onaha. “We’d bring one less geroo into the conspiracy that way.”

“Absolutely,” said Tori as she looked around the commissioner’s stateroom. “If it’s plausible that you’d be driving it, then do it, but not yet. There’s a lot for you to oversee.”

When Onaha followed her inside, she gasped, “Oh, jeez!” Her ears wilted flat, and a terrible case of dry heaves threatened to drop her to her knees.

“What? What?” asked Tori, her eyes shifting quickly between the room and the older gal.

“It stinks in here! How can you not smell that?” asked the chief engineer. “Smells like the commissioner crapped all over the deck then lit it on fire.”

Tori sighed, feeling sorry for Troykintrassa once more. “He might very well have,” she said. “The first bit, about the deck, not the lighting-it-on-fire part.”

Onaha managed a weak smile.

“Put a team in hazmat suits and have them scour every centimeter of the bathroom with high-pressured steam. Recycle everything that’s not bolted down. If you get any of the carpet in here wet, cut it out and recycle it too.” She pointed at the open drink container. “Recycle that. Scrub every surface. Recycle every rag, every brush, bucket, spray bottle, their hazmat suits, cleaning equipment, anything that might have been contaminated.”

“Recycler’s down. Trinity is offline,” Onaha reminded her.

Tori nodded. “Fine. Load it all in bags. Stack the bags on pallets. Put the pallets on the conveyor belt at the mouth of the recycler. The moment the trinity comes back online, all that evidence needs to be a cloud of ions.”

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Reviewer's link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/108qd7G1ARLhdjd6aEdE1rMS6ixOEIYCMWxBtdwt6S7A/edit?usp=sharing

Thoughts?