Malachi sat with his back to his workbench. His arms were folded. He wore a frown and mentally wrestled with the scene before him. His jaw clenched and unclenched as he tried to understand it.
Taking the Valkyrie apart had been easy at first. Panels had been removed and stored nearby. The armour, which being both an experimental ship and an interceptor, was intended more for system protection from micrometeorites than actual combat, had also been removed. The ship was now naked. Skinless. Its innards exposed for all the world - Malachi anyway - to see.
So far, so good.
And sure, it was going to be a challenge to put it back together again but that was why he had squeezed Ellie's ship into the same bay. That had only been possible because of their tapered profile. They now sat side by side, facing each other so the narrow nose of one craft was next to the broad thruster array of its twin.
But even as he had exposed the inside of the ship he found more secrets concealed. The propriety technology wasn't a surprise. This was an experimental military craft, after all. But it wasn't simply experimental. What Malachi found inside wasn't an iterative design; it was radically different. That meant new materials, new parts, new tech and unfortunately, new software.
All together he was looking at a ship he didn't understand, built with tech he didn't know, running on code he couldn't read.
And there was no manual. The flight system and firmware had turned up nothing. Malachi liked manuals. You could learn anything from a manual, that was sort of the point. He liked documentation and instructions and processes. They gave things order and context, and with enough of that he could infer the rest.
Malachi was left trying to infer a pattern from a single data point.
So he had called for help. He had never been someone too proud to ask for help. He wasn't Tila. He wanted results. He wanted to understand.
Malachi pushed against the floor with one foot and spun slowly in his chair to look at the code scrolling up his display in three columns. Text and symbols flashed in coloured groups and lines traced connections from one column to the next in seemingly random patterns.
His fingers bounced lightly on the keyboard, not wanting to commit to an actual keystroke until he knew what he was doing. His jaw still clenched, and his brain still fought to understand the data.
He liked things that made sense. None of this did.
He leaned forward and stared at the numbers.
After a minute he leaned back, oblivious until that moment of the face which was looking over his shoulder.
Malachi jumped, startled from his deep and confusing thoughts, and fell off the chair.
"I didn't know I had that effect on you Malachi."
"Nina! You're here. I was just thinking about you."
"Is that why you fell off the chair? Guilty conscience?"
Malachi pulled himself to his feet and straightened his clothes, subconsciously tugged his clothing to smooth out the creases with more care than usual.
"You're here to help?"
''With anything you need, so what do you need?"
Malachi cleared his throat to speak a reply but left it unsaid. He couldn't presume too much about their relationship. That wouldn't be proper. Best to stay all business.
Instead he rolled his chair over to the Valkyrie he had partially dismantled.
"This," he said.
"Oh my," said Nina. She walked around the naked ship and peered into the wires and chips and pipes that made up its interior. 'It's not as attractive with its clothes off is it?'
'Most things aren't,' said Malachi in the tone of one who has seen too much.
'Point taken. So what's the problem?'
'It's all a problem. I don't understand how it works together. You've done a jigsaw puzzle before, right?'
'When I was little.'
'Well this is like a ten thousand piece jigsaw puzzle that has the same picture on each side, and all of the pieces are missing.'
'Mal, you're always exaggerating things you don't understand. You just can't see how it fits together yet. When you do you'll realise how easy it was all along.'
'That's easy for you to say, you're the software expert.'
'And your the engineering expert. That's why we make such a great team.'
Malachi smiled a big beaming smile. He liked that description. He had always thought of Tila and Ellie as being his team, but Nina was different. Their relationship was... different. Nina complimented him in a way Tila and Ellie never had. They were like sisters. Nina was... better.
Nina crouched for a better look at the underside of the skeletal Valkyrie.
'You want to walk me through it?'
Malachi crouched next to her and balanced himself with one hand on the exoframe.
'I'm used to last generation tech. That's the best we can hope to find here, so I'm not exactly prepared for this. It's been a steep learning curve.'
'Such as what in particular? The core systems?'
'Not so much. They are newer and better. No surprise there. Way better, actually, but putting this back together again and making it fly is the easy part.'
'So engines, navigation, life support and so on, are all standard?
'Standard-ish. Familiar enough anyway. The hard part is the secondary systems. Sensors, jump engines and something in the code called flight profile. You heard of that?'
'No. Are you sure it's not just another name for a pilot assist feature?'
Malachi shook his head and stood up.
'I don't think so. Look at this.' He pointed to the wing struts. 'See?'
Nina peered at the mechanism he was pointing at. 'Not really. Is it the aerodynamics? The wings are unusually tapered for a space fighter.
'Partly, yeah.'
'So this is designed for atmosphere too? That's not so unusual. Even your Rhino can fly in an atmosphere.'
He laughed along with her at her joke. 'Yeah, like a brick through soup.'
'But that's not what you mean?'
'Look closer.'
'I see some internal panelling, a slat of some kind, is that a piston and a control surface?'
'Yep.'
'But it's inside the frame'.
'Weird, huh. Now go and look at the panels which covered this section.'
Nina straightened up. No wonder Malachi was stumped. Who would build a control surface inside the hull of a ship? She walked to the panels Malachi had pointed at and examined them. They seemed perfectly normal. The alloy felt lighter than she had expected but that wasn't a surprise. She expected military tech to be better than the civilian gear that washed up on their shores. She would have puzzled over the aerodynamics of the ship if she hadn't already known is was designed for atmosphere as well as space.
She said as much to Malachi.
'Now try and reattach it,' he said.
She hefted it up and walked back to the ship. Malachi showed her the correct alignment and the panel snapped seamlessly into place. She raised an eyebrow at the fine engineering tolerances.
'Ok, so that wasn't weird at all. What's your point?'
'Have you ever seen a panel that quick and easy to replace?'
'No, but I don't take ships apart and build them again. But neither did you until today. What does this have to do with the internals?'
Malachi pulled the panel off again and laid it on the narrow wing. He traced a narrow box on the panel with his fingertip.
'I think that if there was a gap in this panel about this big, those internal slats could come through the hole and change the shape of the craft. And if that shape changes—'
"It changes the flight profile," Nina finished. "But why? I mean, that's pointless in space. You'll shift the centre of gravity but increase the profile of the ship. You can't go any faster or turn any quicker. What's the advantage for a spacecraft?"
'If this had bigger wings it would manoeuvre like nothing I've seen before.'
'But only in an atmosphere. Those wings still wouldn't make any difference in space.'
'But they make this far a more versatile craft than I thought. It's rated for atmosphere as well as space. That's not common outside of transports and shuttles.'
Mal leaned in closer and pointed at something deep inside the fuselage near the wing framework.
"You see that?"
"What?"
"That valve right there."
"No, but carry on."
Malachi extracted his arm. "That's a fuel line connector. And next to it is a power distributor. But neither one is connected to anything. They feed off the main systems and that's it."
He waited.
"Umm. So?"
"So why is it there?"
"You tell me Mal, I just write the code."
"I don't know why. Who would design a ship with a system like that?
"You said these were experimental. Maybe they were working on more than one configuration?
"Maybe," said Malachi, but he wasn't satisfied. That answer made some sense, but at the same time it didn't. These weren't early production models built to test theories and manufacturing. These were late-stage prototypes. The only thing that really separated these ships from final production was the registration number.
'Didn't your little buddy Jayce say these were recon craft? They don't have any guns. Unless you found some of those hidden away too.'
Malachi snapped the panel back into place. The seam vanished.
'No guns. Maybe the experiment was only the wings. There could be other models I the line with weapons, but we have three of the four ships so it's unlikely the missing ship is armed.'
"You have two of four. You lost one in Praxis."
"That was Tila's fault, but it was probably for the best. Tila's not such a great pilot."
"Not as great as you?" teased Nina.
"I'm nothing special. Ellie's the genius."
"I think you're pretty special, Mal."
Taken by surprise, Malachi said nothing, and the pause turned into an awkward silence until Nina got things moving again.
'What about the rest of it? You can put it all back together I assume?'
'That's not a problem. Like I said, the core systems are pretty standard. Anyway, that's why I have Ellie's ship here too. I can use that for reference if I get stuck.'
'So that's not why you asked for my help?'
'No. I'm comfortable with the hardware.'
'Good to know.'
'I need your help with the software. The flight profile references in the code are only a part of it. There's other code that has no related hardware system. Power distribution for parts that don't exist and propulsion controls for another twelve thrusters. But that's not the exciting part. What do you make of this? He sat back on the chair and rolled back to the workstation. Nina joined him and sat in the second chair. Malachi tapped the screen with a fingertip.
Nina shuffled closer for a better look. The display was still updating the three columns and lines and coloured text appeared at random on the screen. She looked back at the Valkyrie and saw the data cables Malachi had hooked up drop neatly to the floor and snake across the workshop to his computer.
'This is live code?'
'I'm running it straight from the ship. I don't have anything to emulate that software. This is the only way I could do it.'
'That's not wise, Mal,' she cautioned. 'This is unknown code. It could be doing anything.'
'I sand boxed and air gapped my system. What else should I do?'
'Oh well, I suppose that's safe enough. So what is it? Is this the encrypted code?'
'No idea. It was encrypted but I used your tools to break that. It still looks weird to me. What do you think?'
She followed the code for a moment but it was as much a mystery to her as it was to Malachi.
'Can I see it from a cold start? I might be missing something.'
'Sure.' Malachi stood and climbed a short ladder to the cockpit of the Valkyrie. He leaned in and flipped a switch, counted to ten, then flipped it back.
Nina's screen fritzed out and flashed white. A long number appeared in the upper left corner before vanishing. Then code filled the screen, scrolling up so quickly the characters blurred. She reached for the keyboard. Like Malachi, she preferred physical input over voice commands. She could think at the right speed with her hands on the keys. When she was deep in analysis her voice instructions were jumbled and inconsistent as she tried to simultaneously understand what she wanted, formulate the instruction and speak it. Keyboards were so much easier.
She tapped in the commands and the display froze, and wound back to the start.
'It's a network handshake protocol.'
"You can tell that already?'
'Don't feel bad. I couldn't put that thing back together if you paid me.'
'Handshaking to what network though?'
'Did you turn the other ship on?'
'Uh, no. I didn't think of that.'
'Try it. See if they speak to each other.'
"Good plan." Malachi hopped into the second cockpit and turned on the power.
"You're too narrow minded," said Nina. "You see each problem in isolation unless you have a textbook that tells you otherwise."
Malachi unspooled another data cable and plugged it into Ellie's Valkyrie.
'Single minded, not narrow minded. Each problem should be attacked one at a time, otherwise you easily go off track.' He tossed her the other end of the cable.' Hook me up.'
"I thought you'd never ask," she murmured to herself.
Nina plugged the cable into a spare socket, and gave Malachi a signal. He triggered the start up sequence.
Nina tapped more controls and her display split into two horizontal images. The lower part ran through the same start up sequence she had just seen, but this time the code was different. She slowed down the playback and watched as handshake protocols between the two ships synchronised.
'See, I was right,' she said proudly.
'Right about what? You didn't say what should happen,' said Malachi.
'You know what I mean. They're networked now.'
'Like a jump surrogate routine?'
'Jump surrogates transmit system and navigation data along with some high level manoeuvre commands. This seems more complex, like it's designed to be part of a much bigger system with deeper integration.'
'So that's what it feels like,' said Malachi.
'What?'
'Having something explained to you that other people think is simple. Now I know!'
'Sorry to bring you down to earth. It had to happen one day.' She stared at the code, thinking through possibilities. 'You know, there is a lot of heuristic processing going on here. If we could... ' she trailed off. Her fingers continued to type and the screen flicked from one display to another. Malachi could keep up but he didn't understand what he was looking at.
'Heuristics? Like an AI?'
"Nothing as sophisticated as that, and you'd never get the hardware to run an AI in a ship this size anyway. But within limited parameters it can learn."
"How limited?"
"Anything related to flight systems probably. I'd need to run a deeper analysis of the code in a virtual environment. Actually two virtual environments. I'll need to simulate both ships to run a DCH."
"Don't tell Ellie I said this, but what's a DCH?"
"It stands for distributed control Heuristic. A non-localised learning AI. It lives through the network, not in any one node."
Silence.
"Mal?"
'Oh, sorry. I was thinking. How portable is this code. Could you get it to run on any systems here?"
"New Haven systems? Maybe. It depends on the core algorithm. If that can be ported or reverse engineered we could use it. Does that help you?"
"That would be a huge help. All our systems come from different ships. Some of them are running code thirty or forty years older than other systems. Even getting the same type and age of systems to work together is a challenge."
'Are you saying this spaceship can make our plumbing better?
'It's worth a try. What's the worst that could happen?'
'With plumbing? You don't want to know.'
'Okay, bad example. But still, it's worth trying, right?'
'I think so. Good job, Nina. You turned state of the art experimental military code into something that can flush our toilets better. You should be very proud.'
'Mal, you flatter me.' She smiled with mock coyness. 'But seriously, this could really help us out. It's worth investigating.'
'Ok, let's do it. Maybe we'll find out what it's doing on a star fighter along the way.'
'They're not fighters though, are they?'
'No. Slip of the tongue. Just recon ships I think.'
'Shame. If the Valkyries had guns on them we could do a lot more with them. The pirate attacks are getting worse. That's a bad thing to happen when your father has just opened a new trade route.'
'I heard. Maybe Ellie can do something about the pirates in the future once she graduates.'
'She's said yes to the academy?'
'In what universe would Ellie say no to flight school?"
'What did Tila say?'
'She's not happy about it.'
'Does Tila know about us?'
'Us?'
'Your own academy offer. I didn't mean us, us,' stammered Nina.
'Oh, right. Because you know, I thought you meant—'
'I didn't.'
'-us.'
'I didn't.'
Nina paused, waiting for Malachi to take the next step. He didn't.
I guess he hasn't read the manual for this either.
'You know, there could be—' she waited.
'An us?'
'If you want.'
Malachi thought, now or never. He leaned in.
'Am I interrupting?' said Tila, from the doorway.
Malachi groaned inwardly. This must be what Jayce meant when he complained to him once that Tila always found a way to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Malachi was sure that where Jayce and Ellie was concerned Tila's presence wasn't accidental.
'Yes, you are, actually' said Nina. "Have you been there long"
'Long enough. I just need to borrow Malachi.
'We're busy, Tila.'
'It can wait a minute.'
'What do you need, Tila,' said Malachi. He had already said goodbye to the moment.
'I've had a message from my mother. The rescue mission is almost ready. She wants us to meet her on Skygarden in a week.'
'A week? We don't have a ship.'
'She's sending one for us. All three of us,' she said, looking at Nina.
'Tell her,' said Nina to Malachi.
'Tell me what?' said Tila.
'Nothing,' said Malachi.
'Is it about the rescue mission?' said Tila.
'No,' said Nina.
'Then I don't care. You two can get back to your kissing or whatever it is you were doing.' She left as quickly as she had appeared.
Nina and Malachi looked at each other, unsure what to do next. They existed now in that awkward moment of unconsummated intimacy. It was something that nearly was, and now was not.
"Um," said Malachi.
"So," said Nina at the same time.
Tila walked back into the room.
"Malachi!" she shouted.
"What?"
"Your lack of action is killing me Mal. Just kiss her."
And then Tila was gone.
They kissed.