Far Horizon (Juggernaut #4)

Two

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?'