CHAPTER 42
May 3, 2094 (Earth timeline)
February 2, 2093 (Ship timeline)
approximately 2.25 light-years from Earth
1.87 light-years from Proxima
“Why is it that you’re waking me up, CHENG?”
“Sorry, sir.” Cindy Mastrano had hated having to wake the captain up again out of cycle. But this required it. She got straight to the point. “Captain, Gaines left us another present.”
“What the hell is it this time?” Crosby growled over his orange juice. From the looks of his skin color and the way he attacked the drink, Cindy figured his electrolytes and blood sugar were still extremely low from the cryo.
“The comms from home, well, something is scrambling them,” the CHENG explained. “We’ve tracked it down from antenna-to-screen and can’t figure out how and where it is happening.”
“Wait, you mean our communications from home are scrambled?” Crosby asked.
“Yes. We’ve spent two weeks trying to isolate and repair the problem. We even replaced all the modules with the spares,” Cindy said. “Nothing is working. We can see the signal plain as day on the spectrum analyzer, but it is encrypted to hell and gone. Without a key, I doubt we ever decrypt it.”
“When was the last data that we could read?”
“Just after the midpoint physicals. It’s like he knew when we’d all be asleep and not looking,” Cindy said. “If he somehow got this embedded in all the spares and components, which it looks like he did, we’d have to build a completely new comm system to fix this.”
“Do we have the materials to fix it?” Crosby asked.
“I don’t know, maybe, but . . . ”
“Well, spit it out, Cindy.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Son of a bitch!”
“Yes, sir. I agree.”