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What took weeks would now only take days.
“It was no trouble.”
It really wasn’t. Most of the equipment on the ship had already been designed by him previously and he hadn’t had to foot the cost of the materials. So for him, it had just been a matter of building the ship, which he’d enjoyed. There was a slightly better than non-zero chance that he would build his own ship once he had settled in and could get to work.
Morgan half laughed and said, “Looked like it was loads of trouble, but we appreciate it.”
Kira echoed the sentiment through a smile and a slight squeeze of his hand. They bid Morgan adieu not soon after and checked in on the other crew members, even catching Jaden, rigging up purple paint.
Kira walked right by like she didn’t see what he was doing and Jaden pretended he didn’t see her, either. He offered a half wave at Quinn, which he returned.
Walking away, Kira turned her head and answered no one, “I will be down momentarily.”
Waiting another beat for the reply, she looked at Quinn. “Watson is retrofitting one of the shuttles. He needs my opinion on something. I can go down alone.”
“I can go. Unless you think it’s better I don’t.” He didn’t want to preclude her asking to avoid upsetting the A.I..
“If you can both behave.”
“I can behave.” There was very little that Watson could say at this point that would get under Quinn’s skin. The insecurities the A.I. had picked at regarding Kira were no longer a sore spot.
“Well, that’s one of you.”
He couldn’t speak for Watson. Well, he could, but he was fairly certain that if he looked up the A.I.’s inner thoughts, Kira would be rather cross with him. Thus far, he hadn’t done so out of respect for the A.I.’s core intelligence, and he saw no reason to violate that particular sanctity of thought.
Watson held up the tracking device for their inspection. “I had a feeling,” Watson said when they came in separately, keeping things professional. “That there was more than met the eye to their visit.”
The sight of the tracker made Quinn frown. If such a thing was on the ship, he should have detected it. His neural net blinked back on and he scanned over the logs. It depended on some kind of trigger. The device hadn’t sent its signal until they’d been in the same location for a few hours. Since it sent a subspace transmission, the Praetorians didn’t want it to trigger constantly, too high of a chance to get caught, but they couldn’t have it trigger randomly since subspace shots took time to line up. So, it had a sensor that could track time between jumps.
It had triggered, and he’d missed it because he’d been with Kira and his neural net had been off.
“They were more concerned than they let on then. They’ve never hassled us like this before.” Kira took the tracker. No larger than a little Bluetooth speaker and squared like one, but the tracking from it was great if you were in a good range.
Watson looked at Quinn when Kira spoke before returning his gaze to hers. “Yes, well, they’ve never had a reason to before. I’ve been monitoring chatter for Paradigm. They’re working with most governments doing a contract for repossession of property.”
“Well, I can reprogram the tracker to send a spoof signal so they don’t know we’ve located the tracker. That way, they won’t know where we are and won’t know we found it.” Quinn made a priority alert for any outgoing signals, not in standard broadcast frequencies. He kept his systems running. He’d die if that happened, but it could go into sleep mode and it had a small emergency battery that could save his life in the event of a strong enough EMP.
“Even with a signal like that, they still might have something on the device itself. Better to just jettison it as well.”
Watson gingerly took it back from Kira. “This may not be the only one. Leading them on for a few sectors will give us a chance to find them all and do it properly.”
“If there is more than one, they should all be of similar make and production if not identical. I’ll have my detection drones do a sweep of the ship.” It wouldn’t take long for them all, if there were more of them, to be found. He didn’t argue with Kira about the spoof signal. He could set it up in such a way that there was zero risk, but he assumed she was aware of that and was being overly cautious.
Kira nodded tightly. “We’ll scramble the signal then after they’re found and drop them on our next jump.”
The drone that Quinn had activated swiftly entered the room before anyone could speak. The floating octopus mechanical wonder grasped the tracker, scanned it, and broke down its composition for him so that it could be programmed for the others.
“Thank you, Quinn,” Kira’s voice still sounded tight.
“Captain,” Watson started, his voice overly gentle with her. “Should we move ahead of schedule? Jump a few sectors to put distance?”
Folding his arms, Quinn offered no comment on this as the scanning drone did its work. A diagram of the tracker and its components appeared as the ultrasonic vibrations mapped the interior components. Once he had a full analysis, he loaded the easiest to track variables into some drones and sent them whirring through the ship.
“I’ll call a meeting to discuss it.” Kira sounded distant.
“I’ll come once the scan of the ship is completed.” Quinn’s full on work mode had hit, preparing a multitude of counter measures should something like this happen again, he’d leave without so much as a goodbye.
KIRA
