Chapter 1: Diagnostics

Eli had a plan, and his first order of business was to fix the stasis pod. He set the countdown for 334 hours. It had been an hour since Colonel Young had gone into stasis, which Eli had spent staring out the observation deck port, watching the mesmerizing flow of FTL, and thinking.

Mechanically, the stasis pods were set up in groups of eight, each group controlled by a central hub that could connect to twelve pods. The redundancy was built in as a fail-safe. He set Destiny to work, comparing every atom of the one that didn't work with one that did and, in a separate program, the hub that linked to the one that didn't work with one that linked to all its pods. He'd written his own diagnostics program instead of using Rush's. With it, the problem had turned out to be simple to diagnose but difficult to fix. The pod that wouldn't work had a bad capacitor and its hub had a bad relay switch. This was, essentially, a hardware problem, and to fix it Eli needed spare parts.

But there was a bigger problem. All in the last group of eight—Eli, Young, Scott, Rush, TJ, Chloe, Camile, Greer—were at risk if that hub couldn't switch connections as a fail-safe. The capacitor in Eli's pod had overloaded because of the bad switch, and if it could happen to his pod, it could happen to anyone's in that group.

In a ship this large, there must be other groups of pods. The Ancients had planned to board a crew of about four hundred people and there were only seventy-two humans aboard. Eli didn't have time to search manually for the other pods, so he put in the parameters of a hub and asked Destiny to identify all hub locations and plot them on the set of Destiny's blueprints that Camile had been compiling. He also asked Destiny to plot designated storage areas that might contain spare parts. To bypass any security clearance issues, he used the master command code to initiate the search program.

The console beeped. He had found both easily enough. Why hadn't Rush? Or had he found them and not said anything? That might be why Rush had volunteered to be the one who stayed out of stasis. Rush had had a plan, too. He hadn't wanted to skip the remaining two-thirds of this galaxy, true. Eli really didn't, either; he wanted to learn more about the descendants of Destiny II. But Rush was focused on Destiny's mission and he'd lost his small hold on compassion over pragmatism when Amanda was killed. He was dismissive of the descendants. He never brought them up in conversation, and if anyone else forced a comment from him about them, whatever he said was tinged with jealousy.

Rush had probably planned to sit in the chair, so he could stay with Destiny until the end of its journey. The only problem with that was the quarantine of personalities in the computer. When Eli had been forced to put Ginn and Amanda into quarantine, he'd set up a protocol that applied to all personalities. He hadn't mentioned this to Rush. If Rush tried to sit in the chair and turn to cold smoke, he'd be quarantined, too. If Rush had just wanted to get Amanda out of quarantine, that wasn't going to happen either. Eli and Ginn had the only key to open that door.

Focus, Eli thought. His analysis of Rush's motives could wait.

He looked back at the console and started examining the results.

Spare parts for each group of stasis pods were stored in a drawer at the base of its hub. Groups of pods were distributed throughout the ship. There were 512 of them, presumably sixty-four groups of 8. The 72 they had located when exploring were directly under three sections of crew quarters with twenty-four rooms each. These were the quarters nearest their command area, and among the ninety-six apartments they'd found so far.

Eli could just use the spare parts he'd located. He could fix his pod and replace the hub in about an hour, but that would require taking the other seven in his group out of stasis. He'd have to do that eventually, but discussion this early might nix his other plans. He decided to wait. There might be a better solution.

Since he was working alone, most other groups were inaccessible. They were either in unexplored remote sections of the ship, in areas that Destiny had locked for reasons of safety, or the path to them was blocked by locked areas. Access to the group of pods under the fourth section of the crew quarters they were using was blocked by a locked area. Eli wondered, since stasis pods were located under quarters in the exact number needed for the occupants above, if there was a way to access them directly from each section of quarters. Maybe a chute? An enclosed spiral staircase? A secret passage?

Looking for that, too, could wait.

Destiny had plotted three online hubs within the boundaries of the area of the ship they'd been using. That meant they had overlooked twenty-four stasis pods in the core area they'd been using daily since their arrival. Why had no one noticed them?

The only answer was that they must be hidden or disguised, probably for the security of misdirection since all three were in key areas. One hub was under the bridge, another near the clinic, and a third under the DHD console.

Countdown read 332.25.

Eli downloaded the updated blueprint to his laptop and set off for the bridge, glow stick in hand.