Chapter 7: Plans and Perils

In a large and mostly featureless room deep within Polaris, a place which very few people living or dead had ever seen, the sleek, oblong shape of the core chamber filled the slightly depressed floor at the room's center. It seemed to rest there, quiet and opaque, its smooth white surfaces and thick black glass gleaming in the dimmed lights of the room. It was large and vaguely circular, its widest point more than ten meters across, and overall it looked thoroughly alien in appearance. Nothing on its outer surface revealed what lie within, and what few small glowing lights and seams marred its nearly perfect shell gave nothing of its purpose away to the casual eye. Much about the core chamber itself, despite the years and years of intense study made of it by a select few, remained largely a mystery… As did its creator and first human host, Dr. Rebecca Marchesi.

When Anya entered the room she found both Sinclair and Dr. Chambal waiting for her, both men standing before the core and regarding it thoughtfully in the near darkness. For the sake of appearances, and because her paranoia was a finely tuned instrument that had saved her neck many times before, Anya had waited for a while before leaving Earth Monitoring to follow after Sinclair. There was no reason to rush after him and raise suspicions. She knew she would find him here, after all, and a small part of her had not wanted to have to listen to Dr. Chambal's dire pronouncements a second time.

"Did you tell him?" she asked, and the doctor nodded solemnly.

He looked tired, but not nearly as tired as the Chief Engineer did, and not half as weary as she felt deep inside. The past forty-eight hours had been the most disheartening and frustrating of her entire life. Not only had she lost Aden and Lexa, two people whom she cared about deeply, but she was also facing the complete derailment of her entire life's work. She was responsible for Polaris, as well as protecting the legacy of the artificial intelligence it was home to, and now it appeared as though she might have failed in that duty. It was a bitter pill to swallow, but, as ever, Anya was not the type of person to simply give up. She was too stubborn, and that was why she was here now and not getting some much needed rest, or drowning her woes in a nice bottle of black market vodka.

"Good, so now all of us understand just how serious the situation is."

She crossed the room, coming to stand next to the two men by the core, not looking at it as they were, but rather studying both of their faces carefully.

"Any change here?" she asked.

"Some," Dr. Chambal informed her, still not looking her in the eye, "The readings are all still dropping, but at a slower rate now. Of course, that hardly matters, as we hit near rock bottom hours ago already. As far as I can tell, the artificial intelligence is now in an almost complete vegetative state, to use another imperfect human analogy, that is."

Sinclair was not looking at her either, and she felt her ire rising at the air of despondency she sensed growing in the room.

They're tired… and they're giving up, she thought, the realization immediately igniting her renowned temper.

Anya Petrova loathed giving up… Rather, she detested it when others gave up. She couldn't actually remember ever having done so herself, personally.

"Fine, then there is no sense standing around here, staring at it and waiting for conditions to miraculously change. It's time for us to come up with a plan, gentlemen, and I need your help to do it," she informed them, the poorly concealed annoyance in her voice succeeding in finally capturing their full attention.

"Ma'am, with all due respect," Sinclair began, a note of tired pleading in his voice, "What can we honestly do at this point? The doctor tells me that the Polaris A.I. itself has essentially shut down. The only likely way to possibly revive it would be by making a new bridge chip, which no living person knows how to make, and which would be useless anyways as we no longer have any viable hosts left on the Ark… The last two living hosts, Lexa and Aden, are both trapped on the planet's surface. We can't even be sure Lexa is still alive! What's more, even if they do both manage to survive for longer than a few days, it doesn't matter because it's impossible to retrieve them and bring them back to the Ark… Hell, we can't even talk to them at this point! What do you suggest we do, exactly?"

The doctor was nodding as Sinclair spoke, his expression defeated. Anya glared at both of the men, her own frustration over what had occurred coloring her voice as she spoke.

"So we find a way to get the goddamn communications with the dropship fixed!" she growled, "Then we talk to Lexa, find out why the hell she got on that dropship in the first place, and what she and that damn A.I. were planning, and then figure out how to fix it! You are both educated men… You're supposed to be problem solvers, to be able to think outside the box, so why don't you use the brains God gave you and help me figure this problem out!"

Both men appeared slightly taken aback by her outburst and Anya forced herself to take a calming breath, knowing that her anger was mostly with the hopeless situation itself and not the two men before her. Regardless, her passionate words and ferocious glare had the desired effect, as they both exchanged sheepish looks and muttered apologies and promises to help.

"Alright, then," she said, crossing over to the room's sole table, taking a seat on one of the four chairs anchored around it and gesturing for the two men to join her.

"So, the communications issue… That seems like the logical place to start. There's no chance of learning anything useful that will help us fix our broken A.I. if we can't at least talk to Lexa. She's this thing's physical interface, right? She has to know something. I heard you brief Jaha, so I understand that it's the dropship that's causing the lost comms. What would be needed to fix it? Is it something the kids might be able to figure out on their own?"

"It's hard to say," Sinclair admitted, taking the seat across from her. "I recruited one of the inmates, Green, into Engineering just before he was arrested. He would be capable of fixing a minor issue, I believe, but there's no telling what the true cause of the blackout is. If it's due to physical damage, then the chances of them fixing it on their own are almost zero. We didn't send any tools or extra supplies of that sort with them on the dropship. It's impossible to fix something if you don't have the parts."

Anya considered this for a moment, then asked, "Well, then, how do we get them the supplies they need?"

Sinclair frowned, as though the idea had never occurred to him.

"Hmm, well, to be honest… We hadn't really considered that," he admitted, a hint of interest bringing some life back into his face. "I mean, we don't have any small landing vehicles that could deliver supplies like that to the planet's surface, and building something like that from scratch would be difficult, not to mention time consuming. It could take months to construct. We don't have that kind of time."

"Couldn't we, I don't know, just gently crash something nearby?" she asked, feeling a little foolish as she asked the question. She saw the two men share an amused glance at her words.

I'm a politician, damn it, not a rocket scientist!

"Gently crash something from orbit?" Sinclair echoed with just a hint of humor, a small smile turning up the corners of his lips. "No, I don't think that would work, ma'am. Anything we crashed on the surface would be almost completely destroyed. It's doubtful they would even find the wreckage, much less be able to salvage any useable parts from it for repairs."

A contemplative silence fell over the room and Anya could feel her earlier aggravation returning. No matter which way she turned these last couple of days, there only seemed to be more roadblocks confronting her. There was always another solution. A fix to any problem. She had always found this to be true in the past. Where others failed, Anya delivered. It was this underlying philosophy that was part of the reason why she had succeeded in rising to power so quickly on the Ark while still relatively young.

There has to be a solution we're just not seeing…

"What about the old emergency escape pod?" Dr. Chambal asked, surprising them both by joining the conversation.

"Escape pod?... What escape pod?" the other man asked, a note of disbelief in his voice.

"The one here on Polaris, of course."

Sinclair looked stunned at his words, excitement slowly building on his face as he considered them. Anya held her breath, hope returning to her as she watched the intelligent man's mind work.

"Of course… Of course! That's genius, doctor! The Polaris escape pod is perfect… It will need repairs, obviously, before it's safe to use, but it has a guided landing system and should go exactly where we tell it to. Also, it's a two person pod, so there should be plenty of room to put everything you could possibly need to build a working radio on the surface… Hell, there's probably room enough to even send a person down with it, if we wanted."

Sinclair was almost bursting with renewed energy by the time he finished speaking, and the mood in the room immediately lifted to one of relief.

"So that would work?" Anya asked, though she knew from his expression that he was already embracing the plan.

"Yes, I think so… And what's even better, the rest of the Ark doesn't know about the Polaris pod. It's completely off the grid! That's why even I didn't think of it right away… I forgot it even existed. Depending upon the timing of when we launch the pod, we might get away with concealing the fact that we did anything at all, and the rest of the Ark won't have a clue!"

"Maybe, but they will figure out something has happened when the kids suddenly have a working radio," she reminded him. "Depending upon who goes down with it, we might be able to conceal our involvement and confuse them for a little while, but the truth will come out eventually."

"To echo what you told me earlier, Ms. Petrova," Dr. Chambal intoned, "One problem at a time, please."

All three chuckled at this, their humor dry and short lived.

"How long will it take you to get the escape pod ready?" she asked, looking to the Chief Engineer.

"By myself?" he asked, frowning, "I don't know… I might not be able to do it on my own. I'm already on full shifts monitoring the surface mission, and even I need to sleep eventually. I'll have to take a look at it, run some diagnostics. It's been sitting unused for a hundred years, and who knows when the last time someone serviced it was. It could take some serious work to get it space worthy, let alone landing survivable."

"So you're saying you need outside help, then?" Anya asked, concerned by the very suggestion. They had succeeded in keeping Polaris' secrets undiscovered for almost a hundred years purely by trusting very, very few people. Anyone brought in to work on the escape pod might start to ask the wrong sorts of questions. The last thing they needed on top of all their other current troubles was a nosy mechanic looking for answers in the wrong places.

"Yes, but… I think I know the perfect person for this job."

"Really? Who is this perfect person? Not one of your idiot grease monkeys, I should hope."

"No, she's no idiot, and we should be able to trust her, I think… She owes me. I got her into the zero-G program after the medical board disqualified her for a heart defect. Also, now that I think about it, her boyfriend is one of the prisoners they sent to the ground, though I suppose she doesn't know that yet. She's smart, though. She's probably the best mechanic on the Ark, to be honest… but don't tell her I said that. She's already got a big enough attitude as it is. Lucky for us, she also doesn't mind bending the rules a little bit… You will like her," he told her, and Anya raised an eyebrow at his assertion.

"What's this wonder mechanic's name, then?" she asked.

"Raven Reyes."

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In her cramped single room tucked in one of the less favorable corners of Alpha station, Raven slouched onto her cot's thin mattress, bending with a tired groan to pull off her left boot and let it fall to the floor. She'd been following Council members and listening in doorways all day long, and she was exhausted from the strain and stress of it all. After her second time being chased away from Earth Monitoring by the same harried guard, Raven had finally given up for the day and returned home. The Council was keeping secrets, she knew, and it was too much of a coincidence that the Ark's primary control room for monitoring the surface was now both heavily guarded and being frequently visited by the Chancellor and members of the Council so shortly after the mysterious, "accidental" launch of a dropship. That, coupled with the so-called quarantine of the prisoners, was making her exceedingly anxious. She needed to know that Finn was okay, and all of her instincts were telling her that the quarantine, the dropship launch, and the heightened activity at Earth Monitoring were all related somehow.

Raven startled when a sharp knock sounded at her door, and after a moment's pause, she rose to answer it, limping across the room with the awkward gait created by her single boot. When she opened it and saw who it was waiting for her on the other side, she said the only reasonable thing a person in her situation could say.

"Oh, crap..."

The woman before her raised one perfect eyebrow, the harsh angles of her stern face made even more extreme by the slanted shadows cast by the one lightbulb still working above her door.

"Raven Reyes, I presume?" the Councilwoman asked, and then Raven was forced aside as Anya Petrova, Senior Station Representative of Polaris, stepped past her and into her room. The woman stopped only when she reached the foot of her bed against the far wall. She turned to face Raven and let her eyes make a slow circuit of her surroundings, their gaze seeming to weigh and measure everything all at once. Raven went from surprised to see her, to angry at the intrusion within the span of a heartbeat.

"The hell?!... What are you doing here?" she asked, stepping towards the woman with a challenging glare.

This is crazy… What is a member of the Council doing here? Did they already notice me poking around and asking questions today? This can't be good!

"I'll take that as a yes," Anya answered, seemingly unruffled by the younger woman's anger.

"Close the door, please," she ordered next, and Raven felt her hackles rise even higher at the command in her voice.

"What are you doing here?" she repeated, ignoring the order, not wanting to give the woman the satisfaction of doing what she wanted. There was something undeniably threatening about having Anya Petrova in her room, among her personal things. It felt like an invasion, and the woman herself was intimidation personified. Never mind that she had spent the day stalking several Council members throughout the station herself. That was completely different. Her small room was supposed to be her space, was supposed to be safe, and she resented the other woman walking in here like she owned it. Never mind that she was known to be one of the most powerful people on the Ark.

"I should think it would be fairly obvious, considering your activities today."

"What activities?" Raven replied, defiantly. She knew what the woman was talking about, of course, but she was damned if she would incriminate herself willingly.

Anya didn't answer immediately, just watched her with those cool, appraising eyes of hers, her face impassive.

"For someone who seemed so desperate for answers earlier, I'm surprised you haven't figured out yet why I am here. I'm a bit disappointed… Sinclair claimed you were smart."

Raven startled at the mention of the Chief Engineer.

Sinclair? What does my boss have to do with this? Why would he be talking to her about me?

"I am smart… A lot smarter than you, I'd bet," Raven scoffed, not able to help herself even though it was clear the other woman was baiting her on purpose. Her mind was already working, however, the shock and anger giving way to curiosity. She'd been chasing Council members for answers all day, and now there was one right before her, apparently willing to talk?

Does this mean she actually intends to answer my questions? Raven wondered, suspicious even as her hopes started to rise.

"Is this about the dropship, then?" she asked, guessing that this was the secret the Council was most desperate to keep and wanting to see what the woman's reaction would be to the question.

"Very good, Raven… Maybe you are somewhat intelligent after all," Anya said, a small, sardonic smile momentarily slanting her lips. "But if you want answers, then I'm afraid I still need you to shut that door."

A tense silence hung between them for several long moments, and then Raven turned, closing the door behind her and sealing them alone together in the room.

"Fine. Door's closed. Now talk," Raven told her, crossing to her desk so she could lean against it, folding her arms and trying to look as intimidating and in control as her short, petite frame would allow. She had a feeling just then which was very similar to the first time she had stepped off the Ark for a spacewalk… A dropping sensation in the pit of her stomach, the fear and excitement of the unknown opening up before her. She was stepping into something equally vast and unpredictable here, she sensed. Opening a door that she might not be able to shut again. Who knew where these answers might lead her; what dangers were ahead? She didn't dare back down, though, and it never even occurred to her to simply ask Anya to leave and forget all about her suspicions. This was about Finn, after all, and she would do whatever needed to be done to make sure he was alright.

"He also said you were blunt… Glad to see he wasn't wrong on that count either. If you don't mind, I will be equally blunt. It makes everything go so much quicker, and we don't have much time."

Raven swallowed her nervousness and nodded, her apprehension growing by the moment. Anya wasted no time, and in words as stark and blunt as she had warned, she told her about the launch of the dropship and the one hundred juvenile prisoners onboard. Raven felt the blood drain from her face at the knowledge that Finn was, in fact, no longer even on the Ark at all, but down on the Earth's surface, and had been for two days now.

"That's insane!" she replied, her voice hot with anger, "Why the hell would they do that?"

"You're in Engineering… You tell me," Anya said, her voice expectant.

She paused at this, a lingering doubt she had held for some time, but never vocalized, now coming to the forefront of her mind. Questions she had always wondered over about how Engineering was forced to operate now ran through her mind in a steady stream.

Why is it that every mechanic is limited to working on only one or two stations at a time? Why can't you pull up the life support specs for the entire Ark in one convenient place? Why break down and isolate systems data and repairs to such an extent, when it would obviously be more efficient to collate the data and streamline the repairs?... Why doesn't the Council want anyone to be able to see the big picture?

"Because," Raven said after a moment, her voice nearly strangled with the sudden realization, "…the Ark is dying."

"Yes, it is," Anya confirmed, her eyes now fixed on Raven's face.

"How long?"

"How long do we have left? A few months, perhaps, if we are lucky. Low oxygen and higher carbon dioxide levels are already starting to affect the weakest members of the population, of course. We will likely see deaths start happening in just a couple weeks. A month, maybe, before people begin to truly realize what's going on."

"A month?!" Raven echoed, shock and no little fear in her voice. This was it. This was the vast and dangerous unknown she had felt opening up before her earlier. There was no going back from this knowledge. No turning away from it and pretending it didn't exist. The Ark, and therefore everyone she knew, was going to die unless something was done.

"Why are you telling me all this?"

"Because we need you, and Sinclair trusts you," Anya told her, her previously frosty tone softening somewhat.

"Need me for what? What can I do?" Raven asked, and there was another long silence as the other woman seemed to study her, judging her with her eyes.

"Here's the thing, Raven," she said finally, "I don't trust people easily. Never have, probably never will… It's just not in my nature. But, if there is one thing that I do trust, it's that people can almost always be counted on to do what is in their own best interest. So on that note, I have a question for you. Do you love him, this boyfriend of yours?"

Finn's face filled her vision as she had last seen him, and memories of all the times he had saved her, cared for and loved her filled her mind. Did she love Finn? What a silly question. He was her only true family, her best friend, and her first love all in one.

"Finn is all I have. I would do anything for him," she told her, and the sincerity of her words was obvious.

"Good, because what I need you to do is to help us save him. To help save all of them, actually, though I know he is the one you care about," Anya said, and Raven felt a thrill of anticipation at her words. Finn had already saved her life many times over. It was only right that she do whatever was needed to save his now.

"What is it that needs to be done, exactly?"

"No," Anya told her, shaking her head, "You don't get to find that out until I have something in return."

"What?" she demanded impatiently. This woman was infuriating. She walked in here and destroyed Raven's world with her revelations, and now she was dangling Finn's life in front of her like a bargaining chip. Raven clenched the necklace he had made her in her fist, the sharp points of the metal bird wings digging into her palm as she waited for Anya's next words.

"Your promise… Your absolute assurance that you will be able to keep this a complete secret… From everyone. You are obviously smart, Raven, and I know you want to save Finn, but I need to know that you can also be discreet. For this to work, you must be capable of doing what needs to be done, even if that might mean bending, or even breaking, the law. Can you do that? Can you make that promise?"

This is serious, Raven realized, not missing the bit about breaking the law. To break the law on the Ark, any law, was essentially a death sentence if caught.

This could cost me my life.

She didn't even hesitate.

"Yes, I can… I can make that promise," she told her, and her voice was surprisingly firm and confident. "I'll do whatever it takes to save Finn… You can count on it."

Anya smiled then, slowly and with satisfaction, and it was like watching the sun rise over a frozen lake.

"I'm sure I can... It's in your best interest, after all."