There was a terminal at a polished wooden desk off to one side of the room. Jax capped the bottle and secured it back in its cozy case, then made his way toward the terminal, only tripping twice. It turned out the desk wasn’t real wood, just high-quality plastic colored with a wood grain. It would have fooled him a year ago, but on Terroneous, everything was really real wood. Warping, rotting, insect-infested plant matter. It was not as glamorous as rich domers liked to believe.
He slumped into the chair and flicked the terminal on. He wasn’t sure what to expect, but after poking around for a few minutes, he found a messaging app. If he could get a note to Lealina, somehow everything would be a little bit easier to deal with. But that meant he’d need to send something via drone mail. Did they have d-mail on EE-3 yet? Of course they would. Establishing a d-mail station would be one of the primary goals of a new settlement. Yet the few moments Runstom had left him alone, he’d been unable to find any public d-mail information. Despite being a library-bar combination, the Bibliohouse only offered access to a local mail system.
This settlement was about as secretive as it could get, and Jax wondered if there were some clandestine restrictions about sending mail off-planet. It was secretive enough that he’d only heard about it in passing in the last few years, but he had no idea how far along it was in development until he arrived about a week before. It was technically part of the Earth Colony Alliance, like the domes of Barnard-3, Barnard-4, and Sirius-5. With thousands of workers already living on-site, it wouldn’t be long before an exodus was made: the richest of the population making the trek out to the brand-new, state-of-the-art domes.
He found the dock portal on the terminal, which gave him access to a few local resources. He felt a thrill of electricity tingle through his chest when he saw a d-mail messaging system. The feeling quickly slipped away as he was unable to access it.
He sighed and rubbed his eyes with his palms. The stuff milling around in his stomach was not helping him think. It was probably an even worse idea to mix the brown and the clear. The two liquids, thrashing around in the same system—
Before a dizzy spell forced him to slide completely out of his chair, he grabbed the edges and bolted upright. He stared at the screen. A crude interface, with a few icons and small patches of text. But that was just the interface. He had found the dock access. The terminal was just a thin screen and an input scanner. The scanner could be toggled between a few different input modes: swiping holographic icons, hand signals, and touch-typing. It wasn’t an independent computer – the few months on Terroneous had him thinking that way, that there were uses for computers that ran on their own, without servers – it was a ship terminal. The actual network of processors would be buried somewhere in the bowels of the OrbitBurner. The terminal on the bridge and the terminal in front of Jax were essentially the same computer.
Which meant that if Sylvia set up access to any external systems, Jax should be able to find them from this terminal.
He switched to full typing mode on the input scanner. He stabbed at a few key combinations he knew of until one of them worked, causing the screen to display the version information for the interface and the underlying operating system. “Star Sprinter Systems, OS 19.4,” he read aloud. Nothing he’d ever used, but a lot of operating software was derived from the same base code. Based on the key-combo that worked to bring up the version, he was guessing it was a Phoenix OS derivative. He hadn’t worked with that since school, but he’d been immersed for a few years back then, so it was just a matter of dusting off a few brain cells.
After some misremembered key-combos and lots of trial and error, he brought up a command prompt. There he was at least able to fail, but fail in a way that gave him semi-useful error messages and help text. It was technobabble to the average person, but if Jax read an error a few times, he could make sense of it, or at least take a guess. After he’d groped his way around the system for a few minutes, he figured out how to see the external mappings. The dock portal was clearly labeled as dock-portal-618, but there was another more cryptic mapping called sr-2896. Jax checked it for activity, and there was definitely a bunch of traffic running through it.
He opened up another channel on the same mapping, which took him a few tries. Once it was done, he found a common command-based text editor, usually used for system administration, but sometimes used for d-mail composition. Sure enough, the editor’s mailer plugin was able to scan the channel he created on sr-2896 and find a d-mail service. Now all he had to do was type up a message.
At that point, he was a little more thankful for the liquor, because it helped lubricate his words. He had two goals: the first was to let Lealina know that he was okay and that he was trying to get back to Terroneous by any means possible. The second was to disguise all of that so that it didn’t sound like a personal d-mail from Jack Jackson, alias Jack Fugere, the fugitive from ModPol and Space Waste associate.
He just needed a couple of details. During his short time with Lealina, he’d learned they’d both attended the South Haven Institute of Technology on Barnard-4. On a more intimate level, he’d learned that non-domers found dome life claustrophobic – a concept that was a bit foreign to Jax, and really only sunk in when he had to hide deep underground beneath the TEOB Magma Center, where networks of tight tunnels were carved out by geology researchers and their robotic assistants.
To the Director of the Terroneous Environment Observation Bureau —
Your recent trials concerning the malfunction of Pulson Integrated Sensor Systems magnetic field detection equipment has made news all around the known galaxy, including out here to Epsilon Eridani-3. As we’re in the process of establishing our own environmental observation agency in this newly developing colony, we wanted to ensure we learn from the near tragedy that you and your team managed to avoid there on Terroneous. I just wanted to reach out and thank you for your work and for not being afraid to share your story with the rest of the galaxy. As my Life Support Systems professor at the South Haven Institute of Technology used to say, if you can’t learn from history, then what the hell are you doing in my classroom?
I must return to the work of establishing our underground research center, though I must confess I popped up to write this d-mail partly to get out of those tunnels. Quite claustrophobic, indeed!
Wishing you the very best,
— Kay Klosky
The name at the end would be his last guarantee Lealina would know the message was from him. If she were to look it up – and she would, if he piqued her interest with such a bizarre d-mail – she’d find that there was a Kay Klosky employed as a librarian at the Stockton Public Library, one of Jax’s favorite haunts.
He re-read the message a few times and then tapped the send command before he could change his mind. There were no errors, and a confirmation came back letting him know the message was enqueued with some d-mail facility in some unknown location on EE-3. It was out of his hands. Depending on the facility’s capabilities, the message could go out on a drone within a day, and then it would be another day or two for the Zarp-capable micro-ship to zip from the Eridani system to the Barnard system.
There was a small amount of relief flowing through Jax in that moment. He felt purged. He also felt thirsty, but not for anything with alcohol in it; for once he felt thirsty for some honest nourishment. He stepped away from the terminal and wandered around for a moment before he came across a heavy door with a warning sign about the importance of keeping the seal due to perishable goods within.
The door came open with the touch of a button. The first thing Jax saw inside the refrigerated pantry had already perished.
“This