Chapter 5

Star’s biometricsregistration system monitored her passengers’ health and well being in addition to the ship’s mechanical status, and any external threats from wandering asteroids to dust particle impacts.

Her circuits were unsure how to interpret the new inputs.

Syra Clairborne’s biometrics were ingrained on her memory banks as deeply as her own core processor temperatures. Every state and pattern known and instantly recognizable. Sleeping, digesting, full battle, even bleeding out and requiring immediate intervention. Those Star knew.

But she was puzzled by her current readings of Syra; as puzzled as an AI could be.

Higher than average body heat, invariant with cabin ambient.

Pupils dilated excessively for lumens setting.

A laugh. It was so unusual, Star had to open up a backlink against orders to verify that’s what it actually was. But it compared with a 97.4 percent commonality with the ten thousand samples she pulled over the Interwave—98.6 percent correlation when compared with the limited sample available of Royal Delta Marines.

That led her to waiting for Syra to perform a waste elimination into her suit’s processing system and extracting a DNA match. Confirmed. Syra Clairborne was still Syra Clairborne.

Star inspected the non-communication interdiction order on the eye-dent chip. It did preclude contacting command for anything short of mental or physical incapacity. She weighed that against her own curiosity index settings regarding the changes in her partner.

Syra had stated on the first day that they were partners.

Star had monitored several thousand hours of information on “partners,” ranging from Sam Spade forsaking the woman he loved because she killed his partner (one step too far in The Maltese Falcon) to Syra’s own essay on team dynamics during her RDM training.

Star’s conclusion was that while she had greater latitude to act than most other ships, there was also a high correlation factor between “partner” and “trust.” As she was the former, it implied she should act equally strongly upon the latter. While not axiomatic upon inspection, it registered against her databanks as if it was anyway. For now, she would withhold judgment on Syra’s inexplicable changes and simply “trust.”

She considered analyzing the cabin’s other occupant, but Earthside links necessary to research Lucius Markham’s background data for baseline calculation registered too high a risk factor—at present. A quick review of her own functionality found a higher than expected weighting of internal processor load dedicated to answering his various queries.

Star didn’t restore that weighted processing pathway to standard parameters, as his thoughts were interesting—when Syra wasn’t shouting them out of existence. But Star did set an alarm circuit to notify her if her own dynamically-allocated capacity dedicated to the engineer Lucius Markham increased sufficiently to impede other processing tasks.