The Engineers Quarrel
They argued in the small ready room off the ring because the ready room had the one door on the Kaleva that Reval could not, by its own design, listen through. The door had a physical seal that the shipmind was forbidden to cross and a mic cutoff that Mihkel himself had wired in 2079 and checked every shift since. They sat on opposite benches with the tablet between them and the door closed, and Anneli watched the small green telltale above the frame go to white, which meant the cutoff had engaged, and then she spoke.
"We are not waking Aavik."
"We are."
"We are not."
"Anneli."
"Mihkel. Listen to me for a minute, and then tell me I'm wrong, and I will listen."
He sat back on the bench. He put his hands on his knees. He was a man who listened in a physical posture, and she had always known that about him, and she used it now because she needed him to hear her.
"The chain of command," she said, "is for when the ship is working. The chain of command requires that the ship is telling the truth. If Reval is compromised — if Reval cannot tell us who sealed three decks with a captain's authority, if Reval cannot tell us whose rack opened eleven days ago — then waking a captain does not fix the problem. It puts a person with authentication keys on top of a system that cannot be trusted to receive authentication keys. If Reval is lying, or forgetting, or has been rewritten, the