0174: Coincidences

Ziggurat #82

“Doesn’t it strike you as odd that the tower would provide us with a—parking spot—just close enough for us to get fried by our energetic passerby?” Lamont pressed.

Lamont followed Francis out of the control room. “Ed just finished telling us his theory about what that thing was that blasted the ship,” he said. “Has he told you?”

“No,” the captain admitted. “What is it?”

“He thinks it might be an artificial satellite that recharges the tower’s batteries, so to speak, as it flies by.”

Francis thought for a moment, stopping at the sliding double door beyond which was the command deck. Normally, the door’s electronic eye would cause it to open whenever someone stepped up to it. Right now, the doors were half-open and motionless. The control panel on the wall had been unbolted to expose a tangle of wires. “If that’s true, then we were merely in the wrong place at the wrong time. It makes sense.”

“Is that what Phobos thinks?” Lamont asked, following behind the captain as he turned sideways to slip through the ingress.

“Phobos hasn’t told me what he thinks, if anything,” Carter admitted. “It makes sense, though. We know that there was a powerful discharge of energy, and that much of it was absorbed by the tower.”

The command deck was normally as quiet as a library, occupied by only a handful of people, with occasional snatches of subdued conversation set against the beeping and clicking of computer banks. Today it was a bustle of activity, with easily a dozen technicians swarming around the open panels of the command console, passing tools and observations between themselves. Perched in their seats at the console were Sandra Ucan and Abigail Bishop, both staring intently at their instruments and providing feedback for the engineers.

“Where’s Lazarus?” Lamont asked.

“He’s familiarizing himself with the asteroid pod controls,” Francis explained. “He’ll be taking over as shuttle pilot so that Ed can focus on ship repairs.”

“Didn’t he say,” Lamont asked, “that we more-or-less fell into orbit alongside the tower?”

Francis nodded. “Yes, he said that the gravity dynamics here are not what he would expect them to be.”

“Doesn’t it strike you as odd that the tower would provide us with a—parking spot—just close enough for us to get fried by our energetic passerby?” Lamont pressed.

“You’re assigning a good deal of agency to an architectural structure,” Francis pointed out.

“It’s aware of us,” Lamont reminded him. “We demonstrated that.”

Francis turned away from the chaotic scene to meet his eye. “What are you getting at?”

Lamont lowered his voice to a conspiratorial hiss. “While entering this system, we just happened to hear a load of intriguing radio signals. We followed them here, where this tower just happened to be waiting. The tower just happened to give us every assurance we wanted that it was safe to approach, and then led us to this precise spot, where our ship just happened to be disabled sufficiently to force us to turn to the tower for refuge. Which is bully for us, because it just happens to be perfectly suited to our survival. Now I’m asking you to consider, Francis, how likely it seems to you that all this would just happen.”

The captain set his long face grimly. “I’m no idiot, Townsend. The thought had occurred to me.”

“Well, what are you doing about it?” Lamont asked.

“Come to my office,” Francis ordered.

Next: Marvelous Inventions and Surprising Insights