I'm reading the Stardrifter series by David Collins-Rivera, and reviewing each book as I finish it. The short story Unit 19 is a tense story about piracy (or something like it) in outer space! This review contains spoilers.
Classic Stardrifter, and by "classic" I mean it's in the same column as Motherload. It's set on a spaceship, there are people up to no good, there are other people who are just trying to do their danged jobs and really need the baddies to just cut it out.
As with Open All Night, Ejoq is a somewhat minor player in this story. Technically, he never makes an appearance because he's locked in a closet the whole time, and all he can do is call out on the local network. It's a good thing he does, though, because it's his alert to the two total newbies on patrol that something's amiss.
The story is set on a spacehauler, which is sort of a railway train of a spaceship consisting of a tugboat (yeah, I'm mixing metaphors now) at the head and a bunch of container storage units in the middle. When a few systems glitch, two low-level crewmembers are sent to investigate each and every storage unit, one by one, until they figure out what's causing the disruption. When they hit Unit 19, they're contacted by the voice of Ejoq, who has likewise detected something abnormal using his targetig array. It seems there's activity on the hull of the ship.
Ejoq's superpower is his compulsion that the components of a system ought to aligned correctly and utilized to the maximum of their potential. He may have certs in gunnery, but at heart he's a hacker. He figures stuff out, and then uses what he's learned.
That's the plot of a lot of Stardrifter stories, but in this story it's practically written on in the page margins. Ejoq is effective at gunnery in part because of his urgent need to have remote access to all of his systems. In Street Candles that wasn't the setup on GRIZZELDA, and so he tinkered until it worked, and in the end it made a huge difference. In Cold Passage it wasn't supposed to be possible, but he got a tip off from somebody that some systems were connected in a specific way, and so he poked around until he found what he needed. In Unit 19, he's able to be a voice over the radio that affects the physical world because he's keyed into vital systems and can see some things that nobody thought could be observed.
For all his faults (and he has many), Ejoq is kind of brilliant. Actually, he's not brilliant at all. He's just thorough. If that's the greatest complement I can give him, he's still got a lot on James Bond, who's just really good looking and has a catchy ID number. And really it is a great complement. I like operational systems, I appreciate dilligence, and I admire Ejoq's persistent curiosity. Unit 19 is a great showcase of that, which is funny because Ejoq technically gets no "screen" time.