Searching for the Fleet

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Yash’s stomach clenched. “Yes, professor,” she said.

  Yash sat down beside the drive and methodically trimmed the nanobit layer off the surface, setting the nanobits aside. It took less than two minutes.

  Apparently everyone else finished in an equally short period of time because Bellier said, “Well done,” and she clearly meant that for the class. “Questions?”

  No one spoke for a moment. Yash’s heart rate pounded. She didn’t want to ask, didn’t want to seem stupid, but she did have questions.

  So, she figured, no risk no reward.

  “I’m assuming that we didn’t simply unbond the nanobits for some reason to do with the anacapa drive,” she said. She didn’t add that unbonding the bits was the normal way to clear off a layer of nanobits.

  “That is correct,” Bellier said. “All of these drives are different. Your drive would have held up to the unbonding. Mercer’s would not have. Best to learn that there is more than one method of handling a task at hand.”

  Yash nodded. The lesson, then, wasn’t that there was one prescribed way to handle all of this, but that there were several, and each was unique to the circumstance.

  “It would seem to me,” Gallatin said, “that a laser would be more dangerous than unbonding.”

  “A laser is surgical,” Bellier said. “The unbonding is not. You can make a mistake with the laser, for the most part. One small error with the unbonding, and we would lose this lab.”

  As well as their own lives. But she didn’t have to add that, because everyone in the room knew it.

  “You’ve all examined the exterior of your drive,” Bellier said. “Set down your laser blade, and pick up the anacapa drive. Examine its underside, and then set it down exactly as you found it.”

  Yash replaced the blade in its holder on the top of the container, careful to avoid the lip with her gloves. Then she placed her hands on the sides of the anacapa drive and lifted it.

  She grunted at the weight. The drive was heavier than she expected. She held it up, which was easier than she would have thought, only because the gloves adhered to the sides.

  Underneath, the drive was completely flat and clear, with a door carved into the material. Above that door was a small ring that could be pulled.

  If Yash had to guess, she would guess that was where the anacapa drive’s controls were. She found it very odd that they were underneath some kind of clear covering. It would take work to get to the controls, which seemed impractical to her.

  “All right,” Bellier said, “if you haven’t done so already, please set the drive back the way you found it.”

  Yash did so. It took a little extra work to get her gloves off the sides of the drive. She didn’t like the gloves. They seemed unnecessarily complex.

  “This next instruction,” Bellier said, “is for everyone except Zarlengo.”

  Yash felt a little uneasy being singled out. She waited, motionless, while Bellier gave that instruction.

  “Take the deepest hole on your drive,” she said, “and deepen it until you see some silver. The moment you see the silver color, stop.”

  And that was why Yash hadn’t been included. She let out a breath she hadn’t even realized she had been holding.

  She heard rustling as the others did their task. Then little by little, the rustling eased.

  Bellier walked the room, stepping into each area to examine what the others had done. She seemed unusually cautious about this procedure.

  When she finished examining, she returned to her spot in front of the windows.

  “Well done,” she said. “Your first delicate task on an anacapa drive. You’ve all managed to carve into the mass before you, and you managed to find the drive itself.”

  Yash frowned, surprised. She thought the entire thing before her was the drive. She knew from the questions that the others had too.

  “Two of you asked in a sideways fashion, and one of you in a straightforward manner, why these drives do not look like the drives you’ve seen in the specs or in existing containers. The short answer is that these drives do look like the specs, only you can’t see the drives themselves.”

  Yash’s frown grew deeper, and then she understood. The clue was the nanobit coating.

  Apparently, Bellier saw Yash’s change of expression. “Would you like to answer your own question now, Zarlengo?”

  “The silver thing,” Yash said. “That’s the actual anacapa drive.”

  Bellier actually smiled. Yash hadn’t been sure that was possible, but it had just happened. “Exactly, Zarlengo. You asked if that silver thing was important. It is extremely important.”

  “What the heck is all that stuff then?” Darlington asked, or rather, blurted. Because Yash doubted anyone would simply ask a question in a normal give-and-take fashion, given their day so far. “Coating?”

  “Yes, Darlington,” Bellier said. “You’ve just encountered layers and layers of protective coating. The containers we use now came into common use only one hundred years ago. Until that point, the look of the anacapa drive depended on the engineer. Some used a protective coating. Some used several protective coatings. All then put the drive into a container of some kind, but often that container was open on the side. You’ll find all of these variations throughout your career. Many of the older drives are not yet retired, and rather than tamper with the layers of coating, we have learned that it’s safer to leave the layers alone, and work with the drive as it is.”

  Yash tilted her head at her drive, looking at it in a whole new light. She had seen the different surfaces, but she had figured they had something to do with the age of the anacapa drive, not some kind of covering on the drive itself.

  Bellier paced slowly in front of the students, in lecture mode now.

  “I deliberately chose the messiest drives for this class. These drives are retired. They have no power through them, although they can be revived. That will be tomorrow’s task, if you make it through the rest of the day.”

  Yash tensed. For a moment, she had forgotten the elimination aspect of today’s work. Because that was what this had boiled down to. Some kind of elimination work.

  “The gold threads you’ve seen are power conductors into the drives. We don’t use that kind of conductor any longer,” Bellier said, “but you will find drives with those conductors. And to answer your question, Gallatin, the black threads you see are burned-out or blown-out conductors. These drives have been through a lot. That does make them a tad unstable, but not so unstable that we can’t work with them.”

  Oh, great, Yash thought but somehow managed to keep to herself. She was nervous again. She had gone from being frightened to nervous to worried to enjoying the tasks to worried to nervous again.

  And Bellier had told them to keep their emotions out of the lab. As if that were possible.

  “All right,” Bellier said. “I would like you all to replace your laser tool, and remove your gloves. Seal the storage units on the top of the container.”

  Yash did all of those things in the exact order that Bellier told her to. The job was easier than Yash expected. She was getting this part at least.

  “Now,” Bellier said, “open your container.”

  Yash’s stomach clenched. The sandwich had traveled down there, obviously, because she was no longer burping it, but it sure felt heavy down there.

  The nerves. The nerves were getting to her.

  She examined the container’s lid, saw nothing that would make her uneasy, and then checked the controls. They were still set at normal, whatever that was, but she remembered hearing that all anacapa containers had redundant security so that someone couldn’t accidentally open one on the bridge, hit the wrong anacapa control, and destabilize the entire thing.

  Not that Yash knew whether or not an anacapa drive could be destabilized. The secrets of the drive—hell, the basic workings of the drive—were kept from the entire Fleet. No one except the engineers and maybe the upper level brass knew how to mes
s with, disable, or weaponize an anacapa drive.

  Which, Yash was beginning to realize, was just as well.

  She studied the container’s controls for a moment, looking to see if she needed to change anything.

  As she did, she heard one of the men curse. Something clicked, clicked again, and then hummed.

  “Well, Mercer,” Bellier said, “the container thinks you’re breaking into it. You’ll have to wait three minutes and try again.”

  “Three minutes isn’t a lot of protection,” he said.

  “That’s because these containers are generally on the bridge, and someone might have a legitimate reason for trying to open it. Not everyone knows how to open the container, as you can tell.” Bellier sounded amused rather than angry. Which was good.

  And that interaction told Yash a lot about the standard settings. Because Mercer was good at what he did. So he had probably checked the controls and then tried to open the container. He hadn’t realized that standard was still secure.

  She peered deeper in the controls and finally found what she was looking for. It wasn’t labeled anything obvious like open or release but examine. At least, she hoped examine was the setting she needed. She couldn’t see anything else that worked.

  Her heart pounded. Such internal drama for activating a control. She had to work on her own emotional control or she really wouldn’t be up for this job.

  She activated the control and heard something snick inside the container. Then the edges were limned with a faint light.

  Her cheeks warmed. She hoped that light wasn’t coming from the anacapa drive. She hoped she hadn’t activated anything accidentally.

  She leaned up just a bit, looked at the container’s edges again, and saw that the seal had been broken. The light did come from inside.

  With a shaking hand, she grabbed the edge of the container and pushed it back.

  No alarm went off, no sirens blared, she didn’t get injured. All well and good. Her sweating hand simply held the smooth, cool edge of the container.

  She had to lean forward to peer inside.

  The anacapa drive was symmetrical. It was round and sat in a box of its own, only that box didn’t have a lid. The drive glowed a soft whitish gold and pulsed just a little.

  The other side of the container held another, similar box. At the bottom of it, she saw a place to snap in controls like the ones she had seen on the bottom of the retired drive. Some kind of raised metal (or nanobits or something) ran between the two boxes.

  Her teeth were on edge again. They almost felt like they were vibrating. Her entire skull itched, and the itch seemed to come from the bones themselves.

  That feeling slowly worked its way down her entire body.

  She could guess what it was—it was the energy from the drive, released. She suspected it would get worse as four other containers opened.

  With that thought, she saw another container open in her peripheral vision, and Triplett leaning over the edge. Then there was a bang behind Yash, which got a “Be more careful!” from Bellier. A creak, a metallic groan, and silence.

  Yash’s hair floated around her face. She hadn’t double-checked the clasp holding her hair back since that morning. The floating strands decided her: she was cutting it all off. Long hair was impractical for this work. She had known it, but her vanity had gotten to her until this point.

  If she was going to work on these drives, though, in this kind of energy, she wouldn’t be able to keep her hair long at all.

  “Very good,” Bellier said. “Now, I need you all to stand and look at me.”

  Yash stood, and out of the corner of her eye, she noted movement as Darlington, Mercer, Triplett, and Gallatin stood as well. They glowed in the light coming out of the containers.

  Yash could no longer see the crater through the windows. The windows reflected light and nothing else except what was going on inside the lab.

  The jittery feeling continued. Her entire body felt like it moved involuntarily. Not big movements—small ones. Twitches, shaking, some kind of vibration.

  It made her uncomfortable, but she didn’t mind it. She simply accepted it.

  Gallatin had moved away from his container. His entire body was rigid. He stared at the container as if something was going to come out of it and attack him.

  Triplett was rubbing her forefinger against her mouth, a nervous habit that Yash had seen from her a few times before, mostly when faced with something she felt uncertain of.

  Mercer was leaning in, like Yash had, investigating every part of the container. She hadn’t done that yet, but she had seen enough to know that there was more to the interior than she could understand with a single glance.

  And Darlington had both hands on the side of her container as if she was trying to keep herself from floating away in zero-g. The light had paled her face but accented the circles under her eyes from the tears she’d shed at lunch.

  Bellier looked at all of them as if she were unsurprised by what she saw.

  “All right,” she said after a moment. “We are going to do one thing, something you might have to do many times in your career. You need to reach in, and lift the anacapa drive from its moorings. Be very careful.”

  Yash’s mouth went completely dry. Touch an active anacapa drive. She didn’t know people could do that.

  “A few things,” Bellier said. “You will not be able to disengage the controls, so don’t even try. The anacapa drives are functioning at the moment, even though they are not attached to any navigation system. We have programmed the drives so that they cannot be turned off without a code. I have that code should something go wrong.”

  Should something go wrong. Oh, crap. Yash squared her shoulders. This was what she had signed on for. If someone had asked her that morning what she had hoped would happen, she would have said she wanted to be hands-on with an anacapa drive.

  Well, this was as hands-on as it got.

  “Secondly, you will touch the drives with your bare hands. The gloves you found in this container cannot and should not ever touch an actual anacapa drive.”

  Great, Yash thought. She had come close to touching hers. Really close. It would have been nice to have that warning earlier, she thought at Bellier, but did not allow herself to say that out loud.

  If she had, she would have been just as bad as Crenshaw.

  Yash had to remind herself: working with anacapa drives was dangerous. Everyone who took this class knew that up front. There were dozens of warnings and alerts and tests that occurred before anyone could sign up for the class.

  She had almost forgotten about the danger until today. Today was all about the danger.

  “You will hold the drive until I tell you to set it down,” Bellier said. “This is the first step toward moving the drive to another container. You will not do that today, although I might have you do so tomorrow. That’s a two-person job, however, and we might not have two people to do the job by tomorrow’s class.”

  Tomorrow’s class? Yash frowned. That seemed very far in the future.

  “I would suggest that you do not bend at the waist to do this,” Bellier said. “I would suggest that you kneel beside the container, and lean into it, bracing your arms on the container’s lip, and using its strength to help you. You’ll see why once you’re underway.”

  Yash knelt down. Her knees complained. She had already been on them more today than she had in months. She might even end up with bruises.

  “Ready?” Bellier asked. She paused for a moment, probably watching the others get into position. And then she said, “Go ahead. The timer starts…now.”

  Timer. Okay. That was how Bellier was going to keep track of them.

  Yash lowered her hands. At least they weren’t shaking. And she didn’t think her palms were sweating, although she found it hard to tell because her entire body was still vibrating. So in that sense, she was shaking.

  She could see through her skin, the bones, sinew, and blood vessels etched like
a painting on the back of her hand. She swallowed against the dryness in her mouth. If she could see through her hands, what was happening to her eyes? That light was really, really powerful.

  So was the energy coming off the anacapa drive. She could almost feel the waves—or maybe she could feel the waves. If she let her hands hang, they moved ever so subtly up and down.

  But she was on some kind of clock. What kind, she did not know. So she needed to continue downward.

  The area near the anacapa drive was warmer than the area at the top of the container, warmer than the lab. Apparently the drive gave off heat—or the light did—or the work the container did in…well, containing…the energy created its own little heat bubble.

  Not enough to rise to her face or her upper arms, but enough that she could feel the temperature differential as she moved her hands downward.

  Finally, her fingers brushed the edges. The vibration grew so bad that her teeth chattered as if she were cold. The sides were smooth and not warm at all. It felt like touching the sides of a gigantic egg—albeit an egg that vibrated with so much energy that it felt like it was going to blow at any moment.

  That was the most difficult part—that the anacapa drive felt unstable. Or rather, it made her feel like she was unstable, as if she would topple off her knees.

  She was glad for Bellier’s recommendation to lean on the container. Otherwise, Yash might actually have fallen over.

  Her hands didn’t slip, though, despite the vibration. If anything, it felt like her hands had adhered to the sides of the anacapa drive, as if the entire thing had commandeered her skin to its own purposes.

  Her heart pounded. Or maybe that was just the vibration echoing all the way through her.

  She couldn’t tell where her skin began. She felt fused to the drive. It should have alarmed her, but it didn’t. It made her feel…”excited” wasn’t the word. “Alive” was more like it, as if she hadn’t ever been attached to anything before.

  That thought alarmed her and made her wonder if the drive could co-opt her brain.

  Maybe it already had. She had forgotten that she was supposed to lift the damn thing and hold it for a few minutes.