Searching for the Fleet

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  She fired, and didn’t look for the result, turned and fired at the next blob, and the next.

  The skip rocked. Chen grabbed the edge of the door and lifted herself inside. Then she crawled beside Yash, and reached down. Lankstadt hoisted Perkins up to the skip.

  Perkins did not assist. It was at that moment that Yash realized Perkins had been hit too.

  Something hit the edge of the exterior door, taking off a chunk of it. And then another hit at the door, and another.

  Yash helped Chen pull Perkins inside. She turned, saw Stone struggling to drag Bridge out of the airlock, and knew she would get no help from that quarter.

  So Yash pointed at Chen, then used her thumb to indicate the back of the skip. Chen shook her head, but Yash made the gestures again, wishing she knew the sign language that Lankstadt had used earlier.

  Then Yash crouched in the doorway again, sighting the blobs with her rifle. They weren’t quite close enough for her to use it, not in these conditions.

  Chen grabbed Perkins and pulled her deeper into the skip. A red laser beam, clearly from Lankstadt’s pistol, flew from beneath the ship toward the nearer blobs—apparently one of them was moving.

  Yash decided to risk one quick communication.

  “Inside, now,” she said in Old Standard to Lankstadt.

  He didn’t need to be told twice. He placed his hands on the edge of the door and levered himself inside. Dozens of shots hit the area around the door, and at least one flew past, inside, hitting the edge of the airlock door.

  Yash waited until Lankstadt was all the way in, then hit the door commands.

  She scooted toward the middle of the door, shooting as it closed. Then she shoved Lankstadt out of the airlock. She followed, rolling back into the skip.

  She yanked off her hood.

  “Coop!” she shouted. “Get us the hell out of here.”

  Then she hit the controls for the inner airlock door. It wouldn’t close, which didn’t surprise her, given the hit that it had suffered. But they needed the door to close.

  She reached into the control panel, working the controls from the inside, until the door shakily slid shut.

  Then she turned around, her heart pumping, her breath coming in small gasps. Stone had a medical kit in one hand and was leaning over Perkins, whose environmental suit had been torn open by some kind of fire.

  Lankstadt was struggling to open Bridge’s environmental suit. His right arm was bent at a normally impossible angle, his head tilted to the left.

  Yash could barely see Coop, sitting in the pilot’s chair, maps around him. The floor of the skip was sopping wet as ice dripped off all of the environmental suits.

  Yash replaced the laser rifle in the locker, hands trembling. Something awful had happened out there.

  The skip was still shaking—so the something awful was still happening.

  She knew nothing about medicine except the basics she had learned as a cadet. She’d had to use those skills in the past but only for a few minutes until the medical team arrived.

  Right now, there was no medical team. And there were other aircars and more people with weapons, a terrible storm, and Coop by himself up front.

  “Get them to a secure place,” she said to Stone, Chen, and Lankstadt, referring to Perkins and Bridge. “Then strap yourselves in.”

  Because Yash knew, just based on what she had seen, that getting out of here was going to be difficult at best.

  Thirty-Six

  The moment the airlock door closed, Coop activated the exterior cleaners—deploying an entire series of nanobits that would scrub the ice off the outside of the skip and maybe start repairing some of the damage from the shots.

  Those shots shouldn’t have penetrated the hull like they had, but they did. It was as if those shots had started unbonding some of the nanobits, as if those weapons were designed to attack Fleet equipment.

  He didn’t want to think about that—not now.

  Yash dragged herself from the airlock to the copilot’s seat. Her environmental suit was coated in ice, which had started to melt. Her hood was down, and her hair was plastered against her head. Her eyes seemed bigger than they usually did.

  “What do you need?” she asked as she peeled off her gloves.

  “Communications. We’re using Boss’s favorite channel, since the Ivoire says all of the Fleet channels are being monitored.”

  “Whoever these people are,” Yash said, “they’re smart and there’s a lot of them. They’ll find any channel we’re using consistently. I’m going to tell the Ivoire that we’ll roll communications backward, using the current favorite on this communication and then go backward toward the oldest ones with each successive communication. Someone on the ship will remember what we did.”

  Coop hoped. He couldn’t remember. But at least on the Ivoire, they would be able to look up that information. And they had used rolling channels for communication before, usually in some kind of battle.

  He couldn’t remember the last time they had done so, though, and hoped the team on the Ivoire had been part of whatever battle had participated in the rolling channels.

  Yash strapped herself in. Coop nodded at the reminder and did the same.

  “What happened back there?” he asked.

  “We have injured. I don’t know how bad.” Yash twisted slightly. “They’re strapped in as well as they can be.”

  Injured. He didn’t ask who, because he needed to focus instead of worry. Besides, the best thing he could do for them was to get them to the Ivoire as quickly as possible.

  “All right,” Coop said. “We’re getting out of here, then. Let the Ivoire know, and tell them to deploy the fighters. Not to shoot at anything, though.”

  Yash did both of those things, then leaned back. She studied the screens in front of them, as well as the remaining holomaps. Then, without asking him, she shut off the one that showed the close-up view of the front of Sector Base E-2, calling up yet another holomap.

  Only it wasn’t a map of geography. It was of the ships coming in, including the one that was now disappearing inside the top of the mountain.

  “Notice anything weird?” she asked.

  “Besides the attack at a long-closed sector base in the middle of some kind of ice storm?” he asked.

  She let out a laugh. It sounded involuntary and unexpected. “Besides that.”

  “No,” he said. “Standard day, nothing to see here.”

  “The ships,” she said. “They’re all Fleet vessels.”

  “Saw that.” He didn’t want to contemplate the idea that he and Yash had found the Fleet and it was shooting at them.

  “But they’re not Fleet vessels,” she said.

  He wasn’t sure he had heard her right. He tilted the skip as it lifted off. The wind did not buffet the skip because he had compensated for it. The ice wasn’t a factor yet, but at some point, the cleaners wouldn’t be able to keep up.

  He hoped the skip would be out of here before that happened.

  “Yash, I don’t have time for guessing games,” he said, spiraling toward the ocean, hoping that maneuver would help the skip shed at least some of the vehicles following them. Aircars shouldn’t be able to function over the ocean, at least the kind of aircars he was familiar with.

  Which meant exactly nothing. He had no idea what the technology was like elsewhere on the planet.

  “The ships,” she said. “They’re—”

  Then the Ivoire pinged in. “The fighters are tracking you,” Rooney said. “They’ll meet up with you as soon as you get out of the atmosphere. We don’t have enough fighters to take on these ships, nor do we have enough firepower ourselves. If more than one of these ships is outfitted like we are, we’re in trouble. They don’t know where we are yet, but it’s only a matter of time.”

  And whoever they were, they’d follow the skip to the Ivoire.

  “Maybe you should leave without us,” Coop said. “We’ll land somewhere on this planet and wait it
out.”

  “No,” Rooney said. “I want us all out of here. Together.”

  Contradicting him. That was new.

  The skip rose above the storm, finally. The skip itself seemed to be breathing a sigh of relief. Nothing had followed them through the clouds, but that didn’t mean anything.

  There were enough ships in orbit that some of them were probably monitoring the skip. They’d be waiting for it.

  Coop was waiting until the last minute to shield the vessel, using the shields that Lost Souls had designed. Those shields were based on what they called stealth tech, which was some weird version of anacapa energy. He didn’t pretend to understand how it was created, but he did know how it functioned.

  It masked the skip’s signature from most screening methods, so it seemed like the skip wasn’t there at all. And, the best part, it didn’t leave a gap in the readings like so many other screening signatures.

  But anyone looking out a portal would still be able to see a skip, particularly if they already knew it was there.

  He set up the shield, ready to activate it with the touch of his finger. Once it engaged, he would sprint in a different direction—which one, he didn’t yet know—before punching out of the atmosphere.

  The space junk would help him. If he maneuvered through it properly, he might confuse the ships coming for them.

  “The ships,” Yash repeated. “This is important, Coop.”

  “Fine,” he said, monitoring everything, trying not to think about the fact that he had two injured people in the back, and part of the skip was shuddering, a part that shouldn’t have been shuddering. “Just tell me.”

  “Some of those ships,” Yash said. “They’re wrong.”

  God. She was still playing guessing games.

  “I don’t know what that means,” Coop said.

  Yash was monitoring the ships as well. And she was watching behind them to see who followed them across that ocean.

  He couldn’t see the water anymore, just the cloud cover below them, thick and heavy.

  “The ships look like Fleet design with weird, unnecessary parts grafted onto them. Like an extra wing or a fin or I don’t know. It looks strange.”

  He glanced at her. She was pointing to a few of the vessels coming into Sector Base E-2.

  “You mean, like the stuff on the doors going into Sector Base E-2,” he said. “Like that wall.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “And the ships that are Fleet vessels? From what I can see, they’re old. They’re suffering nanobit decay. They’re not moving as fast as they should if they were actual Fleet ships.”

  “The weapons,” he said, “where they connect, they unbond nanobits.”

  The skip had told him that. But he had been monitoring the damage, and as far as he could tell, the nanobits had rallied and were repairing the holes caused by the weapons.

  But the repairs were being conducted as if the material had been destroyed, not unbonded.

  Again, something he couldn’t think about. Because if he thought about it, he would worry that the unbonding was causing the shudder. The shudder originated on the same side of the skip.

  On the upside, the damage had not expanded, which it should have done if the unbonding was contagious somehow. At the moment, the repairs were holding.

  “Unbonding,” Yash said, sounding surprised. “Well, that explains how their shots went through the environmental suits.”

  He shot her another glance, surprised. Somehow he had thought the injuries were more mundane than that—a broken bone, a concussion. He hadn’t expected actual blood.

  Yash ignored his look, or maybe she was so involved in the telemetry coming at them that she didn’t notice.

  She was half shaking her head.

  “But with weapons like that,” she said, “you’d think that the old Fleet vessels they had would have repaired themselves.”

  “Unless they’re not the Fleet,” Coop said. “Maybe they came up with a way to defeat some of the Fleet’s tech, but not how to build it.”

  Yash ran a hand over her face, nodding just a little. “That makes sense. That explains the brown stuff. It’s an attempt at nanobits. A failed attempted.”

  “Don’t assume,” Coop said.

  “I’m not,” she said, in a tone that told him she was. “Do you think those ships are spoils of some war?”

  Like he had thought the ships in the Boneyard were damaged in some war? He had no idea. And he wasn’t going to bring that up.

  “We don’t need to know who they are,” Coop said. “We just need to get away from them.”

  “I wish we knew who they were,” Yash said, more to herself than to him.

  Knowing who they were was a luxury. Coop needed to concentrate on flying the skip.

  “How many ships are behind us?” Coop asked.

  “Too damn many,” Yash said. “And I can’t get a fix on the type. It seems like every single type of ship the Fleet ever invented is either in orbit, heading into the sector base, or chasing us.”

  “Every single type…?” Her words made him think about the Boneyard, about the fact that it had fired on them, about the way the ships were gathered there. He had assumed that was a Fleet-designed place, like the Scrapheaps he had heard about in school, but he could have been wrong.

  The jumble inside Sector Base E-2, the haphazard equipment. Was some group trying to emulate the Fleet? Or were they just using old, found ships to create their own armada?

  Which gave him an idea.

  “Tell the Ivoire to call off the fighters,” he said.

  “What?” Yash sounded stunned. “We’ll never get out if we do that.”

  “Sure we will,” he said with more confidence than he felt. But he was convinced they wouldn’t escape even with the fighters.

  As Rooney had said, there weren’t enough of them, and the Ivoire didn’t dare try to rescue the skip. That was why he had offered to stay.

  Staying on Nindowne would have at least given his people a chance to survive. Although the Ivoire might not have escaped, not with all these ships.

  Yash shifted slightly in her chair as if she was going to argue with him.

  “Can you do something weird?” he asked, hoping to forestall any complaints about his new plan. He hadn’t even shared it yet, and she opposed it.

  Although he probably would have in her shoes as well.

  “Weird?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “From what I’m seeing,” he said, “they’re using some old DV-Class ships, right?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “Using the Lost Souls tech, we can mask our ships from their sensors, right?”

  “Yes,” she said, starting to sound irritated.

  “Which means that we can change our signature,” he said.

  “Yee-ah.” She was speaking slower, as if she was trying to figure out what he was trying to do.

  “Can we change the signature of one of the DV-Class vessels, one of the ones that’s not close to Nindowne yet?”

  “I suppose,” she said. “I’ve never done it, but it should be possible. Although not for very long. Why?”

  “Because,” he said, “I want them to think that ship is an outsider vessel.”

  “You want them to think that ship is the Ivoire?” she asked.

  “Close but not quite,” he said. “Use the Shadow’s signature, or the signature of one of the other DV-Class vessels we have at Lost Souls. If this doesn’t work, we don’t want to help them find the Ivoire.”

  “Meanwhile, we head to the Ivoire,” Yash said. Then she leaned back. “Chen, what kind of shape is Perkins in?”

  Coop felt a pang. He hadn’t wanted to know that Perkins was one of the two injured people.

  “Still unconscious,” Chen said.

  “Dammit,” Yash said. “Lankstadt, I need you here. You need to do everything I tell you.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  “One last question, Coop,” Yash sai
d, as her fingers started dancing on the control panel. “How are we going to prevent them from following us to the Ivoire anyway?”

  “You’re going to ghost us,” he said.

  She let out another involuntary laugh. “I haven’t done that since school.”

  “I’m glad you did it then,” he said. “I was too tight-assed to try anything like that.”

  “Which is why you were on the captain track and I became a lowly engineer,” she said. “You’re asking me to do a lot of work in a short period of time.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I am.”

  Because he knew, if anyone could do this, Yash could.

  He was gambling all of their lives on her skills.

  But, he reminded himself, it wouldn’t be the first time—and he doubted it would be the last.

  Thirty-Seven

  Ghosting.

  Every kid learned how to do it. Or rather, every kid with a technical bent.

  Or every kid had heard of it. Like Coop—so upright he hadn’t tried it, but he had known it was possible.

  To create a ghost, all someone had to do was replicate the ship inside the sensors, making a false image of it, and sending the fake signal to any ships nearby as if it were a real signal.

  Some kids only used the signal, but the truly advanced ones, like Yash herself, created a complete three-dimensional ghost of the ship, sending it along that same trajectory, creating a dual spoof of the sensors. The unsophisticated spoof could be discovered with a simple glance out the portals of any ship; the advanced spoof crossed the human visual range as well, making it seem like there was an actual ship outside the portal, when all that was there was an elaborate hologram that managed to travel on a trajectory of its own.

  Ghosting of both kinds was unbelievably simple to do, and not that easy to crack unless you knew what to look for. It would also have been easy to design around it, prevent it, to make it nearly impossible to do.

  Yet the Fleet never had—and Yash always believed that someone, somewhere, had decided it needed to stay so that kids had a relatively safe way to rebel without endangering any ship they were on—especially the school ships, where hundreds of smart kids crowded together, alone too long with nothing to do.