Warrior Women

by Paula Guran

  “I want to assign you to the on-site investigation spot,” he said. “You have the most experience. However, General Zeller told me that you might not want the task. I don’t believe in taking one person’s word for another’s possible reaction, especially when the other person is available. You’re the best person for the job, Tory. Do you want it?”

  “Of course I do,” she said, keeping her voice calm. The momentary flash of annoyance at Zeller’s name and remark had already faded. Zeller was a problem for another day. “Do you want me to do a grid search or an area search?”

  “See if you can find traces of the Ivoire,” Cho said. “Barring that, see if you can figure out exactly what they did.”

  Something in his phrasing seemed strange to her.

  “Don’t you think they used their anacapa drive?” she asked.

  “I do, but I’ve never seen one take so long to engage, and I’ve never seen a ship light up like that,” he said. “I’m worried that they disappeared, not because of the anacapa but because those little ships used a weapon we don’t understand.”

  Sabin felt chilled. She hadn’t even thought of that possibility. In that case, Coop—and his entire crew—were already dead.

  But she shouldn’t guess. Guessing was the enemy in any search for information.

  “If those ships used such a powerful weapon,” she said, “why would they have remained in the area?”

  “I don’t know,” Cho said. “I don’t think they would have. But I can’t rule out anything at the moment. We need to search.”

  She agreed. “I’ll do my best to figure out what happened here,” she said. “I’ll let you know when we have news.”

  She had almost said if we have news, and had caught herself just in time. Normally, she wasn’t a pessimist, but something was odd here, something she could feel but couldn’t see.

  She wasn’t usually a gut commander. She liked facts and hard information. But she also knew that sometimes hard information took too much time to acquire and gut became important.

  She hoped this wasn’t one of those times.

  8.

  On the day her father disappeared, they pulled Tory Sabin out of class on the Brazza and took her to the observation deck. She always remembered it as “they” because try as she might, she couldn’t remember who took her from class, how she got to the observation deck, how many people spoke to her along the way, or what anyone expected of her.

  She was all of thirteen, precocious and opinionated, one month into her new school—a boarding school, which was unusual at her age. Boarding school for most students started when they qualified for the final four years of mandatory education. She tested way ahead of her peers, and so got assigned to a special school for children her age who were on a fast-track.

  Her father was proud of her. No one had bothered to tell her mother.

  But someone had told her mother that Sabin (whom everyone called Tory back then) was alone on the Brazza, waiting for news of her father, because her mother swooped in as if she would rescue everyone.

  Her mother always wore impractical flowing garments, the kind of thing that confirmed she wasn’t, nor would she ever be, part of the Fleet’s military structure. She was an artist who worked in fabric. Her art changed each time she visited a new culture or planet, so her work became quite collectible among a certain group in the Fleet. She couldn’t replicate patterns or materials once she ran out of whatever she had purchased in her (actually, the Fleet’s) travels, so her pieces became—of necessity—limited editions.

  Tory hadn’t seen her mother in more than six months, even though the ship her mother lived on, the Krásný, never left the Fleet on any kind of mission. Most of the Fleet’s civilians ended up on the Krásný, partly because the military presence was smaller on that ship. The ship specialized in environments and environmental systems, and that included the interior design that kept the people on board all of the ships entertained, stimulated, and sane.

  Her mother sat beside Tory on a bench in the center of the room, enveloping her in lavender perfume. The bench was built so that the occupant had a 360-degree view of the space outside. Plus the domed ceiling was clear so that she could see everything above her.

  Tory wanted to slide away. Her mother’s perfume was overwhelming, but more than that, her mother’s golden gown was made of some kind of shiny but rough fabric, and just being near it made Tory itch.

  “They don’t understand the anacapa, you know,” her mother said conversationally, as if they’d been talking all along. No hello, no hug, no how-have-you-been, or even a comforting he’ll-be-all-right. Nothing. Straight into the old arguments, with Tory standing in for her father. “It’s dangerous to use them, and your father promised, back when we married, that he never would—”

  “Fortunately, you’re divorced,” Tory said and stood up, arms crossed. “He’s overdue by five hours. That’s all, Mom. You can go back to whatever thing you’re designing. I won’t be mad at you. I’m not worried. Daddy’s good at his job.”

  Her mother stood, and this time, wrapped her arms around Tory. Tory thought of elbowing her mother hard and viciously so that her mother would never hug her again, then suppressed the response and squirmed out of her mother’s embrace.

  “They don’t remove a child from school or contact her remaining parent because they think this is routine,” her mother said—so not comfortingly.

  “I’m smart enough to know that, Mother,” Tory said.

  “They think you need me.”

  “They’re wrong.” Tory stepped closer to the observation window. “Daddy will be just fine. The Sikkerhet will return, and he and I will get on with our lives. Without you.”

  Her mother tilted her head just a little, a dismissive you can’t mean that look she had used as long as Tory could remember.

  “I divorced him, not you,” her mother said.

  “Funny,” Tory said, “I couldn’t tell.”

  “I contacted your father about a visitation schedule. He never responded,” her mother said.

  On purpose, Tory almost said but didn’t. He wanted to see if Tory’s mother would push the visitation, wanted to see if she would make contact, if she would hire a lawyer to enforce the terms of the shared custody.

  Her mother had done none of those things. In fact, she hadn’t even done what was on her schedule—a series of intership calls that were supposed to happen every Friday night. Instead, she’d send apologies, usually about work-related distractions, and finally, she stopped apologizing altogether.

  Tory’s father had been surprised; he had thought Tory’s mother was a different person, maybe from the beginning. Tory attributed his blindness to both love and to the fact that he hadn’t spent much time with his wife once he got on a career track. It was only after he kept finding Tory on her own, in the engineering and maintenance areas of the ship, at an age when the crew would report Tory’s appearance (because it was dangerous) that he finally realized his family couldn’t stay on the ship when he had an actual mission.

  When he broke that news to Tory and her mother, her mother had shrugged and said they would move to the Krásný. Tory had burst into tears, begging to stay, and her father, for once, had listened. Not that he could have missed the campaign. Because others on the ship said that Tory shouldn’t—couldn’t—stay with her mother. Not and have actual parental care.

  “What happened between you and Daddy isn’t my business,” Tory said. “I—”

  “It is your business, darling,” her mother said. “If your father had—”

  “I don’t want to discuss it. In fact, I don’t want you here. Daddy will return, and I’ll be fine, and even if I’m not fine, you’re not the kind of person who can take care of anyone. If you don’t leave right now, I will.”

  Her mother stared at her as if Tory had betrayed her.

  “You need me right now,” her mother said. “I thought you were smart. No one misses an anacapa window without a reason, a se
rious reason. In the history of the Fleet, those who miss the window by an hour or more usually do not return. You have a scientific brain. You should understand—”

  “Shut up,” Tory said, her hands balled into fists. “Shutupshutupshutup.”

  “Tory—”

  Tory waved her hand at her mother, effectively silencing her. Then Tory shook her head, and ran for the door. Tory had no idea where she was going to go—if she went back to her room, her mother would find her—but she had to get away.

  Just like she had to get away when she was a child.

  And like she had when she was a child, she found herself heading toward engineering, the only place on any ship with concrete answers.

  The only place she had ever felt safe.

  9.

  Sabin’s search found evidence that Coop had used the anacapa drive. Sabin was relieved and not relieved at the same time. In fact, she couldn’t remember a moment when her emotions over one event had been so mixed.

  The fact that he had used the anacapa proved that those small ships didn’t have some kind of miracle weapon that destroyed the Ivoire. But the fact that he used the anacapa and wasn’t back in the same spot at the time he had mentioned meant he was in trouble.

  Sabin’s mother had been right all those years ago: those who miss the window by an hour or more usually did not return.

  Sabin sent the information to Cho and asked if he wanted her to contact all the sector bases still in operation. Sometimes a ship having trouble with its anacapa wouldn’t show up in the spot it was supposed to; it would instead go immediately to the nearest sector base for repair.

  The failsafe also took ships to sector bases, usually the most active one. If the crisis had been really bad, no one at the base would have thought of contacting the front line—if, indeed, the base even knew that the front line had moved.

  Cho promised to check, and after he did, he requested a private audience with her. He wanted to talk to her nowhere near her crew or his.

  She didn’t think that unusual. She thought it sad. Because she knew part of what he was going to say.

  Her ship had a small communications area just off the bridge. She had built that as well, for moments just like this one. When she thought about it, she realized she had made major modifications to every single ship she had served on, and on none more than the Geneva.

  She slipped inside the communications area. It was larger than the one in her cabin. Ten people could fit in here comfortably, even though, if she needed that many people to hear something, then they would usually go to the conference area or listen on the bridge.

  The communications into this section of the ship were scrambled and encoded, more private than anything else on the Geneva.

  Screens covered all the walls. Everything could become holographic if needed, but she never used that feature. The table in the middle of the room felt out of place. She didn’t sit at it.

  Instead, she leaned on it, and contacted Cho.

  He showed up on the screen in front of her, in a room similar to her own. His ship had been redesigned after she made modifications to hers.

  Cho looked tired. Some of that might have been because of the bachelor party and the change of focus, but some of it was a man trying to cope with hard news, news that upset him, news he wanted to treat dispassionately, even though it was impossible.

  “You think they’re dead,” she said without introduction. She had almost said, you think he’s dead, which was an insight into her own mind that she didn’t want and she certainly didn’t want Cho to hear.

  Either she thought Coop was dead, or she feared it, or she cared about it too much. After all, there were more than five hundred souls on that ship. She should care about all of them equally.

  “What I think doesn’t matter,” Cho said, which was clearly his version of yes. “They haven’t shown up at any of the active sector bases or starbases. The Alta tells me that experts have pinged the older sector bases, and there’s been no activity, at least activity that has shown up in the logs. Experts tell me that they shouldn’t have gone back to sector bases that the Ivoire hasn’t used in the past twenty years, so that double-check was a long shot.”

  She knew that. No ship had shown up on old decommissioned sector bases unless that ship had used or visited the sector base some time in its recent history.

  “The Alta wants us to do a few things,” he said. “They want us to wait until the Taidhleoir arrives. That ship will handle the situation on Ukhanda.”

  The Taidhleoir was another ship that specialized in diplomatic missions. It wasn’t as top of the line as the Ivoire, but it would do.

  “They figured out, then, who the ships belonged to?” Sabin asked.

  “The Xenth say that the ships are Quurzod, but the Quurzod aren’t acknowledging anything, and apparently the Alta can’t confirm. It’s a mess, and they don’t want us in the middle of the diplomatic part of the mess. The front line has to remain, though. The show of force is going to show everyone on Ukhanda that the Fleet isn’t to be messed with.”

  “Even though someone probably think they successfully harmed one of our ships,” she said, more to herself than to Cho.

  “Even though,” Cho said, in the tone that captains used when they didn’t approve of the path their higher ups were taking. “They also want us to do some investigating along the trails left by the small ships and near that spot where the Ivoire lit up so oddly.”

  “I have been,” Sabin said.

  “Not for an indication of anacapa use, but to see if there are other energy signatures that we’re unfamiliar with, or maybe even ones we are familiar with. In other words, they want our investigators to figure out what those ships were attacking the Ivoire with.”

  “Reverse engineer it?” she asked. She’d been part of teams that had done such things in the past. They were usually used in war situations, when one of the participants had developed a new weapon. “We can’t just ask someone on Ukhanda or capture one of the ships?”

  Cho visibly shrugged, and he looked away for a moment. When he glanced back at her, his dark eyes held sadness and something else. Frustration? She didn’t know him well enough to be able to tell.

  “They think something really bad happened on that planet,” he said, “and they believe it’s going to take some work to deal with it. Work we can’t do in a time frame that will enable us to rescue the Ivoire.”

  If they could rescue the Ivoire. He didn’t even have to add that part for her to hear it.

  “You didn’t have to tell me all of this in private,” she said. “You know our bridge crews could have kept this quiet. What else is there?”

  “I wanted you to make a choice. Not your crew, not the Alta. You.” Now his gaze met hers, and she almost felt him in the room. He was scared. She rarely had that thought about other captains, and she had never seen such emotion from Cho. Not that he was showing much now. His mouth had thinned a bit. Anyone who didn’t know him would have thought he was just a little more concerned than normal, a little preoccupied.

  But she could feel it: He was scared.

  Was he scared of her response? Or something else entirely?

  “Here’s the thing, Tory,” he said, his tone confidential. “I talked to some of the generals directly. We all know that time is of the essence in tracking a lost ship in foldspace. But General Zeller wants us to wait until some of the foldspace investigative and rescue ships arrive. He doesn’t trust you.”

  Of course he didn’t. He hadn’t from the moment he met her.

  “Trust me to what?” she asked, although she had a hunch she knew.

  “Search foldspace.” Cho spoke tersely as if he wanted to get this part of the conversation over with. And as she was about to respond, he added, “I don’t understand it, Tory. You’re the one who developed the search method that we’ve used for the past thirty-five years. You’re the one who understands it the best. I know you and Zeller have issues, and I assume it’s none of
my business—”

  “He thinks I’m too emotional about this,” she said. “And you know, on this one thing, he might be right.”

  10.

  Older than her years, brilliant, and obsessed. That was what Sabin’s evaluations all said. She had hacked into them on the night before the very first test mission began.

  Her years were all of twenty, too young to do much in the Fleet, but old enough to be considered an adult. She had already gone to two boarding schools. She had worked her way through some of the most difficult engineering degree programs in the Fleet, plus she had done some work with the Dhom, one of the more advanced cultures they were lucky enough to find two years ago.

  The scientists there taught her things about dimensional theory that no one in the Fleet had contemplated before. After they heard the Dhom scientists, some of her professors postulated that the Fleet had lost a lot of its research into dimensional theory. The professors claimed that the anacapa drive couldn’t have been developed without it.

  Some of her professors were a little naïve, in Sabin’s opinion anyway. She could have pointed to a dozen points in the history of science and technology, points she knew, where something got developed accidentally and no one quite knew how it worked.

  Granted, however, such things rarely inspired confidence, and she didn’t need to point out that there were parts of her theories that were just guesses as well. Guesses based on research, but as she could have pointed out to anyone who listened (as she would argue sometimes inside her own mind), theories needed testing before they became quantifiable.

  Her test missions were the transition between theory and fact. Or at least, between narrower, more apt theories, and something approaching fact.

  What she couldn’t admit to anyone—not her mentors, not the professors, not the captains running the ships would take these risks—was that she really didn’t care about ancient history, anacapa development, or even dimensional theory.

  She cared about finding her father and his crew.