by Paula Guran
And if her theories were right, then even now, she might find them, trapped in foldspace for only a few hours or days. Even if seven years had gone by for them, as those seven years had gone by for the Fleet, she might still discover some remnant of the ship. Maybe the Sikkerhet had gone to a nearby planet and settled. Maybe it had simply refueled and waited, trying to figure out how to return to what the Fleet called “real space,” which was, the current space and time.
The one thing the Fleet had done was build a long-term future trajectory. The Fleet knew where it was going. It was heading into what, for it, was uncharted space. It had advance ships to either map the area or to double-check the maps provided by the locals of the sector the Fleet was currently in.
The only thing uncertain in the Fleet’s map was the timeline. The Fleet had none. It would spend months near some planet, learning the culture. It would spend years helping a new ally fight a war.
If her father knew the trajectory, he might be waiting for the Fleet ahead of where the Fleet currently was. She doubted that, though, since the Alta had sent large ships as well as exploratory vessels ahead, searching for the Sikkerhet.
If her father had gone too far into the trajectory, she might never see him again. The version of the Fleet that greeted him or the descendants on his ship might be populated by her grandchildren’s generations—if, indeed, she ever had grandchildren.
The method she had devised, the method that ultimately got tested, was a three-part grid search inside foldspace. The Fleet had never done foldspace grid searches for lost ships before, not in all the millennia of its existence.
Part of that was a simple disagreement as to what foldspace was. Some theorists believed that foldspace was a different point in time—the future, the past—somewhen else. But a lot of the practical military, those who’d actually flown into foldspace through their anacapa drives, didn’t believe that.
The star maps in foldspace were significantly different than the star maps from the area where the ship had left. It usually took something catastrophic to change star maps in the same area—not even the explosion of a planet would change a star map so drastically as to be completely unrecognizable.
So most theorists believed that foldspace was either an alternate reality that somehow the ships tapped into with the anacapa or a fold in space, an actual place that the ships could somehow access.
What Sabin privately believed was that the anacapa sent a ship far across the universe, into another galaxy altogether, and then back again. But the scientists told her that the anacapa didn’t have the energy for that. Nothing did.
Which left her with dimensional theory. One of her professors claimed that foldspace was another dimension, one that hadn’t yet been charted and wasn’t understood. Some of the work done by the scientists on Dhom pointed to that theory being correct.
She had been contemplating all of that when she realized that none of it mattered. What the ships went into wasn’t important. What it seemed like was.
And what it seemed like was a sector of space like all other sectors of space, except for the different star maps. Except for the fact that none of the equipment that the Fleet had could track the ships down in that sector of space. None of the equipment that any other culture had could track those ships either.
So she decided to do what all the scientists of the anacapa had done before her—not question how it did what it did—but accept the reality that it worked.
In that reality, the ships went somewhere that looked like this reality.
And those realities could be searched.
If she could find the right point in foldspace, the same entry point that a missing Fleet ship had taken.
The same entry point that the Sikkerhet had taken.
The same entry point that her father had taken—and disappeared.
11.
“Oh, come on,” Cho said in a tone she’d never heard him use before. “Zeller’s unreasonable. Everyone knows that. They’re just waiting for him to retire.”
Sabin blinked at him, forcing herself to come back for a moment in her own past. A quick escape in her own mental foldspace.
The small control room was hot. She pushed a strand of hair off her face, and resisted the urge to smile grimly. Cho was staring at her with something like sympathy, which she would not have expected from him.
“I know they’re waiting for him to retire,” she said. “They think he’s old-fashioned. But he’s not entirely unreasonable.”
Cho frowned. He looked like he was about to disagree, when she said, “He’s lived through a lot, Seamus. Sometimes we don’t respect that enough.”
“I can’t believe you’re agreeing with him, after the way he treats you.”
Her smile was thin. “Yeah, I know,” she said. “But I think I don’t treat him well either.”
12.
When Sabin was twenty-one, she hadn’t known who Zeller was. He’d just been a crew member on the Rannsaka, one of the ships that had used her grid system to explore foldspace in search of her father’s ship.
Zeller had simply been a face in the crowd when she boarded the Rannsaka, heading to its largest crew dining room for a briefing.
What she encountered was a celebration.
Over two hundred crew members applauded her as she walked into the room. The captain, a severe woman who until this point rarely seemed to smile, had led the cheers, then surprised Sabin by saying,
“And thanks to Tory Sabin, we now know what happened to five of our vessels. Five, considered lost, and now found.”
Sabin’s breath caught. She’d been running so-called test missions of the grid search for more than a year. The missions were no longer tests, really. Everyone knew they worked on some level. But so far none of the ships found had been the Sikkerhet. All had disappeared at different times, and in different sectors of space. None had had crew members that anyone knew, and indeed, the ships themselves had been empty for a long time. There weren’t even bodies on board, although no one knew if the crews had left voluntarily or not. Most of the ships were open to space. Those ships could have been raided, abandoned, or simply suffered through the passage of time.
As of yet, no one had even tried those ships’ anacapa drives or even tried to boot up the other equipment. The ships had piggybacked on the science vessels and had been taken to Sector Base T so that they could be studied.
Four of those ships anyway.
Sabin hadn’t known about a fifth.
She turned to the captain and said softly, “There’s a fifth?”
“Yes,” the captain said with a smile. “We found it at the very end of our search and it’s already at Sector Base T. And this one’s mostly intact.”
Sabin knew better than to ask the captain why no one had contacted Sabin. Gradually the mission was changing from testing to something run by the military, and the military rarely gave out information.
The entire crowd had grown silent. Maybe they saw Sabin’s reaction, a tentative response, not quite the joy everyone had expected.
She had gotten the news on the other four in her command headquarters on the Pasteur, and she had been with her team. They knew she had been searching for one ship in particular, so her mixed reactions hadn’t bothered them.
She wished she could remain as calm as a scientist should in such circumstances, but her heart rate increased. Her face was slightly flushed and she knew she looked just a bit too eager.
“What ship is it?” she asked, suspecting she knew the answer. After all, why would they throw a celebration if it weren’t the Sikkerhet?
“The Moline,” the captain said, “and the good news is that she’s mostly intact.”
The ship’s name rolled around in her head for a long moment. Moline. Moline. She hadn’t even heard of that ship. She had heard of two of the others before they were found, but the Moline wasn’t one that had any obvious known history.
She could feel her intellect trying to wrap itself arou
nd the news, while her heart sank. She needed to leave the room, she needed to be alone with this, but she also needed to acknowledge everyone’s good work.
“That’s excellent,” she said and hoped she sounded enthusiastic.
“And,” the captain said with that unbelievably cheerful sound in her voice, “I wanted to let you know that the Alta has decided that your foldspace searches are now going to become part of the Fleet’s regular systems. We’ll design ships to do the searches, train people, everything. Your program is official now!”
The crew cheered and applauded. Sabin smiled at them—at least, she hoped she smiled. How come no one had told her this personally? Why were they doing this kind of “celebration”? Didn’t they know this wasn’t about the old ships or even the program? It was about her father.
At the thought of him, the frustration she’d been holding back welled up. She knew better than to react here. Instead she smiled, waved some more, and then nodded once, fleeing the room.
She made it halfway down the corridor before she burst into tears. She had known things would change at some point, but she figured she’d find her father first.
The search wasn’t refined enough yet. She couldn’t pinpoint where a ship disappeared and where it had gone to in foldspace. The grid search had used anacapa signatures to track ships, yes, but they weren’t ships that anyone had been searching for. They had disappeared long ago; their crews would have been dead now, anyway.
Some of the Rannsaka’s crew came through the corridor. She turned away, unable to go farther, and hid her face against the wall, hoping no one would stop for her.
One man did. He touched her back, asked if she was all right.
“Yes,” she had lied. “Yes. Just tired.”
She had no idea if she knew him or if he knew her. She never ever learned who he was. But later, she’d come to suspect Zeller. Zeller, who realized how broken up she had been over not finding her father’s ship, about effectively being removed from running the program she had started.
Or maybe that man had been someone else, and she had given Zeller too much credit. Maybe the man—whoever he had been—had no memory of an incident that loomed so large in her own mind.
The next day, she asked to search for her father’s ship. Her request was denied. Apparently Command Operations on the Alta wanted to examine the five recovered ships before searching for any more.
They told her to put in a request for a future search, and they would get back to her.
They commended her for her service. They designed an entire group of ships to search foldspace, based on her plans. They offered to promote her.
She let them.
And six months later, she was moved from foldspace search to engineering, where she was supposed to improve the anacapa design.
Five years after that, after applying and reapplying to search for her father’s ship to no avail, she applied to the academy for officer training.
And, it turned out, only Zeller had figured out why.
13.
“I haven’t run a search since the very first one, decades ago,” Sabin said to Cho. “Things have changed, procedures have changed, and honestly, I haven’t kept up with most of it.”
She shifted in her chair. The room had closed in on her.
Cho nodded. “I glanced at the information, and from what I can tell, the only time we recovered a ship in foldspace right after the ship missed its window, we had gone in within twenty-four hours.”
She closed her eyes. She could almost picture Coop, grinning at her over a private dinner in their suite on Starbase Kappa, teasing her about the changes in protocol on something or other. He had once told her that she jumped in too early, in his opinion, that a captain needed caution to protect his crew.
She had told him that a captain also had to know when to take a risk.
Cho said something, but she held up her hand to silence him. She needed a moment to think. He was going to explain risks to her that she understood, risks she invented for god’s sake.
Ships had to dive in and out of foldspace just to do the grid search, and each trip into foldspace, each search, put the rescue ships at risk. The best grid search took the coordinated effort of five or more ships, exchanging information, going in, coming out, never staying in foldspace longer than a minute or two to gather information.
Because a minute or two in foldspace could be an hour or more outside of it.
Sixty minutes or sixty-five or sixty-three. The correlation was never entirely precise, which was what made foldspace so very dangerous.
In fact, there were three main things that made foldspace dangerous. The first was that no one entirely understood it, so the sensible captains were leery about using it. The second was that the sensors did not work between foldspace and real space. So returning from or going to foldspace meant that a ship might land on top of something else, like an asteroid or, in the case of real space, another ship.
And of course the final great risk was the one she dealt with right now: the longer a ship stayed in foldspace, the more unreliable the time of return became. No one could predict the exact moment the ship would come back, only that it would come within a time frame. That was why Coop said twenty hours, but he didn’t specify down to the minute or second.
The biggest problem Sabin had now was this: the front line didn’t have five ships to spare. She knew that, and Cho hadn’t mentioned any others. The crew of her ship was going to have to do something it wasn’t trained for, and she would be risking her crew to save another.
Jumping in too fast.
She had a hunch Coop would have waited until the investigative team arrived.
She wouldn’t.
She opened her eyes. Cho was watching her patiently, as if he expected her to say no. He had given her time, and she appreciated that, especially since his time was so valuable.
Just like hers was.
Like Coop’s was.
“I think we need at least two ships to do this,” she said. “And if there are crew members on any ship in the front line who used to work foldspace investigation and rescue. I’d like them to join my team for this rescue attempt.”
Cho’s jaw moved just a little, as if he started to say something and then held it back.
“The Alta didn’t approve two ships for this,” he said.
She started to argue, but it was his turn to hold up his hand.
“But,” Cho said with great force. “I agree with you. If we’re going to mount a rescue, we’re going to do the best we can to get it right.”
She grinned at him, and felt—astonishingly—a prickle of tears behind her eyes. Dammit, she cared more than she wanted to.
She probably should have admitted that as well, but she didn’t. Besides, she suspected Cho understood.
She suspected his willingness to countermand the orders from the Alta had more to do with Coop and the Ivoire than it did any kind of common sense.
She appreciated it, but she didn’t tell Cho that.
She suspected he already knew.
14.
It took half an hour to prepare for the rescue. The Geneva’s partner ship on this mission was the Pueblo, commanded by Captain Jakoba Foucheux. Foucheux had spent two months in foldspace investigation and rescue before asking for a transfer. The reason for the transfer remained classified, a procedure that usually meant some issue with a superior officer, and usually one that never got properly resolved in any kind of arbitration.
Sabin didn’t have any time to dig deeper. She was relieved to have Foucheux, whom she liked, as her partner, but disappointed that Cho had only found ten other crew members who’d worked in foldspace investigation and rescue. Of those ten, only five were available to transfer to Sabin’s ship. The others were too far away on the search near Ukhanda to get back in time to start this mission.
The mission was deceptively simple. Once Sabin finished the math confirming what she believed Coop had done considering the inform
ation he had given, the telemetry that the Ivoire had automatically sent to the Fleet, and the time he’d been gone, she could—within a limited range—figure out the coordinates in foldspace.
The foldspace investigation and rescue section had a formula for all of this, and since they were the ones that had actually discovered recently missing ships in the past, she had two of the borrowed crew members use that formula as well.
All three people—the crew members and her, using her old system—had come up with the same location, which cheered her. If they had been searching for a ship disappeared long ago, they would have a lot more trouble coming up with the same location. They’d probably come up with three different locations, and maybe more, depending on how they all tweaked their formulas.
Once they had a location, the ships would work in tandem. First the Geneva would head to that part of foldspace and immediately scan the area. The Geneva would stay no more than a minute, and reappear, sending all of its scanned information to the Pueblo.
The Pueblo would do the same thing, scanning a slightly different swath of foldspace, and the two ships would continue to work in tandem until they found something, or until the actual investigation and rescue ships arrived.
The problem was that there were no guidelines on which direction to proceed once the searching ships moved beyond the scans of the original location. That was why five ships was better, and more than five desirable. The ships would partner, and go in all directions, doing so quickly, then moving to cover as much of that region of foldspace in the shortest amount of time.
Sabin had to pick a direction after the third set of tandem jumps, and she didn’t like that. She hoped the Ivoire would be easy to find, that it would show up—even as a speck—on the nearest grid search. But she knew that hope and reality often failed to collide.
15.
The first jump into foldspace felt like any other. First, the thrum of the anacapa drive, which she barely heard or felt on a normal day, faded. Then the screens blanked. Sabin knew that if she were watching the navigation controls, they would flicker for just a moment.
The entire ship would bump, only once and very slightly. If she were in a vehicle on the ground, she would think that vehicle had hit a small rock, sending a tiny reverberation through the entire system.