The Runabout

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Mikk is frightened—and rightfully so. Everyone who has died in these malfunctioning anacapa areas on our watch has done so when we couldn’t see them.

  “You will not be out of my range of sight. Or we will end this mission right now.” He’s moving from forceful to a tinge of panic.

  “Boss,” Elaine says to me, turning slightly. “Tell him—”

  “He’s right, Elaine. If we don’t find anything on the sides he can see, we’ll send a probe around the back.” I’m saying that to mollify her. When the time comes, I won’t authorize a probe around that side of the runabout. That’s just a waste of a probe. Instead, we’ll pry those doors.

  “All right,” she says, but she sounds skeptical. “Can I at least make my way back to the front across the top of this thing?”

  I don’t know if she’s asking me or if she’s asking Mikk. But I’m going to let him answer her.

  “Only if you climb up there from the place Boss is right now,” he says to Elaine. “I’ll be able to see you if you do that.”

  “All right,” she says.

  I start to move back the way I came. I’m putting my hands on the spots I used before. I am not going to go completely underneath this vessel, and I note that Mikk didn’t suggest it. He seems worried about Elaine, and frankly, I am as well.

  It’s not like her to question what the leader of a dive says.

  I move out of her way far enough that she pulls herself to the top of the runabout—or what’s passing for the top here. I pull myself up higher too, placing my gloved hands just above the holds she originally used. I also brace my boots on the sides.

  I can feel slight vibrations as she pulls herself along the top of this runabout. Or maybe those vibrations are from the energy causing that music. I don’t know, and it’s not for me to figure out.

  But the music has receded, at least on this side of the runabout, to the levels I’ve experienced before in the Boneyard.

  My headache remains but it isn’t all encompassing.

  We make our way back to the side of the runabout facing the Sove. Elaine reaches that part of the runabout first, and waits for me. I make my way around.

  “There’s nothing up here,” she says.

  The music grows stronger the closer I get to our original line. I peer at it, then at the Dignity Vessel we were initially going to dive. Am I wrong? Is the malfunctioning anacapa on that vessel?

  I’m about to tell Mikk that the music is loud once again when Elaine speaks up.

  She says, “Hey, Boss, we might have something here.”

  Thirteen

  I climb up just a bit farther, careful that my extra tethers don’t get caught in the line between the Sove and the runabout. Elaine keeps one hand and both feet on the runabout, but points at the side we haven’t examined yet.

  She found something there.

  Strangely, I’m not excited about that.

  “I’ll look,” I say.

  I straddle the door, then return to the part of the runabout I initially attached to.

  Then I work my way around to the area that Elaine is pointing at. Once I get close, she eases herself over the edge, making sure her tethers stay in place as well.

  There’s a hole to the right of the second escape pod tube. The hole is larger than I would have thought, but dark, like the nanobits had started to repair it.

  I turn on the light on the back of my glove and aim it at the hole. I see some ragged edges, which I don’t like, and then I note that they’ve smoothed out just a bit, farther in.

  The hole is wide enough that, if I move closer, I can stick my fist in there, and still see around it to see if it opens to the inside.

  I can do that without touching any of the jagged edges if I go slowly enough.

  The music has gotten very, very loud here, bad enough that my eyes actually water from the pain.

  I tell Mikk about the music. Then I ask, “How long have we been on this dive?”

  “Thirty-three minutes, nine seconds,” he says, sounding concerned.

  My suit tells me we’ve been here thirty-three minutes, eight seconds. It’s not a big enough discrepancy to make me stop.

  I’m going to investigate this hole, and then I’ll ask him the time again. This time, I’ll tell him that our clocks have slide out of sync.

  If he doesn’t already know that.

  I stick my fist inside, the light catching the entire interior. The blackness gleams at me from the back side of that hole.

  “The nanobits have done their job,” Yash says in my ear. She sounds dispirited. “They closed the hole. Looks like they didn’t have enough strength to repair it entirely, but they managed to keep the runabout intact.”

  I want to ask her when she thought this happened, how far along in this runabout’s clearly long and tortured history, but I’ll wait to ask that question until I’m back inside the Sove.

  Elaine has floated down beside me, still holding the runabout with one hand. I ask her to check the hole from her side.

  She peers inside, then shines two lights in there, one from her hood and one from her glove. After a moment, she shakes her head.

  “The nanobits closed it off,” she says, “if it ever got breached.”

  I let out a sigh, knowing Mikk will pick up on my frustration. I don’t care. If we could go around the back side, the side he can’t see easily, then we might find another hole.

  But it looks like the nanobits put their last scrap of energy into repairing the hull from whatever attacked it. If we find a hole back there, odds are that it too will be partially repaired.

  “You up for trying the doors?” I ask her. We’ve been out here, according to my suit’s clock, for forty minutes.

  “Yes,” she says. She doesn’t sound tired, but perhaps I’m simply reading that into her response.

  As we work our way back to the runabout’s main doors, I check our clock with Mikk. We’re still one second different. I tell him that, and he makes note.

  We’re nearly to the doors, when Yash says, “Remember the—” before something or someone (probably Mikk) cuts her off. I don’t say anything to reassure her. Of course we’ll try the passcodes first. We’ve been lucky in the past. Some of the ancient and abandoned sector bases that we discovered used the passcodes Yash and Coop were familiar with.

  But I’m convinced that even though this runabout is ancient, it’s not that ancient. She’s going to be disappointed, but there’s nothing I can do about that.

  I reach the doors first, and raise myself over the line so that I’m on the far side. I have to move my tethers again. Even though they were my idea, I hate them. They’re awkward and in the way.

  Elaine is close behind me. We both scan the sides—all four of them—around the door, looking for the area where the exterior panel would be.

  I don’t see one, and neither does Elaine. We switch sides, and search again.

  Even with the flaking nanobits and the thin hull, I’m not seeing anything that suggests a control panel. I move to the center of the door closest to me and run my glove over it. I toggle my faceplate so that I can see the readings, but according to the data streaming along one side, there’s no difference on the surface, nothing that would suggest an exterior access.

  “Yash,” I say into the comm, “the Fleet wouldn’t build a runabout without a way to access it from the outside, would they?”

  After I ask the question, I wince. I know how she’s going to respond: They wouldn’t build a runabout with an anacapa drive either, Boss, but they did.

  To my surprise, she doesn’t say that. She says, “They might, especially for use in hostile areas. They might have built the doors to respond to a bit of equipment that the pilot carries with himself or something.”

  “Remote access,” I say. “You wouldn’t have any idea how to replicate that, would you?”

  “Right now? While you’re diving? No.” She sounds vaguely amused, as if I have imbued her with powers beyond those a hum
an being might have. “Maybe if you come back, I might be able to rig up something that has a—oh, I don’t know—twenty percent chance of working.”

  Not good enough, and we both know it.

  “You up for prying the doors?” I ask Elaine.

  “Yes,” she says.

  It’s dangerous. We have to be careful to make sure our suits don’t snag or get ripped. We also need to attach ourselves to the runabout itself so that we can have our hands free.

  And it will take a lot of physical strength to lever the doors open because we don’t have anything to brace against. Gravity might work against us in this circumstance, but it might also work for us.

  And if I had to bet, I would bet that we’d do better in gravity. We’re used to it.

  But I don’t say that to Elaine. Instead, I say, “All we need is to open it a few centimeters so we can shove the probe inside.”

  “What if there’s an airlock?” she asks.

  She’s right. I hadn’t planned for the airlock.

  “All right,” I concede. “Maybe half a meter or so. I should be able to squeeze through that.”

  Because there’s no chance that the airlock will be automated.

  I think.

  Elaine doesn’t argue with me about squeezing through. I half expect Mikk or Yash to say something, but neither of them do as well.

  I’m hoping that’s because they agree with what we plan, not because the time has slipped yet again.

  Elaine and I use grapplers built into the sides of our suits to tether ourselves to the crumbling nanobit pockmarks on the runabout. The grapplers claw into the sides just enough to keep us in place. We also use our boots to adhere to the side of the runabout, leaving our arms free.

  I debate tethering ourselves to the line as well, but we already have extra tethers hooking us to the Sove, and that should be enough.

  The music whoops and dives, less of a chorus right here than a raucous, atonal symphony. For some reason, that bothers me less than the choral music did.

  The headache remains, but it is less important now.

  I take out my lever, and place it in the very thin line between the two entrance doors. From what I can tell, the doors are designed to slide into the hull.

  Elaine does the same thing from her side. We double-check each other, and agree to pull at the count of three.

  I’m the one who counts.

  Then we pull.

  For long, agonizing seconds, the doors don’t budge. Then hers jiggles just a little. All we need is one, but I’m not giving up on mine.

  It appears to be stuck, though.

  She keeps pulling. If she’s putting as much effort into this as I am, then she’s sweating inside that suit, no matter what the environmental controls are doing.

  Her door jumps a bit more, then pulls back nearly a full meter.

  That’s all we need.

  “Good,” I say.

  “I can go in,” she says.

  “No,” I say, bracing myself for another one of those you’re the most important person arguments. But she doesn’t make it and neither does Yash.

  I use the lever to pull myself closer to the doors. A meter is more than wide enough for me to slide inside sideways, and I do.

  The nanobits are floating in here as well, just as disturbed as they are outside the runabout. The music is even louder. Deafening doesn’t begin to describe it. All-consuming, maybe. I’m beginning to wonder if that sound—that energy—whatever it is—is doing some kind of damage to my brain or my body.

  But I can’t worry about that.

  There is an airlock, just like Elaine predicted there would be. If I had been thinking clearly, I would have known it too. This headache, the music, they’re all interfering with my thought processes. I need to get the probe into the runabout, and then Elaine and I need to get back to the Sove as fast as possible.

  I slide into the airlock and as I get inside, I realize that Mikk can’t see me. A shiver runs down my back. Was this what my divers experienced when they died? Headaches? Loud music? An inability to focus?

  Whatever it is, I can’t afford to worry about it now.

  I have to get the airlock door open, and push the probe through it.

  First, I place my gloved hand on the airlock door. It’s an old failsafe system that Coop told me about for any drifting Fleet ship. Figuring that a drifting ship is a ship without power, there’s a physical mechanism, an actual mechanical weight system inside the door that’s activated by the kind of slap caused by a human hand at just the right level.

  The mechanism exists on the airlock’s interior door, not an exterior door. The theory is, according to Coop, that only members of the Fleet would know this trick. And no one would want an accidental activation on the outside of any kind of ship.

  I don’t expect this glove-slap to work. I’m not sure the Fleet would have left something mechanical in their ships. I assume that the ships, large and small, have evolved tremendously since Coop’s time.

  But the door in front of me wobbles. Then it shakes a little, and opens maybe half a centimeter. That’s all I need. I insert the lever, brace my feet against the wall, and pull.

  This door opens easily.

  There’s darkness beyond and even louder music.

  My hand shakes as I grab the probe from my belt. I activate the probe and toss it inside.

  I wonder if I should send one more after it, then realize that the doors probably won’t close. We will have an easy time sending another probe into that darkness. We can do it from the Sove.

  If I can get back to the Sove. My eyes are watering from the pain in my head. I grip the exterior door with the hand not holding the lever, and propel myself out of the runabout.

  I use so much strength that I vault past Elaine, past the line, and into the emptiness of space between all of the ships. I’m going to have to use those damn tethers to pull myself back to the Sove.

  I haven’t made a mistake like this since I was on my earliest training dives. I’m better than this. I’m—

  The music is softening. I swallow, the pain inside my head easing just a bit.

  “Boss? You okay?” That’s Mikk, I think, talking in my ear.

  “I think,” I manage, and I hope to hell I’m speaking aloud, “Elaine and I are going to need help returning to the Sove.”

  I’m gripping the tether, trying to remember how to use it to get myself to the Sove. One hand over the other, sending tether behind me, right?

  And then the tether becomes tense. It pulls against my waist. I can feel it through the suit.

  I’m zipping through the wide open emptiness faster than I’ve ever moved on my own in space. I should look for Elaine, but I don’t want to move my head. I don’t want the pain to return. I don’t want….

  Fourteen

  I wake up in a bed. I have no idea how I’ve gotten here. For a moment, I wonder if it’s an hallucination.

  I try to stand up, but I’m so dizzy that I can’t lift my head upright.

  I haven’t seen this room before. It’s brightly lit, with comforting pale blue walls. The bed is softer than any I’ve ever been on before.

  I lie down and as I do, I notice that my arms are shaking.

  I have no idea if I’m imagining this. But if I am, I am at least imagining a better place than the one I left.

  At least there’s blessed silence here.

  Or there is, until the sound of a door scraping open makes my skin crawl.

  The med tech we’ve brought on this trip, who serves in the Fleet and whose name I have forgotten, fills the doorway. She’s short and cheerful and too damn young to know anything about medicine.

  Or maybe I’m too damn cranky.

  All I know is she’s not a full-fledged doctor. She’s been a tech forever and then she decided to move up in medicine. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t even know what she doesn’t know.

  Or something like that.

  My head doesn’t hurt, but my brai
n feels slower than usual. It feels like I’m forming thoughts through clouds.

  And one of the thoughts that finally makes it through the damp grayness is that if the med tech is here, then we’re still on the Sove.

  She comes all the way into the room, holding one of those medical pads that we have on every level of this ship. Anyone can diagnose the simple stuff programmed into that pad, and maybe perform treatments, also programmed in. We figured having a human for the exotic stuff was one step up.

  Stuff. God, I can’t even come up with words properly.

  She smiles at me, and I feel helpless. I can’t get away from a person I don’t know who is grinning at me. It makes me nervous.

  Then the door scrapes farther, and Yash enters the room.

  I’m not sure if that’s better or worse.

  She actually smiles when she sees me. She never does that.

  “You’re awake!” She sounds surprised.

  It takes me a moment to remember the transition. I had been in my suit, hearing music so strong that I was in a kind of pain I’d never experienced—and now I’m here, wearing some silky pajamas, lying between soft sheets on an even softer bed.

  “Elaine?” I manage. My voice sounds old and dry.

  Yash’s smile fades. The med tech looks at her, expecting Yash to say whatever it is that needs to be said.

  I want to close my eyes against the news. Elaine is dead. I’ve killed another diver by being reckless, by ignoring the warnings about stealth tech/anacapa drives. I’ve—

  “She’s in a healing coma,” the med tech says. “We’re bringing her out slowly.”

  It takes a moment for the words to register because I’d been so braced for the news that she had died.

  “Healing…?” I ask.

  “We did the same with you,” the med tech says. “You passed out on the dive. We woke you briefly—do you remember?”

  Those damn mental clouds. I focus, grope for memories, find…some light, voices, hands grappling at my hood, Mikk saying You’re not doing this to me, Boss. You’re not…and then nothing.