“Okay,” I say to Yash. “Then let’s go inside.”
Twenty-Five
I slip in first, of course, marking handholds for Yash. She’s good at some parts of diving, but not others, and I worry that she’ll touch the wrong thing or activate something she shouldn’t have.
I want us both to get out of this alive.
I grab a built-in handhold in the corridor, designed for anyone inside the runabout to grab if the artificial gravity fails. I hold myself in position, waiting for Yash to squeeze through.
I’m thinner than she is, and so had no trouble making it through that opening. I’ve been in tighter spaces.
But she’s never done this—at least, not with me—and I want to make sure she’s fine.
She slides through as easily as I did. She reaches up for my handhold, and we hang there together for a moment, getting our bearings.
The interior looks bigger than it had on the video from the probe. I’ve had that happen before; imagery changes your sense of things. I don’t move yet because I want us both to get used to the real interior rather than the one we imagined.
The nanobits float here, making the interior seem murkier than it is. I reach up and flip on my headlamps, as well as the lights in my gloves. I don’t use all of the lights on my suit, though. That would blind Yash, and probably make this entire trip useless.
I’ve already told her that we’re not going into the crew cabins or the kitchen. Much as we could learn from those spaces, our only mission on this trip is the anacapa drive.
Yash believes that if she shuts off the drive, we might be able to bring the runabout home in the Sove. I haven’t yet told her that the runabout is never getting any closer than this to the Sove. Maybe we’ll ship the runabout home in a Dignity Vessel down the road, but it certainly won’t be in a vessel with an unprotected crew on board.
Yash and I both turn our heads toward the cockpit at the same time. It’s as if we both have the same thought: we’re settled in this runabout. Now it’s time to move forward.
So we do.
I lead, pulling myself toward the cockpit door. I hear nothing except my own breathing, steady and even. It feels a little odd not to hear anything. I keep expecting some tiny thread of music, like I usually hear in the Boneyard, but there’s nothing.
The galley kitchen seems dark and foreboding on my left, although I can’t say why I find it ominous. I ignore it as I pass, but stop before going into the cockpit. I grip the door frame, and look back at Yash.
She’s peering into the kitchen.
“Something in there we need to look at?” I ask.
“It looks like someone tore it apart,” she says. “Who would do that?”
“Scavengers?” I say.
“Yes, but it doesn’t look like anything’s missing.” Then she shakes her head slightly. “That I can see anyway.”
She pulls herself toward me. I wait until she’s by my side again, before we ease ourselves into the cockpit.
Like the airlock, the cockpit is larger than I expected. It looks like four large seats had been locked into place when this thing left wherever it left from, with clamp-down bolts for more. Parts of the missing seats remain bolted into the floor. The reclining seat looks oddly comfortable. It’s certainly big enough for someone as large as Coop to rest in comfortably, but it can clearly be modified for someone with a much smaller frame.
This little runabout had originally been built for a small group to travel in comfort to wherever it was going. And with an anacapa drive, they could easily have gone anywhere.
Yash immediately pulls herself toward the navigation panel. She stops before she reaches it, her hand clinging to the pilot’s seat.
It bobs slightly.
I move toward her.
“She’s strapped in,” Yash says, “and she used something to hold her hands in place. Why would someone do that?”
“The gravity gave out?” I ask.
Yash shakes her head again. “I don’t know,” she says. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
I pull closer, then grip the navigation panel so that I can look at the corpse.
It’s clearly female, but it’s not wearing a uniform. I have no idea if she had been wearing one when she got stranded wherever she got stranded, if she got stranded at all. She might have died in a battle or something, which would also explain attaching the hands to the controls, so that she could work in a zero-g environment.
She has mummified, and wisps of hair—maybe brown, maybe black—float around her face. Her mouth is open, but I’m not sure if that means anything.
“What do you think happened to her?” Yash asks.
“I don’t know,” I say. “We’ll have time to speculate later. Right now, we need to finish this mission.”
Yash nods, then joins me at the navigation panel, which surprises me. I expected her to go for the anacapa drive immediately.
“You going to try to start this up?” I ask.
“No,” she says. “I wanted to look at those controls I’d never seen before I tried anything with the anacapa.”
I almost say that she’s probably never seen anything like this runabout, considering it’s much newer than the Ivoire, but I don’t. I let her hover over the navigational controls, poking and prodding at things I don’t entirely understand.
For a moment, it lights up, and she almost lets go in surprise.
“Huh,” she says. “Who knew this thing had power?”
Then the lights fade, and the navigational panel is as dark as it was when we arrived.
Neither of us say anything more. She places a piece of equipment she had strapped to her belt on the navigational panel.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“In theory, it’ll pull data off the panel,” she says. “I thought using it was a long shot, but considering that the panel just activated, this might not be as long a shot as I thought.”
She peers underneath the panel at those controls.
“The controls detach,” she says, and reaches upwards.
I put a hand on her shoulder. “Anacapa first,” I say.
“Unhook that,” she says to me, waving a hand at those controls. “They look like something we might be able to use.”
“With the anacapa?” I ask.
“No,” she says. “In developing our own equipment.”
“Yash, if it’s what caused the anacapa to go wonky—”
“It’s not,” she says. “Trust me. The anacapa went ‘wonky’ on its own. These are something else entirely.”
I have to trust her on this, because even after years of working with Fleet equipment, I know very little about all its permutations.
“You see,” she says, pointing at the edge of the extra panel, “it attaches here. You won’t hurt anything if you detach it.”
“With what?” I ask.
“Whatever works,” she says.
At that moment, Mikk speaks in my ear. “You’re twenty minutes into this dive. You have one hundred and twenty minutes of oxygen. Pay attention.”
“I am,” Yash and I say in unison.
I do a time check with Mikk. We’re still exactly on the same time, which is also unusual in the Boneyard.
“I can see you now,” he says.
“Huh?” I ask.
“The probes,” he says. “They’re still sending.”
We hadn’t been certain they would be. We speculated that they might have reset themselves to a loop.
I look around the cockpit, and finally see one of the probes, wedged into a far corner. I can’t see the second probe.
Yash has worked her way around the pilot’s chair rather than disturb the corpse.
“You know,” she says as she finishes her trip to the anacapa container, “we should probably have some kind of service for her.”
It takes me a moment to realize she’s talking about the corpse.
“I don’t feel right setting her adrift inside the Boneyard,”
I say.
“I don’t feel right leaving her here,” Yash says. “She clearly wanted out of this place. She wouldn’t have lashed herself to the controls otherwise.”
I can think of countless reasons why she had done that, but I don’t say any of them.
Yash and I have a job to do, and we need to focus on that.
“What’s going on with the anacapa?” I ask.
“The container’s closed,” Yash says. “I’m marking it dangerous, and then I’ll open it.”
While I appreciate her caution, I’m feeling a new sense of urgency. Mikk roused it in me when he reminded me of the time.
Even though this isn’t a timed dive, we do have limited air. We have to pay attention, and not push any limits.
I position myself underneath the navigation panel and look at the controls that have Yash so intrigued. They are a separate piece of equipment, which surprises me. Usually, the Fleet doesn’t pile pieces of equipment on top of each other. I can’t tell if this is jury-rigged or if it was put here by a Fleet engineer.
In spite of myself, I’m intrigued now too.
The equipment seems to be attached with some kind of adhesive, not with bolts. I keep one hand on top of the panel, careful to stay away from the area most likely to have actual controls, and use the other hand to gently tug at the panel.
It doesn’t move.
I position my headlamps so that I can see if there’s space between the bottom panel and the top panel.
“Got it,” Yash says. “The anacapa container’s open.”
My heart starts pounding. I don’t hear any music, which is a good thing, but I’m not sure what we’re going to find.
As if hearing my uncertain thoughts, Yash adds a single syllable of her own.
“Huh,” she says.
“What?” I ask, trying not to sound as on edge as I feel.
“This thing looks normal,” she says. “Smaller than I’m used to, but it’s a standard anacapa drive. It doesn’t look decayed or damaged. I’m not sure why it was malfunctioning. Or if it was malfunctioning.”
“You heard the sounds,” I say. “You measured the field.”
“Maybe our equipment was off,” she says.
“I don’t think so,” I say. “We got our strongest measurements on the energy field on the runabout’s exterior outside that spot where you are right now.”
“I know,” Yash says, sounding annoyed. “But I don’t see any explanation for this. I’d like to take it with us.”
“No,” I say as firmly as I can. That anacapa drive isn’t getting near the Sove. “Get what information you need to off of it, and then we leave.”
She sighs audibly, like a child denied a toy.
“All right,” she says.
I return my attention to the control panel. There’s a thin ray of light between it and the navigation panel. I can probably sever it with my knife, if I’m very, very careful.
I unsheathe the knife. I’m always exceedingly careful with it. One mistake, and I’ve sliced open my suit.
I keep the blade as far from me as possible. I slide it between the control panel and the navigation panel, only cutting at what I can see. I don’t want to sever wires—not that the Fleet usually uses wires—and I don’t want to interfere with any major fields of any kind.
Half the panel detaches. It doesn’t drop, of course, but given time, it might just slide away.
I sheath the knife, then grab the edges of that control panel. I tug gently with one hand, making sure the other hand stays braced.
The panel comes off.
“I got the control panel,” I say to Yash.
She rises up like a ghost on the far side of the corpse. Yash is indistinct because of all of the nanobits floating around us.
“Great!” she says, sounding more enthusiastic than I’ve ever heard her. “How much more time do we have in here?”
“Not much.” The answer doesn’t come from me. It comes from Mikk. But I concur.
We’re pressing our luck in here.
“Okay,” she says. “Just let me close this container and—shit!”
I pull myself up higher, still clutching the control panel.
Yash’s entire suit is bathed in a gold light. She looks like she’s being flooded by spotlights.
“What the hell?” I say.
She sounds oddly calm as she answers me. “This anacapa just activated,” she says.
Twenty-Six
I turn to Yash. She’s still bathed in that gold light, her face focused downward at that anacapa drive.
“What did you do?” I ask.
“It doesn’t matter what I did,” she says. “It’s active. We have to get out of here. Now.”
She grabs the navigation panel, cursing the whole way. I have no idea how long it takes an anacapa that’s been completely deactivated to activate, but judging by Yash’s reaction, it doesn’t take much time at all.
“Orlando can’t tug us out of here,” I say. “We have to get to the doors.”
“I know,” Yash says, pulling herself over the navigation panel. She bumps the corpse, mutters, “Sorry,” and then grabs that small device she had placed on top of the panel.
She can’t keep moving this slowly, and I only have one free hand.
“I’m dumping this control thing you had me get,” I say, and she doesn’t argue.
I let go of the control thing and snatch her arm, pulling her forward, using my other hand to grab the handholds we had used before. I’m yanking us out of the cockpit as quickly as I can.
As we reach the doors to the cockpit, she stops being deadweight. She grabs and pulls too, and we’re propelling along, moving as fast I would move on my own.
Behind us, lights switch on.
“Oh, shit,” I say.
The last thing we need is for the full environmental system to engage. Full gravity will slow us down, not help us.
“I thought this runabout was dead,” I say.
“I thought it was too,” Yash says.
“Then how is this happening?”
“I have no idea,” she says.
The lights reflect off the gray nanobits, nearly blinding me. I shut off my headlamps as I move forward, praying that the doors stay open.
“What’s going on?” Mikk asks. “We’re getting energy spikes.”
“Tell Orlando to get ready to drag us out of here,” I say. “The moment he sees us at the exterior doors, we will need help.”
I can’t believe I’m asking for help a second time while inside this damn runabout.
Yash is now side by side with me, propelling us forward along with me. We’re working hand over hand—my hand, her hand, my hand, her hand—as we go.
Then she curses again, something nasty and guttural in her own tongue. Half a second after she finishes the word, I see what’s caught her.
The airlock door has closed.
“Dammit,” I say.
“What?” Mikk asks.
Normally, I would tell him to shut up and let us concentrate, but I like his voice in my comm right now. That means the anacapa hasn’t fully activated. We haven’t left here yet.
“Let me,” Yash says, and rips her arm out of my grip. She moves forward at a faster pace than I knew she was capable of, and she heads to that airlock door.
She’s moving so fast, she almost slams into it. Then she spreads her gloves against it. Nothing happens.
She taps in a code, and still nothing happens.
I reach for my lever. If nothing else, we’re prying that damn door open.
Then she does something else with the controls, rapidly, something I can’t really see, given the nanobits and the weird lighting, and the position of her body.
The airlock door doesn’t open partially. It opens all the way.
“Hurry!” she says to me.
I don’t need to be told twice. I follow her into the airlock, and the interior door closes behind us.
But the exterior door
doesn’t open.
“It’s on a timer,” she says, and I know she’s right. The runabout probably has a program to let out the old environment and allow the people in the airlock to adjust to the pressure of the space they’re about to go into.
“We don’t have time to wait for that,” I say.
“I know,” she says, reaching for another control panel.
Then the exterior door opens just a little. Something has wedged itself between the door and the frame.
“Wonderful,” Yash says. She’s closer to that part of the door than I am. She braces her feet on the wall, grabs the door and shoves it toward the other side of the frame.
I brace myself and shove as well.
The exterior door opens a little farther and she squeezes out. Then a hand reaches in for me.
It’s not her hand. It’s too big.
I grab the hand, and let it pull me out of the runabout. The person holding me is Orlando.
He shoves Yash toward the Sove, then turns to me. “We have to unhitch,” he says.
He’s right. No one’s in the Sove’s bay, so the line hooking the Sove to the runabout can’t be removed. Mikk will have to come down from the bridge to disconnect us.
I doubt there’s time for that.
As I think it, the door slams shut, letting off a wave of nanobits. Orlando has grabbed the edge of the line, and is decoupling it.
I help him.
The line comes free, and he drops it. He’s wearing a tether, just like I am.
We look at each other, like kids playing free-fall games in one-eighth gravity, and then shove off the side of the runabout. We tumble backwards, away from the runabout, careening in different directions.
I don’t care if we make it to the Sove right away. We just need to be as far from that runabout as possible.
I don’t want to think about the waves of energy that will come at us as the runabout’s anacapa fully activates, nor do I want to think about what might happen if the runabout vanishes into foldspace while we’re still out here.
I’m not quite enjoying the tumble, that free-spinning moment when I’m head over feet over head over feet over head, but I’m not hating it either. Around me I see ships, everywhere, bits and pieces of ships, then the two looming Dignity Vessels—the Sove and the new one, the one we initially meant to dive.
The Runabout Page 13