The Renegat

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  He launched into the controls again, not giving instructions again, because explaining was just so damn hard.

  He isolated the bridge and rather than siphoning its environment to other parts of the ship, he directed theirs here. He established a protective bubble around the bridge itself, so even if the ceiling didn’t protect them from the cracked porthole (and seriously, who designed that? Because it was pretty stupid. Maybe that’s why this Scout ship was being retired), then they would be able to survive until someone rescued them.

  If someone rescued them.

  He looked to see how the Brazza Two was doing, but all of the screens that Maida had set up were gone, as was the holographic model. His own control screen was flickering.

  The Br2 Scout3 was running out of power.

  He suddenly felt lighter.

  It took a moment to understand that sensation. He hadn’t felt it in years—the transition between full Earth gravity and zero gravity, happening slowly. He’d gone to zero gravity workouts, but there was no transition. He’d just go from one environment to the next. This one was changing bit by bit.

  He activated the gravity in his boots, and they clamped onto the floor as if they were magnetized.

  “Anyone see what’s going on with the Scrapheap?” he asked.

  “Force field’s closed,” Omar said.

  “The Brazza Two has shut off that thingy tying it to the force field,” Sera said.

  “Explosions are continuing inside the Scrapheap,” Maida said, “but it doesn’t look like anything else is getting out.”

  Crowe tried to make his screen work, but it didn’t. There was a design flaw too. He needed to look at the command controls and they weren’t accessible to him.

  He tried to walk to one of the wall consoles, but the gravity in his boots was holding him back. His legs actually hurt as he moved.

  He cursed.

  “The Brazza Two,” he said. “Is it holding together?”

  “Seems to be,” Sera said.

  “But we’re not,” Adil said. “You getting these warnings?”

  “No,” Crowe said. “My console is down.”

  “We need to get out of here,” Maida said, her voice rising with panic again.

  He blinked, thought, wondered if the Brazza Two would even take a message from them.

  He managed to get to the wall console, and slammed his fist against it with a bit more force than he expected. Fortunately, the slowly decreasing gravity mitigated the power of that blow. He didn’t damage anything, and he would have if he had hit it that hard in full Earth gravity.

  The console flared on. He saw a dozen different warning lights, and actually heard the voice of the ship filtering into his hood, stating each and every one of those warnings with a flat seriousness.

  The Br2 Scout3 was close to the Brazza Two, but he’d lost track of what part of the ship was right near them. He called up a two-D image on the flat screen before him, the best he could do.

  As far as he could tell, they weren’t far from the bay door they had exited from.

  Could they be that lucky?

  “Adil,” he said, “send the signal to the bay doors to open for us.”

  “I’m not sure we can maneuver in there,” Adil said.

  “Just see if the damn doors open,” Crowe said.

  He was investigating whether or not the engines had any thrust at all, and if the helm would respond to commands he gave.

  The power was flickering. The Br2 Scout3 was dying or at least it thought it was dying, but it seemed like there might be just enough juice here to get them on board the Brazza Two again.

  After that, he had no idea what would happen.

  “Doors opening!” Adil sounded ecstatic. Had Crowe ever heard Adil sound ecstatic? Crowe had no idea.

  “Okay,” Crowe said. He rerouted the remaining power to engines and the helm, punching in the proper coordinates for docking—he didn’t even want to try automation (not that he’d ever done anything as complicated as a docking maneuver) and then he hit execute.

  The Br2 Scout3 lurched again, which he hoped was a good sign. He focused on the two-D images on the screen before him, the small ship heading toward the larger one.

  The Brazza Two’s shields were down. The ship seemed to be rotating away from the Br2 Scout3. He hoped that wasn’t the case.

  But the littler ship headed toward the open bay doors. He slowed the Br2 Scout3 as much as possible, hoping that it was slow enough. He gave the ship one last thrust and then shut off the engines entirely, hoping the ship would ease through the doors on its own accord.

  It didn’t veer off course. It headed directly for the Brazza Two, directly for those doors, and then into the docking bay itself. The bay was dark and there was no power, and nothing was going to stop the Br2 Scout3 from going through a wall if he wasn’t careful.

  He hit the inertial dampeners on the Br2 Scout3, demanded that they stop the ship as quickly as they possibly could.

  For a minute he thought they weren’t working either, but then they did. And the Br2 Scout3 floated above the dock, just like it was meant to.

  He didn’t sigh with relief. He couldn’t feel anything. He wasn’t even sure he was breathing properly, but he had to be, because he had enough air to talk.

  “Adil,” Crowe said. “Shut the bay doors.”

  “Okay,” Adil said.

  And Crowe turned on the automatic pilot, instructing it to dock, and hoping that would work.

  Then he leaned against the console, and tried very very hard to stay calm.

  He had no idea why that was so important, but he knew it was.

  The Brazza Two

  It took them an hour to get off the Br2 Scout3 and another hour to get out of the docking bay. They kept their environmental suits on, hoods up, just in case everything inside the bay was compromised.

  Crowe’s suit wouldn’t tell him what the environment around them was, but the bay itself was much darker than it should have been. He kept expecting security around every corner. He thought they might show up with their weapons drawn, might take everyone into custody, but no one seemed to be monitoring the docking bay at all, which really bothered him.

  He discovered part of the problem as they tried to leave the bay. The doors were sealed. He and Adil checked the bay doors to make sure they had closed properly—and they had—so they both figured the sealed exits were part of some security protocol.

  They didn’t discuss overriding it; they just did. None of them wanted to stay in the dark and creepy docking bay.

  It didn’t take long to override the security protocol, which should have bothered Crowe, but it didn’t. He wanted to get back inside the Brazza Two. He wanted to find his room, and hide in it.

  The exit doors slid open to reveal chaos. Bright red lights blinked everywhere. The floor was illuminated yellow so that they could find their way to a safe zone. The ship’s automated voice, so different from the one on the Br2 Scout3, repeated that they were in an emergency and they needed to get to their designated shelter.

  Designated shelter. He had forgotten about that. He’d always thought the drills stupid, and now, there was actual need for all of that practice.

  He had no idea how to get to his shelter from here. And he wasn’t going to go either.

  He had a different destination in mind.

  “Now what do we do?” Maida asked. She was shouting through the environmental suits’ communications link, even though she didn’t have to. Their voices came through clearly even with all the noise.

  Crowe looked around. There was some damage here—the walls had scorch marks (at least, that was what he thought he saw), and it was pretty clear that the Earth gravity had vanished at one point. There was too much debris on the floor, not just ship parts and wall parts, but casual items—tools and gloves and a few plastic dishes (from where he did not know).

  That probably meant the environmental system had been shut down as well, and who knew what othe
r systems had been offline. If he had to guess—and it would just be a guess at the moment—he would say that the power from all available systems went to the shields or to that beam-ray-light thing that the Brazza Two had used to link with the forcefield on the Scrapheap.

  “Get to your designated shelter,” he said to his crew, his team, his friends. “Don’t say where you were or what you were doing. Just go. They may not know that we were the ones on the Br2 Scout3. They’ll know about me—”

  “How?” Omar asked. “If they don’t know about us, they won’t know about you.”

  “I did a lot of work ahead on this,” Crowe said. “My presence will be hard to hide.”

  Besides, he wasn’t sure he wanted to hide it. He would think about that when he left the group.

  “I just don’t want you guys to get into trouble because you listened to me,” he said.

  “Well, we did,” Erika said. “We chose to come along. We should take our punishment too. I mean, look at this.”

  She swept a hand toward the debris in the corridor before them. None of them had ever seen any part of the Brazza Two like this. It had always been pristine.

  “We stole two ships,” Crowe said flatly, “destroyed who knows how many in the Scrapheap, and damaged the Brazza Two.”

  And maybe killed Tessa and her team. Maybe. He refused to believe that yet. Because, after all, he had no proof they had been on that Explorer.

  (Except that she had talked to him. She had told him. She—)

  He shook his head, trying to get the niggling thoughts out of it.

  “This is really serious,” Crowe said, “and they’ll probably pull anyone involved out of the program.”

  Maybe put them in the brig or take them to one of the sector bases for some kind of justice.

  Or send them back to their parents.

  His stomach twisted, and bile rose in his throat. He swallowed the bile down, trying to ignore it.

  “So go,” Crowe said. “You don’t want to be involved in this.”

  “I’m not going to lie,” Erika said.

  “Then don’t lie about yourself,” Crowe said, “but don’t implicate anyone else.”

  “You’re going to lie?” she asked.

  He shook his head.

  “This is my fault,” he said. “Every one of us knows this is all my fault.”

  The Brazza Two

  His team left him after that. One by one, they walked down that corridor, until it curved to the right, and he couldn’t see them anymore.

  No one stayed with him. He hadn’t asked them to, and would have encouraged them not to, if someone had tried.

  No one did.

  He didn’t blame them. They probably felt as numb and lost as he did.

  He unhooked his environmental suit’s hood, and pushed it off his face. He figured he could bring it back up if there was no air, but there was, and he was glad—if he could actually feel something akin to gladness.

  The air had an acrid odor that he couldn’t entirely identify. Some of the stench was burnt plastic and rubber, but some of it smelled faintly like pepper, or ammonia or something that he didn’t want to contemplate.

  His eyes started watering immediately and his brain told him to put the hood back on. But he wasn’t going to. He deserved the watery eyes, the headache already building in his sinuses. He needed to smell this, and taste it, and feel the greasiness of the air.

  He had caused this by being reckless and arrogant. What had he thought? Geniuses, on a joyride. They wouldn’t get caught, or if they did, they’d get their wrists slapped and maybe be rewarded for their ingenuity.

  God, how wrong could one kid be?

  He had shut off the gravity in his boots long ago, but his feet still felt heavy. The muscles were sore fighting that extra force. When he stepped over bits of debris, his knees ached.

  The farther he went down the corridor, the blacker the walls were. It looked like some of the controls had exploded outward. There was a bit of foam on the floor, and the walls and ceiling had a slick wet coating look to them as well. That peppery tang was stronger here, along with the stench of burning.

  His eyes stung, but the tears had stopped. His throat ached, although he was no longer sure the worst of the ache was being caused by the smell.

  He walked along the corridor, saw the footprints from his friends illuminated in the yellow light. Sirens whooped out here, but they sounded anemic. They weren’t coming from overhead; they were echoing from other parts of the ship.

  If the sirens weren’t blaring here, they were either burned out or had never come on. But that annoying voice, a little more robotic than the one on the Br2 Scout3—that was the difference, he had finally identified it, was still telling him (and anyone else who was in this corridor) to go to their designated shelter.

  He hoped everyone had. He hoped the only losses were the two ships. He hoped that Tessa had been lying to him about what she saw.

  Because she was good at winning these contests without following the rules. He always forgot to specify certain details.

  He never said they had to be on the ships. He never said that. He never said they had to travel individually outside of the Brazza Two.

  She could have sent that Explorer-Class vessel on its own mission, and recorded what it saw on her own equipment.

  That was something Tessa would do.

  That was something he hoped and prayed Tessa would do.

  He walked to the ladder linking the docking bay to the other levels. He went inside the wide tube where the ladder was and slid inside. No soot here, no smell of pepper. But hand prints—glove prints—on the rungs. Boot prints too.

  His people probably. His team, his crew, his friends. Going up and away from here. To their shelters.

  He hoped all ten of them had the presence of mind to remove their environmental suits from the Br2 Scout3 before going into the shelter. He had forgotten to say anything.

  He climbed the ladder, his entire body feeling wobbly and stretchy from exhaustion. Mostly he had stood and worried when he was on the bridge of the Br2 Scout3, but it felt like he had been running and hitting things for three solid days.

  Maybe the oxygen was thinner here than he thought.

  Maybe the exhaustion came from something else.

  He shook that thought away as he reached the third level.

  It didn’t smell bad here at all, but the ship’s voice still reminded him to go to his shelter. The yellow lights covered the floor and the red warning lights flashed.

  Nothing looked damaged, though. He wondered how that happened—all the damage below, and nothing here. Although the damage below seemed to have come from systems being overloaded and there were fewer essential systems here. Almost everything here had been designed for the little-littles.

  He didn’t see any of them. He hadn’t seen anyone, not since his team had left him.

  Everyone was probably still in shelters.

  He staggered a bit on his way to the Third Level Mess. He wasn’t sure what caused the stagger—those rubbery tired legs of his or the ship listing and the attitude controls not working or the floor buckling just a bit from whatever had happened below.

  He would find out eventually, he supposed.

  The doors to the Third Level Mess were open, just like he had left them. Or had he left them like that?

  The very thought made his heart lift. Maybe he had been right in his assumptions; maybe Tessa had played him. Maybe she was waiting for him here—she certainly wouldn’t have gone to her designated shelter, not after everything that happened.

  He had declared her the winner, so he couldn’t take that back.

  He stepped through the doors, startled at the red lights blinking. This room was silent—something he’d learned when he worked here. No blanket announcements to panic the little-littles.

  The dim lights in all the corners were still on. The light over the serving table was on as well.

  But the floor was a mi
nefield of utensils and dishes and toys. The toys made his heart clench. He looked around, terrified he’d see some injured or dead little kid crumpled against one of the chairs.

  He switched on the knuckle lights on his glove, swept the entire Mess once, twice, and then a third time, all without moving from the door.

  Nothing.

  He was alone.

  Unless Tessa was hiding, wanting to surprise him. She wouldn’t do that, would she? That wasn’t quite like her.

  He stepped inside, his jangled nerves and his pounding heart ahead of his brain.

  He was alone here.

  She hadn’t come.

  If she had been on the Brazza Two, she would have come here. She had said, I’ll meet you back in the Third Level Mess. And you better pay up, buddy.

  She never let a challenge go unanswered. She never let him forget that he lost. She would be waiting for him, partly to see if he was okay, and partly to gloat that she had won, no matter what the cost.

  Although the cost would have devastated her.

  Instead, it had destroyed her.

  He shook his head, trying to get that last thought out of it. No. She was fine. He was fine. They were all fine.

  He went deeper into the Mess, smelled something sweet and sugary—spilled syrup?—and saw where the toys had come from. The box of extra toys for the distraught kids had toppled over. Or maybe it had risen in zero-G and then turned over. He didn’t know, couldn’t tell, didn’t want to know.

  He was just relieved as he walked that he didn’t see anything else—anyone else.

  Except Tessa.

  “Please be here,” he whispered. “Please.”

  But he knew he was talking to an empty room. He didn’t just know it on a gut level. He knew it throughout his body.

  That victorious trill in her voice, followed by the weird bright light, and the lines of fiery light that trailed to her ship, and the explosion…

  The explosion.

  His knees buckled. He clutched at a nearby chair, missed because it was shorter than he expected (Stupid. This is the Third Level Mess. For little-littles), and nearly fell over. His hand caught the low table going down, and he stood there, bent in half, breathing hard, his entire body aching.