The Renegat

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Her hair matched her makeup, making her skin even paler than it usually was. Her dark eyes, hidden under her long brown lashes, narrowed as Gāo explained the vast amount of data she had received.

  Gāo couldn’t read d’Anano. Gāo had no idea if d’Anano always fidgeted and adjusted the cuffs of her sleeves or if the topic made her more nervous than usual.

  Gāo had nearly reached the end of the background information when her gaze met Vice Admiral Claude Nguyen’s. Nguyen was the other person who had brought a security detail, which had surprised Gāo. He had never seemed like the paranoid type before.

  At the moment, Nguyen stood a half step behind Admiral Hallock. He was shorter than she was, but had land-based muscles, even though he had never lived on land. He did a lot of workouts in full gravity plus. Gāo had run into him on the exercise wing of Krachtige 3 back when both he and Gāo had been commodores, assisting the rear admirals.

  Nguyen might have been the only other in the room who had an inkling about what that hologram was. He had worked the Abandoned Ships Detail early in his career, and many of those ships got taken to nearby Scrapheaps.

  When Gāo finished the initial part of the presentation and took a breath, Nguyen looked like he was about to say something.

  Somehow d’Anano managed to speak first.

  “So,” she said, “we have a malfunctioning Scrapheap. I do not understand why that’s an issue for all of us. Normally you deal with such things, don’t you, Bella?”

  Not Vice Admiral, not even Gāo. But the first name, as a diminishment. Gāo took a breath, then decided not to take anything personally. She didn’t dare.

  They had a big decision to make.

  “Normally, I do,” Gāo said. “I guess I didn’t make myself clear, Vice Admiral. This Scrapheap is not in our records. It predates anything in our files.”

  “Would it have Ready Vessels then?” Rwizi asked.

  “I don’t know if this Scrapheap has Ready Vessels,” Gāo said. “That’s the problem. I thought the Scrapheap system was four thousand years old. This Scrapheap predates the system by two thousand years. We have nothing in our records that states when, exactly, the Ready Vessel system began, so I can’t even guess.”

  Calixte brought a clenched fist to his gaunt face, and tapped his thumb against his chin.

  “One of our school ships has a department that specializes in Fleet history,” he said. “We might be able to find that information there.”

  “Even if the Ready Vessels existed in that ancient Scrapheap,” Rwizi said, “wouldn’t the vessels be so old as to be useless to us?”

  “To us, yes.” Admiral Hallock poured herself an ice tea from one of the pitchers on the sideboard. “But not to a group finding them. We improve our designs, but we don’t abandon them. I believe it would be a safe bet to assume that the Ready Vessels have anacapa drives, and early stages of the weaponry that modern Ready Vessels have. The ships would probably have similar defense capabilities as well.”

  Her words hung for a moment, because no one wanted to interrupt her before she was finished.

  Once he realized she was done, Nguyen said, “I think it would also be safe to assume that if there were Ready Vessels in that Scrapheap, and some organization figured out how we had hidden them, that organization would search for other Scrapheaps.”

  “Fortunately,” d’Anano said, “that Scrapheap will not have the coordinates of any Scrapheap built after it.”

  “That’s not quite how Scrapheaps work,” Nguyen said. “The core of the Scrapheap itself might not have that information, but we store ships built long after a Scrapheap was completed in the Scrapheap itself. If the ships weren’t properly decommissioned, then the location of the other Scrapheaps would be discoverable.”

  “Even if, it seems, the thieves never do discover the Ready Vessels,” Rwizi said.

  No one spoke for a long moment. Normally, in a meeting like this, Gāo would have been pleased that the officers understood the seriousness of her presentation.

  This group clearly understood the seriousness of what they all faced. They also knew, without her repeating the information, that the Scrapheap might have been losing ships for years, not just weeks.

  One hurdle crossed.

  But she was just beginning. And the other fact she wanted them to understand was that she couldn’t accurately trace how long it had taken the information to reach her, so she had no idea whether the crisis occurred a month ago or centuries ago.

  “I’ll be honest,” she said, “this Scrapheap is so old and faraway that I thought of ignoring the contact altogether. But I immediately realized that we might have a larger issue on our hands.”

  “The other Scrapheaps,” Nguyen said.

  “And the Ready Vessels,” Hallock said.

  Everyone looked at her.

  “We like to think they’re undiscoverable, but they aren’t,” she said. “We’ve protected and hidden them well. The flaw with the Fleet, as I see it, is that we don’t change technology that works well. We change technology that isn’t working in quite the way we want it to.”

  Gāo swallowed hard. This was why she had brought the others in.

  Hallock made eye contact with each person in the room before she spoke again.

  “We have never had a challenge or a problem with our storage of Ready Vessels,” Hallock said. “That would be in our records. So we have continued the practice. We have also discussed moving the Ready Vessels from older Scrapheaps to newer Scrapheaps, but we have never done so.”

  She gave the entire group a thin smile.

  “It is something that the admirals discuss at least twice a year, and until today, we had no reason to change that practice. I suspect we will do so going forward.”

  Then her gaze met Gāo’s. Gāo’s breath caught just a little. Nerves kicked in, as if this entire ancient Scrapheap problem had just gotten worse.

  Maybe it had.

  “The question is,” Hallock said, “what do we do about the past? Isn’t that right, Vice Admiral Gāo?”

  “Yes,” Gāo said. “We have the personnel to examine all of our Scrapheaps, but the resources that would take would change our mission. The Fleet moves forward, not back, and a large number of our ships would have to move back to each Scrapheap to investigate any potential problems we might find.”

  “You’re right,” Rwizi said, “sending personnel is not the optimal method for any investigation, especially one that sends sections of the Fleet backwards.”

  Gāo gave Rwizi a small, grateful glance. Rwizi was functioning exactly as Gāo had hoped, as a support who understood what was going on.

  “What about pinging the Scrapheaps?” Calixte asked. “We could ask them specifically for information on the Ready Vessels.”

  Gāo nodded. “I thought of that. We can do that with some of the Scrapheaps. Some of the oldest Scrapheaps are not designed to handle information requests of that nature. We could try to upgrade their systems from a distance, but that would take time. We don’t dare send upgrades through foldspace.”

  No one entirely understood foldspace, although the Fleet traveled in and out of it all the time. The common explanation was that the anacapa drives actually created a fold in space, that shortened a trip between two points, the way that a folded blanket would seemingly shorten the width of that blanket.

  For Gāo, that explanation always created more questions than it resolved. She tried not to think about those questions now. She needed to listen to what the others said before she expressed any opinion at all.

  “We can’t send upgrades through foldspace because of information corruption?” Calixte asked. He clearly did not know.

  “Because we can’t trace anything through foldspace,” Rwizi said. “The only way we would know if the upgrade reached its target would be a successful communication. And if the upgrade went awry, we would also have no idea.”

  “We can send single ships back to repair or upgrade those systems in pers
on,” Hallock said. “We have done that in the past.”

  Gāo knew that. She had just been starting her career in Scrapheaps when a team had to go back to one of the older Scrapheaps to reboot its entire internal system.

  “We might be overreacting,” d’Anano said, using a tone that irritated Gāo. d’Anano used the word we but she meant Gāo. “This all may have happened to one Scrapheap a thousand years ago, and the entire event might have been local.”

  “Exactly,” Gāo said, taking back control of her meeting and surprising d’Anano at the same time. The best way to defang a potential problem in a meeting was to agree with her.

  Sometimes those agreements were false, but in this case, Gāo actually did agree with d’Anano.

  “I have an idea,” Gāo said, “but I don’t like it. And it’s based entirely on Vice Admiral d’Anano’s point.”

  d’Anano looked at Gāo as if reassessing her.

  “I think we send one ship back to that Scrapheap,” Gāo said. “The ship evaluates the entire situation, lets us know if it’s something we need to worry about, and then we make our next decisions.”

  “Sounds sensible,” Calixte said. “Aside from the distance, which is daunting, what do you dislike about this?”

  Gāo was about to answer when Rwizi spoke up.

  “There’s no guarantee that the ship would ever get to the Scrapheap.” Rwizi’s voice was soft. “There’s no guarantee that the ship would be able to communicate with us in anything approximating real time, even if it did get to the Scrapheap. And that’s just the trip to the Scrapheap. The trip back would be just as fraught, just as difficult, if not more so.”

  “We go through foldspace,” Calixte said. “We accept the risks. How is this different?”

  “I haven’t calculated the exact trip yet,” Gāo said, “but my preliminary analysis suggests that the ship would not be able to travel through foldspace to that Scrapheap in one trip. That would almost guarantee the loss of the ship. The safest method of travel would be to go in and out of foldspace a number of times.”

  “How many?” Nguyen asked, his voice tight.

  “I don’t know yet,” Gāo said. “Maybe five. Maybe ten.”

  The vice admirals glanced at each other, as if weighing the reactions of their colleagues. Hallock herself continued to stare at the hologram. Gāo glanced at it too. She hated the fact that the information on it was incomplete.

  “It is my understanding,” Calixte said, “that going into and out of foldspace is as dangerous as traveling a long distance into foldspace.”

  Gāo admired the way that he managed to ask a question without asking a question. Given the job that he had, such a skill was essential. He had to sound like someone who knew what he was talking about, but he also had to be open to new ideas.

  “Every time we enter foldspace or leave it, we take a risk,” Rwizi said. “Statistically, that risk remains the same. You have the same chance of getting lost in foldspace or having an anacapa malfunction in foldspace each time. The statistical weight is not cumulative. The chance, depending on the age of the ship and the anacapa drive, might be as high as fifteen percent, although I doubt that, for reasons I won’t go into here.”

  She didn’t say what she doubted about that percentage—whether it was too high or too low. Gāo had never discussed it with her either. The command staff rarely discussed the dangers of anacapa usage. It is what it is, one of her instructors had said long ago, and she agreed. As long as the anacapa drive was the only effective way to travel extreme distances, the Fleet would continue to take the risks involved with using it.

  “Fifteen percent,” Calixte murmured, as if he didn’t know. Gāo wondered how he couldn’t know. That was a statistic she thought of every single time the Správa went into or out of foldspace.

  “However,” Rwizi said, “from what information we can gather, it appears that danger increases the farther a ship travels in foldspace. Which is why I recommend each ship have anacapa and foldspace experts on board to calculate the best trajectory for travel. Sometimes it’s worthwhile to go in and out of foldspace, and risk the fifteen percent each time. And sometimes, it’s better to travel the long distance, without the big risk.”

  “And in this instance?” Hallock asked, although her tone suggested she already knew the answer.

  “I wouldn’t do it,” Rwizi said. “I wouldn’t travel back there at all. Not on one long trip, not with however many journeys into or out of foldspace in a short period of time. It’s simply too dangerous.”

  Gāo was nodding. She had come to the same conclusion, but she had felt that her conclusion had been personal, not professional. As Rwizi had said, she wouldn’t do it. Even if ordered to.

  She would probably resign.

  “And that doesn’t count the trip back,” Rwizi added. “If a ship somehow makes it to the Scrapheap, that’s a miracle, in my opinion. And then, the ship would face the same potential problems coming back. And for what? Information that we might not need?”

  Hallock made a small sound in the back of her throat, as if taking note of Rwizi’s dismissive tone. Hallock then walked around the hologram, a frown on her face.

  “Did you want all of us to sign off on a decision to ignore the events at that Scrapheap?” d’Anano asked Gāo.

  Gāo’s cheeks started to heat, but she willed the flush away. It was a trick she had taught herself as she rose up the ranks. She made herself focus on the content of d’Anano’s question, rather than Hallock.

  “I felt this wasn’t a decision I could make on my own,” Gāo said. “If I followed protocol, I would have to send several ships back and gather information. If I only send one ship, then we run the risk of not getting the information at all.”

  “And if you ignored the contact from the Scrapheap, as you considered doing, and something happened to the main body of the Fleet, then you would lose your command.” d’Anano stated that last flatly, as if it was the primary consideration in Gāo’s calculations.

  “If I worried about losing my command whenever I make a decision,” Gāo said, “I wouldn’t have the command in the first place.”

  Hallock raised her head, probably at Gāo’s tone. Hallock then glanced at d’Anano. Hallock’s expression was impossible to read.

  “You were correct in contacting us, Vice Admiral Gāo,” Hallock said, shutting down d’Anano’s argument. “This is a decision that must not be made lightly. As I see it, we have several issues to deal with. We have the problems or the past problems at a Scrapheap we did not even know existed.”

  Gāo nodded. So did Rwizi. The other three just watched Hallock, as if they were uncertain what she would say next.

  “We also have the problem of more lost Scrapheaps. We thought this Scrapheap habit of ours was newer than it was. It is not. We might have suffered similar issues at other Scrapheaps and not received any notification at all. Do you agree, Vice Admiral Gāo?” Hallock kept her tone level, not revealing how she felt about any of this.

  “Yes, I do,” Gāo said. “It worries me.”

  “It concerns me as well,” Hallock said. “We have a problem with our communications systems over these long distances. We haven’t paid a lot of attention to those systems, because we go forward, as you said. But we have left a lot of tech behind us. We decommission the sector bases and the starbases. We might need to consider destroying the Scrapheaps.”

  Gāo felt a little dizzy. Destroying Scrapheaps? No one had ever mentioned that before.

  “Why don’t we?” Calixte asked.

  “The Ready Vessels,” Nguyen said quietly, as if he were passing the information to Calixte on a test.

  Calixte nodded. “So we may have been arming sectors without even realizing it.”

  “Not that it matters,” d’Anano said.

  Everyone looked at her.

  She shrugged, seemingly unconcerned by their surprise.

  “Oh, don’t pretend,” she said. “We go into sectors, explore them, use t
hem at times, settle there for a while with our bases, and then we leave. We have no idea if we leave the communities there better off or worse off, and more importantly, we don’t care. If these thieves break into an ancient Scrapheap, are they stealing anything important? We didn’t even know that Scrapheap existed.”

  “We know now,” Nguyen said.

  “We do,” d’Anano said. “But we haven’t been threatened by our own Ready Vessels. We haven’t even fought a major engagement with another fleet in a long time. We’ve gone afoul with settled communities on various planets, but something spacefaring, like us? We haven’t seen the like. Why should we care?”

  Gāo looked at Hallock, to see how she responded to that. But Hallock’s face remained impassive.

  “It’s my understanding,” Gāo said, using Calixte’s verbal trick, “that any ships we send back to that Scrapheap would be on a suicide mission.”

  “I think so, yes,” Rwizi said.

  “And we might not be able to communicate with them once they arrive,” Gāo said.

  “I think that’s a solvable problem.” Hallock had clasped her hands behind her back.

  “The communications issue?” Gāo asked, surprised.

  “The Scrapheap reached us,” Hallock said. “It took several tries, but it did. We can figure out the relays, see if or where the links are broken, and get the information we need. The question on the table is whether that information is worth lives.”

  No one spoke. The vice admirals deliberately did not look at each other.

  Gāo shifted slightly. She had called this meeting, after all. She was the one who should have had the most to say about what the Fleet should do.

  “We have enough information to make major policy shifts,” Gāo said. “They would probably be prudent shifts. We don’t need to send anyone back to the original Scrapheap.”

  “And yet, I am curious, aren’t you?” Hallock said. “That might not be the first Scrapheap. There might be a lot of information that we do not have lurking inside that Scrapheap.”

  “Is it important information?” d’Anano asked. “We have lived without it so far.”