The Renegat

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  First order of business for Lauritz, Dauber knew, was to establish a route for the strange ship’s passengers to go from the docking bay to that deck, without passing crucial systems.

  That was why Dauber had picked Deck Seven. It was the closest personnel deck to the docking bay. Lower level personnel decks had individual cabins for single crew members, a large mess, and two recreational areas, but no essential services and, more importantly, no access to them.

  Even better, Decks Seven and Eight had been cleared before this last pass around the sector base, in case the Aizsargs had to pick up stragglers. Dauber wasn’t displacing any of her crew members.

  “Let’s move,” Dauber said. “At the rate that ship’s venting atmosphere, it only has a few hours left.”

  She was guessing, based on the ship’s size and its layout. She was also assuming that the atmosphere was venting at an even rate throughout the ship.

  For all she knew, the ship had lost a lot of crew already. It looked pretty large to only have 200 people on board.

  “What kind of ship is that, anyway?” she asked Ullman.

  “I’ve been trying to match it so that the rescue vessel knows how to access it,” he said.

  She smiled to herself. She knew he was doing that work, because he was just that good.

  “I’m not finding anything current,” he said. “It looks like a Security-Class vessel from about a hundred years ago.”

  She wasn’t sure how that could be. SC vessels had a very specific design. “It looks nothing like a Security-Class vessel to me,” she said.

  “I know. It threw me too at first,” Ullman said. “The SC designations went through a complete redesign about fifty years ago. In theory, they’re more efficient now.”

  “In theory?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “There are always complainers.”

  And he said nothing else.

  She turned, looking at the ship. It appeared dark, except for the gray atmosphere leaving. Had some of the whiteness she saw earlier been the ship’s lights?

  “What are the major differences between this SC ship and the current ones?” she asked.

  “Too many to list,” Ullman said. “I’m sending specs to the Aizsargs Rescue One, because they’re not going to know how to get around this thing.”

  Aizsargs Rescue One was their newest rescue vehicle. It had just been replaced before this mission. Dauber almost belayed the order to send Rescue One, almost told Ullman to send Rescue Five because it was the oldest rescue vessel, and she didn’t want to risk the new one.

  But, depending on what was happening here, that ship’s survivors might need all the upgraded tech on Rescue One.

  The thought of both rescue vessels made her realize something.

  “Was it standard practice for an SC vessel to work alone a hundred years ago?” she asked Ullman.

  He raised his head, looked at her, and blinked, clearly surprised. He hadn’t thought of that either.

  But both of them knew how SC vessels worked now.

  SC-Class ships were security ships. They were sent to the scene of a crisis, usually in twos or threes, and they handled the emergency. If the SC-Class ships went out alone, it was usually on a forward mission or somewhere planetside to do some preliminary research.

  SC-Class vessels rarely did solitary work for longer than a few days, maybe a week. And usually the planetside work was at a sector base or a planet that might house a sector base.

  She never heard of an SC vessel operating alone this far from the Fleet.

  “I have no idea,” Ullman said. “My understanding of systems and practices is that they remain the same.”

  “Until they don’t,” Ornitz muttered.

  Dauber tilted her head a little, conceding that point.

  But Almadi got to the heart of the matter. She raised her head, squinted at the two-D representation as if it could tell her everything, then said, “Systems and practices now means that we’d see dozens more of these ships coming out of foldspace.”

  Everyone on the bridge looked at her. Dauber frowned.

  “Or,” Ullman said, “they’re still in foldspace.”

  Fortunately, he didn’t use the word stuck, which was something everyone who ever traveled through foldspace worried about, whether they admitted it aloud or not.

  Almadi’s fingers hovered over her work screen. She was probably waiting to calibrate what the Aizsargs should do, depending on Dauber.

  “I’m hoping nothing else comes out of foldspace while we’re working on this ship. After that, we’ll talk to them—” Dauber hoped “—and find out if they were part of a group. Let’s just get over there now.”

  Almadi nodded, then bent her head over the screen, fingers moving.

  Dauber said, “Tell Rescue One to have its shields set and make sure someone monitors the area around the injured ship and Rescue One. I don’t want a ship to emerge from foldspace right near our vessels and fighters. Got that?”

  “Already on it,” Almadi said.

  “Good,” Dauber said.

  That ship, whatever it was, was lucky. It had caught the Aizsargs at the right moment, when she was staffed with her best personnel, doing their best work. Had the injured ship arrived two days from now, it would have been alone in this sector. The base would have been shut down, and even though a lot of people still on the surface of Vostrim knew how to help a disabled ship, they no longer had the tools or capacity to do so.

  “The ship is still not answering us,” Ornitz said.

  “Willfully?” Dauber asked.

  “I can’t tell,” Ornitz said. “But I would be remiss if I didn’t inform you that they might be deliberately avoiding answering our hails.”

  “Why would they do that?” Ullman asked. He sounded a little preoccupied. Or maybe Dauber thought he was. Because he should have known the answer.

  “That ship is by itself. It’s old, and it’s not working well,” Dauber said. “There’s a good chance it’s been stolen.”

  One member of the security team guarding the door to the bridge looked at her sharply. No one else seemed surprised.

  Ullman’s skin flushed. “Sorry, Captain. Wasn’t thinking. Although where would someone pick up a vessel like that? Wouldn’t we know if one was lost?”

  “We lose ships all the time,” Almadi said. “We keep track, but who pays attention to each and every one?”

  “Something else to gather data on, then,” Ullman said. He didn’t sound discouraged at all. He sounded intrigued by the challenge.

  Dauber had a hunch they all were. After all, they had thought this entire mission would be routine, and so far it had been. No DV-Class ship—the largest and most important vessels in the Fleet—liked being at the tail end of Fleet space.

  Sector bases moved as the Fleet moved out of a sector. The main part of the Fleet itself hadn’t been in this sector in over five hundred years.

  Dauber hadn’t protested the assignment—she had been too professional for that—but she had chafed when she received it. No DV captain wanted to take her ship backwards, not even for a few months.

  She didn’t like being in a sector that was well known, that held no surprises, and was, in fact, so unimportant the Fleet was pulling away from it.

  Although she had been wrong, hadn’t she, about the no surprises. That crippled ship out there was something new and different.

  “We have one other thing to find out,” she said to her bridge crew. General order, not to someone specific. “We are going to need to know what got that ship out of foldspace. Did it travel here on its own volition? Come out of foldspace here because that was what it had been programmed to do? Or has it somehow attached to the signal of our anacapa or a dying signal out of Sector Base Z?”

  “I’ll make sure Rescue One has that question front and center,” Almadi said.

  Good. Dauber was glad that Almadi was communicating with Rescue One on that matter. Because the way the ship got here would have a dir
ect impact on the way the Aizsargs helped it. And what they needed to do with the anacapa drive on that ship.

  Dauber straightened her shoulders, then moved to her own station. She had no captain’s chair on the bridge, unlike many of her compatriots. The bridge was no place to sit down, although of late, a chair wouldn’t have hurt.

  Things had moved too slowly here for the past few months. She was happy for the distraction.

  She only hoped that the distraction remained simply that—a distraction.

  Because she didn’t want this incident to become something bigger.

  The Aizsargs Rescue One

  Nothing had attacked Rescue One yet. Attacks were common during rescues. Raul Zarges always braced for attacks first.

  Zarges had run the rescue ships for the Aizsargs for more than a decade. He used to love the work, but even before his last mission, he was seeing any loss of life as a failure.

  And in rescue work, it was all about who got saved, not about who got lost.

  Zarges wasn’t piloting Rescue One. Instead, he stood in the cockpit of the Rescue One, supervising. In theory, anyway. His pilot, Pascal Turris, didn’t need supervising. Turris could handle Rescue One in the middle of a war zone, in his sleep.

  Rescue One was always safer with Turris at the helm than with Zarges. Still, Zarges felt the need to watch the approach to that ancient SC-Class vessel that Captain Dauber had sent him to. Zarges wanted to see what they were up against.

  Zarges was wearing his environmental suit in case he decided to go on the mission. The suit’s hood was down, and the environment was off. He wasn’t sure he would leave the cockpit at all, although he really wasn’t needed here.

  In addition to Turris in the cockpit, Rescue One had a navigator who specialized in close quarters, a life raft technician, and a weapons’ specialist.

  Every contingency planned for.

  The Rescue One was a strange hybrid of a ship. It had a large hold in its belly that could fit three hundred people, but they couldn’t access any other part of the ship. The rest of the Rescue One had been designed to work with a maximum of fifty crew members, and none of them would stay on board for longer than a day or two.

  There weren’t really crew quarters here. Rescue One had pop-out hammocks for overnight missions, and a barely adequate kitchen for the crew. Most of the resources on the ship, besides weapons and rescue tools, were centered near that holding area, including an automated medical bay.

  Usually the rescued needed immediate medical attention, food, and water, and Rescue One generally provided such things on the way back to the Aizsargs—if, indeed, the rescued were going to the Aizsargs. Sometimes Rescue One took the rescued back to whatever planet they had left or the starbase they had traveled out of or the larger ship they had traveled from.

  This past few weeks, Rescue One had taken half a dozen ships back to Z-City. Most of those ships were filled with young people who hadn’t known how to pilot, but wanted to stay with the Fleet, and their parents didn’t.

  Sufia Khusru, his second and the person who had run Rescue One while he was on medical leave, had encouraged most of those kids to apply to school ships, so they could travel with the Fleet and leave Vostrim permanently.

  Zarges had a hunch this mission wouldn’t be nearly as easy as those had been.

  Not that Khusru would have called it easy. But compared to his last mission, the Z-City rescues had been a piece of cake.

  Khusru was in Staging, along with the rest of Zarges’s rescue team. He wasn’t sure yet whether they would use a grappler, a spacebridge, or something else to get the people off that SC-Class vessel.

  He wasn’t even sure they wanted off the vessel.

  Hence the worry about an attack.

  Zarges squinted at the damaged vessel. He was surprised at the SC designation. He had rescued a lot of ships, including several with an SC designation, and he had never seen one with this design.

  The Aizsargs had sent over some specs for the ship, but Zarges hated using design plans to mount a rescue. He liked going into ships of a design he’d seen when it was fully operational, not one that was falling apart and in distress.

  His team was studying the specs as he was watching Rescue One ease closer to the SC-Class vessel. He was watching on the three-D screen his pilot was using, seeing the tube-shaped Rescue One, with its wide belly, ease up beside the much larger SC-Class vessel.

  Zarges had already ordered up life rafts, not just to get the stranded crew off Rescue One, but maybe to send them to the Aizsargs. A fully staffed SC-Class vessel—at least the ones he was familiar with—could have as many as five hundred people on board.

  So far, the preliminary data showed closer to two hundred. But he didn’t entirely trust information coming from a damaged ship. He had to have a contingency plan for the normal crew complement, just in case some kind of damper had activated on sections of the ship.

  If there were five hundred people on board that ship, he would have to improvise the rescue even more than rescues were usually improvised.

  He had already warned Captain Dauber that he might have to send some of the rescued directly to the Aizsargs, without the usual stopover on Rescue One for clean-up and debrief. Captain Dauber assured him that she was prepared to receive whatever and whomever he sent.

  His heart was pounding. He was a lot more nervous than he ever remembered being, but this was his first mission back. And it looked like one he would have to be clear-headed about.

  As he watched the image of the Rescue One move ever closer to the SC-Class vessel, looming against its side like a baby floating toward its father in zero-G, Zarges briefly toyed with letting Khusru run the mission. But that would be an admission that he wasn’t ready to return to work, and if he wasn’t ready now, then he might never be.

  He had to get past his failures somehow, or retire. And the idea of having no real work to do on any kind of vessel, even if he remained with the main body of the Fleet, terrified him at such a visceral level, he couldn’t even speak of it.

  This SC-Class vessel seemed to be blind. No ship of its size—no Fleet ship of that size—should allow a ship like Rescue One to get as close as it was, without hailing it or putting up shields.

  So far, no attack, which—as far as he was concerned—harmed Dauber’s theory that the SC-Class vessel had been stolen. Thieves would attack another ship nearby, right? Particularly if that ship’s designation showed it as part of the Fleet.

  At least, that was what he assumed, and he knew that assumptions could sometime get him into trouble. As damaged as this ship was, it might not have the capability to do anything except drift in space. There might be no way anyone on board could know of the presence of Rescue One.

  Besides, Rescue One had been hailing the vessel since it got within range, and no one had responded. Neither Rescue One nor the Aizsargs had even received an automated distress signal.

  Zarges studied the SC-Class vessel. He could finally see its designation was etched into the side of the ship, which the Fleet had only done a few times in its history. The SC-Class vessel was called the Renegat.

  Its hull was pockmarked and scarred, either by heat weapons or some kind of fire. Patched holes reflected blackly in the lights from Rescue One, showing that the Renegat’s nanobit repair system still worked.

  Up close, Zarges could tell this was a Fleet vessel, albeit of a kind he had never seen before. The smooth hull, the rounded edges, even the shape of the exterior doors, looked familiar.

  But the layout wasn’t, and his team was going to struggle with that.

  “Hail them again,” he said to Turris.

  “I have been,” Turris said. “In addition to a verbal hail, I’ve been pinging, letting them know a ship was close. I’ve also sent some automated signals on other bands, and I’m not getting anything.”

  Zarges took a deep breath. He squinted at the ship.

  “But there are life signs?” he asked.

  “Yeah,�
�� Turris said. “The Aizsargs was right. There are exactly one hundred ninety-nine life signs. A couple of them seemed to have moved, but not very far. I can’t tell if they’re conscious or not.”

  Zarges frowned. If there were two hundred unconscious people on that ship, his rescue team was in trouble. He didn’t have a large enough team to evacuate two hundred unconscious people quickly.

  But Dauber’s theory danced around his head. They could be thieves, in which case, they were working at stealing whatever it was, and they didn’t care about the Renegat’s problems.

  “Is there another working ship on board that one?” Zarges asked. “Maybe inside one of the bays?”

  “There’s no way to know that,” Turris said. “Nothing is powered up, and nothing is hooked to the outside. Not even us.”

  That comment set Zarges back a little. Grappling to the Renegat would be risky at best. Which made it essential that Turris remain in the cockpit. He’d freed Rescue One from tight situations before.

  But the grapple couldn’t hold for long. Rescue One had to stay in touch with the Renegat only as long as it took to let his team board.

  “I’m going to finish suiting up,” he said. “Let the team in Staging know we’re going onto that ship.”

  “I don’t like what I see near that ship,” Turris said. “I’d recommend against grappling.”

  “It’ll be a short contact,” Zarges said. “We’ll use a spacebridge, then we’ll roll it up once we’re on board. You’ll deploy life rafts when we ask for them.”

  If they could. If the two hundred people on board were able to get to some kind of exit.

  Zarges needed to see what they were doing, and figure out how to get them off the ship.

  “I’m not sure that damaged ship can handle a grapple at all,” Turris said.

  “That’s just one of our gambles,” Zarges said, and he heard something in his voice that he hadn’t heard in a long time. It wasn’t fair to call his tone upbeat.

  He didn’t like to think he was happy about people being in trouble.

  But he appreciated the challenge that was facing him. It made him feel alive, just like it used to.