He was using that light to poke at the equipment, trying to fix it—she hoped.
Or at least, not screw it up.
“Something’s happening,” she said.
“No kidding.” His voice was dry and filled with contempt. Damn near everything he said to her was filled with contempt.
She had accepted the contempt back at the Scrapheap—hell, she might even have deserved that contempt—but now she knew the limits of Kabac’s expertise. He wasn’t that much better at anything than she was.
In fact, he was worse at things. She had saved the ship all by herself at least once.
No one on board would be alive without her. Not a single soul, and none of them seemed to want to acknowledge that.
She deserved some kind of respect—or at least a hearing. Particularly now, when everything was going wrong.
“I mean it,” she said. “The ship’s moving.”
“E-yeah.” That contempt again.
“It’s drifting. It shouldn’t be rocking.” She sounded strident. She wished she didn’t care about how she sounded. But she did care. “Something’s going wrong.”
He lifted his head and sighed audibly. “You realize you’re interrupting my work.”
“What work?” she asked. “It’s not work. What are you even doing?”
“Trying to get the power back on,” he said, and bowed his head again. He had told her more than once he knew nothing about the engineering systems on this ship, and now he was trying to get the power back on? Maybe he was the one who was causing the rocking.
And what was he even working on? None of the control panels worked anymore. Not even the control panel near the captain’s chair worked, and it should have, right?
At least Kabac had tools out and was doing something. All she was doing was poking at the dark control panels, hoping something would spring to life.
Advise leaving hostile environment as soon as possible, her suit said.
That couldn’t have been fifteen minutes. Was the warning’s timing accelerating? Had the stupid suit overridden the commands she had given?
Programming only got overridden like that when something was about to go catastrophically wrong.
She pushed off the control panel and headed to one of the utility closets built into the wall of the conference area just behind the bridge. She had to push off a lot of equipment to get there—her traveling skills in zero-G had devolved to damn near nothing.
“You’re not just leaving me up here, are you?” Kabac asked, a bite to the words. It took her a second to hear what was beneath the bite.
Terror. He was as scared as she was—maybe more scared, because she already figured out that she was going to die. Figuring that out was both calming and motivating.
She wasn’t panicking about staying alive, per se, but she was focused on staying alive longer, maybe until they could get the ship’s systems back up and running.
“My suit’s dying,” she said. Dying was an interesting word choice, when she could have used so many other words—failing, been compromised, leaking.
But she had said dying.
“I’ve got over twenty-four hours of oxygen,” he said. “I can share.”
She had no idea how. These stupid suits were supposed to be self-contained. And then there was the matter of the leaks in her suit. The pinprick leaks everywhere.
“Won’t help,” she said, and didn’t explain.
Her suit was leaking. The ship was leaking. She was screwed. They were screwed.
All she could hope for at the moment was that someone on some lower level figured out how to get into engineering and get the systems back online.
Because she had a hunch that getting anything back online was beyond Kabac’s skills.
Just like it was beyond hers.
The Aizsargs Rescue One
The cockpit of Rescue One had the normal mid-rescue silence. But this rescue wasn’t normal, and that made Pascal Turris nervous.
He sat stiffly in the pilot’s chair, monitoring everything. Usually he had a lot more information at this point in a rescue. He would know the layout of the ship in trouble. He would be able to call up the crew complement, figure out who his people needed to talk with, or who would be in charge if the captain was unavailable.
He would know where the best exits were. He would know where to deploy the life rafts if necessary.
He would know how close he needed to be for Rescue One to remain safe.
He knew none of these things. Oh, his crew had tried, and so had everyone else on the Aizsargs. They had sent several diagrams of the interior of SC-Class vessels of the same make and model as the Renegat, but they had no information on the Renegat herself.
No history of repairs, no history of missions, no idea what the ship had been doing for the last hundred-plus years or why it hadn’t been upgraded to a new ship or if it had been stored in a Scrapheap or left on some sector base.
He wanted all of that information, and he wouldn’t get it in time, even though he knew the Aizsargs was working on finding it for him and for the rescue team.
His crew had volunteered to search for more information, but he had stopped them. He needed them to monitor the Renegat. He didn’t like the way the exterior looked. He couldn’t get the kind of readings he wanted, because the Renegat wasn’t communicating with Rescue One.
Even when he deployed the grappler, he didn’t get the kind of information he usually did. He hadn’t thought the deployment would work, but it had. The grappler had dug into the proper ports on the Renegat, and held.
His two rescue teams had no trouble going through the space bridge—or so Ogden reported from Staging.
And that was the last Turris had heard from anyone.
Zarges had wanted Turris to roll up the spacebridge the moment the rescue teams left it, and Ogden had already pinged Turris to ask if the bridge should be disconnected.
Of course it should, but Turris didn’t want to, not quite yet. He wanted to give it just a few more minutes. Time, he figured, for the rescue team to start to go deep into the Renegat, and maybe realize that they couldn’t remain.
Then they could turn around and exit through the spacebridge.
Even though they probably wouldn’t do that, especially now that Zarges was in charge.
Turris had no idea what, exactly, was making him so uncomfortable here. He had successfully performed dozens of rescues in the past year. But he had always relied on his gut as well as his brain, and his gut told him that something was very wrong with the Renegat.
“The atmosphere’s still venting,” Corrado Ranaldi said. He was a short man, fastidious and precise, the perfect person to handle any crisis. Ranaldi was usually their navigator, but while Rescue One was tied to the Renegat, there was nothing to navigate. So he was offering little helpful sentences, as reminders of the duty that Turris wasn’t quite performing.
“You’d think they would have shut that down first thing,” said Anna Vail, who was going to coordinate all of the rescue details on this mission. She often led rescue missions, so she knew what she was talking about.
Turris couldn’t look at her, though. She was bouncing on her toes, clearly restless. She wanted to be part of this mission, on the ship, not in the cockpit.
“Maybe they can’t,” said Mackay Adeon. He was thin and anxious, constantly moving, always completing something. He didn’t normally come to the cockpit. He always handled the technical details of the life rafts. He worried about everything, and knew, if he screwed up any part of life raft duty, a whole bunch of people would die.
He overcompensated by working too hard. So, in the time it had taken to send the in-person rescue teams, Adeon had already set up the life rafts in their bay belowdecks. But he could deploy the rafts from here, if need be.
“They haven’t been on board very long,” Turris said, trying to keep the second-guessing at a minimum.
“Then they need to hustle, because this is a real mess.” Rana
ldi was bent over the navigation controls, but it was clear he was talking about the Renegat. He probably saw the same readings that Turris did. “We should get as far from this ship as possible.”
“I know,” Turris said. He hadn’t wanted to grapple onto the Renegat in the first place, but now that Rescue One was attached, he was afraid to release the grappler. He was worried that removing the grappler would cause even more damage to the Renegat.
To his eye, it seemed like the exterior of the Renegat’s hull was compromised, and the nanobits hadn’t repaired the ship the way they usually did.
He glanced at the ship’s clock. The rescue teams had been on board for ten minutes now. If the team was going to dive back into the spacebridge, they would have notified him of that already.
So that meant they either believed they could get the Renegat running well enough to take her to the relative safety of the nearest starbase or they could get the two hundred people on board off the ship with enough time to spare.
But something niggled at the corner of his eye. He checked and double-checked what he was seeing—in data, in two dimensions, and in three. He couldn’t quite figure out what was making him so very uneasy.
“Anyone else worried about removing the spacebridge?” he asked. Not the best way to ask the question, he knew, but he would rather get the honest answer than have people dance around it.
“I was worried about getting close to the ship at all,” Adeon said.
“I don’t like the idea of pulling it,” Ranaldi said, “but we have no choice.”
“They’re not coming back through no matter what they find,” Vail said. “They think you’ve already pulled it.”
She was right; he hadn’t told the rescue teams he was doing anything differently.
He felt a little odd about that. It wasn’t that he failed to think clearly; it was just that he was so preoccupied with what he had been seeing on that ship.
“Adeon,” Turris said, “do we have any of the records of that ship coming out of foldspace? Something in the way that it’s operating really bothers me, and I can’t put my finger on it.”
“I’ll see,” Adeon said. “But if there were serious, easy to find problems with the anacapa, I would think that the Aizsargs would tell us.”
First rule of rescue, Turris almost said, was do the work yourself. But he didn’t say that. His team knew what the priorities were. Right now, the priorities on board Rescue One were getting ready to assist the teams in the Renegat.
“The team might not have had a chance to check the anacapa drive,” Vail said. “They have a lot to do from the moment they get on that ship.”
Turris knew that, mostly in theory. He had gone inside a crippled ship on a few rescues, but not many. He was always better served to act as a pilot for the rescue vehicle.
“I don’t like the readings I’m seeing,” Adeon said. “They’re uneven, and I didn’t even know that was possible with an anacapa drive.”
“It’s almost as if the drive didn’t shut down when the ship came out of foldspace,” Vail said.
That was it: that was what bothered Turris. The energy readings were abnormal, but energy readings were always abnormal on a ship in trouble. It was the kind of abnormal that bothered Turris the most. He hadn’t seen anything like it.
His stomach twisted. Time to get Rescue One untethered from the Renegat.
Turris sent a message to Ogden, telling him to roll up the space bridge and seal Rescue One. As soon as Ogden let them know he was finished, Rescue One would move away from the Renegat.
“Ranaldi,” Turris said, “figure out where we can move so that we’ll be able to best deploy the life rafts, if we need to.”
“We won’t know where to send the rafts until the teams contact us,” Vail said, as if Turris had never run a rescue before.
To be fair to her, there were two schools of thought on life rafts. One was to take a neutral position as far from the damaged ship as possible. The other was to hover as close to the damaged ship as possible so that the rafts would get to the ship quickly.
Both had their dangers. The first was that the life rafts might not arrive in time. The second was that any explosion on the damaged ship might damage Rescue One instead.
Turris would rather risk Rescue One than lose lives on board a ship in need of rescue. So he ignored Vail, and waited for Ranaldi to plug in the coordinates.
While he waited, Turris monitored the grappler. There were sensors on its claws, but their readings were strange as well. The nanobits that composed the Renegat’s hull seemed active, but they were also losing their bonding. He couldn’t tell if they were actively repairing the ship, or not working productively at all.
“Okay,” Ranaldi said. “I’ve locked in the coordinates.”
Turris nodded, then hit the command to unhook the grappler. He didn’t alter the way it was done; he didn’t do it more slowly or more carefully. Sometimes slow was as bad as fast. Sometimes normal was the best way to succeed.
The grappler started to disengage, and then stopped. A red light flared across Turris’s console.
“It’s stuck,” Ranaldi said, sounding surprised.
Turris nodded. He had half-expected that. Maybe more than half.
He opened a holographic screen, hit the virtual grappler controls and watched as an image of the bent black arm rose in front of him. He scrolled it to one side, so that he could see the actual claws.
Five of them, resembling a hand, which was not an accident of design. They gripped the side of the ship the way that someone might hold a ball that almost exceeded their hand’s span. The only difference was that all five claws were the same length.
“Manual,” he said to the controls. Behind him, he heard Vail gasp. He knew her objection; it was the Fleet’s position that the automated grappler controls worked better than any single person could.
But he felt like the sensors weren’t working properly—not through the fault of the grappler itself, but because of the communication it was receiving from the other ship.
The grappler holographic image created an extra slot for his arm and hand, measured to his specifics. He slipped his right hand inside that holographic image, placed his fingers over the claws, and settled in.
“Sir,” Vail said.
“I’ve got this,” he said curtly. “I’ll need to concentrate to do it right.”
She didn’t say another word.
The entire cockpit was silent. He had to ignore them all, so he didn’t even know if they were watching him. He hoped that Ranaldi was also monitoring the controls, stepping into his occasional role as copilot. But Turris didn’t check that. Right now, Rescue One wasn’t going anywhere, so unless something attacked it or hit it from the side, he could ignore the piloting controls for a few moments.
He had worked grapplers half a dozen times before, and he practiced with them monthly, just to—pun intended—keep his hand in. He needed to know what normal felt like. He did those double-checks on every system that allowed him to access it manually.
He was glad he had done all of that practice. It might make a difference.
He twisted his right hand ever so slightly, feeling for abnormal resistance inside the grappler. Twisting his hand like that should have been difficult, but possible. Instead, his hand felt stuck.
So he tested micromovements, not with the whole hand, but with his fingers.
He started with his thumb, partly because he had practiced with the thumb and the little finger the most. Those were the ones that didn’t quite work the way the other claws worked—mostly because of the way the thumb and the little finger were structured.
The little finger had the right number of joints, but not the strength or the length that the other fingers had. The thumb was the most difficult, because it not only lacked the strength and length of the other fingers, it was also missing a joint.
He had learned, over the years, to use the tip of his thumb as if it were that missing joint.
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He did that now, turning inward, toward the palm of his hand, using the tip of the thumb as a kind of pivot. The claw moved, just the way all the others moved when he tried that maneuver.
So he rotated the thumb-claw back into position, and tried the index finger. That finger-claw he moved straight down, toward the palm, and the claw moved easily.
But doing that simple maneuver caused a strange ache in his middle finger, and an echoing ache in his ring finger.
He moved the index finger-claw back into position, and tried the same downward motion with the middle finger-claw.
It didn’t move at all.
He tried three times, and at no time did that claw budge.
Then he tried with the ring finger-claw. It moved ever so slightly.
The little finger claw moved perfectly.
So the middle-finger claw was stuck.
He removed his hand from the holographic image, and went back to the grappler controls. He deactivated the middle finger-claw, and gave the grappler permission to tear it off, if need be.
He did not mention what he had done to his team.
Then he activated the grappler again, and had it follow normal protocol to disengage.
For a moment, the grappler didn’t move, but there were no flashing red warning lights, nothing that indicated something had gone awry. He watched the claws on the holographic rendering, saw the exact moment that the grappler decided to leave behind its claw, and knew, even before it happened, that the claws would turn.
They did, pulling themselves out of the hull of the Renegat.
The middle finger-claw ripped at the upper joint, causing a damage alert, but no other troubles.
“What the heck?” Adeon asked. He obviously saw the alert.
Turris said nothing. The grappler retracted, folding up as it was designed to do, as it headed into its compartment on the side of Rescue One.
“Ship disengaged,” the computer said, even though Turris hadn’t programmed it to speak through this procedure.
Ranaldi was nodding, though. Apparently, he was the one who had programmed that little surprise.
Turris reached the controls, ready to start Rescue One on its journey to the coordinates that Ranaldi had programmed in, only to find that Rescue One was already moving.
The Renegat Page 19