If that was how he wanted to see it, Crowe wouldn’t disabuse him of that notion.
When Crowe didn’t say anything, Preemas’s grin widened. He looked like he had just won at some game. Crowe wasn’t exactly sure what that game would be.
“All right then,” Preemas said. “You need more coffee?”
Crowe clearly didn’t. He hadn’t touched the original cup.
“I’m fine,” he said.
“You might want to rethink that,” Preemas said. “You’re going to be here a while.”
Crowe frowned.
Preemas stood and walked to the counter in the kitchen. He pulled a tablet off of it.
Crowe hadn’t seen Preemas use an actual physical tablet before. Preemas had always used a networked holoscreen, at least in Crowe’s presence.
Preemas tapped the tablet on. The screen blinked open, but didn’t create a holoimage. Instead it remained flat, and lit from behind.
Preemas approached Crowe, and then held out the tablet.
“I want you to look at my wish list from Sector Base Z,” Preemas said. “Tell me if you agree or disagree with my choices.”
“On the tablet,” Crowe said.
Preemas nodded.
“You want me to change them or mark them in any way?” Crowe asked. “Because I’ll need access.”
“I have it set up so that you can tap yes or no,” Preemas said.
“But not lay out my reasoning,” Crowe said.
“I don’t care about your reasoning,” Preemas said. “If I can’t figure out your objection on my own, I’ll ask you.”
“Because you want me to stay here while I do it, right?” Crowe asked.
“Yes,” Preemas said. “This tablet doesn’t leave my quarters.”
The words hung between them for a moment. Preemas wanted deniability. He didn’t want anyone to know he had already found replacements for crew members who weren’t off the ship yet.
But why? Because he was afraid of being caught? Or was this the long game? Was Preemas doing this for the day he returned, the successful captain who completed an impossible mission?
“I suppose this list only exists on this tablet,” Crowe said.
“You catch on quick, First Officer Crowe,” Preemas said.
“And if I delete the list?” Crowe asked.
Preemas’s hand tightened on the tablet. He looked annoyed.
“You ask a lot of questions about thwarting me,” Preemas said.
“I like to know all the contingencies before I start,” Crowe said. “Besides, I might accidentally delete the list.”
“You, the most talented engineer I’ve ever seen.” Preemas made a dismissive sound.
“Everyone screws up now and then,” Crowe said.
“I’m sure they do,” Preemas said. “But not you. Not anymore.”
That was mostly true. If Crowe made a mistake, it was a small one or it was connected to a misunderstanding of the human beings around him. He rarely made technical errors.
He was probably too cautious these days.
Or he had been, before he became Preemas’s first officer.
“Wish list,” Crowe repeated.
“Yes,” Preemas said.
Crowe took the tablet.
“You want coffee?” Preemas asked.
“I’ll get it when I’m ready,” Crowe said, already looking at the list of names in front of him. The number in the right hand corner told him he had three hundred names to go through.
Names and short resumes. If he touched a name, he got the summary. If he wanted more, he had to tap twice.
He looked up at Preemas, who was still watching him closely.
“If you want me to go over this carefully,” Crowe said, “I’ll be here for hours.”
“I know,” Preemas said.
“I have duties,” Crowe said.
Preemas grinned, and then the grin faded as if it had never been. Those shifting expressions were eerie.
“This is more important than anything else we can do right now,” Preemas said. “If we pick the right people, this mission will succeed.”
Which meant if they picked the wrong people, the mission would fail.
Crowe’s grip tightened on the tablet. He didn’t want the mission to fail, any more than Preemas did.
It was beginning to gall Crowe that the Fleet wanted them all to screw up. He hated the idea that they had already been written off.
No wonder Preemas wanted this so badly. He wanted to prove that this ship of misfits and fools was actually worth something.
And he was right: if they picked the best possible crew, they had a good chance of success.
Whatever that meant.
Part Seven
The Rescue
Now
The Renegat
Zarges turned on the light on the top of his helmet, kept his knuckle lights on, but shut off the lights on his palm and the bottom of his boots.
The corridor in the old SC-Class vessel was dark. But as he passed doors, he realized that the team had entered the ship right-side up for the interior design.
Which was good. He always hated reorienting himself.
The corridor to Engineering looked wider in the darkness than it did on the specs. He turned right, just like he was supposed to, and pushed through the wider corridor.
He was probably moving too fast. But he couldn’t slow down entirely. Some of that was his elevated heart rate, and some of it was the small clock he had installed under his right eye. He had to keep track of time, because he knew they didn’t have a lot of it.
Lights bobbled behind him, letting him know that Iqbar and Palmer were close. Technically, Iqbar should have gone ahead of him, even here, but Zarges didn’t care.
He wanted to slow down and examine the ship around him. There was a lot more damage inside than he expected. The walls had holes in various places, and because the lights were so dim, he couldn’t tell if those holes had come from weapons’ fire or from some kind of internal deterioration.
If he had to guess, he would go for deterioration. Bits and pieces of ship floated around him—the occasional tool, a glove, a cup. Silverware had gone by too, which shouldn’t be on this level at all, if he was near Engineering. At least, not on any Fleet-run ship he had been part of.
Food did not belong on the Engineering level and neither did most personal items. There was too much open equipment here—or the possibility of half-open containers with dangerous items inside—for anything small to be nearby, because of moments just like this one. When the gravity shut down, small items got tangled in everything.
He batted a fork away from his arm (and tried not to think about those prongs puncturing his suit), and continued forward. Either the ship’s gravity had been off longer than a few hours or the ship was not being run according to Fleet protocols.
Or both.
He had to assume that the gravity had been off for longer than a few hours and prepare for someone else running the ship, both at the same time. That niggling worry he had had at first, the one concerning the size of the crew, came back. Maybe there were two hundred immobile life signs because people were dying, and another hundred or two crew members were already dead.
By now, Khusru and her team should have arrived on the Renegat and started their trek to the bridge. She hadn’t come onto the comm either to discuss bodies or anything out of the ordinary.
Although none of them would discuss small, disquieting things, like silverware on the Engineering level.
He finally reached Engineering proper. The doors were open, which was against protocol. But then he realized that the exterior control panel had been destroyed. The doors might have been stuck open.
He peered at the control panel. It had been reconfigured. From what he could tell, the damage to the panel might have been caused by someone inside of Engineering, not from someone outside of it.
He glanced over his shoulder at the wall on the far side of the corridor.
He thought he saw black slashes along it, burn marks, but he wasn’t close enough to tell.
He lifted his head, saw Iqbar looking at the same marks he was looking at. She shrugged. He did too.
They couldn’t solve the mystery of the Renegat at the moment. At the moment, they had to figure out how to save lives.
He entered Engineering as if he knew exactly where he was going. The interior glowed blue. The emergency lighting worked in this section, which meant that the power system was triaging. Only important areas were getting any kind of emergency power at all.
He changed the specs to Engineering only, and superimposed a clear image over what he could see through his hood. The general control panel was deeper inside Engineering, in an alcove behind some of the equipment.
Not logical, but then, a lot of the Fleet’s smaller ships did not have a logical build, especially in ships that didn’t have the array of defensive equipment and weaponry that a DV-Class vessel had.
He propelled himself toward the alcove, careful to avoid equipment jutting out at him. He was having trouble identifying what it all was in the weird lighting.
There were no sharp edges on Fleet ships (at least the ships he was familiar with), partly for moments just like this. The rounded edges made sure nothing punctured an environmental suit. But banging something too hard could still damage a suit. He didn’t want to become part of the emergency himself.
The bobbing lights had faded in the blueness, but he didn’t look back to see if Iqbar and Palmer had kept up with him. He assumed they had. He wondered if they were as unsettled as he was.
He couldn’t see well enough in the blue light to know if anything had been displaced or even stolen out of Engineering. He maneuvered his way around another corner, and slowed as he reached the alcove.
At that moment, Iqbar reached his side. Palmer was just behind her.
Zarges nodded at both of them, and continued forward.
The alcove was exactly where it was supposed to be, with enough room for all three members of his team. He took the center panel, and they took the side panels.
The center panel looked like it was not functioning at all. He put his glove on the surface, hoping that perhaps codes would work or perhaps his identification as a member of the Fleet.
The panel sputtered to life. For a moment it glowed red—caution lights everywhere—and then they faded out, leaving only a pale white glow around a few of the command functions.
The illustrations were older—clearly from another era. And try as he might, he couldn’t get the virtual screen working. He would have to do any work on the control panel itself.
He ran his glove along the edge, hoping to funnel more energy into the panel.
“Is your panel working?” Iqbar asked through their team comm link.
“Barely,” Zarges said.
“Mine isn’t working at all,” Palmer said. Without being asked, he dove beneath the panels and opened the controls from underneath. “It’s getting power. There just isn’t enough to operate this equipment.”
Iqbar activated the gravity on her boots, so that she could crouch beside him. She handed him a short-term energy pack from her belt. Zarges waited in front of the main panel.
The team had done this drill a hundred times, but never on a ship this old, and never under this kind of time crunch.
Still, they worked like it was an everyday mission. Calmly. In control.
The panel powered to life in front of him, nearly blinding him with the layers of red, blaring everywhere.
“Got it,” he said.
“There’s a flaw in the system,” Palmer said. “Something’s draining the energy at double time. That means we only have two hours, tops.”
“If we’re still here two hours from now, we’ve failed.” Zarges didn’t like the red. “Dorthea, I need you over here.”
Iqbar stood beside him, and gasped. He had never heard her gasp during a mission before. If he had been asked just a few moments ago, he would have said that of all of them, Iqbar was the most unflappable.
Her hand hovered over the panel, as if she was afraid to touch it.
“What do you need me to do?” she asked.
“Help me figure out which of these caution lights is the most critical.” But just as he said it, he saw which of the lights was the most critical.
Something was wrong with the anacapa drive.
He touched that caution light, and, for once, the virtual screen appeared. It had even more caution lights and something he had never seen in a ship this large—an ice-blue flare.
Evacuate immediately.
“What the hell?” Iqbar asked.
“Someone’s tampered with the anacapa drive,” he said.
“I see that,” she said. “But it’s not—”
“Looks like they started it incorrectly, then taxed it. If I could figure out what they did, then maybe—”
“That’s not reversible.” Palmer spoke from behind him. He was leaning over Zarges’s shoulder.
The reason Palmer had gone under the control panels was that he was the most adept at handling unfamiliar equipment. He could process information faster than anyone else Zarges had ever worked with.
“Can we forestall it?” Zarges asked. “Maybe buy ourselves more time?”
“Maybe,” Palmer said. “I think we’re better served getting everyone off this ship, and getting as far away from it as possible.”
Zarges was afraid he would say that. “I’ll let the other teams know they’re on point. Dorthea, contact the Aizsargs. Tell them that they’re going to have to move as far away from this ship as possible.”
“Yes, sir.” Iqbar toggled her comm system so that she contacted the Aizsargs directly.
Zarges contacted Khusru.
“Sufia,” he said, “we have to evacuate. We have an anacapa problem. And our timeline just got a lot tighter. This ship isn’t going to last much longer.”
He didn’t want to explain the anacapa in depth. It would be too complicated.
“Got it,” she said. And he felt a small measure of relief.
She knew what to do. Once she was on the bridge, she would begin evacuation procedures from there. She would also make a shipwide announcement if she could.
After he contacted Rescue One, he would see if he could find the shipwide comms from down here.
If Khusru couldn’t make the announcement from the bridge, Zarges would make one from Engineering.
It was always better to have an announcement come from the bridge, though. It gave the order more authority, and often guaranteed faster compliance.
They needed fast compliance. They were going to need every single minute they had.
And even then, he wasn’t sure they would be able to save everyone.
Just his luck. Another impossible mission.
Because nothing was ever easy in this job.
The Aizsargs Rescue One
One had just reached the coordinates that Ranaldi had deemed safe when a message came in from Zarges.
Turris opened the comm so the entire cockpit crew could hear Zarges. It saved time. That way, Turris didn’t have to repeat the information.
“This ship is critical,” Zarges said. “We went to engineering, found most systems already gone, and a seriously malfunctioning anacapa drive.”
The cockpit crew froze, even though Turris knew none of them were surprised. Ranaldi’s gaze met Turris’s over the navigation controls. Vail stopped fidgeting, her hands folded.
The cockpit still had a quiet, but it wasn’t a mid-rescue quiet. It was that moment of quiet just before everything changed.
“How long will it take to fix the anacapa?” Turris asked. He didn’t want to send an anacapa expert over to the Renegat. He needed a stable ship before he did that, and the Renegat was anything but stable.
Adeon had already left his post and grabbed an environmental suit out of one of the storage. He wasn’t the best expert on the anacapa drive, but he was
accurate and he was precise. He would be a great assistant.
Turris held up a hand to stop him, though.
“We can’t fix it,” Zarges said.
“Nonsense,” Vail said before Turris could answer. She really wanted to be on that team. “Anacapa drives just need to be babied. It looks like this one wasn’t shut off—”
“It was tampered with, and then taxed. Someone didn’t know what they were doing.” Zarges didn’t quite sound panicked, but he did sound impatient. “Palmer estimates that we have two hours before the drive explodes. Or whatever it’s going to do. We don’t know, exactly, because none of us have seen this before.”
Vail placed a hand on her console, as if she was prepared to use it to rescue everyone by herself. “We could bring in—”
“No.” Turris glared at Vail. She was always trying to fix things. “We have two hundred people to get off that ship. Two hours is barely enough time.”
“Exactly,” Zarges said. “I’ve already let Sufia know, and I’ll be contacting the Aizsargs next. But if you’re anywhere near your old position, I suggest moving now. Get as far away as you can and still send out the life rafts. The ship’s map we’re using seems pretty accurate, so we’ll be using the bay doors. We’ll let you know more when we know more.”
And then he signed off.
Turris felt something in his stomach ease. He had known there was something wrong with the Renegat’s anacapa. He just hadn’t known exactly what it was.
Now that the problem was diagnosed, he could work on solving it.
“Corrado,” he said to Ranaldi. “Do we have to move again?”
Ranaldi held up one hand as he moved the other on his console. He had probably started investigating the various positions of the ship the moment Zarges had mentioned two hours.
There was a lot to figure out here. The life rafts only held so many people, and moved very slowly. Rescue One only had two life rafts, so the rafts would have to make more than one trip. Their speed factored into this mess, along with the number of bodies that needed rescue.
The Renegat Page 24