Part Eight
Crew Adjustments
100 Years Ago
Z-City
100 Years Ago
Land made Raina Serpell nervous. It was so solid beneath her feet. She couldn’t punch through it and get to another level. She couldn’t activate the land or change it or adhere to it with gravity boots.
The city itself catered to the base. The city sprawled out from the base like wedges of a gigantic pie. Each wedge seemed to have a different focus, from stores that catered to the locals in one wedge to several education facilities in another. The wedge that Raina found herself in right now was mostly geared to the transient population that came through the base—ship’s crews and short-term engineers and builders—people who really didn’t care about Z-City, but just wanted a place to sleep while they were in Sector Base Z.
Her hotel was only a block or so away. It was a structure made of brick, made locally, with carpets on the floors and a gigantic, luxurious bed that made the bunk she shared with India back on the Renegat seem like a tabletop.
It was cold here as well. She had to rent a jacket at the hotel, which had an entire clothing rental store behind the main desk. The clothing rental was apparently something most ship crews needed because they weren’t trained to think about the environment on any planet they went to.
Instead, they went in environmental suits, did their jobs, and left.
She had a wardrobe back on the ship that she had brought but she had left there. As a linguist, she often stayed planetside for a month or two, getting to know a language.
She had been in and out of planetside living for years. She hadn’t liked it.
But she could get used to it, maybe.
India’s words from their conversation after Captain Preemas made his announcement kept sliding through Raina’s head.
They didn’t want you. You could’ve kept moving up in the Fleet.
Maybe if she stayed here—maybe if they stayed here—she could get a promotion. She would end up using her brain, not endangering her body. Perhaps that had always been the appeal of India. India would take the physical risks while allowing Raina the time she needed to think.
India, who wasn’t anywhere near Raina at the moment. India had gone bar-hopping with some of her new friends in security, figuring they wouldn’t have the time or the chance to get drunk once the Renegat was underway again.
At least India was being responsible in that way.
Raina blinked. Her eyes had started tearing the moment she stepped outside the hotel. She liked to think that was because of the chill wind, but she wasn’t certain. It might also have been because she had stepped out of the hotel with one purpose in mind: she wanted to see Z-City.
She shoved her hands in the pockets of the thick coat they had given her, sniffled a little, and stepped onto the street. Z-City had some flying vehicles, but none were allowed this close to the Sector Base. In fact, there was a ring around the base beyond which flying vehicles were allowed.
Down here, all that went by on the roads were wheeled and railed vehicles. Most people used underground transport from the parking areas around the ring.
The streets were mostly empty in this part of Z-City except for the visitors from elsewhere. The streets were empty right now because it was the middle of the workday, according to the man from the hotel who helped her find the right coat. She had thought it was the weather. Right now the weather was cold by her standards, but within two months, it would become cold by local standards. So cold, in fact, that most locals didn’t go outside for weeks. They would travel underground, using transports and basement entrances.
The fresh air that everyone said they came to land for when they moved off-ship would be completely unavailable (and deadly, he said) during that time.
She had to think about that, because if she left the Renegat and stayed in Z-City, she might end up stuck here for the rest of her life, doing linguistic make-work, not being on the cutting edge of language discovery.
She reached the other side of the street and stopped in front of yet another hotel. The sides of this one actually looked like someone had taken rocks and glued them to a wall. She supposed that was some kind of design, but she didn’t understand why it even existed.
She gazed down the street, saw more nonuniform buildings, all of which caught her eye and made her very uncomfortable.
She had grown up on a ship. Ships were regulation for a reason. You didn’t have to think about what the walls around the next corner would look like. You knew. Just like you knew what your cabin would look like. You could personalize it a little, but the retractable furniture, the surfaces, the floor, it was all the same level to level, room to room.
This, where everything was different, made her tense. She sniffled again, knowing that some of the tension came from the decision she was sneaking around.
If she stayed, she lost India forever. And Raina might not gain anything. India had said that the Fleet would have promoted Raina had she stayed off the Renegat, but she hadn’t stayed off the Renegat. She had accepted that assignment.
If she abandoned the ship here, would that reflect badly on her? Would that label her as difficult a crew member as India? Or maybe even worse?
Raina sniffled a third time. Her eyes were burning from the cold. She shoved her hands deeper in her pockets, and wished for the easy comfort of an environmental suit.
She looked in the other direction. The street actually diagonaled down to sector base. The pavement continued into the sector base itself. She’d seen the map. The roads all ended up in some lower level turnaround, where the automated vehicles (wheeled or railed) drove in a circle, picked up more passengers, and left.
The wind played with her hair, making her shiver. When was the last time India had touched her like that? Raina had no idea.
She let out a large sigh, and actually saw the white condensation of her breath.
If she stayed here, she would be in a city she didn’t like much. She might not have a job anymore, although she could probably teach, not that teaching interested her.
If she stayed here, she would be alone. Because she wouldn’t be able to talk India into staying. That had become clear the day Captain Preemas made his announcement. India liked the idea of working security on the Renegat.
Raina had thought as the Renegat landed inside the sector base, that maybe, just maybe, she would scout a place to live, see what the advantages to staying in Z-City were.
But as they walked off the Renegat for their short two-day leave, India had said, “I wish we weren’t stopping. I’m ready to move to the next phase of my life.”
“You’re not afraid of all the danger ahead?” Raina had asked.
India had laughed. “It would be a nice change of pace from our humdrum life, don’t you think?”
Raina hadn’t said anything. She had realized, over the past several days, that India loved her new assignment. India wanted to stay on the ship, and India didn’t really seem to care what Raina wanted.
Apparently, as far as India was concerned, Raina had already made her decision.
And maybe Raina had. She had always put India first.
But Raina was also acutely aware that this was the last chance to abandon this mission, her last chance to stay behind.
If she stayed, she would lose contact with India. They would probably be able to talk, but communication across foldspace took time, and was more prone to monologues than serious discussions.
And if Raina left India—and it would be Raina leaving India if Raina stayed behind—India might take that as affront.
India already seemed to take it as an affront that Raina even considered staying.
Raina let out a shuddery breath, seeing that condensation again. Then she inhaled, feeling the chill air fill her lungs. Weather conditions would only get worse here.
And there was all that gravity, the solid land beneath her feet. The night sky, filled with stars she might never visit,
the ships arriving and taking off, ships she might not be able work on again.
If she stayed, she would gain nothing.
She would definitely lose India.
There were no good choices. So Raina might as well continue on the path that she had assigned herself.
If something went wrong on that path, she had India. They had promised to be together always.
That, at least, was something she could hold on to.
With that one thing, she could build a future.
No matter where she ended up.
The Správa
Vice Admiral Gāo bent over the large table screen in front of her, her right elbow on the screen’s smooth surface, propping her right fist against her cheek. She wasn’t comfortable—the seat of the chair that she had pulled over to the table was now resting against the backs of her knees—but she didn’t want to be comfortable.
She had too much information, much of it contradictory, and she had no idea how to synthesize any of it.
She was in the study she had built off her main research room on the Správa. The study looked deceptively tiny, with wall art modeled on ancient rice paper scrolls and beautiful calligraphed symbols from Earth languages she did not speak. Usually the art calmed her, but she was thinking of shutting it off this afternoon, and putting some of the data files on the walls themselves.
But, she knew, where the data was located wasn’t the problem. The problem was she didn’t know how to organize the data, and as long as she didn’t know how to organize it, she didn’t know how to command an assistant or the system itself to organize it.
Gāo had pulled all of the data from the Scrapheap that the Renegat was going to. She still got daily updates from that Scrapheap. She had commissioned a small study group to investigate how this information was actually reaching the Fleet. Rwizi’s group had already used some of the information—the easily accessible stuff—to plot the Renegat’s foldspace course. But Gāo wanted something more in-depth.
The study group was back-tracing each communications node, figuring out which ones were still active, which ones got skipped, and where, exactly, the information got rerouted.
Some of that information was easy to get, particularly on the nearby nodes, but some of the older information was proving difficult. Mostly, it seemed, the data from the Scrapheap had gone through decommissioned sector bases. The equipment in those bases should have been removed centuries ago, but Gāo was worried that the nanobits rebuilt some of the removed equipment.
She had no confirmation of that, and she hadn’t said anything about it to the other admirals either. She didn’t want Hallock to send yet another suicide mission to some decommissioned sector base to see what was going on there.
Gāo’s back twinged. She stood up and wiped off her face, feeling completely overwhelmed. She had data from the Scrapheap, data from Calixte on some other possible Scrapheaps that the Fleet had forgotten about, and some truly scary data about the kinds of Ready Vessels possibly left behind in these Scrapheaps.
The Ready Vessels were keeping her awake at night when she wasn’t worrying about the crew of the Renegat. She kept revisiting that decision nightly, because she had felt pushed into it, and she had never completely agreed with Hallock. Now that the ship was underway, Gāo felt even more responsible, especially since Preemas’s updates were too short for her tastes, and too upbeat for the man she had met.
But the Ready Vessels bothered her even more than a single suicide mission. The old Ready Vessels, the warships, were often decommissioned because the weapons systems or a propulsion system or some other bit of tech was deemed dangerous. Some of the weapons systems destroyed entire populations in ways that Gāo—and the current version of the Fleet, anyway—believed to be unethical.
Calixte had pulled the research away from the students and only had his officer trainees in engineering and history handle some of the research, primarily because it was so terrifying. As of right now, no one knew if those weapons systems were decommissioned and left in place or if they were decommissioned and destroyed.
Gāo hoped for destroyed, but she kept thinking back to that conversation she had had with Hallock, the one about ships being so valuable the Fleet couldn’t easily destroy any part of them, which was why Scrapheaps existed.
The longer Gāo thought about that argument, the more sense it made. And that actively terrified her. Because if that argument had as much truth to it as she thought, then a lot of these weapons systems or dangerous fuels or exploding propulsion systems might still exist, buried deep in a mostly unguarded and forgotten Scrapheap so many sectors away that she couldn’t count it.
The Fleet had never been attacked by its own abandoned ships, but what if some other culture had? What if the Fleet had inadvertently destroyed entire races of people? What if the Fleet, in its haste to leave an area, had also left a way for the worst people in that area to take control of it?
She placed her hands on the small of her back and stretched.
The what-ifs were driving her crazy. She had no control over them, so she shouldn’t worry about them, but the more she tried to make sense of all the information coming at her, the more she worried about what the Fleet had inadvertently done.
The door to her main research room chimed. The chime also caused a small blue light to appear on the table screen before her, just in case she had been very deep in the research and hadn’t heard the sound.
Her personal assistant, Lieutenant Cali Baker, had actually come to the door rather than contact Gāo through the system. That couldn’t be good.
Gāo let Baker into the main research area, and opened the study door.
Baker was a thin officer who wore her uniform even though Gāo didn’t insist on it. The blue with red trim looked good on Baker, accenting her light brown skin and shockingly pale eyes. She was older than some of the personal assistants to ranking officers, but Gāo liked that about her.
Baker had transferred to one of the school ships early in her career, so that she could be near her children, rather than on separate ships for all but vacations. Career officers rarely made that choice. If they wanted to trade career for family, they usually remained at sector bases, or took research work on some of the support ships.
Baker hadn’t abandoned her career as much as put it on hold. And then, when her children were grown, she returned. Gāo took her on as soon as she was available, appreciating Baker’s unflappable nature, which was partly due to her age, and partly to the way she was.
Baker didn’t look unflappable at the moment, which bothered Gāo. Baker knew how Gāo conducted her business, so Baker’s expressions were often predictive of what Gāo’s would be after Gāo heard whatever news Baker had to impart.
Gāo wanted to ask in a light tone, Who died? but knew better. Baker’s expression was close enough to one that might have been caused by someone’s death.
“Vice Admiral,” Baker said, and Gāo silently cursed. Baker had decided on formality in her tone as well as her words. “We…um…got a message from the head of Sector Base Z.”
Gāo frowned. She had little to do with sector bases. Baker knew that, which made this moment even more unusual.
Sector Base Z had just reached the point where it would be slated for decommission. Decommissioning would take decades, and would happen in stages, but it was going to happen. A location had just been approved for Sector Base C-2.
“He had just found out that you are in charge of the mission for the Renegat,” Baker said.
Gāo’s stomach clenched. She had known the Renegat was heading to the area, and that Preemas was going to make an extra, unplanned stop, to pick up supplies and have the anacapa checked. She hadn’t really approved that, but she understood his caution. The foldspace trips he was facing were going to be arduous, and he had no idea what he might encounter in the old sectors.
Gāo didn’t even ask if there was a problem. She knew there was, or the head of the sector base wouldn’t contact her
.
“What are we facing?” Gāo asked. Was she going to have to call this mission off before the Renegat even got into its long foldspace journey?
She half-expected it. The crew was difficult, and Preemas had his issues. His enthusiasm for this entire mission might have waned.
“The director wants to know if you approved the personnel changes. He found something in the files that said you were in charge of personnel, not Captain Preemas, and figured he should notify you.”
Baker’s expression was a study in calm exasperation. This time, Baker had gotten Gāo’s reaction wrong. There was no calm exasperation here.
Gāo felt a deep fury.
What kind of game was Preemas playing?
“What’s going on?” Gāo asked.
“From what I can tell, several crew have left the ship, and Preemas is replacing them on his own,” Baker said.
Which was the logical thing for most captains to do. But Preemas didn’t have clearance to do anything like this.
“Get him for me,” Gāo said.
She was going to stop this once and for all.
Sector Base Z
Breaux had never done anything like this before. She didn’t consider herself impulsive or even daring, and yet she was standing in the information line to talk with a representative from the SC-Class vessel The Renegat about maybe joining the crew.
The line snaked its way around the employee dining room on the top level of the base. The dining room had slitted windows, so that the employees could watch the mountaintop open whenever a ship asked to land inside the base.
Ships with anacapa drives didn’t ask. They just signaled the anacapa drives inside the base and appeared in the gigantic service areas on the lowest level of the base.
She’d been taken down there a few times, mostly as part of a base tour for employees. The sector base wanted everyone to know where they worked and who they worked with, if possible. Lots of areas were marked classified or specialized, and of course, she wanted to go in those as well, even though she had never been able to.
The Renegat Page 26