Everyone on the bridge was listening now.
“The mission was strange from the start.” Dauber folded her hands behind her back and peered at the files. Some of what she saw, she didn’t want to say aloud, not yet. “It was classified from the very beginning.”
“Classified?” Almadi asked. She walked over. She could look over Dauber’s shoulder because she was cleared for everything that Dauber was, but Almadi didn’t look after all.
She waited, like everyone else.
But they all knew how strange the classification was. Most missions had layers in their files—protected information that only the officers could access, for example. But the Fleet rarely classified any mission. There was no need. The DV-Class vessels were moving forward, exploring, and there was little to hide.
The sector bases had classified areas, but that was to protect research and researchers, not to keep information away from the rest of the Fleet.
But Dauber had only seen an entire classified mission a few times in her career, and even then, those tended to be about diplomacy, not about anything else.
This trip didn’t seem to be about diplomacy. It seemed to concern Scrapheaps.
“I’m seeing references to a foldspace journey,” she said slowly, making sure she wasn’t revealing too much. “And it seemed to be going back, through sectors long since abandoned.”
That very idea made her shiver.
“And it seems…” she said, frowning at the screen, “that the Renegat went alone.”
“They sent a single ship on a long foldspace run?” asked Almadi. “A Security-Class ship?”
Almadi’s tone reinforced Dauber’s surprise. But the fact that Almadi was surprised was even more important, because she had served on SC-Class vessels, and had briefly captained one during her officer training.
Dauber didn’t address Almadi’s surprise, because right now, Dauber had no answers for her. She had more questions.
“According to this,” she said, “the Renegat left Starbase Rho with a new crew.”
“Starbase Rho,” Ullman said softly. “Wow.”
Yes, wow. Starbase Rho had closed decades ago. Dauber had never even seen it.
“The crew compliment,” Dauber said, “was 487. But at a stop at Sector Base Z, they added quite a few new crew members.”
“‘Quite a few?’” Almadi repeated. “What does that mean?”
Dauber shook her head, then glanced at Ullman. She needed him to go through this. To hell with the classified label. It was 100 years out of date. The Renegat was dying. She needed as much information as she could get, as fast as she could get it.
“I can’t tell,” she said. “They might have had crew abandon ship on Sector Base Z, but it’s not clear to me.”
“And why the uncertainty on the crew complement?” Ribisi said. “Either there were 507 crew members or 517.”
“Or something in between,” Ullman said.
The vague number was unusual. Everything about this mission was unusual.
“There’s a chance that is the same crew,” Ribisi said. “The anacapa drive is malfunctioning.”
Everyone knew that one of dangers of foldspace travel was time displacement.
Dauber nodded. “We’ll need a list of original crew members, just in case,” she said. “Not just the officers, like we sent to Khusru.”
“If it is the same crew,” Almadi said, “then what happened? There should be three hundred more people than there are.”
Dauber bit her lower lip. The ship had come through foldspace damaged, with atmosphere leaking and a malfunctioning anacapa drive. But there was no evidence that the ship had been breached by someone else.
Had something gone through the ship? An unidentified virus maybe?
“We’re going to need environmental clearance as well,” Dauber said. She looked at Almadi. “Make sure Rescue One knows this ship arrived three hundred people short. Make sure all of the medical information is accurate, and make sure that anyone who gets off those life rafts goes through full decontamination for every damn thing we can think of.”
She was not going to bring a virus on board this ship.
But she didn’t think that a virus was the problem. She was seeing other intimations of a greater issue, something she didn’t entirely understand.
She handed her tablet to Ullman. He took it with surprise. She had left her clearance open.
She trusted him not to use that clearance to look at files he shouldn’t look at. She knew him well enough to know that such a thing would never cross his mind.
“Figure out what happened to this ship,” she said. “Then report to me.”
“Yes, sir.” He climbed onto the stool he had been leaning on and set to work.
She eased out of the cocoon made by his screens and walked to the main part of the bridge. She looked at Ribisi’s screens as she passed, saw glowing and vibrating anacapa images.
“It’s bad, isn’t it?” she said to him.
“Yeah,” he said.
“What do you think caused it?” she asked.
He shook his head. “I’ve never seen that kind of damage before,” he said. “But I do know this: SC-Class vessels were never built to spend a lot of time in foldspace. Not even the older vessels, at least that I know of. They’re meant to dive in and out, usually with a lot of support from other SC-Class vessels. And yet, you think this one went alone somewhere?”
“That’s what it looks like,” Dauber said.
“That makes no sense,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said. “I know.”
And that bothered her more than she wanted to say.
Part Ten
Into Foldspace
100 Years Ago
The Renegat
The captain’s ready room was crowded. Crowe would have preferred to have this meeting in one of the actual conference rooms, but Captain Preemas was preparing to send the Renegat into foldspace, and he wanted to be as close to the bridge as possible.
The ready room’s amazing amount of furniture made the meeting uncomfortable. Two of the chairs didn’t move, and neither did the elaborate desk. At least Preemas had cleared off the desk.
Six people crowded around it, looking at the surface as if the screen there held answers.
Six people were, in Crowe’s opinion, four people too many.
Although they all belonged in this meeting. He was the one who had brought three of them in—Natalia Stephanos, Tindo Ibori, and Milton Atwater. Preemas had also brought along one of the newbies, a woman named Justine Breaux.
She seemed the most out of place. She suffered from a series of embarrassed flushes, turning her light brown skin a dusty rose. She didn’t really like the attention placed on her, and she had apologized for her lack of education on all things shipwide more than once since the meeting started.
Crowe wanted to tell her to shut up, at least about her inexperience with starships, but he didn’t. It wasn’t his place.
He stood next to Stephanos, who kept shifting from foot to foot. She was a slender dark-haired woman who was quiet until she couldn’t take whatever it was that irritated her anymore. He had managed to snag her from Sector Base Z, where she had gone to teach for a few years. She had hated it, thankfully, so she was willing to come onto the Renegat, even with its problems. She had no family or close relationships, but her prickly nature precluded most of them.
He was glad to have her, considering the length of the foldspace travel that faced them. She knew more about anacapa drives than anyone else he had ever worked with.
Atwater knew a lot about them too, but his knowledge was all theory and history. He was the palest person Crowe had ever seen. Atwater had bright red hair and even brighter green eyes. He knew how the drives were supposed to work, the history of the drives in various ships, how the drives interacted with foldspace, and what kind of limits the drives could be pushed to.
Atwater wasn’t an engineer. He was a foldspace researcher,
the only real foldspace researcher on the ship, and he was in his element. Like Breaux, he was new to space travel and where she was frightened of it, Atwater was giddy.
Both responses were headshaking as far as Crowe and Preemas were concerned, but they knew that was one of the risks they were taking when they brought inexperienced travelers onto the ship.
The final person in the room, Tindo Ibori, was almost as tall as Crowe. Ibori had worked in maintenance until Preemas changed everyone’s jobs. Preemas moved Ibori to navigation, which had turned out to be a brilliant move. Like the best navigators in the Fleet, Ibori could actually see space in all of its dimensions in his mind’s eye. He needed equipment, but only to augment his imagination.
He was there to help the entire team replot their route if need be. And the need would happen, since Preemas had assigned Breaux to research where they were going, based on the old information from past Fleet missions and sector bases. Atwater was to figure out the best way to protect the anacapa drive, and Stephanos was supposed to be the one who would execute the plan—with Crowe’s help, of course.
They had two major assignments: the first was to make sure they got through foldspace without taxing the anacapa drive, and the second was to make sure they ended up where they were supposed to end up.
Right now, the screen on the desk displayed two different maps side by side, in two dimensions. Crowe preferred holographic three-dimensional maps. He would have overlaid one on top of the other, but when he suggested that, he had been overruled.
Apparently the older map only existed in two dimensions, so the computer would have to guess and fill in the three-dimensional map. No one else wanted a computerized guess in the middle of their decision-making.
Crowe was of the opinion that the computer’s guesses were better than theirs, but he had been overruled.
They were looking at the sector that had once housed Sector Base Q. The old maps from the days when Sector Base Q was in operation were detailed, but the current map was not. It wasn’t much more than a guess, since no Fleet ship had been back that way in centuries.
Breaux had already complained that Preemas hadn’t told her what her job would be, so she didn’t have complete access to Fleet archives. She said, more than once, that she could have copied the pertinent archive material before she left.
Crowe had put in a request with Sector Base Z for that information, but no one had sent it to the Renegat. He suspected that Rufus Gerlik wasn’t willing to do any more business with the Renegat.
If Preemas wanted to blindly follow the map that the Fleet had given him, the Renegat would already be heading toward the abandoned Sector Base Q. But Preemas didn’t trust the Fleet any more than Sector Base Z trusted him.
The Fleet’s maps took the Renegat into and out of foldspace ten times. Crowe had developed a different map that made each foldspace trip the same length, which meant that the Renegat would go into and out of foldspace a dozen times.
But neither set of maps—the Fleets and Crowe’s—were based on anything concrete. Preemas got to the heart of that matter fast when he asked the one question no one could answer:
When we emerge from foldspace, how will we know we’re in the correct place?
The question, asked more than a week ago, set everyone back. Because a star map wouldn’t answer that question, particularly the farther back the Renegat went. Space changed, just like everything else. Stars cooled and winked out. Asteroids hit moons, sometimes destroying most or all of them. Inhabited planets sometimes exploded, especially when the humans on that planet went to war with each other.
Humans also built things, like moon-sized bases, and in one historical case, something planet-sized.
So eyeballing the area wouldn’t work. Nor would the oldest maps.
The implication of Preemas’s question wasn’t just whether or not they arrived in the right place on the old maps. But the idea was that they could jump, then jump again, then jump a third time, all without checking against any map, and suddenly, they would be three foldspace trips away from wherever they were supposed to be.
They would never figure out where they had gone awry, particularly if they went into that part of foldspace that no one quite understood. The part where ships vanished or lost time or became becalmed.
Ships did escape from those places, but usually those ships had only taken one foldspace trip, not several.
Preemas wanted to make sure the crew of the Renegat knew where it was at all times.
Crowe wanted the same thing, although part of him wondered if that was even possible.
“Here’s what bothers me,” Breaux said, her voice shaking with nerves. Her fingers shook too. She wasn’t used to brainstorming with people who outranked her, and it showed. “We’re making other assumptions besides the one saying the maps are accurate. We’re assuming that these sectors are at peace. Sectors aren’t static, and we know there’s lots of human habitation throughout. Humans make war, and sometimes, they make war across an entire sector. Suddenly our big ship arrives in the middle of all that?”
Everyone looked at her, and Stephanos didn’t even try to hide her astonishment. No one who served on the Renegat and had served on other ships thought of the Renegat as “big.”
“What?” Breaux asked. “What did I say?”
Crowe took pity on her and spoke before someone could correct her. She felt humiliated enough. He didn’t want to lose her insights, because mostly, they were fresh. Humiliating her further would make her clam up.
“That’s a good point,” he said, a little more loudly than he needed to. “We don’t know what we’re heading into. We could land right in the middle of someone else’s conflict.”
“That’s why we stocked up,” Preemas said. “We’ll be in and out of these sectors before they even know we arrived.”
“We hope,” Ibori said. “If we arrive near those sector bases like the Fleet map wants us to do, we guarantee that we arrive near human habitation. If we assume that those habitats monitor the space near them, then they will know where we are.”
“And there’s another problem.” Atwater spoke up for the first time. “There’s a long history of sector bases being improperly shut down. What if our anacapa drive hooks into an ancient sector base’s arrival drive? We might end up not in the space around the sector base’s home planet, but inside the closed base itself.”
Crowe sucked in a breath. He had no idea such a thing was possible or that there was a “long history” of it. But he had brought Atwater onto the ship for precisely this kind of knowledge.
Preemas cursed softly. “So, we can’t leave yet. We have to redo the maps.”
“Maybe.” Breaux sounded even more tentative than she had before. “But I’ve been talking to Milton, and I wonder if we should avoid the active nodes.”
“The what?” Stephanos asked. Crowe was glad that she had, because he had the same question.
“The data that we received from the Scrapheap went through about thirty-five active nodes to get to us,” Breaux said. “I’ve been studying its route. That data was rerouted about twenty times. I think that means it hit an inactive node, waited some requisite amount of time, and then was resent to a different node. I think maybe we go to the sectors with the inactive nodes, not the active ones.”
“Because…?” Stephanos asked, clearly not following.
Breaux swallowed hard. “Because my guess is that the sectors with the active nodes have improperly shut down sector bases or starbases. Starbases aren’t a worry because we can’t get trapped inside, but sector bases…Milton says…” Then she waved a hand at Atwater, letting him take over her part of the conversation.
Which he did.
“In the histories I studied long before I joined the Renegat,” Atwater said, “I found at least five cases of ships that were called back to old sector bases by the bases themselves. Three of those ships were just fine, although it took the crew some work to get out of the base once they were insi
de. Usually they needed to repair their own anacapa drive, and leave, but in one instance, they had to actually physically climb out of the base.”
Crowe frowned. Preemas looked impatient. He didn’t want to hear any of this. Crowe wasn’t sure he wanted to hear it either, but it felt as if he needed to.
“But,” Atwater said, “there are two instances where a ship ended up inside a destroyed base. One of the ships sent a distress signal as it got pulled, and it got found, shattered, inside.”
“How is that possible?” Stephanos asked. “Our ships are built strong. The nanobits alone—”
“Wouldn’t be enough to compensate for landing inside solid rock,” Crowe said softly. He didn’t even want to imagine how the last few minutes on that ship went.
“The other ship was greatly damaged, but the crew managed to survive,” Atwater said. “I was actually thinking of studying this phenomenon more on Sector Base Z after they told me I couldn’t study in space.”
Preemas’s mouth thinned. “You’re citing five instances out of hundreds of thousands of trips inside and out of foldspace.”
His tone said it was all irrelevant. Crowe wished he could agree.
“Beg pardon, sir,” Atwater said, “but thousands of ships have vanished into foldspace over the centuries. We have no idea where or how those ships ended up. We only know of five instances. There could be many more.”
“Or no more,” Preemas snapped. “Let’s stay focused on the possible. This ship has enough facing it without making up a sector base problem.”
Crowe hated this part of Preemas. The man made a lot of decisions based on what he wanted to believe, not on any kind of fact.
“This sector base problem is not made up,” Crowe said. “I think Justine’s caution is a good one. Active nodes might be dangerous for us.”
Preemas shot him an irritated look.
“All right, then,” Preemas said, sounding even angrier than he looked. “I suppose we’ll need to replot everything.”
The Renegat Page 30