Crowe understood Preemas’s irritation. Preemas wanted to leave this area as fast as he could, before Gāo realized he had gone around some of her orders again.
“Actually,” Breaux said, and then swallowed convulsively. Clearly that was a nervous habit for her. “Um, we won’t have to replot.”
“Justine,” Atwater started.
She held up a hand, stopping him, looking more confident than she had a moment ago.
“I…I…knew that I was going to suggest this,” she said, “so I did some reworking. We’ll still have to look up a few maps, but not as many as you think. We’ll have to skip two of our planned stops.”
“Two out of a dozen,” Crowe said.
She nodded. “I’m guessing, you have to understand that, okay? But when I compared that information I saw in the data stream from the Scrapheap to the coordinates for old sector bases, it looks like there were only two active sector base nodes in this mix. The rest came from nodes nowhere near a sector base, and if it’s not a problem to maybe end up in or near a starbase, then I think we’ll be fine.”
“We can avoid a starbase,” Preemas said, his voice dripping with contempt.
“Then,” she said, no longer meeting anyone’s gaze, “in that case, only two. And they’re farther down the route. Older bases. I mean, much older. Way back. So we’ll have time to research them.”
Preemas let out a breath. “All right. When can we comfortably leave?”
Comfortably? It was all Crowe could do not to give Preemas an incredulous sideways look. They were heading on a major trip into the great unknown, a trip that the Fleet figured they would die on, and Preemas had used the word comfortably?
No one else seemed to notice.
“Realistically,” Atwater said, his head bent down as he looked at the flat maps, “let’s give it one more day. I love Justine’s idea, but I haven’t had a chance to check her route yet.”
“I’d like to check the coordinates as well,” Ibori said.
The team was acutely aware that Breaux was not a navigator. Crowe gave her the sideways look he had avoided giving Preemas.
She stood, hands clasped in front of her, twisting awkwardly together. She was nodding as she bit her lower lip.
“I like that,” she said, surprising him. Most people didn’t like their work challenged. “I would prefer it, in fact. This is all new to me. In the past, everything I’ve done has been theory, and this…isn’t.”
“One more day.” Preemas turned so that he could see Crowe. Their gazes met over Breaux’s head, and Crowe saw both anger and reluctance in Preemas’s look.
“I agree,” Crowe said. “We need the double check.”
Preemas’s lower lip curled, something he sometimes did just before launching into a foul tirade.
Crowe raised his eyebrows, warning Preemas away from saying anything—or so Crowe hoped.
Everyone turned toward Preemas. His expression remained the same—tight, angry, controlled.
Then it relaxed and he grinned. If no one looked at his eyes, they would think he was fine with the decision.
“Tomorrow it is,” Preemas said. “But that’s it. We leave tomorrow no matter what. No amount of planning will prepare us for this trip. At some point, we’re just going to have to leave. No matter how frightened we are.”
“I’m not suggesting this because I’m frightened,” Breaux said, clearly thinking that she was causing the problem.
Crowe held up a hand, stopping her. “The decision to double-check is a good one,” he said, “even though we don’t know what we’re facing.”
“We’ll never know what we’re facing until we get there,” Preemas snapped. “We need to get this trip underway.”
Everyone leaned back, the force of Preemas’s anger clear. Crowe wanted to challenge him, but didn’t dare. He wanted to say, You want this trip to succeed? Then we take some precautions.
But he didn’t.
Because on some level, Preemas was right. On some level, they had to go with what they had. No one had done this before. No amount of planning would change that.
Crowe turned back to the team. He gave Stephanos a pointed glance.
“Let me know if you find anything major,” he said.
She had worked with him before; she understood what he meant. He meant, Let me know if you find something terrifying. Otherwise they would be on their way.
“I will,” she said, in a tone that Crowe recognized. It was a tone that she reserved only for him, only in times of greatest emergency.
Then Stephanos was the one who turned to Preemas.
“Do we have leave to get started, Captain?” she asked.
He waved a hand dismissively. “Of course, go,” he said, keeping his gaze on Crowe.
The other four left, heads down, moving quietly out of the room, almost as if they expected Preemas to shout at Crowe.
It was possible.
“They’re wasting time,” Preemas said.
Crowe shook his head. “They’re making sure we don’t die before we arrive at the Scrapheap.”
“I suppose,” Preemas said. Then he narrowed his eyes. “Well? Go help them.”
“Yes, sir,” Crowe said, and left the ready room.
He wasn’t going to help the team at all. He had other things to work on. Because Breaux had brought up a point that made him realize there was an aspect to this trip that he hadn’t even considered.
He needed to make certain the Renegat’s communications anacapa drive was active. He usually paid no attention to a communications anacapa, leaving them off. They weren’t needed most of the time, especially on ships that operated inside a sector, like most SC-Class vessels.
The anacapa was well protected in its little panel, but it was always better to have the drive inactive. He would have to set it now, because there would be no communicating with the Fleet without it.
He also needed to set up a slow backup data stream, one that would send any recorded messages to the Fleet by the very subchannels that Breaux had mentioned.
Crowe could probably do that work while they were double-checking Breaux’s research.
And unlike Breaux, Crowe wasn’t going to mention this to Preemas at all.
Crowe wasn’t quite sure why. But he was beginning to think that telling this captain everything that was happening on his ship wasn’t always the best idea.
Crowe sighed softly as he made his way across the bridge. He wasn’t sure if he was behaving this way because he rarely trusted his superior officers or if his response was because he was trusting Preemas less and less as each day went on.
And Crowe wasn’t sure he wanted to figure that out.
The Renegat
Breaux stood on the bridge of the Renegat, hands clasped in front of her. The crew was scattered around various stations, some of which had floating screens and others had consoles. No one was sitting down. The overall screens on the ship—the ones that had given a view of the outside of the ship on every other trip she had ever taken on a starship—were off. Black, shiny, reflecting the tense tight faces of everyone here.
The people she knew were crowded toward the front. Natalia Stephanos was standing beside a console that was close to a small black box on the floor. Atwater had told Breaux that was the container for the anacapa drive. Stephanos wasn’t even looking at the drive.
Neither was Ibori. He was at the console that he called the navigator’s station, moving his hands rapidly. He seemed unconcerned by what they were about to do.
Maybe that was how all Fleet crew were trained to look. The ones who seemed tense might have been the screw-ups she’d heard so much about.
Because she didn’t think her team was a group of screw-ups, and neither did Captain Preemas.
He stood near his captain’s chair, looking at even more tablets and screens. He barely seemed to acknowledge her, and that was all right with her.
She felt like she was on the bridge as a courtesy.
That w
as what Atwater had said about both of them. He was also here, standing toward the back just like her, watching everything with eager eyes.
The only person who seemed to acknowledge their presence at all was First Officer Crowe. He had nodded at her, then smiled just a little, before going to work on a console near Stephanos.
Breaux felt useless, even though up until this point, she had worked very hard. The fact that her eyes were scratchy didn’t help. She had had hardly any sleep at all.
She had been up all night with the team, checking the numbers, discussing routes, being asked over and over and over again if she actually thought that the recalculations were worthwhile.
How was she supposed to know? She didn’t have the same skills as a navigator. She had just done basic calculations, then passed everything to the rest of the team. Some of the calculations she had cribbed from the information she had received from the Scrapheap communications file.
Most of the Fleet’s archives were lost or, she suspected, the Fleet never really kept them. The Fleet never really cared about its history as history. Only about certain events as they pertained to decision-making—the fight that had led the Fleet to veer away from its first choice for Sector Base A-2, for example, would be something that had gotten placed in the records.
She found countless examples of battles that led to a change in Fleet technology or classified discussions of discoveries and weaponry. But she hadn’t yet found any established maps or routes that the Fleet thought necessary to maintain. After the Fleet left a sector for good, it no longer cared about maintaining the maps.
It all frustrated her.
She twisted her hands together tightly, feeling even more nervous than she had before. Part of her nerves were caused by the fact that her research wasn’t esoteric any longer. She wasn’t doing it to get a promotion or to be seen as the most knowledgeable expert in her field.
What she had discovered—or hadn’t discovered—was now a matter of life and death.
This entire ship’s trajectory depended on information she had found, surmises she had made, and she was brand new. She didn’t know anything.
Except how to understand the maps. Everyone seemed to value that, even Captain Preemas.
He was the most mercurial man she had ever worked for, and that made her even more nervous. But he didn’t seem to see her except when he needed her, so she didn’t take his moods personally.
Atwater did, but Atwater was a career man. He was hoping to turn this mission into something that would enable him to travel with the Fleet on other missions in the future. He was bright-eyed, and he seemed to believe nothing could go wrong. Especially after First Officer Crowe tried to reassure Breaux.
Don’t worry, he had said when she had fretted about the anacapa drive itself. We have a backup drive with us on the ship.
Until that moment, she hadn’t realized ships could carry backup drives.
Her mouth was dry, and she swallowed against it, heart pounding. Nothing was happening on this bridge, and yet she felt like she had run for miles.
She was terrified and exhilarated at the same time.
“Are we ready?” Captain Preemas asked First Officer Crowe. There was some edge to Captain Preemas’s voice, almost an accusation. He had seemed so impatient the day before, even though he hadn’t directed it at her.
She had had the sense that if he felt he could reasonably do so, he would have simply sent the Renegat through foldspace, calculations be damned.
“As ready as we’re going to be,” First Officer Crowe replied, his voice calm but filled with warning. Almost as if he were trying to tell Captain Preemas that nothing was going to go as anticipated and he had to stop expecting that.
Or maybe she was just projecting. Maybe she was the one who needed to hear the warning.
What she could hear was her heartbeat pounding in her own ears. She had been holding her breath.
She released it.
She glanced over at Atwater. He gave her a goofy sideways grin, filled with excitement. This was the fulfillment of one of his dreams. He had always wanted to be here, on the bridge of some starship.
She had never expected to be, and now she had stumbled onto this ship, this circumstance, about to take an adventure that made even the most seasoned officers nervous.
“All right then,” Captain Preemas said. “Let’s do it.”
His fingers moved on the screen floating in front of him. First Officer Crowe moved his hand slightly as well, and Stephanos crouched just a bit, so that she could get closer to the anacapa drive.
No one else on the bridge moved. Breaux had expected something else at this moment—everyone to look up, everyone to acknowledge that this moment was the moment when they would officially become unreachable, a true explorer ship on a crucial mission back to a place the Fleet never thought it would return to.
But everyone seemed calm, as if this were an everyday event, as if nothing had changed.
Maybe heading into foldspace was an everyday event for all of them. It wasn’t for her or for Atwater. She glanced at him again, but now he was watching Stephanos, that goofy grin still creasing his face.
Breaux should have crossed the bridge and stood beside him. At least then, they could share their own giddy excitement.
But she didn’t want to move. The journey into foldspace was going to begin any moment, and she wanted to pay attention to it.
She stared at the darkened screens, only because she didn’t know where else to look. That, and she could see most of the faces, looking serious as everyone continued their work.
Her hands gripped each other tightly. Her heartrate had accelerated so much that it felt as if her heart couldn’t go any faster. She had to force herself to breathe.
Once they crossed into foldspace, she would feel better. She had to. Then they would be underway.
Or maybe, she would feel like this for the rest of the trip: scared, on edge, uncertain.
Then, the Renegat bumped and skidded, sliding forward as if it were a ground vehicle crossing ice on one of the mountaintops near Sector Base Z. But bumping and skidding was impossible: the Renegat wasn’t on any kind of surface. Space didn’t have turbulence like air did. Space was a vacuum.
In all of her time on ships (which wasn’t that much, if she was being honest), she had never felt anything like this—a continual rocking, bumping, shifting.
She wanted to grab a console, but she didn’t dare. She would have to walk to one, anyway, and even if she did find one, then she might grip it wrong, making something happen when she didn’t mean to.
The skidding feeling continued. No one had warned her about it, and no one else seemed concerned.
Which meant this bump and change was normal when a ship entered foldspace.
Normal.
She exhaled. She had been holding her breath again.
Stephanos’s face had relaxed. So, apparently, she wasn’t worried about the anacapa drive. At least not anymore.
First Officer Crowe hadn’t moved, though. His expression hadn’t changed either. He was still looking at his console.
Captain Preemas gripped the top of his holoscreen and pulled it into a small ball, before it vanished.
The bumping stopped, and the screens came alive. Planets, stars, something white and filmy on the righthand screen, a bit of winking red to the left, none of it familiar. The closest planet wasn’t blue and white and green the way that Vostrim was. It was orange and brown and purple, with a dot of bright red on one side.
Breaux’s breath caught. She was somewhere else. Somewhere very far from where she had started.
And that felt…awe-inspiring and weird at the same time.
Then she made herself breath. In. Out. Trying to remain calm just like everyone else. Only they weren’t trying. They were calm.
As she settled, she realized her chest hurt from the breaths she had been holding, a headache had started, and she was slightly nauseated—maybe from that weird bumpi
ness—but she was here. Somewhere else.
They were somewhere else.
She was here with the entire ship. They were in this adventure together.
She hadn’t really felt that before.
“Breaux!” Captain Preemas barked.
She lifted her head, felt slightly dizzy, made herself breathe. Everyone was working except her and Atwater. And now, Captain Preemas was calling her.
“Yes, sir?” she asked.
“Come here,” he said. “You need to check something.”
She did? Her? She blinked. Atwater was watching, but no one else was.
She wended her way past the consoles, past the bridge crew hard at work, trying not to look at those magnificent stars, strange planets, and colorful moons on the screen. Somewhere else. How very exciting.
She reached Captain Preemas’s side quickly. “Yes, sir?”
He had opened a two-dimensional screen with a map on it. A second screen was open beside it.
“Did we end up where we meant to?” he asked.
How would she know? He was the one with the team and the equipment and the navigators. He understood these things.
She didn’t.
And then she realized what he was asking. He wanted to know if the two-dimensional map he had before him was anything like the one she had used for this sector. She had changed some of the perimeters in her work, as she searched for nodes and arrival spots and the old sector bases.
The first map he had called up was the one she had designed. The second one looked nothing like it.
He was worried, and she didn’t blame him.
She swallowed, willed the headache away (and that didn’t work, but at least she could pretend that it didn’t exist anymore), and looked at the two maps. The new one looked familiar, as if it were the first one before she had tweaked it.
But she didn’t want to say definitively.
What if they were in the wrong place? Would they jump again? Go back? Try to find the other coordinates from here?
No one had told her what the procedure was, and she didn’t know. She had no idea what she would do if the maps were significantly different.
Then she realized that she wouldn’t do anything. She had given her life over to this man, these people, and they would decide for her. The only decision she had made was the one to join this ship.
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