“Do you mind if I alter this image?” she asked, pointing at the second map.
“Tell me what to do and I’ll change it,” he said.
He didn’t want her touching that screen. Maybe there was special access needed or something. Not that it was her concern.
She told him all the steps she had taken to change the first image, imagining it as if she were actually changing the image herself.
His fingers deftly moved across the image, much more accurately than she had managed the first time she tried it.
It only took a few seconds, and then the map refocused. She didn’t have to say anything, because it was obvious that the two maps were the same, but she said, “Yes, according to this, we’re in the exact right spot.”
She was so relieved, her knees started to buckle. She caught herself just in time.
“Excellent,” Captain Preemas said. “Do you concur, First Officer Crowe?”
Breaux had no idea why Preemas had put such emphasis on the words first officer, but he had. And First Officer Crowe didn’t seem to mind.
“Yes,” First Officer Crowe said in a flat tone. “According to our sensors, we are in the right place.”
Someone applauded, just once, before they stopped mid-clap. Breaux knew without looking that the someone who had done that had been Atwater.
She turned her head ever so slightly. His face was red. She gave him a small smile, and he shrugged sheepishly.
“All right then,” Captain Preemas said. “We’ll cross the sector, just like our Fleet masters suggested, and then we’ll take the next foldspace leg of our journey.”
Breaux already knew, from the discussions the day before, that they weren’t following the Fleet’s suggestions just because the Fleet wanted them to travel slowly across sectors, but because both First Officer Crowe and Natalia Stephanos believed that the anacapa drive would work better on this long journey if it had time to rest.
There’s no proof of that, though, right? Captain Preemas had asked, as if he wanted to cram a foldspace journey back-to-back with another foldspace journey until they got to the Scrapheap.
We’re already taking a lot of risks, First Officer Crowe had said in that calm voice he had just used a few moments ago. We don’t need to take any more.
And Captain Preemas had listened to him then. Apparently, they were following that protocol now as well, and Captain Preemas was just letting everyone know.
Captain Preemas surveyed the bridge crew, then looked pointedly at Breaux. She was standing too close, and she knew it. She just had no idea how to extricate herself from her position beside the captain.
Her gaze met his. His was filled with amusement at her obvious predicament.
“Anything else, Breaux?” he asked her, as if it had been her idea to bring her close to the captain’s chair.
She swallowed, hating her nervousness. Since she had him here, she might as well ask about one other thing.
“Yes, sir,” she said. “If someone could make sure that I get all the telemetry from this sector, I will use it to calibrate my work.”
The amusement left his gaze. Had he really been happier when she was uncomfortable?
“You heard her, everyone. Make sure she gets the proper information.” Then he nodded at her, and she understood. She was done here.
“Thank you,” she said softly and made her way to the exit. As she passed Atwater, he fell in beside her.
“I’m giddy,” he said softly, as if that wasn’t obvious, as if he had been hiding his emotions all along.
Breaux was many things, but giddy was not one of them. Relieved, focused, and beneath it all, slightly terrified. She felt like they were traveling to the past, even though they weren’t. They were simply reversing the track that the Fleet had followed for centuries.
And she had that thought as if it were a minor thing.
It wasn’t.
The Správa
Gāo’s eyes ached. She’d been doing a lot of close work for hours, going over data and reports, trying to figure out if it was possible to change the way that the Fleet handled Scrapheaps without getting rid of the idea of Scrapheaps themselves.
She had gone to the officers’ mess on board the Správa, mostly to see other faces and partly to look through the curved portholes at space beyond. She needed to see something pretty and uncomplicated, and even though she knew the universe itself was infinitely complicated, the winking stars and fading blue of the area around the ship calmed her like nothing else could.
The officers’ mess wasn’t as large as the regular crew mess, so it felt homey. Lots of brown and black wood taken from forests near the last two sector bases added an unusual design. The real greenery, vines whose type she couldn’t identify, looped around the booths, above the windows, and along the walls, added to the comforting feeling.
It was as if the designers had brought just enough of planet living into the mess, but not so much that it would intimidate the crew members who had spent their entire lives in space.
Gāo had a favorite table, in the corner between the curved windows and a vine-covered wall. She sat with her back to the vines, and she had learned early on to not push her chair too far back or it would split the vines open and cover her with a gooey mint-scented sap.
Still, when she sat like this, she saw what was going on in the mess, as well as the entire length of the curved windows, and the activity outside of the ship. Sometimes, when the Správa flew in formation with the rest of the command ships, dozens of small ships with their lights and their sleek black bodies filled the view. Other times, like this time, the vastness of space itself, with the pale white and deep gold of distant stars, provided a light that made her heart sing.
After a day of hard work, she needed a bit of inspiration, as well as sustenance. No one would approach her in the officers’ mess unless they were part of her team or unless she beckoned them. And when she sat here, she rarely beckoned anyone.
She sipped the blackest coffee made on the ship, ate a meal of spicy lentil soup with a side of cucumber salad—all ingredients grown in the Správa’s gigantic hydroponics bay. The bay was something she had ordered long ago, when she had transferred to the Správa and it had become her permanent home. She had asked that hydroponics become a major focus of the work on the ship, so that the food would not only be fresh, but varied.
“Forgive me, Vice Admiral.” Lieutenant Cali Baker’s careworn face appeared in miniature in the corner of Gāo’s right eye. “I know you don’t like to be disturbed when you’re eating, but this can’t wait. We have contact from the Renegat.”
Gāo leaned back and dabbed her mouth with a napkin, doing her best not to sigh. “Another message?”
Preemas had sent two direct messages since that fateful discussion about his behavior on Sector Base Z. The first thanked Gāo for her quick review of the new crew members he had unceremoniously hired for the Renegat.
The second informed her that the Renegat was heading into foldspace for its long journey back to the Scrapheap.
The messages had been in line with what she had expected from him. The fact that he had contacted her directly right now was ever so slightly alarming.
“Problem, Lieutenant?”
“I don’t know, sir. He didn’t tell me.” Baker’s pale eyes seemed almost translucent in this small form. “But he is waiting.”
“Transfer him to the communications room here,” Gāo said.
She stood and put her napkin on the table beside her food, hoping she would be able to come back to it while it was still warm.
In all three of the major mess halls, there were small communications rooms off the main dining area, just in case someone needed to have a one-on-one conversation without traveling to a different part of the ship, and without the entire mess listening in.
The communications room off this mess hall was only a few yards from where she was sitting. She entered her command code to access the room, and slipped inside, hoping s
he was moving fast enough to catch Preemas.
Sometimes communications across any foldspace divide were uncertain.
But a wavy hologram of him stood in the center of the tiny room. He looked very professional. His hair was even shorter than it had been before, he was closely shaved, and he wore a casual uniform that looked pressed. The image occasionally fuzzed, revealing the controls on the wall of the communications room, but mostly, it looked like a glowing version of Captain Preemas stood inside the room with Gāo.
She activated her hologram, and then realized she hadn’t even checked her face for an errant bit of soup, nor had she combed her hair. She had been tugging at it, and it was probably a mess.
Ironic that she would be the one who was a mess, not Preemas.
“Captain,” she said as soon as she got the signal that the communications link was active.
There was a tiny delay, and then he said, “Vice Admiral,” mimicking her tone. That was the Preemas she knew.
“I received your previous messages,” she said.
“Sorry I didn’t contact you one-on-one like you asked,” he said. “I wanted to get the foldspace part of the journey underway before my crew changed its mind.”
The question he probably wanted her to ask next was Have they changed their minds? But she didn’t.
“So,” she said, “your report…?”
He clasped his hands behind his back, like she usually did. He stood even straighter, as if he was actually reporting to her in person. “We have completed our first foldspace journey, and I am pleased to say that it was uneventful.”
She let out a shallow breath. Not quite a sigh of relief, because she didn’t want him to know that she was relieved. But relief all the same.
“I brought on two new crew members from Sector Base Z,” he said, “and they specialize in research. I have one digging through the information that we have stored on board this ship about the places the Fleet has traveled and settled over the millennia. She is finding maps and imagery of where we’ve been. It’s been highly useful so far.”
He was digging at Gāo, letting her know that her instructions to him were ill-considered, and his own leadership was so much better than hers.
She had had other captains treat her this way as well. It was a passive-aggressive form of dominance, and one she found best to ignore.
Right now, she could do nothing about Preemas’s attitude toward her, but she didn’t need to. He was doing the job, and apparently, doing it well.
“Her old maps and data confirmed that we came out of foldspace at the exact coordinates that we had planned. Our anacapa is working well, and the ship seems to have no issues, not with personnel, not with supplies, and not with the trip itself.” He sounded almost triumphant.
Gāo was startled at her own mixed response. She was pleased that the first leg of the foldspace journey had gone well, and she was happy that the Renegat was doing well.
But Preemas himself irritated her, and she wanted to shut him down with a sharp phrase accompanied by a haughty look.
“Our researchers are also studying that communication you got from the Scrapheap,” he said.
Communications, plural, she almost said, but she wasn’t willing to derail him yet.
“And because we’re not sure quite how information got to you and how long it took,” he continued, “I decided that I’d better contact you in person after each foldspace leg, just so that you get the message.”
As if that were his idea. This one she wasn’t going to let slip.
“I prefer live communications,” she said. “I had told you that when I gave you this assignment.”
He didn’t move for a long moment. Then his eyes narrowed. She processed that little moment, and realized there was a lag. Not much of one, but enough to be noticeable.
Her stomach clenched. She had had a lot of communications across foldspace, and occasionally, there was a time lag or a data lag. It was usually nothing to worry about, but this was the first leg of a twelve-part journey. She hoped it was a problem between the sector the Renegat was in and the sector the Správa was in, and not something to do with foldspace itself.
“To clarify,” she said, “we have received almost daily data packets from the Scrapheap, and we have an entire unit here studying the information that the Scrapheap is sending to us. So far, there is nothing new, because it believes we have not received its messages. But we can help you with the data flow or the way that the packets have traveled to us.”
He raised his chin slightly, his eyes focused on her as if he were in the room. She realized, as he did that, that he had done so while she was speaking, not after.
Again, there was a slight pause before he responded.
“We would like that information,” he said, “as well as any historical information on the sectors we’re traveling through. Not the items in the normal Fleet database, which we have, but in your database. The more information we have, the better off we will be.”
That was true, and something she hadn’t considered. And, to his credit, he had brought on two researchers who could comb through the information.
“How long do you plan to be in this sector?” she asked. “I can have it sent before you leave.”
“We’re traveling to our next coordinates to make the foldspace journey. Those are the coordinates the Fleet mapped out. It will take us more than a day from here, so you have time.”
Some interesting phrasing there. The coordinates the Fleet mapped out implied that they were going to use other coordinates at a different time.
Ah, well, that was a normal feature of longer journeys. At some point, a ship’s captain had to make decisions to alter a route because of unforeseen obstacles along the way.
“I’ll make sure you receive what we have,” she said, making a mental note. She wasn’t sure the Fleet archives contained much more than he already had.
“I don’t know if you noticed this on your end,” she said, “but on mine, there’s a slight time lag. Maybe thirty seconds at the most, but enough that it’s visible.”
He lifted his head, and then nodded. She wished she knew exactly what he had nodded at, but she couldn’t really tell with the time differential.
“I’ve noticed,” he said, clearing that up. “I’m not sure if it’s my equipment or if it has something to do with the distance we’ve traveled.”
She hadn’t given the equipment any thought. She was working out of the communications array in the mess. She normally didn’t do that.
Transferring from her office here shouldn’t have caused any problems, but shouldn’t have didn’t always mean anything. Sometimes just because something shouldn’t have happened didn’t stop whatever it was from happening.
“Generally,” she said, “it’s not the distance. I’ve communicated easily with a ship that went through foldspace.”
But not backwards through foldspace. Tech in new sectors the Fleet was traveling to was always different, but in the old sectors, it might have pieces of the abandoned Fleet tech, and that could cause interference.
She would check on that theory with some of the engineers.
“I’ll have my chief engineer go over the communications equipment to make sure we don’t have any problems here,” Preemas said. “Because if this is some kind of foldspace lag, it’ll only get worse.”
“We can’t make that kind of assumption,” she said. “We don’t know how communications will work after you’ve traveled four or five sectors away from here. But we shouldn’t have problems on two or three sectors. We’ve done that before. And you’ve only traveled one.”
Or so she hoped. Because, she realized, she had no easy way to check where he was or how far he had gone.
“You don’t think the effect is cumulative?” he asked, and then caught himself. Had he tried to interrupt her and failed because of the time lag? She couldn’t tell.
She was going to answer the question he asked, as if he had waited until she had
finished speaking before asking it.
“Each foldspace trip is different,” she said. “The distance is more of a concern than foldspace itself. Technically, foldspace shouldn’t cause any communications problems. The problems will come because at a certain point, our connection will be bounced through so many nodes and data streams that any discussion we have will, of necessity, slow down.”
She waited for more than a minute, watching him. He didn’t shift or even react to what she was saying. After about thirty seconds, she wondered if he had even heard her.
Then he frowned.
“I wonder if the different nodes in the different sectors can cause problems,” he said quietly, and it seemed like he was speaking more to himself than to her.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I will have my people research that idea here as well.”
Preemas’s lips thinned. He held that expression, a frown creasing the space between his eyes, and then his face relaxed. He nodded.
“Thank you, Vice Admiral,” he said, apparently deciding their communication was done. “I will contact you again when we’ve completed the second foldspace leg.”
She had no reason to hold him in this conversation, although she felt oddly reluctant to let him go.
“Send me a formal report an hour or so ahead of when you will contact me,” she said. “That will give me time to prepare questions, if I have any, and it will also serve as a double check if these communications break down.”
“I will,” he said.
She signed off, but remained standing, facing where he had been for a minute longer.
She had to separate herself emotionally from this mission. She was holding it too tightly and she was taking it too personally.
What was bothering her was not Preemas or the Renegat or even the type of mission itself. What was bothering her was the very thing that Preemas refused to let bother him.
It was a suicide mission. She knew it, and she had assigned the crew based on that designation.
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