Preemas had known it too, but he decided to work harder, to prove that he and his crew were not going to be the ones who died on this mission.
She needed to help him do so.
The first step was to send him all of the possible records that her people could find concerning the sectors he was returning to. And maybe even some information from the school ships, beyond what Calixte had given her at the beginning.
Gāo straightened, her stomach finally settled, the tension in her shoulders gone for the first time in weeks.
She was going to make this right.
Part Eleven
The Rescue
Now
The Renegat
Serpell pushed her way out of the bridge, heading toward Deck Four and the cargo bay. Her heart was pounding, and her emotions were all over the place.
She was happy there were people on the bridge, people who said they could do something, but she was still here, on the Renegat, and she knew she wasn’t safe until she was off the ship.
But at least there was an off the ship now. There hadn’t been a realistic one, at least for her, as recently as thirty minutes ago. The question was, could she get off the ship fast enough?
It was dark in the corridors, although there was some emergency lighting still glowing along the floor. The ship was still in severe distress. And the distress was worse than she even imagined.
An anacapa-based explosion. No one would survive that, the Khusru woman had said.
Anacapa-based.
Kabac had been working on the anacapa. Had he made things worse?
Serpell took a shaky breath, and realized just how thin the air was in her environmental suit. She needed to get to that cargo bay fast, and gliding forward in the dark wasn’t going to cut it.
“Suit,” she said. “I need lights.”
Advise leaving hostile environment as soon as possible, her suit responded.
“I’m trying, please,” she said to the suit, as if it were a person, as if it would respond to begging. “Just a few lights, so I can find a new suit.”
But the suit lights did not come on. Rather than fight with the suit, she kept moving. The emergency lighting extended through this section. The emergency lighting would have to do for right now.
She didn’t know what she would do when she got below. She suspected the only reason emergency lighting worked on this level was because it was the bridge level. The emergency lighting would probably be off everywhere else.
She swallowed and mentally ordered herself to calm down. No one ever escaped something bad because of panic. The shadows, the dark, the thin emergency lighting (the stupid suit), she would deal with all of it, if she took it one step at a time.
She needed to get to Deck Four. Once she was on Deck Four, she needed to get to the cargo bay.
Once she got to the cargo bay, she would either escape or get a new suit or both.
One step.
Deck Four. That was next.
Then lights flared around her, casting her shadow, large and imposing, on the closed black door of the elevator to bridge level. Her heart continued to pound much too hard. It was nerves and the suit. It had to be.
When she got to the cargo bay—if she got to the cargo bay—she would definitely grab a different suit.
The lights got brighter. She propelled herself forward, not sure what or who was following her.
“Raina,” Kabac said in her ear. “Hold up. I’m coming with you.”
She wasn’t sure if she should be relieved he was joining her or worried that he was no longer on the bridge. Those three people probably kicked him off the bridge. They probably suspected him of screwing up the anacapa drive as well.
And what if they were right?
She shook her head a little. She couldn’t think about that right now.
Nor could she stop or even slow down.
“Can’t hold up,” she said. “My suit….”
And she let her voice trail off so that he would think that the problem with her suit was causing her to hurry along. Maybe it was. Maybe they could save her in that cargo bay.
Or maybe she would die there, while three strangers took over the Renegat.
“They’re trying to steal the ship,” Kabac said as he caught up to her.
“You don’t know that,” Serpell said. “And why do you care? The ship is falling apart.”
She should care too because it was trained into her. She should always care about the ship. The ship was more important than the crew. The ship would outlast the crew. That was what she had learned over all the years.
Protect the ship.
“They pulled me away from the anacapa,” he said. “They lied. They say it’s going to explode.”
“I thought you don’t know anything about anacapa drives.” Her throat constricted, making it hard to get the words out. The three had said that on the bridge. What if they were right?
“I know enough to know that alarms would have deafened us by now if the anacapa was malfunctioning,” Kabac said.
He moved ahead of her, and grabbed her arm, using his momentum to pull her forward. She was getting lightheaded. Was the suit finally completely compromised?
“Even with the power gone?” she asked.
He didn’t answer, and she had worked with him enough recently to realize that when he didn’t know the answer, he often remained silent rather than firmly stating something that could later be proven wrong.
“Let’s just get to the cargo bay,” she said. “We’ll find out soon enough if they’re telling us the truth.”
She wasn’t sure how they would find that out, exactly, because cargo bays could be locked off from the rest of the Renegat. That much she knew.
But she had to trust, just a little.
“We’re going to die, you know,” Kabac said softly.
“I know,” she said, just as softly. “Believe me, I know.”
The Renegat
Zarges huddled over the central console in the alcove in Engineering, his visor reflecting the blinking red from the board. Palmer, beside him, was still trying to solve a bit of the anacapa problem from here, even though they all knew it was futile.
Palmer was adding another small energy pack to the console itself, because Zarges had ordered her to.
He had had his team contact both the Aizsargs and Rescue One, and he hoped to hell they moved the ships, because he couldn’t guarantee that his timeline was accurate.
He had thought they would have two hours to abandon this ship and move everyone away.
But it was all a guess, compounded by the fact that this was an anacapa drive malfunction. He needed to get the communications array behind them functioning, because inside it, apparently, was a communications anacapa drive, a feature the Fleet had abandoned more than fifty years ago.
He hadn’t even been able to get into the array, not with the power as low as it was. He needed to check that communications anacapa drive. They were getting no readings from it, but that meant nothing. He had no idea if the communications anacapa had extra containers around it to prevent its energy from reaching into the ship.
He could feel each moment slipping away. Fifteen minutes had passed already, and so far, there had been no announcement from the bridge.
He had to get the crew and passengers of the Renegat moving to the cargo bays, so that the life rafts could ferry them off the ship.
The communications array sputtered weakly to life, thanks to the energy pack Palmer had just placed on it. Now, all Zarges had to do was figure out how to make an announcement that everyone on the ship would pay attention to. Then he would see about that communications anacapa.
He took a deep breath and was about to toggle an actual button that supposedly started the process for a shipwide alert, when the array lit up even more.
Then a captain’s code came through the array, verbally stamped from the bridge. Zarges’s helmet picked up the code and the announcement itself.
&nb
sp; This is the bridge: Evacuate the Renegat immediately. Head to both cargo bays. Follow instructions once you arrive.
The announcement was so loud that it hurt his ears. He hoped the announcement had gone through on all possible channels. He glanced at Palmer, who gave him a thumbs up, and Iqbar, who pulled herself level with him using the console to hold herself in place.
They both had heard the announcement as well.
Zarges let out a small sigh of relief. He wouldn’t have to contact the Renegat’s crew from down here, where he wasn’t even certain such a contact was possible.
Then he made himself focus. The announcement was only step one. The Renegat’s crew had to follow the announcement. Zarges wasn’t sure they would.
The announcement hadn’t come from the captain of the Renegat. Instead, the announcement had started with This is the bridge. That sort of phrasing wasn’t standard procedure.
Zarges had to figure that the crew of the Renegat wouldn’t know exactly what standard evacuation procedure was. They’d hear about standard procedure in their training, and then again when they first boarded a ship, but for most folks that kind of training was years in their past.
He hoped this crew would hear the urgency and act on it immediately.
He needed to as well.
He twisted inside the communications alcove. He placed a hand on the side of the array, and hoped that the identification in his glove would force it to open.
It did, sliding sideways to reveal a small interior shelf. He turned on his glove’s knuckle lights. They illuminated the small space perfectly. He could see the bed for the communications anacapa, but he didn’t see a drive.
He peered sideways.
No drive at all.
The shelf was empty.
“I don’t think we have a communications anacapa,” he said to Palmer.
“The Aizsargs says we do,” she said.
“Well,” Zarges said. “We don’t have time to search for it. Our priority is clearing this ship.”
If there was a communications anacapa and this ship was going to blow, the explosion would increase exponentially. Although he wasn’t sure that mattered. One anacapa, a large one, would cause an explosion that was catastrophic enough.
He pushed himself away from the communications area.
“All right,” he said. “We can’t do anything else here. Let’s help with the evacuations.”
The Renegat
This is the bridge: Evacuate the Renegat immediately. Head to both cargo bays. Follow instructions once you arrive.
The announcement was strange. It sounded official, but it wasn’t official. An official announcement would have had more identifiers—who was talking, who was issuing the orders—or it would have had none at all.
Still, Justine Breaux felt a tiny thread of relief.
She was wearing her environmental suit, her boots clamped to the floor of the third deck recreation room. She wasn’t alone. Five other people were here, although she didn’t know most of them except by their determined faces.
All six of them exercised at the same time every day, using one of the treadmills built into the floor. Only, since that attack the Renegat had suffered a few sectors back, the treadmills hadn’t worked. Still, there was exercise equipment here that could be pulled out of lockers—big heavy balls that could be swung back and forth, when there was gravity, of course.
She made herself take a deep breath. The air in her environmental suit tasted like metal filings, but she didn’t mind.
She wasn’t quite used to the adventures she had been on, but at least she didn’t freak out about them anymore. The first few scared the crap out of her and made her remember Labhras’s words to her:
They don’t want to take anyone who will be missed. They think you’re not coming back.
Missed or not, she was coming back. A different person, just like she had expected. And if she saw Prescott, she was strong enough now to not just tell him off, but to hurt him physically if he even tried to touch her.
Funny that thoughts of Prescott would occupy her right now, when she had faced far worse than him. When she was facing far worse right at this moment.
When she decided to remain with the Renegat, she had assumed the ship would run like it always had, even without half the crew. The ship hadn’t done as well as she expected, but ship life had been somewhat normal.
She researched the way back. She made sure they went to the right sectors. Meals were on time. Her tiny cabin didn’t change, although she could have taken a larger suite.
Breaux had clung to the normal. She hadn’t had much else.
That was what the treadmill was for. The exercise cleared her mind, and she had done way too much of it in the days after the Renegat left the Scrapheap.
The trip back seemed too easy, sometimes.
Then the attack, and the loss of the treadmills. Even then, she had tried. She came down here daily, just to stretch her legs, walking the entire way to get her exercise.
And sometimes there were others here. The same five, whom she grunted at whenever she saw them, or grinned at them a little dismissively, because she really wanted to get to her workout and then return to her quiet research, and then—
The loss of power, the loss of gravity, the ship in trouble. No one made an announcement then. She had gone to the lockers when the gravity went because she knew (guessed, really) that the next loss would be the rest of the environment, and she had handed out the environmental suits.
A couple people said thank you, one woman couldn’t figure out how to put on her suit (fortunately someone else had helped her), and they were all suited up and ready to go to the bridge to find out what was going on when the environmental controls just shut off.
And that was when Justine’s ideas failed. Because she and her five friends would be useless on the bridge. She couldn’t do anything in engineering either, or any other part of the ship where technical stuff was going on. All she could do was research something before or after the event. Valuable, yes, except at moments like this.
So, she had learned throughout this trip, the best advice was to shelter in place. Which was what she had done (and the others had stuck with her) after she got the suit on.
Then she had calmly waited for more instructions, convinced there would be more instructions—or that someone would fix the problem.
She had waited and waited, and she was almost ready to give up, find an escape pod even if that wasn’t normal procedure, when the additional instructions came.
She knew exactly where one of the cargo bays was, because she had entered the ship on that level all those months ago. But finding that bay in the cold and the dark was a whole other matter.
This is the bridge: Evacuate the Renegat immediately. Head to both cargo bays. Follow instructions once you arrive.
The repeated announcement jolted her. Whoever was making the announcements—Raina? One of the old bridge crew?—was completely serious about it.
Breaux flicked on her suit lights, nearly blinding herself. She had to shut off the lights around her shoulders, but she left the helmet lights on.
The other five people did the same thing.
They were doing what she was doing, which irritated her more than she could say.
Not only was she responsible for herself, she was going to end up being responsible for them too.
The announcement gave no timeline. Just said immediately. Which she was taking to mean yesterday.
She started forward, realized walking in gravity boots when she was in a hurry was just plain stupid, and hoped she still had the zero-G skills she had acquired at school as a child.
If not, she could always turn the gravity back on and try to run. That would be hard enough.
She had to clear the negative thoughts from her mind.
She could do this.
She walked to the door, the gravity boots making her feel like she was walking underwater, and then grabbed the edges of the
door frame.
With a single voice command, she shut off the gravity in her boots.
Her hands remained gripped on the frame, but her feet lifted. She felt like she was floating on air, even though she knew she wasn’t.
“Okay,” she said, more to herself than her little flock of followers. “Here goes nothing.”
And then she pushed off into the darkened corridor.
The Renegat
Sufia Khusru floated above the only working console on the bridge of the Renegat. She had been on board a lot of ships in distress, but she had never seen anything like this.
The power to the bridge was thin, something she hadn’t thought possible. The environmental systems were gone, and the emergency lighting itself was so faint as to be almost nonexistent.
Her team had moved into position to see if they could do anything to buy some extra time for the rescue. Ford Cayden was crouched beside the anacapa drive, its weird reddish purple color accenting his narrow features, making his frown of concentration seem even deeper than it was.
Jala Niane had levered herself beneath one of the other consoles, trying to boost the energy readings here. She had already put one of the small energy packs on top of the console.
It hadn’t done much good.
Khusru had achieved her objective: she had sent an announcement to everyone on the ship, telling them to get to the cargo bays. She should probably move her team as well, but it felt wrong to simply abandon the work.
If they could buy a few extra minutes, then they should. Because a few extra minutes might mean a few more lives.
“Anything you can do, Ford?” she asked Cayden. He knew what she meant. She was referring to the anacapa drive.
“No,” he said. “Not even if I had all the time in the universe.”
He let go of the side of the anacapa drive, and floated upward. That weird light had left his face, but it did show the dirt on his environmental suit. The dirt glittered red.
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