Dirt. There shouldn’t have been any dirt at all. This ship had been in trouble for a very long time.
Systems must have shut down bit by bit. Some of the problems that the Renegat was experiencing might have been caused by that slow decline.
It was the kind of thing that engineers generally fixed as a matter of course. The kind of maintenance even the lowest crew member understood needed to be done. The kind of thing that a handful of people on a ship should be able to tell the computer control system, and hand over to that system.
Khusru turned on the spotlight in the palm of her suit’s right hand, and shone it around the nooks and crannies of the bridge. Dirt floated everywhere, which she hadn’t noticed when they had arrived.
Dirt not only floated, it coated the walls and the floor, and hung from the ceiling.
That sense she’d had from the moment she arrived on this ship, the sense that something was horribly wrong, returned a thousandfold.
No matter what had happened to this ship, no matter what had happened to the officers, the ship should have remained spotless. It was one of those things everyone in the Fleet knew as a matter of course.
That odd bit of conversation suddenly rose in her memory. That reluctant man who said he was the only bridge officer left. The woman, who had seemed both desperate and reasonable, correcting him.
You were demoted, she had said. You are only up here because I needed the help.
Something bad had happened, and it had happened to the crew, before things had fallen completely apart.
But Khusru couldn’t solve that now. No matter who these people were, she had to save them.
That was her job.
Niane used the legs of the console to push herself out from underneath it. She floated upwards, like a small child playing in zero-G for the first time.
“Cayden’s right,” she said. “We’re useless here. I can’t even access the information on who remains, who is gone, how many people are supposed to be on board.”
“Let’s move, then,” Khusru said, sweeping her hands toward the door in a go-quickly gesture. “We’ll have to rely on the Aizsargs or Rescue One to let us know if we get everyone off the ship.”
If they could get everyone off the ship, before it completely fell apart.
Cayden and Niane left the bridge ahead of Khusru, moving at a rapid clip. She paused in the door and peered backwards. The bridge looked like it belonged to any damaged ship. Some of the damaged ships she’d been on had floating nanobits and other signs of decay.
But this was dirt and an anacapa drive that had been tampered with and people who had been demoted.
“What happened here?” she whispered, comms off.
Something awful.
Something she wasn’t sure she would ever understand.
The Renegat
If the schematics the Aizsargs had provided him with were correct, Zarges had a long way to go to get to Cargo Bay One, and not a lot of time to do so. He was pushing off the sides of the corridor, following the map his hood had placed across his vision, hoping each detail was correct.
Palmer had remained for one last moment in Engineering, and Zarges hoped to hell Palmer would get out while there was still time. Iqbar had headed to Cargo Bay Two.
Zarges had just received notification from Khusru that there wasn’t much she could do any longer. Her team was leaving the bridge.
They had set the announcement on repeat, and he had heard it a number of times already, enough that he had tuned out the specifics. Khusru told him she could alter it if need be—or, at least, she hoped she could.
And then she had gone silent.
He was moving through the dark corridors alone, which unnerved him. He kept expecting to find more passengers, maybe someone to assist along the way. But so far, he had his team hadn’t found anyone on board.
It was almost as if the information they had received through their scans was wrong. The ship felt empty and abandoned, even though every bit of information they had received from the Aizsargs said it wasn’t.
Khusru had encountered two people on the bridge, but so far, those were the only two people any member of his team had seen.
He hoped his team wasn’t risking their lives for nothing.
And risking the loss of a life raft or two. Those things were automated, but they were valuable and not always the easiest to reprogram. He’d only lost one on any of the missions he’d been on, but that life raft had been full.
His heart rate had increased. His suit sent a little beep of warning. He was forgetting to breathe regularly.
There was a very good chance that this mission would go awry as well. Go awry. Such innocuous words for so much loss of life.
He needed this mission to go well, and it already looked like that was impossible.
Although at this stage in his previous mission, everything had been on track. It had just been that one final instant, that moment when the ship and the life raft had disconnected improperly, and the raft sprang out of control, and he had been jettisoned into space, his tether still attached, his mouth open as everything—
Once again, he shook it off.
This was what his team had been worried about when they sent him here. This was what he had been worried about. This lack of focus.
He blinked, made himself concentrate on the map, and followed it closely, moving faster and faster through the empty corridors, wishing he could ask one of the ship’s computers where all two hundred survivors were.
He had this terrible fear that they were unconscious, that the people on the bridge were space pirates of some kind who had harmed everyone else, and that the ship was compromised. Announcements wouldn’t work if the entire crew was unconscious and unable to move.
The corridor dead-ended in a plethora of sealed doors and interior elevators. The elevators wouldn’t work if the power was off, so there had to be ladders or stairs somewhere.
He didn’t see them on the map he had, but logically, they would be right here, right nearby.
He pushed himself to the walls, grabbed door handles, tugged, and finally found one that jostled as he pulled. But it didn’t open. So he investigated the side, saw that it pushed open instead, leading him to believe it was a stairwell or maintenance tube.
He pushed, and the door eased back as if it were on springs. It revealed both stairs and a ladder, the ladder for moments like this, apparently.
He used both—the ladder to pull himself up with his hands, and the stairs to guide him.
He was sweating now, not from overexertion or an incorrect temperature in his suit, but from nerves. Two levels up and he would reach Cargo Bay One.
He had no idea what he would do if the bay was empty.
Then he made himself shake off that thought.
He would help the life raft dock, then he would wait until the last possible moment before boarding the raft himself and getting off the Renegat with his team. If no one showed up, then there was nothing he could do.
No matter how much he wanted to.
No matter how much he tried.
Part Twelve
Foldspace Again
100 Years Ago
The Renegat
Breaux hadn’t become used to the way the Renegat traveled through foldspace, but at least this time, she knew what to expect. She stood on the bridge for the second trip into foldspace, just like she had stood on the bridge for the first trip, only this time, she stood next to Atwater.
This time, she expected the bridge crew’s extreme focus. The same crew was on duty, and in the same positions as the last time. Natalia Stephanos monitored the anacapa like it was a dog she expected to bite her at any moment. First Officer Crowe looked even more haggard than he had before as he monitored everything at his station.
Breaux had the sense that he wasn’t getting much sleep.
She wasn’t either. Whenever she was in her exceedingly small cabin, she felt like she was missing something or doing something
wrong. She needed to be out and about, even though out and about was often the research wing of the Renegat.
She had been working hard there, preparing for this second trip through foldspace. She had even more information on the next sector of space than she had for the last one, which she found somewhat ironic, given that the previous sector was closer in distance and time.
But that new data stream from the Fleet had added a lot to her research. She didn’t know what kind of cultures the Renegat might run into in this next sector (if any), but she did know what the coordinates should look like, how the nearest sector base got shut down, and what had happened to the starbase not far from where the Renegat was supposed to appear.
She had no idea if Captain Preemas and the bridge crew would find that information valuable, but she had to think they might. She was starting to think in contingencies—research contingencies, she had said to Atwater, during one of their late night discussion sessions.
He was working as hard as she was, trying to figure out if any sector they were going to had areas with improperly shut down anacapa drives. He was also trying to figure out if there were changes in anacapa technology over the millennia. He had said more than once that he worried about changes, not just in the anacapa technology, but in anacapa handling.
The Fleet makes positive changes after terrible events, he had said to Breaux one night, when he had had a little too much to drink. I’m worried that they changed their anacapa handling after something horrible happened, something horrible that they then did not make a record of.
Such a thing was possible, especially considering the gaps in the historical record (if you could call it an historical record) that she was finding.
She didn’t want to think about what could go wrong, though. It was the job of other people on board to have those thoughts. Her job was to confirm that the area around the ship resembled the area around the coordinates the ship had been heading to.
If she found that nothing matched up, and they couldn’t account for the change based on the passage of years, then the problem became someone else’s. She would have to step aside and let the experts figure all of that out.
Which she was happy to do.
That didn’t make her any calmer as the Renegat prepared to head into foldspace for the second time on her journey.
She shifted from foot to foot, trying to tamp the anticipation down. This time, she brought her own tablet, with the proper map of the section loaded onto it.
This trip was a tad dicier than the last. Not only were they traveling over more distance through foldspace, but they were arriving near an abandoned starbase. She trusted that the base was completely dead, but she didn’t know, exactly.
Atwater hadn’t said anything about the starbase. He had questioned her phrase “traveled over more distance through foldspace.” He had launched into a long, and mostly pointless, discussion of the way that foldspace worked (or rather, the way he thought it worked, since no one really knew), reminding her that the name described how it worked—a fold in space.
So they weren’t traveling across foldspace. They were folding a bigger part of space, like folding a blanket instead of folding a scarf. Or something like that.
She truly didn’t care about the technical details, which she knew irritated Atwater. He lived for the technical bits.
She just wanted things to work, and to work properly, when she needed them to work.
She was trying to learn bits about the ship, but she didn’t care as much as she should. She tried to pay attention to aspects of the ship that didn’t concern her, if someone felt it was important to tell her about whatever it was.
Mostly, though, she did her job and did it as well (she hoped) as everyone else was doing theirs.
Captain Preemas had three holoscreens open in front of him. She couldn’t see the information on them, and neither could anyone else.
But she could see the two-D tablet on his chair, and she knew it would have the old maps, just like the tablet she was clutching.
The captain gave the command to send the ship into foldspace, and Breaux clenched her fists, digging her fingernails into her palms instead of grabbing Atwater’s hand for support the way she wanted to.
She didn’t even glance at his face, because she didn’t want to see that goofy grin again. She was working very hard at keeping hers from devolving into complete silliness.
The Renegat bumped and slid, just like it had the last time. But this time, instead of feeling as if she was experiencing an out-of-control slide on ice, the experience felt as if she were rattling down a gravel road in a wheeled cart with no airborne capability.
Her teeth chattered, her body bounced, and she almost felt as if she were bouncing toward the aisle.
Breaux kept an eye on Stephanos and First Officer Crowe, again, figuring if something went seriously wrong, they would be the first to see it.
Their expressions said nothing. They just stared downward as if nothing were happening at all.
The outlines of Captain Preemas’s holoscreens surrounded him like small sketches. He wasn’t looking at those screens, though.
Like Breaux, he was watching Stephanos.
Then the chattering stopped, the bumping eased, and the ship eased into its familiar movement.
The thought that the ship’s movement was familiar made Breaux smile. She couldn’t help herself: now she looked at Atwater.
He looked at her too, and his entire body moved forward a tiny bit as if he thought of hugging her and then changed his mind.
Instead, he nodded, and she knew that later this evening, they would be discussing this in the bar off the main mess, clutching drinks in their hands and speaking softly about how miraculous this all was.
She nodded back, then started across the bridge to the captain’s chair, even though he hadn’t called her yet.
The screens around them sprang to life, revealing a starscape she hadn’t expected. Darker, bluer, fewer stars than she had seen on her information.
There was no starbase at all, at least that she could tell visually.
“The anacapa drive is fine,” Stephanos said in a low voice, even though no one had asked her about it.
Breaux glanced in her direction, and saw that she had been speaking to First Officer Crowe. He was nodding, his mouth a thin line.
No one was looking at the big screens with their panoramic view of this new sector (this old sector, actually) except her.
Then she glanced over her shoulder, and saw Atwater. He was looking too, eyes sparkling.
“What do you have for me?” Captain Preemas asked.
Breaux jumped, her heart pounding. Maybe he had been talking to someone else.
But as she brought her head back around, she realized he hadn’t been. He had been talking to her.
She forced as much of the smile off her face as she could manage. Then she clutched the tablet to her chest and hurried to his side.
“I brought my data this time, sir,” she said to Captain Preemas, “so that we wouldn’t have to reconfigure yours.”
He nodded, then pushed another tablet aside. Maybe he had already done the calculations.
She had asked Tindo Ibori to provide her with all of the navigational information on the Renegat from the moment the ship went into foldspace this second time to the moment it emerged. Her tablet was ready to do the flat side-by-side comparisons. She had even altered the information a bit so that she could add a holoprojection, even though the computer would be adding information on the older material.
She thought it might be worth the risk, just so that the entire bridge crew could see where they had arrived.
If Captain Preemas approved, of course.
“There should be a decommissioned starbase not too far from here,” she said as she set her tablet down. “Or there was a thousand years ago or so.”
Then she let out a small chuckle, mostly at her own expense.
“I mean, I have no idea how long th
ey last or anything, but you’d think someone would have repurposed it or something.” She was babbling now, and no one else had commented.
Maybe no one else could. She was talking to the captain after all, and he had nothing to say.
“Anyway,” she said, “let’s look at this.”
She slid the tablets next to each other, and then the captain set a third near her. The third already had interpolated the new information. She didn’t have to do any of it.
That was really different from life on the sector base. Even when she asked someone to do something, they would only do it once. They’d never think for themselves.
But of course, the captain would. How else had he become captain, after all?
She peered at the images. The starbase, which had been her focus as she worked with these coordinates, wasn’t anywhere nearby. That made her stomach twist.
But she really didn’t know how long a starbase could exist in space. Nothing decayed here, right? So, in theory, it could just remain. Or maybe its moorings—whatever passed for moorings in space, whatever held it in place—maybe that part of the starbase eventually declined or someone had taken it for parts or…
Or they were in the wrong place.
Her stomach ached, and she felt lightheaded. She was holding her breath again.
She needed other markers. Not human markers. Natural markers.
She looked at the planets, and they appeared to be the ones she had been dealing with from the old maps. But a planet with six moons only had five, and there was a small asteroid cluster that had spread out nearby.
“It’s not…it’s not…perfectly aligned,” she said. Then her finger touched that planet. “We’re…we’re…missing a moon.”
She hated that she was stammering, but she couldn’t help herself.
Missing a moon and a starbase, and one of the distant stars seemed smaller than it had been before. And something whitish surrounded it—a nebula? Something else?
The Renegat Page 34