She looked up at the screens surrounding the bridge. The whitish surround seemed clearer on those screens. The star was in the right position, as far as she could tell just by eyeballing it, but the star was a different size.
Or maybe the two-dimensional images that she had showed the star incorrectly. Maybe they magnified it or changed it or the information she was using was so old that it didn’t translate well.
“Systems change over time.” First Officer Crowe had joined them. “We cannot know if this system has changed as well.”
“We’ve hit the correct coordinates,” said Ibori. He was looking at the console just like he was supposed to, but his voice sounded a bit odd. As if he were surprised that they had hit the right place.
It made Breaux uneasy—or even more uneasy than she should have been.
“That’s my reading as well,” Captain Preemas said.
“And mine,” First Officer Crowe said.
“The anacapa drive functioned properly,” Stephanos said.
“So, as far as we can tell, we’re in the right place,” Captain Preemas said. “What we’re seeing—what you’re seeing—is the natural changes in a sector. We’re usually not privy to them.”
Breaux swallowed. While she had researched the information the Fleet had left tantalizingly in its wake about these sectors, she hadn’t ever really researched what happened over time in a universe. How stars decayed. Or what could have happened to the starbase.
Everyone here seemed to know it, but she didn’t, and she felt so naïve.
“That loss of a moon wasn’t a natural occurrence,” Yulia Colvin said. She was at another console, and Breaux had no idea what Colvin’s duties were or what her past rank had been. Breaux had just started wondering about those things, because she had no idea how to address anyone.
Colvin tucked a strand of blonde hair behind her ear.
“That debris field in the planet’s orbit is most of that moon,” she said, “mixed with all kinds of garbage. I don’t know if the moon was inhabited or not, but it was obliterated.”
Captain Preemas raised his head and stared at the larger screens, a frown on his face. Breaux’s heart was pounding hard.
“Any nanobits in that debris field?” he asked Colvin.
“Not that I can find,” she said. “I’m seeing no evidence that there was a starbase anywhere near here. Not that it means anything.”
“Why?” Breaux asked the question, then immediately regretted it.
“We might build our starbases in their permanent location,” Colvin said, giving Breaux a compassionate look. Breaux wasn’t sure why she was getting compassion from Colvin. Because Breaux didn’t know these things? Or because her questions were incredibly stupid and Colvin took pity on her? “But that doesn’t mean someone can’t disassemble them and move them elsewhere.”
“Was there something in the record that led you to believe the starbase still existed?” First Officer Crowe asked.
“The information said it was decommissioned,” she said. “And from what I can tell about procedure, starbases that were decommissioned were left in place.”
“Even a thousand years ago?” Ibori asked.
“I don’t know that for certain,” Breaux said, and everyone started to turn away. But before their attention completely left her, she added, “But I found information from fifteen hundred years ago, and that said that the Fleet left starbases empty and in place, because the pieces were too big to reuse and the nanobits too compromised to trust in any other structure.”
“Sounds familiar,” Stephanos said softly. She was speaking to First Officer Crowe, but no one else had spoken at that moment, so her voice carried.
“Missing starbase, missing moon, evidence of mass destruction surrounding a planet that should have had six moons, but now only has five. Who knows what kind of damage the loss of that moon is doing to the planet itself. Or has done, depending on how long ago all of this happened.” Captain Preemas handed Breaux her tablet.
She took the tablet and clutched it to her chest.
And then, to her surprise, he smiled at her.
“I think you’re right, Justine Breaux,” he said. “I think we have arrived at the correct spot, and we have seen the changes a thousand years have wrought to this place. I also believe there are signs that this sector of space is not—or was not—a very peaceful place. So we’re going to get out of here as fast as we can.”
“You want to enter foldspace from here?” First Officer Crowe asked.
“I don’t want the anacapa drive to work for at least two days,” Stephanos said, but she looked at First Officer Crowe as she did so, as if he were in charge.
“I agree,” Captain Preemas said, putting a slight emphasis on the word I. He had obviously seen Stephanos’s deference to First Officer Crowe, and apparently had not been pleased by it. “We need to let the anacapa drive have some time between activations. We’ll head across this sector, but quickly. Plot a course that takes us far from any planet or moon or anything else that might be inhabited. And let’s have the sensors on full, searching for other ships. I don’t want to be surprised.”
Breaux swallowed hard, her heart rate on the rise again. She didn’t want to be surprised either, but she already was.
She was having trouble with the idea that the maps she had used were a thousand years in the past, and the damage she saw might be contemporary. Part of her was still inclined to believe that nothing had happened in this sector after the Fleet left.
She glanced at Atwater. He raised his eyebrows and gave her a slight smile. Ever so slight. He was still feeling giddy.
She needed to remember what she was doing here, and that there would be surprises, maybe even more of them as the ship went in and out of foldspace.
Around her, the bridge crew got to work.
“Um, Captain?” she said, still clutching the tablet.
He looked up at her, his eyes darkened. He was irritated now, and she wasn’t quite sure why. Perhaps because she had interrupted him.
“You do want us to leave from the same point and arrive at the coordinates we already decided on, right?”
“Yes,” he said curtly. She could hear in his tone that she should have divined that on her own. “I’ll inform you whenever there are changes. There won’t be this time. So I will need one of your magic maps.”
She nodded. “The information gets spottier the farther back we go.”
“I’m aware of that,” he said, and then went back to his work. He didn’t dismiss her. He didn’t even properly end the conversation. He just looked away as if she was nothing.
And compared to everyone else on this bridge, she was.
She held the tablet tightly and headed for the exit.
Atwater fell in beside her.
“Let me help you with the maps,” he said.
“I thought you were compiling data on the foldspace journeys and anacapa histories,” she said.
“I think that’s part of the data,” he said. “Don’t you?”
She shook her head a little. This research was her contribution. She didn’t need him in the middle of it.
“I’ll let you know when I need something,” she said, and hoped that didn’t sound as dismissive as Captain Preemas had sounded to her.
Then she scurried past Atwater, not looking at his face. She didn’t want to know if she had disappointed him or not.
So far, he was her only friend, and she wanted to keep the friendship.
But not at the expense of her work.
Part Thirteen
The Rescue
Now
The Renegat
The way out of the third deck recreation room should have been second nature to Breaux. She exercised here every single day. But in the dark and the cold, without the lights or the landmarks, she had only a vague sense of where she was.
Her habits were ingrained into her feet, not into this floating thing she was doing (which was making her vaguely
nauseous). She would grab onto walls and push herself forward. More than once, she doubled back, having missed the corridor she had meant to take.
The five people in the exercise room were following her, as if she knew what she was doing.
She didn’t, but they probably thought that because she used to go up to the bridge every time the Renegat slid into foldspace. Captain Preemas had trusted her, which made her untrustworthy to the new crew on this return trip.
She had screamed at them to get their attention, reminding them that she was one of the few people who actually knew how they had gotten to the Scrapheap. She was one of the only people who knew what the area should look like as they headed back to Sector Base Z, coordinate by coordinate, crossing foldspace trip by trip by trip.
If the Renegat hadn’t stopped for those supplies, if they hadn’t gotten embroiled in that attack, then maybe they wouldn’t have lost power now.
She bit her lower lip, using the pain to help herself focus.
She needed to get to the nearest cargo bay, and she had only actually been inside them a few times, once helping with supplies.
She’d gone past a lot, though, on her walks.
Walks. Not floats. Not in the dark. And she really hadn’t paid attention because, as she said to Atwater in one of their nightly debriefs way back before everything changed, the corridors all looked the same.
Except on bridge and engineering levels, he had said, correcting her. And someone else had added that in some of the crew cabin corridors, nothing looked the same either.
This is the bridge: Evacuate the Renegat immediately. Head to both cargo bays. We are on the clock. You must hurry.
The voice sounded rote. Breaux didn’t recognize it, either, which had bothered her at first, and bothered her now, but she had no idea what to do about it.
“Anyone else know who’s talking to us?” she asked through the comm link.
But just like every other time she had tried to talk to the five people trailing her like puppies, no one responded.
She was beginning to think her comm didn’t work.
Or, more likely, she had no idea how to turn it on. But shouldn’t it be automatic? When you put on your suit, the comm link should activate, right? Like the information about her body and the suit itself that ran along the base of the hood that she had somehow managed to attach tightly around her neck.
So far, the suit’s oxygen levels were good, and despite the cold in the corridors, which was actually frosting things up, she was warm—not hot from exercising, but comfortably warm enough to get through all of this.
Her heart rate was elevated, but that was normal. She expected that, since deep down (or maybe not deep down), she was absolutely terrified.
She had made two turns out of the recreation room, the same two turns she made every single day, and had been about to make the third when she realized she had been leading everyone to the research room, not to the cargo bays.
She had had to stop, and think. How did she get to the bays from here?
And then she guessed.
She didn’t like guessing, especially now that the faceless voice from the bridge had said they were on the clock.
Of course, they were on the clock, but she hadn’t really thought of it that way.
Wouldn’t they wait for everyone on the crew to get to the cargo bay?
She bit her lower lip so hard she tasted blood.
No, they wouldn’t, and she knew it. Not this group. This group wasn’t just in it for themselves, but they also had no real sense of camaraderie. They screamed at each other at moments of crisis, and they didn’t listen, and they kept trying to do things that didn’t work, and when they had been attacked on the way back, no one could figure out how to use the weapons array at first, not that it mattered because at least two people on the ship thought it was bad to fight back.
She had gotten the foldspace coordinates ready, and that was the trip that had scared the piss out of her, because they entered foldspace in a completely different area than they should have.
They didn’t go to the spot where they had emerged the first time. They just left as these little ships were shooting at them, and making the shields flare, and Kabac kept saying shield flares weren’t normal, and the ship’s computer said that they were taking on damage, and no one knew how to fix that, and then they went into foldspace, and she fretted the entire time, while others tried to repair things.
Then the Renegat emerged in the right place. She had compulsively checked and rechecked and checked the maps over and over and over again.
They had come out in the right place.
She had no idea if they had done so this time, because Raina had banned her from the bridge.
They were having anacapa problems and Kabac said that Breaux made him nervous, as if she was supervising his work, which she wasn’t.
She had just been trying to get them home.
Just like she was trying to get these five crew members—why, why, why hadn’t she introduced herself to them in the past few months?—to the correct cargo bay.
She had to be going in the right direction, because if she wasn’t, someone would have spoken up, right? They would have moved ahead of her, and gotten them on the right path.
They had to.
They were all in this together, whether they liked it or not.
They had to reach the cargo bay, and they had to do it fast.
She rounded another corner and hoped to God she was going in the right direction.
Because she was on the clock—and she didn’t even know how much time she had left.
Part Fourteen
Time Lag
100 Years Ago
The Renegat
Crowe huddled behind the communications array in Engineering. The communications system came in several pieces. One was near the main engineering control panel, in its own alcove in the heart of engineering. That part of the communications system attached to the bridge. If Crowe needed to, he could route all of the communications into Engineering and cut off the bridge entirely.
The only section he couldn’t completely control was the engineering equipment inside the captain’s command closet in the captain’s quarters. That command closet was built in such a way that isolated it from almost all of the major systems in the ship, so that the captain could retain control of the ship if he needed to if something went seriously awry, such as some outside group taking over the ship.
The fact that Crowe couldn’t control the command closet was beginning to worry him. But he would set that aside for the moment.
He needed to check something that most of the crew did not know about. There were parts to the communications array that someone needed special clearance to access. It had become customary for the crew to be kept in the dark about that part of the array, which wasn’t something he approved of. But he followed those rules.
And that meant he had to clear Engineering while he worked on the array. He told everyone who worked there to take a break whether they needed to or not.
Engineering without the crew felt different than Engineering when the crew was working. The sounds were muted, the low-level hum of equipment almost soothing.
Crowe loved the coolness that each alcove had. The alcoves with the most equipment had their own environmental systems to maintain air purity (or a slightly higher oxygen density, in the case of the system near the engines) and the proper temperature for the equipment itself.
The communications array remained cool as a matter of course. If he felt any heat near this array, he would know that something was wrong.
So far, though, he wasn’t finding anything wrong.
He had removed the panels, and stood, hands on his hips, staring at the array’s interior. Everything looked good. Blue lights glowed, golden lights blinked, pale white chips—each barely larger than a speck of dust—dotted the surface of the main board, covering the black nanobits like spilled sugar.
He had half-ex
pected to find blinking red lights or pulled connectors or black nanobit coating on everything.
Or rather, he had half-hoped to find something like that. Because the fact that everything was fine meant something else was going wrong.
Preemas had contacted him as the Renegat sped across the last sector, the one with the exploded moon. As the ship traveled swiftly as far as possible from any possible habitation, the crew found more evidence of destruction. An asteroid field where none had been before, a hollowed-out continent on a once-inhabited planet, satellites around another planet, which was mostly enshrouded in blackish-greenish goo.
Preemas had contacted Vice Admiral Gāo directly to make his reports, and there had been a lag in the contact between them of nearly two minutes. Apparently, Preemas had contacted her after their first foldspace journey, and there had also been a lag. Preemas called the first lag barely noticeable. At most, fifteen seconds, he thought.
A lag, no matter how long, was a problem. Crowe wished Preemas had reported it then, so Crowe could see the progression on all of this—if there had been any progression. But Preemas hadn’t reported it, figuring the lag was a product of the distance or the foldspace travel or something else.
At the end of their meeting this time, however, Gāo had ordered Preemas to figure out what was causing the lag on his end, if, indeed, something was.
After the first lag, Gāo had done some kind of search on her ship to see if there was a local cause. She hadn’t found anything. But she told Preemas she expected a bit of difficulty.
But something about this lag really bothered Crowe.
That was why he was down in Engineering alone, investigating the communications panel without talking to any of the others. If he had to, he would bring in Stephanos, and see what she had to say.
He rubbed his eyes with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. So far, the array looked fine. Vice Admiral Gāo’s very competent people hadn’t found anything either.
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