“Or if they wouldn’t have had any problems at all,” Stephanos said.
Atwater inclined his head toward her. “That too,” he said in a way that led Crowe to believe that idea that they wouldn’t have had problems had never crossed Atwater’s mind.
Which meant that Atwater’s information was inherently biased toward the lag causing problems.
“Was there any information on the ships’ anacapa drives?” Crowe asked.
Stephanos gave him a sharp look. Apparently that question had occurred to her as well.
“The drives?” Atwater sounded surprised.
“Were they old? New? Damaged? From the same type of ship? Were they the same kinds of drives? Were they installed in the same sector base? Repaired in anyway?” Crowe asked.
He had hoped Atwater would have been looking all of that up. Atwater’s specialty was anacapa drives and foldspace, after all. So when Crowe sent him after this information, he had expected Atwater to have looked at the drives as a matter of course.
Crowe set his brownie down, awaiting the answer. As he did, Stephanos caught his eye.
She held her hand just above the tabletop, her thumb and forefinger extended, a space of about an inch between them.
Crowe understood the movement. She wasn’t thinking of the anacapa drives that powered the ships. She was wondering if the little bits of anacapa that powered the long-distance communications on the ships had come from the same large anacapa drive. Usually one gigantic drive was chosen, then sliced carefully, each little bit tested before it was placed into a ship.
Atwater wouldn’t know that. He wouldn’t have the clearance.
Atwater was sliding his fork back and forth. It made a slightly scratchy sound on the surface of the table. He didn’t seem to notice.
“You know how Fleet records are,” he said slowly. Crowe braced himself for an excuse. “I could only access clear records from the past five hundred years or so.”
That was more than Crowe had expected.
“The ships were different versions of DV-Class and SC-Class vessels. There were a couple of smaller ships, because the Fleet kept toying with putting anacapa drives in cargo vessels and some orbiters for a while, but I disregarded that information.” Atwater kept sliding his fork around.
Crowe wanted to grab his hand and make the noise stop. Then Stephanos did grab it, and took the fork away from Atwater.
She waved it at him. “Either use it for what it’s intended for,” she said, “or leave it alone.”
“Sorry,” he said. “I get nervous.”
Stephanos rolled her eyes at him, which was better than what she would have normally said.
Crowe gave her a small smile. She did not smile in return.
“The ships were not the same, then,” Crowe said. “Not built at the same time, not put together in the same place.”
“I didn’t check repair records,” Atwater said, “but given the span of time that I looked at, I don’t think they even got repaired in the same sectors, let alone at the same base.”
Crowe nodded. If only it had been that simple.
“Which means we have to trace the anacapa drives,” Stephanos said to Crowe.
“Or not,” he said.
He stood up, suddenly empathizing with Atwater’s nerves. Crowe grabbed his mug and walked to the tiny kitchen, ostensibly to pour himself more coffee. But he didn’t need more coffee. He needed to think.
“Could you tell if these ships tried to trace the lag in their communications?” he asked, back to Atwater.
“No,” Atwater said. “Ship repair records are impossible to find.”
“This wouldn’t even be in the repair records,” Stephanos said. “They’d be in ship records.”
“I didn’t go that deep,” Atwater said. “I could try.”
“Don’t,” Stephanos said.
But Crowe turned, already shaking his head. Atwater had his back to Crowe, but Stephanos was looking at him.
Crowe left his mug on the counter, and walked back to the table.
“No,” he said. “Try. See if you can find anything, particularly on the anacapa drive. More information is always better than not enough.”
“Yes, sir,” Atwater said.
“Now,” Crowe said, “grab some of those brownies for yourself for later, and head back to research. I need to talk to Natalia.”
“Yes, sir,” Atwater said, then waved his hand over the plate of brownies. He had no idea how to take any.
So Crowe pulled four off the plate and put them on his plate. He put two on Stephanos’s plate, even though she hadn’t touched the first one.
Then he slid the original plate at Atwater, along with the cover.
Crowe almost said, Run along, but that wouldn’t be fair. Atwater had given them a new direction.
Atwater covered the brownies, picked up the plate, nearly dropped it, then gave Crowe an apologetic smile. Crowe nodded, heading for the door. Atwater followed.
Crowe opened the door. Atwater walked through it, and Crowe thanked him, then closed the door, not even giving Atwater time to answer.
Crowe took a deep breath, and returned to the table.
“The communications anacapas,” Stephanos said as he sat down.
“Yeah, possibly,” he said.
“Two different problems then? The communications anacapas are malfunctioning and creating the lag?”“Or they’re interacting with the ship’s anacapa as we go through foldspace,” Crowe said.
She made a face. Then she picked up her first brownie with her fingers—no fork—and ate the thing in two rapid bites.
“The only way to test that,” she said around the food, “is when we’re in foldspace itself.”
“Yeah, I know,” Crowe said. “And even then, it might not give us the answers we want.”
Stephanos wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Then she wiped the back of her hand on her pants.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“What if the interaction of the drives is causing the problem?” Crowe asked. “Do we get the captain to return?”
“And which problem are we talking about?” she asked. “The lag or getting lost in foldspace?”
They stared at each other for a moment.
Then Crowe let out a small breath. “I got a replacement anacapa for the communications array. Should we swap it out now?”
Stephanos opened her mouth, clearly surprised that he had gotten another anacapa drive for the communications array. She knew how hard they were to come by.
But she didn’t address it.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “We don’t know if that’s the problem yet. We don’t know if there’s a problem with the ship at all.”
He nodded, not liking that last statement. He could fix a problem with a ship. He couldn’t fix a problem inherent in the travel system itself.
“I didn’t ask Atwater to check something,” Crowe mumbled, more to himself than to Stephanos.
“What?” she asked.
He pushed his full plate of brownies away, his stomach suddenly aching. “Has anyone ever looked to see if there’s always a communications lag after travel in foldspace?”
“We would have noticed,” she said. “The Fleet would have noticed.”
“Even if it was less than a second?” he asked.
She brought a fist to her face, and tapped her thumb against her lips. Then she stopped, pressing her fingers against her mouth as if she didn’t want to speak at all.
Finally, she dropped her hands. “Less than a second, and after the trips were over, things would return to normal?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Probably.”
Then he frowned.
“But,” he said, thinking out loud, “not a lot of ships communicate with the Fleet after going through foldspace. The ships go wherever they’re going and then return to the Fleet. DV-Class vessels are mostly autonomous. They don’t report in. What we’re doing is odd. We’re repor
ting regularly.”
She brought her hand back up to her face, continuing that tapping all over again. Her eyes moved ever so slightly as she got lost in thought.
Then she brought that fist down and lightly pounded on the table.
“I could check our records,” she said. “Maybe the Renegat has a history of time lost communicating across foldspace.”
“That would only tell us about this ship,” Crowe said. “The ship we’re having a problem with. Maybe.”
“Still,” she said, “we would know if the problem predates us.”
He nodded. He almost wished Gāo hadn’t had them check the lag. It all made Crowe nervous. It got him thinking about all the ships that got lost in foldspace and never returned.
No wonder Gāo wanted the communication problem solved. If the ship had a small percentage chance of returning, then the communications between the Renegat and the Fleet became all the more important.
Preemas had to get the information Gāo wanted back to her, whether the ship returned or not. A lag meant the information might not arrive until days, months, years after it would have been useful.
“Yeah,” Crowe said after a moment. “It probably would be good to know if this lag predates us. If it’s cumulative. If the problem is building somewhere.”
“I’m hoping it’s just a communications issue,” Stephanos said.
He nodded. “We’re heading back into foldspace in a day or so. Let’s see if we can set up some kind of test to monitor that communications anacapa.”
“I’d like to do it,” Stephanos said. “But then I won’t be the one watching our regular anacapa drive.”
He nodded. He still didn’t have the staff he wanted. “Give me some recommendations as to who you would trust monitoring the main drive,” he said.
“That’s simple,” she said. “I trust you.”
The Renegat
In the end, Crowe sent Stephanos to the bridge to monitor the ship’s anacapa as the Renegat made its fourth journey into foldspace. If something went awry with the main anacapa, she was the best person to fix it.
He could handle the communications anacapa just fine on his own.
He was in engineering, alone. Stephanos had come down here an hour before the ship was scheduled to head into foldspace, and helped him set up all of the monitors.
The communications array was open, with the anacapa panel open as well. He had activated the tiny built-in cameras on the containers. He and Stephanos had gone back and forth about doing that. The fact that the camera was active would create an unplanned variable in their test, but it couldn’t be helped.
If he had pulled the little drive out of its nest inside the panel, then he was materially changing the observation, and perhaps causing more problems.
There was no way he could wriggle himself any closer to the little drive, and he couldn’t send in an extra camera. So they had tested the container camera about thirty hours ago.
Those container cameras were usually used to help put a drive into place, to make sure it hadn’t been bumped or jostled in the normal business of traveling. The cameras were so rarely used that Crowe hadn’t even been certain that camera would work.
But it had.
He had also activated every tool that the Fleet had set up to monitor those little drives—also something that would tamper with his experiment. But that couldn’t be helped.
Either he monitored it or he didn’t.
With all of this equipment going, he could have stepped to another part of engineering or even gone to the bridge. He didn’t need to be physically in front of the array—if everything went well, that was.
Part of him didn’t expect it to go well. Part of him expected to see a tiny flare of blue light or a little piece of foldspace open here in engineering itself.
And because he had had that thought, he couldn’t in good conscience let Stephanos work down here. He would never forgive himself if he lost her. He had lost too many people already in foreseeable engineering accidents. He didn’t want to lose another.
He didn’t tell her that, of course. He kept such things very private. So she fought him every step of the way, reminding him that she was the expert on anacapa drives, not him. Reminding him that she might be able to see a problem just by eyeballing it, while he would have to rely on diagnostics.
He let her vent. He was almost as good as she was, maybe better because he knew his own flaws, and he still didn’t change his mind.
Finally, when it became clear that she wasn’t going to relent, he told her, quietly and simply, that he would rather have her monitor the large anacapa drive, the one that could take the entire ship with it if something went wrong.
He had a hunch, he had said, that all the tiny anacapa in the communications array could do was harm the communications array.
She had given him a disbelieving sideways look—she clearly disagreed about the kind of harm the tiny anacapa could do. But she didn’t argue any longer.
“Just make a note on the record,” she said. “A big note. One that says I vociferously disagree.”
Crowe did feel odd, though, not being on the bridge for a foldspace trip, but he couldn’t figure out any other way. He didn’t trust any of the other crew members to work with Preemas on the journey—not if something went wrong.
And Crowe figured that, if something was going to go wrong, it would start soon.
He picked up the flat tablet connected to the container with actual wires. That was a double check. He opened three holographic screens so that he could monitor everything in real time. But if something went wrong with the energy readings, holographic projections were often the first things to disappear.
He wanted something tactile. Normally, he would just use the tablet as is, but he added wires for information (and it had taken him nearly an hour to set that up) because he wanted redundancy upon redundancy upon redundancy.
The holographic screens showed the same thing. The tiny anacapa drive looked like a fleck of gold lying on a white satin surface. It wasn’t gold and the surface wasn’t made of satin, but it looked rich and convincing.
It also looked the way it should look, ready for anything to tap its energy so that it could use its tiny bits of power to send messages out of this sector of space rapidly.
Engineering was too quiet. As he stood there, waiting, he found himself second-guessing his original decision to send everyone out of engineering. If something went wrong, he would need the crew.
And why was he keeping knowledge of that little drive secret? Sure, that was what the Fleet wanted, but the Fleet had sent this entire crew on a mission that the Fleet believed they would not return from.
If someone complained that he had given away Fleet secrets, he had a justifiable defense: We weren’t supposed to return, so I figured they could know.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t convince himself. Not because he thought the ship might return, but because he didn’t want anyone tampering with this part of the equipment, no matter how well intentioned the tamper was.
The Renegat was only a minute or two away from the coordinates designated for their next run into foldspace. So Crowe braced himself, and forced himself to concentrate on that tiny anacapa drive.
Then the Renegat bumped and shuddered in a way that Crowe had never felt before, not all the times he had entered foldspace. He didn’t like it.
He wanted to take over the bridge controls and see exactly what was going on, but he didn’t.
He forced himself to concentrate on the tiny anacapa drive—and he was glad he did. It flared white. Just once, but that was one time too many. The flare was brief, less than five seconds, but that didn’t reassure Crowe.
The drive should have remained inert. It shouldn’t have done anything unless someone was sending a communication—and who would do that in the middle of a foldspace journey?
Still, he made a note, with a time stamp, so that he could return to this moment after the Renegat was out of fold
space. He didn’t want to lose focus. He needed to keep his gaze on that tiny drive.
It looked so innocent now. Golden again, as if that single flare hadn’t happened.
The Renegat kept bumping and shuddering. Then the bumps and shudders escalated. The tiny anacapa drive flared again, and winked out, just before the Renegat’s abnormal bumping abated.
The Renegat suddenly felt motionless, which was how it always felt when the ship emerged from foldspace.
He suspected getting stuck in foldspace would feel the same way.
He didn’t dare look to confirm. Not while he was monitoring that tiny drive.
Then the external message system chirruped.
“We’re clear.” Stephanos spoke in that hollow way people used when they were subvocalizing as they sent a message. “And it looks like we’re where we should be.”
The external system chirruped again. She hadn’t given him a chance to respond, not that he would have known what to say.
He needed to make sense of this data anyway. As soon as Preemas was done with her, Stephanos would come to Engineering. By then, maybe Crowe would have some idea as to what had just happened with the tiny communications drive.
He had hoped that he would see nothing.
But that hadn’t happened. Instead of eliminating part of the problem, he had discovered something he didn’t even know existed. Now, he had even more questions than he had before this experiment started.
And he wasn’t quite sure how he was going to answer them—or if he should even try.
The Renegat
Crowe wasn’t getting much sleep. He had spent most of the last two days sequestered with Stephanos and Atwater, as they examined the data from the communications array and from the ship itself.
They had split up the duties: Atwater was looking at missions that predated this crew, trying to see if any problems were reported with communications after a trip into foldspace.
Stephanos was comparing readings from the main anacapa drive with readings she had from other ships she worked on.
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