“Yes, sir,” Molsheim said, “I do. Come with me.”
She led Gāo around towers of glowing lights. Panels were half-closed or dark, indicating work paused, but not finished, just because she had decided to contact Preemas from down here.
Engineering was always the cleanest part of the ship, something Gāo appreciated. Nothing was out of place. No clothing hung from the back of chairs.
Not that there were many chairs at all. Mostly, the Engineering staff moved around the gigantic room, altering and changing things or monitoring the ship’s functions. Hardly anyone sat down for any reason. If there were chairs, they were lined up in front of their console, the seats neatly tucked underneath it.
Gāo remembered her stint in Engineering decades ago, as part of her officer training. She had learned quickly that the meticulous work done here was not her strong suit.
But she always appreciated the Fleet’s hands-on methods of training. Captains knew every department of their ship. She was beginning to think Admirals knew none.
Because half of the equipment here was modernized and light, no obvious nanobits, nothing that looked familiar to her at all.
She had gotten too wrapped up in the details of her work to remember that she was a part of this ship, someone who might have to command it if something went terribly wrong.
Molsheim led Gāo around one final towering alcove until she was in what could only be described as a circular cubby made up of several alcoves curved inward.
Lieutenant Baker was already there, a holoscreen up and prepared for Gāo. Baker was taller than either Gāo or Molsheim, but sensitive to that. The screen was at Gāo’s level, not Baker’s.
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Gāo said as she stepped in front of the screen. “Are we ready for this?”
“Not quite.” Molsheim answered. She stepped out of the alcove, and her voice receded as she said, “I will let you know when I’m in position.”
“Have you already pinged the Renegat?” Gāo asked Baker. Since they were communicating across such a distance, and the lags were increasing, it was better to let the Renegat know there was an incoming communication.
“Yes, sir,” Baker said. “I used a standard notification. Chief Engineer Molsheim helped me send another one, augmented, as a kind of experiment. So the Renegat should know that you’ll be contacting Captain Preemas.”
“You haven’t gotten any response, I take it,” Gāo said.
“I didn’t ask for one,” Baker said. “I didn’t want to give the captain a chance to say no to this contact.”
Gāo smiled at her. Baker understood the problems and apparently had acted on them.
“I’m ready.” Molsheim’s voice sounded very far away. The various alcoves and equipment dampened sound inside Engineering which had made it one of the more comforting places Gāo had worked in her training, even though she was unsuited for a crew position here.
“All right then,” Gāo said. “Let’s do this.”
Baker pressed the center spot on a screen inside a nearby alcove. The screen in front of Gāo shimmered and then an image on it resolved itself into Preemas.
He was sitting at a desk, apparently waiting for her contact.
If he was in his ready room, it looked nothing like the room she had initially found him in. It was tidier than her study. Surfaces around him shone in the overhead lights.
It took a moment for him to look up. His expression seemed neutral but those bright green eyes of his narrowed just a little, as if he didn’t want to talk with her at all.
She couldn’t dissect the expression, although the lags gave her time, but if she had to guess, she would have guessed that he was annoyed about the contact, maybe even angry over it.
That micro-expression sent a little warning bell through her, although what that bell meant, she wasn’t exactly certain.
“We don’t have time for formalities,” she said to him. “These lags are increasing, and we don’t know why. Before I say anything more, I need to know you can hear me talk to you, right now.”
Then she waited.
His gaze moved over her and then focused on the walls behind her. They weren’t really walls, of course. Behind her were the alcoves, with their cool white and blue lights and darkened screens.
Preemas wasn’t a dumb man. He would realize she was talking to him from Engineering.
She hoped he wouldn’t realize that the switch of venue had come about because of Crowe.
Five long minutes went by. Then another two. Finally, Preemas’s head bobbed, just a little bit, as if he were acknowledging her.
“I can hear you, Vice Admiral,” he said. “I am now aware that this is not a social call.”
His voice was filled with sarcasm. They both knew she wouldn’t be making a social call of any kind. He knew something was up. He just didn’t know what it was.
He said nothing more. She clasped her hands behind her back, holding herself rigid.
“Good,” she said. “As we have discussed, you and I, your mission as designed concerns me. You complained about your crew, with good reason, and I looked the other way as you tried to improve it. I have also been doing a lot of research here on the way the data continues to arrive from the Scrapheap you’re supposed to investigate.”
She held up a hand, as if they were having a normal conversation and she was forestalling his answer.
“And before you ask, there is nothing new in that data,” she said. “It is the same message and data stream that the Scrapheap has been sending for months now. Apparently, our responses, with inquiries, are not getting through. We have sent dozens, including many responses in older versions of Standard, and also using some codes that we could find in the archives. We are still not getting any kind of response.”
She had a mental list of things she was going to tell him. That was just the first thing. She was going to ease her way into commanding him to abort the mission.
“Even with long-range sensors, we cannot verify that the Scrapheap still exists,” she said. “Some of our scientists here are now postulating that this was a data dump, sent when the Scrapheap was in some kind of extremis, as its entire systems were being overrun or destroyed.”
Preemas opened his mouth, then closed it. She assumed that was because she had held up that hand, forestalling him, several minutes earlier, but there really was no way to know.
“And then,” she said, “we have the problem of the time lags in these communications. You have gone through foldspace four times by my calculations. That’s one-third of the distance you need to travel just to get to a Scrapheap that might not be there.”
Preemas’s eyes had narrowed even more. Even though she was looking at his expressions from minutes earlier, it was clear he was getting angry and not hiding it well.
He knew what was coming. If they were having a regular conversation, he would probably have told her to hurry it up.
“The time lags disturb me, Captain Preemas,” she said. “They’re getting worse, not better, and we don’t know what’s causing them. There is a possibility that they’re being caused by actual time displacement. You might have lost minutes as you traveled through foldspace. My concern is that the Renegat will lose days next, then months, and then years. That will do us no good, Captain. We will have sent you back, you will have lost time, and we won’t be able to communicate any longer. This entire mission is predicated on the fact that you have to find out what’s going on at that Scrapheap and let us know what, if anything, that something is. It doesn’t appear you can do that.”
He looked away, then back at the image of her inside his ready room. Then his image froze. She wasn’t sure if he did that or if there was some kind of time limit on how long she could talk before the time lag caught up with her.
“So, Captain Preemas,” she said with as much authority as she could muster, “rather than continue on this mission, I am ordering you to bring the Renegat back to the Fleet. We will deal with the Scrapheap in
some other way.”
And she would deal with Admiral Hallock, even if it meant some kind of reprimand for Gāo herself.
“I need you to acknowledge that order,” Gāo said. “I will be sending the official order at the end of this communique.”
So he couldn’t say that, with the troubles communicating, he didn’t hear her order him to return.
Now, she waited for him to respond.
He moved again. His head tilted back, his eyes narrowed, and his lips thinned. Then he stood up, and the image froze for another moment.
She couldn’t keep track of all the freezing, when it occurred and for how long. It was easier to time the moments between responses than it was to communicate this way.
“Beg pardon, sir,” he said, his tone insolent.
Her heart sank. She had hoped she wouldn’t see this side of him.
“But I’m the officer on the ground. I’m not seeing the problems that you are. My crew now works well together. I have gotten rid of most of the dead weight. They remain at Sector Base Z for someone else to waste time with.”
The Preemas she had dealt with recently wouldn’t have been so blunt. But he was clearly angry. He didn’t like the order to return.
“I moved others to different positions more suited to their skills. The ship now runs the way a ship should run.” He raised his chin. “I think we are more than suited to this mission. I would ask you to rescind that order, sir. We deserve a chance to finish this mission.”
He stopped speaking, then crossed his arms, as if his movements somehow could let her know that he was done and not being interrupted by the time lag.
“I appreciate your candor, Captain Preemas,” she lied. She didn’t think he was being candid at all. “I am glad you alleviated some of my concerns about your crew. However, you did not address the time lag. You will have to travel through foldspace four more times just to return to us. That’s all the risk I’m willing to take. We are seeing an actual problem here, not a theoretical one, and therefore, I am aborting this mission.”
He hadn’t moved at all. She didn’t know if that was the lag. She studied him as if she could get a sense of him just from his posture.
Finally he shifted from foot to foot, then took a deep breath. She knew he was reacting to what she had said.
“I don’t understand your concern now, Vice Admiral,” he said, his voice dripping with contempt. “You were willing to send us to our deaths to garner some information for Admiral Hallock. And now you’re telling me you’re concerned about our lives? Forgive me if I don’t believe you.”
Gāo stood rigidly, glad her hands were clasped behind her back so that he couldn’t see her fingers twisted against each other.
“You’re telling me,” he said, “that you don’t believe you’ll get the information from us, so we should return. It’s the information you value, not our lives. Don’t make this about us. Here’s the truth, Vice Admiral. You didn’t think the mission would fail before we got to the Scrapheap. As long as it looked like we’d get there and you could find out what the hell happened a century ago or whenever that breach occurred, you were fine with losing an entire ship full of misfits. But now that it’s become clear that you might lose the ship without garnering a bit of information, you want us to return. Failure is failure only when the mission doesn’t get accomplished, not when the crew dies. Am I right, Vice Admiral?”
She was twisting her fingers so tightly that it actually hurt to move them. But she knew her expression remained impassive, which was good. Because she wanted to yell at him. And she also wanted to deny everything he said.
Deep down, she wasn’t sure she could deny it.
So, she lifted her chin slightly and peered at him through hooded eyes.
“You have your orders, Captain Preemas. Abort this mission,” she said.
His jaw moved. Then he didn’t move at all. For a moment, she thought he had severed the connection.
But he hadn’t. Five minutes after she spoke, he straightened.
“All right, Vice Admiral,” he said. “Consider your mission aborted.”
And then his image winked out.
That left her even more unsettled. Had he just shut her down or was that some kind of glitch?
The time lags had never been so definite. They had never shut down the communications. And he had just agreed with her, but in a way that filled her with doubts.
Consider your mission aborted.
He didn’t say that the Renegat would return. Nor did he assure her that he was following orders.
He had said: Consider your mission aborted.
And that unnerved her. Because he left her with the sinking feeling that he was going to continue with the ship, heading to that Scrapheap, maybe as a way to prove himself.
She unwound her fingers from each other and let her arms drop to her sides. She shook out her shoulders, knowing that she was holding a lot of tension in them.
He had bested her, over a long-distance communication. If she contacted him right now, she would cede whatever power she had left. If she waited, she could reiterate her order. If he had moved farther away from the Fleet, she could instate Nadim Crowe as captain.
She would see if Molsheim could help her figure out how to broadcast that message to the entire Renegat.
The problem was that Gāo wouldn’t be able to enforce her command—not from this distance—and Preemas knew it.
She formed a fist with her right hand, thumb inside, feeling the pain against her skin. Damn him.
Crowe had told her the Renegat was heading into foldspace within a day or two of his contact with her. That meant that if the Renegat was continuing to the Scrapheap (and she was willing to bet money that it was), they would go through foldspace in 24 hours or less.
She would contact Preemas in 48 hours. If he refused to abort, she would see if she could force Crowe to take over the ship.
That was the only hope she had of getting that crew back alive. That was the only hope Crowe had of returning to the Fleet. She had to impress that upon him somehow.
She squared her shoulders and relaxed that fist. She had a plan now.
She would execute it as best she could.
Part Fifteen
The Mystery of the Renegat
Now
The Aizsargs
Dauber felt an odd jangling throughout her entire system. She leaned over the console before her, hating the uncertainty she faced.
She had never been in a situation like this one. She had rescued many ships, but none as strange and mysterious as the Renegat. Through the screens on the bridge, she could see the events unfolding in real time. Rescue One as far from the Renegat as it could get, the Renegat continuing to vent atmosphere and God knew what else, and the life rafts heading toward the Renegat’s cargo bays.
That was all enough to make her nerves jangle, but she had done big rescues before. Successful or unsuccessful, those rescues had all had a pattern. This one was squarely in the middle of that pattern.
Her people were working the situation, doing the very best they could with whatever faced them. She trusted them, she trusted their training, and she trusted the equipment.
She did not trust the Renegat itself.
The unstable anacapa drive was bad enough. The low number of crew members was worse. The fact that the ship had once been part of the Fleet and had gotten lost bothered her more than she could say.
But this latest bit of information, which she had just managed to pull using her security clearance, disturbed her in a way she couldn’t quite put her finger on.
“Brett,” she said to Ullman, “have you found anything on time lags?”
“With the Renegat?” he asked. He was sifting through all the data she had found as fast as he possibly could, which was much faster than anyone else on the ship. “No. I’ve been seeing something about problems with the communications anacapa drive. It opened another window into foldspace as the main anacapa worked.”
<
br /> She let out a breath. That wasn’t good. She couldn’t remember exactly why the Fleet had jettisoned communications anacapa drives, but she had a hunch this might have been why.
“And don’t ask me if I think that’s what happened,” he said. “I’m seeing lots of drama here and nothing definitive. This is the strangest mission I’ve ever seen, and the strangest ship I’ve ever dealt with.”
She nodded. She felt the same way, and perhaps that was why she was feeling jangly. Shortly, she would bring the people from that ship onto hers, and she had yet to figure out who these people were or why they had arrived in this sector.
“Well,” she said, “I was digging into the mission and I found notes on a time lag between the communications with the Fleet and the Renegat.”
“It happens,” Almadi said. She was helping with the rescue, but she was also keeping track of the flow of information. Almadi had always been fascinated by anacapa drives, even more than most of the people Dauber had served with.
“Yeah, and it’s dangerous,” Ullman said.
Dauber decided not to acknowledge the obvious. “The time lag grew each time the Renegat went through foldspace. After the lag reached eleven minutes, she was ordered to return to the Fleet. The captain received that communication, and was apparently irritated at it, but said he would abort the mission. And that was the last the Fleet heard from the Renegat.”
“Until now,” Ullman said, raising his head out of his research and looking at that disabled ship.
“You think they got caught in foldspace?” Almadi asked Dauber.
“I don’t know what I think,” Dauber said. “There’s a lot of subtext here. The vice admiral who sent them on this mission handled the captain herself. And she recorded a lot of thoughts about the mission. It would take me hours to go through all of this, maybe days.”
Her words hung in the bridge. They all knew they didn’t have days.
“A malfunctioning anacapa would cause time lags,” Ribisi said. Apparently this conversation had gotten his attention as well. He had been focusing on fixing the Renegat’s anacapa drive.
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