And now, he had no idea whether he should contact Gāo or not.
“Let me know when you’re going to talk with the vice admiral again,” Crowe said. “I will monitor the communications array, and see if there’s anything going wrong with the communications anacapa.”
“All right,” Preemas said. “I will do that.”
“Thank you,” Crowe said. He suddenly felt very uncomfortable in Preemas’s suite. “I appreciate it.”
Preemas smiled at him—a real smile now—and said, “You need some sleep, First Officer Crowe.”
Crowe nodded. “I think you’re right. If nothing else, I’ll leave you to it.”
He headed to the still-open door. Preemas followed. They said their goodnights, and suddenly Crowe found himself in the corridor.
Feeling off balance. Feeling like he had entered a world he didn’t entirely understand.
Which defined this entire journey for him. He was entering a world he didn’t understand—a universe he didn’t understand.
He had learned long ago that he couldn’t control everything. He had discovered a way to approach his work and his life with that knowledge firmly at the forefront of his mind. It made a difference in how he interacted with others.
He needed to reclaim that knowledge. And he needed to act on it.
Because, nothing on this ship was in his control. Not even engineering. And he had to be okay with that.
Whether he liked it or not.
The Správa
The doors to Engineering slid open. Vice Admiral Gāo had not announced that she would be coming to the Správa’s Engineering wing, so her presence caught everyone off-guard. The engineers near the door, young officers whose names she did not know, looked at her in shock. Another, older engineer leaned around one of the glowing towers, apparently to see who had entered without permission, and then leaned back when he saw who it was.
The Engineering wing smelled faintly of warm equipment and human sweat. Here, more than any other department except hydroponics, the crew could get so involved in their work that they would often forget the niceties like food, sleep, and showers.
Gāo had noted the faint funk in Engineering before, and always had to remind herself that things would be a lot worse without the extra-strong environmental system, running at full power.
Chief Engineer Molsheim hurried toward Gāo from one of the aisles created by the hulking towers. Molsheim had deep circles under her eyes, and she looked like half of her staff did—tired and drained.
Gāo had not given them any orders, so whatever they were working on had probably come from the captain of the Správa or some other project Gāo was not aware of.
“I’m sorry, Vice Admiral,” Molsheim said. “I somehow did not get notified that you were coming.”
Her tone suggested that heads would roll for that little slip-up—not that failing to notify her of the vice admiral’s pending arrival would have been a “little” slip-up.
“Your staff is doing just fine,” Gāo said with a smile. “I didn’t tell anyone I was coming here.”
Molsheim smiled in return, but the smile didn’t reach her eyes. She was definitely preoccupied with something.
“We can go to my quarters if you like,” Molsheim said. “I don’t have an office here.”
“No need,” Gāo said. “I came here because I would like to know if the messages I sent to the Renegat yesterday and today actually reached them. No one has responded to my hails, which hasn’t happened before, and I’m concerned.”
Molsheim let out a breath. Something in her face suggested that Gāo’s request was a difficult one, but Gāo wasn’t sure why. Molsheim didn’t tell her either.
Instead, Molsheim led her through the towers of equipment, blinking and faintly humming. The warm smell that Gāo had noted when she had entered Engineering grew stronger as the distance between the towers narrowed.
Gāo had no idea how Engineering was laid out. Even though she had been here less than a week before, she couldn’t have found the way to the communications array on her own, no matter how hard she tried.
She had terminated the Renegat’s mission days ago. She expected to hear from Preemas as the ship entered foldspace, heading back to the Fleet. She hadn’t heard a word.
If Preemas wouldn’t talk with her, she expected Crowe to contact her, but she hadn’t heard from him either.
She hadn’t been entirely clear with Molsheim. When Gāo said she was contacting the Renegat, she was deliberately obfuscating. After Preemas had told her that he was aborting the mission, she had waited twenty-four hours to hear his plans. When he hadn’t contacted her within a day, she contacted him directly, and had gotten no response.
She figured Preemas was being temperamental. But she also knew she couldn’t assume, especially given the things Crowe had told her. So she tried to contact Crowe.
She hadn’t gotten a response from him either.
And, if anyone should have responded, it would have been Crowe.
Something was wrong, and she wasn’t sure what that something was. Preemas’s words kept going round and round in her head:
Consider your mission aborted.
He said your mission. Not the journey. Not the mission. He had said your mission, as if someone else had given him another mission entirely.
Or he had given himself one.
Molsheim stopped in front of the communications array. The alcove seemed brighter than it had been, the lights rolling up the towers like water moving up a waterfall.
Gāo recognized this area, but she knew she hadn’t arrived here this way before.
“All right,” Molsheim said. “Let me check the logs.”
She moved to Gāo’s right, closer to one of the towers. Gāo took a step back. She and Molsheim were both small women, but this alcove wasn’t that large. There wasn’t a lot of room for the two of them to stand.
Molsheim opened a screen inside the array instead of using an outside screen. She worked on the screen itself, almost as if she didn’t want Gāo to see what she was doing.
“Your messages went out,” Molsheim said, her back to Gāo. “Standard hails, right?”
“Yes,” Gāo said.
“Sent through the communications array which, considering the distance involved, used the communications anacapa. I see no problems with the hails, and no problems with the anacapa or our systems here.”
Molsheim opened another panel, then another, her fingers working rapidly. Gāo felt useless. Perhaps she should have contacted Molsheim directly and let Molsheim report back to her, rather than watch the woman work.
Molsheim’s broad shoulders went up and down as she inhaled, and then exhaled, as if she were bracing herself.
“We have no record of receipt,” Molsheim said.
“Which means what, exactly?” Gāo asked.
Molsheim closed all three panels, and then turned around.
“It means what I said, I’m afraid,” she said. “It means we have no record of receipt. Our ships are set up to automatically acknowledge a hail, whether or not someone on board chooses to respond to that hail. I can find out if the ship received the hail and then ignored it, for example. I can also tell you if the hail was responded to.”
Gāo felt cold, despite the warmth near the equipment. “Neither of those occurred, I take it,” she said.
“That’s right.” Molsheim frowned.
Gāo sighed. “The captain was supposed to abort the mission and come back, which meant a lot of foldspace travel.”
“Yes, I know.” Molsheim sounded a little odd, and that frown grew.
“But…?” Gāo asked.
“You’re afraid the ship is lost in foldspace, correct?” Molsheim asked.
“Yes,” Gāo said, glad that Molsheim had put the words to that possibility, not her.
“Generally,” Molsheim said, “when a ship is lost in foldspace, the hails bounce back. It’s almost as if the ship doesn’t exist—almost as if the ship never existed.”
That was what Gāo had been taught.
“There are exceptions, though,” Molsheim said. “If you’ve been communicating over a long distance, and have done so recently, sometimes the hails…I wanted to say ‘get through,’ but that’s not accurate. The hails don’t bounce back. It’s as if our system would know that their system exists already, and so doesn’t send the same return message. It makes for confusion.”
“Explain this to me,” Gāo said. She rarely had to deal with foldspace in this way. When she had captained her own vessel, she hadn’t paid a lot of attention to foldspace communications. She had simply done it.
“Usually,” Molsheim said, “the confusion comes in the Fleet’s response. When we know that a ship has disappeared into foldspace, we respond quickly. We send foldspace search vessels and in those situations, they have very good luck finding the missing ship.”
Gāo had heard that before. But she also knew that many of those missing ships had lost significant amounts of time. They experienced time in months, perhaps, while the Fleet experienced it in hours.
“But,” Molsheim said, “in the cases where the hails don’t come back, we don’t respond fast enough to find the lost ships. We think the ships aren’t communicating for another reason.”
Gāo’s chill increased. She was thinking that Preemas hadn’t responded because he was being passive-aggressive—or because he was ignoring her order. But he might have been unable to respond. The Renegat might actually be lost in foldspace.
“Then,” Molsheim said, “when we do respond…”
She shook her head. Gāo frowned. This was clearly emotional for Molsheim.
“Um, sorry,” Molsheim said. “One of my early assignments was on a foldspace search vessel.”
“You saw a lot, then,” Gāo said.
Molsheim glanced back at the array, as if it could save her from this conversation. “Yes, I did.”
She squared her shoulders and turned back toward Gāo.
“The worst of it,” Molsheim said, “wasn’t the ships we couldn’t find. We had hope that they went elsewhere inside foldspace or ended up in a different time, one when we couldn’t search for them.”
She shook her head, her gaze distant. Gāo waited.
“The worst of it,” Molsheim repeated, “was the ships that had clearly been stuck in foldspace for decades, at least from their perspective. Sometimes twenty, thirty, forty years. The ships would run out of food or other supplies. Some of those ships would only have a few people left on staff, waiting for us, or guarding the ship, or something. The others took the escape pods and went…somewhere. But I would have—”
Then she closed her eyes just a little, as if she regretted starting that sentence. She opened them, and sighed.
“—I still have nightmares about that,” she said quietly. “Being stranded forever. Hoping, waiting, for a rescue that, from your perspective, never came. From the Fleet’s perspective, we responded as quickly as we could. We’d get to them maybe a week later. But to them, it was a lifetime or more, and their lives would be over.”
Gāo nodded, not quite sure how to respond. Gāo had heard about these cases, but she had never actually seen them. She understood it intellectually, and she had seen others who had worked on those rescues who were just as affected as Molsheim.
Gāo’s mind had jumped along a whole different track. She wondered how Preemas, who had experienced the terror of being stuck in foldspace for a year, managed the mental side of his command.
Why would he be so willing to take the risk?
“I have a terrible question,” Gāo said. “Is it possible to shut down the hailing system in such a way that it mimics the lost-in-foldspace response?”
“The one that confuses the Fleet and makes it think that the ship in question doesn’t exist?” Molsheim asked.
“Yes,” Gāo said.
Molsheim nodded. “There are several ways to shut down the hailing system so that the Fleet wouldn’t know it. Most of them are very complicated.”
Gāo was not surprised. “Chief engineers know this, then.”
“Depends on their levels of experience,” Molsheim said. “Someone serving on an SC-Class vessel would not know it, generally.”
But this wasn’t a standard crew. Molsheim knew that as well as Gāo did.
“And captains?” Gāo asked.
“I don’t know what captains know,” Molsheim said. “Especially someone like Captain Preemas. He served in a lot of capacities on a lot of vessels.”
“But never in engineering,” Gāo said. “So he would need help shutting down the hailing system?”
Molsheim was frowning. “You think he would do that?”
“I don’t know,” Gāo said, realizing that was almost as damning as answering yes.
Molsheim turned around, pressed an unmarked flat surface on a nearby tower, and then watched as the image of the Renegat rose between her and Gāo.
“Has the Renegat been retrofitted in any way?” Molsheim asked.
“Updated for this journey,” Gāo said. “But not retrofitted. Parts were replaced so that this ship would be in the best shape possible for such a long trip.”
Molsheim nodded. “Well, then,” she said, “if he wanted to shut down the hailing system, and completely disappear from our records, he could do it.”
“But he would need assistance, right?” Gāo asked.
“It takes a minimum of two people to shut the system down,” Molsheim said. “Two different access codes, working at the same time.”
Then she reached out, as if she was going to touch the Renegat. Her fingers floated across the curves of its arch. The Renegat wasn’t as elegant as the usual SC-Class vessel, but it did have a kind of chubby prettiness.
Gāo doubted it was the prettiness of the vessel (in its pristine form) that caught Molsheim’s eye. It was something else.
“Let me check something,” Molsheim said, pulling her fingers back.
She called up the specs for that type of SC-Class ship, scrolled through diagrams that Gāo had never seen before, and sighed. Loudly.
“He could do it,” Molsheim said.
“By himself?” Gāo asked for clarification.
“Not easily,” Molsheim said. “But he could. He wouldn’t even need that much special knowledge.”
“Why not?” Gāo asked.
“Because the Renegat has the same basic design specifications as the Kaluwasan. If he knew that ship really well, then he knows this one too.”
The Kaluwasan was the ship that Preemas captained before the Renegat. Gāo had no idea if Preemas knew that ship really well. Judging from the condition of that ready room, he didn’t. But Gāo was making a judgment based on her own ways of doing things, not the way someone else might.
“Forgive me, Vice Admiral,” Molsheim said, “but the likely scenario is that the Renegat opened a window into foldspace, entered it, and is lost in there.”
Gāo frowned at that image of the Renegat. Molsheim was right: that was the likely scenario. And the entire Fleet had been trained to act on likely scenarios, not unlikely ones.
“All things being equal, I agree with you,” Gāo said.
“But you believe things are not equal,” Molsheim said.
Gāo wasn’t going to admit that out loud.
“We’re going to continue to hail them,” Gāo said. “Various times on different days, using different methods. We can’t rescue them or even try to rescue them if they’re lost in foldspace, so if that’s what happened…”
Her voice trailed off. If that was what happened, then five hundred souls were essentially dead, gone without any way to confirm their loss.
“But…?” Molsheim asked.
Gāo met her gaze. Molsheim had a tiny frown over the bridge of her nose, making her dark eyes look fierce.
“Captain Preemas told me he was determined to prove that he could run an impossible mission,” Gāo said. “He saw this mission as his way back into t
he Fleet. I just canceled that mission.”
Molsheim was shaking her head before Gāo even finished. “Even if he succeeds,” she said, “the cancellation of the mission negates his victory. He’s disobeying orders.”
“I know,” Gāo said. “But he might believe that success will outweigh the disobedience.”
Molsheim was still shaking her head. “Only someone who sees a future with no hope would even try that.”
Gāo thought about that initial ready room, about Preemas and the mess he was when she met him, about the spit-polished man she had seen on board the Renegat, a man who thought he had a future—or had a revived future.
Would he be willing to gamble that future with a charge of disobedience?
She almost smiled at the thought. Of course he would. He was already willing to gamble his life on this mission. He would take an even greater risk to save the mission, so that he wouldn’t lose this chance.
“If we can’t raise the ship in a day or so,” Gāo said, “I want you to trace the contact I received from Chief Engineer Crowe on the Renegat and see if he did something different in contacting us than Preemas did. If so, we’ll contact Crowe. Given his level of concern when he spoke to me a few days ago, I believe that he would not be going along with anything Preemas did counter to my orders.”
“All right. I will do that,” she said. Then Molsheim reached out a hand and lightly touched Gāo’s arm. “But, the most likely scenario is—”
“Is that they’re out of our reach, forever,” Gāo said. “I know, Sinead. I know.”
“Don’t get too twisted up in what-might-have-beens,” Molsheim said. “That’s not good for anyone.”
Gāo patted Molsheim’s hand, then slipped her arm out of Molsheim’s grasp.
“Noted,” Gāo said.
It was good advice. Gāo just hoped that she would be able to take it.
The Renegat
Nearly a month had gone by, and still no word from Vice Admiral Gāo. Crowe had trouble believing the vice admiral, who had looked at him with such concern, would ignore what he had told her.
Particularly since she had sent much of the information he had requested almost immediately after he had spoken to her. Her message had promised more, but that hadn’t arrived either.
The Renegat Page 43