The Renegat

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  What was wrong with her, anyway?

  She was panicking. That was what was wrong.

  If she continued to panic, she would die. And these hangers-on, these people who couldn’t think for themselves, they would die too.

  And she would have them on her conscience.

  She giggled. She wouldn’t have a conscience. She would be dead. And dead people didn’t have a conscience.

  Or at least, she didn’t think they did.

  She stopped, patted her damn suit, then pushed on the fingertips of her gloves. Some suits she’d used, some of the really sophisticated new ones, brought up maps that way.

  But of course this one didn’t.

  “Suit,” she said, “can you put a map of the Renegat on my visor?”

  She hoped she wasn’t broadcasting to the others. But then what did it matter if she was broadcasting? She was trying to save all of them. And if she didn’t say anything, she would literally—literally—die of embarrassment.

  No map appeared.

  And no one else stepped up or said anything. These people were starting to drive her crazy.

  She could only try one more thing.

  “Suit,” she said, “show me how to get to Cargo Bay One from here.”

  Lights flared around her eyes. A red trail led to her right. She turned, then spun. She had limited zero-G skills, and that movement hadn’t helped. In fact, it had probably contributed to her getting turned around.

  She grabbed part of the wall, saw a hand on her leg, and realized she hadn’t even felt it. She looked over, and someone—one of the others, another woman—was holding onto her, helping her out of the spin.

  The red trail was now behind Breaux. She had no idea exactly how that had happened. And to make matters worse, she was dizzy.

  But there was a red trail. And it led down a corridor. And even if the damn trail was wrong, it was a chance.

  She couldn’t let a chance go by. She just couldn’t.

  “Thank you,” she said to the person who stabilized her. “Thank you.”

  And then she eased herself around, using the wall as a brace. When she faced the corridor exactly, she pushed off, careened a little to the side, had to push off that wall, and force herself forward.

  Like swimming, her father had told her all those years ago. He had actually served on a Fleet ship. Maybe she had joined the Renegat because she had been emulating him. Think of it like swimming but without the force of the water, pushing against you.

  She hadn’t understood that until now. She could handle swimming. She would use the walls like water, using them to propel herself forward when she needed to.

  And she needed to.

  Because that be here in five minutes announcement had occurred at least ten minutes ago.

  Please don’t leave without us, she thought, forcing herself not to whisper the words out loud. Please. Please don’t leave without us. We’ll be right there. We’re trying. We just got lost. Please. Please don’t leave us behind.

  The knot in her stomach told her that she didn’t believe she would make it to the cargo bay in time. She would die here.

  But at least she would die trying.

  Part Twenty-Two

  Long-Lost Communications

  95 Years Ago

  The Správa

  “Vice Admiral,” said Lieutenant Octavia Vasiliev, “you need to see this.”

  Vasiliev stood in the doorway to Vice Admiral Gāo’s study, but Gāo could only figure out where she was by the change in light and the sound of Vasiliev’s voice. Gāo stood in the center of the room. More data than she wanted to contemplate surrounded her. It flowed in black and white strands from the ceiling to the floor, forming holographic columns. The information she wanted from each column automatically got highlighted and moved to yet another column. But that information was color-coded. So an entire ribbon of colors across the spectrum congregated in the far corner of her study, where her art was usually displayed.

  She hadn’t seen the art in days. She’d been buried in information about Scrapheaps, trying to figure out where most of them were located.

  It had taken five years to collate all of the information that the Fleet had on Scrapheaps. Five years, and three separate research projects, not counting the brand-new field of study that Calixte had started on one of the school ships. That brand-new field focused on improving Scrapheaps, determining their future, and trying to figure out if anything was needed from the past.

  Gāo swept her arms outward as if she were parting curtains, and the data columns bent and moved as if they actually were curtains. Vasiliev remained in the doorway, a tablet clutched to her chest. She was short and curved, unlike most female Fleet officers. Most of them lost their curves given all of the exercise required to rise in the ranks. Yet she was as trim as her body type would allow her to be. If she lost any more weight, she would be too thin, and if she exercised any more, she would have no time for anything else.

  In fact, Vasiliev’s dedication to making herself better made Gāo feel guilty at least once a day. Sometimes it was for eating an extra pastry at breakfast; sometimes it was for the caffeine she ingested like a lifeline; sometimes it was for skipping an extra walk around the ship.

  Gāo loved Vasiliev. She was the second-best assistant Gāo had ever had, after Cali Baker. But Baker had gotten promoted, and then got promoted again. That was the problem with the good ones. They moved on in their careers—or rather, Gāo let them move on. She’d seen what happened to superior officers who blocked transfers and promotions of their excellent staff members.

  Those staff members eventually withered and became ineffective. Everything that made them the best slowly faded away. And slowly, the senior officers lost their effectiveness because their staff had become useless.

  Gāo wouldn’t have Vasiliev long either, but Gāo would value Vasiliev as long as she worked in this position.

  “What do you have, Lieutenant?” Gāo asked. She never berated her staff for interrupting her. She believed that training them when to interrupt her was as important as dealing with the interruptions themselves.

  “We got a coded communication, for you.” Vasiliev’s chocolate brown eyes, as curved as the rest of her, narrowed. Her arching eyebrows—the same brown as her eyes and hair—moved downward, making them look like someone had drawn wings on her smooth forehead.

  She extended the tablet, almost as if it hurt her.

  “Did you open it?” Gāo asked.

  “No, sir,” Vasiliev said, “because it says eyes only.”

  Vasiliev was Gāo’s eyes. She was supposed to open the eyes only communications, and help Gāo deal with whatever was inside. Vasiliev had the clearance for that duty, and the chops as well.

  Gāo had come to rely on her assistants for their great advice, a trend that had started with Baker, and continued on to Vasiliev.

  “Any reason you didn’t follow office protocol?” Gāo asked. She had learned the hard way not to reprimand someone for a choice when she didn’t have enough information to understand the choice.

  “Um.” Vasiliev bit her upper lip. The frown deepened. She clearly wasn’t sure she had taken the right path in doing this, but she had done it. So she bobbed her head and then said, “It’s, um, it’s from the Renegat.”

  Gāo felt her breath catch. If she had a chair nearby, she would have collapsed into it. She almost reached out to brace herself on the columns of data beside her, but they didn’t exist, not as anything real anyway.

  So she wobbled a little, then took the tablet. She finally understood why Vasiliev had made that choice.

  Had Baker still been on the job, Baker would have opened the communication. But Baker had left three years ago, and by that point, Gāo had reluctantly given up on the Renegat.

  Last she had heard, the Renegat was entering foldspace for the sixth time. Nadim Crowe had asked for her assistance in convincing Captain Preemas to turn the ship around and bring it back to the Fleet. Gāo had or
dered Preemas to do just that.

  And then she had heard nothing.

  She had pinged the Renegat hundreds of times, and received no response. Baker said that at one point, it seemed like something had gotten through, but there was no real way to tell.

  Later, as Gāo had examined the logs of all of those sent communications, she had seen a familiar pattern. When a ship got lost in foldspace, the system often thought it did not exist.

  The first few communications Gāo had sent seemed to go to the ship, and then get blocked. After that, the communications went nowhere. As if the Renegat had ceased to exist.

  More than that, though, it seemed like the Renegat had never existed.

  That sort of reading often happened with ships that had gotten lost in foldspace. The Fleet couldn’t communicate with them. No one could. They simply vanished, and the system seemed to lose faith in their reality, even if someone had been in touch with them just hours before.

  It had taken her years to get past the loss of the Renegat. Gāo had believed—hell, she knew—it was her fault. She had known that ship wouldn’t make it through the long journey. There were too many problems.

  The mission had stalled any promotion Gāo would have gotten in the past five years, but it had utterly destroyed Admiral Hallock’s career.

  Everyone had known that the Renegat’s mission had been her baby, even though she had tried to pass the responsibility on to Gāo. Hallock had played a lot of political games when it became clear that the Renegat was lost, trying to destroy Gāo. Hallock had claimed she was badly served by her subordinates, but too many other vice admirals had been in those meetings.

  Too many other people had known about Gāo’s doubts—about the doubts of anyone with sense. And most of the people involved hadn’t wanted to find out what was going on behind the Fleet. Everyone in the Fleet looked forward.

  Hallock’s argument that she was trying to close down past mistakes wasn’t a compelling one, not for people who didn’t care about fixing lingering mistakes from the past. Hallock sounded more and more out of touch, particularly as her superiors realized she had deliberately sent a ship into danger without the proper backup.

  Her secondary argument, that everyone on board the Renegat had no real business being in the Fleet, fell apart when the survivors, the ones who had left the Renegat on Sector Base Z, had told various committees that Preemas was doing his best with a crew picked for him, a crew that didn’t have the ability or the experience to handle this kind of mission—and wouldn’t have been able to deal with it, even if they had had the experience.

  Because the Renegat wasn’t a DV-Class vessel. It had not been built for this kind of extended travel.

  Hallock had finally retired last year, broken but unrepentant. She still believed that the Scrapheaps were dangerous as well as a waste of resources.

  Gāo hadn’t quite taken up the rallying cry. But she had paid attention. She was concerned about the Ready Vessels. Try as she might to locate the history of them, she couldn’t find much, and what she did find led her to believe that the Fleet should stop seeding the Scrapheap with working ships. The Fleet had never used them. To her knowledge, no one else had either, but Hallock had been right about that; those ships were a danger to the Fleet itself.

  It was one thing to leave a Scrapheap of mostly destroyed vessels, protected by a force field. Other cultures, particularly those not as developed as the Fleet, wouldn’t always be able to reverse engineer the ships. But to leave intact and functioning vessels in a secondary force field, one that the Fleet wasn’t policing, was inviting disaster.

  Especially in Scrapheaps that were only a sector or two away from where the Fleet currently was.

  “The Renegat,” she repeated. “Are you sure?”

  Vasiliev nodded. “I’ve checked everything against our files. I consulted with Cali Baker too. This message definitely came from the Renegat.”

  Gāo took the tablet from Vasiliev. “Is it recent?”

  Vasiliev shook her head. “It took a long time to reach us. We’re not quite sure how long, but long. Would you like me to stay while you see what the message actually is?”

  Gāo thought about it. It would be easier to have someone else here, but it would be harder as well. She had no idea what was on the message, so she had no idea what her own reaction would be.

  It would be better if Baker had been handing her the tablet. But Vasiliev only knew of the Renegat. She hadn’t spent weeks (months) listening to Gāo describe her own hesitations about it all.

  “If you can remain nearby, that would be good,” Gāo said. “But I’d like to watch in private.”

  “All right,” Vasiliev said, as if she had expected that response. She reached across the tablet, pulled it down, and pointed at a small area on the front. “Tap here. In theory, you should see a hologram. If it doesn’t work, let me know.”

  “I will,” Gāo said.

  Vasiliev nodded, then stepped out of the doorway. The door slid closed, leaving Gāo alone with data streaming around her.

  Instead of freezing the program, she shut it down. The towers of data winked out as if they had never been.

  The room looked empty. The walls were blank. Her favorite chair looked abandoned; she had shoved it into a corner, and there it remained. If it weren’t for the coffee cup on a nearby table, the room would have looked forgotten.

  She moved the cup, set the tablet on the tabletop, and touched the spot on the tablet that Vasiliev had showed her.

  Immediately, Nadim Crowe appeared. The holographic image was full-size. It seemed like he was standing in the study with her—or it would, if part of one of his legs wasn’t being bisected by the table itself.

  Vice Admiral, he said stiffly, as if he wasn’t used to talking alone in a room, to someone who wasn’t really there. The situation on the Renegat has become dire. I waited to hear from you after our last contact, and heard nothing. I consulted with Captain Preemas, who told me that you had convinced him to forge on to the Scrapheap….

  A helpless fury rose in her so fast that she had to take a small step backwards, as if Crowe was actually standing in front of her. She paused the hologram, freezing him in place.

  He looked exhausted. The shadows under his eyes were deep, and worry lines hollowed his cheekbones. He probably hadn’t been eating.

  Not that it mattered. Since this was an old image, from years ago.

  Her hands clenched, nails digging into her palms. She had known Preemas was going to ignore her. She actually had a plan for dealing with that.

  She had set that plan aside years ago, when she deemed the Renegat lost.

  She had to remind herself that she could do nothing about this. Preemas had taken his action long ago—he had disobeyed her long ago—and unless he survived, which she now doubted, she could take no action at all.

  Even if he had survived, she could take no action. Because he might not ever return to the Fleet. He might have found himself somewhere else entirely, doing whatever he could to keep his ship and his people alive.

  But she doubted that. She doubted he would do anything for anyone else except Ivan Preemas.

  She squared her shoulders, and opened her fists one finger at a time. Then she started the hologram up again.

  Nadim Crowe grew more comfortable as he talked. He shifted from foot to foot a bit, but his body loosened up. His face got sadder, the lines in his skin deeper, his eyes bottomless pools of sorrow.

  He hated telling her about the condition of the ship—about the things Preemas had ignored, the risks he had been taking.

  And then Crowe got to the fact that Preemas had deliberately sabotaged the communications between the Fleet and the Renegat. Sabotaged any way for Gāo to get in touch with him.

  All that worry, all those efforts, and he had deliberately blocked her? The fury was back, doubled. And with it, frustration. Even if he was alive, she wouldn’t be able to touch him. He was too far away. He had won their little contest
of wills, and the hell of it was, she hadn’t known it.

  She had feared for them, worried about them, took the blame for their loss.

  When that blame could have been put squarely on Preemas’s shoulders, for disobeying orders. And taking the Renegat into foldspace without notifying his chief engineer? While the ship was having problems?

  Preemas hadn’t been thinking clearly.

  No wonder Crowe had contacted her.

  She paused the playback again, looking at the image of the exhausted man before her. Exhausted but not defeated. Worried, but not broken. Not yet.

  Or rather, not then.

  She had no idea what had become of him, and she wasn’t sure how she could find out.

  Whatever had happened had already happened. She had no idea how to fix that, not even in her own mind.

  She took a deep breath, calming down. She believed Nadim Crowe. She had had enough encounters with Preemas to know the man was a wild card. And her experiences trying to contact the ship more or less proved Crowe’s point. Something had happened to their ability to communicate, even after Crowe had reestablished the system.

  After all, it had taken years for this message to reach her.

  When the message ended, she would trace the route it had taken to get to her. She would see how long the message actually took. Because sometimes, ships went into foldspace and stayed there for a short time by their measure, and by the Fleet’s measure, it had been years.

  That was backwards from what usually happened—usually ships were in foldspace for years in their experience and only days in the Fleet’s—but this way happened as well.

  She knew she was being unreasonably optimistic, but that was the only way she could listen to the rest of this message, especially given how defeated Nadim Crowe already seemed.

  He had a long list of things to tell her. She listened as attentively as she could, given how distraught she felt. She would have Vasiliev listen as well. Together they would see what they could do, maybe even try to find the Renegat.