The Renegat

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Then the bumping stopped. It took a moment for him to realize it had stopped. The hair went down on his arms and the back of his neck, and the prickling/stabbing sensation eased. But his skin hurt, as if he had a thousand tiny cuts on each inch of exposed flesh.

  He waited one more minute before opening his eyes. When he did, he looked down at the backs of his hands first. They were red, and still pebbled, like as if he had been bitten by teeny tiny bugs.

  But that staticky feeling was completely gone. The air no longer felt charged. He no longer felt like he was under attack.

  But his entire body ached. His jaw hurt because his teeth had chattered into each other so hard it felt like he might have cracked one of his molars.

  He made himself blink, felt tears—not from pain (he hoped) but from some kind of relief.

  Then he took a tentative step forward, saw Tosidis looking at his hands, so Crowe knew that strange experience had been universal.

  Something crackled, then Preemas’s voice boomed into engineering. In case you haven’t noticed, we have left foldspace. You can continue your duties.

  Preemas didn’t say that they had arrived wherever they had planned on arriving. He wouldn’t even have had time to check or not. Preemas and Breaux were probably examining the records—what few they had of the area around that Scrapheap.

  Crowe couldn’t think about any of that anyway. He needed to concentrate on the equipment.

  “Damage reports?” he said to his team.

  “Nothing so far,” said Torrey Spade. She was one of the people who had run toward the environmental system.

  “I don’t want to touch anything,” said Benjamin Bakhr. He was young, but he had proven himself reliable over the past week. “But it all looks good.”

  Others checked in as well, and found no problems.

  But their voices shook as they spoke, and their eyes looked haunted. Crowe didn’t ask, but he had a hunch the rest of them felt like he did; they didn’t want to go back through foldspace for a long, long time.

  And if Preemas made them take that same kind of journey on the return trip…

  Crowe didn’t want to contemplate it.

  Tosidis was the only one who hadn’t answered him. He was still standing near the open communications array. Crowe stepped closer to him.

  Tosidis’s skin looked raw, as if someone had slapped him repeatedly all over his face. Crowe wondered if he looked the same way, but didn’t ask. He would deal with the physical fallout later—if there was any.

  “I’m sorry,” Tosidis said quietly. “I didn’t watch the drive. I closed my eyes. The pain—”

  “I know,” Crowe said. “I have no idea what that was, but I’ve never experienced it before.”

  “Me either,” Tosidis said. Bakhr nodded from his station. Apparently their voices carried just enough.

  Tosidis waved a hand at the small drive. “We started into foldspace, and another foldspace window formed. I was about to send in the probe when that sticky feeling started.”

  Crowe hadn’t thought of it as sticky, although that wasn’t a bad description either. Whatever it had been, it didn’t feel natural.

  “And I just closed my eyes.” Tosidis was whispering now. “I completely lost track of what I was doing, and then you said not to touch anything, and the next thing I know, we’re here.”

  Wherever here was. Crowe nodded. He wasn’t going to yell at Tosidis. He wasn’t going to yell at any of them. Whatever had just happened to them had been extreme. He saw no point in reprimanding them for acting like human beings instead of some kind of unfeeling creature.

  Crowe moved as close to Tosidis as he could, so that he could see the tiny anacapa. It rested in its little bed, looking completely normal. There was no evidence of a foldspace window or of that light that Crowe had seen reflected on Tosidis’s face.

  The area around the little anacapa drive seemed normal as well. The fact that the Renegat had just gone through the longest foldspace journey ever didn’t seem to have made a difference in the little anacapa drive.

  Crowe glanced at Tosidis. Tosidis wasn’t looking at the drive. He was looking at Crowe. Crowe shrugged, then reached into the small space around the drive.

  Crowe hadn’t touched anything since he had told the crew to keep their hands off the equipment, but he had walked to this spot. If the static had remained, he would have noticed it as his feet touched the floor.

  His gaze held Tosidis’s for just a moment. Tosidis looked scared. His skin was pale and his eyes seemed even more sunken than they had earlier.

  Crowe, he just realized, wasn’t scared at all. He was ready to determine what kind of mess Preemas had gotten them into, and to figure out a way out of that mess.

  Crowe was ready to take real action for the first time since this mission began.

  And the first step in this real action was pretty simple: he had to touch the small anacapa drive.

  He had held anacapa drives off and on throughout his career. No one became an engineer, let alone a chief engineer, without the ability to touch an anacapa drive. The energy in those drives sometimes made people anxious or angry or terrified, which meant those people couldn’t work on the drives at all.

  He had none of those problems. He had always approached the drives with respect, but never trepidation.

  Until now.

  He swallowed hard, then turned his gaze onto the little sliver of a drive. Then he extended his right hand, and brushed the drive with his index finger.

  The drive felt smooth and just a little warm, like active anacapa drives usually did after going through foldspace. He felt a faint echoing energy filtering through his bones. His teeth hummed slightly, not like they had while the ship was in foldspace, but like there was some residual energy that had made its way to his mouth.

  He brought his hand back, then let it fall to his side.

  “I have no idea what I expected,” he said, “but it appears that nothing is different.”

  “That’s good, right?” Tosidis asked.

  Crowe didn’t answer directly. “Anyone seeing anomalies?” he asked through his comm.

  He got some denials, and that was it. No one said they were encountering problems.

  “Um, Nadim?” the voice was soft. It belonged to Stephanos. It sounded like she was trying to keep her communication with him hidden.

  “Yes, Natalia?” he asked.

  “Have you looked outside the ship?” she asked, in that same subdued tone.

  He hadn’t. He had been so focused on the changes inside the ship that outside seemed very far away to him.

  “Problem?” he asked.

  “Almost,” she said, her voice nearly a whisper.

  That caught his attention. He brought up a holographic screen and looked at the external view of the ship.

  The Renegat hovered at the edge of a Scrapheap—at the very edge, as close to the Scrapheap as a ship could get without being inside the Scrapheap.

  Crowe’s heart started pounding, hard. They had nearly opened a foldspace window inside a Scrapheap, something he hadn’t done ever, something the experts believed caused the disaster that had destroyed that Scrapheap in his youth.

  He made himself breathe. He was the first officer and chief engineer of a ship of the Fleet, not the boy who had gotten his friends killed. The Renegat hadn’t appeared inside that Scrapheap. The disaster had been averted—if, indeed, it would have been a disaster.

  Although, judging by Stephanos’s tone, she had thought it would have been.

  “I guess we’re here, then,” Crowe said as calmly as he could. “I guess we’re finally here.”

  The Renegat

  Crowe called up a holographic image of the area around the Renegat. He wanted as clear a view of that Scrapheap as he could get.

  He could just see the edges of it. It was large—larger than he expected. The protected area was much bigger than the area from the Scrapheap he had helped destroy.

  He didn’
t have exact figures, but he knew that this Scrapheap was huge and unwieldy, just from the glimpses he got now.

  The edges of the Scrapheap sparked and glowed. The force field around it didn’t look like anything he had seen before. It was visible to the naked eye, for one thing, which wasn’t at all like the usual Fleet force field. Behind it, he caught glimpses of ships and ship parts. Some of the ships had the curved design of a DV-Class ship, but others were round. Most of them had damage—at least the ones he could see easily.

  He frowned at the Scrapheap, thinking it represented yet another problem that he would have to deal with.

  But at least they were here. Which was going to make Preemas ecstatic, thinking that his method—the method that Crowe did not recommend—had worked.

  Crowe had no idea what was happening on the bridge. He almost didn’t care. He figured that Preemas was celebrating his own wisdom in getting them to the Scrapheap, without seeing the fact that he had nearly gotten them killed.

  Clearly, Stephanos had seen how close they had come to disaster. And if she had seen it, others had as well.

  But Crowe couldn’t concern himself with the others right now. He couldn’t concern himself with the personality details inside the ship. He needed to deal with the Scrapheap first.

  He walked to the center of engineering, to an area that he had been using when the engineering crew had been working on its deep systems check of the ship. He called up several different views of the Scrapheap—some large, some very small.

  Willoughby had left the officer’s mess once they came out of foldspace. She had hurried to engineering, joining him, her face taut.

  “We need to look at the energy readings,” she said.

  She was right. The way that force field was sparking was a visual warning for them.

  “Do so,” he said. “And move a team to diagnostics here on the Renegat. Let’s see how well we survived foldspace.”

  He was giving the orders almost reflexively. He needed to see this Scrapheap almost more than he needed to check on the ship.

  He wasn’t quite sure where the need was coming from. Maybe from a fear he wasn’t sure he wanted to acknowledge.

  It only took a few minutes for him to get holographic images of the Scrapheap set up the way he wanted them to. He placed a three-dimensional image of the Scrapheap in the very center of all of his floating screens. The three-D image floated a few inches off the floor.

  At first, he thought that the image’s resolution was poor. Then he realized that the Scrapheap was filled with holes. The center of the Scrapheap only had a handful of ships, stationary, as if something was holding them in place. Parts floated around them like waves around rocks.

  He had never seen anything like that before.

  He moved away from the two-D floating screens to study the three-D image more closely. He walked around it, hands clasped behind his back. His skin was no longer pebbled, and although it ached, it didn’t feel as bad as it had.

  Small blessing, while he was focused on all of this.

  He peered at the three-D image, thinking that something was wrong with it. Then he turned and saw the two-D images were sparse as well.

  There appeared to be holes in the force field. There were also gaps throughout the Scrapheap.

  And a darkness in the middle that made his stomach twist, although he didn’t know why.

  “I don’t like the energy readings,” Willoughby said from behind him. “That Scrapheap is giving off waves of energy like nothing I have ever seen before.”

  “Anacapa energy?” Crowe asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  He wheeled around, and headed to the screens she had been using. The energy readings included familiar energies, the kind given off by standard Fleet drives, mixed with some anacapa energy, the kind dying drives gave off as well as the kind that drives in rest mode gave off. But there were several other kinds of energy as well, things his system couldn’t readily identify.

  They mixed and floated together, creating some kind of bubble. He couldn’t tell if that was deliberate, either, or if it was some kind of defensive measure, designed to attack anything that got too close to the Scrapheap itself.

  He cursed. “This ship has to move, now.”

  Only he knew that Preemas wouldn’t order the move. Preemas would see that as some kind of rebuke against what he had just done. Preemas would probably want to remain as close to the Scrapheap as possible.

  “Are you going to go to the bridge?” Willoughby’s voice wobbled as she said that, and he realized that she was scared to have him leave engineering.

  He didn’t want to leave either. There were too many unknowns here.

  “No,” he said. “We’ll move the Renegat. Right now.”

  “Sir?” Willoughby asked.

  He didn’t say any more. He just went to the backup controls and programmed a course away from the Scrapheap. As he did so, he locked out the bridge command.

  He worked fast, so that no one on the bridge could respond to any notifications or warnings.

  The Renegat responded quickly, moving as fast as she could away from the Scrapheap.

  “How far does that energy bubble go?” he asked Willoughby. He could see what he thought was the end of it, but he needed someone to double-check his numbers. He had no idea what would happen if he miscalculated, but he didn’t want to find out.

  She told him, and her numbers were the same as his.

  He reset the coordinates, sending the Renegat twice the distance needed, just to be safe.

  “What the hell are you doing, Crowe?” Preemas’s voice boomed through the entire engineering department. “I order you to restore the command to the bridge immediately.”

  The way Preemas’s voice echoed, it might not have gone to just the engineering department. Preemas might have been broadcasting to the entire ship.

  Crowe’s mouth went dry. He had taken a step to save their lives, and it ended up being the step that he had tried to get Gāo to take for him. He had taken over the ship, without really thinking about it.

  “Are you going to answer him?” Willoughby asked, that wobble still in her voice.

  “I’ve got more important things to do right now,” Crowe said. He had to make sure that the bubble wasn’t designed to pursue them. He doubted it was, but he had no evidence. He had seen nothing like it.

  He veered the Renegat away from the Scrapheap, running parallel with it before heading perpendicular again.

  The energy bubble grew, but didn’t seem to follow them.

  “Crowe!” Preemas’s voice was louder and filled with what Crowe had once privately called Preemas’s command bark. “Cease what you’re doing and return control of the ship to me this instant!”

  The Renegat mapped nearby areas of the system. There were several good-sized planets, some of which could easily sustain human life (and probably did). He wasn’t looking to see if any of them had space travel capability. He was actually looking for a safe place to hide the Renegat from that bubble, and he finally found it in a secondary moon off a cold and dead planet.

  He placed the Renegat on the opposite side of that moon from the Scrapheap, then let out a small breath.

  “Crowe!” Preemas shouted. “Crowe, I demand that you cease this instant.”

  Crowe finally decided to answer him, publicly, through the comm.

  “Or what?” Crowe asked. “Or you’ll send us back to the Scrapheap? Because if we had stayed there much longer, the ship would have exploded.”

  “You’re making that up,” Preemas snapped.

  “Which is precisely why I didn’t consult with you before taking the ship away from the Scrapheap,” Crowe said calmly. “We needed action, not argument.”

  “You have no right to take such actions without my okay,” Preemas said.

  “I’m your First Officer and Chief Engineer,” Crowe said. “I have every right.”

  Then he shut off the comm. He was wrong, and he kne
w it, but he didn’t care. The crew needed to hear the argument, and needed to hear it from both of them.

  Crowe ran a hand over his hair, smoothing it against his scalp.

  Willoughby was standing near him, twisting her hands together. Her eyes seemed bigger than he had ever seen them.

  “I don’t want to bring you into the middle of all of this,” Crowe said.

  “I’m already in the middle,” Willoughby said. Her voice was calmer than her hands or her eyes for that matter. She looked terrified.

  “All right,” he said. “If you’re willing to help me…”

  “Of course,” she said just a bit too fervently. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  He could think of a dozen reasons, all of them good, but most of them traditional. They were in new territory. He was aware of that, but Preemas clearly wasn’t.

  And Crowe had no idea how many other people on the ship were aware of it either.

  Clearly, Willoughby was.

  “I need you to monitor the controls here in engineering,” Crowe said. “I need you to make certain that no one manages to rout control back to the bridge.”

  She nodded, her lips thin.

  “You do realize that I’m asking you to help me disobey the captain,” he said, just to be clear.

  She opened her mouth, as if she was going to say something sarcastic. Then she seemed to think the better of it.

  “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

  And before he could ask her if she was willing, she moved in beside him and called up a few more screens so that she could handle whatever came her way.

  “What else do you need?” A voice behind Crowe made him jump. Tosidis was standing there, looking nervous.

  “Helping me right now is probably not a good idea,” Crowe said.

  “I don’t see the logic in that,” Tosidis said. “You’re the one keeping us alive.”

  Crowe let out a small breath. “All right,” he said. “Let’s seal off engineering until we know exactly what we’re dealing with.”