The Renegat

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  There was an increase in energy. Unstable energy, the kind she’d seen coming out of foldspace in the past.

  She had ordered the fighters away from the ship almost an hour ago, and she’d been sweating Rescue One. The readings from the Renegat’s anacapa drive showed that it was terribly unstable, and the resulting explosion would be catastrophic.

  Rescue One already had one hundred survivors on board. She could order Rescue One to return to the Aizsargs now, but that bordered on cruel. She had—she hoped—the extra few minutes for the remaining two life rafts to dock with Rescue One.

  But the third one? That was a wish. Not even a prayer. It wasn’t going to survive.

  “He thinks the missing six passengers will arrive in time,” Ornitz said.

  “I knew I shouldn’t have sent him,” Dauber said. “He’s gotten soft.”

  “It’s not soft to try to rescue six people,” said Lauritz.

  “It is when it will cost more lives and equipment,” Dauber snapped. “Zarges knows that. He knows what the regulations are. Throughout his entire career, he’s made the right call. This is the first time he hasn’t.”

  “The first time he’s been out in almost a year,” Almadi said softly. “Perhaps he wasn’t ready.”

  “Or perhaps,” Ullman said just as softly, “he decided he didn’t want to lose anyone again.”

  “He doesn’t get to make that decision,” Dauber said.

  But Zarges had. Because she couldn’t recall the life raft. It was nearly to the Renegat. And he had already stayed behind.

  One of her best officers, and he was on a suicide mission to save six people he didn’t even know, people who might have nothing to do with the Fleet, people who could be thieves or murderers, people who didn’t deserve his sacrifice.

  She folded her hands together, then squeezed them tight. Damn him.

  Damn him for taking the choice away from her.

  Damn him for making her watch this, even when she knew it was going to go all wrong.

  Part Twenty-Six

  Control

  100 Years Ago

  The Renegat

  The Scrapheap was huge. It covered an area that could have encompassed two large planets—and all of the distance between them. To Crowe’s surprise, however, the Scrapheap wasn’t full. It wasn’t even close to full.

  He stood in the middle of all of the data he had pulled from that Scrapheap, trying to ignore all the crises around him. Occasionally Preemas would bleat something through the comms, something about getting control of the ship back.

  Crowe could ignore that. He liked being able to concentrate on something else. And right now, the Scrapheap—and the energy it was giving off—was more important than Preemas.

  Crowe had Preemas under control, at least for the moment. Occasionally, Crowe would glance at a screen that showed the bridge. Everyone on the bridge looked flustered and confused. Some of that was because they weren’t the most experienced bridge crew, but most of it was because of the crisis Crowe had caused, and Preemas’s reaction to it.

  The remaining engineers seemed less nervous than Crowe expected. Maybe it was the work that faced them. They needed to figure out what was happening with the Scrapheap, and they were all good at focusing at the expense of everything going on around them.

  Thank goodness.

  Even he felt less tired, less panicked, than he had felt before. He had a task now—several tasks—and he had somehow found the concentration to deal with them.

  Maybe because he liked a good puzzle.

  And the Scrapheap was proving to be a puzzle.

  Parts of the Scrapheap—at least that his system registered—glistened in the way that very old security fields glistened. Old fields like that were dangerous and hadn’t been used in centuries. Crowe had come across those old fields when he trained on the first SC-Class vessel he’d ever served on.

  Those old fields were unstable, and didn’t always protect areas that they seemed to be covering. And sometimes they worked too well—shooting down nearby ships that should have received only warnings.

  He couldn’t believe that this Scrapheap would attack the Renegat, but he did not know for certain. He was glad that he had moved the ship away.

  “When we first got information on that Scrapheap,” Tosidis said, “it looked full.”

  Tosidis had moved closer to Crowe, probably so that he could see the Scrapheap better. And Tosidis was right: the Scrapheap seemed to have a lot more ships in that information that had made it to the Fleet.

  But some of that information got rebuilt from the data stream. So the guesses that whoever rebuilt the data made could have been wrong.

  “We have no idea how old that information was,” Crowe said, “or how long it had been traveling to get to us.”

  “Judging by how empty this thing is, it must have been decades.”

  “Or not.” Crowe had examined those logs early in this voyage. “Ships were returning every five days. Whoever had taken ships out of this Scrapheap had done so in a systematic way.”

  He wasn’t as concerned with the loss of DV-Class vessels that the Scrapheap had suffered. Most of those vessels were at least a thousand years old. He was concerned about the loss of their anacapa drives, which he knew had happened because those drives had gotten the ships out of the Scrapheap in the first place.

  The major concern, though, and the one he and Preemas had discussed when they were still discussing things, was that it appeared that the Ready Vessels area had been compromised. Crowe knew, given the scattered information that the Fleet had received, that the area he considered the Ready Vessel area might not have been filled with Ready Vessels.

  It might not have been anything other than another storage area. He wasn’t even sure the Fleet stored Ready Vessels in Scrapheaps this old.

  But Crowe had to act on the assumption that the Fleet had, and if it had, then the situation around this Scrapheap was much more dire than Crowe had initially imaged.

  Because Ready Vessels had been designed to maintain their systems, and keep them activated. Those ships were to move themselves into the main part of the Scrapheap if they no longer worked properly—ostensibly to await repair, but mostly to suffer a slow decline.

  Those ships weren’t just state-of-the-art at the time they had been hidden in the Scrapheap. They were also completely functional vessels with no flaws at all. If someone stole one of those ships, that someone could have used the vessel for decades with no serious problems at all.

  Crowe wouldn’t be able to check on the Ready Vessels until he figured out the Scrapheap’s codes. He had also worked on that early in the voyage, but hadn’t gotten far.

  Although that wasn’t his most pressing problem.

  Preemas had just left the bridge. He was probably going to his quarters to regain control of the ship.

  He wouldn’t be able to.

  And that was the moment that would seal Crowe’s fate as a mutineer, should he ever get tried inside the Fleet. Because removing the command closet in the captain’s quarters showed that Crowe had planned to take over the ship for some time—even if the message he sent to Gāo had never gotten through.

  Crowe’s stomach did a slow flip.

  He glanced around engineering. Everyone was working on the Scrapheap now, except Willoughby who was staying ahead of the bridge crew. Everything they tried to regain control of the ship, she rebuffed.

  Of course, it helped that he had set up invasion protocols. That he had planned ahead for. He had removed all trace of Captain Preemas from those protocols, and had done so weeks ago. If someone had tried to take over the ship, Crowe didn’t trust Preemas enough to handle the situation well.

  Preemas couldn’t regain control of the ship even if he were as smart about engineering as Crowe was. Not from the bridge. Not from the minimal systems in the officer’s mess. Not anywhere.

  The mistake Crowe had made, however, was forgetting that Preemas could enlist help. Crowe hadn’
t blocked others from taking over in case of invasion. The invasion protocols were set up that way—so that someone lower on the chain of command could act if the captain was dead or disabled.

  Crowe had established himself in the captain position, but he hadn’t blocked anyone else.

  And it was beginning to look like Preemas had Stephanos on his side.

  Crowe hadn’t expected that. Natalia Stephanos was a smart woman who made it clear that she loathed Preemas. Crowe couldn’t believe that she would support him over Crowe, particularly at a time like this.

  And yet, she had left the bridge with him. And other than the initial contact to make sure everything was all right, she hadn’t spoken to Crowe since this entire incident began.

  Crowe made himself focus. They had to examine the Scrapheap, figure out what, if anything, had gone wrong here.

  That was the mission, and he was going to fulfill it, just like Preemas would have. Only, unlike Preemas, Crowe was going to make sure a minimum of harm came to this crew.

  Crowe was going to get them out alive—even if it was the last thing he’d ever do.

  The Renegat

  Natalia Stephanos’s heart pounded as she walked half a step behind Captain Preemas on the way to his quarters. She deliberately stayed behind him, half-hoping he would turn around and return to the bridge.

  She didn’t want to help him. She thought Crowe was doing the right thing. But she also didn’t want to lose her position on the bridge. She was afraid that Preemas would replace her with someone who had no idea how an anacapa drive worked, and then they would all be screwed even worse than they were.

  The captain’s quarters were down a corridor all their own. They were not even in the crew wing, but closer to engineering and the center of the ship. The captain was to be protected at all times, at least that was what the design said, and for the most part, that was how it happened.

  Preemas walked quickly. Stephanos had to struggle to keep up. She had been in this part of the ship, but only to perform maintenance and check systems in the corridor itself.

  It felt isolated here, which bothered her more than she wanted to say. She didn’t entirely trust Preemas. She would have said, a few weeks ago, that he would never hurt anyone. But he had gotten so volatile as the trip went on that she was beginning to think he could lash out in anger.

  And she was heading to his quarters, alone.

  She wasn’t quite sure what she was going to do. She wanted to warn Crowe that he was about to lose control of the entire ship, but she didn’t dare. And she really didn’t want to see what Preemas was going to do to Crowe once this all got resolved.

  She was torn between her loyalty to the others on the ship, and her desire to help Crowe who was, in her opinion, one of the only other competent people on board the Renegat. She would be much happier if Crowe were in charge.

  But she didn’t dare say that, not right now. And she wasn’t sure how she felt about disobeying a captain, even one like Preemas. She was just too Fleet to make those kinds of decisions on her own. She believed in rank and hierarchy. She believed in making the right choices the structured way because that made the ship run smoother.

  But Preemas hadn’t followed structure either, and she had to remember that. It wasn’t as if she was feeling torn between a by-the-book captain and a rogue first officer. If anything, Crowe was much more by-the-book than Preemas had ever been.

  Preemas stopped at the door to his quarters. The door was unmarked, unlike the doors in the crew quarters. Individual cabins, like the officers’ cabins, had the rank etched into the door itself. Shared cabins had numbers so that the crew members could find the rooms quickly and efficiently.

  But the captain’s quarters were deliberately hard to find, partly because of the command closet hidden inside of it. She had never worked on this command closet. That was something the chief engineer assigned if the command closet needed some kind of repair. Often the chief engineer did the work himself.

  The door didn’t open automatically, the way it was designed to open when the captain was alone. Instead, Preemas had to give it a small hand signal to show that he was all right, and not opening the door under duress.

  That system was even more complicated when invasion protocols were in place.

  Then she heard the slight hiss as the door slid open.

  “Stephanos!” Preemas snapped, as if he had thought she would linger in the hallway.

  She spun away from the wall, and entered the captain’s quarters.

  They were smaller than she had expected. She had never been in a captain’s quarters before, but she had thought they would have significantly more room than the private cabins in the crew quarters.

  The cabin did have some more room, but not a lot. It had two bedrooms, with doors on the opposite side of the small living room. The kitchen wasn’t much bigger than the kitchen in her cabin.

  Her eye immediately went to the design. There was too much wall space near the kitchen, which meant the command closet had to be there.

  She had just found the outline of the door, as Preemas pushed it open.

  “Get your butt in here, Stephanos,” he said. “I’m going to need your assistance here—”

  And then he just stopped speaking. He was staring into the closet, his mouth open, as if he had forgotten to finish his sentence, as if he hadn’t even had a chance to finish his thought.

  Stephanos moved just a little closer, but she didn’t want to crowd him. She glanced over her shoulder at the door to the corridor. The door had closed, and she hadn’t even noticed.

  She wasn’t sure why that made her even more nervous than she already was, but it had.

  Preemas still hadn’t moved. He looked stunned. Then he started to shake his head, minimally at first, and then with a broader and broader movement.

  “You knew about this, didn’t you?” he said very softly. She had to strain to hear him.

  “Knew about what?” she asked.

  He slammed his fist against the wall beside the door. “This!”

  He clearly wanted her to get closer, to peer inside the room, but she wasn’t going to get near him.

  “Knew about what, captain?” she asked again,

  “Someone disassembled the command closet,” Preemas snapped. He pushed away from the wall, as if he could jettison himself out of this part of the ship with that very simple movement. “You knew about this, didn’t you? Your friend Crowe did this and you helped.”

  Preemas was probably right: Crowe had probably done this. Stephanos didn’t want to contemplate it. Because that meant that Crowe’s insubordination today had been planned longer than a few hours.

  She finally walked toward Preemas. She had to see this for herself. She didn’t get close to him, though. She got as close as she could be without being within range of his arms, and peered into the narrow closet.

  Even though she had never seen an active command closet—only those in decommissioned ships or ships that needed some kind of repair—she could tell at a glance that this one had been tampered with.

  The top had been removed from an entire console. There were bits and pieces of another console on the floor beside the closet’s only chair.

  Preemas took a step toward her, his eyes flaring, and she took a step back.

  “I don’t know what happened here,” she said. “I’ve never been to your quarters before. You can check the logs.”

  “Oh, I’ll be checking the logs.” He took another step toward her. It took all of her strength to hold her position. “You can bet I’ll be checking the logs.”

  She wanted to check them as well. She could barely believe that Crowe would do something like this. Tampering with the command closet meant that he had actually planned to take over the ship at some point.

  She didn’t like that. She had been willing to support Crowe when she had thought he was doing this as a reaction to the long foldspace trip and the arrival (too close!) to the Scrapheap, but to think he
had been planning this for some time…

  Preemas tilted his head, watching her. “You didn’t know, did you?”

  His voice was remarkably calm. The way that he could go from furious to calm in a heartbeat startled her. She liked to tell herself that he could do that because of his captain training, but it didn’t seem like training had taken over. It seemed more like his moods were mercurial, like he could turn them off and on at will.

  “I told you,” she said in the calmest voice she could manage, “I did not help him.”

  Preemas’s eyes narrowed. “Then fix this.”

  She let out a small laugh before she could stop herself. “You’re kidding, right?”

  He stared at her. She could feel his fury grow.

  “I have never seen the captain’s command closet or whatever you call this. I have no idea what’s missing and what should be here and where it can all go. I can figure it out, but it’ll take time.” She still used the calm voice, hoping none of this sounded like excuses, because it wasn’t excuses.

  It was the truth. She had no idea how to do anything he asked.

  “Your friend, Nadim Crowe, has taken over my ship,” Preemas said, his hands in fists again. “We need to get the ship back, in any way possible. If you can’t fix this, then what the hell can you do?”

  She hoped he meant what the hell can you do toward that aim? because she didn’t want him to use a blanket what the hell can you do to talk to her. Her cheeks had warmed. She wasn’t embarrassed, so much as frightened and frustrated.

  Nothing was as she expected it to be. Crowe had actually planned a mutiny. Preemas was becoming unhinged—and she wasn’t sure she blamed him. It was his ship, after all, no matter how she felt about him or his command. She was here, and she was supposed to listen to him.

  She slowly shook her head, saw his fists clench even tighter, and felt her heart rate increase.

  She lifted a single finger, hoping that would stop whatever reaction he was leaning into.