“I am going to think out loud here,” she said. “You know these ships as well as I do, so I would appreciate it if you have ideas.”
She was actually buttering him up, because she had no clue if he knew the ship well. She doubted it, given the way he had behaved.
He moved his head ever so slightly. She had his attention, but she wasn’t sure how long she would be able to hold it.
She continued, “This console will take work. We can put a team on it, but I’m not sure what good that will do. Crowe will still have the ship while we do that.”
“If we have the parts.” Preemas started to kick the console near him, then slowed his foot down and pushed at the equipment instead. It rattled as he did so.
“If we have the parts,” she agreed. “I can try to break into engineering, but that might be a fool’s errand. Because invasion procedures are in place, and that means the ship itself will fight me.”
“Can I override those procedures?” Preemas asked.
She paused. She wasn’t sure if he could. But he might be able to.
“It depends,” she said slowly. “If Crowe used your information to take over the ship, then you can shut down those procedures…with a working console.”
“The ones in the bridge—”
“Are disabled.” She stepped away from that depressing little closet and looked at the rest of the captain’s quarters. They weren’t much better. Neat as a pin, except for the open door to the bedroom, which looked a bit like it had been through zero-G and no one had bothered to clean up afterwards.
“There’s access on every level,” Preemas said.
“Yes, there is,” she said, “and Crowe would have thought of that.” In fact, she believed, that invasion procedures shut down those consoles as well.
On DV-Class vessels, there was a single override in a special area known only to the command staff. But there was nothing like that here, except…
“The weapons room,” she said more to herself than Preemas.
“What?” he asked.
“The weapons room,” she said louder, as if that made a difference. “It has its own entry codes and a self-contained system.”
She wasn’t sure if Crowe would have thought of that. She certainly hadn’t until now.
“You think Crowe would leave weapons unattended, when he’s trying to overthrow my ship?” Preemas’s tone was filled with venom.
She didn’t know how to explain what she thought. Crowe wasn’t trying to take over the ship as much as he was trying to make Preemas do what he wanted.
Or so she had thought before she had seen this messed-up room.
She took a deep breath.
“I have no idea what Crowe would do,” she said. “I didn’t expect any of this. But I do know he’s not focused on weaponry, so he might not have thought of that entry point into the systems.”
“And if he has?” Preemas asked.
She took a deep breath, and took yet another half step away from Preemas.
“Well, then,” she said using that calm voice as protection. “If Crowe has thought that entry too, then we just wait.”
“Wait?”
“Yes,” she said. “Because, if that’s the case, the ship belongs to him.”
The Renegat
Crowe glanced at the small screen above the images of the Scrapheap. He had been monitoring the corridor outside of Preemas’s quarters, wondering what was taking Preemas and Stephanos so long. They’d been inside for a while.
Engineering was quiet. Everyone was working hard. Which was good. They had more work ahead of them than Crowe had expected.
Crowe wasn’t the only one monitoring the bridge, and the Scrapheap herself, but he was the only one monitoring the corridor outside the captain’s quarters. He probably should be monitoring other parts of the ship as well, but he just didn’t have the ability right now.
He was taxed almost to his limits.
Preemas had clearly discovered what Crowe had done to the command closet. Crowe was less worried about what Preemas thought of it than he was about Stephanos. What had she thought?
She couldn’t activate it again, not without a lot of work. Crowe had removed a lot of the equipment. But that might not stop her from trying.
Which worried Crowe. He wanted her to monitor the anacapa drive, especially considering how close they were to this ancient Scrapheap.
The Scrapheap was a mess. A tangle of different energy signatures, a failing force field, a security system that seemed to work intermittently, some tractor beams of a type that Crowe had never seen before, and bits and pieces of ships, untethered from the moorings inside the Scrapheap, floating around like possible weapons, should they collide with the wrong part of an already damaged ship.
Crowe had finally found the control tower in what had once been the middle of the Scrapheap but was nowhere near the middle now. It was about as far from the Renegat as possible and still be inside the Scrapheap, which disturbed him, because he wanted to pull information from that tower without sending a ship into the Scrapheap.
He didn’t think that was possible now.
Although the tower did seem to be working. He couldn’t ping it—his technology was so very different from the tech running this ancient Scrapheap as to be almost designed by a different species. But the tower’s energy signature appeared correct—as correct as he could guess it would be.
He would need to verify whatever it was, and maybe get Atwater or Breaux or one of the other researchers to figure out what kind of language, what kind of codes, the tower would find acceptable. From what Crowe understood, the Fleet’s language and procedures hadn’t changed in the five millennia that it had spent crossing space, but he was no expert.
He truly wished he could still contact the Fleet. This wasn’t a question for a resident expert on board a half-assed SC-Class vessel. This was a question for someone who worked in research, preferably on one of the school ships, someone who made their life’s work something particularly esoteric, someone who could answer Crowe’s question without even looking up the answer.
He let out a sigh. He was faced with more work than he knew how to do, and he was doing it without the resources of the Fleet, and without most of the resources of this ship.
Plus, he wasn’t as focused on the Scrapheap and the mission as he should have been. A good third of his brain was thinking about Preemas, wondering what the man was doing now, how he was reacting, what he was planning.
Crowe needed to focus and he needed to prioritize. He had half of the remaining engineering staff examining the various energy signatures coming out of the Scrapheap. Crowe wasn’t sure what caused all of them, and the last thing he wanted to do was what had happened in his youth—he didn’t want anyone to accidentally ignite something inside the Scrapheap, and cause a chain reaction that would destroy everything.
That bubble of energy that had nearly engulfed the Renegat had scared the hell out of him. He had no idea what other tricks the Scrapheap had up its metaphorical sleeve, but he suspected there were quite a few.
He also figured it had some features that the Fleet had later discarded or improved upon, things he wouldn’t know about because history of the Fleet’s Scrapheaps wasn’t one of his specialties.
Willoughby was still monitoring what the bridge crew was doing to get into engineering, something that was beginning to irritate Crowe. He needed one of his best people on that task, but he wanted Willoughby beside him—especially since Stephanos was either working with Preemas or keeping an eye on him or both. No matter what she was doing, Crowe figured she was lost to him.
He didn’t dare trust her, not anymore.
And that was the other downside to this entire plan.
He was going to have to use some of his brain power figuring out who he could and couldn’t trust. He never used to worry about interpersonal relationships. He didn’t have many of them, and those he did have were pretty superficial.
He had learned the
hard way that the best way to avoid being hurt by someone else was to stay uninvolved.
And now he was going to have to care about others, not because of any particular emotional involvement with them, but because he was going to have to figure out if he could trust them, maybe in less than a minute. He was going to have to make snap judgments, and he was going to have to do it with the fate of the entire ship on his back.
“Um, Mr. Crowe, sir?” Tosidis spoke softly from across engineering. He had left the images of the Scrapheap a while ago to return to the communications array.
“Yeah?” Crowe’s response was curt, and it wasn’t exactly professional. But he had more than enough on his plate at the moment. He didn’t need anything else.
“The, um, communications anacapa drive, the tiny one?” Tosidis said, making that last bit a question as if Crowe had no idea what the drive was. “It’s vibrating.”
Crowe’s heart leapt for just a moment. Gāo was contacting him! He could finally communicate with the Fleet.
And then he remembered where he was and how far away from the Fleet he was and how close he was to some of the strangest energy signatures he had ever seen on anything.
“Vibrating,” he repeated, making it not quite a question.
“Yes, sir. You know how anacapa drives sometimes do when they’re activating.”
Usually anacapa drives only vibrated to the touch, not visibly, and Tosidis wasn’t standing close enough to touch anything.
That meant the drive was actively moving—more than vibrating. It was bouncing.
“Has it opened a foldspace window?” Crowe asked.
“Not yet,” Tosidis said, “but if it keeps behaving like this, it’s only a matter of time until it does.”
Crowe fervently wished that Stephanos was still at her post on the bridge, that she hadn’t decided to work with Preemas, that she was available for Crowe to contact.
He wanted to know if the drive on the bridge was acting the same way.
“With us using invasion protocols,” he said to Willoughby, “can we still see what’s going on with the anacapa drive on the bridge?”
“We should be able to.” Her voice was tight. She had heard everything that Tosidis had said, and she knew what it meant. “And—ah—maybe we should move a little farther away from the Scrapheap?”
If the drives were activating because of some kind of cue from the Scrapheap, it was too late to move farther away. But Crowe didn’t say that. Instead, he just nodded, and said to Bakhr, “Has the energy from the Scrapheap reached us here?”
“Not any more than expected,” Bakhr said.
“Expected?” Crowe said. He hadn’t expected anything. He wasn’t sure what Bakhr was talking about.
“Scrapheaps under duress give off excess energy,” Bakhr said. “Entire systems would feel a little impact.”
“How do you know that?” Crowe asked. He didn’t know it. He could tell from the startled faces in the room not many of the others knew it either—if any of them did.
“I grew up in one of the sectors with a Scrapheap,” Bakhr said. “We had to deal with excess energy all the time.”
It would have been good to know that before they started on this trip.
“How did you deal with it?” Willoughby asked, and then looked down at one of the holoscreens floating near her. Something had caught her attention.
Crowe looked over her shoulder at the screen but couldn’t see what it was.
Bakhr didn’t seem to notice that Willoughby’s attention had gone elsewhere, or maybe he felt it wasn’t important. He said, “We adjusted for a basic level of energy coming out of the Scrapheap. We monitored it continually, and when that energy changed, the entire community took action.”
“What kind of action?” Tosidis asked.
Bakhr shook his head just a little. “I was a kid. I wasn’t part of the discussions, even though I knew it was important. It was one of the things that got me interested in engineering, though, to figure out what was going on around me.”
Crowe’s brain was still stuck on what Bakhr had said earlier. That Scrapheaps under duress gave off excess energy. That excess energy, even if it was expected, might interact with anacapa drives.
“Can you get a reading from the drive on the bridge?” he asked Willoughby.
“Not and keep monitoring what they’re doing to get into engineering,” she said just as tightly. “Someone else will have to check.”
Crowe realized he didn’t trust anyone else to check. He was feeling paranoid, and deeply uncomfortable.
He moved to one of the consoles, and opened a window. He would have to access bridge information without allowing the bridge to gain access to engineering.
It would be tricky, but if he didn’t do it, and that anacapa drive was also being activated, then they had other problems besides the rebellion against Preemas and being in this ancient quadrant.
Crowe built a window into the bridge, making himself work slowly. He guarded that window with protections and codes and firewalls that only he could change. He knew that was risky. He knew some of it was flamboyant enough to call attention to what he was doing, if someone was paying attention and cared.
But he also knew that their best engineer was currently with Preemas in the captain’s cabin, so there was a chance that no one would notice.
There was even a better chance that if someone had noticed, they wouldn’t know what to do about it.
He found the anacapa controls and examined them, making sure his window didn’t activate anything either.
The bridge’s anacapa drive was humming. Not quite vibrating, but not quite active either.
He wasn’t sure what to do to stop it. He knew what not to do. He knew that activating the anacapa drive and sending the Renegat into foldspace would probably cause all of the excess energy from the Scrapheap to mix with the energy from the Renegat, and cause some kind of chain reaction.
The memory of that old Scrapheap igniting ship by ship dominated his mind, just for an instant, until he shook it all away. He had to concentrate.
He had to make the right choice here, and he wasn’t sure what that was.
He let out a small breath, realized that not making a choice was the same as choosing, and made himself activate the helm.
Willoughby was right: they had to move farther away. But he wasn’t sure how far.
“I need to know,” he said to Bakhr, “how far that energy extends. We have to get beyond it.”
“It’s going to pretty much blanket this entire solar system,” Bakhr said.
They couldn’t move quickly out of this solar system. They couldn’t get anywhere quickly without their anacapa drive.
So moving wasn’t really an option after all.
Crowe let out a small breath. “All right then,” he said. “We stay. We’ll have to monitor the anacapa drives.”
And do what? he would have asked, if someone else had given that order. He didn’t know. If they activated, he would at least be informed. Maybe informed just before he died.
Monitor the bridge, monitor the anacapa drives. And do nothing, except keep Preemas out.
Crowe needed to stop reacting and start acting.
He needed a plan. And he couldn’t consult the engineers for it.
He had taken over the ship, whether he wanted to admit it or not. So he needed to guide the ship.
He had to choose: complete the mission as the Fleet designed it or do something else entirely.
And he had to choose fast.
The Renegat
Weapons storage was in its own wing, three decks away from the captain’s quarters. It took Stephanos longer to get there than she wanted.
But she made Preemas take a stealthier route rather than the direct route. If she had taken over the ship the way that Crowe had, then she would have monitored Preemas’s movements from the start. She would have considered him a major threat, and would have acted on that threat.
Hell, she
might eventually slap some lightlocks on him and take him to the brig.
Crowe might still do that. She had no idea what he was planning. She wasn’t sure how the crew would react, though, when they saw their captain imprisoned.
They were Fleet, after all, even if they were Fleet screw-ups. They still believed in the Fleet way of doing things, or they wouldn’t be on this ship. They would have taken whatever opportunities they had to leave and moved on, away from all the rules and regulations.
Stephanos’s stomach felt like an iron ball, and her shoulders ached from tension. She was grinding her teeth together, even though she kept trying to stop herself from doing so.
The weapons room might have been a bad idea. Because arming Preemas could mean some kind of shoot-out on the Renegat herself. The crew, fighting each other for control, trying to settle whatever this was while they were as far away from the Fleet as anyone had ever been.
The entry to the weapons room curved, with doors leading into various areas. Everyone on the ship had their personal weapons, generally some kind of laser pistol. Most people on the ship never carried those weapons, unless they worked security or unless they felt the ship was under threat.
Her own personal weapon was locked in her quarters. It was keyed to her handprint and useless to anyone, including her at the moment.
She wiped her sweaty palms on her pants, then peered at the various doors. Behind each was a different type of weapon. In one area were the laser rifles and weapons with a lot of firepower that could be carried into some uncertain situation. Behind another was handheld nonlethal weapons, things that flashed or exploded, but did no harm.
A third area contained backups for the ship’s weaponry, as well as tools for repairing the smaller weapons. SC-Class ships like the Renegat actually had as much or more firepower than DV-Class vessels, just because SC-Class vessels found themselves in difficult situations, as they tried to rescue damaged ships or counter some kind of threat to a sector.
DV-Class vessels used their firepower in more aggressive situations, if they encountered a hostile space-faring power, or if they found themselves blundering into some kind of war.
The Renegat Page 53