The Renegat

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Stephanos hadn’t been in any of those situations, which was probably why she hadn’t given the weaponry any thought until now. She hoped that it had been the same for Crowe, so that he wouldn’t have given this place any thought.

  Preemas had already taken a few steps ahead of her. He contemplated the various doors as if he were looking at his own options. She felt a chill run down her back.

  By bringing him here, she might have started the path into one of those in-ship civil wars she had only heard about. She couldn’t imagine any of her colleagues dead, nor could she imagine them fighting each other, but she knew it was a possibility, one Preemas might have been thinking about now.

  Preemas continued staring at the doors, his jaw working as if he was grinding his teeth as well.

  He had choices here. He could get the weapons and blast his way into engineering, or he could see if the controls worked. Or he could do a variety of other things.

  Somewhere along the way, she had started clutching her hands into fists. She didn’t say anything though. Preemas was the captain, and he could make his own decisions.

  Then he pivoted, and placed his palm on the panel on the smooth wall, the one that hid a small group of backup controls. If he could get that open, she might be able to use the tools here to get her into other control panels.

  The panel flared red.

  Security code outdated. Access denied.

  Preemas sucked in air, then glanced at her. “What the hell does that mean?”

  It meant that Crowe was even smarter than Stephanos had thought. He hadn’t installed himself as captain or even changed any of the structure inside the various panels.

  It meant that Crowe had disabled Preemas’s security access after activating invasion protocols, probably reporting to the ship that Preemas was incapacitated in some way or injured or compromised by the “invaders.”

  “Well,” she said, “the good news is that the ship still recognizes you.”

  Preemas’s eyes narrowed. “That’s not good news. That’s ridiculous news. It needs to respond to me.”

  She nodded. “It is responding to you,” she said. “That’s the problem. It recognizes you as captain but won’t give you access.”

  “Why the hell not?” Preemas snapped.

  “It thinks…” she sighed. “Invasion protocols, remember? It thinks—”

  “I’m being used by someone who has taken over the ship? Anyone who knows me—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “The ship doesn’t know you. The ship is a machine, and somehow Crowe has convinced it that you’re not trustworthy.”

  But she might not be on that same list.

  “Let me try something,” she said, and stepped beside Preemas. She had to wait until he moved away from the panel so that she could try it.

  Preemas took a reluctant step back.

  She put her palm on the same panel. It didn’t immediately flare red, but it didn’t open either.

  She knew what it was doing, and she felt her heart sink. It was reporting the attempted access to Crowe.

  She didn’t tell Preemas that either.

  Secondary security clearance needed to open this panel. Contact the first officer for emergency code.

  Preemas cursed and slammed his fist against the wall next to the panel. The panel shook. So much for any other attempt they could make. His use of force just precluded anything they could try to trick the system.

  He had just confirmed what the system thought it knew. The system believed it was under attack from the outside. The system believed that Preemas was compromised.

  And, as far as the system was concerned, he had just proven it.

  Preemas pushed past her and shoved his fingers inside one of the door handles, trying to get to the weaponry. She opened her mouth to warn him, but couldn’t get the warning out quickly enough.

  He yelped, and brought his hand back. The system had shocked him—a minor shock, as a warning, but if he tried again, it would get worse.

  Preemas clutched his hand to his chest and whirled on her. “What the hell does Crowe think he’s doing? He’s not in charge of this ship. I am.”

  Well, not anymore, she thought but didn’t say.

  “Get to engineering,” Preemas said. “Break in any damn way you can. We’re going to get this ship back from him, no matter what it takes.”

  Stephanos started to protest, then thought the better of it. She had no idea how to break into engineering. Had Preemas blocked himself in Engineering, she would have gotten in easily, but this was Crowe. And he knew more about ship systems than she did.

  All she could hope for was that he had overlooked something.

  “What are you going to do?” She almost didn’t pose the question; part of her didn’t want to know. But another part wanted to be prepared, just in case something awful happened.

  “I’m going to figure out what weapons we do have,” Preemas snarled, “and I’m going to get my crew, and we’re going to take the ship back, no matter what it takes.”

  “Sir,” she said, before she could stop herself, “we’re alone out here. If something happens to the Renegat—”

  “What, do you think I’m stupid?” He was still clutching his hand. He looked like a vicious little boy who had been burned and was now vowing revenge. “I know that we have no backup. Although, have you looked at that Scrapheap? There’re hundreds of ships inside.”

  Centuries old. They probably didn’t function. But she wasn’t sure she should say that. She wasn’t sure she should say anything else.

  Everything she said seemed to enflame him even more.

  “You going to tell me to be careful?” he said, pushing his face close to hers. “You think I don’t know how desperate this situation is? Your friend Crowe, he knows too. He thinks I’m too much of a coward to even try to take my ship back. But I’m not. And he’s going to pay for this when it’s all over, Fleet or no Fleet.”

  Then Preemas stomped down the corridor, still clutching his arm.

  Stephanos watched him go. She looked helplessly at the weapons room, at the lost opportunity.

  Her heart was pounding. She had to do something to stop the collision between these two men, but she wasn’t sure what she could do.

  She wasn’t sure how to save any of them. She was afraid they were all going to die here, and she could do nothing to stop it.

  The Renegat

  Crowe quickly rearranged the workload inside of engineering. He made Bakhr monitor the bridge anacapa. Crowe also made Bakhr monitor the energy waves coming out of the Scrapheap, looking for changes or increases in energy. Crowe had one other engineer examine the energy waves as well, just in case.

  Crowe needed more help figuring things out quickly, but he didn’t have the personnel. Time was pressing in on him. He couldn’t just research and gather information.

  He had to make some decisions.

  That’s what captains did, sometimes without enough information. And even though he wasn’t the captain, he controlled the ship.

  The decisions were his to make now.

  He walked to the gigantic holographic image of the Scrapheap. More parts of it had filled in. There was a blank spot in the middle, just like he had expected. An area that was impossible to scan. That was usually something that only ships or crew that had gone inside the Scrapheap could notice, and they probably wouldn’t have thought anything of it.

  It was where the Ready Vessels were stored—at least in modern Scrapheaps, the kind he was familiar with.

  Only, as he walked around the hologram of the Scrapheap, he realized that a small corner of that blank sensor area looked ripped away. Something had destroyed the force field that protected the Ready Vessels (or whatever was stored) inside that Scrapheap.

  Crowe opened another screen, and created a hologram of just that area, zooming in as best he could. The Renegat’s sensors couldn’t gather all of the data needed. Getting some of what he wanted would require him to twea
k the sensors, and again, he didn’t have time.

  For a brief moment, he considered sending in a probe. But that would force him to send or use someone outside of engineering. It would definitely alert the rest of the ship to all the things he was doing.

  Crowe used the equipment, moving the smaller hologram of the Scrapheap to show him inside that corner.

  And his breath caught.

  The guarded interior storage appeared empty. At least at this angle. He would have thought it was going to be full.

  But he wasn’t sure why. Someone had clearly broken into the Scrapheap, and might have done it centuries ago. If that someone had managed to crack the codes in the Fleet ships they stole, then they might be able to figure out that better, more functional ships were hidden here.

  Crowe kept zooming in on the hologram, kept refining the image as best he could from this distance, and with all the energy interference. Was that interior empty? Or was there another force field, something that made it hard to see what was actually inside?

  He thought he saw a shadow of something, something large. So he filtered the images, and changed the algorithms slightly.

  He had been wrong: there were ships inside, and they were cloaked somehow, or protected in ways that he couldn’t quite filter through given the equipment he had, and the distance he was at.

  The muscles in his shoulders loosened ever so slightly. More ships. And maybe functional ships.

  He let out a breath as the beginning of a plan started to form in his head.

  If he could get everyone on the ship working together again, then maybe they could fulfill the Fleet’s mission and curtail Preemas’s ego. Or rather, harness it.

  Maybe the Renegat could become a tiny fleet of ships—an armada of some sort—with the crew members who had trouble with Preemas on a different ship, all of them heading back to the Fleet—to use Preemas’s phrase—”as victors.”

  And maybe waving one arm would make all of this conflict go away.

  Crowe smiled grimly to himself. He was being too optimistic.

  But at least this plan was a chance to hold the entire crew together, maybe even a way to have backup anacapa drives to allow the ships to get through that long foldspace journey back with a minimum of trouble.

  Provided the Renegat survived the energy waves coming out of that Scrapheap.

  Provided Crowe could convince Preemas to work with him again.

  Provided the anacapa drives didn’t accidentally open a door into foldspace.

  So many contingencies. So many things that could still go wrong.

  But for the first time since Crowe had sealed off engineering—maybe for the first time since he found out that Preemas had been lying to him—Crowe felt a measure of hope.

  The Renegat

  Break into engineering, he said. As if that were possible. As if she wanted to do it.

  Stephanos’s hands were shaking.

  Preemas expected her to break into engineering. He had asked her to get into it before, and she had investigated, then told him it was impossible.

  But now, he had used the words “break into” engineering, which meant he expected her to use force. He was going to use force.

  He was going to gather a team and somehow, somehow, get into engineering, and maybe kill Crowe.

  Maybe kill them all. The rest of the crew would be collateral damage in this fight. The Renegat would be collateral damage.

  They could all die, and die horribly.

  Stephanos stopped in the middle of a corridor, realizing that she had been walking blindly in the opposite direction from weapons storage. She hadn’t been heading to engineering at all.

  She hadn’t been going anywhere, just walking in her great distress.

  She put a hand on the wall panel, feeling its cool surface beneath her palm. At least the walls felt normal, even if nothing else was.

  She had no good choices here. Either she followed what Preemas wanted her to do and broke into engineering—if she could—and sided with a man who might be crazy, a man who was certainly angry, a man who wasn’t going to listen to reason at all—or she tried to work with Crowe somehow, and then where would that get her? Where it would it get any of them?

  Stephanos bowed her head. She couldn’t think of a third option, something that she could do, something that no one else would think of.

  Unless she took over the ship somehow. A third faction, one that stressed—what? Unity? It was too late for that.

  And she had no idea what was going on with the Scrapheap. She was the one who had warned Crowe. It had been obvious to her that Renegat had arrived too close to the Scrapheap. There was a danger from the outside and one from inside as well.

  If they survived this, it would be a damned miracle.

  Unless she brokered a truce.

  That was the third option.

  Or it would have been, if she were some kind of damned diplomat, which she most decidedly was not. She didn’t know how to talk to people, how to get them to do what she wanted.

  And what did she want?

  She let out a small breath and pushed off the wall.

  She wanted them all to get along. She wanted the Renegat to be a real Fleet ship, not this makeshift thing.

  She wanted to go back to the Fleet, and be an officer, and she would never ever ever misbehave again, not ever. She was so sorry for all the demerits that had relegated her to Sector Base Z, for that “inspired” moment when she jumped to the Renegat, thinking she could work on a ship again. She was so sorry for everything that she had ever done wrong, for the way that her entire life had led her to this moment.

  If she had it to do over again—oh, God. She didn’t want to live it all over again. Not ever.

  And now she was here, stuck here, trapped here.

  Where she was supposed to break into engineering, for god’s sake.

  She wiped a hand over her face. She couldn’t do it. She wouldn’t do it.

  Crowe was her friend and he was a good man—or so she had thought—and he was an excellent engineer, and they needed him on their side no matter what Preemas said, particularly now.

  And she needed to tell Crowe that.

  She needed to let him know that he and Preemas would work together, and she would make that happen somehow. She had to.

  She squared her shoulders, took a deep breath, and let all the fear out. Or tried to. Because she had to do this. No one else could. And she had to be calm while she did so.

  She pivoted, and headed down to engineering. It wasn’t a long walk, and if anything, her resolve grew.

  She found it fascinating that no one else seemed to be around—no one was in the corridors, and no one was peering out of their quarters or hanging out in the mess. This hadn’t been a particularly chummy ship—Preemas’s captain’s style prevented that—but it had been a talky ship, again because of Preemas’s style and the way he had changed all of the jobs. People tried to work together to figure out how to do their new assignments and how to handle this “ignore rank” thing.

  And now, they weren’t in the corridors, they weren’t talking, they weren’t doing anything.

  She felt more alone than she ever had.

  She finally reached engineering. The doors were closed, just like they often were when the team was taking on some major task.

  It looked normal here—workday normal—and that felt odd to her. But it might work in her favor.

  She stood for a moment before those closed doors, then she reached to the panel on the side, and pressed her palm against it. There was a chance—even in invasion protocols—that she could get inside, especially if Crowe hadn’t thought to block her in any way.

  A red light flared around her fingers, and heat shot through her palm. Not extreme heat. Just enough to make her pull her hand back. Warning heat.

  Apparently, Crowe had blocked her. Or he had blocked everyone who wasn’t already in engineering.

  Maybe he knew she had gone with Preemas to hi
s quarters. Maybe Crowe now believed that Stephanos was on Preemas’s side.

  She hated even the thought of sides, but that was the reality now.

  She paced in front of the doors for a moment. Break in. The thing was, she even had an idea how to do it. With the proper tools, she could break the seal on the doors, and then she would be inside.

  She put a finger on the panel, felt the extreme heat. Not a subtle warning now. A threat.

  “Nadim,” she said.

  She wasn’t sure what to call Crowe—First Officer Crowe, Chief Engineer Crowe, Usurper Crowe, Captain Crowe—so she opted for his first name.

  “Nadim, please. Talk to me.”

  Her stomach was jumping. The heat had worked its way into her finger, deep, into the bone. She was going to have to pull her finger off that panel any second now, because she could feel the skin starting to blister.

  “Nadim,” she said. “Please.”

  “I don’t have time.” His voice sounded echoey and annoyed. She pulled her finger off the panel, and glanced at the fingertip. Yep, it was red, but there was no blister, not yet. Still, she wished she had something cold to put it against.

  “None of us have time for this, but please, let me in. We have to talk. Preemas knows.” Her voice didn’t sound good either. Wobbly and scared, no matter how hard she tried to sound strong.

  “Natalia, we’ll talk later,” Crowe said.

  “No,” she said. “No. No! We have to talk now. Nadim, he’s getting weapons.”

  There was a long silence, long enough that she thought Crowe had cut her off and hadn’t heard that part at all. She took a step forward and was looking at the panel, wondering if she would have to sacrifice another fingertip when Crowe’s voice filled the area near the doors.

  “Knows what?” he asked, sounding leery.

  “That you’ve been planning this,” she said, trying not to sound judgmental, trying not to add, God, Nadim, what were you thinking? You never struck me as the type to take over a ship. “He found the captain’s quarters.”

  “You have no idea what’s been going on,” Crowe said. “Preemas cut off our communications with the Fleet. He made talking to them impossible and lied about it.”