“Sir?” Colvin asked. “Won’t First Officer Crowe be expecting us to do something like this?”
Irritation crossed Preemas’s face, then disappeared so quickly that Romano questioned whether she had interpreted the micro expression correctly.
“He has sealed off the weapons’ room,” Preemas said. “He thinks we don’t have access to weaponry. He thinks he controls the entire ship. We’ll show him that he doesn’t.”
Romano swallowed compulsively. The hair on her arms stood up, as well as the hair on the back of her neck. She blamed that on the tingling, whatever that had been. It continued. Her hands ached as the tingle grew worse.
She flexed them, and they moved the way they were supposed to. That was all that mattered. She would worry about the growing ache in her bones later.
“All right,” Preemas said with a determined grin. “Get your gear. We’re going in.”
Part Twenty-Nine
The End of the Renegat
Now
The Aizsargs
If Dauber had less training, she would have been watching events unfold in real time with her hands covering her mouth. As it was, she had to thread her hands together so that she wouldn’t show the tension that had woven its way through her body.
The entire bridge crew had stopped any pretense of working. They were all watching screens or holoimages, staring at data flow, whatever was the easiest for them to either process what they were seeing or to remain distant from it.
She didn’t reprimand any of them. They knew, as well as she did, that this was a crucial moment. She almost saw it as a gesture of respect for Raul Zarges. He was taking a hell of a risk, and she hoped it would pan out.
She watched, but she also made herself concentrate on the next steps.
Rescue One had 193 of the people from the Renegat safe and sound in the hold designed especially for that purpose. No member of Rescue One’s crew was allowed to mingle with the evacuees, because they had arrived from foldspace, with some kind of time differential.
Fleet rules: anyone who had gone through some kind of time change like that needed to be informed of that change slowly. In the past, the Fleet had simply told the ship’s crew of the change and expected them to deal with it. But most hadn’t dealt with it at all.
The Fleet had lost valuable crew that way. Some had quit, others had spiraled downward, losing their ability to function in any capacity that required them to travel in and out of foldspace.
Dauber was following regulations, even if Zarges wasn’t.
She watched the life raft leave the dying Renegat, moving much too slowly. At least all the other vessels were nowhere near the Renegat. The energy spikes were getting more and more frequent and erratic. Dauber didn’t like what she was seeing.
She had a hunch her team didn’t either, although they weren’t saying anything.
Everyone was waiting for that damn raft to get as far from the Renegat as possible.
When this was over, she would recommend to the brass that any future rafts built by the Fleet would have some kind of faster engine built in. She knew the rafts didn’t have them because they were designed to be operated from a distance or by injured survivors.
The Fleet had learned the hard way not to give the inexperienced a lot of choices.
But they had needed this choice right now.
“How far is safe for that life raft?” Ornitz asked, breaking the unofficial silence.
“Dunno,” Ribisi said, and if the Chief Engineer didn’t know, then no one did.
The life raft moved at an excruciating pace no matter what image Dauber looked at.
In two dimensions, the life raft seemed like a flat rectangle that wasn’t moving at all. In three dimensions it was a cube that barely inched forward—which she could only tell by the stars and planets behind it, appearing or disappearing as the cube blocked them.
Only in telemetry could she really see how well the life raft was gaining on Rescue One.
“At this pace, it’ll take them about twenty minutes,” Ullman said, but for whose benefit Dauber didn’t know. She had seen the timing, and she was sure the rest of this bridge crew could see it to.
Twenty excruciating minutes, as the energy spiked and whipped like something she had never seen before. Twenty excruciating minutes—
Ribisi cursed.
Dauber raised her head, searched the images for an anomaly, saw it on the sensors first. Something was actually registering as hot on the far end of the Renegat.
“Where is that coming from?” she asked Ribisi.
“The Renegat’s bridge,” he said.
And she knew. She knew it was all over.
She knew it before that heat image engulfed that entire part of the Renegat, before the anomaly became light on the two- and three-dimensional images she was monitoring, before the light spread outward like hands clawing at the edges of space.
Before the light engulfed the life raft, and it disappeared completely.
She should have ordered Rescue One to move even farther away from the anomaly, but she didn’t. Because she knew they would ignore that order, and it would be on the record, and she didn’t want their disobedience on the record.
Because they were waiting—hoping—Zarges would get out.
The light spread outward, the edges of it reaching—reaching—reaching—toward Rescue One, and then falling off, as if the edges couldn’t maintain.
The light faded and disappeared almost as a unit.
She glanced at the area where the Renegat had been, half-expecting to see debris, but she saw nothing. She also expected to see the edges of a foldspace opening, but she didn’t see that either.
It was as if the Renegat had not existed.
And there was no life raft.
She would have sunk into her chair, if she had allowed herself a captain’s chair. But these sorts of moments were exactly why she didn’t.
She had to be strong for her crew.
“Any sign of the life raft?” she asked, sounding much calmer than she expected. It sounded like she had had no emotional reaction at all.
“No.” Ullman’s voice shook. “They’re gone.”
“Did that explosion send them into foldspace?” Lauritz asked. She clearly wasn’t used to seeing other ships go into foldspace.
Dauber was. She knew the answer before Ullman spoke up.
A ship gave off a certain signature when it headed into foldspace. There was no signature here.
“No,” Ullman said. “The ship—the derelict ship, and the life raft. They’re gone.” Then he cleared his throat. “Destroyed.”
That last word reverberated into a growing silence.
That word would demoralize the crew if Dauber wasn’t careful. She had to handle it correctly, right now.
“One hundred and ninety-three survivors will arrive on this ship within the hour,” she said. “We need to prepare for them. We lost Raul Zarges, but these survivors have lost their home and their friends. Follow protocol. Let me handle the difficult information. And remember one thing.”
Everyone was looking at her, their expressions bland, but their eyes filled with anguish.
“We rescued one hundred ninety-three people we hadn’t even known about when we got out of bed this morning. One hundred ninety-three lives. Saved. Keep that close to your heart as you mourn Raul.”
She didn’t add the one thing that might also have given them comfort. He had chosen to go back, chosen to violate her orders, chosen to take a risk that she knew—they all probably knew—wouldn’t pay off.
If she had mentioned that, it would seem like she approved of his actions in retrospect, and she did not. His heroics cost her a good crewman and one life raft.
And would interrupt her sleep for years.
The bridge crew was still looking at her. For a moment, she wondered if those thoughts had floated across her face. But she hadn’t felt like she moved at all.
She took a deep breath and said
softly, “After we get the newcomers settled, we will plan a memorial for Raul. But we have work to do first.”
That settled it. Heads bent, fingers moved, Lauritz left the bridge to coordinate the arrival of the survivors of the Renegat.
And Dauber wished for a big, welcoming captain’s chair, to enfold her and support her, just for a few minutes.
But she didn’t have one. So she stood, and moved through the rest of her day.
Just like she was supposed to.
Part Thirty
Preparing for Battle
100 Years Ago
The Renegat
Crowe stood in the center of a variety of floating screens of all sizes, monitoring half a dozen things, and he had to force himself to concentrate. He had finally decided that keeping track of the people outside of engineering was as important as all of the other tasks he was working on.
The crew in engineering itself were working hard, keeping their heads down. He would occasionally lift his out of the circle of screens to make sure that no one was upset or collapsing under the stress.
Because the stress was massive. Too many crises all at once. Since he was monitoring the environmental system, he noted that the oxygen usage in engineering had gone up slightly, even though the number of crew members in engineering had gone down.
Everyone was breathing a little too much, trying to calm down.
There was also a slight smell, a funk of human body odor and stale sweat that the environmental system couldn’t overcome. It was a sign, he knew, that everyone was as terrified as he was, and they were doing their best to overcome it all.
He was monitoring the environmental systems for a variety of things, not just oxygen usage. He could see life forms on the rudimentary environmental controls. The environmental controls automatically showed life signs for anyone with engineering access, so that an engineer (or an upper level crew member) could figure out exactly how much stress on the system the people in a given room were causing.
He could dig into other systems, access the crew identifications, since the ship monitored where everyone was at all times. But that would mean he would have to access systems that would flag his activity to the bridge. He could shut off the flag, but even that would call attention to itself.
He didn’t want to do that. He didn’t want Preemas—or someone who still allowed Preemas to tell them what to do—to know what Crowe was working on.
According to the environmental logs, the systems were working well in most parts of the ship. The only exception was the bridge, where that extra energy he had noted from the Scrapheap seemed to have dried the air more than it should have.
He couldn’t dig in and see what caused that, and from what he could tell by crew placement, no one was working on that, either. Some of the bridge crew had left the bridge. A couple of people were heading for the mess.
They weren’t the only ones moving. The entire crew seemed to be shifting positions all over the ship. He hadn’t heard any announcements from Preemas, so either word was getting out in a different way, or everyone was on edge because they were here, at the Scrapheap.
Some crew members were going back to their cabins in the middle of a workday. Still others had gone to the bridge.
And then there was the trip one person was taking with a gurney toward the med bay.
Crowe couldn’t get an exact reading on who that was without revealing himself. If he asked for too much information from the systems, someone who was good with watching what others did—just like he was—would be able to figure out what he was thinking. More or less, anyway. If they were organized enough to watch everything.
Otherwise, nothing had changed. He had his relatively small crew monitor the Scrapheap to make sure that its energy levels weren’t changing. He also had Tosidis keep an eye on the communications anacapa, and Willoughby was watching the bridge anacapa, as well as the bridge itself. The vibrations were continuing, and that made Crowe nervous.
Bakhr had said they couldn’t move far enough away in this solar system to avoid that energy. Crowe was trying to see if Bakhr’s experience from that past Scrapheap applied to this one.
He was having trouble concentrating, though.
He hadn’t heard from Stephanos. And he had no idea why. He was beginning to become convinced that he had been played for a fool. They wanted him to think that Stephanos had come back to his side, but why?
The answer came just a few minutes later. The crew members he was monitoring on the bridge had left the bridge en masse. Only two people remained on the bridge, which startled and alarmed him. A ship this size needed a full crew compliment on the bridge, no matter what was going on.
But apparently the idiot captain didn’t think so.
Everyone else was heading out of the bridge, taking the elevators down, and Crowe knew where they were going: they were going to engineering.
“Can we see what’s going on with the main anacapa drive?” he asked Willoughby.
She was shaking her head. He had no idea if she saw the bridge crew heading this way, but he suspected she did.
“No one seems to have made any change,” she said. “It’s like they’ve forgotten they’re on a ship at all.”
He felt cold. He had that sense as well, and he wasn’t sure why.
But since the bridge crew was mostly off the bridge, Crowe was going to risk figuring out who was where.
He went into the main system and monitored each crew member individually.
The two people on the bridge were Titus M’Ghan and Yulia Colvin, neither of whom had engineering training. M’Ghan was a terrible pilot, whom Crowe avoided at all times and had hoped would leave the ship at Sector Base Z. Of course, that hadn’t happened.
Colvin meant well, but had never risen to the level of competence that should have allowed her to command a runabout let alone run the bridge on an SC-Class vessel.
That alarmed the hell out of Crowe. They wouldn’t know what to do if there was some kind of energy flare from the Scrapheap or if the anacapa started to thrust the ship back into foldspace.
Preemas was leading most of the bridge crew, several security officers, and a few crew members Crowe had had no interaction with toward the elevators.
Crowe’s mouth went dry. He felt lightheaded, then realized he wasn’t breathing.
It had finally come to this. And he had received no other warning from Stephanos.
But, considering who the two crew members left on the bridge were, Crowe didn’t have to worry about subtleties anymore. He entered the main system, moved all its information onto yet another screen, made it float in front of him at eye level, and then turned on the visual.
Preemas stood in front of the bridge-level elevator, with almost twenty people around him, and more on the way. Preemas wore two laser rifles, and some kind of bandolier with small charges packed in it. He had a laser pistol on each hip, and he held another laser pistol in his right hand. He was gesturing with it, the idiot.
The lightheadedness returned, along with an adrenaline spike that made it feel as if Crowe’s innards were trying to slam through his ribs. It was one thing to know that he and the captain were at odds; it was another to see the captain and the small army he had assembled prepare to march on engineering.
“You seeing this?” Crowe asked Willoughby, deciding not to be specific.
“Something with the anacapa?” she asked, which meant she hadn’t noted what Preemas was doing.
“The captain,” Crowe said.
“I see it,” said Tosidis.
“Me, too,” said Bakhr.
The remaining engineering crew chimed in one by one, all of them monitoring what was going on. So Crowe enlarged his various screens, and placed them around the main part of engineering, so that everyone could see in great detail what they faced.
He counted a dozen laser rifles, with two others besides Preemas carrying two. A few of the people with laser rifles looked uncomfortable with them. Everyone who was wi
th Preemas had at least one laser pistol. And one other person carried a bandolier just like Preemas was doing.
Crowe scanned the faces, and he also looked at the computerized identifications. No Stephanos. She wasn’t one of the two people left on the bridge either.
He didn’t like what he was thinking. He called up another small screen just as Tosidis said, “Sir, you see those shape charges?”
“I do,” Crowe said, trying to find the gurney on his smaller screen.
“If they use them all—”
“We have no ship left,” Crowe said. The gurney had entered the med bay.
“They wouldn’t do that, would they?” asked Bakhr.
“I wouldn’t have thought that so many armed crew members would be willing to storm engineering,” Crowe said, and immediately regretted it. These people didn’t need his anger; they needed him to guide them.
But he was distracted, because the med bay had only one other life form in it. When he turned on the identification, the computer told him the person there was Ibori, not Stephanos.
Crowe didn’t go to a visual now. He couldn’t quite bear it. And he didn’t have time to think about it, not with Preemas and his people—his people, who would have thought that?—getting on the elevator to engineering.
Crowe could trap them in the elevator. But they would probably try shooting their way out. And that would do even more damage than attacking the doors of engineering—provided they only used one or two of those shape charges, not the entire lot.
He couldn’t think about Stephanos right now. Or what might happen with the anacapa. He had to deal with the nearly two dozen armed people heading here.
Preemas was going to try to break in, and do it physically. Crowe had expected that, but had hoped Preemas wasn’t going to do it.
At least, Crowe had prepared.
He shut down the feed from the med bay, but kept the rest of the ship information live. He just made it smaller.
The Renegat Page 59