He ended up with a muddy reddish orange that tended toward black in some parts. There were too many colors, too many different kinds of energy, some he didn’t even recognize.
He had no idea how he was going to isolate them. This was the kind of work that would take months—separating the energy strands, figuring out which one was doing what—and finally determining which one was interfering with the anacapa drives.
The work would also take an expert, like Stephanos. No one else knew the drives like she did, not deep down. Except maybe that Atwater kid, even though he had no hands-on experience. He did understand the theory, maybe better than Crowe himself.
If theory was all Crowe could get, he would take theory.
But before he tried to track down Atwater, he would see if his team of two was making any headway on the bridge.
He contacted Tosidis, and actually put him on a screen. Not because Crowe needed to see Tosidis, but because that gave Crowe an excuse to see the bridge.
Tosidis was standing near the captain’s chair. Behind him, the ready room door stood open, but Crowe couldn’t see inside, not from the screen’s angle.
Tosidis looked gray. He hadn’t looked good after the attack, but he looked worse now. He looked like he was a few days from death himself.
“It’s bad up here, sir,” he said, his voice shaking. “You have no idea.”
Whatever Crowe expected, it hadn’t been that. He had hoped to find Tosidis and Bakhr working on the anacapa drive.
Crowe didn’t ask to see the rest of the bridge. He called it up on a different screen and scanned. The bridge was mostly empty except for two, Yulia Colvin and Titus M’Ghan, who looked as sickly as Tosidis did.
Bakhr was standing near the empty navigator’s console. He was wearing gloves, and gingerly working a screen in front of him, one that Crowe couldn’t see.
Two laser pistols sat on top of another console, and a laser rifle littered the floor near the ready room door.
The screens on the bridge were off, and the rest of the consoles were unmanned.
“She died up here,” Tosidis said. “After she touched the anacapa.”
Crowe had been about to ask who she was, then realized the rest of what Tosidis had said had answered his question. She. Stephanos.
Colvin, standing off to the side as if she didn’t really want to be part of this conversation or any conversation really, gripped her hands tightly in front of her.
“She bled everywhere,” Colvin said, voice shaking. It was as if Stephanos were still on the bridge. “There’s a stain near the anacapa.”
“It’s too big to call a stain,” M’Ghan muttered. His face was squinched up into a scowl of disgust.
Colvin continued as if he hadn’t spoken at all. “Her face just collapsed in on itself. She didn’t even look like herself anymore.”
“After she touched the anacapa?” Crowe asked. He wasn’t sure who he was asking. Tosidis looked like he was about to be ill. The other two seemed to have gone past looking ill into being in some kind of shock.
Crowe was missing a small section of the bridge from his screen, and he hoped that was where Bakhr was.
“I wasn’t watching her closely,” M’Ghan said. “But she was working over there, and then there was this big kerfuffle, and Ibori was helping her and the captain, he didn’t think anything was wrong…”
M’Ghan’s voice trailed off, and he shook his head, as if he was trying to get the images out of it.
“What did the captain do?” Crowe asked.
“He was more concerned with what you were doing,” M’Ghan said. “He thought you rigged the anacapa to hurt her.”
Crowe let out a small breath of surprise. He had? He didn’t know anyone who could manipulate an anacapa like that. Not even Stephanos.
“A lot of the crew believed him,” Colvin said.
“But you didn’t?” Crowe asked.
She shrugged one shoulder, and looked down. He took that to mean yes, she had believed it.
“Ask India Romano about it,” M’Ghan said. “She’s the one who closed the anacapa container lid.”
Crowe blinked. Romano? She had moved from…something intellectual to security over his objections. She had never seemed like the brightest person he had encountered.
And unless he was mistaken, she was the one who had shot first after Preemas had died.
He didn’t tell the two remaining crew members on the bridge that he couldn’t ask Romano. She was unconscious.
“Sir?” Bakhr’s voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. Crowe didn’t want to move his view of the bridge, so he opened a smaller second screen near the first. The two screens side by side made it look like Bakhr was standing in a room by himself.
In reality, he was working one of the consoles that Crowe usually preferred. It had a lot of easy-access scientific information, all set-up to appear as screens with a touch.
“It feels really odd up here,” Bakhr said. “Like the air is actually alive.”
Colvin and M’Ghan were nodding.
“It feels to me like I’m being pricked by a hundred needles,” Tosidis said.
That was when Crowe realized that Tosidis was nowhere near the anacapa drive, even though monitoring the drive was the reason he had been sent up to the bridge.
“Have you looked at the anacapa?” Crowe asked Tosidis.
Tosidis shook his head, very slowly. “After what happened to Stephanos, I wasn’t sure I should touch the container.”
“Yet Romano did,” Crowe said, trying not to let too much of his irritation out.
“Yeah.” Tosidis said, as if that didn’t really matter to him, as if he wanted to be anywhere else.
“I need to know what’s happening with the drive,” Crowe said. No one had time to be delicate. Not right now. Because delicate could get them all killed.
“Yes, sir,” Tosidis said, but didn’t move.
Bakhr’s mouth had formed a thin line, as if he were keeping words back, words he really wanted to say.
“I’d check it for you, sir,” Bakhr said, “but I’m trying to sort out these energy signatures. I’ve never seen so many. They’re intertwined, as if they were different kinds of vines that had grown together over time.”
“Don’t bother,” Crowe said. “I’ll handle those.”
“Sir,” Bakhr said quietly, as if they shared a private conversation rather than one overheard by the three others on the bridge. “This isn’t like anything I’ve ever seen.”
“I thought you said it was similar to what happened when you were growing up,” Crowe said.
“Similar, yes,” Bakhr said. “But a thousand times more intense. This Scrapheap is so old, and so many ships inside have probably decayed, not to mention all the different energies have some kind of impact on each other. This is…I don’t think it’s something the Renegat can just deal with, sir. I think we’re going to have to do something.”
Crowe didn’t answer that, because he didn’t have an answer for that. He knew they had to do something. He just didn’t know what it was.
“Figure out if using the anacapa to get the hell out of here would be worse than not using it,” Crowe asked, but even as the words left his mouth, he wondered if he was asking the impossible. They had no idea what these energy signatures were or what was causing them.
He had no idea if anyone had even seen anything like this before. He did know that he needed time to solve this, and he wasn’t sure he had time.
“None of us want to get near the anacapa, sir,” Bakhr said. “That’s why I’m working here. I’m trying to see what I can through the instruments.”
Crowe felt a surge of exhausted anger run through him. Did he have to do everything? Was this entire ship incompetent?
Then he blinked, remembered the answer. Yes. Yes, it was. Incompetent, expendable, useless.
“It’s worse near the anacapa,” Tosidis said. “That alive feeling in the air? If I had to say what it was,
sir, I’d say that it’s just like the communications anacapa. The air is vibrating, sir.”
Crowe raised his head, the words finally getting through to him. The air was vibrating, which meant the environmental system was vibrating, which meant that the entire ship was probably vibrating.
“As if we’re under attack,” he muttered.
“Sir?” Bakhr asked, followed only a fraction of a second later by Tosidis. The other two crew members were frowning.
Crowe started, “Give me the status of the…” and then he realized he could figure things out faster himself. He switched one of the screens from the inside of the ship to the outside, looking at the shields.
The shields were down.
Everyone had been so focused on the internal conflict on the Renegat that they had forgotten to deal with the external threat. Even Stephanos hadn’t thought to check what was going on with the ship’s exterior—although Crowe didn’t know that for a fact. She might have died before she could implement anything.
He let his mind skitter past her name, not wanting to think about the details he had just learned about her death. Instead, he double-checked the shields, making certain they were in working order.
Then he raised them, and reinforced them, as if the Renegat was taking on heavy enemy fire.
“Something changed,” Willoughby said from across engineering. “The communications anacapa is no longer vibrating.”
Crowe’s arms, legs, and face ached. Anywhere he had exposed skin actually hurt, but the hurt was different than the tingle had been. The hurt was apparently what he had been feeling underneath that tingle, blocking out the hurt because it had been too much to deal with.
He rubbed a hand over his arms, feeling goosebumps beneath his palm. As he glanced around engineering, he saw several of the others doing the same thing.
“Sir?” Bakhr was speaking from the bridge. “The energy signatures have changed. I’m only reading a few, and they are very weak.”
“I put up the shields,” Crowe said.
Tosidis let out a shaky laugh. “Who would have expected it to be so easy?” he asked.
“It’s not easy,” Crowe snapped. “Now we have to figure out if all of that energy damaged our anacapa drives, including the backup. And we have to do it without our best person.”
His voice wobbled a bit. He didn’t want it to. He wished the wobble away.
“Are we going to proceed to the mission, then, sir?” Tosidis asked.
Crowe frowned. The Scrapheap. Discovering who, if anyone, had raided it. What the Fleet should do, if anything. If the warships were taken. If they even existed.
The mission. It seemed so unimportant and so far away.
“Anacapas first,” he said. The mission wouldn’t matter if they couldn’t get back to or communicate with the Fleet.
Crowe didn’t want to think that the Renegat might be stranded here, but he was already thinking it. And the thought made him nervous because it felt true.
Stranded here, with potentially damaged anacapa drives, and a rebellious crew. A dead captain, injured fighters, and a good three-quarters of the crew who had no idea at all about what had just happened.
He was exhausted, but he couldn’t quit. Not now. He was still going to have to compartmentalize, still going to have to figure out how to deal with the crew, while inspecting the anacapa drives, while figuring out what, exactly, killed Stephanos, while dealing with the energy signatures from the Scrapheap itself.
He let out a long breath. He was going to have to take it all one crisis at a time.
Because he couldn’t do it any other way. He was already overwhelmed. If he thought too much about the odds of his success—of their success—he would give up.
They all would.
And he couldn’t let that happen.
Part Thirty-Three
Somewhere New
Now
The Aizsargs
It took two more hours before Rescue One docked inside the Aizsargs. The fact that the rescue ship could easily dock inside the Aizsargs told Serpell just how large the Aizsargs was. It was one of the largest DV vessels, which meant it had to be brand-new.
Although the Aizsargs didn’t seem new. As she, and the rest of the survivors, were led off Rescue One into a section of the docking bay, she noted areas that seemed worn, items stored along walls not built for storage. The Aizsargs looked like a well-used vessel that had run more than its share of missions.
Maybe that was how they knew how to funnel the survivors along one side of the docking bay, away from most of the equipment. An opaque screen had been set up on one side, blocking any view of the other ships in the bay.
Which made sense to her, considering that the crew of the Aizsargs often had no idea who they were rescuing. They seemed to know about the Renegat, so they should have trusted the crew here.
So maybe she had been observing standard procedure.
She didn’t know that, considering she never served in the administrative capacity of a ship. She usually hid in her research area—or she had until this horrid horrid trip back to the Fleet.
She had been among the first people to leave Rescue One. She had lost track of Kabac, which didn’t break her heart. She was happy he had survived, but she didn’t want him to be her survival buddy, somehow becoming close to him because they were the only two left who understood how bad it had been on that bridge.
The entire remaining crew of the Renegat trudged through the protected area, toward some double doors. This time, there was no overall announcement, and there still weren’t any people. She was beginning to get terrified all over again.
What if they really weren’t on a Fleet ship? What if they were on something that looked like a Fleet ship?
And did the kind of ship matter, really, considering she was breathing real air and walking in real gravity and wearing a robe that was soft against her skin? She had none of that on the Renegat. Given the condition of her environmental suit, she probably would have been dead by now.
She shuddered at the very thought, but still felt the terror lurking underneath. She had no idea where she was or what she was supposed to do. She had no vision of her future at all.
She barely understood her present.
She was the thirteenth person through the double doors. They opened into a gray corridor that looked like it might have been made out of nanobits, but she wasn’t certain. The gray material glistened in a muted yellow-white light that she had never seen in a Fleet vessel before.
There were no control panels on the walls, and no decoration either. Either the ship was very minimal or this section had been stripped down.
Up ahead, the first person off Rescue One, a person who was still wearing the robe’s hood, stopped. Serpell leaned to the left and saw that person was talking to someone in a gray uniform with silver accents. Serpell had never seen that particular uniform before, although it was similar to other uniforms she’d seen throughout the Fleet.
Her mouth was dry, even though she had drunk four bottles of water on Rescue One. And that thought alerted her to the fact that she needed facilities again.
The person in the uniform—whose gender Serpell couldn’t yet determine—smiled and swept an arm toward a different corridor. The first person off Rescue One trudged in that direction, and the next person stopped there.
The others hung back. Serpell couldn’t tell if they were encouraged to stand back or if they wanted to.
The survivors of the Renegat seemed lost in their own minds right now, maybe too overwhelmed to do much more than continue forward.
She wanted to run forward, shoving the others out of the way, as she got wherever it was the crew of the Aizsargs was going to take them. She wanted to know what was next, not stand in yet another line, letting people decide for her.
It was probably that impulse, which she recognized from the first few days after they had left the Scrapheap, that had probably put her in charge of the Renegat in the first plac
e.
She had learned after dealing with India to ask questions, to push forward, to get the news now rather than wait for someone to deign to tell her.
When Serpell reached the front of the line, she realized that the person before her was male, someone who had grown up on ships and was thin and wispy from living in artificial gravity and, perhaps, preferring zero-G.
He had a smooth face, dark eyes, and short hair. His uniform was clean—as it should have been. So was his face, and so were his fingernails. She envied all of that, and wished—hoped—she would get a chance to clean up as well.
He had a nice smile.
“Welcome,” he said. “I’m Emile Parizo. I’m going to give you a room assignment and directions. You’ll be able to clean up and rest. There will be food in your room as well.”
“And then what?” she asked. As the words came out, she realized she was being rude. She hadn’t even introduced herself. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m Raina Serpell.”
“Nice to meet you, Raina,” he said, and he didn’t ask her rank, which was good, because she really didn’t have one, at least as far as anyone here understood. Or so she assumed, since he hadn’t given her his rank either.
If he had one.
“To answer your question,” he said without a change of inflection in his voice, as if her rudeness hadn’t bothered him at all, “we will have an overall meeting once everyone is settled and refreshed. We’re thinking that won’t be for at least twelve hours, giving you time to sleep.”
She didn’t want to sleep. She needed answers first. But she was at the mercy of the people here.
“At least tell me where we ended up. How you found us. What—”
“Everyone wants to know those things,” he said. “We’ll tell the entire group when we have the meeting. Until then, take care of yourself and tend to your own needs.”
The Renegat Page 63