She swallowed, knowing she wouldn’t be able to pull more information out of him.
She clenched her hands into fists, then released them, willing herself to remain calm somehow.
“Now,” he said in that annoyingly reassuring tone, “would you like to share a room or have a private room? We have both available.”
He sounded like the concierge at a hotel, not a crew member on a Fleet vessel. And how could a functioning vessel have rooms available? What was that about? Especially a choice of rooms?
She opened her mouth to ask again, and then realized that wouldn’t work. He would tell her to wait in that annoyingly reassuring voice, designed to sooth her fractured nerves and the damn calmness was just making her feel worse.
Or maybe she would feel worse anyway, no matter what he said and how he said it. She had suppressed her emotions so much, just trying to get through, and now they threatened to engulf her.
He was watching her with a patience she could barely understand. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the others in line behind her shifting. They were probably as distraught and restless as she had been, and she was holding them up by being indecisive.
If she shared a room, then she would have someone to talk to. The downside of that, though, was that someone, whoever it might be, might want her to act like the leader everyone had thought she was.
She couldn’t take more pressure. Not right now. Particularly after she had failed so very badly, nearly destroying the ship on the journey home.
“Private.” The word croaked out of her.
If she had a private room, she could shower and sleep and eat whenever she wanted to. She could cry, maybe. Finally. She could sit there and shake. She could have a reaction that might let out the tension.
“Wonderful,” he said. “You’ll head to room 1145, down this corridor. A word of warning: the door has a standard lock, not something coded. We’ll give you a code after we see how the arrangements work.”
“How the arrangements work?” she repeated, unable to keep the panic out of her voice.
He gave her a soothing smile—or maybe something he intended to be a soothing smile. “You might think you want privacy, but after a few hours, you might change your mind.”
“Oh,” she said, and felt the fury rise. She really wanted answers.
“Room 1145,” he said again, and this time she heard something slightly different in his voice. He was pushing her, trying to make her move.
She bit back anger and nodded. Then she started down the corridor.
Room 1145. Her next destination on this never-ending trip.
Part Thirty-Four
Aftermath
100 Years Ago
The Renegat
Breaux, Atwater, and six other people who had moved from Sector Base Z to the Renegat sat in the secondary mess, with the lights off and the doors closed. Atwater had brought them here, in the silence. No one used the secondary mess. The primary mess was the domain of Danika Newark, the former first officer turned chef, and everyone preferred to eat there.
Only Atwater and Breaux had weapons—the laser pistols that Preemas had given them. Those weapons were sitting on a long table in the middle of the room, and the eight people in that room were staring at them, as if the weapons were at fault for the situation they found themselves in.
Atwater had contacted all of them on the way here, asking them to join him. He wasn’t doing anything else, wasn’t building a coalition, wasn’t gathering supporters of Captain Preemas or First Officer Crowe.
The eight had hidden inside the mess for hours now. No one had come for them. No one had asked about them. No one even seemed to know they were here.
Breaux wanted to contact the bridge, just so that she knew what was going on. She hated not knowing anything.
It was quiet here, and somehow she thought that was a bad sign.
She ran her finger along the laser pistol that Preemas had given her. The thing terrified her. Using it against her colleagues terrified her more.
Atwater walked over to the doors. They were sealed shut. Breaux had done that after they all arrived. She had done it without asking. She wanted to be safe, whatever that meant.
She had never really been in a situation like this before, where her fate was so intimately tied to what other people were doing. It felt odd to her. It felt wrong.
“You going to use that?” Gary Trubetor asked, nodding toward the pistol. He was short, with hair that he seemed to shave to stubble every day, and a tiny little beard that formed a triangle under his lower lip.
She hadn’t known him on Sector Base Z. She had seen him around the Renegat, but she hadn’t really talked to him here, either.
He made her uncomfortable for reasons she didn’t want to analyze.
Breaux moved her hand away from the pistol. She looked at it as if it were the enemy, not the situation itself.
“I don’t know how,” she said. Then she looked up at him.
Everyone was watching them, including Atwater.
“Do you know how?” she asked Trubetor.
“I’ve had a little training,” he said. “You want to give me that? I’ll guard the door.”
“Against whom?” she asked. “Who are we fighting?”
Trubetor shifted, then glanced at the woman standing beside him. Breaux hadn’t caught her name. Sally or Susan or something plain. Breaux hadn’t seen the woman before either, but Atwater seemed to know all of them, everyone who had left Sector Base Z.
The woman—Susan or Sally or whatever—looked down, as if she didn’t want to be responsible for answering that question. A few of the others were watching Breaux, only to look away when she met their gaze.
“I suppose we’ll have to choose a side,” Trubetor said quietly.
“And how do we do that?” Breaux asked. “The captain wants us to shoot people. The first officer wants to take over the ship.”
She reached toward the pistol again, then pulled her hand back as if the very air around the weapon was hot.
“I don’t want to do either of those things,” she said. “I don’t want to shoot anyone. I don’t want to fight. I didn’t sign up for this.”
There. Finally. She had voiced the thought that had been rattling around her head for hours, maybe days.
One of the men turned away, wiping at his face as if her words had physically hurt him. The Susan-Sally woman bit her lower lip, keeping her head down.
Atwater rocked back to his heels, as if Breaux’s words surprised him.
They shouldn’t have. He had let her know he felt the same way.
As they hurried to the mess, he had said ever so quietly, I don’t think they’ll find us here.
Didn’t that imply that he too did not want to get involved?
“Well, we can’t stay here forever,” Trubetor said. “We’re going to have to leave at some point.”
“Why?” The Susan-Sally woman spoke in a near whisper.
When no one answered her, she looked up. Her lower lashes were spiky, as if they had been coated with tears.
“I mean,” she said, “we have enough food to survive for weeks, and there’s a bathroom on the other side of the kitchen. The cushions in the booths are soft enough to sleep on.”
“We hide for weeks?” Trubetor asked. “Are you nuts? This is a crisis, here. We should do something.”
Breaux nodded. She agreed. They should do something. But there was nothing to do. Not now. The crisis was here, and it was forcing them to pick sides.
If they were going to do something, they should have done it weeks ago, when they joined the ship. When they—she, really—realized just what a disaster this ship was.
Only she had been flattered by the captain’s attention. She had felt honored that he asked her to find the old maps so that the Renegat could complete the mission.
Breaux had completely overlooked the turmoil, figuring it would sort itself out, telling herself that because she had never served on a
ship before, she had no idea how the inner politics worked, how all ships probably seemed dysfunctional from the inside out.
“Maybe they’ll all just kill each other, and we won’t have to worry about it.” That from Leena Capacete. She was a thin, dark-haired woman who always seemed to have a perpetual frown on her face.
Atwater whirled on her. “And then what would we do?” His voice had more anger in it than Breaux expected. “Do you know how to operate this ship? Because I sure as hell don’t. I don’t know how to do much of anything here. This thing is huge, and powerful, and everyone who knows what they’re doing seems bent on fighting each other.”
That anger had dissipated by the time he reached the end of his speech. He raised his eyes toward Breaux, as if he expected her to have answers.
She didn’t have answers. How could she have answers? He was the one who brought them here. He was the one who had gotten them away from the fighting, and for that she was really grateful. But she wasn’t sure what to do next, if anything.
“If only we could go home,” said Susan-Sally, still not looking up. “We could just take one of the small ships, and go back.”
“A ship with an anacapa drive?” Trubetor asked. “Because that’s what we would need.”
“Smaller ships don’t have anacapa drives,” Atwater said. “The Fleet discovered that was too dangerous. People were using the ships without training on the drive, not to mention the kind of pull one of those drives has on the ship itself. Some of the ships never made it out of foldspace.”
His words echoed in the large room. Never made it out of foldspace. Everyone in this situation—all eight of them—had known getting stuck in foldspace was a risk. Apparently, they had all accepted that risk, just like Breaux had.
But they had thought that getting stuck was the big risk, not this civil war that they found themselves in the middle of.
“Does anyone here even know how to do anything like pilot a ship?” Susan-Sally-Whatever asked. She finally raised her gaze upwards, looking around at the seven serious faces surrounding her.
Breaux’s cheeks grew warm. Except for short hops into orbit around Sector Base Z, she hadn’t even been on board a ship before volunteering to serve on the Renegat. The idea of piloting one, even on autopilot, made her really nervous.
A couple of people shook their heads slightly, as if shaking them hard would attract attention. Trubetor focused on Breaux, as if he expected her to say that she had flown a ship before.
She shrugged at him.
Then he looked at Atwater, who hadn’t moved at all.
“Have you flown a ship before?” Trubetor asked.
“It doesn’t matter if I have or not,” Atwater said. “Where would I pilot to? I’m not expert enough to take us in and out of foldspace repeatedly, particularly in a small ship.”
“If the small ships on the Renegat even have anacapa drives,” Susan-Sally Whatever said. “I don’t think they do. I really don’t.”
“You’re forgetting something.” Capacete spoke very softly, yet her words stopped the conversation. She took the time to turn her head, meeting everyone’s gaze, and saving Atwater for last.
“I’m sure we’re forgetting a lot of things,” he said, sounding irritated. Breaux didn’t want him to be irritated. She didn’t want any more turmoil, from anyone, anywhere. “What, in particular, are you thinking of?”
“The Scrapheap,” Capacete said. “It’s filled with old ships.”
“Thousands of years old,” Breaux blurted. “I wouldn’t get on one of those, ever. Even if we thought it was in perfect shape, and how would we know? I mean, do we have any engineers in this room? Do we?”
No one responded. Susan-Sally looked down. Capacete raised her chin slightly, a half smile on her face, as if she felt good about provoking Breaux.
“This talk about us piloting a ship,” Breaux said, “it’s just talk. We need all those fighting people. We can’t do this without them. We’re out of our element here.”
She was breathing harder than she wanted to be. She was more upset than she wanted to be. In her imagination, she was a strong woman who could do anything.
That imagination had brought her to the Renegat. That imagination had led her to believe she could handle anything.
But she couldn’t handle a small ship on her own, let alone a large one.
“You’re saying we should wait for the outcome of the fight,” Susan-Sally said.
Breaux nodded.
“How are we going to know that it’s over?” Trubetor asked. “We going to send out a message saying we’ve been hiding while you people settle your problems, now welcome us back into the fold?”
“That’s not such a bad idea,” Atwater said. “It’s not our fight, after all.”
“We could make it our fight,” said that woman whose name Breaux never learned.
“That’s what the captain wanted us to do,” Breaux said quietly.
“And what’s he going to do to us when he realizes that we didn’t help with either side?” Trubetor asked. “He strikes me as a very vindictive man.”
Breaux had to keep herself from nodding at that. If she was being honest with herself, and apparently, that was what she was doing now, then Preemas hadn’t seemed very stable to her either.
But Crowe had, and he was the one who started this crisis.
Or so Preemas had said.
“I wish we could contact the bridge,” she said.
“I’m sure there’s a way,” Atwater said. “Probably from the kitchen area.”
He looked at her as if he expected her to do it.
“The captain was going to leave the bridge, right?” she asked Atwater. “I mean, that was why he had all the weapons.”
“I say we wait,” Susan-Sally said.
“I say we leave this place now and pick our side,” Trubetor said.
“And I say we find a ship and a pilot and get the hell out of here,” Capacete said. “We don’t owe these crazy people anything.”
Two of the others, the ones Breaux didn’t know at all, nodded at that.
“There have to be habitable planets in this area,” one of the others, yet another woman, said. “I mean, the Fleet wouldn’t have set up a Scrapheap here otherwise.”
“Some planet around here might have been habitable thousands of years ago, Žofka,” Atwater said, “but who knows what has happened in the meantime.”
Žofka rubbed her hands together as if she was trying to twist the fingers off. She clearly didn’t like the uncertainty any more than Breaux did.
“We can search, though, right?” Žofka asked. “And if we find one, we can go there in a small ship on autopilot. That wouldn’t take any anacapa work at all.”
“And who knows what we’ll find,” Susan-Sally said. “Civilizations hostile to outsiders, or people so advanced they might not even recognize us.”
“Or some culture that has never even thought of space travel before,” said Vladislav Shelstein. His lower lip was cracked and bleeding. As she watched, he chewed on it, showing just how nervous he was too.
“Still,” Capacete said. “It’s an option. It’ll get us off this ship.”
“I think we should consider it,” Trubetor said.
Breaux looked at Atwater. For some reason, she expected him to be sensible. Rational. He would come up with the right answer.
He gave her a sheepish half smile, one that held no amusement at all. Then he shrugged.
“It’s an option,” he said quietly. “At least we’re finding a few. I thought we had none when we came to the mess.”
Breaux’s heart sank. She thought he had more of a plan than that when he brought them here. Instead, he had been fleeing Preemas and his decision to use weapons just like she had.
Then she realized everyone was looking at her. They had done that a lot in this conversation. Did they think she was the one in charge? Not Atwater?
Even he was looking at her, expecting her to make some s
ort of decision.
How could she without knowing what was happening outside those doors? She needed to know if there was a big battle, if anyone survived, or if those “options” Atwater had mentioned were simply wishful thinking.
Maybe she was the one in charge of this little band. No one else seemed to be making the hard decisions.
And she wasn’t sure she was up to them either.
“Let’s give it a few hours,” she said. “Let’s see if this crazy situation resolves itself.”
“And if it doesn’t?” Trubetor asked her.
She was right. Everyone was thinking she was in charge. They were all still staring at her.
“We’ll pick an option,” she said. “Based on what we know at that point.”
If they knew anything at all.
The Renegat
Ibori actually had to jog to keep up with the gurneys. They were moving at a rapid pace. He had no idea they had such speed built into them.
His heart was pounding. He wasn’t used to moving this fast. He had never used the treadmills that were recommended to the crew so that they could stay in shape. He always figured walking the corridors was enough.
He had been wrong.
The gurneys wound their way through a path he almost didn’t recognize. They weren’t heading to the bridge, which was what he expected. It took him several minutes to realize they were going toward engineering.
His heart sank. He did not want to see his engineering colleagues dead.
But there were more gurneys than colleagues, so he assumed that some of the people Preemas had brought with him were also dead or dying.
Ibori’s lower lip trembled. He tried not to think about all of the implications of that.
He also didn’t like the fact that he was the only person in these corridors. Was that because everyone else had been in the battle? Or because everyone was in hiding? Had he missed a verbal order from Preemas to the entire crew, to stay in their quarters or to shelter in place?
Ibori could have, he supposed, considering the fact that he had been in the med bay. Sometimes shipwide announcements were muted there so that patients could rest. He hadn’t seen any patients, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t any.
The Renegat Page 64