The Renegat

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  He hadn’t gone into the section for living people, after all.

  The thought made those tears he had suppressed rise to the surface. He was overwhelmed. This was the problem that had moved him from ship to ship.

  Too sensitive for his assignments, one of his captains had said, with great disapproval. Ibori had tended to one of his colleague’s feelings after the captain had yelled at him, and the captain hadn’t been appreciative.

  There had always been reasons that Ibori could cite for the reprimands he got, blame he could give his superior officers.

  But he was beginning to think they were right. Stephanos’s death had left him so deeply shaken that he wasn’t sure if he was going to be useful to anyone for anything.

  He could veer off and go to his cabin. It was small and out of the way and no one would find him there for some time, maybe a day or two.

  By then, this crisis might be over.

  But he couldn’t imagine himself there, hiding and wondering what the hell was actually going on.

  Despite his “sensitivity,” he was a doer. He had to be in the middle of things. He had to participate. He was built that way too.

  A small equipment chute opened at the end of one of the corridors. The gurneys tilted sideways and entered it one by one.

  He couldn’t go that way even if he wanted to. The chute wasn’t much wider than the gurneys themselves. Besides, he didn’t want to be jammed in there with the equipment.

  He headed to the nearby elevators, knowing this was his chance to go to his quarters, to avoid whatever was going on.

  But he also knew where that small equipment chute opened, and it confirmed his hunch: everything was heading to engineering.

  And now he couldn’t stop.

  The elevators—all of them—opened for him, which freaked him out more than he wanted to admit. He wasn’t sure he had ever seen that. The elevators usually had someone else waiting for them somewhere. That was why he often used the tunnels and chutes, going down the ladders rather than waiting for an elevator to reach him.

  He almost pivoted and went to the nearby crew ladder, but he didn’t. He got on the nearest elevator and rode it down to engineering, half-hoping his hunch had been wrong.

  Of course, it wasn’t. The elevator doors opened to reveal a parade of gurneys floating past.

  His stomach lurched. He stood in the elevator long enough for the doors to start to close. He had to use an arm to keep them open as he slipped out, and then he had to be careful to avoid getting hit by a gurney.

  He plastered himself against the wall, before he remembered he could change the gurneys’ pattern just like he had done with the elevator. He stuck out one arm, and the next gurney in the center of the row closest to him moved up. All but the lower gurney shifted to adjust.

  He had to stick out a foot as well to make it work, and for a moment, he thought the lowest side gurney would slam into his leg.

  It didn’t. It moved into the middle row of gurneys. The lower level gurneys all floated into that row.

  He stepped into the empty space he had made and walked with the gurneys, all of the ones in his row avoiding him, but still making him nervous.

  Not because they nearly hit him, but because they weren’t empty like he thought.

  They all had neat packages of bandages in the very center of the cot part, ready to be opened and used by whoever had ordered the gurneys.

  He’d ordered an automated gurney or two in his career (before Stephanos. He winced), and they all had the packaged bandages and small medical scanners, designed for use by someone with no medical experience whatsoever.

  If the gurney itself determined that no one would use the package, it would open a small compartment and the package would drop inside, protected against fluids and any other ick from the body on top of the gurney.

  There had probably been one of those packages underneath Stephanos.

  He winced again, then focused on the gurneys around him. It almost felt like he had ordered them up, and he was leading them to whatever carnage they were heading toward.

  He smelled the carnage before he saw it, which made him shudder. The smell was faint at first—blood mixed with offal mixed with the faint odor of burned metal.

  At first, he thought that smell had lingered in his nostrils from Stephanos (dammit, again), but the smell grew stronger as he got closer to engineering.

  It took a powerful array of odors to overcome the environmental system’s automated scrubber. His heartrate, which had slowed down, sped up, and he swallowed hard against a dry throat.

  The gurneys weren’t some kind of system glitch, then. They were actually needed.

  He glanced over his shoulder, finally willing to flee. But he couldn’t get out of the gurney mess without bumping into one, and weirdly, superstitiously, he didn’t want to do that.

  He let them move him along, around another corner.

  The wall nearest him was scored with burn marks. Some were from laser pistols, but some seemed to be from something even more powerful.

  He rounded the final half corner, and saw it, the carnage so much worse than he expected.

  A pile of people lay on the floor, some on top of the others. Somehow they were all in a relatively small space, even though there was room on the sides.

  The air smelled of burned flesh here, as well as that overpowering stench of blood. Hot metal and the tang of laser fire also filled the air.

  The doors to engineering were open, though, but he could see no people inside.

  He didn’t recognize anyone in the tangle of limbs and bodies. They all seemed like parts to him, even though they were attached.

  The gurneys divided here as well, with the bulk of them going to the left and the rest off to the right.

  That was when he realized that people stood on either side, directing the gurneys. Only three people, two on the left and one on the right.

  Engineers. Colleagues. The people he had been worried about.

  Strangely, he hadn’t worried about the captain at all. But now he did. Was Preemas inside engineering? Had he taken over that part of the ship—or rather retaken it?

  Ibori was stunned to realize he didn’t want Preemas inside engineering. He wanted First Officer Crowe to be handling everything.

  Ibori had picked a side and hadn’t even realized he had done it.

  The two people on the left guided the first gurney down to the pile of bodies. Ibori stepped out of the gurney line and looked down. He couldn’t tell where one person began and another ended. They lay in a sea of blood, and he couldn’t tell who that came from either. But it had already gotten on his shoes.

  He didn’t see weapons, either.

  “What happened?” he asked, louder than he expected to.

  The woman on the left raised her head in surprise. It was Mi Bajaj. Her face was speckled, probably with blood, her eyes wide. She pointed a laser pistol at him. Her hands, blood-covered, were shaking.

  He doubted she had ever fired a laser pistol outside of training.

  Except maybe today.

  “I’m sorry, Tindo,” she said, her voice shaking as well. “I need to know why you’re here.”

  He put his hands up, without moving his arms at all. Almost in a stop. Don’t hurt me motion.

  “I followed the gurneys,” he said. “I was in the med bay with Natalia.”

  “Oh good,” Bajaj said. “She’s all right, then.”

  He shook his head, half-expecting the tears he’d been fighting to start again. But they seemed to have dried up once he saw all the bodies around him.

  “No,” he said. “She’s dead.”

  All three of the people cleaning up turned toward him. He recognized the other two, DeShawn Hagen and Tasneem Zhang, although he had never worked with them. They were both coated with blood as well. Zhang had a smear across her forehead, as if she had tried to wipe some off.

  “Natalia’s dead?” Hagen asked, as if he couldn’t believe it. “
Did the captain kill her?”

  “Um.” Ibori didn’t know how to answer that. Preemas certainly hadn’t cared that she was injured and he had treated her terribly. But kill her? No. Unless the situation itself had caused her death. “No. Not directly. No. She…”

  His voice trailed off. He wasn’t ready to talk about that.

  Zhang grabbed a gurney and held it just the way he had held Stephanos’s gurney. She was guiding it down.

  “What happened here?” Ibori asked again.

  “They tried to storm engineering,” Hagen said. “They failed.”

  Ibori let out a small, scared breath. “And the captain?”

  Hagen waved a hand toward the open doors. Ibori had to stand on his toes to see over the pile of people. Then he saw a huddled form near the control panel on the side. He recognized the pant legs, of all things. They were the bottom part to the captain’s uniform, something that Preemas usually wore with a nontraditional shirt.

  Ibori’s mouth went dry. Not possible. The captain had to be alive.

  But that body was Preemas’s. He had a hole in his forehead. He was clearly dead.

  Ibori felt a trembling beginning in his torso. He wasn’t sure if it was fear or disbelief or sheer terror that caused it.

  He swept his hand toward the pile of bodies.

  “Are they all dead?” he asked.

  “Oh, no,” Zhang said. “That’s why we have to hurry this. We have to get them to the brig. Do you have a weapon?”

  “Me?” Ibori said. “No.”

  He knew that Preemas had been handing them out, but he hadn’t taken one.

  Preemas. The captain. Dead somehow. And everyone else unconscious.

  “Are you willing to help us right now?” Bajaj asked. Something in her tone told him that if he didn’t, she might truss him up as well.

  “Um,” he said. “I guess.”

  His shoes were already coated.

  “There’s a lot of blood here,” he said.

  “Some people are injured,” Hagen said, then he nodded toward Zhang on the other side. She was guiding the gurneys to the most wounded, and using the bandage kits on automatic, letting the gurneys determine what exactly needed to be done.

  Already a handful of gurneys were heading down the corridor, moving even faster than they had before.

  “Where are these going?” Ibori asked.

  “Brig,” Bajaj answered.

  Brig. That meant the battle was over. The fighting was done. There were good guys and bad guys, and the bad guys were being locked up. But Ibori looked at the faces—those he could see—of the people sprawled along the floor, and he didn’t see any bad guys.

  He saw colleagues. He saw people he didn’t like who had ganged up with Preemas. He saw folks he had shared a drink with.

  “What are we going to do with them all?” he asked.

  “Not my concern,” Hagen said as Bajaj said, “Get them to the brig.”

  They looked at each other, then shook their heads.

  “One thing at a time,” Bajaj said to Ibori by way of explanation. “That’s all we can do.”

  “You could go with them,” Hagen said. “We need someone to supervise this transfer.”

  He had a hopeful expression as he looked at Ibori. Ibori’s mouth gaped open. He would manage prisoners in the brig? He wasn’t sure he had ever been to the brig. There had been no tour of the ship when he had come on board, and he had purposely avoided some areas.

  “You can’t do that,” Bajaj hissed. “You don’t know what side he’s on.”

  Hagen gave Ibori a speculative look. “Preemas is dead,” Hagen said coldly. “You upset about that?”

  “Of course I am,” Ibori blurted. “He was a human being.”

  Hagen’s eyebrows went up. Bajaj shook her head, as if she couldn’t believe what an idiot Ibori was. Zhang ignored them all, continuing to work as if the rest of them weren’t even here.

  Ibori was shaking. He had lost a friend today, and it looked like he had lost a lot of colleagues as well. Everything was different, and it had changed in the space of a few hours.

  “I don’t know what you people thought you were doing,” Ibori said. “I don’t know what anyone thought they were doing, but this—this was a colossal mistake. What the hell?”

  Bajaj glared at him, then bent over a woman on the floor and attached wrist locks before guiding a gurney over. He was startled to realize it was Jorja Lakinas.

  Slowly, Bajaj eased Lakinas onto the gurney.

  Ibori watched it all, feeling the horror all the way to his soul. He had had lunch with Lakinas not two days before. They had laughed over the tensions in the ship, saying that it was probably some residual terror about taking such a scary mission.

  And now she was going to the brig? For defending the captain? For following Fleet protocol?

  Although Ibori didn’t know if they had been following protocol. It certainly wasn’t protocol to march on an engineering department, even if the Chief Engineer had gone rogue.

  “I didn’t take a side,” Ibori said. “I was in the med bay with Natalia.”

  They didn’t seem to care, those three people. Bajaj still looked at him with suspicion. Hagen shook his head, then looked away. The gurney he had been guiding floated near him, bumping him occasionally as if urging him to continue the work.

  Zhang eased wrist locks onto another person. Ibori couldn’t even tell if she was arresting a man or a woman. She grabbed a gurney and eased it down, as if she were working on some sort of automated line.

  Bajaj watched him, even as she sent the gurney with Lakinas on it into the queue in the corridor.

  The gurneys were floating, waiting.

  But the pile of unconscious people on the floor was looking more like people huddled together and less like a collection of limbs, torsos, and heads.

  “What are we going to do with all these people?” Ibori asked.

  Bajaj glared at him. “Just stop asking questions, okay? We don’t know. I don’t know. We’re taking this from moment to moment. These people attacked us and tried to kill us. We defended ourselves. We won. And now we have to make sure they don’t attack us again. You got that? We have to protect ourselves and this ship.”

  She pushed another unconscious person onto a gurney. This person, a man, was someone Ibori did not recognize.

  “I don’t have answers,” Bajaj said. “I doubt First Officer Crowe has answers. He told us to do this job, and we’re going to do it. That’s all. Then we move to the next thing. We really need someone in the brig to organize these prisoners.”

  Ibori wasn’t going to do that. He wasn’t going to be a jailer, no matter how hard Bajaj pushed.

  But he understood what she was saying. He remembered the craziness on the bridge, the way that the crew had huddled around Preemas, the way that their eyes sparkled with a hatred Ibori had never seen before.

  The way they refused to see Stephanos as a casualty and instead, saw her as a problem to be solved.

  “What about the med bay?” he asked.

  Hagen was easing a badly injured man onto a gurney. “What about it?”

  “Who is working the med bay?” Ibori asked. “When I was there, I didn’t see anyone working it.”

  “That doesn’t mean no one is there,” Bajaj said.

  It didn’t, but Ibori had a hunch that was the case.

  He didn’t want to be in the middle of any of this, and he only saw one way out.

  “I’ll take everyone to the med bay,” he said. “You find someone else for the brig.”

  “You have medical training?” Bajaj asked.

  “Field training.” Ibori said. A long, long, long time ago. And it had only been a theory class. The first truly bloody person he had ever seen had been Stephanos.

  “Well, that’s more than I’ve had,” Hagen said. “Good. You go with them.”

  Ibori sucked in a breath. He didn’t take orders from Hagen. Technically, Ibori outranked Hagen. But Preemas
had said that rank didn’t matter. Not as the ship got reorganized. (And looked how well that turned out for him.)

  Besides, if Ibori went to the med bay, he would just have to work. He wouldn’t have to fight anyone or weigh in. Or think about what was actually going on.

  He made his way around the pile of people still on the floor. Someone was moaning.

  He wasn’t sure what he signed up for, but he realized it was a sign of just how little he wanted to be here that he was willing to deal with the injured and the dying rather than pick a side.

  “Okay,” he said as he helped Zhang load a young woman he didn’t recognize onto a gurney. The gurney immediately lit up, as it started the program to assess the woman’s injuries.

  All Ibori could see was burns. A lot of them. Laser burns.

  She was going to be in horrible pain, real soon now.

  And he would have to deal with it.

  His stomach twisted.

  He had no good options.

  But he was going to have to choose one.

  The Renegat

  Serpell couldn’t concentrate on her work.

  She sat at her work area, because if she stood, she would pace. She couldn’t reach India. She had tried and tried and tried. The last time they spoke, India was curt with her.

  Everyone else in the research area was working, heads down, hands moving, looking serious. A little earlier, one of the men had said that a friend had told him the crisis between the captain and the first officer was coming to a head, and that they should all brace themselves.

  But no one knew what that meant, so they just continued to work. Work had been their refuge since the long trips through foldspace. Everyone had braced their work stations, so that if the gravity disappeared again or the attitude controls failed, they wouldn’t lose much. Nor would they injure each other.

  In fact, all of them were using the built-in stools now. The stools raised and lowered into a hole in the floor. Serpell was the only one using hers. Everyone else had theirs tucked away.

  She had never seen that before, and half-suspected they all wanted a quick getaway.