The two crew members that Preemas had left behind, Colvin and M’Ghan, were huddling near the wall, beside one of the more useless consoles. Neither crew member was near those consoles, as if they had abandoned all idea of working on the bridge at all.
Bakhr hunched over the science console, his fingers moving across its smooth surface. Apparently he didn’t like working on floating screens.
Tosidis had moved to the edge of the captain’s chair, that little bunker that Preemas had designed to keep himself informed. Tosidis, Crowe was happy to see, had started working again, even if his fingers shook as he moved.
A stench in the bridge made the smell in the corridor of engineering seem miniscule. The odor here started more as a sensation, but as he walked past all of the empty consoles to the navigation panel, the smell grew more and more foul.
Organic rot, like decayed flesh, tinged the air, combined with the scent of old blood. His stomach flopped, and he couldn’t keep quiet.
“How come this place hasn’t been cleaned up?” he asked M’Ghan.
“A lot of it has,” he said. “The environmental system is on scrub.”
“But we left the area near the anacapa,” said Colvin, “because we were afraid to run any equipment near it.”
“Probably wise,” Crowe said, wincing as he spoke. He didn’t want to see where Stephanos had died, but he would have to. He needed to understand it.
He made his way past Bakhr, past the screens that Tosidis was working, unable to see exactly what Tosidis was doing. Not that the details mattered. Tosidis was trying to figure out the anacapa without going near it, which might be useful, if he could figure it out.
Crowe doubted that was possible, but he had doubted a lot of things that had become true.
Like the condition of this bridge. Even though he had seen it on a three-D rendering in engineering, it wasn’t the same as being here. The place represented the turmoil of the entire ship.
This bridge was all about that kind of abandonment. Some of the consoles were on. Others had shut down. The door to the ready room stood open, and inside were even more weapons, as if Preemas hadn’t found enough people to use them. Or maybe Preemas had been stocking them for later.
Some of the chairs were turned away from their consoles. Most of the stools near some of the consoles were only half up, as if someone had tried to store them in the floor, but hadn’t had the time to finish.
And then there was the area around the anacapa drive.
He braced himself. He knew that Stephanos had died there, but he wasn’t sure exactly what had killed her.
He walked down to the front of the bridge, around the navigation console, and made himself look.
The area was worse than the area outside of engineering, mostly because he knew that big blackish-red blood pool had come from only one person. There were no smears on the wall, like there were near engineering, no holes in the console, not even any spatter on any of the nearby furniture.
Just that blood pool, and a few footprints beside it.
The smell was stronger here, of course. He had expected that, but it still overwhelmed him.
Then he looked at the container. The lid was closed. There was no blood on it.
He turned, about to ask exactly what had happened to Stephanos, then realized he was better off replaying the events.
He crouched, opened a small screen, and shut off the sound. No reason the others had to hear this, not right now.
He went back to the moment Stephanos arrived on the bridge. At that moment, the bridge was packed with people, but most of them surrounded Preemas.
He was handing out weapons like they were candy.
Then Preemas looked at Stephanos. They were clearly having words. Finally, he raised one of the laser pistols and held it on her.
Crowe’s breath caught. Had she been injured because Preemas shot her?
Stephanos raised her chin, said something to Preemas, and he got that look—the look Crowe had hated the most—the one that implied that he hadn’t meant what he had said just a few minutes ago, and that he would blame someone else for the “misunderstanding” if he possibly could.
Then he turned away. Stephanos moved to the console closest to the anacapa, said something to Ibori, who nodded.
She worked on the console. Crowe couldn’t see what she had done from this angle, but he could replay images from a different angle if need be. Then she walked over to the anacapa container.
Crowe could see the container clearly. It looked fine, but then, he hadn’t been near it. And to his eye, Stephanos seemed leery. He couldn’t quite put his finger on what made him think that, but something did.
She tried and failed to open the lid. He’d never seen that on a container before. He expected her to go to the console and change some settings, but instead, she used brute force, finally managing to open the container.
The golden glow of the anacapa looked just fine to him. It illuminated her face. She was biting her lower lip, and it wasn’t just because she was concentrating. Something was bothering her.
He wished he could peer over her shoulder into the anacapa drive itself. But the way the bridge cameras were set up, he wouldn’t be able to do that.
She licked her bottom lip, closed her eyes for a brief second, then reached over and grabbed gloves.
Now, it was Crowe’s turn to panic—even though he knew she was dead.
He also knew that something around that drive had killed her.
Something in there made her want to touch the drive. He hadn’t had a lot of anacapa training but he’d had enough to know that touching the drive was an unusual move.
She placed one hand outside the container, then held the other above it. Through it all, she was talking to Ibori. Crowe might have to listen to that conversation later.
Stephanos squared her shoulders and slowly brought her left hand down toward the anacapa drive.
The movement was odd, as if she were slicing through water instead of air. He made the image larger, saw that her entire body was vibrating.
Her eyes leaked tears. Then her nose started to bleed. Blood dripped onto the drive itself, but that didn’t change the color of the light.
Although Stephanos’s face looked different in the light. It was as if the light were illuminating her from within, as if the light was a part of her like it was part of the anacapa drive.
Blood dripped out of her ears, as well, and the tears falling down the sides of her face looked more pink than clear.
Still, she didn’t let go of the drive.
He had no idea what she was trying to do. He had thought he would be able to figure it out just from watching her, but he couldn’t.
The energy that had been flowing into the ship from the Scrapheap had somehow altered the anacapa drive, and caused this reaction.
Ibori noticed that she was in danger. He stepped toward her, but she said something to him, and he stopped. Preemas was sneering at both of them, and in that moment, Crowe was glad he couldn’t hear what was being said.
Stephanos leaned forward, blood pouring out of her nose now, and pushed so hard with her left arm that Crowe could see her muscles working.
She appeared to be stuck to the anacapa drive. Then she flew backwards, falling onto the spot where the blood pool was now.
Ibori leaned over her, and Crowe couldn’t tell what was happening now.
Except that the anacapa drive glowed golden, the light even stronger than it had been a moment before, as if the blood had refreshed it.
He didn’t like that thought. He didn’t like any of his thoughts.
Anacapa drives weren’t supposed to work like that. Anacapa drives usually showed different colors if they were failing, not the normal healthy golden color.
He fast-forwarded through the images, saw people fighting, saw Preemas turn his back on Stephanos, saw others trying to save her, saw Ibori look more and more stricken.
And all the while, the anacapa glowed gold
en, the light getting brighter and brighter.
Finally, India Romano looked at everyone with contempt, then walked across the blood and slammed the lid closed.
She came back to Preemas’s group, but she rubbed her hands against her legs as if her hands bothered her.
And light filtered out of the container’s sides, as if the container could no longer house the drive.
Crowe’s heart was pounding as if he had done something wrong.
He looked at that container.
No light leaked out of it now. It looked perfectly normal.
He stood, realized that he probably should not have crouched like that, moved his shoulders, and straightened his back just a little.
Then he went to the console closest to the anacapa drive, trying to see if the drive’s readings had changed.
They hadn’t. The drive read as normal from the moment the Renegat came out of foldspace until this very moment. It was as if whatever had happened to the drive did not register on the equipment.
Then he looked up to see if that light had had some kind of impact on the ceiling. The light shouldn’t have, but it shouldn’t have grown in intensity like that either.
But the ceiling looked just like it always did. Disgustingly normal.
It was as if the light had had no impact at all.
Although it had—or something from the anacapa drive had had an impact. The air had felt charged, and then when Stephanos had touched the drive, even with her gloves, she had bled.
He opened a small screen on the console, and made himself look at Stephanos, not from the angle he had used before, but from the one above her, as she lay dying.
Colvin had been right: Stephanos no longer looked human. Her face had collapsed in on itself. Some of the crew members who had been watching at her had turned away, as if they couldn’t bear to look.
Crowe could hardly bare to look either. But he did.
Because he had never seen anything like it before. Not ever in his entire career.
It was as if the container holding Stephanos together—her bones and her skin—had collapsed in on themselves, lost structure, lost integrity.
He shut off the image of her face. He couldn’t look at it any longer.
But he stared at the blood pool.
Lost integrity. Lost structure.
“We need to check the ship,” he said to the four others on the bridge.
“What?” M’Ghan. “What do you mean?”
“Full automated inspection,” Crowe said. “Hull integrity, systems integrity, everything.”
And they should probably check the crew too, but he didn’t say that. Not yet. He wanted to see if his theory was correct.
Whatever had mixed with the anacapa energy might have started disassembling the ship at a microlevel.
And if it had the same effect on humans, then maybe some of the behavior he had seen—he had been part of these last few hours—had not been because of simmering tensions but because everyone had literally been falling apart.
He leaned on the console.
What had happened this day was probably not that simple. It had been building for a long, long time. But the emotions, the boiling anger, the screaming he had seen in the corridor as the crew Preemas had brought down from the bridge charged, those might have been exaggerated because the anacapa had been affecting everyone.
Stephanos had just gotten a larger, quicker dose because she had touched the drive.
Then Crowe half-smiled at himself. He wanted that to be true. He wanted this entire mess to have happened because the crew had become irrational, not because they had made the choice to attack each other.
He took a deep breath, realizing that he had stopped compartmentalizing.
He had work to do. He had to figure out how to examine that anacapa drive, and how to do so without harming anyone.
He wasn’t sure that was possible.
But he would try.
The Renegat
Something bit into her wrists. And her hands ached.
India Romano kept her eyes closed, cataloging pains. She couldn’t even feel her left shoulder. It was numb. She remembered something—shrapnel?—hitting it. Her right thigh burned.
And her chest hurt as if someone had slammed a piece of metal against it—hard. So hard that it hurt the inside of her chest, and yet somehow hadn’t broken her ribs.
No. That hurt wasn’t from the outside. It was on the inside. Air.
She hadn’t been getting enough air. She remembered gasping, and seeing lights in front of her eyes, then thinking she couldn’t breathe, the bastards had removed the oxygen, she was going to die…
Her eyes flew open, and she saw the rigid rows of lights along both edges of a corridor ceiling. Her entire body was still tingling—that sensation she had felt earlier.
She lifted her head slightly, which made her dizzy, but she held the position and looked.
She was on a gurney. Strapped on a gurney, and not the kind of straps designed to keep an unconscious person in position. No. The thick straps used for prisoners.
Her feet were apart, and each calf had a strap, which wasn’t regulation. She should have had one over her thighs as well, and along her ankles, but nothing was on her ankles or her thighs—except a white bandage over her entire right thigh, a white bandage that was slowly turning color along the side of her thigh—turning from white to a brownish yellow. She was bleeding or oozing puss or something.
She couldn’t catch her nonexistent breath in this position, and the back of her neck ached, but she didn’t lower her head yet. Instead, she slowly moved her head to the right, saw Odafe Yarleque on a gurney beside her, unconscious, small bandages dotting his arms and covering his face.
She hadn’t even realized he had been fighting with them. She had thought he worked in the med bay.
She turned her head left—even slower, because moving her neck hurt so badly she almost teared up—and saw Bruno Moratis, also unconscious—or maybe just giving up—tears leaking out of his eyes like a slowly moving river. He was strapped properly for a prisoner, a large strap across his chest, another over his hips, thighs, ankles, hands restrained inside the gurney, far enough apart that they couldn’t touch anything important.
Moratis had been fighting beside her just a moment ago—or what had seemed like a moment ago. But Crowe had done something, firing back at them—murdering the captain. Murdering the captain.
Romano let out what breath she had and her head fell back onto the gurney, rocking it a little. It managed to right itself easily. And that was when she realized it was moving forward, slowly, and so gently she could almost not feel the movement. Only the changing lights on the corridor ceiling told her that she was in motion. They were splitting as the corridor split into three different directions.
“Hey,” she said, her voice thin and reedy. She barely had enough air to speak. “What’s going on?”
“Shut up, India,” Yarleque said, his voice stronger than hers. “You’re the one who got us into this.”
She was? She had come down to engineering to defend her captain like everyone else. She had just been following captain’s orders.
“What did you say?” Yarleque continued. “Get them? Well, they got us now.”
The gurney on her left veered left. The gurney on her right stayed beside her.
She raised her head just a little more. The gurneys on the left were heading down another corridor. She squinted, trying to make out where she was, ignoring the dizziness.
They were heading to the med bay. They had to be, considering everyone was unconscious and looked—oh, God, ragged, broken. Not like the impatient group of crew members turned fighters who had crowded into that elevator not too long ago.
She blinked and leaned her head back down, not willing to ask any more questions. The dizziness remained.
If the unconscious were going to the med bay, where was she going?
She turned her head and over the edge of the
gurney, she stared at Moratis. He was unconscious too, and he was traveling her direction.
She closed her eyes for a half second, realized that made her dizzier than keeping them open. She made herself take a deep breath, which hurt. Her lungs ached from emptiness.
She remembered that feeling from childhood. They always locked the teenagers up in some room, and slowly removed the oxygen—enough that it hurt, but not enough to injure them, just so that they all knew what it felt like to go without an environmental suit. It was teen-training, trying to make sure they wouldn’t be reckless.
It had taken nearly a day to get her air back. She had resented the feeling then, and it angered her now. Crowe had subdued them all so easily.
And murdered the captain.
She opened her eyes, and saw that the lights above her had changed color again, a brownish amber that made the entire corridor unpleasant. And that’s when she realized where she was, and where she was going.
The brig.
Of course.
She had seen the brig after joining the security team. All of the new security officers had gotten a tour of the security features on the Renegat. The Renegat was an SC-Class vessel, and SC-Class vessels sometimes had to handle major security breaches, so the brigs on these things were huge.
And cold. And dark. Designed to make prisoners uncomfortable. Designed to keep them quiet—or as quiet as could be.
She had hated the brig when she saw it that day. She had thought that she would never, not ever, willingly put someone in there—unless that person had done something really bad…
Like murdering the captain.
She did not want to go to the brig. Couldn’t they see she was injured? She shouldn’t be in the brig, she should be in the medical bay.
Even though there were medical facilities in the brig. Just not as good as the med bay. But places for prisoners who were too mobile to risk at the bay.
Her heart rate increased, and that breath she’d been struggling with grew even more ragged.
She was not going to go to the brig. They couldn’t make her. She wouldn’t.
The Renegat Page 67