She thrashed on the gurney. She was going to overturn the damn thing, knock the others aside, get out of here, do…what? She had no idea, but she’d develop a plan once she was free.
She rocked the gurney hard, but it kept reestablishing its own balance. It was fighting her, but she would overcome it. She would win.
Then the straps tightened, and another snaked across her hips, forcing her deep into the gurney’s folds. The new strap scraped against her injured thigh, sending pain through her so intense that she gasped.
She couldn’t move to fight. She couldn’t move at all.
And the pain made it almost impossible to want to.
What were they going to do to her? To all of them? They were so far from the Fleet, away from any kind of organization. To shut up everyone who sided with Preemas in the brig would require some kind of maintenance, and lots of care, care there wasn’t the personnel for.
She’d assume that Crowe didn’t have the stomach to kill them all, but he had killed Preemas, so Crowe was clearly willing to kill for what he wanted.
She leaned her head back, cursing the tingling, the ache, and that pain that kept coursing through her right side. Adding to it, the pinch of the straps and the no-longer-smooth glide of the gurney, and she was done. Defeated. At least for the moment.
She closed her eyes against that dark amber light. Maybe she would try something when they all arrived at the brig. Maybe she would unite them.
If she could. If anyone would listen.
The Renegat
Crowe returned to engineering, but he didn’t go to his safe circle of screens in the alcove. Instead, he walked directly to the communications anacapa. He had a lot of figuring to do.
All the way back to engineering, he’d been thinking about what he’d seen. The images of Stephanos’s death, besides breaking his heart, also baffled him. No anacapa drive should have worked like that. Nothing that he knew of in the workings of the anacapa drives had killed someone with a single touch.
Although he mentally had to correct that. Had killed someone who had worked with anacapa drives for years.
He knew that anyone training with anacapa drives who couldn’t handle the feel of one was removed from their presence immediately.
But even that wouldn’t have helped Stephanos. Her death had occurred fast. If something like that had happened on a school ship, the anacapa drives would have been considered a lot more dangerous than they already were.
He did not know if she had touched the drive previously on this journey, nor did he know what had caused her to touch it.
Those thoughts so preoccupied him that he had been startled as he reached the corridors outside of engineering. The stench of blood and death remained, even worse than it had been.
He glanced at the mess, saw the stains turning black, the imprints of hands against the floor, the pooled blood and bits of clothing, parts of weapons, and one single shoe. His stomach turned. He stepped around everything, and went into engineering itself.
He probably should have programmed the environmental and cleaning systems to at least clean up the blood, but he had hesitated twice now on that.
He wasn’t sure why; maybe he expected someone to officially investigate what had gone wrong. Perhaps that was his training kicking in. Or his horrid experience as a young man.
He didn’t have time to contemplate his own psychology, so he was ignoring it. He was ignoring all of it.
He had moved Willoughby away from the communications anacapa, telling her that he needed her to supervise the orders he had given from the bridge. He wanted to know how the Renegat herself was holding up after the onslaught of strange energy from the Scrapheap.
Willoughby had given him an odd look, and it made him wonder if she could see inside his head, if she saw that he wanted the energy to be to blamed for everything that had gone wrong.
But she didn’t say anything. She had moved to the command post he had been using before he went to the bridge. The other engineers were following her bidding. Most of them hadn’t moved out of their alcoves in hours.
Crowe wasn’t sure if that was because they were dedicated to their work or if it was because they felt trapped by the mess outside the door. Maybe they didn’t want to accept what had happened either, and were using the same method—ignoring it—as a way of pretending it never happened.
Willoughby had been monitoring the communications anacapa, with its little container closed. She had opened it to check to see if it was still vibrating, and then closed the container completely.
Crowe did not tell anyone what he was about to do. He needed to examine that tiny drive, and he needed to do so following protocol. His stomach was in tight knots. He placed a shield around the entire alcove he was working in. If something went wrong, he didn’t want anyone to try to grab him and pull him away.
The shield shimmered into place. The shimmer only lasted a second or two, but it caught Willoughby’s eye. She frowned at Crowe. The frown was filled with disapproval.
He half-smiled at her. He couldn’t pull off a full smile for anyone today, but he wanted to reassure her.
He also liked the fact that she had noticed what he had done. If something happened to him, the ship herself would be in good hands with Willoughby.
Then he banished those thoughts, and focused on the work. He braced the door to the panel housing the communications anacapa. That way, if there was a small surge of energy, it would not accidentally slam the little panel door shut.
Then he pressed the controls that made the container and its housing slide out of the compartment. It was easy to remove the container’s lid; there was actually a tiny hinge that pulled the lid up.
He used the automated hinge. The less he touched the anacapa housing, the better.
Then he slipped on the gloves that he had brought with him. He almost slipped on two pair, but realized if there was still an energy problem, the number of gloves he wore wouldn’t matter at all.
Willoughby’s frown deepened as she saw him put on the gloves. He had no idea if she had seen the images of Stephanos dying. He suspected Willoughby had: the woman was thorough, and understanding what had happened to Stephanos was important to all of them.
Willoughby’s gaze rose to his, and she shook her head just a little. She didn’t want him to touch the drive. But he had to in order to examine it the way he wanted to.
He wasn’t going to justify his actions to her. That was precisely why he hadn’t told her what he was going to do. He didn’t want her to cause a stink about it.
The light from the tiny anacapa drive—something he thought of as a slice of an anacapa drive—glowed golden against the raised lid of the container. If he only looked at the light, he would have thought everything was just fine—the same as the main anacapa drive on the bridge.
But as he looked down at that slice, he saw bits of pink flowing through it. He had never seen pink in an anacapa drive before, especially not pink that looked like it had found veins in the drive itself.
He never thought of the drives as having veins, like rocks with metals inside of them. He always thought of the drives as one unit, even though he knew they weren’t.
In his anacapa classes, decades ago, he had seen how different the drives could look from generation to generation, and also how different they looked as time and wear had had an impact on them. But they had never had veins. That was new.
He swallowed hard. All of the controls around the drive said that it was working just fine, exactly like the controls around the larger drive on the bridge.
In circumstances where the controls and the appearance of the drive differed, the common procedure was to use different equipment to scan over the drive. But he understood why Stephanos hadn’t done so. She had been worried that introducing yet another energy signature into the mess would cause even more trouble.
There was less energy around the drive now that he had put up shields around the Renegat. But he still was loathe to
try another piece of equipment.
Which meant he had to examine the drive physically.
And that was exactly what had killed Stephanos.
Crowe flexed his fingers. He would be looking for pitting, fractures, or more vibration in one area or another. Such things would be easy with the regular-sized anacapa, but this tiny one would be a challenge.
Even if his large fingers could hold the communications anacapa properly, he wasn’t sure if his fingertips were sensitive enough to find pitting on something as small as his thumb. The gloves wouldn’t help. Their membrane was thin, but that would still put an extra layer between his skin and the drive itself.
And, if he were being really honest with himself, he was scared to put the drive close to his eyes, so that he could examine the surface up close.
He touched the top of the anacapa drive, expecting to find a rough surface. Instead, it was as smooth as it was designed to be. It didn’t even hum, like the drives sometimes did when they were glowing golden like this one.
He tried to trace those pink lines. If they were fractures, he should feel the fracture, but he didn’t. He didn’t feel anything.
Which was a problem.
He set that problem aside for the moment. One thing at a time. He was looking for damage in the drive itself first, and then he would deal with the way it operated after he finished with its structure.
Sometimes the two—structure and operation—were deeply intertwined, and before he delved into the operation part, he wanted to make certain all was fine with the structure.
He needed to slip his fingers around the slim little drive itself, but as he started to do so, Stephanos’s face rose in his mind, the blood coming out of her nostrils, her tear ducts, and her ears.
He didn’t feel ill. He didn’t feel anything at all. But he almost wiped at his face with his free hand, and it took an act of will to stop himself from doing so.
He was going to fine. He had to be fine. There was no choice in the matter. This ship couldn’t keep losing its most experienced anacapa engineers.
As if wishful thinking worked. He felt a surge of amusement at his own ability to delude himself and then made himself focus on the work.
He finished slipping his fingers around the tiny drive, and paused, half-expecting it to jab him or send shooting pains through his hand, or make his entire body vibrate.
None of those things happened. He was fine.
At least as far as he could tell.
Then he picked up the communications anacapa.
It only weighed a few ounces. The average anacapa drive weighed at least fifteen pounds, if not more. But this thing weighed next to nothing. That surprised him, and he knew it shouldn’t have, because the thing was barely a fraction of the size of an average anacapa drive.
Still, he thought it would have more mass, the way a piece of solid metal had more mass than a hollow piece of glass.
This felt like a glass tube, even though it wasn’t.
The drive also felt fragile, as if he could crush it with his fingers.
And that thought caught him. He made a note of it, then gingerly shifted the drive from his palm to holding it on its edges, using his thumb and forefinger.
He had to force himself to bring the drive up to eye level, and he tried not to think about what could happen.
He stared at it, saw no pits or external groves. The golden glow seemed even more harmless than a sharp beam of light being directed at his retina. When he blinked, he did not see a reflection of the light at all.
He had no idea if that was normal. He hadn’t ever given the light coming out of an anacapa drive any thought.
The pink, though. The pink was something else entirely. He had thought it illuminated fractures in the drive. But viewed up close like this, he realized that the pink spiderwebbed into a series of lines, rather like a bottle made of string. It was as if something had been built inside of the anacapa drive, like a parasite taking over the drive, hollowing it out and creating its own little nest in the interior of the drive itself.
He let out a small breath, realizing just how much tension he was holding in his body. More than he wanted to consider.
He slowly and ever so carefully lowered the drive into its container, then let out another breath as he moved his hand away from the drive.
He felt no different—unless a profound sense of relief could be considered a difference. But physically, he felt the same. He hadn’t been harmed by the drive—at least that he could tell.
He closed the lid on the container, and sent the container back into its holder. Then he removed the shield he had placed around the alcove.
Willoughby was watching him. He looked at her, raising his eyebrows in an unspoken question. Did he look the same? Was he injured and just not feeling it?
She shrugged. And he wasn’t sure if that shrug meant he seemed fine to her or if it meant that she had no idea what he was asking.
But if something had been visibly wrong with his face or his posture, she would have let him know. He had to trust that.
He nodded at her, then removed the gloves and inspected his hands. They looked no different than they had before and they felt fine.
He turned his palm over, and rubbed his thumb against the fingertip on his forefinger. The skin felt like it always did, smooth and warm.
Then he turned his hand back over, shook it out because of the nerves, and made himself focus again.
He had one question, and only one other person could answer it.
He opened a screen so that he could see Tosidis on the bridge.
Tosidis answered, his face drawn and tired. His lips were chapped and bloodied, because, Crowe knew, Tosidis had been biting them. Tosidis was still standing inside the cocoon of screens that Preemas had built.
“If you want an update on the ship,” Tosidis said before Crowe could speak, “we’re still analyzing.”
“I know,” Crowe said. He’d been monitoring what they were doing on yet another screen. He hadn’t seen any flagged information yet, but he hadn’t been watching closely.
He probably shouldn’t have been that dismissive, but he was focused on the anacapa drives first. One problem at a time, as he often told his staff.
“I need something else,” Crowe said. “I can’t find where you catalogued the weight of the communications anacapa. Do you have a recollection of how heavy it was?”
“Oh, my,” Tosidis said. “I’m not sure I catalogued the weight.”
Crowe didn’t nod. He knew that Tosidis hadn’t cataloged the weight or Crowe would have been able to find it. Crowe had just learned to approach someone from the perspective of I’m looking for the correct data, so tell me where you stored it instead of why the hell didn’t you do this right? People usually admitted their mistakes this way, just like Tosidis had.
“But I did remember thinking it was much heavier than I expected,” Tosidis said. “You know, when you work with full-size anacapa drives, you’re not surprised—or, I guess, I wasn’t surprised—that the drive is heavy. You kinda—I kinda—expected it, you know?”
Crowe nodded, his heart sinking as he listened.
“But I had never handled one of the small ones before,” Tosidis said. “That one was much heavier than I thought possible.”
“Anything else you noticed when you touched it?” Crowe asked. He knew better than to ask a leading question, because he might influence Tosidis’s recollection.
“Yeah,” Tosidis said. “It had that same alive feeling that a regular drive had, and by that I mean, it had the same intensity. I would have expected it to be just a fraction of the same intensity, you know what I mean?”
Crowe did. He felt even worse than he had a few minutes before, and he hoped it didn’t show on his face.
“And no pink threading through the drive, right?” he asked, this time asking a leading question.
“Pink?” Tosidis asked. “You saw pink?”
Crowe didn’t answer. H
e just waited.
“I never saw any pink,” Tosidis said. “Is that part of a normal drive? Because I don’t remember it.”
“Don’t worry about any of that at the moment,” Crowe said. “I’ll keep an eye on the anacapa drives.” For now, he added mentally. “I need you to focus on the ship itself.”
Because if the Renegat had been gutted the way he was now believing that the anacapa drives had been gutted, they were in even worse trouble than he had thought.
He leaned his head forward, wishing he understood more about anacapa drives. Wishing he knew how they worked exactly.
Because he couldn’t just rely on Tosidis’s memory here. What Tosidis might consider “heavier than expected,” Crowe might consider “lighter than expected.”
Although on some deep level, he doubted that. The pink construction inside, that parasite analogy that had risen unbidden in his mind, the loss of Stephanos so quickly, all led him to believe something else was going on.
He rubbed a hand over his face, then stopped himself. That nervous habit was getting old.
“Daria,” he said to Willoughby. “Do you know who the acting physician is supposed to be?”
He should have known that, because he was the First Officer on top of everything else, but he couldn’t remember. He might not even have registered that position or, possibly, hadn’t noticed if it went completely unassigned.
“Orlena Seymont,” Willoughby said. “I think. Last I checked.”
“Do you think we can get her to autopsy Stephanos fast?” Crowe asked.
“In the middle of all this?” Willoughby asked. “We sent nearly a dozen people to the med bay. And I’m not even sure Orlena was even there.”
He had known the injured were there, and he silently cursed himself for failing to see if the acting physician was actually in the med bay. For all he knew, she had been standing alongside Preemas when they attacked.
“Can you find out?” he asked.
“Why is an autopsy more important than saving lives?” Willoughby asked.
“Because we need to know what killed Stephanos.” He wiped his fingers on the side of his pants. His fingers felt no different—his hands felt no different—but clearly touching the tiny communications anacapa still bothered him. “This has to take priority.”
The Renegat Page 68