Willoughby frowned. “You think this could harm the rest of us?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“But that’s what you’re worried about.” Willoughby was pushing.
He nodded. He didn’t want to give voice to it, all those fears swirling around inside of him.
“And how are we supposed to tell her to prioritize an autopsy?” Willoughby asked. “With real patients there?”
Willoughby seemed to assume that she was part of the command staff. And Crowe was going to let her assume that. It would make his job easier.
“Tell her that the work she’s doing on the real patients is all for naught if Stephanos died the way I think she died,” Crowe said.
“And how is that?” Willoughby asked.
Crowe shook his head. He wasn’t going to lead her either.
“Let’s just get it done, okay?” he said. “I’m heading back to the bridge.”
“Why?” Willoughby asked.
“To examine the regular anacapa drive,” Crowe said. Because if it was as hollow as the one down here, then there would be no way back through foldspace, and he would have to make other choices.
But he was getting ahead of himself.
He needed more evidence of what had happened to the anacapa drives before he had put up the shields.
And he needed it fast.
Part Thirty-Seven
Mysteries of the Renegat
Now
The Aizsargs
Dauber sat in her ready room, hands threaded through her hair. She had opaqued the door so that no one on the bridge could see inside, which was probably a good thing.
Her frustration wasn’t with her crew.
They had done their job. They had done better than she could have hoped, really. They had saved 193 people from the Renegat, and those 193 people were now housed on two lower decks. The Renegat survivors had the run of those decks, but they couldn’t access any of the upper decks.
The decontamination procedure that the survivors had gone through hadn’t just cleared them of unknown organisms and strange viruses. It had also proven that they were who they said they were.
The records that had been the easiest to find were the identification records for the individual crew members. These survivors were who they said they were; they had been on the Renegat when the ship embarked from Starbase Rho a hundred years before.
These people had been a part of the Fleet then, and should be considered part of the Fleet now.
So Dauber followed protocol for foldspace survivors who had gone through a time jump. She made certain that there were no news sources that the survivors could access, no Fleet histories, in fact, no histories of any kind. The entertainment was lower level standard, so that it didn’t look too advanced.
There was also no way for the survivors to contact anyone outside of the ship. Right now, Dauber—and no one else—controlled who approached the Renegat survivors, and she was keeping those approaches to a minimum.
Not only had she sent crew members who had done this before, but she had also sent her least chatty crew members. The ones who wouldn’t linger and have a conversation with the survivors, the ones who wouldn’t accidentally let something important slip.
All of that was standard procedure, but none of it led to her current frustration. She rested her elbows on the small desk she kept in her ready room mostly for form’s sake, and closed her eyes for a long moment.
The records concerning the Renegat were a complete and utter mess. Dauber had spent the last three days going through them, and she only knew two things for certain: The Renegat had been given a classified assignment and sent by itself on a long foldspace journey that caused people consternation at the time, and the Renegat herself had been written off as lost about fifty years ago.
But that particular action was simply a formal acknowledgment of what the Fleet had accepted as reality three years after the Renegat’s communications ceased.
The Fleet knew that the Renegat had taken a long foldspace journey, and that it hadn’t responded after one of the foldspace legs of that journey. So, as the Fleet often did, it assumed the Renegat was trapped in foldspace.
Only the Fleet had not followed standard procedure at that point. Standard procedure would have required the Fleet to send foldspace search vessels after the Renegat. At least three ships should have gone to the place that the Renegat had last entered foldspace, and then proceeded to do a grid search.
They hadn’t.
And the Fleet—or rather the admirals and vice admirals who had planned the Renegat’s mission—had decided against rescue before they even sent the ship on its mission.
Dauber had no idea if the captain, Ivan Preemas, had known that he was on his own from the very start, but she had a hunch he had. His actions—the ones she had found—had been unusual. A captain who knew that the Fleet wasn’t going to come after him to enforce protocol might make the decisions he made to give his ship a fighting chance.
And deep down, Dauber didn’t blame him. He had been sent on a dangerous and unusual mission with a crew that looked like it wasn’t up to the task. He had been sent in an old SC-Class vessel without the usual backup. And he had no way of getting help if he needed it.
They were headed to an ancient Scrapheap, for reasons she still hadn’t found. And she couldn’t understand what was behind the mission.
She had found a number of Fleet records marked classified, but they were above her level of classification. Not much was. She needed to be a vice admiral to access some of the information about the Renegat.
And she needed to be on a sector base or a starbase, since that information wasn’t even in the Aizsargs’s files.
What was in the Aizsargs’s files were the records pulled from the Renegat before it exploded. But most of those records had to do with the anacapa drive and other engineering problems with the ship.
Dauber had told her team to pull what they could, starting with the anacapa, before she had realized she had a major mystery on her hands.
And the survivors of the Renegat weren’t really helping. They had no rank structure that she could find. Some of that was due to the fact that they needed rescue. Something terrible had happened to them, and she wasn’t sure where or when.
What she did know was that the upper levels of the crew, from captain and first officer through the engineering department, had not been on the ship when it had come through foldspace this last time.
That explained some of the problems—the lack of environment, the damage—but not all of it.
Dauber felt like every time she found an answer, it raised more questions.
Her staff was still digging, still trying to figure out what was going on, but they were finding nothing.
And most of her staff—no matter how good and reliable they were—had never experienced a time-gap foldspace rescue. They knew the theory, but they hadn’t participated in one.
Dauber had. Like all captains of her generation, she had been required to serve on a foldspace search vehicle for six months. That service had been the gloomiest of her career. Unless the crew rescued out of foldspace had been gone—by their own lights—less than a week, they were screwed up.
In a foldspace rescue, it wasn’t uncommon to be missing a lot of crew. Usually, after years had gone by, most of the crew would leave the ship—sometimes to get more supplies, sometimes to find a new place to live.
What was unusual about the Renegat was that the missing crew members were senior officers, not the rank and file. She’d participated in three rescues in which most of the crew had left the ship that had been trapped in foldspace, but in all three cases the crew that remained were the senior officers.
She couldn’t rule out that the Renegat had somehow operated differently, because its mission had been so unusual and its staffing had been nontraditional.
Still, it didn’t feel right—any of it.
She didn’t quite know what to do with these su
rvivors. Her obligations toward them differed depending on what had happened. If they had spent all of their time in foldspace, trapped and lost, then they could go back to the Fleet in some capacity.
She would need guidance for that from her own superior officers. They would probably want to take the Renegat survivors back as a unit, rehabilitate them, and send them to the same place, be it a sector base or a starbase or some ship that went on routine missions without going into foldspace.
She’d even heard of foldspace survivors who would teach units to engineers who handled anacapa drives, to impress on those engineers just how important it was to keep the use of the drives as error-free as possible.
That kind of decision was not hers to make.
But she needed more information before she even contacted her superiors. Because her gut told her that something else was going on here.
The Renegat had suffered a lot of damage and not all of it lined up. The exterior damage didn’t match all of the interior damage.
What disturbed her most was the information that had come from Stanley Palmer, who had been inside the Renegat’s engineering department, trying to salvage the ship at that last minute. He said that the control panel outside of engineering had been damaged. He also said that there was evidence of tampering with some of the equipment inside engineering, tampering in ways that didn’t make any sense to him.
He had told Dauber that the tampering could have come from the inexperienced crew members trying to fix the ship, but something about it had struck him wrong. In engineering, at least, the tampering looked like it had been done by someone with engineering skill, someone who had known what they were doing, someone who had a real purpose behind their actions.
Then Palmer had grinned at her. But I was only there a few hours, and I was a little busy trying to save the ship. I could easily be wrong.
He could have been wrong, yes. But she trusted her crew. And she also knew that impressions made while doing something else were often reliable, because the eye saw things that it didn’t have time to analyze. Those observations went into the subconscious and slowly came to the surface; they were usually purer than observations made with the intent of “understanding” something.
A few of her team—Vail, Parizo, and others who had interacted with the Renegat survivors—believed that the senior staff had died.
Which raised even more questions. Because senior staff as a unit rarely died on any Fleet mission. Some of the senior staff died, along with rank and file crew members, particularly if the mission was dangerous, like this one had been.
Dauber didn’t like what she was thinking; losing the entire senior staff bothered her on a deep level. It also was exacerbated by the handful of survivors who had serious injuries, the kind of injuries that they had barely survived.
She’d seen images of three of them. They had the kind of injuries soldiers usually got from laser battles, not from flying debris in a space battle.
If her darkest suspicions were correct—if these survivors had somehow done away with the senior staff—then they had to be taken to the nearest starbase, and given to the judicial branch of the Fleet. The prosecutors could figure out what to do with them, if anything.
Before Dauber took such drastic measures, though—before she even suggested them, she needed to satisfy herself that her suspicions were justified.
She needed to talk to the crew herself.
And to start, she needed to talk to the one person everyone seemed to refer to as the person who had headed the mission home.
A linguist, of all things. A woman with no leadership experience, named Raina Serpell.
Part Thirty-Eight
Aftermath
100 Years Ago
The Renegat
Once upon a time, Orlena Seymont drank. A lot.
And that was why she was standing in the middle of the biggest disaster of her entire career, surrounded by moaning sobbing colleagues, who had—apparently—inflicted a bunch of wounds on themselves.
She was in the actual medical part of the med bay, not the part where bodies were taken for disposal, in the area where at least two other physicians should be working, but of course there were no other physicians. All of them left on Sector Base Z, and the person who had joined the medical unit—some worthless creature named Bosley something (or something Bosley)—had only been here once that she knew of.
She hadn’t been able to hail him all day, which told her nothing, because she hadn’t been able to hail him any other day either. And when she complained to Captain Preemas, Preemas had laughed and said, More opportunities for you to rebuild your reputation, then.
She’d curse out Preemas, but she didn’t have the heart. Preemas was in the other part of the med bay, very clearly dead. She had to preserve the body, because god knows what was going to happen to the entire crew when the Fleet figured out that the crew had murdered their captain, but that was a problem for another day.
There were enough problems for today—all of them crowded into this space. The gurneys kept coming, and what she saw were wounds, bleeding staunched, faces pale or gray or slack, burns everywhere.
And then there were the smells: scorched flesh, evacuated bowels, vomit, and urine. Things she normally tuned out, but which overwhelmed here. The same with the cries of pain, the hands grasping for her, begging her to help, the yells and the screams and the moans—things she’d been trained to hear and evaluate, just so that she could make a diagnosis when the patient couldn’t communicate clearly.
She needed a drink.
More than anything else, she needed a drink, and she would never ever ever have one again. She’d stopped drinking when she was assigned to this ship, and she’d maintained that throughout everything and she had to maintain it now.
But holy shit, she needed something to hold her up right now, and there was nothing. Nothing and no one.
Just her, and the injured, crowding over one another, three levels deep.
She had finally grabbed a tablet and used it to process everyone, using (in part) the recommendations of the gurneys themselves. The patients came in pre-triaged, decided by computer, of course. This person should get treatment first, that person should get treatment second—and not all of the triaging made human sense.
The medical program was designed by rank, like everything in the Fleet, and Preemas had screwed with the ranks. Seymont had no idea who was running what, even though the system told her that nearly unsavable person needed all of her attention.
Hell, that stupid ranking system was why she had been required to check in Preemas’s body in the first place, even though he was long past her help.
Half the people here were past her help. She didn’t have the skills for this. And the ship had half-assed medical facilities. They were designed to work with the Santé Two. Some doctor or surgeon somewhere who specialized in some esoteric technique would virtually assist the system to handle whatever it faced.
There was no connection to the Fleet, no connection to the Santé Two, no way for Seymont to even approximate good medicine for the truly truly damaged people in front of her.
And now, she was being pinged by the geniuses in engineering.
She put a hand to her ear, and nearly shut off the link to engineering—to the entire ship, really—but she didn’t dare. She needed to stay in touch in case they were going to send more gurneys or fucking shoot themselves up again.
So she answered the ping with, “I don’t have time to talk to you people. What I do need is anyone you have with even a modicum of medical training. Right now.”
“We have another problem.” The person who responded wasn’t First Officer Crowe or whatever he called himself now. It was Daria Willoughby.
“I don’t need another problem,” Seymont said. “I have dozens of them, most of them insolvable. So sorry, I’m cutting off—”
“Orlena.” Willoughby’s voice was sharp. “We think there’s some kind of rapidly moving pathogen. It m
ight be what killed Natalia Stephanos.”
“Yeah, probably. It’s probably stupidity. That’s a virus—”
“No,” Willoughby said. “I’m serious and you have to pay attention. You need to autopsy her—”
“No.” Seymont tapped her tablet, moving the gurneys by severity of injury, not by rank. Damn the system. “I do that, more people die.”
“You don’t, and we all could die.” Willoughby said.
Seymont stood very still for just a moment. She should just walk away. Drink until she couldn’t think any more. Let them all die. Fuck them all, anyway.
“You don’t know medicine,” she said. “You have no idea—”
“At least cut her open,” Willoughby said. “We need to know what’s inside.”
“You do know that autopsies are not done with scalpels, right?” Seymont asked.
“We need to see inside her,” Willoughby said. “Computers might not find this. She was holding the anacapa drive when she died, and—
“For god’s sake,” Seymont said. “If there is something transmitted by touch, the worst thing you can do is send your only physician in to look at it.”
“We don’t have anyone else,” Willoughby said.
“Neither do the dozens of wounded people you just sent to me,” Seymont said, and cut off the contact.
She continued to sort, trying to figure out resources. No one here had minor wounds. Those must have gone elsewhere, which was what the system was set up for whenever there was a mass casualty event.
She didn’t even care about the minorly wounded. The gurneys, with their own medical supply cabinets built in, could take care of them. The problem was the people who could have been saved in a normal situation. She wouldn’t get to all of them in time.
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