The Renegat

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “I had field medicine training a long time ago,” he said.

  “So, no,” she said. “You have no experience. And I don’t have time to train you.”

  Then she raised her chin, just a little.

  “But the people who think they’re in charge have a mission they believe is more important than saving lives. You can do it.”

  “I’d rather save lives,” he said.

  “Oh, the people who think they’re in charge believe that this mission of theirs will save lives.”

  He frowned, not understanding at all. “Who—who are these people?” he asked.

  “First Officer Crowe, ostensibly, and Daria Willoughby, who used to be one of the most sensible people on the ship.” The woman shook her head slightly and then swiped at her tablet. More gurneys moved, some into another room.

  The survivors, then. He let out a small breath. “What do they need?”

  “They think something infectious is on board this ship, and they want me to stop everything I’m doing to perform an autopsy. I just told them to go to hell.” Her dark eyes measured him. “But you—”

  “I don’t know how to perform an autopsy,” he said.

  “You don’t have to. They want to look inside one of the corpses I have in the other part of the bay and see if it has some infection. You’re already suited up, so no known pathogen will get on you. And they all assure me that this will save lives.”

  “I don’t know how you would perform an autopsy without performing an autopsy,” he said.

  “The system in the other room will do it.” She grabbed a tablet off a small ledge behind her. She pressed her fingers on the tablet, then handed it to him over the barely conscious body of a woman on the nearest gurney. “Just do that, and get in touch with Willoughby. She’ll tell you what she’s looking for.”

  “Is it necessary?” Ibori asked. He would rather be here, providing an extra pair of hands.

  “How the hell do I know?” the woman asked. “I don’t have time to debate anything. I want them off my back, you’ll get them off my back, and the faster you do it, the easier it will be for you to come back and help me here. Okay?”

  An autopsy. He let out a small breath. As if this day wasn’t bad enough already.

  He took the tablet, saw some blinking commands, as well as an order in which he was to perform them.

  “All right,” he said. “Does it matter whose body I use?”

  He hated the question. It sounded strange and cold and disrespectful.

  “Apparently so,” she said. “You’re to examine the first body of the day. Natalia Stephanos. I guess she died holding the anacapa drive.”

  “Yeah.” He was surprised he could get the word out. “I was there. She died fast.”

  And horribly. And he didn’t want to see her body again.

  “I was the one who brought her here,” he added.

  Compassion touched the woman’s face, but only for a moment. “I’m sorry,” she said, and if he hadn’t seen the momentary compassion, he wouldn’t have believed her words. “You don’t have to do this.”

  She had opened a door. He could stay here. But he couldn’t get one word out of his brain.

  “They think a pathogen killed her?” he asked.

  “I’m guessing,” she said, moving yet another gurney.

  “And they think it’s contagious?”

  “You can’t get anything in that suit,” she said. “Trust me on that.”

  He nodded, not sure if he did trust her. But it probably didn’t matter. If there was a pathogen, he had already been exposed.

  Although it hadn’t showed up in his decontamination.

  As if reading his thoughts, she added, “They tell me the computers won’t see what they’re looking for.”

  Great. If he didn’t die from all the incompetence on this ship, he would die like Stephanos had, melting and dissolving, his face collapsing in on itself.

  “I’ll do it,” he said, before he could stop himself.

  The woman grinned at him. The grin was grim, if grins could be considered grim.

  “Good man,” she said. “Contact Willoughby, follow the instructions on that tablet, and get back here as fast as you can.”

  He nodded. “Okay,” he said, and was about to duck under one of the gurneys again, when he stopped. “I’m…um…you didn’t introduce yourself.”

  She raised her eyebrows, as if she couldn’t quite believe he was insisting on niceties at this moment.

  “I’m the idiot in charge,” she said, “but you can call me Orlena.”

  “Okay, Orlena,” he said. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  “Make it sooner,” she said. “People are dying here.”

  Yeah, they were. And he wasn’t sure if what he was about to do was going to make things worse.

  The Renegat

  Crowe hurried to the bridge. He was already wearing his favorite environmental suit, the hood down. He didn’t know if the suit would prevent any contamination from the anacapa drive, especially when he touched it, but he was going to use every single tool he had.

  He also carried with him a small box of anacapa specific tools, tools he hadn’t used since school. He had stayed as far away from anacapa drives as he could, preferring to let people who loved them and their mysterious workings, like Stephanos, handle the drives.

  He had done everything he could from afar, while doing the exact minimum for the training he needed as an engineer.

  His lack of continual experience with an anacapa drive was going to bite him now. He knew that, and it bothered him, but it couldn’t be helped.

  Even if he had a person who was an anacapa expert—and not some theory expert like Atwater—on board this ship, he wouldn’t make them touch that drive.

  This was something Crowe had to do by himself.

  The door to the bridge was open. He walked in. The four crew members glanced up at him, but didn’t say anything.

  Then they all returned to work—which both pleased and surprised him. He hadn’t expected them to be so diligent.

  It was hard to be diligent today.

  Tosidis was still sitting in the captain’s chair. He had opened some of the captain’s screens, which were designed so that only the captain could see them and only when the captain was seated. As Crowe walked down toward the center of the bridge, it looked like Tosidis was conducting a symphony or playing with the air.

  Bakhr was still at the science console, frowning as he worked. He wasn’t using holoscreens at all, his fingers dancing along the top of the console. Colvin stood beside him, watching his every movement, and occasionally, saying something softly to him.

  Apparently, Bakhr was trying to teach Colvin something or get her to be a proper assistant. Crowe silently wished Bakhr luck with that.

  M’Ghan had moved to a different console, and as Crowe passed, he saw that M’Ghan was staring at the bridge’s environmental system. It looked like he was trying to boost the scrubbing capability.

  Crowe wanted to tell him that boosting wouldn’t make any difference; the key here was cleaning up the mess that was all around the anacapa drive.

  On a normal vessel, the captain would have ordered the area preserved while the ship itself took images and created a holographic memory of what happened, including samples from the fluids that had soaked into the carpet, as well as readings taken from the anacapa container and the drive itself.

  But there would be no investigative team, no one on the ship to analyze anything—except Crowe, of course.

  He made his way to the edge of the goo-covered floor, and pulled up his hood. As he did, Tosidis said, “What do you need from us?”

  “I need you to get the hell out of here if something goes wrong,” Crowe said.

  Colvin looked alarmed, but Bakhr put his hand on her arm, apparently trying to soothe her. M’Ghan nodded, head down.

  Tosidis straightened his shoulders, as if he expected to launch himself out of that cha
ir at any moment.

  Crowe couldn’t think about any of them right now. He needed to examine that drive.

  He paused at the mess in front of him. He was acutely aware that it had once been part of a woman he respected. It felt like he was harming her in some way just by walking across that. He knew he was being fanciful, but the feeling was hard to shake.

  He recognized it, though. He had had that same feeling off and on over the years, as he learned engineering, and advanced in his career without Tessa.

  His heart twisted. He banished the thought of her, like he often did throughout his career, unable to think about her and the path that her death had lead him on.

  The path that had led him here.

  He crossed the mess. It squished underneath his boots, black liquid rising around him. He knew that the fluids would have to be tested at some point. He recalibrated his boots to gather some of the liquid, so that it would be preserved.

  Then he reached the anacapa container.

  He pulled out a small handheld scanner, no bigger than his thumb. The scanner was recalibrated to examine all types of permutations of anacapa energy. The scanner knew if an anacapa drive was dying, if it had used up most of its energy, if it was solid and would last for a long time, and if it was giving off odd signals.

  It also could identify where the anacapa drive had come from. Many of them were smaller parts of a larger piece. He wasn’t sure if that would be relevant, but he didn’t want to discount anything.

  His mouth was dry, as he approached the container. He knew that Romano had slammed it shut and she had clearly not suffered any ill effects—or at least any visible ill effects (he couldn’t vouch for mental ones).

  But it still unnerved him to touch the container itself. And he had to lift up the anacapa drive to weigh it.

  Although, he reminded himself, he hadn’t felt anything when he touched the communications anacapa. And, as far as he could tell, he was all right.

  He crouched beside the container. It looked like most anacapa containers, dark and closed, the nanobits intact and solid. It didn’t gleam or call attention to itself in any way. If some non-Fleet person came onto the bridge, they would simply think it part of the design, not a container for the most important part of an SC-Class ship.

  He ran the scanner around it, and got no abnormal readings at all. He had set the scanner on its highest level of sensitivity so even if something was just infinitesimally off, the scanner would find it.

  And it found nothing.

  He rested the scanner on his right knee, and studied the container as if it could reveal all of its secrets right now. It didn’t, of course. Maybe it had no secrets to give.

  He clenched his gloved hands, then stretched them, then clenched them again. Then he activated all of the gloves’ sensors. He couldn’t delay this any longer, no matter how much he wanted to.

  He put his hands on each side of the container, half-expecting to feel a vibration or something going awry. Nothing was. And nothing unusual showed up in his glove sensors either.

  Considering what had happened to Stephanos, he would have thought something would show up, even if it was something very small.

  He caught his mood, suddenly, and half-smiled at himself. He wanted something to show up. It was what one of his counselors had called his desire to be punished to expiate the guilt he felt from someone else’s death.

  He shook off the emotion, then used his thumbs to hit the latches on the lid. It rose up slowly, just like it was supposed to, revealing the anacapa drive inside, glowing with a perfect golden light.

  This drive was shaped like a kidney with some knots on the top side. He leaned a little farther forward, dislodging the scanner from his thigh. He managed to catch the scanner before it fell onto the mess below.

  He shoved the scanner into one of the side pockets on his suit. He would deal with the readings later.

  Then he eyeballed the drive. He was seeing some pink etched alongside the gold veins in the drive. The drive also had some dried blood on its surface. He stared at those stains, wondering why they hadn’t been dissolved, then he realized that something had been shut off inside the container.

  Before he touched the drive, he rocked back on his heels and peered at the container controls.

  They were closed. He pushed the little door with the knuckle of his right hand, and the door popped open.

  All of the internal scrubbers for the environment around the drive had been shut off.

  “You can help me,” he said to Tosidis. “I need you to find out if anyone on the bridge shut off the anacapa container controls.”

  “We haven’t seen it in the security feeds.” Bakhr answered, not Tosidis.

  “Yeah, I understand,” Crowe said. “But I’m not interested in who walked over here. I want to know when those controls were shut off. It might have been months ago, or maybe even at Sector Base Z, when the drive was inspected. I just need to know, and Luc has access to that through the captain’s command center.”

  “I’ll look,” Tosidis said.

  Crowe did not wait for Tosidis to find anything. Instead, Crowe inspected all of the controls. Most of them were on—the ones that would actually contain an unplanned surge of energy from the drive and those that would notify the bridge should something start going awry with the drive itself.

  Just the environmental controls were off.

  “And, Titus,” he said to M’Ghan, “stop messing with the environmental controls on the bridge itself.”

  “What do you want me to do?” M’Ghan asked.

  “Nothing,” Crowe said. He didn’t trust M’Ghan. Crowe looked over his shoulder at Bakhr. Fortunately, Bakhr had been watching him. Bakhr gave a small nod.

  Crowe hoped that meant Bakhr had understood Crowe’s unspoken command. He wanted Bakhr to examine the bridge’s environmental system, to see if any parts had been shut off, and when.

  And he didn’t want to give that command aloud, worrying that M’Ghan might have caused the problem himself.

  If Bakhr didn’t understand, Crowe would look all of that up later.

  He did not change any of the controls inside the anacapa container. He would leave them alone for the moment.

  He wanted to get to that drive.

  He flexed his fingers one last time. He was done stalling now. He had to do this.

  Slowly, he reached inside the container and put his hands on the drive. It flared a little, as drives sometimes did when touched.

  As the light inside the drive changed, he saw even more pink stuff, meshing with the golden light, as if it were following the same pattern that the golden light was. It was almost as if the lights were operating simultaneously.

  But the pink had expanded beyond the veins of light as well. It seemed to coat the very middle of the drive. The pink did not look like veins there. Inside the center of the drive, the pink had a pattern, like snowflakes before they hit the ground. Only snowflakes reformed into bits of snow, but this pattern remained intact. Each tiny bit of pink attached itself to other bits of pink, creating something that was more like a web than a vein.

  It was pretty, and it attracted his eye. He made himself blink, and raise his head, wondering if the attraction was part of the problem.

  He let out a small breath, then carefully hefted the anacapa drive, and nearly tossed it over the back of his head.

  He had been using too much force. The drive was so light that it felt like it could float away on its own. He could easily crush it between his palms.

  And crush wouldn’t be the right word, because crush implied effort. If he didn’t move with complete ease and precision, the drive would shatter.

  Every anacapa drive he had ever held felt like he was holding a living, vibrating, rock. This felt like a gigantic egg shell—although most egg shells he had held in his life had been thicker and sturdier.

  Plus, this drive wasn’t vibrating. It didn’t feel alive at all. Usually, holding a drive this long would m
ake his teeth ache—although he had never held a drive with a full environmental suit on.

  He almost pulled off his gloves to see if he could feel the vibration, then decided against it.

  He had enough information for now.

  The drive was compromised.

  Hell, compromised was too small a word. The drive had been hollowed out and destroyed.

  He was holding a husk of a drive.

  But, curiously, it still looked like it functioned.

  “Benjamin,” he said to Bakhr, “what readings are you getting from this drive?”

  “It’s normal,” Bakhr said without hesitation. Maybe he hadn’t been looking at the environmental system at all. Maybe he had thought Crowe’s silent command was all about the anacapa drive.

  That was all right too.

  Normal. The drive was anything but normal.

  The drive had been destroyed from the inside out. Maybe Stephanos had been holding it while the destruction occurred, and that was what had happened to her.

  But Crowe didn’t know, and he wasn’t going to guess.

  Gingerly, he replaced the drive in the container, and closed the container’s lid manually.

  Then he commanded the gloves to retain every bit of dust or dirt or bits of the drive they had come into regular contact with just because he had touched it.

  He peeled off the gloves and put them in another pocket, resisting the urge to wipe his hands on his environmental suit.

  He stood, slowly, his knees creaking because he had been crouching so long.

  “Is it lighter?” Tosidis asked.

  “Yeah,” Crowe said. He didn’t want to explain any more. He had to check the backup drives before he spoke the words he knew he couldn’t take back.

  If the other drive was as damaged as this one, the Renegat was screwed. It would never be able to travel back to the Fleet. The Renegat would never be able to leave this sector.

  It would be stranded here, forever.

  The Renegat

  Ibori didn’t get sick. He considered that his major accomplishment of the day. He didn’t get sick as he watched a beam of light slice into what was left of Stephanos’s body, and claws from the table her body was lying on stretch her skin back as if peeling an environmental suit off her.