If he could call Ibori and Seymont a team. Seymont was still trying to save lives. Ibori was just asking her questions on occasion.
“Right now,” Crowe said, “Benjamin is trying to isolate the various strands of energy that bombarded our vessel, maybe isolate whatever that was.”
Bakhr nodded.
“We’re pretty convinced that we blocked whatever caused this pink stuff,” Crowe said. “Once we activated the shields.”
Once he thought to do that. He had been mentally very harsh on Romano and the others for the choices they had made in the alcove, but he had made bad choices too.
“Do you think that whatever this energy was caused the uprising?” Atwater asked.
Crowe shrugged. “The thought has crossed my mind. But I’m also aware that the crisis we just went through was building for a long time. If I hadn’t taken over control of the ship—”
“We would be dead, I get that,” Atwater said, as if it were a minor thing.
“And the captain reacted badly,” Willoughby said primly.
“I’ll say.” Ellum crossed her arms.
“Logically,” Rodriguez said, “if that energy wave had corrupted our thinking process and put that stuff inside all of us, wouldn’t we still be corrupted? Wouldn’t we still be responding like we had before?”
“I don’t know,” Crowe said. “And we don’t have the time to figure that out. We’re going to have to do a series of things at the same time. We’re going to need to figure out what that pink stuff is, especially if we’re infected with it. After I leave here, I’m heading to the med bay, and we will examine me to see if I’m infected.”
He didn’t want to go, but he would. It was necessary.
“What I need from all of you is help. We’re going to need to do some hands-on science work, yes, but we’re also stranded here. We need options.” Crowe glanced at all of them.
They had deep care lines in their faces that hadn’t been there the day before. They were as tired as he was. And they knew they were nowhere near the end.
“I need a team to find us a habitable planet or a starbase or a moon, some place that we can go if we have to, preferably someplace that won’t mind an extra few hundred people,” Crowe said. “The Fleet used to build Scrapheaps far away from inhabited areas, but this Scrapheap has been here forever. I’m going to assume the sector is very different than it was thousands of years ago.”
“We’re going to be stranded here, aren’t we?” Ellum asked.
Crowe was shaking his head before he even realized it. “We have no good options, Hadley. Even if we find a way back to the Fleet, our captain is dead. There will be a court-martial. I’ll take the blame for all of it—”
The blame was long overdue for him. He should have been punished years ago.
“—but I can’t guarantee that they’ll listen just to me.” Crowe placed his hands on the arms of the captain’s chair. “That’s a risk if we go back.”
“It’s also not a worry, since we’re not going to be able to go anywhere without an anacapa drive,” said Colvin. She sounded a lot more sensible than Crowe had expected.
He glanced at her. She seemed calmer than everyone else, also something he hadn’t expected.
“Yeah,” Crowe said. “Which brings me to my next point. We might be able to get anacapa drives.”
Rodriguez and Ellum glanced at each other in surprise. Atwater brought his head back as if Crowe had shocked him. But Bakhr and Willoughby didn’t move at all.
“If you’re thinking of getting them from the Scrapheap,” Tosidis said, “the ones in there are probably contaminated like ours is.”
“We don’t know that,” Crowe said.
“If it’s coming from that energy wave,” Tosidis said, “then any anacapa drives remaining in the Scrapheap have been subject to that wave.”
“Maybe, maybe not.” Crowe slid forward on the chair so that he could look directly at Bakhr. “Did that wave come at us directly?”
“Like a weapon, you mean?” Bakhr asked.
“Yeah,” Crowe said.
“A lot of the energy we were dealing with is just bleeding off the Scrapheap itself,” Bakhr said.
“But not all of it,” Crowe said.
Bakhr inclined his head. “But not all of it, no.”
“I seem to recall in our original briefing,” Crowe said, “we were told that someone broke into the Scrapheap, stole DV-Class vessels, and left their own vessels behind.”
Bakhr shrugged. Not everyone had been part of those briefings.
“Yeah, that’s true,” Willoughby said. “I remember that. I remember thinking that piece of information was irrelevant because whoever had done that would have had to have been long dead by now. We’d never catch them.”
“But that wasn’t the point, was it?” M’Ghan said quietly. “We weren’t sent to catch them. We were sent to see what they had taken.”
Crowe shook his head. “We were sent to see if they had taken the Ready Vessels.”
Everyone looked at him, and he realized not everyone on the bridge had the kind of clearance that let them know about Ready Vessels.
So he explained them, as quickly as he could.
“We’ve been salting the universe with warships?” Atwater asked when Crowe was done.
“In theory, to protect ourselves,” Crowe said. “But I don’t know how that theory would have worked, since the Fleet never went backwards.”
“I always heard it was for the people we left behind on sector bases,” Willoughby said. “If they needed fighting ships, then they had the ships.”
Bakhr was shaking his head. “Sector bases are never near Scrapheaps.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Crowe said. “We could speculate for hours about Ready Vessels, and we will never know the exact answer. I had always been taught that they were warships, reserved for the Fleet when it was in the area, and, if need be, able to be retrieved with a short foldspace journey.”
“Then logically, we should have cleaned the ships out of the Scrapheaps when the Fleet moved on.” Atwater sounded almost angry.
Crowe gave him a small sideways smile. “Don’t expect logic from the Fleet on everything,” he said. “It stops a lot of disappointment.”
Atwater was shaking his head.
“You’re saying there are Ready Vessels here,” Bakhr said.
“And they look untouched,” Crowe said.
The bridge was silent for a moment.
Then Bakhr said, “So much would have to go our way. We would have to see if that energy wave did, in fact, cause the problems you found. We would need to get into the Scrapheap without problems. We would have to be able to get into the Ready Vessel area without problems. And then we would have to find intact and functioning anacapa drives.”
“If we don’t find the drives,” Colvin said, “we’re stuck here.”
“Nadim already said why returning to the Fleet isn’t in our best interest,” Bakhr said.
“But staying in this sector might not be in our best interest either,” Colvin said.
She was standing just a bit too close to Bakhr. Was Crowe misreading the tension between them? Was there something more than workplace camaraderie?
He shook his head slightly. He didn’t need to know unless it affected their work.
“Yulia is right,” Crowe said. “We might not want to stay in this sector. For all we know, this energy wave has flooded most of the region, and has had some kind of impact we don’t know about.”
“Or we might not be able to find somewhere friendly to stay,” M’Ghan said.
“That too,” Crowe said. “I would feel better if we had a working anacapa drive, even if we choose never to return to foldspace again.”
“At least we’d be choosing,” Willoughby said.
“Exactly,” Crowe said. “I want it to be our choice, rather than us feeling trapped by circumstance.”
“So let me be clear,” Atwater said. “One: We need to s
ee if we’re all infected with this stuff. Two: We need to see what we can find out about the region of space that we’re in. Three: We need to see if we can find working anacapa drives. Am I missing anything?”
“Four,” Bakhr said, “and really, it should be number one: We need to find out what caused that invasive pink stuff in the first place.”
“We don’t have enough staff for this,” Willoughby said quietly, almost as if she was standing next to Crowe rather than being projected from the bridge.
“We don’t have enough staff for anything,” Crowe said. “But we’re going to have to make do. That’s the other thing I want. I want a work schedule. Or, rather, a sleep-and-eat schedule. We’re going to have to run this like the tightest of tight ships for a while. Because we also have injured.”
“And prisoners,” Willoughby said, just a bit louder.
Crowe nodded, hating the word prisoner, even though it was true.
“We’re going to have to keep guards on them, relieve our medical staff at times, and maintain the ship’s systems as well,” Crowe said. “It’s a lot of work, and those four things that we just named are over and above the regular running of the ship.”
He didn’t add that there was one other thing they had to do. They had to ensure regular order on this vessel. They had to quell all those emotions that had boiled over on this horrible day.
He wasn’t sure how to do that. He had never been the emotion guy. And he was standing on the bridge with mostly engineers, none of whom were known for their emotional sensitivity either.
He had no idea how to resolve that one. He wasn’t sure it was solvable.
So he met everyone’s gazes and said, as forcefully as he could, “Let’s get to work.”
The Renegat
Romano didn’t fight anyone when they pulled her out of the brig, because they told her she was going to the med bay. Given the way her hands ached, she welcomed any respite. Her hip looked bad, and was probably getting infected, but her hands. They had never hurt like that before in her entire life.
DeShawn Hagen had called down a gurney and strapped her into it. And he had strapped her the way that she had been strapped before, with every single limb separately held in place.
She knew she couldn’t fight, but she didn’t even try.
It would be easier to escape from the med bay after all.
After they dealt with her hands, of course.
She was also relieved to get out of the brig. The thirty people being held were in terrible shape. She couldn’t tell if they were all injured, but a number of them sat on their bunks and sobbed.
If she could have come up with a plan, she would have, but her mind was hazy. Some of that was because that bastard Crowe had cut the oxygen and it was taking her body a while to recover. Some of that was from her injuries.
She suspected that the original gurney had shot her up with painkillers, and that led to fuzzy thinking as well.
If she knew how to make this gurney shut off the pain meds, she would have—or maybe not. Because the closer she got to the med bay, the better she felt.
Hagen walked alongside her, the laser rifle on the other side of her, so she couldn’t somehow escape from her straps, reach over and grab the damn weapon.
Hagen wouldn’t look at her and wouldn’t talk to her. It was as if the gurney was empty. Only the placement of the laser rifle let her know that he was aware of her.
He had complained when Tasneem Zhang had told him to take Romano to the med bay. He hadn’t seemed happy about being in the brig either, but apparently he found that preferable to seeing all the severely injured and the dying.
If Romano had been feeling better, she would have berated him, told him how he and Nadim Crowe and their cohorts had caused all of this. Then Hagen would have said that she had fired the weapons, and she would have said she wouldn’t have had to if he had followed Fleet protocol, and…God, just thinking of the arguments made her tired.
Everything did, including the fact that Serpell had left her behind. Romano had begged Serpell to get her out of the brig, and Serpell had refused, apparently still thinking she had some kind of career to protect. Or maybe she just believed that she had to get along so that she wouldn’t go to the brig.
Serpell was such a spineless creature. Usually she was easy to boss around, but right now, even Serpell could see how powerless Romano was to do anything.
The corridor opened wide around the med bay, and the gurney slid right in. The lighting here was bright white and cold, not soothing at all. The med bay was divided into two sections—one for actual medicine and one for the dead.
Romano had been here once before, and when she had arrived, the med bay itself had offered her a choice between care and death stuff. But there was no choice in the offing right now.
In fact, there were at least three doors on her left that glowed red, meaning that she and Hagen couldn’t go in them if she wanted to.
“Hey,” Hagen said, sounding confused like people did when something didn’t go as they expected. “I brought the prisoner.”
The prisoner. He could at least have said her name. She turned her head slightly and glared at him, but he still didn’t look at her.
A door on her right slid open, and Tindo Ibori stepped out.
She had been expecting one of the docs, whose names she could never remember. Sycophant or sillyphant or something. Both of the medical professionals Romano had run into had been women. So Ibori’s presence surprised her.
He was wearing an environmental suit, which also bothered her. He had the hood down, but he was wearing gloves.
“In here,” he said and swept one of his gloved hands toward the open door.
She thought that the right side was for dead people.
“Hey,” she said. “That’s not the operating theater. And you’re not a doctor. What’s going on here?”
“Do you need me to stay?” Hagen asked, still talking to Ibori. It was as if Romano didn’t exist at all.
Ibori sighed. He looked exhausted and more than a little sick himself. “I don’t have a weapon, so I suppose I do need you to stay. You’ll have to suit up.”
Hagen nodded.
“Suit up?” Romano asked. “What is this? I thought I was going to get medical care. You don’t need an environmental suit for that.”
Ibori glanced at her. She felt ridiculously grateful at being seen. “Just give me a few minutes, India, okay?”
“You’re not a doctor,” she said.
“Yeah, I know,” he said.
Hagen had his back to her. He still clutched the laser rifle, but he wasn’t paying attention to her. He was looking at a rack of suits. They weren’t really environmental suits. More like the kinds of suits she saw around decontamination containers.
He apparently was taking Ibori’s suggestion to wear a suit very seriously.
Hagen would be preoccupied with that for a few minutes. If she was going to escape, now was the time. Not that she could even move. She thought about struggling against the restraints, then remembered how painful that had been before. And how fruitless.
Then the gurney jerked forward. No one was touching it. But clearly Ibori had done something. The gurney ended up in the center of a narrow room, with all kinds of equipment on the walls. Lights flared around her and she recognized what was happening.
They were isolating her, with some kind of security chamber.
“Hey!” she yelled. “I’m already strapped down. You don’t need the chamber.”
But her voice echoed back in on her.
Ibori and Hagen were in the door. Hagen held a suit in one hand and the laser rifle in the other. Ibori was pointing at Romano, and Hagen shrugged, more than once. Then he handed Ibori the laser rifle, and slid the suit on, slowly.
Ibori looked at the rifle as if it was going to shoot him. Romano remembered him on the bridge, the way he had crouched over Stephanos, trying to help her, and then looking at Preemas as if the man had been
crazy when he started talking about weapons.
Ibori had tried to pretend like he wasn’t going to take a side, but he had. He was on Crowe’s side, even if Ibori had never taken a weapon and shot at Preemas.
Romano looked at the security chamber. It wasn’t quite clear. She could see the occasional rainbow of light streaming down one side as something on the equipment around her beeped.
She couldn’t see a way out even if she wanted one. What the hell were they going to do to her? And why Ibori? What about Doctor Sycophant? Had she died along with everyone else?
Romano shivered. She’d rather take her chances with the medical programs than with Ibori. The man was a navigator, for god’s sake, and clearly wasn’t good at anything, or he wouldn’t be on this ship.
Hagen pulled at the suit, adjusting it over his shoulders. He kept the hood down for a moment. He looked somehow larger in his suit than he had out of it. He took the rifle from Ibori, then nodded at him.
Both men put up their hoods. They didn’t look quite human anymore. She had trouble seeing their faces through the security chamber’s so-called clear walls and then through their so-called clear hoods.
There was a click and she could hear whooshing and the hum of the environmental system.
“India,” Ibori said. “How do your hands feel?”
The question startled her. She hadn’t expected that at all. She had expected Ibori to grab a medical scanner and run it over her hip or maybe have the entire gurney send him a reading about her internal injuries. (If she had any. She wasn’t sure what kind of injuries she had. The very idea made her heart flutter.)
“My hands?” she asked. “Why are you asking about my hands?”
“Because you seem to be favoring them.” That was Hagen, and it was a lie. He couldn’t have seen the way she rubbed her hands.
She couldn’t call him out on the lie, though, because she really did need help with her hands. The ache had moved from a tingle in the beginning to full blown screeching pain, almost like someone was holding her hand on top of a hot surface.
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