We might have to stay here, he told her when he contacted her. And by here, he meant this sector. Far, far away from everything she had known and loved.
She hadn’t thought about it much as she came up to the bridge. All she had known was that she didn’t want to work alone in the research room. But now that she was here, her stomach twisted.
“Finding anything?” she asked him.
“I’m not working on the local issues,” he said.
She found his choice of words odd. Local issues. As if they were just dealing with some kind of minor crisis.
“I’m investigating the Scrapheap, at least from here. Doing some other work,” he said, apparently being deliberately vague. “You can work over here.”
He moved her to a console near his. It looked like one of the tables she used in the research room.
“I’m looking for somewhere we can live,” she said, surprised the words didn’t twist in her throat.
“Not a habitable planet or moon or even a starbase,” he said. “We can find those.”
Of course they could. They didn’t need her for that.
“Look for something that had been the Fleet’s once,” he said. “Somewhere that might be familiar. Or something that would accept us.”
“How am I supposed to know that?” she asked. “The Fleet hasn’t been here for—”
“We know,” Atwater said. “Just see what you can find.”
Then he went back to his console, his shoulders hunched forward. He seemed defeated, somehow, and she wasn’t quite sure how, or what he had learned in the short time they had been apart.
She didn’t like the mood up here at all. No one else spoke to her. They all seemed deeply involved in their own work.
A history with the Fleet didn’t really matter. The Fleet wouldn’t be real to these people, not in this sector. Or would it? Would it be something mythical? Or part of their history? Or would these people here be like the Fleet themselves, people who threw away their history?
Breaux ran a hand through her hair, and tried to figure out how she would even start her search. She needed to access information about the sector, as the sector itself reported it.
She hoped that systems in this sector spoke to systems on the Renegat. She hoped that the language was the same. She hoped that somewhere, some culture would be amenable to the crew of the Renegat.
Or did she?
Because if she didn’t find anything, maybe that would convince everyone on board the ship to try harder to get home.
Home.
She half-smiled at the word. Home was lost to her now. She meant back to the Fleet itself.
The Fleet was home.
And she regretted running away.
The Renegat
Ibori did not seem to be infected with the pink stuff. Short of recalibrating all of the instruments and then trusting that recalibration, Seymont couldn’t be sure, of course. But she thought Ibori was clear, and so did Crowe.
He couldn’t quite explain the relief he felt when he realized that Ibori was clean. If anyone else should have been infected, it should have been Ibori. And he wasn’t.
Which meant that the infection started whenever someone made direct contact with the anacapa drives or the containers.
Crowe remained at his table, his hands still isolated, his pinkie throbbing. He didn’t mind the throb. It made him realize he had to solve this pink stuff problem before he moved on to anything else.
And he couldn’t solve it until he knew what had happened with Ibori. Now that Crowe knew, however, he felt that tickle in his brain grow more insistent.
Only three people had touched anything related to the anacapa drive—that he knew of—after the energy blast from the Scrapheap. Him, Romano, and Stephanos. Crowe had put up the shields after Stephanos had died, but before Romano had been tested.
Logically, if the shields had killed whatever was in Romano’s hands, the shields should have killed what was in his hands as well. And it hadn’t.
So something else was different. Something else had caused the change.
Seymont set Ibori free from the isolation chambers, then turned to Crowe.
“I don’t know what to do with you,” she said. “Or India for that matter. I don’t think you’re contagious, but I’ll be honest, I don’t have the brain power for any of this. I need to get back to the others.”
He started to nod, then stopped himself. “Orlena,” he said, “do you think that something in Romano’s system could have repelled this stuff?”
She gave him a sympathetic look. “I’m sorry, no,” she said.
“Convince me,” he said.
“It would have done so from the start,” she said. “And I saw clear evidence that the pink stuff grew and compromised her blood vessels and nerves, maybe even her muscles. I’m not sure if she will ever heal properly, and I don’t have the time to try to fix her.”
With that, Seymont started for the door. It was clear that she was thinking about the other patients.
“Wait, Orlena,” Crowe said.
“I can’t wait,” she said. “I’ve waited long enough.”
“Something was different between her and me and Natalia,” Crowe said.
“Then figure it out yourself,” Seymont said. “She did something different that the two of you didn’t do.”
“Natalia didn’t have time to do anything.” That was Ibori, speaking quietly. His voice was shaking. “Her nose started bleeding immediately, and then….”
He shook his head.
Crowe frowned. Nothing like that had happened to him, but by the time he was investigating the bigger anacapa drives, he was suited up. The energy field had also been mostly blocked.
Seymont shook herself, as if she had been caught by Ibori’s emotion. “Look,” she said, “I’ll work on this when I have a chance. But right now, it’s just the three of you. No offense, Nadim, but I have more pressing problems next door.”
And then she pushed her way out of the morgue. He wanted to stop her, but he knew that she was right: she needed to get to the others.
Leaving him to figure out the mystery of what was different.
It had to be something physical, something that had happened to Romano or that she had done that he hadn’t.
For the first time, he looked over at her, and wished that she was conscious. He would take the arguing and the viciousness, just to figure out what had changed. Because—
His brain finally stopped tickling.
She was unconscious.
She had been unconscious earlier. He had made her lose consciousness by depriving her of oxygen. Her system had been starving when she lost consciousness.
“Grab Seymont,” he said to Hagen.
“She’ll be furious,” he said.
“I don’t care. Get her now.”
With one quick movement, Hagen set the laser rifle down, and bolted from the room. It only took a few seconds for him to return with a furious Seymont.
“You’re wasting my time,” she snapped.
“I might be saving your life,” he said in return. “I need to know something.”
She crossed her arms and leaned back.
“The major physical difference I can think of,” he said, “is that I starved Romano of oxygen until she passed out.”
“Her and half the people in the med bay,” Seymont said, “all of whom need me.”
“Would that have starved this…parasite…as you’re calling it?”
“I have no idea without conducting experiments I don’t have time for,” she said.
“What about testing it on me?” he asked. “Can you set that up?”
“You know how dangerous that is,” she said. “If I calculate wrong…”
“Then I get what I deserve, at least according to everyone here,” he said. “Let’s try it.”
She glanced at Ibori, and then at Hagen, who had come in behind her.
“We need to replicate the conditions exactly,�
�� she said. “Tindo, figure out how long these people were without oxygen, and how slowly the oxygen returned to their systems. When you know that—”
“I’ll do it,” Hagen said. “I was there. I know mostly what it was.”
“Fine,” Seymont said. “Once you have it set up, we’ll need an isolation chamber for Nadim here—”
“A security chamber,” Crowe said. “Let’s replicate as much as possible.”
“Fine,” Seymont said, her irritation clear. “Set up the chamber whatever you want it to be, set up the timeline, and come get me. I’ll run the damn thing and then I’ll check your hands, Nadim.”
She had dropped the Mr. Crowe somewhere along the way. Crowe was glad of that.
“Sounds good,” he said.
“Fine,” she said a third time. He was amazed how one word could convey so many moods. This time, the fine was dismissive.
She left the room as quickly as she entered it.
“All right, gentlemen,” Crowe said. “You heard her. Let’s get to work.”
The Renegat
It took about fifteen minutes to get all of the information that Seymont wanted, and set up the security chamber around Crowe. He had made her take the isolation bubbles off his hands, resting them on the table, wincing slightly at the pain in his little finger.
The tingle in his other fingers remained. He wondered how quickly the pink stuff spread into his system. Another thing to study—if he had time for study.
He had theories too, that he hadn’t told any of the other three. Because he was afraid of damaging the experiment they were trying. He didn’t want any expectations at all.
But he had already thought of this pink stuff as some kind of weapon that latched on to something in the anacapa drive. If the pink stuff remained dormant until it was touched by oxygen, then it became even more lethal.
Because anacapa drives only ran in oxygen on occupied ships. The drives could operate without a full environment, and sometimes did, but they thrived in a regular environment as well—an environment with oxygen.
If this pink stuff spread by touch, then it would destroy the engineers who understood anacapa drives, and prevent those engineers from solving the problem in any kind of timely manner. It would, effectively, destroy any ability for a vessel with an anacapa drive to travel through foldspace, maybe for good.
Crowe didn’t understand the rate of the spread—at least in the human body. Maybe it had something to do with the degree of exposure or perhaps it was more complicated than that. But the pink stuff did spread quickly through the anacapa drives, which, he suspected, it was built to target.
And who would have done such a thing?
“You ready, Nadim?” Hagen asked.
Crowe looked up. Seymont had returned. She was shifting from foot to foot as if she couldn’t wait for this to get underway.
She probably couldn’t. She still had a lot of patients to deal with on the other side.
Just like he had an entire ship to deal with, once this was solved.
Crowe’s chest hurt. His heart was beating faster than it had a moment ago. They had cut the oxygen before they had told him they were going to do it.
He thought about holding his breath, then changed his mind. None of the people he had knocked unconscious outside of engineering had held their breath. They hadn’t realized what he was doing until too late.
And Hagen was doing the same thing here.
Crowe met his gaze, then gave Hagen a half nod of respect. The nod hurt.
All of Crowe’s muscles started to ache. Or maybe they had already been aching. He wasn’t sure. But he did know that he was starting to feel pain everywhere, and the places where there had been pain hurt even worse than they had before.
Even though he knew what was happening, he tried to take a deep breath, and got nothing. A panic built inside him. He needed to get out of this security barrier. They weren’t going to let him out either. This had been his idea, and he was going to die here.
Part of his brain watched the panic with expected amusement. He had panicked at the loss of oxygen on all of his environmental suit tests back in school—or rather, he had felt panic, but hadn’t acted on it.
You would’ve been captain-track if you didn’t have so many blemishes on your record.
One of his teachers had told him that. But who, he couldn’t remember. He couldn’t remember anything. He couldn’t remember the insights he had had a few moments ago about that pink stuff.
The insights were important.
Saving the Renegat was important.
Sitting here was important.
He just didn’t know why.
The Renegat
When Crowe passed out, he fell sideways, hitting his shoulder on the barrier, and then bouncing in the other direction, and slamming his head on the table. The sound reverberated in the small space, making Ibori jump.
“Will that make a difference?” he asked Seymont.
She was looking at the readings on the screen floating in front of her. So was Hagen, the laser rifle near the door. Romano was still asleep on her gurney. Ibori had realized, sometime in the last hour, that Romano’s unconsciousness had nothing to do with her injury any longer and everything to do with convenience.
“Will what make a difference?” Seymont asked. She sounded annoyed. She’d been sounding annoyed for some time now, and Ibori didn’t blame her. Apparently, she hadn’t even been able to finish working on the case she had started before Crowe arrived in the med bay.
“Him hitting his head!” Ibori’s voice rose even though he didn’t want it to. He sounded almost panicked, or maybe he was panicked. He didn’t want to watch anyone else die today.
“Oh.” Seymont looked up. Apparently she hadn’t even noticed. She stared at Crowe for a moment. “No. The oxygen is what we care about.”
One of Crowe’s hands had fallen off the table, and the other was sliding down slowly. Ibori couldn’t see from his position, but he thought maybe there was some blood on the table too.
Head wounds bled. He remembered that from his field medicine training. Head wounds bled more than expected. He couldn’t panic.
But he was.
He was so tired that everything was a crisis. Then he let out a small laugh. Maybe everything seemed like a crisis because everything was a crisis.
“You’re waking him up, right? What if he doesn’t—”
“Stop, Tindo.” Seymont sounded exhausted. “We’re following the plan.”
“But he hit his head. If he doesn’t—”
“That’s why I’m here,” she said. “I’ll deal with whatever comes up.”
Crowe’s other hand slipped off the table, and swung just a bit. He wasn’t waking up. Ibori shot a glance at Hagen, who was looking at numbers as well.
“How long did it take the others to wake up?” Ibori asked.
“We brought them back slowly.” That wasn’t a real answer, and Hagen knew it. “The question is, how long should we wait to check to see if that stuff died in Crowe’s hand?”
He addressed that to Seymont. It was as if Ibori wasn’t in the room.
He kinda wasn’t. He had no function here, which was probably also why he was fluttering around like a worried child. He made himself take a deep breath—saw the irony in that—and then shook his head slightly.
He needed to calm down. There was a lull in all of the activity and it was making him react—or rather, letting his reactions come to the surface.
He still didn’t have time for reactions. He needed to focus, and to figure out what to do next.
“I think we can check as soon as he’s conscious,” Seymont was saying to Hagen. “If the lack of oxygen caused the die-off in Romano, then it would have happened fast.”
Crowe moaned and brought his right hand to his forehead. He didn’t lift his head, though.
Ibori was glad to see the movement, glad to hear the moan.
Hagen and Seymont didn’t seem to have an em
otional reaction at all, though. They continued, as if Crowe hadn’t done anything.
Crowe sat up. Blood had run down the right side of his face from a cut on his forehead. His right hand was on the cut, even though he probably shouldn’t have touched it.
“Nadim,” Seymont said. “I’m going to need to slice another finger.”
That had been so painful. Ibori thought he had been able to handle pain well, but having Seymont slice into his finger, not an hour ago, had been one of the most painful things he had ever experienced.
He had mentioned it to her, and she had laughed. It’s the nerve endings in the fingertip, she had said. Fingers are designed to be extremely sensitive.
And they were. His index finger on his right hand still ached from the slice.
Crowe winced, nodded, and then winced again. “Same hand?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Hold that hand above the table. We’re going to have to clean the table off anyway.”
“My head hurts.” Crowe was speaking slowly.
“I bet it does,” Seymont said. She had no bedside manner at all. It was clear that she wanted to be somewhere else. “We’ll worry about that in a minute. Hand up, please.”
Crowe half-closed his eyes, started to raise his right hand, then stopped. He raised his left hand, and held it, palm up.
One of the isolation bubbles formed around the hand. Ibori moved slightly to the right, so that he could see. He had already opened a small screen that was tied to the equipment Seymont had used before.
Ibori wanted to see if this experiment worked—in real time.
A surgical hand formed underneath Crowe’s left hand, holding it in place. When that surgical hand had held Ibori’s, the grip had been firm and impossible to shake off.
The second surgical hand formed inside the bubble, a scalpel instead of the index finger. This time, Ibori looked away. He didn’t need to see that again—and be reminded of how it felt.
Even though his own finger throbbed in sympathy.
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