Crowe’s entire body jerked.
Ibori looked at the screen floating near him. He remembered what he had seen before—the pink against the veins, the abnormal material nestled under the skin.
He had been relieved when that hadn’t shown up in his reading. He was still relieved.
It took a moment for the small camera to focus on the interior of Crowe’s finger. There seemed to be dirt on the lens. Ibori was about to tell Seymont to wipe the dirt off, when he realized what he was seeing.
The pink stuff had died.
Crowe had been right.
The lack of oxygen had killed it.
“It worked?” Ibori breathed.
“Looks like it.” Seymont sounded so matter of fact. And yet, this discovery, this thing that had just happened, might well save all of their lives. For good. She should have been more excited.
“It worked?” Crowe echoed. He tilted his head back, his skin a weird shade of greenish gray, probably from the lack of oxygen.
“Let me finish before I declare victory.” As Seymont said that, the scooping finger ran over the wound in Crowe’s finger.
Hagen was tapping the screens in front of him as she did so.
“Yeah.” Hagen’s voice lilted upwards with the beginnings of a disbelieving joy. “Yeah. It’s the same stuff you pulled out of Romano. The lack of oxygen killed that shit dead.”
Ibori let out a half laugh. He had hoped for it, but hadn’t expected it.
Seymont leaned her head back and closed her eyes.
Crowe laughed. Ibori wasn’t ever sure he had heard Crowe laugh before.
“What does this mean?” Ibori asked. “We’re going to pull the oxygen from the Renegat?”
“No need,” Hagen said. “We can deal with the anacapa drives on their own, and anyone who might be contaminated, we do this to.”
Ibori nodded, weak-kneed with relief.
“What does this mean?” Crowe repeated, as if Hagen hadn’t spoken.
“It means we had a victory,” Seymont said. “I hadn’t realized how much I needed one.”
“It means,” Crowe said, his voice stronger than it had been a moment before, “that we have a future. We just need to figure out how to implement it.”
Part Forty-One
A Century and Change
Now
The Aizsargs
Dauber was beginning to recognize the survivors by their faces alone. Not that she had met everyone—she hadn’t—but she had looked at quite a bit of footage from the Renegat as she was trying to figure out exactly what had happened to it.
She watched the Renegat survivors slowly enter the same large room where Anna Vail had first talked with them. That time, the room had been set up for a short meeting. None of the furniture had arisen from the floor. There were sideboards with food, but not a lot.
This time, the sideboards remained but they had abundant food of all types. There was water as well, but no stimulants and no alcohol. Rows of chairs had risen out of their places in the floor, as tight as Dauber could make them and still have room for the nearly 200 survivors from that ship.
Counselors and security were strategically placed between the sideboards, and a few were already standing in the back, doing their best to blend in to the dark wall.
Dauber fully expected half of the survivors to melt down somehow. She’d seen it before, when she had done her short stint on foldspace search vehicles. Then, she had only had to observe as the captain of the search ship informed a dozen crew members of a rescued ship that they had lost twenty years.
Twenty years had been traumatic, but at least most friends and family had still been alive when those dozen crew members had returned. She doubted anyone that the Renegat survivors had known were still living. Long life was rare, particularly among the traveling Fleet. She had heard of people living longer than 150 years, some as high as 200 years, on some of the former sector bases, but most humans barely made it past their 130s.
Anyone the survivors had known would have had to have been very young when the survivors disappeared. And, Dauber knew from the research, most of the survivors had left no friends or family behind. Maybe that would make this news easier.
Last night and this morning, she had reviewed the protocol for telling survivors of foldspace that they had lost time. Few people reacted well. And, the materials said, the ones she had to watch out for the most were the ones who responded stoically, because they might get ambushed by their emotions at a much later date.
That was for standard crews, lost in foldspace on a routine mission. Nothing had been routine for the Renegat.
Dauber stood on the small raised platform at the front of the room, and watched as the survivors made their way inside. A handful had wheelchairs and other apparatus that still startled her. Fleet medicine was good, more than good enough to repair serious damage that people suffered.
But only when they had access to the proper care and the right kind of medical professionals. She hadn’t really realized, until she saw the Renegat survivors, how important connection among all the Fleet ships truly was.
It took a lot of restraint for her to keep from nodding at the various faces she recognized. So far, she had only personally met with six survivors, and the longest meeting she had had was with Serpell. It had also been the most frustrating.
But the others hadn’t really been helpful either. They all seemed to tell the same story, and sometimes it was spoken slowly and cautiously as if the person speaking was trying to remember the proper words they had been told to say.
The last of the survivors straggled in. The most severely injured gathered near Dauber’s left, far from the door.
Everyone else stood in front of the chairs but didn’t sit down. Either they were waiting for permission to take a chair or they weren’t sure exactly what they were supposed to do.
“Please sit,” Dauber said. Three of the people in the front row glanced at the chairs as if the chair might hurt them. But they sat.
Only a handful of people in the back continued to stand, and Dauber realized that there were no empty chairs near them. She waved a hand at Vilma Lauritz, who was in the back with the counselors. Lauritz and several members of her security team were nearby in case some of the survivors reacted violently.
Having them seated would minimize the impact. If they fainted or their knees gave way, they would already be sitting. If they wanted to hit something, they would have to stand, which would automatically draw attention to them.
Lauritz touched controls on the wall, and brought up two more rows of chairs in the back.
The rest of the survivors then sat down.
“Thank you all for coming,” Dauber said. “I’m Captain Kim Dauber. I am pleased to have you all on board the Aizsargs.”
Raina Serpell sat in the very center of the room, her hands folded in her lap, her head down. Yusef Kabac sat at her left, and kept glancing at her. Dauber worked hard to avoid Kabac’s gaze. The man had been annoying in their short session. He had been trying to impress Dauber, and his know-it-all attitude had pushed her away instead.
If she hadn’t seen the report from some of the survivors identifying him as the one who got the doors to one of the Renegat’s cargo bays open at the potential risk of his own life, she would have thought him a worthless idiot. Instead, she figured he was clueless and directionless, the kind of person who didn’t learn easily and didn’t take advice well.
“I’m sure many of you have noticed some of the unusual restrictions we placed on you when you boarded the Aizsargs,” Dauber said. “These are part of a protocol that we are required to follow in cases like yours.”
“There are cases like ours?” one of the injured women—Lakinas?—muttered just loud enough for Dauber to hear.
Dauber did not acknowledge the comment. She wasn’t going to let anything pull her off script.
“There is no easy way to tell you all this,” she said. “So I am going to do so bluntly and with n
o dancing around. The Renegat left on its mission more than one hundred years ago.”
There was a collective gasp around the room.
“By the time we found you,” Dauber said, “you had been officially considered lost for over ninety years. Unofficially, the Fleet considered you lost two months after your last contact with the vice admiral who had approved your mission.”
“Vice Admiral Gāo?” someone asked.
That comment Dauber did acknowledge. “Yes,” she said into the direction of the voice.
All of the survivors were looking at her directly now, even Serpell, whose face was a mask of anguish. Dauber’s heart twisted, but she didn’t let her emotion show on her face.
“They wrote us off?” someone else asked. “We were doing something dangerous and they wrote us off?”
Dauber couldn’t tell where the voice had come from, but the security team toward the back left moved just enough to let her know they had seen the person who had spoken. One of the counselors put a hand out, blocking the team from doing anything.
Apparently, the counselor wanted them all to wait, to see how this played out.
“Unfortunately,” Dauber said, loudly enough to keep the survivors’ attention, “the Fleet has had to develop systems to deal with a loss of time in foldspace. The systems—”
“We didn’t lose the time in foldspace,” a woman yelled. “I know we didn’t. We kept track of everything. We weren’t becalmed or anything. We weren’t trapped—”
“Please,” Dauber said, holding up her hand. “I know this is hard.”
“You have no idea,” Lakinas said. “You have no damn idea. You’re—”
“Please,” Dauber said, more forcefully this time. “Let me continue and you’ll—”
“Continue?” Lakinas said, even louder this time. “So that you can cover your ass with the Fleet. Yes, Admiral. I followed procedure. They were still upset—”
Dauber clapped her hands together. The sound reverberated off the walls.
“Now that I have your attention again,” she said, “we will be following a procedure developed after you folks disappeared. It has been shown to ease the transition.”
“Ease?” a man yelled from the back. “You can’t ease one hundred years.”
“The Fleet knows, from experience,” Dauber continued, “that it will take a long time and a lot of counseling to deal with what’s happened to you—”
“You have no idea what happened to us,” a woman named Jane Zerpa said, her voice wobbling. Zerpa had been one of the few Dauber had talked with. “The deaths, the fights, the attack. You have no idea. And now we’re here. It was getting back to the Fleet that drove us. Don’t you understand?”
Dauber did understand. She would have been the same way.
She gave Zerpa, a large woman who seemed to be forever on edge, her most compassionate gaze.
“I do understand,” Dauber said. “I would have wanted to come home too.”
Voices rumbled beneath hers as the survivors turned toward each other, or tried to ask questions, or moaned into their hands, which were now covering some of their mouths.
“The Fleet is eternal,” she said. “It’s not that different than it was a hundred years ago.”
Although she didn’t know that for certain. She wasn’t sure if she was lying or not. She assumed not, but she couldn’t know. She was certain small things were different.
“The Fleet has a system for finding relatives,” she said.
“They chose us because we didn’t have relatives,” Declan Connolly said. He had spent a lot of time on the Renegat’s bridge, which was why Dauber had talked with him. During their short interview, he had had trouble meeting her gaze.
“I know,” she said. “But you had friends. You had a life.”
A number of people were shaking their heads.
“We will help you through this,” Dauber said, deciding to go back on to the script. “There are counselors in the back who will meet with you. All of you need to have at least one mandatory meeting with a counselor. You can choose to have more if you want.”
And the counselors might choose for you, was the next sentence she was supposed to say, but she didn’t. These people seemed stressed enough.
They were shifting in their chairs. Some had their heads down, hands stuck in their hair, maybe even covering their ears.
A few were watching her with tears streaming down their faces.
“I’m not going to say that everything will be all right,” she said. “You did go through hell to get here. We realize that, and we know that will have an impact on everything that happens to you going forward.”
A few more people looked up.
Dauber’s gaze met Serpell’s. Serpell was one of the stoic ones the Fleet protocol warned about. But her nose had turned red, and her teeth were visibly holding down her lower lip.
“We are going to take you to Starbase Sigma,” Dauber said, “and there—”
“Sigma?” Kabac said, his voice nearly a wail. “The Fleet just finished Starbase Rho.”
Serpell closed her eyes, and a tear caught the light as it meandered its way down her face.
Dauber nodded. “You will have a lot of disconcerting moments like that one,” she said. “I’m not trying to normalize it. I am trying to warn you. A number of things are different. We will get you to Starbase Sigma. They have facilities that will help you—”
“You’re going to incarcerate us there,” Lakinas said. “The Fleet sends survivors to sector bases, not starbases. Starbases handle legal.”
“They did,” Dauber said, not quite lying. Starbases still handled legal. “Please do remember, as you try to filter information we’re telling you, that some things are different in this time period.”
“God,” someone moaned, and that led to a cacophony of sound—yells, cries, sobs. People were hunched over, their shoulders shaking. Others had their arms around each other.
Still, a handful continued to gaze at Dauber as if she could give them some kind of answer that would make them feel better.
Not that she could.
She clapped her hands again. The sound carried, and several people jumped as if they had been shot.
But the noise stopped.
“You will remain on this deck,” Dauber said, “unless you’re being escorted to a counseling appointment. We’re going to open up the computer network a bit, so that you can read the history of the past hundred years, and catch up on Fleet business.”
“But we can’t try to contact anyone we used to know, right?” Connolly asked, his voice bitter.
“Not yet,” Dauber said. “Some of the things you will want to do are beyond our capability here on the Aizsargs. You’ll be able to do most everything when you get to Starbase Sigma.”
She hoped. She didn’t exactly know, but at that point, these people wouldn’t be her problem anymore.
She didn’t tell them that they would be debriefed. Nor did she tell them that she had already sent all of the Renegat records to the justice unit on Starbase Sigma. That unit would decide how to handle these people.
Her decision-making for them was done. She had decided that she couldn’t deal with everything that had gone wrong on their ship, and that the Fleet itself needed to figure out what to do with these survivors, not her.
Maybe that was the coward’s way out. It seemed that way as she looked at nearly two hundred distraught people. She felt an incredible compassion for them and their situation—they had survived hell, probably by thinking about home.
Only their home was gone. Everything they knew had been destroyed.
And she, in following procedure, was going to make things worse.
Because she suspected they had done some things in their quest for survival that went against all of the Fleet’s protocols.
“I don’t suppose we have a choice.” Serpell spoke with great force. Dauber finally understood why the others had followed her.
They all l
ooked at Serpell now. The crying had stopped, although sniffling continued from various points in the room. The counselors had moved a bit closer, but still hadn’t joined the group.
Dauber wasn’t sure she understood the question. “A choice?”
“We can’t ask you to drop us somewhere else,” Serpell said. “We have to go to Starbase Sigma, don’t we?”
Fascinating idea, that they could choose to end up somewhere else. Dauber wasn’t sure where that came from. Maybe Lakinas’s comment about the legal ramifications of their journey.
“I don’t have a choice,” Dauber said. “Fleet procedure for rescues like this requires me to bring the survivors to a place of the Fleet’s choosing.”
She left off the part that she had recommended which of the two options the Renegat survivors would have to take.
“Where you go from there,” she said, “is not up to me. I don’t know that procedure. I’ve never been a part of it.”
“We have to go to Starbase Sigma, whether we want to or not,” Serpell said.
“Yes,” Dauber said. “We will arrive in just a few days. Please use the time you have here to talk with our counselors and figure out how to move forward again.”
“Yeah,” said that male voice she couldn’t identify. “Because moving backwards worked so damn well for us.”
Half the survivors laughed, a strange bitter sound.
Dauber frowned. They had gone backwards, at the Fleet’s direction. She hadn’t really thought of that in depth before, how unnatural that trip must have seemed.
“I wish I had better news,” she said to the group. “But we will do everything in our power to help you.”
Then she beckoned the counselors and security to move forward, and essentially surround the survivors.
Conversations rose, mixed with cries of anguish and some ugly sobbing.
Serpell continued to stare at Dauber as if Serpell were trying to figure out Dauber’s motivation.
Dauber wanted to say, If you had been honest with me, maybe you would have been able to go to a sector base. Maybe you wouldn’t have to go through that extra step.
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