But she didn’t, of course. She couldn’t.
Besides, she wasn’t sure that comment was true. The Fleet did have procedures, particularly for ships that returned without their captains.
The Renegat had no senior officers at all, and that was suspicious.
It seemed even more suspicious to Dauber now. Serpell seemed almost angry at this turn of events—not at the lost time, but at the destination.
Then Dauber turned away from her, away from all of them, and reminded herself that the anger might have been misplaced. The anger might have been about the lost time, but Serpell (and some of the others) might choose to blame Dauber instead.
Dauber glanced over her shoulder. A number of the survivors were standing now. A few were holding each other. The counselors were talking to people on the fringes of the crowd, and some of Dauber’s junior officers were standing near the door, taking names of the people who were trying to flee the room for somewhere more private.
She slipped out the side, entered a small corridor that allowed her to walk back to the elevators undetected.
She leaned against the wall and closed her eyes.
She had known today would be hard. She had even anticipated the anger. But she hadn’t quite understood what was behind Serpell’s stare. Fury yes, but something else.
Betrayal? Terror?
Dauber closed her eyes. In sending the survivors to Starbase Sigma, she had vacated any right to solve the mysteries of the Renegat herself.
And, she realized, she was all right with that.
She wanted these people off her ship. They felt dangerous to her—and she wanted them gone.
Part Forty-Two
Saving The Renegat
100 Years Ago
The Renegat Orbiter One
Crowe felt like a nervous boy again, about to embark on something he knew was wrong. Only he wasn’t waiting for his team in the children’s mess. He stood in the cockpit of the Renegat Orbiter One, something one of his former captains called a ship-to-shore vessel, after long ago sailing vessels.
Crowe had chosen Orbiter One because it did not have an anacapa drive, but it did have speed. It had the most powerful force fields of all the small ships on the Renegat. And Orbiter One also had some laser canons and a few directional weapons should anything go wrong.
His palms were wet, and his fingertips still ached. The fingers that Seymont had sliced open hurt when he brushed them against anything, but that was a small price to pay for the knowledge he had gathered.
The knowledge made him confident, and the confidence had helped him officially take over the Renegat. As he told the entire remaining crew, someone had to lead them. He made a shipwide announcement after he’d had some sleep and things settled down in the brig.
He had told everyone about the threats from the Scrapheap, and the weapon he had discovered. He called the pink stuff the anti-anacapa weapon, since it chewed up anacapa drives from the inside. He told the ship that they were lucky that the small medical and engineering team had figured out how that weapon killed humans as well, and how to stop it.
He wiped his hands on the outside of his environmental suit. He had brought six others with him on Orbiter One. Bakhr sat near the console, monitoring the energy coming off the Scrapheap.
Ibori was piloting. It turned out that he had a lot more experience in that realm, particularly with small ships, than Titus M’Ghan did. M’Ghan remained on the bridge of the Renegat, along with Atwater, Ellum, and Rodriguez.
Willoughby ran engineering, which Crowe still kept guarded as if it held all of the secrets.
Tosidis sat nervously beside Ibori, threading his fingers together. Tosidis hadn’t done much outside-the-ship work, past his training, but he was a smart engineer and he knew a lot about systems.
Crowe missed Stephanos tremendously. He needed an anacapa expert now, and he didn’t have one. He was going to have to rely on the team he had here.
Most of them sat in the cockpit, pretending to be relaxed. Tasneem Zhang even had her head back and eyes closed. Everyone else was studying the Scrapheap as it loomed ahead of them.
Besides Crowe, only two others stood. Yulia Colvin was actually pacing, and next to her, Danika Newark continually adjusted her environmental suit, as if it didn’t quite meet her standards.
Newark was the surprise. Crowe had brought her along because of Colvin.
Crowe had learned, by examining the records, that Colvin had a lot of exterior repair experience. She had often gone outside of ships, investigating problems on ships’ hulls and patching equipment in zero-G environments.
Her various promotions had taken her away from that. When Crowe had asked her about her experiences, she had smiled. I loved working in space, she had said. I’d love to explore those ships in the Scrapheap.
But she had had one condition: she wanted to bring an experienced partner.
Apparently, on some ship in their history, they had actually been repair buddies. According to Colvin, Newark was one of the few people who knew how to stay calm when working outside of a ship.
Crowe had started to protest, and then he remembered the one thing that Preemas had taught him about the Renegat: almost everyone had been in the wrong job for the wrong reason. Crowe had thought that Preemas found Newark’s expertise when he moved her to the chef position, but Preemas had ignored her extensive experience working in zero-G.
Maybe Preemas hadn’t thought he would need it.
When Crowe looked up those experiences in Newark’s record, he found commendation after commendation. Then she had been promoted above her skill level and, apparently, over her own protests. She hadn’t wanted to move up. She had wanted to keep the job she had trained for.
She seemed a lot calmer now than the woman he had known as first officer. She had actually given him a small smile when she had boarded Orbiter One.
He hadn’t smiled in return.
This mission was a serious one, made more serious by his history with Scrapheaps.
In the few hours of sleep he’d managed over the past few days, he’d had two memory-nightmares about the Scrapheap exploding.
This Scrapheap was completely different. It had a malfunctioning and half-ruined protective force field, a lot of empty places where ships had been, pieces of older ships so damaged as to be almost unidentifiable, and a central tower that looked like someone had dug holes into it.
The Ready Vessels still seemed protected, but he could see the ghostly shapes of them through their force field. And that told him either the force field was malfunctioning or it was slowly losing power.
He also knew it was possible that it had been designed differently than the force fields he was used to.
He’d been thinking a lot about force fields and shields lately because, he realized as he worked on understanding the anti-anacapa weapon, that the Fleet had encountered it before. The shields on the Renegat had been designed to block the weapon’s infiltration of the vessel.
Preemas’s failure to arrive in this sector shielded had caused the weapon’s invasion. Although Crowe couldn’t put the failure entirely on Preemas. If the Fleet kept track of its history, the entire Renegat would have known that there were weapons that had targeted the Fleet’s most essential drive, and the Renegat would have been prepared.
Crowe did not like to think about the implications of the weapon—that some culture somewhere had targeted the Fleet so specifically, and so effectively, causing severe problems. The weapon also showed a sophisticated understanding of the anacapa drive, which meant that whoever had developed this weapon might have had a better understanding of the drive than the Fleet did.
Atwater had wanted to discuss all of that, but Crowe had brushed him off. What Crowe had needed, he told Atwater, was a way to guarantee that any drive brought back to the Renegat was free of the weapon. Atwater was now searching through the databases, trying to see if the Fleet had—in its distant past—developed a test for finding the weapon.
> Crowe also had Willoughby put a team together to reverse engineer the block against the weapon in the shield. If the shield could stop the weapon’s energy, then the shield could identify the threat in that energy.
Crowe needed the Renegat’s computer system to be able to identify the weapon as well.
He ran his right hand over his face. His skin was damp, mostly from nerves. The environmental system in the cockpit of Orbiter One was working just fine.
But he was on edge, and that edge got sharper and sharper as he got closer and closer to the Scrapheap.
The plan was that Orbiter One would enter the Scrapheap in the biggest opening in the Scrapheap’s force field. Crowe had already set up Orbiter One’s shipwide identification band, so that it reflected not just modern Standard, but a version of Standard that they had found in the information that had gotten sent to the Fleet all that time ago.
One of the linguists, Raina Serpell, had helped him design that, even though a few people in engineering had told him not to use her assistance. She was married to India Romano, and although she hadn’t rebelled with Romano, most of the crew saw Serpell as compromised by Romano.
Crowe didn’t care who was compromised by whom. As he had said in his shipwide announcement, the crew had to work together now to survive. They needed each other.
He wished he had the full crew complement, but he had to leave the worst of the rebels in the brig. And then there were the injured and the dying in the med bay. Some of them, Seymont told him, would never recover fully, even if they survived.
Crowe moved to the pilot’s chair, standing slightly behind Ibori, trying not to let his own tension infect anyone. Like he had done all of those years ago, Crowe had actually modeled this trip into the Scrapheap. He had run simulation after simulation, looking for the best way in. He had had Bakhr run similar simulations.
They both found the same entry into the Scrapheap, and the same possible cautions near the force field surrounding the Ready Vessels.
From what Crowe could tell, there were still working anacapa drives in the Ready Vessels. He couldn’t get readings, but the Ready Vessels looked mostly untouched.
He hoped they were.
The Renegat needed two working anacapa drives and a communications anacapa, if they could find one. If they couldn’t, he wasn’t going to worry about it. Communications anacapa drives were luxuries. He didn’t need to contact the Fleet right now anyway, especially given what had happened a few days ago.
He resisted the urge to ask Ibori if he was clear on the plan. They had gone over the coordinates half a dozen times already. At one point, Ibori had given Crowe a sideways look.
“What are you worried about?” Ibori had asked.
That this ship will cause the entire Scrapheap to explode. The thought had crossed Crowe’s brain before he could stop it. But he didn’t say that. He also didn’t say, Nothing, which was his default response.
Instead, he had answered honestly. “I’m worried about this entire journey,” he had said. “We need this.”
Strangely, he wasn’t worried about his part in it. He hadn’t worked in zero-G outside of a ship in a decade or more. And he hadn’t been particularly good at the work when he had done it. He preferred to work and think in the comfort of an engineering bay or a bridge. He didn’t like working with gloves covering his fingers, and an environmental suit his only protection between him and the coldness of space.
But he was going to do it now. He needed to look at the anacapa drives himself. Right now, he didn’t really trust anyone else.
“Okay,” Ibori said. “We’re approaching now.”
Technically, they had been approaching all along. But what Ibori meant was Orbiter One was finally nearing the space around the Scrapheap where—in modern Scrapheaps at least—the Scrapheap’s defenses would activate.
Crowe probably should have sat down and strapped in. But he didn’t. He placed his hands on the back of Ibori’s chair, making Ibori turn slightly and glare at him.
But Crowe didn’t want to move. He wanted to see this as the pilot did. Ibori had a circle of screens around him. Colvin had called up some floating screens and was monitoring Orbiter One’s passage as well.
Crowe appreciated that. She clearly had a system for working outside of the ship, and he wasn’t going to interfere with it.
Bakhr had a group of screens floating around him as well. Crowe had given Bakhr permission to alter the shields on Orbiter One as needed to compensate for any energy coming off the Scrapheap. That Bakhr also thought the Scrapheap might target them made Crowe feel a little better.
His mouth was dry, though, and he kept quiet. He knew he was too distracted to command this little ship at the best of his ability. He had to trust the others here, and he was.
Tosidis leaned forward and called up a holographic representation of the Scrapheap and Orbiter One. Orbiter One, glowing yellow on the hologram, looked like a speck of dust about to enter a planet.
Crowe did not look at the representation anymore. Instead, he watched what Ibori was watching, Orbiter One moving ever closer to the edge of the Scrapheap.
The Scrapheap’s force fields crackled and flared, as if they were malfunctioning in some of the smaller areas. Crowe was beginning to think that most of the Scrapheap’s defenses were down, when a red light spread across the remaining ships.
The red light sent a jolt of adrenaline through Crowe. For a brief, ugly, half second, he thought maybe Orbiter One had somehow ignited the interior of the Scrapheap, even though he knew that was impossible.
Orbiter One hadn’t even entered the Scrapheap yet.
“What’s that?” Tosidis asked as the red light circled around the entire Scrapheap.
“Central tower.” Ibori sounded preoccupied.
“Doing what?” Newark asked.
“If I knew, I’d tell you,” Ibori said.
“They got our identification?” Bakhr asked, with just a tinge of panic in his voice.
“I sure hope so,” Ibori said. “I’ve been sending it since we left the Renegat.”
Crowe willed himself to remain calm. It was hard. That red light had ignited all those old memories, which weren’t buried as deep as he had hoped.
He could almost hear Tessa’s voice: You better pay up, buddy.
Pay up. He’d been doing that his whole life. And now he was trying to do it again. He needed to save the remaining crew of the Renegat.
That thought made him focus.
“Use that old channel we set up,” he said to Ibori. “Put the identification message in old Standard on repeat from that channel.”
“I’ll do it,” Tosidis said. Clearly Preemas’s structure remained with this crew. Orders were something to be ignored, or not followed to the letter.
Crowe only half-cared. He wanted the crew to get this done, no matter how they did it.
The red light caught Orbiter One. He could see it on the representation first, and then on one of Ibori’s screens.
“Has that light changed the energy readings around the Scrapheap?” he asked Bakhr.
“Nope.” Bakhr sounded calmer than Crowe expected. “The energy readings are still a complete mess of various signatures, but nothing is ramping up.”
“Good,” Crowe said. He glanced at that central tower in the representation. The tower wasn’t that far from the gigantic hole in the Scrapheap’s force field.
He had measured that hole as he ran the simulations. It was the size of a small moon. They had a pretty clear path from that entry point to the Ready Vessels. Most of the large ships had been removed from that area. Even the ones on the imagery sent back to the Fleet—the ones that had been replaced with non-Fleet vessels were gone.
Orbiter One’s trajectory took it through the center of that hole, into the very middle of the emptiness. Although emptiness wasn’t really what they faced. More like an area filled with small traps, mostly composed of parts of ships and unidentified pieces of technology.
&
nbsp; Crowe hadn’t even tried to figure out what tech was causing the various energy signatures. When Bakhr ran his simulations, he tried to figure out the energy signatures first, and had no real luck. He had come to Crowe and said that to figure out the signatures first would take at least a week, maybe more.
They both had agreed that the Renegat didn’t have that kind of time.
Not because the Renegat was low on stores or because of any kind of pressure from the outside. But because the remaining crew was restless. Many of them were terrified of being trapped in this sector. They all wanted the freedom that the anacapa drive gave them—even if the entire ship decided never to use the drive again.
Crowe’s fingers dug into the back of Ibori’s chair, prompting Ibori to give Crowe another filthy look.
Crowe almost lifted his hands off the back of the chair, but didn’t. He couldn’t, really. He needed the support—especially as Orbiter One slid firmly into the Scrapheap itself.
The young Crowe—the Crowe with imagination and dreams—had thought the interior of a Scrapheap would be a magical place, filled with great ships that had had stirring histories and equipment that he had only seen in ancient tech blueprints.
The actual inside, of this Scrapheap, anyway, was a lot more prosaic. The name suited it. The junk Orbiter One threaded its way through was—as far as he could tell—just that. Bits of ships and parts of equipment that seemed to have no use at all.
The only difference from what his younger self had expected was that these pieces were stationary. There was something in the Scrapheap that held all the various ships and parts of ships in place.
But that something didn’t have an impact on Orbiter One. The ship managed to follow its plotted trajectory as if it were being pulled forward by one of those beams of light.
Crowe glanced at the representation of the tower again. The light had shut itself off. The tower looked dormant.
He wondered if that meant that the tower had accepted Orbiter One as a Fleet vessel, or if that function had been completely shut off.
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