Technically, he should have let Colvin lead this mission. She had a lot more experience exploring old vessels. But Crowe couldn’t put her in charge, partly because he didn’t trust anyone, not after what had happened with Preemas, but partly because she didn’t know exactly what they were looking for—and Crowe did.
He was glad he had made that decision now, because he wouldn’t have wanted Colvin to accidentally start the environmental systems in this ancient ship.
The three of them squeezed into the airlock and then pushed into the ship itself.
There were no maps of this vessel, at least not in his suit’s storage, and none on Orbiter One either. This vessel—whatever it was—was so old that blueprints of its interior didn’t seem to exist anywhere—or at least anywhere that he could find.
The fact that he could talk to it, and read its notifications, seemed like a small miracle to him. He wondered if the Fleet had stored these vessels here centuries after the Scrapheap shut down, and knew that, at the moment, he had no way to find out.
He pulled the scanner he had brought with him, and turned it on. He was holding his breath. He had to force himself to stop doing that. But each time he used one of his own pieces of tech, he worried that he would ignite something.
The scanner monitored anacapa energy. He could have monitored that through his suit, but he didn’t want to. He wanted to be able to easily shut off the tech and toss it away from the team, if he needed to.
When he had described that, before the mission started, everyone looked at him as if he were being paranoid. And maybe he was. But he liked to think he was being cautious instead.
The anacapa energy on this ship was low level and came from one area only. That area was to their right and one deck above them.
He told Colvin and Newark that in two quick sentences. They nodded their response.
“Yulia,” he said, “you lead. But should anything unusual happen, you stop and wait for me.”
She knew how to find good handholds, how to work in this kind of zero-G, and what to avoid. It only made sense that she would be the one to lead while inside.
“You sure?” she asked.
“Go,” he said.
She pushed past him, setting a pace faster than one he would usually have set. She turned on all of the external lights in her suit except for the lights at the bottom of her boots. That way she wasn’t blinding the other two, but she was illuminating their journey.
Crowe hadn’t thought to do that.
He was now positive he had made the right decision.
He turned on the lights in his gloves and along the sleeves of his suit. He also turned on the hood lamp on his forehead, but left the rest of the face lights off. He hated using those, because they sometimes blinded him.
Newark brought up the rear, and like Colvin, she had all of her suit lights on. Together, the three of them brightened the corridor considerably.
The corridor had sharp angles and corners on its doors. The floor seemed to be carpeted, although Crowe couldn’t tell just from looking at it. None of the doors were open. Panels jutted out of the walls, right about the height Crowe was traveling, so he had to be careful not to hit them.
The corners and angles and sharp edges made him nervous. Any one of those edges could compromise his environmental suit.
Colvin kept a killing pace. She would push off the control panels or the walls themselves, then use an outstretched hand to right herself, half-floating, half-propelling herself down that corridor.
Crowe struggled to keep up. He had never traveled like this, not fast, anyway, so his technique was nowhere near as good as hers.
Newark stayed with him, although she would occasionally pull ahead, and then seem to remind herself that she needed to bring up the rear. He would have told her to go forward, but he was worried that he would get hopelessly behind, and then get confused in the dark corridors.
No one said anything. The comms were open, though. He could hear the occasional grunt or a harsh intake of breath. But no conversation at all, which he appreciated.
Once they started moving, he stopped worrying. They had to get through this, see what condition the anacapa drive was in, and figure out if their sensors were leading them astray with the drives. If the drive was as it seemed, then it wouldn’t take a lot of work to get the needed drives.
If the drive wasn’t as it seemed, then they had a lot of work ahead of them, and he wasn’t sure if the crew of the Renegat was up to that task.
Colvin finally veered to the right. He followed, a little slower than he wanted to. She had stopped near an elevator and was using one of the scanners she had brought to probe for some other way to the next level up.
As Crowe started to reach for his scanner, she set hers back in its pocket, and grabbed at something he couldn’t quite see clearly. He moved a little closer, so that his hood light illuminated what she was reaching for.
It was a handle.
“Scan the underside first,” he said. “Sometimes, in the old, old, vessels, these handles were fake.”
They were traps for the unwary, designed to slice into environmental suits.
He was pretty sure this ship predated that trick—apparently, it had been developed when Fleet ships were routinely getting boarded by strangers—but he couldn’t be sure of anything.
“Thanks.” Colvin moved to one side and angled the scanner toward the back of the handle, turning on one of the scanner’s exterior lights.
Newark reached them, and turned on the gravity in her boots, sinking to the floor. She approached that handle as well.
“It’s clear,” she said.
Colvin pocketed her scanner, then grabbed the handle. She braced her feet on the wall below, then turned on the gravity in her boots, and tugged.
Debris rose from the area around the handle. The debris floated past Crowe, startling him. The debris was not black or gray like sloughed off nanobits, but shiny and silver, like shaved metal.
“Need help?” he asked.
“Give me a second,” Colvin said, her voice straining. The muscles in her back became visible through her environmental suit.
Newark stood to the left, her hood illuminating a different side of the handle. Crowe was about to turn the gravity on in his boots when the gigantic door around the handle popped open, just slightly, as if it didn’t want to open all the way.
Colvin swore, but the sound seemed more like relief than anger.
“Okay,” she said. “Now let’s all try this thing.”
Crowe moved closer. The handle wasn’t really on a door so much as a hatch. And the hatch was anchored at what he considered to be the top, which made him realize that had the gravity come on in the ship, Newark would have been standing on the ceiling.
That also explained the awkward placement of the control panels. They had probably been placed deliberately low, and if the ship’s environment were on, they would probably have light tabs on their sides, so that they’d be visible from a long distance off.
Newark moved closer and put her hands on the handle. Colvin moved slightly to the right. Crowe remained to the left. Once the hatch opened farther, he would reach inside and shove it the rest of the way.
The debris floated around them, catching the light. He wasn’t sure where the debris came from. The edges of the hatch seemed smooth and round, just like they were supposed to.
Maybe there was dirt inside the tunnel connecting the decks.
If there was, he didn’t like that. A ship shouldn’t be quite that filthy, even after it had been left for a long time.
Although that depended on whether the environmental system remained on.
He couldn’t make assumptions. As he had learned on that horrible night on the Br2 Scout3, assumptions could kill.
Colvin got the hatch to open just a bit farther. Newark scanned the hatch’s edges and stuck her scanner inside as well. Apparently she had been listening too.
“It’s clear,” she said to
Crowe. Then she tugged on the handle along with Colvin.
Crowe reached inside and gingerly put his hand on the back of the hatch. He attached his boots to the wall, just like Colvin had done, and shoved that hatch door.
The hatch flew open and, had they not been anchored, the women would have flown backwards as well.
Instead, they banged against the hatch.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Fine,” Colvin said and Newark said at the same time, “Yeah.”
Crowe leaned into the opening from the hatch, using the lights on his gloves and his hood light see what was next.
This was not a maintenance tunnel as he had expected. It was wide enough to accommodate a number of people. It was also square, with edges, just like everything else. Rung ladders covered all four walls. There was no floor that he could see, which made sense, since this team had entered on a middle deck.
This tunnel, housed next to the elevator, was the main way to travel between decks. How horribly inconvenient. But it was an efficient design.
“All right,” he said. “We’re going to climb up. I’m going first.”
That wasn’t the procedure they’d been following, but he wanted to see what was on that deck. Some Fleet ships had the entire deck for their bridge. Others had a separate bridge entrance.
If this one was all bridge, he wanted to see that. He also wanted to prevent another query from the ship, offering to turn the environment on in the bridge only—provided this ship had that feature.
It felt strange, not knowing the ship’s layout. He never went into a Fleet ship without knowing its basic plan.
He climbed up the rungs, using the lack of gravity to pull himself up several rungs at a time.
He could tell the women were following him, because their lights bobbed, illuminating this wide space.
He almost missed the next level, but his scanner vibrated against his leg, telling him he was close to the anacapa energy.
That was when he saw the hatch. It didn’t have a handle. It had a wheel that he had to turn and push.
“We have another door,” he said as he stopped next to it. He used the knuckle lights on his gloves to make sure there was nothing sharp about that wheel.
There wasn’t anything visible. So he leaned over from the rungs, then locked his left foot first, then his right onto the wall, using the full gravity in his boots. He put his hands on that wheel, testing it. It moved more easily to the right, which relieved him, for some reason.
The wheel was as he expected, then.
He turned it carefully, and unlike the hatch below, this larger door popped open as if it had been waiting years to do so.
He leaned forward, using the door as a shield, and peered into what seemed—at first—to be a corridor. Then he saw chairs and consoles dangling from what he thought of as the ceiling, and long columns of equipment alongside them. Between the columns of equipment were screens, located almost directly across from him.
Apparently whoever had designed this vessel liked their screens up high, rather than at eye level.
The scanner was buzzing vehemently against his leg. He was very close to the anacapa drive.
He shut off the gravity in his boots, then pushed himself up and onto what had to be the bridge. He pushed himself a bit too hard, floating upward. For a half second, he wasn’t sure what to do, then realized he could turn on the gravity in his boots.
He floated down, landing softly, shaking his head at all the skills he had left behind.
“Yulia, Danika, come on up,” he said, glad they hadn’t been able to see his error. Working in zero-G had never been his strong suit, and it certainly wasn’t his strength now.
He pulled the scanner from his pocket. His sore hands wrapped around the scanner, holding it tight. It was still vibrating hard. He turned 360 degrees, ever so slowly, trying to find where the bulk of the anacapa energy was coming from.
He found it, finally, in the place he expected it the least.
That tall cabinet behind him seemed to be the place where the anacapa energy was coming from. He squinted at it, unable to see any protections or containers for the drive.
Maybe there was one inside the cabinet.
He walked over to it and crouched, looking for a way to open the cabinet.
He found a latch on the side—an old-fashioned flip latch that he could manipulate with his fingers. He did, wincing as his sore finger brushed against what his gloves identified as metal.
Metal and anacapa drives. He had been taught not to put those things in close proximity.
He opened the door, and blinked as a faint golden light reached him. What looked like a rock rested on a cushioned cubby in the middle of a shelf. That rock glowed slightly amber.
The scanner nearly jumped out of his hand. He turned the scanner off, and slipped it back into his pocket, locking the scanner in place. Then he peered at the rock.
It was a very old, unrefined anacapa drive. No one had lopped pieces off of it. It hadn’t been augmented or protected in any way.
“Found it,” he said, so that the other two team members knew what he was doing. “Stay back please.”
He reached into the other pocket of his environmental suit and pulled out the protective gloves, designed for use with an anacapa drive. This was the main reason he had come on this mission: he knew he could touch an anacapa drive.
In theory, Newark should have been able to as well, but it wasn’t a theory he wanted to test, since not everyone could handle a drive safely.
He leaned just a bit closer to the drive, trying to see if any pink threaded its way through the drive.
He didn’t see anything, but that didn’t mean that the drive was all right. The others hadn’t been.
“Danika,” he said, “open the container and hold it near me.”
She moved up beside him. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her set the container near his right thigh. She held the container tightly in both hands.
He slipped his double-gloved hands under the drive, getting ready to lift. If the drive felt too light, he would leave it in place. It should feel very heavy, and thrum with power, even through both gloves and the environmental suit.
The moment his gloved hands touched the drive, his teeth chattered against each other. He had only felt something this powerful once before, holding a large anacapa drive when he was still training as an engineer.
He slowly lifted this drive, and felt the solidity of it. It was lighter than it should have been because of the lack of gravity, but he could still feel the drive’s mass.
Nothing had hollowed out this drive. And it was filled with power, more than he had held in a long time.
He still examined it, turning it over in his hands, even though it felt like his bones were going to vibrate out of his skin. He was getting a headache, but that was normal for him when he held anacapa drives. He wasn’t sniffling, he couldn’t taste blood, and nothing else felt awry.
This drive was fine. Maybe even better than fine. It still had peak energy, something most of the drives the Fleet used did not have after a few decades in service.
He hefted the drive to the container, then set the drive inside. He kept one hand on top of the drive as he brought the container lid down with the other hand. He removed his hand from inside the container at the very last minute.
The second he stopped touching the drive, the thrumming in his teeth and bones stopped. The headache receded.
Newark sealed the container closed, then looked up at him. The lights on her hood nearly blinded him, but he gave her a reassuring smile anyway.
“Can we use this drive?” she asked.
He grinned at her. He felt a little giddy, and he knew that was relief.
“Oh, yes, we can,” he said. “It’s probably better than the drive we came out here with.”
She let out a small hoot of joy. Colvin laughed at the sound, and Crowe’s grin widened.
They had a lot left to do. They n
eeded to get this drive to an environmentally free area near the Renegat. Then they needed to make sure the drive wasn’t infected.
But Willoughby said she was close to a system on that. Crowe knew it wouldn’t take much.
They would be able to use the anacapa drive again.
The Renegat was free to travel in foldspace again. It could go wherever it needed to go.
That thought made the panic that had been underpinning Crowe’s every move ease.
They weren’t trapped in this sector. He wasn’t trapped in this sector.
They had choices again.
And until this moment, he hadn’t realized just how much he needed them.
Part Forty-Three
Long-Lost Communications
85 Years Ago
The Správa
Three months before her official retirement, Admiral Gāo had finally found the information she had been searching for.
She sat in the gigantic suite that had been her home on the Správa for decades. She had dedicated an entire room to the study of Scrapheaps, and one Scrapheap in particular.
She still collected information on that old Scrapheap that the Renegat had been heading toward when the ship got lost. She had actually brought in an assistant to design a program that would tell her if there was any change to the daily information the Scrapheap sent through those old back channels.
Over the years, the program had found several changes, mostly of ship thefts that were similar to the thefts she had seen before, and erosion of the systems around the Scrapheap. Apparently, the force field into the Scrapheap continued to decay.
A parade of lieutenants who became her assistants for a few years before promotion seemed to believe that the old Scrapheap was an obsession. Gāo had even heard them discussing that Scrapheap as a seminal moment in her career, something she couldn’t get past.
That was probably true, but, in her eyes, irrelevant. The Scrapheap/Renegat incident had taught her to speak up, even when the risk was greater than she wanted it to be. She learned to fight harder than she ever had before, and she had made a lot of difference in the past fifteen years.
The Renegat Page 81