One thing she had done: she had gotten the Fleet to change its practice with Ready Vessels. She had found enough proof to show that the program was useless and a waste of time as well as resources. Future Scrapheaps would not hold Ready Vessels, only old and useless ships.
She couldn’t quite convince the Fleet or herself to destroy old ships, although she had laid the groundwork for some other enterprising leader to make that change in the future.
She hated being at the end of her career, but she knew it was time. She had narrowed her focus too much, and she felt irritated at some of the younger Vice-Admirals who made suggestions for things she had suggested decades ago. She wanted those young Vice-Admirals to understand that their ideas weren’t new or even timely, and no one was going to implement them without a lot of work that the Fleet did not want to do.
The moment she realized she was thinking like that, she realized she was done with this part of her life. She always wanted to be a forward thinker, not someone who quashed souls and ideas. She failed as much as she succeeded at that, but at least she tried.
And then she would come back to this suite, check that program for the Old Scrapheap, which ran continuously, and note the lack of change (most of the time). The handful of changes she had seen turned out to be exciting blips in a week or a month, but nothing major.
She had no idea what she’d been hoping for, but she would know it when she saw it.
For the past month, she had made arrangements to have the entire system moved to her new quarters on Starbase Sigma. She had signed up for the retraining program designed for captains, commanders, and admirals at the end of their active career. There, she would find another, less demanding career—not quite something to do with her time, but something to keep her mind engaged.
And as part of that quest, she had thought, maybe, she should let this program go.
If she could.
So when she walked into the room to check the stats, what she found startled her so much that she sat heavily on the creaky old chair she’d been using for more than a decade.
A ship had entered the Scrapheap. Not just any ship, but a ship the system recognized.
It was one of the Renegat’s orbiters. And it had opened the force field leading into the Ready Vessels.
She let out a small breath of air, and felt tears prickle her eyes. The Renegat had actually made it to the Scrapheap. The ship had done the impossible, even with all of the crew issues, and gone into the Scrapheap to investigate the problems that had originally sent the Renegat there.
She blinked, hard. One of those tears traced its way down her face. She rubbed the tear away with her thumb, and made herself smile.
They tried. They had actually done better than she thought. They had somehow continued forward, even though they had more problems than they could deal with.
That meant, somehow, the Preemas situation had been resolved. And the Renegat had done what it was supposed to do, under someone’s command.
She swallowed hard, then shook her head, wishing she had someone to share this with. Cali Baker had moved to a completely different sector and was overseeing the building of some new sector base. None of Gāo’s other former assistants really understood the depth of the issues with the Renegat.
All of the former vice admirals who had been part of the decision to send the Renegat out were either retired or in other parts of the sector. And none of them understood her obsession with the Renegat. They all looked at its loss as one of those incidents in their careers, one of those things they were part of that hadn’t worked out.
None of them felt the Renegat’s loss like she had.
“Well,” she muttered to herself. She had her answer. She was going to keep the system. She would move it to Starbase Sigma.
She might never hear anything about the Renegat again. Something might have happened with the Ready Vessels or with the ship herself. But the idea that they had made it—that they had done something she had believed impossible—filled her with relief.
She had known that the chances of the Renegat succeeding were slim. But she had wanted them to have a chance at redemption. When Nadim Crowe had contacted her, and she had seen his plea all those years ago, she had figured the Renegat’s politics had prevented it from doing its job.
But the fact that the orbiter had gone into the force field, the fact that the crew of the Renegat had somehow continued in the face of those long odds, made her feel so much better.
Made her feel less responsible.
If the ship failed—and it did, because it hadn’t returned—it wasn’t because of the crew she had put together. It had been because of the dangers of the foldspace journey or working so very far away from the Fleet.
She took a deep breath, stood, and then scanned the room, with the screens running everywhere, processing information from a Scrapheap she had never seen, a Scrapheap that she felt she knew intimately anyway.
She hadn’t realized she had been carrying such a burden from the Renegat. Her obsession, after all.
Now, finally, she felt like she could step away from this career. She could move on.
She had an answer.
She still didn’t know what happened to the Renegat, but she did know that the ship had continued to function, long after she had thought it impossible to do so.
She leaned against the chair and realized that the Renegat had held her back in a way she hadn’t expected. Part of her mind had been back there, blaming herself for its fate.
And she didn’t need to do that anymore.
She would continue to monitor, because she was curious. But she could feel the obsession leaching from her.
This was the answer she had been seeking.
And she was content.
Part Forty-Four
Repairing The Renegat
100 Years Ago
The Renegat
Crowe sat cross-legged on the bridge of the Renegat, right next to the anacapa container. He had never sat cross-legged in an environmental suit before, but it was surprisingly comfortable. He wore double layers of gloves, and had his hood up, although privately, he felt like he didn’t need to have his hood up at all.
He had become quite comfortable working in an environmental suit, something he had never thought would happen. He had also become quite comfortable with the anacapa drive, enough that it worried him. He didn’t want to be too confident in his own abilities, especially since he was sitting where Stephanos had died.
In the weeks since the Renegat had been near the Scrapheap, the crew had done a lot of work on the vessel. Crowe had directed it all.
The very first thing they had done was pull up the carpet where Stephanos had died. He didn’t want the environmental system to try to clean that area, nor did he want various bots and the crew to clean it either.
Instead, he had bots remove the carpet and replace the flooring with a strong nanobit seal, as it should have been from the beginning. He had no idea why the bridge on the Renegat had been carpeted. It had always seemed like a strange choice to him, but it was one he had decided he could live with, until Stephanos had died here.
If he could have replaced the anacapa container, he would have. The container had been cleaned and sterilized of that anti-anacapa weapon, but he didn’t entirely trust the container’s integrity, no matter how it came out on various scans.
He couldn’t replace it, though. He didn’t have the materials to build a better anacapa container, and so far, none of the fifteen Ready Vessels his teams had explored had an actual functioning anacapa container, at least not one he would have trusted.
Some of those vessels had rudimentary containers, but they looked more dangerous than no container at all.
The entire engineering staff was on the bridge at the moment, except Colin Vezner, whom Crowe had in engineering proper.
Ever since the incident with Preemas (and that was how Crowe was allowing himself to think about it), Crowe kept one person he trusted in engi
neering at all times. He wanted to maintain control of the ship, and the best way to do that was to control both the bridge and engineering.
The engineers were at different consoles, and Tosidis sat in the captain’s chair. Most systems could be activated from that chair, with the proper clearance and with screens that opaqued to private.
Crowe had thought about altering those screens to be functional throughout the bridge, but as he solidified control, he changed his mind. He wanted several areas where only one person could access the important controls. He had one in his quarters (he had rebuilt the captain’s command center), another in engineering, and a third in the command chair here on the bridge.
The Renegat was now his ship. No one seemed to question that he was the leader now, although he did not have them call him captain. That seemed to be the wrong way to go—made the mutiny and the death of Preemas seem too calculating, which it was not.
The crew did listen to him, except for the six people in the med bay and the dozen people still in the brig. He had gone down to talk to the prisoners in the brig on three separate occasions, offering to free them if they worked with him.
All of them refused. All of them blamed him—rightly—for Preemas’s death. None of them saw that there had been any need to get rid of Preemas, and a few had told Crowe that they would not have let him imprison Preemas in the brig had Preemas lived.
Crowe had never even thought of imprisoning Preemas, although, Crowe supposed, that would have been the right step. If Crowe had convinced Preemas to step aside, Crowe would have isolated Preemas to quarters, which was one of the many reasons that Crowe had gotten rid of the captain’s control closet there.
Crowe did not regret killing Preemas. As time went by, Crowe was beginning to think it had been the only thing he could have done.
Preemas had not been the kind of man who would have allowed himself to be confined for long.
The crew certainly wouldn’t be repairing the Renegat if Preemas were still alive. These last few weeks, the crew had worked on the Renegat as if it were about to leave on its maiden voyage rather than having gone through the longest journey of its existence.
Even so, Crowe worried about the ship. Without the support of a sector base, he couldn’t improve the ship in the ways he wanted to. It wasn’t just the anacapa container. There were a dozen—maybe a thousand—little details that made this ship less than suitable for…what?
That was what he had to figure out. Because if the Renegat went back to the Fleet, half the crew would be up on charges, if not all of the crew. And staying here, without any Fleet support, didn’t seem like an option either.
But he was noodling all of his choices, and what he had come to was this: He would make the Renegat the best ship possible. He had already made sure that the ship could run easily on automatic pilot—at least in a sector. Handling foldspace would still require someone who had worked with anacapa drives, but he didn’t want the average untrained person touching an anacapa.
But he did want the contingency in place that someone could run this ship with a minimum of work. To do otherwise, after they had lost so many knowledgeable crew members, would be foolish.
He wanted to be prepared for everything.
With that in mind, he had taken a lot of equipment from the Ready Vessels, and used that equipment to augment the Renegat’s systems.
He was also toying with the idea of improving one of the Ready Vessels, should any be suitable, and maybe making it into the primary ship for this crew. He wasn’t sure exactly why he would do that.
He just wanted options.
In all cases, though, he had to make sure that there was no trace of that anti-anacapa weapon anywhere. He and the engineering staff had worked out a system to make sure that the weapon wasn’t a threat to the Renegat and maybe not to any of the other ships.
And, as Willoughby had said to him, threats were another factor to consider. The Fleet had apparently built a lot of response to threats they had faced in the past into the technology of later ships. The Renegat would not have survived if the shield hadn’t blocked that anti-anacapa weapon.
Who knew what other threats lurked in these forgotten sectors of space, threats that the Fleet had faced and had incorporated into their various systems.
So much to think about.
Crowe looked at all of the tools scattered around him. He was at the last stage of the ship repair. He was going to handle the anacapa drive himself, mostly because of Stephanos. If someone had to die on this day, it would be him.
Although he didn’t expect it would come to that.
So far, the crew had cleared out that anti-anacapa weapon from all of the systems. It had taken some stellar work by Willoughby and her crew, reverse engineering the block in the shields and applying it to the various systems so that they could scan for the weapon in all of its various forms.
The engineering staff had used those scans to clear the Renegat of all traces of the weapon. They also used it to isolate the energy that had infected the Renegat with the weapon.
The weapon hadn’t come from the Scrapheap’s central tower, as Crowe had initially thought, but from the vessels that had been left in the Scrapheap when those vessels’ owners had left the ships behind and taken Fleet vessels out in their stead.
Initially, Crowe was going to send a team into one of those vessels to see if they could find a timeline for the thefts, but Atwater had talked him out of it. Atwater had said that it didn’t matter when the thefts occurred. It had been long enough ago for the messages to travel all the way to the Fleet, which meant that the Renegat was in no immediate danger from those attackers.
In fact, Atwater said, it looked like the Fleet had met up with those attackers later and dealt with them in some kind of final way, which was why the protections had been built into the shields and nowhere else.
That had a certain logic. Crowe was going to accept it, and not worry about outsiders trying to get at his Renegat crew.
He had enough to worry about.
He sensed unease among the crew, although no one spoke to him directly.
They were all uneasy about the future. Once the anacapa drive was hooked up and functioning, the entire crew had choices to make.
Normally he would have made the choices for them—that’s what captains did—but he wasn’t an official captain. And he wasn’t sure this crew—one that had overthrown a previous captain—would follow his lead on anything.
They didn’t even agree on everything. Half of the crew wanted to return to the Fleet, and the others were afraid of doing so. Maybe afraid wasn’t the right word. The others recognized the personal dangers of returning.
Their lives were going to be different no matter what choice they made. Not everyone seemed to understand that.
Some of the crew were delusional enough to believe the Fleet would welcome them with open arms.
He had already tried to disabuse several crew members—including Kabac—of that idea. In fact, it had been Crowe’s conversation with Kabac that made Crowe worry about the future of this crew.
Nothing held them all together, and he wasn’t popular enough to bring the crew together just based on his personality alone.
The team he had with him on the bridge trusted him though. All of his engineers—even Ellum and Rodriguez—would do whatever he said, no questions asked. They had become his core supporters, partly because they knew how hard he worked, and partly because they—more than anyone else on the Renegat—understood how close the entire crew had come to dying.
He glanced at the travel case that housed one of the anacapa drives he had pulled off a Ready Vessel. It had taken weeks to pick the right drive. He had brought six working anacapa drives onto the Renegat, clearing each one of traces of the weapon. Some of the drives, which had looked good on their Ready Vessels, didn’t seem as solid on the Renegat itself.
The first drive he had chosen on that very first day was actually too large to fit into the anacap
a container on the Renegat—and Crowe didn’t have the skill to modify the drive to fit.
He hadn’t replaced it, though. He had been storing the excess drives in different corners of the Renegat. At some point, though, he would have too many anacapa drives in a single vessel. He might have to leave the excess drives behind, although he was contemplating another solution.
The Renegat had a lot of small ships in its docking bay, too many small ships for the crew to ever use. Crowe was considering placing one of the small ships a safe distance from the Renegat, and storing some more drives and excess equipment there.
He hadn’t told the crew yet—or rather, his engineering crew, whom he was thinking of as the crew. Everyone else, with the exception of Colvin, Seymont, and Newark, really weren’t worth his time.
And that wasn’t a captain’s attitude either.
Whenever he came across the non-captainlike attitudes inside of him, he thought of picking someone else to lead the Renegat, but there was no one else he trusted.
At some point, that person would disagree with Crowe, and because Crowe had installed them as leader of the ship, that person would have the final decision-making power.
Crowe wasn’t ready to give that up.
Just like he wasn’t ready to give up control of the anacapa drives.
He slid the travel case toward him. He was wearing double gloves. He had the regular anacapa container open. He just had to move the drive and make sure all of the parts worked.
The very idea of doing it twisted his stomach. Once that drive was installed in the container, there was no going back.
He put his hood up, sealing it in place.
“Make sure you’re suited up,” he said to the team.
The precautions probably weren’t necessary, but he was going to do them anyway. He wasn’t going to lose another team member to an errant anacapa drive.
Tosidis put his hood up fast, and so did Bakhr. But Ellum shook his head slightly, because he believed Crowe was overreacting, and had said so. That had led to an argument among his engineers about the dangers of the drives, and Tosidis saying that everyone should watch the images of Stephanos’s death before they stopped taking precautions.
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