The Renegat

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  I don’t know why it’s necessary, Serpell had said. We’re all ready to take the next step.

  That was a lie. She had no idea how the others were feeling. She hadn’t asked them. She was ready to take the next step. She wanted off this ship—off all ships, really—and to move forward.

  As people in the Fleet always did.

  Consider it your last official duty, Dauber had said and had signed off, leaving Serpell alone in her quarters, staring at an empty space in the center of the room.

  Last official duty. One more. Not that she had ever had official duties as a leader. Not that she had wanted them.

  But she had executed them just fine. She had gotten her people home. Except India. India had died at Amnthra, and Serpell really didn’t miss her.

  She rubbed her hands together, hating how sweaty they were. She probably should have brought a bag, just so she had something to do with her hands—maybe shift it from hand to hand or something.

  She threaded her hands together and took a tiny step forward. She was afraid to look at the other survivors. She didn’t want to catch Kabac’s eyes.

  She had had enough of him. If she never saw him again, she would be a happy woman.

  If she never saw any of them again, she would be content.

  She made herself take a deep breath. Then a side door opened near the bay door.

  For some reason, she had expected the bay door to open all the way, but of course, it hadn’t. They weren’t moving ships in and out. They were moving people, and people could go single file through the doors.

  Two of the Aizsargs crew, a man and a woman that Serpell did not know, stood on either side of the door.

  She reached them, and they nodded at her. They didn’t even say goodbye or anything. Or wish her good luck with her future.

  For some reason, she had expected that. Had hoped for it, really. A kind word. A half gesture. Something to acknowledge what they had all been through.

  Instead, the man spoke to the person following her.

  “Wait here,” he said. “It will take a few minutes to process each person.”

  Serpell frowned. She nearly turned back to ask what that meant. No one had told her about processing. She had already gone through decontamination and all kinds of other checks when she boarded the Aizsargs. There was no need for more processing.

  She’d never been processed when she’d gone to a starbase before.

  But that had been more than 100 years ago. Maybe things were different now.

  The thought turned her anticipation into something closer to anxiety. New things were fine, she reminded herself. Everything was going to be new for a while.

  If she could figure out how an SC-Class vessel worked (more or less), she could figure out anything.

  She stepped off the Aizsargs into a narrow corridor. The lighting was dim, and the walls were gray. She had entered through a dozen different corridors like that throughout her years on ships. The corridor felt reassuringly normal.

  Even if she was the only one in it. No one followed her—at least not yet.

  Her mouth had gone dry. This didn’t feel right. When she had disembarked from other ships, she had always walked with a group. No one had left individually, unless they were being dumped at a location.

  The thought made her turn back. Dumped. They were leaving her here? By herself?

  But that made no sense. And it didn’t matter anyway. She was on Starbase Sigma, which was someplace she had never seen before. The Aizsargs was someplace she had never seen before either. She had survived it.

  She had nowhere else to go.

  That thought made her face forward again. The corridor wound around one corner and then another. And then a door opened, letting in light.

  She let out a small breath. Finally, she had arrived.

  She walked through the doors, only to step into a booth, not a room.

  More damn decontamination units. The Aizsargs crew should have warned her. Dauber should have warned her.

  She stepped inside the booth, and the door snapped shut behind her.

  Raina Serpell. The androgynous voice startled her. She hadn’t expected to hear her name. But the Aizsargs had given her a new identification chip, so she shouldn’t have been too surprised. Place your hands on the counter in front of you.

  She didn’t see a counter. And then she realized that the counter was clear. She lifted her hands and placed them on the smooth surface.

  This was the oddest decontamination unit she had ever encountered, but each system was different.

  Then something wrapped itself around her wrists and shoved her hands together so hard that her thumbs slammed into each other.

  She gasped, startled.

  The counter disappeared, and her arms fell forward, elbows jamming into her stomach, hands slapping into her thighs.

  Raina Serpell, you are under arrest for mutiny and 60 counts of murder. These major charges as well as several minor charges shall be enumerated as you are processed into the Fleet Judicial System. You will not speak until you are asked to. You will be assigned an advocate for processing. You may change advocates when processing ends.

  “Sixty counts?” she asked. “What do you mean, sixty counts?”

  Your questions will be answered once your advocate is in place. Step forward.

  The doors opened in front of her. The area was labeled holding. There were signs and arrows popping up in front of her, telling her what direction to move in and how she would be processed.

  “This is some kind of mistake,” she said to the air. There were no people here. Of course, there were no people here.

  And this was what Dauber had meant by processing. They were taking Serpell first because she had been the leader of the Renegat.

  Sixty counts.

  Her breath caught. They were blaming her for the deaths of Crowe and the others.

  Crowe had been the leader of the mutiny against Preemas. It had all been Crowe’s fault, not hers. She had done the right thing, the only thing.

  She had brought everyone back.

  She had saved the entire crew.

  Except the engineers and some of the senior staff and India.

  But they had been in the way. They had wanted to stay away from the Fleet.

  Something beside her shoved her forward, taking her to a station off to her right to continue processing. The room was set up for a dozen people to go through at one time, but she was alone.

  Then she heard a snap, as the doors to the processing booth shut. Another Renegat survivor was getting arrested.

  Processed.

  No wonder Dauber had seemed curt and angry.

  She had found something. Or learned something.

  Sixty was a really specific number.

  Someone had talked to the crew of the Aizsargs and told them what had happened to Crowe and his team.

  Crowe.

  He had said that if the Renegat returned, the entire crew would be charged as mutineers. Serpell had thought he was wrong.

  He hadn’t been.

  That was the irony, wasn’t it? He hadn’t been wrong at all.

  She squared her shoulders. The hope she had been feeling only moments ago was dashed.

  Her future wasn’t a new life in a starbase, with freedom and a new career.

  Her future was defending herself against charges of mutiny and murder.

  She hadn’t come back here for this. And yet, here she was.

  She had made the wrong choices from beginning to end. From hooking up with India to returning to the Fleet.

  She couldn’t blame India for this one. Serpell had ultimately made this decision. And stupidly, she had hoped that she would finally settle into the kind of life she actually wanted.

  She had hoped for a real future on a starbase, and she was going to get one.

  Just not the one she imagined.

  And not one she ever would have wanted.

  Part Forty-Six

  Final De
cisions

  100 Years Ago

  Unnamed Vessel

  Crowe knew the risks.

  He had been planning this day for nearly a month. Once he had found the newest vessel in the Ready Vessel section of the Scrapheap, he knew that he had to test it, see if it was the kind of ship he wanted.

  But he also knew that the test would take dozens of personnel. He had no idea how to conduct the test otherwise.

  He stood on the bridge of the vessel. It probably had a name and a designation, but he didn’t know what either of those things were. He also didn’t know exactly how old the vessel was.

  It had features he had never seen before. It had an actual working backup anacapa drive in engineering, more weaponry than he had ever seen in a Fleet vessel, and shields that looked state-of-the-art for his time, rather than the time here.

  He and the engineering staff had spent nearly a week on this ship, testing systems, seeing how old it was, and whether or not it was a ship from their era.

  It wasn’t, but Atwater believed it had been a prototype for the kind of DV-Class vessels that the entire crew was used to.

  Crowe stood on the bridge of this vessel, legs slightly apart, hands clasped behind his back. He had gotten the screens working ten days before, and they showed all the other ships in the Scrapheap. The holographic imagery worked well.

  The command controls seemed to function.

  His entire engineering team was here, in various parts of the ship. That was the risk he was taking. He had brought every competent person off of the Renegat to run this final test.

  And, he was going to talk to them, to see if they would help him convince the rest of the Renegat’s crew to stay in this sector. To build and improve ships, in space itself, and maybe discover some kind of mission on their own.

  He wasn’t sure that suggestion would work, and he was open to several others. But he didn’t want to talk to the dead weight in the Renegat’s crew. He wanted to talk with these people.

  After this test.

  He swallowed hard, then leaned forward and tapped the console in front of him. He would have to modify it to make smaller, working, holographic screens for this ship—should it become the main ship.

  He wasn’t sure why he wanted it to be the main ship, except for a feeling he had about the Renegat. He wasn’t usually a superstitious man, but that ship felt cursed to him. Maybe because so many crew members had died stupidly on board the ship.

  Maybe because he’d had to repair it so many times—most recently with parts that didn’t quite fit into the ship itself.

  Or maybe he just wanted to lay the ghost of Preemas to rest, and Crowe couldn’t do that onboard the Renegat.

  The entire console was lit up before him. Each working section of the ship was lit green. Inside the green were blue dots, indicating where each crew member was. He hadn’t logged them into the computer—that was a system that could be set up later—so he couldn’t tell who was who except by section.

  He had Danika Newark in the mess. She had come over with him earlier and set up the food system. They had even brought a few supplies—the minimum amount to test with. On this day, they had brought more (but not much) because he wanted a feast of celebration to end this test—if it worked, of course.

  If not, the food would wait until the next test or the next.

  Willoughby was in engineering. The rest of the engineers were scattered around the ship’s most important systems. He had even given Atwater a job. The man was going to monitor the controls in the captain’s quarter. Apparently, the captain’s control closet had been part of the Fleet even as far back as this ship.

  Atwater couldn’t touch those systems, but he would let Crowe know if those systems worked or not.

  Crowe clenched his fists and then unclenched them. The test was both simple and complex.

  The crew would turn on every single system simultaneously. If it was possible to make that particular system run at full capacity without causing issues inside of the Scrapheap, then the person in charge of that system would run it to capacity.

  Crowe had run simulations of this, and he had done so on the ship. The ship’s systems had told him it would all work together.

  But, after the experience with the anti-anacapa weapon, he had learned that he couldn’t trust what ship systems told him.

  “All right,” he said on the shipwide comm. “We will hit go in three…two…one…”

  The ship shuddered, which he did not like. And then the consoles around him lit up. The bridge gained a hum that both surprised and pleased him. He hadn’t realized the hum was missing. It was here now.

  It was the sound of a ship that functioned.

  He smiled slowly. Even if some of the systems broke down or didn’t work quite the way he wanted them to, they could run together. This ship was functional.

  He hadn’t expected that.

  He had hoped for it. But there had been so many failures on this trip, that any kind of hope seemed foolish.

  This didn’t.

  Not any longer.

  And now, he had some choices to make.

  The Renegat

  The Renegat shuddered, then bumped and rolled.

  Serpell recognized the feeling, and gripped the wall of the corridor in panic.

  The Renegat had gone into foldspace. Why had it gone into foldspace? Was it the new anacapa drive? Did it do something strange?

  She ran to the elevators, and headed up to the bridge before she could even think about it. She didn’t see anyone else in the corridor or the elevator, not that they would have been dumb enough to travel through the ship during the foldspace window.

  But the bumping stopped, and the ship had righted itself, at least as far as Serpell could tell.

  She burst out of the elevator, and ran to the bridge.

  The door was open, and the bridge was empty. Her breath caught. She had been right. The anacapa drive had sent them into foldspace on its own.

  She moaned, and that’s when she saw movement near the drive.

  Yusef Kabac stood next to the drive, working the console closest to it.

  “What the hell did you do?” she asked.

  He looked up, as if he hadn’t realized she was there.

  “They were going to make us stay in the sector,” he said. “You know that, right? That backwater primitive place, without the Fleet? They were going to make us stay.”

  “You don’t know that,” she said, even though deep down, she knew he was right. Everyone had been talking about it, arguing it, worrying over it.

  Most people she spoke to had wanted to go back, no matter what the dangers were.

  “Of course, I know that,” he said. “They’re scared of traveling back. But they isolated themselves, all of the rebels. They were going to get court-martialed. We won’t.”

  She stared at Kabac. He stared back.

  “Where are we?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure,” he said, “but the system tells me that we’re at the exact coordinates we want to be for our return trip. I was just about to contact Justine Breaux to have her confirm with her little research materials.”

  Where they needed to be. Heading back.

  Serpell swallowed. “We should probably go back and get the others,” she said.

  “Travel back to that Scrapheap?” Kabac said.

  She nodded.

  “Why?” he asked. “So we can have the inevitable fight? You saw how they treat people who disagree with them. It was only a matter of time before they either killed or imprisoned the rest of us.”

  She leaned on a nearby console.

  “Who’ll run the ship?” she asked, and with that question, she knew that deep down, she agreed with Kabac. She had been afraid of speaking out against Crowe and his team. She had been afraid of what they would do to her.

  “We don’t need anyone to run it,” Kabac said. “We just head back. We follow the coordinates, and retrace our steps, and we’re home.”

>   “You make it sound easy,” she said.

  He shrugged. “We’re not trying to do anything else. If we were trying to go on a mission or something, it would be harder. But we have one goal, and we can do it.”

  She nodded. As she did, some other crew members ran onto the bridge. She knew some of them by name. Garja Blaquer. Declan Connolly. Anthony Varasteh.

  They all started talking at once.

  Kabac smiled at them and gave them the answers he had given her.

  They didn’t seem upset.

  Serpell walked around them, and headed out of the bridge. Weirdly, she wasn’t upset either.

  She was relieved.

  They were going home.

  Finally.

  Where they would be safe.

  Unnamed Vessel

  “Nadim.”

  Crowe frowned, not willing to move away from the various control consoles. The ship was working beautifully, better than he expected. He felt a certain joy in that.

  “Nadim.”

  He looked up, saw Tosidis standing right in front of him, arms crossed. Tosidis never called him “Nadim.”

  Something was wrong.

  “What’s happened?” Crowe asked. He was braced for something wrong. This ship hadn’t been used in a very long time, if much at all. The strain on the systems from them running together might have shown a weakness that wasn’t appearing on his consoles.

  “The Renegat is gone,” Tosidis said.

  “What?” It took Crowe a moment to understand Tosidis’s statement. Crowe had been lost in the details of this ship, not the Renegat. “What do you mean, gone?”

  “Gone,” Tosidis said. “It’s not in the sector.”

  “What?” Crowe asked again.

  He manipulated the screens on this ship, and then had them search for the Renegat. Nothing showed up.

  “Look.” Tosidis tapped a different console, bringing up a holographic image that showed the past few hours. The hologram ran forward quickly, showing the Renegat in the area where Crowe had left it.

  And then the Renegat glowed golden for a half second before the silvery shadow of foldspace opened around them.