The Runabout Read online

  The Runabout

  A Diving Novel

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  This one is for the fans. I hope you have as much fun reading this book as I had writing it.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  The Falls sample chapter

  Newsletter sign-up

  Also by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  About the Author

  One

  Choral music. Sixteen voices, perfect harmony, singing without words. Chords shifting in a pattern. First, third, fifth, minor sixth, and down again.

  I can hear them, running up and down the scales like a waterfall, their chorus twice as loud as the rest of the music floating through the Boneyard.

  Of course, I know there is no music here. I am hearing the malfunctioning tech of a thousand, five thousand, ten thousand ships, all clustered together in an area of space larger than some planets. The sound is the way that my head processes the changing energy signatures, although, oddly, I can’t hear any of it when I have my exterior communications link off.

  Anyone with a genetic marker that ties them to the Fleet can hear this. Everyone else can’t.

  Although I’ve never really tested this assumption thoroughly. I don’t know if those of us with the marker hear the same thing.

  My mind is wandering, which is dangerous during a dive. I have just exited the Sove, a Dignity Vessel we pulled from the Boneyard months ago, and I’m heading toward a completely intact Dignity Vessel only a few meters away. I’m wearing an upgraded environmental suit with more features than I’ve ever used before. I hate those, but I’ve finally gotten used to the clear hood that seals around the neck instead of a helmet like I used to wear.

  We’ve sent a line from the Sove’s smallest bay door to the only visible door on the Dignity Vessel, and I’m clinging to that line by my right hand.

  I’m facing the Dignity Vessel when the sound catches me.

  Elaine Seager, one of the original Six who learned to dive with me way after we discovered the need for markers, is slowly working her way toward the other Dignity Vessel. She’s ever so slightly ahead of me on the line. I was the second one to exit the Sove.

  Orlando Rea, another one of the Six, is waiting to exit the Sove. We have strict procedure about the distance between divers on a line.

  In fact, we have strict procedures about everything.

  The procedures keep us safe.

  “What’s the holdup?” Yash Zarlengo asks from inside the Sove. She’s monitoring us. She hates diving, and avoids it as much as possible.

  She’ll have to do a lot of it on this trip—she often has to dive when we’re in the Boneyard—but she’s going to dive only after we know what’s inside our target vessel.

  I snap to attention, still caught by that sound.

  “I’m the holdup,” I say. “Orlando, you need to go around me and catch up to Elaine.”

  “Not procedure, Boss,” Orlando says from behind me. His tone is half-amused, half-chiding. I’m the one who always harps on procedure.

  But he does as I ask. He exits the bay door on the right side instead of the left, and grips the line.

  I flip my comm so that Yash can’t hear what I have to say to the other two divers.

  “You hearing that?” I ask.

  Orlando looks around—up, down, sideways. There are ships everywhere. Different kinds, different makes, different eras. As far as we can tell, they’re all Fleet vessels, although some of our team back at the Lost Souls Corporation hopes that we’ll also find vessels we’ve never seen before.

  There’s a theory that these ships were stored here during a protracted war.

  I think the theory’s wishful thinking. Because I love diving ancient and abandoned ships, I’ve learned a lot about history. And one thing that unites human beings, no matter where they live, is their ability to take a historical fact and discard it for a story that sounds ever so much better.

  The war sounds so much better than a ship graveyard, put here to store abandoned ships until they’re needed—a kind of junkyard in space.

  I’ve stopped arguing that point of view, though. I figure time will tell us what this place actually is.

  I can’t see Orlando’s face through his hood. He has turned away from me.

  I wish the new suits had one more feature. I wish we could monitor each other’s physical reactions in real time. We send that information back to the Sove as we dive, but we don’t give it to each other.

  I didn’t help with the design of the new suits, and that was a mistake. Yash designed them to handle the constantly changing energy waves we identified inside the Boneyard. The waves come from all the anacapa drives inside the Boneyard and, Yash thinks, from the Boneyard’s anacapa drives as well. Each drive has a different signature, and malfunctioning drives have even stranger signatures.

  We hit the waves as we move across the emptiness from one ship to another, sometimes one wave in the short distance, and sometimes three dozen waves.

  Orlando’s hand remains tightly wrapped around the line.

  “Yeah,” he says softly, in answer to my question. “I do hear that. I can’t tell where it’s coming from.”

  Elaine has stopped a few meters from us.

  “Are we diving or not?” she asks.

  That annoyed question went across the open channel, which means Yash heard it.

  “Is there a holdup?” she asks again. “Besides Boss?”

  I decide to come clean. “We’ve got a strange energy signature.”

  “I’m not reading anything from your suits,” she says.

  I sigh silently. We’re now getting to the thing she hates—the musicality of the Boneyard itself.

  “I can hear it,” I say.

  “Me, too,” Orlando says. He doesn’t have to. I hope he’s not protecting me.

  Even though Yash represents the Fleet on these dives, I’m in charge of them. I still run the Lost Souls Corporation, even if I’ve delegated many of my duties to Ilona Blake.

  I never go on dives where someone else is in charge.

  “Well,” Yash says, “whatever you ‘hear’ isn’t important. Examining that ship ahead of you is.”

  She’s right. We are salvaging ships from the Boneyard, and it takes a lot of work. We’ve taken seventeen Dignity Vessels so far, but not all of them work as well as we want them to. We’ve ended up using six of them for parts.

  Orlando turns toward me, remembering, maybe at this late date, that I’m the one who gives the final orders here.

  I nod, then sigh.

  “She’s right,” I say. “We’re on the clock. Let’s keep moving forward.”

  Two

  Each dive runs on a timetable. It’s a trick I learned decades ago, when I started wreck diving with teams. If you don’t have a timetable, you can’t measure your progress.

  You also can’t measure your failure.

  And often, you have no idea something has gone wrong until it’s much too late.

  It’s nearly impossible to ma
intain a consistent clock in the Boneyard. That’s something we’ve been working on since we started diving it. The anacapa waves skew the recording of passing time in various kinds of tech.

  My biggest fear is that they’ll actually change the way the divers experience time, as opposed to the way that the crew on the Sove experiences it.

  That differential killed my mother at the abandoned Fleet starbase that we called the Room of Lost Souls. She did not have the genetic marker, and time passed quickly for her. I was with her: time passed the same for me as it did for those outside the room.

  Here in the Boneyard, my dive team and I have seen some strange changes due to the anacapa waves—mostly in suit measurements to be sure—but I worry that the differential that killed my mother will also kill us.

  I’ve discussed this repeatedly with Yash. We’ve compensated (we hope) for the differential with the suits. But we’re being excessively cautious on every dive in the Boneyard.

  We begin our planning back at the Lost Souls Corporation. Which, yes, I named for the Room of Lost Souls, partly as a way to remember that everything we deal with in our work is extremely dangerous.

  When we first entered the Boneyard nine months ago now, we scanned the entire yard—we hope anyway. (I’m not so sure.) We found more ships than we can dive in our lifetimes, more ships than a thousand of us can dive in our lifetimes.

  So, we’re trying to cherry-pick what we need, and even that’s hard, since we have diverse needs.

  Yash, and the crew of the Ivoire, who got stranded here, 5,000 years in their future, because of a malfunctioning anacapa drive, want to find a way to rejoin the Fleet.

  I want enough Dignity Vessels to protect us against the Empire. We’ve had several skirmishes with them not too long ago. With some savvy Fleet tactics and the element of surprise, we won those skirmishes. But I suspect we won’t remain victors forever.

  At some point, the Lost Souls Corporation—and the Nine Planets Alliance, which houses us—will gain the attention of the Empire all over again, and we’ll need more than the military savvy and surprise to fight them.

  We’ll need better ships.

  The Fleet’s Dignity Vessels are those ships.

  So, back at Lost Souls, we pick the vessel or vessels we’re going to try to pull out of the Boneyard, and then we come here, get as close as we can with the Sove, and explore the chosen ship. Twice, we decided the Dignity Vessels we dove were too damaged to take back to Lost Souls. The rest, we dove, and then we reactivated the ships, sending them back to Lost Souls using their own anacapa drives.

  It’s been scary and exhilarating, and something I enjoy more than all the politics and business combined.

  We remain organized with our dives when we arrive. As excited as some of us get (as I get), we make sure we follow our plan to the letter.

  That means the first thing we do, after settling in, is hook the Sove and the chosen ship with a grappling line. Then we map the line.

  We noticed on our very first dive in the Boneyard all those months ago that the line seems to wobble when it leaves the ship and grips the other ship. As far as we’ve been able to tell, that wobble isn’t an actual bobble, a movement caused by a force exerted on the line.

  It’s a perception, as the line goes through different anacapa waves, and experiences time slightly differently in each wave. We can actually see the changes the line goes through. Those changes register as a wobble, when they are, in reality, a slowing and speeding up, a slight change in course that we can actually see.

  That wobble has made us very cautious.

  What we do when we map the line is that the dive team—whoever that will be—uses the line to travel outside the Sove to the other ship. We have every single piece of data-capture equipment in our suits on. We also have at least one person carrying a small active probe, which records everything.

  Then we bring the data back, and we make a map of the changes in anacapa waves along the line’s path.

  The fewest changes we’ve recorded have been three on a single dive, even though—on that dive—the distance between the ships was the longest we had. The most changes we’ve recorded has been twenty-five.

  So far, we haven’t been able to figure out an equation that will help us determine how many changes exist in a particular section of the Boneyard. We estimated that this particular dive will have six different wave changes between us and the new ship, but we don’t know that for sure.

  That frustrates Yash.

  It frustrates me too.

  And it worries me. All the unknowns in the Boneyard excite me and terrify me. Whenever I come here, I feel like the young diver I was on my first few wreck dives, when I realized just how little I knew about ancient space ships, and about space itself.

  Each dive since those early dives has been a challenge.

  Each dive in the Boneyard takes that original challenge and ratchets it up by a factor of one hundred.

  We’re doing something crazy here.

  And for that reason, I’m enjoying myself immensely.

  Three

  Right now, our task is to map the line. We need to know where all the waves are. We also need to know if there are readings we don’t understand.

  I’ve learned the hard way to watch out for things like that.

  We’re also looking at everything around us.

  This particular region of the Boneyard has only a few Dignity Vessels. The one we hope to dive seems to date from the same time period as the Ivoire, the ship that brought Yash to our time period. The other Dignity Vessels that we’ve captured have been newer than the Ivoire, and while the Ivoire’s engineering staff likes that, they’re also intimidated by it.

  They want something familiar, so we decided to come to this part of the Boneyard. Our original scans noted the Dignity Vessels here were older than the ones near the first dives we took months ago.

  We weren’t able to judge the age of the other nearby ships. These are small vessels, planet hoppers, runabouts, and fighters, things used for short distances. The Fleet also uses them as decoys. That way, the populations of the planets the Fleet approaches have no idea that hundreds of large ships are in the area.

  The Fleet also uses its small ships to explore planets and other areas, and also to fight some of its battles.

  Or perhaps I should say used, since we have no idea if the Fleet still follows that practice, or if the Fleet still even exists.

  I keep those thoughts to myself most of the time. The surviving crew of the Ivoire chooses to believe that the Fleet still exists, and fights with me when I say it doesn’t. I stopped mentioning it—not because I changed my mind, but because the fights are worthless without proof.

  I also came to a realization as I indulged in those fights. I was arguing theory. The Ivoire crew was talking about their lives. They needed to believe the Fleet still existed, more than I needed to convince them that it didn’t. They needed something from their past life to hold on to. It kept them moving forward.

  I’m moving forward now, slowly, because the music bothers me. It seems to bother Orlando as well, but Elaine hasn’t really noticed it. She hates mapping the line, even though it’s necessary.

  Before we go, we always choose the direction we’ll hang from the line. We generally mimic the position of the ship we’ve embarked from. The ship’s artificial gravity creates a sense of up and down that lingers when we do short dives. So we head out in such a way that we can easily get back into the airlock and remain on our feet.

  That means our up is the ship’s up, and our down is the ship’s down. It makes discussions easier later—even when we get to the other ship, which will have no artificial gravity on at all. That ship will be tilted, and maybe the ceiling will be our down, but we don’t need to worry about it—not when we’re in the mapping phase.

  The choral music seems even louder as I progress along the line. My stomach has knotted and I know soon that Mikk, who is monitoring all of our vitals, will g
ive me the usual caution about the gids. The gids mean that my heart rate is elevated, I’m breathing too rapidly, and my adrenaline is up.

  That almost always happens to me early in a dive. It’s so common for me that those who dive with me usually ignore my first five minutes of data—what would be gids for other divers. But I suspect my heart rate has been elevated longer than usual.

  I force myself to breathe evenly, and as I do, I realize what’s bothering me.

  The music should be thin here. The only anacapa drives around us should be from the Dignity Vessel we’re going to dive, and the Sove. The Sove’s anacapa drive is just fine. I’m assuming—we’re all assuming—the drive on the Dignity Vessel we’re going to explore is malfunctioning.

  We should hear that Dignity Vessel’s anacapa over everything else, a strong kind of reverberating music of some kind or another. And then, faintly, the sounds of other malfunctioning drives much farther away.

  But this music is strong. Either there’s a very powerful anacapa drive breaking down somewhere far from here—so powerful, in fact, that we can hear it (feel it, experience it, whatever) from far away—or something else nearby has an anacapa drive.

  “I’m stopping for a moment,” I say to everyone. I need to look around.

  “You okay?” This is Mikk from inside the Sove. Those vitals, again.

  “I’m fine, but something’s odd out here. Orlando, Elaine, please look around and see what we’re missing. Mikk, are there other Dignity Vessels in the area?”

  As I say that last, I wince. The Ivoire crew hates the term “Dignity Vessel,” but most of us still use it as shorthand when the Ivoire crew isn’t around.