Encounter on Starbase Kappa Read online

  ENCOUNTER ON STARBASE KAPPA

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  1

  Starbase Kappa slipped. Captain Jonathan "Coop" Cooper knew no other way to describe the feeling. The entire base had shifted just a little.

  He put out a gloved hand and braced himself. He stood inside what once had been the control room, although on starbases, the Fleet called these rooms headquarters, probably because back in the dark, dark ages, long before Coop was born, the Fleet allowed strangers to stay in the base.

  Not any longer—or at least, the Fleet hadn't allowed strangers on starbases in Coop's lifetime.

  Which was, oddly, centuries ago.

  He refused to let himself think about that. He had another problem altogether. He turned toward Yash Zarlengo, the best engineer the Ivoire had, maybe the best engineer in the Fleet—or at least, she had been, before the Ivoire vanished from the Fleet.

  And there he was, thinking about it all again.

  He made himself focus.

  Yash had been standing near one of the control panels, a pile of tools scattered on a small built-in table to her side. She had managed to turn on the gravity the moment the team arrived, but she hadn't been able to get the atmosphere to work. The team needed environmental suits to explore the interior. Hers clung to her like a second skin. The visor half-hid her face.

  "You feel that?" he asked.

  "Yeah," she said, and she didn't sound happy.

  They both understood why. That slipping feeling was unique: it generally happened on a ship when an anacapa drive kicked in. Only they weren't on a ship. They were on an old abandoned starbase, one that had caused problems in this sector for hundreds of years, if the stories Coop had heard could be believed.

  The base had its own anacapa. All of the Fleet's bases had had one. If the base was abandoned, the anacapa should have been shut down.

  This one hadn't been. It was active and probably malfunctioning. That was one of the problems Coop's team was here to address.

  He activated the comm in his environmental suit.

  "Dix, did you do something to the anacapa?" he asked. His first officer, Dix Pompiano, had taken a small team into what had been the very center of the starbase, six stories down, to disable and remove the anacapa.

  Coop didn't get an answer which, a year ago, he would have thought odd. But for the past several months, ever since the Ivoire got separated from the Fleet, Dix's behavior had become increasingly erratic.

  Initially, Coop had decided not to bring Dix on this mission, but for the last few weeks, Dix had seemed like his old self. He'd even grown upbeat, something Coop didn't think he'd ever see again.

  He'd been relieved, figuring his first officer had returned from whatever personal hell he'd assigned himself to.

  Only now a prickly feeling on the back of Coop's neck made him wonder if Dix had deliberately misled him. Coop had had enough problems recently; he didn't need more. And Dix's emotional decline had been something Coop simply didn't want to accept.

  "Dix?" he said again. Then he looked at Yash. "You want to try?"

  "He hasn't answered for the last few minutes," she said, sounding annoyed and worried at the same time.

  Coop bit back a harsh response. He needed his team to communicate with him, particularly here, on this empty base. But he didn't say what he was thinking.

  He was also on edge. He'd been on that edge for months now, ever since the Ivoire got stuck. A man could live with extreme stress well in the beginning, but seven months in, it didn't just become tedious, it also became exhausting.

  Plus, he was trying to focus on too many things at once. He had mentally declared his personal future off limits, but his past wasn't pretty either. He had thought this trip to Starbase Kappa would help with the Ivoire's new reality, but now he wasn't so sure.

  That slight slip happened again. Coop braced his other hand against the wall. He was standing near a control panel he'd had to pry open. The controls had deteriorated. This room had suffered at least a thousand years of neglect, maybe more.

  He still had trouble wrapping his mind around the time shifts he and his crew had been subjected to. He knew that others—like Dix—had even more difficulty.

  "Dix," Coop said again. "I need to hear from you now."

  "Captain." The voice that came through the comm didn't belong to Dix. Instead, it belonged to Layla Lalliki, the Ivoire's chief science officer. She had gone with Dix into the anacapa control room, along with three anacapa specialists.

  Coop didn't like hearing her instead of Dix. "I need Dix, Layla," he said.

  "Yeah, I know," she said. "And I need you here now, sir. Right now."

  He finally understood what he was hearing in her voice. Controlled panic.

  He glanced over at Yash. She had frozen in place.

  "What's going on?" he asked Lalliki.

  "Something you need to see, sir," Lalliki said. "I can't describe it. Please, sir."

  Yash continued to stare at him, or at least he thought she did. The hoods of the environmental suits were difficult for someone not wearing the suit to see through, unless that person activated an interior light. Usually, it played to his crew's advantage.

  Right now, he felt like ordering everyone to turn on that interior light. He wanted to see faces, nuances, emotions.

  And that told him he was as on edge as his crew was.

  "Do you need someone to stay in here with you?" he asked Yash.

  She shook her head. "This can wait. I'm going with you."

  And somehow, her matter-of-fact tone made his panic rise. He had to struggle to beat it back. She knew, like he knew, that he had made a mistake.

  He shouldn't have brought Dix on this mission.

  Maybe the Ivoire shouldn't have come on this mission at all.

  2

  She had told him not to come, and he hadn't listened.

  Her people called her Boss. She refused to tell him her real name. He was the captain of his own ship, a man who had only that as his identity now, and very little else. He wasn't going to call anyone Boss.

  He had told her that, and it hadn't made any difference. She still hadn't shared her real name with him.

  So he compromised.

  The word "Boss" was in a different language—or rather, in the language his language had evolved into over thousands of years—and so he called her by that foreign word when he needed to use a name for her.

  But mentally, he just called her "she."

  She had been the first person he had seen when his ship arrived in this strange new future. She'd been wearing what he thought was a dated environmental suit, and had been investigating his ship, stunned that it had suddenly appeared deep within a mountainside.

  He'd been stunned, too; the ship's coordinates told him the anacapa drive had brought the Ivoire to Sector Base V, but the space he was in didn't look like Sector Base V. Instead, it looked like an abandoned sector base from decades before.

  Later, he learned that the anacapa malfunctioned, bringing him and his crew five thousand years into their future. The language was different, once-familiar planets were different, everything was different except for the people. People remained the same complicated, emotional creatures who believed they knew everything and secretly feared they knew nothing.

  This situation, as he sometimes called it, exacerbated that fear among his crew. And if someone had asked him before the trip into the future had happened how his crew would have handled it, he would have said, Any crew in the Fleet would cope easily. We're always moving to new places. We have no stable homes, no set environment. We have no historic roots tied to planets or lifestyles. We would be fine.

  A
nd he would have been wrong.

  Because he didn't realize that by coming five thousand years into the future, they had left their true home behind. The Fleet itself had become a legend with no names attached, just a mythical group of ships that came into an area, fixed it (or meddled, depending on the story), and then left. Many people now believed that the Fleet was a comforting children's story, that no group of ships like that had ever existed.

  One of the first things Boss had said to him once they could talk freely—after he acquired enough of her language—was how startled she was to see someone from the Fleet and how vindicated she felt. All of her life, she had argued that the Fleet was real, and now she had proof.

  Not that she could show anyone.

  This future that the Ivoire found itself in had a generations-long conflict between a large rapacious government and a group of rebels. But honestly, almost every new situation the Fleet found itself in—and that was a lot of situations over the years of Coop's life—involved a large rapacious government and a group of rebels.

  Once he tried to tell Boss how common this was, but she wouldn't hear it. She claimed the Empire she battled was "evil" and the rebels "good."

  She usually saw shades of gray when it came to the personal level, but on that universal scale, she was purely black and white. No empire could be as bad as the Enterran Empire (even though he knew of many that were far worse) and no rebels had tougher odds against them (even though he knew of many rebel movements that didn't make it through a year, let alone generations).

  These rebels, whom she had more or less allied herself with, had joined forces into something they called the Nine Planets Alliance which, Coop could have told Boss if she had been willing to listen, would someday be someone else's evil government, needing rebellion against.

  But the Nine Planets Alliance had provided him a home, and for that he was grateful. That home was really Boss's. She had started a corporation that she called The Lost Souls, and she used it to rehabilitate Fleet ships and to study what she called stealth technology.

  What she was studying was actually the anacapa technology of the Fleet. The anacapa technology did so much more than provide stealth capability. The fact that Boss was meddling with it—and would continue to meddle with it, without knowing what it was—was one of the reasons Coop decided to speak with her in the first place.

  Eventually, they became allies. But she didn't run him or his crew. He took care of the Ivoire, and he made sure the distance between Boss's people and his remained clear. She could command the people in Lost Souls, but he commanded the Ivoire and everyone on her.

  Boss understood that very, very well, and supported it.

  So six months into his life in the future, when he finally decided on his first mission in this new place with his crew, he told Boss his plans to go to Starbase Kappa. He didn't tell her to get her approval. He told her as a matter of courtesy.

  He just didn't expect her reaction.

  He hadn't expected it at all.

  3

  The Fleet always placed the anacapa controls in the most protected area, whether the anacapa was on a starbase or on a spaceship. The protection hadn't helped the Ivoire's anacapa, which had malfunctioned when weapons fire hit it seven months ago. The anacapa sent things into something called foldspace. The experts, like Yash and Lalliki, argued as to whether foldspace was a different region of space, another dimension, or an alternate universe.

  The entire Fleet agreed on only a few things: time ran differently in foldspace, and foldspace wasn't in the same part of the universe as the ship had been in moments before.

  The Ivoire had gotten trapped in foldspace for two weeks, and then had hooked up to the malfunctioning anacapa on Sector Base V. Boss's team of explorers had activated that anacapa accidentally, and the anacapa did what it was supposed to: It used its emergency powers to link the Ivoire's anacapa with the base's anacapa, and pulled the Ivoire out of foldspace and into Sector Base V.

  But not the Sector Base that the Ivoire had left. The Sector Base five thousand years in the future.

  Five thousand years.

  His brain still couldn't wrap around that. This part of space was littered with remnants of his past, from ruined Fleet vessels to Sector Base V to Starbase Kappa.

  A year ago, in his personal timeline, he'd been here with one of his closest friends and occasional lover, Victoria Sabin. They'd stayed in a fancy suite, had fantastic meals, and saw old friends.

  Now he returned to a place abandoned and malfunctioning, filled with the ghosts of people who had died here recently because something had gone wrong with Starbase Kappa's anacapa as well.

  At least, that was what he could tell from Boss's stories.

  Coop and Yash went down two levels to what had been the heart of Starbase Kappa. Now, according to the map that Boss had made four years ago, the anacapas ection of the base was near the edge of the base, levels below what Boss's people called the Room of Lost Souls.

  The Room of Lost Souls was an actual room, on what looked like the entry level of Starbase Kappa. If a ship docked, its crew would find the room relatively quickly. People had died there.

  The anacapa was in a protected space that butted up against the floor of the Room of Lost Souls, as it was called now. What the room had been in the base's prime was one of many recreation areas that could be shut down or expanded if the operational facilities inside the starbase needed expansion.

  The anacapa control room had been locked and guarded with some of the standard shutdown procedures that the Fleet used. Generally, when the Fleet decommissioned a starbase, it used the starbase's anacapa to move the base to a different sector of space. Then the Fleet engineers disassembled the starbase, and used the parts that were still good or viable for a new starbase or a sector base.

  The Fleet never wasted anything, which was one of the things that made Starbase Kappa so very odd.

  It shouldn't have been here.

  And it certainly shouldn't have been here after five thousand years.

  The anacapa room had a double door system. The outer doors stood open only because Dix and his crew had left them that way for a rapid escape. The inner door remained closed because there was no way to prop it open. Regulations didn't allow it.

  Some of the materials inside any anacapa area were different from the rest of the starbase. They were stronger, and provided protection against anacapa malfunctions.

  Until this past year, Coop had had limited experience with anacapa malfunctions. Now they seemed to be the story of his life.

  Although the fact that the anacapa functioned at all after five thousand years had given him hope, a misplaced hope, or so Lalliki and Yash told him, but hope all the same. He knew that the Ivoire's arrival in this time and place had a lot to do with the vagaries of two different anacapa s , malfunctioning in two different ways (or maybe several different ways), but part of him hoped that the malfunctions could be recreated in a lab.

  His public policy was to act as if he would never leave this time period, but his personal hope was that someday, he and his crew would find a way back to their own time, a way that would enable them to rejoin their friends and family and the familiarity of the Fleet.

  Because right now, he felt like he was haunting his own life.

  Dix's team had disabled the identification panels to enter the inner door. They had reported to Coop on that.

  So he just had to push open the door and step inside.

  He did, Yash on his heels.

  The interior of the anacapa room was brightly lit and still filled with equipment, which surprised him, even though Dix had mentioned that when the team arrived.

  Still, Coop did not expect to see viewing stations, a landing platform large enough for a warship in trouble, and all sorts of engineering equipment still intact.

  He also didn't expect to see the anacapa, extending from its housing in the floor, and Dix reaching into the casing, his arms inside all the way to his s
houlders.

  Layla Lalliki turned toward Coop. She was tall and thin, and even though he could barely see her face through the environmental suit hood that protected her pasty skin, he got the sense that she felt out of her element.

  Lalliki flapped her arms helplessly, a movement that no one comfortable in zero-g would ever use. But Coop understood it: she didn't outrank Dix, and what he was doing disturbed her. She wanted him to stop.

  The three anacapa experts stood around Dix, clutching the repair tools. Coop didn't know these members of his crew very well, and he certainly didn't know them by what he could identify now, which was height and build. There was a short roundish one, another short but thin one, and a taller one with shoulders so broad that Coop would guess that he was male.

  Lalliki walked quickly toward Coop, but he signaled her to stop. He knew what was wrong—or enough of it, anyway.

  Dix knew a lot about a lot of things, but he was no anacapa expert. Still, he had spent most of the last six months studying the drive, trying to figure out what had gone wrong and what could be recreated.

  He had come to Coop's cabin late one night and helped himself, uninvited, to some whiskey that Coop had been saving.

  We don't understand these damn drives, Dix had said. We can work them, we can repair them—more or less—but we're playing with things we only partially get.

  I'm sure the specialists would disagree with you, Coop had said, deciding not to mention the whiskey. Instead, he had poured a glass for himself.

  If they disagreed, they would know what foldspace is, Dix said, then sighed . I think we're screwed, Coop. We need some kind of access to our own past, something still functioning. We shut down the sector base, and it was a mistake. We can't make that mistake again.

  Coop had forgotten that conversation until now. It had been months ago, and he and Dix had had countless conversations after that. Many of them had been about Dix's family, his love for the Fleet, and the woman he had left behind on the Geneva. Dix had been in love, the kind of love Coop had never experienced, and losing her was tearing him apart in ways Coop didn't completely understand.