The Runabout Read online

  Yash did not miss that small interaction. Her gaze seems to catch everything.

  She takes a deep breath, and stands.

  “All right,” she says. “We sent the second probe inside the runabout this morning. The doors were still open.”

  I let out a small breath.

  “Good,” I say, about the probe, about the doors, about everything.

  Yash glances at me, but doesn’t do anything else to acknowledge me.

  She says, “We have a lot of data that looks, superficially, like the data we got from the original probe. But Mikk and I and Zaria will go over it, just to make sure that we’re not missing something. We’ll be bringing in some of the trainees as well. I don’t want to miss anything.”

  This time I don’t respond aloud. It would seem odd for me to continually say “good,” as if I’m encouraging her along.

  I lean back in the therapeutic chair. It molds to my back, giving me support in ways that chairs normally do not. That feels odd, like someone is actually holding me in place.

  “Mikk ran a program comparing the visual footage from both probes,” Yash says. “With some slight differences, the visuals are exactly the same.”

  “Slight differences?” Elaine asks in that half whisper.

  “We have footage of the second probe as it passes the first probe,” Yash says. “Things like that.”

  Elaine tries to nod, but can’t because of her neck brace. Or maybe her head is just wobbling. I don’t know.

  Looking at her makes me distinctly uneasy. I could have ended up just like that—and maybe I was when I wasn’t conscious.

  “So,” Yash says, “we’ll be using the footage from the first probe.”

  Then her gaze meets mine.

  “And before you say anything,” she adds, “we will do a visual comparison later, to make sure everything really is the same.”

  I hadn’t been planning on saying anything, but clearly, Yash has me being critical of her in her head. Which is fine. It keeps her on her toes.

  “Good,” I say, because she expects me to.

  “All right.” Her hand hovers over the controls on the tabletop. “Just so you know, Mikk and I haven’t really looked closely at the footage either. So we’ll probably be as surprised as you are at some of the things here.”

  I nod. Elaine makes her strange little head movement.

  Jaylene moves just a bit closer to Elaine, as if guarding her while we watch.

  Yash brings her hand down, and the conference room dims. The screen behind her shows the footage from the probe.

  Mikk and I learned long ago not to show footage from the probes in three dimensions. The probes don’t have enough data to build the backs and sides of things, so everything looks a little compressed.

  Instead, we watch in two dimensions, and sometimes see much more than we ever would in person.

  I can tell right from the start that Mikk has edited a bit of the footage. The probe I had sent into the airlock was already active. Images of the probe going through the airlock were not there.

  The footage starts inside the runabout itself. Nanobits float by like sediment. The interior of the runabout is falling apart just like the exterior.

  No one had guided the probe, so it followed its programming. The programming was pretty elementary: examine everything swiftly at first and then up close.

  So the moment the probe is inside the runabout, the images track through the small corridor.

  Everything is canted slightly to the right. My brain adjusts instantly, which is a bit of a relief, considering how creaky it’s been, but Elaine has to tilt her head slowly to the left to accommodate that difference.

  Jaylene frowns at her, and so does Mikk. I don’t like that much either.

  But I focus on the runabout instead.

  The design of the runabout is similar to designs I’ve seen from the runabouts on the Ivoire, but not quite the same. There are two crew cabins down the corridor. The cabins are exactly the same size, which is not how they had been designed for the Ivoire.

  One of the cabins had a blanket floating near the right wall, a pillow trapped in a corner. God knows how long they’ve been there—it takes forever for items like that to decay in space, especially if they’ve been built to withstand the rigors of space travel.

  The other cabin looks nearly empty, although it might not be if we can get inside.

  I’m itching to dive this runabout now. I don’t smile—I can’t with Elaine so close—but I feel like me, the old me, completely, for the first time since I woke up.

  The probe takes us back down the hall, navigating the floating nanobits like they’re something that can actually harm the probe. It ducks into the galley kitchen, which seems oddly barren. Something’s missing there, but I don’t know what, exactly, because I’m not sure what’s standard in an active Fleet kitchen.

  The probe makes its way to the cockpit.

  It looks like the cockpit/inflight area of one of the larger runabouts on the Ivoire. The runabout once had seats bolted to the floor behind the actual navigational equipment, but apparently two of the seats—at the very least—are gone. Only one passenger seat remains. It has gotten stuck in a reclining position.

  Everything else seems intact. The pilot’s chair faces the navigational equipment. And the screen across from the navigational equipment doesn’t look damaged—at least as best I can tell using the grainy imagery from the probe.

  I recognize the screen. It’s like the screens on some of the smaller ships on the Ivoire, designed to show two-dimensional imagery or to open onto the space before it. Unlike most of the Fleet designs, some of these smaller ships do not keep their cockpits protected in the center of the ship itself.

  If I am understanding the layout of this runabout, the cockpit wasn’t protected here either. It was on the side of the exterior where Elaine and I ran into the most problems. I’ll have to double-check this with Mikk and Yash, but it seems to me that’s the case.

  Like it was programmed to do, the probe spends time in the cockpit. It doesn’t look at the standard seats or the pilot’s chair, although I wish I could make it do so. Because there’s something odd there.

  The probe heads to the navigational equipment, which looks like it’s intact. The navigational equipment doesn’t appear to be working, which is not a surprise, but it doesn’t seem damaged at all.

  “I don’t see an anacapa drive,” Mikk says. “I’ve looked at this part of the footage, and I don’t see anything.”

  “There are controls underneath the navigational board that I’ve never seen before,” Yash says. “I suspect those are for the anacapa.”

  “But where’s the drive?” Mikk asks. “It has to be in the ship somewhere.”

  The probe moves closest to the wall. Yash points at something just beside the panel, and on the floor itself.

  “That’s not quite big enough to house an anacapa drive that I’m familiar with,” she says. “But the casing looks right.”

  “Would it be so close to the navigational controls?” I ask.

  “I have no idea,” she says. “But this is a pretty standard runabout layout, and there’s nowhere else to put it that you can access it easily.”

  “How easily would you have to access it?” Jaylene asks, surprising me. I thought she was more focused on Elaine than the images floating by us.

  “Quickly if something goes wrong,” Yash says. “You can’t hide it under the floors or in the ceiling.”

  “Did you see that hole in the corridor?” Mikk asks. “It looked like someone had dug in there for something.”

  I hadn’t seen that. But the missing chairs didn’t seem to be anywhere either, and that’s odd.

  “It looks like this might have been scavenged,” I say, “but the navigational equipment looks untouched.”

  “Are scavengers…super…super…superstitious?” Elaine asks, her whisper cutting into our conversation.

  We all look at her in the same
movement. I guess none of us really expected her to contribute much to this meeting.

  “Why?” Mikk asks.

  “Because of…the corpse,” she says.

  “What?” Yash asks. She looks at Mikk as if she expects him to explain this.

  He shrugs.

  Elaine sees their surprise, and something in her face changes. She thinks they don’t believe her because of her injuries.

  “Can you pan?” she asks.

  “We have what we have,” Yash says.

  “Then re…re…reverse,” Elaine says. “I’ll show you.”

  She struggles against the chair.

  “I don’t want you to stand,” Jaylene says, but Elaine ignores her. Elaine rises, slowly, her head brace moving with her.

  The chair changes shape, almost like it’s reaching for her. She uses one arm of the chair to brace her left side. Her right side shuffles.

  Jaylene and Mikk have stood as well, moving just close enough to Elaine to brace her if she falls. She looks determined not to.

  She uses her chair, then another, and then another to stair-step herself to the edge of the table where Yash is. Yash takes a step closer to Elaine, but Elaine says, “Please move… back.”

  For a moment, Yash doesn’t move at all. She doesn’t seem to understand what Elaine wants, but I do.

  “Yash,” I say. “You’re in her way.”

  “Oh,” Yash says, and scrambles aside.

  I get up as well, and Jaylene shoots me a glare that would have made me stop moving yesterday. But I’m all right. I’m healing, probably thanks to those nanobits.

  Besides, if Elaine can move, I can too.

  I walk down the other side of the table. Now Elaine and I are flanking Yash.

  “What do you want me to reverse to?” I ask Elaine.

  “I got it,” Yash says.

  I ignore her, keeping my hand on the controls. I have a hunch I know where Elaine is going with this.

  “The first…gli…gla…when we first see the cockpit,” Elaine says. Now I realize she’s having trouble with words too. That must be very frustrating. “All the way to the… image of the navigation panel.”

  Yash reaches for the controls, but I have already mentally cued up those moments, so it only takes me a second to reach them. I had a hunch we were missing something.

  Elaine stands near the footage, and as the probe’s camera shows the gap between the chairs, it also focuses—just barely—on the pilot’s chair. Something hangs down to one side, the side we couldn’t see well. The side where Yash believes the anacapa controls are.

  “Zoom…,” Elaine says.

  She doesn’t need the next word. I know it. In. She wants me to zoom in on that hanging thing.

  I do. It looks like the side of a hand.

  Mikk curses slightly.

  “Now,” Elaine says to me. “Regular.”

  Yash is frowning, but I know what Elaine means. I return to the regular view that we’d seen before, moving just a little slower than usual.

  “Where to?” I ask Elaine.

  “Navigation panel,” she says.

  I move the image forward until we have a clear view of the navigation panel. What had looked like a shadow to me as we first viewed this wasn’t.

  It was another hand, resting on the navigation board.

  I have no idea how that’s possible, unless the hand is wearing a glove that will make it stick to the panel. The other hand is floating slightly—or it looks like it is—but the hand on the panel seems like it’s resting there.

  I don’t want to think about how it remains attached without some kind of adhesive.

  I zoom in on the hand. It’s definitely a hand, and it’s attached to an arm. Judging from what little bit we can see, it appears to be mummified.

  Which means it has been in this runabout a very, very long time.

  I look at Elaine. Her eyes are sunken even deeper into her face. But she smiles at me, and this time, it doesn’t bother me that she can only move part of her mouth.

  She’s feeling triumphant, and I don’t blame her. She saw something everyone else missed. I know how important that is after the last few days.

  “Let’s ignore the scavengers for a minute,” I say to Mikk and Elaine.

  Yash moves into my line of sight and crosses her arms, as if she doesn’t want to hear what I’m going to say next.

  But she does. She just doesn’t realize it yet.

  “This body looks mummified,” I say, “and if it really is, and if it’s somehow attached to that navigation panel, then it probably dates from whatever went wrong inside this runabout.”

  Yash is frowning at me. Mikk is nodding, though. And Elaine’s smile remains.

  Jaylene stands as close to Elaine as she can without letting Elaine know she’s there. Right now, Elaine is balanced, and not noticing how badly she’s been injured.

  I’d like to keep it that way.

  “That means the Fleet didn’t store these ships,” Yash says. “We take care of the bodies of our dead.”

  “Yes, you do,” I say.

  I had watched a Fleet funeral for the Ivoire’s first officer after he committed suicide. It was a sad and lovely affair, and clearly something everyone needed.

  “But I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion yet,” I say.

  Yash glares at me. “You can’t tell me that we have become a heartless people over 5,000 years. That’s not who—”

  “That’s not what I’m saying.” I keep my voice low, and try to ignore the fact that Elaine has wobbled.

  Jaylene doesn’t ignore it, though. She grabs Elaine and helps her into the nearest chair. Elaine apologizes softly, and Jaylene, just as softly, says, “I’m impressed you stood that long.”

  Everything stops while that happens, but neither Yash nor I look at Elaine directly. We know she’s feeling weak instead of proud of herself for managing this long, and we don’t want to draw attention to how she’s feeling.

  “What I’m saying is this.” I pause just a little for dramatic effect. “I’m saying that if the Boneyard is, indeed, run by the Fleet, as we suspect, then the Fleet doesn’t look at these ships before scooping them up and moving them here. Nothing gets inspected at all.”

  “Why would anyone do that?” Mikk asks.

  “This is some kind of first-stage round-up pen,” I say. “Maybe the Fleet put it together so that derelict ships wouldn’t litter the sector. Or maybe there’s a system—”

  “There usually is a system,” Mikk mumbles. “The Fleet loves its systems.”

  Elaine half strangles back a cough. We all look at her. She makes the sound again, and I realize she’s not coughing. She’s laughing.

  “Such an…understatement,” she manages.

  We all smile—Jaylene with relief more than amusement—and then I say to Mikk, “You’re right. The Fleet loves its systems. And they’re usually sensible.”

  “Usually?” Yash says softly.

  I ignore that. “If this is a round-up pen, a place where they put the derelict ships they find until they have a purpose for them, then there’s some way to sort them. And, I would assume, inspections come at that point.”

  “That makes sense,” Mikk says.

  “It explains the varied anacapa readings,” Yash says. “They’ve been bothering me. If I were running this place, I’d make sure all the functioning anacapas were shut off.”

  That surprises me. “What if you needed them?” I ask.

  “What do you mean?” Yash asks.

  I shrug. “I mean, what if you wanted to move one of these large ships out of the Boneyard and across the sector? The sector bases have anacapas that can link with a ship’s anacapa, right?”

  “If they’ve found a signal, and feel it’s necessary.” Yash sounds a bit defensive and I don’t blame her. The Ivoire ended up here because it had sent out a distress signal and rather than have that signal picked up by a sector base in their time period, the signal got picked up by an aban
doned sector base in mine.

  “The Fleet don’t need to find these signals,” I say. “If they put the ships in the Boneyard, they’ll have a record of each.”

  “You’d think they’d shut down the malfunctioning anacapas,” Mikk says.

  “You’d think,” I say, “but that shield around the Boneyard will probably protect any ship outside of it, should there be a massive explosion.”

  “They’d lose everything inside here, then,” Yash says.

  “But if this is just a round-up pen of derelicts,” I say, “it won’t matter much. It’s like having an explosion at a garbage dump.”

  The entire group is silent for a moment.

  Then Elaine struggles a little, moving her head sideways. Jaylene steps closer to her, clearly worried.

  “That…doesn’t explain the… scavenging,” Elaine says. She sounds exhausted—she probably is exhausted—but that’s not stopping her from participating.

  “You think it was done by the Fleet?” I ask.

  “We wouldn’t leave a body,” Yash says, forcefully this time.

  I agree with her, but I want to hear Elaine. I ignore Yash’s comment by keeping my gaze on Elaine.

  “We need to…see inside,” Elaine says.

  “You two aren’t diving,” Jaylene says to me and Elaine. “Not now, not again. Not on this trip. I need someone with real experience looking at you.”

  Elaine ignores her the way I ignored Yash. Elaine and I just stare at each other.

  I think we both know we’re not going to dive again this trip. But we both understand that only by being inside that runabout can we figure out even a little bit of what happened there.

  “I don’t like the mysteries,” Yash says after a moment.

  I let out a small laugh.

  “I do,” I say. “I really do.”

  Nineteen

  We have to end the meeting because we don’t want to tire Elaine further. But if I’m being honest with myself, I’m tired too.

  Not weary, though. Not discouraged. Rather excited in a way I haven’t felt for years.

  I let Mikk hover as he walks me back to my room in the medical wing.

  “Would you do me a favor?” I ask.

  “What’s that?” He sounds a little wary.