Searching for the Fleet Read online

  He had seen the crew drink before, but he hadn’t paid attention to the amount until last night.

  And he hadn’t liked what he saw.

  “How you doing, Lieutenant Tightass?” Nisen asked him as she flopped into the captain’s chair.

  Coop didn’t acknowledge her at all. He wasn’t going to start answering to insults, because if he did, the name would stick, not just on this ship, but on future assignments as well.

  “Underwear’s too tight for the second day in a row,” she muttered, leaning back in the ruined chair. “We need to get you one size up, Lieutenant Tightass. The pressure on your balls is making you rigid everywhere.”

  He tapped one of the screens, working hard to concentrate on the numbers before him.

  She chuckled. “Okay,” she said, “probably not everywhere…”

  He kept his head bent downward, and closed his eyes for a brief second, hoping no one else could see his response. He had to learn how to train his face to remain impassive while his emotions whipsawed inside of him. He usually managed impassive when there was a crisis, but he hadn’t quite hit impassive when he was feeling humiliated.

  “Good God, Lieutenant Cooper, you really are a tightass,” Nisen said. “I always find it suspicious when a man can’t laugh at himself.”

  And I always find it difficult to laugh when someone confuses bullying with humor, he nearly said. He had to bite the inside of his lip again, so that the words wouldn’t leave.

  “All right,” she said in a slightly different tone. “Report to me, Lieutenant Cooper. What are you finding in all your research?”

  He raised his head. His gaze met hers. Her eyes were bloodshot.

  “I’m finding nothing unusual, sir,” he said in his most formal voice.

  “Told you it was a waste of time,” Heyek said from behind him.

  Nisen grinned, then put her hand on the edge of the control arm of the captain’s chair.

  “I don’t agree with Lieutenant Heyek,” Coop said. “I don’t believe that looking at the data was a waste of time in this instance.”

  Nisen leaned her head back, then tilted it toward him, clearly surprised. “Even though you found nothing different?”

  “Especially because I found nothing different.” He lowered the screen between him and her. That single movement made it feel like he had taken a step closer to her when he hadn’t.

  “Intriguing, Lieutenant,” Nisen said. “You want to explain that logic?”

  “I compared the Voimakas’s actions with her sister ships. The Voimakas performed the exact same calculations as the other ships. The Voimakas followed procedure to the letter.”

  “Foldspace is a crapshoot, Lieutenant,” Heyek said. “Hasn’t anyone told you that?”

  Is that why you all drink to excess? he thought but did not say. Because your job entails entering foldspace dozens of times searching for someone who got lost by entering it once?

  “The only differences are slight.” Coop continued as if Heyek hadn’t spoken at all. “The other two ships entered foldspace from slightly different grid coordinates. They weren’t at the same coordinates at all, nor did they move to those coordinates.”

  “Close enough, though,” said Heyek. Apparently Nisen was letting the lieutenant do her dirty work for her.

  This time, Coop looked directly at Heyek. She, at least, didn’t look like she had slept in her uniform. It was crisp and clean, just like she was. Her dark hair was pulled back tightly from her face. There was no sign that she had been drinking the night before with Nisen.

  “Close enough,” he repeated, letting just a hint of sarcasm into his voice. “Apparently, they were not ‘close enough,’ Lieutenant. They entered foldspace and then exited with no problem at all. The Voimakas did not.”

  Heyek had her arms crossed. She was looking down on him from her perch three rows up. “And you think it was because of the entry point?”

  “I am looking for anomalies,” he said.

  “It’s not an anomaly for a ship to enter foldspace from a slightly different coordinate than her sister ships,” Heyek said. “That’s how we do it when more than one ship enters foldspace at the same time.”

  “That’s right,” Coop said, making sure his voice held no irritation at the fact that she had just explained procedure to him as if he were an ensign on his first assignment.

  Heyek frowned at him. “We—and the experts back on the Pasteur—don’t think the anacapa drives of the ships interact when they all head to foldspace at the same time. We’ve run experiments—”

  “I know,” Coop said, cutting her off. “I’ve studied them.”

  “Then you’re wasting all of our time,” Heyek said.

  Coop exhaled through his teeth, making sure there was no sound of irritation.

  “Ships vanish into foldspace when no other ship surrounds them,” Heyek said, as if she couldn’t let it go. “We don’t always get close-up information from nearby ships. That’s a luxury in this case. And it proves nothing.”

  “I agree,” Coop said. “It proves nothing. But—”

  “But nothing.” Heyek glanced at Nisen, and said to her, “I told you, we don’t need to do this kind of fussy—”

  “Actually, Captain, we do,” Coop said.

  Nisen raised her eyebrows at him. “You have a theory, Lieutenant Tightass?”

  She was trying to shut him up.

  “Lieutenant Cooper, sir,” he said. “In case you’d forgotten.”

  Isaak Li, the comm officer just inside Coop’s line of sight behind the captain, snickered, and ducked behind a nearby console. Li was a small man, so he could hide easily.

  “Lieutenant Cooper,” Nisen said. “You have a theory?”

  Every word dripped with sarcasm, with a lack of respect that he found breathtaking. If he ever became lucky enough to run his own ship, this kind of treatment would not happen—especially from a superior officer to a subordinate.

  “I do, Captain,” Coop said. “I think those slightly different coordinates make all of the difference. The ships are not entering foldspace from the same point. They’re entering at different points. Foldspace is tricky, particularly when it comes to time. Perhaps it is just as tricky with its entry points.”

  “You don’t think the experts have been studying that?” Heyek snapped.

  Coop gave her a slow, measured look. “I suspect they have,” he said, “and I suspect that’s why they’re always asking us for more information. Have you ever thought that the procedure might not be about our search, but about future searches?”

  Heyek’s eyes narrowed. Two of the bridge officers behind her grinned openly as if they were pleased that Coop had taken her on.

  Nisen hadn’t noticed any of that. Instead, she pursed her lips and nodded.

  “Lieutenant Tightass might have a point,” she said.

  Coop felt a surge of irritation, which he kept off his face. He didn’t correct her this time because correcting her again would show her that she was getting under his skin.

  “I don’t think they take any of that into account,” Heyek said, “any more than they look at the build and design of the ship. Every ship is different, even if it is the same class of vessel as the other ships that didn’t get lost. Anacapa drives have anomalies, command structures vary—”

  “Information is information, Lieutenant,” Nisen snapped, “and the scientists probably use all of it. Sometimes we cut too many corners. I think Lieutenant Tightass is right: we shouldn’t cut any on these rescues.”

  Heyek opened her mouth to argue, then seemed to think the better of it, and closed her mouth again.

  “I want to give some thought to the entry point thing,” Nisen said. “Who are we working with at the site?”

  “The Soeker, the Tragač, the Iarrthóir, and the Ofuna,” Li said. He had spoken up quickly as if he wanted a change of subject. Until he snickered at the interchange, Coop hadn’t paid a lot of attention to him, thinking him just another of
the bridge officers who marched in lock-step with Nisen.

  But Li looked over a nearby console at Coop, and gave him a thumbs-up so quick that Coop barely had time to register it.

  Heyek shot Li a dirty look. “They were close to the coordinates, just like we were,” she said, taking over the narrative again. “That’s why they were chosen to work with us.”

  “We’ll arrive first,” Li said, head down. Coop wondered if Li was smiling. He seemed to be enjoying poking at Heyek.

  “We’re about ten minutes out,” Heyek said.

  “Good,” Nisen said. “Because I want to look at Lieutenant Tightass’s findings.”

  She propelled herself out of her chair as if it had an eject button.

  She stood just outside Coop’s screen barrier, looked at all of them which were, for her, eye-height, grinned, and said, “Tightass, permission to come aboard.”

  The phrase sounded vaguely dirty, which she probably intended. It also acknowledged the separation he had built from the rest of the crew. And then there was that nickname again. He was going to be stuck with it, no matter what he did.

  “Permission granted, Captain,” Coop said as formally as he could. He stepped away from the jury-rigged console so that she could enter his little protected space.

  As she did, he bowed ever so slightly.

  “Welcome aboard,” he said, and set to work.

  Eleven

  The math was complicated, but the information it communicated wasn’t. The Voimakas entered foldspace one-point-two seconds ahead of the Mandela, one of its sister ships, and two-point-five seconds ahead of the other ship, the Krachtige. The Mandela arrived at the new coordinates seventeen minutes later, the Krachtige five minutes after that. They waited, as per procedure, for the Voimakas, which never arrived.

  The Krachtige did the first round of investigation, checking to see if the Voimakas ended up at a starbase or a sector base. Sometimes, a malfunctioning anacapa drive sent a ship back to the place where the drive had last been repaired or replaced.

  None of the nearby bases reported anything. Once the Fleet got involved, they double-checked that same information, and did not find the Voimakas. Nor was it near any coordinates where it had entered or exited foldspace before.

  The one thing none of these reports addressed, the one thing Coop didn’t know how to address either, was the fact that sometimes foldspace sent a ship to a different time period. Usually the differences were small—a few hours, maybe a few days. But sometimes they were vast, ten, twenty, thirty years into the future.

  If the Voimakas ended up a few days in its future, everyone would know soon enough. It would arrive on some future date, and let the entire Fleet know about the return. But if the Voimakas ended up years in the future—or, God forbid—in the past, then there was no way to know without a records search.

  And records searches in Fleet records were difficult at best. The Fleet didn’t keep a lot of information about its past. Only the history ships attached to the various universities even had the capability for such storage, and their storage facilities were haphazard. The active sector bases also kept information—or they were supposed to. Whether or not that information got moved when the sector bases shut down was something no one seemed to know.

  After Coop made his small presentation to Nisen, as quietly as he could even though he knew the rest of the bridge listened in, he said, “Let me ask one question. You have done many foldspace grid searches involving multiple ships just like we’re going to do here.”

  Nisen raised her head and looked up at him. She was nearly a foot shorter than he was, something he only noticed at moments like this. Her outsized personality made her seem much taller.

  “When ships coordinate pieces of the grid, there’s overlap in the map, right?” he asked.

  She frowned, then blinked, as if she didn’t know how to answer him. Coop found that interesting all by itself.

  “Yes.” Rettig walked down the aisle from his perch near the exit. He had kept a low profile in the discussions until now. “Usually, there’s a lot of overlap.”

  Rettig was the one person on the bridge crew that Coop liked. Rettig was a wiry man with arms like sticks, the kind that training hard in zero-g often gave an athlete. Coop had no idea what (if anything) Rettig trained for, but Coop suspected it was some kind of intership competition.

  “Usually?” Coop asked.

  “Sometimes there isn’t.” Rettig stepped into the same protected space that Coop and Nisen were in, as if it were a separate conference room and he had been invited to join them. “If there is no overlap, we abort the mission.”

  “That’s not protocol,” Coop said.

  Nisen straightened, as if his words irritated her, but Rettig nodded.

  “We developed it,” he said. “Or rather, I did, and the captain agreed. What freaks us all out is that the star maps don’t coordinate.”

  Coop looked from him to Nisen. Her entire demeanor had changed. She seemed larger, stronger, more in control than she had just five minutes before.

  “We never find the ship we’re looking for if the star maps don’t coordinate,” she said softly.

  “The ship you’re looking for,” Coop repeated. “You find ships though.”

  Rettig nodded. “That’s what freaked me out. All of us, really.”

  “The ships we find are old.” Nisen’s voice was very soft now. Coop doubted anyone else could hear this. “Fifty, sixty, seventy years old.”

  A chill ran through him. “Abandoned?”

  “Not always,” Rettig said. “You wish they were, though.”

  “Before you ask,” Nisen said, “no one’s alive on them either.”

  The words hung in the air around them.

  Then Nisen turned, and tapped one of the holoscreens. It winked out and returned, looking exactly the same.

  “We usually do twenty, twenty-five trips into foldspace during a grid search,” she said in a louder voice.

  “Sometimes as many as fifty.” Rettig was looking at Coop, as if Coop should understand.

  He finally did. They were losing their nerve. All of them. They were diving into and out of foldspace like it was regular space, aware that each trip, no matter how short, might trap them there.

  “We’re going to arrive first,” Nisen said, more to the screen than to Coop or Rettig. “We should go in first.”

  Coop nearly blurted, That’s not procedure, but of course, she knew that.

  “What are you thinking, Captain?” Heyek had come down another aisle and was peering over one of the screens. Apparently she didn’t like being left out of the discussions either.

  “I’d like to see if Lieutenant Cooper’s hypothesis is correct. If we enter foldspace at the exact coordinates that the Voimakas used, then maybe we’ll see the ship.” Nisen wasn’t looking at any of them, which was probably good, because Rettig paled, and Heyek winced.

  Coop froze ever so slightly. He was aware that the captain had just used his real name, as a sign of respect. He was probably going to lose that respect with his next question. He tried to keep his tone nonconfrontational. “I thought when the grid search started, it always started from the entry point.”

  “We go in and out at the same spot as four other ships, we’ll pile on top of each other,” Heyek said, treating him as if this were his first time into foldspace ever. Apparently, she had heard the question as confrontational.

  Coop gave her a withering glance. “I would have thought at least one ship went in at the precise coordinates.”

  “We never have,” Rettig said. “I think the fear is we’d appear in foldspace on top of the ship we’re looking for.”

  “Unstated fear,” Nisen said. “Not in the manuals, of course. But the thought is there.”

  “We’re always close,” Heyek said, as if she had come up with the grid search method herself.

  “But not precise,” Rettig said, “not down to the fifteenth decimal, like you found, Coop.”
/>   Coop. Was that the first time someone on this ship had deliberately used his nickname? He suspected it was.

  “How far out are we from the others?” Nisen wasn’t talking to the three inside Coop’s little protective barrier. She was looking at Li.

  “The first ship will join us about fifteen minutes after we arrive,” Li said.

  Nisen braced her hands on the jury-rigged console. “Fifteen minutes. We can try your method, then, Lieutenant.”

  Coop wanted to say it wasn’t his method. But he didn’t. Let her blame him if something went wrong.

  “We’ll let the other ships know that we’re going in before they get here,” Nisen said. “We’ll do what we can, then we’ll be the ones in charge of organizing the grid search after the others turn up. I’ll argue that the Arama go in at those coordinates every time we have a turn.”

  “Unless the star maps don’t match.” Heyek said that softly, her gaze on Nisen.

  Nisen looked over at her, as if they shared a secret. Then Nisen nodded. She didn’t say yes, though. She didn’t go on the record, which Coop found interesting.

  He found the entire discussion interesting. He had thought this was a shoddy crew, lax and undisciplined. He hadn’t realized that this was a terrified crew, determined to do their jobs despite the fear they had for their own lives.

  That put all of the behavior he had seen into a different context, including the captain’s bullying. She wanted to make it unpleasant for him to stay, maybe even request a transfer before the time was right. Had she forced other candidates on the captain track off the ship in the past?

  Nisen had moved closer to him. She was so close, in fact, that it took all of his personal strength not to step backward.

  “If your theory is correct,” she said, “we’re taking a large risk going in at those exact coordinates. We might end up as lost as the Voimakas.”

  “Isn’t that always the risk?” Coop asked.

  Nisen’s expression hardened. “Spoken like someone who doesn’t understand the risk,” she said, and pushed past Rettig to leave the little protected area.