Searching for the Fleet Read online

  She grinned. “Amateurs who drink on an empty stomach get drunk.”

  He grinned back. “But I’m no amateur.”

  Although he might be, compared to her. And compared to the rest of the crew of the Arama. He only drank when he was on leave.

  He let his grin fade. “Thank you, ma’am,” he said.

  “Don’t thank me,” she said. “You just make sure that when something goes horribly, terribly wrong in your command—and it will, you’ll walk into one of those impossible situations where there are no good results—you’ll do the best you can by your crew, even if it means breaking all the rules. Can you promise me that, Tightass?”

  He thought about it for a moment, thought about being trapped for years in foldspace, about staying on the ship even though it meant sacrificing his life, his future, while the rest of the crew went to places unknown to start again.

  That probably broke some rules. Just like bringing a ratty captain’s chair into a pristine new vessel probably broke rules.

  He needed to pay more attention. He needed to see what leaders were doing, when they chose to follow regulations and when they chose not to. He needed to figure out whether a break with regulation meant something good for the crew or not.

  Nisen tilted her head. He had been silent long enough to catch her attention.

  “I can make you that promise, Captain,” he said. “Even though at this moment, I’m not sure I understand all the implications of it.”

  She smiled and grabbed her beer.

  “That’s spot on, Coop,” she said. “You don’t understand the implications of it. You won’t, until the day comes. I’d like to say you’ll think about me in that moment, but you won’t. I’ll be a distant memory, if you think of me at all. I want this all to be second nature to you.”

  She raised her glass to him.

  “And I’m pretty sure it will,” she said. Then she downed the contents. “You’re one behind, Tightass. I’m buying. Catch up.”

  Then she signaled Heyek, who went behind the bar and poured Coop a pale ale. Not his usual drink of choice, but he didn’t say anything.

  Heyek brought the drink over and handed it to him without a change in expression, leading him to believe this was how the meetings with the captain candidates and Nisen always ended.

  Heyek went back to the bar, and Coop raised his glass to Nisen.

  “To you, Captain,” he said, “and your crew.”

  She grinned at him. “For God’s sake, Tightass. Let’s just drink.”

  And so they did.

  Part Four

  The Search

  Now

  Fourteen

  At first, Yash thought she had seen the flashing light because she needed to sleep.

  She had gotten only four hours of sleep per night since she had started work on the runabout data. Much of that sleep had been in a small suite she had set aside for rest during long projects.

  That suite had actually been someone’s quarters when the station had been functional. The bathroom had needed repair, but it had a good-sized working shower, a sink that functioned well enough, and the second toilet in the lab. The main room wasn’t much bigger than a closet, but it was the right size for sleeping.

  Until she started this project, she hadn’t needed the sleeping suite. She would work here, then traipse back to her apartment, which had more room than she had ever needed.

  She wasn’t sure Ilona would approve of a sleep suite in a lab. Some kind of order had gone out early, designating sections throughout the station—some sections set aside for offices, others for scientific projects, and still others for work with the various ships. There were the hopeful sections set aside for restaurants and shops. While a couple of bars with food had shown up, no real restaurants had yet.

  And then, of course, there were the living quarters, off in their own section, with a myriad of rules governing behavior so that people who lived in each other’s pockets didn’t get on each other’s nerves.

  Yash had never told anyone about this particular suite. She had even brought in the bed herself so that no one would know about it. She didn’t want to go through the permission cycle to do unusual things. While Yash mostly liked the fact that Ilona had moved Lost Souls from a haphazard management system to a business-oriented one, Yash had hated all the procedures that had come along with it.

  She found her own behavior a bit surprising for a woman who had been raised in the Fleet’s strict regimentation. When it suited her, she claimed she didn’t work for Lost Souls because she was on loan from the Fleet. And when it suited her, she reminded herself that the Fleet that she knew didn’t exist anymore, so she could behave as she pleased.

  She had never been that woman before. Even if she found the Fleet, she wondered if she would be able to return to the woman she had been.

  She kept secrets now, which she had never done before—not like this. And even about smaller things, like this suite.

  Although the suite wasn’t as much of a secret as it had been. Coop had just learned about it because he had been working alongside her. Although he had kept sensible hours. He didn’t seem as eager to work his way through the data as she did.

  In an unspoken agreement, he worked while she slept, although from his attitude, she wondered if he was doing that as a favor for her so that she felt the research could continue even though she was forced to take time away from it all.

  Still, she was finding it impossible to shut off her mind. She could only sleep when exhausted, and it seemed to take a lot to exhaust her.

  She hadn’t been this focused since the Ivoire was stuck in foldspace, nearly six years ago.

  This time, she had only had three hours’ sleep before she staggered into one of the side labs. She had to check one thing her brain had given her during its brief rest: it had wondered what all of the probe imagery showed at that moment the anacapa drive activated.

  Her brain seemed to remember a flash that had appeared on the probe imagery. But now that she was awake, she worried that she had imagined it.

  She needed to check it out before she got distracted by other things.

  The side lab had been set up for a small tech crew: three work stations along three sides. All of the workstations were networked with each other, but not with any other part of the lab or of the station.

  She had several small labs set up like this around that big room. That way, she felt secure doing research with old, rundown data from ships that had either been damaged or destroyed. She didn’t want the old data to contaminate anything in her lab.

  This side lab was cold and smelled faintly of stale air. She hadn’t been in here since she had loaded the probe telemetry into the workstation nearest the door. The center of this room was empty—no table, no chairs, nothing to make anyone comfortable.

  When she had set it up, she had imagined this room would be used for the kind of holographic projection she was now doing in that large central room.

  The floor beneath her bare feet was cold as well. As she activated the nearest workstation, she realized she was wearing only the T-shirt and loose pants she’d taken to sleeping in. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d showered.

  She ran a hand over her face. If she couldn’t sleep, then she had to eat. If she failed at both, she would collapse on the floor of the lab, and Coop would shut down the research until she was on her feet, and she didn’t want that.

  At that thought, her stomach growled. She needed to get the food soon. But she just wanted to move to the anacapa drive activation, to quiet her mind.

  She shivered a little in the room’s chill, using the flat screen in front of her to set the data to the precise time stamp she needed.

  She knew that the imagery from the probe would show a golden light that emanated from the anacapa itself. When she had been in the runabout’s cockpit, that light had tipped her off to the fact that the anacapa drive had come alive.

  Then that light had nearly blinded her,
and adrenalin had shot through her. Just thinking about that moment made adrenalin shoot through her again. If she could have, she would have thrown her arms around the anacapa drive. Her first thought in that moment had been that someone had activated the anacapa drive, and she wanted to find that someone.

  Yash took a deep breath, making herself feel the cold of the room, her bare feet on the floor. She needed to focus on the memory without the emotion. Reviewing how the drive had activated, that moment of joy and then fear that the malfunctioning drive might trap her and Boss in foldspace. Yash had shouted a warning, galvanized into action by her own concerns, and then forced Boss out of that cockpit.

  It had all seemed surreal, the way the nanobits floating around them had glowed in the light, the last-second grab of the data stick that Yash had somehow managed, and the fast, panicky escape through zero-g. (Okay, she had panicked a little; Boss had not.)

  They had gotten out, and Yash always felt relieved about that.

  From the moment she had escaped the runabout, she had felt different—lighter, excited about the future, feeling as if she had a future for the first time in years.

  But from that moment, she had focused on the data she had retrieved from the console, not on the data from the probes.

  Now, she licked her lips. They were dry. The room felt a little arid. Maybe she had the environmental controls set on some kind of default. If she remembered when she left, she would check that.

  She ran a hand through her hair, feeling it spike upward. All she wanted to do right now was see the probe imagery before she grabbed something out of that small break room. Something edible, plus coffee.

  She smiled a little at that thought. The coffee she made, which had been getting systematically worse as time went on, had been the one thing sustaining her. She sometimes forgot to eat, but she hadn’t forgotten to make coffee.

  It wasn’t even leaving her jittery.

  Or maybe she just didn’t notice anymore.

  She did notice not having any. She had been studying data these past few days while clutching a mug in one hand. The mug almost felt like a necessary tool.

  She rubbed her hands against the loose pants, feeling them slide along her thighs, and forced herself to concentrate.

  In their escape from the runabout, Yash and Boss hadn’t been able to remove the probes. There hadn’t been time for one thing, and Yash doubted they would have tried even if they could.

  During that crisis, she hadn’t even given the probes any thought. They became an issue later, when someone—and she couldn’t remember who—realized the probes were still inside the runabout.

  At that moment, the diving crew had believed (hoped) that they could get data from the runabout after it had ended up elsewhere. But they hadn’t been able to—although the data streamed to the Sove until the probes disappeared with the runabout.

  That was a lot of data. The files were huge and complex. The probes that the Sove had sent into the runabout had been the most sophisticated that Lost Souls had. Boss liked a lot of data before she dived anything.

  She always wanted her divers to be safe.

  Yash had been planning to review the probe data, but not yet. The instant she had realized that the probes didn’t provide data about where the runabout had ended up, she had dismissed them. They were not relevant to her or any of the work she was doing.

  She had hoped to review their data later, to see if there were any surprises, but there was so much other work to be done first that they had slipped her mind.

  Or rather, they had slipped her conscious mind. Her subconscious was after something.

  Yash had been running the probe imagery in their own holographic projection in the large room while she worked on the anacapa itself. Sometimes she would glance at the projection, so perhaps that was how she had seen the flash.

  And if that were the case, then that flash might have been less significant than she thought when she woke up this morning.

  She rubbed a hand over her face. She was kinda sorta waking up—waking up enough, anyway, to start feeling annoyed at herself.

  She had developed a system so that she could study all of the data in what she had thought would be the right order—for her. Not for Lost Souls. But to find the Fleet.

  If the Fleet still existed. With that thought, she made a mental bow toward Coop. He was insisting that she add that phrase to everything she thought, said, and did.

  It was his insistence on that phrase that made her decide to study the anacapa drive first. She realized she had been assuming that the small drive in the runabout acted like the drives in the DV-Class vessels.

  She was usually smart enough to know that any equipment, modified to fit a slightly different purpose, would probably have quirks the original piece of equipment did not have.

  But she had been so excited about the runabout disappearing into foldspace that she had automatically assumed its anacapa worked the way the Ivoire’s anacapa worked. And that would have meant that something activated the anacapa from elsewhere.

  She had started work on the anacapa because she was becoming afraid she had made what she privately called a Dix Assumption. A Dix Assumption was an assumption based on the desire to return to the Fleet, not based on evidence at all. Everyone from the Ivoire had Dix Assumptions. Everyone, even Coop. Most of the Dix Assumptions were harmless, but some of them could be deadly.

  And she didn’t want to make one of the deadly Dix Assumptions.

  Yash hadn’t told Coop about her own suspicions because she needed him to work beside her. He had been looking up information on where the runabout had been built, what ship it had been assigned to, and where it had vanished from.

  So far, he hadn’t told her anything, but to be fair, she hadn’t asked. She had been focused too deeply on the drives themselves.

  She had started with the specs of the anacapa drives for runabouts, buried in the runabout’s Fleet materials. She had planned to move to that specific runabout’s anacapa within a few hours of examining the specs, but the specs had proven so interesting, she had stuck with them longer than expected.

  She had found some small differences between the drives already, just from the specs. If she had to guess about those differences, and apparently she did because there was no one to consult, she would say that the differences had been built in to stabilize the drive.

  Not that it had worked. The drive’s malfunction was what had led Boss into that runabout in the first place.

  What Yash did not know was if the drive’s malfunction was unique to that particular runabout or if all of the small anacapa drives could malfunction like that.

  Yash wasn’t sure she would be able to find that information, either. If something had gone wrong on the runabout and the person piloting the runabout had not been an engineer or anacapa expert, then the information Yash needed might not be in the records.

  She had a small nagging fear that she would never find the answers in the records, just because whoever had piloted the runabout hadn’t known anything technical at all.

  Yash shook off that thought. The reason she had been working in a particular order was so that she wouldn’t be distracted by other research. She needed to focus, and this morning—if, indeed, it was morning—she had violated one of her hard-and-fast rules, just by being here, in this room, to look at the probe data, not the runabout data.

  But that sense that the flash was something important had been impossible to shake.

  She needed to see the data that she had watched on a continual loop in the big room. And she didn’t want to see the data in a modified three-dimensional projection.

  She wanted to see the data as the data was designed to be viewed, exactly as the probes had sent it to the Sove in real time. That data would consist of flat, gray, two-dimensional imagery, plus all kinds of telemetry. All of that could be (and was) modified to create the three-dimensional image she had been using, but the key here was the word modified. She had changed a fe
w things, which might have caused the flash that had gotten the attention of her sleeping mind.

  She opened four flat screens—two for each probe—and set them to float in front of her. She made them solid, not clear, because she didn’t want to see any part of this small lab through the data.

  She wanted the data to appear as pure as it possibly could. That way she could concentrate on it fully.

  Then the lab door opened. Of course it did. She had just gotten ready to focus, and someone interrupted her. That was becoming the norm for her these days.

  It was all she could do not to snap at the person. Because only one person could be opening that door.

  She whirled, nearly lost her balance, and had that momentary thought of Whoops. I really do need sleep before catching herself on the side of a console.

  Coop watched her with a slightly bemused expression on his face. He hadn’t lost himself to the research. He wore his usual black T-shirt and black pants. His hair, which was longer than he used to wear it on the Ivoire, glistened in the artificial light. He looked like he was about to go on his usual business, as if nothing could make him deviate from his usual routines.

  Of course, he had looked this put together when the Ivoire had been trapped in foldspace, and even more put together in the six months after the Ivoire had arrived in this time period.

  Coop seemed to get tidier as he became more focused, not a wreck like she was.

  “I have breakfast in the break room,” he said.

  “In a minute.” Yash turned away from him, making sure that she had all of the data in this room.

  “Now,” he said. “You’re insisting on staying awake, so I’m insisting on feeding you.”

  “Yeah,” she said, not looking at him. “I’ll be there.”

  “The food’s warm,” he said, “the coffee’s hot, and I’m not taking no for an answer.”

  “I’m not giving you no,” she said. “I’m telling you to wait a minute.”

  “I’m not going to wait,” he said. “You’re coming with me now.”