Searching for the Fleet Read online

  She looked up, saw the determined look on his face, and knew she no longer had a choice about what she would do next. The man leaning in the doorway wasn’t Coop, her partner in research. It was Captain Cooper of the Ivoire at his most demanding, the man who would take matters into his own hands when he needed to.

  Her lips thinned. She was too tired to argue with Coop. That was her excuse and she was holding to it.

  “Okay, Captain.” She shut down the screens. She didn’t want the data to start scrolling before she came back. She wanted to be in control of all of it.

  She sauntered past him, pretending she wasn’t as annoyed as she actually was.

  He made a show of sniffing the air as she walked by.

  “After you eat,” he said, “you will shower.”

  “That can wait,” she said, stepping into the main lab. She didn’t have time to shower. She needed to get to work.

  “No,” he said. “It really can’t wait. It’s been waiting too long already.”

  There was no humor in his tone. She glanced at him. He raised his eyebrows, and she flushed.

  She hadn’t realized it had gotten that bad.

  He was probably worried. Bad hygiene was often a sign of someone who no longer cared about himself. Dix had gone through a phase like that early on, as had some of the others who hadn’t coped well with the loss of the Fleet.

  But she had coped well. And she often went without showering when she was deep into a project.

  Of course, Coop didn’t normally know that, because he hadn’t worked in engineering. Everyone in the engineering section had worked for days without showering, shorting sleep, and barely managing to eat enough during those days in foldspace. The entire crew of engineers had done the same thing to get themselves through school, through any major crisis.

  Engineers didn’t care.

  Apparently, captains did.

  She let herself into the break room and stopped, startled, as the peppery scent of her favorite breakfast soup filled the room. Coop hadn’t cobbled something together from the food stuffs she kept here; he had actually brought a vat of the soup she had introduced him to when she had first joined the Ivoire. Either he had made it or he had gotten someone to do it for him.

  It was simmering on its own heat source, enough food here to last a few days. Beside it, a paler coffee than she usually made steamed from its own pot. And a large loaf of sourdough bread sat on its own plate. Coop took a cup of chopped hardboiled eggs out of the cooler and set them down, then handed her an empty bowl.

  She was hungrier than she remembered being in years. She grabbed the ladle and made sure she got some of the tomatoes, bell peppers, chard, and chickpeas before she took a slice of the bread, placed it on top of the broth, and added some eggs.

  Then she sat down in her usual chair.

  “Thank you,” she said, feeling moved that he had done this. She was so hungry she hadn’t even poured the coffee first.

  He served himself as well, then sat across from her. She noted that he was sitting in the steam coming off the soup. Apparently the scent of garlic and spicy red pepper was preferable to the stench of Yash.

  She half smiled, then spooned up some of the soup. It was as good as it smelled.

  “To what do I owe this?” she asked, before breaking off some bread and eggs with her spoon.

  “I was hoping to get a bit more work done before you woke up,” he said. “I thought this would simmer longer.”

  “It doesn’t need to,” she said. She was eating faster than she probably should have. “You have news though.”

  “I have near news,” he said.

  She paused, and looked up at him. She had been wrong: he wasn’t quite as put together as she had thought he was. He had shadows under his eyes, and his face seemed thinner than it had before.

  Or maybe she was just imagining that. Lord knows, her brain was taking her to unusual places on this day.

  “Near news?” she said. “What the heck is that?”

  “Something that has little meaning out of context,” he said. “I had hoped to have context for you when you woke up.”

  She frowned, intrigued now. She paused, giving the food time to settle as she watched him.

  “This model of runabout was designed and first created at Sector Base D-2,” Coop said quietly.

  Yash had to set her bowl down. She didn’t trust herself to keep her hands steady.

  “D-2,” she said. “Do you know where that is?”

  “I have coordinates, but I don’t know what to make of them,” he said. “In the records, it appears that the runabout’s last journey might have been out of a different sector base. I was going to confirm that before you woke up.”

  “You make it sound like I committed a crime, getting up early,” she said.

  “I’m beginning to think so,” he said. “I worry about you.”

  Then he paused, stirring his bread and eggs into the reddish broth.

  “This runabout is probably three thousand years old,” he said. “I expected more of a reaction from you about that.”

  She shrugged. She had discovered its age when she looked up the anacapa specs. “I expected it to be old,” she said. “It was in the Boneyard.”

  “But the runabout activated,” he said. “You thought the activation came from the Fleet.”

  She nodded, not quite able to explain how she felt. “The runabout had been ransacked,” she said. “There was a possibility that someone had stolen from it and was pulling it out of the Boneyard for their own use.”

  “But you don’t think so,” Coop said.

  She got up, mostly because she couldn’t sit with this, and poured herself her first coffee of the morning.

  “The Ivoire was pulled out of foldspace by a Fleet facility,” she said. “In fact, it was pulled back to the last base that we had visited before we went into foldspace.”

  “That was a fluke,” Coop said.

  “Was it?” she asked, then turned. “Someone had to put that runabout into the Boneyard. We’ve been moving ancient ships around. Boss had been doing that before she met us. And the Empire moves ships too. Why wouldn’t a modern version of the Fleet? I’m sure some of the equipment still has its uses or they would have destroyed the ships by now.”

  Coop made a soft snorting sound. His spoon clanged against the side of the bowl. “You’re making a lot of assumptions there.”

  “Yes, I am.” She brought her coffee back to her spot, feeling a bit self-conscious now about her lack of shower. “I have even more assumptions. I seem to come up with some every single day, which isn’t good. That’s why I set aside this time to delve into the data from the runabout. Better to work from facts and see where they lead us.”

  “That was the general idea behind this project,” Coop said. “But it sounds like—”

  “I’m tired,” she said, not wanting to argue with him. “I want to work even faster, but I can’t. I need to go over what the computers find. I need to trust the data. I need to make sure that whatever I find can be backed up by a thousand pieces of evidence.”

  “What do you expect to find?” Coop asked.

  “What I hope to find,” she said, “is a way to get to the Fleet. What I fear we will find are the scavengers who pulled most of the materials from the interior of that runabout. What I suspect we’ll find is just enough information to irritate me.”

  Coop didn’t smile like she had hoped he would. Instead, he frowned at her. She couldn’t read him. She wasn’t sure if that was because she was exhausted, or because her brain was busy with all the research, or because he was in that Captain Cooper space he entered, the one where he kept his emotions walled off from everyone.

  “Were you disappointed that the runabout is so old?” she asked him.

  “Surprised,” he said, which was often Coop-speak for a deeper emotion. She would wait to see if he told her what that emotion was. “The data we have says the runabout is not old.”

 
“Not as much nanobit decay,” she said, “not like you would expect from a three-thousand-year-old ship. But the Ivoire seems brand-new, and she’s more than five thousand years old.”

  He nodded, that frown remaining on his face. “The equipment is different,” he said. “Newer. I had thought…”

  Then he let his voice trail off.

  So Coop had hopes too, he just didn’t voice them the way that Yash had. The way that Dix had.

  Yash figured that anything which had been in that Boneyard was ancient.

  “The Boneyard is old,” she said.

  “That means nothing,” Coop said. “It was built for storage. I would have expected that the Fleet used the Boneyard for storage until the Boneyard was filled up.”

  There was no way to fill the Boneyard. There was enough room to keep adding ships for centuries or more. But Yash didn’t say that to Coop. Coop had been working off a Dix Assumption.

  When Dix Assumptions burst, it was painful.

  “I figure the Fleet used that Boneyard until they moved too far away from it to make it viable,” Yash said. “Like sector bases.”

  Coop’s frown deepened. He dipped a piece of bread in his soup, then ate the piece, his hand cupped beneath it to catch the drips.

  “That suggests there are a lot of Boneyards,” he said.

  “The Fleet went through a lot of ships during our lifetimes. We’re talking about thousands of years worth of ships,” Yash said.

  “We’re trained to take parts and use them in new ships,” he said, almost at a mumble.

  “When the parts are viable,” Yash said.

  “So if these ships are just junked,” Coop said, “why are you so excited about the loss of that runabout?”

  “It’s not a loss,” Yash said. “Something activated that anacapa.”

  She paused, thought about it, realized that the flash and the activation were linked. She was standing before she even realized it. She grabbed the mug of coffee and another slice of bread, and started out of the room.

  Then Coop stood. “Shower,” he said.

  “Coop, this is—”

  “Shower,” he repeated. He walked to the door and held it open.

  She rolled her eyes at him, then set the food and coffee down. “I can get there on my own,” she said, realizing his intention.

  “And yet you haven’t, for days,” he said.

  She shook her head, and walked to her small cabin. “You going to watch?” she asked.

  “I’m going to wait until you get into the shower, yes,” he said.

  She smiled at him, about to tell him that engineers worked like this all the time, but realized it would make no impact. He was worried about her; she was worried about him.

  The runabout and its disappearance had brought a new element into the relationship they had maintained for the past six years.

  The runabout had reintroduced hope.

  She wondered if Coop thought it was the wrong kind of hope—the kind that led people to make stupid decisions, the way Dix had.

  Perhaps that was why Coop was hovering.

  Or perhaps he was infected with hope as she was.

  She decided not to clutter her brain with that kind of speculation. The faster she took a shower, the sooner she would be able to return to work.

  She walked into the suite, which was in as bad shape as she was. She didn’t want Coop to see it—or, more accurately, smell it. But she apparently had no choice.

  He looked at the room with that unsmiling face he’d been wearing since breakfast.

  “You’re going to start taking care of yourself,” he said.

  She opened her mouth to protest, but he raised one hand.

  “This is not the request of a friend,” he said. “This is an order, one I should have given you when you came back. You’re the only one we have now who can figure out some of this stuff. I can’t lose you, Yash.”

  She wondered if he knew that he was still crossing the lines between personal and professional. He couldn’t lose her. Not the Fleet wherever it was. Not the crew of the Ivoire. Not Lost Souls.

  Coop himself.

  Whether he knew it or not, he was moving into a different place in his head. That insidious hope had changed his priorities.

  Just like it had changed hers.

  Fifteen

  Coop waited until he heard the shower start. Then he cleaned up Yash’s bedroom. He pulled the filthy sheets and piled the dirty clothes into the suite’s only closet. He put new sheets on the bed, set the environmental controls on cleanse, and had one of the small robots that had come with the starbase to clean up the main floor.

  The room smelled better by the time he had finished those things.

  He felt like he had done something, but he also felt like it hadn’t been enough.

  Yash was obsessed. Dix had been obsessed. Some of the others—the ones who had died—had been obsessed.

  Obsession was dangerous.

  And Coop felt it lurking in his own subconscious.

  He made himself return to the break room. The soup remained on simmer. He had made enough of it to last the day, figuring neither of them would care that it was (in theory) a breakfast soup. He also left the coffee on. He would make more later, since Yash was so bad at making good coffee.

  But he cleaned up the room, forcing himself to take the time. He couldn’t go after Yash for failing to take care of herself if he failed to take care of himself.

  He could feel that same urge to work and work and work that she had, hoping to find answers to questions he had buried years ago.

  He had already found a few, startled at how disappointed he had been by the age of that runabout.

  He finished cleaning up, then grabbed one more slice of bread, and filled his mug with coffee. Then he left the break room, and headed to the workstation he had chosen from all of the little areas that Yash had constructed in this large space.

  The work area he had chosen had five different easily accessible screens, a flat monitor along the front with more controls than he felt like using, a few actual tables on each side, and an adjustable chair, should he decide to sit while working.

  He didn’t let himself do that. Whenever his legs got fatigued, he would take that as a sign he needed to move around. He pulled up the screens, making a barrier out of them like he used to do when he was a mere lieutenant on the various ships he had cycled through.

  He had no idea why he believed he needed a barrier here; he trusted Yash. But at the same time, he felt strangely vulnerable, something he hadn’t acknowledged about himself for years.

  He needed to review all of the information that Yash had assigned him, but he didn’t feel like being methodical this morning. He had reviewed enough data off the runabout to find that it had been built on Sector Base D-2. The sector base that he had visited last in his own timeline had been Sector Base V.

  The Ivoire had returned to Sector Base V five thousand years in the Ivoire’s future, only to discover that the base had been decommissioned, and was in ruins. The base was deep in the Empire, far from Lost Souls, but not so far that it took an anacapa drive to get there.

  If Coop wanted to, he could travel back to Vaycehn, where Sector Base V was buried, on a regular ship without an anacapa drive. It would take time—weeks, maybe, depending on the ship. But not the years it would take to go to the sector base where he had received his commission. To return to that base—which had been decommissioned in his own timeline—he would have to use the Ivoire or some other ship that had an anacapa drive.

  Not that he wanted to go that far back.

  The Fleet would have built eight sector bases between Sector Base V and Sector Base D-2. He now had the coordinates for Sector Base D-2, so he knew what direction the Fleet had moved in.

  If he dug through the records, he would also be able to find the coordinates for those eight sector bases.

  Part of him wasn’t sure he wanted to; they would be closed and abandoned as well. But
part of him knew they would have information that he wouldn’t get off one small ship.

  Still, following the trajectory of a ship that was three thousand years old wouldn’t put him in contact with the Fleet. They could have veered off in a completely different direction at Sector Base G-2 or continued on the same path. He had no way of knowing.

  But he wanted to learn.

  He had just set up the middle screen to map the trajectory of the Fleet between Sector Base V and Sector Base D-2 when Yash came out of her small suite. Her hair was still wet, plastered to her head, but she was wearing a black shirt that didn’t look slept in and black pants that weren’t covered with dust or dirt or whatever the last pair of pants had been covered in.

  With her hair wet, she looked younger and more vulnerable, the shadows under her eyes prominent. Then she grinned at him.

  “Just so you know,” she said, “I’m going to have more soup before I go back to work. And then I don’t want to be interrupted. I have an idea. I want to follow it through.”

  He nodded, made himself smile, and didn’t allow himself to say that he was following through on an idea as well. He sipped his own coffee, pleased it tasted rich and warm instead of like burned wires, and looked at the screen before him.

  Sector Base D-2 was so far from here that Boss’s equipment did not have any accurate maps for that region of space. The Fleet maps that Coop was also working off of were three thousand years old, and probably no longer accurate.

  But that was all he had.

  He isolated the Fleet information, then put it on a separate screen. He took the coordinates for the other eight bases, and had the computers translate those coordinates to Boss’s maps. Three of those bases disappeared into the unmapped section of Boss’s maps as well.

  He felt a surge of frustration. If he needed any kind of visual representation of how far away the Fleet was, he had it now. Because, if his math was correct, the Fleet (if it still existed) was building Sector Base L-2. That meant the only active bases—depending on the place the Fleet would be in the cycle of base building and base closures—were Sector Bases J-2 and K-2, and maybe, just maybe, Sector Base I-2 was still in the process of being shut down.