Searching for the Fleet Read online

  Usually he was very good at imagining broad expanses of distances, but the problems with the star maps frustrated him. The old technology here at Lost Souls frustrated him. The fact that he couldn’t find the Fleet frustrated him.

  He pressed his fists knuckle-side-down on the edge of the large console, bent his head, closed his eyes, and made himself take very deep breaths.

  He had to remind himself that what he was looking for were answers—not a resumption of his old life with the Fleet. Even if he found the Fleet, that life was five thousand years gone.

  He had built a life here, and he was building a future here. The life he had envisioned for himself as a young man, the life he had pursued with great vigor, was no longer possible. It would never be possible again.

  A small involuntary smile crossed his face. He opened his eyes.

  He had given that speech to dozens of Ivoire crew members over the years. He had believed it when he had given it to them.

  He had also believed he had not been in need of that speech. He had thought all of his years of experience, training to become a captain, dealing with foldspace—its good sides and its bad—had immunized him against any kind of problem with the loss of that kind of dream.

  Clearly, his beliefs had been wrong.

  The irony was that he and Yash weren’t even close to finding the Fleet. All they had found was confirmation that the Fleet had existed for two thousand years after the Ivoire had disappeared.

  He made himself stand up straight. He opened his fists, shook out his shoulders, and took one last deep breath.

  The one thing that was becoming clear to him, though, was something that had been clear to Yash from the start. The Boneyard was not a graveyard of vessels that had survived some great war. The Boneyard was something else.

  He still firmly believed that the Fleet—at least the Fleet as he had known it—would not waste resources maintaining an active defensive system around a bunch of ruined ships.

  Unless that defensive system was no longer state of the art. Unless it was the kind of thing that the Fleet had felt it could put into place and abandon at will.

  The Fleet abandoned a lot of things in its constant movement forward. It abandoned sector bases and starbases. It abandoned people who no longer wanted to travel regardless of their level of training and value to the Fleet. It even abandoned ships. The smaller ships, like the runabout, didn’t have an internal destruct protocol. The DV-Class vessels did.

  He picked up his coffee mug and sipped. The liquid was tepid.

  Then he sat down. The chair he pulled over squeaked under his weight. He stretched his legs under the console, staring at the information on the screens before him but not really seeing any of it.

  Every DV-Class vessel they had found in that Boneyard had been stripped of proprietary Fleet information. The movement of ships, the names of crew members, the history of the Fleet itself, was mostly gone. Sometimes procedures remained. Sometimes information on how to repair certain systems.

  Once, Yash had found information on Sector Base V’s shutdown, but not anything about Sector Base W. A few times, Yash had pulled some of the deleted information back.

  But usually, the DV-Class vessels that Lost Souls was taking from the Boneyard were of an era not too far off of Coop’s. Those ships were in worse shape than the Ivoire as well, which was why Lost Souls had to use so many of those ships for parts.

  The later ships didn’t seem to have as much fragmentary information on them or, as Yash had said more than once in great frustration, she did not know how to even recognize the files that had held the deleted information.

  Coop, she had said to him one afternoon, at some point, we’ll encounter ships that will be so far beyond my technical expertise that I won’t even recognize that there’s fragments of information available.

  He had tried to soothe her. Once he had reminded her that the technological growth in this region of space had peaked and then fallen backward.

  She hadn’t believed that the Fleet would lose its technological edge, and now, given that he had coordinates for the Fleet that took it far beyond this sector of space—so far beyond that the cultures around this sector had never gone in that direction—he was beginning to think that Yash was right.

  The Fleet’s technology had continued moving forward.

  Perhaps that was why they had placed defenses around these old ships. Perhaps it would take no effort at all for someone from the Fleet to return and take what they needed from those ships.

  Coop frowned. That hypothesis made no sense, given what he knew of the Fleet’s culture. The Fleet would never come backward, not for old ships, not for anything that he was aware of.

  Although he didn’t know that for a fact. And the runabout itself might provide answers he couldn’t get from DV-Class vessels.

  He’d been so worried about Yash that he hadn’t thought about the differences between the smaller ships and the larger ones. He had looked at the data files, had seen that they were large, and had immediately triaged.

  He had tried to find information he thought relevant to the search for the Fleet, rather than information that would give him answers to questions he wasn’t even certain he had thought of yet.

  All of the data files in that runabout should have been intact. All of them.

  No wonder Yash was so excited.

  No wonder she had asked for help—his help, not the help that Lost Souls could provide.

  Lost Souls would want all the technological specs—and they were going to get more specs than they had planned for.

  But Yash and Coop, and many of the survivors of the Ivoire, they wanted to know about the Fleet. What had happened, what they had missed.

  He might be able to find that.

  He might be able to find a lot of things.

  If he went slowly and methodically.

  He finished his cold coffee. He felt better than he had in days. Maybe weeks.

  He had a mission. He didn’t have to tell anyone about it.

  He just had to complete it, one little bit of data at a time.

  Sixteen

  Coop had cleaned up after her. When she had stepped out of the shower and seen that Coop had actually straightened her suite, her face had heated. Instead of feeling annoyance at his lack of understanding of her process, she felt embarrassed that she had let everything go that far.

  Or maybe she was embarrassed that a captain of the Fleet had actually cleaned her rooms for her. The training of how people behaved in the Fleet was deep, and it was old, and it was engrained.

  She put the sheets into the built-in cleaner, then headed back into the lab itself. It still smelled of garlic and spicy red pepper, mixed with coffee. She wasn’t hungry, but the smell could tempt her toward more food. After she finished some of her work.

  That flash needed her attention.

  She padded, no longer barefoot, past Coop. He was working behind several screens, a look of fierce concentration on his face. He hadn’t seemed disappointed that the runabout had been built thousands of years before, which surprised her.

  She had been thinking about that in the shower, not certain how a ship that old could have been called back to the Fleet. Her disappointment had grown the more she thought about it, worried that the runabout had been plucked out of time by a random occurrence at a closed sector or star base, just like the Ivoire had.

  With Coop’s news, she was less certain that the Fleet still existed than she had been when she woke up.

  She didn’t say anything, though. She was still going to focus on extracting as much information from those probes as she could.

  Coop raised his head as she passed by. He acknowledged her with a preoccupied smile that she recognized from serving beside him for years. It meant that he saw her but he was too busy to talk.

  Not that she wanted to either.

  She stepped into the break room, which had also been cleaned up. The flush returned to her cheeks. If she was going to
continue to work with Coop at her side, she was going to have to dump some old habits. She couldn’t be completely obsessed with work at the expense of everything else.

  She grabbed a mug of Coop’s really good coffee, then let herself out of the break room again.

  This time, Coop didn’t acknowledge her. He seemed lost in the work he was doing.

  She walked past as quietly as she could, heading into her side lab.

  It was colder than the rest of the lab, and the air still smelled stale. When Coop had dragged her out for breakfast, she had frozen the information coming off the imagery from the probes. The screens remained frozen on the two-dimensional grainy images. The interior of the runabout was barely visible, the console and the captain’s chair looking more like gray lumps than anything recognizable.

  Which, at the moment, was all right with her. The one image that still haunted her from that dive was the woman who had mummified in that captain’s chair. She had lashed herself to the console so that she could work, a movement that Yash didn’t entirely understand.

  Sometimes her mind played with that image, running over it the way that the tongue ran over a bit of food caught in a tooth.

  Yash stepped into the workspace, called up the environmental controls, and set the temperature a few degrees warmer. She also had the air recycle, to get rid of the stale smell—and didn’t let herself wonder if part of that smell had lingered from her and her lack of showers.

  She reset all the probe data, leaving two screens with the two-dimensional imagery right in front of her. The telemetry from the first probe ran to her left, and the second on the farthest screen to her right. Directly in front of her was the probe that showed the cockpit door. Slightly off center was the probe that had come in later. It had pointed toward the area that had held the anacapa drive.

  She synched all four screens to the moment that the second probe arrived, then hurried through the data to find the beginning of her dive with Boss. That dive had seemed like it lasted forever, but it really hadn’t—maybe half an hour at most, at least in the cockpit itself.

  The trip to the airlock to escape the runabout after the anacapa drive activated had seemed like it had taken hours, but that had probably been the fastest part of the entire dive.

  Fortunately, Yash didn’t have to watch that again.

  All she wanted to see were the events in the cockpit, from the moment she and Boss touched any equipment until the anacapa drive had activated.

  Yash watched that in the flat black, gray, and white imagery. Boss’s movements held a lot of confidence. Strangely, Yash’s had too, even though Yash had been scared spitless throughout the entire dive.

  At the beginning of the dive, Yash had put the data recorder on the console. Now, she watched the imagery slowly. As far as she could tell, she had not activated anything when she put that recorder on the console. Boss had gone to work on the console, while Yash had moved closer to the anacapa drive.

  There the helpful imagery only appeared from the second probe. Yash, negotiating the floating nanobits (which made the imagery even blurrier), touching the case, then easing it open, using all of her training to avoid touching anything important.

  What she couldn’t tell from this imagery or from any other imagery was whether or not this anacapa drive had other triggers, ones that did not exist on the anacapa drives she was familiar with.

  But from this vantage now, it seemed like she had not activated anything on the anacapa drive as she examined it. The probes recorded no fluctuation in energy level—not on the visual spectrum or any other spectrum. And the one thing that Lost Souls’ high-end probes specialized in was varying energy readings, particularly from anacapa drives.

  Boss had lost too many divers to malfunctioning anacapa fields. She was highly sensitive to changes in those energy readings and had calibrated every probe owned by Lost Souls to account for all of the possible readings.

  Yash trusted the probe readings on energy levels as if she had programmed those probes herself.

  Yash watched the imagery until the light from the anacapa appeared, illuminating everything. There had been no flash there, nothing that even resembled a strobing that her brain recalled from the imagery she saw in the other, larger lab.

  That meant that the flash she had seen—if it hadn’t been a trick of the modified files—hadn’t come from the anacapa’s activation. It had come later.

  She crossed her arms, watching very carefully. The light as the anacapa activated, her silent response, Boss’s snap into action—all of that so familiar Yash could recite what happened second by second.

  Yash’s diving self grabbed the data recorder off the console as Boss hustled her out of the cockpit, the nanobits floating around them in the disturbance and the bright glare of the light from the anacapa drive.

  Outside of that cockpit, she and Boss had scurried, moving as fast as they could to escape.

  Inside that cockpit, the nanobits settled just a bit, no longer disturbed by the two women. The cockpit probably looked like it had before they arrived—except for the glowing anacapa drive.

  Yash glanced at the mummified woman, wondering if she had hoped for the anacapa to light up like that, if she would have seen it as a good thing—a rescue, something she had been waiting for.

  Then Yash shook off the image of that long-dead woman, although it haunted her. That woman showed Yash yet another future, one everyone on the Ivoire could have experienced had they remained stuck in foldspace. Coop would probably have sent the crew to any livable planet nearby when it looked like they wouldn’t get out of foldspace, but not everyone would have left.

  Yash would not have left.

  She shook off the thought and focused on the imagery. The glow from the anacapa drive grew so intense that it outlined everything in that cockpit.

  Yash sipped her coffee. She had never seen an anacapa glow like that, because every time she had seen one activate, it had been in a closed container.

  She had left that container open. Maybe that had something to do with the flash; maybe that light, plus the nanobits, plus the two-dimensional rendering had created an illusion of some kind of flare. Maybe—

  Then a gigantic flash of light appeared. That flash showed up on the imagery of both probes. The probe that faced the entry into the cockpit caught the edge of the flash, while the probe that focused on the anacapa itself caught all of it.

  The flash seemed to obliterate the entire wall of the cockpit—just for a second—and then the wall reappeared. But something opened along the edge, some kind of darkness, a bit of gloom, followed by—equipment? She couldn’t tell.

  She stopped all of the imagery there—not just the visual imagery but the telemetry as well. She didn’t look at the telemetry. She would save that for later.

  First she wanted to see if what she was looking at was an optical illusion or something real.

  The hair stood up on the back of her neck, leading her to believe that her subconscious—which had started all of this—thought the opening was real. But she was a data-driven woman. She wasn’t going to believe anything until she had numbers to back it all up.

  She took one more sip from her coffee mug—not because she wanted coffee at this moment (she didn’t) but because she wanted to do something normal, something to keep her grounded in the present while she looked at her own past.

  Then she isolated the imagery from the probe facing the exit. First she watched that more closely, saw that the whiteness from the flash made everything vanish there too.

  She was beginning to think that was a flaw in the visual recording equipment—something had happened in that cockpit that the probe’s cameras didn’t have the range to capture.

  Then that flash vanished, and the cockpit exit reappeared. Shadows—or some illusion from the nanobits?—swept across the exit, like a hand moving in front of a light. The shadows continued for nearly thirty seconds, before the imagery completely ended.

  She backed that imagery
up to the place where the flash began, then froze it. She turned her attention to the other probe’s imagery. This time, she went through it bit by bit.

  The anacapa glow, then the flare of light, appearing, growing slowly, and then obliterating every image coming out of the probe. She had been right. The equipment—at least the probe’s cameras—couldn’t adequately record whatever had happened, so it defaulted to some kind of whiteness.

  The whiteness gradually faded, replaced by an actual opening near the anacapa drive. Again, the camera didn’t have the capacity to show whatever was in that darkness, although it did show the darkness changing color—going from black to gray to dark gray to black. And then, for a half second, shelves, wall screens, a console…?

  She blinked, thinking those images weren’t possible. She reversed the imagery from the probe, and looked again.

  Perhaps the probe recorded over old imagery or substituted images of things it knew for the data that had been coming through the camera.

  Still, she froze those images, went through them one by one, and thought that yes, she was seeing through foldspace, into something else—a destination, perhaps?

  That wasn’t possible. Was it?

  She had never seen it before. She had used anacapa drives to go into foldspace her entire life, but her eyes had never registered anything like this.

  But she had never watched a ship enter foldspace with the anacapa container open. She also had never used a probe like these two to record the entry into foldspace.

  She had traveled in, with equipment that had traveled in.

  She felt a momentary giddiness, followed by a great sense of impossibility, followed by a curiosity she hadn’t felt in a long time.

  Had the Fleet ever had any outside equipment monitoring the entry into foldspace? Had there ever been this kind of analysis?

  She couldn’t remember seeing any. She wouldn’t have even thought of it on her own. Entering foldspace was difficult, uncomfortable, and nerve-wracking, but it was something the ships of the Fleet did every day.