Searching for the Fleet Read online

  “I was looking for you,” he said.

  She blinked hard, then wiped her eyes. “God,” she said. “I haven’t done that in years.”

  He assumed she meant falling asleep after eating, but he didn’t ask and she didn’t explain further.

  “I found that file,” he said as he stirred his soup. “It is fascinating.”

  She slid her own bowl of soup in front of her, then stood up and grabbed some bread. She ripped it into small pieces and put those pieces on top of the broth, the way that the soup had been designed.

  He had been too hungry to do so.

  “I have something to tell you too,” she said as she sat back down. “I forgot earlier. How long was I asleep?”

  “Long enough for me to go through that file,” he said, being deliberately unclear. He wanted her to focus on what he was telling her, not on the fact that she had fallen asleep without planning to.

  She stirred her soup, then took a bite, not saying anything.

  He made himself eat a few bites first, before he started talking. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to stop once he started.

  “You going to keep me in suspense?” she asked.

  “Didn’t mean to, sorry,” he said. “I haven’t eaten much since this morning.”

  He set the spoon against the edge of the bowl so that he wouldn’t tap the spoon nervously against the bowl’s side.

  “There was a huge scandal at E-2,” he said. “It was so bad that they actually closed the base earlier than planned.”

  “What?” She sounded surprised. He had been. He knew of no base that had closed early like that—not that he knew the history of all of the sector bases. “What happened?”

  “Sandoveil, the town built around that sector base, was a tourist town. There were a lot of natural wonders in the area, and a lot of beauty. Some very rustic aspects to the entire region, things that people loved.”

  She waved a hand at him to get to the point. But the history of the region was part of the point.

  “Even members of the Fleet vacationed there, sometimes taking weeks in cabins near a river and a massive waterfall, enjoying the quiet.”

  She frowned at him.

  “This information is important,” he said. “Because the area was considered quite dangerous.”

  “And it wasn’t dangerous?” she asked.

  “Oh, it was,” he said. “Lots of people died there or got injured because of the natural terrain. Not as many from the Fleet as you’d think. More local tourists from other parts of Nindowne, which was what the planet was called.”

  “So?” Yash asked.

  “So, apparently, not all of those people died of natural causes,” he said.

  She took another bite of soup, frowning. “Someone was killing them?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “For years. And she was connected to the Sector Base in a way that I couldn’t find.”

  “She…?” Yash asked.

  He nodded.

  “She was part of the Fleet?” Yash asked.

  “Apparently,” he said. “I didn’t get much of her history.”

  “And she’s important why?” Yash asked.

  “She stole the runabout,” he said.

  “Our runabout?” Yash asked.

  It wasn’t theirs. It had never been theirs. And he hadn’t even been in it, but he didn’t correct her.

  “Yes,” he said. “The runabout you found in the Boneyard.”

  “She flew back here from Sector Base E-2?” Yash asked. She set her spoon down. She had finished her second bowl of soup quickly. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “It doesn’t make sense for a reason,” Coop said. “Because she stole the runabout from inside the sector base.”

  Yash let out a small breath, her eyes widening. “Using the anacapa drive.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “And the runabout returned not too long afterwards, in terrible shape, with a mummified corpse inside.”

  “Was she the dead woman?” Yash asked.

  “Yes,” Coop said, feeling the excitement he had felt as he had found out this information return.

  Yash opened her mouth slightly, then let out a small breath, almost a huh. She seemed more affected by this news than Coop expected.

  Or rather, affected in a very different way.

  “She got lost in foldspace,” Yash said softly.

  Coop shrugged. He hadn’t seen evidence of that. There was nothing in the file he had found. He wasn’t even sure why that file had been in one of the ships that Lost Souls had found.

  Actually, Yash had taken him almost directly to the information. Coop really wasn’t certain which ship held the information or what that ship had been doing.

  Or if the information had come from only one part of one ship.

  Yash looked lost in thought. Or maybe lost in the memory of what it had been like to be trapped in foldspace.

  Coop put out a hand, and gently touched her arm. “She was a murderer, Yash. Fleeing justice.”

  Yash’s gaze focused on him. “We know that for sure?”

  “Whoever put that file together seemed pretty certain,” Coop said.

  “Fleeing justice,” Yash said. “Alone in a runabout. With an anacapa drive. Do you think she knew where she was going?”

  Coop squeezed Yash’s arm ever so gently. “I don’t think it matters much anymore. What she did, how they meant to punish her. Which actually ended up happening to her.”

  “What happened to her does matter to us,” Yash said. “She ended up here, for a long long time.”

  “In the Boneyard,” Coop said. “She ended up in the Boneyard.”

  Yash’s frown grew. “If they knew she had stolen the runabout, they would have been pinging that anacapa drive, searching for it.”

  “Probably,” Coop said. “I didn’t see the technical details in the file I was reading.”

  Yash picked up her spoon, and scraped the last of the soup out of her bowl. The movement was methodical, not about the soup per se. She was clearly thinking, and clearly needed to keep her hands busy.

  “The point that caught me,” Coop said, releasing her arm, “was that this woman and this runabout were not in foldspace when you found them.”

  Yash raised her head and let the spoon, filled with the remnants of the soup, fall against the bowl.

  “So it didn’t matter if they pinged the anacapa. They couldn’t find her. Do you think she was here, in this part of space, for all that time?”

  “I don’t know, not without more study,” Coop said.

  “From what you said, Sector Base E-2 is very far from here. Their signal shouldn’t have reached that anacapa drive.” Yash was speaking quietly, almost speaking to herself.

  Then her gaze met Coop’s.

  “Let’s be clear,” Yash said. “The runabout—the one that we found—made it back to E-2 with a mummified corpse inside.”

  “Yes,” Coop said.

  “Anything else to identify the time period?” Yash asked.

  “Which time period?” Coop asked.

  “That the runabout came from?” Yash asked, a bit of impatience in her voice.

  “I saw images of the interior,” Coop said. “It matched the images I’ve seen from you and Boss.”

  He had one more piece of information, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to share it with her.

  “That doesn’t mean anything. The runabout could have gone back into foldspace, and then stayed there for some time. And then the signal from E-2 pulled it back.” Yash tapped her spoon on the side of the bowl. The sound was irritating.

  Coop took the spoon from her as if she was a child.

  She didn’t even seem to notice.

  “The runabout might not have gone from the Boneyard to E-2,” Yash said. “It might have—”

  “I think it did,” Coop said. He picked up all the empty bowls and put them in the cleaner. Then he started to make coffee. He needed to keep his hands busy.

  “Why
?” Yash asked.

  “Because,” he said, “they had images of you.”

  Twenty

  Yash sat very still. She wanted to think she hadn’t heard Coop correctly, but she knew she had.

  They had images of you.

  She couldn’t quite wrap her brain around that, and for once, Coop wasn’t watching her intently. He apparently did not want to see the effect his words had on her. Instead, he had gotten up and was cleaning up the break room. He left the soup alone, but he was putting the remains of the bread into a container.

  He had already done something with the coffee beans she had ground. Normally, she would have loved the fact that he was making more coffee, but at the moment, she was annoyed.

  She wanted to see his face, and she knew he was deliberately not watching her. It was one of his tricks, so that someone could take hard information and absorb it better.

  “Me? They have images of me?” she asked after a moment. “Alone?”

  “No,” he said. “You and Boss. It’s fleeting. I saw it. You are doing some work around that console. And then the imagery goes away.”

  Fleeting images. She thought back to those moments in the runabout’s cockpit. For a brief moment, the runabout’s systems had come to life. That had surprised both Yash and Boss. The runabout hadn’t had a lot of energy left in its systems, but apparently it had had enough to not only startle them, but record them in the system.

  “And,” Coop was saying, “they found the labels you had put on the exterior door, the airlock door, and the anacapa drive.”

  “Labels?” Yash didn’t know what he was referring to.

  “The warning stickers, the danger ones? The ones that you and Boss fought about all those years ago?”

  Yash half smiled. Coop remembered the argument, not the procedure. But then, he hadn’t gone diving with Boss, at least that Yash remembered, so he wouldn’t know how the procedure worked in practice.

  Boss had insisted on placing warning signs on everything she found that had a small whiff of danger. She didn’t want someone to die accidentally in a wave of malfunctioning anacapa energy.

  The fight, which Yash had forgotten until now, was not about placing the warning signs, but about how the signs should be designed for maximum effect, and where, when, and how they should get placed on anything. She and Boss had argued about which language to use, they had argued about placement, and they had argued about how best to protect anyone going into a derelict vessel.

  In the end, Yash had the designers at Lost Souls make warnings that were primarily directed at anyone connected to Lost Souls.

  She and Boss had placed a number of those warnings on the runabout. The final one Yash had slapped into place had been on the anacapa drive container.

  Her brain caught on that moment, turned it over in her head. She hadn’t touched anything but the container when she slapped that warning on it.

  “Still,” she said, “that image, those warnings, they could have been there after years.”

  Coop was shaking his head. He finished assembling the coffee, and it started to brew, filling the small room with the scent of a lighter roast than she usually chose. Maybe he hadn’t used the beans she had set aside after all.

  He sat down across from her, his expression serious. “I believe that the runabout went from the Boneyard back to E-2.”

  “Based on what evidence?” she asked.

  He gave her a look she recognized. It was one of his did you really say that? looks. And it was tinged with disappointment. Or maybe she had imagined that part.

  “Based on everything you said, Yash.” His tone was gentle. “You said the runabout hadn’t had a lot of energy. You said the anacapa drive was activated from somewhere else. You were perfectly willing to believe that the drive was activated by the Fleet here and now. Why aren’t you willing to believe that the drive was activated from E-2 three thousand years ago?”

  “Because that’s not how it works,” she said. “The runabout wasn’t trapped in foldspace. The Ivoire was trapped in foldspace.”

  He remained motionless for a long moment. Behind him, the coffee darkened. He had used a drip method to make it. The slow way, not the instant way she used.

  His silence bothered her.

  “When Boss and her crew accidentally activated the beacon on Sector Base V,” Yash said, “the anacapa reached into foldspace, and pulled us out.”

  “I know,” Coop said quietly. Clearly, she had insulted him by over explaining. But he hadn’t responded.

  “Then I don’t see how you believe that it happened this time,” Yash said.

  “The only thing that’s different between your scenario and mine,” Coop said, “is that Sector Base E-2 pulled the runabout into the past. You initially believed that a current version of the Fleet had pulled the runabout somewhere else.”

  “Yes,” Yash said.

  “So you think the time jumps only happen when the ship is stranded in foldspace,” he said.

  Now he was asking for something she wasn’t sure of. She hesitated. “We don’t understand foldspace,” she said.

  “That’s right,” he said. “We don’t. Nor do we fully understand the anacapa drive.”

  She sat very still.

  “Even if the modern Fleet had pulled the runabout out of the Boneyard, they would have had to pull it through foldspace, Yash.”

  She knew that. Now, she was the one who felt talked down to.

  “You said there was some kind of strange energy field in the Boneyard,” Coop said.

  “Most of it caused by the runabout,” Yash said.

  “But not all of it,” he said.

  She had to concede that point. “Not all of it, no.”

  “Then maybe some strange circumstances happened with the runabout. You activated it, and somehow, it triggered the beacon from E-2,” Coop said.

  “That’s backwards from what happened to us,” Yash said. “The beacon on Sector Base V had been shut down. Boss activated it.”

  “She did,” Coop said. “But I’m sure it had been activated more than once in five thousand years. Something brought us forward in time, some vagary that we don’t understand. And it might have been something in foldspace, something we did that interacted with what they did, something that we had in common with the runabout, maybe. Some kind of reading…?”

  “Some kind of telemetry,” she said, more to herself than to him. “Oh, my goodness, Coop. You need to come with me.”

  He frowned at her. “What?”

  She had to show him the telemetry, the images from that probe.

  “You have to come with me,” she repeated. “Right now.”

  Twenty-One

  The light had returned to Yash’s eyes. For a moment, Coop had been worried. She had seemed very upset that the runabout had gone from the Boneyard to the past, and he hadn’t been able to pinpoint the exact cause of her upset.

  He wasn’t sure if she had been upset because the runabout going directly from the Boneyard back to Sector Base E-2 thousands of years ago meant that—in Yash’s mind—the Fleet did not exist now. Or if she had been upset because she and Boss had somehow tampered with the runabout. Or if Yash had been upset because she didn’t understand the mechanism that sent the runabout back.

  But he had said something to trigger an idea, something that got her powerful mind working in a different direction.

  She was already on her feet. He shot a wistful glance at the coffee, wishing he had time to pour a mug, but he clearly didn’t.

  “Come on,” she said.

  He stood. By the time he was out of his chair, she was out of the break room, and heading back to her side lab. He had to hurry to follow.

  She was inside before he was even halfway there. He sped up, and got inside just as she shut down the holographic image of herself. Otherwise, she hadn’t touched anything.

  “See this?” she asked, tapping one of the two-dimensional images.

  He could answer that as i
f she were referring to the screen or as if she was referring to something in the image.

  He chose neither. “I’m seeing blurs of gray and black.”

  “Come closer,” she said and stepped aside.

  He stepped into the ring of screens, startlingly like his ring in his side lab, and frowned at the image in front of him. He saw vague shapes, but nothing that resolved itself into something he understood.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not sure what I’m looking at.”

  “Watch.” She backed up the image, then replayed it. He saw a bright light obliterate most of the screen, and then something opening where the wall had been.

  “What is this, the runabout?” he asked.

  “More than that,” she said. “It’s imagery from one of the probes. According to the telemetry, that opening appeared just as the runabout went into foldspace. Have we ever had an outside image of a ship entering foldspace?”

  He wasn’t at all sure what she meant by her question. He was about to say so, when she clarified.

  “I don’t mean an image from another ship watching a ship go into foldspace or images from a vessel’s own internal systems as it entered foldspace. I mean, from some other kind of equipment with a focus on the anacapa drive, showing the foldspace opening from inside the ship.”

  He didn’t answer immediately, because he couldn’t think of anything, which meant nothing. He didn’t know the technological history of the Fleet. He had no idea what existed and what hadn’t.

  “I haven’t seen anything like that,” he said. “But I’ve never seen that kind of light flare when an anacapa activated, either.”

  “I forgot to tell you,” she said. “The container was open. So everything was exaggerated.”

  He blinked. He couldn’t remember the last time he had actually looked at the anacapa drive as it initiated.

  He wasn’t sure he had ever looked at an anacapa drive when it initiated. Part of him actually believed that looking at a drive when it activated was bad for his health or his eyes or something.

  He would have to pinpoint that memory later.

  “What has this to do with the runabout’s return to E-2?” he asked.