Searching for the Fleet Read online

  “This.” She froze the image again and tapped it. “Look.”

  She was no longer questioning the runabout’s return to E-2. Or, maybe, she was ignoring that part of what he said.

  She tapped that blur of images.

  He looked, saw…an opening? Shelves? Equipment? A door? He wasn’t sure.

  “I don’t know what you’re showing me,” he said, not wanting to guess.

  “I think we were looking through the fold in space,” she said. “Just for a moment. The telemetry said the runabout was already in foldspace when this happened. And we got images—the last images—from that probe.”

  He frowned. He would need to see it again.

  “That doesn’t look like the runabout went to a DV-Class vessel,” Coop said. “If that’s a room, then the runabout went to a sector base.”

  “I think that’s probably the case,” she said.

  “You just spent fifteen minutes arguing that the runabout couldn’t have gone to Sector Base E-2,” Coop said.

  “In the past,” she said. “I was protesting the in the past part.”

  She wasn’t looking at him. She was studying the data she had frozen on one of the screens.

  “And you’re not protesting that now?” he asked.

  “I have a working theory,” she said.

  “A working theory.” He had no idea how she had gone from arguing with him to having a theory in the space of a few minutes.

  She nodded. “You said what does the Ivoire have in common with the runabout?”

  “Besides a long trip through time,” he said.

  “Besides that,” she said, as if it were nothing.

  He had no idea what the two ships had in common. The ships were different sizes. They had gone to different places. They were from different timelines.

  But Yash’s brain was clearly making connections, and they seemed so obvious to her that she believed they would be obvious to him. They weren’t obvious at all.

  “You’ll have to tell me,” he said.

  She leaned back just a little. From that position, he realized, she could see both him and one of the screens.

  “The Ivoire had just been to Sector Base V,” Yash said. “We had taken a little time there, and then we activated our anacapa drive to get out of there. We had gone on the mission, and the Quurzod shot at us, harming the drive.”

  He bit his tongue, not wanting to remind her that he had been there, that he remembered all of these details. But he didn’t interrupt her because he recognized this mode of hers.

  She was laying the groundwork for her assumptions, picking the details that helped her make those connections that he hadn’t been able to see.

  “The shots damaged the anacapa,” she said. They both knew that. They had seen it happen, felt it happen. The anacapa had actually frozen—stopped—as it activated. Then it rebooted. At least, that was how Yash explained it at the time.

  He hadn’t asked her since. Dix had, and Dix hadn’t liked her responses.

  But Coop had continued to move forward, blaming the Quurzod, thinking the event was a one-time occurrence—at least when it came to traveling that far through time.

  “I think,” Yash said, “Maybe, the hits to the anacapa drive interfered with the way that we went into foldspace.”

  She had never quite expressed it that way before. She had talked about the damage, and had hypothesized, when they were trapped in foldspace, that the drive had been so badly damaged that it couldn’t reactivate.

  But she hadn’t said that the damage to the anacapa drive had affected the manner in which they entered foldspace.

  “What I’m thinking now,” she said, “what might be plausible, given what happened to the runabout, is this. That last memory in the anacapa drive, the last normal trip that we took—”

  “Was out of Sector Base V,” he said quietly, finally getting the connections she was making.

  “And the last place the runabout had been,” she said, “was in Sector Base E-2. When the damaged anacapa finally activated, it took the runabout back to the place it had left.”

  “The failsafe,” he said. “Of course.”

  It seemed so simple, and yet he hadn’t thought of it. Yash hadn’t either.

  Probably because they believed what happened to the Ivoire was unique. And considering the evidence he had just pulled about the runabout, that belief was probably false.

  Other ships had had similar problems. Getting lost in time through foldspace might have been unusual, but what happened to the Ivoire had not been unique.

  And because he had assumed that what happened to the Ivoire was unique, he had never even considered the simplest reason that the Ivoire had gone to Sector Base V.

  The failsafe that all anacapa drives had.

  The failsafe existed in case the anacapa drive couldn’t be programmed, but could be activated. In those circumstances, which were a lot more common than the one the Ivoire and that runabout had found themselves in, the failsafe enabled the drive to send the ship back to the place where it had entered foldspace.

  Coop had never used that failsafe in his years with the Fleet, but apparently, the Ivoire had activated the failsafe on its own. If Yash was right.

  “Did you activate that anacapa drive on that runabout?” he asked. Because if she had, then that anacapa drive’s failsafe might have activated as well.

  “I don’t know if I activated it,” she said. “Possibly, although I’m not sure how. But the interior of that runabout was badly damaged. Someone might have jury-rigged some of the controls, and when the runabout came to life, ever so briefly, it might have activated more than we realized.”

  It took a lot of power to activate an anacapa that wasn’t working. He had struggled with that problem on several missions, in a variety of different ways.

  The idea that the momentary activation that Boss and Yash had made of the runabout made the anacapa drive work properly didn’t seem likely to him.

  But if he were considering simple solutions he hadn’t contemplated before, there was one other that he needed to mention.

  “That moment on the runabout might just have provided enough energy to send out a distress beacon,” he said. “We were constantly sending distress beacons. The entire time we were trapped in foldspace. We sent out distress beacons in every format we could think of.”

  Her gaze met his. That energy gleamed in her eyes as if she hadn’t gotten tired, as if she hadn’t nearly worked herself to death the last few days.

  “The Ivoire was constantly sending distress beacons,” she said, “and those beacons were only going to Sector Base V.”

  “You know that for a fact?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “But I could look. Distress beacons can be localized. It might have had something to do with the default, with the failsafe. I never checked the distress beacon. All the work I had done to figure out why we came here, and I had never done that.”

  There were other simple things Coop hadn’t considered. He would review protocols and see what (if anything) he had missed.

  Because as excited as Yash seemed to be now about these new paths, Coop still had some doubts.

  And he felt out of his depth. She knew more about the systems than he did. He was good, but she was the expert.

  “A number of things bother me,” he said, “especially if we consider that the Ivoire’s distress beacon sent messages back to Sector Base V. Sector Base V was new when we vanished. It existed for another three to four hundred years. It should have picked up our signal some other way—and sooner. Shortly after we left, in fact.”

  “Should have,” Yash said. “But we were in foldspace, and foldspace sometimes does strange things with time.”

  He knew that. He had known that for his entire career. Years after he helped rescue the captain of the Voimakas, he had met her. She had retired right after the incident and had moved planetside, working outside, handling gardening for an apartment complex near Sector Base
U.

  She hadn’t thanked him for saving her life. Instead, she had said, The best thing about being outside is that it feels timeless. And then she had smiled at him. Isn’t it ironic? I find gardening timeless, when it is based on seasons and the passage of time. Heh.

  And then she had walked away from him.

  Strange things with time. Lost time. Lost ships.

  “But,” he said, trying to shake off that memory. It was as disturbing now as it had been the day it happened. “As you were reminding me earlier, the runabout wasn’t in foldspace when it was pulled back to E-2.”

  “Your theory, not mine,” Yash said. “We don’t know that for sure. But let’s go with your theory for a moment, shall we?”

  He tensed, waiting. He always found it intriguing when she did this, because her mind worked so differently than his. He never knew what direction she would take his ideas to.

  “That runabout had had some kind of massive power failure,” she said. “It couldn’t send out a distress beacon. Not until we activated it ever so briefly.”

  He glanced at the flat imagery, at the grays and blacks and the suggestion of shelves in the blur.

  “But,” Yash said, “if this woman had stolen the runabout, then the sector base or the ship or wherever she stole the runabout from would have a procedure for recovering it.”

  “The sector base,” he said. “She stole it from the base.”

  Yash nodded. “But the ship the runabout came from might have procedures as well.”

  “True,” Coop said. He hated guessing about procedures developed in a future the two of them did not know.

  “In our time,” Yash said, “the procedure was to constantly ping the runabout. We would have had a way to contact it, and we would have been using a very powerful beacon to pull it back to Sector Base E-2.”

  Coop looked at her.

  “And if this woman knew that,” Yash said, “then she would have not activated the distress signal, ever. No matter what happened to her. She would not have allowed anything to come her way from any Fleet ship or base.”

  That made sense to Coop. If he were running from the Fleet in a Fleet vessel, he would have made sure that the vessel was not in touch with the Fleet in any way.

  “But,” he said, “when you activated the runabout briefly, you must have activated everything, including the signals back to the Fleet.”

  “Maybe,” Yash said. “It might have been the only time that the distress signal went back to Sector Base E-2.”

  He let out an involuntary huh of surprise. That made sense. But they were guessing. And if the last few years had done anything for him, they had given him a hatred of guessing.

  “Is there any way to check that assumption?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “We can check all of these assumptions. We have the runabout’s data files. We can see if this woman ever activated a distress signal, if she cut off contact to the Fleet, what exactly happened to that runabout.”

  He felt a bit of tension leave him. He liked that, much better than speculating.

  “We can also check the runabout’s files against the files on the Ivoire to see if there were any similarities in procedure, particularly around the time that the anacapa drives pulled the ships into another time period.”

  She sounded excited about all of this. Coop was as well.

  They had a focus, a way to solve one of the mysteries that had been bothering him since he got to this time period.

  She was smiling as she contemplated all of that work. Then her smile faded.

  “You know,” she said, “Dix would have seen this as the beginning of a map that might take us back to our own time.”

  She was right; Dix would have seen that. He would have urged them to replicate whatever they found so that the Ivoire could return to its own time.

  “Do you see it that way?” Coop asked, feeling a little breathless. He didn’t want to lose Yash to a Dix kind of crazy.

  “No,” Yash said. “But it’s intriguing, isn’t it?”

  It was intriguing and beguiling. Coop didn’t like the things he was seeing in himself these past few days. The tendency toward obsession hadn’t been like him, and now he was feeling beguiled by figuring out exactly what had brought the Ivoire here.

  “What’s really fascinating to me,” Yash said, as if she hadn’t noticed his concern, “is peering into foldspace like that.”

  He hadn’t thought of it. He still hadn’t accepted it. But she was clearly excited about it. She had dragged him into this side lab just to see those images.

  “If that’s what we’re seeing,” Coop said.

  She nodded, a bit preoccupied. “If we can do that, if we can see into foldspace, we might make travel through foldspace safer.”

  He frowned. He wanted to make foldspace travel safer. But right now, that felt like a side branch off what they had been working on.

  Everything they had discussed, looking at the ways the ships got compromised, investigating the anacapa drives, looking into foldspace, would increase their knowledge and would probably make Lost Souls money as Yash helped them develop changes to the technology.

  But it didn’t help them resolve the mysteries that had dogged him for years.

  And now, he was ready to have them solved.

  He was about to say so when Yash’s gaze met his. She had been puzzling something.

  “None of this explains how that runabout got into the Boneyard in the first place,” she said.

  “Your theory actually does,” he said.

  She shook her head slightly, the small frown between her eyes asking him to clarify without her voicing the question at all.

  “If that woman did not want contact with the Fleet,” Coop said, “she might have left foldspace—not where she intended to be, but somewhere else. Maybe back in what we now call Empire space. She might have gone backward, thinking the Fleet would never look for her in a sector they had long abandoned. In doing so, she would have avoided the Fleet, but she might have had other issues, issues that compromised the runabout.”

  “Like running into a culture that didn’t want her in their region of space,” Yash said. “And if they fired on her like the Quurzod had with us….”

  Coop nodded. “Or,” he said, “she might have emerged from foldspace only to have some kind of cascade failure with the runabout, something that prevented her from going planetside somewhere and seeking help. She might not have been stranded in foldspace at all.”

  “Stranded in regular space,” Yash said.

  “That seems likely,” Coop said. “The runabout was being upgraded and repaired at the sector base.”

  He thought of the protest from the long-dead anacapa engineer, her complaints about working on the smaller anacapa drives. He would have to share that with Yash.

  “And if the work wasn’t complete,” Yash said, “it could have caused a serious malfunction in the runabout, something that an amateur couldn’t have fixed.”

  “Or even someone with a bit of knowledge about systems,” Coop said. “At a certain point, you do need an expert.”

  “If she couldn’t contact the Fleet,” Yash said, “then she couldn’t have gone to starbases or sector bases or any place where someone connected to the Fleet might have been. She might not have been able to find the right kind of help.”

  “If she could find any help at all,” Coop said.

  “It looked like she had been in there a long time,” Yash said.

  “To mummify, yes,” Coop said. “It—”

  “No,” Yash said quietly. “Some of the things we found in the cabins. It just seemed like she had been trapped, alone, in that runabout for more than a few weeks.”

  “I thought everything was torn up,” Coop said.

  “Not everything,” Yash said.

  “So she tried to fix the ship,” Coop said, “and failed.”

  “Then she ran out of food or water or something happened to her physically.”

&
nbsp; Coop nodded. “And then she died.”

  Yash’s lips thinned. She turned away from the images on the screens, almost as if they reminded her of that body, of the months (or years) of desperation that the woman had suffered through.

  That a murderer had suffered through.

  Coop had to remind himself of that.

  “Then,” Yash said after a moment, “the ship got torn up for useful parts by person or persons unknown.”

  “Yeah,” Coop said. “Then, whoever put the Boneyard together—”

  “The Fleet?” Yash asked.

  Coop shrugged. “We don’t know that. We’re using Fleet technology. Someone else might have as well.”

  “Whoever,” Yash said.

  “Whoever,” Coop said, in agreement, “they scooped up the runabout and put it in the Boneyard.”

  “Not caring there was a body inside,” Yash said. That had bothered her from the beginning. She had believed the Fleet would have not allowed a dead body to remain in a derelict ship.

  Coop hadn’t been so certain, and he wasn’t going to argue that point now, either.

  “I’m not sure anyone knew there was a body inside,” he said. “I’m not sure they even knew what was inside. I suspect the runabout was scanned and then stored in that Boneyard, maybe kept for parts.”

  “Like we’re keeping some of the ships we find,” she said.

  “Exactly,” he said.

  “A ship graveyard,” she said, using the phrase they had used from the beginning. “And it wasn’t until we went into that runabout that the little ship even managed to contact E-2.”

  “Or, more accurately,” Coop said, “receive all the signals coming from E-2.”

  “Maybe that power, those pings, coming from E-2 through foldspace had accumulated. Amplified their reach somehow.” Yash sighed, then shook her head. “You know, it’s really stupid that we don’t understand foldspace better. We use it all the damn time.”

  Coop understood the “we.” It meant the Fleet. And they had had this discussion dozens of times over their careers.

  “Foldspace revealed itself over decades,” he said.

  “Yeah, yeah, I know the excuse,” she said.

  “And if we stopped using it,” he said, referring to Fleet, “we would have had to change our entire culture.”