The Runabout Read online

  Yash looks at me, blinks as if she isn’t quite sure why I’m here, and then straightens. She had been slightly bent as she worked in that model, and apparently, she’d been standing that way for a long time. She puts her hand on her back and stretches just a little. I can hear the muscles pop, something that only happens with those who were land-born, like us.

  “I haven’t found anything yet,” she says, “and I’m thinking that’s a good thing. I don’t want to find a hidden vessel.”

  I nod, agreeing.

  “This is the third scan we’ve done,” she says. “The first looked for active anacapas in the large ships nearby. We also looked for something that might be designed to keep the Boneyard protected, some special tech that we haven’t seen before.”

  “Good thinking,” I say. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  She lets out a breath, then shakes her arms and wrists. She must have been studying that model for much longer than she realized.

  “I’m worried that the Boneyard has a lot of surprises for us,” she says. “I’m just not sure how to find them.”

  Me either, but I don’t want to discuss that at the moment. It seems like a tangent.

  “Our second scan was to look for a large enough space to fit one of our major ships,” she says. “But we didn’t find that either. Zaria designed the scan I’m looking at now. We ran it once and found nothing. I’m running it again, slower this time, because you know how new programs are. They often miss things just because of the newness of their designs.”

  “I know.” I don’t add that’s why I used our older program. I’m not going to rub it in. She can figure that out if she wants, later, after we’re done with this trip.

  “I’ll contact you when we figure out where the signature is coming from,” she says. “There’s a lot of interference—”

  “We found the malfunctioning drive,” I say, gently. “Mikk and I.”

  Yash stops, and blinks hard again, processing. I understand how that feels. I’ve been so deep in research and work that it takes a while for my brain to switch to something new.

  I’ve just never seen Yash like this. But I’ve never seen Yash hard at work before either.

  “You and Mikk?” she asks.

  “Yeah,” I say, not explaining further. “The bad anacapa signature is coming from the ancient runabout.”

  I step past her and touch the holographic image of the runabout. It’s almost impossible to see at this magnification. Yash is looking at a section of the Boneyard, and the most visible ships are the Dignity Vessels. The runabout looks like an old-fashioned rivet, the kind I found in that very first Dignity Vessel I dove, years and years ago.

  Yash shakes her head. “It can’t be.”

  “That’s what we thought.” I lie to her. I want her to think I believe, as she does, that the Fleet would never use anacapa drives in small ships. But I see this as one more piece of evidence that the Fleet she knew is long gone.

  “It makes no sense to put an anacapa in a vehicle that small,” she says, not arguing with me, but instead, arguing with the engineers who designed the thing. Long-dead engineers most likely.

  “We have no idea what the Fleet ran up against,” I say. “Maybe there was a reason for the change.”

  “I can’t imagine what it would be.” Yash moves to a console that I hadn’t even noticed. It juts out from the wall not far from us. She taps the surface.

  I walk over to her side, skirting the gigantic holomodel.

  “It is one of our ships,” she says more to herself than me. “Or, at least, it uses technology that we designed. The interior design is different than anything I’ve seen, but that doesn’t mean much. If someone added an anacapa drive to a runabout, the design would have to change to compensate.”

  She shakes her head.

  “But anacapas are for long distance travel, and runabouts aren’t. They can’t even hold enough supplies or crew to handle distance travel. At most, a few years of supplies could be stored in the runabout and that’s for a small crew, maybe four at most.”

  Yash looks up at me, a frown furrowing her forehead.

  “This makes no sense,” she says.

  “I know,” I say. I agree with that much. I believe her argument against anacapa drives in small ships. I’m reluctant to use the skip she modified now, because it has an anacapa drive.

  Too many things can go wrong.

  “The ship is old, too,” she adds, more to herself than me. “The nanobits are sloughing off the exterior. That takes centuries to occur.”

  “Even if there’s a malfunctioning anacapa field?” I ask.

  Yash makes a small curious noise, as if she hadn’t thought of that. Her fingers are still moving across the console, searching for something.

  She finally lets out a sigh and stops.

  “You’re right,” she says. “There’s a slight anacapa field here. And I didn’t think to look for it. Yet you and Mikk did.”

  “It’s our training,” I say, not wanting her to think she’s losing her edge. “We look for damaged ships to dive, not at how to improve things that already exist.”

  Even though she doesn’t lift her head from that console, I can see her cheeks move as she smiles.

  “You know, Boss,” she says, “you present yourself as one tough woman with a hard interior. But you’re quite nice when you want to be. You didn’t have to smooth things over for me.”

  I’m a little offended. I don’t like being called nice. Nice, to me, means that I’m failing somehow.

  “Just being honest,” I say, and I am. Mikk and I have different training from Yash.

  Then I realize she called me “Boss.” She and Coop do their best to avoid the name everyone else uses for me. They don’t like the idea of someone else having that moniker, even though I’m not—and never really will be—their boss.

  Yash taps something on the console, then straightens. The console’s screen goes dark.

  I have no idea what she had just done.

  She turns toward me.

  “If we’re going to dive the ship we came for,” she says, “we need to deal with this runabout first. That anacapa drive on it seems to be in its final death throes.”

  Was that why its music seemed so alluring to me? Or was there another reason?

  “You’re seeing that as a problem,” I say. “I’m not entirely sure I understand what the problem is.”

  “I don’t know when that anacapa was built,” she says. “I don’t know what it’s made out of. I’m not even sure how one can fit inside a runabout comfortably. There might be modifications we don’t know about.”

  “There probably are,” I say.

  She nods, once, as if she’s conceding a point. And maybe she is.

  “Yeah,” she says, “there probably are. And that’s not good.”

  “Because…?”

  “Because dying anacapas can be dangerous and unpredictable. Some blow up. Some activate a field in a large area around the anacapa drive itself, sending everything in that area into foldspace. That’s the theory, anyway. I’ve never been near a dying anacapa, not this kind, anyway.”

  I’ve been around several. And they terrify me.

  “And,” she adds, “then there’s just the possibility that the dying anacapa might interact with nearby anacapas.”

  “And do what?” I ask.

  She shrugs. “Take us all somewhere, maybe. Cause a feedback loop of some kind, maybe. Create something that might interfere with the Boneyard itself, maybe.”

  I grow cold. “If it interacts with the Boneyard,” I say slowly, “the Boneyard might attack us again.”

  “Yeah.” She wipes a hand over her mouth, as if she can prevent herself from talking. She doesn’t, though. She says, “And then there’s the issue of leaving.”

  “The issue of leaving,” I repeat. That sounds ominous. “What exactly are you afraid of?”

  Even though I think I know. I want her to say it. She’s the anacap
a expert, not me.

  She squares her shoulders and takes a deep breath.

  “I’m not sure what will happen when we activate our anacapa,” she says. “And if we activate ours at the same time as we activate the one on the other ship—”

  The Dignity Vessel we plan to dive. We used that same plan months ago, when we needed to get a Dignity Vessel out of the Boneyard quickly.

  “—those anacapa fields might do something to that runabout’s anacapa drive, something I can’t predict.”

  I swallow hard. I’ve heard that activating anacapas—large ones—occasionally creates blowback, which is why Coop always insists on activating a Dignity Vessel’s anacapa drive away from anything connected to Lost Souls. He says anacapas should be activated as far from anything important as possible, unless it’s an emergency.

  But I’ve never heard him or anyone else connected with the Fleet say that the arrival of a ship out of foldspace can cause a problem.

  Logically, though, it should.

  “Why didn’t our anacapa drive interact with that runabout’s anacapa drive when we arrived?” I ask.

  She bites her lower lip. She’s clearly thinking about this hard.

  “My initial response,” she says, “is that the Sove didn’t cause any problems because the largest surge in anacapa energy occurs when we activate the drive, not when we shut it off.”

  “But?” I ask, hearing that word in her tone.

  “But there is a change in the nearby energy readings whenever a ship arrives out of foldspace,” she says.

  I remember. I had been in an underground chamber—the ruins of a Fleet sector base—when the Ivoire first arrived, finally freed from its foldspace prison where it had been trapped—ship time—for weeks. In my universe, the real universe, our universe, the Ivoire had been missing for 5,000 years.

  When the Ivoire arrived, we registered energy readings. The Ivoire also brought the coldness of space with it, and a host of other smaller things, including some condensation. We didn’t know it all at the time. We were too startled by a huge ship appearing out of nowhere.

  I didn’t think about that as we brought the Sove back into the Boneyard. Our very presence here has probably made some kind of difference in the nature of the Boneyard itself.

  “Be clear,” I say, “because I am not the expert. What do you mean, exactly?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I really don’t. This is all new to me.”

  We stare at each other.

  “Could the reason that anacapa is malfunctioning be our fault?” I ask, partly because I will keep turning that particular possibility over and over in my mind if I don’t.

  “No,” she says. “The malfunction isn’t our fault. But the acceleration of the deterioration might be. The fact that it’s nearly done—or even the power of the energy signal, yeah, that could all be our fault. Just for arriving here.”

  I curse and rub my hand over the back of my neck. That sends a shiver through me.

  “Or,” she says, sensing my change in mood, “maybe nothing’s different. Maybe there will be no interaction at all. As I said, I have no way to know any of it.”

  “And no way to model the possibilities?” I ask.

  “If we have a lot of time, sure,” she says. “But I would think we want to get out of here as fast as possible.”

  I’m shaking my head before I say anything.

  She glances at the holographic map, as if it reinforces her thinking. She’s going to argue—hard—that we need to return to Lost Souls.

  “No, we want that ship.” I caught myself before I said Dignity Vessel. “We need to explore it. And we’re going to run into all kinds of other issues in the Boneyard when we bring the Sove back, even if we go to another section.”

  I sigh, thinking. Then I walk around the model, looking at the ships of all sizes, scattered haphazardly in the Boneyard itself. The Boneyard holds them in position using yet another kind of technology that we only hazily understand. There’s not gravity here, but it’s not pure space either. The ships aren’t drifting. They’ve gathered, and they’re in a kind of protective bubble.

  We’re always cautious around anacapa drives. We’re also cautious with the Boneyard, since there’s much we still don’t understand.

  We’ve always assumed that the Dignity Vessels have anacapa drives. However, we’ve never approached the other ships as if they have anacapas.

  This runabout changes everything. We now have to search all the small ships, and make sure that they don’t have a functioning drive inside.

  “We’ve done some of the work,” I say, more to myself than to her. “We know that the other small ships nearby do not have anacapa drives—or if they do, the drives are not functioning at all.”

  “You know that?” she asks. “Your program is that accurate?”

  I give her a small smile.

  “We used to search for stealth tech, back before we knew you. It was valuable and it was dangerous. After a bad experience with an early Fleet vessel—” I nearly said “Dignity Vessel” again. “—we tried to stay clear of stealth tech. Which meant we had to search for it all the time.”

  I didn’t tell her about the history with my father, about the Room of Lost Souls, about all the other encounters. I had told Coop, and if he had chosen not to enlighten her or the rest of his crew, that was between them.

  “Our program is fairly sophisticated,” I say, even though as I utter the words, I wonder if she would think so. Everything we do is primitive by Fleet standards. “We can be pretty certain about the small ships nearby. But outside of this area?” I make a circle with my right forefinger, indicating the area we’re in at the moment on the holomap. “We can’t be certain at all.”

  Yash bites her lower lip again, studying the map. She’s extremely smart. She knows what I’m saying.

  If we abort this entire mission now, then we have to abort missions in the future. We can’t come back here if we’re afraid of malfunctioning anacapa drives.

  Although, if we come back, I might suggest we don’t bring as many people. It’s much more dangerous in here than I had initially thought.

  “What do you suggest?” she asks.

  “We can shut off that runabout’s anacapa drive, right?” I ask.

  “Maybe,” she says. “As I mentioned, I have no idea what they put in that runabout. If the anacapa is different from what I’m used to—”

  “I won’t hold you to it,” I say. “I’m just asking if, in theory, we can shut it down, right?”

  “Yes,” she says. “We can shut it down.”

  “Because that’s what I’d like to do,” I say. “I’d like to dive that runabout, get what information we can from it, and shut off the anacapa drive.”

  “I don’t think we have time to get all the information we need out of the runabout,” she says.

  I plan these major diving missions with no end date. You never know what you’re going to run into. So the dives take as long as the dives take.

  I stand up straighter than I had, turning toward her slightly. “Are we on a clock that I don’t know about?”

  “I figured we have a couple of weeks,” she says, either ignoring my annoyed tone or unconcerned over it. “And if we add the runabout, then we don’t have enough time for the other ship.”

  Clocks and schedules and military precision. This is why I don’t like working with the Ivoire crew. They want to know everything we’re going to do, down to the second.

  Dives have to be flexible. Dives cannot be planned.

  And it doesn’t matter how many times I explain that to people like Yash, they don’t understand it.

  Rather than have that argument yet again, I simply say, “We’ll have time.”

  She half shakes her head before she catches herself. “You don’t think it’ll take long to dive the runabout?”

  “It’s not very big,” I say. “We need to map it. Then we have to decide what we’re going to do with it.”


  “Meaning?” she asks.

  “Do we just shut down the drive and let it stay here? Or do we take it back to Lost Souls and study it? Or do we do something else entirely?”

  She threads her fingers together. I’ve never seen Yash this nervous. Her nervousness is coming out in small ways.

  I’m not entirely sure what she’s afraid of.

  “And if we can’t shut the drive down?” she asks quietly.

  There it is, the thing that frightens her. She can see something I can’t.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I’m not sure what will happen if we destroy the runabout.”

  She swallows hard. “I can hazard a guess,” she says. “If something explodes in the Boneyard, the Boneyard might think it’s being attacked.”

  “But the thing that explodes would be a ship that’s been part of the Boneyard for a long time,” I say. “I can’t imagine, with all of this equipment, that ships have never exploded inside this place. It might even be a common occurrence.”

  I’m not sure if I’m speaking out of a weird kind of wishful thinking. But it would seem to me that all this old tech goes wrong on occasion.

  Yash is frowning at me. I’m not sure she agrees with me. I’m not sure she knows what she believes.

  “We’re not a strange vessel to the Boneyard,” I continue. “If something explodes near the Sove, the Boneyard might simply absorb that explosion.”

  “Let’s assume that’s correct,” Yash says. “That still won’t help us.”

  It’s my turn to frown. “What do you mean?”

  “A regular anacapa drive will cause all kinds of ripples and energy spikes when it’s destroyed. I have no idea what this one will do.” She shifts slightly. “I’m not even sure I can predict it.”

  I nod. Good points all. The bottom line is that we won’t know anything at all until we go inside that runabout.

  And I’ve already had a reaction to its malfunctioning anacapa drive. If one of my divers reacted as I had, I’m not sure I would allow them inside that runabout.

  I’m going to have to come clean before we dive this thing.

  Which means I’m going to have to talk to everyone—soon.