The Renegat Read online

  Maybe that was because of the equipment. The equipment had been updated, but it looked grafted on, like a bandage over a particularly ugly wound.

  The consoles were too large, for one thing, all of them a little too square for the design. The captain’s chair, standard in larger ships, had been removed here. In fact, in order to make room for the extra equipment, every single chair in the bridge was gone.

  He felt a little dizzy and then realized he’d been holding his breath. Not that it mattered. He hadn’t tested with modern up-to-date equipment. His simulation had been based on the older ship, the design that Br2 Scout3 had been built to, not the one it had been upgraded to.

  “Wow,” Adil said from beside him. “This thing has an anacapa drive.”

  He was looking at the anacapa container, near the navigation controls.

  Crowe cursed under his breath. He didn’t want to be anywhere near an anacapa drive. He thought he had picked a ship without one.

  He’d studied the drives enough to know they were unpredictable, and the last thing he wanted was one of his people messing with one, and getting them all in trouble.

  “We’re not touching it,” Crowe said. “In fact, we’re not even opening the container. The first thing I’m going to do when I get to the controls is lock us out of the anacapa.”

  “No need,” Maida said. “None of us want to touch it, right, gang?”

  The entire crew chorused their unwillingness to touch the anacapa drive. He felt some of the tension leave.

  This was why he had picked the ten people that he had. They believed in the same things he did. And they had that risk-taking attitude that he liked. Only they weren’t reckless in their risk-taking. They took calculated risks.

  “All right,” he said. “I’m holding you guys to that, mostly because we’re behind schedule as it is. Stations, everyone.”

  They all had assigned places and tasks. Navigation, shields (should they be necessary), and, most importantly, at least to him, recording the mission, not just on the ship’s system, but on separate systems.

  The crew was heading out to see a Scrapheap for the first—and maybe only—time in their lives. They needed a record of the visit.

  “Here we go,” he said.

  And they all descended on the bridge, ready for the challenge of a lifetime.

  The Br2 Scout3

  Fortunately, the captain’s station remained in the middle of the bridge, even though the equipment had been changed out. Not that it would have mattered if the captain’s station was in the back or near the phalanx of screens at the bottom of the bowl.

  Crowe had run the simulations so many times that he could picture the station in his sleep. He was glad it was in the same place. That, at least, felt like he had expected it to.

  He called up the holographic command screen. The structure of its menu looked like he expected as well, which was a relief. He glanced around the bridge. His crew was in place, all ten in their positions.

  Maida was at the very bottom of the bowl. She had all of the screens on, plus a holographic replica of the area around the ship which was, right now, the interior of the Brazza Two’s docking bay.

  Crowe’s palms were sweating: he wiped them on the exterior of his environmental suit, not that it did any good. That material repelled liquid. It repelled everything.

  He faced the biggest hurdle of all—leaving the Brazza Two without being detected.

  Three days ago, he had found the automated exit controls for the docking ring. No one had to monitor exiting ships on most DV-Class vessels. But the Brazza Two monitored exits because of all the students on board.

  But the default command/control inside the computer of a DV-Class vessel was an automated unmonitored exit, not the kind of exit the Brazza Two used. All he had to do was reset the Brazza Two’s command/control default, and he could leave easily.

  Or so he had hoped when he reset that default. He had had no way to double-check what he had done.

  He entered the command for decoupling from the Brazza Two. That system—like so many on board the Br2 Scout3—was automated.

  In theory, the Br2 Scout3 would contact the Brazza Two, and together, the automated systems on both ships would execute the departure of the Br2 Scout3 from the Brazza Two.

  A list of procedures appeared on his holographic screen, which he hadn’t expected. Some things had been reprogrammed in other ways to accommodate the school ship, apparently.

  One by one, each item on the procedure list checked itself off. As they got close to the final two—which would culminate in exiting the ship—he said to Igasho, “Activate the travel program.”

  Igasho nodded, and touched images on his holographic screen.

  Crowe had decided a week ago to plot the coordinates of their trip alongside the Scrapheap. That way, he wouldn’t be tempted to change the travel plans as they flew out—something he suspected he would do once he saw the Scrapheap.

  He had plotted a trip that would take them along the edges of the Scrapheap, just far enough from its own protective barrier that the automated defense systems in the Scrapheap wouldn’t notice his ship at all.

  Technically, the Scrapheap was programmed not to worry about Fleet vessels, but Crowe had spent the last few months studying Scrapheaps—what little he could find. What he discovered was that most of them had been programmed when they were built and weren’t updated by any ships that came within range.

  There was also a lot about Scrapheaps that wasn’t in the easily accessible file, which meant that there was a lot about Scrapheaps that were on a need-to-know basis, something that made them even more dangerous, at least in his opinion.

  “Here we go,” Maida said.

  The door to the docking bay opened. It showed up on screen after screen and in the holographic recreation near her. The Br2 Scout3 lurched forward, the way larger ships did when they had to leave some place at the lowest level of power.

  Crowe’s heart rate increased, but not with fear. With excitement. He was commanding his first ship. Yeah, this was an unofficial mission and yeah, he wasn’t really captain, but it felt real enough.

  It felt like his future was waiting for him right outside the Brazza Two.

  The crew seemed to hold its collective breath. They watched as the Br2 Scout3 eased out of the docking bay.

  “When do I open the portholes?” Sera asked.

  She was in charge of what Crowe had been calling the in-ship visuals. They had come to see the Scrapheap, and they were going to see the Scrapheap, not just on screens—which they could do from the Brazza Two—but up close and in person. Or as up close and in person as it was possible without going inside the Scrapheap itself.

  “Now, I guess,” Crowe said, and instantly regretted the I guess. Captains didn’t speak in I guesses. Captains actually knew what they wanted, even when they didn’t. They sounded certain.

  He wasn’t sounding certain at all.

  Sera tapped her screen and then the bridge’s ceiling opened, revealing the largest porthole Crowe had ever seen. He had been mentally braced for that, but being braced and actually seeing it were two different things.

  Some of the documentation he’d seen on this type of scout ship had called the porthole over the bridge a design flaw, while others called it one of the most magnificent parts of the ship.

  It was, he decided, both. Easy to attack and destroy (even with the protective layer provided by the ceiling) but it also provided one of the best views he’d ever seen on a starship.

  The porthole curved downward and added extra width to the front of the bridge bowl. The porthole also curved along the sides of the bridge’s walls as well. The only place the porthole didn’t appear was behind him, where the door was. Bad design though it was, it was also a bit uplifting, and he found he didn’t mind it one bit.

  The Br2 Scout3 eased out of the docking bay and into the space around The Brazza Two. The Brazza Two seemed impossibly huge next to the scout ship, dominating one
entire side of the scout ship and towering over it as well, looming like a darkness over the porthole.

  Crowe had picked this evening for the competition because in the morning, the officer contingent would begin its investigation of the Scrapheap, which meant that the Brazza Two was as close to the Scrapheap as it was going to get. He had figured that the officer training might involve day-long or week-long investigations of the Scrapheap, with other small ships hanging around the edges of the Scrapheap.

  So he had calculated that this night was probably his best—his only—opportunity to see the Scrapheap up close.

  The competition would keep him honest and get him back to the Brazza Two long before anyone got up for breakfast.

  He was glad he planned that way, because the images on the screens before him took his breath away—and that was before he saw the Scrapheap with his own eyes.

  He knew how big the Scrapheap was. He’d read the statistics. It was the size of a large moon. It wasn’t perfectly spherical because it was an amalgamation of retired Fleet vessels, sent to the Scrapheap while the Fleet figured out what to do with them.

  This Scrapheap had been in existence for more than four hundred years, if not longer. It was protected by a force field and had some kind of internal monitoring mechanism in the very center.

  From what he could find in the records, the Scrapheap had a way of communicating with the Fleet should something go horribly awry. He had no idea what that meant, but it made him wary of going into the Scrapheap.

  The other thing that made him wary about going inside—besides the force field and the notification—was the way that ships became part of the Scrapheap. They were either brought by other ships or they were sent to the internal coordinates of the Scrapheap using an anacapa drive.

  Sometimes, he guessed, ships just appeared inside of it, and if they hit another ship, well then, oh, well. He didn’t want to get hit, even if it were extremely unlikely that getting hit would happen.

  “Wow,” Erika said. She was looking up, so he did too.

  Above him, the edge of the Scrapheap twinkled. That was all the confirmation he needed of a working force field. Then, beyond it, he could see the outline of an old DV-Class ship, and parts of some other ships, seemingly motionless, and much too close to each other.

  His mouth gaped open despite his best efforts to remain calm in the face of something magnificent.

  The Br2 Scout3 moved slowly, but it seemed much too close to the Scrapheap. He glanced down at his controls.

  Nope. The Br2 Scout3 was following the edge of the Scrapheap exactly as he had programmed it.

  The Scrapheap was just so large that it seemed like the Br2 Scout3 was closer than it actually was.

  He looked at the screens, saw his own ship as a pinprick against the edge of the large Scrapheap nearby. The Brazza Two was farther from the Br2 Scout3 than the Scrapheap was, but he had designed this maneuver that way deliberately, although now he was wondering what, exactly, he had been thinking when he had done so.

  The Scrapheap scared him. Contrary to what he had expected, he had no desire to break through that force field, to visit the inside of the Scrapheap, to see what he was missing. He was close enough, maybe even too close.

  The Scrapheap hovered near his little scout ship like some malevolent creature, about to absorb him.

  He wiped his sweaty palms on his pants, then realized that captains didn’t do that. Captains didn’t do a lot of things. They didn’t recklessly put their friends in danger on a mission that they weren’t trained for.

  He had thought the simulations and the research would be enough.

  He was wrong.

  The Br2 Scout3

  Crowe swallowed against his dry throat. No wonder the Fleet did not allow students near the Scrapheap. It was too dangerous.

  They needed to turn back.

  His team didn’t seem anxious, though. For some reason, the scariness wasn’t bothering them. Most worked their positions, as if they were regular bridge officers. Two weren’t working at all. They were still looking up, gaping at the Scrapheap.

  “Any sign of Tessa?” he asked.“Seriously?” Omar asked before anyone could answer Crowe. “We’re touching distance from the Scrapheap, and you ask about Tessa?”

  “Yeah.” Crowe licked his bottom lip. It was chapped. He’d been tugging on it without even realizing it.

  He wanted to declare the competition done. And if Tessa hadn’t even gotten off the Brazza Two, then he could backtrack without fear of humiliation.

  That thought had barely crossed his mind when another followed. Screw humiliation. He needed to get back to the ship.

  “The other docking bay just opened,” Maida said. She touched something on her holographic controls and another screen rose.

  A ship that Crowe didn’t recognize emerged from the docking bay. The design marked the ship as an Explorer-Class, one that was retired when the Scouts got bigger.

  “Oh, crap,” he said, maybe out loud.

  Tessa was doing what he had initially thought of doing. There were a handful of Explorer-Class ships on the Brazza Two, for reasons he could not divine since no one had touched them in years. He wasn’t even sure their systems had been maintained.

  He knew it would be a lot of work to see if they had been maintained, which was why he had changed his mind about using one. He figured it would be hard enough for a group of teenage geniuses to pilot a ship larger than an orbiter when they hadn’t done it before, but he figured it would be even harder for them to handle a crisis if something went wrong.

  They just didn’t have enough experience.

  And he was smart enough to know that, at least.

  He had felt a lot more confident about the scout ship. Although with all of the full simulations he had run, he had discovered a few crises that his inexperienced crew couldn’t solve, and that the automatic controls couldn’t handle either.

  He called those simulations the Kiss Your Ass Goodbye scenarios, and fortunately, in all of the simulations he had run, the crew had only hit one of those once.

  Once was worth the risk out of thousands of simulations.

  He had thought, anyway.

  He had no idea what kind of risk Tessa was taking, but it was a greater risk than he wanted to contemplate.

  “Can you figure out how to hail them?” he asked Omar.

  “Tessa’s ship?” Omar said. “It might take some time. I have no idea what that ship is or what it’s called or if they’ll even answer us.”

  Crowe swallowed again, and it actually hurt. His throat was so dry that swallowing scraped. His heart was pounding.

  This entire lark had gone awry, and not because of him.

  “Figure out how.” Crowe moved his own command screen closer. He would try to figure this out too. He hadn’t investigated the communications on board the Br2 Scout3 because he figured he wouldn’t need it.

  All he had imagined was someone—the Brazza Two—trying to contact him. Not him trying to contact someone else.

  Through his clear holographic command screen, he could see the Explorer vessel. It was shaped like a stubby tube, and it rotated rapidly, something he had only seen a few Fleet ships do. He had no idea what the rotation meant. Rotation could be used for a variety of things, and he had no idea why it had been built into the design of the Explorer-Class ships.

  And then the ship vanished.

  “Don’t get rid of the visuals,” he barked at Maida.

  “I didn’t,” she said.

  He got cold. “What do you mean you didn’t?”

  “I mean,” Maida said sounding as panicked as he felt, “Tessa’s ship disappeared.”

  He swore. Explorers had anacapa drives. Tessa wouldn’t be crazy enough to use one, would she? That took special training. Not even high level officers could use anacapa drives without clearance—

  “Look!” Adil said, pointing at the Scrapheap.

  There it was, the Explorer-Class vessel, butted up ag
ainst the force field.

  Crowe’s breath caught. “Tell me that’s not inside the Scrapheap,” he said, but no one did.

  He used his own controls, but their readings were inconclusive. Or maybe he just couldn’t understand them.

  “Hail her,” he said to the crew in general. “Someone. Hail her now.”

  Three different people started pressing their fingers against their holographic consoles, searching for a way to contact Tessa.

  Maida found it first—or rather, didn’t find it.

  “I think she’s inside the Scrapheap,” Maida said, answering his first question, “because I’m being told that the ship is outside of communications range, and that’s just not true.”

  Crowe put a hand on the top of his skull, wrapping his fingers in his hair. Why would Tessa do this? Why?

  But he knew the answer. She did it so that she could beat him. And she had. How did he let her know that she had?

  “I think I got through,” Adil said. “See if you can talk to her.”

  “Tessa,” Crowe said. “You win, okay? Now get out of there.”

  “Do I have that on record?” Tessa’s voice came through the console loud and clear, as if she was beside him.

  “You do. You win. We all attest to it. Now get out.”

  “You should see this, Crowe,” she said. “You have no idea how many ships are here. It’s so neat.”

  “Great,” he said. “Maybe next time. Take great video. And, um, do you think you can get out without using the anacapa drive?”

  “Why?” she asked. “That’s how we got in.”

  “I know,” he said, and then stopped himself. He didn’t want to say the drives were dangerous, because he didn’t want to scare her. But they were, and no one in their group knew how to use one.

  “Stop worrying,” she said. “We’re going to take a few touristy vids and then we are out of here. I promise. You get on your little trajectory up and down the outside. I’ll meet you back in the Third Level Mess. And you better pay up, buddy.”