Searching for the Fleet Read online

When she finished, her gaze met Coop’s. He looked both calm and serious, like he often did in the middle of a crisis.

  He was someone she could rely on. She valued that more than she had realized.

  She swallowed hard, gulping a little air as she did so. She had no idea how to tell Coop about Dix.

  “Can I enter the bridge safely?” Coop asked.

  “Yes,” Yash said. “Come to me. You need to see this.”

  It was better to show him than to tell him.

  At the same time, part of her didn’t want him to know. She had no idea how Coop would react to this. They both had seen a lot of death among the crew—in battle, in the normal course of things like illness and aging. They had lost friends and colleagues from other ships. But they had never lost someone to suicide.

  Coop walked slowly toward her, as if he was worried that something was going to go wrong near the other consoles. She directed him around the console she was working on, so he wouldn’t get in her way.

  Then she pointed at Dix’s body, still wrapped around that anacapa drive.

  Coop stared. His expression didn’t change. Then he crouched, but didn’t touch.

  “The blood’s tacky,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. “I think he’s been here for hours.”

  “Have you called anyone from medical?”

  “No,” Yash said. “Not yet. I’m making sure Dix hasn’t tampered with the anacapa drive.”

  Coop’s head moved ever so slightly, as if he had started to shake it, and then stopped himself. He had placed his hands on his thighs, elbows out. Then he leaned forward just a little more.

  “I don’t see anything obvious,” Coop said.

  “Me either,” Yash said. “But he chose to be here, and he touched that container in a variety of ways before dying.”

  Coop nodded, but didn’t look at her. He was studying Dix’s body and the container itself.

  “I’m checking everything I can think of,” Yash said.

  Coop stood, glanced at the console she was working on, and frowned. He looked disturbed now.

  “I revoked all Dix’s clearances except the one that allowed him on the bridge,” Coop said. “I should have revoked that one too.”

  A tiny thread of anger, barely discernable, in the deep timbre of his voice.

  “No blaming,” she said to him, like he had said to her when she discussed that anacapa freeze with him one of those drunken nights. “We get lost if we blame. It takes us in the wrong direction. Move forward.”

  Coop’s lips twisted as if he had swallowed something sour.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s deal with what we have. What Dix presented us with.”

  The annoyance was clear in Coop’s tone. His gaze met hers.

  “Brief me,” he said.

  She did. She told him all she knew, and all she had done.

  When she finished, she pointed at the container. The blood on its sides was turning black.

  “The container concerns me,” she said. “I have no idea if he breached it.”

  Coop followed her finger, staring at the container. “What could he have done if he had breached it?”

  Coop made no secret of the fact that he was not an anacapa engineer. He had never wanted to learn how to do more than the basics on that drive.

  Yash could think of a million things that anyone could do to tamper with the anacapa, but she knew that wasn’t what Coop was asking.

  “I mean,” Coop said, still focused on the container—or maybe on the body beside it—”if he wanted to send us back into foldspace or into the past, wouldn’t he have stuck around to see if it worked?”

  That was when Yash knew that Coop still hadn’t accepted how far Dix had deteriorated. Or maybe that kind of deterioration was unfathomable to Coop. It certainly didn’t happen much among high-level DV-Class officers.

  Yash wasn’t sure it had ever happened before.

  “At first, I too thought he was going to use his skills to send us back through time to our Fleet,” she said. “Then I rejected the idea entirely.”

  Coop frowned at her. “But you still think he tampered with the anacapa drive.”

  She nodded, the movement small. “Suicides are angry people, Coop. Anger turned inward sometimes, but not always. Sometimes the suicide turns the anger outward as well.”

  Coop frowned at her as if he was trying to make sense of what she was saying. She didn’t want to be more explicit, especially since she was still recording, but—

  Coop cursed. “I almost said that Dix would never do anything like that, but I would have thought that Dix would never have done anything like this either.”

  He snapped his hand toward Dix’s body, the movement revealing that Coop was as furious at Dix as Yash was.

  “You think he tampered with the anacapa drive,” Coop said.

  “I don’t know,” Yash said. “He certainly tried, but I’m not sure how far he got or what his intentions were. I would have said that he killed himself after realizing he couldn’t get into the system, but the bone knife belies that.”

  “Bone…oh.” Coop crouched, and looked closely at the knife. Apparently he hadn’t noticed it before. “That is part of a set.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “Those bone knives he got are the sharpest knives on the ship,” Coop said.

  “I know that too.”

  Coop looked up at her, then rose, slowly, his knees popping with the movement.

  “You have a concern you haven’t told me.”

  “I do,” she said. “I’m afraid that he did something that would overload the anacapa drive.”

  “But nothing has happened yet, and he’s clearly been dead for some time,” Coop said.

  Yash nodded. “I’m worried that he booby-trapped it.”

  “You think he would put this destruction on a timer of some kind?” Coop asked.

  “That’s one way.” Yash peered at the body. She hated seeing Dix’s hands still pressed against the container. “There are a lot of other ways to accomplish the same thing. Most of them use a trigger, not a timer, but they would have the same effect. They would overload the anacapa drive.”

  “From the tone of your voice,” Coop said, “you have a specific vision of what an overloaded anacapa looks like. I understand it’s bad. But either I don’t know or never learned the details. Throughout my career, I was told that we needed to avoid it, and so we have. Except when we went into foldspace after the Quurzod weapons hit our ship.”

  Yash was shaking her head before he even finished. “What happened to us that day wasn’t an anacapa overload. Those Quurzod weapons augmented the energy from the anacapa drive, altered it in some way, and that alteration destroyed a part of the anacapa as it was activating.”

  Coop was frowning. “So, what happened to us…that’s not it. You mean something different when you say overload.”

  “I do,” she said quietly. “I mean that everything explodes.”

  Four

  Coop turned away from the anacapa container, away from Dix’s body, away from Yash herself. He peered at the open portals.

  Yash knew what he saw. The edge of the station. The other ships occasionally going by. The dots and light and blackness that all combined into this sector of space.

  She also knew what he was doing as he looked away. He didn’t want her to see his reaction.

  But she had, already. He hadn’t believed her when she said that everything would explode. He clearly needed a moment to think about what she had just said.

  “Everything.” He wasn’t asking for clarification. He was repeating her word. Her unbelievable word.

  “The anacapa has a lot of power, especially one this size—”

  “You’re talking overload.” He spoke slowly. She recognized the tone. He was working it out for himself. “You mean one of those chain reactions, this anacapa drive will send the wrong kind of energy to the other anacapa drives nearby, triggering them, which will th
en cause this massive explosion, obliterating everything.”

  Technically, he was wrong. There was no “wrong kind of energy.” But the effect was the same and the effect had been what she was talking about.

  “If this anacapa drive overloads,” she said, “then it could do many things. It could obliterate the ship. It could send us all back to foldspace, maybe in pieces. Or it could initiate those chain reactions you were talking about.”

  “Which would destroy the space station, the other ships, this ship, and everything in the vicinity,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said quietly.

  “Including every single human being.”

  She could only see the side of his face, but that impassive expression was back. The one that most people thought so calm, but which she knew was actually a cover for very deep emotions.

  “You think Dix is trying to murder us all?” Coop asked.

  “I think he was pretty angry about being here. I think he believed none of us belonged here. I also think he hated Lost Souls and what Boss is building.” Yash swallowed hard again, wishing her mouth wasn’t so dry. “So, yes. I think Dix might have been trying to destroy everything. I’m not sure he would think of it as murder. More as setting things right.”

  But what did she know? She wasn’t a psychologist. She was an engineer.

  Coop squared his shoulders, as if he was adjusting to a new weight that had just fallen on them. “How do we figure this out?”

  “That’s what I was doing when you arrived,” Yash said.

  “Do we touch the container?” Coop asked. “Do we remove it? Should we deactivate the anacapa remotely?”

  Yash licked her lips. All of those things were possible, and all of them were predictable. If she could predict them, then Dix would have been able to.

  “Should we bring others here to help you?” Coop asked, and something in his tone made her realize that her silence was frustrating him.

  “No,” she said. “Not yet. I worry that they’ll trigger something. I won’t be able to monitor them.”

  “I don’t have the deep knowledge you have of the anacapa drive,” Coop said. “I don’t know how I can help you.”

  Yash nodded. Her heart, which had been pounding hard, had settled down. She felt calmer. Was it Coop’s presence or was it because she had finally gotten a handle on what she feared?

  “Dix picked this spot for a reason,” she said. “He was sending us a message. He could have killed himself in his quarters. He could have fallen asleep and made sure he never woke up. There are a million ways he could have harmed himself, and none of them would have been this bloody or this obvious.”

  Coop turned, a slight frown between his eyebrows. Even though he was trying for the calm expression, he wasn’t entirely managing it.

  “I believe Dix wanted us to respond in a particular way.” Yash took a deep breath. From this moment forward, clarity and honesty were the two most important parts of the conversation. “I believe he wanted you to respond in a particular way.”

  Coop nodded, and glanced at Dix’s body. Then Coop nodded again.

  “So, you need to imagine I didn’t arrive first,” Yash said. “You need to tell me what you would have done if you had been the person to discover Dix.”

  Coop folded his hands behind his back, head down, clearly contemplating. “And what if someone else had found him? Someone other than me? Wouldn’t Dix have thought about that?”

  “He would have,” Yash said. “But he didn’t know I visited the bridge a lot. I’ve never told him, and he wasn’t usually here. So it didn’t matter if someone else found Dix. Whoever it was—except for me—would have contacted you after making sure Dix was dead.”

  “But you did contact me,” Coop said.

  “After I ran through some diagnostics,” Yash said. “Besides, if you didn’t show up right away, I could take action. No one else could. Or rather, no one else would think to.”

  Coop’s lips thinned. “All right,” he said. “You want me to go through each step?”

  “I need scenarios,” she said. “If you found him, then what? If someone else did, then what? And work from there.”

  “You’re betting that he used a trigger, not a timer,” Coop said.

  “Well, no,” Yash said. “First, I’m going to go over everything he did on this panel. I’ll find the timer if he placed one here. If I’m even right about the fact that he set a booby-trap at all.”

  “You are,” Coop said. “You’re right about the message. He and I argued endlessly about using the anacapa again, trying to get home. I finally told him I was never going to try.”

  “When did you say that?” Yash asked.

  “I said it repeatedly,” Coop said, “but he didn’t hear me. Not until after the debacle on Starbase Kappa.”

  “He heard you then?” Yash asked.

  “Not entirely,” Coop said. “He kept trying, kept thinking I didn’t understand what he meant, how we could recreate the circumstances that got us here, and that recreation would send us home.”

  “I never thought it would,” Yash said.

  “Neither did I,” Coop said, “and that was what we argued first. Finally, I said I wasn’t going to try. I was done trying. We weren’t going home. Not ever. And nothing he could ever say would change my mind on that.”

  She could hear the forcefulness behind Coop’s soft words. She could imagine how he had said that to Dix. Coop would have used that command voice of his. He would have spoken with hard and clipped authority, and he would have gotten through to Dix.

  “When?” she asked. “When did you tell him that?”

  Coop winced. “Last week.”

  Yash nodded, wanting to say she was unsurprised. But she wasn’t. She was surprised that Coop was still taking Dix seriously as recently as one week ago. Dix had caused a serious crisis on Starbase Kappa, and Coop had still been trying to work with him?

  Usually Yash didn’t question Coop’s judgment and she didn’t say anything now. But Coop’s refusal to accept Dix’s mental failures was not like Coop. Had he been playing a longer game? Or had he seen something of himself in Dix? Had the Psychological and Emotional Stress Department been involved? Or had Coop simply been trying to talk Dix down on his own?

  “The next time I saw him after that conversation,” Coop said slowly, “was last night. And I thought—I guess I was hoping—with that apology, that the conversation last week worked.”

  “The discussion was tense,” Yash said.

  “It was,” Coop said. “But he apologized. At the beginning, and at the end.”

  I owe you guys an apology. And I’m sorry.

  He never said what he was sorry for.

  “I thought—I hoped—he was going in a new direction.” Coop shook his head. “I wanted to believe he would improve. I always wanted to believe he would improve. With logic, with time.”

  Yash nodded. Time. What had Dix said about time? He had looked out the window and had said, There’s the future. It’s been there all along, hasn’t it?

  Yash had thought he was looking forward, finally, taking those steps toward leaving their losses behind.

  She had believed in Dix too. Maybe not as much as Coop had, but she had wanted Dix to rejoin them. The third leg in a once-sturdy stool.

  “But Dix said ‘this’ had happened to all of us.” Coop frowned at her. “Did that mean he thought we all were as despondent as him, unable to live in the moment? Didn’t I disabuse him of that?”

  Clearly, Coop hadn’t disabused Dix of anything.

  “He was apologizing in advance for what he was going to do here,” Yash said. “Not for his behavior in the past. But for this.”

  Coop nodded.

  “And now we need to figure out what he’s done,” Yash said. “I’m going to finish here. You’re going to give me scenarios.”

  “Yeah, I will,” Coop said. “But not yet.”

  He moved to a different console, then pressed his palm against
it. The screen lit up. His fingers danced across it, but Yash couldn’t see what he was doing.

  She needed him to focus on the anacapa drive. She needed those scenarios if she was going to figure out how to use the data she was slowly deriving from Dix’s actions.

  A holographic screen popped up in front of Coop, and Yash recognized it. Communications.

  “This is the captain,” he said. “Evacuate the Ivoire immediately. Do not gather your things, do not search for a friend or family member. Proceed to the nearest exit and leave now.”

  The screen glowed red. He touched something on it, and the red blinked three times.

  He wanted the message to repeat but only three times. Yash had no idea how long the people on board would have before there were more repeats.

  “What’re you doing?” she asked.

  “Saving lives,” he said.

  Five

  While he waited for the 30 people on board to evacuate, Coop opened another screen and talked through all the scenarios he could think of.

  Yash listened with half an ear. She was still pulling up more data. Dix had spent a lot of time on the bridge before he had killed himself.

  She was becoming more and more convinced that her paranoia had been justified; Dix had done something.

  She just hadn’t figured out what yet.

  The message repeated twice before Coop stopped talking. Yash looked up, startled. He hadn’t finished the first scenario yet, let along getting to any others.

  He was bent over the console, the screen in front of him still glowing red as the minutes ticked down before the announcement repeated.

  A second half-screen floated over the console to his left, and she recognized that screen by color. It showed all the heat signatures of every living creature on board.

  As she watched, five left the Ivoire. She scanned the entire map of the ship, just as she had been trained to do, and saw only two remaining heat signatures—hers and Coop’s.

  “Computer,” he said, “check the entire ship for life signs.”

  His fingers brushed the side of the half-screen, creating yet another half-screen. That one showed the environmental system, calculating usage of air, based on human usage. She had taught Coop that trick years ago as a way of going outside the system to see if anyone hid on board.