Searching for the Fleet Read online

  Coop could probably ask for one of those at his funeral, but Yash couldn’t. Or she couldn’t have, if they were still with the Fleet.

  But the white pods. They traveled a particular distance, and then burned from the inside out, scattering what little remained into whatever solar system the ship found itself in.

  “I hope you sent him as far away as possible,” Yash said.

  “No. I want to see the destruction.” Coop’s voice was soft, but that didn’t hide the emotion. The fury remained.

  The pod glowed red for a moment, then appeared to melt. For a moment, the pod looked like it had become smoke, and then even that evaporated.

  Yash let out a breath. Neither of them had said the customary words for a Fleet funeral. They hadn’t even said words of honor for an enemy.

  Instead, they stood, watching in silence.

  “That’s done,” Coop said after a moment, then shut the portal.

  Yash stared at it just a little longer.

  “People are going to wonder what happened,” she said. “Why we took the Ivoire out. What happened to Dix. They’ll want to know.”

  Coop nodded. He shut down screens as well.

  “Routine maintenance,” he said. “We were just checking systems on the ship.”

  “That’s not what the manifests will say,” Yash said.

  “You’re going to clear all of that.” Coop gave her a flat look. “We’re not going to tell anyone what happened here.”

  Yash frowned. “But if they ask about Dix…?”

  “We tell them he killed himself. We had to dispose of the body.”

  The words hung between them for a moment.

  “Someone is going to want a service,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Coop said dryly. “I’m sure they will.”

  “It’ll be odd if we don’t speak at it,” she said.

  “It’ll be worse if we do.” Coop’s lips moved in a smile, but his eyes didn’t change. They remained flat and calm. “He committed suicide. We’re not up to talking about it. We won’t have to either. Others will step in.”

  Yash nodded. Coop was right. The crew knew how he felt about suicides. He had no sympathy for them.

  Yash had, until today.

  Of course, Dix wasn’t just a suicide. He had tried to take everyone with him.

  And she would have to process that, apparently without the help of her comrades on the Ivoire.

  Coop must have seen something on her face. He put a hand on her arm, his touch gentle.

  “Dix was wrong,” Coop said. “You have to remember that.”

  “I know,” she said. “Killing himself, setting up this—”

  “No,” Coop said. “Saying that something bad had happened to all of us. He was wrong about that.”

  Yash frowned. Coop had been as upset about this move into the future as everyone else.

  “The Fleet moves forward, Yash,” Coop said. “We’re as far forward as any ship has ever been. Not in space. In time. It’s what we’re designed for.”

  She swallowed. “Then why are you disbanding the crew?”

  “I’m not,” Coop said. “I’m letting them choose where they stand, just like I would have at any sector base stop.”

  Yash resisted the urge to look at the closed portal, at the new container on the floor.

  “We learned a lot about Dix today,” Coop said. “We’ve learned a bit about the others. We’ll still have a crew years from now, but it’ll be a different one. And we’ll have figured out how to define our mission this far forward. We haven’t figured that out yet.”

  She let out a small breath. He was right. That was the dislocated feeling she had had. It wasn’t because they were here. That was almost theoretical. She hadn’t tried to return to the past, and she had encountered many more unusual cultures than this one in the course of her career.

  What they had lost was a sense of community, of the Fleet guiding them. They were on their own right now.

  They needed a new mission.

  “Do you know what that mission will be?” Yash asked.

  “No,” Coop said. “I think we keep searching for the Fleet, for what it has become in this time period. But if we don’t find it, we have tools. We have resources. We can act as an adjunct to our Fleet, here and now.”

  “Boss won’t like that,” Yash said.

  “In some ways,” Coop said, “it dovetails with what she’s trying to do with Lost Souls.”

  Finding the old tech. Revitalizing it. Making it work for them.

  “You going to bring her in?” Yash asked.

  “Only if it becomes necessary,” Coop said. “Fleet business belongs to the Fleet.”

  “And the rest of the crew?” Yash asked.

  “We’ll let them settle. We have time. We need more information.” Coop glanced at the closed portal. “I think, after today, the weak ones are gone.”

  Yash nodded, hoping he was right. Then she straightened her spine.

  “You asked me to get rid of the information about what happened here,” she said.

  “Yes,” Coop said.

  “But if we stay Fleet, we follow Fleet procedure. I’ll isolate all of the relevant information, and restrict access. Only you and I will be able to open anything to do with today.”

  Coop smiled at her, and this time, the smile reached his eyes. “Good call, Engineer Zarlengo. You are exactly right. We need to continue to follow procedure when we can. Which means, after we return to Lost Souls, I get to buy you a drink.”

  She smiled too. It felt weird to smile after all they’d been through. She still had a lot to process.

  But the smile felt good, too.

  “All right, Captain,” she said. “Just you and me. One drink. Maybe a toast.”

  “To what?” he asked.

  She shrugged one shoulder, pretending to be casual when she wasn’t feeling casual at all.

  “To the future,” she said, “and moving forward. Just like we always have.”

  Part Two

  The Search

  Now

  Eight

  Everyone wanted a piece of the runabout data. Yash wanted to hoard it.

  She stood in the center of her lab on the space station the Lost Souls Corporation called home. Her lab was huge, more of a complex than a single area. She had chosen a suite with one big room in the exact middle of the lab, and several other smaller rooms around it. For the past several months, she had walked through the big room to get to one of the other smaller rooms, and otherwise didn’t do much with the big room at all.

  She kept the big room, though, hoping she would one day be able to get a small ship in there and do a lot of design work. Or do a lot of work on the ship to discover its secrets.

  The ship she had hoped she would bring back had vanished a few weeks ago. It was a runabout that had clearly been built long after the Ivoire went into foldspace.

  But the runabout’s anacapa had activated when Yash and Boss were diving the ship, and they had barely escaped in time. Boss saw that as a near-miss.

  Yash—well, Yash grinned every time she thought about it.

  Somewhere, the Fleet still existed, and somehow, it had activated the runabout’s anacapa from a distance, and brought it home.

  Yash had managed to pull all of the runabout’s data during that dive. She had just been turning her attention to the anacapa drive when it had activated.

  She still wondered if she had somehow tripped something in the anacapa drive, and that had sent a message to the Fleet. She wished she knew. That piece of information didn’t seem to be in the data she had pulled.

  But she had a lot of other data, and she was accessing it in the big room of her lab. She didn’t want to work on small screens. She wanted large holographic images, partly to make her work efficient, but also to inspire herself. She liked thinking about the runabout being back with the Fleet. She liked imagining what had happened when the ship returned.

  She also liked walking insi
de the holographic image of the runabout’s interior. She could imagine it as a state-of-the-art vessel, with additions she hadn’t even imagined back in her day, and she saw it for what it had become—a ruin of a once-beautiful ship.

  Both aspects of the runabout—the imagined glory days and the decay—excited her. They were both evidence of a Fleet that had existed long after she left.

  They were evidence of the fact that she held data that would give her answers, answers she had been craving ever since she had arrived in this unfamiliar future.

  She didn’t understand all that she had pulled from the runabout—hell, she hadn’t even accessed all of the information yet—but she knew that the ship had upgrades she had never seen before.

  In fact, it wasn’t even fair to call those things upgrades. They weren’t tweaks to the runabouts she had worked with decades (centuries?) before this one was built. They were flat-out changes, things she wasn’t entirely sure she understood.

  She had finally found time to work on the runabout the way she wanted to. She had spent the last two weeks shedding most of her responsibilities at Lost Souls. And that was hard, because she had ended up with so many different jobs.

  Some of that was the function of the corporation; it had been understaffed from the beginning.

  But some of it was because she was one of the few people with the knowledge to transform the broken-down, damaged, and dormant DV-Class ships Lost Souls had found all over the sector into active, working vessels. Yash also helped develop tech—based on the Fleet’s tech—for Lost Souls to sell.

  Yash had arrived at the lab hours earlier than usual because she had been unable to sleep. Ilona Blake, who ran Lost Souls, had offered Yash as many assistants as she wanted to help her dig through the data, even the data on the Fleet.

  Yash didn’t want any assistants. She wanted to be alone with all of the information, and that caused problems, because Lost Souls had financed the trip to the Boneyard that resulted in this information. Ilona was the first person who wanted to mine the data of what she called “actionable items.” She certainly wasn’t the last.

  Yash had done some of that, mostly to keep everyone off her back. She had thrown some tidbits to Ilona, tidbits that would keep staff busy for months.

  But some of that had backfired on Yash.

  Most of the people who worked in tech development were not part of the Fleet. Yash had more knowledge in her little finger than they had accumulated in a lifetime.

  In the past, she had been readily available, answering questions, helping them structure their work so that they would learn which piece went where, and sometimes offering actual seminars on Fleet technology.

  She hadn’t minded doing any of that, because in her heart, she had believed the Fleet was gone. She would never find it again.

  But she no longer believed that. She needed to focus on finding out how to contact the Fleet. And each moment that went by when she couldn’t focus on finding the Fleet irritated the piss out of her.

  She spent most of the morning establishing little holographic fiefdoms throughout the large room. The interior of the ruined runabout’s cockpit faced the west wall. She left a space large enough for the interior of the cockpit when it was new. She couldn’t set that up yet, because she hadn’t found the specs.

  Then she set up an area for the data sent by the two probes that had gone into the runabout. One probe had entered before any of the crew had, and the other before the second visit. Both had disappeared into foldspace when the runabout had.

  Yash had hoped for more information to come filtering back to them through the probes, but that hadn’t happened—yet.

  Although she had set up a data capture device on the Sove, the DV-Class ship Boss was using again to dive the Boneyard.

  The Boneyard was a ship graveyard, filled with Fleet vessels. It was in another sector, and unlike anything Yash had ever seen before. Early in her career, she had heard rumors of something the Fleet called a Scrapheap, but she hadn’t connected that to a Boneyard until she saw mention of a Scrapheap in one of the DV-Class vessels that Boss had “liberated” from the Boneyard.

  Boss had liberated the Sove, which was why (Yash believed) the Sove could go in and out of the Boneyard at will. The Sove was only slightly more advanced than the Ivoire, so the information on the Sove had not provided a lot of insight into what had become of the Fleet.

  Plus, most of the Sove’s data had been scrubbed from the ship. Yash had been able to find fragments of old data, and that had been the kind of data that did not compromise the Fleet itself.

  Since the Fleet always scrubbed data from anything it abandoned, the fact that the Sove had been scrubbed led Yash to believe the Fleet had placed the Sove inside the Boneyard. Boss said the Sove might’ve been abandoned elsewhere and later brought to the Boneyard, but Coop hadn’t liked that theory.

  He didn’t like most theories concerning the Boneyard, except his own. Coop worried that the Boneyard stored ships damaged in a major war involving the Fleet, although Yash had doubted that explanation from the moment she and Boss tried to access the Boneyard. The ships inside seemed to be Fleet vessels from different eras.

  But so far, Lost Souls hadn’t been able to pull any ships from the Boneyard that would help Yash in her search for the Fleet.

  She half hoped that when the Sove returned to the Boneyard, the ship would pick up more data from the probes that had vanished with the runabout. That, of course, would require the runabout to be back in what they called “real space,” as opposed to foldspace.

  Yash hadn’t told anyone of that particular hope, realizing it was closer to wish fulfillment than anything that could happen in reality.

  And she worried about indulging in fantasies about ways to find the Fleet. She firmly believed that indulging fantasies like that had been part of what had driven Dix over the edge five years ago.

  The probes had provided a lot of information before they vanished, however. Yash had gone through some of that information, but not all of it. And certainly not any of the data accumulated just before the probes vanished into foldspace.

  So the probe data had its own little fiefdom. Next to it, she had set up a holographic representation of the runabout’s engine. And next to that, several different representations of the runabout’s anacapa drive.

  She worried the most about those, because she wasn’t sure the holographic representations were accurate. That anacapa drive, like all anacapa drives, lived in its container, and so wasn’t subject to any recordings. The probes got readings from the drive, but not any visual contact with it, except when Yash herself had opened that container—and even then, her body had blocked most of the view.

  For holographic representation of the anacapa drive, she was using the specs for the drive, as well as the information already logged into the runabout’s databases. None of those databases had as much information on the anacapa drive as they did on the rest of the runabout.

  That led Yash to believe whoever had been trapped in that runabout had known nothing about anacapa drives except how to use them.

  That fact didn’t surprise her, either, because most people in the Fleet didn’t even know that much. The drives were so delicate, they took specialized training.

  And that particular drive had had problems, because its strange signature had led Boss to dive the runabout in the first place. The energy coming off that drive had been dangerous. Yash believed then—and still believed now—that the drive had been malfunctioning.

  It had mostly ceased to function by the time she and Boss had dived the runabout. In fact, when the runabout’s anacapa had flared to life, Yash had been surprised, because she had thought the anacapa drive had already burned itself out.

  Yash stepped back from her fiefdoms. The big room was only half full of holographic representations. They probably would have looked confusing to anyone else who came into the lab. A runabout cockpit, an empty space, a runabout’s engine, data scrolling from the pr
obes, and the anacapa drive, pulsing in the middle of the air as if anacapas normally floated off the ground, would probably seem like chaos to everyone else.

  But to Yash, they were beautiful. She smiled whenever she looked at them.

  She hadn’t felt like this since she had come to this strange future. She couldn’t remember just idly smiling at something before her. And she couldn’t remember this level of excitement with such a workload ahead of her.

  Her stomach rumbled. She was hungry. She had actually brought two meals to the lab, planning to lock herself in here for hours and hours. Ilona Blake wouldn’t approve; she preferred the people at Lost Souls to eat regular meals outside of their workstations, but she would never know.

  She would have to contact Yash to even get into the lab. The lab was as far from Ilona’s office as possible.

  When Yash had chosen her lab, it had been in a ring that she doubted Lost Souls would need for years. When Boss had purchased the space station, some of the team had chided her. The space station was huge, and seemed like it would be impossible to fill. The wasted space, half the team argued, would cost more money that Lost Souls would ever make, even if they kept the environmental systems off in the unused portions. And that didn’t even count the condition the station had been in. The station had been left to sit empty, a casualty of another corporation’s bankruptcy. Lost Souls had been repairing and augmenting the station section by section.

  Yash had chosen a spot at the edge of the ring that people had to walk through abandoned and dilapidated corridors to get to. She had asked for and received that location partly because she had known some of her work would be dangerous, and partly because she didn’t want constant visitors.

  She wanted people to feel out of their depth when they approached her lab. She wanted them to feel a bit frightened as they traversed the emptiness. That way, she figured, anyone who came to her would think twice about a visit if they knew the effort they would have to put in to get to her.

  Best laid plans. Those corridors were abandoned no longer. Lost Souls was growing faster than Yash had imagined the corporation could. At least, she had the distance from the main part of Lost Souls to keep people away.