Searching for the Fleet Read online

  And currently, she also had the lab locked down. If someone wanted to join her, they would have to contact her directly before getting inside.

  She reluctantly pulled herself away from the setup and walked to the tiny closet-sized room she had allocated as a break room. She could chill or heat food here, but do little else.

  As she pulled the door open, the smell of coffee overwhelmed her. She blinked, wondering what had happened, then remembered. When she arrived this morning, she had made coffee, but had gotten so involved in setting up the main part of the lab, she had forgotten about it. It was probably so strong that it would be barely drinkable—for anyone else.

  She smiled to herself. She used to make coffee and forget about it when she was in school. She hadn’t had the opportunity to do so on any ship, including the Ivoire. Instead, she would simply go to the cafeteria and get something.

  But here—well, she was beginning to feel like a student again, in more ways than one.

  The coffeepot sat on the small counter she had built against the wall when she set up the lab. She grabbed a white mug, poured herself a cup, and realized she couldn’t even see the bottom of the mug through the liquid. Sludge. But she didn’t care.

  She pulled out her lunch—carrots, an apple, and a sandwich made with a cinnamon-raisin oat bread that one of the newer recruits baked. Yash leaned against the wall, knowing she had to eat, but anxious to return to her work.

  She was on the edge of being overwhelmed, even here. She had so much to do. Not just the setup, but sifting through the information, cross-checking it, and then examining it in comparison to the data from the other ships that Boss and her crew had pulled from the Boneyard.

  And none of that included studying that little anacapa drive. Yash really wanted to dig into that, but was saving it until last, hoping she would find even more information about it before she got to it.

  Not knowing exactly what she had here excited her, but also made her realize that her own private estimates of how long this work would take were probably wildly off.

  She had no idea how she could keep Ilona from dragooning her into more work for Lost Souls, but she had to try. Technically, Yash didn’t even work for Lost Souls. She was on loan from the Ivoire, something she could get Coop to revoke at a moment’s notice.

  If he was willing to do so.

  She wasn’t sure he was.

  She had explained the runabout to him, but he wasn’t as excited about it as she was.

  You sure you didn’t hit something yourself when you were opening that container? he asked after she had told him about the events in the runabout.

  The thing was, she wasn’t certain, and she couldn’t lie to him. So ever since then, he had refused to believe the runabout’s disappearance had anything to do with the Fleet. He preferred to think that Yash had somehow activated the runabout’s system, and it had used old coordinates to send the runabout back where it came from.

  Sometimes ships did operate like that, but not in this instance. The runabout’s power was mostly drained. She had managed to power up the console briefly, but there wasn’t enough power inside the runabout proper to allow the interface between the anacapa drive and the regular engine to power up, let alone send the runabout into foldspace.

  Yash had given up trying to convince Coop of that.

  She was beginning to think he didn’t want to be convinced.

  In spite of herself, she found Dix’s words echoing in her head: So you’d leave Boss for the Fleet? he had asked Coop. And Coop had said he would leave anyone, that was part of the job.

  But there was no Fleet, not anymore. Not in the way there had been when Coop had been trained.

  Yash knew—Coop knew—that if they found the Fleet now, it wouldn’t be their Fleet. She believed it would have similar attributes—thousands of ships, moving ever forward, changing the universe for the better as they went along.

  But she wasn’t sure that would be enough for Coop, not in this time period. Because if they rejoined the modern Fleet, Coop would not be a captain. He might not even be able to serve.

  His knowledge would be too old, his habits something out of such a distant past that the modern Fleet wouldn’t know what to do with him.

  He would not command anyone in the Fleet, even if they had a record of the Ivoire, which Yash doubted they would.

  But Yash, she would be able to survive in the new Fleet. Once they accepted her, she would go back to school, take classes in their tech, and start all over again as the lowest trainee if she had to.

  She knew she could learn the new methods, as long as the Fleet had some of the same core values.

  She wanted the mission. She wanted the regimentation. She wanted the attitude, focusing on the future, moving forever forward.

  Coop probably didn’t know that she was willing to leave though. Or maybe she was underestimating him.

  Because Coop kept track of everything to do with the remaining Ivoire crew. He didn’t want to be blindsided again by something going awry, the way it had with Dix.

  Yash had finished the sandwich without tasting it. She put the carrots away untouched. She made herself eat the apple, and she still didn’t drink the coffee. Not because it looked like it was made of nanobits, but because she was hyper enough.

  The work itself—or rather, the thought of all that work—gave her energy. And she didn’t want to waste a single minute thinking about Coop or dealing with what might happen instead of what already was happening.

  Even before she realized she had done it, she had let herself out of the break room and back into the main part of the lab. She stopped, looking at her fiefdoms, and then grinned.

  She was going to get answers—and unlike almost everyone else at Lost Souls—she didn’t care where the answers would take her.

  Nine

  The message Coop got irritated the hell out of him.

  I am working on a difficult project, Yash said in an automated audio-only file. I will respond to emergencies only.

  Coop stood in the wide corridor outside the door to Yash’s lab. He had wandered down here, ostensibly because he wanted to talk to her about some modifications he thought the DV-Class vessels needed to keep the Empire at the border between Empire Space and the Nine Planets Alliance—a border he had protected in some skirmishes almost a year ago.

  There was some rumbling that Empire ships would come after Lost Souls, now that its tech was spreading into the Empire itself. He couldn’t confirm the rumors, but he wouldn’t put it past them.

  Or maybe he was just itching for another fight. He had done a lot of work in the past ten months, but he hadn’t done anything exciting.

  He hovered outside the lab door. It was recessed into the wall, with a small shield in front of it, a shield he had activated when he tried to put his hand on the door’s controls.

  That was when Yash had spoken to him in that autocratic, automated tone.

  If he had thought of contacting her before he had walked all this way, he would have gotten the message back at his own quarters. Instead, he had decided to stretch his legs, and walked the nearly two miles inside the station just to get to the ring that housed Yash’s lab.

  He had no idea how far he had walked down the twisty corridors of this ring to get to the lab.

  The problem was that when Yash said an emergency, she meant an emergency. She would be really mad at him if he interrupted her for any other reason.

  But the fact that she had locked herself in her lab without telling him about it irritated him. Usually she gave him a heads-up when she was going to be unavailable.

  He knew that part of the reason she had made the message was because of the data she had retrieved from that runabout. She had been different ever since she had returned from that trip to the Boneyard.

  She was the old Yash these days. Her acerbic sense of humor had returned, and she laughed a lot. He had forgotten how lighthearted she could be.

  The Yash whom he had seen for t
he past six years had been deadly serious about almost everything. That Yash had always appeared during stressful times on the Ivoire, but she used to vanish when the stress ended.

  Apparently, the stress hadn’t ended until Yash had gotten some answers from the runabout.

  Or figured she would get answers.

  Coop stepped back from her door, feeling indecisive. He was never indecisive, so that feeling irritated him as well.

  And the corridor itself wasn’t improving his mood.

  Once he crossed into Yash’s section of the ring, the corridor looked as dilapidated as it had when she decided to settle here. The garbage and the crumbling interior walls warned the casual visitors off, and made it uncomfortable to stand near the door.

  The lighting was good right near her door, but the lighting malfunctioned in the rest of the corridor. Of course, Yash had the skills to fix something that simple, and of course she hadn’t.

  In fact, he suspected, she had made the entire corridor even more uncomfortable. The temperature was significantly lower than anywhere else in the station, and judging by the way he was breathing, the oxygen level of the air was just a bit too thin as well.

  Yash hadn’t wanted visitors from the start, but verbally excluding them hadn’t worked as her duties for Lost Souls had increased. People felt as if their emergencies were her emergencies, something she complained about.

  But these small changes, which affected the comfort level of anyone who came to this part of the ring, affected them on a subconscious level and probably had more effect than Yash’s verbal warning.

  On everyone except Coop.

  He normally would have walked away. She was busy, but she was probably busy with that data from the runabout. She had, he discovered as he searched for her, quit most of the work she had been doing specifically for Lost Souls.

  She had even stepped down from some commissions he wanted her to stay on, such as training the new recruits in the science, engineering, and technological aspects of Fleet vessels.

  He needed Yash for a lot of things. She was his confidant on anything he couldn’t share with Boss, anything to do with what the Fleet had been or might become in the future.

  “Good Lord, you’re lurking.” Yash’s voice filled the corridor. “You never lurk.”

  It was that second sentence that made Coop understand that Yash wasn’t using a follow-up audio-only message, but was actually speaking to him.

  “Technically,” he said, “I don’t have an emergency, but I would like to know what is going on with the runabout data.”

  There was a long moment of silence. He wondered if she actually heard him.

  Then her voice echoed in the dingy space. “You’re alone, right?”

  He started to answer, but as he did, the small shield in front of the door sparkled, flared, and vanished. Then the door swished open.

  Yash stood in front of the entry, blocking his way. Her hair, usually too short, had grown out a bit, uneven and ragged. Her eyes had deep circles underneath them, and her skin was the mottled gray that crew members who did not eat properly or exercise enough got on long voyages.

  His heart ached at the sight of her. Was she going the way of Dix? That had become Coop’s greatest fear, for all the members of the Ivoire’s crew. Or at least the ones who had stayed with the Ivoire and come to Lost Souls.

  He didn’t dare ask if she was all right. She would snap at him. He was going to have to circle around the question.

  “You have not cared about the runabout data at all,” she snapped. So much for trying to prevent that reaction. “What’s different today? Did Ilona send you?”

  Coop had no idea why Ilona Blake would send him to talk with Yash about the runabout data.

  “No,” he said.

  “Then what is it?” Yash stood with her arms at her sides as if she were about to go into battle.

  The air coming out of her lab was warmer than the air in this corridor. And he thought he caught the scent of coffee.

  “I’ve been paying attention, Yash,” he said, which was as close as he was going to get to asking how she was. “You’ve been dropping a lot of your duties here at Lost Souls.”

  “And you’ve come to rope me back into them?” No one did defensive as well as Yash. She combined a bit of anger with even more bite. If he pushed too hard, she would find a way to lash into him, and it would be painful.

  “No,” he said, using the calmest voice he had. “What you do with your time is your business. You don’t work for Lost Souls.”

  “Glad someone noticed,” she said, but that statement didn’t have the anger behind it that the other ones had.

  “I heard you had locked yourself in your lab, and since I knew you’d been shedding Lost Souls duties, I figured it had something to do with the runabout data,” he said.

  She nodded, then put one hand on the side of the door, probably getting ready to close it.

  “I’ll let you know when I have something that might interest you.” Her tone made it a rebuke.

  “That’s the thing, Yash,” he said, balancing himself on the balls of his feet, ready to step forward quickly if she tried to close that door. “I know you. You’re divorcing yourself from the data that Lost Souls wants, and you’re focusing on Fleet data.”

  Her expression remained impassive. Her arm didn’t move either.

  “So?” she asked.

  “So,” he said. “I expect you found something. That’s why you’re doing this.”

  She gave him a wry half smile. “I haven’t found a damn thing, Coop. I haven’t had a chance to look. That’s why I’m doing this.”

  She waited as if she wanted him to say something.

  “You believe there’s something there,” he said.

  “I know there’s something in the data,” she said. “We just need time to find it.”

  His entire body had grown tense. He nearly turned away, but he held himself in position.

  “You don’t want to believe that, do you?” she asked. “You don’t want to find the Fleet.”

  He shook his head. “That’s not it, Yash. I’m afraid if we go after the information assuming something is there, we’ll find something, even if we make it up.”

  That wry half smile grew ever so slightly. “You’re protecting yourself,” she said.

  His eyes narrowed. He didn’t see himself as the kind of man who protected himself from information he didn’t want.

  “After that first year, you stopped going to places around the sector, trying to find the Fleet. You weren’t even that excited about the Boneyard. Boss and I were, but you weren’t.” Yash tilted her head just a little. “You seemed to think all of those ships had been in some kind of war, and that’s why they were there, unusable.”

  “It’s a theory,” he said, not willing to defend it.

  “Yes, it’s a theory,” Yash said. “And it sounds made-up to me. The Boneyard has defensive capability. If those ships were abandoned because they had no value, then why defend it?”

  “The defensive capability was automated,” Coop said. “You do what you can to keep people from stealing ships.”

  “Like Boss has all these years?” Yash asked.

  He rocked back on his heels. Normally, he would defend Boss, even to Yash. Coop and Boss had become a couple, if one could call two damaged people who were somewhat averse to sharing their lives with anyone a couple.

  “Those ships Boss found were abandoned in the Empire,” he said.

  “As if that makes a difference,” Yash said. “Some ships just become derelicts. I’m not sure the Fleet would care. We used to leave small ships behind. No one told us to retrieve them.”

  That was true. The only ships that Coop had orders to return to the Fleet were DV-Class vessels, and then, only when it was possible. The anacapa drives were to be shut down completely or brought back, again if possible.

  But he knew from the long-abandoned ships Boss had found that the ship’s crew hadn’t always
succeeded in shutting down the anacapa drive. Boss didn’t keep records of her dives—at least not ones he could access—so he had no idea if the ships themselves had been destroyed so fast that the Fleet hadn’t been able to find them.

  But he had thought it suspicious that much of what Boss had found had been in the Empire’s territory, and once she had moved into searching around the Nine Planets Alliance, there hadn’t been any derelict ships at all.

  “I know you think the Fleet still monitors that Boneyard,” Coop said, “but it makes no sense to me, given the Fleet’s mission.”

  “It makes sense to me,” Yash said. “Now, if you don’t mind, I have a lot of work to do.”

  She moved her right hand, apparently about to shut that door.

  “I’d like to help,” Coop said.

  “Doing what?” she asked in a tone that would have gotten her called out for insubordination if she was still serving on the Ivoire.

  “C’mon, Yash,” he said, keeping his tone deliberately light. “I know how to search through data.”

  Her lips thinned. “It’s going to be technical.”

  He resisted the urge to push past her. “Yes, it is. And I can handle all of the technical stuff, except the anacapa details. You know that.”

  “I also know you have had no interest in this,” she said. “So what has changed?”

  It was a good question, one he probably didn’t have the best answer for. He needed a challenge. He needed something else to think about.

  He needed a focus.

  Boss was at the Boneyard, diving. He had no interest in accompanying her. He had already checked the ships patrolling the border, and nothing was happening on that front. The tentative truce was holding.

  He was half tempted to take the Ivoire out with as full a crew complement as he could get, and just move forward, pretend they still had the Fleet’s mission.

  But eventually the Ivoire would run into trouble, and at some point, he would probably be coming back here, either to add more ships or to repair the Ivoire.