Searching for the Fleet Read online

  “There’s enough data here that you’ve locked yourself away to go through it,” he said. “Which means you believe that you’ll find something worthwhile.”

  “Coop,” Yash said. “You were hovering. There’s something else going on.”

  He nodded. He didn’t want to admit to himself what he’d been feeling, why he dithered here, why he had felt a little lost.

  He finally understood part of Dix’s impulse. Coop wanted the familiarity of the Fleet. He wanted a sense of home—even if he had to recreate it himself.

  “I guess I’m ready for answers,” he said.

  Yash studied him for a moment, apparently trying to see if he was being sincere.

  “You’re going to do everything I tell you do to,” she said after a minute.

  “I know that,” he said.

  She took a deep breath, as if she was considering, and then she stepped aside.

  “Welcome to my lair,” she said. “Be prepared to work your ass off.”

  That last sentence reminded him of one of the first captains he had ever served under.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, resisting the urge to salute Yash. “Ass is ready to be sacrificed.”

  She laughed, the door swished closed, and the real work began.

  Part Three

  Lieutenant Tightass

  Over Five Thousand Years Ago or Thirty Years Ago (depending on who you ask)

  Ten

  Overdue by fifteen hours. Too long, really. The Voimakas was in serious trouble. A ship lost in foldspace almost never came back, especially after the twenty-four-hour window.

  Coop felt the urgency, but he was beginning to think no one else on the Arama did. Seven others worked on the Arama’s bridge this afternoon, but none of them did their work with any kind of haste. They had even refused Coop’s request to notify the captain of their new mission.

  “Standard procedure,” Lieutenant Leontyne Heyek said after Coop made his request. Even though he was a lieutenant too, he was the new guy on the ship. He had been told her experience made her outrank him. “We execute new orders and inform the captain when she returns to the bridge.”

  Which, he thought, was exactly backward of the way things ran in the Fleet. But he hadn’t served on a foldspace search vessel before. He had been taught that time was of the essence in a foldspace grid search, so responding to commands from headquarters immediately made sense to him.

  What didn’t make sense was no one on the bridge crew wanted to let the captain know that new orders had arrived.

  The Arama would meet four other foldspace search vessels at the exact point where the Voimakas, the ship they would be searching for, had entered foldspace. The search would commence according to procedures developed less than ten years ago.

  Because the foldspace search program was so new, Coop had expected the Arama to be a much more sophisticated vessel, maybe something like the search-and-rescue ships he had worked on shortly after his graduation from officer training.

  Instead, this ship was smaller than he had expected, and had a counterintuitive design that bothered him every time he reported for duty.

  The bridge was circular, and the floor slanted downward. The command officers worked in the bottom of the circle, with their subordinates at stations on each level above.

  There were no portals on this bridge, and the wall of screens that he had thought standard to all Fleet ships no matter the size did not exist here. Instead the circular walls of this bridge were covered with equipment, much of it lashed down. There were no lockers on this bridge either, no real storage.

  His first thought when he had received his tour of the Arama was that the bridge was the most dangerous space on the ship. If something went awry and loosened all that equipment, the bridge crew would be in danger of injury just from flying debris.

  Had he been running this ship—and of course he wasn’t—he would have requested a bridge redesign at the next sector base stop. The designers there wouldn’t have been able to put in portals because this bridge was in the exact center of the Arama, but the designers would have been able to build better storage.

  And that alone would have made him more comfortable here.

  Although he doubted anything could have made him completely comfortable here.

  Usually he worked at the back of the bridge near the entrance, but this afternoon, he stood in the bridge’s exact center, six screens floating around him. He had set them up like a barrier, even though it was an ineffective barrier at best. He could see the other seven crew members only because they stood higher than he did. They could see him as well, but they couldn’t see what was on the screens he was monitoring.

  He was capturing all the information coming from headquarters, from other ships that had served in the area near the Voimakas, and the last information from the Voimakas itself. He was trying to reconstruct the Voimakas’s last hour or so.

  Heyek had told him that a reconstruction was a waste of time: the Arama had never found a ship in foldspace because of a reconstruction. He would have listened to her had the Arama already been onsite and ready to start the search—time was of the essence, after all—but the Arama had to get to the location, and while they were speeding toward those coordinates, he saw no harm in following procedure.

  Or rather, he felt compelled to follow procedure.

  He was beginning to think he was the only one here who was.

  He stood slightly to the right of the tattered captain’s chair. The Arama’s captain, Debbie Nisen, refused to let the chair be replaced or recovered, claiming that it fit her the way that it was. The cushions did retain the shape of her body because she wouldn’t allow anyone to change them out.

  Nor did she allow anyone else to sit in that chair. Not even someone who had to command the Arama when she wasn’t on the bridge. It made for an awkward work environment. Coop had had the comm more than once since he arrived, and each time, he had stood behind the chair and worked the controls on its arms while standing up.

  He hadn’t wanted to sit in the thing—he thought he detected the faint smell of ancient sweat and unwashed bodies—but he did wish that Captain Nisen followed at least some of the procedures mandated by headquarters. Especially the ones concerning bridge and day-to-day operations.

  Someone, probably Coop’s predecessor, had built a small console to the right of the captain’s chair. Coop knew that a crew member had built that console because it didn’t conform to modern regulations. It had more flaws than anything he had ever worked on.

  Rather like the Arama.

  He didn’t complain, though. He had learned at previous postings to remain silent about the different ways that different captains ran their ships. As his advisor on the officer training track had told him more than once, Coop would be learning from example—and sometimes those examples wouldn’t be pretty.

  The Arama wasn’t pretty at all. It didn’t even feel like a Fleet ship, not in design and certainly not in crew behavior. The crew had a startling lack of discipline, which made him as (or maybe more) uncomfortable than the bridge’s strange design.

  He was disciplined and focused, which was why he stood down here now, coordinating all of the information. Lieutenant Heyek, who was nominally in charge this afternoon, hadn’t even assigned him the work; she had simply assumed he would do it.

  Or perhaps she assumed he would do something else, and the fact that he hadn’t intuited what that something else was would get him a reprimand on the record.

  He didn’t know, and at the moment, he didn’t care. His focus was on the rescue of the Voimakas. The Arama had failed to rescue the last nine ships it had gone after in foldspace, something he had learned before he came here.

  He had been told that it was pretty common to fail at foldspace search and rescue. One of his instructors had told him that foldspace search and rescue was a fool’s mission, but that someone important in Command Operations had lost family to foldspace and felt the new procedures were wor
th the investment in time, ships, and personnel.

  Another former instructor had smiled when she learned that Coop was joining the crew of the Arama. Someone thinks you need to learn humility, she had said with a chuckle.

  Maybe Coop needed to learn humility or maybe the crew of the Arama needed to remember the importance of procedure.

  Or maybe it was just a random assignment. Those happened as well.

  All that really mattered was that Coop was the new guy, automatically transferred because he had done so well on his previous assignment. When he arrived on the Arama, he learned that he had supplanted a popular officer who had been transferred too, which would have made the crew irritated at him no matter what, but Captain Nisen had compounded his unpopularity right from the start.

  She had announced that Coop was on a captain’s trajectory and wouldn’t be with the ship that long. Her introduction to the officer core on the Arama made him sound like a grasping opportunist, rather than a man who wanted to work and learn how to command.

  Coop hadn’t understood why she had done that to him on the very first day. She had to know that the introduction would hurt his chances of working well with the crew. But she hadn’t seemed to care about crew relations.

  When he had asked her why she had informed the crew about his career trajectory in his introduction, trying as hard as he could to keep his tone neutral, she had squinted up at him, and said, Better they know now you’re a short-timer, and then had walked away.

  Her response had startled him. He had no idea if he was a short-timer or not. Officers on his career path often served for years on the same vessel.

  Besides, his projected tenure on this vessel shouldn’t have mattered. Crews were supposed to work together whether they knew each other well or not.

  For a week or two, he wondered if the captain had made that introduction in that manner because he was married, and she was warning off anyone interested in some kind of hook-up. He’d had captains do that before when he’d come onboard a ship, but usually during leisure hours, and always with a joking tone.

  He would have understood that admonition; some married officers had trouble maintaining their vows after months (or years) apart from their spouses.

  But Coop followed regulation and procedure assiduously, and that meant with his marriage as well. He and Mae had discussed their continual separations before they decided to marry, debating whether the marriage was necessary while they were both building their careers.

  Ultimately, they decided it was. The Fleet gave preferences to spouses who indicated the desire to start a family. If those spouses could share a ship or a mission, then they would. Mae was a linguist, and once Coop became captain, he could request her presence on any ship he commanded.

  He missed her more than he wanted to contemplate, particularly while he was on this ship. He couldn’t complain about his treatment here when he contacted her; he knew that there was a distinct possibility that his communications were monitored. He figured they could talk freely when they got together on leave.

  He wished he had leave now. He didn’t want to perform another foldspace grid search. The first two he had participated in had been cleanup efforts, mapping a part of foldspace with no real hope of finding the missing vessels.

  He had no idea if this mission would be the same, but given Heyek’s lack of interest in following procedure, he had a hunch she believed that the Voimakas was already lost.

  That defeatist attitude was the thing he hated the most about serving on the Arama. They were supposed to be a search-and-rescue vehicle. Instead, they were more of a cover-your-ass vehicle—at least that was how it seemed to him.

  Which was why he was personally reviewing every bit of information on the Voimakas that he could find.

  The Voimakas was a new DV-Class vessel with an upgraded anacapa drive. The anacapa drive had, in theory, some extra features. He had no idea what those were.

  He didn’t know much about the anacapa drive or about foldspace, although he figured he would learn while he was here.

  He had thought of it all as theory until he had joined the crew of the Arama. At that moment, foldspace ceased to be a tool that a starship sometimes used to travel long distances, and became an actual place where ships disappeared, never to be seen again.

  Like the Voimakas. It was one of three DV-Class vessels assigned to a new sector. They were to travel to that new sector to search for the best location for a new sector base.

  The Voimakas had gone into foldspace first. The other two ships had followed. When they had arrived in the new sector, they hadn’t seen the Voimakas. It should have arrived before them.

  But foldspace could be tricky. A minute in foldspace might actually be an hour in what the Fleet called “real space.” It wasn’t unusual for three ships to go into foldspace at roughly the same time and arrive at the new coordinates half an hour apart.

  The other two ships waited the requisite hour. Then two. And after that, they had to contact the Fleet to let them know that the Voimakas might be trapped in foldspace.

  At that point, the Fleet sent another ship to the coordinates where the Voimakas had gone into foldspace. Sometimes ships rebounded out of foldspace, unable to travel the distance across the fold.

  But the Voimakas wasn’t there either. It didn’t respond to hails. Seven hours in, the Fleet declared the Voimakas missing. If the Fleet waited longer than that to declare a ship missing, the Fleet would miss the best rescue window.

  That early declaration meant that the missing ships might appear just as the investigation got started. That had happened on Coop’s first mission with the Arama. The so-called missing ship hadn’t been missing at all. It had arrived at the coordinates on the other side of the sector ten hours after the ship had entered foldspace.

  When the news of the ship’s appearance hit, Kyle Rettig, one of the engineers who had been manning the bridge alongside Coop, had leaned over and said, Get used to this. We get sent back all the time. Sometimes I think all we do is criss-cross the sector on made-up assignments.

  Coop hadn’t known how to respond to that, so he hadn’t. But he hadn’t forgotten it. He had no idea if Rettig had been goading him or had been simply being kind, and Coop had no way to find out.

  But so far, Coop’s experience on the Arama had been arriving at coordinates, doing a grid search inside foldspace, and then giving up much too early, declaring the ship lost.

  This time he was determined that the Arama wouldn’t lose the Voimakas. If the ship still existed, the Arama would find it.

  The bridge doors hissed open, and Captain Nisen entered. She was a short, square woman with spiky blonde hair and a muscular frame. Her black-and-gray uniform was rumpled as if she had slept in it or stored it in a ball at the foot of her bed. Her boots were dull and stained.

  She certainly wasn’t setting an example for her crew—or rather, she was setting the wrong kind of example. Coop only gave her a quick glance, because if he looked longer, his disapproving expression would become obvious.

  “Brief me,” she said to Heyek as she passed.

  Heyek gave a succinct timeline of the notification of the missing Voimakas, and then let Nisen know they were less than thirty minutes from the coordinates where the ship was last seen.

  “And what’s the new guy doing?” Nisen asked, as if Coop wasn’t there—or couldn’t hear her.

  “He seems to think we should review all the information the Fleet sent,” Heyek said. “As if the four other ships aren’t doing the same thing.”

  Maybe they’re blowing off procedure too, Coop wanted to say but didn’t. Maybe your laziness in relying on your colleagues is what ensured that the other ships we searched for never got found.

  He bit the inside of his lower lip so that he wouldn’t speak up. His mouth tasted faintly of blood. He had bit down too hard.

  “Rookie moves,” Nisen said with a laugh. “But we’ll put it in the report anyway. The Fleet’ll think we actually f
ollowed procedure for once in our lives.”

  Coop filtered the information into one screen, so that he had an accurate map of the Voimakas’s last journey. He had the coordinates where the ship entered foldspace down to the most precise measurement possible.

  Nisen tripped over nothing as she reached the command circle, grabbing the edge of her chair and chuckling to herself. The sour smell of last night’s brandy mixed with old sweat rose off her like a cloud.

  Coop kept his head down, and started breathing through his mouth, making a mental note of the time. He would write her behavior into a mission report, which he would file when the Arama reached the next sector base.

  He would report that Nisen was still drunk from the night before. The senior staff had found a table in the Arama’s only bar, grabbed two bottles of whiskey, and proceeded to drink hard. When Nisen arrived, she had grabbed a bottle of brandy from the stash under one of the counters and had finished it all herself.

  Coop had sat at the edge of the group, nursing a single glass of whiskey while the rest of the senior staff polished off the bottles. Heyek hadn’t gotten drunk, as far as he could tell, but Nisen had become embarrassing. She grew louder with each glass, laughing so hard that at one point Coop thought she was going to laugh herself sick.

  She had staggered out of the bar around midnight, taking a second bottle of brandy with her back to the captain’s quarters.

  He must have had a disapproving expression on his face as he watched her go, because Heyek had said, “We drink here, Cooper. Nothing in regulations prevents it. So stop being so damned straight-laced and join the party.”

  After that, he hadn’t been able to leave. He stayed for a half hour before he felt comfortable enough to slip away. He hadn’t even finished his first glass of whiskey, let alone the five or six the rest of the senior staff had downed.

  He had gotten to his quarters, a tiny single room with a bed that folded out of the wall, and had laid awake for nearly an hour, wondering what he had gotten himself into.