Searching for the Fleet

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  The only system she hadn’t worked on a lot was the anacapa drive. She had repaired it in foldspace, just like she had told Coop and Dix, but she hadn’t cycled it on much here. They had used it when Coop had taken the Ivoire to Starbase Kappa, and they had used it again on a few “fact-finding missions” as Coop called them, searching for the Fleet.

  But Yash had been tense each and every time. She used to trust the anacapa drive more than the rest of the crew did (which was to say, not that much), but she no longer trusted the anacapa drive at all.

  If she was being honest with herself, she was a bit afraid of it now. The change had been large for her as well.

  Still, on her monthly scans, she checked the anacapa drive’s controls to make sure they functioned. She also checked the drive to make sure no one had snuck onto the ship and tampered with the drive or no one had activated it remotely.

  Not that activating it remotely would have been easy, particularly since she did not have the drive in assistance-needed mode. But she worried about it.

  Since arriving here, in this time period, she worried about everything.

  She worked her way across control panels and through the bridge itself, checking each system just like she always did. There was an odd smell on the bridge, something coppery and slightly foul. She checked the environmental systems, and saw nothing amiss, although she didn’t check all of the records to see if someone had spilled something. She would do that if the smell lingered after she had moved through the bridge.

  The environmental system activated at different levels, depending on what was occurring on the bridge. Since nothing much had happened here in the last few weeks, the system had remained on low.

  She rounded the corner of one of the stationary control panels, and stopped. Boots jutted out from under the console.

  Boots, attached to legs, legs wearing an older dress uniform, black with silver piping.

  That foul, coppery scent was stronger here.

  She didn’t even have to look to know what she would find. A body. The question was: Whose?

  She moved to the side of the console, next to the large container protecting the anacapa drive.

  Dix was wrapped around the container, clutching it like a lifeline. Blood had pooled near his head, and one of the bone knives he had received as a gift after successfully negotiating an agreement on Colashen was on the floor, not too far from his neck.

  He had slit his own throat.

  His hands gripped the container, though, palm prints everywhere, palm prints in blood.

  He hadn’t tried to clutch the wound closed. He hadn’t sent for help. He had clearly intended to do this.

  His face was whitish gray. She had always heard the term “bloodless,” but she had never really seen it. Not like this.

  His eyes were open and dull, his mouth slack.

  He had done this deliberately. He had planned this, the bastard. He had known he was going to do this last night, and he had come to say goodbye.

  That little finger-wave, that half smile. It wasn’t because he was getting better. It was because he knew he was leaving.

  He was getting out.

  No. He was quitting.

  She clenched her fist. She had this insane desire to kick him, to take his blood-covered hands off her anacapa container, and fling them away. To fling him away.

  It took every ounce of control she had to remain still. The bastard. What did he think this would gain? This show he had put on. Had he expected the bridge to contact someone to help him, to prevent the actual death? If so, then why had he slit his own throat? He had cut the carotid artery, which was guaranteed to bleed him out in minutes, long before anyone could get to him.

  Although there was equipment on the bridge that could be used in an emergency. Tools that would seal wounds, that would actually fly to the side of the injured and bind the wound until it could be repaired.

  She glanced up, saw that nothing along the medical wall had been disturbed.

  The fact that the medical wall was untouched meant he had actively shut off the assist controls before he had slit his own throat.

  And he had called Coop cruel.

  She took a deep breath, willing herself calm.

  First she had to preserve the scene.

  She leaned over the control panel, and made sure the information that the bridge recorded as a matter of course—who arrived, who left, the footage from the security cameras, the changes in environmental controls, and the record of the changes she had made since she arrived here—were archived.

  She had brought a data strip and set it on the control panel. The strip copied data off the control panel, so she could remove that data from the Ivoire. The strip was unique to the Fleet, so that the control panel knew it could share the information. She would place that information in her second bedroom, with information she had taken off all of the Fleet ships that Lost Souls had found.

  Then she froze.

  Had Dix tampered with anything? More specifically, had he tampered with the anacapa drive?

  He had tampered with the anacapa on Starbase Kappa, in a fruitless attempt to get back to their time period. What had stopped him from doing so here?

  She swallowed hard, her heart hammering.

  Nothing had happened yet. If he had done something, it would have to be on a timer, as something that would happen after he died.

  She needed to contact Coop. Then she needed to look.

  Three

  “I need you on the Ivoire.” Yash sent through Coop’s private command channel. “I need you on the bridge stat.”

  She hoped he was still hooked into the comm. So many members of the Ivoire crew had decided to go untethered—as they called it—removing the tiny communications devices that they normally wore when they left the ship.

  “Problem?” Coop asked in that tone that told her he didn’t want to be interrupted.

  “I’m not saying any more,” she said. “Get here. Now.”

  He was changing. The Coop of old would have been a lot more professional, less annoyed.

  He probably thought there were no problems on the Ivoire that couldn’t wait.

  He was wrong.

  She walked around the console, looking at the anacapa controls. It didn’t seem like anyone had touched them, but she had to be sure.

  She wiped her sweaty palms on the back of her shirt, then took a deep breath.

  Before she did, she activated a voice log, giving the date in both the timeline of Lost Souls and also in the ship’s time, as if the Ivoire had never left the past.

  Then she said, “I am making this recording in case I find something else awry. For the record, I have found the body of former First Officer Dix Pompiono…” and she paused.

  Coop hadn’t officially removed Dix from duty. Coop had been following procedure, more or less. He had wanted to document everything that Dix had done wrong, and the medical attention Dix had probably needed.

  If Coop had demoted Dix, Dix wouldn’t have been able to access the bridge.

  If only.

  “Dix killed himself. At least as far as I can tell without touching or moving him. The medical team will have to confirm. The reasons I have activated a voice log are twofold: I am alone on the bridge, and will remain so for several minutes more as I wait for Captain Cooper to join me.”

  She let out a breath. She sounded calmer than she was. Not that she was panicked. The fury had her shaking. Goddamn it, Dix.

  “The second reason is that I found Dix with his arms wrapped around the anacapa container. Dix had lost control of himself on a mission to Starbase Kappa five months ago, and had tampered with an active, if dying, anacapa drive. I am concerned he has done something similar here.”

  But why would he? He had planned to kill himself. And he wasn’t so far gone that he would believe that the anacapa needed blood to activate.

  She smiled grimly at the very thought.

  “I do not know what I’m going to find. I ha
ve already set the bridge controls to record everything occurring on the bridge at full levels, but I still need to make sure that the record is clear. Which is why I’m going to narrate my investigation. I will not go into depth unless I need to.”

  She didn’t want to go into depth, to think about the proper wording of every phrase. Not yet anyway.

  “First,” she said. “I need to check the anacapa controls.”

  She was not going to explain why. Nor was she going to mention how her right hand shook as it hovered over the section of the console that activated the controls quickly.

  Sometimes she saw that section of the console in her nightmares, her fingers inputting codes, then her palm, slamming against the console, giving it permission to execute the commands she had just placed—commands that had sent the Ivoire into foldspace.

  Commands that had led to the ship ending up here.

  It didn’t matter to her nightmares that at the very same moment, Quurzod ships had fired on the Ivoire, causing serious damage. It didn’t matter to her, even though she knew that something in the Quurzod ships’ weapons had interacted with the anacapa drive. The drive had been damaged: she had seen that in foldspace, and she had felt it that day.

  She hadn’t shut off the drive.

  She probably should have shut off the drive.

  Yash slowly brought her hand down on the smooth surface. The controls rose, responding to her touch.

  The anacapa controls only worked for select personnel. She had no idea if Coop had restricted Dix’s use of the anacapa drive. She would have. And she should have suggested it when they came back from Starbase Kappa, but she had been too busy, thinking about that mission. Too busy thinking about all the implications for their new future.

  The controls looked normal.

  Yash let out a small breath, then reminded herself that it didn’t matter how the controls looked. They had looked normal after they had resumed their cycle, that day the anacapa drive had malfunctioned.

  Still, she verbally noted that the controls seemed fine, and then discussed how she was going to dig further, to make sure that what seemed fine actually was fine.

  First, she had the system show her any unusual activity, no matter how small.

  What she found wasn’t small at all. Dix had tried to access the anacapa drive, but he hadn’t been able to.

  Coop had done exactly what he should have done. He had removed Dix’s access to sensitive systems.

  Yash nodded as she saw that. Coop had figured Dix would test to see if he could still access the bridge, but had gambled that Dix wouldn’t try to access sensitive systems—important systems.

  Yash almost looked to see if Dix had tried to access other systems, but made herself stop. She needed to investigate the anacapa drive first. That was the one Dix was most focused on.

  At Starbase Kappa, Dix thought he could recreate the circumstances that had sent the Ivoire into foldspace, and then five thousand years in the future. Dix had believed he could use that recreation to reverse what had happened.

  Yash still had no idea how Dix believed that would happen. To her, that kind of thinking was as filled with magic as trying to active the anacapa drive using blood.

  But Dix hadn’t been in his right mind, no matter how he had seemed in the bar the night before.

  The first hurdle crossed. Dix hadn’t tampered with the anacapa drive controls. But she needed to examine more. Because of who Dix was, and how he had become First Officer.

  Coop had always trusted Yash more than he trusted Dix. Coop had told Yash that more than once. But she had never been on the captain track as first officers usually were. She had been really honest with Coop from the beginning: she didn’t want to become a captain. She loved the engineering work. She liked design and tech as well.

  Being captain, being in charge of all these people, would have gotten in the way, even if she had been good at working with people, which she was not.

  So she had been Coop’s advisor on choosing among his first officer candidates. Coop had had reservations about all three candidates. Dix had been the most well rounded of all of them. He had known DV-Class vessels better than anyone. People liked him and, more importantly, they listened to him.

  And, Coop had said—Yash had said—Dix had an uncanny ability to find the holes in a system. If there was a back door, even if it was unintentional—especially if it was unintentional—Dix would find it.

  Yash was looking now to see if he had found anything here.

  The unusual activity she had called up should have shown something like that, if he had done so. It would also have shown if he had tried and failed.

  And he had.

  He had spent hours after leaving Coop and Yash, searching for something, a way into the anacapa drive. But Dix hadn’t found it, at least not from the console.

  She looked down at Dix again, his hands on that container. The console should have showed if someone breached the container. Coop should have been notified if someone had.

  But Dix, with that ability to find ways around systems, might have shut off the notifications.

  She crouched, looked around the blood at the container’s edges and the seals. They seemed normal, as normal as anything with blood smeared on it could be.

  She couldn’t entirely tell though. Not with a quick glance.

  She stood up. She didn’t want to open the container, not without Coop here. Not without help.

  Dix could have set a trap. He might have set up something that would ensure the entire ship would blow up if she tried to open the container.

  Her mouth had gone dry. She couldn’t believe she was thinking of this, that she was mentally accusing Dix—someone she had known for years—of doing something so nasty.

  Of course, this suicide was nasty, and she hadn’t expected him to do that either.

  But setting the Ivoire’s anacapa to blow, that required a special kind of nasty. Had he been crazy enough to believe that if he didn’t want to live in this new time period, no one else did either?

  And how would she know if that was the case without opening that container?

  After voicing her suspicions for the recording she was making, she turned back to the console and made herself look at the notification system. She was looking to see if he had shut off the notifications that would have brought Coop here—or her, or someone else—if anyone touched the anacapa drive.

  As far as she could tell, Dix hadn’t touched the notification system. He hadn’t touched any of it.

  But did he need to? Would the system have notified her or Coop if Dix had touched it? Because he might have been authorized to do so.

  Had she been careless enough to make it easy for the first officer to touch an anacapa drive, particularly a first officer like Dix, a man who had no real knowledge of the drives? She didn’t know, and didn’t remember what she had done. There were standard settings which allowed bridge officers access, and those were supposed to be altered once the main bridge crew was established.

  The Ivoire’s main bridge crew—the crew that had been on the bridge that horrid day over a year ago—had been together for years. She didn’t remember everything she had done six months ago; she certainly couldn’t remember what she had done more than a decade before.

  She thought about accessing the notification records to see what she had set up, but she wasn’t sure that was worthwhile. She usually did things properly. Should she trust in what she had usually done?

  And did it matter?

  Because Dix might have hidden what he touched.

  Dix did have the ability to do something like that.

  She closed her eyes. With all those paranoid thoughts, she was becoming as crazy as Dix. He was turning her into a crazy woman and he was dead.

  One step at a time. Or, as Coop had said last night, one problem at a time.

  Yash opened her eyes. She needed to find out exactly what Dix had accessed. As she did that, she needed to assess what that access mea
nt. Then she would have to see if he had executed some inexplicable activity or performed activity he had tried to erase.

  She didn’t look at Dix’s body. She couldn’t. Not anymore.

  She couldn’t think about him. She decided to approach this like a math problem rather than an emotional problem. Tiny discovery after tiny discovery, keeping track in her head, making sure she understood whether or not the things she discovered could interact with each other in such a way as to make something new.

  “I’m here. Now what?”

  She jumped, her heart pounding. Coop had spoken from behind her. She had been expecting him, but she had gotten so deep into the work she hadn’t thought of him in—however long.

  She raised her head, turning until she could see him.

  Coop stood near the entrance to the bridge. His hair was mussed as if he had been sleeping. He wore the same kind of black T-shirt and pants he had worn the night before, and she found herself wondering if he had even gone back to his rooms.

  Not her business. What he did in his own time was personal. She didn’t have a right to know.

  He was scanning the entire bridge, probably seeing the empty work stations and the unattended captain’s chair just like she had. He would note the changes since the last time he had been here, including the shuttered screens. He probably hadn’t noticed the faint scent of death, though, since he stood just outside the entrance. He wasn’t stepping into the bridge just in case the problem was internal and going inside would cause even more problems.

  Procedure.

  That calmed her. His presence calmed her.

  She wasn’t working this alone anymore.

  She held up one finger, then explained her thinking in the recording, just so that she would remember.

  Coop frowned as she spoke. She didn’t mention Dix as she talked to the recording, didn’t mention anything except her findings and her supposition on the ways those findings might work together.