Searching for the Fleet

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “Lost in research, I see,” she said.

  “I found the sector bases through E-2,” he said, unable to keep that news to himself for even a moment.

  “E-2,” she said. “Wow.” And then she frowned. “E-2. I saw something about E-2.”

  “In the runabout materials?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “When we were working on one of the DV-Class ships we brought back from the Boneyard. I was able to recover some information off it, although not as much as I wanted. I remembered the mention of Sector Base E-2, because I was hoping I could find the coordinates. I didn’t, of course. Good work.”

  “That’s it?” he asked. “You remember it because of a passing mention?”

  “And the frustration of not finding the coordinates,” she said. “It was more than a year ago. And I…”

  Her voice trailed off, and her eyes got a faraway look. Then she focused on him. Her expression was serious.

  “Coop, there was something about Sector Base E-2. Something weird and unusual.”

  “It was near a mountain range,” he said.

  “Most sector bases are near mountain ranges,” she said with just a bit of contempt. “There was something else. Some mystery or some nastiness or something. God, I can’t remember because I didn’t think it was important.”

  Her gaze was darting all over his screens as if they held the answer.

  “God, Coop, it was some kind of scandal.” She finally stopped looking around. Her eyes met his directly, and he felt the shock of her entire personality behind them.

  Her personality and an uncertainty that wasn’t normal for her.

  “What would a two-thousand-year-old scandal matter?” he asked.

  “It wouldn’t,” she said. “That was why I ignored it, more or less. But I think…”

  She stopped, shook her head, and then sighed.

  “Yash, just tell me,” he said.

  “I might be misremembering,” she said.

  “Noted,” he said, using his most formal tone.

  “But I think,” she said. “I think that the scandal…involved a runabout.”

  He glanced at her, allowing his skepticism to show on his face.

  “I know, I know,” she said. “That’s why I think I’m misremembering it. But there was something, a scandal with a small ship, and I remember thinking that was weird, and then not doing anything about it because we have so much other work.”

  He held his mug tightly, afraid he was going to drop it on the equipment. When had he become that guy, the one who set his food and drink on the same surface as his work? He used to ban liquids and food in the bridge, except during long, long missions, and then he required everyone to keep their beverages on a secondary surface, one far from the equipment.

  “It was memorable,” she said into his silence. “Whatever it was. And I know it was about Sector Base E-2.”

  “That base,” he said, “isn’t on the same trajectory as the other bases.”

  He set his mug on the floor, and then tapped one of the commands for the screen with the Fleet’s coordinates for the sector bases on it. That screen spun so that Yash could see it as well.

  “Wow,” she said. “Like a finger, broken at the tip. I wouldn’t have expected that.”

  Coop nodded. “And there’s no concurrent map in our current archives for the sectors from Sector Base Z to E-2.”

  “The numbering’s weird,” Yash said. “There’s no A-1 through Z-1?”

  “No,” Coop said. “That tripped me up at first as well. They went from A-Z to A-2 to Z-2, although if my math is right, they should be building L-2 right about now.”

  “If everything’s the same,” Yash said. And then she grinned, catching him by surprise. “And of course, it’s not the same, because I never would have allowed A-1 to disappear.”

  He smiled back at her. “You wouldn’t have lived long enough to plan it. Even if we had stayed in our own timeline.”

  She gave him a withering glance, but her eyes twinkled. “I would have insisted on living long enough. I would have planned it before I died.”

  He loved seeing her improved mood. They were moving forward on something that had stalled them for six years. It had lightened his mood as well.

  “Do you recall where you saw the mention of E-2?” he asked. “Which ship?”

  “I didn’t see any coordinates for that base or for any other sector base that we were looking for.” Her smile had faded. “I did search for that. Almost obsessively.”

  He wondered if the word “almost” had been added for his benefit.

  “Every ship we got,” he said, in acknowledgement. Because he had done that as well, probably not in the same depth that she had, though. He hadn’t seen a mention of E-2 or any sector base past V when he had gone through the records.

  She dipped her head toward him in acknowledgement. “Yeah,” she said. Then sighed. “That Boneyard—I keep looking at it, and thinking the answers we need are in there.”

  “There are thousands upon thousands of ships there,” he said.

  She nodded. “And I want to go into every one of them, access their control panels, download the information, and bring it back here.”

  “I want to bring all of the ships here,” he said before he could stop himself.

  Her gaze met his, sharp and penetrating. “You don’t want to go back to the Fleet.”

  “We can’t go back,” he said, letting the frustration color his words. “We had that discussion with Dix. It’s not possible.”

  She shook her head, waving a hand dismissively. “I said that wrong. You’re not interested in finding the modern Fleet. You want to build one.”

  He held her gaze, steady. “It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?” he said after a moment.

  “I thought you were building a fleet of ships for Boss,” Yash said.

  “Boss isn’t interested in anything military. She wants the Nine Planets Alliance protected. She wants the Empire to stay away. But she doesn’t care about anything besides diving and exploring ships. She’s not even that interested in the new technology that Lost Souls is marketing, except that it is making money to fund her dives.”

  He said all of that as dispassionately as he could. He had never talked with Boss about this dream—if dream were the correct word. He had helped her build what she wanted and he had helped her maintain the tenuous border with the Empire.

  But the little tastes he’d had of combat, the tastes he’d had of exploration, the tastes he’d had of the old days of the Fleet, leading the Ivoire into places it had never been before, those galvanized him, made him remember the man he had been, the man he was afraid he was losing.

  Yash was frowning at him. “Rebuilding would take so many people. Skilled people. We’re not going to find them in this place.”

  “I know,” he said quietly.

  She glanced at the sector base maps. “You think we’ll find the people we need at the abandoned sector bases? Coop, they’ve been abandoned for centuries. You remember Vaycehn.”

  The people there had completely forgotten that a sector base even existed below ground. They had lived with the consequences of malfunctioning anacapa drives for generations because they had no ability to fix the problem.

  “I haven’t forgotten,” he said quietly. “But every culture is different.”

  “You actually believe we’ll find some culture whose tech moved forward after the Fleet left? Not backward?”

  He shrugged one shoulder. “I haven’t thought that far ahead. I want some questions answered first.”

  “Like what happened to the Fleet,” Yash said. “You don’t want to go head-to-head with them if they still exist.”

  He didn’t know how to address that. He hadn’t given that any thought at all. The Fleet didn’t fight unless it had a reason to. He couldn’t imagine ever giving them any reason to.

  “I do want to know what happened to the Fleet,” he said slowly, as if acknowledging all of this for
the first time. “But I think it’s because I’m feeling the gap between our past and our present. I want to fill in those five thousand years. It’s more than idle curiosity. It’s a way to move forward, I guess. So that I’m not mired in the past.”

  She stared at him. “Moving forward,” she said quietly.

  He nodded.

  “We’ve been flailing,” she said.

  “We’ve been stuck in the present,” he said. “And we don’t even recognize the present we’re in.”

  “Huh,” she said softly. “I had never thought of it that way.”

  “I’ve been dancing around it for quite some time,” he said, “letting Lost Souls take the lead, point us in the direction we needed to go.”

  Letting Boss take the lead. Standing back because Coop hadn’t understood this place, this sector, this now. But he’d been here for years. He understood this little sector. He needed to move away from it, somehow. But in a way that made sense for him.

  “I’m hungry,” Yash said. “You hungry?”

  He shook his head. He had been hungry, but he wasn’t any longer. He needed to dig deeper in the work.

  “Just tell me which ship you found that information on,” he said.

  She smiled. “I can do better than that,” she said. “I can give you the information right now.”

  Eighteen

  Yash led Coop into a different side lab. At the moment, she had the luxury of too much space. She had spread her research into a variety of labs, one lab per ship. She had figured over time she would consolidate, or maybe bring someone else in to help her with the lab work.

  She hadn’t expected to bring in Coop.

  He looked around at the computers, the work consoles that resembled consoles on Fleet ships, and the equipment lining the walls.

  “I had no idea you had this much space,” he said after a minute, but she knew that wasn’t what he had originally been about to say.

  The side lab she had initially placed him in had been makeshift, the kind of lab that was all over Lost Souls. These side labs, toward the back of the gigantic space she had commandeered, deliberately contained Fleet-based equipment.

  If she couldn’t find it from the various ships that Lost Souls had taken for their parts, she had built it—primarily by herself, with some robotic help. She had also brought in a few people she trusted from the design labs, but never the same people for the same project.

  Coop glanced at her and raised his eyebrows. “Almost looks like a small area on a sector base.”

  “Starbase, actually,” Yash said.

  He nodded, then stepped farther inside. He ran his fingers along the edge of the nearest console, and shook his head.

  She slipped past him and went to the farthest console. She had pulled information off one of the derelict DV vessels. That ship had looked like it had been used by a variety of non-Fleet pilots, and she worried that all the information on that vessel had been corrupted.

  She also worried that it would harm anything she put it in contact with, unleashing some kind of virus or some kind of location beacon, or something that Lost Souls didn’t want.

  She hadn’t had the time to scrub everything she had brought into this lab. Which wasn’t entirely true. She hadn’t taken the time. It was easier to isolate the data than it was to carefully scrub it, making certain that she didn’t remove any of the Fleet tags as she did so.

  “Keep this information isolated,” she said to Coop. “This ship was one of those derelicts that we believe had squatters.”

  He nodded.

  “The database is pretty corrupted,” she added. “Someone had tried to recover the Fleet’s data. The captain had done their duty and deleted everything important, but not all that well. So what we have is what we have.”

  He took his place behind the console, with the frozen data stream visible.

  But he wasn’t looking at the information she had called up. Instead, he was looking at her with such concentration that it made her feel vaguely uncomfortable.

  “How much information have you squirreled away?” he asked.

  The term squirreled would have offended her, if it weren’t so very accurate.

  She caressed the console’s edge, keeping her head down. She didn’t want to see his reaction.

  “Every bit of data from every Fleet ship that Lost Souls has ever found or touched, I have somewhere in this lab.” She swallowed, then shrugged one shoulder. “If the only thing we found was a console or a ruined back section to a fighter, I pulled that too. I really hadn’t had the time to go through any of it. I was too busy training new recruits for Lost Souls and figuring out how to make their backward and stupid systems work with ours.”

  But that was different now. She didn’t say it because he was aware of the change.

  “And to answer the questions you haven’t asked yet,” she said, still running her fingertips along that very smooth edge, “I haven’t found any coordinates for anything useful. Most of what I found didn’t even have Sector Base V’s location. Mostly, I was finding ships that had last rendezvoused with Sector Base U.”

  She had found that curious too, and she half expected Coop to say so. He didn’t. He probably hadn’t thought it through.

  She had. Most of the ships that Lost Souls had found in the Empire or around this area of the Nine Planets Alliance had been older than the Ivoire, and abandoned here.

  She had assumed they drifted here from somewhere else, but she hadn’t done any mapping. She hadn’t had time.

  The lack of time was beginning to frustrate her more than she could say.

  She finally raised her head. He wasn’t watching her at all. He had already started to dig into the information on the console.

  She hadn’t seen him this engaged in a long time.

  “The information on Sector Base E-2 is scattered throughout,” she said. “I didn’t try to organize anything. But the largest file had to do with that scandal. There’s a lot of data in it, most of which I ignored.”

  He nodded, still not looking at her. He added, “Thank you,” in a tone that completely dismissed her.

  She smiled. She suddenly felt less alone in her searching—and in her focus.

  She hovered for a minute, wanting to see what he found. He straightened a little, and she knew the next step would be him turning to her, meeting her gaze, and repeating Thank you pointedly.

  For a moment, she felt like she had lost control of her lab. Then she smiled at herself. She had been wanting help for a long time. She had the best help she could possibly get.

  She was still tired, and still distractible—not that she expected to be anything else right now.

  She slipped out of the side lab, and that was when she realized she hadn’t told him about the strangeness she had found in that probe imagery.

  The strange imagery had been the reason she sought him out in the first place.

  She toyed with walking back in, letting him know what she had found, and then decided that was a bad idea.

  He was focused on Sector Base E-2 right now, and the lost information. Anything she told him might get set aside because of that focus.

  She would wait for a few hours, then come back with a bowl of that soup he had made for her. He would need to eat then.

  He had convinced her to take care of herself while she worked; she needed to remind him to do the same.

  She looked around the main lab, her fiefdoms still established, but neglected since this morning’s revelation.

  She was so overwhelmed by how much data she had found, how much she needed to do, and how it all tied in with all of the information that both she had Coop wanted, that she felt as if her narrow focus for a few hours today had jeopardized the work she’d been doing.

  “A little paranoid, aren’t we?” she muttered to herself.

  Paranoid, overwhelmed, frightened, and lost.

  She shook her head ever so slightly. She had felt lost ever since the Ivoire had arrived here. She just
hadn’t acknowledged it much—because, she was afraid, to do so might be the first step down a steep slide that would lead to Dix kind of crazy.

  Or she had felt that way until today.

  Now, she felt like she was moving forward again, by teeny tiny increments. Where she was moving forward to, however, she had no idea. And she had a hunch she wouldn’t know that for a long, long time.

  Nineteen

  Yash wasn’t in the side lab she had been working in all day. Coop peered through the door, saw imagery of something gray and black on two flat screens, saw telemetry frozen in place on two other screens, and an unmoving holographic image of Yash herself.

  He left the door slightly ajar, and began a search for her. He didn’t want to use the comm system she had installed here, just in case she was deep in her work, wherever that was. He would make the decision on whether or not to interrupt her when he found her.

  Turned out, there was no decision to make. He pushed open the break room door, only to see Yash sound asleep on the small table, an empty bowl and spoon to one side.

  The coffee was nearly empty. She had ground some beans, but she hadn’t put the grounds in a filter. A ladle remained in the soup, the bread was more than half gone, and Yash herself was making little snoring sounds.

  He needed to wake her, but the spicy garlic scent of the soup reminded him that he hadn’t eaten in hours.

  He grabbed a bowl, served himself, and then put a lid back on the soup. He didn’t make more coffee, although he did dump out the remains of the batch he had made more than eight hours before.

  The snoring stopped. He turned as he was getting himself a piece of bread to see Yash sitting up and running her hand through her hair. Her hair stood up in tufts. He finally understood why it looked spiky after she had been working for a while.

  “What the…?” she asked, not finishing the sentence.

  “I think you fell asleep.” He set his bowl in front of her and took her bowl away. He did not comment on how exhausted she had to be to fall asleep that fast.

  He got himself another bowl of soup, and sat across from her.