Searching for the Fleet

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  The boxes were almost the size of Yash’s bed back on the Brazza. They stood as high as her knees and had no obvious locks or control mechanisms.

  Beside each one was a rock. The rocks were different sizes, but none was smaller than Yash’s head. They had pits and grooves, rather like the rocks in the crater outside, but they were an odd gray color.

  If someone asked her what that color was, she would have said that it was the color of death.

  She shivered involuntarily, then looked down. The hair on her arms had risen. She would have said it had risen with the cold, but that wasn’t accurate. That reaction on her skin was caused by the energy field.

  Professor Bellier waited until all nine students crowded into the room. Five women, four men. No one moved away from the door because they had no idea where to stand.

  Yash didn’t like being clustered with the group, so she moved off to one side, nearest the right wall. It was colder over here, if that was possible, but the energy field didn’t feel quite as strong.

  She licked her lips, realizing for the first time that near the door, even her teeth had vibrated slightly with the field. She had, at first, thought the inside of her mouth felt strange because she had been nervously grinding her teeth. But that wasn’t true.

  Something in that field was vibrating her bones.

  Bellier’s gaze raked over Yash. Yash’s cheeks heated. Was she supposed to stick with the group? Was she supposed to cluster like a frightened child, waiting for an invitation to go deeper into the room?

  She didn’t ask, though, just met Bellier’s gaze until it slid away from her.

  “Welcome to the hands-on anacapa lab,” Bellier said as the door closed behind the group. “We will be spending the next week or two here, provided all of you make it through the training. You will learn how the drives work, how to repair them on a minimal level, and how to set one up—again, at the beginning level.”

  Yash felt her heart leap. She wanted to do work like this. She loved getting her hands on equipment.

  “If you make so much as one error,” Bellier said, “you could compromise your drive. If you make a large enough error, you could send us all into foldspace, unprotected. If you end up doing that, you will probably activate some of the other drives, and that will send this entire lab into foldspace, along with the runabout attached to the surface of the lab. And before someone asks the most stupid question of all—has this happened?—it has happened, just not in my class. I had two predecessors on this part of the job. One survived.”

  Her expression wasn’t as grim as Yash would have thought it needed to be, given what she was saying. Sometimes, Yash had a sense that the professors in hands-on engineering school liked to scare the students with apocryphal tales of disaster.

  “Now,” Bellier said, “you will each take a place near one of the containers. That will be your workspace for the duration of this lesson.”

  The students glanced at each other. It seemed to be an involuntary reaction, waiting to see who would go first. Yash did it as well, then realized she was doing so, and barely prevented herself from rolling her eyes at her own behavior.

  She left the side of the room, walked between the boxes and the windows, which took her directly in front of Professor Bellier.

  Up close the rocks looked less like rocks and more like something made from nanobits and then destroyed by time and decay. The rocks weren’t black, which they would have been if they were made of new nanobits, but the rocks had that gray color that nanobits sometimes got when they were unbonding from each other.

  Some of the rocks had gold and white threads running through them, but again, on a more uniform level than one might find outside, on a moon, for example.

  The largest rock that she had seen was only two feet away from Bellier. But if they were going to learn how to work on these drives, and the rocks were somehow important, then Yash wanted one large enough to enable her to see everything clearly.

  She knew she needed to face the professor, so Yash threaded her way between the large rock and one of the containers, stopping behind the rock, and standing very still, her hands clasped behind her back.

  Professor Bellier gave her a hooded look, then nodded ever so slightly. Yash had a sense that Bellier had expected her to go first.

  Yash’s movements freed the other students. They still milled just a bit, then started toward the containers, most moving in a clump.

  No one seemed to want to walk past Yash to take the containers beyond her, but two of the women and one man ended up with no choice. They walked behind her, making her just a bit nervous. The woman who led that small group took the container as far from Yash as possible. The man took the next container, leaving the container beside Yash open.

  She frowned, then realized the container on the other side was open as well. No one took that. The remaining woman took the container to Yash’s left.

  No one stood directly in front of Professor Bellier. Who had apparently lied in the other room. She had said she could only take nine, but there were ten rocks and containers. Was she going to use one? She hadn’t said so.

  Or had she decided that only nine students were worthy?

  Yash decided that conundrum had nothing to do with her. She would simply take each moment as it came.

  “That was a bit more work than expected,” Professor Bellier said drily. “You’ll need to make decisions quickly if you ever want to work on a DV-Class ship. Zarlengo is the only one who seems to have confidence in her abilities. Or perhaps she is the only one of you who is not scared of me.”

  Oh, Yash was scared of Bellier. Not of Bellier as a person so much as scared of what Bellier could do to her and her dreams. Perhaps that was what tripped up the other students as well.

  “All right,” Bellier said. “Before you, you see an inactive anacapa drive. These drives are old and have been decommissioned. When you are working in a normal anacapa lab, you will be working with newly developed drives. They’re much more dangerous than the older drives. We have tested these drives and believe they can do no harm.”

  “Believe,” muttered Flavia Latour, the woman beside Yash. Latour was tall and thin, red-haired, with skin so pale it seemed translucent.

  “Yes, Latour,” Bellier said. “‘Believe.’ You will learn that with the anacapa drives, we cannot be certain of everything.”

  “That’s why they’re dangerous to work with,” said Lionel Crenshaw. He stood three containers down from Yash. She was glad he hadn’t chosen to stand beside her. She had found him to be a hard-edged know-it-all who loved to curry favor from the professor.

  Which, apparently, he was trying to do now.

  “Are you teaching this class, Crenshaw?” Bellier snapped.

  He straightened, not that it did much good. He was one of the shortest students in the class, with just a bit of extra weight around his waist. Yash always wondered how someone so clearly inactive had managed to qualify for a program that had more physical requirements than most.

  But he was part of the Crenshaw family, which had at least one Admiral in its ranks. He had probably gotten this far because no one wanted to say no to him.

  “No, ma’am,” Crenshaw said to Bellier. “I’m sorry, ma’am.”

  “If you were sorry, Crenshaw,” Bellier said, “you would stop offering unsubstantiated opinions.”

  He nodded, almost desperately, but Bellier didn’t seem to notice that. She scanned the rest of the class, making eye contact with each and every one of them as if she were making certain that they were all paying attention.

  “The anacapa drive is dangerous because of the amount of energy it contains,” she said, “not because we do not know everything about them. There is much we don’t know about many things that we use almost daily, and yet we use them with great enthusiasm and do not think about what we don’t know.”

  Yash resisted the urge to glance at Crenshaw. He had annoyed her from the day they had started the class together, and she lo
ved hearing him get set-down. So much so that she wanted to see him react.

  “The fear of the anacapa drive,” Bellier said, “comes because of its power. The myth of the anacapa drive is that it is unknowable. The truth of the anacapa drive is that we are still learning—even after millennia of use—its capacity. We have only used small parts of this drive to fuel our trips into foldspace. There is much more that the drive can do, if we can figure out how to harness its power.”

  Yash had never heard Bellier sound passionate about anything before. Until this point, being in Bellier’s class had been a marathon of dry lectures and even drier information, none of it presented in an entertaining manner, the way information in the other classes in the section had been.

  Sometimes Yash had wondered if Bellier had done that on purpose, trying to weed out the members of the class by boring them to death.

  But Yash never asked. She just endured.

  “No two drives are the same,” Bellier said. “They have similar capacities and similar structures, but they differ. Some of my colleagues believe anacapa drives are living things, rather than simple tools that enable the Fleet to travel as well as it does. I do not believe that. I believe that whenever you try to harness power this great, you will find variations in it, and that is what we have experienced so far. Variation.”

  Yash took in the information, and mentally set her questions aside. She knew better than to interrupt Bellier’s flow, no matter how many questions the lecture raised.

  “The drive before you is your drive,” Bellier said. “You will learn all of its components. Then you will learn how to activate it. You will learn how to attach that drive to a small system, and if any of you make it past those lessons, you will learn how to install that drive into a replica of a DV-Class ship. Now, are there questions?”

  No one moved. Yash had learned through the course of the class to only ask questions she felt might not be answered otherwise.

  And Yash had one of those.

  “Um, Professor?” Yash said, wishing she didn’t sound as uncertain as she felt. “I had always heard that it was dangerous to have more than one anacapa drive in the same area. In fact, one of my other professors had said the reason small ships did not have anacapa drives was so that the drives wouldn’t interact or interfere with the drive on board a DV-Class vessel.”

  “And who is the idiot who told you that?” Bellier asked.

  Yash hadn’t meant to call out one of her professors. She had simply discovered that the best way to approach Bellier was to have some kind of source to back up an assumption.

  “Professor Temin,” said Crenshaw, clearly trying to suck up to Bellier all over again.

  Bellier sighed. “Some people truly do not belong in this department,” she said. She didn’t even look at Crenshaw. Instead, her gaze was still on Yash.

  Yash did not move, even though she felt the urge to swallow hard. Nerves. None of her other professors intimidated her the way that Bellier did.

  “Let me unpack your questions,” Bellier said, surprisingly with no contempt at all. “First, it is dangerous to have many anacapa drives in the same area, but it is also inevitable. If it were dangerous to have too many anacapa drives in the same area, then the anacapa research stations inside the sector bases would not be bundled close together. Sometimes there are as many as fifty anacapa drives, in one form or another of activation, in less space than we have right now.”

  Yash nodded. She had known that, and yet hadn’t put it together with the admonitions she had heard. Clearly, Professor Bellier was right; there was a lot of misinformation about anacapa drives floating around the Fleet.

  “Which brings us to Professor Temin’s stupidity,” Professor Bellier said. “There are many reasons we do not have anacapa drives in small ships. The main reason, and the only one that needs to concern you at the moment, is because the ships need a smaller version of the drive, and we have not yet found one that meets all of our very rigorous standards.”

  She glanced at Crenshaw, and the look didn’t seem friendly.

  “Even if we did,” Bellier said, “there are many other problems with sending small ships into foldspace. Problems outside of our purview here. However, I suggest you ask Professor Temin about the potential problems of small ships in foldspace and see what kind of idiotic answer he gives you.”

  Then Bellier returned her gaze to Yash. Yash felt her cheeks heat, even though she had willed them not to.

  “To address the underlying question behind your artful and somewhat manipulative initial question,” Bellier said. “Is it dangerous to be in this room with all of the anacapa drives? Of course. And it is more dangerous than you realize. There are not simply ten inactive drives in this small space. There are ten active drives in the containers.”

  She gave them all a slight smile.

  “And you thought you were nervous before,” she said. Then she laughed.

  Yash did not like the sound of that laugh at all. Neither, it seemed, did her fellow students. They shifted slightly, almost as if the laugh had shoved them somehow.

  “On top of each container,” Bellier said, “you will find a pair of gloves. Put them on, then adjust them to your hand-size. You will need those to work with the drives.”

  Yash hadn’t seen gloves on top of the containers, but she had been preoccupied with what she had thought were rocks, and which had turned out to be anacapa drives. Inactive ones, but still.

  She had seen a few of the drives during her studies, but all had been active, all pulsed with life and color. They had seemed so much smoother than these drives, which were pitted and dark.

  She walked to her container. The other students followed suit, and she felt a surge of annoyance. She was not their leader. She was learning just like they were. Didn’t they have any self-confidence? Didn’t they have initiative?

  She scanned the top of the container, and still didn’t see the gloves. Then she realized they were recessed inside a small depression on the top of the container.

  Before she grabbed them, though, she paused: If Bellier wanted them to have gloves, why hadn’t she told them to bring their normal pair? Either these gloves were special or it was common to keep an additional pair on or near one of the containers.

  Yash would reserve judgment about whether the gloves were special until she touched them.

  But she approached the gloves with caution, examining the depression before touching it.

  Then something snapped, and Latour cried out in pain.

  Startled, Yash looked over at Latour. Latour was standing beside her container, cradling her right hand in her left, tears in her eyes. Blood dripped down her right arm.

  “Looks like you need medical attention, Latour.” Bellier didn’t quite sound the same as she usually did. Nor did she sound concerned. She almost sounded pleased, which annoyed Yash. “There is a door to your left. It will take you to the infirmary. We have medical technicians standing by.”

  Latour sniffed. “I’m fine. It’s just a cut. I can work.”

  “You probably could,” Bellier said. “But you won’t. You did not examine the area around the gloves before grabbing your pair. You were reckless, and we can’t have recklessness around an anacapa drive.”

  “I-I didn’t mean it,” Latour said. “You said to get the gloves, and I was getting the gloves. I was completing the instructions as you gave them.”

  Yash glanced at Bellier. Bellier’s eyes had narrowed.

  “So,” Bellier said, “you’re saying it’s my fault that you got injured.”

  “No, I mean, the instructions could have been clearer,” Latour said. She glanced at Yash, as if expecting Yash—of all people—to back her up. “You were grabbing for the gloves, right?”

  Yash didn’t answer her. No one answered her.

  “You’re dismissed, Latour,” Bellier said.

  “I can come back though, right?” Latour asked. She sounded desperate. Yash didn’t blame her. If Yash had been in h
er situation, Yash would have felt desperate.

  Right now, though, Yash was working very hard at keeping her own emotions in check.

  She didn’t want to feel desperate before she needed to.

  “No, you may not come back,” Bellier said. She stared at Latour.

  Latour still clutched her injured hand, pivoting slightly, looking at the other students as if she thought they would defend her.

  “You’re getting blood on the floor, Latour,” Bellier said. “You need to tend to that wound.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Latour said. Apparently she associated leaving with failure, not the ill-considered grab for the glove.

  “I don’t care,” Bellier said. “You have failed my class. Get out.”

  Latour made a small sound, almost like a sob, and then fled to that rear door. It slid open. She paused in front of it as if hoping someone would call her back.

  No one did. No one was looking at her at all, except Yash and Bellier.

  Then a shadow appeared on the edge of the door as someone arrived there. There was a murmur of voices, something Yash couldn’t hear clearly.

  Latour either stepped through or was yanked through that door and then it swished closed.

  A small trail of blood led from the door back to the now abandoned container. Yash’s gaze followed it, then returned to Bellier, whose lips thinned.

  “Have I told you all to stop working?” Her voice snapped like that container had snapped at Latour. “I have told you in the past that work on an anacapa drive requires complete focus. None of you has focused on the work before you. Not a single one.”

  Yash’s heart started pounding. Could she lose her opportunity because she had watched Latour lose hers? Yash would never forgive herself if that were the case.

  She crouched beside the case and looked at the depression where the gloves were, hoping that by immediately getting to work, Bellier would forget Yash’s lack of focus.