Searching for the Fleet

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  But even that hope showed a lack of focus. Yash made herself take a deep breath and shut out everything around her—the cold, the strange energy in the room, the rustle of the other students—and examine the container before her.

  The top appeared smooth until she looked closely. There were several depressions, each holding different items, each difficult to see without knowing they were there.

  She had never seen a container like this one before, and she had examined the anacapa containers on the bridges of various DV-Class vessels. They seemed a lot simpler than the container before her.

  Simpler, and smaller. The containers on the DV-Class ships were about half the size of this container. The anacapa drive before her, the dead one, would have easily fit in something smaller.

  So one of the many questions before her was why was this container so much larger?

  She didn’t touch it, not yet. She looked at it, took a deep breath through her nose to see if the container had an odor (it didn’t that she could find), and guessed that it was all made of nanobits. The shiny black surface certainly suggested it, but she’d have to touch to find out.

  She wasn’t ready to touch.

  The gloves were in the depression in the exact center of the container’s top. The other depressions—five of them in all—were scattered across the surface.

  Some were larger than the glove depression, some were deeper, and one looked less like a depression and more like a button, waiting to be pushed.

  She wasn’t going to do that either.

  The depressions were odd in and of themselves. They looked like drawers built into the container—drawers without lids.

  Or did they have lids? Clear lids? Or maybe some of the lids had recessed into the container and other lids had not.

  A snap resounded so loudly in the quiet of the room that Yash jumped. Someone whimpered. A male whimper.

  “You know what to do, Hettinger,” Bellier said. “At least, now you do, since Latour showed you the way. And for your future career, do pay attention to what others do wrong so that you don’t have to replicate their unfortunate actions.”

  The whimpering continued, but Hettinger, at least, did not protest his expulsion. His shoes squeaked as he walked behind Yash, who didn’t even spare him a look.

  She did hear the second door open and swish closed. Then she mentally reminded herself to focus. Focus was gravely important.

  Lids. The depressions had to have lids, maybe even a series of them.

  The depression closest to her appeared to contain an array of very small tools, barely the size of her little finger, none of which she recognized. A depression a bit father away occasionally blinked red, but not warning red. More like something was reminding anyone who looked at it that something else had been activated.

  The button was the most tempting, but it was far enough away from her that she wasn’t even going to give it much thought, not until she was ready.

  “If you are going to spend the next hour staring at the damn gloves,” Bellier said, “then I will flunk all of you. Get the gloves. We need to start.”

  She was egging them on, forcing them to move faster than they normally would have, given the injuries that had happened to two of their number.

  Injuries to the hand. Latour’s injury had been to her right hand, the hand she reached with. It had looked like a cut, something that had sliced the skin quickly and efficiently, but with a snap.

  Yash let out a small breath. She slid her hand into her right pocket and pulled out the multipurpose tool. She did not look up to see if Bellier approved or disapproved.

  Then Yash flipped through the tiny controls on the side of the slender tool until she found the penlight. She flicked it on and pointed it at the edges of the depression around the gloves.

  The gloves themselves glowed in the light, revealing dozens of reflectors built into the surface. Yash ignored that (although she did find it fascinating). Instead she looked for the edges of a fast-closing lid, and found it—a third lip between two edges.

  But she didn’t touch that either. Clearly the lid was on a spring of some kind and it caught anything in its path.

  If she were going for the gloves without paying attention to any of the warnings she had already received, she would have reached into the middle of the depression without touching the edges, gripped the gloves in her hand, and pulled them free.

  So, instead of doing that, she peered at the sides of that depression right at the center where her hand would have gone in.

  And recognized two tiny motion detectors, so small she wouldn’t have been able to see them if she hadn’t been looking. They reflected the light from her multipurpose tool.

  Now, she had to find a way to deactivate the motion sensors. Or to activate them and find a way to open the lid.

  There had to be easily accessible controls nearby.

  She ran the light around the outside edge of the depression and saw nothing. Then she leaned back, examined the side of the container, and saw a very thin line that indicated a small door. The door was also on a spring, the kind that sprang open with nothing more than a push.

  She wasn’t sure she dared touch it. But she also felt the ticking clock.

  “Shit,” one of the women said. “Shit, shit, shit, shit.”

  Yash wondered what went wrong this time. She wasn’t going to look, even though Bellier had urged them all to learn from each other’s mistakes.

  “Thank you for the commentary, Darlington,” Bellier said, her voice tinged with amusement. “Continue your work without the scatology, if you please.”

  “Continue?” Darlington sounded as surprised as Yash felt. Whatever Darlington had done, it hadn’t risen to the level of error that Latour’s work had.

  “Continue,” Bellier said, as if she were a queen granting an audience.

  “Oh, wow. Good,” Darlington said, and then said nothing else.

  Yash almost hazarded a look, but stopped herself just in time. Darlington had done something, and Bellier had approved of the fact that Darlington had taken action, at least.

  Yash took a deep breath. She needed to do the same. What would she do if she wasn’t so damn terrified of losing her position with Bellier?

  Yash turned the multipurpose tool around to its rounded edge, the one that usually belonged in her hand. She elongated the tool’s body, swallowed hard, hoped her nervousness didn’t show, and then pressed the rounded edge against the middle of that side door.

  The door sprang open, revealing a control panel.

  Nothing else happened. No snapping lids, no unexpected trap. Just the blinking of a standard panel that would allow her to handle the container’s controls.

  Still, she took an extra minute with the interior of the panel, making certain that she saw every part of those controls before she touched them.

  Then she put the multipurpose tool back in her pocket. Her heart was pounding and her hands were sweating. She rubbed them on her shirt, then found the controls that handled the motion detectors. She shut those off.

  She still wasn’t going to reach inside the depression. Someone had set this container on the highest level of security so that any touch to one of the systems marked critical would get some kind of reaction.

  Gloves in a little storage depression weren’t a critical system—normally. But clearly this was some kind of evil test that Bellier had designed.

  Yash was not going to assume that anything about this exercise was normal.

  She shut off the security protocols—all of them—and then closed the lids of the small storage depressions, hoping that would reset to standard protocols. She did not do an entire reboot of the container because she had no idea what was inside.

  Someone made a small sound of distress.

  “A near miss, Crenshaw. Perhaps if you paid attention to your own container instead of peering at all the others, you would get this one small task done.” Bellier’s voice held a lot of contempt.

 
Yash swallowed, hard, trying to shut out all of the distraction.

  “If no one has those gloves on in five minutes,” Bellier said, “then we will forgo this exercise, and I will leave here with high hopes for next year’s class.”

  She’s trying to rattle you, Yash thought, deliberately forming the words in her mind to keep herself calm.

  She’s succeeding, her brain shoved back at her somewhat defiantly, making her smile.

  Then Yash let the smile fade. But it had helped. It had calmed her a great deal.

  She rose up slightly, and looked at the surface of the container. It looked smooth, as if there were no storage sections on that surface at all.

  To her right, she could see Bellier staring at her. And if Yash peered ever so slightly over the container at the other containers that the remaining students on that side of the room were working on, she saw all of them still had the glove depression open.

  No one, as far as she could tell, had found the controls.

  She focused on her own work again.

  It was time to take a risk.

  Twenty-Three

  Yash let out a small breath, her heart pounding. So far, two students had failed, and the class had just started the first exercise.

  She had wanted hands-on. She hadn’t expected to be leaning in front of a coffin-size container, a dead anacapa drive at her feet, with Bellier watching closely, hoping everyone would fail.

  Yash ran her fingers along the top of the container. She felt tiny differences in the surface where the storage lids had closed, but those differences were not visible to the naked eye.

  The top of the container was surprisingly warm, which made her heart rate increase. She wasn’t sure what she would find inside if the exterior was that warm.

  But she wasn’t to that stage yet. She just needed the damn gloves.

  She swallowed compulsively again, wished she had some water to get rid of the sour taste in her mouth, and then squatted down again, peering at the controls.

  They claimed that everything inside the container was normal, including, she assumed, the gloves.

  The controls also claimed that the advanced security measures had been shut down.

  She was going to have to trust that, going to have to believe that no other traps awaited her.

  She used the tip of her right index finger to activate the control that opened the storage lid over the gloves. The lid slid back.

  She removed the multipurpose tool from her pants, turned on its penlight function, and peered at the motion sensors.

  They were dark. So were some of the other chips nearby, chips she hadn’t even seen when she had looked the first time.

  She shivered. So if she had deactivated the motion sensors but left the other security measures on, she would have tripped some other kind of alarm.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Bellier shift slightly. Bellier was still watching her, maybe even watching more closely than she had a few moments ago.

  Yash tried to ignore that. She had to wipe her sweating palms on her pants again. Even though the room was cold, she wasn’t anymore. A thin layer of sweat covered her everywhere.

  She wasn’t sure she had been this nervous since she had gone through her initial testing for engineering school.

  She started to reach for the gloves, stopped, wiped off her sweaty palm again, and cursed silently. If she failed, she failed.

  If she failed now, then she deserved to fail.

  Yash eased her hand over the top of the container until her palm was above the gloves themselves. Then she lowered her hand, expecting something to snap closed or some alarm to go off.

  But nothing happened. Her hand sank into the depression and brushed the surface of the gloves. They were rough, as if they were made of scales rather than fabric.

  Her fingers closed around the gloves, and she pulled them free.

  “Well, brava, Zarlengo. You are the first. It only took you ten minutes to do such a simple task, but you managed it.”

  Yash expected the sarcasm, but that didn’t make it sting less. She had just completed a not-so-simple task.

  She did not put on the gloves because she was afraid they were booby-trapped as well. But she took a deep breath and felt a little bit of the tension leave.

  Bellier’s eyes were twinkling as they met Yash’s. Then Bellier clapped her hands.

  Something snapped and someone cursed. This time, Yash looked. One of the women clutched her right hand, tears streaming down her face.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Bellier said. “You’re doing delicate work, Palfrey. You shouldn’t let a simple sound derail you. Remember that in whatever assignment they give you that is much more suited to your…talents.”

  Palfrey kept her hand clutched to her chest and made her way around the back of the containers. As she passed Yash, Palfrey sniffed audibly.

  “By the way,” Bellier said as Palfrey continued past, “tears are unprofessional. Everyone fails. One should learn to take failures in stride.”

  Palfrey stopped and turned, her face red, her lower lip trembling.

  Yash tried to make herself as small as possible. She had a hunch she knew what was coming.

  “There’s no reason to be this level of mean,” Palfrey said. “I’ve put up with your nastiness all semester. You’re unreasonable, and I will report you.”

  Bellier smiled. “You won’t be the first. Go ahead. But I will warn you, because—although you do not believe it—I am not mean. I am difficult and tough and I push you on purpose. My superiors know this, and know my practices. They also know that my work weeds out the unprepared. I should have weeded you out sooner, Palfrey. The emotional response here isn’t just undignified, it’s dangerous.”

  “It is not!” Palfrey said. “You’re being unfair.”

  “And you may leave now,” Bellier said.

  Palfrey stared at her, and Bellier met that stare with one that seemed deadly. In front of Yash, two of the remaining students grabbed gloves. She smiled, impressed in spite of herself.

  She wasn’t sure if she could have remained focused with this fight going on.

  Finally, Palfrey stomped to the door and let herself out of the room.

  “Two more in the middle of all of that commotion,” Bellier said. “Bravo, you two. Excellent work. Zarlengo gets a commendation for arriving at the solution first. You both will also get a commendation for completing the work in the midst of someone’s unnecessary emotional crisis.”

  Behind Yash, a woman made a small sound of satisfaction.

  “And another,” Bellier said. “Excellent. The rest of you, you only have one minute before I ask you to leave as well.”

  Yash opened her left hand and set the gloves on the palm. She examined the material they were made out of and realized she had never seen it before.

  The top of the glove had small chips or something like chips. There was a technological layer over a secure layer and then, on the interior, some kind of fabric.

  She still didn’t put them on. She was supposed to, but she wasn’t ready to, afraid they too might be laced with traps.

  “Emotions,” Bellier said, “have no place in a workspace as serious as one involving anacapa drives. Nor does desire or ambition or some sense of fairness. If you graduate from this program, and that’s still up for debate, you will someday find yourself in a difficult situation, time of the essence, a crisis happening around you—Ah, well done.”

  She nodded toward the students. Yash did not look in either direction to see who they were.

  “Well done. Six of you. That’s the best score we’ve had in more than eight classes. We’ll see if you can move on from here. But know I am well pleased.”

  Bellier didn’t smile—it would probably take an order from the Fleet to make her smile—but she appeared a lot lighter than she had a few moments ago.

  “You’ll note that they finished with only ten seconds to spare,” she said. “That is just fine. The key is to ge
t the job done within the time limit provided. If you can complete the job quickly and accurately, then all the better, but if you cannot, it is better to finish.”

  Yash closed her left hand around the gloves. Receiving praise from Bellier felt even more uncomfortable than listening to the woman yell.

  “Now,” Bellier said, “your instructions were to put on the gloves, but none of you have done that. I understand the reluctance, after the trial you just went through. I also know that if I reassure you all is fine, you will still not feel comfortable.”

  Yash smiled. That was true. She no longer trusted Bellier to do anything in a straightforward manner.

  “The gloves, as Zarlengo has noted because I saw her investigate them closely, are unlike any you’ve seen before.”

  Yash saw a couple of heads bob downward, obviously looking more closely at the gloves.

  “These gloves are specially designed for work on inactive and dead anacapa drives,” Bellier said. “They will absorb small amounts of energy, should something in the drive accidentally activate. Should something like that happen to you today, you must set the drive down and back away. In theory, the gloves will protect you long enough to stop touching that drive.”

  “In theory?” Darlington asked.

  Yash admired her courage. After nearly screwing up the first part of this test, Darlington still felt confident enough to ask a question like that.

  Or maybe she was too stupid to realize that she should just keep her mouth shut, like Yash was doing. Even though those two words had caught her as well.

  Bellier made a grim little face, but her eyes were twinkling again. She was enjoying this day—maybe the first time since the semester began that Bellier seemed to enjoy anything.

  “In theory,” Bellier repeated. “So far, the gloves have worked. I have no idea what will happen should someone hang on to one of the anacapa drives too long or if more power runs through a drive than we expect. So I hedge, because I cannot predict what will happen with perfect accuracy.”

  The way she said that last part made another shiver run down Yash’s back. Bellier had said that bit about prediction on purpose—not just to make them uneasy, but to teach them that nothing was certain in this lab.