Searching for the Fleet

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Gallatin pushed himself away from the container and wobbled toward the door. Triplett reached his side and slipped her arm around him. He put one of his arms around her, and together they made their way out of the lab.

  Yash, Darlington, and Mercer watched. So did Bellier. She waited until the lab door closed before she spoke again.

  “Well,” she said. “And now, the three of you. I can see from your faces that you’re worried.”

  Do you blame us? Yash wanted to ask, but didn’t. She didn’t even glance at the other two survivors either.

  “You shouldn’t be worried at all,” Bellier said. “I am well pleased.”

  Yash blinked, not sure she heard that correctly. Pleased? Bellier? Really? Why?

  “You all showed incredible presence of mind,” Bellier said. “Zarlengo, Mercer, before rushing to the emergency, you closed your containers. That is correct, and had there been some kind of anacapa overload that could have triggered other problems, that maneuver right there might have prevented the situation from escalating.”

  Yash was holding her breath. The praise was hard to hear. It was so very unexpected.

  “Darlington, you did not close your container immediately, but when you saw the other two do so, you did as well, displaying a capacity to think even in an extreme and unusual circumstance. Well done.”

  Yash risked a glance at Darlington, whose cheeks had gone dusky, either from nerves or from being singled out.

  “The three of you handled the emergency swiftly and with great thought. You also showed compassion, especially you, Darlington. That is a rare trait among the leadership positions in the Fleet. It will be an asset if you use it correctly. We will work on that.”

  Yash frowned. We will work…? Did she dare hope?

  Bellier actually smiled. “I said I was well pleased, and I am. I have three students who will now proceed with the anacapa program. Some years, I initiate the work in this lab and by the end of the day, I have no students left. I don’t recall a year where I have had three.”

  Yash glanced at Mercer. He smiled just a little, not joyfully—Yash wasn’t feeling joyful either—but with some kind of relief.

  “Don’t worry,” Bellier said, “the elimination portion of this class—and your future classes in this curriculum—are over. You will make mistakes. You will make many mistakes. We can only hope that the mistakes will be good ones, ones we can learn from.”

  Yash frowned. She still wasn’t following. “We?” She had no idea why Bellier would say we. “You’re the experts, right? How can you learn from our mistakes?”

  “Ah, Zarlengo. You are the first student I’ve had who has picked up on that phraseology. You are more detail oriented than any who have come before, including me. Combine that with the creative side of your mind, and you are exactly what this program needs.”

  Now, Yash felt her own skin heat up. Bellier’s switch to extreme praise was very strange. Yash felt more off her game than she had felt during the so-called extreme emergency.

  “To answer your question, Zarlengo,” Bellier said. “We are not experts. We simply know more about the anacapa drive than the three of you do. But not as much more as you probably think.”

  Both Mercer and Darlington glanced at Yash, as if the question had made them uncomfortable, not Bellier’s answer.

  “Isn’t the essence of being an expert knowing more than a beginner?” Yash asked.

  “On all the other systems in the Fleet,” Bellier said, “we have actual experts, people who can build those systems from scratch, people who know more than the specs ever explain, people who know the limits and the capabilities of those systems so deeply that they can use the systems in ways the rest of us cannot.”

  Yash did not like how this answer was going. She was beginning to regret asking the question.

  “With the anacapa drive, however,” Bellier said, “no one knows its limits or its capabilities. We believe we only understand a small fraction of what the drive can do.”

  “But we build them from scratch,” Mercer said.

  “Yes,” Bellier said. “We do, replicating the original drive exactly every single time.”

  “The original drive?” Darlington asked.

  Bellier nodded. “We started with one drive, thousands of years ago,” she said. “It was not created by the Fleet. It took more than a decade to recreate the drive, and once that happened, everything the Fleet was started to develop.”

  “Not created by the Fleet?” Yash asked. “What do you mean?”

  “Must I spell this out exactly for you, Zarlengo?” Bellier asked, but she didn’t sound sarcastic or disappointed. Just slightly amused. “We didn’t invent the anacapa drive. We stole it.”

  Part Six

  The Search

  Now

  Twenty-Six

  The Ivoire orbited a moon one planet away from the coordinates that Coop had discovered back at Lost Souls. The planet that, in theory, once housed Sector Base E-2 looked like a gray, blue, and white ball on the holographic map that he had called up of this solar system.

  He didn’t know the name of the solar system, not even something given to him from the incomplete Fleet files. He had researchers digging through all of the data Yash and her team had pulled from the ships that Boss had found or pulled from the Boneyard.

  Unfortunately, for the most part, the Fleet captains had done their duty and destroyed all of the sensitive data. What Coop had were fragments, maddening fragments—and the coordinates of Sector Base E-2.

  It had taken a longer trip through foldspace than he liked to get here. Everyone had been nervous, especially the Ivoire’s crew. He’d managed to bring back almost the original crew. Only a few dozen who had made lives away from Lost Souls or who couldn’t face foldspace again had stayed behind.

  And of course, then there were a handful who had died, a few of them by their own hand. Like Dix.

  For the first time in years, the bridge had a full crew compliment. Lynda Rooney once again acted as his first officer. Usually she helmed the Shadow, but when he had sent out the call to the entire crew of the Ivoire, saying he wanted to go to a newly discovered site of a sector base, they had all signed on.

  He hadn’t even felt bad that he was leaving Lost Souls in the lurch. He and his people had trained a lot of staff over the past year, enough that they could run a DV-Class vessel and continue the patrol of the border between the Empire and the Nine Planets Alliance.

  Ilona Blake had argued with him when he told her he was taking the Ivoire on this mission, especially when she found out how far he was going, but he hadn’t even let her finish before he reminded her that no one in the Fleet belonged to Lost Souls. Yes, some of them were employed by Lost Souls, but they were Fleet first. The Fleet, wherever and whenever it was, would always hold their allegiance.

  She had no argument against that, especially since the crew of the Ivoire had given Lost Souls so much. As he argued with Blake, he knew Yash was meeting with several of Lost Soul’s techs, briefing them on some of the new things she had discovered about anacapa drives, runabouts, and smaller ships.

  After the Ivoire set out on this, its first mission in more than a year, Yash had told him with a smile that in the last week she had given Lost Souls enough work—and enough new tech—to last them three decades. No one could argue with that.

  The only person that Coop hadn’t told was Boss. She was on a long mission to the Boneyard, recovering ships and sending them back to Lost Souls with surprising regularity. It was as if her injury on the previous trip with Yash had whipped Boss into some kind of frenzy, making her want to dive and recover every single ship in the Boneyard.

  She should have come back two months before Coop left, but she hadn’t, sending message after message delaying her return. When she had sent her first message, he and Yash had just discovered the location of Sector Base E-2. He had promised himself he would tell Boss about the base when she returned.

  Then she delayed h
er return three more times. Each time, he nearly told her about the mission to the base, and each time he backed away.

  He had no idea if Blake had mentioned it to her. It would probably come out while he was gone—and he wasn’t sure he cared. Boss might end up angry at him, but she of all people should understand why he had to do this.

  And why he had to do it with as many of his own people as possible.

  Still, he had taken a few of hers—on loan, as he said to Blake, who hadn’t objected as much as he expected. Two of the loaned crew sat on the bridge now, in front of consoles that were powered up but not in use.

  The first, Lucretia Stone, was an archeologist who had helped Coop and Yash search for sector bases in the past. She had tangled with Coop, particularly at the site of Sector Base W, but she was exceptionally good at her job.

  She had brought an entire team with her, mostly archeologists, many of whom had continued to work at the site of Sector Base W after Coop had abandoned it, looking for the next sector base.

  Yash had convinced him that their experiences with old closed sector bases would make them invaluable on this mission.

  Stone had also insisted on McAllister Bridge, a scientist whose specialty Coop didn’t entirely understand. He had been on Boss’s team when the Ivoire first showed up in this time period. At that point, Bridge was one of the only people from this time who had an even slight grasp of nanobit technology.

  He had learned more in the intervening years, or so Stone said. She also claimed that he had made a point of studying nanobit decay as well as the way that closed sector bases changed over time.

  Coop didn’t care about what happened to the bases as much as he cared about how to use that information to find another sector base.

  McAllister Bridge was monitoring his console, already examining information that was coming from the planet that the Fleet had called Nindowne. It had ten continents and the base had been located in the most environmentally hostile, least populated of the continents—but that had been more than 2,000 years before.

  The archeologists would study what had changed in 2,000 years. They could figure out how the lay of the land would alter, what to look for, and how the natural environment would destroy anything manmade in easily discernable ways.

  Provided, of course, that nothing else was built over the old base, or if the base wasn’t repurposed, or if it was destroyed.

  “There’s a lot of junk in orbit around Nindowne,” said Kjersti Perkins. Coop loved having her on his bridge. She was always no-nonsense. She knew more about the systems than anyone on the ship except Yash. “I don’t like it.”

  “I don’t either,” said Anita Tren. She was the tiniest officer on the Ivoire, but one of the most talented. In the intervening years, she had altered her console on the bridge to accommodate her height—once the Ivoire no longer had to answer to the Fleet and its sometimes ridiculously rigid regulations.

  “That stuff really is junk,” said Lynda Rooney. She had a holographic screen floating above her console showing Nindowne in three dimensions. She had enlarged the image so much that Coop could see all kinds of details. “Old satellites that are no longer active, the remains of some kind of space station, some ships that don’t seem to have any power, and lots of floating debris.”

  Coop tapped his fingers on the arm of his command chair, calling up some screens on his own. He peered at the telemetry pouring at him from Nindowne.

  They were right: the junk floating around the planet seemed to be uniformly inactive. And old.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Coop said. “What do you think is going on here? Was there a war? Some kind of invasion force?”

  “I think it’s too soon to tell.” Jason Xilvii stood at the farthest console from Coop’s command chair. Xilvii had been a junior officer when the Ivoire was actually with the Fleet. Once Xilvii had arrived at Lost Souls, he left the Fleet to work weapons and tactical and research at the corporation, thinking it would be easier on him to embrace his new life completely rather than try to continue a career that no longer truly existed.

  He had been invaluable in Coop’s skirmishes with the Empire on the border of the Nine Planets a year ago, and Coop had personally asked him on this mission.

  Even so, Xilvii seemed to feel like he didn’t belong with the bridge crew. He kept himself as far from the main crew as possible. In off hours, he didn’t socialize with the main bridge crew, keeping with some of his old friends—still junior officers, if ranking meant anything anymore.

  Coop wasn’t sure it did.

  “You have some kind of theory, Xilvii,” Coop said. “Share it.”

  “No theory, really.” Xilvii sounded nervous. “More like an observation. I’ve been drilling past the junk to look at the surface itself. Nine of the ten continents are populated. From the numbers we sort of had from the data Engineer Zarlengo provided us, it seems that the population of those nine continents has grown exponentially in the past two thousand years.”

  Coop tried not to let his amusement show at Xilvii’s formality. Engineer Zarlengo indeed. If Yash were on the bridge instead of coordinating things in engineering, she would have been amused at the designation, spoken with such stiff formality.

  “But the population of that tenth continent hasn’t grown like the other places,” Coop said. He saw the numbers as well. He just didn’t know what they meant. “It’s still populated, though.”

  “By a fraction of the people who had lived there when the sector base was open,” Xilvii said.

  “That’s not unusual,” Rooney said, sounding dismissive. “Most of the Fleet moves on when a sector base is closed. Even the land-based. They often go to other sector bases and start over.”

  “But not all of them,” Anita said softly, as if she didn’t want to completely disagree with Rooney.

  “True,” Rooney said. “Not all of them. But we don’t always find thriving communities around a sector base.”

  Coop was watching Xilvii. The man was moving slightly, as if he was shifting back and forth on his feet. As if he couldn’t contain his nervousness.

  “That’s not what you’re getting at, is it, Xilvii?” Coop had forgotten this element of command—seeing his people and figuring out what they were actually trying to communicate to him.

  “No, sir,” Xilvii said. “This planet, whatever they call it now—”

  “We’re still calling it Nindowne,” Stone said.

  Coop glared at her. She wasn’t part of the bridge crew. He had warned her that she wouldn’t be able to participate in a free discussion like she usually did at Lost Souls.

  But she had always been difficult. It shouldn’t have surprised him that she would ignore his warnings.

  And, in truth, he wasn’t sure if it mattered that she had. He was feeling a lot less rigid than he used to feel, as if the full force of the Fleet no longer held him in check and made him follow certain regulations that now seemed stringent to him.

  Maybe Boss had had more of an effect on him than he realized.

  “Nindowne,” Xilvii repeated softly. “Right. Anyway. This planet, Nindowne, it um, it’s in rough shape, sir.”

  “Meaning what?” Coop asked.

  “The largest continent has five different cities and their air quality is exceptionally poor. If we were going to the largest continent, I would have to recommend oxygen masks. The air quality is that bad.”

  “Wow,” Bridge said. Coop glanced at him. Bridge seemed surprised that Coop had heard him. Bridge hadn’t moved from his previous position, meaning he hadn’t done anything to double-check the air quality; he had just seemed stunned by what Xilvii had to say.

  “But,” Xilvii said, “Judging by the air quality over the tenth continent, we should have no trouble down there. It’s oxygen rich, has a nutrient mix that’s very familiar to Fleet-friendly planets, and is very human-friendly. I can see why the Fleet chose this place as the home of a sector base. But if I were to establish a base now, I mi
ght have passed it over. The planet’s atmosphere isn’t toxic, exactly, but it’s heading that way. A superficial scan doesn’t match what the Fleet usually looks for in a sector base planet.”

  Xilvii said all of this as if it had import. But half the bridge crew was frowning at him, clearly not following the logic. Coop wasn’t sure he did either.

  “What has this to do with the space junk?” Coop asked.

  “May I, Captain?” Bridge asked. Coop shot him another glance, surprised that he had spoken up.

  “If it’s all right with Xilvii,” Coop said, and looked at him to confirm.

  Xilvii was watching Bridge with something like relief. “Please,” Xilvii said.

  Bridge nodded and then stood up. He clearly wasn’t used to Fleet procedures. He wasn’t giving a speech; he was just going to make a comment.

  Coop felt his lips twitch with a potential smile. He didn’t allow it. He didn’t want Bridge to feel as if Coop was making fun of him.

  “I think the relevant point here,” Bridge said, “is that the people of this planet are treating, and have treated, their home with great disregard. They’ve polluted the atmosphere in the most populated areas, and, from my scans, it looks like they’ve made some other bad choices for the health of the planet as well.”

  Fair point. But they were two thousand years in the future. The sector base closing had occurred a long time ago. What the people of this planet had or had not done since really didn’t matter to Coop.

  What mattered to him was finding the coordinates for the next sector base in the sequence, Sector Base F-2.

  “It does not surprise me,” Bridge said, “or, I would hazard a guess, surprise Xilvii, that the people of this planet are now polluting the space around it.”

  Ah, that was the point. In other words, they both believed that the materials in orbit around Nindowne were not defensive or offensive weapons. That made quite a difference in how the Ivoire would approach the base.

  “You think the space junk is just litter?” Perkins asked, as if she couldn’t believe that.