Searching for the Fleet

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “Not like this,” Coop said. “We need to get back to the skip and get the proper equipment this time.”

  “You want to explore tonight?” Yash asked.

  He was torn about that. He normally would have had them wait until daybreak. But they hadn’t planned on staying longer than a few hours, and the skip itself didn’t have proper sleeping quarters for seven people. The skip did have enough food, though.

  “We could come back tomorrow,” Stone said.

  Coop smiled, glad one of the civilians suggested that. “There is a possibility that this place is being guarded,” he said. “I think we might have slipped past, but I doubt we can do it twice.”

  “So we’re exploring tonight,” Yash said, as if he had answered her question directly.

  “Just far enough to see which of our readings is correct,” Coop said.

  “If either of them are,” Yash said.

  “That’s right,” Coop said. “If either of them are.”

  Twenty-Eight

  As Yash stepped into her environmental suit inside the skip, she found herself wishing that Boss was leading this mission. That wish surprised Yash; clearly, she had come a long way in her relationship with Boss. At first, Yash hadn’t liked her at all, but over time, if she had to describe the relationship, she would have called it a grudging respect.

  Only since their adventure on the runabout in the Boneyard, Yash didn’t think that respect was so grudging anymore. Particularly as she was wishing for Boss to be here for this mission.

  This mission was akin to a dive, and much as Yash loved Coop, she didn’t think he was as good a dive master as Boss was. He hadn’t even had them bring the diving suits that Yash had designed for Lost Souls.

  To be fair, Yash hadn’t thought to bring any either. She had been focused on figuring out if the sector base was here. Given what they had found so far, she was convinced they were in the right place.

  They had found where Sector Base E-2 had been; the question now was what condition was it in—and whether or not it had information to share with them.

  The others were gearing up as well. Stone was staring at her environmental suit as if she had never worn one before—which, given this type of suit, was probably true. Bridge was flailing his arms slightly, turning around in slow half circles, trying to capture the arms and torso of the suit, unable to quite sort it out.

  The security team already had their suits on, but not the hoods. Coop was tugging his gloves over his hands, suit already adhering to his tall, broad-shouldered form. Perkins had her suit on as well, without the hood. She was adding some equipment to her belt, including a laser pistol.

  Yash’s stomach twisted. She was a lot more nervous than she usually was. She had tried hard to keep her emotions out of this entire mission, but she now knew that was impossible.

  She was excited to be here, excited that there was another base, excited that they had found something. She loved that there were nanobits and signs that the Fleet had been here, no matter how long ago.

  She was so thrilled that she was shaking.

  And Boss would have blocked her from diving with this kind of physical reaction. If they were in the Boneyard. If they were in space.

  They were not.

  Still, Yash had to calm down. Because, oddly enough, she was the person here with the most exploration experience. Not Fleet exploration experience. Boss-trained experience.

  Yash wasn’t going to point that out to Coop, though. He believed his emotions were in check, but she knew from having been on a similar mission with him that they were not. He was going to charge his way through the next few hours, no matter what happened. If he saw something that intrigued him, he would go for it without a lot of thought to procedure.

  She half smiled to herself. He would behave like she had done in the lab. Then her smile faded. Here, his behavior could cost him his life.

  She tugged the suit up, made sure it sealed around her arms and legs. She slipped on the gloves she had worn earlier and placed the wand on the suit’s belt. Normally, she would have left the hood down on a planet, but she was going to be the one in charge of this mission, and she needed to follow the rules.

  Boss’s rules.

  “Coop,” Yash said, “we need to stop for a minute.”

  He finished adjusting the gloves, then frowned at her. He was clearly not ready to stop anything.

  “We don’t know what’s behind that blackness,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s why we’re going there.”

  “And because we don’t know,” she said, ignoring him, “we might get into some kind of trouble, and get into it rather quickly.”

  He paused, eyes hooded. He clearly knew she was right. He might argue with her after she finished, but she had his attention for the moment.

  “We need to keep someone on this skip,” she said, “monitoring our vitals just as if we were exploring in space.”

  Coop raised his chin slightly but didn’t say anything.

  “We also need to keep the skip on standby just in case we need to leave quickly. We can’t ignore the fact that we’re finding evidence of others nearby.” Yash didn’t want to say anything more than that because she didn’t want to alarm the civilians. But she didn’t like the fact that some of the cloaking they had found was deliberately aimed at Fleet personnel.

  It also bothered her that some of that cloaking had actually worked with their Fleet equipment—which should have been considered ancient by Sector Base E-2 standards, not counting the standards of this current time.

  Coop sighed ever so slightly. Yash doubted the others even saw it. Then he nodded just once.

  “Lankstadt,” Coop said, voice sharp. “Can you pilot?”

  “Yes, sir,” Lankstadt said. “Both of us can.”

  Yash almost smiled. She recognized Lankstadt’s attempt at manipulation. He didn’t want to stay on board any more than she did.

  “Good,” Coop said. “You will take the first shift in the skip.”

  The first shift? Yash almost said something, then decided against it. She would argue with Coop later if need be. But this was a good start.

  “The rest of us will see what we can find in that dark area,” he said. “We’ll run on a timer. Yash—forty-five minutes, you think?”

  That was longer than any space dive she had gone on, but they weren’t in space.

  “Sounds good,” she said.

  “Then we’ll return here and compare notes. We’ll decide if we need to go farther, or if we need to go back for more equipment and personnel.” Coop’s gaze met Yash’s. His eyes were twinkling.

  She hadn’t expected that.

  “Think Boss will approve?” he asked, letting Yash know he knew exactly what she had been up to.

  “No,” Yash said. “She would want tethers, even though we’re on land.”

  “I’m not tethering to the skip,” Coop said.

  “Which is why I didn’t even suggest it,” Yash said. Besides, she thought tethers on land would be cumbersome.

  “Sometimes tethering going into the unknown is a good idea,” Bridge said. He had finally grabbed the back of his suit and pulled it up where it belonged.

  “If we don’t like what we find at the edge of that dark area,” Coop said, “we might tether on the next trip.”

  He was making it clear that they wouldn’t follow anything other than Fleet procedure this time. Keeping one person back at the skip was a slight variation, but not a great one. Generally, a small team stayed behind when there was a possible threat.

  He grabbed the last of his gear, then walked into the airlock alone. Yash had changed the settings so that they didn’t have to go through the entire airlock procedure to get out of the skip. Coop didn’t have to wait for the interior doors to close. He stepped outside without waiting for anyone else.

  Yash wanted to hurry, to follow him, but she made herself remain methodical, checking every last bit of her suit and her equipment.
She too added a laser pistol to her belt.

  She was on edge here, and she wasn’t quite sure why. Too many unexplained aspects to this place. Besides, Chen and Perkins would need backup if something went horribly wrong.

  She went through the airlock and exit, gripping the side of the door with her right glove as she stepped down to the ground.

  Coop was standing near the skip, his hands clasped behind his back. He was staring across that vast stretch of pavement.

  Twilight had fallen everywhere in this part of the valley. The darkness wasn’t absolute—it had a grayish brightness to it because the sun was still up on the other side of the mountains, and some of that light was still filtering into this area.

  But the growing dark made it impossible to see the overhang and the possible cave opening from the skip. Yash’s heart rate increased. Sometimes, her upbringing on land did not serve her well. There was nothing wrong with darkness.

  Every dive she had done in space had been done in darkness.

  But this wasn’t space. The wind fingered her cheeks, messing her short hair. At least the mist had stopped. But the air had gotten decidedly colder.

  Coop hadn’t turned on any of his suit’s lights. She didn’t turn on hers either as she approached him.

  Behind her, she heard faint conversation as the others left the skip.

  “I’m thinking of having Stone and Bridge continue their work out here,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “We need their eyes on that interior.”

  “Interior?” he said. “You’re thinking it is the base, then?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And so are you. That’s why you don’t want tethers.”

  He tilted his head to one side. “No unusual anacapa drive readings here. I checked.”

  She had too, several times. Once from the Ivoire, figuring if they found unusual anacapa drive readings, they would know without landing that the sector base was below. They would also know that it was dangerous.

  Then she had checked again as they were orbiting in the skip. And one final time as they had landed.

  Nothing here, in the exterior of the potential base. But that didn’t mean that the base’s anacapa drives weren’t malfunctioning below. The nanobit coatings she had found here were intact and continuing to repair themselves. They would keep any problematic energy spikes from reaching outside.

  In theory.

  “You and I are going in first,” Coop said.

  “I know.” Yash wasn’t going to argue with him. She had no reason to argue with him. She wanted to be the first one past that curtain. She wanted to see what was ahead.

  The other team members joined them.

  “Perkins,” Coop said, “you and Chen are behind me and Yash. Stone and Bridge, the four of us are going to go in first. The two of you will monitor the readings with your equipment, since yours seems to be more accurate than ours.”

  If, of course, this was a real sector base. Otherwise the readings that the Ivoire’s equipment had would be the accurate one.

  But Yash didn’t say anything and neither did anyone else.

  “I want hoods up,” Coop said. “I want everyone to record everything. And as the group is moving, I don’t want any member of this group monitoring equipment. We need our eyes. Let the suits tell us if something is awry. Is that clear?”

  Everyone answered in the affirmative.

  “All right,” Coop said. “Lankstadt, do you have all of us?”

  “Yes, sir. Visual, telemetry, and vitals. I will monitor the area as well.” He sounded cool and professional. Yash hadn’t trained him, though, so she had no idea how competent he was.

  She hated having to trust someone she didn’t know well.

  “Ready?” Coop asked her softly.

  “Ready,” she said and started forward.

  Twenty-Nine

  Coop had chosen an environmental suit with a clear hood all the way around. The very top of the hood had a light that he could control, so that it would illuminate anything he wanted it to all the way around. Right now, in deference to the rest of his team, he only had lights on facing forward.

  He had also turned on the knuckle lights on his gloves and the lights all around his boots.

  They illuminated the pavement. It was finely cracked, just like it looked, and incredibly smooth. He’d seen pavement like this before at Sector Base T shortly after it closed. The ship he had served on at the time was doing a post-closure inspection decades after the last worker had left the base.

  The design of that base had been similar to what he suspected was the design for E-2. If, he had to remind himself, this actually was Sector Base E-2.

  The hood blocked the wind and the distinctive odor of this region. His nose hadn’t yet become used to that smell of brine and fish, but he found that he missed it. The smell had made it very clear where he was.

  He was remarkably calm. He had thought he would be excited about seeing what they would discover. But he was focused now on the task at hand, focused in a way that felt familiar. He hadn’t felt like this in a long time.

  He glanced at Yash. Her hood was clear only on three sides. The back was covered. Her hood light was a focused beam that shut off whenever she faced someone, for which he was very grateful. Her hands and arms were lit up, as were her lower legs and boots.

  Apparently, she wanted to see all of this.

  The lights grew brighter as Chen and Perkins turned on their hood lights, then Stone and Bridge. Or at least, that was the order he figured they had turned on their equipment in. He wasn’t going to double-check.

  Even though Bridge had dived with Boss, he was inexperienced, at least as far as Coop was concerned. Stone was her own woman, never really hitting the level of professionalism that the Fleet aspired to—at least not on matters like entering an unknown area.

  Coop wasn’t going to babysit either of them. If something happened, he would let Perkins and Chen deal with it. Coop was going to focus on what he saw ahead of him, and nothing else.

  The pavement was vast and went on farther than he had expected. The twilight had provided some kind of optical illusion, making the entire area seem truncated.

  It wasn’t. And as they got closer to the overhang and possible cave opening, the cracks in the pavement grew. Wind blew across it all, carrying leaves, dirt, scraps of cloth and what appeared to be paper. He didn’t touch any of it.

  Instead he focused on the spindly green plants growing out of the cracks. So the pavement near the old road was still in use, but the pavement here wasn’t.

  He held up his hand, stopping everyone, and then stopped himself. He had to take Yash by the arm. She hadn’t seen him stop.

  “Note the plants?” he asked, pointing at the spindly green things. “They weren’t near the road. Let’s find an area of this pavement where the cracks aren’t as bad, shall we?”

  Yash nodded. She understood. Coop half braced himself for a question from the civilians, but none came. Instead, all six members of the team pivoted, their backs to each other, and raked areas of the pavement with the strongest beams off their gloves.

  Coop had moved somewhat kitty-corner to where he had been before. The cracks looked just as vast in the segment he was examining as they were where he was standing.

  “Over here,” Chen said. She was perpendicular to him, the light from her gloves pointing at the narrowing valley and the mudflats beyond.

  Coop turned his gloves in that direction, adding to the light she had trained on the area. In the brightness, the pavement looked almost brown, like the road, not like the gray behind them.

  That was odd in and of itself.

  Yash had turned and so had Perkins. Coop couldn’t see Stone or Bridge and he didn’t really care what they were doing.

  “See?” Chen said. “No weeds or whatever those are poking out of the pavement. And I’m not even sure that’s pavement.”

  Coop trained his light along the brown area. It was clearly manufactured, b
ut it lacked the smoothness of something made from nanobits. The brown material had bubbles and imperfections, as if someone had sprayed it over the ground and left the brown stuff to dry. It was uneven and looked a little unstable.

  It hugged some kind of barrier wall that appeared to have been built out of nanobits. That barrier wall was black and absorbed the light, just like nanobits did.

  He didn’t ask Yash to take out her wand. If the barrier wall became relevant, he would have her examine it then.

  He followed the brown area with his light. Keeping track of the brown material was easy because it covered part of the ground, creating a small lip. The brown led all the way to the edge of that overhang, precisely the place where it seemed attached to the side of the mountain.

  “We’ll walk over there.” He marched toward the brown area, not waiting for the others to gather themselves or come with him.

  For a moment, his shadow, long and skinny, extended almost to the brown area as the others kept their lights pointed in that direction. Then they toned down the beams and followed him, and his shadow became human-sized again.

  The wind whistled around him. He had his hood set up for internal communications, but he had left the external microphones on as well so he could hear everything around them. The wind, gusting, was providing its own distraction.

  He had no idea how anyone lived in actual weather. It was difficult at best, annoying at times like these. And his suit was registering small handfuls of sand pelting into him, as well as a drop in temperature.

  The suit warned him that a storm was coming. He wasn’t sure what to do with that information: he was in an environmental suit and it could handle severe weather, as could his gloves and his boots. They were made to create their own artificial gravity, so not even the wind should bother him too much.

  He reached the edge of that brown area. His hunch had been right: it was made of the same material as the road. Although he had initially thought the road was old, he was reconsidering that assumption. Because the wind wasn’t disturbing the surface of the brown area at all.