She hoped to God that whatever was eating at the skip wasn’t eating at Perkins and Bridge too.
The ghosted skip vanished.
“Damn,” she said.
“What?” Coop asked.
“They’re going to start searching for us now,” she said.
“Yeah, they already have an idea where we are.” He didn’t sound panicked, just matter of fact.
Yash nodded, even though he wasn’t looking at her. Why had these skips been built without weapons? She was so going to add weapons to every single ship that came out of Lost Souls.
If she ever made it back there.
Forty
There it was—the Ivoire—a big blob on one of his screens, an actual ship on the holomap right in front of him, and a vast array of telemetry on the screen he used the most.
He felt relieved, but worried at the same time. This close to the finish line was where most commanders screwed up. They slowed down, they thought they were safe, they thought it was over.
He still had a lot of things to do.
“Fighters,” Yash said.
He glanced at the wider two-dimensional screen next to Yash. A dozen fighters, from a variety of makes and models, had locked onto them and were heading this way.
They had clearly found the skip, so Coop dropped the stealth tech and diverted as much energy as he could to the small little shield that some stupid designer had put into the skip, clearly thinking no one would use it.
He hoped it would hold up to one or two shots, if it worked at all.
“Just got a coded message from the Ivoire,” Yash said. “Cargo Bay Three is ready and about to open on our signal.”
Cargo bay. He hadn’t expected them to go into a cargo bay, but it made sense. The cargo bays were mostly empty on the Ivoire since it rarely traveled long distances any longer.
“Those fighters are a lot faster than anything we have,” Yash said. “Or they have anacapa drives too, and used them to get here.”
Short range anacapa usage? In a small ship? That would be suicidal.
Coop didn’t have time to think about it.
“They’re almost in firing range,” Yash said.
“Tell Rooney to fire on them the moment they get close enough. The last thing we want is some modified version of that weapon to hit the Ivoire,” Coop said.
Plus, he and Yash both knew that the Ivoire couldn’t use its shields for that moment when the skip entered the cargo bay. If a fighter was close enough, it could hit the Ivoire at that moment and do a lot of damage.
“Done,” Yash said.
Coop was not monitoring the fighters. He wasn’t doing anything except planning the quickest course to that open cargo bay door.
That weapon’s destruction was nearly to the engines, so it no longer mattered if he overloaded them. They would be gone in a matter of minutes.
He pushed the engines, taking them to their very limit.
The skip shuddered so hard it felt like it was about to come apart—which it actually was.
The Ivoire loomed large on the exterior screen. All he could see were the sides of the ship, gleaming darkly in the light of distant stars.
He had never seen anything so welcoming.
The cargo bay was just to his left.
He had to maneuver slightly, barely turning the skip. He could no longer program the changes into the helm. He had to do it by hand, and he was, sweat coming down the side of his face as if he had been yanking the skip forward by hand.
Maybe he had been.
The side of the Ivoire disappeared. All he could see now was the mouth of the cargo bay, open and ready to receive the skip.
The interior of the cargo bay looked unfamiliar—filled with white webbing—and he realized he had never landed a ship into a quarantined bay before.
First time for everything.
He hoped Rooney had set up internal shields. He hoped she was prepared for them coming in too fast.
He hoped they had some way to siphon off the extra energy, because he couldn’t double-check for it.
The skip entered the bay much too fast. Coop immediately let up the speed, hoping something would stop them. The shuddering was so extreme that bits of the ceiling panels started falling.
He hoped someone was monitoring this, because the engines had overloaded and they could explode.
Yash was trying to stop that from her console. He could have told her it wouldn’t work, but he let her try. She knew a lot more about all of these ships than he did.
He leaned back as the skip slowly stopped shuddering.
They hadn’t shot through any walls in the cargo bay. The crew hadn’t been flung forward as the skip came to a hard stop.
Everything had worked.
He really hadn’t thought it possible.
“We’re here,” he said, and didn’t sound as triumphant as he wanted to. “Somehow, we’re here.”
Forty-One
They had to go through decontamination, which was the last thing Yash wanted to do. She had already called for medical assistance, but—per Coop’s order—warned the medical team that whatever had happened to Perkins and Bridge might hurt the entire ship. Everyone needed to be warned.
The back of the skip looked like it had been hit with a dozen weapons, even though it hadn’t. Bits of the wall were gone, leaving gaping holes. Some of the furniture, normally attached to the skip itself, had been flung into an interior wall, narrowly missing Bridge.
The moment the skip stopped, Stone had gotten up to tend to the patients. She seemed calmer than Yash expected.
“My data strips?” Yash asked as she stopped near the remaining members of the team. She knew she sounded insensitive, but the strips had the only information anyone had been able to pull from Sector Base E-2.
“I’ve got them,” Chen said. “I had Perkin’s strip, and I grabbed the others when the skip started shuddering.”
The relief Yash felt was more profound than she realized. She had been worried this had all been for nothing.
“Oh, thank you,” Yash said.
“I’ll get them out of here, if you like,” Chen said. “Can they make it through decontamination?”
“I don’t know,” Yash said. She had no idea what level of decontamination Rooney had ordered up or what type. “But I’m going to stay here. I’ll take the data strips and upload them.”
“Won’t that harm the systems on the Ivoire?” Chen asked.
Yash almost smiled at how deep a security officer’s training actually went.
“I don’t think so,” Yash said. “But I’m going to layer the files with as much protection as I can. I’ll also isolate them inside the Ivoire’s systems.”
If she could even access the systems.
At least the skip’s shuddering had ceased. Coop had shut down the engines. He had already scrambled off of the skip.
The danger wasn’t over yet, and he needed to be on the bridge. Yash didn’t. There were people who could handle everything from this point forward.
She needed to secure the data, and maybe help the med techs with the injured.
“You get out of here,” Yash said. “You’ve done everything you can.”
“I’m going to stay until they’re out.” Chen nodded at Bridge and Perkins. Stone was still working with them. Lankstadt had walked in their direction, looking no worse for the wear.
They were in good hands.
Yash took the data strips from Chen, then headed back to the console.
Despite the confidence she had expressed to Chen, Yash wasn’t sure she could keep the data isolated. She had to hope the system would flag anything that was amiss.
She usually didn’t rely on hope. But she had no real choice here.
She had to rely on it in a dozen different ways. Including hope that this skip would hold together long enough for her to get the data transferred.
She didn’t even want to think about that.
So she sat down and got
to work.
Forty-Two
Decontamination hadn’t been painful, but it had been messy and unpleasant. Coop submitted to it to save his ship, leaving his environmental suit behind along with his clothes and his boots.
He showed up on the bridge wearing the white, loose weave clothing that was standard in any decontamination chamber. He hadn’t wanted to risk more time heading to his cabin for a proper change of clothes.
No one on the bridge seemed to notice. Anita Tren was the only one who acknowledged his arrival. She nodded at him and gave him a small smile before returning to work.
Rooney stood near the captain’s chair, one hand resting on the chair’s arm. Xilvii was still at the farthest console from the chair, his dark hair in spikes around his head, not as a style, but because he’d been running his hands through it.
He looked years older than he had before the Ivoire left Lost Souls.
The other three people on the bridge seemed calm—the kind of calm that came in the middle of a prolonged battle. Coop didn’t say a word to any of them as he headed to the chair.
Rooney stepped aside. “Captain,” she said.
“Stay,” he said. “You’re running this mission.”
Which wasn’t entirely true. He needed to have input, but he didn’t even know where they were at the moment.
Then the Ivoire stuttered its way out of foldspace. On the single open screen that covered the far wall, the remains of Starbase Kappa appeared. Coop’s stomach twisted.
The last time he had been here, he had started an incident that had nearly sent the Nine Planets Alliance into a war with the Empire. He didn’t see any Empire ships nearby, however, and that disappointed him. Where were they when he needed them?
Starbase Kappa was called the Room of Lost Souls by everyone in this time period. It had had a malfunctioning anacapa drive that Coop’s people had managed to shut down. The starbase still drifted now, empty and abandoned. Apparently, ships in the Empire still avoided it.
“We’re here,” Rooney said. “What’s next?”
“Send a distress signal,” he said.
She blinked at him. She had fought alongside him against the Empire less than a year ago. He had wrestled them to a stalemate at the border between the Empire and the Nine Planets, a stalemate that still held.
“You want to announce our presence?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “Sorry. A standard distress signal. Then move away from the starbase.”
“You heard him,” Rooney said. “Distress signal. Move.”
His team didn’t need to hear more than that. Nor did they question what he was doing. But Rooney did. He could see it in her eyes.
It only took a few moments to move away from the starbase.
“We’ve gotten a response,” Anita Tren said. “Two ships, less than three minutes out.”
“Good,” Coop said. “We’ve got less than two minutes then. Program the anacapa with the coordinates for home.”
Home. He hadn’t expected to use that word. He wasn’t sure he ever had in this context.
“To be clear,” Rooney said. “You want to head back to Lost Souls Corporation.”
“Yes,” he said. “Right now.”
She waved a finger at Anita, who set to work. Coop didn’t even look at the anacapa drive.
He was about to tell Rooney why he was doing this when one of the foldspace search vessels appeared near Starbase Kappa.
Coop’s heart jumped. He had hoped that the Not-Fleet didn’t have that technology, but they did.
He also hoped the Ivoire was far enough away that they wouldn’t notice it, not before the Ivoire jumped to foldspace.
At that moment, the Ivoire entered foldspace a second time in ten minutes, leaving Starbase Kappa behind. The ship bumped ever so slightly, the transition into foldspace so much smoother than it used to be.
Coop let out a small breath.
“Son of a bitch,” Rooney said. “How did you know they could track us?”
“I didn’t,” Coop said. “I was kinda hoping they couldn’t.”
He was both thrilled and worried about the fact that they had the technology to track a ship through foldspace. Thrilled, because that meant no one would get lost in foldspace again. Worried that they might follow the Ivoire to the Nine Planets Alliance.
“You solved the problem though,” Anita said. “One of those ships answering the distress signal was nearly at the starbase. That Empire ship will deal with whatever ships emerge from foldspace—and do so quickly. Great distraction.”
Coop nodded. He hoped the distraction would work. But he wasn’t going to know if it did, not really. The Not-Fleet ships might not follow the Ivoire to foldspace, but they might make note of where he was going.
More likely, though, was that the Empire would keep those ships from getting anywhere near the Ivoire’s most recent foldspace entry point.
“The Empire’s going to think those are our ships,” Xilvii said. “Aren’t you worried they’ll think we violated the truce?”
“It’s not a formal truce,” Coop said. “Besides, either those strange ships will go back into foldspace or they’ll be captured by the Empire. If they’re captured, the Empire will know right away that the ships aren’t ours.”
“And whoever is using those ships will find out about us,” Xilvii said.
“Maybe,” Coop said. He didn’t believe it, though. They hadn’t obviously stolen anything from Sector Base E-2. The arrival of all those ships might have been the way that whoever ran Sector Base E-2 now ran their defenses.
Or they had seen the entry into Sector Base E-2 as an act of war.
Whatever it was, the Ivoire couldn’t go back there. No one from Lost Souls could go back there.
If they stayed away, then whoever ran Sector Base E-2 now might see the entire thing as someone exploring the wrong place at the wrong time.
Then he shook his head at himself. He was being hopelessly optimistic.
Coop and his crew had arrived in a working Fleet vessel; they had used Fleet technology, albeit old tech. They understood old versions of Standard. They had used a skip augmented with Fleet tech. And they had activated an anacapa drive, not once, but twice.
The Not-Fleet was now on notice: there were others using Fleet tech in areas that the Fleet should have abandoned millennia ago.
If the Not-Fleet even cared about the Fleet, even understood Fleet history, then they would know this was a problem.
The Not-Fleet had to know about the Fleet, right? Because the Not-Fleet had to have a reason for developing weapons that unbonded nanobits.
Coop now wished he had gotten information out of his section of the sector base. He had no idea who had been chasing them or why.
“I think we did the best we could, given the circumstances,” Rooney said. “We’ve seen several abandoned sector bases now. We simply assumed this one had been too, and we were wrong. Next time we won’t be that unprepared.”
“We’re not heading back to Sector Base E-2,” Coop said.
“Never say never,” Anita muttered.
He smiled at her, but she didn’t smile back.
“I mean,” she said, “what if they find out who we are from the Empire? They might come after us.”
“They might,” Coop said. “We’ll have to make sure Lost Souls is ready. But I don’t think they’ll find out about us.”
“Care to share why?” Anita asked.
“The Empire,” Coop said. He had been studying the Empire ever since he had to fight against it. “They’re extremely difficult to deal with. They won’t know what these vessels are or how they got so deep into Empire space. The Empire will deal with them as invaders first, which means the Empire won’t share information with them. About anything.”
“If only one ship followed us to Starbase Kappa,” Rooney said, “then they’re screwed.”
She’d been studying the Empire too. Coop figured it was only a matter of time before the Empir
e tried to subdue the Nine Planets again, and Rooney agreed. They both wanted to be prepared before they went into battle against it.
“The Empire is going to try to do everything to find out how that ship got into Empire space,” Rooney said, “which means they’ll deal harshly with the crew.”
“If the crew doesn’t fight back,” Xilvii said.
“Empire ships are not made of nanobits,” Coop said. “Their ships will be a lot harder for one foldspace search vehicle to defeat. I think we’re safe enough for now.”
“They’ll know we went into foldspace,” Xilvii said.
“They might not even have registered our presence,” Rooney said. “Besides, I scanned Starbase Kappa. It’s still abandoned, and it doesn’t have any monitoring equipment. There should be no record of our presence in this part of space, provided the ship chasing us didn’t see us.”
Coop nodded. He didn’t tell the crew about his other gamble. He was hoping that the Empire’s vessels still had a stealth tech energy signature, one that would interfere with any tracking that a foldspace search vessel might deploy.
“Heading out of foldspace,” Anita said.
Coop looked at the screens in front of him. They had gone white for that half second between foldspace and regular space.
He felt no trepidation at all about being in foldspace anymore. Apparently this mission—or the series of trips he had taken recently—had gotten him past the trauma of getting lost in foldspace.
“When are we?” Xilvii asked, sounding tense.
But, apparently, not everyone was past that trepidation.
The screen cleared, and Lost Souls appeared. The starbase that the corporation had commandeered floated in the distance, looking smaller than Coop expected.
When were they indeed?
“Pinging,” Xilvii said. Most ships coming out of foldspace pinged now, getting a reading from Lost Souls as to the date and time, rather than having some poor hapless person inform them that something had gone wrong with their trip.
Rooney was looking at the floating screen to her right, her body tense. Maybe Coop was the only person who wasn’t worried about being in foldspace any longer.
Searching for the Fleet Page 38
