Searching for the Fleet

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “We’re fine,” Rooney said after a moment. “We didn’t lose or gain time.”

  The bridge crew let out a collective sigh of relief—everyone except Coop.

  He tapped the controls on the arm of his chair, without sitting in it since, technically, he had given the comm to Rooney.

  The skip was still intact, the engines powered down. As far as he could tell, the quarantine was working. Only one life sign remained on board the skip.

  Yash. She was working at something.

  She was always working at something.

  The medical team had managed to take the injured to a quarantined medical unit in another part of the bay. The unit was updating in real time: no one had died yet, although Bridge was critical. Apparently, he had been hit full-on with one of those weapons.

  Two injuries, some information, a Not-Fleet, and a narrow escape.

  Coop suddenly felt giddy. He had missed command. He had missed those moments when every decision had to be made quickly or something awful would happen.

  He hated the day-to-day routine of Lost Souls.

  He clearly needed to be back, doing some form of this, some kind of work, leading missions, running point.

  “Captain?” Rooney asked, glancing down at what he was doing. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I am.”

  In fact, he was better than he had been in a long, long time. But he didn’t tell her that. He needed to process what had happened, figure out what that meant for who he was and where he was going.

  Although he did know where he was going.

  He was heading forward again.

  Into the future.

  Just like he had been trained to do.

  Forty-Three

  Three nights later, Yash met Coop in their favorite bar on the Ivoire. Entering the bar made her feel like she had gone back in time. The floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked the space station that Lost Souls had just purchased.

  Lost Souls had grown so large it was going to move its command to an even larger station, one that continually added wings and layers. Ilona Blake was supervising building, and sometimes, in quiet moments, Yash wondered if Blake was building her own empire.

  Other than the view, the bar looked the same. The same twenty-five tables were still organized in the same small groups. Different plants ran along the counter, plants that were actually real, plants that hydroponics believed would thrive in this environment, so close to the main commissary.

  Someone had polished the brass. The teak-colored wood shone as well. And alcohol bottles still lined the two interior walls, although most of the bottles were from this time period now, and from the Nine Planets.

  The crew had worked their way through the bottles from their past, although Coop once told Yash he had taken some of his favorites and stashed them in his captain’s cabin for important occasions.

  She wondered if this was one of those occasions.

  She didn’t see him as she walked deeper into the bar. He had asked her if she wanted to join him, and she had almost said no. She wanted to dig through the information she had pulled out of Sector Base E-2. She had finally gotten the information out of quarantine and realized that she had a treasure trove of data.

  The Fleet had not properly cleared the files when it shut down Sector Base E-2 if, indeed, it had shut down Sector Base E-2 rather than simply abandoning it. She had a hunch she would find the answer to that mystery as she looked through the data. She hoped she would find out about a lot of things as she combed it.

  She felt that obsession she had felt weeks ago—the one that had led to the trip to Sector Base E-2 in the first place—return. Coop probably sensed it too, which was why he brought her here.

  Or maybe he was just lonely. Boss hadn’t come back yet, and he had no one to talk with. Not about things that really mattered.

  Yash was about to wander to the alcohol wall when she saw Coop, sitting at a table deep in the bar. The chair he was sitting on rested on two legs only, and his feet were crossed on the tabletop. A glass of peach-colored liquid rested on his chest, a glistening square bottle with the same liquid open on the table beside another glass.

  Anything that peach color should be sweet, but Yash knew from experience the drink had a bite to it. She couldn’t remember the name of the liquid—some kind of weird hybrid that most resembled a vodka mixed with peach-flavored hot sauce. Coop had always liked it, though, and Yash could tolerate it.

  He must have seen her reflection in the windows because he leaned forward, poured two fingers of liquid into her glass, and handed it to her as she reached his side.

  She sat down on the bench seat. The view from here wasn’t so much of the space station as an array of stars beyond.

  She sipped the liquid. It was sharper than she remembered, with a tang at the back of the tongue that was almost sour.

  “I called this place home,” Coop said. “In the middle of everything. I was standing on the bridge of the Ivoire, and I called Lost Souls home.”

  He didn’t have to explain any more than that. Yash understood what bothered him: A captain of the Fleet should consider his ship home.

  But Coop no longer did.

  He had changed—and he had just realized it.

  She let out a small sigh. She had changed too. That trip hadn’t changed her as much as cemented what she had been slowly realizing—that no matter how hard she tried, no matter what she sought, the past was long in the past. She would never be able to revisit the Fleet, not the one she knew. She would never regain her friends or her family.

  She would never again have that comforting naiveté that she had grown up with. She had been raised to believe the Fleet was constant, that while other things changed, the Fleet never did.

  And that had been wrong.

  “I felt it too,” she said. “Going into my lab. It’s so big. You can’t have a lab that big on a ship.”

  Coop gave her a sideways glance, maybe checking to see if she truly understood. She smiled at him—not a happy smile. Just a sympathetic one.

  Then he put his glass on his chest again.

  “Perkins is going to be just fine,” he said. “She’ll have some rehab, but nothing major.”

  Perkins had been shot in the back. The shot had destroyed her environmental suit. As the nanobits unbonded, some of them invaded her skin, but hadn’t caused any permanent damage.

  Bridge, on the other hand, had been shot in the stomach, and by the time they had returned to Lost Souls, the mingling of the unbonded bits with his colon had caused a terrible infection.

  “Bridge is still critical,” Coop said, “but they’re willing to say he’ll survive now.”

  “Good,” Yash said. There was nothing else she could add. Because that was one of the other lessons that kept getting reinforced.

  People died. One day they were here and the next they weren’t, and no matter how much she wanted to believe she could control that, she knew she couldn’t.

  She didn’t take another drink. She didn’t want it. She just leaned her head back, still tired from the entire trip.

  No ship had followed them to Lost Souls. There was no chatter from the Empire either about an armada of ships invading or anything else. Although that meant nothing. Starbase Kappa was on the other side of the Empire from the Nine Planets Alliance. Even if something major had happened there, the chance of the news arriving at Lost Souls was pretty slim.

  “I got the data to my lab,” Yash said. “They didn’t shut the base down properly. We should have some kind of history of the Fleet once I organize everything.”

  Coop nodded, slowly twirling the glass as if it were a dial that would open his chest.

  “We’ll get some answers then,” he said.

  “Just not the ones we need.”

  He looked at her sideways, a frown creasing his face.

  Yash shrugged one shoulder. “The Fleet’s right, you know. We were raised right.”

  He stoppe
d twirling the glass, still looking at her, waiting for her to continue.

  “We wanted to know what happened to everyone so we could go into our future,” she said. “But that was the wrong question. What happened that far in the past, it doesn’t matter now. It’s just a curiosity.”

  Coop nodded, then looked away from her. He took a sip from his glass, setting it down between them, his hand resting there as if resting the glass on his chest was too much work.

  “The questions are what’s around us now,” she said. “And what do we do with it? Where do we go from here?”

  “Or do we go from here,” Coop said.

  He swung his feet off the table and sat up, then put his glass beside the bottle.

  “I need to command a ship, Yash,” he said.

  “I know,” she said.

  “But I don’t need to live on one.”

  Her breath caught. That was a hell of an admission from a captain of the Fleet. Only Coop wasn’t a captain of the Fleet anymore. He was someone else, and this was an acknowledgement of that.

  “Those ships,” he said. “That’s what the ragtag force we’re building here will look like.”

  “Prettier ships, I hope,” Yash said. “They had no sense of design.”

  He grinned at her. “Yeah. But you know what I mean.”

  She did. Not a Fleet, per se. They’d been wrong when they talked about building a new Fleet.

  They were building something else here. Blake was building a gigantic business. Boss was building knowledge in the form of old ships. And Yash could stop tweaking old technologies and make some newer ones, ones that would actually benefit the Nine Planets, Lost Souls, and whatever it was that Coop wanted to do.

  “Boss explores the present to find out about the past,” Coop said. “I’ve been trying that in my own way.”

  He had. Yash hadn’t realized it, but he had.

  “It doesn’t work for me. I’m not an explorer. I thrive best in combat. Isn’t that odd?” He sounded surprised by it.

  But Yash wasn’t.

  “We don’t have anyone to fight,” Yash said. “We’re safe here.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “We don’t know. We don’t know what’s out there, and what’s around us. We don’t even know what will happen with the Empire.”

  She set her glass beside his. “You had fun out there.”

  It sounded like an accusation. She hadn’t meant it that way.

  But Coop didn’t seem to notice. “Fun’s the wrong word,” he said. “I felt alive. I was using all of my skills for the first time in a long time. I’m good at tactical. I’m good at being the underdog. I’m good at thinking on the fly. And I enjoy it.”

  “You’re not going to go out and provoke fights, are you?” Yash asked.

  He shook his head. “I’m not that person.”

  He was right; he wasn’t.

  “But I’ve been thinking,” he said. “We need to take over all of Lost Souls’ defenses. We need to do more than patrol the border with the Empire. We need to train a lot of crew. We need recruits, and we need good solid DV-Class vessels that we can trust.”

  “Those Not-Fleet people know how to unbond nanobits,” Yash said.

  “Yeah,” Coop said, “and maybe we can figure that out. That’s the first step toward defending against it, right?”

  “I suppose,” she said. She hated reverse engineering. It always led to mistakes.

  “What I want,” he said, “is their tech. They know how to track in foldspace. I want that.”

  Yash didn’t have to ask who “they” were. The Not-Fleet people. The ones who attacked.

  “You want to go on a raid?” she asked.

  “Maybe,” he said. “I don’t know yet. What I want right now is a mission debrief. I want that from the entire crew. I want to know what worked and what didn’t. I want to know how we can improve. And I want to know what they all think we should do in the future.”

  “That seems very democratic of you,” Yash said. “What happened to the hierarchy?”

  He shrugged. “It has its uses. But it seems like one of my life lessons—one of the ones I have to learn over and over again—is that rigidity is the enemy of the good. The more rigid I am, the poorer my decisions. And that goes to everything from procedure to hierarchy to assuming I know what the hell I want with my life.”

  Yash nodded. Then she said, “You remember being in here with Dix that last night?”

  “I’ll never forget it,” Coop said.

  “He said we’d lost the future, remember that?”

  “Yeah,” Coop said. “But at the same time, he’d raised a glass to that window and said, There’s the future. It’s been there all along. I always thought that was ironic, considering he then tried to take our futures away.”

  “He took his own away,” Yash said.

  “It frightened him,” Coop said. “He was mourning what he called the expected imagined future. The rigid future. The one in which we kept traveling forward under someone else’s command.”

  Yash picked up her glass. That weird bitter liquid seemed appropriate now.

  “That’s what I’ve been thinking about,” Coop said. “Not the loss of a future. The loss of the hierarchy. Not in the Ivoire, but above the Ivoire. We’re the ones in charge now, Yash. If we want to be. And while we were trained to run departments and ships, we were never trained to lead—not with a vision, creating the future.”

  She sipped, wincing at the taste. She had been bemoaning the loss of structure, saying she wanted to return to the Fleet to join the regimented life she had known. But the regiment was about knowing where you fit, how it all went together, and who expected what from you.

  The Fleet had done the thinking. She functioned inside their vision and limited her work to whatever they needed.

  Coop was right; there was no one above them now, no structure that showed them where the next step should be.

  They could invent it from scratch.

  She should have found that terrifying. Instead, it felt freeing.

  “I take it we’re going to stop searching for the Fleet,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Coop said. “I think we found it.”

  She looked at him in surprise. “We did?”

  He opened his hands, indicating the two of them.

  “It was a community, Yash, filled with people, a shared vision, and a collection of ships. We have a community. We have people we care about. We’re gaining a collection of ships. We just need a vision.”

  “It sounds like you’re gaining one,” Yash said.

  “I think I am,” Coop said quietly. “I finally think I am.”

  She nodded. She was too. She wasn’t the same woman she had been six years ago. She wasn’t the same woman she would have been if she hadn’t gotten lost in foldspace.

  She was someone new. Someone other. Someone with opportunities she had never had before.

  It was time to embrace them, rather than lament what she had lost. It was time to step into the life she had, not the life she thought she deserved.

  It was time to be herself—once and for all.

  She held up her glass. “A toast to the future,” she said.

  “Our future,” Coop said as he clinked his glass to hers. “Our unknown future.”

  “And everything it sends our way,” Yash said, and finished her drink.

  Learn more about foldspace and the history of the Fleet in The Application of Hope: A Diving Universe Novella. On sale now.

  “REQUESTING SUPPORT. The Ivoire, just outside of Ukhanda’s orbit. Need warships.”

  The calmness in the request caught Captain Tory Sabin’s ear before the name of the ship registered. She had stopped on the bridge just briefly, on her way to a dinner she had sponsored for her support staff. She wasn’t dressed like a captain. She had decided to stay out of her uniform and wear an actual dress for a change.

  At least she had on practical shoes.

  But she felt odd as she hur
ried across the nearly empty bridge, covered in perfume, her black hair curled on the top of her head, her grandmother’s antique rivets-and-washers bracelet jingling on her left wrist. She grabbed the arm of the captain’s chair, but didn’t sit down.

  Only three people stood on the bridge—the skeleton crew, all good folks, all gazing upwards as if the voice of Jonathon “Coop” Cooper, captain of the Ivoire, were speaking from the ceiling.

  Then Lieutenant Perry Graham, a man whose reddish blond hair and complexion made him look continually embarrassed, leaned forward. He tapped the console in front of him, so that he could bring up the Ivoire’s location.

  It came up in a 2-D image, partly because of the distance, and partly because Graham—the consummate professional—knew that Sabin preferred her long-distance views flat rather than in three dimensions. The best members of any bridge crew learned how to accommodate their captain’s quirks as well as her strengths.

  She moved closer to the wall screen displaying the image. The ship, marked in shining gold (the default setting for the entire Fleet), showed up in small relief, traveling quickly. Like Coop had said, the Ivoire wasn’t too far from the planet Ukhanda. Whatever was causing the crisis wasn’t readily apparent from this distant view, but Sabin could tell just from Coop’s voice that he had been under attack.

  Coop was one of those men, one of those captains, who didn’t ask for help if he could avoid it. Much as she teased him about this, she knew she fell in that category as well.

  Sabin didn’t have to tell Graham to zoom in. He did, more than once, until the Ivoire looked huge. Around it were at least a dozen other ships, so small and feathery that they almost seemed like errors in the image.

  “What the hell?” said Second Lieutenant Megan Phan. She was tiny and thin, her angular face creased with a frown. She probably hadn’t even realized that she had spoken out loud.

  Sabin doubted the other two had realized it either. Phan’s words probably echoed their thoughts. In all her years in the Fleet, Sabin had never seen ships like that.