by Paula Guran
His uniform was so crisp she knew he had put it on right after the call to the bridge. So he’d been either asleep or doing something else when the call came in.
“Sorry, sir,” Graham said, sounding just a bit contrite.
“I want identification on those ships,” Sabin said. “We have time—half a day, you said. So let’s see if we can cut that time short, and see if we can figure out who or what we’re dealing with. The other cultures on Ukhanda are a mystery to me. Maybe they developed some technology of their own that we’re not familiar with.”
“Do you want me to send for Sector Research?” Meri Ebedat spoke up for the first time. She usually handled navigation, but she’d been doing some maintenance on the secure areas of the bridge during the respite period. She had a streak of something dark running along her left cheek, and her eyes were red-rimmed. Her brown hair had fallen from its usually neat bun.
She had to be near the end of her shift, although now, she wouldn’t be leaving. She was a good all-around bridge crew member, and Sabin would need her as the mission continued.
“Yeah, do it,” Sabin said, “although I doubt Sector Research knows much more than we do. We haven’t had enough time to study Ukhanda. That was one reason the Ivoire was there.”
“You think they did something wrong?” Wilmot asked her softly, but the entire bridge crew heard.
She knew what he meant: he meant had the Ivoire offended one of the cultures in a severe way.
But she gave the standard answer. “By our laws, probably not,” she said.
He gave her a sideways look. He wanted a real answer, even though he knew the real answer. They all did knew the real answer.
Had the Ivoire—or, rather, its on-planet team—offended one of the cultures? Clearly. And if Coop didn’t act quickly, the entire ship might pay the price.
2.
“Do you ever question it?” Coop asked Sabin months before, his hands behind his head, pillows pushed to the side, strands of his black hair stuck to his sweat-covered forehead.
They were in a suite on Starbase Kappa. They had pooled their vacation funds for the nicest room on the base—or at least, the nicest room available to someone of a captain’s rank. Sabin hadn’t stayed anywhere this luxurious in her entire life—soft sheets, a perfect bed, a fully stocked kitchen with a direct link to the base’s best restaurant, and all the entertainment the Fleet owned plus some from the nearby sector, not that she had needed entertainment. She had Coop.
The two of them weren’t a couple, not really. They were a convenience.
It was almost impossible for captains to have an intimate relationship with anyone once they were given a ship. Coop’s marriage to his chief linguist—a marriage that began when they were still in school—hadn’t made it through his first year as captain.
Sabin had never been married, and she hadn’t been in love in decades. At least that was what she told herself. Because the people she interacted with on a daily basis were all under her command. She didn’t dare fall in love with them or favor them in any way.
It wasn’t against Fleet policy to marry or even sleep with a crew member (provided both had enough years and seniority to understand the relationship, and provided both had signed off with all the various legal and ethical departments), but it didn’t feel right to her to sleep with and then command another person.
It didn’t feel right to Coop either. They’d discussed it one night, decided they were attracted enough to occasionally scratch an itch, and somehow the entire convenience had improved their friendship rather than harmed it (as they had both feared it might).
Ever since, they would communicate on a private link between their ships, and when their ships had a mutual respite period, they got a room and scratched that itch, sometimes repeatedly.
She had been about to get out of bed and order some food when Coop spoke. She had the covers pulled back, but his tone caught her, and she lay back down.
“Do I question what?” she asked, grabbing one of his pillows and propping it under her back.
“Our mission,” he said. “Or at least part of our mission.”
She felt cold despite the blankets and the perfect environmental setting. She hadn’t heard anyone question the Fleet’s mission since boarding school. At that point, everyone questioned, just a little. They were encouraged to.
“You don’t believe in the mission any more?” she asked, turning on her side to face him. If Jonathon “Coop” Cooper no longer believed in the Fleet, well, then the Fleet might as well disband. Because the universe had shifted somehow and the rules no longer applied.
“Part of it,” he said. “Although to say that I don’t believe might be too strong. Let’s just say I’m worrying about things.”
He didn’t look at her. He was staring at the ceiling, which was covered with a star field she didn’t recognize. Starbase Kappa was old, built by her grandfather’s generation and much of the base paid homage to places the Fleet had been almost a century ago. The Fleet usually liked to leave its past behind. Even the feats of bravery and the victories (large and small) became the stuff of legend, not something that the old-timers discussed as if they were meaningful events.
“What are you worrying about?” She propped herself up on her elbow so that she was in his field of vision.
He glanced at her, then smiled almost dismissively, and looked back up at the ceiling.
“What makes us so smart?” he asked.
She blinked, not expecting that.
“You and me?” she asked, thinking about their captains’ duties.
He sat up, shaking his head as he did so. The blanket slid down his torso, revealing the dusting of black hair that covered his chest and narrowed on its way down his stomach.
Normally that would have distracted her, but his mood changed everything. She wasn’t sure she had ever seen Coop this focused, even though she knew he was capable of it.
“Not you and me,” he said. “The Fleet. We’ve been traveling for thousands of years. We go into a sector and if someone asks for help—or hell, if we figure they need help even if they don’t ask—we give them assistance. We advise them, we make them see our point of view. We give them whatever they need from diplomatic support to military back up, and we stay as long as they need us, or at least until we believe they’ll be just fine.”
She’d been in hundreds of these kinds of conversations throughout her life, but never with another full adult vested with the powers of the Fleet. Always with children or teenagers or discontented civilians who traveled on the various ships.
Never with another captain.
“We never go back and check, we have no idea if we’ve done harm or good.” Coop ran a hand through his hair, making it stand on end. “We continually move forward, believing in our own power, and we never test it.”
“We test it,” she said. “The fact that we’ve existed this long is a test in and of itself. We’ve been the Fleet for thousands of years. We’ve lived this way forever. We know the history of various regions. That’s just not normal, at least for human beings.”
“Because we never stick long enough to be challenged,” he said. “And we ‘weed’ out the bad elements, giving them crappy—and sometimes deadly—assignments or we leave them planetside someplace where we convince ourselves they’ll be happy.”
Her breath caught. Finally, a glimmer of what might have caused this mood.
“Did you have to leave someone behind, Coop?” she asked softly.
“No,” he said emphatically, then gave her a look that, for a moment, seemed filled with betrayal. “Haven’t you wondered these things?”
She hadn’t. She wasn’t that political. She stayed away from the diplomats and the linguists and the sector researchers. She didn’t like intership politics or the mechanics of leadership.
She knew what she needed to know to run her ship better than anyone else in the Fleet—better than Coop, although she would never tell him that—and s
he left the rest to the intellectuals and the restless minds.
She had never expected such questioning from Coop. If anything, she found it a bit disappointing. She didn’t want him to doubt the mission.
She had thought better of him than that.
She wasn’t sure how to respond, because anything she said would probably shut him down. It might even interfere with the comfortable convenience of their relationship.
But he expected an answer. More than that, he seemed to need one.
“In my captaincy,” she said after a moment, after giving her self some time to think, “the Geneva has never had an on-planet assignment. We’ve been front line or support crew or the occasional battleship. We don’t get the diplomatic missions.”
“You haven’t thought about what we do, then,” he said flatly.
“Not since school, Coop,” she said, finally deciding on honesty.
“Not once? This mission from God or whatever is causing us to move ever forward, spreading the gospel of—what? A culture that we’ve never lived in and we no longer know existed?”
He sounded wounded, as if all of this were personal. She had to think just to remember what he was talking about. The Fleet left Earth thousands of years ago, and supposedly did have a mission, to find new cultures and to help them or something like that.
She had never paid attention to mythology and history in school. She didn’t think it pertained to anything she was doing.
She still didn’t.
“I think,” she said gently, “we have our own culture now. The Fleet doesn’t live on planets or moons. Its world is the ships. That’s what we are. The ships. And everything else is what we do to maintain our ships. We do explore, we do encounter other peoples, but that’s not the Fleet’s main job. The Fleet’s main job is to maintain the Fleet.”
He slouched in the bed. “Oh, hell, that’s even more depressing.”
“Why do you question?” she asked.
He gave her that betrayed look again, then threw the covers back.
“Why do you breathe?” he asked, and left the room.
3.
“Captain,” Graham said, “I managed to modify our visuals just a bit. Those little ships are firing.”
Sabin stood so that she could see the screen better. She had assumed that the little ships were doing something to the Ivoire, but, she realized as she watched, she hadn’t thought of it as firing on the larger ship for two reasons.
The first reason was that something that small couldn’t have weapons that would damage the Ivoire—not individually, anyway, and to her, somehow, that meant that any shots those little ships did take would be harmless. The second reason she hadn’t thought the little ships were firing was that the Ivoire didn’t seem to be reacting as if it were being shot at.
Why wasn’t Coop shooting back? He could blow those things apart.
But the modified view showed little rays of light, coming from the small ships and hitting the Ivoire with a flare. The light and the flare were clearly constructs that Graham had designed to make the shots visible.
Still, they seemed creepy and a little overwhelming, rather like being stung continually by tiny insects. Pinpricks in isolation were annoying. Continual pinpricks weren’t just annoying, they became painful.
“Have those ships been targeting more than one area on the Ivoire?” she asked. The answer wasn’t readily apparent from the images that Graham had designed.
“I don’t know,” he said, “but if they are, the Ivoire’s in real trouble. From what I can tell, those ships have a lot of firepower.”
The weapons she understood, the ones that worked against great ships like these, required a lot of space and often their own power system away from the ship’s engines. She had never seen ships so tiny with repeated firepower, the kind that could do damage on something like the Ivoire.
That wasn’t entirely true. It was possible, if the ships gave up something, like speed. But these little ships kept up with the Ivoire and had powerful weapons.
“How is that possible?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Graham said. “They’re not like anything we’ve ever encountered before.”
“And,” Phan said, “they don’t seem to be anything our various allies have encountered either.”
“What about the Xenth?” Sabin asked. The Xenth weren’t really allies, but they were the ones who suggested the brokered peace conference.
“I’m not getting anything from Sector Research,” Phan said. “They’re scrambling for information from the Alta. But they’re not finding anything.”
“Which might mean that there’s nothing to find,” Wilmot said.
He seemed unusually pessimistic. Sabin frowned at him. He didn’t look at her. He was bent over his console, working furiously on improving their speed so that they could get to Coop faster.
“Captain.” The single word cut through all the discussion. It was Alvarez. “Look at the Ivoire.”
Sabin looked. It seemed to glow.
“Is that your effect, Perry?” she asked Graham.
“No, sir,” he said. “That’s the Ivoire.”
Sabin had never seen anything like that before. “What the hell is that?”
The Ivoire’s glow increased and then the ship vanished.
“Tell me they activated their anacapa,” she said, hoping she didn’t sound as worried as she felt.
“They did,” Graham said, “but I only know that because I just got a transmission from them a few minutes ago, announcing their intention to do so.”
“That transmission should be simultaneous with the anacapa’s activation,” Sabin said. “We should have gotten it as the Ivoire vanished.”
“Yes, sir,” Graham said, his tone speaking to the problem more than his words did.
“Keep this screen open, but show me what happened when that transmission was sent,” she said.
Another screen appeared next to the main screen. On it, the ships—all of them, including the Ivoire—were in slightly different positions.
The little rays of light kept hitting the Ivoire in various places all over its hull.
“Dammit,” Ebedat said.
“What?” Sabin said. She hadn’t seen anything. But her eye kept getting drawn to the scrum of little ships left in the Ivoire’s wake. The Ivoire’s disappearance seemed to have confused them. Or maybe they were automatic, and unable to cope with a target that suddenly vanished.
“I think,” Ebedat said, “and let’s put an emphasis on ‘think,’ okay? I think that six shots hit the Ivoire as it activated the anacapa.”
“That shouldn’t cause a problem,” Wilmot said.
“Not with weapons we understand,” Ebedat said, “but these didn’t show up on our system without some tweaking from Lieutenant Graham.”
“Good point,” Sabin said, wanting to shut down dissent while Ebedat had the floor.
“And look.” Ebedat froze the frame, then went over to it and pointed. “Three of those shots hit the general vicinity of the anacapa drive.”
“The most protected drive on all the ships,” Wilmot said. “You can’t hit the anacapa without penetrating the hull.”
“Do we have proof that the hull was penetrated?” Alvarez asked.
“There’s no obvious damage,” Graham said.
Sabin frowned at it all. “We don’t know what kind of weapons they’re using. They might have penetrated the hull without damaging it.”
“That’s not possible,” Wilmot said.
“Most cultures would say the anacapa isn’t possible either,” Sabin said, “and almost everyone we’ve encountered hasn’t figured out that foldspace exists.”
The bridge was silent for a moment. The second screen’s image remained frozen. On the first screen, the little ships swarmed the spot where the Ivoire had been, almost as if they were trying to prove to themselves that it hadn’t become invisible.
“The anacapa couldn’t have malfunctioned and creat
ed that light,” Wilmot said, but he didn’t sound convinced.
“We don’t know if that light came from the weapons,” Sabin said. “The Ivoire is probably in foldspace right now. Did Captain Cooper send us a window? How long does he plan to be in foldspace?”
“That part of the message was garbled,” Graham said. “Give me a moment to clean it up.”
“How long would you remain in foldspace, Captain, if this were happening to the Geneva?” Phan asked.
“The Ivoire knew support was half a day out,” Sabin said. “That would seem like a blip in foldspace. They could return without worrying about the little ships.”
She hoped that was what Coop had done. Just because one captain would do it didn’t mean another would. It was logical, though. And then they could all take on the problems caused by those little ships.
“They’ll also get a chance to assess damage,” Wilmot said, “and maybe recalibrate their own weapons to take out those little ships.”
Sabin frowned. Coop hadn’t fired on those ships, that she had seen anyway. Maybe he had other reasons that he couldn’t do so. Maybe his weapons systems weren’t working. Maybe he already knew that the weapons had no effect on those little vessels.
“He planned a twenty-hour window, sir,” Graham said. “At least I think that’s what the Ivoire’s message said. I’m coordinating with several others in the front line. We’ll let you know if that estimate is wrong.”
“It sounds right to me,” Sabin said. “It gives the Ivoire enough time to do some work on its own and it gives those small ships enough time to give up on the Ivoire and think it gone.”
“And it also gives enough time for us to arrive,” Wilmot said.
“Is he leaving this mess for us to clean up?” Phan asked, a bit too bluntly.
But Sabin knew what she meant. “The Fleet is operating diplomatically on Ukhanda. Once fire is exchanged, diplomacy ends.”
“Yeah, so why wouldn’t we fire?” Phan asked.
“I mean, once we fire, diplomacy ends,” Sabin said.
“So we’re supposed to take it when someone shoots at us?” Phan asked.
