The Falls [05 Diving Universe] 2016

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “I can assure you,” Fedo said, “I know a great deal about anacapa drives as well, and what I know is not wrong.”

  “Really?” Bristol asked. “Because you want to come in here and recall the runabout, right? Do you even know what kind of condition it’s in? Do you know where it is? Do you know where it will end up?”

  “It will return to the Ijo,” Fedo said. “All of our small ships are equipped with return mechanisms that we designed. They hook into the anacapa—”

  “Which is sitting right here.” Bristol touched the anacapa box. “That’s where your runabout’s anacapa is. Not on the runabout.”

  The entire team that Virji brought with her looked at Bristol with horror.

  “You asked me to repair your runabout,” Bristol said. “We ran several diagnostics, found that the anacapa drive was weak and possibly malfunctioning, and removed it.”

  “That’s not possible,” Fedo said. “An FS-Prime runabout won’t operate without an anacapa.”

  Give a prize to the idiot engineer, Bristol wanted to say. Instead, she managed, “That’s correct. Which is why we swapped out your anacapa with one of our reserve anacapas.”

  “And your reserve anacapa malfunctioned. Oh dear,” Fedo said.

  “No, it did not,” Bristol said. At least that we know of, she added mentally. “This is a procedure we’ve done many times. We’ve used our reserve anacapa many times as well. We always test it before putting it into a runabout. Always.”

  Fedo looked like she was about to argue, but Bristol wasn’t going to let her, not yet anyway. Not until Bristol had finished.

  “You know nothing about the reserve anacapa,” Bristol said. “You have no idea when it was manufactured, what its capabilities are, or why we chose it to replace the runabout’s regular anacapa. I do, and I know where and what could have happened.”

  “We don’t need the original anacapa to bring her back, do we?” Virji asked Fedo. Clearly, Virji was discussing Glida Kimura now. Apparently, the people who had invaded Bristol’s lab had a plan, one they had decided to use before they barged in here, one that Virji, at least, wasn’t willing to give up. “We use maintenance mode, tap into whatever anacapa she’s using, and—”

  “Maintenance mode?” Bristol asked.

  Fedo glared it at her. “I suppose you don’t read your updates. All the small ships on the Ijo are equipped with a fail-safe in the maintenance system. Anyone who tries to steal the ship won’t see this. It’s a backdoor into the anacapa drive, one we can access from here.”

  “Even if the ship’s in foldspace?” Bristol had never heard of any way that a Fleet vessel could communicate with another vessel in foldspace, not even through the maintenance system.

  In spite of herself, she was intrigued. Because if the engineering crew of the Ijo had come up with something like that, they should have contacted everyone who worked with anacapa drives throughout the Fleet. Despite what Fedo said, Bristol did examine all of the updates, and she knew no one had ever sent this information.

  She would have flagged it for her staff because it was that important. Finding better ways to pull ships out of foldspace was a high priority at all of the sector bases.

  If the Ijo had a way to contact and rescue ships in foldspace, then it was imperative that the ship share that method. Because communicating with a ship in foldspace would be a breakthrough of massive proportions, even if that communication was as specific as the maintenance mode speaking to the anacapa drive.

  That gave the sector base yet another tool in its arsenal so that it could rescue trapped ships.

  Not that any of this mattered at the moment, because no one knew if this Kimura woman was trapped. And if she had stolen the runabout, she would not have activated the distress signal, not even if she really was in trouble.

  Bristol stared at Fedo, waiting for her to answer the question about maintenance mode and foldspace.

  Fedo’s lips thinned.

  It was Virji who answered.

  “We haven’t attempted maintenance mode in foldspace, although I was assured it would work.” She glanced at Fedo. “Was that incorrect?”

  If Bristol had felt kinder, she would have stepped in. If she understood what Fedo had been talking about, and if the whole maintenance mode gambit worked even in foldspace, there was still the issue of the anacapa drives.

  Fedo had said the communication was between the maintenance mode and the original anacapa. If the Ijo could communicate through foldspace with the runabout, and if the maintenance mode got the message, it would still have to transmit that message to the anacapa drive.

  The original anacapa was a hundred times more powerful than the replacement anacapa. Even if the communication got through to the replacement anacapa, the replacement anacapa might not have enough power to link with the Ijo’s drive and return to the Ijo.

  Bristol ran through all of that in her head, expecting Fedo to actually be saying the same thing out loud.

  Only Fedo was not speaking. She looked a little appalled, as if she wasn’t quite sure what was going on.

  Bristol’s breath caught. She suddenly realized what was happening.

  Captain Virji wanted to bring this Kimura woman back. Virji, who didn’t have the anacapa expertise, had rousted her people to get Kimura one way or another. Virji figured she knew how to do it, with some half-remembered explanations of the maintenance mode and the anacapa drive. She had rousted her people, and if they had protested, then she might have said that Bristol could help.

  Although Bristol doubted that. She was beginning to get the sense that Virji was one of those captains whose word was law, and no one dare contradict it. So if Virji believed that something impossible could happen, her people would do whatever they could to make the impossible happen—or, at least, to wave their hands and do their very best.

  These five people, including Fedo, had probably convinced the captain to come to Bristol’s lab because the runabout had left from here. They had probably hoped that the runabout would boomerang back here.

  Or maybe they had been counting on Bristol to help.

  Although, given Fedo’s hostility, Bristol doubted that.

  Fedo’s uncomfortable look, though, caught Bristol, and made her realize that everything was about to come apart. If Bristol wanted to control this situation, now was the time to do so.

  “I have no idea what your team told you about your maintenance mode workaround and foldspace,” Bristol said to Virji. Bristol could see Fedo out of the corner of her eye.

  The color had drained from Fedo’s face, and Bristol suddenly realized how critical her words sounded.

  “I suspect,” Bristol said, modifying her tone just a little, “that whatever they told you about the runabout and the Ijo is correct, for that circumstance. But this circumstance is different.”

  Virji’s eyes narrowed. She raised her chin slightly.

  Even Bristol, who wasn’t all that great at reading others, understood that movement. Virji was showing her resistance to whatever Bristol was going to say.

  “Whatever you were told about the maintenance mode,” Bristol said, “probably came from tests with the small vehicles in your bay. But those tests were invalidated for this runabout when I switched out the anacapa drives.”

  Fedo gave her a grateful look.

  Bristol continued in a flat, even voice, “I doubt anyone who serves on a Fleet vessel knows that it’s common operating procedure to swap out the anacapas in FS-Prime runabouts when work proceeds on those ships, particularly if there are hints of anacapa problems.”

  Bristol glanced at Fedo, whose eyes had grown big. She shook her head ever so slightly. Bristol wanted to point at her, to get her to settle down.

  But Fedo wouldn’t settle down. She knew she had made a mistake. She had promised her overly demanding captain that she could do something that was impossible. Bristol knew it. She hoped that Fedo understood that Bristol held the future of the entire Ijo engineering crew in her
hands.

  They had screwed up. They had promised that they could communicate with a ship in foldspace without testing that promise. It was foolish, and egotistical, and probably never would have been discovered if the Kimura woman hadn’t stolen the runabout.

  “Because I didn’t know about the workaround,” Bristol said. “I did not hook up that anacapa drive to anything except the navigational system. That’s all we needed to keep the runabout in proper working order.”

  Virji crossed her arms, but she had brought her chin down. She was now looking at Bristol directly.

  Bristol was getting through. She had to tread carefully to make sure she didn’t overpromise and she didn’t ruin the small headway she was making with Virji.

  “The reason I did that is that the runabout just needed to ‘think’ it had a functioning anacapa.” Bristol shrugged. “So, even if you could figure out how to communicate with that runabout, wherever it is, your maintenance fail-safe isn’t hooked up. The maintenance system was shut off the moment we brought that runabout to this lab.”

  Fedo was nodding. That was standard procedure on all repairs. If an automated maintenance system was left on, it would try to undo all the work a repair team was doing as the repair team was working.

  “In other words,” Virji said, sounding very disappointed, “we’re not going to be able to recall Everly anyway.”

  Everly must have been Kimura. Or whatever her name was.

  “I didn’t say that.” Bristol was still shaking from the interruption and the amount of emotional energy that had come at her. She wished Pereyra had been in this room when the team had come in. Pereyra would have handled this entire encounter with a lot less anger and a lot more finesse.

  “Before you interrupted me,” Bristol said, “I was already working on a way of recovering the runabout. We’ve managed a few foldspace rescues in the past. I was hoping to try one here.”

  Fedo tilted her head. She clearly had questions, but she wasn’t willing to ask them in front of her captain.

  Virji didn’t seem to notice Fedo’s reaction at all.

  “I hadn’t realized you had this well in hand,” Virji said. “Yet you’re working this all alone.”

  “Actually, I’m not,” Bristol said. “My team is working on this at various points in the base. We’re trying to figure out where the runabout is before we try to recall it.”

  “I don’t understand,” Virji said.

  Fedo, who was standing slightly behind her, closed her eyes briefly, as if she couldn’t believe what the captain was saying.

  Bristol was a bit surprised she had to explain this, but she decided to do the best she could.

  “The runabout might be in orbit around a nearby planet or it might be in foldspace. It might even be lurking in the asteroid belt at the edge of this solar system, waiting for the Ijo to leave.” She added that last because she had a sense that Virji’s overinflated ego liked the occasional massage.

  Of course, Bristol was so bad with people, she might have been misreading that, but she wasn’t sure.

  “You can determine that from what, exactly?” Virji asked.

  Standard scans, Bristol almost said and then decided against it. Virji clearly had the idea that the runabout would be hard to find, and right now, Bristol didn’t want to dissuade her.

  “There are a variety of things that we’re doing,” Bristol said. “And more that we could do.”

  As she spoke, her mind played with the maintenance mode idea that Fedo had described. There was something in that description that might help find this Kimura woman.

  “I’ll leave my team with you,” Virji said. “You can direct them, and get them to help you—”

  The last thing Bristol wanted was more people in her lab. But Fedo seemed bright enough, and embarrassed enough, to help a little.

  “I just need her,” Bristol said. “Everyone else can go back to the Ijo, maybe get me a history of where the runabout’s been recently or something.”

  It was make-work, but it was the only thing she could come up with at the moment.

  “It hasn’t been anywhere,” Virji said. “We don’t use those runabouts.”

  She sounded tense.

  Bristol didn’t care about the inner politics of the Ijo. All she cared about was getting her lab back.

  “Well, it’s been places,” Bristol said. “Maybe not recently, but once upon a time. And those places might be programmed into its drive. So if someone would check for me…?”

  Fedo stepped forward, and for a moment, Bristol worried that she would leave. Instead, she turned to the four other people who had come into the lab with Virji.

  “Head back to the Ijo and see if you can find records or anything that might help us here. Also, records of Everly’s use of the runabout would help as well.”

  “Indeed,” Virji said, as if she were the one giving the orders.

  “Let me know if you find anything,” Fedo said. Apparently she was used to that kind of interruption from Virji.

  The four nodded, and headed to the door. Bristol made herself smile at Virji. “Captain, if you would like to go with your team…”

  “No, I’ll stay here,” Virji said. “I’m sure I can be useful.”

  Fedo’s mouth twisted as if she had swallowed something sour. Apparently, they weren’t going to get rid of Virji any time soon.

  “Well, then, take a seat,” Bristol said. “Some of this will get very technical. And it might be dangerous, since we’ll be working with an open anacapa drive.”

  Virji’s smile was condescending. “We are used to danger,” she said. “That’s what the ships of the Fleet are all about.”

  Behind her, Fedo rolled her eyes.

  Bristol was beginning to like her.

  “All right then,” Bristol said, because she couldn’t do anything else. She turned to Fedo. “Are you ready to give this a try?”

  “Yes,” Fedo said. “Let’s see what we can figure out.”

  And together they walked over to the anacapa drive casing to start the most dangerous work Bristol had attempted in years.

  FORTY-FOUR

  BASSIMA ARRIVED AT the sector base, unable to shake her own feelings of irritation. She knew that Hranek had few social skills, particularly when he was busy, but she had never had him treat her like such an idiot before.

  After she saw him, she stopped briefly at the Sandoveil Security Office. She needed to see Amy Loraas before heading to the sector base. What Hranek didn’t know—or maybe he had forgotten—was that the security office had to work in coordination with the sector base on anything that involved both of them.

  Loraas was in, and receptive to everything Bassima told her. Of course, Loraas had to see what evidence there was. She believed, like Bassima, that there was more than enough to take Glida Kimura into custody. They would resolve the other issues later. Once they had Glida Kimura under watch, they would be able to slow down the investigation.

  Loraas added one more wrinkle. She wanted the day crew to find out where Glida Kimura went after she left Taji Kimura’s office. There was a short period of time that Bassima couldn’t find footage on. Bassima suspected that was when Glida got rid of Taji’s body.

  Bassima might have fought to keep that part of the job if she hadn’t struggled with that footage all night.

  Bassima was slowing down, and she felt it. She needed a nap, if nothing else, and she would get it once Glida was in custody.

  The exterior of the sector base was almost impossible to see from the road. Even the parking area was hidden under a shelf of rock that matched the mountainside. The rock was reinforced with nanobits so that it wouldn’t come down.

  But Bassima hated it nonetheless. It looked unstable to her, which was probably on purpose. Its very appearance made outsiders think twice before walking underneath it.

  She parked her official aircar in the visitor’s area, which was deliberately tiny. There were very few visitors to the sector base—or at least,
very few that came by ground. Sometimes young locals just out of school or new arrivals to the Sandoveil Valley applied for work here.

  They all had to be DNA tested before they could get a job here, which Bassima thought outrageously invasive. It was one of the many reasons she wasn’t working here.

  That, and she didn’t want to spend her entire working life underneath a mountain.

  Most of the new arrivals who visited the sector base, though, came from the Fleet. They either entered with that weirdo-magic drive she’d heard so much about, that somehow helped them appear under solid rock; or, on very rare occasions, the fake mountaintop above the sector base opened, and a ship went through it.

  When that happened, the entire city got warning. The YSR-SR usually had to scramble to make sure no one had been hiking up there. It was illegal to hike on the fake mountaintop, but that didn’t stop people from doing it.

  In fact, a lot of teenagers had died up there over the centuries. It seemed that the word restricted was a magnet for anyone under the age of twenty-five. Bassima always thought it was a way that they could prove just how incredibly stupid they were.

  But she wasn’t allowed to voice opinions like that. Because more than once, she’d been the one to break the news to grieving families that their reckless teenage kid wasn’t ever coming back.

  She wiped a hand over her face, willing herself awake. She’d gone in the front door of the sector base only a few times since she started working for the security office. The last time had been more than a decade ago.

  She finger-combed her hair and tugged on the shirt of her uniform, hoping she looked at least slightly presentable.

  The entry was wide and cavernous, which she was certain was intentional. It was almost like she had entered a gigantic black cave. It was dark and uncomfortable, and she knew that was on purpose, because she had asked about the design once.

  Anyone who balked at this part of the sector base couldn’t work in any other section.

  She didn’t balk, exactly, but she understood. Her skin crawled, just like it had every other time she had come here. It was a sensation she apparently hadn’t forgotten.