The Runabout

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

“I know,” I say, “and that might be a problem.”

  She frowns at me. So does Mikk. But Elaine is nodding, and Orlando looks as unsettled as I feel.

  “What happened?” Yash asks.

  “There’s another malfunctioning anacapa drive,” I say, “and we couldn’t spot it from the line.”

  I explain the music without going into detail about how beautiful it is. How it lured me. I do mention how loud it was, and Elaine adds that she couldn’t hear it as strongly close to the ruined Dignity Vessel we had targeted.

  Yash’s frown grows deeper. She looks at Orlando, as if asking him for confirmation of what we’re saying.

  “The sound was strong,” he says. “And I didn’t see any ship it could have come from.”

  We all turn, almost as a unit, to that area holomap of the Boneyard. I scan it, looking for any kind of Dignity Vessel that would be close enough to cause the reaction the three of us had.

  We had deliberately chosen this particular Dignity Vessel because it was close to our entry point into the Boneyard, it was located near the edge of the Boneyard, and there weren’t other Dignity Vessels around it. We are still a bit skittish, worried that maybe we are being watched.

  The Boneyard itself had fired on us once, as we were taking ships out of it the very first time. We don’t know if the Boneyard can attack us while we’re inside the Boneyard. We also don’t know if the Boneyard will attack us using its shielding equipment, or if some of these ships are set up to act as security around the Boneyard, when something triggers a built-in automated response.

  I like to think that no one would have designated a ship with a malfunctioning anacapa to defend the Boneyard, but we still don’t know, exactly, what this place is, so we’re not sure what we’re facing.

  Yash leans toward the area holomap, peering at it as if it provides answers. She’s slowly shaking her head.

  “None of the small ships should have anacapa drives,” she says, “and you didn’t see bits of equipment floating loosely.”

  “We didn’t,” I confirm, even though she really wasn’t asking me. She was just reiterating what I had said, as if she was trying to process it all.

  “Hmm,” she says. “There’s no real empty area around here, where something could be shielded. Unless…”

  “Unless?” I ask.

  She shakes her head firmly, as if dismissing the idea.

  “Unless?” I press.

  She looks over at me. “Unless they’ve masked a signature. What we’re reading as a group of small ships isn’t.”

  “Can they do that?” I ask.

  Anger flashes in her eyes, but it disappears almost as quickly as it appears. Then she shrugs as if she’s calm, which she clearly is not.

  “I have no idea what the Fleet can or cannot do,” she says. “Five thousand years ago, no, we couldn’t do that. And we haven’t discovered that technology in any of the ships we’ve pulled so far.”

  “Then,” I say slowly, “why are you mentioning it as a possibility?”

  “Because,” she says. “Everything is a possibility now. I have the feeling that if we can imagine it, it might have already been built.”

  Sounds magical to me, but I’m not going to say that. I know the weight of time has fallen on the crew of the Ivoire in a way that I don’t entirely understand.

  I also know that we can’t be chasing phantoms, when we’re faced with real challenges.

  I need to learn that as well. My mother is phantom. What happened to her happened decades ago, and I am a different person, in a different place.

  “We don’t have the technology either,” I say. “Not Lost Souls, not the Nine Planets, not the Empire. So let’s go with what we know.”

  Yash doesn’t move for a moment, and I wonder if she even heard me. Then she slaps a hand on the table. It vibrates, but the holomap doesn’t. It looks constant and unchanging.

  “You did the right thing, aborting,” she says.

  I don’t want to acknowledge that. Of course, I did the right thing. And I don’t have to justify it. Not even now.

  “We need to scan. We need to investigate every little corner of this part of the Boneyard. We can’t send anyone out there again until we know.”

  She looks at me as if she expects me to back her up. I smile just a little, because I can’t help it.

  Yes, we need to do those things. Yes, I already had that thought. Yes, that’s why I aborted the mission.

  But I don’t say that. I don’t need to.

  She looks surprised at my expression, and then she smiles, just a little sheepishly. She doesn’t apologize—Yash rarely apologizes—but she shrugs again.

  “It’ll take some time,” she says.

  “I know,” I say, and realize I’m calmer than I’ve been since we get back.

  Now we’re in familiar territory for me. Dive a little, research a lot, look for hazards, account for the hazards, dive again.

  Mikk leans back, out of Yash’s range of vision, and gives me a small grin. He approves.

  He also knows, as I do, that we have a lot of work to do before we can dive again.

  Six

  After our meeting, Yash disappears into Engineering. She is going to work with all the trainees and Zaria. They’re going to design a program to account for the masking that Yash is talking about. It has to do with spatial relations and size, and maybe something existing half-in and half-out of foldspace.

  I think that’s all too complicated. So does Mikk. He and I sit in the conference room long after Yash has left.

  I grab a slice of bread, spread some whitish-purple sauce on it that tastes vaguely of plums, and top it with shredded carrots. Then I fold it in half. A makeshift meal until I can get a real one.

  I set the meal next to my water, and sit back down. Mikk hasn’t moved.

  “So what’s really bothering you?” he asks.

  I’m not sure if he’s asking that because of the readings on my suit from earlier or because he knows me well enough to know there’s more to the story than what I told Yash.

  Or both.

  “We need to check those small ships,” I say.

  “Yash says the Fleet doesn’t put anacapa drives in small ships,” Mikk says.

  “I know what Yash says.” I take a bite out of the sandwich. It’s better than I expected. Or I’m hungrier than I thought I was. “I also know her information on the Fleet is five thousand years old.”

  He stares at me for a moment, probably shocked that I said that aloud. We’ve all been very circumspect in how we deal with the Ivoire crew. They’re fragile people, even though they’ve been in our timeline for years now.

  We don’t discuss how long they’ve been here, how old their information is, how wrong they might be. We try to be kind to them, because we’re in an odd circumstance.

  Even though their tech is 5,000 years old, it’s more advanced than ours. A few of the staff at Lost Souls, particularly César Voris, a historian who has worked with me for years, believe that it’s possible the modern Fleet—if there is such a thing—are as backwards as we are now.

  Over centuries, we lost our tech. Lots of knowledge has completely disappeared. It’s possible that the same thing happened to the Fleet.

  Of course, if I bank on that, then I’m making the same mistakes that Yash is. I’m basing my opinions of the way the universe works on the way that the universe works in my time period, not in all others.

  “You think the Fleet added anacapa drives to small ships?” Mikk sounds incredulous. “You think they actually got past all of those fears that Yash brings up every time we mention adding anacapa drives to our skips?”

  “She got past it once,” I say. “We have a skip with an anacapa.”

  “And she blames you for it,” he says.

  “As she should,” I say. “It was my idea. And it’s my responsibility if anything goes wrong.”

  Mikk leans back, tilting his chair just enough so that he can reach the sideboard wi
thout getting up. He grabs a spotted apple, one of his favorite things.

  He doesn’t eat it, though. He clutches it as if it’s a ball and he’s about to throw it.

  “We have enough staff on this ship,” he says after a moment. “We can actually run the scans without disturbing the calculations she’s doing.”

  “You and I can run the scans,” I say. “It’s not hard. It’s probably not even going to be time-consuming.”

  He grins at me. “You’re going rogue, Boss.”

  I give him a sideways, disapproving look, even though I’m amused at his tone.

  “Why is that funny?” I ask.

  “Because you own the company,” he says. “You don’t have to hide from your employees.”

  I’ve been hiding from my employees ever since I got employees. Especially employees whose names I can’t remember, if I learned them at all. Lost Souls now employs more people than some starbases.

  “Technically,” I say, becoming serious, “Yash isn’t one of my employees.”

  “Yeah,” he says, “but everyone else is.”

  I know, and there are days—weeks, months, even—when that bothers me. I like to pretend, as I’m doing right now, like I’m back in my own ship, Nobody’s Business, and I’m dealing with a small crew hired for one particular job.

  I hired Mikk for several jobs in the past, before he became an employee of Lost Souls. In some ways, going rogue with him, as he said, will feel like old times.

  I smile.

  “Let’s do this thing,” I say.

  He smiles in return. “Thought you’d never ask.”

  Seven

  Mikk and I go to my suite. I have commandeered the captain’s suite. When we first started using the Sove, I hadn’t wanted a suite that big. It’s a small apartment with two bedrooms, a living area, a full kitchen, a large bathroom, and an entire other small apartment’s worth of equipment.

  It was the equipment that ultimately convinced me to make the suite mine. Because buried in the specs for that suite, as Coop showed me one afternoon, is a backup bridge.

  If I have to, I can fly this entire ship by myself from the suite.

  Not that I can comfortably fly a Dignity Vessel. But I’ve learned enough to get us home in an emergency.

  And this little room, with its backup bridge, makes the captain’s suite too dangerous to give to someone else or even leave unattended. So I took it, and hope I never have to use it.

  The backup bridge is built for one person to use comfortably, but two can squeeze into it. There’s a pilot’s chair, lots of navigational equipment, a space for holoimages, and a large screen on the far wall.

  There’s also more computing power than I have ever had on any ship I ever used for diving.

  It’s that computing power that I want right now.

  Mikk and I squeeze into the backup bridge. I sit in the pilot’s chair. He stands behind me, uncomfortably close. I can see his reflection on the navigational board.

  I am not sure how much he knows about the backup bridge. He knows it’s here, but I’m not sure he knows how to use it.

  I should probably teach him, since in some ways, I trust him more than I trust Yash.

  I lean so that Mikk can see over my shoulder, and hit the very first commands Coop ever taught me.

  I isolate the backup bridge from the regular bridge and from engineering. No one in those departments will know that I’m using the equipment here.

  I’m not sure why I’m being so secretive. If someone were to ask me, I’d say it’s because being secretive is a habit for me. I’ve always kept my own counsel.

  But there’s more to it than that. A couple impulses, in fact.

  I don’t want Yash to know that I think she’s chasing fantasies. I’m being protective of yet another Ivoire crew member.

  I also don’t want an argument from her. I want to present a fait accompli if, indeed, I do find something.

  I tap one more control on the board. A rather uncomfortable stool-like chair rises out of the floor near the other side of the room.

  “That’s yours, I’m afraid,” I say to Mikk.

  He grins, then heads over and sits down. I transfer his identification data to the other board, and he runs through his own personal ID sequence.

  Then we begin.

  Mikk and I have done this kind of search before, long before Lost Souls became as big as it is. We have old programs that look for malfunctioning “stealth tech,” which is what we thought anacapa drives were, before we learned about the Fleet.

  Those scans work better than some of the Fleet-designed scans because ours are built to look for malfunctioning tech, not anacapa signatures in general. Plus, ours have been refined over the years to look for very slight signals, where none of the Fleet-designed scans were initially designed to find anything that was near the end of its natural life.

  The biggest challenge for Mikk and me isn’t finding the malfunctioning anacapa signals. It’s finding the correct one in a morass of signals.

  We will have to examine all of the scans pretty closely, because we don’t have time to redesign the program. We need to find whatever this is relatively quickly, in case we’re being threatened by something we don’t quite comprehend.

  We dig in, just like we used to do before we ever met the crew of the Ivoire. Before Lost Souls. Before we were anything but a small wreck-diving team with a focus on history, a team that stumbled onto something big, something that changed our small corner of the universe—forever.

  Five hours in, we find it. The malfunctioning anacapa is in the ancient, damaged runabout I had noticed when we were mapping the line. That runabout had looked like nothing consequential, and yet it’s giving off a malfunctioning anacapa signal that’s stronger than anything I’ve ever seen.

  We leave my quarters, and I take the news to Yash myself.

  Eight

  Yash is working in the engineering section of the Sove, five levels down from the captain’s quarters. It’s strange to walk through the nearly empty ship. I’ve been in a lot of empty Dignity Vessels, now that we have a number of them at Lost Souls, but never while they’re in flight.

  There’s a hum to the ship, a quiet vibration that happens whenever a Dignity Vessel’s full life-support system kicks on. The lights, artificial gravity, and temperature controls make some kind of sound that I can sense. Maybe it’s similar to the sounds I hear when I’m around malfunctioning anacapa drives, because Yash denies that there’s any difference between a functioning Dignity Vessel and one that’s mostly shut down.

  I think she’s so used to being on Dignity Vessels that there are sounds and feelings she has tuned out since childhood, things that sound unusual to me.

  The humming semi-silence on the Sove doesn’t unnerve me as much as it makes me uncomfortable. That sense that we’re on a ship too large for our mission hits me again.

  I make my way to engineering, taking an extra check of my mood. I have calmed down now that we’ve done the search. I’m far enough away from that music that it seems like I overreacted.

  Maybe I did. But I am going to keep an eye on myself.

  And before my next dive, I will probably talk to Mikk about that reaction—if I can figure out how to discuss it without getting me sidelined.

  The engineering section of the Sove is really three levels of the ship. Equipment, programs, experimental areas, and teaching areas all exist within the Sove, just like most of the Dignity Vessels I’ve been in.

  But Yash and her team are working out of the main engineering area. Doors swish open as I walk into that part of the ship. The front section, buried deep inside the ship itself so that it would be hard to damage, has a strange, pale blue and gold light when it’s in use.

  I don’t understand any of the equipment down here, even though different people have explained it to me in different ways. I know enough about ships to repair my own skip, to use my own single-ship, and to save my own life with modern tech built by the
Empire or some private company from my time.

  But there’s a lot to Fleet-built equipment that makes no sense to me at all—and that’s before we get to the anacapa drive. The anacapa drive, which unnerves me most of all, because no Fleet engineer understands it entirely.

  I’m not even sure of the history of the drive, only that it’s deeply tied to the Fleet’s identity and history. Once the Fleet got anacapa drives, it traveled farther than it had before. The anacapa drive made the Fleet of old into the Fleet that raised Yash and Coop. The starbases scattered all over sectors, the sector bases built across distances that make my brain hurt, and the Fleet itself, moving ever forward, came about because the anacapa drive can take the ships into foldspace for brief moments of time, and then bring them back elsewhere.

  The anacapa drives also malfunction more than any other part of the ship, which I find nearly unacceptable.

  Coop and Yash consider it a fact of life.

  Yash is standing in the center of the room, looking at a holomap of the area around the Sove. A square box moves through the three-dimensional map, changing color as it goes.

  I’m guess that this is the program she designed to see if some Dignity Vessel is masking itself as a smaller vessel.

  “Finding anything?” I ask.

  She jumps. She clearly did not hear me enter the engineering area.

  I don’t see the rest of her team, but that means nothing. There are rooms and more rooms off this main area. One floor down is the anacapa drive itself, housed in a protective area, even though the drive is relatively small.

  That’s a change that we’ve made, something I ordered once we started using Dignity Vessels for patrol and to come back to the Boneyard. The first Dignity Vessel I ever dove had its anacapa drive just off the bridge. That ship was older than the Ivoire, but the Ivoire’s design isn’t too much different than that.

  Since I’ve seen a lot of death in malfunctioning anacapa fields, I don’t like the idea of having an anacapa drive so close to critical personnel. If someone dies near an anacapa drive, they’ll do so because they ventured near the drive, not because the drive is badly placed.