The Runabout

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

“I’m not sure,” I say.

  “That’s normal,” the tech says, tapping that pad just a little. I have no idea if she’s looking up what’s normal for this situation or if she actually knows that it’s normal. I’m beginning to worry that she doesn’t know.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Yash says curtly. “You’re conscious now. How are you feeling?”

  “Shaky,” I say, because there’s no point in lying. “Was I injured?”

  Yash presses her lips together. The med tech brings down her pad, and looks at me for a moment.

  God help me, I recognize that look. It’s an evaluation of the person on the other side of the conversation. There’s a calculation that goes into it: Is she capable of understanding what I’m going to say? Is she emotionally ready to hear it? Do I lie? Do I lie now and tell the truth later? Do I lie forever?

  “Yes,” the med tech says after a moment. “There was damage on a cellular level. After some discussion, we decided to use a nanorepair kit on both you and Elaine, in conjunction with the medically induced coma.”

  So many questions. I’m having trouble sorting them. So I decide to stop. I’ll ask as they come up.

  “Why didn’t we go back to Lost Souls?” I ask.

  Yash hadn’t wanted us to dive in the first place. She had wanted us to leave. So the logical thing to do, with two members of this relatively small crew injured, would have been to make sure we were all right. Return to Lost Souls, then dive later.

  Even I would have approved that.

  “It’s too risky to activate our anacapa drive,” Yash says.

  I feel cold despite all of the covers and the proper settings for the environmental system.

  I start to sit up, but the med tech puts her warm hand on my shoulder.

  “Stay still,” she says. Then she looks at Yash. “We can discuss this later.”

  “Not if you want me to stay in bed,” I say. “We’re discussing this now.”

  “See?” Yash says to her. “I told you she would have questions you can’t answer.”

  Yash sits on the side of the bed so that I’m not looking up at her. I actually appreciate that. I hadn’t realized how much effort it took just to tilt my head.

  “Before you ask,” she says, “we don’t know exactly what happened.”

  “To me and Elaine? Or to the runabout? Or to the Sove?” I ask.

  “The Sove is fine,” Yash says. “Nothing happened to this ship at all.”

  “Then why can’t we use our anacapa drive?” I ask.

  She takes a deep breath, then folds her hands together as if she’s keeping them from trembling.

  “Because,” she says, “we don’t know what’ll happen to the Boneyard if we do.”

  Fifteen

  What she tells me is this:

  The readings from that malfunctioning anacapa drive spiked after we opened the airlock door. Right now, Yash and Mikk have no idea why. The probe went in and did send information back, but they haven’t processed it yet.

  Yash and Mikk want to do it themselves, but they haven’t had time. Instead, they’ve been helping care for me and Elaine.

  “How long have we been down?” I ask, frustrated that even asking a simple question is harder than I want it to be.

  “Only twelve hours,” Yash says. “Jaylene wanted us to feed this information to you slowly, but I knew you wouldn’t accept that.”

  “That’s right,” I say.

  She nods and continues, with Jaylene the med tech hovering.

  “When the readings spiked,” Yash says, “Mikk asked you if you were all right.”

  I remember that clearly. His voice, breaking through the music, like a lifeline.

  “I told him we’d need help getting back,” I say, frowning at the ache that accompanied the memory. Not an emotional ache. An ache inside my brain.

  “Yes,” Yash says, “you did. But it was odd. Your words reached him after we had already started tugging you toward the Sove.”

  The time differential. Apparently it had gotten worse.

  “We got you and Elaine at the same time. Then we unhooked the line that attached the Sove to the runabout. We thought about leaving, but….”

  Yash just stops talking, as if she’s censoring herself. I squirm, ready to sit up again. Jaylene, the med tech, presses on my shoulder ever so gently. This woman is not going to let me up without a fight.

  “But?” I demand.

  “It stopped,” Yash says.

  I’m worried that my brain didn’t process what she said correctly. “What stopped?”

  “The energy from that malfunctioning anacapa,” she says. “We’re getting no readings from it at all.”

  “Is it our equipment?” I ask.

  Yash gives me a withering look.

  “I’m not asking as if you haven’t done your job,” I say, understanding the look. “I’m trying to understand.”

  She nods, and I suddenly realize that she’s exhausted. The last eighteen hours or so have taken a toll on her.

  “We have checked, double-checked, and triple-checked the equipment,” she says. “We thought of launching another probe, but we haven’t had time. I don’t want the trainees to do it.”

  I understand that.

  “The energy is just not registering at the moment,” Yash says.

  “And the probe?” I ask.

  “Still sending information,” she says. “We’re not getting readings about the malfunctioning drive from the probe either.”

  I lean back on the pillow. Jaylene’s hand moves with me. This woman does not trust me at all.

  She shouldn’t. If she and Yash weren’t so insistent, I’d be up and moving around.

  “So,” I say, “what’s the plan?”

  “We’re going to wait,” Yash says. “As soon as you’re able, we’ll watch the footage from the probe. We’re analyzing the data now.”

  “And if I’m not able?” I ask. The words feel odd, but then, so do I. And while we’ve been discussing the ships and the crew, we haven’t really discussed what’s going on with me.

  Yash sighs as if she had hoped I wasn’t going to ask that question. She glances at Jaylene to see if Jaylene wants to take the question.

  Apparently, Jaylene doesn’t.

  “Then we’ll have to leave the Boneyard,” Yash says.

  Her words hang. She expects me to understand something. I’m waiting for the clouds to part, but they don’t.

  So I have to ask.

  “How?”

  “We’ll cut a hole in the force field surrounding it, like we did before with that skip,” she says. “We’ll exit the Boneyard, and then we’ll activate our anacapa.”

  It takes a second for the thoughts to process. “You’re afraid that the Boneyard will fire on us again,” I say.

  “Yes.” Her answer is curt. “We have no idea what the firepower of the Boneyard itself is. But if it harnesses the firepower of many of its ships, then I’m not sure we can fight it.”

  I lean my head back. Just this little discussion is tiring me out. What the hell happened to me out there? I’ve never felt like this before.

  “We have to find out what’s going on with that anacapa drive, Boss,” Yash says. “We have to know if that flare was the last gasp of the anacapa or if we triggered something when we opened that door. We need to know what kind of danger we’re in.”

  “We can’t dive it again,” I say.

  “We don’t know that,” Yash says. “If the anacapa drive is dead, we can easily dive it.”

  I can’t believe I’m on the other side of this argument for once.

  “We still won’t know if it’s safe,” I say.

  Jaylene moves, turning her body so that I can’t see her face. But I know what she’s doing. She’s telling Yash to back off.

  Which is probably smart. Because I’m feeling distressed, and being distressed actually hurts.

  “We have time to decide this,” Yash says.

  “Before we do,”
I say, “let’s double-check the original readings.”

  Yash frowns at me. “What do you mean?”

  “Mikk and I were convinced the runabout’s anacapa was the one malfunctioning. But as I moved around that runabout’s exterior, the energy—the sound—faded. If it was the runabout, should it have done that?”

  “That’s the problem,” Yash says. “It shouldn’t have done any of this.”

  Sixteen

  After that, Jaylene makes Yash leave. Jaylene doesn’t want Yash to tire me out. But Jaylene stays. She takes her hand off my arm, and she uses the bed’s diagnostic system to run some tests.

  She tells me only part of the results, and I’m getting so fatigued, I’m not sure I care.

  But I do care about one thing. After she finishes running her tests, I ask, “Tell me exactly. What kind of damage did that little adventure do to me?”

  Her gaze flicks toward the door, as if she’s been instructed not to talk to me like this without Yash present.

  But Yash isn’t in charge of this mission, I am. Although Yash is the senior Fleet officer on board.

  I’m going to ignore that detail, though. It’s my body. My health.

  “According to Mikk,” Jaylene says, “everyone who has died in a malfunctioning anacapa field like the one you encountered aged prematurely.”

  “Not exactly,” I say. “They mummified.”

  “And the suits registered that they had been in the anacapa field much longer than they actually had by our calculations,” Jaylene said.

  “Yes,” I say. “We measured hours. Their bodies measured years.”

  “So it looked like aging.” She’s pushing this for a reason.

  “I’m not sure he explained that clearly to you,” I say. “Did you look at the records?”

  “I will,” she says. “I’ve been busy with the two of you.”

  She means me and Elaine, not me and Mikk.

  “The point is,” Jaylene says, “that those victims who died in malfunctioning anacapa fields, they had been destroyed on a cellular level, in ways consistent with time passing.”

  Apparently, she confuses that with aging. But I’ll give her that.

  “More or less,” I say, unable to give her a full yes.

  “You’ve been able to tolerate malfunctioning anacapa fields in the past,” she says.

  It’s not a question, but I answer as if it were one. “Yes.”

  “And you were doing fine in this malfunctioning anacapa field until the very end,” she says.

  “Yash says the energy was higher than she’d ever seen it,” I say.

  “Yes, it was.” Jaylene taps the pad in front of her. Then she turns it toward me. A round, gelatinous object faces me. It almost looks like a planet, surrounded by a watery ring. Something about it pleases me, like staring into deep space pleases me.

  Then she taps the screen, and shows me a similar object. It’s gray now, and most of the liquid appears to be gone. The central “planet” isn’t round any longer. It’s flat on the sides, and bits of it are flaking off into the liquid. It reminds me, in some ways, of the graying nanobits that we encounter on aging ships.

  “These are two versions of your cells,” Jaylene says. “The first came from your last exam, just before we left on this voyage. The second was what your cells looked like when you returned from your dive.”

  My stomach tightens. My mouth has gone dry.

  Then she taps the screen again. Now I know what I’m looking at, kinda. Something black and round, even smaller than the cell itself, seems to be rounding up the flakes and piling them together. The cell isn’t quite as gray.

  “That’s one of your cells six hours ago,” she says, “after we injected you with the nanobits. I just took one more scan…”

  She taps the screen again, and now the flakes are gone. The cell isn’t gray but it isn’t entirely healthy either, although it’s getting its shape back. The nanothingies, whatever they are, seem focused away from the center, and are congregating near the edge.

  “That’s what the cell looks like right now,” she says. “It’s improving. But I have no idea how long the improvement will take, if it will bring you back to normal for you, or if it will last.”

  Well, that was brutal. I don’t say that, of course. But I’m feeling woozy, and that’s partly because I’ve been holding my breath throughout her entire presentation.

  “So, on the health question,” she says, “I have no idea what a full recovery will be for you. Clearly, this is something we’ve just discovered, and it’s going to take a lot of work examining it, and figuring out what caused it.”

  “But you believe this is what happened to my other divers,” I say.

  “Yes,” she says, “and contrary to what Mikk told me, it seems to happen rapidly, not slowly. The outside force attacks each cell, sucking it of its life in one way or another.”

  “Or its moisture,” I say, thinking about what I considered liquid.

  She shrugs one shoulder. “Perhaps. We don’t know. And this kind of study is outside of my expertise.”

  “Is this what happened everywhere?” I ask. And then I force myself to amend the question. “Even in my brain?”

  “The brain is a web of connective tissue,” she says. “Lots of the connections in your brain—and in Elaine’s—were stretched thin. They weren’t broken. We caught it before the connections snapped. But they were damaged.”

  “I have brain damage,” I say dully.

  “Not necessarily,” Jaylene says. “The brain is an amazing instrument. It regrows neural pathways, often on its own. Your brain had a lot of trauma, but its recovery is as startling as what we’re seeing in the other cells in your body.”

  That explains the muzziness, though—why I feel like I’m thinking through clouds. Some of the pathways in my brain are blocked, shortened, thinner.

  “I think if you had been in that field another ten minutes, you’d be dead,” Jaylene says. “And if you’d been in it for another twenty, you probably would have ended up like those previous divers.”

  I shake my head, then wish I hadn’t. “But I’ve gone into malfunctioning fields before.”

  “I know,” Jaylene says. “Yash and I believe that what you and Elaine experienced is something else entirely. It’s not a malfunction as we know it inside the Fleet.”

  “But Coop said, when he shut down the Room of Lost Souls—” then I pause, and use the Fleet name. “I mean, Starbase Kappa. When he shut down the anacapa there, that it was just a malfunctioning field.”

  “You operated for a long time in this particular field,” she says. “You were having trouble, but I don’t think it’s what our instruments registered as the malfunction. I think you, and Elaine, and your mother if what Mikk tells me is true, were experiencing something that we’re not measuring.”

  Her cheeks flush, then she shrugs prettily.

  “But,” she says, “that’s really just a guess. It’s going to take scientists to figure this out.”

  I rub my poor damaged forehead with the first three fingers of my right hand. I can’t feel anything different in the skin or in my fingertips. But inside, there’s still a sense of absence. I wonder if that’s from the extreme pain, if the brain is still recovering. Or if it knows it lost something it might never recover.

  “This isn’t making sense to me,” I say finally. “I don’t know if that’s because of the damage or—”

  “Perhaps we should wait and see,” Jaylene says.

  I ignore that. I’m not quite communicating the way I want to.

  “What I mean is,” I say, “we brought people with the genetic marker into similar fields, and they were fine. I was fine until this one. I have the marker. So does Elaine. We’ve never had trouble before.”

  Jaylene nods. Her lips are thin. “I’m hoping that Yash and Mikk discover something. This is not my area of expertise. I’m not sure what’s going on. I personally think it’s a combination of factors. That field was s
tronger here, in the Boneyard. Whether the field was amplified by something else here or whether we encountered something new, I don’t know. But there were differences that we knew about from the start.”

  “And now the field is gone,” I say.

  “At the moment,” she says.

  “Between you and me,” I say, “what do you think of Yash’s idea of sending someone else in to shut down the rogue anacapa drive?”

  Jaylene looks at me balefully. “I think it’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  Seventeen

  The phrases “stupidest thing” and “shut down the drive” echo in my head for the next two days. We have no good choices, and I’m thinking about all of them.

  We might end up choosing the option with the least degree of stupid, as my old friend Squishy would say. Sometimes great risks require a little bit of stupid.

  We took a great risk coming in here, and now we might have to take another great risk to get out.

  I spend most of those two days in bed. By the middle of the second day, I’m feeling well enough to want to walk around. The dizziness is gone, and the scans Jaylene shows me are better. The cells look like cells again, albeit different than they had before.

  She tries to explain the difference to me, using terms that are familiar but used in a way I don’t entirely comprehend.

  I understand situational medicine. I can wrap a broken arm, help someone who is oxygen deprived, figure out what to do about severe lacerations. I don’t know the details of human biology. It doesn’t interest me as much as spaceships and derelicts and wrecks and mechanical things.

  So I’m at a bit of a loss when it comes to the details of my own condition. I never expected to be in bed so long. I never expected to be so weak.

  I figured, if something happened to me while diving, I would die out there. I never expected to be saved. I never expected to be damaged.

  I never expected to be weak.

  But I try not to dwell on it. I am improving, and rapidly, according to Jaylene. So is Elaine. We haven’t had a chance to talk yet, because Jaylene believes we both need rest more than companionship.