The Application of Hope

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  "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 anymore?" 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 around 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 she 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 herself 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 are no longer sure 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 had 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'v
e 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 created 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.

  Had Phan never been in a battle? Sabin couldn't remember. It had been a long time since the Geneva had been under fire.

  "Sometimes," Sabin said. "But we're generally not a diplomatic ship. Captain Cooper's weapon components would be different for this mission, and his orders would be constrained."

  "Twenty hours," Wilmot said, clearly wanting to change the conversation. Protecting Phan? Sabin couldn't tell. "Does he want us there early to take the action he couldn't take?"

  "He probably wants the show of force," Graham said. "It's one thing for a bunch of tiny ships to go after a large ship. It's another to face twenty ships from our front line."

  Graham had a point. And Sabin had a job to do. She had to get her ship to that location, but she also needed clear instructions from the Alta. The diplomatic mission might be important or it might be something that the front line could scrub.

  "I'm going to change," Sabin said, "and while I'm in my cabin, I'm going to see if I can get clear orders from the Alta on what we need to do when we get to Ukhanda. The last thing we need to do is blunder our way into a crisis."

  Phan looked at her, expression serious. This time, however, Phan didn't say anything.

  Wilmot was still staring at the screen as if he were trying to understand it.

  "For the moment, Charlie," Sabin said to him, "you have the comm. Notify me if anything changes. And do your best to get us to that spot as fast as we can go, would you?"

  "Yes, sir," Wilmot said.

  She tugged on her bracelet as she left the bridge. To tell the truth, she was relieved that the dinner wouldn't happen. She liked action. She liked doing her job, not talking about trivial things.

  She was worried about Coop, but he could take care of himself.

  Her most important job now was to make sure the Geneva didn't screw up the Fleet's plans for the region.

  She needed guidance, and she needed it now.

  4

  It only took Sabin a few minutes to remove the dress and put on her uniform. Her uniform felt like a second skin to her. She glanced at the bed, her dress with its bow and fancy fabric splayed on top of the coverlet, and wondered what she had been thinking. She expected her crew to be prepared on front line.

  She should have been, too.

  Her quarters were
the largest on the Geneva, not because she reserved the best for herself, but because regulations insisted. She had to put up with a certain amount of ceremony as captain, and she didn't like it any more than she liked the dress.

  But she appreciated her quarters this evening. Because, unbeknownst to most of the crew, the captain's quarters had a back-up control area, along with its own private communication network. And to get into that area took several layers of identification and approval. Once she was inside—alone—no one else could get in without even more identification and approval from her.

  The area was just off her bedroom. A panel in the wall hid the entrance to the back-up control area.

  She finger-combed her hair, then went through the various protocols that opened the panel. It slid back, revealing a small space that looked more elaborate than the back-up controls in engineering. In addition to the back-up navigation, piloting, and weaponry, there was an entire console for communications.

  She closed the panel, then settled in, facing the communications console. This was where she had usually contacted Coop. In fact, he was the person she spoke to the most from this room.

  It felt odd not to contact him at all.

  The thought made her just a little shaky. She wasn't sure why she was so on edge about his message, even though her counselor at the academy would tell her why she was. He would have said that it had to do with her father.

  Sabin set that aside.

  She took a deep breath, feeling the calm she was known for descending on her.

  She put a message through to Command Operations on board the Alta. Command Operations guided the Fleet. It was an organization of top-ranked officials, most of whom had served with distinction as captains of their ships once upon a time. They were the ones who essentially ran the Fleet.

  There was a civilian government, but because the Fleet's origins were military, the power structure remained so. The civilian government took care of general management and often took care of diplomatic relations, but in situations like this one, Command Operations took charge.

  Sabin identified herself, and then she said, "I realize I'm not senior captain for the front line, but so far, the senior captain hasn't checked in."