The Application of Hope

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  "Fortunately, you're divorced," Tory said and stood up, arms crossed. "He's overdue by five hours. That's all, Mom. You can go back to whatever thing you're designing. I won't be mad at you. I'm not worried. Daddy's good at his job."

  Her mother stood, and this time, wrapped her arms around Tory. Tory thought of elbowing her mother hard and viciously so that her mother would never hug her again, then suppressed the response and squirmed out of the older woman's embrace.

  "They don't remove a child from school or contact her remaining parent because they think this is routine," her mother said—so not comfortingly.

  "I'm smart enough to know that, Mother," Tory said.

  "They think you need me."

  "They're wrong." Tory stepped closer to the observation window. "Daddy will be just fine. The Sikkerhet will return, and he and I will get on with our lives. Without you."

  Her mother tilted her head just a little, a dismissive you can't mean that look she had used as long as Tory could remember.

  "I divorced him, not you," her mother said.

  "Funny," Tory said, "I couldn't tell."

  "I contacted your father about a visitation schedule. He never responded," her mother said.

  On purpose, Tory almost said but didn't. He wanted to see if Tory's mother would push the visitation, wanted to see if she would make contact, if she would hire a lawyer to enforce the terms of the shared custody.

  Her mother had done none of those things. In fact, she hadn't even done what was on her schedule—a series of intership calls that were supposed to happen every Friday night. Instead, she'd send apologies, usually about work-related distractions, and finally, she stopped apologizing altogether.

  Tory's father had been surprised; he had thought Tory's mother was a different person, maybe from the beginning. Tory attributed his blindness to both love and to the fact that he hadn't spent much time with his wife once he got on a career track. It was only after he kept finding Tory on her own, in the engineering and maintenance areas of the ship, at an age when the crew would report Tory's appearance (because it was dangerous) that he finally realized his family couldn't stay on the ship when he had an actual mission.

  When he broke that news to Tory and her mother, her mother had shrugged and said they would move to the Krásný. Tory had burst into tears, begging to stay, and her father, for once, had listened. Not that he could have missed the campaign. Because others on the ship said that Tory shouldn't—couldn't—stay with her mother. Not and have actual parental care.

  "What happened between you and Daddy isn't my business," Tory said. "I—"

  "It is your business, darling," her mother said. "If your father had—"

  "I don't want to discuss it. In fact, I don't want you here. Daddy will return, and I'll be fine, and even if I'm not fine, you're not the kind of person who can take care of anyone. If you don't leave right now, I will."

  Her mother stared at her as if Tory had betrayed her.

  "You need me right now," her mother said. "I thought you were smart. No one misses an anacapa window without a reason, a serious reason. In the history of the Fleet, those who miss the window by an hour or more usually do not return. You have a scientific brain. You should understand—"

  "Shut up," Tory said, her hands balled into fists. "Shutup shutup shutup."

  "Tory—"

  Tory waved her hand at her mother, effectively silencing her. Then Tory shook her head, and ran for the door. Tory had no idea where she was going to go—if she went back to her room, her mother would find her—but she had to get away.

  Just like she had to get away when she was a child.

  And like she had when she was a child, she found herself heading toward engineering, the only place on any ship with concrete answers.

  The only place she had ever felt safe.

  9

  Sabin's search found evidence that Coop had used the anacapa drive. Sabin was relieved and not relieved at the same time. In fact, she couldn't remember a moment when her emotions over one event had been so mixed.

  The fact that he had used the anacapa proved that those small ships didn't have some kind of miracle weapon that destroyed the Ivoire. But the fact that he used the anacapa and wasn't back in the same spot at the time he had mentioned meant he was in trouble.

  Sabin's mother had been right all those years ago: those who missed the window by an hour or more usually did not return.

  Sabin sent the information to Cho and asked if he wanted her to contact all the sector bases still in operation. Sometimes a ship having trouble with its anacapa wouldn't show up in the spot it was supposed to; it would instead go immediately to the nearest sector base for repair.

  The fail safe also took ships to sector bases, usually the most active one. If the crisis had been really bad, no one at the base would have thought of contacting the front line—if, indeed, the base even knew that the front line had moved.

  Cho promised to check, and after he did, he requested a private audience with her. He wanted to talk to her nowhere near her crew or his.

  She didn't think that unusual. She thought it sad. Because she knew part of what he was going to say.

  Her ship had a small communications area just off the bridge. She had built that as well, for moments just like this one. When she thought about it, she realized she had made major modifications to every single ship she had served on, and on none more than the Geneva.

  She slipped inside the communications area. It was larger than the one in her cabin. Ten people could fit in here comfortably, even though, if she needed that many people to hear something, then they would usually go to the conference area or listen on the bridge.

  The communications into this section of the ship were scrambled and encoded, more private than anything else on the Geneva.

  Screens covered all the walls. Everything could become holographic if needed, but she never used that feature. The table in the middle of the room felt out of place. She didn't sit at it.

  Instead, she leaned on it, and contacted Cho.

  He showed up on the screen in front of her, in a room similar to her own. His ship had been redesigned after she made modifications to hers.

  Cho looked tired. Some of that might have been because of the bachelor party and the change of focus, but some of it was a man trying to cope with hard news, news that upset him, news he wanted to treat dispassionately, even though it was impossible.

  "You think they're dead," she said without introduction. She had almost said, you think he's dead, which was an insight into her own mind that she didn't want and she certainly didn't want Cho to hear.

  Either she thought Coop was dead, or she feared it, or she cared about it too much. After all, there were more than five hundred souls on that ship. She should care about all of them equally.

  "What I think doesn't matter," Cho said, which was clearly his version of yes. "They haven't shown up at any of the active sector bases or starbases. The Alta tells me that experts have pinged the older sector bases, and there's been no activity, at least activity that has appeared in the logs. Experts tell me that they shouldn't have gone back to sector bases that the Ivoire hasn't used in the past twenty years. The double-check was a long shot."

  She knew that. No ship had shown up on old decommissioned sector bases unless that ship had used or visited the sector base some time in its recent history.

  "The Alta wants us to do a few things," he said. "They want us to wait until the Taidhleoir arrives. They're the ones who will handle the situation on Ukhanda."

  The Taidhleoir was another ship that specialized in diplomatic missions. It wasn't as top of the line as the Ivoire, but it would do.

  "They figured out then who the ships belonged to?" Sabin asked.

  "The Xenth say that the ships are Quurzod, but the Quurzod aren't acknowledging anything, and apparently the Alta can't confirm. It's a mess, and they don't want us in the middle of the diplomatic part of the mess. The front line has to remain
, though. The show of force is going to show everyone on Ukhanda that the Fleet isn't to be messed with."

  "Even though someone probably thinks they successfully harmed one of our ships," she said, more to herself than to Cho.

  "Even though," Cho said, in the tone that captains used when they didn't approve of the path their higher ups were taking. "They also want us to do some investigating along the trails left by the small ships and near that spot where the Ivoire lit up so oddly."

  "I have been," Sabin said.

  "Not for an indication of anacapa use, but to see if there are other energy signatures that we're unfamiliar with, or maybe even ones we are familiar with. In other words, they want our investigators to figure out what those ships were attacking the Ivoire with."

  "Reverse engineer it?" she asked. She'd been part of teams that had done such things in the past. They were usually used in war situations, when one of the participants had developed a new weapon. "We can't just ask someone on Ukhanda or capture one of the ships?"

  Cho shrugged, and he looked away for a moment. When he glanced back at her, his dark eyes held sadness and something else. Frustration? She didn't know him well enough to be able to tell.

  "They think something really bad happened on that planet," he said, "and they believe it's going to take some work to deal with it. Work we can't do in a time frame that will enable us to rescue the Ivoire."

  If they could rescue the Ivoire. He didn't even have to add that part for her to hear it.

  "You didn't have to tell me all this in private," she said. "You know our bridge crews could have kept this quiet. What else is there?"

  "I wanted you to make a choice. Not your crew, not the Alta. You." Now his gaze met hers, and she almost felt him in the room. He was scared. She rarely had that thought about other captains, and she had never seen such emotion from Cho. Not that he was showing much now. His mouth had thinned a bit. Anyone who didn't know him would have thought he was just a little more concerned than normal, a little preoccupied.

  But she could feel it: He was scared.

  Was he scared of her response? Or something else entirely?

  "Here's the thing, Tory," he said, his tone confidential. "I talked to some of the generals directly. We all know that time is of the essence in tracking a lost ship in fold-space. But General Zeller wants us to wait until some of the foldspace investigative and rescue ships arrive. He doesn't trust you."

  Of course he didn't. He hadn't from the moment he met her.

  "Trust me to what?" she asked, although she had a hunch she knew.

  "Search foldspace." Cho spoke tersely as if he wanted to get this part of the conversation over with. And as she was about to respond, he added, "I don't understand it, Tory. You're the one who developed the search method that we've used for the past thirty-five years. You're the one who understands it the best. I know you and Zeller have issues, and I assume it's none of my business—"

  "He thinks I'm too emotional about this," she said. "And you know, on this one thing, he might be right."

  10

  Older than her years, brilliant, and obsessed. That was what Sabin's evaluations all said. She had hacked into them on the night before the very first test mission began.

  Her years were all of twenty, too young to do much in the Fleet, but old enough to be considered an adult. She had already gone to two boarding schools. She had worked her way through some of the most difficult engineering degree programs in the Fleet, plus she had done some work with the Dhom, an advanced culture that they were lucky enough to find two years ago.

  The scientists there taught her things about dimensional theory that no one in the Fleet had contemplated before. After they heard the Dhom scientists, some of her professors postulated that the Fleet had lost a lot of its research into dimensional theory. The professors claimed that the anacapa drive couldn't have been developed without it.

  Some of her professors were a little naïve, in Sabin's opinion anyway. She could have identified a dozen points in the history of science and technology, points she knew, where something got developed accidentally and no one quite knew how it worked.

  Granted, however, such things rarely inspired confidence, and she didn't need to explain that there were parts of her theories that were just guesses as well. Guesses based on research, but as she could have told anyone who listened (as she would argue sometimes inside her own mind), theories needed testing before they became quantifiable.

  Her test missions were the transition between theory and fact. Or, at least, between narrower, more apt theories, and something approaching fact.

  What she couldn't admit to anyone—not her mentors, not the professors, not the captains running the ships that would take these risks—was that she really didn't care about ancient history, anacapa development, or even dimensional theory.

  She cared about finding her father and his crew.

  And if her theories were right, then even now, she might find them, trapped in foldspace for only a few hours or days. Even if seven years had gone by for them, as those seven years had gone by for the Fleet, she might still discover some remnant of the ship. Maybe the Sikkerhet had gone to a nearby planet and settled. Maybe it had simply refueled and waited, trying to figure out how to return to what the Fleet called "real space," which was the current space and time.

  The one thing the Fleet had done was build a long-term future trajectory. The Fleet knew where it was going. It was heading into what, for it, was uncharted space. It had advance ships to either map the area or to double-check the maps provided by the locals of the sector the Fleet was currently in.

  The only thing uncertain in the Fleet's map was the timeline. The Fleet had none. It would spend months near some planet, learning the culture. It would spend years helping a new ally fight a war.

  If her father knew the trajectory, he might be waiting for the Fleet ahead of where the Fleet currently was. She doubted that, though, since the Alta had sent large ships as well as exploratory vessels ahead, searching for the Sikkerhet.

  If her father had gone too far into the trajectory, she might never see him again. The version of the Fleet that greeted him or the descendants on his ship might be populated by her grandchildren's generations—if, indeed, she ever had grandchildren.

  The method she had devised, the method that ultimately got tested, was a three-part grid search inside foldspace. The Fleet had never done foldspace grid searches for lost ships before, not in all the millennia of its existence.

  Part of that was a simple disagreement as to what foldspace was. Some theorists believed that foldspace was a different point in time—the future, the past—some- when else. But a lot of the practical military, those who'd actually flown into fold-space through their anacapa drives, didn't believe that.

  The star maps in foldspace were significantly different than the star maps from the area where the ship had left. It usually took something catastrophic to change star maps in the same area—not even the explosion of a planet would change a star map so drastically as to be completely unrecognizable.

  So most theorists believed that foldspace was either an alternate reality that somehow the ships tapped into with the anacapa or a fold in space, an actual place that the ships could somehow access.

  What Sabin privately believed was that the anacapa sent a ship far across the Universe, into another galaxy altogether, and then back again. But the scientists told her that the anacapa didn't have the energy for that. Nothing did.

  Which left her with dimensional theory. One of her professors claimed that fold-space was another dimension, one that hadn't yet been charted and wasn't understood. Some of the work done by the scientists on Dhom pointed to that theory being correct.

  She had been contemplating all of that when she realized that none of it mattered. What the ships went into wasn't important. What it seemed like was.

  And what it seemed like was a sector of space like all other sectors of space, except for the differ
ent star maps. Except for the fact that none of the equipment that the Fleet had could track the ships down in that sector of space. None of the equipment that any other culture had could track those ships either.

  So she decided to do what all the scientists of the anacapa had done before her—not question how it did what it did—but accept the reality that it worked.

  In that reality, the ships went somewhere that looked like this reality.

  And those realities could be searched.

  If she could find the right point in foldspace, the same entry point that a missing Fleet ship had taken.

  The same entry point that the Sikkerhet had taken.

  The same entry point that her father had taken—and disappeared.

  11

  "Oh, come on," Cho said in a tone she'd never heard him use before. "Zeller's unreasonable. Everyone knows that. They're just waiting for him to retire."

  Sabin blinked at him, forcing herself to come back for a moment from her own past. A quick escape in her own mental foldspace.

  The small control room was hot. She pushed a strand of hair off her face, and resisted the urge to smile grimly. Cho was staring at her with something like sympathy, which she would not have expected from him.

  "I know they're waiting for him to retire," she said. "They think he's old-fashioned. But he's not entirely unreasonable."

  Cho frowned. He looked like he was about to disagree, when she said, "He's lived through a lot, Seamus. Sometimes we don't respect that enough."

  "I can't believe you're agreeing with him, after the way he treats you."

  Her smile was thin. "Yeah, I know," she said. "But I think I don't treat him well either."

  12

  When Sabin was twenty-one, she hadn't known who Zeller was. He'd just been a crewmember on the Rannsaka, one of the ships that had used her grid system to explore foldspace in search of her father's ship.

  Zeller had simply been a face in the crowd when she boarded the Rannsaka, heading to its largest crew dining room for a briefing.