The Application of Hope

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  What she encountered was a celebration.

  Over two hundred crewmembers applauded her as she walked into the room. The captain, a severe woman who until this point rarely seemed to smile, had led the cheers, then surprised Sabin by saying,

  "And thanks to Tory Sabin, we now know what happened to five of our vessels. Five, considered lost, and now found."

  Sabin's breath caught. She'd been running so-called test missions of the grid search for more than a year. The missions were no longer tests, really. Everyone knew they worked on some level. But so far none of the ships found had been the Sikkerhet. All had disappeared at different times, and in different sectors of space. None had had crewmembers that anyone knew, and indeed, the ships themselves had been empty for a long time. There weren't even bodies on board, although no one knew if the crews had left voluntarily or not. Most of the ships were open to space. Those ships could have been raided, abandoned, or simply suffered through the passage of time.

  As of yet, no one had even tried those ships' anacapa drives or even tried to boot up the other equipment. The ships had piggybacked on the science vessels and had been taken to Sector Base T so that they could be studied.

  Four of those ships, anyway.

  Sabin hadn't known about a fifth.

  She turned to the captain and said softly, "There's a fifth?"

  "Yes," the captain said with a smile. "We found it at the very end of our search and it's already at Sector Base T. And this one's mostly intact."

  Sabin knew better than to ask the captain why no one had contacted Sabin. Gradually her mission was changing from testing to something run by the military, and the military rarely gave out information.

  The entire crowd had grown silent. Maybe they saw Sabin's reaction, a tentative response, not quite the joy everyone had expected.

  She had gotten the news on the other four in her command headquarters on the Pasteur, and she had been with her team. They knew she had been searching for one ship in particular, so her mixed reactions hadn't bothered them.

  She wished she could remain as calm as a scientist should in such circumstances, but her heart rate increased. Her face was slightly flushed and she knew she looked just a bit too eager.

  "What ship is it?" she asked, suspecting she knew the answer. After all, why would they throw a celebration if it weren't the Sikkerhet?

  "The Moline," the captain said, "and the good news is that she's mostly intact."

  The ship's name rolled around in her head for a long moment. Moline. Moline. She hadn't even heard of that ship. She had heard of two of the others before they were found, but the Moline wasn't one that had any obvious known history.

  She could feel her intellect trying to wrap itself around the news, while her heart sank. She needed to leave the room, she needed to be alone with this, but she also needed to acknowledge everyone's good work.

  "That's excellent," she said and hoped she sounded enthusiastic.

  "And," the captain said with that unbelievably cheerful sound in her voice, "I wanted to let you know that the Alta has decided that your foldspace searches are now going to become part of the Fleet's regular systems. We'll design ships to do the searches, train people, everything. Your program is official now!"

  The crew cheered and applauded. Sabin smiled at them—at least, she hoped she smiled. How come no one had told her this personally? Why were they doing this kind of "celebration"? Didn't they know this wasn't about the old ships or even the program? It was about her father.

  At the thought of him, the frustration she'd been holding back welled up. She knew better than to react here. Instead she smiled, waved some more, and then nodded once, fleeing the room.

  She made it halfway down the corridor before she burst into tears. She had known things would change at some point, but she figured she'd find her father first.

  The search wasn't refined enough yet. She couldn't pinpoint where a ship disappeared and where it had gone to in foldspace. The grid search had used anacapa signatures to track ships, yes, but they weren't ships that anyone had been searching for. They had disappeared long ago; their crews would have been dead now, anyway.

  Some of the Rannsaka's crew came through the corridor. She turned away, unable to go farther, and hid her face against the wall, hoping no one would stop for her.

  One man did. He touched her back, asked if she was all right.

  "Yes," she had lied. "Yes. Just tired."

  She had no idea if she knew him or if he knew her. She never even learned who he was. But later, she'd come to suspect Zeller. Zeller, who realized how broken up she had been over not finding her father's ship, about effectively being removed from running the program she had started. Or maybe that man had been someone else, and she had given Zeller too much credit. Maybe the man—whoever he had been—had no memory of an incident that loomed so large in her own mind.

  The next day, she asked to search for her father's ship. Her request was denied. Apparently Command Operations on the Alta wanted to examine the five recovered ships before searching for any more.

  They told her to put in a request for a future search, and they would get back to her.

  They commended her for her service. They designed an entire group of ships to search foldspace, based on her plans. They offered to promote her.

  She let them.

  And six months later, she was moved from foldspace search to engineering, where she was supposed to improve the anacapa design.

  Five years after that, after applying and reapplying to search for her father's ship to no avail, she applied to the academy for officer training.

  And, it turned out, only Zeller had figured out why.

  13

  "I haven't run a search since the very first one, decades ago," Sabin said to Cho.

  "Things have changed, procedures have changed, and honestly, I haven't kept up with most of it."

  She shifted in her chair. The room had closed in on her.

  Cho nodded. "I glanced at the information, and from what I can tell, the only time we recovered a ship in foldspace right after the ship missed its window, we had gone in within twenty-four hours."

  She closed her eyes. She could almost picture Coop, grinning at her over a private dinner in their suite on Starbase Kappa, teasing her about the changes in protocol on something or other. He had once told her that she jumped in too early, in his opinion, that a captain needed caution to protect his crew.

  She had told him that a captain also had to know when to take a risk.

  Cho said something, but she held up her hand to silence him. She needed a moment to think. He was going to explain risks to her that she understood, risks she invented for god's sake.

  Ships had to dive in and out of foldspace just to do the grid search, and each trip into foldspace, each search, put the rescue ships at risk. The best grid search took the coordinated effort of five or more ships, exchanging information, going in, coming out, never staying in foldspace longer than a minute or two to gather information.

  Because a minute or two in foldspace could be an hour or more outside of it.

  Sixty minutes or sixty-five or sixty-three. The correlation was never entirely precise, which was what made foldspace so very dangerous.

  In fact, there were three main things that made foldspace dangerous. The first was that no one entirely understood it, so the sensible captains were leery about using it. The second was that the sensors did not work between foldspace and real space. So returning from or going to foldspace meant that a ship might land on top of something else, like an asteroid or, in the case of real space, another ship.

  And of course the final great risk was the one she dealt with right now: the longer a ship stayed in foldspace, the more unreliable the time of return became. No one could predict the exact moment the ship would come back, only that it would come within a time frame. That was why Coop said twenty hours, but he didn't specify down to the minute or second.

  The biggest pr
oblem Sabin had now was this: the front line didn't have five ships to spare. She knew that, and Cho hadn't mentioned any others. The crew of her ship was going to have to do something it wasn't trained for, and she would be risking her crew to save another. Jumping in too fast.

  She had a hunch Coop would have waited until the investigative team arrived.

  She wouldn't.

  She opened her eyes. Cho was watching her patiently, as if he expected her to say no. He had given her time, and she appreciated that, especially since his time was so valuable. Just like hers was. Like Coop's was.

  "I think we need at least two ships to do this," she said. "And if there are crewmembers on any ship in the front line who used to work foldspace investigation and rescue, I'd like them to join my team for this rescue attempt."

  Cho's jaw moved just a little, as if he started to say something and then held it back.

  "The Alta didn't approve two ships for this mission," he said.

  She started to argue, but it was his turn to hold up his hand.

  "But," Cho said with great force. "I agree with you. If we're going to mount a rescue, we're going to do the best we can to get it right."

  She grinned at him, and felt—astonishingly—a prickle of tears behind her eyes. Dammit, she cared more than she wanted to.

  She probably should have admitted that as well, but she didn't. Besides, she suspected Cho understood.

  She suspected his willingness to countermand the orders from the Alta had more to do with Coop and the Ivoire than it did any kind of common sense.

  She appreciated it, but she didn't tell Cho that.

  She suspected he already knew.

  14

  It took half an hour to prepare for the rescue. The Geneva's partner ship on this mission was the Pueblo, commanded by Captain Jakoba Foucheux. Foucheux had spent two months in foldspace investigation and rescue before asking for a transfer. The reason for the transfer remained classified, a procedure that usually meant some issue with a superior officer, and usually one that never got properly resolved in any kind of arbitration.

  Sabin didn't have time to dig deeper. She was relieved to have Foucheux, whom she liked, as her partner, but disappointed that Cho had only found ten other crewmembers who'd worked in foldspace investigation and rescue. Of those ten, only five were available to transfer to Sabin's ship. The others were too far away on the search near Ukhanda to get back in time to start this mission.

  Their job would be deceptively simple. Once Sabin finished the math confirming what she believed Coop had done given the information he had managed to get to them, the telemetry that the Ivoire had automatically sent to the Fleet, and given the time he'd been gone, she could—within a limited range—figure out the coordinates in foldspace.

  The foldspace investigation and rescue section had a formula for all of this, and since they were the ones that had actually discovered recently missing ships in the past, she had two of the borrowed crewmembers use that formula as well.

  All three people—the crewmembers and her, using her old system—had come up with the same location, which cheered Sabin. If they had been searching for a ship that disappeared long ago, they would have a lot more trouble coming up with the same location. They'd probably suggest three different locations, and maybe more, depending on how they all tweaked their formulas.

  Once they had a location, the ships would work in tandem. First the Geneva would head to that part of foldspace and immediately scan the area. The Geneva would stay no more than a minute, and reappear, sending all of its scanned information to the Pueblo.

  The Pueblo would do the same thing, scanning a slightly different swath of fold-space, and the two ships would continue to work in tandem until they found something, or until the actual investigation and rescue ships arrived.

  The problem was that there were no guidelines on which direction to proceed once the searching ships moved beyond the scans of the original location. That was why five ships was better, and more than five desirable. The ships would partner, and go in all directions, doing so quickly, then moving to cover as much of that region of fold-space in the shortest amount of time.

  Sabin had to pick a direction after the third set of tandem jumps, and she didn't like that. She hoped the Ivoire would be easy to find, that it would show up—even as a speck—on the nearest grid search. But she knew that hope and reality often failed to coincide.

  15

  The first jump into foldspace felt like any other. First, the thrum of the anacapa drive, which she barely heard or felt on a normal day, faded. Then the screens blanked. Sabin knew that if she were watching the navigation controls, they would flicker for just a moment.

  The entire ship would bump, only once and very slightly. If she were in a vehicle on the ground, she would think that vehicle had hit a small rock, sending a tiny reverberation through the entire system.

  Then the screens would reappear, the navigation controls click back full force, and the reverberation disappear, replaced by the thrum of the anacapa.

  Sabin had jumped into foldspace so many times she usually didn't notice the details. In fact, she could only remember noticing a few times in her past: on her first trip doing a grid search, on her first jump as chief engineer, and then the first time she piloted a vessel, as a lieutenant on the path to full command.

  So, Sabin watched herself react here as if she were standing outside herself. Paying attention to those tiny details, common details, meant three things. She was worried about this grid search. She was worried about her ship.

  And she was worried about Coop.

  The images on the screen were a star map she didn't recognize. Even though that happened with every jump into foldspace, it was still something she noticed. She liked knowing exactly where she was, and in foldspace, she never did.

  "Rapid grid search," she ordered, even though Wilmot, Phan, and Ebedat were already bent over their consoles. Sabin wanted to be in and out of foldspace as fast as she could.

  "We have it, sir," Wilmot said.

  "Good," Sabin said. "Let's go back."

  Alvarez activated the anacapa.

  As the screens blanked for the second time in less than a minute, Sabin said, "Graham, the millisecond we return, you need to send that information to the Pueblo. Even before we analyze."

  "Yes, sir," Graham said.

  By the time he finished speaking, the Geneva had returned to real space.

  "Done, sir," Graham said, and as he spoke, the Pueblo vanished.

  Sabin let out a small breath.

  "Any ships?" she asked Wilmot.

  "Not obviously in this first grid," he said. "How deep a search do you want?"

  "It's all we got at the moment, so keep some part of the system probing as deep as possible," she said. "The better the search, the better our luck will be."

  And as she said that, the Pueblo returned in the same place it had been a few minutes before.

  "Okay," she said, "let's go again."

  And they did.

  16

  Twenty-five searches later, Wilmot said, "Sir, the Pueblo may have found something."

  Sabin's heart rose, but she made herself take a deep breath and tamp down the emotion. "May" was not definitive enough, and Foucheux was the kind of woman who would be accurate in her descriptions.

  "Tell the Pueblo that we'll delay our search to see what's on the grid. Let's compare notes."

  Sabin knew that speed was of the essence. The true investigative team wouldn't be here for a while, so the Geneva and the Pueblo needed to act. But they had to act together, and as accurately as they could.

  Sabin had the five former members of foldspace investigation and rescue evaluate the information. She did the same.

  And she discovered that Foucheux was right: there was something at the edge of the Pueblo's last grid search that looked like one of the Fleet's ships. Oddly, it didn't have an active signature, but that could mean many things.

  It could
mean that the Ivoire was dead, with no power at all. It could also mean that what they were looking at was a ship, but not one of the Fleet's.

  "Is the computer finding anything else on its deep searches?" Sabin asked Wilmot. "Are we getting other strange readings?"

  "No, sir," he said. "This is the only thing that could be a ship, according to the data we've analyzed so far."

  No analysis could be complete in such a short period of time. There could be other things in the grid that they'd missed because of their focus on the Ivoire.

  But all of that—if there was anything at all—would have to wait for the foldspace investigation and rescue team.

  She needed to make a decision now.

  "Tell the Pueblo we're going to focus our search on that part of the grid, and we're going to take a maximum of three minutes per search inside foldspace instead of one minute."

  "Sir?" Wilmot asked. "The time—"

  "I am aware of the time," Sabin said. "We don't have enough ships to double up, so we have continue doing this as best we can."

  Her heart was pounding. Three minutes in foldspace would seem like forever to the ship outside foldspace. But it would also give her time—and Foucheux time—to figure out what, if anything, that reading on the sensors was.

  "Take us into the last place the Pueblo was," Sabin said to Alvarez. "Then prepare to move quickly toward that blip. If we read it as anything but one of our ships, we move back into position, and return to real space. Got that?"

  She wanted everyone clear on the mission before they went in.

  "Let the Pueblo know we're heading in," she said, and gave the order.

  17

  When they were inside foldspace, the blip on the Pueblo's search grid did not seem like a blip at all. It looked solid.

  Sabin's bridge crew worked quietly and quickly, shouting out information only when necessary.

  The blip wasn't that far away from their position, and as they approached, it became clear they were looking at a ship.

  One of the Fleet's ships.

  But not the Ivoire. The Ivoire's design was sleeker, with some of the design tweaks that Sabin herself had helped engineer.