The Renegat

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  The explosion. Tessa. God. What had she been thinking? Why hadn’t she simulated it out? Why had she tried something so risky?

  Risky like stealing ships and going to the Scrapheap in the first place. As a lark. A trick to fool the teachers and to see something forbidden. To prove how smart he was.

  He hiccoughed—half a laugh at himself, half something else he didn’t want to identify. His chest hurt, his throat was full, his eyes were watering again, and damn. Tessa.

  He had no idea how long he stood there, shaking, unwilling to stand up, but eventually he did. Eventually, he had to. His back was giving out.

  No one came for him. No one probably even knew he was here.

  But the red lights had stopped blinking while he was bent over, and the floor was no longer yellow.

  Someone would come to clean up this place.

  If there was any reason to.

  He should have started the cleaning process, but he couldn’t bring himself to do so.

  Instead, he made it to the mural and sat on the bench beneath it, wondering if those painted kittens and puppies had magical soothing powers.

  Probably not.

  He wasn’t sure he believed in magic anyway. He used to like to say—to Tessa—that he was a man of science.

  Tessa.

  He closed his eyes and waited, hoping she would come back to him, and knowing she never ever would.

  The Brazza Two

  It took nearly a week for someone in authority to talk to him, and that someone ended up being the captain.

  Crowe had spent the entire week confined to quarters, but the quarters he was confined to weren’t his. The dorm rooms on his level did not have kitchens and had a shared bathroom between four rooms, and someone—he had no idea who—decided he was too dangerous to be with anyone else.

  He concurred. He was dangerous.

  He got bits and pieces of news in his luxurious prison. The brig had been completely demolished when some of the debris hit it, which was why he was imprisoned in the two-room quarters. The quarters had a large porthole, but it had been sealed closed. He couldn’t look out of it, even if he wanted to.

  He no longer had computer privileges either, and everyone seemed to forget he had been a student, because no one gave him homework or study materials or anything to read. He could access only the first level of entertainment, which he kept playing on repeat. He just had it on as noise.

  He couldn’t access any other news, but someone different stopped by every day, and each time, he would ask what happened. He got different snippets from different people.

  The death toll finally settled at fifty. They had initially thought it would go higher, but apparently, the injured were recovering.

  The damage to one entire section of the ship was catastrophic. Entire levels were closed off, but that was where most of the people had died—and they had died in ways he didn’t want to think about, because their section had been ripped open and exposed to space, and while the ship could repair itself and put down a barrier to hold in the ship’s environment, the barrier would go down wherever it was most likely to hold, and in that case, apparently, the barrier had sacrificed an entire wing of the ship.

  Fortunately every nonessential person had already evacuated that area.

  And no children died.

  Except, as a woman had told him tersely, just as she was leaving the room, the eleven teenagers on board that ship.

  Seven days afterwards, exactly, the captain summoned him.

  Only Crowe hadn’t been aware of the summons initially. Two guards got him, told him to join them now, and then marched him through darkened corridors that looked abandoned.

  Halfway through the march, he wondered if someone was planning to hurt him physically for all he had done.

  But by the time that he got to the ship’s administrative level, he knew that no one was going to hurt him or beat him up or discipline him in unsanctioned ways.

  The guards had taken him through a deserted part of the ship so that no one would see him or talk to him or come at him.

  They were, apparently, protecting him. And he wanted to tell them he was not worth their time.

  But he didn’t.

  Because they led him into a suite of rooms he’d never been in before. The rooms were brightly lit and beautifully decorated—or had been until last week. Some of the decorations had been put back, like images stuck to the walls, only those images were frozen rather than rotating through a panorama of views. Most were frozen on some planetside image—a waterfall, some flowers, but one of them was of a little-little laughing beneath the mural, and he had to look away.

  The guards led him into a narrow room with too much light, and a gigantic black desk that almost resembled half a wall. Behind it, the captain stood, her hands clasped behind her back—that posture he had mimicked before everything changed.

  She turned around. Her face had new lines, and her eyes were sunken into their sockets from lack of sleep.

  “Leave us,” she said to the guards.

  They did, the door closing behind them.

  That was when Crowe realized the room had no chairs at all.

  “I’m not going to ask you why you did it,” she said. “We found all the materials you prepared, figured out what systems you breached, and talked to your friends. If I really cared why you did it, I suppose I’d be more thorough and ask you. But I don’t care.”

  She sounded tired too. That energy he had so admired in her was gone.

  “I just want to tell you that you pose a hell of a dilemma.” She raised her chin just a little, and with that movement, he realized that he was taller than she was. “You see, Mr. Crowe, we wouldn’t be standing here without you.”

  “I know,” he said miserably. “I’ve been thinking about it—”

  “You did not let me get to my point,” she said. “You saved every life on the Brazza Two. That maneuver of yours, sharing the energy from the scout ship with our ship, no one taught you that, right?”

  He shook his head. Of course no one had taught him that. Who could have taught him that? He wasn’t supposed to be on ships, let alone train on them.

  “You had gotten your ship clear of the debris field. You could have left. You could have taken the ship far from us, and all of you could have escaped. Instead, you came back and made yet another risky maneuver, enabling us to close that force field. You saved lives.”

  He was still shaking his head. “I didn’t though. People died.”

  “They did,” she said, her tone flat. “And that’s our dilemma. You were reckless, and your recklessness destroyed ships and cost fifty people their lives. And then you were brilliant, and you saved over four hundred of us. By rights, we should banish you from Fleet ships forever. But if we do, we’ll lose one of the most brilliant thinkers we’ve encountered in generations.”

  She smiled, but the smile didn’t reach her very tired eyes.

  “See?” she said. “Dilemma.”

  “No,” he said, since the head-shaking was doing no good. “It’s not a dilemma. Send me away. It’s all my fault. Everything. I coerced everyone else. I made them. It all happened because of me—”

  “Actually,” she said, “we both know that’s not true. Tessa Linley made one fatal choice. She used her anacapa drive. No one is allowed to use that drive without nearly a decade of training, and somehow she managed to override all of those systems.”

  “Tessa didn’t do anything wrong,” he said. “It was all me. It—”

  “You discarded that very same idea,” Captain Mbue said. “You even told the others on your bridge crew that your friend Tessa had made a serious mistake.”

  “She wouldn’t have made it if I hadn’t challenged her to race to the Scrapheap,” he said.

  Captain Mbue’s gaze met his for a long moment. He stopped talking. He felt heat creep up his cheeks. She was shaming him into silence without telling him to shut up.

  “The Explorer Tessa took had
n’t been touched in years. As far as we can tell, its anacapa drive was starting to decay.”

  He opened his mouth to ask about that. The captain held up a finger, stopping him.

  “They do that. It’s something you learn if you take the decades-long course in anacapa usage. The drives malfunction and cause serious problems, which is why they get replaced more often than some believe necessary.”

  The captain paused. She was studying him, but he wasn’t entirely sure why.

  “The energy from that anacapa caused a reaction inside the Scrapheap,” she said. “It’s too technical to explain, and I’m not entirely sure I understand it, since anacapa drives are not my specialty, but that reaction caused the energy to change, which caused all of those explosions.”

  “Then why didn’t her ship blow up first?” he blurted, then caught himself. He almost put his hands over his mouth, but he didn’t. He made himself stand perfectly still.

  “Because anacapa drives can create a wave, and that wave moved outward from the point where she entered the Scrapheap, and that wave then found something else that caused the reaction, which threaded back through all the other ships until it found hers.” The captain looked like she was going to say something else, but she stopped.

  She looked down, ran her fingers along that long desk, tapped it with the forefinger of her right hand, and then stopped, drawing a circle.

  “You probably don’t know this since you’ve been in isolation,” she said, “but the reaction continues inside the Scrapheap. There are continual explosions. That’s why we had to close that force field.”

  “There are no other ships around,” he said. “Why didn’t you just leave? No one else would have gotten hurt.”

  She raised her head, gave him a grim smile, and said, “If only I could tell you, Mr. Crowe. I cannot. I was following orders.”

  “Everyone on this ship could have died,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. Simply. Flatly. She had known that, and had still done it. She had risked every child on this ship, every adult, every single little-little. “And they would have died without you.”

  He studied her. He had no idea how she could be so cold about what had happened, about what she had nearly done.

  She tilted her head just a little, as if she were taking a measure of him.

  “I’m not willing to sacrifice you, Mr. Crowe,” she said.

  His stomach churned, just like it had when he first got back to the ship. This felt so wrong. He didn’t want her to defend him.

  “You’re talented,” she said. “You’ve got a gift, a gift the Fleet needs.”

  He shook his head again.

  “And you’ve learned humility—I hope, anyway,” she said. “Have you?”

  His gaze skittered away from hers. He wasn’t even sure what she meant.

  She reached across that table and grabbed his arm. Her hand was cold.

  “They’re going to punish you,” she said.

  He nodded, not looking at her, despite the power of her grip.

  “And then,” she said, shaking his arm, “you’re going to rehabilitate yourself. For me.”

  He swung his head toward her. He hadn’t expected that.

  She gave him a small smile. “I’m being demoted, Mr. Crowe. I should be. It’s—”

  “It’s not your fault,” he said. “It’s mine. All of this—”

  “Of course it’s my fault,” she said. “I’m the captain. I let you and your friends steal ships. You were planning this methodically for weeks, and no one under my command caught it. That’s on me. These deaths are as much on me as they are on you, Mr. Crowe.”

  Her fingers were digging into his skin. He didn’t pull away, though. He couldn’t, not without breaking eye contact, and he couldn’t do that either.

  He finally realized that she wasn’t being cold. She was being contained, more than anyone he had ever seen.

  “You and me together,” she said quietly, “we owe the universe fifty lives.”

  He started. Her words made him catch his breath.

  “It was our carelessness that lost those lives,” she said. “I’m not going to diminish those lives by dividing them up—twenty-five for me, twenty-five for you. We each owe the universe fifty lives, Mr. Crowe, and we are going to spend the rest of our days atoning for that.”

  He was having trouble breathing. He wasn’t sure what, exactly, she meant.

  “You can’t atone if you go home to those parents of yours or get banished to some planet around an abandoned sector base. You can only atone by serving. That talent of yours has to be nurtured until one day, it saves at least fifty lives that wouldn’t have been saved. Am I clear, Mr. Crowe?”

  He nodded. She was clear.

  “I will be doing the same,” she said, “from whatever post they assign me. But the last thing I’ll do as captain is direct your punishment. You will spend three years in rehabilitation on a Fleet vessel. It won’t be pleasant. And then you’ll have to start your education all over again. Your scores here will be wiped off your record. You will learn everything you can, and you will do the best you can, and if you make even the smallest mistake, I will come after you. Is that clear, Mr. Crowe?”

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “It’s clear.”

  “Good.”

  She let go of him. Her fingers had left red marks on his skin, and an ache in his bones. She gave him a fierce look.

  “I hope this is the last time I ever see you,” she said. “Because if I do see you again, it means you’ve failed.”

  He nodded.

  “You’re dismissed, Mr. Crowe.”

  He nodded again, and pivoted, feeling heavier than he had felt before he entered the room. Then he had had no idea what his future was going to be, and in some ways, he still didn’t.

  But she had given him a direction, and it was one he agreed with.

  Except…

  Tessa. She had been so much more than he could ever have been. They competed, but only so that he could aspire to her greatness, her brilliance.

  She had gotten an anacapa drive working. That should have been impossible. And others would say that it was reckless and stupid, but the feat itself, somehow working that drive, that was years beyond where she should have been.

  He couldn’t have done it.

  And now he wouldn’t.

  Because Captain Mbue was right; he needed to atone. And to do that, he had to learn a whole new way of being. A humbler, smarter, less risky way of being.

  He stepped back into that ruined anteroom, filled with the stuck images. The guards flanked him, as he walked back to his quarters.

  He no longer had any idea who he would have been if he hadn’t challenged Tessa to the competition.

  He had no idea who he was now.

  All he knew was who he had to be—a man who could carry fifty deaths on his shoulders, and somehow make sure nothing like that ever happened again.

  He had no idea if he could do that.

  But he knew he had to try.

  Part Two

  Contact

  100 Years Ago

  The Správa

  Vice Admiral Bella Gāo sank into the chair in the center of her research room. She had deliberately designed the room to have as little furniture as possible. Her chair, cabinets built into the wall to store whatever she might need, and a table to set things like the occasional cup of coffee or some snacks if she was going to be here a long time.

  She had a lot of tech in this room, though, most of it responding only to her voice command. The junior officers who worked with her could access the information on their own systems, but they couldn’t see what she had changed—not without her permission.

  Only her superior officers knew the other log-ins to her systems, and so far, in the twenty years she had worked in this room, no one else had tried to access it.

  There’d been no need.

  She worried that there might be a need right now.

  Her chair was
bolted into the floor, a decision she had made almost a decade ago, when the Správa had encountered some difficulties in a foldspace maneuver that had caused the entire ship to lose attitude controls. Generally, the DV-Class vessels that formed Command Operations for the Fleet didn’t have any difficulties at all. They traveled with the core of the Fleet, stayed away from any military issues, and were usually the last to enter a sector, generally by a well-traveled foldspace route.

  Still, that one incident had reminded her she was on a ship, and occasionally, troubles arose. Back then, she had thought herself so practical, bolting her chair into place.

  This morning, she regretted that decision. She wanted to move the chair to the back wall, so she could move around. She could go through the commands to release the chair or to fold it into the floor, but that would take time, and oddly enough, she didn’t feel like she had time.

  So she would have to make do.

  Spherical holographic projections of various Scrapheaps surrounded her, most of them about a foot in diameter. Sometimes she thought of the Scrapheap projections as if they were a series of human heads floating around her, as ghastly and lost as a decapitated head could be, filled with information no longer useful, memories nearly gone, and antiquated ideas best left unspoken.

  But every now and then, one of those severed heads became an actual ghost, something she had to deal with. She would have to focus down and concentrate, spend a few days thinking about things that she hadn’t considered before, and then the crisis—if it could be called a crisis—was over.

  This time, though. This time worried her.

  The gigantic three-dimensional holoimage in front of her was not the size of a head. The ball was the size of a small tabletop that seated four and even at that size, it didn’t give her the information she wanted.

  She had walked around it three times, always bumping against her chair. She had increased the size of the image so she could see inside it better, but she knew the size wasn’t the problem.