The Renegat

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Rwizi went to the sideboard, picked up a plate, and placed a sandwich on it. The movement surprised Gāo. Gāo would have thought the meeting nearly over, but Rwizi clearly did not.

  She turned, waving the plate at the others, as if asking them if they wanted anything. So far, two of the vice admirals waved a dismissive hand at her. Hallock ignored her entirely.

  “There’s one thing no one has mentioned,” Rwizi said, picking at the sandwich. “The trip through foldspace.”

  “I think we’ve been discussing that,” Nguyen said.

  “Yes,” Rwizi said. “The trip backwards. But a single trip that long has never been tried, at least that we know of, and it would be nice to know if our assumptions about such trips are correct.”

  Gāo shifted again. Something about this made her very uncomfortable, but she couldn’t put her finger on what.

  Calixte asked, “Meaning?”

  “Meaning wouldn’t it be better to send ships back to that Scrapheap to test the distance? We know we have communications nodes along the way. We have coordinates, and we have backup ships, in case the ships get damaged on the journey.” Rwizi picked up her sandwich and held it, but didn’t move it toward her mouth. “We would know how the trip works, and what the issues are. And as a bonus, we could get information from the Scrapheap itself.”

  “If it’s still there,” Nguyen said.

  Hallock looked at him in surprise. Rwizi took a bite from her sandwich. Gāo frowned.

  “No one has mentioned that possibility either,” Nguyen said. “But there could have been enough raids to take out the Scrapheap. Or maybe it exploded like that one did, thirty…forty…years ago now. Your ancient Scrapheap might be gone.”

  “Or it might be a treasure trove of information,” Calixte said. It sounded like he was warming to the idea.

  “Your traveling once through foldspace argument has merit, Vice Admiral Rwizi,” Hallock said. “Let me bring it to the operating committee and see what they think. In the meantime, Vice Admiral Calixte, get a team to research old Scrapheaps. See if we have records in that school ship you mentioned, records we haven’t looked at in centuries. We might discover other Scrapheaps existing as well.”

  “Yes, sir,” Calixte said.

  “Vice Admiral Rwizi,” Hallock said. “I want you to plot two different trips to that Scrapheap. One trip is a direct shot through foldspace. The other in small bites. Calculate the odds of success to get there.”

  Rwizi grabbed a napkin and dabbed at her mouth. “What about the trip back?”

  “For the time being, we shall assume they’ll come back the way they went,” Hallock said. Then she glanced at Gāo.

  Gāo braced herself, but Hallock looked back at the hologram.

  “Vice Admiral d’Anano,” Hallock said. “I want you to prepare a list of people whom we can spare from the Fleet. They need to be spectacular at their jobs, but not necessarily career material.”

  “Troublemakers?” d’Anano asked.

  Hallock tilted her head back and forth, as if considering the word. “Not quite. People who do not fit in. We’ll need enough to staff a ship, and they are going to need to work together. But…”

  Her voice trailed off.

  d’Anano’s lips twisted.

  “But,” d’Anano said, “if they all die on this mission, it won’t make any difference to the Fleet at all.”

  “Yes,” Hallock said quietly.

  “That means you don’t want them to have family either, right?” d’Anano said.

  “They can have family,” Hallock said. “But not close family. If we decide this mission is a go, there will be no spouses or children or grandparents on board. Only people essential to the mission itself.”

  “What kind of ship are we going to send?” d’Anano asked, sounding like she believed the mission would happen.

  Gāo didn’t. She took Hallock at her word. Hallock was still exploring the possibility.

  “I don’t think we have any DV-Class vessels to spare,” Hallock said. “And that might be too much ship for what we’re considering.”

  “The ship will need to defend itself,” Nguyen said.

  “It’ll also need to be able to survive for months, if need be, without backup,” Gāo added, simply because she could remain quiet no longer.

  “And it’ll need a good, new, anacapa drive, properly integrated into its systems,” Rwizi said.

  “That’s a DV-Class vessel,” Nguyen said. “We’d have to send a relatively new ship.”

  “Not necessarily.” Calixte sounded thoughtful. “We could send an SC-Class ship.”

  “A security vessel?” Nguyen said. “They rarely work alone.”

  “But they’re designed to do all the things you mentioned,” Calixte said, “and just because they don’t normally work alone doesn’t mean they can’t. It’s just tradition that makes us send several security ships to a crisis.”

  “Tradition, common sense, and good tactics,” Gāo said.

  She took a breath, about to suggest that they retrofit a DV-Class vessel from one of the closer Scrapheaps, and then realized that was silly. If they were going to send a ship, they would have to do so soon. They wouldn’t have time for a retrofit.

  “SC-Class,” Hallock said to d’Anano. “Find the right staff for a brand new SC-Class ship. Give me double the names. Split up duties. And let me know the pros and cons of each.”

  “That’s a minimum of eight hundred names, Admiral,” d’Anano said.

  “Yes,” Hallock said in that same flat tone she had used earlier. “It is.”

  No one spoke for a moment. The flatness of her words made them even more powerful. People who were expendable. A ship that might not come back. A mission that had several purposes, none of them entirely obvious.

  “Admiral,” Gāo said, “just before I came here, I was notified that another data blast arrived from the Scrapheap. I suspect we’ll get the raw data every day until or unless we block it. May I bring in others to help me sift through that data? I’d like to see if it’s all repetitive or if each day brings new information.”

  “By all means,” Hallock said, “bring in your best team. Make sure they know the data and the information we glean from it all is classified.”

  “Yes, sir,” Gāo said. “If the information is a continual resend, do I have your permission to block future transmissions?”’

  “Not yet, Vice Admiral Gāo. We need to decide what we’re doing next. There’s more information than just the data stream. We also need to see if the communications nodes for each data burst are the same.”

  Hallock looked at the group, then glanced a final time at the hologram. She reached out, almost as if she wanted to touch it, and then brought her hand back.

  “I think we’ve decided enough for now,” she said to Gāo. “I’d like to reconvene in two days’ time. That will give us time to contemplate what we’ve discussed here. It’ll give your people a chance to examine the data more thoroughly. We might learn more about Scrapheaps and Ready Vessels. And we should have a least a tentative list of names, right, Vice Admiral d’Anano?”

  “Yes, sir,” d’Anano said, already sounding weary.

  “All right then,” Hallock said. “Let’s move forward with this. You’re all dismissed.”

  The four vice admirals left, Rwizi carrying her plate and the remains of her sandwich with her.

  Gāo had to return the room to its usual status, so she remained. To her surprise, so did Hallock.

  Hallock set her ice tea on the sideboard. She hadn’t touched the liquid at all. She leaned against the sideboard. Her posture wasn’t as rigid, and her expression was softer, maybe even compassionate.

  “You find all of this disconcerting,” Hallock said. “Yet you’ve ordered personnel to take risks bigger than this throughout your career.”

  Gāo took a deep breath. That was true, and she hadn’t thought about her reaction in this context. She’d made much tougher decisions on her own
, but this time felt different.

  She wasn’t sure why.

  She glanced at the hologram. It was large and gray and incomplete. The shadows and the blurs inside of it were unusual as well, but not that unusual. She had sent ships into dangerous situations with a lot less information than this.

  “I…think it’s the going backwards,” Gāo said slowly. “We’re not sending a ship or a group of ships to find out something new. We’re checking on something old, something we’ve abandoned.”

  Hallock was nodding as Gāo spoke.

  “It doesn’t feel like we’re doing our jobs when we go back, does it?” Hallock said. “It feels as if we’re making a mistake.”

  “Yeah.” That was it. Gāo finally understood.

  “Even though it’s not your fault that the Fleet lost track of the older Scrapheaps,” Hallock said.

  “It’s my responsibility, though,” Gāo said. “I’m in charge of Scrapheaps.”

  “And your work has changed or, rather, will change, now that we know about this one. Many of the items we discussed today will fall into your purview.”

  Gāo nodded. Hallock was right. The communications piece would end up on Gāo’s plate, as would finding the older Scrapheaps, and figuring out what kind of shape they were in.

  “This mission, if we do it,” Gāo said, “will only be the first of many.”

  “Or not.” Hallock pushed away from the sideboard. She pointed at the hologram. “Can you make that go away?”

  Gāo called up her system on its own holographic screen, tapped a single corner, and the Scrapheap hologram disappeared.

  The conference room suddenly felt huge. Hallock went to the wall panel, and tapped the controls. The floor shuddered and Gāo had to move closer to the sideboard.

  The table rose first, long and gleaming. It always got cleaned when it was placed in the floor. Then the chairs rose back to their spots.

  And now the conference room looked like it always had, a place where decisions were made easily and comfortably, where risks were discussed as if they were theoretical instead of real.

  Gāo felt some of the pressure leave with the hologram itself.

  Hallock swept her hand toward the table, inviting Gāo to sit. Gāo did. Hallock sat beside her, not at the head of the table at all.

  So this was going to seem informal. It was a nice trick, one Gāo had used with subordinates as well.

  “Let me tell you something,” Hallock said, not adding that the “something” was in confidence, but implying it. “I have wanted to change this policy for years.”

  “Which one?” Gāo asked.

  “Scrapheaps themselves,” Hallock said. “You’re feeling uncomfortable because you’re sending a ship backwards. I have always felt that way about Scrapheaps. They don’t fit with the Fleet’s mission. We move forward.”

  The table dug into Gāo’s side, and the seat of the chair pressed against her right thigh. But Gāo didn’t move. She wasn’t sure if she should agree or if this was some kind of test.

  It would help if she could read Hallock, but Gāo had never been able to do that, not with Admiral Hallock. Some of the other admirals, sure. They never seemed to hide what they were thinking. But Admiral Hallock kept her opinions close.

  Maybe that was why Gāo thought this was a test. Because she had never been in this circumstance with Admiral Hallock before.

  “We close our sector bases, and remove all relevant material from them. We have had ships arrive at decommissioned bases,” Hallock said, “and those bases are almost always unusable. The community has moved on, and is sometimes unrecognizable. Knowledge of the Fleet is mostly gone. But Scrapheaps remain part of our system. We upgrade them—or should. We monitor them. We make them report across vast distances. And, apparently, they can find us, against long odds.”

  “You think that Scrapheap knows where we are?” Gāo asked.

  “Scrapheaps don’t ‘know’ anything,” Hallock said.

  Gāo felt that as a bit of a rebuke. She didn’t want to defend herself though. She needed to focus on what Hallock was saying.

  “But the communications system tracked us, and anyone with sense and a bit of engineering ability might be able to back trace any communication we send to a Scrapheap.” Hallock raised her eyebrows just a little, emphasizing her point. Clearly, she had made this point to others. “So I believe that makes us findable. Whether someone would want to is another matter altogether.”

  Gāo frowned. She sat up in the chair, relieving the pressure on her side. Then she shifted slightly. She had to consider her words before speaking. She didn’t want to insult Hallock, but Gāo also wanted to make sure she understood.

  “You want to send a ship, not for any of the reasons we discussed earlier,” Gāo said, “but to gather information to bring to the other admirals. You want this to be the first salvo in shutting down the Scrapheaps.”

  If Gāo were a different woman, she would feel threatened by that. After all, her entire job was about Scrapheaps.

  But she didn’t. Hallock had a good argument, and had put her finger on something that had always bothered Gāo about her work.

  She never felt like she was doing a job that benefitted the Fleet, no matter what her superior officers said. She always felt like she—and sometimes she alone—was looking in the wrong direction, facing backwards while all of her comrades faced forwards.

  She had spent the last few decades of her career making decisions about things that the Fleet had long since abandoned. And she had done a lot of mental gyrations so that she wouldn’t have to think about that.

  Hallock shifted as well, placing her elbow on the back of her chair, and turning slightly so that she faced Gāo more directly.

  “It wouldn’t be the first salvo,” Hallock said. “Since I left your job, I’ve been pushing the admirals to shut down the Scrapheaps. My arguments have not made a lot of difference. Tradition counts for a lot more within the command structure than I like. What the others have asked for, and what I have been unable to provide, is evidence that the Scrapheaps do not function as intended.”

  Gāo frowned. “But they do protect the abandoned and forgotten ships.”

  “Do they?” Hallock asked. “You have evidence of theft on a grand scale. Theft that might have taken place a century ago or more.”

  “In a sector we no longer care about,” Gāo said.

  “Perhaps,” Hallock said. “I care less about the theft of damaged ships than I do about Ready Vessels. Even so, what you have in that little bit of data you provided us, is the beginning of an argument with evidence to shut down the Scrapheaps, just like we shut down sector bases.”

  “What would we do without Scrapheaps?” Gāo asked.

  Hallock smiled. It was her first real smile of the meeting, and it transformed her face into a web of smile lines, showing her age, but making her seem more approachable at the same time.

  “Now you sound like my colleagues,” Hallock said. “This is where we get into trouble—the entire Fleet. We follow tradition and continue doing things the way they’ve always been done, even when the system is not logical and does not function.”

  Gāo’s cheeks heated. She couldn’t stop that flush at all.

  “We develop a new group of ships.” Hallock lowered her voice as she said that. “We send them back, and we have them destroy any Fleet vessel that they find.”

  Gāo’s breath caught. Destroy a ship? A perfectly functional ship? That went counter to everything she had ever learned.

  “See?” Hallock said. “Destroying a ship is harder for us than taking a life.”

  “But the ships might be useful,” Gāo blurted.

  “Have they ever been?” Hallock asked. “In your entire command, have you ever known us to remove a ship from the Scrapheap? Have you ever known us to take spare parts from a Scrapheap?”

  She didn’t give Gāo a chance to answer, not that Gāo needed to. The answer was, of course, no. They never had.

/>   “We are keeping the ships because we have been trained—perhaps indoctrinated is a better word—to maintain them. To keep them alive at all costs. Sector bases and starbases are easy to abandon. We do not live on them. But we live on the ships. They are as much a part of us as our hands.”

  Admiral Hallock’s eyes twinkled, as if she knew that Gāo—and anyone else—would see this as a radical thought.

  Gāo did feel distinctly uncomfortable even thinking about destroying a Fleet ship. Fleet ships contained lives and memories and more. They were homes; they were the Fleet itself.

  Hallock watched Gāo as if expecting Gāo’s reaction. That small smile grew on Hallock’s face.

  “You don’t like this concept, do you?” Hallock asked.

  Like. Dislike. Gāo had no idea.

  “I don’t know,” Gāo said after a moment. “I had never given it any thought before now.”

  Hallock’s smile seemed to have frozen in place. Perhaps Gāo wasn’t as big an ally as Hallock had thought. Or perhaps Hallock had thought Gāo agreed with her, even though no one Gāo knew had ever spoken of these concepts before.

  “Did you know,” Hallock said slowly, “that some land-based cultures actually put their dead into the ground?”

  Gāo had studied such things when she was in school. “Yes,” she said. “It has something to do with crop nutrients.”

  “No, it does not,” Hallock said. “Those cultures alter the bodies so that they will not decay. They remain preserved as best as the science allows.”

  Gāo was stunned. “Preserved for what?”

  Hallock opened her hands, as if to say I have no idea. “For some, it is a religious ideal. Something about being restored to the flesh. For others, custom, perhaps? But I have given it a lot of thought. For those cultures, the bodies are the vessels. The ships, if you will. Because they travel individually, and live on their planet. They do not live communally as we do, and they do not see the ships or other vehicles as anything other than utilitarian.”

  Gāo had encountered that before, usually in cities that sprang up around a sector base. The culture in those cities was dramatically different than one on a Fleet ship.