The Renegat

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “The Scrapheaps are nothing more than a burial ground, in space, for our most important bodies,” Hallock said.

  Gāo pressed her lips together, not sure what she should say about that concept. She wasn’t sure if she agreed with it. She wasn’t sure what she thought.

  Had this information come from someone else, Gāo might not have considered it at all. But this was Admiral Hallock, who was not known for outré ideas. Admiral Hallock was known as one of the most sensible members of the command team.

  “If I can prove that these Scrapheaps actively harm the Fleet,” Hallock said quietly, “then we might be able to shut them down.”

  “And do what with the Ready Vessels?” Gāo asked.

  Hallock’s eyes twinkled again. Apparently, she had been asked this question before. Or maybe she was just waiting for Gāo to come up with it.

  “I believe our warships should travel with us,” Hallock said. “We train a different military staff, one that will run those ships at all times, rather than bring in staff when we need them.”

  “But other cultures will see our warships,” Gāo said. “They’ll think we’re going to attack them.”

  “That presupposes other cultures understand our ships now,” Hallock said. “How do they know that DV-Class ships are also used for diplomacy? Those ships have weapons and defensive capabilities. Any culture sufficiently advanced enough to scan a DV-Class vessel could easily think that vessel is a warship. Sometimes, Bella, our culture is very egocentric.”

  Gāo frowned. Hallock was giving her several things to consider, things she hadn’t thought of before.

  Hallock flattened her hand on the table, and then stood. “Well,” she said, “that’s enough philosophy for the moment.”

  Gāo stood as well.

  “What I want you to know, Vice Admiral Gāo—” apparently, they were back to being formal again “—is that unless some other information is brought to my attention in the next few days, convincing information, at least to me, I will be approving this mission. We will be sending one SC-Class vessel to that Scrapheap. Ostensibly, we will be testing an extra-long foldspace journey, as Vice Admiral Rwizi suggested, but you and I will both know that we will be watching for other information.”

  Gāo swallowed hard. “Why are you telling me this? Why not tell the others?”

  “They will not lose their command if things change,” Hallock said.

  “Neither will I,” Gāo said.

  Hallock rocked back ever so slightly. “We won’t have Scrapheaps any longer.”

  Gāo smiled. “We will be spending years decommissioning the Scrapheaps. I can guarantee that. And if that occurs, someone has to be in charge. That someone may as well be me.”

  Hallock laughed and clapped Gāo on the back. “I hadn’t even thought of that. You are correct. So it shouldn’t matter to you if things change. You might even end up with a more challenging job.”

  Perhaps. Gāo made herself smile back, although she still felt distinctly uncomfortable.

  Hallock had succeeded in making Gāo feel uneasy about something she had felt certain about just that morning.

  “I know this isn’t common procedure,” Hallock said to Gāo, “but I would like you to oversee this mission yourself. I will want regular reports from you once the mission is underway.”

  Gāo nodded, even though she wasn’t sure the mission would happen. There was still a lot to determine.

  And Gāo knew that, if she really wanted to stop this trip from happening, all she had to do was request a hearing with the other admirals.

  That would make an enemy out of Admiral Hallock, though.

  Gāo had to consider her next moves carefully. It might be better to take the risk, send the ship back to the Scrapheap, and see what happened next, than it would be to make such a powerful enemy.

  Besides, the Fleet would then learn the fate of at least one of its Scrapheaps.

  Gāo wished Hallock had said nothing, had simply given the order to send the mission, and let the rest happen as it may. Gāo wished Hallock had not brought her into the politics of the Scrapheaps at all.

  Now Gāo was going to have to determine how she felt about Scrapheaps, Fleet policy, and these traditions.

  Unless the ship they sent back to that Scrapheap discovered something definitive.

  Gāo wasn’t sure what that something would be.

  But she half-hoped that she would find out.

  The Správa

  True to her word, Admiral Hallock approved the mission. And, true to her word, she put Gāo in charge of it. Gāo could have assigned the mission to underlings, but she didn’t want to.

  She was hoping she could derail the entire thing.

  The morning the orders came down, she was having a breakfast her father used to make in their quarters when she was a girl. Comfort food. Bean sprout rice, cold cucumber soup, seasoned kelp, and, of course, kimchi. She wanted grilled short ribs, but cooking them was difficult in her own kitchen, and she didn’t want them that much. She was stirring up eggs to make a vegetable omelet for protein, when the little bell sounded, indicating important orders.

  Still, she didn’t look immediately. Her quarters were smaller than the average senior officer’s quarters because she didn’t like large spaces. She had a kitchen that opened to a dining area, and a comfortable living area. Because she was an admiral, she couldn’t have quarters on the outside edges of the ship. Hers were buried deep inside the Správa, so she made do with large screens that rotated through images of some of the most calming places she had seen in her travels. She also had a small greenhouse between her living area and the single bedroom she had insisted on, and sometimes she just shut off the screens and looked at the growing plants.

  She had toyed with doing that this morning after her stretching routine, but had made breakfast instead.

  Now, she regretted it. Because she had known that the orders would arrive soon. The other vice admirals had done their assigned tasks.

  She hadn’t liked what she had seen, particularly from Vice Admiral Rwizi. The courses she and her team had plotted were numerous, because, as she said, there was a bit of guesswork involved. The maps of the sectors were old or relatively nonexistent. So she had gone with the areas that had surviving nodes that the information had come through. And even then, she hadn’t liked what she had found.

  The short trips, with any ship using an anacapa, no longer had a 15% risk factor, like most anacapa trips. The risk factor increased with each trip, not because the anacapa might fail, but because the odds of going off course increased with each trip.

  However, Rwizi gave the long journey—one single trip through foldspace—a 50% chance of succeeding. She noted that she was being optimistic.

  She said, if she were doing the trip, and here in her report, she had said (again) that she would not, she would take the short trips. Not because they were safer. In the end, they might have even more risk, but because there was a chance that the crew could leave the ship and live in a sector once inhabited by the Fleet.

  Getting lost in foldspace, on the other hand, usually meant the entire crew died.

  Gāo had brought this report to Hallock’s attention, and Hallock had nodded. It is what I expected, she had said.

  I think it disqualifying. I don’t think we should take this mission, Gāo had said.

  If it were just for the thefts, I would agree, Hallock had responded. But it is not.

  And those words replayed over and over again in Gāo’s mind since that short discussion. The reason she needed comfort food this morning wasn’t because she was feeling sad or out of sorts, but because she finally—deeply—understood what Admiral Hallock wanted.

  She wanted the crew of that ship to die. She wanted the mission to fail. She would use that as an example of how the Fleet couldn’t maintain its Scrapheaps. How, even though the plan to keep Ready Vessels and old ships in one place seemed good in theory, it was not a practice that worked for the Fleet at al
l.

  Gāo had spent the last two nights trying to figure out if she wanted any part of this mission. Yes, saying no to it would destroy her career. But that mattered less to her as she got older, a fact that sometimes surprised her, since she no longer had family to fall back on. She had never had children, never had a long serious relationship, except with the Fleet itself.

  And she was willing to give that up to prevent a mission that would result in certain death for the handful chosen.

  But, as Hallock had said, Gāo had given orders like that before. She had sent crews to their deaths before. The difference was that they had known they were on a suicide mission.

  They had known what they were fighting for.

  She hadn’t been given strict orders yet, but she knew, just from the way Admiral Hallock was acting, that Gāo wouldn’t be able to tell anyone what the real mission was. Once the mission failed, Hallock would present herself as the voice of reason.

  We tried, she would say. We planned the best mission we could. Our people couldn’t even arrive. Or couldn’t get back, or whatever happened.

  Gāo also had a hunch that Hallock would insist on the short trips, not just because of Rwizi’s recommendation, but because that was the only way to track the ship.

  And then the Fleet could declare the ship lost, the mission a failure, and Scrapheaps a dead concept.

  The orders pinged insistently. She finished the omelet and pushed it, steaming, onto a plate. Then she set it next to the rest of her breakfast.

  She hadn’t touched any of it. The act of making the breakfast had been as soothing—maybe even more soothing—than the act of eating it.

  Besides, the orders were here.

  Gāo opened the orders on a holographic screen near her dining room table. She stood, just in case Hallock had the guts to give the orders in person.

  But of course, Hallock hadn’t done that. The orders had come, as orders usually did, on official forms.

  Vice Admiral Bella Gāo would oversee a mission to what might be the original Scrapheap, to fix that Scrapheap and find out whatever had happened to it. The ship would follow the plan outlined by Vice Admiral Rwizi. The crew would use maps synthesized from information gathered from that Scrapheap and stored in the Fleet’s files, information compiled by Vice Admiral Calixte and his team.

  Vice Admiral Gāo would choose the final crew from the list of possible crew members sent to her by Vice Admiral d’Anano. They would gather on an SC-Class vessel, already chosen in consultation with Vice Admiral Nguyen. That vessel, The Renegat, was being retrofitted and augmented to handle a long mission such as this.

  The Renegat would leave in one month’s time.

  Gāo admired the way that Hallock had named each of the vice admirals who had consulted on this mission. The orders made it seem like the entire group had decided to make this work, when, in fact, they had all expressed doubts.

  But that was why Hallock was an admiral and the rest were vice admirals. She knew how to play the political game better than anyone Gāo had ever known.

  Gāo looked at her omelet, which was no longer steaming. She poked at the kimchi, then stirred the cucumber soup. Her stomach growled. She was hungry, even if she didn’t deserve the comfort food, not with what she was going to have to do.

  Then she tapped a finger on the table. What bothered her wasn’t the mission, exactly. She had helmed missions she privately thought unwarranted before. That was one of the banes of her existence, part of her career.

  What bothered her was lying to the crew, as she brought them onboard.

  But what if she were honest with them? What if she told them that the mission had little chance of success? And what if she told them that they were being put on this ship, this Renegat, because they wouldn’t be missed.

  They would then be able to say no to the assignment. That no might force them to leave the Fleet, but the Fleet didn’t value them anyway.

  She stopped tapping the table and clutched her hand into a fist. She was well aware that her reaction in the moment was more about her than it was about the crew of the Renegat. Those people were, at the moment anyway, simply names on a list to her.

  But if she was going to run this mission—and Hallock had told her she was—then Gāo had to do things her way.

  And her way included honesty and choice. If Gāo said no to helming the mission, Hallock would simply find someone else. But if Gāo did the best she could, and still couldn’t end up with a full crew complement, then the mission might not happen.

  And if the Renegat had a full crew, then she could console herself with the idea that they were all informed. They knew what they were getting into, as best as anyone could.

  Gāo took a deep breath, and nodded to herself. She hadn’t come to a great compromise, but she had come to an acceptable one.

  She could lead this mission and still hang on to what little integrity she still had left.

  The Kaluwasan

  The captain’s ready room smelled of whiskey, rotting fruit, and unwashed blankets. Not even the air purifiers in the environmental system had been able to clear the stench, which gave Gāo an indication of just how filthy the ready room actually was. Gāo nearly walked out right at that moment, without even talking to the man who leaned against the wall, his arms crossed.

  But Commander Isma Fiorenza put her manicured hand on Gāo’s arm, a silent reminder of her promise. Fiorenza had asked Gāo to approach Captain Ivan Preemas with an open mind.

  Fiorenza was Preemas’s superior officer and, apparently, his champion. Gāo had no idea why anyone would champion a man so clearly undisciplined.

  The causes of the ready room’s odors were obvious—overflowing garbage, wadded blankets (and clothing) strewn across the floor, and a desk littered with tablets, tools, and dirty dishes.

  Preemas watched Gāo’s reaction to his ready room without moving, as if he expected her to walk out without talking to him.

  He didn’t look like a man who deserved a conversation. He was as messy as his ready room, although he had known she was coming to talk with him about a new position. Technically, moving to the Renegat would be a promotion. Anyone else would have dressed up for it.

  Preemas hadn’t. He hadn’t shaved in days. His blondish-brown hair, which desperately needed a trim, touched the edges of his wrinkled blue uniform.

  The uniform was the only familiar thing about him. It had the gold captain’s strips and the word security emblazoned across the right breast pocket.

  He wore nonregulation brown boots that looked like they had seen better days, and contrary to regulation, he wore rings on each finger of his right hand.

  Fiorenza was his exact opposite. Every part of her was coiffed and pressed. She wasn’t wearing a uniform because it wasn’t required for field commanders, even when they were on a mission. But security teams all had to wear uniforms because the teams never knew when they would be called into action.

  The Kaluwasan, Preemas’s ship, hadn’t seen action for nearly a month. Gāo had examined the files. The ship had saved three other vessels that had been stranded at the edge of the sector and had prevented at least one of the ships from exploding. The Kaluwasan, with the help of one other SC-Class vessel, also fought off five smaller vessels of unknown origin, thought to be regional pirate vessels bent on stealing the Fleet technology from the ships.

  The files made the fight, standoff, and rescue sound both heroic and dramatic, and perhaps they had been. But Gāo was seeing nothing heroic about Preemas.

  She saw attitude and incompetence. Shipshape was an adjective for a reason. A clean, well-maintained ship showed discipline and respect for the ship herself. That this room—the captain’s room—was so filthy would have disqualified Captain Preemas from almost any command Gāo was considering him for.

  Gāo’s usual method for calming her nerves—taking a deep breath—would not work here. She was breathing shallowly on purpose. She had considered breathing through her mouth, but she h
ad no idea what kinds of germs she would inhale.

  “I thought I ordered you to clean up before our visit,” Fiorenza said to Preemas.

  “I have,” Preemas said as if he were a teenage boy caught inside his filthy bedroom. “The Kaluwasan is spotless.”

  “Except for this room,” Fiorenza said. “I told you we were going to meet in this room.”

  He raised his eyebrows, his green eyes flat. It felt as if he was daring Gāo and Fiorenza to walk out.

  Gāo didn’t have time for games. She had a short-list of possible captains for the Scrapheap mission, and Preemas was at the top of it.

  She had reviewed his record. It started out stellar. He had done exceedingly well in school in every single discipline a captain needed. He fast-tracked through all of his training. He had worked his way to second officer on a DV-Class vessel by the time he was thirty.

  Then that vessel, the Esizayo, got lost in foldspace for an entire year, but on the ship itself, only 25 hours had passed. Preemas was one of the few who did not need counseling afterwards, since his entire life had been that ship. He hadn’t missed a year out of the life of his children or hadn’t missed an important event like the death of a parent.

  Either he had been able to convince himself that the lost year meant nothing to him or, indeed, it had meant nothing to him.

  He continued on the fast track to captaincy, going through the various trainings with just a blip on his record here and there. A little insubordination, at the right moments, usually for the right reasons. He had charisma and lots of friends, and no one held those moments against him.

  He got promoted until he received his own DV-Class vessel, the Raadiya, which had an undistinguished run under his command, until the Drauxhill Incident. A first-contact mission that went so seriously awry that it caused the Fleet to reconsider its first-contact protocols, the Drauxhill Incident concerned Preemas only in that he was captain at the time. He had not participated in the first contact, having followed protocol to the letter.