This week’s Free Fiction Monday is a little different. It’s a way to sample my new Diving novel, Searching for the Fleet, before its publication day on Tuesday, Sept. 18. The novella “Dix,” which was first published in the March/April issue of Asimov’s, follows Yash Zarlengo, an engineer aboard the ship Ivoire, as she tries to cope with the fallout of the accident that caused the Ivoire to be propelled five thousand years in the future. When First Officer Dix does something that shocks Yash to her core, she must put her own life on the line to uncover a threat that could mean the end to everything she knows. 

“Dix,” by Hugo Award-winning author Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is free on this website for one week only. The story, which is part of the Diving Series novel Searching for the Fleet, is also available as an ebook, paperback, and audiobook. The novel will be released on Tuesday, Sept. 18. For more information or to order the book, click here.  

 

 

Dix

A Diving Series Novella

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

 

 

Five Years Ago

 

For the rest of her life, Yash Zarlengo would replay that last night in her mind, going over each and every detail, looking for something different—a clue, perhaps, a missed signal.

She never found one that satisfied her.

Yash and Jonathan “Coop” Cooper had been sitting in their favorite bar in the Ivoire. The bar was really just an extension of the main commissary, but the ship’s designers had gone all out. The bar had twenty-five tables organized in small groups, some with counter running behind them, and plants shielding the patrons. The tables were made of brass and some teak-colored wood. The chairs matched the tables, except for the comfortable brass-colored cushions.

Alcohol bottles lined the two interior walls. The wall that was easiest to reach had once held the alcohol which had been easiest to find in what had been the sector the Ivoire traveled through. The wall behind the recycler cleaning unit had upper cabinets filled with bottles that were mostly one-of-a-kind.

Technically, everything in this bar was now one-of-a-kind.

Yash tried not to think about that. Instead, she stared out the floor-to-ceiling windows that revealed the vastness of space—or whatever planet the Ivoire orbited. The windows could be shuttered, then shielded, and often were when the ship was traveling from place to place.

But at that moment, the Ivoire was docked at the space station that housed the Lost Souls Corporation. A woman who called herself Boss in that bastardization of Standard everyone spoke in this time period had started the corporation to discover more about something she called “stealth tech,” but which really had more to do with the Fleet’s anacapa drives.

Boss had found the Ivoire. In fact, Boss had accidentally rescued the Ivoire. She and her people had inadvertently activated the equipment in a decaying sector base. That equipment had pulled the Ivoire out of a trap in foldspace, bringing the Ivoire and her crew five thousand years into their future.

As a cadet—hell, throughout her career—Yash thought she could deal with anything. But the loss of everything she knew—from the Fleet itself to the language her people spoke to the history that was just yesterday to her and so far in the past as to be unknown to these people—was overwhelming. Some days, she thought she wouldn’t make it.

But going through this with the crew of the Ivoire, all five hundred of them, made it easier. She wasn’t going through this alone.

She took comfort in that.

Hence the drinking sessions with Coop. They would meet in the bar not quite nightly, put their feet on the tables precisely because that wasn’t regulation, and drink some of the old whiskey, the kind that they had brought from planets they would never see again, in a time period they couldn’t return to.

After the first few sessions, Coop and Yash usually didn’t get drunk. They sipped and stared at the edges of the space station and the edges of the sector beyond. Planets Yash still didn’t recognize, nebulae that gleamed against the blackish-blueness, the red star so far in the distance that it looked like a pinprick of blood.

She wasn’t coming to love those things, but they were becoming familiar. Anything could become familiar, given enough time.

That night, about a year after they had arrived in this strange future, Coop was staring at his whiskey, not drinking it at all. He was looking through the glass at the view, in an unusually contemplative mood.

He had been everyone’s rock. A solid, broad-shouldered man who seemed even taller and more broad-shouldered since they had arrived, he now had a few more lines on his face, a hint of silver in his black hair. He had stopped wearing any kind of uniform a few months ago, and had said nothing about it.

He now dressed like Boss’s people, wearing black pants and a black or gray T-shirt, quietly moving his association from a Fleet that probably no longer existed to Lost Souls Corporation and its vague connection to something called the Nine Planets Alliance.

He was shedding as much of the past as he could, and making it okay for the rest of the crew to do so. Some were already thinking of leaving the Ivoire permanently, taking jobs inside Lost Souls or becoming planet-bound somewhere in the Nine Planets.

Yash couldn’t contemplate any of that. She still wore her Fleet clothes as well, although some of them were getting worn. She would have to replace her regulation boots soon, and she didn’t want to. They were comfortable.

They were also coming apart.

“Hey, can anyone join this little party?” Dix Pompiono, the Ivoire’s nominal first officer, spoke from behind them.

Yash tensed. Coop stopped swirling the liquid in his glass. His expression hadn’t changed, a sign that Coop didn’t want anyone to know what he was feeling.

But Yash knew exactly how Coop felt. Neither she nor Coop wanted to deal with Dix right now. This was their relaxation place, not a place for histrionics. And Dix had been all over the emotional map ever since the Ivoire arrived here.

Dix had actually suffered some kind of breakdown a few months ago after a mission Coop ran to Starbase Kappa to shut down a long-malfunctioning anacapa drive. The mission had nearly failed because of Dix. Coop resented that deeply.

Yash hadn’t told Coop that she had found the mission joyous, in its own way. Yash had felt useful again, like she was back in the old Fleet, with a proper goal and a future.

Of course, after that mission, the Ivoire’s crew had nothing to do. And, in some ways, that mission had been the Ivoire crew’s last gasp. The mission had brought up too many conflicting feelings for everyone, not even counting what had happened with Dix.

“Gotta pour your own.” Coop sounded welcoming, but the pause before he spoke probably told Dix more than enough.

Behind her, glasses clinked. Then she saw movement reflected in the windows before her. Dix had taken a tumbler out of the cabinet near the recycler. He had grabbed the whiskey bottle and was now pouring himself a drink.

Coop let out a sigh so small Yash wouldn’t have heard it if she hadn’t been sitting next to him. Yash patted his arm, not to comfort, but in agreement.

Coop glanced at her, blue eyes hooded. Then he shrugged ever so slightly with the shoulder closest to her, as if to say, What can you do?

She mimicked his shrug so that he understood that she identified with him. The nice quiet evening they’d been enjoying would be quiet no longer.

Dix rounded the table nearest them, carrying a tumbler of whiskey two fingers full. He stopped, looked at the view, then took a sip.

He was gaunt now. He had always been too thin, and abnormally tall for someone who ended up as bridge crew. His hair had gone completely white in the past year, and his cheeks were sunken inward.

The last time Yash had seen him, his hands shook as if he couldn’t control them.

But they weren’t shaking now.

“There’s the future,” he said, looking at the sector they still hadn’t explored. “It’s been there all along, hasn’t it?”

He sounded like the old Dix, a little wry, intelligent, and maybe even a bit hopeful.

Yash couldn’t believe that Dix was hopeful. He’d been the most distraught of all of the senior crew members, the one who had been least able to contain his heartbreak when he learned they could never, ever go back.

Indeed, his completely insane meltdown on Starbase Kappa had come from some cockamamie scheme he had developed to send the Ivoire back to its own time period—and Coop had thwarted him.

Dix had barely spoken to Coop since.

Dix sipped from his tumbler, tilted his head back—clearly savoring the whiskey—and then swallowed. He turned away from the windows, and set his glass on a nearby table. But he didn’t sit.

Instead, he continued to stand, the light from the space station illuminating half his face, leaving the side closest to Yash in shadow.

“I owe you guys an apology,” Dix said.

His voice had strength, which she hadn’t expected. The last time he had used the word “apology” in her presence he had said, I suppose you expect an apology, and his tone had been as mean as the words.

Now, Yash didn’t answer him, but she met his gaze. He still seemed sad, as if sadness had leached into his very soul. She wondered if someone who knew her well would think the same thing of her.

Coop didn’t even move. It was as if Coop hadn’t heard anything.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” Dix said, glancing at Coop, then looking back at Yash. “I’ve been acting as if this happened just to me. It didn’t. It happened to all of us.”

Yash didn’t wanted to react to anything Dix said, but she couldn’t help herself. She nodded.

He gave her a faint smile, took that nod as an invitation, and sat down to the left of Coop. Coop rested his glass of whiskey on his flat stomach, and continued to stare at the universe beyond.

“I can make excuses,” Dix said, “and I did. I know I did. The loss of Lenore made me crazy.”

Everything made you crazy, Yash thought but didn’t say. She didn’t dare speak out at all, because everyone had lost family and loved ones, even her. She would never see her parents again, or her twin sisters. She hadn’t had a lover at the time the Ivoire left on its last mission for the Fleet, but she had had an entire cadre of friends, all of whom had not served on the Ivoire.

She would never see them again. She would never see anyone she loved who hadn’t been on the Ivoire again.

“Sometimes I think if we could access records of the Fleet, learn about what happened to everyone, I’d feel better,” Dix said.

Yash stiffened. She’d had that thought. So had Coop. They’d actually looked through the information they’d pulled from Starbase Kappa, but it was minimal. Maintenance records mostly. No history of Fleet personnel, not even personnel who had come later.

As was proper. No information about the Fleet should have been available in any closed Fleet outpost. None.

“But I keep turning it over and over in my mind,” Dix said, “and I realize that discovering that Lenore married someone else and had kids with him—or didn’t marry anyone and died alone—that wouldn’t help me. It’s not just the loss of the people, selfish as that is to say. It’s the loss of the future. The expected, imagined future.”

Coop let out a small sigh. His fingers wrapped around the glass, but he didn’t take another drink.

“How do you do it?” Dix asked. “How do you get through each day? How do you accept that you should put your uniform away and say goodbye to the Fleet, when the Fleet has been our entire life?”

Coop stiffened. Yash did too. Yash hadn’t ever had that conversation with Coop, although she’d had others. About the Fleet. About where it might be now, five thousand years later. About whether or not it still existed.

About whether approaching it if it did exist was a good idea.

“You don’t want to talk about it, do you?” Dix asked. “That’s how you’re coping. You’re denying what’s in front of you.”

A surge of anger ran through Yash. Coop wasn’t denying anything. Neither was she. They were moving forward each and every day, just like they’d been trained to do.

She swung her feet off the table, sitting up, about to speak, when Coop lifted one hand from his glass, forefinger out, stopping her.

“I’m using my training,” he said to Dix. “You should too.”

“Training?” Dix made a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob. “None of us were trained for this.”

Coop’s lips thinned. He sat up, then put his glass on the table in front of him.

Yash tensed. She would step between them if need be. The crew was still on edge; they didn’t need to hear that their captain had physically fought with Dix.

Then she swallowed, thinking about her own reaction.

Coop wasn’t a violent man. He had never hit anyone on his crew, rarely hit someone who had attacked him. He was the calmest person she knew.

That hint of violence in the air? Was she imagining it? Or had it come from her?

She shifted slightly, saw Coop’s posture. No. She knew him well. He was furious. He was past furious. He was barely holding himself together.

“We are all trained for this, First Officer Pompiono,” Coop said, enunciating each word precisely. He was using the captain speak he used only with the most recalcitrant crew members, the ones he would dump at the next port after dozens of write-ups. The hopeless ones.

Dix raised his eyebrows. “I never heard any of my instructors mention that foldspace could catapult us five thousand years in the future, making us lose everything, cheating us of our own march through time. Making us abandon our families—”

“Then you weren’t paying attention.” Coop handed his glass to Yash, as if she were his second in command, not Dix. And in truth, she had become Coop’s second in command. She had been at his side for the entire year they’d been stuck here, working on the Ivoire, figuring out the way forward. Dix had been wallowing in his own losses and breakdown, and Yash had been working. Hard. Like most of the crew.

Yash set Coop’s glass next to hers, out of the way.

Dix leaned back just a little, but there was something in his eyes. A kind of triumph, maybe? Relief that he had finally gotten an obvious emotional reaction out of Coop?

Coop laid his hands flat on the table’s faux wood surface as if he were stretching them, as if he were pushing the table down so that he wouldn’t do anything harmful to anyone.

“Our training,” Coop said, “was about this, and only this.”

Dix frowned, opening his mouth to speak, probably to disagree, when Coop continued.

“We were told that DV-Class ships ventured out alone. We could get lost. We might never come back. We often had no one to rely on but ourselves. I don’t know about you, but my training included years of role-playing those very things, plus going over historical incidents of lost ships, coping with hundreds and hundreds of scenarios in which this very thing occurred.”

“It’s not the same,” Dix said.

“It’s exactly the same.” Coop spoke softly, but used as much energy as if he had shouted them.

Yash was holding her breath. She made herself release it.

“It’s not the same,” Dix repeated. “In those scenarios, we would have had hope.”

“Hope?” Coop spoke the word as if Dix had been using Boss’s bastardized Standard. “What kind of hope are you talking about?”

“Hope that we could return.” Dix was calm, like the Dix of old. The man that Coop had made First Officer.

Yash could remember when Dix inspired confidence in everyone, when he knew the exact right words to say. When he really was an extension of Coop, understanding exactly how Coop would approach something, and then anticipating it, so Coop never even had to give the order.

“You lack that hope now?” Yash asked. Because she didn’t. She was still searching for a way back, even though she knew it was a long shot. They had gotten here, hadn’t they? That meant returning was possible as well.

Coop turned his head slightly, as if he had just remembered that Yash was in the conversation.

Then he shifted his body, almost blocking her view of Dix.

“You think all of those scenarios,” Coop said, “the hundreds and hundreds of them that we learned, would always have hope?”

“Yes,” Dix said.

“Ship destroyed, crew scattered, the Fleet never notified before it happened, you think those kinds of scenarios had hope?”

“Steal a ship, buy one, get back to the Fleet,” Dix said.

“Without an anacapa drive,” Coop said. “Not possible.”

“But the hope—”

“Is a myth, Dix. You were in the same classes I was. You had the same training, the same instructors. Did you miss the parts about ships getting lost forever in foldspace? Do you think those crews had hope?”

“Until they died, yes, I do,” Dix said.

“Did you have this kind of hope when we were stranded in foldspace?” Coop asked.

“Yes,” Dix said calmly. “I was convinced we’d get home.”

Coop harrumphed. Yash thought back to those horrid weeks just over a year ago. She hadn’t allowed herself to think about getting back to the Fleet. Nor had she let herself think about foldspace as much more than a theoretical problem. The Fleet used foldspace as a tool to travel long distances. The Fleet believed that the anacapa drive created a fold in space, so that ships could cross it quickly.

But Yash hadn’t been sure that they entered a fold in space. She thought maybe they had traveled somewhere else, a different sector of the universe, somewhere far away. Or maybe they had entered some kind of interdimensional portal. She had kept those thoughts to herself when the Ivoire was trapped in foldspace, because she needed to fix the ship, figure out what had gone wrong, to create some kind of chance—

“I wasn’t convinced we’d get back to the Fleet,” Coop said.

“But you said you were.” Dix sounded surprised. Apparently, he had trusted in Coop’s words.

Yash had too. She had thought Coop amazingly calm throughout that entire ordeal—as much as she had paid attention to him. She had spent so much time in engineering that most nights she had even slept there.

“I said I believed we could escape foldspace,” Coop said. “One problem at a time. Remember, Dix? It’s part of the training.”

Dix flinched.

Yash nodded. She was rather astounded that Dix had to be reminded. One problem at a time was a core principle of the Fleet. She had been operating on that very principle when the Ivoire had been trapped in foldspace.

“And I was right,” Coop said. “We escaped foldspace.”

“We didn’t do anything to escape,” Dix said. “These people we’re stuck with, this Lost Souls thing, they got us out.”

Yash clenched a fist. How dare he? He knew how hard everyone worked to get out of foldspace.

She finally spoke up. “You’re mistaken, Dix.”

His head swiveled toward her as if he had forgotten she was there. Coop, too. He frowned at her in surprise.

“We fixed the anacapa drive just enough,” she said, “so that when a signal came from another anacapa drive, we had the energy to assist in the pull from foldspace. If that signal had come one week earlier, we would still be stranded there.”

Dix’s eyes narrowed. “You believe that.”

“I know that,” she said.

Coop nodded. “One problem at a time,” he said. “That’s what we did in foldspace. We worked the problem.”

Dix’s lower lip trembled, making him look like a little boy who got caught in a lie.

He squared his shoulders, then said, “So what’s the current problem? Getting back to our time period? Getting back to the Fleet?”

If he had actually been doing his job the last year, he would know what everyone was working on and how they were coping.

Although not everyone was coping. And Coop was managing those people as well.

To his credit, he didn’t say that. He leaned forward, putting more of his weight on his flattened hands, then peered at Dix as if unable to believe that Dix had no idea what was going on.

“We’re five thousand years in the future,” Coop said. “Five thousand years of technological advances. Five thousand years of changes. Five thousand years of Fleet history.”

“Technology is backwards here,” Dix said, interrupting Coop’s flow.

“Here at Lost Souls, yes,” Coop said. “It is. But we haven’t found the Fleet yet. And once we find them, if we find them, we have no idea if they’ll believe us, help us, or work with us. But I don’t care. One problem at a time, Dix.”

“We’re searching for the Fleet?” Dix asked.

“We never stopped searching for the Fleet,” Yash said.

Dix shifted slightly on his chair. “And you think that when we find them—”

“If we find them,” Coop corrected.

“You think they’ll help us get back.” For the first time in a year, Dix sounded almost joyful.

“No,” Coop said. “I make no such assumption. One problem at a time.”

“But the new technology, as you said.” Dix was smiling, but his smile was that intense weird smile he had had on Starbase Kappa. “Their technology will be better than Boss’s. They’ll know how to get us back.”

“A lot of assumptions in that,” Yash said. “We don’t know if the Fleet still exists. We don’t know if the Fleet of the present—if there is one—has better tech than Lost Souls. We don’t know if they’re going to want to send us back, because it might cause all kinds of problems. There are time lines—”

“And alternate realities, and yeah, yeah.” Dix waved a hand. “I believe in that less than I believe in foldspace.”

Whatever that meant. He had gone off the deep end after all. After the apology, Yash had hoped the old Dix had come back. She missed him. Before the Ivoire got lost in foldspace, he used to sit in this bar with the two of them, and work shipboard problems as if they were nothing.

The man in front of her only resembled that man. The man in front of her had Dix’s shell, but not his courage. And she was beginning to think he didn’t have Dix’s brain either.

“Are we going to even try to get back?” Dix asked Coop.

“When?” Coop asked.

“What do you mean, when? If we get a chance. Are we going to try?”

Coop looked away, focusing on the windows. Yash looked too, saw the lights of a small ship as it left the space station on a mission she probably would never know about.

Coop took a deep breath. “One problem at a time, Dix.”

Dix slammed his hand on his table, making his glass jump and spilling just a bit of the whiskey. “I need to know, Coop. I need to know we’re trying.”

“Getting back to the Fleet and to our time period is an extreme long shot, Dix.” Coop spoke softly. “And I’m not sure it’s worth attempting. Because—the training, Dix. We’re trained to make the most of the situation we’re in, not to wish we were somewhere else.”

The color fled Dix’s face, leaving only two red spots on his cheeks, almost as if Coop had physically slapped him.

“I lost the love of my life,” Dix said.

“Most likely,” Coop said, and Yash tensed at the bluntness. Although she knew that was part of the training too. No use sugarcoating anything, because that didn’t help anyone deal with change.

Better to face it straight on.

“But you would have lost her if her ship got damaged in some battle,” Coop said. “You would have lost her if we remained stranded in foldspace. Hell, Dix, you would have lost her—or she would have lost you—at the end of your lives. One of you would have had to die first.”

Dix pressed his lips together. His eyes had filled with tears. “You’re a mean son of a bitch, you know that, Coop?”

Coop gave him a languid, sideways look. “I never pretended otherwise. You don’t get to be the captain of a DV-Class vessel by being kind, Dix. I thought you knew that.”

Dix ran a shaking hand over his face. “I didn’t know anything.”

Yash frowned at Dix in surprise. Of course he had known what it took to be captain. He had been on the captain track. There were personality tests, and stress tests, and a willingness to do exactly what Coop had done: disregard someone’s feelings to get that someone back in line.

Had Dix forgotten that? All of it? Or had he tested well, only to perform poorly in the field?

Coop folded his hands together as if he had to hold them in place to prevent them from—what? Grabbing Dix and shaking him?

Because Yash wanted to do that.

“Remember who you are, Dix,” Coop said. “Use your training. You’re second in command on this ship.”

“Not any more,” Dix said bitterly. “You sidelined me.”

“You need to face forward, Dix,” Coop said, ignoring Dix’s accusation. His accurate accusation. “We need you to work the problem.”

“The problem, the problem,” Dix snapped. “As if it’s something minor.”

Yash glanced at Coop. His expression was calm, but he was gripping his hands together so tightly that his knuckles had turned white.

“DV-Class ships never deal with something minor, Dix,” Coop said. “You know that too.”

“They don’t deal with something like this, either,” Dix said.

“How do you know?” Yash asked.

Both men looked at her with surprise. She shrugged. She had been thinking about this a lot.

“Dozens, maybe hundreds, of ships have disappeared forever, lost to foldspace. Those are the ones we know about, the ones that were actually observed entering foldspace. But we lose a lot of ships because they never return from some mission, and we can’t track them down. We don’t know how many other ships, how many other crews, how many other captains have dealt with this very thing.”

Dix stared at her, his eyes tear-filled, his nose red. “And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”

“We’re not here to make you feel better,” Coop said.

Dix turned that hideous gaze on Coop.

“None of us feel better,” Coop said. “But most of us are working.”

“Yeah,” Dix said. “Working every angle. Sleeping with that woman who found us. Must be nice to have her to warm your bed.”

Coop’s impassive expression vanished. In its stead, he gazed at Dix with compassion.

“I know you lost Lenore,” Coop said, clearly trying a different tack. “And I know you loved her more than anything.”

“I won’t replace her,” Dix said. “I won’t try.”

“I’m not suggesting you do,” Coop said.

“You have no idea how this feels,” Dix said.

Coop nodded. “You’re right,” he said. “I don’t.”

Yash frowned. She hadn’t expected him to say that. Was this another attempt at calming Dix? Or was this just Coop, tossing away any attempt at caution?

“I don’t know if I ever will know what you felt for Lenore,” Coop said. “They tested me. They test all candidates for captaincy. We’re less likely than other members of the Fleet to have long-term romantic relationships. When have you ever heard a captain use the phrase, ‘The love of my life’?”

“Are you saying I’m not captain material?” Dix asked.

Good God. Everything was about him. That wasn’t the point, and if he had been listening—

“It would have depended on how you tested out on other things,” Coop said. “But a willingness to sacrifice deep human connection in favor of the right decision for the ship, a certain bloodlessness, if you will, or, as you said, a willingness to be a mean son of a bitch, that’s damn near the number one requirement.”

“So you’d leave Boss for the Fleet?” Dix said.

“You’re under a misapprehension,” Coop said. “We’re close, but we’re not in a relationship.”

Yet, Yash thought. But they would be.

“If you were.” Dix’s tone implied that he didn’t believe Coop’s denial. “Would you leave her to go home?”

Home was an interesting word choice. Although Yash empathized with it. That was the thing: the Ivoire felt like home, but this time period did not.

“Yes,” Coop said. He relaxed his hands. They were still clasped together, but loosely. “Here’s what you miss, Dix. I would leave a loved one for any mission, if ordered to do so by the Fleet. I would, and I have.”

“Even someone you thought you could spend the rest of your life with?” Dix asked.

“Yes,” Coop said.

“And never see them again?” Dix asked, voice trembling.

“That’s the risk,” Coop said. “That’s what we all agreed to when we joined the crew of this vessel. I thought you understood that.”

Dix blinked and looked away. A single tear hung on the lashes of his left eye. Yash stared at it, wondering if he knew it was there. Wondering if he cared.

“We lost everything,” he whispered.

“Face forward,” Coop said. The words were brutal. His tone was brutal. “That’s what the Fleet does, Dix. Forever forward. You know that.”

Dix nodded. The tear fell, landing on the edge of the table and falling out of Yash’s line of sight.

“I forgot,” he said, his voice thick with tears.

“I know,” Coop said gently. He put a hand on Dix’s shoulder. Dix jumped. “Drink with us. Yash and I have been talking about all of this since we got here. We’ll catch you up on our plans.”

Dix’s Adam’s apple bobbed—a nervous swallow.

For a moment, Yash thought he was going to stay. For a moment, she thought they would be able to reclaim the team that they had been just over a year ago.

Then Dix shook his head. “I have enough to think about for one night.”

He stood, reached out one hand toward Coop.

Coop took it.

Dix shook.

“Thank you,” Dix said. “You clarified things.”

“Good,” Coop said. But he didn’t add, as Yash might have, Glad I could help. It was almost as if he didn’t believe the conversation made any difference at all.

“Join us tomorrow?” Yash asked, partly because Coop didn’t. Partly because it seemed like Dix expected it.

He smiled at her, and the smile was warm. “I’ve missed these moments,” he said.

“Me, too,” she said.

He picked up his whiskey, knocked it back, then carried the tumbler to the cleaner/recycler.

“I am sorry,” Dix said.

She nodded. “We know.”

Then he waved his fingers, a small goodbye. He left the bar.

Coop picked up his own drink, put his feet back on the table, and leaned back in the chair. He still didn’t take a sip.

Yash watched until she was certain Dix was gone. Then she settled back into her spot although she didn’t feel as relaxed.

“He did apologize,” she said.

“He did,” Coop said, as if it didn’t matter.

They sat in silence for a long time. Then Yash said, “He’s not the man you thought he was, is he?”

Coop finally picked up his glass. He peered into it, then—finally—took a sip.

“He’s the man I feared he was,” Coop said. It was, in its own way, the closest Coop had ever come to saying he had picked the wrong first officer.

Yash finished her drink, and thought about getting another. This night, it felt wrong to get drunk. Maybe she was past anesthetizing herself. Maybe she had moved to another stage.

“He’s right, though,” Coop said.

“About what?” Yash asked. She braced herself. She hadn’t ever expected Jonathon “Coop” Cooper to talk about loss.

“I’ll never know how he feels,” Coop said, and finished his drink.

 

***

 

The next morning, Yash arrived on the Ivoire early to run the monthly systems checks. The Ivoire didn’t need that many checks, but they made Yash feel better.

No one knew how often she came here, not even Coop.

She walked into the bridge, lights coming up as she entered. No matter how many times she had come here since they had arrived in this strange future, she still felt uncomfortable in the empty bridge. It had been built for activity, with dozens of work stations, and the captain’s chair in the very center, waiting for someone to take command. A door to her right led into a small conference area, and a line of storage cabinets covered the wall beside that door.

She always glanced at them, afraid someone had tampered with them. She didn’t trust everyone at Lost Souls, even though none of them should have had access to the Ivoire’s bridge.

The bridge felt even more uncomfortable than usual this morning, and she couldn’t quite put her finger on why. The hair on the back of her neck had gone up the moment she stepped into the main part of the bridge.

The only anomaly she could see were the screens. They had been shuttered, blocking the view of the docking bay she had seen just the night before.

She thought that odd; she liked having the portals open, liked seeing everything in real time. The shuttered portals were how she knew she hadn’t been the last person up here. That too was odd, but she didn’t think too much about it because Coop had been in the ship with her last night.

They no longer lived on the Ivoire, taking larger berths in the converted space station, but a handful of crew members still did. Coop did not discourage them. He wanted someone to continue manning the ship. He probably would have done it himself if no one else had volunteered to stay.

But he was gradually easing his grip on the past, and moving off the Ivoire had been one of those steps for him. Just like it had been for Yash.

She actually liked her new apartment. She liked the extra bedroom, which she had cluttered with equipment. She liked the large kitchen, and the bathroom was a religious experience.

She too, apparently, was easing her grip on the past.

The conversation last night, the apology from Dix, had buoyed her mood. Maybe others who were having trouble moving into the future would do so if Dix did.

She had gone to sleep hopeful, and had awakened with even more hope. She was humming as she went through some of the start-up routines.

As she saw it, one of her duties as chief engineer was to make sure each system activated and functioned. She had developed a cycle in the past year, a way of working through each system, checking it and its readings against the readings made before the Ivoire got trapped in foldspace, and also against the readings made after the Ivoire had come here.

The only system she hadn’t worked on a lot was the anacapa drive. She had repaired it in foldspace, just like she had told Coop and Dix, but she hadn’t cycled it on much here. They had used it when Coop had taken the Ivoire to Starbase Kappa, and they had used it again on a few “fact-finding missions” as Coop called them, searching for the Fleet.

But Yash had been tense each and every time. She used to trust the anacapa drive more than the rest of the crew did (which was to say, not that much), but she no longer trusted the anacapa drive at all.

If she was being honest with herself, she was a bit afraid of it now. The change had been large for her as well.

Still, on her monthly scans, she checked the anacapa drive’s controls to make sure they functioned. She also checked the drive to make sure no one had snuck onto the ship and tampered with the drive or no one had activated it remotely.

Not that activating it remotely would have been easy, particularly since she did not have the drive in assistance-needed mode. But she worried about it.

Since arriving here, in this time period, she worried about everything.

She worked her way across control panels and through the bridge itself, checking each system just like she always did. There was an odd smell on the bridge, something coppery and slightly foul. She checked the environmental systems, and saw nothing amiss, although she didn’t check all of the records to see if someone had spilled something. She would do that if the smell lingered after she had moved through the bridge.

The environmental system activated at different levels, depending on what was occurring on the bridge. Since nothing much had happened here in the last few weeks, the system had remained on low.

She rounded the corner of one of the stationary control panels, and stopped. Boots jutted out from under the console.

Boots, attached to legs, legs wearing an older dress uniform, black with silver piping.

That foul, coppery scent was stronger here.

She didn’t even have to look to know what she would find. A body. The question was: Whose?

She moved to the side of the console, next to the large container protecting the anacapa drive.

Dix was wrapped around the container, clutching it like a lifeline. Blood had pooled near his head, and one of the bone knives he had received as a gift after successfully negotiating an agreement on Colashen was on the floor, not too far from his neck.

He had slit his own throat.

His hands gripped the container, though, palm prints everywhere, palm prints in blood.

He hadn’t tried to clutch the wound closed. He hadn’t sent for help. He had clearly intended to do this.

His face was whitish gray. She had always heard the term “bloodless,” but she had never really seen it. Not like this.

His eyes were open and dull, his mouth slack.

He had done this deliberately. He had planned this, the bastard. He had known he was going to do this last night, and he had come to say goodbye.

That little finger-wave, that half smile. It wasn’t because he was getting better. It was because he knew he was leaving.

He was getting out.

No. He was quitting.

She clenched her fist. She had this insane desire to kick him, to take his blood-covered hands off her anacapa container, and fling them away. To fling him away.

It took every ounce of control she had to remain still. The bastard. What did he think this would gain? This show he had put on. Had he expected the bridge to contact someone to help him, to prevent the actual death? If so, then why had he slit his own throat? He had cut the carotid artery, which was guaranteed to bleed him out in minutes, long before anyone could get to him.

Although there was equipment on the bridge that could be used in an emergency. Tools that would seal wounds, that would actually fly to the side of the injured and bind the wound until it could be repaired.

She glanced up, saw that nothing along the medical wall had been disturbed.

The fact that the medical wall was untouched meant he had actively shut off the assist controls before he had slit his own throat.

And he had called Coop cruel.

She took a deep breath, willing herself calm.

First she had to preserve the scene.

She leaned over the control panel, and made sure the information that the bridge recorded as a matter of course—who arrived, who left, the footage from the security cameras, the changes in environmental controls, and the record of the changes she had made since she arrived here—were archived.

She had brought a data strip and set it on the control panel. The strip copied data off the control panel, so she could remove that data from the Ivoire. The strip was unique to the Fleet, so that the control panel knew it could share the information. She would place that information in her second bedroom, with information she had taken off all of the Fleet ships that Lost Souls had found.

Then she froze.

Had Dix tampered with anything? More specifically, had he tampered with the anacapa drive?

He had tampered with the anacapa on Starbase Kappa, in a fruitless attempt to get back to their time period. What had stopped him from doing so here?

She swallowed hard, her heart hammering.

Nothing had happened yet. If he had done something, it would have to be on a timer, as something that would happen after he died.

She needed to contact Coop. Then she needed to look.

 

***

 

“I need you on the Ivoire.” Yash sent through Coop’s private command channel. “I need you on the bridge stat.”

She hoped he was still hooked into the comm. So many members of the Ivoire crew had decided to go untethered—as they called it—removing the tiny communications devices that they normally wore when they left the ship.

“Problem?” Coop asked in that tone that told her he didn’t want to be interrupted.

“I’m not saying any more,” she said. “Get here. Now.”

He was changing. The Coop of old would have been a lot more professional, less annoyed.

He probably thought there were no problems on the Ivoire that couldn’t wait.

He was wrong.

She walked around the console, looking at the anacapa controls. It didn’t seem like anyone had touched them, but she had to be sure.

She wiped her sweaty palms on the back of her shirt, then took a deep breath.

Before she did, she activated a voice log, giving the date in both the timeline of Lost Souls and also in the ship’s time, as if the Ivoire had never left the past.

Then she said, “I am making this recording in case I find something else awry. For the record, I have found the body of former First Officer Dix Pompiono…” and she paused.

Coop hadn’t officially removed Dix from duty. Coop had been following procedure, more or less. He had wanted to document everything that Dix had done wrong, and the medical attention Dix had probably needed.

If Coop had demoted Dix, Dix wouldn’t have been able to access the bridge.

If only.

“Dix killed himself. At least as far as I can tell without touching or moving him. The medical team will have to confirm. The reasons I have activated a voice log are twofold: I am alone on the bridge, and will remain so for several minutes more as I wait for Captain Cooper to join me.”

She let out a breath. She sounded calmer than she was. Not that she was panicked. The fury had her shaking. Goddamn it, Dix.

“The second reason is that I found Dix with his arms wrapped around the anacapa container. Dix had lost control of himself on a mission to Starbase Kappa five months ago, and had tampered with an active, if dying, anacapa drive. I am concerned he has done something similar here.”

But why would he? He had planned to kill himself. And he wasn’t so far gone that he would believe that the anacapa needed blood to activate.

She smiled grimly at the very thought.

“I do not know what I’m going to find. I have already set the bridge controls to record everything occurring on the bridge at full levels, but I still need to make sure that the record is clear. Which is why I’m going to narrate my investigation. I will not go into depth unless I need to.”

She didn’t want to go into depth, to think about the proper wording of every phrase. Not yet anyway.

“First,” she said. “I need to check the anacapa controls.”

She was not going to explain why. Nor was she going to mention how her right hand shook as it hovered over the section of the console that activated the controls quickly.

Sometimes she saw that section of the console in her nightmares, her fingers inputting codes, then her palm, slamming against the console, giving it permission to execute the commands she had just placed—commands that had sent the Ivoire into foldspace.

Commands that had led to the ship ending up here.

It didn’t matter to her nightmares that at the very same moment, Quurzod ships had fired on the Ivoire, causing serious damage. It didn’t matter to her, even though she knew that something in the Quurzod ships’ weapons had interacted with the anacapa drive. The drive had been damaged: she had seen that in foldspace, and she had felt it that day.

She hadn’t shut off the drive.

She probably should have shut off the drive.

Yash slowly brought her hand down on the smooth surface. The controls rose, responding to her touch.

The anacapa controls only worked for select personnel. She had no idea if Coop had restricted Dix’s use of the anacapa drive. She would have. And she should have suggested it when they came back from Starbase Kappa, but she had been too busy, thinking about that mission. Too busy thinking about all the implications for their new future.

The controls looked normal.

Yash let out a small breath, then reminded herself that it didn’t matter how the controls looked. They had looked normal after they had resumed their cycle, that day the anacapa drive had malfunctioned.

Still, she verbally noted that the controls seemed fine, and then discussed how she was going to dig further, to make sure that what seemed fine actually was fine.

First, she had the system show her any unusual activity, no matter how small.

What she found wasn’t small at all. Dix had tried to access the anacapa drive, but he hadn’t been able to.

Coop had done exactly what he should have done. He had removed Dix’s access to sensitive systems.

Yash nodded as she saw that. Coop had figured Dix would test to see if he could still access the bridge, but had gambled that Dix wouldn’t try to access sensitive systems—important systems.

Yash almost looked to see if Dix had tried to access other systems, but made herself stop. She needed to investigate the anacapa drive first. That was the one Dix was most focused on.

At Starbase Kappa, Dix thought he could recreate the circumstances that had sent the Ivoire into foldspace, and then five thousand years in the future. Dix had believed he could use that recreation to reverse what had happened.

Yash still had no idea how Dix believed that would happen. To her, that kind of thinking was as filled with magic as trying to active the anacapa drive using blood.

But Dix hadn’t been in his right mind, no matter how he had seemed in the bar the night before.

The first hurdle crossed. Dix hadn’t tampered with the anacapa drive controls. But she needed to examine more. Because of who Dix was, and how he had become First Officer.

Coop had always trusted Yash more than he trusted Dix. Coop had told Yash that more than once. But she had never been on the captain track as first officers usually were. She had been really honest with Coop from the beginning: she didn’t want to become a captain. She loved the engineering work. She liked design and tech as well.

Being captain, being in charge of all these people, would have gotten in the way, even if she had been good at working with people, which she was not.

So she had been Coop’s advisor on choosing among his first officer candidates. Coop had had reservations about all three candidates. Dix had been the most well rounded of all of them. He had known DV-Class vessels better than anyone. People liked him and, more importantly, they listened to him.

And, Coop had said—Yash had said—Dix had an uncanny ability to find the holes in a system. If there was a back door, even if it was unintentional—especially if it was unintentional—Dix would find it.

Yash was looking now to see if he had found anything here.

The unusual activity she had called up should have shown something like that, if he had done so. It would also have shown if he had tried and failed.

And he had.

He had spent hours after leaving Coop and Yash, searching for something, a way into the anacapa drive. But Dix hadn’t found it, at least not from the console.

She looked down at Dix again, his hands on that container. The console should have showed if someone breached the container. Coop should have been notified if someone had.

But Dix, with that ability to find ways around systems, might have shut off the notifications.

She crouched, looked around the blood at the container’s edges and the seals. They seemed normal, as normal as anything with blood smeared on it could be.

She couldn’t entirely tell though. Not with a quick glance.

She stood up. She didn’t want to open the container, not without Coop here. Not without help.

Dix could have set a trap. He might have set up something that would ensure the entire ship would blow up if she tried to open the container.

Her mouth had gone dry. She couldn’t believe she was thinking of this, that she was mentally accusing Dix—someone she had known for years—of doing something so nasty.

Of course, this suicide was nasty, and she hadn’t expected him to do that either.

But setting the Ivoire’s anacapa to blow, that required a special kind of nasty. Had he been crazy enough to believe that if he didn’t want to live in this new time period, no one else did either?

And how would she know if that was the case without opening that container?

After voicing her suspicions for the recording she was making, she turned back to the console and made herself look at the notification system. She was looking to see if he had shut off the notifications that would have brought Coop here—or her, or someone else—if anyone touched the anacapa drive.

As far as she could tell, Dix hadn’t touched the notification system. He hadn’t touched any of it.

But did he need to? Would the system have notified her or Coop if Dix had touched it? Because he might have been authorized to do so.

Had she been careless enough to make it easy for the first officer to touch an anacapa drive, particularly a first officer like Dix, a man who had no real knowledge of the drives? She didn’t know, and didn’t remember what she had done. There were standard settings which allowed bridge officers access, and those were supposed to be altered once the main bridge crew was established.

The Ivoire’s main bridge crew—the crew that had been on the bridge that horrid day over a year ago—had been together for years. She didn’t remember everything she had done six months ago; she certainly couldn’t remember what she had done more than a decade before.

She thought about accessing the notification records to see what she had set up, but she wasn’t sure that was worthwhile. She usually did things properly. Should she trust in what she had usually done?

And did it matter?

Because Dix might have hidden what he touched.

Dix did have the ability to do something like that.

She closed her eyes. With all those paranoid thoughts, she was becoming as crazy as Dix. He was turning her into a crazy woman and he was dead.

One step at a time. Or, as Coop had said last night, one problem at a time.

Yash opened her eyes. She needed to find out exactly what Dix had accessed. As she did that, she needed to assess what that access meant. Then she would have to see if he had executed some inexplicable activity or performed activity he had tried to erase.

She didn’t look at Dix’s body. She couldn’t. Not anymore.

She couldn’t think about him. She decided to approach this like a math problem rather than an emotional problem. Tiny discovery after tiny discovery, keeping track in her head, making sure she understood whether or not the things she discovered could interact with each other in such a way as to make something new.

“I’m here. Now what?”

She jumped, her heart pounding. Coop had spoken from behind her. She had been expecting him, but she had gotten so deep into the work she hadn’t thought of him in—however long.

She raised her head, turning until she could see him.

Coop stood near the entrance to the bridge. His hair was mussed as if he had been sleeping. He wore the same kind of black T-shirt and pants he had worn the night before, and she found herself wondering if he had even gone back to his rooms.

Not her business. What he did in his own time was personal. She didn’t have a right to know.

He was scanning the entire bridge, probably seeing the empty work stations and the unattended captain’s chair just like she had. He would note the changes since the last time he had been here, including the shuttered screens. He probably hadn’t noticed the faint scent of death, though, since he stood just outside the entrance. He wasn’t stepping into the bridge just in case the problem was internal and going inside would cause even more problems.

Procedure.

That calmed her. His presence calmed her.

She wasn’t working this alone anymore.

She held up one finger, then explained her thinking in the recording, just so that she would remember.

Coop frowned as she spoke. She didn’t mention Dix as she talked to the recording, didn’t mention anything except her findings and her supposition on the ways those findings might work together.

When she finished, her gaze met Coop’s. He looked both calm and serious, like he often did in the middle of a crisis.

He was someone she could rely on. She valued that more than she had realized.

She swallowed hard, gulping a little air as she did so. She had no idea how to tell Coop about Dix.

“Can I enter the bridge safely?” Coop asked.

“Yes,” Yash said. “Come to me. You need to see this.”

It was better to show him than to tell him.

At the same time, part of her didn’t want him to know. She had no idea how Coop would react to this. They both had seen a lot of death among the crew—in battle, in the normal course of things like illness and aging. They had lost friends and colleagues from other ships. But they had never lost someone to suicide.

Coop walked slowly toward her, as if he was worried that something was going to go wrong near the other consoles. She directed him around the console she was working on, so he wouldn’t get in her way.

Then she pointed at Dix’s body, still wrapped around that anacapa drive.

Coop stared. His expression didn’t change. Then he crouched, but didn’t touch.

“The blood’s tacky,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “I think he’s been here for hours.”

“Have you called anyone from medical?”

“No,” Yash said. “Not yet. I’m making sure Dix hasn’t tampered with the anacapa drive.”

Coop’s head moved ever so slightly, as if he had started to shake it, and then stopped himself. He had placed his hands on his thighs, elbows out. Then he leaned forward just a little more.

“I don’t see anything obvious,” Coop said.

“Me either,” Yash said. “But he chose to be here, and he touched that container in a variety of ways before dying.”

Coop nodded, but didn’t look at her. He was studying Dix’s body and the container itself.

“I’m checking everything I can think of,” Yash said.

Coop stood, glanced at the console she was working on, and frowned. He looked disturbed now.

“I revoked all Dix’s clearances except the one that allowed him on the bridge,” Coop said. “I should have revoked that one too.”

A tiny thread of anger, barely discernable, in the deep timbre of his voice.

“No blaming,” she said to him, like he had said to her when she discussed that anacapa freeze with him one of those drunken nights. “We get lost if we blame. It takes us in the wrong direction. Move forward.”

Coop’s lips twisted as if he had swallowed something sour.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s deal with what we have. What Dix presented us with.”

The annoyance was clear in Coop’s tone. His gaze met hers.

“Brief me,” he said.

She did. She told him all she knew, and all she had done.

When she finished, she pointed at the container. The blood on its sides was turning black.

“The container concerns me,” she said. “I have no idea if he breached it.”

Coop followed her finger, staring at the container. “What could he have done if he had breached it?”

Coop made no secret of the fact that he was not an anacapa engineer. He had never wanted to learn how to do more than the basics on that drive.

Yash could think of a million things that anyone could do to tamper with the anacapa, but she knew that wasn’t what Coop was asking.

“I mean,” Coop said, still focused on the container—or maybe on the body beside it—”if he wanted to send us back into foldspace or into the past, wouldn’t he have stuck around to see if it worked?”

That was when Yash knew that Coop still hadn’t accepted how far Dix had deteriorated. Or maybe that kind of deterioration was unfathomable to Coop. It certainly didn’t happen much among high-level DV-Class officers.

Yash wasn’t sure it had ever happened before.

“At first, I too thought he was going to use his skills to send us back through time to our Fleet,” she said. “Then I rejected the idea entirely.”

Coop frowned at her. “But you still think he tampered with the anacapa drive.”

She nodded, the movement small. “Suicides are angry people, Coop. Anger turned inward sometimes, but not always. Sometimes the suicide turns the anger outward as well.”

Coop frowned at her as if he was trying to make sense of what she was saying. She didn’t want to be more explicit, especially since she was still recording, but—

Coop cursed. “I almost said that Dix would never do anything like that, but I would have thought that Dix would never have done anything like this either.”

He snapped his hand toward Dix’s body, the movement revealing that Coop was as furious at Dix as Yash was.

“You think he tampered with the anacapa drive,” Coop said.

“I don’t know,” Yash said. “He certainly tried, but I’m not sure how far he got or what his intentions were. I would have said that he killed himself after realizing he couldn’t get into the system, but the bone knife belies that.”

“Bone…oh.” Coop crouched, and looked closely at the knife. Apparently he hadn’t noticed it before. “That is part of a set.”

“I know,” she said.

“Those bone knives he got are the sharpest knives on the ship,” Coop said.

“I know that too.”

Coop looked up at her, then rose, slowly, his knees popping with the movement.

“You have a concern you haven’t told me.”

“I do,” she said. “I’m afraid that he did something that would overload the anacapa drive.”

“But nothing has happened yet, and he’s clearly been dead for some time,” Coop said.

Yash nodded. “I’m worried that he booby-trapped it.”

“You think he would put this destruction on a timer of some kind?” Coop asked.

“That’s one way.” Yash peered at the body. She hated seeing Dix’s hands still pressed against the container. “There are a lot of other ways to accomplish the same thing. Most of them use a trigger, not a timer, but they would have the same effect. They would overload the anacapa drive.”

“From the tone of your voice,” Coop said, “you have a specific vision of what an overloaded anacapa looks like. I understand it’s bad. But either I don’t know or never learned the details. Throughout my career, I was told that we needed to avoid it, and so we have. Except when we went into foldspace after the Quurzod weapons hit our ship.”

Yash was shaking her head before he even finished. “What happened to us that day wasn’t an anacapa overload. Those Quurzod weapons augmented the energy from the anacapa drive, altered it in some way, and that alteration destroyed a part of the anacapa as it was activating.”

Coop was frowning. “So, what happened to us…that’s not it. You mean something different when you say overload.”

“I do,” she said quietly. “I mean that everything explodes.”

 

***

 

Coop turned away from the anacapa container, away from Dix’s body, away from Yash herself. He peered at the open portals.

Yash knew what he saw. The edge of the station. The other ships occasionally going by. The dots and light and blackness that all combined into this sector of space.

She also knew what he was doing as he looked away. He didn’t want her to see his reaction.

But she had, already. He hadn’t believed her when she said that everything would explode. He clearly needed a moment to think about what she had just said.

“Everything.” He wasn’t asking for clarification. He was repeating her word. Her unbelievable word.

“The anacapa has a lot of power, especially one this size—”

“You’re talking overload.” He spoke slowly. She recognized the tone. He was working it out for himself. “You mean one of those chain reactions, this anacapa drive will send the wrong kind of energy to the other anacapa drives nearby, triggering them, which will then cause this massive explosion, obliterating everything.”

Technically, he was wrong. There was no “wrong kind of energy.” But the effect was the same and the effect had been what she was talking about.

“If this anacapa drive overloads,” she said, “then it could do many things. It could obliterate the ship. It could send us all back to foldspace, maybe in pieces. Or it could initiate those chain reactions you were talking about.”

“Which would destroy the space station, the other ships, this ship, and everything in the vicinity,” he said.

“Yes,” she said quietly.

“Including every single human being.”

She could only see the side of his face, but that impassive expression was back. The one that most people thought so calm, but which she knew was actually a cover for very deep emotions.

“You think Dix is trying to murder us all?” Coop asked.

“I think he was pretty angry about being here. I think he believed none of us belonged here. I also think he hated Lost Souls and what Boss is building.” Yash swallowed hard again, wishing her mouth wasn’t so dry. “So, yes. I think Dix might have been trying to destroy everything. I’m not sure he would think of it as murder. More as setting things right.”

But what did she know? She wasn’t a psychologist. She was an engineer.

Coop squared his shoulders, as if he was adjusting to a new weight that had just fallen on them. “How do we figure this out?”

“That’s what I was doing when you arrived,” Yash said.

“Do we touch the container?” Coop asked. “Do we remove it? Should we deactivate the anacapa remotely?”

Yash licked her lips. All of those things were possible, and all of them were predictable. If she could predict them, then Dix would have been able to.

“Should we bring others here to help you?” Coop asked, and something in his tone made her realize that her silence was frustrating him.

“No,” she said. “Not yet. I worry that they’ll trigger something. I won’t be able to monitor them.”

“I don’t have the deep knowledge you have of the anacapa drive,” Coop said. “I don’t know how I can help you.”

Yash nodded. Her heart, which had been pounding hard, had settled down. She felt calmer. Was it Coop’s presence or was it because she had finally gotten a handle on what she feared?

“Dix picked this spot for a reason,” she said. “He was sending us a message. He could have killed himself in his quarters. He could have fallen asleep and made sure he never woke up. There are a million ways he could have harmed himself, and none of them would have been this bloody or this obvious.”

Coop turned, a slight frown between his eyebrows. Even though he was trying for the calm expression, he wasn’t entirely managing it.

“I believe Dix wanted us to respond in a particular way.” Yash took a deep breath. From this moment forward, clarity and honesty were the two most important parts of the conversation. “I believe he wanted you to respond in a particular way.”

Coop nodded, and glanced at Dix’s body. Then Coop nodded again.

“So, you need to imagine I didn’t arrive first,” Yash said. “You need to tell me what you would have done if you had been the person to discover Dix.”

Coop folded his hands behind his back, head down, clearly contemplating. “And what if someone else had found him? Someone other than me? Wouldn’t Dix have thought about that?”

“He would have,” Yash said. “But he didn’t know I visited the bridge a lot. I’ve never told him, and he wasn’t usually here. So it didn’t matter if someone else found Dix. Whoever it was—except for me—would have contacted you after making sure Dix was dead.”

“But you did contact me,” Coop said.

“After I ran through some diagnostics,” Yash said. “Besides, if you didn’t show up right away, I could take action. No one else could. Or rather, no one else would think to.”

Coop’s lips thinned. “All right,” he said. “You want me to go through each step?”

“I need scenarios,” she said. “If you found him, then what? If someone else did, then what? And work from there.”

“You’re betting that he used a trigger, not a timer,” Coop said.

“Well, no,” Yash said. “First, I’m going to go over everything he did on this panel. I’ll find the timer if he placed one here. If I’m even right about the fact that he set a booby-trap at all.”

“You are,” Coop said. “You’re right about the message. He and I argued endlessly about using the anacapa again, trying to get home. I finally told him I was never going to try.”

“When did you say that?” Yash asked.

“I said it repeatedly,” Coop said, “but he didn’t hear me. Not until after the debacle on Starbase Kappa.”

“He heard you then?” Yash asked.

“Not entirely,” Coop said. “He kept trying, kept thinking I didn’t understand what he meant, how we could recreate the circumstances that got us here, and that recreation would send us home.”

“I never thought it would,” Yash said.

“Neither did I,” Coop said, “and that was what we argued first. Finally, I said I wasn’t going to try. I was done trying. We weren’t going home. Not ever. And nothing he could ever say would change my mind on that.”

She could hear the forcefulness behind Coop’s soft words. She could imagine how he had said that to Dix. Coop would have used that command voice of his. He would have spoken with hard and clipped authority, and he would have gotten through to Dix.

“When?” she asked. “When did you tell him that?”

Coop winced. “Last week.”

Yash nodded, wanting to say she was unsurprised. But she wasn’t. She was surprised that Coop was still taking Dix seriously as recently as one week ago. Dix had caused a serious crisis on Starbase Kappa, and Coop had still been trying to work with him?

Usually Yash didn’t question Coop’s judgment and she didn’t say anything now. But Coop’s refusal to accept Dix’s mental failures was not like Coop. Had he been playing a longer game? Or had he seen something of himself in Dix? Had the Psychological and Emotional Stress Department been involved? Or had Coop simply been trying to talk Dix down on his own?

“The next time I saw him after that conversation,” Coop said slowly, “was last night. And I thought—I guess I was hoping—with that apology, that the conversation last week worked.”

“The discussion was tense,” Yash said.

“It was,” Coop said. “But he apologized. At the beginning, and at the end.”

I owe you guys an apology. And I’m sorry.

He never said what he was sorry for.

“I thought—I hoped—he was going in a new direction.” Coop shook his head. “I wanted to believe he would improve. I always wanted to believe he would improve. With logic, with time.”

Yash nodded. Time. What had Dix said about time? He had looked out the window and had said, There’s the future. It’s been there all along, hasn’t it?

Yash had thought he was looking forward, finally, taking those steps toward leaving their losses behind.

She had believed in Dix too. Maybe not as much as Coop had, but she had wanted Dix to rejoin them. The third leg in a once-sturdy stool.

“But Dix said ‘this’ had happened to all of us.” Coop frowned at her. “Did that mean he thought we all were as despondent as him, unable to live in the moment? Didn’t I disabuse him of that?”

Clearly, Coop hadn’t disabused Dix of anything.

“He was apologizing in advance for what he was going to do here,” Yash said. “Not for his behavior in the past. But for this.”

Coop nodded.

“And now we need to figure out what he’s done,” Yash said. “I’m going to finish here. You’re going to give me scenarios.”

“Yeah, I will,” Coop said. “But not yet.”

He moved to a different console, then pressed his palm against it. The screen lit up. His fingers danced across it, but Yash couldn’t see what he was doing.

She needed him to focus on the anacapa drive. She needed those scenarios if she was going to figure out how to use the data she was slowly deriving from Dix’s actions.

A holographic screen popped up in front of Coop, and Yash recognized it. Communications.

“This is the captain,” he said. “Evacuate the Ivoire immediately. Do not gather your things, do not search for a friend or family member. Proceed to the nearest exit and leave now.”

The screen glowed red. He touched something on it, and the red blinked three times.

He wanted the message to repeat but only three times. Yash had no idea how long the people on board would have before there were more repeats.

“What’re you doing?” she asked.

“Saving lives,” he said.

 

***

 

While he waited for the 30 people on board to evacuate, Coop opened another screen and talked through all the scenarios he could think of.

Yash listened with half an ear. She was still pulling up more data. Dix had spent a lot of time on the bridge before he had killed himself.

She was becoming more and more convinced that her paranoia had been justified; Dix had done something.

She just hadn’t figured out what yet.

The message repeated twice before Coop stopped talking. Yash looked up, startled. He hadn’t finished the first scenario yet, let along getting to any others.

He was bent over the console, the screen in front of him still glowing red as the minutes ticked down before the announcement repeated.

A second half-screen floated over the console to his left, and she recognized that screen by color. It showed all the heat signatures of every living creature on board.

As she watched, five left the Ivoire. She scanned the entire map of the ship, just as she had been trained to do, and saw only two remaining heat signatures—hers and Coop’s.

“Computer,” he said, “check the entire ship for life signs.”

His fingers brushed the side of the half-screen, creating yet another half-screen. That one showed the environmental system, calculating usage of air, based on human usage. She had taught Coop that trick years ago as a way of going outside the system to see if anyone hid on board.

She had learned that trick from Dix.

Bastard.

And then she made herself focus, and returned to work.

She got deep into the data, only dimly aware that Coop had moved away from the console to the main navigation console. Then the floor hummed beneath her feet, catching her in a familiar vibration.

He was starting up the ship. Of course he was. It was the only smart play.

If Dix had rigged the anacapa drive to overload and cause a cascade effect with the other anacapa drives nearby, then the best way to handle the crisis was to make sure only one anacapa drive exploded.

Theirs.

Coop didn’t need the anacapa drive to move the ship. The standard engines would be able to get the Ivoire far away from the space station in a matter of minutes.

Yash tapped the console, making sure that there was no change in the anacapa drive as Coop started the ship. If the readings on the console were correct—and she had to assume they were—then the anacapa drive was just fine, at least at the moment.

She was banking a lot on the fact that Dix was using a trigger and not a timer. But to Dix, who wanted to make a point, a trigger made more sense.

A trigger guaranteed that someone found his body, saw his protest or whatever the hell this was, and had a chance of understanding his point.

A timer would make sure the anacapa explosion occurred, but if it occurred at the wrong moment and obliterated everything, then no one would ever know about Dix’s suicide and his damn message.

She needed to concentrate. Because what she knew and what she guessed were two different things. There were no real studies on what happened to a ship when an anacapa overloaded. There were theories, not true knowledge.

The Ivoire would probably be destroyed, but there was a chance it would travel, damaged and unusable, into foldspace.

And then there was the chance that the Ivoire would explode, and all of its pieces, including its human crew, would be forced into foldspace. The crew would die, unprotected and alone, in the vastness of space.

Right now, its human crew numbered two—herself and Coop.

There was no way to protect her and Coop, except to find the problem and disarm it. She wasn’t even going to put on an environmental suit. If the ship exploded and she and Coop were thrust into foldspace—alive—all an environmental suit would buy them was two or three days of agony, waiting for a rescue that would never come.

If Coop ordered her into an environmental suit, she would put it on. Otherwise, she was just going to continue working.

The air shifted, adding just a bit of oxygen like it always did when the ship was in motion, designed to keep the crew alert. The extra oxygen was a bit excessive, designed for a full crew compliment.

Instead, Coop was piloting the Ivoire alone. The ship was designed for that, but it wasn’t recommended. And he almost always used a copilot.

Instead, he let Yash work.

So she did until he spoke up.

“We’re clear of the space station and the shipping lanes,” he said. “If we blow, we go alone.”

In more ways than one. But she didn’t say that. She didn’t say anything.

Instead, she nodded.

“And,” he said, “I don’t know if you heard what I was doing, but I managed to finish the scenarios you asked for.”

Perfect timing. She had done just about all she could with the bits of the data that Dix had touched. All she had been able to figure out was that he had come into this bridge with a clear plan. Dix might even have had a list—do this to misdirect here; do that to misdirect there—because none of what he had done, in the order he had done it, made sense otherwise.

Of course, she was following the trail of a crazy man who had ended up committing suicide. There was always the chance that he had done all of this out of order because he had been out of his mind.

She wasn’t going to assume that. He had seemed rational enough the night before.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s give those scenarios a go.”

She needed to listen first, see if there were similarities in the scenarios, things that Dix could have predicted. And then she had to correlate those similarities to whatever he had done—even though he had done those things out of order.

She nodded to Coop, and cleared a small screen before her, ready to listen.

 

***

 

Scenario One.

Coop’s voice, rich and methodical, filled the bridge. Coop had a screen up as well, and he was making notes, just like Yash was. Only he was probably looking for different things.

After we left the bar last night, Yash, I went to the space station. I wouldn’t have returned to the Ivoire for two days or more. That’s important. That’s one of my patterns.

She hadn’t known that. Had Dix? Maybe. If he had been focused on Coop.

So I would have entered the bridge, and I would have assumed—and Dix probably assumed—that no one else had entered since he had.

After a minimum of two days, this bridge would stink. The environmental system would scrub the smell as much as it could, but a human body, particularly the size of Dix’s, has an overpowering stench that challenges even the best environmental system.

It sounded like Coop was speaking from experience. Yash wasn’t sure why he had that kind of experience. But she didn’t know his entire history, any more than he knew all of hers.

The bridge environmental system is on minimal, so I’m sure I would have smelled him before I saw him. That would have immediately put me on alert. I would have known something was wrong, and I would have investigated—slowly.

I would have cursed myself for coming alone, for no longer wearing the standard uniform, for not carrying a weapon as a matter of routine. I’ve gotten pretty lax, Yash. I’ve become too comfortable in this place.

She hadn’t expected Coop to be so honest. She glanced at him over the console. He shrugged, and toggled something, pausing his voice.

“I figured you needed to hear those things as well,” he said. “Dix would know what I would be wearing. He would know what I am capable of.”

She nodded. Coop was right. Dix would know all that. That was one reason Dix had become first officer—his ability to predict Coop’s behavior.

Coop gave her a small smile, half sheepish, half rueful, and then he toggled his voice back on.

It doesn’t take long to examine the bridge, and Dix’s body is hard to miss. I would have found it fast.

By then it would have been in an obvious state of decay. I would scan the rest of the bridge, but I would assume, from what I saw of Dix’s body, that there was no immediate threat, that the threat had been days ago, when Dix had died.

Coop’s voice had gotten sad. There was an implication in his tone, something she felt as well: it was entirely plausible that Dix could have been dead for two days and no one would have noticed.

Dix had to know that as well. He’d been left alone a lot. That one detail alone made the trigger scenario the most plausible—that and the fact that nothing else had happened yet.

I would have gone to the body. I would have examined it the way I had done when you pointed the body out to me.

In other words, he would have crouched, looked, and examined.

I would not have touched him or anything near him, including that knife. I would have seen it. I would have assumed, from its presence, the fact that his carotid artery had been severed, and the way he was lying, that he had done this to himself.

I would have assumed that, as he died, he put his hands on the container, and I would have assumed he had done so for a reason. That reason would have been to send a message to me: that I should have listened to him about using the anacapa drive to get us home, and since I refused him, he killed himself. Like a damn petulant child who wasn’t getting his way.

Yash smiled. Exactly.

I would have been angry first. I am angry. I suppose, even in that scenario, the one in which I did not suspect Dix of doing anything malicious, I would have been angry for days. Maybe afterward, I would have mourned. Maybe.

Coop’s voice had trembled as he said that. There was more in his tone than he realized. A little devastation lurked beneath it.

Yash hadn’t realized until today just how much Coop had cared about Dix.

The first thing I would have done, even as I crouched down to look at Dix, is contact the medical team. I wouldn’t have asked for a specific person, because I have no idea who is on the ship at any given point. I do know that we always have a medical team on board.

Then he chuckled on the recording, which surprised her. She glanced over at him. Coop definitely was not chuckling now. He looked very serious.

Except right at the moment, I guess.

The scenario paused there, as if Coop had contemplated what he was going to say next. Or maybe he had been thinking about the risks he and Yash were taking.

Anyway…the medical team. I would have taken whoever was here. There would have been no reason to bring in a specialist that I would have seen, and Dix hadn’t been close to anyone in the medical core. Or anywhere, for that matter. Which, I suppose, was part of the problem. His entire support system had been left in the past.

Yash started. She hadn’t thought of that. She wondered how many others on the Ivoire crew had the same issue. She had never asked.

The medical team wouldn’t have arrived immediately. I wouldn’t have asked them to act like it was an emergency. So I would have had to wait, and while I waited, I would have tried to find out why the bridge itself hadn’t notified me when Dix started bleeding. It should have.

Yash had looked for that as well. But she hadn’t gone at it directly. She had cycled through the various systems, looking for something awry. She had found the command shutdowns that Dix had ordered, specifically the way he had shut off bridge notifications to senior staff members.

Dix hadn’t tried to hide the shutdown commands, then. Because he expected Coop to look for them, and for nothing else?

I would have started with the environmental system, because it was the part of the bridge that would have noticed the blood first. If I didn’t find anything there, I would have moved to the notification system itself, as well as the entire security system.

I have no idea how much I would have gotten done, because I can’t factor in how long it would have taken the medical team to arrive. I also have no idea what I would have found.

But Yash did. She had found tampering in the notification system first, not the environmental system.

So Dix hadn’t foreseen everything Coop would have done, in the order in which he would have done it.

Once the medical team arrived, I would have turned the investigation and the handling of Dix’s body over to them. I would have supervised his removal from the area of the anacapa container, making sure the team didn’t touch anything they shouldn’t have, but that would have been the extent of my focus.

You’ll have to look up what their procedures are for the dead body of a known bridge member, and with an easily discernable cause. I don’t know that.

This time, Yash toggled the scenario playback off.

“What did you mean, ‘a known bridge member’?” she asked Coop.

He frowned at her. He tilted his head, as if he couldn’t quite believe the question. Clearly, whatever he was thinking about was fairly obvious, at least from his perspective.

“It’s the ‘easily discernable cause’ that’s the important part of the sentence,” he said. “Not the known bridge member.”

“Okay,” Yash said. “Talk me through that. You clearly know more about it than I do.”

He blinked in surprise, then nodded.

“We do a training exercise, several dozen of them, in fact, designed for all sorts of scenarios—”

“We who?” she asked.

“Anyone on the leadership track,” he said. “When you make it to be considered as captain material, they run all kinds of holographic and hypothetical scenarios. Several of them have to do with a dead body on the bridge.”

“Several of them,” she repeated. She had never heard of this.

“Yes,” he said. “If the ship has been breached by person or persons unknown who then murder a member of the bridge crew and leave the corpse on the bridge. Or an enemy, with malicious intent, leaves a body on the bridge.”

“Malicious intent?” Yash asked. “What does that mean?”

Coop gave her a guarded look. “There are a lot of ways to destroy a ship, Yash. One way is to take out its command structure.”

She nodded. She knew that.

“The body could be a Trojan horse. It could be filled with toxins or with a virus or some kind of plague. It could be rigged to explode—”

Coop stopped talking as Yash whirled, and looked down at Dix. She hadn’t thought of that at all. Did he have explosives on him? Was he rigged to explode, not the anacapa drive?

Coop cursed. “That’s what he did, isn’t it?”

“It’s certainly safer and easier than messing with the anacapa drive,” she said. But it still bothered her that Dix had done a bunch of other things on the control panel.

Coop had already moved to the supplies locker. Inside that locker was containment clothing as well.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m going to check him out.”

“He’ll have set it up so that if you move him…” She stopped. She didn’t know that either.

She picked up a hand scanner and took several small steps over to the body.

“Don’t touch him,” Coop said. “We don’t know if he used the entire ‘body on the bridge’ playbook.”

She turned the scanner on, keeping it as far from the anacapa container as possible. The scanner was useless to examine an anacapa drive, which was where her focus had been. She had figured the medical team would eventually examine the body.

But the scanner could interact with a damaged anacapa drive. Anything with energy could. She couldn’t worry about that.

“Yash,” Coop said. “Don’t—”

“I’m not touching him,” she said.

She held the scanner near his face, not sure what she was looking for. The scanner showed Dix was still in rigor. Then it delved into his entire bone structure, the soft tissues, all of the biological details. She moved the scanner slightly, saw that, indeed, the carotid had been cut all the way through. The artery looked flat and useless, probably because it wasn’t filled with blood.

Information, flowing along the side of the scanner, actually listed the rate of decay and was pinpointing the time of death.

She didn’t look. She roughly knew when that was.

Coop joined her, crouching beside her. He wore an environmental suit, which surprised her.

“You need to suit up,” he said.

She nodded. He was right. If they touched the body and anything got released, they could die horribly.

She handed the scanner to Coop, stood, and headed around the other side of the console, to the supplies locker. Lots of weapons in there. Dix could have used any one of them to kill himself.

Instead he had used that bone knife.

Maybe he already knew he didn’t have access to the locker.

But that hadn’t stopped him from finding a back door into the console, and tampering there. He would have been able to tamper with the locker door as well. The lock there wasn’t nearly as complicated as the system on the control panel.

She pulled out an environmental suit sized for her. Her regular suit was in her cabin on the lower deck. She hadn’t even bothered to move that suit to her apartment on the space station, which said something about her attitude.

She slipped the suit on, and pulled up the hood. Then she glanced over her shoulder to see if Coop had done the same with his.

He was leaning over the body, the scanner just above it. She felt her breath catch. She hadn’t warned him about staying away from the anacapa drive. He should have known that, of course, but still. She always preferred to err on the side of caution.

“Yash,” Coop said. “There is something here.”

She made her way back, feeling restricted in the suit. She usually didn’t wear them. In fact, she couldn’t remember the last time she had worn one.

“Come see this,” Coop said. “Double-check me.”

She crouched beside him, the material stretching over her clothes, pulling on it. She hated that feature of environmental suits in real gravity. The suits felt looser in zero-g, although it was arguable about whether or not they were.

She flicked on the suit’s data stream, letting it run along one side of her clear hood. She also set the suit to alert her should anything toxic reveal itself in the atmosphere around her—toxic or potentially dangerous.

Then she took the scanner from Coop.

“His back and his left side,” Coop said.

She brought the scanner as close as she dared, saw nothing obvious in the shape of his body, his clothing, or his skin. But the scanner read nanobit activity near the armpit and shoulder blade.

She enhanced the scanner, saw that the nanobits had become a coating over him. The chemical analysis made no sense to her, so she had the scanner explain it.

The scanner told her that the coating was made of a touch explosive developed in the same culture that had developed the bone knife.

“Did you see what that was?” she asked Coop, then thrust the scanner toward him.

She couldn’t see Coop’s expression through his hood. The light near the anacapa drive caused a weird reflection on the clear material.

But she didn’t have to see Coop’s face to know how he felt.

He felt like she did.

Dix had left the damn knife as something that would mislead them, and as a clue. Bastard. What had he been playing at?

She shook her head a little.

He hadn’t been playing at all.

She moved the scanner across the rest of his body, looking for more coating or a variation on it. She found it near his left hip.

“Those are the places we would have used to leverage him off the floor,” Coop said quietly.

“He was trying to take us all out,” Yash said.

“But he wasn’t,” Coop said. “That container should have prevented any explosion from hitting the anacapa drive. Right?”

She was the one who had told Coop that. It was a great simplification. Various forms of energy could hit and interact with the anacapa. Most of them were rare, and often only occurred in strange circumstances.

Like an explosion. And not an explosion of the ship, where the energies and components were known. But an explosion using a different kind of device, like a touch explosive made of nanobits.

Still, that didn’t answer her initial question: What had Dix been doing on the console?

She moved the scanner toward the container, following along Dix’s arms to see if he had put more explosive on them.

No explosive, but the scanner lit up red when it got to his hands.

The word breach blinked, over and over again.

Breach.

Coop glanced over her shoulder. “The container’s been breached?”

She nodded.

“But it’s not obvious. It’s not open,” Coop said.

Exactly. She clicked through the scanner’s readings. She let out a small breath.

“He used acid,” she said, more to herself than Coop.

“For what?” Coop asked.

“On his hands.” She winced. God, that would have been painful. And he would have had to do it before he slit his own throat.

She hadn’t known this man. She had thought she had, but she hadn’t. The determination he had shown, the level of destruction he was attempting.

She was appalled.

Coop stared at the scanner, then he looked at Dix’s hands. “That’s why they’re attached to the container? They’re not leaning on anything?”

She didn’t move the scanner closer. She didn’t dare.

“They’re inside the container, just a little. The acid ate away his skin, but more importantly, it ate away the edges of the container.”

“It looks solid,” Coop said.

“If we touch it,” she said, “it’ll collapse.”

Dix couldn’t get into the system. That’s what she had seen. He had gotten into the notification system, the environmental system—nominally anyway—but he couldn’t find a back way into the anacapa drive. He had tried, which was why the readings she had initially gotten made no sense.

There was a logic to his early actions, but not his later ones—at least, not the kind of logic she had assumed. His early actions obfuscated what he was trying to do. His later ones showed his frustration as he searched for, but didn’t find, a side way into the anacapa controls.

“Now what?” Coop asked.

Yash looked at him in surprise. She wasn’t used to Coop asking for instructions from her.

But of course he was. They had to juggle two things: a body that could explode if they handled it wrong, and an exposed anacapa drive that could already be unstable.

One problem at a time.

First, the body. If it exploded, then anything else she had done up to that point would not matter.

She let out a small breath. The body was a two-pronged problem: the touch explosive and those hands.

“We need two different localized shields,” she said to Coop. “First, one around the body—except the hands and arms. The other around the container.”

The localized bridge shields protected crew members or bridge equipment in case of an attack, usually some kind of laser weapon or hand-to-hand combat. The bridge shields weren’t very powerful, or else they would interfere with the operation of some of the equipment, but they would contain an explosion the size of the one that Dix tried to create—provided he hadn’t done anything more, like swallow something explosive to enhance the magnitude of the bomb.

“We’ll section the shields at the elbows, just in case.” Coop said. He understood what she meant to do. The suggestion of sectioning made that clear.

The bridge shields were badly designed. Yash had always meant to fix them. Their energy could harm skin that came into long-term contact with them, so no one could—for example—stick an arm out, have the shield form around the arm, and then shoot an interloper. The burning on the skin would have been too painful, and the shot would end up being impossible.

But it didn’t matter if Dix’s arms burned at the point of contact with the shields. Still, she double-checked with the scanner, making sure no touch explosives—or even a handful of unbonded nanobits—coated his arms.

None did, not from the shoulder/armpit down.

She activated both shields, and watched them burn through the skin. For the first time since putting on the environmental suit, she was glad she wasn’t breathing the air on the bridge. The stench had to be foul.

“Now what?” Coop asked.

She let out a small breath. “We unbond the nanobits. That should disassemble the touch explosive without setting it off. We isolate the component parts so they can’t reassemble automatically, and then we remove the body from the bridge.”

“All right,” Coop said. “You handle the anacapa drive, and I’ll deal with the body itself.”

She glanced at him, about to protest, but then she stopped. He was right. If they worked in tandem, they might have a chance of getting out of here alive.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll see what the damage is, and work from there. Tell me when or if you want to move the body.”

Coop nodded. He moved to one of the consoles. He could activate all kinds of equipment inside the shield, using the right commands.

For a moment, she worried that he wouldn’t know them, but of course he would. This was standard. Deactivating nanobit bonding was something that everyone learned. They just didn’t learn how to do it with nanobits designed to explode.

Coop would know, though. That was the kind of thing that a captain could learn without becoming an expert.

It was the anacapa drive that was the main problem. She had to deal with that herself.

She made herself focus on the container. She stared at it, then had the computer analyze the container’s solidity.

As she expected, the container was compromised.

She went to the console that housed the anacapa controls. She called up a holographic image of the anacapa itself.

The holographic image glowed golden, just like it was supposed to. She flipped it, changed it, moved it around, and examined it from all angles.

As far as she could tell, using just the equipment, the anacapa was fine. Whatever Dix had done to the container hadn’t yet reached the drive.

She stopped, double-checked that assumption, gave it some extra thought. Nothing Dix had done could have altered the diagnostics for the anacapa drive. He hadn’t tampered with those readings. She had a record of everything he touched, and he hadn’t touched that.

Which meant she could trust the readings she was getting on the anacapa drive.

She needed to isolate the drive, and since it hadn’t been harmed—yet—by that acid, she could do so.

She opened another screen, tapped it, and prepped another full bridge shield. She would put that shield around the anacapa drive.

The problem was that she had to do so in a perfectly timed manner. She had to open the container so that its lid wasn’t inside that shield, and then she had to wrap the shield around the anacapa drive. The problem was that she would be jostling the container when she opened it, and that jostling might put the acid in touch with the anacapa.

And she couldn’t even put anything in-between the drive and the container. There wasn’t enough room.

She brought up one more small screen, and monitored Coop’s work, as if he were a rookie engineer. He had pulled the nanobits off the body, and was separating them into component categories. He had created small shield bubbles so that the component parts of the nanobits would flow into the appropriate bubble, just like they were supposed to.

If he were one of her rookie engineers, he would have received a commendation from her.

She half smiled, hoping she would be able to do as well as Coop was.

She wasn’t going to tell him what she was trying. Either it would work or it wouldn’t. If it didn’t work, then they were both screwed anyway.

She thought of automating the commands, letting the computer open the container and then send the shield down. Whatever she gained in split-second timing, she might lose if Dix had tampered with some of the automated command system.

Some of the automation lived in the environmental equipment. She didn’t have time to check to see if Dix had tampered with any of that.

She needed to get the anacapa drive out of that container, and into a new one.

One step at a time. One problem at a time.

She was going to handle the movement herself. She had done tricky work on anacapa drives before. She could do it again.

She moved the holographic control screen with her, and walked to the front of the container. Dix had wrapped himself around three sides with his feet extended as close to the front of the container as possible.

He had clearly been thinking someone might try to break into the container. He figured they would have to maneuver around him.

Yash had to, because he was mostly covered in a shield. (Which you hadn’t expected, you bastard, she thought at him, wishing he could actually hear that. He had always hated it when she yelled at him. She wanted him to hate this now. She certainly did.)

She had to take three-part action, not two-part action. She had to shut off the shield around the container, open the lid, and then put a shield around the anacapa drive.

She needed to do that in record time.

She wasn’t going to think about being fast. She was going to concentrate on being precise.

“Okay,” Coop said, startling her. “The body’s ready to move, except for the hands.”

She nodded. “You’ll be able to move it in a minute or two. Call up a stretcher and a protective medical bubble. By the time it gets here, we’ll be ready for it.”

Everything in the medical bay was automated, so that someone trapped alone on the Ivoire could take care of themselves if need be. Hell, someone trapped alone on any of the Fleet’s ships large enough to have a med bay could do that.

“Yes’m. I’ll get right on that,” Coop said. There was amusement in his tone, which meant that he had probably already done exactly what she asked.

Her cheeks heated. She had just given the captain orders. She really had moved far away from Fleet thinking in a lot of areas.

Then she put Coop out of her mind. She needed to fully concentrate to make sure she didn’t miss a step of what she was going to do.

She set the commands on the screen before her, but didn’t execute them. She kept them open, so that she could hit the commands in the proper sequence.

Step one: cancel the shield around the container.

Step two: open the container.

Step three: shield the anacapa drive itself.

Then she crouched near the container.

If she did this right, it would take less than thirty seconds to complete the entire task, maybe as few as ten seconds. If she did it wrong…

She took a deep breath, and started.

 

***

 

With the touch of a finger, Yash canceled the shield. It flared, then vanished, just like it was supposed to.

Then she commanded the anacapa container lid to open. This step made her the most nervous. She didn’t know if the acid had destroyed any of the controls inside the container.

The container shuddered, then the lid floated back, hitting the shield around Dix’s torso. The lid started to close again, but she activated the second shield, the one meant to surround the anacapa drive.

For a half second, she thought the lid would close before the shield activated, but the lid banged against the second shield, and flipped backward again. The lid hung between the two shields for a moment, then the entire container fell apart, leaving the anacapa drive to glow in the middle of the mess.

“Good job,” Coop said. “We can get the body out of here now.”

She nodded, feeling her heart race. It hadn’t been racing earlier, but it was now—a reaction to getting this done.

The container’s side was almost completely gone. She saw the bones and sinew in Dix’s hands, looking half eaten away, like raw meat badly carved up.

He had done that to himself deliberately, probably as a last resort, after he couldn’t break into the controls.

She shook her head. She wasn’t going to think about him. He wasn’t worth her time.

Instead, she stood and went to the equipment locker. There was a smaller container inside of it, a backup in case the anacapa drive’s container got damaged.

At least, she hoped there was one, because that was the one thing she had forgotten to check.

She opened the door, and stared at everything for a moment, her heart still thudding hard.

There were more environmental suits, some smaller weapons, and a lot of parts of consoles, chairs, communications equipment. Finally, she saw the extra container, shoved toward the back.

She grabbed the container, slid it out, and turned.

The stretcher had lowered itself near Dix’s body. Coop was supervising the transition. She hoped he had already wrapped the body in the protective medical bubble.

God, she was nervous. She didn’t trust Coop—who probably knew more about this part of the plan than she ever would—to do his job properly.

At least the make-sure instructions hadn’t come out of her mouth.

This time.

The stretcher floated upward, Dix’s body flat on its back, the arms barely attached. The elbows were burned, the forearms hanging on only by bits of sinew. The hands didn’t bleed or drip or anything, which surprised her, given how they looked. But they had been that way for more than twenty-four hours. There probably wasn’t any fluid left.

Coop watched it, his expression grim. He had his arms crossed over his chest as the stretcher made its way toward the exit.

She didn’t want to watch the stretcher leave. Instead, she went to the anacapa drive. She pushed the most damaged piece of the container away with her booted foot, and shoved the other pieces aside as well.

Then she set the backup container down in front of the drive on the one spot where Dix’s body hadn’t rested. She opened that container, made sure the interior had accumulated no dirt or grime, and left the lid tilted back.

She was nearly done.

Only a few more steps.

She shut off the shield around the anacapa drive, then gathered the drive in her arms. She hadn’t held an anacapa drive in nearly five years. She could feel it pulsing through her environmental suit.

The drive was inactive, so she could move it without compromising its connection to the controls—provided she did so fast.

And she didn’t want to hold this drive for very long.

Her teeth vibrated. The flowing energy actually made the bones in her body hum. She hated holding these drives. Holding it seemed easier with the suit on, but she still felt like she was holding something that could destroy her in a matter of seconds.

She put the drive in the new container.

With her gloved hands, she reached down and moved the bottom of the old container out of the way. Then, using her knuckles, she shoved the new container into place.

The bottom of the container would run through its diagnostics, making sure none of that acid had eaten its way to the controls. She didn’t set the diagnostics to look for the acid, in case Dix had thought to tamper with that specific a command.

He hadn’t. The diagnostic ran clean, and the system asked her if she wanted to establish contact with the anacapa drive through this new container.

She said yes.

The container and the anacapa flared orange as they hooked up, and then the lid came down on its own.

The system asked her if she wanted to engage the drive.

She declined.

Set up, ready to go. When—if—Coop decided to use the Ivoire’s anacapa drive again, the system would remind whoever was in charge that the anacapa had been placed in a new container and would ask them to run the diagnostics again.

She let out a small sigh, stood, and stared at the pieces of the previous container, scattered across the floor.

Dix had tried to destroy everything.

Dix.

She shook her head, then set the thought aside.

She used another screen to access the cleaning equipment stored on the next deck down, in case Dix had messed with the bridge’s cleaning protocols. She programmed the cleaners to come and remove the bits of the container and whatever else Dix had left around the bridge.

She marked the instruction hazardous material, so it would be dealt with properly.

Then she rocked back on her heels and closed her eyes.

“Done?” Coop asked.

She nodded without opening her eyes.

“We’re safe?” he asked.

“As we can be.” She opened her eyes and stood up. The cleaning equipment—some small robotic pieces and floating garbage dumps that looked oddly like that stretcher—were making their way onto the bridge.

“We have to dispose of the body,” Coop said.

She nodded.

“I’d like to do it together,” he said.

She wanted that, too. She wanted Dix gone. “You want me to join you in the med bay?”

“No,” Coop said. “We can dispose of the body from here. I just want to watch it leave the ship.”

He had moved to the captain’s chair. He raised one of the portals, revealing the exterior of the ship. Then he tapped the controls, and a small pod jettisoned from the med bay side of the Ivoire.

The pod was small and white. Yash had seen more of them than she ever wanted to. A handful of the pods were designed to float to a particular planet or just travel through space, but they were golden, and often reflective. Usually, they were reserved for someone with clout.

Coop could probably ask for one of those at his funeral, but Yash couldn’t. Or she couldn’t have, if they were still with the Fleet.

But the white pods. They traveled a particular distance, and then burned from the inside out, scattering what little remained into whatever solar system the ship found itself in.

“I hope you sent him as far away as possible,” Yash said.

“No. I want to see the destruction.” Coop’s voice was soft, but that didn’t hide the emotion. The fury remained.

The pod glowed red for a moment, then appeared to melt. For a moment, the pod looked like it had become smoke, and then even that evaporated.

Yash let out a breath. Neither of them had said the customary words for a Fleet funeral. They hadn’t even said words of honor for an enemy.

Instead, they stood, watching in silence.

“That’s done,” Coop said after a moment, then shut the portal.

Yash stared at it just a little longer.

“People are going to wonder what happened,” she said. “Why we took the Ivoire out. What happened to Dix. They’ll want to know.”

Coop nodded. He shut down screens as well.

“Routine maintenance,” he said. “We were just checking systems on the ship.”

“That’s not what the manifests will say,” Yash said.

“You’re going to clear all of that.” Coop gave her a flat look. “We’re not going to tell anyone what happened here.”

Yash frowned. “But if they ask about Dix…?”

“We tell them he killed himself. We had to dispose of the body.”

The words hung between them for a moment.

“Someone is going to want a service,” she said.

“Yeah,” Coop said dryly. “I’m sure they will.”

“It’ll be odd if we don’t speak at it,” she said.

“It’ll be worse if we do.” Coop’s lips moved in a smile, but his eyes didn’t change. They remained flat and calm. “He committed suicide. We’re not up to talking about it. We won’t have to either. Others will step in.”

Yash nodded. Coop was right. The crew knew how he felt about suicides. He had no sympathy for them.

Yash had, until today.

Of course, Dix wasn’t just a suicide. He had tried to take everyone with him.

And she would have to process that, apparently without the help of her comrades on the Ivoire.

Coop must have seen something on her face. He put a hand on her arm, his touch gentle.

“Dix was wrong,” Coop said. “You have to remember that.”

“I know,” she said. “Killing himself, setting up this—”

“No,” Coop said. “Saying that something bad had happened to all of us. He was wrong about that.”

Yash frowned. Coop had been as upset about this move into the future as everyone else.

“The Fleet moves forward, Yash,” Coop said. “We’re as far forward as any ship has ever been. Not in space. In time. It’s what we’re designed for.”

She swallowed. “Then why are you disbanding the crew?”

“I’m not,” Coop said. “I’m letting them choose where they stand, just like I would have at any sector base stop.”

Yash resisted the urge to look at the closed portal, at the new container on the floor.

“We learned a lot about Dix today,” Coop said. “We’ve learned a bit about the others. We’ll still have a crew years from now, but it’ll be a different one. And we’ll have figured out how to define our mission this far forward. We haven’t figured that out yet.”

She let out a small breath. He was right. That was the dislocated feeling she had had. It wasn’t because they were here. That was almost theoretical. She hadn’t tried to return to the past, and she had encountered many more unusual cultures than this one in the course of her career.

What they had lost was a sense of community, of the Fleet guiding them. They were on their own right now.

They needed a new mission.

“Do you know what that mission will be?” Yash asked.

“No,” Coop said. “I think we keep searching for the Fleet, for what it has become in this time period. But if we don’t find it, we have tools. We have resources. We can act as an adjunct to our Fleet, here and now.”

“Boss won’t like that,” Yash said.

“In some ways,” Coop said, “it dovetails with what she’s trying to do with Lost Souls.”

Finding the old tech. Revitalizing it. Making it work for them.

“You going to bring her in?” Yash asked.

“Only if it becomes necessary,” Coop said. “Fleet business belongs to the Fleet.”

“And the rest of the crew?” Yash asked.

“We’ll let them settle. We have time. We need more information.” Coop glanced at the closed portal. “I think, after today, the weak ones are gone.”

Yash nodded, hoping he was right. Then she straightened her spine.

“You asked me to get rid of the information about what happened here,” she said.

“Yes,” Coop said.

“But if we stay Fleet, we follow Fleet procedure. I’ll isolate all of the relevant information, and restrict access. Only you and I will be able to open anything to do with today.”

Coop smiled at her, and this time, the smile reached his eyes. “Good call, Engineer Zarlengo. You are exactly right. We need to continue to follow procedure when we can. Which means, after we return to Lost Souls, I get to buy you a drink.”

She smiled too. It felt weird to smile after all they’d been through. She still had a lot to process.

But the smile felt good, too.

“All right, Captain,” she said. “Just you and me. One drink. Maybe a toast.”

“To what?” he asked.

She shrugged one shoulder, pretending to be casual when she wasn’t feeling casual at all.

“To the future,” she said, “and moving forward. Just like we always have.”

 

Copyright © 2018 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Published by WMG Publishing
“Dix” was published previously in slightly different form in Asimov’s SF Magazine, March/April 2018
Searching for the Fleet cover and layout copyright © 2018 by WMG Publishing
Searching for the Fleet cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing
Searching for the Fleet cover art copyright © Philcold/Dreamstime

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.