Asimov's Science Fiction: October/November 2013 (20 page)

"The Fury can get there faster."

There turned out to be few fools on board. Commander de Prado returned to his quarters, or wherever else he chose to seethe and make plans. He had enough sense not to force a struggle he could not win on shipboard, but could win once we were back home.

The captain, some careerists might say, had acted foolishly in challenging the first officer and those who stood behind him. His prospects for future promotions and commands had dimmed, and he might well be facing early retirement. He seemed to care little about that. He had safeguarded the ship and its passengers, and that ranked higher in the professional circles he valued.

Meanwhile, he—and the rest of us—had a shipful of miners to associate with. A rough cut of passengers dined with us, even at the captain's table, and sweated with us at the gym. Many welcomed this more democratic turn of events. Miro, ever more interactive and plugged in than I, told me that alliances and interactions of several sorts were being formed in the days before we reached orbit around Messier III, where the miners would offload.

Miro, Breville, and I found ourselves together a lot. Miro thought the Fury crisis had its positive points. She believed that it was percolating through her psyche—her word—and would ultimately manifest in her art. That's the way it works, she said, and I believed her.

I told this to Breville after a good judo workout. He reached for a water bottle while he considered his response.

"This is an art, too," he said. "A martial art, and in its practice there are analogs to your Fury encounter. There is technique. There is strategy. There is a philosophy and a mindset. You each brought these factors to bear, and you scored an
ippon,
a clean takedown."

A provocative insight. Breville could surprise.

"Interesting," I said. "I'd liken the experience more to
ukemi.
We each practiced our moves and both gained knowledge by it. I believe that the Fury has the ability to learn. As for me, I got a good look into the architecture of sentience. Machine sentience. Like with Miro, this will reverberate in my psyche, and will manifest somewhere, somewhen."

Eventually the miners disembarked.

We voyaged on, without their vigor—and their Fury.

ENCOUNTER ON STARBASE KAPPA

Kristine Kathryn Rusch
| 14071 words

Hugo-award winner Kristine Kathryn Rusch is publishing several series at the same time, all under different names. She writes the award-winning Smokey Dalton mystery series as Kris Nelscott, award-winning romance as Kristine Grayson, and SF/romance as Kris DeLake. In addition, she has three series under Kristine Kathryn Rusch: the Retrieval Artist series, the Fey series, and the Diving series. For the first time in her career, all the books are in print. The next Diving book,
Skirmishes,
will appear in the fall of 2013, the next Smokey Dalton novel in March of 2014, and the next Retrieval Artist book shortly after that. Her standalone thriller,
Snipers,
just came out from WMG Publishing. Somehow Kris has also found time to return to editing—kind of—acting as overall editor with her husband Dean Wesley Smith for the Fiction River anthology series. That project started, thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign, in April with
Fiction River: Unnatural Worlds,
and continues bimonthly. Her newest tale for us hails from the Diving series. It depicts an alarming...

Starbase Kappa slipped. Captain Jonathan "Coop" Cooper knew no other way to describe the feeling. The entire base had shifted just a little.

He put out a gloved hand and braced himself. He stood inside what once had been the control room, although on starbases, the Fleet called these rooms headquarters, probably because back in the dark dark ages, long before Coop was born, the Fleet allowed strangers to stay in the base.

Not any longer—or at least, the Fleet hadn't allowed strangers on starbases in Coop's lifetime.

Which was, oddly, centuries ago.

He refused to let himself think about that. He had another problem altogether. He turned toward Yash Zarlengo, the best engineer the
Ivoire
had, maybe the best engineer in the Fleet—or at least, she had been, before the
Ivoire
vanished from the Fleet.

And there he was, thinking about it all again.

He made himself focus.

Yash had been standing near one of the control panels, a pile of tools scattered on a small built-in table to her side. She had managed to turn on the gravity the moment the team arrived, but she hadn't been able to get the atmosphere to work. The team needed environmental suits to explore the interior. Hers clung to her like a second skin. The visor half-hid her face.

"You feel that?" he asked.

"Yeah," she said, and she didn't sound happy.

They both understood why. That slipping feeling was unique: it generally happened on a ship when an
anacapa
drive kicked in. Only they weren't on a ship. They were on an old abandoned starbase, one that had caused problems in this sector for hundreds of years, if the stories Coop had heard could be believed.

The base had its own
anacapa.
All of the Fleet's bases had had one. If the base was abandoned, the
anacapa
should have been shut down.

This one hadn't been. It was active and probably malfunctioning. That was one of the problems Coop's team was here to address.

He activated the comm in his environmental suit.

"Dix, did you do something to the
anacapa?"
he asked. His first officer, Dix Pompiano, had taken a small team into what had been the very center of the starbase, six stories down, to disable and remove the
anacapa.

Coop didn't get an answer which, a year ago, he would have thought odd. But for the past several months, ever since the
Ivoire
got separated from the Fleet, Dix's behavior had become increasingly erratic.

Initially, Coop had decided not to bring Dix on this mission, but for the last few weeks, Dix had seemed like his old self. He'd even grown upbeat, something Coop didn't think he'd ever see again.

He'd been relieved, figuring his first officer had returned from whatever personal hell he'd assigned himself to.

Only now a prickly feeling on the back of Coop's neck made him wonder if Dix had deliberately misled him. Coop had had enough problems recently; he didn't need more. And Dix's emotional decline had been something Coop simply didn't want to accept.

"Dix?" he said again. Then he looked at Yash. "You want to try?"

"He hasn't answered for the last few minutes," she said, sounding annoyed and worried at the same time.

Coop bit back a harsh response. He needed his team to communicate with him, particularly here, on this empty base. But he didn't say what he was thinking.

He was also on edge. He'd been on that edge for months now, ever since the
Ivoire
got stuck. A man could live with extreme stress well in the beginning, but seven months in, it didn't just become tedious, it also became exhausting.

Plus, he was trying to focus on too many things at once. He had mentally declared his personal future off limits, but his past wasn't pretty either. He had thought this trip to Starbase Kappa would help with the
Ivoire's
new reality, but now he wasn't so sure.

That slight slip happened again. Coop braced his other hand against the wall. He was standing near a control panel he'd had to pry open. The controls had deteriorated. This room had suffered at least a thousand years of neglect, maybe more.

He still had trouble wrapping his mind around the time shifts he and his crew had been subjected to. He knew that others—like Dix—had even more difficulty.

"Dix," Coop said again. "I need to hear from you
now."

"Captain." The voice that came through the comm didn't belong to Dix. Instead, it belonged to Layla Lalliki, the
Ivoire's
chief science officer. She had gone with Dix into the
anacapa
control room, along with three
anacapa
specialists.

Coop didn't like hearing her instead of Dix. "I need Dix, Layla," he said.

"Yeah, I know," she said. "And I need you here now, sir. Right now."

He finally understood what he was hearing in her voice. Controlled panic.

He glanced over at Yash. She had frozen in place.

"What's going on?" he asked Lalliki.

"Something you need to see, sir," Lalliki said. "I can't describe it. Please, sir."

Yash continued to stare at him, or at least he thought she did. The hoods of the environmental suits were difficult for someone not wearing the suit to see through, unless that person activated an interior light. Usually, it played to his crew's advantage.

Right now, he felt like ordering everyone to turn on that interior light. He wanted to see faces, nuances, emotions.

And that told him he was as on edge as his crew was.

"Do you need someone to stay in here with you?" he asked Yash.

She shook her head. "This can wait. I'm going with you."

And somehow, her matter-of-fact tone made his panic rise. He had to struggle to beat it back. She knew, like he knew, that he had made a mistake.

He shouldn't have brought Dix on this mission.

Maybe the
Ivoire
shouldn't have come on this mission at all.

She
had told him not to come, and he hadn't listened.

Her people called her Boss. She refused to tell him her real name. He was the captain of his own ship, a man who had only that as his identity now, and very little else. He wasn't going to call anyone Boss.

He had told her that, and it hadn't made any difference. She still hadn't shared her real name with him.

So he compromised.

The word "Boss" was in a different language—or rather, in the language his language had evolved into over thousands of years—and so he called her by that foreign word when he needed to use a name for her.

But mentally, he just called her "she."

She had been the first person he had seen when his ship arrived in this strange new future. She'd been wearing what he thought was a dated environmental suit, and had been investigating his ship, stunned that it had suddenly appeared deep within a mountainside.

He'd been stunned, too; the ship's coordinates told him the
anacapa
drive had brought the
Ivoire
to Sector Base V, but the space he was in didn't look like Sector Base V. Instead, it looked like an abandoned sector base from decades before.

Later, he learned that the
anacapa
malfunctioned, bringing him and his crew five thousand years into their future. The language was different, once-familiar planets were different, everything was different except for the people. People remained the same complicated, emotional creatures who believed they knew everything and secretly feared they knew nothing.

This situation, as he sometimes called it, exacerbated that fear among his crew. And if someone had asked him before the trip into the future had happened how his crew would have handled it, he would have said,
Any crew in the Fleet would cope easily. We're always moving to new places. We have no stable homes, no set environment. We have no historic roots tied to planets or lifestyles. We would be fine.

And he would have been wrong.

Because he didn't realize that by coming five thousand years into the future, they had left their true home behind. The Fleet itself had become a legend with no names attached, just a mythical group of ships that came into an area, fixed it (or meddled, depending on the story), and then left. Many people now believed that the Fleet was a comforting children's story, that no group of ships like that had ever existed.

One of the first things Boss had said to him once they could talk freely—after he acquired enough of her language—was how startled she was to see someone from the Fleet and how vindicated she felt. All of her life, she had argued that the Fleet was real, and now she had proof.

Not that she could show anyone.

This future that the
Ivoire
found itself in had a generations-long conflict between a large rapacious government and a group of rebels. But honestly, almost every new situation the Fleet found itself in—and that was a lot of situations over the years of Coop's life—involved a large rapacious government and a group of rebels.

Once he tried to tell Boss how common this was, but she wouldn't hear it. She claimed the Empire she battled was "evil" and the rebels "good."

She usually saw shades of gray when it came to the personal level, but on that universal scale, she was purely black and white. No empire could be as bad as the Enterran Empire (even though he knew of many that were far worse) and no rebels had tougher odds against them (even though he knew of many rebel movements that didn't make it through a year, let alone generations).

These rebels, whom she had more or less allied herself with, had joined forces into something they called the Nine Planets Alliance which, Coop could have told Boss if she had been willing to listen, would someday be someone else's evil government, needing rebellion against.

But the Nine Planets Alliance had provided him a home, and for that he was grateful. That home was really Boss's. She had started a corporation that she called The Lost Souls, and she used it to rehabilitate Fleet ships and to study what she called stealth technology.

What she was studying was actually the
anacapa
technology of the Fleet. The
anacapa
technology did so much more than provide stealth capability. The fact that Boss was meddling with it—and would continue to meddle with it, without knowing what it was—was one of the reasons Coop decided to speak with her in the first place.

Eventually, they became allies. But she didn't run him or his crew. He took care of the
Ivoire,
and he made sure the distance between Boss's people and his remained clear. She could command the people in Lost Souls, but he commanded the
Ivoire
and everyone on her.