Asimov's Science Fiction (2 page)

"How far out are we?" Sabin asked Lieutenant Ernestine Alvarez, who was running navigation.

"Even at top speed, we're half a day away," Alvarez said.

Too close to use the
anacapa
drive with any accuracy. The
anacapa
enabled the Fleet to negotiate long distances. It put a ship in foldspace, and then the ship would reappear at set coordinates. The problem was that the ship would reappear blind—and in a battle situation, that wasn't optimum.

Plus, time worked differently in foldspace, and while the best crews could usually predict the time differences down to the second, sometimes even the work of the best crews went haywire. Engineers claimed the problem was with sections of foldspace itself; scientists believed the problem was with certain
anacapa
drives.

Even with centuries of study and upgrades, neither group could come to a complete agreement. In Sabin's opinion, the Fleet had forever messed with something it did not understand when it started using the
anacapa
drive.

She wasn't going to use it on something like this. Nor was she going to order the rest of the front line to do so—not unless Coop sent out a major distress signal, which he had not yet done.

She wasn't going to explain herself to her crew, but if she had to, she would tell them what she always told them—that portion of the truth that they needed to know. It was the same truth every time they considered using the
anacapa
drive. The
anacapa
put a strain on the ship and on the crew that Sabin couldn't quite quantify. She hated using it for that very reason, just like most of the captains did.

Which was probably why Coop hadn't used his drive yet. The
anacapa
also worked as a shield. The ship would jump to foldspace for a moment, and then return to its original coordinates. Depending on how the
anacapa
was programmed, the return could happen seconds later or days later, without much time passing on the ship at all.

"Another twenty-five ships have just left Ukhanda's orbit," Alvarez said.

"That settles where the ships are from, at least," Graham said.

"It was pretty obvious that the ships were from Ukhanda," Phan said. "The question is which culture controls them."

That
was
the question. It would have an impact on everything: how the front line ships would proceed, how they would fight back,
if
they would do more than simply rescue the
Ivoire.
If they needed to rescue the
Ivoire.
Coop might get away on his own.

Sabin hoped Coop would get away on his own.

She had asked Graham, "Have you sent a message to the
Alta,
asking if they know which culture owns these ships? Because we need to get some diplomats on the mission here, to ensure we don't make things worse."

The
Alta
was twice as large as all of the other ships in the Fleet, including the warships, and it housed the Fleet's government when that government was in session.

"I notified them as soon as we got Captain Cooper's message," Graham said. "I trust that they're monitoring the
Ivoire
as well."

Sabin was about to remind Graham that one should never "trust" someone else to do anything important, when Wilmot snapped, "Don't make assumptions, Lieutenant."

He sounded a bit harsh, even for him. Sabin glanced at him. That small smile had disappeared, and she saw, for the first time, how tired he looked. She wondered what he'd been doing during respite, besides running drills.

His uniform was so crisp she knew he had put it on right after the call to the bridge. So he'd been either asleep or doing something else when the call came in.

"Sorry, sir," Graham said, sounding just a bit contrite.

"I want identification on those ships," Sabin said. "We have time—half a day, you said. So let's see if we can cut that time short, and see if we can figure out who or what we're dealing with. The other cultures on Ukhanda are a mystery to me. Maybe they developed some technology of their own that we're not familiar with."

"Do you want me to send for Sector Research?" Meri Ebedat spoke up for the first time. She usually handled navigation, but she'd been doing some maintenance on the secure areas of the bridge during the respite period. She had a streak of something dark running along her left cheek, and her eyes were red-rimmed. Her brown hair had fallen from its usually neat bun.

She had to be near the end of her shift, although now she wouldn't be leaving. She was a good all-around bridge crewmember, and Sabin would need her as the mission continued.

"Yeah, do it," Sabin said, "although I doubt Sector Research knows much more than we do. We haven't had enough time to study Ukhanda. That was one reason the
Ivoire
was there."

"You think they did something wrong?" Wilmot asked her softly, but the entire bridge crew heard.

She knew what he meant: he meant had the
Ivoire
offended one of the cultures in a severe way.

But she gave the standard answer. "By our laws, probably not," she said.

He gave her a sideways look. He wanted a real answer, even though he knew the real answer. They all knew the real answer.

Had the
Ivoire—
or, rather, its on-planet team—offended one of the cultures? Clearly. And if Coop didn't act quickly, the entire ship might pay the price.

"Do you ever question it?" Coop had asked Sabin months before, his hands behind his head, pillows pushed to the side, strands of his black hair stuck to his sweat-covered forehead.

They were in a suite on Starbase Kappa. They had pooled their vacation funds for the nicest room on the base—or at least, the nicest room available to someone of a captain's rank. Sabin hadn't stayed anywhere this luxurious in her entire life—soft sheets, a perfect bed, a fully stocked kitchen with a direct link to the base's best restaurant, and all the entertainment the Fleet owned plus some from the nearby sector, not that she had needed entertainment. She had Coop.

They weren't a couple, not really. They were a convenience.

It was almost impossible for captains to have an intimate relationship with anyone once they were given a ship. Coop's marriage to his chief linguist—a marriage that began when they were still in school—hadn't made it through his first year as captain.

Sabin had never been married, and she hadn't been in love in decades. At least that was what she told herself. Because the people she interacted with on a daily basis were all under her command. She didn't dare fall in love with them or favor them in any way.

It wasn't against Fleet policy to marry or even sleep with a crewmember (provided both had enough years and seniority to understand the relationship, and provided both had signed off with all the various legal and ethical departments), but it didn't feel right to her to sleep with and then command another person.

It didn't feel right to Coop either. They'd discussed it one night, decided they were attracted enough to occasionally scratch an itch, and somehow the entire convenience had improved their friendship rather than harmed it (as they had both feared it might).

Ever since, they would communicate on a private link between their ships, and when their ships had a mutual respite period, they got a room and scratched that itch, sometimes repeatedly.

She had been about to get out of bed and order some food when Coop spoke. She had the covers pulled back, but his tone caught her, and she lay back down.

"Do I question what?" she asked, grabbing one of his pillows and propping it under her back.

"Our mission," he said. "Or at least part of our mission."

She felt cold despite the blankets and the perfect environmental setting. She hadn't heard anyone question the Fleet's mission since boarding school. At that point, everyone questioned; just a little. They were encouraged to.

"You don't believe in the mission anymore?" she asked, turning on her side to face him. If Jonathon "Coop" Cooper no longer believed in the Fleet, well, then the Fleet might as well disband. Because the Universe had shifted somehow and the rules no longer applied.

"Part of it," he said. "Although to say that I don't believe might be too strong. Let's just say I'm worrying about things."

He didn't look at her. He was staring at the ceiling, which was covered with a star field she didn't recognize. Starbase Kappa was old, built by her grandfather's generation, and much of the base paid homage to places the Fleet had been almost a century ago. The Fleet usually liked to leave its past behind. Even the feats of bravery and the victories (large and small) became the stuff of legend, not something that the old-timers discussed as if they were meaningful events.

"What are you worrying about?" She propped herself up on her elbow so that she was in his field of vision.

He glanced at her, then smiled almost dismissively, and looked back up at the ceiling.

"What makes us so smart?" he asked.

She blinked, not expecting that.

"You and me?" she asked, thinking about their captains' duties.

He sat up, shaking his head as he did so. The blanket slid down his torso, revealing the dusting of black hair that covered his chest and narrowed on its way down his stomach.

Normally that would have distracted her, but his mood changed everything. She wasn't sure she had ever seen Coop this focused, even though she knew he was capable of it.

"Not you and me," he said. "The Fleet. We've been traveling for thousands of years. We go into a sector and if someone asks for help—or hell, if we figure they
need
help even if they don't ask—we give them assistance. We advise them, we make them see our point of view. We give them whatever they need from diplomatic support to military back up, and we stay as long as they need us, or at least until we believe they'll be just fine."

She'd been in hundreds of these kinds of conversations throughout her life, but never with another full adult vested with the powers of the Fleet. Always with children or teenagers or discontented civilians who traveled on the various ships.

Never with another captain.

"We never go back and check, we have no idea if we've done harm or good." Coop ran a hand through his hair, making it stand on end. "We continually move forward, believing in our own power, and we never test it."

"We test it," she said. "The fact that we've existed this long is a test in and of itself. We've been the Fleet for thousands of years. We've lived this way forever. We know the history of various regions. That's just not normal, at least for human beings."

"Because we never stick around long enough to be challenged," he said. "And we 'weed' out the bad elements, giving them crappy—and sometimes deadly—assignments or we leave them planetside someplace where we convince ourselves they'll be happy."

Her breath caught. Finally, a glimmer of what might have caused this mood.

"Did you have to leave someone behind, Coop?" she asked softly.

"No,"
he said emphatically, then gave her a look that, for a moment, seemed filled with betrayal. "Haven't you wondered these things?"

She hadn't. She wasn't that political. She stayed away from the diplomats and the linguists and the sector researchers. She didn't like intership politics or the mechanics of leadership.

She knew what she needed to know to run her ship better than anyone else in the Fleet—better than Coop, although she would never tell him that—and she left the rest to the intellectuals and the restless minds.

She had never expected such questioning from Coop. If anything, she found it a bit disappointing. She didn't want him to doubt the mission.

She had thought better of him than that.

She wasn't sure how to respond, because anything she said would probably shut him down. It might even interfere with the comfortable convenience of their relationship.

But he expected an answer. More than that, he seemed to need one.

"In my captaincy," she said after a moment, after giving herself some time to think, "the
Geneva
has never had an on-planet assignment. We've been front line or support crew or the occasional battleship. We don't get the diplomatic missions."

"You haven't thought about what we do, then," he said flatly.

"Not since school, Coop," she said, finally deciding on honesty.

"Not once? This mission from God or whatever is causing us to move ever forward, spreading the gospel of—what? A culture that we've never lived in and we are no longer sure existed?"

He sounded wounded, as if all of this were personal. She had to think just to remember what he was talking about. The Fleet had left Earth thousands of years ago, and supposedly did have a mission, to find new cultures and to help them or something like that.

She had never paid attention to mythology and history in school. She didn't think it pertained to anything she was doing.

She still didn't.

"I think," she said gently, "we have our own culture now. The Fleet doesn't live on planets or moons. Its world is the ships. That's what we are. The ships. And everything else is what we do to maintain our ships. We do explore, we do encounter other peoples, but that's not the Fleet's main job. The Fleet's main job is to maintain the Fleet."

He slouched in the bed. "Oh, hell, that's even more depressing."

"Why do you question?" she asked.

He gave her that betrayed look again, then threw the covers back.

"Why do you breathe?" he asked, and left the room.

"Captain," Graham said, "I managed to modify our visuals just a bit. Those little ships
are
firing."

Sabin stood so that she could see the screen better. She had assumed that the little ships were doing something to the
Ivoire,
but, she realized as she watched, she hadn't thought of it as
firing
on the larger ship for two reasons.

The first reason was that something that small couldn't have weapons that would damage the
Ivoire
—not individually, anyway, and to her, somehow, that meant that any shots those little ships did take would be harmless. The second reason she hadn't thought the little ships were firing was that the
Ivoire
didn't seem to be reacting as if it were being shot at.