The Diving Bundle: Six Diving Universe Novellas (34 page)

“I’m not reading any problems. These images are coming from the ship’s exterior just like they should be,” she said.

Coop frowned and wished, not for the first time, that the original Fleet engineers had thought it proper to build portals into the bridge. He would like to do a visual comparison of what he saw on the wall screens with what he saw out the portal.

But he would have to leave the bridge to do that.

So he snapped his finger at the most junior officer on deck, Kjersti Perkins. She didn’t even have to be told what he wanted. She nodded and exited.

Perkins would have to walk three-tenths of a mile just to get to the nearest portal. The bridge was in the nose of the ship, completely protected by hull. The original engineers had thought the portals were for tourists, and didn’t insert any until the ship widened into its residential and business wings.

But Coop couldn’t just worry about what was outside the ship. He also had to worry about what was inside the ship.

“Give me updated damage reports,” he said.

“Nothing new,” Yash said, which was a relief. Coop had been expecting more damage all over the ship. Normal activation of the
anacapa
drive often revealed weak spots in the ship, and this activation had been anything but normal.

It had been desperate—more desperate than he ever wanted to admit.

Fifteen days of drift—full engine failure, at least on the standard engines. The
anacapa
worked—it had gotten them there, after all, wherever there was, which none of them could exactly figure out. It seemed like they’d moved dimensions, just like they were supposed to, but something had gone wrong with the navigation equipment, confirmed by scans.

An asteroid field where there shouldn’t be one. A star in the proper position, but not at the proper intensity. A planet with two moons instead of the expected three.

Nothing was quite right, and yet a lot was. Coop didn’t even want to think about the possibilities.

He didn’t dare.

He set up the distress beacon, the one tied to the
anacapa
, so that it could reach any nearby bases, and prayed for an answer.

Which didn’t come.

So he increased the scans. The
Ivoire
couldn’t move yet—not with a regular drive anyway, although repairs were coming along, as the engineers said—but everything else seemed to be working.

They should have gotten a response from two different bases: Sector Base V and Sector Base U, which was at the very edge of their range. Not to mention Starbase Kappa, which—according to the records—wasn’t that far from here.

Nothing. He’d left the signal on, but checked it and asked the science whiz kids in the school wing to work the design for a new signal, something a little less formal, he said, and he told their teacher what he really wanted was for them to build a new signal from scratch.

Just in case the old had been damaged in the fight with the Quurzod, and somehow that damage hadn’t registered. He couldn’t spare the engineers to do the work. He needed the students more than he ever had before.

He didn’t tell the teacher that, but she had clearly figured it out. She looked grimly determined, and told him the kids would get on the project right away.

They were only half done when Dix caught the edge of a reply.

Automated from Sector Base V:
We have heard your distress signal. We are prepared to use our own drive to bring you to us. If that is what you need, turn on your
anacapa
drive now
.

Without a second thought, Coop turned on the drive, and the
Ivoire
whisked out of the drift, their drive piggybacking on Sector Base V’s.

He’d studied the process in school and hadn’t entirely understood it. Just that something about the two drives linked, locked, and provided extra power, power that could bring a damaged ship from wherever it was to wherever it needed to be.

The
Ivoire
’s journey took half a minute, maybe less. They were drifting in an unknown part of space, and then they weren’t.

Then they were here, in Sector Base V, beneath the mountains that towered over Venice City.

They were here and they should have been safe.

But they weren’t.

Coop had a sense they were in deeper shit than they’d ever been in before.

***

Perkins returned quicker than Coop expected. She must have scurried down those corridors.

“It’s the same,” she said, somewhat breathlessly. “The view’s the same.”

He had expected that, and yet hoped for a different outcome. Dix bent over his console. So did Tren. They checked their readings again, probably for the fifteenth or sixteenth time.

Coop took a deep breath. He didn’t need the repeated readings. The equipment said they were in Sector Base V, so they had to be in Sector Base V.

A different Sector Base V than the one he had left a month ago.

He ran a hand over his face. The
anacapa
created a fold in space. The Fleet used it as both a drive and a cloak, although cloak wasn’t the accurate term. If a ship were under fire, it activated its
anacapa
drive, moving into foldspace, and then returning to the same point in regular moments or hours later. Sometimes moments were all it took to confuse the enemy ships.

Sometimes hours got the ship—and the Fleet—out of a serious dilemma.

That was how the ships continued to travel through hundreds of years. They rarely got damaged in battle, and when they did, they could go elsewhere to repair. The Fleet had learned long ago how to do extensive repair in space, but they had also learned that sometimes parts simply wore out. Repair could only do so much, particularly when spread over hundreds of years, thousands of battles, and countless trips via the
anacapa
drive.

That was why the Fleet built settlements on hospitable planets, usually choosing a mountainous region, always picking a hard-to-reach (by ground) location far from the main civilizations (if there were any). The settlements were mostly underground and never considered permanent.

Sector Base N, for example, had been abandoned for nearly four hundred years. No one from the Fleet went back to that sector, so they didn’t need the base.

Although on every settlement, a handful of people chose to stay. Some married into the indigenous population. Some simply liked life planetside better than life in space, although Coop never understood why.

As a kid, he thought about all those lost bases, like he thought about the nearly mythical Earth, and wondered what it would be like to return to them.

His father kidded him, saying Coop was the only child whose adventurous spirit turned backward instead of forward.

Coop let his hand drop away from his face. Then he looked at the wall screens again.

“It doesn’t make sense,” he muttered.

The others were watching him. He wasn’t sure how many of them knew what he was thinking.

And he wasn’t exactly sure what he was thinking. Had someone left the base’s
anacapa
drive active, even though the base had been under attack? That didn’t make sense, because every commander—on base and on ship—was instructed to shut off an
anacapa
drive before enemy capture.

Shut off, or destroy.

Even though the Fleet had traveled all over the known universe, it had never encountered another civilization with an
anacapa
drive. They had encountered other marvelous technology, but never anything as sophisticated and freeing as the
anacapa
.

Without the
anacapa
, the Fleet could never have continued on its extensive mission. Without the
anacapa
, the Fleet would never have left its own small sector of space around Earth.

The
anacapa
had enabled it to travel great distances, carrying its own brand of justice and its own kind of integrity to worlds far and wide.

Had the
anacapa
drive here in Sector Base V malfunctioned, forcing everyone to leave? He’d heard of malfunctioning
anacapa
drives before. They were one of the most dangerous parts of the Fleet. A ship with a malfunctioning drive sometimes had to be destroyed to protect the Fleet and anything around it.

But that made no sense either. Because the
anacapa
drive inside all the sector bases was tied to working equipment. Not just working equipment, but equipment that had been turned on and used manually by a human being within the past twenty-four hours.

It was a failsafe, designed by some far-seeing engineer, or, as Coop’s father would have said, designed by a professional worrier, someone who tried to see all the problems and plan for them.

The failsafe had been designed to prevent exactly this kind of problem: A ship could get trapped planetside. Crews would be trapped inside a mountain, especially if the internal corridors had collapsed, and there was no real way out.

The human failsafe was necessary because no one knew—even now, after generations of using the drives—how long an
anacapa
could survive without maintenance. There were some in the Fleet who believed that an
anacapa
drive would remain functional long after the human race had disappeared from the universe.

The human race hadn’t disappeared. The
anacapa
drive still worked. But something had happened in the repair area. Something bad.

“Should we go out there, see what went wrong?” Perkins asked.

No one answered her. She specialized in communication. She spoke fifteen languages fluently, another forty haphazardly, and had a gift for picking up new languages all the time. Combined with the computer database on languages all over the known universe, and her ability to recognize patterns, Perkins was one of the most formidable linguists in the Fleet, and Coop’s secret weapon whenever they went anywhere new.

But so far, except for the disaster with the Quurzod—which wasn’t her fault—she had never been on a mission where something had gone wrong.

“We can’t go out there yet,” Coop said. “We need to know what we’re facing.”

He didn’t want to tell her that if the
anacapa
had malfunctioned, the area outside the ship might be deadly to the team. Not obviously deadly—they wouldn’t die the moment they walked out there.

There were ways to test this, but he would actually have to look them up. No one had encountered this sort of thing in living memory, and the training for it had slipped, although the warnings had remained.

“You think the base was attacked?” Dix asked.

“Possible,” Coop said. He didn’t want to reveal his suspicions any more than that. He wanted the bridge crew to explore all options. “Let’s figure out what’s going on here before we make any moves.”

“Sir?” Yash sounded strange.

He glanced at her.

She was pointing at an area on the wall screen. A woman walked toward the ship’s exterior. The woman was thin. She wore a form-fitting environmental suit of a type Coop had never seen before. She had cylinders attached to the belt on her hip and what looked like a knife hilt.

He could only get a glimpse of her angular face through her helmet.

As he watched, she reached out and put her gloved hand on the
Ivoire
’s side.

“Is she the one who attacked us?” Perkins asked.

“We don’t know if the base was attacked,” Coop said.

“But it’s been abandoned,” Perkins said.

“There could be a variety of reasons for that.” This time, Dix answered her. But he didn’t elaborate and neither did Coop.

But Perkins wasn’t dumb. Just inexperienced. “So is that woman part of a repair crew?”

“I don’t think so,” Yash said. “I don’t recognize her suit.”

“It could be special hazmat suits from Venice City itself,” Tren said.

Perkins eyes opened wider. “Hazmat? So it’s toxic out there?”

Coop shrugged. “We don’t know anything yet. All we know is that we’re here, nothing is as it was when we left, and a woman is in the repair room. We don’t even know if it’s a woman we’ve met before. I can’t see her face clearly, can you?”

“No,” Dix said.

“But she’s human, right?” Perkins asked.

“What else would she be?” Yash asked with a touch of impatience. The Fleet, in all its travels, had never discovered an alien race, not as the Fleet defined it, anyway, which was a non-standard, unexpected life form of equal intelligence to humans.

“I don’t know,” Perkins said. “That woman looks weird.”

Perkins’ voice held an edge of panic. She’d felt responsible for the Quurzod disaster, even though the fault didn’t lie with the linguists, but with the Quurzod themselves (intransigent bastards). She had held up well during the fifteen days in that unrecognizable area of space, but she must have been clinging to the thought that everything would be fine when they reached Sector Base V.