The Diving Bundle: Six Diving Universe Novellas (37 page)

Coop needed it done. If those outsiders were hostile, if something had destroyed this base and threatened his ship, he needed to know. They had to be prepared to leave quickly.

“And go where?” Lynda asked him softly as he was about to leave the bridge. She was a bit more anal than he was. If the ship had to leave quickly, he’d figure out where at the time. If the ship were repaired, he could catch the Fleet but he had to know where the Fleet would be.

The Fleet always traveled on the same trajectory. The problem was that the Fleet’s mission determined its timetable. The Fleet’s mission, which it had adhered to without fail since it left Earth, was to support the underdog, fight the right battles, help individuals, nations, and entire regions of space become self-sufficient, able to protect their own peoples without hurting others.

The mission was vague, and sometimes the Fleet ended up on a side it didn’t want to be on, but mostly, it had worked. And when the Fleet felt the peoples, the nations, the regions of space were stable, it moved on, secure in the knowledge that it had done its job well.

Sometimes, to do that job well, the Fleet had to stay longer than expected. Sometimes on a random stop for supplies, the Fleet would encounter a group that needed their help. Sometimes, no one they met needed help, not for years.

So the Fleet’s location along its chosen route would be a suggestion, a hope, rather than an actual schedule. And the stragglers could catch up, because the
anacapa
worked by folding space and could, with the right calculations, fold the
Ivoire
within a few years (and a few light-years) from the Fleet itself.

If the
anacapa
worked. If the
Ivoire
retained enough power to travel that far. If they didn’t get attacked by those outsiders.

If, if, if.

The ifs threatened to overwhelm him. That sensation was a familiar one to him. It came when he lacked sleep.

So he left the bridge, went to his quarters and slept.

***

The sleep helped. When Coop returned to the bridge, he was calm, ready to work, and filled with ideas.

He wasn’t quite filled with hope, but he knew that was the next best thing.

Lynda greeted him tiredly. “They’ve been back an hour,” she said, “It looks like the same group.”

He peered at the screens. He only saw the woman, waving her arm at something, particles swirling around her. But it looked like she was gesturing at someone.

At several someones, actually. The rest of the outsiders.

If the same group returned, then that might have been the entire team. In fact, it probably was the entire team.

Which was welcome news. It meant that he only had to compete with one team for time inside the former repair room.

“They came back exactly eighteen hours after they left,” Lynda said.

Coop would wager that they would leave six hours after they arrived. Obviously, their suits couldn’t handle much more than that, and they had no backup team.

And no backup suits, or at least, suits they could put on so soon after using the others.

More good news.

He looked at the wall screens. Two of the outsiders were running what appeared to be handheld computers over the built-in equipment. Two more were going deeper into the repair room itself.

And the woman he had seen the day before, along with one other person—a man (the one who had run from the spot where the
Ivoire
now rested?) were going over the ship, inch by inch.

Coop wondered what they hoped to find.

He wondered what they thought of all they had seen.

He wondered who they were.

“Are they going to do any kind of damage on that equipment?” he asked Zaria Diaz, this shift’s on-deck engineer. Diaz was a tiny dark-haired woman who often spent her time inside the machinery. She was one of the few crew members who could fit into some of the crawlspaces.

“They shouldn’t damage the equipment,” Diaz said, “so long as they only run their own equipment over it and don’t touch anything.”

“And if they touch it?” he asked.

“I think that’s what turned the equipment back on in the first place.”

“Turned it back on?” he asked.

She nodded. “I think this entire room had been shut down.”

Coop folded his hands behind his back and faced Diaz. “You’re still working on assumptions, though, aren’t you?”

“I don’t have any proof of anything,” she said. “I tried all night to get our equipment to talk with the base equipment. I don’t think it’s going to happen without someone venturing into that mess and seeing what they find.”

He nodded. He agreed.

His bridge crew was filing back on. He dismissed Rooney’s bridge crew, then set up a work schedule for the next few days. He wanted the quality team with him.

But he needed good people to cover the other two shifts.

And he wanted an exploratory team ready to go into the repair room as soon as the outsiders left.

Yash complained about that part of the plan. She wanted to go into the repair room herself.

But he couldn’t risk his best people, not yet. Those environmental suits the outsiders wore worried him. He didn’t want to lose any of his best staff to surprises.

So the first exploratory team was made up of highly qualified junior officers, a few scientists, one excellent team leader that Coop was eyeing for promotion, and a couple engineers.

The engineers and the scientists should figure out what was wrong with the equipment (if anything). They also had a bit of combat experience, so they could handle a surprise attack if the outsiders returned.

And they had the expertise to download any information they could find off the shutdown equipment.

Coop would brief them himself. He wanted them ready for anything. He also wanted them to be careful in another way.

He wanted them to leave everything the way they found it. He didn’t want the outsiders to know they’d been there.

That meant searching for other recording devices besides the ones inside the repair room. It also meant somehow making the recordings automatically taken by the equipment in the room inaccessible.

He wouldn’t know how to do any of that, but he knew his engineers did.

He hoped they would have enough time on their little mission to get all of that done.

***

Coop sent out the exploratory team one hour after the outsiders left. As Coop expected, the outsiders left exactly six hours after they arrived. If the outsiders were going to come back in, if they had forgotten anything or needed to do anything else, then they would have done so within that hour.

Still, the exploratory team had instructions to leave the moment the door to the corridor got activated. With luck, they could all be inside the ship before any outsiders came into the room.

Coop scheduled his team for a little under five hours. That way, he figured, if the outsiders had switched to six-hour intervals, then his team would be gone before they returned.

Besides, he saw no reason to hurry. The
Ivoire
could remain in this base for months without opening her doors. By then, he suspected, the outsiders would be long gone.

He would take that option if he had to.

He just hoped he wouldn’t have to.

***

Joanna Rossetti led the exploratory team. She was one of the best young officers Coop ever had the pleasure to work with. Had she been just a bit older and a bit more experienced, he would have promoted her to second officer instead of Lynda Rooney.

Not that he had ever had problems with Lynda Rooney.

Joanna Rossetti was thin and small, wiry and tough, more suited to space than land-based missions. She could fit anywhere, get into any small area, and often did. She had spent half her life training in zero-g, something a lot of the Fleet never did, and so was adept at all kinds of space missions, from those in zero gravity to those in low gravity. Her small size made heavy gravity possible as well; she didn’t feel as crushed by it as someone who weighed more.

She was also a thinker. She solved problems as fast as Coop did, faster than most of the people on his excellent bridge crew.

That was one of the many things he liked about her.

Coop let her choose the two officers that would go along with her. He figured she needed people she could trust. He hadn’t been surprised when she chose Adam Shärf. Coop had been watching Shärf as well. Shärf was young, agile, and intelligent. He had a spotless record, and was known for stopping fights instead of starting them.

Her choice of Salvador Ahidjo did surprise Coop. As far as Coop knew—and he tried to keep track of all of his officers—Ahidjo had done nothing to distinguish himself throughout his career. Ahidjo was older than Coop and had remained at the same rank for nearly two decades. His work was fine but never outstanding. There was never any reason to promote or demote him. He was simply a solid member of the core, who did his job rather quietly and never rose to anyone’s attention.

Except, apparently, Rossetti’s.

Coop didn’t ask her about her choice. He was less concerned with the make-up of the officer level of the team than he was with the scientists and engineers. Here, he had to trust both Dix and Yash. Dix, who knew which scientists had the expertise and could work best in less than optimal conditions, and Yash, who knew her engineering team.

At Coop’s request, she picked engineers who had once worked in a sector base or alongside the sector base technicians whenever the
Ivoire
was in a base. He wanted someone familiar with the equipment.

As for the scientists, he wanted creativity as well as the ability to work anywhere. He needed open minds, minds that could see alternatives that most scientists couldn’t.

Dix said he knew the perfect three. Yash had more candidates than three, so Coop told her to pick the best, keeping the others on the list for later missions, if necessary.

He looked over the qualifications, tried to remember names and faces (knowing he would fail) and, ultimately, trusted his two senior staff members to make the best possible choices.

Then he briefed the team, and sent them into what had once been the repair room of Sector Base V.

***

There were two theories of leadership among the commanders of the Fleet: the first theory believed that the leaders had the most expertise and therefore were the least expendable; the second theory believed that the leaders had the most expertise and therefore had to be first on the ground, to make sure everything was fine.

Clearly, Rossetti belonged in the second category.

Her tiny form looked even smaller as she climbed down the ladder from the exterior door, and stepped onto the floor. Particles rose around her, thick and heavy, more of them than he had seen before. Some of them came from his cleaning of the ship, but the rest had to be coming from somewhere else.

The particles floated around her like snow. She captured some of them in her glove, and closed her fist, clearly doing a small test of her own.

Coop didn’t say anything. He watched from the bridge, using the wall screens on full. Usually, when the ship was in motion, he kept the screens off or on half power. To have them on full continually made him feel as if only a thin membrane separated him from the repair room outside the ship.

That feeling seemed even stronger now. As he watched his team step onto the repair room floor, he felt as if he could take one step through the membrane and join them.

After all, he knew what it felt like to be in that room.

The last time he had been there, only a month before, the room had been slightly cold. The equipment functioned better in chilly conditions, so the staff kept the room cooler than the interior of most ships. And, one of the staff explained to him, the newly arrived ship always chilled the air as well. It still carried some of the cold from space, and that brought down the ambient temperature all by itself.

The air also had a metallic tang. The local staff claimed they couldn’t smell it, but he could. Every section base he’d ever been to had a version of that smell. Sometimes the smell was tinged with sulfur, thanks to underground springs nearby, and sometimes it was laced with a chalky smell, one that came from the inside of the mountain itself.

Every place was different. He knew if he had to, he could identify the section bases he’d been to by smell alone.

Although the team he’d just sent into the repair room wasn’t feeling cold or smelling a metallic tang. They were snug in their environmental suits, suits made of material so strong that the knife the outsider woman had worn wouldn’t penetrate them.

The air filters were built into the suits themselves. The suits looked thin, but they weren’t. They had three layers. The exterior was made of that impermeable material. The middle layer carried the oxygen stores, so that the suit’s wearer didn’t need oxygen canisters like the outsiders had. The interior layer measured and controlled body temperature, as well as maintaining every other part of the environment that gave the suits their name.