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 the Fleet 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, arriving in an empty base, could get trapped. If the anacapa didn’t work, and the corridors leading to the surface had collapsed, then the ship— and more important, its crew—wouldn’t be able to escape above ground.
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. She wasn’t as good as Coop’s former wife, Mae, the Ivoire’s senor linguist. But Mae had come back from her experience with the Quurzod damaged. As she healed, she worked on the communications systems, not on the bridge.
“We can’t go out there yet,” Coop said. “We need to know what we’re facing.”
“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,” Anita said.
Perkins’s 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 nonstandard, unexpected life-form of equal intelligence to humans.
“I don’t know,” Perkins said. “That woman looks weird.”
Perkins’s voice held an edge of panic. She’d felt responsible for the Quurzod disaster, even though the fault didn’t lie with the linguists. She had held up well during the fifteen days in that unrecognizable