Boneyards (2 page)

“I'll be fine,” he says flatly.

Stone is oblivious to his power. Stone is oblivious to a lot of human interaction. It is both her weakness and her strength.

“You don't decide what rocks do,” she says. “They decide. No matter what happens, Captain, the natural environment will triumph over the human spirit every single time.”

He does not argue with her the way a lesser person would. He was raised in space; he knows that human will cannot conquer everything.

But in this instance, it does not matter to him. I can see it in the set of his jaw, the look in his eye.

Mikk, one of my divers, who has come down here not to dive or explore (since this trip is truly informational), but for muscle in case something horrible does happen, gives me a sideways look. I can read Mikk's expressions after decades of working with him.

He wants me to step in and settle the conflict between Coop and Stone.

Technically, I should step in. But I suspect there will be a lot of interpersonal battles on this trip, and I am not going to risk my authority arbitrating a fight I will lose.

Stone is right, of course: Coop should not go in there. But Coop has spent the last five years coping with loss and change that would devastate most people. I am not sure he cares if the rocks slip and he gets crushed.

“You do realize,” I say softly to him, “that if you're back there and injured we might not be able to help you.”

He gives me the same withering look he gave Stone. He realizes it, and as I suspected, he doesn't care.

“You have my permission to abandon me for the sake of the mission,” he says.

The words have just enough sarcasm to anger me. But I don't let that out. He's baiting me when he's really angry at Stone for treating him like an idiot.

“What are you trying to find back there?” I ask, pretending like his previous words don't matter to me at all.

“Evidence,” he says.

“That's what the prolonged investigation is for,” Stone says.

“I don't want to have a prolonged investigation if we can settle this in a few minutes,” he says in a tone that vibrates with frustration.

They have had this argument before, clearly not in my presence, and they still haven't settled it.

Now Yash is the one to give me the sideways look, but not before Stone starts down the argument's familiar road.

“You can't determine what happened from guesswork,” she says, not trying to hide her frustration either. “Sometimes I think you don't understand what five thousand years really means in terms of the toll it takes on everything from buildings to mountains.”

Her words echo in the rock-strewn space, and then she blanches. She has just realized what she has said.

“Captain, I'm sorry—”

“No, you're not,” he says. “I'm going in there.”

And then, he stomps into the small corridor made by those rocks.

I curse silently. I had asked what he was looking for so that I would have an idea of how long he would be back there. I want to know if we're going to need to worry. It's a simple precaution we use on space dives—timing everything, giving limits because they ensure that the diver remains focused on the task at hand.

I take a deep breath to calm myself. Of course, Coop will stay focused on the task at hand. He's the one who has been focused on this mission from the very beginning.

Still, reflexively, I glance at my watch, then move to the mouth of that corridor. Stone grabs my arm and moves me back a dozen centimeters.

“I don't want you to get hurt if those rocks fall,” she says quietly.

She seems resigned. Maybe, like me, she has always known he would go in there and that there would be little we could do to stop him.

I want her to reassure me that he will be all right. I want her to tell me that ground accidents are rare. I want her to say that we're not silly for letting him go alone.

But I know she will say none of those things. I wouldn't say them if we were on a real dive.

Instead, I beckon Yash to my side. “Let me see those schematics,” I say.

She taps the pad, zooming in on the part of the room that she believes we're standing in.

Just like I thought, we're near the back of the gigantic room, not too far from the doors that open onto the apartments and the storage areas.

If, of course, the Fleet built Sector Base W according to these schematics and didn't change the design as they worked on the site. Yash, who was raised
on a sector base to a family of technology specialists, says that often the design will change as the engineers discover problems inside the base's location.

She often discusses a base she apprenticed on, a base that had to make all kinds of alterations because the presence of methane threatened the entire build.

“What's he looking for?” I ask her.

She shrugs, but I recognize her expression. She knows. And she's not willing to tell me.

She assumes everything is confidential. Coop is still her commander, and she operates as if everything he tells her is under the seal of that command.

I don't have that attitude. Coop and I have had a lot of go-rounds since we met, many of them over who is in charge. It took me months to get him to call me Boss, which is what everyone calls me. I don't acknowledge my so-called “real” name, not because I dislike it or even because my father was the one to christen me with it, but because that name no longer applies to me.

It hasn't applied to me for decades.

Coop finally gave in one afternoon over coffee. He shook his head, and said to me,
I can't avoid your name forever. I have to call you something. I'll just pretend “Boss” is your given name. After all, it's not like I'm using that word in my native language.

His native language, our joint linguists have figured out, is one of the parents of my language. Even the language has twisted and altered over five thousand years, so much so that when we first met, we couldn't speak to each other.

I know Stone's accusation is a false one: perhaps more than the rest of us, Coop knows how long five thousand years is. He deals with it every single day.

And just when I think he has the knowledge—and the feelings it engenders—under control, he does something like this.

W
e crowd around the opening in the rock pile, which is probably not the smartest thing we can do. But Stone and I are standing only about a meter away, and when Yash joined us, it became an unspoken invitation for everyone else to join us.

Mikk turns on the wrist lights on his environmental suit, lights that can imitate bright flares, and he aims them at the opening. He looks, to the casual observer, like an insecure man flexing his muscles. Mikk already has more obvious muscles than most people I know—something that has come in handy in more than one crisis situation.

“I don't need any damn light,” Coop says from not too far away, but he doesn't ask Mikk to turn them off. Coop is still surly from the power struggle with Stone, and is probably regretting his impulsive decision to go in there without inspecting the area first.

He's usually a lot more cautious than this. His uncharacteristic impatience is a testament to how long he's waited to come here, how much he has given up these last few years.

“Do you need a damn tiny person?” Rossetti asks in a tone that would have bordered on insubordination if she had been on the
Ivoire.

To my relief, a chuckle floats out of that opening.

“Probably,” he says, sounding a lot more like himself. “But there's no sense in risking you. I'm almost there.”

I move a little closer and look inside that pile of rock. I can see Coop, outlined in the light from Mikk's suit. Coop is crouching as he makes his way through, turning from side to side to avoid outcroppings of rock.

He really is too big to be inside that opening, but he's going to go through with this now—not out of stubbornness, but because there's something he needs to know for himself, and it's not enough to have someone else tell him. He needs to see it in person.

I've only seen Coop act this way one other time before, and that was the day we joined forces. The
Ivoire
had been trapped for weeks, first in foldspace and then in Sector Base V, and Coop couldn't quite believe what all the evidence was telling him. I think he hoped, deep down, that I was lying to him, that the evidence was lying to him, that he had ended up at the wrong base in the right time period rather than the right base in the wrong time period.

Whatever his motivation, he nearly got everyone on my team arrested for treason by the Enterran Empire. Only some quick thinking and even quicker action on his part and mine saved all of our hides.

I hope his impulsiveness now doesn't cause another emergency. I've been inside rock fall only once before, and I hated it. I'd rather die in the vacuum of space than be crushed underground by a pile of rock.

He slips around a corner, and I can no longer see his entire frame. Now I only catch glimpses of him as he moves along.

At least he's moving carefully, and so far we haven't heard much from within, not even the tinkle of a falling pebble.

Yash holds the pad out as if staring at the schematics will help. Rossetti has moved even closer. Mikk still stands with his arms raised. Stone has her arms crossed, and she glares at the interior of that opening.

She doesn't understand why I let Coop go, why I didn't rebuke him. We all know he would have listened to me, however reluctantly.

But I understand, maybe better than anyone else on my team, what he's going through. He's been remarkably patient so far.

He has waited years for this moment.

I don't know if I could have waited that long.

Coop spent his first year upon arrival at Lost Souls learning. He learned our language; he learned a broad general history of the sector; he learned our customs. He also spent the rest of his time dealing with his own crew.

The shock of moving so far forward in time devastated everyone. Some coped by resigning their commissions and leaving the Fleet altogether, claiming they never wanted to experience travel under an
anacapa
drive again. Others worked even harder on maintaining the
Ivoire
, shoring up discipline and acting like the ship would rejoin the Fleet. Still others offered to work for the Lost Souls Corporation, helping us with scientific research.

And a few, a hopeless despondent few, found ways to take their own lives.

Those people, including Coop's first officer, Dix Pompiono, challenged everything the crew of the
Ivoire
knew and believed about themselves. The members of the Fleet don't give up, Coop kept saying to me, even though their own history, by his own account, belied that.

The Fleet simply had methods of dealing with those who could no longer travel, and were no longer up to the rigors of military life aboard such a ship. The team always had the option of remaining planetside at any planet they visited, or they could leave their ship and volunteer for duty in a different ship. They could join other cultures, or become ground crew at sector bases or leave the Fleet altogether, at any point.

But the handful who died believed themselves trapped here, in a way that Coop didn't entirely understand. For Coop, rejoining whatever remains of the Fleet five thousand years out is like rejoining family. Many of the others believe the same thing.

Those who died, however, knew they would never see family and friends again, and couldn't cope with that loss. So they imposed yet another loss on the survivors of the time shift, a loss that made Coop angrier than anything else.

“He's been out of visual range for a long time,” Mikk says softly to me.

I glance at my watch. At least fifteen minutes have passed since I last saw him through the gaps in the rocks.

“You want to send someone in?” Mikk asks, which means he's saying, in Mikk-speak, that he's volunteering to go inside because he believes it crucial.

“Not yet,” I say.

The rocks haven't fallen. We would have heard it. But I've talked to Stone enough about the risks to know that Coop could be in danger even if the rocks haven't fallen. He could be stuck in a tight area, one he wedged himself into and now can't get himself out of.

“The amount of time that has passed is relatively insignificant, given what he's trying to do,” Stone says, letting us know that she overheard us and that she should be the one making the decisions on what happens next.

“We're not sure exactly what it is he's trying to do,” Mikk says.

“He wants to see if shutdown procedures were followed,” Yash says.

I look at her in surprise. She hasn't been willing to answer that question until now. I can't tell if she's speaking up at the moment because she's worried about Coop or because she's tired of our arguments.

“Even if he finds your equipment, which I don't think he will,” Stone says in her snottiest tone, “he won't be able to tell how it was shut down.”

“You don't know our equipment,” Yash says in an equally snotty tone.

“I do know that in an undisturbed environment it can survive,” Stone says. She was with us at Sector Base V, even though she was never allowed inside. “But this environment has been open to the elements for a very long time.”

“Yeah, I know,” Yash says dismissively. “He does too.”

I look at her. She knows even more than she's saying. But I don't ask. I figure it'll all play out shortly.

I move closer to the opening. I don't see him any longer. This time, Stone doesn't try to stop me.

Mikk glances at me, still worried. I shrug. Stone says we're going to wait, so we'll wait.