Skirmishes (25 page)

Which is odd, considering I still
felt
like I had the gids.

I flag this and plan to mention it to Nyssa. I’m the only diver we have with information on dives like this that goes back years. Orlando and Elaine dove lots of strange situations, but rarely dangerous wrecks in space.

I wish we had more information. There’s something here that’s bothering me, something I haven’t consciously recognized.

But what I have learned is that my subconscious often offers up answers long before my conscious brain is aware of the question.

I dress, eat a little something else, then gather all the materials that I need for this meeting.

Then I leave, feeling a bit more apprehensive than I expected.

FORTY

THE DIVE TEAM and Mikk wait for me in the conference room. Mikk is great at interpreting data, plus I want him to run the dives when I can’t.
If
I can’t. I’m not sure he can run the dives either, given what’s going on with those energy fields, but I need the security of some kind of backup.

He sits in the far corner of the room, apparently trying to be invisible. It appears to be working; Yash doesn’t seem to notice him at all. She sits at the head of the conference table, not because she’s taking over control, but because she’s still filtering through information.

I hand my personal readings to Nyssa. I know she doesn’t have the past history.

“Compare these for me, would you?” I ask. “See what you can find.”

She nods, looking a bit confused.

In fact, my words stop everyone and make them glance at me. I realize I haven’t spoken a greeting, but neither have they. We all look a bit tired and withdrawn, instead of adrenaline-filled and excited like we had been a few hours before.

If I hadn’t seen this after every single major dive of my career, I would have been worried. I’m rather surprised Yash isn’t, until I realize that she glanced up for only an instant.

She’s deep inside the screens again.

“Yash,” I say. “You have something?”

“When it fits into the review,” she says, not looking up.

Normally, if this were an isolated dive team without the Fleet backup, I would pick on Yash, force her to focus on the discussion, and get her under my complete command/control.

But I don’t need to do that here. She’s not going to dive for days, maybe a week or more, and I have plenty of time to rope her in.

Instead, we review. We talk about timing, and how the technical aspects of the dive went. We focus on Denby quite a bit because he’s new, and he needs to know exactly how he did—good and bad.

Mostly, I see good. I have no qualms about keeping him on my dive team. I’ve seen excellent divers who start out with a terrible first dive. Most divers improve after their first dive, and Denby’s was nearly spotless. I try not to have high hopes for him.

It’s hard.

About thirty minutes in, we finish. That’s when I turn my attention back to Yash.

“So,” I say, moving my hand toward her so that she can see it next to the screens, “what has your attention?”

“That line,” she says, and it takes me a moment to follow. She means the line attaching the skip to Ship One, rather than some line in the conversation.

“It bothered me too,” I say. “It shouldn’t have wobbled.”

“It didn’t wobble,” she says, and that has my full attention.

“It
looked
like it wobbled,” I say.

“But it was steady when I put my hand on it,” Elaine said. “So the wobble was long gone after you guys went through your dive.”

It was steady when I put my gloved hand on it as well, even though I didn’t say that. Instead, I look at Orlando. He is the only other one with enough experience to know when a line feels off.

“Felt fine to me too, but I know what Boss is saying.” His hair needs a comb, and he has deep circles under his eyes. The adrenaline rush always leaves him drained. Once, after a long series of dives, I worried that he was sick. Instead, it was just the way his body handled the stress. “I remember that when I reached for it, I worried that it wasn’t secure.”

“Because your eyes told you otherwise?” Denby asks. He sounds nervous. Maybe his default tone is nervousness, because he’s not acting nervous.

“Did yours?” Orlando asks him.

Denby opens his mouth, then closes it tightly, and shrugs. “I don’t have enough experience to trust any of my senses out there,” he says.

“You need to,” Mikk says from the far side of the table. Three heads turn toward him. Yash still acts like no one else is in the room. Everyone else seems to have just remembered Mikk is there. “Sometimes your senses are all you have out there.”

“I’m still learning,” Denby says, but in a tone I recognize. It’s an
agree-with-the-leader
tone, not a tone actually filled with agreement.

“Clearly,” Mikk says, and leans back. He’s watching Yash too.

“The line
did
wobble,” Yash says. She raises her head and looks at me. She seems to know what I’m about to say because she adds, “When I said earlier that it didn’t wobble, I meant that it didn’t wobble because something from the outside impacted it, like a wave in an ocean or a breeze in the air. It wobbled because of the way it was released.”

I frown. I don’t want to have communication issues here. I want to understand everything she means, which means I have to focus.

“What happened is that we sent a command through the equipment from the controls inside the skip. That command went through the skip’s internal equipment to the equipment controlling the line. That equipment operated just fine
until
the little hatch opened and the line started to leave the ship. Then something had an impact, not on the line, but on the commands coming from the skip.”

“We were hacked?” Orlando asks.

“No,” she says. “Those energy signatures that we see, they have an impact on some things. Not on the line, because it’s a physical object. It doesn’t have any engine of its own, no nanotechnology, nothing that makes it anything other than a line. But the equipment that sent it out has its own energy readings, and that equipment also interacts with the skip.”

“And,” I say, “apparently it interacts with the energy signatures inside the Boneyard.”

“‘Interact’ is too strong a word,” Yash says. “I am more willing to say that the energy signatures had some kind of microscopic impact on the equipment, enough to send the line out at two different speeds and with a slight error in its target.”

We’re all leaning toward her. She doesn’t even notice.

“What’s fascinating to me,” she says, “is that it started out on the correct course at the right speed, but the second that hatch opened, the speed and trajectory changed ever so slightly. It created the wobble.”

“It also wobbled on the way back,” I say.

“Because it was being pulled by the same equipment,” Yash says. “And the same interaction occurred as it was being withdrawn.”

I let out a small sigh. I glance at Nyssa. She raises her eyebrows at me. I should confess right now that there’s something odd in my readings, but I’m not going to. I don’t want to have my own rules bench me.

What I do say is this:

“We need to make sure there’s nothing odd about the readings from our suits. And we should check the voice prints to see if our voices were distorted, or if there was a millisecond of difference between the moment Yash told me that fifteen minutes were up and the moment I received the message.”

“You’re thinking this has a physical impact on us?” Elaine asks.

I shrug. “Not on us, necessarily, but on our equipment, and that includes our suits. We have to be able to trust the readings.”

“That’s what I’m thinking,” Yash says.

“Then we’ll need to study this before we send anyone out again,” Mikk says.

The voice of reason. The reason I’ve brought him here. He’s not addicted to the dive, so his stomach doesn’t clench at the very thought of delaying.

But the rest of us look stricken.

“Can’t we keep going?” Denby asks. “There’s so much to learn.”

Like Yash, he feels the press of time—
all
of time: now, his future, and five-thousand lost years.

“We’ve just gotten started,” Orlando says. “I’m not behind waiting.”

“It’s not a vote,” I say. Because if it were, waiting would lose. Everyone wants to keep going, to go through the risk, the adventure. “We do this as safely as we can.”

“We
are
,” Orlando says.

I smile at him. I understand how he feels. “I know,” I say. “We’re going to continue doing that.”

I turn to Yash, who isn’t as focused on the screens before her as she was. She’s clearly listening to this conversation with half an ear.

“How long will it take you to figure out if these energy signatures pose some kind of threat?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” she says. “You might be asking the impossible.”

She heard the scientific question—
when can you explain the phenomenon?
—when I was asking a practical question—
how soon before your best guess allows us to dive safely again?

So I ask that question.

“Oh,” she says. “I’m going to need to check the readings on all systems. Maybe we can calibrate something.”

She glances at Mikk whose expression doesn’t change. It’s as if she’s asking him for permission to do this right.

“I can’t promise complete safety,” she says to him.

“I’m not asking for complete safety,” I say, directing her attention back to me. “I’m asking for an assurance that we’re not diving into a disaster.”

“You know I can’t give that,” Yash says.

“But you can tell me if we can make tweaks that will let us trust our equipment.”

“Not with certainty,” Yash says.

“We’re in space,” I say. “It comes with a guaranteed amount of risk. I want to know if, all things being equal, we can dive the Boneyard with the same level of safety we dive the area around Lost Souls.”

“No, of course not,” Yash says. “Expecting that—”

“We have a good bunch of engineers here,” Denby says, ignoring his superior officer. I mentally cheer him for that. “I think we can figure out some things in a few days.”

“That’s not your call, Denby,” Yash says.

“Actually,” I say, “here, it is. He’s part of the dive team. He knows what we need and what we don’t.”

“He’s already said he’s in a hurry,” Yash says.

“We all are,” I say. “Which is why I’m putting Mikk in charge of the scientific side of this dive. He’ll be the one to determine when we can dive again.”

I do this in part to keep me out of it. I also do it because this meeting has convinced me of something I’m not telling anyone—at least not yet.

I’m convinced that those who lack the genetic marker cannot dive the Boneyard. And that includes Mikk.

“He doesn’t know anything about science,” Yash blurts.

Mikk grins, then he shrugs. He’s playing the ignorant, which used to irritate me. I finally figured out how smart he is, and I’ve trusted that ever since.

But he’s got Yash fooled.

“Oh,” he says calmly. “I know enough to help with this dive.”

“I beg to differ,” Yash says.

“It won’t make any difference. Mikk will clear us for the next trip.” Then I give him a stern look. “I want to dive this within the week.”

“I hope to get you there within a day,” he says.

I smile at him. I miss him on this dive. It’ll be nice to have him as part of it, however small.

“Good,” I say, and work hard not to add,
The sooner the better
. Because I don’t want him to know how addicted to this dive I’ve become. I’ll deal with that myself.

Even though I can feel those ships out there, their history locked inside them, knowledge I have no idea even exists waiting for me to discover it.

I make myself look away from him. I make eye contact with every member of the team, and then I say—as much to myself as to them, “Let’s get some rest. This might be the last chance we have to prepare for a difficult week. Let’s take advantage of it.”

They nod, and leave one by one.

Mikk waits until they go.

“This is no different from any other dive,” he says, and in that sentence, I know he’s seen right through me.

“Oh, Mikk,” I say. “We can say that all we want. But we both know that’s not true. There’s so much—”

“And it’s been here for a long time. It’ll wait.”

“I suppose it will,” I say. “But I don’t want to.”

“I know,” he says. “I also know that’s why you brought me in. To make sure you follow the rules and stay hooked to the line.”

“You know me too well,” I say.

He grins. “Thank God,” he says.

THE THIRD SKIRMISH

NOW

FORTY-ONE

COOP STOOD NEAR his captain’s chair, trying to ignore the odd feeling in his stomach. His bridge crew was working quickly, seeing if they could find confirmation of his assumption that the imperial ships planned an attack on Lost Souls.

He had a secondary realization, one that worried him deeply. His rescue fantasy—the idea that Boss would come to the border with dozens of Fleet ships—had become a nightmare. Because he’d been thinking about it and he realized that if she returned soon, she would return to Lost Souls.

She would arrive at Lost Souls at the same moment the Empire’s ships attacked. They’d think the Fleet vessels had a full crew and active weapons systems.

The Empire’s ships would go after the Fleet ships first, and would destroy all of them.

“More chatter, sir,” Perkins said. “A lot is happening through their comm system, not all of it verbal.”

He forced himself to concentrate on what was happening now, not what he imagined might happen. Even without Boss there, the arrival of imperial ships at Lost Souls could be a complete disaster.