Skirmishes (4 page)

I trust him.

“Boss,” he says, maybe sensing that only part of my attention is on him. “We can count.”

I shrug. “I guess you could. But I’m not sure if it’s worth our while. I’m not sure if we’ll be accurate. It looks like there’s a lot of parts in that Boneyard. And I don’t want us using any equipment that will interfere with Yash’s work.”

Yash has the important job. She needs to figure out what that force field is made of and whether or not we can breach it. We can use the
anacapa
to go inside the Boneyard, but if the force field is active inside as well, then we might encounter a problem. Differing energy fields might interact and create problems like we once encountered with the malfunctioning
anacapas,
or the fields might repel each other.

Plus we don’t know what the force field will do to our skip or to the
Two
herself. Or to our diving equipment.

And then there’s the matter of the ships inside the force field. They might still have active
anacapa
drives as well.

Yash and I have gone through countless possibilities, and I know she’s gone through even more than I have, because at a certain point, my brain just turned to mush.

I figure we need to know what we’re facing, and then we deal with it.

It’s Yash’s job to get enough details so that we will know whether or not we can move forward.

“Well, Yash,” I say. “Can we do this?”

“You can count all you want,” she says to Mikk, or maybe she’s speaking to me. She thinks I’m asking about figuring out how many ships are inside the Boneyard. I was referring to the Boneyard herself.

I let Yash continue.

She’s looking at Mikk as she gives the rest of the instructions. “Just don’t use sensors on that force field. Take images from the outside, then have the computers count or something. I think it would be better, though, if you can actually verify how big this damn Boneyard is.”

She sounds distracted. She doesn’t care what we all do, as long as we leave her alone to finish her job.

I’m not sure how far along she is on this job.

“How many people do you need to work on the force field?” I ask quietly.

She glances at me. “I’m going to do it alone to start. I’ve brought a good team. They’ll back me up.”

I nod. I know better than to ask her how long this will take. Her answer would sound like an answer I would give the crew: It’ll take how long it takes.

Even though Coop wants answers yesterday, and even though we need more ships for our upcoming fight with the Empire, I’m trying to run this trip the way I would have run a dive in the old days: We’ll be here until we’re done.

I find that exciting. And liberating. And frightening.

Because I haven’t lived like a diver in nearly a decade. I’m out of practice.

And I know I have to get my head on straight before I can lead a team inside that Boneyard. I have to think like a diver, not like a corporate executive or a woman who’s worried about a war with a much larger power.

I have to think like the old Boss, and I haven’t been her for a long, long time.

THE FIRST SKIRMISH

ABOUT FOUR YEARS EARLIER

FOUR

STARBASE KAPPA SLIPPED. Coop knew no other way to describe the feeling. The entire base had shifted just a little.

He put out a gloved hand and braced himself. He stood inside what once had been the control room, although on starbases, the Fleet called these rooms headquarters, probably because back in the dark, dark ages, long before Coop was born, the Fleet allowed strangers to stay in the bases.

Not any longer. Well, that was obvious. But in Coop’s memory, the Fleet hadn’t allowed strangers on starbases.

He turned toward Yash.

She stood near one of the control panels, a pile of tools scattered on a small built-in table to her side. She had managed to turn on the gravity the moment the team arrived, but she hadn’t been able to get the atmosphere to work. The team needed environmental suits to explore the interior. Hers clung to her like a second skin. The visor half-hid her face.

“You feel that?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said, and she didn’t sound happy.

They both understood why. That slipping feeling was unique: it generally happened on a ship when an
anacapa
drive kicked in. Only they weren’t on a ship. They were on an old abandoned starbase, one that had caused problems in this sector for hundreds of years, if the stories Coop had heard could be believed.

The base had its own
anacapa
. All of the Fleet’s bases had had one. If the base had been abandoned, the
anacapa
should have been shut down.

This one hadn’t been. It was active and probably malfunctioning. That was one of the problems Coop’s team was here to address.

He activated the comm in his environmental suit.

“Dix, did you do something to the
anacapa
?” he asked.

Coop’s first officer, Dix Pompiono, had taken a small team into what had been the very center of the starbase to disable and remove the
anacapa
.

Coop didn’t get an answer, which, a year ago, he would have thought odd. But for the past several months, ever since the
Ivoire
got separated from the Fleet, Dix’s behavior had become increasingly erratic.

Initially, Coop had decided not to bring Dix on this mission. Then, in the last few weeks, Dix seemed like his old self. He’d even grown upbeat, something Coop hadn’t thought he’d ever see again.

He’d been relieved, figuring his first officer had returned from whatever personal hell he’d assigned himself to.

Only now a prickly feeling on the back of Coop’s neck made him wonder if Dix had deliberately misled him. Coop had had enough problems recently; he didn’t need more. And Dix’s emotional decline had been something Coop simply didn’t want to accept.

“Dix?” Coop said again. Then he looked at Yash. “You want to try?”

“He hasn’t answered for the last few minutes,” she said, sounding annoyed and worried at the same time.

Coop bit back a harsh response. He needed his team to communicate with him, particularly here, on this empty base. But he didn’t want to repeat the question. Not yet.

He was on edge. He’d been on that edge for months now, ever since the
Ivoire
got stuck. A man could live with extreme stress well in the beginning, but seven months in, it didn’t just become tedious, it also became exhausting.

Plus, he was trying to focus on too many things at once. He had mentally declared his personal future off limits, but his past wasn’t pretty, either. He had thought this trip to Starbase Kappa would help with the
Ivoire’s
new reality, but now he wasn’t so sure.

That slight slip happened again. Coop braced his other hand against the wall. He was standing near a control panel he’d had to pry open. The controls had deteriorated. This room had suffered at least a thousand years of neglect, maybe more.

He still had trouble wrapping his mind around the time shifts he and his crew had been subjected to. He knew that others—like Dix—had even more difficulty.

“Dix,” Coop said again. “I need to hear from you
now
.”

“Captain.” The voice that came through the comm didn’t belong to Dix. Instead, it belonged to Layla Lalliki, the
Ivoire
’s chief science officer. She had gone with Dix into the
anacapa
control room, along with three
anacapa
specialists.

Coop didn’t like hearing her instead of Dix. “I need Dix, Layla.”

“Yeah, I know,” she said. “And I need you here now, sir. Right now.”

He finally understood what he was hearing in her voice. Controlled panic.

He glanced over at Yash. She had frozen in place.

“What’s going on?” he asked Lalliki.

“Something you need to see, sir,” Lalliki said. “I can’t describe it. Please, sir.”

Yash continued to stare at him, or at least he thought she did. The visors on the environmental suits were difficult for someone not wearing the suit to see through, unless the wearer activated an interior light. Usually, the opaqueness played to his crew’s advantage.

Right now, though, he felt like ordering everyone to turn on that interior light. He wanted to see faces, nuances, emotions.

And that told him he was as nervous as his crew was.

“Do you need someone to stay in here with you?” he asked Yash.

She shook her head. “This can wait. I’m going with you.”

And somehow, her matter-of-fact tone made his panic rise. He had to struggle to beat it back. She knew, like he knew, that he had made a mistake.

He shouldn’t have brought Dix on this mission.

Maybe the
Ivoire
shouldn’t have come on this mission at all.

FIVE

SHE
HAD TOLD HIM not to come, and he hadn’t listened.

Her people called her Boss. She refused to tell him her real name. He was the captain of his own ship, a man who had only that as his identity now, and very little else. He wasn’t going to call anyone Boss.

He had told her that, and it hadn’t made any difference. She still hadn’t shared her real name with him.

So he compromised.

The word “Boss” was in a different language—or rather, in the language his language had evolved into over thousands of years—and so he called her by that foreign word when he needed to use a name for her.

But mentally, he just called her “she.”

She had been the first person he had seen when his ship arrived in this strange new future. She had been investigating his ship, stunned that it had suddenly appeared deep within a mountainside.

He’d been stunned too; the ship’s coordinates told him the
anacapa
drive had brought the
Ivoire
to Sector Base V, but the space he was in didn’t look like Sector Base V. Instead, it looked like an abandoned sector base from decades before.

Later, he learned that the
anacapa
had malfunctioned, bringing him and his crew five thousand years into their future. The language was different, once-familiar planets were different, everything was different except for the people. People remained the same, complicated, emotional creatures who believed they knew everything and secretly feared they knew nothing.

This situation, as he sometimes called it, exacerbated that fear among his crew. And if someone had asked him before the trip into the future had happened how his crew would have handled it, he would have said,
Any crew in the Fleet would cope easily. We’re always moving to new places. We have no stable homes, no set environment. We have no historic roots tied to planets or lifestyles. We would be fine
.

And he would have been wrong.

Because he hadn’t realized that by coming five thousand years into the future, they had left their true home behind. The Fleet itself had become a legend with no names attached, just a mythical group of ships that came into an area, fixed it (or meddled, depending on the story), and then left. Many people now believed that the Fleet was a comforting children’s story, that no group of ships like that had ever existed.

One of the first things Boss had said to him when she could talk freely to him—after he acquired enough of her language to talk with her—was how startled she was to see someone from the Fleet and how vindicated she felt. All of her life, she had argued that the Fleet was real, and now she had proof.

Not that she could show anyone.

This future that the
Ivoire
found itself in had a generations-long conflict between a large rapacious government and a group of rebels. But to be honest, almost every new situation the Fleet found itself in—and that was a lot of situations over the years of Coop’s life—involved a large rapacious government and a group of rebels.

Once he had tried to tell Boss how common this was, but she wouldn’t hear it. She claimed the Empire she battled was “evil” and the rebels “good.”

She usually saw shades of gray when it came to the personal level, but on that universal scale, she was purely black and white. No empire could be as bad as the Enterran Empire (even though he had seen many that were far worse) and no rebels had tougher odds against them (even though he knew of many rebel movements that didn’t make it through a year, let alone generations).

These rebels, whom she had more or less allied herself with, had joined forces into something they called the Nine Planets Alliance, which, Coop could have told Boss if she had been willing to listen, would someday be someone else’s evil government, needing rebellion against.

But the Nine Planets Alliance had provided him a home, and for that he was grateful. That home was really Boss’s. She had started a corporation that she called The Lost Souls, and she used it to rehabilitate Fleet ships and to study what she called stealth technology.

What she was studying was actually the
anacapa
technology of the Fleet. The
anacapa
technology did so much more than provide stealth capability. The fact that Boss was meddling with it—and would continue to meddle with it, without knowing what it was—was one of the reasons Coop had decided to speak with her in the first place.

Eventually, they had become allies. But she didn’t run him or his crew. He took care of the
Ivoire
, and he made sure the distance between Boss’s people and his remained clear. She could command the people in Lost Souls, but he commanded the
Ivoire
and everyone on her.

Boss understood that very, very well. She supported it.

So six months into his life in the future, when he finally decided on his first mission in this new place with his crew, he told Boss his plans to go to Starbase Kappa, which she called The Room of Lost Souls. She’d had an epiphany there, which was why she named her corporation after the place.