Skirmishes (5 page)

He didn’t tell her to get her approval. He told her as a matter of courtesy.

He just didn’t expect her reaction.

He hadn’t expected it at all.

“No,” Boss had said when he told her his plan. “You can’t do this.”

They were inside her office. The Lost Souls Corporation had bought a space station in the Nine Planets Alliance. The station housed two former Fleet ships for study, and parts of several others that had been discovered over the years.

Boss’s office was large. It had three separate spaces—a huge entrance area with separate seating groups, a private area where Boss spent most of her time alone, and a conference room that was even larger than the main area.

Boss met with everyone in the entrance area. No one went into the private area. Boss was the ultimate loner, and she was still getting used to running a corporation. Sometimes Coop wondered how she had ever managed to command a ship—even a small ship. All that time with people had to wear her down.

She sat on the couch, frowning at him. She wasn’t pretty—she was too thin for that—but she was athletic, with close-cropped hair and the graceful movements of someone comfortable in her own body.

He found her exceptionally attractive, and he tried to ignore it. If he were back in his own time, he might act on it—he rarely met someone his equal whom he was attracted to who wasn’t also part of the Fleet—but here, he didn’t know if he was just being needy and lonely, in search of a distraction and a bit of human contact.

Still, he touched her too much, casually in conversations, and usually she touched him back.

On this day, though, she didn’t. Her eyes had become steely and her mouth was in a thin line. Her arms were crossed.

“You can’t do this, Coop,” she repeated.

He almost said, like a child,
I can do whatever I want
.

Instead, he said, “You told me that the Room of Lost Souls has been a danger to everyone who comes near it for its entire history. It clearly has a malfunctioning
anacapa
drive. My people can shut it down. Then we’ll come back.”

She shook her head. “You don’t understand what could go wrong.”

He felt a flare of anger. Of course he understood. He understood better than she did. She had no connection to the technology, and while he couldn’t fix it himself, he knew more about the
anacapa
than she and her people ever would.

“I’m just telling you this as a courtesy,” he said. “We’ll do what we need to do.”

“Coop.” She leaned forward and touched his knee, as if she needed to get his attention. She
had
his full attention, so she didn’t need to touch him.

And for the first time since he’d met her, her touch irritated him.

“You’ll need our maps,” she said.

“I know where the Room of Lost Souls is,” he said. “It was our starbase, remember. It hasn’t moved.”

“You don’t know that,” she said. “It doesn’t behave the way we expect it to.”

“We can find it,” he said.

He was shaking. The mission meant more to him than he wanted to say. He needed something to do. He had to feel useful, instead of like a charity case.
Look at that man. He used to be the captain in a legendary fleet. Now he doesn’t understand anything. He just lives off the goodwill of others, and dreams of a home he’ll never find.

He shook the thought away.

“That’s not what I’m worried about,” she said. “The Room of Lost Souls is deep in Enterran space.”

“I’m not at war with your empire,” he snapped.

“I know.” She was using a tone he’d never heard her use before. It was the tone that people used with a child or a sick person or someone incapable of understanding a certain concept. “But we don’t want the Empire to know that Dignity Vessels actually work.”

He hated that term, Dignity Vessel. She promised not to use it, but she lapsed all the time. The Fleet hadn’t used the term Dignity Vessel in generations (well, thousands of years if he started counting from now). The term grated, showed her ignorance, and made him feel even more out of place.

“The Empire won’t know. We’re not flying in and flying out,” Coop said. “We’re using our
anacapa
. We’ll arrive near Starbase Kappa and then we’ll shut off the starbase’s
anacapa
and return. We’ll be gone a day at most.”

“And if an Empire ship is there?” she asked.

“You said that the place is uninhabited,” Coop said.

“I said that regular ships don’t stop. They heed the warning. But the Empire has been running experiments in stealth tech, and knew years ago about the Room of Lost Souls. I’m sure they’re still running experiments there.”

Coop shook his head. “The technology at Starbase Kappa is ours. It has killed how many of your people?”

“I don’t know,” Boss said tightly. Her arms were crossed again, and she was leaning back on that couch.

“You’ve lost some people there,” he said.

She took a deep breath. “My mother and one of my closest friends died in that Room. They didn’t have the genetic marker that allows people to work inside your stealth technology.”

“It’s not—”

“I know,” she said. “It’s not stealth technology, and you don’t fly a Dignity Vessel. Old habits die hard, Coop. And you know what I mean. You’re picking nits so that we don’t deal with what’s really going on.”

Now he crossed his arms. “What, in your opinion, is really going on?”

“You need something to do. You have a ship and no mission. It’s not natural for you.”

She saw him more clearly than anyone else ever had. Maybe that was why he was attracted to her.

Or maybe he just showed his emotions more these days, and anyone could have made that deduction.

“This is not a fruitless mission,” he said with a bit more passion than he planned.

“No, it’s not,” she said. “Eventually, we’ll have to deal with the
anacapa
on your starbase. But right now, everyone in the sector knows that the Room of Lost Souls is dangerous. It’s an approach-at-your-own-risk site. Most ships don’t land there. So there’s nothing pressing about going.”

“Yes, there is,” he said.

She sighed. “Coop—”

“You’re right. My ship is in need of a mission. But it’s not just me. It’s my crew. They’re going crazy here. They’re getting trapped in all of their losses and feeling as if they have no future. We need—I need—to remind them who they are and what they can do. I need them to become a
crew
again, Boss, not just some people who ended up five thousand years in the future.”

She closed her eyes and tilted her head back. She was thinking about his point, clearly. Then she shook her head slightly, as if she had been arguing with herself, and finally she sighed.

She opened her eyes, brought her head down, and scowled at him.

“I don’t like this mission. Can’t we find something else for you to do?”

“We’re not children,” Coop said. “We don’t need to be entertained.”

“That’s not my point,” she said. “My point is—”

“That’s exactly your point. I need my crew on a real mission, one any ship in the Fleet would take. The trip to Starbase Kappa is such a mission. We know that our tech is malfunctioning and killing people. We have to stop that. It’s a real mission with a real objective, and it won’t take a lot of time. It’ll shore up some rusty skills and it’ll get my team working together again. It benefits all of us.”

“The Empire—”

“I don’t care about your empire,” he said. “If a ship shows up and threatens us, we’ll destroy it. But if the starbase is as isolated as you say, that probably won’t happen.”

“The Empire can’t know that stealth tech works,” she said. “And I used the term deliberately. Because that’s what they call your device.”

“They won’t know,” Coop said. “How could they? Even if they see us appear, they won’t know that the drive did it.”

“And then they’ll send the information to their headquarters and it won’t matter if you destroy their ship. They will have seen a Dignity Vessel appear out of nowhere, and they’ll see the so-called stealth tech in action.”

“The ship will appear near a place of superstition, a place that some of your people believe is haunted. Surely the sighting will be discounted.”

He sounded a bit desperate even to himself. He didn’t want to, but he wasn’t giving up this mission.

She ran a hand over her forehead. Then she sighed again. “Lord knows, I’ve taken a lot of risks in my time.”

He knew, with that sentence, that he had convinced her. But he wasn’t going to interrupt her.

“And you’ll go whether I approve your mission or not.”

“It’s not your job to approve—”

“I know, Coop.” She sounded tired. “I’m not the boss of you.”

She echoed their arguments about her name. He smiled.

“No, you’re not,” he said gently. “But I would like your help on this. Your maps, your experience, anything you can tell me.”

She nodded. The anger seemed to be gone, but she was clearly disappointed.

“Promise me that if the Empire shows up—”

“I’ll make sure they never inform anyone about us or the starbase or the
anacapa
drive.”

“Thank you,” she said softly.

But he knew she didn’t believe he could keep that promise—and he wasn’t entirely sure he understood why.

SIX

COOP AND YASH went down two levels to what had once been the heart of Starbase Kappa. A year ago, in his personal timeline, he’d come to this starbase with one of his closest friends and occasional lover, Victoria Sabin. They’d stayed in a fancy suite, had fantastic meals, and seen old friends.

Now he returned to a place abandoned and malfunctioning, filled with the ghosts of people who had died here recently because something had gone wrong with Starbase Kappa’s
anacapa
.

At least, that was what he could tell from Boss’s stories.

The Fleet always placed the
anacapa
controls in the most protected area, whether the
anacapa
was on a starbase or on a spaceship. According to the map that Boss had made four years ago, the
anacapa
section of the base was now near the edge of the base, levels below what Boss’s people called The Room of Lost Souls.

The Room of Lost Souls was an actual room, on what looked, to the uninitiated, like the entry level of Starbase Kappa. If a ship docked, its crew would find the room relatively quickly. People had died there.

The
anacapa
was in a protected space that butted up against the floor of the Room of Lost Souls. What the actual room had been in the base’s prime was one of many recreation areas that could be shut down or expanded if the operational facilities inside the starbase needed expansion.

The
anacapa
control room had been locked and guarded with some of the standard shutdown procedures that the Fleet used. Generally, when the Fleet decommissioned a starbase, it used the starbase’s
anacapa
to move the base to a different sector of space. Then the Fleet engineers disassembled the starbase and used the parts that were still good or viable for a new starbase or a sector base.

The Fleet never wasted anything, which was one of the things that made Starbase Kappa so very odd.

It shouldn’t have been here.

And it certainly shouldn’t have been here after five thousand years.

The
anacapa
room had a double door system. The outer doors stood open only because Dix and his crew had left them that way for a rapid escape. The inner door remained closed because there was no way to prop it open. Regulations didn’t allow it.

Some of the materials inside any
anacapa
area were different than the rest of the starbase. They were stronger, and provided protection against
anacapa
malfunctions.

Until this past year, Coop had had limited experience with
anacapa
malfunctions. Now they seemed to be the story of his life.

Although, the fact that the
anacapa
functioned at all after five thousand years had given him hope—a misplaced hope, or so Lalliki and Yash told him, but hope all the same. He knew that the
Ivoire’s
arrival in this time and place had a lot to do with the vagaries of two different
anacapa
s, malfunctioning in two different ways (or maybe several different ways), but part of him hoped that the malfunctions could be recreated in a lab.

His public policy was to act as if he would never leave this time period, but his personal hope was that someday he and his crew would find a way back to their time period, a way that would enable them to rejoin their friends and family and the familiarity of the Fleet.

Because right now, he felt like he was haunting his own life.

Dix’s team had disabled the identification panels to enter the inner door. They had reported to Coop on that.

So he just had to push open the door and step inside.

He did, Yash on his heels.

The interior of the
anacapa
room was brightly lit and still filled with equipment, which surprised him, even though Dix had mentioned that when the team arrived.

Still, Coop did not expect to see viewing stations, a landing platform large enough for a warship in trouble, and all sorts of engineering equipment still intact.

He also didn’t expect to see the
anacapa
, extending from its housing in the floor, and Dix reaching into the casing, his arms inside all the way to his shoulders.

Layla Lalliki turned toward Coop. She was tall and thin, and even though he could barely see her face through the environmental suit visor that protected her pasty skin, he got the sense that she felt out of her element.

Lalliki flapped her arms helplessly, a movement that no one comfortable in zero-g would ever use. But Coop understood it: she didn’t outrank Dix, and what he was doing disturbed her. She wanted him to stop.

The three
anacapa
experts stood around Dix, clutching the repair tools. Coop didn’t know these members of his crew very well, and he certainly didn’t know them by what he could identify now, which was height and build. There was a short roundish one, another short thin one, and a taller one with shoulders so broad that Coop would guess that he was male.