Skirmishes (14 page)

I never dive-trained her. I don’t want an amateur diver coming with me on any dive, not any more. I’ve taken too many tourists. In other words, I’ve done my time with beginners, and I’m not going to train any more beginners unless I absolutely have to.

She waits, so that I have to explain what I mean.

“The four of us take the skip,” I say indicating the others in the room. Elaine gives me a small smile; she’s heard me give a similar speech before. Once nervous and out of her depth, she has come into her own. Some of it is her age—she’s not much younger than I am—and some of it is her experience with me. She knows I’ll win this argument.

Orlando has leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his small frame. He’s the only one built like a wreck-diver—thin and wiry. I used to think him bookish (and he was), but those traits have made him one of my most reliable assistants.

Nyssa is also thin, but she’s not as good a diver as Orlando. She’s become my best dive medic. She has a calm that can’t be faked, an ability to go in and deal with whatever’s gone wrong as if what she’s facing is a normal occurrence instead of something only dive medics see.

Yash looks at the three as if she’s never seen them before. I can read her thoughts as clearly as if she’s spoken them: No one at that table knows how to repair an
anacapa
drive—and the skip’s drive is new and relatively untested.

“You have no idea what you’ll be facing,” she says.

I suppress a smile. She’s not stating the obvious because she thinks we don’t understand. She’s stating it so she doesn’t make a less professional observation.

“I know,” I say.

“There’s no one from the Fleet on this dive team,” she adds.

“I know that as well,” I say.

“Coop wants someone from the Fleet on every dive team,” she says.

There it is. Coop told me that repeatedly before we left, and I repeatedly reminded him that I’m in control of dives, not him.

“Coop’s not here,” I say.

“I wouldn’t have signed on if I thought you were going to disobey him,” Yash says.

“And I wouldn’t have let you sign on if I thought you would forget who is in charge of this mission and who has been in charge from the very beginning.”

Yash tilts her head back in surprise. I’m not sure if she’s surprised at my tone or at her own mistake.

“I don’t agree with you on this,” she says with a little less edge. This is the voice she usually uses to talk with Coop. “You could get trapped in there. You could die.”

She says that with one eye to the others as if she expects them to be surprised by this. They’re not. They’ve heard that speech from me dozens of times. All of my divers have. That’s one of my personal rules: I tell the divers the dangers they’re going to face, and they get to choose the level of their participation.

People who have dived with me a lot have heard the “this could kill you” speech more times than they can remember.

“Better us than the entire
Two
,” I say.

Her lips thin. She turns to the others at the table. “No offense,” she says to them, then turns to me, “but I was talking to you.”

I smile. I’ve heard her give this speech before, primarily to Coop when we were trying to find the Fleet’s old Sector Bases. He truly shouldn’t have been doing what he needed to do—he’s the captain of a large ship that still functions as a traditional vessel.

I run a large corporation, but if I die tomorrow, no one will miss me. Business will go on as usual. I have set it up that way.

“I know the risks I’m taking,” I say.

“I don’t think you do,” she says.

This is beginning to irritate me. “It doesn’t matter what you think. I’m the most experienced diver I know. Not even Mikk has more experience than I do.”

Of course, all of the other divers who were more experienced than me are now dead, but I don’t add that.

“We need experience here. I’m going to run this dive, and I’m doing it my way. If you like, I can take you out of the cockpit and you will have no more responsibilities unless something happens with the
anacapa
.”

Her eyes narrow. “You need me.”

“I need your expertise,” I say. “I have that. You’ve figured out the force field. I’m sure someone else can take it from here—not as well as you—but they can. And they can consult with you if we need something else.”

She shakes her head once as if she can’t believe I proposed such stupidity. I can’t quite believe I said it either. I’m bluffing for the first time in a long time. We do need her, and we need her more than almost anyone else on board the
Two
, except maybe—just maybe—me.

“You may not be able to communicate with us from inside the Boneyard,” she says.

“I know,” I say.

She glances at the others, and I catch a bit of desperation in her that I haven’t seen before. Or maybe, that I haven’t
recognized
before.

“It’s some kind of modified
anacapa
field,” she says. “Time may operate differently in there.”

Part of me wishes she hasn’t said that out loud. I understood it from the moment she told me how the force field operates. But I’m also glad she said it, because now the dive team knows.

They know the true risk.

Time might go faster for us, so we’ll look outside the Boneyard, see the
Two
, then watch it disappear in a matter of seconds, even though the ship might have waited for weeks. We might come out in the future, just like the
Ivoire
did.

Or we might never come out, forced to remain in that Boneyard until our food runs out. Then we die.

Those are just two of the risks we’re taking. The skip might get torn apart by the
anacapa
forces, or there might be a defensive weapon inside the Boneyard that will attack us the moment we breach the force field. The ships themselves might hold dangers we haven’t even suspected.

I look at Orlando, Nyssa, and Elaine. “You know you don’t have to go,” I say.

Orlando chuckles, as if he has expected this. Elaine’s smile grows.

“And miss the adventure?” Nyssa asks. “Are you kidding me?”

Yash frowns at them. She thinks them too flip. But I know that what I’m hearing is more than bravado.

Diving becomes a part of you. For some of us, the greater the risk, the more enjoyable the dive—particularly if we survive it with no casualties and no serious problems.

That’s where I’ll have my issues. I’ve lived with regrets—too many mistakes on my part, too many serious problems. Too many deaths—and those regrets can color my command.

I don’t want the regrets to have any place here.

As with all of my dives, I accept that I might die here.

I’ll do everything I can to make sure that no one else does.

TWENTY

THE
ANACAPA
DRIVE in the cockpit of the skip hides in a black box near the command console. There’s no other place for something that large.

The problem is that the skip is small, compared to the
Two
. Compared to most ships, really. I still think of the skip as big, but that’s only because it has two rooms, separated by a galley kitchen. My first skip had only the cockpit area and another smaller area for cooking—although on that skip, cooking wasn’t recommended.

I have to be careful not to trip over the
anacapa
. I’m not used to it being there, and even though Yash marked it with a lot of yellow warning stickers, I still fail to see it at times. I’ve bruised my shins on it more than I care to think about.

I’m flying the skip. That’s the other reason I’m going on this first mission; I want to be the first pilot to use this skip’s
anacapa
drive while we’re away from the Lost Souls. If something goes wrong, it’s all on me.

I know that something can go wrong with the
anacapa
, and not just because the
Ivoire
had trouble with theirs. The technical staff on the
Ivoire
balked for years at putting an
anacapa
drive into anything smaller than a Dignity Vessel.

The extra Fleet ships that are small and travel inside the
Ivoire
don’t have an
anacapa
. That includes two-man fighters and troop transports. There are a few leisure ships as well, small things for the officers to use, and they have no
anacapa,
either.

When I first requested an
anacapa
for the
Two,
Coop stonewalled me. Then he listened. And finally, months later, he had me talk with his engineering staff, who looked shocked at the very idea.

They all believe that the
anacapa
, even a small one like the one in the skip, is too powerful for most ships.

I suspect they’re right. But we’ve tested this
anacapa
several times, and it seems to work well. Just like the
anacapa
in the
Two
works well.

Still, Yash joins me on the skip to watch me input the coordinates for the blank space inside the Boneyard. She wants to make sure everything works correctly.

She hangs around an extra minute or two, until I pointedly thank her. She still wants me to invite her on this mission, and I will not do so, no matter how hard she tries to get me to change my mind.

Orlando boards already partially suited up. We have new diving suits, courtesy of the
Ivoire’s
technicians and the training they’ve given the engineers at the Lost Souls. Because of the things we’ve learned, we’ve modified a lot of our equipment—from environmental suits to weapons to our food-prep stations.

We’ve changed and patented more things in the last five years than I ever could have imagined. But we’ve stayed away from anything that even touches on
anacapa
technology. We don’t want some brilliant engineer inside the Empire to stumble on an oddity in our design and then use it to create something powerful, like an Empire-based
anacapa
drive.

Orlando straps into his seat, the rest of his special diving suit waiting beside the airlock. He assumes he’s going with me into whatever darkness we decide to explore.

I’m not sure I’m leaving the skip on the first dive. I’m the only good pilot we have on this short trip. All of my other pilots, the really good ones who are not Fleet-based, do not have the marker. I’m not going to risk them, not yet.

So I’ll probably stay behind with Nyssa, but I haven’t said anything. We don’t make diving assignments until we reach our first location.

Nyssa brings a lot of medical equipment as well as her suit. She’s prepared for all eventualities, which I greatly appreciate. I have seen more strange medical emergencies on dives than I have on anything else, including the one military mission Coop and I went on together.

I shudder thinking of that. People died on that mission.

“You okay, Boss?” Elaine asks me. She hasn’t suited up. She doesn’t do so unless she knows she’s going to dive. She’s one of the divers who has learned she’s most comfortable wearing nothing but her suit, but she doesn’t like wearing her suit in a normal environment.

That’s the only part of her which shows how late her training started. The rest of us can wear our suits all the time.

But we all have problems. Even though I’m the best diver in the group, I’m prone to the gids—breathing too much, using up too much oxygen. I get excited or nervous or just too focused to pay attention to my breathing and my oxygen usage.

I need someone on the skip to monitor that for me, particularly on any dive I take after a long layoff. After a few days of diving, my gids go away. But I’m a dangerous diver in the beginning.

Elaine doesn’t get the gids. If anything, she’s too cautious. But that caution makes her someone you always want at your side, no matter what you’re doing. She’ll think the problem through and then take appropriate action.

I find it amazing whenever I consider the fact that she’s only been diving a little over five years.

Some people take to it right away, some—like Elaine—learn it solidly and slowly, and most everyone else can’t manage much more than a tourist dive.

“I want everyone strapped in before we go,” I say.

I ostentatiously strap myself into the pilot’s chair to prove my point. Normally, we don’t strap in when we use the
anacapa
. It almost takes longer to attach the strap than it does to go through foldspace to our destination.

But I have no idea what’s going to happen, and I’d rather have us locked in than floating unconscious around a damaged cockpit. I know of a lot of people who would have survived an accident if they’d only been strapped to their seats.

No one complains. They all strap down. Nyssa gives me a curious look, as if she doesn’t entirely understand it, but she says nothing.

I go through the safety checks twice, then I separate the skip from the
Two.
I can almost feel Yash in the
Two
’s cockpit, staring at the skip and wishing she were on board.

Or maybe she’s staring at it, praying that we’re not as foolish as she thinks we are.

I move the skip far from the
Two
, but away from the Boneyard. Apparently I don’t entirely trust Yash either, or maybe, more accurately, the
anacapa
that she built. I’m worried that it’ll malfunction in the wrong place, and take others with it.

That’s why I didn’t use the skip’s
anacapa
drive inside the
Two
. An
anacapa
can be activated anywhere. It doesn’t have backwash or sonic squeals or other problems that regular ship drives do. The
anacapa
makes a little sound, slides a few places, and then—suddenly—we’re in foldspace.

But if we come back at the wrong coordinates, or if the
Two
has moved even slightly from its original position because of drift or inattentiveness, we could appear half inside the
Two
and half outside, breaking us apart or doing the same thing to the
Two
.