Skirmishes (2 page)

And Coop would like to keep it that way.

“Get me the specs on those ships,” he said to Officer Anita Tren.

She was tiny and barely saw over a console. But she could gather information faster than anyone else on his current bridge crew.

“I’ve already been working on it,” Anita said. “We’ve got five warships out there, with five battle cruisers and five larger ships that can either move people and materiel or simply transport passengers. This is a show of force, Coop.”

“I got that,” he said. “But for whom? The Nine Planets? Or is something else happening at this end of the Empire that I don’t know about?”

“We’ve been monitoring the information feeds in the Empire for a while,” said Second Engineer Zaria Diaz. Coop liked having her on the bridge when Yash wasn’t here. Diaz, who was as tiny as Anita Tren, had a talent for finding problems that no one even knew existed yet.

“And?” Coop asked.

“And nothing,” Diaz said. “If they’re here, they’re here for us.”

“Cloaked,” Perkins said. She clearly didn’t understand it.

“They’re trying to sneak into the Nine Planets?” Anita asked.

“I don’t think so,” Coop said. “I think they want to appear before us and scare the crap out of us.”

The bridge crew laughed. He appreciated that too. It had taken a lot to scare his people six years ago. Ever since they came into this strange future universe, they rarely scared at all.

They’d faced the worst, and survived it. He knew that some of them, even now, probably preferred death.

His thoughts rested for a moment on his former first officer, Dix Pompiono, and then he shook it off. Dix had given up. It was one thing to die in battle, another to die by your own hand.

Coop didn’t respect the second choice.

Dix’s choice.

“Shouldn’t we warn them somehow?” Perkins asked.

“Warn them of what?” Coop asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “That we can take them out if we want to. We have superior firepower.”

One on one, Coop’s ships outmatched theirs. Maybe even two or three to one. But two of his ships against fifteen of theirs, ten of them battleships in one way or another? He didn’t want to go through that particular match-up.

“We’re not doing anything unless they cross that border,” Coop said.

And maybe not even then.

He only had pieces of a plan, not an entire plan. He hoped Boss would get back soon.

He hoped she would have answers.

He hoped she would bring back dozens of working ships.

THE DIVE

NOW

TWO

WE SKITTER OUT of foldspace, and I look at the navigation screen on
Nobody’s Business Two.
We have arrived exactly where Yash Zarlengo said we would.

Yash stands beside me, an athletic woman clearly raised in real gravity. Her thick muscles and strong bones make her seem larger than she really is. Or maybe it’s her oversized personality, or the fact that—against all odds—I’ve come to trust her.

I rarely trust anyone. Even though I’m traveling with more than thirty people on the
Two
, I don’t trust most of them. I expect them all to do something wrong. I barely know some of them.

But Yash both built and runs the
anacapa
drive in this ship. I might command the
Two
, but Yash makes sure we survive any trip we take into foldspace—a place that still makes all of us nervous.

We’re not in foldspace now. Now we’re way outside of our sector with no backup whatsoever. We’re the only ship in a vast and mostly empty area of space. There’s a starbase half a day from here, but it’s not a friendly place.

Besides, the last time we were there, we attracted some scavengers who wanted to steal our
anacapa
drive. This time, we’re hoping that those scavengers—indeed, anyone in this sector—aren’t somehow monitoring our arrival.

Because we’re sitting outside the Boneyard.

The Boneyard is the largest ship graveyard I have ever seen. And the sad part about it is that it looks like the majority of the ships inside come from the Fleet. None of us knows how those ships got here, and none of us knows why they’ve been left here.

That’s what my team and I are supposed to find out.

I’ve got my divers. I’ve got Yash. And I’ve got soldiers to protect me, not just from the scavengers, but from anyone else who might be nearby.

I hate traveling with all these people. The
Two
is bigger than my original ship,
Nobody’s Business
, and smaller than Dignity Vessels like the
Ivoire
. But I’ve never traveled in a ship nearing its maximum capacity of passengers, and I hope I never do so again.

I’m a loner, even though I’m running a major corporation now, and like most loners, I truly prefer to be alone.

That’s why wreck diving suits me. Why it has always suited me. I was actually looking forward to this trip until the passenger list grew. Then I realized I was responsible for all of these people in one way or another, and they would be crowding the narrow corridors of the
Two
, and I’ve been annoyed ever since.

Well, not annoyed. Not really. Tense.

Worried.

I can’t tell anyone how very worried I am.

I wipe my hands on the sides of my pants. My palms are actually sweating, which happens to me only when I’m extremely nervous. I like to blame my nerves on the fact that the entire cockpit is filled with people, but that’s not the whole story.

Still, the crowd isn’t helping. The cockpit is built for twelve, and we have fifteen in here, not counting me. Everyone who hasn’t seen the Boneyard wants to see it right away, instead of waiting for the mission brief. We couldn’t fit everyone who hadn’t seen the Boneyard into the cockpit, even though Yash kept inviting more and more, until we’re now squeezed.

She has no real idea how uncomfortable crowds make me. She knows I’m a loner, but she thinks that eccentric, something I turn on and off, like a smile. She doesn’t realize that a lot of people disturb me on principle.

She never had the choice to be alone. She grew up in a society based on crowds. From what I can tell, the Fleet built space into their ships for people to have privacy, but those same people could choose from their childhoods on to be with others, and most did.

The very idea makes me shiver.

Just like standing in this cockpit makes me shiver. There are people behind me that I can’t see, and that drives me crazy.

I could order everyone away, but I don’t. This is a momentous occasion for a lot of the people here, and they really need to see what’s before them.

My divers, on the other hand, aren’t in the cockpit (except for Mikk, who is at the helm). My divers are used to me. They understand my needs and probably share them.

Besides, my divers know they’ll be seeing the Boneyard soon enough.

They’re in the briefing room, studying what little information we got on our previous trip, and waiting for me. We sort of lucked into the decision to keep the divers out of the cockpit. They chose not to come, and the others begged to join us.

Silly me, I didn’t speak up when Yash said yes.

She does want them to see everything. And she really isn’t paying attention to moods. Technically, I should do that. Just one of the many things I’m not suited for as captain of a large ship.

Not that I have the official title of captain, nor is this a large ship. It’s my current diving vessel, and circumstances brought the crowd along with us.

Circumstances and the damn
anacapa
drive.

I keep thinking I’d’ve been calmer if I hadn’t gone into foldspace—if all of us hadn’t gone into foldspace. Foldspace makes everyone nervous—particularly the borrowed crew members from the
Ivoire
.

Foldspace is exactly what it sounds like—at least that’s how everyone explains it to me. They compare foldspace to a fold in a blanket, which tells me they’ve all been briefed the same way as well. They even begin with the same phrase:
foldspace provides a shortcut in space
. Then they expand, using the same example.

Say you want to go from one part of a blanket to another. Rather than travel the entire length of the blanket, you fold it, and both parts touch.

That’s how foldspace works. Plug in the coordinates from where you are and then add the ones from where you’re going, activate the
anacapa
, and it’ll fold space the way that we would fold a blanket.

Only now that I’ve been to foldspace a few times, I know the analogy isn’t quite accurate. We don’t immediately leap from one spot to another. We actually pause in foldspace. We stop there for a minute or two. Each time I’ve done this—which is more than I’ve wanted to—I’ve seen a different star map inside foldspace itself, leading me to believe that foldspace isn’t so much a fold or a shortcut or points on a damn blanket as it is a different place altogether, one with its own stars—and maybe, its own people.

I have not discussed this with Yash. She’s a fantastic engineer who understands more about the
anacapa
drive than anyone else I know. She’s also very no-nonsense, and refuses to talk in hypotheticals unless she believes it will get us somewhere.

I’ve heard her discuss foldspace—mostly to dismiss the nerves that the
Ivoire
crew members still feel. The
Ivoire
got stuck in foldspace for two weeks, and then appeared in our universe, in what had been a familiar place to them.

Only they were five thousand years in their own future.

It’s taken a lot of adjustment for the more than five hundred members of the
Ivoire
’s crew to realize they’re stuck here, in a universe that only seems familiar. Some crew members have killed themselves. Others have left the service altogether.

The remaining ones divide into two rather loose groups: the ones who believe they can return to the Fleet and the past (which most of them still think of as the present) and the ones who have accepted that they now live in what they once considered an unimaginable future.

Yash is one of the realists. She believes that she’s stuck here, in this time period, for the rest of her life. That doesn’t stop her from seeking information about what happened to the Fleet, but it does make her much more willing to take risks here and now. She has also settled in. She looks at the rest of us as colleagues instead of people she will only know briefly.

It’s been more than five years since the
Ivoire
arrived. I think Yash’s perspective is the correct one. But who am I to say? I’ve dealt with the
Ivoire
crew, but I can’t begin to understand the extreme dislocation that they’ve suffered.

Right now, Yash is as nervous as I am. Normally, she would sit at her newly built station as we traveled here from the Lost Souls Corporation deep in the Nine Planets Alliance. But she stood through the foldspace transition just like I did.

But I’m the only one who knows that her nerves came not from being in foldspace like almost everyone else’s on board, but because she wasn’t entirely sure where we’d end up when we emerged from it. And she wasn’t worried that we were going to the past or some unknowable future. She was afraid we’d end up inside the Boneyard itself, maybe on top of, or inside of, a ship.

Even though I had recorded the coordinates the last time we were here—the
only
time we were here—she didn’t believe that I had done so accurately. She spent a lot of time running diagnostics on the
Two’s
entire system, making sure we were being accurate.

She’s a worrier, although everyone says that part of her personality is new. There’s a lot of new to deal with in my team. This is the first time I’ve mixed members of the
Ivoire
with members of my own diving team, and done so without Coop on board. In the past, Coop has always kept his own people in line, and I’ve taken care of mine.

We’ve run joint missions before, usually to great success. I’ve just never done so on a diving mission, which is nothing like anything the crew from the
Ivoire
has ever done.

“Let’s open windows all over the ship,” I say.

Yash looks at me sideways. I don’t give commands in the proper language, at least for the military-trained
Ivoire
team members. Even now, even after knowing me for five years, they still are uncertain when I’m telling them to do something or simply making a suggestion.

I can rephrase, I suppose, but before I do, Yash nods. Joanna Rossetti, another of the
Ivoire
’s best people, nods back. Rossetti is at the helm, partly because she can handle the
anacapa
augmentation on the
Two’s
piloting system with no problem, but also because she is great in any surprise situation. She’s had my back more than once, and I’ve been grateful for it.

She activates the controls that reveal the windows all over the ship.

The ones in the cockpit go from dark to clear, revealing the Boneyard in all its glory.

And glory is the word I mean. I love graveyards. I always have. Even land-based graveyards, which are, if I think about it, disgusting—bodies decaying in dirt, bugs, skin sloughing off bone. I’d rather have my body sent out into deep space, spinning forever in the starlight.

But that’s too irreverent for me to say. I’ve never admitted it to anyone, not even Coop, who has become the closest thing to a confidant that I’ve had in decades.

I certainly won’t tell him that I find the Boneyard beautiful. He looked at it only once—the day we discovered it—and found it terrifying.

All those ships from the Fleet, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, filling an area so large that it’s bigger than some asteroid belts. It might even be the size of a small solar system. We have yet to measure it.

The old spacers who told me about it on the starbase Azzelia a few weeks ago said it was the size of a large moon, but what we have seen shows that they significantly underestimated its size, just like we did when we first saw it.