Skirmishes (20 page)

I’m thrilled to be on this mission, and I didn’t realize it until right now.

Yash, on the other hand, isn’t looking at the bay door rise. She’s staring at the console as if she can will it to become something more sophisticated. Her hand trembles as it rests above the glowing imagery.

“You have a little time,” I say. “You can put your arm down.”

She lets out a small laugh, as if she too didn’t realize what she’s feeling.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve been on a two-person mission,” she says. “I never liked them.”

“I love them,” I say, “but not as much as I like traveling alone.”

“You are much more courageous than I am, Boss,” she says softly. “I prefer having the backing of the entire Fleet behind me. The fact that it’s just the
Ivoire
now makes me feel unprotected and alone.”

I doubt she would have admitted that to me in any other circumstance. I don’t bother to correct her about being alone. I understand what she means. She doesn’t count the Lost Souls because we’re backward by her standards, and even if we weren’t, we’re not her people.

“Then this must be real awkward for you,” I say gently.

“Oh, you have no idea,” she says.

Actually, I probably do, but in reverse. I feel that way whenever the cockpit crowd grows past three or four. When I’m on the
Ivoire
, I feel the pressure of the hundreds of people on the ship with me. And when I’m at Lost Souls, where I now have so many employees that I don’t know the number without looking and couldn’t tell you their names if I tried, I get regular panic attacks.

“With luck, this’ll be short,” I say.

“With luck,” she says, “it won’t.”

I grin at her. She grins back. Then we ease out of the bay, and into space.

THIRTY-ONE

THE BONEYARD LOOMS before us like a gigantic planet. We can’t see around it, over it, or under it. All we can see is a small bit of it, growing before us as we get closer.

The large old portholes on the skip are made of a different kind of material than the windows on the
Two.
Through these portholes, the force field looks like a thin shadow we have to cross.

“You see that?” I ask Yash.

“Yeah,” she says. “I didn’t expect the force field to be visible.”

“Maybe as a warning?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “It shows up on sensors long before you can see it with the naked eye. It must be something in the composition of your ancient windows there.”

This time, she says the word “ancient” with a bit of approval.

We’re taking turns monitoring the sensors and looking at the Boneyard through the portholes. We started doing this without discussing it, but clearly we’re both a bit nervous. We want to see what’s ahead of us—visually, anyway—and we also want to know what, exactly, it is.

What we see—what
I
see—are ships. Ships and parts of ships that seem to extend forever. They are above us and below us and extending to each side of us. They disappear far into the distance in all directions. And they seem stationary, which takes some energy in and of itself to accomplish.

Some details are hard to see with that force field veil over everything. I can see shapes, but not outlines of doors or portholes. I see parts of ships, but I’m not processing what parts.

In fact, it’s hard to focus on the individual ships at all. The Boneyard itself seems like an entity composed of ships. It’s as if I want to concentrate on skin cells whenever I look at a human being. I sometimes see what the skin cells make, like an arm or a face, but I can’t really see each cell clearly.

I keep losing the individual ships to the totality of the Boneyard.

My stomach clenches. The idea of diving ships here now seems impossible. Not because it would be hard—it probably wouldn’t be. It would probably be a lot of fun.

But because there are so many ships.

This is the rest of my life, plus countless lives afterward. This is millions, maybe billions, of people hours, and I’m not sure what the point would be. One person can’t dive the entire Boneyard. Nor can one team.

I swallow hard.

I guess I knew this on some level, but I didn’t
understand
it until now. I want the person beside me to be Coop, not Yash. I want to pull him aside, somewhere private, and say quietly,
Your answers are probably here, but we might never find them—at least not in your lifetime. Whatever you need to know is probably buried in some ship we can’t even see from this vantage point
.

Yash’s hands are shaking. Something is going through her mind as well, but I’m not going to ask what it is. She’s been through a lot, and this trip is making her nervous enough already.

She swallows hard, then says, head down, “I can send a modified signal to that force field, letting it know we’re friendly. That’s my first attempt. Do you still want to go in?”

Either she’s feeling my sudden mood change or she’s become even more hesitant. I’m betting on her hesitation, not my mood.

I’m not one to run from a challenge, particularly a challenge like this. We’re about to enter a diving Mecca, filled with more questions than I’ll ever find answers to.

In some ways, it’s a personal heaven for me.

“Of course I want to go in,” I say.

“Okay,” she says, and taps the console. “Let’s see what this does.”

I know she has several other techniques planned to get us inside the Boneyard, so I don’t expect this one to work.

So I’m as surprised as I can be when the force field clears right before us, creating a small hole in the shadow.

“Oh, my God,” Yash says.

Exactly. Oh, my God, and any other expression of surprise you can think of.

My hands shake as I handle the controls.

As I send the skip inside.

THIRTY-TWO

AHEAD OF US, I send a probe. Decades of caution force me to take that step. I almost didn’t do it, but in the end, I can’t go into the Boneyard without taking the right precautions. I just can’t.

I launch the probe on our trajectory. It moves much faster than we are.

“What the hell is that?” she asks, sounding tense.

“I have to send in a probe.”

She swears in her language. “If this is a typical Fleet outpost, they’ll destroy it and think we’re hostile.”

“Really?” I ask. “Because it has no weaponry at all. It’s just a little informational gadget.”

“The systems here should be automated,” she says. “It’s procedure.”

As if it’s procedure now, instead of five thousand years ago. I say nothing. She’s probably right.

But if she’s right, then even our skip, with its unfamiliar design, might be seen as hostile once it’s inside, and then we’ll get destroyed.

The probe goes inside, and I can’t see it any more. I also don’t see any obvious weapons’ fire.

The hole in the force field remains. The hair rises on the back of my neck. Is this standard procedure for the Boneyard? Does something go in without follow-up from an active ship? Is that how the ships get inside?

Or did something else happen to the probe? Was it destroyed by some kind of weapon I’m not familiar with?

I slow the skip even more, planning to stop it if I can’t figure out what happened to the probe.

Then telemetry starts appearing on a nearby screen. The probe is still working, still active, still unharmed.

I let out a breath I hadn’t even realized I was holding.

The telemetry shows odd energy readings, some spikes, some readings I recognize from
anacapa
fields. It registers dozens of ships in proximity to it, and no active threats.

Yash looks at the readings as well. She glances at me, then shakes her head in silent acceptance.

I speed the skip back up. We’re moving forward once again.

As we approach that hole in the force field, I realize just how large it is. Large enough for more than one Dignity Vessel to go through it. Large enough for a phalanx of Dignity Vessels in military formation to slide in. Large enough to dwarf us and make me feel even smaller than that probe.

I glance at Yash. She’s staring at the looming hole before us, and I can read her expression. She knows, like I know, that this is the last moment in which we can back out.

Then the skip goes inside that hole. The force field thickness is five times the length of the skip. The hole seems to extend forever. We bump a bit as we hit some kind of energy wave, and that makes Yash look back at the equipment.

She touches her screen again. It looks, from here, like she’s sending a confirm signal or modifying something on the skip itself.

I decide to focus on my piloting instead of on what she’s doing. The Boneyard is distraction enough.

We finally leave the hole, and to my relief, it does not close up on us. At least, not immediately.

We have arrived in a small hole between four damaged Dignity Vessels. One has obvious weapons scoring on its underbelly. Another has a large hole leading through the ship to the bridge itself. A third is missing the engineering section, and the last looks just fine, from the outside anyway.

The ships are clearly inactive, and clearly empty.

“There are active
anacapa
drives in here,” Yash says, her voice sounding rusty. “They’re not malfunctioning. They’re on the setting we call ‘off’ even though the drive really isn’t off. It’s more dormant than off.”

I didn’t need the full explanation. I’ve gotten it a dozen times. But I know why she’s telling me this in such complete detail. She doesn’t know what I know and what I don’t. Hell, I don’t know what I know and what I don’t. So it’s better to over explain. I’ll never complain about that.

“Do you think some of these ships are just being stored?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I doubt it. This is not the formation we use to store inactive but viable ships. I think they’re all damaged somehow, but damaged in different ways. I’d like to go in farther and investigate the controls for the force field.”

Suddenly she’s courageous. I have to suppress a smile. She wouldn’t think of it that way. She’s forgotten why we’re here, and how we conduct exploratory missions. How
I
conduct them.

She’s acting like a first-time wreck diver overwhelmed with the sheer awesomeness before her. She wants to discover more and more and more. It’s like a drug high, something that the diver can’t get enough of.

And, like a drug high, it will kill if the diver isn’t very, very careful.

“I know you would,” I say, “but we’re not going to deviate from our mission. We’re going to download as much information as possible in the next ten minutes, and then we’re going back to the
Two
.”

“It won’t hurt to—”

“It will,” I say. “We’ll make some kind of mistake. I know you want to understand what’s going on here, and so do I, but if we do this wrong, we’ll die in here. Right now, this is the only ship that we have that can even enter the Boneyard. No one can rescue us, Yash. Remember?”

She looks at me, shocked, then blinks as color fills her cheeks. She has forgotten. She’s made a rookie mistake, and she’s embarrassed by it.

“Of course you’re right,” she says in her most professional voice. “Let’s get the information and then leave.”

I nod—and we set to work.

THIRTY-THREE

AFTER TEN MINUTES in the Boneyard, I ease the skip back along the exact same trajectory on which we entered. I don’t turn the skip around. I just move the skip backward, not deviating in any way from the path we entered on.

“I’m not done,” Yash says. “You should have told me you wanted to go.”

“I did tell you.” I’ve been through this kind of interaction with dozens of divers. If I weren’t so tense, I would find this very amusing—the highly professional Yash getting lost in a dive. Or the beginnings of a dive, anyway. “We follow the rules.”

“You’re making the rules up as you go,” she says.

“Actually, I’m not,” I say. “These are the rules of any dive you would do with me. I’ve used these rules for years.”

“And you’ve still lost divers,” she snaps.

Her words, meant to push, do not hurt me at all. I have lost divers, and it’s always painful. But I make sure I analyze the reasons why, and do my best not to make same mistake again.

“Yes, I have lost divers,” I say, “but generally not because they’ve broken the rules. It’s been because we encountered something we didn’t expect and didn’t know how to deal with, and not even the rules could save us.”

I let those words hang. Or maybe Yash does, because she doesn’t respond. She watches both the portholes and the console as we retrace our path.

Just as we’re about to enter that hole in the force field, she asks, “You’re not going to retrieve the probe?”

“No,” I say. “I want to know if we can still receive its readings once the force field closes again.”

“It may not close,” she says. “Not unless I give it the signal.”

“Then you’ll give it the signal,” I say. “Because we don’t want to leave the Boneyard open to scavengers.”

“They haven’t shown up,” she says.

“Not yet,” I say. And maybe they won’t appear while we’re here, but I’m back in dive mode. I’m so cautious that it even annoys me. If I can think of something that will go wrong, I will do my best to protect against it.

Yash will come to her senses when we leave the Boneyard. Once she’s away from the temptation. She will realize that cautious is best, and she’ll be appalled at her behavior.

I know Coop would be reprimanding her right about now—if he wasn’t caught up in the Boneyard’s majesty too. And considering how he’s acted when we’ve found abandoned Sector Bases, I think I’m lucky to have Yash at my side and not Coop. Coop is used to taking matters into his own hands, and that makes him hard to control.

Yash is used to following orders.