Skirmishes (28 page)

Haunting and beautiful, like the Boneyard itself.

I have to force myself to shut down the exterior sound and turn the comm back on. Through it, I hear Yash, “What the hell was that?”

“The sound of the Boneyard,” I say, a bit startled that she could hear it. “You might want to get the skip’s audio system to record that.”

“I never even thought of doing that,” she mutters. “And how come you shut off your comm?”

“Accident,” I lie.

Orlando leans his head out from his position at the end of the line. He doesn’t buy that excuse for a moment. He grins at me, then nods me forward.

I slowed us just a bit, so now I move more quickly, getting to the door within nine minutes instead of the eleven of the first dive.

Denby arrives beside me. He’s got firm instructions. He waits beside the door’s hidden exterior control panel. He’ll jump in, if the door doesn’t open right away.

I use the sensors in my gloves’ fingertips to find the door’s latch. Yash assures me that this model Dignity Vessel still has a latch that can be accessed from the exterior. Too many incidents, apparently, of repair crews getting stranded or other problems getting into this part of the ship. Later, redundant entries were built in, but for now, this ship has an old-fashioned finger trigger that can be activated by someone on the outside.

That someone, though, won’t get through the airlock without help from a control panel, a password, or permission from someone on the inside.

And, of course, our scans show that there is no one on the inside.

The latch feels rough against the tip of my glove. The suit itself warns that I might snag it if I’m not careful.

I pull my hand back, turn on my headlamp, and peer at the latch. It looks broken, but I’m not certain. I’ve only seen the specs Yash brought with us, and none of them are from actual ships, only from ship designs.

I send the image back to her.

“Broken,” she says.

I nod, even though she can’t see me. By now, Orlando has reached me. He runs his hand along the edge as well, looking for backup. Elaine is on Denby’s far side, preparing to help him with the control mechanism.

“You’re on,” I say to Denby.

He doesn’t have to be told twice. He pulls open the control panel with an ease that surprises me. The panel itself looks dead, but Yash assures me that there’s a touch-backup here, one that works without any kind of power running through the ship. Apparently, most Dignity Vessels have that sort of reinforcement. The key is finding it.

As he works the panel, I frown. The key isn’t just finding the reinforcement; the key is working on a ship that is new enough to have its redundant systems work. The first Dignity Vessel I ever found had been empty and floating in our space for five thousand years. It had centuries’ worth of damage, maybe millennia’s worth. I don’t know exactly, because I lost that ship to the Empire.

The others we’ve captured all have serious aging issues.

The only ship I’ve ever seen that seems—is?—relatively new is the
Ivoire
herself. Because she is, in her own lifespan, maybe fifty years old.

I place my gloved hand flat on the side of Ship One, like I had done with the
Ivoire
when I first found her. I want to make sure I get all kinds of readings here, from composition to age to rate of decay.

The look of this ship bothers me, and I can’t quite express why.

“She doesn’t open automatically,” Denby says. “And she’s rejecting my personal code.”

He doesn’t sound discouraged. That’s something I love about the
Ivoire
crew. If they have an emotional reaction to setbacks, they generally don’t show it.

“I’m going to try a system backup code now,” he says.

The system backup codes are given only to ship leaders throughout the Fleet. Occasionally, those codes get revamped, generally when the areas that use the code are considered too far away to ever need the old code again. For a few years, there’s code overlap, and then the new code takes its place.

The one thing Yash doesn’t know, the one thing she never asked Coop, is whether or not the older codes remain in the system, so that someone sent via
anacapa
drive to old (or new) places has the ability to get into a ship if need be.

I want to hold my breath as Denby works. I do bite my lower lip. But I also concentrate on inhaling and exhaling—slowly, so I don’t get the gids.

“Got it,” he says.

I look at the door, expecting it to slide open the way that the
Ivoire’s
door does. But it doesn’t. It jerks just a centimeter or so, then stops.

I let out a small breath when the door jerks again, then slowly slides to the left. Halfway across, it sticks.

We all stare at it for a moment, as if we can’t believe what we’ve just seen.

Then I reach in and shove on the door, trying to loosen it again.

“You want me to try the code again?” Denby asks.

“I want you to find what has it jammed,” Orlando says, and there’s no way to know if he’s joking. I suspect he’s not.

Normally, I would give him a harsh look, but Denby is so straight-laced that he doesn’t seem to notice. He’s still looking at me.

“Don’t bother,” I say. “We can fit through this.”

I run my gloved hand along the edge of the door to make sure there are no other sharp edges. I’m not feeling any, and the gloves haven’t warned me of any.

I turn, peer inside the airlock, with my headlamp on.

The airlock’s interior door is open.

My breath catches. For a moment, I wonder what kind of crisis caused that door to stay open—did someone die in the airlock?—and then I realize that the ship was deliberately stored that way.

The door itself is a barrier. Two doors and an airlock might’ve proven too difficult for anyone to get through, especially if they needed to quickly.

Of course, I’m assuming, guessing, which is something I always do on dives. Something not entirely necessary here.

“Yash,” I say through the comm. “Is it Fleet policy to leave airlock interior doors open on decommissioned ships?”

“Decommissioned?” Orlando asks. I know he understands the term. But I seem to have confused him.

Good thing I hadn’t addressed the question to him.

“Of course,” Yash says. “But the other part of a decommissioning procedure is to take all of the valuable and proprietary tech out of the bridge and engineering.”

She sounds disappointed, and I have to admit, her statement disappoints me too.

Then I realize she’s also assuming. She’s assuming that the Fleet did a standard decommission on this ship. What if they had a different policy for Fleet ships in the Boneyard?

I don’t ask her that. We’d be guessing and wasting time.

Instead, I cling to the side of the door and look at my team.

“You guys ready to go inside?” I ask.

Elaine grins like a crazy woman. “Are you kidding me? Of course.”

Orlando’s smiling too.

But Denby remains by the control panel. He’s not looking happy. “Maybe I should stay here.”

In his tone, I hear the same fear I’ve heard from Yash, from all the other
Ivoire
crew members. A fear of what they’ll discover, of what their discoveries will confirm.

“We’ll need you inside,” I say. I hope. I have no idea if we’ll make it to the bridge in the forty minutes left in our dive—thirty, if you count how long it will take us to return to the skip.

“But, if something goes wrong with the door….” he says, and deliberately lets his voice trail off.

“If something goes wrong with the door,” I say, “then someone from the skip will come over and deal with it.”

Or not. Depending on how long we’ve been inside, and what actually did go wrong.

If everyone inside the skip has reason to believe we’re dead, no one will come after us.

But I don’t think that’s what Denby’s thinking of at the moment. I think he’s just realized he’s about to go into a dark and empty space ship, with only a thin suit between him and disaster.

I think he’s just realized that something could go horribly wrong in there—and that something isn’t just a discovery of some awful past. It might also be something he can’t get out of.

Every diver encounters this moment early in his diving career. What he does at that moment determines if he will remain a diver or if he will give it up at the first opportunity.

I can cajole Denby through a handful of dives. But I can’t convince him to make diving his life’s work—even with the Boneyard all around us.

He gives me a funny smile, relieved and sheepish and terrified all at the same time.

“Do we go in with same order as we took the line?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I say.

Which means that I get to go first.

FORTY-SIX

I SLIP INSIDE the airlock. It’s dark, spacious, and somewhat familiar. It looks like the
Ivoire’s
airlock if the doors were open, the gravity off, and the ship sideways. My headlamp makes one small yellow circle in the darkness. I turn on my glove lights as well. I’m the first one inside; I have to make it as light for my companions as possible without blinding them.

I use the interior door as the next handhold. I’ve also turned on the marking function inside my gloves. It’s an old habit of mine, but a good one: I make sure we all use the same handholds, the same stops, the same path, by marking each.

That way, only one of us damages something inadvertently. The others know where to avoid it. Or, conversely, we all know where the safe handholds are, and we can proceed accordingly from one dive to the next.

Ahead, I can see vague outlines in the intact corridor. We’re at a side door, not the door into one of the cargo bays like I had initially thought on our first dive.

Yash had shown me a map of all the entrances on the
Ivoire
and similar ships. She knew, from the location of this one, that it was more of a maintenance door than one the crew generally used. She prepared me for the corridor, and showed me a map so I had it in my memory, as well as one in my suit’s memory, so that I can compare.

I’m glad she’s done so. It makes the dive easier, if a bit less dramatic.

The others crowd into the airlock. I move into the corridor.

The suit records my time on this mission at twenty-one minutes.

“Yash, you able to hear me?” I ask.

It takes a moment before she responds, just long enough for my heart to stutter with worry.

“What time does your suit’s internal clock show?” she asks.

“Twenty-two minutes, ten seconds,” I say. I can see Orlando nodding near me.

“I had twenty-two nine,” she says. “Is that enough of a discrepancy to abort?”

Probably. I don’t know. I don’t care. It’s fascinating in here.

“Not yet,” I say. “Keep pinging us.”

“Will do,” she says. “With that second loss, you need to come back a little early.”

I understand what she means. She wants us to return on time, and to plan for losing precious minutes inside this ship.

It’s probably sensible, and I can’t ignore every sensible suggestion someone makes. The me who runs dives from the skip would get irritated at me the diver in charge if I did that.

“Got it.” I beckon the others. I don’t know how far we’ll get inside the ship. If Yash’s map is accurate, then we’re a long distance from the bridge, but not that far from engineering. The
anacapa
drive is somewhere in between.

As Denby comes out of the airlock, he glances at the ship’s door.

“It’s still open,” he reports as he reaches my side. I guess he believes I’m worried. I’m not. I’ve been in much worse situations. We have a lot of oxygen, a backup ship, and probably two dozen other ways out.

Elaine says nothing as she joins us. She carefully puts her hands where mine have been. She has only a general light on around her suit, making sure that we can see her, but not something that will distract us from what we’re doing.

“This is frighteningly familiar,” Orlando says as he reaches the group. “It seems we’ve been here before.”

Denby looks at him in shock, but I don’t.

“The practice dives,” Elaine whispers to Denby to clarify.

We did a few in some of the half-restored Dignity Vessels at Lost Souls. We shut off the environmental systems and practiced wreck-diving techniques. It felt fake to me, but apparently not to Orlando and some of the others.

Although Denby hadn’t noticed the comparisons.

Of course, Denby lived on the
Ivoire
, so a Dignity Vessel probably always feels familiar to him.

“Where to?” Denby asks me. He hasn’t forgotten that I asked him to lead us once we were inside.

I check my suit’s timer. Twenty-five minutes. We only have five more before I have to order us to retrace our steps.

“I think we need to see the
anacapa
first,” I say. Besides, the closer we get to it, the more we’ll know about whether or not it’s malfunctioning.

“We won’t get there in five minutes,” he says.

“Well, let’s get part of the way there,” I say, gently reminding him that we’re mapping—or at least confirming the Dignity Vessel map—with each trip.

He nods and moves forward, hands shaking a little as he follows protocol, going from one good handhold to another.

As we go deeper inside, I can see some things are different from a working Dignity Vessel like the
Ivoire
. The corridor has no decorations, but I don’t know if that’s normal for a decommissioned ship or if the lack of power has something to do with it or if some ships never have corridor decorations. Some of the back corridors on the
Ivoire
now depict images of the long-lost Fleet life. Others display very abstract art. I believe both are ways to cope with the changes, but Coop tells me that the ship’s crew has always divided itself into realistic, representational, and abstract factions.

Some of the corridor’s doors stand open, others remain closed, and I can’t see any pattern in it. I’ll check with Yash when we return. She might know.