Skirmishes (8 page)

“Captain,” Anita spoke through his private link. “So far as we can tell, no one has discovered the
Ivoire
. There are a dozen ships quite some distance away, but their sensors are trained outward, not inward. They seem to believe nothing can get past them.”

Coop almost nodded. He’d expected that. It was the kind of mistake an overconfident military made.

“Anita,” he said. “I want you to listen carefully. On my order, I want the
Ivoire
to activate its
anacapa
and vanish for a least six hours. Then, at the same time, I want you to activate the transport’s cloak.”

“Their equipment is sophisticated enough to break through our cloak,” she said.

The woman across from him said, “I don’t believe you.”

For a moment, Coop wasn’t sure what the woman was referring to. He would have to parse it out when he was done with Anita. So he shrugged again.

He said to Anita, “I know they can see through our cloak. I want them to. Because, if they are monitoring the
Ivoire
, and it disappears when the transport disappears, they’ll think the mechanism is the same. They’re not close enough to the
Ivoire
for their equipment to show any difference.”

“Got it,” Anita said.

Beside him, Rossetti chuckled. “I like the way you think, Captain.”

He permitted himself one small smile before answering the woman in front of him. She had said she didn’t believe he was interested in a place of myth. He made sure he was using his easy-going voice again.

“You don’t believe that we were interested in a place called on all maps The Room of Lost Souls? Who could avoid such a place?”

“Anyone with an instinct for self-preservation,” the woman said. As she spoke, the soldiers behind her shifted. Her words seemed to mean more to them than to Coop.

“You keep threatening that something bad will happen,” Coop said. “Are you going to kill us for visiting here?”

“No,” the civilian said. He turned toward the woman. “For God’s sake, Commander, we
need
to talk to these people. There are at least thirty of them and they all have the marker.”

The woman stepped toward the civilian. “You are here on my sufferance. One more word, and I’ll send your people back to the ship.”

“Actually,” the civilian said to her, “you’re here because of me, and you have no right to order me around.”

Such animosity. Apparently the lack of discipline wasn’t the only problem this group of soldiers had.

“Fun as this all is,” Coop said, “it has nothing to do with me or my people. We had no idea we were trespassing, so we’ll leave. Just give us thirty minutes and we’ll be out of your way.”

He hoped thirty minutes was enough time to get Dix out of that room. In fact, he hoped Yash had already gotten him out of there, even though no one had notified Coop that she had been successful.

Then the starbase slipped again. Coop held back a curse. Two of the empire’s soldiers scurried through the door they’d entered from. The others shifted nervously.

“What the hell?” the civilian said as he extended his arms for balance. “That’s new. You’re doing something, aren’t you?”

“Now, Anita,” Coop said to Anita on the private channel. “Have the
Ivoire
and the transport disappear
right now
.”

She acknowledged him.

Then he looked at the woman and the civilian before him and said through his speaker, “What am I doing? I’m talking to you. This place has been moving like that ever since we arrived. We thought it was normal.”

“It’s not normal,” the civilian said. This time, he successfully shook off the soldier holding him. “Commander, they’re clearly doing something in that room. Something important. You know this place has been changing size. I’ll wager that what we’re feeling is something they did. Maybe they’ve been manipulating the Room all along.”

The woman’s head moved back slightly. Anyone else would have thought that the civilian’s words bothered her, but Coop knew better. She had just gotten word that the transport had vanished.

“I think we’re done talking,” she said to Coop. “You’ll all come with us now.”

“Weapons,” Coop said on the private channel to his soldiers. They responded quickly, pointing their laser rifles at the entire group before him.

Her people responded with their weapons out. Coop knew that his people would make it out of a shootout. Hers wouldn’t.

“I don’t think we’re going anywhere,” Coop said to the woman. “I’ve told you our plans. I was very clear. We need thirty minutes to leave this place.”

“Your transport is cloaked,” she said.

“Standard procedure,” he said. “We do that as we power up and prepare to leave. That way no one tracks us because they don’t know our origin point. Don’t you people do the same thing?”

He hoped it sounded plausible. To him, it sounded like the bold-faced lie it was.

“I don’t like what’s happening here,” the woman said. “You’re coming with us and we will remove the rest of your people from here.”

Coop let the contempt he felt into his voice. “I don’t think so. We’ve offered to cooperate. You should take us up on that.”

Her eyebrows went up, and she tilted her head just a little. “Is that a threat?”

He shrugged. He wanted her to see that. “You can take it however you want. I think of it as friendly advice. Two of your soldiers have already left the area. It’s clear that your crew lacks discipline. I watched you for a long time before you even noticed me, and my people have been watching you longer than I have. You can’t get most of your crew out of this entry. Apparently they’re afraid of this Room of Lost Souls, as you call it, and that fear trumps whatever discipline you have.”

Her expression didn’t change, but she moved her head just a little, enough so that he caught it. The civilian behind her looked at all of the soldiers around him as though they had betrayed him. Only the four other civilians looked calm.

Had they been inside this starbase before? Was that why they weren’t afraid?

“Now,” Coop said as reasonably as he could. “You could let us leave of our own accord, or you could try to force us to go with you. I don’t recommend the second.”

Even though it would probably please Boss. It would be an excuse to get rid of these people, to make certain that any knowledge of the
anacapa
ceased to exist.

“Let me go with them,” the civilian said. “I want to see how they got into that room. It’ll be cooperation, and I can make sure they leave.”

Coop felt a moment of irritation. He wanted to leave here with no loss of life, and he had almost been there. They hadn’t seen the
Ivoire
, and they didn’t know where the
anacapa
drive actually was. If this civilian came with them, then the shooting would start.

But he didn’t dare say anything, because if he voted either way, he would influence their decisions.

“Leave the room open,” the woman said.

“Which room?” Coop asked, continuing to play his game with her. He theoretically didn’t know, so he wouldn’t be able to leave the proper door ajar.

“All of them,” she said.

“Fine,” he said.

“No!” the civilian said at the same time.

Coop’s irritation grew. This idiot wanted to die.

“I have to know how they got in,” the civilian said. “If that door closes and we get trapped….”

He let the thought hang, but he didn’t need to. From the woman’s expression, she understood. And, from the half-second look of dislike that flashed across her face, she probably didn’t care if the civilian got trapped in one of those rooms.

For the first time, Coop wondered how many people she had lost to this starbase. He would wager it was quite a few.

“He can tell you how he opened it,” the woman said to the civilian.

“No,” the civilian said. “It’s clearly not easy. If it were, we would have opened it already. We’ve been trying to open that door for
years
.”

Coop sighed silently.

“The price of knowledge,” Rossetti said softly through their private link.

“Let’s hope she says no,” Coop said to Rossetti.

“Fine,” the woman said, even though she clearly thought this a bad idea. “Rigley, Lerner, go with Vilhauser.”

Two of the soldiers moved beside the civilian, who had to be Vilhauser. One of the other civilians turned toward the woman in charge, apparently asking on a private channel if they should go too. She shook her head as she said no, almost as if she couldn’t believe they were questioning her.

Coop smiled again. Civilians. He had often felt a similar annoyance with Boss’s people.

“If your people try anything,” the woman said to Coop. “We will blow up your ship.”

“It’s cloaked,” he said, with fake confidence, hoping that she did indeed mean the transport and not the
Ivoire
.

“And our sensors see right through that cloak. Would you like me to tell you where it is at the moment?”

The transport probably hadn’t moved. He hadn’t given the order for it to leave the starbase yet.

“No need,” he said. “I believe you.”

He also believed she thought she had superior firepower. She acted like someone who knew she had the upper hand.

He would let her continue to believe that. He had a more pressing problem.

Did he take her people hostage and fly them back to Lost Souls? Or did he kill them when his ship left?

He didn’t like either option, but he couldn’t see another that he liked better.

And that bothered him more than he wanted to admit.

NINE

HAD COOP BEEN the commander in charge of the Enterran Empire’s mission here, he would have had his soldiers escort the interlopers off the starbase. The fact that the woman didn’t do that spoke less to her command capabilities than to her uncertainty as to whether or not her people would survive a trip deep into the so-called Room of Lost Souls.

Even though she probably knew that these two soldiers would survive a trip deeper into the base, the soldiers didn’t. He could see it in their rigid posture, the set looks on their faces.

They were good men, young, and probably on an early posting. One of his mentors had called soldiers like this fodder, and Coop didn’t disagree. The difference was that a good captain knew that wars, battles, and situations like this one needed fodder. Any captain who took the loss of such people personally wouldn’t last.

That was why he had called that captain a mentor. Coop had learned a valuable lesson from him. It was another reason that Coop didn’t get to know the junior members of his very large crew well. If he became attached, he didn’t make good decisions.

The woman clearly agreed. She’d sent her people in without a smidgeon of remorse. She had a job to do, and she was doing it as best she could.

The civilian, on the other hand, was so excited that Coop thought he might burn through his oxygen. The civilian literally bounced up the stairs, moving with a rhythm that would normally have suggested that the gravity in his boots was failing. But Yash had turned on the base’s gravity, so what the civilian’s boots did or didn’t do didn’t matter. Still, he was moving quicker than he should—than anyone should with such limited oxygen reserves.

Had the civilian been one of Coop’s, Coop would have cautioned him. But honestly, if the guy died going up these stairs, one problem would be solved.

The empire soldiers moved slower, almost as if they didn’t want to protect this guy. They were doing a poor job of it. They soon found themselves in the middle of Coop’s group, rather than at the front or the back of it. They clearly couldn’t see anything, which he thought just fine. He didn’t care what they could or couldn’t see; he needed his people to keep an eye on them.

“So,” Rossetti asked him on the private channel as they made their way up the stairs. “Are we evacuating?”

“I don’t see any reason to stay,” Coop said, then realized that wasn’t an official answer. He was feeling less and less official as this so-called mission went on. He should have felt more efficient. He had originally designed this mission to return to Captain Jonathon Cooper, and instead, he was getting farther away from that man.

Then he glanced at Rossetti. She flanked him, and gave him a look too. Funny how it bothered him that she couldn’t see him, but it didn’t bother him when others couldn’t see his expression.

“Yes,” he said in his captain’s voice. “We’re evacuating.”

He knew the others in his crew heard this, but he added something for Anita, just to be clear, “Anita, I want you to handle this. We need all non-essential personnel off this base as quickly as possible.”

“I’m not sure what’s essential,” she said.

“Leave the team that’s with me, and everyone else can go,” Coop said. “Yash, did you hear that? Get Dix out of there.”

“Not possible, Captain,” Yash said.

Coop’s stomach clenched. What had Dix done?

“Take him out physically if you have to,” Coop said.

“We’ll be taking the
anacapa
too, then,” she said. “He won’t let it go.”

“We can’t leave it,” Coop said, hoping that Dix was listening in.

“Coop!” Dix had been listening. He sounded drunk, even though Coop knew he wasn’t. “We can recreate the scenario now. Get those Enterran people to hit this thing with one of their weapons as we activate it. That should work.”

“It won’t work, Dix,” Coop said, feeling tired. “A combination of two
anacapas
and a shot from a weapon that no longer exists sent us here. There’s no guarantee that any of that will work on the way back.”

“I think it will,” Dix said.

“You’re evacuating the starbase, Dix,” Coop said. “Whether you want to or not.”

“Fine,” Dix said. “Just make sure someone hits this
anacapa
at the right time.”

Coop put his gloved hand against the wall for a brief moment, and then closed his eyes.

“You all right, Captain?” Rossetti asked.

No, he wasn’t all right. He had made the wrong choice to come here, it had had the wrong effect on him, and now he was going to have to do things he didn’t want to do.