Skirmishes (15 page)

I’m not willing to risk it.

When we get a safe distance from the
Two
, I turn in my seat and look at my crew. Elaine clings to her strap as if it offends her. Orlando leans back in his chair, ready to be taken on an adventure. Nyssa’s gaze meets mine, and she nods just once, silent permission to get this mission underway.

“Here we go,” I say, and activate the
anacapa
.

The skip slips slightly, that funny, tiny bump that says the
anacapa
has been activated. Normally, the slip feels almost like the group has tripped on a rug together, or the attitude controls have gone out on the ship just for a second before the pilot rights it.

This time, that slight slip feels bigger, more of a tilt. I attribute that to my imagination. I’ve been heavily focused on the
anacapa
, and worried about it, so of course I’m going to feel this particular slip much more than I normally would.

Or so I tell myself.

The sensors on the skip darken. The screens on the control panel go black for just a moment, and then they’re back, registering yet another star map that I don’t recognize. I hit “capture” so that the skip’s console records everything, not just the telemetry it receives, and then I brace myself for that move out of foldspace.

Which comes almost immediately. Another slip, a bump, a shake—and blackness. This time, all of our equipment goes dark.

My stomach turns. I’m holding my breath. Dammit, I actually thought that this would work. Then I wonder if that’s what everyone thinks when they’re about to die.

The ship settles, but I see nothing.

I turn toward my divers. Nyssa’s eyes are wide. Orlando is sitting up, trying to keep a calm expression on his face. Elaine looks terrified.

Then the
anacapa
slips again, and we’re back in foldspace. The sensors come back online, the screens activate, and I see that same star map—at least I think it’s the same star map—before we slip again.

The skip bobbles. My heart is pounding.

The equipment is still running, the screens showing me the Boneyard. From the outside.

With the
Two
beside us.

This time, I don’t trust the equipment. I know what happened to the
Ivoire
. I know that we don’t understand exactly what we’re playing with.

I know things can (have?) gone wrong.

I clear the skip’s windows and look outside the vessel with my own two eyes.

Yes, the Boneyard is ahead of us, the
Two
to our right, just like it was when we left, moments ago. At least I hope it was moments. We were in foldspace twice.

I have no idea how long we were gone—as measured by the
Two
, anyway.

“What just happened?” Elaine asks.

I let out a small breath. We’re back, anyway. We didn’t die. That’s something, at least.

But we didn’t get into the Boneyard either.

“Boss?” She sounds panicked now. “What happened?”

I shake my head. “I wish to hell I knew.”

TWENTY-ONE

HERE’S WHAT WE KNOW: we know that our first attempt at getting into the Boneyard didn’t work. We also know that there was one unbelievably scary moment in that trip where everything went black.

We know that is the moment when we should have arrived in the Boneyard.

The rest is all theory.

Yash and I have hashed out this theory in constant meetings. We’ve experimented with the skip, taking it out together, just me and her, some distance away from the Boneyard, and then activating the
anacapa
. The
anacapa
works fine away from the Boneyard.

On our journeys in the skip, we’ve gone into foldspace and then come out of foldspace at the new coordinates—which are never in the Boneyard or near the Boneyard.

Yash believes the Boneyard repelled us somehow. I think our
anacapa
malfunctioned. But the real key here is that neither of us knows what happened at all.

We’re guessing.

The readings we got didn’t help either. Nothing is helping.

Yash seems ready to pull out her hair.

Me, I’m not willing to go through that again. I think I’m pretty adventurous, but upon reflection, I realized I’m adventurous only with certain things.

Like wreck diving. I’ll take all kinds of chances when I go into a wreck—sometimes alone—in darkness and emptiness. I
like
those chances.

But the thought of being stuck nowhere in a small skip with three other people, none of whom really knows how to work the device that will get us home, well, that has me spooked beyond belief.

I think of it now, after we’ve gone through the experience, and I wonder if we even should have tried it.

Which brings me to this moment:

Yash and I in the
Two
’s conference room, again.

We’ve picked the conference room because we can pace. We can shout at each other if we have to. And we have all of the equipment in there along with some privacy settings so that we can double-check our assumptions—those assumptions that are double-checkable, of course.

Yash looks haggard. Her hair falls around her face, and her eyes are sunken. I might have to order her to eat, if I can figure out a way to do it.

This is the first indication that I’ve had as to how very important this mission is to her. Apparently, she has some secret hopes as well. She wants to know what’s in that Boneyard more than anybody.

She flops into one of the chairs. “The Boneyard’s force field is defeating me,” she says.

Yeah, it is. But I don’t say that out loud. I’ve said it before, and it’s led to some shouting matches. We’re not going to shout any more, or at least, I’m not. We’re going to figure this thing out, if we can.

“Maybe we should go back to the beginning,” I say. “What we do know.”

“We know that we can’t get in there any more than those scavenger friends of yours can.” She always calls them that, because I believe that the initial scavengers followed me from Azzelia after telling me about the Boneyard. I believe they thought I was an easy mark, and I’d be trapped there, and then they could pluck my ship.

They were wrong.

So far, they haven’t shown up here. Thank heavens.

I am about to say something about the scavengers, about the way we’re constantly monitoring for them, when something else she says stops me.

“‘We know that we can’t get in there,’” I say, quoting her. “
Do
we know that? I mean, do we really know that?”

“Yes,” she says. “It repels us, it throws us out. We went somewhere dark and scary.”

So much anger and sarcasm in her voice. I don’t say anything because I understand it. Yash went somewhere dark and scary for two full weeks, then escaped it to find herself here.

She has a right to anger and sarcasm on that topic. I had tried hard not to complain about what happened when we tried to get the skip into the Boneyard, but apparently I had failed at that.

“Yeah,” I say. “It threw us out,
when we used the
anacapa
drive.
”

She tilts her head back and looks at the ceiling. Then she lets out a small breath.

“Son of a
bitch
,” she says. “Son of a fucking bitch.”

She gets up, circles the chair, and goes to the head of the table. There she taps on the holocontrols. I just watch her work. She’s looking at a virtual screen about eye-height because that’s what she prefers.

I’ve learned not to look over her shoulder or ask questions as she does.

“We got stuck,” she says.

“You guys did,” I say. “We didn’t. I don’t think the same thing happened to the skip as happened to the
Ivoire
.”

“I’m not talking about the ships,” she says. “Or even the
anacapa
drive itself. I’m talking about you and me.”

She taps the holocontrols again and the screen vanishes. She places her hands beside the controls and leans forward, as if she’s about to address a crowd. Instead, she turns that intense gaze on me.

“We had a plan,” she says. “We were coming here, working fast, taking the skip in, and then taking our time.”

“Yeah,” I say, not sure where she’s going. I assume that’s still the plan.

“We figured we were using the
anacapa
for
all
travel. All of it. That’s where we’re stuck.”

I had been inching toward that statement. She’s hit it almost immediately and has probably moved even faster in her own head.

“Can we go in without an
anacapa
drive?” I ask.

She swings her head toward me, her gaze becoming even more intense, if that’s possible. “You mean without it on,” she says.

“Yeah,” I say.

“The other skip doesn’t have one at all, does it?” she asks.

I want to say,
I don’t know how it could if you didn’t install it
, but I’m still trying to play good captain here. “No, it doesn’t.”

“That force field is just a modified
anacapa
field—”

“You
think
it is, you said.” I’m getting nervous now. “You said you didn’t know.”

“I know enough,” she says. “If you do what I say with the regular skip, you just might get in there.”

Just
and
might
were not comfort words.
Just
and
might
made me a lot more nervous than I realized.

“And what happens if we can’t get in?” I ask.

“Nothing,” she says. “This isn’t one of those force fields that destroys ships. It just…repels…them…”

She says that last so slowly that I know she’s had yet another realization. She stands all the way up.

“That damn thing,” she says, more to herself than to me. “They’ve figured out a way to repel an
anacapa
drive that they don’t recognize.”

“What?” I ask.

She shakes her head, curses distractedly, and then sits down. She taps something on the table screen before her, and curses again.

“Want to share?” I ask.

She still doesn’t answer. I’m going to hover if she doesn’t tell me what’s going on.

Then she looks up, her expression remote. She’s not in this room; she’s elsewhere, thinking about something I’ll probably never understand.

After a moment, her eyes focus—on me.

“Boss,” she says, and I nearly jump. Like Coop, she does her best not to use the name everyone else uses for me. “You don’t understand. The Fleet has long believed it needs to have a device that wards off
anacapa
drives.”

“Wards off?” I ask, trying to ignore the way she still talks about the Fleet in the present tense.

“For as long as I’ve been an engineer, the Fleet has worried about what would happen if someone steals one of our ships with a drive. I mean, we’ve lost hundreds, maybe thousands of ships over the centuries, but we always recovered the
anacapa
on the ships whose location we know. We’ve had ships stolen, but not the larger vessels. Just the fighters and the transports—”

“The ships without an
anacapa
,” I say, beginning to get this now.

“Exactly,” she says. “But we’ve always worried that those ships we left behind would come back and bite us in a way we can’t quite foresee. And they might even be able to catch up to us, find us anywhere, because of the way that the
anacapa
s can link up.”

Two
anacapa
drives linked up to pull the
Ivoire
into the future, using what had been designed as a rescue technology. The sector base received the distress signal from the
Ivoire
and answered it, pulling the
Ivoire
to the base. Only it was the base five thousand years in the future that had received the signal, not the one in Yash’s timeline.

Initially, Coop had sent a near-constant distress signal from the
Ivoire
, trying to pick up other nearby signals. But after shutting down the
anacapa
on Vaycehn and the one on the Room of Lost Souls, he never even received a ping—no contact at all.

I hadn’t even learned he’d done that for years. And then it took months after that for him to tell me how deeply disappointed he was that he hadn’t even gotten a faint signal in response.

I have never thought about the implications of this part of the technology. If someone else has captured a Dignity Vessel, then theoretically they could use the same technology to end up in the very heart of wherever the Fleet is now.

No wonder they were trying to build a defense against it. No wonder they hadn’t; it was mostly theory. In practice, they hadn’t needed it.

“You’re saying they finally invented it,” I say.

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.” She curses again, then pirouettes. I’ve never seen Yash do anything so youthful and girlish before. “You know what this means?”

“You’ve found evidence of the Fleet,” I say.

“Not just evidence,” she says. “Evidence they survived. Evidence they’ve moved forward. Evidence of their damned trajectory.”

The trajectory has been an issue almost from the beginning. Theoretically, the Fleet moved in a planned direction. Theoretically, Coop could have diagrammed where the Fleet would be—kinda sorta. The Fleet never stayed a set period of time. Sometimes it remained in one location for a hundred years. Sometimes it remained only a week. So he can’t really map where it would be, not without finding stops along the way.

This Boneyard is, in other words, a stop. An important stop, not just because of the ships stored here, but because of the way they’re stored.

My mind races, trying to deal with the possibilities. The Fleet made it to here. It was able to set up these ships with some kind of protection.

But it also felt it needed something that repelled
anacapa
drives. Was that a precautionary protection—a just-in-case something new gets invented in the future—or was it in response to a real threat?