Skirmishes (23 page)

She had been continually told that Rosealma Quintana knew more, but so far as Elissa could tell, no one had managed to interrogate Quintana properly. And now Quintana was no longer in Empire custody.

So Elissa was going in with less information than she usually had. But judging by the ships on that border, there wasn’t a lot of firepower at the Lost Souls Corporation.

Besides, she had enough of the layout to know how to deploy her soldiers on a quick strike. They were going in, killing whomever got in their way, and taking the research. At the same time, she would have other strike teams invading the Dignity Vessels still docked at the station. Those strike teams would capture the vessels and—if the vessels worked—would bring them back to the Empire.

While the main force was occupied here on the border, she would take what the Empire needed. Then let the Nine Planets fight the Empire.

Let them try.

She glanced at the time and smiled to herself.

She had just enough time to get to the bridge to monitor everything.

She took one last look at the observation deck. She wished she could see those ships on the border. She wished she could see that betraying bastard when he realized he was defending the wrong location.

She wished she could know when she hurt him as much as he had hurt her.

THE DIVE

NOW

THIRTY-SEVEN

THE BONEYARD CLOSES around us. I ease the skip inside the opening in the force field, my stomach twisting. On this newer skip, more problems register. The sensors are better, and more attuned to differing energy patterns. The sensors are finding a lot of them.

It has taken Yash five days to strip this skip of its
anacapa
drive and to scrub all of the
anacapa
signatures out of it. She thinks we have a clean skip, but she’s not sure.

For that reason, she’s come with us. Again.

I understand the reason for her on this trip, but honestly, I would have preferred one or two of her engineering staff, someone new, someone a little more trained in the art of diving, someone a tad more willing to listen to me.

I’ve brought the entire main dive team on this mission, partly because I’m worried about Yash. I’ve also added one more diver, this one from the original
Ivoire
crew.

Gustav Denby is one of the youngest full crew members on the
Ivoire
. He had just received his commission before the ship got trapped in foldspace. He had only served on the ship for a few days before leaving the Fleet forever.

His lack of service on the
Ivoire
made him a great candidate for me. Even though he’s loyal to Coop and the Fleet, he’s also pliable. His training hasn’t hardened into rigid ways of doing things.

Of all of the Fleet members I’ve trained as divers, only Denby is able to follow my instructions without a momentary hesitation. I recognize that hesitation for what it is: it’s that second when the brain registers a complaint—
That’s not how we do things!—
and then dismisses it. Denby doesn’t complain, not even with that short delay.

I like that about him.

I don’t expect him to join us on the dive. He’ll remain in the skip with Yash and Nyssa. I don’t want Nyssa anywhere near the inside of a Dignity Vessel unless there’s an emergency. I need her for her calm and her medical skills.

The people who will dive this first ship will be me, Orlando, and Elaine. And we’ll go by the book. Well, my book, anyway.

I have warned them all about this. I’ve also told them that Nyssa will be in charge while we’re gone. I’ve pulled Nyssa aside and let her know that if Yash gives orders in routine matters, she’s to be ignored. Only when she deals with
anacapa
drives or Fleet technology should Nyssa listen, and even then, she should remember that I will be looking over her shoulder.

If I can.

What makes me nervous about this dive (more nervous than I usually am) is that we don’t know a lot of things about the Boneyard. Yash, her engineering team, and I have studied the energy readings inside the Boneyard itself, and we can’t identify everything. We’re not exactly sure what we’re looking at.

Yash had a small group try to recreate those readings to see if they would have an impact on our diving suits, and the result was the one we wanted. She believes that the dive will be safe. But she’s not going to guarantee anything. She’s not willing to admit everything will work out just fine. She’s not even willing to give me a percentage.

Which, I have to admit, makes me secretly glad. I have accused Yash of diving addiction, but I have it much worse and in a completely different way. I have learned to curb some of the addition with structure, but that structure only exists so that I can continue to dive. I have knocked some sense into myself over the years.

The skip makes it all the way into the Boneyard, and I let out a small sigh of relief. Yash, sitting next to me at the skip’s controls, also lets out a small sigh. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see the rest of the team relax slightly.

We all knew the first test was just getting into the Boneyard. We’ve passed that.

Now we have a dozen or more other tests. Some I won’t even register. Yash will see a lot of them. She’s reconfigured the console to have what she calls a science station. I refer to it as the engineering array—or I’ve started to, after I’d initially called it the
anacapa
controls. Yash corrected me quickly.

Now that there no longer is an
anacapa
drive on this skip, it has no need for controls. But Yash did configure everything to monitor all of this strange energy more completely.

I’m glad she’s doing that, because I can feel the ships yanking my attention away from this skip and her crew.

We’ve chosen three ships to dive over the next few days. The first thing we will check for, once we get inside, is a working
anacapa
drive. If the ship lacks that, then we move to another ship.

But we’re not even going to see the first ship’s drive today. We might not even get inside the first ship. Our primary mission today—and maybe for several days following this—is to test the Boneyard herself.

My biggest worry is one that I haven’t confessed to anyone: since the Boneyard rejects vehicles with an unrecognizable
anacapa
signal, will it reject people with unrecognizable uniforms? Will it examine our tech somehow and deem us unfit for the Boneyard proper?

All I have told the dive team is this: we will proceed according to our slowest protocols. We don’t know what we’re facing, so we’ll take readings on everything, even the slightest thing.

We’ve brought backup environmental suits, extra dive suits, and more oxygen than we need. We have some standard environmental suits from the
Ivoire
, which I don’t want to dive in, but we will use them if we have to. We also have a few of my oldest dive suits, the kind that have no tech that the Fleet recognizes, just in case we need that.

And Nyssa has more medical supplies than I’ve ever brought on a skip before. I’m very worried about what will happen outside of this ship.

Mikk saw it before we left. He’s been with me for so many years that he knows all the signs of my worries. He even asked if he should go along. Yash keeps insisting that everyone without the genetic marker will be fine, but I’m not taking her word for it. I’m not assuming anything on this trip. I’m going to make sure it all runs as smoothly as it can, and as by the book as possible.

Of course, the book is
my
book, but still.

The first ship we’ve chosen is a Dignity Vessel that appears intact. Yash assures me that this ship dates from the same period in Fleet history as the
Ivoire
. She’s been clear about what she means by the same period. She believes they were built within 200 years of each other.

She won’t know how similar the ships are until she actually goes inside this one—which won’t be today.

Right now, we’re calling this Ship One. I hope, if we decide the ship’s worth our time, that we’ll find out its name. I’m also hoping that it comes from a few years
after
the
Ivoire
disappeared, so Yash doesn’t know the ship’s immediate history.

I’m fully aware that not every danger to our mission is the physical kind. I’m worried that too much information too soon might actually harm the performance of my Fleet colleagues.

Yash’s reaction to the Boneyard itself reminds me just how fragile these people actually are.

First, I run the skip the length of the ship. We scan it, looking for a compromised hull or other damage that would make the ship unusable in its current condition.

I’m doing that scanning as well as piloting the skip. Yash is monitoring the energy readings. Orlando shifts in his chair. I know he wants to be involved, but I’m not going to let him.

Right now, Yash and I will control the information the divers receive. If we decide to abort, I don’t want that decision to become an argument.

My divers aren’t military. They don’t follow orders as well as Yash would like, or even as well as I would like sometimes.

Mostly, though, I prefer the way they all think for themselves.

It only takes a few moments to run my scan. The information I get matches the information we got the first time we were in the Boneyard. This ship seems to be intact.

“
Anacapa
readings?” I ask Yash.

“Oh, yeah, more than I can count,” she says. She sounds tense.

“I meant from Ship One,” I say calmly.

She glances at me, and then grins. She’s excited, and this time, it has raised her mood.

“Sorry,” she says. “I’m looking at all of this, and it’s—well, we’ll talk later. But as for Ship One, I have no idea. I can’t isolate anything in here.”

“At least we haven’t been knocked out of the Boneyard,” I say. “That’s a start.”

Or, at least, it’s a start for the skip. We haven’t tried to go into the Boneyard with just a thin layer of nanofiber between our skin and whatever the hell those readings are.

I move the skip near the center of Ship One. Theoretically, we’re above the bridge. We might be able to get some readings from it, if we do things right.

We debated about whether or not we would release a probe and have it attach to Ship One. After a lot of discussion, we decided against it. Even though it’s my standard procedure to send in as many probes as possible, Yash convinced me that doing so here might trigger the wrong reaction.

She’s worried that a still-active ship on low power might consider the probe to be a weapon. The probe will be giving off an energy signal after all, and it will be sending telemetry back to the skip. That might be enough to wake up a sleeping giant, and convince it—and maybe other still-functioning ships inside the Boneyard—that the Boneyard is under attack.

I’ve never dived anything that might attack me back, so I take her advice very seriously. I’ve dived wrecks in the past, not ships that might be stored for reasons other than damage. And we don’t know why some of these seemingly intact ships are here.

“Is it going to be possible to keep the skip steady?” I ask Yash.

We were worried that whatever it is holding the ships in place might interfere with the skip’s controls or make our normal maneuvering impossible.

“Looks like it,” she says, without glancing up. “I’m still worried about this line you’re going to attach.”

That’s where we fought. I always attach the skip to whatever wreck I’m going to dive by a strong line. I’ve had divers get wreck-blindness, divers nearly die, divers who pushed off wrong and nearly toppled head-over-heels into space when the gravity in their boots did not save them.

The only thing that saved all of those divers was the line. It was something the diver could feel, something that gave the diver hope, something for the diver to cling to that wasn’t part of the wreck so that the diver felt safe.

Even if that feeling of safety was a false sense of security. Sometimes that was all it took to save a life.

“Yeah, I’m worried about it too,” I say, “but I’m even more worried about not having it.”

Those three sentences we uttered encompassed hours of arguing and planning. We aren’t going to change our plans now, unless we see something outside this skip that gives us a compelling reason to do so.

“Should we suit up?” Denby asks, and Orlando touches his arm. Wrong question. Denby should wait for orders. But he’s new, and he’s as eager as a diver can be.

Orlando actually has a small smile on his face as he glances over at me. He can remember his first dives as well—if you call what he did back on Vaycehn diving.

“We’re going to send that line over first,” I say.

And we’re going to give Ship One a chance to react to it. If the reaction is violent, I want my divers in their chairs and able to hang on while Yash and I try to get us the hell out of here.

“You ready?” I ask Yash.

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” she says, managing to convey her disapproval with her tone.

I send the line to the spot near one of the outside entrances. We chose that spot before we ever left
The Two
.

The line wobbles as it goes, which I’ve never seen it do before, and then it scrapes against Ship One. For a moment, I don’t think the line will hold. Then it grapples on, about two meters to the left of the spot we had chosen.

I glance at Yash. She looks back, her mouth a thin line.

If anything is going to happen with that line, it’ll happen now.

I watch Ship One. Nothing changes. Its exterior doesn’t flare, it doesn’t shake off the line or the grapple. The power levels around the ship don’t change at all.

The skip has gone through a slight change—the normal change when we extend a line. It yanks a little, stabilizes some, moves a bit to the left. I’ve taught Yash how to maintain the skip when the line’s extended, because there are some tricks to keeping the line taut and the skip stable.