Skirmishes (29 page)

I don’t think it worth asking Denby. I don’t want to distract him.

“Thirty minutes,” Elaine says, and she sounds disappointed.

I know I am.

“We have to turn around,” I say, and then I wait for Denby to do so.

He pauses just ahead of me, his entire body pointed forward as if begging to continue. Then his shoulders go up and down in a silent sigh.

He pushes off and moves ahead of me, again following the protocol we established. I’m going to bring up the rear on the return.

Orlando leads us out, and we move twice as fast as we did upon arrival.

Denby, to his credit, doesn’t ask if we can spend the time we saved inside the ship. He knows better.

We reach the airlock, and I feel my stomach clench.

There’s no way to know if that exterior door remained open—at least not from where we are. And I’m not going to ask Yash to check.

Orlando ducks inside the airlock first.

“We’re clear,” he says, and I exhale.

I hear Elaine let out a grunt of approval. Denby puts a hand against his forehead, as if the relief is almost too much for him.

After we’re done with the initial stages of the Boneyard, he won’t be back. He’s done diving.

I don’t know if it’s the ship that has upset him, or if it reminds him of those days trapped in foldspace, or if he’s just not wreck-diving material. I won’t ask, either.

But I ratchet down my expectations of him just a little bit.

I’m the last into the airlock. I glance over my shoulder at the ship’s darkened interior.

I feel a little bit of giddiness—
we’re going to figure you out
, I promise Ship One—and then I slip into the strange lights of the Boneyard, and grab the line that will guide me back to the skip.

FORTY-SEVEN

YASH AND I decide we need to evaluate this dive together before we bring in the rest of the dive team. It’s unusual, I know, but that time differential isn’t something we want everyone else to argue about.

We meet in the conference room with the door sealed. I have brought in dinner. Even though I’ve eaten and rested, I know that Yash and her engineers have spent the last few hours examining that time differential. I suspect she hasn’t eaten.

As I watch her tear into the stew and bread that I’ve brought, I know that I’m right.

I eat slowly, savoring the rich broth and the spices and the warmth, knowing that I need to maintain my strength, which means I have to watch everything from my food intake to my sleep. The more the better on dives, because you never know what might go wrong.

Yash eats for a few minutes before she shoves a tablet at me. It’s covered with all kinds of equations and squiggles and graphs that I suppose I could understand if I took it into my cabin, plugged it into my computer, and asked tons of questions as I went through it line by line.

I hate doing stuff like that, so I just glance at it.

“What am I looking at?” I ask.

“A mess,” she says, her mouth partially full. “But a fascinating mess.”

I raise my eyebrows. I didn’t expect the word “fascinating.”

“I didn’t think to examine the sound of the Boneyard,” she says as she pulls off a hunk of bread. She holds it in one hand while she talks, clearly waiting to take a bite when she’s finished with some important sentence. “Thank you for that.”

“You’re welcome,” I say. “I was just curious.”

“That’s how science begins.” She smiles. The hunk of bread has vanished in the short few seconds it took me to answer her. She rips off another and dunks it in the stew, holding the bread there this time so it won’t drip on her. “The exterior of that ship—the Boneyard itself—is amazing.”

“I know,” I say.

“No, you don’t,” she says. “But I’m getting ahead of myself.”

She takes a bite from the second hunk of bread and sets it on the edge of her stew plate. I take this moment to eat some of my bread.

She leans back, hands moving as if she can’t contain her enthusiasm.

“I checked all of the times—the ones on your suit, the ones inside you and the others, the ones we have here, and there is a time differential.”

“Crap,” I say.

She holds up a finger. “Let me finish. The differential exists inside the Boneyard itself, and it changes according to where you guys are on that line.”

“What?” I ask.

“It stops inside Ship One, and inside the skip. That’s what this is.” She taps the tablet, which is upside down from her perspective, and she enlarges one of the graphs. “You’re the red, Orlando is the blue, Elaine is the green, and Denby is the yellow. This is the skip, here’s the line, then these are the times. You can see how each line is different depending on where you guys are along the line we strung between the two ships. You see…”

I shake my head just a little, frowning. “I’m not going to look at charts and stuff. Just give me the short version right now.”

“There are all kinds of energy waves in that Boneyard,” she says. “Most are
anacapa
, but others are
anacapa
waves times ten million, things we have never seen before—not my culture or yours.”

“Okay.” I’m a bit stunned. I really did think—like Coop—that the Boneyard was built by the Fleet. “Is it something the Fleet could have developed?”

“You’re too far ahead of our analysis,” Yash says.

“Meaning you know the answer and you’re going to build to it, or you don’t know the answer and need more research?”

“We need more research,” she says. “But here’s what you’re going through. When one of those energy waves hits you, it changes your measurement of time—or at least the measurement in your suit.”

I push my plate away, feeling a little cold. “What do you mean, my suit? Does that mean my internal chip is fine?”

“Yes,” she says. “It keeps time consistent with the time on the skip.”

“So the suit is untrustworthy,” I say. “Did you check its overall integrity?”

“I’ll get to that,” she says.

I let out a sigh. I hate it when people do that. I really only need a bit of information: Can we do the next dive? How safe will it be?

But I trust Yash enough to give her a few more minutes before I hit her with those questions.

She continues, “There was no
anacapa
reading from inside Ship One. Or outside of it either, that we can tell anyway, given all of the interference. Ship One’s
anacapa
is either completely shut down or it doesn’t exist anymore.”

I let out a small sigh. We’re going to have to dive her to see which of those is true. “And that’s good news?”

“It is,” she says, “in that Ship One seems to be intact and her shielding seems to protect her from all those energy waves in the Boneyard proper.”

“You checked the readings I got on my glove?” I ask. “I mean, did anybody add shielding to Ship One’s exterior?”

“The shielding is just like the
Ivoire’s
. Ship One is much older—not in design, but in actual time passed—but she seems relatively similar otherwise.”

That’s exactly what my eyes already told me. It’s nice to get the confirmation.

“And the skip is protecting us when we’re in the Boneyard,” I say.

“Yes,” she says.

“So,” I say. “Tell me about the suits.”

She sighs. “You should say, ‘Tell me about the Boneyard.’”

“I would’ve, but I didn’t think you could,” I said.

“I can’t exactly,” she says. “Just the information you four got on your three dives will take my team weeks to process.”

“We don’t—”

She holds up her hand to stop me from saying any more. “I know we don’t have weeks, at least on this dive, and if we fulfill Coop’s mission.”

The “if” catches me.

“But you like risks,” she says.

“Risks?” I ask.

She pulls off another hunk of bread. She looks at it like it has the answers. Then she sighs.

“Here’s what I know,” she says. “I know that all of that energy, all of the things happening in the Boneyard, have an impact on the suits. I know that the impact varies from whatever point you’re at inside the Boneyard, and whatever’s happening with the energy at that moment. I have no idea if that energy will compromise a suit’s integrity.”

“Over time?” I ask.

She makes a small sound, almost of disgust. “That’s even harder to answer. Let me try it this way. Clearly some of those waves have an impact on the suit’s function, at least in its clock, and I suspect, although at the moment I cannot prove, in the suit’s entire system. So, ‘over time’ isn’t a great phrase. I would say that at one second, your suit could be working fine and at another, you could have catastrophic suit failure. It’ll seem like one second to the next for you, but that suit might experience a century in that second.”

She takes a bite of the bread, chewing, allowing me to take in that comment. I’m going to wait for the rest of it before I say anything.

“Or, those energy waves might not be having an impact on time inside the suit, just on the suit’s entire function. So it might be happening in real time, but the suit ceases working for a moment. When we’re dealing in tenths of a second, you might not even notice, but if something were to change for the worst—a minute, two, three—you will notice. You’ll die out there.”

I almost say
That’s always a risk
, but I don’t want to sound flip. Besides, I’m not feeling flip.

“So,” I say, “let me be clear. You saw an impact on the suits, other than inside their clocks.”

“Yes,” she says, “enough to worry me, but not enough to prove anything. I can tell you that the integrity of those suits won’t survive more than a handful of visits to the Boneyard. You’ll have to switch suits.”

I frown, thinking. We all brought backup suits, and then there are others that some of the people on the
Two
have that we can borrow. But it’s not ideal.

“We’re not going to be able to get a lot of ships on this trip, are we?” I ask.

“It depends on how you want to run things,” she says. “I think we can send someone back with one of the skips and have them return in one of the
Ivoire’s
transports with some suits.”

I nod. I’ll think about that later.

“Are we guaranteeing a catastrophic suit failure by continuing to dive?” I ask.

“Eventually, yes,” Yash says. “Can I tell you whether it will happen to your suit or Denby’s? I have no idea. Can I tell you if it will happen while we’re here on these dives? No, I can’t. I may have enough data, but I haven’t processed it, and I’m not sure I entirely understand it.”

“You want to get to that control station in the Boneyard,” I say.

“It would help,” she says. “But I’m not willing to do it right now, given what we know and the equipment we have. I’d rather try with the
Ivoire
.”

Or one of the ships we’re diving for.

I nod. Then I grab some bread for myself, more to give myself something to do than because I’m hungry.

“Well,” I say, “let’s go take a vote.”

“What?” Yash’s shock comes through that one word.

I grin at her. “This isn’t a military vessel,” I remind her. “My divers are volunteers. They know they’re risking their lives, but now we have evidence of the kinds of risks they’re facing. They need to know, and they need to make the best choice for themselves.”

“I think it’s too late for that,” she says. “We have a mission—”

“And I don’t want a terrified or reluctant diver on it,” I say. “
I’m
going to go. But the other three get to make their own decisions.”

She shakes her head. “Just when I think I am beginning to understand you,” she says, “I realize I’m entirely wrong.”

“It’s just a different way of doing things,” I say, “and it works for me.”

What I don’t tell her is this: I don’t want to be the person who orders someone to their death. I’ve had too many people die on dives with me. Their ghosts still haunt me. I don’t want a fresh set of ghosts, reminding me how terrified they were, and how I forced them to do something they didn’t want to do.

Yash might understand. I’m sure a lot of commanders in the Fleet understand.

But she would do it anyway, and I will not.

Not ever.

FORTY-EIGHT

MY TEAM COMES THROUGH, even Denby. Maybe I should say especially Denby. I gave them the choice about whether or not they want to continue the dives, given the threat to the suits and the horrible way we might die out here, and they opt to continue.

I’d like to say I didn’t doubt it for a second, but that would be a lie. I did doubt it, and not just Denby, whom I knew might just follow orders. But for everyone. When you rip your own suit, that’s one thing. The suit might reseal itself, it might save you. There are a million ways to die while diving, but most of them—I’d say 80% of them—are user inflicted. You know if you behave properly, you have a better chance of getting out.

But a collapse of suit integrity at the wrong moment through no fault of your own, that is probably something you will not survive. It makes even the toughest of us rethink what we’re about to do.

We all rethought, and yet here we are, floating outside the door to Ship One’s
anacapa
room. This is our third dive since my conversation with Yash. We’ve explored a goodly portion of the engineering side of the ship, and each time we return to the
Two
we check our suit integrity.

Elaine, our cautious one, has opted for a new suit on this dive. Mine might be ragged—that’s Yash’s term—but I want to wear it this one last time. The others have less damage to their suits, even though I believe that Nyssa will order everyone to use new suits sometime soon.

It took half a dive to open the
anacapa
room. We didn’t have the codes. Yash talked with other Fleet crew members to see if they could remember old codes or the patterns for new ones.

We finally got the door open on the last dive.

On this dive, we have made it to the
anacapa
room in record time. This is the heart of our dive. If the
anacapa
doesn’t work, then we’re going to have to start all over again with a new ship. I’m not sure I’m willing to do that, with the suit problems and the things that we don’t understand in the Boneyard. And if I’m not willing, I’m certainly not going to expect my team to dive it.