Skirmishes (13 page)

But she had to plan for everything.

“While he’s doing that,” Elissa said, “let’s see if there’s something we missed.”

“Ma’am,” Binek said softly. Somehow he had come up beside her. “I could try to go to the rear of the ship, see if anything is working there.”

She shook her head before remembering that he couldn’t see her. “We don’t have an airlock between the door here and the corridor. We run the risk of venting all of our atmosphere.”

She didn’t say anything about the groaning outside the door. She hoped she wouldn’t have to explain further.

“I just think we need to explore all of our options, ma’am.”

“Me, too,” she said just as softly. “The problem is that we have so very few of them.”

SEVENTEEN

IT ONLY TOOK Trombino ten minutes to make a sign out of the reflectors on the remaining environmental suit. He placed them on the door to the suit locker. The strips spelled
In Here
.

Elissa then sent her crew inside. They didn’t want to go, but she made them. The longer they kept warm, the better chance they had.

Her cheeks ached with cold and her nose was numb. As she closed the locker’s door, she promised her bridge crew that she would join them shortly.

She just never specified that she would join them in the locker. She had a hunch none of them would make it, and she would join them in death.

Or rather, they would join her, since she would die first.

But she was going to do everything she could to prevent that.

She had no idea what had been in that wave that had hit them after the explosion, but she knew it had something to do with that malfunctioning stealth tech.

And she also knew that she lacked the scientific knowledge to figure out how stealth tech worked. Everyone who knew that was either on the other side of that creaking door or had died in the initial explosion.

So she could do only minimal things.

Her crew had tried to do the normal restarts. She was going to try some abnormal ones.

Nothing had power, but she didn’t see any fried equipment either. Whatever had gone through hadn’t burned out the controls. It had just disabled them.

And if she could figure out a way to jumpstart them again, she might buy some more time.

But focusing on everything had gotten her nowhere. Now she was just going to focus on the environmental systems.

Her crew needed warmth.

Somehow she was going to provide it.

She crawled under the console that contained the environmental controls. It had taken force, but she had managed to open the interior. She couldn’t see clearly, so she was going by feel.

But her gloves were getting in the way. She could feel the shapes of things, but not what they actually were.

She had to take the gloves off.

She hesitated for just a moment. The gloves protected her skin. Eventually, though, that wouldn’t matter.

Or maybe not so eventually. She took a deep breath of icy air, and then pulled her gloves off. She reached into the guts of the console and found the controls. She touched them, and her fingertips burned.

She brought her hands back, shocked, and it took a moment for her brain to process what she felt.

Ice. She had felt ice. Ice at very, very cold temperatures burned the skin.

She glanced at the locker door, wondered how her people were doing. They were probably warmer than she was.

Wait, no probably about it. They were.

And they knew by now that she wasn’t going to join them any time soon.

She took another deep breath, feeling the chill move all the way down her lungs, and reached back inside the panel. By will alone, she would make this all work. And the first thing she was going to will was that the burning sensation wouldn’t bother her.

Then she was going to find a way to turn on the environmental systems, if it was the last thing she ever did.

EIGHTEEN

SHE WAS WARM, so therefore, she was dead.

But she was comfortable, and she had this idea that death wasn’t comfortable at all.

Elissa opened her eyes—no scraping eyelids, no freezing eyeballs. It took a moment to focus, and then a moment longer to process what she was seeing.

A ceiling. With lights. A brown ceiling, with soft lights.

The air was warm.

And she was on a bed. Without restraints.

Which meant there was gravity.

She raised a hand—or tried to—but an alarm went off, and something brought her arm down gently.

A woman with hair almost as short as Elissa’s walked into the room, followed by Flag Commander Janik. The woman didn’t surprise her; Flag Commander Janik did.

His skin was gray and his tight black curls had some white, which caught the light. She hadn’t seen him look so tense before, almost as if the stress had aged him prematurely.

“Welcome back, Commander,” he said. The sound of his voice was almost painful.

She blinked, grateful that the simple movement was so very easy. “You rescued us.”

Her voice did scrape, not because of ice in her throat, but because she was thirsty.

“
I
didn’t,” he said with a bit of a smile. “The
Stillwater
did. She came directly to you, and managed to get the survivors out.”

The woman beside Janik grabbed water, and helped Elissa sit up so she could drink some of it. She had never felt so weak in her life.

The
Stillwater
had been one of the anchor ships in the information shield. There was no sensible way for the
Stillwater
to have reached her first.

She processed that and another word, “survivors.”

“There were transports that were closer than the
Stillwater
,” she said, her voice a little less raspy. “And fighters.”

“Yes,” Janik said. “They got hit with the same thing you did.”

Thing
. He didn’t know what happened. No one had told him. Had anyone been alive to tell him?

“You said survivors,” she said. “How many?”

He glanced at the woman, who nodded and looked rueful at the same time.

“Just your bridge crew,” he said gently. “And not even all of them. Calthorpe didn’t make it.”

“I knew that,” she said, trying to process. God, her brain was working slow.

“I want to update you on your condition,” the woman said to Elissa. Then she looked over at Janik. “Flag Commander, you can talk with Commander Trekov later.”

“Wait,” Elissa said, and would have lifted a hand, if something didn’t keep pulling her arm down. “Just my bridge crew? They were the only ones on the
Discovery
who made it. No one else?”

“No one else,” Janik said softly.

“What about the transports? The fighters?”

“Eight people survived, Commander,” Janik said. “Including you.”

Her heart rate increased and it made her feel wobbly. Something was still wrong with it. Something was wrong with her.

“How many died?” Elissa asked him.

He tilted his head. “Later, Commander. When you’re better.”

“
No
,” she said. “Now.”

“Six hundred,” he said. “We think. We lost a lot of information.”

“Lost information?”

The woman had her hand on Janik’s arm, pulling him back. “Let her rest.”

“I’ll tell you later, Commander,” he said, obviously complying with the woman.

But Elissa didn’t want him to wait. She needed to know.

“You couldn’t repair the ships?” she said. “They were destroyed, from that wave. But the information should be there.”

“It’s not,” Janik said. “We can’t get them back up, no matter what we try. They
look
fine. That’s the irritating part. So everything from your mission is gone. Everything.”

Including six hundred lives. Her breath caught. She couldn’t go there yet. She couldn’t process any of this. She didn’t dare.

So she looked at the woman. “And me? Why can’t I lift my arms?”

“We’re repairing your hands,” she said almost cheerfully. “You can’t feel it, but they’re in a solution that is good for new skin. We kept you in a coma while we did something similar for your face. The new skin there is not as delicate now.”

New skin. On her face. New skin, and new other things? She couldn’t tell. But she felt strange enough to know that more had happened to her physically.

“I nearly died,” she said, and it wasn’t a question.

“There was a debate as to whether or not you
were
dead,” Janik said. “But the medical staff on the
Stillwater
, they revived you. They had to. You’re a hero, Commander.”

“A hero?” For killing six hundred people? She didn’t ask that part, but she had a hunch Janik heard it in her tone.

“You saved your bridge crew against the longest odds I’ve ever seen,” he said. “By rights, none of you should have made it. You saved them. They all agree on that.”

“So they’re okay. They’re not here?”

“They’re better than you are,” the doctor said, clearly answering both questions. “And now you’re going to rest. Everything else can wait.”

That last was pointed at Janik. He nodded. “I’ll be back, Commander. We can debrief later. We want you well first.”

She closed her eyes. Debrief. A hero. Six hundred dead.

How ridiculous.

And such an opportunity. She could lie about everything. Not even her bridge crew knew what happened.

The thought felt alien, a product of the ambition she could barely remember. She had wanted her own command. She got it.

And six hundred people died.

She would tell Janik why. She would tell them about the troubles with the command structure of the Special Research Posting, the way she couldn’t handle Vilhauser, the mistakes she made on the Room of Lost Souls. She would tell Janik it was her fault that their scientific mission failed and good people died.

She would tell him.

And then she would enlist his help in finding the betraying bastard—whoever he was.

Whatever he was.

Even if she no longer had a command, she would find him.

And she would make him pay.

THE DIVE

NOW

NINETEEN

IT TAKES YASH two days to figure out the force field. She can modify our
anacapa
to enter it, or so she tells me. She has also discovered where at least part of the force field comes from.

Apparently the force field originates from what we believe to be the center of the Boneyard. Then the field gets reinforced by some kind of nodules or amplifiers around the edges of the Boneyard.

Yash stresses that this is all theory, and she would like to go inside to confirm.

She’s not going in, at least not on the first few trips. She’s our expert on the
anacapa
, and if something happens, I need her to get us out of there.

We’re standing inside the
Two’s
conference room, staring at the holographic image that Yash has created of the Boneyard floating at the edge of the long table. She and I point, our fingers going through the images as we try to figure everything out.

The three other people in the conference room sit on the comfortable chairs and watch.

Orlando Rea, Elaine Seager, and Nyssa Quinte have dived with me for years. I hired them not for their diving abilities but because they have the genetic marker that enables them to work inside a malfunctioning
anacapa
field.

Initially, I didn’t know that they had a marker. I just knew that the Empire had tricked them into going into a malfunctioning field on the Room of Lost Souls, and they had survived. They, and three others, had realized what the Empire had done and had left almost immediately, refusing to work for anyone connected to the Empire.

They signed on with me over five years ago to take on the Empire and destroy it for so carelessly risking their lives.

I risk their lives too, but I do it with their permission.

They were terrible divers in the beginning; they’re among my best now.

And they know me. They know I will consult with them before we do anything dangerous.

So they’re listening intently as Yash and I discuss our next move.

“We could take the
Two
here,” Yash says, putting her finger into a wide, empty spot near the edge of the Boneyard. “You can dive from there.”

I shake my head. “What if there’s a ship there that doesn’t show up on our sensors? We’ll appear in its space, get damaged, and become a permanent part of the Boneyard.”

We’ve had variations on this discussion for days. Yash takes my comments almost as a personal insult. She believes we’ll be just fine. She trusts her readings.

I don’t. I’ve gone into too many dark situations, too many places filled with unknowns, to accept that this journey will be an easy one.

Yash says she’s been to dark places too, places filled with unknowns. I know she has, usually with the full force of the Fleet behind her. She sometimes forgets how very alone we are out here, that Coop and the
Ivoire
won’t swoop in to rescue us, and if our comm system malfunctions, we won’t be able to ask anyone else—known or unknown—to help us, either.

Yash gives me a look that I have come to recognize as complete contempt. She won’t say anything—she’s too well trained for that—but there are times when she thinks I’m either too cautious or not cautious enough.

She prefers Coop as a captain, and when he’s not around, she believes that she knows best. She would clearly take the
Two
into the Boneyard.

I refuse.

“I want to take the skip,” I say. “We’ll run this first trip like a dive.”

“I’m not familiar with what that means, exactly,” she says.

“I know,” I say.