Skirmishes (21 page)

We back into that hole in the force field, and for some reason, this part makes me nervous. It takes me a second to figure out why: I’m afraid that the force field will close before we leave.

I resist the urge to change our speed while we’re inside. Any deviation might cause more problems. We might be seen as a threat if we hurry out, especially if this is as automated as Yash thinks it is.

Finally we emerge into our part of space. I’m just a little dizzy. We’re done moving and I feel nothing but relief.

On a subconscious level, I find the Boneyard terrifying. Or maybe the level isn’t that subconscious. Maybe I’m being my old cautious self because I know so many different ways to die in that Boneyard.

And I also know that all of those ways I can think of are probably only a fraction of the ways to die in there. They’re the ones I can predict, I can understand, I can guess at.

I have no idea what else lurks in there.

But, silly me, I do plan to find out.

THIRTY-FOUR

YASH WAS RIGHT: the only way to close the force field was to send a signal. She’s encouraged by this. She believes it means the Fleet hasn’t changed much since she was with it.

I think if the Fleet still exists, it has changed a lot. I see no evidence that the Fleet exists now. I only see evidence that the Fleet existed a long time ago, and abandoned a lot of places all over several sectors.

The Boneyard itself might be an abandoned place.

That’s what Coop initially assumed, and I’m still working on that premise. The fact that Yash has made some kind of contact with Fleet technology—technology that’s not broken or antiquated, but somewhat unfamiliar to her—makes her believe that the Fleet still exists.

All of this makes me realize that the belief has always been just beneath the surface for her, and she’s a lot less sensible about her loss than I thought she was.

I store that information for later, in case it becomes important.

I was right about one thing: Yash is appalled at her behavior inside the Boneyard. I try to tell her that such behavior is normal on a first dive, but she doesn’t think we’ve dived. We didn’t don suits and head out into a wrecked ship. We were just inside a graveyard of wrecked ships. I try to tell her that’s part of what diving is, but she’s having none of it.

She thinks she’s failed somehow.

Considering the fact that it was her technical knowledge that got us into the Boneyard in the first place, I see no failure anywhere. I can’t tell her that either. I realize, after a few fruitless conversations with her, that she is going to flagellate herself for a while, and that’s her way of dealing with the lost millennia and the death of everything she knows.

She had that reinforced inside the Boneyard, whether she realizes it or not.

I’m not going to be the one to help her realize what’s going on.

I have too much to do.

I have data to analyze. And unlike my usual dives, I’m not going to do so with the entire group watching.

I want Yash to examine the data her way, and I want time alone with the rest of it.

I quarantine the information we’ve gotten from the dive, and make sure that—at the moment—only Yash and I can examine it. I know Mikk wants to see it as well, but I’m not going to let him. I need to think about all of this unfiltered.

For that reason, I use the non-networked system inside my quarters to go over everything we’ve seen. Ever since my first dive, I’ve had a completely different computer set up in my quarters than anywhere else.

I initially established this because I am such a loner; I didn’t trust my very first diving crew, and I didn’t want them to know anything about the dive.

I soon learned that that was bad policy. I needed more minds than mine on everything. Even then, though, I wanted to protect some information, often because I never wanted the locations of our wreck dives on any public network—or any chance of them finding their way to a public network.

A lot of times, I left the wrecks where they were, a tribute to their history, so they couldn’t be used for scrap or confiscated by the Empire or even allowed to become a tourist wreck dive, which I do recognize as ironic, because I used to make a living taking tourists on wreck dives.

But preservation is one of my loves, history is one of my loves, and I’m careful not to betray either.

Except when militarily necessary.

I smile grimly and get to work.

My quarters are larger than I like. They have two rooms, both larger than any other cabin on this ship. If the bed weren’t built in, I would place it in the front area so that no one could see me working. Unfortunately, the bed, like so much of the furniture, came already attached.

My main desk is as far from the door as possible. I work with my back to the wall and my screens facing that wall. That way, no one can enter and take images of what I’m doing for later consumption.

Not that anyone enters these quarters except me. Coop tried joining me once and learned why that was a bad idea. If we wanted time alone, we took it in whatever cabin I assigned him for the trip.

These quarters have a tiny private galley kitchen, which I use on days like this. I’m focused on information, research, and discovery, not on socializing and eating. I know that drives my crew nuts, but I don’t care. I’m busy; they should find a way to be busy as well.

Yash and I gathered a lot of information in our ten minutes inside the Boneyard. But that’s not what I’m looking at first. First, I’m examining the telemetry from the probe.

It sent nearly an hour’s worth of material before its feed shut down. For all I know, it’s still trying to send information.

But, as I expected, the moment the force field closed, the probe’s telemetry feed stopped. Our designs are no match for that Fleet force field.

Yash has assigned some of the engineers that she brought with her to modify a probe to see if they can get it to send information through the force field. I insisted that if they develop something like that, they also make sure that we can shut it off from
outside
the force field. I’m still concerned that others—particularly those scavengers—will figure out a way inside.

I’ve spent most of the day examining the telemetry from the probe and looking at what Yash and I discovered. I also have a third computer system, untethered to the one I’m using for the downloads and telemetry, matching information from all of the devices we used, so that I’m not doing the yeoman’s work of information sorting.

Because there’s really too much information to deal with.

I have discovered a few things, things that have made me pause with each revelation, and forced me to reconsider plans.

First, the Boneyard’s sheer size is daunting. It makes what sounded like a simple mission into a very difficult one. Some modification of the force field keeps the ships in position. Or, as Yash suggested, some device got placed in all of the ships and partial ships that locks them in place.

I put her on investigating this, since I don’t even know what to look for.

My brain is still processing the vast number ships, all Fleet built. If this Boneyard is the only such thing of its kind,
and
the Fleet still exists, that means the Fleet has lost several ships per year, and then placed them (or parts of them) in the Boneyard.

But Coop once told me that the size of the Fleet varies. Some generations go through a ship-building mania, and they add a lot of new ships to the Fleet. Those ships aren’t as heavily peopled—at least at first—and they move along with the rest, or remain at one of the Sector bases until needed.

So if the Fleet still exists and it is composed of 1,000 ships, then it lost and recovered a lot of ships. Not every ship that gets damaged can be salvaged, and I’m sure that some get completely destroyed.

Not to mention the Dignity Vessel wrecks that we’ve found so far. They never got rounded up and put into the Boneyard. Coop tells several stories of ships he knows about that got lost in foldspace—or at least, that he believes got lost in foldspace—not to mention the ships that never returned from some mission.

I would assume that any ship that gets put into the Boneyard has been found by the Fleet.

But the location of this Boneyard, plus the design of the force field and some of the ships, tells me it was placed here after Coop disappeared from the Fleet. So of course he wouldn’t have known about the Boneyard before he left.

Still, the place’s sheer size is disturbing and doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Mathematical or otherwise. I did have our scanners do a cursory search for Fleet-only materials, and they reported back that everything they could scan—which was an interesting phrase in and of itself—showed only Fleet-based ships.

I had also asked that the scanners do a count of all the ships in the Boneyard, but they didn’t have enough time or enough information. The parts of ships—especially three-quarter ships—confused the computers. They didn’t know if those were a full ship, a partial ship, or something to be ignored.

We’ll have to design a program to figure out exactly what we’ve stumbled upon.

Just that thought alone got me up and out of my chair, pacing. The number of ships overwhelms me, particularly when I want to dive them all. I won’t be able to.

I knew that, but I didn’t really
know
it. For some reason, the number—even though it is an estimate—makes the Boneyard even more real to me.

It is now a thing, not an idea, something with recognizable limits and measures, even if those limits and measures are huge. I can wrap my brain around all of this, and make plans, when I couldn’t do so before.

Before we got here for our second visit, all I knew was that the Boneyard was large and it probably had a lot of Fleet ships inside it. Maybe it had other ships from other places, maybe not.

There is no way that it could be the remains of one battle, like Coop initially thought. I’m not even sure it could be the remains of one large war.

I let that sink into my imagination for a moment, and then I continue.

I have much too much to think about: not just the information the sensors provided, not just the number of ships, not just what we’re facing, but also I must plan. I have a mission to accomplish—theoretically—and now it’s my job to figure out if that mission is even possible.

Because there’s one problem that I have yet to discuss with Yash.

We both knew that the thing which generated the force field was in what we think is the very center of the Boneyard. But we thought we’d be able to get to that center using an
anacapa
drive.

We still might be able to, after some futzing and some reworking or maybe even using one of the ships from the Boneyard itself.

But that’s the
only
way to get there.

Besides, that’s much too much work for this trip, if we combine it with liberating a few of the ships.

Frankly, we need more ships more than we need to understand what’s going on with the Boneyard. At least in the short term. And I’m not sure how to convince Yash of that.

She wants to know what happened five thousand or so years in the past, and I’m worried about the next five months ahead of us.

This wouldn’t be such a big concern, except for one thing: I need her beside me to explore that Boneyard. I need her concentration and her expertise, and I’m not sure I have either.

I need a plan, and I need to develop it before I talk to her.

Because, in that conversation, I’m going to have to convince her that I’m right, that I’m worth listening to, and I’m worth following.

And I’m not sure I can do that, all on my own.

THIRTY-FIVE

I SPEND TWO DAYS gathering facts and putting together a presentation just for Yash. My hands are shaking as I wait for her in the conference room. She can make or break this entire mission.

She can convince the Fleet members on the
Two
that the mission isn’t worth doing. She can also take over this ship with very little effort, although my people will defend me as best they can.

They’re divers, though, and scholars, and pilots. Not fighters. She has fighters—and I can’t believe I’m thinking this.

Only I know that I can’t get it out of my brain.

Two reasons:

I’ve angered partners before, and had them do something horrible and unexpected.

And, now that I’ve realized that Yash isn’t totally focused on remaining in this future, I have rethought her volatility level. She could go off the deep end if I push her too hard away from discovering what she needs to know about her family and friends.

I consider Coop a very sane man, considering all he’s been through. I also know (now, anyway) that captains in the Fleet don’t get to that position by being weak-minded or overly emotional people. He thinks things through, he doesn’t panic, and he makes sound decisions. It’s in his character, it’s part of his job description, and it’s what he needs to do for his people.

And he still goes a little crazy once in a while over the changes he’s been through since the
Ivoire
arrived here.

Yash doesn’t have that personality or that level of stability as part of her job description. That I attributed her with more calmness with Coop has to do with the way she presented herself to me, not with the actual truth of her position.

I’ve reassessed, and now I know that she could go just a little crazy right here, right now, on this mission. Normally, I wouldn’t blame her. I probably would be a lot harder to handle in her circumstance.

But I need her to listen to me or I need to sideline her or, if she gets too intractable, I need to abort this mission.

And I have to do it without angering everyone else from the Fleet.

I’m trying not to pace. Pacing makes my nervousness really hard to miss. Shaking, though, is something I can easily hide. I can press my hands against the tabletop, or fold them in my lap. Yash won’t know.