Skirmishes (22 page)

Yash enters. She has deep circles under her eyes, and she looks thinner, even though I know that’s not possible, not in this short a time. But she’s tired and stressed, and I’m not even sure she’s entirely here. I think her attention is elsewhere, and I think that just because of the look in her eyes.

“We don’t have time for a sit-down,” she says.

“We need it,” I say, keeping my voice calm. It is the only calm thing about me.

“We need to follow this information, figure out—”

“We need to agree,” I say.

She blinks, then puts her hand on the back of a nearby chair, and leans toward me. Now I’ve got her full attention.

“
We
need to agree,” she says, in a tone filled with sarcasm. “You mean I have to agree with you.”

Yes, that’s what I mean, but that’s not what I’m going to say. At least, not quite that directly.

I say, “I’ve been going over the information we got in the Boneyard and—”

“So have I,” she says, “and it’s pretty clear to me that you need me on all trips into that Boneyard.”

She’s afraid I don’t want her to travel inside? I almost smile. That’s the reaction of an addicted diver, someone for whom the search, the hunt, is more important than anything else.

“I do need you,” I say, “but that’s not the point I was going to make. If you sit down, we can finish this discussion.”

Like adults
, I want to add, but I don’t.

Her eyes narrow and her lips thin, but she sits down heavily, reluctantly, like a teenager making silent protest. The chair creaks from the violence of her movement.

I ignore that.

I’ve thought about how to approach this almost as long as I’ve been thinking about the information we got from our trip.

“Our mission—”

“Your mission,” she says, and I sigh. Audibly. With full exasperation.

“
Our
mission,” I say, “is to bring back ships so that we can study them, so that we can find out information—”

“And so you can fight your stupid Empire.”

She has gone full teenager on me. If I weren’t so tense, I might find it amusing.

“So that I can fight ‘my stupid’ Empire,” I say, nodding toward her.

That shuts her up.

“You want to find out about the Fleet,” I say.

“Get to it,” she snaps. “What do you want?”

“I want to plan the dives my way.”

“And you’re afraid I won’t let you,” she says.

“Yes,” I say.

“Because why? We all know that you’re in charge of this ship.”

“Because,” I say, “if I were in your shoes, I would be fighting me all the way.”

She inhales slightly. I have surprised her.

“What are you talking about?” she asks.

“The Boneyard is too big to handle with one skip and a limited crew,” I say. “I want to change the point of the dive. It’ll enable us to fulfill
my
mission, but not yours, not yet. I have ideas on how to do yours as well.”

“Mine?” she asks. “Technically, mine is the same as yours.”

“Technically, maybe. You’re doing what Coop asked,” I say. “But we both know that realistically, following the short-term mission makes you mad. It’s hard, and it’s not what you personally need, which makes it hard, or should I say hard
er,
to work for me.”

I deliberately use the word “for” instead of “with.” I’m not sure she’ll catch that, but if she does, she’ll get what I mean even more.

“What are you proposing?” she asks.

“That we dive the closest prospects. Three ships, which is all we have pilots for. We make sure—well,
you
make sure—their
anacapa
drives are viable. Then we send them back to Lost Souls. We follow, with as much data as we can gather, and figure out a couple of things. First, we figure out how to enable an
anacapa
drive that you or your team has built to enter that Boneyard. Second, we figure out where exactly that force field generator is, and third—”

“I already figured that out,” she says. “There’s an actual substation of some kind. I told you that.”

“I saw it,” I say. “And it looks like it is the generator, but you also told me that you don’t know if it’s an actual generator or an amplifier.”

“I told you that before we went in,” she says.

“Has something changed your mind?” I ask.

Her cheeks pinken. “Not yet.”

I nod, careful not to say that simply proves my point.

“What I’m looking at here,” I say, “is—”

“Your own concerns, just like I said,” she snaps.

“Is,” I repeat, “how to best to use our limited resources with limited risk. Diving is all about risk, Yash, and we don’t know a lot of things, like what’s really holding those ships in place, where they come from, if anyone monitors this place, and what its real purpose is.”

“We’d know that if we went to that center substation,” she says.

“You
think
,” I say. “You
hope
. You don’t
know
.”

My gaze meets hers. She looks away. After a moment, she nods. “I hope.”

“We dive this, we come back in a week or two with the ships we need, and then you can hand-pick your team from the
Ivoire
to dive this Boneyard properly. We go into that substation prepared. In fact, we might have to dive this with the ships we bring back. They’ll be part of the Boneyard, after all.”

That makes her turn toward me. “You want to get the ships, take them back, get them working, and then bring them here as a kind of spy ship?”

“I guess you can put it that way,” I say. “We’re not of the Fleet, and we’ll be using one of their ships, so yeah. A spy ship works.”

Her gaze goes down, toward the table, and a small furrow appears on her forehead. She’s clearly thinking about this. This part of the plan has surprised her.

“And we bring back engineers,” she says.

“And whomever else you believe needs to come with us,” I say. “By then, we will have gathered enough information about the Boneyard, about the force field, and about the layout to bring the right people.”

She grunts, then leans back. Her hands thread behind her head. She looks up at the ceiling. I suddenly realize she’s been as nervous about this meeting as I have.

Had she planned to take over the mission?

I don’t know and I’m not going to ask. I don’t want to derail whatever she’s thinking of. Because I did get her moving in a new direction, and I want her to continue doing so.

“I don’t like going in with one ancient skip,” she says after a moment, still looking at the ceiling.

“Neither do I,” I say. I want to tell her my plan to remove the
anacapa
from one of the other skips, but I’ll let her speak first. I owe her that much.

“I can easily remove the
anacapa
drives from the two other skips,” she says. “That way all of our skips can get inside the Boneyard without being boomeranged back, or whatever happened to us.”

“All?” I ask, in spite of myself. I had only planned to redesign one.

“We need two rotating skips and a medical vessel, right?”

Ideally, she is right. But I had never planned to rotate the skips I had, not with the skip she calls “ancient.” I had planned to use that only in an emergency, which I guess this is.

“Can you see any reason to leave an
anacapa
on board one of the skips?” she asks. “Because at the moment, I can’t.”

She’s still thinking of the Boneyard and the dives, not of the whole mission.

“If something happens to the
Two
,” I say, “we need an escape vessel, even if it’s one of the skips heading back to Lost Souls with a request for help.”

She grunts again, then sits up, her hands falling to her sides. She swivels so that she’s looking at me directly. Intensely. It makes me a bit nervous.

“You don’t think conventionally,” she says. “But you have a tactical brain. I wouldn’t have expected it.”

“Thank you,” I say. “I think.”

“We’ll do it your way,” she says as if she were the person in charge of the mission, and I was a junior officer suggesting a new path. “In the end, it may take less time than mine.”

And that’s the moment I know with certainty that she was planning to take over the entire mission, to guide us deep into the Boneyard with no backup at all. If Yash had been in charge of this trip, it would have ended in disaster, no doubt about it.

Now there’s less chance of a disaster, although the chance remains.

I’m not going to ask her what her plan is/was. I don’t dare. If she explains it, she might get reattached to it.

“How long will it take you to remove the
anacapa
from one of the skips?” I ask.

“Two days, tops,” she says. “We’ll have to scrub it, make sure none of the
anacapa
’s energy signature remains. That’ll be the hard part.”

It certainly is the part I don’t understand. But I don’t ask her to explain what she’ll do. That’s not important to me. What’s important is that she’ll do it, that this mission will go forward the way I want it to, without trouble from my crew.

“Let me know when it’s done,” I say. “I’ll use the time to examine our data and figure out which ships appear to be the most intact.”

“You realize we might not find an intact
anacapa
on any of these ships,” she says. “Then we’ll have to piggyback.”

“Or something,” I say. I’m not making contingencies about that damn drive with anything or with any of my people. “We’ll figure it out if we have to.”

Or we’ll go back to the Lost Souls and report my mission as a failure. Either way, it won’t be an entire loss, because we will have gathered a lot more intel about the Boneyard itself.

I’m not going to make any assumptions, though. I’m going to plan this dive as if it were any other dive, filled with danger, excitement, and the unknown.

My spirits lift. I had no idea how nervous I had been about this meeting, but now that it’s gone well, I’m relieved.

We can start diving proper.

I
can start diving.

And that thrills me, more than I can say.

THE STANDOFF

NOW

THIRTY-SIX

ELISSA STOOD on the observation deck of the flagship
Ewing Trekov
, named for her great-great-grandfather. She thought it an unfortunate coincidence that the command ship for this operation was the
Ewing Trekov
. Not only did she dislike the ship’s name and its implications, she also thought it an outdated monstrosity.

But it was the only ship available. The other flagships were on maneuvers elsewhere in the Empire and couldn’t get to the border region quickly enough. The moment Elissa let General Command know she had identified the perpetrators of the attacks on the research stations, General Command demanded immediate action.

They wanted to punish the perpetrators, of course. They wanted to let the Nine Planets know that they could not house terrorists. And they wanted that stealth tech, even if it meant stealing the Dignity Vessels.

It hadn’t taken Elissa long to come up with a plan that the General Command had approved.

Before she arrived here, she wasn’t sure if her plan would work. But now that she saw the two working Dignity Vessels and the junk vessels pretending to be some sort of defense force, she knew her plan would succeed.

She just wished she were doing more than observing from a distance. That’s what she hated about promotion. It took her out of the middle of the fighting and put her in charge of the battle.

She liked planning a campaign. She liked the entire thought process that went into it—figuring out what ship would be needed where, planning for contingencies, picking out her dream commanders, and then dealing with the actual ones. But she liked fighting just as much. She loved being in the fray, thinking on the fly, surviving the moment.

Even after the attack she had barely survived on the lost, lamented
Discovery,
she still loved being in the fray. She had almost died in space. As deeply as it had terrified her that day, she would face it all again if she had to.

It was probably some kind of adrenalin addiction. Or maybe it was just part of being a commander. Her personality was suited to this in all of its ups and downs. Even some of the Flag commanders didn’t quite believe she wanted to return to the field. They had tested and retested her since she survived that attack at the Room of Lost Souls.

Each psychological test cleared her for duty. In space. In a ship. Commanding a crew. Fighting an enemy if she had to.

She wasn’t lying or being tough. She preferred being here.

Except for the waiting part.

She glanced at the time.

She needed to get back to this ship’s bridge. She was using it as a command center. The operation would start in just a few minutes.

She needed to oversee it, even if there wasn’t much she could do from here.

She’d already studied the border of the Nine Planets Alliance. The Nine Planets agreed about a lot of things, but the one thing they couldn’t agree upon was how to defend this border.

Which meant they didn’t have an adequate information shield covering every meter of it. Nine of her ships had already slipped through the border. They would launch a surprise attack on the Lost Souls Corporation.

She had some data on the Corporation, although not as much as she would like. Some of the conspirators who helped Rosealma Quintana blow up various research stations had been caught, and had given their interrogators information on the layout, the defense systems, and the way the corporation was run.

The information contradicted somewhat, and it also was woefully incomplete. The conspirators didn’t know much about a defense system besides a ship they called the
Ivoire
, which was one of the ships on the border now. One of the Dignity Vessels.

And the conspirators also didn’t know much about the inner workings of Lost Souls. Most of the conspirators claimed they didn’t know much about stealth tech, although that proved mostly untrue. However, what they did know was about as detailed as what the researchers in the Empire knew.