Skirmishes (3 page)

The Boneyard shows up as an emptiness on a star map, which freaks navigators out. It disturbed me the first time I saw it, and I’m still not sure how that’s done. Because it should show up as a ship graveyard. It doesn’t. It shows up as a blackness, a nothingness, in space itself.

I suspect some of that star map blackness is the energy field around the Boneyard. But some of that star map blackness is custom. On the old star maps, the Boneyard showed up as a black nothingness because no one could penetrate its borders, so it was a great unknown area. Back then, unknown often showed up on star maps as blankness—or blackness, given how the maps were designed.

That black emptiness, at least as it pertained to the Boneyard, got transferred to modern star maps.

When we went back to the Lost Souls Corporation after finding the Boneyard for the first time, we researched the Boneyard. Or we tried to. I have dozens of researchers of all types on staff. Those people know how to find any detail, if it’s available.

Coop and Yash and members of the
Ivoire
did their best combing what Fleet records they had from way back when. They also set their best science team on the readings we picked up from the Boneyard itself.

We know this: the Boneyard, its force field, and its ships have been here for a long, long,
long
, time.

Maybe the full five thousand years that the
Ivoire
lost.

That’s all we know for certain. We can only make educated—or maybe not so educated—guesses about the rest.

Coop’s convinced the Fleet that he spent his life with, the Fleet he was born into, had fought a huge battle here. He hasn’t said, but I know he believes that this battle was devastating, and the Fleet lost.

He thinks the ships are from that battle, and he believes that they constitute the bulk of the Fleet at the time—maybe even the entire Fleet. He worries that the Fleet got destroyed shortly after he left, and everyone he knew died in that hideous battle.

I know better than to remind him that everyone he knew then has died thousands of years ago. A careless member of my staff made a similar comment early on, and the cold, dismissive look Coop gave her hid the pain her remark had caused him.

If I had to guess, I’d say that Coop prefers the idea of the Fleet being destroyed in a battle that he can research and understand than the idea that the Fleet continued without him, heading into the vast unknown of space on missions he’ll never know about.

Because he’s usually an evidence guy. And the evidence we have so far points to something far different than one battle.

First of all, the size. The Fleet was large, but not so large that its final resting place would take more space than a small moon. Secondly, the only ships that we can see in the Boneyard are Fleet-made. If the Boneyard had been a former battlefield, there should be other ships inside it, ships from other cultures.

And then there’s the type of ships. Yes, the Fleet was huge. But the ships here don’t look like the images of the ships I’ve seen on the
Ivoire
. They’re Fleet ships, but they don’t seem to match the ships that Coop and his crew left behind.

Some look like the first Dignity Vessel that I found long before I met Coop. That ship had a completely different construction, with actual rivets holding parts together, something the Fleet of Coop’s day hadn’t used for centuries. I’ve mentioned that, and Coop says I remember it wrong. I don’t mind the dismissiveness; he never saw that ship, so it’s not real to him in some way.

But I’ve also told Yash, and she asked to see the specs. I’ve shown them to her. They made her very, very quiet. That disturbed me more than Coop’s inability to listen.

The structure of some of the visible ships inside the Boneyard looks more like the structure of that first vessel than it does any of the Dignity Vessels from Coop’s era. But we haven’t been able to go inside to see for certain.

And I’m not going to come to any conclusions until I have gone into that Boneyard. Because I’ve learned, through countless dives of countless wrecks, that assumptions only get you in trouble. The more you assume, the more you search for whatever it is you’ve decided you’re looking for.

That’s one of the many reasons I’m relieved that Coop has stayed behind. He would approach this dive so very differently, and I’d be afraid that he’d infect my crew.

For this very reason, only my people will dive the Boneyard. We know very little about the Fleet—especially compared with the
Ivoire
crew. We won’t make assumptions based on a shared past. We’ll make our own set of assumptions, some of which will happen because of our ignorance of Fleet technology, but Yash will help with that, at least.

Although I do worry about having Yash on this mission. I need her because I can’t operate the
anacapa
without her, but I don’t want her talking to the dive team. In fact, when I briefed her on this trip, I made her swear that she wouldn’t talk about the dive mission at all.

It was a dicey moment, because technically, I’m not her commander. Coop is. He still maintains his captain’s rank, hoping to return the
Ivoire
to the Fleet one day. His crew—what remains of it—acts under that assumption as well.

Technically, he has loaned the
Ivoire
crew members to me for this mission—the engineering staff to protect the
Two
and my team, and the soldiers one level below.

Soldiers. If you had asked me years ago whether or not I’d allow soldiers on a diving mission, I would have laughed at you.

But Coop and I ventured into the Empire’s territory a month ago and attacked them. We had a very good reason, but we knew that attack would have consequences. Those consequences include soldiers on every voyage Coop, I, or my team takes.

Those consequences have also given this mission even more importance. The more operable ships we find, the more we can use them to defend the Nine Planets.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. We have to get inside the Boneyard first, and that might not be easy.

The Boneyard has a force field around it, a field we had only begun to analyze on our first visit here before we got attacked. We’re hoping that the field is a modified
anacapa
field, but we don’t know for certain—and that’s another thing that worries me.

I’ve had friends and relatives die because of malfunctioning
anacapa
s. At the time, we thought it a strange energy form—we had no idea what it really was. The
Ivoire
’s crew has reassured me countless times that my crew is fine around a working
anacapa
, that it’s only the malfunctioning ones which cause a problem.

Yash tells me that my team will be safe no matter what; she will make certain they’re nowhere near malfunctioning
anacapa
drives.

I hope she’s right. I’ve brought a few of my most trusted team members on this trip, but they don’t have the genetic marker that enables them to survive inside a malfunctioning
anacapa
field. Every member of the team that will dive with me has the marker.

I’m not taking any chances.

Although, as I stare at the Boneyard unfolding before me, I realize that I’ve been lying to myself.

Of course I’m taking chances. I’m taking terrible chances. I’m taking the chance that we’ll all get discovered here by the scavengers who attacked us the last time. I’m taking the chance that we can actually get into the Boneyard.

And I’m taking the chance that we can get out.

Maybe it’s because I’m older now and more experienced, or maybe it’s because I feel the weight of all these lives around me. But I’m much more aware of what can go wrong and what the costs are.

I’m also aware that the Boneyard will answer a lot of questions, and maybe, just maybe, it’ll help us stop something I’ve wanted stopped for decades.

It might provide a way to stop the Empire from expanding, from taking over the entire sector, and yet another sector after that, and another sector after that.

Whatever we find inside this Boneyard might just save us all.

THREE

“I DIDN’T EXPECT it to be amazing,” someone says behind me.

I don’t turn around. I step back and look away from the screens, most of which show the Boneyard as a gigantic unrelieved blackness, and look out the windows as best as I can. I have to look past several heads.

People turning to each other, people whispering, people cupping their hands over their mouths in awe.

They’ve seen it. They can leave now.

I think that, but I don’t say it. Instead, I move just a little so I can look out the windows.

All I can see are bits and pieces of the Boneyard. It’s bigger than I remember, more vibrant. The ships almost seem like they’re in motion, which they probably are. Nothing stays completely still in space, but the movements are usually microscopic.

I’m not sure if my sense of movement is a trick of the mind or something to do with that force field.

Not that it matters.

The ships have my attention now.

They float, in various stages of ruin. Some seem just fine; others have gigantic holes where their bridges should be. Still others are missing wings or the tail section or the underbelly where, on most large Fleet ships, the family members live.

Some ships are just underbelly. Or just wings. Or the sides of a ship without any interior at all.

I itch to go inside any of those ships.
All
of those ships. I have missed diving. All of this corporate stuff—setting up the business, organizing a large workforce to modify Fleet technology to the modern age, working our patents and trademarks, doing our sales, and building our own small group of ships—takes time. I run an organization bigger than any I’ve ever belonged to, and I hate it.

Well, that’s not entirely true. The hate part is true. The running part is less true. About a year ago, I passed the day-to-day operations to Ilona Blake, and she handles the personnel, the decisions, the conflicts. I still steer—I’m not going to let Lost Souls, despite its name, become a soulless organization. I’ll do everything I can to prevent that.

That’s something I care about.

But I’m passionate about diving. I just forget that sometimes. So much else happens—I start a business, I deal with people, I ignore regulations.

I’ve been deeply wrapped up in the
Ivoire
and Lost Souls.

But my heart belongs to diving—going into the unknown, learning about a ship, learning about a past. Exploring what remains.

Realizing that, no matter what happens to me on a day-to-day basis, it will be forgotten a year from now, and it won’t matter to anyone else a century from now. No one will exactly be able to piece together all the bits of my life.

As a loner, that gives me comfort. As a lover of history, it gives me a sense that I’m part of something greater than myself. As a diver, it lets me feel closer to the unknowable past.

Outside of this ship, behind a force field we don’t entirely understand, lie more ships to dive than I’ve dived in years. Maybe more than I’ve dived in my lifetime.

Part of me wants to stay here forever, go from ship to ship, learn about each one, and die decades from now with most of the Boneyard yet to be discovered.

But I am here on a mission. I dive for Coop and the survivors of the
Ivoire
. I want to let them know what happened to their Fleet, if I can.

And I want to get technology for Lost Souls. More ships, more equipment, more
knowledge
.

Those are the stated goals.

But for me, the unstated goal is the most important goal. I want to return to my roots. I’ve missed being alone in near-dark in a place I’ve never been before, trying to figure out where I am, what I’m doing, and how I will survive. I thrive on adrenaline, and diving has always given me that rather startling rush.

That adrenaline rush is actually something I need to be careful of. My old diving partners would remind me of that each time we went out. One of them would monitor me while she waited on the skip, so that I wouldn’t use my oxygen more quickly than I needed to.

She’s dead now. Many of my diving partners are dead. Or retired. Or they’ve vanished.

The original crew exists only in my head. But oh, how we would have loved this place. We would have dived it without a thought to war or the future or discovering someone’s past. We would let the wrecks tell us their secrets without prejudging them at all.

I have never wreck dived for money—real dives, historical diving. I’ve taken tourists to old wrecks so I could afford my other trips. Trips that were mostly for me. I often did not report the historic wrecks I found. I let them remain, their history intact, taking from them only the information which they wanted to share with me.

All of that ended, of course, when I discovered my first Dignity Vessel—and that put me on the path that led to the
Ivoire
. To here.

To now.

“I’m still stunned at how big this place is,” Yash says softly. She sounds unnerved. Maybe she is. We’re about to get answers. They might not be the answers she wants, but we’ll get some.

“Can we count how many ships are in there?” someone else asks.

Even though I’ve been introduced to these people more than once, I can’t remember their names. Maybe I don’t want to. Maybe part of my brain is happier if it is less crowded than this cockpit is.

“I’m sure we can,” I say, “but it’s not the best use of our time.”

“Some of us have nothing to do at the moment, Boss,” Mikk says from his position at the helm. He’s learning how to work the new
Two
controls. He’s one of my best people.

He has been with me for a long, long time. He’s much more muscular than most divers, and always uses special suits. But those muscles have helped us when we’ve been on land-based missions, gravity-filled missions. He’s helped me in more ways that I can say.