Skirmishes (7 page)

But in a fight, he was better. He had come up through the ranks at a time when the Fleet fought several battles, not just in space, but hand-to-hand.

He didn’t expect that here, but he had another complication: he had made a promise to Boss. He had said that he wouldn’t let her evil Empire find out about his ship.

He might not follow Fleet guidelines throughout this encounter, and that would be on him, not on a fantastic officer like Rossetti.

She had brought five soldiers with her, the same five that had helped with the first ground battle the crew of the
Ivoire
had fought in this strange new time period. Four others joined as they kept going down levels. They were all armed heavily, and their environmental suits had real body armor.

He glanced at Rossetti. She was covered in protective gear as well. He was the only one who wore a standard environmental suit.

Of course, if the people they were going to meet wanted to start something, they would go after Coop anyway. The difference between the environmental suit he wore now and his armored suit was that the armored suit would protect him well against weapons he had seen in this time period. His environmental suit would only survive a few heavy-duty (and well-aimed) shots from laser weapons before becoming compromised.

“Anita,” he said into his comm link, “you have anything more on these soldiers?”

Anita was watching from the transport. The condition of Starbase Kappa’s equipment didn’t allow anyone to monitor from here.

“They’re not that disciplined,” Anita said. “They start to leave the area they arrived in, then they stop and talk about something. Two at least have planted themselves near a door, weapons raised, shaking their heads every time someone beckons them.”

Boss had said there were a lot of superstitions about this place. Could the stories be so horrible that trained soldiers were unwilling to come into it?

If so, that might work to Coop’s advantage.

For a moment, he toyed with letting the outside soldiers set the agenda, and see if they would come after his people at all.

Then he decided against it. He needed to find out who they were, what they wanted, and why they were on this base with weapons. If Boss questioned him later, he would say he was making certain they weren’t from the Empire.

But deep down, he knew the truth.

Deep down, he was spoiling for a fight, and he hoped to hell that this group would give it to him.

EIGHT

OVER ROSSETTI’S OBJECTIONS, Coop strode first into the landing area where the soldiers still milled. He almost said,
Welcome to Starbase Kappa
, but he refrained. Instead he stood, with his arms crossed, near the door into the main part of the base and let his own team catch up to him.

If the uniforms were any indication, Anita was wrong: there weren’t twenty soldiers here. There were fifteen soldiers and five civilians. And Coop recognized the ornate blue uniforms because Boss had shown him examples.

He was facing members of the Enterran Empire, just like Anita had thought.

Coop waited until they noticed him, which took a full two minutes. They had clearly been arguing amongst themselves, but he couldn’t hear any of it because it was on their private comm links.

He turned on the speaker on his suit. That temptation to welcome them to Starbase Kappa rose again, but he still didn’t say anything. He would let them begin this encounter.

When they noticed Coop and his team, four of the five civilians started in surprise. The soldiers grabbed their weapons tighter, locking them in place, standing at attention. So there was discipline after all—and that was a good thing.

It meant that the breakdown of discipline when the Empire’s group arrived showed extreme fear.

Boss had been right: this place did terrify the entire sector.

The only civilian who hadn’t been surprised stepped forward. He was taller than the other civilians, and wore a bulky environmental suit with actual oxygen containers, a square helmet that was made of some kind of clear material, and thin gloves like the ones Boss had worn when Coop first met her. Her environmental suit had been more sophisticated than this guy’s, but not of any higher quality.

“You got the secret room open!” the civilian said through the speaker on his helmet. He sounded both excited and enthusiastic.

He took another step toward Coop, but one of the soldiers grabbed his arm.

The civilian tried to shake the soldier off and failed. Still, Coop could see how eager the civilian was. The civilian’s clear helmet allowed Coop to see his face. The civilian had curly black hair, dark eyes, and avid features. He was thin, but not athletic or space thin. And he had deep lines around his nose and mouth, almost as if his face were forcing him into a permanent frown no matter what he did.

“How in God’s name did you get that room open?” the civilian asked, doing his best to ignore the soldier who held him back.

A female soldier stepped in front of the civilian. She was younger, with a taunt expression on her narrow features. Her eyes were hooded and her mouth a thin line. Her hair was so short that Coop could barely see it through her helmet.

She turned slightly toward the civilian. Coop recognized the movement. She was chastising the civilian through a private channel.

Then she looked back at Coop. “You’re trespassing.”

The civilian reached for her, as if he were disagreeing, but she stepped ever so slightly out of his grasp.

“Oh.” Coop deliberately sounded surprised. He glanced around himself as if seeing this level for the first time. “We thought this place had been abandoned.”

He knew he spoke with an accent, and his sentence structure was probably a bit too perfect. Just by speaking, he identified himself as someone outside this sector.

He hoped they wouldn’t care.

“The Room of Lost Souls is property of the Enterran Empire,” the woman said. “Didn’t you see the postings?”

He hadn’t seen any postings. He wondered if he had missed them because the
Ivoire
had come here using the
anacapa
drive instead of flying through Empire space.

“The maps we have state that this place had been deserted for generations. The maps also state that we should avoid it.” Coop smiled, even though he knew they couldn’t see his smile. Sometimes people could hear a smile in his voice. He was gambling on that. “That admonition intrigued me.”

“And you are?” the woman asked.

Coop wasn’t about to answer that question. Even if he had felt inclined to answer it, he wouldn’t have known how.

So he took a tack from one of the Fleet’s new-encounter playbooks. He answered a question with something that sounded friendly but was really a question. “I take it you’re from the Enterran Empire.”

“Yes,” she said.

“I need to talk to him,” the civilian said to the woman. He almost sounded panicked. “He got the secret room open.”

Coop studied them for a moment. He had thought Boss’s concerns about the Empire might have been a bit paranoid until this very moment.

The civilian’s eagerness to get to the area where the
anacapa
still functioned, disturbed Coop greatly.

“Technically, I didn’t get the room open,” Coop said. Technically, his team opened the room before he arrived on the starbase, but he didn’t add that. “Give us a little time. I had no idea this place belonged to someone. I’ll get my people out of here.”

At the moment, he needed to be the cooperative stranger. He wanted these people to think him no threat at all, just a man who had stumbled into the wrong place for the wrong reason.

Maybe they would confide in him—or if they didn’t
confide
exactly, they might at least let information slip. Then he could decide how to proceed.

“I’d rather you show me how to get into that room,” the civilian said.

The woman shot him an annoyed glance. “We need to check out your people,” she said to Coop.

“Why?” he asked. “We all know this base is empty.”

“Your people seem to have no trouble in this base,” she said as if she found that suspicious. Of course she would.

She knew about the genetic marker.

She knew that anyone without a marker died in places like Starbase Kappa. And the death wasn’t pretty.

Apparently, the Empire team that faced him now found the fact that his crew could easily work in this environment suspicious.

Hell, he’d find it suspicious too if he were in their position, especially if what Boss said were true: that the Empire was trying to control what it called stealth tech.

“Plus,” the woman added, “we didn’t see you entering this part of space.”

He felt a little cold. They believed he had stealth tech—a cloak they couldn’t penetrate. He wondered if they believed him part of Boss’s group, or if they worried that another group existed.

“I’m not sure why you would have expected to see me,” Coop said, in that same casual, comfortable, off-hand way he’d been speaking. He wanted this woman to relax around him, and so far, she hadn’t.

She hadn’t even changed her posture. She still blocked the civilian man who kept raising a hand, almost like a child trying to get the attention of an adult.

“Our postings don’t lie,” she said, as if it were a test. It probably was.

“We’ve already established that I didn’t see the postings,” Coop said.

She tilted her head, as if reluctantly granting him this point.

“We’ve posted most of this region, informing ships to turn away. We also state that anyone who gets through will be considered trespassers and might get shot on sight.”

“Apparently, your postings aren’t as numerous as you thought,” Coop said. “And it sounds like they make idle threats, since we never saw a ship of yours on our trip here.”

Once again, he hadn’t lied. But he also knew why he hadn’t seen any of those ships. He hadn’t come the way that this woman expected, and he needed her to tell him how many ships there were, how far away they were, and what they knew—if anything—about the
Ivoire
.

“You might not have seen us,” she said, “but we should have seen you. We had an information shield in place.”

It took him a moment to understand the terminology.

“Does she mean they had enough ships to put up a sensor blanket?” Rossetti asked on their private link.

“I think so,” Coop said, glad that his visor didn’t allow the woman to see him talking to Rossetti. “Have Anita contact the
Ivoire
. We need to know how many ships are in the immediate area, and whether or not their sensors have pinged ours. We need to know if they’ve found the
Ivoire
or not.”

“Got it,” Rossetti said.

Coop tilted his head, as if he had been thinking. He hadn’t moved enough for the woman to realize he’d been conversing with his own people.

“An information shield,” he said. “You believe that we would have passed through one on our way here?”

“I know you would have,” she said. “There’s no other way here. You would have had to go through our sensors.”

“And you don’t think there are gaps in your sensors,” he said, not really asking a question, but stating it and making it sound as if she were naïve to expect a gap-free shield.

“There aren’t,” she said firmly.

“And yet we’re here,” he said.

“You could’ve cloaked,” the civilian said, as if he couldn’t contain himself. “Stealth tech—”

“No cloak is good enough to mask against our sensors,” the woman said, more to the civilian than to Coop.

“And yet,” Coop said, pausing for emphasis as he repeated himself, “we’re here.”

The woman glared at him. She straightened her shoulders. “You came in a small ship, one that cannot have traveled through deep space.”

Coop felt a surge of relief. She didn’t know about the
Ivoire
. That didn’t mean her ships hadn’t found it, but so far, no one had communicated that information to her.

“So,” he said, with just a touch of amusement, “now you know the capabilities of my ship. Have you flown one like it?”

“I know, based on the size and the power configuration, that it couldn’t have traveled here on its own. That’s a short-range vessel. If I had to guess, I would say it’s a troop transport.”

She was good. She clearly hadn’t seen a Fleet transport vessel before, but she had figured it out. None of the transports or the life pods or the smaller fighters had
anacapa
drives. They were simply too dicey to use without a full engineering staff.

“Until you people showed up,” Coop said, “I had no reason to bring a troop here.”

“So what are you doing here?” the civilian asked.

That was a harder question to answer. Coop tried to keep it simple. “We’re exploring. None of us had been here before.”

“And somehow you got into the secret room,” the civilian said.

“It didn’t look secret,” Coop said. “In fact, I’m not even sure what you’re referring to as the secret room. We’ve found some doors that were harder to open than others, but we didn’t find any hidden spaces at all.”

Again, true.

The civilian tried to step forward, but the soldier who held him pulled him back. “The secret room is the door inside—”

“What’s the point of your exploration?” the woman said quickly, as if she didn’t want the civilian to finish his statement.

Coop shrugged. “The point of our exploration is what’s always the point of exploration. Information, mostly. But I have to admit, there’s just a bit of an adrenalin high going into a new place, particularly one that’s been deserted for this long.”

“Did you expect to find something here?” the woman asked—and the question felt pointed.

“Of course not,” Coop said. “This place has been abandoned for a long time. Abandoned places get scavenged. I figured there would be little here, except of exploratory or informational value.”

“You keep repeating the word information. What are you trying to find out?”

“Aren’t you interested in where this place came from?” Coop asked. “Your guides and warnings seem to give it mythic powers. We wanted to see that.”