Boneyards Read Free

sorry—”
    “No, you're not,” he says. “I'm going in there.”
    And then, he stomps into the small corridor made by those rocks.
    I curse silently. I had asked what he was looking for so that I would have an idea of how long he would be back there. I want to know if we're going to need to worry. It's a simple precaution we use on space dives—timing everything, giving limits because they ensure that the diver remains focused on the task at hand.
    I take a deep breath to calm myself. Of course, Coop will stay focused on the task at hand. He's the one who has been focused on this mission from the very beginning.
    Still, reflexively, I glance at my watch, then move to the mouth of that corridor. Stone grabs my arm and moves me back a dozen centimeters.
    “I don't want you to get hurt if those rocks fall,” she says quietly.
    She seems resigned. Maybe, like me, she has always known he would go in there and that there would be little we could do to stop him.
    I want her to reassure me that he will be all right. I want her to tell me that ground accidents are rare. I want her to say that we're not silly for letting him go alone.
    But I know she will say none of those things. I wouldn't say them if we were on a real dive.
    Instead, I beckon Yash to my side. “Let me see those schematics,” I say.
    She taps the pad, zooming in on the part of the room that she believes we're standing in.
    Just like I thought, we're near the back of the gigantic room, not too far from the doors that open onto the apartments and the storage areas.
    If, of course, the Fleet built Sector Base W according to these schematics and didn't change the design as they worked on the site. Yash, who was raisedon a sector base to a family of technology specialists, says that often the design will change as the engineers discover problems inside the base's location.
    She often discusses a base she apprenticed on, a base that had to make all kinds of alterations because the presence of methane threatened the entire build.
    “What's he looking for?” I ask her.
    She shrugs, but I recognize her expression. She knows. And she's not willing to tell me.
    She assumes everything is confidential. Coop is still her commander, and she operates as if everything he tells her is under the seal of that command.
    I don't have that attitude. Coop and I have had a lot of go-rounds since we met, many of them over who is in charge. It took me months to get him to call me Boss, which is what everyone calls me. I don't acknowledge my so-called “real” name, not because I dislike it or even because my father was the one to christen me with it, but because that name no longer applies to me.
    It hasn't applied to me for decades.
    Coop finally gave in one afternoon over coffee. He shook his head, and said to me, I can't avoid your name forever. I have to call you something. I'll just pretend “Boss” is your given name. After all, it's not like I'm using that word in my native language.
    His native language, our joint linguists have figured out, is one of the parents of my language. Even the language has twisted and altered over five thousand years, so much so that when we first met, we couldn't speak to each other.
    I know Stone's accusation is a false one: perhaps more than the rest of us, Coop knows how long five thousand years is. He deals with it every single day.
    And just when I think he has the knowledge—and the feelings it engenders—under control, he does something like this.

W e crowd around the opening in the rock pile, which is probably not the smartest thing we can do. But Stone and I are standing only about a meter away, and when Yash joined us, it became an unspoken invitation for everyone else to join us.
    Mikk turns on the wrist lights on his environmental suit, lights that can imitate bright flares, and he aims them at the opening. He looks, to the casual observer, like an insecure man flexing his muscles. Mikk already has more obvious muscles than