Skirmishes Read Free Page B

anacapa augmentation on the Two’s piloting system with no problem, but also because she is great in any surprise situation. She’s had my back more than once, and I’ve been grateful for it.
    She activates the controls that reveal the windows all over the ship.
    The ones in the cockpit go from dark to clear, revealing the Boneyard in all its glory.
    And glory is the word I mean. I love graveyards. I always have. Even land-based graveyards, which are, if I think about it, disgusting—bodies decaying in dirt, bugs, skin sloughing off bone. I’d rather have my body sent out into deep space, spinning forever in the starlight.
    But that’s too irreverent for me to say. I’ve never admitted it to anyone, not even Coop, who has become the closest thing to a confidant that I’ve had in decades.
    I certainly won’t tell him that I find the Boneyard beautiful. He looked at it only once—the day we discovered it—and found it terrifying.
    All those ships from the Fleet, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, filling an area so large that it’s bigger than some asteroid belts. It might even be the size of a small solar system. We have yet to measure it.
    The old spacers who told me about it on the starbase Azzelia a few weeks ago said it was the size of a large moon, but what we have seen shows that they significantly underestimated its size, just like we did when we first saw it.
    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