Asimov's Science Fiction: October/November 2013 (22 page)

"I've heard the arguments," Coop said, trying to ignore the insubordination, recognizing it for the crazy that it was. "And I'm telling you, my old friend, that I believe you. They're part of my crew. They'll have to do what I tell them. If I tell them to follow my instructions, they'll have to."

Dix shifted just a little. His arms had to hurt, being in that position for so long.

"You tell them to instruct me what to do and I'll do it," he said.

He clearly wasn't going to let go of those controls. Dammit.

"The
anacapa
is delicate," Coop said. "I think they'll need hands on—"

"See, that's where you think you're so clever, Captain Cooper," Dix said, the sarcasm dripping from his voice. "And you're not. You're not clever at all. You want me to let go of the interior of the drive so your people can put me into the brig, and you can go ahead with this crazy mission that will destroy the drive and our chances to get the hell out of here. You want to stay because you've fallen for that woman, and you don't care who it hurts."

Coop winced, and hoped Dix didn't see it. Yes, Coop had developed a relationship with Boss, but it hadn't become sexual—yet. He had a hunch it would. He wasn't ready. And he certainly wouldn't give up his whole life and everything he knew for her, no matter what.

But Dix didn't believe that. Dix, who needed to get home to the woman he had left behind. Dix, who probably loved her in exactly the way he accused Coop of loving Boss.

"Dix," Coop said as calmly as he could. "I'm afraid that you're the one who is going to screw up the drive so badly that we won't be able to get back."

Dix snorted with disbelieving laughter. "I'm sure you
don't
believe that, Coop. You know better."

"No," Coop said firmly.
"You
know better. You know that we're not certified to work on
anacapas,
but we are the ones the others trust. We're the ones who give the orders. So, listen to me: I agree with you. We need to combine the
anacapas
and see if we can get back to our Universe, our people, our Fleet. But you and I aren't the ones who can work on the drives. We're the ones who tell others what to do,
even if they don't agree with us.
Remember?"

Dix froze. Coop could actually see him thinking.

Coop's heart rate started to increase. Dix was contemplating what he said. Maybe Coop had managed to reach the last part of Dix that was thinking clearly.

"Captain?" The voice didn't belong to anyone in the
anacapa
room. It belonged to Anita Tren, whom he had left in charge of the transport they had brought to the starbase from the
Ivoire.

Everyone moved, which meant everyone heard the voice. Even Dix. Tren had not used a private channel.

Another dammit. Coop didn't want Dix to be distracted, to have time to think. (Or, to be more accurate, to revert to the worst of the crazy.)

"We have a problem, sir," Tren said without waiting for Coop to respond. "Are you there?"

Dix shook his head, and leaned even closer to the
anacapa,
hunching away from Coop as if he expected Coop to strike him.

"I'm here, Anita," Coop said. "What is it?"

"Sir," Tren said. "Twenty soldiers have arrived. I think they're from the Enterran Empire."

Coop frowned. Whatever he had expected, it wasn't this. "Twenty? They're in ships?"

"No, sir. They're on the starbase. Apparently they docked on the far side from us, several levels down. We weren't looking for them because we didn't think anyone came to this base. I'm sorry, sir."

"They're on the base?" Coop couldn't quite wrap his brain around it.

"Yes, sir. They look hesitant, sir, but they're armed."

Armed. Coop didn't repeat that one. Armed. He hadn't expected it. Should he have expected it? He hadn't expected Dix either.

Clearly, Dix wasn't the only one whose thinking had been clouded of late.

"Dix," Coop said. "I want you to step back from the
anacapa.
Let the experts do the work you're trying to do."

"No," Dix said. "They won't listen."

"Dix, I don't have time—"

"Yeah, I know," Dix said. "And neither do I. You have a military mission, Captain. I have a humanitarian one. Let me finish what I'm doing."

Whatever chance Coop had had of convincing Dix to step back was gone. Coop stood.

He could stun his old friend, but weapons fire in this closed space wasn't the best idea. And the environmental suit, with its three layers of protection, limited their options.

"Keep an eye on him," Coop said to Yash. And then he added her on a private channel, "See if you can figure out a way to stop him."

"I'll do my best, sir," Yash said through that same channel. "Be careful."

Coop nodded an acknowledgement. He couldn't promise her that he would be careful, however, because he didn't know what careful was any more. "No," Boss had said when he told her his plan. "You can't do this."

They were inside her office. The Lost Souls Corporation had bought a space station in the Nine Planets Alliance. The station housed two former Fleet ships for study, and parts of several others that had been discovered over the years.

Boss's office was large. It had three separate spaces—a huge entrance area with separate seating groups, a private area where Boss spent most of her time alone, and a conference room that was even larger than the main area.

Boss met with everyone in the entrance area. No one went into the private area. Boss was the ultimate loner, and she was still getting used to running a corporation. Sometimes Coop wondered how she had ever managed to command a ship—even a small ship. All that time with people had to wear her down.

She sat on the couch, frowning at him. She wasn't pretty—she was too thin for that—but she was athletic, with close-cropped hair and the graceful movements of someone comfortable in her own body.

He found her exceptionally attractive, and he tried to ignore it. If he were back in his own time, he might act on it—he rarely met someone his equal whom he was attracted to who wasn't also part of the Fleet—but here, he didn't know if he was just being needy and lonely, in search of a distraction and a bit of human contact.

Still, he touched her too much, casually in conversations, and usually, she touched him back.

On this day, though, she didn't. Her eyes had become steely and her mouth was in a thin line. Her arms were crossed.

"You can't do this, Coop," she repeated.

He almost said, like a child
, I can do whatever I want.

Instead, he said, "You told me that the Room of Lost Souls has been a danger to everyone who comes near it for its entire history. It clearly has a malfunctioning
anacapa
drive. My people can shut it down. Then we'll come back."

She shook her head. "You don't understand what could go wrong."

He felt a flare of anger. Of course he understood. He understood better than she did. She had no connection to the technology, and while he couldn't fix it himself, he knew more about the
anacapa
than she and her people ever would.

"I'm just telling you this as a courtesy," he said. "We'll do what we have to do."

"Coop." She leaned forward and touched his knee, as if she needed to get his attention. She
had
his full attention, so she didn't need to touch him.

And for the first time since he'd met her, her touch irritated him.

"You'll need our maps," she said.

"I know where the Room of Lost Souls is," he said. "It was our starbase, remember. It hasn't moved."

"You don't know that," she said. "It doesn't behave the way we expect it to."

"We can find it," he said.

He was shaking. The mission meant more to him than he wanted to say. He needed something to do. He had to feel useful, instead of a charity case.
Look at that man. He used to be the captain in a legendary fleet. Now he doesn't understand anything. He just lives off the goodwill of others, and dreams of a home he'll never find.

He shook the thought away.

"That's not what I'm worried about," she said. "The Room of Lost Souls is deep in Enterran space."

"I'm not at war with your empire," he snapped.

"I know." She was using a tone he'd never heard from her before. It was the tone that people used with a child or a sick person or someone incapable of understanding a certain concept. "But we don't want the Empire to know that Dignity Vessels actually work."

He hated that term, Dignity Vessel. She promised not to use it, but she lapsed all the time. The Fleet hadn't used the term Dignity Vessel in generations (well, thousands of years if he started counting from now). The term grated, showed her ignorance, and made him feel even more out of place.

"The Empire won't know. We're not flying in and flying out," Coop said. "We're using our
anacapa.
We'll arrive near Starbase Kappa and then we'll shut off the star-base's
anacapa
and return. We'll be gone a day at most."

"And if an Empire ship is there?" she asked.

"You said that the place is uninhabited," Coop said.

"I said that regular ships don't stop. They heed the warning. But the Empire has been running experiments in stealth tech, and knew years ago about the Room of Lost Souls. I'm sure they're still running experiments there."

Coop shook his head. "The technology at Starbase Kappa is ours. It has killed how many of your people?"

"I don't know," Boss said tightly. Her arms were crossed again, and she was leaning back on that couch.

"You've lost some people there," he said.

She took a deep breath. "My mother and one of my closest friends died in that Room. They didn't have the genetic marker that you and I have that would alllow them to work inside your stealth technology."

"It's not—"

"I know," she said. "It's not stealth technology, and you don't fly a Dignity Vessel. Old habits die hard, Coop. And you know what I mean. You're picking nits so that we don't deal with what's really going on."

Now he crossed his arms. "What, in your opinion, is really going on?"

"You need something to do. You have a ship and no mission. It's not natural for you."

She saw him more clearly than anyone else ever had. Maybe that was why he was attracted to her.

Or maybe he just showed his emotions more these days, and anyone could have made that deduction.

"This is not a fruitless mission," he said with a bit more passion than he planned.

"No, it's not," she said. "Eventually, we'll have to deal with the
anacapa
on your starbase. But right now, everyone in the sector knows that the Room of Lost Souls is dangerous. It's an approach-at-your-own-risk site. Most ships don't land there. So there's nothing pressing about going."

"Yes, there is," he said.

She sighed. "Coop—"

"You were right. My ship is in need of a mission. But it's not just me. It's my crew. They're going crazy here. They're getting trapped in all of their losses and feeling as if they have no future. We need—I need—to remind them who they are and what they can do. I need them to become a
crew
again, Boss, not just some people who ended up five thousand years in the future."

She closed her eyes and tilted her head back. She was thinking about his point, clearly. Then she shook her head slightly, as if she had been arguing with herself, and finally she sighed.

She opened her eyes, brought her head down, and scowled at him.

"I don't like this mission. Can't we find something else for you to do?"

"We're not children," Coop said. "We don't need to be entertained."

"That's not my point," she said. "My point is—"

"That's exactly your point. I need my crew on a real mission, one any ship in the Fleet would take. The trip to Starbase Kappa is such a mission. We know that our tech is malfunctioning and killing people. We have to stop that. It's a real mission with a real objective, and it won't take a lot of time. It'll shore up some rusty skills and it'll get my team working together again. It benefits all of us."

"The Empire—"

"I don't care about your empire," he said. "If a ship shows up and threatens us, we'll destroy it. But if the starbase is as isolated as you say, that probably won't happen."

"The Empire can't know that stealth tech works," she said. "And I used the term deliberately. Because that's what they call your device."

"They won't know," Coop said. "How could they? Even if they see us appear, they won't know that the drive did it."

"And then they send the information to their headquarters and it won't matter if you destroy their ship. They will have seen a Dignity Vessel come out of nowhere, and they'll see the so-called stealth tech in action."

"The ship will show up near a place of superstition, a place that some of your people believe is haunted. Surely the sighting will be discounted."

He sounded a bit desperate even to himself. He didn't want to, but he wasn't giving up this mission.

She ran a hand over her forehead. Then she sighed again. "Lord knows, I've taken a lot of risks in my time."

He knew, with that sentence, that he had convinced her. But he wasn't going to interrupt her.

"And you'll go whether I approve your mission or not." "It's not your job to approve—"

"I know, Coop." She sounded tired. "I'm not the boss of you."

She echoed their arguments about her name. He smiled.

"No, you're not," he said gently. "But I would like your help on this. Your maps, your experience, anything you can tell me."

She nodded. The anger seemed to be gone, but she was clearly disappointed.

"Promise me that if the Empire shows up—"

"I'll make sure they never inform anyone about us or the starbase or the
anacapa
drive."

"Thank you," she said softly.

But he knew she didn't believe he could keep that promise—and he wasn't entirely sure he understood why.

It felt weird, going through the familiar corridors of Starbase Kappa, only without the stores, the restaurants, the spectacular and different hotels.