Asimov's Science Fiction: October/November 2013 (23 page)

He had a map of the old starbase in his head and the partial one Boss had made on the bottom of his visor, but even then, moving to the lower levels was slow going.

He had told ten members of his team to join him, but only one other officer. That officer, Joanna Rossetti, sidled up to him the moment she arrived.

"Let me handle this, Coop," she said, as she should have. Fleet procedure did not allow a captain to go first into a hostile situation.

However, who would punish him now for disobeying regulations? The Fleet? It wasn't nearby, and besides, the Fleet he knew hadn't existed for five thousand years.

His crew could call for a court-martial and maybe even use procedures to remove him, and then what? He would still be stuck in this time period, and so would they. Someone else would captain the
Ivoire,
but what would that someone do, especially after some kind of crew rebellion?

"I got it, Jo," he said.

Rossetti shook her head. She pushed past him as if she could protect him, which always made him smile. She was small and wiry, built for space—the small ceilings, the nooks and crannies. She functioned best in zero-g, unlike some of his team.

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 act according to Fleet guidelines throughout this encounter, and that would be on him, not on a fantastic officer like Rossetti.

She'd 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?"

Tren was watching from the transport. The condition of the starbase's equipment didn't allow anyone to monitor from here.

"They're not that disciplined," Tren 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.

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, Tren was wrong: there weren't twenty soldiers here. There were fifteen soldiers and five civilians. And Coop recognized the ornate uniforms because Boss had shown him examples.

He was facing members of the Enterran Empire, just like Tren 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 speak. 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 into 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.

The technology in this so-called future wasn't one-tenth as good as the technology that Coop had left in the past.

"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 man 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 taut 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 said, deliberately sounding 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 from outside this sector.

He hoped they wouldn't care.

"The Room of Lost Souls is the 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 has 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 heart of the starbase, where the
anacapa
still functioned, disturbed Coop greatly.

"Technically, I didn't get the room open," he said. Technically, his people 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 whose team 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.

The Fleet personnel had a genetic marker that allowed them to enter any area with a malfunctioning
anacapa
drive. The geneticists on the Fleet developed the marker early in the Fleet's history so that personnel didn't die if an
anacapa
suddenly went crazy. It also prevented non-Fleet personnel from entering a malfunctioning
anacapa
field. It was a safety measure for the ships. At least, that was how it had been designed.

If something disabled or crippled an
anacapa
on a Fleet vessel, the ship couldn't be boarded. It prevented ship takeovers, and a whole bunch of other threatening acts.

Apparently, though, it also caused a lot of problems in this future. The
anacapas
remained functional long past the time that the experts said the drives would. And they didn't just quit working. So far, he had discovered three separate problems with malfunctioning
anacapa
drives, and he was new to this place.

The Fleet always left staff behind when they closed down a sector base, and those staff members (usually volunteers) would intermarry with the locals. The genetic marker got passed on, but apparently not to everyone.

Anyone without a marker died in places like Starbase Kappa. And the death wasn't pretty.

Apparently, the Empire team that faced him now knew how rare survival was here, and 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," he 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 that 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."