Skirmishes Read Online Free PDF

had been abandoned, the anacapa should have been shut down.
    This one hadn’t been. It was active and probably malfunctioning. That was one of the problems Coop’s team was here to address.
    He activated the comm in his environmental suit.
    “Dix, did you do something to the anacapa ?” he asked.
    Coop’s first officer, Dix Pompiono, had taken a small team into what had been the very center of the starbase to disable and remove the anacapa .
    Coop didn’t get an answer, which, a year ago, he would have thought odd. But for the past several months, ever since the Ivoire got separated from the Fleet, Dix’s behavior had become increasingly erratic.
    Initially, Coop had decided not to bring Dix on this mission. Then, in the last few weeks, Dix seemed like his old self. He’d even grown upbeat, something Coop hadn’t thought he’d ever see again.
    He’d been relieved, figuring his first officer had returned from whatever personal hell he’d assigned himself to.
    Only now a prickly feeling on the back of Coop’s neck made him wonder if Dix had deliberately misled him. Coop had had enough problems recently; he didn’t need more. And Dix’s emotional decline had been something Coop simply didn’t want to accept.
    “Dix?” Coop said again. Then he looked at Yash. “You want to try?”
    “He hasn’t answered for the last few minutes,” she said, sounding annoyed and worried at the same time.
    Coop bit back a harsh response. He needed his team to communicate with him, particularly here, on this empty base. But he didn’t want to repeat the question. Not yet.
    He was on edge. He’d been on that edge for months now, ever since the Ivoire got stuck. A man could live with extreme stress well in the beginning, but seven months in, it didn’t just become tedious, it also became exhausting.
    Plus, he was trying to focus on too many things at once. He had mentally declared his personal future off limits, but his past wasn’t pretty, either. He had thought this trip to Starbase Kappa would help with the Ivoire’s new reality, but now he wasn’t so sure.
    That slight slip happened again. Coop braced his other hand against the wall. He was standing near a control panel he’d had to pry open. The controls had deteriorated. This room had suffered at least a thousand years of neglect, maybe more.
    He still had trouble wrapping his mind around the time shifts he and his crew had been subjected to. He knew that others—like Dix—had even more difficulty.
    “Dix,” Coop said again. “I need to hear from you now .”
    “Captain.” The voice that came through the comm didn’t belong to Dix. Instead, it belonged to Layla Lalliki, the Ivoire ’s chief science officer. She had gone with Dix into the anacapa control room, along with three anacapa specialists.
    Coop didn’t like hearing her instead of Dix. “I need Dix, Layla.”
    “Yeah, I know,” she said. “And I need you here now, sir. Right now.”
    He finally understood what he was hearing in her voice. Controlled panic.
    He glanced over at Yash. She had frozen in place.
    “What’s going on?” he asked Lalliki.
    “Something you need to see, sir,” Lalliki said. “I can’t describe it. Please, sir.”
    Yash continued to stare at him, or at least he thought she did. The visors on the environmental suits were difficult for someone not wearing the suit to see through, unless the wearer activated an interior light. Usually, the opaqueness played to his crew’s advantage.
    Right now, though, he felt like ordering everyone to turn on that interior light. He wanted to see faces, nuances, emotions.
    And that told him he was as nervous as his crew was.
    “Do you need someone to stay in here with you?” he asked Yash.
    She shook her head. “This can wait. I’m going with you.”
    And somehow, her matter-of-fact tone made his panic rise. He had to struggle to beat it back. She knew, like he knew, that he had made a mistake.
    He shouldn’t have brought Dix on