Skirmishes Read Online Free PDF Page B

this mission.
    Maybe the Ivoire shouldn’t have come on this mission at all.

 
     
     
     
    FIVE
     
     
    SHE HAD TOLD HIM not to come, and he hadn’t listened.
    Her people called her Boss. She refused to tell him her real name. He was the captain of his own ship, a man who had only that as his identity now, and very little else. He wasn’t going to call anyone Boss.
    He had told her that, and it hadn’t made any difference. She still hadn’t shared her real name with him.
    So he compromised.
    The word “Boss” was in a different language—or rather, in the language his language had evolved into over thousands of years—and so he called her by that foreign word when he needed to use a name for her.
    But mentally, he just called her “she.”
    She had been the first person he had seen when his ship arrived in this strange new future. She had been investigating his ship, stunned that it had suddenly appeared deep within a mountainside.
    He’d been stunned too; the ship’s coordinates told him the anacapa drive had brought the Ivoire to Sector Base V, but the space he was in didn’t look like Sector Base V. Instead, it looked like an abandoned sector base from decades before.
    Later, he learned that the anacapa had malfunctioned, bringing him and his crew five thousand years into their future. The language was different, once-familiar planets were different, everything was different except for the people. People remained the same, complicated, emotional creatures who believed they knew everything and secretly feared they knew nothing.
    This situation, as he sometimes called it, exacerbated that fear among his crew. And if someone had asked him before the trip into the future had happened how his crew would have handled it, he would have said, Any crew in the Fleet would cope easily. We’re always moving to new places. We have no stable homes, no set environment. We have no historic roots tied to planets or lifestyles. We would be fine .
    And he would have been wrong.
    Because he hadn’t realized that by coming five thousand years into the future, they had left their true home behind. The Fleet itself had become a legend with no names attached, just a mythical group of ships that came into an area, fixed it (or meddled, depending on the story), and then left. Many people now believed that the Fleet was a comforting children’s story, that no group of ships like that had ever existed.
    One of the first things Boss had said to him when she could talk freely to him—after he acquired enough of her language to talk with her—was how startled she was to see someone from the Fleet and how vindicated she felt. All of her life, she had argued that the Fleet was real, and now she had proof.
    Not that she could show anyone.
    This future that the Ivoire found itself in had a generations-long conflict between a large rapacious government and a group of rebels. But to be honest, almost every new situation the Fleet found itself in—and that was a lot of situations over the years of Coop’s life—involved a large rapacious government and a group of rebels.
    Once he had tried to tell Boss how common this was, but she wouldn’t hear it. She claimed the Empire she battled was “evil” and the rebels “good.”
    She usually saw shades of gray when it came to the personal level, but on that universal scale, she was purely black and white. No empire could be as bad as the Enterran Empire (even though he had seen many that were far worse) and no rebels had tougher odds against them (even though he knew of many rebel movements that didn’t make it through a year, let alone generations).
    These rebels, whom she had more or less allied herself with, had joined forces into something they called the Nine Planets Alliance, which, Coop could have told Boss if she had been willing to listen, would someday be someone else’s evil government, needing rebellion against.
    But the Nine Planets Alliance had provided him a home, and for