Read Online Skirmishes by Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Free Book Online

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 area where the anacapa still functioned, disturbed Coop greatly.
    “Technically, I didn’t get the room open,” Coop said. Technically, his team 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 who 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.
    She knew about the genetic marker.
    She knew that anyone without a marker died in places like Starbase Kappa. And the death wasn’t pretty.
    Apparently, the Empire team that faced him now 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,” Coop 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