Read Online Skirmishes by Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Free Book Online Page A

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 one 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.”
    The woman glared at him. She straightened her shoulders. “You came in a small ship, one that cannot have traveled through deep space.”
    Coop felt a surge of relief. She didn’t know about the Ivoire . That didn’t mean her ships hadn’t found it, but so far, no one had communicated that information to her.
    “So,” he said, with just a touch of amusement, “now you know the capabilities of my ship. Have you flown one like it?”
    “I know, based on the size and the power configuration, that it couldn’t have traveled here on its own. That’s a short-range vessel. If I had to guess, I would say it’s a troop transport.”
    She was good. She clearly hadn’t seen a Fleet transport vessel before, but she had figured it out. None of the transports or the life pods or the smaller fighters had anacapa drives. They were simply too dicey to use without a full engineering staff.
    “Until you people showed up,” Coop said, “I had no reason to bring a troop here.”
    “So what are you doing here?” the civilian asked.
    That was a harder question to answer. Coop tried to keep it simple. “We’re exploring. None of us had been here before.”
    “And somehow you got into the secret room,” the civilian said.
    “It didn’t look secret,” Coop said. “In fact, I’m not even sure what you’re referring to as the secret room. We’ve found some doors that were harder to open than others, but we didn’t find any hidden spaces at all.”
    Again, true.
    The civilian tried to step forward, but the soldier who held him pulled him back. “The secret room is the door inside—”
    “What’s the point of your exploration?” the woman said quickly, as if she didn’t want the civilian to finish his statement.
    Coop shrugged. “The point of our exploration is what’s always the point of exploration. Information, mostly. But I have to admit, there’s just a bit of an adrenalin high going into a new place, particularly one that’s been deserted for this long.”
    “Did you expect to find something here?” the woman asked—and the question felt pointed.
    “Of course not,” Coop said. “This place has been abandoned for a long time. Abandoned places get scavenged. I figured there would be little here, except of exploratory or informational value.”
    “You keep repeating the word information. What are you trying to find out?”
    “Aren’t you interested in where this place came from?” Coop asked. “Your guides and warnings seem to give it mythic powers. We wanted to see that.”
    “Captain,” Anita spoke through his private link. “So far as we can tell, no one has discovered the Ivoire . There are a dozen ships quite some distance away, but their sensors are trained outward, not inward. They seem to believe nothing can get past them.”
    Coop almost nodded. He’d expected that. It was the kind of mistake an overconfident military made.
    “Anita,” he said. “I want you to listen carefully.