Vilhauser said, “I have to know how they got in. If that door closes and we get trapped….”
If the door closed and they got trapped, then she wouldn’t have to deal with them anymore.
“He can tell you how he opened it,” she said.
“No,” Vilhauser said. “It’s clearly not easy. If it were, we would have opened it already. We’ve been trying to open that door for years.”
Way to put the Empire at a disadvantage, Vilhauser, she thought. Broadcast your fears and weaknesses. These strangers won’t take advantage of that.
But she didn’t say anything.
So, Vilhauser had been trying to open the door for years? Well then, let him get his wish and go inside. If there was trouble, she could say she tried to help, but he kept getting in her way.
Just to keep up appearances, she told two of the soldiers whom she knew had been to the Room before, Rigley and Lerner, to accompany Vilhauser.
“Commander,” Rigley said on the private comm, “would you like the rest of the scientists to go?”
“I don’t want anyone to go,” she replied on the comm. “But I seem to have no choice with Vilhauser. You can refuse this assignment and it won’t be on your permanent record.”
“That’s all right, ma’am,” Rigley said. “If there’s trouble, I’ll make sure he escapes.”
“And me?” Lerner asked.
“You can take care of yourself,” Rigley said with a smile.
In spite of herself, Elissa smiled too. Just a small one, since she knew that the stranger could see her.
Then she gave the stranger her best glare. “If your people try anything, we will blow up your ship.”
“It’s cloaked,” the stranger said.
“And our sensors see right through that cloak. Would you like me to tell you where it is at the moment?”
“No need,” he said. “I believe you.”
“Good,” she said. “I expect you off this Room in the next thirty minutes.”
“We’re already packing up,” he said.
“Not until I see everything,” Vilhauser said.
The stranger looked at him for a long moment. Elissa knew what she would say if she were in the stranger’s shoes. She would say, You’ll see what I want you to see and nothing more.
But the stranger said nothing to Vilhauser.
Instead, the stranger spoke to her. “I’ll take good care of your civilian here.”
She started. It was that obvious, apparently. And this man, this stranger, was very smart.
Smart enough that she didn’t want to go against him in any way, if she could avoid it.
“Thank you,” she said, and almost meant it.
She watched as they all headed back up the stairs, and then she returned to the Discovery. Vilhauser wanted to be in charge.
And now he was.
15
HER EARS ACHED. Her eyelids scraped over her eyeballs. She was freezing from the inside out—the outside in?—and she tried not to care. She thought maybe she was making some progress on those systems. Parts moved, at least.
Then lights filled the bridge. She looked up for a moment, her breath catching in her freezing lungs. If she had tears that weren’t frozen, they would have fallen out of her eyes.
She had done it.
Except that the lights were wrong. They weren’t coming from the equipment or the systems or the ceiling.
They were coming from—outside?
She let out a breath.
Or maybe inside. Inside her.
She had heard that people saw lights just before they died. She had also heard that people who froze to death got warmer as death neared.
Well, whoever perpetrated that particular myth had gotten it wrong. And that made her just a little bit angry.
Well, if she wasn’t going to be warm, maybe she could guarantee that her crew would be.
She kept working, even though her fingers were numb and nearly useless, and light grew brighter….
16
THE STRANGERS TOOK Vilhauser to the place he called the secret room. Rigley reported back to Elissa. She listened to the play-by-play as she returned to the Discovery.
She went immediately to the bridge. She didn’t even pull off her environmental suit, although she did remove the bubble helmet.
Calthorpe had screens up inside the bridge, showing her that the strangers were packing up all over the Room. She had no idea what the strangers had been working on, but they apparently didn’t care that she knew they’d been up to something.
That bothered her, but not quite as much as the stranger himself had. She had the feeling he was toying with her. He felt like an experienced commander, someone who knew exactly what he was doing, and who was afraid of nothing.
“Have you been able to track that transport?” she asked.
“No, ma’am,” Binek said from his post across the bridge. “It’s unfamiliar. Its engines are different too, and we’ve never seen anything with this configuration. We’re not getting as much information with their cloak up either.”
“But they are leaving,” Calthorpe added. “I guess they don’t really care that we found them.”
“Track them after the transport leaves. Maybe it’ll show us the hole in the information shield.”
Calthorpe nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
The strangers headed back to their transport. They left the gravity running on the Room. They left the doors open like they promised. And they gave Vilhauser a case with a device in it.
Vilhauser excitedly told Rigley that it was stealth tech.
The idiot had no idea how to behave on any kind of mission. He shouldn’t have taken the case.
Elissa suppressed a sigh, then turned to Gatson. “Analyze that thing Vilhauser is carrying.”
“I’m on it, ma’am,” Gatson said.
Elissa watched as stranger after stranger stepped from the Room’s main landing area into what looked like nothingness. She’d never seen people board a cloaked ship before. It looked almost like they were jumping into space.
“I think he’s right. He’s got the stealth tech device,” Gatson said.
Elissa cursed. She had thought the stupid thing was malfunctioning, which was why the Room was so dangerous.
“Get one of the other scientists here,” she said. “We’re not letting that device on this ship until we know that it won’t turn the Discovery into the Room of Lost Souls.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Gatson sounded almost relieved.
Elissa watched on screen as Vilhauser emerged on the lower level, clutching the case as if it were a baby. Rigley and Lerner followed several steps behind, clearly uneasy.
“The transport is powering up,” Calthorpe said. “You want to stop it?”
“They promised they’d leave, and so far, they’re keeping their promises,” Elissa said.
“You trust them?” Lee asked.
“I didn’t say that,” Elissa said.
“Commander,” Vilhauser’s voice sounded tinny over the comm. “We’re ready to board.”
“I’m not ready to let you board, Doctor,” she said. “I want that device analyzed first.”
“We can do that on the ship,” Vilhauser said.
“No, Doctor, we can’t. And we won’t. I don’t know what that thing is, and you got it from people we can’t identify. For all I know, you’re holding a weapon.”
“It’s stealth tech, Commander.”
“Even worse, Vilhauser.” She knew what stealth tech could do. “We don’t know enough about stealth tech for me to be comfortable that it’s on my ship.”
“Commander, you already have stealth tech on your ship.”
“In little vials, Vilhauser. I can tell, without help from your people, that what you’re holding is a thousand times stronger than what’s here.”
“Probably a million,” Gatson said softly.
“I don’t want it anywhere near my ship,” Elissa said to Vilhauser.
&
nbsp; “Well, you have no choice, Commander, because I’m bringing it on board.”
She’d had enough of the pompous bastard. He’d ruined the first encounter, making it impossible to know who those strangers were. He’d taken risks that would never have been sanctioned by command, and he’d probably screwed up her career forever.
She would be damned if she let him kill her crew.
“We’re taking the Discovery back to its resting position, Doctor,” she said, leaning on the console. She gave a hand signal to Calthorpe. “We’ll be back in a few hours, after you’ve figured out how to shut that thing down.”
“And if I can’t?” Vilhauser asked.
“Then you’ll study it on the Room of Lost Souls until you can,” she said.
“I can’t sanction this, Commander. I order you to open the airlock doors.”
She nodded at Calthorpe. He detached the ship from the Room and slowly backed away.
“The scientific mission is yours, Doctor,” she said to Vilhauser. “The ship is mine. Your mission threatens the lives on this ship, so you can complete part of that mission on the Room. You will complete it there, because I take no command from you. I will be back in two hours. If you don’t have that thing shut off by then, I’ll let you board. But I won’t let that device on board. Is that clear?”
“It’s unacceptable, Trekov,” Vilhauser snapped, “and you know it. I’ll have you court-martialed.”
She smiled. “Too late,” she said. “I’ve screwed up this mission so badly already that you’ll probably have to stand in line.”
With that, she sped the ship’s movement away from the Room on her very own.
Then she saw weapons’ fire—and knew the stranger on the transport really had been a sneaky bastard. He’d set her up.
She probably wouldn’t live to be court-martialed.
And the sad thing was, her crew wouldn’t live to testify against her.
17
SHE WAS WARM, so therefore, she was dead.
But she was comfortable, and she had this idea that death wasn’t comfortable at all.
Elissa opened her eyes—no scraping eyelids, no freezing eyeballs. It took a moment to focus, and then a moment longer to process what she was seeing.
A ceiling. With lights. A brown ceiling, with soft lights.
The air was warm.
And she was on a bed. Without restraints.
Which meant there was gravity.
She raised a hand—or tried to—but an alarm went off, and something brought her arm down gently.
A woman with hair almost as short as Elissa’s walked into the room, followed by Flag Commander Janik. The woman didn’t surprise her; Flag Commander Janik did.
His skin was gray and his tight black curls had some white which caught the light. She hadn’t seen him look so tense before, almost as if the stress had aged him prematurely.
“Welcome back, Commander,” he said. The sound of his voice was almost painful.
She blinked, grateful that the simple movement was so very easy. “You rescued us.”
Her voice did scrape, but not because of ice in her throat, because she was thirsty.
“I didn’t,” he said with a bit of a smile. “The Stillwater did. She came directly to you, and managed to get the survivors out.”
The woman beside the Admiral grabbed water, and helped Elissa sit up so she could drink some of it. She had never felt so weak in her life.
The Stillwater had been one of the anchor ships in the information shield. There was no sensible way for the Stillwater to have reached her first.
She processed that and another word, “survivors.”
“There were transports that were closer than the Stillwater,” she said, her voice a little less raspy. “And fighters.”
“Yes,” Janik said. “They got hit with the same thing you did.”
Thing. He didn’t know what happened. No one had told him. Had anyone been alive to tell him?
“You said survivors,” she said. “How many?”
He glanced at the woman, who nodded and looked rueful at the same time.
“Just your bridge crew,” he said gently. “And not even all of them. Calthorpe didn’t make it.”
“I knew that,” Elissa said, trying to process. God, her brain was working slow.
“I want to update you on your condition,” the woman said to Elissa. Then she looked over at Janik. “Flag Commander, you can talk with the Commander Trekov later.
“Wait,” Elissa said, and would have lifted a hand, if something didn’t keep pulling her arm down. “Just my bridge crew? They were the only ones on the Discovery who made it. No one else?”
“No one else,” Janik said softly.
“What about the transports? The fighters?”
“Nine people survived, Commander,” Janik said. “Including you.”
Her heart rate increased and it made her feel wobbly. Something was still wrong with it. Something was wrong with her.
“How many died?” Elissa asked him.
He tilted his head. “Later, Commander. When you’re better.”
“No,” she said. “Now.”
“Six hundred,” he said. “We think. We lost a lot of information.”
“Lost information?”
The woman had her hand on the Admiral’s arm, pulling him back. “Let her rest.”
“I’ll tell you later, Commander,” he said, obviously complying with the woman.
But Elissa didn’t want him to. She needed to know.
“You couldn’t repair the ships?” she said. “They were destroyed, from that wave. But the information should be there.”
“It’s not,” Janik said. “We can’t get them back up, no matter what we try. They look fine. That’s the irritating part. So everything from your mission is gone. Everything.”
Including six hundred lives. Her breath caught. She couldn’t go there yet. She couldn’t process any of this. She didn’t dare.
So she looked at the woman. “And me? Why can’t I lift my arm?”
“We’re repairing your hands,” she said almost cheerfully. “You can’t feel it, but they’re in a solution that is good for new skin. We kept you in a coma while we did something similar for your face. The new skin there is not as delicate now.”
New skin. On her face. New skin, and new other things? She couldn’t tell. But she felt strange enough to know that more had happened to her physically.
“I nearly died,” she said, and it wasn’t a question.
“There was a debate as to whether or not you were dead,” Janik said. “But the medical staff on the Stillwater, they revived you. They had to. You’re a hero, Commander.”
“A hero?” For killing six hundred people? She didn’t ask that part, but she had a hunch Janik heard it in her tone.
“You saved your bridge crew against the longest odds I’ve ever seen,” he said. “By rights, none of you should have made it. You saved them. They all agree on that.”
“So they’re okay. They’re not here?”
“They’re better than you are,” the doctor said, clearly answering both questions. “And now you’re going to rest. Everything else can wait.”
That last was pointed at Janik. He nodded. “I’ll be back, Commander. We can debrief later. We want you well first.”
She closed her eyes. Debrief. A hero. Six hundred dead.
How ridiculous.
And such an opportunity. She could lie about everything. Not even her bridge crew knew what happened.
She could blame everything on Vilhauser.
The thought felt alien, a product of the ambition she could barely remember. She had wanted her own command. She had gotten it.
And six hundred people had died.
Because of her.
Vilhauser could take some of the blame, but he had no military training. He had no experience in the field.
She did. And she had screwed it all up.
She would tell Janik
about the troubles with the command structure of the SRP, the way she couldn’t handle Vilhauser, the mistakes she made on the Room of Lost Souls. She would tell Janik it was her fault that their scientific mission failed, and good people died.
She would tell him.
And then she would enlist his help in finding the betraying bastard—whoever he was.
Whatever he was.
She needed to tell Janik that and more. She would supply the missing information on the mission that had gone so very wrong.
She had to.
Six hundred lives demanded it—and this time, she wouldn’t let them down.
The story continues…
Skirmishes by Kristine Kathryn Rusch is available
in ebook, trade paperback and audiobook
from your favorite bookseller.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
USA Today bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes in almost every genre. Generally, she uses her real name (Rusch) for most of her writing. Under that name, she publishes bestselling science fiction and fantasy, award-winning mysteries, acclaimed mainstream fiction, controversial nonfiction, and the occasional romance. Her novels have made bestseller lists around the world and her short fiction has appeared in eighteen best of the year collections. She has won more than twenty-five awards for her fiction, including the Hugo, Le Prix Imaginales, the Asimov’s Readers Choice award, and the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Choice Award.
To keep up with everything she does, go to kriswrites.com. To track her many pen names and series, see their individual websites (krisnelscott.com, kristinegrayson.com, krisdelake.com, retrievalartist.com, divingintothewreck.com). She lives and occasionally sleeps in Oregon.
If you liked these novellas, you might like these works by Kristine Kathryn Rusch:
The Spires of Denon
Skirmishes
The Disappeared: A Retrieval Artist Novel
Snipers
Alien Influences
The Diving Bundle: Six Diving Universe Novellas Page 44
