Read Skirmishes for Free Online

that he was grateful. That home was really Boss’s. She had started a corporation that she called The Lost Souls, and she used it to rehabilitate Fleet ships and to study what she called stealth technology.
    What she was studying was actually the anacapa technology of the Fleet. The anacapa technology did so much more than provide stealth capability. The fact that Boss was meddling with it—and would continue to meddle with it, without knowing what it was—was one of the reasons Coop had decided to speak with her in the first place.
    Eventually, they had become allies. But she didn’t run him or his crew. He took care of the Ivoire , and he made sure the distance between Boss’s people and his remained clear. She could command the people in Lost Souls, but he commanded the Ivoire and everyone on her.
    Boss understood that very, very well. She supported it.
    So six months into his life in the future, when he finally decided on his first mission in this new place with his crew, he told Boss his plans to go to Starbase Kappa, which she called The Room of Lost Souls. She’d had an epiphany there, which was why she named her corporation after the place.
    He didn’t tell her to get her approval. He told her as a matter of courtesy.
    He just didn’t expect her reaction.
    He hadn’t expected it at all.
    “No,” Boss had said when he told her his plan. “You can’t do this.”
    They were inside her office. The Lost Souls Corporation had bought a space station in the Nine Planets Alliance. The station housed two former Fleet ships for study, and parts of several others that had been discovered over the years.
    Boss’s office was large. It had three separate spaces—a huge entrance area with separate seating groups, a private area where Boss spent most of her time alone, and a conference room that was even larger than the main area.
    Boss met with everyone in the entrance area. No one went into the private area. Boss was the ultimate loner, and she was still getting used to running a corporation. Sometimes Coop wondered how she had ever managed to command a ship—even a small ship. All that time with people had to wear her down.
    She sat on the couch, frowning at him. She wasn’t pretty—she was too thin for that—but she was athletic, with close-cropped hair and the graceful movements of someone comfortable in her own body.
    He found her exceptionally attractive, and he tried to ignore it. If he were back in his own time, he might act on it—he rarely met someone his equal whom he was attracted to who wasn’t also part of the Fleet—but here, he didn’t know if he was just being needy and lonely, in search of a distraction and a bit of human contact.
    Still, he touched her too much, casually in conversations, and usually she touched him back.
    On this day, though, she didn’t. Her eyes had become steely and her mouth was in a thin line. Her arms were crossed.
    “You can’t do this, Coop,” she repeated.
    He almost said, like a child, I can do whatever I want .
    Instead, he said, “You told me that the Room of Lost Souls has been a danger to everyone who comes near it for its entire history. It clearly has a malfunctioning anacapa drive. My people can shut it down. Then we’ll come back.”
    She shook her head. “You don’t understand what could go wrong.”
    He felt a flare of anger. Of course he understood. He understood better than she did. She had no connection to the technology, and while he couldn’t fix it himself, he knew more about the anacapa than she and her people ever would.
    “I’m just telling you this as a courtesy,” he said. “We’ll do what we need to do.”
    “Coop.” She leaned forward and touched his knee, as if she needed to get his attention. She had his full attention, so she didn’t need to touch him.
    And for the first time since he’d met her, her touch irritated him.
    “You’ll need our maps,” she said.
    “I know where the Room of Lost Souls is,” he said. “It