Free Skirmishes by Kristine Kathryn Rusch Page A

turned toward the woman in charge, apparently asking on a private channel if they should go too. She shook her head as she said no, almost as if she couldn’t believe they were questioning her.
    Coop smiled again. Civilians. He had often felt a similar annoyance with Boss’s people.
    “If your people try anything,” the woman said to Coop. “We will blow up your ship.”
    “It’s cloaked,” he said, with fake confidence, hoping that she did indeed mean the transport and not the Ivoire .
    “And our sensors see right through that cloak. Would you like me to tell you where it is at the moment?”
    The transport probably hadn’t moved. He hadn’t given the order for it to leave the starbase yet.
    “No need,” he said. “I believe you.”
    He also believed she thought she had superior firepower. She acted like someone who knew she had the upper hand.
    He would let her continue to believe that. He had a more pressing problem.
    Did he take her people hostage and fly them back to Lost Souls? Or did he kill them when his ship left?
    He didn’t like either option, but he couldn’t see another that he liked better.
    And that bothered him more than he wanted to admit.

 
     
     
     
    NINE
     
     
    HAD COOP BEEN the commander in charge of the Enterran Empire’s mission here, he would have had his soldiers escort the interlopers off the starbase. The fact that the woman didn’t do that spoke less to her command capabilities than to her uncertainty as to whether or not her people would survive a trip deep into the so-called Room of Lost Souls.
    Even though she probably knew that these two soldiers would survive a trip deeper into the base, the soldiers didn’t. He could see it in their rigid posture, the set looks on their faces.
    They were good men, young, and probably on an early posting. One of his mentors had called soldiers like this fodder, and Coop didn’t disagree. The difference was that a good captain knew that wars, battles, and situations like this one needed fodder. Any captain who took the loss of such people personally wouldn’t last.
    That was why he had called that captain a mentor. Coop had learned a valuable lesson from him. It was another reason that Coop didn’t get to know the junior members of his very large crew well. If he became attached, he didn’t make good decisions.
    The woman clearly agreed. She’d sent her people in without a smidgeon of remorse. She had a job to do, and she was doing it as best she could.
    The civilian, on the other hand, was so excited that Coop thought he might burn through his oxygen. The civilian literally bounced up the stairs, moving with a rhythm that would normally have suggested that the gravity in his boots was failing. But Yash had turned on the base’s gravity, so what the civilian’s boots did or didn’t do didn’t matter. Still, he was moving quicker than he should—than anyone should with such limited oxygen reserves.
    Had the civilian been one of Coop’s, Coop would have cautioned him. But honestly, if the guy died going up these stairs, one problem would be solved.
    The empire soldiers moved slower, almost as if they didn’t want to protect this guy. They were doing a poor job of it. They soon found themselves in the middle of Coop’s group, rather than at the front or the back of it. They clearly couldn’t see anything, which he thought just fine. He didn’t care what they could or couldn’t see; he needed his people to keep an eye on them.
    “So,” Rossetti asked him on the private channel as they made their way up the stairs. “Are we evacuating?”
    “I don’t see any reason to stay,” Coop said, then realized that wasn’t an official answer. He was feeling less and less official as this so-called mission went on. He should have felt more efficient. He had originally designed this mission to return to Captain Jonathon Cooper, and instead, he was getting farther away from that man.
    Then he glanced at Rossetti. She flanked him,