Skirmishes: Boss and Coop make a good team

Skirmishes by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Skirmishes (2013) is the fourth novel in Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s DIVING universe. It begins a month after the events in Boneyards which, of course, you’ll want to read first. Skirmishes has a structure similar to Boneyards – there are two main plotlines (one starring Boss and the other starring Coop) and one of them jumps around in time.

In Boss’s plotline, she’s trying to get into the Boneyard which is, presumably, a graveyard containing a vast number of Fleet spaceships which Boss discovered in the previous book. She wants to collect a bunch of these ships which her company, Lost Souls, can use to protect the Nine Planet Alliance from the empire.

Boss is having difficulties getting past the Boneyard’s force field but, fortunately, she has the help of one of Coop’s Fleet officers, a woman who has expertise in such technology. By studying the Boneyard and its protections, they get more information about what happened to the fleet after the Ivoire left, but they’re left with more questions than answers. This plotline moves slowly.

While Boss is gone, Coop and the Ivoire (as well as another fleet ship his people have recently commandeered) are patrolling the Nine Planet Alliance’s border with the empire. This is the plotline that jumps around in time and is best described as a series of skirmishes (hence the book’s title) between Coop’s crew and the empire.

The skirmishes that occur in the past give us other perspectives or more details about events we’ve already seen, or fill in some details that we’ve missed. For example, we get another perspective about what happened at the Room of Lost Souls, we see the rescue of Squishy from Coop’s perspective, and we get some glimpses into how Coop’s crew handled learning they were stranded in the future. (In my review of the previous book, I mentioned that I wanted to know more about this, so I was happy to see it.) We also meet some characters that were adversely affected by some of these skirmishes and now have reason to want to destroy Boss and Coop (and who could blame them?).

Skirmishes is a slow-moving but important installment in the DIVING series. It answers several questions and, though it revisits some events we’ve seen before, it still manages to advance the plot. Boss and Coop make a good team, though sometimes it’s hard to admire their actions. Coop, especially, does some things in this book that are ruthless and, as I mentioned in my previous review, they seem out of character. Perhaps I’ve been misjudging him all along, but I liked him better in the earlier books.

I’m hoping we get to see more of the Boneyard in a future story. I feel like we barely scratched its surface.