Boneyards (10 page)

Q
uint ran his hand through his hair, making it stand on end. He walked toward her. There wasn't a lot of room in this cabin. It took all of Squishy's strength not to back away.

“When the
Dane
entered imperial space,” he said, “I was actually hopeful. I thought you had come back to help us.”

“I did,” she said softly.

“No, you didn't,” he said. “You came back here to destroy us.”

Quint's words offended her. Squishy stood perfectly still, trying to control the anger.

“I did not come to destroy you,” she said. “People who destroy things kill people.”

“You killed Cloris,” he said.

Her cheeks heated. She made herself breathe before she spoke. Even then, her words were clipped.

“I didn't come to destroy you,” she said again. “I came to help you.”

His face flushed. The wounds disappeared in the redness. He took a step away from her, moving his head at the same time so she couldn't see his eyes.

“That's what I wanted to believe, Rose,” he said, clasping his hands behind his back. The posture looked terribly familiar. She did it all the time, and she realized, with a sinking feeling, she had learned it from him. “I wanted to believe that you could stop all of the deaths. Didn't you ever wonder how you got in so easily? Why no one cared that you'd been gone for so many years?”

She had wondered, then chalked it up to the Empire's incompetence. She figured people were watching her, but it didn't matter. She had an entire team, she had a way to contact them if she needed to, and she had no actual work to do until she destroyed the research station. For six months, her work had been blameless, although she made a point of stopping those experiments, the ones that would have resulted in someone's death.

He tilted his head back. “I
believed
in you, Rosealma. You're brilliant. I honestly thought you could fix it all.”

Her breath caught in her throat. It all fit: how she got in, why he kept showing up, asking the occasional question, keeping an eye on her, telling her she was doing well.

She shook her head. “I did fix things, just not the way you wanted.”

“You just set them back some, Rosealma. You didn't fix anything at all,” he said.

She almost, almost told him about destroying the backup research, but she didn't. The only thing her people hadn't destroyed was the scientists themselves. Someone destructive would have destroyed them too. But she wasn't destructive. It would take the scientists years to reconstruct their work, and maybe by then, someone new would come in, someone to tell them about the folly of their ways.

She could send them that researcher. She could send in moles who would direct them away from their own destruction and onto a path that would lead nowhere.

If she ever got out of this.

He was frowning. She couldn't trust him. Not even when he said he could keep her from the worst punishments. Maybe he could. But he wouldn't save her from interrogations. And the last thing she wanted to do was betray her friends.

She didn't dare trust him. He always tricked her.

And then she got cold. He was tricking her now, forcing her into conversation while the military closed in on her ship. She wasn't leaving the area—

—because of him.

She had to get away from him. Or at least, she had to try.

She made her expression change. She frowned with—she hoped—concern.

“Oh, dear,” she said, keeping her voice calm. “You're bleeding again.”

He raised a hand toward his face.

“Don't touch it,” she said. “I don't know what got in those wounds. But something's keeping them from healing. I don't want you to spread it. Sit back on the bed.”

He looked alarmed. He sat down.

She grabbed her kit and brought it over. Then she picked up the numbing agent. “Lean back. Close your eyes for just a minute.”

He did. She grabbed one of the anesthetics, hoped the dosage wouldn't be too much for him, and as she wiped the numbing agent along his clean cheek, she inserted the anesthetic into his neck.

“Hey!” he said, opening his eyes. He tried to sit up. But she held him down with one hand, knowing the anesthetic would work quickly.

He fumbled, reached, and fell backward.

“Hey,” he repeated softly. And then he closed his eyes.

She stepped back, counting for a full minute. No one, no matter how strong they were, could stay awake with that stuff flowing through them. She checked his vital signs. They were good.

She hadn't really thought this through. But she had only a few minutes to execute the plan, however haphazard it was.

Her heart was beating harder than his was. She hurried to the main cabin to check its escape pod. If that pod wasn't set up, she'd have to take things from one of the other pods.

But this one had food and water for a week, more if he rationed. Her hand floated over the pod's communications equipment. If she took the communications system out of the pod, she would buy more time. He couldn't contact anyone. She could leave the emergency beacon.

But he might die before anyone found him.

Then she shook her head. One person too many had already died on this mission. She wasn't going to kill Quint too.

She left the pod's door open. Then she went to the bed. It had been a long time since she lifted someone heavier than she was. She eyeballed him. She thought she could do it without reducing the gravity in the ship.

She slid under him and pulled him over her shoulder, wobbling a bit under his weight. She lurched like a drunk as she carried him to the pod, glad that the ship was relatively empty, so she didn't hit much. She crouched, her knees screaming in protest, then let him fall to the floor.

He didn't wake up.

She shoved him into the pod, checked his vitals one last time, and let out a small sigh of relief. He was fine. He would be fine.

Weirdly, she felt the urge to apologize. She was leaving him yet again without any explanation—or, at least, without an explanation he could understand.

But she didn't say anything. Instead, she closed the pod door, and then she went to the cockpit. She needed to check one thing.

She hurried to the control panel, and noted the coordinates, and made sure the pod's emergency beacon showed on her communications readout.

Then she went back to the cabin, saw her supplies on the nearby table, the scrunched pad where Quint had been just a moment before. The pod glistened in its bay, the door still closed.

She couldn't help herself: she had to open it to make sure he was still inside.

He was. And he was still unconscious. He hadn't moved at all.

She closed the door and hit the in-room command, jettisoning the pod. The panel doors closed, then the wall vibrated as the pod disconnected itself from the ship.

“Get out,” she whispered. She never wanted to see him again, and she was afraid she would.

She hurried back to the cockpit and looked at the screens, watching as the pod tumbled away from the
Dane.
She needed to get out of this sector. This cruiser couldn't escape Enterran space fast enough to get her to the Nine Planets before Quint was found. Plus she had believed him when he said that he had already released information about the ship.

Everyone would be looking for her.

For that reason alone, she couldn't go back to the rendezvous, nor could she contact the others. She hoped they would follow instructions and leave after the designated period of time.

Not that anyone would be looking for them. As far as the Empire knew, as far as Quint knew, she had been working alone.

The pod got smaller and smaller until it was just a dot on her screen. She should just leave him to his fate. After all, one death in the service of a cause didn't matter. That was his philosophy, anyway.

But it wasn't hers.

She went to the control panel, scanned for the nearest starbase, and sent a coded message, warning of a ship in trouble, and escape pods at these coordinates.

It was the least she could do to salve her own conscience, even though doing so might cause her capture.

She had no idea if she would get out of this alive, but she was going to try. And she was going to try to do it alone.

T
he
anacapa
drive, when it's working properly, operates quickly and efficiently. It moves a ship from one part of space to another in a blink. But it can also move a ship forward from one time to another without moving it in space at all. And the
anacapa
drive can move a ship in both time and space, but less efficiently and using a lot more energy.

I never want to be on a ship that uses its
anacapa
drive to move in time. Maybe I'm superstitious. Maybe I'm practical. Or maybe I'm simply wary. The
anacapa's
move through time is what brought the
Ivoire
here. The movement through space itself seemed to have worked fine.

Coop, Yash, Mikk, and I are in the cockpit of
Nobody's Business Two.
This ship is much bigger than the original
Business
, and I used to think that ship huge.

The cockpit alone here has the capacity to hold a dozen people. I could staff it with a real crew if I wanted to. I don't want to. I have never overcome my aversion to crowds of people, and now I doubt I ever will. It seems to be an integral part of me, one that makes me even more unsuited to running Lost Souls.

Right now, Ilona Blake is actually running Lost Souls. She did so for most of the previous year, with my supervision. She made no mistakes that I could find. She's efficient, organized, and friendly. She knows how to make people do whatever she wants when she wants them to. And she understands Lost Souls' mission. Better yet, she believes in it down to her very core.

If all goes well, I'm going to promote her to chief operating officer when I get back. The less I'm involved in the day-to-day workings of the corporation, the happier I'll be.

I am weirdly happy right now. I sit in the pilot's chair of the
Two
and look at the strange foldspace star map on the screen in front of me. Mikk stands near the door, massive arms crossed as if he's standing guard. He's ready to jump in should something go wrong, which is just his nature. Right now, he's the unnecessary person on the bridge, but I want him here so that I don't feel outnumbered by
Ivoire
crew, even if there are only two of them.

Coop sits to my right, my nominal copilot, and Yash sits to my left. Yash is the most important one in this cockpit right now. She's the one who operates the
anacapa
drive. I can do what any pilot can do—I can turn it on and off. I can actually do a few other things, because learning the capabilities of the
anacapa
has been one of my priorities.

But should something go wrong—and most of my experiences with
anacapa
drives, particularly before I knew what they were, were with drives that had gone horribly wrong—I want someone in front of those drive controls who can design an
anacapa
drive from a hair follicle and chipped tooth.

Even though the
Ivoire
had an entire team of engineers in charge of various aspects of the
anacapa
drive, no one on that ship knew more about it than Yash. Therefore, she's the one I want to operate this brand new
anacapa
drive built especially for the
Two
.

The journey to Sector Base Y is the farthest I will have ever traveled in foldspace. Before that, it was the journey to Sector Base W from the Lost Souls' space station. This is probably—and I'm guessing because I didn't put in the coordinates—five times the distance.

I am nervous, but not like Mikk is. Mikk is nervous because he doesn't want to get trapped. Neither do I. But I'm nervous because our
anacapa
is new, built by Yash and her engineers specifically for the smaller vessels owned by the Lost Souls.

Yash says that the principle is the same, and the size of the
anacapa
doesn't matter. I don't know enough about the science to know if she's right, and it's not like we can verify with an outside engineer. I'm all about verification. When Ilona first ran the corporation for me, I had outside auditors double-check her financial work (without her knowledge, of course). I use a variety of outside experts from the Nine Planets to verify different aspects of our research—although never the totality of our research on a particular topic because I don't want the scientists to know exactly what we're doing.

We're also selling trademarks and patents on bits of technology from the Dignity Vessels—tech unrelated to the
anacapa
or the weaponry, of course. And we're not discussing where that tech comes from.

I am paranoid but, Coop says, in a good and healthy way, considering the power of the Empire.

The only way I could even partially double-check Yash's claims for the new
anacapa
before taking it into the field for the first time two years ago was to have Squishy look it over. Squishy heads our part of the
anacapa
division, or as she insists on calling it, the stealth-tech division.

She says she uses the name to remind her of past sins.

I think she's just being as stubborn about the wording as the rest of us.

I wanted Squishy on this trip, but she took a prolonged leave of absence several months ago, claiming burnout. Since she hasn't taken time off in almost seven years, I let her go. But I miss her.

And even more than that, I miss her cranky—honest—expertise.

I lean back in the somewhat ostentatious pilot's chair and frown at foldspace. It's still a relatively strange concept for me to contemplate. Coop gave me the layman's explanation shortly after I met him, and it's still the one I default to.

The
anacapa
drive creates an actual fold in space, the way that a person would create a fold in a blanket. The
anacapa
user knows where she is and where she's going. She gives the
anacapa
those two coordinates, and the
anacapa
gets the ship from here to there as if it has taken a shortcut—which, I suppose, it has.

That shortcut can have an impact on time as well, and I don't understand that mechanism as well as I understand the distance mechanism. In fact, I don't even try anymore. I know that the
anacapa
works, and when it works well, it's a godsend for long-distance space travel.

When it works poorly, it can cost lives, or worse. It can destroy communities, or send ships forward five thousand years.

I try not to think about that when we're in foldspace, but I find myself dwelling on it each and every time. I guess foldspace makes me a lot more nervous than I want to admit.

Suddenly the ship does a little dance that I have come to recognize as a shift out of foldspace. Everything skitters—vision, hearing, even that sense of motion. The first time I experienced it, I thought it felt like the entire ship's crew tripped over the same spot in a rug at the very same time. It is as if we've hit some kind of mutual bump and we go over it together.

Then we're level, on the other side of foldspace, and the
anacapa
automatically disengages.

Still, Yash watches both it and the coordinates at our arrival point. She can reengage within seconds if we need her to.

“This it?” Yash asks Coop.

“It should be,” he says.

We've stopped near a planet named Treffet. It's inside the habitable zone around its sun, but is uncomfortably close to that sun—at least for me. It's in roughly the same area in relation to its sun that Wyr was. Wyr is where Sector Base V is, and is one of the hottest places I've ever had the misfortune to go to.

But the weather will be the least of our problems. We're far from home in more ways than one. Treffet doesn't belong to the Nine Planets Alliance, nor is it a part of the Enterran Empire. Treffet, so far as I can tell, is filled with nonaligned cultures, not that I've done a tremendous amount of research.

I had planned to do that research if and when Coop decided we would go to Sector Base Y. I figured I had months, maybe years, given the amount of work we would have to do at Sector Base W. When we got here, we would be prepared to deal with Treffet's ruling bodies, whoever they might be.

Instead, we followed Coop's rather impulsive plan, and got here without my usual level of research.

“I'm not reassured by the phrase ‘it should be,’” Mikk says from behind me. He's speaking to Coop.

“I didn't come out here,” Coop says. “This is the planet that was initially chosen for Sector Base Y, but the base was just in the planning stages. If the team ran into difficulties, the base could have ended up somewhere else.”

Mikk sighs.

“I don't want to take the
Two
into orbit and then search to see what's belowground,” I say. “That might attract too much attention. I'd rather send a skip.”

“The
Two
can orbit using your traditional cloak,” Coop says.

He doesn't like our cloak, so I am surprised by his suggestion. We have adopted new language for the cloak. Everyone else—those who know nothing about the secret military research in the Empire or about the
anacapa
drive—call this technology “stealth mode.” With all of our references to malfunctioning stealth tech and old stealth technology, we have finally moved to the very simple “cloak.”

Although “cloak” doesn't really describe what this stealth mode does. All it does is mask our presence on another ship's instruments or on instruments functioning at ground level.

Coop has repeatedly voiced his hatred of the cloak precisely because it's standard throughout the Empire and the Nine Planets Alliance. He believes that someone has probably developed a way to pierce a standard cloak without others knowing about it—and he's probably right.

Plus the cloak is designed for our cultures, not for other cultures. The cloak might mask the ship from the cultures in the Nine Planets or in the Empire, but not mask the ship out here.

“I don't want to risk the
Two
,” I say. “It can stay out here and remain cloaked.”

Coop gives me an annoyed look. He knows I'm being practical; I'm doing exactly what he would do if he were in charge of this mission. But he's not.

“I don't suppose you'll let me go,” he says in a deceptively calm tone.

“Hell,” Yash says, “I won't let you go.”

“I'm afraid you can't go either,” I say to her.

She rolls her eyes at me, but the response isn't a mean one. I prefer to interpret it as somewhat fond. “I know, I know,” she says. “I shouldn't really be on this mission in the first place.”

I told her that time and time again. I really didn't want to risk her because it risked all of our
anacapa
research.

“I can only bend so far,” I say.

“You're irreplaceable as well,” Coop says.

I can't tell if he's speaking from his fondness for me or if he actually believes that.

“He's right, you know, Boss,” Mikk says. “You're in charge.”

“Actually,” I say as I lever myself out of the pilot's chair, “we need someone on this trip who can make command decisions, who can pilot the skip, and who can act quickly. That's me or Coop.”

“I can act quickly,” Mikk says, and he sounds almost surly.

“But we're in unknown political territory here,” I say, “and if anyone is going to do something that will get us in trouble, I would rather it be me.”

The other three have no response to that. Yash and Coop have no right to respond, and Mikk just makes a face. Whether or not he agrees with me, he knows better than to argue.

“I want Rossetti with me. She'll know what to look for in a sector base if it's not entirely obvious. And I need a backup pilot.” I raise my eyebrows at Mikk. “You want to come?”

“Without you,” he says, “but I'll take what I can get.”