Boneyards (25 page)

T
hree days later, the ships came.

By then, Squishy was half-mad with anticipation. She spent hours questioning herself, questioning her plan, questioning her ideas. She paced the
Dane
, going from the small cockpit to the galley to the second cabin, and back to the cockpit.

Only once did she try the door to the main cabin, and then she stopped.

She was beginning to worry that Quint had died in his escape pod, that she hadn't done enough to save him, and she knew, she
knew
, that his death would haunt her most of all.

Sometimes she thought the Empire really had no idea who or where she was, and then she would have to remind herself about the tracers. Then she worried that they weren't working or that no one had monitored them or—worst case—that the Empire would simply monitor her until she gave up and went back to Lost Souls.

She would never, ever go back to Lost Souls. She didn't dare.

She hated being by herself. She used to think she loved being by herself—not as much as Boss, maybe, but more than most. And now Squishy knew that this kind of enforced solitude wasn't for her. It could never be for her.

She was starting to question everything.

Or maybe, just maybe, she had never ever had so much time alone with her own thoughts.

Either way, it didn't matter. She wasn't being paranoid, no matter how much her mind wanted to convince her she was.

She was thinking of giving up, saying that her conscience couldn't handle the guilt from the explosion, something, anything to keep the attention away from Lost Souls, when a voice blared across her cockpit:

Prepare to be boarded.

It was some kind of official announcement, filtered through her systems. It told her exactly what to do to comply with the boarding.

Failure to follow these instructions could result in damage to the ship, injury to its passengers, or death.

“Death,” she muttered. “To me or the ship?”

Not that it mattered. It might be better for all concerned if she died. But of course, as Boss had known, Squishy didn't have the courage to go through with that.

At least, she hadn't summoned the courage yet.

She sank into the command chair in front of her small control panel, then called up images of the ship's exterior. Five imperial war vessels.

Five.

She supposed she should be flattered. She was one tough, dangerous woman in the eyes of the Empire, and it needed five gigantic ships to take down her little cruiser.

Although, if she thought clearly, maybe the Empire wasn't so far off. Maybe she was that dangerous. After all, she had blown up one of their science vessels years ago even if she had done it through a proxy.

And then she had destroyed one of their major research stations.

She wondered if the Empire knew she had also had a hand in destroying all of the backup materials relating to stealth tech. By now, maybe they did have an idea. Maybe that, in addition to the explosion, was why there were five ships.

Or maybe there were just five in the vicinity.

Second warning: You are about to be boarded
….

The instructions repeated just like they had before. She was going to comply, and then she thought,
Why make it easy for them?
She lifted her hands off the control panel. If they destroyed the ship or damaged it or injured her, then so be it.

And if this silly boarding procedure caused death, then she was willing to accept that too.

Although she knew, deep down, that they wouldn't kill her. They believed she had too much information.

The little ship shook as a grappler attached to the outside. Something scraped, and she winced. A warning light went on along her control panel, telling her that the exterior hull near the main exit had been damaged and if whatever it was that had caused the damage was removed, the ship would need to seal up the exterior door to prevent a loss of environment.

“So,” she muttered, “the damage is purposeful.”

She debated: Sit? Stand? Stay in the cockpit? Go to the door and greet them? Hide in the back room?

In the end, she decided to stand near the control panel.

She watched as the exterior door got breached, then as someone used something to open the
Dane's
interior door by force. The environmental controls remained on, and nothing on her control panel told her that the ship's integrity had been compromised.

The control panel informed her that seven people had entered the
Dane
, and more followed. She wondered how many human beings they thought they needed to capture just one. Did they think she was going to stand here with some kind of laser rifle and pick them off one by one?

They probably did.

She smiled to herself: paranoid bastards. Somehow their caution made her feel stronger. She no longer felt like the half-mad woman who had been stalking around this ship for days.

She had been right. Her assumptions, her actions, everything she had done had been right.

They stomped through the narrow corridor and poured through the cockpit door, wearing battle armor so heavy they didn't look human at all. One, two, three—she stopped counting at five, and watched a group of them line up near the doorway, military fashion, weapons pointed at her as if she was going to blow them apart.

She actually felt a second of regret: she hadn't thought of attacking them.

Then she remembered: everyone who had died in stealth-tech research here in the Empire had all been working for the imperial military, including Professor Dane, even though he wasn't strictly military. She had been part of the military. Maybe that was why she hadn't thought of attacking them.

These soldiers left the doorway clear, and after a second, a man slipped through it. He didn't have a weapon at all, but then, he didn't need one.

He looked thin and tired, his face red with little cuts. He hadn't gone to a surgeon after all.

“Quint,” she said softly.

“Surprised to see me?” he asked with such anger that her heart started racing.

But she kept her voice calm as she said, “Not this time, no. I doubt you can ever surprise me again.”

TWENTY YEARS EARLIER

R
osealma came out of the meeting room and crumpled onto a bench beside the door. She hated this building. It was part of the military complex, but it was supposedly the Justice Building. It had been designed in the old style: a lot of expensive wood, imported from all over the Empire, and some marbled stone covering the floors.

The problem was that all the stone made the corridors an echo chamber. The wood dampened some of it, but not all of it. And then, lined up against the walls, were the regulation uncomfortable benches.

Just like the uncomfortable chairs inside that meeting room.

She put a hand to her face.

She was tired. She had been tired for more than a year, living and reliving the failed experiment, the problems, the attempted rescue, and finally the shutdown. She had testified and argued and fought. She had wondered if any of it was fair, particularly when the court decided to jail Hansen.

For a while, she kept going back to Vallevu between cases because that was where her off-site home with Quint was. But eventually, she couldn't face it any longer.

She stopped going home. She got an apartment near the courts and she stayed. At first she drank, because she needed her mind on something else. Then she realized if she kept doing that, she would go crazy, so she went back to school.

Medicine provided a good penance. It wasn't stealth tech. It wasn't related to weapons work at all, and yet it appealed to her scientific mind. It kept her thinking about something else.

She got to think about something else now. She was done. And it felt…odd.

“Rosealma?”

The voice belonged to Quint. She didn't want to face him now. But she could hear footsteps coming closer. That damn echo.

She'd been living with that for months as well.

She steeled her shoulders, rubbed a hand over her face, and stood.

Quint had come down the hallway, but he was alone. “Did they take your recommendations?”

“No,” she said. “But they offered me a job. They want me to be director of Stealth-Tech Research.”

He came over to her and put his arm around her. Somehow it didn't feel comforting. “Good. You can make changes when you get back to the project. Sometimes the best changes are made from within anyway.”

“I'm not making changes,” she said.

He looked at her. She slipped out of his embrace. He stood with his arm upright for just a moment, as if her movement surprised him. Then he let his arm drop.

“What?” he asked.

“I turned them down.”

“Why?” he asked.

She looked at his face, broad and familiar, and wondered how she had ever found it attractive.

“I told you,” she said. “It isn't the methodology. There's something wrong with the way that we conduct the research itself. Our assumptions are flawed. We're playing with something so dangerous that it could destroy all of us if we're not careful.”

“You're being melodramatic,” he said, and her breath caught.

He was supposed to be the one who believed her. He was supposed to be the one who understood. He had been with her from the beginning. He knew she had changed the direction of the research, and when she had done that, the deaths had started.

Or, as the committee had said, the disappearances.
No one knows if they're dead, Quintana
, one of the generals said to her.
You have simply made that assumption.

They're dead to us, sir
, Rosealma said.
We'll never get them back.

“No,” she said. “I'm not being ‘melodramatic.’ If we continue this research, many more good people will die. And that's something we could stop.”

“So change the direction of the research, Rose,” he said.

“I did that once already,” she said. “I made things worse.”

He was frowning. He didn't seem to understand what she was saying. “The research is important. This technology will help all of the ships in the Empire.”

He was giving her the company line, and that made her even more tired.

“No, it won't,” she said. “It won't help any ship except military vessels. If we ever get the stealth tech to work, it'll just make the Empire stronger. It won't do any good at all.”

He shook his head slightly. Either he didn't agree with what she was saying or he really didn't understand it. She liked to think he didn't understand it. But she was beginning to fear that he wasn't agreeing with her.

“Quint, this technology, it's not worth all the lives. People shouldn't have to die because we're trying to re-create an old weapons system.”

He studied her for a long moment. Her breath caught. She had spent a long time with him. She had trusted him, trusted her future to him. She had pledged her life to his.

Surely that had to be worth something, even if it was just a chance to give her the benefit of the doubt.

Then he said, “People die, Rose. They die for thousands of reasons, some good, some bad, some utterly stupid. They die in accidents and they die too young and they die because they went the wrong way or chose the wrong path. People die.”

She was shaking. “Not because of something I developed.”

“You didn't develop stealth tech,” he said.

“I thought I understood it. I don't. And people are dying because of that. And those assholes in that room won't stop the research. They won't let us rethink our entire strategy. They say we've had too many breakthroughs.”

“We've had more breakthroughs because of you than we ever had before,” Quint said.

She was staring at him and wondering when he had become a stranger. What was he arguing? That she continue?

“The breakthroughs come at too high a cost,” she said.

“You lose some lives to save others,” he said.

“Stealth tech won't save lives!” Her raised voice shocked her. She had never yelled at Quint before. She cleared her throat. “Stealth tech, if it works, will cost lives. The Empire will use it to move into the Nine Planets Alliance.”

“You don't know that,” Quint said, but as he spoke, he looked away.
He
knew it. He knew she was right, and he wasn't willing to say that to her.

“It doesn't matter,” she said, walking around him. “They didn't listen to me.”

“So you do what I said.” He kept pace with her. “Take the job. You change the experiment from within.”

“Even if I had the stomach for it—which I don't,” she said, “I can't do it now.”

“Why?” he asked.

“I resigned my commission, Quint. I'm done with all of this.”

He grabbed her arm so hard that it hurt. “Don't do that, Rose. Go back in there. Tell them you made a mistake.”

“I didn't make a mistake, Quint,” she said. “I did what I had to do.”

He grabbed her other arm and pulled her toward him. He brought his face close to hers. “You can't do this, Rose. You're our best mind. You're the secret to stealth tech. You can't leave.”

“I already have, Quint.” She tried to keep her voice calm, even though he was hurting her.

“Those people, they don't matter,” he said. “They're expendable. You're not.”

“What people?” she asked. “The ones who died? Or their loved ones who want to believe their dead relatives will come back?”

“All of them,” he said. “You can't care about them. Your work is too important.”

“Do you care about them?” she asked.

“Hell, no,” he said. “Why should I?”

She wrenched out of his grasp. Her upper arms ached where his hands had dug in. She lowered her head and walked away.

“Rose, wait.”

She didn't. She kept walking. He grabbed her one more time, and she tried to yank away, but he held her too tight.

“Why should I care about them?” he asked.

“Because science is supposed to be for the public good, Quint,” she said. “Not to help the Empire gain more power.”

“There's nothing wrong with the Empire, Rose.” He sounded convinced.

She looked down at his hand. “Let me go, Quint. You're hurting me.”

He released her. She shook her arm, trying to get the circulation back.

“And, for the record, Quint,” she said, “any time a government believes that it can sacrifice people for the greater good, then there's something wrong with that government.”

He frowned as if he was trying to understand. The look on his face hurt her more than anything. He hadn't understood. He hadn't understood from the beginning. And she should have realized it.

She turned her back on him, and walked away.

And she hoped she would never ever see him again.