Boneyards (29 page)

TWENTY-ONE YEARS EARLIER

“Y
ou did
what
?” Rosealma asked, standing behind the clear double panes. She was queasy, hands on the control panel, feeling like she was going to be sick.

Not again
, she thought.
Not again.

She had helped design this military base. She was the one who had suggested putting it in orbit above a sparsely populated planet. She was the one who had suggested that the families live in Vallevu, a very pretty city on the ground below, so that they were nowhere near the experiments.

She had set up the sections of the base, keeping various experiments away from other experiments. The dangerous stuff was so far away from the operational and housing parts of the base that people joked about it, saying they needed a shuttle just to get to work in the morning.

She wanted it that way. She had even worked on the committees that set up the procedures and regulations—no one worked alone, no one worked on stealth tech in isolation, no one experimented on human subjects without a mountain of approval, no one made decisions without some kind of failsafe.

And now she stood in the deepest, darkest, most distant stealth-tech lab, and saw—nothing. No lab techs, no furniture, no walls. Even part of the interior of the damn base was missing.

Her stomach hurt and her hands trembled. The scientist beside her was just a baby, round-faced, wide-eyed, barely old enough to have a graduate degree, let alone the kind of credentials that allowed him to work in her lab.

Not that she was much older, in years anyway. But in life—she had aged fifty years in the past five.

“What did you do?” she asked again.

She knew it was him because he was the only one in the staging area, and he was the one who had called her, which pissed her off, because he should have contacted an entire team when something went wrong.

“I—” His voice broke, and she wasn't sure he would be able to get the words out. She needed him to get the words out, because if he didn't, she would have to review the logs, and that would take time—time she suspected they didn't have.

“I can't fix this unless you tell me what you did,” she snapped.

He opened his mouth, then closed it. She cursed, and turned to the control panel. She'd even had a control panel installed in each of the labs as if they were separate laboratory ships operating in deep space. If anything went wrong, the labs should have isolated themselves even farther, but this one hadn't. She had no idea how many people had been working in the next lab over, the lab that was no longer there, and she wasn't sure she wanted to know. But she was going to have to find out.

“You said we actually got the cloak to work,” he said.

She whirled on him. What was his name? Robbie, Reggie, Ralphie? She glanced at the name badge along the front of his uniform jacket. Hansen. Radley Hansen.

“We got the cloak to work in a limited fashion,” she said. “Meaning it masked a single item, very small. A coin. That was it. Nothing more elaborate than that.”

“Yes, ma'am, I know, ma'am, I'm sorry, ma'am.”

She went cold. “You came in here, by yourself, and ran the experiment again, didn't you?”

“I'm sorry, ma'am, truly. I was just thinking—”

“Of yourself, of promotion, of the fact that if you succeeded, you would own stealth tech, you would be the one who everyone came to because you knew how it worked, isn't that right?”

“Sort of, ma'am. I thought I saw an anomaly in the data from the first experiment, and I came in to double-check it—”

“Alone,” she said. “You came in alone.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Against direct orders. No one was to work alone.”

His face was red. “Everyone does it, ma'am.”

Anger surged through her. She wanted to hit something—hell, she wanted to hit him. Everyone did it? And she wasn't aware of it? If this were a minor infraction, she would check right now. But it wasn't minor, it was major, and she needed to deal with the crisis first, not with the group of idiots who broke the rules and might just have cost dozens of lives.

“So you ran the experiment again,” she said.

“First I read the data, and really, ma'am, there was something wrong. When you shut down the cloak, the coin reappeared but it wasn't the same coin.”

“Of course it was the same coin.” She had checked it herself.

He shook his head. “It was an older coin. I can show you the scans—”

“I don't want to see the damn scans,” she said. “I want to know what you did.”

He closed his eyes, knowing he was admitting to something that might be the death of his career at best, might get him court-martialed at worst.

“I brought in one of my own coins,” he said, his entire face trembling. His eyes popped open. They were red and round and filled with fear. “I knew every marking, I recorded everything I knew about that coin, I even wrapped it in a strand of my hair, so that I would know it was mine.”

She stayed very still because if she didn't stay still, she would lay this asshole flat, and then pummel him, maybe to death.

“I put it in there,” he said, his voice breaking again, “and I set it in the same position as the other coin had been in during the first experiment, and I came out, and I ran the experiment again, only this time, the cloak didn't work, it sent out this pulse of energy and it was big and it demolished the back half of the room, and I tried to shut it down, and it won't shut down, it's still growing I think, and I tried to reverse it, and when that didn't work, I called you.”

“So you fucking tampered with the tech before contacting me?”

“I was trying to fix it,” he said.

“You are eighteen different kinds of idiot,” she said. “You need to call in the rest of the team, right now.”

“But ma'am, I think the field is growing and what if it pulses again, we'd lose anyone who showed up here.”

She whirled on him. “So you figured
I
was the expendable one?”

“No, ma'am, no. I figured we had to solve this with the fewest people and you were the only chance of doing that. You're the one who knows this stuff backwards and forwards—”

“And I'm the one who put in the safeguards that you didn't follow to prevent precisely this kind of thing from happening,” she said, turning back to the controls, shaking now because she was only just beginning to understand how catastrophic this all was, all because some kid wanted to further his career and figured he'd be forgiven when he discovered the secret to everything.

“Yes, ma'am, I'm sorry, ma'am, I didn't intend it, ma'am.”

“You didn't intend it,” she repeated with deep sarcasm. “Of course you
didn't intend it, you idiot. You intended to be complimented and told how damn brilliant you are. Well, that'll never happen now. It just depends on how many people have died as to what kind of stupid they'll consider you.”

He took a step backward, as if her words had the force of blows.

“Have you contacted anyone else like I just asked?” she said, knowing he hadn't. “Have you?”

“N-N-No, ma'am.”

“Then get on it.” She was shaking with fury, and the anger wouldn't do her any good. But dammit, she had done everything she could to prevent something like this, and it had happened anyway, and if what she saw was any indication, it was worse—it was worse than the first time.

She had believed in this stuff once, and it had brought her here. To a room with no back where an entire wing of the science lab had just vanished. Or maybe (best case) maybe it had simply been cloaked.

But she doubted it, and she knew she didn't have the ability to figure all of this out on her own.

Hansen did have a point: the more people who came here now, the more people were at risk. But she needed help—
they
needed help.

She hit the command button that she had insisted be installed in every lab. Her staff joked about it, saying Rosealma wanted instant access to the head of the facility because she didn't feel important enough.

She did want instant access, because she needed instant access in moments like this. Nonessential personnel had to leave the base, and she couldn't make that call. She needed permission to have some staff help her with the crisis.

And she needed everything done Right Now.

Q
uint didn't come to see her for two days. At least, she thought it was two days. There was really no way to tell. She counted meals: she had just finished her eighth. She figured that eighth meal was lunch, and the type of food confirmed it: a sandwich with bread she hadn't had since she left the Empire, some kind of fruit she didn't recognize, and a glop of something whitish that smelled like cheese, but she was too uncertain to even eat it.

But she really wasn't certain. The food had been coming at irregular intervals—or so it seemed. She wasn't sure if she believed the intervals were irregular because her time-sense was off, or if they truly were irregular to keep her off-balance.

Maybe both.

Either way, she had just put the food back on the little table that jutted out near her chair, and slapped the wall like the reading device instructed, when Quint entered.

She wasn't quite sure how he did that either. She was surrounded by walls on all four sides. Suddenly he appeared in front of the door—the wall—where she had entered.

He looked less battered. The cuts on his face were no longer red and appeared to be fading. Apparently the surgeon on board this military vessel had enough equipment to work on his injuries. She was a bit surprised the surgeon hadn't removed them altogether.

Maybe Quint had waited too long. Maybe it would take some kind of specialist now.

He was wearing his uniform, but he had left the jacket outside the cell. His brown shirt was open slightly, and his black pants fit perfectly. He looked good, better than she had seen him look in the last six months.

Or maybe she was just that lonely.

“Had time to think?” he asked.

She gave him a tired smile. “You know I have.”

“Change your mind?”

Change her mind about what, exactly? She didn't ask. She just sat on that strange chair and watched him.

He stood awkwardly in front of the door. “You're still considered military, you know.”

“I resigned,” she said.

“And retained your pension. You're retired military.”

She sighed softly. She'd read the complaints. She wasn't going to face a civilian court, which might actually have sympathy or consider her a bit impaired because of all the things that had gone wrong since she started working in stealth tech. She would face a military tribunal and be charged with murder, mass murder, and a bunch of minor counts, including destruction of government property.

But the mass murder charge came from the problems at Vallevu, the ones in which she had initially been found not-involved. Because this time, she had opted to blow up a military research station where weapons work was being done (or so Quint had said), the military was revisiting the early charge, changing it.

According to the complaint, she was showing a pattern now, starting with—of all things—Professor Dane's death. Even though she hadn't been in charge of that experiment, just a lowly post-doc. Even though she hadn't been present when things went awry in Vallevu.

The only thing she had done—and granted, that was big enough—was blow up the research station.

And kill Cloris.

“You'll be punished to the full extent of the law,” Quint said. “And just your military position will show that you knew what the law was.”

She sighed. “I read the complaints.”

“Then you know what they're charging you for.”

She nodded. “I assume I'll get access to an attorney when we get where we're going.”

“That's what I'm here to talk with you about.” He looked around the room, as if he was trying to find a place to sit down. His gaze rested on the bed for just a moment, and flicked away. “You get to decide where we're going.”

“I do?” she said with a bit of surprise. “I have that much power, do I?”

“If you cooperate,” Quint said, “then I can get the mass murder charges dropped.”

“So can a good attorney,” Squishy said with a bravado she didn't feel.

“Rosealma, please,” Quint said in a tone of annoyance. “Take this seriously.”

“I am taking it seriously,” she said. “I just don't know what you want me to do.”

She wasn't asking, not really. She wasn't going to change her mind. She was going to fight some of the charges, but not the ones from this visit to the Empire. She was going to go to prison, and maybe she was going to let them kill her.

But she was curious.

“I know you continued stealth-tech research in the Nine Planets,” Quint said. “There's been a lot of rumors about breakthroughs. I believe rumors don't exist without truth behind them. Which means that there have been breakthroughs, and I believe you're behind those breakthroughs, Rose.”

She studied him for a moment. He seemed serious. “You have a lot of faith in me.”

“You're brilliant, Rose. I've said that all along.”

She sighed. “Do you actually think I would have come here if I had a good career under way in the Nine Planets? Why would I throw that all away?”

“Why don't you tell me?” he said. The sentence, sympathetic and warm, would have worked a lot better if he had been able to sit down and make eye contact, instead of shift from foot to foot in front of that nearly invisible door.

“You're making a lot of false assumptions, Quint,” she said. “You're assuming I know anything about the Nine Planets. You're assuming that I resumed my research career, abandoning my medical career. You're assuming everything.”

“You wouldn't have killed anyone if you were still in medicine, Rose,” he said.

“I'm not sure anyone died,” Squishy said. “I only have your word for that.”

He raised his eyebrows, as if she had startled him.

“Look,” he said after a moment. “Here's the choice. We have one final research lab, one your people never found. I'd like to take you there and have you update our experts on stealth tech.”

Her stomach knotted. Her face held the same expression it had before—she hoped—but she was so nauseous, she wasn't sure she had held it.

Another lab? She thought she had destroyed everything.

What he said just meant this entire trip was for nothing.

“Or,” he was saying, “we take you to a maximum security military prison, and you'll disappear inside with some pretty hard cases until your trial, which will be at least a year away.”

She was such a fool. How could she think one woman could demolish all of their research? She should have figured out that they had leaked that information about the deaths to attract her.

Of course, she wasn't that self-involved. That was the biggest issue. She would never have recognized it if someone was targeting her, because she didn't think she was worth targeting.

“Rose,” Quint said, his exasperation getting more and more evident. “Just agree to go to the base. Because they're going to get the information out of you anyway, and believe me, it's better for you if you volunteer it.”

She frowned. “You're threatening me?”

He shook his head. “I've seen what happens to people who go through the interrogation process. You won't be able to work in medicine or in science afterwards, Rose. You'll be lucky if you remember your name.”

The nausea was growing worse. She made herself breathe. Sometimes oxygen shut down the gag reflex.

She had opted for this. She had been warned. And then she had failed to follow through.

“Make the right choice, Rose,” he said. “Please.”

“That's the thing,” she said, more to herself than to him. “I already missed the chance to do that.”