Boneyards (5 page)

T
he corridor was empty. The sirens continued to wail, and the androgynous voice repeatedly informed Squishy that she had only five minutes to evacuate.

She reached down and grabbed that jar. It was warm. She wondered what the hell it actually was. She knew what it wasn't. It wasn't a functioning
anacapa
drive.

But it might have been a malfunctioning version of it, missing the various pieces that actually made the
anacapa
work.

She carried the jar to one of the side rooms and set it inside.

Then she took one last look around. It hadn't been a bad research station. The station had been well designed and well equipped, although all of the state-of-the-art protections, all of the one-of-a-kind technology couldn't help it now.

She tapped into the control panel on the wall, looking for heat signatures and individual life tags. Everyone who was supposed to be here was tagged, and should show up on the panel. Everyone who wasn't supposed to be here should show up as a heat signature.

She was the only heat signature and had the only tag. In a place that normally housed a thousand scientists, she was the only one who remained.

She let out a small sigh of relief.

The sirens sounded even louder than they had before, probably because the station was empty. All of the spaceships had left as well, except for her designated evacuation vessel. She opened its systems, checked to make sure it was empty, then shut it down.

Finally, she punched in an access code, opening previously sealed corridors, then sprinted out the door.

The androgynous voice accompanied her.

Emergency evacuation under way. Proceed to your designated evac area
….

She ran as fast as she could down the escape route she had set up more than a month before. She wasn't in the best shape any longer, even though she had made certain to exercise every day. It didn't matter. She couldn't run as fast as she used to.

She wondered if that would make a difference. Maybe she should have gone to her designated evac area.

As if to mock her, the androgynous voice was telling her:

…
Do not double back. Go directly to your designated evac area. The station will shut down entirely in…five…minutes.

“Shut up,” she whispered, using precious breath.

She skidded around the last corner, putting out a hand to catch herself, then headed to the last remaining ship.

It wasn't quite a single ship and it wasn't quite a skip. It was a modified cruiser, one she had designed herself and parked on the station when she first arrived months ago.

She reached into her pocket, clicked the ship's remote, and ordered it to start, hoping the station's systems did not prevent the remote access. She had set them up so that they wouldn't, but everything changed in an emergency.

…
Do not finish your work. Do not bring your work. Once life tags move out of an area, that area will seal off
….

If she survived this, she would be hearing that stupid voice in her sleep. Small price, she supposed.

The doors were open to the docking area. The stupid voice was lying about everything being sealed off.

Well, not lying exactly. Unable to cope with directions Squishy had programmed long ago. She wanted
her
ship, not some designated evac vessel that she couldn't control. She hadn't even checked her dedicated evac vessel for supplies and provisions, although she made sure her cruiser was well stocked.

…
The station will shut down entirely in…three…minutes.

She ran up the ramp. The door to the ship, which she had rechristened the
Dane
in a fit of whimsy, stood open. She hurried inside, slammed the lock, shot through the airlock and into the ship itself.

Only two meters to the command chair, and she crossed those faster than she had run through the corridors. She slammed her open palm on the controls, recited the Old Earth Standard nonsense poem she had learned in the last year, and the controls came on.

Then she hit the preprogrammed escape plan and the ship roared into life. It rose and headed toward the docking doors faster than they were opening.

She cursed and hoped there was some kind of failsafe for those doors, because she didn't want to slow down and she didn't want to hit them and she certainly didn't want to be here with the station about to blow.

At the last second, the doors slammed open (or, at least, she thought they slammed—they shook the wall as they hit it, which had to sound like slamming, although she couldn't hear it), and then she was free of the place.

The
Dane
zoomed away from the station as fast as the ship could safely go without hitting FTL. She turned the screens onto the station itself, imagined that snarky automated voice continuing its countdown to the now-empty station:

The station will shut down entirely in…five…four…three…two…one
….

She raised her head, expecting to see the station blow into a million pieces. Instead it remained intact, and she wondered if she had gotten her count wrong. She hadn't really been paying attention to the clock. She'd been running, not counting minutes.

Her heart was pounding and she was breathing hard. Her palm had left a damp print on the controls.

She stared at the screens and wondered, for the very first time, if she had gotten it all wrong.

NINETEEN AND A HALF YEARS EARLIER

T
he woman sitting at the edge of the bar wasn't pretty. She was too thin, her head too small, her features not clearly defined. She wasn't even a woman—not quite, anyway. She was probably eighteen if she was a day, but she pretended to be older, and that had caught Rosealma's attention.

That, and the woman's brownish-blond hair. The hair was choppy, clearly cut by the woman herself. The woman's long fingers were wrapped around a mug of some kind of ale, and she looked lonely.

Maybe it was the loneliness that caught Rosealma. Or maybe it was the woman's sideways glances. Rosealma tried not to watch her, but there was something, something interesting, the first interesting thing Rosealma had seen since she left Vallevu.

The bar was old and seedy, the space station not much better. Rosealma had used the last of her hazard pay to get here, and really didn't want to leave. She had placed six months' rent on a berth that wasn't much more than a bed, an entertainment wall, and an unlimited supply of reading material from the station's rather eclectic (and ancient) library.

The woman glanced at her again, and Rosealma lifted her own mug of ale in a kind of toast. The woman smiled. She tilted her head sideways as she did so, as if she couldn't quite believe she had caught another person's attention. She might even have been blushing.

The bar owner, who was also the bartender, shouted at someone near the entrance, something about nonpayment of a bill. Rosealma didn't listen. Out here, everyone was short of money, and everyone wanted something for nothing.

She found it was easier to remain quiet about everything, to be ignored rather than draw attention to herself. She had come as close to disappearing as a human being could without actually losing her identity and starting all over.

The woman at the end of the bar glanced at Rosealma again, then looked at the seat next to her.

Rosealma's breath caught. She wasn't sure if she should walk over. If she had a flirtation with the woman, then she would be noticed, and everything would change.

Still, she hadn't had a real conversation in six months, and surprisingly, she missed talking. Not about trivial things like the quality of the ale or the best place to eat for the fewest credits, but about ideas and politics and science and the things that people talked about when they were laughing and relaxing with each other.

She missed interaction, and she had never thought she would.

She sighed, stood, and grabbed her mug of ale.

Then the lights flickered out, and her stomach fluttered. She recognized the moment as it happened: the gravity had changed. The lights came back on just as she floated upward, her ale floating with her, the glass emptying and beads of liquid dotting everything around her.

No one screamed like they would have had this been planetside, although a few people cursed as their beverages took on a life of their own. The chairs and tables were bolted down, but the mugs weren't, and neither was the ice or the bar snacks or the lemons, olives, and cherries.

She and everyone else in the bar were in the middle of a mess, which would only get worse when the gravity returned to normal.

Behind her, the bar owner shouted, “You son of a bitch!” and that was when she realized that the gravity change wasn't some kind of malfunction; it had been planned, probably to get money out of the bar owner.

She glanced at the woman and was startled to see how lovely she looked, her hair spiking upward, her long limbs gangly no longer. The woman looked at home in zero-g, as if floating was her preferred method of travel.

She used the tops of chairs to slowly propel herself toward Rosealma.

“It looks like there's trouble,” the woman said, glancing toward the main entrance. The bar owner was shaking his fist, propelling himself backward as he did so, probably the only person in the entire bar who wasn't used to zero-g.

Rosealma couldn't tell which of the people floating around him had made him angry, and she really didn't want to find out. She smiled at the woman.

“I'm Rosealma.”

The woman's eyebrows went up, giving her smile a wry cynicism. “Wow, that's a mouthful. You don't have a nickname?”

“Do I need one?” Rosealma asked.

“Everyone out here has a nickname. It's easier.”

“Easier?”

“Yeah,” the woman said. “That way we don't have to clarify which Rose or Alma we're talking about. We don't need last names or even first names. We're just too damn lazy anyway.”

And then she laughed. The laugh was raspy and deep, and Rosealma realized that the woman hadn't been eighteen for a long time. She was at least in her mid-twenties, maybe older, and she had seen as much or more than Rosealma had.

“What's your nickname?” Rosealma asked.

“Turtle,” the woman said. “You know what a turtle is?”

“Some kind of Earth creature.”

“Earth hell,” Turtle said. “The little ones are all the way out here. Some ships have them as mascots.”

“You're someone's mascot?”

Turtle grinned at her. “Nah. I look like a turtle.”

“You don't,” Rosealma said, although she wasn't exactly sure what a turtle looked like. “You're the prettiest thing in this bar.”

Turtle smiled and tilted her head again. Her cheeks did turn red. “You be careful,” she said, “or I'll start thinking you're flirting with me.”

“Maybe I am flirting,” Rosealma said, startled at her own boldness.

Turtle's smile grew. “Then we should get out of this bar before the gravity changes. It's going to be a mess and I'll feel obligated to clean it up.”

“I don't feel obligated to anything,” Rosealma said. Which wasn't true, of course. She felt obligated for everything, and sorry for even more, and the weight of everything—from the regrets to the losses to the destruction of all of her dreams—threatened to crash her to the floor quicker than a gravity change.

“So you're running away,” Turtle said. Her tone was businesslike, not curious. She wasn't asking a question, just stating a fact.

“No,” Rosealma said. “You have to care to run away.”

Turtle studied her for a moment, the smile gone. Then she nodded once. “Well, then, I need to run away from this bar.” She extended her hand. “You want to come along?”

Rosealma looked at Turtle's hand, with its long fingers and visibly chewed cuticles. Rosealma took it almost before she realized she had made a decision.

“Let's go,” she said, “and never look back.”

Turtle raised their joined hands. “Deal,” she said.

T
he station blew.

It started in the middle. A glow built, then expanded. The center disappeared in the light, and that's when Squishy realized it was imploding.

She stared at the screen in the
Dane
for just a moment. The silence in the cockpit was profound. She could hear her own breathing, and it sounded raspy. The
Dane
was cold—she had just gotten here, just started it up, just moved away from the station—

—and she hadn't moved far enough. In her desire to see the station explode, she had put herself at risk. God knows what would happen when that place went, with all the malfunctioning stealth tech on board. How many interdimensional rifts would open? How many pulses would plume along with the debris?

She slammed her palm on the control panel, her fingers grasping for the FTL command. It took four movements to launch FTL, and her shaking hand made all four hard. It felt like the movements took forever, even though it probably only took a few seconds. Still, she had to get out of here.

The
Dane
winked out, the images vanishing from the screen, and as they did, she collapsed in the command chair, hands to her face. Her heart was pounding, and she was feeling just a little queasy.

She had pulled it off, and no one died.

“You want to explain to me what the fuck just happened?”

The male voice made her jump. She had thought she was alone. She had
assumed
she was alone. She hadn't even checked to see if anyone had gotten into the
Dane.
The
Dane
would have masked a heat signature from the station's control board. She would have had to ask the
Dane
as she got into the airlock, and she had been in such a hurry, she hadn't thought of it.

She was such an idiot.

She dropped her hands slowly, making herself breathe as she did so. She wanted to seem calmer than she was, even though he had seen her jump.

She recognized the voice—how could she not? She had lived with it for years, and when she heard it again, even after the loss of decades, it was as if she had never been away from him.

Quint.

She turned her chair toward him.

He leaned against the entrance to the cockpit, arms crossed. He had probably explored the entire ship, not that there was much to see. Two cabins, a full galley, some storage, and of course, the area she called the mechanicals, where most of the things that ran the cruiser or helped its passengers survive lived.

She hadn't checked any of it. She had assumed that her locks would hold, that no one would access this ship. She certainly hadn't expected anyone to get on it in the middle of a crisis.

Her mistake.

She felt it in the small cockpit. Even though he stood at the entrance, he wasn't that far away from her. He had seen her stare at the screens, heard her raspy breathing, saw her momentary panic.

And he knew her well enough to know what all of it meant.

She knew him well too, and she had never quite seen him like this. Blood had dried on his face, black and crusty, outlining the wrinkles he had allowed to appear on his skin over the decades. He had managed—in his escape from the station—to find his uniform jacket. It covered the ripped shirt, although she could still see bits of fabric folded strangely across his chest.

He probably hadn't looked at his reflection. He probably didn't realize the blood was still on his face, if he had even known it was on his face in the first place.

The fact that he was on her ship surprised her. Not because he had figured out it was hers, but because it took some stones to avoid the evac ships and wait for her, stones she hadn't realized he had.

She hadn't answered his question. He raised his eyebrows, silently asking it again.

“The station blew up,” she said. “Or it was blowing up, just like we knew it would. I just hit the FTL. The last thing we want is to be near that part of space. There's a good chance that explosion could open an interdimensional rift.”

He frowned. “A what?”

She almost smiled, but she didn't. She had distracted him. He hadn't really been asking about the station before.

“An interdimensional rift.” She swallowed. “The stealth tech was unstable.”

“It's always been unstable,” he snapped. “You know that better than most.”

She nodded. She did know it better than most. That was why she had come here in the first place. But she wasn't going to tell him that. At least, not yet.

“Yes, I do know that,” she said. “But this time, the entire research station paid the price instead of a few volunteers.”

“A few…” His face turned red. She had forgotten about that reaction he had until just now. She had made him angry. It was amazing that she still knew what buttons to push after decades apart. He finally managed, “It wasn't a few.”

She knew that. It had been hundreds of people, most of whom hadn't volunteered at all, unless their induction into the Enterran military counted as volunteering.

They had fought about this before, the two of them. She still remembered every word of those fights.

“This time no one died in the unstable stealth tech,” she said.

“That you know of,” he said.

“No,” she said. “I know this for a fact. No one died.”

He glared at her. He didn't believe her.

He never had.