Boneyards (9 page)

“Do you think you can get Professor Dane back?” a woman asked.

“I'm not sure Professor Dane has gone anywhere,” Rosealma said. “But I sure as hell am going to do my best to find out.”

Q
uint actually needed some minor surgery on some of the cuts. They were deep and too wide, and filled with all kinds of debris. Squishy convinced him to go to the nearest cabin, the one with the biggest bed. Before she had him lie down on it, she pulled the bedding.

She had no idea what had lodged in his face, but she didn't want it on anything important. She used a disposable liner and had him lie on that.

He eased himself onto the bed, watching her the entire time. Some movements of his were so familiar. That one was. He used to lie down and pat the bed beside him, half smiling at her in a way he thought enticing.

It had been enticing in the beginning. And then it became uncomfortable. And finally, embarrassing.

Not for her. But for him.

She hoped he didn't remember that.

He eased onto his back, folded his hands across his chest, and closed his eyes, but only for a moment. He opened them quickly, as if he remembered he couldn't trust her.

Although opening himself up like this was a kind of trust. He let her use a topical anesthetic to numb his face, and then he watched her work, her hands against his warm skin, her fingers working with the small, sensitive tweezers. They did 90 percent of the work, examining the cut and its edges so that she knew if she had removed all of the debris. But she still used her fingers to probe the edges of the wounds, a holdover from her medic days on Boss's diving runs.

Quint had been through medical procedures before. He knew better than to move. She got into a rhythm, working the cuts, removing the debris, operating almost by rote.

Her fingers knew what to do. The work was familiar—too familiar. It gave her time to mull what Quint had said.

Squishy hadn't compared the number of people who escaped to the number of people who had been in the station that day. And if Quint was right, then a few people—not just Cloris—could have died, and it wouldn't have shown up on Squishy's scans. At least, it wouldn't have shown up with the scans she had done.

Maybe if she had done some others…

She forced herself to concentrate on the microsurgery she was doing. She had to clean out those wounds carefully. She couldn't leave even the smallest bit of debris in them. She had no idea if whatever had embedded itself in Quint's skin had been from the particular stealth-tech experiment that Cloris had destroyed. It might have been from Squishy's bomb, or it might have been from the room itself. Or something from a rift—she had no idea.

But Cloris had vanished. Quint had told Squishy that much by repeating her own words to her. Cloris had vanished in that bright light, and because the imperial military's science branch had yet to rule on what that meant in connection to stealth tech, Cloris was still technically alive.

Squishy had failed. She had planned to pull off this particular job without killing anyone.

Quint's gaze kept moving as her hands moved. It must have seemed odd, her gloved fingers touching him so close to his eyes. But he didn't flinch, and he didn't say anything, and that bothered her almost as much as his steady stare. She felt like he could see through her, and that bothered her too. She had loved that about him when she was younger, but she had become extremely private over the years. She valued that privacy. It was part of her. She didn't want to change it now.

When she finished, she rubbed an additional numbing agent across his skin. He would be sore for days because of what she had done. Field medicine wasn't nearly as good as medicine at any starbase.

“You're going to need to see a real surgeon,” she said as she removed her gloves and dropped them into the bin she'd built into the cruiser. “You'll need a double-check on my work.”

“Your work is fine,” Quint said, his words slightly mangled because the numbing agent made it hard for him to move the muscles in his cheek.

“No, it's not,” Squishy said. “You'll have terrible scars if you don't see someone soon. I don't have the equipment to properly fix the skin. I'm going to do a scan for somewhere nearby that has good medical facilities. I'll change our course and drop you there.”

He sat up, put his hand up as if he was going to touch his face, and then clearly changed his mind. “Then what will happen to you?”

“I'll stay until your surgery is over,” she lied.

He smiled—or tried to. It looked a bit lopsided because of the numbing agent. “No you won't, Rosealma. You'll leave the minute they take me into the facility, not that it matters. The Empire is looking for you and they will find you.”

She went cold. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that before we left, I let the authorities know that you were the one who blew the station. I gave them the identification information for this ship. They'll track you, find you, and put you in prison, Rose.”

She rubbed her hands together. Her palms were wet. She had gone from cold to a cold sweat in the space of a few seconds. “Why would you do that?”

“You killed Cloris,” Quint said.

“Not according to imperial law, I didn't,” Squishy said, then realized she was admitting to the explosions. “Besides, there's no proof I did anything wrong.”

“There wouldn't have been,” he said, “if you had gone directly to your evac ship, Rose. But you didn't. You came here.”

“I explained that,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “You did.”

Squishy used cleaning solution on her hands, then cleaned her surgical instruments. She didn't put them away, however. She still needed to run them through the sonic cleaner. But she didn't want to leave Quint alone.

He was sitting up. His skin looked raw. The cuts dotted his face.

“You came here too,” she said. “It would have been easier for you to evacuate. You had already given the authorities my information. There was no reason for you to join me.”

He gave her a hurt look. “You need me.”

He had said that in the past, and it never failed to provoke her. It angered her now. She didn't need him. She had never needed him.

She had no idea why he thought she did.

“Why do I need you?” she asked, unable to keep the sarcasm out of her voice.

“Because I'm the only person who can prevent you from disappearing into the bowels of the Empire's prison system.”

“You sound like I've already been tried and convicted,” she said.

He shrugged. “Times are different now. You destroyed government property. Military property. That was classified as a weapons research site, Rose. They don't need to try you. They just need to show a few select judges that you're guilty.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You think they'd charge me with murder?”

“Probably not,” he said. “They'll probably charge you with treason. Which is worse.”

She swallowed in spite of herself. “Murder can carry a death penalty. How is treason worse?”

He looked down at his hands. “There are some things, Rose, that you don't want to live through.”

She cleared her throat, set her surgical instruments down, then let her hands hover over them as if she was going to use them as weapons. She didn't want to think about all of the implications of this conversation. But she couldn't put off thinking about it any longer.

“How do you know that there are some things I don't want to live through?” she asked Quint.

Quint sighed. “I work in Imperial Intelligence, Rose.”

She frowned, suddenly feeling confused. “You used to work in military intelligence. Then you moved on. On the station, you were head of security. You told me that not six months ago.”

He shook his head ever so slightly. “I didn't tell you that. I implied it. You didn't really care enough to investigate.”

He was right: she hadn't cared. She had been more concerned with keeping him away from her than she had been with the intricacies of his job.

“What does that mean, Imperial Intelligence?” she asked. “And how is that different from military intelligence?”

He let out a small sigh. “It's different in degree, Rose. Military intelligence is child's play compared to what I do. I was promoted after you left. I run an entire intelligence division now. I have more information at my fingertips than you could ever imagine.”

Her stomach turned, although she wasn't sure why. Something about what he was saying disturbed her, and disturbed her so deeply that she didn't want to look at it closely.

“So what are you doing here with me?” she asked. “How come you're not on one of those ships or contacting the Empire or something?”

“You're my Achilles' heel, Rose. You know that reference? It's not from Professor Dane's class, but it's from the same department. Lost cultures. Cultures so old we only have stories about them.”

“I know what the phrase means,” she said.

And it frightened her. How could she be his weakness? They hadn't seen each other in decades.

“I should have reported you,” he said softly. “I should have reported you the moment the
Dane
crossed into Enterran territory.”

It felt like her heart stopped. Then she realized she had forgotten to take a breath. “What do you mean?”

“Squishy,” he said, standing up. He started to come toward her, then seemed to think better of it and stopped. “How can you let them call you Squishy? You have a beautiful name. You're a beautiful woman, Rose.”

He knew she had lived outside the Enterran Empire. He knew her nickname. He knew much more about her than she had ever known about him.

“For the first time in your life,” he said, “when you left Vallevu, you didn't leave it entirely. You stayed in touch. You let some people know how you were doing. You didn't say much in the messages, but the messages came from the Nine Planets Alliance.”

Her fists were clenched so tightly that her hands ached. Had she made a mistake coming to the Empire? Not for herself, but for all the others? For the work she had been doing back at the Nine Planets? Had she let the Empire in when Boss and the team had worked so hard to keep the Empire out?

“Don't worry,” he said. “I couldn't track you inside the Alliance. They have good protections in place.”

Her heart started pounding. She had forgotten that he used to do that, answer her questions even when she hadn't spoken them.

“But I have a hunch I know what got you out to the Nine Planets,” he said. “There've been credible rumors that the Nine Planets has made breakthroughs in stealth tech. I know enough about stealth tech to know that the person who understands it best is you.”

She almost denied it. She didn't understand it best, not anymore. Now there was an entire department of people who worked with the
anacapa
drive, who had worked on it all of their lives, working with knowledge passed down from generations. Now she was behind in her understanding of the technology.

Although not in her understanding of the technology that the Empire was developing. Imperial stealth tech consistently malfunctioned and killed because imperial stealth tech tried to harness a burning log with a rope. Sometimes the rope held for just a moment, but eventually it would get burned as well. Everyone who worked in imperial stealth tech believed that the log was the technology. They didn't even see or understand the fire.

“I wanted you back here,” he said, extending his hands. She looked at his hands, then looked at him, keeping her gaze level, showing as little emotion as she possibly could. He was scaring her. He probably knew how much he was scaring her, and by extending his hands, he tried to calm her.

Slowly, he let his hands drop.

“I wanted you working for us again,” he said. “You know so much, and things have gone so wrong.”

“You're the one who leaked that information about the stealth-tech research,” she said. Anger she hadn't even realized she was feeling made her voice tremble. “You're the one.”

He nodded. “I figured it would bring you back. And it did.”

ONE YEAR EARLIER

S
quishy stood in front of the schematics for the small
anacapa
drive displayed on the table before her. She had her hands clasped behind her back. Six people crowded around her. The room was long and narrow, adjacent to her office, an office she rarely used. Mostly, she was in the various labs, working on a dozen projects.

Once upon a time, she supervised all of the work on the space station, but she couldn't any longer. Too much was being done. So much, in fact, that Boss—or to be more accurate, the Lost Souls Corporation—had recently purchased another space station for different kinds of work. Squishy didn't know what happened at the new place except in theory. Most of the work there was dedicated to historical and anthropological research, as well as ground sciences like geology—things that held no interest for her.

What interested her—what had always interested her—was this technology. More than biology, more than all of the medicine she studied, she wanted to know about
anacapa
drives.

She stood back from the schematics, then ordered up a holographic version. It rose and floated above her. She tapped the screen so that she got a three-dimensional model of the drive. It floated next to the schematics, about the size of her fist, encased in black. She ordered the casing removed and studied the drive.

It looked wrong to her, but she wasn't the expert. The people beside her were, but the person whose opinion mattered was Bradley Taylor.

Taylor had come from the
Ivoire
, the working Dignity Vessel that Boss had found four years before. He was young, and when he first came to the Nine Planets, he hadn't been old enough to get work in the
Ivoire's
engineering department. But he had a knack for
anacapa
drives. He loved them as much as Squishy did, and once here, he had become her de facto right-hand man.

“It doesn't look complete to me,” Squishy said, directing her comments to Taylor. The others listened.

“It does seem small,” he said, “but I can assure you that it works.”

She programmed both holographs so that they revolved. Then they turned upside down, moving in all three dimensions. She watched, but that discomfort remained.

She shook her head. “Something's wrong. I just can't tell what it is.”

Taylor didn't seem upset. Instead, he leaned into the images and watched them move as if they held the answers.

“I wish we could run some tests,” he said.

“No tests until I have some idea that this will work,” she said. Too many people had died in “tests.”

No one from the
Ivoire
objected either. The only reason they were at the base was because their
anacapa
drive had malfunctioned a long, long time ago.

“We know that the
anacapa
part will work,” said Sadie Juarez. She was thin and intense. She had come from one of the top universities in the Nine Planets. She was a brilliant theorist, but she still hadn't grasped the dangers of the research. “Maybe there's some kind of way we can isolate the experiment…”

She let her voice trail off so that everyone knew what she was saying, even though she hadn't finished the thought.

“We're not the Empire,” said Ward Zauft. He had helped Squishy since she started her research at Lost Souls. He was wiry, had too much energy, and was always keeping an eye out for problems in experiments. She liked that the most about him. “We don't let eighty-five people die just because we hope the experiment will work.”

Squishy nodded, then frowned. Eighty-five was a specific number, and it was too small to encompass all of the people who had died in the last few decades.

She turned toward him. “Eighty-five?”

“Haven't you heard? That's the latest loss. Eighty-five people because some stealth-tech experiment went awry.” He wasn't even looking at her. He was clearly thinking about the drive in front of him, not the news he was passing on.

“Where did you see that?” she asked.

Something in her tone seemed to catch his attention. He looked away from the rotating drives, his gaze meeting hers. A slight frown creased his forehead.

“It got leaked and made some of the science news sites just this week,” he said. “They said the eighty-five people who died were the latest tragic accident in a program plagued by them.”

“I heard it, too,” Juarez said. “The story said that the numbers couldn't be confirmed but that maybe as many as eight hundred people have died in stealth-tech-related experiments in the past twenty years.”

Squishy was shaking. She knew of the first two hundred of the dead. She had a hunch that eight hundred figure was too small.

“So they're warning people away?” she asked. “Telling them not to work for the imperial science programs?”

“It wasn't that kind of news,” Juarez said. “It was my impression that they were just interested in the statistics, nothing more.”

Statistics. Squishy let out a small breath. “I don't want anyone running an experiment on this until someone who has worked with
anacapa
drives for a decade or more looks at this.”

Then she excused herself and went to her office. She felt lightheaded and off balance.

The Empire was still experimenting with stealth tech, even after she and Boss had tried to shut them down. And people were still dying in the experiments. Over and over again, people were dying.

What would it take to convince the Empire that stealth tech was too dangerous to pursue? Or could it be persuaded?

Maybe she and Boss had been on the right track six years before. Maybe they should do everything they could to destroy the research. All of the research.

She didn't like the way her thoughts were going, but she recognized the feeling. She couldn't keep working here while people were dying back there. Particularly if they were following protocols she had developed decades before.

The scientists with the Empire's program were following faulty assumptions with old information, and that wasn't just dangerous to them. It was dangerous to the entire sector.

Something had to be done.

And she knew only one person she trusted to do it.