Asimov's SF, October-November 2011 (6 page)

"I believe stealth tech builds on itself.” Or at least, the kind of stealth tech the Empire was developing. They were only working on one small part of what turned out to be a powerful drive used by the Dignity Vessels. The anacapa drive was dangerous in experienced hands. In inexperienced hands, it was deadly.

As she had learned repeatedly over the years.

"And your belief is based on what, exactly?” Quint asked.

She swallowed hard. She didn't want to answer that honestly.

"I came back to stealth tech research a few years ago,” she said.

"When you left Vallevu?” he asked.

She turned, surprised. He hadn't moved, arms still crossed, head still slightly tilted.

"I still have friends there too, you know,” he said.

She hadn't even thought of that. She could have checked up on him in the two years she lived there without him, but she hadn't even tried. He wasn't someone she thought about.

She didn't want to think about him, even with him standing right there.

"Yes,” she said tightly. “After I left Vallevu."

"I couldn't find you anywhere after that,” he said.

"I didn't realize you were looking,” she said, refusing to be relieved. She didn't want him to know she had gone to the Nine Planets Alliance. She didn't want to tell him anything.

He shrugged. “The Empire had no record of your work after you got discharged."

"You checked,” she said, feeling cold.

"When you got here,” he said, “you better believe I checked. You'd taken up a medical practice on Vallevu. I had no idea why you were back in stealth tech. I'm still not sure I believe it, not after so long an absence."

"Sometimes the Empire doesn't keep records about its researchers,” she said.

"I can access most records,” he said. “Even the ones they don't keep."

She felt cold. “You can't follow everything."

"I can try,” he said.

Her heart was racing. He wasn't threatening her, was he? Was he here because he knew what she'd been doing, because he understood that her purpose on the station hadn't been benign?

For the first time, she wasn't exactly sure how to handle him.

She had to give him something. She wasn't sure why; she just knew that she did.

"I worked salvage for a while. I gave the Empire a mostly intact Dignity Vessel back then. If you check the payouts, you'll see one to me."

He continued to watch her, as if he didn't entirely believe her. If he mentioned that the same Dignity Vessel had exploded about two years later, then she would know she was in real trouble.

Instead, he sighed and let his arms fall to his sides. “Salvage, Rose?"

It was her turn to shrug. “Once a cargo monkey, always a cargo monkey,” she said with less levity than she had planned.

"Still,” he said, “someone as brilliant as you shouldn't work salvage."

"I needed time off from being brilliant,” she said. “Being brilliant kills people."

"And working salvage doesn't?"

She thought back to the dive that had caused her to break up with Turtle, the dive that had cost the lives of two other divers because Boss hadn't believed that Squishy had known what she was talking about. Squishy had known that the Dignity Vessel they had found was dangerous, and Boss wouldn't listen. The deaths weren't the worst of it. The deaths had simply been a symptom of the way that stealth tech—imperial stealth tech—seemed to drive everyone insane.

"Do you ever hate your life, Quint?” Squishy asked.

He studied her for a few minutes. She could see him trying out and discarding several answers, including the first one—the truthful one, whatever that may have been.

"No, I don't hate my life,” he said. “Why?"

Because, maybe if he did, they could talk. Maybe if he regretted all he had done, they could talk.

But he didn't, and she knew that meant trouble.

Six Months Earlier

The research station was a marvel. She hadn't seen anything that big or that well constructed before. At first, it intimidated her, and then she realized that even the largest, most well-built thing could be brought down, usually by its own flaws.

The first flaw? The Empire's belief in credentials. Hers were still valid, still respected, despite the twenty years since her discharge from the military. She was considered one of the pioneers of stealth tech and as such, the researchers were happy to have her back in the fold. They were pleased that she had returned, and saw it as a happy accident, one that would enable them to make the breakthrough they had always strived for.

Her time in Vallevu had served her well. After she had left Boss's team the first time, she had come home—or what she thought of as home—to the former military base where she had first been stationed. When she had initially been stationed at Vallevu, she hadn't lived planetside. She had lived in the science station, in orbit. The families lived on the planet below for safety's sake, and that part had worked.

No one in the families had died there. But they all got scarred so badly that the Empire actually took pity on them, decommissioned the base, sold them the land, and gave them enough money to fund the community, so long as they never talked to anyone about what happened.

It made the small community of Vallevu wary of outsiders, but Squishy hadn't been an outsider. Not when she limped home, defeated and ruined, her second attempt at a career ending in death just like the first.

Well, not quite like the first. Because her diving career had ended with two deaths she'd tried to prevent instead of hundreds of deaths she had caused.

She used to shut down when she thought of those deaths, but no longer. Now they made her angry.

And anger was why she had come to this research station. Anger, and the taste she had recently acquired for revenge.

But she hadn't expected to find Quint here. On her second day as a fulltime employee of the research station, she had been sitting in the spectacular office they had given her when he ducked his head inside and said, “Bet you never expected to see me again."

Her breath caught and it took her a moment to compose herself. She didn't smile. Quint didn't deserve her smile.

"I certainly didn't expect to see you here,” she said, and that was true.

"I hadn't expected to see you here either,” he said, then stepped farther into the room.

She struggled to remain steady. She didn't want to be near him.

"So,” he said, “how do we play this? As the friendly exes who occasionally share a beer or as the exes who can't stand the sight of each other and avoid each other at all costs?"

She swallowed, feeling off balance for the first time since she had arrived. She didn't want to “play” this at all. She wanted to pretend it had never happened, but it had, and now she had to deal with her ex-husband, who both knew her better than anyone ever had and who didn't know her at all.

"Is there something in between?” she asked.

His smile faded a little. “How about I come back after we've had some time to think about it?"

She nodded.

"Thanks,” she said and returned to her desk, continuing to unpack. After a moment, she realized he was still there. Apparently, she wasn't going to get rid of him as easily as she wanted to.

"What are you doing here, really?” she asked.

"I always check in the new arrivals,” he said. “I was surprised to see your name."

"I'll bet,” she said. She hadn't looked for his. She had looked for one other name, the former head of the stealth tech project, Boss's father. But she hadn't seen his name. Boss believed him dead, and Squishy thought the same thing. But sometimes, it paid to be cautious.

Although she hadn't been cautious enough with the names from her own past.

Then she realized exactly what Quint had said. “You didn't check me in."

"That's what I'm doing now,” he said. “You need a tour of the facility? An introduction to the other staff?"

"That was already taken care of,” she said.

"Because you're a VIP,” he said, and she couldn't tell if he was being sarcastic or not.

"They seem to think I'm the godmother of stealth tech,” she said, trying to make a joke. Instead her eyes filled with tears. She didn't want him to see that, so she turned away.

"Yeah,” he said, “we never really know who we're going to become, do we?"

"Or who others think we should be,” she said. “Whether we want to be that person or not."

Now

She couldn't go to the rendezvous point. Not even if she somehow dropped Quint off along the way. He was watching her, in ways she hadn't expected.

Fortunately, she hadn't been in touch with any of the others since she'd started her work at the research station.

She hoped they had gotten their jobs done. Some of it she knew they had completed—the off-site backup site had gone down on time—and some of it she wouldn't know if anything changed, not if she didn't get in touch with them.

It was hard to destroy all of the modern research on stealth tech. She knew she would miss a lot of it. But that was why she had decided to blow the facility, why she'd figured it had to be destroyed from the inside out.

Before she had planted the explosives, she had planted information that showed how flawed stealth tech was, and would lead anyone who investigated to believe that the tech itself caused the explosions.

Which, technically, it had.

"How come you didn't evacuate with everyone else, Rosealma?” Quint asked.

"I did evacuate,” she said. “I'm alive, just like you are."

He shook his head. “You had an escape route planned. You came to this ship, not to your evac ship."

"So did you,” she said.

"You know what I mean,” he said.

She ran her hand along the edge of the control panel. This cruiser felt small with two people in it. She really wanted to get rid of him, but she didn't know how. Drop him off somewhere? Dump him into an escape pod? Ask him politely to leave?

"What are you implying?” she asked, tired of the dance. “Are you implying that I was behind what happened?"

"Were you?” he asked.

The question hurt, even though it was logical. Even though she had been behind it.

"How dare you ask me that?” she said softly. “How dare you? After all we've been through, why wouldn't I have my own escape planned? Why wouldn't I plan for disaster? I figured I'd be running out of that facility at top speed at one point or another, and in no way was I going to trust a ship attached to the research station, under computer control of that station. I figured I'd only get one chance to save myself, and I was going to do it my way."

Quint stopped leaning on the doorway. He ran a hand over his face, his fingers stopping as they hit the dried blood. He seemed startled by it, then took a shaky breath.

"If that's how you felt, why did you come back?” he asked.

"Because I couldn't stay away,” she said. “I know more than most people. And I couldn't let other scientists stumble around in the dark."

"Yet the results were worse than before,” he said.

She shook her head. “No one died this time."

"You could argue that no one died before,” he said.

"You could argue it,” she said. “But you would be wrong."

Twenty-one Years Earlier

"You 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 suggested putting it in orbit above a sparsely populated planet. She was the one who 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 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 further, 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.