Asimov's SF, October-November 2011 (7 page)

"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 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 backward and forward—"

"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.

The first time. She shook her head, struggling not to let the force of memory land on top of everything else. The first time, she had been a graduate student at the most prestigious school in the sector, Mehkeydo Academy, and it had been her favorite professor who'd vanished.

Well, he hadn't vanished, he actually had gone into a malfunctioning stealth tech field to save a post-doctoral student, and he had never come out. Neither of them had. Only that accident had been confined to the room where the experiments were being conducted, and the two of them—professor and student—hadn't instantly vanished. They had shuddered, or their image had, as if it had been on some kind of readout and the readout had skipped. That had gone on for a good ten minutes, and then they had disappeared, and nothing the team had ever done had brought them back.

Modern stealth tech studies had been in their infancy then. Mehkeydo Academy had led the research, thinking it a harmless investigation into ancient technologies. Although the Enterran Empire's military had been around even then, blocking the building, taking over the experiments when it became clear that something had gone wrong.

Rosealma had ignored them, concentrating instead on figuring out what had happened, figuring out whether or not she could at least recover the bodies of Professor Holmes and the post-doc.

She never did, and she had theories as to why, but they got subsumed in the quest for safety measures while studying a viable and possibly life-saving technology.

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 it 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.

Now

"Where are we going, Rosealma?” Quint asked. He rubbed his face, trying to remove the caked blood.

She sighed, stood up, and got out her medical kit. Time to see how injured he really was.

"I don't know where we're going,” she said as she tugged the small kit out of the storage area near the door. She set the kit on her chair.

"You changed course a while ago,” he said.

She opened the kit, slipped on some gloves, and removed some cleansing strips. “Yeah, I did."

The less she lied to him, the better.

"From where to where?” he asked.

She cupped the cleansing strips in her right hand and walked over to him. “I have no fucking idea. Now hold still."

"What about the rendezvous point?” he asked as she grabbed his chin with her left hand, and it took all of her control not to start in surprise.

"The station's?” she asked.

He nodded and she tightened her hold on his chin. Her fingers were probably causing bruises, and she didn't care. She wrapped the cleansing strip around her index and middle finger and began to wipe off the blood. Scrape it off was a better way to put it.

"I'm not going back,” she said. “I was stupid to go back in the first place. It's as if every time someone messes with stealth tech the accidents get worse. I can't keep involving myself in that."

"Yet you can't stay away, can you?” he asked, the words somewhat mangled from the force of her fingers on his cheeks.

She didn't answer him. As the blood came off, she found a series of small cuts, some of which still had debris embedded in them.

"What happened?” she asked him. “I thought there weren't any explosions on the station until that big one."

"Cloris Kashion saw something embedded in one of the stealth tech tubes,” he said. “She decided to remove it."

Squishy's heart started to pound. She wondered if he could feel it through her fingertips. She forced herself to concentrate on cleaning the wounds.

The stealth tech tubes weren't really tubes at all. They were jars filled with just enough material to start a stealth tech reaction. Only it didn't have the right composition. So much was missing, so many details she had only just started to learn when she began working with a real, active Dignity Vessel's
anacapa
drive. The pieces that the Empire had of what it called stealth tech were so dangerous that they could make entire regions of space impossible to pass through.

She had attached the explosive devices to the various tubes. It had taken her two days. The devices were tiny and almost impossible to see. They slipped into the tube, and once turned on, interacted with the tech, destroying it.

She had initially developed the weapon years ago, but she had since modified it with the help of the Dignity Vessel's engineers, so that it wouldn't open the interdimensional rift she had mentioned to Quint.

"There was just a flash of something as her hand went around the tube,” he said. “I can't tell you what it was, only that I had seen it before somewhere, and I knew—"

He shook his head, or tried to. Her fingers were still clutching his chin. His gaze met hers, and so far as she could tell, she was seeing deep inside him. He was vulnerable and at this moment—or maybe at the moment he remembered—he was scared.

"I just shoved everyone out and tried to grab her, but she had pulled on that thing, and the tube exploded, sending me backward through the door. We got it closed, but just barely. That was when I came looking for you."

"And you got her out, right?” Squishy asked.

His look changed. Subtly. It went from open to closed, from frightened to shut off, in the space of a second.

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

She closed her eyes. “And you would be wrong."

Twenty-one Years Earlier

Sixteen of them, sixteen scientists—the best in the Empire—working their asses off. Rosealma coordinated all of them, dividing her own mind into a thousand pieces so that she could think of the implications of stealth tech science and manage her team all at the same time.

They were working fast, because they were all afraid that whatever Hansen had unleashed would grow and grow and eventually envelop the station. There was an energy signature that Rosealma didn't recognize buried in the middle of the reaction, something she knew her people hadn't created, and she was afraid that the experiment had morphed into something she didn't recognize.

Sixteen scientists, struggling to contain the reaction. Once they contained it, they would shut it down. But it kept growing, and she was afraid it was going to pulse again.

She had looked at the records. Hansen's description was spot-on. The experiment had pulsed.

But she suspected he was wrong about the reason. He said he had tried the experiment again—and he had. But it looked like her successful cloak, the one she had celebrated the night before he contacted her, had never really ceased. She thought she had shut down the experiment, thought that was confirmed by the reappearance of that coin. Hansen was right: the coin
was
different. But he was also wrong: the coin was the same. It was older, and it shouldn't have been. If she had to guess—and hell, that was all she was doing these days, she was
guessing
—then she would guess that the coin hadn't been cloaked at all, but it had moved forward then backward in time. When she had shut down the experiment, or moved to shut down the experiment, or initiated the shutdown that she thought would turn off the damn cloak, she had brought the coin back to its starting point.

The coin had experienced time differently than she had, and that alarmed her.

It also gave her hope. Because if she could move a coin forward then backward in time, maybe she could move people forward then backward in time. She might be able to recover the folks who had gotten lost.

"Might” being the operative word.

And she tried not to think about all the pitfalls, including the most important one: coins were immobile by nature; people were not. So if all of those people got moved to a different time period or they experienced time differently (more rapidly?) then they had probably moved away from the experiment area. They wouldn't all be in that area when the experiment got shut down.

She proposed that solution to her team and no one argued with her. The key was to shut down the experiment—all the way down—because her fear (their fear) was that it would grow and create some kind of rift or keep growing, even after it had consumed the station itself.

Somewhere in the middle of all this chaos, while she was thinking of a thousand different things, and trying to concentrate on each one of them, Quint came into the lab and scared her to death.

"What the hell are you doing here?” she asked, blocking him with her body.

He lifted bags that he had been holding in both hands. The bags smelled of garlic and fresh bread. “Bringing food."

"Get out,” she said. “You can't stay."

"I can do whatever I want, Rosealma,” he said gently. “I outrank you."

"It's dangerous here,” she said. “I want you gone."

He gave her a small smile, then set the bags on a chair. He knew better than to set them on any tabletop, near any experiment at all. The scents grew stronger, mixing with the smell of cooked beef and thyme. Rosealma's stomach growled and she realized she was lightheaded.