Boneyards (30 page)

TWENTY-ONE YEARS EARLIER

S
ixteen 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.

She couldn't look at the missing labs, at the emptiness where people should have been. She made herself focus on the control panels and the screens and the research in front of her, on what was
there
, not on what was missing.

All sixteen scientists 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 it 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 an 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.

“How long has it been?” she asked him softly.

“Twenty hours,” he said, and pulled her toward him. He held her tightly, and she tried not to squirm away.

He had always worried about her, always told her not to let the dangers of her job ruin their lives. He meant let the dangers of her job ruin his life—he was afraid she would be the one who died, just like her professor had. Quint had probably come in here just to make sure she wasn't taking unnecessary risks.

“I'm supposed to tell you,” he said so quietly she could barely hear him, “that you have another twenty hours. At that point, you and your team will have to leave.”

“We're not leaving until we solve this,” she said.

He shook his head. “It's not your decision.”

“We can't just leave this,” she said. “It's dangerous. We think it's expanding.”

She wasn't supposed to tell him any of this, but she figured it didn't matter. Clearance was a minor issue. Besides, he was probably reporting to the head of the station. And maybe even to the military's science commander himself.

“I know,” Quint said, his voice still low. “That's what some of the others are saying.”

“Then you understand why we can't leave it,” she said.

“It might expand you out of existence,” he said.

She nodded. “Or expand this part of space out of existence or maybe even part of the planet. We don't know, Quint.”

“It doesn't matter,” he said. “They're removing you all in twenty hours, whether you've solved this or not.”

“And they're going to let the expansion happen?” she asked. “They're going to leave this disaster untouched?”

“They're going to blow it up,” he said.

She pulled away from him. “They can't do that. It might expand the problem. It might make this thing grow faster. We just don't know. You have to tell them to leave me alone.”

“I'll do my best, Rose,” he said, “but I'm not in charge any more than you are.”

“But it's stupid—”

“I know,” he said, then kissed her. The kiss felt good. It brought her to herself momentarily, like the smell of food had. She had almost forgotten how to be alive, because she had been so busy thinking.

He clung to her for a moment, then eased back just enough so that he could see her face.

“Promise me you'll leave when the time comes,” he said.

“I can't promise that,” she said.

“You'll die otherwise.”

“We'll stay until we finish this,” she said. “You tell them that.”

“I already have,” he said, his voice wobbling just a bit. “And they said that doesn't matter. They're destroying the base in a little over twenty hours. With you on it or not.”

She looked at him. “You'd let them do that?”

“I don't have a choice,” he said. “They didn't want me to come in now. They didn't want me to warn you. I got permission for that. I might not get permission to pull you out. I'll try, Rose, but I can't guarantee anything.”

“Neither can I,” she said, and turned her back on him.

E
ight more meals later, the door opened again. This time, four guards entered. They told Squishy to extend her arms so that she could be cuffed, and then they put something on her feet as well so that she could only shuffle instead of walk.

As if she was a dangerous prisoner.

As if they were frightened of her.

They probably were. After all, she was a mass murderer, at least in the eyes of the Empire.

The guards wore full gear including helmets. The battle gear seemed more intimidating in her cell, probably because the guards took up so much room.

She knew one of the guards was male, because he was the one who curtly gave her orders—
Extend your hands, Keep your face forward, Do not move
—but she couldn't tell the gender of the others. They were all taller than her, or at least they seemed that way, maybe because their boots gave them extra height. Just like the armor gave them extra width, making them seem like they had planet-bound muscles.

They led her—shuffling—into the main brig area, which looked bigger now than it had when they first brought her in. If that was the result of a few days of captivity, she had no idea what would happen after years.

Of course, if they put her in a real prison, she would never get out again.

She kept her head forward, not bowed like she had seen so many other prisoners do. She wondered what kind of prison they had brought her to. Some were “easy” prisons, for celebrities and people charged with crimes without violence. She was probably going somewhere high security, for people who murdered and set off bombs and used violence to make their point. Dangerous people.

People like her.

She hadn't seen Quint since that afternoon (if, indeed, it was an afternoon), and he didn't show up now. Just the silent guards backtracking the route they had taken her days ago, heading to one of the military vessel's airlocks and exits.

Her heart was pounding—of course it was; she was terrified—but she tried to keep her breathing under control. She was sweating, and she realized for the first time that she hadn't had a shower or a change of clothing in days.

They could probably smell how frightened she was.

They took her down a couple of levels. The trip to the airlock was longer just because she shuffled. She felt old and fragile and very small, probably like she was supposed to. She also felt helpless.

When they got close to the airlock, they veered toward another part of the ship, and she almost corrected them. She bit back her comment, let them continue to take charge.

They brought her to an empty wing of the ship, then pushed her into a gigantic locker area. A woman she had never seen before stood there.

She had clothes over her arm.

“You're to shower,” she said, “and then put these on.”

The clothes didn't look like a prison uniform. They looked like regular clothing. But she had only seen prison uniforms in news footage and entertainments. She didn't know if such uniforms actually existed or if they were the stuff of fiction.

She waited while the guards removed the thing around her feet and hands. They turned so she could take her clothes off. But the woman didn't.

“It's a sonic shower,” the woman said, as if she'd had this conversation before and it exhausted her.

Squishy nodded, then walked toward the shower. She was happy to see it. She felt heavy with filth from her ordeal.

She stepped into the shower, and realized she would miss all the amenities of her life.

That was what prison was for; to make the person understand what she had given up to commit her crime.

Sonic showers were not worth lingering in, although this one did leave her feeling cleaner than she had in days.

The woman actually helped her dress, and Squishy wasn't embarrassed by this. She was already becoming accustomed to the lack of privacy.

The clothing was loose, probably to accommodate the various latches and leashes the military had to attach to her.

They reattached the things to her, but not as tightly. She could actually take steps instead of shuffle. The guards did tighten her cuffs, though, holding her hands together in front of her.

She didn't want to leave the ship. Not because she had grown attached to it, but because she wasn't sure when she would ever be on a ship again. All of her life, she had never stayed in the same place longer than a few years. Even places she had stayed for those years had allowed her to travel, to get away, to be private.

And even though she had been alone these last few days, she certainly hadn't been private.

The guards took her down the expected corridor now, to the airlock. She wasn't even sure if it was the same guards, since no one spoke, and there was nothing about those uniforms that distinguished them.

They got to the airlock, and one of the guards stepped forward, putting some command into the keypad. The airlock door slid open, revealing an airlock the size of the
Dane's
cockpit.

This wasn't the airlock she had entered. She was turned around, or maybe all of the corridors on this ship looked the same.

The airlock was large enough for all of them—guards and prisoner—to get into together. Two guards flanked her and two followed.

She couldn't escape if she wanted to.

Her stomach tightened, and she wished she hadn't eaten that crappy breakfast—if indeed it was breakfast. (According to her mental schedule, it should have been, but she had gotten another sandwich and that weird fruit.)

She tried not to be too melodramatic inside her own head, almost smiling at herself for using the term, but she couldn't help it. She was stepping into a prison, and she was about to leave the life she had known forever.

She was entitled to feel bad about that, right? Even if she deserved it.

The main door opened, and she frowned.

She certainly didn't expect the docking bay of a prison to look like the docking bay at the research station she had so recently blown up.

“I'll take her from here,” Quint said to the guards.

He was standing off to the side, in his security uniform, the one he had worn at the research station—or one just like it. Several security guards stood next to him, not in battle armor, but in standard security uniforms with laser pistols on their hips.

Squishy's head suddenly hurt. She had destroyed that research station. She had seen it explode. It was gone, and there was no way he could have rigged her ship to show that without it happening.

So she had to be somewhere else.

That other research station he mentioned?

If that was the case, then how had she ended up here? She hadn't made those promises he wanted. She had decided not to talk. She was willing—well, “willing” was the wrong word; “braced” was probably better—to suffer those interrogations.

“Come on, Rose,” Quint said, extending his hand.

She couldn't take it even if she wanted to, which she did not.

“I didn't agree to anything,” she said to him.

“Not yet,” he said. “You will. Trust me.”

She didn't trust him. But that didn't matter. She wasn't in a prison, yet. She would be after this little interlude, but every day away from total confinement was a gift.

She walked toward him, the restraints on her legs tugging at her skin and nearly tripping her.

“Does she need those?” he asked, looking down.

“It's better, sir,” said the guard beside her. Male. A voice she recognized. So that was the same group of guards.

“Unhook her,” Quint said.

“Beg pardon, sir, but she could kill you with those feet.”

Squishy raised her eyebrows. She had no idea how to kill anyone with her feet. She wasn't even sure how to do it hand-to-hand, except maybe in theory, and the theory came from a medical, healing perspective.

“She won't try to kill me,” Quint said.

“She did once, sir.”

Quint smiled just a little and shook his head. “If she had wanted to kill me that day, she had plenty of opportunity. She didn't. Take those off.”

“Sir, I'll have to make a note of this in the file. That we're setting her legs free on your orders.”

“Fine,” Quint said, and watched as one of the guards bent down to loosen the restraints.

Squishy felt an urge to kick him, just because he had given her the idea. She would kick the guard, use her slightly mobile hands to grab a nearby laser pistol, then kill everyone in sight. She would flee into the station…and what? Get captured again?

It wasn't even a worthwhile fantasy.

The guard unhooked her legs, but her skin ached where the restraints had been.

“Come on, Rosealma,” Quint said again.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“To meet a man who knows how to ask the right questions,” Quint said. “And maybe you'll feel comfortable enough with him to give him the right answers.”

Squishy didn't believe there were right answers. Not anymore. But she followed Quint anyway.

Because she had no other choice.