Boneyards (6 page)

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS EARLIER

W
arning sirens whooped. Rosealma recognized the sound from the drills. Something had gone wrong in the science lab.

Her lab.

She raced across campus, across the sidewalks, and through the gathering crowd in front of the Ancient and Lost Technology Building. Somehow she had grabbed her identification out of her pocket while she ran and clutched it in her left hand.

Guards stood in front of her holding laser rifles.

She had never seen weapons on campus before, and they frightened her more than the alarms did.

The day was sunny and bright, the grass bright blue just like it was supposed to be. The weather warm, the air fresh. Only the sirens marred the perfection.

She held up her identification. It was supposed to get her into any lab connected with Ancient Technologies, and it should definitely get her into this lab. This was her lab. She was one of the research assistants.

“I work in that building,” she said, trying to sound brave. “What's going on?”

The guards didn't answer her, at least not directly. They glared at her. She had never seen people look so fierce. They held their laser rifles sideways, blocking her passage. Other graduate students arrived, running from all parts of campus, just like Rosealma had.

“What the hell?” someone asked behind her, but no one answered.

The building looked normal. Its windowless black façade reflected the other buildings around it, just like it always had. She expected to see some kind of cataclysm through the blackness, something that would indicate what kind of problem she faced.

If she knew what the problem was, she could solve it.

Or she could try.

Guards couldn't try. Guards had no idea how to solve problems. She had learned that on the
Bounty
, the cargo ship she had grown up on. Guards were just there to protect things or to prevent something, not to solve anything.

“Please,” she said, stepping closer. “Let me in. I can help.”

She couldn't quite understand what had gone wrong here. There were several such laboratory buildings on campus. Ancient and Lost Technologies was not the most dangerous lab on campus. Not even close. In fact, the most dangerous labs weren't on campus at all, but in a small industrial park several kilometers away, covered with protective domes and barriers in case anything bad happened.

Nothing encased the Ancient and Lost Technologies Lab Building. There was no need. Everything they did here was in the name of history more than in the name of science. The experiments that occurred here were hopeful experiments designed to recover lost knowledge, without any real chance of that happening.

Or so she had been led to believe. That was part of the speech she had heard when she accepted the post-doc to work in stealth tech. She was told they might discover something that could aid ships in the region in their cloaking, but probably not. Not unless they actually found some kind of schematic from a Dignity Vessel or from the technology the vessels left behind.

And no matter how hard scholars like Professor Dane searched, they hadn't found anything like that.

“Seriously,” Rosealma said to the guards. “Let me in. I work here.”

Then Quint showed up. He was breathing hard, and his handsome face was red. His cropped black hair glistened with sweat. He had been running from a long distance away. He had a class clear on the other side of campus. She had teased him about it when they left his dorm room that morning.

He didn't say anything. Instead, he put his gigantic arm around her shoulder, pulling her close, pulling her away from the weapons. He smelled so sharply of fear that she turned her head.

“Let it go,” Quint said softly. “It's not our business.”

“But it
is
,” Rosealma said. “Something's wrong in there.”

He pulled her back farther. She stumbled against him, struggling as he moved her. She didn't want to go backward. She wanted inside. She wanted to make sure everything was all right.

His hand clamped hard on the soft skin of her upper arm. “Stop fighting me.”

She wasn't fighting him. She just didn't want to move.

“We shouldn't be going away,” she said. “We should help.”

He stopped and held her beside him. He looked more serious than she had ever seen him. The expression on his face held her in place more than his hands did.

“Look at those guards,” he said. “They're not campus security.”

“The hell they aren't,” she said. “They're in the building all the time. Of course they're campus police.”

“God,” he said, his voice lowered to a whisper, almost as if he was talking to himself. “Sometimes I forget how sheltered you were.”

“Sheltered?” She raised her voice. If anyone had been sheltered, it had been him. She had been all over the sector before her fifth birthday. She knew more about the sector than anyone at the school, more than her professors, more than her fellow students. If someone mentioned some place in class, chances were Rosealma had been there, and no one else had. “I'm not sheltered.”

“Wrong word, then,” he said in a tone that told her he didn't believe that. He was just placating her. “Sometimes I forget you don't know a lot about the Empire.”

She was going to argue—she would have argued vociferously (she loved arguing with him), if it wasn't for the sirens. She had never heard them outside of a drill in any place planetside. On a ship, they meant the worst kind of disaster.

Here, she had no idea. So he was right about that, at least.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“The guards are not campus security,” he said. “They're military. Don't you recognize the uniforms?”

Her people avoided uniforms. They avoided the Empire as much as they could, even though they worked within it. They followed the regulations, of course, because that enabled them to travel long distances on their cargo ship without interference. The Empire was an annoyance, like the small governments that made up the Empire were annoyances. Regulations that changed from port to port, type of cargo to type of cargo, docking regulation to docking regulation, inspection to inspection. Nothing more.

“No,” she said softly. “I don't recognize the uniforms.”

He cursed under his breath, then shook his head. “You've been working on a project for the Empire's military wing and you had no idea that's who funded you?”

Her stomach clenched. The sirens continued. More and more people were arriving, crowding them. More guards came out of the building.

She stared at their uniforms. Green and gold, with piping along the sleeves. Laser rifles so new they had a shine. Men and women her age, no older, muscular in the way of the planet bound, their expressions flat and serious.

The imperial military? She had heard horror stories about them, about the way they could just take over a ship, even a ship as large as the one she had been raised on, but she had never seen them before.

Or, to be more accurate, she had never realized that she had seen them before. She had seen them in various places all over the sector, hanging back, holding weapons.

She remembered asking her father as he tightly held her hand in a docking bay who those uniformed people were near the door into some starbase whose name she had long forgotten.

Baby
, he had said in that tone of his, the one that meant “ask me later,”
they're just guards.

He had been right; technically he had been right. They had been guards. Just not the kind she thought. And she had never asked him about them again—or maybe she had in the same kind of circumstance and he had given the same kind of answer.

She had been so young then, and there was so much she hadn't questioned. Things happened, and that was just the way life was. The way
her
life was.

So when she saw them here, she had made an assumption, based on long-ago information.

Baby, they're just guards.

Yes, they were, but not harmless campus security guards.

Members of the Enterran Empire Military, the fearsome military that shut down entire cargo routes without warning, and fired on ships that didn't follow the proper protocol.

“They don't fund me,” she said to Quint, only because arguing was her default mode, and she needed time to think. “They fund my professors.”

She was looking at the guards. They seemed different now, now that she understood who they were. She was having trouble catching her breath.

She had worked for the military? Really? And no one had told her?

“Who do you think wants stealth tech?” Quint asked softly.

She looked at him. She didn't answer him, because she couldn't. She had been doing it for the
Bounty
, for all of the cargo monkeys. But they wouldn't be able to have stealth tech, not if the tech was owned by the military. They wouldn't want any commercial ship, any nonmilitary vessel to have a tool like that.

She leaned her head forward and rested it on Quint's shoulder. She felt stupid, something that she hadn't felt since she arrived here all those years ago.

He put both of his arms around her and held her close. He probably had no idea what she was feeling, probably thought she was upset about the sirens and not getting into the building, and she
was
, but the fact that she had missed the implications of everything, that disturbed her even more.

Then the sirens shut off.

She lifted her head. Her ears rang, and for a moment, she seemed to be hearing an echo of the sirens, as if sound could linger in the air long after the source shut off.

Her heart continued to race.

She turned. She and Quint were in a crowd of maybe two hundred people now. All of them had gathered because of the noise, and now fidgeted because the noise had stopped.

A woman came out of the building and stood on the steps. Rosealma had seen her before too. She was the director of the Experimental Lost Technologies Unit. She was squat and blond, her hair frizzed as if she had forgotten to comb it. She was much older than Rosealma, in that middle-age range where Rosealma couldn't even guess a decade. Not elderly, but old. Mature. Adult.

The director held up her hands for calm. It took a moment, but the entire crowd turned toward her and became completely silent.

Quint's arm tightened around Rosealma, but she didn't lean into him or put her arm around him. Instead she stood stiffly beside him.

“We've had a situation here,” the director said, her voice hoarse. “I can't yet explain it. I'm not sure I understand it. We do need scientists, doctoral candidates and post-docs to come inside. If you've been working in this building, please show your pass. Only the people involved in this particular experiment will get through. We will answer everyone else's questions as soon as we know what's going on.”

“Is everyone inside all right?” someone shouted from the back.

The director looked even more tired than she had a moment ago. “I am not taking questions at this moment.”

Rosealma's breath caught. The director deliberately did not answer the question that could have soothed the crowd. Which meant something had happened, something serious.

But why not answer that question? Either everyone was fine or someone wasn't. People were wounded, people were grievously injured, or people were dead.

There was no in-between.

Yet a feeling prickled against the back of her neck, a sense of foreboding that she couldn't quite will away.

The crowd was separating. Those who didn't have a pass to the building were stepping back. The others were queuing up. The guards were scanning the passes, letting in only a few people.

The director had gone back inside the building.

“Come on,” Rosealma said to Quint.

He didn't move for a long moment. “I don't like this,” he said.

“Me, either,” she said, “but I think they need all the help they can get.”

“If they don't know what's going on, then how do they know it's safe?” he asked.

She gave him a sideways glance. He wasn't looking at her. He was staring at the building as if it could give him answers.

“Don't you want to know what's going on?” she asked.

“Not at the risk of our lives,” he said.

She turned inside his arm so that she could face him. “What does that mean?”

“It means that we're just lowly post-docs, working on something that isn't even ours. We don't need to risk our lives because someone says we must.”

She tilted her head as if she had never seen him before.

“I'm going in,” she said, and slipped out of his embrace.

S
quishy's heart was pounding, and she had trouble catching her breath. The physical reaction made sense. She had just fled a research station, run to her ship, and gotten it out of the area as the station blew. She should have been shaking with the release of adrenaline, but Quint's presence prevented that.

She'd had an adrenaline surge just a few minutes ago when she saw him standing in the door of the cockpit. She still hadn't gotten used to him, even though she had been working near him for six months.

He hadn't moved, except to glare at her.

She felt defensive. He always made her feel defensive. It was all she could do not to move in front of the control panel, blocking him from it. She had to do her best to keep up the pretense of calm.

She had already pushed one of his buttons; he could just as easily push one of hers. And maybe he was.

“I know for a fact that no one died when that station blew,” she said. “That's why I left last. I made the computer system check for anyone else.”

“And if someone else was on that station, what would you have done?” he asked.

She stared at him. She had worried about that. As she had been scanning for heat signatures and identification tags, she had worried about that. Scientists didn't always listen to instructions, but apparently these had.

At least about the evacuation.

He crossed his arms. “Tell me, Rosealma. You only had five minutes left. What would you have done?”

He would keep pressing her until she answered him. He had always done that, and she had always hated it.

“Something,” she said, knowing her answer was inadequate, knowing that it was probably wrong. What would she have done? What could she have done?

At that point, nothing. Maybe opened a few corridors, prayed that whomever was trapped had gotten out on their own. Could have gotten out on their own.

He rolled his eyes. “'Something.'” That word had more sarcasm in it than any he'd uttered so far. And Quint was good at sarcasm. “Don't lie to me, Rosealma. You wouldn't have done anything. You couldn't. There wouldn't have been time. You would have run to your little escape route and hoped for the best.”

It was her turn to flush. She made herself breathe so that he couldn't see any other anger response from her. She was as angry at him as she had been the day she left.

And if someone had asked her just two days before if the anger against him had faded, she would have said yes.

Amazing how all of the old patterns came back as if time hadn't passed at all. Time was such a strange thing—fluid and rigid all at once, existing in different dimensions at different speeds, and yet happening right now, this instant, moving forward, never backward.

“How come you didn't go to your evac ship?” she asked, then felt a moment of panic. His ship hadn't waited for him. Had it?

She made herself take another deep breath. It hadn't. She had checked, made certain that all of the evac ships had left before she had.

She wondered if he saw the thought flicker across her face. It had been decades, but he still knew her too. And it was taking him a long time to respond to her question.

“I wanted to make sure you got out,” he said.

“Don't lie to me, Quint,” she said in the exact same tone he had used.

He tilted his head. The expression used to be attractive on his unlined, youthful face. On his older, blood-covered face, it was a bit ghoulish.

“I'm not lying to you, Rose. If you'll remember, I tried to get you out earlier.”

“I do remember,” she snapped, “and I told you to leave. You did. But you didn't go to your evac ship, and now I want to know why.”

His face was expressionless. He did that when he had an emotional reaction that he didn't want anyone to know about.

“What if I hadn't come to this ship?” she asked. “You would have died. This ship is tied to me. You couldn't have gotten it out of the station.”

“But you did come,” he said softly.

And he had known she would. She had asked the wrong question. The answer to her initial question was simple: he had come here because of her. What she should have asked was this: How had he known she would be here?

She stared at him, feeling a tug. She wanted to continue the fight—it was familiar, it was comfortable, it was how they related—but she also wanted to get him the hell off of this ship. She had no idea who he really was now. She had changed a lot in two-plus decades. He probably had too.

“The ship is registered to you, Rose,” he said after a moment.

She felt her breath catch. She hadn't expected him to answer her.

“You still use my name,” he said.

She shrugged a single shoulder. He found her use of his last name significant. It wasn't. She used his last name because it was her last name, at least in the Empire. Quintana. Young and naïve and supposedly in love, she had taken his name and had become the wife of Edward Quintana, better known as Quint. He had had a nickname then. She hadn't.

She swiveled her chair away from him and looked at the control panel. She tapped the coordinates, altering them. She couldn't go to the rendezvous point, nor could she go back to the Nine Planets Alliance, not with him on board.

Fortunately, she hadn't been in touch with any of the others since she 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 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.

She wasn't quite sure where to go, so she programmed in a space station at the edge of Enterran space.

“You changing our course, Rose?”

“Just making sure it's correct,” she said, feeling a bit breathless. It was hard to lie to him, just like it had always been. Her cheeks warmed. Somewhere inside her was that young girl who thought she had fallen in love.

“Tell me what really happened on the research station,” he said.

“I don't know,” she said, not facing him. If she faced him, he would see the lie. “Some kind of chain reaction is my guess. There should have been better protections for working with stealth tech.”

“Scientists have worked on stealth tech for years,” he said. “No research station has ever blown up.”

Not the entire station. But parts of a previous station had blown apart. He had conveniently forgotten that.

“Scientists had never had a dedicated site to work on stealth tech before,” she said. “I suspect that was the mistake.”

“Why?” There was something in his voice, something new. He didn't trust her.

Of course he didn't trust her. She had left him, then divorced him. She had never given him the courtesy of an explanation. She always figured he knew.

Only when she got older, and her relationship with Turtle decayed, did she realize that each person experienced the relationship differently. He probably hadn't understood what happened, any more than Squishy could explain why her relationship with Turtle died on a disastrous dive with Boss ten years ago.

“Why would that be a mistake, Rosealma?” His voice sounded strangled, as if he were trying to pull the emotion from it.

“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 kept 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 records, you'll find it.”

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 side. “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, if he regretted all he had done, they could talk.

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

“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 one of the escape pods? 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 and said again, “No one died this time.”