Boneyards (7 page)

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

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

SIX MONTHS EARLIER

T
he research station was a marvel. Squishy hadn't seen anything that big or that well constructed before. It extended as far as the eye could see. When she brought the
Dane
into the station, she had watched through the portholes, amazed that this gigantic thing before her was man-made. Huge, black, extending in all directions, the station looked like a maze designed to confuse children, with rings around various levels, and labs isolated in wings so far from the main part of the station that there was only one way to access them.

At that moment, she thought her task impossible. Later, as she got used to the place, she realized it wasn't.

But that moment of entry, that moment when she walked into the station alone, she wondered if she was strong enough.

That feeling remained until 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 imperial military. She was considered one of the pioneers of stealth tech, and as such, the researchers were happy to have her back into 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 Squishy 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. Back then, the families lived on the planet below for safety's sake, and that part had worked.

No one in the families had died. 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.

Her years in Vallevu, both times—before and after—allowed the Empire to track her life. Or to track it enough to believe it understood her. It thought she had gone into space to clear her head, then returned to her work. Her second time in Vallevu had been as a doctor, not a stealth scientist, but she had done some research into the effects of loss on communities, and she had published her work.

That loss study, done with the permission of the people she lived with, had focused on Vallevu, the loss she dealt with, the loss of stealth-tech researchers.

Squishy's entire life had been tied to stealth tech, more than the Empire realized.

And she hated stealth tech, more than the Empire realized.

If they had known that, they never would have allowed her within a thousand light-years of this place. Instead, they invited her on board, claimed to be happy to have her, and gave her one of the best offices in the entire place.

First she got assigned a division to help her get up to speed on the current thinking in stealth tech. She had to restrain herself. Stealth-tech researchers in the Empire were going in the wrong direction. They thought stealth tech was merely a cloak, something that would take a ship out of time for a second and then bring it back. Or maybe even take the ship out of phase just enough that it could still see the area around it without interacting with that area.

They had no idea that the cloaking aspects of stealth tech were a side effect of a much more powerful technology, one that flew Dignity Vessels for thousands of years, one that enabled them to travel over distances that the Empire simply couldn't imagine in time that seemed almost miraculous.

She couldn't tell anyone here that, and she didn't want to.

Not even when she realized Quint worked here.

She hadn't checked the employee manifest at the station before she arrived, partly because she was afraid if she saw the names of old colleagues, she would abort the mission.

She couldn't abort. Too many others had taken a leave of absence from Lost Souls to run important aspects of the mission—dangerous aspects—in other parts of the Empire.

If she failed her job, their risks would have been for nothing.

And when she saw them at the rendezvous point, she would have to face them, telling them why she had failed.

She didn't want to fail. This was her idea, after all.

Although two days into her mission, she wondered if she was crazy, when she sat in the spectacular office the station had given her. The office was in the very center of the administrative wing, with a 360-degree view of the interior of the station itself. If she looked out the clear panels, she could see scientists at work in their offices or in their labs. Only the top secret areas were blocked off.

If she wanted to, she could open the privacy tiles on her ceiling, so that she could see the labs and rings above her. The idea of others looking down on her unnerved her, so she kept the ceiling privacy tiles closed, even though she didn't plan to keep her work hidden from anyone here.

Her mission was twofold: she had to gain everyone's trust, and she had to destroy the station. The whole station, not a part of it, not a wing. Everything had to be obliterated.

And she had to do it by herself, without losing a single life.

Sometimes that felt impossible, and sometimes she thought she was the only person in the entire universe who could pull it off.

She was thinking it was all impossible on her second day, as she unpacked what meager belongings she had brought with her—mostly her medical tchotchkes and some artwork she had kept from the children in Vallevu. She initially put the art out, but it made her sad, so she was in the process of repacking it when a man ducked his head into her office.

“Bet you never expected to see me again.”

She turned, and her breath caught. Quint. She hadn't seen him in twenty years. Those years had aged him. He had thickened. His face had worry lines that accented his cheekbones and made him traditionally handsome. His hair remained black, and his eyes, while tired, were still just as dark and just as mysterious.

She hadn't expected to see him again. She didn't want to ever see him again. And apparently he knew that, or he wouldn't have made that statement.

Still, she wasn't going to take the bait. He wanted her off balance, scared or angry. She was off balance, but she had been off balance before he arrived.

She wasn't scared or angry. She had bested Quint more than once. She could do it again.

“If I had expected to see you again, it wouldn't have been here,” she said.

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

She wanted to remind him that she hadn't invited him in, and then tell him that he wasn't welcome. But she didn't do that.

Instead she quietly watched him as he made his way around the room, glancing at the other chairs, the view, and the personal items she had just started to put out.

He used to hate silence. She wondered if he still did.

After a moment, she got her answer. He returned to his spot near the door. He pushed it so that it closed most of the way. Anyone who passed in the hall would understand that they were having a semi-private conversation and wouldn't listen in.

Since all of the chairs had something on them, he crossed his arms and leaned against the wall.

“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 let her gaze sweep over him as she assessed him. Even though he had thickened up, he hadn't let himself get out of shape. If anything, he looked more muscular than he ever had. He also looked like he had lost his sense of humor somewhere and hadn't bothered to retrieve it. His words could have been construed as light and flirtatious if his tone had matched.

It hadn't.

He meant the question, and he wanted to hear her answer.

“Is there something between beer and hatred?” she asked.

He leaned his head back so that his skull brushed the wall. He was leaning against the last privacy panel before the wall opened into her spectacular view. The clear panels reflected him over and over again, see-through versions of Quint lining one side of the room.

“You don't hate me, then?” Somehow he didn't sound vulnerable when he asked the question. “The last time we saw each other, I got the impression that you did.”

“We last saw each other twenty years ago, Quint,” she said. “I don't know you anymore. I have no idea who you are now.”

“Really?” he asked. “Do you think people can change so much they're unrecognizable to each other?”

She studied him for a long moment. He still had no clue what had happened between them, and she didn't feel like enlightening him.

“Twenty years is a long time, Quint,” she said. “I have no idea what you've done during that time. I didn't even know you would be here.”

“Really?” he asked. “You didn't check the station manifest before you arrived?”

“Should I have done that?” she asked. “What would it have gained me, besides learning that you were here?”

He didn't respond for the longest time. Instead, he watched her. She wasn't sure what he was studying her for. Was he comparing the old her to the new her? Or was he trying to unnerve her?

Or both?

Then she realized he had unnerved her. She had been thinking about the past, and not the present.

“What are you doing in my office anyway?” she asked. “There are a lot of people on this station. How did you even know I was here?”

“I always check in the new arrivals,” he said.

“What kind of job is that, checking in new arrivals?” she asked.

“Security,” he said.

He had been a promising scientist when she met him. But he had gone farther and farther away from science when they were together. She hadn't expected him to abandon it altogether.

“I was surprised to see your name on the arrivals list,” he said.

“I'll bet,” she 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.”

“W
here are we going, Rosealma?” Quint asked. He rubbed on 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.

How did he know about her rendezvous with the others? And then she realized that he didn't. The scientists and researchers were supposed to gather at some point if there was any threat to the station.

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 to join anyone from the station,” 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 to you?” she asked him. “I thought there weren't any explosions on the station until that big one.”

“Cloris Kashion saw something embedded on 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 the material didn't have the right composition. So much was missing, so many details she had only just started to learn when she started 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. Squishy's 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.”