Boneyards (8 page)

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS EARLIER

T
he inside of the Ancient and Lost Technologies Laboratory building smelled the same as it always had. A bit dusty, a bit sterile, not because of chemicals used, but because it got cleaned every single day, which wiped out the bulk of the odors.

As she stepped inside, out of the pale sun, away from the still-confused crowd, the fact that the building smelled the same surprised her. She had expected something sharp, like blood or urine or the tang that certain laser weapons give off.

The lifts were shut down, which was her first indication that something was wrong. Her lab was on the tenth floor, and she climbed the black reflective steps, which were made of the same material as the building's exterior.

Red warning lights started flashing on the ninth floor, warning unauthorized personnel to stay away. The audio announcement was off, however, probably because it was usually accompanied by sirens. It seemed to take forever to reach the tenth floor.

The lab was shut off by a triple entry system. First, she had to press her palm against a door at the top of the stairs. Before the door unlocked, it displayed a warning:

** Possible Hazard Inside. Proceed With Caution.**

That flashed twice, followed by:

**Only Authorized Personnel. Authorization Subject To Revocation Without Cause.**

And then the hazard warning appeared again.

Finally, the door unlocked, slid open just wide enough to admit Rosealma, and closed behind her.

That had never happened to her before, at least not here. She had gone through airlocks all of her life on ships and in ports, but never inside a planetside building, and never on campus. The campus prided itself on being open. Even the restricted areas could be opened to unauthorized personnel if someone simply queried an administrator.

Although probably not today.

She stood in the airlock, feeling odd. It was simply a building space between doors. She could see light around both doors, which meant that air and contaminants leaked through.

The door in front of her had never been closed before. She touched it with her palm, and the same warnings ran along the door's message board.

Then the door clicked open, letting her into what she had always thought of as the real airlock.

The front of the lab was sealed in the same way that spaceships sealed their exteriors. She couldn't peer in, she couldn't breathe any of its air, and she couldn't hear anything from the interior. Her heart pounded.

She touched her palm to the entry panel, and the door opened, revealing chaos.

But not the kind of chaos that she expected.

She had expected smoke and still-flaring fires, people dead on the floor, destroyed workstations, and gigantic holes in the wall.

Instead, she found people running back and forth or clustering in groups. Half of the staff wore the silly white lab coats that the professors in Ancient and Lost Technologies insisted upon, and the rest were in civilian garb, just like she was.

But they were consulting, talking over each other, looking at readouts—and not looking in the direction of the experiment booth at all. The silence, the decorum, the protocol was gone, replaced by a visible sense of panic.

Visible and pungent. That stench of fear she had expected below dominated here.

She stepped away from the door, and it closed behind her. No one noticed Rosealma's arrival. They just kept talking and comparing notes. She could make out individual words but not their context, so she tuned it out.

She walked forward. The experimental lab was divided into sections that were walled off from each other, each with its own environment.

Three of the sections were shut off, dark, just like they always were. They were unassigned and not in use at the moment. No one had been conducting experiments in them.

The other seven sections seemed to be in some stage of usage. Lights were down in three of those, but the dim lights still showed experiments in progress. Two of the remaining four sections had scientists inside, consulting just like the scientists outside the labs were doing. No one seemed to be doing actual hands-on work.

One section had lights on full and several containers on several tables. She couldn't tell if activity in that room had been interrupted or if someone had just turned on the lights to see what was happening.

The remaining section was the one that caught her eye. That section, directly in front of her, was the one she went into the most often, where the stealth-tech experiment that she had been working on was conducted.

Or had been conducted.

That section was completely empty.

Nothing remained—not a table, not a chair, not a computer. Even the lights seemed odd, and it took her a moment to figure out why. The lights weren't on inside the section. Spotlights from the airlock area were shining into the section, as well as lights above the containment equipment.

“What's going on in section 14B?” she asked the next person who scurried past her.

“That's what we'd like to know,” he said as he hurried by.

She hadn't expected that response. She wanted someone to tell her the section had been cleared out because of the emergency, that the area was no longer in use. But not
that's what we'd like to know.

She looked at the cluster of scientists nearest her. She recognized several of them, but none of them were Professor Erasmus Dane, who ran the experiments that Rosealma worked on. Professor Dane was in charge of this entire lab; he should have been there, directing everyone.

Rosealma walked over to the scientists. Three vids were playing on three screens, but no one watched them. The vids were real-time recordings of the experiments, and from the time stamp, they were from earlier in the day.

“Where's Professor Dane?” she asked the group.

They started guiltily. Four people didn't even look up. Two looked away. Only one person faced her. Assistant Professor Herman Gill.

He wasn't much older than she was. He had been the whiz kid of his class, fast-tracked through school, through his post-doc, through everything, given tenure over and above a lot of other more established professors because of the quality of his research. Every school, every major organization in the sector wanted him. He wanted to stay in academia, and he had his choice of places to go. Mehkeydo University had offered him terms so amazing that Rosealma had even heard about it.

The only concession he had had to make was an assistant professorship to start. He didn't mind, so long as he had time to do his experiments.

His round cheeks were red, his blue eyes wild. Beads of sweat dotted his forehead. His brown hair stood up in spiky streaks, not because it was supposed to but because he'd been running his fingers through it or he had forgotten to comb it when he got out of bed.

He didn't look like a whiz kid now. He looked terrified.

“You're Professor Dane's assistant, aren't you?” he said in a voice calmer than she had expected, given his appearance.

There was no good answer to that. Rosealma was more than Professor Dane's assistant, less than Professor Dane's partner.

“I want to know where Professor Dane is,” Rosealma said. “He should be here.”

“Do you work with him or not?” Gill snapped.

“Yes,” Rosealma said.

“Then maybe you can figure this out.”

He tapped the screen in front of him. It showed 14B in speeded-up time. As Rosealma watched, things disappeared. First an apple sitting on the table, then a pen, then the table itself crumbled and disappeared. As it did, one of the assistants, an idiot named Russell Fowler, blundered into 14B.

The moment he entered, he stopped. He seemed to blur a little. Then he looked up. Or, to be more accurate, his head changed positions, but Rosealma didn't see how exactly. It wasn't a smooth movement. At one point his head was down; at another, it was up.

The chair vanished, and when Rosealma was looking at it, Fowler crumpled, and a moment later, he was gone as well.

“What the hell?” Rosealma asked. “Who made this recording? It's clearly been doctored.”

“It's not doctored,” Gill said.

That was when Rosealma realized the lighting had changed. She stared at the emptiness for what seemed like a long time.

Then Professor Dane appeared in the frame. Professor Dane was a formidable man, tall and broad, given to wearing vintage suits and capes when he went outside. He had on a cape in the vid.

He was gesturing; then he waited, nodded, and pulled open the door. He stepped inside and vanished.

Just vanished.

Gill stopped the vid. “That's all we have. No one has gone in since.”

Rosealma studied him. He wasn't lying to her, that she could tell anyway. But she didn't trust the vid. She didn't trust any of this.

“Show me all of the vids from all the angles in real time.”

“It'll take three hours,” he said.

“That took place over three hours?” She turned toward the frozen screen, whose image was no different than the image she saw when she looked at 14B itself.

“Three hours, from the moment that things started vanishing to the moment we lost Professor Dane,” Gill said.

“Russell was working here by himself?” Rosealma asked.

“Others were working on different experiments,” Gill said.

“Were you here?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I got here just before Professor Dane.”

“How long had Professor Dane been here before he went inside 14B?”

“An hour.”

“But he still had his cloak on.”

“He didn't take it off. He started working immediately.” Gill crossed his arms. “What are you people messing with?”

Rosealma stood back and looked at everyone in the room. She was the only one who had worked directly with Professor Dane. No one else was involved with 14B.

“Where's the rest of the team?” she asked.

“We had a death,” he said. “We couldn't call in a team directly. You know protocol.”

She didn't know protocol. At least, not on a death. There had never been one in the lab while she worked here, while she had gone to school here. At least not a death that she knew of.

“How do you know you had a death?” she asked. “I don't see a death here.”

“God,” Gill said, “you sound just like Professor Dane.”

Rosealma's cheeks got hot, but she didn't back down. Something was off here—something besides the strangeness in 14B.

“When did the sirens go off?” she asked.

“I hit them,” he said, “shortly after Professor Dane got here.”

Whiz kid my ass
, Rosealma thought.
Control freak who thought he knew more than everyone else, more likely.

“So you deliberately prevented Professor Dane from summoning his team,” she said.

Gill gave her a startled look. “We had a death—”

“You had a disappearance,” she said. “And it might be harmless. Do you know what stealth tech is? It's a cloak.”

A bead of sweat ran down Gill's face. “If it's a cloak, then how come Professor Dane hasn't returned yet?”

“Maybe because it's still on,” she said.

“Maybe?” Gill asked.

“It's an
experiment
,” she said. “I can't be precise. I don't even know what Fowler was doing in there. We have strict orders not to go inside that room when an experiment is running.”

“Yet Fowler and your Professor Dane did just that.”

“Maybe Professor Dane had a reason,” she said. “Did you show him the vid?”

“Yes,” Gill said.

“In real time?” she asked.

“There's no time to view it in real time,” he said.

“Idiot,” she breathed.

“What?”

“I just called you an idiot,” she said. “If it's a cloak, then no one is harmed, no one is dead, you just made some stupid assumptions. I want Professor Dane's team here. I want to find out what happened.”

“We all do,” Gill said. “But the professor should have been able to break a cloak.”

“From inside a room? Without any controls?” She had raised her voice so loudly that everyone in the lab was watching them now. “How would you expect him to do that?”

“He went in there. He had to have known that something would happen.”

“He probably went in there to pull Fowler out,” she said.

“And that didn't work,” Gill said.

“Because the cloak might have malfunctioned,” she said. She shoved him aside. “I hope to God that the malfunction is something we can reverse. Because if they died in there while you were screwing around, then it's on you.”

“So you think they're dead too,” Gill said, and she finally understood what was in his voice. He was scared—scared not just that they were dead, but that his career was going to follow. Maybe he had never failed before. Maybe he had never lost this kind of control before.

She hadn't either. She had no idea what she was doing, although she had more of an idea than Gill did.

“I don't know what they are,” she said, “and I won't know if you don't get the hell out of my way.”

He took a step back, startled. No one talked to the whiz kid like that.

“Someone get the rest of the team,” she said. “I'm going to need help here.”