The Diving Bundle: Six Diving Universe Novellas
Author: Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Date: 2000-01-01 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Short Stories; Fiction; Womens; Science Fiction; Anthologies; Novella
Description: Fast-paced action, engaging characterization and page-turning adventures. Dave Dickingson of Astroguyz says: “The Diving Universe, conceived buy Hugo-Award winning author Kristine [Kathryn] Rusch is a refreshingly new and fleshed out realm of sci-fi action and adventure.” RT Book Reviews has called it “classic space opera.” Analog says, “Boss, as much historian as salvager, reminds one of a Poul Anderson or Gordon R. Dickson protagonist. This is definitely a fun universe to visit: dive in!” The Diving Universe novellas have been selected as Readers’ Choice winners three times by readers of Asi
Publisher: WMG Publishing, Inc.

Copyright Information

Collection Title

Copyright © 2013 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

First published in 2013 by WMG Publishing

Published by WMG Publishing

Cover and Layout copyright © 2013 by WMG Publishing

Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing

Cover art copyright © Philcold/Dreamstime

“Diving into the Wreck” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch was first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, December, 2005

“The Room of Lost Souls” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch was first published in Asimov’s SF Magazine, April/May, 2008

“Becalmed” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch was first published in Asimov’s SF Magazine, April/May, 2011

“Becoming One with the Ghosts” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch was first published in Asimov’s SF Magazine, October/November 2010

“Stealth” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch was first published in Asimov’s SF Magazine, October/November, 2011

“Strangers at the Room of Lost Souls” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch was first published by WMG Publishing, 2013.

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Old Way

Diving into the Wreck

The Room of Lost Souls

Becalmed

Becoming One with the Ghosts

Stealth

Strangers at the Room of Lost Souls

Copyright Information

About the Author

Introduction

THE OLD WAY

AT A CONVENTION several years ago, the editor who would eventually buy the novel Diving into the Wreck for his brand-new book line told me he wasn’t sure if he should buy the book. His concern? That the first two parts of the novel had originally appeared in Asimov’s SF as novellas. It didn’t matter to him that both novellas had won the Asimov’s Readers Choice award for the best novella of the year. Or that they had received international awards as well.

He worried that the previous publication would taint the novel somehow.

I leaned back in shock. Even though he professed to know the science fiction field, he apparently did not know it at all. In sf, it’s customary to publish short pieces before the longer work appears. Books from Nancy Kress’s Beggars in Spain trilogy to Connie Willis’s time travel novels had appeared in short form first, as did parts of Joe Haldeman’s classic The Forever War or one of my very favorite pieces (in both forms), Daniel Keyes’ Flowers For Algernon.

That this young editor thought it unusual to publish a book after the shorter works appeared showed how little he knew the field. I had to coach him on ways to market to book—using the novellas as a hook, not as a detriment. Yes, readers had seen parts of the book, but not all of the book. And readers would buy the novel in part because they wanted to read the rest of the story.

I write out of order, and I never know what pieces of a story I have until I finish that segment. I initially thought “Diving into the Wreck” was just a novella, even though I knew what the Dignity Vessel was and how that myth/legend had come about.

I had no idea the story was tied to “The Room of Lost Souls” until Boss started narrating that novella to me. Then I wrote what I thought was the next novella, but couldn’t finish it. That novella turned out to be the opening section of the novel City of Ruins, which does not stand alone. I had to back up and figure out what was going to happen next to finish the first Diving novel.

I learned years ago that it’s more fun to tell myself stories to complete my world-building than it is to write a “bible” or some kind of background material. “Becoming One With The Ghosts” started as a way to explain the opening of City of Ruins to myself. Parts of the novella are in the novel, but not in the same order. (My mind is a jigsaw puzzle mess.)

As I wrote that book, I needed to figure out what mission Coop had just completed. So I wrote “Becalmed” which, so far, isn’t in any of the novels. I suspect some day it will be.

“Stealth” circles back to a character we first meet in “Diving” the novella—Squishy. “Stealth” is her story, just like Boneyards is, in part, her story. “Stealth” let me explain Squishy to myself. (And yes, parts of “Stealth” are in Boneyards in different form.)

“Strangers at the Room of Lost Souls,” introduces a new character who becomes quite influential in Skirmishes, the fourth Diving novel. She’s got a role in several books, I think. “Strangers” was fun to write because it’s a companion piece—literally—to another novella called “Encounter at Starbase Kappa,” which Asimov’s will publish in its October/November 2013 issue.

Both novellas get sewn together in Skirmishes, and they’re so closely related that I didn’t feel right offering Sheila Williams of Asimov’s both novellas. That’s why WMG Publishing did “Strangers” as a standalone volume before Skirmishes came out.

There are two other novellas in the Diving universe as of this writing, and neither of them are parts of novels (yet). The first, “The Spires of Denon,” was an Asimov’s cover story in 2009 (and a finalist for the Readers’ Choice award). WMG reprinted the novella in 2011. I have no idea to this day how “Spires” fits in the overall set-up, although I trust that I’ll figure it out.

The other novella, “The Application of Hope,” appeared in Asimov’s in the August 2013, issue. The novella shows what happened to Coop and his team from a brand-new perspective, which is one that I’m quite excited about. “Hope” will become a standalone WMG novella sometime in 2014.

The novellas are fun—and the readers seem to like them. So far, the Diving novellas have won three Asimov’s Readers Choice awards and have been nominated for three others. They’ve received two prestigious UPC awards in Europe, and have been reprinted in several different languages. They’ve provided the inspiration for covers for Asimov’s as well as Esli Magazine in Russia. And they’ve helped me figure out what I’m doing next.

I know there will be other Diving novellas long before I’m done telling the story of Boss and her group. I have several planned, plus I have a lot of world building to do, so I know that even more will crop up. The neat thing about writing novellas first is that element of surprise. Did I know that Coop had visited the Room of Lost Souls? Yes, but I didn’t know when until I wrote “Strangers” Did I know that Squishy hated stealth tech? Yes, but I didn’t know why until I wrote “Stealth.”

Boss herself started as a mystery to me when I wrote “Diving.” I still don’t know her real name. She won’t tell me—or anyone else it seems. It doesn’t feel quite right to call her Boss either, since that’s not how she thinks of herself. But that’s what everyone else calls her, so I use that shorthand when I’m not writing about her.

The Diving universe is constantly evolving, both on the page and in my own imagination. I’m glad you’ve decided to join me on the journey—and I hope in a few years to do another bundle of “Diving” novellas. I’m already three novellas into that bundle, and I’m sure there will be more. I just don’t know when the others will appear—or what, exactly, they’ll be about.

Fortunately, WMG Publishing understands how the novellas and novels work together. It’s fun to continue a science fiction tradition—writing both long and short in the same series. I hope to do this for many years to come.

—Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Lincoln City, Oregon

August 16, 2013

DIVING INTO THE WRECK

WE APPROACH THE WRECK in stealth mode: lights and communications array off, sensors on alert for any other working ship in the vicinity. I’m the only one in the cockpit of the Nobody’s Business. I’m the only one with the exact coordinates.

The rest of the team sits in the lounge, their gear in cargo. I personally searched each one of them before sticking them to their chairs. No one, but no one, knows where the wreck is except me. That was our agreement.

They hold to it or else.

We’re six days from Longbow Station, but it took us ten to get here. Misdirection again, although I’d only planned on two days working my way through an asteroid belt around Beta Six. I ended up taking three, trying to get rid of a bottom-feeder that tracked us, hoping to learn where we’re diving.

Hoping for loot.

I’m not hoping for loot. I doubt there’s something space-valuable on a wreck as old as this one looks. But there’s history value, and curiosity value, and just plain old we-done-it value. I picked my team with that in mind.

The team: six of us, all deep-space experienced. I’ve worked with two before—Turtle and Squishy, both skinny space-raised women who have a sense of history that most out here lack. We used to do a lot of women-only dives together, back in the beginning, back when we believed that sisterhood was important. We got over that pretty fast.

Karl comes with more recommendations than God; I wouldn’t’ve let him aboard with those rankings except that we needed him—not just for the varied dives he’s gone on, but also for his survival skills. He’s saved at least two diving-gone-wrong trips that I know of.

The last two—Jypé and Junior—are a father-and-son team that seem more like halves of the same whole. I’ve never wreck dived with them, though I took them out twice before telling them about this trip. They move in synch, think in synch, and have more money than the rest of us combined.

Yep, they’re recreationists, but recreationists with a handle: their hobby is history, their desires—at least according to all I could find on them—to recover knowledge of the human past, not to get rich off of it.

It’s me that’s out to make money, but I do it my way, and only enough to survive to the next deep space trip. I don’t thrive out here, but I’m addicted to it.

The process gets its name from the dangers: in olden days, wreck diving was called space diving to differentiate it from the planet-side practice of diving into the oceans.

We don’t face water here—we don’t have its weight or its unusual properties, particularly at huge depths. We have other elements to concern us: No gravity, no oxygen, extreme cold.

And greed.

My biggest problem is that I’m land-born, something I don’t confess to often. I spent the first forty years of my life trying to forget that my feet were once stuck to a planet’s surface by real gravity. I even came to space late: fifteen years old, already land-locked. My first instructors told me I’d never unlearn the thinking real atmosphere ingrains into the body.

They were mostly right; land pollutes me, takes out an edge that the space-raised come to naturally. I gotta consciously choose to go into the deep and dark; the space-raised glide in like it’s mother’s milk. But if I compare myself to the land-locked, I’m a spacer of the first order, someone who understands vacuum like most understand air.

Old timers, all space-raised, tell me my interest in the past comes from being land-locked. Spacers move on, forget what’s behind them. The land-born always search for ties, thinking they’ll understand better what’s before them if they understand what’s behind them.

I don’t think it’s that simple. I’ve met history-oriented spacers, just like I’ve met land-born who’re always looking forward.

It’s what you do with the knowledge you collect that matters and me, I’m always spinning mine into gold.

***

So, the wreck.

I came on it nearly a year before, traveling back from a bust I’d got suckered into with promise of glory. I was manually guiding my single-ship, doing a little mapping to pick up some extra money. They say there aren’t any undiscovered places any more in this part of our galaxy, just forgotten ones, and I think that’s true.

An eyeblink is all I’d’ve needed to miss the wreck. I caught the faint energy signal on a sensor I kept tuned to deep space around me. The sensor blipped once and was gone, that fast. But I had been around enough to know that something was there. The energy signal was too far out, too faint to be anything but lost.

As fast as I could, I dropped out of FTL, cutting my sublight speed to nothing in the drop. It still took me two jumps and a half day of searching before I found the blip again and matched its speed and direction.

I had been right. It was a ship. A black lump against the blackness of space.

My single-ship is modified—I don’t have automatic anythings in it, which can make it dangerous (the reason single-ships are completely automatic is so that the sole inhabitant is protected), but which also makes it completely mine. I’ve modified engines and the computers and the communications equipment, so that nothing happens without my permission.

The ship isn’t even linked to me, although it is set to monitor my heart rate, my respiration rate, and my eyes. Should my heart slow, my breathing even, or my eyes close for longer than a minute, the automatic controls take over the entire ship. Unconsciousness isn’t as much of a danger as it would be if the ship were one-hundred-percent manual, but consciousness isn’t a danger either. No one can monitor my thoughts or my movements simply by tapping the ship’s computer.

Which turned out to be a blessing because now there are no records of what I had found in the ship’s functions. Only that I had stopped.

My internal computer attached to the eyelink told me what my brain had already figured out. The wreck had been abandoned long ago. The faint energy signal was no more than a still running current inside the wreck.

My internal computer hypothesized that the wreck was Old Earth make, five thousand years old, maybe older. But I was convinced that estimation was wrong.

In no way could Earthers have made it this far from their own system in a ship like that. Even if the ship had managed to survive all this time floating like a derelict, even if there had been a reason for it to be here, the fact remained: no Earthers had been anywhere near this region five thousand years ago.

So I ignored the computerized hypothesis, and moved my single-ship as close as I could get it to the wreck without compromising safety measures.

Pitted and space-scored, the wreck had some kind of corrosion on the outside and occasional holes in the hull. The thing clearly was old. And it had been floating for a very long time. Nothing lived in it, and nothing seemed to function in it either besides that one faint energy signature, which was another sign of age.

Any other spacer would’ve scanned the thing, but other spacers didn’t have my priorities. I was happy my equipment wasn’t storing information. I needed to keep this wreck and its whereabouts my secret, at least until I could explore it.

I made careful private notes to myself as to location and speed of the wreck, then went home, thinking of nothing but what I had found the entire trip..

In the silence of my free-floating apartment, eighteen stories up on the scattered space-station wheel that orbited Hector One Prime, I compared my eyeball scan to my extensive back-up files.

And got a jolt: The ship was not only Old Earth based, its type had a name:

It was a Dignity Vessel, designed as a stealth warship.

But no Dignity Vessel had made it out of the fifty light year radius of Earth—they weren’t designed to travel huge distances, at least by current standards, and they weren’t manufactured outside of Earth’s solar system. Even drifting at the speed it was moving, it couldn’t have made it to its location in five thousand years, or even fifty thousand.

A Dignity Vessel.

Impossible, right?

And yet…

There it was. Drifting. Filled with mystery.

Filled with time.

Waiting for someone like me to figure it out.

***

The team hates my secrecy, but they understand it. They know one person’s space debris is another’s treasure. And they know treasures vanish in deep space. The wrong word to the wrong person and my little discovery would disappear as if it hadn’t existed at all.

Which was why I did the second and third scans myself, all on the way to other missions, all without a word to a soul. Granted, I was taking a chance that someone would notice my drops out of FTL and wonder what I was doing, but I doubted even I was being watched that closely.

When I put this team together, I told them only I had a mystery vessel, one that would tax their knowledge, their beliefs, and their wreck-recovery skills.

Not a soul knows it’s a Dignity Vessel. I don’t want to prejudice them, don’t want to force them along one line of thinking.

Don’t want to be wrong.

The whats, hows and whys I’ll worry about later. The ship’s here.

That’s the only fact I need.

***

After I was sure I had lost every chance of being tracked, I let the Business slide into a position out of normal scanner and visual range. I matched the speed of the wreck. If my ship’s energy signals were caught on someone else’s scans, they automatically wouldn’t pick up the faint energy signal of the wreck. I had a half dozen cover stories ready, depending on who might spot us. I hoped no one did.

But taking this precaution meant we needed transport to and from the wreck. That was the only drawback of this kind of secrecy.

First mission out, I’m ferry captain—a role I hate, but one I have to play. We’re using the skip instead of the Business. The skip is designed for short trips, no more than four bodies on board at one time.

This trip, there’s only three of us—me, Turtle and Karl. Usually we team-dive wrecks, but this deep and so early, I need two different kinds of players. Turtle can dive anything, and Karl can kill anything. I can fly anything.

We’re set.

I’m flying the skip with the portals unshielded. It looks like we’re inside a piece of black glass moving through open space. Turtle paces most of the way, walking back to front to back again, peering through the portals, hoping to be the first to see the wreck.

Karl monitors the instruments as if he’s flying the thing instead of me. If I hadn’t worked with him before, I’d be freaked. I’m not; I know he’s watching for unusuals, whatever comes our way.

The wreck looms ahead of us—a megaship, from the days when size equaled power. Still, it seems small in the vastness, barely a blip on the front of my sensors.

Turtle bounces in. She’s fighting the grav that I left on for me—that landlocked thing again—and she’s so nervous, someone who doesn’t know her would think she’s on something. She’s too thin, like most divers, but muscular. Strong. I like that. Almost as much as I like her brain.

“What the hell is it?” she asks. “Old Empire?”

“Older.” Karl is bent at the waist, looking courtly as he studies the instruments. He prefers readouts to eyeballing things; he trusts equipment more than he trusts himself.

“There can’t be anything older out here,” Turtle says.

“Can’t is relative,” Karl says.

I let them tough it out. I’m not telling them what I know. The skip slows, shuts down, and bobs with its own momentum. I’m easing in, leaving no trail.

“It’s gonna take more than six of us to dive that puppy,” Turtle says. “Either that, or we’ll spend the rest of our lives here.”

“As old as that thing is,” Karl says, “it’s probably been plundered and replundered.”

“We’re not here for the loot.” I speak softly, reminding them it’s an historical mission.

Karl turns his angular face toward me. In the dim light of the instrument panel, his gray eyes look silver, his skin unnaturally pale. “You know what this is?”

I don’t answer. I’m not going to lie about something as important as this, so I can’t make a denial. But I’m not going to confirm either. Confirming will only lead to more questions, which is something I don’t want just yet. I need them to make their own minds up about this find.

“Huge, old.” Turtle shakes her head. “Dangerous. You know what’s inside?”

“Nothing, for all I know.”

“Didn’t check it out first?”

Some dive team leaders head into a wreck the moment they find one. Anyone working salvage knows it’s not worth your time to come back to a place that’s been plundered before.

“No.” I pick a spot not far from the main doors, and set the skip to hold position with the monster wreck. With no trail, I hoped no one was gonna notice the tiny energy emanation the skip gives off.

“Too dangerous?” Turtle asks. “That why you didn’t go in?”

“I have no idea,” I say.

“There’s a reason you brought us here.” She sounds annoyed. “You gonna share it?”

I shake my head. “Not yet. I just want to see what you find.”

She glares, but the look has no teeth. She knows my methods and even approves of them sometimes. And she should know that I’m not good enough to dive alone.

She peels off her clothes—no modesty in this woman—and slides on her suit. The suit adheres to her like it’s a part of her. She wraps five extra breathers around her hips—just-in-case emergency stuff, barely enough to get her out if her suit’s internal oxygen system fails. Her suit is minimal—it has no back-up for environmental protection. If her primary and secondary units fail, she’s a little block of ice in a matter of seconds.

She likes the risk; Karl doesn’t. His suit is bulkier, not as form-fitting, but it has external environmental back-ups. He’s had environmental failures and barely survived them. I’ve heard that lecture half a dozen times. So has Turtle, even though she always ignores it.

He doesn’t go starkers under the suit either, leaving some clothes in case he has to peel quickly. Different divers, different situations. He only carries two extra breathers, both so small that they fit on his hips without expanding his width. He uses the extra loops for weapons, mostly lasers, although he’s got a knife stashed somewhere in all that preparedness.

The knife has saved his life twice that I know of—once against a claim-jumper, and once as a pick that opened a hole big enough to squeeze his arm through.

They don’t put on the headpieces until I give them the plan. One hour only: twenty minutes to get in, twenty minutes to explore, twenty minutes to return. Work the buddy system. We just want an idea of what’s in there.

One hour gives them enough time on their breathers for some margin of error. One hour also prevents them from getting too involved in the dive and forgetting the time. They have to stay on schedule.

They get the drill. They’ve done it before, with me anyway. I have no idea how other team leaders run their ships. I have strict rules about everything, and expect my teams to follow.

Headpieces on—Turtle’s is as thin as her face, tight enough to make her look like some kind of cybernetic human. Karl goes for the full protection—seven layers, each with a different function; double night vision, extra cameras on all sides; computerized monitors layered throughout the external cover. He gives me the handheld, which records everything he “sees.” It’s not as good as the camera eyeview they’ll bring back, but at least it’ll let me know my team is still alive.

Not that I can do anything if they’re in trouble. My job is to stay in the skip. Theirs is to come back to it in one piece.

***

They move through the airlock—Turtle bouncing around like she always does, Karl moving with caution—and then wait the required two minutes. The suits adjust, then Turtle presses the hatch, and Karl sends the lead to the other ship.

We don’t tether, exactly, but we run a line from one point of entry to the other. It’s cautionary. A lot of divers get wreck blindness—hit the wrong button, expose themselves to too much light, look directly into a laser, or the suit malfunctions in ways I don’t even want to discuss—and they need the tactical hold to get back to safety.

I don’t deal with wreck blindness either, but Squishy does. She knows eyes, and can replace a lens in less than fifteen minutes. She’s saved more than one of my crew in the intervening years. And after overseeing the first repair—the one in which she got her nickname—, I don’t watch.

Turtle heads out first, followed by Karl. They look fragile out there, small shapes against the blackness. They follow the guideline, one hand resting lightly on it as they propel themselves toward the wreck.

This is the easy part: should they let go or miss by a few meters, they use tiny air chips in the hands and feet of their suits to push them in the right direction. The suits have even more chips than that. Should the diver get too far away from the wreck, they can use little propellants installed throughout their suits.

I haven’t lost a diver going or coming from a wreck.

It’s inside that matters.

My hands are slick with sweat. I nearly drop the handheld. It’s not providing much at the moment—just the echo of Karl’s breathing, punctuated by an occasional “fuck” as he bumps something or moves slightly off-line.

I don’t look at the images he’s sending back either. I know what they are—the gloved hand on the lead, the vastness beyond, the bits of the wreck in the distance.

Instead, I walk back to the cockpit, sink into my chair, and turn all monitors on full. I have cameras on both of them and read-outs running on another monitor watching their heart and breathing patterns. I plug the handheld into one small screen, but don’t watch it until Karl approaches the wreck.

The main door is scored and dented. Actual rivets still remain on one side. I haven’t worked a ship old enough for rivets; I’ve only seen them in museums and histories. I stare at the bad image Karl’s sending back, entranced. How have those tiny metal pieces remained after centuries? For the first time, I wish I’m out there myself. I want to run the thin edge of my glove against the metal surface.

Karl does just that, but he doesn’t seem interested in the rivets. His fingers search for a door release, something that will open the thing easily.

After centuries, I doubt there is any easy here. Finally, Turtle pings him.

“Got something over here,” she says.

She’s on the far side of the wreck from me, working a section I hadn’t examined that closely in my three trips out. Karl keeps his hands on the wreck itself, sidewalking toward her.

My breath catches. This is the part I hate: the beginning of the actual dive, the place where the trouble starts.

Most wrecks are filled with space, inside and out, but a few still maintain their original environments, and then it gets really dicey—extreme heat or a gaseous atmosphere that interacts badly with the suits.

Sometimes the hazards are even simpler: a jagged metal edge that punctures even the strongest suits; a tiny corridor that seems big enough until it narrows, trapping the diver inside.

Every wreck has its surprises, and surprise is the thing that leads to the most damage—a diver shoving backwards to avoid a floating object, a diver slamming his head into a wall jarring the suit’s delicate internal mechanisms, and a host of other problems, all of them documented by survivors, and none of them the same.

The handheld shows a rip in the exterior of the wreck, not like any other caused by debris. Turtle puts a fisted hand in the center, then activates her knuckle lights. From my vantage, the hole looks large enough for two humans to go through side-by-side.

“Send a probe before you even think of going in there,” I say into her headset.

“Think it’s deep enough?” Turtle asks, her voice tinny as it comes through the speakers.

“Let’s try the door first,” Karl says. “I don’t want surprises if we can at all avoid them.”

Good man. His small form appears like a spider attached to the ship’s side. He returns to the exit hatch, still scanning it.

I look at the timer, running at the bottom of my main screen.

17:32

Not a lot of time to get in.

I know Karl’s headpiece has a digital readout at the base. He’s conscious of the time, too, and as cautious about that as he is about following procedure.

Turtle scuttles across the ship’s side to reach him, slips a hand under a metal awning, and grunts.

“How come I didn’t see that?” Karl asks.

“Looking in the wrong place,” she says. “This is real old. I’ll wager the metal’s so brittle we could punch through the thing.”

“We’re not here to destroy it.” There’s disapproval in Karl’s voice.

“I know.”

19:01. I’ll come on the line and demand they return if they go much over twenty minutes.

Turtle grabs something that I can’t see, braces her feet on the side of the ship, and tugs. I wince. If she loses her grip, she propels, spinning, far and fast into space.

“Crap,” she says. “Stuck.”

“I could’ve told you that. These things are designed to remain closed.”

“We have to go in the hole.”

“Not without a probe,” Karl says.

“We’re running out of time.”

21:22

They are out of time.

I’m about to come on and remind them, when Karl says, “We have a choice. We either try to blast this door open or we probe that hole.”

Turtle doesn’t answer him. She tugs. Her frame looks small on my main screen, all bunched up as she uses her muscles to pry open something that may have been closed for centuries.

On the handheld screen, enlarged versions of her hands disappear under that awning, but the exquisite detail of her suit shows the ripple of her flesh as she struggles.

“Let go, Turtle,” Karl says.

“I don’t want to damage it,” Turtle says. “God knows what’s just inside there.”

“Let go.”

She does. The hands reappear, one still braced on the ship’s side.

“We’re probing,” he says. “Then we’re leaving.”

“Who put you in charge?” she grumbles, but she follows him to that hidden side of the ship. I see only their limbs as they move along the exterior—the human limbs against the pits and the dents and the small holes punched by space debris. Shards of protruding metal near rounded gashes beside pristine swatches that still shine in the thin light from Turtle’s headgear.

I want to be with them, clinging to the wreck, looking at each mark, trying to figure out when it came, how it happened, what it means.

But all I can do is watch.

The probe makes it through sixteen meters of stuff before it doesn’t move any farther. Karl tries to tug it out, but the probe is stuck, just like my team would’ve been if they’d gone in without it.

They return, forty-two minutes into the mission, feeling defeated.

I’m elated. They’ve gotten farther than I ever expected.

***

We take the probe readouts back to the Business, over the protests of the team. They want to recharge and clean out the breathers and dive again, but I won’t let them. That’s another rule I have to remind them of—only one dive per twenty-four hour period. There are too many unknowns in our work; it’s essential that we have time to rest.

All of us get too enthusiastic about our dives—we take chances we shouldn’t. Sleep, relaxation, downtime all prevent the kind of haste that gets divers killed.

Once we’re in the Business, I download the probe readouts, along with the readings from the suits, the gloves, and the handheld. Everyone gathers in the lounge. I have three-D holotech in there, which’ll allow us all to get a sense of the wreck.

As I’m sorting through the material, thinking of how to present it (handheld first? Overview? A short lecture?), the entire group arrives. Turtle’s taken a shower. Her hair’s wet, and she looks tired. She’d sworn to me she hadn’t been stressed out there, but her eyes tell me otherwise. She’s exhausted.

Squishy follows, looking somber. Jypé and Junior are already there, in the best seats. They’ve been watching me set up. Only Karl is late. When he arrives—also looking tired—Squishy stops him at the door.

“Turtle says it’s old.”

Turtle shoots Squishy an angry look.

“She won’t say anything else.” Squishy glances at me as if it’s my fault. Only I didn’t swear the first team to secrecy about the run. That was their choice.

“It’s old,” Karl says, and squeezes by her.

“She’s says it’s weird-old.”

Karl looks at me now. His angular face seems even bonier. He seems to be asking me silently if he can talk.

I continue setting up.

Karl sighs, then says, “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

No one else asks a question. They wait for me. I start with the images the skip’s computer downloaded, then add the handheld material. I’ve finally decided to save the suit readouts for last. I might be the only one who cares about the metal composition, the exterior hull temperature, and the number of rivets lining the hatch.

The group watches in silence as the wreck appears, watches intently as the skip’s images show a tiny Turtle and Karl slid across the guideline.

The group listens to the arguments, and Jypé nods when Karl makes his unilateral decision to use the probe. The nod reassures me. Jypé is as practical as I’d hoped he’d be.

I move to the probe footage next. I haven’t previewed it. We’ve all seen probe footage before, so we ignore the grainy picture, the thin light, and the darkness beyond.

The probe doesn’t examine so much as explore: its job is to go as far inside as possible, to see if that hole provides an easy entrance into the wreck.

It looks so easy for ten meters—nothing along the edges, just light and darkness and weird particles getting disturbed by our movements.

Then the hole narrows and we can see the walls as large shapes all around the probe. The hole narrows more, and the walls become visible in the light—a shinier metal, one less damaged by space debris. The particles thin out too.

Finally a wall looms ahead. The hole continues, so small that it seems like the probe can continue. The probe actually sends a laser pulse, and gets back a measurement: the hole is six centimeters in diameter, more than enough for the equipment to go through.

But when the probe reaches that narrow point, it slams into a barrier. The barrier isn’t visible. The probe runs several more readouts, all of them denying that the barrier is there.

Then there’s a registered tug on the line: Karl trying to get the probe out. Several more tugs later, Karl and Turtle decide the probe’s stuck. They take even more readouts, and then shut it down, planning to use it later.

The readouts tell us nothing except that the hole continues, six centimeters in diameter, for another two meters.

“What the hell do you think that is?” Junior asks. His voice hasn’t finished its change yet, even though both Jypé and Junior swear he’s over eighteen.

“Could be some kind of forcefield,” Squishy says.

“In a vessel that old?” Turtle asks. “Not likely.”

“How old is that?” Squishy’s entire body is tense. It’s clear now that she and Turtle have been fighting.

“How old is that, boss?” Turtle asks me.

They all look at me. They know I have an idea. They know age is one of the reasons they’re here.

I shrug. “That’s one of the things we’re going to confirm.”

“Confirm.” Karl catches the word. “Confirm what? What do you know that we don’t?”

“Let’s run the readouts before I answer that,” I say.

“No.” Squishy crosses her arms. “Tell us.”

Turtle gets up. She pushes two icons on the console beside me, and the suits’ technical readouts come up. She flashes forward, through numbers and diagrams and chemical symbols to the conclusions.

“Over five thousand years old.” Turtle doesn’t look at Squishy. “That’s what the boss isn’t telling us. This wreck is human-made, and it’s been here longer than humans have been in this section of space.”

Karl stares at it.

Squishy shakes her head. “Not possible. Nothing human made would’ve survived to make it this far out. Too many gravity wells, too much debris.”

“Five thousand years,” Jypé says.

I let them talk. In their voices, in their argument, I hear the same argument that went through my head when I got my first readouts about the wreck.

It’s Junior that stops the discussion. In his half-tenor, half-baritone way, he says, “C’mon, gang, think a little. That’s why the boss brought us out here. To confirm her suspicions.”

“Or not,” I say.

Everyone looks at me as if they’ve just remembered I’m there.

“Wouldn’t it be better if we knew your suspicions?” Squishy asks.

Karl is watching me, eyes slitted. It’s as if he’s seeing me for the first time.

“No, it wouldn’t be better.” I speak softly. I make sure to have eye contact with each of them before I continue. “I don’t want you to use my scholarship—or lack thereof—as the basis for your assumptions.”

“So should we discuss this with each other?” Squishy ‘s using that snide tone with me now. I don’t know what has her so upset, but I’m going to have to find out. If she doesn’t calm down, she’s not going near the wreck.

“Sure,” I say.

“All right.” She leans back, staring at the readouts still floating before us. “If this thing is five thousand years old, human made, and somehow it came to this spot at this time, then it can’t have a forcefield.”

“Or fake readouts like the probe found,” Jypé says.

“Hell,” Turtle says. “It shouldn’t be here at all. Space debris should’ve pulverized it. That’s too much time. Too much distance.”

“So what’s it doing here?” Karl asked.

I shrug for the third and last time. “Let’s see if we can find out.”

***

They don’t rest. They’re as obsessed with the readouts as I’ve been. They study time and distance and drift, forgetting the weirdness inside the hole. I’m the one who focuses on that.

I don’t learn much. We need more information—we revisit the probe twice while looking for another way into the ship—and even then, we don’t get a lot of new information.

Either the barrier is new technology or it is very old technology, technology that has been lost. So much technology has been lost in the thousands of years since this ship was built.

It seems like humans constantly have to reinvent everything.

***

Six dives later and we still haven’t found a way inside the ship. Six dives, and no new information. Six dives, and my biggest problem is Squishy.

She has become angrier and angrier as the dives continue. I’ve brought her along on the seventh dive to man the skip with me, so that we can talk.

Junior and Jypé are the divers. They’re exploring what I consider to be the top of the ship, even though I’m only guessing. They’re going over the surface centimeter by centimeter, exploring each part of it, looking for a weakness that we can exploit.

I monitor their equipment using the skip’s computer, and I monitor them with my eyes, watching the tiny figures move along the narrow blackness of the skip itself.

Squishy stands beside me, at military attention, her hands folded behind her back.

She knows she’s been brought for conversation only; she’s punishing me by refusing to speak until I broach the subject first.

Finally, when J&J are past the dangerous links between two sections of the ship, I mimic Squishy’s posture—hands behind my back, shoulders straight, legs slightly spread.

“What’s making you so angry?” I ask.

She stares at the team on top of the wreck. Her face is a smooth reproach to my lack of attention; the monitor on board the skip should always pay attention to the divers.

I taught her that. I believe that. Yet here I am, reproaching another person while the divers work the wreck.

“Squishy?” I ask.

She isn’t answering me. Just watching, with that implacable expression.

“You’ve had as many dives as everyone else,” I say. “I’ve never questioned your work, yet your mood has been foul, and it seems to be directed at me. Do we have an issue I don’t know about?”

Finally she turns, and the move is as military as the stance was. Her eyes narrow.

“You could’ve told us this was a Dignity Vessel,” she says.

My breath catches. She agrees with my research. I don’t understand why that makes her angry.

“I could’ve,” I say. “But I feel better that you came to your own conclusion.”

“I’ve known it since the first dive,” she says. “I wanted you to tell them. You didn’t. They’re still wasting time trying to figure out what they have here.”

“What they have here is an anomaly,” I say, “something that makes no sense and can’t be here.”

“Something dangerous.” She crosses her arms. “Dignity Vessels were used in wartime.”

“I know the legends.” I glance at the wreck, then at the handheld readout. J&J are working something that might be a hatch.

“A lot of wartimes,” she says, “over many centuries, from what historians have found out.”

“But never out here,” I say.

And she concedes. “Never out here.”

“So what are you so concerned about?”

“By not telling us what it is, we can’t prepare,” she says. “What if there’re weapons or explosives or something else—”

“Like that barrier?” I ask.

Her lips thin.

“We’ve worked unknown wrecks before, you and me, together.”

She shrugs. “But they’re of a type. We know the history, we know the vessels, we know the capabilities. We don’t know this at all. No one really knows what these ancient ships were capable of. It’s something that shouldn’t be here.”

“A mystery,” I say.

“A dangerous one.”

“Hey!” Junior’s voice is tinny and small. “We got it open! We’re going in.”

Squishy and I turn toward the sound. I can’t see either man on the wreck itself. The handheld’s imagery is shaky.

I press the comm, hoping they can still hear me. “Probe first. Remember that barrier.”

But they don’t answer, and I know why not. I wouldn’t either in their situation. They’re pretending they don’t hear. They want to be the first inside, the first to learn the secrets of the wreck.

The handheld moves inside the darkness. I see four tiny lights—Jypé’s glove lights—and I see the same particles I saw before, on the first images from the earliest probe.

Then the handheld goes dark. We were going to have to adjust it to transmit through the metal of the wreck.

“I don’t like this,” Squishy says.

I’ve never liked any time I was out of sight and communication with the team.

We stare at the wreck as if it can give us answers. It’s big and dark, a blob against our screen. Squishy actually goes to the portals and looks, as if she can see more through them than she can through the miracle of science.

But she doesn’t. And the handheld doesn’t wink on.

On my screen, the counter ticks away the minutes.

Our argument isn’t forgotten, but it’s on hold as the first members of our little unit vanish inside.

After thirty-five minutes—fifteen of them inside (Jypé has rigorously stuck to the schedule on each of his dives, something which has impressed me)—I start to get nervous.

I hate the last five minutes of waiting. I hate it even more when the waiting goes on too long, when someone doesn’t follow the time-table I’ve devised.

Squishy, who’s never been in the skip with me, is pacing. She doesn’t say any more—not about danger, not about the way I’m running this little trip, not about the wreck itself.

I watch her as she moves, all grace and form, just like she’s always been. She’s never been on a real mystery run. She’s done dangerous ones—maybe two hundred deep space dives into wrecks that a lot of divers, even the most greedy, would never touch.

But she’s always known what she’s diving into, and why it’s where it is.

Not only are we uncertain as to whether or not this is an authentic Dignity Vessel (and really, how can it be?), we also don’t know why it’s here, how it came here, or what its cargo was. We have no idea what its mission was either—if, indeed, it had a mission at all.

37:49

Squishy’s stopped pacing. She looks out the portals again, as if the view has changed. It hasn’t.

“You’re afraid, aren’t you?” I ask. “That’s the bottom line, isn’t it? This is the first time in years that you’ve been afraid.”

She stops, stares at me as if I’m a creature she’s never seen before, and then frowns.

“Aren’t you?” she asks.

I shake my head.

The handheld springs to life, images bouncy and grainy on the corner of my screen. My stomach unclenches. I’ve been breathing shallowly and not even realizing it.

Maybe I am afraid, just a little.

But not of the wreck. The wreck is a curiosity, a project, a conundrum no one else has faced before.

I’m afraid of deep space itself, of the vastness of it. It’s inexplicable to me, filled with not just one mystery, but millions, and all of them waiting to be solved.

A crackle, then a voice—Jypé’s.

“We got a lot of shit.” He sounds gleeful. He sounds almost giddy with relief.

Squishy lets out the breath she’s obviously been holding.

“We’re coming in,” Junior says.

It’s 40:29.

***

The wreck’s a Dignity Vessel, all right. It’s got a DV number etched inside the hatch, just like the materials say it should. We mark the number down to research later.

Instead, we’re gathered in the lounge, watching the images J&J have brought back.

They have the best equipment. Their suits don’t just have sensors and readouts, but they have chips that store a lot of imagery woven into the suits’ surfaces. Most suits can’t handle the extra weight, light as it is, or the protections to ensure that the chips don’t get damaged by the environmental changes—the costs are too high, and if the prices stay in line, then either the suits’ human protections are compromised, or the imagery is.

Two suits, two vids, so much information.

The computer cobbles it together into two different information streams—one from Jypé’s suit’s prospective, the other from Junior’s. The computer cleans and enhances the images, clarifies edges if it can read them and leaves them fuzzy if it can’t.

Not much is fuzzy here. Most of it is firm, black-and-white only because of the purity of the glovelights and the darkness that surrounds them.

Here’s what we see:

From Junior’s point-of-view, Jypé going into the hatch. The edge is up, rounded, like it’s been opened a thousand times a day instead of once in thousands of years. Then the image switches to Jypé’s legcams and at that moment, I stop keeping track of which images belong to which diver.

The hatch itself is round, and so is the tunnel it leads down. Metal rungs are built into the wall. I’ve seen these before: they’re an ancient form of ladder, ineffective and dangerous. Jypé clings to one rung, then turns and pushes off gently, drifting slowly deep into a darkness that seems profound.

Numbers are etched on the walls, all of them following the letters DV, done in ancient script. The numbers are repeated over and over again—the same ones—and it’s Karl who figures out why: each piece of the vessel has the numbers etched into it, in case the vessel was destroyed. Its parts could always be identified then.

Other scratches marked the metal, but we can’t read them in the darkness. Some of them aren’t that visible, even in the glovelights. It takes Jypé a while to remember he has lights on the soles of his feet as well—a sign, to me, of his inexperience.

Ten meters down, another hatch. It opens easily, and ten meters beneath it is another.

That one reveals a nest of corridors leading in a dozen different directions. A beep resounds in the silence and we all glance at our watches before we realize it’s on the recording.

The reminder that half the dive time is up.

Junior argues that a few more meters won’t hurt. Maybe see if there are items off those corridors, something they can remove, take back to the Business and examine.

But Jypé keeps to the schedule. He merely shakes his head, and his son listens.

Together they ascend, floating easily along the tunnel as they entered it, leaving the interior hatches open, and only closing the exterior one, as we’d all learned in dive training.

The imagery ends, and the screen fills with numbers, facts, figures and readouts which I momentarily ignore. The people in the room are more important. We can sift through the numbers later.

There’s energy here—a palpable excitement—dampened only by Squishy’s fear. She stands with her arms wrapped around herself, as far from Turtle as she can get.

“A Dignity Vessel,” Karl says, his cheeks flushed. “Who’d’ve thought?”

“You knew,” Turtle says to me.

I shrug. “I hoped.”

“It’s impossible,” Jypé says, “and yet I was inside it.”

“That’s the neat part,” Junior says. “It’s impossible and it’s here.”

Squishy is the only one who doesn’t speak. She stares at the readouts as if she can see more in them than I ever will.

“We have so much work to do,” says Karl. “I think we should go back home, research as much as we can, and then come back to the wreck.”

“And let others dive her?” Turtle says. “People are going to ghost us, track our research, look at what we’re doing. They’ll find the wreck and claim it as their own.”

“You can’t claim this deep,” Junior says, then looks at me. “Can you?”

“Sure you can,” I say. “But a claim’s an announcement that the wreck’s here. Something like this, we’ll get jumpers for sure.”

“Karl’s right.” Squishy’s voice is the only one not tinged with excitement. “We should go back.”

“What’s wrong with you?” Turtle says. “You used to love wreck diving.”

“Have you read about early period stealth technology?” Squishy asks. “Do you have any idea what damage it can do?”

Everyone is looking at her now. She still has her back to us, her arms wrapped around herself so tightly her shirt pulls. The screen’s readout lights her face, but all we can see are parts of it, illuminating her hair like an inverse nimbus.

“Why would you have studied stealth tech?” Karl asks.

“She was military,” Turtle says. “Long, long ago, before she realized she hates rules. Where’d you think she learned field medicine?”

“Still,” Karl says, “I was military too—”

Which explained a lot.

“—and no one ever taught me about stealth tech. It’s the stuff of legends and kid’s tales.”

“It was banned.” Squishy’s voice is soft, but has power. “It was banned five hundred years ago, and every few generations, we try to revive it or modify it or improve it. Doesn’t work.”

“What doesn’t work?” Junior asks.

The tension is rising. I can’t let it get too far out of control, but I want to hear what Squishy has to say.

“The tech shadows the ships, makes them impossible to see, even with the naked eye,” Squishy says.

“Bullshit,” Turtle says. “Stealth just masks instruments, makes it impossible to read the ships on equipment. That’s all.”

Squishy turns, lets her arms drop. “You know all about this now? Did you spend three years studying stealth? Did you spend two years of post-doc trying to recreate it?”

Turtle is staring at her like she’s never seen her before. “Of course not.”

“You have?” Karl asks.

Squishy nods. “Why do you think I find things? Why do you think I like finding things that are lost?”

Junior shakes his head. I’m not following the connection either.

“Why?” Jypé asks. Apparently he’s not following it as well.

“Because,” Squishy says, “I’ve accidentally lost so many things.”

“Things?” Karl’s voice is low. His face seems pale in the lounge’s dim lighting.

“Ships, people, materiel. You name it, I lost it trying to make it invisible to sensors. Trying to recreate the tech you just found on that ship.”

My breath catches. “How do you know it’s there?”

“We’ve been looking at it from the beginning,” Squishy says. “That damn probe is stuck like half my experiments got stuck, between one dimension and another. There’s only one way in and no way out. And the last thing you want—the very last thing—is for one of us to get stuck like that.”

“I don’t believe it.” Turtle says with such force that I know she and Squishy have been having this argument from the moment we first saw the wreck.

“Believe it.” Squishy says that to me, not Turtle. “Believe it with all that you are. Get us out of here, and if you’re truly humane, blow that wreck up, so no one else can find it.”

“Blow it up?” Junior whispers.

The action is so opposite anything I know that I feel a surge of anger. We don’t blow up the past. We may search it, loot it, and try to understand it, but we don’t destroy it.

“Get rid it.” Squishy’s eyes are filled with tears. She’s looking at me, speaking only to me. “Boss, please. It’s the only sane thing to do.”

***

Sane or not, I’m torn.

If Squishy’s right, then I have a dual dilemma: the technology is lost, new research on it banned, even though the military keeps conducting research anyway trying, if I’m understanding Squishy right, to rediscover something we knew thousands of years before.

Which makes this wreck so very valuable that I could more than retire with the money we’d get for selling it. I would—we would—be rich for the rest of our very long lives.

Is the tech dangerous because the experiments to rediscover it are dangerous? Or is it dangerous because there’s something inherent about it that makes it unfeasible now and forever?

Karl is right: to do this properly, we have to go back and research Dignity Vessels, stealth tech, and the last few thousand years.

But Turtle’s also right: we’ll take a huge chance of losing the wreck if we do that. We’ll be like countless other divers who sit around bars throughout this sector and bemoan the treasures they lost because they didn’t guard them well enough.

We can’t leave. We can’t even let Squishy leave. We have to stay until we make a decision.

Until I make a decision.

On my own.

***

First, I look up Squishy’s records. Not her dive histories, not her arrest records, not her disease manifolds—the stuff any dive captain would examine—but her personal history, who she is, what she’s done, who she’s become.

I haven’t done that on any of my crew before. I’ve always thought it an invasion of privacy. All we need to know, I’d say to other dive captains, is whether they can handle the equipment, whether they’ll steal from their team members, and if their health is good enough to handle the rigors.

And I believed it until now, until I found myself digging through layers of personal history that are threaded into the databases filling the Business’s onboard computer.

Fortunately for me and my nervous stomach, the more sensitive databases are linked only to me—no one else even knows they exist (although anyone with brains would guess that they do)—and even if someone finds the databases, no one can access them without my codes, my retinal scan, and, in many cases, a sample of my DNA.

Still, I’m skittish as I work this—sound off, screen on dim. I’m in the cockpit, which is my domain, and I have the doors to the main cabin locked. I feel like everyone on the Business knows I’m betraying Squishy. And I feel like they all hate me for it.

Squishy’s real name is Rosealma Quintinia. She was born forty years ago in a multinational cargo vessel called The Bounty. Her parents insisted she spend half her day in artificial gravity so she wouldn’t develop spacer’s limbs—truncated, fragile—and she didn’t. But she gained a grace that enabled her to go from zero-G to Earth Normal and back again without much transition at all, a skill few ever gain.

Her family wanted her to cargo, maybe even pirate, but she rebelled. She had a scientific mind, and without asking anyone’s permission, took the boards—scoring a perfect 100, something no cargo monkey had ever done before.

A hundred schools all over the known systems wanted her. They offered her room, board, and tuition, but only one offered her all expenses paid both coming and going from the school, covering the only cost that really mattered to a spacer’s kid—the cost of travel.

She went, of course, and vanished into the system, only to emerge twelve years later—too thin, too poor, and too bitter to ever be considered a success. She signed on with a cargo vessel as a medic, and soon became one of its best and most fearless divers.

She met Turtle in a bar, and they became lovers. Turtle showed her that private divers make more money, and brought her to me.

And that was when our partnership began.

I sigh, rub my eyes with my thumb and forefinger, and lean my head against the screen.

Much as I regret it, it’s time for questions now.

***

Of course, she’s waiting for me.

She’s brought down the privacy wall in the room she initially shared with Turtle, making their rift permanent. Her bed is covered with folded clothes. Her personal trunk is open at the foot. She’s already packed her nightclothes and underwear inside.

“You’re leaving?” I ask.

“I can’t stay. I don’t believe in the mission. You’ve preached forever the importance of unity, and I believe you, Boss. I’m going to jeopardize everything.”

“You’re acting like I’ve already made a decision about the future of this mission.”

“Haven’t you?” She sits on the edge of the bed, hands folded primly in her lap, her back straight Her bearing is military—something I’ve always seen, but never really noticed until now.

“Tell me about stealth tech,” I say.

She raises her chin slightly. “It’s classified.”

“That’s fucking obvious.”

She glances at me, clearly startled. “You tried to research it?”

I nod. I tried to research it when I was researching Dignity Vessels. I tried again from the Business. I couldn’t find much, but I didn’t have to tell her that.

That was fucking obvious too.

“You’ve broken rules before,” I say. “You can break them again.”

She looks away, staring at that opaque privacy wall—so representative of what she’d become. The solid backbone of my crew suddenly doesn’t support any of us any more. She’s opaque and difficult, setting up a divider between herself and the rest of us.

“I swore an oath.”

“Well, let me help you break it,” I snap. “If I try to enter that barrier, what’ll happen to me?”

“Don’t.” She whispers the word. “Just leave, Boss.”

“Convince me.”

“If I tell you, you gotta swear you’ll say nothing about this.”

“I swear.” I’m not sure I believe me. My voice is shaky, my tone something that sounds strange to even me.

But the oath—however weak it is—is what Squishy wants.

Squishy takes a deep breath, but she doesn’t change her posture. In fact, she speaks directly to the wall, not turning toward me at all.

“I became a medic after my time in Stealth,” she says. “I decided I had to save lives after taking so many of them. It was the only way to balance the score…”

***

Experts believe stealth tech was deliberately lost. Too dangerous, too risky. The original stealth scientists all died under mysterious circumstances, all much too young and without recording any part of their most important discoveries.

Through the ages, their names were even lost, only to be rediscovered by a major researcher, visiting Old Earth in the latter part of the past century.

Squishy tells me all this in a flat voice. She sounds like she’s reciting a lecture from very long ago. Still, I listen, word for word, not asking any questions, afraid to break her train of thought.

Afraid she’ll never return to any of it.

Earth-owned Dignity Vessels had all been stripped centuries before, used as cargo ships, used as junk. An attempt to reassemble one about five hundred years ago failed because the Dignity Vessels’ main components and their guidance systems were never, ever found, either in junk or in blueprint form.

A few documents, smuggled to the colonies on Earth’s Moon, suggested that stealth tech was based on interdimensional science—that the ships didn’t vanish off radar because of a “cloak” but because they traveled, briefly, into another world—a parallel universe that’s similar to our own.

I recognized the theory—it’s the one on which time travel is based, even though we’ve never discovered time travel, at least not in any useful way, and researchers all over the universe discourage experimentation in it. They prefer the other theory of time travel, the one that says time is not linear, that we only perceive it as linear, and to actually time travel would be to alter the human brain.

But what Squishy is telling me is that it’s possible to time travel, it’s possible to open small windows in other dimensions, and bend them to our will.

Only, she says, those windows don’t bend as nicely as we like, and for every successful trip, there are two that don’t function as well.

I ask for an explanation, but she shakes her head.

“You can get stuck,” she says, “like that probe. Forever and ever.”

“You think this is what the Dignity Vessels did?”

She shakes her head. “I think their stealth tech is based on some form of this multi-dimensional travel, but not in any way we’ve been able to reproduce.”

“And this ship we have here? Why are you so afraid of it?” I ask.

“Because you’re right.” She finally looks at me. There are shadows under her eyes. Her face is skeletal, the lower lip trembling. “The ship shouldn’t be here. No Dignity Vessel ever left the sector of space around Earth. They weren’t designed to travel vast distances, let alone halfway across our known universe.”

I nod. She’s not telling me something I don’t already know. “So?”

“So,” she says. “Dozens and dozens of those ships never returned to port.”

“Shot down, destroyed. They were battleships, after all.”

“Shot down, destroyed, or lost,” she says. “I vote for lost. Or used for something, some mission now lost in time.”

I shrug. “So?”

“So you wondered why no one’s seen this before, why no one’s found it, why the ship itself has drifted so very far from home.”

I nod.

“Maybe it didn’t drift.”

“You think it was purposely sent here?”

She shakes her head. “What if it stealthed on a mission to the outer regions of Old Earth’s area of space?”

My stomach clenches.

“What if,” she says, “the crew tried to destealth—and ended up here?”

“Five thousand years ago?”

She shakes her head. “A few generations ago. Maybe more, maybe less. But not very long. And you were just the lucky one who found it.”

***

I spend the entire night listening to her theories.

I hear about the experiments, the forty-five deaths, the losses she suffered in a program that started the research from scratch.

After she left R&D and went into medicine, she used her high security clearance to explore older files. She found pockets of research dating back nearly five centuries, the pertinent stuff gutted, all but the assumptions gone.

Stealth tech. Lost, just like I assumed. And no one’d been able to recreate it.

I listen and evaluate, and realize, somewhere in the dead of night, that I’m not a scientist.

But I am a pragmatist, and I know, from my own research, that Dignity Vessels, with their stealth tech, existed for more than two hundred years. Certainly not something that would have happened had the stealth technology been as flawed as Squishy said.

So many variables, so much for me to weigh.

And beneath it all, a greed pulses, one that—until tonight—I thought I didn’t have.

For the last five centuries, our military has researched stealth tech and failed.

Failed.

I might have all the answers only a short distance away, in a wreck no one else has noticed, a wreck that is—for the moment anyway—completely my own.

***

I leave Squishy to sleep. I tell her to clear her bed, that she has to remain with the group, no matter what I decide.

She nods as if she’s expecting that, and maybe she is. She grabs her nightclothes as I let myself out of the room, and into the much cooler, more dimly lit corridor.

As I walk to my own quarters, Jypé finds me.

“She tell you anything worthwhile?” His eyes are a little too bright. Is greed eating at him like it’s eating at me? I’m almost afraid to ask.

“No,” I say. “She didn’t. The work she did doesn’t seem all that relevant to me.”

I’m lying. I really do want to sleep on this. I make better decisions when I’m rested.

“There isn’t much history on the Dignity Vessels—at least that’s specific,” he says. “And your database has nothing on this one, no serial number listing, nothing. I wish you’d let us link up with an outside system.”

“You want someone else to know where we are and what we’re doing?” I ask.

He grins. “It’d be easier.”

“And dumber.”

He nods. I take a step forward and he catches my arm.

“I did check one other thing,” he says.

I am tired. I want sleep more than I can say. “What?”

“I learned long ago that if you can’t find something in history, you look in legends. There’s truths there. You just have to dig more for them.”

I wait. The sparkle in his eyes grows.

“There’s an old spacer’s story that has gotten repeated through various cultures for centuries as governments have come and gone. A spacer’s story about a fleet of Dignity Vessels.”

“What?” I asked. “Of course there was a fleet of them. Hundreds, if the old records are right.”

He waves me off. “More than that. Some say the fleet’s a thousand strong, some say it’s a hundred strong. Some don’t give a number. But all the legends talk about the vessels being on a mission to save the worlds beyond the stars, and how the ships moved from port to port, with parts cobbled together so that they could move beyond their design structures.”

I’m awake again, just like he knew I would be. “There are a lot of these stories?”

“And they follow a trajectory—one that would work if you were, say, leading a fleet of ships out of your area of space.”

“We’re far away from the Old Earth area of space. We’re so far away, humans from that period couldn’t even imagine getting to where we are now.”

“So we say. But think how many years this would take, how much work it would take.”

“Dignity Vessels didn’t have FTL,” I say.

“Maybe not at first.” He’s fairly bouncing from his discovery. I’m feeling a little more hopeful as well. “But in that cobbling, what if someone gave them FTL.?”

“Gave them,” I muse. No one in the worlds I know gives anyone anything.

“Or sold it to them. Can you imagine? One legend calls them a fleet of ships for hire, out to save worlds they’ve never seen.”

“Sounds like a complete myth.”

“Yeah,” he says, “it’s only a legend. But I think sometimes these legends become a little more concrete.”

“Why?”

“We have an actual Dignity Vessel out there, that got here somehow.”

“Did you see evidence of cobbling?” I ask.

“How would I know?” he asks. “Have you checked the readouts? Do they give different dates for different parts of the ship?”

I hadn’t looked at the dating. I had no idea if it was different. But I don’t say that.

“Download the exact specs for a Dignity Vessel,” I say. “The materials, where everything should be, all of that.”

“Didn’t you do that before you came here?” he asks.

“Yes, but not in the detail of the ship’s composition. Most people rebuild ships exactly as they were before they got damaged, so the shape would remain the same. Only the components would differ. I meant to check our readouts against what I’d brought, but I haven’t yet. I’ve been diverted by the stealth tech thing, and now I’m going to get a little sleep. So you do it.”

He grins. “Aye, aye, captain.”

“Boss,” I mutter as I stagger down the corridor to my bed. “I can’t tell you how much I prefer boss.”

***

I sleep, but not long. My brain’s too busy. I’m sure those specs are different which confirms nothing. It just means that someone repaired the vessel at one point or another. But what if the materials are the kind that weren’t available in the area of space around Earth when Dignity Vessels were built? That disproves Squishy’s worry about the tech of that thing.

I’m at my hardwired terminal when Squishy comes to my door. I’ve gone through five or six layers of security to get to some very old data, data that aren’t accessible from any other part of my ship’s networked computer system.

Squishy waits. I’m hoping she’ll leave, but of course she doesn’t. After a few minutes, she coughs.

I sigh audibly. “We talked last night.”

“I have one more thing to ask.”

She stepped inside, unbidden, and closed the door. My quarters felt claustrophobic with another person inside them. I’d always been alone here—always—even when I had a liaison with one of the crew. I’d go to his quarters, never bring him into my own.

The habits of privacy are long engrained, and the habits of secrecy even longer. It’s how I’ve protected my turf for so many years, and how I’ve managed to first-dive so many wrecks.

I dim the screen and turn to her. “Ask.”

Her eyes are haunted. She looks like she’s gotten even less sleep than I have.

“I’m going to try one last time,” she says. “Please blow the wreck up. Make it go away. Don’t let anyone else inside. Forget it was here.”

I fold my hands on my lap. Yesterday I hadn’t had an answer for that request. Today I do. I’d thought about it off and on all night, just like I’d thought about the differing stories I’d heard from her and from Jypé, and how, I realized fifteen minutes before my alarm, neither of them had to be true.

“Please,” she says.

“I’m not a scientist,” I say, which should warn her right off, but of course it doesn’t. Her gaze doesn’t change. Nothing about her posture changes. “I’ve been thinking about this. If this stealth tech is as powerful as you claim, then we might be making things even worse. What if the explosion triggers the tech? What if we blow a hole between dimensions? Or maybe destroy something else, something we can’t see?”

Her cheeks flush slightly.

“Or maybe the explosion’ll double-back on us. I recall something about Dignity Vessels being unfightable, that anything that hit them rebounded to the other ship. What if that’s part of the stealth tech?”

“It was a feature of the shields,” she says with a bit of sarcasm. “They were unknown in that era.”

“Still,” I say. “You understand stealth tech more than I do, but you don’t really understand it or you’d be able to replicate it, right?’

“I think there’s a flaw in that argument—”

“But you don’t really grasp it, right? So you don’t know if blowing up the wreck will create a situation here, something worse than anything we’ve seen.”

“I’m willing to risk it.” Her voice is flat. So are her eyes. It’s as if she’s a person I don’t know, a person I’ve never met before. And something in those eyes, something cold and terrified, tells me that if I met her this morning, I wouldn’t want to know her.

“I like risks,” I say. “I just don’t like that one. It seems to me that the odds are against us.”

“You and me, maybe,” she says. “But there’s a lot more to ‘us’ than just this little band of people. You let that wreck remain and you bring something dangerous back into our lives, our culture.”

“I could leave it for someone else,” I say. “But I really don’t want to.”

“You think I’m making this up. You think I’m worrying over nothing.” She sounds bitter.

“No,” I say. “But you already told me that the military is trying to recreate this thing, over and over again. You tell me that people die doing it. My research tells me these ships worked for hundreds of years, and I think, maybe your methodology was flawed. Maybe getting the real stealth tech into the hands of people who can do something with it will save lives.”

She stares at me, and I recognize the expression. It must have been the one I’d had when I looked at her just a few moments ago.

I’d always known that greed and morals and beliefs destroyed friendships. I also knew they influenced more dives than I cared to think about.

But I’d always tried to keep them out of my ship and out of my dives. That’s why I pick my crews so carefully; why I call the ship Nobody’s Business.

Somehow, I never expected Squishy to start the conflict.

Somehow, I never expected the conflict to be with me.

“No matter what I say, you’re going to dive that wreck, aren’t you?” she asks.

I nod.

Her sigh is as audible as mine was, and just as staged. She wants me to understand that her disapproval is deep, that she will hold me accountable if all the terrible things she imagines somehow come to pass.

We stare at each other in silence. It feels like we’re having some kind of argument, an argument without words. I’m loathe to break eye contact.

Finally, she’s the one who looks away.

“You want me to stay,” she says. “Fine. I’ll stay. But I have some conditions of my own.”

I expected that. In fact, I’d expected that earlier, when she’d first come to my quarters, not this prolonged discussion about destroying the wreck.

“Name them.”

“I’m done diving,” she says. “I’m not going near that thing, not even to save lives.”

“All right.”

“But I’ll man the skip, if you let me bring some of my medical supplies.”

So far, I see no problems. “All right.”

“And if something goes wrong—and it will—I reserve the right to give my notes, both audio and digital, to any necessary authorities. I reserve the right to tell them what we found and how I warned you. I reserve the right to tell them that you’re the one responsible for everything that happens.”

“I am the one responsible,” I say. “But the entire group has signed off on the hazards of wreck diving. Death is one of the risks.”

A lopsided smile fills her face, but doesn’t reach her eyes. The smile itself seems like sarcasm.

“Yeah,” she says as if she’s never heard me make that speech before. “I suppose it is.”

***

I tell the others that Squishy has some concerns about the stealth tech and wants to operate as our medic instead of as a main diver. No one questions that. Such things happen on long dives—someone gets squeamish about the wreck; or terrified of the dark; or nearly dies and decides to give up wreck-diving then and there.

We’re a superstitious bunch when it gets down to it. We put on our gear in the same order each and every time; we all have one piece of equipment we shouldn’t but we feel we need just to survive; and we like to think there’s something watching over us, even if it’s just a pile of luck and an ancient diving belt.

The upside of Squishy’s decision is that I get to dive the wreck. I have a good pilot, although not a great one, manning the skip, and I know that she’ll make sensible decisions. She’ll never impulsively come in to save a team member. She’s said so, and I know she means it.

The downside is that she’s a better diver than I am. She’d find things I never would; she’d see things I’ll never see; she’d avoid things I don’t even know are dangerous.

Which is why, on my first dive to that wreck, I set myself up with Turtle, the most experienced member of the dive team after Squishy.

The skip ride over is tense: those two have gone beyond not talking into painful and outspoken silence. I spend most of my time going over and over my equipment looking for flaws. Much as I want to dive this wreck—and I have since the first moment I saw her—I’m scared of the deep and the dark and the unknown. Those first few instances of weightlessness always catch me by surprise, always remind me that what I do is somehow unnatural.

Still, we get to our normal spot, I suit up, and somehow I make it through those first few minutes, zip along the tether with Turtle just a few meters ahead of me, and make my way to the hatch.

Turtle’s gonna take care of the recording and the tracking for this trip. She knows the wreck is new to me. She’s been inside once now, and so has Karl. Junior and Jypé had the dive before this one.

I’ve assigned three corridors: one to Karl, one to J&J, and one to Turtle. Once we discover what’s at the end of those babies, we’ll take a few more. I’m floating; I’ll take the corridor of the person I dive with.

Descending into the hatch is trickier than it looks on the recordings. The edges are sharper; I have to be careful about where I put my hands.

Gravity isn’t there to pull at me. I can hear my own breathing, harsh and insistent, and I wonder if I shouldn’t have taken Squishy’s advice: a ten/ten/ten split on my first dive instead of a twenty/twenty/twenty. It takes less time to reach the wreck now; we get inside in nine minutes flat. I would’ve had time to do a bit of acclimatizing and to have a productive dive the next time.

But I hadn’t been thinking that clearly, obviously. I’d been more interested in our corridor, hoping it led to the control room whatever that was.

Squishy had been thinking, though. Before I left, she tanked me up with one more emergency bottle. She remembered how on my first dives after a long lay-off, I used too much oxygen.

She remembered that I sometimes panic.

I’m not panicked now, just excited. I have all my exterior suit lights on, trying to catch the various nooks and crannies of the hatch tube that leads into the ship.

Turtle’s not far behind. Because I’m lit up like a tourist station, she’s not using her boot lights. She’s letting me set the pace, and I’m probably setting it a little too fast.

We reach the corridors at 11:59. Turtle shows me our corridor at 12:03. We take off down the notched hallway at 12:06, and I’m giddy as a child on her first space walk.

Giddy we have to watch. Giddy can be the first sign of oxygen deprivation, followed by a healthy disregard for safety.

But I don’t mention this giddy. I’ve had it since Squishy bowed off the teams, and the giddy’s grown worse as my dive day got closer. I’m a little concerned—extreme emotion adds to the heavy breathing—but I’m going to trust my suit. I’m hoping it’ll tell me if the oxygen’s too low, the pressure’s off or the environmental controls are about to fail.

The corridor is human-sized and built for full gravity. Apparently no one thought of adding rungs along the side or the ceiling in case the environmental controls fail.

To me, that shows an astonishing trust in technology, one I’ve always read about but have never seen. No ship designed in the last three hundred years lacks clingholds. No ship lacks emergency oxygen supplies spaced every ten meters or so. No ship lacks communications equipment near each door.

The past feels even farther away than I thought it would. I thought once I stepped inside the wreck—even though I couldn’t smell the environment or hear what’s going on around me—I’d get a sense of what it would be like to spend part of my career in this place.

But I have no sense. I’m in a dark, dreary hallway that lacks the emergency supplies I’m used to. Turtle’s moving slower than my giddy self wants, although my cautious, experienced boss self knows that slow is best.

She’s finding handholds, and signaling me for them, like we’re climbing the outside of an alien vessel. We’re working on an ancient system—the lead person touches a place, deems it safe, uses it to push off, and the rest of the team follows.

There aren’t as many doors as I would have expected. A corridor, it seems to me, needs doors funneling off it, with the occasional side corridor bisecting it.

But there are no bisections, and every time I think we’re in a tunnel not a corridor, a door does appear. The doors are regulation height, even now, but recessed farther than I’m used to.

Turtle tries each door. They’re all jammed or locked. At the moment, we’re just trying to map the wreck. We’ll pry open the difficult places once the map is finished.

But I’d love to go inside one of those closed off spaces, probably as much as she would.

Finally, she makes a small scratch on the side of the wall, and nods at me.

The giddy fades. We’re done. We go back now—my rule—and if you get back early so be it. I check my readout: 29:01. We have ten minutes to make it back to the hatch.

I almost argue for a few more minutes, even though I know better. Sure, it didn’t take us as long to get here as it had in the past, but that doesn’t mean the return trip is going to be easy. I’ve lost four divers over the years because they made the mistake I wanted to make now.

I let Turtle pass me. She goes back, using the same push-off points as before. As she does that, I realize she’s marked them somehow, probably with something her suit can pick up. My equipment’s not that sophisticated, but I’m glad hers is. We need that kind of expertise inside this wreck. It might take us weeks just to map the space, and we can expect each other to remember each and every safe touch spot because of it.

When we get back to the skip and I drop my helmet, Squishy glares at me.

“You had the gids,” she says.

“Normal excitement,” I say.

She shakes her head. “I see this coming back the next time, and you’re grounded.”

I nod, but know she can’t ground me without my permission. It’s my ship, my wreck, my job. I’ll do what I want.

I take off the suit, indulge in some relaxation while Squishy pilots. We didn’t get much, Turtle and I, just a few more meters of corridor mapped, but it feels like we’d discovered a whole new world.

Maybe that is the gids, I don’t know. But I don’t think so. I think it’s just the reaction of an addict who returns to her addiction—an elation so great that she needs to do something with it besides acknowledge it.

And this wreck. This wreck has so many possibilities.

Only I can’t discuss them on the skip, not with Squishy at the helm and Turtle across from me. Squishy hates this project, and Turtle’s starting to. Her enthusiasm is waning, and I don’t know if it’s because of her personal war with Squishy or because Squishy has convinced her the wreck is even more dangerous than usual.

I stare out a portal, watching the wreck grow tinier and tinier in the distance. It’s ironic. Even though I’m surrounded by tension, I finally feel content.

***

Half a dozen more dives, maybe sixty more meters, mostly corridor. One potential storage compartment, which we’d initially hoped was a stateroom or quarters, and a mechanic’s corridor, filled with equipment we haven’t even begun to catalogue.

I spend my off-hours analyzing the materials. So far, nothing conclusive. Lots of evidence of cobbling, but that’s pretty common for any ship—with FTL or not—that’s made it on a long journey.

What there’s no evidence of are bodies. We haven’t found a one, and that’s even more unusual. Sometimes there’re skeletons floating—or pieces of them at least—and sometimes we get the full-blown corpse, suited and intact. A handful aren’t suited. Those’re the worst. They always make me grateful we can’t smell the ship around us.

The lack of bodies is beginning to creep out Karl. He’s even talked to me in private about skipping the next few dives.

I’m not sure what’s best. If he skips them, the attitudes might become engrained, and he might not dive again. If he goes, the fears might grow worse and paralyze him in the worst possible place.

I move him to the end of the rotation, and warn Squishy she might have to suit up after all.

She just looks at me and grins. “Too many of the team quit on you, you’ll just have to go home.”

“I’ll dive it myself, and you all can wait,” I say, but it’s bravado and we both know it.

That wreck isn’t going to defeat me, not with the perfect treasure hidden in its bulk.

That’s what’s fueling my greed. The perfect treasure: my perfect treasure. Something that answers previously unasked historical questions—previously unknown historical questions; something that will reveal facts about our history, our humanity, that no one has suspected before; and something that, even though it does all that, is worth a small—physical—fortune.

I love the history part. I get paid a lot of money to ferry people to other wrecks, teach them to dive old historical sites. Then I save up my funds and do this: find new sites that no one else knows about, and mine them for history.

I never expected to mine them for real gold as well.

I shake every time I think about it, and before each dive, I do feel the gids. Only now I report them to Squishy. I tell her that I’m a tad too excited, and she offers me a tranq which I always refuse. Never go into the unknown with senses dulled, that’s my motto, even though I know countless people who do it.

We’re on a long diving mission, longer than some of these folks have ever been on, and we’re not even halfway through. We’ll have gids and jitters and too many superstitions. We’ll have fears and near-emergencies, and God forbid, real emergencies as well.

We’ll get through it, and we’ll have our prize, and no one, not any one person, will be able to take that away from us.

***

It turned this afternoon.

I’m captaining the skip. Squishy’s back at the Business, taking a boss-ordered rest. I’m tired of her complaints and her constant negative attitude. At first, I thought she’d turn Turtle, but Turtle finally got pissed, and decided she’d enjoy this run.

I caught Squishy ragging on J&J, my strong links, asking them if they really want to be mining a death ship. They didn’t listen to her, not really—although Jypé argued with her just a little—but that kind of talk can depress an entire mission, sabotage it in subtle little ways, ways that I don’t even want to contemplate.

So I’m manning the skip alone, while J&J are running their dive, and I’m listening to the commentary, not looking at the grainy nearly worthless images from the handheld. Mostly I’m thinking about Squishy and how to send her back without sending information too and I can’t come to any conclusions at all when I hear:

“…yeah, it opens.” Junior.

“Wow.” Jypé.

“Jackpot, eh?” Junior again.

And then a long silence. Much too long for my tastes, not because I’m afraid for J&J, but because a long silence doesn’t tell me one goddamn thing.

I punch up the digital readout, see we’re at 25:33—plenty of time. They got to the new section faster than they ever have before.

The silence runs from 25:33 to 28:46, and I’m about to chew my fist off, wondering what they’re doing. The handheld shows me grainy walls and more grainy walls. Or maybe it’s just grainy nothing. I can’t tell.

For the first time in weeks, I want someone else in the skip with me just so that I can talk to somebody.

“Almost time,” Jypé says.

“Dad, you gotta see this.” Junior has a touch of breathlessness in his voice. Excitement—at least that’s what I’m hoping.

And then there’s more silence…thirty-five seconds of it, followed by a loud and emphatic “Fuck!”

I can’t tell if that’s an angry “fuck,” a scared “fuck” or an awed “fuck.” I can’t tell much about it at all.

Now I’m literally chewing on my thumbnail, something I haven’t done in years, and I’m watching the digital, which has crept past thirty-one minutes.

“Move your arm,” Jypé says, and I know then that wasn’t a good fuck at all.

Something happened.

Something bad.

“Just a little to the left,” Jypé says again, his voice oddly calm. I’m wondering why Junior isn’t answering him, hoping that the only reason is he’s in a section where the communications relay isn’t reaching the skip.

Because I can think of a thousand other reasons, none of them good, that Junior’s communication equipment isn’t working.

“We’re five minutes past departure,” Jypé says, and in that, I’m hearing the beginning of panic.

More silence.

I’m actually holding my breath. I look out a portal, see nothing except the wreck, looking like it always does. The handheld has been showing the same grainy image for a while now.

37:24

If they’re not careful, they’ll run out of air. Or worse.

I try to remember how much extra they took. I didn’t really watch them suit up this time. I’ve seen their ritual so many times that I’m not sure what I think I saw is what I actually saw. I’m not sure what they have with them, and what they don’t.

“Great,” Jypé says, and I finally recognize his tone. It’s controlled parental panic. Sound calm so that the kid doesn’t know the situation is bad. “Keep going.”

I’m holding my breath, even though I don’t have to. I’m holding my breath and looking back and forth between the portal and the handheld image. All I see is the damn wreck and that same grainy image.

“We got it,” Jypé says. “Now careful. Careful—son of a bitch! Move, move, move—ah, hell.”

I stare at the wreck, even though I can’t see inside it. My own breath sounds as ragged as it did inside the wreck. I glance at the digital:

44:11

They’ll never get out in time. They’ll never make it, and I can’t go in for them. I’m not even sure where they are.

“C’mon.” Jypé is whispering now. “C’mon son, just one more, c’mon, help me, c’mon.”

The “help me” wasn’t a request to a hearing person. It was a comment. And I suddenly know.

Junior’s trapped. He’s unconscious. His suit might even be ripped. It’s over for Junior.

Jypé has to know it on some deep level.

Only he also has to know it on the surface, in order to get out.

I reach for my own communicator before I realize there’s no talking to them inside the wreck. We’d already established that the skip doesn’t have the power to send, for reasons I don’t entirely understand. We’ve tried boosting power through the skip’s diagnostic, and even with the Business’s diagnostic, and we don’t get anything.

I judged we didn’t need it, because what can someone inside the skip do besides encourage?

“C’mon, son.” Jypé grunts. I don’t like that sound.

The silence that follows lasts thirty seconds, but it seems like forever. I move away from the portal, stare at the digital, and watch the numbers change. They seem to change in slow-motion:

45:24 to

…25 to

…2…6…

to

…2… … … 7…

until I can’t even see them change any more.

Another grunt, and then a sob, half-muffled, and another, followed by—

“Is there any way to send for help? Boss?”

I snap to when I hear my name. It’s Jypé and I can’t answer him.

I can’t answer him, dammit.

I can call for help, and I do. Squishy tells me that the best thing I can do is get the survivor—her word, not mine, even though I know it’s obvious too—back to the Business as quickly as possible.

“No sense passing midway, is there?” she asks, and I suppose she’s right.

But I’m cursing her—after I get off the line—for not being here, for failing us, even though there’s not much she can do, even if she’s here, in the skip. We don’t have a lot of equipment, medical equipment, back at the Business, and we have even less here, not that it mattered, because most of the things that happen are survivable if you make it back to the skip.

Still, I suit up. I promise myself I’m not going to the wreck, I’m not going help with Junior, but I can get Jypé along the guideline if he needs me too.

“Boss. Call for help. We need Squishy and some divers and oh, shit, I don’t know.”

His voice sounds too breathy. I glance at the digital.

56:24

Where has the time gone? I thought he was moving quicker than that. I thought I was too.

But it takes me a while to suit up, and I talked to Squishy, and everything is fucked up.

What’ll they say when we get back? The mission’s already filled with superstitions and fears of weird technology that none of us really understand.

And only me and Jypé are obsessed with this thing.

Me and Jypé.

Probably just me now.

“I left him some oxygen. I dunno if it’s enough…”

So breathy. Has Jypé left all his extra? What’s happening to Junior? If he’s unconscious, he won’t use as much, and if his suit is fucked, then he won’t need any.

“Coming through the hatch…”

I see Jypé, a tiny shape on top of the wreck. And he’s moving slowly, much too slowly for a man trying to save his own life.

My rules are clear: let him make his own way back.

But I’ve never been able to watch someone else die.

I send to the Business: “Jypé’s out. I’m heading down the line.”

I don’t use the word help on purpose, but anyone listening knows what I’m doing. They’ll probably never listen to me again, but what the hell.

I don’t want to lose two on my watch.

***

When I reach him six minutes later, he’s pulling himself along the guideline, hand over hand, so slowly that he barely seems human. A red light flashes at the base of his helmet—the out of oxygen light, dammit. He did use all of his extra for his son.

I grab one small container, hook it to the side of his suit, press the “on” only halfway, knowing too much is as bad as too little.

His look isn’t grateful: it’s startled. He’s so far gone, he hasn’t even realized that I’m here.

I brought a grappler as well, a technology I always said was more dangerous than helpful, and here’s the first test of my theory. I wrap Jypé against me, tell him to relax, I got him, and we’ll be just fine.

He doesn’t. Even though I pry him from the line, his hands still move, one over the other, trying to pull himself forward.

Instead, I yank us toward the skip, moving as fast as I’ve ever moved. I’m burning oxygen at three times my usual rate according to my suit and I don’t really care. I want him inside, I want him safe, I want him alive, goddammit.

I pull open the door to the skip. I unhook him in the airlock, and he falls to the floor like an empty suit. I make sure the back door is sealed, open the main door, and drag Jypé inside.

His skin is a grayish blue. Capillaries have burst in his eyes. I wonder what else has burst, what else has gone wrong.

There’s blood around his mouth.

I yank off the helmet, his suit protesting my every move.

“I gotta tell you,” he says. “I gotta tell you.”

I nod. I’m doing triage, just like I’ve been taught, just like I’ve done half a dozen times before.

“Set up something,” he says. “Record.”

So I do, mostly to shut him up. I don’t want him wasting more energy. I’m wasting enough for both of us, trying to save him, and cursing Squishy for not getting here, cursing everyone for leaving me on the skip, alone, with a man who can’t live, and somehow has to.

“He’s in the cockpit,” Jypé says.

I nod. He’s talking about Junior, but I really don’t want to hear it. Junior is the least of my worries.

“Wedged under some cabinet. Looks like—battlefield in there.”

That catches me. Battlefield how? Because there are bodies? Or because it’s a mess?

I don’t ask. I want him to wait, to save his strength, to survive.

“You gotta get him out. He’s only got an hour’s worth, maybe less. Get him out.”

Wedged beneath something, stuck against a wall, trapped in the belly of the wreck. Yeah, like I’ll get him out. Like it’s worth it.

All those sharp edges.

If his suit’s not punctured now, it would be by the time I’m done getting the stuff off him. Things have to be piled pretty high to get them stuck in zero-G.

I’ll wager the Business that Junior’s not stuck, not in the literal, gravitational sense. His suit’s hung up on an edge. He’s losing—he’s lost—environment and oxygen, and he’s probably been dead longer than his father’s been on the skip.

“Get him out.” Jypé’s voice is so hoarse it sounds like a whisper.

I look at his face. More blood.

“I’ll get him,” I say.

Jypé smiles. Or tries to. And then he closes his eyes, and I fight the urge to slam my fist against his chest. He’s dead and I know it, but some small part of me won’t believe it until Squishy declares him.

“I’ll get him,” I say again, and this time, it’s not a lie.

***

Squishy declared him the moment she arrived on the skip. Not that it was hard. He’d already sunken in on himself, and the blood—it wasn’t something I wanted to think about.

She flew us back. Turtle was in the other skip, and she never came in, just flew back on her own.

I stayed on the floor, expecting Jypé to rise up and curse me for not going back to the wreck, for not trying, even though we all knew—even though he probably had known—that Junior was dead.

When we got back to the Business, Squishy took his body to her little medical suite. She’s going to make sure he died from suit failure or lack of oxygen or something that keeps the regulators away from us.

Who knows what the hell he actually died of. Panic? Fear? Stupidity?—or maybe that’s what I’m doomed for. Hell, I let a man dive with his son, even though I’d ordered all of my teams to abandon a downed man.

Who can abandon his own kid anyway?

And who listens to me?

Not even me.

My quarters seem too small, the Business seems too big, and I don’t want to go anywhere because everyone’ll look at me, with an I-told-you-so followed by a let’s-hang-it-up.

And I don’t really blame them. Death’s the hardest part. It’s what we flirt with in deep-dives.

We claim that flirting is partly love.

I close my eyes and lean back on my bunk but all I see are digital readouts. Seconds moving so slowly they seem like days. The spaces between time. If only we can capture that—the space between moments.

If only.

I shake my head, wondering how I can pretend I have no regrets.

***

When I come out of my quarters, Turtle and Karl are already watching the vids from Jypé’s suit. They’re sitting in the lounge, their faces serious.

As I step inside, Turtle says, “They found the heart.”

It takes me a minute to understand her, then I remember what Jypé said. They were in the cockpit, the heart, the place we might find the stealth tech.

He was stuck there. Like the probe?

I shudder in spite of myself.

“Is the event on the vid?” I ask.

“Haven’t got that far.” Turtle shuts off the screens. “Squishy’s gone.”

“Gone?” I shake my head just a little. Words aren’t processing well. I’m having a reaction. I recognize it: I’ve had it before when I’ve lost crew.

“She took the second skip, and left. We didn’t even notice until I went to find her.” Turtle sighs. “She’s gone.”

“Jypé too?” I ask.

She nods.

I close my eyes. The mission ends, then. Squishy’ll go to the authorities and report us. She’s gonna tell them about the wreck and the accident and Junior’s death. She’s gonna show them Jypé, whom I haven’t reported yet because I didn’t want anyone to find our position, and the authorities’ll come here—whatever authorities have jurisdiction over this area—and confiscate the wreck.

At best, we’ll get a slap, and I’ll have a citation on my record.

At worst, I’ll—maybe we’ll—face charges for some form of reckless homicide.

“We can leave,” Karl says.

I nod. “She’ll report the Business. They’ll know who to look for.”

“If you sell the ship—”

“And what?” I ask. “Not buy another? That’ll keep us ahead of them for a while, but not long enough. And when we get caught, we get nailed for the full count, whatever it is, because we acted guilty and ran.”

“So, maybe she won’t say anything,” Karl says, but he doesn’t sound hopeful.

“If she was gonna do that, she woulda left Jypé,” I say.

Turtle closes her eyes, rests her head on the seat back. “I don’t know her anymore.”

“I think maybe we never did,” I say.

“I didn’t think she got scared,” Turtle says. “I yelled at her—I told her to get over it, that diving’s the thing. And she said it’s not the thing. Surviving’s the thing. She never used to be like that.”

I think of the woman sitting on her bunk, staring at her opaque wall—a wall you think you can see through, but you really can’t—and wonder. Maybe she always used to be like that. Maybe surviving was always her thing. Maybe diving was how she proved she was alive, until the past caught up with her all over again.

The stealth tech.

She thinks it killed Junior.

I nod toward the screen. “Let’s see it,” I say to Karl.

He gives me a tight glance, almost—but not quite—expressionless. He’s trying to rein himself in, but his fears are getting the best of him.

I’m amazed mine haven’t got the best of me.

He starts it up. The voices of men so recently dead, just passing information—”Push off here.” “Watch the edge there.”—makes Turtle open her eyes.

I lean against the wall, arms crossed. The conversation is familiar to me. I heard it just a few hours ago, and I’d been too preoccupied to give it much attention, thinking of my own problems, thinking of the future of this mission, which I thought was going to go on for months.

Amazing how much your perspective changes in the space of a few minutes.

The corridors look the same. It takes a lot so that I don’t zone—I’ve been in that wreck, I’ve watched similar vids, and in those I haven’t learned much. But I resist the urge to tell Karl to speed it up—there can be something, some wrong movement, piece of the wreck that gloms onto one of my guys—my former guys—before they even get to the heart.

But I don’t see anything like that, and since Turtle and Karl are quiet, I assume they don’t see anything like that either.

Then J&J find the holy grail. They say something, real casual—which I’d missed the first time—a simple “shit, man” in a tone of such awe that if I’d been paying attention, I would’ve known.

I bite back the emotion. If I took responsibility for each lost life, I’d never dive again. Of course, I might not after this anyway—one of the many options the authorities have is to take my pilot’s license away.

The vids don’t show the cockpit ahead. They show the same old grainy walls, the same old dark and shadowed corridor. It’s not until Jypé turns his suit vid toward the front that the pit’s even visible, and then it’s a black mass filled with lighter squares, covering the screen.

“What the hell’s that?” Karl asks. I’m not even sure he knows he’s spoken.

Turtle leans forward and shakes her head. “Never seen anything like it.”

Me either. As Jypé gets closer, the images become clearer. It looks like every piece of furniture in the place has become dislodged, and has shifted to one part of the cockpit.

Were the designers so confident of their artificial gravity that they didn’t bolt down the permanent pieces? Could any ship’s designers be that stupid?

Jypé’s vid doesn’t show me the floor, so I can’t see if these pieces have been ripped free. If they have, then that place is a minefield for a diver, more sharp edges than smooth ones.

My arms tighten in their cross, my fingers forming fists. I feel a tension I don’t want—as if I can save both men by speaking out now.

“You got this before Squishy took off, right?” I ask Turtle.

She understands what I’m asking. She gives me a disapproving sideways look. “I took the vids before she even had the suit off.”

Technically, that’s what I want to hear, and yet it’s not what I want to hear. I want something to be tampered with, something to be slightly off because then, maybe then, Jypé would still be alive.

“Look,” Karl says, nodding toward the screen.

I have to force myself to see it. The eyes don’t want to focus. I know what happens next—or at least, how it ends up. I don’t need the visual confirmation.

Yet I do. The vid can save us, if the authorities come back. Turtle, Karl, even Squishy can testify to my rules. And my rules state that an obviously dangerous site should be avoided. Probes get to map places like this first.

Only I know J&J didn’t send in a probe. They might not have because we lost the other so easily, but most likely, it was that greed, the same one which has been affecting me. The tantalizing idea that somehow, this wreck, with its ancient secrets, is the dive of a lifetime—the discovery of a lifetime.

And the hell of it is, beneath the fear and the panic and the anger—more at myself than at Squishy for breaking our pact—that greed remains.

I’m thinking, if we can just get the stealth tech before the authorities arrive, it’ll all be worth it. We’ll have a chip, something to bargain with.

Something to sell to save our own skins.

Junior goes in. His father doesn’t tell him not to. Junior’s blurry on the vid—a human form in an environmental suit, darker than the pile of things in the center of the room, but grayer than the black around them.

And it’s Junior who says, “It’s open,” and Junior who mutters “Wow” and Junior who says, “Jackpot, huh?” when I thought all of that had been a dialogue between them.

He points at a hole in the pile, then heads toward it, but his father moves forward quickly, grabbing his arm. They don’t talk—apparently that was the way they worked, such an understanding they didn’t need to say much, which makes my heart twist—and together they head around the pile.

The cockpit shifts. It has large screens that appear to be unretractable. They’re off, big blank canvases against dark walls. No windows in the cockpit at all, which is another one of those technologically arrogant things—what happens if the screen technology fails?

The pile is truly in the middle of the room, a big lump of things. Why Jypé called it a battlefield, I don’t know. Because of the pile? Because everything is ripped up and moved around?

My arms get even tighter, my fists clenched so hard my knuckles hurt.

On the vid, Junior breaks away from his father, and moves toward the front (if you can call it that) of the pile. He’s looking at what the pile’s attached to.

He mimes removing pieces, and the cameras shake. Apparently Jypé is shaking his head.

Yet Junior reaches in there anyway. He examines each piece before he touches it, then pushes at it, which seems to move the entire pile. He moves in closer, the pile beside him, something I can’t see on his other side. He’s floating, head first, exactly like we’re not supposed to go into one of these spaces—he’d have trouble backing out if there’s a problem—

And of course there is.

Was.

“Ah, hell,” I whisper.

Karl nods. Turtle puts her head in her hands.

On screen nothing moves.

Nothing at all.

Seconds go by, maybe a minute—I forgot to look at the digital readout from earlier, so I don’t exactly know—and then, finally, Jypé moves forward.

He reaches Junior’s side, but doesn’t touch him. Instead the cameras peer in, so I’m thinking maybe Jypé does too.

And then the monologue begins.

I’ve only heard it once, but I have it memorized.

Almost time.

Dad, you’ve gotta see this.

Jypé’s suit shows us something—a wave? A blackness? A table?—something barely visible just beyond Junior. Junior reaches for it, and then—

Fuck!

The word sounds distorted here. I don’t remember it being distorted, but I do remember being unable to understand the emotion behind it. Was that from the distortion? Or my lack of attention?

Jypé has forgotten to use his cameras. He’s moved so close to the objects in the pile that all we can see now are rounded corners and broken metal (apparently these did break off then) and sharp, sharp edges.

Move your arm.

But I see no corresponding movement. The visuals remain the same, just like they did when I was watching from the skip.

Just a little to the left.

And then:

We’re five minutes past departure.

That was panic. I had missed it the first time, but the panic began right there. Right at that moment.

Karl covers his mouth.

On screen, Jypé turns slightly. His hands grasp boots and I’m assuming he’s tugging.

Great. But I see nothing to feel great about. Nothing has moved. Keep going.

Going where? Nothing is changing. Jypé can see that, can’t he?

The hands seem to tighten their grip on the boots, or maybe I’m imagining that because that’s what my hands would do.

We got it.

Is that a slight movement? I step away from the wall, move closer to the vid, as if I can actually help.

Now careful.

This is almost worse because I know what’s coming, I know Junior doesn’t get out, Jypé doesn’t survive. I know—

Careful—son of a bitch!

The hands slid off the boot, only to grasp back on. And there’s desperation in that movement, and lack of caution, no checking for edges nearby, no standard rescue procedures.

Move, move, move—ah, hell.

This time, the hands stay. And tug—clearly tug—sliding off.

C’mon.

Sliding again.

C’mon son,

And again.

just one more,

And again.

c’mon, help me, c’mon.

Until, finally, in despair, the hands fall off. The feet are motionless, and, to my untrained eye, appear to be in the same position they were in before.

Now Jypé’s breathing dominates the sound—which I don’t remember at all—maybe that kind of hiss doesn’t make it through our patchwork system—and then vid whirls. He’s reaching, grabbing, trying to pull things off the pile, and there’s no pulling, everything goes back like it’s magnetized.

He staggers backwards—all except his hand, which seems attached—sharp edges? No, his suit wasn’t compromised—and then, at the last moment, eases away.

Away, backing away, the visuals are still of those boots sticking out of that pile, and I squint, and I wonder—am I seeing other boots? Ones that are less familiar?—and finally he’s bumping against walls, losing track of himself.

He turns, moves away, coming for help even though he has to know I won’t help (although I did) and panicked—so clearly panicked. He gets to the end of the corridor, and I wave my hand.

“Turn it off.” I know how this plays out. I don’t need any more.

None of us do. Besides, I’m the only one watching. Turtle still has her face in her hands, and Karl’s eyes are squinched shut, as if he can keep out the horrible experience just by blocking the images.

I grab the controls and shut the damn thing off myself.

Then I slide onto the floor and bow my head. Squishy was right, dammit. She was so right. This ship has stealth tech. It’s the only thing still working, that one faint energy signature that attracted me in the first place, and it has killed Junior.

And Jypé.

And if I’d gone in, it would’ve killed me.

No wonder she left. No wonder she ran. This is some kind of flashback for her, something she feels we can never ever win.

And I’m beginning to think she’s right, when a thought flits across my brain.

I frown, flick the screen back on, and search for Jypé’s map. He had the system on automatic, so the map goes clear to the cockpit.

I superimpose that map on the exterior, accounting for movement, accounting for change—

And there it is, clear as anything.

The probe, our stuck probe, is pressing against whatever’s near Junior’s faceplate.

I’m worried about what’ll happen if the stealth tech is open to space, and it always has been—at least since I stumbled on the wreck.

Open to space and open for the taking.

Karl’s watching me. “What’re you gonna do?”

Only that doesn’t sound like his voice. It’s the greed. It’s the greed talking, that emotion I so blithely assumed I didn’t have.

Everyone can be snared, just in different ways.

“I don’t know what to do,” I say. “I have no idea at all.”

***

I go back to my room, sit on the bed, stare at the portal which, mercifully, doesn’t show the distant wreck.

I’m out of ideas, out of energy, and out of time.

Squishy and the cavalry’ll be here soon, to take the wreck from me, confiscate it, and send it into governmental oblivion.

And then my career is over. No more dives, no more space travel.

No more nothing.

I think I doze once because suddenly I’m staring at Junior’s face inside his helmet. His eyes move, ever so slowly, and I realize—in the space of a heartbeat—that he’s alive in there: his body’s in our dimension, his head on the way to another.

And I know, as plainly as I know that he’s alive, that he’ll suffer a long and hideous death if I don’t help him, so I grab one of the sharp edges—with my bare hands (such an obvious dream)—and slice the side of his suit.

Saving him.

Damning him.

Condemning him to an even uglier slow death than the one he would otherwise experience.

I jerk awake, nearly hitting my head on the wall. My breath is coming in short gasps. What if the dream is true? What if he is still alive? No one understands interdimensional travel, so he could be, but even if he is, I can do nothing.

Absolutely nothing, without condemning myself.

If I go in and try to free him, I will get caught as surely as he is. So will anyone else.

I close my eyes, but don’t lean back to my pillow. I don’t want to fall asleep again. I don’t want to dream again, not with these thoughts on my mind. The nightmares I’d have, all because stealth tech exists are terrifying, worse than any I’d had as a child—

And then my breath catches. I open my eyes, rub the sleep from them, think:

This is a Dignity Vessel. Dignity Vessels have stealth tech, unless they’ve been stripped of them. Squishy described stealth tech to me—and this vessel, this wreck has an original version.

Stealth tech has value.

Real value, unlike any wreck I’ve found before.

I can stake a claim. The time to worry about pirates and privacy is long gone, now.

I get out of bed, pace around the small room. Staking a claim is so foreign to wreck-divers. We keep our favorite wrecks hidden, our best dives secret from pirates and wreck divers and the government.

But I’m not going to dive this wreck. I’m not going in again—none of my people are—and so it doesn’t matter that the entire universe knows what I have here.

Except that other divers will come, gold-diggers will try to rob me of my claim—and I can collect fees from anyone willing to mine this, anyone willing to risk losing their life in a long and hideous way.

Or I can salvage the wreck and sell it. The government buys salvage.

If I file a claim, I’m not vulnerable to citations, not even to reckless homicide charges, because everyone knows that mining exacts a price. It doesn’t matter what kind of claim you mine, you could still lose some, or all, of your crew.

But best of all, if I stake a claim on that wreck, I can quarantine it—and prosecute anyone who violates the quarantine. I can stop people from getting near the stealth tech if I so choose.

Or I can demand that whoever tries to retrieve it, retrieve Junior’s body.

His face rises, unbidden, not the boy I’d known, but the boy I’d dreamed of, half-alive, waiting to die.

I know there are horrible deaths in space. I know that wreck-divers suffer some of the worst.

I carry these images with me, and now, it seems, I’ll carry Junior’s.

Is that why Jypé made me promise to go in? Had he had the same vision of his son?

I sit down at the network, and call up the claim form. It’s so simple. The key is giving up accurate coordinates. The system’ll do a quick double-check to see if anyone else has filed a claim, and if so, an automatic arbitrator will ask if I care to withdraw. If I do not, then the entire thing will go to the nearest court.

My hands itch. This is so contrary to my training.

I start to file—and then stop.

I close my eyes—and he’s there again, barely moving, but alive.

If I do this, Junior will haunt me until the end of my life. If I do this, I’ll always wonder.

Wreck-divers take silly, unnecessary risks, by definition.

The only thing that’s stopping me from taking this one is Squishy and her urge for caution.

Wreck-divers flirt with death.

I stand. It’s time for a rendezvous.

***

Turtle won’t go in. She’s stressed, terrified, and blinded by Squishy’s betrayal. She’d be useless on a dive anyway, not clear-headed enough, and probably too reckless.

Karl has no qualms. His fears have left. When I propose a dive to see what happened in there, he actually grins at me.

“Thought you weren’t gonna come around,” he says.

But I have.

Turtle mans the skip. Karl and I have gone in. We’ve decided on 30/40/30, because we’re going to investigate that cockpit. Karl theorizes that there’s some kind of off switch for the stealth tech, and of course he’s right. But the wreck has no real power, and since the designers had too much faith in their technology to build redundant safety systems, I’m assuming they had too much faith to design an off switch for their most dangerous technology, a dead-man’s switch that’ll allow the stealth tech to go off even if the wreck has no power.

I mention that to Karl and he gives me a startled look.

“You ever wonder what’s keeping the stealth tech on then?” he asks.

I’ve wondered, but I have no answer. Maybe when Squishy comes back with the government ships, maybe then I’ll ask her. What my non-scientific mind is wondering is this: Can the stealth tech operate from both dimensions? Is something on the other side powering it?

Is part of the wreck—that hole we found in the hull on the first day, maybe—still in that other dimension?

Karl and I suit up, take extra oxygen, and double-check our suit’s environmental controls. I’m not giddy this trip—I’m not sure I’ll be giddy again—but I’m not scared either.

Just coldly determined.

I promised Jypé I was going back for Junior, and now I am.

No matter what the risk.

The trip across is simple, quick, and familiar. Going down the entrance no longer seems like an adventure. We hit the corridors with fifteen minutes to spare.

Jypé’s map is accurate to the millimeter. His push-off points are marked on the map and with some corresponding glove grip. We make record time as we head toward that cockpit.

Record time, though, is still slow. I find myself wishing for all my senses: sound, smell, taste. I want to know if the effects of the stealth tech have made it out here, if something is off in the air—a bit of a burnt smell, something foreign that raises the small hairs on the back of my neck. I want to know if Junior is already decomposing, if he’s part of a group (the crew?) pushed up against the stealth tech, never to go free again.

But the wreck doesn’t cough up those kind of details. This corridor looks the same as the other corridor I pulled my way through.

Karl moves as quickly as I do, although his suit lights are on so full that looking at him almost blinds me. That’s what I did to Turtle on our trip, and it’s a sign of nervousness.

It doesn’t surprise me that Karl, who claimed not to be afraid, is nervous. He’s the one who had doubts about this trip once he’d been inside the wreck. He’s the one I thought wouldn’t make it through all of his scheduled dives.

The cockpit looms in front of us, the doors stuck open. It does look like a battlefield from this vantage: the broken furniture, the destruction all cobbled together on one side of the room, like a barricade.

The odd part about it is, though, that the barricade runs from floor to ceiling, and unlike most things in zero-G, seem stuck in place.

Neither Karl nor I give the barricade much time. We’ve vowed to explore the rest of the cockpit first, looking for the elusive dead-man switch. We have to be careful; the sharp edges are everywhere.

Before we left, we used the visuals from Jypé’s suit, and his half-finished map, to assign each other areas of the cockpit to explore. I’m going deep, mostly because this is my idea, and deep—we both feel—is the most dangerous place. It’s closest to the probe, closest to that corner of the cockpit where Junior still hangs, horizontal, his boots kicking out into the open.

I go in the center, heading toward the back, not using hand-holds. I’ve pushed off the wall, so I have some momentum, a technique that isn’t really my strong suit. But I volunteered for this, knowing the edges in the front would slow me down, knowing that the walls would raise my fears to an almost incalculable height.

Instead, I float over the middle of the room, see the uprooted metal of chairs and the ripped shreds of consoles. There are actual wires protruding from the middle of that mess, wires and stripped bolts—something I haven’t seen in space before, only in old colonies—and my stomach churns as I move forward.

The back wall is dark, with its distended screen. The cockpit feels like a cave instead of the hub of the Dignity Vessel. I wonder how so many people could have trusted their lives to this place.

Just before I reach the wall, I spin so that I hit it with the soles of my boots. The soles have the toughest material on my suit. The wall is mostly smooth, but there are a few edges here, too—more stripped bolts, a few twisted metal pieces that I have no idea what they once were part of.

This entire place feels useless and dead.

It takes all of my strength not to look at the barricade, not to search for the bottoms of Junior’s boots, not to go there first. But I force myself to shine a spot on the wall before me, then on the floor, and the ceiling, looking for something—anything—that might control part of this vessel.

But whatever had, whatever machinery there’d been, whatever computerized equipment, is either gone or part of that barricade. My work in the back is over quickly, although I take an extra few minutes to record it all, just in case the camera sees something I don’t.

It takes Karl a bit longer. He has to pick his way through a tiny debris field. He’s closer to a possible site: there’s still a console or two stuck to his near wall. He examines them, runs his suit-cam over them as well, but shakes his head.

Even before he tells me he’s found nothing, I know.

I know.

I join him at a two-pronged hand-hold, where his wall and mine meet. The handhold was actually designed for this space, the first such design I’ve seen on the entire Dignity Vessel.

Maybe the engineers felt that only the cockpit crew had to survive uninjured should the artificial gravity go off. More likely, the lack of grab bars was simply an oversight in the other areas, or a cost-saving measure.

“You see a way into that barricade?” Karl asks.

“We’re not going in,” I say. “We’re going to satisfy my curiosity first.”

He knows about the dream; I told him when we were suiting up. I have no idea if Turtle heard—if she did, then she knows too. I don’t know how she feels about the superstitious part of this mission, but I know that Karl understands.

“I think we should work off a tether,” he says. “We can hook up to this handhold. That way, if one of us gets stuck—”

I shake my head. There are clearly other bodies in that barricade, and I would wager that some of them have tethers and bits of equipment attached.

If the stealth tech is as powerful as I think it is, then these people had no safeguard against it. A handhold won’t defend us either, even though, I believe, the stealth tech is running at a small percentage of capacity.

“I’m going first,” I say. “You wait. If I pull in, you go back. You and Turtle get out.”

We’ve discussed this drill. They don’t like it. They believe leaving me behind will give them two ghosts instead of one.

Maybe so, but at least they’ll still be alive to experience those ghosts.

I push off the handhold, softer this time than I did from the corridor, and let the drift take me to the barricade. I turn the front suit-cams on high. I also use zoom on all but a few of them. I want to see as much as I can through that barricade.

My suit lights are also on full. I must look like a child’s floaty toy heading in for a landing.

I stop near the spot where Junior went in. His boots are there, floating, like expected. I back as far from him as I can, hoping to catch a reflection in his visor, but I get nothing.

I have to move to the initial spot, that hole in the barricade that Junior initially wanted to go through.

I’m more afraid of that than I am of the rest of the wreck, but I do it. I grasp a spot marked on Jypé’s map, and pull myself toward that hole.

Then I train the zoom inside, but I don’t need it.

I see the side of Junior’s face, illuminated by my lights. The helmet is what tells me that it’s him. I recognize the modern design, the little logos he glued to its side.

His helmet has bumped against the only intact console in the entire place. His face is pointed downward, the helmet on clear. And through it, I see something I don’t expect: the opposite of my fears.

He isn’t alive. He hasn’t been alive in a long, long time.

As I said, no one understands interdimensional travel, but we suspect it manipulates time. And what I see in front of me makes me realize my hypothesis is wrong:

Time sped up for him. Sped to such a rate that he isn’t even recognizable. He’s been mummified for so long that the skin looks petrified, and I bet, if we were to somehow free him and take him back to the Business, that none of our normal medical tools could cut through the surface of his face.

There are no currents and eddies here, nothing to pull me forward. Still, I scurry back to what I consider a safe spot, not wanting to experience the same fate as the youngest member of our team.

“What is it?” Karl asks me.

“He’s gone,” I say. “No sense cutting him loose.”

Even though cutting isn’t the right term. We’d have to free him from that stealth tech, and I’m not getting near it. No matter how rich it could make me, no matter how many questions it answers, I no longer want anything to do with it.

I’m done—with this dive, this wreck—and with my brief encounter with greed.

***

We do have answers, though, and visuals to present to the government ships when they arrive. There are ten of them—a convoy—unwilling to trust something as precious as stealth tech to a single ship.

Squishy didn’t come back with them. I don’t know why I thought she would. She dropped off Jypé, reported us and the wreck, and vanished into Longbow Station, not even willing to collect a finder’s fee that the government gives whenever it locates unusual technologies.

Squishy’s gone, and I doubt she’ll ever come back.

Turtle’s not speaking to me now, except to say that she’s relieved we’re not being charged with anything. Our vids showed the government we cared enough to go back for our team member, and also that we had no idea about the stealth tech until we saw it function.

We hadn’t gone into the site to raid it, just to explore it—as the earlier vids showed. Which confirmed my claim—I’m a wreck-diver, not a pirate, not a scavenger—and that allowed me to pick up the reward that Squishy abandoned.

I’d’ve left it too, except that I needed to fund the expedition, and I’m not going to be able to do it the way I’d initially planned—by taking tourists to the Dignity Vessel so far from home.

The wreck got moved to some storehouse or warehouse or way station where the government claims it’s safe. Turtle thinks we should’ve blown it up; Karl’s just glad it’s out of our way.

Me, I just wished I had more answers to all the puzzles.

That vessel’d been in service a while, that much was clear from how it had been refitted. When someone activated the stealth, something went wrong. I doubt even the government scientists would find out exactly what in that mess.

Then there’s the question of how it got to the place I found it. There’s no way to tell if it traveled in stealth mode or over those thousands of years, although that doesn’t explain how the ship avoided gravity wells and other perils that lie in wait in a cold and difficult universe. Or maybe it had been installed with an updated FTL. Again, I doubted I would ever know.

As for the crew—I have no idea, except that I suspect the cockpit crew died right off. We could see them in that pile of debris. But the rest—there were no bodies scattered throughout the ship, and there could’ve been, given that the vessel is still intact after all this time.

I’m wondering if they were running tests with minimal crew or if the real crew looked at that carnage in the cockpit and decided, like we did, that it wasn’t worth the risk to go in.

I never looked for escape pods, but such things existed on Dignity Vessels. Maybe the rest of the crew bailed, got rescued, and blended into cultures somewhere far from home.

Maybe that’s where Jypé’s legends come from.

Or so I like to believe.

Longbow Station has never seemed so much like home. It’ll be nice to shed the silent Turtle, and Karl, who claims his diving days are behind him.

Mine are too, only in not quite the same way. The Business and I’ll still ferry tourists to various wrecks, promising scary dives and providing none.

But I’ve had enough of undiscovered wrecks and danger for no real reason. Curiosity sent me all over this part of space, looking for hidden pockets, places where no one has been in a long time.

Now that I’ve found the ultimate hidden pocket—and I’ve seen what it can do—I’m not looking any more. I’m hanging up my suit and reclaiming my land legs.

Less danger there, on land, in normal gravity. Not that I’m afraid of wrecks now. I’m not, no more than the average spacer.

I’m more afraid of that feeling, the greed, which came on me hard and fast, and made me tone-deaf to my best diver’s concerns, my old friend’s fears, and my own giddy response to the deep.

I’m getting out before I turn pirate or scavenger, before my greed—which I thought I didn’t have—draws me as inexorably as the stealth tech drew Junior, pulling me in and holding me in place, before I even realize I’m in trouble.

Before I even know how impossible it’ll be to escape.

“Diving Into The Wreck,” a novella by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, was first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, December, 2005.

THE ROOM OF LOST SOULS

1

THE OLD SPACER’S BAR on Longbow Station is the only bar there that doesn’t have a name. No name, no advertising across the door or the back wall, no cute little logos on the magnetized drinking cups. The door is recessed into a grungy wall that looks like it’s temporary due to construction.

To get in, you need one of two special chips. The first is hand-held—given by the station manager after careful consideration. The second is built into your i.d. You get that one if you’re a legitimate spacer, operating or working for a business that requires a pilot’s license.

I have had the second chip since I was eighteen years old. I’ve been using it more and more these last few years, since I discovered a wrecked Dignity Vessel that I thought I could mine for gold.

Instead, that ship mined me.

Now I take tourists to established wrecks all over this sector. I coordinate the trip, collect the money and hire the divers who’ll make those tourists believe they’re doing real wreck-diving.

Tourists never do real wreck diving. It’s too dangerous. The process gets its name from the dangers: in olden days, wreck diving was called space diving to differentiate it from the planet-side practice of diving into the oceans.

We don’t face water here—we don’t have its weight or its unusual properties, particularly at huge depths. We have other elements to concern us: No gravity, no oxygen, extreme cold.

Those risks exist no matter what kind of wrecks we dive. So I minimize everything else: I make sure the wrecks are known, mapped, and harmless.

I haven’t lost any tourists. But I have lost friends to real wreck diving. And several times, I’ve almost lost myself.

I haven’t been wreck diving since the Dignity Vessel. I’ve turned down other wreck divers who heard I wasn’t going out on my own any more and wanted me to supervise their dives.

What those divers don’t understand is that I was supervising the Dignity Vessel when I lost two divers and destroyed three friendships.

I can’t stomach doing that again.

So mostly, I camp at Longbow station. I bought a berth here, something I vowed I’d never do, but I don’t spend a lot of time in it. Instead, I sit in the old spacer’s bar and listen to the stories. Sometimes I make up a few of my own.

When I need money, I take tourists to established wrecks. Theoretically, those dives make everyone happy—the tourists because they’ve had a “real” experience; the divers because they got to practice their skills; and me, because I made an obscene amount of money for very little work.

But obscene amounts of money don’t do it for me. I bought the berth here so that I don’t have to crawl back to my ship if I drink too much or feel like taking a half-hour nap. I haven’t spent money on much else.

I used to use the money to finance my real passion—finding wrecks. I wasn’t so much interested in salvage, although I’d been known to sell minor items.

I was interested in the history, in discovering a ship, in figuring out how it ended up where it was and why it got abandoned and what happened to its crew.

Over the years, I’d solved a few historical mysteries and found even more. I liked the not-knowing. I liked the discovery. I liked the exploration for exploration’s sake.

And I loved the danger.

I miss that.

But every time I think on trying it again, I see the faces of the crew I lost: not just Jypé and Junior, who died horribly on that last trip, but Ahmed and Moïse and Egyed and Dita and Pnina and Ioni. All of them died diving.

All of them died diving with me.

I used to lull myself to sleep making up alternate scenarios, scenarios in which my friends lived.

I don’t do that any more.

I don’t do much any more. Except sit in the old spacer’s bar on Longbow and wait for tourists to contact me for a job. Then I plan the visit, go to the wreck, plant some souvenirs, come back, pick up the tourists and give them the thrill of their lives.

With no danger, no risk.

No excitement.

The opposite of what I used to do.

2

SHE’S LAND-BORN. I don’t need to see her thick body with its heavy bones to know that. Her walk says it all.

The space-born have a grace—a lightness—to everything they do. Not all are thin-boned and fragile. Some have parents who think ahead, who raise them half in Earth Normal and half in zero-G. The bones develop, but that grace—that lightness—it develops too.

This woman has a heaviness, a way of putting one foot in front of the other as if she expects the floor to take her weight. I used to walk like that. I spent my first fifteen years mostly planet-bound in real gravity.

We have the same build, she and I—that thickness which comes from strong bones, the fully formed female body that comes from the good nutrition usually found planetside.

I used to fight both of those things until I realized they gave me an advantage spacers usually don’t have.

I don’t break.

Grab a spacer wrong and her arms snap.

Grab me wrong, and I’ll bruise.

She sits down, says my name as if she’s entitled to, and then raises her eyebrows as if they and not the tone of her voice provide the question mark.

“How’d you get in here?” I pull my drink across the scarred plastic table and lean my chair against the wall. Balancing chairs feels like that second after the gravity gets shut off but hasn’t yet vanished—a half and half feeling of being both weighted and weightless.

“I have an invitation,” she says and holds up the cheap St. Christopher’s medal that houses this week’s guest chip. Station management shifts the chip housing every week or two so the chips can’t be scalped or manufactured. After five guest chips are given out, management changes housing. There is no predictable time nor is there predictable housing.

“I didn’t invite you,” I say, picking up my drink and balancing its edge on my flat stomach. I can’t quite get the balance right and I catch the drink before it spills.

“I know,” the woman says, “but I came to see you.”

“If you want to hire my ship to do some wreck diving, go through channels. Send a message, my system’ll scan your background, and if you pass, you can see any one of a dozen wrecks that’re open to amateurs.”

“I’m not interested in diving,” the woman says.

“Then you have no reason to talk to me.” I take a drink. The liquid, which is a fake but tasty honey-and-butter ale, has warmed during the long afternoon. The warmth brings out the ale’s flavor, which is why I nurse it—or at least why I say I nurse it. I don’t like to get drunk—I hate the loss of control—but I like drinking and I like to sit in this dark, private, enclosed bar and watch people whom I know won’t give me any guff.

“But I do have a reason to talk to you.” She leans toward me. She has pale green eyes surrounded by dark lashes. The eyes make her seem even more exotic than her land-born walk does. “You see, I hear you’re the best—”

My snort interrupts her. “There is no best. There’s a half a dozen companies that’ll take you touring wrecks—and that’s without diving. All of us are certified. All of us are bonded and licensed and all of us guarantee the best touring experience in this sector. It just varies in degree—do you want the illusion of danger or do you want a little bit of history with your deep space adventure? I don’t know who sent you in here—”

She starts to answer, but I raise a finger, stopping her.

“—and I don’t care. I do want you to contact someone else for a tour. This is my private time, and I hate having it interrupted.”

“I’m sorry,” she says and the apology sounds sincere.

I expect her to get up, leave the bar or maybe move to another table, but she does neither.

Instead she leans closer and lowers her voice.

“I’m not a tourist,” she says. “I have a mission and I’m told you’re the only one who can help me.”

In the two years since the Dignity Vessel, no one has tried this old con on me. In the twenty years before, I’d get one or two of these approaches a year, mostly from rivals wanting coordinates to the wrecks I refused to salvage.

I’ve always believed that certain wrecks have historical value only when they’re intact—not a popular belief among salvagers and scavengers and most wreck divers—but one that I’ve adhered to since I started in this business at the ripe old age of eighteen.

I point to Karl, a slight but muscular diver who has the best reputation on Longbow. He’s not very good at finding things, but he has his moments. He was with me on that last run and we haven’t spoken since we docked.

“Karl’s good,” I say. “In fact, if you want real adventure, not the touristy kind, he’s the best. He’ll take you to deep space, no questions asked.”

“I want you,” the woman says.

I sigh. Maybe she does. Maybe she’s been led astray by some old-timer. Maybe she thinks I still have some valuable coordinates locked in my ship.

I don’t. I dumped pretty much everything the day I decided I would only do tourist runs.

“Please,” she says. “Just let me tell you what’s going on.”

I sigh. She’s not going to leave without telling me. Unless I force her. And I’m not going to force her because it would take too much effort.

I take another swig of my ale.

She folds her hands together, but not before I see that her fingers are shaking.

“I’m Riya Trekov, the daughter of Commander Ewing Trekov. Have you heard of him?”

I shake my head. I haven’t heard of most people. Among the living, I only care about divers, pilots, and scavengers. Among the dead, I know only the ones whose wrecks would have once made my diving worthwhile. I also knew the ones who had piloted the wrecks I found, as well as the people who sent them, and the politicians, leaders or famous people of their time, their place, their past.

But modern commanders, people whose name I should recognize? I am always at a loss.

“He was the supreme commander in the Colonnade Wars.”

Her voice is soft, and it needs to be. The Colonnade Wars aren’t popular out here. Most of the spacers sitting in this bar are the children or grandchildren of the losers.

“That was a hundred years ago,” I say.

“So you do know the wars.” Her shoulders rise up and down in a small sigh. She apparently expected to tell me about them.

“You’re awfully young to be the daughter of a supreme commander from those days.” I purposely don’t say the wars’ name. It’s better not to rile up the other patrons.

She nods. “I’m a post-loss baby.”

It takes me a minute to understand her. At first I thought she meant post-loss of the Colonnade Wars, but then I realize that anyone titled supreme commander in that war had been on the winning side. So she meant loss of something else.

“He’s missing?” I ask before I can stop myself.

“He has been for my entire life,” she says.

“Was he missing before you were born?”

She takes a deep breath, as if she’s considering whether or not she should tell me. Her caution peaks my curiosity. For the first time, I’m interested in what she’s saying.

“For fifty years,” she says quietly.

“Fifty standard years?” I ask.

She nods. If I’m guessing her age right, and if she’s not lying, then her father went missing before the peace treaties were signed.

“Was he missing in action?” I ask.

She shakes her head.

“A prisoner of war?” Our side—well, the side that populates this part of space, which is only mine by default—didn’t give the prisoners back even though that was one of the terms of the treaty.

“That’s what we thought,” she says.

The “we” is new. I wonder if it means she and her family or she and someone else.

“But?” I ask.

“But I put detectives on the trail years ago, and there’s no evidence he was ever captured. No evidence that he met with anyone from the other side,” she says with surprising diplomacy. “No evidence that his ship was captured. No evidence that he vanished during the last conflicts of the war, like the official biographies say.”

“No real evidence?” I ask. “Or just no evidence that can be found after all this time?”

“No real evidence,” she says. “We’ve looked in the official records and the unofficial ones. I’ve interviewed some of his crew.”

“From the missing vessel,” I say.

“That’s just it,” she says. “His ship isn’t missing.”

So I frown. She has no reason to approach me. Even in my old capacity, I didn’t search for missing humans. I searched for famous ships.

“Then I don’t understand,” I say.

“We know where he is,” she says. “I want to hire you to get him back.”

“I don’t find people,” I say mostly because I don’t want to tell her that he’s probably not still alive.

No human lives more than 120 years without enhancements. No human who has spent a lot of time in space can survive an implantation of those enhancements.

“I’m not asking you to,” she says. “I’m hoping you’ll recover him.”

“Recover?” She’s got my full attention now. “Where is he?”

The tip of her tongue touches her top lip. She’s nervous. It’s clear she isn’t sure she should tell me, even though she wants to hire me.

Finally, she says, “He’s in the Room of Lost Souls.”

***

Ask anyone and they’ll tell you. The Room of Lost Souls is a myth.

I’ve only heard it talked about in whispers. An abandoned space station, far from here, far from anything. Most crews avoid it. Those that do stay do so only in an emergency, and even then they don’t go deep inside.

Because people who go into the room at the center of the station, what would be, in modern space stations, the control room but which clearly isn’t, those people never come out.

Sometimes you can see them, floating around the station or pounding at the windows, crying for help.

Their companions always mount rescue attempts, always lose one or two more people before giving up, and hoping—praying—that what they’re seeing isn’t real.

Then they make repairs or do whatever it is they needed to do when they arrive, and fly off, filled with guilt, filled with remorse, filled with sadness, happy to be the ones who survived.

I’ve heard that story, told in whispers, since I got to Longbow Station decades ago, and I’ve never commented. I’ve never even rolled my eyes or shaken my head.

I understand the need for superstition.

Sometimes its rituals and talismans give us a necessary illusion of safety.

And sometimes it protects us from places that are truly dangerous.

***

“Why in the known universe would I go there to help you?” I ask, with a little too much edge in my voice.

She studies me. I think I have surprised her. She expected me to tell her that the Room of Lost Souls is a myth, that someone had lied to her, that she is staking her quest on something that has never existed.

“You know it, then.” She doesn’t sound surprised. Somehow she knows that I’ve been there. Somehow she knows that I am one of the only people to come out of the Room alive.

I don’t answer her question. Instead, I drain my ale and stand. I’m sad to leave the old spacer’s bar this early in the day, but I’m going to.

I’m going to leave and walk around the station until I find another bar as grimy as this one.

Then I’m going to go inside and I am, most likely, going to get drunk.

“You should help me,” she says softly, “because I know what the Room is.”

I start to get up, but she grabs my arm.

“And I know,” she says, “how to get people out.”

3

HOW TO GET PEOPLE OUT.

The words echo in my head as I walk out of the bar. I stop in that barren corridor and place one hand against the wall, afraid I’m going to be sick.

Voices swirl in my head and I will them away.

Then I take a deep breath and continue on, heading into the less habitable parts of the station, the parts slated for renovation or closure.

I want to be by myself.

I need to.

And I don’t want to return to my berth, which suddenly seems too small, or my ship, which suddenly seems too risky.

Instead I walk across ruined floors and through half-gutted walls, past closed businesses and graffiti-covered doorways. It’s colder down here—life support is on, but at the minimum provided by regulation—and I almost feel like I’m heading into a wreck, the way I used to head into a wreck when I was a beginner, without thought and without care.

I don’t remember much. I remember thinking it looked pretty. Colored lights—pale blues and reds and yellows—extended as far as the eye could see. They twinkled. Around them, only blackness.

My mother held my hand. Her grip was tight through the double layer of our spacesuit gloves. She muttered how beautiful the lights were.

Before the voices started.

Before they built, piling one on top of the other, until—it seemed—we got crushed by the weight.

I don’t remember getting out.

I remember my father, cradling me, trying to stop my shaking. I remember him giving orders to someone else to steer the damn ship, get us out of this godforsaken place.

I remember my mother’s eyes through her headpiece, reflecting the multi-colored lights, as if she had swallowed a sea of stars.

And I remember her voice, blending with the others, like a soprano joining tenors in the middle of a cantata—a surprise, and yet completely expected.

For years, I heard her voice—strong at first and unusual in its power—then blending, and mixing, until I can’t pick it out any longer.

I didn’t know if that voice—mixing with other voices—was an aural hallucination, a dream, or a reality. Sometimes I thought it both.

But it sneaks up on me at the most unexpected moments, sometimes beginning with just a hum. The hum sends shivers down my back, and I do whatever I can to silence the voices.

Which is usually nothing.

Nothing except wait.

***

After three days, Riya Trekov finds me.

I’m having dinner in Longbow’s most exclusive restaurant. The food is exquisite—fresh meat from nearby ports, vegetables grown on the station itself, sauces prepared by the best chef in the sector. There’s fresh bread and creamy desserts and real fruit, a rarity no matter what space port you dock on.

The view is exquisite as well—windows everywhere except the floor. If you look up, you see the rest of the station towering above you, lights in some of the guest rooms, decoration in some of the berths. If you look out one set of side windows, you see the docks with the myriad of ships—from tiny single-ships to armored yachts to passenger liners.

Another group of windows show the gardens with their own airlocks and bays, the grow lights sending soft rays across the entire middle of the station.

On this night, I’m having squid in dark chocolate sauce. The squid isn’t what Earthers think of as squid, but an ocean-faring creature from one of the nearby planets. It has a salty nutlike taste that the chocolate accents.

I try to focus on the food as Riya sits down. She’s carrying a plate and a full glass of wine.

Clearly she had been eating somewhere else in the restaurant, on one of the layers I can’t see from my favorite table. But she had seen me come in and somehow, she thinks that gives her permission to join me.

“Have you thought about it?” she asks, as if she made an offer and I said I would consider it.

I can lie and say I hadn’t thought about any of it. I can be blunt and say that I want nothing to do with the Room of Lost Souls.

Or I can be truthful and say that her words have played through my head for the last three days. Tempting me. Frightening me.

Intriguing me.

At odd moments, I find myself wondering how I would see the place, after all my years of wreck diving, after all the times I’ve risked my life, after all the hazards I’ve survived.

“You have,” she says with something like triumph.

I continue to eat, but I’m no longer savoring the taste. I almost push my plate away—it’s a crime not to taste this squid—but I don’t.

I don’t want her to see any emotion from me at all.

“But you have questions,” she says as if I’m actually taking part in this conversation. “You want to know how I found you.”

The hell of it is that I do want to know that. Hardly anyone knows I survived the Room of Lost Souls. I can’t say that no one knows because the crew on my father’s ship knew. And I have no idea what happened to all of them.

“I have people who can find almost anything,” she says.

People. She has people. Which means she’s rich.

“If you have people,” I say with an emphasis on that phrase, “then have them go to the Room themselves and have them ‘recover’ your father.”

Her cheeks flush. She looks away, but only for a minute. Then she takes a deep breath, as if she needs courage to dive back into this conversation.

“They don’t believe that anyone can get out. They think that’s as much a myth as the Room itself.”

I don’t know how I got out. My memory is fluid and try as I might to recover that moment, I can’t.

When it becomes clear that I am not going to confirm or deny what happened to me, she says, “Your father is still alive.”

I jolt. I had no idea the old man had made it this long.

“Have you ever asked him about the Room?”

I haven’t, mostly because I never had the chance. But I don’t tell her that. Instead, I say, “You spoke to my father.”

She nods. “He’s happy to know you’re still alive.”

I’m not sure I’m happy to know that he is. I prefer to think of myself as a person without a family, a woman without a past.

“Quite honestly,” she says, “he’s the one who recommended you for this job. I first approached him, and he says he’s too old.”

I slide my plate to the edge of the table to hide my face as I do the calculations. He turns seventy this year which is not old at all.

“He also said you have all the skills I need for this job.” She hasn’t touched her food. “He says he doesn’t.”

That much is true. He’s never gone diving—at least that I know of. He captained a ship, but in the old-fashioned way—not as a hands-on pilot, but as a planetbound owner, who told others what to do.

We were on some kind of pleasure cruise, I think, when my mother and I wandered into the Room. Or maybe we were moving from one system to another.

I honestly don’t know. I don’t remember and I never asked him.

He wasn’t around much anyway. After Mother vanished into that Room, he dumped me with my maternal grandparents and went in search of the very thing Riya claims she found: a way to recover people from the Room of Lost Souls.

“It makes no sense that he has refused to help you,” I say as a bus tray arrives, sends out a small metal arm that sweeps my plate into its interior, and then floats away. “He’s always wanted a way into the Room.”

“He says the problem is not the way in, but the way out.” She finally picks up her fork and picks at her now-cold food.

A chill runs through me. Does my father speak with that kind of authority because he has sent people in after my mother? Or because he’s thinking of what happened to us all those years ago?

“And yet you claim you have that way out.”

A serving tray appears with an ice cream glass filled with red and black berries separated by layers of cream. My coffee steams beside it. My standing order. I shouldn’t take it, but I do.

“I do have a way out,” she says.

“But you can’t find anyone stupid enough to test it,” I say.

She lets out a small laugh. “Is that what you think? You think I need a test subject?”

I take a sip of my coffee. It’s slightly bitter, like all coffee on Longbow station. Somehow the beans grown here lack the richness I’d found on other stations.

“The way out has been tested. Going in and returning is no longer an issue. What I need is someone with enough acumen to bring out my father.”

Something in her tone reaches me. It’s a hint of frustration, a bit of anger.

Her people have failed her. Which is why she’s coming to me.

“You’ve done this before,” I say.

She nods. “Six times. Everyone survived. Everyone is healthy. There are no residual problems.”

“Except they can’t find your father.”

“Oh,” she says. “They have found him. They just can’t recover him.”

Now I am intrigued. “Why not?”

“Because,” she says, “they can’t convince him to leave.”

***

I take a bite of the berries and cream. I need a few moments to think about this. I still feel as if she’s conning me, but I’m not sure how. Or why she would do so.

“Why did he leave?” I ask.

She blinks at me in surprise. She clearly didn’t expect curiosity from me.

“Leave?”

“You said he didn’t show up for the treaty signings. That he essentially missed the end of the war. Why?”

She frowns just enough so that I realize she’s never considered this question. She’s been looking at her father as someone—something—she lost, not as a person in his own right. Oh, he has history, but it’s history without her, and therefore not relevant.

“No one knows,” she says.

Someone always knows. And if that someone is no longer alive, the answer would probably be in the records. Something this modern is easy to trace; it’s the old stuff, like the Dignity Vessels, whose history gets lost to time that are difficult to figure out.

She’s finally hooked me and she probably doesn’t even know how. I don’t want to return to the Room for my mother—I barely remember her and what I do remember is vague. I don’t even want to return to face my own past.

I want to solve this mystery she has unwittingly presented me with. I want to know why a famous man, a man who won some of the most important battles of an important war, disappears before the war ends, and winds up in a place he knew better than to approach.

For the first time in years, the historian in me, the diver in me senses a challenge. Not like the old challenges, the ones that cost me so many friends and colleagues.

But a new challenge, one that will threaten me alone.

One that has the risk I miss combined with the historical mysteries that I love.

I try not to let my sudden enthusiasm show. I ask, as coldly as I can, “What are you paying?”

Her eyes light up. She seems surprised. Maybe she thought she’d never catch me. Maybe I am her last hope.

She names a figure. It’s astoundingly high.

Still, I say, “Triple it and I’ll consider the job.”

“If you can get him out,” she says, her voice breathless with excitement, “I’ll give you one hundred times that much.”

Now I’m feeling breathless. That’s more money than I’ve earned in two decades.

But I don’t have a use for the money I have. I can’t imagine what I’d do with a sum that large.

Still, I negotiate because that too is in my blood. “I want it all up front.”

“Half,” she says. “And half when you recover him.”

That’s fair. Half would provide me a berth at Longbow and all of my expenses for the rest of my life. I’d never have to touch the rest of my money, the stuff I earned these past few years.

“Half up front,” I say, agreeing, “and half when I recover him—only if you pay all expenses for the entire investigation and journey.”

“Investigation?” She frowns, as if she doesn’t like the word.

I nod. “Before I go after him, I need to know who he is.”

“I told you—”

“I need to know him, not his reputation.”

Her frown grows. “Why?”

“Because,” I say, “in all the hundreds of theories about that Room, only one addresses the souls trapped inside.”

“So?”

“So haven’t you wondered how a man like your father got lost in there?”

I can tell from her expression that she hasn’t considered that at all.

“Or why the name of the place—in all known languages—is the Room of Lost Souls. Are the souls lost because they entered? Or were they lost before they opened the door?”

She shifts slightly in her chair. She doesn’t like what I’m saying.

“You’ve thought of this before,” she says.

“Of course I have.” I keep my voice down.

She nods. “You think he was lost before he went in?”

“I have no idea,” I say, “but I plan to find out.”

4

BY THE TIME I ARRIVE at my berth, the money is in my accounts. That surprises me. I thought, after our conversation, that Riya would back out. She doesn’t want to know her father as a human being. She wants only the image of him that she built up through her lonely childhood. The war hero who vanished. The strong man who got trapped.

Not a sad survivor who might have gotten lost long before he opened a door into a forbidden place.

Still, she has paid me and she has given me free reign.

I sit at the built-in desk and move the money to all of my accounts. I’m going to have to create some new ones before I leave so that my holdings are diversified. Before I do that, I pay for this berth for the next five years.

I warned Riya that the recovery could take a long time. She wants it done right. After I heard her tales of the previous attempts, I knew that part of the problem was she hired thieves and ruffians and risk-takers who specialized in cross-system possession recovery.

She hired disposable people who usually committed snatch-and-grabs. People who didn’t care much for her mission or their own lives.

People who wouldn’t be missed.

In that, they were a lot like me.

Riya and I finished the negotiations as I drank my coffee. She showed me the device her people had used to get out of the Room. I examined it. It looked unusual enough.

But she wouldn’t give me its specs until I was ready to go to the Room.

I was fine with that. It gave both of us an illusion of control—me, the ability to say I was done before I went into the Room; and her, the belief that I had no idea how to use what she had shown me.

We made a verbal record of our negotiations. Both of our attorneys would work together to make a formal agreement which we would sign within the month.

She seemed nervous and uncertain, while I was nervous and happy. If someone had asked me before we started the negotiations who would feel what, I would have said that I’d be the uncertain one while she would be happy with all that we’ve done.

I fully expected her to terminate before I arrived in my berth.

Instead she paid me.

I finish transferring the money. I contact and pay my attorney, notifying her of her obligations in drafting this agreement.

Then I lean back in my chair.

For the first time since I’ve come to Longbow Station, balancing my chair on two legs does not satisfy me. The berth—with its built-in desk, view of the grow pods, and slide-out soft bed—no longer feels like home.

I need to move. I need to get out of here.

I need to spend the night on my ship.

***

By modern standards, Nobody’s Business is a small ship, but by mine, it’s huge. The Business can fly with a single pilot, but it’s designed for twenty to fifty people.

When I was wreck-diving, I’d fly with ten or less and to me, that felt crowded. I’d close off the lower levels and lock up the cargo bays.

Sometimes I forget all the space I’m not using. The main level has the bridge and auxiliary controls. It also has the lounge, where I’ve put most of my viewing technology so that I can review dives. There are six cabins on this level as well, including mine.

The captain’s cabin is two levels up. I never use it. My cabin is the same size as all the others. It looks the same as well except for the hard-wired terminal that I use when I don’t want anyone hacking into my work.

Most (but not all) of the other systems on the Business are networked, and I’m up-front with any crew that I hire that I watch the systems diligently. If they put something on the system from a virus to a piece of information, it’s mine. I’ve learned a lot that way.

The Business is docked in the permanent section of the station. I pay extra to keep her systems disconnected from the station’s systems. I also bribe the officials to keep an eye on her, to make sure no one enters illegally.

Even so, I still run several security programs—all of them redundant. No one, not even the best hacker, can shut off all of them and still have time to case my ship.

So as I enter the Business, I stand in the airlock and check the first layer of security, seeing who—if anyone—has crossed this threshold since I last went through.

According to the programs, no one has.

I let myself in, breathing the stale air. I keep the environmental systems on low when I’m station bound—no sense wasting the energy. I power up, check more redundant security systems, and run a full diagnostic which I network to my own internal computer.

Long ago, I set up the Business and my single ship to communicate with me—mostly to make sure I remain awake and alert when I’m piloting either ship. But I also use the links to communicate with the Business about internal matters, mostly so that I’m not tied to the bridge.

The air has become cool as the environmental systems kick in. My cabin still smells faintly of incense from an abortive and mistaken attempt at relaxation on the last trip full of tourists. I make a mental note to have this room cleaned top to bottom, and then I sit at the hardwired terminal.

It’s covered with a faint layer of dust. I haven’t touched it in more than a year. I’m not even sure it’ll power up.

But it does. Then it runs its own diagnostics and shows me all the security video from the cabin itself. I let the video play in a corner of the touchscreen while I access my financials.

I move ninety percent of the money that Riya paid me from my public accounts to my private ones. In a day or so, I’d create some new accounts, and divide the money up even more.

Then I settle into my chair and order lunch from my personal store.

I’m going to be here for a while. I have a lot of research to do and I don’t want it traced.

***

I start with the Colonnade Wars.

I learned long ago to research everything, especially something you’re certain of, because the memory plays tricks. And something you’re certain of is most likely to be the thing you’ll get wrong.

The Colonnade Wars lasted nearly one hundred years. The wars began as a series of skirmishes on the far end of this sector. Then actual war broke out toward the other end, on a small planet that had been colonized so long that some believed the humans on that planet actually evolved there.

Other battles—with different participants—started throughout the sector. At first, the weapons brokers and the mercenaries seemed to be the only ones who knew about the various skirmishes, but then it became clear that powerbrokers from several nation states were financing their favorites in each conflict. And sometimes those powerbrokers backed both factions at the same time.

The battle turned away from the petty internal squabbles—over land, over entitlements, over religious shrines—and turned against those who funded the fights.

Suddenly the powerful found themselves fighting on several fronts. Their massive armies and huge weapon systems were no match to the smaller, more creative warfare of their enemies.

And it looked, for a long time, as if the massive armies would break.

Enter Commander Ewing Trekov and his cohorts. All of them had been injured on one front or another. Most of them had come within a heartbeat of dying.

They ended up at the same treatment facility in the very center of the sector, and there they realized they had the same philosophy about the wars.

First, they believed that the Colonnade Wars were not wars at all, but a single war—a large, scattered battlefield that spread across several systems. These men and women, brilliant all, realized that fighting each front as if it were a separate war was what was destroying the army. A military could have no coherent strategy when it believed it was fighting a dozen wars at once.

So these people, as they healed, began studying the history of warfare—not just in this sector, but throughout human history, as far back as they could go. They discussed superweapons and super troops. They discussed a unified front and a robotized military. They explored remote fighting versus hands-on.

And they realized that nothing—no discovery, no miracle weapon, no well-equipped soldier—had ever taken the place of living commanders with a broad and unified vision.

And sometimes that vision was as simple as this: Annihilate the enemy wherever you find him; whoever he might be.

According to the histories, the man who first articulated that simple vision in the Colonnade Wars was Commander Ewing Trekov. Whether or not that’s true is another matter.

What is true—and verifiable—is that Commander Trekov was the most effective leader of the war. He destroyed more enemy strongholds, captured more ships, and killed more soldiers—from all sides—than any other commander in the war.

He was supposed to be at the victory celebration. More importantly, he was supposed to be at the treaty signing ceremony. There wasn’t just one treaty to be signed, but dozens—all with various governments (or, as one observer more accurately called them, various survivors). Trekov’s presence wasn’t just symbolic. He had negotiated several of the treaties himself.

Slowly I realize that I could spend the rest of my life reading about the Colonnade Wars and not get to all the details.

But those details don’t concern me. All that concerns me is Commander Trekov.

And he’s there but not there. Mentioned but not quoted. Observed but not really seen.

So I look up Trekov himself—when he was born, where he went to school, where he got his training. I look for family information—both on his family of origin and on the family he left behind.

I find Riya Trekov. She’s significantly younger than I thought—born to Trekov’s childless fifth wife nearly two decades after his disappearance. The other children want nothing to do with Riya—they believe her to be illegitimate, even though her DNA, her provenance (so to speak), is probably surer than theirs.

She has an easily accessible history—with degrees in accounting and business, a long career in high finance, and a personal wealth that’s almost legendary. She accumulated those funds on her own, and is known around the sector as one of the most intuitive investors around.

Now she’s invested in me—the first whim I could find in her entire history—and I wonder if this investment will pay off.

It’s certainly turning into a research nightmare on my end.

Because the back-story on Ewing Trekov is confusing. His origins seemed lost in time. His education is classified as is most of his military experience. His battles are well documented, but that’s about all of his life that’s well documented

In the official histories, Trekov’s personal history is deliberately vague. Which makes me wonder what’s hidden there, and why no one is supposed to know.

For a while, I pace around the main level, trying to figure out how to discover the man and not the myth. And then I realize I’m researching him wrong.

I need to approach him as if he were a ship, a wreck I’m trying to discover.

I need to go backwards—from the last known sighting—and then I need to dig in the unofficial records, the half-hidden reports, and the highlights of his personal past.

Within forty-eight hours, my ship is stocked, my meager belongings on board, and I am heading to a little-known military outpost at what once was the edge of the sector.

The last recorded place anyone saw Ewing Trekov alive.

5

BY ALL RIGHTS, this little outpost should be famous. It is not only the last place Ewing Trekov was seen alive, but it is also the place that he and the other commanders planned their strategy.

Military outposts are security minded. They make places like Longbow Station seem lawless. So I’ve come with letters of introduction from a general whom I supervised on tourist dives, a colonel who has known me since I began my career, and a government official who testified to the fact that my research is never for public purposes, only to find important “historical information.”

I also have a letter of explanation from Riya Trekov, giving me permission to look into her family’s confidential files. I have no idea if such a letter will open doors for me—I have never researched a human subject before—but I figure such a letter can’t hurt.

This outpost is top of the line. The materials in the public areas are new and smell faintly of recently assembled metal. The lighting set higher than any I’d seen in a commercial outpost and the environmental systems are running at maximum comfort.

My tax dollars keep these soldiers in relative luxury, at least for space-farers. Most off-duty personnel walk around in shirt-sleeves and thin pants. Anyone on Longbow wearing such flimsy clothing would freeze.

I am given a bracelet which opens doors to the sections of the outpost that I’m allowed in. I’ve been given a guest suite—they don’t call civilian quarters berths here—and with the suite comes the suggestion that I use it instead of staying shipside.

The suite is larger than the captain’s cabins on most luxury yachts. It doesn’t take me long to find out that I’m in one of the VIP rooms, courtesy, it seems to my ties with the general. His letter, which I scan after I look at my quarters, asks that the military treat me like one of their own.

Apparently they take that to mean they should treat me like they would treat him.

My rooms—and I have five of them—all have a view of the concentric rings, as well as a private kitchen (along with a personal chef should I not want cafeteria food), a valet should I require it, and a daily cleaning service. I don’t require a valet or room cleaning service (although I know they won’t waive that entirely), and I stress to everyone that I can how much I value my privacy.

My in-room computer system can access the public library of the base, and I start there, sitting on one of the most comfortable chairs I’ve ever used in my life, and scrolling through list upon list of recorded information pertaining to Commander Trekov himself.

It takes me nearly three days, but I finally find visual and audio files of his arrival on the base. No holographic files, at least not yet. But the visual and audio ones are the first I’ve found of the Commander at all.

He’s imposing, nearly six-seven, which is tall for someone who spent his life in ships. His walk marks him as planet-raised as well, as do his thick bones and well-defined muscles.

He’s not a handsome man, although he might have been once. His face is carelined and his eyes are sad. His hair is cut short—regulation then as now—and he has a fastidiousness that seems extreme even in this military environment.

I freeze one of the images of his face and frame it. Then I set it, as a holopicture, on the tabletop near my work station. I used to do this with ships that I was searching for. Ships that had disappeared or whose wrecks existed somewhere in a grid that no one had bothered searching for decades.

The images of the ships were always of them new. I used to compare that image with the wreck when I found it, not to find my way around it but so that I could get a sense of what hopes were lost in the ship’s ultimate destruction.

But the image I keep of Ewing Trekov isn’t of his youth, but of what he looked like toward the end. It’s an acknowledgement that I’m searching for the part of him that’s left over, the skeleton, the frame, the bits and pieces that survived.

I am no closer to getting him out of that Room by staring at his image than I got close to a wreck by staring at the original image of a ship. But I feel closer. I feel like this image holds something important, something I’m missing.

Or maybe, something I’m not yet allowed to see.

***

There are actually people on the outpost who remember Ewing Trekov. They’re old now, but most of them still work in their respective departments.

All of them were willing to talk with me and after days of interviews, only one seems to have a story that I can’t find in the records.

Her name is Nola Batinet. She wants to meet in the officers’ mess.

The mess isn’t a dining hall, like the mess for regular soldiers. The officers’ mess is divided into six different restaurants, each with its own entrance off the central bar. People in uniform fill that bar. They all have an air of authority.

A tiny woman stands near a real potted plant. The plant is taller than I am, probably taller than Trekov was. It’s bright green, has broad leaves, and smells strongly of mint.

The woman is so small she could hide among the leaves.

As I approach, she holds out a small hand, which I take gently in greeting. The bones are as fragile as I feared. I’m careful not to squeeze at all, afraid I’ll break her.

“We have a reservation in Number Four,” she says.

Apparently the six restaurants here have no names. They go by number.

Number Four is dark and smells of garlic. There are no tables, just built-in booths with backs so high you can’t see the other diners.

A serving unit—a simple holographic menu with audio capabilities—whisks us to the nearest booth. At first, I figure that the unit does so with each customer. Then I realize it’s addressing Nola Batinet by name and has reassured her that they never let her favorite booth go when there’s the possibility that she will come into the mess.

She thanks it as if it were human, nods when it asks if she wants the usual, and then she turns to me. I haven’t even looked over the menu yet, but I’m not really here for the food. I take whatever it is she’s having, order some coffee and some water, and wait until the server unit floats away.

“So,” she says, “Ewing Trekov. I knew him well.

A faint smile crosses her face as she thinks of him. Her memories—at least the one she’s lost in—are clearly pleasant.

A tray floats over with our beverages and with a large plate of cheeses and meats. I’ve never seen so many different kinds. The meats are clearly manufactured and are composed of so many different colors that I’m hesitant at first.

But Nola has been eating here for decades and seems no worse for it. After she eats a few pieces, I try one. The meat is peppery and filled with the garlic that I’ve been smelling. It’s remarkably good.

“You’re working for his daughter, right?” Nola asks. “The created one.”

“She wants me to recover her father,” I say, even though I’ve told Nola this when I first contacted her through the outpost networks. “She thinks he’s in the Room of Lost Souls.”

Nola nods just enough to confuse me. That tiny movement could mean she knows he’s in the Room or that she has heard of this daughter’s whim before. Or it could simply be an acknowledgement of what I have to say.

“Why does she want him?” Nola asks. “She never knew him.”

And I had neglected to ask that question. Or maybe it wasn’t neglect at all. If I knew, I wouldn’t have taken the job, and the job had—in the end—intrigued me.

“It’s not my concern,” I say. “I’m just supposed to find him.”

“You won’t find him,” Nola says. “He’s long gone.”

“How did you know him?” I ask, trying to get the conversation away from my job and back to her.

That small smile has returned. “The way most women knew him.”

“You were lovers.”

She nods. For a moment, her gaze rests somewhere to the left of me, and I know she’s not seeing me or the booth or any part of Number Four. She’s lost in the past with Ewing Trekov.

“You make it sound like he had a lot of lovers,” I say.

Her eyes focus and move toward me. When they rest on me, they hold a bit of contempt. She knows what I’m doing, and she doesn’t like it. She wants to control this conversation.

“A lot of lovers,” she says, “a lot of wives, and more children than he could keep track of.”

Maybe that’s where the disapproval comes from. Riya Trekov isn’t special in Nola’s eyes.

“He didn’t care about family?” I ask.

Nola shrugs. “The man I knew didn’t have time for relationships. Not long ones, any way. His entire life was about the wars and the entire sector. He saw lives the way we see stars—something far away and yet precious. Individual lives meant something to him only for a few weeks. Then he moved on.”

There’s pain in her voice.

“He moved on from you,” I say as I take some yellow cheese. It’s slimy against my fingers, but I don’t dare put it back.

“Of course he did. Anyone who believed he would do otherwise was a fool.”

But the bitter twist on the word “fool” makes it clear to me who “anyone” was.

“You said that you know things no one else does.” I make myself eat the slimy cheese. It’s remarkably good. Rich and sharp, a taste that goes well with the pepper and garlic of the meat.

“Of course I do,” she says. “And some of it will go with me to my own death.”

It’s my turn to nod. I understand that kind of privacy.

She sets the plate near the edge of the table. Something moving so fast that I can barely see it whisks the plate away.

“But the story I’m going to tell you,” she says, “isn’t one of those. And it’s not something you’ll find in the histories either.”

I wait.

“It’s about his plans,” she says with that secret smile. “He never planned to go to any of the ceremonies and he wasn’t going to sign any treaties.”

“He told you this?” I ask, mostly because she’s surprised me. Everything I’ve seen says he fully intended to go to the ceremonies. He sent notice as to when his ship would arrive. He had a contingent of honor guards waiting for him on another outpost nearer to the ceremony. He even had a dress uniform ordered special for the occasion.

“No, he didn’t tell me anything,” she says. “At least, not in so many words. He wasn’t that kind of man. I figured it out, years later.”

***

She figured it out when she remembered what happened that last day. How he’d been, how sad he seemed.

They met in his VIP cabin. It was large and lovely with a bed the size of her quarters. But he wasn’t interested in sex, although they had some.

He ordered food for them—an astonishing meal for a place this remote. Yet he didn’t enjoy the meal. He picked at it, letting much of it go to waste. She couldn’t—she hadn’t had a meal this good since she was stationed here.

But he waited until she was finished before he spoke.

“How do you do it?” he asked. “How do you save lives when you know they’ll just go to waste?”

She didn’t understand what he meant. “Go to waste?”

“Most of your patients here, they’ll get sent back out and they’ll die out there. Or they’ll go home and they won’t be the same. Their families will no longer know them. Their lives will be different.”

“But not wasted,” she said.

He kept picking at the food. He wouldn’t look at her. “How do you know?”

“How do you?” she asked.

He shrugged.

“Most of these soldiers I see, they’re children,” she said. “They’ll go home and remake their lives.”

He shrugged again. “What about career military?”

She set her own fork down and pushed her plate away. She realized then she had to pay attention to this conversation, that it seemed to be about one thing and was really about another.

“Are you worried about what’ll happen to you after the ceremonies?” she asked.

He shook his head, but he still didn’t look up. He was developing a bald spot near his crown, and he hadn’t paid for enhancements. The small circle of skin made him seem vulnerable in a way she’d never noticed before.

“This isn’t about me,” he said, but she didn’t believe him.

“You can stay in the military,” she said. “They need planners. Even in peacetime, they’ll need a standing army. Governments always do.”

“Seriously, Nola,” he said with some irritation. “It’s not about me.”

“What is it about then?” she asked.

He shook his head again. The movement was small, almost involuntary, as if he were speaking to himself instead of her.

“Your units? The people under your command?”

He kept shaking his head.

“Your injured?”

“The dead,” he said softly.

She was silent for a long time, hoping he would elaborate. But he didn’t. So she struggled to understand.

“We can’t help them,” she said. “Even now with the technology that we have, the knowledge that we have, we can’t help them. We just try to prevent death.”

“And how do you do that?” he asked, raising his head. “How do you know who’s worthy?”

She frowned. She was a doctor. She had been all her adult life. “I don’t choose the worthy ones. That’s not my decision.”

“I’ve seen triage,” he said. “You pick. You always pick.”

Her breath caught.

“I don’t choose by worthiness,” she said softly. “I choose by my skill level. I choose by time. Who will survive the intervention? Who will take the least amount of time so that I can get to other injured? Who will be the least amount of work.”

That last made her face flush. She’d never admitted it to someone else before—at least not to someone who wasn’t a doctor, someone who wasn’t really faced with those decisions.

“That’s how you pick who’s worthy,” he said.

His words made her flush deepen.

“Doesn’t that bother you? Don’t you look at the ones you didn’t even try to save, the ones you sacrificed for the others, and wonder about them? Don’t you sometimes think you made the wrong choice?”

Her face was so warm now that it actually hurt.

“No.” She wanted to say that with confidence, but her voice was small, smaller than she’d ever heard it around him. “If I thought I always made the wrong choice, I couldn’t do my job.”

“But in the wee hours, when you’re alone…?”

She was staring at him. He hadn’t looked up once.

After a moment, he shook his head a third time, as if he were arguing with himself.

“Never mind,” he said. “I’m just tired.”

Which gave her an excuse to leave.

She had no sense it was the last time she’d see him. The next day, he had left the outpost.

And she never heard from him again.

***

“I’m sorry,” I say after giving her a moment to return from the memory. “I don’t see how all of that meant he didn’t plan to go to the ceremony. I don’t see how this relates to the Room of the Lost Souls.”

She raises her eyebrows in surprise. I get the distinct feeling she has just decided I’m dumb.

“He wasn’t thinking about the future,” she says. “He was thinking about the past.”

“I got that,” I say, and hope the words weren’t too defensive. “But he makes no mention of the ceremonies or of the Room. So I’m not sure how you made the connection all these years later.”

A slight frown creases the bridge of her nose. “The Room,” she says, “is a pilgrimage. Some say it’s a sacred place. Others believe only the damned can visit it.”

My breath catches. I haven’t heard any of that before. Or maybe I have. I used to make it a practice of not listening to stories about the Room because I believed no one could understand that place if they hadn’t been there.

“All right,” I say, “let’s assume he knew that. How do you know he went there next?”

“His crew says so.” She crosses her arms.

“I know that,” I say. “But you found this interchange important. Enlighten me. Why?”

“Because I was stupid,” she snaps. “He wasn’t talking about me. He was talking about himself. His choices. His way of doing things. His losses. I’m sure he was reflecting on them because everyone expected him to celebrate the end of the Wars.”

“He should have celebrated,” I say.

She smiles faintly, then nods. For a moment she looks away. I can see her make a decision. She takes a deep breath and uncrosses her arms.

“I agreed with you back then. I figured he should have been at his happiest. But he wasn’t so wrong about our jobs. I spent a lot of years as the chief surgeon on a military ship, and mostly I handled minor injuries and not-so-serious illness. But when we were in the middle of a battle, and the wounded kept pouring in, I just reacted.”

I nod, not wanting her to stop.

“I worked my ass off,” she says. “And people died.”

She leans back, and rests her wrist on the side of the table. “I never, ever counted how many people I saved. I still don’t. I suppose I can look it up. But I know to the person how many have died under my watch,” she says softly. “I’ll wager Ewing knew too. And each one of those deaths, they take something from you.”

A little piece of yourself, I almost add. But I don’t want her to think I’m sympathizing falsely, and I’m not willing to reveal as much of myself to her as she has revealed of herself to me.

“He wouldn’t have been talking about death if he was going to go to those ceremonies,” she says. “He wouldn’t have been looking at the past. He would have been looking toward the future, at what we could build.”

She sounds so confident. Yet they were just lovers, in passing, on a military output. How well did she really know him, after all?

And how can I ask her that without insulting her further?

So I try a different tack, partly to take my mind off those irritating questions and partly because I want to know.

“You said it’s a pilgrimage. You said only the damned can get in.”

Her frown grows. “Have you never heard of the Room?”

“I know it,” I say, choosing my words carefully. “I just don’t know the legends.”

And I should. I used to believe that the legends were more important than “facts” or histories or stories they could verify. Because legends held a bit of truth.

“Do the damned go to get cleansed?” I ask.

Her mouth closes. She takes a breath, sighs, then gives me that faint smile all over again.

“Some say the Room bestows forgiveness on those who deserve it.” That faraway look appears in her eyes.

“And those who don’t?” I ask.

Tears well. She doesn’t brush at them, doesn’t even seem to notice them.

“They never come back,” she says. Then she frowns at me. “You think he went for forgiveness, not to disappear.”

I shrug. “The timing works. If he completed his pilgrimage to the Room, he could have gone to the treaty-signing ceremonies.”

“With a pure heart,” she whispers.

“He was a hero,” I say without a trace of irony. “Didn’t he have one already?”

And for the first time, she has no answer for me.

***

She has led me in a whole new direction. I’m not looking for the remains of a man. I’m looking for something unusual, something special.

A man has a history and occasionally he becomes a legend. But a man is rarely special by himself. Sometimes he becomes special in a special time. Sometimes he rises beyond his upbringing to become something new. Sometimes he starts a movement, or alters the course of a country.

And sometimes—rarely—he changes an entire sector.

Like Ewing Trekov supposedly did with his friends as they developed a plan for the war.

But that story implies that he didn’t work alone. That if he had died before he came to this outpost, someone else would have picked up that mantle. That someone might not have performed as well. He—or she—might have done better. There’s no way to know.

But like all humans, Trekov wasn’t entirely unique.

The Room of Lost Souls is unique.

No one knows exactly what it is or how it got to be. No one knows where it started or who built it or why.

Places develop myths, become legends in ways more powerful than any human being ever can. Because beneath each legendary human is the reminder that he is human, that what makes him special is how he rose above his humanness to become a little bit more than the rest of us.

Not a lot more. Just a little bit.

Trekov was a man who had more children than he could count, who made love to women but apparently didn’t love them. A man who cared more about his work than his family.

A man like so many others.

A man who just happened to be the right man for the war he found himself in.

But the Room—the Room existed before humans settled this sector. The Room shows up in the earliest documents from the earliest space travelers.

And because it’s so old, and because no one knows exactly how it works or why it’s here or how it came to be, myths grew up around it.

People go on a pilgrimage.

Smart people, like Ewing Trekov.

People believe the Room will do something for them. Change something about them. Satisfy something within them.

The legends around the Room are fraught with danger. Space travelers are warned to stay away from it. I remember that much.

I heard that much.

But I’m not sure when. Or where. Or from whom.

Still, I need to heed my own advice.

I need to research the thing I think I know the best.

I need to talk to the one other person who remembers it vividly.

I have to talk to my own father.

Much as I don’t want to.

6

HE LIVES HALFWAY ACROSS the sector, on a small planet whose only inhabited continent counts itself as one of the losers in the Colonnade Wars.

He’s lived there for nearly two decades—and it’s a sign of how out of touch we are that I actually had to look that information up.

My father’s house is a maze of glass, stairs, and steel. From the outside it seems haphazard, rooms on top of rooms, but from the inside, it has a wide-open feel, like the best cruise liners, designed not to take you to a destination but to help you enjoy the journey.

He built his house in the center of a large blue lake, so at night the water reflected the skies above. If those skies are clear, it seems like he is in space, traveling from one port to another.

He doesn’t seem surprised to see me. If anything, he’s a little relieved.

I arrive in the middle of the afternoon and he insists I stay there. I nearly decline until he shows me the guest room. It is at the very top of the house, glass on all sides except the part of the floor that covers the room below. The bed seems to free-float between the blueness of the lake and the blueness of the sky.

The sun—too close to this planet for my tastes—sends light through the glass, but environmental controls keep the room cool and comfortable. My father shows me where those controls are so I can lessen the gravity if I want.

It takes me a while to realize that my father’s house is modeled on the station that houses the Room of Lost Souls. We meet in the center room—the room that would be the Room of Lost Souls if we were on that station—and he offers me a meal.

I decline. I’m too nervous in his presence to eat anything.

My father is no longer the man I remember, the man who cradled me when I got out of that Room. That man had been in his late thirties, tall and strong and powerful. He’d loved his wife and his daughter, making us the center of his life.

He’d commanded ships, built an empire of wealth, and still had time for us.

He abandoned everything to figure out how to get my mother out of that place. His businesses, his friends.

Me.

Which makes it so strange to see him now, essentially idle, in this place of openness and reflected light.

He still looks strong, but he hasn’t bothered with enhancements. His face has lines—sadness lines that turn down his eyes, and pinch the corners of his mouth. He has let his hair go completely white, along with his eyebrows, which have become bushy. His mustache—something I considered as much a part of him as his hands—is long gone.

He makes our greeting awkward by trying to hug me. I won’t let him.

He acts like he still has affection for me. He does make it clear that he has followed my career—as much as he can through what little I make public.

But he has respected my wishes—the wishes I screamed at him the last time I ran away from my grandparents—and has stayed out of my life.

“You sent Riya Trekov to me,” I say.

I can’t sit in the chair he’s offered me. I’m too restless in his presence, so I pace in the large room. The glass here opens onto the other rooms. Through their glass walls I can see still more rooms, and at the very end, the lake. Looking at it through all this glass makes it seem far away, and not real. It looks like a holograph of a lake, the kind you’d see on the distance ships of my childhood.

“I figured if anyone could help her, you could.” His voice is the same, deep and warm and just a little nasal.

I shake my head. “You’re the one who has done all the research on the Room.”

“But you’re the one who has dived the most dangerous wrecks ever found.”

I turn toward him then. He sits in the very center of the room. His chair is made of frosted glass and the cushions that protect his skin are a matching white. He looks like he has risen from the floor—a creature of glass and sunlight.

“You think this is like a wreck?” I ask. “Wrecks are known. They’re filled with space and emptiness. They have corners and edges and debris, but they’re part of this universe.”

“You think the Room isn’t?” He folds his hands and rests his chin on his knuckles.

“I don’t know what it is. You’re the one who has spent his life studying the damn thing.”

So much for trying to hide my bitterness toward his choices.

He grimaces, but nods, an acknowledgement that my bitterness has its reasons.

“Yes,” he says. “I’ve studied it. I’ve traveled to it countless times. I’ve sent people in there. I’ve repeated the same experiments that have been tried since it was discovered. None of them work.”

“So why do you think Riya Trekov’s device will work?” I ask.

“Because I was with her on one of the missions,” he says. “I watched people she paid go in and come back out.”

“Empty-handed,” I say.

He nods.

“Yet she thinks someone can bring her father out.”

“She might be right,” he says.

“And if he can come out, so can Mother.”

“Yes.” The word is soft. He lifts his chin off his folded hands. The knuckles have turned white.

“If you believe this and you think I’m the one who can bring a lost soul out, how come you didn’t ask me to do this yourself?”

“I did,” he says. “You turned me down.”

I snort and sink into one of the nearby chairs. He’s right; he did contact me. I had forgotten it among his many summonses, all of which I ignored. But this one had been his last, a long plea explaining that he not only had a way into the Room of Lost Souls, he had a way to survive it.

“You used to say you never wanted me to go back in there. You discouraged me from even going near the place, remember?”

I had been fifteen and full of myself. I’d run away from my grandparents half a dozen times. They were in constant mourning for my mother, and believed I was no substitute. It was pretty clear that they blamed me for her loss.

The final time, my father came after me, and I told him I could get my mother. I was the only one who’d come out alive. He owed me the chance to try.

He had refused.

I left him—and my grandparents—and never contacted any of them again. Although he kept trying to reach me. And I kept glancing at, then refusing, his messages.

“I couldn’t risk it,” he says. “We barely got you out that first time.”

“Yet you recommended me to go in when Riya Trekov comes to call. Because she has a way out or because you don’t care any more?”

His cheeks flush. “You didn’t have to agree.”

The chair is softer than I expect. I relax into it. “I know,” I say, giving him that much. “Her plea interested me.”

“Because of your diving,” he says.

I shake my head. Because I have nothing left. But I don’t say that.

“I recommended you because you’re trained now,” he says. “Of everyone I know, you have a chance, not just to get out. But to get out with something. You’ve become an amazing woman.”

I no longer know him. I can’t tell if he’s being sincere or if he’s trying to convince me.

He’s still a man obsessed. I wonder what he’ll do if he recovers the remnants of Mother. Her “soul” or her memory or even her self. He’s lived for decades without her. If she’s still alive, she’s spent double her initial lifespan inside a single Room.

I came here to find out one thing. So rather than debate the merits of my experience or the point of his obsession, I say, “Tell me what happened. How did we end up at the Room? How did we lose Mother?”

“You don’t remember?” he asks.

The lights, the voices. I remember. Just not in any detail.

“My memories are a child’s memories,” I say. “I want the real story. The adult story. Mistakes and all.”

7

WE HAD NO HOME. I didn’t remember that, just like I didn’t remember moving onto the ship six months before. My parents had sold our house and had put everything they had into his business, a fleet of cargo ships that ran all over the sector.

The business had become a success when my father stopped caring about the ethics of the cargo he carried. Sometimes he brought food or agricultural supplies to far-flung outposts. Sometimes he brought weapons to splinter groups rebelling against various governments.

He didn’t care, so long as he got his payment.

He made so much money, he no longer needed to run the fleet, but he did. Still, my mother begged him to buy land and he did that too. This land, kilometers and kilometers of it, the entire lake and the surrounding greenery.

He promised her they would retire here.

But they were still young, and he loved travel. He commanded the lead vessel because he owned it, not because he was good at piloting or even at leadership.

He tells me about the trips, about the deliveries, about the crew. The ship had a contingent of forty regular with two dozen others whom he hired for larger jobs. Sometimes they worked the cargo, sometimes they repaired the ship. Always they listened to him, whether he was right or not.

But he wasn’t the one who commanded them to the Room of Lost Souls. That was my mother. She had heard about it, studied it, thought about it.

She wanted to see it.

She didn’t believe a place that old—human-made—could exist in this part of space.

“She was trying to be a tourist,” he says now. “Trying to make all this travel work.”

But I wonder. Just like I wondered about Trekov. If my mother had done all the studying, had she been planning a pilgrimage? Because of my father’s business or because of some problem all her own?

I realize, as I’m sitting there, I know even less about her than I know about my father. I only know what I remember, what her parents told me in their grief, and what my father is telling me now.

“I took her there,” he says. “With no thought, no study. I thought it just an ancient relic, a place that we could see in half a day and be gone.”

“Half a day,” I mutter.

He looks at me, clearly startled that I spoke.

“So she planned to go to the Room?”

“That was the point of our visit,” he says.

“And she wanted to take me?” I can’t believe anyone who studied that place would bring a child to it.

“You suited up and followed her. You grabbed her hand as she went through that door. I think you were trying to keep her from going inside.”

But I wasn’t. I was entranced with the lights, as fascinated as she had been.

“I saw you go in,” he says. “I called to you both, but the door closed behind you.”

“And then?” I ask.

“And then I couldn’t get you out.”

Minutes became hours. Hours became a day. He tried everything short of going in himself. He smashed at the window, tried to dismantle the walls, sent in some kind of grappler to grab us. Nothing worked.

“Then, one day, the door opened.” His voice still holds a kind of awe. “And there you stood, your hands over your ears. I grabbed you and pulled you out, and held you, and the door closed again. Before I could go in. Before I could reach inside…”

His voice trails off, but I remember this part. I remember him clinging to me, his hands so firm that they bruise me. It feels like he holds me for days.

“You couldn’t tell us anything,” he says. “You didn’t think any time had gone by at all. You were tired and cranky and overwhelmed. And you never wanted to go in again.”

“You asked?”

He shakes his head. “You said. Without prompting. We stayed for a month. We never got her out.”

And then he ordered the ship to leave. Because he knew he could spend the rest of his life struggling against that place. And he had a child. A miracle child, who had escaped.

“I dropped you with your grandparents and came back. I figured I could go in and get her. But I couldn’t. Except for you, I didn’t know anyone who had gotten out.”

“Which is why you want me to go,” I say.

He shakes his head. “I’ve found people willing to go inside. Nothing comes out.”

“I thought you said you went with Riya Trekov. That she has a way out.”

“She does. People go in. They come out. But they’re always alone.”

Now I ask him. “What’ll you do if you get her? She won’t be the same. You’re certainly not.”

“I know,” he says, and for a moment, I think he’s going to leave it at that. Then he adds, “None of us are.”

***

We talk long into the night.

Or rather, I listen as he talks.

He tells me what he knows about the Room. He has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the place, combined with a series of theories, myths, and legends he has collected over the decades.

What it all comes to is what I already know: No one knows who built the Room or the station it’s on. No one knows when it was built—only that it predates the known human colonization of this sector. No one knows what its purpose was or why it was abandoned.

No one knows anything, except that people who go in do not come out.

Unless they’re protected by Riya Trekov’s device.

The device, as my father explains it, is a personal shield, developed by a company that’s related to my father’s old business. The shield relies on technology so old that few people understand it.

Sometimes I think all of human history is about the technology we’ve lost. We’re constantly reinventing things.

Or recovering them.

Apparently, this device is something reinvented.

How it works is simple: It acts like a spacesuit—creating a bubble around the user that contains both environment and gravity and anything else the user might need.

It has the same flaws a spacesuit has as well: It allows a person to enter an environment but not interact with it—or at least, not interact in important ways.

But the shield is different from a spacesuit as well. From the first discovery of the Room, humans have tried to enter wearing spacesuits, and that has not worked.

So Riya Trekov’s device negates something—or protects against something—that a spacesuit does not. Somehow, that device—that bubble it creates—is the perfect protection against the Room.

At least that is what my father would have me believe.

That’s what Riya Trekov showed me briefly on Longbow Station.

But now I have more qualms than before. Because the more my father talks, the more disgusted I become.

He has spent all this time studying the Room. He has made that Room his life’s work.

Yet he has never been able to risk that life, not even to pull me or my mother out of the Room.

As he paces around me, I think of all the times I’ve gone into a wreck, how I’ve looked for trapped divers, what I’ve risked to recover their bodies.

I’ve only failed to recover one.

On the Dignity Vessel. I left one of my divers behind because he was trapped in something I did not understand.

Like I do not understand Riya Trekov’s device.

Like I do not understand the Room.

People have devoted their lives to the mystery that is the Room, and have learned nothing.

Unlike them, I do not want to learn anything. I don’t even want to recover my mother or Ewing Trekov—both of whom I consider dead.

I want to see the Room for myself, to satisfy some curiosity that has plagued me since I was ten years old. In that, perhaps, I am more like my mother than my father. If his story is to be believed—and I am not sure it is—then my mother just wanted to see the anomaly for herself.

Which is, in part, what I want to do. But more than that, I want to see, experience, and understand from an adult perspective what had so influenced me as a child.

I want to know how much the Room formed me, the embittered wreck diver, the woman who once believed that preserving the past was more important than any money that can be made from it.

The woman who believed—and maybe still does—that the past holds secrets, secrets which, if understood, can teach us more about ourselves than any science can.

I do not tell my father any of this. I let him believe I’m doing a job. I pretend to be interested in all that he tells me.

And I pretend to be surprised when he tells me he wants to join me.

He says he wants to see the Room one last time.

8

IT TAKES MONTHS to put a team together. The people who want to go to the Room are not experienced divers or experienced space travelers for that matter. The people who do not want to go are the ones I need.

I am able to buy some of them—money goes a long way with people who live on the edge—but I cannot buy all. Most importantly, I cannot buy Karl, who was with me on the Dignity Vessel job.

At first, he won’t even talk to me. But eventually, his curiosity gets the better of him. He agrees to meet me in the old spacer’s bar in Longbow Station.

I am at the station alone. I told my father that I would not be able to recruit when he was around. He has a reputation for being difficult and for thinking he’s in charge. I actually got him to sign legal documents attesting to the fact that he would not run anything on board my ship or do anything to command (or jeopardize) my expedition.

I am using three factors in picking my team: I want people who are creative—both mechanically and intellectually; I want people who have dived the most dangerous wrecks in the sector; and I want people who are honest.

Finding the last two is relatively easy—divers have to be honest or they don’t survive. The survivors are usually the ones who have been on the most dangerous missions.

But most divers leave the creativity to the person in charge of the mission. Since, in the past, that was me, I never had the opportunity to work with other dive team leaders.

Except Karl.

He started his business after I quit mine. He took over my routes, and I didn’t interfere with him because I believed I would never wreck dive again.

But that isn’t the only reason I want him.

I want him because he’s trustworthy—and he’s dangerous.

I don’t know a lot about his personal history, but I do know a few things, things I’ve observed and things he’s told me.

He’s ex-military and he’s excellent with a knife. He can kill anything—and has, twice on dive trips, once before I knew him, and once after he opened his own business and trusted the wrong person.

He’s cautious to a fault and yet oddly fearless. I say oddly because I’ve seen him back away from a dive because of worries about it, only to see him conquer those worries and go in.

I respect that about him.

I also know he can get my people back to Longbow if something happens to me.

He can get them back and he can handle my father.

Those elements are more important than creativity, more important than diving ability, more important than survival skills.

He has just come off a run of his own. He won’t tell me where, which leads me to believe he has discovered a wreck he doesn’t want me to know about.

His angular face seems even thinner than before, and his gray eyes seem silver in this light. He looks older, as if leading his own expeditions has taken something out of him.

He wears a thin white shirt over his slender chest. His pants are too loose, suggesting that the thinness in his face isn’t my imagination. He’s lost weight.

He straddles a chair across from me, using the chair’s back as protection between us. He wraps his arms around it and stares at me.

“You have some nerve,” he says.

“Yes, I do.” I smile.

He doesn’t smile back.

Then I sigh and let the smile fade. “I would like to hire you for a run.”

“And I would like to tell you to go fuck yourself.” But he doesn’t move. “But if I do, you’ll just keep asking me. So I came to hear what you have to say and to tell you no in person.”

I understand why he’s angry at me. I also understand if he never works with me again. When I hired him to go to the Dignity Vessel, I didn’t tell him what we were diving, even though I knew.

I didn’t tell any of my team. I didn’t want them to bring preconceptions to the dive.

That was just the first mistake I made on that trip—if I had spoken up, we might not have gone in, and we wouldn’t have lost two divers.

Karl swore he’d give up diving after that, but he didn’t. It’s a hard profession to renounce. There isn’t much left in this sector that allows the kind of freedom, risk and adventure real wreck diving does.

“Just hear me out,” I say to him.

This time, I tell him everything. I tell him about my past, about my father, about Riya Trekov and her father. I tell him about the Room and its dangers. I tell him about the pilgrimages and the quasi-religious symbolism others have found in the place.

Then I tell him what I remember of the Room itself.

That’s when he finally moves. Just a little, but enough so that I know I’ve hooked him somehow.

And I’m not quite sure how.

“If what you say is true,” he says, “this is the second wreck you want to bring me to that’s out of time.”

My breath catches. I knew that the station and the Room don’t belong. I haven’t allowed myself to make the mental comparison to the Dignity Vessel.

“You think it’s related to the Dignity Vessel?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “There’s always a chance. But I worry about preconceptions.”

“Yeah,” he says dryly. “I remember that about you.”

The words sting.

“I might be wrong,” I say. “Preconceptions might be necessary. I don’t know. I just know I’m going to do this job as if it’s a dive, and I want the best team possible.”

“You realize the chances of someone dying on this trip are very high,” he says.

“Yes.” I swallow. That someone will probably be me.

He sighs. He’s clearly thinking about the offer. We haven’t talked money yet. I doubt money will mean much to him.

“What do you get out of this?” he asks. “Reconciliation with your father?”

I shake my head. “I want nothing from him.”

“Yet you bring him along. That could compromise us right there.”

I like the word “us.” I didn’t expect it. But I don’t show him that I’ve noticed.

“I know it could,” I say. “I’ll need help minimizing contact with him.”

“And your mother.” He shakes his head. “This is fraught with emotion. You taught me that dives should have no emotion.”

And yet our last dive was filled with it. We were trying to recover a body, and we couldn’t. It devastated us both.

“I know,” I say.

“If I go,” he says, “I run the mission.”

My entire body freezes. “How can it be my mission if you run it?”

“The dives,” he says. “Anything to do with the Room. If I say we pull out, we pull out. If I say we leave someone behind, we leave them.”

I bite my lower lip. I’m barely breathing.

“C’mon, Boss,” he says, using my old divers’ nickname. “You know that’s why you’re asking me to go. I’m the only one qualified, and the only one you’ll listen to. You know that when I say we have to leave, I’ll be right.”

I let out the breath I was holding. Part of me has relaxed. He is right. That’s why I chose to approach him. Because of our history. Because I know he’s more cautious than I am, and because he has nothing at stake.

Except proving to me that I can be wrong.

“No grudges?” I ask.

He smiles for the first time. It’s a sad smile. “I’ve lost two divers in the years since the Dignity Vessel. I don’t know if I would have made the mistakes you made, but I’ve made some of my own. I think I’m finally beginning to understand you. So, no grudges. I’ll do what’s best for the mission, not what’s best for Riya Trekov or your father. Or for you.”

I nod. “You haven’t even asked about money.”

“I know you’ll be fair,” he says. Then his smile grows. “And I’ve always wanted to see the Room. The most mysterious place in this sector. I say let’s go.”

***

Maybe that’s why such places catch and kill so many. Because they capture the imagination. Certainly that’s why so many stories spring up around them.

And so many myths.

With Karl at my side, I do even more work. We sort through the repeated histories, and try to find the sources of various legends. We trace the Room in the modern era as best we can, and we ghoulishly make a list of all the souls known to have been lost in the place.

There are more than five hundred—and that’s just recorded losses. Who knows how many others there were? No one has kept track of the abandoned single ships found near the station or people on a pilgrimage all on their own.

In passing, I say to Karl that what we’ve learned isn’t worth the time we’ve spent. And he says what we’ve learned is that there are no odd recorded stories, things that don’t quite fit into the other stories.

Maybe there’s even a recognizable pattern. There certainly is to the losses. What happened to my father and his crew is the same as what happened to the very first ship that discovered the place, centuries ago.

“The same,” I say, “except me coming out of that Room.”

“Except that,” Karl says.

***

In the end, we put together a team of ten, not counting me or Karl or Riya or my father.

Karl will lead the mission once we arrive at the station. Until then, I am in charge. I’ll be in charge again when we leave the station as well. It’s only when we’re docked—when we’re near the Room—that Karl will have control.

We use the Business. It has never been so full—at least not as long as I owned it. My father has the captain’s cabin, which assuages my conscience. I’ve cut him off from all command and all control, which has to be difficult for him. So I reward him with the best quarters on the ship.

Riya has the third best cabin. Mine is second best, and with its dedicated hardwired computer, I don’t want anyone near it.

The dive team has the rest of the main deck and Karl has the only room on the upper deck. It has the best views, and is impressive, should anyone visit him. I want him to look powerful and in charge, even before he is.

Some—including my father—believe that I placed Karl in charge of the mission at the station because Karl and I are lovers. The dive team knows differently—it’s no secret in the diving community how angry Karl was with me after the events with the Dignity Vessel—but they’re under orders not to correct that misperception.

Karl helped me vet the dive team. Two women who’d been on some of his previous dives, an old timer who has more experience than me and Karl combined, three superb and fearless pilots, three young men hired more for their strength than their diving ability, and another old colleague, a woman who had accompanied me on my earliest professional dives.

I have decided to treat this as a real dive, which means that we are focusing on the station, not just the Room. From everything that Karl and I have found, it seems people who have gone to the station have gone for the Room—or only spent time in the Room.

No one has given the habitats more than a cursory examination, not even the scholars. In fact, the scholars have mostly relied on the discovery of others, being too afraid to examine things themselves.

On the first day out, I brief the dive team about our mission. We meet in the lounge. The Business’s lounge is not for recreation. I put all of my playback and analysis equipment here. I also use it to analyze upcoming dives. There are comfortable chairs as well as two sofas, but they’re arranged in an uncomfortable pattern—a semi-circle facing the various screens and portholes.

Nine members of the dive team are here, as well as myself and Karl. I have banned Riya and my father from attending any meetings about the upcoming dives. The missing member of the team is the pilot who is currently flying the ship.

The team spreads around the lounge, trying to look casual, but I recognize the emotions here. Everyone is excited. The work is what they live for—it’s what I used to live for—and when they’re approaching something new, it’s thrilling, not frightening.

I haven’t felt the thrill yet. I haven’t felt fear either, which I consider a victory. What I am feeling is nervous. I have no idea how any of this will play out.

I’m not sure how I want it too.

Still, I try to maintain an upbeat attitude, like I used to do when I started dangerous dive missions in the past. I walk in front of the screens, looking every member of the team in the eye as I speak.

I am not as honest with them as I was with Karl. I do mention problems—my father, the loss of my mother to the Room, which is why Karl will lead once we get to the station—but I do not mention my own reservations.

Instead, I talk about the history.

“We are not looking for items to resell,” I say, although everyone probably knows that. After all, they’ve signed on to dive with me and Karl, not some salvage divers or treasure hunters. “We’re looking for information—anything that will tell us about the station, about who built it, how it came to be here—why it’s out here at all so far away from everything—and what its purpose actually is.”

“Do we know if the Room is an integral part of the station?” asks Roderick. He’s slight but broad-shouldered, a landbound pilot, who somehow became one of the most highly rated in the sector. I supervised his first shift with the Business and was impressed. He found my control shortcuts without explanation in a matter of minutes.

“We know nothing,” I say. “We don’t know if the Room’s intentional or part of an accident.”

“We do know,” Karl says, “that the habitats next to the Room have been destroyed. But we don’t know how. We don’t know if someone destroyed them trying to block access to the Room or if the Room was something else and an accident or an explosion or something gone horribly wrong created the damage that we’ll find around it.”

“We’re not scientists,” says Odette. She’s the oldest diver, whom I’d partnered with long ago. She is standing in the back of the lounge near the main exit, her stick-thin arms crossed. She looks delicate against the bulkhead, as if nothing could prevent her from floating off into space. “How are we supposed to know what happened in there or what any of it means?”

“Between us, we have centuries of experience with ancient technologies.” I’m mostly talking to her and Karl now, but some of the other divers we hired have it as well. “We’ll know as much or more than any scientist we bring out here.”

“Besides,” Karl says, “we are going to bring back as much information as we can about the station. Our goal is to be the definitive historical mission for the station and the Room.”

“Is that why you wouldn’t give us a timeline?” asks Tamaz, one of the young male divers we hired for his strength and not for his great experience. He has muscles along his arms and chest that I haven’t seen in most divers. He probably had to have a special suit made.

But I wanted his strength in case we have to pull someone out of the Room. We’ve already established that machines can’t do it, but a person might be able to. A very strong, very motivated person.

“We are not giving you a timeline because we can’t,” I say. “The Room’s past history shows that people can sometimes be inside for hours or a day before coming out again.”

Although the only history that showed that was mine. All of the people hired by Riya and my father came out within hours of going in, just like they were supposed to.

Both Karl and I felt the dive team didn’t have to know this aspect of the Room’s history—nor did they have to know the fact that I had already been inside. I did not want to be seen as an expert on the interior, particularly when I can’t remember much about it.

“If there’s no treasure inside, why would people go in?” asks Mikk, another of the strong young men. He’s taller than Tamaz, but otherwise looks very much the same. I would have considered them brothers if I hadn’t known otherwise.

“There’s treasure,” I say before Karl can comment. “But it’s not the monetary kind. We warned you about that when we hired you for the dive.”

Mikk waves his right hand. It’s bigger than my thigh. “I’m not thinking for me. I mean all these five hundred people you say never came out. Why go in in the first place?”

“You’re not religious, are you, Mikk?” Davida asks softly. She’s one of Karl’s hires, a regular wreck diver who has the standard lean physique along with skin so taut it looks stretched over her frame.

“So?” he sounds defensive.

“That’s what a pilgrimage is, something religious.” Davida sounds sure of herself, but she’s obviously not that religious either.

“Pilgrimages have religious connotations, yes,” Odette says from her post in the back. This time, the dive team looks at her as if they haven’t really noticed her before. “But a pilgrimage is also a mission to a special place, not just a sacred place. One could say this is a pilgrimage.”

Her gaze is on mine. She knows some of my family’s history, but I don’t believe she knows all of it.

“It certainly is for Riya Trekov,” I say to cover my own discomfort. “She believes her father’s soul is trapped in this place, and she believes we can recover it.”

“Do you?” Tamaz asks me.

I think for a moment—the lights, the voices building one upon another, the clutch of my father’s arms as he holds me tight.

“No,” I say after a moment, “but that doesn’t mean we aren’t going to try.”

9

THE STATION IS BIGGER than I remember, bigger than my father’s descriptions of it, bigger than anything mentioned in the archives.

It looms ahead of the Business like a small asteroid or a tiny moon. It’s gray in the constant twilight of space, the reflection of far away stars making it seem brighter than it actually is.

There are no visible lights on the station, nothing that marks it as a landing site or an outpost or some kind of waystation. There are no energy readings, faint or otherwise.

I fly us toward the station as Roderick, Karl, and the other two pilots—Hurst and Bria—monitor the audio bands, trying to find any sign of life coming from the place.

The five of us sit shoulder to shoulder as we work the controls. The cockpit feels crowded, even though it’s built for ten or more. The station shows up on my viewscreen and in my controls as well as in the portholes throughout the ship.

Out of deference to my father, we do not dock on the exterior docking ring. This was where his large cargo ship docked—it couldn’t go any deeper into the station itself—and this was where the nightmares that have haunted the rest of his life began.

Instead, I pick a smaller ring on the upper level, where the habitats are still intact. From here, it looks as if we’ve approached a darkened but working space station. Reflections in the exterior windows of the station make it seem like someone is moving inside.

That startles Hurst—he even points it out—but Karl and I have approached so many wrecks, we’re used to the phenomenon.

“It’s just us,” he says. “We’re seeing our own reflections.”

Still Hurst works the sensors. He’s not convinced. He’s already spooked, and I don’t like that. I need solid, steady people, not superstitious ones given to outbursts.

I make a mental note to keep him away from the pilot’s chair during this part of the mission. And I will tell Karl that later on.

Right now, we settle into work. First we have to use our own equipment to map the station. Then we’ll proceed with a dive plan.

“It’s bigger than I thought,” Bria says. She has steady hands, which I appreciate, and a quick sense of humor. Her dark head is bent over the controls, her hands moving across them as if the Business is a ship she’s spent her entire life aboard.

“It’s a lot bigger,” says Hurst. His hands are shaking. He made it clear to us when he was hired that he’d never flown a mission like this. He’d mostly done combat zones. Active danger—shots, explosions—doesn’t bother him. He’s a quick thinker in that kind of situation, and since Karl and I didn’t know what we were facing, we wanted one pilot with experience flying in and out of a constantly changing situation.

“All our previous readings are wrong,” Karl says, and that’s when I look. He gives me his handheld.

Previous specs showed the station to be one-quarter to one-half the size of this station.

“Are we in the right place?” Roderick asks.

I nod. The coordinates are right. The middle of the station is right as well.

But I don’t trust it. I do my own scan.

The readings on the exterior of the station are correct except for the station’s size. The strange metal, the age of the station itself, its unusual structure match the past specs.

“What the hell?” Roderick mutters.

Karl has frozen beside me. The hair on the back of my neck has risen.

“There are a million explanations,” Bria says, oblivious to our reaction. “You said no one explored the whole thing. Maybe no one mapped it either. You’re relying on stuff you’ve found in databases, which could be corrupted or tampered with or just plain wrong.”

“True,” Hurst says. “I’ve run into this all over the sector. Particularly in the lesser known parts. No one really cares how big something is unless they need to. Most people aren’t that accurate.”

But this is a place that ships have come to on pilgrimages. This is a place that has been studied.

And my own sense as we approached was that it has become bigger.

I swallow hard, but I don’t say anything.

Instead, I get out of the pilot’s chair and sweep my hand toward it, looking at Karl’s angular face.

“It’s your mission now,” I say.

He hesitates. Then he takes a deep breath and slides into the pilot’s chair. Of the five of us in the cockpit, he is, by far, the weakest pilot, but he knows what I’m doing.

I’m symbolically relinquishing command.

I have to.

I’m already not thinking rationally. I’m making things up based on my past experience.

And that terrifies me.

***

I leave them to mapping. I go to my quarters and log onto my dedicated computer. I call up files I haven’t looked at in years.

Files that I stored after the Dignity Vessel.

Files on stealth technology.

Modern ships have stealth technology. It shields our ships from each other’s instruments. But it does not make the ship completely invisible. It simply makes us invisible to all but the naked eye. If we pass in front of a porthole, someone on that ship will see us.

Our weak stealth technology is hard won. We’ve been working on it for generations, always seeking to improve it, and never doing so.

True stealth technology—the kind that actually makes a ship invisible (and, in some cases, impossible not just to see but to hear and touch)—is extremely dangerous. The kind of stealth that the ancients had actually changed the ship itself (or whatever the stealth was applied to). Some believe that the ship dissolved and reformed at a particular point. Others think it went out of phase with everything else in the universe. And still others believe that it actually leaves this dimension.

No one knows, exactly, because we have lost more technology than we have kept. The ancients had things we’ve never had. We didn’t understand what they did or the way that they built things. We lost that knowledge somewhere along the way.

Our military—our scientists—have attempted to reverse engineer all kinds of things, including the kind of stealth the ancient Dignity Vessels had, but to no avail.

An old military diving buddy of mine once said that kind of stealth tech was banned, the knowledge deliberately lost. She claimed that hundreds would die every few generations or so when someone tries to revive the technology. She believes it is beyond our grasp.

It certainly was on the Dignity Vessel that Karl and I dove. The stealth tech there was based on interdimensional science. Those ships didn’t vanish off radar because of a “cloak” but because they traveled, briefly, into another world—a parallel universe that’s similar to our own.

When I first heard this theory, I recognized it. It’s the one on which time travel is based, even though we’ve never discovered time travel, at least not in any useful way, and researchers all over the universe discourage experimentation in it. They prefer the other theory of time travel, the one that says time is not linear, that we only perceive it as linear, and to actually time travel would be to alter the human brain.

But my experience in that Dignity Vessel showed me that it’s possible to open small windows in other dimensions. Only in practice those windows don’t work the way they do in theory. They explode or get stuck or ships get lost.

People get lost.

Is that what we’re facing here? Yet another version of ancient stealth tech?

My skin is crawling.

That would be too simple, and too much of a coincidence.

And it wouldn’t explain the voices.

This is why I have given over the controls to Karl earlier than I planned. Although I’m beginning to doubt the wisdom of that. Karl is as familiar with ancient stealth-tech as I am and is scarred by it too.

I hope it won’t affect his judgment here.

I stand and pace my small quarters, and as I do I remember the other reasons I hired Karl to run things.

Riya.

My father.

My mother.

Those voices.

No preconceptions, that’s my motto. And I need to wait until mine are under control before I face the team all over again.

***

By the time I come out, the station is mapped. It is definitely larger than our research told us it would be. Karl wants to bring in my father, and I can’t contradict him even though I don’t want to use my father for anything.

We meet in the lounge. Fortunately, Karl has kept Riya out of this meeting. Most of the dive team is here and all of the pilots. The Business, safely docked, has its automatic alarms on in case something happens.

Still, this close to a dive, I hate leaving the cockpit unattended.

Karl reminds everyone that he is in charge now. Then he introduces my father—using all of his very impressive credentials—and says,

“I invited him into this meeting because he’s been here before. He knows a lot about the station and even more about the Room.”

Karl looks at me. My father is standing next to him, dwarfing Karl. My father, with his planet-bound height and muscle, looks almost superhuman compared to the divers. And even though he’s older than everyone except, perhaps, Odette, he seems much more powerful.

I don’t like the contrast.

“The changes in what we’re expecting are enough to make me reassess the mission,” Karl says.

I turn toward him, shocked. This isn’t the man I hired all those years ago. This isn’t Karl the Fearless.

He sees my look and holds up his hand to silence me. “I’ve learned over the years that it’s best to talk about the unexpected, and even better to get the dive team’s read on it. We’re here to take extreme risks, but not unnecessary risks.”

I dig my teeth into my lower lip, so that I don’t contradict him—at least not yet. At least not this early in the very first meeting he’s called.

Karl explains our findings, and he uses some impressive graphs and charts and diagrams that he’s clearly worked on in the short time since he called the meeting. Then he turns to my father.

“What do you make of this?” Karl asks.

My father walks in front of the displays, his hands clasped behind his back like a professor grading a student’s work. I get the sense that he likes the attention and is milking it.

“Your worry isn’t necessary,” he says after a minute. He addresses Karl like the rest of us aren’t here. “I’ve seen this before.”

I remain still in the back of the lounge. Odette crosses her arms. Karl tilts his head, obviously intrigued.

“Every time I come here, the station is bigger.” My father does not pause, even though he should have. The sentence sends a ripple of interest through the group and would have given him the attention he obviously craves. “I think it’s programmed to build new units, which is why the habitable ones are on the outer layers, not in the middle.”

It’s a plausible explanation, and no one asks him for his proof. I would have. My father is not a scientist, and he didn’t back up what he just said with any statistics or experimentation. Just observation and a supposition.

“So it’s normal,” says Bria with something like relief.

“There’s nothing normal about this place,” my father says.

“How do we test the growing theory?” asks Jennifer. She’s one of my hires, and she looks at me as she asks this, all wide eyes and innocence. But I’ve known her for a while, and Jennifer isn’t innocent. She’s annoyed that I’ve been forgotten, and she’s pointing me out to the others on purpose.

I’m glad for the opening. “We test all theories. That’s why it’s best to go slow. The more we learn before we go to the Room, the better off we’ll be.”

“You actually think we’ll learn something new about the Room?” Davida asks. She’s sitting by Jennifer and Roderick on the couch. They glance at her in surprise.

“Why else come on this mission if you can’t learn something new?” Roderick asks.

“It’s just that this thing has existed for so long and no one knows anything about it,” Davida says. “That’s beginning to creep me out.”

“We know some things,” my father says and goes into his lecture on the history of the Room. He doesn’t seem to notice that he’s talking mostly about conjecture and theory, but some of the others do. They squirm. He’s lost the attention he worked so hard to gain.

It takes Karl a while to shut my father down, but he finally does. Then Karl looks at me as if my father’s lack of social graces are my fault.

I give Karl a half smile and a shrug.

Karl gets my father to sit. Then Karl sets up the dive roster for the following day—Bria piloting one of the four-man skips (so that our teams don’t have to free dive to get into far sections of the station) and Davida, Jennifer, and Mikk in the upper habitats—with a promise of more when we meet that night.

The team shifts, but this time it isn’t because of my father’s long-windedness. It’s because they’re excited.

It’s because they’re ready.

We all are.

10

FOR THE NEXT THREE WEEKS, we dive the station, making detailed maps, exploring the new and old habitats, sharing small discoveries.

Every night we meet in the lounge and watch the captured imagery of that day’s dives. The divers narrate and the others ask questions. That way, we all have the same information.

We learn quite a few things—the built-in furniture is the same in all of the habitats, although in the “new” section, as Karl likes to call it, it’s not dented or warped or even scratched.

The new sections contain a few other things—remotes attached to entertainment equipment, equipment that doesn’t seem to work “although it might if we can find a good way to power the entire station,” my father says. “Maybe the entertainment programming is supposed to come from the damaged central area.”

I don’t like having my father in the lounge at night. He’s not methodical and he’s given to supposition. I think supposition is deadly. Karl finds it fascinating, but he can separate out the supposition from fact.

I’m not sure some of the younger divers can. Although they occasionally find my father long-winded, they seem to like him. They may even admire him.

I don’t ask anyone what they think of him, not that they’d give me an honest opinion. Everyone is aware that he is my father and that we aren’t on the best of terms.

Indeed, everyone else talks to him more than I do.

Including Riya, who daily complains that we are wasting her time and money. From the moment we arrived, she wanted us to go into the Room and do nothing else. Fortunately, Karl is in charge of this part of the mission, and Karl must talk to her, reminding her that caution is our byword, and even if we don’t recover her father on this trip, the information we gather might make it possible to recover him on the next.

One night, she came to me to complain. I waved her off. “You gave me as much time as I needed,” I reminded her.

“Yes,” she said. “I gave you that, not him.”

“And I placed him in charge while we’re at the station. I trust him.”

She glared at me. “I hope that trust isn’t misplaced.”

So far, it doesn’t seem misplaced. I approve of the way he’s handling the team—dividing assignments based on experience and on interest. It soon becomes clear who likes going through debris-crowded destroyed habitats, and who prefers a minute exploration of the pristine edges of the station.

He also has kept track of the pilots—who handles the skip best in tight quarters and who is the most observant. And he hasn’t lost track of the Room.

Once a week, he and I have gone around its exterior. The first time, we mapped it. The second time, we mapped again to see if it had expanded. The third, we just observed.

The station hasn’t grown while we’re here. And we’ve seen nothing untoward about the Room, although on that first dive I was surprised to learn that the Room is encased on all sides.

For some reason, I thought part of it was open to space. I’m assuming that’s because I saw the lights and they seemed to lead somewhere. And also, I’m sure I thought the Room had unlimited space because it has taken so many bodies.

When you peer through the main window, you can see none of those bodies. In fact, you can’t even see the lights. It looks dark and empty, like the still-intact habitats.

Only when you shine a light inside, it disappears into the darkness. It does not reflect back at you.

My father claims to recognize all of this, which is making Karl grow more and more exasperated with him. At one point, in one of our nightly meetings, Karl snapped at him, “I asked you to tell us everything you knew about the Room.”

My father shrugged. “I have.”

“Yet each night, you have some new observation, some new memory.”

My father didn’t seem perturbed at Karl’s tone. “You think small details are important, things I noticed, but never really thought much about. So when I remember them, I tell you.”

Karl asked if there were other things like that which my father noted, things he wanted to tell us.

My father shrugged again. “I’m sure I’ll remember when the time comes.”

Karl looked at me and caught me rolling my eyes. But I said nothing to him or my father. Karl asked to command this part of the mission because he believed my observations and judgments would be compromised.

He’s only beginning to realize that my father’s are as well.

***

The readings have come back from the new habitats. They’re composed of the same material as the rest of the station, only it isn’t worn down by centuries. It does seem newer, just like the interior furniture does. A lot points to my father’s theory—that the structure is being built new—but I am not sure how.

If the station is adding to itself over time, I’m not sure what materials it’s using. My father seems ignorant of the law of matter conservation, so he thinks it possible to create something from nothing. I’ve never seen that happen.

Then, one night, I woke bolt upright on my bed, worried that the matter being used to make the new station comes from the bodies of the dead.

I had to do the calculations just to calm myself down. They showed me that even with every part of a body being used, there wasn’t enough material.

Either the station had some kind of supply, something we didn’t recognize, or it was bringing matter in from elsewhere.

Or it wasn’t growing itself. It was revealing itself, like I feared.

And I found a lot of evidence to support that theory. At least, evidence that part of me wanted to believe.

When we left the Dignity Vessel, we left one of our divers—Junior—inside. Because we were worried that he might still be alive but in some kind of time dilation, Karl and I went back to see if we could rescue him. Failing that, we hoped to find a way to help him die.

We learned that, indeed, Junior had gone through a time dilation, but not the kind we thought. He had aged so rapidly that the upper half of his body, still in its dive suit had mummified.

His waist and legs had only been dead for a day but his upper half, his torso and his face had been dead for centuries.

I found myself wondering if the station wasn’t going through the same sort of time split. Maybe the station was stuck in two different timeframes . Maybe it was stuck. And like some stuck objects, it was slowly sliding out of whatever held it.

Which would explain how it “grew” each time my father had visited, and why the newer areas didn’t seem to age. Maybe the time split here was the opposite of the one we’d found on the Dignity Vessel.

Instead of time progressing rapidly in the part we couldn’t reach, it was progressing slowly there—or maybe not at all. That the parts of the station being revealed were in a section between time, between dimensions.

I was no scientist, and I had no way to test my theories. I didn’t even want to mention them to Karl. He had enough to worry about.

I did mention one worry, however. I told him it concerned me that the station expanded outward, and I made him promise no skip and no diver would travel to the outer edges.

I didn’t want another Junior. I didn’t want someone to get stuck between two times or two dimensions or two universes.

I wanted to be cautious and in this, as in everything else, Karl agreed.

***

Everything seems to be going fine, and despite my discomfort, my mood has improved. The divers are enjoying their dives and no one has had a close call or been injured.

We’re not lulled into a complacency, however. We know that the worst part of the dive is ahead, and that it belongs to me.

I’ve been preparing, and not just in my visits to the Room. I’ve spent most of my free time examining Riya’s device. I’ve run it through my computers, trying to find its origin, and cannot.

It is made of familiar materials, but they’re grafted onto a center that I do not recognize or understand. The materials in that center aren’t anything like what I found on the Dignity Vessel or here at the station, and for that I’m relieved.

It doesn’t seem to do much when it turns on—I get a small energy spike, and lights run along the edges of the device. But I don’t sense the bubble or see momentary shimmer or something that would imply an actual shield going around me.

But a lot of things work without being obvious. And I’m not testing the device in zero-G. I’m testing in Earth Normal, in full environment. I don’t want to test it outside the ship, lest I cause problems.

I wish I knew more about the device, but Riya can’t tell me much. She says she got the shield through her father’s connections.

She can tell me nothing else.

So I memorize the exterior dimensions of the Room, so that I can find the edges even if I can’t see them. And I try to ignore the music in my head, which seems to grow each and every day.

Grow isn’t exactly the right word. The music plays a little longer each time I “hear” it. It isn’t louder or any more insistent. It’s just harder to shut off.

I’m actually becoming used to it. In the past it would distract me and I would have to concentrate on anything outside myself while the voices sang. Now they’re a background accompaniment, and I wonder if I would actually notice them if I weren’t planning to go back inside the Room so soon.

The night before I go in, Karl calls me to his quarters. I haven’t been up to them since I assigned them. I’m startled to see that he’s blocked the view of the station, but has left the portals that open to the space views clear.

He’s sitting near the clear portals, his back reflected in them. His eyes are wide, and for the first time since I’ve given him control, I worry that he’s not up to it.

Something has unsettled him.

“You okay?” I ask as I sit across from him. My back is to the station. Although the portals are opaqued against it, I can feel it looming, almost as if it’s a living entity, one that grows and changes and becomes something else.

“I’m a little uncomfortable,” he says and shifts in his seat as if to prove the remark. “I’ve put this conversation off too long.”

I stiffen. One of the risks of giving him control is that he would keep it, that he would make the mission—and in some ways, the ship—his. I trusted him not to do that, but that trust suddenly feels fragile.

“What’s going on?” I ask, careful to keep my voice calm.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about tomorrow’s dive,” he says. “I don’t think you should do it.”

The words hang between us. I make myself breathe before responding.

“Have you seen something that makes the dive untenable?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “The dive is fine. I think we should go ahead with it. I just don’t think you should be the one to go in.”

My face heats. “That’s the whole point of this mission.”

“Going into the Room to recover Commander Trekov is the point of this mission—the central point, the one you and I agreed on. But this whole mission is larger than that, and we’re learning some great things. We wouldn’t have done that without you.”

He clearly planned that little speech. It sounds forced.

“Who’ll go in?” I ask.

“Me,” he says.

“Alone?” The word squeaks out. I’m surprised and can no longer hide it.

“I have the most dive experience next to you,” he says.

“Actually, that’s not true. Odette does.”

“All right, then,” he says. “You and I have the most diving experience on dangerous wrecks. She’s spent the last fifteen years on tourist runs.”

“Like me,” I say softly.

“You haven’t spent fifteen years at it, and if that were the only problem, I’d ignore it.”

I want to cross my arms and glare at him. But I don’t. I put him in charge for a reason. I’m going to hear him out.

“So what are the other problems?” I ask.

He takes a deep breath. “Your father for one.”

“I don’t like him,” I say. “We have history. So what?”

“You have a shared history. And it has to do with the loss of your mother.” Karl folds his hands across his knee, then unfolds them. He’s clearly nervous.

“We discussed this,” I say. “That’s why you’re in charge.”

“I know,” he says. “But that loss is significant. It caused the rift between you two and it changed both of your lives. I’ve heard your story about the Room and you were entranced by that place.”

“I was happy to get out,” I say, repeating what my father told me.

“But you went in willingly. What if the Room causes some kind of hypnosis? What if you’re still susceptible to it? It’s irresponsible to send you in on the first dive.”

I’m about to protest when I register the word “first.”

“You think there will be more than one dive?” I ask.

“There has to be,” he says. “We do it by the book. We map and observe and then we discuss. If we’re going to remove something from the Room, we do so on the final dive.”

“So you want to do at least four dives,” I say.

He nods. “The problem is that we only have one device, so only one of us can go in at a time. You’ll be looking for your mother. You know you will—”

I’m shaking my head, but deep down, I know he’s right. Of course, I’ll be looking for her. And for Commander Trekov, and the others trapped in that place.

“—and you won’t be focused on the small but necessary details. I will. I’ve made a point of not looking at your mother’s image or Commander Trekov’s. Even if I see them, I won’t recognize them. They’ll be part of the entire package. I won’t be tempted to move too quickly.”

I swallow hard. “Why not send someone else in? It’s a risky mission. You’re in charge. You should stay out here.”

“It is risky,” he says. “But you’ll be out here. And if I can’t survive with that device, no one else will be able to either. So you’ll abort and get everyone out of here.”

“We can make that decision together,” I say. “Send in another diver.”

“Who? Odette? Mikk? Who are you going to send in, knowing that most people who have gone inside that Room have died? Are you willing to risk their lives?”

I don’t say anything. We both know that I wasn’t when I hired them. I knew there was only one device and I would be the one to use it. Everyone else was brought in, initially, to help extract me from the Room, not to go in and explore.

“I’m not willing to risk yours either,” I say.

“You don’t get a choice.” He’s calmer now. His gaze meets mine. Those gray eyes reflect the darkness of the portals behind me. “You put me in charge.”

“But I still have the device,” I say. “And I’m not giving it to you.”

“No, you don’t have it,” he says. “That’s why I wanted to meet you here. I had it removed from your quarters.”

I feel so violated I have to prevent myself from lunging at him. No one goes in my cabin. No one even has access.

Except I gave him command. He has the codes.

He must have looked them up.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

My face is so hot that it feels inflamed. I’m gripping my chair, and it takes all of my energy to stay in one place. Fighting him will do neither of us any good.

In handing over command, I also gave him implicit rights to imprison me in my own ship. I’m not going to give him the satisfaction.

“You know this is the right decision,” he says.

I’m not going to acknowledge that.

“You’re the one who taught me that emotion can be deadly to a dive,” he says.

I get up. I trust myself to walk to his door and to get out. But that’s all I trust.

Still, I stop. “You will never violate the sanctity of my cabin again.”

He nods. “I’m sorry,” he says again. “I had Odette wear her recorders and keep them on. She knows if she touched anything other than the device I’ll have her hide.”

It isn’t the touching that bothers me. It’s the entering.

That is my private space. No one else belongs in there.

My quarters are so private they almost feel like an extension of myself.

I don’t say any more. I step into the hallway, wait until the door closes, and lean against the wall.

A part of my brain already acknowledges that his decision is sensible. I know that when I calm down, I’ll agree. Four dives into the Room is actually the minimum for a dangerous area.

Not one, like I’d been planning.

I’d been thinking like a survivor of a disaster, not like a wreck diver.

And Karl understands that.

He’s protecting me from myself, yes, but more than that, he’s doing his job.

He’s making sure the mission is a success.

And I hate him for it.

11

I INSIST ON BEING in the skip the next morning. Karl lets me on board, but he won’t let me pilot. I am strictly an observer.

Today’s pilot is Roderick. Karl’s diving partner—a misnomer, really, since Karl has to go in alone—is Mikk. I’ve brought my suit just in case, but Karl gave it a filthy look as I entered the skip.

He doesn’t want me entertaining any thoughts of diving the Room. I’m along for two reasons: as a courtesy to me, and so that we don’t have to explain our plan to my father or Riya.

They’ve proven more rigid than I could ever be. As time has progressed, they’ve complained more and more about the habitat dives. They want someone in the Room and they want it soon.

They don’t even know we’re going in today. In the last several meetings, Karl has left out the diving rosters and locations until my father was gone.

Karl thought I would object to keeping them in the dark about the Room dive. But I don’t. I haven’t liked the access he’s given them from the beginning. That’s more than I would have offered.

Roderick is good at flying the skip in enclosed spaces. We want the skip as close to the entry point as possible. That way, the divers don’t have to cover a lot of known ground before going into the important part of the dive. It saves time and could save lives if someone got into trouble.

In this case, the skip would have to go into the destroyed habitats. It’s not as dangerous as it sounds. Most of the debris has been cleared by time or by scavengers. Roderick flies with the portals closed, which makes me feel blind.

But he focuses on instruments, and he’s so good with them that I don’t complain. Not that I have any right to, anyway.

Because the distance between the Room and the Business is so short, Karl has already put on his suit. It’s an upgrade from the days when we dove together, but it resembles the one he had before.

Karl likes redundant systems. His suit is expensive and a little bulky. It has an internal environmental system, like all suits, but it also has an external one.

He used to carry only two extra breathers. Now he has four, and they’re larger than the ones he used to have. Apparently the Dignity Vessel experience has had a greater impact on him than he’s willing to admit.

Instead of a slew of weapons in the loops along his belt, he carries a few tools and his knife. The knife has a long curved blade and has saved his life more than once.

I find myself staring at it throughout the short journey, wondering what he would use it on inside that Room.

Mikk has also suited up. He’ll go as far as the Room’s door and wait there—not the best assignment, especially for a young diver. But if Mikk doesn’t know patience by now, he’ll never learn it. And he swears he understands how long he might have to monitor that door.

Roderick anchors the skip to the remaining wall so that he won’t have to use thrust in the small space. He and I will wait on board and will monitor everything through the suit cameras that Karl and Mikk will wear. They’ll also have audio in their headpieces.

The dive will follow a strict schedule. Because Karl doesn’t have a lot of distance to traverse between the skip and the Room’s door, we decided on a two-hour dive—longer than I would have liked, and shorter than he wanted.

It’ll only take him five minutes to get inside and, theoretically, five minutes to get back. The rest of the time, he should be observing and mapping.

Provided his equipment works inside. To our knowledge, no one has filmed the interior of the Room, and we don’t know if that’s because they haven’t thought of it or if they didn’t succeed when they tried.

Just before he puts on his headpiece, he attaches the device to his belt. Since we don’t know much about how the device works, we don’t want it inside his suit. We want to give him as much protection as possible.

Then he slips on his headpiece. It’s as cautious as the rest of his suit—seven layers of protection, each with a different function including double night vision, and computerized monitors layered throughout the external cover. He hands me the handheld, which will report everything the cameras on the side of his headpiece “see.”

We are the least confident in the handheld. The shield device might disrupt the signals the cameras send back. We tested as best we could near the Business and didn’t have any trouble, but we’re not sure if that was an accurate test.

Like so much with wreck diving, this part of the dive gets tested only in the field.

I’m nervous. Karl is not. Roderick hasn’t said anything, and Mikk acts like this is a normal dive. While he’s curious about the Room, it’s an intellectual curiosity. He knows he won’t be able to dive it this trip, so it’s not the center of his attention.

In some ways, he’s along for the ride, even more than I am.

We don’t tether to the Room—that would be dangerous with the skip powered down—but we do extend a line. Karl is doing this as a courtesy to me. I won’t dive without lines. I’ve seen too many divers get wreck blindness—they turn on their headlamps on a small space, they take a laser to the eyeball, their suit’s visor malfunctions—and they can’t get back without help.

The line is the simplest form of help. If they follow it from skip to wreck, then they know how to get back. We don’t use lines inside wrecks, although I suggested it for the Room.

Karl gave that suggestion a lot of thought, and had an alteration. Once he reaches the door, he will attach a tether to one of the loops on his belt. If he loses consciousness in there, we can pull him back.

Mikk and Karl proceed to the airlock. They wave as they step inside.

They wait the required two minutes as their suits adjust. Then Mikk presses the hatch and Karl sends the lead out the door.

It only takes a moment to cleave to the jamb beside the Room’s door. We picked that spot because it seemed soft enough to hold the line. Nothing else around the Room’s exterior did.

They’re stepping out of the airlock. They’ll move at a very slow pace because they’re good divers. They’ll test the line. They’ll make sure each part of their suits is functioning. Then they’ll travel slowly to that door, and coordinate before Karl goes in.

I take those few minutes to walk into the cockpit. Roderick is sitting in what I consider to be my seat—the pilot’s chair—and is already monitoring the readouts. In addition to the skip’s cameras, some suit monitors send information directly to the skip itself. And both suits send heart-rates and breathing patterns—or will so long as nothing interferes with the signal.

I plug Karl’s handheld into one small screen but only look at it to make sure the information is coming to me. Grainy flat images, mostly of the line, appear before me.

Then I look up. Roderick still has the portals opaqued.

“Let’s watch this in real time,” I say.

He doesn’t look up from the instrumentation. “I don’t like staring at interior station walls when I’m on a skip.”

“I don’t care,” I say. “We have a team out there. We need our eyes as well as our equipment. We need every advantage we can get.”

I shudder to think he’s run dives in the habitats on instruments only, and make a mental note to tell Karl that night. It should be a requirement for each dive that the pilot watches from the cockpit. The pilot won’t be able to see inside some of the spaces, but he will be able to see if there’s a problem between the lead and the skip itself.

“Karl says I’m supposed to make the decisions,” Roderick says.

“Well, I have twenty years of dive experience, and let me tell you, only amateurs let their people out of a ship on instrument only.”

He winces, then flattens his hand against the control panel. With a hum, all of the windows become visible.

Usually being in the skip with the windows clear feels like you’re inside a piece of black glass moving through open space. Right now, it seems like we’ve crashed into a junkyard. A blown wall opens to space on our left side. Beneath us, the habitat’s floor is in shreds. Above us is the sturdy floor of the next level, and to our right is the line, leading to the Room’s door.

Karl’s already halfway down the lead. Mikk is hurrying to catch up.

I look at their breathing and heart rates. They’re in the normal range. But it’s not like Karl to move that fast.

I touch the communication panel. “You seeing something?”

“There’s not a lot between the skip and the door, Boss.” There’s laughter in Karl’s voice, as if he expected me to ask this question. “Relax.”

I take my hand off the panel. Roderick is glaring at me, but in his expression I can see resignation. He knows that I’m going to run this skip while Karl’s gone.

Roderick also knows he has no recourse. Even when Karl returns, telling on me won’t make any difference. Karl won’t ban me from these missions. If he does, I’ll declare this entire trip a bust and leave. Then I’ll return on my own or with a new team and dive it all again.

Karl reaches the door and tugs on the lead, checking its hold. It seems to be fine. Mikk arrives a moment later. His feet are curled beneath him, but they could just as easily brush against the floor.

This is the part of Mikk’s dive that I would hate—floating there, waiting for Karl to do the actual work. For the first time since Karl changed our plans, I’m happy to be in the skip. At least I can pace here.

Karl runs a gloved hand along the door’s edge. The cameras on his wrist light up and show what we saw on our preliminary dive—that the edges of this door are pockmarked—not from time or debris—but from people trying to break in. The metal is smoother here than anywhere else, as if countless people have run their gloved hands along the edges in the past.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” my mother asks me through her suit. She turns her head toward me just a little, and I can see the outlines of her face through her headpiece. Behind her something hums.

Sweat has formed on my forehead. Goddamn Karl, he’s right. I would have gotten lost in my own head, in my own memories, if I had gone in alone on this first trip.

I shake my head as if I can free it from the past and settle into the co-pilot’s chair.

Karl pans the door, making sure nothing has changed since the last time we looked at it. Then his gloved hand slips down to the latch.

My breath catches as the door opens. The lights on his suit flare. He turns toward us, waves again, and then goes inside.

For a moment, I can see him outlined against the Room’s darkness. Then he propels himself deeper and he is no longer visible through the clear windows of the skip.

The monitors show that his heart rate is slightly elevated. His breathing is rapid, but not enough to cut the dive short. This is the kind of breathing that comes from excitement and eagerness, not from panic or the gids.

“My God,” he says. “This place is beautiful.”

“It’s even prettier inside,” my mother says. Her voice sounds very far away. The lights blink against her suit, making her seem like she’s covered in bright paint—all primary colors.

“You should see this,” he says.

The cameras have fuzzed. We’re not getting any visuals at all. The audio is faint.

“I don’t like this,” Roderick says as the instruments slowly fail.

I knew it would happen. Maybe I remembered something—or something in my subconscious recalled how faint my mother’s voice had become. But I had known.

I had warned Karl and he said he was prepared.

But I’m cold. I’m sitting in the co-pilot’s chair with my arms wrapped around my torso, feeling terrified.

My father said the device worked.

But what if it fails like the cameras fail?

Riya says a dozen others went in and came out. She showed me evidence.

Showed us evidence.

Karl made this choice.

“I don’t like this at all.” Roderick’s hands are flying across the board, trying to bring up the readings. I glance at the handheld screen. The image is still there, faint and reassuring. Just a blur in all the fuzz.

Karl is moving forward.

But I know better than to tell Roderick everything will be all right. I glance at Mikk through the clear porthole.

He’s holding the lead and waiting, just like he’s supposed to. And good man that he is, he isn’t even peering in the door.

He’s following orders to the letter.

Static, a buzz, and a harmonic. A voice? I can’t tell. Roderick is still working the instrument panel and I’m staring through the window at the door beyond.

All I see is blackness.

Karl is probably seeing lights. Hearing voices in harmony. Listening to the blend.

I hope the device protects him.

My arms tighten. My stomach aches. I feel ill.

I catch myself about to curse Karl for being right about my reactions. But I’m superstitious. I can’t curse him. Not now.

Not while we’re waiting for him to come out of that Room.

12

WE WAIT FOR AN HOUR. Then an hour and a half.

Then two.

At two hours ten minutes, Mikk asks, “Should I reel him in?”

We haven’t had any contact. We don’t have any readings.

Karl is the kind of diver who never wastes a second, the kind who is always on time.

“How much oxygen does he have without the refills?” I ask Roderick.

“Five, maybe six hours, so long as he’s breathing right. He didn’t think he needed the larger storage, since the skip was so close.”

I would have made the same judgment. My suit can handle two weights of oxygen as well. The back-ups are in case the internal supply gets compromised somehow, not as supplements to it.

“You want to wait another hour?” Roderick asks. No more pretense at being in charge. We both know I’m the one qualified to make the right decisions.

And oddly, as cold as I am, I’m calm. The emotions I felt at the beginning of the dive are long gone.

It’s the two younger members of the team who are beginning to panic.

And that’s reason enough to bring Karl in.

“Tug,” I say to Mikk. “See if he responds.”

Mikk tugs and then grunts as if in surprise. The tether attached to Karl has gone slack.

Roderick looks at me, terrified. Mikk says, “What do I do?”

We have to know the severity of this.

“One more gentle tug,” I say. Maybe Karl has let out the line. Maybe he’s closer than we think.

Mikk tugs again. I can see how little effort he uses, how his movement should just echo through the tether.

Instead it comes careening back at him, with something attached.

Something small and U-shaped.

“Oh, no,” Mikk says.

And I hear the same words come out of my mouth as I realize what I’m seeing.

“What is it?” Roderick asks, his voice tight with fear.

“Karl’s belt,” I say. “The tug dislodged Karl’s belt.”

***

Only, it turns out, my assessment isn’t entirely accurate. The tug didn’t dislodge Karl’s belt.

Karl did. He unlatched it. There’s no way to tell how long ago he did so either.

He got disoriented or lost or maybe he was reaching for the tether to pull himself back. Whatever happened, his fingers found the controls holding the belt to his suit and unhooked it.

Mikk shows us the seal with his own cameras, how it’s unhooked in such a way that only the suit-wearer could have done. It didn’t break and it didn’t fall off.

Karl let it go.

“So pretty,” my mother says, her voice a thread. “So very pretty.”

“Pan it for me,” I say, forcing the memory of my mother aside.

Mikk does. The knife is in its holder. So are the back-up breathers.

And the device.

Mikk grabs it as I realize what I’m seeing. “I’m going after him,” Mikk says, attaching the device to his belt.

“No,” I say with great force. “You are staying put.”

“But we need to get him. He can’t be that far in. The tether didn’t come back from a great distance.”

“I know,” I say. “But going in disoriented him, and he’s got more experience than you. It’ll disorient you. I’m going in.”

“He said you’re not supposed to dive.” Roderick has put his hand on my arm.

I shake it off.

“I’ve been in there before,” I say. “I know what to expect. Neither of you do. Mikk is strong enough to get me out if he has to. We’ll double-tether me. We’ll hook to my belt and my suit. He’ll be able to pull us free.”

“Karl says if you lose one diver, you shouldn’t send another after him.” Roderick is speaking softly. He thinks he’s not being overheard, but I have the communications panel lit.

“That’s if the other person’s dead or dying,” I say. “For all we know, he’s wreck blind and lost. You want him to float around in there?”

“Can he survive without this device thing?” Mikk asks.

Roderick starts at Mikk’s voice, then frowns at me.

“I did,” I say. “I didn’t have a shield. People do survive the Room without protection. The problem is that most folks don’t even realize their companions are in trouble for hours. Maybe the Room doesn’t kill them. Maybe the Room disorients them. Maybe, if that’s what happens and if someone catches it soon enough, the other person gets out.”

“Two point five hours,” Mikk says, sounding breathless. “That’s quick, isn’t it?”

“Do you need to come into the skip?” I ask him as I grab my suit. I strip, not caring that Roderick is watching. I hate wearing the suit over my clothes. “You sound like you’re short of air.”

“I have plenty,” Mikk says.

“You can recover while I’m getting suited,” I say.

“His heart rate is elevated, but still in the safe zone,” Roderick says. “But if you want to bring him in, then let’s do it now.”

Abort. Leave Karl. That’s what Roderick is saying, in code now that he realizes Mikk—and maybe Karl himself—is listening.

“Stay there,” I say. “I’m coming to you.”

I have to slow down. I need to dress properly, make sure my suit functions. My own heart rate is elevated, and I’m trying not to listen to the low hum that’s been haunting the back of my brain since that damn door opened.

My suit is thinner than Karl’s. Body-tight with fewer redundant controls. I used to think he was too cautious. Now I wish I had all the equipment he did.

I check systems, then put on my head gear. I don’t bother with extra cameras, although I don’t tell Roderick that. I slide on my gloves, grab five tethers, and sling them along my belt hook like rolled up whips.

I open the airlock and look directly at Roderick. “Now you’re in charge,” I say as I let the door close.

The two minutes it takes for my suit to adjust seem like five hours. I work on slowing my own breathing, making sure I’m as calm as I can be.

Then I press open the exterior door.

My suit immediately gives me the temperature and notes the lack of atmosphere. It warns me about some small floating debris.

I place my hand on the lead and slide toward Mikk. I can see his face through his headgear.

He looks terrified.

Now I wish we hadn’t brought one of the strong divers. I would give anything for someone with a lot of experience.

But I don’t have that.

I have the children.

And I have to make the most of them.

13

MIKK ATTACHES TETHERS to my belt, my suit and one of my boots. I must look like some kind of puppet. I warn him not to tug for at least an hour, unless I tug first. I take the device, turn it off, then turn it on, and make sure the lights run along the bottom and sides like they’re supposed to.

They do.

I attach it to my belt.

Then I float toward that damn door.

The opening looks smaller than I remember and somewhat ordinary. In my career, I’d gone through countless doors that led to an inky blackness, a blackness that would eventually resolve itself under the lights of my suit.

But right now, I have those lights off. I want to see the interior as I remember it. I want to see the light show.

Only I don’t. There are no lights. The persistent hum that I’d been hearing since we arrived has grown.

It sounds like the bass line to a cantata. I freeze near the door and listen. First the bass, then the tenors, followed by altos, mezzo sopranos, and sopranos. Voices blending and harmonizing.

Only they aren’t. What I had identified years ago as the voices of the lost is actually some kind of machine noise. I can hear frequency and pitch, and my mind assembled those sounds—or to be more accurate, those vibrations—into music, which as a child was something I could understand.

Now I understand what I’m hearing and for the first time since I go into the Room, I’m nervous.

“Your heart rate is elevated,” Roderick says from the control room.

“Copy that,” I say, and flick on my suit lights. They illuminate everything around me. There’s a floor, a ceiling, the window that we’d already observed, and walls.

A completely empty room.

Except for Karl, floating free in the middle of it. His face is tilted toward the floor, his legs bent, his feet raised slightly. Occasionally he bumps against something and changes trajectory.

He’s either unconscious or—

I don’t let myself complete that thought. I use a nearby wall to propel myself toward him. I grab him by the waist and pull him toward me. His bulky suit is hard to hold; I undo the tether on my boot and attach it to his right wrist.

That’s not normal procedure—you could pull off the arm of the suit if you’re not careful—but I don’t plan to let go of him. Instead, I tug my remaining tethers, and hope Mikk is strong enough to pull us both out.

It takes a moment, and then we’re moving backwards. I shift slightly so that I can see if we’re about to hit anything.

The empty room stuns me. I expected not just the lights, but shades of the people lost. Or their remains. Or maybe just a few items that they had brought in with them, things that had fallen off their suits and remained, floating in the zero gravity for all time.

The previous divers wearing the device said they couldn’t recover Commander Trekov—that he wouldn’t leave. Were they lying? Or had they seen something I hadn’t?

The open door looms. I kick away from the wall and float a little too high. I have to let go of Karl with one hand to push away from the ceiling.

Then we slide through the door and into the destroyed habitat. Mikk still clings to the tethers.

I shove Karl at him, then reach behind me and grab that damn door.

It takes all of my strength to close it. There’s some kind of resistance—something that makes the movement so difficult that I can’t do it on my own.

I’m not going to ask Mikk for help, though, and I’m not going to leave the door open. I grunt and shove, then turn on the gravity in boots for leverage. I sink to the metal floor, brace my feet, and push that door.

It takes forever to close. I’m sweating as I do, and my suit is making little beeping noises, warning me about the extreme exertion. Roderick is cautioning me, and Mikk is telling me to wait so that he can help.

I don’t wait.

The door closes and I lean on it, wondering how I can close it permanently, so no one ever goes in there again.

I can’t come up with anything—at least, not something I can do fast—so I make sure it’s latched, and then I turn off the gravity in my boots. As I float upwards, I grab the lead.

I wrap my other hand around Karl and pull him with me. Mikk is protesting, repeating over and over again that he can bring Karl in.

Of course, Mikk can bring him in, but he won’t. I’m the one who brought Karl here. I’m the one who put him in charge. I’m the one who didn’t protest when he wanted to go into that Room alone.

He’s my responsibility, and I need to get him back to the skip.

It only takes a few minutes. It’s not hard to move him along. Mikk moves ahead of us and pulls open the skip’s exterior door. Together we shove Karl into the airlock and then follow him inside.

I detach the lead. As I close the exterior door, I hear Mikk gasp.

I turn.

His body is visibly trembling. He’s looking into Karl’s faceplate.

I walk over to them and look.

Karl’s face has shrunken in on itself. His eyes are gone, black holes in what was once a handsome face.

“He’s dead,” Mikk says and he sounds surprised.

That’s when I realize I’m not. I think I knew Karl was dead when his belt appeared at that door. Karl’s too cautious to lose his extra breathers, his weapons, and the device.

“What happened to him?” Roderick asks from inside the skip.

I touch Karl’s faceplate. It’s scratched, cloudy, marred by the passage of time. The suit is so fragile that my grip has loosened its exterior coating.

He didn’t just die. He suffocated. Or froze. Or both. His suit ran out of oxygen. The environmental systems shut off, and he was left to the blackness of space as if he were outside the station, unprotected.

“Is it something catching?” Roderick’s voice rises.

“No,” I say. At least, not yet. Someday we’ll all die from the passage of time.

“Then what is it?” Roderick asks. I realize at that moment, he’s not going to open the interior door until I tell him.

“The device malfunctioned,” I say, and that’s true. It didn’t protect him, although it protected me. “The Room killed him.”

“How?” Mikk asks, his voice nearly a whisper.

All I have is a working theory at the moment, and I learned long ago not to let others know my theories. It causes problems, particularly if I’m right.

“I don’t know exactly how,” I say, and that’s not entirely a lie. I don’t know the mechanics of what happened exactly, although I do know what caused it.

That Room has a functioning stealth system. Ancient stealth, not the stuff we invented. The kind we found on the Dignity Vessel. Only here, it works, and has continued to work over time.

That’s why we couldn’t find an energy signal, like we did on the Dignity Vessel. Because the stealth tech is working here, masking everything, including itself.

The station isn’t growing. The stealth shield is degrading. The exterior parts of the station move in a slower timeframe . The interior part, nearest the stealth tech itself, is moving at an accelerated pace.

That’s why Karl died when the device malfunctioned. Time accelerated for him.

I wonder if that was when he saw the lights. Time passing, things appearing and changing, like the light from stars long gone, seen over a distance.

At least he hadn’t died frightened.

Or had he? Thinking he was alone in that big empty Room.

Thinking we had abandoned him.

Like all the other souls lost in that horrible place.

14

WE GET HIM INSIDE. It’s harder in real gravity; he’s heavier than I expected. Roderick and Mikk want to remove the suit, to see what really happened, but I talk them out of it.

We’ll do it on the Business.

We fill out logs, download information, remove equipment—all the things you’re supposed to do at the end of a dive. We do it without speaking, and while trying not to look at the body on the floor behind us.

Then Roderick goes to the cockpit. Mikk sinks down beside Karl, as if staring at him would bring him back. I take out the device. It’s still on. The lights run along the bottom in the same pattern they did when I picked it up from Mikk.

I shut it off again, then turn it on. I can feel no vibration, nothing to signal that the thing is working. Nothing changes around me—no visual shift, no audio hallucination.

Nothing.

Just like before.

I should have seen that as a warning.

But I didn’t.

It was my fault for trusting technology I didn’t understand.

15

MOMENTS LATER, the skip arrives at the Business. Roderick sends the signal and we ease into the docking bay. The doors shut behind us, and the countdown begins until the atmosphere inside the bay gets restored.

No one here knows that Karl is dead. No one knows how spectacularly we failed.

I tell Roderick and Mikk that Karl has to remain on the skip. We’ll send in some of the other crew to retrieve him, while I look up the forms he filled out so that we would take care of his body according to his wishes.

I also tell them not to say much until we meet tonight in the lounge.

Then I take the device, tuck the handheld into my pocket, and leave the skip. I’m going to meet the team first and I’m going to tell them what went wrong.

My father and Riya are standing near the door. No one else is with them and I have the distinct impression they’ve prevented the rest of the team from coming here.

My father is smiling. Riya is looking hopeful. Somehow they know we were in the Room.

All of my good intentions fade.

I toss the device at them. “This damn thing malfunctioned.”

It skitters across the floor. My father is staring at me. Riya bends down to pick it up. As she stands, she frowns.

“Obviously it didn’t fail,” she says. “You’re here.”

“I’m here,” I say, “but Karl is dead.”

“Karl?” Riya glances at my father as if he understands what I’m talking about.

And to his credit, he does. “You let Karl go into the Room?”

“I didn’t let him do anything,” I snap. “He’s in charge.”

Or he was in charge. But I don’t correct myself.

“He chose to go in. He decided last night.”

“You let him?” my father repeated.

Behind me, I can hear the door to the skip snap shut. Footsteps along the floor tell me that Roderick and Mikk have joined us, but have stopped just a few meters back.

“How irresponsible of you.” Riya shakes her head. “I gave this to you with the express understanding that you would use it.”

“Really?” I say. “You gave it to me so someone could access that Room and recover your father, which isn’t possible by the way.”

“You were supposed to go. That’s the basis for our agreement.” She’s still shaking the device at me. “You were supposed to go.”

She didn’t react to what I said about her father. Maybe she hadn’t understood me.

“What you want,” I say slowly, as if I’m talking to a child, “is not possible. Your father is not recoverable. Didn’t the previous people who went in tell you that? Didn’t they tell you how empty that fucking Room is?”

“It’s not our responsibility that he died,” she says. “You didn’t follow my instructions.”

I know she heard me the second time. And it’s clear she doesn’t care. She knew what was in that Room. She knew that her father—or some kind of ghost of him—wasn’t there.

I snatch the device from her hand. “What happens if I break this thing?”

“Don’t,” my father says, but he’s not scared. He is looking at my face, not at the device in my hand.

I turn and toss it to Mikk. He catches it, looking surprised. He holds it like it burns him, even though it’s cool to the touch.

Then I advance on my father. “Tell me what’s really going on here.”

“You were supposed to go in,” he says.

“I did,” I say. “I went in and recovered my friend.”

“He’s like almost mummified,” Roderick says, his voice shaking. “What does that?”

My father looks at me, then looks at Riya. She is staring at Roderick.

“They both went in?” she asks. “Together?”

“The boss already told you,” Mikk says. “She had to recover his body. He went in alone. It was a smart dive move. He was going to map everything. He thought he’d be clearer headed than everyone else.”

“You shouldn’t have allowed it,” my father says.

“Maybe if I’d had all the information, I wouldn’t have,” I say. “What aren’t you two telling me? Besides the fact that you knew the Room was empty.”

“It’s not our fault,” Riya says. “You didn’t listen.”

“I listened,” I say. “You wanted us to recover your father. You wanted me to treat it like I would treat any other wreck, and your father would be salvage. That’s what you offered. You came to me because I’d gotten out of the Room before and you figured I wouldn’t be scared to wear the device…”

My voice trails off as I listen to what I had just said. I had gotten out of the Room before. That’s why they hired me. Not because of the device. Not because of her father.

Because I had escaped once before.

“The device doesn’t work, does it?” I ask. “It’s just pretty lights and nothing more.”

“No,” my father says, but Mikk takes the device and rips it apart. He takes out the center piece, the part I couldn’t quite place, and stomps on it.

The lights still run along the outer edge of the frame.

“Son of a bitch,” he says.

Roderick takes the device, turns it over, then crouches and looks at the pieces on the floor of the bay. Whatever that circle piece was, it was solid. There were no component parts, nothing that built into an engine or a chip.

“What were you people thinking?” he asks my father and Riya. “Why did you do this?”

“You were testing something else, weren’t you?” I’m looking at my father. “This is something to do with your business, not with Mother, isn’t it?”

He doesn’t answer. He takes a step back. His cheeks flush.

“The others who went in, the ones you say tested the device, they’re all survivors too, aren’t they?” I ask.

Riya looks at my father again.

“I thought I was the only one still alive,” I say.

My father is staring at me.

“But there are others, aren’t there? And you found them. You sent them in. And they came out again. Didn’t they?”

I take a step toward Riya and I let her see how angry I really am.

“Didn’t they?” I ask again.

“Yes,” she says.

“With a fake device. A handful of us can come and go as we please, can’t we?”

“Yes,” my father says.

“Why didn’t you just tell us?” I ask.

“Would you have gone in then?” Riya asks.

“What does my getting into that Room prove?”

“That some of us can do it,” my father says. “Some of us are designed to survive.”

He clings to me. His helmet hits mine, and a crack appears along my visor. He covers it with his gloved hand and I can hear his voice in our comm system: Hurry, hurry, I think her suit is compromised.

He holds me so tight I can’t breathe. We go through the door back to the single ship someone has brought and they stuff me inside. My dad can barely fit beside me. He checks the environmental system in the single ship, then pulls off my helmet and shoves a breather in my mouth.

C’mon, baby, c’mon, he says, don’t die on me now.

My lungs hurt. My body aches. I look up at him and he’s terrified. He keeps glancing out the porthole at the Room.

I had no idea, he says. I didn’t know or I wouldn’t have let her go in there. I certainly wouldn’t have let her bring you.

But I can’t think about it. I can’t think about any of it. The hum is too loud, the voices echoing in my head. I close my eyes, and I refuse to think about it. About the way she stopped talking, the way her hand slipped from mine, the way her faceplate shattered as her body slammed into the wall.

Then I wrapped my arms around my knees, waiting. My daddy would come. I knew he would come.

I stayed there for what seemed like days, listening to the voices, feeling my mother’s body brush against mine, as she got older and thinner and more and more horrible.

Finally I couldn’t look any more. I closed my eyes and wondered when the voices would get me.

Then my father grabbed me and pulled me out.

And I was safe.

I look at him now. His eyes are wide. He has made a verbal slip and he knows it.

“My God,” I say. “You know what’s in there.”

“Honey,” my father says. “Don’t.”

I turn to Roderick and Mikk. “Go get the others. Bring a stretcher so that we can take Karl out of here with some dignity.”

“I don’t think we should leave you here,” Mikk says. He’s catching onto this quicker than Roderick.

“I’ll be fine,” I say. “Just hurry back.”

They head to the door. Riya watches them go. My father keeps looking at me.

“You tell me what you know,” I say, “Or I’m going to have the authorities come get both of you for fraud and murder. You clearly brought us out here on false pretenses, and now a man is dead.”

Karl is dead. My heart aches.

“Call them,” Riya says. “They won’t care. Our contract is with them.”

My father closes his eyes.

I look from him to her. “For stealth tech. This is all about stealth tech.”

“That’s right,” she says. “You’re one of the lucky few who can work in its fields without risks.”

Lucky few. Me and a handful of others, all of whom were conned by this woman and my father. For what? A government military contract?

“What are you trying to do?” I ask. “Consign us to some government hell hole?”

My father has opened his eyes. He’s shaking his head.

“No, you’re just the test subjects,” Riya says, apparently oblivious to my tone. “Before they approved our project, they wanted to make sure everyone who got out before could get out again. You were the last one. Your father didn’t think you would work with us, but I proved him wrong.”

“I signed on to help you recover your father,” I say to her.

She shrugs one shoulder. “I never knew him. I really don’t care about him. And you were right. I already knew he wasn’t in that Room. But I figured telling you about him would work. I’m not the only one in this bay who was abandoned by her father.”

My father puts a hand to his forehead. I haven’t moved.

“I thought this was an historical project,” I say, maybe too defensively. “I thought this was a job, like the kind I used to do.”

“That’s what you were supposed to think,” she says. “Only you weren’t supposed to send someone else into the Room. You’re the only one with the marker.”

Marker. As in genetic marker. I turn to my father.

“That’s what you meant by designed. I’m some kind of test subject. I have some kind of genetic modification.,”

“No,” he says. “Or yes. Or I’m not sure. You see, we think that anyone on a Dignity Vessel had been bred or genetically modified to work around stealth tech. Then the ships got stranded and the Dignity crews mingled with the rest of the population. Some of us have the marker. You do. I do. Your mother didn’t.”

He says that last with some pain. He still grieves her. I don’t doubt that. But somehow he got mixed up in this.

“There were no Dignity Vessels this far out,” I say. “They weren’t designed to travel huge distances, and they weren’t manufactured outside of Earth’s solar system.”

“Don’t insult my intelligence,” he says. “We know you found a Dignity Vessel a few years ago. I’ve seen it.”

Because I salvaged it and got paid for it. I couldn’t leave it in space, a deathtrap to whoever else wandered close to it.

Like this Room is.

I salvaged the vessel and gave it to the government so they could study the damn stealth tech.

And now my father has seen the vessel.

“That’s how I knew how to find you,” he says.

“You didn’t need me,” I say. “You had the others.”

“We needed all of you,” Riya says. “The government won’t give us a go unless we had a one-hundred percent success rate. Which we do. Your friend Karl simply proves that you need the marker or you’re subject to the interdimensional field.”

Karl and Junior and my mother and who knows how many others.

“How long have the government known?” I ask. “How long have they known that the Room is a stealth-tech generator?”

She shrugs. “Why does it matter?”

“Because they should have shut it down.” I’m even closer to her than I was before. She’s backing away from me.

“They can’t,” my father says. “They don’t know how.”

“Then they should have blocked off the station,” I say. “This place is dangerous.”

“There are centuries’ worth of warnings to keep people away,” Riya says. “Besides, it’s not our concern. We have scientists who can replicate that marker. We think we’ve finally discovered a way to work with real stealth tech. Do you know what that’s worth?”

“My life, apparently,” I say. “And my mother’s. And Karl’s.”

Riya is looking at me. She’s finally understanding how angry I am.

“Don’t,” my father says.

“Don’t what?” I ask. “Don’t hurt her? Why should you care? I could have died in there. Me, the daughter you swore to protect. Or did you abandon that oath along with your search for my mother? Was that even real?”

“It was real, honey,” he says. “That’s how I found this. Riya and I met at a survivor’s meeting. We started talking—”

“I don’t care!” I snap. “Don’t you understand what you’ve done?”

“You wouldn’t have died,” he says. “That’s why we approached you last. Once we were sure the others made it, then we came to you. Besides, you’ve done much more dangerous things on your own.”

“And so has Karl.” I’m close to both of them now. I’m so angry, I’m trembling. “But you know what the difference is?”

My father shakes his head. Riya watches me as if she’s suddenly realized how dangerous I can be.

“The difference is that we chose to take those risks,” I say. “We didn’t choose this one.”

“I heard you tell the team,” Riya says, “that someone might die on this mission.”

“I always tell my teams that,” I say. “It makes them vigilant.”

“But this time you believed it,” my father says.

“Yeah,” I say softly. “I thought that someone would be me.”

16

AND THAT’S THE CRUX OF IT. I know it as soon as I say it. I thought I would die on this mission and apparently, I was fine with that.

I thought I’d die in multicolored lights and song, like I thought my mother had died, and I thought it a beautiful way to go. I’d even convinced myself that I would die diving, so it would be all right.

I would be done.

But it’s not all right. Karl’s dead, and I can’t even prove fault, except my own. Only when I review the decisions we made, we made the right ones with the information we had.

The thought brings me up short, prevents me from slamming Riya or my father against the bay wall.

Somehow I get out of that bay without either of them.

I don’t speak to them as the Business leaves the station. I don’t speak to them when I drop them at the nearest outpost. I expressly tell them that if they contact me or my people again, I will find a way to hurt them—but I don’t know exactly how I would do that.

Riya’s right. The government would back them because they’re working on a secret and important project. Stealth tech is the holy grail of military research. So she and my father can get away with anything.

And—stupid me—I finally realize that my father has no feelings for me at all. He never has. The clinging I remember is just him pulling me free of the Room, leaving my mother—my poor mother—behind.

I can’t even guarantee that we weren’t part of some early experiment on the same project. While my father was telling my mother’s parents to care for me while he tried to recover her, he might have been simply trying to recoup his losses from that trip, experimenting with people and markers and things that survive in the strangest of interdimensional fields.

After we leave my father and Riya on the outpost, we have a memorial service for Karl. I talk the longest because I knew him the best, and I don’t cry until we send him out into the darkness, still in his suit with his knife and breathers.

He would have wanted those. He would have appreciated the caution, even though it was caution—in the end—that got him killed.

As we head back to Longbow Station, I have decided to resuscitate my business. Only I’m not going to wreck dive like I used to. I’m going to find Dignity Vessels. I’m going to capture anything that vaguely resembles stealth tech and I’m going to find a place to keep it where our government can’t get it.

I’m going to run a shadow project. I’m going to find out how this stuff works and I’m going to do it before the government does because I won’t have to follow the regulations.

The government and the people like my father, they have to follow certain rules and protocols, all the while keeping the project secret.

I won’t have to. If I go far enough out of the sector, I won’t have to follow any rules at all.

I can make my own. Change the way the battle is fought. Redefine the war.

I learned that from Ewing Trekov. Don’t fight the war you’re given; fight the war you can envision.

Once the government has stealth tech, they’ll have a seemingly invincible military. They’ll be stronger in ways that can hurt the smaller governments in the region and anyone who works at the edges of the law, like I do.

But if we have stealth tech too, then all sides are equal. And if we can figure out how to use that tech in ways they haven’t imagined, then we get ahead.

All my life, I searched the past for my purpose. I sensed that something back there opened the key to my future.

Who knew that I would find all that I lost in the one place that had taken everything from me.

There are no souls in that Room, just like there are no voices.

There’s only the harshness of time.

And like the ancients before me, I’m going to harness that harshness into a weapon, a defense, and a future.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with it.

Maybe I’ll just wait, and let the future reveal itself like the habitats on the station, one small section at a time.

“The Room of Lost Souls” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch was first published in Asimov’s SF Magazine, April/May, 2008.

BECALMED

1

HERE’S WHAT THEY TELL YOU when you want to leave the Fleet:

Stay behind. Don’t get back on the ship, not even to retrieve your things. Have someone bring the important items to you.

Check to see if any of your friends or any members of your family want to leave as well. Don’t force them. For most of us, the ship is and has always been home. Life on a planet—any planet—is different. Very different. So different that some can’t handle it, even if they think they can.

Don’t go to a base. Don’t ask to be dropped off. Stay. Create a new life with the grateful people you’ve saved/helped/rescued.

Become someone else.

They tell us these things before each mission and then again as one is ending. They tell us these things so that we can make the right choice for us, the right choice for the ship. The right choice for everyone.

They do this because they used to forbid us from leaving. We were of the ship, they’d say. We were part of the Fleet. We were specially chosen, specially bred.

We were, they said, able to overcome anything.

But that wasn’t true. Even with ships built for five hundred people, there is no room for one slowly devolving intellect, one emotionally unstable but highly trained individual.

No room for the crazy, the sick, or the absolutely terrified.

The key, however, is finding that person. Figuring out who she is.

And what to do about her.

2

IT HAD BEEN A SLAUGHTER. Twenty-seven of us, and only three survived.

I am one of the survivors.

And that is all I know.

I sit on the window seat in my living area, staring out the portal. I had asked, back when I got promoted the very first time, to have an apartment on the outer edges of the ship. I’d been told apartments that brushed against the exterior were dangerous, that if the ship sustained serious damage I could lose everything.

But I like looking out the portal—a real portal, not a wall screen, not some kind of entertainment—at space as it is at this moment.

But I do not look into space.

Instead, I have activated a small section of my wall screen. I read and reread the regulations. I translate them into different languages. I have the ship’s computer recite them to me. I have the children’s school programs explain them.

The upshot is the same:

I should leave. I should never have come back to the ship. That was my mistake.

Theirs was to keep me and not ask me to remain planetside.

These errors make me nervous. They make me wonder what will happen next, and that is unusual. The ship thrives on structure. Structure comes from following a schedule, following the rules, following long-established traditions.

Tradition dictates an announcement to the entire crew at the beginning and end of each mission: the always familiar, easily quotable regulations about disembarking at the next stop, about leaving if you can no longer perform your duties.

We should have gotten that announcement as soon as the anacapa drive delivered us to this fold in space. We have been here too long.

Even I know that.

Each ship in the Fleet has an anacapa drive. The drive works also works as a cloak, although my former husband objects to that term. If the Ivoire is under attack, the captain activates the anacapa drive, which moves us into foldspace. We stay in foldspace only a moment, then return to our original position seconds or hours later, depending on the manner in which the navigators programmed the anacapa. Sometimes, in a battle, seconds are all you need. The enemy ship moves; we do not. We vanish for a moment. Then we reappear, behind them.

Or we don’t reappear for hours, and they think us long gone.

Either way, we are only in foldspace for a moment.

We have been in this foldspace for days.

I bring my feet onto the window seat, press my thighs against my breasts, and rest my head on my knees.

No one will tell me anything. I am shaky and emotional, unable to remember. Unable to think clearly about anything.

And for a woman who has spent her entire life thinking, this change terrifies me most of all.

3

AFTER FOUR SHIP DAYS, they open my apartment door.

They don’t knock. They override the locks—locks I’ve programmed in my paranoia.

I don’t recognize them, although I recognize their gold uniforms.

Medical Evaluation Unit: Psychological and Emotional Stress Department.

How many people have I sent to them over the years? How smug have I felt when the medics in the gold uniforms take troublesome workers from my linguistic unit?

Now they’ve come for me—four Ship Days after we entered this foldspace, ten Ship Days after I was medivacked from our makeshift headquarters on Ukhanda, nine Ship Days after they asked what the Quurzod had done and I answered, “To my knowledge, nothing at all.”

To my knowledge.

Which is terrifyingly incomplete.

Two men and a woman stand in my doorway. I don’t recognize any of them. Clearly, they were never on the teams that took workers from my section.

The woman is the spokesman. She introduces herself. The name washes over me even though I try to catch it, hang onto it, remember it.

Her spiel isn’t what I expect. I expected the standard: You have the right to refuse treatment. You have the right to remain in your apartment until we reach planetside. You have the right to your own medical professional.

Instead, she says, “You are about to undergo a battery of psychological tests. Some will prove exceedingly difficult and/or uncomfortable. Some are designed to retrieve memories you—or something around you—have blocked. These tests will provide us with the truth as you understand it. They will also show if you still retain what is commonly known of as your sanity. Do you understand?”

Oh, I understand. I should be relieved by this, but I am not. I swallow uncontrollably. I am shaking.

What I want to say, what I’m trying not to say, is that I don’t want to remember. I don’t want to know.

Just charge me and be done with it.

Take me back to Ukhanda and leave me there, like you were supposed to.

Forget I even exist.

“Do you understand?” she asks again.

One of the men stares at me, as if he’s trying to figure out whether or not I can speak. I can speak in fifteen languages, and twenty-three different dialects. I can understand sixty languages, albeit some imperfectly.

I can speak. And I do understand. I just don’t want to admit it.

She starts, “Do you—”

“Yes,” I say, thinking that will end her spiel.

But it doesn’t.

“You will want an advocate,” she says. “That can be a friend, a family member, or a professional. We can provide you with a list of professional advocates or you can contact one on your own.”

I dry swallow again. An advocate? I’d heard this in legal matters, but not in psychological ones.

What did I do on Ukhanda?

Do I know?

Do they?

“Am I in serious trouble?” I ask.

For a moment, the woman’s eyes soften. I sense compassion. But then, I might be searching for it.

Or seeing it where it does not exist.

“Yes,” she says.

“Could it damage my family?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says.

I have left my family out of this so far. I haven’t contacted them since my return. Nor have I allowed any of them to contact me, although they’ve tried. I have shut them out, changed the contact codes, refused to acknowledge them when they’ve been outside my door.

Now I feel a bit of comfort—what I had seen as selfish behavior will benefit them after all.

“I’m not going with you until I have an advocate,” I say.

“Good choice,” she says, and waits while I contact the best advocate we have.

4

I HAVE NEVER MET my advocate before, but I have followed her work for nearly a decade. Legal matters onboard ship are often petty, but they provide real-time entertainment of a kind that most fictions can’t.

And when the legal matters spill into the Fleet, then the entertainment ratchets up.

Leona Shearing has handled some of the biggest intraFleet controversies, but she keeps her hand in on the smaller cases, mostly, she tells me when she arrives at my apartment, because she likes to remain busy. IntraFleet controversies happen only rarely. Smaller, shipboard cases occur every day.

She acts as if I’m a smaller shipboard case. I don’t disabuse her of this notion, although she is surprised that three medical personnel have come to take me away, not the usual two.

She is a flamboyant woman who wears her hair down. She prefers flowing garments, unusual clothing in the Fleet, where most every department has its own uniform and the uniforms differ only by color. She does not work for the Fleet. She runs her own business. All the advocates have their own businesses, as do some of the tutors scattered across the ships. Specialists on the Sante often work privately as well, and so do many of the restaurateurs on the Brazza.

Still, working for someone other than the Fleet is unusual, and risky. Many do not acknowledge their difference, wearing clothing that suggests a uniform. Leona Shearing accentuates her difference with her clothing and her hair. Her manner, however, is strictly professional.

She interviews me briefly—asking my name, my rank, my position, as if she’s checking to see if I am of sound mind. Then she turns to the three medical personnel, who have not left the room, and asks them why they didn’t just send for me.

“She needs to be escorted,” the woman says.

“You only need two people for that,” Leona says.

“One stays. We have occasion to search the apartment.”

She frowns, then narrows her eyes as she looks at me. “Did you let them in here?”

“No,” I say. “They overrode the codes.”

She stands. “You need to tell me what she’s being accused of.”

“She ran a team of twenty-seven to study the Quurzod,” the woman says. “Only three returned.”

“I assume she’s one of the three who returned,” Leona says.

“Yes,” the woman says.

“The twenty-four are dead?” Leona asks.

“We believe so,” the woman says.

“You don’t know?” Leona asks.

“We have not verified the deaths,” the woman says.

Something whispers across my brain, too fast for me to catch it.

“Are the other two survivors being investigated?” Leona says.

“No,” the woman says.

“Why not?” Leona asks.

The woman looks at me. “She’s the only one who broke away from the group.”

My stomach clenches. I have to will my hands not to form fists. I lean against the portal, unable to look at the strangeness of space.

“So?” Leona says.

“So she’s the only one we found covered in blood,” the woman says.

I bite my lower lip. Technically, they didn’t find me. Technically, I staggered into a nearby village, and the villagers contacted the ship.

Technically, I found them.

“I still don’t see the issue,” Leona asks. “I’m sure you tested the blood. From your tone and her appearance, I’m gathering that it wasn’t all hers.”

“None of it was hers,” the woman says.

I glance at Leona. I expect her to look at me, then get up and nod toward me regretfully, to tell me that I no longer deserve her services. But she doesn’t look in my direction at all.

Instead, she says to the woman, “Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t we at war with the Quurzod?”

“We weren’t then,” the woman says.

“We weren’t friendly,” Leona says. “We were there at the request of the Xenth, to investigate claims of genocide, were we not?”

The woman stiffens. So do I. I don’t remember genocide. I don’t remember going planetside.

I don’t remember anything except the heat, the dry air. The stench of drying blood.

“We weren’t at war yet,” the woman says primly.

“We were in unfriendly territory, trying to change the balance of power,” Leona says. “That’s as close as you can get without declaring hostilities.”

The woman’s mouth thins. The men haven’t moved. It’s as if the conversation is going on in another room.

I try not to look at them. I try not to look at any of them.

“I am not a politician,” the woman says. “I’m not sure at what stage a war becomes a war.”

“Perhaps at the first sign of bloodshed,” Leona says.

“I think that’s too simplistic,” the woman says.

“I thought you weren’t a politician,” Leona says.

They stare at each other. My heart pounds. I’m not sure what my advocate is playing at.

The woman takes a deep breath. “They say she caused the deaths.”

“Who says?” Leona asks, and I hear a new note in her voice. Triumph? Had she been fishing for information? Was that why she goaded the medics?

“The other two,” the woman says.

“The other two,” Leona says. “Who weren’t covered in blood.”

“Yes,” the woman says.

“Who didn’t stagger out of the desert alone, dehydrated, and nearly dead,” Leona says.

Was I nearly dead? I don’t remember that. I just remember how the heat served up mirages like water, how the air had so much dust it seemed like a live thing, how my skin burned to the touch.

“What were they doing while their colleagues were dying?” Leona says.

The woman gets that prim look again. “I don’t know,” she says. “You’ll have to ask them.”

She’s lying. She knows.

My stomach is a hard knot. I rest one hand against it, hoping to soothe it.

“If you suspect her of a heinous crime,” Leona says, “why did you let her back on ship?”

“She has the captain’s protection,” the woman says.

I wince. I didn’t ask for that. He shouldn’t be involved.

“The captain can’t protect her,” Leona says. “He should know that. If she’s done something wrong, she gets punished—planetside.”

“We’re at war,” the woman says. “We couldn’t keep our people planetside.”

“Then we leave her and bring the innocents back,” Leona says.

I close my eyes. She’s right. That’s what the regulations say. I shouldn’t be here.

“The captain can’t change the regulations,” Leona says. She’s clearly pushing something, but what I don’t know.

“Actually,” the woman says, “that’s a gray area. We have two policies, the modern and the ancient. Both apply in this case.”

Leona frowns. She doesn’t agree. Isn’t it her business to know the regulations? Isn’t she the expert in them, like I’m the expert in languages?

“No one gets left behind,” the woman says. “That’s the ancient regulation. No matter how criminal, how perverted, how sick, no one gets left behind.”

She looks at me as she says those things and she has that look in her eyes again. What I had initially taken for sympathy is something else. Fear? Disgust?

“The captain chose to follow that regulation,” the woman says.

“Is that why he didn’t run the announcement?” I ask.

“I don’t presume to know why the captain does what he does,” the woman says. “He should have left you behind.”

“I know,” I say.

Leona frowns at me and even though I don’t know her, I can read her expression. Shut up. Let me talk. I’m your advocate. Let me advocate.

“You want to tell me why he didn’t?” the woman asks.

I shrug one shoulder. I don’t honestly know. I haven’t talked to him. Since I got back, the entire Fleet’s been attacked. We’ve moved, been hit, then moved to foldspace. I suspect the captain’s been busy.

“Are you sure it was him who ordered me back?” I ask.

“Enough,” Leona says. “We can talk all night, but until we have facts, I can’t help you. And I need to know what you want. I know what they want. They want to test you.”

She’s looking at me, and her eyes hold no emotion at all. Only a few people can effectively do that. She’s clearly learned it over the course of her career. She doesn’t know what to think of me, and she doesn’t want me to know that.

She wants me to think she’s on my side.

As if I know what my side is.

“I can block the tests,” she says.

My heart leaps as she says this, but I dry swallow yet again. I am afraid of the tests. I am afraid of what they will reveal. I am afraid of what they won’t reveal.

“Why don’t you study my case,” I say, sounding calm and logical, which I am not, “and then we’ll decide what to do.”

“We need to take her out of the residential wing,” the woman says. “She’s dangerous.”

“We don’t know that,” Leona says.

“We can assume,” the woman says.

Leona turns back to her. Leona’s expression changes, from that flat look she gives me to something akin to anger. Only I’m not sure that emotion is real either.

“From my understanding,” Leona says, “she’s been here for days. If she was going to snap, she would have already. Lock the doors, post a guard, put some kind of monitor on her. But leave her here. You know as well as I do that familiarity provides comfort.”

But the apartment isn’t familiar.

Well, part of it is. The furniture, the mementos that I have brought from previous trips, my bedding, my clothing.

But the view from the portal—it’s unfamiliar, and bound to become more so.

If I don’t have to look outside the ship, I might feel better.

“Do you have portals in the evaluation ward?” I ask the woman.

“Yes,” she says.

So outside lurks here, there, in any place they’d take me.

I let out a shaky sigh. “Then I’ll stay here.”

As if the decision is sane.

As if I am.

As if I would know the difference.

5

THEY ALL LEAVE ME, Leona who is off to do research, the three medical personnel. They’ve posted guards, just like Leona told them to, and they made a point of letting me know. The guards—both big, muscular men—displayed the laser pistols attached to their hips and gave me a stern look.

The warning was clear. If I tried to leave, they’d shoot.

If I tried to leave.

Which I’m not going to do.

Maybe they’re the ones who aren’t thinking. I’m the one who locked myself in my apartment. I’m the one who has hidden from everyone I love.

My twin sister Deirdre has left me increasingly urgent messages, using her technical skills to override the protections I’ve put on my private communications. She is worried, she says. She has heard horrible things, she says. She wants to see me, she says.

Too bad. I don’t want to see her.

I don’t want to see anyone.

Not even Coop.

Jonathon Cooper, our captain. My former husband. He looks like a captain of the Fleet should. He’s tall, broad-shouldered, dark haired, handsome, and oh, so intelligent.

We married young and I was going to have a thousand babies, or maybe the acceptable two. But the babies never happened. Every time I got pregnant, I had to go planetside on some mission or another, and every time, I lost them.

The prenatal unit offered to harbor the fetuses for me, so that my risky job wouldn’t have an impact on my children, but Coop didn’t like the idea. For a man who has attached himself to a machine—loving the Ivoire more than anyone, anything else—he has very old-fashioned views about children. He believes that a child housed in a fetal unit will not have the warmth and compassion, the ability to bond with others, that regular humans do.

He might be right; Lord knows, he’s shown me a lot of studies, all from the Fleet, all from various points in our history, all very scientific.

I know this, but I also know that gestating a child in the woman is no guarantee either. The fetus gets exposed to whatever the woman gets exposed to, and sometimes that exposure is toxic or strange or just plain terrifying.

Dry, dry sand. Heat so extreme that my skin aches. The blood has dried on my skin and it stinks, rotting, even as it’s attached to me. But I cannot get it off. I don’t have the water to drink, let alone any to clean myself. I don’t have—

I stand up. My face feels flushed, my skin tight with dried blood.

I don’t want to remember.

I put my hands on my cheeks. I was thinking about Coop. Coop and the babies that never were, and our perennial argument, and the way that he looks at me, even now, as if I have broken his heart.

We still love each other. But we are no longer in love with each other. If we ever were in love with each other.

I think we were in love with the idea of each other. Coop is a bona fide hero, a man who rushes in when he should hang back, who has saved countless lives, who always puts others first and rarely thinks of himself.

I’m the intellectual, the collected one, the one who thinks before she acts—who thinks in many languages before she acts. Coop has always been intrigued by my skills, my ability to make myself understood, to put myself in the place of another culture, another person, to become someone I’m not, even if only for a few minutes.

There is too much Coop to subsume into another human being, even for a moment. I’m beginning to understand that there is not enough me, and perhaps that’s why I can completely vanish into another perspective, because mine is so fragile, so very frail.

Or is it? Coop always says I have a firm core. He may be right. That may be why I am still here—alive, one of three survivors. But that might also be why I can’t remember, why I feel my brains leaking out of my skull, why my memory skips as if it were a rock skimming a clear mountain lake.

I am standing in the middle of my apartment, back to the portal, in foldspace, guards outside my door, my memory gone. I am here because my former husband still loves me too much to sacrifice me for the good of the ship, even though he makes up other reasons. Ancient regulations versus new regulations. Silly, that. He just can’t abide sending me to the middle of that planet, as the war has heated up, a war we started.

Twenty-four died.

I survived.

Along with two others.

Whom I can’t remember.

Just like I can’t remember what happened to everybody else.

6

“SOMETHING ODD IS HAPPENING HERE,” I say to Leona. I’m looking out my portal at foldspace. At least I think it’s foldspace.

I recognize nothing out there, and neither does my computer. When I catch a moment, a moment when I can concentrate, I use my apartment computer, trying to figure out where we are. I have to use the information stored on the computer itself; the ship has cut me off. I can’t get into any systems, even informational ones.

The message system doesn’t even work properly. If I want to send a message to anyone other than the medical evaluation unit or Leona, I have to send it through the approval system. Someone else will listen to my complaints, read my notes, see my anxious face.

Rather than let that happen, I don’t send messages.

Not that I feel like communicating anyway.

“Yes, something odd is happening,” Leona says. “You’re essentially imprisoned in your own apartment.”

She sounds offended by this, which strikes me as strange. I’m not offended. I turn.

She’s sitting at my table, her own portable notebook on her lap. Her dark hair is up, and she’s wearing a formal tunic with matching pants.

“I’m not talking about me,” I say, sweeping a hand toward the portal. “Something odd is happening on the ship. To the ship. I don’t know where we are.”

Her expression freezes as if I’ve said something wrong.

“Is this something you’re not supposed to tell me?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “I forgot, that’s all. You can’t access the news.”

Shipboard news is an outside system. I’ve never really paid attention anyway, except when I need to for my work, and even then, I’m not really watching. I’m listening—not to what’s going on, but to how it’s expressed.

I am the ship’s senior linguist, a position as important as the captain’s in its own way. Strange that I haven’t thought of that since I’ve come back. I haven’t identified myself as a linguist at all. I haven’t missed the interplay of languages, the way that the same sentence in one language can mean something completely different when translated word-for-word into another.

Context, subtext, word origins, emotions, all contained in one little phrase, one little word. The difference between “an” and “the” can alter meaning dramatically.

And it’s my job to know these subtleties in every language I specialize in. It’s my job to understand them in the new languages I encounter. It’s my job to make sure we can all communicate clearly, because the basis of diplomacy isn’t action, it’s words.

Words, words, words.

“You’ve gone pale,” Leona says. “Do you need to sit down?”

“No.” I walk back to the portal. It’s space-black out there—not quite total darkness. The universe has its own light, and it’s lovely, most of the time. But usually you can see the source—the star in the distance, the reflection off clouds protecting a planet’s atmosphere.

I see nothing.

I have seen nothing for days.

I sometimes check my own eyesight to see if the problem is inside my head.

(I’m so afraid it is inside my head.)

“What’s the news?” I ask, even though I’m no longer sure I want to know.

She pauses. I turn. She’s frowning. It’s an expression I didn’t expect to see on her face. She’s not someone who lets her emotions near the surface.

I have a clear sense of how terrified she is, and how unwilling she is to admit it.

Although I can’t tell you why I feel that way. I can’t tell you how I know.

I just do.

Something subtle then, something subtle like the things I specialize in.

“The anacapa malfunctioned,” she says. “We’re becalmed.”

Becalmed. A nautical term, adapted from Earth, in the days before ships sailed the heavens. In those days, ships sailed the waters, the seas, they were called, and being becalmed was dangerous.

Sailing ships had no engines. They were powered by the wind. And when the wind was gone, the ship didn’t move. Sometimes, way out at sea, a becalmed ship wouldn’t move for days, weeks, and the men—it was always men—on board would die.

Some say they died from thirst or lack of food.

But other accounts say that men who were becalmed died because conditions had driven them insane.

“Becalmed,” I repeat, and sink into a nearby chair. My heart rate has increased.

Leona watches me, as if she’s afraid of what the news will do to me.

She should be.

The Fleet adopted the word “becalmed” because it’s the best way to describe being stuck in foldspace. The anacapa malfunctions, and we can’t get back. It has happened throughout our history.

Ships get lost, some because they’re becalmed. What no one knows, what no one can figure out, is if they’re stuck in an alternate universe or in the actual fold of space itself.

If there is an actual fold of space.

We don’t know—at least those of us who are in no real need to know. Coop probably knows. He’s probably doing everything he can.

“Has he sent a distress?” I ask, because I can’t not ask. I have to know, even though I do know. Of course, Coop sent a distress. Of course, he’s run through procedure. Of course, he’s done everything he can do.

“Several,” she says.

“And?”

“No one is responding.” She looks at her well-manicured hand. “Some believe that our comm system is down.”

I’m an expert in the comm system. I have to be. Because if the comm techs are incapacitated, someone from the linguistic staff still has to communicate to others. So my technical training—my mechanical training, to use another old Earth term—is in comm systems. I’m as good (maybe better) than Coop’s chief communications officer.

And no one has called me.

Maybe that’s why I haven’t heard any announcement. Not because Coop couldn’t leave me behind, but because another emergency superseded mine.

Maybe I’m forgotten, a byproduct, something the junior members of the staff must deal with until the regular members have time to think about me.

“I have comm system expertise,” I say, again, because I can’t not say it.

“I know,” Leona says.

But she says no more.

“When did the anacapa malfunction?” I ask.

She looks at me, as if I should remember. I don’t remember.

“We were outgunned,” she says. “The Quurzod were right behind us. They fired as we engaged the anacapa. We suffered a lot of damage, and that’s when they think the drive malfunctioned.”

This does not reassure me, which irritates me. Apparently I’d been hoping for reassurance.

“We don’t know?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “It’s hard to do assessments out here. They want to go to a base, but no base is answering. We have limited equipment, limited supplies. We’re on rations—.”

She stops herself.

I stand up again. I’m like a child’s toy—up, down, up, down. I can’t stay still for a moment.

“We don’t need to be on rations,” I say. “We have enough supplies to last years.”

Then it’s my turn to freeze. We have enough supplies to last years if we know where we are. If we know where we’re going. If we know we can get resupplied.

“They think no one will find us, don’t they?” I whisper. “They think we’re on our own.”

She nods. Just once, as if nodding more than once would be too much acknowledgement, would make us complicit in something.

“They don’t know where we are, do they?” I ask.

She shrugs, but it isn’t a casual gesture. It’s a frustrated gesture.

Shrugs are part of communication. The nuances of shrugs are something I have learned over time.

“They need me,” I say.

“Yes,” she says. “They do.”

But she doesn’t move, and she doesn’t say any more. She’s eloquent in her silences.

They need me, but they haven’t come for me. They believe I can’t help them, because I’m somehow damaged, because I’ve done something wrong.

“Is that why the medical evaluation team came?” I say. “To get me back to work?”

She looks at that manicured hand again. She doesn’t reply. Is that a no? Suddenly, for all my training in subtlety, all I’ve learned about reading gestures, I can’t tell.

Finally, she takes a breath. She was steeling herself to talk with me. She isn’t sure I should hear this, but she’s going to tell me anyway.

“Do you know why the Quurzod came after us so vehemently?” she asks.

“No.” I don’t remember much after staggering into that village, after someone gasped, pulled me aside, touched my caked skin.

I collapsed, and woke up on a bed, hooked up to an IV, liquid applied directly into the veins because I couldn’t drink on my own. I woke up later in the hospital wing on the Ivoire, refreshed, no longer burned, my skin smooth and clean and my mouth no longer dry.

I have no idea how I got there, only that I did.

“The Quurzod came because of you,” she says.

I look at her.

“We lost twenty-four,” she says. “They lost more.”

I cannot move. “How many more?”

She shrugs—oh, so eloquent. Not frustrated this time, but an I-don’t-know shrug, an is-an-exact-number-really-important? shrug. “You tell me.”

I have to force myself to breathe. “You’re saying it’s my fault?”

“I’m not saying anything,” she says.

But she is. Oh, she is.

Because I am responsible for communications, language, diplomacy.

If we went in twenty-seven strong—and we did—that means we went in as a team. A planetside team usually has thirty, but I remember—(do I? Or am I making this up?)—that we lost three because they couldn’t stomach the Quurzod.

Not that the Quurzod are so different from us. We haven’t discovered any aliens in our travels—not true aliens, anyway, not aliens in the way that we define them, as sentient creatures who build and create and form attachments like we do. We’ve found strange creatures and even stranger plants, but nothing like the human race.

Although we have found humans throughout our centuries of travel. Thousands and thousands of humans. Each with different languages, different skills, different levels of development.

But exactly the same—emotional, callous, brilliant, sad—capable of great good and great violence, often within the same culture.

The Quurzod—the Quurzod, oh, I remember the briefings, snatches of the briefings at any rate. They make an art out of violence. They kill and maim and do so with great relish. When they committed genocide against the Xenth, they did so with psychopathic glee—killing children in front of parents, torturing loved ones, experimenting to see what kind of punishment a human body could take before it had enough and simply quit.

The stories distressed my team. Three couldn’t face the Quurzod.

It makes no sense. If I started this, then that was all the more reason to leave me behind. We’re taught from childhood that sacrifices are necessary.

We travel in a fleet of ships 500 strong. We split off for various missions, and sometimes we sacrifice an entire ship if we have to. An individual life—one of at least 500 lives on the Ivoire alone—means less than the mission.

The mission: to provide assistance throughout the known universe. We are the good guys, the rescuers; we are the ones who make the wrongs right. We do what we can, interfere if we must, help when we’re needed.

And when we make mistakes, we make them right.

We don’t run.

It seems like we ran.

“I want to talk to Coop,” I say.

Leona shakes her head. “Not until you can tell us what happened.”

“Then I should let the medical evaluation unit run their tests.”

Her head shaking becomes more pronounced. “You can’t. We need truth here, not legal tricks.”

“Tricks?” I say. “They’ll be using equipment, running diagnostics—”

“Asking you questions, putting memories in your head.” She runs her hand over her notebook. “We’ll wait until your own memories return.”

She looks at the portal, then back at me.

“After all,” she says dismally. “We have time.”

7

SOMETIMES I SLEEP. The body demands it, and when it can no longer function without sleep, I doze wherever I am.

I have fallen asleep on the divan. I love the divan. I have put it in the center of my living area, where most people have group seating. But I never hold meetings here.

I used to study on it, let words dance around me as I spoke them. They’d turn red if I pronounced something wrong, and they’d vanish if spoken correctly. I loved word dancing. I loved study.

Now I lie on the divan and I stare out the portal at all that nothing, not thinking at all. Words don’t even run through my head. I know I’ve been thinking, but I cannot articulate what the thoughts are.

Yet as I fall asleep, I know I am asleep. I feel the divan beneath me, note that the apartment is a bit too cold, think I should tell the apartment’s system to adjust the heat. Or I should grab a blanket from the bedroom. I should be comfortable.

But I am not. I claw my way through a pile of stinky, sticky flesh. Arms move, legs flop, a head turns toward me, eyes gone. I force myself not to look. I am climbing people and I know that if I don’t I will die.

I jerk awake, shudder, trying to get the images from my head. Leona wants me to remember.

I don’t.

I get up and take a blanket off my bed. Then I stop and look at the wall, the only wall I have decorated.

An old blanket—a quilt, to use the proper term—adds color to the room. Pinks and reds and glorious blues, mixed together in a wedding ring pattern. The quilt has been in my family for generations, given, my mother said, to an ancestor as the Fleet embarked from Earth itself.

I don’t know for certain because I’ve never tested the quilt. I keep it out of harsh light. It’s preservation framed, done by my grandmother, and its beauty should remind us of tradition, of homes we’ll never see again, of family.

I have cousins on other ships in the Fleet, family, some distant in corridors down the way. We are not close. My sister has a daughter, and if I never have children, this quilt will go to her.

I wrap the blanket around myself and walk back to the divan. I recline on it again, look out the portal, see that brightly lit blackness, threatening starshine, but not delivering it.

And—

I’m still climbing. The sunlight beats down on me, the heat nearly unbearable. I’ve been praying for the wind to stop since I got here, but now that it has, I want it back, if only to get rid of the insects and the stench.

I am the only one alive. I do not want to look but I do—faces, eyes especially, eyes glazed over and an odd white. Blood everywhere. I climb, standing on people, and if I look up, I can see an edge to the pit I am in.

I stop, listen, hear only my ragged breathing. If I can hear it, someone else can hear it too. Someone lurking out there. Someone who will—

I can’t do it this way. There is no comfort in this apartment, in these rooms. If this is a memory, then I do not want to be alone with it.

If it is a nightmare, I want it banished.

If it is an example of how I will live from now on, I cannot. I will not. I will die before I continue like this.

I contact Leona. Her face appears on my wall screen, looking concerned. I do not give her time to speak.

I say, “I’m going to have the evaluations.”

And then I sever the link.

8

THE GUARDS ESCORT ME to the medical unit. I’m not used to being escorted. I’m used to leading. But these two men, both bigger than me, walk beside me, brushing against me, making it clear that I’m in their power.

They lead me down one of the main corridors in the ship, so it’s wide enough for people to pass us. Everyone who does averts their eyes, partly because I no longer look like me, and partly because I’m being escorted.

Just because there are five hundred of us on the ship doesn’t mean we all know each other. Some of us apprenticed on other ships. Some of us grew up elsewhere in the Fleet. I met Coop on the Brazza, when we were going to school. That we both ended up on the senior staff of the Ivoire had less to do with our designs than with our abilities, and a gap in leadership at the Ivoire at the time.

Back then I was young enough not to realize that I profited from other people’s failures. I notice now.

Just like I’m being noticed, even though people are looking away. They see a crazed woman, hair down, so distracted she forgot to put on shoes before she told the guards she wanted to go to the medical unit. I’m walking through the cold corridors with bare feet, wearing a knee-length white shirt and matching pants—my comfort clothes—in a place where almost everyone else is in uniform.

The medical evaluation unit is on the fifth level of the medical wing. Everything here is as white as my clothing, with nanobits that keep the walls and floors clean. My bare feet leave footprints that get erased by the nanobits after just a moment. The dirt from the guards’ shoes evaporates as quickly as well.

The staff working in the medical unit must work one week in other parts of the ship. This area is too sterile for good human health, and the medical personnel who do not leave find themselves developing allergies and sensitivities to the most normal things—like skin cells and cooking oils.

I’ve put in time in the medical unit as well—all of the linguists do as part of our training. We program the medical database with medical terms from any new language we’ve learned. We also train the staff to speak the most rudimentary forms of many languages—enough to ask after another person’s health—and to understand the answers.

The guards lead me to the fifth level. There a woman waits for me. She’s not the woman who invaded my apartment. Nor is she anyone I know.

She’s tiny, with raven-black hair, black eyes, and a straight line for a mouth. She extends her hand.

“I’m Jill Bannerman,” she says. “I’ll help you through the evaluation.”

“I can’t do anything until my advocate gets here,” I say. The words come out awkward and ungracious. I’m excellent at being accommodating, at saying the right thing at the right time—or I used to be.

“I know,” Bannerman says. “I’ll get you ready, and then we’ll wait for her. She should be here shortly.”

I don’t know what ready means. It makes me nervous. I shake my head. “I’d like to wait.”

“All right,” she says, as if she expected that. “Sit here. We’ll get started as soon as she arrives.”

She leads me to an orange chair that curves around my body as I sit. I’m so paranoid that I wonder if it’s taking readings from me.

But the Ivoire—the Fleet, actually—has privacy laws. Even if this chair records information off me, no one can use the information without my permission.

Have I given permission by agreeing to the evaluation? I have no idea. I should have checked with Leona first.

That’s what she’ll say.

Jill Bannerman speaks softly to my guards, then she leaves the room. The guards move out of the main area and back outside the doors. I’m alone in a room with half a dozen chairs, with walls that reset themselves, and furniture that changes color every ten minutes. First orange, then red, then mauve, then purple, then blue. I watch the furniture, a bit unnerved by it all.

There is nothing else to watch, no entertainment, no open portals, no other people. Just me and the constantly changing furniture.

I tuck my cold feet underneath my legs and make myself breathe deeply. I want to tap my fingertips on the chair, but someone will read that as nervousness, I’m sure. I don’t know why I’m worried that they will notice—it’s hard to miss, and if the system is recording my vital signs, the nervousness will show in my elevated heart rate, my slightly higher-than-normal blood pressure, and even in my breathing.

The only thing I’m not doing right now is regretting my decision. I’m suddenly quite happy to be out of my apartment. I hadn’t realized how claustrophobic I felt in it, how shut down I had been.

How terrified.

The doors slide open and Leona sweeps in. Her green tunic changes the color scheme in the room. Now the chairs float through forest colors—green, dark green, blue-green, blue. She slides into a chair across from me.

“We can still leave,” she says.

I shake my head.

“We need a consult, and we can’t have it here,” she says.

So I am being monitored. “I’m doing this,” I say.

“You made that clear,” she says. “Now we determine how to do it best for you.”

Whatever that means.

“There’s a privacy room just over there,” she says. “We’re using it.”

I’ve read up on advocacy. She’s not supposed to give me orders. She’s supposed to follow mine. But she’s worried and I’m not strong enough to fight her. Besides, I’m not leaving the medical evaluation unit. I’m just stepping into a private room for a few minutes to consult with my advocate.

I don’t have to take her advice.

She touches the wall and a door slides open. I hadn’t noticed it while I was waiting, distracted (apparently) by the constantly changing furniture.

This room is also white with a black conference table that has grown out of the floor. Two chairs sit side by side. I suppose if more people walk in, more chairs will grow out of their storage spots on the floor.

The overhead lights spotlight the chairs and nearby, coffee brews as if someone set it up for us.

Leona ignores it, but I help myself. As I touch the coffee pot, pastries slide in from the far wall. Pastries and an entire plate of fruit, some of it exotic.

“I thought we’re on rations,” I say to her.

“We are, but maybe the medical wing is exempt.”

The food gets her up and she stacks a plate with strudels and Danishes and things I don’t even have a name for. I grab a banana that looks like it came from one of the hydroponics bays, and something with lots of frosting and raisins.

My stomach actually growls. I’m not sure when the last time I ate was.

We sit down with our food and our coffees, suddenly so civilized.

She picks up one of the Danishes, but doesn’t take a bite. “I know I can’t change your mind, but I want you to know what’s at risk.”

I eat the banana first. It’s green and chewy, not really ripe, almost sour. I don’t care. It feels like the first food I’ve eaten in years, even though it’s not.

“I found out why they brought you back to the ship,” Leona says.

That, of all things, catches my attention. It sounds ominous.

“Why?”

“They need to know what happened planetside. They need to know if it’s our fault.”

A shiver runs down my back. If it’s our fault. Of course it’s our fault. The Fleet meddles. That’s what we do.

“What do the other two survivors say?” I ask.

She doesn’t look at me. Instead she takes a bite of that Danish and eats slowly. I want to push her on this. I want her to tell me everything right now.

But some vestiges of my training remain. I sit and watch, counting silently to myself because it’s the only way I can keep still.

Stillness used to be my best weapon. I could wait for anyone. I could listen forever, and learn, without making a move.

But I seem to have lost that ability. I’m restless now, and time feels like it has sped up. Even though I know it has only taken a moment for her to eat that small bite of pastry, it feels as if she has taken an hour.

“What do they say?” I ask because I can’t wait any longer. So much for stillness.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I haven’t spoken to them directly.”

“But you know,” I press.

She shrugs a shoulder—a sorry-said-all-I-can shrug.

Then she sets the pastry down and wipes her hand on a small napkin. “Look,” she says. “If that mess turns out to be our fault, then you’ll probably be executed. Now do you see why I don’t want you to do this?”

“I need to do this,” I say softly.

“Why?” she asks.

“The memories are coming back. I can’t experience them on my own. It’s better if they all come back at once.”

She stares at me, and then sighs. “I’ll see what I can do,” she says, and leaves.

9

I SIT IN THAT ROOM for what feels like forever, but really is only about an hour. There is a bathroom next to the service area, and I’m able to use that, but I’m not able to leave the room itself. I pace. I count to ten in fifteen languages. Then in six more. And then I start over because I can’t remember all the languages I just tried.

I’ve just started counting to one hundred when Leona returns.

“Jill Bannerman is outside,” Leona says. “When she comes in here, you tell her what you told me about not being able to cope. Be dramatic. The more threatened you feel the better.”

“I won’t be lying,” I say. “I can’t do this alone.”

Those words are so inadequate. If I close my eyes, I can feel the heat, the blood drying on my skin, the bodies rolling beneath my hands. I can’t sit still with that. I have to move. And the more of it that comes back to me, the more movement I need to make.

“You tell her that,” Leona says. “Make it very clear that this is a medical issue.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Because that gives you legal protection. You’ll be considered a patient, not a criminal. If they had taken you that afternoon when you called me, you’d’ve been a criminal. Just like you would have been if you hadn’t waited for me today. This way, you’ll be able to say anything, do anything, and it won’t come out in a legal proceeding. At least not in detail. The ship’s staff can have an advocate in the room, and he can testify to what you say, but it won’t have the force of your testimony. It can only be used to start an investigation, which they’re already running.”

I stare at her. She thinks I’ve done something wrong. They all seem to think I’ve done something wrong.

Is that why I can’t remember?

“Before you decide,” she says, “this is your last chance to go back to your apartment. You can do this on your own and no one will ever have to know.”

My stomach clenches. “And then what?”

“What do you mean?”

“Will I ever be able to leave my apartment? Will I be able to return to my duties?”

She shakes her head. “You’ll be alive. Isn’t that enough?”

I think about the view from my portal. Stuck in foldspace with nothing to see. The same walls, a different view, if we’re lucky, but the same walls for the rest of my life. No more languages. No more work.

No more friends or family.

Just me. Alive. In my apartment.

Becalmed.

“Send her in,” I say, “and I’ll tell her the truth.”

***

The truth is that I am terrified of my own mind. The truth is that I’m afraid my memories will kill me. I’m afraid if I never access them, they will kill me, and I’m afraid if I do remember, I can’t live with them.

Somehow I stammer that out to Jill Bannerman and she takes some kind of notes and Leona gets her dispensation or whatever it is and I meet the senior staff’s advocate, a man named Rory Harper, whom I’ve seen before, but I can’t remember in what context.

He’s older, fifties, sixties, silvering hair and a dignity that I don’t like. I don’t want someone like him to see me go through the tests. I don’t want anyone to see me.

But I have no choice.

So I agree to everything, and end up here.

10

YOU NEVER SEE the whole ship, no matter what ship you’re on. About fifty ships have a specialty. Those ships never go on planetside missions because we don’t want to lose them. I got the last of my education on the Brazza. The Brazza specializes in education, the Santé specializes in medical training, the Eiffel specializes in engineering, and the Seul specializes in officer training, just to name a few.

And even on the Brazza, adventurous and young, I never explored the entire ship. No one did, no one could. There was just too much to see, too much to do.

And here, on the Ivoire, even though I’ve worked in the medical wing, I’ve never seen these rooms.

The testing rooms.

They’re dark and strange, buried deep within the ship. They feel like the very center of the ship, even though they cannot be. The Ivoire, like all of the ships in the Fleet, have a birdlike design—a narrow, curved front, expanding to massive body in the center with wider sections that seem like wings, and a final tail toward the back. This makes the Ivoire sound small, but it is not.

The medical unit is in one of the wider sections, with easy access from several areas of the ship. The unit is several levels down, with a lot of material between it and the exterior, unlike my apartment, which is right on the edge. If an attack destroys a section of the ship, that section mostly will not include the medical unit.

Or these testing facilities.

They seem close, cavelike, and my breath catches as I step inside.

I will be alone in here, with doctors of all kinds, as well as my advocate (Leona) and the ship’s advocate (Harper) observing through the walls. Or through something. I am a bit unclear on the mechanism.

Jill assures me that I will be safe, that the monitors in the floor, the walls, the very room itself, will know when I am too emotional to continue, and will pull me back. I will rest, then, and maybe even receive something to help me into a dreamless sleep.

I do not like this room. I do not like the low light, the dark interior, the cushy floor. I want a portal or a screen or something familiar. Before the door closes, I catch her arm.

“Is there somewhere else to do this?”

She shakes her head. “This room is safe.”

“I don’t like it,” I say. “There’s nothing here.”

She gives me a sad look that I suspect she intended as compassionate. “We need the room to mold around you. Nothing in here can contradict what’s happening inside your mind. That’s probably what’s making you uncomfortable.”

I cannot go inside. I remain in the doorway. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I can’t do this.”

“It will help you.”

I shake my head—or rather, I shake my head even more. I don’t realize until this moment that I’ve been shaking my head all along.

“No,” I say. “I can’t go in this room.”

Somehow Leona has found her way to my side. “If she doesn’t want to go in, she doesn’t have to.”

Leona’s voice is firmer than mine. Its forcefulness makes my stomach muscles tighten. I feel nauseous.

“People often balk before going in,” Jill says. “It’s part of the process. Your memories are difficult, and the fear you feel has to do with them, not with the room.”

I’m still shaking my head. “No.”

Leona slips her arm around my back. She leads me out of the area. Jill follows, uttering soothing words, trying to coerce me back into that room.

I can’t. I won’t.

We get to the main room—the room that constantly changes—it’s white now, with yellow accents—and I burst into tears.

Part of me stands aside and watches myself cry. I don’t cry. I can count the number of times I’ve shed tears, including the day my parents died.

The crying feels alien, as if there is a part of me that I cannot control.

“I’m sorry,” I manage.

“It’s better,” Leona says.

But it’s not. I’ll be alone, in my room, dealing with the memories all by myself.

At least I’ll have a portal.

That views foldspace.

Nothingness.

Becalmed.

11

BUT THE DREAMS are gone as if they have never been. As if a mere attempt to enter the room has taken the memories from my head and made me feel more human.

I clean up, then I clean the apartment. I find a language in the database, an old language, a dead language (or so they think) and I proceed to learn it, word for ancient word.

I am digging in for forever, when my door chirrups. A preprogrammed signal, the only one I’ve put in my door’s system.

For Coop.

My breath catches. I don’t want to see him. I do want to see him. I want him to go away. I want him to tell me everything.

I go to the door, but do not open it. I engage the comm. “You’re supposed to be running the ship.”

“I am,” he says. I recognize that tone. It’s constrained—his captain’s tone. His I’m-not-alone-so-don’t-bother-me-with-personal-stuff tone. “I’m coming in.”

He’s captain. He can override any command on this ship.

I step back, run a hand over my hair, check my blouse. I’ve been dressing like a professional ever since I came back, ever since I started my new language, even though I never thought I’d see anyone again. I need the pretense.

I need to think I’ll have a use again.

He comes in, and waits as the door closes behind him.

I’m always startled at how much older he looks. Not that command has aged him, although it has, it’s just that I remember the boy I fell for, the handsome dark-haired boy full of promise, and now that boy has become a man—a powerful man—who stands before me.

He’s wearing his black uniform with silver piping, the everyday uniform, nothing special. He would look normal if it weren’t for his hair. He hasn’t tended to it in days, and it has grown long, brushing his collar, making him seem almost unkempt.

“They say you’re refusing treatment,” he says.

I can’t tell if this visit is compassionate or a ship problem. I can’t tell if he’s here because he’s my former husband and still my friend, or if he’s here because he’s the ship’s captain, or both.

I’m not sure I should be able to tell.

“I went to them for help, but I can’t go in the treatment rooms.” It sounds crazy. I sound crazy. But I’m beginning to come to terms with that. I think I am crazy.

“The doctors say you’re claustrophobic,” he says. “That’s why you can’t go in. You’ve never been claustrophobic before.”

I look at him, a denial about to cross my lips. Then—

—the bodies pile on top of me. I’m drowning in them, afraid to move, afraid not to move, my head wedged in a slightly angled position. I catch some air, but not much. Enough, apparently, to keep me breathing, even though I feel like I’m being crushed.

I curse and realize that I’m sitting down. Coop is crouched before me.

“What was that?” he asks.

I tear up. I blink, hoping that he won’t notice. “The memories,” I say. Then I take a deep breath, determined to change the subject. “Why are they letting you in here? What if I’m dangerous?”

He smiles. “You’re not?”

“The medical evaluation unit thought I was.”

“They’re wrong,” he says.

“You don’t know that,” I say. “You can’t know that.”

“You got brainwashed in a month planetside? You’ve a firm core, remember? No one can brainwash you. That’s why you’re such a good linguist. You can keep your sense of self while understanding others.”

“Anyone can change,” I say. My heart is beating hard. “They think I killed twenty-four people.”

He has taken my right hand. He holds it gently, and rises just a little so that he’s not crouching any more. He sits beside me, like a shy lover, but there’s nothing romantic in his posture.

“Twenty-four people died,” he says. “And you didn’t. That’s what we know.”

“Why didn’t you leave me there?” I ask. “That’s protocol.”

“I wasn’t about to leave you there,” he says.

I look at him. I don’t know how to respond. So I say, “You should let me look at the communications array.”

“I’d love to,” he says. “But I can’t. Not until we know what you’ve done.”

“What do the others say?”

“They say you abandoned them.” His voice is harsh. “They say you left everyone to fend for themselves.”

“I would never do that.” The words come out of my mouth before I can stop them.

This time his smile is real. “I know,” he says. “I think they’re lying.”

12

QUURZID, the language the Quurzod speak, is a mixture of six different languages we’ve encountered in this sector. Only the Quurzod have toughened up the words, shortened the syntax, added guttural sounds and some glottal stops that none of the other languages have.

Yet the Quurzod language flows, like music, even with the harshness. Almost because of the harshness—atonal and oddly beautiful, spare, austere, and to the point.

I can hear the Quurzod talking all around me, even though I am not with them. I am sitting in that awful testing room. Coop walked me inside, his arm around my back. His presence reassures me, even though it shouldn’t, even though we shouldn’t get along. We’re not a couple any longer.

Yet some vestiges of couplehood remain.

Coop has left—he’s on call, which means if I need him, and he’s not handling some emergency, he’ll come. But my sister sits outside this room. My twin sister, Deirdre.

We no longer look alike, she and I. We’ve lived our lives so differently that what once looked identical now just looks familial. If I had lived her life, I would look like her—heavier, settled, smile lines around her mouth. Her hair flows around her face, and her eyes are soft.

Deirdre waits for me in the waiting room, even though she knows this might take a day or more. She doesn’t care. She acts as if I’m dying of some dread disease, and for all we know, I am.

Some mental disease.

I have already settled onto the floor of this strange room, but it hasn’t curved around me yet. It’s waiting for me to give the go-ahead. Because I balked the first time, I get an extra five minutes to reconsider my choice.

I’m not going to change my mind.

The Quurzod whisper around me. If I close my eyes, I’ll be able to see them. They met us on a broad plain, the sun setting behind them. It was a dramatic and powerful introduction, the sky blood-red as the light died.

The Xenth warned us that the Quurzod would be dramatic. The Xenth warned us that the Quurzod would lie.

My arms are pressed against my side. Something has punctured the skin in my wrist. My eyes flutter open for a moment, and it becomes clear that the room has absorbed me.

My breath catches in complete panic. My heart races. I want to claw myself out, I want to climb, I need to—

—get out. Escape. I could die in here. I will die in here if I’m not careful. I will disappear and no one will know what happened to me in this bloody silence, this stench, this heat and the pressure and the horrible, horrible—

“No,” I whisper. It takes me a moment to realize I whisper in Quurzid. Unlike most human languages which use simple words, often words of one syllable, for no, Quurzid uses seven syllables for no—a long, complicated word, one that requires a lot of effort to speak correctly. You can’t involuntarily finish the word “no” in Quurzid, like you can in Standard. “No” in Standard slips out. In Quurzid, you know what you’re saying by the third syllable, and you can leave the word unfinished.

The Quurzid word for “no” is the most deliberate word for “no” in any language I’ve encountered.

And that’s the word I spoke. A deliberate word, one shows I do not now—or ever—want to revisit those memories.

For a moment, I imagine screaming for help, thinking of escape, like they told me to, so that the room will release me. But then I will see my sister’s face as I leave, filled with disappointment and fear and concern.

My sister, the caretaker, knows that she will be responsible for me, because she can’t not be responsible for me, no matter how much I try to keep her out.

I close my eyes as the whispers start again, the Quurzod, talking among themselves as they stood on that ridge. They were half naked, only their arms and legs covered with some kind of paint, a bit of armor across their genitals. The women as well as the men are bare-chested. They show no shame in revealing their bodies, unlike some cultures we’ve encountered.

Unlike the Xenth.

The Xenth should have been the musical ones. Their language is all sibilants intermingled with soft “ch” sounds and the occasional sighing vowel. But the effect isn’t musical. It’s creepy, as if something is hissing with disapproval or anger.

Three of our people quit at the prospect of facing the Quurzod, but it was the Xenth who terrified me. The Xenth with their too-thin women, wearing long sleeves and high-neck collars and tight pants that sealed at the ankles, even in the heat. The Xenth, whose men looked at me as if I were not just dressed improperly but suggestively.

I wore a uniform that covered everything except my neck, and I considered coming back to the ship just so that I could get the proper clothing. But our Xenth hosts assured me there was no time. They wanted us to broker some kind of resolution to a fight with them and the Quurzod, a fight over a genocide that had occurred a year before, a fight that could—in the opinion of the Xenth—lead to planetwide war.

We had studied everything, or so we thought. Sixteen different cultures existed on the only continent on Ukhanda. Sixteen different cultures with only two that had the military might to dominate—the Quurzod and the Xenth. The Xenth controlled the plains, but the Quurzod held the mountains. They also controlled most of the airways, giving the Xenth the seas. Both had space flight, but the Quurzod used it to their own advantage.

How the Xenth contacted us, I am not certain. They didn’t contact the Ivoire. They contacted one of the other ships in our Fleet, and decisions went up the chain of command. The Ivoire got involved because of me. Because I am—was—had been—the best linguist in the Fleet.

My heart twists. I open my eyes. The room is the color of that twilight, blood-red and gold, with shadowy figures lining the walls. My stomach turns.

I can’t do this. I can’t do it. I can’t.

But if I don’t, I’ll die.

I have no idea if the words I’m thinking come from the meeting or that horrible memory of the bodies or come from now. I hate the way my arms press against my sides. I shift, and am surprised that the floor shifts with me. I can—if I want—pull that thing from my wrist, the thing that is going to keep me hydrated and nourished, and flee this place. Go on my own, figure things out by myself. Live my own damn life.

Alone.

Becalmed.

I take a deep breath.

I have never fled from a battle in my life.

I force my eyes closed and let the memories overtake me.

13

I CAME TO THE MEETINGS LATE. Linguists from the flagship, Alta, had flanked the diplomats, talking with the Xenth long before I arrived. I got study materials and cultural documents one week before my first meeting, and that meeting was with the Xenth.

The Xenth’s capital city, Hileer, was a port city. The buildings on the bay had glass walls facing the water, but deeper inland, the buildings had no windows at all. The Xenth built backwards—or what I thought of as backwards—the tallest buildings by the view with the rest getting progressively shorter the farther away from the water we got. Only doors had glass, and then only a small rectangle, built at eye-level, so that the person inside could see who knocked.

The buildings of state, where the parties and balls and ceremonies were held, stood bayside, but the buildings of government, where the actual governing occurred, were single-story structures miles from the waterline.

The ceilings were low, the doorways lower, and the interiors too dark for my taste. They were also both chilly and stuffy, as if the air got recycled only rarely. Add to that the hissing, scratching sound of the Xenth language, and for the first time in my long and storied career, I felt a distinct on-sight aversion to the people I was meeting.

I had to work to smile, work to touch palms—their version of shaking hands—work to concentrate on their words, instead of their shifting eyes, which were as much a part of their communication as hand gestures were to some cultures. I did learn to understand the eye shifts, but try as I might, I could not add them to my personal repertoire. I apologized in advance, and the Xenth seemed to understand.

I had no real importance to them. I had no real diplomatic importance in that room, anyway. I was there to listen, learn, and discover all I could about the Quurzod.

The Xenth had asked for help with them.

What the Xenth told us that afternoon is this:

Their quarrels with the Quurzod went back five hundred years. Initially, they had border skirmishes that caught almost no attention. Neither the Xenth nor the Quurzod cared much about their shared borders.

They did care about the seas, and sea battles between both countries had become legendary, but rare. Usually the ships passed each other in international waters, threatening, but not following up on the threats.

But travel became easier, as both sides built roads, discovered their own personal air travel, and slowly conquered space. Neither group were nation-builders, at least initially. They didn’t want to conquer the other side and take their land. But no one could define exactly what land belonged to whom on those shared borders, and as travel became more commonplace, so did the border skirmishes, which led to many deaths, which led to formal armed hostilities, which led to full-scale warfare at least a dozen times in the past 250 years.

Another culture, the Virrrzd, negotiated the first peace treaty for the Xenth and Quurzod, and it held (tentatively) for thirty years. Then the border skirmishes started up again, along with raids into each other’s territories.

The raids went deeper and deeper, growing more and more violent, until the Quurzod committed an out-and-out massacre, killing every single Xenth (man, woman, and child) within one hundred miles of what the Quurzod believed to be the border.

The Xenth immediately called for another peace conference, demanding reparations. The Quurzod came, and as both sides made actual headway, Quurzod along the border died hideously.

The Quurzod claimed they were attacked by an illegal chemical weapon, long banned on Ukhanda. The Xenth claimed that the Quurzod’s own building materials had an adverse reaction with chemicals the Xenth used for land cultivation. The Quurzod deaths, the Xenth claimed, were caused by their own greed in gobbling up the land.

The Fleet arrived just as the war along the border was about to escalate again. The Alta contacted both sides and offered to broker a deal between them. Only the Xenth took the Alta up on it.

The Quurzod were too busy burying their dead.

Or so we were told.

Claims, counterclaims, historical arguments so detailed that even the locals did not understand all of them. The Fleet managed to hold off hostilities by patrolling the border with our own people. We have small fighters that we used to fly over the disputed area, keeping both sides away.

We had maintained that position during the months of negotiation.

Finally, the Quurzod agreed to talks, so long as there would be no activity along the border during that time. No chance for backstabbing, or so they said.

My team would go in three months in advance of the diplomats. We would become as Quurzod as possible, learn their culture, their traditions, their rituals. We wouldn’t go native—we had learned over the years that too many cultures had found the attempt to go native as deep an insult (or perhaps a deeper insult) than failing to learn the language.

So much of communication is nonverbal. Eye movements like the Xenth had, hand gestures found in so many Earth cultures, smiles or lack thereof in a series of cultures in the previous sector. These things could make or break a delicate negotiation.

I’d heard rumors—impossible to substantiate without talking to the Quurzod themselves—that Quurzid had a four-tiered structure. The first was a formal tier, for strangers within the Quurzod culture. Extremely polite, with its own sentence structure and vocabulary. The second was the familial tier for family and close friends, informal in its sentence structure with a private vocabulary, often known only to the family/friends themselves. The third was street Quurzid, offensive, abrupt, and as violent as the culture. Again, a different sentence structure and vocabulary. Used in threatening situations, among the criminal classes, and by the military in times of war.

Finally, there was diplomatic Quurzid, which bore almost no relation to any of the other forms of Quurzid at all. So far as I could tell, diplomatic Quurzid evolved as a language to speak to enemies, without giving them any insight into the Quurzod at all.

The Virrrzd were the ones who figured that out, which was why they could successfully broker the original deal with the Xenth. But the Virrrzd were unwilling to get involved this time—the conflict between the Xenth and Quurzod had taken such a nasty turn that the Virrrzd were afraid for their own safety.

The Virrrzd knew both formal and diplomatic Quurzid, but not street or familial Quurzid. We felt—the linguists, the diplomats, the Fleet—that the only way to settle this dispute between the Xenth (who had only one language in only one form) and the Quurzod was to quite simply learn to communicate fully with the Quurzod.

Which was why my team got sent in.

14

I SURFACE TO SIBILANTS (whisper, whisper, hiss, hiss, hiss) and shudder as I open my eyes. The room is dark and has folded around me. I can’t really see anything. My heart pounds. I have no idea how much time has passed.

I’m supposed to get lost in the memories, and maybe I am lost, but it doesn’t feel like the kind of lost I expected. It’s almost as if I’m having a conversation with someone else, not reliving the past. Not like—

—clawing, climbing, reaching, bodies rolling beneath my feet, shifting against my hand, the feel of dried blood on my cheek, the cold flesh under my palms. That’s lost. I’m lost. I’ll never survive—

I’m holding my breath. I have to make myself breathe, and as I inhale the breath sounds like a sob. The air has a faint tinge of rot—is that what this place does? It mimics what happened?—and I think it’d be so easy to escape, so easy to leave—

Only to live in my room forever. Forever slipping, dreaming, hiding from my own brain, my own memories.

I close my eyes and force myself back inside, force myself to breathe—

***

—the hot dry air. A small headache has formed between my eyes. The Quurzod are not cordial, although we’ve been here for weeks. My host family will not talk while I am in the room. I hear them whispering when I am nearby, and I strain to listen. But they use formal Quurzid whenever I’m around.

Fortunately, my team fares better. They have made recordings of Quurzid in all its glory, marking what they believe to be familial Quurzid and what they believe to be street Quurzid.

No Quurzod will tell us the difference. Once the Quurzod figured out that we wanted to know the entirety of their language, they stopped treating us like guests and started treating us as if we were Xenth.

Except for Klaaynch. Klaaynch is thin, reedy, beautiful according to our culture—long blond hair and classic features—but strange to the Quurzod, whose features are thicker, hair generally a dark, almost orangish red. I cannot quite tell how old Klaaynch is. She’s one of those girls who looks the same at thirteen as she will at twenty-three.

I’m guessing she’s eighteen or so, very curious, with a gift for language. She already speaks some Standard poorly, learned through overheard snatches of discussion.

She reminds me of myself. All ears, wanting to know what everyone is saying, no matter what language they speak.

Her family won’t host, so she watches me from afar. I eat in the prescribed visitor restaurants, and stay in the visitor hotel when I am not with my host family. The Quurzod agreed to host families, but balked at overnight stays, and frowned on sharing meals. “Host” is not really a good term for what they’re doing, but we have no other. They are sharing as much as they can.

Klaaynch cannot sit with me in a visitor restaurant, and I cannot go to a Quurzod-only place. Sometimes she sits beneath one of the arching trees that mark every intersection. I have learned to eat outside in the visitor restaurants, at the table closest to the tree. Klaaynch and I talk, or try to, and she has promised me she will teach me familial Quurzid.

She says in diplomatic Quurzid (the only Quurzid I know fluently), They cannot tell me who my friends are. They cannot determine whom I care about and whom I do not. If they try, I shall challenge them.

I admire her reasoning.

And her courage. She wants to step outside her culture and learn other cultures. She wants to become more than who she is.

Is this what Coop says he saw in me? This desire for knowledge, the desire to add to the core by reaching beyond the training, beyond the culture?

I sit and murmur to Klaaynch, not knowing that her face—

—is the first one I see, rolling toward me, eyes open, mouth gone, as if someone cut it away, those cheekbones crushed, her hair wrapped around her neck. She is buried just above me, thrown on top of me, her blood on my skin—

***

I gasp, and this time I am thinking of escape long before I vocalize it. I claw the floor, the needle poking my skin, the darkness holding me. I climb out and crawl toward the door, nearly there when Jill reaches me. She drags me out of the room as if she’s dragging me out of that pit.

I stumble and fall against Deirdre who asks me what’s wrong, asks me to talk to her, asks me what I need.

“Leona,” I say. “Please. Find Leona.”

And then I pass out.

***

And wake in one of the hospital beds, like I found myself in after they rescued me on Ukhanda. Leona is there, but not there. She flits in, she flits out. She won’t talk to me in the medical wing. She forces me to wait until I am well enough to sit in a conference room without any medical equipment at all. She is even going to bring the chairs.

She knows that I know. She doesn’t know what I know. Just that I know.

And I ache because of it.

I ache.

15

CULTURES DO NOT invent languages and traditions overnight. They evolve over time. And while some linguists believe that the language comes before the culture, I believe that the language serves the culture.

Think of a culture that has developed four different languages, each with a prescribed purpose. The Xenth, who wear formal clothing and have precise traditions about who may have windows and who may not, who may look to the left and who may not, have but one language, without much more complexity than most human languages. Twenty-eight letters, millions of words, a simple sentence structure followed in infinite variations.

But the Quurzod, who wear little to no clothing, and have windows everywhere, and few walls in their homes, the Quurzod divide the world with their language. Language is forbidden to some, and embraced by others.

Language is not just for communicating, but also for protection. Protection of the culture, protection of the family, protection of the Quurzod traditions, whatever they might be.

And whatever they might be, they are precious to the Quurzod.

In my excitement to learn, I forgot about strictures and structures and barriers. I forgot that language conceals as well as reveals. I forgot that protections exist for a reason.

And I forgot what it is like to be young and curious and different from everyone else.

I forgot.

I grew up in a culture that embraces difference, celebrate diversity, and loves outsiders. A culture that believes itself superior to all others, yes, but in an open-minded way, a way that allows curiosity, a way that states the more we learn, the better we are.

I forgot that not everyone sees the universe as broadly as we do.

I forgot that not everyone has seen the universe.

I forgot that not everyone is allowed to see the universe.

When we finally get to our private conference room, I tell Leona that she no longer has to defend me. I caused the crisis with the Quurzod. I should have been left behind.

I should have been left to die.

She wants me to explain that, and I do, because I owe her that much. I explain, but haltingly. I do not want to slip into the memories again. But someone has to understand.

Someone has to know.

Besides me.

16

CHILDREN ABSORB LANGUAGE. They are born without it, but with the capacity to learn it. Some lose that capacity as they age, or let it atrophy or never really had a great capacity for it at all. But others never lose the ability to absorb language, and consequently, they crave more and more of it.

They want to learn—or maybe they need to learn.

I have always needed to learn. Sounds and syntax are like symphonies to me, and as much as I love the old symphonies, I am always searching for new ones.

Klaaynch needed to learn too. And if all I had done was teach her Standard, we would have been fine. But she wanted to teach me the glories of Quurzid—all of Quurzid—and I wanted to learn.

She might have gotten away with teaching me some familial Quurzid. She was right; no one could choose her friends for her.

But street Quurzid—it was beautiful and complex and revealing, a culture in and of itself, one that revered violence and anger as a way of life. Each word had degrees of meaning depending on how it fell in a sentence, as well as what tone the speaker used (High, low? Soft, loud? Quick, slow?), and each meaning had nuances as well. Street Quurzid was one of those languages that would take weeks to learn and a lifetime to understand.

I was thinking that after I completed my mission as the linguistic diplomat at the peace conference between the Xenth and Quurzod, I would stay on Ukhanda and study street Quurzid. I would spend the rest of my life immersed in the most complex language I had ever heard.

Maybe I mentioned that to someone. Maybe I had merely thought it. Maybe my intentions were clear to people whose language was so complex that my language must have seemed like a child’s first halting sentences.

I don’t know.

What I do know is this. I convinced Klaaynch to take me to one of the violence pools—a gathering site where the Quurzod train. They live in those places, not in their homes, not in their streets, not in their restaurants or their places of business, but in their violence pools.

Violence pools are little mobile communities. They exist as long as they need to. If they get discovered by outsiders, they move.

Small buildings, assembled out of sticks and cloth, appear, then disappear as needed. They form a circle around a flattened area, and in that flattened area, lessons happen.

Most of the lessons are in things we consider illegal. How to kill someone with a wide variety of weaponry. How to kill someone with sticks. How to kill someone with fists alone. These are not military lessons, which we also provide, but lessons in survival.

Quurzid, for all its complexity, does not seem to have a word for “murder.”

Lessons here are proprietary. Outsiders cannot see them. I did not observe the violence pool during lessons, although I heard about them. The worst, according to Klaaynch, were the defensive lessons. Because if you failed, you would get injured. If you had trouble learning why you failed, you would get injured in the same way repeatedly. If you flinched as someone came at you after you had already been injured once, you were taken off the roster until your psyche healed. If you flinched again after your return, you were relegated to non-violent work—talking, writing, science, mathematics—all of which were seen as inferior.

Klaaynch’s dream of being a linguist was considered odd, and it was odd, for the Quurzod. The only thing that saved her, the only thing that gave her any kind of power and potential, was her ability to fight.

She was considered the best of her generation.

And she proved it.

It took her four hours to die.

I know because I watched.

It was the only time I had been allowed in an actual violence pool during fighting. I sat behind Klaaynch and her team. We sat there, all except the two who escaped. Klaaynch and her young team. Me and mine. Twenty-three lives from the ship, lives I wasted in my attempt to learn the wrong form of Quurzid. Awnings attached to the small buildings shaded us, but the air was hot—hotter than anything I had ever experienced—and dry.

The Quurzod gave us water. They gave us something to keep our fluids balanced. They wanted us to live—at least until the fighting ended.

I was not allowed to speak, and I did not.

Around me, Quurzod I had met—most in their teens, some barely adult—fought for their very survival.

But the match that mattered was Klaaynch’s.

It took four hours for their best fighters to kill her. A dozen adults against one thin girl. Four hours.

If she had survived for six hours, she would have lived and been granted favors. One of the favors she wanted was to get permission for me to study street Quurzid.

Not the violence pools themselves.

Just street Quurzid.

And while I did that, she wanted me to teach her Standard. Standard, and all of the other languages I knew.

She was so marvelous. So strong. So brave. So beautiful.

But three hours and forty-five minutes in, someone snapped her right femur. She kept fighting, but she had no base, no way to maintain her balance. At three hours and fifty-eight minutes, she fell.

It took only two minutes to finish her off. The others in her violence pool, those who had been contaminated by me, died that afternoon as well.

The fighters dismantled the buildings. Beneath the largest was the pool itself. A hollow, empty pit in the ground, designed to hold the losers of any large fight.

Klaaynch had told me this as we waited for the others to show up. She told me that the pools often were not used, and when the time came to move the violence pool, the actual pool itself got filled.

This one got filled too.

With us.

Most of my team fought back. When it became clear that we would die, they fought. But they were no match for the Quurzod.

They went into the pool. Then me, then Klaaynch’s friends.

And finally, Klaaynch.

No one touched me, except to knock me unconscious. It should have been enough to kill me. In the heat, among the dead, in the dryness.

I should have died.

But I did not.

17

TO HER CREDIT, Leona does not speak as I tell my story. She tries to keep her face expressionless, but she cannot control her eyes. They narrow, they widen. Several times, she keeps them closed for a few extra seconds, as if she does not want to look at me any more.

I don’t want to look at me either.

“The other two, they were right,” I say. “I caused this. I’m why we’re here. Becalmed.”

Leona does not nod. Nor does she reach out a hand to comfort me. She sighs. “They abandoned their post.”

They did. They left the Quurzod as the rest of us went to the violence pool. They should have stayed with us, but they thought something might go wrong and they fled.

I should have told the others to go as well. The mistake was mine, not theirs.

“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “I shouldn’t be here.”

“The Captain decides that,” she says. “He brought you back.”

“When he didn’t have all of the information,” I say.

She inclines her head. She is conceding that point.

“Tell him I’m ready. He can’t send me back, but he shouldn’t keep me here either.”

“You’re volunteering for execution?” she asks.

“It’s the right thing,” I say.

“I don’t think that’s your decision,” she says. “Not any more.”

18

THEY RETURN ME to my quarters. The apartment no longer looks like mine. I recognize everything in it, I even remember hanging the quilt, scrunching the blanket on my divan, but the place feels strange to me, like a memory that I have abandoned. The apartment has a dusty odor, as if I’ve been gone for months, which is impossible. First of all, I have not been gone more than a few days, and secondly, the air gets recycled in here. Nothing should smell of dust.

I make myself dinner and sit in one of the chairs to eat it. Normally, I would play a language quiz or watch an entertainment, but I do neither. I sit and listen.

The Quurzod whisper all around me. The sound infects me, like the memories infected me. The memories are there, but I no longer slip into them accidentally. Instead, I roll them around in my mind, worrying them, like my tongue would worry a chipped tooth.

No wonder I blocked them. All those people, dead because of me. Because I did not understand—when I am trained to understand.

I should have known. I should have figured it out.

And I did not.

Not even when Klaaynch said to me that she could chose her own friends. When she said it with defiance, with that glow the rebellious get as they anticipate a fight.

If the Quurzod so strongly protect the language they use for family and friends, it should have seemed obvious to me that they would viciously defend the language they strove to keep secret. I should have known—maybe I did know—of course I knew.

And that is why I blocked the memories.

I didn’t want to remember that feeling—that I’ll-deal-with-it-later feeling—the one I ignored.

I have been sitting with my plate in my lap for nearly an hour when the door chime sounds. Coop’s chime.

It does not surprise me. A part of me has expected to see him all along.

He looks big, powerful, as he comes through that door. His presence is almost too much for the room.

“Leona tells me you volunteered for execution.” He does not sit. He towers over me. “I won’t do it.”

“It’s regulation.” I clutch the plate. I have not really moved, except that my muscles have tensed.

“Regulation is what the captain says it is,” he says.

I shake my head slightly. “If that were true, each ship would be a tiny dictatorship.”

He sits on the divan across from me, balancing on the edge, leaning toward me. “It’s not like you to give up.”

I look at him. When we met, I predicted the lines that formed around his eyes. But the one that furrows his brow is a surprise; he frowns more than I would have ever expected.

“I haven’t given up,” I say. Even when I should have. I’m the one who caused this, not him. I’m the one who didn’t die in that pit. I’m the one who climbed out—over bodies, over people I knew. I’m the one who staggered through that desert, to the borders where I knew the Xenth would find me. I’m the one who made it to that village, against all odds.

I did not give up.

And I should have.

“You haven’t thought it through,” he says. “They tricked us.”

I blink, frown, then get up. I walk the plate to the recycling unit. If I don’t eat that food, someone else should get the nutrients.

“They didn’t trick me,” I say with my back to him. “I went to that violence pool of my own free will.”

“Not the Quurzod,” he says. “The Xenth.”

I turn. I didn’t deal with the Xenth. Most of the negotiations with the Xenth happened before I was brought into the discussions.

I am suddenly cold.

He’s looking at his hands. “They tricked all of us.”

I walk back and sit down. I wait.

He raises his head. Those lines, those sad eyes.

“Think about it,” he says. “The imbalance of power that has existed there for centuries. Then, one day, a fleet of ships arrives, a fleet with more power than the Xenth can imagine. And we offer to help.”

He twists his hands together. He has thought of this for a long time.

“They ask the initial negotiators, they say—”

“If we ask you to obliterate the Quurzod, you would do so?” I whisper this in Xenth. I have read the documentation. They did say that, and the initial negotiators wrote it off as a test.

I believed the initial negotiators. After all, they’re the ones on the ground. They watch body language. They know the culture—or should know the culture. They’re the ones who understand what is going on.

Besides, the Xenth’s question wasn’t unusual. Every culture we encounter wants to know our limits. Our limits are that we help, we do not engage.

Unless we are engaged first.

Coop quotes the line, ignoring my Xenth, which he does not understand. He is used to me muttering in other languages. I have done it as long as he has known me. “We refuse to destroy Quurzod. We spend time studying the situation, and then we offer our diplomatic services to the Xenth. But during the time we studied them, the Xenth studied us.”

So buttoned up, so formal and proper. Hidden, too, but we should have expected that.

Only that isn’t my mistake. I wasn’t with the initial group. The initial groups came from elsewhere in the Fleet, and somehow they overcame—or maybe never had—their aversion to the Xenth, and their hissing, sibilant-filled language.

I, on the other hand, never trusted them.

But I did trust my commanders. I trusted my orders, figuring they all knew the history, the facts, the personalities of both sides.

“The Xenth knew,” Coop says. “They knew about the violence; they’ve suffered from it. They accused the Quurzod of massacres, not telling us that this was part of Quurzod culture, that they kill anyone—regardless of nationality—if they violate certain rules. The Xenth made sure we did not know those rules. They sent us in blind.”

It is so easy to blame another culture. But I shake my head. I believe in mistakes before I believe in deviousness.

“That can’t be true,” I say. “The Xenth left too much to chance.”

“They left nothing to chance,” he says. “If we had actually figured out a way to negotiate with the Quurzod, the Xenth would have gained a solid border, some defined territory, an end to a long war. But if we did not find a way to negotiate, if we aggravated the Quurzod, the Quurzod would come after us. They would have engaged us—”

“And the Xenth’s war would have become our war,” I say. He’s right. The logic is inescapable. It explains my unease. It explains the lack of preparation the Fleet’s diplomatic team gave to my team. The Fleet’s team was tricked.

I don’t usually believe in the duplicity of other cultures, but this is too big a mistake to miss—at least on the part of the Xenth. And I understand the Fleet’s diplomacy well enough to know that had we understood the extreme violence of the Quurzod, no one would have sent my team in unprotected.

“The Xenth’s war did become our war,” Coop says. “Only the rest of the Fleet fights it while we wait here.”

“We don’t know if they’re fighting it,” I say.

He stares at me. We know. They’re fighting it. And while the Quurzod are fierce on the ground, they are no match for the Fleet in space.

The Quurzod will fight brilliantly, like Klaaynch did. And then the Fleet will destroy something important, destroy the Quurzod’s balance.

And they will die within minutes, leaving the Xenth to fill the void.

Without us, the Fleet will think they have done the right thing.

I look at Coop. He smiles, just a little, hesitant, more the boy I remember than the man he is.

“If you knew all of this,” I say, “why didn’t you tell me? Why did you let me stay locked in here, with the doubts and the memories?”

“I suspected,” he says. “I had no proof. I just knew you, and your core, and how you would never, ever betray any of us, nor would you knowingly jeopardize children.”

“They weren’t really children,” I say softly.

“They weren’t yet adults either,” he said.

I nod. I will always carry them—the twenty-three members of my team, and the dozen young friends of Klaaynch, and Klaaynch herself. They died for my curiosity, for my ever-solid core.

“It would’ve been easier if you executed me,” I say softly.

He puts his hands over mine. His hands are warm. He says, “Anyone who commands lives with these moments.”

I shudder. “But I’m done. I’ve made my mistake. I should have known—”

“No,” he says. “The mistake wasn’t yours. In fact, you have done the one thing that might help us.”

“What’s that?” I ask.

“You learned street Quurzid.”

I shake my head. “I don’t know street Quurzid. I know as much street Quurzid as the first contact team knows when it goes into a new situation. A phrase here and there, nothing more.”

“That’s not what your memory says. Your memory knows street Quurzid. You might not be able to speak it, but you have enough of it to help us.”

I want to pull my hands from his. I never want to go near street Quurzid again.

“How?” I ask.

“When we get back, you can tell the Quurzod in all of their languages how we both got betrayed.”

“And have them destroy the Xenth?” I am appalled.

“Yes,” he says so softly that I can barely hear him. This is not the idealistic man I met on Brazza. This man is ruthless, utterly ruthless.

“But the Quurzod, they’re horrible people,” I say.

He studies me.

I wait, but tap my finger ever so slightly. I have lost the gift of patience somewhere. It vanished in that desert.

“You’re confusing their culture with ours,” he says.

I flush. I used to say that to him. So young. So idealistic. I would say, One culture cannot judge another until they have a deep understanding of all parts of the culture.

Including the language, he would say, his eyes sparkling.

And the history, and the things that have developed that culture. Just because they have evolved a tradition that we disagree with doesn’t make our position right.

“It’s not the same,” I say.

“It is,” he says.

“The Quurzod murder each other,” I say.

“So do we,” he says. “You asked me to murder you.”

“I asked you to execute me, according to our laws.”

He waits. Dammit, he has the patience now.

He waits.

He has made his point.

My shoulders slump. We know each other well enough that he understands my capitulation without my verbal acknowledgement.

“I need you to master street Quurzid,” he says.

“I don’t know enough of it,” I say.

“Then do your best,” he says. “You need to become the expert in Quurzid. Then you need to figure out how to teach our people the language.”

“Not just those on the Ivoire,” I say.

“I want a plan of instruction, something recorded, so that all of the ships in the Fleet can learn it,” he says. “I want us to be ready as soon as someone hears our distress call. I want to be able to end the fighting around Ukhanda immediately.”

His hands are still around mine. He shakes, just a little, as he says that.

“You think we’ll get out of this, then?” I ask.

“Are you asking if we’ll be becalmed forever?”

I nod.

“No,” he says.

“But you put us on rations,” I say.

“It might be a week,” he says. “It might be a year. I want to be prepared.”

“The Quurzod damaged the anacapa drive, didn’t they?”

“While we were engaging it,” he says. “It’ll take some time to figure out what exactly went wrong. That’s why I need you.”

“Me?”

He nods, and his hands tighten around mine. “I need you to figure out what’s wrong with the communications array. I’m convinced our distress signals aren’t getting through.

I flush, then let out a small breath. “You trust me to get back to work?”

His gaze meets mine. “Mae,” he says, “I’ve trusted you all along.”

He has. He’s been the only one. I didn’t even trust myself.

I bow my head, stunned at his faith in me. Stunned that I still have a future.

He stands, puts his hands on my shoulder, and kisses the top of my head.

“Welcome back,” he whispers.

I lean into him for just a moment.

“It’s good to be back,” I say, with more relief than I expected, and resist the urge to add, You have no idea how good it is.

Because I have a hunch he does know, and that’s why he didn’t leave me behind.

Because I am still part of the ship. A necessary part of the ship.

And you never abandon the necessities. No matter how difficult it is to retrieve them.

“Becalmed” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch was first published in Asimov’s SF Magazine, April/May, 2011.

BECOMING ONE WITH THE GHOSTS

THEY LANDED SMOOTHLY, which surprised the hell out of Coop. The Ivoire had suffered more damage than he ever could have imagined, and yet the venerable old craft had gotten them here—all five hundred of them, mostly in one piece.

For a brief moment, he bowed his head. He took a deep breath and let a shudder run through him—the only emotion he’d allowed himself in more than a week.

Then he raised his head and looked.

The walls had full screens, top to bottom, just like he’d ordered. It didn’t matter much when the Ivoire transitioned, but now that the ship had arrived at Sector Base V, the walls told him a lot.

A lot that he didn’t understand.

The Ivoire had landed inside the base, just like usual. The ship stood on the repair deck, just like it was supposed to.

The base was cavernous. It had to be. Like the other ships of her class, the Ivoire was large. She comfortably housed five hundred people, providing family quarters, school, and recreation in addition to being a working battleship. Two ships the size of the Ivoire could fit into this base, with another partially assembled along the way.

Not to mention the equipment, the specialized bays, the private working areas.

The Sector Base was huge and impossible to process all at once.

But what Coop could process looked wrong.

For one thing, no one manned the equipment. Much of it looked like it wasn’t even turned on. The lights were dim or off completely. The workstations—the ones he could see in the half-light—looked like they’d suffered minor damage.

But he didn’t know how they could have. Like all the Sector Bases, Sector Base V was over a mile underground in a heavily fortified area. No one could get in or out without the proper equipment.

To his knowledge, no Sector Base had ever been attacked, not even in areas under siege. Granted, his knowledge wasn’t as vast as the history of the Fleet, but he knew how difficult it was to damage a Sector Base.

Although it looked like someone had harmed this one. Because it had been fine a month ago.

Before the battles with the Quurzod, he’d brought the Ivoire in for its final systems check and repair. He had known that he wouldn’t get another full-scale repair for a year, maybe more. Particularly if the Fleet conquered the Quurzod and moved on, like planned. Then the Ivoire, and the other ships in the Fleet wouldn’t get the full-scale treatment for five years. It would take that long to build Sector Base W, at the edges of the new sector of space.

He hadn’t planned on ever returning here.

He certainly hadn’t planned on returning here in defeat.

Or what felt like defeat.

And now the base looked wrong.

“You sure we’re seeing Sector Base V?” he asked his First Officer Dix Pompiano. Dix was tall and thin, almost too tall for a bridge command. Yet he could bend himself as if he were made of string, and fit into the smallest of places.

Like his command post. Dix insisted on the station farthest from Coop, in case the bridge got hit. Dix figured that if as much distance as possible separated them, one of them would survive.

Coop had always figured if the bridge got hit, the entire vessel would disappear. The anacapa drive—small as it was—was located on the bridge itself. If the drive took a direct hit, then the drive’s protections would fail. Half the ship would be in this dimension, half in another—if they were lucky. If they weren’t, the entire thing might explode.

Maybe it was the half-and-half dimensions that made Dix want to stay separate from Coop. They’d never discussed it, and they weren’t about to now.

“It sure as hell doesn’t look like Sector Base V,” Dix said. “But the readings say it is.”

It looked like Sector Base V to Coop. He recognized some of the specialized equipment, built with parts of the indigenous rock.

“We’re in the right point in space,” said Anita Tren. She stood at her post, even though her built-in chair brushed against her backside. She was small, so small that she had to boost herself into that chair. On good days, she would kid that she needed to stand so that she could be closer to her board.

“Have you confirmed that we’re under Venice City?” Coop asked.

Venice City, the latest settlement. “Latest” was technically accurate, but the location, on the most remote planet in this sector, had been settled fifty years before Coop was born. At his first visit here, on his tenth birthday, he had thought the city old.

His father had laughed at that, telling Coop there were places in this sector that had been colonized for thousands of years. Human habitation, his father said, although no one knew where those humans had originated.

The Fleet, everyone knew, originally came from Earth, but so long ago that no one alive had seen the home planet or even the home solar system. Earth was as much a myth as the Fleet itself, something rare and special and lost to time.

As a young man, Coop had toyed with the idea of going back there. He thought of building a ship, begging, borrowing (hell, stealing) an anacapa drive, and plotting the trip back.

But ultimately, he feared disappointment. He’d seen too many legendary parts of space already and they rarely lived up to the billing they’d gotten.

He liked the Earth of his imagination. He didn’t want to see anyone or anything spoil it.

Like they had spoiled Venice City. When he’d heard that the settlement was named for an old Earth city that had disappeared into the ocean—an ancient city of canals and tall stone buildings—he had expected the same here.

Instead, he found a haphazard collection of buildings perched in a dry valley, one that got so hot in its summer than he thought he would die. Later, his father had explained to a disappointed Coop that the name had come from a joke, a conversation among the settlement’s inhabitants as the place took shape.

What’s the official name going to be?

Not Death Valley. Names can be prophetic.

Hell, then we probably should call it Venice City. Maybe an ocean will find us then.

Coop never found that funny. Just like he didn’t find this funny.

The base looked dimmer than usual. The equipment seemed smaller in the emptiness. Some lights were on, but not many. And the bulk of the base disappeared into the darkness.

“Is something wrong with the screens then?” Coop asked Yash Zerlengo, his onsite engineer.

She had left her station. She had walked up to the nearest wall screen and was investigating it with her handheld, as well as with the fingertips of her left hand.

She was Coop’s height, broad shouldered, a former athlete raised planetside, which was unusual in the Fleet. But she had her family’s knack for technology. She knew how to repair anything, how to build most things, and seemed to have a sixth sense about anything technical.

“I’m not reading any problems. These images are coming from the ship’s exterior just like they should be,” she said.

Coop frowned and wished, not for the first time, that the original Fleet engineers had thought it proper to build portals into the bridge. He would like to do a visual comparison of what he saw on the wall screens with what he saw out the portal.

But he would have to leave the bridge to do that.

So he snapped his finger at the most junior officer on deck, Kjersti Perkins. She didn’t even have to be told what he wanted. She nodded and exited.

Perkins would have to walk three-tenths of a mile just to get to the nearest portal. The bridge was in the nose of the ship, completely protected by hull. The original engineers had thought the portals were for tourists, and didn’t insert any until the ship widened into its residential and business wings.

But Coop couldn’t just worry about what was outside the ship. He also had to worry about what was inside the ship.

“Give me updated damage reports,” he said.

“Nothing new,” Yash said, which was a relief. Coop had been expecting more damage all over the ship. Normal activation of the anacapa drive often revealed weak spots in the ship, and this activation had been anything but normal.

It had been desperate—more desperate than he ever wanted to admit.

Fifteen days of drift—full engine failure, at least on the standard engines. The anacapa worked—it had gotten them there, after all, wherever there was, which none of them could exactly figure out. It seemed like they’d moved dimensions, just like they were supposed to, but something had gone wrong with the navigation equipment, confirmed by scans.

An asteroid field where there shouldn’t be one. A star in the proper position, but not at the proper intensity. A planet with two moons instead of the expected three.

Nothing was quite right, and yet a lot was. Coop didn’t even want to think about the possibilities.

He didn’t dare.

He set up the distress beacon, the one tied to the anacapa, so that it could reach any nearby bases, and prayed for an answer.

Which didn’t come.

So he increased the scans. The Ivoire couldn’t move yet—not with a regular drive anyway, although repairs were coming along, as the engineers said—but everything else seemed to be working.

They should have gotten a response from two different bases: Sector Base V and Sector Base U, which was at the very edge of their range. Not to mention Starbase Kappa, which—according to the records—wasn’t that far from here.

Nothing. He’d left the signal on, but checked it and asked the science whiz kids in the school wing to work the design for a new signal, something a little less formal, he said, and he told their teacher what he really wanted was for them to build a new signal from scratch.

Just in case the old had been damaged in the fight with the Quurzod, and somehow that damage hadn’t registered. He couldn’t spare the engineers to do the work. He needed the students more than he ever had before.

He didn’t tell the teacher that, but she had clearly figured it out. She looked grimly determined, and told him the kids would get on the project right away.

They were only half done when Dix caught the edge of a reply.

Automated from Sector Base V: We have heard your distress signal. We are prepared to use our own drive to bring you to us. If that is what you need, turn on your anacapa drive now.

Without a second thought, Coop turned on the drive, and the Ivoire whisked out of the drift, their drive piggybacking on Sector Base V’s.

He’d studied the process in school and hadn’t entirely understood it. Just that something about the two drives linked, locked, and provided extra power, power that could bring a damaged ship from wherever it was to wherever it needed to be.

The Ivoire’s journey took half a minute, maybe less. They were drifting in an unknown part of space, and then they weren’t.

Then they were here, in Sector Base V, beneath the mountains that towered over Venice City.

They were here and they should have been safe.

But they weren’t.

Coop had a sense they were in deeper shit than they’d ever been in before.

***

Perkins returned quicker than Coop expected. She must have scurried down those corridors.

“It’s the same,” she said, somewhat breathlessly. “The view’s the same.”

He had expected that, and yet hoped for a different outcome. Dix bent over his console. So did Tren. They checked their readings again, probably for the fifteenth or sixteenth time.

Coop took a deep breath. He didn’t need the repeated readings. The equipment said they were in Sector Base V, so they had to be in Sector Base V.

A different Sector Base V than the one he had left a month ago.

He ran a hand over his face. The anacapa created a fold in space. The Fleet used it as both a drive and a cloak, although cloak wasn’t the accurate term. If a ship were under fire, it activated its anacapa drive, moving into foldspace, and then returning to the same point in regular moments or hours later. Sometimes moments were all it took to confuse the enemy ships.

Sometimes hours got the ship—and the Fleet—out of a serious dilemma.

That was how the ships continued to travel through hundreds of years. They rarely got damaged in battle, and when they did, they could go elsewhere to repair. The Fleet had learned long ago how to do extensive repair in space, but they had also learned that sometimes parts simply wore out. Repair could only do so much, particularly when spread over hundreds of years, thousands of battles, and countless trips via the anacapa drive.

That was why the Fleet built settlements on hospitable planets, usually choosing a mountainous region, always picking a hard-to-reach (by ground) location far from the main civilizations (if there were any). The settlements were mostly underground and never considered permanent.

Sector Base N, for example, had been abandoned for nearly four hundred years. No one from the Fleet went back to that sector, so they didn’t need the base.

Although on every settlement, a handful of people chose to stay. Some married into the indigenous population. Some simply liked life planetside better than life in space, although Coop never understood why.

As a kid, he thought about all those lost bases, like he thought about the nearly mythical Earth, and wondered what it would be like to return to them.

His father kidded him, saying Coop was the only child whose adventurous spirit turned backward instead of forward.

Coop let his hand drop away from his face. Then he looked at the wall screens again.

“It doesn’t make sense,” he muttered.

The others were watching him. He wasn’t sure how many of them knew what he was thinking.

And he wasn’t exactly sure what he was thinking. Had someone left the base’s anacapa drive active, even though the base had been under attack? That didn’t make sense, because every commander—on base and on ship—was instructed to shut off an anacapa drive before enemy capture.

Shut off, or destroy.

Even though the Fleet had traveled all over the known universe, it had never encountered another civilization with an anacapa drive. They had encountered other marvelous technology, but never anything as sophisticated and freeing as the anacapa.

Without the anacapa, the Fleet could never have continued on its extensive mission. Without the anacapa, the Fleet would never have left its own small sector of space around Earth.

The anacapa had enabled it to travel great distances, carrying its own brand of justice and its own kind of integrity to worlds far and wide.

Had the anacapa drive here in Sector Base V malfunctioned, forcing everyone to leave? He’d heard of malfunctioning anacapa drives before. They were one of the most dangerous parts of the Fleet. A ship with a malfunctioning drive sometimes had to be destroyed to protect the Fleet and anything around it.

But that made no sense either. Because the anacapa drive inside all the sector bases was tied to working equipment. Not just working equipment, but equipment that had been turned on and used manually by a human being within the past twenty-four hours.

It was a failsafe, designed by some far-seeing engineer, or, as Coop’s father would have said, designed by a professional worrier, someone who tried to see all the problems and plan for them.

The failsafe had been designed to prevent exactly this kind of problem: A ship could get trapped planetside. Crews would be trapped inside a mountain, especially if the internal corridors had collapsed, and there was no real way out.

The human failsafe was necessary because no one knew—even now, after generations of using the drives—how long an anacapa could survive without maintenance. There were some in the Fleet who believed that an anacapa drive would remain functional long after the human race had disappeared from the universe.

The human race hadn’t disappeared. The anacapa drive still worked. But something had happened in the repair area. Something bad.

“Should we go out there, see what went wrong?” Perkins asked.

No one answered her. She specialized in communication. She spoke fifteen languages fluently, another forty haphazardly, and had a gift for picking up new languages all the time. Combined with the computer database on languages all over the known universe, and her ability to recognize patterns, Perkins was one of the most formidable linguists in the Fleet, and Coop’s secret weapon whenever they went anywhere new.

But so far, except for the disaster with the Quurzod—which wasn’t her fault—she had never been on a mission where something had gone wrong.

“We can’t go out there yet,” Coop said. “We need to know what we’re facing.”

He didn’t want to tell her that if the anacapa had malfunctioned, the area outside the ship might be deadly to the team. Not obviously deadly—they wouldn’t die the moment they walked out there.

There were ways to test this, but he would actually have to look them up. No one had encountered this sort of thing in living memory, and the training for it had slipped, although the warnings had remained.

“You think the base was attacked?” Dix asked.

“Possible,” Coop said. He didn’t want to reveal his suspicions any more than that. He wanted the bridge crew to explore all options. “Let’s figure out what’s going on here before we make any moves.”

“Sir?” Yash sounded strange.

He glanced at her.

She was pointing at an area on the wall screen. A woman walked toward the ship’s exterior. The woman was thin. She wore a form-fitting environmental suit of a type Coop had never seen before. She had cylinders attached to the belt on her hip and what looked like a knife hilt.

He could only get a glimpse of her angular face through her helmet.

As he watched, she reached out and put her gloved hand on the Ivoire’s side.

“Is she the one who attacked us?” Perkins asked.

“We don’t know if the base was attacked,” Coop said.

“But it’s been abandoned,” Perkins said.

“There could be a variety of reasons for that.” This time, Dix answered her. But he didn’t elaborate and neither did Coop.

But Perkins wasn’t dumb. Just inexperienced. “So is that woman part of a repair crew?”

“I don’t think so,” Yash said. “I don’t recognize her suit.”

“It could be special hazmat suits from Venice City itself,” Tren said.

Perkins eyes opened wider. “Hazmat? So it’s toxic out there?”

Coop shrugged. “We don’t know anything yet. All we know is that we’re here, nothing is as it was when we left, and a woman is in the repair room. We don’t even know if it’s a woman we’ve met before. I can’t see her face clearly, can you?”

“No,” Dix said.

“But she’s human, right?” Perkins asked.

“What else would she be?” Yash asked with a touch of impatience. The Fleet, in all its travels, had never discovered an alien race, not as the Fleet defined it, anyway, which was a non-standard, unexpected life form of equal intelligence to humans.

“I don’t know,” Perkins said. “That woman looks weird.”

Perkins’ voice held an edge of panic. She’d felt responsible for the Quurzod disaster, even though the fault didn’t lie with the linguists, but with the Quurzod themselves (intransigent bastards). She had held up well during the fifteen days in that unrecognizable area of space, but she must have been clinging to the thought that everything would be fine when they reached Sector Base V.

And now everything wasn’t fine. It was enough to break a more experienced officer.

“When was the last time you slept, Kjersti?” Coop asked.

She looked at him sideways, understanding in her eyes. She knew that he had caught the beginnings of panic in her voice, knew that he was about to send her to her quarters.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“Go rest,” he said.

“Sir—”

“Kjersti,” he said. “Go rest.”

She straightened, recognizing the order. “Whom should I send to replace me?”

“No one,” he said. “Not just yet. I’ll send for you if we need anything.”

She nodded, thanked him, and left the bridge.

The others watched, knowing they were as tired, as worried, and maybe even as panicked. They just had more experience and knew how to push the emotions away.

“Are we getting any readings on the environment out there?” Coop asked. “Any idea at all why that woman is in an environmental suit?”

“Everything reads normal,” Yash said.

“But that stuff floating around her,” Tren said. “What’s that?”

Coop didn’t see floating material. The entire repair room looked dim to him. Clearly Tren saw something. But she was closer to the wall screen.

“Maybe that’s the hazardous material,” Dix said.

“We don’t know if it’s hazardous out there,” Coop said. “Perhaps the suit is just an excess of caution.”

“Why would she be cautious about a base underneath a mountain?” Dix asked.

“Tunnel collapse?” Tren said.

“Sometimes planets themselves create a hazardous environment. When they built Sector Base S, they encountered a series of methane pockets,” Yash said.

Everyone looked at her.

She shrugged.

“We had to study base building in training,” she said. “Sector Base S is a cautionary tale. We actually learned how to build without exposing anyone to underground surprises.”

“They weren’t building anything here,” Coop said.

“But a groundquake, a volcanic eruption, an explosion on the surface might hurt the integrity underground and cause something like Sector Base S encountered,” Yash said.

“Wouldn’t methane show up in the readings?” Tren asked.

“I’m not trusting anything we’re getting right now,” Yash said. “Some of the damage the Ivoire suffered is pretty subtle. We’ve only been focused on the major stuff. Once we look at everything, we might discover that some of the things we think are minor are more serious than we initially thought.”

Coop had a hunch all of the damage on the Ivoire was major. But he had been operating from that principle from the beginning. He had been relieved when the trip through foldspace to here hadn’t completely destroyed the Ivoire.

“Any way to hail that woman?” Dix asked.

Coop had just let his linguist go. He wasn’t going to try to contact strangers without a linguist on deck.

“See what readings you can get off the base’s equipment,” he said to Yash.

“I’ll do what I can,” she said. “A lot of the equipment is still inactive.”

“Inactive?” Coop said, startled. “Shouldn’t it be dormant?”

That was the customary thing to do in leaving a base. If the area was safe enough to leave the anacapa drive functional, then the equipment around it needed to function as well. It had to remain dormant so that the touch of a human being could bring the equipment up on a moment’s notice.

So, theoretically, could the arrival of a ship that traveled to the base on a piggybacked anacapa merge.

“Yes, it should be dormant,” Yash said. “But these things were shut off.”

“And the anacapa remained functional?”

She opened her hands in a how-should-I-know gesture. “Right now, nothing’s working like it should.”

“Is that because of a malfunction in the Ivoire?”

“Honestly, Coop,” she said, dispensing with the “sir” now that Perkins was gone, “I have no idea. I won’t know until I get out there and investigate.”

He looked at the wall screen. “None of us is going out there until we know who these people are and what the hell’s going on.”

“How do you propose we find that out, then?” Dix asked.

“We be patient,” Coop said.

“There could be an immediate threat,” Dix said.

“There could be,” Coop said. “But right now, we’re getting no indication of that.”

“Except an empty base, a stranger in the repair room, and malfunctioning equipment,” Dix said.

“We waited fifteen days to get here,” Coop said, “with a crippled ship and no answers to our distress calls. We were patient. We got here.”

“Where things aren’t good,” Dix said.

“They’re better than they were,” Coop said. “We’re not in an unidentified part of space. In that room, there are things that will help us repair this ship. If we’re patient, we’ll be able to fix the Ivoire and catch the Fleet.”

“If that woman doesn’t attack us,” Tren said.

Coop gave her a sideways look. She wasn’t speaking out of panic. She was just throwing out a possibility.

“One woman? Who happens to be carrying a knife? What do you think she’ll do, Anita, stab the Ivoire to death?”

He hadn’t meant to be that sarcastic. He was tired too. And a bit worried about what he was seeing here. But no longer worried that the five hundred people in his charge would die on the ship.

They would survive. He knew that much now.

But whether or not they would die under Venice City was another matter. He was going to take this slowly, no matter what his crew wanted.

“How are our weapons systems?” he asked Yash. He hadn’t had cause to ask since they activated the anacapa to get away from the Quurzod. Nothing had approached them for fifteen days.

“We’ve repaired some of them,” Yash said, “but nothing we can fire down here.”

“Why not?” Coop asked.

“Because the walls are made of nanobits just like the hull of the Ivoire,” she said. The Fleet’s technology was nanobased, with the help of the anacapa drive. The drive powered the technological change on a planet, essentially powering the nanobots that sculpted the interiors of mountains into the best bases he’d ever found in the known universe. “The shots will bounce off. They’ll ricochet until the energy is spent.”

“Damaging nothing,” Coop said.

“Except the equipment,” Yash said, “and anyone who happens to be in the repair room.”

“Exactly,” he said.

“But these weapons weren’t meant to be fired in atmosphere,” she said. “If there’s a methane leak, for example, then we might have another kind of explosion.”

“Or an anacapa malfunction,” Dix said.

“The weapons won’t cause an anacapa malfunction,” Yash said.

“I know,” Dix said. “I meant if their anacapa has malfunctioned….”

“It hasn’t,” Coop said. “It got us here.”

Yash gave him a sideways look. He knew that look. It was one that cautioned him to silence. The two of them had served together since they were cadets, and they had bolstered each other from the beginning.

“You disagree,” he said to her.

“Even a malfunctioning anacapa could have had enough energy to get us here,” she said.

“Great,” he said. “So we’re back to square one. We won’t know anything until we get out there and take some readings. And we’re not going to do that as long as those outsiders are here.”

He walked over to that part of the wall screen and peered at the woman. She was still touching the Ivoire’s exterior, as if she could gather information about the ship through the palm of her glove.

For all he knew, she could.

Her face was barely visible inside the helmet. He couldn’t really make out her features, but he thought she looked intrigued. Like she hadn’t expected the Ivoire. Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe she knew the Fleet was long gone.

She tilted her head. It felt like she could see him.

But he knew that wasn’t true. She couldn’t see him at all. She probably didn’t even know he was there.

“What’s she doing?” Tren asked.

Coop shook his head. He had a theory—he always had theories, and he learned it was never wise to share them, at least not when he led a mission. Always better to gather information.

Behind her, he saw movement. Four others, huddled near the exterior door, nearly lost in the gloom.

Only it wasn’t really gloom. The woman was teaching him that. Particles floated in the air around her. They were coating the exterior of the ship, which was probably why the base looked so damn dark.

Apparently he was finally able to see the stuff that Tren had been referring to.

“There’s some kind of substance on the exterior of the ship,” he said. “Look at her hand. It’s clearer than everything else.”

Her gloved hand. She had placed her palm flat against the ship. The glove was white, so tight that he could see the ridges in her palm, the bend of her fingers.

She knew nothing about the vessel. None of the outsiders did. From the way they huddled, they seemed frightened by it.

Of course, he was guessing. But they were human, and their body language wasn’t aggressive. It was protective.

“Do you have a visual of our arrival?” he asked Dix.

“I’m sure we do,” Dix said.

“Let’s see it. Center screen.”

Dix floated his fingers over his console. It took a moment, but the screen in the center of the bridge went dark, replaced by the shimmer created by the anacapa whenever a ship was about to arrive at its destination.

The shimmer looked silver, then slowly resolved into an image of the repair area’s interior. The equipment, looking just as odd, the screens over the command consoles, showing what the ship was seeing just like they’d been programmed to do. Redundant imagery at the moment, but useful most of the time. The repair crew could look and see what a ship saw as it traveled to the base.

Sometimes they could even figure out where the damage was because of something coming through the feed.

So the screens were working, which he hadn’t noticed after they arrived. Then he looked at the floor itself. It had yellow lines, outlining the landing area, and Danger! written all across the face, so that no one would accidentally step on the pad.

Sometimes the repair crew didn’t know when a ship was going to arrive. A vessel’s anacapa drive could shut off and the vessel would appear on the landing platform, not realizing that the ship had just appeared where a human being had been standing.

Someone had been standing there in the feed. Someone wearing an environmental suit similar to the woman’s.

Similar, but not the same.

So this wasn’t a military team then. Private? They didn’t have matching suits.

The person—a man, Coop guessed just from his general shape—whirled as if in response to someone calling his name. The man hesitated for just a moment—and then he sprinted off the platform, diving toward the main door just as the ship settled.

Coop could barely make out the five people, huddled against the door. All of their helmeted faces were turned toward the ship, but none of the people moved.

While Coop had been relieved, while he was trying to figure out where he was and what had happened, they had been trying to figure out what they were seeing.

Eventually, they determined that it was safe enough to approach the ship.

“Thanks,” Coop said to Dix. “That answered a lot of questions.”

And created a whole hell of a lot more.

***

The woman stood outside the ship for a very long time. The particles swirled around her, but she ignored them as if she expected them or perhaps she was used to them. Coop watched her as she touched the side of his ship, as she beckoned the others to join her.

One of them, a different man than the one who had nearly been crushed by the Ivoire, found the ship’s main exterior door. The outsiders gathered around it, clearly discussing what to do next.

Coop let them. They couldn’t get in, not without codes and approvals. Or very powerful weapons.

And none of the five seemed to have weapons, aside from the woman’s knife.

“Can you get any readings on the atmosphere inside the repair room?” he asked Yash.

“From what I can tell,” she said, “the air seems fine. It seems to be recycling from the outside, just like it was designed to do. But I don’t trust the reading.”

“Because of the environmental suits,” he said.

She shook her head. “Because of the particles. Those things are large, and if they get into lungs, they might do some damage, depending on what they are.”

“Are the particles coming in from outside?” Coop asked.

“Doesn’t seem that way.” Dix was bent over his console. He’d been replaying the entry imagery—Coop had seen some of it as he had walked past Dix’s station. “We’re coated with those particles and we didn’t bring them with us. So they’re inside the base.”

“We need to get that stuff off the ship,” Yash said. “We don’t know what it is and whether or not it’s doing additional damage.”

“We can’t do anything as long as those people are so close,” Coop said. He didn’t want to accidentally kill the outsiders.

“How do we move them?” Dix asked.

“We don’t,” Coop said. “They’re wearing environmental suits. That gives them some kind of time limit. Their oxygen won’t last forever.”

“What if they’re just using some kind of filtration system?” Tren asked.

“Not likely,” Yash said. “The woman has cylinders on her hips. Those looked like extra oxygen to me.”

“You’re guessing,” Tren said.

“It’s an educated guess,” Yash snapped.

Coop glared at both of them. Nerves were getting frayed. He was going to have to relieve this crew relatively soon, even if they didn’t know exactly what was going on.

“What kind of readings are you getting from the particles?” he asked Yash.

“Nothing definitive,” she said. “But I’m not sure how well the ship’s exterior sensors are working.”

“Test the exterior sensors on the woman’s glove,” he said. “Tell me what it’s made of.”

Yash nodded. Coop moved closer to the woman’s image, as close as he could get without pressing his nose against the wall.

“I don’t recognize the material,” Yash said, “although that’s not unusual. It’s composed of…”

She listed a series of ingredients, talked about how they combined into some kind of microfiber that had incredible tensile strength, and went on at great detail about how effective such material would be in an environmental suit.

Coop paid only the smallest amount of attention, enough to absorb the important information, but lose all of the details. The upshot, as he understood it, was simple. The environmental suit, while thin, would work in space and be quite effective on short trips. But the suits on the Ivoire were vastly superior.

Yash concluded with, “If that suit’s indicative of this culture, then these people are technologically inferior to us.”

Which meant that they were far behind developmentally—at least, that would be how the Fleet’s playbook called it. Coop didn’t always agree with that. In some senses, the Fleet was far behind everyone else. The Fleet was operating on technology built by generations many years in the past. Yes, the engineers knew how to maintain the technology and how to replicate it, but they hadn’t really developed anything new.

At least, not on their own.

They had developed additions to the Fleet based on technology they’d discovered as they’d traveled through the stars.

“You can tell all that about the suit,” he said to Yash, “but you can’t tell me anything about the particles.”

“I can’t tell you why those people are afraid of them,” Yash said. “They seem like flakes off the equipment in the repair room or maybe some nanobits floating free.”

“What would cause nanobits to float free?” Tren asked.

“Serious damage to the base,” Dix said.

“Or some kind of decay,” Yash said. “Something that made the bits’ bonding fail.”

“Some kind of microscopic weapon?” Coop asked.

“I don’t know,” Yash said. “I’m going to have to test with actual particles.”

“So we’re going to need some samples,” Coop said. “Since these folks don’t believe that the particles will hurt their environmental suits, we can assume our vastly superior suits will do just fine out there.”

“You don’t want to use one of the small probes, then?” Dix asked. Clearly that was what he had expected, probably what he would have ordered, if he had been left in charge.

“I want a quick grab,” Coop said, “maybe an airlock test for particulate toxicity, and then I want to explore that room.”

More importantly, he wanted to check the equipment, see the records, figure out what the hell happened here.

“So what are we going to do?” Perkins asked. “Are we going to go out there and introduce ourselves to these people?”

Coop shook his head. “They probably don’t even know we’re here—”

“Don’t know we’re here?” Tren said. “C’mon, Coop. That woman’s been exploring the surface of the ship. She clearly knows we’re here.”

“She knows the ship is here,” Coop said. “She doesn’t know that we’re in it.”

“She’d think this thing is automated?” Tren asked.

“Why not?” Coop asked. “The base looks abandoned. That group of five people probably activated the beacon that brought us here. Face it, Anita, if we were all dead, the ship would have come without our guidance. It’s designed that way. We turn on the beacon and the anacapas do the rest.”

It was another aspect of the failsafe mechanism. If the crew were in any way incapacitated, the ship would come here and, if they were lucky, someone would be here to help.

“You’re making a lot of assumptions,” Dix said.

“I certainly am,” Coop said. “That’s why I want some certainty. The sooner we can get out of here and explore that repair room, the happier I’ll be.”

“But you don’t want to meet those people,” Perkins said.

“We’re going to wait until they leave,” Coop said.

“And if another crew comes in after them?” Dix asked.

“We’ll analyze the situation then,” Coop said. “We have no other choice.”

***

It took another hour for the outsiders to leave. Four of them spent some time crowded around the Ivoire’s main exterior door, probably discussing how to open it. The woman walked around part of the ship, touching it, and peering closely at any change in the hull. The ship was much too large for her to go all the way around.

She was clearly examining it, and for all the bridge crew could tell, she was probably running some kind of diagnostic on it as well.

Finally, one of the others broke away from the group and loped toward the woman. She shook her head, as if participating in a conversation, and then the other person—one of the men—finally reached her side. He took her arm, gently but firmly.

She shook him off and moved away.

He took her arm again, and this time, she sighed visibly, and walked with him around the side of the ship.

They joined the others, and together the group left through the door that led to the corridor.

“Maybe we should lock it,” Dix said.

“Because that wouldn’t be noticed.” That was the second time Coop had used sarcasm. He was as tired as the crew. He sighed. “Send that tester through the airlock.”

Yash nodded. She had chosen a team of scientists to capture the particles, but the scientists would be monitored by the engineering staff—by Yash really.

None of the bridge crew had gone down to the main exterior doors. Coop wanted the crew to remain on the bridge in case something went wrong.

He even insisted that a junior member of the science team take the particle sample.

Only two people, wearing their own environmental suits, would be in the airlock. They would take the particulate matter using some method that he didn’t entirely understand, and then they would bring it back inside.

Coop wanted them to open the exterior door, scoop up some particles, close the doors, and get the hell out of the airlock.

And that was all.

Even though Dix protested. He felt they should take advantage of the outsiders’ absence to explore the room.

Coop shook his head. First off, exploring the room was the wrong phrase. It was a cavern, impossible to explore all at once. Besides, they’d all been in that area a dozen times before. They needed information, and they were going to collect it slowly.

However, he thought it fascinating that he wasn’t the only member of the bridge crew who believed the outsiders would be back.

He wondered how long those suits needed to be replenished. He also wondered if the team’s leader was reckless. If the leader was, the same team would be back within the hour. If the leader wasn’t, either a new team would enter soon, or the other team would wait some designated amount of time, maybe a full day, before returning.

Coop was going to try to get as much done in the time that he had.

He didn’t monitor the airlock experiment. He had Yash do that from the bridge.

It only took a few minutes. Some of the particles got into the airlock itself, and Coop asked that they be captured instead of expelled.

“We got everything,” Yash said. “It looks like it’s safe to go out there.”

“Do the extensive tests,” Coop said. He wanted to go out there as much as the others, but he had learned about caution the hard way. It was always better to take precautions.

“I’d like to go monitor the experiments,” Yash said.

“No,” Coop said. “I need you here.”

“What for?” she asked. “Standing around waiting?”

He shook his head. “I was thinking we could scrub the particles off the ship’s exterior now that the outsiders are gone. You think it’s safe to do that?”

Yash shrugged. “The preliminary tests came back that the substance is harmless. Essentially, the particles are the same material as the walls, so far as we can tell. I think it’s a bit of a gamble to scrub the ship, but not a major one.”

“Scrub it,” Coop said.

Yash entered the commands. At least that part of the ship was working. It scaled the particulate matter off its hull in a matter of seconds. More particles floated through the air, but the image on the screens was clearer than it had been just a moment ago.

The repair area was still dim. The lights had faded from their normal brightness to something that looked weak and grayish. Maybe that had something to do with particulate cover on the lights themselves. Coop couldn’t know that without a clearer view.

As the particulate matter settled down, he noted that the equipment closest to the exits appeared to be running. He could see lights and some of the screens above the control panels. But as he looked farther into the distance, farther away from the main door, he couldn’t see anything. The depths of the repair room seemed particularly dark.

“I still can’t get the systems to talk to each other, Coop,” Yash said. “I don’t think the problem is on our end. I seem to be making an exterior request, but nothing is coming back at us.”

He nodded, then folded his hands behind his back.

He was going to have no choice, then.

Someone was going to have to venture into that room.

***

A second outsider team didn’t come in the doors, at least not immediately. The room remained silent.

The bridge crew had been working nearly 24 hours straight. They all needed rest. The ship was here, something was going on, and Coop couldn’t solve the puzzles instantly.

He ordered the bridge crew to take ten hours, but he also ordered them to leave their comm links open. If something went wrong, he wanted this team back on the bridge with just a few minutes notice.

He put Lynda Rooney, his second officer, in charge. She was a big-boned woman, raised planetside like Yash, but with more experience on a bridge than Coop had. A screw-up early on in her career derailed her climb upward for nearly ten years, but she was back on track now, and he was happy to have her on his team.

He also installed the second most competent team that he had on the bridge itself. He made sure Lynda knew that no one was to leave the ship or contact the outsiders if (when) they returned.

He wanted to know the exact moment the outsiders returned, and he wanted their every movement recorded. He didn’t want to be awakened unless the outsiders did something truly unexpected like attack the ship or try to destroy the equipment.

He also wanted to know how long the outsiders remained in the room. He needed to know the length of their shift, so that he could adjust the length of his.

Lynda understood all of this. She also knew exactly what he was doing with the experiments, and she promised to monitor the repair work that continued on the interior of the ship.

Both Coop and Lynda knew the repair work would go slower than planned, now that it was clear that they weren’t going to get help from the base. But that didn’t stop the work from proceeding.

Coop needed it done. If those outsiders were hostile, if something had destroyed this base and threatened his ship, he needed to know. They had to be prepared to leave quickly.

“And go where?” Lynda asked him softly as he was about to leave the bridge. She was a bit more anal than he was. If the ship had to leave quickly, he’d figure out where at the time. If the ship were repaired, he could catch the Fleet but he had to know where the Fleet would be.

The Fleet always traveled on the same trajectory. The problem was that the Fleet’s mission determined its timetable. The Fleet’s mission, which it had adhered to without fail since it left Earth, was to support the underdog, fight the right battles, help individuals, nations, and entire regions of space become self-sufficient, able to protect their own peoples without hurting others.

The mission was vague, and sometimes the Fleet ended up on a side it didn’t want to be on, but mostly, it had worked. And when the Fleet felt the peoples, the nations, the regions of space were stable, it moved on, secure in the knowledge that it had done its job well.

Sometimes, to do that job well, the Fleet had to stay longer than expected. Sometimes on a random stop for supplies, the Fleet would encounter a group that needed their help. Sometimes, no one they met needed help, not for years.

So the Fleet’s location along its chosen route would be a suggestion, a hope, rather than an actual schedule. And the stragglers could catch up, because the anacapa worked by folding space and could, with the right calculations, fold the Ivoire within a few years (and a few light-years) from the Fleet itself.

If the anacapa worked. If the Ivoire retained enough power to travel that far. If they didn’t get attacked by those outsiders.

If, if, if.

The ifs threatened to overwhelm him. That sensation was a familiar one to him. It came when he lacked sleep.

So he left the bridge, went to his quarters and slept.

***

The sleep helped. When Coop returned to the bridge, he was calm, ready to work, and filled with ideas.

He wasn’t quite filled with hope, but he knew that was the next best thing.

Lynda greeted him tiredly. “They’ve been back an hour,” she said, “It looks like the same group.”

He peered at the screens. He only saw the woman, waving her arm at something, particles swirling around her. But it looked like she was gesturing at someone.

At several someones, actually. The rest of the outsiders.

If the same group returned, then that might have been the entire team. In fact, it probably was the entire team.

Which was welcome news. It meant that he only had to compete with one team for time inside the former repair room.

“They came back exactly eighteen hours after they left,” Lynda said.

Coop would wager that they would leave six hours after they arrived. Obviously, their suits couldn’t handle much more than that, and they had no backup team.

And no backup suits, or at least, suits they could put on so soon after using the others.

More good news.

He looked at the wall screens. Two of the outsiders were running what appeared to be handheld computers over the built-in equipment. Two more were going deeper into the repair room itself.

And the woman he had seen the day before, along with one other person—a man (the one who had run from the spot where the Ivoire now rested?) were going over the ship, inch by inch.

Coop wondered what they hoped to find.

He wondered what they thought of all they had seen.

He wondered who they were.

“Are they going to do any kind of damage on that equipment?” he asked Zaria Diaz, this shift’s on-deck engineer. Diaz was a tiny dark-haired woman who often spent her time inside the machinery. She was one of the few crew members who could fit into some of the crawlspaces.

“They shouldn’t damage the equipment,” Diaz said, “so long as they only run their own equipment over it and don’t touch anything.”

“And if they touch it?” he asked.

“I think that’s what turned the equipment back on in the first place.”

“Turned it back on?” he asked.

She nodded. “I think this entire room had been shut down.”

Coop folded his hands behind his back and faced Diaz. “You’re still working on assumptions, though, aren’t you?”

“I don’t have any proof of anything,” she said. “I tried all night to get our equipment to talk with the base equipment. I don’t think it’s going to happen without someone venturing into that mess and seeing what they find.”

He nodded. He agreed.

His bridge crew was filing back on. He dismissed Rooney’s bridge crew, then set up a work schedule for the next few days. He wanted the quality team with him.

But he needed good people to cover the other two shifts.

And he wanted an exploratory team ready to go into the repair room as soon as the outsiders left.

Yash complained about that part of the plan. She wanted to go into the repair room herself.

But he couldn’t risk his best people, not yet. Those environmental suits the outsiders wore worried him. He didn’t want to lose any of his best staff to surprises.

So the first exploratory team was made up of highly qualified junior officers, a few scientists, one excellent team leader that Coop was eyeing for promotion, and a couple engineers.

The engineers and the scientists should figure out what was wrong with the equipment (if anything). They also had a bit of combat experience, so they could handle a surprise attack if the outsiders returned.

And they had the expertise to download any information they could find off the shutdown equipment.

Coop would brief them himself. He wanted them ready for anything. He also wanted them to be careful in another way.

He wanted them to leave everything the way they found it. He didn’t want the outsiders to know they’d been there.

That meant searching for other recording devices besides the ones inside the repair room. It also meant somehow making the recordings automatically taken by the equipment in the room inaccessible.

He wouldn’t know how to do any of that, but he knew his engineers did.

He hoped they would have enough time on their little mission to get all of that done.

***

Coop sent out the exploratory team one hour after the outsiders left. As Coop expected, the outsiders left exactly six hours after they arrived. If the outsiders were going to come back in, if they had forgotten anything or needed to do anything else, then they would have done so within that hour.

Still, the exploratory team had instructions to leave the moment the door to the corridor got activated. With luck, they could all be inside the ship before any outsiders came into the room.

Coop scheduled his team for a little under five hours. That way, he figured, if the outsiders had switched to six-hour intervals, then his team would be gone before they returned.

Besides, he saw no reason to hurry. The Ivoire could remain in this base for months without opening her doors. By then, he suspected, the outsiders would be long gone.

He would take that option if he had to.

He just hoped he wouldn’t have to.

***

Joanna Rossetti led the exploratory team. She was one of the best young officers Coop ever had the pleasure to work with. Had she been just a bit older and a bit more experienced, he would have promoted her to second officer instead of Lynda Rooney.

Not that he had ever had problems with Lynda Rooney.

Joanna Rossetti was thin and small, wiry and tough, more suited to space than land-based missions. She could fit anywhere, get into any small area, and often did. She had spent half her life training in zero-g, something a lot of the Fleet never did, and so was adept at all kinds of space missions, from those in zero gravity to those in low gravity. Her small size made heavy gravity possible as well; she didn’t feel as crushed by it as someone who weighed more.

She was also a thinker. She solved problems as fast as Coop did, faster than most of the people on his excellent bridge crew.

That was one of the many things he liked about her.

Coop let her choose the two officers that would go along with her. He figured she needed people she could trust. He hadn’t been surprised when she chose Adam Shärf. Coop had been watching Shärf as well. Shärf was young, agile, and intelligent. He had a spotless record, and was known for stopping fights instead of starting them.

Her choice of Salvador Ahidjo did surprise Coop. As far as Coop knew—and he tried to keep track of all of his officers—Ahidjo had done nothing to distinguish himself throughout his career. Ahidjo was older than Coop and had remained at the same rank for nearly two decades. His work was fine but never outstanding. There was never any reason to promote or demote him. He was simply a solid member of the core, who did his job rather quietly and never rose to anyone’s attention.

Except, apparently, Rossetti’s.

Coop didn’t ask her about her choice. He was less concerned with the make-up of the officer level of the team than he was with the scientists and engineers. Here, he had to trust both Dix and Yash. Dix, who knew which scientists had the expertise and could work best in less than optimal conditions, and Yash, who knew her engineering team.

At Coop’s request, she picked engineers who had once worked in a sector base or alongside the sector base technicians whenever the Ivoire was in a base. He wanted someone familiar with the equipment.

As for the scientists, he wanted creativity as well as the ability to work anywhere. He needed open minds, minds that could see alternatives that most scientists couldn’t.

Dix said he knew the perfect three. Yash had more candidates than three, so Coop told her to pick the best, keeping the others on the list for later missions, if necessary.

He looked over the qualifications, tried to remember names and faces (knowing he would fail) and, ultimately, trusted his two senior staff members to make the best possible choices.

Then he briefed the team, and sent them into what had once been the repair room of Sector Base V.

***

There were two theories of leadership among the commanders of the Fleet: the first theory believed that the leaders had the most expertise and therefore were the least expendable; the second theory believed that the leaders had the most expertise and therefore had to be first on the ground, to make sure everything was fine.

Clearly, Rossetti belonged in the second category.

Her tiny form looked even smaller as she climbed down the ladder from the exterior door, and stepped onto the floor. Particles rose around her, thick and heavy, more of them than he had seen before. Some of them came from his cleaning of the ship, but the rest had to be coming from somewhere else.

The particles floated around her like snow. She captured some of them in her glove, and closed her fist, clearly doing a small test of her own.

Coop didn’t say anything. He watched from the bridge, using the wall screens on full. Usually, when the ship was in motion, he kept the screens off or on half power. To have them on full continually made him feel as if only a thin membrane separated him from the repair room outside the ship.

That feeling seemed even stronger now. As he watched his team step onto the repair room floor, he felt as if he could take one step through the membrane and join them.

After all, he knew what it felt like to be in that room.

The last time he had been there, only a month before, the room had been slightly cold. The equipment functioned better in chilly conditions, so the staff kept the room cooler than the interior of most ships. And, one of the staff explained to him, the newly arrived ship always chilled the air as well. It still carried some of the cold from space, and that brought down the ambient temperature all by itself.

The air also had a metallic tang. The local staff claimed they couldn’t smell it, but he could. Every section base he’d ever been to had a version of that smell. Sometimes the smell was tinged with sulfur, thanks to underground springs nearby, and sometimes it was laced with a chalky smell, one that came from the inside of the mountain itself.

Every place was different. He knew if he had to, he could identify the section bases he’d been to by smell alone.

Although the team he’d just sent into the repair room wasn’t feeling cold or smelling a metallic tang. They were snug in their environmental suits, suits made of material so strong that the knife the outsider woman had worn wouldn’t penetrate them.

The air filters were built into the suits themselves. The suits looked thin, but they weren’t. They had three layers. The exterior was made of that impermeable material. The middle layer carried the oxygen stores, so that the suit’s wearer didn’t need oxygen canisters like the outsiders had. The interior layer measured and controlled body temperature, as well as maintaining every other part of the environment that gave the suits their name.

These suits didn’t even have separate helmets. Instead, they had full-face hoods with clear material that ran from the ears to the eyes, wide enough not to impede the wearer’s vision, but much more protective than a glass or plastic plate over the face.

The only problem with that part of the suit design was that Coop had to intuit mood. He couldn’t see expression, except through the eyes themselves.

Not that it mattered in this instance. In this instance, he had told the team to communicate everything, so that he, Yash, and Dix could track what they were doing.

Through a special earpiece, Dix monitored the scientists on one channel. Yash monitored the engineers on another. Coop monitored the leaders on a third. The team spoke among themselves on a fourth channel, using it only when necessary, so that they didn’t clutter up each other’s hearing with needless chatter.

There wasn’t much chatter on Coop’s channel while the team waited on the floor for everyone to emerge from the airlock. He watched them in relative silence. Rossetti updated him with names as each person joined the group.

Once the team was assembled, she gave them instructions. They divided into three groups, each composed of an engineer, a scientist and an officer. The engineer and the scientist had been assigned to a section of equipment. The officer guarded them and provided advice.

Rossetti’s team stayed closest to the ship. Coop had determined that. He wanted her near that door in case the outsiders returned. He also figured the active equipment up front would have the most information, so he made certain that his best team was on that section, instead of the farthest back.

Ahidjo’s team took the middle section. Shärf’s team took a far section. They only covered about an eighth of the repair room. More equipment faded into the dark. Coop would save that for later missions, if he needed them.

Of course, Rossetti’s team reached their equipment first. They split, the engineer looking at the actual workings, the scientist taking the readings. Rossetti hung back, looking around as if she expected something bad to happen.

“Sir?”

Coop started. Rossetti’s voice had come along a fifth channel, one that went directly into his earpiece. It sounded like she was standing beside him.

He had to change frequencies on the small mike he had placed in his front teeth. “What?” he subvocalized, so that he didn’t disturb Dix or Yash.

“Something’s odd here,” Rossetti said.

He wanted to say, No kidding, but he knew better than to waste precious time talking. He simply waited for her to continue.

She did. “You’ve known me for some time. I’m not superstitious, but something feels wrong here. I can’t quite figure out how to describe it.”

“Try,” he said.

She nodded once. Her head bob made more particles swirl around her. It looked like his team was in a particle storm.

Ahidjo’s team had just reached the second section of equipment. The engineer touched the edge of the console, and lights flickered on.

Coop smiled. He had expected that. It confirmed what he had thought earlier; the outsiders had turned the equipment on when they started exploring the room.

On the third channel, he said, “Ahidjo, Shärf. Make sure your teams shut down that equipment before you leave today.”

“Yes, sir,” they said in unison.

Rossetti turned her head toward them, observing their progress for a moment. Then she continued on the fifth channel.

“If I had entered this place without knowing what it was,” she said, her tone measured as if she was choosing each word carefully, “I would think that it had been abandoned long ago.”

“Why?” he asked.

She shook her head, but he didn’t think that was her entire response. It looked more like an involuntary movement, an I-don’t-know kind of reaction.

After that, she paused for a very long time.

“I can’t give you a definitive answer to that, sir,” she said. “It’s just an impression.”

Then she fell silent. Coop didn’t expect her to say more. His people were used to quantifying things. The fact that she couldn’t figure out a reason for her feeling probably bothered her more than it bothered him.

It had taken a bit of courage for Rossetti to tell him about that sense of abandonment. Yet she felt it important.

She wasn’t sensing lingering violence, the way he had upon entering an area after a battle; she was sensing emptiness.

Coop didn’t like emptiness. He would have preferred the lingering violence. It suited his training so much better.

The third team reached their piece of equipment. The lights come on, but they looked very far away and faded. The particle storm made them hard to see.

Maybe the particle storm gave Rossetti that feeling; maybe it was something else. When the others returned, he would ask them if they had felt something similar.

At the moment, however, they worked, updating him periodically, not saying exactly what they found—that was for the return briefing—but letting him know that the work was proceeding, that no one had entered the room (even though he could see that), that the equipment seemed to be working fine.

So far, no one had found any communications problems in the sector base’s equipment, which meant that the Ivoire’s communications array had been damaged, just like Yash suspected. The engineers on his ship had even more work to do than they all initially suspected.

The time passed quickly. Yash and Dix monitored their frequencies as well as did some work on their own consoles. But Coop just studied the repair room, unable to shake what Rossetti had said.

He had experienced that feeling of long-abandonment in a place recently vacated just once in his career. He’d been twenty-five. He was at Section Base T, and he accompanied a senior officer as they did a final inspection of a decommissioned ship.

The ship, the Défi, had been badly damaged in an attack. Rather than repair it, the staff at Section Base T would use it and another badly damaged ship to build an entirely new ship.

The Défi had been Coop’s home during the last of his education. A lot of cadets went there for officer training. The ship had had a lively, active student community, as well as the usual crew compliment and domestic side. He had loved that place.

But it had seemed entirely different on that final walk-through, as if someone had taken the heart out of the ship. Which, apparently, they had. Without the human population, the Défi had become just another junked ship, ready to be torn down into its various parts.

That ship still haunted his dreams. Sometimes, old friends long gone would run down its corridors, laughing as they coaxed him into The Grog, the cadet bar. He didn’t drink much—never had, really—so his presence in The Grog was always an event.

He would wake up feeling sad for something he had lost.

Maybe that was what Rossetti was feeling. She had been here just a month ago as well. He had no idea what kind of experiences she had had during their layover. Maybe those were coloring her reaction now.

But that wasn’t something he could discuss with her on Channel Five or on Channel Three. He would wait until she returned.

At four hours and thirty minutes, he reminded his team that they had to shut down before they returned. He also wanted additional cameras (if there were any) disabled. He wanted the interior to look as much like it had when the others left as his team could make it.

They began their shutdown procedures. In the distance, he saw the lights of the far sector shut off. At least that was working. Then middle section went off. If the team returned quickly enough, maybe the particles would have stopped swirling.

He stood near the wall again, hands clasped behind him. His heartbeat had risen just slightly. He wanted the team to move quicker, although he didn’t say anything.

He wanted them out before the outsiders returned.

Ultimately, he needn’t have worried. At the end of their fifth hour, they were all inside the airlock. The lights on the far panels had gone out, and the teams had reported that they had altered the feeds on all the cameras they could find.

The particle storm settled, just like Coop wanted it to. If the others worked on six-hour rotations, like he thought, he had built in an hour to spare. They would return soon.

He would let Rooney monitor them.

He would be in the briefing room with the teams, learning what they had found.

***

What they had found was troubling indeed.

The teams had arrived in the briefing room for the meeting with their handhelds. They all had wet hair and loose fitting clothes, having cleaned up after going into the repair room. The white environmental suits looked gray upon their return, and they’d peeled them off in the airlock, but some of the particles still stuck to their clothing, which was why Coop had approved real water showers as well as the standard sonic shower. He also made them change in the decontamination area just in case.

The scientists and engineers sat toward the back of the room. The commanders clustered around one end of the table. Coop, Yash, and Dix sat at the other end.

The briefing room, like the bridge, had no portals. In here, the wall screens were usually off, but someone—probably Rossetti—had turned them on. There were no images, just an occasional multi-colored line through the center to show that the screens were drawing power.

“What’ve you got?” Coop asked Rossetti.

She was the only one of the group that didn’t look tired. She sat, spine straight, directly across from him, her small hands flat on the tabletop.

“First,” she said, “we don’t need the suits. Every test we did says the atmosphere inside that room is fine.”

“And the particles?” Dix asked.

“Harmless,” she said. “They’ve been through more testing than we usually do on anything. They seem to be unbonded nanobits, and we’ve all worked around unbonded nanobits before.”

They had. The bits occasionally got into the lungs, but could be removed with little effort. Many of the Fleet’s crew members had no reaction to nanobits at all, and could, in fact, absorb them. It was, one of the medics once told Coop, a genetically desired trait that seemed to have developed in the Fleet’s population over time.

Rossetti glanced at the others from the teams, then said, “It would be easier to work in the repair room without the environmental suits.”

Her team had clearly asked her to say that. She hadn’t done any hands-on work, so this wasn’t coming from her experience.

“So noted,” Coop said. He would make no promises without consulting with his best people. “What else do you have for me?”

Rossetti took a deep breath, then pressed her hands against the tabletop. He finally understood why she sat that way; it was a calming gesture, one she clearly needed.

“Do you recall what I told you, sir, when I was on the repair room floor?”

“Yes,” he said, and didn’t elaborate. He hadn’t mentioned it to his team, but he would tell them if they needed to know.

“Apparently, I was right. The sector base had been long abandoned, sir. The mandatory shutdown sequence began one hundred years after we left.” She spoke flatly, as if the news hadn’t bothered her at all. But her splayed hands belied that.

“One hundred years?” Dix said.

Coop’s heart was pounding. “We left a month ago,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” Rossetti said. “But the elapsed time in the station is at least two hundred years, maybe longer.”

She hadn’t insulted his intelligence by explaining how such a thing could happen. They all knew. It was one of the risks of the anacapa drive. The drive folded space, which meant that it could (and often did) cause a ship to go out of time.

During those fifteen days stranded in that unidentified part of space, Coop had worried about this aspect of the anacapa drive. He had known that foldspace occasionally caused time alterations. His training taught him not to worry about them until he was confronted with them.

Which he was now.

“You’re certain of this?” he asked.

He looked at the scientists and engineers. What he had initially taken for exhaustion was defeat. And fear.

If their calculations were right, they were at least two hundred years in their own future, in an empty sector base, with a damaged ship.

They saw only catastrophe.

Coop knew that in this instance, time was on his side. If he could repair the Ivoire, he could send her through foldspace to the place where the Fleet might be. His calculations (and theirs) could be as much as fifty years off, but that wouldn’t matter. The Fleet followed a set trajectory. Only battles and meetings with other cultures changed the timeline. Coop’s team could guess the farthest that the Fleet would get on that trajectory, and go there. If the Fleet had already arrived, they could continue until they caught it (which wouldn’t take long). If the Fleet hadn’t arrived yet (which was more likely), they could wait for it to catch them.

The older members of the crew might never see the Fleet again, but the younger members would.

If the scientists were right.

If the Ivoire truly was two hundred years in its own future.

“Two hundred years is manageable,” Yash said softly, clearly mistaking his silence for shock.

“I know,” he said, just as softly, silencing her.

He folded his own hands on the tabletop. He was strangely calm. Now that he knew what was happening, he would probably remain calm until they had a firm plan.

“What kind of evidence do you have?” he asked Rossetti.

She turned to one of the engineers, the only one that Coop had ever interacted with, an older man by the name of José Cabral.

“The equipment itself gives us the timeline,” Cabral said. “The sector base closed one hundred years after we left. A rudimentary staff remained, those who didn’t want to travel with the Fleet to Sector Base Y, which was where this group would be posted. This staff continued to live on the surface, charged with maintaining the equipment at low power levels for the next fifty years.”

Coop nodded. This was standard procedure.

Dix shifted in his chair. The news clearly made him nervous.

“After fifty years without human contact,” Cabral said, “the equipment went dormant. Everything shut down except the touch command.”

Touch command. Meaning that the systems would only reactivate if the equipment got touched by human hands. Coop would have to confirm that with Yash, but he didn’t think that some kind of falling debris would activate the system. Just contact from a member of the Fleet. At least, that was what he had been told.

“How long has this base been dormant?” Coop asked.

“Impossible to tell, sir,” Cabral said. “When the system goes dormant, even its internal clock mechanism ceases. Only the anacapa drive continues to function, at a very low level, of course, and then only because it is safer to keep the drive running than it is to shut it down.”

Coop nodded. He had been told that as well.

“If I may, sir.” One of the scientists, a middle-aged woman, spoke up. She was thin, with harsh lines around her mouth and eyes. Coop had to struggle to recall her name, which he had only heard in the context of this mission. “The evidence points toward the machinery being off for a very long time.”

One of the other scientists held up his hand, as if to stop her, but she caught it in her own and brought it down.

“What evidence?” Coop asked.

“The particles, sir,” she said. “Nanobits are durable. They don’t lose their bonding except in a few instances. Most nanobits lose their bonding through a chemical reaction that we haven’t seen here, or the room itself would be toxic.”

“And the other instance?” Coop asked.

“Time,” she said. “Specifically, five hundred to a thousand years, sir.”

“We don’t have proof of that,” said the scientist whose hand she still held. “We just have supposition.”

“And past experience,” she said. “We’ve encountered this before, and by we, I mean the Fleet. Never have the nanobits lost their bonding in less than five hundred years.”

Coop’s stomach flipped. He had to work to keep his hands relaxed, so that his knuckles wouldn’t show white.

“We’ll have to test to be certain,” said one of the other scientists. He wasn’t looking at Coop, but at Dix. Dix, who sat rigidly next to Coop. Dix, who, rumor had it, had fallen in love with one of the chefs on the Geneva.

The Geneva, which was traveling with the Fleet.

If the Fleet was five hundred years distant from them, in no way could Coop plot the Fleet’s course. There were too many variables. Two hundred years was at the very edge of possible.

Five hundred years meant that the Ivoire would never rejoin the Fleet.

Coop wouldn’t let himself think of that. He didn’t have proof.

“The equipment itself isn’t damaged,” Rossetti said, trying to take control of the briefing back from her scientist. “It’s just old.”

Coop nodded.

“We should be able to use information in the database to help us fix the Ivoire,” she said.

He nodded again. He wasn’t thinking about that quite as much. He knew his engineers could fix the Ivoire. She had extensive damage, but none of it was catastrophic.

He was more concerned about their current situation.

“The outsiders,” he said and paused. Everyone looked at him. They clearly hadn’t expected him to mention the outsiders at this point. “You told me their suits looked underdeveloped.”

He said this last to Yash.

She nodded. “Ours are technically superior, if that glove is any indication.”

“Oxygen cylinders, knives, inferior suits,” he said. “Their society didn’t develop from ours then.”

“Probably not,” Yash said.

“So the settlement on the surface is gone,” he said.

She shrugged. “We don’t know that.”

He nodded again. Two hundred years was a long time. They were going to need to know about the history of Sector Base V as well as Venice City, what they had missed, and what they faced.

“I assume that the shutdown was a standard shutdown,” he said to Rossetti.

By that, he meant that the sector base was shut down because the Fleet had moved on, not because of some problem on the planet itself.

Rossetti had to look at her team.

José Cabral nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said, answering for the team. “The shutdown was ordered by the Fleet and completed according to procedure. Staff remained behind. At that time, Venice City was a thriving community, and many people did not want to leave.”

“No indications that anything went wrong on the surface?” Coop asked.

“None,” Cabral said.

Coop nodded. “Clearly, we’re going to need more information. We need to know how much time has lapsed. I’m also going to want to talk with the outsiders.”

“You sir?” Rossetti said, before biting her lower lip. She clearly hadn’t meant to speak out of turn. The statement had been involuntary.

“Yes,” he said.

“I don’t think we should surprise them,” Yash said.

“We won’t,” he said. “We’ll let them know we’re here.”

Maybe the outsiders had answers. If nothing else, he could get past them and travel up to the surface. Someone in Venice City had to know something.

If Venice City remained.

He shuddered at that thought. Maybe the old-timers had been right. Maybe they should have been careful about how they named their city. They had named it Venice City because the Earth city had been built on canals. But it had eventually disappeared under the water.

What if this Venice had disappeared as well?

He placed his hands flat on the table and used them to push himself to his feet.

“Thank you all for the work,” he said. “You’ll have new orders tomorrow. We’re going to figure out exactly when we are. But know this: we’ll be all right.”

He sounded confident even though he didn’t feel confident. He felt as if someone had shut off the ship’s gravity, and he was floating, unfettered, in a world he thought he knew.

The others, though, seemed calmer. Maybe it was the shared knowledge. Maybe it was the fact that they were not in charge of it; he was, and as their commander, he was the one who needed to solve the problem.

But he knew, as a commander—as a human being—that some problems had no easy solution.

And this problem was one of those.

***

Coop had to work on three things at once: He had to repair the Ivoire; he had to download information from the sector base; and he had to approach the outsiders.

He ordered his engineering staff to concentrate on the Ivoire’s repairs. He needed the ship in full working order so that they could leave Sector Base V at a moment’s notice.

He assigned the scientists and some junior engineers to the sector base team. If repairs were needed on the sector base equipment, his senior engineering staff could handle those after they finished with the Ivoire.

He alone was going to worry about the outsiders.

His first step: he had to let them know he was here.

So, after the outsiders left from their latest foray into the repair room, he sent Rossetti’s team back into the room, with orders to download information and to leave the equipment running when they completed their five-hour mission.

Rossetti’s team didn’t wear environmental suits. The team had no trouble working, and didn’t seem to have any ill effects from the particles. The studies were correct; the room itself was as harmless as it had been two hundred plus years before.

Rossetti’s team worked hard. They left the equipment running when they returned to the ship. They went through decontamination and testing to make certain they remained healthy, and they continued their work inside the Ivoire. They weren’t to contact him unless or until they had processed new information from their downloads.

He was less concerned with that information than he was the outsiders.

He made sure he had control of the bridge when the outsiders returned.

They opened the door at the exact moment he expected them. The woman came in first. She stopped and held out a hand, as if to prevent the others from entering.

Then she took some tentative steps forward. She paused, looked around the room, and then turned toward the ship. For a moment, it felt as if she were looking through the screens directly at Coop. He felt his breath catch.

She had received his message; she clearly knew that someone was in the ship, that it hadn’t arrived automatically without a crew on board.

Then she backed toward the door, stepped back into the corridor with the rest of her team, and pulled the door closed.

He wanted to commend her: Good job. You have no idea about the nature of the threat, or even if your team is prepared for it. But you do know that we’ve been observing you. And that we’re here.

He knew she wouldn’t return until she felt ready to do so, and he liked that as well.

Still, he watched for another hour, waiting. When she didn’t return, he felt oddly disappointed, and just as oddly pleased.

“I need Rossetti, Shärf, Ahidjo, and Perkins on the bridge,” he said to Dix.

“Yes, sir,” Dix said.

Coop stood, his hands behind his back, and studied that empty repair room. What would he do if he were the woman?

He would have retreated, as she had. He would have briefed his team. Then he would return, with his team ready for anything.

But he would return as soon as possible.

“Sir?” Rossetti had come onto the bridge. Her hair had the fly-away quality of the newly dry, but she wore her uniform—red with black, the sign of the Fleet, the same version of the uniform she had worn on her first trip into the repair room without an environmental suit.

“Sorry to bring you back here so soon, Joanna,” Coop said, “but I need you to go out there and wait for the outsiders.”

Shärf arrived, then Ahidjo, both wearing their uniforms as well. Perkins was only a moment behind them. She wore her dress uniform, the one the Fleet demanded its linguists wear for first contact.

“The three of you will guard Special Officer Perkins,” Coop said. “You will wait near the door of the Ivoire until the outsiders return. Perkins will do all of the talking, even if the outsiders address the rest of you. She knows the protocol. You do not. Is that understood?”

All four of them nodded. Perkins’ eyes were bright. As uncomfortable as she had felt after the failure of talks with the Quurzod, she was clearly eager to get back to work. As young and new as Perkins was, her enthusiasm was one of the things Coop liked about her.

She clearly loved this work and wanted to do it.

“If they don’t return, sir?” Rossetti asked.

“They will,” he said.

“But if they don’t, sir?”

She wanted to know how long they would stand out there, waiting.

“Give it three hours, Joanna. If they haven’t come back in that time, we’ll go on as if they’re not coming back. You four can come back into the ship and rest.”

“Thank you, sir,” Rossetti said.

“I do need you carrying weapons,” Coop said. “Just in case.”

Rossetti nodded.

“Me too, sir?” Perkins asked.

It wasn’t procedure for the linguist to be armed.

“No,” he said. “But remember that at least one member of the outsiders’ team is carrying a knife. Don’t get within striking range.”

Perkins straightened her shoulders. “I won’t, sir.”

“Good,” he said, sending them out of the bridge. “And good luck.”

***

The communications array still wasn’t repaired. He wouldn’t be able to listen to any conversation that Perkins had with the outsiders, which was probably just as well. He’d listened to such negotiations before, and they had always confused him.

The tangle of languages made easy understanding difficult. Even if he could listen, he wasn’t sure he would. He didn’t want to let his perceptions get in the way of his linguist.

The team had just stepped out of the airlock when the exterior door opened. Coop felt his heart rate increase.

This was the dangerous moment—the moment when anything could happen. The outsiders could leave. They could feel threatened and attack.

But they did neither of those things.

They just froze at the doorway and stared at Rosetti’s team.

Then, slowly, the woman reached up and removed the helmet of her environmental suit.

Yash gasped. Coop glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. “Problems?” he asked.

“We can handle this environment. What if they can’t?”

Coop shrugged. “She would know what they can and can’t handle.”

But he said no more. He had suspected the outsiders’ leader had forced her team to wear the suits out of an excess of caution. Her willingness to remove her helmet when she saw his crew convinced him he was right.

The woman wasn’t pretty. She was too thin, the kind of thinness he’d seen in professional spacers all over the known universe. Her cheeks were hollow, but her eyes were bright and filled with intelligence. He couldn’t adequately judge her age. Not young, but not old. Maybe his age, maybe not.

She spoke, and Coop instantly changed his mind about the tangle of languages. He would have given anything to hear this conversation.

Perkins stepped forward so that she stood a few feet in front of the three officers. Then she pressed her hands together and bowed, a greeting that the Fleet had learned was acceptable in most human cultures.

Perkins did not speak. Clearly, then, the language that the outsider woman had used wasn’t familiar to Perkins. Coop felt oddly disappointed, hoping that the woman and the other outsiders would be able to clear up the mystery quickly, easily, and with just a few words.

Clearly that wasn’t going to happen.

The outsider woman watched, shrugged, and then bobbed her head. Her companions didn’t move. Nor did they remove their helmets. Either she had ordered them to keep the helmets on, or they weren’t as courageous as she was.

Perkins tapped herself and spoke. The woman stared at her. Perkins made the same gesture and spoke again.

The woman nodded once, then tapped her own shoulder. She spoke.

Perkins frowned.

The woman repeated the gesture.

Perkins said something and the woman glanced at the people behind her.

A man removed his helmet. He was younger than Coop, slender but not thin like the woman, with dark hair and eyes that glittered. He spoke to the woman, and then looked at Perkins.

She opened her hands as if to say that she didn’t understand.

The man tapped his own shoulder, then spoke. Then he put a hand on the outsider woman’s shoulder and spoke again.

Perkins tilted her head, then talked for a good minute or more.

The man and woman looked relieved. Clearly they and Perkins had actually communicated. Perkins said something else, the others nodded, and then Perkins bowed again.

She signaled to the team that they were done, and they went back into the ship.

The man said something to the woman, but she shook her head. Then she ushered her team out of the repair room and back into the corridor.

The meeting was done.

***

Coop wanted to run to the airlock and find out exactly what had happened, but he knew better. He waited on the bridge until Perkins contacted him.

Then the two of them went into the briefing room.

She looked more excited than he had ever seen her. She had scrubbed down and changed out of her uniform, but she wore a less dressy version of it for her meeting with him.

“I captured a lot of their speech patterns,” she said. “They spoke to each other quite a bit, and I captured that, which is good.”

Coop had forgotten this about her. Perkins never gave a report in a linear manner.

“They don’t speak Standard, then,” he said.

She paused and looked at him. Then she gave him a rueful smile. “Oh, yeah. Sorry. You weren’t listening in. I’m not sure what they speak. It sounded familiar when the woman started talking to us, but I couldn’t understand her. I thought at first that she was speaking Standard, but pronouncing it differently, so differently that I had trouble processing it. Then I realized that the words sounded familiar but weren’t familiar.”

“Which means what?” Coop asked.

“Which means they might be speaking a mangled form of Standard or some kind of pidgin language. It might also be a related language with similar sounds. I already have the computer working on it, and I expect to have results before our next meeting with them, which I’m hoping will be tomorrow.”

“Did you set that up with them?”

She shrugged. “As best I could. They seemed pretty startled by us. They seemed even more shocked that we had trouble communicating.”

“Did you understand anything they said?”

“I think so, but I’m not sure.”

Coop frowned. She had never given him that response before. “What do you mean?”

“It’s that sound-like thing I mentioned,” Perkins said. “I gave the woman my name. The woman did the same thing, but I think she gave me her rank.”

“Which is?”

“She’s their leader.”

“That’s clear,” Coop said.

“But I’m not sure that’s what she said,” Perkins said. “I thought we were doing pretty well. I said my name, she responded with her title, and then I asked her where we were. The man stepped forward and introduced himself.”

“I noticed that,” Coop said.

“But his name sounded like an object,” she said. “In our language, his name means bridge. So the woman might have been giving me her name and it’s something other than a title. I got very confused at that point, which is why I called the meeting off. I wanted more information from the computer before I went farther.”

“All right,” Coop said. Then, because he couldn’t help himself, he said, “When do you think I can talk to them?”

“Sir, this could take weeks.”

“Not if the language is related.”

“I said I’m guessing,” she said.

“I know,” he said, feeling a touch of color warm his cheeks. He had vowed he wasn’t going to let the crew know about his impatience, and then he revealed it to Perkins. “Sorry. The sooner we can question them about substantive things, the better off we are.”

“I know, sir,” she said, “but it’s better to understand them than to guess, don’t you think?”

He nodded, reluctantly. He wanted that conversation and he wanted it soon. Just like he wanted the ship repaired. Just like he wanted to know when they were.

“Good work,” he said to Perkins. “Let me know when you have enough of the language to act as a translator.”

“I will, sir,” she said. “And I’ll try to make it sooner rather than later.”

I hope so, he almost said, but didn’t. I really, really hope so.

***

It took Perkins nearly two weeks to figure out the outsiders’ language with any kind of precision. During that time, the engineers managed most of the major repairs on the ship. Coop sifted through much of the information pulled from the repair room’s equipment, but didn’t come up with any more information than his team was finding.

He repeatedly had communications contact Venice City, but didn’t get any response. As the sensors came back online, he mapped the underground caverns around the repair room. The entire complex was much bigger than it had been the month before.

And as the equipment got repaired, he had his team see what the sensors could find on the surface.

There was a city in the narrow valley, just like there had been for decades. But the city was no longer in the same place. Instead, it was scattered along the mountainside, far away from the city center that Coop had visited several times.

He knew that cities sprawled, but he had never seen one that abandoned its original site.

All of these pieces of information didn’t add up into anything coherent, not yet, which made talking to the outsiders all the more imperative.

The number of outsiders never changed, and although Perkins asked the woman what their group was called, she never got an answer she understood.

She was understanding more and more, however, partly because of the outsiders themselves. After a few days, one of the outsiders, the man who called himself Bridge showed an ability to speak Perkins’ language. It took Perkins another day or two to understand him because the man mangled every single word he tried to say. It was almost as if he was familiar with the language in its written form, but hadn’t ever spoken it.

At least, that was Perkins’ hypothesis. Coop wasn’t so certain. If the outsiders could read Standard, then how come they hadn’t heeded the warnings written all over the floor in the repair room? How come they seemed surprised when the ship nearly crushed one of them?

Still, Coop wasn’t the linguist, and he had to rely on Perkins’ expertise to figure out what was going on. In less than two weeks, Perkins decided that the language the outsiders spoke was a form of Standard, but so changed by time and distance, as well as influence from other cultures, as to be practically unrecognizable.

The fact that the man called Bridge could speak her language, though, didn’t bode well, as she told Coop in one of their briefings.

“Sir, I think all of this means that we speak an old and possibly forgotten form of their language. One that is no longer active, but lives only in archives.”

He felt a chill run through him, even though on some deep level, he expected her to say that.

“How long does it take for a language to change like that?”

She shrugged. “There are instances of that happening within a few hundred years of no contact.”

“But?” he asked.

“But generally, it happens over many centuries. Five, six, seven hundred years or more.”

He stared at her. It was within the realm of possibility. They had gotten the ship to talk with the equipment in the repair room, but hadn’t gleaned any more information about the time factor. Some of the scientific tests had come back that the equipment itself had aged several hundred years, but, as the scientists said, some of that could have been due to the proximity of a working (and possibly malfunctioning) anacapa drive.

“They can’t be from the future of Venice City,” he said. “Their suits aren’t as evolved as ours.”

She shrugged. “They’re from our future somewhere. Somewhere they acquired our language. Then they lost touch with us, and the language changed, as languages do.”

“It’s time for me to talk to them,” he said. “Can you clearly translate for us?”

“If we do it in the Ivoire,” she said. “I need the computer to back me up.”

He thought about that for a moment. He had always envisioned the meeting to take place inside the repair room. He hadn’t wanted the outsiders in his ship.

But he understood Perkins’ point. And he needed the information now more than he needed to protect the ship’s secrets.

Not that it had a lot of secrets from the outsiders. They had access to similar equipment in the repair room, but something had prevented them from understanding what they found.

If they did learn to understand the equipment, they would understand his ship as well.

So there wasn’t much he could hide from them.

He just had to hope that the barrier—whatever it was—would continue.

“All right,” Coop said. “Set up an appointment.”

“Yes, sir,” Perkins said.

“And I don’t want her whole team in here. Bring her and the man who speaks the language—Bridge?—into the briefing room. You and I will talk to them.”

“All right, sir,” Perkins said, and looked relieved. Everyone on the Ivoire was nervous. Everyone wanted answers because, as Dix told Coop, they were making up worst-case scenarios the longer this went on.

Coop didn’t have to ask what those worst-case scenarios were. He had been making up his own.

Initially they had involved being stranded in Sector Base V forever, but now that the Ivoire was mostly repaired, he knew that wouldn’t happen. Now he just had to figure out where he would take his crew, and when.

And for that, he needed to talk to the outsiders as soon as he possibly could.

***

He set up the briefing room as if he were receiving heads of state. For all he knew, he was.

He had his personal chef make some pastries and lay out various snacks. He set out bottles of wine he had picked up at Starbase Kappa. He also had flavored waters cooling on a sideboard, and various hot liquids on the other side of the room.

He wore his dress uniform. He posted two guards inside the room as a show of force, and had several others standing by. But he still planned to meet the woman and Bridge with only Perkins at his side.

Coop didn’t greet them at the airlock. He had Perkins do that, along with another set of guards. He ordered the areas where the outsiders would walk blocked off, so that they would have no contact with anyone except him and Perkins.

He watched the wall screen, as the outsiders stepped out of the airlock. The woman came first, then the man. The woman looked around as if she were trying to take in every detail. She even touched the wall gently with her fingers, as if trying to see what it was made out of.

As they walked through the corridors of the ship, the woman would occasionally reach out and touch a doorframe or run her fingers along a wall. Coop contacted Yash and asked if she was seeing all of this.

She was and, she assured him, the woman could do no harm with her naked fingertips.

He wasn’t worried so much about naked fingertips. He was worried about some little nanovirus or something she had attached to her fingertips. Yash promised to have the walls wiped as soon as the outsiders left the corridor, and she would let him know if something was amiss.

It took nearly fifteen minutes for the outsiders to walk from the airlock to the briefing room. As they stopped by the guards, Coop shut off the wall screen and stood at the head of the table, his hands clasped behind his back.

He was oddly nervous. He checked in with himself. He wasn’t nervous because he thought he might get some answers. He had already figured out that he wasn’t going to like the timeline the woman would give him—if, indeed, she had one. He suspected the Ivoire was much farther than two hundred years away from the Fleet.

The evidence kept coming in that the Ivoire was at least five hundred years away.

Coop had been thinking of how to break that news to his crew for more than a week now, the news that they were on their own, stranded in the future, with no purpose, no mission, and no chance of ever seeing the Fleet again.

He hadn’t quite come to terms with that, but he was braced for it.

So he wasn’t nervous that the outsiders would tell him a timeline he didn’t want to hear.

He was nervous about meeting them.

And really, if he was honest with himself, he wasn’t nervous about them. He was nervous about her.

The woman had intrigued him from the start, even before he could see her face clearly. She explored an area that had clearly been abandoned, but she hadn’t looted it. She had treated it with respect.

She seemed to be gathering information. When she saw the ship, she didn’t flee, nor did she use weapons to try to break in. She continued her own explorations, and she also tried to figure out the ship.

Then, when she realized the ship was occupied, she didn’t attack. She regrouped, came back, and did her best to communicate with Perkins.

She had shown intelligence, curiosity, and courage, all traits that Coop admired.

He felt as if he was going to meet a colleague, not someone who could do him any harm.

He straightened his shoulders as the door slid open.

The woman came in first, her movements slow, but not tentative. She was slighter than Coop expected. Her image on the wall screen had distorted her height, made her seem taller than she actually was. But she had presence. He could feel it as she moved toward him, hand outstretched.

“Boss,” she said.

At least, that was what it sounded like. Coop glanced at Perkins.

“That’s what they call her,” Perkins said. “I don’t know if it’s a name or her title.”

“Or both,” Coop said.

The man, Bridge, was watching the conversation. His eyes did glitter more than any eyes Coop had ever seen. They must have been artificial. Bridge seemed to be taking in the entire conversation.

Coop decided to ignore him for a moment, and kept his attention on the woman.

He took her hand. It was dry and small, warmer than he expected, certainly warmer than his own hand.

“I’m Jonathon Cooper, the commander of this ship,” he said. “People call me Coop.”

Perkins translated.

The woman nodded. She repeated, “Coop.”

He smiled. “Yes.”

He hadn’t let go of her hand. She hadn’t let go of his. She didn’t smile in return, but the skin around her eyes crinkled as if she was pleased.

“Special Officer Perkins here,” Coop said, “isn’t certain if your name is Boss or if that’s your title.”

The man stepped forward. He seemed alarmed that Coop hadn’t let go of the woman’s hand.

“I’m Bridge,” he said, his words barely understandable. “Boss is her name and her title.”

The woman said something to Bridge, and he responded.

“They call you by your title?” Coop asked her, without looking at Bridge or Perkins.

“I prefer it,” the woman said. Or rather, Perkins said. Her translations were a bit slow, but they made Coop feel like he was having a conversation—albeit an awkward one—with the woman.

“Surely you can understand my position,” Coop said. “As commander of this ship, I can’t call someone else Boss.”

The woman shrugged, her hand still locked in his. “Then call me what you will.”

She wasn’t going to tell him anything else, not yet, and he wasn’t going to call her Boss.

Bridge came up beside her. “I’m McAllister Bridge,” he said in very bad Standard. “I’ll do my best to assist your translator.”

Coop reluctantly let go of the woman’s hand, but he didn’t extend his hand to Bridge, nor did Bridge extend his to Coop.

“Thank you,” Coop said. “I think we need all the help we can get trying to communicate with each other.”

He pulled back a chair at the side of the table for the woman. Then he indicated that they both should sit.

He went to the sideboard, held up the carafe of wine, and raised his eyebrows, silently asking the outsiders if they wanted some.

Bridge looked at the woman. So she was in charge, even if this Bridge was a bit pushy.

“Yes,” the woman said, and that word was clear. So she knew some Standard as well.

Coop looked at Bridge. He nodded.

Coop poured four glasses of wine. He set Perkins’ glass across the table from the woman’s.

Then he sat down at the head of the table. “We have a lot of questions,” Coop said. “We would have talked before, but we wanted to make sure we could understand each other.”

The woman finally smiled. The expression pulled her face together, making her seem both younger and prettier.

“That makes sense,” she said.

Coop folded his hands together. “It seems to me,” he said as clearly and slowly as he could, “that you seemed surprised when our ship arrived. Why is that? Didn’t you know that ships could land here?”

Bridge looked at the woman as Perkins translated. Bridge started to answer, but the woman held up her hand. She leaned forward just a little so that she blocked Bridge’s line of sight.

So, they had a few issues about who was in charge. Bridge verbally acknowledged the woman’s authority, by calling her Boss and telling Coop that was her position, but he didn’t seem to like her control.

The way that the woman tolerated Bridge without disciplining him in any way reinforced Coop’s sense that theirs was not a military operation. It was something else.

“This area has been abandoned for a very long time,” the woman said. “No one even knew the equipment was down here. It surprised us. We were just starting to explore this giant compound when your ship arrived.”

Coop hadn’t expected that answer. He expected something more concrete, something like, The base has been abandoned for two hundred years, so we didn’t think anyone was using it…

“If you didn’t know the base was here,” he said, “why were you exploring underground?”

Bridge’s hand lightly brushed the woman’s arm, but she ignored him. Clearly he didn’t want her to say something. And just as clearly, she wasn’t going to listen to him.

“We were tracking the power source,” she said. “We’re familiar with it. We’ve found it throughout this sector. It’s dangerous and it’s causing problems on the surface.”

“The power source?” Coop looked at Perkins who shrugged.

“I’m not sure of the translation,” she said to him. “That’s what I understand and that’s what the computer gives us.”

“Your stealth drive,” Bridge said. He had to speak the words three times before Coop understood him. Perkins still looked a bit confused.

“Stealth drive?” Coop said.

“The energy signature,” Bridge said. “The thing that allows Dignity Vessels to cloak. It’s still active in this underground area.”

Dignity Vessels. Coop peered at Bridge and then asked him to repeat his words. Bridge did. Coop glanced at Perkins who nodded just once.

She had caught the same thing Coop had. The words “Dignity Vessels” had surprised them both.

Dignity Vessel was the original name of the ships in the Fleet. The name came from the Fleet’s original mission, to bring peace and dignity throughout the known universe.

The Fleet never did bring peace. They focused more on justice. And they did try to restore dignity where there was none.

But they didn’t call themselves Dignity Vessels, although the words were still part of the ship’s identification numbers. That these people knew what Dignity Vessels were gave Coop hope that less time had passed than he feared.

“What kind of trouble on the surface?” Coop asked.

“The excess energy,” the woman said quickly, before Bridge could answer, “creates death holes.”

Or at least, that was what Perkins thought she said. Perkins ran the sentence through the computer as well and got a similar translation. Bridge watched it all with curiosity.

“Death holes?” Coop asked. “Sink holes?”

“A wave of energy blows through the ground, like a geyser,” the woman said, “creating a tunnel. Vaycehn occasionally loses entire neighborhoods to these tunnels.”

“Vaycehn?” Coop asked.

“It’s what they call Venice City,” Perkins said, with an edge in her voice.

Coop didn’t want to explore that edge, not at the moment, anyway.

“You’re convinced these death holes are caused by something down here?” Coop asked the woman.

“We know it. A big hole opened when your ship arrived.”

Coop frowned. Clearly something had malfunctioned. “Why didn’t you contact the Fleet?”

The woman looked at Bridge. He shook his head slightly. She put her hand on his for just a moment, as if to keep him silent.

“Because,” the woman said after a moment, “until your ship arrived, we thought the Fleet was just a legend.”

“What?” Coop asked.

The woman looked a little sheepish. “We found some ruined Dignity Vessels before. I’ve dived some of the wrecks. But I never thought I’d see a functioning ship with a functioning crew.”

“Because we’re a legend,” Coop said.

“No one knows much about you,” she said. “We thought you traveled in large groups, going from section to section, distributing justice.”

“We do,” he said.

“But no one has any evidence of that. What we do know is garbled, lost to time and mythology. Some places claim you exist and you helped them create their civilizations. Some say you never existed. Others claim you were rogue agents fleeing a dying government, and that you stirred up trouble wherever you went.”

The hair on the back of his neck had risen. How long did it take for the Fleet’s exploits to get lost?

“What do you say?” Coop asked.

“I say that your Dignity Vessels have turned into the greatest mystery of my life.”

“A mystery I can solve for you,” he said.

She shrugged, as if she didn’t want to commit to the idea. “I don’t see a Fleet here,” she said. “You’re just one ship.”

“We were damaged,” he said. “We came here for repairs.”

True enough, but not complete. He didn’t want to give her the full answer—not yet.

“Alone?” Bridge asked.

She put her hand on his again, as if to remind him that she was asking the questions.

“The base should have been active,” Coop said. “We only left a month ago.”

Bridge shook his head. “That’s not possible.”

“Shut up, Bridge,” the woman said. She didn’t seem surprised by Coop’s words. Bridge did. She knew more about Dignity Vessels and the Fleet than she was admitting.

“How long has this base been abandoned?” Coop asked.

Bridge crossed his arms and leaned back, as if he expected to be consulted on the question. The woman ignored him.

“We don’t know exactly,” she said.

“But you have a guess,” he said.

“No, I don’t,” she said. “I don’t guess.”

He appreciated that. “What do you know?”

She took a deep breath. Her face was filled with compassion. She turned to Perkins.

“I hope you can translate this accurately,” she said.

“I’ll try,” Perkins said, or at least, that was what Coop thought she said. Some of the words in the outsiders’ language did sound familiar. He understood now why Perkins had been so cautious. Sometimes familiar words led to greater misunderstandings than unknown words.

“What we know is this.” The woman spoke slowly, obviously doing so to make it easier for Perkins to translate. “The city of Vaycehn is the oldest known city in the sector. Vaycehn has been here, in one form or another, for five thousand years.”

“No,” Coop said before he even realized he had spoken. He made himself breathe. Maybe Perkins had mistranslated. “The city above was called Venice. Venice City. It was the first settlement ever on Wyr.”

Wyr was the name the Fleet had given this planet.

“Wyr.” The woman repeated the word without waiting for the translation, and then nodded. “Yes. We’re on Wyr.”

“Venice City,” he prompted.

“The oldest known settlement here is in the area with the worst of the death holes,” the woman said. “It’s five thousand years old.”

“So far as our records show,” Bridge said, “this place has always been called Vaycehn.”

“Bridge, enough,” the woman said. There was warning in her voice, and a toughness to her posture. Coop was beginning to understand why they called her Boss. He wouldn’t want to make her angry.

“There’s no record of Venice City?” Coop asked.

“None,” the woman said.

“Sir,” Perkins said. “The way that language morphs, and the way that these people speak…”

Coop looked at her. So did Bridge. No one was translating for the woman called Boss, at least not yet.

“Venice City could be mispronounced, mangled, changed over the centuries through pronunciation errors,” Perkins said. “It could have become Vaycehn.”

“That’s supposition, Perkins,” Coop said. “We’re trying to figure out facts here.”

She nodded once.

But he understood her all the same. She thought—Bridge thought; hell, the woman named Boss thought—that Vaycehn had been here for at least five thousand years. If Vaycehn was a settlement placed on the ruins of Venice City, then Venice City had been built even longer ago.

The very idea made Coop’s mind hurt.

Five thousand years. How did one month become five thousand years?

“Are you sure you’re translating the numbers correctly?” Coop asked Perkins.

“The computer is confirming them,” she said.

“But you programmed it,” he said. “Could you have programmed it wrong?”

Her expression remained impassive. No flashes of anger, no sense of doubt. “Anything’s possible, sir,” she said.

Then she turned to Bridge and said something in his language.

He responded in his bad Standard. “Boss is talking about five thousand years. Fifty one-hundred-year cycles.”

Coop’s stomach clenched. He was glad he had his hands clasped together. He didn’t want the others to see them shaking.

“You’re sure of that?” he asked.

Both Bridge and the woman nodded.

“My God,” he said, and stood up. “My God.”

He walked over to the sideboard, his heart pounding. Five hundred years would have been a disaster. Five thousand was an impossibility.

Except that the anacapa drive in the station was malfunctioning, creating something called death holes. The Ivoire had all kinds of damage as well. Together both anacapa drives—one clearly malfunctioning and one that might be—had rescued the Ivoire from that fifteen-day death float, and brought it here, where it could be repaired.

But it could never ever rejoin the Fleet.

Not even if Coop wanted it to. Not even if he could figure out how to traverse foldspace to reach some point in the Fleet’s trajectory. The errors he would make in a two-hundred year timeline would make it just barely possible to catch up to the Fleet. The errors he would make in a five-hundred year timeline would make it impossible to catch the Fleet.

He couldn’t even map the distance between the Ivoire and the Fleet with any kind of accuracy. Not over five thousand years. Not even with a working anacapa and foldspace on his side.

The Fleet might as well be a legend.

And the Ivoire had just become a ghost.

He didn’t look at Perkins. He wanted to maintain some kind of emotional control.

He needed his own people on this. Although he knew what they would find. The evidence had been there already: the language, the unbonded nanobits, the condition of the equipment.

He made himself focus.

“So you’re from Venice City?” he asked the woman as he turned around.

The woman’s expression was filled with compassion. She had an idea of what he was going through. He didn’t want her to think of him that way. He didn’t want her to feel sorry for him.

“No,” she said. “I’m not from Venice City. I am not from Vaycehn either.”

That surprised him.

“What are you doing here, then?” he asked.

Bridge started to answer but she glared at him.

“We came because of the death holes,” she said.

“Came from where?” he asked.

“The Nine Planet Alliance,” she said.

It meant nothing to him, just like she had known it would.

“Did Venice City—Vaycehn—hire you to solve this death-hole problem?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Then why are you here?” he asked.

“Because we’re trying to understand your technology,” she said. “It’s littered throughout the sector, and it’s killing people.”

Killing people. Coop shook his head. Killing people.

It was taking a moment for words to get through his brain. He was in some kind of shock. Unexpected harsh news did that.

News that led to grieving.

And he would have a lot of grieving to do. He had lost not just his friends, but his entire world.

He made himself focus on the woman’s words. He was the commander of this ship, and in his training, he learned how to get past a shocking fog. He learned how to operate even when everything seemed like it had gone wrong.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “The technology is killing people?”

The woman nodded. “The energy field. It kills. I know of hundreds of deaths attached to it. I’ve personally witnessed three caused by the field.”

“Such as the field you detected down here,” Coop said.

“Yes,” she said.

“And you came here anyway,” he said.

“That’s my job,” she said.

“What’s your job, exactly?” he asked.

“To find this technology. To figure out how it works. To shut it off. And if I can’t do that, to destroy it.”

Perkins’ eyes widened in shock. She was prone to panic. Or maybe she was already feeling her reaction to the five thousand years news.

Coop had to trust her to translate as best she could, but he couldn’t look at her. Not any longer.

“Were you going to destroy this base?” Coop asked the woman.

“As I said,” the woman said, “we had just found it. I was excited by the equipment, and the fact that it worked. I hoped we might learn more about your technology.”

“Technology.” Coop frowned. “All of our technology is killing people throughout the sector?”

“No,” the woman said. “Just the energy that radiates from this place. We call it your stealth drive. I gather that’s not correct.”

So she saw the look Coop had given Perkins when the term was first used.

“We do use the technology to hide the ships, yes,” Coop said, not willing to lie to this woman, but not wanting to tell her everything.

“Why would you need to hide them down here?” Bridge asked.

This time, his question was clear. Or maybe Coop was just getting used to his terrible accent.

But Coop chose to ignore him. If the woman was in charge, then Coop would talk to the woman.

“I don’t understand,” Coop said. “How does the technology kill people?”

She sighed, then looked at her hands. She turned to Perkins and said something. Perkins nodded and said to Coop, “She wants to tell a story. I’m not going to translate word for word, but I’m going to wait until she’s done and then tell you as best I can.”

Coop nodded.

The woman spoke for about five minutes, her voice rising and falling. As emotions crossed her face, she looked down or turned away. Bridge watched her, clearly as fascinated as Coop. Perkins’ attention was divided between the woman and the translation coming through the computer. Her intense concentration seemed to cause her to miss the emotions flowing through the woman’s body.

But Coop saw them all. He saw fear and deep sorrow. He saw loss and loneliness. He saw anger, anger so intense that the woman’s entire body tensed as she spoke of it.

By the end of her tale, she had calmed herself again.

But Coop knew now what drove her. Rage, fueled by a catastrophic loss. He didn’t know what kind of loss and he didn’t know what, exactly, had made her angry, but he did know that those emotions were what moved her forward, what got her through the day.

Finally, the woman stopped. She nodded at Perkins.

Perkins took a deep breath.

“Let’s hope I get this right,” she said.

“Do your best,” Coop said.

“There is a place in this sector called something like the Room of the Missing Spirits. Or the Place of the Lost Ghosts. I’m not certain of the exact translation.” Perkins glanced at Bridge. He didn’t help her. Maybe he didn’t know those words in Coop’s language. Maybe it was one of those concepts that didn’t translate well.

“She thinks it’s an abandoned space station,” Perkins said. “It’s been there from the beginning of recorded history in this sector.”

Coop’s cheeks warmed. Starbase Kappa was in this sector, and it was older than Venice City.

“This place has a low grade version of the energy signature that is here on Wyr. She went there as a child with her family. Her mother died there, becoming one of the ghosts.”

Coop looked at the woman. She was studying him, as if gauging his reaction. He wondered if she understood more of the language than she could speak.

Probably. That was his experience with other languages. He could understand some of them and couldn’t speak them at all.

Perkins continued with the woman’s story.

“She was very young when her mother died. Decades later, she encountered the same kind of energy in an abandoned Dignity Vessel that she was exploring. Only she didn’t realize that the energy was the same until after one of her crew died. She lost another friend when he went exploring the Room of the Missing Spirits. Now she has made it her mission to find this energy and prevent it from killing anyone else.”

That was a much shorter version of what the woman said.

“You’re sure that’s all?” Coop said.

“She used names and dates,” Perkins said. “I felt they weren’t as necessary.”

Coop nodded. He hoped he would be able to hear the woman’s unadulterated version some day.

“How come the energy has killed her mother and her friend but not her?” he asked. “Did they go to the wrong spot?”

Perkins translated the question.

The woman glanced at Bridge, who looked upset. He said something that sounded negative, but the woman shrugged and turned back to Perkins, speaking slowly again.

“Apparently, most people who enter the energy field die,” Perkins said. “But some people are immune. It would take some hefty translation work for me to understand why. She’s using some pretty specialized terms here.”

“She’s one of the people who can survive in the field,” Coop said.

“I guess so,” Perkins said.

“Ask her,” Coop snapped.

“Yes,” the woman said before Perkins could ask. Then the woman pointed to herself and then to Bridge. She swept her hands out, then held up five fingers, probably indicating the others in her group.

Explorers. Scientists. People with an ability to survive which others didn’t have.

That was the dynamic of the group. They weren’t military. They were thrown together for a common purpose. Which explained Bridge’s behavior. He was in charge of things elsewhere and not used to taking orders, although he was trying.

Coop looked at the woman, this Boss. He said, “We’re going to figure out what’s gone wrong with the equipment. We’ll stop it from killing your friends.”

She frowned, then glanced at Perkins, who translated.

The woman spoke. Coop didn’t understand a single word.

“What about your problem?” Perkins translated.

Meaning, what about you being stranded five thousand years in the future?

“We have some study to do,” Coop said. “Then we will talk further.”

He stood. He wanted the meeting to end. He needed to think about all of these things.

He needed to figure out what to do next.

***

Perkins took them back to the airlock. Coop told her and the guards that they couldn’t reveal any aspect of the conversation. Coop stressed that he wasn’t sure the others were telling the truth.

The guards looked relieved at that, but Perkins clearly didn’t believe him.

He didn’t believe it either.

After everyone left, Coop sat alone in the briefing room. He shut off the wall screens, opaqued the door, and put his head in his hands.

Stranded. Five thousand years from family, friends, the Fleet, his mission, his very life.

Stranded.

Not drifting, like he had done for fifteen days, but stuck in a new place, a place that didn’t remember much about his people, a place that didn’t even speak the same language.

He had the training to deal with parts of this. He had been taught to go into a new culture, to understand it, and to use that understanding for the betterment of the Fleet and the culture itself.

But the Fleet was gone.

It was now the ship. The Ivoire and its crew of five hundred.

Five hundred people, who would feel exactly what he was feeling.

Lost. Abandoned. Trapped.

Helpless.

It took him nearly an hour to realize he had accepted the woman’s version.

He stood, ran his hand through his hair, and went to the bridge.

He finally knew what he had to do.

***

He sent the scientists to confirm what the woman had said. They had to test the equipment, test the anacapa drive, figure out the age of the repair room itself, as if it were an alien place.

He sent a small team through the corridors in environmental suits, figuring if most of the others couldn’t come in here, his people couldn’t go out there. But that was wrong.

They could and did go through the corridors, most of them unfamiliar and unmapped. They used handhelds to figure out where the city was—Coop didn’t want them interacting with the locals, not yet—and how long it had been there.

He sent Yash to investigate the base’s anacapa drive.

It was malfunctioning and it had been blowing holes in the surface for a very long time. Energy would back up in the system and come out sideways, making the holes unpredictable.

It took very little to repair that problem.

But, Yash said, the problems with the anacapa drive meant that it could have brought them to the right place at the wrong time.

They were stranded, and there was absolutely nothing Coop could do about it.

***

After nearly a week, he asked the woman to meet him in the repair room. He asked her to come alone. He carried a handheld with Perkins’ language program downloaded, so that he could get at least a partial translation of the woman’s words.

He had been studying her language as well. He had a hunch it would be his language in the future.

He waited for her just outside the ship.

This was his first time out of the Ivoire since it returned to Sector Base V. The air was chilly and it smelled metallic, like always. The particles brushed his skin as they fell around him, gentle and soft.

He wore a pair of black pants and a short-sleeved black shirt, with black boots. He had decided against a uniform.

He wanted her to take him to the surface.

She came alone. She didn’t ask how he was. She could tell. She would have guessed that he had done his research, and had confirmed much of what she told him.

He knew now that she had told him the truth.

Perkins had already asked her to take him to the surface. She had warned him that no one knew that the ship existed. He would have to pass himself off as part of her crew.

He didn’t mind.

He needed to know what he was facing.

The woman came up to him and stopped. She gave him a rueful smile.

“I’m sorry,” she said in his language.

He wanted to say that he was fine, that it didn’t matter. He was the commander of the Ivoire, one of the best ships in the Fleet, and as such, he could help her with her problem, shutting down the energy leaks all over the sector.

But he didn’t say that. He would tell her that eventually, but he wasn’t that strong.

He wasn’t fine.

“Thank you,” he said in her language.

She slipped a hand through his arm, a gesture he had never seen from her, not in all the time he had observed her.

He put his hand over hers. She looked up at him.

“What do I call you?” he asked in her language.

She paused for a moment. Then she leaned her head on his shoulder just briefly before answering.

“Friend,” she said in his language. “I am your friend.”

Friend. It was a beginning.

“Friend,” he said to her. “I like that very much.”

Then they walked through the repair room doors, into the corridor, heading to the surface, to a place Coop had never seen before, a place he had been as a child, as a young man.

A place he had once known and a place he had to learn anew.

They walked, and with each step, Coop felt his mission changing. He would represent the Fleet here, in this place.

Once he understood it.

Once he knew exactly how he and his new friends fit in.

“Becoming One With The Ghosts” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch was first published in Asimov’s SF Magazine, October/November 2010

STEALTH

NOW

“GO, GO, GO, GO!” Squishy waved her arms, shouting as she did.

She stood in the mouth of the corridor and watched as scientist after scientist fled the research station, running directly toward the ships.

The corridors were narrow, the lights on bright, the environmental system on full. It would have been cold in the corridors if it weren’t for the panicked bodies hurrying past her. The sharp tang of fear rose off them, and she heard more than one person grunt.

“Go, go, go!” She continued shouting and waving her arms, but she had to struggle to be heard over the emergency sirens.

An automated voice, androgynous and much too calm, repeated the same instructions every thirty seconds: Emergency evacuation underway. Proceed to your designated evac area. If that evac area is sealed off, proceed to your secondary evac area. Do not finish your work. Do not bring your work. Once life tags move out of an area, that area will seal off. If sealed inside, no one will rescue you. Do not double back. Go directly to your designated evac area. The station will shut down entirely in…fifteen…minutes.

Only the remaining time changed. Squishy’s heart was pounding. Her palms were damp, and she kept running her fingers over them.

“Hurry!” she said, pushing one of the scientists forward, almost causing him to trip. “Get the hell out of here!”

Another ran by her, clutching a jar. She stopped him, took the jar, and set it down.

He reached for it. “My life’s work—”

“Had better be backed up off site,” she said, even though she knew it wasn’t. The off-site backups were the first thing destroyed, nearly three hours before. “Get out of here. Now!”

He gave the jar one last look, then scurried away. She glanced at the jar too, saw it pulsating, hating it, and wanting to kick it over. But she didn’t.

She stood against the wall, moving the teams forward, getting them out. No one was going to die this day.

A woman clutched at her. “My family—”

“Will find you. They’ve been notified of the evac,” Squishy said, even though she had no idea if that were true.

“Are they far enough away?” the woman asked, clutching at Squishy.

What made these people so damn clingy? She didn’t remember scientists being clingy before.

“They are,” Squishy said, “but you’re not.”

She pushed at the woman, and the woman stumbled, then started to run, letting her panic take over. They’d had drills here: Squishy made sure of that when she arrived, but apparently no one thought about what the drills actually implied.

And this was no drill.

Her ears ached from the sirens. Then the stupid automated voice started up again.

Emergency evacuation underway. Proceed to your designated evac area….

She tuned it out, counting the scientists as they passed. There was no way she could count a thousand people, not that all of them would run past her anyway. But she was keeping track. Numbers always helped her keep track.

Her heart raced, as if it were running along with everyone else.

Quint stumbled out of the side corridor, his face bloody, his shirt torn. He reached her and she flinched.

“We have to evacuate,” he said, grabbing her.

“I’m going to go,” she said. “I want to make sure everyone’s out.”

“They’re out,” he said. “Let’s go.”

She shook her head. “You go. I’ll catch up.”

“Rosealma, we’re not doing this again,” he said.

“Yes, we are,” she said. “Get out now.”

“I’m not leaving you,” he said.

This was not the moment for him to develop balls. “Get out, Quint. I can take care of myself.”

I always have, she thought, but bit back the words.

“Rosealma,” he said. “I’m sorry—”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said. “Get out.”

And she shoved him. He lost his balance, his feet hitting the jar. It skittered across the floor, and she looked at it, wondering what would happen if the damn thing shattered.

He saw her. “Do we need that?”

“Aren’t you listening?” she said. “You’re supposed to leave everything behind.”

“You didn’t make the rules,” he snapped.

She pointed up, even though she wasn’t sure if the automated voice came from “up” or if it came from some other direction. It did rather feel like the Voice of God.

“Those aren’t my rules,” she said. “They’re the station’s. Now, hurry. I’ll be right behind you.”

“Promise me you won’t do anything stupid, Rosealma,” he said.

“When have I done anything stupid?” she asked, sounding calmer than she felt. Sometimes she thought that everything she had done was stupid. Hell, she knew that everything she had ever done was stupid. That was why she was here, to make up for the stupid, and it wasn’t coming out so well.

“Rosealma—”

“Go,” she said.

He gave her an odd look and then hurried, half-running, half-walking down the corridor. Twice he glanced over his shoulder, as if he expected her to follow.

She didn’t.

The corridor was emptying out. No one had run past in at least a minute. The damn sirens sounded even louder in the emptiness.

Emergency evacuation underway. Proceed to your designated evac area….

“Shut up,” she whispered, wishing she could shut the stupid voice down. But she didn’t dare. She needed everyone off this station.

She needed everyone to live.

NINETEEN YEARS EARLIER

THE MOOD ON THE SKIP was tense. The light was terrible. The tourist was lying next to the door, unconscious, blood covering his face. The three women running the dive stood near the control panel, looking down at him.

None of them wanted to help him. Rosealma knew that without consulting with the other two.

“He hasn’t even gotten off the skip yet,” Turtle said. She was thin and looked strange in her environmental suit. She hadn’t put on the helmet, and without it, she really did look like a turtle.

She had gotten the nickname long before Rosealma met her, but Rosealma understood why the first time she’d seen Turtle in her environmental suit with her tiny head sticking out of it.

“Just because they have money doesn’t mean they have brains,” said the spacer-thin woman leading this little dive. She wouldn’t tell anyone her name, insisting on being called Boss.

Rosealma didn’t call anyone Boss, particularly a thirty-something woman whose only claim to the job title was the fact that she owned the skip that was taking them to the celebrated space wreck.

Still, this Boss promised good money for the practice dive, as she called it, and if the dive worked out, then both Turtle and Rosealma could join her team of divers. Boss wanted to take divers to real wrecks, unexplored wrecks, not the historic wrecks that tourists wanted to see. But she couldn’t do that without government funding, and Boss never took money from the Enterran Empire—or so she said.

“Look,” Rosealma said, squatting beside the stupid tourist. “I have some equipment. Let me see what I can do.”

“We need to get him back.” Boss ran a hand through her short cap of chestnut hair. “He needs a medic.”

“I am a medic,” Rosealma snapped.

Turtle looked at her in surprise. The two of them had been sleeping together for six months, and Rosealma hadn’t told Turtle about her background. Or, rather, Rosealma hadn’t told Turtle much about her background, including her medical training and her various scientific degrees.

“Then get to it,” Boss said. “I don’t think he’ll appreciate getting an infection on top of losing the eye.”

“He’s not going to lose the eye.” Rosealma grabbed the skip’s medical kit from beside the control panel. Then she took her own tools from the bag she carried on every single trip.

“He’s going to lose the eye,” Boss said stubbornly, and she didn’t sound sympathetic.

Rosealma wasn’t sympathetic either. The guy really was an idiot. He had a tiny knife and he had been gesturing with it, explaining to Boss how he would cut just a small bit of the historic wreck as a souvenir, and how it wouldn’t hurt the wreck at all.

Boss had gotten angry and told him that if he were going to cut up the wreck, then she wouldn’t take him to it. He had leaned toward her, shaking that little knife, blade up, and said, I’m paying you, honey, to take me to that wreck, and if you don’t put me on it, then I’m not paying for anything.

You already paid a deposit, Boss had said.

I’ll take it back.

Just try, she had said, and smiled.

He had leaned toward her, waving that blade, and the skip had lurched just enough so that he had lost his footing. He had let out a little squeak, and had fallen forward, the knife skittering out of his hand, leaving a tiny blood trail on the skip’s floor.

Rosealma had glanced over her shoulder at the crucial moment. Turtle had been standing near the control panel, but she hadn’t been touching it.

Or at least, she hadn’t been touching it a second after the skip lurched. What she’d been doing a second or two before the lurch no one would ever know.

“The idiot sliced through his own eyeball,” Boss said.

“I don’t know why you let him come on board with a weapon,” Turtle said.

“I didn’t,” Boss said. “The thing was small enough for him to conceal.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Rosealma said. “If you move away, I can help him.”

“I almost wish you wouldn’t,” Boss said.

“Then you’ll get sued,” Rosealma said, although she didn’t know if that were true.

She crouched over the stupid tourist, tilted his head back and cleaned the blood away from the eye. Then she used her handheld to magnify the eyeball.

Just like she thought. He had nicked it, making it bleed. Most of the blood came from the socket, not the eye itself.

She had an entire stash of lenses. Too many cases of laser blindness had made her cautious. The lenses would graft onto the eyeball, and serve as a protection until the victim could get to a real medical facility.

Boss was watching. Turtle leaned over.

“Squishy,” Turtle said.

“What?” Rosealma asked.

“It looks squishy. Is it?”

Boss uttered a shaky laugh, and looked at Turtle. “For a minute, I thought you were calling her Squishy.”

“Why not?” Rosealma muttered. “One name is the same as another.”

She worked on the eye—and noted that it was a little squishy—but she didn’t tell them that. Then she patched him up, but she didn’t give him anything that would wake him. He needed to heal and they didn’t need to listen to his bluster. He wasn’t going to get to dive his precious little historic wreck, and Rosealma doubted he would get his deposit back, no matter how hard he protested.

Boss turned the skip around and headed back to her larger ship, Nobody’s Business. For the rest of the trip, Turtle called Rosealma Squishy, and giggled.

The name stuck.

NOW

THE CORRIDOR WAS EMPTY. The sirens continued to wail, and the androgynous voice repeatedly informed Squishy that she had only five minutes to evacuate.

She reached down and grabbed that jar. It was warm. She wondered what the hell it actually was. She knew what it wasn’t. It wasn’t a functioning anacapa drive.

But it might have been a malfunctioning version of it, missing the various pieces that actually made the anacapa function.

She carried the jar to one of the side rooms and set it inside.

Then she took one last look around. It hadn’t been a bad research station. The station had been well designed and well equipped, although all of the state-of-the-art protections, all of the one-of-a-kind technology couldn’t help it now.

She tapped into the control panel on the wall, looking for heat signatures and individual life tags. Everyone who was supposed to be here was tagged, and should show up on the panel. Everyone who wasn’t supposed to be here should show up as a heat signature.

She was the only heat signature and had the only tag. In a place that normally housed a thousand scientists, she was the only one who remained.

She let out a small sigh of relief.

The sirens sounded even louder than they had before, probably because the station was empty. All of the spaceships had left as well, except for her designated evacuation vessel. She opened its systems, checked to make sure it was empty, then shut it down.

Finally, she punched in an access code, opening previously sealed corridors, then sprinted out the door.

The androgynous voice accompanied her.

Emergency evacuation underway. Proceed to your designated evac area….

She wanted to tell it to shut up, but of course it would shut up involuntarily, and not too long from now.

She ran as fast as she could down the escape route she had set up more than a month before. She wasn’t in the best shape any longer, even though she had made certain to exercise every day. It didn’t matter. She couldn’t run as fast as she used to.

She wondered if that would make a difference. Maybe she should have gone to her designated evac area.

As if to mock her, the androgynous voice was telling her to get to that evac area.

…Do not double back. Go directly to your designated evac area. The station will shut down entirely in…five…minutes.

“Shut up,” she whispered, using precious breath. She was breathing harder than she expected.

She skidded around the last corner, putting out a hand to catch herself, then headed to the last remaining ship.

It wasn’t quite a single ship and it wasn’t quite a skip. It was a modified cruiser, one she had designed herself and parked on the station when she first arrived months ago.

She reached into her pocket, clicked the ship’s remote, and ordered it to start, hoping the station’s systems did not prevent the remote access. She had set them up so that they wouldn’t, but everything changed in an emergency.

…Do not finish your work. Do not bring your work. Once life tags move out of an area, that area will seal off….

If she survived this, she would be hearing that stupid voice in her sleep. Small price, she supposed. Maybe she could try some dedicated dreaming and shoot out the voice.

The doors were open to the docking area. The stupid voice was lying about everything being sealed off.

Well, not lying exactly. Unable to cope with directions Squishy had programmed long ago. She wanted her ship, not some designated evac vessel that she couldn’t control. She hadn’t even checked her dedicated evac vessel for supplies and provisions, although she made sure her cruiser was well stocked.

…The station will shut down entirely in…three…minutes.

She ran up the ramp. The door to the ship, which she had rechristened The Dane in a fit of whimsy, stood open. She hurried inside, slammed the lock, shot through the airlock and into the ship itself.

Only two meters to the command chair, and she crossed those faster than she had run through the corridors. She slammed her open palm on the controls, recited the Old Earth Standard nonsense poem she had learned in the last year, and the controls came on.

Then she hit the preprogrammed escape plan and the ship roared into life. It rose and headed toward the docking doors faster than they were opening.

She cursed and hoped there was some kind of failsafe for those doors, because she didn’t want to slow down and she didn’t want to hit them and she certainly didn’t want to be here with the station about to blow.

At the last second the doors slammed open (or, at least, she thought they slammed—they shook the wall as they hit it, which had to sound like slamming, although she couldn’t hear it) and then she was free of the place.

The Dane zoomed away from the station as fast as the ship could safely go without hitting FTL. She turned the screens onto the station itself, imagined that snarky automated voice continuing its countdown to the now empty station:

The station will shut down entirely in…five…four…three…two…one….

She raised her head, expecting to see the station blow into a million pieces. Instead it remained intact and she wondered if she had gotten her count wrong. She hadn’t really been paying attention to the clock. She’d been running, not counting minutes.

Her heart was pounding and she was breathing hard. Her palm had left a damp print on the controls.

She stared at the screens and wondered, for the very first time, if she had gotten it all wrong.

NINETEEN YEARS EARLIER

THE WOMAN SITTING at the edge of the bar wasn’t pretty. She was too thin, her head too small, her features not clearly defined. She wasn’t even a woman—not quite, anyway. She was probably eighteen if she was a day, but she pretended to be older, and that had caught Rosealma’s attention.

That, and the woman’s cap of brownish-blond hair. The hair was choppy, clearly cut by the woman herself. The woman’s long fingers were wrapped around a mug of some kind of ale, and she looked lonely.

Maybe it was the loneliness that caught Rosealma. Or maybe it was the woman’s sideways glances. Rosealma tried not to watch her, but there was something, something interesting, the first interesting thing Rosealma had seen since she left Vallevu.

The bar was old and seedy, the space station not much better. Rosealma had used the last of her hazard pay to get here, and really didn’t want to leave. She had placed six months’ rent on a berth that wasn’t much more than a bed, an entertainment wall, and an unlimited supply of reading material from the station’s rather eclectic (and ancient) library.

At the moment, she was staying off the grid. Not because anyone was looking for her, but because she didn’t want to be bothered.

So far no one had bothered her. One old spacer had told her she had the “look.”

It’s your eyes, he said, leaving off the endearment she had heard him use with other women on the station. You got that long stare. You seen stuff, stuff I’m not sure I want to hear about.

He was right: he didn’t want to hear it. She didn’t want to tell him. She didn’t want to tell anyone. She didn’t want to talk, not about her past. She wanted to pretend that her life had started here, on this stupid station, way out at the ass-end of nowhere.

The woman glanced at her again, and Rosealma lifted her own mug of ale in a kind of toast. The woman smiled. She tilted her head sideways as she did so, as if she couldn’t quite believe she had caught another person’s attention. She might even have been blushing.

The bar owner, who was also the bartender, shouted at someone near the entrance, something about non-payment of a bill. Rosealma didn’t listen. Out here, everyone was short of money, and everyone wanted something for nothing.

She found it was easier to remain quiet about everything, to be ignored rather than draw attention to herself. She had come as close to disappearing as a human being could without actually losing her identity and starting all over.

The woman at the end of the bar glanced at Rosealma again, then looked at the seat next to her.

Rosealma’s breath caught. She wasn’t sure if she should walk over. If she had a flirtation with the woman, then she would be noticed, and everything would change.

Still, she hadn’t had a real conversation in six months, and surprisingly, she missed talking. Not about trivial things like the quality of the ale or the best place to eat for the fewest credits, but about ideas and politics and science and the things that people talked about when they were laughing and relaxing with each other.

She missed interaction, and she never thought she would.

She sighed, stood, and grabbed her mug of ale.

Then the lights flickered out, and her stomach floated. She recognized the moment as it happened: the gravity had changed. The lights came back on just as she floated upwards, her ale floating with her, the glass emptying and beads of liquid dotting everything around her.

No one screamed like they would have had this been planetside, although a few people cursed as their beverages took on a life of their own. The chairs and tables were bolted down, but the mugs weren’t, and neither was the ice or the bar snacks or the lemons, olives, and cherries.

She and everyone else in the bar were in the middle of a choreographed mess, which would only get worse when the gravity returned to normal.

Behind her, the bar owner shouted, “You son of a bitch!” and that was when she realized that the gravity change wasn’t some kind of malfunction; it had been planned, probably to get money out of the bar owner.

She glanced at the woman and was startled to see how lovely she looked, her cap of hair spiking upwards, her long limbs gangly no longer. The woman looked at home in zero-g, as if floating was her preferred method of travel.

She used the tops of chairs to slowly propel herself toward Rosealma.

“It looks like there’s trouble,” the woman said, glancing toward the main entrance. The bar owner was shaking his fist, propelling himself backwards as he did so, probably the only person in the entire bar who wasn’t used to zero-g.

Rosealma couldn’t tell which of the people floating around him had made him angry, and she really didn’t want to find out. She smiled at the woman.

“I’m Rosealma.”

The woman’s eyebrows went up, giving her smile a wry cynicism. “Wow, that’s a mouthful. You don’t have a nickname?”

“Do I need one?” Rosealma asked.

“Everyone out here has a nickname. It’s easier.”

“Easier?”

“Yeah,” the woman said. “That way we don’t have to clarify which Rose or Alma we’re talking about. We don’t need last names or even first names. We’re just too damn lazy anyway.”

And then she laughed. The laugh was raspy and deep, and Rosealma realized that the woman hadn’t been eighteen for a long time. She was at least in her mid-twenties, maybe older, and she had seen as much or more than Rosealma had.

“What’s your nickname?” Rosealma asked.

“Turtle,” the woman said. “You know what a turtle is?”

“Some kind of Earth creature.”

“Earth hell,” Turtle said. “The little ones are all the way out here. Some ships have them as mascots.”

“You’re someone’s mascot?”

Turtle grinned at her. “Naw. I look like a turtle.”

“You don’t,” Rosealma said, although she wasn’t exactly sure what a turtle looked like. “You’re the prettiest thing in this bar.”

Turtle smiled and tilted her head again. Her cheeks did turn red. “You be careful,” she said, “or I’ll start thinking you’re flirting with me.”

“Maybe I am flirting,” Rosealma said, startled at her own boldness.

Turtle’s smile grew. “Then we should get out of this bar before the gravity changes. It’s going to be a mess and I’ll feel obligated to clean it up.”

“I don’t feel obligated to anything,” Rosealma said. Which wasn’t true, of course. She felt obligated for everything, and sorry for even more, and the weight of everything, from the regrets to the losses to the destruction of all of her dreams threatened to crash her to the floor quicker than a gravity change.

“So you’re running away,” Turtle said. Her tone was businesslike, not curious. She wasn’t asking a question, just stating a fact.

“No,” Rosealma said. “You have to care to run away.”

Turtle studied her for a moment, the smile gone. Then she nodded once. “Well, then, I need to run away from this bar.” She extended her hand. “You want to come along?”

Rosealma looked at Turtle’s hand, with its long fingers and visibly chewed cuticles. Rosealma took it almost before she realized she had made a decision.

“Let’s go,” she said, “and never look back.”

Turtle raised their joined hands. “Deal,” she said.

NOW

THE STATION BLEW.

It started in the middle. A glow built, then expanded. The center disappeared in the light, and that’s when Squishy realized it was imploding.

She slammed her palm on the control panel, her fingers grasping for the FTL command. It took four movements to launch FTL, and her shaking hand made all four hard. It felt like the movements took forever, even though it probably only took a few seconds. Still, she had to get out of here.

Silently she cursed herself for wanting to see the explosion.

The Dane winked out, the images vanishing from the screen, and as they did, she collapsed in the command chair, hands to her face. Her heart was pounding and she was feeling just a little queasy.

She had pulled it off, and no one died.

“You want to explain to me what the fuck just happened?”

The male voice made her jump. She had thought she was alone. She had assumed she was alone. She hadn’t even checked to see if anyone had gotten into The Dane. The Dane would have masked a heat signature from the station’s control board. She would have had to ask The Dane as she got into the airlock, and she had been in such a hurry, she hadn’t thought of it.

She was such an idiot.

She dropped her hands slowly, making herself breathe as she did so. She wanted to seem calmer than she was, even though he had seen her jump.

She recognized the voice—how could she not? She had lived with it for years, and when she heard it again, even after the loss of decades, it was as if she had never been away from him.

Quint.

She turned her chair toward him.

He leaned against the entrance, arms crossed. There was only one other room in this cruiser, and he had probably been waiting in it. She hadn’t bothered to check. Her mistake.

The blood had dried on his face, black and crusty, outlining the wrinkles he had allowed to appear on his skin over the decades. The ripped shirt was gone, though, replaced by his uniform’s brown jacket. He probably hadn’t looked at his reflection. He probably didn’t realize the blood was still on his face, if he had even known it was on his face in the first place.

The fact that he was on her ship surprised her. Not because he figured out it was hers, but because it took some stones to avoid the evac ships and wait for her, stones she hadn’t realized he had.

She hadn’t answered his question. He raised his eyebrows, silently asking it again.

“The station blew up,” she said. “Or it was blowing up, just like we knew it would. I just hit the FTL. The last thing we want is to be near that part of space. There’s a good chance that explosion could open an interdimensional rift.”

He frowned. “A what?”

She almost smiled, but she didn’t. She had distracted him. He hadn’t really been asking about the station before.

“An interdimensional rift.” She swallowed. “The stealth tech was unstable.”

“It’s always been unstable,” he snapped. “You know that better than most.”

She nodded. She did know it better than most. That was why she was here. But she wasn’t going to tell him that. At least, not yet.

“Yes,” she said. “But this time, the entire research station paid the price instead of a few volunteers.”

“A few….” He shook his head. She could almost read his mind. They both knew that it wasn’t a few volunteers who had paid the price over the years. It had been hundreds of people, most of whom hadn’t volunteered at all, unless their induction into the Enterran military counted as volunteering.

“Only this time,” she said, “no one died.”

“That you know of,” he said.

“I do know,” she said. “In fact, I’m certain. 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. “With five minutes left, what would you have done?”

“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 whoever was trapped had gotten out on their own. Could have gotten out on their own.

“Something.” He snorted. “Don’t lie to me, Rosealma.”

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 backwards.

Or at least, not backwards yet.

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

She made herself take a deep breath. They 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 flick 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, and she felt a surge of anger. Even the anger didn’t dissipate over time. It was like being an alcoholic—one drink, one surge of anger—and everything came back as if it had never disappeared.

“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.”

He stared at her.

“What if I hadn’t come here?” 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 did he know 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. 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.

“I saw no reason to change it,” she said.

“Never remarried?” He didn’t ask if she had ever fallen in love, ever had another relationship. Quint was about the legalities. He had always been about the legalities.

“No,” she said.

He remained silent so that she could ask What about you?, but she didn’t.

“Me, either,” he said after a moment.

She nodded once, then 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.

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. “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.”

“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 payouts, you’ll see one to me.”

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, maybe if he did, they could talk. Maybe if he regretted all he had done, they could talk.

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

SIX MONTHS EARLIER

THE RESEARCH STATION was a marvel. She hadn’t seen anything that big or that well constructed before. At first, it intimidated her, and then 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 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 she 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. When she had initially been stationed at Vallevu, she hadn’t lived planetside. She had lived in the science station, in orbit. The families lived on the planet below for safety’s sake, and that part had worked.

No one in the families had died there. 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.

Well, not quite like the first. Because her diving career had ended with two deaths she tried to prevent instead of hundreds of deaths she had caused.

She used to shut down when she thought of those deaths, but no longer. Now they made her angry.

And anger was why she had come to this research station. Anger, and the taste she had recently acquired for revenge.

But she hadn’t expected to find Quint here. On her second day as a full-time employee of the research station, she had been sitting in the spectacular office they had given her when he ducked his head inside and said, “Bet you never expected to see me again.”

Her breath caught and it took her a moment to compose herself. She didn’t smile. Quint didn’t deserve her smile.

“I certainly didn’t expect to see you here,” she said and that was true.

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

She struggled not to remain steady. She didn’t want to be near him.

“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 swallowed, feeling off balance for the first time since she had arrived. She didn’t want to “play” this at all. She wanted to pretend it had never happened, but it had, and now she had to deal with her ex-husband, who both knew her better than anyone ever had and who didn’t know her at all.

“Is there something in between?” she asked.

His smile faded a little. “How about I come back after we’ve had some time to think about it?”

She nodded.

“Thanks,” she said and returned to her desk, continuing to unpack. After a moment, she realized he was still standing there. Apparently, she wasn’t going to get rid of him as easily as she wanted to.

“What are you doing here, really?” she asked.

“I always check in the new arrivals,” he said. “I was surprised to see your name.”

“I’ll bet,” she said. She hadn’t looked for his. She had looked for one other name, the former head of the stealth tech project, Boss’s father. But she hadn’t seen his name. Boss believed him dead, and Squishy thought the same thing. But sometimes, it paid to be cautious.

Although she hadn’t been cautious enough with the names from her own past.

Then she realized exactly what Quint had 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.”

NOW

SHE COULDN’T GO to the rendezvous point. Not even if she somehow dropped Quint off along the way. He was watching her, in ways she hadn’t expected.

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.

“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 an escape pod? 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. “No one died this time.”

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

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

TWENTY-ONE YEARS EARLIER

“YOU DID WHAT?” Rosealma asked, standing behind the clear double panes. She was queasy, hands on the control panel, feeling like she was going to be sick.

Not again, she thought. Not again.

She had helped design this military base. She was the one who suggested putting it in orbit above a sparsely populated planet. She was the one who suggested that the families live in Vallevu, a very pretty city on the ground below, so that they were nowhere near the experiments.

She had set up the sections of the base, keeping various experiments away from other experiments. The dangerous stuff was so far away from the operational and housing parts of the base that people joked about it, saying they needed a shuttle just to get to work in the morning.

She wanted it that way. She had even worked on the committees that set up the procedures and regulations—no one worked alone, no one worked on stealth tech in isolation, no one experimented on human subjects without a mountain of approval, no one made decisions without some kind of failsafe.

And now she stood in the deepest, darkest, most distant stealth tech lab, and saw—nothing. No lab techs, no furniture, no walls. Even part of the interior of the damn base was missing.

Her stomach hurt and her hands trembled. The scientist beside her was just a baby, round-faced, wide-eyed, barely old enough to have a graduate degree, let alone the kind of credentials that allowed him to work in her lab.

Not that she was much older, in years anyway. But in life—she had aged fifty years in the past five.

“What did you do?” she asked again.

She knew it was him because he was the only one in the staging area, and he was the one who called her, which pissed her off, because he should have contacted an entire team when something went wrong.

“I—” His voice broke, and she wasn’t sure he would be able to get the words out. She needed him to get the words out because if he didn’t, she would have to review the logs, and that would take time, time she suspected they didn’t have.

“I can’t fix this unless you tell me what you did,” she snapped.

He opened his mouth, then closed it. She cursed, and turned to the control panel. She’d even had a control panel installed in each of the labs as if they were separate laboratory ships operating in deep space. If anything went wrong, the labs should have isolated themselves even farther, but this one hadn’t. She had no idea how many people had been working in the next lab over, the lab that was no longer there, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. But she was going to have to find out.

“You said we actually got the cloak to work,” he said.

She whirled on him. What was his name? Robbie, Reggie, Ralphie? She glanced at the name badge along the front of his uniform jacket. Hansen. Radley Hansen.

“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 what 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 backwards and forwards—”

“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 backwards, 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 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 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 instant access 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 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.

“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 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 it 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. 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 backwards 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 forwards, then backwards in time, maybe she could move people forwards, then backwards 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.

NOW

HE ACTUALLY NEEDED some minor surgery on some of the cuts. They were deep and too wide, and filled with all kinds of debris. She convinced him to lie down on the only bed—a foldout that recessed into a wall.

While she worked on his cuts, she couldn’t stop thinking about what he had said.

She hadn’t compared the number of people who escaped to the number of people who had been in the station that day. And if he were right, then a few people—not just Cloris—could have died, and it wouldn’t have shown up on Squishy’s scans. At least, it wouldn’t have shown up with the scans she had done.

Maybe if she had done some others….

She forced herself to concentrate on the microsurgery she was doing. She had to clean out those wounds carefully. She couldn’t leave even the smallest bit of debris in them. She had no idea what was in that particular stealth tech experiment that Cloris had destroyed or if whatever had embedded itself in Quint’s skin had been from that experiment. It might have been from her bomb, or it might have been from the room itself. Or something from a rift—she had no idea.

But Cloris had vanished. Quint told Squishy that much by repeating her own words to her. Cloris had vanished in that bright light, and because the Enterran military’s science branch had yet to rule on what that meant in connection to stealth tech, Cloris was still technically alive.

Squishy had run into that at Vallevu, the way that all of the survivors left behind on the planet couldn’t get death benefits—and some survivors didn’t want death benefits, because they didn’t want to believe their loved ones had died, even though years had gone by.

Still not focusing, not entirely. The news of Cloris’s death had shaken Squishy more than she wanted to admit. She had planned to pull off this particular job without killing anyone.

She had failed.

But she couldn’t fail at this. Microsurgery had become a specialty of hers. General practice medicine had become a specialty—a way of making up for all the people her other specialties had killed.

Each cut in Quint’s face had come from her. Indirectly, of course. But still, she was responsible.

So she was responsible for fixing them.

Quint watched her work. It must have seemed odd, her gloved fingers touching him so close to his eyes. But he didn’t flinch, and he didn’t say anything and that bothered her almost as much as his steady gaze. She felt like he could see through her, and that bothered her too. She had loved that about him when she was younger, but she had become extremely private over the years. She valued that privacy. It was part of her. She didn’t want to change it now.

When she finished, she rubbed an additional numbing agent across his skin. He would be sore for days because of what she had done. Field medicine wasn’t nearly as good as medicine at any starbase.

“You’re going to need to see a real surgeon,” she said as she removed her gloves and dropped them into the bin she’d built into the cruiser. “You’ll need a double-check on my work.”

“Your work is fine,” Quint said, his words slightly mangled because the numbing agent made it hard for him to move the muscles in his cheek.

“No, it’s not,” Squishy said. “You’ll have terrible scars if you don’t see someone soon. I don’t have the equipment to properly fix the skin. I’m going to do a scan for somewhere nearby that has good medical facilities. I’ll change our course and drop you there.”

He sat up, put his hand up as if he were going to touch his face, and then clearly changed his mind. “Then what will happen to you?”

“I’ll stay until your surgery is over,” she lied.

He smiled—or tried to. It looked a bit lopsided because of the numbing agent. “No you won’t, Rosealma. You’ll leave the minute they take me into the facility, not that it matters. The Empire is looking for you and they will find you.”

She went cold. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that before we left, I let the authorities know that you were the one who blew the station. I gave them the identification information for this ship. They’ll track you, find you, and put you in prison, Rose.”

She rubbed her hands together. Her palms were wet. She had gone from cold to a cold sweat in the space of a few seconds. “Why would you do that?”

“You killed Cloris,” Quint said.

“Not according to imperial law, I didn’t,” Squishy said, then realized she was admitting to the explosions. “And there’s no proof I did anything wrong.”

“There wouldn’t have been,” he said, “if you had gone directly to your evac ship, Rose. But you didn’t. You came here.”

“I explained that,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “You did.”

TWENTY-ONE YEARS EARLIER

SIXTEEN HOURS AFTER Quint brought food, Rosealma managed to shut down the experiment. It had taken all kinds of finagling. She thought she had shut it down six hours before, but she hadn’t. Testing and retesting and even more testing showed her something was still pulsing.

She had to go back to the earliest experiments to figure out how to turn the damn thing off. She had to go back to that afternoon when they lost Professor Holmes in one of the simplest stealth tech experiments ever done.

Rosealma—a post-doc—had been the one to finally shut down that experiment, and she was the one who shut down this one.

And if someone asked her to explain exactly how she did it, she wouldn’t be able to do so. Normally she had a very orderly mind, but not this afternoon or evening or whenever the hell it had become. Her expanded mind felt like it was becoming part of the stealth tech, like it was stretching into a variety of dimensions, and that was when she realized what the pulses were—an attempt to reach those dimensions.

She had been trying to shut down a cloak, and that hadn’t worked. But when she shut down the device that could reach outside of this dimension—when she had actually looked at the experiment as something that crossed both space and time—she was able to deactivate it.

She still wasn’t sure she had shut it all down—she wasn’t sure they could shut it down. Not after what they had done. But she had disabled it or made it inactive, at least for the time being.

Then she had sent the others out, asked for a meeting with the head of the base via vid conference, and told him that this device, this cloak that her people had created, needed to be put somewhere far away from human beings, from any possibility of human beings ever traveling through, and certainly not any place where those human beings would colonize.

He said he understood. He said the military would find such a place. She gave instructions for transport, made him swear that he wouldn’t destroy the base with the device in it—explaining, once again, the disaster—and then she left it to him.

She evacuated like everyone else had, and trusted the military to take care of it.

Only later did she realize that they had followed part of her instruction, but not all of it.

They had taken the device away before destroying the military base. They blew up the base, but first they made sure that no stealth tech was on board.

And they didn’t abandon the experiments at all.

Instead, they moved the experiments to an even more remote site, did not let the scientists working on them have their families anywhere nearby, and made everyone who worked around stealth tech sign waivers in case of “accidental death or disappearance.”

But Rosealma didn’t find out about that for a year. She was too busy, testifying at the various courts martial and being investigated herself for some kind of negligence.

Eventually, she was cleared, and then she was offered a new job: Director of Stealth Tech Research.

And that made her furious.

NOW

SQUISHY USED CLEANING SOLUTION on her hands, then cleaned her surgical instruments. She didn’t put them away, however. She still needed to run them through the sonic cleaner. But she didn’t want to leave Quint alone in the cockpit.

He was sitting up. His skin looked raw from the cleaners she had used on it. The cuts dotted his face. They weren’t as bad as they had been, but they would scar without the proper treatment. And they would hurt when the numbing agent wore off. She could still give him something, knock him out, take him to some place on her own. And she was considering it.

“You came here too,” she said, continuing the conversation.

He had said she made a mistake coming to this ship; she could argue that he made the same mistake.

She said, “It would have been easier for you to evacuate. You had already given the authorities my information. There was no reason for you to join me.”

He gave her a hurt look. “You need me.”

He had said that in the past, and it never failed to provoke her. It angered her now. She didn’t need him. She had never needed him.

She had no idea why he thought she did.

“Why do I need you?” she asked, unable to keep the sarcasm out of her voice.

“Because I’m the only person who can prevent you from disappearing into the bowels of the Empire’s prison system.”

“You sound like I’ve already been tried and convicted,” she said.

He shrugged. “Times are different now. You destroyed government property. Military property. That was classified as a weapons research site, Rose. They don’t need to try you. They just need to show a few select judges that you’re guilty.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You think they’d charge me with murder?’

“Probably not,” he said. “They’ll probably charge you with treason. Which is worse.”

She swallowed in spite of herself. “Murder can carry a death penalty. How is treason worse?”

He looked down at his hands. “There are some things, Rose, that you don’t want to live through.”

She felt even colder than she had. She hadn’t quite bargained for all of this. Somehow she had thought she would get away. Or maybe she had thought she would die on that station.

She had certainly made contingency plans for her own death. She had told the others how to get away if she didn’t show up. And she hadn’t thought of capture.

So what made her assume she wouldn’t show up? She had to have assumed, deep down, that she would die. Because dying was certainly no less than she deserved, not considering all that she had done.

Hundreds—quite literally hundreds—of people would still be alive if she hadn’t gone into stealth tech, if she hadn’t realized that no one was thinking about stealth tech correctly.

She even remembered the moment of realization. She remembered when it all started.

THIRTY-TWO YEARS EARLIER

ROSEALMA HAD BEEN NAÏVE and terrified, outside her element, in a school on Hector Prime, a school on the ground, in real gravity, in a place where she couldn’t just float away.

She had chosen the Mehkeydo Academy because it was the best planet-bound school in the sector. She had grown up on The Bounty, a multinational cargo vessel, that never stopped anywhere for longer than a few weeks. She had thought with the ignorance of youth that staying planet-bound would be interesting.

Instead, it had been stifling. She felt heavy and awkward and stupid, when she was none of those things. Because of her spacer background, she was the thinnest girl in class, and one of the smartest too. She had scored 100 on her boards, something no cargo monkey had ever done, and that made her eligible for full scholarships from the best schools in the Enterran Empire.

She had chosen Mehkeydo Academy, and for nearly two years, she believed she had chosen incorrectly.

Until that moment in class.

No one saw the change occur, because hardly anyone looked at her. Most people thought her odd—and from their standpoint, she was. Even the professor, Erasmus Dane, rarely looked at her.

He was strange too, that Dane. A highly regarded professor of Ancient Technologies, Dane loved anything old and out of date. He carried an ancient wooden pointer stick in his hand, tapping the metal tip on any surface to prove his point. He wore tweed jackets and wool trousers and always smelled a bit fusty, as if his clothes were as old as his obsessions.

And one of his obsessions was stealth tech. He called it the ultimate lost technology. In his introductory class, Technologies and the Ancient World, he explored the way that human beings—from the beginnings of known civilization on old Earth—gained and lost knowledge. His focus in that class was on a group known as the Romans, who built things from roads to aqueducts, and whose engineering abilities flummoxed succeeding cultures for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years.

By the end of that semester, he spoke about a legend of amazing ships and how he saw the people who flew them as the Romans that the Enterran Empire couldn’t quite emulate.

His mention of the fleet was the first time Rosealma had heard of it. The ships were called Dignity Vessels and they sounded magical: they were big and black and swooped like birds. They housed five hundred to a thousand to ten thousand crew members. They had weapons that could destroy entire planets. And they could vanish in the middle of battle, only to reappear at the exact right moment, and destroy entire squadrons.

Rosealma loved the Dignity Vessel stories. She particularly loved how heroic the leaders of the Dignity Vessels sounded. But most of all she loved the stories of the Dignity Vessel fleet—how it was a hundred or five hundred or a thousand strong and how it never went back to Old Earth where it came from. Instead, it traveled ever forward, on a mission to save the worlds beyond the stars, fighting for the underdog, saving peoples and cultures that couldn’t save themselves.

Dane claimed these stories had a basis in fact, and urged his students to find the truth. He had them dig through ancient records, through texts, and translations, finding any mention of Dignity Vessels and their crew.

Rosealma loved the assignment and spent most of her semester on it. She discovered that no ship had ten thousand crew members, and that the stories of the Dignity Vessels weren’t always heroic.

But she also discovered that the ability to appear and disappear in a battle wasn’t magical at all. It was technology based, and once upon a time, the Enterran Empire had known how to do the same thing.

The Enterran Empire called that ability stealth technology. And Rosealma moved from a study of the Dignity Vessels to a study of the history of stealth technology long before she took Dane’s Lost Technologies Advanced Seminar.

Unlike most of her classmates, Rosealma had grown up on ships. And she knew that such a technology would change everything. It would make life both easier and more difficult.

She had been moving away from a degree in history toward a degree in science when she had her epiphany in Dane’s class. One of her other history professors told her she had a scientist’s mind—she didn’t like the inaccuracies in the historical records; she wanted to find a way to ensure that the historical record was accurate. She wanted precision and certainty and rigor, things that the study of history could never ever have.

In that fateful lecture, Dane paced, like he always did, three-quarters performer and one-quarter professor, using his ancient pointer stick like a weapon. Any student who even appeared to doze got the stick slammed against a desk, making the entire class jump to attention. He would lean on the stick to make a point, slap it against his hand as he contemplated an idea. He would use the stick as a superweapon against the tiny holographic Dignity Vessels he surrounded himself with, creating a ripple in the hologram as the stick sailed through it.

On that particular morning, he created an entire battlefield. Ships of various types fighting over nothing, weapons firing into the pretend space around him. Dane stood in the middle of the chaos, an invisible giant to the ships.

Rosealma watched the Dignity Vessels. They were hard to miss, with their birdlike shape and long wingspan. They tilted and moved like predators, larger than every other ship, although Rosealma doubted that was how it had been. Just because one culture had a big ship didn’t mean others lacked big ships as well.

But that wasn’t the first mistake she noted in the professor’s presentation.

Dane spent the morning discussing stealth technology. The Dignity Vessels winked in and out of the battlefield like lights turning on and off. When they disappeared, weapons fire would go through the empty space as if the ships had never been there.

Based on his research, Dane said he believed that stealth tech cloaked the vessel all at once, making it invisible—not just to the instruments on the various ships which was the way that stealth tech worked on existing ships, but also to the naked eye. So anyone who looked through a porthole saw the blackness of space instead of the outline of a Dignity Vessel.

Hands shot up, of course, as their owners wondered how the shot missed the vessel then. And Dane, who had probably given this lecture a hundred times in his career, had an answer before the question even got asked.

“The vessels cloaked,” he said, “and then they maneuvered out of the way. They returned to the same position before decloaking, to throw off their enemies.”

But Professor Dane had never served on a ship. Rosealma had checked his curriculum vitae before taking the class, and she had noted his lack of expertise in actual space travel. Dane had taken vacation trips off Hector Prime, but he had never lived on a vessel, trained on a vessel, flown a vessel or spent more than a few days on one.

He really had no idea how modern vessels worked, let alone how ancient ones did.

And sometimes, Rosealma believed, it didn’t matter how much someone understood an intellectual concept: that was no substitute for hands-on experience.

Those thoughts flashed through her mind as she looked at the miniature simulation—and that was when she had her epiphany. The Dignity Vessel’s stealth technology wasn’t a traditional cloak. No captain would have his ship execute four maneuvers when he could execute two.

In a battle, time was everything. The captain would cloak the vessel and move away from the spot where he cloaked, never to return. But he would never cloak the vessel, move out of the way, then return, and uncloak. It simply wasn’t logical. And if that was how the Dignity Vessels’ cloaks really operated, and if that was the prescribed maneuver, the ships would have been easy to defeat. All the enemy had to do was surround that spot in space and wait for the Vessel to return.

But the Vessels didn’t always return. Sometimes they did move away. Sometimes they returned to the same spot moments later, and sometimes they returned days later.

Either the cloaks used power efficiently, allowing a Vessel to remain hidden for days at a time (and if that was the case, why didn’t the Vessel simply leave the area?) or the stealth technology wasn’t a cloak as anyone in the Enterran Empire understood it.

Rosealma went back to her primary sources, found the references that had bothered her, and in the next class asked Dane about them. She cited them, then brought them up beside her holographically as she asked her question.

“Professor,” she said, “eyewitnesses throughout the known history of the Dignity Vessels reported weapons fire hitting the area where the vessels had been seconds—sometimes nanoseconds—after the Vessel engaged its stealth drive. No ship can maneuver out of the way that quickly. Couldn’t the stealth technology have worked in a different way?”

“You’re assuming that their technology is similar to ours,” he said. “They could maneuver faster than any other ship.”

“Then why, when they were in trouble in battle, didn’t they just maneuver out of the way without cloaking? If they could travel much faster than all of the other ships, wasting energy on a cloak makes no sense.”

He gave her a patronizing smile. “I assure you the ships couldn’t have operated any other way.”

“But you’re assuming the stealth tech is a cloak,” she said.

“What else could it be?” he asked, pretending at patience, but clearly annoyed that she had questioned his intellectual prowess.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But—”

“Of course you don’t know,” he said. “None of us know. Stealth technology is lost.”

“But you said our ships used it in the early days of the Empire.”

His pretense at patience left. “Look at the histories, young lady, then talk to me. We didn’t use the stealth technology. It malfunctioned and nearly destroyed our fleet. The Dignity Vessels were much stronger ships than ours, built by better engineers, run by gifted scientists. They could adjust for the various stresses of the cloak. We could not.”

Then he turned away from her and moved to a different part of the lecture. And he never ever called on her in class again.

But it didn’t matter, because she knew he was wrong. He didn’t understand several things about space-faring vessels. Not deep down. He had no idea how terrifying it got when a ship’s energy reserves faded or the power system collapsed. He didn’t seem to understand that the kind of maneuverability he described was impossible outside of FTL drives. The Empire had FTL drives, had had them for centuries, and never used them for maneuvers that Professor Dane described.

Once engaged, all FTL drives forced ships to travel great distances in a matter of minutes. Returning to the same spot in a battlefield was ridiculous, but even if it was militarily recommended, it would be difficult after engaging an FTL drive—particularly in the minute or two mentioned in account after account after account from people in different time periods, from different sectors, people who had never spoken to each other, and indeed, couldn’t have spoken to each other because their cultures wouldn’t connect in a meaningful way for another two thousand years.

“It sounds like he has a different definition of magic than you do,” said Edward Quintana. Quintana—Quint to his friends—had decided mid-semester that Rosealma interested him. He sat next to her in class, walked her across the quad, and had been angling to spend more time with her.

He was good-looking for someone planet-bound, with a heavy bone structure and muscle mass. He was both broader and taller than she was used to, and it took a while for her to become accustomed to his strong features. Planetside, he was considered handsome, his blue-black hair skimming his strong jawline, accenting rather than hiding his thick neck.

On the Bounty, he would be considered too big to be beautiful, clumsy and lumbering, without the grace of those who spent at least half of their time in zero-G.

“Definition of magic?” she asked, trying not to sound too defensive, although she felt that way.

They had just left the Lost Technologies building, which was smack in the middle of campus. Hector Prime’s sun, considered weak by some standards, was in the center of the sky, and a pale yellow light coated everything. Students sat outside, shoes and coats off, sitting on blankets or the specially made grass the university had planted to avoid Hector Prime’s environmental regulations. The grass was blue, rather than green, which irritated more traditional students, but Rosealma liked it, particularly on days like this when the weak sun made the grass sparkle.

“Yeah,” Quint said, taking her arm and leading her around a pile of shirts and pants. Half a dozen students were jumping naked in a nearby fountain, squealing as the cold water hit their skin.

Rosealma didn’t think it that warm, but she was used to the constant temperature on board the Bounty. Any change in temperature took her days to adjust to.

“Join me for a beer and I’ll explain,” he said.

She smiled. He’d been asking her out for weeks—beers, lunches, dinners—and she’d been saying no.

“Oh, what the hell,” she said, and followed him to the student union.

It was a clear building designed to reflect the sun’s rays, making the building look like it glowed from within. The interior was surprisingly dim, which made it less comfortable for Rosealma than she would have liked.

Quint led her to the beer bar and before she could stop him, he bought her something dark and rich and smelling faintly of cherries. Then he led her through a tunnel she hadn’t known existed into an open space inside the building. It felt like she was stepping inside a ray of sunshine, and it took her breath away.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“One of the Academy’s many secrets,” he said, pulling out a chair for her. She sat, then took her sweet-smelling beer. The scent told her it had been brewed on campus—the food services majors always experimented with new forms of old products. She took a tentative sip. The beer didn’t taste as bad as she thought it would. In fact, it had a tang that she liked.

Quint smiled at her, then raised his eyebrows just a little. “And that,” he said, “is another of the Academy’s many secrets.”

She laughed, then eased back in her chair. She didn’t relax enough here. It was hard for her. On the Bounty, she used to go to the zero-G playground and float for relaxation. Here, the zero-G areas were either research intensive or by appointment only.

“So, magic,” she said. “You’re saying I believe in magic.”

“Both of you do,” he said. “And you and Professor Dane are arguing about whose belief is right.”

She frowned. She did not believe in magic. She believed there were things in the universe she did not understand, things that functioned in ways she couldn’t explain, but that didn’t mean those things were magic.

Still, she didn’t want to argue with Quint. Not yet, anyway.

“Enlighten me,” she said.

“Professor Dane believes that ships can move quicker in a microburst than they should be able to,” Quint said. “He thinks that the Dignity Vessels have a drive different than, maybe even faster than, an FTL, and combined with the cloak, that makes them magical. When you asked your question, you threatened to destroy his magical theory and it unnerved him.”

“I thought I just nipped at his pride by questioning his expertise,” she said.

“That too,” Quint said, cradling his mug. “But you also believe in magic.”

She resisted the urge to cross her arms. “Really?”

Quint nodded. “You believe that a ship could remain in place, become invisible to the naked eye, and not be affected by weaponry. That’s magic.”

She shook her head. “I didn’t say that.”

“Then how could those ships become invisible and not deflect a direct shot without the eyewitnesses all over the known universe being wrong?”

“I can think of two ways off the top of my head,” she said. “In the first, the ship absorbs the shot and takes the energy from it, creating the illusion of the shot going through.”

“Like it created the illusion of disappearing?” he asked.

“Something like that,” she said. “Or it could go slightly out of phase.”

“Out of phase?” he asked.

“Move just a hair into another dimension.”

He laughed. “As if that’s possible.”

“It’s more likely than a ship maneuvering the way that the professor describes,” she said. “It’s one of the theories of time travel, that people can move out of time for just a moment, and then come back. There’ve been experiments in a controlled environment that show such a thing is possible.”

“And there’ve been experiments that postulate a drive faster than FTL,” he said. “It’s all theory, which goes back to belief, which goes to magic.”

“You are stubborn,” she said.

“And so are you,” he said. “Why do you want to prove the professor wrong?”

“Besides the fact that he’s a pompous ass?” she asked.

Quint’s grin grew. “Besides that, yes.”

“Because my maneuver—my magic, if you will—is simpler,” she said.

Quint set his beer down. His smile remained, but changed just a little, as if what she said made him think.

“Simpler?” he asked.

She nodded, then leaned forward. “We’re talking about a fleet of vessels so advanced that they’ve survived away from their home base for centuries. These vessels rebuild on the run, they move from place to place, they’re like a living city that’s constantly changing. I’ve lived like that, although not to the same extreme.”

Quint leaned forward too. He was closer to her than she expected, which made her breath catch for just a moment. She could feel something between them, something electric.

Something unseen, unmeasured, and untested. Yet she knew it was there—and more than that: she knew that he knew. Without asking. Without confirming. Without precision and rigor, she had certainty.

“To live like that,” she said, surprised that her voice didn’t betray her sudden emotion, “you have to be efficient. No movement can be wasted. Every command does double-duty. The ship has to perform at the top of its ability with every single thing it does. And Professor Dane’s theory isn’t efficient. It might be logical, but in practice, it would use more resources than it would save.”

“Even if it saved the ship,” Quint said.

“Especially if it saved the ship,” she said. “That ship is part of the fleet and the fleet is an entity in and of itself. Lose too many ships and there is no fleet. So you must develop some kind of system to save individual ships that is efficient, quick, and easy to execute. Professor Dane’s system is none of those things.”

“And yours is?” Quint asked.

She shrugged and leaned back, grabbing her mug of beer like a shield. “He’s had decades to think about this. I’ve been working on my theory for two whole days.”

Quint stared at her for a long moment, as if he were sizing her up. Then he said, “You do know that there’s an entire scientific wing here devoted to recovering lost technologies.”

“For science majors,” she said.

“Why aren’t you one?” he asked. “You seem to have the interest. You could see if your out-of-phase thing is even possible.”

“When I’m a post-doc,” she said.

“What is it Professor Dane says?” Quint asked. “Romans weren’t built in a day.”

“Rome,” Rosealma said. “He said Rome.”

But she wasn’t thinking about the ancient saying that Professor Dane had taught them. She was thinking about efficiency and cloaks and cargo ships.

She could study something here that would actually have a use on the Bounty. If she could discover how to replicate stealth technology, cargo ships could travel through difficult and dangerous parts of the sector, and deliver goods on the far side of the known universe. It would increase profits and safety all at the same time.

“You hadn’t thought of studying science, huh?” Quint asked.

She smiled at him for the very first time—a real smile, not a polite one to get him to leave her alone. “You want me to study magic.”

“Hell, yeah,” he said. “Because I believe you’re actually onto something, and I’d hate to work on your theory all alone.”

NOW

SQUISHY HAD FORGOTTEN that Quint had been there from the beginning. She had forgotten until just now.

Then perhaps it was fitting that he was here on The Dane, the ship she named for that incorrect professor to remind herself how often she had been incorrect, despite her arrogance.

Or maybe—like Professor Dane—because of it.

She cleared her throat, set her surgical instruments down, then let her hands hover over them as if she were going to use them as weapons. She didn’t glance at The Dane’s control panels, and she didn’t look at exactly where they were going. She didn’t want to know to think about that, at least not yet.

Nor did she want to think about all of the implications of this conversation. But she had to think about it.

She couldn’t put off thinking about it any longer.

“How do you know that there are some things I don’t want to live through?” she asked Quint.

He finally touched his face, his fingers briefly brushing against the cuts. Then he stopped as if he realized he was violating an instruction. Which he was. She had asked him not to touch the wounds, even though she had known that would be hard for him.

“I could say that I know you, Rose. You would have believed that once.” He clenched his hands into fists, then flattened them against his thighs.

The feeling had to have been coming back to his face. But she didn’t offer him any more numbing agent. She wanted to wait.

“What do you mean I would have believed that once?” she asked.

He shook his head slightly, not looking at her. “You never really gave me much thought, did you, Rose?”

“You’re being elliptical,” she said. “You know I hate that.”

And he did know that. He was right: he knew more about her than she knew about him. She hadn’t bothered to learn him in the same kind of depth that he had learned her.

She used to attribute that to the fact he wanted the relationship more. But she hadn’t learned Turtle well either. Squishy liked people. She liked being around them. But they didn’t interest her as much as ideas or science or medicine.

Quint sighed. “I work in Imperial Intelligence, Rose.”

She frowned, suddenly feeling confused. “You used to work in military intelligence. Then you moved on. On the station, you were head of security. You told me yourself.”

He shook his head ever so slightly. “I didn’t tell you that. I implied it. You didn’t really care enough to investigate.”

He was right: she hadn’t cared. She had been more concerned with keeping him away from her than she had been with the intricacies of his job.

“What does that mean, Imperial Intelligence?” she asked. “And how is that different from military intelligence?”

He let out a small sigh. “It’s different in degree, Rose. Military intelligence is child’s play compared to what I do. I was promoted after you left. I run an entire intelligence division now. I have more information at my fingertips than you could ever imagine.”

Her stomach turned, although she wasn’t sure why. Something about what he was saying disturbed her, and disturbed her so deeply that she didn’t want to look at it closely.

“So what are you doing here with me?” she asked. “How come you’re not on one of those ships or contacting the Empire or something?”

“You’re my Achilles heel, Rose. You know that reference? It’s not from Professor Dane’s class, but it’s from the same department. Lost cultures. Cultures so old we only have stories about them.”

“I don’t remember the story,” she said, “but I know what the phrase means.”

And it frightened her. How could she be his weakness? They hadn’t seen each other in decades.

“I should have reported you,” he said softly. “I should have reported you the moment The Dane crossed into Enterran territory.”

It felt like her heart stopped. Then she realized she had forgotten to take a breath. “What do you mean?”

“Squishy,” he said, standing up. He started to come toward her, then seemed to think the better of it and stopped. “How can you let them call you Squishy? You have a beautiful name. You’re a beautiful woman, Rose.”

Her hands floated toward the control panel. She was trying to leave, as if she could escape him by hitting some commands on the panel. She couldn’t do that. Not without being obvious anyway.

She clasped her hands behind her back. She just didn’t want to listen to him. This was the kind of thing that made her uncomfortable, that had always made her uncomfortable.

She raised her gaze to his. He was watching her closely, and she didn’t know exactly what he saw. Did he see how uncomfortable she was? Did he see her slow understanding of what he meant?

He knew she had lived outside the Enterran Empire. He knew her nickname. He knew much more about her than she had ever known about him.

“For the first time in your life,” he said, “when you left Vallevu, you didn’t leave it entirely. You stayed in touch. You let some people know how you were doing. You didn’t say much in the messages, but the messages came from the Nine Planets Alliance.”

She gripped the edge of the control panel. Had she made a mistake coming here? Not for herself, but for all the others? For the work she had been doing back at the Nine Planets? Had she let the Empire in when Boss and the team had worked so hard to keep the Empire out?

“Don’t worry,” he said, “I couldn’t track you inside the Alliance. They have good protections in place.”

Her heart started pounding. She had forgotten that he used to do that, answer her questions even when she hadn’t spoken them.

“But I have a hunch I know what got you out to the Nine Planets,” he said. “There’ve been credible rumors that the Nine Planets has made breakthroughs in stealth tech. I know enough about stealth tech to know that the person who understands it best is you.”

She almost denied it. She didn’t understand it best, not any more. Now there was an entire department of people who worked with the anacapa drive, who had worked on it all of their lives, working with knowledge passed down from generations. Now she was behind in her understanding of the technology.

Although not in her understanding of the technology that the Empire was developing. Theirs only opened a small crack in the anacapa drive. That’s why imperial stealth tech consistently malfunctioned and killed. Because imperial stealth tech tried to harness a burning log with a rope. Sometimes the rope held for just a moment, but eventually it would get burned as well. Everyone who worked in imperial stealth tech believed that the log was the technology. They didn’t even see or understand the fire.

“I wanted you back here,” he said, extending his hands. She looked at them, then looked at him, keeping her gaze level, showing as little emotion as she possibly could. He was scaring her. He probably knew how much he was scaring her, and by extending his hands, he tried to calm her.

Slowly, he let his hands drop.

“I wanted you working for us again,” he said. “You know so much and things have gone so wrong.”

“You’re the one who leaked that information,” she said. Anger she hadn’t even realized she was feeling made her voice tremble. “You’re the one.”

He nodded. “I figured it would bring you back. And it did.”

ONE YEAR EARLIER

SQUISHY STOOD IN FRONT of the schematics for the small anacapa drive displayed on the table before her. She had her hands clasped behind her back. Six people crowded around her. The room was long and narrow, adjacent to her office, an office she rarely used. Mostly, she was in the various labs, working on a dozen projects.

Once upon a time, she supervised all of the work on the space station, but she couldn’t any longer. Too much was being done. So much, in fact, that Boss—or to be more accurate, the Lost Souls Corporation—had recently purchased another space station for different kinds of work. Squishy didn’t know what happened at the new place except in theory. Most of the work there was dedicated to historical and anthropological research, as well as ground sciences like geology, things that held no interest for her.

What interested her—what had always interested her—was this technology. More than biology, more than all of the medicine she studied, she wanted to know about anacapa drives.

She stood back from the schematics, then ordered up a holographic version. It rose and floated above her. She tapped the screen so that she got a three-dimensional model of the drive. It floated next to the schematics, about the size of her fist, encased in black. She ordered the casing removed and studied the drive.

It looked wrong to her, but she wasn’t the expert. The people beside her were, but the person whose opinion mattered was Bradley Taylor.

Taylor had come from the Ivoire, the working Dignity Vessel that Boss had found four years before. He was young and when he first came to the Nine Planets, he hadn’t been old enough to get work in the Ivoire’s engineering department. But he had a knack for anacapa drives. He loved them as much as Squishy did, and once here, he had become her de facto right-hand man.

The Ivoire’s crew had scattered over the years. Many stayed with the ship, but some—like Taylor—didn’t ever want to travel by spaceship again. They certainly didn’t want to be on a ship with a functioning (and occasionally employed) anacapa drive.

Still Taylor had valuable skills, and he wanted to use them. Squishy was more than willing to put him to work in her labs. The design before her was mostly his.

“It doesn’t look complete to me,” Squishy said, directing her comments to Taylor. The others listened.

“It does seem small,” he said, “but I can assure you that it works.”

She programmed both holographs so that they revolved. Then they turned upside down, moving in all three dimensions. She watched, but that discomfort remained.

She shook her head. “Something’s wrong. I just can’t tell what it is.”

Taylor didn’t seem upset. Instead, he leaned into the images and watched them move as if they held the answers.

“I wish we could run some tests,” he said.

“No tests until I have some idea that this will work,” she said. Too many people had died in “tests.”

No one from the Ivoire objected either. The only reason they were at the base was because their anacapa drive had malfunctioned a long, long time ago.

“We know that the anacapa part will work,” said Sadie Juarez. She had come from one of the top universities in the Nine Planets. She was a brilliant theorist, but she still hadn’t grasped the dangers of the research. “Maybe there’s some kind of way we can isolate the experiment….”

She let her voice trail off so that everyone knew what she was saying, even though she hadn’t finished the thought.

“We’re not the Empire,” said Ward Zauft. He had helped Squishy since she started her research at Lost Souls. He was thin and wiry, had too much energy, and was always keeping an eye out for problems in experiments. She liked that the most about him. “We don’t let 85 people die just because we believe the experiment will work.”

Squishy nodded, then frowned. Eighty-five was a specific number, and it was too small to encompass all of the people who had died in the last few decades.

She turned toward him. “Eighty-five?”

“Haven’t you heard? That’s the latest loss. Eighty-five people because some stealth tech experiment went awry.” He wasn’t even looking at her. He was clearly thinking about the drive in front of him, not the news he was passing on.

“Where did you see that?” she asked.

Something in her tone seemed to catch his attention. He looked away from the rotating drives, his gaze meeting hers. A slight frown creased his forehead.

“It got leaked and made some of the science news sites just this week,” he said. “They said the eighty-five people who died were the latest tragic accident in a program plagued by them.”

“I heard it too,” Juarez said. “The story said that the numbers couldn’t be confirmed but that maybe as many as 800 people have died in stealth tech related experiments in the past twenty years.”

Squishy was shaking. She knew of the first two hundred of the dead. She had a hunch that 800 figure was too small.

“So they’re warning people away?” she asked. “Telling them not to work for the imperial science programs?”

“It wasn’t that kind of news,” Juarez said. “It was my impression that they were just interested in the statistics, nothing more.”

Statistics. Squishy let out a small breath. “I don’t want anyone running an experiment on this until someone who has worked with anacapa drives for a decade or more looks at this.”

Then she excused herself and went to her office. She felt lightheaded and off balance.

The Empire was still experimenting with stealth tech, even after she and Boss had tried to shut them down. And people were still dying in the experiments. Over and over again, people were dying.

What would it take to convince the Empire that stealth tech was too dangerous to pursue? Or could it be persuaded?

Maybe she and Boss had been on the right track six years before. Maybe they should do everything they could to destroy the research. All of the research.

But that would mean destroying the scientists too, and Squishy couldn’t do that. Destroyed research and a large accident—one that ruined everything but didn’t kill anyone—might make the Empire think twice about continuing the research, at least in the direction it was going. It might force some of the scientists out.

She leaned against her door, looked at her office, saw the neglect. A sweater she hadn’t worn in months hung over the back of her chair. A cup that hadn’t been washed in probably that long sat on one side of her desk.

She didn’t like the way her thoughts were going, but she recognized the feeling. She couldn’t keep working here while people were dying back there. Particularly if they were following protocols she had developed decades before.

The scientists with the Empire’s program were following faulty assumptions with old information, and that wasn’t just dangerous to them. It was dangerous to the entire sector.

Something had to be done. But what?

NOW

QUINT RAN HIS HAND through his hair. He stood and walked toward her. It took all of Squishy’s strength not to back away.

She had forgotten how big he was, how muscular. She had always found that both appealing and intimidating. Only now, the appealing part was gone. She felt smaller than she ever had beside him.

“When The Dane entered imperial space,” he said, “I was actually hopeful. I thought you had come back to help us.”

“I did,” she said softly.

“No, you didn’t,” he said. “You came back here to destroy us.”

ONE YEAR EARLIER

SHE FOUND BOSS next to her latest project, a reconstructed Dignity Vessel that Boss had deliberately kept nameless. Boss was thin and ropy, preoccupied, her hair cut short, new lines near her eyes. But she didn’t seem tired, even though she was working impossible hours. Lately, Boss seemed energized, as if the Dignity Vessel projects had revitalized a part of her.

The Dignity Vessel itself dwarfed everything else in the bay. The ship was huge. Squishy always forgot how big the Vessels were, even though she had now been inside several of them. The first Dignity Vessel, all those years ago, had been a derelict, floating in space, and even though it had taken a long time to dive it, the ship hadn’t seemed as big as these. Space itself made everything seem small.

Since Squishy had come to work at Lost Souls, she had worked on five derelict ships. Then the Ivoire had arrived and some members of the crew had helped repair one of the five derelicts. This ship was another found ship, and it needed a lot of interior work, which Boss was supervising.

“We did it once before,” Squishy said as she walked beside Boss, staring up at the Dignity Vessel. The ship jutted above them, shading them from the lights at the top of the bay.

Boss stopped walking. Squishy had made her entire presentation while they examined the exterior of the Dignity Vessel. She had felt a bit uncomfortable, arguing that they should take a team into imperial space, with the mission of destroying stealth tech. She was half-hoping that Boss would take in a Dignity Vessel on a trial run, maybe even go in with the anacapa engaged, use the high-powered weaponry, and destroy the base that Squishy had discovered.

But Boss was frowning, and that wasn’t a good sign. “Why do you care? The Empire kills people in a variety of ways. We can’t stop that. We’re working to keep the balance of power in the sector, to keep the Empire from moving out here. That’s more than enough.”

Squishy swallowed. She had thought Boss would understand. But Squishy had forgotten how Boss could overlook disturbing things. She had done that on their first dives in a Dignity Vessel, ignoring Squishy’s warning, and leading to the breach that had hurt their relationship for years.

“People are dying because of me,” Squishy said.

“Nonsense,” Boss said. “You haven’t been part of stealth tech research for decades, at least not in the Empire.”

“But I’m the one who took them down this path. I’m the one who started all of these experiments. Everyone who died since then died because of me.”

Boss shook her head.

“Don’t be dismissive,” Squishy snapped. “In the past, you’ve dismissed me and that was a mistake.”

“One mistake,” Boss said. “A big one, I grant you. But just one. And I’ve apologized repeatedly. This is different.”

“How is this different?” Squishy asked.

“It’s not personal, Squishy,” Boss said. “I know you think it is, but it’s not. A lot of people can hold the blame for all those deaths, including the people who continue the experiments in light of the disasters they’re causing. It’s not about you.”

Squishy straightened. “You don’t understand—”

“I do,” Boss said. “I’ve lost people because of mistakes I’ve made. I understand. But the worst thing we can do is go into the Empire.”

“You did it,” Squishy said. “You went to Vaycehn, and found the Ivoire.”

Boss nodded. “And it could have been a disaster. They didn’t catch us that time, but they might this time. We’re fugitives.”

“Not all of us,” Squishy said. “I still get my military pension. It goes to my home in Vallevu.”

Boss didn’t say a word, but she was clearly struggling to remain silent.

“I can go back in with a team,” Squishy said before Boss could say anything. “We can use the same explosives that I developed a few years ago. I did the research, Boss. The Empire has confined stealth tech to one gigantic base. We get rid of the base, we get rid of the tech.”

“They’re not stupid enough to keep all of the research on that one base,” Boss said. “It’s backed up somewhere.”

“And once we find where the backups are kept, we launch the mission. I could go back, revamp my credentials and work in the lab until we’re ready to launch the attack. They wouldn’t suspect anything.”

Boss snorted. “You haven’t worked in stealth tech in decades and then you return? How is that not suspicious?”

“I would blame the leaked studies.” Squishy straightened. “I’m on the record—several legal records—protesting the way the experiments were conducted. That was decades ago. I would have complete credibility if I went back and stated that I wanted to return to correct the mistakes and make sure no one died.”

“And they’d hire you?” Boss asked.

“They asked me to rejoin when I brought them the first Dignity Vessel,” Squishy said. Squishy had claimed the vessel she had taken from Boss on that fateful trip for the imperial government to get it out of Boss’s hands. It had been a reaction to Boss’s high-handed decision-making on that particular trip. The decision-making that led to the “one mistake” that Boss had just mentioned.

“And you said no,” Boss said. “That was years ago. Things change.”

Squishy shook her head. “I’m still considered the godmother of stealth tech research. I’m mentioned in a ton of studies. I’d like to fix that.”

“And what?” Boss asked. “Give them the anacapa drive?”

“Make sure they can never catch us,” Squishy said. “Make sure that their research goes a different direction.”

“You can’t control research,” Boss said. “You know that.”

“But you can alter it,” Squishy said.

“And if you get caught?” Boss asked. “What then? They’ll get you to tell them about the anacapa drive.”

Squishy shook her head. “I’d die first.”

“Don’t be melodramatic,” Boss said.

Squishy sighed. “I still don’t have a great working knowledge of the anacapa drive. It’s vast and complex and I certainly couldn’t build one from scratch. If the Empire catches me, the only thing they’d get from me is that the drive exists. They’d also learn how powerful it is. They’d learn that they’re making a terrible mistake when they try to treat it as a cloak.”

“And then they come after us,” Boss said.

“They’ll come after us eventually,” Squishy said.

“No,” Boss said and walked away.

Squishy scrambled to keep up. “People are dying, Boss.”

“All over the Empire, for all kinds of reasons,” Boss said. “Hell, people are dying in the Nine Planets for all kinds of reasons too. Some are too poor, some are too sick, some still live under repressive regimes. I’m not going in there to rescue those folks. Why should I rescue a bunch of scientists in the middle of the Empire? Scientists who specialize in weapons research, I might add.”

Squishy was shaking. Her initial answers—there might be someone like me; they’re important; they’re scientists for fuck’s sake—wouldn’t be good enough for Boss.

“You wouldn’t go in,” Squishy said. “I would.”

Boss stopped walking and turned around. “So I should send in the only one of us who isn’t connected to the Ivoire who has any chance of understanding how an anacapa drive works.”

“There are a lot of people here who understand it as well as I do,” Squishy said. “And they’re not all connected to the Ivoire.”

“But they’re not you,” Boss said softly. “So my answer stands. No.”

She started walking again. Squishy started to follow, then stopped. Boss said no. She rarely revisited decisions, and only when faced with a great deal of evidence that her assumptions were wrong.

Her assumptions weren’t wrong here. She was right: this wasn’t a Lost Souls’ mission.

This was a personal mission.

And it was one Squishy would complete. With or without the help of anyone else.

NOW

QUINT’S WORDS OFFENDED HER. Squishy stood perfectly still, trying to control the anger.

“I did not come to destroy you,” she said. “People who destroy things kill people.”

“You killed Cloris,” he said.

“I got everyone out of that facility,” Squishy snapped. “Cloris wasn’t following orders.”

“You didn’t either,” he said.

She stared at him. She was trembling. He was trembling too. He tried to be calm, but he wasn’t. Maybe she was seeing him clearer than she thought.

“I didn’t come to destroy you,” she said again. “I came to help you.”

His face flushed. The wounds disappeared in the redness. He took a step away from her, moving his head at the same time so she couldn’t see his eyes.

“That’s what I wanted to believe, Rose,” he said, clasping his hands behind his back. The posture looked terribly familiar. She did it all the time, and she realized, with a sinking feeling, she had learned it from him. “I wanted to believe that you could stop all of the deaths. Didn’t you ever wonder how you got in so easily? Why no one cared that you’d been gone for so many years?”

She had wondered, then chalked it up to the Empire’s incompetence. She figured people were watching her, but it didn’t matter. She had an entire team, she had a way to contact them if she needed to, and she had no actual work to do until she destroyed the research station. For six months, her work had been blameless, although she made a point of stopping those experiments, the ones that would have resulted in someone’s death.

He tilted his head back. “I believed in you, Rosealma. You’re brilliant. I honestly thought you could fix it all.”

Her breath caught in her throat. It all fit, how she got in, why he kept showing up, asking the occasional question, keeping an eye on her, telling her she was doing well. He had believed in her, and despite herself, she felt sad that she had disappointed him.

“I’m your magic,” she said.

He turned, a puzzled expression on his face. He didn’t remember the conversation. Of course, he didn’t. That conversation about magic and beliefs had changed her life. It had just been a moment to him.

“What?” he asked.

She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I did fix things, just not the way you wanted.”

“You just set them back some, Rosealma. You didn’t fix anything at all,” he said.

She almost, almost told him about destroying the backup research, but she didn’t. The only thing her people hadn’t destroyed was the scientists themselves. Someone destructive would have destroyed them too. But she wasn’t destructive. It would take the scientists years to reconstruct their work and, maybe by then, someone new would come in, someone to tell them about the folly of their ways.

She could send them that researcher. She could send in moles who would direct them away from their own destruction and onto a path that would lead nowhere.

If she ever got out of this.

“What happened to you?” Quint asked softly. “You used to love this work, Rosealma. You didn’t believe in destroying anything.”

“What happened to me?” she asked. She couldn’t believe he had said that.

He didn’t remember that either. Apparently, he had remembered all of the wrong things.

TWENTY YEARS EARLIER

ROSEALMA CAME OUT of the meeting room and crumpled onto a bench beside the door. She put a hand to her face.

She was tired. She had been tired for more than a year, living and reliving the failed experiment, the problems, the attempted rescue, and finally the shutdown. She had testified and argued and fought. She had wondered if any of it was fair, particularly when the court decided to jail Hansen.

He hadn’t followed procedure. He hadn’t listened, but he hadn’t done anything criminal either. At least, not criminal enough to warrant the kind of punishment he received.

She had argued about that too, although, if she was honest with herself, not as forcefully as she would have if no one had died.

And a lot of people had died.

The ironic thing—the sad thing—was that there was no accurate body count, because there were no bodies. Anyone who had gone missing that day was counted among the dead.

For a while, she kept going back to Vallevu between cases because that was where her off-site home with Quint was. But eventually, she couldn’t face it any longer.

She stopped going home. She got an apartment near the courts and she stayed. At first she drank, because she needed her mind on something else. Then she realized if she kept doing that, she would go crazy, so she went back to school.

Medicine provided a good penance. It wasn’t stealth tech. It wasn’t related to weapons work at all, and yet it appealed to her scientific mind. It kept her thinking about something else.

She got to thinking about something else now. She was done. And it felt…odd.

“Rosealma?”

The voice belonged to Quint. She didn’t want to face him now. But she could hear footsteps coming closer.

She steeled her shoulders, rubbed a hand over her face, and stood.

Quint had come down the hallway, but he was alone. “Did they take your recommendations?”

“No,” she said. “But they offered me a job. They want me to be Director of Stealth Tech Research.”

He came over to her and put his arm around her. Somehow it didn’t feel comforting. “Good. You can make changes when you get back to the project. Sometimes the best changes are made from within anyway.”

She stopped walking so suddenly that his arm pushed her forward. He dropped his arm, and had to take a step back to rejoin her.

“What?” he asked.

“I turned them down.”

“Why?” he asked.

She looked at his face, broad and familiar, and wondered how she had ever found it attractive.

“I told you,” she said. “It isn’t the methodology. There’s something wrong with the way that we conduct the research itself. Our assumptions are flawed. We’re playing with something so dangerous that it could destroy all of us if we’re not careful.”

“You’re being melodramatic,” he said, and her breath caught.

He was supposed to be the one who believed her. He was supposed to be the one who understood. He had been with her from the beginning. He knew she had changed the direction of the research and when she had done that, the deaths had started.

Or, as the committee had said, the disappearances. No one knows if they’re dead, Quintana, one of the generals said to her. You have simply made that assumption.

They’re dead to us, sir, Rosealma said. We’ll never get them back.

“No,” she said. “I’m not being ‘melodramatic.’ If we continue this research, many more good people will die. And that’s something we could stop.”

“The research is important, Rose. This technology will help all of the ships in the Empire.”

He was giving her the company line, and that made her even more tired.

“No, it won’t,” she said. “It won’t help any ship except military vessels. If we ever get the stealth tech to work, it’ll just make the Empire stronger. It won’t do any good at all.”

He was frowning at her, as if he didn’t understand her.

“Quint, this technology, it’s not worth all the lives. People shouldn’t have to die because we’re trying to recreate an old weapons system.”

He studied her for a long moment. Then he said, “People die, Rose. They die for thousands of reasons, some good, some bad, some utterly stupid. They die in accidents and they die too young and they die because they went the wrong way or chose the wrong path. People die.”

She was shaking. “Not because of something I developed.”

“You didn’t develop stealth tech,” he said.

“I thought I understood it. I don’t. And they’re dying because of that. And those assholes in that room won’t stop the research. They won’t let us rethink our entire strategy. They say we’ve had too many breakthroughs.”

“We’ve had more breakthroughs because of you than we ever had before,” Quint said.

She was staring at him and wondering when he became a stranger. What was he arguing? That she continue?

“The breakthroughs come at too high a cost,” she said.

“You lose some lives to save others,” he said.

“Stealth tech won’t save lives!” Her raised voice shocked her. She had never yelled at Quint before. She cleared her throat. “Stealth tech, if it works, will cost lives. The Empire will use it to move into the Nine Planets Alliance.”

“You don’t know that,” Quint said, but as he spoke, he looked away. He knew it. He knew she was right, and he wasn’t willing to say that to her.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, walking around him. “They didn’t listen to me.”

“So you do what I said.” He kept pace with her. “Take the job. You change the experiment from within.”

“Even if I had the stomach for it—which I don’t,” she said, “I can’t do it now.”

“Why?” he asked.

“I resigned my commission, Quint. I’m done with all of this.”

He grabbed her arm so hard that it hurt. “Don’t do that, Rose. Go back in there. Tell them you made a mistake.”

“I didn’t make a mistake, Quint,” she said. “I did what I had to do.”

He grabbed her other arm and pulled her toward him. He brought his face close to hers. “You can’t do this, Rose. You’re our best mind. You’re the secret to stealth tech. You can’t leave.”

“I already have, Quint.” She tried to keep her voice calm, even though he was hurting her.

“Those people, they don’t matter,” he said. “They’re expendable. You’re not.”

“What people?” she asked. “The ones who died? Or their loved ones who want to believe their dead relatives will come back?”

“All of them,” he said. “You can’t care about them. Your work is too important.”

“Do you care about them?” she asked.

“Hell, no,” he said. “Why should I?”

She wrenched out of his grasp. Her upper arms ached where his hands had dug in. She lowered her head and walked away.

“Rose, wait.”

She didn’t. She kept walking. He grabbed her one more time, and she tried to yank away, but he held her too tight.

“Why should I care about them?” he asked.

“Because science is supposed to be for the public good, Quint,” she said. “Not to help the Empire gain more power.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the Empire, Rose,” He sounded convinced.

She looked down at his hand. “Let me go, Quint. You’re hurting me.”

He released her. She shook her arm, trying to get the circulation back.

“And, for the record, Quint,” she said. “Any time a government believes that it can sacrifice people for the greater good, then there’s something wrong with that government.”

He frowned as if he was trying to understand. The look on his face hurt her more than anything. He hadn’t understood. He hadn’t understood from the beginning. And she should have realized it.

She turned her back on him, and walked away.

And she hoped she would never ever see him again.

NOW

“WHAT HAPPENED TO ME,” she repeated. If she explained it to him, she would simply see that expression again, the one she had walked away from so long ago.

So she decided to sidestep the question.

“What happened to me is simple,” she said. “I grew up.”

He was frowning. She couldn’t trust him. Not even when he said he could keep her from the worst punishments. Maybe he could. But he wouldn’t save her from interrogations. And the last thing she wanted to do was betray her friends.

She didn’t dare trust him. He always tricked her.

And then she got cold. He was tricking her now, forcing her into conversation while the military closed in on her ship. She wasn’t leaving the area—
because of him.

She had to get away from him. Or at least, she had to try.

“What does that mean, grew up?” he asked.

“It means it’s been a long time since I last saw you, Quint,” she said. “What happened to me is too complicated to explain in an hour-long conversation. I lived a lot. So did you.”

His frown eased as the tension in his body seemed to go. Maybe she did know him. And maybe she had grown up enough to fool him.

“Oh, dear,” she said, keeping her voice calm. “You’re bleeding again.”

He raised a hand toward his face.

“Don’t touch it,” she said. “I don’t know what got in those wounds. But something’s keeping them from healing. I don’t want you to spread it. Sit back on the bed.”

He looked alarmed. He sat down.

She grabbed her kit and brought it over. Then she picked up the numbing agent. “Lean back. Close your eyes for just a minute.”

He did. She grabbed one of the anesthetics, hoped the dosage wouldn’t be too much for him, and as she wiped the numbing agent along his clean cheek, she inserted the anesthetic into his neck.

“Hey!” he said and tried to sit up. But she held him down with one hand, knowing the anesthetic would work quickly.

He fumbled, reached, and fell backwards.

“Hey,” he repeated softly. And then he closed his eyes.

She stepped back, counting for a full minute. No one, no matter how strong they were, could stay awake with that stuff flowing through them. She checked his vital signs. They were good.

She hadn’t really thought this through. But she had only a few minutes to execute the plan, however haphazard it was.

Her heart was beating harder than his was. She hurried to one of the escape pods, and checked the supplies. Food and water for a week, more if he rationed. Her hand floated over the communications equipment. If she took it out the pod, she would buy more time. He couldn’t contact anyone. She could leave the emergency beacon.

But he might die before anyone found him.

Then she shook her head. One person too many had already died on this mission. She wasn’t going to kill Quint too.

She left the pod’s door open. Then she went to the bed. It had been a long time since she lifted someone heavier than she was. She eyeballed him. She thought she could do it without reducing the gravity in the ship.

She slid under him and pulled him over her shoulder, wobbling a bit under his weight. She lurched like a drunk as she carried him to the pod, glad that the ship was relatively empty, so she didn’t hit much. She crouched, her knees screaming in protest, then let him fall to the floor.

He didn’t wake up.

She shoved him into the pod, checked his vitals one last time, and let out a small sigh of relief. He was fine. He would be fine.

Weirdly, she felt the urge to apologize. She was leaving him yet again without any explanation—or, at least, without an explanation he could understand.

But she didn’t say anything. Instead, she closed the pod door, and went to The Dane’s control panel. She noted the coordinates, made sure the pod’s emergency beacon showed on her communications readout, and then set the pod loose.

“Get out, get out, get out,” she whispered. She never wanted to see him again, and she was afraid she would.

She looked at the screens, watched as the pod tumbled away from The Dane. She needed to get out of this sector. This cruiser couldn’t escape Enterran space fast enough to get her to the Nine Planets before Quint was found. Plus she had believed him when he said that he had already released information about the ship.

Everyone would be looking for her.

For that reason alone, she couldn’t go back to the rendezvous, nor could she contact the others. She hoped they would follow instructions and leave after the designated period of time.

Not that anyone would be looking for them. As far as the Empire knew, as far as Quint knew, she had been working alone.

The pod got smaller and smaller until it was just a dot on her screen. She should just leave him to his fate. After all, one death in the service of a cause didn’t matter. That was his philosophy, anyway.

But it wasn’t hers.

She went to the control panel, scanned for the nearest starbase, and sent a coded message, warning of a ship in trouble, and escape pods at these coordinates.

It was the least she could do to salve her own conscience, even though doing so might cause her capture.

She had no idea if she would get out of this alive, but she was going to try. And she was going to try to do it alone.

But she kept staring at that dot, even as it became part of the blackness of space, indistinguishable from everything around it.

He had known her well. He had probably known what she would do.

He had made it easy for her to get into the Empire, to get back on a stealth tech research team. He had done it for the wrong reason, but he had done it.

Had he let her go this time?

She closed her eyes for just a moment. He had called her his Achilles heel. Maybe she was. And maybe she should be grateful.

But she’d rather believe that she had escaped him a second time.

She’d rather believe she had done it on her own.

“Stealth” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch was first published in Asimov’s SF Magazine, October/November, 2011.

STRANGERS AT THE ROOM OF LOST SOULS

1

OPERATIONS COMMANDER ELISSA TREKOV saw the weapons fire first. It came from what to her eyes looked like a blank spot on the screens in front of her. Fortunately, the Discovery’s sensors saw through the cloak that created that blank spot to the transport vessel which had left just moments before.

She bent over the controls on the bridge of the Discovery, not because she was flying the large science ship, but because she was arguing with the three people she had just left on the Room of Lost Souls. She still wore her environmental suit, even though she had removed the bubble helmet. It sat on the seat behind her.

She hadn’t had time to remove the suit because that damn Vilhauser, on the station, wasn’t listening to her.

But if she hadn’t been bent over, essentially hogging two stations while her bridge crew tried to work around her, she wouldn’t have seen the weapons’ fire from the transport vessel. Those flashes of light had given her just a few precious seconds to make a decision.

She hoped it was enough time.

Thank God she had ordered the Discovery to detach from the lower landing area on the Room of Lost Souls. She had planned to leave Vilhauser behind, along with two very good soldiers, because the idiot scientist wasn’t listening to her, and his actions threatened her crew.

Now there was a second threat—the weapons’ fire, cool and white across the dark starscape.

The betraying bastard who commanded that transport had waited until his ship was as close to the edge of his firing range as possible. Those shots would take seconds to arrive, but those seconds were enough.

“Calthorpe, activate the stardrive!” she said, as her gloved hand slapped the emergency beacon. They were going to need help, and she wanted to make sure they got it—even before she got the Discovery out of here.

Her first fucking solo command, and she wasn’t sure the Discovery would survive it. Not that she was in charge of the Discovery. That was Lieutenant Calthorpe, whom she just accidentally demoted to navigator.

Elissa was in charge of all the ships in the region, including the Discovery. And, at the moment, she could’ve handled one threat, but not two. There was Vilhauser and the damn device, and now that betraying bastard on the transport had decided to get involved.

She had no idea what would happen if the transport’s weapons’ fire missed the Discovery and hit the Room of Lost Souls.

And she didn’t want to find out.

2

“JANIK SAYS it’s my first real flag rank command.” Elissa held a glass of red wine in her left hand. The wine was some kind of specialty from a planet she’d never heard of. The Empire was so big, there were lots of planets she’d never heard of—and as for regions on those planets, well, forget it.

She could read a star map, she could remember who commanded what and when, she could remember battles, important historic figures, and all sorts of details about all sorts of ships.

But knowing the land-based details of the Empire itself, she figured she had to get some bits of knowledge from the databases. She couldn’t remember everything.

Rustin had ordered the wine, and frankly, she was scared to drink it. She’d had local specialty wines before, enough to be suspicious of any cheap wine on an expensive orbiting resort, like this one.

She had picked the resort. She had actually dug into her inheritance to pay her way. Normally, she couldn’t afford a place like this, not on her salary.

She ended up paying most of Rustin’s way too, if only because she had invited him, and he had assumed he would stay with her. She hadn’t specified that, but when he arrived and the misunderstanding got cleared up, there were no cheap rooms left. He had to share her suite.

When they got that news, he had grinned and said, It’s not like we weren’t going to share a bed anyway.

She had nodded at that, even though she knew he had expected it. Still, part of her felt odd about the assumption.

She was just beginning to figure out why.

Rustin watched her from the other side of the booth, his black eyes narrowing as he seemed to size her up. He had already managed to bunch up the fancy napkin, knock over a water glass, and drop the silverware. He was a large clumsy man, and proud of both facts. Sometimes she wondered how he managed to survive military life.

But of course she knew. He was an excellent raconteur when he wanted to be, he had a lot of friends, and when he focused down on a job, there was no one better.

She had forgotten, though, that in repose, he was annoying as hell.

She watched his long fingers play with the stem on the wine glass. She worried that he might snap the damn thing. He certainly didn’t care about the glass, and truth be told, he didn’t care about the wine either, as long as it was alcoholic.

But he could be political at times, and maybe that was why she had invited him. She wanted his political take on her situation. Like her, he was an Operations Commander. Unlike her, he had a fixed assignment of ships and a fixed area to patrol. Last year, before she had even received her promotion, she had heard he was on the short list to move up to Group Commander.

But he also had a wicked temper that seemed to be getting worse, so she doubted that his promotion would come any time soon.

Rustin downed the rest of his wine in a single gulp. He wiped his lower lip with his thumb.

“Technically,” he said, “Flag Commander Janik is right: you haven’t had a real command yet.”

A quick sudden anger made her breath catch. Rustin was supposed to agree with her. He was supposed to help her. He wasn’t supposed to criticize her.

“I saved your damn butt on the Loeven Front,” she snapped. “I was in charge of those ships.”

He raised his eyebrows. They needed trimming, and made him seem comical, which he was not. He clearly noted her tone. She never usually took that tone with him, although he’d taken it before with her.

“You were in charge of everything,” Rustin said calmly, “because the Operations Commander died in the middle of that fight. That doesn’t make the mission your command. It does, however, make the result your success.”

He sounded reasonable, for once. When did he become the reasonable one?

She swished the wine in her glass so fast that the liquid almost swirled out of it. She didn’t want him to sound reasonable. She wanted a fight—and, she now realized, she had invited Rustin to join her on these days off just so she could get it.

Only he wasn’t playing. Rustin was nothing if not contrary.

“I’ve commanded other operations since the Loeven Front,” she said, her words clipped.

“Oh, be fair, Elissa. Those were outings. Tests. You were still a Commander until last year. You don’t even have a regular posting yet. You’re so newly minted they could still demote you and no one would notice.” He picked up the bottle and poured more of the wine into his glass.

She had known about the outings and the tests. She would have welcomed them if she hadn’t been so damn educated in the ways of the military. Most Commanders didn’t have to prove themselves after they’d saved an entire squadron in a battle. They got an immediate mission or a posting to somewhere interesting.

She hadn’t. She had gotten a few more tests, as if she had actually screwed up instead of saving hundreds of lives.

“This is about my family, not me,” she said.

“Oh, probably.” Rustin drank half of his second glass in two quick gulps. He was going to be drunk before the appetizers got here.

And she really hated his tone. In fact, she hated everything about this evening, including the fact that it had been her idea.

“‘Oh, probably’?” she said, her tone sharp. “That’s all you can say?”

He rolled his eyes and set the glass down. A waiter came by with the cheese thingies that Rustin had ordered and the paté with crostini that had sounded good to her.

Either this restaurant wasn’t as good as advertised, or the fact that the paté looked more like baby poop than goose liver was a symptom of her mood.

“You’ve been complaining about your family connections as long as I’ve known you, Lis,” Rustin said, using the nickname that she hated. He’d always used that nickname, and it always irritated her.

Yep, she had invited him for the fight and nothing else.

“Either,” he said, grabbing one of the cheese thingies, “you complain because everyone expects you to be your great-grandfather—”

“Great-great,” she mumbled.

“—or it’s because everyone thinks you’ll fuck up like your grandmother—”

“Grandfather,” she said just a little louder.

“—or it’s because they think you’ll melt down like your uncle—”

“I know,” she said forcefully. It was either that or correct him again, since the meltdown was courtesy of her aunt, just as Elissa was trying to get as many recommendations as she could to get into the military’s most elite officer training academy. Her aunt’s meltdown, which Elissa had discussed repeatedly with Rustin, had derailed that appointment, and sent Elissa to second-tier schools, because God and the military brass somehow knew she could’ve been cut from the same cloth.

No one cared that there were literally hundreds of Trekovs now, and they were all descendants of Ewing, the Great Hero of the Colonnade Wars, a legendary man, who had had a legendary number of children, including one not too much older than Elissa. That daughter was vat-grown, but that didn’t stop her from going after the family fortune and using the family name.

“I don’t know why you’re so damn defensive about all of it,” Rustin said. “I mean, it’s been a fact of your life since you were born. I’m sure a lot of us would love the Trekov fame and fortune.”

That was the first time he’d ever mentioned the money, and since the money paid for his room here, the mention was probably deliberate.

Elissa grabbed one of the cheese thingies and took a bite. It tasted like stale dog farts. She set the thing down and chased the taste out of her mouth with the questionable wine which, after the cheese thingie, didn’t taste that questionable at all.

“You don’t really get it, do you?” she said. “They’re giving me an SRP and expecting me to be grateful. Then they’re telling me—someone who has proven herself in battle—that I’m going to spend my time babysitting scientists until the day those scientists discover something. If and when they discover something.”

Rustin took a crostini and lavishly spread the paté on it. He ate the entire thing in one gulp, probably trying to irritate her even more. Considering how yucky it all looked, she really didn’t care what he ate and didn’t eat.

“Those scientists are both the pride of the Empire and its future,” he said, quoting the line they’d all heard since the guarding of the scientists had become a military priority. “You should be grateful.”

He should be grateful that she didn’t take the paté and shove it in his face.

Everyone knew that an SRP was bullshit duty. SRP stood for Special Research Postings. They generally went to operations commanders who had served with distinction on the battlefield but who had proven themselves too scarred (or too difficult) to ever return to a front line.

She wasn’t scarred, and she wasn’t difficult. If anything, she was too accommodating, which, if she thought about it, might’ve been the other reason she got the SRP.

The other problem with an SRP was that the scientists could be trouble. They often believed themselves in charge of the military mission, when in fact, they were only in charge of the scientific part of it. In all situations involving the ship and outsiders, the military remained in charge.

How long the damn SRP lasted, however, depended entirely on the scientists and their stupid classified projects.

“So,” she said, “do you want this posting? Because I could recommend you instead.”

Rustin gave her a wide grin. His damn eyes twinkled. He’d been working up to this moment, this punch line.

“You could,” he said, “but it would mean nothing. Because you’re shipping out in three days, and no one is going to replace you unless you resign or die. Oh, wait! You’re a Trekov. You don’t dare resign, do you?”

She tossed her napkin on the table, and stood up. She’d told him all the pressures that came with being a Trekov in confidence, not so that he could shove them in her face.

“You’re a son of a bitch, you know that?” she said, and walked away.

She stopped on the way out and made sure that he couldn’t charge anything to her room. Then she got new keys.

Let him figure out how to take care of himself here.

She was done.

She had her fight, and now she’d spend her last few days off—maybe in years—relaxing. Just like she should have done from the very beginning.

3

THE WEAPONS’ fire slammed into the lower level of the Room of Lost Souls, slicing off the landing area. Bright white light nearly blinded Elissa, and she would have ordered her staff to dim the screen but they were already ahead of her.

The Discovery’s stardrive kicked in, and she let out a small breath. Not only would they get away from the debris field, but they would get away from the transport before the betraying bastard realized that his shots missed their target.

Then something hit her ship, rocking it, and knocking out all the lights. She went from leaning on the console to falling away from it and slamming into the ceiling.

Sudden zero-g. She activated the gravity in her boots—or tried to. Nothing happened.

Things hit her—people, pieces of equipment. She had set down the suit’s helmet and now it had to be among the things floating around in the darkness.

She could breathe, but her chest—her entire body, really—felt odd, as if it had been electrified. Her heart shivered—literally shivered—before returning to its usual rhythm.

Around her, she heard gasps and cries, and echoey bangs as people hit things. She reached up and grabbed onto something on the wall/ceiling/floor nearest her. The first thing she had to do was orient herself.

As she held on, she realized that the ship—the large long ship—was rolling over and over and over again, like an out-of-control children’s toy. She had been floating free, moving with her own momentum, the stuff around her was moving at a different pace, and the ship was moving too.

Only its movements were even less predictable because it had just activated the stardrive, and then the whatever hit them and pushed them in yet another direction. Because Elissa was effectively blind to the exterior of her ship, she had no idea if something big in the debris field was going to hit her or not.

Something big like the Room of Lost Souls itself.

Son of a bitch. That betraying bastard hadn’t missed. He had deliberately targeted Vilhauser, and the resulting explosion had caused this ripple.

The thought hit the forefront of her brain, a grasp for understanding and nothing more. And that was all she needed.

She couldn’t focus on what happened. She needed to focus on what was about to happen.

She had to save this ship and everyone on it.

“Grab something stable!” she yelled. “Grab something stable right now!”

She had to get her crew thinking, because she doubted there was enough time to do much else.

Right now, the ship had oxygen and the temperature was reasonable. The gravity was gone, and so far as she could tell, everything—all of the equipment—had been shut down.

The back-ups on her suit weren’t working, not that she had access to all of them. Some of them were in the stupid helmet, which of course, she couldn’t see.

There was ambient light, however, because the crew had had the portals open. Something was glowing from outside the ship, providing some light inside the bridge.

It had just taken time for her eyes to adjust.

She could see shapes, and little else. Unidentifiable material of all sizes floated around her.

People were easier to see—long bodies, limbs flailing, reaching for something to grab onto.

Thank God bridge crews had mandatory gravity training exercises. The crew knew how to handle this.

Although, when she ran the exercises, she hadn’t ever shut the lights and power off at the same time. And, dammit, neither had her instructors, which meant that no one else’s instructors had done so either.

She hoped to hell that emergency beacon she’d sent had reached the fighters and transports she’d sent for earlier. Even though she had asked them to remain out of range, they might have seen the explosion. With luck, someone would be here soon.

She let out a small breath, her throat sore even though she hadn’t been yelling. Everything about her body, not just her heart, felt off. Whatever had affected the systems had had an impact on her as well.

Which meant that it had done the same to her crew.

She hoped that whatever it was had a localized effect, because if it didn’t, it would move outward as a wave. Which meant it would hit everything in its path—the fighters, the transports, everything.

But not the squadron, right? It was too far away.

She was guessing. But the guessing gave her some comfort. Because if the whatever had moved out as a wave, it would dissipate, and its effects wouldn’t be as severe farther away from the actual explosion itself.

Besides, the distress beacon could be received all over the sector. Even away from her squadron.

She hoped.

Because her ship needed rescue quickly.

It needed rescue now.

4

ELISSA GOT HER SRP briefing after her vacation, and learned some wonderful facts. The reason General Command wanted an up-and-coming commander on this mission rather than a tired old crusty one (as Rustin would have put it) was because the GC considered the SRP dangerous.

Research postings weren’t generally dangerous—at least not in space. Most commanders simply maintained ships near a secret research lab, and spent their days running drills or training cadets or goofing off. The dangerous research postings weren’t space missions. They were ground missions on planets newly conquered by the Empire or just outside of Empire space.

In those places, diplomats handled the problems, and if things got too bad, a guard team went in with the scientists while ships orbited the research planet. Even those duties weren’t classified any more dangerous than a remote outpost somewhere. Fighting could flare up, but probably wouldn’t—that was how it was all judged.

Only on her mission, someone (or several someones) believed that the ships, the scientists, and anyone else in the vicinity would be in actual physical danger, probably because they were going to work at the Room of Lost Souls.

Elissa had never been to the Room of Lost Souls, even though her famous great-great-grandfather had died there under somewhat mysterious circumstances. He was supposed to show up at treaty-signing ceremonies for the Colonnade Wars, treaties he helped negotiate, and instead, he stopped off at the Room of Lost Souls first.

And no one ever saw him again.

The official biographies buried his connection to the Room of Lost Souls, but she knew it. Her entire wing of the family knew it. They all avoided the Room.

And now she’d been ordered there.

Sometimes she believed that someone in General Command actively hated her and wanted her out of the military forever.

And sometimes she thought that General Command had a nice sense of irony. The most famous Commander Trekov of all—Force Commander Ewing Trekov—disappeared at the Room of Lost Souls, so it would only be appropriate that the most recent Commander Trekov would be part of the team that decoded its mysteries.

Or maybe it was a combination of the two things. Or maybe just a luck of the draw.

She had no idea, and she wasn’t in a position to ask.

If Rustin had asked her on their vacation if a more dangerous SRP would have made her happier, she would have said yes.

But once she found out where she was going, she had an uneasy feeling. She couldn’t confess to it, of course. Theoretically, the military didn’t believe in superstitious nonsense, and almost everything about the Room was superstitious nonsense.

Most people believed that the Room didn’t even exist, that it was a ghost story designed to keep ships out of a certain sector of space. But the Room did exist. It looked like a space station, some place where a ship could stop, refuel, maybe get some supplies.

Only as ships approached, they realized it was abandoned.

Most ships went on, but a few docked anyway. Either they guessed this was the famous Room of Lost Souls or they wanted to explore an abandoned space site.

And more often than not, someone in the crew died.

Elissa didn’t know why until she’d signed all the non-disclosure agreements connected to this SRP. Her security clearance got bumped to the highest level, and she learned that there was something on the Room of Lost Souls, something the Empire needed to understand.

5

ELISSA’S OWN MOMENTUM had stopped. Now she was moving with the ship itself. She could feel it turn. It also groaned, and that sound worried her more than anything. Something was bending, shifting, twisting, and that wasn’t good.

She wondered if there had been a hull breach on any of the levels. If so, then the atmosphere would dissipate in the bridge a lot more quickly. The problem was, she didn’t have any way of examining the hull, not with everything shut down.

She held onto something jutting out of the wall/ceiling/floor. She couldn’t quite tell, but she knew that she was probably nowhere near the consoles, since this jutting thing was unprotected. She had felt the wall/ceiling/floor around it, and realized the jut was intentional. Which meant that she was clinging to something a human wasn’t meant to get near in the traditional work-day on the bridge.

“Everyone found something to hang onto?” she asked.

No one answered her. She still saw limbs flailing in that twilight, and then someone floated by.

She couldn’t be the only person still alive, could she? She was the only one in an environmental suit, but the helmet had floated past her twice, and the human head was a vulnerable thing. If the whatever that had hit after the explosion had killed people without environmental suits, then it should have killed her too.

She had to assume her crew—her well-trained crew—was in shock.

“Speak to me, people,” she said, her voice calmer than she felt. Her heart still seemed off. It was shivery, even though it was beating, and her stomach was—well, the only word she could use was itchy. Even her skin felt crawly, like she had walked into a super-charged room.

That thought made her shivers grow worse. Only the new shivers were real ones—shivers from an emotional reaction, not from something happening to her.

“I…I’m okay.” The female voice sounded uncertain, and Elissa couldn’t identify it.

It wasn’t like her crew to be shaken up, even by a disaster of this magnitude. She didn’t like it.

“Let’s try this,” Elissa said. “I want names, then condition.”

After that, she’d worry about location, assignments, and getting this ship working again. One thing at a time.

It would calm all of them—including her.

“Lieutenant Homer Ryder, ma’am.” Ryder’s voice sounded strong, but it echoed in the quiet. “I’m bruised and banged up, I might have a broken ankle, but I think I’m all right. I’ve had worse, ma’am.”

Elissa let out a small breath. She had expected injuries. She just hoped they wouldn’t be too severe.

“Lieutenant Nisha Lee.” Lee didn’t sound as strong. Her voice had a rasp to it. “I hit my head, ma’am, but I don’t think I have a concussion. I’m a little dizzy, but I expect that to pass. I also dislocated my shoulder, but I managed to fix it.”

Elissa winced. She knew how painful shoving a shoulder back in the socket could be. She had no idea how someone achieved that in zero-g, but apparently Lee had.

“Officer Phoebe Gatson.” There was the faint voice that had spoken a few moments ago, the voice that Elissa hadn’t been able to place. “I got a few cuts, but I stopped the bleeding. I don’t think anything major is wrong, but I tell you, my body feels like it’s been through some kind of super-charged environment.”

That feeling that Elissa had. Apparently Gatson shared it.

“Me too,” Lee said.

“Yeah,” Ryder added. “Whatever hit us had some kind of physical component.” Then he caught his breath as if he realized what he’d said. “I mean, it affected our bodies, not—”

“I know what you mean, Lieutenant,” Elissa said, “and I’m feeling the same way. And like you, I’m convinced it came from that thing that hit us.”

“I feel dizzy too, ma’am. Officer Alistair Binek,” he added that last as if he wasn’t sure she would recognize his voice. She did. “And I’m pretty sure I cracked a rib. Nothing serious. I can breathe just fine.”

“I think I broke a few ribs,” said a new female voice. “Provisional Lois Baxter, ma’am. I’m breathing all right, and I don’t think my lungs are damaged. I suspect I’ll feel this more when the gravity comes back.”

Baxter was the only Provi on the bridge crew, and one of Elissa’s best crew members, even though—or maybe because—she had worked her way up through the ranks.

“With luck, Provi,” Elissa said, “we’ll have the gravity on soon, and someone medical will be able to ease the pain.”

“It’s not a problem right now, ma’am,” Baxter said.

Her crew was doing its best to convince her that they were fine. But she heard something in the voices, something that told her they were not fine, any more than she was.

“Officer Malachi Locke, ma’am. I’m pretty sure my right arm is broken, maybe in more than one place. But I’m functional, especially while the gravity is off.” Locke sounded almost cheerful, so Elissa knew it was a front.

She was about to respond when one more voice spoke up, sounding shaky.

“Officer Sepp Trombino, ma’am. I had a bloody nose but I don’t think it’s broken. I’ve had a broken nose. I know what it feels like and this isn’t it. My body has that same uncomfortable feeling everyone else has described, but I’m good to go, ma’am.”

She smiled. Trombino was one of her more gung-ho officers, but he often complained his way through things. She didn’t mind right now. They all had reason to complain.

She went over the responses in her head. Seven responses. She should have had eight.

“What about Lieutenant Calthorpe?” Elissa made sure her voice remained steady as she asked about the only person who hadn’t checked in.

She waited, watching the shadowy things float past her. Unidentifiable, even by shape. She couldn’t tell, but it seemed like the flare from outside the ship was fading as well.

“Anyone? Is Calthorpe near you or did he hit his head? Is he unconscious?”

“Someone keeps bumping me,” Ryder said from across the bridge. His voice echoed just a bit.

Now that she had asked everyone to identify themselves, she could recognize voices, even when they sounded just a bit off. She was beginning to think that whatever happened had affected her hearing as well.

Or maybe it had had the same impact on her brain as it had had on her heart.

That made her shiver yet again.

“Someone?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” Ryder said, his voice even. She didn’t hear uncertainty in him or even distress. And she should have heard distress, since he believed he had broken his ankle in the ship’s initial violent reaction to the explosion. “First, some fabric brushed my face, and then a little while later, I felt skin.”

That turned her stomach, and it shouldn’t have. She was usually made of stronger stuff than that.

“Anyone think that it might’ve been you bumping into Lieutenant Ryder?” she asked. “Anyone?”

“We all banged around a lot, ma’am,” Binek said. “I know I hit a lot of stuff at first. Might’ve been people, ma’am.”

A chorus of voices added their agreement.

“Since that initial explosion, has anyone brushed up against a fellow crew member?” Elissa asked, realizing that everyone’s brains were working too slowly. She had never encountered this before. It put the entire ship at even more of a disadvantage.

No one answered her with an affirmative. No one answered that question at all.

She took a deep breath and let it out. Was it her imagination or was the air noticeably cooler than it had been a few minutes before?

“All right,” she said. “We’re going to have to assume that Calthorpe is unconscious. If he floats past anyone, please find a way to ground him.”

She was still shivering. Shock? She hoped not. She didn’t need it, not right now. She needed to be clear. They all needed to be clear.

“Now,” she said, “we need to get near the console. We need to turn lights and atmosphere back on. Then we need to assess the damage.”

Something banged far away, as if it came from outside and was echoing through the ship. She could feel a vibration through her hand.

It couldn’t be one of the fighters. She would have seen its lights through the portal, right? Besides, it was too soon for one to get here.

Or maybe her sense of time was off.

She made herself take a deep breath.

If the Room had exploded, then there was a lot of junk out there. Even if it hadn’t, there would still be some parts—not to mention bits of Vilhauser and her two excellent soldiers—floating near the ship.

Plus, that device, that malfunctioning device that had caused her to separate from the Room in the first place, might not have come apart in the explosion. She had no idea what that device was, and she had no idea what it could do.

Everything was supposition at this point.

Everything.

Including their odds for survival.

6

THE EMPIRE CALLED the thing operating in the Room of Lost Souls stealth tech, but Elissa learned it was something more than that.

She finally understood on her first full day on the Discovery, as she went on a tour of the research labs with the head scientist, Keon Vilhauser. Vilhauser called himself a technician rather than a researcher; he said he liked knowing how something worked, not how to recreate it in the lab.

The labs filled the entire center of the Discovery. The ship was built with the scientific function in mind. Each section was walled off from the other sections in case something went wrong.

In fact, the Discovery could separate into three parts if necessary—the bridge and the front part of the ship could detach from the middle, and the engineering section, all the way in the back, could do the same. If an on-board experiment got out of control and the ship had warning, it could abandon the scientific middle and leave it alone in the darkness of space.

Elissa didn’t like the design. She preferred the older science ships that had the experimental labs in the back. The labs could be detached and left behind with the bulk of the ship intact.

The problem was that those ships were also easier to attack, and there was no better way to destroy a science vessel then to hit its lab with something lethal.

The Discovery was the command ship of this expedition. Elissa commanded a squadron of thirty vessels, most of which would simply stand guard outside the Room’s section of space. They would link their sensors, covering an established region of space. Such a technique was called an information shield, and it was highly effective. It made sure no other ships would enter the region while the Discovery was working at the Room of Lost Souls.

In fact, Elissa had added one additional protection outside the sector: she placed warning buoys along the way to the squadron, warning any outsiders that proceeding into the sector would be considered trespassing, and would be punished as such.

She believed in warning innocents that they might be getting in trouble. That way if they showed up near her squadron, and their ship had to be destroyed, they at least had sufficient warning.

After the Discovery had left port, Vilhauser invited Elissa into the science lab. He took her to his lab first.

Vilhauser had covered the tables with small vials of yellow pulsing light. She could see them from the doorway. The lab felt…unusual…as if it had more static than other places on the ship.

Vilhauser invited her to step inside, but stopped her near the door for a good minute before he spoke. He had watched her for that entire minute, as if he expected her to run.

Elissa had been stared down by stronger people than Vilhauser. As he stared at her, she stared at him. He had long black hair, curly like Rustin’s, but unlike Rustin’s, the curls were out of control. Vilhauser’s eyes matched his hair color, and probably made him attractive when he was younger. Now, frown lines turned his eyes downward, and marked two deep grooves that ran from either side of his nose down to his chin. He was thin and flabby, the kind of person who wouldn’t have made it through five minutes of her standard qualification drill for incoming crew members.

“Well,” he said flatly. “At least you have the marker.”

She knew about the genetic marker. She wouldn’t have been on this trip if she didn’t have it. Neither would her crew.

So she found his comment odd, almost as odd as she found him.

“They made sure we all have it,” she said. “No one would be on this mission if they lacked the marker.”

His frown lines seemed to grow deeper. Then he shook his head as if she were the most naïve person he had ever met.

“You have a lot of faith in your military masters,” he said.

She bristled, but she didn’t show it. She hated it when civilians who benefitted from a military presence bad-mouthed the military. Only her training kept her from expressing her disgust at him.

“I’ve been on half a dozen of these so-called SRPs,” he said, “and even though the crew is supposed to be vetted for the marker, the vetting is poor. If one of your crew members flew near the Room of Lost Souls, then someone considers them vetted.”

She hadn’t checked the vetting, and that idea gave her pause. But she didn’t move. And she didn’t let Vilhauser know that his point made her uneasy.

Either he sensed it, or he felt the need to justify his statement. He added, “I’ve had soldiers die because we’ve been running stealth tech experiments on a science ship. Usually nothing happens outside the lab, but every now and again, the wrong person walks inside, and dies. Horribly.”

His expression didn’t change either, as if “horribly” wasn’t all that horrible, or as if he had become very jaded about the whole thing.

“Your name is Trekov,” he said, “and one of your relatives died in the Room, which means that some branches of your family lack the marker. However, you wouldn’t be standing in here if you didn’t have the marker.”

She nodded toward the vials of pulsing light. “I take it that’s an active stealth tech field.”

“I wouldn’t call it a field,” he said. “But it is active, and someone without the marker would be in trouble right now.”

That anger she’d kept tamped down since she’d been on vacation rose again. The arrogant bastard. He’d brought her in here to see if she would die? What an asshole.

What a dangerous asshole.

She made note of that.

“Do you want to bring the entire crew in here one at a time?” she asked in a neutral tone, as if she hadn’t figured out that she would have died without the marker. Inside, though, she wanted to give full voice to the anger she felt. It was all she could do to keep her words from being sarcastic.

“Of course not,” he said. “We should have done something like that before we came out here. I looked over the records and made certain that a preponderance of the crew had gone into a prescribed stealth tech area at least once. The crew members who hadn’t are either on the lower decks or I asked them to be moved to other ships in the squadron.”

She straightened her shoulders and raised her chin ever so slightly. So that was where the confusing orders had come from. Lieutenant Calthorpe had informed her that certain crew members were not allowed on the Discovery for personnel reasons and that others would be confined to areas outside of the laboratory middle.

Some of those crew members did not like the constraint and asked her personally why she had ordered that. She hadn’t, she told them, and then approved their transfers to other ships in the squadron if they so desired.

Now, she wondered if she should have left any of them on this ship at all.

“I know no one has briefed you on exactly what we’ll be doing,” Vilhauser said. “Succinctly, our mission is this: we believe that the Room has an active stealth tech device, but we can’t find it. Our mission is to locate it and remove it from the Room. We will be taking items from the Room and testing them—away from the Room itself. You should know that if anything happens to the Discovery, we prefer it happen away from the Room so that the Room remains intact.”

That last part Flag Commander Janik had told her. The Room of Lost Souls was a valuable treasure and should not be destroyed under any circumstances. At the time, she had thought the circumstances he referred to were an attack by another ship. Now, she realized that he meant should something go wrong, it was better to blow up the Discovery (or parts of it) than to harm the Room itself.

“You do understand that this mission could last months,” Vilhauser said.

“Of course,” she said, this time letting just a hint of that sarcasm out. “I was briefed.”

She made it sound like everything he had told her was old hat, which it most decidedly was not. But she didn’t want him to know that her superiors had treated her as poorly as he had assumed they had.

“Good,” Vilhauser said. “I trust you have enough here to keep the crew entertained.”

Entertained. A military unit did not need entertainment. It did need action, though, and she had already discussed that with her superiors before the mission. She would be running some simulations, just to keep her people “entertained,” as Vilhauser put it. She preferred to think of it as maintaining the crew’s readiness.

“We are prepared to serve as long as we have to,” she said.

“Good,” he said. “Then you’re dismissed.”

She didn’t move. He had finally gone too far.

“Mister Vilhauser,” she said.

“Doctor,” he corrected.

She nodded an acknowledgement but didn’t repeat the honorific.

“I run this mission,” she said. “When you are on the Discovery, you are under my command. Is that clear?”

“No, ma’am,” he said. “I run the mission. You run the ship.”

“I run the squadron,” she said. “You determine how long the scientific part of the mission will last. You handle the science and the scientists. I make sure you are all safe. If I believe there’s a threat, you will listen to me, and you will leave.”

“That’s not my understanding, ma’am.”

“Then clarify your understanding with your superiors, Vilhauser,” she said, deciding to forgo the honorific entirely. “Because I have my orders and I plan to follow them. Are we clear?”

He remained silent for several minutes. When she didn’t try to fill that silence, he said, “Are we going to have a problem, ma’am?”

She gave him what Rustin called her nasty smile. “I don’t know, Vilhauser. But you should know this: If we have a problem, I will settle it in the way that is best for the crew.”

“And if you harm this mission, Commander,” he said, “I will report you to your superiors.”

“Of course you will,” she said. “You’ll be within your rights.”

“You sound like you don’t care about my rights, Commander.”

This time, she let her emotions into her voice. “You got it, Doctor. I don’t care about your rights. I care about the lives of the crews on my ships, and you just made it very clear that you don’t. If you truly worried about those with the marker, you would have done more than review files. You would have spoken to me before we launched, and you certainly wouldn’t have risked my life.”

“You’re paid to risk your life, ma’am,” he said.

“I am paid to protect and serve the Empire, Doctor,” she said. “I am not paid to be at the whim of a scientist who has no concept of right or wrong. Now are we clear?”

He studied her for a long moment. “You don’t seem to like me, ma’am.”

“I’m not supposed to like you,” she said. “I’m just supposed to ensure that you complete your scientific mission without interference from others. I will do that. And you will do your best not to accidentally kill my people.”

He let out a snort. “They said you were tough. I had no idea how tough.”

“No,” she said. “You have no idea who I am or what I’m capable of. Keep that in mind as you proceed, Vilhauser. My people come first.”

“If that were true, you’d be commanding all of this mission.”

“That’s what you don’t understand, Vilhauser,” she said as she let herself out of the lab. “I am commanding all of this mission. And you will listen to me, whether you want to or not.”

7

THE CREW WAS USED to working in zero-g, but they were used to working in zero-g while lights were on. They hadn’t had drills for working in near-darkness since she had taken over, and maybe some of them never had.

One of Elissa’s officer training instructors had run the class through darkness drills. Elissa had found them disconcerting. Several talented officer recruits actually washed out because of those drills. Those recruits had hated working in those conditions, and one of them even demanded that the instructor guarantee they would never encounter such a thing.

He had laughed. Clearly, he said, you’ve never been in battle.

Elissa had been in battle many times, and she’d even commanded disabled ships, but nothing like this.

She had to squint to locate what she believed to be the ship’s consoles. The light coming through the portals was fading, and soon they would only have starlight to work from, and not much at that.

She had learned a zero-g trick as a child. She closed her eyes and mentally erased any effect of gravity. In other words, she wiped out the so-called rule that the console had to be on the floor, the portals on the wall, and nothing on the ceiling.

She got rid of concepts like floor and ceiling altogether.

That ability had made her stand out when the officer training had moved from zero-g with a ship whose attitude controls were working to a ship whose attitude controls had malfunctioned.

She used those skills now, while the rest of her crew probably struggled with attempting to mentally map the actual layout of the slowly rotating ship.

She let go of the jutting thing and floated toward what she believed were the consoles. She grabbed a rounded edge and pulled herself in. Yep, these were the consoles. They had always had a slight vibration as power thrummed through them.

They had no vibration now.

She used one hand to hold herself above the consoles, and then she counted the edges from her spot.

The console wasn’t one big piece of equipment, but several pieces, and if she knew where she was among those pieces, then she knew what faced her on those dark boards.

Lieutenant Nisha Lee joined her. Elissa knew it was Lee, not because of her small size—several of the bridge crew were small—but because of the faint jasmine perfume she always wore. The scent was mixed with sweat now, and probably a hint of anxiety, but Lee said nothing.

She was using both arms, so that dislocated shoulder truly had gone back into its socket.

Two other crew members floated down from various positions and found a place beside Elissa. She cared less about who they were than what they could do.

She was in front of navigation.

“Lieutenant,” she said to Lee, “I believe you have the environmental systems.”

“I know, ma’am.” Lee held her position with one hand and moved the other on the console. She sounded distracted, but Elissa wasn’t sure if that was because she was ignoring the radiating pain in her shoulder or because she had other problems.

Elissa could orient the ship with this part of the console. She moved her fingers up, searching for the raised controls. They should have popped up the moment the lights went out.

But they hadn’t. The console felt flat and useless under her hands.

“Commander,” said Trombino. He was the person who ended up beside her on the left. “Nothing raised up here. This console still is on standard control.”

“This one too,” Lee said.

“And this one,” said Gatson. She was one console over from Trombino. “I’m already under—if that’s the word—trying to manually activate. Nothing wants to work, ma’am.”

Nothing wants to work. Of course not. They weren’t going to catch a break.

“Do what you can,” Elissa said. “The same with the rest of you. I’ll move to the door controls.”

A small back-up control unit was built into the wall beside the door. To the untrained observer, the back-up control didn’t do much. But everyone on the bridge knew that the cover plate could be removed and with a passcode typed into a keypad, an override system could be activated. The keypad was manual, meaning that it operated on a spring rather than a computer.

Only ten members of the crew had that passcode. Two of those people had to be on the bridge at all times. It was an order that most ship commanders ignored, and indeed, had the explosion happened while Elissa was coming back from the Room, only Calthorpe would have had that code.

Elissa moved to the door. Beyond it, she heard more groaning from the ship herself. She didn’t like it. Nothing out on the other side of that door should’ve been subjected to the kind of stress that caused that noise.

She made herself focus. Her fingers found the ridge in the wall beside the door. She dug her nails under the edge, then pulled. The control panel opened easily.

Just for the heck of it, she tried to turn on the lights from here. She pressed the familiar depression on the panel, and—nothing happened. She let out a small sigh, as silently as she could. She wasn’t frustrated, not really, but she was growing worried.

She removed the panel, holding it in one hand as she typed on the keypad with the other. The controls eased out of their holder, and her shaky heart sped up. She recognized the feeling for what it was: a surge of adrenaline mixed with hope.

Her fingers slid along the raised control panel. The pattern was familiar. Every commander had been taught to do this one blind. Someone figured that a commander might have to do this behind her back or sideways or upside down, often without seeing what she was doing.

Sometimes the in-the-field experience did make it to training.

She activated the panel, worried slightly that the internal lights on the panel itself didn’t come on, then decided to ignore that. She didn’t care as long as she managed to get the systems working inside the bridge again.

She hit the switches, then looked over her shoulder.

The twilight seemed dimmer—she had been right; that flare was fading—but she could see her crew, staring at her.

“Well?” she asked, and her voice had a bit more edge than she wanted it to.

She saw Lee swivel slightly, focus on the console in front of her, and move her arms just a little.

“The controls didn’t raise,” she said.

That would have been a first step. So would the lights coming back on.

Neither happened.

No response meant that this panel, too, was damaged.

Someone sighed on the other side of the bridge. The sound echoed in the silence.

Elissa couldn’t think of anything to say. She didn’t know how to reassure her crew.

“How do you think they’re doing in the rear of the ship?” Trombino asked. He sounded desperate.

Or maybe she just heard desperation. She understood it. She was trying to fend it off herself.

“I think whatever happened hit all of us,” she said. “Even if there were power elsewhere in the ship, we’d have to wait until they restore it here before we dare venture out of the bridge.”

She didn’t tell them about the groaning, but she suspected they’d all heard it. And if they thought about it, they knew what it meant.

“Can we open up a console and see if we can repair it inside?” Binek asked.

“It won’t matter,” she said. “Something disabled all of our systems.”

“How can you know that?” Binek asked, and she wasn’t guessing here. He did sound desperate.

Elissa lowered her head, then realized she had a piece of information none of the rest of them did.

“The gravity in my boots doesn’t work,” she said. “I would wager if I put on the helmet for the environmental suit that the oxygen isn’t working. I’m convinced all systems are down.”

“How is that possible?” Trombino asked.

“Did those strangers have some kind of weird weapon?” Ryder asked.

Apparently, she had one other piece of information that her crew didn’t have.

“The weapons’ fire from the strange transport ship didn’t hit us,” Elissa said. “It hit the device that Vilhauser wanted off the Room.”

“You’re kidding me,” Binek said. “That thing he was so excited about? It killed him?”

“Yeah,” Elissa said softly. And there was a good possibility that it would kill all of them too.

8

THE FIRST BIG FIGHT with Vilhauser came over the location of the Discovery. He didn’t want the ship anywhere near the Room of Lost Souls, unless researchers were actually on the Room.

Elissa wanted the ship to remain in a stable pattern around the Room, so that the other ships in her squadron would know where the Discovery was at any one time.

Besides, she figured the only time the Room was dangerous was when Vilhauser and his science team messed with the site itself.

But Vilhauser was insistent, and rather than fight him over something like this, she decided to reserve her true firepower for something that she felt was important, like the way that Vilhauser treated her soldiers when they were actually on a mission.

That had been the second big fight—the first fight with consequences for her. Because she wouldn’t let Vilhauser disrespect her crew, no matter how much he tried.

And, she made it clear that if his bad behavior continued, she would call this SRP off. He claimed that if she did that, he would make sure her decision had a negative impact on her career, to which she had replied,

I’m a Trekov. You think you can have a negative impact on my career? Give it a shot.

She later realized he thought she meant that she had clout because she was the great-great-granddaughter of Ewing Trekov when actually she’d meant that the rest of her military relatives had so trashed the name that she had no clout at all.

The third big fight hadn’t started yet, although she could feel it building the same day that Lieutenant Calthorpe had notified her that a transport ship had docked with the Room of Lost Souls.

Elissa had been in the officer’s mess, finishing up her largest meal of the day. She had done her exercises, run part of her crew through some drills, and double-checked on Vilhauser.

So she had been surprised when Calthorpe called her to the bridge. Elissa had hurried, only to be greeted with the news about the transport.

Elissa couldn’t have been more shocked than if Calthorpe had told her that the Room had flown away under its own power. In fact, she would have been less shocked. The Room was mysterious; the kind of protections she had placed around this sector of space were not. “Did our people let it through?”

“No, ma’am,” Calthorpe said. “I’ve already checked.”

Elissa had approved the information shield herself. She knew there were no gaps in it. If a ship approached this sector, she would know it. Her people would know it. They would know it from the first moment that ship approached the warning buoys.

“Is that transport using some kind of stealth technology that we’re unfamiliar with?” she asked.

“Not that we can tell, ma’am,” Calthorpe said. “It appears that the transport used a standard cloak. They appeared inside our shield and headed, uncloaked, to the Room. We didn’t even notice them until they docked.”

“Why the hell not?” Elissa asked, although she had an inkling why. She had her ships monitoring the area outside of the shield. She had figured the inside was safe. After all, no ship could get in, and there were no nearby planets.

She had swept the entire area before she set up the shield so there was no way that a ship could slip inside undetected.

Was there?

“We were looking in the wrong direction, ma’am,” Calthorpe said.

Nothing like stating the obvious. Elissa understood that much. Like kids linking arms around a circle, they had faced outward, ignoring what was going on inside that circle.

They had sensors near the Room itself, in case the energy levels changed or something else went wrong. Elissa hadn’t told Vilhauser about those, but she felt it important, especially after Vilhauser himself seemed nervous about staying near the Room.

“Whose transport is it?” Elissa asked.

“We don’t know, ma’am,” Calthorpe said. “We’ve never seen the ship type before.”

“Then how do you know it’s a transport?” Elissa asked.

“We don’t for certain, ma’am. We’re just describing how it’s being used.”

Enough talk. She walked to the console, brought everything on the screen, and stared at the transport. It was sleeker than any ship she’d ever seen.

Rather than ask about it, she opened another screen and had the system review the moment the transport arrived. She watched it dock, then saw thirty people exit the ship. The people wore two different kinds of environmental suits as sleek as the ship. One type, according to her sensors, had a thicker layer. Those people also carried more than one weapon.

Soldiers.

But from where? She didn’t recognize the suits or the ship. Nor did she recognize the equipment some of them carried into the Room.

They walked into the main part of the Room of Lost Souls—the most dangerous part—as if they were completely unconcerned.

“They split off there,” Calthorpe said. “Some went into the actual room itself. Others went into what we’re calling the control room. And some went to that area where Vilhauser has been working.”

The actual room was an empty room in the center of the Room of Lost Souls, a place where those without the marker heard noises, saw lights, went inside, and died.

“Great,” Elissa said. “You haven’t told Vilhauser about this, have you?”

“No, ma’am.” Calthorpe sounded shocked at the very suggestion. “I needed to inform you first.”

And then they had to figure out what to do with these people.

“We’re searching for the transport in our database,” Calthorpe said, “but so far we’re finding nothing. And our sensors don’t even know what these suits are made of.”

“Wonderful,” Elissa said, shaking her head. Strangers in strange armor on strange ships, messing with the work of the most difficult person she knew.

“I also have an entire team going through the data our ships have been sending us from the shield. Plus the squadron itself is going over it all. So far, we haven’t found any holes in our shield.”

“What about a ship?” Elissa asked. “That transport had to come from somewhere, and it doesn’t look like a long-range vessel.”

She knew that what it looked like and what it was were two different things. But generally, ships that docked the way this one had came from somewhere else, the way that small short-range fighters did.

“We’re not finding anything yet, ma’am,” Calthorpe said.

“What about cloaks?” Elissa asked.

“Well, that’s where it gets interesting.” Calthorpe tapped the console and a third screen appeared. “The transport was cloaked initially, but it arrived at the Room uncloaked.”

Elissa frowned. Generally a cloak remained if a cloaked ship believed there was any kind of threat.

“Did it scan the Room?” she asked, thinking that maybe the ship realized the Room of Lost Souls was empty.

“Not that we can tell,” Calthorpe said. “And here’s the other weird thing. If you follow the transport’s energy signature, you’ll see that its trajectory makes no sense.”

Calthorpe tapped the screen. His fingertip created a red line that he then drew across the image. “The ship appeared, uncloaked, here. Then it came directly to the Room.”

Elissa nodded.

“But before it uncloaked, look at its path.”

Its path was zigzag at first, then circular, and then it went back sideways a bit before the transport became visible.

“That makes no sense,” Elissa said. “If it thought someone was following it, it would have remained cloaked.”

“Or maybe it believed it was in the clear, and then it uncloaked?” Calthorpe sounded uncertain. Elissa felt uncertain. The transport’s behavior was decidedly odd.

“Go back farther on that signature. See if there’s a ship near the arrival point,” Elissa said.

“Already done, ma’am,” Calthorpe said. “What I’ve shown you is what we have. The energy signature is as strange as the transport. The signature dissipates quicker than any we’re used to. We can’t go back any farther than what we have.”

Elissa frowned.

“And, ma’am, we are looking for another ship along the area suggested by this transport. We’re also going back weeks, before our squadron set up the shield. So far, we’ve found nothing.”

Elissa nodded. She went over the information herself, not because she didn’t trust this crew—she did—but because this was the first interesting thing to happen around the Discovery in weeks.

She had spent at least ten minutes looking at the screens, when the bridge door opened.

“Do you know what’s going on at the Room?”

She recognized the voice before she turned around. Vilhauser. The last person she wanted to see.

“We have the situation under control, Doctor,” she said without moving. She didn’t want to give him any more attention than he deserved.

“Do you realize they’re inside the Room?”

The man was excessively dramatic.

“Yes, Doctor, we do,” she said.

“No,” he said. “I mean the room. The secret room. The one I’ve been trying to get into since we arrived.”

She turned around.

He stood just inside the door, face flushed, hair sticking up in tufts. She’d never seen him disheveled before; he’d always been such a precise person. He was clearly disturbed, and he had come here at full run.

“What do you mean, secret room?” she asked.

“There’s a room we can’t get into. We can go around it on all four sides, but we can’t get in it. And from what we can tell, it’s really big.” He tugged at his hair. “I think it’s the place that the stealth tech is. The room where everyone dies is just above it, and there’s nothing in that room. But something is going wrong, and then there’s an area we can’t go it? Logically, it’s the place.”

She frowned. He didn’t have to tell her the details of his work in the Room. She just had to guard him. So this was the first she was hearing about a secret room.

“Why can’t you get in?” she asked.

“We can’t even find the door’s latch. We can see the outline, but we can’t figure out how to open it.”

Normally he wouldn’t have admitted that kind of failure to her. It was a sign of how very distressed he was.

“Then how do you know they’re inside?” she asked.

“We have sensors everywhere,” he said. “They went in.”

“I thought nothing worked near the malfunctioning stealth tech,” she said.

“It works. It just has to be adjusted for—oh, hell, it would take too long to explain. Just trust me. These people, these invaders, they’re in the room. They’re probably stealing the stealth tech.”

She let out a breath. Son of a bitch. He could be right.

She turned to Calthorpe. “Get us to the Room right now.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Calthorpe said.

“And I want the squadron to send a few transports of our own and some fighters. Make sure they stay out of sensor range. We’ll only use them if we need them. Is that clear?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Calthorpe said.

Elissa put a hand on Vilhauser’s back and led him out of the bridge into the corridor. The door closed behind them.

“Tell me what you know, everything you know about this secret room,” she said to him.

He almost managed to hide his contempt. She knew what he wanted to say: he wanted to say she couldn’t understand what he was going to tell her.

Instead, he said, “That room is what we came for. It’s the key to the entire mission.”

Suddenly everything he had told her fell into place. The fact that he was a technician and not a researcher. He could get some equipment out of a dead space station, but he might not understand all of it.

He wasn’t working on recreating stealth tech inside the ship like some of the other scientists she’d met. He was trying to capture stealth tech that already existed.

And he was failing so badly that he couldn’t even get into the room itself.

“I want to see everything you have on that room,” she said. “And I want to see it now.”

9

NO MATTER WHAT THEY DID, they couldn’t access the proper controls on the console. The bridge remained in darkness. At one point, Ryder managed to grab Calthorpe, and strap him into a chair. Ryder said Calthorpe was unconscious, but something in Ryder’s tone made Elissa think that maybe Ryder wasn’t telling the crew everything.

She decided not to ask. She couldn’t do anything about Calthorpe, even if he were badly hurt, so it was better to try to get the ship back under control.

If she could get the ship under control.

The flare had faded to nothing, but her eyes had adjusted to the dimness. She still couldn’t see clearly, but she could make out shapes. And some of those shapes were her crew, doing their very best.

They had two major problems: the ships that were closest to them, the fighters and the transports, hadn’t arrived. Which meant that they were probably disabled as well, although, she had to hope, not as disabled as her ship was.

That meant rescue might take a while. The commanders in her squadron would have to make the right decisions: how to protect the area, maintain the information shield, rescue the crew members in the fighters, and come get the Discovery. Theoretically, the Discovery should have been their first priority, but the commanders served with the officers on the transports and fighters. Sometimes personal loyalty trumped orders.

The second problem her crew had was more immediate: it was getting colder. The air might last hours, but if the temperature dropped significantly, the crew wouldn’t last hours.

Elissa had managed to snag her environmental suit helmet, and as she suspected, nothing about it worked. It just provided an extra layer of clothing. A super-strong layer, but a layer nonetheless.

Still, she had one and her crew didn’t.

They were her priority.

“Okay,” she said. “We’re going to do two things. Binek, I want you to check the nearest life pod. See if its systems got fried. If the systems are fine, we will finally have a solution.”

She doubted that the systems were fine, but she didn’t say anything. Stranger things had happened.

“Secondly,” she said, “we need to open the equipment locker and remove the environmental suits.”

The equipment locker was part of the bridge. She wouldn’t have to manually open that door to the corridor. And the word “locker” was a misnomer; it was actually a small room off the bridge. The locker had a door with a manual override. The door opened with a simple pull if the power to the ship went down.

Someone had been thinking on that design, at least.

“You think some of the suits will work?” Trombino asked. Again, he sounded a bit too eager, as if he were clutching onto anything.

“I am not in the guessing business, Officer,” she said, her tone flat. A man prone to great highs would also fall to a great low if things did not turn out as he expected. She didn’t want to raise his hopes. “We’re taking this one step at a time.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. She could see his form, outlined against the portal, moving to the far side of the bridge. Apparently, he would be the first to the equipment locker. That was fine.

She followed.

Someone else—she couldn’t tell who—pulled the door open. It groaned, much like the sound she had heard from outside the bridge.

The interior of the locker was dark, the kind of blackness that hid your hand half an inch from your face.

“Ma’am.” Binek spoke from behind her. “I checked the pod closest to me. None of its systems work. I didn’t go in all the way, because it’s even colder than in here. But I’ll go deeper if you want me to.”

“No need, Binek, thank you.” She wished they could catch a break. She had never been afraid of dying in space, but now that she was faced with that reality, she vaguely wondered why she hadn’t been afraid of it. It was a bad way to die.

“I’m just going to pull the suits out so that we can see sizes,” Trombino said. “That work, Commander?”

“Yes,” she said.

He extended a hand holding a suit, and someone smaller—Gatson?—grabbed it. He continued to take and extend suits until no one picked up the final one.

“Should we put Calthorpe into his suit, ma’am?” Trombino asked, his tone carefully neutral.

Ryder answered before Elissa could even gather a thought.

“No,” Ryder said.

With that one flat word, they all knew: Calthorpe was dead.

The bridge was silent for a long moment, until a groan echoed in the compartment. The groan came from outside, probably from the way the ship was twisting.

“You have a suit, right, Commander?” Trombino asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“You know,” he said, “this locker’s big. We could get in it before the cold really sets in. Our combined body warmth—”

“Might get us an extra ten minutes,” Gatson said. “I’m not sure I want to be in that kind of darkness for an extra ten minutes.”

“An extra ten minutes is the difference between living and dying sometimes,” Elissa said. “If we need it, we’ll go in there.”

“No one’ll find us in time,” Lee said. “No one would think to look.”

“Unless we marked it somehow,” Binek said.

“There’s reflectors on the last suit,” Trombino said. “I’ll pull them off, see what I can create.”

Elissa didn’t argue. They needed to keep moving, needed to keep busy. Despite what she had said to Gatson, Elissa agreed with her: An extra ten minutes probably wouldn’t make much of a difference.

But she had to plan for everything.

“While he’s doing that,” Elissa said, “let’s see if there’s something we missed.”

“Ma’am,” Binek said softly. Somehow he had come up beside her. “I could try to go to the rear of the ship, see if anything is working there.”

She shook her head before remembering that he couldn’t see her. “We don’t have an airlock between the door here and the corridor. We run the risk of venting all of our atmosphere.”

She didn’t say anything about the groaning outside the door. She hoped she wouldn’t have to explain further.

“I just think we need to explore all of our options, ma’am.”

“Me, too,” she said just as softly. “The problem is that we have so very few of them.”

10

THE TRANSPORTS AND FIGHTERS she had requested were already in place by the time the Discovery got to the Room of Lost Souls. The Discovery hadn’t been that far away, which meant that some of her ships in the squadron had been running war games.

She still couldn’t quite figure out how that transport—that unrecognizable transport—had gotten in, particularly if her people had been participating in a military exercise.

On her orders, the Discovery docked at the Room’s lowest level. The unrecognizable transport had docked where ships usually did, on the middle level, quite some distance away.

She had already selected fourteen of her best combat soldiers. She would have brought a smaller group, but Vilhauser insisted on going as well, and he was going to bring the scientists who apparently specialized in that secret room.

She needed the extra staff to corral him. And she knew she couldn’t talk to him along the comm system. He would just shut her voice off, which would put her soldiers in the difficult position of having to choose who to listen to: their commander or the guy who was in charge of the scientific part of the mission.

She decided it would be easier if she went along. If the mission morphed into something scientific, she could make the call. If it didn’t, then she would keep Vilhauser under control.

She put all of that in her briefing notes, in case something unplanned happened out there, something caused by the stupid rules that General Command had set up for the SRP. She would make a case, when she got back, that the chain of command on an SRP couldn’t be this mushy. Someone had to make all of the decisions for the mission, even if that meant having a more scientifically versed commander in charge of the squadron handling the SRP.

She suited up, and then organized her team near the airlock. Even though Vilhauser wanted his team to go in first, she wouldn’t let him. She was sending soldiers in to clear the area.

As they waited for the last of the scientists, one of the soldiers, Ensign Enzo Dryden, pulled her aside. He was one of her youngest officers, but he had risen in the ranks fairly quickly. She trusted him.

And she didn’t like the look on his face. A frown creased his broad forehead and his jaw clenched.

Clearly whatever he was going to say made him nervous, but he spoke anyway.

“A few of the soldiers are worried, Commander. They’ve never gone into the Room of Lost Souls before. They’ve heard the stories.” He ran a hand through his short-cropped red hair. “I’m thinking it might be better if we change the team out a little.”

She had her bubble helmet under her arm. It wasn’t unusual for someone with combat experience to make suggestions, although it was unusual as everyone was suiting up for the mission.

Dryden had worked with many of these soldiers before. She noted that he named no names, which gave her confidence. He wasn’t recommending that anyone leave the team.

“When we selected the active soldiers for this SRP, Dryden, none of us expected a ground action. Now we’re faced with one—or something that resembles one.” She kept her voice low so that no one else could hear her. “I chose this team because everyone on it has had actual hand-to-hand experience.”

“I appreciate that, ma’am, but it might be better to have people with experience in the Room. Honestly, ma’am, I’ve never seen some of these people so terrified.”

She almost asked for names. She believed that discussing terror before a mission was unprofessional. Every soldier had been terrified at one point or another. It came with the job. She couldn’t count the times that terror seized her before a mission. These days, her adrenalin still pumped. She’d been worried the first time she had gone into the Room of Lost Souls as well, but she had come out all right.

“Can they perform their duties, Ensign?”

His green eyes widened just a bit at the question. “I believe so, ma’am.”

“Do you have suggestions of others who have had ground combat experience and who have also been in the Room?”

He swallowed. “Not off the top of my head, ma’am.”

“Well,” she said, hoping she sounded confident, “I’ve been assured that everyone on the Discovery has the ability to go into the Room of Lost Souls without effect.”

“Beg pardon, ma’am, but I’ve heard those assurances as well, and they’re incomplete. A lot of people have made it to the entire structure of the Room of Lost Souls, and died inside the actual room itself.”

She wondered if Vilhauser had told someone else that. Something else to discuss with him when this was all over.

“Are you one of the terrified ones, Ensign?” she asked.

A slight reddish hue colored Dryden’s cheeks. “I wouldn’t characterize myself that way, ma’am.”

“Good,” she said. “Because I will need you on this team. You’ll need to help the terrified ones through this. I’m not expecting anyone to go into the actual room that’s caused all the troubles. Vilhauser and his people can do that.”

“Even if there’s an action in that room, ma’am?” Dryden asked.

He meant even if the fight moved to that room. She thought about it for one small second.

“Yes,” she said. “Even if.”

He smiled. “That should reassure most of the team, ma’am.”

“Good,” she said. She was going to watch him, to see any reaction from the soldiers he talked to, but at that moment, Vilhauser and his scientists showed up.

So much for her plans.

She sighed softly. She recognized two of the scientists as people who had caused her trouble before.

Great. Not only did she have to deal with Vilhauser’s attitude, she would also have to deal with theirs.

She walked over to Vilhauser, stopping him and his four scientists before he got to the soldiers.

“I’m going to object again, Doctor, to five scientists going to the Room of Lost Souls,” she said.

He opened his mouth to answer her, but she didn’t let him speak. She’d made that mistake too many times in the past.

“We don’t know who these intruders are,” she continued, “or what they’re doing. For all we know, they’re going to react badly to our presence and immediately attack.”

He was carrying his bubble helmet under his arm. He gave her a look of both pity and contempt, and somehow that look also managed to convey how very stupid she was.

“Commander,” he said in a tone that matched the look, “it’s obvious that we’re about to meet scientists. They’ve discovered something that we’ve been trying to do for a very long time. We will have a meeting of the minds.”

“I’m sure you will,” she said snidely, since contempt was the tone of the day. “I’m sure that you’re facing scientists, because we all know that scientists prefer environmental suits with body armor and carry large weapons wherever they go.”

“That, Commander,” he said, “is what we have people like you for.”

Then he pushed past her. She opened her mouth to add that he had misunderstood, that the strangers had body armor, and then she decided the comment wasn’t worthwhile.

Vilhauser had completely undermined her authority, but there wasn’t much she could do about it, not under the rules the Empire set for an SRP. She’d learned long ago that a commander who had to demand respect would get even less of it than a commander who let moments like this pass.

Only she wasn’t going to let the moment pass completely.

“Doctor Vilhauser,” she said. “I’m going to treat this trip as a military mission. I will order my people back if I believe they’re in danger. If you do not follow my orders, then your people will get left behind. I will not send my people into a hostile situation because you ‘believe’ these intruders to be sympathetic. I will protect my own.”

He stopped, turned, and smiled at her dismissively. “I’m sure we won’t have a problem, Commander.”

One of the other scientists, a man whose name she couldn’t remember, half smiled at her and shrugged, almost as if he were apologizing.

She had to make a decision now. Either she ran this mission exactly the way she wanted to, or she did not go. Without her, though, her team would be subject to Vilhauser’s whims.

“Let’s go,” she said to her team, mostly because she couldn’t say anything else. “Let’s just go.”

11

IT ONLY TOOK TROMBINO ten minutes to make a sign out of the reflectors on the remaining environmental suit. He placed them on the door to the suit locker. The strips spelled In Here.

Elissa then sent her crew inside. They didn’t want to go, but she made them. The longer they kept warm, the better chance they had.

Her cheeks ached with cold and her nose was numb. As she closed the locker’s door, she promised her bridge crew that she would join them shortly.

She just never specified that she would join them in the locker. She had a hunch none of them would make it, and she would join them in death.

Or rather, they would join her, since she would die first.

But she was going to do everything she could to prevent that.

She had no idea what had been in that wave which had hit them after the explosion, but she knew it had something to do with that malfunctioning stealth tech.

And she also knew that she lacked the scientific knowledge to figure out how stealth tech worked. Everyone who knew that was either on the other side of that creaking door or had died in the initial explosion.

So she could do only minimal things.

Her crew had tried to do the normal restarts. She was going to try some abnormal ones.

Nothing had power, but she didn’t see any fried equipment either. Whatever had gone through hadn’t burned out the controls. It had just disabled them.

And if she could figure out a way to jumpstart them again, she might buy some more time.

But focusing on everything had gotten her nowhere. Now she was just going to focus on the environmental systems.

Her crew needed warmth.

Somehow she was going to provide it.

12

ELISSA BARELY BOARDED the lower level of the Room of Lost Souls when the trouble started. Someone had turned on the gravity to the entire station, which had Vilhauser bleating excitedly—apparently, he hadn’t figured out how to do that either—and some of her team had trouble initially just because they forgot to turn off the gravity in their boots. Then, two of her soldiers—Kuether and Maichle—refused to walk to the stairs beyond the landing platform.

They were simply too scared.

Dryden wanted to send them back to the ship, get replacements, but Elissa didn’t. She ordered them to remain near the door, facing the stairs, in case the strangers tried to get to the Discovery.

At least, that was the solution. To get to that solution, she and Dryden had another round of private discussions, and Kuether and Maichle went back and forth like scared children, following one instruction and then another. If the strangers were watching, they would think her team completely incompetent.

And then Vilhauser wanted to take his little band of scientists and head to that secret room—without protection, without help.

“They’re scientists,” he said. “We’ll be fine.”

She wouldn’t give him the courtesy of an argument. Scientists were dying in pursuit of knowledge throughout the Empire, often at the hands of other scientists who had defected to the Nine Planets, scientists who believed that whatever the Empire was working on had to be evil, and therefore had to be stopped.

“You will go nowhere until we figure out what we’re facing,” she said to Vilhauser in a tone she’d never used with him before.

She could see his face through his bubble helmet. His eyes were wide. She had startled him.

She finally set up her team in a proper recon formation—the two cowards and the scientists would remain here, others would fan out over the stairs, and the rest would work their way up.

She would head to the secret room first. She knew how many of the strangers were there. That gave her a small advantage. Then, if need be, she would contact the unidentified transport, which was probably where their leader was hiding out.

She had just gotten her team to the stairs, when Calthorpe contacted her from the bridge.

“Commander, they’ve figured out that you’re on the Room. A group is heading your way.”

“How many?” she asked.

“They seem to be bringing in specific people. It started with two heading toward you from the secret room, but I see eight more people on the move. I think you’ll be facing ten. And of those ten, nine have those reinforced environmental suits.”

“And weapons?” she asked.

“Something that looks like laser rifles,” Calthorpe said. “But those are only the visible weapons. And I can’t tell from here what their capabilities are.”

“All right,” she said. “Update me if you get more.”

Then she turned her attention to her team. They had all heard Calthorpe as well.

“I’m going to greet them,” Vilhauser said.

“You are going to listen to me,” she said. “We’re going to assume they’re hostile. Then we’re going to—”

One of the soldiers facing her started, and she stopped. Four of her people immediately moved into attack position, backs straight, rifles at the ready.

Her heart pounding, she turned.

Ten people faced her, people she didn’t recognize, in environmental suits so thin they looked like skin. The only way she could tell the difference between the armored suits and the unarmored suit was that the armored suits looked a bit more rigid, particularly over the torso.

Unless she missed her guess, only one suit had no armor. That suit belonged to the man in the center.

At least, she thought the person facing her was a man. He was taller than the average space-faring person, with very broad shoulders and a military posture. But that was all she had to go on. She couldn’t see his face except as a shadow through his gray visor.

They didn’t even wear helmets. The environmental suits had some kind of hood component, which looked both more efficient and more constraining at the same time.

She had no idea how long they’d been watching, which made her want to curse out her people, even though the problem had been hers. Calthorpe had warned her. She shouldn’t have been taken by surprise.

Yet somehow she thought the strangers were farther away—that they had just left that stupid secret room.

“You got the secret room open!” Vilhauser said, sounding like a teenager meeting someone famous.

The idiot had used the speaker on his helmet, so he broadcast to the entire landing area.

“Doctor,” she snapped through the private comm. “Shut up.”

He moved toward the strangers and Dryden tried to hold him back. Obviously, Vilhauser wasn’t listening.

“How in God’s name did you get that room open?” he asked the strangers.

The strangers didn’t reply. Hell, they hadn’t even moved. But she did. She stepped in front of Vilhauser so that he couldn’t even see the strangers.

“If you don’t shut up,” she said, “I will personally send you back to Discovery, and you won’t be conscious when I do it.”

He gave her a sideways glance, clearly startled that she had spoken to him like that. At least he hadn’t shut off his internal comm link yet.

Then she faced the strangers. “You’re trespassing.”

“Oh?” The person without the armored suit spoke. His voice was deep and male. “We thought this place had been abandoned.”

He spoke with an accent she didn’t recognize. And she couldn’t tell from his tone whether or not he was telling the truth.

It really bothered her that she couldn’t see his face.

She raised her chin slightly. “The Room of Lost Souls is property of the Enterran Empire. Didn’t you see the postings?”

Because of the postings, she would have been within her rights under Empire law to shoot these people on sight. But she also knew she would get in trouble for that, because they had opened that secret room, and they did seem to have some knowledge of the way that the Room of Lost Souls worked.

“The maps we have state that this place had been deserted for generations. The maps also state that we should avoid it.” The stranger tilted his head just a little. “That admonition intrigued me.”

He didn’t call the Room by its designation, the way that someone from the Empire would. Anyone, really. The Room of Lost Souls had worked its way into myth long ago, and anyone from this sector would have acknowledged that.

She asked, “And you are?”

She deliberately phrased the question that way, because she wanted him to decide whether he would tell her his name, his rank, or the name of the group he represented.

Instead, the bastard didn’t answer. “I take it you’re from the Enterran Empire.”

“Yes,” she said, deciding to give him that. He nodded again, a little, as if in acknowledgement, and as he was about to tell her who he was, Vilhauser grabbed her arm.

“I need to talk to him. He got the secret room open.”

The idiot didn’t use his internal comm. He said all of that through his speaker. He shattered the delicacy of this initial contact.

“Technically, I didn’t get the room open,” the stranger said as if Vilhauser had spoken to him.

His reply clearly started Vilhauser. It startled her as well. She wondered what the stranger meant by technically.

He continued, “Give us a little time. I had no idea this place belonged to someone. I’ll get my people out of here.”

So he didn’t want a confrontation either. Good. Clearly, the Empire’s presence worried him. She opened her mouth, but Vilhauser spoke first.

“I’d rather you show me how to get into that room,” he said.

She resisted the urge to throttle Vilhauser. She kept her gaze on the stranger, knowing she was at a disadvantage. He could see her expressions—and probably her annoyance at Vilhauser—and she couldn’t see anything about him or his people.

“We need to check out your people,” she said. She didn’t want to be surprised again. She wasn’t even sure about their weapons.

“Why?” the stranger asked. “We all know this base is empty.”

She wasn’t talking about the emptiness of the base. She was more concerned with the fact that these ten people seemed to have no concern—indeed, no understanding—of the danger they were in from the Room itself.

Or maybe they weren’t in danger. Maybe they had no idea what the Room did to most people in the Empire.

Maybe they truly were strangers.

She wasn’t sure how to express that, without giving too much away. So she said, “Your people seem to have no trouble in this base. Plus, we didn’t see you entering this part of space.”

He straightened. Just a bit, but enough for her to notice. She might not have noticed, though, if she had been watching his expression. She was looking for anything that might give her a clue about him, and his posture was about all she had. Everyone around him had remained still.

She needed her soldiers to behave like his people. Hell, she needed the idiot scientists to behave like his people as well.

The stranger did seem surprised that she hadn’t seen his ship, but she wasn’t sure what that surprise was. Had they cloaked and he was astonished they had done so? Or had they slipped in through an opening in the information shield?

“I’m not sure why you would have expected to see me,” he said.

Damn. He was playing the same game she was: Be coy, don’t give too much away.

So she decided to give him more information, information he would know if he had somehow come through the shield.

“We’ve posted most of this region, informing ships to turn away. We also state that anyone who gets through will be considered trespassers and might get shot on sight.”

“Apparently, your postings aren’t as numerous as you thought,” the stranger said. “And it sounds like they make idle threats, since we never saw a ship of yours on our trip here.”

That statement matched what her people had experienced. But she wasn’t going to say so.

“You might not have seen us,” she said, “but we should have seen you. We had an information shield in place.”

“An information shield,” the stranger said as if he hadn’t heard that term before. “You believe that we would have passed through that on our way here?”

“I know you would have,” she said. “There’s no other way here. You would have had to go through our sensors.”

“And you don’t think there are gaps in your sensors,” he said.

“There aren’t,” she said firmly, even though she wasn’t certain.

“And yet we’re here,” he said. Was that sarcasm? What was it about her that provoked sarcasm today.

“You could’ve cloaked,” Vilhauser said in that same excited voice. She knew where his statements were leading. He was going to ask the damn stranger if he had stealth tech, and she needed to stop it now.

“No cloak is good enough to mask against our sensors,” she said loudly, and she was glad she did, because Vilhauser had actually added the words “stealth tech” before he realized he had said too much.

“Doctor,” Dryden said to Vilhauser through the comm, “please let the Commander handle this.”

She was both grateful and irritated at Dryden for speaking up. She needed to concentrate on the strangers, but she was having trouble. She was not a diplomat, and this situation was beyond anything she had done before.

She said to the stranger, “You came in a small ship, one that cannot have traveled through deep space.”

“So,” the stranger said, with amusement in his voice, “now you know the capabilities of my ship. Have you flown one like it?”

“I know, based on the size and the power configuration, that it couldn’t have traveled here on its own. That’s a short-range vessel. If I had to guess, I would say it’s a troop transport.”

That tiny movement again, the one he probably didn’t even know that he did. It was a tell of some kind. She had identified the ship’s function. But if it were a short-range vessel designed for carrying troops, then where was the mother ship?

“Until you people showed up,” the stranger said, “I had no reason to bring a troop here.”

“So what are you doing here?” Vilhauser managed to ask before Elissa could speak up.

The stranger said, “We’re exploring. None of us had been here before.”

“And somehow you got into the secret room,” Vilhauser said.

“It didn’t look secret,” the stranger replied. “In fact, I’m not even sure what you’re referring to as the secret room. We’ve found some doors that were harder to open than others, but we didn’t find any hidden spaces at all.”

Vilhauser tried to shake off Dryden, but Dryden pulled him back. Not even Dryden could stop this idiot from taking over the encounter. “The secret room is the door inside—”

“What’s the point of your exploration?” Elissa asked over him, hoping the stranger didn’t take this little internal conflict as a sign of weakness.

The stranger turned toward her. He seemed to have some sort of reaction to Vilhauser, but she couldn’t’ tell what it was. Contempt? Mockery? Amusement? Relief that this little Empire team was horribly inept?

The stranger said, “The point of our exploration is what’s always the point of exploration. Information, mostly. But I have to admit, there’s just a bit of an adrenalin high going into a new place, particularly one that’s been deserted for this long.”

Someone who came to the Room because it existed? That definitely marked this little group as not from the sector.

“Did you expect to find something here?” she asked.

Vilhauser wasn’t moving now. Apparently this interested him too.

“Of course not,” the stranger said. “This place has been abandoned for a long time. Abandoned places get scavenged. I figured there would be little here, except of exploratory or informational value.”

He kept repeating the word “information.” She found that curious. “What are you trying to find out?”

“Your guides and warnings seem to give this place mythic powers,” the stranger said. “We wanted to see that.”

Your guides. Not the Empire’s guides. Not the guides all over the sector. Your guides. As if he weren’t from here.

There was more to this transport’s arrival on the Room of Lost Souls. These people weren’t afraid of the Room’s deadly history; they knew how to open complicated doors; and they could turn the gravity on in the entire station, something the scientists had been completely unable to do.

This was more than a sight-seeing trip, and she was a bit insulted that the man speaking to her thought he could fool her this way.

Maybe she should stop dancing with him. Maybe she should be even more direct.

“I don’t believe you,” she said.

He actually turned toward her, which made her realize he hadn’t been looking at her full on before. He paused for a moment. Had her statement startled him? Was he trying to decide whether or not to be honest with her?

Then he said, “You don’t believe that we were interested in a place called on all maps the Room of Lost Souls? Who could avoid such a place?”

“Anyone with an instinct for self-preservation,” she said.

The soldiers behind her shifted. Dryden said softly, in their comm, “Commander….” as if warning her.

But she ignored him.

The stranger tilted his head again. “You keep threatening that something bad will happen. Are you going to kill us for visiting here?”

She guessed they were both putting everything on the table now. He wanted to know if they would attack. She had threatened him before. She could threaten him again.

She was about to when that damn Vilhauser meddled yet again.

“No, no, of course not,” he said. Then he turned toward her, grabbing her arm. She wanted to shake him off, but he had a determined look. He wouldn’t give up, unless she dragged him out of here—which she was going to do if he didn’t fucking settle down.

“For god’s sake, Commander,” Vilhauser said, and he still was using his speaker, probably because he figured the broadcast would allow the strangers to side with him. “We need to talk to these people. There are at least thirty of them and they all have the marker.”

She wanted to hit him. Just knock his bubble helmet loose and see how he reacted. She clenched a fist against her side, the side that the stranger couldn’t see.

“You,” she said to Vilhauser, “are here on my sufferance. One more word, and I’ll send your people back to the ship.”

She kept that on speaker too. It was already clear to the stranger that she had problems in her ranks. She was going to let him know that the problems weren’t with her soldiers, but with the idiot scientists.

Vilhauser’s determined look became something more sinister.

“Actually,” he said, “you’re here because of me, and you have no right to order me around.”

Son of a bitch. Didn’t he know what he was doing? He was hurting all of them. He was hurting the entire empire.

Then someone chuckled. She turned toward the sound. It had come from the strangers.

“Fun as this all is,” the man said, “it has nothing to do with me or my people. We had no idea we were trespassing, so we’ll leave. Just give us thirty minutes and we’ll be out of your way.”

Finally, progress. She was about to agree when the Room—moved. There was no other word for it. It felt like a ship with the power down, drifting in space. It made Elissa dizzy for a moment, and off-kilter.

Vilhauser pin-wheeled his arms to keep his balance, nearly hitting one of the other scientists. The strangers spread their legs farther to catch their balance, as if they’d done this before.

“We lost two,” Dryden said softly into the comm.

Elissa glanced behind her, saw that Maichle and Kuether had fled through the door they were supposed to be guarding.

So much for any pretense of professionalism. Now the strangers knew just how deeply terrified her people were.

13

ELISSA’S FINGERS WERE SEIZING UP. She could barely move them.

She had crawled under the console that contained the environmental controls. It had taken force, but she had managed to open the interior. She couldn’t see clearly, so she was going by feel.

But her gloves were getting in the way. She could feel the shapes of things, but not what they actually were.

She had to take the gloves off.

She hesitated for just a moment. The gloves protected her skin. Eventually, though, that wouldn’t matter.

Or maybe not so eventually. She took a deep breath of icy air, and then pulled her gloves off. She reached into the guts of the console and found the controls. She touched them, and her fingertips burned.

She brought her hands back, shocked, and it took a moment for her brain to process what she felt.

Ice. She had felt ice. Ice at very very cold temperatures burned the skin.

She glanced at the locker door, wondered how her people were doing. They were probably warmer than she was.

Wait, no probably about it. They were.

And they knew by now that she wasn’t going to join them any time soon.

She took another deep breath, feeling the chill move all the way down her lungs, and reached back inside the panel. By will alone, she would make this all work. And the first thing she was going to will was that the burning sensation wouldn’t bother her.

Then she was going to find a way to turn on the environmental systems, if it was the last thing she ever did.

14

“WHAT THE HELL?” Vilhauser said when he caught his balance. The Room’s movement seemed to startle him as much as it had startled everyone else. “That’s new. You’re doing something, aren’t you?”

He directed that last at the strangers.

“What am I doing?” The stranger responded in a slightly aggrieved tone. “I’m talking to you. This place has been moving like that ever since we arrived. We thought it was normal.”

Elissa did not believe that at all. She’d seen the strangers respond. Her people had been terrified by the movement. It had stunned her and made Vilhauser act even more unprofessionally.

But the strangers just adjusted their bodies and their balance, as if they’d done it a million times before.

“It’s not normal.” Vilhauser said, with as much anger in his tone as Elissa had ever heard. He shook off Dryden, and to her surprise, came toward her, not heading for the stranger.

“Commander,” Vilhauser said. “These people are clearly doing something in that room. Something important. You know this place has been changing size over the years. I’ll wager that what we’re feeling is something they did. Maybe they’ve been manipulating the Room all along.”

Vilhauser had a point. But then, the change might be something as simple as the gravity. None of her people had been on the Room with the gravity on. Maybe the old equipment caused that slipping movement. Maybe it was normal, here.

Then Calthorpe from the Discovery said into the comm, “Commander? The transport has cloaked. I can still track it by its energy signature, but they’ve made it invisible to 98% of our sensors. They’re up to something.”

She felt a surge of anger run through her. She’d had enough of games.

“I think we’re done talking,” she said to the stranger.

His soldiers formed a tight circle around him as they pulled their laser rifles. The rifles aimed directly at her.

Her heart pounded. She didn’t even have to order her soldiers to raise their weapons. They did it so fast that she was surprised no one fired accidentally.

Vilhauser, the coward, cringed, and his scientists huddled together.

“I don’t think we’re going anywhere,” the stranger said. “I’ve told you our plans. I was very clear. We need thirty minutes to leave this place.”

“Your transport is cloaked,” she said.

“Standard procedure,” he said. “We do that as we power up and prepare to leave. That way no one tracks us because they don’t know our origin point. Don’t you people do the same thing?”

It was her turn to chuckle. No one cloaked without a reason. It used too much energy.

“I don’t like what’s happening here,” she said. “You’re coming with us and we will remove the rest of your people from the Room.”

“I don’t think so.” His voice dripped with contempt. “We’ve offered to cooperate. You should take us up on that.”

Her eyebrows went up, and she tilted her head just a little. “Is that a threat?”

He shrugged. She knew that shrug was deliberate. He was pretending to be calm, but they both knew that if one of them made another mistake, someone would die.

“You can take it however you want,” the stranger said. “I think of it as friendly advice. Two of your soldiers have already left the area. It’s clear that your crew lacks discipline. I watched you for a long time before you even noticed me, and my people have been watching you longer than I have. You can’t get most of your crew out of this entry. Apparently they’re afraid of this Room of Lost Souls, as you call it, and that fear trumps whatever discipline you have.”

Her cheeks warmed. He was right; her soldiers had behaved terribly. Vilhauser had been worse, and she’d probably been the worst of all. For all of that fighting she had done to get her own command, she hadn’t been ready for it after all. She had made mistake after mistake, which had led them here.

“Now,” the stranger said, “you could let us leave of our own accord, or you could try to force us to go with you. I don’t recommend the second.”

She studied them. Those environmental suits were either tissue thin or they were made of something she didn’t understand.

These people weren’t afraid of the Room. They knew how to use its systems, which had been too difficult for good old technician Vilhauser and all of the people who had been here before them.

Did she gamble with her people and possibly lose? Or did she trust the stranger to leave the Room without her help?

Was it worth going to battle over a place that so terrified her people they fled at the first opportunity?

Apparently Vilhauser took her silence for a lack of nerve. He touched her arm. She wanted to slap him.

“Let me go with them,” he said through his stupid speaker. “I want to see how they got into that secret room. It’ll be cooperation, and I can make sure they leave.”

Like he had any ability to make them do anything.

Still, it was a way to put this entire fiasco on him. He had stepped into this first contact and destroyed any attempt she had made to do it right. Vilhauser also claimed he was in charge of this mission.

Since it was already so screwed up, she saw no reason not to let him win this battle. Let him go with the strangers. If he died, if something happened to the Room, well, then, it would all be on him.

She hadn’t taken her gaze off the stranger. “Leave the room open,” she said to him.

“Which room?”

As if he didn’t know.

“All of them,” she said.

“Fine,” he said as Vilhauser said, “No!”

She looked at him, trying not to scream at him.

Vilhauser said, “I have to know how they got in. If that door closes and we get trapped….”

If the door closed and they got trapped, then she wouldn’t have to deal with them anymore.

“He can tell you how he opened it,” she said.

“No,” Vilhauser said. “It’s clearly not easy. If it were, we would have opened it already. We’ve been trying to open that door for years.”

Way to put the Empire at a disadvantage, Vilhauser, she thought. Broadcast your fears and weaknesses. These strangers won’t take advantage of that.

But she didn’t say anything.

So, Vilhauser had been trying to open the door for years? Well then, let him get his wish and go inside. If there was trouble, she could say she tried to help, but he kept getting in her way.

Just to keep up appearances, she told two of the soldiers whom she knew had been to the Room before, Rigley and Lerner, to accompany Vilhauser.

“Commander,” Rigley said on the private comm, “would you like the rest of the scientists to go?”

“I don’t want anyone to go,” she replied on the comm. “But I seem to have no choice with Vilhauser. You can refuse this assignment and it won’t be on your permanent record.”

“That’s all right, ma’am,” Rigley said. “If there’s trouble, I’ll make sure he escapes.”

“And me?” Lerner asked.

“You can take care of yourself,” Rigley said with a smile.

In spite of herself, Elissa smiled too. Just a small one, since she knew that the stranger could see her.

Then she gave the stranger her best glare. “If your people try anything, we will blow up your ship.”

“It’s cloaked,” the stranger said.

“And our sensors see right through that cloak. Would you like me to tell you where it is at the moment?”

“No need,” he said. “I believe you.”

“Good,” she said. “I expect you off this Room in the next thirty minutes.”

“We’re already packing up,” he said.

“Not until I see everything,” Vilhauser said.

The stranger looked at him for a long moment. Elissa knew what she would say if she were in the stranger’s shoes. She would say, You’ll see what I want you to see and nothing more.

But the stranger said nothing to Vilhauser.

Instead, the stranger spoke to her. “I’ll take good care of your civilian here.”

She started. It was that obvious, apparently. And this man, this stranger, was very smart.

Smart enough that she didn’t want to go against him in any way, if she could avoid it.

“Thank you,” she said, and almost meant it.

She watched as they all headed back up the stairs, and then she returned to the Discovery. Vilhauser wanted to be in charge.

And now he was.

15

HER EARS ACHED. Her eyelids scraped over her eyeballs. She was freezing from the inside out—the outside in?—and she tried not to care. She thought maybe she was making some progress on those systems. Parts moved, at least.

Then lights filled the bridge. She looked up for a moment, her breath catching in her freezing lungs. If she had tears that weren’t frozen, they would have fallen out of her eyes.

She had done it.

Except that the lights were wrong. They weren’t coming from the equipment or the systems or the ceiling.

They were coming from—outside?

She let out a breath.

Or maybe inside. Inside her.

She had heard that people saw lights just before they died. She had also heard that people who froze to death got warmer as death neared.

Well, whoever perpetrated that particular myth had gotten it wrong. And that made her just a little bit angry.

Well, if she wasn’t going to be warm, maybe she could guarantee that her crew would be.

She kept working, even though her fingers were numb and nearly useless, and light grew brighter….

16

THE STRANGERS TOOK Vilhauser to the place he called the secret room. Rigley reported back to Elissa. She listened to the play-by-play as she returned to the Discovery.

She went immediately to the bridge. She didn’t even pull off her environmental suit, although she did remove the bubble helmet.

Calthorpe had screens up inside the bridge, showing her that the strangers were packing up all over the Room. She had no idea what the strangers had been working on, but they apparently didn’t care that she knew they’d been up to something.

That bothered her, but not quite as much as the stranger himself had. She had the feeling he was toying with her. He felt like an experienced commander, someone who knew exactly what he was doing, and who was afraid of nothing.

“Have you been able to track that transport?” she asked.

“No, ma’am,” Binek said from his post across the bridge. “It’s unfamiliar. Its engines are different too, and we’ve never seen anything with this configuration. We’re not getting as much information with their cloak up either.”

“But they are leaving,” Calthorpe added. “I guess they don’t really care that we found them.”

“Track them after the transport leaves. Maybe it’ll show us the hole in the information shield.”

Calthorpe nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

The strangers headed back to their transport. They left the gravity running on the Room. They left the doors open like they promised. And they gave Vilhauser a case with a device in it.

Vilhauser excitedly told Rigley that it was stealth tech.

The idiot had no idea how to behave on any kind of mission. He shouldn’t have taken the case.

Elissa suppressed a sigh, then turned to Gatson. “Analyze that thing Vilhauser is carrying.”

“I’m on it, ma’am,” Gatson said.

Elissa watched as stranger after stranger stepped from the Room’s main landing area into what looked like nothingness. She’d never seen people board a cloaked ship before. It looked almost like they were jumping into space.

“I think he’s right. He’s got the stealth tech device,” Gatson said.

Elissa cursed. She had thought the stupid thing was malfunctioning, which was why the Room was so dangerous.

“Get one of the other scientists here,” she said. “We’re not letting that device on this ship until we know that it won’t turn the Discovery into the Room of Lost Souls.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Gatson sounded almost relieved.

Elissa watched on screen as Vilhauser emerged on the lower level, clutching the case as if it were a baby. Rigley and Lerner followed several steps behind, clearly uneasy.

“The transport is powering up,” Calthorpe said. “You want to stop it?”

“They promised they’d leave, and so far, they’re keeping their promises,” Elissa said.

“You trust them?” Lee asked.

“I didn’t say that,” Elissa said.

“Commander,” Vilhauser’s voice sounded tinny over the comm. “We’re ready to board.”

“I’m not ready to let you board, Doctor,” she said. “I want that device analyzed first.”

“We can do that on the ship,” Vilhauser said.

“No, Doctor, we can’t. And we won’t. I don’t know what that thing is, and you got it from people we can’t identify. For all I know, you’re holding a weapon.”

“It’s stealth tech, Commander.”

“Even worse, Vilhauser.” She knew what stealth tech could do. “We don’t know enough about stealth tech for me to be comfortable that it’s on my ship.”

“Commander, you already have stealth tech on your ship.”

“In little vials, Vilhauser. I can tell, without help from your people, that what you’re holding is a thousand times stronger than what’s here.”

“Probably a million,” Gatson said softly.

“I don’t want it anywhere near my ship,” Elissa said to Vilhauser.

“Well, you have no choice, Commander, because I’m bringing it on board.”

She’d had enough of the pompous bastard. He’d ruined the first encounter, making it impossible to know who those strangers were. He’d taken risks that would never have been sanctioned by command, and he’d probably screwed up her career forever.

She would be damned if she let him kill her crew.

“We’re taking the Discovery back to its resting position, Doctor,” she said, leaning on the console. She gave a hand signal to Calthorpe. “We’ll be back in a few hours, after you’ve figured out how to shut that thing down.”

“And if I can’t?” Vilhauser asked.

“Then you’ll study it on the Room of Lost Souls until you can,” she said.

“I can’t sanction this, Commander. I order you to open the airlock doors.”

She nodded at Calthorpe. He detached the ship from the Room and slowly backed away.

“The scientific mission is yours, Doctor,” she said to Vilhauser. “The ship is mine. Your mission threatens the lives on this ship, so you can complete part of that mission on the Room. You will complete it there, because I take no command from you. I will be back in two hours. If you don’t have that thing shut off by then, I’ll let you board. But I won’t let that device on board. Is that clear?”

“It’s unacceptable, Trekov,” Vilhauser snapped, “and you know it. I’ll have you court-martialed.”

She smiled. “Too late,” she said. “I’ve screwed up this mission so badly already that you’ll probably have to stand in line.”

With that, she sped the ship’s movement away from the Room on her very own.

Then she saw weapons’ fire—and knew the stranger on the transport really had been a sneaky bastard. He’d set her up.

She probably wouldn’t live to be court-martialed.

And the sad thing was, her crew wouldn’t live to testify against her.

17

SHE WAS WARM, so therefore, she was dead.

But she was comfortable, and she had this idea that death wasn’t comfortable at all.

Elissa opened her eyes—no scraping eyelids, no freezing eyeballs. It took a moment to focus, and then a moment longer to process what she was seeing.

A ceiling. With lights. A brown ceiling, with soft lights.

The air was warm.

And she was on a bed. Without restraints.

Which meant there was gravity.

She raised a hand—or tried to—but an alarm went off, and something brought her arm down gently.

A woman with hair almost as short as Elissa’s walked into the room, followed by Flag Commander Janik. The woman didn’t surprise her; Flag Commander Janik did.

His skin was gray and his tight black curls had some white which caught the light. She hadn’t seen him look so tense before, almost as if the stress had aged him prematurely.

“Welcome back, Commander,” he said. The sound of his voice was almost painful.

She blinked, grateful that the simple movement was so very easy. “You rescued us.”

Her voice did scrape, but not because of ice in her throat, because she was thirsty.

“I didn’t,” he said with a bit of a smile. “The Stillwater did. She came directly to you, and managed to get the survivors out.”

The woman beside the Admiral grabbed water, and helped Elissa sit up so she could drink some of it. She had never felt so weak in her life.

The Stillwater had been one of the anchor ships in the information shield. There was no sensible way for the Stillwater to have reached her first.

She processed that and another word, “survivors.”

“There were transports that were closer than the Stillwater,” she said, her voice a little less raspy. “And fighters.”

“Yes,” Janik said. “They got hit with the same thing you did.”

Thing. He didn’t know what happened. No one had told him. Had anyone been alive to tell him?

“You said survivors,” she said. “How many?”

He glanced at the woman, who nodded and looked rueful at the same time.

“Just your bridge crew,” he said gently. “And not even all of them. Calthorpe didn’t make it.”

“I knew that,” Elissa said, trying to process. God, her brain was working slow.

“I want to update you on your condition,” the woman said to Elissa. Then she looked over at Janik. “Flag Commander, you can talk with the Commander Trekov later.

“Wait,” Elissa said, and would have lifted a hand, if something didn’t keep pulling her arm down. “Just my bridge crew? They were the only ones on the Discovery who made it. No one else?”

“No one else,” Janik said softly.

“What about the transports? The fighters?”

“Nine people survived, Commander,” Janik said. “Including you.”

Her heart rate increased and it made her feel wobbly. Something was still wrong with it. Something was wrong with her.

“How many died?” Elissa asked him.

He tilted his head. “Later, Commander. When you’re better.”

“No,” she said. “Now.”

“Six hundred,” he said. “We think. We lost a lot of information.”

“Lost information?”

The woman had her hand on the Admiral’s arm, pulling him back. “Let her rest.”

“I’ll tell you later, Commander,” he said, obviously complying with the woman.

But Elissa didn’t want him to. She needed to know.

“You couldn’t repair the ships?” she said. “They were destroyed, from that wave. But the information should be there.”

“It’s not,” Janik said. “We can’t get them back up, no matter what we try. They look fine. That’s the irritating part. So everything from your mission is gone. Everything.”

Including six hundred lives. Her breath caught. She couldn’t go there yet. She couldn’t process any of this. She didn’t dare.

So she looked at the woman. “And me? Why can’t I lift my arm?”

“We’re repairing your hands,” she said almost cheerfully. “You can’t feel it, but they’re in a solution that is good for new skin. We kept you in a coma while we did something similar for your face. The new skin there is not as delicate now.”

New skin. On her face. New skin, and new other things? She couldn’t tell. But she felt strange enough to know that more had happened to her physically.

“I nearly died,” she said, and it wasn’t a question.

“There was a debate as to whether or not you were dead,” Janik said. “But the medical staff on the Stillwater, they revived you. They had to. You’re a hero, Commander.”

“A hero?” For killing six hundred people? She didn’t ask that part, but she had a hunch Janik heard it in her tone.

“You saved your bridge crew against the longest odds I’ve ever seen,” he said. “By rights, none of you should have made it. You saved them. They all agree on that.”

“So they’re okay. They’re not here?”

“They’re better than you are,” the doctor said, clearly answering both questions. “And now you’re going to rest. Everything else can wait.”

That last was pointed at Janik. He nodded. “I’ll be back, Commander. We can debrief later. We want you well first.”

She closed her eyes. Debrief. A hero. Six hundred dead.

How ridiculous.

And such an opportunity. She could lie about everything. Not even her bridge crew knew what happened.

She could blame everything on Vilhauser.

The thought felt alien, a product of the ambition she could barely remember. She had wanted her own command. She had gotten it.

And six hundred people had died.

Because of her.

Vilhauser could take some of the blame, but he had no military training. He had no experience in the field.

She did. And she had screwed it all up.

She would tell Janik about the troubles with the command structure of the SRP, the way she couldn’t handle Vilhauser, the mistakes she made on the Room of Lost Souls. She would tell Janik it was her fault that their scientific mission failed, and good people died.

She would tell him.

And then she would enlist his help in finding the betraying bastard—whoever he was.

Whatever he was.

She needed to tell Janik that and more. She would supply the missing information on the mission that had gone so very wrong.

She had to.

Six hundred lives demanded it—and this time, she wouldn’t let them down.

The story continues…

Skirmishes by Kristine Kathryn Rusch is available
in ebook, trade paperback and audiobook
from your favorite bookseller.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

USA Today bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes in almost every genre. Generally, she uses her real name (Rusch) for most of her writing. Under that name, she publishes bestselling science fiction and fantasy, award-winning mysteries, acclaimed mainstream fiction, controversial nonfiction, and the occasional romance. Her novels have made bestseller lists around the world and her short fiction has appeared in eighteen best of the year collections. She has won more than twenty-five awards for her fiction, including the Hugo, Le Prix Imaginales, the Asimov’s Readers Choice award, and the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Choice Award.

To keep up with everything she does, go to kriswrites.com. To track her many pen names and series, see their individual websites (krisnelscott.com, kristinegrayson.com, krisdelake.com, retrievalartist.com, divingintothewreck.com). She lives and occasionally sleeps in Oregon.

If you liked these novellas, you might like these works by Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

The Spires of Denon

Skirmishes

The Disappeared: A Retrieval Artist Novel

Snipers

Alien Influences