Asimov's SF, October-November 2011

by Dell Magazine Authors

  She glanced at the woman and was startled to see how lovely she looked, her cap of hair spiking upward, 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 backward 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 as 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 it go.

  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 there 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 would get out on their own. Could get 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 backward.

  Or at least, not backward 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 naive 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 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 was 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 checked 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 sides. “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 m
inutes. 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 in 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'd 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.