“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 backward through the door. We got it closed, but just barely. That was when I came looking for you.”
“And you got her out, right?” Squishy asked.
His look changed. Subtly. It went from open to closed, from frightened to shut off, in the space of a second.
“You could argue that no one died,” he said.
She closed her eyes. “And you would be wrong.”
* * * *
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 forward then backward in time, maybe she could move people forward then backward in time. She might be able to recover the folks who had gotten lost.
“Might” being the 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 make the situation worse. 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 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 was 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 was 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. It would have to be an area of space where there was no possibility of human beings ever traveling through it, and certainly not somewhere that 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'd 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'd 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.
Asimov's SF, October-November 2011 Page 6
