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 anymore. 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 military contract?
“What are you trying to do?” I ask. “Consign us to some imperial hellhole?”
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 a 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 death trap to whoever else wandered close to it.
Like this Room is.
I salvaged the vessel and gave it to the Empire 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 Empire 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 has the Empire 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 survivors’ 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.”
~ * ~
TWENTY-SIX
And that’s the crux of it. I know it as soon as I say it. I thought I would m I 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, and prevents me from slamming Riya or my father against the bay wall.
Somehow I get out of that bay without killing 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 Empire will back them because they’re working on a secret and important project. Stealth tech is the holy grail of military research. So she and m
y 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 realize that I have to stop them— my father, the Empire, all those naive scientists like Squishy once was. I have to take the functioning stealth tech away from them.
I have to make sure they never fully understand this technology.
I have to make sure they never ever win.
~ * ~
PART THREE
THE HEART OF THE MACHINE
TWENTY-SEVEN
My task isn’t as hard as it sounds. It’s much easier to destroy something than it is to understand it or to re-create it or even to find it.
But before I start my mission, I need some questions answered.
I need to find Squishy.
Squishy lives in Vallevu, a pretty little town high in the mountains of Naha. She calls herself Rosealma now, and she works as a doctor in a small clinic specializing in family practice.
I am surprised by all of it—by the fact that she has chosen a quiet life, by the fact that she lives in gravity, by the fact that she never dives. When I arrive at her home, I am surprised by one more thing.
The children.
The house is full of children.
It’s warm here, and the air is thin. We’re five thousand meters above sea level. The house is built on the crest of this part of the mountain and appears to have 360-degree views. Mostly, from my vantage, I can see only clouds and sunlight and bluish purple sky, but even that is enough.
It’s stunning here. It almost seems like this point is floating, as if it’s traveling through this thin air to somewhere else, like a skyship.
The area offers the illusion of freedom and travel.
Until you look at the house itself.
The house is big and square, with many windows. It dominates the landscape. There are five stories, each smaller than the other, until the fifth is little more than a balcony with a tower in the center.
The house has a wide, rock- and grass-covered yard, with trees and bushes and plenty of places to sit. Paths thread through flowers and foliage. A front porch rises out of the plants like it has grown from them and attached itself to the house.
An elderly woman sits on the porch, watching the children play hide-and-seek in the yard.
I can’t count how many children there are—maybe ten, maybe more— but they are all of different ages, and they all seem very comfortable in front of Squishy’s house.
The woman watches them as she sips on a glass of brown liquid. She doesn’t move as I come up the main path, but I sense that her gaze has switched from the children’s games to me.
“Hello,” I say in my friendliest tone. “I’m looking for Rosealma. The people at her clinic say I can find her here.”
The woman doesn’t respond. She sips from that glass
“I’m an old colleague,” I say. “I just need to talk to her for a few minutes.”
The children have stopped playing. Several more pop their heads out of the bushes and watch me. It feels eerie, as if they’re not quite human. But they are human. I can smell the child sweat mingling with the minty sweetness of the plants and see the impish grins that pass from face to face when they think I’m not looking.
None of these children have been raised in space. They all have the strong bones and thick musculature of children who have grown up in normal gravity.
They make me nervous.
“Please,” I say, “if I can just talk to her …”
The woman doesn’t answer, but one of the older children—a girl, I think, but I can’t really tell—ducks under the porch and disappears.
My stomach clenches. I can dive abandoned ships all by myself in the vastness of space, but I’m afraid to cross that last bit of path. I don’t want to walk through that crowd of staring children, and I don’t want to step onto that porch with the silent woman.
All of this—heat, children, plants—is so far from my everyday life that it stops me from doing anything at all.
Even though no one speaks, it’s not quiet up here. The air buzzes faintly—insect noise, I suppose—and far away, something chirps at irregular intervals. If I were on the Business, I’d check out that chirp, see if it was an equipment malfunction.
But here, I suppose, it’s something alive, something that makes such a noise for reasons I can’t understand.
Or maybe there are machines here as well, machines I can’t see.
I lick my lips. “Ma’am,” I say—
And then the main door on the porch bangs open. The child who disappeared under the porch comes out first. It is a girl, reedy and strong, the lines of her face just beginning to slide into adolescence.
Another woman stands behind her, and it takes me a moment to realize that the new woman is Squishy.
She’s not thin anymore. She’s rounded, softer, her cheeks chubby and red-tinged. Only her eyes remain the same, flat and distant and frightening.
“What do you want?” she asks.
I’ve practiced this moment a million times, and I’ve come up with a million answers. What do I want? To reverse time, Squishy. To go back to the original discovery of the Dignity Vessel and that very first meeting, with you and Karl and Turtle and Jypé and Junior. I want to tell you all what I think we’ve found, and I want you to tell us how dangerous it is and I want all of us to vote on whether or not we go inside, and then when we do vote …
I’ll go in anyway.
I shake my head just a little. I don’t say any of that, just like I don’t say the countless other things I could say. Like: I found more stealth tech. Like: Karl’s dead. Like: I need your help.
Instead, I say, “I owe you an apology.”
The girl stands in front of Squishy like a shield. I can’t see Squishy’s face. The woman on the porch acts like nothing is going on.
The children watch. They know something is happening here, but they clearly don’t know what that something is.
“Yeah, you do owe me an apology.” Squishy hasn’t moved. The girl looks over her shoulder at Squishy, and that’s when I see the resemblance. The girl looks like a younger version of the Squishy I met. A younger, gravity-bound version.
I’d never thought of Squishy as someone with a family. I’d always thought of her as someone like me, someone who abandoned her family when she realized they never really cared about her.
“To say I’m sorry is inadequate,” I say. “But I am sorry. Deeply sorry.”
Squishy steps past the girl. She puts a hand on the girl’s shoulder and stares at me. Squishy’s gaze hasn’t changed. It’s still flat and dismissive.
Neither of us move for the longest moment. The air continues to buzz around us, like a circuit going bad. A child moves, rustling some leaves. A purplish scent fills the air, so strong that I have to hold back a sneeze.
“That’s it?” Squishy says. “That’s the apology?”
I nod.
“Then you can leave,” she says.
I take a deep breath. “I can,” I say. “But I shouldn’t.”
“Shouldn’t?”
The gi
rl is looking up at Squishy again. The woman still hasn’t moved, but for a moment she doesn’t seem quite as solid as she had. I finally realize that she’s not real. She’s some sort of projection, maybe a part of the game the children were playing, maybe a holographic nanny, or maybe a low-tech security program, designed to chase intruders away just by her presence.
I make myself focus on Squishy’s voice. It’s as flat as her gaze. She doesn’t want to show any emotion. She’s being deliberately calm—too much so. Which is almost like showing emotion, to me anyway.
It shows me that she’s afraid of how she feels, afraid that if she lets those emotions loose they’ll be inappropriate to the place or the time. Or maybe she’s hiding emotions so strong that the only way to control them is to deny them.
I make myself take a deep breath. That thick scent gets caught in the back of my throat and I cough.
“Because of what I did with the Dignity Vessel,” I say.
“Because of what I forced you to do,” Squishy says.
The girl in front of her is frowning.
“No,” I say. “Because I found it, and we dived it …”
I can’t go on, not in front of the children. I have to censor what I was going to say about Jypé’s death, about Junior’s corpse.
I swallow against that tickle, wishing that smell would fade back.
“Because of the way I had us dive it,” I say, “I put some things into motion, things that I can’t take back. But I can stop those things, with your help.”
Squishy raises her chin slightly. Her expression doesn’t change. The girl watches her, but the other children watch me.
Finally Squishy sighs. “Come with me,” she says. “We’ll go somewhere private and talk.”
Somewhere private turns out to be a gazebo far from the house. The gazebo is on a ledge that extends over the valley below. Plants crawl up the gazebo’s walls and cover its roof.
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