Stealth Read online

  “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 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.

  But she hadn't expected to find Quint here. On her second day as a fulltime 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 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 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'd 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'd 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 co
me 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 further, 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 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 backward and forward-"

  "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 backward, 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 had 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'd 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.

  Modem 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 it 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 his face, trying to remove the caked blood.