Diving into the Wreck

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 girl 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.

The entire thing looks unstable to me—the ledge extending off the mountainside, and the plants covering the building like some kind of decay.

But the chairs inside are clean, and oddly, so is the floor. The gazebo has no windows—only archways completely open to the outside. Yet the interior is cool. A breeze that I hadn’t noticed near the house blows through here, and the shade is pleasant.

I don’t like standing in the sun.

Squishy stands at the farthest edge of the gazebo, the part that overhangs the valley, and clings to the wall.

I sit on some kind of couch that appears to be made of sturdy woven sticks. The sticks are painted white, and they look new.

The entire thing creaks as I move, yet I’m somehow confident in the couch’s sturdiness.

Squishy and I didn’t talk as we walked up the path. The girl wanted to come with us, and Squishy told her no. Squishy told her that she had to watch the other children.

The girl made a face, but she stayed behind.

A few of the other children followed, until Squishy turned on them and glared.

They ran back to the house, laughing. Apparently they had wanted that reaction.

The air doesn’t buzz here. The only noise comes from the creaking furniture, and the breeze, rustling the leaves on the plants.

I know so little about plants. I don’t know if these are native to Naha or if they are transplanted from Earth. Until I got here, I had no idea that plants could grow on buildings—or that people didn’t mind when the plants did.

“Somehow,” I say to break the silence, “this isn’t where I would have imagined you.”

“You’ve imagined me?” Squishy doesn’t turn around. She seems like Squishy and not like Squishy. The extra poundage on her is muscle, not fat, yet she doesn’t seem stronger to me. It seems like she softened, eased into life here, lost her edge.

“I think about you a lot,” I say. “I should have listened to you.”

“Yes,” she says. “You should have.”

I sigh. This isn’t going to be easy. I knew that when I came. However, I didn’t expect Squishy to make it even harder.

“Please,” I say. “Sit down. Let me tell you what happened.”

Finally, she turns around. “You mean something’s happened since the Dignity Vessel.”

“Oh, yeah,” I say. “Way too much.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

I tell Squishy everything. I leave nothing out.

I tell her about my father, about Riya Trekov, about the Room of Lost Souls.

She sits on a chair that matches the stick-woven couch. She has her hands folded in her lap, her legs crossed at the ankles. The breeze plays with her hair. She looks like a woman who is listening politely to a story that has nothing to do with her.

Until I get to Karl.

Then she closes her eyes.

Just for a moment, but it’s long enough.

“So now,” she says before I finish, “you want revenge.”

Of course I want revenge. I dream of it sometimes, of going after my father, of shoving Riya Trekov into the Room of Lost Souls, then following her inside so that I can watch her die.

Yes, I want revenge.

But I’m smart enough to know I’ll never get it. Not really.

“I want to stop them,” I say.

“From taking others to the Room of Lost Souls?” she asks.

“No,” I say. “I want to stop them from solving the mysteries of stealth tech.”

Squishy’s hands tighten. She leans forward. I have her attention now.

I tell her about the genetic markers. I tell her about the “designed” humans loose in the population. I tell her that the Empire now has several people who can work in stealth tech without dying.

She lets out a small breath.

“And,” she says as if this has been a conversation instead of a monologue, “they have working stealth tech.”

“Yeah,” I say. “The Room.”

“And the Dignity Vessel that I gave them,” she says.

“That we gave them,” I say.

She sighs. “What exactly do you want to do?”

“I don’t want them to have a breakthrough,” I say. “If the Empire gets stealth tech, they’ll be able to conquer the Nine Planets Alliance within weeks. At first, the Alliance won’t even know who’s attacking them.”

The Empire never made it to the Nine Planets in the last war. The distance was too far for the Empire to sustain. But the Colonnade Wars frightened the planets and they formed an alliance, planning to fight the Empire if it tried to overtake any of them.

The Alliance has kept the Empire out of this part of the sector so far. But stealth tech would change everything. The Empire could defeat one part of the Alliance before it ever had a chance to send for help.

“So give the Alliance some stealth tech,” Squishy says.

“And people with markers? And a way to create those markers?” I roll my eyes. “You make it sound like there are Dignity Vessels all over the sector.”

She just looks at me. I wonder if I’ve said something wrong. Finally, she sighs. “Why did you come to me?”

“I want you to tell me my options,” I say.

“You know your options,” she says. “You destroy that vessel.”

“And the Room?” I ask.

She looks at me for the longest time. “I’d need to see it,” she says.

I swallow hard. I’m not going back there. I’m not going to go inside that Room ever again. I’m not going to look at the habitats or the docking areas or the station, looming out of the darkness.

“You said you mapped it,” she says.

I let out a breath.

“I have a place we can view things. Did you record inside the Room itself?”

“No,” I say. “But Karl did.”

There isn’t much. The cameras on his suit quit about the time he died. Roderick and Mikk tried to recover the information.

I didn’t help at all, and I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to look at the last minutes—the last few days—of Karl’s life.

But I will, with Squishy.

Because she’s right.

I have to.

Her setup is inside her medical practice. There are several rooms set up for holographic projection, some of which re-create patients on surgical tables. Apparently she uses this place to review what she or others have done.

It reminds me of the lounge in the Business, only this setup is more efficient.

Nothing else happens in these rooms except viewing. Viewing and learning and understanding.

It takes a while to make my recordings compatible with her system. I let her worry about all of that. While she does it, I wander the practice, trying to figure out who Squishy is now.

The practice itself is comfortable. Patients enter a waiting area that tailors itself just for them. When I walk inside that room, it becomes a replica of a space ship’s cockpit. The cockpit is generic—it has a fake star map outside its portals and the guidance equipment is out of date—but I’m instantly comfortable.

The room takes information from my various chips and re-creates the environment I’m in the most often.

As I stand there, not taking the pilot’s chair, the room seems to think I’m uncomfortable. A holographic list appears before me. A soft female voice tells me I can reprogram the room to one of these other places.

One of them is a spaceport bar.

Obviously, I’ve spent too much time on Longbow Station.

I leave the waiting area and investigate the examination rooms. They’re as patient-specific as the waiting area. Because I haven’t logged in, the rooms want to know if I’m a visitor, a family member, or a patient.

I don’t answer.

I back out quickly and wander the corridors. The private areas are locked.

No one else is here, except for me and Squishy.

So I go back to the viewing area.

Squishy is still fiddling with the machinery. I lean against the wall and wait.

This woman is different from the one who left the Business years ago. The weight isn’t the only thing that’s changed. The military posture is gone as well.

I understand the medical practice—she has found a new way to expiate all her guilt from those deaths—but I don’t understand the children.

I asked her about them as we walked down to the village.

She shrugged. Then when I pressed her for an answer, she said, “Everyone needs a place to go.”

“That girl, the one who got you,” I said, “she’s clearly family.”

Squishy gave me a sideways look—one I couldn’t read.

“Oh,” she said softly. “They’re all family.”

And she wouldn’t say anything else.

Now she stands, puts a hand on her back like it hurts her, and turns around. “Got it,” she says.

I take a deep breath. I’m not sure I want to see this.

“You can leave, you know,” she says.

But I can’t. She needs me to explain what she’s seeing. She needs context, and only I can provide it.

The station looks small. Nothing we recorded shows the vastness of the place, the sense of emptiness that we all felt when we first examined it.

Not even the Business, locked into one of the docking rings, gives it a real sense of perspective.

At first, Squishy and I discuss size, measurements—both the ones that my team took when it arrived and the ones my father claimed he had.

I explain again that my father’s information isn’t trustworthy, that he has lied to me all along.

But Squishy waves her hand to silence me.

“We can download more information when we need it,” she says. “Others have been to the Room as well.”

We. I’m not sure how I feel about the word “we.” I don’t want us both to investigate anything. I just want her help repairing the damage I’ve already done.

I want to know my options.

Squishy is acting like we have a mission.

For three nights, we examine the footage of the Room. Fortunately, Squishy has turned down the audio. Karl does start to talk about twelve hours in, speculating, wondering if we can find him or if he’s entered another dimension.

Mikk listened to the audio on the way back, hoping to figure out what went wrong. He’s as haunted as I am, only he blames himself. I keep telling him that what happened is my fault. Odette forcefully told him that it’s my father’s fault, but Mikk blames himself.

I do understand that. When you’re part of a mission, you believe that you have to do everything you can to make it go well.

When it doesn’t go well, you review, make certain things will go well the next time. That’s part of our training.

When things go horribly awry—when someone dies—then you review as well. Only you carry the burden of that death, and the what-ifs become even more powerful.

You become more powerful. You imagine what would have happened if you spoke up a moment sooner, or tugged the line earlier, or refused to participate in the mission.

You try to find the one way the mission would have worked, and of course, you can’t. Or worse, you can.

I know what went wrong on the Dignity Vessel. I went wrong. So did Squishy. If I had told my divers it was a Dignity Vessel, they would have acted differently. If Squishy had told them that she worried the probe was stuck in an ancient stealth field, we never would have gotten near it.

Divers died because we did things wrong.

Jypé and Junior died.

But Karl died because my father and Riya Trekov lied to us. Much as I want to review that and change the decision to go with them, I know I would have done nothing different. All of my actions were correct—except, maybe, going in after Karl. That was reckless.

But I’m glad I did it.

Mikk’s actions were right too. We just can’t convince him of it.

And listening to Karl talk to himself in what, to him, was the last few days of his life, made Mikk feel even worse.

Squishy says she doesn’t need to hear it, although I know she’s making herself a copy of the imagery. I have a hunch she will listen when I am not around.

And I am grateful for that bit of sensitivity.

There isn’t much to see. The others told me that Karl claimed he heard music and saw lights, but none of that shows up on the imagery. I do explain the music and lights to Squishy. I give her my theories.

She pauses the imagery as I talk. “You heard sound?” she asks.

I nod. “It’s almost unbearable in the Room. It sounded like a faint hum on the Dignity Vessel. I noticed it when we went to get Junior.”

“Not before?”

I can no longer remember what I heard and when. Junior has woven his way into my dreams. My nightmares, actually. I still see his face behind that clouded helmet. Sometimes he speaks to me. Sometimes I watch him age and can do nothing about it.

Often I watch him try to free himself. I try to tell him that he can’t, that he’s stuck in time, but he won’t believe me.

After a moment, I answer Squishy. “I don’t know when I first noticed it on the Dignity Vessel.”

“That took a lot of thought,” she says with no sympathy at all.

I shrug. “I could have told you after we found the body. But some of the details are gone now. I just know that the hum and the music are related, and I only hear them around ancient stealth tech.”

She taps a finger against her chin and looks at the image in front of us. It hasn’t changed much as we watch. Sometimes Karl explored the edges of the Room. Sometimes he tried the door. But he could never leave, for reasons I can only guess at. Was the door in another dimension? Out of time with him? Or was there something else going on?

I do know it was difficult for me to close that door after I pulled him out. Clearly, for whatever reason, it was impossible for him to open it.

“Sound,” Squishy repeats as if she’s mulling the concept. “In all the time I worked on stealth tech, no one reported any sounds.”

“Do you think that’s what was missing?” I ask.

“Sound?”

“Whatever the sound really is,” I say.

“Clearly,” she says. “Because you’ve been inside one working stealth tech system and near a malfunctioning one, and both times you heard something unusual.”

“But did I hear it because I can function in stealth tech?”

“Karl heard it,” Squishy says.

“When he was trapped inside of it,” I say. “But I heard it even outside the stealth tech. I heard it from the moment we arrived on the station.”

She’s frowning at me. “You never asked if anyone else heard anything?”

I shake my head.

“That’s not like you, Boss,” she says, and that’s the first time our conversation feels like one of our conversations of old.

“Nonsense,” I say. “You left because I hadn’t told you enough. Isn’t this just one more case of not saying anything?”

“No,” she says slowly. “Because you connect the sound to the stealth tech, so you would have asked others about it. You didn’t.”

“I didn’t make the connection until late,” I say.

“Still,” she says. “After you got out of the Room, you would have said something.”

I didn’t say much of anything when I got out of the Room. I was afraid if I said too much I would lose what small grip I had on my temper and go after my father and Riya.

“It wasn’t a normal mission,” I say.

“Clearly,” she says again.

That’s a new habit of hers, and one I’m not sure I like. It’s a bit condescending. But it’s obvious that she’s been in charge here for a very long time. She’s been the one people have confided in, the one who told them how to take care of themselves, how to live their lives.

On our missions, that had been my function, even though I listened to her and the other members of the team. Only now, she’s not acting like a team member.

She’s acting like Rosealma Quintinia, the doctor in Vallevu, the woman I really don’t know.

“I’m going to have to check my notes,” she says.

“You kept notes?” I ask. “On stealth tech? They let you do that?”

“They didn’t let me do anything,” she says. “I just did it. I had qualms from the beginning. I wanted to keep track of everything I learned, and I didn’t want it for their view only. I wanted to have the opportunity to think and speculate without those speculations becoming fact.”

I have a hunch, from her tone, that too many of those speculations became fact anyway. Or at least played some role in the experimentations.

“What do you think is important about the sound?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I think something is. But you’ve brought me so much information, I’m not sure where to start.”

“Start?” Now I’m the one who is confused. “Start with what?”

“Figuring out stealth tech.”

She sounds almost fanatical. There’s a light in her eye I haven’t seen before.

“I don’t want to figure out stealth tech,” I say to her. “I want to prevent my father and the Empire from figuring it out. It’s dangerous.”

“I know,” she says softly.

“I want to destroy it,” I say.

“You’ve told me that,” she says.

“Yes, I have,” I say, “but you don’t seem to understand. I want to destroy it. By myself. At no risk to anyone else.”

This time, she heard me. She looks at me, a slight frown creasing her forehead. “If that’s the case, why did you come to me?”

“Remember our conversation about the Dignity Vessel?” I ask. “Remember how you asked me to blow up the ship?”

“Yes,” she says. “You wouldn’t.”

“For a variety of reasons. I wasn’t going to because I wanted that ship. I loved the mystery of it, the history in it. I loved how challenging it was, and I found it beautiful. I didn’t want to destroy it. I wanted to explore it.”

“I know,” she says, crossing her arms.

“But I asked you a question about destroying the Dignity Vessel, remember? I asked you what would happen if we bombed it. Would we do some kind of damage? Open a rift in that dimensional field that the ship traveled in? Would we leave the stealth tech intact while destroying the ship?”

“I told you it didn’t matter,” she says.

“But it does,” I say. “Because ships do travel through there. And the last thing we want is for them to go into some kind of weird anomaly that we created.”

She stares at me. “And that’s somehow worse than the Empire getting stealth tech? Tell me how.”

She’s seeing something I’m not. “People will die,” I say.

“Do you know how many people will die when the Empire fully develops its stealth tech? The Colonnade Wars aren’t really over. They’re in hiatus. The Empire still believes the rebels are traitors. It’ll attack the Nine Planets Alliance, and it’ll be impossible to defeat. That’s why the Empire wants this. You know it’s important. You called it the holy grail of military technology, and you’re right.”

It’s my turn to stand. I know some of what she’s saying, but there’s a recklessness to her words, a recklessness born of deep conviction. She believes it’s wrong, so we can take any measure to destroy stealth tech, damn the consequences.

If dealing with stealth tech has taught me anything, it has taught me this: Actions have consequences. And some of those consequences can be prevented with thought and preparation.

I say, as calmly as I can, “I came to you, Squishy, because you understand stealth tech—”

“No one understands stealth tech,” she says.

I clear my throat, irritated. I have to take two deep breaths before I can continue.

“I came to you because you know more about stealth tech than I do—-”

“I’m not sure that’s true,” she says.

“Do you want to hear me out or not?” I snap.

She looks startled. No matter what has happened between us over all these years, I have rarely lost my temper at her.

“I’m sorry.” She uncrosses her arms and threads her fingers together. She adopts a posture of someone who is trying hard to listen, and while I don’t doubt her sincerity, I do doubt her ability to hear me.

She’s fanatical about stealth tech, just like I was fanatical about that Dignity Vessel.

“You understand the science of stealth tech,” I say.

She’s about to object, but I hold up one hand.

“Or,” I add, “you understand more of it than I do, and probably more than I ever will. I don’t have a scientific mind. I’m suited toward history and exploration, not contemplation.”

She moves slightly. I sense impatience, but she doesn’t say anything.

“I want a real, scientific examination of what can happen if we destroy that Dignity Vessel. I want to know the best case and the worst case, and everything you can think of in-between. I want to know if we’re going to unleash something awful into the universe. I want to know if we’re going to do what we’re trying to prevent the Empire from doing.”

She waits. I nod, indicating that I’m done, at least for the moment.

“What about the Room?” she asks.

“What about it?” I ask.

“Do you want to destroy that too?”

“Yes,” I say. “But I think we have to pick our targets correctly. Right now, scientists are working on that Dignity Vessel. Anyone can go into the ship. It’s just one small area that keeps them out. So the study is easier. But I know no one is working the Room yet. It’s still too dangerous.”

“You said they can create that marker,” she says. “Soon they’ll have scientists inside of it.”

“I don’t know if that’s a lie or not,” I say. “Riya Trekov told me that, and I got the impression that finding the genetic marker and making one that works is still in the experimental stages. Think about it, Squishy. Would you go into that Room knowing how many people died in there, just because someone promises you that the untested marker they’ve given you might work?”

“You went in with a lot less.”

I turn away from her. She’s right, of course. I had gone in with a lot less. But I had no desire to come out.

I haven’t told her that part.

“So did Karl,” she adds.

“I can’t speak for Karl,” I say. Then I realize how harsh that sounds. “When you put it in those terms, however, it does seem out of character for him. He was always cautious. I have to think he thought everything through.”

“Everything except the fact that the device might not work.”

I shake my head. “We talked about that. We knew going into the Room might be suicide.”

“I can understand why you would want to do it,” she says. “Your mother died in there. You probably felt guilty about that, figured you might deserve to die.”

I don’t move. She’s close, but not as close as she thinks. Because I wasn’t feeling guilty about my mother. I was thinking of Jypé and Junior and the other divers I’d lost over the years.

My failures over the years.

My failures. Not my parents’ failures or things that had happened to me as a child. But the things that I had done wrong.

“But Karl didn’t have that dark side to his personality,” Squishy says. “At his core, Karl was an optimist.”

I wouldn’t have called him that, but we each have our perceptions. And Squishy’s perceptions of me are closer than I like to think. So maybe she is close with Karl too.

“He was also an adventurer,” I say. “That’s his job. And as cautious as he was, he was cautious in the context of a job that could have killed him every time he put on that suit.”

She pauses. “True enough,” she says after a long moment.

“Most scientists aren’t risk takers. They—”

“That’s not true,” she says.

“But it is,” I say.

“Scientists take risks every day,” she says over me. “That’s what their experiments are. Daily risks.”

“In a controlled environment. With data that can be quantified and measured and moved forward. Every scientist I know hates it when something unexpected happens. You hated it, Squishy. That was one of the reasons you left the military program.”

Her face flattens. She gets that expression she had when I first saw her in Vallevu—protected, guarded.

Angry.

“No scientist is going to go to an uncontrolled environment like the Room—an environment none of us completely understands—and run experiments. That could compromise the experiments. You know that, Squishy.”

She stares at me.

“But scientists like you,” I say, “scientists who are also adventurers would go into the Dignity Vessel. People without the marker have gone into that ship and come out alive. They can send probes into it, maybe some kind of countermeasures. They can work with that level of stealth tech, but not the fully functional level of stealth tech.”

She doesn’t move for the longest time. Finally she glances at the image she has frozen. It’s just a corner of the Room, and it looks hazy because—well, I’m not sure why. Because something was happening to Karl’s equipment, maybe, or because the equipment couldn’t capture everything the human eye could see.

“You’re taking a lot of risk based on some supposition,” she says after a moment.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“What if you’re wrong? What if you destroy the Dignity Vessel and leave the Room intact, and the Dignity Vessel isn’t what they were interested in? What if the Room is?”

She has a good point. She always makes good points.

But there’s only so much I can do. And even though I’m an adventurer, there’s only so much I’m willing to risk.

At least at first.

“If we can successfully destroy the Dignity Vessel,” I say, “then we can consider destroying the Room. Let’s do this methodically. Let’s see what a small explosion will do before we contemplate a larger one.”

“We?” she asks.

“Me,” I say, “using some technology you’ve designed for me.”

“You want me to build a bomb?” She looks around the room we’re standing in. Her office, in a doctor’s quarters. She has spent the last several years saving lives. Now I want her to make something that might take them.

“Yes,” I say. “Haven’t I been clear?”

“Not that clear,” she mutters. “You haven’t been that clear at all.”

TWENTY-NINE

Squishy shuts off the images from Karl’s suit. Then she sinks into a nearby chair. She suddenly looks tired.

I’m not sure what she thought I wanted. It’s clear how involved she is in her life here. The children, the medical practice, the lovely house. It’s all something that radiates contentment.

Although Squishy doesn’t radiate contentment at the moment.

“Obviously we haven’t been communicating,” she says softly. “Tell me again why you’re here.”

I grab a nearby chair and sit down. “Before you left the Business, you insisted that we destroy the Dignity Vessel. I got the sense that you knew how to do it. I just wasn’t willing to listen.”

She nods.

“So now, I’m willing to listen. I’m going to destroy that damn ship, but I don’t know how to do it. I’m afraid if I do it wrong, I’ll make things worse. Or maybe I’ll just blow another hole in the hull and it won’t hurt the stealth tech at all. That piece will stay intact.”

She isn’t looking at me. She nods again, as if she understands what I’m saying.

“What I want from you,” I say, “what I’m hoping you can give me, is a foolproof way to destroy that ship.”

“Without destroying whoever takes the bomb inside,” she says.

I shake my head. “I’m taking it in. Alone. If I die, I die. But I don’t want to take a bomb in and die in vain. Do you understand now?”

She doesn’t say anything. She extends her hands and studies them as if she’s never seen them before, as if they belong to someone else. She’s hunched into herself, and I have the sense that I’ve disappointed her yet again.

“What did you think I came for?” I ask.

She shakes her head slightly.

“Squishy,” I say, “what did you think I was asking?”

“I want to destroy it,” she says after a moment. “I deserve to destroy it. After all, it nearly destroyed me.”

I can say nothing to that. Squishy doesn’t look destroyed to me. She looks like a successful woman, a pillar in her community. People love her here. I’ve discovered that in my few days in Vallevu. They love her and they don’t understand why I am here.

I’m beginning to wonder that myself.

I leave her because we have reached an impasse. She won’t help me destroy the ship if she can’t place the charges. And I’m going to be the only one who places the bomb.

Too many other people have died in my place. Some of the early divers I’ve lost, I lost because we didn’t know how to properly run a dive. I can cope with that. We made mistakes, and any one of us could have died.

A few others died because of their own stupidity. I don’t blame myself for that either. I’m not responsible for every stupid act someone pulls.

But Jypé and Junior died for my greed, because I thought I knew best. I didn’t investigate enough. If anyone should have died in that wreck, it was me.

Only, as I later discovered, I couldn’t have died there. I was the only one on board who could have investigated stealth tech, and I was the one who didn’t dive that wreck enough to get to the tech first. I could have survived the tech. I could have pulled the debris away from the field and found the probe. I would have seen the danger, and warned the others away.

No one would have died.

I blame myself for their deaths, for not giving them enough information about the dive, and for not listening to Squishy.

But that’s not the death that bothers me. Karl bothers me. He died in my place, doing my job. Granted, we had discussed the dangers, and we both thought we understood them. But Karl had no chance of surviving the Room. Even without knowing the information my father and Riya Trekov kept secret, we knew that I had a chance of survival because I had survived the Room before.

I don’t know how to tell Squishy about these things. I can’t let her go into that cockpit. I can’t let her plant any bombs. She would be going in my place, no matter how much she says she deserves it, and I can’t let her do that.

I can’t let someone else die in my place.

Too many have died already.

I pace my hotel room, trying to think of a way to get Squishy to work with me instead of trying to take over the mission. The hotel room itself is uncomfortable, partly because it’s on land.

I’ve had several nightmares here, each worse than the last. First I see my mother drift. Then I hear the music for hours, and I wake to silence, clutching my ears. Finally, I dream repeatedly of Karl, his voice slowing as he realizes that he’s trapped and we’ll never find him, even though he’s only a few meters away.

In my nights here, I switch between the bed and the couch. The bed is soft and covered with blankets. It looks inviting. After I found Squishy, I napped here and forced myself awake as the first nightmare came on.

So I moved the half dozen pillows to the couch in the front room of the suite and slept there, thinking I wouldn’t get comfortable enough to sleep soundly. I dreamt more in that half sleep than I would have in a full sleep, so I moved back to the bed again.

The room itself has a view of the mountains and the sky. I can program everything from thousands of plays and holovids and readings that play on the wall across from the bed to the bed itself. I can make it softer or firmer, raise it up or let it flatten against the floor. I can even change its length and width—within the confines of the room, of course.

But the one thing I can’t program is the environment. Sure, I can change the temperature and the humidity. But I can’t change the gravity, and I can’t make the room feel like it’s on a ship, hurtling through space. If I could do that—if I could make the room feel like it’s traveling far from here—I would be able to sleep.

Being in the room only adds to my frustration. I leave, heading to the restaurant across the street.

The hotel has its own restaurant, but it’s like restaurants in a thousand other places, with a generic menu designed to appeal to people from all over the system. The restaurant across the street has local cuisine, using local ingredients, and I have fallen in love with one of the omelets, made with homegrown tomatoes and mint. I don’t recognize the cheese placed on top, but it adds a tang that only accents the mint.

The restaurant never closes. On my first night in the hotel, I came here after fighting the nightmares and ordered the best meal in the house, letting the chef decide what that was. He asked me what I needed, and I said comfort food, and somehow he figured out the kind of meal that soothed me.

From then on, I was hooked on the place. I’ve come often enough to become known as Rosealma’s friend. No one here calls her Squishy, and I’m careful not to. I don’t want to explain how she got the nickname.

To the people here, she’s a nice woman, a good doctor, someone who cares for the children.

And the children are the issue. Late one night, when I couldn’t sleep, I asked the owner about Squishy’s children. It wasn’t as abrupt as it sounds. The owner, a tall, slender woman who has a knack for listening, was doing an inventory—which mostly meant carrying a handheld and letting it examine each shelf.

The work wasn’t engaging her, so she asked me questions: Who was I? Why was I visiting Rosealma? How long had it been since I’d seen her?

I answered some questions truthfully. I told her that I ran my own business and that Squishy (although I said Rosealma) had once worked for me. I needed to get away after the sudden death of a colleague, and I realized that Squishy probably hadn’t heard the news.

Rather than send her an impersonal message, I brought the news myself, as an excuse to travel here and see the Vallevu I had heard so much about.

I don’t know if the owner believed me. But when it became clear that she wanted to know more than I was willing to tell her, I gradually shifted the conversation away from myself and onto Squishy.

“She worked as a medic for me,” I said. “Yet I was surprised to see she had a private practice here.”

“She’s a good doctor,” the owner said. “People love her. I got the sense she hated field medicine.”

“She did,” I say, “because you can only work with what you’ve brought and what’s at hand.”

The owner was quiet for a moment after that. I wasn’t sure if she was listening to her own memories or if she assumed I was stuck inside mine. Or maybe she was done asking me questions, having gleaned enough information to pass onto the locals about the strange friend of Rosealma’s who arrived in town unexpectedly.

“The children surprised me too,” I said. “Some of them are too old to be Rosealma’s.”

“They’re all hers,” the owner said. “She cares for them. She’s raising them.”

“They can’t all be hers,” I said.

The woman gave me a withering look. “Biologically, they’re not,” she said. “But Rosealma loves them as her own.”

“Orphans, then?”

She shrugged a shoulder and the conversation ended there. No matter how many times I tried to engage her, on how many future nights, I wasn’t able to.

Now I’m hunched over my omelet, a cup of the best coffee I’ve had steaming beside my hand. The owner sits at the counter. She’s watching me, and I get the sense that she wants to ask me a question but doesn’t know how.

“Go ahead,” I say tiredly. “Ask whatever you want.”

She smiles slightly. Then she grabs two pieces of pie, puts some kind of cream on top, and brings them to the table. She keeps one for herself and gives the other to me.

I’m not ready for it. I still have half an omelet to go.

“They say you and Rosealma are working on a project together,” she says.

I shrug. “I asked her to review information from our friend’s death.”

“It’s more than that,” the owner says. “She’s searching for a replacement at the clinic. She wants to leave.”

This news both startles me and doesn’t surprise me at all. Of course, Squishy hasn’t told me that. She is taking care of her business here, which is none of my concern. Until our discussion a few hours before, she thought she was leaving with me.

She thought she wasn’t going to come back.

“She’s not coming with me.” I finally finish the omelet. I set the plate to one side, but I don’t take the pie, not yet. I want the food to settle. Instead, I grab the coffee.

“Good,” the owner says. “Because we can’t spare her.”

“I would suppose doctors are hard to find here,” I say.

“That’s not why,” she says. “We got by before; we could get by again.”

“Then I don’t understand,” I say.

“The families here are former military,” she says. “Vallevu isn’t a natural community. We were given this land and the money to build on it.”

I freeze. I don’t want to be anywhere connected to the military. “After the Colonnade Wars?” I ask, trying to pinpoint this in time.

She shakes her head. “We haven’t been here that long.”

I wait, but she doesn’t say any more. Instead she picks at her own piece of pie.

“How long?” I ask.

“Technically,” she says, “I’m not allowed to talk about that.”

I sigh.

“But,” she adds, “I was twenty-five when I came here. I’m fifty now.”

She gives me an odd smile, as if she’s begging me to understand something I’m only gelling glimmers of.

“Are you one of the founders?” I ask.

“Not quite,” she says. “A few people have been here longer than me. Maybe by five years or so.”

“And Squ—Rosealma?”

“She was invited, but she never came. Until a few years ago.”

After she left the Dignity Vessel. The glimmer of understanding is finally beginning.

I start, “So the people who retired here—”

“Actually, no one retired here,” the owner says. “This was a base at first.”

“A base,” I repeat. The housing doesn’t look like base housing. It’s too nice for that. “The Empire dropped quite a bit of money here.”

Some nervousness must echo through my voice, because she smiles. “Relax,” she says. “The base closed long ago.”

“But this is still imperial property,” I say.

She shakes her head. “Abandoned and purchased legally by the families who live here.”

“Who are former military.” I wrap my hands around my cup. The coffee is now cold. “I suppose I have enough information to figure this out, but I’m dense. I don’t know your name—”

She starts to tell me, but I wave her off.

“—and I don’t want to know. I can’t tell anyone if you broke confidentiality, and aside from your employees, we’re the only ones in the place. So tell me what I’m missing.”

She gets up and takes the cup out of my hand. She pours out the remaining coffee. For a moment, I think she’s subtly telling me to leave. Then she grabs the coffeepot and pours me a refill.

She brings the cup back to the table.

“You don’t know the history of Naha, do you?” she asks.

“I don’t know the history of a lot of things,” I say. I don’t know the history of any planets. I can barely handle the history of the sector, and then only vaguely. I need some details so that I know which ships should be where, when, and who was piloting them. But if the information didn’t affect surrounding space, it didn’t interest me.

“We used to have a military base in orbit,” she says. “It was classified, so it doesn’t surprise me that you didn’t know. It was also hard to miss, since it was so large.”

“And the families lived on the planet?” I ask. I know enough about military history to know that’s strange.

“It was a science base. People used to speculate that they were making weapons up there.”

“Were they?” I ask.

She gives me that odd smile again. “That’s classified.”

“I thought we dealt with that,” I say.

“The kind of classified that could get me, a former military worker who lived on that base, in trouble.”

“Oh,” I say. She is trying to tell me what she can without getting herself in too much trouble. I have to pay more attention. She’s giving me the information in an order that won’t get her in trouble but that will make her meaning clear.

If I’m quick enough to catch on.

“So,” I say after a moment, “people believed they were making weapons.”

She nods.

“And it was military scientists who worked up there,” I say.

She nods again.

“While their families were down here, for safety’s sake.”

“At first,” she says.

“And then?” I ask.

“What do you know about hazardous duty pay?” she asks.

I hate elliptical conversations. They’re the opposite of what I believe. I believe in being blunt and honest and straightforward. This conversation is going to give me a headache before the night is through.

“I know that hazardous duty pay is a great deal more than regular pay,” I say tentatively.

“With bonuses should the soldier die in the line of that hazardous duty.”

I blink.

“It sometimes takes years to declare someone dead,” she adds.

I’m frowning now. I have to put this together with—what? If you have a dead body, then it shouldn’t be hard to declare someone dead.

But if you don’t …

I let out a small breath. On the Business, all those years ago, Squishy said to me, Why do you think I like finding things that are lost? Because I’ve accidentally lost so many things.

Things? Karl had asked her. He was in that conversation, as were Jypé and Junior. And me. Such ironies.

And she answered him. Ships, people, materiel. You name it, I lost it trying to make it invisible to sensors.

People. She said people.

It sometimes takes years to declare someone dead.

Particularly if they’ve been lost.

“Rosealma was assigned to that military base, wasn’t she?” I ask.

“Until her tour was up,” the owner says.

I let out a breath. Squishy worked on stealth tech in orbit around this planet. And somehow, this community was tied to it all.

“Then she left,” I say.

“She didn’t have family,” the owner says.

“Did you?” I ask.

Her eyes narrow. She shakes her head. “I was given a medical discharge. I’m no longer combat worthy.”

“May I ask why?” I ask.

“I’m afraid of the dark,” she says softly.

My gaze meets hers. She knows why I’m here. She knows what happened, maybe not to Karl, but to Jypé and Junior. She knows about the stealth tech.

“You’re one of Rosealma’s good friends,” I say.

She nods. “You’ve upset her.”

“I’m sorry for that,” I say.

“You asked about the children,” she says.

Days ago, I wanted an answer, but now I don’t. “Yes.”

“They’re hers. And mine. And everyone’s. We care for them.”

“Where are their parents?” I ask.

“Lost,” she whispers.

Lost. Like ships and materiel. I shiver. “You made it sound like Rosealma was the only person who cares for them.”

“The children love her best,” the owner says. “They would be devastated if something happens to her.”

“So would I, I say. “Believe me, so would I.”

THIRTY

You didn’t tell me this was a military base,” I say to Squishy the next evening. We are in the viewing area of her medical practice, where we’ve been the past few nights. Only on this night, there is no image of Karl’s surrounding us.

For the first time, I feel like we’re alone.

“It’s not,” Squishy says.

“But it was,” I say. “It’s on imperial property.”

“The families bought this land,” she says. “They’ve invested a fortune to clean it up.”

“To clean up what?” I ask.

Her lips thin. Then she smiles, as if she’s had a private joke with herself. “What does it matter if I tell you?” she says. “Of all people, you’re not going to say anything.”

I feel my cheeks heat. Was that why the restaurant owner didn’t tell me much? She was afraid I would run to the authorities?

I only know one person in Vallevu who ever did that, and it wasn’t me.

“The families cleaned up everything legally,” she says.

“Legally?” I ask.

“They effectively sued to own this place,” she says. “Then when they got it, they scrubbed the record. In no way can the military reclaim this land. In fact, it should be off their books as well.”

I frown. “Why?”

“Because,” she says, a slight color building in her cheeks, “the families believe someday their loved ones will come back.”

I feel a deep horror, something I thought I was past. The families here believe like the families did at the Room of Lost Souls. Someday their loved ones will return to them. Someday, their loved ones will come back.

Only unlike the Room, where no one could stay for a long time, simply because of its location, these families remained at the site of their loved ones’ disappearance for years.

“Shouldn’t they be in orbit instead of down here?” I ask.

She looks at me sharply. “Diana talked to you,” she says.

“I don’t know any Diana,” I say. And that’s true. I never let the owner of the restaurant—if, indeed, that was Diana—tell me her name.

“Yeah,” Squishy says in a tone that implies she doesn’t believe me.

“You didn’t answer my question,” I say.

She nods. “They should be in orbit, yes. On the military science station. We had an entire wing for our work. And they should be waiting somewhere near it. Only it’s gone.”

I saw many things in orbit when I approached Naha. There were a few obvious tourist resorts—places where people stayed so that they could get a lovely view of the planet without traveling too far from home—and a few other things that I’m sure were classified. But I didn’t see anything obviously military. I would have noticed, I’m sure.

“Gone,” I repeat, just to make sure we’re being clear this time.

“The military took the base apart. The equipment went other places. I’m not sure what happened to the parts of the base itself. I know some people thought it contaminated.” She shrugs. “This is all after my time.”

“So they can’t stay in orbit, so they stay here.”

“If you believe that someone can return from stealth tech—or whatever it was that we created—then yes, this is the second most logical place to be. The soldiers who took part, they knew their families were here. So they would come here. If they could ever come home.”

It’s clear from the way she says that that she doesn’t believe they will ever return.

“That’s how the families ended up with this place,” she says. “They were supposed to leave when their loved ones were declared legally dead, but they wouldn’t. A bunch of them wouldn’t even participate in the call to declare their loved ones dead. The military had to do it over their protests.”

I stare at her. “There was a battle over Vallevu?”

“Yes,” she says. “And in this case, the families won.”

“The children,” I say. “They’re orphans of soldiers who were … lost?”

Her face closes down again. “The children aren’t any of your business.”

“Actually, they are,” I say. “They’re the reason you can’t go to that Dignity Vessel.”

Her expression is flat. She doesn’t want me to see how she feels. But now I’m getting to know that expression, and I’ve come to realize she puts it on when she’s the most frightened, and the most upset.

“I want to destroy that ship,” she says.

“You can,” I say. “You build the bomb. I’ll place it.”

“I’m going to place it,” she says.

I shake my head. “You can’t. You don’t want those children to lose you too.”

“I’ll be fine,” she says.

She sounds like me at the Room. Or me just before going to the Dignity Vessel. All bravado and denial.

But I don’t tell her that. Instead, I say, “Squishy, look. You can build the bomb. You can even come with me on the trip to the Dignity Vessel. You just can’t dive the wreck.”

“I want to go onto that wreck.”

“Serve as my science officer and medic,” I say.

She shakes her head.

I’m getting irritated. She’s being stubborn—again. I don’t want her to be stubborn.

“If we fail,” I say, “and we both die, then what? The Empire continues with its program. More family members will disappear. Or worse. The Empire will get stealth tech.”

She raises her chin slightly. I know I have her attention now.

“But if I go in,” I say, “and if I fail, then you’ll live to fight another day.”

“I’ll just go in the next time on my own,” she says.

“But I won’t be alive to see it,” I say. “Then it’ll be your choice.”

“It’s not my choice now?” she asks.

I shake my head. “It’s my choice. My mission. My father’s behind this, Squishy, and all he’s interested in is money. He sacrificed my mother to it.”

“You said you don’t know that for sure,” she says.

“You heard my story,” I say. “What do you think?”

She looks away.

“I saw you with those children,” I say. “They care about you. You’re different with them. Warmer.”

“Nicer,” she says.

I smile. “That too.” Then I let my smile fade. “Don’t you think that’s worth coming back for?”

“Others can take care of them.”

“But everyone tells me the children prefer you.”

She stares at me. “I can come?” she asks.

“If you swear to me you won’t dive the wreck,” I say.

Her jaw clenches. She moves away from me. She walks around the furniture, then stares at the wall where we watched the images that Karl recorded.

She’s clearly thinking about it. The question is, even if she agrees, can I trust her to keep her word?

I don’t know the answer to that. But I do know that I need her. I don’t have the expertise to make weaponry. I suppose I could make some kind of bomb or buy something that might be effective. But I’m not sure it’ll work on the Dignity Vessel.

The mysterious Dignity Vessel that is out of time and out of its proper region of space.

In some ways, I am more superstitious about that ship than most people are about the Room. That ship seems almost magical to me, and because it does, it seems indestructible too.

I need Squishy not just for her expertise, but for her common sense. If I were to tell her I thought that the ship was somehow immortal, she would laugh at me.

She stops pacing. She glares at me as if I’ve participated in the discussion she’s been having with herself.

“All right,” she says with barely contained anger. “I’ll take your conditions.”

“I want you to swear to me you won’t go into that wreck,” I say. “Not for any reason.”

She crosses her arms. For a moment, I think she won’t agree. Then she says, “I swear. I’ll stay out of the damn Dignity Vessel. And I’ll help you blow the fucking thing up.”

THIRTY-ONE

We leave Vallevu three days later. It will take us a while to get to Longbow Station. That’s where I’ve left the rest of the team that dove the Room with me. They want their revenge on my father and Riya Trekov, and while I know that revenge isn’t always the best motive for something like this, right now I’ll take what I can get.

On the trip to Longbow, Squishy starts her work. Right now, she’s just doing theory, but she will need some kind of scientific station, somewhere safe where she can do a few small experiments and build her bomb.

Obviously she can’t do that on Longbow. She won’t work at Vallevu either—those people have suffered enough, she says. What she wants is a decommissioned military science vessel. Those things are designed with disaster in mind.

The science workstation detaches from the main part of the ship, so if some experiment gets out of control, the crew can jettison the laboratory and send it into space.

Only trying to find such a vessel would get us noticed.

So instead, Squishy suggests that we modify the interior of one of the skips. She and an assistant (not me) will leave Longbow, take the skip out of the space owned by Longbow, and do their work.

They’ll be within view of the station, but should anything happen to the skip, not close enough that an explosion will damage Longbow.

It isn’t until she makes these conditions that the entire project becomes real to me. I want to blow up the Dignity Vessel, but I don’t want anyone harmed in the process. The fact that Squishy’s work might destroy even a small section of Longbow terrifies me.

We are half a day away when I finally talk with Squishy about this. We’re having a meal I prepared in the Business’s galley. Usually I don’t cook for anyone else. If someone else is on the ship, I either hire a cook or, if I have a large team, I make sure someone on that team doubles as chef.

I never thought Squishy would come back with me, so I didn’t hire anyone to take care of us. She has to eat my food which, although it lacks sophistication, is at least filling.

This afternoon I serve the leftover soup I made from some meat (whose name I forgot) from Naha, and cornbread that I made fresh. I can bake, which often gets me through long trips on the Business, but I can’t do much else.

Squishy eats like a former prisoner, hunched over her food, one arm circling it. She claims it comes from eating rapidly with others on military vessels. Since I’ve never served, I don’t know. I do know that Karl, who had also been military, had eaten the same way.

Still I find it a disconcerting habit. I keep the gravity at Earth normal on the Business, so eating is never an issue. I lean my chair against the galley’s wall, hold my bowl against my stomach, and eat slowly. I will have my piece of cornbread for dessert.

I don’t know how to approach her about her work. Finally, I just decide to be honest.

“I’m having second thoughts,” I say.

“I knew you would.” She doesn’t look up at me. She keeps her bowl close to her chest, the spoon scraping against the bowl’s sides. “What part worries you? Or are we just going to abandon the whole idea?”

Her moods have fluctuated since she got on board the ship. Some of it I understood: She got instantly homesick for Vallevu and her life there. But some of it I did not. Every time she goes into the cabin we set aside for her research, she stops at the door, as if she is the one having second thoughts, not me. Sometimes she comes out calm, and sometimes she emerges furious.

Once she left the cabin in tears.

“We’re not going to abandon the whole idea,” I say. No matter how many qualms I have, I cannot stomach the idea of the Empire having stealth tech. “I just need to know what you’re doing.”

“You’re having second thoughts about me, then,” she says, setting her bowl aside. It’s completely clean, as if no soup has been inside it at all.

She’s making me defensive. I forgot how good she is at that. “No, not exactly,” I say, and then realize I lost control of the conversation the moment I said “second thoughts.”

So I decide to try another tack.

“When you said you need to experiment, I thought I understood. Then you said that you can’t do it on Longbow, and I got concerned. And when you mentioned that the skip might blow up—”

“You’ve never built a bomb,” she says.

That’s true enough. I’ve never built anything large, and certainly not anything large and destructive.

“No, I haven’t,” I say. “Before I went to see you, I figured I would simply buy one for this project.”

My language is so clean, as if I’m discussing a dive or a new piece of equipment.

“If we were facing a regular ship, you could have done that,” she says. “But we’re not. The very thing that brought you to me is why I need to be as far from Longbow as I can and work.”

“Obviously, I don’t understand,” I say.

She gets up and cuts herself a large piece of cornbread. She doesn’t put it on a plate, but instead cups it in one hand, using the other to break pieces off of it.

“I have to make sure the bomb works,” she says, “not just in theory, but in practice.”

I let out a small breath. Whatever I had expected her to say, it wasn’t that. “That’s not possible,” I say. “We don’t have any real stealth tech.”

“I know,” she says. “And if my research determines that we can use a conventional explosive, then I won’t need to work on the skip. But if we can’t, then I’m going to need to see how certain types of matter interact with each other.”

I grab her bowl and place it in the washer. I add mine to that, then cut myself a large piece of cornbread, place it on a plate, and grab a fork. I start some coffee, less because I want it than because I want the time to think about what she just said.

“I thought you can’t replicate stealth tech,” I say.

“We did some bottle experiments,” she says. “They didn’t work, but we didn’t know as much as I do now. I want to try one of those, and see what happens.”

“No,” I say.

“No?” She sounds shocked.

“You’re not doing any kind of experimentation. The only time you detonate anything is when we get to the Dignity Vessel.”

“I thought you said I can’t go in.”

“You can’t. You’ll teach me what to do,” I say.

She shakes her head. That very movement makes me angry.

“You’re not replicating stealth tech in even the smallest way inside my skip,” I say. “You’re not experimenting with anything. You and I are going to decide on the most effective possible bomb and we are going to use it. Once. On that vessel. There will be no test run. There will be no experimenting.”

Her cheeks are red. “But it might not work,” she says.

“That’s the risk we’re taking. You’re here to figure out what we need.”

“That’s what I’m trying to do,” she says.

“Not,” I continue, “as a scientist. As a diver, an adventurer, and a human being who wants this stuff out of our lives.”

“If that Dignity Vessel is on a base somewhere,” she says, “then we could take out hundreds of innocent lives.”

“It’s not on a base,” I say.

She pauses, pieces of cornbread dripping from one hand into the other. She looks like a little girl, making a mess because she doesn’t know how to properly eat that particular food.

“It’s not?” she asks. “How are they working on it, then?”

“I’m not sure they are yet,” I say. “All I know is that they’ve set up a guard.”

“That’s it?”

I shrug. I’ve sent Mikk and part of the team to check it out from a distance. They were on that mission while I came to Naha to see Squishy.

“I’ll know when we get back,” I say.

I told Mikk not to get too close. If he got caught, he could say he was traveling nearby and had no idea there was something important in that part of space. He was going to treat it as if he were taking a bunch of people on a tourist dive (not that my team would ever be tourists) and let the Empire think he was just a bit ignorant.

I hope it worked.

“See why I’m not too worried about blowing up the ship?” I ask. “It’s in the middle of nowhere.”

“I’d have to test—”

“No,” I say. “You can read about Dignity Vessels. I gave you the numbers for the component parts. You know what the ship is made of. We destroy it, and most likely, we’ll destroy the stealth tech.”

“Most likely,” she says, and takes a bite of cornbread.

I am simply repeating her argument back to her, but now she doesn’t sound convinced.

“You were worried,” she says, “that we’d create an even larger stealth tech field, even with the ship gone. Aren’t you still worried about that?”

Of course I am. I’d be foolish not to worry about it. “Of course I’m still worried about it, Squishy,” I say.

“If I do a bottle experiment, I might figure out—”

“No,” I say. “First of all, you could die. Second, you could open a rift near Longbow. And third, if we do create something nasty, we’ll start rumors and warn people away from that part of space.”

“If we survive,” she says.

I nod. “If we survive.”

THIRTY-TWO

I am relieved to see Longbow. I am even more relieved to find that Mikk and the team have returned from their mission to the Dignity Vessel intact. Their little ruse worked.

We meet in a small restaurant that I have rented for the evening. The proprietor has set out a full meal for us—meats, cheeses, breads, fruits and vegetables grown in one of Longbow’s hydroponic gardens—and he has left us alone. That too is by my request. He’ll return in two hours, serve desserts, and then usher us outside.

I don’t mind. It’s the privacy I’m after, not the food.

The team is already waiting for me. They’re milling around the long table in the middle of the restaurant. Everything here is done to look authentically Old Earth—wooden tables, wooden floors, wooden walls, big thick wooden signs, and a wooden bar off to one side.

None of the wood is real, of course, and I have no way to judge if any restaurant on Old Earth ever looked like this. But it has always felt authentic to me.

The food sits in the center of the long table on thick white plates. The same spread appears on both sides of the table, so things don’t have to be passed very far.

Most everyone already holds a plate, loaded with a different variety of snacks. Full glasses of various liquids sit near different spots on the table where people have already staked their claim.

There are only two spots left, one at the head of the table and the other to the right of the head.

Apparently Squishy and I have assigned seating. I glance at Mikk. He smiles at me. He’s done this. He has really stepped into a leadership role since Karl died, and I appreciate it.

Mikk sets his glass to the left of the head of the table. Then he puts his plate down. Everyone else comes to the table as well.

Odette takes the foot. Her presence surprises me. She was so angry after we dropped my father and Riya Trekov off the Business that I thought she wouldn’t work with me again.

As we all thread to the table, there’s only one person I don’t recognize. She’s too thin. Her hair is so short I can’t tell its color.

It’s not until she stops beside me that I realize who I’m looking at.

Turtle.

“Turtle,” I say, and hug her. She feels brittle. “I thought I’d never see you again.”

She hugs me briefly, then steps back. She looks to my side, her gaze finding Squishy.

“I contacted her,” Squishy says. “Just before we left Vallevu.”

“I couldn’t believe I heard from you.” Turtle tentatively touches Squishy’s arm. “Thanks for letting me know about Karl.”

Squishy moves away ever so delicately.

“You told her in a communication?” I ask. I can’t believe the insensitivity of that. Karl and Turtle were friends. I figure that such news is always better told in person.

“I told her to meet us here and to find some of your divers,” Squishy says to me. “They’d let her know what happened.”

Turtle gives Squishy another longing look, and then steps back. “I’m so sorry about Karl,” Turtle says to me. “It sounds awful.”

I remember the feel of him in my suited arms. How I could close my arms around him and gently tug him backwards, getting no resistance at all. How, in that moment, I knew that the Karl was gone, even though his body remained.

“It’s probably worse because Karl would be alive if it weren’t for her dad,” Mikk says. “If Boss hadn’t stopped me, I would have killed the bastard. Hell, I’m still not sure we shouldn’t.”

I give Mikk a sideways look—a silent “not now.”

He shrugs.

Turtle stays close to my side. She’s still peering at Squishy.

“You look different,” Turtle says to Squishy.

“Boss says I’m nicer now,” Squishy says. Then she smiles. “I’ll work on fixing that.”

Mikk smiles, but no one else does. Instead, we go to the table. I sit at the head, as I’m expected to do.

I look around the table. No one is missing. Roderick sits between Bria and Jennifer. Hurst looks tiny next to Davida and Tamaz. Turtle actually looks like she belongs.

Only Squishy seems out of place.

There is also one empty chair, and I’m not sure if that’s accidental or by design. The chair is even kicked out a little and turned at an angle, just like Karl would have done if he were actually sitting there.

My heart twists. To cover that sudden surge of emotion, I wave at Odette, who, at the other side of the table, seems impossibly far away. She actually smiles at me, and waves back.

I make the introductions. I tell my most recent team that Turtle and Squishy dived the Dignity Vessel with me, and they’re familiar with it. I also tell them that Squishy won’t be diving it this time.

“She’s our medic,” I say. “She’s also in charge of destroying the damn thing.”

“How can she destroy it if she doesn’t dive?” Mikk asks.

I glance at Squishy. I don’t know how much of her past she wants me to tell them.

She tilts her chair slightly. “I’m former military,” she says. “I worked in the stealth tech program. Boss thinks I can blow the ship up.”

“Do you think so?” Hurst asks.

“Boss won’t let me test my equipment,” Squishy says as if this were a democracy, as if she can convince the others to vote for her way of doing things.

“You would want to test an explosion?” Davida asks. I can hear the horror in her voice. “Where would you do that?”

“On one of the skips,” Squishy says. “It would be controlled—”

“If it were going to happen,” I say. “Which it’s not. Squishy is going to figure out exactly what components we need and how much we need. Then I’m going to take it into the wreck.”

“That wreck is big,” Mikk says. “You can’t dive it alone.”

“I’m going to,” I say.

He shakes his head. Apparently he thinks this is a democracy too. “It’s too dangerous. I think a team can safely go in there with you—”

“You haven’t been inside,” I say. “It’s better if I go by myself.”

“I’ve been inside,” Turtle says softly. “I never went into the cockpit, though, where we lost Junior. That’s where the stealth tech is. I think if you stay away from that part of the ship, you’ll be fine. I mean, I’m okay, and so is Squishy. Nothing harmed us while we were there.”

Everyone is watching her, looking more than a little confused.

She gives a small shrug. “I’m just trying to say that I think Mikk’s right. It’s better if a team goes in, just in case there’s a problem.”

I feel a thin band of anger start in my stomach. “I know what I want to do here,” I say, “and it doesn’t involve any other divers.”

“Maybe you should hear us out first,” Mikk says. “You don’t know what you’re facing.”

“I know what’s inside that ship,” I say, and realize I sound as stubborn as Squishy did when I was talking to her on Vallevu. “You haven’t been inside. Have you?”

I ask that last with an edge in my voice. He was under strict instructions not to dive the wreck. If he didn’t follow those instructions, I will not bring him along on the new trip.

“No, I haven’t been inside,” he says, “but you haven’t asked what we’ve found.”

I lean back slightly. I’m not used to Mikk talking back to me. Give him control of his own mission and he believes he’s in charge.

But he’s also right. I need to know what happened when he went to the Dignity Vessel, and I need to know before we make actual plans. Everything could change depending on what he saw.

“You’re right,” I say. “We shouldn’t be arguing procedure until we have all of the information.”

Squishy and Turtle both look at me, with matching stunned expressions on their faces. Apparently they’ve never heard me utter that sentence before.

Mikk doesn’t notice their response, although Odette does. She grins, apparently understanding what they’re thinking.

“We left just after you did,” Mikk says. “I rented a ship—I figured it would give us more verisimilitude—and I took Jennifer and Hurst with me.”

He took the younger-looking members of the crew. They were good choices if Mikk didn’t plan on diving. It would seem to a stranger boarding the ship that everyone on board was naive and new to diving.

“We brought rented equipment and stashed ours in the cargo hold, figuring no one would ever look for it, not with the rented stuff sitting out. Then we charted half a dozen courses, and began each one of them, veering off course every time. Hurst got us ‘lost’ so that it really looked like we had no idea where we were going.”

“I was beginning to think we didn’t,” Jennifer says.

Everyone laughs, but I don’t think she meant it as a joke. I think she had gotten nervous.

“The Dignity Vessel is a long way from nowhere,” I say.

Mikk nods. “I think that’s why they’re not too worried about it.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

He holds up his hand. “Let me explain,” he says.

They drifted in, like a group that’s tired and not sure where it’s supposed to be. They let the rented ship—called The Seeker—drift once they got close.

The one thing The Seeker did have was an excellent scanning system. Hurst used it to see what was in the vicinity. They located three military-class vessels, none of them warships. Two were quick maneuvering skips, and one was a command vessel. They formed a loose circle around one point in space.

The active vessels made it impossible for Mikk or Hurst to lock in on the Dignity Vessel’s signal, the thing that drew me to it so long ago, but they surmised it was there, just by the way the other ships surrounded it.

“There were only three ships,” Squishy says, interrupting the narrative. “And one of them was a command vessel?”

Mikk nods. He doesn’t seem irritated by the interruption.

I would have been.

“That’s not a lot of firepower,” Squishy says. “A determined someone could come into that area with the right equipment and drag that Dignity Vessel out of there.”

“It doesn’t sound possible to me,” I say.

“It is.” Odette speaks from the other side of the table. “There’s an easy maneuver to make the odds in your favor. But I want to hear what else Mikk found.”

She sounds a little annoyed. I’m getting a sense she’s not fond of Squishy. They’ve both been around diving a long time, so it’s possible they’ve met before and have a history.

It can also be that Squishy’s abrasive nature has already rubbed Odette the wrong way.

“We had to get a lot closer to see if the Dignity Vessel was actually there,” Mikk continues. “We drifted The Seeker in, as if we weren’t paying attention.”

Hurst knew how to do a casual mask of the scans, so it wouldn’t seem like they were looking for something. If they did get caught, he planned to say that the ships made him nervous and he wanted to know if they were a threat.

The three vessels didn’t seem to notice The Seeker. They didn’t come after it and they didn’t say anything to it.

Finally, the small team got a reading on the Dignity Vessel. They were even able to get a holographic image of it. They compared that image to the images I gave them before I left, and figured that not much has changed in the intervening years.

They even saw the probe.

Hurst wanted to go in closer. Jennifer agreed. It was Mikk who wanted to come back.

“I figured we were too exposed,” Mikk says, “but Hurst reminded me that Boss wanted a recon, and if we had to send another ship, then the people surrounding the Dignity Vessel might get suspicious.”

“I’m confused,” I say. “Those ships surrounded the Dignity Vessel? I thought they were small.”

“They were small,” Jennifer says. “But they were constantly moving around it.”

“The two skips were, anyway,” Hurst says. “The command vessel stayed in place.”

“You’re sure that was a command vessel?” Squishy asks.

Hurst nods. “I don’t think it could’ve been anything else.”

Neither of us tell Squishy that Hurst used to pilot ships in combat zones. He’s as familiar with military procedure as she is.

She shrugs skeptically, looking away. I’m not skeptical at all, and it’s my opinion that counts.

“I knew they were watching us,” Hurst says. “And I figured we should continue our ruse. We’re just a lost band of wannabe divers. Then we see the Dignity Vessel and we want to know more about it. We figured we would go in closer.”

“Did you?” Turtle asks.

Hurst nods. “I wanted to get into a better scanning range. I didn’t believe what we were seeing.”

“I thought there had to be more ships,” Squishy mutters.

“It’s not the ships,” Mikk says. “There were only three. But the readings we were getting of the Dignity Vessel were odd.”

“Odd?” I ask.

“I think they were feeding us scans off their own ship’s systems,” Hurst says. “They added some stuff.”

I hold up a hand. “What did they add?”

“Radiation,” he says. “The ship was giving off the strongest radiation signature I’ve ever seen.”

“Every ship gives off radiation,” Squishy says, “especially if it’s spent some time in space.”

“We know,” Mikk says gently.

I give him a sharp look. He gets softer and more gentle when he’s irritated. He doesn’t meet my gaze. He knows I’m sensing his mood.

“The readings we were getting off the Dignity Vessel were off the charts,” Hurst says. “The kind of readings you’d get if the ship had been in some kind of firefight. You know, with ancient radioactive weapons or something.”

“The implication,” Jennifer says, “is that the ship is so contaminated no one dare go on board, even in an environmental suit.”

“We didn’t get readings like that ever,” Turtle says in surprise.

I fold my hands together. “But it’s a great way to keep passersby away from the ship, and it also explains why the military is there. They’re trying to clean up some kind of toxic mess, which they generally only do when they’re the ones who cause the mess.”

“Well,” Mikk says to me, “you never said anything about radiation, but we knew about stealth tech, and we thought maybe it went haywire or something and caused the readings.”

“We reviewed your information again,” Hurst says. “From what we can tell, you got no radiation readings from the stealth tech at all.”

“We weren’t in the cockpit very long,” I say. We weren’t thinking of taking radiation readings. When Karl and I were in the cockpit, we were trying (hoping) to save Junior.

“Not just the cockpit, Boss,” Turtle says. “Karl and I never noticed anything on our first dive, and believe me, I would have monitored for it. I’m terrified of radiation.”

“She is,” Squishy says, and they look at each other from across the table. For a moment, the old attraction between them becomes obvious to everyone.

Then Squishy looks away.

Turtle makes herself look at the others. Her cheeks are flushed.

“The readings had to be false,” Mikk says. “We argued about that a little. Hurst wanted to get closer, and I have to say, I was the one arguing for caution.”

“But Boss wanted to know what we were facing,” Hurst repeats. I’m beginning to sense that was his mantra on this trip with Mikk and Jennifer. It must have annoyed them after a while, but I’m relieved that Hurst listened.

I did—I do—want to know what we are facing.

Mikk nods. “We got really close and took our own scans. That’s when it got dicey.”

One of the smaller military ships broke away from the Dignity Vessel and headed straight for The Seeker. As the military ship came, it demanded that everyone on The Seeker identify themselves and why they were in the vicinity.

“We thought about lying,” Mikk says.

“Be honest,” Hurst says. “I thought about lying. I didn’t want them to know I was a vet.”

Squishy looks at him in surprise. She has underestimated him, and she finally realizes it. She gives me a glance, as if I should have protected her from herself.

I say nothing. I let them continue with the story.

“But I decided it was better that I tell the truth,” Hurst says.

“Or as much of the truth as we could,” Jennifer says. “We agreed to answer questions directly, but not to embellish.”

“I wanted to do most of the talking,” Mikk says.

“And so he did,” Hurst says with a small smile.

The military ship took their identification and then demanded to board them. The entire crew had expected that. So they agreed to the boarding and crowded near the airlock to wait.

It didn’t take long. The military ship grappled onto theirs, holding it in place. Then four soldiers boarded, coming through the airlock with weapons drawn.

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” Jennifer says. “It scared me worse than any dive.”

“Except the Room,” Hurst says softly.

She gives him a sad look. Then she nods. “Except the Room.”

The four soldiers crowded into The Seeker’s cockpit. Their weapons—laser rifles—were long and looked more powerful than anything Mikk had ever seen. Hurst believed they were newer models than the ones he’d trained with, powerful guns that could kill from a great distance—and if the settings were right, wouldn’t do any damage to a ship’s hull.

“Scary,” Turtle mutters.

Half the people around the table nod.

Squishy just crosses her arms, as if she already knew about this sort of thing.

“They asked us to identify ourselves all over again,” Jennifer says. “So I introduced us.”

“It was a nice effect,” Mikk says, “because her voice was shaking.”

“It wasn’t an effect,” she says. “I was scared.”

The soldiers muscled their way in. They searched the ship, found the rented diving equipment, and asked a lot of questions about where the team planned to go and what they planned to do.

Jennifer told them that the team had been looking for a specific wreck, but couldn’t find it. They’d gotten turned around several times.

“All four soldiers were men,” Mikk says, “and Jen’s doing this little lost girl thing with them. They believed it.”

“I believed it,” Hurst says, “and I knew she was lying.”

“They checked our logs and our trips report, and they offered to help with plotting the correct course,” Jennifer says. “Then Hurst got all defensive with them, and I got worried. I thought he was going to ruin it.”

“But it turns out that was the thing that turned the tide,” Mikk says. “They might have thought it was a setup if it weren’t for Hurst saying he knew better. They pushed him aside and proved to him he was wrong.”

“I pretended like that hurt my feelings.” Hurst laughs. “Instead, I used the time they were searching through my equipment to do a quiet scan on them.”

“Did you learn anything?” I ask.

“Nothing I didn’t expect. These were real soldiers, fighters, career military. Their work was classified, but they were strong and battle-ready.” Hurst looks at me. We both know that’s significant.

When we go to the Dignity Vessel, we have to be ready to fight.

Squishy squirms beside me. She has realized that we must fight as well, and she clearly doesn’t like the idea.

I turn my chair slightly so that I don’t have to see her. She’s distracting me.

“It took a while,” Mikk says, “but they accepted our story. Then they told us to leave immediately.”

“I did ask them about the ship,” Jennifer says.

“But she was smart about it,” Hurst says. “She did that lost little girl thing again, talking to the big bad soldiers.”

“It wasn’t as bad as all that,” Jennifer says.

“No, she wasn’t acting like a little girl,” Mikk says. “She was flirting.”

Jennifer gives him a fond smile. “I asked them if they were worried about being that close to so much radiation.”

“And one of them says to her, ‘It’s not as bad as it seems.’” Mikk laughs. “The guy next to him whacks him on the arm, as if he’d done something wrong. Which, essentially, he had. He told us that the radiation wasn’t really a problem.”

“But the way he said it, you could interpret it as he was just being a tough soldier,” Hurst says. “That’s what Jen did. She saved our butts.”

“She got us a lot of information,” Mikk says.

“Like what ?” I ask.

“The ships have a minimum complement of soldiers,” Jennifer says. “They aren’t paying a lot of attention to what’s going on around them. I even got the sense that it took them a while to see us.”

“All the time we thought we were being watched, and they probably hadn’t even noticed us,” Hurst says.

“They consider it the worst duty in the sector because it’s so dull,” Jennifer says.

“It makes sense,” Hurst says. “They were trained for battle, and there they are, circling some abandoned ship for weeks, with nothing really to do.”

“What about the command ship?” Squishy asks.

Mikk looks at her. His expression is measuring, as if he doesn’t really want to talk with her. Squishy is not making herself popular with my team.

Hurst is the one who answers her.

“The command ship is the one detail we weren’t able to figure out,” he says. “They didn’t tell us why it was there, and we couldn’t ask.”

“I tried,” Jennifer says. “I said something dumb like how come it wasn’t the big ship that came for us, and they said that the big ship rarely does hands-on work. But that’s all they said about it.”

“They probably didn’t dare say anything else.” I scan the table. Everyone is watching Jennifer, Mikk, and Hurst. Apparently they haven’t told this to the team—or if they have, they haven’t told the story in its entirety.

“Then what?” I ask. “Did they detain you?”

“They talked a little bit,” Jennifer says. “They wanted to know about diving.”

“We had to be careful,” Hurst says. “We didn’t want to sound too knowledgeable.”

“But we did want to seem enthusiastic,” Mikk says. “I think we achieved that.”

“I don’t think they cared,” Jennifer says. “I think they wanted something to do. Imagine circling around that wreck, waiting for something to happen.”

“They’ll be itchy,” Squishy says. “That’s dangerous.”

Turtle nods. So does Hurst.

Odette leans forward. Her movement is so abrupt that it’s an interruption all by itself.

“You were on a fact-finding mission,” she says to Mikk, sounding like she’s the leader instead of me. I let her take this. Odette can be quite forceful if need be. “You discover three ships—two small military vessels and something you call a command ship. Four restless soldiers who really didn’t investigate you all very deeply from what I can tell, and a manufactured scan of the Dignity Vessel. Is that all you found?”

“It doesn’t sound like much when you put it that way,” Hurst says.

“You’ve given us details, but no understanding,” she says. “For us to make plans, we need understanding.”

“I have to add one more detail,” Mikk says. “We did get a good scan of the Dignity Vessel. One of our own.”

We all look at him.

He spreads his hands as if he’s apologizing. “It’s not too different from what you found. But … Squishy? Is that really your name?”

“It’s what Boss calls me,” Squishy says, “and that’s good enough.”

He sighs as if he doesn’t approve. “They never fixed the hole where the probe is. The ship is still open to space. They haven’t put anything on it. The radiation readings were in the normal range.”

“With the hull still open to space like that, then that means they didn’t get the ship’s internal environment up and running,” Turtle says.

“The ship is the same vessel you found,” Mikk says to me. “Same low power reading, same openings. If anything, the hull is even more pockmarked, but I can’t say that for certain.”

“They haven’t done anything with the Dignity Vessel?” Squishy asks.

“Not that we could tell.”

“No life signs on board or anything?” Squishy asks.

“The Seekers equipment wasn’t that sophisticated,” he says. “We couldn’t get life sign readings from any of the ships.”

“The military vessels were shielded,” Squishy says.

“I figured,” Mikk says in that gentle dry tone that implies he’s humoring her. “But we couldn’t get anything from the Dignity Vessel either, and I doubt they shielded that.”

“It would’ve been too risky,” Turtle says, taking him seriously.

Squishy just frowns at him. “I can’t believe they’re not working on the vessel.”

“I told you,” I say. “They’re waiting for my father and Riya Trekov to finish their experiment.”

“I thought they did, with you,” Squishy says.

“Things move slowly in the Empire,” Hurst says. “As former military, you should know that.”

She glares at him, then leans back.

“Maybe that’s why the command vessel was there,” Turtle says. “Maybe something is happening. Or am I misunderstanding what a command vessel is?”

“You’re not,” Hurst says. “That’s the mystery of the place. With two tiny military vessels, they didn’t need a vessel that big. We couldn’t get any information about it, and they certainly weren’t going to tell us why it was there.”

“Do you think they’re bringing in more ships?” Bria asks. “Maybe that’s why it was there.”

“You’d think the ships would arrive before the command vessel,” Hurst says.

“It’s all speculation,” Odette says. “We need facts.”

I agree with her. We need facts.

“Here’s what I understand,” I say. “The Dignity Vessel is exactly where we left it. They have a small team of guards surrounding it. Two small military vessels with a crew complement of—what?”

I look at Squishy, then at Hurst. I’m hoping they know.

Hurst shrugs one shoulder. “I can’t imagine more than eight soldiers on each of those ships.”

“They’re built for ten,” Squishy says. “But if this is easy duty, the military isn’t going to waste twenty soldiers on some wreck in space. There might only be four on each vessel.”

“You mean we saw the entire crew?” Jennifer says. “That makes no sense. Someone had to remain with the ship.”

Odette nods. “It makes sense to me. Five. That’s half what the ships will bear. If you have five on each, then you have a redundant system. Something can happen to one ship, and you haven’t lost your entire crew. But you’re not fully staffed, so you’re not wasting money either.”

“What about the command vessel?” I ask.

“I’d like to see the specs,” Squishy says. “Maybe it’s a scout vessel.”

Finally, Hurst gets annoyed. “Believe me,” he says, “it was a command ship.”

“That’s a minimum of thirty,” Squishy says to me, as if she hasn’t noticed his irritation.

“On the command ship?” I ask.

She nods.

“So we have forty soldiers, minimum, maybe fifty,” I say, “and God knows how many nearby.”

“We didn’t register any,” Mikk says, “but they could’ve been in stealth mode.”

“I don’t see the point of that,” Odette says. “Especially if nothing has happened to that vessel in years. I think we have to assume there were only the three ships.”

“All right,” I say. “Three ships. Maybe fifty soldiers. No one on the Dignity Vessel. And probably no one is doing long-range scans or they would have come to get The Seeker much sooner. They wouldn’t have let The Seeker get that close.”

“I agree,” Squishy says.

“They may be itchy,” I say, “but they’re also complacent. It’ll take them a while to get up to speed on any situation. The question is time.”

“Time?” Mikk asks.

“We need time to plant that bomb. We haven’t dived the Dignity Vessel in years. We could get to the heart of it within about fifteen minutes, if my memory serves, but we can’t do that now.”

“Why not place the bomb in that hole in the hull?” Jennifer asks.

Squishy shakes her head. “We want the bomb outside of the stealth tech. Close, but not close enough to be in the stealth tech field.”

“Still, planting it outside seems the logical thing to do,” Jennifer says.

“That also makes the bomb obvious to the military,” I say. “I’d rather put it in the cockpit.”

I want to obliterate that place from my memory. I’m not sure a bomb will do it, but I hope it will.

“We need some kind of diversion,” Odette says. “We need those military vessels out of the area for at least an hour.”

“An hour?” Hurst says. “You think that’ll be enough?”

I shake my head. “We’re better off planning for two or three hours, and even that might cut it close.”

I put my hands on the table and stand up, effectively ending the meeting. More hard facts aren’t forthcoming, and speculation will only confuse the issue. Squishy hasn’t finished the bomb yet.

Up to this point, the bomb is all I’ve focused on. Now I have to get us past military vessels and find time to dive. That’ll take a lot more planning than I’m used to.

I wish Karl were here. This is a mission he would be able to lead much better than I would. His own military background and his innate caution would guarantee success.

“Let’s think on this,” I say. “We have time. Let’s make sure we do this right.”

THIRTY-THREE

Odette pulls me aside later. I am heading for my berth. She insists on walking with me.

The corridors in this part of Longbow are narrow and cramped. They’re designed to discourage people who’ve been drinking and eating in the nearby restaurants from venturing in this direction. There is barely enough room for both of us to walk side by side, even though neither of us is large.

Before she speaks, Odette looks over her shoulder. When she is satisfied that we’re alone, she says, “I think you should let Squishy go.”

“I sought her out,” I say.

“I know,” she says, “and I’m not exactly sure why. She’s not trustworthy.”

I clasp my hands behind my back. “She knows a lot about stealth tech.”

“You’ve asked her for her expertise in that area, and she’s given you what she knows. At least, as much as you can tell.”

We go around a corner, and I stop. I want to see Odette’s face as we talk. “You don’t like her, do you?” I ask.

“Do you?” Odette asks.

It’s a fair enough question. “We were friends once.”

“Once,” Odette says. “Then she betrayed you. To the Empire, no less. She’s the reason they have that Dignity Vessel in the first place.”

“I know,” I say. I’m not likely to forget that betrayal.

“Have you ever asked her why she turned you in?”

“I know why,” I say. “She thought stealth tech was too dangerous for us. For any layperson, really. She wanted the Dignity Vessel removed from that site.”

“Which didn’t happen,” Odette says. “You’d think Squishy would know that it couldn’t happen.”

I think about that for a long moment. Odette has a point. And I never asked Squishy to clarify her reasons. She hasn’t apologized to me for reporting the Dignity Vessel, nor has she said she made a mistake.

I’m not even sure she considers her actions a mistake, given what she knew at the time. She figured no one could work in stealth tech. She probably figured giving something that dangerous to the Empire might save lives.

“She fought me pretty hard on that Dignity Vessel dive,” I say. “If she wanted to stop me—and anyone else—from diving the vessel, she made the right choice. She didn’t report us until Jypé and Junior died. I assumed— hell, I know—she couldn’t take it anymore. She didn’t want to be part of any more deaths.”

“Yet she gives the ship to the Empire, which guarantees there will be more deaths,” Odette says.

“What choice did she have?” I ask. “She didn’t want others to stumble onto the wreck, and I wasn’t listening to her.”

Odette frowns. She looks at the empty corridor as if making certain we’re still alone. When she looks back at me, her frown seems to have deepened.

“She’s delaying you now,” Odette says. “She wants to test everything. She wants to tell others what to do. She invited her old lover and is now ignoring her. All of this will cause troubles on the mission.”

I got into this position the first time by not listening to one of my team members. After Jypé and Junior died, I vowed I would listen. I have to struggle right now to follow my own vow.

Which is odd, since I’ve known Odette a long time.

“Have you worked with Squishy before?” I ask, recalling the stray thought I’d had during the meeting.

“My opinion remains the same,” Odette says. “She’s trouble.”

So she has worked with Squishy.

“I’m not doubting your opinion,” I say. “I just want a little more information.”

Odette sighs. She leans against the wall, something I would never do here, since these corridors are filthy.

“I worked with her,” she says. “I helped train her to dive.”

“A long time ago,” I say.

“Boss, you’re being dismissive,” she says.

Normally, she would be right. What I’m saying may sound dismissive, but it isn’t.

“I’m trying to get a sense of how long ago this was,” I say.

“When Squishy came out of the military,” Odette says. “Before you gave her that ridiculous nickname. We called her Rosealma, but she wasn’t fond ol that either. She was very military.”

“Meaning?”

“By the book. She didn’t like change or variables. Even after the training, I thought she was a dangerous dive partner.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Because she wanted everything just so,” Odette says.

That wasn’t the Squishy I dived with. But most divers were by the book in the beginning. If they remained by the book, they could never go beyond tourist dives.

I would never take an inflexible by-the-book diver on my wreck dives. But if I tell Odette that, she’ll think I’m being defensive again.

“Did you have other trouble with her?” I ask.

“I never knew exactly where she stood,” Odette says. “Like now. Is she working for the Empire? Is she working for you? Or is she working on something else?”

I smile. “She’s not working for me, and she’s certainly not working for the Empire.”

“How can you be sure?” Odette asks.

“Because I’ve been to her home. I’ve talked with the locals. That’s an antigovernment place.”

“So they tell you,” she says.

“The research I did after I left backs it up,” I say.

She nods once. “If she’s not working for you or the Empire, who is she working for?”

“Herself,” I say. “Just like the rest of us.”

“That doesn’t reassure me,” Odette says.

“I didn’t think you were asking for reassurance,” I say. “I thought you were talking about Squishy.”

Odette studies me. She knew me back in my beginning days too. She obviously feels like I’ve changed enough to lead a team. This will be the second time she trusts me to lead her somewhere dangerous—and the first time did not go well.

“Do you trust her?” she asks me.

“No,” I say.

“Then why bring her along?” Odette asks.

It’s my turn to frown.

“She convinced me on that first dive into the Dignity Vessel that she knew a lot about stealth tech. I wanted that expertise,” I say.

“And now?”

I shake my head. “I guess I expected more from her. I expected her to find a way to destroy the tech only.”

“She hasn’t done that?” Odette says.

“She won’t, not without experimentation,” I say.

Odette nods. “And you won’t allow the experiments.”

“Would you?”

She studies me for a moment. Then she says, “No.”

We’re both quiet. I’m about to head to my berth—alone—when she says, “I think you should send her back where you found her.”

I sigh. I can feel my own reluctance. I think about it for a moment and realize where it’s coming from.

“No,” I say. “She stays. She’s as determined as I am to destroy the Dignity Vessel.”

“But you can’t trust her,” Odette says.

“I can trust her on that,” I say. I nod to Odette and start down the corridor, thinking the conversation is over.

But Odette follows me and grabs my arm. “You’re giving her too much credit.”

“If I fail, what does it matter?” I ask.

“You haven’t thought about this, have you? Your failure? What’s the best way to guarantee it?”

“Not go to the Dignity Vessel,” I say, half seriously.

“Make sure the bomb doesn’t work at all,” Odette says. “Or make sure it detonates early.”

Which would kill me. I can’t imagine Squishy killing me. But then, I couldn’t imagine Squishy leaving the team years ago either.

I feel cold. “What do you suggest?”

“Let her work on her bomb,” Odette says. “Let her think she’s part of this. But let me get you something big, something that’ll take out the entire ship.”

“You know where to get a bomb like that?” I ask.

“I didn’t always wreck dive,” she says. “I worked salvage in my early days.”

“With Squishy?” I ask.

“Before Squishy,” she says. “But I still have a lot of friends who salvage.”

“You mean full destruction salvage,” I say.

She nods.

Full destruction salvage works like this: The divers go in and strip the ship of its valuables. They also take important parts, like engine parts and computer chips. Sometimes they take things like screens or certain types of exterior material, particularly if the ship is made of expensive components. Then the divers blow the ship up. They don’t just destroy the ship. They obliterate it. Unless you arrive in the area shortly after the explosion, you have no idea anything even happened in that region of space.

I stare at Odette “I didn’t know that about you.”

She shrugs. “I made a lot of money. Then we found a beautiful old ship, one of the loveliest things I’d ever seen. Everything was carved and molded. It was stunning. I tried to buy it from my friends, but they wouldn’t hear of it.”

She looks down the corridor, but this time I know she’s not checking to make sure we’re alone. This time, she’s seeing that old wreck, the one she thought was so lovely.

“I cried when we blew it up,” she says.

She turns back toward me.

“There isn’t a day that goes by without me thinking of that ship.” She gives me a half smile. “I often wonder if I could have done something else to save it. I’ve never seen another one like it. It was someone’s baby, and we destroyed it.”

She shakes her head.

“That’s when you stopped working salvage,” I say.

“Yeah,” she says. “But I’ve kept my connections. I can get us something that will obliterate that Dignity Vessel.”

I study her. She’s serious.

“We’re going to need weapons too,” I say.

“I figured as much,” she says. “Have you ever used a weapon on a dive before?”

“No,” I say. “But I’ve been prepared to.”

Her expression tells me being prepared to use a weapon and using that weapon are not the same thing.

But I know that. And she doesn’t insult my intelligence by reminding me of it.

“You’re going to need guards,” she says.

“Guards?” I ask.

“People to flank you when you go in. You’re going to need a team to watch your back. Preferably someone who has fired a weapon before.”

“Like you,” I say.

“Like me,” she says. “And Hurst.”

“Sounds like a good team to me,” I say.

She can sense that I’m about to leave again. She takes my arm. “There are a lot of logistics, Boss,” she says.

“I know,” I say.

“No, you don’t,” she says. “When you blow a ship, you don’t want to be near it. You don’t want to be caught destroying it.”

I guess I knew that, but I hadn’t thought it through. It makes sense. Still, I taunt her a little. “Even if you obliterate it?”

“Especially if you obliterate it,” she says. “Especially then.”

THIRTY-FOUR

It takes us weeks to put all the pieces together. Odette contacts her friends and suddenly we have weapons. She tells me we have our bomb as well, but I do not ask where it is.

I research everything that I can, from the military vessels Hurst saw (their maximum crew complement is ten) to the command vessel. None of the images of command vessels I show Hurst are the one he saw, but we can’t find an image of that ship. For all we know, it’s a new model. At least we have a general size. I still can’t figure out what its mission was, but I at least know how many people we might be facing.

I even visit the rental ship, The Seeker, and investigate its scanning equipment myself. It’s a primitive version of the Business. We won’t need to get nearly as close to the Dignity Vessel as The Seeker did to do a proper scan. We might even be able to scan the military vessels, particularly before they know we’re there.

Squishy works on her bomb too, something delicate and sophisticated, something—she tells me—that will take out the stealth tech only, leaving the Dignity Vessel intact.

She thinks that pleases me, and it might have, years ago. But I want the Dignity Vessel all gone. I don’t tell her this. I’ve decided to use Odette’s weapon, but I tell no one that.

Not even Odette.

In the last week, I have become obsessed with the actual mission itself. How we’ll get in, how we’ll distract the military, how we’ll buy ourselves enough time.

I also want to make sure we don’t take anyone else out when we obliterate the Dignity Vessel. While I’m okay with a charge of destroying imperial property, I don’t want to be charged with murder.

Hurst becomes my primary tactician. He’s flown combat missions, and as Odette reminded me, this is a combat mission.

In some ways, this is the first step toward war.

All the way along, people remind me of that. Of the huge step I’m taking. Of the risks involved.

I pretend to care. Sometimes I mouth political slogans—the Empire has gotten too big since the Colonnade Wars; too much power in one place creates a great danger; stealth tech doesn’t belong to anyone except the ancients who knew how to use it. But mostly, I’m not thinking of politics.

Mostly, I’m thinking about my father.

I see his face—not just the man who recently betrayed me, the one whose face has become mostly planes and angles accented by silvering hair, but also the face of the man who held me close outside of the Room, who put his hand over the crack in my helmet and urged whoever was with us to get us out of there quickly.

I try to remember the man from my childhood, not just the man who grabbed me when I left the Room, but the man who took me and my mother on that trip, who let us go into the Room alone.

I cannot see that man’s face. It’s as if he doesn’t quite exist. He’s more of a sense than a person, or maybe a construct, someone I want him to be rather than who he was.

But the man I can see clearly, besides the one who traveled with us to the Room, is the one who came to my grandparents’ house on that last visit.

She’s always angry, my grandmother said to him that day. She’s sullen and sharp-tongued and not very nice at all.

My father answered, but I didn’t hear what he said.

Whatever it was, my grandmother didn’t like it. She’s your child. There’s nothing of my daughter in her. Find her someplace else to go. We don’t want her here.

I have no other place for her, my father said. You agreed to take her in.

When we thought she’d be normal, my grandmother said.

Normal. Whatever that meant.

Those raised voices caught my attention, and I slipped out of my room. I stood at the top of the stairs, waiting for my father to defend me.

I have no idea what I wanted him to say, only that I wanted him to say something. Something about me. Something that showed he cared. Or at least understood.

What he did say was, You signed a legal agreement, saying you would care for her until she came of age.

We want out, my grandmother said. We’re too old to take care of a child, particularly one as troubled as she is.

To this day, I do not know what those troubles were. I performed well in school. I had friends. Yes, I talked back to my grandparents, but I followed their rules. I lived as quietly in their house as I could.

They just expected me to be like my mother, and clearly, I was nothing like her. Maybe I had been my father’s daughter.

Or maybe I was a desperate, lonely child who had never come to terms with her mother’s horrible death.

A death I had witnessed.

A death no one else wanted to talk about.

I can’t take her with me, my father said. She’d just get in the way.

And that was the moment it all ended for me. Any idea of family, of love, of caring.

She’d just get in the way.

We thought she’d be normal.

I went back into my room and packed what few things I had. I took the money I had earned through odd jobs, and I sat on the edge of the bed, waiting for someone to come talk to me.

But my father left without a word. My grandmother didn’t come upstairs. Finally, I left my packed bag near the bed and went down.

Is Dad coming back? I asked.

Eventually, my grandmother said.

Tonight? I asked.

No, she said.

My heart twisted. I don’t know if she lied. I’ll never know. Later, I realized it was just like her. My anger was often provoked by her harsh words, her insensitivity. Sometimes I think she liked to poke at me to get the response she expected, something harsh or sullen or just plain mean, from me.

I’d like to see him, I said.

Well, she said, you missed your chance.

It seems I always missed my chance with my father. Or maybe I never really had one.

I left that night, and I never came back. For years, my family had no idea where I was. Odette was the one who convinced me I had to let them know I wasn’t dead, although I’m still not sure why. I wish I hadn’t now.

I wish I had truly let them go.

I know my decision to destroy the Dignity Vessel, as high-minded as I make it sound, is about my father. I want him to pay. Not just for ignoring me, although there’s a part of me—the young part, the girl who stood at the top of those stairs—who does want him to pay for that.

No, what I really want him to pay for is my mother’s death.

And Karl’s.

THIRTY-FIVE

We approach the wreck in stealth mode: lights and communications array off, sensors on alert for the military ships around the Dignity Vessel. I’ve never traveled in a convoy before, but I am doing so now. In addition to the Business, we have rented The Seeker again, and one other ship, the Space King.

The Seeker is a compact vessel that has maneuverability and some sophisticated systems. The Space King is a pleasure ship, designed for short luxurious travel from one part of the system to the other.

Mikk and Jennifer pilot The Seeker. They have their rented dive equipment, plus some salvage supplies. Turtle, Davida, and Bria are on the Space King, in the finest clothing we can afford. Their diving equipment is in storage on the Business; I doubt they’ll have any use for it.

But they do have weapons.

We all do.

And I’ve insisted that we learn how to use them.

Hurst pilots the Business. When he and Odette escort me onto the Dignity Vessel, Roderick will pilot the ship. Tamaz and Squishy will remain on board with him. Tamaz’s only job is to guard Squishy—something Squishy does not know.

Nor does she know that I will not be using the bomb she’s developed. I’ve decided to use the more powerful explosive Odette acquired at great expense.

I’ve done some research myself, and while I don’t understand the fledgling science of ancient stealth tech (not that the Empire has let much information out about it), I do know a bit about explosives.

The Dignity Vessel is old and large. The metal hull, with its rivets and its dents, is fragile compared with modern ships. But its very size makes it difficult to destroy completely.

That, more than anything, made me decide to go with Odette’s explosive. Hers is designed to obliterate. Squishy’s is targeted to the cockpit, designed to destroy the stealth tech and little else.

We spoke of it briefly when she finished. Apparently I had an odd expression on my face when she talked about the device’s subtleties.

I thought you’d be pleased, Boss, she said. You don’t like destroying historic things.

I don’t. If I could think of a way to keep the Dignity Vessel intact, I would. But sometimes, you have to make sacrifices for the greater good.

Or, at least, this is what I tell myself.

As we approach, I can’t tell if what I’m feeling are understandable nerves, regrets, or a desire to abort the entire mission. I pilot, thinking that being hands-on will calm me.

It does give me a chance to reflect: I actually think about how I would feel if we turned around right now and headed back to Longbow.

I think I would be relieved in the short term.

The long term would depend on a few things. If the military and my father’s people solve the mysteries of stealth tech and change the balance of power in the sector, then I will regret not taking advantage of this moment.

If they never solve it, then I might be all right with the decision to turn around.

Although once again, my father would continue to make a profit off death—my mother’s and Karl’s.

Karl. He would stand beside me urging caution. But he would go into the Dignity Vessel at my side, like he did when we searched for Junior. Karl had no qualms about taking care of threats.

And if he had had all the proper information, he would have seen my father as a threat.

We pass a small area of space that I have secretly designated as the point of no return. My fingers don’t even hover over the navigation system. I pilot us forward as if I have no qualms at all.

We are not turning back.

The mission is about to begin.

We have set up the mission in three parts. We designed the first part to separate the military ships from the Dignity Vessel. The second part sends me and my team into the Dignity Vessel, and the third part gets us out of the area before the explosion.

Oddly enough, it’s the first part that makes me the most nervous.

Perhaps because I have no control over it at all.

When we reach the designated coordinates just past the point of no return, the Space King breaks away from our convoy. The Space King speeds away on a perpendicular course from us, its modern stealth mode still on.

When it reaches another designated set of coordinates, it will modulate its speed and shut off its stealth mode. It will also create an echo in its sensors. The echo will show a different route for the Space King, a leisurely one that comes from a resort-heavy area some distance from here.

As we were researching vehicles to rent, I learned that the Space King is a high-end luxury rental. In addition to all its amenities—cabins the size of apartments on Hector Prime and a galley stocked with the most expensive (and best) food from areas around Longbow—the Space King has one of the fastest engines ever designed as well as an array of defensive weapons.

Apparently, a ship like that attracts space pirates, and the owners of the Space King—a high-end luxury rental firm which caters to the wealthiest among us—want to make sure they don’t get sued by renters who get ambushed and can’t defend themselves.

We rented the Space King for its speed. The weapons are a luxury that we hope we won’t have to use.

The Space King zooms away from us, and I silently hope they’ll be all right. We’re basing our actions on Hurst’s memory of military tactics and Squishy’s occasional sarcastic opinion about things the military will and will not tolerate.

We travel for another hour before The Seeker breaks away. It will find the path it used a few weeks before, when it first investigated the Dignity Vessel. Mikk and Jennifer have loaded The Seeker with alcohol and sex aids. They’ve also added some broken rental diving equipment (which the dive shop gave us at no extra cost), and have scattered it through the cargo space so that it looks like there was a fight.

They are going to come back, pretending to be drunken adventurers. If asked, they will claim they got into a fight with Hurst—ostensibly about coming back to the Dignity Vessel, but really over relationships. Then just to prove him wrong, they’re going to ask the military to let them dive the old ship or at least inspect its exterior.

We actually made a security recording of part of the so-called fight that they had. Hurst, the ex-military member of their team, argues that the military won’t let them close. Mikk claims they will. He says they want the ship nearby because they need something to do, and he will provide that something.

We’re hoping that one military ship will approach The Seeker and the other will investigate the Space King. The Space King’s speed and ability to maneuver should draw the command vessel as well, when it becomes clear that it can outrun the smaller military ship.

We figure we need to keep all three ships busy for a few hours. We’re going to monitor the Dignity Vessel. When the first two ships leave, Odette, Hurst, and I will get into the skip. We’re going to fly in close and wait, in stealth mode, until the third ship leaves.

Then we’re going in.

THIRTY-SIX

We stay just outside of sensor range for two hours after the other ships have left us. Hurst worries that the military’s scans have improved since he left the service. Squishy says no one thinks about improving scans, but I rely on Hurst’s caution.

When our planned two-hour window is up, we move to the very edge of sensor range. We stay in stealth mode, and we scan the area around the Dignity Vessel.

And get a surprise.

There are only two military vessels, both small. We find no evidence of the command ship.

“They’re doing that to fool us,” Hurst says. “Like they’re doing with the false Dignity Vessel radiation information.”

I concur, but I have no way to prove it without going closer. I don’t want to draw attention to ourselves, not while our friends are drawing the smaller ships away.

We’re going to have to wait until we think it’s safe to go in, and then we’re going to have to do another scan.

An hour after we arrive, one of the military vessels flies off in the direction of the Space King. We’re huddled in the cockpit, staring at our sensor information as if it is a lifeline—which, for all we know, it is.

“Let’s hope they can give those bastards a run,” Roderick says, with uncharacteristic force.

I look at him. He still seems too young and green to me to have the experience he claims, but I’ve seen him pilot ships and I trust him.

Tamaz stands behind Squishy, watching the monitors, but also keeping an eye on her. I get the sense that he trusts her less than Odette does, and I wonder if someone (Odette herself?) has talked with him about Squishy.

Squishy radiates calm. She’s watching the proceedings as if she already knows the outcome. I wonder if this is how she doctors in Vallevu, pretending calm in a crisis, just to keep the others from panicking.

Odette sits in the copilot’s chair, even though I don’t let her touch the controls. Odette has never piloted anything larger than a skip, although she’s navigated ships the size of the Business on occasion. She has threaded her fingers together. She keeps looking at all the sensors, checking them one against the other as if they’re lying to her.

We all suppose that they are.

“I think you should run the readings again, Boss,” Hurst says. He’s standing just behind me, hovering the way I usually hate my crew members to hover. He clearly wants to handle the controls himself, and I won’t let him.

“I don’t want to do too many scans,” I say.

“I know,” he says, “but we registered that first ship leaving, and if we’re looking at a false scan of military vessels, we shouldn’t have gotten that reading.”

He has a point. We might be looking at things in real time after all.

I’m tempted to run the scan, but I’m not going to. I don’t want to give the second military vessel any excuse to stay in the area.

Of course, if there are only two, will they both leave their posts to go after stray ships?

I can only hope so.

“Boss,” he says, urging me.

I shake my head. “We’re going to wait,” I say. “I know it’s hard.”

I resist the urge to tell him to be patient. He knows he has to be patient. We all know it. And that’s the most difficult part of this early section of the mission.

Forty-five minutes after the first ship left, the second ship moves out of its little orbit of the Dignity Vessel. It comes toward us, making my heart skip a beat.

“I thought we’re in stealth,” Squishy snaps, sounding decidedly not calm.

“We are,” I say. “But they might have upgraded their scanning equipment like Hurst said before we left.”

“You should move this thing back out of scanning range then,” Odette says.

“First,” I say, “if they have upgraded their system, how do we know what scanning range is? And second, if they haven’t, I don’t want to give them a ghost.”

A ghost is a blip in their scanning systems, one that shows just a hint of a nearby ship, which is usually caused by movement. The ghosts are precisely one of the things that the military hates about current stealth tech (one of the things we all hate).

Since modern stealth tech only masks us on instruments, ships do better when they remain stationary. Especially ships with the lights and communications down, like the Business is right now.

We’re dark, and even if someone looks out a portal, they might not see us. We have a good chance of blending into our surroundings. If we move, we might catch someone’s eye.

We also might show up as a brief blip on the sensors—a bit of an energy signature or a slight blur of motion that shows up for a half second.

That half second might be enough to blow our cover.

We watch the military vessel bear down on us. My heart is pounding. I’m beginning to wonder at my own wisdom. Maybe I should have moved when Odette urged me to.

Behind me, I can hear Hurst’s ragged breathing. Odette has leaned forward, her hands still clutched so that she doesn’t touch the board. Roderick paces.

Only Tamaz and Squishy remain in place. Squishy is pretending at calm again, and Tamaz really seems calm. Or maybe he has found some deep place inside of himself where he goes when things get difficult.

At the last moment, the military vessel veers off. It heads on a path that should take it to The Seeker.

Roderick lets out a relieved whistle.

“That was closer than I like,” Odette says.

“Can we move now?” Squishy asks, once again her voice betraying her true emotional state—which is quite a bit more agitated than I realized.

I don’t answer her. Instead I move us forward—slowly—and I double my scans.

First, I search for energy signatures and ghosts. I haven’t ruled out the possibility that the command ship is cloaked, just like we were. I get as close as I dare, but I’m not seeing anything.

I set up my own sensors to monitor the area around the Dignity Vessel. I want notification of the smallest anomaly.

“If we can’t find that command ship, are we going to abort?” Hurst asks.

I don’t know the answer to that. So I don’t say anything.

I do know that if we don’t go into the Dignity Vessel on this trip, we have blown our chance. Any way to get those military vessels away from the ship will have been barred from us—that is, if we don’t want an actual firefight.

At this moment, I wish we had strong weaponry. The weapons on the Space King are the most sophisticated that civilians can legally buy. Squishy tells me that they aren’t strong enough to destroy the Dignity Vessel. After some study, Odette concurs.

But I do some investigating on my own and realize that there’s nothing that we can shoot at the Dignity Vessel that will do the kind of damage that we want.

We can destroy part of its hull. We can open yet another section to space. We can even (probably) destroy the cockpit.

But I want that thing obliterated.

And to obliterate, we have to go in.

Of course, that doesn’t stop me from wishing we could just send a barrage of weapons from here, destroy the Vessel, and fly off as if we had no involvement at all.

I scan the Dignity Vessel. I expect to get the fake scan, the one that tells me there’s too much radiation.

But I don’t. I get a new image of the Dignity Vessel, which tells me that the military ships were the ones creating the false image, and they’re gone.

“I think we can go in,” I say.

“We have to hurry,” Squishy says.

I turn. This is precisely the kind of thinking that I don’t want on this mission.

“We’re going to do this right, Squishy. We’re following the plan we set up. We’re not going to hurry.”

She licks her lower lip, then nods. “I just meant that we need to act now.”

She’s eager. She wants this done as much as I do, maybe more. I can feel the depth of her desire to finish this mission.

“Stay calm,” I say to her. It’s a not-so-subtle dig at her posture and her fake manner.

She doesn’t snap at me like I expect her to. Instead, she nods once.

“All right, Boss,” she says. “Looks like we’re finally under way.”

THIRTY-SEVEN

I pilot the skip toward the wreck. Odette and Hurst are already partially suited up. They don’t know who is going to accompany me inside. I left that decision to the last minute, wanting to be flexible, and now I’m glad that I did.

As we come in, we aren’t in stealth. The skip really doesn’t have an effective stealth mode, and I don’t want to be blind.

No command vessel comes toward us. No one tries to communicate with us. There isn’t even an automated message to warn us away.

This tells me that Jennifer’s initial impression is correct. These soldiers guarding the wreck are waiting for something to happen. They’ve gone days, maybe weeks, maybe months, without seeing another ship.

The fact that two have shown up on the same afternoon doesn’t bother them, because they know that the chances of yet a third ship showing up are extremely remote.

The soldiers aren’t being vigilant, because the time they’ve spent out here has taught them that they don’t need to be.

So far, this is working in our favor.

“The command ship should have come after us by now,” Hurst says.

“I know,” I say.

I have placed the cockpit windows on clear. The Dignity Vessel looms ahead.

It looks bigger than I remember, and for a moment, I worry that it’s growing, like the station around the Room. So I run yet another scan, checking its size against the specs I logged years before.

I get the result I’m hoping for: The Dignity Vessel hasn’t changed.

Only my perception has.

My heart is pounding. If Squishy were here, she would warn me about the gids. I can hear Karl’s voice, telling me this dive will be too emotional for me.

For a moment, I consider sending Odette and Hurst in without me. Then I realize this dive will be emotional for them too—and they’ve never been inside a Dignity Vessel before. Even with a map, they won’t know exactly where they’re going.

Once inside, they might move wrong, and then what would happen? They might get stuck in the stealth field, just like Junior did.

No. If we’re going to do this, I need to dive the wreck.

I need to lead my team.

I need to be the boss.

My two team members are staring at the Dignity Vessel. Hurst isn’t even looking at the controls, getting the latest readouts from the sensors. His mouth is open slightly. Odette is chewing on her lower lip, something I haven’t seen her do since our earliest days diving together.

“It’s so big,” Hurst says.

I don’t like his tone. There’s too much awe in it.

“You saw the specs,” I say.

“I know,” he says. “They just didn’t translate into this kind of size in my mind. I’ve never dived a wreck this big.”

I make myself take a deep breath. Clearly, I’m not the only one who’s nervous.

“Odette?” I say. “Is your device powerful enough for this ship?”

She nods. Then she turns. Of the three of us, she seems the most calm— even with the lip biting. “I have dived something this big before,” she says.

“A Dignity Vessel?” I ask.

“Old freighters,” she says. “They’re larger than this. They’re like miniature planets.”

I’ve seen them, and they are large, although not as large as she says. Certainly as large as the Dignity Vessel, though.

I grab my environmental suit. I strip, then slip it on. It clings to my skin. I haven’t worn it since I pulled Karl out of the Room, but it feels like an old friend.

“Hurst,” I say, “you’re staying here. I need you to monitor the area.”

“I thought we were all three going in,” he says.

Both Odette and I look at him. “Then who will keep an eye on the skip?” she asks.

I’m glad she asks him, because my tone certainly wouldn’t have been as polite.

“We’re going to be tethered,” she continues. “If one of those ships comes back and severs the tether, we die. They won’t even be responsible. They’ll plead ignorance, thinking someone was in the skip and had tied to it to rob it.”

She sounds so positive about this that I wonder if this scenario played out when she was working with the scavengers. And then I remember: What she describes is an old pirating trick. It’s a way to steal a diving vessel when all the members of the team go into a wreck.

I tilt my head slightly. Odette might be more of an asset on this trip than I realized.

“You have your device?” I ask.

She nods.

“Finish suiting up.” I pick up the laser pistol I brought for personal use. I have never dived with any laser weapons, even though I know how to shoot one. But I’m not the best shot, and for that, Hurst might be a better choice. His military experience gave him a lot of weapons training.

But there aren’t any ships around. We’ve bought some time. With luck, we’ll go in and out without using the laser pistols at all.

I also strap a knife to my belt. It’s the same model knife as the one Karl always carried, although it isn’t his. His is still attached to his body, floating somewhere near the Room.

My knife is in a thick sheath, since I have dived with a knife before, and I know that the greatest danger is cutting into my own suit. I stopped carrying knives early in my career when I watched one of my dive partners slice open the seam on her thigh. We managed to seal it up, but the entire dive was compromised.

Still, I’m carrying the knife for two reasons: It’s the weapon I’m most familiar with, and I want to honor Karl on this dive.

Since I have nothing of his own to carry with me, I need to carry something that reminds me of him. Divers are superstitious, after all.

Although on the outside, my knife looks nothing like his. The sheath makes it look like another breather. I’m already carrying one weapon that someone can take away from me and use against me.

I don’t need two.

I pick up my helmet. Then I nod to Odette. She’s finishing with her suit. She has four breathers on her hips, as well as her own laser pistol, and something extra on her front.

That extra thing is the bomb itself.

My heart pounds so hard I think that the others can probably hear it.

“I’ve left Squishy’s bomb on the skip,” I say to Hurst. “If something happens to us, you bring it back to her and tell her to find a way to use it.”

His eyes are big. He nods.

“I’ve watched those vids from your previous dives here,” he says. “I won’t be able to communicate with you.”

“Not when we’re inside the wreck,” I say.

“But what if the ships come back?”

I shrug. There isn’t much he can do. But if I don’t give him something, he’ll panic now. He was expecting to go in, and now that I’ve deprived him of the adventure, his imagination has kicked into overdrive.

“There’s not much you can do,” Odette says before I have a chance to speak. “The skip has no weapons.”

“We’re going to be on a strict timetable,” I say. “Twenty to get to the cockpit, thirty in the cockpit, and twenty to get out. If we’re close to those numbers, stay here. We might make it back before they get here.”

“If not?” he asks.

I look at Odette. She looks at me.

“After an hour ten,” I say, “you have to get out.”

“I’ll wait for you,” he says.

Odette shakes her head. “You can’t. You might die. You have to get clear of the Dignity Vessel.”

His mouth opens again, and then closes tightly in disgust. While he’s been thinking of the dive, he’s clearly forgotten the point of the mission.

“If you can,” I say, “you warn those military ships away. I don’t want collateral damage.”

“They’ll go in,” he says. “They’ll try to remove that bomb.”

“They won’t be able to,” I say. “Not in the time they have.”

And suddenly my mouth is dry. The potential for collateral damage is great. I don’t want to cost lives—any more than I already have.

“If they show up, hold them off as long as possible,” I say, trying to make myself feel better.

“By doing what?” he asks. “Leaning out the airlock and shooting at them with my laser pistol?”

I grin in spite of myself. “If you actually think that’ll work.”

Then I look at Odette. She has her gear on, her helmet under her arm.

“You ready?” I ask.

“As I’ll ever be,” she says.

“You can back out now,” I say. “I can do this alone.”

“No, you can’t,” she says, and puts on her helmet. It makes her head look twice as large as it is, which makes the package attached to her front look small.

I hope that thing won’t trigger as we maneuver our way into the ship. She says it’s easy to operate and not something to fear, but I do worry.

I worry about everything.

“Keep an eye out,” I say to Hurst, and then I put my helmet on.

We head to the airlock as he extends the tether between the skip and the Dignity Vessel.

Here we go, I think, but do not say. Here we go.

THIRTY-EIGHT

We reach the wreck in less than five minutes. I stop us as we touch the hull. I want to make certain we haven’t moved too quickly.

“Check your monitors,” I say to Odette.

She tilts her head. The clear part of her helmet reflects the lights from the skip. “Heart rate normal,” she says. “Breathing normal. I’m fine.”

My breathing is up and so is my heart rate, but I don’t tell her that. Because my elevated heart rate is also normal for me every single time I return to diving after a layoff.

Of course, I also don’t mention that the elevation is the highest I’ve seen on a return dive. I chalk that up to the fact we’re about to do something illegal.

Something illegal and something that would normally go against every principle that I have.

“Good,” I say. “Because now we’re at the tough part.”

I lead her to the hatch and am surprised to find that it’s open. I have no idea if Karl and I left it that way, not that it matters. I’m sure military divers have been inside.

For the first time, I cringe, realizing we might find other bodies—newer bodies—in that cockpit.

I make myself take a deep breath. I’m glad I’ve brought along extra breathers, because I’m using a lot of oxygen at the moment. Hurst, bless him, has said nothing.

This is the last time he could speak to us before we go into the wreck, and he doesn’t. He doesn’t remark on my elevated heart rate or my breathing. Maybe he’s not monitoring them.

Given how nervous he was when we left, he might only be monitoring the surrounding space.

Which is probably good enough—considering. If something goes wrong, he can’t come and rescue us anyway.

I turn on the lights under my boots. I know better than to light up like a tourist on her first dive—I remember how blinding that was in the small space that leads into the ship—but I’m tempted. I’m very tempted.

I slide into the hatch first. I’m going to lead the way to the cockpit.

I’ve reviewed the directions. I’ve also put them on a small map that can run in front of my faceplate if I press the right button. The map will overlay on the plate, leaving my field of vision clear, but helping me maneuver.

I hope I don’t have to use it. I will have part of it on when we go inside, however. If I get turned around, I want the navigation system to beep at me so that we don’t waste time being lost.

The hatch is wider than I remember, but the ladder seems even more fragile. I grip it with my gloved hands, and it seems like the rungs are loose.

As I go down, I check the bolts. They don’t seem to be screwed in as tightly as they had before.

Or maybe that’s my memory again.

I thought my memory of this place was clear, but maybe it’s not. Maybe the overlay of trauma has heightened the wrong things. I’m glad I decided to use the special map and the guidance system. I’m beginning to worry that I’m wrong about a lot of things.

Some things are different. The particles that floated around us like snow are gone. Maybe that’s because the hatch has been open to space for a long time. Or maybe enough military divers have gone in and have knocked things loose.

“I thought you said this thing was narrow,” Odette says. Her voice sounds a bit hollow through her suit system and into mine.

“It is,” I say.

“You haven’t seen narrow,” she says, and she’s right. By some dive standards, this is wide open. I have been in situations so tight that I was afraid I would get stuck.

But I don’t call those places narrow. I call them dangerous.

Still, I can understand her initial worry and her relief. She’s got an extra half meter of material attached to her front.

“This is as narrow as it gets outside the cockpit,” I say.

“Good.”

We make it to the bottom. The corridors open away from the entry, just like I remember.

Just like I dream.

The nightmares of Jypé and Junior joined the nightmare of my mother’s death shortly after they died. Only the Jypé-and-Junior nightmare is less a distortion of what happened than a memory of it.

My stomach clenches. It almost feels like I’m back in the dream. I make myself move forward.

I’m surprised I remember where the handholds are and where we pushed off from. But my navigation system never beeps at me, and we move quickly down the corridor.

As we do, I hear voices. Faint voices. They’re whispering. I make myself focus on them, reminding myself that these aren’t voices at all, but something to do with stealth tech.

The focus enables me to separate out the sounds. Not whispering, but a soft thrum. Several soft thrums on different levels.

I get an idea.

“Do you hear anything unusual?” I ask Odette.

“Just my own breathing,” she says. “That’s the only part of diving I hate. Why? Do you think someone’s here?”

There’s an edge to that final question, as if she’s afraid we’re going to get attacked while we’re inside the vessel. If we do, we’ll never get out.

Surprisingly, that thought calms my own breathing. My heart rate has slowed now that we’re inside.

“No,” I say. “It’s just that there’s a sound I associate with stealth tech. I thought maybe if you heard it too, you have the marker.”

“Oh.” She’s following me, careful to put her hands where mine have been. “That doesn’t sound very scientific.”

“It’s not,” I say.

The corridors seem cleaner. Except “clean” isn’t quite the right word. They’re not as dismal. They’re just as dark, but it almost looks like someone has scraped off a layer of dirt—or something—that accumulated over time.

Although I have no idea how dirt could have formed way out here in the middle of nowhere. Just like rust couldn’t form without oxygen.

Yet everything seems just a little shinier, just a little newer. The words and numbers running along the doorways are clearer.

I’m becoming more and more certain, as we move, that this isn’t a fault of my memory. The Dignity Vessel is different.

People have been here.

A lot of people, during the time I was gone.

We reach the final corridor. I check with Odette.

“Everything still okay?” I ask.

“Fine,” she says, but she doesn’t add anything. I don’t know what she thinks of the ship.

I’m not sure I should know what she thinks of the ship, given what we’re about to do.

So I don’t ask for her opinion.

However, I do check the time.

Less than five minutes to the hatch. Less than eight minutes to get here. We should make it to the cockpit with five minutes to spare.

I slow us through that corridor. I want to make certain we’re both calm. Because this is the tricky part.

Odette has walked me through it before, but I’m still nervous. I’ve never set an explosive device.

She’s offered to do it—it doesn’t have to be near the stealth tech, given the power of the explosive—but I want it to be there. If anything gets obliterated, I want it to be those stealth tech controls.

I want to shut the whole thing off.

Or, at least, send it to oblivion.

I swallow against a dry throat. The corridor widens a little.

We’re here.

And now I have confirmation that the military has spent a lot of time in this Dignity Vessel. Modern signs litter this part of the corridor.

Danger.

Do Not Pass without Authorization.

Warning: To Unapproved Personnel, the Field Inside These Doors Can Be Lethal.

The signs begin about six meters from the entrance, and grow more and more insistent the closer we get. But there is no barrier, nothing the military has constructed to prevent illegal entry.

I wonder if they couldn’t get anything to work here.

Just like our communications devices don’t work here.

For the first time, I worry that I’ve made a mistake bringing Odette’s device.

Maybe it won’t work here either.

I make myself take a deep slow breath. It’ll work. If I keep it outside the stealth field. It’ll have to work.

Odette has slowed down. I look at her. She’s doing something to the packet on the front of her suit.

“I think I’m going to stay out here,” she says.

“You’re going to have to come closer than that,” I say. “You have to talk me through setting the device.”

She takes such a deep breath that I can hear it. “I’ll do it through the door,” she says.

That’s fine with me. As long as she can see what I’m doing, then we’ll be all right.

Provided we can get through the door. The signs make me worry that someone has locked it - the old-fashioned way, with some kind of padlock.

The thrumming is stronger. If I don’t pay attention, it sounds like a chorus of hums. If I concentrate, I can hear the different sounds at the different levels.

The sound isn’t giving me a headache like it normally does. Instead, it’s lifting my spirits. I was worried that I’d back out once I saw the interior again, that my preservationist instincts would collide with my desire for revenge and I would back away from destroying the ship.

But the thrumming keeps me on edge, reminds me why I’m actually here. If anything, my feelings about destroying the stealth tech have grown stronger.

“Here,” Odette says to me.

She hands me the packet. It seems smaller now that it’s not attached to her suit.

I don’t attach it to mine. Instead, I clutch it in one hand. My heart rate is increasing again, and I make myself breathe evenly so that I stay calm.

“Come with me,” I say. “It’s not far.”

And indeed, it isn’t. It only takes us a minute to get there.

My worries about the padlock weren’t justified. The door is propped open. Someone has braced it open by attaching it to the wall.

Apparently, whoever did this was afraid of being trapped inside.

“If it’s so dangerous, why would they do that?” Odette asks.

“So you can get out quickly,” I say. I add the “quickly” mostly for her sake. Because the real answer is that they just want to make sure they can get out.

We peer in. The cockpit looks very different. All the debris is gone. What remains is broken edges and hints of places where the furniture had once been. Lights, activated by our movement, have come on around the controls.

But no lights come on near the stealth tech field. I automatically look in that direction.

I was afraid I would see Junior, still horizontal in the debris field.

He’s no longer there. Someone—the military probably—removed his body. I knew they would

But I was afraid just the same.

I let out a small sigh.

“It doesn’t look threatening,” Odette says.

In fact, it’s even more dangerous now. Because the debris field marked where the stealth tech was. It’s harder to determine now where the stealth tech begins and the regular part of the cockpit ends.

“Stay back,” I say.

I stop just inside the door. It’s easy to see through that hole open to space. The hole where our probe is. I resist the urge to go to it and peer out.

Now I’m hearing the same soft harmonies I heard when I came here with Karl. They’re soothing instead of distracting.

“Someone’s been working in here, haven’t they?” Odette says.

“Yeah,” I say.

“Where’s the field?” she asks, even though I told her before we came. She and Hurst both studied the maps with me.

“Over there.” I point. “You stay as far from that part of the cockpit as you can.”

“I’m not going any deeper,” she says.

But she’s looking. So am I.

After a moment, she says, “I think the best place to put the explosive is on the floor.”

I glance at her.

“In the exact center of the room,” she says. “Then we can be sure to get the maximum effect inside the ship.”

I had envisioned putting it on the walls I had investigated with Karl. But I think that Odette has made a good point.

“All right,” I say.

She has gotten me moving. I would have hovered longer, thinking about the past.

Getting lost in it, like Karl was afraid I would do in the Room.

You’ll be looking for your mother. You know you will, he said, and you won’t be focused on the small but necessary details. I will.

He had been right. I had just looked for Junior.

Part of me can feel Karl here.

Because the cockpit, without its furniture and debris, reminds me of the Room.

That thought makes me move faster. I pick a spot in the exact center of the floor, away from the broken areas. I remove the bomb from the packet and attach it, just like Odette showed me how to do.

It seems ridiculously easy. Just like the bomb seems ridiculously small to cause such extreme damage. It’s not much bigger than my laser pistol.

I set it down. “Okay,” I say. “Remind me again how to activate this thing.”

She does. She’s the one who programmed it. She gave us forty-five minutes to clear the area—which is the very minimum we could come up with.

I move slowly, repeating everything she says, touching each part of the device as I activate it.

Which I do.

It snaps into place and seems to sink into the floor.

“Is that normal?” I ask.

“That’s what it’s supposed to do,” she says.

One small blue light appears on the top edge. That’s the only indication that the explosive is armed.

“All right,” I say. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

THIRTY-NINE

We do. We get the hell out of there.

We move faster than we probably should. I don’t monitor my heart rate or my breathing. Both are elevated.

I probably have the gids.

I don’t care.

We reach the hatch and we climb. Odette stays with me. Halfway up, she removes one of her breathers and adds it to her suit. So clearly she’s been breathing too hard too.

We’re both nervous, which isn’t a good thing.

But we’re almost done.

I reach the top first. I ease myself out and down to the tether. I’m about to contact Hurst when something stops me. I turn and look at the skip.

It’s dwarfed by a ship I’ve never seen before. The ship is the size of the Business, but it isn’t the Business. It has Enterran Empire logos and the military’s red, square symbol along the side.

Apparently, this is the command ship that Mikk had seen. It has returned.

And it’s grappled onto the skip.

It could have taken the skip inside one of its cargo bays, but hasn’t, probably because of the tether.

Odette pulls herself out. I hear a crackle in my helmet. She’s about to say something.

I extend my hand in front of her in an attempt to silence her. She looks at me questioningly, and again the weird material of her helmet reflects the lights of the ships. I can’t see her face.

I hold my gloved index finger up. She looks up, but she doesn’t say anything. So I point at the skip.

She lets out a breath of air, which I can hear through our comm system.

If someone is paying attention, they can hear it too.

What I’m hoping is that they’ve lost track of us, that Hurst is trying to talk with them or deal with them or fight with them.

If he is, and they’re not paying attention to us, then we have an advantage.

If they’ve already captured him and are watching the Dignity Vessel, then they’ve seen us and are prepared for us.

Either way, we have no choice. We have to get back to the skip and get out of here.

The fact that they’re waiting for us is a good sign. I told Hurst to leave if it looked like trouble was coming—unless we were just about to come out of the Dignity Vessel.

If he followed orders—always a big “if’ with divers who aren’t actually diving—then the command vessel has only been there for a few minutes.

I test the tether. It’s holding just fine.

I nod at Odette, and together we pull our way to the skip. We move quicker than we moved going to the Dignity Vessel.

As we travel, I stare at the new ship. It doesn’t look like the older models of command ships. I’ve dived the wrecks of several, and they all seem to be based on the same design.

Up front are weapons, in the back, extra thrusters. Some have life pods scattered throughout. Newer models have replaced many of the life pods with more weapons bays. Along the bottom of the ship are bay doors for smaller ships—about the size of the skip—to exit and also battle.

This command vessel seems small. I don’t see all the weapons bays and there are only two bay doors for ships. There’s a strange line in the middle of the command vessel and a marking that I’ve never seen before.

As we get to the skip’s airlock, I wait for Odette. She arrives a half second behind me. I hope she follows my lead.

I’m going to release the tether and climb into the airlock in the same movement. She has to get out of the way or the tether will hit her as it comes back to the skip.

I’m doing this so that the skip only shakes once. They might think we’re still outside. You should always put the tether back before getting into the airlock. No one will expect me to do both at the same time.

I shove Odette behind me and point to the airlock. She nods. I wish I can see her face more clearly; I get the sense that I’ve surprised her.

I don’t care. We need to move quickly. I reach for the airlock opener. She points to the tether.

It’s my turn to nod. I point at the airlock, give her a slight shove, and then turn to the tether. I hit the airlock release and the tether’s release at the same time.

Theoretically, two divers can get inside an airlock in the time it takes a tether to release itself and wind back into its holder. I’ve done it before, but it takes coordination and luck.

Odette makes a slight squeak—one I hope no one heard in the command vessel or the skip’s cockpit—and scrambles to get inside the airlock.

I follow.

The airlock’s outer door is closing just as the tether bangs into the skip.

Then I turn toward the interior door. I pull my laser pistol. It feels heavy in my hand. The gravity has come on inside the airlock, which means that the environment is almost on full.

Odette has her laser pistol drawn as well.

My heart is pounding all over again, and my breath is coming hard. A warning light goes on in the corner of my helmet: I am consuming oxygen at twice the normal rate.

The interior door opens.

I step in—and am greeted by three people I do not know, holding laser pistols on me. A large woman with dark hair has her arm around Hurst’s stomach and another laser pistol pointed at his head.

“Put down your weapons,” she says.

I don’t even have to think about it. I do. Odette does as well.

“Good,” the woman says. “Now step all the way inside.”

I do that as well. “Can I get out of my helmet?” I ask. I don’t want to tell her that my oxygen is running low.

She shrugs. “It’s your skip.”

I take off my helmet. My face cools. I realize my hair is wet. I’m covered in sweat.

The woman is not wearing a uniform. Neither are her companions. They’re both men. One is thin and wiry, but looks flabby somehow. Had I seen him closely before I got out of the airlock, I might have tried to take him. But all I saw were the weapons.

The other man is beefy and his face is ruddy. Had I met him on Longbow Station, I would have thought him a drinker, someone I didn’t have to take too seriously.

Whatever I expected, it was not this.

“What do you want?” I ask, playing dumb.

“What were you doing on the Dignity Vessel?” she asks.

Hurst’s eyes are wide. He’s trying to signal to me. I’m not sure what he wants me to say, but I know what I’m going to say.

“Let my friend go,” I say.

“Answer me first,” the woman says.

I shake my head. I have nothing to lose. I’m going to gamble all of their lives, but they don’t know that.

“Let him go,” I say, “and I’ll tell you everything.”

“She’s stubborn,” says a voice from the galley. “Let him go.”

The woman pushes Hurst at me. He trips, catches me, and grabs my hand. Something solid hits my glove. It’s all I can do not to look at him in surprise.

He has given me something, and I think I know what it is.

“You’ve hurt him,” I say, to cover up my surprise.

“We just held him until you came back,” the woman says. “We didn’t want to give you warning.”

“Warning of what?”

A man steps out of the galley, bending at the waist so that he doesn’t hit his head. He doesn’t need to stand up for me to know who he is.

It’s my father.

“What the hell are you doing here?” I snap.

“I missed you too,” he says. “You do realize you were diving my wreck?”

He looks healthier than he did when I saw him at his home. A little thinner, and in better shape. It takes me a minute to realize he’s the one who put up all the signs, who left the cockpit door open and cleaned out the debris.

He’s the one who has been working inside the Dignity Vessel.

“I haven’t been diving your wreck,” I say. “I came here to destroy it.”

“Well, now you see that you can’t. It’s military property—”

“We have to get out of here,” I say, “because I’ve already done my damage.”

He stops, recognizing something in my tone. “You don’t destroy things,” he says.

“I do if they’re dangerous,” I say.

“The wreck isn’t dangerous. We keep it guarded, although I was a bit worried when we got back and found our ships were gone.”

“You need to be gone, too. We have—” I glance at my watch. We got out in record time. “—fifteen minutes to get clear.”

“Clear of what?” he asks, just like I want him to.

“Clear of the explosion,” I say.

“You would need something massive to destroy that Dignity Vessel,” says one of the men. “Two little things like you can’t carry something like that.”

“Anyone want to explain gravity to this man?” I ask, still staring at my father.

He knows I’m serious.

“Get your device out of there,” he says.

“I would if I could,” I say. “But it took us ten minutes to get to the cockpit, and that was after we were fully suited. Neither Odette nor I have enough oxygen to go back. Even if we did, we wouldn’t get there in time. And …”

I let the word trail before I smile sweetly at him.

“… I don’t know how to disable the bomb.”

He curses and turns away from me. Then he looks at the woman. “We have to get out of here.”

“She’s bluffing,” the woman says.

“My daughter doesn’t bluff,” he says.

“There’s no reason to get out of here,” she says. “We’ve got shields. An explosion won’t hurt us.”

My father glares at her. I had forgotten that look. It is filled with contempt. “We’re pretty sure that ancient stealth tech creates a dimensional rift. I have no idea if exploding the ship will close the rift or open it wider. Do you want to be here to find out?”

The woman’s cheeks turn bright red. “We can’t get out of here with the skip grappled on.”

“Then put it in the bay,” he says. “But get us out of here.”

“It takes two pilots to put a skip in the bay,” the woman says. “I’ve never flown anything this small—”

“I’ll do it,” Hurst says with a little more panic in his voice than I like. Apparently, he doesn’t want to die for this mission.

“We can’t trust you,” the woman says.

“Then let go of the skip,” I say. “Get your people out of here. We’ll be just fine.”

“We’re not doing that,” my father says. “Get this skip into the bay. Warn the other ships to stay away from here. If she is bluffing, we’ll know within the hour.”

The woman doesn’t have to be told twice. She goes back through the galley. Apparently the grapple attached to our emergency doors. It also must have an oxygen-filled corridor which allowed them to travel over here.

I’ve heard of grapplers that sophisticated, but I’ve never seen one. Apparently, I will see one now.

“Get out of the suit,” my father says to me. “We have some business to attend to.”

I don’t move. Everyone is looking at me. Odette takes off her helmet. her face is covered in sweat, but she seems fine otherwise.

“I said, gel out of the suit,” my father says.

“I don’t wear anything under my suit,” I say. “Either it stays on or you will have to give me some privacy so that I can change clothes.”

His eyes narrow. He glances at the others. One of the men is trying not to smile.

My father’s look of exasperation grows. “All right then,” he says. “Come with me. Your friends can stay here.”

“Sorry,” I say to Odette and Hurst. Then I follow my father through the galley and to the emergency doors.

They’re open. I can see the grappler just beyond—a black corridor, devoid of any decoration at all. It’s just a functional space that expands so people can go back and forth between two ships docked together.

My father steps inside. I follow.

“Don’t try anything,” he says.

I’m tempted. So far, he hasn’t noticed the knife. It wouldn’t take much to stab him, run ahead, use the emergency controls on the grappler, and set the skip free.

But I can’t quite bring myself to kill him. Not here, not like this.

“We have to close the doors,” I say, waving my left hand at the open emergency doors between the skip and the grappler. “We can’t separate these things otherwise.”

I keep my right hand at my side. I’m still holding Squishy’s device. My father hasn’t noticed that either.

“Well, do it,” he says.

I turn slightly. “You don’t know how, do you?”

“I usually have people for that.” His comment reminds me of my first meeting with Riya Trekov and her tone about her people. That should have warned me away then—I’d even made note of it—and it hadn’t.

If I had walked away then, things would be quite different now.

“I can’t do it alone,” I say. “I need your help.”

He gives me an odd look, as if he had expected more of me, then follows me back to the door. I grab one edge with my left hand, bracing my right against the doorframe. I don’t lean my right on the frame; I just make it look like I’m using my hand.

He grabs the doors too, and together we tug. The doors slide closed, and I step back.

We’re alone in the grappler.

He gives me that measuring look again—I’m not sure why—and heads to the door of his ship.

I follow. We’re moving faster now. When we get inside, he hits some kind of release, and those doors close as well.

Then he taps a communicator on his sleeve and says, “We’re in.”

I hear a squeal as the machinery starts. This ship isn’t as high tech as I thought. The grappler begins its procedure to disengage.

I resist the urge the glance at my watch. We don’t have much time left.

“Follow me,” my father says.

That I do follow him without question says less about his hold over me than it does about my curiosity. I want to know what he’s doing here. His presence bothers me a lot. He’s not a scientist—or he wasn’t when I was a child, but he’s lived a lifetime since then. Who knows what he’s picked up? Who knows who he has with him, and what they’ve done?

The grappler slides into place, shaking this ship just a little. I hope the skip is inside the bay now.

I follow my father down a corridor so wide it seems like a room, particularly after that small tunnel through the grappler.

“What are you doing here?” I ask.

“I told you,” he says. “I’m diving the wreck.”

“You aren’t a diver,” I say, even though I know I’m wrong. He’s not a diver like I am, but he knows how to dive. I have a hunch he’s dived the Room. I know he can work in an environmental suit. He rescued me from outside the Room while wearing one.

He doesn’t respond to that. Instead he turns and stops in front of large double doors. A green light went on above his head. He taps the edge of one of the doors, and the door becomes clear. Inside sits the skip.

My people have arrived.

“I want to talk to them,” I say.

“Later,” he says. “Don’t you want to see your ship blow up?”

For a moment, I think he means the Business. Then I realize he’s referring to the Dignity Vessel. I’m not sure if the contempt in his tone comes from the fact that I found the vessel or from the fact that he still might not believe me about the bomb.

I don’t answer him. Instead, I follow him to a room across the corridor. He presses the side of the door and it slides open. We step into a platform that seems to jut into space. The walls, floor, and ceiling are clear.

In the distance, I can barely make out the Dignity Vessel. We’re moving away from it rapidly.

“By my watch,” he says, “it should explode any minute now.”

I glance at mine. One minute and forty-nine seconds, to be exact.

“Magnify,” he says, and he’s clearly not speaking to me. The image in front of us becomes larger. The Dignity Vessel is now the size of my hand.

“Again,” he says,

The Dignity Vessel now fills the main window. It looks like it’s only a few meters away from us, even though I know it’s much farther.

I have turned my arm so I can glance at the time without moving my head. I look down.

One minute exactly.

My father clasps his hands behind his back in a military pose.

“What kind of ship is this?” I ask.

“It’s an imperial vehicle,” he says.

“Clearly,” I say. “But what type?”

“Military science vessel,” he says.

Science vessel. Fascinating. It probably doesn’t have elaborate weapons systems. If it has weapons at all.

My mouth is dry. I’m still staring at the Dignity Vessel, and I realize I have no idea if that explosive will work.

Then the Dignity Vessel turns white. It freezes for a moment, as if it’s suspended in time, and then the whiteness gets so bright that both my father and I have to shield our eyes.

Still I can see the shape of the vessel against my eyelids, this time done in golds. I finally open my eyes again, and it’s gone.

There’s only a pinpoint of light, tiny and white, where the vessel was.

“You took it off magnify,” I say, because I can’t think of any other way to respond. I’m lightheaded and nauseous. I wanted to destroy the stealth tech, which meant destroying the vessel, but ruining the damn thing still shocks me.

I’ve never done anything like this before.

“No,” he says. He sounds as shocked as I feel. “No, it’s still on magnify.”

“Then what’s that light?”

“You tell me,” he says.

“I’m not the one with a science vessel,” I say.

The light fades, slower than I expect.

Finally, it winks out.

We stand in silence for the longest moment. Maybe moments. I don’t know. I no longer look at my watch.

I have no need to.

“I can’t believe you blew it up,” he says. “Why the hell did you blow it up?”

“Stealth tech is dangerous,” I say, sounding like Squishy. “It kills people.”

“Hell,” he says, his voice shaking. “The laser pistol you were carrying kills people.”

“At least they know what hit them,” I say.

He turns. The view from the window—that point in space where the Dignity Vessel had been—seems black and vast.

“That was working stealth tech,” he says. “Such low grade that we could actually make progress with it. It was the best find in a generation, maybe two. You had no right to destroy it.”

“You had no right to kill Karl,” I snap.

“I didn’t,” he says. “You did. You were supposed to go in there. You would have survived.”

“You only know that because I survived the first time,” I say. “Maybe I shouldn’t yell at you about Karl. Maybe I should yell at you about Mother. Did you send her in there to see if she had the marker? Or did you know she would die in there?”

He grows pale. “That’s not fair.”

“Isn’t it?” I ask. “You risk dozens of lives for your little experiment and you tell me I’m not being fair?”

He grabs me by the left arm and yanks me forward. “Let me show you something,” he says.

If I move to the right and hook my foot around his ankle, I can drop him without much movement at all. Of course, if I let go of Squishy’s bomb, I can grab my knife and stab him to death in a matter of seconds.

I do neither.

Instead, I let him drag me out of the room.

I let him control me, one last time.

FORTY

I hear it before I see it: a tiny thrumming, so faint it sets my teeth on edge.

Maybe I felt it from the moment I got on this ship.

My heart starts pounding hard again.

“What did you do?” I ask.

“I didn’t do anything,” he says, “except hire the right people. They’re figuring this out.”

A headache builds between my eyes. I stumble forward into the corridor. He’s still holding my arm tightly. I can feel his fingers pinch my flesh through my suit.

“Why do you want this so badly?” I ask. “Is it the money?”

“If it were the money, I could have quit a long time ago,” he says.

We follow an incline, which takes us up a level. I note an elevator to our side, but he doesn’t take it, preferring to stay in the corridor instead.

The thrumming becomes a tiny chorus, as if a group of singers were far away, their song just beginning to filter toward us.

“Then what is it?” I ask.

“You were wrong about your mother,” he says. “I loved her.”

“So you say.” I make myself walk fast enough to keep up with him. I don’t want to be dragged any farther.

I also stare at the walls, mentally making note of landmarks, as if I were diving this ship instead of walking through it. There’s a map of the ship at the beginning of the incline. It has a lot of decks and levels.

I nod toward the image. “How many people are on this ship?”

“It can hold one hundred,” he says.

“That’s not what I asked,” I say.

“I usually run with a crew of fifty,” he says.

“But you’ve been gone. Where were you?”

He doesn’t answer for a moment.

“You’re running this with a skeleton crew, aren’t you? That woman who caught Hurst in the skip, she doesn’t know anything about stealth tech, does she?”

The questions she asked made that clear.

“Where’s your team?” I ask.

“I don’t use the same people all the time,” he says. “It’s my project.”

“You’re keeping them in the dark,” I say. “You want to be the one to claim this discovery as your own.”

“Then you destroyed it,” he says, but his words hold no conviction.

“You didn’t discover the Dignity Vessel,” I say. “You have stealth tech on this ship. Ancient stealth tech. I can hear it.”

He stops and turns to me. “Hear it?”

I bite my lower lip. Am I the only person who can hear the thrumming of stealth tech? I thought everyone with a marker could hear that faint singing sound.

“You hear the chorus?” he asks.

I nod, reluctantly, but I do nod.

“Not everyone can hear it,” he says. “Not even everyone with the marker. I wonder what that means?”

“I don’t really care,” I say. “Why don’t you understand how dangerous this stuff is?”

“And why don’t you understand that if it’s dangerous, it’s better off with the Empire?”

“Who’s trying to re-create it,” I snap, “so it can kill again.”

“If they understand it,” he says, “they can shut off the Room.”

“If they understand it,” I say, “they can build Rooms of their own.”

He doesn’t say anything, but he continues to pull me along. We finally get to a flatter part of the corridor. We go past another map. This one has little red symbols scattered in various places on the ship. Five are in the cockpit. Then I remember. This is a science vessel. I’m in the lab.

The front part of the ship can leave us behind if it wants to.

If it deems the lab dangerous.

I see four more red dots some distance from us, and then two in the middle.

Those dots must represent life signs. The two in the middle have to be us.

Eight crew members on a ship that fits one hundred? What are they doing here? Why so few?

My father stops in front of two shielded doors. The chorus has grown. He presses his thumb against the center of the door, then leans forward for the retinal scan. He breathes onto the edge, probably as proof that he’s alive. That last precaution is the key. So many of these systems have no indicator for living thumbs or retinnas.

The doors open. This room is as closed as the one below was open. There are no portals, no openings to the rest of the ship or to space—just workstations along the side, a long table in the middle, and a giant computer screen on the far wall from where I’m standing. Numbers run along that screen as well as in a three-dimensional graph. It takes me a moment to recognize the graph. It’s an energy indicator. It’s registering the power of… something, although I’m not sure what.

In the very center of the room, on top of the table, surrounded by three different clear shields, is a bottle the size of my forearm.

The bottle appears to be throbbing, but it’s not. I know it’s not, because it’s the source of the sound. And the sound, packed into that little space, makes it seem like it’s moving.

Maybe it is. With some kind of vibration.

“There it is,” my father says with no small amount of pride. “The first working stealth field in five thousand years. This one was created in our lab.”

My mouth is dry. “You didn’t,” I say.

“I did.” He steps toward it.

I stay back.

“How do you know it works?” I ask.

He points to the graph.

“Have you had anyone stick their arm in there?” I ask, and I can hear the maliciousness in my voice. “Have you uncorked that bottle near someone who doesn’t have the marker?”

“Of course not.” He sounds shocked.

“Then you don’t know if it works,” I say.

He gives me a withering look. “Of course I do,” he says. “And you do too. You can hear it, just like I can.”

“How many people know about your little experiment in stealth tech?” I ask.

He smiles at me. “The Empire already has my specs.”

“So they can build it?” I hear the panic in my own voice. I’ve destroyed the Dignity Vessel for nothing.

“Not yet,” he says. “But soon. We had to take bits of your Dignity Vessel’s technology to build our own.”

“You didn’t build this from scratch?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “Right now, we need a bit of a kick start. You’ve just made that a lot harder. The Dignity Vessel was perfect because the stealth tech’s power had diminished over the years. We could work in it safely.”

“Those of you with a marker,” I say.

He nods.

“But you can’t work in the Room of Lost Souls?” I ask.

“There’s no control panel in the Room,” he says. “There’s no control panel anywhere on that station, at least that we can find.”

In spite of myself, I shiver. How hard has he looked?

And, more to the point, how many lives has he sacrificed?

“So,” he says with great bitterness, “if you wanted to set us back, you’ve managed it. If you wanted to destroy the program, you haven’t.”

I nod. Not yet, I haven’t. I try hard not to close my hand too tightly around Squishy’s bomb. “Because you have other working stealth tech?”

He grins at me. “Even you should know that Dignity Vessels are hard to come by.”

“So you don’t.”

“Not yet,” he says. “We’ll find more.”

My heart is pounding. I don’t want them to find more. I don’t want them to have this technology at all.

His words do reassure me a little; they don’t have any other functioning stealth tech. It might take generations to find another ship. The setback I’ve just caused might be as effective as destroying the program.

“What about the rest of your team?” I ask. “Where are they? Shouldn’t they be sharing in this glory?”

“I told you,” he says, “I don’t work with the same people. We weren’t here when you arrived because we were dropping off the last group of scientists. The next group is due in a few days.”

“But you stay the whole time,” I say. “Why is that?”

“My work,” he says. “My project.”

Then he sighs and looks at the bottle, as if it has all the answers.

“And I thought, somehow, that it was my Dignity Vessel.”

“Because I found it?” I ask.

He shrugs and doesn’t look at me. Yet I know his answer. His answer is yes. Because of me.

“So,” I say in a softer tone. “Explain this thing to me.”

He gives me a sideways look, as if he can’t believe me.

“Look,” I say, “I’m going to lose anyway. The military is farther along on stealth tech than I thought because of you. I may as well know what’s going on.”

“It’s classified,” he says.

“Yeah?” I say. “Then you shouldn’t have shown me that bottle.”

His smile softens. The smile of my father—my childhood father, the one I remember vaguely from the days before Mother died. My heart twists.

His grip on my arm loosens. He doesn’t pull me to the containers around the bottle. He guides me there.

“In the bottom of the bottle,” he says, pointing toward it, “you see that bit of color? That’s from the Dignity Vessel. It carries a charge… .”

I stop listening. I don’t know enough science to understand this anyway. Instead, I concentrate on the voices rising and falling in my head. The chorus isn’t as powerful as it was on the Dignity Vessel, and it certainly is nowhere near as overwhelming as it was in the Room.

It’s an accompaniment, something ever so faint, just within hearing range. If the stealth tech on the Dignity Vessel was weak, this is almost nonexistent.

But not quite.

It’s there enough that I can hear it, that my father’s computer system can measure its output.

I know my team isn’t in danger on that skip. They could get one room away from the stealth tech on the Dignity Vessel with no ill effects. They’re okay here.

But if my father boosts this somehow, then people will get hurt.

Again.

“It’s lovely,” I say. I touch the edge of the containment field with my left hand. My father lets me. He releases my arm, leans forward, and continues explaining whatever it is that he’s talking about.

I do note that he knows more about stealth tech than a nonscientist should. He has been studying.

I lean forward, just like he is. I keep my left forefinger on the containment field. In my right hand, I run my gloved thumb along the edge of Squishy’s device.

She made it very easy. A simple on-off switch that has to be flicked, then squeezed. The timer is built in. There’s nothing to set up. Once the device comes in proximity of a stealth field and is turned on, it will weld itself to the stealth field, like a magnet against metal. Only no one will be able to pry it loose.

It then taps the stealth tech’s power to fuel its own reaction.

And it will blow within an hour.

Or so she told me. She seemed to believe it would work. But, she kept reminding me (a little bitterly), she never had a chance to test it.

So it’s all theory.

A theory that I want badly to work.

I flick the switch, or what feels like the switch through the thickness of my glove. Then I squeeze the damn device, hoping I turn it on.

Another voice joins the chorus.

My father looks at me, alarmed. He hears it too.

I slam the device against the containment screen. The entire screen turns red.

“What the hell is that?” he asks.

“The end to your experiments,” I say, and I hope I’m right.

FORTY-ONE

I grab my father’s arm.

“And now,” I say, “we’re getting out of here.”

My father yanks his arm away. He reaches for the device.

“What is that thing?” he asks.

“Another bomb,” I say. “This one designed by a former stealth tech engineer. Don’t try to remove it. It taps into the stealth tech.”

“That’s not possible,” he says. He wraps his fingers around it and tugs. The containment field ripples like water, but it holds. The device does not come off.

“You can’t do this,” he says.

“I already have,” I say. “Now we have to leave. Just like we had to leave when the Dignity Vessel blew.”

“No,” he says. He’s put his face close to the device, trying to figure out how to pull it off.

I don’t like seeing his face so close to a bomb. I don’t want to kill him— I know that now. No matter what he’s done, I can’t kill him.

And I can’t leave him here.

I pull the knife. It gleams redly in the light from the containment field.

He stands up and looks at me, mouth agape. “You’re not serious.”

“You have to leave with me,” I say.

“Or what?” he asks. “You’ll kill me?”

I don’t answer that. I figured the knife would be enough of a threat. Obviously it’s not.

“Go ahead,” he says. “If you’re right and this is a bomb, I’m dead anyway. You’re just hastening my death by a few minutes.”

I don’t correct him. He has more than a few minutes, but I don’t want him to know that.

“You have to leave with me.” My voice doesn’t sound like my own. It sounds strangled and young.

And at the same time, it sounds like his outside the Room, when he pulled me toward his ship. Then, it was his voice filled with panic, his voice that sounded strangled.

Because of me? Or because of my marker?

I’ll never know.

“Come on,” I say. “When this blows, it could open a dimensional rift, just like the stealth field on the Dignity Vessel.”

“I’m not going to let that happen,” he says.

“You’re not going to be able to separate the device from the stealth field.”

“It’s not attached to the stealth field,” he says. “It’s attached to the containment field. I can separate your device from that field.”

“You don’t know that,” I say.

“And you don’t know that I can’t,” he says.

“The person who designed this spent decades working on stealth tech,” I say.

“And failing,” he says. “I’m the only one who has succeeded.”

He peers at the device again, his whole face glowing red. Then he looks up at me sideways.

“Put that thing away,” he says. “If you believe the bomb will go off, then get the hell out of here and save yourself.”

I take his arm again. He shakes me off.

I stare at him.

“You’re wasting time,” he says. “If you’re right and I’m wrong, your friends will die with us.”

“What about your friends?” I ask.

“I guess we’d better let them know too,” he says. “They’ll leave the lab behind and get away. You’ll be arrested.”

I shake my head. The Empire is the least of my worries.

“If they leave, you really can’t get out.”

He gives me a withering look. “Have some faith in my abilities,” he says. “I know more about stealth tech than anyone, including your little friend.”

My stomach twists. In all my time planning my revenge, I never imagined this moment. I had known I couldn’t kill him after the Room. I had thought this was better; destroy his research, which would be just like killing him.

Only I imagined him living with the consequences for years, mourning the loss, looking at his failure.

I never imagined him trying to pry a bomb off a containment field, dying because of me.

“Either get out,” he says calmly, “or help me with this thing.”

I stare at it. I hear the voices swirling in my head. I remember my mother, her face turned upward, light on her skin before it aged and mummified, before it died.

For one brief moment, she had looked beautiful.

He doesn’t look beautiful. He looks ghastly, the red lining the bones of his face, accenting the hollows, leaving shadows. That’s how I’ve always seen him—filled with shadows.

I sheathe the knife. Then I back away from him. When I get to the doors, I run.

Fortunately, I know ships. I learn them the first time I go through them, whether I’m diving or I’m traveling in them.

I run back the way we came. My lightheadedness has grown worse, and I know I’m still a bit short on oxygen. I force myself to breathe so that I don’t pass out.

I get to the bay doors and slap them open. Then I reach the skip and pause. There should still be two guards inside. I don’t want to alert them. But maybe my father already has. Maybe he has let the group in the cockpit know and everyone overheard.

I poke the knife into the controls for the emergency doors. It’s not recommended procedure because it opens to the doors too fast. But we’re still in the bay, so we’re all right.

Then I hoist myself inside.

Hurst hurries into the galley, followed by the two guards. Odette stands just behind them, but it’s her face I see first.

“I used Squishy’s bomb,” I say. “They built a stealth field.”

“That’s not possible,” Odette says. “Our controls would have registered it.”

“It’s a baby stealth field,” I say. “The device is attaching now.”

Hurst swears and pushes past the guards. They look stunned.

“Either you come with us,” I say, “or you go join your friends in the cockpit.”

“Another bomb?” one of the men asks.

“Yes.” I’m all the way inside now. No one has helped me up. I grab the sides of the door and sway a little. I am very dizzy. I push the controls, putting in a code that will lock them and maybe repair some of the damage I’ve just done.

“Like the one on the Dignity Vessel?” he asks.

Odette starts to answer, but I speak over her. “Yes,” I say.

“Fuck,” the guard says. “That thing destroyed the Dignity Vessel.”

“That’s right,” I say.

Odette closes her mouth. She gives me a little grin. Obviously she was going to tell them that the device was different. She likes my style instead.

The guard heads into the cockpit, knocking Odette aside. His companion joins him. “We have to leave,” he says. “Now.”

I can’t agree more.

“Do you know the codes for the exterior doors?” I ask.

“Don’t need them,” he says, then taps our communications relay. The cockpit of the science ship answers, and he explains the situation. They sound a little calmer than he does. Apparently my father has already contacted them and told them he can remove the device.

“You can stay if you trust him that much,” I say, loud enough for the people in the science ship’s cockpit to hear as well as the guard.

The guards look at each other. Then the guard says, “Open the damn doors.”

The cockpit says something that sounds like compliance. A warning appears on our screens. The bay’s gravity has shut off.

They’re going to open the exterior doors.

Hurst pushes into the guard. “You want to fly this thing?” Hurst asks.

The guard moves away.

The doors start to open just as our lower thrusters come on. When the doors are open about halfway, we fly out of there.

We can’t go back to the Business, not with these guys on board. We have to get away, but we can’t go far. The skip isn’t made for long-distance travel.

Hurst looks at me, then looks at them. “Don’t worry about it,” I say. “Let’s just find a safe distance from here and see if Squishy’s device works.”

I don’t know what we’ll do if it doesn’t.

Because then the guards will retake us. We’ll all be under arrest for destroying imperial property and attempted murder. We’ll face years of prison. My father will still have his stealth tech.

And both Karl and my mother will go unavenged.

FORTY-TWO

The bomb does not obliterate the ship.

At the designated moment, the ship bobbles.

“It’s still there,” one of the guards says.

Then the ship slowly flips, like a child lounging in zero-g slowly deciding to reveal his belly. Only the ship doesn’t stop flipping. It just turns and turns and turns, spinning with its own momentum—or the momentum of the explosion.

We’re all watching the images holographically. What we can see through the portholes is only the blackness of space.

We’ve been watching since we steered clear. About a half an hour after we stopped—ten minutes before the explosion—the front section of the science vessel separated and flew off so fast that it seemed to disappear.

The guards say nothing. They don’t even try to attack us. They realize there is no point. We outnumber them. Even if they do overtake us again, where will they go? They would have to kill us, and they don’t seem willing to do so.

Or maybe I’m just ascribing motives. Maybe they’re just stunned at the destruction of the ship, giving us time to outthink them.

Either way, their status has changed from guard to prisoner in a matter of moments.

We can’t take them back to the Business. We have to make our own escape before the other ships come back.

Before the front part of the science vessel comes back to see what happened.

Hurst turns on the navigational controls. “Where are we headed, Boss?”

I’m not ready to answer him. I’m still staring at the science vessel. Its spin has already slowed. Eventually, it will stop moving and find its own part of space.

I freeze one of the holoimages and walk around it. There, on the far side, is a hole in the vessel’s hull.

A small hole, like the one we had found in the Dignity Vessel.

My breath catches. Had someone blown up the Dignity Vessel’s stealth tech, and what we found was all that was left? Or had something else happened?

“Boss?” Hurst asks again.

I make myself breathe out.

Then I turn to the guards. “What’s procedure in a case like this?”

“There are no cases like this,” says the guard who initially thought there was no explosion.

“In war or in the face of an attack,” I say. “When your ship is damaged and it’s been abandoned, what’s procedure?”

They look at each other. The other guard answers. “The smaller ship will come back. The military vessels should be back anyway. I’m amazed they both left.”

I’m not. They had no idea we had scheduled an attack. Not after weeks (months?) in which nothing happened. They’ll be back as soon as our ships get the all-clear.

“Is there a timeline?” I ask. “Do they have to return in a designated period of time?”

They look at each other again. I finally realize that they believe I’ll attack the other ships. I resist the urge to shake my head. Of course I’ll attack them. In my little weaponless skip.

But I don’t say that. Instead, I say, “Our escape pods on this skip hold one person each. They support life for sixty-four hours at the longest. Will someone be back for you in that amount of time?”

The first guard starts to nod, but the other catches his arm.

“We’re not keeping you on this skip,” I say. “I just want to make sure you’re not going to die out there.”

I don’t tell them what the alternative is because I don’t know of any alternative. I guess we could try to make it to a base and dump them there, but that seems too risky to me.

“We’re going to die,” the second guard says. “You’ll be responsible for killing us.”

But the first guard rolls his eyes. “You can put me in an escape pod,” he says. “But I will tell the authorities everything I know when they pick me up.”

“That’s fine with me,” I say.

I turn to Hurst. “Move in as close to the wreck as you can safely get. Make sure there are no new energy signatures.”

He nods. He sets the navigation and takes the ship toward what’s left of the science vessel.

It’s amazing to me how quickly it has become “the wreck” to both of us. No one tries to correct me.

I stare at it on the small two-dimensional screen near the controls. It looks vulnerable there, still slowly turning.

Part of me wants to go and see if my father is still inside. But I know he won’t be. He probably ran to the cockpit and urged them to escape. He isn’t the kind of man who dies for his own causes.

But if he believed he could unhitch the device, he might have stayed too long. Even then, I wouldn’t find him because he would have been right near the stealth tech when Squishy’s device went off.

I don’t know if it obliterated him, or if it sent him into some kind of limbo, like we sent Junior and Karl.

Like my father sent Mother.

But I also know I won’t be able to find out.

“You want them in the escape pods now, right?” Odette asks me in a tone that leads me to believe this isn’t the first time she’s asked the question.

I turn toward her. She looks as tired as I feel.

“Yeah,” I say.

“I’m not getting any unusual readings,” Hurst says.

I move him aside, and do some searching on my own. I remember how the initial energy signal for the Dignity Vessel appeared as the kind of blip that most ships never register. I search for that kind of blip now.

Behind me, I can hear Odette talking to the guards, taking their weapons, and giving them some food and water from the galley. I almost tell her that there’s no need—the escape pods have rations and water—but I don’t. Let her assuage her own conscience her own way.

I keep looking for a blip.

And don’t find one.

Maybe my father’s little stealth tech experiment was too small to leave any kind of reading out here. Squishy’s device was designed for something much larger. Maybe it really and truly destroyed that stealth tech.

Or maybe what remains is so minuscule that nothing we have can measure it.

“Do you have anything you want to say to them, Boss?” Odette asks.

I turn. Both guards are pressed into the hatches of their escape pods. They look reluctant to go in deeper. The fit will be tight for them.

“Good luck,” I say, then walk over and close the hatches myself.

The escape pods can be released from the inside or the outside. I hit the release buttons before the guards can even find the interior controls. The first pod slides down its tube. The tube seals off the skip from the pod, then sends the pod into space.

The pod floats away from us. The second pod follows only a minute later.

I stare at them through the nearest portal. I’d rather be out of the ship in my environmental suit, clinging to a tether, than inside one of those things.

But if their companions come back within two days, they’ll be fine. Testy, but fine.

And I can’t imagine why the military wouldn’t be back. After all, they have to catch us.

“Let’s get to the Business” I say to Hurst.

Then I close the portals and close my eyes.

I did it. I destroyed the stealth tech. And I may have killed my father in the bargain.

I expected success to feel better.

I expected it to make a difference.

FORTY-THREE

We meet the Business at the designated coordinates. Squishy, Roderick, and Tamaz are full of questions, which we answer in quick sentences, promising more when everyone returns.

Mikk and Jennifer returned shortly before we did. The Seeker is permanently barred from this area of space, and both Mikk and Jennifer are on some kind of governmental watch list.

Jennifer laughs as she sits in the galley. “It worked. They thought I was really drunk and ready to party.”

“For a while, I thought they were too,” Mikk says. “But at the last minute, they remembered they had a job to do and shooed us away from there.”

Neither Mikk nor Jennifer seems too concerned about the watch list. I’m not either. We’re all going to have to stay in the far reaches of this Empire’s space.

But we knew that going in.

It takes another day before the Space King joins us. It actually has some weapons scarring. Turtle, Davida, and Bria look frazzled, but they too managed to escape. However, they’re pretty certain that the military vessel got all the specs from their ship.

“They know it’s a rental,” Turtle says. “They’ll be waiting for us to return it.”

I hadn’t planned for this, but I know what to do. We have to abandon both The Seeker and the Space King. Then we’ll declare them destroyed and send in a fee to the rental agency from the next station we stop at.

I explain all of this before I ever get to the details of our mission.

“What are we going to do now?” Turtle asks.

I sigh. “I guess we find somewhere to hole up.”

Davida, who is relieved to be back on the Business, offers to cook us a special dinner. She wants us to tell our stories over food.

I figure that’s fine.

She cooks—all sorts of things with stored food that I didn’t know could be done (but she has just become the designated chef on any trip we’re on)— and we all tell our adventures.

Of course, they pay the closest attention to mine. The destruction of both bits of stealth tech, and the possible death of my father.

Squishy is pleased that the bomb worked.

But as we continue to talk, her smile slowly fades.

I’m almost afraid to ask her what’s bothering her. I really don’t want the mood—which isn’t quite victorious and isn’t quite sad—to change.

But I do ask her.

“Your father figured out how to make stealth tech,” she says. “Ancient stealth tech.”

I frown at her. She’s sitting to my left. Mikk is across from her. He has a guarded expression on his face.

“And he was gone when you first arrived, dropping off his scientists and getting new ones for something else,” she says.

I nod.

“His stealth tech clearly worked.”

I shrug. “I could hear it, faintly. But I didn’t test it.”

“My device worked with it,” Squishy says. “My device wouldn’t have worked on just anything. It needed the stealth tech to power it.”

I have no idea how she built it, and I don’t want to know, even now.

“So that’s confirmation, then,” I say.

“And that’s bad news,” she says.

Mikk groans. He starts to get up, but I grab his wrist.

“Why?” I ask.

“Because,” Squishy says, “you say your father wasn’t a scientist.”

I nod.

“So someone else put that together.”

“It sounded like a group of someone elses put that together,” I say.

“Even so,” she says. “Enough of the technology has been revived. The military has it.”

“Provided,” I say, “that they can find some more ancient stealth tech to cannibalize. My father said they can’t use the Room.”

“And you believe him?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say. “They used the control panel from the Dignity Vessel. We’ve been all over the station around the Room. No one ever found a control panel.”

I look at the others for confirmation. They nod. They’re interested now.

“The Room, your Dignity Vessel.” Squishy sighs. “There’s a lot of ancient stealth tech around here. All the Empire needs is another wrecked Dignity Vessel.”

“It was a fluke that we found that one,” I say.

She shakes her head. “There’ve been others,” she says. “But there’s never been any working stealth tech in any of them. That’s how the military got the idea to rebuild ancient stealth tech in the first place.”

I stare at her, feeling cold. “You’re telling me that if they find another Dignity Vessel, they’ll be able to re-create my father’s work?”

“Most likely,” she says. “Now they know about people with markers and they know how to make something that approximates stealth tech. They have the know-how. They just need the right tools.”

She sounds like my father. He seemed so certain that destroying the Dignity Vessel and his little bottle wouldn’t make that much of a difference. Then he contradicted himself by fighting to save that little experiment.

My stomach twists. I stand up. The Empire cannot get stealth tech. I’ve set them back, but I haven’t destroyed their efforts.

I should have realized how hard it is to obliterate anything. After all, I dive wrecks from the distant past. Wrecks filled with time and history and lost dreams.

I leave the group, distraught. I pace my cabin until exhaustion finally takes me.

I sleep—only to wake up in the middle of the night.

With an idea.

FORTY-FOUR

If we can’t destroy stealth tech, we can share it.

We have the know-how. We have the money.

Thanks to Riya Trekov and to Squishy’s finder’s fee from long ago, we can continue for years without making a dime.

We’re pariahs now anyway: Mikk and Jennifer on a watch list; Turtle’s, Bria’s, and Davida’s images broadcast as possible thieves or pirates; and me— I’m a full-fledged criminal who has at the very least destroyed valuable imperial property.

At the most, I’ve committed murder to do so.

We want to stop the Empire from getting ancient stealth tech, and there’s only one surefire way to do it.

We have to find the stealth tech first. We have to find the Dignity Vessels; we have to track down other legends like the Room of Lost Souls. Once we find it, we work with it. We now know we can use bits of ancient stealth tech to create stealth tech of our own.

We also know that some people, with the right markers, can work in a stealth tech field. No one has to die.

Giving the Empire stealth tech will change the balance of power in the sector. But if all of the former rebel governments get stealth tech as well, then the balance remains.

It’s a big undertaking, and we wouldn’t be able to do it alone. But I have a hunch the Nine Planets Alliance will give us shelter and maybe, just maybe, some funds as well—especially when they hear how quickly the Empire can conquer them if the Empire is the only one in the sector with stealth tech.

I work up a presentation for the group. It takes me two days. By then, they’ve been wondering what they’re going to do with their lives.

I sit them down and give them my ideas. A few—Squishy, of course, and Mikk—modify them. We have a plan.

Then I give them a few more days to think about whether or not they’ll join.

Not all of them will. And that doesn’t matter, because our base will not be anywhere permanent—at least not at first.

At least, that’s what I’m thinking right now.

The only person who has a reason to leave us is Squishy, and it’s all right with me if she does. No one likes her (except me and possibly Turtle), and I know where to find her. If I need more explosive devices, I can ask her to build them and get them to me.

The team likes my plan. They understand it, and agree with it.

We have a new mission, a complicated mission. We have to find old Dignity Vessels and other forms of ancient stealth tech. We have to create a new version of that stealth tech in the lab.

And we have to keep our efforts secret from the Empire.

I’ll handle the search. Someone else can handle the science.

But I have to stay in charge.

I find it ironic, honestly, that I’ll be doing this—the woman who never much paid attention to the Empire. The woman who loves to be alone.

Now I have to put together another team. A bigger team.

One that builds on the smarts, determination, and talent of this crew.

One that will get everything right.