A hundred schools all over the known systems wanted her. They offered her room, board, and tuition, but only one offered her all expenses paid both coming and going from the school, covering the only cost that really mattered to a spacer’s kid—the cost of travel.
She went, of course, and vanished into the system, only to emerge twelve years later—too thin, too poor, and too bitter to ever be considered a success. She signed on with a cargo vessel as a medic and soon became one of its best and most fearless divers.
She met Turtle in a bar, and they became lovers. Turtle showed her that private divers make more money and brought her to me.
I sigh, rub my eyes with my thumb and forefinger, and lean my head against the screen.
Much as I regret it, it’s time for questions now.
Of course, she’s waiting for me.
She’s brought down the privacy wall in the room she initially shared with Turtle, making their rift permanent. Her bed is covered with folded clothes. Her personal trunk is open at the foot. She’s already packed her nightclothes and underwear inside.
“You’re leaving?” I ask.
“I can’t stay. I don’t believe in the mission. You’ve preached forever the importance of unity, and I believe you, Boss. I’m going to jeopardize everything.”
“You’re acting like I’ve already made a decision about the future of this mission.”
“Haven’t you?” She sits on the edge of the bed, hands folded primly in her lap, her back straight. Her bearing is military—something I’ve always seen, but never really understood until now.
“Tell me about stealth tech,” I say.
She raises her chin slightly. “It’s classified.”
“That’s fucking obvious.”
She glances at me, clearly startled. “You tried to research it?”
I nod. I tried to research it when I was researching Dignity Vessels. I tried again from the Business. I couldn’t find much, but I didn’t have to tell her that.
That was fucking obvious too.
“You’ve broken rules before,” I say. “You can break them again.”
She looks away, staring at that opaque privacy wall—so representative of what she’d become. The solid backbone of my crew suddenly doesn’t support any of us anymore. She’s opaque and difficult, setting up a divider between herself and the rest of us.
“I swore an oath.”
“Well, let me help you break it,” I snap. “If I try to enter that barrier, what’ll happen to me?”
“Don’t.” She whispers the word. “Just leave, Boss.”
“Convince me.”
“If I tell you, you gotta swear you’ll say nothing about this.”
“I swear.” I’m not sure I believe me. My voice is shaky, my tone something that sounds strange even to me.
But the oath—however weak it is—is what Squishy wants.
Squishy takes a deep breath, but she doesn’t change her posture. In fact, she speaks directly to the wall, not turning toward me at all.
“I became a medic after my time in Stealth,” she says. “I decided I had to save lives after taking so many of them. It was the only way to balance the score. …”
Experts believe stealth tech was deliberately lost. Too dangerous, too risky. The original stealth scientists all died under mysterious circumstances, all much too young and without recording any part of their most important discoveries.
Through the ages, their names were even lost, only to be rediscovered by a major researcher, visiting Old Earth in the latter part of the past century.
Squishy tells me all this in a flat voice. She sounds like she’s reciting a lecture from very long ago. Still, I listen, word for word, not asking any questions, afraid to break her train of thought.
Afraid she’ll never return to any of it.
Earth-owned Dignity Vessels had all been stripped centuries before, used as cargo ships, used as junk. An attempt to reassemble one about five hundred years ago failed because the Dignity Vessels’ main components and their guidance systems were never, ever found, either in junk or in blueprint form.
A few documents, smuggled to the colonies on Earth’s moon, suggested that stealth tech was based on interdimensional science: The ships didn’t vanish off radar because of a “cloak” but because they traveled, briefly, into another world—a parallel universe that’s similar to our own.
I recognized the theory—it’s the one on which time travel is based, even though we’ve never discovered time travel, at least not in any useful way, and researchers all over the universe discourage experimentation in it. They prefer the other theory of time travel, the one that says time is not linear, that we only perceive it as linear, and to actually time travel would be to alter the human brain.
But what Squishy is telling me is that it’s possible to time travel, it’s possible to open small windows in other dimensions and bend them to our will.
Only, she says, those windows don’t bend as nicely as we like, and for every successful trip, there are two that don’t function as well.
I ask for explanation, but she shakes her head.
“You can get stuck,” she says, “like that probe. Forever and ever.”
“You think this is what the Dignity Vessels did?”
She shakes her head. “I think their stealth tech is based on some form of this multidimensional travel, but not in any way we’ve been able to reproduce.”
“And this ship we have here? Why are you so afraid of it?” I ask.
“Because you’re right.” She finally looks at me. There are shadows under her eyes. Her face is haunted, the lower lip trembling. “The ship shouldn’t be here. No Dignity Vessel ever left the sector of space around Earth. They weren’t designed to travel vast distances, let alone halfway across the known universe.”
I nod. She’s not telling me something I don’t already know. “So?”
“So,” she says. “Dozens and dozens of those ships never returned to port.”
“Shot down, destroyed.” This is what the databases say, and the news doesn’t surprise me. Dignity Vessels were battleships, after all.
“Shot down, destroyed, or lost,” she says. “I vote for lost. Or used for something, some mission now forgotten in time.”
I shrug. “So?”
“So you wondered why no one’s seen this before, why no one’s found it, why the ship itself has drifted so very far from home.”
I nod.
“Maybe it didn’t drift.”
“You think it was purposely sent here?”
She shakes her head. “What if it stealthed on a mission to the outer regions of Old Earth’s area of space?”
My stomach clenches.
“What if,” she says, “the crew tried to destealth—and ended up here?”
“Five thousand years ago?”
She shakes her head. “A few generations ago. Maybe more, maybe less. But not very long. And you were just the lucky one who found it.”
SEVEN
I spend the entire night listening to Squishy’s theories.
I hear about the experiments, the forty-five deaths, the losses she suffered in a program that started the research from scratch.
After she left R&D and went into medicine, she used her high security clearance to explore older files. She found pockets of research dating back nearly five centuries, the pertinent stuff gutted, all but the assumptions gone.