Stealth tech. Lost, just like I assumed. And no one’d been able to recreate it.
I listen and evaluate, and realize, somewhere in the dead of night, that I’m not a scientist.
But I am a pragmatist, and I know, from my own research, that Dignity Vessels, with their stealth tech, existed for more than two hundred years. Certainly not something that would have happened had the stealth technology been as flawed as Squishy said.
So many variables, so much for me to weigh.
And beneath it all, a greed pulses, one that—until tonight—I thought I didn’t have.
For the last five centuries, our military has researched stealth tech and failed.
Failed.
I might have all the answers only a short distance away, in a wreck no one else has noticed, a wreck that is—for the moment anyway—completely my own.
I leave Squishy to sleep. I tell her to clear her bed, that she has to remain with the group, no matter what I decide.
She nods as if she’s expecting that, and maybe she is. She grabs her night-clothes as I let myself out of the room and into the much cooler, more dimly lit corridor.
As I walk to my own quarters, Jypé finds me.
“She tell you anything worthwhile?” His eyes are a little too bright. Is greed eating at him like it’s eating at me? I’m almost afraid to ask.
“No,” I say. “She didn’t. The work she did doesn’t seem all that relevant to me.”
I’m lying. I really do want to sleep on this. I make better decisions when I’m rested.
“There isn’t much history on the Dignity Vessels—at least that’s specific,” he says. “And your database has nothing on this one, no serial number listing, nothing. I wish you’d let us link up with an outside system.”
“You want someone else to know where we are and what we’re doing?” I ask.
He grins. “It’d be easier.”
“And dumber.”
He nods. I take a step forward and he catches my arm.
“I did check one other thing,” he says.
I am tired. I want sleep more than I can say. “What?”
“I learned long ago that if you can’t find something in history, you look in legends. There’re truths there. You just have to dig more for them.”
I wait. The sparkle in his eyes grows.
“There’s an old spacers’ story that has gotten repeated through various cultures for centuries as governments have come and gone. A spacers’ story about a fleet of Dignity Vessels.”
“Of course there was a fleet of them,” I say. “Hundreds, if the old records are right.”
He waves me off. “More than that. Some say the fleet’s a thousand strong, some say it’s a hundred strong. Some don’t give a number. But all the legends talk about the vessels being on a mission to save the worlds beyond the stars, and how the ships moved from port to port, with parts cobbled together so that they could move beyond their design structures.”
I’m awake again, just like he knew I would be. “There are a lot of these stories?”
“And they follow a trajectory—one that would work if you were, say, leading a fleet of ships out of your area of space.”
“We’re far away from the Old Earth area of space. We’re so far away, humans from that period couldn’t even imagine getting to where we are now.”
“So we say. But think how many years this would take, how much work it would take.”
“Dignity Vessels didn’t have faster-than-light engines,” I say.
“Maybe not at first.” He’s fairly bouncing from his discovery. I’m feeling a little more hopeful as well. “But consider this. They’ve traveled for a long time. What if one of the places they stopped had developed FTL? What if the engineers there helped them cobble that FTL into a Dignity Vessel?”
“You mean gave it to them?” I ask. No one in the worlds I know gives anyone anything.
“Or sold it to them. Can you imagine? One legend calls them a fleet of ships for hire, out to save worlds they’ve never seen.”
“Sounds like a complete myth.”
“Yeah,” he says, “it’s only a legend. But I think sometimes these legends become a little more concrete.”
“Why?”
“We have an actual Dignity Vessel out there that got here somehow.”
“Did you see evidence of cobbling?” I ask.
“How would I know?” he asks. “Have you checked the readouts? Do they give different dates for different parts of the ship?”
I haven’t looked at the dating. I have no idea if it is different. But I don’t say that.
“Download the exact specs for a Dignity Vessel,” I say. “The materials, where everything should be, all of that.”
“Didn’t you do that before you came here?” he asks.
“Yes, but not in the detail of the ship’s composition. Most people rebuild ships exactly as they were before they got damaged, so the shape would remain the same. Only the components would differ. I meant to check our readouts against what I’d brought, but I haven’t yet. I’ve been diverted by the stealth tech thing, and now I’m going to get a little sleep. So you do it.”
He grins. “Aye, aye, Captain.”
“Boss,” I mutter as I stagger down the corridor to my bed. “I can’t tell you how much I prefer ‘boss.’”
I sleep, but not long. My brain’s too busy. I’m sure those specs are different, which confirms nothing. It just means that someone repaired the vessel at one point or another. But what if the materials are the kind that weren’t available in the area of space around Earth when Dignity Vessels were built? That disproves Squishy’s worry about the tech.
Doesn’t it?
I’m at my hardwired terminal when Squishy comes to my door. I’ve gone through five or six layers of security to get to some very old data, data that isn’t accessible from any other part of my ship’s networked computer system.
Squishy waits. I’m hoping she’ll leave, but of course she doesn’t. After a few minutes, she coughs.
I sigh audibly. “We talked last night.”
“I have one more thing to ask.”
She steps inside, unbidden, and closes the door. My quarters feel claustrophobic with another person inside them. I’d always been alone here— always—even when I had a liaison with one of the crew. I’d go to his quarters, never bring him into my own.
The habits of privacy are long ingrained, and the habits of secrecy even longer. It’s how I’ve protected my turf for so many years, and how I’ve managed to first-dive so many wrecks.
I dim the screen and turn to her. “Ask.”
Her eyes are sunken into her face. She looks like she’s gotten even less sleep than I have.
“I’m going to try one last time,” she says. “Please blow the wreck up. Make it go away. Don’t let anyone else inside. Forget it was here.”
I fold my hands on my lap. Yesterday I hadn’t had an answer for that request. Today I do. I’d thought about it off and on all night, just like I’d thought about the differing stories I’d heard from her and from Jypé, and how, I realized fifteen minutes before my alarm, neither of them had to be true.
“Please,” she says.
“I’m not a scientist,” I say, which should warn her right off, but of course it doesn’t. Her gaze doesn’t change. Nothing about her posture changes. “I’ve been thinking about this. If this stealth tech is as powerful as you claim, then we might be making things even worse. What if the explosion triggers the tech? What if we blow a hole between dimensions? Or maybe destroy something else, something we can’t see?”
Her cheeks flush slightly.
“Or maybe the explosion’ll double-back on us. I recall something about Dignity Vessels being unfightable, that anything that hit them rebounded to the other ship. What if that’s part of the stealth tech?”