I stayed there for what seemed like days, listening to the voices, feeling my mother’s body brush against mine, as she got older and thinner and more and more horrible.
Finally I couldn’t look anymore. I closed my eyes and wondered when the voices would get me.
Then my father grabbed me and pulled me out.
And I was safe.
I look at him now. His eyes are wide. He has made a verbal slip and he knows it.
“My God,” I say. “You know what’s in there.”
“Honey,” my father says. “Don’t.”
I turn to Roderick and Mikk. “Go get the others. Bring a stretcher so that we can take Karl out of here with some dignity.”
“I don’t think we should leave you here,” Mikk says. He’s catching onto this quicker than Roderick.
“I’ll be fine,” I say. “Just hurry back.”
They head to the door. Riya watches them go. My father keeps looking at me.
“You tell me what you know,” I say, “or I’m going to have the authorities come get both of you for fraud and murder. You clearly brought us out here on false pretenses, and now a man is dead.”
Karl is dead. My heart aches.
“Call them,” Riya says. “They won’t care. Our contract is with them.”
My father closes his eyes.
I look from him to her. “For stealth tech. This is all about stealth tech.”
“That’s right,” she says. “You’re one of the lucky few who can work in its fields without risks.”
Lucky few. Me and a handful of others, all of whom were conned by this woman and my father. For what? A military contract?
“What are you trying to do?” I ask. “Consign us to some imperial hellhole?”
My father has opened his eyes. He’s shaking his head.
“No, you’re just the test subjects,” Riya says, apparently oblivious to my tone. “Before they approved our project, they wanted to make sure everyone who got out before could get out again. You were the last one. Your father didn’t think you would work with us, but I proved him wrong.”
“I signed on to help you recover your father,” I say to her.
She shrugs one shoulder. “I never knew him. I really don’t care about him. And you were right. I already knew he wasn’t in that Room. But I figured telling you about him would work. I’m not the only one in this bay who was abandoned by her father.”
My father puts a hand to his forehead. I haven’t moved.
“I thought this was a historical project,” I say, maybe too defensively. “I thought this was a job, like the kind I used to do.”
“That’s what you were supposed to think,” she says. “Only you weren’t supposed to send someone else into the Room. You’re the only one with the marker.”
Marker. As in genetic marker. I turn to my father.
“That’s what you meant by designed. I’m some kind of test subject. I have some kind of genetic modification.”
“No,” he says. “Or yes. Or I’m not sure. You see, we think that anyone on a Dignity Vessel had been bred or genetically modified to work around stealth tech. Then the ships got stranded and the Dignity crews mingled with the rest of the population. Some of us have the marker. You do. I do. Your mother didn’t.”
He says that last with some pain. He still grieves her. I don’t doubt that. But somehow he got mixed up in this.
“There were no Dignity Vessels this far out,” I say. “They weren’t designed to travel huge distances, and they weren’t manufactured outside of Earth’s solar system.”
“Don’t insult my intelligence,” he says. “We know you found a Dignity Vessel a few years ago. I’ve seen it.”
Because I salvaged it and got paid for it. I couldn’t leave it in space, a death trap to whoever else wandered close to it.
Like this Room is.
I salvaged the vessel and gave it to the Empire so they could study the damn stealth tech.
And now my father has seen the vessel.
“That’s how I knew how to find you,” he says.
“You didn’t need me,” I say. “You had the others.”
“We needed all of you,” Riya says. “The Empire won’t give us a go unless we had a one hundred percent success rate. Which we do. Your friend Karl simply proves that you need the marker or you’re subject to the interdimensional field.”
Karl and Junior and my mother and who knows how many others.
“How long has the Empire known?” I ask. “How long have they known that the Room is a stealth tech generator?”
She shrugs. “Why does it matter?”
“Because they should have shut it down.” I’m even closer to her than I was before. She’s backing away from me.
“They can’t,” my father says. “They don’t know how.”
“Then they should have blocked off the station,” I say. “This place is dangerous.”
“There are centuries’ worth of warnings to keep people away,” Riya says. “Besides, it’s not our concern. We have scientists who can replicate that marker. We think we’ve finally discovered a way to work with real stealth tech. Do you know what that’s worth?”
“My life, apparently,” I say. “And my mother’s. And Karl’s.”
Riya is looking at me. She’s finally understanding how angry I am.
“Don’t,” my father says.
“Don’t what?” I ask. “Don’t hurt her? Why should you care? I could have died in there. Me, the daughter you swore to protect. Or did you abandon that oath along with your search for my mother? Was that even real?”
“It was real, honey,” he says. “That’s how I found this. Riya and I met at a survivors’ meeting. We started talking—”
“I don’t care!” I snap. “Don’t you understand what you’ve done?”
“You wouldn’t have died,” he says. “That’s why we approached you last. Once we were sure the others made it, then we came to you. Besides, you’ve done much more dangerous things on your own.”
“And so has Karl.” I’m close to both of them now. I’m so angry, I’m trembling. “But you know what the difference is?”
My father shakes his head. Riya watches me as if she’s suddenly realized how dangerous I can be.
“The difference is that we chose to take those risks,” I say. “We didn’t choose this one.”
“I heard you tell the team,” Riya says, “that someone might die on this mission.”
“I always tell my teams that,” I say. “It makes them vigilant.”
“But this time you believed it,” my father says.
“Yeah,” I say softly. “I thought that someone would be me.”
TWENTY-SIX
And that’s the crux of it. I know it as soon as I say it. I thought I would m I die on this mission, and apparently I was fine with that.
I thought I’d die in multicolored lights and song, like I thought my mother had died, and I thought it a beautiful way to go. I’d even convinced myself that I would die diving, so it would be all right.
I would be done.
But it’s not all right. Karl’s dead, and I can’t even prove fault, except my own. Only when I review the decisions we made, we made the right ones with the information we had.
The thought brings me up short, and prevents me from slamming Riya or my father against the bay wall.
Somehow I get out of that bay without killing either of them.
I don’t speak to them as the Business leaves the station. I don’t speak to them when I drop them at the nearest outpost. I expressly tell them that if they contact me or my people again, I will find a way to hurt them—but I don’t know exactly how I would do that.