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.