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.”