The Diving Bundle: Six Diving Universe Novellas (49 page)

She still wasn’t sure she had shut it all down—she wasn’t sure they could shut it down. Not after what they had done. But she had disabled it or made it inactive, at least for the time being.

Then she had sent the others out, asked for a meeting with the head of the base via vid conference, and told him that this device, this cloak that her people had created, needed to be put somewhere far away from human beings, from any possibility of human beings ever traveling through, and certainly not any place where those human beings would colonize.

He said he understood. He said the military would find such a place. She gave instructions for transport, made him swear that he wouldn’t destroy the base with the device in it—explaining, once again, the disaster—and then she left it to him.

She evacuated like everyone else had, and trusted the military to take care of it.

Only later did she realize that they had followed part of her instruction, but not all of it.

They had taken the device away before destroying the military base. They blew up the base, but first they made sure that no stealth tech was on board.

And they didn’t abandon the experiments at all.

Instead, they moved the experiments to an even more remote site, did not let the scientists working on them have their families anywhere nearby, and made everyone who worked around stealth tech sign waivers in case of “accidental death or disappearance.”

But Rosealma didn’t find out about that for a year. She was too busy, testifying at the various courts martial and being investigated herself for some kind of negligence.

Eventually, she was cleared, and then she was offered a new job: Director of Stealth Tech Research.

And that made her furious.

NOW

SQUISHY USED CLEANING SOLUTION on her hands, then cleaned her surgical instruments. She didn’t put them away, however. She still needed to run them through the sonic cleaner. But she didn’t want to leave Quint alone in the cockpit.

He was sitting up. His skin looked raw from the cleaners she had used on it. The cuts dotted his face. They weren’t as bad as they had been, but they would scar without the proper treatment. And they would hurt when the numbing agent wore off. She could still give him something, knock him out, take him to some place on her own. And she was considering it.

“You came here too,” she said, continuing the conversation.

He had said she made a mistake coming to this ship; she could argue that he made the same mistake.

She said, “It would have been easier for you to evacuate. You had already given the authorities my information. There was no reason for you to join me.”

He gave her a hurt look. “You need me.”

He had said that in the past, and it never failed to provoke her. It angered her now. She didn’t need him. She had never needed him.

She had no idea why he thought she did.

“Why do I need you?” she asked, unable to keep the sarcasm out of her voice.

“Because I’m the only person who can prevent you from disappearing into the bowels of the Empire’s prison system.”

“You sound like I’ve already been tried and convicted,” she said.

He shrugged. “Times are different now. You destroyed government property. Military property. That was classified as a weapons research site, Rose. They don’t need to try you. They just need to show a few select judges that you’re guilty.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You think they’d charge me with murder?’

“Probably not,” he said. “They’ll probably charge you with treason. Which is worse.”

She swallowed in spite of herself. “Murder can carry a death penalty. How is treason worse?”

He looked down at his hands. “There are some things, Rose, that you don’t want to live through.”

She felt even colder than she had. She hadn’t quite bargained for all of this. Somehow she had thought she would get away. Or maybe she had thought she would die on that station.

She had certainly made contingency plans for her own death. She had told the others how to get away if she didn’t show up. And she hadn’t thought of capture.

So what made her assume she wouldn’t show up? She had to have assumed, deep down, that she would die. Because dying was certainly no less than she deserved, not considering all that she had done.

Hundreds—quite literally hundreds—of people would still be alive if she hadn’t gone into stealth tech, if she hadn’t realized that no one was thinking about stealth tech correctly.

She even remembered the moment of realization. She remembered when it all started.

THIRTY-TWO YEARS EARLIER

ROSEALMA HAD BEEN NAÏVE and terrified, outside her element, in a school on Hector Prime, a school on the ground, in real gravity, in a place where she couldn’t just float away.

She had chosen the Mehkeydo Academy because it was the best planet-bound school in the sector. She had grown up on
The Bounty
, a multinational cargo vessel, that never stopped anywhere for longer than a few weeks. She had thought with the ignorance of youth that staying planet-bound would be interesting.

Instead, it had been stifling. She felt heavy and awkward and stupid, when she was none of those things. Because of her spacer background, she was the thinnest girl in class, and one of the smartest too. She had scored 100 on her boards, something no cargo monkey had ever done, and that made her eligible for full scholarships from the best schools in the Enterran Empire.

She had chosen Mehkeydo Academy, and for nearly two years, she believed she had chosen incorrectly.

Until that moment in class.

No one saw the change occur, because hardly anyone looked at her. Most people thought her odd—and from their standpoint, she was. Even the professor, Erasmus Dane, rarely looked at her.

He was strange too, that Dane. A highly regarded professor of Ancient Technologies, Dane loved anything old and out of date. He carried an ancient wooden pointer stick in his hand, tapping the metal tip on any surface to prove his point. He wore tweed jackets and wool trousers and always smelled a bit fusty, as if his clothes were as old as his obsessions.

And one of his obsessions was stealth tech. He called it the ultimate lost technology. In his introductory class, Technologies and the Ancient World, he explored the way that human beings—from the beginnings of known civilization on old Earth—gained and lost knowledge. His focus in that class was on a group known as the Romans, who built things from roads to aqueducts, and whose engineering abilities flummoxed succeeding cultures for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years.

By the end of that semester, he spoke about a legend of amazing ships and how he saw the people who flew them as the Romans that the Enterran Empire couldn’t quite emulate.

His mention of the fleet was the first time Rosealma had heard of it. The ships were called Dignity Vessels and they sounded magical: they were big and black and swooped like birds. They housed five hundred to a thousand to ten thousand crew members. They had weapons that could destroy entire planets. And they could vanish in the middle of battle, only to reappear at the exact right moment, and destroy entire squadrons.

Rosealma loved the Dignity Vessel stories. She particularly loved how heroic the leaders of the Dignity Vessels sounded. But most of all she loved the stories of the Dignity Vessel fleet—how it was a hundred or five hundred or a thousand strong and how it never went back to Old Earth where it came from. Instead, it traveled ever forward, on a mission to save the worlds beyond the stars, fighting for the underdog, saving peoples and cultures that couldn’t save themselves.

Dane claimed these stories had a basis in fact, and urged his students to find the truth. He had them dig through ancient records, through texts, and translations, finding any mention of Dignity Vessels and their crew.

Rosealma loved the assignment and spent most of her semester on it. She discovered that no ship had ten thousand crew members, and that the stories of the Dignity Vessels weren’t always heroic.

But she also discovered that the ability to appear and disappear in a battle wasn’t magical at all. It was technology based, and once upon a time, the Enterran Empire had known how to do the same thing.

The Enterran Empire called that ability stealth technology. And Rosealma moved from a study of the Dignity Vessels to a study of the history of stealth technology long before she took Dane’s Lost Technologies Advanced Seminar.

Unlike most of her classmates, Rosealma had grown up on ships. And she knew that such a technology would change everything. It would make life both easier and more difficult.

She had been moving away from a degree in history toward a degree in science when she had her epiphany in Dane’s class. One of her other history professors told her she had a scientist’s mind—she didn’t like the inaccuracies in the historical records; she wanted to find a way to ensure that the historical record was accurate. She wanted precision and certainty and rigor, things that the study of history could never ever have.

In that fateful lecture, Dane paced, like he always did, three-quarters performer and one-quarter professor, using his ancient pointer stick like a weapon. Any student who even appeared to doze got the stick slammed against a desk, making the entire class jump to attention. He would lean on the stick to make a point, slap it against his hand as he contemplated an idea. He would use the stick as a superweapon against the tiny holographic Dignity Vessels he surrounded himself with, creating a ripple in the hologram as the stick sailed through it.

On that particular morning, he created an entire battlefield. Ships of various types fighting over nothing, weapons firing into the pretend space around him. Dane stood in the middle of the chaos, an invisible giant to the ships.

Rosealma watched the Dignity Vessels. They were hard to miss, with their birdlike shape and long wingspan. They tilted and moved like predators, larger than every other ship, although Rosealma doubted that was how it had been. Just because one culture had a big ship didn’t mean others lacked big ships as well.

But that wasn’t the first mistake she noted in the professor’s presentation.

Dane spent the morning discussing stealth technology. The Dignity Vessels winked in and out of the battlefield like lights turning on and off. When they disappeared, weapons fire would go through the empty space as if the ships had never been there.

Based on his research, Dane said he believed that stealth tech cloaked the vessel all at once, making it invisible—not just to the instruments on the various ships which was the way that stealth tech worked on existing ships, but also to the naked eye. So anyone who looked through a porthole saw the blackness of space instead of the outline of a Dignity Vessel.

Hands shot up, of course, as their owners wondered how the shot missed the vessel then. And Dane, who had probably given this lecture a hundred times in his career, had an answer before the question even got asked.

“The vessels cloaked,” he said, “and then they maneuvered out of the way. They returned to the same position before decloaking, to throw off their enemies.”

But Professor Dane had never served on a ship. Rosealma had checked his curriculum vitae before taking the class, and she had noted his lack of expertise in actual space travel. Dane had taken vacation trips off Hector Prime, but he had never lived on a vessel, trained on a vessel, flown a vessel or spent more than a few days on one.

He really had no idea how modern vessels worked, let alone how ancient ones did.

And sometimes, Rosealma believed, it didn’t matter how much someone understood an intellectual concept: that was no substitute for hands-on experience.

Those thoughts flashed through her mind as she looked at the miniature simulation—and that was when she had her epiphany. The Dignity Vessel’s stealth technology wasn’t a traditional cloak. No captain would have his ship execute four maneuvers when he could execute two.

In a battle, time was everything. The captain would cloak the vessel and move away from the spot where he cloaked, never to return. But he would never cloak the vessel, move out of the way, then return, and uncloak. It simply wasn’t logical. And if that was how the Dignity Vessels’ cloaks really operated, and if that was the prescribed maneuver, the ships would have been easy to defeat. All the enemy had to do was surround that spot in space and wait for the Vessel to return.

But the Vessels didn’t always return. Sometimes they did move away. Sometimes they returned to the same spot moments later, and sometimes they returned days later.

Either the cloaks used power efficiently, allowing a Vessel to remain hidden for days at a time (and if that was the case, why didn’t the Vessel simply leave the area?) or the stealth technology wasn’t a cloak as anyone in the Enterran Empire understood it.

Rosealma went back to her primary sources, found the references that had bothered her, and in the next class asked Dane about them. She cited them, then brought them up beside her holographically as she asked her question.