16

 

 

AND THAT’S THE CRUX OF IT. I know it as soon as I say it. I thought I would 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, prevents me from slamming Riya or my father against the bay wall.

Somehow I get out of that bay without 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.

Riya’s right. The government would back them because they’re working on a secret and important project. Stealth tech is the holy grail of military research. So she and my father can get away with anything.

And—stupid me—I finally realize that my father has no feelings for me at all. He never has. The clinging I remember is just him pulling me free of the Room, leaving my mother—my poor mother—behind.

I can’t even guarantee that we weren’t part of some early experiment on the same project. While my father was telling my mother’s parents to care for me while he tried to recover her, he might have been simply trying to recoup his losses from that trip, experimenting with people and markers and things that survive in the strangest of interdimensional fields.

After we leave my father and Riya on the outpost, we have a memorial service for Karl. I talk the longest because I knew him the best, and I don’t cry until we send him out into the darkness, still in his suit with his knife and breathers.

He would have wanted those. He would have appreciated the caution, even though it was caution—in the end—that got him killed.

As we head back to Longbow Station, I have decided to resuscitate my business. Only I’m not going to wreck dive like I used to. I’m going to find Dignity Vessels. I’m going to capture anything that vaguely resembles stealth tech and I’m going to find a place to keep it where our government can’t get it.

I’m going to run a shadow project. I’m going to find out how this stuff works and I’m going to do it before the government does because I won’t have to follow the regulations.

The government and the people like my father, they have to follow certain rules and protocols, all the while keeping the project secret.

I won’t have to. If I go far enough out of the sector, I won’t have to follow any rules at all.

I can make my own. Change the way the battle is fought. Redefine the war.

I learned that from Ewing Trekov. Don’t fight the war you’re given; fight the war you can envision.

Once the government has stealth tech, they’ll have a seemingly invincible military. They’ll be stronger in ways that can hurt the smaller governments in the region and anyone who works at the edges of the law, like I do.

But if we have stealth tech too, then all sides are equal. And if we can figure out how to use that tech in ways they haven’t imagined, then we get ahead.

All my life, I searched the past for my purpose. I sensed that something back there opened the key to my future.

Who knew that I would find all that I lost in the one place that had taken everything from me.

There are no souls in that Room, just like there are no voices.

There’s only the harshness of time.

And like the ancients before me, I’m going to harness that harshness into a weapon, a defense, and a future.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with it.

Maybe I’ll just wait, and let the future reveal itself like the habitats on the station, one small section at a time.