TWENTY-ONE YEARS EARLIER

 

 

SIXTEEN OF THEM, sixteen scientists—the best in the Empire—working their asses off. Rosealma coordinated all of them, dividing her own mind into a thousand pieces so that she could think of the implications of stealth tech science and manage her team all at the same time.

They were working fast, because they were all afraid that whatever Hansen had unleashed would grow and grow and eventually envelop the station. There was an energy signature that Rosealma didn’t recognize buried in the middle of the reaction, something she knew her people hadn’t created, and she was afraid that the experiment had morphed into something she didn’t recognize.

Sixteen scientists, struggling to contain the reaction. Once they contained it, they would shut it down. But it kept growing, and she was afraid it was going to pulse again.

She had looked at the records. Hansen’s description was spot-on. The experiment had pulsed.

But she suspected he was wrong about the reason. He said he had tried the experiment again—and he had. But it looked like her successful cloak, the one she had celebrated the night before he contacted her, had never really ceased. She thought she had shut down the experiment, thought that was confirmed by the reappearance of that coin. Hansen was right: the coin was different. But he was also wrong: the coin was the same. It was older, and it shouldn’t have been. If she had to guess—and hell, that was all she was doing these days, she was guessing—then she would guess that the coin hadn’t been cloaked at all, but it had moved forward then backward in time. When she had shut down the experiment, or moved to shut down the experiment, or initiated the shutdown that she thought would turn off the damn cloak, she had brought the coin back to its starting point.

The coin had experienced time differently than she had, and that alarmed her.

It also gave her hope. Because if she could move a coin forwards, then backwards in time, maybe she could move people forwards, then backwards in time. She might be able to recover the folks who had gotten lost.

Might, being an operative word.

And she tried not to think about all the pitfalls, including the most important one: coins were immobile by nature; people were not. So if all of those people got moved to a different time period or they experienced time differently (more rapidly?) then they had probably moved away from the experiment area. They wouldn’t all be in that area when the experiment got shut down.

She proposed that solution to her team and no one argued with her. The key was to shut down the experiment—all the way down—because her fear (their fear) was that it would grow and create some kind of rift or keep growing, even after it had consumed the station itself.

Somewhere in the middle of all this chaos, while she was thinking of a thousand different things, and trying to concentrate on each one of them, Quint came into the lab and scared her to death.

“What the hell are you doing here?” she asked, blocking him with her body.

He lifted bags that he had been holding in both hands. The bags smelled of garlic and fresh bread. “Bringing food.”

“Get out,” she said. “You can’t stay.”

“I can do whatever I want, Rosealma,” he said gently. “I outrank you.”

“It’s dangerous here,” she said. “I want you gone.”

He gave her a small smile, then set the bags on a chair. He knew better than to set them on any tabletop, near any experiment at all. The scents grew stronger, mixing with the smell of cooked beef and thyme. Rosealma’s stomach growled and she realized she was lightheaded.

“How long has it been?” she asked him softly.

“Twenty hours,” he said, and pulled her toward him. He held her tightly, and she tried not to squirm away.

He had always worried about her, always told her not to let the dangers of her job ruin their lives. He meant let the dangers of her job ruin his life—he was afraid she would be the one who died, just like her professor had. Quint had probably come in here just to make sure she wasn’t taking unnecessary risks.

“I’m supposed to tell you,” he said so quietly she could barely hear him, “that you have another twenty hours. At that point, you and your team will have to leave.”

“We’re not leaving until we solve this,” she said.

He shook his head. “It’s not your decision.”

“We can’t just leave this,” she said. “It’s dangerous. We think it’s expanding.”

She wasn’t supposed to tell him any of this, but she figured it didn’t matter. Clearance was a minor issue. Besides, he was probably reporting to the head of the station. And maybe even to the military’s science commander himself.

“I know,” Quint said, his voice still low. “That’s what some of the others are saying.”

“Then you understand why we can’t leave it,” she said.

“It might expand you out of existence,” he said.

She nodded. “Or expand this part of space out of existence or maybe even part of the planet. We don’t know, Quint.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “They’re removing you all in twenty hours, whether you’ve solved this or not.”

“And they’re going to let the expansion happen?” she asked. “They’re going to leave this disaster untouched?”

“They’re going to blow it up,” he said.

She pulled away from him. “They can’t do that. It might expand the problem. It might make this thing grow faster. We just don’t know. You have to tell them to leave me alone.”

“I’ll do my best, Rose,” he said, “but I’m not in charge any more than you are.”

“But it’s stupid—”

“I know,” he said, then kissed her. The kiss felt good. It brought her to herself momentarily, like the smell of food had. She had almost forgotten how to be alive, because she had been so busy thinking.

He clung to her for a moment, then eased back just enough so that he could see her face.

“Promise me you’ll leave when the time comes,” he said.

“I can’t promise that,” she said.

“You’ll die otherwise.”

“We’ll stay until we finish this,” she said. “You tell them that.”

“I already have,” he said, his voice wobbling just a bit. “And they said that doesn’t matter. They’re destroying the base in a little over twenty hours. With you on it or not.”

She looked at him. “You’d let them do that?”

“I don’t have a choice,” he said. “They didn’t want me to come in now. They didn’t want me to warn you. I got permission for that. I might not get permission to pull you out. I’ll try, Rose, but I can’t guarantee anything.”

“Neither can I,” she said, and turned her back on him.