TWENTY-ONE YEARS EARLIER

 

 

SIXTEEN HOURS AFTER Quint brought food, Rosealma managed to shut down the experiment. It had taken all kinds of finagling. She thought she had shut it down six hours before, but she hadn’t. Testing and retesting and even more testing showed her something was still pulsing.

She had to go back to the earliest experiments to figure out how to turn the damn thing off. She had to go back to that afternoon when they lost Professor Holmes in one of the simplest stealth tech experiments ever done.

Rosealma—a post-doc—had been the one to finally shut down that experiment, and she was the one who shut down this one.

And if someone asked her to explain exactly how she did it, she wouldn’t be able to do so. Normally she had a very orderly mind, but not this afternoon or evening or whenever the hell it had become. Her expanded mind felt like it was becoming part of the stealth tech, like it was stretching into a variety of dimensions, and that was when she realized what the pulses were—an attempt to reach those dimensions.

She had been trying to shut down a cloak, and that hadn’t worked. But when she shut down the device that could reach outside of this dimension—when she had actually looked at the experiment as something that crossed both space and time—she was able to deactivate it.

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.