Boneyards by Kristine Kathryn Rusch Page A

Squishy didn't know what happened at the new place except in theory. Most of the work there was dedicated to historical and anthropological research, as well as ground sciences like geology—things that held no interest for her.
    What interested her—what had always interested her—was this technology. More than biology, more than all of the medicine she studied, she wanted to know about anacapa drives.
    She stood back from the schematics, then ordered up a holographic version. It rose and floated above her. She tapped the screen so that she got a three-dimensional model of the drive. It floated next to the schematics, about the size of her fist, encased in black. She ordered the casing removed and studied the drive.
    It looked wrong to her, but she wasn't the expert. The people beside her were, but the person whose opinion mattered was Bradley Taylor.
    Taylor had come from the Ivoire , the working Dignity Vessel that Boss had found four years before. He was young, and when he first came to the Nine Planets, he hadn't been old enough to get work in the Ivoire's engineering department. But he had a knack for anacapa drives. He loved them as much as Squishy did, and once here, he had become her de facto right-hand man.
    “It doesn't look complete to me,” Squishy said, directing her comments to Taylor. The others listened.
    “It does seem small,” he said, “but I can assure you that it works.”
    She programmed both holographs so that they revolved. Then they turned upside down, moving in all three dimensions. She watched, but that discomfort remained.
    She shook her head. “Something's wrong. I just can't tell what it is.”
    Taylor didn't seem upset. Instead, he leaned into the images and watched them move as if they held the answers.
    “I wish we could run some tests,” he said.
    “No tests until I have some idea that this will work,” she said. Too many people had died in “tests.”
    No one from the Ivoire objected either. The only reason they were at the base was because their anacapa drive had malfunctioned a long, long time ago.
    “We know that the anacapa part will work,” said Sadie Juarez. She was thin and intense. She had come from one of the top universities in the Nine Planets. She was a brilliant theorist, but she still hadn't grasped the dangers of the research. “Maybe there's some kind of way we can isolate the experiment…”
    She let her voice trail off so that everyone knew what she was saying, even though she hadn't finished the thought.
    “We're not the Empire,” said Ward Zauft. He had helped Squishy since she started her research at Lost Souls. He was wiry, had too much energy, and was always keeping an eye out for problems in experiments. She liked that the most about him. “We don't let eighty-five people die just because we hope the experiment will work.”
    Squishy nodded, then frowned. Eighty-five was a specific number, and it was too small to encompass all of the people who had died in the last few decades.
    She turned toward him. “Eighty-five?”
    “Haven't you heard? That's the latest loss. Eighty-five people because some stealth-tech experiment went awry.” He wasn't even looking at her. He was clearly thinking about the drive in front of him, not the news he was passing on.
    “Where did you see that?” she asked.
    Something in her tone seemed to catch his attention. He looked away from the rotating drives, his gaze meeting hers. A slight frown creased his forehead.
    “It got leaked and made some of the science news sites just this week,” he said. “They said the eighty-five people who died were the latest tragic accident in a program plagued by them.”
    “I heard it, too,” Juarez said. “The story said that the numbers couldn't be confirmed but that maybe as many as eight hundred people have died in stealth-tech-related experiments in the past twenty years.”
    Squishy was shaking. She knew of the first two hundred of the dead. She had a hunch that eight