I recognized the theory—it’s the one on which time travel is based, even though we’ve never discovered time travel, at least not in any useful way, and researchers all over the universe discourage experimentation in it. They prefer the other theory of time travel, the one that says time is not linear, that we only perceive it as linear, and to actually time travel would be to alter the human brain.
But what Squishy is telling me is that it’s possible to time travel, it’s possible to open small windows in other dimensions, and bend them to our will.
Only, she says, those windows don’t bend as nicely as we like, and for every successful trip, there are two that don’t function as well.
I ask for an explanation, but she shakes her head.
“You can get stuck,” she says, “like that probe. Forever and ever.”
“You think this is what the Dignity Vessels did?”
She shakes her head. “I think their stealth tech is based on some form of this multi-dimensional travel, but not in any way we’ve been able to reproduce.”
“And this ship we have here? Why are you so afraid of it?” I ask.
“Because you’re right.” She finally looks at me. There are shadows under her eyes. Her face is skeletal, the lower lip trembling. “The ship shouldn’t be here. No Dignity Vessel ever left the sector of space around Earth. They weren’t designed to travel vast distances, let alone halfway across our known universe.”
I nod. She’s not telling me something I don’t already know. “So?”
“So,” she says. “Dozens and dozens of those ships never returned to port.”
“Shot down, destroyed. They were battleships, after all.”
“Shot down, destroyed, or lost,” she says. “I vote for lost. Or used for something, some mission now lost in time.”
I shrug. “So?”
“So you wondered why no one’s seen this before, why no one’s found it, why the ship itself has drifted so very far from home.”
I nod.
“Maybe it didn’t drift.”
“You think it was purposely sent here?”
She shakes her head. “What if it stealthed on a mission to the outer regions of Old Earth’s area of space?”
My stomach clenches.
“What if,” she says, “the crew tried to destealth—and ended up here?”
“Five thousand years ago?”
She shakes her head. “A few generations ago. Maybe more, maybe less. But not very long. And you were just the lucky one who found it.”
I spend the entire night listening to her theories.
I hear about the experiments, the forty-five deaths, the losses she suffered in a program that started the research from scratch.
After she left R&D and went into medicine, she used her high security clearance to explore older files. She found pockets of research dating back nearly five centuries, the pertinent stuff gutted, all but the assumptions gone.
Stealth tech. Lost, just like I assumed. And no one’d been able to recreate it.
I listen and evaluate, and realize, somewhere in the dead of night, that I’m not a scientist.
But I am a pragmatist, and I know, from my own research, that Dignity Vessels, with their stealth tech, existed for more than two hundred years. Certainly not something that would have happened had the stealth technology been as flawed as Squishy said.
So many variables, so much for me to weigh.
And beneath it all, a greed pulses, one that—until tonight—I thought I didn’t have.
For the last five centuries, our military has researched stealth tech and failed.
Failed.
I might have all the answers only a short distance away, in a wreck no one else has noticed, a wreck that is—for the moment anyway—completely my own.
I leave Squishy to sleep. I tell her to clear her bed, that she has to remain with the group, no matter what I decide.
She nods as if she’s expecting that, and maybe she is. She grabs her nightclothes as I let myself out of the room, and into the much cooler, more dimly lit corridor.
As I walk to my own quarters, Jypé finds me.
“She tell you anything worthwhile?” His eyes are a little too bright. Is greed eating at him like it’s eating at me? I’m almost afraid to ask.
“No,” I say. “She didn’t. The work she did doesn’t seem all that relevant to me.”
I’m lying. I really do want to sleep on this. I make better decisions when I’m rested.
“There isn’t much history on the Dignity Vessels—at least that’s specific,” he says. “And your database has nothing on this one, no serial number listing, nothing. I wish you’d let us link up with an outside system.”
“You want someone else to know where we are and what we’re doing?” I ask.
He grins. “It’d be easier.”
“And dumber.”
He nods. I take a step forward and he catches my arm.
“I did check one other thing,” he says.
I am tired. I want sleep more than I can say. “What?”
“I learned long ago that if you can’t find something in history, you look in legends. There’s truths there. You just have to dig more for them.”
I wait. The sparkle in his eyes grows.
“There’s an old spacer’s story that has gotten repeated through various cultures for centuries as governments have come and gone. A spacer’s story about a fleet of Dignity Vessels.”
“What?” I asked. “Of course there was a fleet of them. Hundreds, if the old records are right.”
He waves me off. “More than that. Some say the fleet’s a thousand strong, some say it’s a hundred strong. Some don’t give a number. But all the legends talk about the vessels being on a mission to save the worlds beyond the stars, and how the ships moved from port to port, with parts cobbled together so that they could move beyond their design structures.”
I’m awake again, just like he knew I would be. “There are a lot of these stories?”
“And they follow a trajectory—one that would work if you were, say, leading a fleet of ships out of your area of space.”
“We’re far away from the Old Earth area of space. We’re so far away, humans from that period couldn’t even imagine getting to where we are now.”
“So we say. But think how many years this would take, how much work it would take.”
“Dignity Vessels didn’t have FTL,” I say.
“Maybe not at first.” He’s fairly bouncing from his discovery. I’m feeling a little more hopeful as well. “But in that cobbling, what if someone gave them FTL.?”
“Gave them,” I muse. No one in the worlds I know gives anyone anything.
“Or sold it to them. Can you imagine? One legend calls them a fleet of ships for hire, out to save worlds they’ve never seen.”
“Sounds like a complete myth.”
“Yeah,” he says, “it’s only a legend. But I think sometimes these legends become a little more concrete.”
“Why?”
“We have an actual Dignity Vessel out there, that got here somehow.”
“Did you see evidence of cobbling?” I ask.
“How would I know?” he asks. “Have you checked the readouts? Do they give different dates for different parts of the ship?”
I hadn’t looked at the dating. I had no idea if it was different. But I don’t say that.
“Download the exact specs for a Dignity Vessel,” I say. “The materials, where everything should be, all of that.”
“Didn’t you do that before you came here?” he asks.
“Yes, but not in the detail of the ship’s composition. Most people rebuild ships exactly as they were before they got damaged, so the shape would remain the same. Only the components would differ. I meant to check our readouts against what I’d brought, but I haven’t yet. I’ve been diverted by the stealth tech thing, and now I’m going to get a little sleep. So you do it.”