Empire, and in doing so, he killed a friend of mine, just like he killed my mother.
My team—everyone in the company, really—believes that I’m funding stealth-tech research as a vendetta against my father. It doesn’t matter that he probably died in an explosion. They think I’m always going to act on some kind of revenge cycle, determined to destroy anything that old man might have created.
I don’t think my stealth-tech research is a vendetta. I think it’s the only way to maintain the balance of power in the sector.
I have tried, over the years, not to think about what would happen once we understood stealth tech.
Now I’m faced with a working Dignity Vessel, which has arrived inside a cavern with a stealth-tech field, and I know I’m near a breakthrough. I may actually be looking at working stealth tech.
I have to keep this quiet, and I have to understand it.
I might even have to control it.
Somehow.
The scoring near that part of the ship disturbs me. Does that mean the stealth tech in this ship has gone awry as well?
I wish I could climb to the top of this part of the ship. Up there is a hatch—or there should be one—a hatch that will lead me through a shaft that will take me down to a maze of corridors. At the end of those corridors will be the bridge, and inside the bridge, I might actually find functioning stealth-tech controls.
“Boss?” Kersting again. He’s probably going to nag about leaving. “I think I’ve found a door.”
I turn, take a step back, and look at his position. He’s near the wide part of the ship, inside an area just under one of the curves.
None of the other Dignity Vessels we’ve found has a door there.
I think.
There are still parts to those ships that we don’t understand. And on most of them, entire sections of the ships are missing.
All four of us join Kersting. He has indeed found a door. It’s barely outlined against the blackness. In fact, Kersting found it not by looking, but by running his glove along the surface. The glove found a minor anomaly, something barely visible to the naked eye.
I run my hand over that area as well. My glove tells me that there is a minute crack, one that goes deep.
“I ran my hand all the way around the bottom,” Kersting says. “I can’t reach the top. But it seems to be a door.”
I can’t reach the top either. Neither can any of the rest of us. But it does seem to be door-shaped. It’s large—twice as large as it needs to be to let in passengers.
It intrigues me. Have we missed this on the other ships?
“Did you find a latch?” I ask Kersting.
“No,” he says. “But to be fair, I haven’t touched the middle part, just that outline. And not the top either.”
I want in. We all want in. But we can’t hurry this, no matter how much I want to.
“I guess we start mapping here.” I’m smiling as I say it. A Dignity Vessel and a door.
At the moment, the future of stealth tech doesn’t matter.
At the moment, all that matters is the mystery before me—and the answers it may provide.
* * * *
EIGHTEEN
T
he woman stood outside the Ivoire for a very long time. The particles swirled around her, but she ignored them as if she expected them, or perhaps she was used to them. Coop watched her as she touched the side of his ship, as she beckoned the others to join her.
One of them, a different man than the one who had nearly been crushed by the Ivoire, found the ship’s main exterior door. The outsiders gathered around it, clearly discussing what to do next.
Coop let them. They couldn’t get in, not without codes and approvals. Or very powerful weapons.
And none of the five seemed to have weapons, aside from the woman’s knife.
“Can you get any readings on the atmosphere inside the repair room?” he asked Yash.
“From what I can tell,” she said, “the air seems fine. It seems to be recycling from the outside, just like it was designed to do. But I don’t trust the reading.”
“Because of the environmental suits,” he said.
She shook her head. “Because of the particles. Those things are large, and if they get into lungs, they might do some damage, depending on what they are.”
“Are the particles coming in from outside?” Coop asked.
“Doesn’t seem that way.” Dix was bent over his console. He’d been replaying the entry