Free Boneyards by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

still valid, still respected, despite the twenty years since her discharge from the imperial military. She was considered one of the pioneers of stealth tech, and as such, the researchers were happy to have her back into the fold. They were pleased that she had returned and saw it as a happy accident, one that would enable them to make the breakthrough they had always strived for.
    Her time in Vallevu had served her well. After Squishy had left Boss's team the first time, she had come home—or what she thought of as home—to the former military base where she had first been stationed. Back then, the families lived on the planet below for safety's sake, and that part had worked.
    No one in the families had died. But they all got scarred so badly that the Empire actually took pity on them, decommissioned the base, sold them the land, and gave them enough money to fund the community, so long as they never talked to anyone about what happened. It made the small community of Vallevu wary of outsiders, but Squishy hadn't been an outsider. Not when she limped home, defeated and ruined, her second attempt at a career ending in death just like the first.
    Her years in Vallevu, both times—before and after—allowed the Empire to track her life. Or to track it enough to believe it understood her. It thought she had gone into space to clear her head, then returned to her work. Her second time in Vallevu had been as a doctor, not a stealth scientist, but she had done some research into the effects of loss on communities, and she had published her work.
    That loss study, done with the permission of the people she lived with, had focused on Vallevu, the loss she dealt with, the loss of stealth-tech researchers.
    Squishy's entire life had been tied to stealth tech, more than the Empire realized.
    And she hated stealth tech, more than the Empire realized.
    If they had known that, they never would have allowed her within a thousand light-years of this place. Instead, they invited her on board, claimed to be happy to have her, and gave her one of the best offices in the entire place.
    First she got assigned a division to help her get up to speed on the current thinking in stealth tech. She had to restrain herself. Stealth-tech researchers in the Empire were going in the wrong direction. They thought stealth tech was merely a cloak, something that would take a ship out of time for a second and then bring it back. Or maybe even take the ship out of phase just enough that it could still see the area around it without interacting with that area.
    They had no idea that the cloaking aspects of stealth tech were a side effect of a much more powerful technology, one that flew Dignity Vessels for thousands of years, one that enabled them to travel over distances that the Empire simply couldn't imagine in time that seemed almost miraculous.
    She couldn't tell anyone here that, and she didn't want to.
    Not even when she realized Quint worked here.
    She hadn't checked the employee manifest at the station before she arrived, partly because she was afraid if she saw the names of old colleagues, she would abort the mission.
    She couldn't abort. Too many others had taken a leave of absence from Lost Souls to run important aspects of the mission—dangerous aspects—in other parts of the Empire.
    If she failed her job, their risks would have been for nothing.
    And when she saw them at the rendezvous point, she would have to face them, telling them why she had failed.
    She didn't want to fail. This was her idea, after all.
    Although two days into her mission, she wondered if she was crazy, when she sat in the spectacular office the station had given her. The office was in the very center of the administrative wing, with a 360-degree view of the interior of the station itself. If she looked out the clear panels, she could see scientists at work in their offices or in their labs. Only the top secret areas were blocked off.
    If she wanted to, she could open the