Diving into the Wreck - [Diving Universe 01]

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  One hour gives them enough time on their breathers for some margin of error. One hour also prevents them from getting too involved in the dive and forgetting the time.

  They have to stay on schedule.

  They get the drill. They’ve done it before, with me anyway. I have no idea how other team leaders run their ships. I have strict rules about everything, and expect my teams to follow.

  Headpieces on—Turtle’s is as thin as her face, tight enough to make her look like some kind of cybernetic human. Karl goes for the full protection— seven layers, each with a different function; double night vision, extra cameras on all sides; computerized monitors layered throughout the external cover. He gives me the handheld, which records everything he sees. It’s not as good as the camera eye view they’ll bring back, but at least it’ll let me know my team is still alive.

  Not that I can do anything if they’re in trouble. My job is to stay in the skip. Theirs is to come back to it in one piece.

  They move through the airlock—Turtle bouncing around like she always does, Karl moving with caution—and then wait the required two minutes. The suits adjust, then Turtle presses the hatch, and Karl sends the lead to the other ship.

  We don’t tether exactly, but we run a line from one point of entry to the other. It’s cautionary. A lot of divers get wreck blindness—hit the wrong button, expose themselves to too much light, look directly into a laser, or the suit malfunctions in ways I don’t even want to discuss—and they need the tactical hold to get back to safety.

  I don’t deal with wreck blindness either, but Squishy does. She knows eyes, and can replace a lens in less than fifteen minutes. She’s saved more than one of my crew in the intervening years. And after overseeing the first repair—the one in which she got her nickname—I don’t watch.

  Turtle heads out first, followed by Karl. They look vulnerable out there, small shapes against the blackness. They follow the guideline, one hand resting lightly on it as they propel themselves toward the wreck.

  This is the easy part: should they let go or miss by a few meters, they use tiny air chips in the hands and feet of their suits to push them in the right direction. The suits have even more chips than that. Should the diver get too far away from the wreck, they can use little propellants installed throughout their suits.

  I haven’t lost a diver going or coming from a wreck.

  It’s inside that matters.

  My hands are slick with sweat. I nearly drop the handheld. It’s not providing much at the moment—just the echo of Karl’s breathing, punctuated by an occasional “fuck” as he bumps something or moves slightly off-line.

  I don’t look at the images he’s sending back either. I know what they are—the gloved hand on the lead, the vastness beyond, the bits of the wreck in the distance.

  Instead, I walk back to the cockpit, sink into my chair, and turn all monitors on full. I have cameras on both of them and readouts running on another monitor watching their heart and breathing patterns. I plug the handheld into one small screen, but I don’t watch it until Karl approaches the wreck.

  The main door is scored and dented. Actual rivets still remain on one side. I haven’t worked a ship old enough for rivets; I’ve only seen them in museums and histories. I stare at the bad image Karl’s sending back, entranced. How have those tiny metal pieces remained after centuries? For the first time, I wish I’m out there myself. I want to run the thin edge of my glove against the metal surface.

  Karl does just that, but he doesn’t seem interested in the rivets. His fingers search for a door release, something that will open the thing easily.

  After centuries, I doubt there is any easy here. Finally, Turtle pings him.

  “Got something over here,” she says.

  She’s on the far side of the wreck from me, working a section I hadn’t examined that closely. Karl keeps his hands on the wreck itself, sidewalking toward her.

  My breath catches. This is the part I hate: the beginning of the actual dive, the place where the trouble starts.

  Most wrecks are filled with space, inside and out, but a few still maintain their original environments, and then it gets really dicey—extreme heat or a gaseous atmosphere that interacts badly with the suits.

  Sometimes the hazards are even simpler: a jagged metal edge that punctures even the strongest suits; a tiny corridor that seems big enough until it narrows, trapping the diver inside.

  Every wreck has its surprises, and surprise is the thing that leads to the most damage—a diver shoving backward to avoid a floating object, a diver slamming his head into a wall that jars the suit’s delicate internal mechanisms, and a host of other problems, all of them documented by survivors and none of them the same.

  The handheld shows a rip in the exterior of the wreck, not like any other caused by debris. Turtle puts a fisted hand in the center, then activates her knuckle lights. From my vantage, the hole looks large enough for two humans to go through side by side.

  “Send a probe before you even think of going in there,” I say into her headset.

  “Think it’s deep enough?” Turtle asks, her voice tinny as it comes through the speakers.

  “Let’s try the door first,” Karl says. “I don’t want surprises if we can at all avoid them.”

  Good man. His small form appears like a spider attached to the ship’s side. He returns to the exit hatch, still scanning it.

  I look at the timer, running at the bottom of my main screen.

  17:32

  Not a lot of time to get in.

  I know Karl’s headpiece has a digital readout at the base. He’s conscious of the time, too, and is as cautious about that as he is about following procedure.

  Turtle scuttles across the ship’s side to reach him, slips a hand under a metal awning, and grunts.

  “How come I didn’t see that?” Karl asks.

  “Looking in the wrong place,” she says. “This is real old. I’ll wager the metal’s so brittle we could punch through the thing ourselves.”

  “We’re not here to destroy it.” There’s disapproval in Karl’s voice.

  “I know.”

  19:01. I’ll come on the line and demand they return if they go much over twenty minutes.

  Turtle grabs something that I can’t see, braces her feet on the side of the ship, and tugs. I wince. If she loses her grip, she propels, spinning, far and fast into space.

  “Crap,” she says. “Stuck.”

  “I could’ve told you that. These things are designed to remain closed.”

  “We have to go in the hole.”

  “Not without a probe,” Karl says.

  “We’re running out of time.”

  21:22

  They are out of time.

  I’m about to come on and remind them when Karl says, “We have a choice. We either try to blast this door open or we probe that hole.”

  Turtle doesn’t answer him. She tugs. Her frame looks small on my main screen, all bunched up as she uses her muscles to pry open something that may have been closed for centuries.

  On the handheld screen, enlarged versions of her hands disappear under that awning, but the exquisite detail of her suit shows the ripple of her flesh as she struggles.

  “Let go, Turtle,” Karl says.

  “I don’t want to damage it,” Turtle says. “God knows what’s just inside there.”

  “Let go.”

  She does. The hands reappear, one still braced on the ship’s side.

  “We’re probing,” he says. “Then we’re leaving.”

  “Who put you in charge?” she grumbles, but she follows him to that hidden side of the ship. I see only their limbs as they move along the exterior—the human limbs against the pits and the dents and the small holes punched by space debris. Shards of protruding metal near rounded gashes beside pristine swatches that still shine in the thin light from Turtle’s headgear.

  I want to be with them, clinging to the wreck, looking at each mark, trying t
o figure out when it came, how it happened, what it means.

  But all I can do is watch.

  The probe makes it through sixteen meters of stuff before it doesn’t move any farther. Karl tries to tug it out, but the probe is stuck, just like my team would’ve been if they’d gone in without it.

  They return, forty-two minutes into the mission, feeling defeated.

  I’m elated. They’ve gotten farther than I ever expected.

  ~ * ~

  FOUR

  W

  e take the probe readouts back to the Business, over the protests of the team. They want to recharge and clean out the breathers and dive again, but I won’t let them. That’s another rule I have to remind them of—only one dive per twenty-four-hour period. There are too many unknowns in our work; it’s essential that we have time to rest.

  We all get too enthusiastic about our dives—we take chances we shouldn’t. Sleep, relaxation, downtime all prevent the kind of haste that gets divers killed.

  Once we’re in the Business, I download the probe readouts, along with the readings from the suits, the gloves, and the handheld. Everyone gathers in the lounge. I have three-D holotech in there that’ll allow us all to get a sense of the wreck.

  As I’m sorting through the material, thinking of how to present it (handheld first? overview? a short lecture?), the entire group arrives. Turtle’s taken a shower. Her hair’s wet, and she looks tired. She swore to me she wasn’t stressed out there, but her eyes tell me otherwise. She’s exhausted.

  Squishy follows, looking somber. She looks solid next to Turtle’s thinness. But Squishy is thin too, just not as brittle. She has muscles like Karl does and a squat square face. Her hair is cut like his as well, shorn against her skull, which makes it easier for her to dive.

  Jypé and Junior are already there, in the best seats. They’ve been watching me set up. They look like father and son. When Junior grows into his bone structure, he’ll be a handsome man like his father.

  Right now, he looks like a partially completed sketch.

  The completed sketch sits next to him. Jypé has a land-born’s way of moving—heavy and solid—but he looks too light to be land-born. He’s adapted to space better than I have.

  Junior was born in space and raised in it, alternating between zero-g and Earth normal. He has the grace that his father lacks.

  Leaning on the built-in couch, they both look strong and rested, ready for anything.

  I hope that they are.

  Karl is late. When he arrives—also looking tired—Squishy stops him at the door.

  “Turtle says it’s old.”

  Turtle shoots Squishy an angry look.

  “She won’t say anything else.” Squishy glances at me as if it’s my fault. Only I didn’t swear the first team to secrecy about the run. That was their choice.

  “It’s old,” Karl says, and squeezes by her.

  “She’s says it’s weird-old.”

  Karl looks at me now. His angular face seems even bonier. He seems to be asking me silently if he can talk.

  I continue setting up.

  Karl sighs, then says, “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  No one else asks a question. They wait for me. I start with the images the skip’s computer downloaded, then add the handheld material. I’ve finally decided to save the suit readouts for last. I might be the only one who cares about the metal composition, the exterior hull temperature, and the number of rivets lining the hatch.

  The group watches in silence as the wreck appears, watches intently as the skip’s images show a tiny Turtle and Karl slide across the guideline.

  The group listens to the arguments, and Jypé nods when Karl makes his unilateral decision to use the probe. The nod reassures me. Jypé is as practical as I remembered.

  I move to the probe footage next. I haven’t previewed it. We’ve all seen probe footage before, so we ignore the grainy picture, the thin light, and the darkness beyond.

  The probe doesn’t examine so much as explore: its job is to go as far inside as possible, to see if that hole provides an easy entrance into the wreck.

  It looks so easy for ten meters—nothing along the edges, just light and darkness and weird particles getting disturbed by the probe’s movements.

  Then the hole narrows and we can see the walls as large shapes all around. The hole narrows more, and the walls become visible in the light—a shinier metal, one less damaged by space debris. The particles thin out too.

  Finally a wall looms ahead. The hole continues, so small that it seems like the probe can’t continue. The probe actually sends a laser pulse and gets back a measurement: the hole is six centimeters in diameter, more than enough for the equipment to go through.

  But when the probe reaches that narrow point, it slams into a barrier. The barrier isn’t visible. The probe runs several more readouts, all of them denying that the barrier is there.

  Then there’s a registered tug on the line: Karl trying to get the probe out. Several more tugs later, Karl and Turtle decide the probe’s stuck. They take even more readouts, and then shut it down, planning to use it later.

  The readouts tell us nothing except that the hole continues, six centimeters in diameter, for another two meters.

  “What the hell do you think that is?” Junior asks. His voice hasn’t finished its change yet, even though both Jypé and Junior swear he’s over eighteen.

  “Could be some kind of force field,” Squishy says.

  “In a vessel that old?” Turtle asks. “Not likely.”

  “How old is that?” Squishy’s entire body is tense. It’s clear now that she and Turtle have been fighting.

  “How old is that, Boss?” Turtle asks me.

  They all look at me. They know I have an idea. They know age is one of the reasons they’re here.

  I shrug. “That’s one of the things we’re going to confirm.”

  “Confirm.” Karl catches the word. “Confirm what? What do you know that we don’t?”

  “Let’s run the readouts before I answer that,” I say.

  “No.” Squishy crosses her arms. “Tell us.”

  Turtle gets up. She pushes two icons on the console beside me, and the suits’ technical readouts come up. She flashes forward, through numbers and diagrams and chemical symbols, to the conclusions.

  “Over five thousand years old.” Turtle doesn’t look at Squishy. “That’s what the boss isn’t telling us. This wreck is human-made, and it’s been here longer than humans have been in this section of space.”

  Karl stares at it, then he shakes his head. “Not possible. Nothing human-made would’ve survived to make it this far out. Too many gravity wells, too much debris.”

  “Five thousand years,” Jypé says.

  I let them talk. In their voices, in their argument, I hear the same argument that went through my head when I got my first readouts about the wreck.

  It’s Junior who stops the discussion. In his half-tenor, half-baritone way, he says, “C’mon, gang, think a little. That’s why the boss brought us out here. To confirm her suspicions.”

  “Or not,” I say.

  Everyone looks at me as if they’ve just remembered I’m there.

  “Wouldn’t it be better if we knew your suspicions?” Squishy asks.

  Karl is watching me, eyes slitted. It’s as if he’s seeing me for the first time.

  “No, it wouldn’t be better.” I speak softly. I make sure to have eye contact with each of them before I continue. “I don’t want you to use my scholarship—or lack thereof—as the basis for your assumptions.”

  “So should we even bother to discuss this with each other?” Squishy’s using that snide tone with me now. I don’t know what has her so upset, but I’m going to have to find out. If she doesn’t calm down soon, she’s not going near the wreck.

  “Sure,” I say.

  “All right.” She leans back, staring at the readouts still floating before us. “If this thing is five thousand
years old, human-made, and somehow it came to this spot at this time, then it can’t have a force field, at least not as we understand it.”

  “Or fake readouts like the probe found,” Jypé says.

  “Hell,” Turtle says. “It shouldn’t be here at all. Space debris should’ve pulverized it. That’s too much time. Too much distance.”

  “So what’s it doing here?” Karl asked.

  I shrug for the third and last time. “Let’s see if we can find out.”