Diving into the Wreck - [Diving Universe 01]

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  The girl made a face, but she stayed behind.

  A few of the other children followed, until Squishy turned on them and glared.

  They ran back to the house, laughing. Apparently they had wanted that reaction.

  The air doesn’t buzz here. The only noise comes from the creaking furniture, and the breeze, rustling the leaves on the plants.

  I know so little about plants. I don’t know if these are native to Naha or if they are transplanted from Earth. Until I got here, I had no idea that plants could grow on buildings—or that people didn’t mind when the plants did.

  “Somehow,” I say to break the silence, “this isn’t where I would have imagined you.”

  “You’ve imagined me?” Squishy doesn’t turn around. She seems like Squishy and not like Squishy. The extra poundage on her is muscle, not fat, yet she doesn’t seem stronger to me. It seems like she softened, eased into life here, lost her edge.

  “I think about you a lot,” I say. “I should have listened to you.”

  “Yes,” she says. “You should have.”

  I sigh. This isn’t going to be easy. I knew that when I came. However, I didn’t expect Squishy to make it even harder.

  “Please,” I say. “Sit down. Let me tell you what happened.”

  Finally, she turns around. “You mean something’s happened since the Dignity Vessel.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I say. “Way too much.”

  ~ * ~

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  I

  tell Squishy everything. I leave nothing out.

  I tell her about my father, about Riya Trekov, about the Room of Lost Souls.

  She sits on a chair that matches the stick-woven couch. She has her hands folded in her lap, her legs crossed at the ankles. The breeze plays with her hair. She looks like a woman who is listening politely to a story that has nothing to do with her.

  Until I get to Karl.

  Then she closes her eyes.

  Just for a moment, but it’s long enough.

  “So now,” she says before I finish, “you want revenge.”

  Of course I want revenge. I dream of it sometimes, of going after my father, of shoving Riya Trekov into the Room of Lost Souls, then following her inside so that I can watch her die.

  Yes, I want revenge.

  But I’m smart enough to know I’ll never get it. Not really.

  “I want to stop them,” I say.

  “From taking others to the Room of Lost Souls?” she asks.

  “No,” I say. “I want to stop them from solving the mysteries of stealth tech.”

  Squishy’s hands tighten. She leans forward. I have her attention now.

  I tell her about the genetic markers. I tell her about the “designed” humans loose in the population. I tell her that the Empire now has several people who can work in stealth tech without dying.

  She lets out a small breath.

  “And,” she says as if this has been a conversation instead of a monologue, “they have working stealth tech.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “The Room.”

  “And the Dignity Vessel that I gave them,” she says.

  “That we gave them,” I say.

  She sighs. “What exactly do you want to do?”

  “I don’t want them to have a breakthrough,” I say. “If the Empire gets stealth tech, they’ll be able to conquer the Nine Planets Alliance within weeks. At first, the Alliance won’t even know who’s attacking them.”

  The Empire never made it to the Nine Planets in the last war. The distance was too far for the Empire to sustain. But the Colonnade Wars frightened the planets and they formed an alliance, planning to fight the Empire if it tried to overtake any of them.

  The Alliance has kept the Empire out of this part of the sector so far. But stealth tech would change everything. The Empire could defeat one part of the Alliance before it ever had a chance to send for help.

  “So give the Alliance some stealth tech,” Squishy says.

  “And people with markers? And a way to create those markers?” I roll my eyes. “You make it sound like there are Dignity Vessels all over the sector.”

  She just looks at me. I wonder if I’ve said something wrong. Finally, she sighs. “Why did you come to me?”

  “I want you to tell me my options,” I say.

  “You know your options,” she says. “You destroy that vessel.”

  “And the Room?” I ask.

  She looks at me for the longest time. “I’d need to see it,” she says.

  I swallow hard. I’m not going back there. I’m not going to go inside that Room ever again. I’m not going to look at the habitats or the docking areas or the station, looming out of the darkness.

  “You said you mapped it,” she says.

  I let out a breath.

  “I have a place we can view things. Did you record inside the Room itself?”

  “No,” I say. “But Karl did.”

  There isn’t much. The cameras on his suit quit about the time he died. Roderick and Mikk tried to recover the information.

  I didn’t help at all, and I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to look at the last minutes—the last few days—of Karl’s life.

  But I will, with Squishy.

  Because she’s right.

  I have to.

  Her setup is inside her medical practice. There are several rooms set up for holographic projection, some of which re-create patients on surgical tables. Apparently she uses this place to review what she or others have done.

  It reminds me of the lounge in the Business, only this setup is more efficient.

  Nothing else happens in these rooms except viewing. Viewing and learning and understanding.

  It takes a while to make my recordings compatible with her system. I let her worry about all of that. While she does it, I wander the practice, trying to figure out who Squishy is now.

  The practice itself is comfortable. Patients enter a waiting area that tailors itself just for them. When I walk inside that room, it becomes a replica of a space ship’s cockpit. The cockpit is generic—it has a fake star map outside its portals and the guidance equipment is out of date—but I’m instantly comfortable.

  The room takes information from my various chips and re-creates the environment I’m in the most often.

  As I stand there, not taking the pilot’s chair, the room seems to think I’m uncomfortable. A holographic list appears before me. A soft female voice tells me I can reprogram the room to one of these other places.

  One of them is a spaceport bar.

  Obviously, I’ve spent too much time on Longbow Station.

  I leave the waiting area and investigate the examination rooms. They’re as patient-specific as the waiting area. Because I haven’t logged in, the rooms want to know if I’m a visitor, a family member, or a patient.

  I don’t answer.

  I back out quickly and wander the corridors. The private areas are locked.

  No one else is here, except for me and Squishy.

  So I go back to the viewing area.

  Squishy is still fiddling with the machinery. I lean against the wall and wait.

  This woman is different from the one who left the Business years ago. The weight isn’t the only thing that’s changed. The military posture is gone as well.

  I understand the medical practice—she has found a new way to expiate all her guilt from those deaths—but I don’t understand the children.

  I asked her about them as we walked down to the village.

  She shrugged. Then when I pressed her for an answer, she said, “Everyone needs a place to go.”

  “That girl, the one who got you,” I said, “she’s clearly family.”

  Squishy gave me a sideways look—one I couldn’t read.

  “Oh,” she said softly. “They’re all family.”

  And she wouldn’t say anything else.

  Now she stands, puts a hand on her back like it hurts her, and turns around. “Got it,
” she says.

  I take a deep breath. I’m not sure I want to see this.

  “You can leave, you know,” she says.

  But I can’t. She needs me to explain what she’s seeing. She needs context, and only I can provide it.

  The station looks small. Nothing we recorded shows the vastness of the place, the sense of emptiness that we all felt when we first examined it.

  Not even the Business, locked into one of the docking rings, gives it a real sense of perspective.

  At first, Squishy and I discuss size, measurements—both the ones that my team took when it arrived and the ones my father claimed he had.

  I explain again that my father’s information isn’t trustworthy, that he has lied to me all along.

  But Squishy waves her hand to silence me.

  “We can download more information when we need it,” she says. “Others have been to the Room as well.”

  We. I’m not sure how I feel about the word “we.” I don’t want us both to investigate anything. I just want her help repairing the damage I’ve already done.

  I want to know my options.

  Squishy is acting like we have a mission.

  For three nights, we examine the footage of the Room. Fortunately, Squishy has turned down the audio. Karl does start to talk about twelve hours in, speculating, wondering if we can find him or if he’s entered another dimension.

  Mikk listened to the audio on the way back, hoping to figure out what went wrong. He’s as haunted as I am, only he blames himself. I keep telling him that what happened is my fault. Odette forcefully told him that it’s my father’s fault, but Mikk blames himself.

  I do understand that. When you’re part of a mission, you believe that you have to do everything you can to make it go well.

  When it doesn’t go well, you review, make certain things will go well the next time. That’s part of our training.

  When things go horribly awry—when someone dies—then you review as well. Only you carry the burden of that death, and the what-ifs become even more powerful.

  You become more powerful. You imagine what would have happened if you spoke up a moment sooner, or tugged the line earlier, or refused to participate in the mission.

  You try to find the one way the mission would have worked, and of course, you can’t. Or worse, you can.

  I know what went wrong on the Dignity Vessel. I went wrong. So did Squishy. If I had told my divers it was a Dignity Vessel, they would have acted differently. If Squishy had told them that she worried the probe was stuck in an ancient stealth field, we never would have gotten near it.

  Divers died because we did things wrong.

  Jypé and Junior died.

  But Karl died because my father and Riya Trekov lied to us. Much as I want to review that and change the decision to go with them, I know I would have done nothing different. All of my actions were correct—except, maybe, going in after Karl. That was reckless.

  But I’m glad I did it.

  Mikk’s actions were right too. We just can’t convince him of it.

  And listening to Karl talk to himself in what, to him, was the last few days of his life, made Mikk feel even worse.

  Squishy says she doesn’t need to hear it, although I know she’s making herself a copy of the imagery. I have a hunch she will listen when I am not around.

  And I am grateful for that bit of sensitivity.

  There isn’t much to see. The others told me that Karl claimed he heard music and saw lights, but none of that shows up on the imagery. I do explain the music and lights to Squishy. I give her my theories.

  She pauses the imagery as I talk. “You heard sound?” she asks.

  I nod. “It’s almost unbearable in the Room. It sounded like a faint hum on the Dignity Vessel. I noticed it when we went to get Junior.”

  “Not before?”

  I can no longer remember what I heard and when. Junior has woven his way into my dreams. My nightmares, actually. I still see his face behind that clouded helmet. Sometimes he speaks to me. Sometimes I watch him age and can do nothing about it.

  Often I watch him try to free himself. I try to tell him that he can’t, that he’s stuck in time, but he won’t believe me.

  After a moment, I answer Squishy. “I don’t know when I first noticed it on the Dignity Vessel.”

  “That took a lot of thought,” she says with no sympathy at all.

  I shrug. “I could have told you after we found the body. But some of the details are gone now. I just know that the hum and the music are related, and I only hear them around ancient stealth tech.”

  She taps a finger against her chin and looks at the image in front of us. It hasn’t changed much as we watch. Sometimes Karl explored the edges of the Room. Sometimes he tried the door. But he could never leave, for reasons I can only guess at. Was the door in another dimension? Out of time with him? Or was there something else going on?

  I do know it was difficult for me to close that door after I pulled him out. Clearly, for whatever reason, it was impossible for him to open it.

  “Sound,” Squishy repeats as if she’s mulling the concept. “In all the time I worked on stealth tech, no one reported any sounds.”

  “Do you think that’s what was missing?” I ask.

  “Sound?”

  “Whatever the sound really is,” I say.

  “Clearly,” she says. “Because you’ve been inside one working stealth tech system and near a malfunctioning one, and both times you heard something unusual.”

  “But did I hear it because I can function in stealth tech?”

  “Karl heard it,” Squishy says.

  “When he was trapped inside of it,” I say. “But I heard it even outside the stealth tech. I heard it from the moment we arrived on the station.”

  She’s frowning at me. “You never asked if anyone else heard anything?”

  I shake my head.

  “That’s not like you, Boss,” she says, and that’s the first time our conversation feels like one of our conversations of old.

  “Nonsense,” I say. “You left because I hadn’t told you enough. Isn’t this just one more case of not saying anything?”

  “No,” she says slowly. “Because you connect the sound to the stealth tech, so you would have asked others about it. You didn’t.”

  “I didn’t make the connection until late,” I say.

  “Still,” she says. “After you got out of the Room, you would have said something.”

  I didn’t say much of anything when I got out of the Room. I was afraid if I said too much I would lose what small grip I had on my temper and go after my father and Riya.

  “It wasn’t a normal mission,” I say.

  “Clearly,” she says again.

  That’s a new habit of hers, and one I’m not sure I like. It’s a bit condescending. But it’s obvious that she’s been in charge here for a very long time. She’s been the one people have confided in, the one who told them how to take care of themselves, how to live their lives.

  On our missions, that had been my function, even though I listened to her and the other members of the team. Only now, she’s not acting like a team member.

  She’s acting like Rosealma Quintinia, the doctor in Vallevu, the woman I really don’t know.

  “I’m going to have to check my notes,” she says.

  “You kept notes?” I ask. “On stealth tech? They let you do that?”

  “They didn’t let me do anything,” she says. “I just did it. I had qualms from the beginning. I wanted to keep track of everything I learned, and I didn’t want it for their view only. I wanted to have the opportunity to think and speculate without those speculations becoming fact.”

  I have a hunch, from her tone, that too many of those speculations became fact anyway. Or at least played some role in the experimentations.

  “What do you think is important about the sound?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I think something i
s. But you’ve brought me so much information, I’m not sure where to start.”

  “Start?” Now I’m the one who is confused. “Start with what?”