Diving into the Wreck - [Diving Universe 01]

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  To the people here, she’s a nice woman, a good doctor, someone who cares for the children.

  And the children are the issue. Late one night, when I couldn’t sleep, I asked the owner about Squishy’s children. It wasn’t as abrupt as it sounds. The owner, a tall, slender woman who has a knack for listening, was doing an inventory—which mostly meant carrying a handheld and letting it examine each shelf.

  The work wasn’t engaging her, so she asked me questions: Who was I? Why was I visiting Rosealma? How long had it been since I’d seen her?

  I answered some questions truthfully. I told her that I ran my own business and that Squishy (although I said Rosealma) had once worked for me. I needed to get away after the sudden death of a colleague, and I realized that Squishy probably hadn’t heard the news.

  Rather than send her an impersonal message, I brought the news myself, as an excuse to travel here and see the Vallevu I had heard so much about.

  I don’t know if the owner believed me. But when it became clear that she wanted to know more than I was willing to tell her, I gradually shifted the conversation away from myself and onto Squishy.

  “She worked as a medic for me,” I said. “Yet I was surprised to see she had a private practice here.”

  “She’s a good doctor,” the owner said. “People love her. I got the sense she hated field medicine.”

  “She did,” I say, “because you can only work with what you’ve brought and what’s at hand.”

  The owner was quiet for a moment after that. I wasn’t sure if she was listening to her own memories or if she assumed I was stuck inside mine. Or maybe she was done asking me questions, having gleaned enough information to pass onto the locals about the strange friend of Rosealma’s who arrived in town unexpectedly.

  “The children surprised me too,” I said. “Some of them are too old to be Rosealma’s.”

  “They’re all hers,” the owner said. “She cares for them. She’s raising them.”

  “They can’t all be hers,” I said.

  The woman gave me a withering look. “Biologically, they’re not,” she said. “But Rosealma loves them as her own.”

  “Orphans, then?”

  She shrugged a shoulder and the conversation ended there. No matter how many times I tried to engage her, on how many future nights, I wasn’t able to.

  Now I’m hunched over my omelet, a cup of the best coffee I’ve had steaming beside my hand. The owner sits at the counter. She’s watching me, and I get the sense that she wants to ask me a question but doesn’t know how.

  “Go ahead,” I say tiredly. “Ask whatever you want.”

  She smiles slightly. Then she grabs two pieces of pie, puts some kind of cream on top, and brings them to the table. She keeps one for herself and gives the other to me.

  I’m not ready for it. I still have half an omelet to go.

  “They say you and Rosealma are working on a project together,” she says.

  I shrug. “I asked her to review information from our friend’s death.”

  “It’s more than that,” the owner says. “She’s searching for a replacement at the clinic. She wants to leave.”

  This news both startles me and doesn’t surprise me at all. Of course, Squishy hasn’t told me that. She is taking care of her business here, which is none of my concern. Until our discussion a few hours before, she thought she was leaving with me.

  She thought she wasn’t going to come back.

  “She’s not coming with me.” I finally finish the omelet. I set the plate to one side, but I don’t take the pie, not yet. I want the food to settle. Instead, I grab the coffee.

  “Good,” the owner says. “Because we can’t spare her.”

  “I would suppose doctors are hard to find here,” I say.

  “That’s not why,” she says. “We got by before; we could get by again.”

  “Then I don’t understand,” I say.

  “The families here are former military,” she says. “Vallevu isn’t a natural community. We were given this land and the money to build on it.”

  I freeze. I don’t want to be anywhere connected to the military. “After the Colonnade Wars?” I ask, trying to pinpoint this in time.

  She shakes her head. “We haven’t been here that long.”

  I wait, but she doesn’t say any more. Instead she picks at her own piece of pie.

  “How long?” I ask.

  “Technically,” she says, “I’m not allowed to talk about that.”

  I sigh.

  “But,” she adds, “I was twenty-five when I came here. I’m fifty now.”

  She gives me an odd smile, as if she’s begging me to understand something I’m only gelling glimmers of.

  “Are you one of the founders?” I ask.

  “Not quite,” she says. “A few people have been here longer than me. Maybe by five years or so.”

  “And Squ—Rosealma?”

  “She was invited, but she never came. Until a few years ago.”

  After she left the Dignity Vessel. The glimmer of understanding is finally beginning.

  I start, “So the people who retired here—”

  “Actually, no one retired here,” the owner says. “This was a base at first.”

  “A base,” I repeat. The housing doesn’t look like base housing. It’s too nice for that. “The Empire dropped quite a bit of money here.”

  Some nervousness must echo through my voice, because she smiles. “Relax,” she says. “The base closed long ago.”

  “But this is still imperial property,” I say.

  She shakes her head. “Abandoned and purchased legally by the families who live here.”

  “Who are former military.” I wrap my hands around my cup. The coffee is now cold. “I suppose I have enough information to figure this out, but I’m dense. I don’t know your name—”

  She starts to tell me, but I wave her off.

  “—and I don’t want to know. I can’t tell anyone if you broke confidentiality, and aside from your employees, we’re the only ones in the place. So tell me what I’m missing.”

  She gets up and takes the cup out of my hand. She pours out the remaining coffee. For a moment, I think she’s subtly telling me to leave. Then she grabs the coffeepot and pours me a refill.

  She brings the cup back to the table.

  “You don’t know the history of Naha, do you?” she asks.

  “I don’t know the history of a lot of things,” I say. I don’t know the history of any planets. I can barely handle the history of the sector, and then only vaguely. I need some details so that I know which ships should be where, when, and who was piloting them. But if the information didn’t affect surrounding space, it didn’t interest me.

  “We used to have a military base in orbit,” she says. “It was classified, so it doesn’t surprise me that you didn’t know. It was also hard to miss, since it was so large.”

  “And the families lived on the planet?” I ask. I know enough about military history to know that’s strange.

  “It was a science base. People used to speculate that they were making weapons up there.”

  “Were they?” I ask.

  She gives me that odd smile again. “That’s classified.”

  “I thought we dealt with that,” I say.

  “The kind of classified that could get me, a former military worker who lived on that base, in trouble.”

  “Oh,” I say. She is trying to tell me what she can without getting herself in too much trouble. I have to pay more attention. She’s giving me the information in an order that won’t get her in trouble but that will make her meaning clear.

  If I’m quick enough to catch on.

  “So,” I say after a moment, “people believed they were making weapons.”

  She nods.

  “And it was military scientists who worked up there,” I say.

  She nods again.

  “While their families were down here, for safety’s sake.
”

  “At first,” she says.

  “And then?” I ask.

  “What do you know about hazardous duty pay?” she asks.

  I hate elliptical conversations. They’re the opposite of what I believe. I believe in being blunt and honest and straightforward. This conversation is going to give me a headache before the night is through.

  “I know that hazardous duty pay is a great deal more than regular pay,” I say tentatively.

  “With bonuses should the soldier die in the line of that hazardous duty.”

  I blink.

  “It sometimes takes years to declare someone dead,” she adds.

  I’m frowning now. I have to put this together with—what? If you have a dead body, then it shouldn’t be hard to declare someone dead.

  But if you don’t . . .

  I let out a small breath. On the Business, all those years ago, Squishy said to me, Why do you think I like finding things that are lost? Because I’ve accidentally lost so many things.

  Things? Karl had asked her. He was in that conversation, as were Jypé and Junior. And me. Such ironies.

  And she answered him. Ships, people, materiel. You name it, I lost it trying to make it invisible to sensors.

  People. She said people.

  It sometimes takes years to declare someone dead.

  Particularly if they’ve been lost.

  “Rosealma was assigned to that military base, wasn’t she?” I ask.

  “Until her tour was up,” the owner says.

  I let out a breath. Squishy worked on stealth tech in orbit around this planet. And somehow, this community was tied to it all.

  “Then she left,” I say.

  “She didn’t have family,” the owner says.

  “Did you?” I ask.

  Her eyes narrow. She shakes her head. “I was given a medical discharge. I’m no longer combat worthy.”

  “May I ask why?” I ask.

  “I’m afraid of the dark,” she says softly.

  My gaze meets hers. She knows why I’m here. She knows what happened, maybe not to Karl, but to Jypé and Junior. She knows about the stealth tech.

  “You’re one of Rosealma’s good friends,” I say.

  She nods. “You’ve upset her.”

  “I’m sorry for that,” I say.

  “You asked about the children,” she says.

  Days ago, I wanted an answer, but now I don’t. “Yes.”

  “They’re hers. And mine. And everyone’s. We care for them.”

  “Where are their parents?” I ask.

  “Lost,” she whispers.

  Lost. Like ships and materiel. I shiver. “You made it sound like Rosealma was the only person who cares for them.”

  “The children love her best,” the owner says. “They would be devastated if something happens to her.”

  “So would I, I say. “Believe me, so would I.”

  ~ * ~

  THIRTY

  Y

  ou didn’t tell me this was a military base,” I say to Squishy the next evening. We are in the viewing area of her medical practice, where we’ve been the past few nights. Only on this night, there is no image of Karl’s surrounding us.

  For the first time, I feel like we’re alone.

  “It’s not,” Squishy says.

  “But it was,” I say. “It’s on imperial property.”

  “The families bought this land,” she says. “They’ve invested a fortune to clean it up.”

  “To clean up what?” I ask.

  Her lips thin. Then she smiles, as if she’s had a private joke with herself. “What does it matter if I tell you?” she says. “Of all people, you’re not going to say anything.”

  I feel my cheeks heat. Was that why the restaurant owner didn’t tell me much? She was afraid I would run to the authorities?

  I only know one person in Vallevu who ever did that, and it wasn’t me.

  “The families cleaned up everything legally,” she says.

  “Legally?” I ask.

  “They effectively sued to own this place,” she says. “Then when they got it, they scrubbed the record. In no way can the military reclaim this land. In fact, it should be off their books as well.”

  I frown. “Why?”

  “Because,” she says, a slight color building in her cheeks, “the families believe someday their loved ones will come back.”

  I feel a deep horror, something I thought I was past. The families here believe like the families did at the Room of Lost Souls. Someday their loved ones will return to them. Someday, their loved ones will come back.

  Only unlike the Room, where no one could stay for a long time, simply because of its location, these families remained at the site of their loved ones’ disappearance for years.

  “Shouldn’t they be in orbit instead of down here?” I ask.

  She looks at me sharply. “Diana talked to you,” she says.

  “I don’t know any Diana,” I say. And that’s true. I never let the owner of the restaurant—if, indeed, that was Diana—tell me her name.

  “Yeah,” Squishy says in a tone that implies she doesn’t believe me.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” I say.

  She nods. “They should be in orbit, yes. On the military science station. We had an entire wing for our work. And they should be waiting somewhere near it. Only it’s gone.”

  I saw many things in orbit when I approached Naha. There were a few obvious tourist resorts—places where people stayed so that they could get a lovely view of the planet without traveling too far from home—and a few other things that I’m sure were classified. But I didn’t see anything obviously military. I would have noticed, I’m sure.

  “Gone,” I repeat, just to make sure we’re being clear this time.

  “The military took the base apart. The equipment went other places. I’m not sure what happened to the parts of the base itself. I know some people thought it contaminated.” She shrugs. “This is all after my time.”

  “So they can’t stay in orbit, so they stay here.”

  “If you believe that someone can return from stealth tech—or whatever it was that we created—then yes, this is the second most logical place to be. The soldiers who took part, they knew their families were here. So they would come here. If they could ever come home.”

  It’s clear from the way she says that that she doesn’t believe they will ever return.

  “That’s how the families ended up with this place,” she says. “They were supposed to leave when their loved ones were declared legally dead, but they wouldn’t. A bunch of them wouldn’t even participate in the call to declare their loved ones dead. The military had to do it over their protests.”

  I stare at her. “There was a battle over Vallevu?”

  “Yes,” she says. “And in this case, the families won.”

  “The children,” I say. “They’re orphans of soldiers who were . . . lost?”

  Her face closes down again. “The children aren’t any of your business.”

  “Actually, they are,” I say. “They’re the reason you can’t go to that Dignity Vessel.”

  Her expression is flat. She doesn’t want me to see how she feels. But now I’m getting to know that expression, and I’ve come to realize she puts it on when she’s the most frightened, and the most upset.

  “I want to destroy that ship,” she says.

  “You can,” I say. “You build the bomb. I’ll place it.”

  “I’m going to place it,” she says.

  I shake my head. “You can’t. You don’t want those children to lose you too.”

  “I’ll be fine,” she says.

  She sounds like me at the Room. Or me just before going to the Dignity Vessel. All bravado and denial.

  But I don’t tell her that. Instead, I say, “Squishy, look. You can build the bomb. You can even come with me on the trip to the Dignity Vessel. You just can’t dive the wreck.”