Diving into the Wreck - [Diving Universe 01]

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “I want to go onto that wreck.”

  “Serve as my science officer and medic,” I say.

  She shakes her head.

  I’m getting irritated. She’s being stubborn—again. I don’t want her to be stubborn.

  “If we fail,” I say, “and we both die, then what? The Empire continues with its program. More family members will disappear. Or worse. The Empire will get stealth tech.”

  She raises her chin slightly. I know I have her attention now.

  “But if I go in,” I say, “and if I fail, then you’ll live to fight another day.”

  “I’ll just go in the next time on my own,” she says.

  “But I won’t be alive to see it,” I say. “Then it’ll be your choice.”

  “It’s not my choice now?” she asks.

  I shake my head. “It’s my choice. My mission. My father’s behind this, Squishy, and all he’s interested in is money. He sacrificed my mother to it.”

  “You said you don’t know that for sure,” she says.

  “You heard my story,” I say. “What do you think?”

  She looks away.

  “I saw you with those children,” I say. “They care about you. You’re different with them. Warmer.”

  “Nicer,” she says.

  I smile. “That too.” Then I let my smile fade. “Don’t you think that’s worth coming back for?”

  “Others can take care of them.”

  “But everyone tells me the children prefer you.”

  She stares at me. “I can come?” she asks.

  “If you swear to me you won’t dive the wreck,” I say.

  Her jaw clenches. She moves away from me. She walks around the furniture, then stares at the wall where we watched the images that Karl recorded.

  She’s clearly thinking about it. The question is, even if she agrees, can I trust her to keep her word?

  I don’t know the answer to that. But I do know that I need her. I don’t have the expertise to make weaponry. I suppose I could make some kind of bomb or buy something that might be effective. But I’m not sure it’ll work on the Dignity Vessel.

  The mysterious Dignity Vessel that is out of time and out of its proper region of space.

  In some ways, I am more superstitious about that ship than most people are about the Room. That ship seems almost magical to me, and because it does, it seems indestructible too.

  I need Squishy not just for her expertise, but for her common sense. If I were to tell her I thought that the ship was somehow immortal, she would laugh at me.

  She stops pacing. She glares at me as if I’ve participated in the discussion she’s been having with herself.

  “All right,” she says with barely contained anger. “I’ll take your conditions.”

  “I want you to swear to me you won’t go into that wreck,” I say. “Not for any reason.”

  She crosses her arms. For a moment, I think she won’t agree. Then she says, “I swear. I’ll stay out of the damn Dignity Vessel. And I’ll help you blow the fucking thing up.”

  ~ * ~

  THIRTY-ONE

  W

  e leave Vallevu three days later. It will take us a while to get to Longbow Station. That’s where I’ve left the rest of the team that dove the Room with me. They want their revenge on my father and Riya Trekov, and while I know that revenge isn’t always the best motive for something like this, right now I’ll take what I can get.

  On the trip to Longbow, Squishy starts her work. Right now, she’s just doing theory, but she will need some kind of scientific station, somewhere safe where she can do a few small experiments and build her bomb.

  Obviously she can’t do that on Longbow. She won’t work at Vallevu either—those people have suffered enough, she says. What she wants is a decommissioned military science vessel. Those things are designed with disaster in mind.

  The science workstation detaches from the main part of the ship, so if some experiment gets out of control, the crew can jettison the laboratory and send it into space.

  Only trying to find such a vessel would get us noticed.

  So instead, Squishy suggests that we modify the interior of one of the skips. She and an assistant (not me) will leave Longbow, take the skip out of the space owned by Longbow, and do their work.

  They’ll be within view of the station, but should anything happen to the skip, not close enough that an explosion will damage Longbow.

  It isn’t until she makes these conditions that the entire project becomes real to me. I want to blow up the Dignity Vessel, but I don’t want anyone harmed in the process. The fact that Squishy’s work might destroy even a small section of Longbow terrifies me.

  We are half a day away when I finally talk with Squishy about this. We’re having a meal I prepared in the Business’s galley. Usually I don’t cook for anyone else. If someone else is on the ship, I either hire a cook or, if I have a large team, I make sure someone on that team doubles as chef.

  I never thought Squishy would come back with me, so I didn’t hire anyone to take care of us. She has to eat my food which, although it lacks sophistication, is at least filling.

  This afternoon I serve the leftover soup I made from some meat (whose name I forgot) from Naha, and cornbread that I made fresh. I can bake, which often gets me through long trips on the Business, but I can’t do much else.

  Squishy eats like a former prisoner, hunched over her food, one arm circling it. She claims it comes from eating rapidly with others on military vessels. Since I’ve never served, I don’t know. I do know that Karl, who had also been military, had eaten the same way.

  Still I find it a disconcerting habit. I keep the gravity at Earth normal on the Business, so eating is never an issue. I lean my chair against the galley’s wall, hold my bowl against my stomach, and eat slowly. I will have my piece of cornbread for dessert.

  I don’t know how to approach her about her work. Finally, I just decide to be honest.

  “I’m having second thoughts,” I say.

  “I knew you would.” She doesn’t look up at me. She keeps her bowl close to her chest, the spoon scraping against the bowl’s sides. “What part worries you? Or are we just going to abandon the whole idea?”

  Her moods have fluctuated since she got on board the ship. Some of it I understood: She got instantly homesick for Vallevu and her life there. But some of it I did not. Every time she goes into the cabin we set aside for her research, she stops at the door, as if she is the one having second thoughts, not me. Sometimes she comes out calm, and sometimes she emerges furious.

  Once she left the cabin in tears.

  “We’re not going to abandon the whole idea,” I say. No matter how many qualms I have, I cannot stomach the idea of the Empire having stealth tech. “I just need to know what you’re doing.”

  “You’re having second thoughts about me, then,” she says, setting her bowl aside. It’s completely clean, as if no soup has been inside it at all.

  She’s making me defensive. I forgot how good she is at that. “No, not exactly,” I say, and then realize I lost control of the conversation the moment I said “second thoughts.”

  So I decide to try another tack.

  “When you said you need to experiment, I thought I understood. Then you said that you can’t do it on Longbow, and I got concerned. And when you mentioned that the skip might blow up—”

  “You’ve never built a bomb,” she says.

  That’s true enough. I’ve never built anything large, and certainly not anything large and destructive.

  “No, I haven’t,” I say. “Before I went to see you, I figured I would simply buy one for this project.”

  My language is so clean, as if I’m discussing a dive or a new piece of equipment.

  “If we were facing a regular ship, you could have done that,” she says. “But we’re not. The very thing that brought you to me is why I need to be as far from Longbow as I can and work.”

  “Obviously, I
don’t understand,” I say.

  She gets up and cuts herself a large piece of cornbread. She doesn’t put it on a plate, but instead cups it in one hand, using the other to break pieces off of it.

  “I have to make sure the bomb works,” she says, “not just in theory, but in practice.”

  I let out a small breath. Whatever I had expected her to say, it wasn’t that. “That’s not possible,” I say. “We don’t have any real stealth tech.”

  “I know,” she says. “And if my research determines that we can use a conventional explosive, then I won’t need to work on the skip. But if we can’t, then I’m going to need to see how certain types of matter interact with each other.”

  I grab her bowl and place it in the washer. I add mine to that, then cut myself a large piece of cornbread, place it on a plate, and grab a fork. I start some coffee, less because I want it than because I want the time to think about what she just said.

  “I thought you can’t replicate stealth tech,” I say.

  “We did some bottle experiments,” she says. “They didn’t work, but we didn’t know as much as I do now. I want to try one of those, and see what happens.”

  “No,” I say.

  “No?” She sounds shocked.

  “You’re not doing any kind of experimentation. The only time you detonate anything is when we get to the Dignity Vessel.”

  “I thought you said I can’t go in.”

  “You can’t. You’ll teach me what to do,” I say.

  She shakes her head. That very movement makes me angry.

  “You’re not replicating stealth tech in even the smallest way inside my skip,” I say. “You’re not experimenting with anything. You and I are going to decide on the most effective possible bomb and we are going to use it. Once. On that vessel. There will be no test run. There will be no experimenting.”

  Her cheeks are red. “But it might not work,” she says.

  “That’s the risk we’re taking. You’re here to figure out what we need.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to do,” she says.

  “Not,” I continue, “as a scientist. As a diver, an adventurer, and a human being who wants this stuff out of our lives.”

  “If that Dignity Vessel is on a base somewhere,” she says, “then we could take out hundreds of innocent lives.”

  “It’s not on a base,” I say.

  She pauses, pieces of cornbread dripping from one hand into the other. She looks like a little girl, making a mess because she doesn’t know how to properly eat that particular food.

  “It’s not?” she asks. “How are they working on it, then?”

  “I’m not sure they are yet,” I say. “All I know is that they’ve set up a guard.”

  “That’s it?”

  I shrug. I’ve sent Mikk and part of the team to check it out from a distance. They were on that mission while I came to Naha to see Squishy.

  “I’ll know when we get back,” I say.

  I told Mikk not to get too close. If he got caught, he could say he was traveling nearby and had no idea there was something important in that part of space. He was going to treat it as if he were taking a bunch of people on a tourist dive (not that my team would ever be tourists) and let the Empire think he was just a bit ignorant.

  I hope it worked.

  “See why I’m not too worried about blowing up the ship?” I ask. “It’s in the middle of nowhere.”

  “I’d have to test—”

  “No,” I say. “You can read about Dignity Vessels. I gave you the numbers for the component parts. You know what the ship is made of. We destroy it, and most likely, we’ll destroy the stealth tech.”

  “Most likely,” she says, and takes a bite of cornbread.

  I am simply repeating her argument back to her, but now she doesn’t sound convinced.

  “You were worried,” she says, “that we’d create an even larger stealth tech field, even with the ship gone. Aren’t you still worried about that?”

  Of course I am. I’d be foolish not to worry about it. “Of course I’m still worried about it, Squishy,” I say.

  “If I do a bottle experiment, I might figure out—”

  “No,” I say. “First of all, you could die. Second, you could open a rift near Longbow. And third, if we do create something nasty, we’ll start rumors and warn people away from that part of space.”

  “If we survive,” she says.

  I nod. “If we survive.”

  ~ * ~

  THIRTY-TWO

  I

  am relieved to see Longbow. I am even more relieved to find that Mikk and the team have returned from their mission to the Dignity Vessel intact. Their little ruse worked.

  We meet in a small restaurant that I have rented for the evening. The proprietor has set out a full meal for us—meats, cheeses, breads, fruits and vegetables grown in one of Longbow’s hydroponic gardens—and he has left us alone. That too is by my request. He’ll return in two hours, serve desserts, and then usher us outside.

  I don’t mind. It’s the privacy I’m after, not the food.

  The team is already waiting for me. They’re milling around the long table in the middle of the restaurant. Everything here is done to look authentically Old Earth—wooden tables, wooden floors, wooden walls, big thick wooden signs, and a wooden bar off to one side.

  None of the wood is real, of course, and I have no way to judge if any restaurant on Old Earth ever looked like this. But it has always felt authentic to me.

  The food sits in the center of the long table on thick white plates. The same spread appears on both sides of the table, so things don’t have to be passed very far.

  Most everyone already holds a plate, loaded with a different variety of snacks. Full glasses of various liquids sit near different spots on the table where people have already staked their claim.

  There are only two spots left, one at the head of the table and the other to the right of the head.

  Apparently Squishy and I have assigned seating. I glance at Mikk. He smiles at me. He’s done this. He has really stepped into a leadership role since Karl died, and I appreciate it.

  Mikk sets his glass to the left of the head of the table. Then he puts his plate down. Everyone else comes to the table as well.

  Odette takes the foot. Her presence surprises me. She was so angry after we dropped my father and Riya Trekov off the Business that I thought she wouldn’t work with me again.

  As we all thread to the table, there’s only one person I don’t recognize. She’s too thin. Her hair is so short I can’t tell its color.

  It’s not until she stops beside me that I realize who I’m looking at.

  Turtle.

  “Turtle,” I say, and hug her. She feels brittle. “I thought I’d never see you again.”

  She hugs me briefly, then steps back. She looks to my side, her gaze finding Squishy.

  “I contacted her,” Squishy says. “Just before we left Vallevu.”

  “I couldn’t believe I heard from you.” Turtle tentatively touches Squishy’s arm. “Thanks for letting me know about Karl.”

  Squishy moves away ever so delicately.

  “You told her in a communication?” I ask. I can’t believe the insensitivity of that. Karl and Turtle were friends. I figure that such news is always better told in person.

  “I told her to meet us here and to find some of your divers,” Squishy says to me. “They’d let her know what happened.”

  Turtle gives Squishy another longing look, and then steps back. “I’m so sorry about Karl,” Turtle says to me. “It sounds awful.”

  I remember the feel of him in my suited arms. How I could close my arms around him and gently tug him backwards, getting no resistance at all. How, in that moment, I knew that the Karl was gone, even though his body remained.

  “It’s probably worse because Karl would be alive if it weren’t for her dad,” Mikk says. “If Boss hadn’t stopped me, I would have killed the bastard. H
ell, I’m still not sure we shouldn’t.”

  I give Mikk a sideways look—a silent “not now.”

  He shrugs.

  Turtle stays close to my side. She’s still peering at Squishy.

  “You look different,” Turtle says to Squishy.

  “Boss says I’m nicer now,” Squishy says. Then she smiles. “I’ll work on fixing that.”