Diving into the Wreck - [Diving Universe 01]

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  It’s my turn to frown.

  “She convinced me on that first dive into the Dignity Vessel that she knew a lot about stealth tech. I wanted that expertise,” I say.

  “And now?”

  I shake my head. “I guess I expected more from her. I expected her to find a way to destroy the tech only.”

  “She hasn’t done that?” Odette says.

  “She won’t, not without experimentation,” I say.

  Odette nods. “And you won’t allow the experiments.”

  “Would you?”

  She studies me for a moment. Then she says, “No.”

  We’re both quiet. I’m about to head to my berth—alone—when she says, “I think you should send her back where you found her.”

  I sigh. I can feel my own reluctance. I think about it for a moment and realize where it’s coming from.

  “No,” I say. “She stays. She’s as determined as I am to destroy the Dignity Vessel.”

  “But you can’t trust her,” Odette says.

  “I can trust her on that,” I say. I nod to Odette and start down the corridor, thinking the conversation is over.

  But Odette follows me and grabs my arm. “You’re giving her too much credit.”

  “If I fail, what does it matter?” I ask.

  “You haven’t thought about this, have you? Your failure? What’s the best way to guarantee it?”

  “Not go to the Dignity Vessel,” I say, half seriously.

  “Make sure the bomb doesn’t work at all,” Odette says. “Or make sure it detonates early.”

  Which would kill me. I can’t imagine Squishy killing me. But then, I couldn’t imagine Squishy leaving the team years ago either.

  I feel cold. “What do you suggest?”

  “Let her work on her bomb,” Odette says. “Let her think she’s part of this. But let me get you something big, something that’ll take out the entire ship.”

  “You know where to get a bomb like that?” I ask.

  “I didn’t always wreck dive,” she says. “I worked salvage in my early days.”

  “With Squishy?” I ask.

  “Before Squishy,” she says. “But I still have a lot of friends who salvage.”

  “You mean full destruction salvage,” I say.

  She nods.

  Full destruction salvage works like this: The divers go in and strip the ship of its valuables. They also take important parts, like engine parts and computer chips. Sometimes they take things like screens or certain types of exterior material, particularly if the ship is made of expensive components. Then the divers blow the ship up. They don’t just destroy the ship. They obliterate it. Unless you arrive in the area shortly after the explosion, you have no idea anything even happened in that region of space.

  I stare at Odette “I didn’t know that about you.”

  She shrugs. “I made a lot of money. Then we found a beautiful old ship, one of the loveliest things I’d ever seen. Everything was carved and molded. It was stunning. I tried to buy it from my friends, but they wouldn’t hear of it.”

  She looks down the corridor, but this time I know she’s not checking to make sure we’re alone. This time, she’s seeing that old wreck, the one she thought was so lovely.

  “I cried when we blew it up,” she says.

  She turns back toward me.

  “There isn’t a day that goes by without me thinking of that ship.” She gives me a half smile. “I often wonder if I could have done something else to save it. I’ve never seen another one like it. It was someone’s baby, and we destroyed it.”

  She shakes her head.

  “That’s when you stopped working salvage,” I say.

  “Yeah,” she says. “But I’ve kept my connections. I can get us something that will obliterate that Dignity Vessel.”

  I study her. She’s serious.

  “We’re going to need weapons too,” I say.

  “I figured as much,” she says. “Have you ever used a weapon on a dive before?”

  “No,” I say. “But I’ve been prepared to.”

  Her expression tells me being prepared to use a weapon and using that weapon are not the same thing.

  But I know that. And she doesn’t insult my intelligence by reminding me of it.

  “You’re going to need guards,” she says.

  “Guards?” I ask.

  “People to flank you when you go in. You’re going to need a team to watch your back. Preferably someone who has fired a weapon before.”

  “Like you,” I say.

  “Like me,” she says. “And Hurst.”

  “Sounds like a good team to me,” I say.

  She can sense that I’m about to leave again. She takes my arm. “There are a lot of logistics, Boss,” she says.

  “I know,” I say.

  “No, you don’t,” she says. “When you blow a ship, you don’t want to be near it. You don’t want to be caught destroying it.”

  I guess I knew that, but I hadn’t thought it through. It makes sense. Still, I taunt her a little. “Even if you obliterate it?”

  “Especially if you obliterate it,” she says. “Especially then.”

  ~ * ~

  THIRTY-FOUR

  I

  t takes us weeks to put all the pieces together. Odette contacts her friends and suddenly we have weapons. She tells me we have our bomb as well, but I do not ask where it is.

  I research everything that I can, from the military vessels Hurst saw (their maximum crew complement is ten) to the command vessel. None of the images of command vessels I show Hurst are the one he saw, but we can’t find an image of that ship. For all we know, it’s a new model. At least we have a general size. I still can’t figure out what its mission was, but I at least know how many people we might be facing.

  I even visit the rental ship, The Seeker, and investigate its scanning equipment myself. It’s a primitive version of the Business. We won’t need to get nearly as close to the Dignity Vessel as The Seeker did to do a proper scan. We might even be able to scan the military vessels, particularly before they know we’re there.

  Squishy works on her bomb too, something delicate and sophisticated, something—she tells me—that will take out the stealth tech only, leaving the Dignity Vessel intact.

  She thinks that pleases me, and it might have, years ago. But I want the Dignity Vessel all gone. I don’t tell her this. I’ve decided to use Odette’s weapon, but I tell no one that.

  Not even Odette.

  In the last week, I have become obsessed with the actual mission itself. How we’ll get in, how we’ll distract the military, how we’ll buy ourselves enough time.

  I also want to make sure we don’t take anyone else out when we obliterate the Dignity Vessel. While I’m okay with a charge of destroying imperial property, I don’t want to be charged with murder.

  Hurst becomes my primary tactician. He’s flown combat missions, and as Odette reminded me, this is a combat mission.

  In some ways, this is the first step toward war.

  All the way along, people remind me of that. Of the huge step I’m taking. Of the risks involved.

  I pretend to care. Sometimes I mouth political slogans—the Empire has gotten too big since the Colonnade Wars; too much power in one place creates a great danger; stealth tech doesn’t belong to anyone except the ancients who knew how to use it. But mostly, I’m not thinking of politics.

  Mostly, I’m thinking about my father.

  I see his face—not just the man who recently betrayed me, the one whose face has become mostly planes and angles accented by silvering hair, but also the face of the man who held me close outside of the Room, who put his hand over the crack in my helmet and urged whoever was with us to get us out of there quickly.

  I try to remember the man from my childhood, not just the man who grabbed me when I left the Room, but the man who took me and my mother on that trip, who let us go into the Room alone.

  I cannot see that man
’s face. It’s as if he doesn’t quite exist. He’s more of a sense than a person, or maybe a construct, someone I want him to be rather than who he was.

  But the man I can see clearly, besides the one who traveled with us to the Room, is the one who came to my grandparents’ house on that last visit.

  She’s always angry, my grandmother said to him that day. She’s sullen and sharp-tongued and not very nice at all.

  My father answered, but I didn’t hear what he said.

  Whatever it was, my grandmother didn’t like it. She’s your child. There’s nothing of my daughter in her. Find her someplace else to go. We don’t want her here.

  I have no other place for her, my father said. You agreed to take her in.

  When we thought she’d be normal, my grandmother said.

  Normal. Whatever that meant.

  Those raised voices caught my attention, and I slipped out of my room. I stood at the top of the stairs, waiting for my father to defend me.

  I have no idea what I wanted him to say, only that I wanted him to say something. Something about me. Something that showed he cared. Or at least understood.

  What he did say was, You signed a legal agreement, saying you would care for her until she came of age.

  We want out, my grandmother said. We’re too old to take care of a child, particularly one as troubled as she is.

  To this day, I do not know what those troubles were. I performed well in school. I had friends. Yes, I talked back to my grandparents, but I followed their rules. I lived as quietly in their house as I could.

  They just expected me to be like my mother, and clearly, I was nothing like her. Maybe I had been my father’s daughter.

  Or maybe I was a desperate, lonely child who had never come to terms with her mother’s horrible death.

  A death I had witnessed.

  A death no one else wanted to talk about.

  I can’t take her with me, my father said. She’d just get in the way.

  And that was the moment it all ended for me. Any idea of family, of love, of caring.

  She’d just get in the way.

  We thought she’d be normal.

  I went back into my room and packed what few things I had. I took the money I had earned through odd jobs, and I sat on the edge of the bed, waiting for someone to come talk to me.

  But my father left without a word. My grandmother didn’t come upstairs. Finally, I left my packed bag near the bed and went down.

  Is Dad coming back? I asked.

  Eventually, my grandmother said.

  Tonight? I asked.

  No, she said.

  My heart twisted. I don’t know if she lied. I’ll never know. Later, I realized it was just like her. My anger was often provoked by her harsh words, her insensitivity. Sometimes I think she liked to poke at me to get the response she expected, something harsh or sullen or just plain mean, from me.

  I’d like to see him, I said.

  Well, she said, you missed your chance.

  It seems I always missed my chance with my father. Or maybe I never really had one.

  I left that night, and I never came back. For years, my family had no idea where I was. Odette was the one who convinced me I had to let them know I wasn’t dead, although I’m still not sure why. I wish I hadn’t now.

  I wish I had truly let them go.

  I know my decision to destroy the Dignity Vessel, as high-minded as I make it sound, is about my father. I want him to pay. Not just for ignoring me, although there’s a part of me—the young part, the girl who stood at the top of those stairs—who does want him to pay for that.

  No, what I really want him to pay for is my mother’s death.

  And Karl’s.

  ~ * ~

  THIRTY-FIVE

  W

  e approach the wreck in stealth mode: lights and communications array off, sensors on alert for the military ships around the Dignity Vessel. I’ve never traveled in a convoy before, but I am doing so now. In addition to the Business, we have rented The Seeker again, and one other ship, the Space King.

  The Seeker is a compact vessel that has maneuverability and some sophisticated systems. The Space King is a pleasure ship, designed for short luxurious travel from one part of the system to the other.

  Mikk and Jennifer pilot The Seeker. They have their rented dive equipment, plus some salvage supplies. Turtle, Davida, and Bria are on the Space King, in the finest clothing we can afford. Their diving equipment is in storage on the Business; I doubt they’ll have any use for it.

  But they do have weapons.

  We all do.

  And I’ve insisted that we learn how to use them.

  Hurst pilots the Business. When he and Odette escort me onto the Dignity Vessel, Roderick will pilot the ship. Tamaz and Squishy will remain on board with him. Tamaz’s only job is to guard Squishy—something Squishy does not know.

  Nor does she know that I will not be using the bomb she’s developed. I’ve decided to use the more powerful explosive Odette acquired at great expense.

  I’ve done some research myself, and while I don’t understand the fledgling science of ancient stealth tech (not that the Empire has let much information out about it), I do know a bit about explosives.

  The Dignity Vessel is old and large. The metal hull, with its rivets and its dents, is fragile compared with modern ships. But its very size makes it difficult to destroy completely.

  That, more than anything, made me decide to go with Odette’s explosive. Hers is designed to obliterate. Squishy’s is targeted to the cockpit, designed to destroy the stealth tech and little else.

  We spoke of it briefly when she finished. Apparently I had an odd expression on my face when she talked about the device’s subtleties.

  I thought you’d be pleased, Boss, she said. You don’t like destroying historic things.

  I don’t. If I could think of a way to keep the Dignity Vessel intact, I would. But sometimes, you have to make sacrifices for the greater good.

  Or, at least, this is what I tell myself.

  As we approach, I can’t tell if what I’m feeling are understandable nerves, regrets, or a desire to abort the entire mission. I pilot, thinking that being hands-on will calm me.

  It does give me a chance to reflect: I actually think about how I would feel if we turned around right now and headed back to Longbow.

  I think I would be relieved in the short term.

  The long term would depend on a few things. If the military and my father’s people solve the mysteries of stealth tech and change the balance of power in the sector, then I will regret not taking advantage of this moment.

  If they never solve it, then I might be all right with the decision to turn around.

  Although once again, my father would continue to make a profit off death—my mother’s and Karl’s.

  Karl. He would stand beside me urging caution. But he would go into the Dignity Vessel at my side, like he did when we searched for Junior. Karl had no qualms about taking care of threats.

  And if he had had all the proper information, he would have seen my father as a threat.

  We pass a small area of space that I have secretly designated as the point of no return. My fingers don’t even hover over the navigation system. I pilot us forward as if I have no qualms at all.

  We are not turning back.

  The mission is about to begin.

  We have set up the mission in three parts. We designed the first part to separate the military ships from the Dignity Vessel. The second part sends me and my team into the Dignity Vessel, and the third part gets us out of the area before the explosion.

  Oddly enough, it’s the first part that makes me the most nervous.

  Perhaps because I have no control over it at all.

  When we reach the designated coordinates just past the point of no return, the Space King breaks away from our convoy. The Space King speeds away on a perpendicular course from us, its modern stealth mode still on.
>
  When it reaches another designated set of coordinates, it will modulate its speed and shut off its stealth mode. It will also create an echo in its sensors. The echo will show a different route for the Space King, a leisurely one that comes from a resort-heavy area some distance from here.