The Diving Bundle: Six Diving Universe Novellas

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  I did not give up.

  And I should have.

  “You haven’t thought it through,” he says. “They tricked us.”

  I blink, frown, then get up. I walk the plate to the recycling unit. If I don’t eat that food, someone else should get the nutrients.

  “They didn’t trick me,” I say with my back to him. “I went to that violence pool of my own free will.”

  “Not the Quurzod,” he says. “The Xenth.”

  I turn. I didn’t deal with the Xenth. Most of the negotiations with the Xenth happened before I was brought into the discussions.

  I am suddenly cold.

  He’s looking at his hands. “They tricked all of us.”

  I walk back and sit down. I wait.

  He raises his head. Those lines, those sad eyes.

  “Think about it,” he says. “The imbalance of power that has existed there for centuries. Then, one day, a fleet of ships arrives, a fleet with more power than the Xenth can imagine. And we offer to help.”

  He twists his hands together. He has thought of this for a long time.

  “They ask the initial negotiators, they say—”

  “If we ask you to obliterate the Quurzod, you would do so?” I whisper this in Xenth. I have read the documentation. They did say that, and the initial negotiators wrote it off as a test.

  I believed the initial negotiators. After all, they’re the ones on the ground. They watch body language. They know the culture—or should know the culture. They’re the ones who understand what is going on.

  Besides, the Xenth’s question wasn’t unusual. Every culture we encounter wants to know our limits. Our limits are that we help, we do not engage.

  Unless we are engaged first.

  Coop quotes the line, ignoring my Xenth, which he does not understand. He is used to me muttering in other languages. I have done it as long as he has known me. “We refuse to destroy Quurzod. We spend time studying the situation, and then we offer our diplomatic services to the Xenth. But during the time we studied them, the Xenth studied us.”

  So buttoned up, so formal and proper. Hidden, too, but we should have expected that.

  Only that isn’t my mistake. I wasn’t with the initial group. The initial groups came from elsewhere in the Fleet, and somehow they overcame—or maybe never had—their aversion to the Xenth, and their hissing, sibilant-filled language.

  I, on the other hand, never trusted them.

  But I did trust my commanders. I trusted my orders, figuring they all knew the history, the facts, the personalities of both sides.

  “The Xenth knew,” Coop says. “They knew about the violence; they’ve suffered from it. They accused the Quurzod of massacres, not telling us that this was part of Quurzod culture, that they kill anyone—regardless of nationality—if they violate certain rules. The Xenth made sure we did not know those rules. They sent us in blind.”

  It is so easy to blame another culture. But I shake my head. I believe in mistakes before I believe in deviousness.

  “That can’t be true,” I say. “The Xenth left too much to chance.”

  “They left nothing to chance,” he says. “If we had actually figured out a way to negotiate with the Quurzod, the Xenth would have gained a solid border, some defined territory, an end to a long war. But if we did not find a way to negotiate, if we aggravated the Quurzod, the Quurzod would come after us. They would have engaged us—”

  “And the Xenth’s war would have become our war,” I say. He’s right. The logic is inescapable. It explains my unease. It explains the lack of preparation the Fleet’s diplomatic team gave to my team. The Fleet’s team was tricked.

  I don’t usually believe in the duplicity of other cultures, but this is too big a mistake to miss—at least on the part of the Xenth. And I understand the Fleet’s diplomacy well enough to know that had we understood the extreme violence of the Quurzod, no one would have sent my team in unprotected.

  “The Xenth’s war did become our war,” Coop says. “Only the rest of the Fleet fights it while we wait here.”

  “We don’t know if they’re fighting it,” I say.

  He stares at me. We know. They’re fighting it. And while the Quurzod are fierce on the ground, they are no match for the Fleet in space.

  The Quurzod will fight brilliantly, like Klaaynch did. And then the Fleet will destroy something important, destroy the Quurzod’s balance.

  And they will die within minutes, leaving the Xenth to fill the void.

  Without us, the Fleet will think they have done the right thing.

  I look at Coop. He smiles, just a little, hesitant, more the boy I remember than the man he is.

  “If you knew all of this,” I say, “why didn’t you tell me? Why did you let me stay locked in here, with the doubts and the memories?”

  “I suspected,” he says. “I had no proof. I just knew you, and your core, and how you would never, ever betray any of us, nor would you knowingly jeopardize children.”

  “They weren’t really children,” I say softly.

  “They weren’t yet adults either,” he said.

  I nod. I will always carry them—the twenty-three members of my team, and the dozen young friends of Klaaynch, and Klaaynch herself. They died for my curiosity, for my ever-solid core.

  “It would’ve been easier if you executed me,” I say softly.

  He puts his hands over mine. His hands are warm. He says, “Anyone who commands lives with these moments.”

  I shudder. “But I’m done. I’ve made my mistake. I should have known—”

  “No,” he says. “The mistake wasn’t yours. In fact, you have done the one thing that might help us.”

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “You learned street Quurzid.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know street Quurzid. I know as much street Quurzid as the first contact team knows when it goes into a new situation. A phrase here and there, nothing more.”

  “That’s not what your memory says. Your memory knows street Quurzid. You might not be able to speak it, but you have enough of it to help us.”

  I want to pull my hands from his. I never want to go near street Quurzid again.

  “How?” I ask.

  “When we get back, you can tell the Quurzod in all of their languages how we both got betrayed.”

  “And have them destroy the Xenth?” I am appalled.

  “Yes,” he says so softly that I can barely hear him. This is not the idealistic man I met on Brazza. This man is ruthless, utterly ruthless.

  “But the Quurzod, they’re horrible people,” I say.

  He studies me.

  I wait, but tap my finger ever so slightly. I have lost the gift of patience somewhere. It vanished in that desert.

  “You’re confusing their culture with ours,” he says.

  I flush. I used to say that to him. So young. So idealistic. I would say, One culture cannot judge another until they have a deep understanding of all parts of the culture.

  Including the language, he would say, his eyes sparkling.

  And the history, and the things that have developed that culture. Just because they have evolved a tradition that we disagree with doesn’t make our position right.

  “It’s not the same,” I say.

  “It is,” he says.

  “The Quurzod murder each other,” I say.

  “So do we,” he says. “You asked me to murder you.”

  “I asked you to execute me, according to our laws.”

  He waits. Dammit, he has the patience now.

  He waits.

  He has made his point.

  My shoulders slump. We know each other well enough that he understands my capitulation without my verbal acknowledgement.

  “I need you to master street Quurzid,” he says.

  “I don’t know enough of it,” I say.

  “Then do your best,” he says. “You need to become the expert in Quurzid. Then you need to figure out how t
o teach our people the language.”

  “Not just those on the Ivoire,” I say.

  “I want a plan of instruction, something recorded, so that all of the ships in the Fleet can learn it,” he says. “I want us to be ready as soon as someone hears our distress call. I want to be able to end the fighting around Ukhanda immediately.”

  His hands are still around mine. He shakes, just a little, as he says that.

  “You think we’ll get out of this, then?” I ask.

  “Are you asking if we’ll be becalmed forever?”

  I nod.

  “No,” he says.

  “But you put us on rations,” I say.

  “It might be a week,” he says. “It might be a year. I want to be prepared.”

  “The Quurzod damaged the anacapa drive, didn’t they?”

  “While we were engaging it,” he says. “It’ll take some time to figure out what exactly went wrong. That’s why I need you.”

  “Me?”

  He nods, and his hands tighten around mine. “I need you to figure out what’s wrong with the communications array. I’m convinced our distress signals aren’t getting through.

  I flush, then let out a small breath. “You trust me to get back to work?”

  His gaze meets mine. “Mae,” he says, “I’ve trusted you all along.”

  He has. He’s been the only one. I didn’t even trust myself.

  I bow my head, stunned at his faith in me. Stunned that I still have a future.

  He stands, puts his hands on my shoulder, and kisses the top of my head.

  “Welcome back,” he whispers.

  I lean into him for just a moment.

  “It’s good to be back,” I say, with more relief than I expected, and resist the urge to add, You have no idea how good it is.

  Because I have a hunch he does know, and that’s why he didn’t leave me behind.

  Because I am still part of the ship. A necessary part of the ship.

  And you never abandon the necessities. No matter how difficult it is to retrieve them.

  “Becalmed” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch was first published in Asimov’s SF Magazine, April/May, 2011.

  BECOMING ONE WITH THE GHOSTS

  THEY LANDED SMOOTHLY, which surprised the hell out of Coop. The Ivoire had suffered more damage than he ever could have imagined, and yet the venerable old craft had gotten them here—all five hundred of them, mostly in one piece.

  For a brief moment, he bowed his head. He took a deep breath and let a shudder run through him—the only emotion he’d allowed himself in more than a week.

  Then he raised his head and looked.

  The walls had full screens, top to bottom, just like he’d ordered. It didn’t matter much when the Ivoire transitioned, but now that the ship had arrived at Sector Base V, the walls told him a lot.

  A lot that he didn’t understand.

  The Ivoire had landed inside the base, just like usual. The ship stood on the repair deck, just like it was supposed to.

  The base was cavernous. It had to be. Like the other ships of her class, the Ivoire was large. She comfortably housed five hundred people, providing family quarters, school, and recreation in addition to being a working battleship. Two ships the size of the Ivoire could fit into this base, with another partially assembled along the way.

  Not to mention the equipment, the specialized bays, the private working areas.

  The Sector Base was huge and impossible to process all at once.

  But what Coop could process looked wrong.

  For one thing, no one manned the equipment. Much of it looked like it wasn’t even turned on. The lights were dim or off completely. The workstations—the ones he could see in the half-light—looked like they’d suffered minor damage.

  But he didn’t know how they could have. Like all the Sector Bases, Sector Base V was over a mile underground in a heavily fortified area. No one could get in or out without the proper equipment.

  To his knowledge, no Sector Base had ever been attacked, not even in areas under siege. Granted, his knowledge wasn’t as vast as the history of the Fleet, but he knew how difficult it was to damage a Sector Base.

  Although it looked like someone had harmed this one. Because it had been fine a month ago.

  Before the battles with the Quurzod, he’d brought the Ivoire in for its final systems check and repair. He had known that he wouldn’t get another full-scale repair for a year, maybe more. Particularly if the Fleet conquered the Quurzod and moved on, like planned. Then the Ivoire, and the other ships in the Fleet wouldn’t get the full-scale treatment for five years. It would take that long to build Sector Base W, at the edges of the new sector of space.

  He hadn’t planned on ever returning here.

  He certainly hadn’t planned on returning here in defeat.

  Or what felt like defeat.

  And now the base looked wrong.

  “You sure we’re seeing Sector Base V?” he asked his First Officer Dix Pompiano. Dix was tall and thin, almost too tall for a bridge command. Yet he could bend himself as if he were made of string, and fit into the smallest of places.

  Like his command post. Dix insisted on the station farthest from Coop, in case the bridge got hit. Dix figured that if as much distance as possible separated them, one of them would survive.

  Coop had always figured if the bridge got hit, the entire vessel would disappear. The anacapa drive—small as it was—was located on the bridge itself. If the drive took a direct hit, then the drive’s protections would fail. Half the ship would be in this dimension, half in another—if they were lucky. If they weren’t, the entire thing might explode.

  Maybe it was the half-and-half dimensions that made Dix want to stay separate from Coop. They’d never discussed it, and they weren’t about to now.

  “It sure as hell doesn’t look like Sector Base V,” Dix said. “But the readings say it is.”

  It looked like Sector Base V to Coop. He recognized some of the specialized equipment, built with parts of the indigenous rock.

  “We’re in the right point in space,” said Anita Tren. She stood at her post, even though her built-in chair brushed against her backside. She was small, so small that she had to boost herself into that chair. On good days, she would kid that she needed to stand so that she could be closer to her board.

  “Have you confirmed that we’re under Venice City?” Coop asked.

  Venice City, the latest settlement. “Latest” was technically accurate, but the location, on the most remote planet in this sector, had been settled fifty years before Coop was born. At his first visit here, on his tenth birthday, he had thought the city old.

  His father had laughed at that, telling Coop there were places in this sector that had been colonized for thousands of years. Human habitation, his father said, although no one knew where those humans had originated.

  The Fleet, everyone knew, originally came from Earth, but so long ago that no one alive had seen the home planet or even the home solar system. Earth was as much a myth as the Fleet itself, something rare and special and lost to time.

  As a young man, Coop had toyed with the idea of going back there. He thought of building a ship, begging, borrowing (hell, stealing) an anacapa drive, and plotting the trip back.

  But ultimately, he feared disappointment. He’d seen too many legendary parts of space already and they rarely lived up to the billing they’d gotten.

  He liked the Earth of his imagination. He didn’t want to see anyone or anything spoil it.

  Like they had spoiled Venice City. When he’d heard that the settlement was named for an old Earth city that had disappeared into the ocean—an ancient city of canals and tall stone buildings—he had expected the same here.

  Instead, he found a haphazard collection of buildings perched in a dry valley, one that got so hot in its summer than he thought he would die. Later, his father had explained to a disappointed Coop that the name had come from a joke, a conversation among the
settlement’s inhabitants as the place took shape.

  What’s the official name going to be?

  Not Death Valley. Names can be prophetic.

  Hell, then we probably should call it Venice City. Maybe an ocean will find us then.

  Coop never found that funny. Just like he didn’t find this funny.

  The base looked dimmer than usual. The equipment seemed smaller in the emptiness. Some lights were on, but not many. And the bulk of the base disappeared into the darkness.

  “Is something wrong with the screens then?” Coop asked Yash Zerlengo, his onsite engineer.

  She had left her station. She had walked up to the nearest wall screen and was investigating it with her handheld, as well as with the fingertips of her left hand.

  She was Coop’s height, broad shouldered, a former athlete raised planetside, which was unusual in the Fleet. But she had her family’s knack for technology. She knew how to repair anything, how to build most things, and seemed to have a sixth sense about anything technical.

  “I’m not reading any problems. These images are coming from the ship’s exterior just like they should be,” she said.

  Coop frowned and wished, not for the first time, that the original Fleet engineers had thought it proper to build portals into the bridge. He would like to do a visual comparison of what he saw on the wall screens with what he saw out the portal.

  But he would have to leave the bridge to do that.

  So he snapped his finger at the most junior officer on deck, Kjersti Perkins. She didn’t even have to be told what he wanted. She nodded and exited.

  Perkins would have to walk three-tenths of a mile just to get to the nearest portal. The bridge was in the nose of the ship, completely protected by hull. The original engineers had thought the portals were for tourists, and didn’t insert any until the ship widened into its residential and business wings.

  But Coop couldn’t just worry about what was outside the ship. He also had to worry about what was inside the ship.

  “Give me updated damage reports,” he said.