Asimov's SF, April-May 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Instead, I talk about the history.

  “We are not looking for items to resell,” I say, although everyone probably knows that. After all, they've signed on to dive with me and Karl, not some salvage divers or treasure hunters. “We're looking for information—anything that will tell us about the station, about who built it, how it came to be here—why it's out here at all so far away from everything—and what its purpose actually is.”

  “Do we know if the Room is an integral part of the station?” asks Roderick. He's slight but broad-shouldered, a landbound pilot, who somehow became one of the most highly rated in the sector. I supervised his first shift with the Business and was impressed. He found my control shortcuts without explanation in a matter of minutes.

  “We know nothing,” I say. “We don't know if the Room's intentional or part of an accident.”

  “We do know,” Karl says, “that the habitats next to the Room have been destroyed. But we don't know how. We don't know if someone destroyed them trying to block access to the Room or if the Room was something else and an accident or an explosion or something gone horribly wrong created the damage that we'll find around it.”

  “We're not scientists,” says Odette. She's the oldest diver, whom I'd partnered with long ago. She is standing in the back of the lounge near the main exit, her stick-thin arms crossed. She looks delicate against the bulkhead, as if nothing could prevent her from floating off into space. “How are we supposed to know what happened in there or what any of it means?”

  “Between us, we have centuries of experience with ancient technologies.” I'm mostly talking to her and Karl now, but some of the other divers we hired have it as well. “We'll know as much or more than any scientist we bring out here.”

  “Besides,” Karl says, “we are going to bring back as much information as we can about the station. Our goal is to be the definitive historical mission for the station and the Room.”

  “Is that why you wouldn't give us a timeline?” asks Tamaz, one of the young male divers we hired for his strength and not for his great experience. He has muscles along his arms and chest that I haven't seen in most divers. He probably had to have a special suit made.

  But I wanted his strength in case we have to pull someone out of the Room. We've already established that machines can't do it, but a person might be able to. A very strong, very motivated person.

  “We are not giving you a timeline because we can't,” I say. “The Room's past history shows that people can sometimes be inside for hours or a day before coming out again.”

  Although the only history that showed that was mine. All of the people hired by Riya and my father came out within hours of going in, just like they were supposed to.

  Both Karl and I felt the dive team didn't have to know this aspect of the Room's history—nor did they have to know the fact that I had already been inside. I did not want to be seen as an expert on the interior, particularly when I can't remember much about it.

  “If there's no treasure inside, why would people go in?” asks Mikk, another of the strong young men. He's taller than Tamaz, but otherwise looks very much the same. I would have considered them brothers if I hadn't known otherwise.

  “There's treasure,” I say before Karl can comment. “But it's not the monetary kind. We warned you about that when we hired you for the dive.”

  Mikk waves his right hand. It's bigger than my thigh. “I'm not thinking for me. I mean all these five hundred people you say never came out. Why go in the first place?”

  “You're not religious, are you, Mikk?” Davida asks softly. She's one of Karl's hires, a regular wreck diver who has the standard lean physique along with skin so taut it looks stretched over her frame.

  “So?” He sounds defensive.

  “That's what a pilgrimage is, something religious.” Davida sounds sure of herself, but she's obviously not that religious either.

  “Pilgrimages have religious connotations, yes,” Odette says from her post in the back. This time, the dive team looks at her as if they haven't really noticed her before. “But a pilgrimage is also a mission to a special place, not just a sacred place. One could say this is a pilgrimage.”

  Her gaze is on mine. She knows some of my family's history, but I don't believe she knows all of it.

  “It certainly is for Riya Trekov,” I say, to cover my own discomfort. “She believes her father's soul is trapped in this place, and she believes we can recover it.”

  “Do you?” Tamaz asks me.

  I think for a moment—the lights, the voices building one upon another, the clutch of my father's arms as he holds me tight.

  “No,” I say after a moment, “but that doesn't mean we aren't going to try.”

  * * * *

  The station is bigger than I remember, bigger than my father's descriptions of it, bigger than anything mentioned in the archives.

  It looms ahead of the Business like a small asteroid or a tiny moon. It's gray in the constant twilight of space, the reflection of faraway stars making it seem brighter than it actually is.

  There are no visible lights on the station, nothing that marks it as a landing site or a outpost or some kind of way station. There are no energy readings, faint or otherwise.

  I fly us toward the station as Roderick, Karl, and the other two pilots—Hurst and Bria—monitor the audio bands, trying to find any sign of life coming from the place.

  The five of us sit shoulder to shoulder as we work the controls. The cockpit feels crowded, even though it's built for ten or more. The station shows up on my viewscreen and in my controls as well as in the portholes throughout the ship.

  Out of deference to my father, we do not dock on the exterior docking ring. That was where his large cargo ship docked—it couldn't go any deeper into the station itself—and that was where the nightmares that have haunted the rest of his life began.

  Instead, I pick a smaller ring on the upper level, where the habitats are still intact. From here, it looks as if we've approached a darkened but working space station. Reflections in the exterior windows of the station make it seem as if someone is moving inside.

  That startles Hurst—he even points it out—but Karl and I have approached so many wrecks we're used to the phenomenon.

  “It's just us,” he says. “We're seeing our own reflections.”

  Still Hurst works the sensors. He's not convinced. He's already spooked, and I don't like that. I need solid, steady people, not superstitious ones given to outbursts.

  I make a mental note to keep him away from the pilot's chair during this part of the mission. And I will tell Karl that later on.

  Right now, we settle into work. First we have to use our own equipment to map the station. Then we'll proceed with a dive plan.

  “It's bigger than I thought,” Bria says. She has steady hands, which I appreciate, and a quick sense of humor. Her dark head is bent over the controls, her hands moving across them as if the Business is a ship she's spent her entire life aboard.

  “It's a lot bigger,” says Hurst. His hands are shaking. He made it clear to us when he was hired that he'd never flown a mission like this. He'd mostly done combat zones. Active danger—shots, explosions—doesn't bother him. He's a quick thinker in that kind of situation, and since Karl and I didn't know what we were facing, we wanted one pilot with experience flying in and out of a constantly changing situation.

  “All our previous readings are wrong,” Karl says, and that's when I look. He gives me his handheld.

  Previous specs showed the station to be one-quarter to one-half the size of this station.

  “Are we in the right place?” Roderick asks.

  I nod. The coordinates are right. The middle of the station is right as well.

  But I don't trust it. I do my own scan.

  The readings on the exterior of the station are correct except for the station's size. The strange metal, the age of the station itself, its unusual structure match the past specs.

 
; “What the hell?” Roderick mutters.

  Karl has frozen beside me. The hair on the back of my neck has risen.

  “There are a million explanations,” Bria says, oblivious to our reaction. “You said no one explored the whole thing. Maybe no one mapped it either. You're relying on stuff you've found in databases, which could be corrupted or tampered with or just plain wrong.”

  “True,” Hurst says. “I've run into this all over the sector. Particularly in the lesser known parts. No one really cares how big something is unless they need to. Most people aren't that accurate.”

  But this is a place that ships have come to on pilgrimages. This is a place that has been studied.

  And my own sense as we approached was that it has become bigger.

  I swallow hard, but I don't say anything.

  Instead, I get out of the pilot's chair and sweep my hand toward it, looking at Karl's angular face.

  “It's your mission now,” I say.

  He hesitates. Then he takes a deep breath and slides into the pilot's chair. Of the five of us in the cockpit, he is, by far, the weakest pilot, but he knows what I'm doing.

  I'm symbolically relinquishing command.

  I have to.

  I'm already not thinking rationally. I'm making things up based on my past experience.

  And that terrifies me.

  * * * *

  I leave them to mapping. I go to my quarters and log onto my dedicated computer. I call up files I haven't looked at in years.

  Files that I stored after the Dignity Vessel.

  Files on stealth technology.

  Modern ships have stealth technology. It shields our ships from each other's instruments. But it does not make the ship completely invisible. It simply makes us invisible to all but the naked eye. If we pass in front of a porthole, someone on that ship will see us.

  Our weak stealth technology is hard won. We've been working on it for generations, always seeking to improve it, and never doing so.

  True stealth technology—the kind that actually makes a ship invisible (and, in some cases, impossible not just to see but to hear and touch)—is extremely dangerous. The kind of stealth that the ancients had actually changed the ship itself (or whatever the stealth was applied to). Some believe that the ship dissolved and reformed at a particular point. Others think it went out of phase with everything else in the universe. And still others believe that it actually left this dimension.

  No one knows, exactly, because we have lost more technology than we have kept. The ancients had things we've never had. We don't understand what they did or the way that they built things. We lost that knowledge somewhere along the way.

  Our military—our scientists—have attempted to reverse-engineer all kinds of things, including the kind of stealth the ancient Dignity Vessels had, but to no avail.

  An old military diving buddy of mine once said that kind of stealth tech was banned, the knowledge deliberately lost. She claimed that hundreds die every few generations or so when someone tries to revive the technology. She believes that stealth tech is beyond our grasp.

  It certainly was on the Dignity Vessel that Karl and I dove. The stealth tech there was based on interdimensional science. Those ships didn't vanish off radar because of a “cloak,” but because they traveled, briefly, into another world—a parallel universe that's similar to our own.

  When I first heard this theory, I recognized it. It's the one on which time travel is based, even though we've never discovered time travel, at least not in any useful way, and researchers all over the universe discourage experimentation in it. They prefer the other theory of time travel, the one that says time is not linear, that we only perceive it as linear, and to actually time travel would be to alter the human brain.

  But my experience in that Dignity Vessel showed me that it's possible to open small windows into other dimensions. Only in practice those windows don't work the way they do in theory. They explode or get stuck or ships get lost.

  People get lost.

  Is that what we're facing here? Yet another version of ancient stealth tech?

  My skin is crawling.

  That would be too simple, and too much of a coincidence.

  And it wouldn't explain the voices.

  This is why I have given over the controls to Karl earlier than I planned. Although I'm beginning to doubt the wisdom of that. Karl is as familiar with ancient stealth tech as I am and is scarred by it too.

  I hope it won't affect his judgment here.

  I stand and pace my small quarters, and as I do I remember the other reasons I hired Karl to run things.

  Riya.

  My father.

  My mother.

  Those voices.

  No preconceptions, that's my motto. And I need to wait until mine are under control before I face the team all over again.

  * * * *

  By the time I come out, the station is mapped. It is definitely larger than our research told us it would be. Karl wants to bring in my father, and I can't contradict him even though I don't want to use my father for anything.

  We meet in the lounge. Fortunately, Karl has kept Riya out of this meeting. Most of the dive team is here and all of the pilots. The Business, safely docked, has its automatic alarms on in case something happens.

  Still, this close to a dive, I hate leaving the cockpit unattended.

  Karl reminds everyone that he is in charge now. Then he introduces my father—using all of his very impressive credentials—and says,

  “I invited him into this meeting because he's been here before. He knows a lot about the station and even more about the Room.”

  Karl looks at me. My father is standing next to him, dwarfing Karl. My father, with his planet-bound height and muscle, looks almost superhuman compared to the divers. And even though he's older than everyone except, perhaps, Odette, he seems much more powerful.

  I don't like the contrast.

  “The changes in what we're expecting are enough to make me reassess the mission,” Karl says.

  I turn toward him, shocked. This isn't the man I hired all those years ago. This isn't Karl the Fearless.

  He sees my look and holds up his hand to silence me. “I've learned over the years that it's best to talk about the unexpected, and even better to get the dive team's read on it. We're here to take extreme risks, but not unnecessary risks.”

  I dig my teeth into my lower lip, so that I don't contradict him—at least not yet. At least not this early in the very first meeting he's called.

  Karl explains our findings, and he uses some impressive graphs and charts and diagrams that he's clearly worked on in the short time since he called the meeting. Then he turns to my father.

  “What do you make of this?” Karl asks.

  My father walks in front of the displays, his hands clasped behind his back like a professor grading a student's work. I get the sense that he likes the attention and is milking it.

  “Your worry isn't necessary,” he says after a minute. He addresses Karl as if the rest of us aren't here. “I've seen this before.”

  I remain still in the back of the lounge. Odette crosses her arms. Karl tilts his head, obviously intrigued.

  “Every time I come here, the station is bigger.” My father does not pause, even though he should have. The sentence sends a ripple of interest through the group and gives him the attention he obviously craves. “I think it's programmed to build new units, which is why the habitable ones are on the outer layers, not in the middle.”

  It's a plausible explanation, and no one asks him for his proof. I would have. My father is not a scientist, and he didn't back up what he just said with any statistics or experimentation. Just observation and a supposition.

  “So it's normal,” says Bria with something like relief.

  “There's nothing normal about this place,” my father says.

  “How do we test the growing theory?” asks Jennifer. She's one of my hires, and she looks at me as
she asks this, all wide eyes and innocence. But I've known her for a while, and Jennifer isn't innocent. She's annoyed that I've been forgotten, and she's pointing me out to the others on purpose.

  I'm glad for the opening. “We test all theories. That's why it's best to go slow. The more we learn before we go to the Room, the better off we'll be.”

  “You actually think we'll learn something new about the Room?” Davida asks. She's sitting by Jennifer and Roderick on the couch. They glance at her in surprise.

  “Why else come on this mission if you can't learn something new?” Roderick asks.

  “It's just that this thing has existed for so long and no one knows anything about it,” Davida says. “That's beginning to creep me out.”

  “We know some things,” my father says and goes into his lecture on the history of the Room. He doesn't seem to notice that he's talking mostly about conjecture and theory, but some of the others do. They squirm. He's lost the attention he worked so hard to gain.

  It takes Karl a while to shut my father down, but he finally does. Then Karl looks at me as if my father's lack of social graces are my fault.

  I give Karl a half smile and a shrug.

  Karl gets my father to sit. Then Karl sets up the dive roster for the following day—Bria piloting one of the four-man skips (so that our teams don't have to free dive to get into far sections of the station) and Davida, Jennifer, and Mikk in the upper habitats—with a promise of more when we meet that night.

  The team shifts, but this time it isn't because of my father's long-windedness. It's because they're excited.

  It's because they're ready.

  We all are.

  * * * *

  For the next three weeks, we dive the station, making detailed maps, exploring the new and old habitats, sharing small discoveries.

  Every night we meet in the lounge and watch the captured imagery of that day's dives. The divers narrate and the others ask questions. That way, we all have the same information.

  We learn quite a few things—the built-in furniture is the same in all of the habitats, although in the “new” section, as Karl likes to call it, it's not dented or warped or even scratched.