She looks away, staring at that opaque privacy wall—so representative of what she’d become. The solid backbone of my crew suddenly doesn’t support any of us anymore. She’s opaque and difficult, setting up a divider between herself and the rest of us.
“I swore an oath.”
“Well, let me help you break it,” I snap. “If I try to enter that barrier, what’ll happen to me?”
“Don’t.” She whispers the word. “Just leave, Boss.”
“Convince me.”
“If I tell you, you gotta swear you’ll say nothing about this.”
“I swear.” I’m not sure I believe me. My voice is shaky, my tone something that sounds strange even to me.
But the oath—however weak it is—is what Squishy wants.
Squishy takes a deep breath, but she doesn’t change her posture. In fact, she speaks directly to the wall, not turning toward me at all.
“I became a medic after my time in Stealth,” she says. “I decided I had to save lives after taking so many of them. It was the only way to balance the score. …”
Experts believe stealth tech was deliberately lost. Too dangerous, too risky. The original stealth scientists all died under mysterious circumstances, all much too young and without recording any part of their most important discoveries.
Through the ages, their names were even lost, only to be rediscovered by a major researcher, visiting Old Earth in the latter part of the past century.
Squishy tells me all this in a flat voice. She sounds like she’s reciting a lecture from very long ago. Still, I listen, word for word, not asking any questions, afraid to break her train of thought.
Afraid she’ll never return to any of it.
Earth-owned Dignity Vessels had all been stripped centuries before, used as cargo ships, used as junk. An attempt to reassemble one about five hundred years ago failed because the Dignity Vessels’ main components and their guidance systems were never, ever found, either in junk or in blueprint form.
A few documents, smuggled to the colonies on Earth’s moon, suggested that stealth tech was based on interdimensional science: The 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.
I recognized the theory—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 what Squishy is telling me is that it’s possible to time travel, it’s possible to open small windows in other dimensions and bend them to our will.
Only, she says, those windows don’t bend as nicely as we like, and for every successful trip, there are two that don’t function as well.
I ask for explanation, but she shakes her head.
“You can get stuck,” she says, “like that probe. Forever and ever.”
“You think this is what the Dignity Vessels did?”
She shakes her head. “I think their stealth tech is based on some form of this multidimensional travel, but not in any way we’ve been able to reproduce.”
“And this ship we have here? Why are you so afraid of it?” I ask.
“Because you’re right.” She finally looks at me. There are shadows under her eyes. Her face is haunted, the lower lip trembling. “The ship shouldn’t be here. No Dignity Vessel ever left the sector of space around Earth. They weren’t designed to travel vast distances, let alone halfway across the known universe.”
I nod. She’s not telling me something I don’t already know. “So?”
“So,” she says. “Dozens and dozens of those ships never returned to port.”
“Shot down, destroyed.” This is what the databases say, and the news doesn’t surprise me. Dignity Vessels were battleships, after all.
“Shot down, destroyed, or lost,” she says. “I vote for lost. Or used for something, some mission now forgotten in time.”
I shrug. “So?”
“So you wondered why no one’s seen this before, why no one’s found it, why the ship itself has drifted so very far from home.”
I nod.
“Maybe it didn’t drift.”
“You think it was purposely sent here?”
She shakes her head. “What if it stealthed on a mission to the outer regions of Old Earth’s area of space?”
My stomach clenches.
“What if,” she says, “the crew tried to destealth—and ended up here?”
“Five thousand years ago?”
She shakes her head. “A few generations ago. Maybe more, maybe less. But not very long. And you were just the lucky one who found it.”
~ * ~
SEVEN
I spend the entire night listening to Squishy’s theories.
I hear about the experiments, the forty-five deaths, the losses she suffered in a program that started the research from scratch.
After she left R&D and went into medicine, she used her high security clearance to explore older files. She found pockets of research dating back nearly five centuries, the pertinent stuff gutted, all but the assumptions gone.
Stealth tech. Lost, just like I assumed. And no one’d been able to recreate it.
I listen and evaluate, and realize, somewhere in the dead of night, that I’m not a scientist.
But I am a pragmatist, and I know, from my own research, that Dignity Vessels, with their stealth tech, existed for more than two hundred years. Certainly not something that would have happened had the stealth technology been as flawed as Squishy said.
So many variables, so much for me to weigh.
And beneath it all, a greed pulses, one that—until tonight—I thought I didn’t have.
For the last five centuries, our military has researched stealth tech and failed.
Failed.
I might have all the answers only a short distance away, in a wreck no one else has noticed, a wreck that is—for the moment anyway—completely my own.
I leave Squishy to sleep. I tell her to clear her bed, that she has to remain with the group, no matter what I decide.
She nods as if she’s expecting that, and maybe she is. She grabs her night-clothes as I let myself out of the room and into the much cooler, more dimly lit corridor.
As I walk to my own quarters, Jypé finds me.
“She tell you anything worthwhile?” His eyes are a little too bright. Is greed eating at him like it’s eating at me? I’m almost afraid to ask.
“No,” I say. “She didn’t. The work she did doesn’t seem all that relevant to me.”
I’m lying. I really do want to sleep on this. I make better decisions when I’m rested.
“There isn’t much history on the Dignity Vessels—at least that’s specific,” he says. “And your database has nothing on this one, no serial number listing, nothing. I wish you’d let us link up with an outside system.”
“You want someone else to know where we are and what we’re doing?” I ask.
He grins. “It’d be easier.”
“And dumber.”
He nods. I take a step forward and he catches my arm.
“I did check one other thing,” he says.
I am tired. I want sleep more than I can say. “What?”
“I learned long ago that if you can’t find something in history, you look in legends. There’re truths there. You just have to dig more for them.”
I wait. The sparkle in his eyes grows.
“There’s an old spacers’ story that has gotten repeated through various cultures for centuries as governments have come and gone. A spacers’ story about a fleet of Dignity Vessels.”
“Of course there was a fleet of them,” I say. “Hundreds, if the old records are right.”
He waves me off
. “More than that. Some say the fleet’s a thousand strong, some say it’s a hundred strong. Some don’t give a number. But all the legends talk about the vessels being on a mission to save the worlds beyond the stars, and how the ships moved from port to port, with parts cobbled together so that they could move beyond their design structures.”
I’m awake again, just like he knew I would be. “There are a lot of these stories?”
“And they follow a trajectory—one that would work if you were, say, leading a fleet of ships out of your area of space.”
“We’re far away from the Old Earth area of space. We’re so far away, humans from that period couldn’t even imagine getting to where we are now.”
“So we say. But think how many years this would take, how much work it would take.”
“Dignity Vessels didn’t have faster-than-light engines,” I say.
“Maybe not at first.” He’s fairly bouncing from his discovery. I’m feeling a little more hopeful as well. “But consider this. They’ve traveled for a long time. What if one of the places they stopped had developed FTL? What if the engineers there helped them cobble that FTL into a Dignity Vessel?”
“You mean gave it to them?” I ask. No one in the worlds I know gives anyone anything.
“Or sold it to them. Can you imagine? One legend calls them a fleet of ships for hire, out to save worlds they’ve never seen.”
“Sounds like a complete myth.”
“Yeah,” he says, “it’s only a legend. But I think sometimes these legends become a little more concrete.”
“Why?”
“We have an actual Dignity Vessel out there that got here somehow.”
“Did you see evidence of cobbling?” I ask.
“How would I know?” he asks. “Have you checked the readouts? Do they give different dates for different parts of the ship?”
I haven’t looked at the dating. I have no idea if it is different. But I don’t say that.
“Download the exact specs for a Dignity Vessel,” I say. “The materials, where everything should be, all of that.”
“Didn’t you do that before you came here?” he asks.
“Yes, but not in the detail of the ship’s composition. Most people rebuild ships exactly as they were before they got damaged, so the shape would remain the same. Only the components would differ. I meant to check our readouts against what I’d brought, but I haven’t yet. I’ve been diverted by the stealth tech thing, and now I’m going to get a little sleep. So you do it.”
He grins. “Aye, aye, Captain.”
“Boss,” I mutter as I stagger down the corridor to my bed. “I can’t tell you how much I prefer ‘boss.’”
I sleep, but not long. My brain’s too busy. I’m sure those specs are different, which confirms nothing. It just means that someone repaired the vessel at one point or another. But what if the materials are the kind that weren’t available in the area of space around Earth when Dignity Vessels were built? That disproves Squishy’s worry about the tech.
Doesn’t it?
I’m at my hardwired terminal when Squishy comes to my door. I’ve gone through five or six layers of security to get to some very old data, data that isn’t accessible from any other part of my ship’s networked computer system.
Squishy waits. I’m hoping she’ll leave, but of course she doesn’t. After a few minutes, she coughs.
I sigh audibly. “We talked last night.”
“I have one more thing to ask.”
She steps inside, unbidden, and closes the door. My quarters feel claustrophobic with another person inside them. I’d always been alone here— always—even when I had a liaison with one of the crew. I’d go to his quarters, never bring him into my own.
The habits of privacy are long ingrained, and the habits of secrecy even longer. It’s how I’ve protected my turf for so many years, and how I’ve managed to first-dive so many wrecks.
I dim the screen and turn to her. “Ask.”
Her eyes are sunken into her face. She looks like she’s gotten even less sleep than I have.
“I’m going to try one last time,” she says. “Please blow the wreck up. Make it go away. Don’t let anyone else inside. Forget it was here.”
I fold my hands on my lap. Yesterday I hadn’t had an answer for that request. Today I do. I’d thought about it off and on all night, just like I’d thought about the differing stories I’d heard from her and from Jypé, and how, I realized fifteen minutes before my alarm, neither of them had to be true.
“Please,” she says.
“I’m not a scientist,” I say, which should warn her right off, but of course it doesn’t. Her gaze doesn’t change. Nothing about her posture changes. “I’ve been thinking about this. If this stealth tech is as powerful as you claim, then we might be making things even worse. What if the explosion triggers the tech? What if we blow a hole between dimensions? Or maybe destroy something else, something we can’t see?”
Her cheeks flush slightly.
“Or maybe the explosion’ll double-back on us. I recall something about Dignity Vessels being unfightable, that anything that hit them rebounded to the other ship. What if that’s part of the stealth tech?”
“It was a feature of the shields,” she says with a bit of sarcasm. “They were unknown in that era.”
“Still,” I say. “You understand stealth tech more than I do, but you don’t really understand it or you’d be able to replicate it, right?”
“I think there’s a flaw in that argument—”
“But you don’t really grasp it, right? So you don’t know if blowing up the wreck will create a situation here, something worse than anything we’ve seen.”
“I’m willing to risk it.” Her voice is flat. So are her eyes. It’s as if she’s a person I don’t know, a person I’ve never met before. And something in those eyes, something cold and terrified, tells me that if I had met her just this morning, I wouldn’t want to know her.
“I like risks,” I say. “I just don’t like that one. It seems to me that the odds are against us.”
“You and me, maybe,” she says. “But there’s a lot more to ‘us’ than just this little band of people. You let that wreck remain and you bring something dangerous back into our lives, our culture.”
“I could leave it for someone else,” I say. “But I really don’t want to.”
“You think I’m making this up. You think I’m worrying over nothing.” She sounds bitter.
“No,” I say. “But you already told me that the military is trying to recreate this thing, over and over again. You tell me that people die doing it. My research tells me these ships worked for hundreds of years, and I think maybe your methodology was flawed. Maybe getting the real stealth tech into the hands of people who can do something with it will save lives.”
She stares at me, and I recognize the expression. It must have been the one I’d had when I looked at her just a few moments ago.
I’d always known that greed and morals and beliefs destroyed friendships. I also knew they influenced more dives than I cared to think about.
But I’d always tried to keep them out of my ship and out of my dives. That’s why I pick my crews so carefully; why I call the ship Nobody’s Business.
Somehow, I never expected Squishy to start the conflict.
Somehow, I never expected the conflict to be with me.
“No matter what I say, you’re going to dive that wreck, aren’t you?” she asks.
I nod.
Her sigh is as audible as mine was, and just as staged. She wants me to understand that her disapproval is deep, that she will hold me accountable if all the terrible things she imagines somehow come to pass.
We stare at each other in silence. It feels like we’re having some kind of argument, an argument without words. I’m loath to break eye contact.
Finally, she’s the one who looks away.
“You want me to stay,” she says. “Fine. I’ll stay. But I
have some conditions of my own.”
I expected that. In fact, I’d expected that earlier, when she’d first come to my quarters, not this prolonged discussion about destroying the wreck.
“Name them.”
“I’m done diving,” she says. “I’m not going near that thing, not even to save lives.”
“All right.”
“But I’ll man the skip, if you let me bring some of my medical supplies.”
So far, I see no problems. “All right.”
“And if something goes wrong—and it will—I reserve the right to give my notes, both audio and digital, to any necessary authorities. I reserve the right to tell them what we found and how I warned you. I reserve the right to tell them that you’re the one responsible for everything that happens.”
“I am the one responsible,” I say. “But the entire group has signed off on the hazards of wreck diving. Death is one of the risks.”
A lopsided smile fills her face, but doesn’t reach her eyes. The smile itself seems like sarcasm.
“Yeah,” she says as if she’s never heard me make that speech before. “I suppose it is.”
~ * ~
EIGHT
I tell the others that Squishy has some concerns about the stealth tech and wants to operate as our medic instead of as a main diver. No one questions that. Such things happen on long dives—someone gets squeamish about the wreck; or terrified of the dark; or nearly dies and decides to give up wreck diving then and there.
We’re a superstitious bunch when it gets down to it. We put on our gear in the same order each and every time; we all have one piece of equipment we shouldn’t but we feel we need just to survive; and we like to think there’s something watching over us, even if it’s just a pile of luck and an ancient diving belt.
The upside of Squishy’s decision is that I get to dive the wreck. I have a good pilot, although not a great one, manning the skip, and I know that she’ll make sensible decisions. She’ll never impulsively come in to save a team member. She’s said so, and I know she means it.
The downside is that she’s a better diver than I am. She’d find things I never would; she’d see things I’ll never see; she’d avoid things I don’t even know are dangerous.
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