Diving into the Wreck du-1

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “We need some kind of diversion,” Odette says. “We need those military vessels out of the area for at least an hour.”

  “An hour?” Hurst says. “You think that’ll be enough?”

  I shake my head. “We’re better off planning for two or three hours, and even that might cut it close.”

  I put my hands on the table and stand up, effectively ending the meeting. More hard facts aren’t forthcoming, and speculation will only confuse the issue. Squishy hasn’t finished the bomb yet.

  Up to this point, the bomb is all I’ve focused on. Now I have to get us past military vessels and find time to dive. That’ll take a lot more planning than I’m used to.

  I wish Karl were here. This is a mission he would be able to lead much better than I would. His own military background and his innate caution would guarantee success.

  “Let’s think on this,” I say. “We have time. Let’s make sure we do this right.”

  ~ * ~

  THIRTY-THREE

  Odette pulls me aside later. I am heading for my berth. She insists on walking with me.

  The corridors in this part of Longbow are narrow and cramped. They’re designed to discourage people who’ve been drinking and eating in the nearby restaurants from venturing in this direction. There is barely enough room for both of us to walk side by side, even though neither of us is large.

  Before she speaks, Odette looks over her shoulder. When she is satisfied that we’re alone, she says, “I think you should let Squishy go.”

  “I sought her out,” I say.

  “I know,” she says, “and I’m not exactly sure why. She’s not trustworthy.”

  I clasp my hands behind my back. “She knows a lot about stealth tech.”

  “You’ve asked her for her expertise in that area, and she’s given you what she knows. At least, as much as you can tell.”

  We go around a corner, and I stop. I want to see Odette’s face as we talk. “You don’t like her, do you?” I ask.

  “Do you?” Odette asks.

  It’s a fair enough question. “We were friends once.”

  “Once,” Odette says. “Then she betrayed you. To the Empire, no less. She’s the reason they have that Dignity Vessel in the first place.”

  “I know,” I say. I’m not likely to forget that betrayal.

  “Have you ever asked her why she turned you in?”

  “I know why,” I say. “She thought stealth tech was too dangerous for us. For any layperson, really. She wanted the Dignity Vessel removed from that site.”

  “Which didn’t happen,” Odette says. “You’d think Squishy would know that it couldn’t happen.”

  I think about that for a long moment. Odette has a point. And I never asked Squishy to clarify her reasons. She hasn’t apologized to me for reporting the Dignity Vessel, nor has she said she made a mistake.

  I’m not even sure she considers her actions a mistake, given what she knew at the time. She figured no one could work in stealth tech. She probably figured giving something that dangerous to the Empire might save lives.

  “She fought me pretty hard on that Dignity Vessel dive,” I say. “If she wanted to stop me—and anyone else—from diving the vessel, she made the right choice. She didn’t report us until Jypé and Junior died. I assumed— hell, I know—she couldn’t take it anymore. She didn’t want to be part of any more deaths.”

  “Yet she gives the ship to the Empire, which guarantees there will be more deaths,” Odette says.

  “What choice did she have?” I ask. “She didn’t want others to stumble onto the wreck, and I wasn’t listening to her.”

  Odette frowns. She looks at the empty corridor as if making certain we’re still alone. When she looks back at me, her frown seems to have deepened.

  “She’s delaying you now,” Odette says. “She wants to test everything. She wants to tell others what to do. She invited her old lover and is now ignoring her. All of this will cause troubles on the mission.”

  I got into this position the first time by not listening to one of my team members. After Jypé and Junior died, I vowed I would listen. I have to struggle right now to follow my own vow.

  Which is odd, since I’ve known Odette a long time.

  “Have you worked with Squishy before?” I ask, recalling the stray thought I’d had during the meeting.

  “My opinion remains the same,” Odette says. “She’s trouble.”

  So she has worked with Squishy.

  “I’m not doubting your opinion,” I say. “I just want a little more information.”

  Odette sighs. She leans against the wall, something I would never do here, since these corridors are filthy.

  “I worked with her,” she says. “I helped train her to dive.”

  “A long time ago,” I say.

  “Boss, you’re being dismissive,” she says.

  Normally, she would be right. What I’m saying may sound dismissive, but it isn’t.

  “I’m trying to get a sense of how long ago this was,” I say.

  “When Squishy came out of the military,” Odette says. “Before you gave her that ridiculous nickname. We called her Rosealma, but she wasn’t fond ol that either. She was very military.”

  “Meaning?”

  “By the book. She didn’t like change or variables. Even after the training, I thought she was a dangerous dive partner.”

  “Why?” I ask.

  “Because she wanted everything just so,” Odette says.

  That wasn’t the Squishy I dived with. But most divers were by the book in the beginning. If they remained by the book, they could never go beyond tourist dives.

  I would never take an inflexible by-the-book diver on my wreck dives. But if I tell Odette that, she’ll think I’m being defensive again.

  “Did you have other trouble with her?” I ask.

  “I never knew exactly where she stood,” Odette says. “Like now. Is she working for the Empire? Is she working for you? Or is she working on something else?”

  I smile. “She’s not working for me, and she’s certainly not working for the Empire.”

  “How can you be sure?” Odette asks.

  “Because I’ve been to her home. I’ve talked with the locals. That’s an antigovernment place.”

  “So they tell you,” she says.

  “The research I did after I left backs it up,” I say.

  She nods once. “If she’s not working for you or the Empire, who is she working for?”

  “Herself,” I say. “Just like the rest of us.”

  “That doesn’t reassure me,” Odette says.

  “I didn’t think you were asking for reassurance,” I say. “I thought you were talking about Squishy.”

  Odette studies me. She knew me back in my beginning days too. She obviously feels like I’ve changed enough to lead a team. This will be the second time she trusts me to lead her somewhere dangerous—and the first time did not go well.

  “Do you trust her?” she asks me.

  “No,” I say.

  “Then why bring her along?” Odette asks.

  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. “S
he 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

  It 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.