Diving into the Wreck du-1

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “I’m not going to let that happen,” he says.

  “You’re not going to be able to separate the device from the stealth field.”

  “It’s not attached to the stealth field,” he says. “It’s attached to the containment field. I can separate your device from that field.”

  “You don’t know that,” I say.

  “And you don’t know that I can’t,” he says.

  “The person who designed this spent decades working on stealth tech,” I say.

  “And failing,” he says. “I’m the only one who has succeeded.”

  He peers at the device again, his whole face glowing red. Then he looks up at me sideways.

  “Put that thing away,” he says. “If you believe the bomb will go off, then get the hell out of here and save yourself.”

  I take his arm again. He shakes me off.

  I stare at him.

  “You’re wasting time,” he says. “If you’re right and I’m wrong, your friends will die with us.”

  “What about your friends?” I ask.

  “I guess we’d better let them know too,” he says. “They’ll leave the lab behind and get away. You’ll be arrested.”

  I shake my head. The Empire is the least of my worries.

  “If they leave, you really can’t get out.”

  He gives me a withering look. “Have some faith in my abilities,” he says. “I know more about stealth tech than anyone, including your little friend.”

  My stomach twists. In all my time planning my revenge, I never imagined this moment. I had known I couldn’t kill him after the Room. I had thought this was better; destroy his research, which would be just like killing him.

  Only I imagined him living with the consequences for years, mourning the loss, looking at his failure.

  I never imagined him trying to pry a bomb off a containment field, dying because of me.

  “Either get out,” he says calmly, “or help me with this thing.”

  I stare at it. I hear the voices swirling in my head. I remember my mother, her face turned upward, light on her skin before it aged and mummified, before it died.

  For one brief moment, she had looked beautiful.

  He doesn’t look beautiful. He looks ghastly, the red lining the bones of his face, accenting the hollows, leaving shadows. That’s how I’ve always seen him—filled with shadows.

  I sheathe the knife. Then I back away from him. When I get to the doors, I run.

  Fortunately, I know ships. I learn them the first time I go through them, whether I’m diving or I’m traveling in them.

  I run back the way we came. My lightheadedness has grown worse, and I know I’m still a bit short on oxygen. I force myself to breathe so that I don’t pass out.

  I get to the bay doors and slap them open. Then I reach the skip and pause. There should still be two guards inside. I don’t want to alert them. But maybe my father already has. Maybe he has let the group in the cockpit know and everyone overheard.

  I poke the knife into the controls for the emergency doors. It’s not recommended procedure because it opens to the doors too fast. But we’re still in the bay, so we’re all right.

  Then I hoist myself inside.

  Hurst hurries into the galley, followed by the two guards. Odette stands just behind them, but it’s her face I see first.

  “I used Squishy’s bomb,” I say. “They built a stealth field.”

  “That’s not possible,” Odette says. “Our controls would have registered it.”

  “It’s a baby stealth field,” I say. “The device is attaching now.”

  Hurst swears and pushes past the guards. They look stunned.

  “Either you come with us,” I say, “or you go join your friends in the cockpit.”

  “Another bomb?” one of the men asks.

  “Yes.” I’m all the way inside now. No one has helped me up. I grab the sides of the door and sway a little. I am very dizzy. I push the controls, putting in a code that will lock them and maybe repair some of the damage I’ve just done.

  “Like the one on the Dignity Vessel?” he asks.

  Odette starts to answer, but I speak over her. “Yes,” I say.

  “Fuck,” the guard says. “That thing destroyed the Dignity Vessel.”

  “That’s right,” I say.

  Odette closes her mouth. She gives me a little grin. Obviously she was going to tell them that the device was different. She likes my style instead.

  The guard heads into the cockpit, knocking Odette aside. His companion joins him. “We have to leave,” he says. “Now.”

  I can’t agree more.

  “Do you know the codes for the exterior doors?” I ask.

  “Don’t need them,” he says, then taps our communications relay. The cockpit of the science ship answers, and he explains the situation. They sound a little calmer than he does. Apparently my father has already contacted them and told them he can remove the device.

  “You can stay if you trust him that much,” I say, loud enough for the people in the science ship’s cockpit to hear as well as the guard.

  The guards look at each other. Then the guard says, “Open the damn doors.”

  The cockpit says something that sounds like compliance. A warning appears on our screens. The bay’s gravity has shut off.

  They’re going to open the exterior doors.

  Hurst pushes into the guard. “You want to fly this thing?” Hurst asks.

  The guard moves away.

  The doors start to open just as our lower thrusters come on. When the doors are open about halfway, we fly out of there.

  We can’t go back to the Business, not with these guys on board. We have to get away, but we can’t go far. The skip isn’t made for long-distance travel.

  Hurst looks at me, then looks at them. “Don’t worry about it,” I say. “Let’s just find a safe distance from here and see if Squishy’s device works.”

  I don’t know what we’ll do if it doesn’t.

  Because then the guards will retake us. We’ll all be under arrest for destroying imperial property and attempted murder. We’ll face years of prison. My father will still have his stealth tech.

  And both Karl and my mother will go unavenged.

  ~ * ~

  FORTY-TWO

  The bomb does not obliterate the ship.

  At the designated moment, the ship bobbles.

  “It’s still there,” one of the guards says.

  Then the ship slowly flips, like a child lounging in zero-g slowly deciding to reveal his belly. Only the ship doesn’t stop flipping. It just turns and turns and turns, spinning with its own momentum—or the momentum of the explosion.

  We’re all watching the images holographically. What we can see through the portholes is only the blackness of space.

  We’ve been watching since we steered clear. About a half an hour after we stopped—ten minutes before the explosion—the front section of the science vessel separated and flew off so fast that it seemed to disappear.

  The guards say nothing. They don’t even try to attack us. They realize there is no point. We outnumber them. Even if they do overtake us again, where will they go? They would have to kill us, and they don’t seem willing to do so.

  Or maybe I’m just ascribing motives. Maybe they’re just stunned at the destruction of the ship, giving us time to outthink them.

  Either way, their status has changed from guard to prisoner in a matter of moments.

  We can’t take them back to the Business. We have to make our own escape before the other ships come back.

  Before the front part of the science vessel comes back to see what happened.

  Hurst turns on the navigational controls. “Where are we headed, Boss?”

  I’m not ready to answer him. I’m still staring at the science vessel. Its spin has already slowed. Eventually, it will stop moving and find its own part of space.

  I freeze one of the holoimages and walk around it. Th
ere, on the far side, is a hole in the vessel’s hull.

  A small hole, like the one we had found in the Dignity Vessel.

  My breath catches. Had someone blown up the Dignity Vessel’s stealth tech, and what we found was all that was left? Or had something else happened?

  “Boss?” Hurst asks again.

  I make myself breathe out.

  Then I turn to the guards. “What’s procedure in a case like this?”

  “There are no cases like this,” says the guard who initially thought there was no explosion.

  “In war or in the face of an attack,” I say. “When your ship is damaged and it’s been abandoned, what’s procedure?”

  They look at each other. The other guard answers. “The smaller ship will come back. The military vessels should be back anyway. I’m amazed they both left.”

  I’m not. They had no idea we had scheduled an attack. Not after weeks (months?) in which nothing happened. They’ll be back as soon as our ships get the all-clear.

  “Is there a timeline?” I ask. “Do they have to return in a designated period of time?”

  They look at each other again. I finally realize that they believe I’ll attack the other ships. I resist the urge to shake my head. Of course I’ll attack them. In my little weaponless skip.

  But I don’t say that. Instead, I say, “Our escape pods on this skip hold one person each. They support life for sixty-four hours at the longest. Will someone be back for you in that amount of time?”

  The first guard starts to nod, but the other catches his arm.

  “We’re not keeping you on this skip,” I say. “I just want to make sure you’re not going to die out there.”

  I don’t tell them what the alternative is because I don’t know of any alternative. I guess we could try to make it to a base and dump them there, but that seems too risky to me.

  “We’re going to die,” the second guard says. “You’ll be responsible for killing us.”

  But the first guard rolls his eyes. “You can put me in an escape pod,” he says. “But I will tell the authorities everything I know when they pick me up.”

  “That’s fine with me,” I say.

  I turn to Hurst. “Move in as close to the wreck as you can safely get. Make sure there are no new energy signatures.”

  He nods. He sets the navigation and takes the ship toward what’s left of the science vessel.

  It’s amazing to me how quickly it has become “the wreck” to both of us. No one tries to correct me.

  I stare at it on the small two-dimensional screen near the controls. It looks vulnerable there, still slowly turning.

  Part of me wants to go and see if my father is still inside. But I know he won’t be. He probably ran to the cockpit and urged them to escape. He isn’t the kind of man who dies for his own causes.

  But if he believed he could unhitch the device, he might have stayed too long. Even then, I wouldn’t find him because he would have been right near the stealth tech when Squishy’s device went off.

  I don’t know if it obliterated him, or if it sent him into some kind of limbo, like we sent Junior and Karl.

  Like my father sent Mother.

  But I also know I won’t be able to find out.

  “You want them in the escape pods now, right?” Odette asks me in a tone that leads me to believe this isn’t the first time she’s asked the question.

  I turn toward her. She looks as tired as I feel.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  “I’m not getting any unusual readings,” Hurst says.

  I move him aside, and do some searching on my own. I remember how the initial energy signal for the Dignity Vessel appeared as the kind of blip that most ships never register. I search for that kind of blip now.

  Behind me, I can hear Odette talking to the guards, taking their weapons, and giving them some food and water from the galley. I almost tell her that there’s no need—the escape pods have rations and water—but I don’t. Let her assuage her own conscience her own way.

  I keep looking for a blip.

  And don’t find one.

  Maybe my father’s little stealth tech experiment was too small to leave any kind of reading out here. Squishy’s device was designed for something much larger. Maybe it really and truly destroyed that stealth tech.

  Or maybe what remains is so minuscule that nothing we have can measure it.

  “Do you have anything you want to say to them, Boss?” Odette asks.

  I turn. Both guards are pressed into the hatches of their escape pods. They look reluctant to go in deeper. The fit will be tight for them.

  “Good luck,” I say, then walk over and close the hatches myself.

  The escape pods can be released from the inside or the outside. I hit the release buttons before the guards can even find the interior controls. The first pod slides down its tube. The tube seals off the skip from the pod, then sends the pod into space.

  The pod floats away from us. The second pod follows only a minute later.

  I stare at them through the nearest portal. I’d rather be out of the ship in my environmental suit, clinging to a tether, than inside one of those things.

  But if their companions come back within two days, they’ll be fine. Testy, but fine.

  And I can’t imagine why the military wouldn’t be back. After all, they have to catch us.

  “Let’s get to the Business” I say to Hurst.

  Then I close the portals and close my eyes.

  I did it. I destroyed the stealth tech. And I may have killed my father in the bargain.

  I expected success to feel better.

  I expected it to make a difference.

  ~ * ~

  FORTY-THREE

  We meet the Business at the designated coordinates. Squishy, Roderick, and Tamaz are full of questions, which we answer in quick sentences, promising more when everyone returns.

  Mikk and Jennifer returned shortly before we did. The Seeker is permanently barred from this area of space, and both Mikk and Jennifer are on some kind of governmental watch list.

  Jennifer laughs as she sits in the galley. “It worked. They thought I was really drunk and ready to party.”

  “For a while, I thought they were too,” Mikk says. “But at the last minute, they remembered they had a job to do and shooed us away from there.”

  Neither Mikk nor Jennifer seems too concerned about the watch list. I’m not either. We’re all going to have to stay in the far reaches of this Empire’s space.

  But we knew that going in.

  It takes another day before the Space King joins us. It actually has some weapons scarring. Turtle, Davida, and Bria look frazzled, but they too managed to escape. However, they’re pretty certain that the military vessel got all the specs from their ship.

  “They know it’s a rental,” Turtle says. “They’ll be waiting for us to return it.”

  I hadn’t planned for this, but I know what to do. We have to abandon both The Seeker and the Space King. Then we’ll declare them destroyed and send in a fee to the rental agency from the next station we stop at.

  I explain all of this before I ever get to the details of our mission.

  “What are we going to do now?” Turtle asks.

  I sigh. “I guess we find somewhere to hole up.”

  Davida, who is relieved to be back on the Business, offers to cook us a special dinner. She wants us to tell our stories over food.

  I figure that’s fine.

  She cooks—all sorts of things with stored food that I didn’t know could be done (but she has just become the designated chef on any trip we’re on)— and we all tell our adventures.

  Of course, they pay the closest attention to mine. The destruction of both bits of stealth tech, and the possible death of my father.

  Squishy is pleased that the bomb worked.

  But as we continue to talk, her smile slowly fades.

  I’m almost afraid to ask her what’s bothering her. I really don
’t want the mood—which isn’t quite victorious and isn’t quite sad—to change.

  But I do ask her.

  “Your father figured out how to make stealth tech,” she says. “Ancient stealth tech.”

  I frown at her. She’s sitting to my left. Mikk is across from her. He has a guarded expression on his face.

  “And he was gone when you first arrived, dropping off his scientists and getting new ones for something else,” she says.

  I nod.

  “His stealth tech clearly worked.”

  I shrug. “I could hear it, faintly. But I didn’t test it.”

  “My device worked with it,” Squishy says. “My device wouldn’t have worked on just anything. It needed the stealth tech to power it.”

  I have no idea how she built it, and I don’t want to know, even now.

  “So that’s confirmation, then,” I say.

  “And that’s bad news,” she says.

  Mikk groans. He starts to get up, but I grab his wrist.

  “Why?” I ask.

  “Because,” Squishy says, “you say your father wasn’t a scientist.”

  I nod.

  “So someone else put that together.”

  “It sounded like a group of someone elses put that together,” I say.

  “Even so,” she says. “Enough of the technology has been revived. The military has it.”

  “Provided,” I say, “that they can find some more ancient stealth tech to cannibalize. My father said they can’t use the Room.”

  “And you believe him?” she asks.

  “Yes,” I say. “They used the control panel from the Dignity Vessel. We’ve been all over the station around the Room. No one ever found a control panel.”

  I look at the others for confirmation. They nod. They’re interested now.

  “The Room, your Dignity Vessel.” Squishy sighs. “There’s a lot of ancient stealth tech around here. All the Empire needs is another wrecked Dignity Vessel.”

  “It was a fluke that we found that one,” I say.

  She shakes her head. “There’ve been others,” she says. “But there’s never been any working stealth tech in any of them. That’s how the military got the idea to rebuild ancient stealth tech in the first place.”