But she was there, and she remained there as I swam toward her, my skin trembling within the confines of my suit. She remained there as I approached the gash in her side, my cameras rolling and my floodlights on, showing me her secrets.
The first secret was enough to make my breath catch in my throat—never a good idea when depending on canned air. The hole in her side was clearly what had taken her down to the depths. Historians had always assumed she hit something, since nothing else explained the disappearance of a ship of her size and status. They’d also assumed the hit had been sudden and catastrophic, since otherwise, she would have had the time to radio for help.
This hole was large enough to qualify as catastrophic, but it wasn’t a tear in her skin, and it wasn’t the punched-in pit of a hard impact. It was a blooming metal flower, the edges curled outward like petals, revealing a tempting glimpse at the secrets hidden within. The Star hadn’t hit anything.
The Star had died of a self-inflicted wound.
The crawling in my skin intensified as I continued forward, careful to turn and give my camera a panoramic view of the scene. The Star had been a suicide, whether accidental or intentional. Had this been an act of terrorism? Or had some essential system overloaded and blown, taking her down before anyone could call for help? Neither theory explained how she’d come to rest here, so far from where she should have been, but one mystery had been solved, even if the solution raised a dozen more questions.
I paused at the opening, panning my light around, revealing layers of damaged steel and devastation. My ear piece crackled.
“I don’t think you should go in there,” said Dave’s voice. “It might not be structurally sound.”
I couldn’t answer him, so I held my hand up to the camera and signed, slowly but firmly, ‘No.’
“Come on, Angie. It doesn’t look safe. You need to get away from there. Come back, and we can start checking out the interior later.”
I didn’t bother signing this time. I simply pushed forward, out of the open sea and into the confines of the Star’s hold. The walls closed in around me as my light played across them, revealing their details for the first time in a century.
I swam forward, and all around me, the Star shone.
* * *
Dave met me at the rail when I returned to the ship, a scowl on his face and a towel in his hands. “When I tell you something isn’t safe, you’re supposed to listen,” he snapped. From him, that was a soliloquy worthy of the stage, and I felt a little bad for inspiring it.
Only a little, though. I held up my bag of small treasures, items taken from the Star to prove that we’d been the first to get there, and more, that she really was the vessel we believed her to be. “Sorry,” I said. “You know how I love to shop.”
Dave managed to hold his scowl for a few more seconds before it melted away, replaced by eager greed and a childlike awe. He was here for the score as much as I was. “Show,” he said.
“Aw, did you use up all your pronouns on that little speech?” I asked. I handed him the bag and took the towel. “Give me a minute to dry off, and we can go through the goodies.”
Dave nodded, silent again, and walked with the spoils toward the waiting table.
There are historians who hate people like us, and for good reason: we disrupt the sites we discover in the process of proving that we were the ones who discovered them. They hate the ones like me and Dave a little less, because at least we roll cameras and don’t make off with millions of dollars in gold and diamonds and other valuables, but they still hate us. I can live with that. I hold secrets and answers in my hands every time I do my job right, and that’s worth a little hatred.
Dave was sitting impatiently, his eyes locked on the bag, when I came back, now wearing warm, dry clothes. He looked up at me and grunted. I grinned.
“Good things come to those who wait,” I said, and sat down to begin pulling secrets out of my metaphorical treasure chest.
Historians might hate us, but we were always careful: we only removed the pieces that were unlikely to be damaged by the transitions, and we never broke into air-filled rooms if we had any choice in the matter. Because of the way big ships go down, some compartments can stay sealed for decades, even centuries, and those are the ones with the most historical relevance. I’ve known treasure hunters who traveled with crowbars and small explosives, who didn’t care how much they destroyed in their quest for relevance and riches. We never did that.
One by one, I produced a jar of jam, a few pieces of tarnished silverware, a bottle of wine miraculously unbroken by the blast, a small jewelry box, and—most precious of all—a green glass bottle with a wax stopper jammed firmly into its neck, trapping both air and what looked like a hand-written letter inside. The sea had never been able to break through the wax.
“Why write a letter in a bottle if you know your ship is going down?” I asked philo-sophically.
“Maybe somebody who wished they’d been alive in the age of cellphones.” Dave produced a knife, beginning to slowly run it around the edge of the wax seal. He was easing it open, giving the bottle time to adjust to every change of pressure and temperature.
I should probably have told him to stop, to save this last mystery for the historians who would eventually take this site from us. I did no such thing. My cameras were good enough to have picked up the bottle when I claimed it from the silt clogging the Star’s hall, but not good enough to have seen that it was still air-tight and perfectly sealed. We’d hand over the message and the bottle, and if we chose to be the ones who read it first, who could blame us?
While Dave was distracted with the message, I reached for the jewelry box. It was locked, but time and the sea had had their way with the findings: the lock didn’t give way. The hinges on the box itself did. I flipped the lip open, peering greedily inside. Some of the pieces I’d seen dredged up from the bottom of the sea had been stunning. Even if the water had been able to rot fabric and thread, people used to sail with all manner of gold and jewels draped around their necks, as if their mere presence on the deck wasn’t enough to scream that they had money. This box could hold a king’s ransom—
Or it could hold a small brown rock sphere with a long crack down one side, barely revealing the sparkling shapes of the crystals inside. The water had eaten the fabric around it, but left the rock untouched: I had no doubt this thing was as smooth and inexplicable as it had been on the day a rich woman decided a rock was a better accessory for an ocean voyage than all the pearls in Portland.
“What the hell?” I picked up the rock, and nearly dropped it as the skin on my fingertips tingled, suddenly warm despite the chill lingering in the air. I tightened my grip, holding the rock up to the light. It sparkled with microscopic motes of shimmering dust. Still nothing impressive enough to have deserved a place of pride in the jewelry box. “This is bizarre.”
“This is bad.”
I glanced to Dave. He was pale, holding a curled sheet of paper toward me. It was shaking. There wasn’t a wind, and it was shaking.
He was shaking.
Wordlessly, I took the papers from his hand with my free one. Our fingertips brushed and that tingle was back, inexplicable and almost hot this time, more intense than it had been before. I set the rock back in its resting place, and I read.
This is my apology to the world. I would that it had been unnecessary: that G_d Almighty, in His wisdom and grace, had not seen fit to place this trial before me. But I am only a man, and I have no influence over the divine, and my time—such as it now is—grows short.
For those who have found this note, if ever it is found: flee this cursed ship. Take nothing, touch nothing, and leave our bones consigned to the deep, where perhaps they can be allowed to rest.
For those whose families set sail with me and mine: I am so very sorry. This was the only way to be sure the foul taint was cleansed from our fair land, and while each death is set upon my shoulders, I assure you that so many more would have died
if we had not boarded this vessel. It is as a pebble to a mountain. This may bring you cold comfort, but they did not die in vain.
I glanced up. “What the hell is this?”
“Keep reading,” said Dave, staring fixedly at his fingertips.
I kept reading.
The fallen star was found by my son, Matthew Jr., a day before we were to sail. It had come down on the beach, and he tracked its descent with the bright fierceness that is the sole domain of children. Nothing had ever shone so brightly in his eyes as that star.
I am grateful that it was found, that tragedy was hence averted for the city and country I love. But though the thought may be shameful, I wish it had been found by other hands. That this cruel sacrifice should be placed on other shoulders, and not on mine.
My son is already dead.
“What the fuck.”
“Keep reading.”
The first signs of illness had already appeared, in all of us, when time came to depart for the Star. I left what apologies I could; I bought an extra ticket for my wife’s maid, who thought the ocean air would cure what ailed her. She does not think so any longer, but sees the necessity of what I must do. She has family in Portland. She would keep them safe. We will keep them safe.
The star, if such it is, carries with it more than a taste of the heavens: it carries sickness such as I have never known, sickness such as mortal flesh cannot bear. I have worn gloves to write this missive, and pray only that any who find our grave will find it before they find the star, which cannot be broken, not even with the crushing pistons of our ship’s engine, nor melted, nor destroyed in any earthly way. It is cracked, yes, but I believe that to be by some foul design, for the crack is where the evil escapes.
If you have already seen the star, it is too late for you. Please. I beg of you. Choose as I have chosen, and spare the ones you love by sacrificing yourself. No man is worth the world.
I only wish I could pretend we were.
Signed, in regret, your obedient servant, Matthew Alder.
I turned the letter over in my hand, looking for a postscript—some note on the back that would tell me this was all a joke played by a man on a sinking ship, looking for one last “gotcha” before the waves closed over his head.
There wasn’t one. But there was a purple teardrop sketched across my knuckles, like the flesh there had been somehow terribly bruised. I dropped the letter. Trying not to let my fingers tremble, I brushed them across the damaged skin.
There was no pain. Only a soft squishing sensation as the meat of my hand collapsed inward, revealing the structured scaffolding of the bones beneath.
I made a sound.
“Yeah,” said Dave bleakly. I raised my eyes. He showed me the fingertips of his left hand, where they had brushed against mine. They were the deep, blackened purple of a bruise, and the color was spreading, winding its way up his fingers like water soaking into dampened paper.
“He sank them.” He blew the boiler, or maybe he somehow had access to dynamite and smuggled it aboard. Anything to make sure the ship, once it left harbor, didn’t return. Anything to sink the star, and the plague it had carried, where no one would ever find it, because it was too contagious, and too terrible, and sometimes quarantine isn’t enough. Sometimes quarantine could never be enough.
There was still no pain in my hand. Whatever was eating my flesh was also deadening my nerves. A small blessing, in a day that didn’t contain very many.
“Yeah,” said Dave.
I looked toward the water. I looked at the box that contained the…meteorite? Asteroid? Weapon from beyond the stars? In the end, it didn’t really matter what it was. What mattered was that it had come here, it had fallen here, and now we all had to live with the consequences.
“At least we solved one last mystery,” I whispered.
“Yeah,” said Dave, and we sat together, and waited to remember how to breathe.
* * *
So here we are. If you’re listening to this, if you’re investigating the latest great maritime disaster—the disappearance of two second-tier treasure hunters and all their very expensive tech—or if you’re investigating something that happened a hundred years ago, congratulations: you’ve found us, and with us, the Sendale Star.
Now go away.
We have better than letters in a bottle these days. We have anchored probes and geo-locators, we have cloud storage and the ability to suspend messages until the right conditions are met. Until someone comes too close, more than once, which either means they’re looking for us, or that they’ve already found us. Scavengers always know our own.
Do not dive here. Do not search here. Leave it alone. Leave us alone. Be a hero by doing nothing, and save the world one more time from a falling star that we were never meant to catch. This is the only wish we have left, and we’re making it on the star that Alder carried to condemn a ship, and we’re making it on the Star, who tried so hard to hide.
This is Angela Madison and David Cooper, of the Catch and Release, signing off and going down with the ship.
End transmission.
ANOTHER DREAM TO EUROPA
Michael Robertson
Do it for the money—that stopped working after the first couple of weeks. Money’s almost as good in saturation diving for the oil rigs.
My butt slides around with the skinsuit’s weird oily smoothness as I rock back and forth on the wooden bench.
Do it so they won’t think you’re scared.
That’s the one I’d been relying on. And it had worked for a good long while, shame giving me enough impulse to rise up off the bench, zip the skinsuit up, and push out that door.
Today the shame doesn’t bother me. Let them think I’m a coward. Maybe I am. Let them get linked up to the dive remote, see how brave they are. Let them stare down the borehole. Let them feel the alien ice crowding on all sides while the winch hums them lower, lower, lower…
I slap myself on both cheeks. Why suffer through it twice?
Do it for the mission? I try that on for size. Thinking of myself as the anchor leg of the relay. Hundreds of women and men spent decades on this. Guiding the payload to Europa. Shepherding the robots as they chewed a base below the surface. All to get the diving mech in place, above a borehole down to that new ocean.
There’s a gentle knock on the door.
“Monsieur Gregory?”
I squeeze my eyes shut. I could quit. They can’t make me get in the tank and uplink to the mech.
Only, I gave my word. Signed on the line. Told them I was their man.
Do it to keep my word.
I stand up. The tile floor feels dry and warm through the skinsuit.
“Coming,” I say, and step out of the door.
Laurent steps back and smiles at me. “Apologies, I do not mean to rush,” he says, and turns to go fiddle with his equipment.
Melanie gives me a small smile, only half-turning from the displays she’s watching.
The tank is a long, low tub with a curved lid. Fluorescent light washes a gleam over the stainless steel rim and refracts through the gel inside, deep blue like the liquid they used to use in diaper commercials to show how absorbent the diaper was.
I’ve avoided learning how any of it works. Like how Vikings didn’t like knowing how to swim. If I knew too much about how I could lie down here and then wake up in a mech on Europa, I’d spend the whole time wondering about what-ifs. What-ifs, and, of course, how-comes, like how come it feels exactly like I’m there even when I know I’m here?
They shave my head clean, slather it with that cold jelly, and fit the interface package over it like a hood. I take the breather mouthpiece in my mouth and bite down, quirk my cheeks around until it’s sitting just right.
My heart speeds up when they seal the envelope around my head, locking the breather and the interface package in place. It must look like a bad fake space helmet from a fifties comic, but I don’t care so long as it keeps me breathing while I float in my ge
latinous coffin.
I shiver at that thought. Jeez. No need to make things even worse.
“Uplink is green,” Melanie says. “You may lie down.”
Laurent’s watching my vitals. Maybe that’s why he adds, “When you are ready.”
Melanie glances at him, then back to her displays.
The skinsuit keeps everything feeling warm and dry, so sinking into the gel is like being cradled in a nest of pillows.
Laurent’s blue face leans over above me. He waves his blue hand, then grasps the lid and swings it down. And then it’s dark.
Dreaming is what it’s most like. Once they close that lid I start to doze. A comfortable absence settles on my mind. I don’t think about anything in particular.
Like always, once I’m in, I’m cool. Jitters before? Sometimes. Sometimes even regrets after. Or nightmares. One time I was leading this tour around a shipwreck—I guess every diver works that patch of tropical tourist bullshit. So there I was in Bali taking sunburned old Midwesterners down to the good old shipwreck Liberty, pointing out the swirling jackfish and the anemones and keeping my eyes on all their lines to make sure they didn’t suffocate themselves trying to get good pictures, and this bumphead parrotfish shoots out from behind one of the rusted out sections of the hull, just coming right for my face. Who knows why. Big fish. I don’t react in the moment; they’re not dangerous fish, mostly. And just when it gets close to me, it turns, and I get this momentary flash of its eyeball and that weird, tall face, regarding me, snub beak mouth half open.
That was it. The fish swam off. I kept leading the tour. Surfaced, collected my tips.
But that bumphead followed me into my dreams. Can’t say why. I’ve had sharks give me a once over. Bull shark once even. But that bumphead, well. Even now, more years later than I care to tell you, the odd night I’ll wake up with a flash of that face like a cinder block and that eye peeking out.
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