I carry these images with me, and now, it seems, I’ll carry Junior’s.
Is that why Jypé made me promise to go in? Had he had the same vision of his son?
I sit down at the network and call up the claim form. It’s so simple. The key is giving up accurate coordinates. The system’ll do a quick double check to see if anyone else has filed a claim, and if so, an automatic arbitrator will ask if I care to withdraw. If I do not, then the entire thing will go to the nearest court.
My hands itch. This is so contrary to my training.
I start to file—and then stop.
I close my eyes—and he’s there again, barely moving, but alive.
If I do this, Junior will haunt me until the end of my life. If I do this, I’ll always wonder.
Wreck divers take silly, unnecessary risks, by definition.
The only thing that’s stopping me from taking this one is Squishy and her urge for caution.
Wreck divers flirt with death.
I stand. It’s time for a rendezvous.
~ * ~
ELEVEN
T
urtle won’t go into the Dignity Vessel. She wants to quit, even though she won’t admit it. I’ve never seen her so agitated. She paces through the Business like we’ve caged her inside.
Even though she won’t talk to us, it’s clear that she’s stressed, terrified, and blinded by Squishy’s betrayal.
Turtle, my best diver, would be useless on a dive right now. She’s not clearheaded enough, and I worry that her extreme emotional swings would make her reckless.
Fortunately, Karl has no qualms about diving the Dignity Vessel. His fears left with Jypé’s body. Apparently Karl knew something awful would happen, and when it finally did, it calmed him.
I appreciate the calm. I’m stressed too and stunned by Squishy’s departure. I guess I never knew her, which is odd, since I once thought I knew her very well.
Mostly, though, I’m worried, worried that I’m breaking my promise to Jypé, worried that I’ve left one of my divers to a slow death on an empty ship.
So it’s Karl I go to, Karl I ask to partner with me on a dive in the Dignity Vessel. I tell him I want to see what happened in there for myself.
He actually smiles when he hears that.
“Thought you weren’t going to come around,” he says.
But I have.
Turtle doesn’t protest this mission. In fact, she too thinks it’s the right thing to do.
Some of her agitation fades. Apparently she thought that I agreed with Squishy and was afraid that I’d be abandoning Junior forever.
I almost did.
Turtle asks to man the skip. We need her, Karl and I, and we both think she’s calm enough to handle any emergency that comes up.
Karl and I are going in, knowing we have good backup. Knowing that we’re doing all we can.
We’ve decided on thirty/forty/thirty, because we’re going to investigate that cockpit. Karl theorizes that there’s some kind of off switch for the stealth tech, and of course he’s right. But the off switch would have to be on the tech itself, wherever that is, since the wreck has no real power.
The designers had too much faith in their technology to build redundant safety systems—I’m assuming they had too much faith to design a secondary off switch for their most dangerous technology, a dead-man’s switch that’ll allow the stealth tech to go off even if the wreck has no power.
I mention that to Karl and he gives me a startled look.
“You ever wonder what’s keeping the stealth tech on, then?” he asks.
I’ve wondered, but I have no answer. Maybe when Squishy comes back with the Empire ships, I’ll be able to ask her. What my nonscientific mind is wondering is this: Can the stealth tech operate from both dimensions? Is something on the other side powering it?
Is part of the wreck—that hole we found in the hull on the first day, maybe—still in that other dimension?
Karl and I suit up, take extra oxygen, and double-check our suits’ environmental controls. I’m not giddy this trip—I’m not sure I’ll be giddy again—but I’m not scared either.
Just coldly determined.
I promised Jypé I was going back for Junior, and now I am.
No matter what the risk.
The trip across is simple, quick, and familiar. Going down the entrance no longer seems like an adventure. We hit the corridors with fifteen minutes to spare.
Jypé’s map is accurate to the millimeter. His push-off points are marked on the map and with some corresponding glove grips. We make record time as we head toward that cockpit.
Record time, though, is still slow. I find myself wishing for all my senses: sound, smell, taste. I want to know if the effects of the stealth tech have made it out here, if something is off in the air—a bit of an acrid odor, something foreign that raises the small hairs on the back of my neck. I want to know if Junior is already decomposing, if he’s part of a group (the crew?) pushed up against the stealth tech, never to go free again.
But the wreck doesn’t cough up those kind of details. This corridor looks the same as the other corridor I pulled my way through.
Karl moves as quickly as I do, although his suit lights are on so full that looking at him almost blinds me. That’s what I did to Turtle on our trip, and it’s a sign of nervousness.
It doesn’t surprise me that Karl, who claimed not to be afraid, is worried. He’s the one who had doubts about this trip once he’d been inside the wreck. He’s the one I thought wouldn’t make it through all of his scheduled dives.
The cockpit looms in front of us, the doors stuck open. It does look like a battlefield from this vantage: the broken furniture, the destruction all cobbled together on one side of the room, like a barricade.
The odd part about it is, though, that the barricade runs from floor to ceiling, and unlike most things in zero-g, seems stuck in place.
Neither Karl nor I give the barricade much time. We’ve vowed to explore the rest of the cockpit first, looking for the elusive dead-man switch. We have to be careful; the sharp edges are everywhere.
Before we left, we used the visuals from Jypé’s suit, and his half-finished map, to assign each other areas of the cockpit to explore. I’m going deep, mostly because this is my idea, and deep—we both feel—is the most dangerous place. It’s closest to the probe, closest to that corner of the cockpit where Junior still hangs, horizontal, his boots kicking out into the open.
As I float into the cockpit, I hear a faint hum. The sound is familiar, something I’ve heard before. It’s tantalizing, like a song whose tune is just out of reach—a hint of a remembered melody.
A shiver runs down my spine. The triggered memory is just out of reach as well, and something tells me I don’t want to think about it now.
I need all my concentration to focus on the search for the dead-man switch.
I go in the center, heading toward the back, not using handholds. I’ve pushed off the wall, so I have some momentum, a technique that isn’t really my strong suit. But I volunteered for this, knowing the edges in the front would slow me down, knowing that the walls would raise my fears to an almost incalculable height.
Instead, I float over the middle of the room, see the uprooted metal of chairs and the ripped shreds of consoles. There are actual wires protruding from the middle of that mess, wires and stripped bolts—something I haven’t seen in space before, only in old colonies—and my stomach churns as I move forward.
The back wall is dark, with its distended screen. The cockpit feels like a cave instead of the hub of the Dignity Vessel. I wonder how so many people could have trusted their lives to this place.
Just before I reach the wall, I spin so that I hit it with the soles of my boots. The soles have the toughest material on my suit. The wall is mostly smooth, but there are a few edges here, too—more stripped bolts, a few twisted metal pieces that I have no idea what they once were part of.
This entire plac
e feels useless and dead.
It takes all of my strength not to look at the barricade, not to search for the bottoms of Junior’s boots, not to go there first. But I force myself to shine a spot on the wall before me, then on the floor, and the ceiling, looking for something—anything—that might control part of this vessel.
But whatever they had, whatever machinery there’d been, whatever computerized equipment, is either gone or part of that barricade. My work in the back is over quickly, although I take an extra few minutes to record it all, just in case the camera sees something I don’t.
It takes Karl a bit longer. He has to pick his way through a tiny debris field. He’s closer to a possible site: there’s still a console or two stuck to his near wall. He examines them, runs his suit-cam over them as well, but shakes his head.
Even before he tells me he’s found nothing, I know.
I know.
I join him at a two-pronged handhold, where his wall and mine meet. The handhold was actually designed for this space, the first such design I’ve seen on the entire Dignity Vessel.
Maybe the engineers felt that only the cockpit crew had to survive uninjured should the artificial gravity go off. More likely, the lack of grab bars was simply an oversight in the other areas, or a cost-saving measure.
“You see a way into that barricade?” Karl asks.
“We’re not going in,” I say. “We’re going to satisfy my curiosity first.”
He knows about the dream; I told him when we were suiting up. I have no idea if Turtle heard—if she did, then she knows too. I don’t know how she feels about the superstitious part of this mission, but I know that Karl understands.
“I think we should work off a tether,” he says. “We can hook up to this handhold. That way, if one of us gets stuck—”
I shake my head. There might be other bodies in that barricade, and if there are, I would wager that some of them have tethers and bits of equipment attached.
If the stealth tech is as powerful as I think it is, then these people had no safeguard against it. A handhold won’t defend us either, even though, I believe, the stealth tech is running at a small percentage of capacity.
“I’m going first,” I say. “You wait. If I get pulled in, you go back. You and Turtle get out.”
We’ve discussed this drill. They don’t like it. They believe leaving me behind will give them two ghosts instead of one.
Maybe so, but at least they’ll still be alive to experience those ghosts.
I push off the handhold, softer this time than I did from the corridor, and let the drift take me to the barricade. I turn the front suit-cams on high. I also use zoom on all but a few of them. I want to see as much as I can through that barricade.
My suit lights are also on full. I must look like a child’s floaty toy heading in for a landing.
I stop near the spot where Junior went in. His boots are there, floating, like expected. I back as far from him as I can, hoping to catch a reflection in his visor, but I get nothing.
I have to move to the initial spot, that hole in the barricade that Junior initially wanted to go through.
I’m more afraid of that than I am of the rest of the wreck, but I do it. I grasp a spot marked on Jypé’s map, and pull myself toward that hole.
Then I train the zoom inside, but I don’t need it.
I see the side of Junior’s face, illuminated by my lights. The helmet is what tells me that it’s him. I recognize the modern design, the little logos he glued to its side.
His helmet has bumped against the only intact console in the entire place. His face is pointed downward, the helmet on clear. And through it, I see something I don’t expect: the opposite of my fears.
He isn’t alive. He hasn’t been alive in a long, long time.
As I said, no one understands interdimensional travel, but we suspect it manipulates time. And what I see in front of me makes me realize my hypothesis is wrong.
Time sped up for him. Sped to such a rate that he isn’t even recognizable. He’s been mummified for so long that the skin looks petrified, and I bet, if we were to somehow free him and take him back to the Business, that none of our normal medical tools could cut through the surface of his face.
There are no currents and eddies here, nothing to pull me forward. Still, I scurry back to what I consider a safe spot, not wanting to experience the same fate as the youngest member of our team.
“What is it?” Karl asks me.
“He’s gone,” I say. “No sense cutting him loose.”
Even though cutting isn’t the right term. We’d have to free him from that stealth tech, and I’m not getting near it. No matter how rich it could make me, no matter how many questions it answers, I no longer want anything to do with it.
I’m done—with this dive, this wreck—and with my brief encounter with greed.
~ * ~
TWELVE
W
e do have answers, though, and visuals to present to the Empire’s ships when they arrive. There are ten of them—a convoy— unwilling to trust something as precious as stealth tech to a single ship.
Squishy didn’t come back with them. I don’t know why I thought she would. She dropped off Jypé, reported us and the wreck, and vanished into Longbow Station, not even willing to collect a finder’s fee that the Empire gives whenever it locates unusual technologies.
Squishy’s gone, and I doubt she’ll ever come back.
Turtle’s not speaking to me now, except to say that she’s relieved we’re not being charged with anything. Our vids showed the Empire we cared enough to go back for our team member, and also that we had no idea about the stealth tech until we saw it function.
We hadn’t gone into the site to raid it, just to explore it—as the earlier vids showed. Which confirmed my claim—I’m a wreck diver, not a pirate, not a scavenger—and that allowed me to pick up the reward that Squishy abandoned.
The reward is embarrassingly large. I’ve never seen that much money all at once.
Normally, though, I would have left it. I don’t like making money that way.
But I couldn’t leave it this time. I needed to fund the expedition, and I’m not going to be able to do it the way I’d initially planned—by taking tourists to the Dignity Vessel so far from home.
The Empire chased us away from the vessel. They’re talking about moving it to some storehouse or warehouse or way station, but I’m not sure how they’re going to do it.
I don’t think they dare move it, not with the stealth tech still functioning. I think they’ll lose some divers and some equipment, just like the rest of us have.
But I didn’t tell them that. I didn’t get a chance to tell them much of anything. All I could do was defend myself and my crew, accept the ticket for the lost claim and the hollow thanks of the agent in charge of that convoy.
As we left that group of ten ships, we couldn’t even see the Dignity Vessel they surrounded. Turtle now agrees with Squishy; she thinks we should have blown the vessel up.
Karl is just glad that it’s no longer part of our lives.
But it’ll always be a part of mine.
I think about it constantly, speculating. Worrying.
Wishing I had more answers to all the questions the Vessel raised.
Like this one: That vessel had been in service a while—that much was clear from how it had been refitted. When someone activated the stealth, something went wrong. What happened to the crew then? Did they abandon the vessel or die in it? Did they try to shut the stealth tech off or did they run from it?
Were they running tests with minimal crew, or had the real crew looked at that carnage in the cockpit and decided, like we did, that it wasn’t worth the risk to go in? Was this a repair mission gone wrong?
I never looked for escape pods, but such things existed on Dignity Vessels—at least they do in the specs. Maybe the rest of the crew bailed, got rescued, and blended into cultures somewhere far from home.
Maybe that’s where Jypé’s legends come from.
Or so I like to believe.
I’ll never know.
Just like I’ll never know how the vessel got to the place I found it. There’s no way to tell if it traveled in stealth mode over those thousands of years, although that doesn’t explain how the ship avoided gravity wells and other perils that lie in wait in a cold and difficult universe. Or maybe it had been installed with an updated FTL.
Diving into the Wreck - [Diving Universe 01] Page 9