Diving into the Wreck - [Diving Universe 01]

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  I do note that he knows more about stealth tech than a nonscientist should. He has been studying.

  I lean forward, just like he is. I keep my left forefinger on the containment field. In my right hand, I run my gloved thumb along the edge of Squishy’s device.

  She made it very easy. A simple on-off switch that has to be flicked, then squeezed. The timer is built in. There’s nothing to set up. Once the device comes in proximity of a stealth field and is turned on, it will weld itself to the stealth field, like a magnet against metal. Only no one will be able to pry it loose.

  It then taps the stealth tech’s power to fuel its own reaction.

  And it will blow within an hour.

  Or so she told me. She seemed to believe it would work. But, she kept reminding me (a little bitterly), she never had a chance to test it.

  So it’s all theory.

  A theory that I want badly to work.

  I flick the switch, or what feels like the switch through the thickness of my glove. Then I squeeze the damn device, hoping I turn it on.

  Another voice joins the chorus.

  My father looks at me, alarmed. He hears it too.

  I slam the device against the containment screen. The entire screen turns red.

  “What the hell is that?” he asks.

  “The end to your experiments,” I say, and I hope I’m right.

  ~ * ~

  FORTY-ONE

  I

  grab my father’s arm.

  “And now,” I say, “we’re getting out of here.”

  My father yanks his arm away. He reaches for the device.

  “What is that thing?” he asks.

  “Another bomb,” I say. “This one designed by a former stealth tech engineer. Don’t try to remove it. It taps into the stealth tech.”

  “That’s not possible,” he says. He wraps his fingers around it and tugs. The containment field ripples like water, but it holds. The device does not come off.

  “You can’t do this,” he says.

  “I already have,” I say. “Now we have to leave. Just like we had to leave when the Dignity Vessel blew.”

  “No,” he says. He’s put his face close to the device, trying to figure out how to pull it off.

  I don’t like seeing his face so close to a bomb. I don’t want to kill him— I know that now. No matter what he’s done, I can’t kill him.

  And I can’t leave him here.

  I pull the knife. It gleams redly in the light from the containment field.

  He stands up and looks at me, mouth agape. “You’re not serious.”

  “You have to leave with me,” I say.

  “Or what?” he asks. “You’ll kill me?”

  I don’t answer that. I figured the knife would be enough of a threat. Obviously it’s not.

  “Go ahead,” he says. “If you’re right and this is a bomb, I’m dead anyway. You’re just hastening my death by a few minutes.”

  I don’t correct him. He has more than a few minutes, but I don’t want him to know that.

  “You have to leave with me.” My voice doesn’t sound like my own. It sounds strangled and young.

  And at the same time, it sounds like his outside the Room, when he pulled me toward his ship. Then, it was his voice filled with panic, his voice that sounded strangled.

  Because of me? Or because of my marker?

  I’ll never know.

  “Come on,” I say. “When this blows, it could open a dimensional rift, just like the stealth field on the Dignity Vessel.”

  “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 lik
es 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

  T

  he 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. There, 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.