The Diving Bundle: Six Diving Universe Novellas

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  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 pull 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.

  ***

  We do have answers, though, and visuals to present to the government 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 government 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 government 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.

  I’d’ve left it too, except that 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 wreck got moved to some storehouse or warehouse or way station where the government claims it’s safe. Turtle thinks we should’ve blown it up; Karl’s just glad it’s out of our way.

  Me, I just wished I had more answers to all the puzzles.

  That vessel’d been in service a while, that much was clear from how it had been refitted. When someone activated the stealth, something went wrong. I doubt even the government scientists would find out exactly what in that mess.

  Then there’s the question of how it got to the place I found it. There’s no way to tell if it traveled in stealth mode or 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. Again, I doubted I would ever know.

  As for the crew—I have no idea, except that I suspect the cockpit crew died right off. We could see them in that pile of debris. But the rest—there were no bodies scattered throughout the ship, and there could’ve been, given that the vessel is still intact after all this time.

  I’m wondering if they were running tests with minimal crew or if 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.

  I never looked for escape pods, but such things existed on Dignity Vessels. 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.

  Longbow Station has never seemed so much like home. It’ll be nice to shed the silent Turtle, and Karl, who claims his diving days are behind him.

  Mine are too, only in not quite the same way. The Business and I’ll still ferry tourists to various wrecks, promising scary dives and providing none.

  But I’ve had enough of undiscovered wrecks and danger for no real reason. Curiosity sent me all over this part of space, looking for hidden pockets, places where no one has been in a long time.

  Now that I’ve found the ultimate hidden pocket—and I’ve seen what it can do—I’m not looking any more. I’m hanging up my suit and reclaiming my land legs.

  Less danger there, on land, in normal gravity. Not that I’m afraid of wrecks now. I’m not, no more than the average spacer.

  I’m more afraid of that feeling, the greed, which came on me hard and fast, and made me tone-deaf to my best diver’s concerns, my old friend’s fears, and my own giddy response to the deep.

  I’m getting out before I turn pirate or scavenger, before my greed—which I thought I didn’t have—draws me as inexorably as the stealth tech drew Junior, pulling me in and holding me in place, before I even realize I’m in trouble.

  Before I even know how impossible it’ll be to escape.

  “Diving Into The Wreck,” a novella by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, was first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, December, 2005.

  THE ROOM OF LOST SOULS

  1

  THE OLD SPACER’S BAR on Longbow Station is the only bar there that doesn’t have a name. No name, no advertising across the door or the back wall, no cute little logos on the magnetized drinking cups. The door is recessed into a grungy wall that looks like it’s temporary due to construction.

  To get in, you need one of two special chips. The first is hand-held—given by the station manager after careful consideration. The second is built into your i.d. You get that one if you’re a legitimate spacer, operating or working for a business that requires a pilot’s license.

  I have had the second chip since I was eighteen years old. I’ve been using it more and more these last few years, since I discovered a wrecked Dignity Vessel that I thought I could mine for gold.

  Instead, that ship mined me.

  Now I take tourists to established wrecks all
over this sector. I coordinate the trip, collect the money and hire the divers who’ll make those tourists believe they’re doing real wreck-diving.

  Tourists never do real wreck diving. It’s too dangerous. The process gets its name from the dangers: in olden days, wreck diving was called space diving to differentiate it from the planet-side practice of diving into the oceans.

  We don’t face water here—we don’t have its weight or its unusual properties, particularly at huge depths. We have other elements to concern us: No gravity, no oxygen, extreme cold.

  Those risks exist no matter what kind of wrecks we dive. So I minimize everything else: I make sure the wrecks are known, mapped, and harmless.

  I haven’t lost any tourists. But I have lost friends to real wreck diving. And several times, I’ve almost lost myself.

  I haven’t been wreck diving since the Dignity Vessel. I’ve turned down other wreck divers who heard I wasn’t going out on my own any more and wanted me to supervise their dives.

  What those divers don’t understand is that I was supervising the Dignity Vessel when I lost two divers and destroyed three friendships.

  I can’t stomach doing that again.

  So mostly, I camp at Longbow station. I bought a berth here, something I vowed I’d never do, but I don’t spend a lot of time in it. Instead, I sit in the old spacer’s bar and listen to the stories. Sometimes I make up a few of my own.

  When I need money, I take tourists to established wrecks. Theoretically, those dives make everyone happy—the tourists because they’ve had a “real” experience; the divers because they got to practice their skills; and me, because I made an obscene amount of money for very little work.

  But obscene amounts of money don’t do it for me. I bought the berth here so that I don’t have to crawl back to my ship if I drink too much or feel like taking a half-hour nap. I haven’t spent money on much else.

  I used to use the money to finance my real passion—finding wrecks. I wasn’t so much interested in salvage, although I’d been known to sell minor items.

  I was interested in the history, in discovering a ship, in figuring out how it ended up where it was and why it got abandoned and what happened to its crew.

  Over the years, I’d solved a few historical mysteries and found even more. I liked the not-knowing. I liked the discovery. I liked the exploration for exploration’s sake.

  And I loved the danger.

  I miss that.

  But every time I think on trying it again, I see the faces of the crew I lost: not just Jypé and Junior, who died horribly on that last trip, but Ahmed and Moïse and Egyed and Dita and Pnina and Ioni. All of them died diving.

  All of them died diving with me.

  I used to lull myself to sleep making up alternate scenarios, scenarios in which my friends lived.

  I don’t do that any more.

  I don’t do much any more. Except sit in the old spacer’s bar on Longbow and wait for tourists to contact me for a job. Then I plan the visit, go to the wreck, plant some souvenirs, come back, pick up the tourists and give them the thrill of their lives.

  With no danger, no risk.

  No excitement.

  The opposite of what I used to do.

  2

  SHE’S LAND-BORN. I don’t need to see her thick body with its heavy bones to know that. Her walk says it all.

  The space-born have a grace—a lightness—to everything they do. Not all are thin-boned and fragile. Some have parents who think ahead, who raise them half in Earth Normal and half in zero-G. The bones develop, but that grace—that lightness—it develops too.

  This woman has a heaviness, a way of putting one foot in front of the other as if she expects the floor to take her weight. I used to walk like that. I spent my first fifteen years mostly planet-bound in real gravity.

  We have the same build, she and I—that thickness which comes from strong bones, the fully formed female body that comes from the good nutrition usually found planetside.

  I used to fight both of those things until I realized they gave me an advantage spacers usually don’t have.

  I don’t break.

  Grab a spacer wrong and her arms snap.

  Grab me wrong, and I’ll bruise.

  She sits down, says my name as if she’s entitled to, and then raises her eyebrows as if they and not the tone of her voice provide the question mark.

  “How’d you get in here?” I pull my drink across the scarred plastic table and lean my chair against the wall. Balancing chairs feels like that second after the gravity gets shut off but hasn’t yet vanished—a half and half feeling of being both weighted and weightless.

  “I have an invitation,” she says and holds up the cheap St. Christopher’s medal that houses this week’s guest chip. Station management shifts the chip housing every week or two so the chips can’t be scalped or manufactured. After five guest chips are given out, management changes housing. There is no predictable time nor is there predictable housing.

  “I didn’t invite you,” I say, picking up my drink and balancing its edge on my flat stomach. I can’t quite get the balance right and I catch the drink before it spills.

  “I know,” the woman says, “but I came to see you.”

  “If you want to hire my ship to do some wreck diving, go through channels. Send a message, my system’ll scan your background, and if you pass, you can see any one of a dozen wrecks that’re open to amateurs.”

  “I’m not interested in diving,” the woman says.

  “Then you have no reason to talk to me.” I take a drink. The liquid, which is a fake but tasty honey-and-butter ale, has warmed during the long afternoon. The warmth brings out the ale’s flavor, which is why I nurse it—or at least why I say I nurse it. I don’t like to get drunk—I hate the loss of control—but I like drinking and I like to sit in this dark, private, enclosed bar and watch people whom I know won’t give me any guff.

  “But I do have a reason to talk to you.” She leans toward me. She has pale green eyes surrounded by dark lashes. The eyes make her seem even more exotic than her land-born walk does. “You see, I hear you’re the best—”

  My snort interrupts her. “There is no best. There’s a half a dozen companies that’ll take you touring wrecks—and that’s without diving. All of us are certified. All of us are bonded and licensed and all of us guarantee the best touring experience in this sector. It just varies in degree—do you want the illusion of danger or do you want a little bit of history with your deep space adventure? I don’t know who sent you in here—”

  She starts to answer, but I raise a finger, stopping her.

  “—and I don’t care. I do want you to contact someone else for a tour. This is my private time, and I hate having it interrupted.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says and the apology sounds sincere.

  I expect her to get up, leave the bar or maybe move to another table, but she does neither.

  Instead she leans closer and lowers her voice.

  “I’m not a tourist,” she says. “I have a mission and I’m told you’re the only one who can help me.”

  In the two years since the Dignity Vessel, no one has tried this old con on me. In the twenty years before, I’d get one or two of these approaches a year, mostly from rivals wanting coordinates to the wrecks I refused to salvage.

  I’ve always believed that certain wrecks have historical value only when they’re intact—not a popular belief among salvagers and scavengers and most wreck divers—but one that I’ve adhered to since I started in this business at the ripe old age of eighteen.

  I point to Karl, a slight but muscular diver who has the best reputation on Longbow. He’s not very good at finding things, but he has his moments. He was with me on that last run and we haven’t spoken since we docked.

  “Karl’s good,” I say. “In fact, if you want real adventure, not the touristy kind, he’s the best. He’ll take you to deep space, no questions asked.”

  “I wan
t you,” the woman says.

  I sigh. Maybe she does. Maybe she’s been led astray by some old-timer. Maybe she thinks I still have some valuable coordinates locked in my ship.

  I don’t. I dumped pretty much everything the day I decided I would only do tourist runs.

  “Please,” she says. “Just let me tell you what’s going on.”

  I sigh. She’s not going to leave without telling me. Unless I force her. And I’m not going to force her because it would take too much effort.

  I take another swig of my ale.

  She folds her hands together, but not before I see that her fingers are shaking.

  “I’m Riya Trekov, the daughter of Commander Ewing Trekov. Have you heard of him?”

  I shake my head. I haven’t heard of most people. Among the living, I only care about divers, pilots, and scavengers. Among the dead, I know only the ones whose wrecks would have once made my diving worthwhile. I also knew the ones who had piloted the wrecks I found, as well as the people who sent them, and the politicians, leaders or famous people of their time, their place, their past.

  But modern commanders, people whose name I should recognize? I am always at a loss.

  “He was the supreme commander in the Colonnade Wars.”

  Her voice is soft, and it needs to be. The Colonnade Wars aren’t popular out here. Most of the spacers sitting in this bar are the children or grandchildren of the losers.

  “That was a hundred years ago,” I say.

  “So you do know the wars.” Her shoulders rise up and down in a small sigh. She apparently expected to tell me about them.

  “You’re awfully young to be the daughter of a supreme commander from those days.” I purposely don’t say the wars’ name. It’s better not to rile up the other patrons.

  She nods. “I’m a post-loss baby.”

  It takes me a minute to understand her. At first I thought she meant post-loss of the Colonnade Wars, but then I realize that anyone titled supreme commander in that war had been on the winning side. So she meant loss of something else.