The Diving Bundle: Six Diving Universe Novellas

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “He’s missing?” I ask before I can stop myself.

  “He has been for my entire life,” she says.

  “Was he missing before you were born?”

  She takes a deep breath, as if she’s considering whether or not she should tell me. Her caution peaks my curiosity. For the first time, I’m interested in what she’s saying.

  “For fifty years,” she says quietly.

  “Fifty standard years?” I ask.

  She nods. If I’m guessing her age right, and if she’s not lying, then her father went missing before the peace treaties were signed.

  “Was he missing in action?” I ask.

  She shakes her head.

  “A prisoner of war?” Our side—well, the side that populates this part of space, which is only mine by default—didn’t give the prisoners back even though that was one of the terms of the treaty.

  “That’s what we thought,” she says.

  The “we” is new. I wonder if it means she and her family or she and someone else.

  “But?” I ask.

  “But I put detectives on the trail years ago, and there’s no evidence he was ever captured. No evidence that he met with anyone from the other side,” she says with surprising diplomacy. “No evidence that his ship was captured. No evidence that he vanished during the last conflicts of the war, like the official biographies say.”

  “No real evidence?” I ask. “Or just no evidence that can be found after all this time?”

  “No real evidence,” she says. “We’ve looked in the official records and the unofficial ones. I’ve interviewed some of his crew.”

  “From the missing vessel,” I say.

  “That’s just it,” she says. “His ship isn’t missing.”

  So I frown. She has no reason to approach me. Even in my old capacity, I didn’t search for missing humans. I searched for famous ships.

  “Then I don’t understand,” I say.

  “We know where he is,” she says. “I want to hire you to get him back.”

  “I don’t find people,” I say mostly because I don’t want to tell her that he’s probably not still alive.

  No human lives more than 120 years without enhancements. No human who has spent a lot of time in space can survive an implantation of those enhancements.

  “I’m not asking you to,” she says. “I’m hoping you’ll recover him.”

  “Recover?” She’s got my full attention now. “Where is he?”

  The tip of her tongue touches her top lip. She’s nervous. It’s clear she isn’t sure she should tell me, even though she wants to hire me.

  Finally, she says, “He’s in the Room of Lost Souls.”

  ***

  Ask anyone and they’ll tell you. The Room of Lost Souls is a myth.

  I’ve only heard it talked about in whispers. An abandoned space station, far from here, far from anything. Most crews avoid it. Those that do stay do so only in an emergency, and even then they don’t go deep inside.

  Because people who go into the room at the center of the station, what would be, in modern space stations, the control room but which clearly isn’t, those people never come out.

  Sometimes you can see them, floating around the station or pounding at the windows, crying for help.

  Their companions always mount rescue attempts, always lose one or two more people before giving up, and hoping—praying—that what they’re seeing isn’t real.

  Then they make repairs or do whatever it is they needed to do when they arrive, and fly off, filled with guilt, filled with remorse, filled with sadness, happy to be the ones who survived.

  I’ve heard that story, told in whispers, since I got to Longbow Station decades ago, and I’ve never commented. I’ve never even rolled my eyes or shaken my head.

  I understand the need for superstition.

  Sometimes its rituals and talismans give us a necessary illusion of safety.

  And sometimes it protects us from places that are truly dangerous.

  ***

  “Why in the known universe would I go there to help you?” I ask, with a little too much edge in my voice.

  She studies me. I think I have surprised her. She expected me to tell her that the Room of Lost Souls is a myth, that someone had lied to her, that she is staking her quest on something that has never existed.

  “You know it, then.” She doesn’t sound surprised. Somehow she knows that I’ve been there. Somehow she knows that I am one of the only people to come out of the Room alive.

  I don’t answer her question. Instead, I drain my ale and stand. I’m sad to leave the old spacer’s bar this early in the day, but I’m going to.

  I’m going to leave and walk around the station until I find another bar as grimy as this one.

  Then I’m going to go inside and I am, most likely, going to get drunk.

  “You should help me,” she says softly, “because I know what the Room is.”

  I start to get up, but she grabs my arm.

  “And I know,” she says, “how to get people out.”

  3

  HOW TO GET PEOPLE OUT.

  The words echo in my head as I walk out of the bar. I stop in that barren corridor and place one hand against the wall, afraid I’m going to be sick.

  Voices swirl in my head and I will them away.

  Then I take a deep breath and continue on, heading into the less habitable parts of the station, the parts slated for renovation or closure.

  I want to be by myself.

  I need to.

  And I don’t want to return to my berth, which suddenly seems too small, or my ship, which suddenly seems too risky.

  Instead I walk across ruined floors and through half-gutted walls, past closed businesses and graffiti-covered doorways. It’s colder down here—life support is on, but at the minimum provided by regulation—and I almost feel like I’m heading into a wreck, the way I used to head into a wreck when I was a beginner, without thought and without care.

  I don’t remember much. I remember thinking it looked pretty. Colored lights—pale blues and reds and yellows—extended as far as the eye could see. They twinkled. Around them, only blackness.

  My mother held my hand. Her grip was tight through the double layer of our spacesuit gloves. She muttered how beautiful the lights were.

  Before the voices started.

  Before they built, piling one on top of the other, until—it seemed—we got crushed by the weight.

  I don’t remember getting out.

  I remember my father, cradling me, trying to stop my shaking. I remember him giving orders to someone else to steer the damn ship, get us out of this godforsaken place.

  I remember my mother’s eyes through her headpiece, reflecting the multi-colored lights, as if she had swallowed a sea of stars.

  And I remember her voice, blending with the others, like a soprano joining tenors in the middle of a cantata—a surprise, and yet completely expected.

  For years, I heard her voice—strong at first and unusual in its power—then blending, and mixing, until I can’t pick it out any longer.

  I didn’t know if that voice—mixing with other voices—was an aural hallucination, a dream, or a reality. Sometimes I thought it both.

  But it sneaks up on me at the most unexpected moments, sometimes beginning with just a hum. The hum sends shivers down my back, and I do whatever I can to silence the voices.

  Which is usually nothing.

  Nothing except wait.

  ***

  After three days, Riya Trekov finds me.

  I’m having dinner in Longbow’s most exclusive restaurant. The food is exquisite—fresh meat from nearby ports, vegetables grown on the station itself, sauces prepared by the best chef in the sector. There’s fresh bread and creamy desserts and real fruit, a rarity no matter what space port you dock on.

  The view is exquisite as well—windows everywhere except the floor. If you look up, you see the rest of the station towering above y
ou, lights in some of the guest rooms, decoration in some of the berths. If you look out one set of side windows, you see the docks with the myriad of ships—from tiny single-ships to armored yachts to passenger liners.

  Another group of windows show the gardens with their own airlocks and bays, the grow lights sending soft rays across the entire middle of the station.

  On this night, I’m having squid in dark chocolate sauce. The squid isn’t what Earthers think of as squid, but an ocean-faring creature from one of the nearby planets. It has a salty nutlike taste that the chocolate accents.

  I try to focus on the food as Riya sits down. She’s carrying a plate and a full glass of wine.

  Clearly she had been eating somewhere else in the restaurant, on one of the layers I can’t see from my favorite table. But she had seen me come in and somehow, she thinks that gives her permission to join me.

  “Have you thought about it?” she asks, as if she made an offer and I said I would consider it.

  I can lie and say I hadn’t thought about any of it. I can be blunt and say that I want nothing to do with the Room of Lost Souls.

  Or I can be truthful and say that her words have played through my head for the last three days. Tempting me. Frightening me.

  Intriguing me.

  At odd moments, I find myself wondering how I would see the place, after all my years of wreck diving, after all the times I’ve risked my life, after all the hazards I’ve survived.

  “You have,” she says with something like triumph.

  I continue to eat, but I’m no longer savoring the taste. I almost push my plate away—it’s a crime not to taste this squid—but I don’t.

  I don’t want her to see any emotion from me at all.

  “But you have questions,” she says as if I’m actually taking part in this conversation. “You want to know how I found you.”

  The hell of it is that I do want to know that. Hardly anyone knows I survived the Room of Lost Souls. I can’t say that no one knows because the crew on my father’s ship knew. And I have no idea what happened to all of them.

  “I have people who can find almost anything,” she says.

  People. She has people. Which means she’s rich.

  “If you have people,” I say with an emphasis on that phrase, “then have them go to the Room themselves and have them ‘recover’ your father.”

  Her cheeks flush. She looks away, but only for a minute. Then she takes a deep breath, as if she needs courage to dive back into this conversation.

  “They don’t believe that anyone can get out. They think that’s as much a myth as the Room itself.”

  I don’t know how I got out. My memory is fluid and try as I might to recover that moment, I can’t.

  When it becomes clear that I am not going to confirm or deny what happened to me, she says, “Your father is still alive.”

  I jolt. I had no idea the old man had made it this long.

  “Have you ever asked him about the Room?”

  I haven’t, mostly because I never had the chance. But I don’t tell her that. Instead, I say, “You spoke to my father.”

  She nods. “He’s happy to know you’re still alive.”

  I’m not sure I’m happy to know that he is. I prefer to think of myself as a person without a family, a woman without a past.

  “Quite honestly,” she says, “he’s the one who recommended you for this job. I first approached him, and he says he’s too old.”

  I slide my plate to the edge of the table to hide my face as I do the calculations. He turns seventy this year which is not old at all.

  “He also said you have all the skills I need for this job.” She hasn’t touched her food. “He says he doesn’t.”

  That much is true. He’s never gone diving—at least that I know of. He captained a ship, but in the old-fashioned way—not as a hands-on pilot, but as a planetbound owner, who told others what to do.

  We were on some kind of pleasure cruise, I think, when my mother and I wandered into the Room. Or maybe we were moving from one system to another.

  I honestly don’t know. I don’t remember and I never asked him.

  He wasn’t around much anyway. After Mother vanished into that Room, he dumped me with my maternal grandparents and went in search of the very thing Riya claims she found: a way to recover people from the Room of Lost Souls.

  “It makes no sense that he has refused to help you,” I say as a bus tray arrives, sends out a small metal arm that sweeps my plate into its interior, and then floats away. “He’s always wanted a way into the Room.”

  “He says the problem is not the way in, but the way out.” She finally picks up her fork and picks at her now-cold food.

  A chill runs through me. Does my father speak with that kind of authority because he has sent people in after my mother? Or because he’s thinking of what happened to us all those years ago?

  “And yet you claim you have that way out.”

  A serving tray appears with an ice cream glass filled with red and black berries separated by layers of cream. My coffee steams beside it. My standing order. I shouldn’t take it, but I do.

  “I do have a way out,” she says.

  “But you can’t find anyone stupid enough to test it,” I say.

  She lets out a small laugh. “Is that what you think? You think I need a test subject?”

  I take a sip of my coffee. It’s slightly bitter, like all coffee on Longbow station. Somehow the beans grown here lack the richness I’d found on other stations.

  “The way out has been tested. Going in and returning is no longer an issue. What I need is someone with enough acumen to bring out my father.”

  Something in her tone reaches me. It’s a hint of frustration, a bit of anger.

  Her people have failed her. Which is why she’s coming to me.

  “You’ve done this before,” I say.

  She nods. “Six times. Everyone survived. Everyone is healthy. There are no residual problems.”

  “Except they can’t find your father.”

  “Oh,” she says. “They have found him. They just can’t recover him.”

  Now I am intrigued. “Why not?”

  “Because,” she says, “they can’t convince him to leave.”

  ***

  I take a bite of the berries and cream. I need a few moments to think about this. I still feel as if she’s conning me, but I’m not sure how. Or why she would do so.

  “Why did he leave?” I ask.

  She blinks at me in surprise. She clearly didn’t expect curiosity from me.

  “Leave?”

  “You said he didn’t show up for the treaty signings. That he essentially missed the end of the war. Why?”

  She frowns just enough so that I realize she’s never considered this question. She’s been looking at her father as someone—something—she lost, not as a person in his own right. Oh, he has history, but it’s history without her, and therefore not relevant.

  “No one knows,” she says.

  Someone always knows. And if that someone is no longer alive, the answer would probably be in the records. Something this modern is easy to trace; it’s the old stuff, like the Dignity Vessels, whose history gets lost to time that are difficult to figure out.

  She’s finally hooked me and she probably doesn’t even know how. I don’t want to return to the Room for my mother—I barely remember her and what I do remember is vague. I don’t even want to return to face my own past.

  I want to solve this mystery she has unwittingly presented me with. I want to know why a famous man, a man who won some of the most important battles of an important war, disappears before the war ends, and winds up in a place he knew better than to approach.

  For the first time in years, the historian in me, the diver in me senses a challenge. Not like the old challenges, the ones that cost me so many friends and colleagues.

  But a new challenge, one that will threaten me alone.

  One that has th
e risk I miss combined with the historical mysteries that I love.

  I try not to let my sudden enthusiasm show. I ask, as coldly as I can, “What are you paying?”

  Her eyes light up. She seems surprised. Maybe she thought she’d never catch me. Maybe I am her last hope.

  She names a figure. It’s astoundingly high.

  Still, I say, “Triple it and I’ll consider the job.”

  “If you can get him out,” she says, her voice breathless with excitement, “I’ll give you one hundred times that much.”

  Now I’m feeling breathless. That’s more money than I’ve earned in two decades.

  But I don’t have a use for the money I have. I can’t imagine what I’d do with a sum that large.

  Still, I negotiate because that too is in my blood. “I want it all up front.”

  “Half,” she says. “And half when you recover him.”

  That’s fair. Half would provide me a berth at Longbow and all of my expenses for the rest of my life. I’d never have to touch the rest of my money, the stuff I earned these past few years.

  “Half up front,” I say, agreeing, “and half when I recover him—only if you pay all expenses for the entire investigation and journey.”

  “Investigation?” She frowns, as if she doesn’t like the word.

  I nod. “Before I go after him, I need to know who he is.”

  “I told you—”

  “I need to know him, not his reputation.”

  Her frown grows. “Why?”

  “Because,” I say, “in all the hundreds of theories about that Room, only one addresses the souls trapped inside.”

  “So?”

  “So haven’t you wondered how a man like your father got lost in there?”

  I can tell from her expression that she hasn’t considered that at all.

  “Or why the name of the place—in all known languages—is the Room of Lost Souls. Are the souls lost because they entered? Or were they lost before they opened the door?”

  She shifts slightly in her chair. She doesn’t like what I’m saying.

  “You’ve thought of this before,” she says.