The Diving Bundle: Six Diving Universe Novellas

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “Of course I have.” I keep my voice down.

  She nods. “You think he was lost before he went in?”

  “I have no idea,” I say, “but I plan to find out.”

  4

  BY THE TIME I ARRIVE at my berth, the money is in my accounts. That surprises me. I thought, after our conversation, that Riya would back out. She doesn’t want to know her father as a human being. She wants only the image of him that she built up through her lonely childhood. The war hero who vanished. The strong man who got trapped.

  Not a sad survivor who might have gotten lost long before he opened a door into a forbidden place.

  Still, she has paid me and she has given me free reign.

  I sit at the built-in desk and move the money to all of my accounts. I’m going to have to create some new ones before I leave so that my holdings are diversified. Before I do that, I pay for this berth for the next five years.

  I warned Riya that the recovery could take a long time. She wants it done right. After I heard her tales of the previous attempts, I knew that part of the problem was she hired thieves and ruffians and risk-takers who specialized in cross-system possession recovery.

  She hired disposable people who usually committed snatch-and-grabs. People who didn’t care much for her mission or their own lives.

  People who wouldn’t be missed.

  In that, they were a lot like me.

  Riya and I finished the negotiations as I drank my coffee. She showed me the device her people had used to get out of the Room. I examined it. It looked unusual enough.

  But she wouldn’t give me its specs until I was ready to go to the Room.

  I was fine with that. It gave both of us an illusion of control—me, the ability to say I was done before I went into the Room; and her, the belief that I had no idea how to use what she had shown me.

  We made a verbal record of our negotiations. Both of our attorneys would work together to make a formal agreement which we would sign within the month.

  She seemed nervous and uncertain, while I was nervous and happy. If someone had asked me before we started the negotiations who would feel what, I would have said that I’d be the uncertain one while she would be happy with all that we’ve done.

  I fully expected her to terminate before I arrived in my berth.

  Instead she paid me.

  I finish transferring the money. I contact and pay my attorney, notifying her of her obligations in drafting this agreement.

  Then I lean back in my chair.

  For the first time since I’ve come to Longbow Station, balancing my chair on two legs does not satisfy me. The berth—with its built-in desk, view of the grow pods, and slide-out soft bed—no longer feels like home.

  I need to move. I need to get out of here.

  I need to spend the night on my ship.

  ***

  By modern standards, Nobody’s Business is a small ship, but by mine, it’s huge. The Business can fly with a single pilot, but it’s designed for twenty to fifty people.

  When I was wreck-diving, I’d fly with ten or less and to me, that felt crowded. I’d close off the lower levels and lock up the cargo bays.

  Sometimes I forget all the space I’m not using. The main level has the bridge and auxiliary controls. It also has the lounge, where I’ve put most of my viewing technology so that I can review dives. There are six cabins on this level as well, including mine.

  The captain’s cabin is two levels up. I never use it. My cabin is the same size as all the others. It looks the same as well except for the hard-wired terminal that I use when I don’t want anyone hacking into my work.

  Most (but not all) of the other systems on the Business are networked, and I’m up-front with any crew that I hire that I watch the systems diligently. If they put something on the system from a virus to a piece of information, it’s mine. I’ve learned a lot that way.

  The Business is docked in the permanent section of the station. I pay extra to keep her systems disconnected from the station’s systems. I also bribe the officials to keep an eye on her, to make sure no one enters illegally.

  Even so, I still run several security programs—all of them redundant. No one, not even the best hacker, can shut off all of them and still have time to case my ship.

  So as I enter the Business, I stand in the airlock and check the first layer of security, seeing who—if anyone—has crossed this threshold since I last went through.

  According to the programs, no one has.

  I let myself in, breathing the stale air. I keep the environmental systems on low when I’m station bound—no sense wasting the energy. I power up, check more redundant security systems, and run a full diagnostic which I network to my own internal computer.

  Long ago, I set up the Business and my single ship to communicate with me—mostly to make sure I remain awake and alert when I’m piloting either ship. But I also use the links to communicate with the Business about internal matters, mostly so that I’m not tied to the bridge.

  The air has become cool as the environmental systems kick in. My cabin still smells faintly of incense from an abortive and mistaken attempt at relaxation on the last trip full of tourists. I make a mental note to have this room cleaned top to bottom, and then I sit at the hardwired terminal.

  It’s covered with a faint layer of dust. I haven’t touched it in more than a year. I’m not even sure it’ll power up.

  But it does. Then it runs its own diagnostics and shows me all the security video from the cabin itself. I let the video play in a corner of the touchscreen while I access my financials.

  I move ninety percent of the money that Riya paid me from my public accounts to my private ones. In a day or so, I’d create some new accounts, and divide the money up even more.

  Then I settle into my chair and order lunch from my personal store.

  I’m going to be here for a while. I have a lot of research to do and I don’t want it traced.

  ***

  I start with the Colonnade Wars.

  I learned long ago to research everything, especially something you’re certain of, because the memory plays tricks. And something you’re certain of is most likely to be the thing you’ll get wrong.

  The Colonnade Wars lasted nearly one hundred years. The wars began as a series of skirmishes on the far end of this sector. Then actual war broke out toward the other end, on a small planet that had been colonized so long that some believed the humans on that planet actually evolved there.

  Other battles—with different participants—started throughout the sector. At first, the weapons brokers and the mercenaries seemed to be the only ones who knew about the various skirmishes, but then it became clear that powerbrokers from several nation states were financing their favorites in each conflict. And sometimes those powerbrokers backed both factions at the same time.

  The battle turned away from the petty internal squabbles—over land, over entitlements, over religious shrines—and turned against those who funded the fights.

  Suddenly the powerful found themselves fighting on several fronts. Their massive armies and huge weapon systems were no match to the smaller, more creative warfare of their enemies.

  And it looked, for a long time, as if the massive armies would break.

  Enter Commander Ewing Trekov and his cohorts. All of them had been injured on one front or another. Most of them had come within a heartbeat of dying.

  They ended up at the same treatment facility in the very center of the sector, and there they realized they had the same philosophy about the wars.

  First, they believed that the Colonnade Wars were not wars at all, but a single war—a large, scattered battlefield that spread across several systems. These men and women, brilliant all, realized that fighting each front as if it were a separate war was what was destroying the army. A military could have no coherent strategy when it believed it was fighting a dozen wars at once.

  So these people, as they healed, began studying
the history of warfare—not just in this sector, but throughout human history, as far back as they could go. They discussed superweapons and super troops. They discussed a unified front and a robotized military. They explored remote fighting versus hands-on.

  And they realized that nothing—no discovery, no miracle weapon, no well-equipped soldier—had ever taken the place of living commanders with a broad and unified vision.

  And sometimes that vision was as simple as this: Annihilate the enemy wherever you find him; whoever he might be.

  According to the histories, the man who first articulated that simple vision in the Colonnade Wars was Commander Ewing Trekov. Whether or not that’s true is another matter.

  What is true—and verifiable—is that Commander Trekov was the most effective leader of the war. He destroyed more enemy strongholds, captured more ships, and killed more soldiers—from all sides—than any other commander in the war.

  He was supposed to be at the victory celebration. More importantly, he was supposed to be at the treaty signing ceremony. There wasn’t just one treaty to be signed, but dozens—all with various governments (or, as one observer more accurately called them, various survivors). Trekov’s presence wasn’t just symbolic. He had negotiated several of the treaties himself.

  Slowly I realize that I could spend the rest of my life reading about the Colonnade Wars and not get to all the details.

  But those details don’t concern me. All that concerns me is Commander Trekov.

  And he’s there but not there. Mentioned but not quoted. Observed but not really seen.

  So I look up Trekov himself—when he was born, where he went to school, where he got his training. I look for family information—both on his family of origin and on the family he left behind.

  I find Riya Trekov. She’s significantly younger than I thought—born to Trekov’s childless fifth wife nearly two decades after his disappearance. The other children want nothing to do with Riya—they believe her to be illegitimate, even though her DNA, her provenance (so to speak), is probably surer than theirs.

  She has an easily accessible history—with degrees in accounting and business, a long career in high finance, and a personal wealth that’s almost legendary. She accumulated those funds on her own, and is known around the sector as one of the most intuitive investors around.

  Now she’s invested in me—the first whim I could find in her entire history—and I wonder if this investment will pay off.

  It’s certainly turning into a research nightmare on my end.

  Because the back-story on Ewing Trekov is confusing. His origins seemed lost in time. His education is classified as is most of his military experience. His battles are well documented, but that’s about all of his life that’s well documented

  In the official histories, Trekov’s personal history is deliberately vague. Which makes me wonder what’s hidden there, and why no one is supposed to know.

  For a while, I pace around the main level, trying to figure out how to discover the man and not the myth. And then I realize I’m researching him wrong.

  I need to approach him as if he were a ship, a wreck I’m trying to discover.

  I need to go backwards—from the last known sighting—and then I need to dig in the unofficial records, the half-hidden reports, and the highlights of his personal past.

  Within forty-eight hours, my ship is stocked, my meager belongings on board, and I am heading to a little-known military outpost at what once was the edge of the sector.

  The last recorded place anyone saw Ewing Trekov alive.

  5

  BY ALL RIGHTS, this little outpost should be famous. It is not only the last place Ewing Trekov was seen alive, but it is also the place that he and the other commanders planned their strategy.

  Military outposts are security minded. They make places like Longbow Station seem lawless. So I’ve come with letters of introduction from a general whom I supervised on tourist dives, a colonel who has known me since I began my career, and a government official who testified to the fact that my research is never for public purposes, only to find important “historical information.”

  I also have a letter of explanation from Riya Trekov, giving me permission to look into her family’s confidential files. I have no idea if such a letter will open doors for me—I have never researched a human subject before—but I figure such a letter can’t hurt.

  This outpost is top of the line. The materials in the public areas are new and smell faintly of recently assembled metal. The lighting set higher than any I’d seen in a commercial outpost and the environmental systems are running at maximum comfort.

  My tax dollars keep these soldiers in relative luxury, at least for space-farers. Most off-duty personnel walk around in shirt-sleeves and thin pants. Anyone on Longbow wearing such flimsy clothing would freeze.

  I am given a bracelet which opens doors to the sections of the outpost that I’m allowed in. I’ve been given a guest suite—they don’t call civilian quarters berths here—and with the suite comes the suggestion that I use it instead of staying shipside.

  The suite is larger than the captain’s cabins on most luxury yachts. It doesn’t take me long to find out that I’m in one of the VIP rooms, courtesy, it seems to my ties with the general. His letter, which I scan after I look at my quarters, asks that the military treat me like one of their own.

  Apparently they take that to mean they should treat me like they would treat him.

  My rooms—and I have five of them—all have a view of the concentric rings, as well as a private kitchen (along with a personal chef should I not want cafeteria food), a valet should I require it, and a daily cleaning service. I don’t require a valet or room cleaning service (although I know they won’t waive that entirely), and I stress to everyone that I can how much I value my privacy.

  My in-room computer system can access the public library of the base, and I start there, sitting on one of the most comfortable chairs I’ve ever used in my life, and scrolling through list upon list of recorded information pertaining to Commander Trekov himself.

  It takes me nearly three days, but I finally find visual and audio files of his arrival on the base. No holographic files, at least not yet. But the visual and audio ones are the first I’ve found of the Commander at all.

  He’s imposing, nearly six-seven, which is tall for someone who spent his life in ships. His walk marks him as planet-raised as well, as do his thick bones and well-defined muscles.

  He’s not a handsome man, although he might have been once. His face is carelined and his eyes are sad. His hair is cut short—regulation then as now—and he has a fastidiousness that seems extreme even in this military environment.

  I freeze one of the images of his face and frame it. Then I set it, as a holopicture, on the tabletop near my work station. I used to do this with ships that I was searching for. Ships that had disappeared or whose wrecks existed somewhere in a grid that no one had bothered searching for decades.

  The images of the ships were always of them new. I used to compare that image with the wreck when I found it, not to find my way around it but so that I could get a sense of what hopes were lost in the ship’s ultimate destruction.

  But the image I keep of Ewing Trekov isn’t of his youth, but of what he looked like toward the end. It’s an acknowledgement that I’m searching for the part of him that’s left over, the skeleton, the frame, the bits and pieces that survived.

  I am no closer to getting him out of that Room by staring at his image than I got close to a wreck by staring at the original image of a ship. But I feel closer. I feel like this image holds something important, something I’m missing.

  Or maybe, something I’m not yet allowed to see.

  ***

  There are actually people on the outpost who remember Ewing Trekov. They’re old now, but most of them still work in their respective departments.

  All of them were willing to talk with me and after days of interviews, onl
y one seems to have a story that I can’t find in the records.

  Her name is Nola Batinet. She wants to meet in the officers’ mess.

  The mess isn’t a dining hall, like the mess for regular soldiers. The officers’ mess is divided into six different restaurants, each with its own entrance off the central bar. People in uniform fill that bar. They all have an air of authority.

  A tiny woman stands near a real potted plant. The plant is taller than I am, probably taller than Trekov was. It’s bright green, has broad leaves, and smells strongly of mint.

  The woman is so small she could hide among the leaves.

  As I approach, she holds out a small hand, which I take gently in greeting. The bones are as fragile as I feared. I’m careful not to squeeze at all, afraid I’ll break her.

  “We have a reservation in Number Four,” she says.

  Apparently the six restaurants here have no names. They go by number.

  Number Four is dark and smells of garlic. There are no tables, just built-in booths with backs so high you can’t see the other diners.

  A serving unit—a simple holographic menu with audio capabilities—whisks us to the nearest booth. At first, I figure that the unit does so with each customer. Then I realize it’s addressing Nola Batinet by name and has reassured her that they never let her favorite booth go when there’s the possibility that she will come into the mess.

  She thanks it as if it were human, nods when it asks if she wants the usual, and then she turns to me. I haven’t even looked over the menu yet, but I’m not really here for the food. I take whatever it is she’s having, order some coffee and some water, and wait until the server unit floats away.

  “So,” she says, “Ewing Trekov. I knew him well.

  A faint smile crosses her face as she thinks of him. Her memories—at least the one she’s lost in—are clearly pleasant.

  A tray floats over with our beverages and with a large plate of cheeses and meats. I’ve never seen so many different kinds. The meats are clearly manufactured and are composed of so many different colors that I’m hesitant at first.