And that terrifies me.
***
I leave them to mapping. I go to my quarters and log onto my dedicated computer. I call up files I haven’t looked at in years.
Files that I stored after the Dignity Vessel.
Files on stealth technology.
Modern ships have stealth technology. It shields our ships from each other’s instruments. But it does not make the ship completely invisible. It simply makes us invisible to all but the naked eye. If we pass in front of a porthole, someone on that ship will see us.
Our weak stealth technology is hard won. We’ve been working on it for generations, always seeking to improve it, and never doing so.
True stealth technology—the kind that actually makes a ship invisible (and, in some cases, impossible not just to see but to hear and touch)—is extremely dangerous. The kind of stealth that the ancients had actually changed the ship itself (or whatever the stealth was applied to). Some believe that the ship dissolved and reformed at a particular point. Others think it went out of phase with everything else in the universe. And still others believe that it actually leaves this dimension.
No one knows, exactly, because we have lost more technology than we have kept. The ancients had things we’ve never had. We didn’t understand what they did or the way that they built things. We lost that knowledge somewhere along the way.
Our military—our scientists—have attempted to reverse engineer all kinds of things, including the kind of stealth the ancient Dignity Vessels had, but to no avail.
An old military diving buddy of mine once said that kind of stealth tech was banned, the knowledge deliberately lost. She claimed that hundreds would die every few generations or so when someone tries to revive the technology. She believes it is beyond our grasp.
It certainly was on the Dignity Vessel that Karl and I dove. The stealth tech there was based on interdimensional science. Those ships didn’t vanish off radar because of a “cloak” but because they traveled, briefly, into another world—a parallel universe that’s similar to our own.
When I first heard this theory, I recognized it. It’s the one on which time travel is based, even though we’ve never discovered time travel, at least not in any useful way, and researchers all over the universe discourage experimentation in it. They prefer the other theory of time travel, the one that says time is not linear, that we only perceive it as linear, and to actually time travel would be to alter the human brain.
But my experience in that Dignity Vessel showed me that it’s possible to open small windows in other dimensions. Only in practice those windows don’t work the way they do in theory. They explode or get stuck or ships get lost.
People get lost.
Is that what we’re facing here? Yet another version of ancient stealth tech?
My skin is crawling.
That would be too simple, and too much of a coincidence.
And it wouldn’t explain the voices.
This is why I have given over the controls to Karl earlier than I planned. Although I’m beginning to doubt the wisdom of that. Karl is as familiar with ancient stealth-tech as I am and is scarred by it too.
I hope it won’t affect his judgment here.
I stand and pace my small quarters, and as I do I remember the other reasons I hired Karl to run things.
Riya.
My father.
My mother.
Those voices.
No preconceptions, that’s my motto. And I need to wait until mine are under control before I face the team all over again.
***
By the time I come out, the station is mapped. It is definitely larger than our research told us it would be. Karl wants to bring in my father, and I can’t contradict him even though I don’t want to use my father for anything.
We meet in the lounge. Fortunately, Karl has kept Riya out of this meeting. Most of the dive team is here and all of the pilots. The Business, safely docked, has its automatic alarms on in case something happens.
Still, this close to a dive, I hate leaving the cockpit unattended.
Karl reminds everyone that he is in charge now. Then he introduces my father—using all of his very impressive credentials—and says,
“I invited him into this meeting because he’s been here before. He knows a lot about the station and even more about the Room.”
Karl looks at me. My father is standing next to him, dwarfing Karl. My father, with his planet-bound height and muscle, looks almost superhuman compared to the divers. And even though he’s older than everyone except, perhaps, Odette, he seems much more powerful.
I don’t like the contrast.
“The changes in what we’re expecting are enough to make me reassess the mission,” Karl says.
I turn toward him, shocked. This isn’t the man I hired all those years ago. This isn’t Karl the Fearless.
He sees my look and holds up his hand to silence me. “I’ve learned over the years that it’s best to talk about the unexpected, and even better to get the dive team’s read on it. We’re here to take extreme risks, but not unnecessary risks.”
I dig my teeth into my lower lip, so that I don’t contradict him—at least not yet. At least not this early in the very first meeting he’s called.
Karl explains our findings, and he uses some impressive graphs and charts and diagrams that he’s clearly worked on in the short time since he called the meeting. Then he turns to my father.
“What do you make of this?” Karl asks.
My father walks in front of the displays, his hands clasped behind his back like a professor grading a student’s work. I get the sense that he likes the attention and is milking it.
“Your worry isn’t necessary,” he says after a minute. He addresses Karl like the rest of us aren’t here. “I’ve seen this before.”
I remain still in the back of the lounge. Odette crosses her arms. Karl tilts his head, obviously intrigued.
“Every time I come here, the station is bigger.” My father does not pause, even though he should have. The sentence sends a ripple of interest through the group and would have given him the attention he obviously craves. “I think it’s programmed to build new units, which is why the habitable ones are on the outer layers, not in the middle.”
It’s a plausible explanation, and no one asks him for his proof. I would have. My father is not a scientist, and he didn’t back up what he just said with any statistics or experimentation. Just observation and a supposition.
“So it’s normal,” says Bria with something like relief.
“There’s nothing normal about this place,” my father says.
“How do we test the growing theory?” asks Jennifer. She’s one of my hires, and she looks at me as she asks this, all wide eyes and innocence. But I’ve known her for a while, and Jennifer isn’t innocent. She’s annoyed that I’ve been forgotten, and she’s pointing me out to the others on purpose.
I’m glad for the opening. “We test all theories. That’s why it’s best to go slow. The more we learn before we go to the Room, the better off we’ll be.”
“You actually think we’ll learn something new about the Room?” Davida asks. She’s sitting by Jennifer and Roderick on the couch. They glance at her in surprise.
“Why else come on this mission if you can’t learn something new?” Roderick asks.
“It’s just that this thing has existed for so long and no one knows anything about it,” Davida says. “That’s beginning to creep me out.”
“We know some things,” my father says and goes into his lecture on the history of the Room. He doesn’t seem to notice that he’s talking mostly about conjecture and theory, but some of the others do. They squirm. He’s lost the attention he worked so hard to gain.
It takes Karl a while to shut my father down, but he finally does. Then Karl looks at me as if my father’s lack of social graces are my fault.
I give Karl a half smile and a shrug.
Karl gets m
y father to sit. Then Karl sets up the dive roster for the following day—Bria piloting one of the four-man skips (so that our teams don’t have to free dive to get into far sections of the station) and Davida, Jennifer, and Mikk in the upper habitats—with a promise of more when we meet that night.
The team shifts, but this time it isn’t because of my father’s long-windedness. It’s because they’re excited.
It’s because they’re ready.
We all are.
10
FOR THE NEXT THREE WEEKS, we dive the station, making detailed maps, exploring the new and old habitats, sharing small discoveries.
Every night we meet in the lounge and watch the captured imagery of that day’s dives. The divers narrate and the others ask questions. That way, we all have the same information.
We learn quite a few things—the built-in furniture is the same in all of the habitats, although in the “new” section, as Karl likes to call it, it’s not dented or warped or even scratched.
The new sections contain a few other things—remotes attached to entertainment equipment, equipment that doesn’t seem to work “although it might if we can find a good way to power the entire station,” my father says. “Maybe the entertainment programming is supposed to come from the damaged central area.”
I don’t like having my father in the lounge at night. He’s not methodical and he’s given to supposition. I think supposition is deadly. Karl finds it fascinating, but he can separate out the supposition from fact.
I’m not sure some of the younger divers can. Although they occasionally find my father long-winded, they seem to like him. They may even admire him.
I don’t ask anyone what they think of him, not that they’d give me an honest opinion. Everyone is aware that he is my father and that we aren’t on the best of terms.
Indeed, everyone else talks to him more than I do.
Including Riya, who daily complains that we are wasting her time and money. From the moment we arrived, she wanted us to go into the Room and do nothing else. Fortunately, Karl is in charge of this part of the mission, and Karl must talk to her, reminding her that caution is our byword, and even if we don’t recover her father on this trip, the information we gather might make it possible to recover him on the next.
One night, she came to me to complain. I waved her off. “You gave me as much time as I needed,” I reminded her.
“Yes,” she said. “I gave you that, not him.”
“And I placed him in charge while we’re at the station. I trust him.”
She glared at me. “I hope that trust isn’t misplaced.”
So far, it doesn’t seem misplaced. I approve of the way he’s handling the team—dividing assignments based on experience and on interest. It soon becomes clear who likes going through debris-crowded destroyed habitats, and who prefers a minute exploration of the pristine edges of the station.
He also has kept track of the pilots—who handles the skip best in tight quarters and who is the most observant. And he hasn’t lost track of the Room.
Once a week, he and I have gone around its exterior. The first time, we mapped it. The second time, we mapped again to see if it had expanded. The third, we just observed.
The station hasn’t grown while we’re here. And we’ve seen nothing untoward about the Room, although on that first dive I was surprised to learn that the Room is encased on all sides.
For some reason, I thought part of it was open to space. I’m assuming that’s because I saw the lights and they seemed to lead somewhere. And also, I’m sure I thought the Room had unlimited space because it has taken so many bodies.
When you peer through the main window, you can see none of those bodies. In fact, you can’t even see the lights. It looks dark and empty, like the still-intact habitats.
Only when you shine a light inside, it disappears into the darkness. It does not reflect back at you.
My father claims to recognize all of this, which is making Karl grow more and more exasperated with him. At one point, in one of our nightly meetings, Karl snapped at him, “I asked you to tell us everything you knew about the Room.”
My father shrugged. “I have.”
“Yet each night, you have some new observation, some new memory.”
My father didn’t seem perturbed at Karl’s tone. “You think small details are important, things I noticed, but never really thought much about. So when I remember them, I tell you.”
Karl asked if there were other things like that which my father noted, things he wanted to tell us.
My father shrugged again. “I’m sure I’ll remember when the time comes.”
Karl looked at me and caught me rolling my eyes. But I said nothing to him or my father. Karl asked to command this part of the mission because he believed my observations and judgments would be compromised.
He’s only beginning to realize that my father’s are as well.
***
The readings have come back from the new habitats. They’re composed of the same material as the rest of the station, only it isn’t worn down by centuries. It does seem newer, just like the interior furniture does. A lot points to my father’s theory—that the structure is being built new—but I am not sure how.
If the station is adding to itself over time, I’m not sure what materials it’s using. My father seems ignorant of the law of matter conservation, so he thinks it possible to create something from nothing. I’ve never seen that happen.
Then, one night, I woke bolt upright on my bed, worried that the matter being used to make the new station comes from the bodies of the dead.
I had to do the calculations just to calm myself down. They showed me that even with every part of a body being used, there wasn’t enough material.
Either the station had some kind of supply, something we didn’t recognize, or it was bringing matter in from elsewhere.
Or it wasn’t growing itself. It was revealing itself, like I feared.
And I found a lot of evidence to support that theory. At least, evidence that part of me wanted to believe.
When we left the Dignity Vessel, we left one of our divers—Junior—inside. Because we were worried that he might still be alive but in some kind of time dilation, Karl and I went back to see if we could rescue him. Failing that, we hoped to find a way to help him die.
We learned that, indeed, Junior had gone through a time dilation, but not the kind we thought. He had aged so rapidly that the upper half of his body, still in its dive suit had mummified.
His waist and legs had only been dead for a day but his upper half, his torso and his face had been dead for centuries.
I found myself wondering if the station wasn’t going through the same sort of time split. Maybe the station was stuck in two different timeframes . Maybe it was stuck. And like some stuck objects, it was slowly sliding out of whatever held it.
Which would explain how it “grew” each time my father had visited, and why the newer areas didn’t seem to age. Maybe the time split here was the opposite of the one we’d found on the Dignity Vessel.
Instead of time progressing rapidly in the part we couldn’t reach, it was progressing slowly there—or maybe not at all. That the parts of the station being revealed were in a section between time, between dimensions.
I was no scientist, and I had no way to test my theories. I didn’t even want to mention them to Karl. He had enough to worry about.
I did mention one worry, however. I told him it concerned me that the station expanded outward, and I made him promise no skip and no diver would travel to the outer edges.
I didn’t want another Junior. I didn’t want someone to get stuck between two times or two dimensions or two universes.
I wanted to be cautious and in this, as in everything else, Karl agreed.
***
Everything seems to be going fine, and despite my discomfort, my mood has improved. The divers are enjoying their dives and no one has had a close call or been injured
.
We’re not lulled into a complacency, however. We know that the worst part of the dive is ahead, and that it belongs to me.
I’ve been preparing, and not just in my visits to the Room. I’ve spent most of my free time examining Riya’s device. I’ve run it through my computers, trying to find its origin, and cannot.
It is made of familiar materials, but they’re grafted onto a center that I do not recognize or understand. The materials in that center aren’t anything like what I found on the Dignity Vessel or here at the station, and for that I’m relieved.
It doesn’t seem to do much when it turns on—I get a small energy spike, and lights run along the edges of the device. But I don’t sense the bubble or see momentary shimmer or something that would imply an actual shield going around me.
But a lot of things work without being obvious. And I’m not testing the device in zero-G. I’m testing in Earth Normal, in full environment. I don’t want to test it outside the ship, lest I cause problems.
I wish I knew more about the device, but Riya can’t tell me much. She says she got the shield through her father’s connections.
She can tell me nothing else.
So I memorize the exterior dimensions of the Room, so that I can find the edges even if I can’t see them. And I try to ignore the music in my head, which seems to grow each and every day.
Grow isn’t exactly the right word. The music plays a little longer each time I “hear” it. It isn’t louder or any more insistent. It’s just harder to shut off.
I’m actually becoming used to it. In the past it would distract me and I would have to concentrate on anything outside myself while the voices sang. Now they’re a background accompaniment, and I wonder if I would actually notice them if I weren’t planning to go back inside the Room so soon.
The night before I go in, Karl calls me to his quarters. I haven’t been up to them since I assigned them. I’m startled to see that he’s blocked the view of the station, but has left the portals that open to the space views clear.
The Diving Bundle: Six Diving Universe Novellas Page 14