The Diving Bundle: Six Diving Universe Novellas

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  “Exactly,” he said.

  “But these weapons weren’t meant to be fired in atmosphere,” she said. “If there’s a methane leak, for example, then we might have another kind of explosion.”

  “Or an anacapa malfunction,” Dix said.

  “The weapons won’t cause an anacapa malfunction,” Yash said.

  “I know,” Dix said. “I meant if their anacapa has malfunctioned….”

  “It hasn’t,” Coop said. “It got us here.”

  Yash gave him a sideways look. He knew that look. It was one that cautioned him to silence. The two of them had served together since they were cadets, and they had bolstered each other from the beginning.

  “You disagree,” he said to her.

  “Even a malfunctioning anacapa could have had enough energy to get us here,” she said.

  “Great,” he said. “So we’re back to square one. We won’t know anything until we get out there and take some readings. And we’re not going to do that as long as those outsiders are here.”

  He walked over to that part of the wall screen and peered at the woman. She was still touching the Ivoire’s exterior, as if she could gather information about the ship through the palm of her glove.

  For all he knew, she could.

  Her face was barely visible inside the helmet. He couldn’t really make out her features, but he thought she looked intrigued. Like she hadn’t expected the Ivoire. Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe she knew the Fleet was long gone.

  She tilted her head. It felt like she could see him.

  But he knew that wasn’t true. She couldn’t see him at all. She probably didn’t even know he was there.

  “What’s she doing?” Tren asked.

  Coop shook his head. He had a theory—he always had theories, and he learned it was never wise to share them, at least not when he led a mission. Always better to gather information.

  Behind her, he saw movement. Four others, huddled near the exterior door, nearly lost in the gloom.

  Only it wasn’t really gloom. The woman was teaching him that. Particles floated in the air around her. They were coating the exterior of the ship, which was probably why the base looked so damn dark.

  Apparently he was finally able to see the stuff that Tren had been referring to.

  “There’s some kind of substance on the exterior of the ship,” he said. “Look at her hand. It’s clearer than everything else.”

  Her gloved hand. She had placed her palm flat against the ship. The glove was white, so tight that he could see the ridges in her palm, the bend of her fingers.

  She knew nothing about the vessel. None of the outsiders did. From the way they huddled, they seemed frightened by it.

  Of course, he was guessing. But they were human, and their body language wasn’t aggressive. It was protective.

  “Do you have a visual of our arrival?” he asked Dix.

  “I’m sure we do,” Dix said.

  “Let’s see it. Center screen.”

  Dix floated his fingers over his console. It took a moment, but the screen in the center of the bridge went dark, replaced by the shimmer created by the anacapa whenever a ship was about to arrive at its destination.

  The shimmer looked silver, then slowly resolved into an image of the repair area’s interior. The equipment, looking just as odd, the screens over the command consoles, showing what the ship was seeing just like they’d been programmed to do. Redundant imagery at the moment, but useful most of the time. The repair crew could look and see what a ship saw as it traveled to the base.

  Sometimes they could even figure out where the damage was because of something coming through the feed.

  So the screens were working, which he hadn’t noticed after they arrived. Then he looked at the floor itself. It had yellow lines, outlining the landing area, and Danger! written all across the face, so that no one would accidentally step on the pad.

  Sometimes the repair crew didn’t know when a ship was going to arrive. A vessel’s anacapa drive could shut off and the vessel would appear on the landing platform, not realizing that the ship had just appeared where a human being had been standing.

  Someone had been standing there in the feed. Someone wearing an environmental suit similar to the woman’s.

  Similar, but not the same.

  So this wasn’t a military team then. Private? They didn’t have matching suits.

  The person—a man, Coop guessed just from his general shape—whirled as if in response to someone calling his name. The man hesitated for just a moment—and then he sprinted off the platform, diving toward the main door just as the ship settled.

  Coop could barely make out the five people, huddled against the door. All of their helmeted faces were turned toward the ship, but none of the people moved.

  While Coop had been relieved, while he was trying to figure out where he was and what had happened, they had been trying to figure out what they were seeing.

  Eventually, they determined that it was safe enough to approach the ship.

  “Thanks,” Coop said to Dix. “That answered a lot of questions.”

  And created a whole hell of a lot more.

  ***

  The woman stood outside the ship for a very long time. The particles swirled around her, but she ignored them as if she expected them or perhaps she was used to them. Coop watched her as she touched the side of his ship, as she beckoned the others to join her.

  One of them, a different man than the one who had nearly been crushed by the Ivoire, found the ship’s main exterior door. The outsiders gathered around it, clearly discussing what to do next.

  Coop let them. They couldn’t get in, not without codes and approvals. Or very powerful weapons.

  And none of the five seemed to have weapons, aside from the woman’s knife.

  “Can you get any readings on the atmosphere inside the repair room?” he asked Yash.

  “From what I can tell,” she said, “the air seems fine. It seems to be recycling from the outside, just like it was designed to do. But I don’t trust the reading.”

  “Because of the environmental suits,” he said.

  She shook her head. “Because of the particles. Those things are large, and if they get into lungs, they might do some damage, depending on what they are.”

  “Are the particles coming in from outside?” Coop asked.

  “Doesn’t seem that way.” Dix was bent over his console. He’d been replaying the entry imagery—Coop had seen some of it as he had walked past Dix’s station. “We’re coated with those particles and we didn’t bring them with us. So they’re inside the base.”

  “We need to get that stuff off the ship,” Yash said. “We don’t know what it is and whether or not it’s doing additional damage.”

  “We can’t do anything as long as those people are so close,” Coop said. He didn’t want to accidentally kill the outsiders.

  “How do we move them?” Dix asked.

  “We don’t,” Coop said. “They’re wearing environmental suits. That gives them some kind of time limit. Their oxygen won’t last forever.”

  “What if they’re just using some kind of filtration system?” Tren asked.

  “Not likely,” Yash said. “The woman has cylinders on her hips. Those looked like extra oxygen to me.”

  “You’re guessing,” Tren said.

  “It’s an educated guess,” Yash snapped.

  Coop glared at both of them. Nerves were getting frayed. He was going to have to relieve this crew relatively soon, even if they didn’t know exactly what was going on.

  “What kind of readings are you getting from the particles?” he asked Yash.

  “Nothing definitive,” she said. “But I’m not sure how well the ship’s exterior sensors are working.”

  “Test the exterior sensors on the woman’s glove,” he said. “Tell me what it’s made of.”

  Yash nodded. Coop moved closer to the woman’s image, as close as he could get without pressing hi
s nose against the wall.

  “I don’t recognize the material,” Yash said, “although that’s not unusual. It’s composed of…”

  She listed a series of ingredients, talked about how they combined into some kind of microfiber that had incredible tensile strength, and went on at great detail about how effective such material would be in an environmental suit.

  Coop paid only the smallest amount of attention, enough to absorb the important information, but lose all of the details. The upshot, as he understood it, was simple. The environmental suit, while thin, would work in space and be quite effective on short trips. But the suits on the Ivoire were vastly superior.

  Yash concluded with, “If that suit’s indicative of this culture, then these people are technologically inferior to us.”

  Which meant that they were far behind developmentally—at least, that would be how the Fleet’s playbook called it. Coop didn’t always agree with that. In some senses, the Fleet was far behind everyone else. The Fleet was operating on technology built by generations many years in the past. Yes, the engineers knew how to maintain the technology and how to replicate it, but they hadn’t really developed anything new.

  At least, not on their own.

  They had developed additions to the Fleet based on technology they’d discovered as they’d traveled through the stars.

  “You can tell all that about the suit,” he said to Yash, “but you can’t tell me anything about the particles.”

  “I can’t tell you why those people are afraid of them,” Yash said. “They seem like flakes off the equipment in the repair room or maybe some nanobits floating free.”

  “What would cause nanobits to float free?” Tren asked.

  “Serious damage to the base,” Dix said.

  “Or some kind of decay,” Yash said. “Something that made the bits’ bonding fail.”

  “Some kind of microscopic weapon?” Coop asked.

  “I don’t know,” Yash said. “I’m going to have to test with actual particles.”

  “So we’re going to need some samples,” Coop said. “Since these folks don’t believe that the particles will hurt their environmental suits, we can assume our vastly superior suits will do just fine out there.”

  “You don’t want to use one of the small probes, then?” Dix asked. Clearly that was what he had expected, probably what he would have ordered, if he had been left in charge.

  “I want a quick grab,” Coop said, “maybe an airlock test for particulate toxicity, and then I want to explore that room.”

  More importantly, he wanted to check the equipment, see the records, figure out what the hell happened here.

  “So what are we going to do?” Perkins asked. “Are we going to go out there and introduce ourselves to these people?”

  Coop shook his head. “They probably don’t even know we’re here—”

  “Don’t know we’re here?” Tren said. “C’mon, Coop. That woman’s been exploring the surface of the ship. She clearly knows we’re here.”

  “She knows the ship is here,” Coop said. “She doesn’t know that we’re in it.”

  “She’d think this thing is automated?” Tren asked.

  “Why not?” Coop asked. “The base looks abandoned. That group of five people probably activated the beacon that brought us here. Face it, Anita, if we were all dead, the ship would have come without our guidance. It’s designed that way. We turn on the beacon and the anacapas do the rest.”

  It was another aspect of the failsafe mechanism. If the crew were in any way incapacitated, the ship would come here and, if they were lucky, someone would be here to help.

  “You’re making a lot of assumptions,” Dix said.

  “I certainly am,” Coop said. “That’s why I want some certainty. The sooner we can get out of here and explore that repair room, the happier I’ll be.”

  “But you don’t want to meet those people,” Perkins said.

  “We’re going to wait until they leave,” Coop said.

  “And if another crew comes in after them?” Dix asked.

  “We’ll analyze the situation then,” Coop said. “We have no other choice.”

  ***

  It took another hour for the outsiders to leave. Four of them spent some time crowded around the Ivoire’s main exterior door, probably discussing how to open it. The woman walked around part of the ship, touching it, and peering closely at any change in the hull. The ship was much too large for her to go all the way around.

  She was clearly examining it, and for all the bridge crew could tell, she was probably running some kind of diagnostic on it as well.

  Finally, one of the others broke away from the group and loped toward the woman. She shook her head, as if participating in a conversation, and then the other person—one of the men—finally reached her side. He took her arm, gently but firmly.

  She shook him off and moved away.

  He took her arm again, and this time, she sighed visibly, and walked with him around the side of the ship.

  They joined the others, and together the group left through the door that led to the corridor.

  “Maybe we should lock it,” Dix said.

  “Because that wouldn’t be noticed.” That was the second time Coop had used sarcasm. He was as tired as the crew. He sighed. “Send that tester through the airlock.”

  Yash nodded. She had chosen a team of scientists to capture the particles, but the scientists would be monitored by the engineering staff—by Yash really.

  None of the bridge crew had gone down to the main exterior doors. Coop wanted the crew to remain on the bridge in case something went wrong.

  He even insisted that a junior member of the science team take the particle sample.

  Only two people, wearing their own environmental suits, would be in the airlock. They would take the particulate matter using some method that he didn’t entirely understand, and then they would bring it back inside.

  Coop wanted them to open the exterior door, scoop up some particles, close the doors, and get the hell out of the airlock.

  And that was all.

  Even though Dix protested. He felt they should take advantage of the outsiders’ absence to explore the room.

  Coop shook his head. First off, exploring the room was the wrong phrase. It was a cavern, impossible to explore all at once. Besides, they’d all been in that area a dozen times before. They needed information, and they were going to collect it slowly.

  However, he thought it fascinating that he wasn’t the only member of the bridge crew who believed the outsiders would be back.

  He wondered how long those suits needed to be replenished. He also wondered if the team’s leader was reckless. If the leader was, the same team would be back within the hour. If the leader wasn’t, either a new team would enter soon, or the other team would wait some designated amount of time, maybe a full day, before returning.

  Coop was going to try to get as much done in the time that he had.

  He didn’t monitor the airlock experiment. He had Yash do that from the bridge.

  It only took a few minutes. Some of the particles got into the airlock itself, and Coop asked that they be captured instead of expelled.

  “We got everything,” Yash said. “It looks like it’s safe to go out there.”

  “Do the extensive tests,” Coop said. He wanted to go out there as much as the others, but he had learned about caution the hard way. It was always better to take precautions.

  “I’d like to go monitor the experiments,” Yash said.

  “No,” Coop said. “I need you here.”

  “What for?” she asked. “Standing around waiting?”

  He shook his head. “I was thinking we could scrub the particles off the ship’s exterior now that the outsiders are gone. You think it’s safe to do that?”

  Yash shrugged. “The preliminary tests came back that the substance is harmless. Essentially, the particles are the same material as the walls, so far as we
can tell. I think it’s a bit of a gamble to scrub the ship, but not a major one.”

  “Scrub it,” Coop said.

  Yash entered the commands. At least that part of the ship was working. It scaled the particulate matter off its hull in a matter of seconds. More particles floated through the air, but the image on the screens was clearer than it had been just a moment ago.

  The repair area was still dim. The lights had faded from their normal brightness to something that looked weak and grayish. Maybe that had something to do with particulate cover on the lights themselves. Coop couldn’t know that without a clearer view.

  As the particulate matter settled down, he noted that the equipment closest to the exits appeared to be running. He could see lights and some of the screens above the control panels. But as he looked farther into the distance, farther away from the main door, he couldn’t see anything. The depths of the repair room seemed particularly dark.

  “I still can’t get the systems to talk to each other, Coop,” Yash said. “I don’t think the problem is on our end. I seem to be making an exterior request, but nothing is coming back at us.”

  He nodded, then folded his hands behind his back.

  He was going to have no choice, then.

  Someone was going to have to venture into that room.

  ***

  A second outsider team didn’t come in the doors, at least not immediately. The room remained silent.

  The bridge crew had been working nearly 24 hours straight. They all needed rest. The ship was here, something was going on, and Coop couldn’t solve the puzzles instantly.

  He ordered the bridge crew to take ten hours, but he also ordered them to leave their comm links open. If something went wrong, he wanted this team back on the bridge with just a few minutes notice.

  He put Lynda Rooney, his second officer, in charge. She was a big-boned woman, raised planetside like Yash, but with more experience on a bridge than Coop had. A screw-up early on in her career derailed her climb upward for nearly ten years, but she was back on track now, and he was happy to have her on his team.

  He also installed the second most competent team that he had on the bridge itself. He made sure Lynda knew that no one was to leave the ship or contact the outsiders if (when) they returned.