The Diving Bundle: Six Diving Universe Novellas

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  In fact, Elissa had added one additional protection outside the sector: she placed warning buoys along the way to the squadron, warning any outsiders that proceeding into the sector would be considered trespassing, and would be punished as such.

  She believed in warning innocents that they might be getting in trouble. That way if they showed up near her squadron, and their ship had to be destroyed, they at least had sufficient warning.

  After the Discovery had left port, Vilhauser invited Elissa into the science lab. He took her to his lab first.

  Vilhauser had covered the tables with small vials of yellow pulsing light. She could see them from the doorway. The lab felt…unusual…as if it had more static than other places on the ship.

  Vilhauser invited her to step inside, but stopped her near the door for a good minute before he spoke. He had watched her for that entire minute, as if he expected her to run.

  Elissa had been stared down by stronger people than Vilhauser. As he stared at her, she stared at him. He had long black hair, curly like Rustin’s, but unlike Rustin’s, the curls were out of control. Vilhauser’s eyes matched his hair color, and probably made him attractive when he was younger. Now, frown lines turned his eyes downward, and marked two deep grooves that ran from either side of his nose down to his chin. He was thin and flabby, the kind of person who wouldn’t have made it through five minutes of her standard qualification drill for incoming crew members.

  “Well,” he said flatly. “At least you have the marker.”

  She knew about the genetic marker. She wouldn’t have been on this trip if she didn’t have it. Neither would her crew.

  So she found his comment odd, almost as odd as she found him.

  “They made sure we all have it,” she said. “No one would be on this mission if they lacked the marker.”

  His frown lines seemed to grow deeper. Then he shook his head as if she were the most naïve person he had ever met.

  “You have a lot of faith in your military masters,” he said.

  She bristled, but she didn’t show it. She hated it when civilians who benefitted from a military presence bad-mouthed the military. Only her training kept her from expressing her disgust at him.

  “I’ve been on half a dozen of these so-called SRPs,” he said, “and even though the crew is supposed to be vetted for the marker, the vetting is poor. If one of your crew members flew near the Room of Lost Souls, then someone considers them vetted.”

  She hadn’t checked the vetting, and that idea gave her pause. But she didn’t move. And she didn’t let Vilhauser know that his point made her uneasy.

  Either he sensed it, or he felt the need to justify his statement. He added, “I’ve had soldiers die because we’ve been running stealth tech experiments on a science ship. Usually nothing happens outside the lab, but every now and again, the wrong person walks inside, and dies. Horribly.”

  His expression didn’t change either, as if “horribly” wasn’t all that horrible, or as if he had become very jaded about the whole thing.

  “Your name is Trekov,” he said, “and one of your relatives died in the Room, which means that some branches of your family lack the marker. However, you wouldn’t be standing in here if you didn’t have the marker.”

  She nodded toward the vials of pulsing light. “I take it that’s an active stealth tech field.”

  “I wouldn’t call it a field,” he said. “But it is active, and someone without the marker would be in trouble right now.”

  That anger she’d kept tamped down since she’d been on vacation rose again. The arrogant bastard. He’d brought her in here to see if she would die? What an asshole.

  What a dangerous asshole.

  She made note of that.

  “Do you want to bring the entire crew in here one at a time?” she asked in a neutral tone, as if she hadn’t figured out that she would have died without the marker. Inside, though, she wanted to give full voice to the anger she felt. It was all she could do to keep her words from being sarcastic.

  “Of course not,” he said. “We should have done something like that before we came out here. I looked over the records and made certain that a preponderance of the crew had gone into a prescribed stealth tech area at least once. The crew members who hadn’t are either on the lower decks or I asked them to be moved to other ships in the squadron.”

  She straightened her shoulders and raised her chin ever so slightly. So that was where the confusing orders had come from. Lieutenant Calthorpe had informed her that certain crew members were not allowed on the Discovery for personnel reasons and that others would be confined to areas outside of the laboratory middle.

  Some of those crew members did not like the constraint and asked her personally why she had ordered that. She hadn’t, she told them, and then approved their transfers to other ships in the squadron if they so desired.

  Now, she wondered if she should have left any of them on this ship at all.

  “I know no one has briefed you on exactly what we’ll be doing,” Vilhauser said. “Succinctly, our mission is this: we believe that the Room has an active stealth tech device, but we can’t find it. Our mission is to locate it and remove it from the Room. We will be taking items from the Room and testing them—away from the Room itself. You should know that if anything happens to the Discovery, we prefer it happen away from the Room so that the Room remains intact.”

  That last part Flag Commander Janik had told her. The Room of Lost Souls was a valuable treasure and should not be destroyed under any circumstances. At the time, she had thought the circumstances he referred to were an attack by another ship. Now, she realized that he meant should something go wrong, it was better to blow up the Discovery (or parts of it) than to harm the Room itself.

  “You do understand that this mission could last months,” Vilhauser said.

  “Of course,” she said, this time letting just a hint of that sarcasm out. “I was briefed.”

  She made it sound like everything he had told her was old hat, which it most decidedly was not. But she didn’t want him to know that her superiors had treated her as poorly as he had assumed they had.

  “Good,” Vilhauser said. “I trust you have enough here to keep the crew entertained.”

  Entertained. A military unit did not need entertainment. It did need action, though, and she had already discussed that with her superiors before the mission. She would be running some simulations, just to keep her people “entertained,” as Vilhauser put it. She preferred to think of it as maintaining the crew’s readiness.

  “We are prepared to serve as long as we have to,” she said.

  “Good,” he said. “Then you’re dismissed.”

  She didn’t move. He had finally gone too far.

  “Mister Vilhauser,” she said.

  “Doctor,” he corrected.

  She nodded an acknowledgement but didn’t repeat the honorific.

  “I run this mission,” she said. “When you are on the Discovery, you are under my command. Is that clear?”

  “No, ma’am,” he said. “I run the mission. You run the ship.”

  “I run the squadron,” she said. “You determine how long the scientific part of the mission will last. You handle the science and the scientists. I make sure you are all safe. If I believe there’s a threat, you will listen to me, and you will leave.”

  “That’s not my understanding, ma’am.”

  “Then clarify your understanding with your superiors, Vilhauser,” she said, deciding to forgo the honorific entirely. “Because I have my orders and I plan to follow them. Are we clear?”

  He remained silent for several minutes. When she didn’t try to fill that silence, he said, “Are we going to have a problem, ma’am?”

  She gave him what Rustin called her nasty smile. “I don’t know, Vilhauser. But you should know this: If we have a problem, I will settle it in the way that is best for the crew.”

  “And if you harm this mission, Commander,�
�� he said, “I will report you to your superiors.”

  “Of course you will,” she said. “You’ll be within your rights.”

  “You sound like you don’t care about my rights, Commander.”

  This time, she let her emotions into her voice. “You got it, Doctor. I don’t care about your rights. I care about the lives of the crews on my ships, and you just made it very clear that you don’t. If you truly worried about those with the marker, you would have done more than review files. You would have spoken to me before we launched, and you certainly wouldn’t have risked my life.”

  “You’re paid to risk your life, ma’am,” he said.

  “I am paid to protect and serve the Empire, Doctor,” she said. “I am not paid to be at the whim of a scientist who has no concept of right or wrong. Now are we clear?”

  He studied her for a long moment. “You don’t seem to like me, ma’am.”

  “I’m not supposed to like you,” she said. “I’m just supposed to ensure that you complete your scientific mission without interference from others. I will do that. And you will do your best not to accidentally kill my people.”

  He let out a snort. “They said you were tough. I had no idea how tough.”

  “No,” she said. “You have no idea who I am or what I’m capable of. Keep that in mind as you proceed, Vilhauser. My people come first.”

  “If that were true, you’d be commanding all of this mission.”

  “That’s what you don’t understand, Vilhauser,” she said as she let herself out of the lab. “I am commanding all of this mission. And you will listen to me, whether you want to or not.”

  7

  THE CREW WAS USED to working in zero-g, but they were used to working in zero-g while lights were on. They hadn’t had drills for working in near-darkness since she had taken over, and maybe some of them never had.

  One of Elissa’s officer training instructors had run the class through darkness drills. Elissa had found them disconcerting. Several talented officer recruits actually washed out because of those drills. Those recruits had hated working in those conditions, and one of them even demanded that the instructor guarantee they would never encounter such a thing.

  He had laughed. Clearly, he said, you’ve never been in battle.

  Elissa had been in battle many times, and she’d even commanded disabled ships, but nothing like this.

  She had to squint to locate what she believed to be the ship’s consoles. The light coming through the portals was fading, and soon they would only have starlight to work from, and not much at that.

  She had learned a zero-g trick as a child. She closed her eyes and mentally erased any effect of gravity. In other words, she wiped out the so-called rule that the console had to be on the floor, the portals on the wall, and nothing on the ceiling.

  She got rid of concepts like floor and ceiling altogether.

  That ability had made her stand out when the officer training had moved from zero-g with a ship whose attitude controls were working to a ship whose attitude controls had malfunctioned.

  She used those skills now, while the rest of her crew probably struggled with attempting to mentally map the actual layout of the slowly rotating ship.

  She let go of the jutting thing and floated toward what she believed were the consoles. She grabbed a rounded edge and pulled herself in. Yep, these were the consoles. They had always had a slight vibration as power thrummed through them.

  They had no vibration now.

  She used one hand to hold herself above the consoles, and then she counted the edges from her spot.

  The console wasn’t one big piece of equipment, but several pieces, and if she knew where she was among those pieces, then she knew what faced her on those dark boards.

  Lieutenant Nisha Lee joined her. Elissa knew it was Lee, not because of her small size—several of the bridge crew were small—but because of the faint jasmine perfume she always wore. The scent was mixed with sweat now, and probably a hint of anxiety, but Lee said nothing.

  She was using both arms, so that dislocated shoulder truly had gone back into its socket.

  Two other crew members floated down from various positions and found a place beside Elissa. She cared less about who they were than what they could do.

  She was in front of navigation.

  “Lieutenant,” she said to Lee, “I believe you have the environmental systems.”

  “I know, ma’am.” Lee held her position with one hand and moved the other on the console. She sounded distracted, but Elissa wasn’t sure if that was because she was ignoring the radiating pain in her shoulder or because she had other problems.

  Elissa could orient the ship with this part of the console. She moved her fingers up, searching for the raised controls. They should have popped up the moment the lights went out.

  But they hadn’t. The console felt flat and useless under her hands.

  “Commander,” said Trombino. He was the person who ended up beside her on the left. “Nothing raised up here. This console still is on standard control.”

  “This one too,” Lee said.

  “And this one,” said Gatson. She was one console over from Trombino. “I’m already under—if that’s the word—trying to manually activate. Nothing wants to work, ma’am.”

  Nothing wants to work. Of course not. They weren’t going to catch a break.

  “Do what you can,” Elissa said. “The same with the rest of you. I’ll move to the door controls.”

  A small back-up control unit was built into the wall beside the door. To the untrained observer, the back-up control didn’t do much. But everyone on the bridge knew that the cover plate could be removed and with a passcode typed into a keypad, an override system could be activated. The keypad was manual, meaning that it operated on a spring rather than a computer.

  Only ten members of the crew had that passcode. Two of those people had to be on the bridge at all times. It was an order that most ship commanders ignored, and indeed, had the explosion happened while Elissa was coming back from the Room, only Calthorpe would have had that code.

  Elissa moved to the door. Beyond it, she heard more groaning from the ship herself. She didn’t like it. Nothing out on the other side of that door should’ve been subjected to the kind of stress that caused that noise.

  She made herself focus. Her fingers found the ridge in the wall beside the door. She dug her nails under the edge, then pulled. The control panel opened easily.

  Just for the heck of it, she tried to turn on the lights from here. She pressed the familiar depression on the panel, and—nothing happened. She let out a small sigh, as silently as she could. She wasn’t frustrated, not really, but she was growing worried.

  She removed the panel, holding it in one hand as she typed on the keypad with the other. The controls eased out of their holder, and her shaky heart sped up. She recognized the feeling for what it was: a surge of adrenaline mixed with hope.

  Her fingers slid along the raised control panel. The pattern was familiar. Every commander had been taught to do this one blind. Someone figured that a commander might have to do this behind her back or sideways or upside down, often without seeing what she was doing.

  Sometimes the in-the-field experience did make it to training.

  She activated the panel, worried slightly that the internal lights on the panel itself didn’t come on, then decided to ignore that. She didn’t care as long as she managed to get the systems working inside the bridge again.

  She hit the switches, then looked over her shoulder.

  The twilight seemed dimmer—she had been right; that flare was fading—but she could see her crew, staring at her.

  “Well?” she asked, and her voice had a bit more edge than she wanted it to.

  She saw Lee swivel slightly, focus on the console in front of her, and move her arms just a little.

  “The controls didn’t raise,” she said.

  That would have been a first step. So would the
lights coming back on.

  Neither happened.

  No response meant that this panel, too, was damaged.

  Someone sighed on the other side of the bridge. The sound echoed in the silence.

  Elissa couldn’t think of anything to say. She didn’t know how to reassure her crew.

  “How do you think they’re doing in the rear of the ship?” Trombino asked. He sounded desperate.

  Or maybe she just heard desperation. She understood it. She was trying to fend it off herself.

  “I think whatever happened hit all of us,” she said. “Even if there were power elsewhere in the ship, we’d have to wait until they restore it here before we dare venture out of the bridge.”

  She didn’t tell them about the groaning, but she suspected they’d all heard it. And if they thought about it, they knew what it meant.

  “Can we open up a console and see if we can repair it inside?” Binek asked.

  “It won’t matter,” she said. “Something disabled all of our systems.”

  “How can you know that?” Binek asked, and she wasn’t guessing here. He did sound desperate.

  Elissa lowered her head, then realized she had a piece of information none of the rest of them did.

  “The gravity in my boots doesn’t work,” she said. “I would wager if I put on the helmet for the environmental suit that the oxygen isn’t working. I’m convinced all systems are down.”

  “How is that possible?” Trombino asked.

  “Did those strangers have some kind of weird weapon?” Ryder asked.

  Apparently, she had one other piece of information that her crew didn’t have.

  “The weapons’ fire from the strange transport ship didn’t hit us,” Elissa said. “It hit the device that Vilhauser wanted off the Room.”