The Diving Bundle: Six Diving Universe Novellas

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  She shook her head before remembering that he couldn’t see her. “We don’t have an airlock between the door here and the corridor. We run the risk of venting all of our atmosphere.”

  She didn’t say anything about the groaning outside the door. She hoped she wouldn’t have to explain further.

  “I just think we need to explore all of our options, ma’am.”

  “Me, too,” she said just as softly. “The problem is that we have so very few of them.”

  10

  THE TRANSPORTS AND FIGHTERS she had requested were already in place by the time the Discovery got to the Room of Lost Souls. The Discovery hadn’t been that far away, which meant that some of her ships in the squadron had been running war games.

  She still couldn’t quite figure out how that transport—that unrecognizable transport—had gotten in, particularly if her people had been participating in a military exercise.

  On her orders, the Discovery docked at the Room’s lowest level. The unrecognizable transport had docked where ships usually did, on the middle level, quite some distance away.

  She had already selected fourteen of her best combat soldiers. She would have brought a smaller group, but Vilhauser insisted on going as well, and he was going to bring the scientists who apparently specialized in that secret room.

  She needed the extra staff to corral him. And she knew she couldn’t talk to him along the comm system. He would just shut her voice off, which would put her soldiers in the difficult position of having to choose who to listen to: their commander or the guy who was in charge of the scientific part of the mission.

  She decided it would be easier if she went along. If the mission morphed into something scientific, she could make the call. If it didn’t, then she would keep Vilhauser under control.

  She put all of that in her briefing notes, in case something unplanned happened out there, something caused by the stupid rules that General Command had set up for the SRP. She would make a case, when she got back, that the chain of command on an SRP couldn’t be this mushy. Someone had to make all of the decisions for the mission, even if that meant having a more scientifically versed commander in charge of the squadron handling the SRP.

  She suited up, and then organized her team near the airlock. Even though Vilhauser wanted his team to go in first, she wouldn’t let him. She was sending soldiers in to clear the area.

  As they waited for the last of the scientists, one of the soldiers, Ensign Enzo Dryden, pulled her aside. He was one of her youngest officers, but he had risen in the ranks fairly quickly. She trusted him.

  And she didn’t like the look on his face. A frown creased his broad forehead and his jaw clenched.

  Clearly whatever he was going to say made him nervous, but he spoke anyway.

  “A few of the soldiers are worried, Commander. They’ve never gone into the Room of Lost Souls before. They’ve heard the stories.” He ran a hand through his short-cropped red hair. “I’m thinking it might be better if we change the team out a little.”

  She had her bubble helmet under her arm. It wasn’t unusual for someone with combat experience to make suggestions, although it was unusual as everyone was suiting up for the mission.

  Dryden had worked with many of these soldiers before. She noted that he named no names, which gave her confidence. He wasn’t recommending that anyone leave the team.

  “When we selected the active soldiers for this SRP, Dryden, none of us expected a ground action. Now we’re faced with one—or something that resembles one.” She kept her voice low so that no one else could hear her. “I chose this team because everyone on it has had actual hand-to-hand experience.”

  “I appreciate that, ma’am, but it might be better to have people with experience in the Room. Honestly, ma’am, I’ve never seen some of these people so terrified.”

  She almost asked for names. She believed that discussing terror before a mission was unprofessional. Every soldier had been terrified at one point or another. It came with the job. She couldn’t count the times that terror seized her before a mission. These days, her adrenalin still pumped. She’d been worried the first time she had gone into the Room of Lost Souls as well, but she had come out all right.

  “Can they perform their duties, Ensign?”

  His green eyes widened just a bit at the question. “I believe so, ma’am.”

  “Do you have suggestions of others who have had ground combat experience and who have also been in the Room?”

  He swallowed. “Not off the top of my head, ma’am.”

  “Well,” she said, hoping she sounded confident, “I’ve been assured that everyone on the Discovery has the ability to go into the Room of Lost Souls without effect.”

  “Beg pardon, ma’am, but I’ve heard those assurances as well, and they’re incomplete. A lot of people have made it to the entire structure of the Room of Lost Souls, and died inside the actual room itself.”

  She wondered if Vilhauser had told someone else that. Something else to discuss with him when this was all over.

  “Are you one of the terrified ones, Ensign?” she asked.

  A slight reddish hue colored Dryden’s cheeks. “I wouldn’t characterize myself that way, ma’am.”

  “Good,” she said. “Because I will need you on this team. You’ll need to help the terrified ones through this. I’m not expecting anyone to go into the actual room that’s caused all the troubles. Vilhauser and his people can do that.”

  “Even if there’s an action in that room, ma’am?” Dryden asked.

  He meant even if the fight moved to that room. She thought about it for one small second.

  “Yes,” she said. “Even if.”

  He smiled. “That should reassure most of the team, ma’am.”

  “Good,” she said. She was going to watch him, to see any reaction from the soldiers he talked to, but at that moment, Vilhauser and his scientists showed up.

  So much for her plans.

  She sighed softly. She recognized two of the scientists as people who had caused her trouble before.

  Great. Not only did she have to deal with Vilhauser’s attitude, she would also have to deal with theirs.

  She walked over to Vilhauser, stopping him and his four scientists before he got to the soldiers.

  “I’m going to object again, Doctor, to five scientists going to the Room of Lost Souls,” she said.

  He opened his mouth to answer her, but she didn’t let him speak. She’d made that mistake too many times in the past.

  “We don’t know who these intruders are,” she continued, “or what they’re doing. For all we know, they’re going to react badly to our presence and immediately attack.”

  He was carrying his bubble helmet under his arm. He gave her a look of both pity and contempt, and somehow that look also managed to convey how very stupid she was.

  “Commander,” he said in a tone that matched the look, “it’s obvious that we’re about to meet scientists. They’ve discovered something that we’ve been trying to do for a very long time. We will have a meeting of the minds.”

  “I’m sure you will,” she said snidely, since contempt was the tone of the day. “I’m sure that you’re facing scientists, because we all know that scientists prefer environmental suits with body armor and carry large weapons wherever they go.”

  “That, Commander,” he said, “is what we have people like you for.”

  Then he pushed past her. She opened her mouth to add that he had misunderstood, that the strangers had body armor, and then she decided the comment wasn’t worthwhile.

  Vilhauser had completely undermined her authority, but there wasn’t much she could do about it, not under the rules the Empire set for an SRP. She’d learned long ago that a commander who had to demand respect would get even less of it than a commander who let moments like this pass.

  Only she wasn’t going to let the moment pass completely.

  “Doctor Vilhauser,” she said. “I’m going to trea
t this trip as a military mission. I will order my people back if I believe they’re in danger. If you do not follow my orders, then your people will get left behind. I will not send my people into a hostile situation because you ‘believe’ these intruders to be sympathetic. I will protect my own.”

  He stopped, turned, and smiled at her dismissively. “I’m sure we won’t have a problem, Commander.”

  One of the other scientists, a man whose name she couldn’t remember, half smiled at her and shrugged, almost as if he were apologizing.

  She had to make a decision now. Either she ran this mission exactly the way she wanted to, or she did not go. Without her, though, her team would be subject to Vilhauser’s whims.

  “Let’s go,” she said to her team, mostly because she couldn’t say anything else. “Let’s just go.”

  11

  IT ONLY TOOK TROMBINO ten minutes to make a sign out of the reflectors on the remaining environmental suit. He placed them on the door to the suit locker. The strips spelled In Here.

  Elissa then sent her crew inside. They didn’t want to go, but she made them. The longer they kept warm, the better chance they had.

  Her cheeks ached with cold and her nose was numb. As she closed the locker’s door, she promised her bridge crew that she would join them shortly.

  She just never specified that she would join them in the locker. She had a hunch none of them would make it, and she would join them in death.

  Or rather, they would join her, since she would die first.

  But she was going to do everything she could to prevent that.

  She had no idea what had been in that wave which had hit them after the explosion, but she knew it had something to do with that malfunctioning stealth tech.

  And she also knew that she lacked the scientific knowledge to figure out how stealth tech worked. Everyone who knew that was either on the other side of that creaking door or had died in the initial explosion.

  So she could do only minimal things.

  Her crew had tried to do the normal restarts. She was going to try some abnormal ones.

  Nothing had power, but she didn’t see any fried equipment either. Whatever had gone through hadn’t burned out the controls. It had just disabled them.

  And if she could figure out a way to jumpstart them again, she might buy some more time.

  But focusing on everything had gotten her nowhere. Now she was just going to focus on the environmental systems.

  Her crew needed warmth.

  Somehow she was going to provide it.

  12

  ELISSA BARELY BOARDED the lower level of the Room of Lost Souls when the trouble started. Someone had turned on the gravity to the entire station, which had Vilhauser bleating excitedly—apparently, he hadn’t figured out how to do that either—and some of her team had trouble initially just because they forgot to turn off the gravity in their boots. Then, two of her soldiers—Kuether and Maichle—refused to walk to the stairs beyond the landing platform.

  They were simply too scared.

  Dryden wanted to send them back to the ship, get replacements, but Elissa didn’t. She ordered them to remain near the door, facing the stairs, in case the strangers tried to get to the Discovery.

  At least, that was the solution. To get to that solution, she and Dryden had another round of private discussions, and Kuether and Maichle went back and forth like scared children, following one instruction and then another. If the strangers were watching, they would think her team completely incompetent.

  And then Vilhauser wanted to take his little band of scientists and head to that secret room—without protection, without help.

  “They’re scientists,” he said. “We’ll be fine.”

  She wouldn’t give him the courtesy of an argument. Scientists were dying in pursuit of knowledge throughout the Empire, often at the hands of other scientists who had defected to the Nine Planets, scientists who believed that whatever the Empire was working on had to be evil, and therefore had to be stopped.

  “You will go nowhere until we figure out what we’re facing,” she said to Vilhauser in a tone she’d never used with him before.

  She could see his face through his bubble helmet. His eyes were wide. She had startled him.

  She finally set up her team in a proper recon formation—the two cowards and the scientists would remain here, others would fan out over the stairs, and the rest would work their way up.

  She would head to the secret room first. She knew how many of the strangers were there. That gave her a small advantage. Then, if need be, she would contact the unidentified transport, which was probably where their leader was hiding out.

  She had just gotten her team to the stairs, when Calthorpe contacted her from the bridge.

  “Commander, they’ve figured out that you’re on the Room. A group is heading your way.”

  “How many?” she asked.

  “They seem to be bringing in specific people. It started with two heading toward you from the secret room, but I see eight more people on the move. I think you’ll be facing ten. And of those ten, nine have those reinforced environmental suits.”

  “And weapons?” she asked.

  “Something that looks like laser rifles,” Calthorpe said. “But those are only the visible weapons. And I can’t tell from here what their capabilities are.”

  “All right,” she said. “Update me if you get more.”

  Then she turned her attention to her team. They had all heard Calthorpe as well.

  “I’m going to greet them,” Vilhauser said.

  “You are going to listen to me,” she said. “We’re going to assume they’re hostile. Then we’re going to—”

  One of the soldiers facing her started, and she stopped. Four of her people immediately moved into attack position, backs straight, rifles at the ready.

  Her heart pounding, she turned.

  Ten people faced her, people she didn’t recognize, in environmental suits so thin they looked like skin. The only way she could tell the difference between the armored suits and the unarmored suit was that the armored suits looked a bit more rigid, particularly over the torso.

  Unless she missed her guess, only one suit had no armor. That suit belonged to the man in the center.

  At least, she thought the person facing her was a man. He was taller than the average space-faring person, with very broad shoulders and a military posture. But that was all she had to go on. She couldn’t see his face except as a shadow through his gray visor.

  They didn’t even wear helmets. The environmental suits had some kind of hood component, which looked both more efficient and more constraining at the same time.

  She had no idea how long they’d been watching, which made her want to curse out her people, even though the problem had been hers. Calthorpe had warned her. She shouldn’t have been taken by surprise.

  Yet somehow she thought the strangers were farther away—that they had just left that stupid secret room.

  “You got the secret room open!” Vilhauser said, sounding like a teenager meeting someone famous.

  The idiot had used the speaker on his helmet, so he broadcast to the entire landing area.

  “Doctor,” she snapped through the private comm. “Shut up.”

  He moved toward the strangers and Dryden tried to hold him back. Obviously, Vilhauser wasn’t listening.

  “How in God’s name did you get that room open?” he asked the strangers.

  The strangers didn’t reply. Hell, they hadn’t even moved. But she did. She stepped in front of Vilhauser so that he couldn’t even see the strangers.

  “If you don’t shut up,” she said, “I will personally send you back to Discovery, and you won’t be conscious when I do it.”

  He gave her a sideways glance, clearly startled that she had spoken to him like that. At least he hadn’t shut off his internal comm link yet.

  Then she faced the strangers. “You’re trespassing.”

  “Oh?”
The person without the armored suit spoke. His voice was deep and male. “We thought this place had been abandoned.”

  He spoke with an accent she didn’t recognize. And she couldn’t tell from his tone whether or not he was telling the truth.

  It really bothered her that she couldn’t see his face.

  She raised her chin slightly. “The Room of Lost Souls is property of the Enterran Empire. Didn’t you see the postings?”

  Because of the postings, she would have been within her rights under Empire law to shoot these people on sight. But she also knew she would get in trouble for that, because they had opened that secret room, and they did seem to have some knowledge of the way that the Room of Lost Souls worked.

  “The maps we have state that this place had been deserted for generations. The maps also state that we should avoid it.” The stranger tilted his head just a little. “That admonition intrigued me.”

  He didn’t call the Room by its designation, the way that someone from the Empire would. Anyone, really. The Room of Lost Souls had worked its way into myth long ago, and anyone from this sector would have acknowledged that.

  She asked, “And you are?”

  She deliberately phrased the question that way, because she wanted him to decide whether he would tell her his name, his rank, or the name of the group he represented.

  Instead, the bastard didn’t answer. “I take it you’re from the Enterran Empire.”

  “Yes,” she said, deciding to give him that. He nodded again, a little, as if in acknowledgement, and as he was about to tell her who he was, Vilhauser grabbed her arm.

  “I need to talk to him. He got the secret room open.”

  The idiot didn’t use his internal comm. He said all of that through his speaker. He shattered the delicacy of this initial contact.

  “Technically, I didn’t get the room open,” the stranger said as if Vilhauser had spoken to him.

  His reply clearly started Vilhauser. It startled her as well. She wondered what the stranger meant by technically.