Diving into the Wreck du-1

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  I grab the controls and shut the damn thing off myself.

  Then I slide onto the floor and bow my head. Squishy was right, dammit. She was so right. This ship has stealth tech. It’s the only thing still working, that one faint energy signature that attracted me in the first place, and it has killed Junior.

  And Jypé.

  And if I’d gone in, it would’ve killed me.

  No wonder she left. No wonder she ran. This is some kind of flashback for her, something she feels we can never ever win.

  And I’m beginning to think she’s right, when a thought flits across my brain.

  I frown, flick the screen back on, and search for Jypé’s map. He had the system on automatic, so the map goes clear to the cockpit.

  I superimpose that map on the exterior, accounting for movement, accounting for change—

  And there it is, clear as anything.

  The probe, our stuck probe, is pressing against whatever’s near Junior’s faceplate.

  I’m worried about what’ll happen if the stealth tech is open to space, and it always has been—at least since I stumbled on the wreck.

  Open to space and open for the taking.

  Karl’s watching me. “What’re you gonna do?”

  Only that doesn’t sound like his voice. It’s the greed. It’s the greed talking, that emotion I so blithely assumed I didn’t have.

  Everyone can be snared, just in different ways.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I say. “I have no idea at all.”

  I go back to my room, sit on the bed, stare at the portal, which mercifully doesn’t show the distant wreck.

  I’m out of ideas, out of energy, and out of time.

  Squishy and the calvary’ll be here soon to take the wreck from me, confiscate it, and send it into governmental oblivion.

  And then my career is over. No more dives, no more space travel.

  No more nothing.

  I think I doze once because suddenly I’m staring at Junior’s face inside his helmet. His eyes move, ever so slowly, and I realize—in the space of a heartbeat—that he’s alive in there: his body’s in our dimension, his head on the way to another.

  And I know, as plainly as I know that he’s alive, that he’ll suffer a long and hideous death if I don’t help him, so I grab one of the sharp edges—with my bare hands (such an obvious dream)—and slice the side of his suit.

  Saving him.

  Damning him.

  Condemning him to an even uglier slow death than the one he would otherwise experience.

  I jerk awake, nearly hitting my head on the wall. My breath is coming in short gasps. What if the dream is true? What if he is still alive? No one understands interdimensional travel, so he could be, but even if he is, I can do nothing.

  Absolutely nothing, without condemning myself.

  If I go in and try to free him, I will get caught as surely as he is. So will anyone else.

  I close my eyes, but don’t lean back to my pillow. I don’t want to fall asleep again. I don’t want to dream again, not with these thoughts on my mind. The nightmares I’d have, all because stealth tech exists, are terrifying, worse than any I’d had—

  And then my breath catches. I open my eyes, rub the sleep from them, think:

  This is a Dignity Vessel. Dignity Vessels have stealth tech, unless they’ve been stripped of them. Squishy described stealth tech to me—and this vessel, this wreck, has an original version.

  Stealth tech has value.

  Real value, unlike any wreck I’ve found before.

  I can stake a claim. The time to worry about pirates and privacy is long gone, now.

  I get out of bed, pace around the small room. Staking a claim is so foreign to wreck divers. We keep our favorite wrecks hidden, our best dives secret from pirates and wreck divers and the Empire.

  But I’m not going to dive this wreck. I’m not going in again—none of my people are—and so it doesn’t matter that the entire universe knows what I have here.

  Except that other divers will come, gold diggers will try to rob me of my claim—and I can collect fees from anyone willing to mine this, anyone willing to risk losing their life in a long and hideous way.

  Or I can salvage the wreck and sell it. The Empire buys salvage.

  If I file a claim, I’m not vulnerable to citations, not even to reckless homicide charges, because everyone knows that mining exacts a price. It doesn’t matter what kind of claim you mine, you could still lose some, or all, of your crew.

  But best of all, if I stake a claim on that wreck, I can quarantine it—and prosecute anyone who violates the quarantine. I can stop people from getting near the stealth tech if I so choose.

  Or I can demand that whoever tries to retrieve it, retrieve Junior’s body.

  His face rises, unbidden, not the boy I’d known, but the boy I’d dreamed of, half alive, waiting to die.

  I know there are horrible deaths in space. I know that wreck divers suffer some of the worst.

  I carry these images with me, and now, it seems, I’ll carry Junior’s.

  Is that why Jypé made me promise to go in? Had he had the same vision of his son?

  I sit down at the network and call up the claim form. It’s so simple. The key is giving up accurate coordinates. The system’ll do a quick double check to see if anyone else has filed a claim, and if so, an automatic arbitrator will ask if I care to withdraw. If I do not, then the entire thing will go to the nearest court.

  My hands itch. This is so contrary to my training.

  I start to file—and then stop.

  I close my eyes—and he’s there again, barely moving, but alive.

  If I do this, Junior will haunt me until the end of my life. If I do this, I’ll always wonder.

  Wreck divers take silly, unnecessary risks, by definition.

  The only thing that’s stopping me from taking this one is Squishy and her urge for caution.

  Wreck divers flirt with death.

  I stand. It’s time for a rendezvous.

  ~ * ~

  ELEVEN

  Turtle won’t go into the Dignity Vessel. She wants to quit, even though she won’t admit it. I’ve never seen her so agitated. She paces through the Business like we’ve caged her inside.

  Even though she won’t talk to us, it’s clear that she’s stressed, terrified, and blinded by Squishy’s betrayal.

  Turtle, my best diver, would be useless on a dive right now. She’s not clearheaded enough, and I worry that her extreme emotional swings would make her reckless.

  Fortunately, Karl has no qualms about diving the Dignity Vessel. His fears left with Jypé’s body. Apparently Karl knew something awful would happen, and when it finally did, it calmed him.

  I appreciate the calm. I’m stressed too and stunned by Squishy’s departure. I guess I never knew her, which is odd, since I once thought I knew her very well.

  Mostly, though, I’m worried, worried that I’m breaking my promise to Jypé, worried that I’ve left one of my divers to a slow death on an empty ship.

  So it’s Karl I go to, Karl I ask to partner with me on a dive in the Dignity Vessel. I tell him I want to see what happened in there for myself.

  He actually smiles when he hears that.

  “Thought you weren’t going to come around,” he says.

  But I have.

  Turtle doesn’t protest this mission. In fact, she too thinks it’s the right thing to do.

  Some of her agitation fades. Apparently she thought that I agreed with Squishy and was afraid that I’d be abandoning Junior forever.

  I almost did.

  Turtle asks to man the skip. We need her, Karl and I, and we both think she’s calm enough to handle any emergency that comes up.

  Karl and I are going in, knowing we have good backup. Knowing that we’re doing all we can.

  We’ve decided on thirty/forty/thirty, because we’re going to investigate that cockpit. Karl theorizes that there’s some kind of off switc
h for the stealth tech, and of course he’s right. But the off switch would have to be on the tech itself, wherever that is, since the wreck has no real power.

  The designers had too much faith in their technology to build redundant safety systems—I’m assuming they had too much faith to design a secondary off switch for their most dangerous technology, a dead-man’s switch that’ll allow the stealth tech to go off even if the wreck has no power.

  I mention that to Karl and he gives me a startled look.

  “You ever wonder what’s keeping the stealth tech on, then?” he asks.

  I’ve wondered, but I have no answer. Maybe when Squishy comes back with the Empire ships, I’ll be able to ask her. What my nonscientific mind is wondering is this: Can the stealth tech operate from both dimensions? Is something on the other side powering it?

  Is part of the wreck—that hole we found in the hull on the first day, maybe—still in that other dimension?

  Karl and I suit up, take extra oxygen, and double-check our suits’ environmental controls. I’m not giddy this trip—I’m not sure I’ll be giddy again—but I’m not scared either.

  Just coldly determined.

  I promised Jypé I was going back for Junior, and now I am.

  No matter what the risk.

  The trip across is simple, quick, and familiar. Going down the entrance no longer seems like an adventure. We hit the corridors with fifteen minutes to spare.

  Jypé’s map is accurate to the millimeter. His push-off points are marked on the map and with some corresponding glove grips. We make record time as we head toward that cockpit.

  Record time, though, is still slow. I find myself wishing for all my senses: sound, smell, taste. I want to know if the effects of the stealth tech have made it out here, if something is off in the air—a bit of an acrid odor, something foreign that raises the small hairs on the back of my neck. I want to know if Junior is already decomposing, if he’s part of a group (the crew?) pushed up against the stealth tech, never to go free again.

  But the wreck doesn’t cough up those kind of details. This corridor looks the same as the other corridor I pulled my way through.

  Karl moves as quickly as I do, although his suit lights are on so full that looking at him almost blinds me. That’s what I did to Turtle on our trip, and it’s a sign of nervousness.

  It doesn’t surprise me that Karl, who claimed not to be afraid, is worried. He’s the one who had doubts about this trip once he’d been inside the wreck. He’s the one I thought wouldn’t make it through all of his scheduled dives.

  The cockpit looms in front of us, the doors stuck open. It does look like a battlefield from this vantage: the broken furniture, the destruction all cobbled together on one side of the room, like a barricade.

  The odd part about it is, though, that the barricade runs from floor to ceiling, and unlike most things in zero-g, seems stuck in place.

  Neither Karl nor I give the barricade much time. We’ve vowed to explore the rest of the cockpit first, looking for the elusive dead-man switch. We have to be careful; the sharp edges are everywhere.

  Before we left, we used the visuals from Jypé’s suit, and his half-finished map, to assign each other areas of the cockpit to explore. I’m going deep, mostly because this is my idea, and deep—we both feel—is the most dangerous place. It’s closest to the probe, closest to that corner of the cockpit where Junior still hangs, horizontal, his boots kicking out into the open.

  As I float into the cockpit, I hear a faint hum. The sound is familiar, something I’ve heard before. It’s tantalizing, like a song whose tune is just out of reach—a hint of a remembered melody.

  A shiver runs down my spine. The triggered memory is just out of reach as well, and something tells me I don’t want to think about it now.

  I need all my concentration to focus on the search for the dead-man switch.

  I go in the center, heading toward the back, not using handholds. I’ve pushed off the wall, so I have some momentum, a technique that isn’t really my strong suit. But I volunteered for this, knowing the edges in the front would slow me down, knowing that the walls would raise my fears to an almost incalculable height.

  Instead, I float over the middle of the room, see the uprooted metal of chairs and the ripped shreds of consoles. There are actual wires protruding from the middle of that mess, wires and stripped bolts—something I haven’t seen in space before, only in old colonies—and my stomach churns as I move forward.

  The back wall is dark, with its distended screen. The cockpit feels like a cave instead of the hub of the Dignity Vessel. I wonder how so many people could have trusted their lives to this place.

  Just before I reach the wall, I spin so that I hit it with the soles of my boots. The soles have the toughest material on my suit. The wall is mostly smooth, but there are a few edges here, too—more stripped bolts, a few twisted metal pieces that I have no idea what they once were part of.

  This entire place feels useless and dead.

  It takes all of my strength not to look at the barricade, not to search for the bottoms of Junior’s boots, not to go there first. But I force myself to shine a spot on the wall before me, then on the floor, and the ceiling, looking for something—anything—that might control part of this vessel.

  But whatever they had, whatever machinery there’d been, whatever computerized equipment, is either gone or part of that barricade. My work in the back is over quickly, although I take an extra few minutes to record it all, just in case the camera sees something I don’t.

  It takes Karl a bit longer. He has to pick his way through a tiny debris field. He’s closer to a possible site: there’s still a console or two stuck to his near wall. He examines them, runs his suit-cam over them as well, but shakes his head.

  Even before he tells me he’s found nothing, I know.

  I know.

  I join him at a two-pronged handhold, where his wall and mine meet. The handhold was actually designed for this space, the first such design I’ve seen on the entire Dignity Vessel.

  Maybe the engineers felt that only the cockpit crew had to survive uninjured should the artificial gravity go off. More likely, the lack of grab bars was simply an oversight in the other areas, or a cost-saving measure.

  “You see a way into that barricade?” Karl asks.

  “We’re not going in,” I say. “We’re going to satisfy my curiosity first.”

  He knows about the dream; I told him when we were suiting up. I have no idea if Turtle heard—if she did, then she knows too. I don’t know how she feels about the superstitious part of this mission, but I know that Karl understands.

  “I think we should work off a tether,” he says. “We can hook up to this handhold. That way, if one of us gets stuck—”

  I shake my head. There might be other bodies in that barricade, and if there are, I would wager that some of them have tethers and bits of equipment attached.

  If the stealth tech is as powerful as I think it is, then these people had no safeguard against it. A handhold won’t defend us either, even though, I believe, the stealth tech is running at a small percentage of capacity.

  “I’m going first,” I say. “You wait. If I get pulled in, you go back. You and Turtle get out.”

  We’ve discussed this drill. They don’t like it. They believe leaving me behind will give them two ghosts instead of one.

  Maybe so, but at least they’ll still be alive to experience those ghosts.

  I push off the handhold, softer this time than I did from the corridor, and let the drift take me to the barricade. I turn the front suit-cams on high. I also use zoom on all but a few of them. I want to see as much as I can through that barricade.

  My suit lights are also on full. I must look like a child’s floaty toy heading in for a landing.

  I stop near the spot where Junior went in. His boots are there, floating, like expected. I back as far from him as I can, hoping to catch a reflection in his visor, but I get nothing
.

  I have to move to the initial spot, that hole in the barricade that Junior initially wanted to go through.

  I’m more afraid of that than I am of the rest of the wreck, but I do it. I grasp a spot marked on Jypé’s map, and pull myself toward that hole.

  Then I train the zoom inside, but I don’t need it.

  I see the side of Junior’s face, illuminated by my lights. The helmet is what tells me that it’s him. I recognize the modern design, the little logos he glued to its side.

  His helmet has bumped against the only intact console in the entire place. His face is pointed downward, the helmet on clear. And through it, I see something I don’t expect: the opposite of my fears.

  He isn’t alive. He hasn’t been alive in a long, long time.

  As I said, no one understands interdimensional travel, but we suspect it manipulates time. And what I see in front of me makes me realize my hypothesis is wrong.

  Time sped up for him. Sped to such a rate that he isn’t even recognizable. He’s been mummified for so long that the skin looks petrified, and I bet, if we were to somehow free him and take him back to the Business, that none of our normal medical tools could cut through the surface of his face.

  There are no currents and eddies here, nothing to pull me forward. Still, I scurry back to what I consider a safe spot, not wanting to experience the same fate as the youngest member of our team.

  “What is it?” Karl asks me.

  “He’s gone,” I say. “No sense cutting him loose.”

  Even though cutting isn’t the right term. We’d have to free him from that stealth tech, and I’m not getting near it. No matter how rich it could make me, no matter how many questions it answers, I no longer want anything to do with it.

  I’m done—with this dive, this wreck—and with my brief encounter with greed.

  ~ * ~

  TWELVE

  We do have answers, though, and visuals to present to the Empire’s ships when they arrive. There are ten of them—a convoy— unwilling to trust something as precious as stealth tech to a single ship.