The Final Frontier

by Neil Clarke

  The group watches in silence as the wreck appears, watches intently as the skip’s images show a tiny Turtle and Karl slid across the guideline.

  The group listens to the arguments, and Jypé nods when Karl makes his unilateral decision to use the probe. The nod reassures me. Jypé is as practical as I’d hoped he’d be.

  I move to the probe footage next. I haven’t previewed it. We’ve all seen probe footage before, so we ignore the grainy picture, the thin light, and the darkness beyond.

  The probe doesn’t examine so much as explore: its job is to go as far inside as possible, to see if that hole provides an easy entrance into the wreck.

  It looks so easy for ten meters—nothing along the edges, just light and darkness and weird particles getting disturbed by our movements.

  Then the hole narrows and we can see the walls as large shapes all around the probe. The hole narrows more, and the walls become visible in the light—a shinier metal, one less damaged by space debris. The particles thin out too.

  Finally a wall looms ahead. The hole continues, so small that it seems like the probe can continue. The probe actually sends a laser pulse, and gets back a measurement: the hole is six centimeters in diameter, more than enough for the equipment to go through.

  But when the probe reaches that narrow point, it slams into a barrier. The barrier isn’t visible. The probe runs several more readouts, all of them denying that the barrier is there.

  Then there’s a registered tug on the line: Karl trying to get the probe out. Several more tugs later, Karl and Turtle decide the probe’s stuck. They take even more readouts, and then shut it down, planning to use it later.

  The readouts tell us nothing except that the hole continues, six centimeters in diameter, for another two meters.

  “What the hell do you think that is?” Junior asks. His voice hasn’t finished its change yet, even though both Jypé and Junior swear he’s over eighteen.

  “Could be some kind of forcefield,” Squishy says.

  “In a vessel that old?” Turtle asks. “Not likely.”

  “How old is that?” Squishy’s entire body is tense. It’s clear now that she and Turtle have been fighting.

  “How old is that, Boss?” Turtle asks me.

  They all look at me. They know I have an idea. They know age is one of the reasons they’re here.

  I shrug. “That’s one of the things we’re going to confirm.”

  “Confirm.” Karl catches the word. “Confirm what? What do you know that we don’t?”

  “Let’s run the readouts before I answer that,” I say.

  “No.” Squishy crosses her arms. “Tell us.”

  Turtle gets up. She pushes two icons on the console beside me, and the suits’ technical readouts come up. She flashes forward, through numbers and diagrams and chemical symbols to the conclusions.

  “Over five thousand years old.” Turtle doesn’t look at Squishy. “That’s what the boss isn’t telling us. This wreck is human-made, and it’s been here longer than humans have been in this section of space.”

  Karl stares at it.

  Squishy shakes her head. “Not possible. Nothing human-made would’ve survived to make it this far out. Too many gravity wells, too much debris.”

  “Five thousand years,” Jypé says.

  I let them talk. In their voices, in their argument, I hear the same argument that went through my head when I got my first readouts about the wreck.

  It’s Junior that stops the discussion. In his half-tenor, half-baritone way, he says, “C’mon, gang, think a little. That’s why the boss brought us out here. To confirm her suspicions.”

  “Or not,” I say.

  Everyone looks at me as if they’ve just remembered I’m there.

  “Wouldn’t it be better if we knew your suspicions?” Squishy asks.

  Karl is watching me, eyes slitted. It’s as if he’s seeing me for the first time.

  “No, it wouldn’t be better.” I speak softly. I make sure to have eye contact with each of them before I continue. “I don’t want you to use my scholarship— or lack thereof—as the basis for your assumptions.”

  “So should we discuss this with each other?” Squishy’s using that snide tone with me now. I don’t know what has her so upset, but I’m going to have to find out. If she doesn’t calm down, she’s not going near the wreck.

  “Sure,” I say.

  “All right.” She leans back, staring at the readouts still floating before us. “If this thing is five thousand years old, human-made, and somehow it came to this spot at this time, then it can’t have a forcefield.”

  “Or fake readouts like the probe found,” Jypé says.

  “Hell,” Turtle says. “It shouldn’t be here at all. Space debris should’ve pulverized it. That’s too much time. Too much distance.”

  “So what’s it doing here?” Karl asked.

  I shrug for the third and last time. “Let’s see if we can find out.”

  They don’t rest. They’re as obsessed with the readouts as I’ve been. They study time and distance and drift, forgetting the weirdness inside the hole. I’m the one who focuses on that.

  I don’t learn much. We need more information—we revisit the probe twice while looking for another way into the ship—and even then, we don’t get a lot of new information.

  Either the barrier is new technology or it is very old technology, technology that has been lost. So much technology has been lost in the thousands of years since this ship was built.

  It seems like humans constantly have to reinvent everything.

  Six dives later and we still haven’t found a way inside the ship. Six dives, and no new information. Six dives, and my biggest problem is Squishy.

  She has become angrier and angrier as the dives continue. I’ve brought her along on the seventh dive to man the skip with me, so that we can talk.

  Junior and Jypé are the divers. They’re exploring what I consider to be the top of the ship, even though I’m only guessing. They’re going over the surface centimeter by centimeter, exploring each part of it, looking for a weakness that we can exploit.

  I monitor their equipment using the skip’s computer, and I monitor them with my eyes, watching the tiny figures move along the narrow blackness of the skip itself.

  Squishy stands beside me, at military attention, her hands folded behind her back.

  She knows she’s been brought for conversation only; she’s punishing me by refusing to speak until I broach the subject first.

  Finally, when J&J are past the dangerous links between two sections of the ship, I mimic Squishy’s posture—hands behind my back, shoulders straight, legs slightly spread.

  “What’s making you so angry?” I ask.

  She stares at the team on top of the wreck. Her face is a smooth reproach to my lack of attention; the monitor on board the skip should always pay attention to the divers.

  I taught her that. I believe that. Yet here I am, reproaching another person while the divers work the wreck.

  “Squishy?” I ask.

  She isn’t answering me. Just watching, with that implacable expression.

  “You’ve had as many dives as everyone else,” I say. “I’ve never questioned your work, yet your mood has been foul, and it seems to be directed at me. Do we have an issue I don’t know about?”

  Finally she turns, and the move is as military as the stance was. Her eyes narrow.

  “You could’ve told us this was a Dignity Vessel,” she says.

  My breath catches. She agrees with my research. I don’t understand why that makes her angry.

  “I could’ve,” I say. “But I feel better that you came to your own conclusion.”

  “I’ve known it since the first dive,” she says. “I wanted you to tell them. You didn’t. They’re still wasting time trying to figure out what they have here.”

  “What they have here is an anomaly,” I say, “something that makes no sense and can’t be here.”

/>   “Something dangerous.” She crosses her arms. “Dignity Vessels were used in wartime.”

  “I know the legends.” I glance at the wreck, then at the handheld readout. J&J are working something that might be a hatch.

  “A lot of wartimes,” she says, “over many centuries, from what historians have found out.”

  “But never out here,” I say.

  And she concedes. “Never out here.”

  “So what are you so concerned about?”

  “By not telling us what it is, we can’t prepare,” she says. “What if there’re weapons or explosives or something else—”

  “Like that barrier?” I ask.

  Her lips thin.

  “We’ve worked unknown wrecks before, you and me, together.”

  She shrugs. “But they’re of a type. We know the history, we know the vessels, we know the capabilities. We don’t know this at all. No one really knows what these ancient ships were capable of. It’s something that shouldn’t be here.”

  “A mystery,” I say.

  “A dangerous one.”

  “Hey!” Junior’s voice is tinny and small. “We got it open! We’re going in.”

  Squishy and I turn toward the sound. I can’t see either man on the wreck itself. The handheld’s imagery is shaky.

  I press the comm, hoping they can still hear me. “Probe first. Remember that barrier.”

  But they don’t answer, and I know why not. I wouldn’t either in their situation. They’re pretending they don’t hear. They want to be the first inside, the first to learn the secrets of the wreck.

  The handheld moves inside the darkness. I see four tiny lights—Jypé’s glove lights—and I see the same particles I saw before, on the first images from the earliest probe.

  Then the handheld goes dark. We were going to have to adjust it to transmit through the metal of the wreck.

  “I don’t like this,” Squishy says.

  I’ve never liked any time I was out of sight and communication with the team.

  We stare at the wreck as if it can give us answers. It’s big and dark, a blob against our screen. Squishy actually goes to the portals and looks, as if she can see more through them than she can through the miracle of science.

  But she doesn’t. And the handheld doesn’t wink on.

  On my screen, the counter ticks away the minutes.

  Our argument isn’t forgotten, but it’s on hold as the first members of our little unit vanish inside.

  After thirty-five minutes—fifteen of them inside (Jypé has rigorously stuck to the schedule on each of his dives, something which has impressed me)—I start to get nervous.

  I hate the last five minutes of waiting. I hate it even more when the waiting goes on too long, when someone doesn’t follow the timetable I’ve devised.

  Squishy, who’s never been in the skip with me, is pacing. She doesn’t say any more—not about danger, not about the way I’m running this little trip, not about the wreck itself.

  I watch her as she moves, all grace and form, just like she’s always been. She’s never been on a real mystery run. She’s done dangerous ones—maybe two hundred deep space dives into wrecks that a lot of divers, even the most greedy, would never touch.

  But she’s always known what she’s diving into, and why it’s where it is.

  Not only are we uncertain as to whether or not this is an authentic Dignity Vessel (and really, how can it be?), we also don’t know why it’s here, how it came here, or what its cargo was. We have no idea what its mission was either—if, indeed, it had a mission at all.

  37:49

  Squishy’s stopped pacing. She looks out the portals again, as if the view has changed. It hasn’t.

  “You’re afraid, aren’t you?” I ask. “That’s the bottom line, isn’t it? This is the first time in years that you’ve been afraid.”

  She stops, stares at me as if I’m a creature she’s never seen before, and then frowns.

  “Aren’t you?” she asks.

  I shake my head.

  The handheld springs to life, images bouncy and grainy on the corner of my screen. My stomach unclenches. I’ve been breathing shallowly and not even realizing it.

  Maybe I am afraid, just a little.

  But not of the wreck. The wreck is a curiosity, a project, a conundrum no one else has faced before.

  I’m afraid of deep space itself, of the vastness of it. It’s inexplicable to me, filled with not just one mystery, but millions, and all of them waiting to be solved.

  A crackle, then a voice—Jypé’s.

  “We got a lot of shit.” He sounds gleeful. He sounds almost giddy with relief.

  Squishy lets out the breath she’s obviously been holding.

  “We’re coming in,” Junior says.

  It’s 40:29.

  The wreck’s a Dignity Vessel, all right. It’s got a DV number etched inside the hatch, just like the materials say it should. We mark the number down to research later.

  Instead, we’re gathered in the lounge, watching the images J&J have brought back.

  They have the best equipment. Their suits don’t just have sensors and readouts, but they have chips that store a lot of imagery woven into the suits’ surfaces. Most suits can’t handle the extra weight, light as it is, or the protections to ensure that the chips don’t get damaged by the environmental changes—the costs are too high, and if the prices stay in line, then either the suits’ human protections are compromised, or the imagery is.

  Two suits, two vids, so much information.

  The computer cobbles it together into two different information streams— one from Jypé’s suit’s prospective, the other from Junior’s. The computer cleans and enhances the images, clarifies edges if it can read them and leaves them fuzzy if it can’t.

  Not much is fuzzy here. Most of it is firm, black-and-white only because of the purity of the glovelights and the darkness that surrounds them.

  Here’s what we see:

  From Junior’s point-of-view, Jypé going into the hatch. The edge is up, rounded, like it’s been opened a thousand times a day instead of once in thousands of years. Then the image switches to Jypé’s legcams and at that moment, I stop keeping track of which images belong to which diver.

  The hatch itself is round, and so is the tunnel it leads down. Metal rungs are built into the wall. I’ve seen these before: they’re an ancient form of ladder, ineffective and dangerous. Jypé clings to one rung, then turns and pushes off gently, drifting slowly deep into a darkness that seems profound.

  Numbers are etched on the walls, all of them following the letters DV, done in ancient script. The numbers are repeated over and over again—the same ones— and it’s Karl who figures out why: each piece of the vessel has the numbers etched into it, in case the vessel was destroyed. Its parts could always be identified then.

  Other scratches marked the metal, but we can’t read them in the darkness. Some of them aren’t that visible, even in the glovelights. It takes Jypé a while to remember he has lights on the soles of his feet as well—a sign, to me, of his inexperience.

  Ten meters down, another hatch. It opens easily, and ten meters beneath it is another.

  That one reveals a nest of corridors leading in a dozen different directions. A beep resounds in the silence and we all glance at our watches before we realize it’s on the recording.

  The reminder that half the dive time is up.

  Junior argues that a few more meters won’t hurt. Maybe see if there are items off those corridors, something they can remove, take back to the Business and examine.

  But Jypé keeps to the schedule. He merely shakes his head, and his son listens.

  Together they ascend, floating easily along the tunnel as they entered it, leaving the interior hatches open, and only closing the exterior one, as we’d all learned in dive training.

  The imagery ends, and the screen fills with numbers, facts, figures and readouts which I momentarily ignore. The people in th
e room are more important. We can sift through the numbers later.

  There’s energy here—a palpable excitement—dampened only by Squishy’s fear. She stands with her arms wrapped around herself, as far from Turtle as she can get.

  “A Dignity Vessel,” Karl says, his cheeks flushed. “Who’d’ve thought?”

  “You knew,” Turtle says to me.

  I shrug. “I hoped.”

  “It’s impossible,” Jypé says, “and yet I was inside it.”

  “That’s the neat part,” Junior says. “It’s impossible and it’s here.”

  Squishy is the only one who doesn’t speak. She stares at the readouts as if she can see more in them than I ever will.

  “We have so much work to do,” says Karl. “I think we should go back home, research as much as we can, and then come back to the wreck.”

  “And let others dive her?” Turtle says. “People are going to ghost us, track our research, look at what we’re doing. They’ll find the wreck and claim it as their own.”

  “You can’t claim this deep,” Junior says, then looks at me. “Can you?”

  “Sure you can,” I say. “But a claim’s an announcement that the wreck’s here. Something like this, we’ll get jumpers for sure.”

  “Karl’s right.” Squishy’s voice is the only one not tinged with excitement. “We should go back.”

  “What’s wrong with you?” Turtle says. “You used to love wreck diving.”

  “Have you read about early period stealth technology?” Squishy asks. “Do you have any idea what damage it can do?”

  Everyone is looking at her now. She still has her back to us, her arms wrapped around herself so tightly her shirt pulls. The screen’s readout lights her face, but all we can see are parts of it, illuminating her hair like an inverse nimbus.

  “Why would you have studied stealth tech?” Karl asks.

  “She was military,” Turtle says. “Long, long ago, before she realized she hates rules. Where’d you think she learned field medicine?”