by Neil Clarke
He grins. “Aye, aye, captain.”
“Boss,” I mutter as I stagger down the corridor to my bed. “I can’t tell you how much I prefer Boss.”
I sleep, but not long. My brain’s too busy. I’m sure those specs are different which confirms nothing. It just means that someone repaired the vessel at one point or another. But what if the materials are the kind that weren’t available in the area of space around Earth when Dignity Vessels were built? That disproves Squishy’s worry about the tech of that thing.
I’m at my hardwired terminal when Squishy comes to my door. I’ve gone through five or six layers of security to get to some very old data, data that aren’t accessible from any other part of my ship’s networked computer system.
Squishy waits. I’m hoping she’ll leave, but of course she doesn’t. After a few minutes, she coughs.
I sigh audibly. “We talked last night.”
“I have one more thing to ask.”
She stepped inside, unbidden, and closed the door. My quarters felt claustrophobic with another person inside them. I’d always been alone here—always—even when I had a liaison with one of the crew. I’d go to his quarters, never bring him into my own.
The habits of privacy are long engrained, and the habits of secrecy even longer. It’s how I’ve protected my turf for so many years, and how I’ve managed to first-dive so many wrecks.
I dim the screen and turn to her. “Ask.”
Her eyes are haunted. She looks like she’s gotten even less sleep than I have.
“I’m going to try one last time,” she says. “Please blow the wreck up. Make it go away. Don’t let anyone else inside. Forget it was here.”
I fold my hands on my lap. Yesterday I hadn’t had an answer for that request. Today I do. I’d thought about it off and on all night, just like I’d thought about the differing stories I’d heard from her and from Jypé, and how, I realized fifteen minutes before my alarm, neither of them had to be true.
“Please,” she says.
“I’m not a scientist,” I say, which should warn her right off, but of course it doesn’t. Her gaze doesn’t change. Nothing about her posture changes. “I’ve been thinking about this. If this stealth tech is as powerful as you claim, then we might be making things even worse. What if the explosion triggers the tech? What if we blow a hole between dimensions? Or maybe destroy something else, something we can’t see?”
Her cheeks flush slightly.
“Or maybe the explosion’ll double-back on us. I recall something about Dignity Vessels being unfightable, that anything that hit them rebounded to the other ship. What if that’s part of the stealth tech?”
“It was a feature of the shields,” she says with a bit of sarcasm. “They were unknown in that era.”
“Still,” I say. “You understand stealth tech more than I do, but you don’t really understand it or you’d be able to replicate it, right?’
“I think there’s a flaw in that argument—”
“But you don’t really grasp it, right? So you don’t know if blowing up the wreck will create a situation here, something worse than anything we’ve seen.”
“I’m willing to risk it.” Her voice is flat. So are her eyes. It’s as if she’s a person I don’t know, a person I’ve never met before. And something in those eyes, something cold and terrified, tells me that if I met her this morning, I wouldn’t want to know her.
“I like risks,” I say. “I just don’t like that one. It seems to me that the odds are against us.”
“You and me, maybe,” she says. “But there’s a lot more to ‘us’ than just this little band of people. You let that wreck remain and you bring something dangerous back into our lives, our culture.”
“I could leave it for someone else,” I say. “But I really don’t want to.”
“You think I’m making this up. You think I’m worrying over nothing.” She sounds bitter.
“No,” I say. “But you already told me that the military is trying to recreate this thing, over and over again. You tell me that people die doing it. My research tells me these ships worked for hundreds of years, and I think, maybe your methodology was flawed. Maybe getting the real stealth tech into the hands of people who can do something with it will save lives.”
She stares at me, and I recognize the expression. It must have been the one I’d had when I looked at her just a few moments ago.
I’d always known that greed and morals and beliefs destroyed friendships. I also knew they influenced more dives than I cared to think about.
But I’d always tried to keep them out of my ship and out of my dives. That’s why I pick my crews so carefully; why I call the ship Nobody’s Business.
Somehow, I never expected Squishy to start the conflict.
Somehow, I never expected the conflict to be with me.
“No matter what I say, you’re going to dive that wreck, aren’t you?” she asks.
I nod.
Her sigh is as audible as mine was, and just as staged. She wants me to understand that her disapproval is deep, that she will hold me accountable if all the terrible things she imagines somehow come to pass.
We stare at each other in silence. It feels like we’re having some kind of argument, an argument without words. I’m loathe to break eye contact.
Finally, she’s the one who looks away.
“You want me to stay,” she says. “Fine. I’ll stay. But I have some conditions of my own.”
I expected that. In fact, I’d expected that earlier, when she’d first come to my quarters, not this prolonged discussion about destroying the wreck.
“Name them.”
“I’m done diving,” she says. “I’m not going near that thing, not even to save lives.”
“All right.”
“But I’ll man the skip, if you let me bring some of my medical supplies.”
So far, I see no problems. “All right.”
“And if something goes wrong—and it will—I reserve the right to give my notes, both audio and digital, to any necessary authorities. I reserve the right to tell them what we found and how I warned you. I reserve the right to tell them that you’re the one responsible for everything that happens.”
“I am the one responsible,” I say. “But the entire group has signed off on the hazards of wreck diving. Death is one of the risks.”
A lopsided smile fills her face, but doesn’t reach her eyes. The smile itself seems like sarcasm.
“Yeah,” she says as if she’s never heard me make that speech before. “I suppose it is.”
I tell the others that Squishy has some concerns about the stealth tech and wants to operate as our medic instead of as a main diver. No one questions that. Such things happen on long dives—someone gets squeamish about the wreck; or terrified of the dark; or nearly dies and decides to give up wreck-diving then and there.
We’re a superstitious bunch when it gets down to it. We put on our gear in the same order each and every time; we all have one piece of equipment we shouldn’t but we feel we need just to survive; and we like to think there’s something watching over us, even if it’s just a pile of luck and an ancient diving belt.
The upside of Squishy’s decision is that I get to dive the wreck. I have a good pilot, although not a great one, manning the skip, and I know that she’ll make sensible decisions. She’ll never impulsively come in to save a team member. She’s said so, and I know she means it.
The downside is that she’s a better diver than I am. She’d find things I never would; she’d see things I’ll never see; she’d avoid things I don’t even know are dangerous.
Which is why, on my first dive to that wreck, I set myself up with Turtle, the most experienced member of the dive team after Squishy.
The skip ride over is tense: those two have gone beyond not talking into painful and outspoken silence. I spend most of my time going over and over my equipment looking for flaws. Much as I want to dive this wreck—and I have since th
e first moment I saw her—I’m scared of the deep and the dark and the unknown. Those first few instances of weightlessness always catch me by surprise, always remind me that what I do is somehow unnatural.
Still, we get to our normal spot, I suit up, and somehow I make it through those first few minutes, zip along the tether with Turtle just a few meters ahead of me, and make my way to the hatch.
Turtle’s gonna take care of the recording and the tracking for this trip. She knows the wreck is new to me. She’s been inside once now, and so has Karl. Junior and Jypé had the dive before this one.
I’ve assigned three corridors: one to Karl, one to J&J, and one to Turtle. Once we discover what’s at the end of those babies, we’ll take a few more. I’m floating; I’ll take the corridor of the person I dive with.
Descending into the hatch is trickier than it looks on the recordings. The edges are sharper; I have to be careful about where I put my hands.
Gravity isn’t there to pull at me. I can hear my own breathing, harsh and insistent, and I wonder if I shouldn’t have taken Squishy’s advice: a ten/ten/ten split on my first dive instead of a twenty/twenty/twenty. It takes less time to reach the wreck now; we get inside in nine minutes flat. I would’ve had time to do a bit of acclimatizing and to have a productive dive the next time.
But I hadn’t been thinking that clearly, obviously. I’d been more interested in our corridor, hoping it led to the control room whatever that was.
Squishy had been thinking, though. Before I left, she tanked me up with one more emergency bottle. She remembered how on my first dives after a long lay-off, I used too much oxygen.
She remembered that I sometimes panic.
I’m not panicked now, just excited. I have all my exterior suit lights on, trying to catch the various nooks and crannies of the hatch tube that leads into the ship.
Turtle’s not far behind. Because I’m lit up like a tourist station, she’s not using her boot lights. She’s letting me set the pace, and I’m probably setting it a little too fast.
We reach the corridors at 11:59. Turtle shows me our corridor at 12:03. We take off down the notched hallway at 12:06, and I’m giddy as a child on her first space walk.
Giddy we have to watch. Giddy can be the first sign of oxygen deprivation, followed by a healthy disregard for safety.
But I don’t mention this giddy. I’ve had it since Squishy bowed off the teams, and the giddy’s grown worse as my dive day got closer. I’m a little concerned—extreme emotion adds to the heavy breathing—but I’m going to trust my suit. I’m hoping it’ll tell me if the oxygen’s too low, the pressure’s off or the environmental controls are about to fail.
The corridor is human-sized and built for full gravity. Apparently no one thought of adding rungs along the side or the ceiling in case the environmental controls fail.
To me, that shows an astonishing trust in technology, one I’ve always read about but have never seen. No ship designed in the last three hundred years lacks clingholds. No ship lacks emergency oxygen supplies spaced every ten meters or so. No ship lacks communications equipment near each door.
The past feels even farther away than I thought it would. I thought once I stepped inside the wreck—even though I couldn’t smell the environment or hear what’s going on around me—I’d get a sense of what it would be like to spend part of my career in this place.
But I have no sense. I’m in a dark, dreary hallway that lacks the emergency supplies I’m used to. Turtle’s moving slower than my giddy self wants, although my cautious, experienced boss self knows that slow is best.
She’s finding handholds, and signaling me for them, like we’re climbing the outside of an alien vessel. We’re working on an ancient system—the lead person touches a place, deems it safe, uses it to push off, and the rest of the team follows.
There aren’t as many doors as I would have expected. A corridor, it seems to me, needs doors funneling off it, with the occasional side corridor bisecting it.
But there are no bisections, and every time I think we’re in a tunnel not a corridor, a door does appear. The doors are regulation height, even now, but recessed farther than I’m used to.
Turtle tries each door. They’re all jammed or locked. At the moment, we’re just trying to map the wreck. We’ll pry open the difficult places once the map is finished.
But I’d love to go inside one of those closed off spaces, probably as much as she would.
Finally, she makes a small scratch on the side of the wall, and nods at me.
The giddy fades. We’re done. We go back now—my rule—and if you get back early so be it. I check my readout: 29:01. We have ten minutes to make it back to the hatch.
I almost argue for a few more minutes, even though I know better. Sure, it didn’t take us as long to get here as it had in the past, but that doesn’t mean the return trip is going to be easy. I’ve lost four divers over the years because they made the mistake I wanted to make now.
I let Turtle pass me. She goes back, using the same push-off points as before. As she does that, I realize she’s marked them somehow, probably with something her suit can pick up. My equipment’s not that sophisticated, but I’m glad hers is. We need that kind of expertise inside this wreck. It might take us weeks just to map the space, and we can expect each other to remember each and every safe touch spot because of it.
When we get back to the skip and I drop my helmet, Squishy glares at me.
“You had the gids,” she says.
“Normal excitement,” I say.
She shakes her head. “I see this coming back the next time, and you’re grounded.”
I nod, but know she can’t ground me without my permission. It’s my ship, my wreck, my job. I’ll do what I want.
I take off the suit, indulge in some relaxation while Squishy pilots. We didn’t get much, Turtle and I, just a few more meters of corridor mapped, but it feels like we’d discovered a whole new world.
Maybe that is the gids, I don’t know. But I don’t think so. I think it’s just the reaction of an addict who returns to her addiction—an elation so great that she needs to do something with it besides acknowledge it.
And this wreck. This wreck has so many possibilities.
Only I can’t discuss them on the skip, not with Squishy at the helm and Turtle across from me. Squishy hates this project, and Turtle’s starting to. Her enthusiasm is waning, and I don’t know if it’s because of her personal war with Squishy or because Squishy has convinced her the wreck is even more dangerous than usual.
I stare out a portal, watching the wreck grow tinier and tinier in the distance. It’s ironic. Even though I’m surrounded by tension, I finally feel content.
Half a dozen more dives, maybe sixty more meters, mostly corridor. One potential storage compartment, which we’d initially hoped was a stateroom or quarters, and a mechanic’s corridor, filled with equipment we haven’t even begun to catalogue.
I spend my off-hours analyzing the materials. So far, nothing conclusive. Lots of evidence of cobbling, but that’s pretty common for any ship—with FTL or not—that’s made it on a long journey.
What there’s no evidence of are bodies. We haven’t found a one, and that’s even more unusual. Sometimes there’re skeletons floating—or pieces of them at least—and sometimes we get the full-blown corpse, suited and intact. A handful aren’t suited. Those’re the worst. They always make me grateful we can’t smell the ship around us.
The lack of bodies is beginning to creep out Karl. He’s even talked to me in private about skipping the next few dives.
I’m not sure what’s best. If he skips them, the attitudes might become engrained, and he might not dive again. If he goes, the fears might grow worse and paralyze him in the worst possible place.
I move him to the end of the rotation, and warn Squishy she might have to suit up after all.
She just looks at me and grins. “Too many of the team quit on you, you’ll just have to go home.
”
“I’ll dive it myself, and you all can wait,” I say, but it’s bravado and we both know it.
That wreck isn’t going to defeat me, not with the perfect treasure hidden in its bulk.
That’s what’s fueling my greed. The perfect treasure: my perfect treasure. Something that answers previously unasked historical questions—previously unknown historical questions; something that will reveal facts about our history, our humanity, that no one has suspected before; and something that, even though it does all that, is worth a small—physical—fortune.
I love the history part. I get paid a lot of money to ferry people to other wrecks, teach them to dive old historical sites. Then I save up my funds and do this: find new sites that no one else knows about, and mine them for history.
I never expected to mine them for real gold as well.
I shake every time I think about it, and before each dive, I do feel the gids. Only now I report them to Squishy. I tell her that I’m a tad too excited, and she offers me a tranq which I always refuse. Never go into the unknown with senses dulled, that’s my motto, even though I know countless people who do it.
We’re on a long diving mission, longer than some of these folks have ever been on, and we’re not even halfway through. We’ll have gids and jitters and too many superstitions. We’ll have fears and near-emergencies, and God forbid, real emergencies as well.
We’ll get through it, and we’ll have our prize, and no one, not any one person, will be able to take that away from us.
It turned this afternoon.
I’m captaining the skip. Squishy’s back at the Business, taking a boss-ordered rest. I’m tired of her complaints and her constant negative attitude. At first, I thought she’d turn Turtle, but Turtle finally got pissed, and decided she’d enjoy this run.
I caught Squishy ragging on J&J, my strong links, asking them if they really want to be mining a death ship. They didn’t listen to her, not really— although Jypé argued with her just a little—but that kind of talk can depress an entire mission, sabotage it in subtle little ways, ways that I don’t even want to contemplate.