Kristine Rusch - Diving into the Wreck

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 in 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. But it seems bare. There are no obvious safety devices.

To me, that shows an astonishing trust in technology, one I’ve always read about but have never seen. No ship lacks emergency oxygen supplies spaced every ten meters or so, although this one does. No ship lacks communications equipment near each door, although this one does.

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 them for me, 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 want 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 and 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 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 one, and that’s even more unusual. Sometimes there are 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 are 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, his attitudes might become ingrained, 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 fortune.

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 that 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.

Only I’m not sure we will get through it. Not after what happened this afternoon.