Kristine Rusch - Diving into the Wreck

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.

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 switch 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.