Kristine Rusch - Diving into the Wreck

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.

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.

Squishy didn’t come back with them. I don’t know why I thought she would. She dropped off Jypé, reported us and the wreck, and vanished into Longbow Station, not even willing to collect a finder’s fee that the Empire gives whenever it locates unusual technologies.

Squishy’s gone, and I doubt she’ll ever come back.

Turtle’s not speaking to me now, except to say that she’s relieved we’re not being charged with anything. Our vids showed the Empire we cared enough to go back for our team member, and also that we had no idea about the stealth tech until we saw it function.

We hadn’t gone into the site to raid it, just to explore it—as the earlier vids showed. Which confirmed my claim—I’m a wreck diver, not a pirate, not a scavenger—and that allowed me to pick up the reward that Squishy abandoned.

The reward is embarrassingly large. I’ve never seen that much money all at once.

Normally, though, I would have left it. I don’t like making money that way.

But I couldn’t leave it this time. I needed to fund the expedition, and I’m not going to be able to do it the way I’d initially planned—by taking tourists to the Dignity Vessel so far from home.

The Empire chased us away from the vessel. They’re talking about moving it to some storehouse or warehouse or way station, but I’m not sure how they’re going to do it.

I don’t think they dare move it, not with the stealth tech still functioning. I think they’ll lose some divers and some equipment, just like the rest of us have.

But I didn’t tell them that. I didn’t get a chance to tell them much of anything. All I could do was defend myself and my crew, accept the ticket for the lost claim and the hollow thanks of the agent in charge of that convoy.

As we left that group of ten ships, we couldn’t even see the Dignity Vessel they surrounded. Turtle now agrees with Squishy; she thinks we should have blown the vessel up.

Karl is just glad that it’s no longer part of our lives.

But it’ll always be a part of mine.

I think about it constantly, speculating. Worrying.

Wishing I had more answers to all the questions the Vessel raised.

Like this one: That vessel had been in service a while—that much was clear from how it had been refitted. When someone activated the stealth, something went wrong. What happened to the crew then? Did they abandon the vessel or die in it? Did they try to shut the stealth tech off or did they run from it?

Were they running tests with minimal crew, or had the real crew looked at that carnage in the cockpit and decided, like we did, that it wasn’t worth the risk to go in? Was this a repair mission gone wrong?

I never looked for escape pods, but such things existed on Dignity Vessels—at least they do in the specs. Maybe the rest of the crew bailed, got rescued, and blended into cultures somewhere far from home.

Maybe that’s where Jypé’s legends come from.