Kristine Rusch - Diving into the Wreck

I’m being as cautious as I can.

My sensors are on full, but I’m not recording with them. Instead, I’m using a link I’ve built into the single ship that attaches to a small computer I wear on my wrist.

The additional link was simple enough to build: single ships are designed to monitor the pilot’s eyes, heart rate, and respiration rate. Should my heart slow, my breathing even, or my eyes close for longer than a minute, the automatic controls take over the entire ship. Unconsciousness isn’t as much of a danger as it would be if the ship were completely manual, but consciousness isn’t a danger either. No one can monitor my movements simply by tapping the ship’s computer.

The additional link that I’ve set up only feeds information in one direction—into my personal computer. The coordinates of the blip, the readings I’ve taken as I’ve approached, and everything about the blip itself are stored on my system, not the single ship’s.

All someone probing my ship from a distance will learn is that I’ve come to an unusual region of space for a reason they can’t entirely determine.

But I know. The faint energy signature has led me to a black lump against the blackness of space.

A ship, just like I’d hoped and feared.

My breath catches. I scan for distress signals, for signs of life. But my sensors tell me that the ship has no environment and no active power systems. The energy signature I’ve found remains weak—one final system that refuses to turn off or, perhaps, a sort of stardrive that I don’t entirely recognize. One that’s built on some form of energy with a half-life that’ll give off readings for generations.

The wreck is huge—five times the size of the Business —and it has a configuration I don’t recognize. My single ship’s computer hypothesizes that the ship is Old Earth make, at least five thousand years old, but I ignore that hypothesis since it has to be wrong.

Ships that old could never have made it this far from Earth, not in five thousand years. Maybe not even in ten.

This ship is something else, something my not-so-sophisticated single ship computer system doesn’t recognize. The system doesn’t guess per se—-computers still lack the ability to do that—but it sends me information with confidence, picking the closest ship from the array it has in its database.

What I can tell for certain is this: The wreck has been alone and abandoned for a long time. The giant hull is pitted and space-scored, with some kind of corrosion on the outside.

As I circle the thing, moving slowly and keeping my distance, I notice some holes as well, where debris has hit the hull over time.

The holes mean there are no working shields and no way for someone to still be alive on that thing. I suspect, with something as old as this ship appears to be, that scavengers have already looted its interior.

The ship is derelict, abandoned and worthless.

To everyone but me.

I leave the ship as I’ve found it, drifting. I make no mention of it in the mandatory reports that I have to send to the next space base. I tell no one what I’ve seen.

I just make note, and I keep my own computer files on my personal system. I never let that system out of my sight.

It takes me three full travel days (with stops along the way) to get to Hector Prime. I keep an apartment there, although I don’t call that home.

Home, to me, is Nobody’s Business , which I have modified for my every need. But I keep two “real” residences—the apartment on Hector Prime and a berth at Longbow Station.

The berth at Longbow gives me privileges at the station. The apartment on Hector Prime allows me to store my stuff somewhere relatively safe.

I like Hector Prime. It’s at the very edge of the Enterran Empire, so far away from the Empire’s center that the government actually seems lax here. I’m not antigovernment; I just don’t think about it much. Because if I do, I worry.

The Empire started the Colonnade Wars all those years ago. It wanted more territory, and it succeeded in getting that territory. If things had gone differently, Hector Prime would have been part of what the Empire calls Rebel Space. The rest of us call it the Nine Planets Alliance, and we travel back and forth between the Alliance and the Empire.

Technically, the Empire holds my citizenship, but in reality, the Alliance touches my heart. That’s probably because the Alliance doesn’t want my heart—and the Empire does.

Or maybe I just like misfits, since I consider myself one.

Still, my official address is on Hector Prime. I keep an apartment in one of the more expensive sections of the city. I like the area’s security—the way it’ll notify the Business if someone is breaking into apartments in the area, not to mention if someone were to break into mine.

Most of my possessions, while valuable, mean little to me. But the computer system that I store there is almost as valuable as the one I have hardwired into my quarters on the Business. On my apartment system, I keep coded records, logs, and other information.

I doubt anyone can break the codes, but I want to be informed if someone tries.

For buried within all that information—a lot of flotsam and jetsam of galaxy history, favorite reading materials, downloaded holoplays, and fake genealogy charts for the family I’ve long ago abandoned—are the locations of my favorite wrecks. Not the ones the tourists dive, but the ones that hold a special place in my heart.

The ones filled with history. The ones that matter more to me than anything.

I don’t record the new ship’s presence in any of those logs. I won’t record it until after I’ve dived it. But I do make a hand-scrawled note and paste it to my kitchen wall. All the note has are numbers: the date I discovered the wreck followed by the identification number of my single ship intermingled with the wreck’s coordinates. The code is simple, and a determined someone could break it, I suppose, but no one has yet.

And it’s a nice security feature in case someone steals my systems—all of them.

Right now, I don’t care about much of the information on them.

All I care about is the new wreck.

My apartment is almost as spare as the single ship. I have a kitchen, a bedroom, and a living room. I sleep in the living room and use the bedroom as a workspace. It’s littered with computer parts, old and new. It would take a burglar a while to figure out which system is the current one.

Sometimes I change from a modern machine to an old one. Sometimes I add components that don’t really fit just to throw people off.

While I have been robbed on the Business —by a former colleague, no less—I haven’t been robbed in the apartment.

But a diver can’t be too careful.

It’s a competitive business, and what a diver has, besides her diving skills, are the locations of her favorite and upcoming wrecks. No matter how much money a diver has, no matter how much loot she finds, she learns that those things don’t matter.

All that matters are the wrecks.

I switch the systems around again before I begin research on the new wreck. First I download the ship’s shape and the specs I could gather by flying around it.

Then I let the database work, seeing if my extensive collection of historical ships has any record of something of this shape.

I’m loath to work on the public networks. Sometimes an inquiry is enough to notify a claim jumper. I prefer to use the databases I’ve developed.