Kristine Rusch - Diving into the Wreck

“Let’s hope they can give those bastards a run,” Roderick says, with uncharacteristic force.

I look at him. He still seems too young and green to me to have the experience he claims, but I’ve seen him pilot ships and I trust him.

Tamaz stands behind Squishy, watching the monitors, but also keeping an eye on her. I get the sense that he trusts her less than Odette does, and I wonder if someone (Odette herself?) has talked with him about Squishy.

Squishy radiates calm. She’s watching the proceedings as if she already knows the outcome. I wonder if this is how she doctors in Vallevu, pretending calm in a crisis, just to keep the others from panicking.

Odette sits in the copilot’s chair, even though I don’t let her touch the controls. Odette has never piloted anything larger than a skip, although she’s navigated ships the size of the Business on occasion. She has threaded her fingers together. She keeps looking at all the sensors, checking them one against the other as if they’re lying to her.

We all suppose that they are.

“I think you should run the readings again, Boss,” Hurst says. He’s standing just behind me, hovering the way I usually hate my crew members to hover. He clearly wants to handle the controls himself, and I won’t let him.

“I don’t want to do too many scans,” I say.

“I know,” he says, “but we registered that first ship leaving, and if we’re looking at a false scan of military vessels, we shouldn’t have gotten that reading.”

He has a point. We might be looking at things in real time after all.

I’m tempted to run the scan, but I’m not going to. I don’t want to give the second military vessel any excuse to stay in the area.

Of course, if there are only two, will they both leave their posts to go after stray ships?

I can only hope so.

“Boss,” he says, urging me.

I shake my head. “We’re going to wait,” I say. “I know it’s hard.”

I resist the urge to tell him to be patient. He knows he has to be patient. We all know it. And that’s the most difficult part of this early section of the mission.

Forty-five minutes after the first ship left, the second ship moves out of its little orbit of the Dignity Vessel. It comes toward us, making my heart skip a beat.

“I thought we’re in stealth,” Squishy snaps, sounding decidedly not calm.

“We are,” I say. “But they might have upgraded their scanning equipment like Hurst said before we left.”

“You should move this thing back out of scanning range then,” Odette says.

“First,” I say, “if they have upgraded their system, how do we know what scanning range is? And second, if they haven’t, I don’t want to give them a ghost.”

A ghost is a blip in their scanning systems, one that shows just a hint of a nearby ship, which is usually caused by movement. The ghosts are precisely one of the things that the military hates about current stealth tech (one of the things we all hate).

Since modern stealth tech only masks us on instruments, ships do better when they remain stationary. Especially ships with the lights and communications down, like the Business is right now.

We’re dark, and even if someone looks out a portal, they might not see us. We have a good chance of blending into our surroundings. If we move, we might catch someone’s eye.

We also might show up as a brief blip on the sensors—a bit of an energy signature or a slight blur of motion that shows up for a half second.

That half second might be enough to blow our cover.

We watch the military vessel bear down on us. My heart is pounding. I’m beginning to wonder at my own wisdom. Maybe I should have moved when Odette urged me to.

Behind me, I can hear Hurst’s ragged breathing. Odette has leaned forward, her hands still clutched so that she doesn’t touch the board. Roderick paces.

Only Tamaz and Squishy remain in place. Squishy is pretending at calm again, and Tamaz really seems calm. Or maybe he has found some deep place inside of himself where he goes when things get difficult.

At the last moment, the military vessel veers off. It heads on a path that should take it to The Seeker.

Roderick lets out a relieved whistle.

“That was closer than I like,” Odette says.

“Can we move now?” Squishy asks, once again her voice betraying her true emotional state—which is quite a bit more agitated than I realized.

I don’t answer her. Instead I move us forward—slowly—and I double my scans.

First, I search for energy signatures and ghosts. I haven’t ruled out the possibility that the command ship is cloaked, just like we were. I get as close as I dare, but I’m not seeing anything.

I set up my own sensors to monitor the area around the Dignity Vessel. I want notification of the smallest anomaly.

“If we can’t find that command ship, are we going to abort?” Hurst asks.

I don’t know the answer to that. So I don’t say anything.

I do know that if we don’t go into the Dignity Vessel on this trip, we have blown our chance. Any way to get those military vessels away from the ship will have been barred from us—that is, if we don’t want an actual firefight.

At this moment, I wish we had strong weaponry. The weapons on the Space King are the most sophisticated that civilians can legally buy. Squishy tells me that they aren’t strong enough to destroy the Dignity Vessel. After some study, Odette concurs.

But I do some investigating on my own and realize that there’s nothing that we can shoot at the Dignity Vessel that will do the kind of damage that we want.

We can destroy part of its hull. We can open yet another section to space. We can even (probably) destroy the cockpit.

But I want that thing obliterated.

And to obliterate, we have to go in.

Of course, that doesn’t stop me from wishing we could just send a barrage of weapons from here, destroy the Vessel, and fly off as if we had no involvement at all.

I scan the Dignity Vessel. I expect to get the fake scan, the one that tells me there’s too much radiation.

But I don’t. I get a new image of the Dignity Vessel, which tells me that the military ships were the ones creating the false image, and they’re gone.

“I think we can go in,” I say.

“We have to hurry,” Squishy says.

I turn. This is precisely the kind of thinking that I don’t want on this mission.

“We’re going to do this right, Squishy. We’re following the plan we set up. We’re not going to hurry.”

She licks her lower lip, then nods. “I just meant that we need to act now.”

She’s eager. She wants this done as much as I do, maybe more. I can feel the depth of her desire to finish this mission.

“Stay calm,” I say to her. It’s a not-so-subtle dig at her posture and her fake manner.

She doesn’t snap at me like I expect her to. Instead, she nods once.

“All right, Boss,” she says. “Looks like we’re finally under way.”

I pilot the skip toward the wreck. Odette and Hurst are already partially suited up. They don’t know who is going to accompany me inside. I left that decision to the last minute, wanting to be flexible, and now I’m glad that I did.

As we come in, we aren’t in stealth. The skip really doesn’t have an effective stealth mode, and I don’t want to be blind.

No command vessel comes toward us. No one tries to communicate with us. There isn’t even an automated message to warn us away.

This tells me that Jennifer’s initial impression is correct. These soldiers guarding the wreck are waiting for something to happen. They’ve gone days, maybe weeks, maybe months, without seeing another ship.