Kristine Rusch - Diving into the Wreck

I’ve never done anything like this before.

“No,” he says. He sounds as shocked as I feel. “No, it’s still on magnify.”

“Then what’s that light?”

“You tell me,” he says.

“I’m not the one with a science vessel,” I say.

The light fades, slower than I expect.

Finally, it winks out.

We stand in silence for the longest moment. Maybe moments. I don’t know. I no longer look at my watch.

I have no need to.

“I can’t believe you blew it up,” he says. “Why the hell did you blow it up?”

“Stealth tech is dangerous,” I say, sounding like Squishy. “It kills people.”

“Hell,” he says, his voice shaking. “The laser pistol you were carrying kills people.”

“At least they know what hit them,” I say.

He turns. The view from the window—that point in space where the Dignity Vessel had been—seems black and vast.

“That was working stealth tech,” he says. “Such low grade that we could actually make progress with it. It was the best find in a generation, maybe two. You had no right to destroy it.”

“You had no right to kill Karl,” I snap.

“I didn’t,” he says. “You did. You were supposed to go in there. You would have survived.”

“You only know that because I survived the first time,” I say. “Maybe I shouldn’t yell at you about Karl. Maybe I should yell at you about Mother. Did you send her in there to see if she had the marker? Or did you know she would die in there?”

He grows pale. “That’s not fair.”

“Isn’t it?” I ask. “You risk dozens of lives for your little experiment and you tell me I’m not being fair?”

He grabs me by the left arm and yanks me forward. “Let me show you something,” he says.

If I move to the right and hook my foot around his ankle, I can drop him without much movement at all. Of course, if I let go of Squishy’s bomb, I can grab my knife and stab him to death in a matter of seconds.

I do neither.

Instead, I let him drag me out of the room.

I let him control me, one last time.

I hear it before I see it: a tiny thrumming, so faint it sets my teeth on edge.

Maybe I felt it from the moment I got on this ship.

My heart starts pounding hard again.

“What did you do?” I ask.

“I didn’t do anything,” he says, “except hire the right people. They’re figuring this out.”

A headache builds between my eyes. I stumble forward into the corridor. He’s still holding my arm tightly. I can feel his fingers pinch my flesh through my suit.

“Why do you want this so badly?” I ask. “Is it the money?”

“If it were the money, I could have quit a long time ago,” he says.

We follow an incline, which takes us up a level. I note an elevator to our side, but he doesn’t take it, preferring to stay in the corridor instead.

The thrumming becomes a tiny chorus, as if a group of singers were far away, their song just beginning to filter toward us.

“Then what is it?” I ask.

“You were wrong about your mother,” he says. “I loved her.”

“So you say.” I make myself walk fast enough to keep up with him. I don’t want to be dragged any farther.

I also stare at the walls, mentally making note of landmarks, as if I were diving this ship instead of walking through it. There’s a map of the ship at the beginning of the incline. It has a lot of decks and levels.

I nod toward the image. “How many people are on this ship?”

“It can hold one hundred,” he says.

“That’s not what I asked,” I say.

“I usually run with a crew of fifty,” he says.

“But you’ve been gone. Where were you?”

He doesn’t answer for a moment.

“You’re running this with a skeleton crew, aren’t you? That woman who caught Hurst in the skip, she doesn’t know anything about stealth tech, does she?”

The questions she asked made that clear.

“Where’s your team?” I ask.

“I don’t use the same people all the time,” he says. “It’s my project.”

“You’re keeping them in the dark,” I say. “You want to be the one to claim this discovery as your own.”

“Then you destroyed it,” he says, but his words hold no conviction.

“You didn’t discover the Dignity Vessel,” I say. “You have stealth tech on this ship. Ancient stealth tech. I can hear it.”

He stops and turns to me. “Hear it?”

I bite my lower lip. Am I the only person who can hear the thrumming of stealth tech? I thought everyone with a marker could hear that faint singing sound.

“You hear the chorus?” he asks.

I nod, reluctantly, but I do nod.

“Not everyone can hear it,” he says. “Not even everyone with the marker. I wonder what that means?”

“I don’t really care,” I say. “Why don’t you understand how dangerous this stuff is?”

“And why don’t you understand that if it’s dangerous, it’s better off with the Empire?”

“Who’s trying to re-create it,” I snap, “so it can kill again.”

“If they understand it,” he says, “they can shut off the Room.”

“If they understand it,” I say, “they can build Rooms of their own.”

He doesn’t say anything, but he continues to pull me along. We finally get to a flatter part of the corridor. We go past another map. This one has little red symbols scattered in various places on the ship. Five are in the cockpit. Then I remember. This is a science vessel. I’m in the lab.

The front part of the ship can leave us behind if it wants to.

If it deems the lab dangerous.

I see four more red dots some distance from us, and then two in the middle.

Those dots must represent life signs. The two in the middle have to be us.

Eight crew members on a ship that fits one hundred? What are they doing here? Why so few?

My father stops in front of two shielded doors. The chorus has grown. He presses his thumb against the center of the door, then leans forward for the retinal scan. He breathes onto the edge, probably as proof that he’s alive. That last precaution is the key. So many of these systems have no indicator for living thumbs or retinnas.

The doors open. This room is as closed as the one below was open. There are no portals, no openings to the rest of the ship or to space—just workstations along the side, a long table in the middle, and a giant computer screen on the far wall from where I’m standing. Numbers run along that screen as well as in a three-dimensional graph. It takes me a moment to recognize the graph. It’s an energy indicator. It’s registering the power of… something, although I’m not sure what.

In the very center of the room, on top of the table, surrounded by three different clear shields, is a bottle the size of my forearm.

The bottle appears to be throbbing, but it’s not. I know it’s not, because it’s the source of the sound. And the sound, packed into that little space, makes it seem like it’s moving.

Maybe it is. With some kind of vibration.

“There it is,” my father says with no small amount of pride. “The first working stealth field in five thousand years. This one was created in our lab.”

My mouth is dry. “You didn’t,” I say.

“I did.” He steps toward it.

I stay back.

“How do you know it works?” I ask.

He points to the graph.

“Have you had anyone stick their arm in there?” I ask, and I can hear the maliciousness in my voice. “Have you uncorked that bottle near someone who doesn’t have the marker?”

“Of course not.” He sounds shocked.

“Then you don’t know if it works,” I say.