Kristine Rusch - Diving into the Wreck

I freeze one of the holoimages and walk around it. There, on the far side, is a hole in the vessel’s hull.

A small hole, like the one we had found in the Dignity Vessel.

My breath catches. Had someone blown up the Dignity Vessel’s stealth tech, and what we found was all that was left? Or had something else happened?

“Boss?” Hurst asks again.

I make myself breathe out.

Then I turn to the guards. “What’s procedure in a case like this?”

“There are no cases like this,” says the guard who initially thought there was no explosion.

“In war or in the face of an attack,” I say. “When your ship is damaged and it’s been abandoned, what’s procedure?”

They look at each other. The other guard answers. “The smaller ship will come back. The military vessels should be back anyway. I’m amazed they both left.”

I’m not. They had no idea we had scheduled an attack. Not after weeks (months?) in which nothing happened. They’ll be back as soon as our ships get the all-clear.

“Is there a timeline?” I ask. “Do they have to return in a designated period of time?”

They look at each other again. I finally realize that they believe I’ll attack the other ships. I resist the urge to shake my head. Of course I’ll attack them. In my little weaponless skip.

But I don’t say that. Instead, I say, “Our escape pods on this skip hold one person each. They support life for sixty-four hours at the longest. Will someone be back for you in that amount of time?”

The first guard starts to nod, but the other catches his arm.

“We’re not keeping you on this skip,” I say. “I just want to make sure you’re not going to die out there.”

I don’t tell them what the alternative is because I don’t know of any alternative. I guess we could try to make it to a base and dump them there, but that seems too risky to me.

“We’re going to die,” the second guard says. “You’ll be responsible for killing us.”

But the first guard rolls his eyes. “You can put me in an escape pod,” he says. “But I will tell the authorities everything I know when they pick me up.”

“That’s fine with me,” I say.

I turn to Hurst. “Move in as close to the wreck as you can safely get. Make sure there are no new energy signatures.”

He nods. He sets the navigation and takes the ship toward what’s left of the science vessel.

It’s amazing to me how quickly it has become “the wreck” to both of us. No one tries to correct me.

I stare at it on the small two-dimensional screen near the controls. It looks vulnerable there, still slowly turning.

Part of me wants to go and see if my father is still inside. But I know he won’t be. He probably ran to the cockpit and urged them to escape. He isn’t the kind of man who dies for his own causes.

But if he believed he could unhitch the device, he might have stayed too long. Even then, I wouldn’t find him because he would have been right near the stealth tech when Squishy’s device went off.

I don’t know if it obliterated him, or if it sent him into some kind of limbo, like we sent Junior and Karl.

Like my father sent Mother.

But I also know I won’t be able to find out.

“You want them in the escape pods now, right?” Odette asks me in a tone that leads me to believe this isn’t the first time she’s asked the question.

I turn toward her. She looks as tired as I feel.

“Yeah,” I say.

“I’m not getting any unusual readings,” Hurst says.

I move him aside, and do some searching on my own. I remember how the initial energy signal for the Dignity Vessel appeared as the kind of blip that most ships never register. I search for that kind of blip now.

Behind me, I can hear Odette talking to the guards, taking their weapons, and giving them some food and water from the galley. I almost tell her that there’s no need—the escape pods have rations and water—but I don’t. Let her assuage her own conscience her own way.

I keep looking for a blip.

And don’t find one.

Maybe my father’s little stealth tech experiment was too small to leave any kind of reading out here. Squishy’s device was designed for something much larger. Maybe it really and truly destroyed that stealth tech.

Or maybe what remains is so minuscule that nothing we have can measure it.

“Do you have anything you want to say to them, Boss?” Odette asks.

I turn. Both guards are pressed into the hatches of their escape pods. They look reluctant to go in deeper. The fit will be tight for them.

“Good luck,” I say, then walk over and close the hatches myself.

The escape pods can be released from the inside or the outside. I hit the release buttons before the guards can even find the interior controls. The first pod slides down its tube. The tube seals off the skip from the pod, then sends the pod into space.

The pod floats away from us. The second pod follows only a minute later.

I stare at them through the nearest portal. I’d rather be out of the ship in my environmental suit, clinging to a tether, than inside one of those things.

But if their companions come back within two days, they’ll be fine. Testy, but fine.

And I can’t imagine why the military wouldn’t be back. After all, they have to catch us.

“Let’s get to the Business” I say to Hurst.

Then I close the portals and close my eyes.

I did it. I destroyed the stealth tech. And I may have killed my father in the bargain.

I expected success to feel better.

I expected it to make a difference.

We meet the Business at the designated coordinates. Squishy, Roderick, and Tamaz are full of questions, which we answer in quick sentences, promising more when everyone returns.

Mikk and Jennifer returned shortly before we did. The Seeker is permanently barred from this area of space, and both Mikk and Jennifer are on some kind of governmental watch list.

Jennifer laughs as she sits in the galley. “It worked. They thought I was really drunk and ready to party.”

“For a while, I thought they were too,” Mikk says. “But at the last minute, they remembered they had a job to do and shooed us away from there.”

Neither Mikk nor Jennifer seems too concerned about the watch list. I’m not either. We’re all going to have to stay in the far reaches of this Empire’s space.

But we knew that going in.

It takes another day before the Space King joins us. It actually has some weapons scarring. Turtle, Davida, and Bria look frazzled, but they too managed to escape. However, they’re pretty certain that the military vessel got all the specs from their ship.

“They know it’s a rental,” Turtle says. “They’ll be waiting for us to return it.”

I hadn’t planned for this, but I know what to do. We have to abandon both The Seeker and the Space King. Then we’ll declare them destroyed and send in a fee to the rental agency from the next station we stop at.

I explain all of this before I ever get to the details of our mission.

“What are we going to do now?” Turtle asks.

I sigh. “I guess we find somewhere to hole up.”

Davida, who is relieved to be back on the Business, offers to cook us a special dinner. She wants us to tell our stories over food.

I figure that’s fine.

She cooks—all sorts of things with stored food that I didn’t know could be done (but she has just become the designated chef on any trip we’re on)— and we all tell our adventures.

Of course, they pay the closest attention to mine. The destruction of both bits of stealth tech, and the possible death of my father.