Kristine Rusch - Diving into the Wreck

I tell people I sleep alone because I prefer to be alone. I do prefer to be alone. I like my own company. But the reason I sleep alone is that I dream.

Or, more accurately, I nightmare.

I thrash and moan and frighten anyone within hearing distance. The cabins on my ship, Nobody’s Business, have soundproof walls, as does my berth on Longbow Station. I put my bed in the center room of my apartment on Hector Prime, and hope no one can hear me through the floor.

So far no one has. Or, at least, no one has tried to come to my rescue.

Even though I was rescued before.

For almost forty years, I have had the dream every night—unless I’m traveling in the Business or in my single ship. Movement—movement through space—somehow negates the dream.

Or maybe it echoes the rescue.

For the dream is based on fact. The nightmare actually happened,

My mother and I suited up and walked, hand in hand, into a room on an abandoned space station. Mother wanted to explore, and I didn‘t want her to go alone. I was maybe four, maybe five. I don’t remember exactly, and no one has ever talked of it.

What I do remember is a jumble—colored lights, beautiful voices singing in six-part harmony. Mothers face turned upward toward the lights.

“Beautiful,“ she said, her voice blending into the chorus. “Oh, so beautiful. “

And then she left me and floated toward that light.

I called for her, but she never came back. I huddled on the floor of that room, surrounded by light and voices, and wrapped my spacesuited arms around my spacesuited knees, waiting.

Alone.

I didn’t scream then, and I don’t scream now. I never scream. But I gasp myself awake as the oxygen in my suit fails. My visor cracks, and even though I am four, maybe five, I know I am going to die.

Obviously, I didn’t die. My father found me and brought me back to our ship. But he never did find my mother.

And he never spoke of her again.

I hurtle through the darkness of space, snug and secure in my single ship.

I’ve just come back from a salvage operation run by a friend, a salvage operation that held no real interest for me except as a way to pick up some extra cash.

That, and my friend promised me I could have the tourist dive site if the wreck was one I could use. By use, we meant that I could bring inexperienced divers to the wreck and give them the pretend adventure their money has paid for. Since this wreck is suited for tourist dives, I’m planning to file a postsalvage claim when I get back to Hector Prime.

My single ship is small, little more than a cockpit (which fits only one) with a bedroom/galley behind. I never sleep on the single ship. It has automatic controls, but I shut them off as I travel.

If I can’t take the ship from a port to a station or a station to a hub in thirty hours (which is the longest I can go safely without sleep), then I travel in my full-sized ship, Nobody’s Business.

But the salvage is an easy week from Hector Prime and there are a lot of space stations along the way, so I take the single ship. It’s inconspicuous, and I like that—not just as a woman alone in the vastness of space, but also as a wreck diver.

Too often, the Business has attracted thieves and claim jumpers, people who would just as soon kill you as give up the ship you’ve discovered.

No one has ever followed my single ship. To my knowledge, no one has ever tried.

On the way back, in the only stretch of space that made me nervous as I planned the trip, my sensors blip.

Most pilots ignore a blip like that. Most ships’ automatic circuits actually filter such blips out. That’s why I fly the single ship manually.

Small sensor blips mean that a faint energy signature is somewhere nearby—although “nearby” is relative in space—and faint energy signatures often point to abandoned and distressed ships.

I specialize in abandoned ships. I dive them, sometimes for salvage, sometimes for curiosity, sometimes to locate a good tourist wreck.

The work pays well enough that I can indulge my true love—diving ancient wrecks for the history value. I collect ship types the way some people collect glassware. I want to be able to say I dove a previously undiscovered Generation C-Class or an abandoned first-issue space yacht or a commandeered merchant ship from the Colonnade Wars.

After I dive the ships and map them, I often turn them over to museums or historical societies. Sometimes I leave them in place for tourist dives, and sometimes I don’t report them at all, leaving them in their floating grave for some other enterprising diver to discover.

I’ve explored more than a thousand ships, and still a blip on my sensors sends my heart pounding.

As quick as I can, I drop out of faster-than-light. Then I press the screen in front of me, replaying the readout to make sure I haven’t misread the blip.

I haven’t. It existed for only a fraction of a second, but it existed.

I memorize the coordinates—which are a long way from me now—and I work my way back.

It takes two jumps and a half day of searching before I find the blip again and match its speed and direction.

I’m already fifteen hours alone in the single ship. I should find a place to get a meal and a good night’s sleep, but I’m too far from anything. An energy signature this far out belongs to a ship that’s lost.

My stomach clenches. I never know what I’m going to encounter when I find a lost ship.

Five separate times, I’ve found ships in distress. One still had its beacon going decades after everyone on board had died. Two other ships had dying crew members on board, crew members I was too late to save.

I had to help the last two ships jury-rig some kind of fail-safe, and then leave, promising that I would send help—which I always did. Leaving is the hardest part. The people on board, no matter how professional they are, have panicked. They’re near the end, and they always believe that a single pilot will never send anyone back for them.

They’re convinced I’ll never tell anyone about them when they hear that I’m a professional wreck diver. They think I’m going to wait until they die so I can come back and loot the ship.

I’m sure some of my colleagues might do that, but I never would. I do business as ethically as a wreck diver can. I file the proper documentation (after I’ve dived, however), and I try to keep my group dives injury free. Every wreck diver has lost a team member at one point or another, and I’m no exception, but as dive companies go, mine is pretty accident free.

I pride myself on that, just like I pride myself on helping people who need it.

But I don’t like helping. It’s fraught with emotion of all kinds, and I do my best to stay out of emotional situations. I’m as pure a loner as someone can be. Space suits me. I can go weeks without speaking to anyone, and I don’t miss the company.

So going from my single ship to a situation potentially filled with needy, dying people always makes me nervous.

I ease the single ship forward quietly, lights and communications array off. Once I happened upon a group of marauders who used a distress signal to lure in unsuspecting do-gooders. I managed to get away before they could harm me, but I’ve heard of several other pilots who’ve suffered the loss of their ships and worse.