The Diving Bundle: Six Diving Universe Novellas (38 page)

These suits didn’t even have separate helmets. Instead, they had full-face hoods with clear material that ran from the ears to the eyes, wide enough not to impede the wearer’s vision, but much more protective than a glass or plastic plate over the face.

The only problem with that part of the suit design was that Coop had to intuit mood. He couldn’t see expression, except through the eyes themselves.

Not that it mattered in this instance. In this instance, he had told the team to communicate everything, so that he, Yash, and Dix could track what they were doing.

Through a special earpiece, Dix monitored the scientists on one channel. Yash monitored the engineers on another. Coop monitored the leaders on a third. The team spoke among themselves on a fourth channel, using it only when necessary, so that they didn’t clutter up each other’s hearing with needless chatter.

There wasn’t much chatter on Coop’s channel while the team waited on the floor for everyone to emerge from the airlock. He watched them in relative silence. Rossetti updated him with names as each person joined the group.

Once the team was assembled, she gave them instructions. They divided into three groups, each composed of an engineer, a scientist and an officer. The engineer and the scientist had been assigned to a section of equipment. The officer guarded them and provided advice.

Rossetti’s team stayed closest to the ship. Coop had determined that. He wanted her near that door in case the outsiders returned. He also figured the active equipment up front would have the most information, so he made certain that his best team was on that section, instead of the farthest back.

Ahidjo’s team took the middle section. Shärf’s team took a far section. They only covered about an eighth of the repair room. More equipment faded into the dark. Coop would save that for later missions, if he needed them.

Of course, Rossetti’s team reached their equipment first. They split, the engineer looking at the actual workings, the scientist taking the readings. Rossetti hung back, looking around as if she expected something bad to happen.

“Sir?”

Coop started. Rossetti’s voice had come along a fifth channel, one that went directly into his earpiece. It sounded like she was standing beside him.

He had to change frequencies on the small mike he had placed in his front teeth. “What?” he subvocalized, so that he didn’t disturb Dix or Yash.

“Something’s odd here,” Rossetti said.

He wanted to say,
No kidding
, but he knew better than to waste precious time talking. He simply waited for her to continue.

She did. “You’ve known me for some time. I’m not superstitious, but something feels wrong here. I can’t quite figure out how to describe it.”

“Try,” he said.

She nodded once. Her head bob made more particles swirl around her. It looked like his team was in a particle storm.

Ahidjo’s team had just reached the second section of equipment. The engineer touched the edge of the console, and lights flickered on.

Coop smiled. He had expected that. It confirmed what he had thought earlier; the outsiders had turned the equipment on when they started exploring the room.

On the third channel, he said, “Ahidjo, Shärf. Make sure your teams shut down that equipment before you leave today.”

“Yes, sir,” they said in unison.

Rossetti turned her head toward them, observing their progress for a moment. Then she continued on the fifth channel.

“If I had entered this place without knowing what it was,” she said, her tone measured as if she was choosing each word carefully, “I would think that it had been abandoned long ago.”

“Why?” he asked.

She shook her head, but he didn’t think that was her entire response. It looked more like an involuntary movement, an I-don’t-know kind of reaction.

After that, she paused for a very long time.

“I can’t give you a definitive answer to that, sir,” she said. “It’s just an impression.”

Then she fell silent. Coop didn’t expect her to say more. His people were used to quantifying things. The fact that she couldn’t figure out a reason for her feeling probably bothered her more than it bothered him.

It had taken a bit of courage for Rossetti to tell him about that sense of abandonment. Yet she felt it important.

She wasn’t sensing lingering violence, the way he had upon entering an area after a battle; she was sensing emptiness.

Coop didn’t like emptiness. He would have preferred the lingering violence. It suited his training so much better.

The third team reached their piece of equipment. The lights come on, but they looked very far away and faded. The particle storm made them hard to see.

Maybe the particle storm gave Rossetti that feeling; maybe it was something else. When the others returned, he would ask them if they had felt something similar.

At the moment, however, they worked, updating him periodically, not saying exactly what they found—that was for the return briefing—but letting him know that the work was proceeding, that no one had entered the room (even though he could see that), that the equipment seemed to be working fine.

So far, no one had found any communications problems in the sector base’s equipment, which meant that the
Ivoire
’s communications array had been damaged, just like Yash suspected. The engineers on his ship had even more work to do than they all initially suspected.

The time passed quickly. Yash and Dix monitored their frequencies as well as did some work on their own consoles. But Coop just studied the repair room, unable to shake what Rossetti had said.

He had experienced that feeling of long-abandonment in a place recently vacated just once in his career. He’d been twenty-five. He was at Section Base T, and he accompanied a senior officer as they did a final inspection of a decommissioned ship.

The ship, the
Défi
, had been badly damaged in an attack. Rather than repair it, the staff at Section Base T would use it and another badly damaged ship to build an entirely new ship.

The
Défi
had been Coop’s home during the last of his education. A lot of cadets went there for officer training. The ship had had a lively, active student community, as well as the usual crew compliment and domestic side. He had loved that place.

But it had seemed entirely different on that final walk-through, as if someone had taken the heart out of the ship. Which, apparently, they had. Without the human population, the
Défi
had become just another junked ship, ready to be torn down into its various parts.

That ship still haunted his dreams. Sometimes, old friends long gone would run down its corridors, laughing as they coaxed him into
The Grog
, the cadet bar. He didn’t drink much—never had, really—so his presence in
The Grog
was always an event.

He would wake up feeling sad for something he had lost.

Maybe that was what Rossetti was feeling. She had been here just a month ago as well. He had no idea what kind of experiences she had had during their layover. Maybe those were coloring her reaction now.

But that wasn’t something he could discuss with her on Channel Five or on Channel Three. He would wait until she returned.

At four hours and thirty minutes, he reminded his team that they had to shut down before they returned. He also wanted additional cameras (if there were any) disabled. He wanted the interior to look as much like it had when the others left as his team could make it.

They began their shutdown procedures. In the distance, he saw the lights of the far sector shut off. At least that was working. Then middle section went off. If the team returned quickly enough, maybe the particles would have stopped swirling.

He stood near the wall again, hands clasped behind him. His heartbeat had risen just slightly. He wanted the team to move quicker, although he didn’t say anything.

He wanted them out before the outsiders returned.

Ultimately, he needn’t have worried. At the end of their fifth hour, they were all inside the airlock. The lights on the far panels had gone out, and the teams had reported that they had altered the feeds on all the cameras they could find.

The particle storm settled, just like Coop wanted it to. If the others worked on six-hour rotations, like he thought, he had built in an hour to spare. They would return soon.

He would let Rooney monitor them.

He would be in the briefing room with the teams, learning what they had found.

***

What they had found was troubling indeed.

The teams had arrived in the briefing room for the meeting with their handhelds. They all had wet hair and loose fitting clothes, having cleaned up after going into the repair room. The white environmental suits looked gray upon their return, and they’d peeled them off in the airlock, but some of the particles still stuck to their clothing, which was why Coop had approved real water showers as well as the standard sonic shower. He also made them change in the decontamination area just in case.

The scientists and engineers sat toward the back of the room. The commanders clustered around one end of the table. Coop, Yash, and Dix sat at the other end.

The briefing room, like the bridge, had no portals. In here, the wall screens were usually off, but someone—probably Rossetti—had turned them on. There were no images, just an occasional multi-colored line through the center to show that the screens were drawing power.

“What’ve you got?” Coop asked Rossetti.

She was the only one of the group that didn’t look tired. She sat, spine straight, directly across from him, her small hands flat on the tabletop.

“First,” she said, “we don’t need the suits. Every test we did says the atmosphere inside that room is fine.”

“And the particles?” Dix asked.

“Harmless,” she said. “They’ve been through more testing than we usually do on anything. They seem to be unbonded nanobits, and we’ve all worked around unbonded nanobits before.”

They had. The bits occasionally got into the lungs, but could be removed with little effort. Many of the Fleet’s crew members had no reaction to nanobits at all, and could, in fact, absorb them. It was, one of the medics once told Coop, a genetically desired trait that seemed to have developed in the Fleet’s population over time.

Rossetti glanced at the others from the teams, then said, “It would be easier to work in the repair room without the environmental suits.”

Her team had clearly asked her to say that. She hadn’t done any hands-on work, so this wasn’t coming from her experience.

“So noted,” Coop said. He would make no promises without consulting with his best people. “What else do you have for me?”

Rossetti took a deep breath, then pressed her hands against the tabletop. He finally understood why she sat that way; it was a calming gesture, one she clearly needed.

“Do you recall what I told you, sir, when I was on the repair room floor?”

“Yes,” he said, and didn’t elaborate. He hadn’t mentioned it to his team, but he would tell them if they needed to know.

“Apparently, I was right. The sector base had been long abandoned, sir. The mandatory shutdown sequence began one hundred years after we left.” She spoke flatly, as if the news hadn’t bothered her at all. But her splayed hands belied that.

“One hundred years?” Dix said.

Coop’s heart was pounding. “We left a month ago,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” Rossetti said. “But the elapsed time in the station is at least two hundred years, maybe longer.”

She hadn’t insulted his intelligence by explaining how such a thing could happen. They all knew. It was one of the risks of the
anacapa
drive. The drive folded space, which meant that it could (and often did) cause a ship to go out of time.

During those fifteen days stranded in that unidentified part of space, Coop had worried about this aspect of the
anacapa
drive. He had known that foldspace occasionally caused time alterations. His training taught him not to worry about them until he was confronted with them.

Which he was now.

“You’re certain of this?” he asked.

He looked at the scientists and engineers. What he had initially taken for exhaustion was defeat. And fear.

If their calculations were right, they were at least two hundred years in their own future, in an empty sector base, with a damaged ship.

They saw only catastrophe.

Coop knew that in this instance, time was on his side. If he could repair the
Ivoire
, he could send her through foldspace to the place where the Fleet might be. His calculations (and theirs) could be as much as fifty years off, but that wouldn’t matter. The Fleet followed a set trajectory. Only battles and meetings with other cultures changed the timeline. Coop’s team could guess the farthest that the Fleet would get on that trajectory, and go there. If the Fleet had already arrived, they could continue until they caught it (which wouldn’t take long). If the Fleet hadn’t arrived yet (which was more likely), they could wait for it to catch them.