The Diving Bundle: Six Diving Universe Novellas (5 page)

“A Dignity Vessel,” Karl says, his cheeks flushed. “Who’d’ve thought?”

“You knew,” Turtle says to me.

I shrug. “I hoped.”

“It’s impossible,” Jypé says, “and yet I was inside it.”

“That’s the neat part,” Junior says. “It’s impossible and it’s here.”

Squishy is the only one who doesn’t speak. She stares at the readouts as if she can see more in them than I ever will.

“We have so much work to do,” says Karl. “I think we should go back home, research as much as we can, and then come back to the wreck.”

“And let others dive her?” Turtle says. “People are going to ghost us, track our research, look at what we’re doing. They’ll find the wreck and claim it as their own.”

“You can’t claim this deep,” Junior says, then looks at me. “Can you?”

“Sure you can,” I say. “But a claim’s an announcement that the wreck’s here. Something like this, we’ll get jumpers for sure.”

“Karl’s right.” Squishy’s voice is the only one not tinged with excitement. “We should go back.”

“What’s wrong with you?” Turtle says. “You used to love wreck diving.”

“Have you read about early period stealth technology?” Squishy asks. “Do you have any idea what damage it can do?”

Everyone is looking at her now. She still has her back to us, her arms wrapped around herself so tightly her shirt pulls. The screen’s readout lights her face, but all we can see are parts of it, illuminating her hair like an inverse nimbus.

“Why would you have studied stealth tech?” Karl asks.

“She was military,” Turtle says. “Long, long ago, before she realized she hates rules. Where’d you think she learned field medicine?”

“Still,” Karl says, “I was military too—”

Which explained a lot.

“—and no one ever taught me about stealth tech. It’s the stuff of legends and kid’s tales.”

“It was banned.” Squishy’s voice is soft, but has power. “It was banned five hundred years ago, and every few generations, we try to revive it or modify it or improve it. Doesn’t work.”

“What doesn’t work?” Junior asks.

The tension is rising. I can’t let it get too far out of control, but I want to hear what Squishy has to say.

“The tech shadows the ships, makes them impossible to see, even with the naked eye,” Squishy says.

“Bullshit,” Turtle says. “Stealth just masks instruments, makes it impossible to read the ships on equipment. That’s all.”

Squishy turns, lets her arms drop. “You know all about this now? Did you spend three years studying stealth? Did you spend two years of post-doc trying to recreate it?”

Turtle is staring at her like she’s never seen her before. “Of course not.”

“You have?” Karl asks.

Squishy nods. “Why do you think I find things? Why do you think I
like
finding things that are lost?”

Junior shakes his head. I’m not following the connection either.

“Why?” Jypé asks. Apparently he’s not following it as well.

“Because,” Squishy says, “I’ve accidentally lost so many things.”

“Things?” Karl’s voice is low. His face seems pale in the lounge’s dim lighting.

“Ships, people, materiel. You name it, I lost it trying to make it invisible to sensors. Trying to recreate the tech you just found on that ship.”

My breath catches. “How do you know it’s there?”

“We’ve been looking at it from the beginning,” Squishy says. “That damn probe is stuck like half my experiments got stuck, between one dimension and another. There’s only one way in and no way out. And the last thing you want—the very last thing—is for one of us to get stuck like that.”

“I don’t believe it.” Turtle says with such force that I know she and Squishy have been having this argument from the moment we first saw the wreck.

“Believe it.” Squishy says that to me, not Turtle. “Believe it with all that you are. Get us out of here, and if you’re truly humane, blow that wreck up, so no one else can find it.”

“Blow it up?” Junior whispers.

The action is so opposite anything I know that I feel a surge of anger. We don’t blow up the past. We may search it, loot it, and try to understand it, but we don’t destroy it.

“Get rid it.” Squishy’s eyes are filled with tears. She’s looking at me, speaking only to me. “Boss, please. It’s the only sane thing to do.”

***

Sane or not, I’m torn.

If Squishy’s right, then I have a dual dilemma: the technology is lost, new research on it banned, even though the military keeps conducting research anyway trying, if I’m understanding Squishy right, to rediscover something we knew thousands of years before.

Which makes this wreck so very valuable that I could more than retire with the money we’d get for selling it. I would—we would—be rich for the rest of our very long lives.

Is the tech dangerous because the experiments to rediscover it are dangerous? Or is it dangerous because there’s something inherent about it that makes it unfeasible now and forever?

Karl is right: to do this properly, we have to go back and research Dignity Vessels, stealth tech, and the last few thousand years.

But Turtle’s also right: we’ll take a huge chance of losing the wreck if we do that. We’ll be like countless other divers who sit around bars throughout this sector and bemoan the treasures they lost because they didn’t guard them well enough.

We can’t leave. We can’t even let Squishy leave. We have to stay until we make a decision.

Until I make a decision.

On my own.

***

First, I look up Squishy’s records. Not her dive histories, not her arrest records, not her disease manifolds—the stuff any dive captain would examine—but her personal history, who she is, what she’s done, who she’s become.

I haven’t done that on any of my crew before. I’ve always thought it an invasion of privacy. All we need to know, I’d say to other dive captains, is whether they can handle the equipment, whether they’ll steal from their team members, and if their health is good enough to handle the rigors.

And I believed it until now, until I found myself digging through layers of personal history that are threaded into the databases filling the
Business’s
onboard computer.

Fortunately for me and my nervous stomach, the more sensitive databases are linked only to me—no one else even knows they exist (although anyone with brains would guess that they do)—and even if someone finds the databases, no one can access them without my codes, my retinal scan, and, in many cases, a sample of my DNA.

Still, I’m skittish as I work this—sound off, screen on dim. I’m in the cockpit, which is my domain, and I have the doors to the main cabin locked. I feel like everyone on the
Business
knows I’m betraying Squishy. And I feel like they all hate me for it.

Squishy’s real name is Rosealma Quintinia. She was born forty years ago in a multinational cargo vessel called
The Bounty.
Her parents insisted she spend half her day in artificial gravity so she wouldn’t develop spacer’s limbs—truncated, fragile—and she didn’t. But she gained a grace that enabled her to go from zero-G to Earth Normal and back again without much transition at all, a skill few ever gain.

Her family wanted her to cargo, maybe even pirate, but she rebelled. She had a scientific mind, and without asking anyone’s permission, took the boards—scoring a perfect 100, something no cargo monkey had ever done before.

A hundred schools all over the known systems wanted her. They offered her room, board, and tuition, but only one offered her all expenses paid both coming and going from the school, covering the only cost that really mattered to a spacer’s kid—the cost of travel.

She went, of course, and vanished into the system, only to emerge twelve years later—too thin, too poor, and too bitter to ever be considered a success. She signed on with a cargo vessel as a medic, and soon became one of its best and most fearless divers.

She met Turtle in a bar, and they became lovers. Turtle showed her that private divers make more money, and brought her to me.

And that was when our partnership began.

I sigh, rub my eyes with my thumb and forefinger, and lean my head against the screen.

Much as I regret it, it’s time for questions now.

***

Of course, she’s waiting for me.

She’s brought down the privacy wall in the room she initially shared with Turtle, making their rift permanent. Her bed is covered with folded clothes. Her personal trunk is open at the foot. She’s already packed her nightclothes and underwear inside.

“You’re leaving?” I ask.

“I can’t stay. I don’t believe in the mission. You’ve preached forever the importance of unity, and I believe you, Boss. I’m going to jeopardize everything.”

“You’re acting like I’ve already made a decision about the future of this mission.”

“Haven’t you?” She sits on the edge of the bed, hands folded primly in her lap, her back straight Her bearing
is
military—something I’ve always seen, but never really noticed until now.

“Tell me about stealth tech,” I say.

She raises her chin slightly. “It’s classified.”

“That’s fucking obvious.”

She glances at me, clearly startled. “You tried to research it?”

I nod. I tried to research it when I was researching Dignity Vessels. I tried again from the
Business
. I couldn’t find much, but I didn’t have to tell her that.

That was fucking obvious too.

“You’ve broken rules before,” I say. “You can break them again.”

She looks away, staring at that opaque privacy wall—so representative of what she’d become. The solid backbone of my crew suddenly doesn’t support any of us any more. She’s opaque and difficult, setting up a divider between herself and the rest of us.

“I swore an oath.”

“Well, let me help you break it,” I snap. “If I try to enter that barrier, what’ll happen to me?”

“Don’t.” She whispers the word. “Just leave, Boss.”

“Convince me.”

“If I tell you, you gotta swear you’ll say nothing about this.”

“I swear.” I’m not sure I believe me. My voice is shaky, my tone something that sounds strange to even me.

But the oath—however weak it is—is what Squishy wants.

Squishy takes a deep breath, but she doesn’t change her posture. In fact, she speaks directly to the wall, not turning toward me at all.

“I became a medic after my time in Stealth,” she says. “I decided I had to save lives after taking so many of them. It was the only way to balance the score…”

***

Experts believe stealth tech was deliberately lost. Too dangerous, too risky. The original stealth scientists all died under mysterious circumstances, all much too young and without recording any part of their most important discoveries.

Through the ages, their names were even lost, only to be rediscovered by a major researcher, visiting Old Earth in the latter part of the past century.

Squishy tells me all this in a flat voice. She sounds like she’s reciting a lecture from very long ago. Still, I listen, word for word, not asking any questions, afraid to break her train of thought.

Afraid she’ll never return to any of it.

Earth-owned Dignity Vessels had all been stripped centuries before, used as cargo ships, used as junk. An attempt to reassemble one about five hundred years ago failed because the Dignity Vessels’ main components and their guidance systems were never, ever found, either in junk or in blueprint form.

A few documents, smuggled to the colonies on Earth’s Moon, suggested that stealth tech was based on interdimensional science—that the ships didn’t vanish off radar because of a “cloak” but because they traveled, briefly, into another world—a parallel universe that’s similar to our own.

I recognized the theory—it’s the one on which time travel is based, even though we’ve never discovered time travel, at least not in any useful way, and researchers all over the universe discourage experimentation in it. They prefer the other theory of time travel, the one that says time is not linear, that we only perceive it as linear, and to actually time travel would be to alter the human brain.

But what Squishy is telling me is that it’s possible to time travel, it’s possible to open small windows in other dimensions, and bend them to our will.

Only, she says, those windows don’t bend as nicely as we like, and for every successful trip, there are two that don’t function as well.

I ask for an explanation, but she shakes her head.

“You can get stuck,” she says, “like that probe. Forever and ever.”

“You think this is what the Dignity Vessels did?”

She shakes her head. “I think their stealth tech is based on some form of this multi-dimensional travel, but not in any way we’ve been able to reproduce.”