Diving into the Wreck

ONE

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.

I’m being as cautious as I can.

My sensors are on full, but I’m not recording with them. Instead, I’m using a link I’ve built into the single ship that attaches to a small computer I wear on my wrist.

The additional link was simple enough to build: single ships are designed to monitor the pilot’s eyes, heart rate, and respiration rate. Should my heart slow, my breathing even, or my eyes close for longer than a minute, the automatic controls take over the entire ship. Unconsciousness isn’t as much of a danger as it would be if the ship were completely manual, but consciousness isn’t a danger either. No one can monitor my movements simply by tapping the ship’s computer.

The additional link that I’ve set up only feeds information in one direction—into my personal computer. The coordinates of the blip, the readings I’ve taken as I’ve approached, and everything about the blip itself are stored on my system, not the single ship’s.

All someone probing my ship from a distance will learn is that I’ve come to an unusual region of space for a reason they can’t entirely determine.

But I know. The faint energy signature has led me to a black lump against the blackness of space.

A ship, just like I’d hoped and feared.

My breath catches. I scan for distress signals, for signs of life. But my sensors tell me that the ship has no environment and no active power systems. The energy signature I’ve found remains weak—one final system that refuses to turn off or, perhaps, a sort of stardrive that I don’t entirely recognize. One that’s built on some form of energy with a half-life that’ll give off readings for generations.

The wreck is huge—five times the size of the Business—and it has a configuration I don’t recognize. My single ship’s computer hypothesizes that the ship is Old Earth make, at least five thousand years old, but I ignore that hypothesis since it has to be wrong.

Ships that old could never have made it this far from Earth, not in five thousand years. Maybe not even in ten.

This ship is something else, something my not-so-sophisticated single ship computer system doesn’t recognize. The system doesn’t guess per se—-computers still lack the ability to do that—but it sends me information with confidence, picking the closest ship from the array it has in its database.

What I can tell for certain is this: The wreck has been alone and abandoned for a long time. The giant hull is pitted and space-scored, with some kind of corrosion on the outside.

As I circle the thing, moving slowly and keeping my distance, I notice some holes as well, where debris has hit the hull over time.

The holes mean there are no working shields and no way for someone to still be alive on that thing. I suspect, with something as old as this ship appears to be, that scavengers have already looted its interior.

The ship is derelict, abandoned and worthless.

To everyone but me.

I leave the ship as I’ve found it, drifting. I make no mention of it in the mandatory reports that I have to send to the next space base. I tell no one what I’ve seen.

I just make note, and I keep my own computer files on my personal system. I never let that system out of my sight.

It takes me three full travel days (with stops along the way) to get to Hector Prime. I keep an apartment there, although I don’t call that home.

Home, to me, is Nobody’s Business, which I have modified for my every need. But I keep two “real” residences—the apartment on Hector Prime and a berth at Longbow Station.

The berth at Longbow gives me privileges at the station. The apartment on Hector Prime allows me to store my stuff somewhere relatively safe.

I like Hector Prime. It’s at the very edge of the Enterran Empire, so far away from the Empire’s center that the government actually seems lax here. I’m not antigovernment; I just don’t think about it much. Because if I do, I worry.

The Empire started the Colonnade Wars all those years ago. It wanted more territory, and it succeeded in getting that territory. If things had gone differently, Hector Prime would have been part of what the Empire calls Rebel Space. The rest of us call it the Nine Planets Alliance, and we travel back and forth between the Alliance and the Empire.

Technically, the Empire holds my citizenship, but in reality, the Alliance touches my heart. That’s probably because the Alliance doesn’t want my heart—and the Empire does.

Or maybe I just like misfits, since I consider myself one.

Still, my official address is on Hector Prime. I keep an apartment in one of the more expensive sections of the city. I like the area’s security—the way it’ll notify the Business if someone is breaking into apartments in the area, not to mention if someone were to break into mine.

Most of my possessions, while valuable, mean little to me. But the computer system that I store there is almost as valuable as the one I have hardwired into my quarters on the Business. On my apartment system, I keep coded records, logs, and other information.

I doubt anyone can break the codes, but I want to be informed if someone tries.

For buried within all that information—a lot of flotsam and jetsam of galaxy history, favorite reading materials, downloaded holoplays, and fake genealogy charts for the family I’ve long ago abandoned—are the locations of my favorite wrecks. Not the ones the tourists dive, but the ones that hold a special place in my heart.

The ones filled with history. The ones that matter more to me than anything.

I don’t record the new ship’s presence in any of those logs. I won’t record it until after I’ve dived it. But I do make a hand-scrawled note and paste it to my kitchen wall. All the note has are numbers: the date I discovered the wreck followed by the identification number of my single ship intermingled with the wreck’s coordinates. The code is simple, and a determined someone could break it, I suppose, but no one has yet.

And it’s a nice security feature in case someone steals my systems—all of them.

Right now, I don’t care about much of the information on them.

All I care about is the new wreck.

My apartment is almost as spare as the single ship. I have a kitchen, a bedroom, and a living room. I sleep in the living room and use the bedroom as a workspace. It’s littered with computer parts, old and new. It would take a burglar a while to figure out which system is the current one.

Sometimes I change from a modern machine to an old one. Sometimes I add components that don’t really fit just to throw people off.

While I have been robbed on the Business—by a former colleague, no less—I haven’t been robbed in the apartment.

But a diver can’t be too careful.

It’s a competitive business, and what a diver has, besides her diving skills, are the locations of her favorite and upcoming wrecks. No matter how much money a diver has, no matter how much loot she finds, she learns that those things don’t matter.

All that matters are the wrecks.

I switch the systems around again before I begin research on the new wreck. First I download the ship’s shape and the specs I could gather by flying around it.

Then I let the database work, seeing if my extensive collection of historical ships has any record of something of this shape.

I’m loath to work on the public networks. Sometimes an inquiry is enough to notify a claim jumper. I prefer to use the databases I’ve developed.

Even using mine, it takes a full day of nonstop work before it locates a match.

The system shows me the match holographically, creating models of the ship I saw and the ship in the database. The holographic ships cover the carpeted floor. I can walk around them. I can put one image on top of the other. I can enlarge or reduce them.

I do all of these things. My computer believes these ships are the same, and my eyes tell me that they are as well.

But I don’t like what I’m seeing.

Because that means my single ship computer was right: this wreck is five thousand years old.

Worse, it’s Earthmade.

And even worse than that, it’s a Dignity Vessel.

Dignity Vessels, while legendary, have never traveled more than fifty light-years from Earth.

Dignity Vessels weren’t designed to travel huge distances, at least by current standards, and they weren’t manufactured outside of Earth’s solar system. Even drifting at the speed it’s currently moving, it couldn’t have arrived at its present location in five thousand years, or even fifty thousand.

Yet it’s there.

Drifting. Filled with mystery.

Filled with time.

Waiting for someone like me to figure it out.

TWO

I need a team. I can’t dive a ship the size of a Dignity Vessel alone even if

I want to. First of all, it won’t be safe. Second, I would spend the rest of my life mapping the damn thing. And third, no one would believe me if I decide that my information is right.

I take the Business to Longbow Station. Longbow sits at the very edges of Empire Space. When the Colonnade Wars began, Longbow belonged to the group the Empire now calls the rebels. Some maps place Longbow in the Nine Planets Alliance; others place it in the Enterran Empire.

Both the Empire and the Alliance long ago learned to leave Longbow alone. Longbow is such an important trading hub that both sides decided it was better—and safer—to let the station be just a little bit lawless, and to govern itself, than it was to attempt to take over the place.

As a result, a lot of people with iffy allegiances live on Longbow. You quickly learn that it’s better not to ask people’s politics or their past history.

Longbow started as a docking berth five hundred years ago. You can still see the original station, tucked inside one of the modular units that was new a hundred years before.

Over time, Longbow became a major hub. Instead of replacing sections, the owners simply built onto the existing parts. So the station looks like a child’s toy, held together by spit and static. Depending on how you approach it, you can’t even see where the ships dock.

The station looks like a creature with a thousand tentacles and no center core.

But there is a center core. It’s buried underneath all the rebuilding. Very few people make it to that core. Only longtime spacers even know where the core is, which is fortunate, since the old spacers’ bar on Longbow doesn’t let tourists and first-timers through the door.

The old spacers’ bar is the only bar on Longbow that doesn’t have a name. No name, no advertising across the door or the back wall, no cute little logos on the magnetized drinking cups. The door is recessed into a grungy wall that looks like it’s temporary due to construction.

To get in, you need one of two special chips. The first is handheld—given by the station’s manager after careful consideration. The second is built into your ID. You get that one only if you’re a legitimate spacer, operating or working for a business that requires a pilot’s license.

I have had the second chip since I was eighteen years old.

And I know that the people I will find in that bar will be as experienced as I am. As experienced, as space-worn, and as skeptical.

They’ll also be on break or looking for work.

In essence, any divers I see inside will be exactly what I need.

In the end, I settle on five divers.

The least experienced are a father-and-son team, Jypé and Junior. I tourist-dived with them a few times, years ago, when they were starting to get their space legs. I’m the one who encouraged them to go beyond the safe dives and move to wreck diving, salvage, and historical diving.

They both have natural diving talent, an ability to float through zero-g even though both are land-born. They understand history and they love new places, new things.

They’re also one of the best teams I’ve ever worked with. They move in synch, think in synch, and work in synch. They even look alike. Junior is a younger version of Jypé, same black hair, dark skin, and strong bone structure—stronger than that of most divers. The fact that they’re land-born shows in their build. But their background doesn’t harm their diving.

Besides, they have the money to pursue this new career. Jypé made a fortune in some land-based business and now invests it in preserving historical wrecks—wrecks he’s helped discover.

I trust Jypé’s knowledge of historical ships almost as much as I trust my own.

Deep down, I was hoping I’d find Jypé and Junior when I came to Longbow. The fact that I have makes me feel like this mission is destined.

The next two people I hire are also a longtime team. I first met Squishy and Turtle when I started wreck diving, decades ago.

Squishy and Turtle have been a couple as long as I’ve known them. They’re both thin, active women who can run their own team if they have to. Squishy’s a bit secretive—she doesn’t like to talk about her past—and Turtle respects that. But every dive we’ve gone on together has been successful. They have a level of expertise that no other divers I know have achieved.

Turtle has an uncanny sense of corners and danger spots. She’s also a good pilot. She’s saved my life more than once.

And somewhere along the way, Squishy learned field medicine. I discovered long ago that it’s best to have a medic on each mission.

It’s even better to have a medic who dives.

It takes me nearly a week to find the last member of the team. Many of the more established divers say no to me when I refuse to tell them what kind of ship we’re diving.

All I will tell anyone is that we have a mystery vessel, one that will tax their knowledge, their beliefs, and their wreck-recovery skills.

I don’t want anyone who goes to the coordinates to know we have a Dignity Vessel before we arrive. I don’t want to prejudice them, don’t want to force them along one line of thinking.

I also don’t want to be wrong.

Besides, while I’m hunting for the last member of the team, I don’t want to tip my hand. If we do have a Dignity Vessel, it’ll be worth a fortune in curiosity value alone. The wrong word to the wrong person and my little discovery will disappear as if it hasn’t existed at all.

But a lot of divers won’t go into a wreck blind. They believe it’s better to know what they’re facing, even if they later discover that they’re wrong about the type of ship.

Because of that, a lot of experienced divers turn me down.

That’s how I end up with Karl.

Even though I’ve known him for more than ten years, we’ve rarely worked together. He has always intimidated me. He’s big for a diver, blond, muscular, and very pale. Yet he is one of the best divers in the sector. He has incredible rankings from almost every certifying body that exists. He’s gone on more dives than I have and has dived more kinds of ships than I ever will.

But he is also cautious, and caution isn’t always compatible with historical wreck diving. Some of his dive partners have made fun of the redundant equipment he carries and the large knife he sticks into his belt.

I think the knife is dangerous—he could poke a hole in his environmental suit—but I also know I can’t convince him to give the knife up. It’s saved his life more than once—the last time when he was solo diving a wreck he discovered and got ambushed by three claim jumpers.

He killed them, finished the dive, and then reported his actions. I was on Longbow when he went up on charges and ably defended himself with holo-cordings, audio, and not a little bit of personal outrage.

Karl is the only member of the team who worries me. If I can’t keep him under control, he might take over the dive.

And there’s nothing I hate more than losing control of a mission.

Except losing a member of my team.

THREE

We approach the wreck in stealth mode: lights and communications array off, sensors on alert for any other working ship in the vicinity. I’m the only one in the cockpit of the Nobody’s Business. I’m the only one with the exact coordinates.

The rest of the team sits in the lounge, their gear in cargo. I personally searched each one of them before sticking them to their chairs. No one, but no one, knows where the wreck is except me. That is our agreement.

They hold to it or else.

We’re six days from Longbow Station, but it took us ten to get here. Misdirection again, although I’d only planned on two days working my way through an asteroid belt around Beta Six. I ended up taking three, trying to get rid of a bottom-feeder that tracked us, hoping to learn where we’re diving.

Hoping for loot.

After I’m sure I have lost every chance of being tracked, I let the Business slide into a position far enough from the wreck that we’re out of normal scanner range. We can’t eyeball the wreck either. We match the wreck’s speed, but do little else.

I use this precaution on all of my valuable wreck dives. If my ship’s energy signals are caught on someone else’s scans, they won’t pick up the faint energy signal of the wreck. I have a half dozen cover stories ready, depending on who might spot us. I’ll tell them lies about why we’re in this area of space. I’ll tell them anything I can to get rid of them.

But most of all, I hope no one will stumble upon us while we dive the wreck.

Taking this precaution means we need transport to and from the wreck. That’s the only drawback of this kind of secrecy.

First mission out, I’m ferry captain—a role I hate, but one I have to play. We’re using the skip instead of the Business. The skip is designed for short trips. It has a main room that melds into the pilot’s area, a cargo bay, a galley kitchen, and a bathroom. It also has two escape pods in case something goes wrong. The pods only fit one person each—a design flaw, since the skip itself holds four.

The skip is also designed to travel anonymously. I had the name and logo removed right after I bought it. Not even the pods have any identifying features. I don’t want to be easily identified, particularly when I’m diving an unknown wreck.

On this trip, there’s only three of us—me, Turtle, and Karl. Usually we team-dive wrecks, but this deep and this early, I need two different kinds of players. Turtle can dive anything, and Karl can kill anything. I can fly anything.

We’re set.

The process we’re about to embark on gets its name from the dangers: in olden days, wreck diving was called space diving to differentiate it from the planetside practice of diving into the oceans.

We don’t face water here—we don’t have its weight or its unusual properties, particularly at huge depths. We have other elements to concern us: no gravity, no oxygen, extreme cold.

And greed.

My biggest problem is that I’m land-born, something I don’t confess to often. I spent the last forty years of my life trying to forget that my feet were once stuck to a planet’s surface by real gravity. I even came to prolonged zero-g late: fifteen years old, already landlocked. My first instructors told me I’d never unlearn the thinking real atmosphere ingrains into the body.

They were mostly right; land pollutes me, takes out an edge that the space-raised come to naturally. I have to consciously choose to go into the deep and dark; the space-raised glide in like it’s mother’s milk. But if I compare myself to the landlocked, I’m a spacer of the first order, someone who understands vacuum like most understand air.

But because I’m the least able diver on the skip, I’ll stay on board, even though I’m the one who discovered the Dignity Vessel. I trust Karl and Turtle; besides, they’ll record everything they see.

It will almost be as if I’ve dived with them.

Almost.

I fly the skip with the portals unshielded. It looks like we’re inside a piece of black glass moving through open space. Turtle paces most of the way, walking back to front to back again, peering through the portals, hoping to be the first to see the wreck.

She’s even thinner than she was when I first met her decades ago. Her bones look fragile enough to snap. Her skin is rough from the chemicals some suits are contaminated with and from weird exposures from bad dives. Her fingers are long, birdlike.

She no longer looks like the woman we nicknamed Turtle. Then her head had been the smallest thing about her. When she put on an environmental suit, it seemed like she put on a protective shell.

In those days, I was convinced she could slide her helmeted head inside her suit and pretend to be a rock, just like a real turtle.

Now her head seems large against her skeletal frame. Middle age has not treated her well, although she is as strong and healthy as ever.

Karl monitors the instruments as if he’s flying the skip instead of me. If I hadn’t worked with him before, I’d be freaked. I’m not; I know he’s watching for unusuals, whatever comes our way.

Karl is the opposite of Turtle. He looks as sturdy as she seems fragile. He has a broad open face and close-cut blond hair.

Everything about him seems efficient and strong, as powerful as that knife he carries everywhere he goes.

The wreck looms ahead of us—a megaship, from the days when size equaled power. Still, it seems small in the vastness, barely a blip on the front of my sensors.

Turtle bounces past. She’s fighting the grav that I left on for me—that landlocked thing again—and she’s so nervous, someone who doesn’t know her would think she’s on something.

“What the hell is it?” she asks. “Old Empire?”

“Older.” Karl is bent at the waist, looking courtly as he studies the instruments. He prefers readouts to eyeballing things; he trusts equipment more than he trusts himself.

“There can’t be anything older out here,” Turtle says.

“‘Can’t’ is relative,” Karl says.

I let them tough it out. I’m not telling them what I know. The skip slows, and shuts down. I’m easing in, leaving no trail.

“It’s gonna take more than six of us to dive that puppy,” Turtle says. “Either that, or we’ll spend the rest of our lives here.”

“As old as that thing is,” Karl says, “it’s probably been plundered and replundered.”

“We’re not here for the loot.” I speak softly, reminding them it’s a historical mission.

Karl turns his angular face toward me. In the dim light of the instrument panel, his gray eyes look silver. “You know what this is?”

I don’t answer. I’m not going to lie about something as important as this, so I can’t make a denial. But I’m not going to confirm either. Confirming will only lead to more questions, which is something I don’t want just yet. I need them to make their own minds up about this find.

“Huge, old.” Turtle shakes her head. “Dangerous. You know what’s inside?”

“Nothing, for all I know.”

“Didn’t check it out first?”

Some dive team leaders head into a wreck the moment they find one. Anyone working salvage knows it’s not worth your time to come back to a place that’s been plundered before.

“No.” I pick a spot not far from the main doors and set the skip to hold position with the monster wreck. With no trail, I hoped no one was gonna notice the tiny energy emanation the skip gives off.

“Too dangerous?” Turtle asks. “That why you didn’t go in?”

“I have no idea if it’s dangerous.” I’m referring to the skip, not diving alone.

Diving alone is always dangerous.

“There’s a reason you brought us here.” She sounds annoyed. “You gonna share it?”

I shake my head. “Not yet. I just want to see what you find.”

She glares, but the look has no teeth. She knows my methods and even approves of them sometimes. And she should know that I’m not good enough to dive alone.

She peels off her clothes—no modesty in this woman—and slides on her suit. The suit adheres to her like it’s a part of her. She wraps five extra breathers around her hips—just-in-case emergency stuff, barely enough to get her out if her suit’s internal oxygen system fails. Her suit is minimal—it has no backup for environmental protection. If her primary and secondary units fail, she’s a little block of ice in a matter of seconds.

She likes the risk; Karl doesn’t. His suit is bulkier, not as form-fitting, but it has external environmental backups. He has had environmental failures and has barely survived them. I’ve heard that lecture half a dozen times. So has Turtle, even though she always ignores it.

He doesn’t go naked under the suit either, leaving some clothes in case he has to peel quickly. Different divers, different situations. He only carries two extra breathers, both so small that they fit on his hips without expanding his width. He uses the extra loops for weapons, mostly lasers, although he’s got that knife stashed somewhere in all that preparedness.

They don’t put on the headpieces until I give them the plan. One hour only: twenty minutes to get in, twenty minutes to explore, twenty minutes to return. Work the buddy system. We just want an idea of what’s in there.

One hour gives them enough time on their breathers for some margin of error. One hour also prevents them from getting too involved in the dive and forgetting the time.

They have to stay on schedule.

They get the drill. They’ve done it before, with me anyway. I have no idea how other team leaders run their ships. I have strict rules about everything, and expect my teams to follow.

Headpieces on—Turtle’s is as thin as her face, tight enough to make her look like some kind of cybernetic human. Karl goes for the full protection— seven layers, each with a different function; double night vision, extra cameras on all sides; computerized monitors layered throughout the external cover. He gives me the handheld, which records everything he sees. It’s not as good as the camera eye view they’ll bring back, but at least it’ll let me know my team is still alive.

Not that I can do anything if they’re in trouble. My job is to stay in the skip. Theirs is to come back to it in one piece.

They move through the airlock—Turtle bouncing around like she always does, Karl moving with caution—and then wait the required two minutes. The suits adjust, then Turtle presses the hatch, and Karl sends the lead to the other ship.

We don’t tether exactly, but we run a line from one point of entry to the other. It’s cautionary. A lot of divers get wreck blindness—hit the wrong button, expose themselves to too much light, look directly into a laser, or the suit malfunctions in ways I don’t even want to discuss—and they need the tactical hold to get back to safety.

I don’t deal with wreck blindness either, but Squishy does. She knows eyes, and can replace a lens in less than fifteen minutes. She’s saved more than one of my crew in the intervening years. And after overseeing the first repair—the one in which she got her nickname—I don’t watch.

Turtle heads out first, followed by Karl. They look vulnerable out there, small shapes against the blackness. They follow the guideline, one hand resting lightly on it as they propel themselves toward the wreck.

This is the easy part: should they let go or miss by a few meters, they use tiny air chips in the hands and feet of their suits to push them in the right direction. The suits have even more chips than that. Should the diver get too far away from the wreck, they can use little propellants installed throughout their suits.

I haven’t lost a diver going or coming from a wreck.

It’s inside that matters.

My hands are slick with sweat. I nearly drop the handheld. It’s not providing much at the moment—just the echo of Karl’s breathing, punctuated by an occasional “fuck” as he bumps something or moves slightly off-line.

I don’t look at the images he’s sending back either. I know what they are—the gloved hand on the lead, the vastness beyond, the bits of the wreck in the distance.

Instead, I walk back to the cockpit, sink into my chair, and turn all monitors on full. I have cameras on both of them and readouts running on another monitor watching their heart and breathing patterns. I plug the handheld into one small screen, but I don’t watch it until Karl approaches the wreck.

The main door is scored and dented. Actual rivets still remain on one side. I haven’t worked a ship old enough for rivets; I’ve only seen them in museums and histories. I stare at the bad image Karl’s sending back, entranced. How have those tiny metal pieces remained after centuries? For the first time, I wish I’m out there myself. I want to run the thin edge of my glove against the metal surface.

Karl does just that, but he doesn’t seem interested in the rivets. His fingers search for a door release, something that will open the thing easily.

After centuries, I doubt there is any easy here. Finally, Turtle pings him.

“Got something over here,” she says.

She’s on the far side of the wreck from me, working a section I hadn’t examined that closely. Karl keeps his hands on the wreck itself, sidewalking toward her.

My breath catches. This is the part I hate: the beginning of the actual dive, the place where the trouble starts.

Most wrecks are filled with space, inside and out, but a few still maintain their original environments, and then it gets really dicey—extreme heat or a gaseous atmosphere that interacts badly with the suits.

Sometimes the hazards are even simpler: a jagged metal edge that punctures even the strongest suits; a tiny corridor that seems big enough until it narrows, trapping the diver inside.

Every wreck has its surprises, and surprise is the thing that leads to the most damage—a diver shoving backward to avoid a floating object, a diver slamming his head into a wall that jars the suit’s delicate internal mechanisms, and a host of other problems, all of them documented by survivors and none of them the same.

The handheld shows a rip in the exterior of the wreck, not like any other caused by debris. Turtle puts a fisted hand in the center, then activates her knuckle lights. From my vantage, the hole looks large enough for two humans to go through side by side.

“Send a probe before you even think of going in there,” I say into her headset.

“Think it’s deep enough?” Turtle asks, her voice tinny as it comes through the speakers.

“Let’s try the door first,” Karl says. “I don’t want surprises if we can at all avoid them.”

Good man. His small form appears like a spider attached to the ship’s side. He returns to the exit hatch, still scanning it.

I look at the timer, running at the bottom of my main screen.

17:32

Not a lot of time to get in.

I know Karl’s headpiece has a digital readout at the base. He’s conscious of the time, too, and is as cautious about that as he is about following procedure.

Turtle scuttles across the ship’s side to reach him, slips a hand under a metal awning, and grunts.

“How come I didn’t see that?” Karl asks.

“Looking in the wrong place,” she says. “This is real old. I’ll wager the metal’s so brittle we could punch through the thing ourselves.”

“We’re not here to destroy it.” There’s disapproval in Karl’s voice.

“I know.”

19:01. I’ll come on the line and demand they return if they go much over twenty minutes.

Turtle grabs something that I can’t see, braces her feet on the side of the ship, and tugs. I wince. If she loses her grip, she propels, spinning, far and fast into space.

“Crap,” she says. “Stuck.”

“I could’ve told you that. These things are designed to remain closed.”

“We have to go in the hole.”

“Not without a probe,” Karl says.

“We’re running out of time.”

21:22

They are out of time.

I’m about to come on and remind them when Karl says, “We have a choice. We either try to blast this door open or we probe that hole.”

Turtle doesn’t answer him. She tugs. Her frame looks small on my main screen, all bunched up as she uses her muscles to pry open something that may have been closed for centuries.

On the handheld screen, enlarged versions of her hands disappear under that awning, but the exquisite detail of her suit shows the ripple of her flesh as she struggles.

“Let go, Turtle,” Karl says.

“I don’t want to damage it,” Turtle says. “God knows what’s just inside there.”

“Let go.”

She does. The hands reappear, one still braced on the ship’s side.

“We’re probing,” he says. “Then we’re leaving.”

“Who put you in charge?” she grumbles, but she follows him to that hidden side of the ship. I see only their limbs as they move along the exterior—the human limbs against the pits and the dents and the small holes punched by space debris. Shards of protruding metal near rounded gashes beside pristine swatches that still shine in the thin light from Turtle’s headgear.

I want to be with them, clinging to the wreck, looking at each mark, trying to figure out when it came, how it happened, what it means.

But all I can do is watch.

The probe makes it through sixteen meters of stuff before it doesn’t move any farther. Karl tries to tug it out, but the probe is stuck, just like my team would’ve been if they’d gone in without it.

They return, forty-two minutes into the mission, feeling defeated.

I’m elated. They’ve gotten farther than I ever expected.

FOUR

We take the probe readouts back to the Business, over the protests of the team. They want to recharge and clean out the breathers and dive again, but I won’t let them. That’s another rule I have to remind them of—only one dive per twenty-four-hour period. There are too many unknowns in our work; it’s essential that we have time to rest.

We all get too enthusiastic about our dives—we take chances we shouldn’t. Sleep, relaxation, downtime all prevent the kind of haste that gets divers killed.

Once we’re in the Business, I download the probe readouts, along with the readings from the suits, the gloves, and the handheld. Everyone gathers in the lounge. I have three-D holotech in there that’ll allow us all to get a sense of the wreck.

As I’m sorting through the material, thinking of how to present it (handheld first? overview? a short lecture?), the entire group arrives. Turtle’s taken a shower. Her hair’s wet, and she looks tired. She swore to me she wasn’t stressed out there, but her eyes tell me otherwise. She’s exhausted.

Squishy follows, looking somber. She looks solid next to Turtle’s thinness. But Squishy is thin too, just not as brittle. She has muscles like Karl does and a squat square face. Her hair is cut like his as well, shorn against her skull, which makes it easier for her to dive.

Jypé and Junior are already there, in the best seats. They’ve been watching me set up. They look like father and son. When Junior grows into his bone structure, he’ll be a handsome man like his father.

Right now, he looks like a partially completed sketch.

The completed sketch sits next to him. Jypé has a land-born’s way of moving—heavy and solid—but he looks too light to be land-born. He’s adapted to space better than I have.

Junior was born in space and raised in it, alternating between zero-g and Earth normal. He has the grace that his father lacks.

Leaning on the built-in couch, they both look strong and rested, ready for anything.

I hope that they are.

Karl is late. When he arrives—also looking tired—Squishy stops him at the door.

“Turtle says it’s old.”

Turtle shoots Squishy an angry look.

“She won’t say anything else.” Squishy glances at me as if it’s my fault. Only I didn’t swear the first team to secrecy about the run. That was their choice.

“It’s old,” Karl says, and squeezes by her.

“She’s says it’s weird-old.”

Karl looks at me now. His angular face seems even bonier. He seems to be asking me silently if he can talk.

I continue setting up.

Karl sighs, then says, “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

No one else asks a question. They wait for me. I start with the images the skip’s computer downloaded, then add the handheld material. I’ve finally decided to save the suit readouts for last. I might be the only one who cares about the metal composition, the exterior hull temperature, and the number of rivets lining the hatch.

The group watches in silence as the wreck appears, watches intently as the skip’s images show a tiny Turtle and Karl slide across the guideline.

The group listens to the arguments, and Jypé nods when Karl makes his unilateral decision to use the probe. The nod reassures me. Jypé is as practical as I remembered.

I move to the probe footage next. I haven’t previewed it. We’ve all seen probe footage before, so we ignore the grainy picture, the thin light, and the darkness beyond.

The probe doesn’t examine so much as explore: its job is to go as far inside as possible, to see if that hole provides an easy entrance into the wreck.

It looks so easy for ten meters—nothing along the edges, just light and darkness and weird particles getting disturbed by the probe’s movements.

Then the hole narrows and we can see the walls as large shapes all around. The hole narrows more, and the walls become visible in the light—a shinier metal, one less damaged by space debris. The particles thin out too.

Finally a wall looms ahead. The hole continues, so small that it seems like the probe can’t continue. The probe actually sends a laser pulse and gets back a measurement: the hole is six centimeters in diameter, more than enough for the equipment to go through.

But when the probe reaches that narrow point, it slams into a barrier. The barrier isn’t visible. The probe runs several more readouts, all of them denying that the barrier is there.

Then there’s a registered tug on the line: Karl trying to get the probe out. Several more tugs later, Karl and Turtle decide the probe’s stuck. They take even more readouts, and then shut it down, planning to use it later.

The readouts tell us nothing except that the hole continues, six centimeters in diameter, for another two meters.

“What the hell do you think that is?” Junior asks. His voice hasn’t finished its change yet, even though both Jypé and Junior swear he’s over eighteen.

“Could be some kind of force field,” Squishy says.

“In a vessel that old?” Turtle asks. “Not likely.”

“How old is that?” Squishy’s entire body is tense. It’s clear now that she and Turtle have been fighting.

“How old is that, Boss?” Turtle asks me.

They all look at me. They know I have an idea. They know age is one of the reasons they’re here.

I shrug. “That’s one of the things we’re going to confirm.”

“Confirm.” Karl catches the word. “Confirm what? What do you know that we don’t?”

“Let’s run the readouts before I answer that,” I say.

“No.” Squishy crosses her arms. “Tell us.”

Turtle gets up. She pushes two icons on the console beside me, and the suits’ technical readouts come up. She flashes forward, through numbers and diagrams and chemical symbols, to the conclusions.

“Over five thousand years old.” Turtle doesn’t look at Squishy. “That’s what the boss isn’t telling us. This wreck is human-made, and it’s been here longer than humans have been in this section of space.”

Karl stares at it, then he shakes his head. “Not possible. Nothing human-made would’ve survived to make it this far out. Too many gravity wells, too much debris.”

“Five thousand years,” Jypé says.

I let them talk. In their voices, in their argument, I hear the same argument that went through my head when I got my first readouts about the wreck.

It’s Junior who stops the discussion. In his half-tenor, half-baritone way, he says, “C’mon, gang, think a little. That’s why the boss brought us out here. To confirm her suspicions.”

“Or not,” I say.

Everyone looks at me as if they’ve just remembered I’m there.

“Wouldn’t it be better if we knew your suspicions?” Squishy asks.

Karl is watching me, eyes slitted. It’s as if he’s seeing me for the first time.

“No, it wouldn’t be better.” I speak softly. I make sure to have eye contact with each of them before I continue. “I don’t want you to use my scholarship—or lack thereof—as the basis for your assumptions.”

“So should we even bother to discuss this with each other?” Squishy’s using that snide tone with me now. I don’t know what has her so upset, but I’m going to have to find out. If she doesn’t calm down soon, she’s not going near the wreck.

“Sure,” I say.

“All right.” She leans back, staring at the readouts still floating before us. “If this thing is five thousand years old, human-made, and somehow it came to this spot at this time, then it can’t have a force field, at least not as we understand it.”

“Or fake readouts like the probe found,” Jypé says.

“Hell,” Turtle says. “It shouldn’t be here at all. Space debris should’ve pulverized it. That’s too much time. Too much distance.”

“So what’s it doing here?” Karl asked.

I shrug for the third and last time. “Let’s see if we can find out.”

They don’t rest. They’re as obsessed with the readouts as I’ve been. They study time and distance and drift, forgetting the weirdness inside the hole. I’m the one who focuses on that.

I don’t learn much. We need to know more, so we revisit the probe twice while looking for another way into the ship. Even then, we don’t get a lot of new information.

Either the barrier is new technology or it is very old technology— technology that has been lost. So much technology has been lost in the thousands of years since this ship was built. It seems like humans constantly have to reinvent everything.

We know some of what our ancestors knew. We know a little of what they did.

Some of it sounds like magic to me, and some of it sounds like incredible science, the kind that should be beyond human beings. Actually, now, much of it is beyond us. We have forgotten so much—or lost it—or never truly learned it in the first place.

Some old spacers stay away from wrecks. These old-timers believe the wrecks are haunted - not by the dead crew, but by old science, the kind that could kill us because we don’t understand it.

I think we should always strive for understanding, and I believe in rediscovery.

I believe in never letting anything important get lost.

Six dives later and we still haven’t found a way inside the ship. Six dives, and no new information. Six dives, and my biggest problem is Squishy.

She has become angrier and angrier as the dives continue. I’ve brought her along on the seventh dive to man the skip with me, so that we can talk.

Junior and Jypé are the divers. They’re exploring what I consider to be the top of the ship, even though I’m only guessing. They’re going over the surface centimeter by centimeter, exploring each part of it, looking for a weakness that we can exploit.

I monitor their equipment using the skip’s computer, and I monitor them with my eyes, watching the tiny figures move along the narrow blackness of the skip itself.

Squishy stands beside me at military attention, her hands folded behind her back.

She knows she’s been brought for conversation only; she’s punishing me by refusing to speak until I broach the subject first.

Finally, when J&J are past the dangerous links between two sections of the ship, I mimic Squishy’s posture—hands behind my back, shoulders straight, legs slightly spread.

“What’s making you so angry?” I ask.

She stares at the team on top of the wreck. Her face is a smooth reproach to my lack of attention; the monitor on board the skip should always pay attention to the divers.

I taught her that. I believe that. Yet here I am, reproaching another person while the divers work the wreck.

“Squishy?” I ask.

She isn’t answering me. Just watching, with that implacable expression.

“You’ve had as many dives as everyone else,” I say. “I’ve never questioned your work, yet your mood has been foul, and it seems to be directed at me. Do we have an issue I don’t know about?”

Finally she turns, and the move is as military as the stance. Her eyes narrow.

“You could’ve told us this was a Dignity Vessel,” she says.

I think we should always strive for understanding, and I believe in rediscovery.

I believe in never letting anything important get lost.

My breath catches. She agrees with my research. I don’t understand why that makes her angry.

“I could’ve,” I say. “But I feel better that you came to your own conclusion.”

“I’ve known it since the first dive,” she says. “I wanted you to tell them. You didn’t. They’re still wasting time trying to figure out what they have here.”

“What they have here is an anomaly,” I say, “something that makes no sense and can’t be here.”

“Something dangerous.” She crosses her arms. “Dignity Vessels were used in wartime.”

“I know the legends.” I glance at the wreck, then at the handheld readout. J&J are working something that might be a hatch.

“A lot of wartimes,” she says, “over many centuries, from what historians have found out.”

“But never out here,” I say.

And she concedes. “Never out here.”

“So what are you so concerned about?”

“By not telling us what it is, we can’t prepare,” she says. “What if there’re weapons or explosives or something else—”

“Like that barrier?” I ask.

Her lips thin.

“We’ve worked unknown wrecks before, you and me.”

She shrugs. “But they’re of a type. We know the history, we know the vessels, we know the capabilities. We don’t know this at all. No one really knows what these ancient ships were capable of. It’s something that shouldn’t be here.”

“A mystery,” I say.

“A dangerous one.”

“Hey!” Junior’s voice is tinny and small. “We got it open! We’re going in.”

Squishy and I turn toward the sound. I can’t see either man on the wreck itself. The handheld’s imagery is shaky.

I press the comm, hoping they can still hear me. “Probe first. Remember that barrier.”

But they don’t answer, and I know why not. I wouldn’t either in their situation. They’re pretending they don’t hear. They want to be the first inside, the first to learn the secrets of the wreck.

The handheld moves inside the darkness. I see four tiny lights—Jypé’s glove lights—and I see the same particles I saw before, on the first images from the earliest probe.

Then the handheld goes dark. We were going to have to adjust it to transmit through the metal of the wreck.

“I don’t like this,” Squishy says.

I’ve never liked any time I was out of sight and communication with the team.

We stare at the wreck as if it can give us answers. It’s big and dark, a blob against our screen. Squishy actually goes to the portals and looks as if she can see more through them than she can through the miracle of science.

But she doesn’t. And the handheld doesn’t wink on.

On my screen, the counter ticks away the minutes.

Our argument isn’t forgotten, but it’s on hold as the first members of our little unit vanish inside.

After thirty-five minutes—fifteen of them inside (Jypé has rigorously stuck to the schedule on each of his dives, something that has impressed me)—I start to get nervous.

I hate the last five minutes of waiting. I hate it even more when the waiting goes on too long, when someone doesn’t follow the timetable I’ve devised.

Squishy, who’s never been in the skip with me, is pacing. She doesn’t say any more—not about danger, not about the way I’m running this little trip, not about the wreck itself.

I watch her as she moves, all grace and form, just like she’s always been. She’s never been on a real mystery run. She’s done dangerous ones—maybe two hundred deep-space dives into wrecks that a lot of divers, even the most greedy, would never touch.

But she’s always known what she’s diving into, and why it’s where it is.

Not only are we uncertain as to whether or not this is an authentic Dignity Vessel (and really, how can it be?), we also don’t know why it’s here, how it came here, or what its cargo was. We have no idea what its mission was, either—if, indeed, it had a mission at all.

J&J have a little over two minutes left inside.

Squishy’s stopped pacing. She looks out the portals again, as if the view has changed. It hasn’t.

“You’re afraid, aren’t you?” I ask. “That’s the bottom line, isn’t it? This is the first time in years that you’ve been afraid.”

She stops, stares at me as if I’m a creature she’s never seen before, and then frowns.

“Aren’t you?” she asks.

I shake my head.

The handheld springs to life, images bouncy and grainy on the corner of my screen. My stomach unclenches. I’ve been breathing shallowly and not even realizing it.

Maybe I am afraid, just a little.

But not of the wreck. The wreck is a curiosity, a project, a conundrum no one else has faced before.

I’m afraid of deep space itself, of the vastness of it. It’s inexplicable to me, filled with not just one mystery, but millions, and all of them waiting to be solved.

A crackle, then a voice—Jypé’s.

“We got a lot of shit.” He sounds gleeful. He sounds almost giddy with relief.

Squishy lets out the breath she’s obviously been holding.

“We’re coming in,” Junior says.

It’s 40:29.

FIVE

The wreck’s a Dignity Vessel, all right. It’s got a DV number etched inside the hatch, just like the materials say it should. We mark the number down to research later.

Instead, we’re gathered in the lounge, watching the images J&J have brought back.

They have the best equipment. Their suits don’t just have sensors and readouts, but they have chips that store a lot of imagery woven into the suits’ surfaces. Most suits can’t handle the extra weight, light as it is, or the protections to ensure that the chips don’t get damaged by the environmental changes—the costs are too high, and if the prices stay in line, then either the suits’ human protections are compromised or the imagery is.

Two suits, two vids, so much information.

The computer cobbles it together into two different information streams—one from Jypé’s suit’s perspective, the other from Junior’s. The computer cleans and enhances the images, clarifies edges if it can read them and leaves them fuzzy if it can’t.

Not much is fuzzy here. Most of it is firm, black-and-white only because of the purity of the glove lights and the darkness that surrounds them.

Here’s what we see:

From Junior’s point-of-view, Jypé going into the hatch. The edge is up, rounded, like it’s been opened a thousand times a day instead of once in thousands of years. Then the image switches to Jypé’s leg cams and at that moment, I stop keeping track of which images belong to which diver.

The hatch itself is round, and so is the tunnel it leads down. Metal rungs are built into the wall. I’ve seen these before: they’re an ancient form of ladder, ineffective and dangerous. Jypé clings to one rung, then turns and pushes off gently, drifting slowly deep into a darkness that seems profound.

Numbers are etched on the walls, all of them following the letters DV, done in ancient script. The numbers are repeated over and over again—the same ones—and it’s Karl who figures our why: each piece of the vessel has the numbers etched into it, in case the vessel was destroyed. Its parts could always be identified then.

Other scratches marked the metal, but we can’t read them in the darkness. Some of them aren’t that visible, even in the glove lights. It takes Jypé a while to remember he has lights on the soles of his feet as well—a sign, to me, of his inexperience with this kind of dive.

Ten meters down, another hatch. It opens easily, and ten meters beneath it is another.

That one reveals a nest of corridors leading in a dozen different directions. A beep resounds in the silence, and we all glance at our watches before we realize it’s on the recording.

The reminder that half the dive time is up.

Junior argues that a few more meters won’t hurt. Maybe see if there are items off those corridors, something they can remove, take back to the Business, and examine.

But Jypé keeps to the schedule. He merely shakes his head, and his son listens.

Together they ascend, floating easily along the tunnel as they entered it, leaving the interior hatches open and only closing the exterior one, as we’d all learned in dive training.

The imagery ends, and the screen fills with numbers, facts, figures, and readouts that I momentarily ignore. The people in the room are more important. We can sift through the numbers later.

There’s energy here—a palpable excitement—dampened only by Squishy’s fear. She stands with her arms wrapped around herself, as far from Turtle as she can get.

“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 skull, making her seem half dead.

“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 kids’ 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 how? Did you spend three years studying stealth? Did you spend two years of postdoc trying to re-create 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 re-create 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 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 of 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.”

SIX

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 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 the crew 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.

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 understood 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 anymore. 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 even to 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: 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 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 multidimensional travel, but not in any way we’ve been able to reproduce.”

“And this ship we have here? Why are you so afraid of it?” I ask.

“Because you’re right.” She finally looks at me. There are shadows under her eyes. Her face is haunted, the lower lip trembling. “The ship shouldn’t be here. No Dignity Vessel ever left the sector of space around Earth. They weren’t designed to travel vast distances, let alone halfway across the known universe.”

I nod. She’s not telling me something I don’t already know. “So?”

“So,” she says. “Dozens and dozens of those ships never returned to port.”

“Shot down, destroyed.” This is what the databases say, and the news doesn’t surprise me. Dignity Vessels were battleships, after all.

“Shot down, destroyed, or lost,” she says. “I vote for lost. Or used for something, some mission now forgotten in time.”

I shrug. “So?”

“So you wondered why no one’s seen this before, why no one’s found it, why the ship itself has drifted so very far from home.”

I nod.

“Maybe it didn’t drift.”

“You think it was purposely sent here?”

She shakes her head. “What if it stealthed on a mission to the outer regions of Old Earth’s area of space?”

My stomach clenches.

“What if,” she says, “the crew tried to destealth—and ended up here?”

“Five thousand years ago?”

She shakes her head. “A few generations ago. Maybe more, maybe less. But not very long. And you were just the lucky one who found it.”

SEVEN

I spend the entire night listening to Squishy’s theories.

I hear about the experiments, the forty-five deaths, the losses she suffered in a program that started the research from scratch.

After she left R&D and went into medicine, she used her high security clearance to explore older files. She found pockets of research dating back nearly five centuries, the pertinent stuff gutted, all but the assumptions gone.

Stealth tech. Lost, just like I assumed. And no one’d been able to recreate it.

I listen and evaluate, and realize, somewhere in the dead of night, that I’m not a scientist.

But I am a pragmatist, and I know, from my own research, that Dignity Vessels, with their stealth tech, existed for more than two hundred years. Certainly not something that would have happened had the stealth technology been as flawed as Squishy said.

So many variables, so much for me to weigh.

And beneath it all, a greed pulses, one that—until tonight—I thought I didn’t have.

For the last five centuries, our military has researched stealth tech and failed.

Failed.

I might have all the answers only a short distance away, in a wreck no one else has noticed, a wreck that is—for the moment anyway—completely my own.

I leave Squishy to sleep. I tell her to clear her bed, that she has to remain with the group, no matter what I decide.

She nods as if she’s expecting that, and maybe she is. She grabs her night-clothes as I let myself out of the room and into the much cooler, more dimly lit corridor.

As I walk to my own quarters, Jypé finds me.

“She tell you anything worthwhile?” His eyes are a little too bright. Is greed eating at him like it’s eating at me? I’m almost afraid to ask.

“No,” I say. “She didn’t. The work she did doesn’t seem all that relevant to me.”

I’m lying. I really do want to sleep on this. I make better decisions when I’m rested.

“There isn’t much history on the Dignity Vessels—at least that’s specific,” he says. “And your database has nothing on this one, no serial number listing, nothing. I wish you’d let us link up with an outside system.”

“You want someone else to know where we are and what we’re doing?” I ask.

He grins. “It’d be easier.”

“And dumber.”

He nods. I take a step forward and he catches my arm.

“I did check one other thing,” he says.

I am tired. I want sleep more than I can say. “What?”

“I learned long ago that if you can’t find something in history, you look in legends. There’re truths there. You just have to dig more for them.”

I wait. The sparkle in his eyes grows.

“There’s an old spacers’ story that has gotten repeated through various cultures for centuries as governments have come and gone. A spacers’ story about a fleet of Dignity Vessels.”

“Of course there was a fleet of them,” I say. “Hundreds, if the old records are right.”

He waves me off. “More than that. Some say the fleet’s a thousand strong, some say it’s a hundred strong. Some don’t give a number. But all the legends talk about the vessels being on a mission to save the worlds beyond the stars, and how the ships moved from port to port, with parts cobbled together so that they could move beyond their design structures.”

I’m awake again, just like he knew I would be. “There are a lot of these stories?”

“And they follow a trajectory—one that would work if you were, say, leading a fleet of ships out of your area of space.”

“We’re far away from the Old Earth area of space. We’re so far away, humans from that period couldn’t even imagine getting to where we are now.”

“So we say. But think how many years this would take, how much work it would take.”

“Dignity Vessels didn’t have faster-than-light engines,” I say.

“Maybe not at first.” He’s fairly bouncing from his discovery. I’m feeling a little more hopeful as well. “But consider this. They’ve traveled for a long time. What if one of the places they stopped had developed FTL? What if the engineers there helped them cobble that FTL into a Dignity Vessel?”

“You mean gave it to them?” I ask. No one in the worlds I know gives anyone anything.

“Or sold it to them. Can you imagine? One legend calls them a fleet of ships for hire, out to save worlds they’ve never seen.”

“Sounds like a complete myth.”

“Yeah,” he says, “it’s only a legend. But I think sometimes these legends become a little more concrete.”

“Why?”

“We have an actual Dignity Vessel out there that got here somehow.”

“Did you see evidence of cobbling?” I ask.

“How would I know?” he asks. “Have you checked the readouts? Do they give different dates for different parts of the ship?”

I haven’t looked at the dating. I have no idea if it is different. But I don’t say that.

“Download the exact specs for a Dignity Vessel,” I say. “The materials, where everything should be, all of that.”

“Didn’t you do that before you came here?” he asks.

“Yes, but not in the detail of the ship’s composition. Most people rebuild ships exactly as they were before they got damaged, so the shape would remain the same. Only the components would differ. I meant to check our readouts against what I’d brought, but I haven’t yet. I’ve been diverted by the stealth tech thing, and now I’m going to get a little sleep. So you do it.”

He grins. “Aye, aye, Captain.”

“Boss,” I mutter as I stagger down the corridor to my bed. “I can’t tell you how much I prefer ‘boss.’”

I sleep, but not long. My brain’s too busy. I’m sure those specs are different, which confirms nothing. It just means that someone repaired the vessel at one point or another. But what if the materials are the kind that weren’t available in the area of space around Earth when Dignity Vessels were built? That disproves Squishy’s worry about the tech.

Doesn’t it?

I’m at my hardwired terminal when Squishy comes to my door. I’ve gone through five or six layers of security to get to some very old data, data that isn’t accessible from any other part of my ship’s networked computer system.

Squishy waits. I’m hoping she’ll leave, but of course she doesn’t. After a few minutes, she coughs.

I sigh audibly. “We talked last night.”

“I have one more thing to ask.”

She steps inside, unbidden, and closes the door. My quarters feel claustrophobic with another person inside them. I’d always been alone here— always—even when I had a liaison with one of the crew. I’d go to his quarters, never bring him into my own.

The habits of privacy are long ingrained, and the habits of secrecy even longer. It’s how I’ve protected my turf for so many years, and how I’ve managed to first-dive so many wrecks.

I dim the screen and turn to her. “Ask.”

Her eyes are sunken into her face. She looks like she’s gotten even less sleep than I have.

“I’m going to try one last time,” she says. “Please blow the wreck up. Make it go away. Don’t let anyone else inside. Forget it was here.”

I fold my hands on my lap. Yesterday I hadn’t had an answer for that request. Today I do. I’d thought about it off and on all night, just like I’d thought about the differing stories I’d heard from her and from Jypé, and how, I realized fifteen minutes before my alarm, neither of them had to be true.

“Please,” she says.

“I’m not a scientist,” I say, which should warn her right off, but of course it doesn’t. Her gaze doesn’t change. Nothing about her posture changes. “I’ve been thinking about this. If this stealth tech is as powerful as you claim, then we might be making things even worse. What if the explosion triggers the tech? What if we blow a hole between dimensions? Or maybe destroy something else, something we can’t see?”

Her cheeks flush slightly.

“Or maybe the explosion’ll double-back on us. I recall something about Dignity Vessels being unfightable, that anything that hit them rebounded to the other ship. What if that’s part of the stealth tech?”

“It was a feature of the shields,” she says with a bit of sarcasm. “They were unknown in that era.”

“Still,” I say. “You understand stealth tech more than I do, but you don’t really understand it or you’d be able to replicate it, right?”

“I think there’s a flaw in that argument—”

“But you don’t really grasp it, right? So you don’t know if blowing up the wreck will create a situation here, something worse than anything we’ve seen.”

“I’m willing to risk it.” Her voice is flat. So are her eyes. It’s as if she’s a person I don’t know, a person I’ve never met before. And something in those eyes, something cold and terrified, tells me that if I had met her just this morning, I wouldn’t want to know her.

“I like risks,” I say. “I just don’t like that one. It seems to me that the odds are against us.”

“You and me, maybe,” she says. “But there’s a lot more to ‘us’ than just this little band of people. You let that wreck remain and you bring something dangerous back into our lives, our culture.”

“I could leave it for someone else,” I say. “But I really don’t want to.”

“You think I’m making this up. You think I’m worrying over nothing.” She sounds bitter.

“No,” I say. “But you already told me that the military is trying to recreate this thing, over and over again. You tell me that people die doing it. My research tells me these ships worked for hundreds of years, and I think maybe your methodology was flawed. Maybe getting the real stealth tech into the hands of people who can do something with it will save lives.”

She stares at me, and I recognize the expression. It must have been the one I’d had when I looked at her just a few moments ago.

I’d always known that greed and morals and beliefs destroyed friendships. I also knew they influenced more dives than I cared to think about.

But I’d always tried to keep them out of my ship and out of my dives. That’s why I pick my crews so carefully; why I call the ship Nobody’s Business.

Somehow, I never expected Squishy to start the conflict.

Somehow, I never expected the conflict to be with me.

“No matter what I say, you’re going to dive that wreck, aren’t you?” she asks.

I nod.

Her sigh is as audible as mine was, and just as staged. She wants me to understand that her disapproval is deep, that she will hold me accountable if all the terrible things she imagines somehow come to pass.

We stare at each other in silence. It feels like we’re having some kind of argument, an argument without words. I’m loath to break eye contact.

Finally, she’s the one who looks away.

“You want me to stay,” she says. “Fine. I’ll stay. But I have some conditions of my own.”

I expected that. In fact, I’d expected that earlier, when she’d first come to my quarters, not this prolonged discussion about destroying the wreck.

“Name them.”

“I’m done diving,” she says. “I’m not going near that thing, not even to save lives.”

“All right.”

“But I’ll man the skip, if you let me bring some of my medical supplies.”

So far, I see no problems. “All right.”

“And if something goes wrong—and it will—I reserve the right to give my notes, both audio and digital, to any necessary authorities. I reserve the right to tell them what we found and how I warned you. I reserve the right to tell them that you’re the one responsible for everything that happens.”

“I am the one responsible,” I say. “But the entire group has signed off on the hazards of wreck diving. Death is one of the risks.”

A lopsided smile fills her face, but doesn’t reach her eyes. The smile itself seems like sarcasm.

“Yeah,” she says as if she’s never heard me make that speech before. “I suppose it is.”

EIGHT

I tell the others that Squishy has some concerns about the stealth tech and wants to operate as our medic instead of as a main diver. No one questions that. Such things happen on long dives—someone gets squeamish about the wreck; or terrified of the dark; or nearly dies and decides to give up wreck diving then and there.

We’re a superstitious bunch when it gets down to it. We put on our gear in the same order each and every time; we all have one piece of equipment we shouldn’t but we feel we need just to survive; and we like to think there’s something watching over us, even if it’s just a pile of luck and an ancient diving belt.

The upside of Squishy’s decision is that I get to dive the wreck. I have a good pilot, although not a great one, manning the skip, and I know that she’ll make sensible decisions. She’ll never impulsively come in to save a team member. She’s said so, and I know she means it.

The downside is that she’s a better diver than I am. She’d find things I never would; she’d see things I’ll never see; she’d avoid things I don’t even know are dangerous.

Which is why, on my first dive to that wreck, I set myself up with Turtle, the most experienced member of the dive team after Squishy.

The skip ride over is tense: those two have gone beyond not talking, into painful and outspoken silence. I spend most of my time going over and over my equipment looking for flaws. Much as I want to dive this wreck—and I have since the first moment I saw her—I’m scared of the deep and the dark and the unknown. Those first few instances of weightlessness always catch me by surprise, always remind me that what I do is somehow unnatural.

Still, we get to our normal spot, I suit up, and somehow I make it through those first few minutes, zip along the tether with Turtle just a few meters ahead of me, and make my way to the hatch.

Turtle’s gonna take care of the recording and the tracking for this trip. She knows the wreck is new to me. She’s been inside once now, and so has Karl. Junior and Jypé had the dive before this one.

The one thing I don’t like about this wreck is the effect it has on our communications. The skip doesn’t have the power to send into the wreck, for reasons I don’t entirely understand. We’ve tried boosting power through the skip’s diagnostic, and even with the Business’s diagnostic, and we don’t get anything.

If there’s trouble when we’re inside, the skip can’t notify us. That didn’t bother me as much when I piloted the skip, but the very idea bothers me now that I’m about to go inside.

It’s clearly an issue of control for me. If I’m diving, I’m no longer in charge. But I tell no one about my personal worries, even though they know the communications problem. I simply try to set the worries aside.

I’ve assigned three corridors: one to Karl, one to J&J, and one to Turtle. Once we discover what’s at the end of those babies, we’ll take a few more. I’m a floater; I’ll take the corridor of the person I dive with.

Descending into the hatch is trickier than it looks on the recordings. The edges are sharper; I have to be careful about where I put my hands.

Gravity isn’t there to pull at me. I can hear my own breathing, harsh and insistent, and I wonder if I shouldn’t have taken Squishy’s advice: a ten/ten/ten split on my first dive instead of a twenty/twenty/twenty. It takes less time to reach the wreck now; we get inside in nine minutes flat. I would’ve had time to do a bit of acclimatizing and to have a productive dive the next time.

But I hadn’t been thinking that clearly, obviously. I’d been more interested in our corridor, hoping it led to the control room, wherever that was.

Squishy had been thinking, though. Before I left, she tanked me up with one more emergency bottle. She remembered how on my first dives after a long layoff, I used too much oxygen.

She remembered that I sometimes panic.

I’m not panicked now, just excited. I have all my exterior suit lights on, trying to catch the various nooks and crannies of the hatch tube that leads into the ship.

Turtle’s not far behind. Because I’m lit up like a tourist station, she’s not using her boot lights. She’s letting me set the pace, and I’m probably setting it a little too fast.

We reach the corridors in at 11:59- Turtle shows me our corridor at 12:03. We take off down the notched hallway at 12:06, and I’m giddy as a child on her first space walk.

Giddy we have to watch. Giddy can be the first sign of oxygen deprivation, followed by a healthy disregard for safety.

But I don’t mention this giddy. I’ve had it since Squishy bowed off the teams, and the giddy’s grown worse as my dive day got closer. I’m a little concerned—extreme emotion adds to the heavy breathing—but I’m going to trust my suit. I’m hoping it’ll tell me if the oxygen’s too low, the pressure’s off, or the environmental controls are about to fail.

The corridor is human-sized and built for full gravity. But it seems bare. There are no obvious safety devices.

To me, that shows an astonishing trust in technology, one I’ve always read about but have never seen. No ship lacks emergency oxygen supplies spaced every ten meters or so, although this one does. No ship lacks communications equipment near each door, although this one does.

The past feels even farther away than I thought it would. I thought once I stepped inside the wreck—even though I couldn’t smell the environment or hear what’s going on around me—I’d get a sense of what it would be like to spend part of my career in this place.

But I have no sense. I’m in a dark, dreary hallway that lacks the emergency supplies I’m used to. Turtle’s moving slower than my giddy self wants, although my cautious, experienced boss self knows that slow is best.

She’s finding handholds, and signaling them for me, like we’re climbing the outside of an alien vessel. We’re working on an ancient system—the lead person touches a place, deems it safe, uses it to push off, and the rest of the team follows.

There aren’t as many doors as I would have expected. A corridor, it seems to me, needs doors funneling off it, with the occasional side corridor bisecting it.

But there are no bisections, and every time I think we’re in a tunnel not a corridor, a door does appear. The doors are regulation height, even now, but recessed farther than I’m used to.

Turtle tries each door. They’re all jammed or locked. At the moment, we’re just trying to map the wreck. We’ll pry open the difficult places once the map is finished.

But I’d love to go inside one of those closed-off spaces, probably as much as she would.

Finally, she makes a small scratch on the side of the wall and nods at me.

The giddy fades. We’re done. We go back now—my rule—and if you get back early so be it. I check my readout: 29:01. We have ten minutes to make it back to the hatch.

I almost argue for a few more minutes, even though I know better. Sure, it didn’t take us as long to get here as it had in the past, but that doesn’t mean the return trip is going to be easy. I’ve lost four divers over the years because they made the mistake I want to make now.

I let Turtle pass me. She goes back, using the same push-off points as before. As she does that, I realize she’s marked them somehow, probably with something her suit can pick up. My equipment’s not that sophisticated, but I’m glad hers is. We need that kind of expertise inside this wreck. It might take us weeks just to map the space, and we can expect each other to remember each and every safe touch spot because of it.

When we get back to the skip and I drop my helmet, Squishy glares at me.

“You had the gids,” she says.

“Normal excitement,” I say.

She shakes her head. “I see this coming back the next time, and you’re grounded.”

I nod, but know she can’t ground me without my permission. It’s my ship, my wreck, my job. I’ll do what I want.

I take off the suit and indulge in some relaxation while Squishy pilots. We didn’t get much, Turtle and I, just a few more meters of corridor mapped, but it feels like we discovered a whole new world.

Maybe that is the gids, I don’t know. But I don’t think so. I think it’s just the reaction of an addict who returns to her addiction—an elation so great that she needs to do something with it besides acknowledge it.

And this wreck. This wreck has so many possibilities.

Only I can’t discuss them on the skip, not with Squishy at the helm and Turtle across from me. Squishy hates this project, and Turtle’s starting to. Her enthusiasm is waning, and I don’t know if it’s because of her personal war with Squishy or because Squishy has convinced her the wreck is even more dangerous than usual.

I stare out a portal, watching the wreck grow tinier and tinier in the distance. It’s ironic. Even though I’m surrounded by tension, I finally feel content.

NINE

Half a dozen more dives, maybe sixty more meters, mostly corridor. One potential storage compartment, which we’d initially hoped was a stateroom or quarters, and a mechanic’s corridor, filled with equipment we haven’t even begun to catalogue.

I spend my off-hours analyzing the materials. So far, nothing conclusive. Lots of evidence of cobbling, but that’s pretty common for any ship—with FTL or not—that’s made it on a long journey.

What there’s no evidence of are bodies. We haven’t found one, and that’s even more unusual. Sometimes there are skeletons floating—or pieces of them at least—and sometimes we get the full-blown corpse, suited and intact. A handful aren’t suited. Those are the worst. They always make me grateful we can’t smell the ship around us.

The lack of bodies is beginning to creep out Karl. He’s even talked to me in private about skipping the next few dives.

I’m not sure what’s best. If he skips them, his attitudes might become ingrained, and he might not dive again. If he goes, the fears might grow worse and paralyze him in the worst possible place.

I move him to the end of the rotation and warn Squishy she might have to suit up after all.

She just looks at me and grins. “Too many of the team quit on you, you’ll just have to go home.”

“I’ll dive it myself, and you all can wait,” I say, but it’s bravado and we both know it.

That wreck isn’t going to defeat me, not with the perfect treasure hidden in its bulk.

That’s what’s fueling my greed. The perfect treasure: my perfect treasure. Something that answers previously unasked historical questions—previously unknown historical questions; something that will reveal facts about our history, our humanity, that no one has suspected before; and something that, even though it does all that, is worth a small fortune.

I shake every time I think about it, and before each dive, I do feel the gids. Only now I report them to Squishy. I tell her that I’m a tad too excited, and she offers me a tranq that I always refuse. Never go into the unknown with senses dulled, that’s my motto, even though I know countless people who do it.

We’re on a long diving mission, longer than some of these folks have ever been on, and we’re not even halfway through. We’ll have gids and jitters and too many superstitions. We’ll have fears and near emergencies, and God forbid, real emergencies as well.

We’ll get through it, and we’ll have our prize, and no one, not any one person, will be able to take that away from us.

Only I’m not sure we will get through it. Not after what happened this afternoon.

I’m captaining the skip. Squishy’s back at the Business, taking a boss-ordered rest. I’m tired of her complaints and her constant negative attitude. At first, I thought she’d bring Turtle to her point of view, but Turtle finally got pissed and decided she’d enjoy this run.

I caught Squishy ragging on J&J, my strong links, asking them if they really want to be mining a death ship. They didn’t listen to her, not really— although Jypé argued with her just a little—but that kind of talk can depress an entire mission, sabotage it in subtle little ways, ways that I don’t even want to contemplate.

So I’m manning the skip alone, while J&J are running their dive, and I’m listening to the commentary, not looking at the grainy, nearly worthless images from the handheld. Mostly I’m thinking about Squishy and how to send her back without sending information too, and I can’t come to any conclusions at all when I hear:

“… yeah, it opens.” Junior.

“Wow.” Jypé.

“Jackpot, eh?” Junior again.

And then a long silence. Much too long for my tastes, not because I’m afraid for J&J, but because a long silence doesn’t tell me one goddamn thing.

I punch up the digital readout, see we’re at 25:33—plenty of time. They got to the new section faster than they ever have before.

The silence runs from 25:33 to 28:46, and I’m about to chew my list off, wondering what they’re doing. The handheld shows me grainy walls and more grainy walls. Or maybe it’s just grainy nothing. I can’t tell.

For the first time in weeks, I want another person in the skip with me just so that I have someone to talk to.

“Almost time,” Jypé says.

“Dad, you gotta see this.” Junior has a touch of breathlessness in his voice. Excitement—at least that’s what I’m hoping.

And then there’s more silence … thirty-five seconds of it, followed by a loud and emphatic “Fuck!”

I can’t tell if that’s an angry “fuck,” a scared “fuck,” or an awed “fuck.” I can’t tell much about it at all.

Now I’m literally chewing on my thumbnail, something I haven’t done in years, and I’m watching the digital, which has crept past thirty-one minutes.

“Move your arm,” Jypé says, and I know then that wasn’t a good fuck at all.

Something happened.

Something bad.

“Just a little to the left,” Jypé says again, his voice oddly calm. I’m wondering why Junior isn’t answering him, hoping that the only reason is he’s in a section where the communications relay isn’t reaching the skip.

I can think of a thousand other reasons, none of them good, that Junior’s communication equipment isn’t working.

“We’re five minutes past departure,” Jypé says, and in that, I’m hearing the beginning of panic.

More silence.

I’m actually holding my breath. I look out a portal, see nothing except the wreck, looking like it always does. The handheld has been showing the same grainy image for a while now. 37:24

If they’re not careful, they’ll run out of air. Or worse.

I try to remember how much extra they took. I didn’t really watch them suit up this time. I’ve seen their ritual so many times that I’m not sure what I think I saw is what I actually saw. I’m not sure what they have with them, and what they don’t.

“Great,” Jypé says, and I finally recognize his tone. It’s controlled parental panic. Sound calm so that the kid doesn’t know the situation is bad. “Keep going.”

I’m holding my breath, even though I don’t have to. I’m holding my breath and looking back and forth between the portal and the handheld image. All I see is the damn wreck and that same grainy image.

“We got it,” Jypé says. “Now careful. Careful—son of a bitch! Move, move, move—ah, hell.”

I stare at the wreck, even though I can’t see inside it. My own breath sounds as ragged as it did inside the wreck. I glance at the digital:

44:11

They’ll never get out in time. They’ll never make it, and I can’t go in for them. I’m not even sure where they are.

“C’mon.” Jypé is whispering now. “C’mon, Son, just one more, c’mon, help me, c’mon.”

The “help me” wasn’t a request to a hearing person. It was a comment. And I suddenly know.

Junior’s trapped. He’s unconscious. His suit might even be ripped. It’s over for Junior.

Jypé has to know it on some deep level.

Only he also has to know it on the surface, in order to get out.

I reach for my own communicator before I remember there’s no talking to them inside the wreck.

“C’mon, Son.” Jypé grunts. I don’t like that sound.

The silence that follows lasts thirty seconds, but it seems like forever. I move away from the portal, stare at the digital, and watch the numbers change. They seem to change in slow motion:

45:24 to

… 25 to

…2…6…

to

…2………7…

until I can’t even see them change anymore.

Another grunt, and then a sob, half muffled, and another, followed by—

“Is there any way to send for help? Boss?”

I snap to when I hear my name. It’s Jypé and I can’t answer him.

I can’t answer him, dammit.

I can call for help, and I do. Squishy tells me that the best thing I can do is get the survivor—her word, not mine, even though I know it’s obvious too—back to the Business as quickly as possible.

“No sense passing midway, is there?” she asks, and I suppose she’s right.

But I’m cursing her—after I get off the line—for not being here, for failing us, even though there’s not much she can do, even if she’s here, in the skip. We don’t have a lot of equipment, medical equipment, back at the Business, and we have even less here, not that it matters, because most of the things that happen are survivable if you make it back to the skip.

Still, I suit up. I promise myself I’m not going to the wreck, I’m not going to help with Junior, but I can get Jypé along the guideline if he needs me too.

“Boss. Call for help. We need Squishy and some divers and oh, shit, I don’t know.”

His voice sounds too breathy. I glance at the digital.

56:24.

Where has the time gone? I thought he was moving quicker than that. I thought I was too.

But it takes me a while to suit up, and I talked to Squishy, and everything is fucked up.

What’ll they say when we get back? The mission’s already filled with superstitions and fears of weird technology that none of us really understand.

And only me and Jypé are obsessed with this thing.

Me and Jypé.

Probably just me now.

“I left him some oxygen. I dunno if it’s enough….”

So breathy. Has Jypé left all his extra? What’s happening to Junior? If he’s unconscious, he won’t use as much, and if his suit is fucked, then he won’t need any.

“Coming through the hatch

I see Jypé, a tiny shape on top of the wreck. And he’s moving slowly, much too slowly for a man trying to save his own life.

My rules are clear: let him make his own way back.

But I’ve never been able to watch someone else die.

I send to the Business: “Jypé’s out. I’m heading down the line.”

I don’t use the word help on purpose, but anyone listening knows what I’m doing. They’ll probably never listen to me again, but what the hell.

I don’t want to lose two on my watch.

When I reach him six minutes later, he’s pulling himself along the guideline, hand over hand, so slowly that he barely seems human. A red light flashes at the base of his helmet—the out-of-oxygen light, dammit. He did use all of his extra for his son.

I grab one small container, hook it to the side of his suit, and press the “on” only hallway, knowing too much is as bad as too little.

His look isn’t grateful: it’s startled. He’s so far gone, he hasn’t even realized that I’m here.

I brought a grappler as well, a technology I always said was more dangerous than helpful, and here’s the first test of my theory. I wrap Jypé against me, tell him to relax, I got him, and we’ll be just fine.

He doesn’t. Even though I pry him from the line, his hands still move, one over the other, trying to pull himself forward.

Instead, I yank us toward the skip, moving as fast as I’ve ever moved. According to my suit, I’m burning oxygen at three times my usual rate and I don’t really care. I want him inside, I want him safe, I want him alive, goddammit.

I pull open the door to the skip. I unhook him in the airlock, and he falls to the floor like an empty suit. I make sure the back door is sealed, open the main door, and drag Jypé inside.

His skin is a grayish blue. Capillaries have burst in his eyes. I wonder what else has burst, what else has gone wrong.

There’s blood around his mouth.

I yank off the helmet, his suit protesting my every move.

“I gotta tell you,” he says. “I gotta tell you.”

I nod. I’m doing triage, just like I’ve been taught, just like I’ve done half a dozen times before.

“Set up something,” he says. “Record.”

So I do, mostly to shut him up. I don’t want him wasting more energy. I’m wasting enough for both of us, trying to save him, and cursing Squishy for not getting here, cursing everyone for leaving me on the skip, alone, with a man who can’t live, and somehow has to.

“He’s in the cockpit,” Jypé says.

I nod. He’s talking about Junior, but I really don’t want to hear it. Junior is the least of my worries.

“Wedged under some cabinet. Looks like—battlefield in there.”

That catches me. Battlefield how? Because there are bodies? Or because it’s a mess?

I don’t ask. I want him to wait, to save his strength, to survive.

“You gotta get him out. He’s only got an hour’s worth, maybe less. Get him out.”

Wedged beneath something, stuck against a wall, trapped in the belly of the wreck. Yeah, like I’ll get him out. Like it’s worth it.

All those sharp edges.

If his suit’s not punctured now, it will be by the time I’m done getting the stuff off him. Things have to be piled pretty high to get them stuck in zero-g.

I’ll wager the Business that Junior’s not stuck, not in the literal, gravitational sense. His suit’s hung up on an edge. He’s losing—he’s lost— environment and oxygen, and he’s probably been dead longer than his father’s been on the skip.

“Get him out.” Jypé’s voice is so hoarse it sounds like a whisper.

I look at his face. More blood.

“I’ll get him,” I say just to calm him.

Jypé smiles. Or tries to. And then he closes his eyes, and I fight the urge to slam my fist against his chest.

“I’ll get him,” I say again, and this time, it’s a promise, not a lie.

A promise to a man who can no longer hear me.

A man who is already dead.

TEN

Squishy declared him dead the moment she arrived on the skip. Not ^^ that it was hard. He’d already sunken in on himself, and the blood— it isn’t something I want to think about.

She flew us back. Turtle was in the other skip, and she never came in, just flew back on her own.

I stayed on the floor, expecting Jypé to rise up and curse me for not going back to the wreck, for not trying, even though we all knew—even he probably had known—that Junior was dead.

When we got back to the Business, Squishy took Jypé’s body to her little medical suite. She’s going to make sure he died from suit failure or lack of oxygen or something that keeps the regulators away from us.

Who knows what the hell he actually died of. Panic? Fear? Stupidity? Maybe that’s what I’m doomed for. Hell, I let a man dive with his son, even though I’d ordered all of my teams to abandon a downed man.

Who can abandon his own kid anyway?

And who listens to me?

Not even me.

My quarters seem too small, the Business seems too big, and I don’t want to go anywhere because everyone’ll look at me with an I-told-you-so followed by a let’s-hang-it-up.

And I don’t really blame them. Death’s the hardest part. It’s what we flirt with in deep dives.

We claim that flirting is partly love.

I close my eyes and lean back on my bunk, but all I see are digital readouts. Seconds moving so slowly they seem like days. The spaces between time. If only we can capture that—the space between moments.

If only.

I shake my head, wondering how I can pretend I have no regrets.

When I come out of my quarters, Turtle and Karl are already watching the vids from Jypé’s suit. They’re sitting in the lounge, their faces serious.

As I step inside, Turtle says, “They found the heart.”

It takes me a minute to understand her, then I remember what Jypé said. They were in the cockpit, the heart, the place we might find the stealth tech.

He was stuck there. Like the probe?

I shudder in spite of myself.

“Is the event on the vid?” I ask.

“Haven’t got that far.” Turtle shuts off the screens. “Squishy’s gone.”

“Gone?” I shake my head just a little. Words aren’t processing well. I’m having a reaction. I recognize it: I’ve had it before when I’ve lost crew.

“She took the second skip, and left. We didn’t even notice until I went to find her.” Turtle sighs. “She’s gone.”

“Jypé too?” I ask.

She nods.

I close my eyes. The mission ends, then. Squishy’ll go to the authorities and report us. She’s going to tell them about the wreck and the accident and Junior’s death. She’s going to show them Jypé, whom I haven’t reported yet because I didn’t want anyone to find our position, and the authorities’ll come here—whatever authorities have jurisdiction over this area—and confiscate the wreck.

At best, we’ll get a slap, and I’ll have a citation on my record.

At worst, I—maybe we—will face charges for some form of reckless homicide.

“We can leave,” Karl says.

I shake my head. “She’ll report the Business. They’ll know who to look for.”

“If you sell the ship—”

“And what?” I ask. “Not buy another? That’ll keep us ahead of them for a while, but not long enough. And when we get caught, we get nailed for the full count, whatever it is, because we acted guilty and ran.”

“So maybe she won’t say anything,” Karl says, but he doesn’t sound hopeful.

“If she was going do that, she would have left Jypé,” I say.

Turtle closes her eyes and rests her head on the seat back. “I don’t know her anymore.”

“I think maybe we never did,” I say.

“I never used to think she got scared,” Turtle says. “I yelled at her—I told her to get over it, that diving’s the thing. And she said it’s not the thing. Surviving’s the thing. She never used to be like that.”

I think of the woman sitting on her bunk staring at her opaque wall—a wall you think you can see through, but you really can’t—and wonder. Maybe she always used to be like that. Maybe surviving was always her thing. Maybe diving was how she proved she was alive, until the past caught up with her all over again.

The stealth tech.

She thinks it killed Junior.

I nod toward the screen. “Let’s see it,” I say to Karl.

He gives me a tight glance, almost—but not quite—expressionless. He’s trying to rein himself in, but his fears are getting the best of him.

I’m amazed mine haven’t gotten the best of me.

He starts it up. The voices of men so recently dead, just passing information—”Push off here.” “Watch the edge there.”—makes Turtle open her eyes.

I lean against the wall, arms crossed. The conversation is familiar to me. I heard it just a few hours ago, and I’d been too preoccupied to give it much attention, thinking of my own problems, thinking of the future of this mission, which I thought was going to go on for months.

Amazing how much your perspective changes in the space of a few minutes.

The corridors look the same. It takes a lot so that I don’t lose focus—I’ve been in that wreck, watched similar vids, and in those I haven’t learned much. But I resist the urge to tell Karl to speed it up—there can be something, some wrong movement, some piece of the wreck that attaches to one of my guys—my former guys—before they even get to the heart.

But I don’t see anything like that, and since Turtle and Karl are quiet, I assume they don’t see anything like that either.

Then J&J find the heart. They say something, real casual—which I’d missed the first time—a simple “shit, man” in a tone of such awe that if I’d been paying attention, I would’ve known.

I bite back the emotion. If I took responsibility for each lost life, I would never dive again. Of course, I might not after this anyway. One of the many options the authorities have is to take my pilot’s license away.

The vids don’t show the cockpit ahead. They show the same old grainy walls, the same old dark and shadowed corridor. It’s not until Jypé turns his suit vid toward the front that the pit’s even visible, and then it’s a black mass filled with lighter squares, covering the screen.

“What the hell’s that?” Karl asks. I’m not even sure he knows he’s spoken.

Turtle leans forward and shakes her head. “Never seen anything like it.”

Me either. As Jypé gets closer, the images become clearer. It looks like every piece of furniture in the place has become dislodged, and has shifted to one part of the cockpit.

Were the designers so confident of their artificial gravity that they didn’t bolt down the permanent pieces? Could any ship’s designers be that stupid?

Jypé’s vid doesn’t show me the floor, so I can’t see if these pieces have been ripped free. If they have, then that place is a minefield for a diver, more sharp edges than smooth ones.

My arms tighten in their cross, my fingers forming fists. I feel a tension I don’t want—as if I can save both men by speaking out now.

“You got this before Squishy took off, right?” I ask Turtle.

She understands what I’m asking. She gives me a disapproving sideways look. “I took the vids before she even had the suit off.”

Technically, that’s what I want to hear, and yet it’s not what I want to hear. I want something to be tampered with, something to be slightly off, because then, maybe then, Jypé might still be alive.

“Look,” Karl says, nodding toward the screen.

I have to force myself to see it. The eyes don’t want to focus. I know what happens next—or at least, how it ends up. I don’t need the visual confirmation.

Yet I do. The vid can save us, if the authorities come back. Turtle, Karl, even Squishy can testify to my rules. And my rules state that an obviously dangerous site should be avoided. Probes get to map places like this first.

Only I know J&J didn’t send in a probe. They might not have because we lost the other probe so easily, but most likely, it was that greed, the same one that has been affecting me. The tantalizing idea that somehow, this wreck, with its ancient secrets, is the dive of a lifetime.

And the hell of it is, beneath the fear and the panic and the anger—more at myself than at Squishy for breaking our pact—this wreck is the discovery of a lifetime.

I’m thinking, if we can just get the stealth tech before the authorities arrive, it’ll all be worth it. We’ll have a chip, something to bargain with.

Something to sell to save our own skins.

Junior goes in. His father doesn’t tell him not to. Junior’s blurry on the vid—a human form in an environmental suit, darker than the pile of things in the center of the room, but grayer than the black around them.

And it’s Junior who says, “It’s open,” and Junior who mutters, “Wow,” and Junior who says, “Jackpot, huh?” when I thought all of that had been a dialogue between them.

He points at a hole in the pile, then heads toward it, but his father moves forward quickly, grabbing his arm. They don’t talk—apparently that was the way they worked, such an understanding they didn’t need to say much, which makes my heart twist—and together they head around the pile.

The cockpit shifts. It has large screens that appear to be unretractable. They’re off, big blank canvases against dark walls. No windows in the cockpit at all, which is another one of those technologically arrogant things—what happens if the screen technology fails?

The pile is truly in the middle of the room, a big lump of things. Why Jypé called it a battlefield, I don’t know. Because of the pile? Because everything is ripped up and moved around?

My arms get even tighter, my fists clenched so hard my knuckles hurt.

On the vid, Junior breaks away from his father and moves toward the front (if you can call it that) of the pile. He’s looking at what the pile’s attached to.

He mimes removing pieces, and the cameras shake. Apparently Jypé is shaking his head.

Yet Junior reaches in there anyway. He examines each piece before he touches it, then pushes at it, which seems to move the entire pile. He moves in closer, the pile beside him, something I can’t see on his other side. He’s floating, headfirst, exactly like we’re not supposed to go into one of these spaces—he’d have trouble backing out if there’s a problem—

And of course there is.

Was.

“Ah, hell,” I whisper.

Karl nods. Turtle puts her head in her hands.

On screen nothing moves.

Nothing at all.

Seconds go by, maybe a minute—I forgot to look at the digital readout from earlier, so I don’t exactly know—and then, finally, Jypé moves forward.

He reaches Junior’s side, but doesn’t touch him. Instead the cameras peer in, so I’m thinking maybe Jypé does too.

And then the dialogue begins.

I’ve only heard it once, but I have it memorized.

Almost time.

Dad, you’ve gotta see this.

Jypé’s suit shows us something—a wave? a blackness? a table?—something barely visible just beyond Junior. Junior reaches for it, and then

Fuck!

The word sounds distorted here. I don’t remember it being distorted, but I do remember being unable to understand the emotion behind it. Was that from the distortion? Or my lack of attention?

Jypé has forgotten to use his cameras. He’s moved so close to the objects in the pile that all we can see now are rounded corners and broken metal (apparently these did break off then) and sharp, sharp edges.

Move your arm.

But I see no corresponding movement. The visuals remain the same, just like they did when I was watching from the skip.

Just a little to the left.

And then:

We’re five minutes past departure.

That was panic. I had missed it the first time, but the panic began right there. Right at that moment.

Karl covers his mouth.

On screen, Jypé turns slightly. His hands grasp boots, and I’m assuming he’s tugging.

Great. But I see nothing to feel great about. Nothing has moved. Keep going.

Going where? Nothing is changing. Jypé can see that, can’t he?

The hands seem to tighten their grip on the boots, or maybe I’m imagining that because that’s what my hands would do.

We got it.

Is that a slight movement? I step away from the wall, move closer to the vid, as if I can actually help.

Now careful.

This is almost worse because I know what’s coming, I know Junior doesn’t get out, Jypé doesn’t survive. I know—

Careful—son of a bitch!

The hands slid off the boot, only to grasp back on. And there’s desperation in that movement, and lack of caution, no checking for edges nearby, no standard rescue procedures.

Move, move, move—ah, hell.

This time, the hands stay. And tug—clearly tug—sliding off.

C’mon.

Sliding again.

C’mon, Son.

Again.

Just one more.

And again.

C’mon, help me, c’mon.

Until, finally, in despair, the hands fall off. The feet are motionless, and, to my untrained eye, appear to be in the same position they were in before.

Now Jypé’s breathing dominates the sound—which I don’t remember at all—maybe that kind of hiss doesn’t make it through our patchwork system—and then vid whirls. He’s reaching, grabbing, trying to pull things off the pile, and there’s no pulling, everything goes back like it’s magnetized.

He staggers backward—all except his hand, which seems attached— sharp edges? No, his suit wasn’t compromised—and then, at the last moment, eases away.

Away, backing away, the visuals are still of those boots sticking out of that pile, and I squint, and I wonder—am I seeing other boots? Ones that are less familiar?—and finally he’s bumping against walls, losing track of himself.

He turns, moves away, coming for help even though he has to know I won’t help (although I did) and panicked—so clearly panicked. He gets to the end of the corridor, and I wave my hand.

“Turn it off.” I know how this plays out. I don’t need any more.

None of us do. Besides, I’m the only one watching. Turtle still has her face in her hands, and Karl’s eyes are squinched shut, as if he can keep out the horrible experience just by blocking the images.

I grab the controls and shut the damn thing off myself.

Then I slide onto the floor and bow my head. Squishy was right, dammit. She was so right. This ship has stealth tech. It’s the only thing still working, that one faint energy signature that attracted me in the first place, and it has killed Junior.

And Jypé.

And if I’d gone in, it would’ve killed me.

No wonder she left. No wonder she ran. This is some kind of flashback for her, something she feels we can never ever win.

And I’m beginning to think she’s right, when a thought flits across my brain.

I frown, flick the screen back on, and search for Jypé’s map. He had the system on automatic, so the map goes clear to the cockpit.

I superimpose that map on the exterior, accounting for movement, accounting for change—

And there it is, clear as anything.

The probe, our stuck probe, is pressing against whatever’s near Junior’s faceplate.

I’m worried about what’ll happen if the stealth tech is open to space, and it always has been—at least since I stumbled on the wreck.

Open to space and open for the taking.

Karl’s watching me. “What’re you gonna do?”

Only that doesn’t sound like his voice. It’s the greed. It’s the greed talking, that emotion I so blithely assumed I didn’t have.

Everyone can be snared, just in different ways.

“I don’t know what to do,” I say. “I have no idea at all.”

I go back to my room, sit on the bed, stare at the portal, which mercifully doesn’t show the distant wreck.

I’m out of ideas, out of energy, and out of time.

Squishy and the calvary’ll be here soon to take the wreck from me, confiscate it, and send it into governmental oblivion.

And then my career is over. No more dives, no more space travel.

No more nothing.

I think I doze once because suddenly I’m staring at Junior’s face inside his helmet. His eyes move, ever so slowly, and I realize—in the space of a heartbeat—that he’s alive in there: his body’s in our dimension, his head on the way to another.

And I know, as plainly as I know that he’s alive, that he’ll suffer a long and hideous death if I don’t help him, so I grab one of the sharp edges—with my bare hands (such an obvious dream)—and slice the side of his suit.

Saving him.

Damning him.

Condemning him to an even uglier slow death than the one he would otherwise experience.

I jerk awake, nearly hitting my head on the wall. My breath is coming in short gasps. What if the dream is true? What if he is still alive? No one understands interdimensional travel, so he could be, but even if he is, I can do nothing.

Absolutely nothing, without condemning myself.

If I go in and try to free him, I will get caught as surely as he is. So will anyone else.

I close my eyes, but don’t lean back to my pillow. I don’t want to fall asleep again. I don’t want to dream again, not with these thoughts on my mind. The nightmares I’d have, all because stealth tech exists, are terrifying, worse than any I’d had—

And then my breath catches. I open my eyes, rub the sleep from them, think:

This is a Dignity Vessel. Dignity Vessels have stealth tech, unless they’ve been stripped of them. Squishy described stealth tech to me—and this vessel, this wreck, has an original version.

Stealth tech has value.

Real value, unlike any wreck I’ve found before.

I can stake a claim. The time to worry about pirates and privacy is long gone, now.

I get out of bed, pace around the small room. Staking a claim is so foreign to wreck divers. We keep our favorite wrecks hidden, our best dives secret from pirates and wreck divers and the Empire.

But I’m not going to dive this wreck. I’m not going in again—none of my people are—and so it doesn’t matter that the entire universe knows what I have here.

Except that other divers will come, gold diggers will try to rob me of my claim—and I can collect fees from anyone willing to mine this, anyone willing to risk losing their life in a long and hideous way.

Or I can salvage the wreck and sell it. The Empire buys salvage.

If I file a claim, I’m not vulnerable to citations, not even to reckless homicide charges, because everyone knows that mining exacts a price. It doesn’t matter what kind of claim you mine, you could still lose some, or all, of your crew.

But best of all, if I stake a claim on that wreck, I can quarantine it—and prosecute anyone who violates the quarantine. I can stop people from getting near the stealth tech if I so choose.

Or I can demand that whoever tries to retrieve it, retrieve Junior’s body.

His face rises, unbidden, not the boy I’d known, but the boy I’d dreamed of, half alive, waiting to die.

I know there are horrible deaths in space. I know that wreck divers suffer some of the worst.

I carry these images with me, and now, it seems, I’ll carry Junior’s.

Is that why Jypé made me promise to go in? Had he had the same vision of his son?

I sit down at the network and call up the claim form. It’s so simple. The key is giving up accurate coordinates. The system’ll do a quick double check to see if anyone else has filed a claim, and if so, an automatic arbitrator will ask if I care to withdraw. If I do not, then the entire thing will go to the nearest court.

My hands itch. This is so contrary to my training.

I start to file—and then stop.

I close my eyes—and he’s there again, barely moving, but alive.

If I do this, Junior will haunt me until the end of my life. If I do this, I’ll always wonder.

Wreck divers take silly, unnecessary risks, by definition.

The only thing that’s stopping me from taking this one is Squishy and her urge for caution.

Wreck divers flirt with death.

I stand. It’s time for a rendezvous.

ELEVEN

Turtle won’t go into the Dignity Vessel. She wants to quit, even though she won’t admit it. I’ve never seen her so agitated. She paces through the Business like we’ve caged her inside.

Even though she won’t talk to us, it’s clear that she’s stressed, terrified, and blinded by Squishy’s betrayal.

Turtle, my best diver, would be useless on a dive right now. She’s not clearheaded enough, and I worry that her extreme emotional swings would make her reckless.

Fortunately, Karl has no qualms about diving the Dignity Vessel. His fears left with Jypé’s body. Apparently Karl knew something awful would happen, and when it finally did, it calmed him.

I appreciate the calm. I’m stressed too and stunned by Squishy’s departure. I guess I never knew her, which is odd, since I once thought I knew her very well.

Mostly, though, I’m worried, worried that I’m breaking my promise to Jypé, worried that I’ve left one of my divers to a slow death on an empty ship.

So it’s Karl I go to, Karl I ask to partner with me on a dive in the Dignity Vessel. I tell him I want to see what happened in there for myself.

He actually smiles when he hears that.

“Thought you weren’t going to come around,” he says.

But I have.

Turtle doesn’t protest this mission. In fact, she too thinks it’s the right thing to do.

Some of her agitation fades. Apparently she thought that I agreed with Squishy and was afraid that I’d be abandoning Junior forever.

I almost did.

Turtle asks to man the skip. We need her, Karl and I, and we both think she’s calm enough to handle any emergency that comes up.

Karl and I are going in, knowing we have good backup. Knowing that we’re doing all we can.

We’ve decided on thirty/forty/thirty, because we’re going to investigate that cockpit. Karl theorizes that there’s some kind of off switch for the stealth tech, and of course he’s right. But the off switch would have to be on the tech itself, wherever that is, since the wreck has no real power.

The designers had too much faith in their technology to build redundant safety systems—I’m assuming they had too much faith to design a secondary off switch for their most dangerous technology, a dead-man’s switch that’ll allow the stealth tech to go off even if the wreck has no power.

I mention that to Karl and he gives me a startled look.

“You ever wonder what’s keeping the stealth tech on, then?” he asks.

I’ve wondered, but I have no answer. Maybe when Squishy comes back with the Empire ships, I’ll be able to ask her. What my nonscientific mind is wondering is this: Can the stealth tech operate from both dimensions? Is something on the other side powering it?

Is part of the wreck—that hole we found in the hull on the first day, maybe—still in that other dimension?

Karl and I suit up, take extra oxygen, and double-check our suits’ environmental controls. I’m not giddy this trip—I’m not sure I’ll be giddy again—but I’m not scared either.

Just coldly determined.

I promised Jypé I was going back for Junior, and now I am.

No matter what the risk.

The trip across is simple, quick, and familiar. Going down the entrance no longer seems like an adventure. We hit the corridors with fifteen minutes to spare.

Jypé’s map is accurate to the millimeter. His push-off points are marked on the map and with some corresponding glove grips. We make record time as we head toward that cockpit.

Record time, though, is still slow. I find myself wishing for all my senses: sound, smell, taste. I want to know if the effects of the stealth tech have made it out here, if something is off in the air—a bit of an acrid odor, something foreign that raises the small hairs on the back of my neck. I want to know if Junior is already decomposing, if he’s part of a group (the crew?) pushed up against the stealth tech, never to go free again.

But the wreck doesn’t cough up those kind of details. This corridor looks the same as the other corridor I pulled my way through.

Karl moves as quickly as I do, although his suit lights are on so full that looking at him almost blinds me. That’s what I did to Turtle on our trip, and it’s a sign of nervousness.

It doesn’t surprise me that Karl, who claimed not to be afraid, is worried. He’s the one who had doubts about this trip once he’d been inside the wreck. He’s the one I thought wouldn’t make it through all of his scheduled dives.

The cockpit looms in front of us, the doors stuck open. It does look like a battlefield from this vantage: the broken furniture, the destruction all cobbled together on one side of the room, like a barricade.

The odd part about it is, though, that the barricade runs from floor to ceiling, and unlike most things in zero-g, seems stuck in place.

Neither Karl nor I give the barricade much time. We’ve vowed to explore the rest of the cockpit first, looking for the elusive dead-man switch. We have to be careful; the sharp edges are everywhere.

Before we left, we used the visuals from Jypé’s suit, and his half-finished map, to assign each other areas of the cockpit to explore. I’m going deep, mostly because this is my idea, and deep—we both feel—is the most dangerous place. It’s closest to the probe, closest to that corner of the cockpit where Junior still hangs, horizontal, his boots kicking out into the open.

As I float into the cockpit, I hear a faint hum. The sound is familiar, something I’ve heard before. It’s tantalizing, like a song whose tune is just out of reach—a hint of a remembered melody.

A shiver runs down my spine. The triggered memory is just out of reach as well, and something tells me I don’t want to think about it now.

I need all my concentration to focus on the search for the dead-man switch.

I go in the center, heading toward the back, not using handholds. I’ve pushed off the wall, so I have some momentum, a technique that isn’t really my strong suit. But I volunteered for this, knowing the edges in the front would slow me down, knowing that the walls would raise my fears to an almost incalculable height.

Instead, I float over the middle of the room, see the uprooted metal of chairs and the ripped shreds of consoles. There are actual wires protruding from the middle of that mess, wires and stripped bolts—something I haven’t seen in space before, only in old colonies—and my stomach churns as I move forward.

The back wall is dark, with its distended screen. The cockpit feels like a cave instead of the hub of the Dignity Vessel. I wonder how so many people could have trusted their lives to this place.

Just before I reach the wall, I spin so that I hit it with the soles of my boots. The soles have the toughest material on my suit. The wall is mostly smooth, but there are a few edges here, too—more stripped bolts, a few twisted metal pieces that I have no idea what they once were part of.

This entire place feels useless and dead.

It takes all of my strength not to look at the barricade, not to search for the bottoms of Junior’s boots, not to go there first. But I force myself to shine a spot on the wall before me, then on the floor, and the ceiling, looking for something—anything—that might control part of this vessel.

But whatever they had, whatever machinery there’d been, whatever computerized equipment, is either gone or part of that barricade. My work in the back is over quickly, although I take an extra few minutes to record it all, just in case the camera sees something I don’t.

It takes Karl a bit longer. He has to pick his way through a tiny debris field. He’s closer to a possible site: there’s still a console or two stuck to his near wall. He examines them, runs his suit-cam over them as well, but shakes his head.

Even before he tells me he’s found nothing, I know.

I know.

I join him at a two-pronged handhold, where his wall and mine meet. The handhold was actually designed for this space, the first such design I’ve seen on the entire Dignity Vessel.

Maybe the engineers felt that only the cockpit crew had to survive uninjured should the artificial gravity go off. More likely, the lack of grab bars was simply an oversight in the other areas, or a cost-saving measure.

“You see a way into that barricade?” Karl asks.

“We’re not going in,” I say. “We’re going to satisfy my curiosity first.”

He knows about the dream; I told him when we were suiting up. I have no idea if Turtle heard—if she did, then she knows too. I don’t know how she feels about the superstitious part of this mission, but I know that Karl understands.

“I think we should work off a tether,” he says. “We can hook up to this handhold. That way, if one of us gets stuck—”

I shake my head. There might be other bodies in that barricade, and if there are, I would wager that some of them have tethers and bits of equipment attached.

If the stealth tech is as powerful as I think it is, then these people had no safeguard against it. A handhold won’t defend us either, even though, I believe, the stealth tech is running at a small percentage of capacity.

“I’m going first,” I say. “You wait. If I get pulled in, you go back. You and Turtle get out.”

We’ve discussed this drill. They don’t like it. They believe leaving me behind will give them two ghosts instead of one.

Maybe so, but at least they’ll still be alive to experience those ghosts.

I push off the handhold, softer this time than I did from the corridor, and let the drift take me to the barricade. I turn the front suit-cams on high. I also use zoom on all but a few of them. I want to see as much as I can through that barricade.

My suit lights are also on full. I must look like a child’s floaty toy heading in for a landing.

I stop near the spot where Junior went in. His boots are there, floating, like expected. I back as far from him as I can, hoping to catch a reflection in his visor, but I get nothing.

I have to move to the initial spot, that hole in the barricade that Junior initially wanted to go through.

I’m more afraid of that than I am of the rest of the wreck, but I do it. I grasp a spot marked on Jypé’s map, and pull myself toward that hole.

Then I train the zoom inside, but I don’t need it.

I see the side of Junior’s face, illuminated by my lights. The helmet is what tells me that it’s him. I recognize the modern design, the little logos he glued to its side.

His helmet has bumped against the only intact console in the entire place. His face is pointed downward, the helmet on clear. And through it, I see something I don’t expect: the opposite of my fears.

He isn’t alive. He hasn’t been alive in a long, long time.

As I said, no one understands interdimensional travel, but we suspect it manipulates time. And what I see in front of me makes me realize my hypothesis is wrong.

Time sped up for him. Sped to such a rate that he isn’t even recognizable. He’s been mummified for so long that the skin looks petrified, and I bet, if we were to somehow free him and take him back to the Business, that none of our normal medical tools could cut through the surface of his face.

There are no currents and eddies here, nothing to pull me forward. Still, I scurry back to what I consider a safe spot, not wanting to experience the same fate as the youngest member of our team.

“What is it?” Karl asks me.

“He’s gone,” I say. “No sense cutting him loose.”

Even though cutting isn’t the right term. We’d have to free him from that stealth tech, and I’m not getting near it. No matter how rich it could make me, no matter how many questions it answers, I no longer want anything to do with it.

I’m done—with this dive, this wreck—and with my brief encounter with greed.

TWELVE

We do have answers, though, and visuals to present to the Empire’s ships when they arrive. There are ten of them—a convoy— unwilling to trust something as precious as stealth tech to a single ship.

Squishy didn’t come back with them. I don’t know why I thought she would. She dropped off Jypé, reported us and the wreck, and vanished into Longbow Station, not even willing to collect a finder’s fee that the Empire gives whenever it locates unusual technologies.

Squishy’s gone, and I doubt she’ll ever come back.

Turtle’s not speaking to me now, except to say that she’s relieved we’re not being charged with anything. Our vids showed the Empire we cared enough to go back for our team member, and also that we had no idea about the stealth tech until we saw it function.

We hadn’t gone into the site to raid it, just to explore it—as the earlier vids showed. Which confirmed my claim—I’m a wreck diver, not a pirate, not a scavenger—and that allowed me to pick up the reward that Squishy abandoned.

The reward is embarrassingly large. I’ve never seen that much money all at once.

Normally, though, I would have left it. I don’t like making money that way.

But I couldn’t leave it this time. I needed to fund the expedition, and I’m not going to be able to do it the way I’d initially planned—by taking tourists to the Dignity Vessel so far from home.

The Empire chased us away from the vessel. They’re talking about moving it to some storehouse or warehouse or way station, but I’m not sure how they’re going to do it.

I don’t think they dare move it, not with the stealth tech still functioning. I think they’ll lose some divers and some equipment, just like the rest of us have.

But I didn’t tell them that. I didn’t get a chance to tell them much of anything. All I could do was defend myself and my crew, accept the ticket for the lost claim and the hollow thanks of the agent in charge of that convoy.

As we left that group of ten ships, we couldn’t even see the Dignity Vessel they surrounded. Turtle now agrees with Squishy; she thinks we should have blown the vessel up.

Karl is just glad that it’s no longer part of our lives.

But it’ll always be a part of mine.

I think about it constantly, speculating. Worrying.

Wishing I had more answers to all the questions the Vessel raised.

Like this one: That vessel had been in service a while—that much was clear from how it had been refitted. When someone activated the stealth, something went wrong. What happened to the crew then? Did they abandon the vessel or die in it? Did they try to shut the stealth tech off or did they run from it?

Were they running tests with minimal crew, or had the real crew looked at that carnage in the cockpit and decided, like we did, that it wasn’t worth the risk to go in? Was this a repair mission gone wrong?

I never looked for escape pods, but such things existed on Dignity Vessels—at least they do in the specs. Maybe the rest of the crew bailed, got rescued, and blended into cultures somewhere far from home.

Maybe that’s where Jypé’s legends come from.

Or so I like to believe.

I’ll never know.

Just like I’ll never know how the vessel got to the place I found it. There’s no way to tell if it traveled in stealth mode over those thousands of years, although that doesn’t explain how the ship avoided gravity wells and other perils that lie in wait in a cold and difficult universe. Or maybe it had been installed with an updated FTL.

I was never able to examine it well enough to figure that out, and what images I got from the cockpit raised more questions than they answered.

The entire ship raises more questions than it answers.

And I can’t shake it.

But I have to, and I pretend that I have as we pull into Longbow Station.

The station has never seemed so much like home. It’ll be nice to shed the silent Karl, and Turtle, who claims her diving days are behind her.

My diving days are behind me too, only in not quite the same way. The Business and I’ll still ferry tourists to various wrecks, promising scary dives and providing none.

But I’ve had enough of undiscovered wrecks and danger for no real reason. Curiosity sent me all over this part of space, looking for hidden pockets, places where no one has been in a long time.

Now that I’ve found the ultimate hidden pocket—and I’ve seen what it can do—I’m not looking anymore. I’m hanging up my suit and reclaiming my land legs.

Less danger there, on land, in normal gravity. Not that I’m afraid of wrecks now. I’m not, no more than the average spacer.

I’m more afraid of that feeling, the greed, which came on me hard and fast, and made me tone-deaf to my best diver’s concerns, my old friend’s fears, and my own giddy response to the deep.

I’m getting out before I turn pirate or scavenger, before my greed— which I thought I didn’t have—draws me as inexorably as the stealth tech drew Junior, pulling me in and holding me in place, before I even realize I’m in trouble.

Before I even know how impossible it’ll be to escape.

This isn’t the life I imagined for myself, but as I look around the station, I realize none of us live the life we imagined. For some of us, life is better than anything our imaginations could conjure.

For others, it’s worse.

I’ve lived an adventurous life.

I’m getting too old to continue on that path.

At least, that’s what I’m telling myself right now.

And I suspect I’ll tell myself that for a long, long time to come.