The Diving Bundle: Six Diving Universe Novellas (21 page)

He must have looked them up.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

My face is so hot that it feels inflamed. I’m gripping my chair, and it takes all of my energy to stay in one place. Fighting him will do neither of us any good.

In handing over command, I also gave him implicit rights to imprison me in my own ship. I’m not going to give him the satisfaction.

“You know this is the right decision,” he says.

I’m not going to acknowledge that.

“You’re the one who taught me that emotion can be deadly to a dive,” he says.

I get up. I trust myself to walk to his door and to get out. But that’s all I trust.

Still, I stop. “You will never violate the sanctity of my cabin again.”

He nods. “I’m sorry,” he says again. “I had Odette wear her recorders and keep them on. She knows if she touched anything other than the device I’ll have her hide.”

It isn’t the touching that bothers me. It’s the entering.

That is my private space. No one else belongs in there.

My quarters are so private they almost feel like an extension of myself.

I don’t say any more. I step into the hallway, wait until the door closes, and lean against the wall.

A part of my brain already acknowledges that his decision is sensible. I know that when I calm down, I’ll agree. Four dives into the Room is actually the minimum for a dangerous area.

Not one, like I’d been planning.

I’d been thinking like a survivor of a disaster, not like a wreck diver.

And Karl understands that.

He’s protecting me from myself, yes, but more than that, he’s doing his job.

He’s making sure the mission is a success.

And I hate him for it.

11

I INSIST ON BEING in the skip the next morning. Karl lets me on board, but he won’t let me pilot. I am strictly an observer.

Today’s pilot is Roderick. Karl’s diving partner—a misnomer, really, since Karl has to go in alone—is Mikk. I’ve brought my suit just in case, but Karl gave it a filthy look as I entered the skip.

He doesn’t want me entertaining any thoughts of diving the Room. I’m along for two reasons: as a courtesy to me, and so that we don’t have to explain our plan to my father or Riya.

They’ve proven more rigid than I could ever be. As time has progressed, they’ve complained more and more about the habitat dives. They want someone in the Room and they want it soon.

They don’t even know we’re going in today. In the last several meetings, Karl has left out the diving rosters and locations until my father was gone.

Karl thought I would object to keeping them in the dark about the Room dive. But I don’t. I haven’t liked the access he’s given them from the beginning. That’s more than I would have offered.

Roderick is good at flying the skip in enclosed spaces. We want the skip as close to the entry point as possible. That way, the divers don’t have to cover a lot of known ground before going into the important part of the dive. It saves time and could save lives if someone got into trouble.

In this case, the skip would have to go into the destroyed habitats. It’s not as dangerous as it sounds. Most of the debris has been cleared by time or by scavengers. Roderick flies with the portals closed, which makes me feel blind.

But he focuses on instruments, and he’s so good with them that I don’t complain. Not that I have any right to, anyway.

Because the distance between the Room and the
Business
is so short, Karl has already put on his suit. It’s an upgrade from the days when we dove together, but it resembles the one he had before.

Karl likes redundant systems. His suit is expensive and a little bulky. It has an internal environmental system, like all suits, but it also has an external one.

He used to carry only two extra breathers. Now he has four, and they’re larger than the ones he used to have. Apparently the Dignity Vessel experience has had a greater impact on him than he’s willing to admit.

Instead of a slew of weapons in the loops along his belt, he carries a few tools and his knife. The knife has a long curved blade and has saved his life more than once.

I find myself staring at it throughout the short journey, wondering what he would use it on inside that Room.

Mikk has also suited up. He’ll go as far as the Room’s door and wait there—not the best assignment, especially for a young diver. But if Mikk doesn’t know patience by now, he’ll never learn it. And he swears he understands how long he might have to monitor that door.

Roderick anchors the skip to the remaining wall so that he won’t have to use thrust in the small space. He and I will wait on board and will monitor everything through the suit cameras that Karl and Mikk will wear. They’ll also have audio in their headpieces.

The dive will follow a strict schedule. Because Karl doesn’t have a lot of distance to traverse between the skip and the Room’s door, we decided on a two-hour dive—longer than I would have liked, and shorter than he wanted.

It’ll only take him five minutes to get inside and, theoretically, five minutes to get back. The rest of the time, he should be observing and mapping.

Provided his equipment works inside. To our knowledge, no one has filmed the interior of the Room, and we don’t know if that’s because they haven’t thought of it or if they didn’t succeed when they tried.

Just before he puts on his headpiece, he attaches the device to his belt. Since we don’t know much about how the device works, we don’t want it inside his suit. We want to give him as much protection as possible.

Then he slips on his headpiece. It’s as cautious as the rest of his suit—seven layers of protection, each with a different function including double night vision, and computerized monitors layered throughout the external cover. He hands me the handheld, which will report everything the cameras on the side of his headpiece “see.”

We are the least confident in the handheld. The shield device might disrupt the signals the cameras send back. We tested as best we could near the
Business
and didn’t have any trouble, but we’re not sure if that was an accurate test.

Like so much with wreck diving, this part of the dive gets tested only in the field.

I’m nervous. Karl is not. Roderick hasn’t said anything, and Mikk acts like this is a normal dive. While he’s curious about the Room, it’s an intellectual curiosity. He knows he won’t be able to dive it this trip, so it’s not the center of his attention.

In some ways, he’s along for the ride, even more than I am.

We don’t tether to the Room—that would be dangerous with the skip powered down—but we do extend a line. Karl is doing this as a courtesy to me. I won’t dive without lines. I’ve seen too many divers get wreck blindness—they turn on their headlamps on a small space, they take a laser to the eyeball, their suit’s visor malfunctions—and they can’t get back without help.

The line is the simplest form of help. If they follow it from skip to wreck, then they know how to get back. We don’t use lines inside wrecks, although I suggested it for the Room.

Karl gave that suggestion a lot of thought, and had an alteration. Once he reaches the door, he will attach a tether to one of the loops on his belt. If he loses consciousness in there, we can pull him back.

Mikk and Karl proceed to the airlock. They wave as they step inside.

They wait the required two minutes as their suits adjust. Then Mikk presses the hatch and Karl sends the lead out the door.

It only takes a moment to cleave to the jamb beside the Room’s door. We picked that spot because it seemed soft enough to hold the line. Nothing else around the Room’s exterior did.

They’re stepping out of the airlock. They’ll move at a very slow pace because they’re good divers. They’ll test the line. They’ll make sure each part of their suits is functioning. Then they’ll travel slowly to that door, and coordinate before Karl goes in.

I take those few minutes to walk into the cockpit. Roderick is sitting in what I consider to be my seat—the pilot’s chair—and is already monitoring the readouts. In addition to the skip’s cameras, some suit monitors send information directly to the skip itself. And both suits send heart-rates and breathing patterns—or will so long as nothing interferes with the signal.

I plug Karl’s handheld into one small screen but only look at it to make sure the information is coming to me. Grainy flat images, mostly of the line, appear before me.

Then I look up. Roderick still has the portals opaqued.

“Let’s watch this in real time,” I say.

He doesn’t look up from the instrumentation. “I don’t like staring at interior station walls when I’m on a skip.”

“I don’t care,” I say. “We have a team out there. We need our eyes as well as our equipment. We need every advantage we can get.”

I shudder to think he’s run dives in the habitats on instruments only, and make a mental note to tell Karl that night. It should be a requirement for each dive that the pilot watches from the cockpit. The pilot won’t be able to see inside some of the spaces, but he will be able to see if there’s a problem between the lead and the skip itself.

“Karl says I’m supposed to make the decisions,” Roderick says.

“Well, I have twenty years of dive experience, and let me tell you, only amateurs let their people out of a ship on instrument only.”

He winces, then flattens his hand against the control panel. With a hum, all of the windows become visible.

Usually being in the skip with the windows clear feels like you’re inside a piece of black glass moving through open space. Right now, it seems like we’ve crashed into a junkyard. A blown wall opens to space on our left side. Beneath us, the habitat’s floor is in shreds. Above us is the sturdy floor of the next level, and to our right is the line, leading to the Room’s door.

Karl’s already halfway down the lead. Mikk is hurrying to catch up.

I look at their breathing and heart rates. They’re in the normal range. But it’s not like Karl to move that fast.

I touch the communication panel. “You seeing something?”

“There’s not a lot between the skip and the door, Boss.” There’s laughter in Karl’s voice, as if he expected me to ask this question. “Relax.”

I take my hand off the panel. Roderick is glaring at me, but in his expression I can see resignation. He knows that I’m going to run this skip while Karl’s gone.

Roderick also knows he has no recourse. Even when Karl returns, telling on me won’t make any difference. Karl won’t ban me from these missions. If he does, I’ll declare this entire trip a bust and leave. Then I’ll return on my own or with a new team and dive it all again.

Karl reaches the door and tugs on the lead, checking its hold. It seems to be fine. Mikk arrives a moment later. His feet are curled beneath him, but they could just as easily brush against the floor.

This is the part of Mikk’s dive that I would hate—floating there, waiting for Karl to do the actual work. For the first time since Karl changed our plans, I’m happy to be in the skip. At least I can pace here.

Karl runs a gloved hand along the door’s edge. The cameras on his wrist light up and show what we saw on our preliminary dive—that the edges of this door are pockmarked—not from time or debris—but from people trying to break in. The metal is smoother here than anywhere else, as if countless people have run their gloved hands along the edges in the past.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” my mother asks me through her suit. She turns her head toward me just a little, and I can see the outlines of her face through her headpiece. Behind her something hums
.

Sweat has formed on my forehead. Goddamn Karl, he’s right. I would have gotten lost in my own head, in my own memories, if I had gone in alone on this first trip.

I shake my head as if I can free it from the past and settle into the co-pilot’s chair.

Karl pans the door, making sure nothing has changed since the last time we looked at it. Then his gloved hand slips down to the latch.

My breath catches as the door opens. The lights on his suit flare. He turns toward us, waves again, and then goes inside.

For a moment, I can see him outlined against the Room’s darkness. Then he propels himself deeper and he is no longer visible through the clear windows of the skip.

The monitors show that his heart rate is slightly elevated. His breathing is rapid, but not enough to cut the dive short. This is the kind of breathing that comes from excitement and eagerness, not from panic or the gids.

“My God,” he says. “This place is beautiful.”

“It’s even prettier inside,” my mother says. Her voice sounds very far away. The lights blink against her suit, making her seem like she’s covered in bright paint—all primary colors.

“You should see this,” he says.

The cameras have fuzzed. We’re not getting any visuals at all. The audio is faint.

“I don’t like this,” Roderick says as the instruments slowly fail.