The Diving Bundle: Six Diving Universe Novellas (24 page)

“I’ll be fine,” I say. “Just hurry back.”

They head to the door. Riya watches them go. My father keeps looking at me.

“You tell me what you know,” I say, “Or I’m going to have the authorities come get both of you for fraud and murder. You clearly brought us out here on false pretenses, and now a man is dead.”

Karl
is dead. My heart aches.

“Call them,” Riya says. “They won’t care. Our contract is with them.”

My father closes his eyes.

I look from him to her. “For stealth tech. This is all about stealth tech.”

“That’s right,” she says. “You’re one of the lucky few who can work in its fields without risks.”

Lucky few. Me and a handful of others, all of whom were conned by this woman and my father. For what? A government military contract?

“What are you trying to do?” I ask. “Consign us to some government hell hole?”

My father has opened his eyes. He’s shaking his head.

“No, you’re just the test subjects,” Riya says, apparently oblivious to my tone. “Before they approved our project, they wanted to make sure everyone who got out before could get out again. You were the last one. Your father didn’t think you would work with us, but I proved him wrong.”

“I signed on to help you recover your father,” I say to her.

She shrugs one shoulder. “I never knew him. I really don’t care about him. And you were right. I already knew he wasn’t in that Room. But I figured telling you about him would work. I’m not the only one in this bay who was abandoned by her father.”

My father puts a hand to his forehead. I haven’t moved.

“I thought this was an historical project,” I say, maybe too defensively. “I thought this was a job, like the kind I used to do.”

“That’s what you were supposed to think,” she says. “Only you weren’t supposed to send someone else into the Room. You’re the only one with the marker.”

Marker. As in genetic marker. I turn to my father.

“That’s what you meant by designed. I’m some kind of test subject. I have some kind of genetic modification.,”

“No,” he says. “Or yes. Or I’m not sure. You see, we think that anyone on a Dignity Vessel had been bred or genetically modified to work around stealth tech. Then the ships got stranded and the Dignity crews mingled with the rest of the population. Some of us have the marker. You do. I do. Your mother didn’t.”

He says that last with some pain. He still grieves her. I don’t doubt that. But somehow he got mixed up in this.

“There were no Dignity Vessels this far out,” I say. “They weren’t designed to travel huge distances, and they weren’t manufactured outside of Earth’s solar system.”

“Don’t insult my intelligence,” he says. “We know you found a Dignity Vessel a few years ago. I’ve seen it.”

Because I salvaged it and got paid for it. I couldn’t leave it in space, a deathtrap to whoever else wandered close to it.

Like this Room is.

I salvaged the vessel and gave it to the government so they could study the damn stealth tech.

And now my father has seen the vessel.

“That’s how I knew how to find you,” he says.

“You didn’t need me,” I say. “You had the others.”

“We needed all of you,” Riya says. “The government won’t give us a go unless we had a one-hundred percent success rate. Which we do. Your friend Karl simply proves that you need the marker or you’re subject to the interdimensional field.”

Karl and Junior and my mother and who knows how many others.

“How long have the government known?” I ask. “How long have they known that the Room is a stealth-tech generator?”

She shrugs. “Why does it matter?”

“Because they should have shut it down.” I’m even closer to her than I was before. She’s backing away from me.

“They can’t,” my father says. “They don’t know how.”

“Then they should have blocked off the station,” I say. “This place is dangerous.”

“There are centuries’ worth of warnings to keep people away,” Riya says. “Besides, it’s not our concern. We have scientists who can replicate that marker. We think we’ve finally discovered a way to work with real stealth tech. Do you know what that’s worth?”

“My life, apparently,” I say. “And my mother’s. And Karl’s.”

Riya is looking at me. She’s finally understanding how angry I am.

“Don’t,” my father says.

“Don’t what?” I ask. “Don’t hurt her? Why should you care? I could have died in there. Me, the daughter you swore to protect. Or did you abandon that oath along with your search for my mother? Was that even real?”

“It was real, honey,” he says. “That’s how I found this. Riya and I met at a survivor’s meeting. We started talking—”

“
I don’t care!
” I snap. “Don’t you understand what you’ve done?”

“You wouldn’t have died,” he says. “That’s why we approached you last. Once we were sure the others made it, then we came to you. Besides, you’ve done much more dangerous things on your own.”

“And so has Karl.” I’m close to both of them now. I’m so angry, I’m trembling. “But you know what the difference is?”

My father shakes his head. Riya watches me as if she’s suddenly realized how dangerous I can be.

“The difference is that we chose to take those risks,” I say. “We didn’t choose this one.”

“I heard you tell the team,” Riya says, “that someone might die on this mission.”

“I always tell my teams that,” I say. “It makes them vigilant.”

“But this time you believed it,” my father says.

“Yeah,” I say softly. “I thought that someone would be me.”

16

AND THAT’S THE CRUX OF IT. I know it as soon as I say it. I thought I would die on this mission and apparently, I was fine with that.

I thought I’d die in multicolored lights and song, like I thought my mother had died, and I thought it a beautiful way to go. I’d even convinced myself that I would die diving, so it would be all right.

I would be done.

But it’s not all right. Karl’s dead, and I can’t even prove fault, except my own. Only when I review the decisions we made, we made the right ones with the information we had.

The thought brings me up short, prevents me from slamming Riya or my father against the bay wall.

Somehow I get out of that bay without either of them.

I don’t speak to them as the
Business
leaves the station. I don’t speak to them when I drop them at the nearest outpost. I expressly tell them that if they contact me or my people again, I will find a way to hurt them—but I don’t know exactly how I would do that.

Riya’s right. The government would back them because they’re working on a secret and important project. Stealth tech is the holy grail of military research. So she and my father can get away with anything.

And—stupid me—I finally realize that my father has no feelings for me at all. He never has. The clinging I remember is just him pulling me free of the Room, leaving my mother—my poor mother—behind.

I can’t even guarantee that we weren’t part of some early experiment on the same project. While my father was telling my mother’s parents to care for me while he tried to recover her, he might have been simply trying to recoup his losses from that trip, experimenting with people and markers and things that survive in the strangest of interdimensional fields.

After we leave my father and Riya on the outpost, we have a memorial service for Karl. I talk the longest because I knew him the best, and I don’t cry until we send him out into the darkness, still in his suit with his knife and breathers.

He would have wanted those. He would have appreciated the caution, even though it was caution—in the end—that got him killed.

As we head back to Longbow Station, I have decided to resuscitate my business. Only I’m not going to wreck dive like I used to. I’m going to find Dignity Vessels. I’m going to capture anything that vaguely resembles stealth tech and I’m going to find a place to keep it where our government can’t get it.

I’m going to run a shadow project. I’m going to find out how this stuff works and I’m going to do it before the government does because I won’t have to follow the regulations.

The government and the people like my father, they have to follow certain rules and protocols, all the while keeping the project secret.

I won’t have to. If I go far enough out of the sector, I won’t have to follow any rules at all.

I can make my own. Change the way the battle is fought. Redefine the war.

I learned that from Ewing Trekov. Don’t fight the war you’re given; fight the war you can envision.

Once the government has stealth tech, they’ll have a seemingly invincible military. They’ll be stronger in ways that can hurt the smaller governments in the region and anyone who works at the edges of the law, like I do.

But if we have stealth tech too, then all sides are equal. And if we can figure out how to use that tech in ways they haven’t imagined, then we get ahead.

All my life, I searched the past for my purpose. I sensed that something back there opened the key to my future.

Who knew that I would find all that I lost in the one place that had taken everything from me.

There are no souls in that Room, just like there are no voices.

There’s only the harshness of time.

And like the ancients before me, I’m going to harness that harshness into a weapon, a defense, and a future.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with it.

Maybe I’ll just wait, and let the future reveal itself like the habitats on the station, one small section at a time.

“
The Room of Lost Souls” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch was first published in
Asimov’s SF Magazine
, April/May, 2008.

BECALMED

1

HERE’S WHAT THEY TELL YOU when you want to leave the Fleet:

Stay behind.
Don’t get back on the ship, not even to retrieve your things.
Have someone bring the important items to you.

Check to see if any of your friends or any members of your family want to leave as well.
Don’t force them.
For most of us, the ship is and has always been home.
Life on a planet—any planet—is different.
Very different.
So different that some can’t handle it, even if they think they can.

Don’t go to a base.
Don’t ask to be dropped off.
Stay.
Create a new life with the grateful people you’ve saved/helped/rescued.

Become someone else.

They tell us these things before each mission and then again as one is ending.
They tell us these things so that we can make the right choice for us, the right choice for the ship.
The right choice for everyone.

They do this because they used to forbid us from leaving.
We were of the ship, they’d say.
We were part of the Fleet.
We were specially chosen, specially bred.

We were, they said, able to overcome anything.

But that wasn’t true.
Even with ships built for five hundred people, there is no room for one slowly devolving intellect, one emotionally unstable but highly trained individual.

No room for the crazy, the sick, or the absolutely terrified.

The key, however, is finding that person.
Figuring out who she is.

And what to do about her.

2

IT HAD BEEN A SLAUGHTER.
Twenty-seven of us, and only three survived.

I am one of the survivors.

And that is all I know.

I sit on the window seat in my living area, staring out the portal.
I had asked, back when I got promoted the very first time, to have an apartment on the outer edges of the ship.
I’d been told apartments that brushed against the exterior were dangerous, that if the ship sustained serious damage I could lose everything.

But I like looking out the portal—a real portal, not a wall screen, not some kind of entertainment—at space as it is at this moment.

But I do not look into space.

Instead, I have activated a small section of my wall screen.
I read and reread the regulations.
I translate them into different languages.
I have the ship’s computer recite them to me.
I have the children’s school programs explain them.

The upshot is the same: