The Diving Bundle: Six Diving Universe Novellas (58 page)

That had been the second big fight—the first fight with consequences for her. Because she wouldn’t let Vilhauser disrespect her crew, no matter how much he tried.

And, she made it clear that if his bad behavior continued, she would call this SRP off. He claimed that if she did that, he would make sure her decision had a negative impact on her career, to which she had replied,

I’m a Trekov. You think you can have a negative impact on my career? Give it a shot
.

She later realized he thought she meant that she had clout because she was the great-great-granddaughter of Ewing Trekov when actually she’d meant that the rest of her military relatives had so trashed the name that she had no clout at all.

The third big fight hadn’t started yet, although she could feel it building the same day that Lieutenant Calthorpe had notified her that a transport ship had docked with the Room of Lost Souls.

Elissa had been in the officer’s mess, finishing up her largest meal of the day. She had done her exercises, run part of her crew through some drills, and double-checked on Vilhauser.

So she had been surprised when Calthorpe called her to the bridge. Elissa had hurried, only to be greeted with the news about the transport.

Elissa couldn’t have been more shocked than if Calthorpe had told her that the Room had flown away under its own power. In fact, she would have been less shocked. The Room was mysterious; the kind of protections she had placed around this sector of space were not. “Did our people let it through?”

“No, ma’am,” Calthorpe said. “I’ve already checked.”

Elissa had approved the information shield herself. She knew there were no gaps in it. If a ship approached this sector, she would know it. Her people would know it. They would know it from the first moment that ship approached the warning buoys.

“Is that transport using some kind of stealth technology that we’re unfamiliar with?” she asked.

“Not that we can tell, ma’am,” Calthorpe said. “It appears that the transport used a standard cloak. They appeared inside our shield and headed, uncloaked, to the Room. We didn’t even notice them until they docked.”

“Why the hell not?” Elissa asked, although she had an inkling why. She had her ships monitoring the area outside of the shield. She had figured the inside was safe. After all, no ship could get in, and there were no nearby planets.

She had swept the entire area before she set up the shield so there was no way that a ship could slip inside undetected.

Was there?

“We were looking in the wrong direction, ma’am,” Calthorpe said.

Nothing like stating the obvious. Elissa understood that much. Like kids linking arms around a circle, they had faced outward, ignoring what was going on inside that circle.

They had sensors near the Room itself, in case the energy levels changed or something else went wrong. Elissa hadn’t told Vilhauser about those, but she felt it important, especially after Vilhauser himself seemed nervous about staying near the Room.

“Whose transport is it?” Elissa asked.

“We don’t know, ma’am,” Calthorpe said. “We’ve never seen the ship type before.”

“Then how do you know it’s a transport?” Elissa asked.

“We don’t for certain, ma’am. We’re just describing how it’s being used.”

Enough talk. She walked to the console, brought everything on the screen, and stared at the transport. It was sleeker than any ship she’d ever seen.

Rather than ask about it, she opened another screen and had the system review the moment the transport arrived. She watched it dock, then saw thirty people exit the ship. The people wore two different kinds of environmental suits as sleek as the ship. One type, according to her sensors, had a thicker layer. Those people also carried more than one weapon.

Soldiers.

But from where? She didn’t recognize the suits or the ship. Nor did she recognize the equipment some of them carried into the Room.

They walked into the main part of the Room of Lost Souls—the most dangerous part—as if they were completely unconcerned.

“They split off there,” Calthorpe said. “Some went into the actual room itself. Others went into what we’re calling the control room. And some went to that area where Vilhauser has been working.”

The actual room was an empty room in the center of the Room of Lost Souls, a place where those without the marker heard noises, saw lights, went inside, and died.

“Great,” Elissa said. “You haven’t told Vilhauser about this, have you?”

“No, ma’am.” Calthorpe sounded shocked at the very suggestion. “I needed to inform you first.”

And then they had to figure out what to do with these people.

“We’re searching for the transport in our database,” Calthorpe said, “but so far we’re finding nothing. And our sensors don’t even know what these suits are made of.”

“Wonderful,” Elissa said, shaking her head. Strangers in strange armor on strange ships, messing with the work of the most difficult person she knew.

“I also have an entire team going through the data our ships have been sending us from the shield. Plus the squadron itself is going over it all. So far, we haven’t found any holes in our shield.”

“What about a ship?” Elissa asked. “That transport had to come from somewhere, and it doesn’t look like a long-range vessel.”

She knew that what it looked like and what it was were two different things. But generally, ships that docked the way this one had came from somewhere else, the way that small short-range fighters did.

“We’re not finding anything yet, ma’am,” Calthorpe said.

“What about cloaks?” Elissa asked.

“Well, that’s where it gets interesting.” Calthorpe tapped the console and a third screen appeared. “The transport was cloaked initially, but it arrived at the Room uncloaked.”

Elissa frowned. Generally a cloak remained if a cloaked ship believed there was any kind of threat.

“Did it scan the Room?” she asked, thinking that maybe the ship realized the Room of Lost Souls was empty.

“Not that we can tell,” Calthorpe said. “And here’s the other weird thing. If you follow the transport’s energy signature, you’ll see that its trajectory makes no sense.”

Calthorpe tapped the screen. His fingertip created a red line that he then drew across the image. “The ship appeared, uncloaked, here. Then it came directly to the Room.”

Elissa nodded.

“But before it uncloaked, look at its path.”

Its path was zigzag at first, then circular, and then it went back sideways a bit before the transport became visible.

“That makes no sense,” Elissa said. “If it thought someone was following it, it would have remained cloaked.”

“Or maybe it believed it was in the clear, and then it uncloaked?” Calthorpe sounded uncertain. Elissa felt uncertain. The transport’s behavior was decidedly odd.

“Go back farther on that signature. See if there’s a ship near the arrival point,” Elissa said.

“Already done, ma’am,” Calthorpe said. “What I’ve shown you is what we have. The energy signature is as strange as the transport. The signature dissipates quicker than any we’re used to. We can’t go back any farther than what we have.”

Elissa frowned.

“And, ma’am, we are looking for another ship along the area suggested by this transport. We’re also going back weeks, before our squadron set up the shield. So far, we’ve found nothing.”

Elissa nodded. She went over the information herself, not because she didn’t trust this crew—she did—but because this was the first interesting thing to happen around the
Discovery
in weeks.

She had spent at least ten minutes looking at the screens, when the bridge door opened.

“Do you know what’s going on at the Room?”

She recognized the voice before she turned around. Vilhauser. The last person she wanted to see.

“We have the situation under control, Doctor,” she said without moving. She didn’t want to give him any more attention than he deserved.

“Do you realize they’re
inside the Room
?”

The man was excessively dramatic.

“Yes, Doctor, we do,” she said.

“No,” he said. “I mean the
room
. The
secret
room. The one I’ve been trying to get into since we arrived.”

She turned around.

He stood just inside the door, face flushed, hair sticking up in tufts. She’d never seen him disheveled before; he’d always been such a precise person. He was clearly disturbed, and he had come here at full run.

“What do you mean, secret room?” she asked.

“There’s a room we can’t get into. We can go around it on all four sides, but we can’t get in it. And from what we can tell, it’s really big.” He tugged at his hair. “I think it’s the place that the stealth tech is. The room where everyone dies is just above it, and there’s nothing in that room. But something is going wrong, and then there’s an area we can’t go it? Logically, it’s the place.”

She frowned. He didn’t have to tell her the details of his work in the Room. She just had to guard him. So this was the first she was hearing about a secret room.

“Why can’t you get in?” she asked.

“We can’t even find the door’s latch. We can see the outline, but we can’t figure out how to open it.”

Normally he wouldn’t have admitted that kind of failure to her. It was a sign of how very distressed he was.

“Then how do you know they’re inside?” she asked.

“We have sensors everywhere,” he said. “They went in.”

“I thought nothing worked near the malfunctioning stealth tech,” she said.

“It works. It just has to be adjusted for—oh, hell, it would take too long to explain. Just trust me. These people, these invaders, they’re in the room. They’re probably stealing the stealth tech.”

She let out a breath. Son of a bitch. He could be right.

She turned to Calthorpe. “Get us to the Room right now.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Calthorpe said.

“And I want the squadron to send a few transports of our own and some fighters. Make sure they stay out of sensor range. We’ll only use them if we need them. Is that clear?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Calthorpe said.

Elissa put a hand on Vilhauser’s back and led him out of the bridge into the corridor. The door closed behind them.

“Tell me what you know, everything you know about this secret room,” she said to him.

He almost managed to hide his contempt. She knew what he wanted to say: he wanted to say she couldn’t understand what he was going to tell her.

Instead, he said, “That room is what we came for. It’s the key to the entire mission.”

Suddenly everything he had told her fell into place. The fact that he was a technician and not a researcher. He could get some equipment out of a dead space station, but he might not understand all of it.

He wasn’t working on recreating stealth tech inside the ship like some of the other scientists she’d met. He was trying to capture stealth tech that already existed.

And he was failing so badly that he couldn’t even get into the room itself.

“I want to see everything you have on that room,” she said. “And I want to see it now.”

9

NO MATTER WHAT THEY DID, they couldn’t access the proper controls on the console. The bridge remained in darkness. At one point, Ryder managed to grab Calthorpe, and strap him into a chair. Ryder said Calthorpe was unconscious, but something in Ryder’s tone made Elissa think that maybe Ryder wasn’t telling the crew everything.

She decided not to ask. She couldn’t do anything about Calthorpe, even if he were badly hurt, so it was better to try to get the ship back under control.

If
she could get the ship under control.

The flare had faded to nothing, but her eyes had adjusted to the dimness. She still couldn’t see clearly, but she could make out shapes. And some of those shapes were her crew, doing their very best.

They had two major problems: the ships that were closest to them, the fighters and the transports, hadn’t arrived. Which meant that they were probably disabled as well, although, she had to hope, not as disabled as her ship was.

That meant rescue might take a while. The commanders in her squadron would have to make the right decisions: how to protect the area, maintain the information shield, rescue the crew members in the fighters, and come get the
Discovery
. Theoretically, the
Discovery
should have been their first priority, but the commanders served with the officers on the transports and fighters. Sometimes personal loyalty trumped orders.

The second problem her crew had was more immediate: it was getting colder. The air might last hours, but if the temperature dropped significantly, the crew wouldn’t last hours.

Elissa had managed to snag her environmental suit helmet, and as she suspected, nothing about it worked. It just provided an extra layer of clothing. A super-strong layer, but a layer nonetheless.