“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.