“We are not looking for items to resell,” I say, although everyone probably knows that. After all, they’ve signed on to dive with me and Karl, not some salvage divers or treasure hunters. “We’re looking for information— anything that will tell us about the station, about who built it, how it came to be here—why it’s out here at all so far away from everything—and what its purpose actually is.”
“Do we know if the Room is an integral part of the station?” asks Roderick. He’s slight but broad-shouldered, a land-bound pilot who somehow became one of the most highly rated in the sector. I supervised his first shift with the Business and was impressed. He found my control shortcuts without explanation in a matter of minutes.
“We know nothing,” I say. “We don’t know if the Room’s intentional or part of an accident.”
“We do know,” Karl says, “that the habitats next to the Room have been destroyed. But we don’t know how. We don’t know if someone destroyed them trying to block access to the Room or if the Room was something else and an accident or an explosion or something gone horribly wrong created the damage that we’ll find around it.”
“We’re not scientists,” says Odette. She’s the oldest diver, whom I’d partnered with long ago. She is standing in the back of the lounge near the main exit, her stick-thin arms crossed. She looks delicate against the bulkhead, as if nothing could prevent her from floating off into space. “How are we supposed to know what happened in there or what any of it means?”
“Between us, we have centuries of experience with ancient technologies.” I’m mostly talking to her and Karl now, but some of the other divers we hired have it as well. “We’ll know as much or more than any scientist we bring out here.”
“Besides,” Karl says, “we are going to bring back as much information as we can about the station. Our goal is to be the definitive historical mission for the station and the Room.”
“Is that why you wouldn’t give us a timeline?” asks Tamaz, one of the young male divers we hired for his strength and not for his great experience. He has muscles along his arms and chest that I haven’t seen in most divers. He probably had to have a special suit made.
But I wanted his strength in case we have to pull someone out of the Room. We’ve already established that machines can’t do it, but a person might be able to. A very strong, very motivated person.
“We are not giving you a timeline because we can’t,” I say. “The Room’s past history shows that people can sometimes be inside for hours or a day before coming out again.”
Although the only history that showed that was mine. All of the people hired by Riya and my father came out within hours of going in, just like they were supposed to.
Both Karl and I felt the dive team didn’t have to know this aspect of the Room’s history—nor did they have to know the fact that I had already been inside. I did not want to be seen as an expert on the interior, particularly when I can’t remember much about it.
“If there’s no treasure inside, why would people go in?” asks Mikk, another of the strong young men. He’s taller than Tamaz, but otherwise looks very much the same. I would have considered them brothers if I hadn’t known otherwise.
“There’s treasure,” I say before Karl can comment. “But it’s not the monetary kind. We warned you about that when we hired you for the dive.”
Mikk waves his right hand. It’s bigger than my thigh. “I’m not thinking for me. I mean all these five hundred people you say never came out. Why go in in the first place?”
“You’re not religious, are you, Mikk?” Davida asks softly. She’s one of Karl’s hires, a regular wreck diver who has the standard lean physique along with skin so taut it looks stretched over her frame.
“So?” Mikk sounds defensive.
“That’s what a pilgrimage is, something religious.” Davida sounds sure of herself, but she’s obviously not that religious either.
“Pilgrimages have religious connotations, yes,” Odette says from her post in the back. This time, the dive team looks at her as if they haven’t really noticed her before. “But a pilgrimage is also a mission to a special place, not just a sacred place. One could say this is a pilgrimage.”
Her gaze is on mine. She knows some of my family’s history, but I don’t believe she knows all of it.
“It certainly is for Riya Trekov,” I say to cover my own discomfort. “She believes her father’s soul is trapped in this place, and she believes we can recover it.”
“Do you?” Tamaz asks me.
I think for a moment—the lights, the voices building one upon another, the clutch of my father’s arms as he holds me tight.
“No,” I say after a moment, “but that doesn’t mean we aren’t going to try.”
NINETEEN
The station is bigger than I remember, bigger than my father’s descriptions of it, bigger than anything mentioned in the archives.
It looms ahead of the Business like a small asteroid or a tiny moon. It’s gray in the constant twilight of space, the reflection of faraway stars making it seem brighter than it actually is.
There are no visible lights on the station, nothing that marks it as a landing site or an outpost or some kind of way station. There are no energy readings, faint or otherwise.
I fly us toward the station as Roderick, Karl, and the other two pilots— Hurst and Bria—monitor the audio bands, trying to find any sign of life coming from the place.
The five of us sit shoulder to shoulder as we work the controls. The cockpit feels crowded, even though it’s built for ten or more. The station shows up on my viewscreen and in my controls as well as in the portholes throughout the ship.
Out of deference to my father, we do not dock on the exterior docking ring. This was where his large cargo ship docked—it couldn’t go any deeper into the station itself—and this was where the nightmares that have haunted the rest of his life began.
Instead, I pick a smaller ring on the upper level, where the habitats are still intact. From here, it looks as if we’ve approached a darkened but working space station. Reflections in the exterior windows of the station make it seem like someone is moving inside.
That startles Hurst—he even points it out—but Karl and I have approached so many wrecks, we’re used to the phenomenon.
“It’s just us,” Karl says. “We’re seeing our own reflections.”
Still, Hurst works the sensors. He’s not convinced. He’s a small man, younger than most pilots, with black hair that falls to his shoulders and often hides his face.
But it’s easy to tell that he’s already spooked. I don’t like that. I need solid, steady people, not superstitious ones given to outbursts.
I make a mental note to keep him away from the pilot’s chair during this part of the mission. And I will tell Karl that later on.
Right now, we settle into work. First we have to use our own equipment to map the station. Then we’ll proceed with a dive plan.
“It’s bigger than I thought,” Bria says. She has steady hands, which I appreciate, and a quick sense of humor. Her dark head is bent over the controls, her hands moving across them as if the Business is a ship she’s spent her entire life aboard.
“It’s a lot bigger,” says Hurst. His hands are shaking. He made it clear to us when he was hired that he’d never flown a mission like this. He’d mostly done combat zones. Active danger—shots, explosions—doesn’t bother him. He’s a quick thinker in that kind of situation, and since Karl and I didn’t know what we were facing, we wanted one pilot with experience flying in and out of a constantly changing situation.