“No, you don’t have it,” he says. “That’s why I wanted to meet you here. I had it removed from your quarters.”
I feel so violated I have to prevent myself from lunging at him. No one goes in my cabin. No one even has access.
Except I gave him command. He has the codes.
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.
TWENTY-ONE
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 gives it a filthy look as I enter 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 not mentioned the diving rosters and locations until my father was gone.
Karl thought I would object to keeping Riya and my lather in the dark about the Room dive. But I don’t. I haven’t liked the access Karl has 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 will have 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.
This suit is expensive and a little bulky. It has an internal environmental system, like all suits, but it also has an external one.
Karl 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. 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. 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. He has made one 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.