“Do you think so?” Hurst asks.
“Boss won’t let me test my equipment,” Squishy says as if this were a democracy, as if she can convince the others to vote for her way of doing things.
“You would want to test an explosion?” Davida asks. I can hear the horror in her voice. “Where would you do that?”
“On one of the skips,” Squishy says. “It would be controlled—”
“If it were going to happen,” I say. “Which it’s not. Squishy is going to figure out exactly what components we need and how much we need. Then I’m going to take it into the wreck.”
“That wreck is big,” Mikk says. “You can’t dive it alone.”
“I’m going to,” I say.
He shakes his head. Apparently he thinks this is a democracy too. “It’s too dangerous. I think a team can safely go in there with you—”
“You haven’t been inside,” I say. “It’s better if I go by myself.”
“I’ve been inside,” Turtle says softly. “I never went into the cockpit, though, where we lost Junior. That’s where the stealth tech is. I think if you stay away from that part of the ship, you’ll be fine. I mean, I’m okay, and so is Squishy. Nothing harmed us while we were there.”
Everyone is watching her, looking more than a little confused.
She gives a small shrug. “I’m just trying to say that I think Mikk’s right. It’s better if a team goes in, just in case there’s a problem.”
I feel a thin band of anger start in my stomach. “I know what I want to do here,” I say, “and it doesn’t involve any other divers.”
“Maybe you should hear us out first,” Mikk says. “You don’t know what you’re facing.”
“I know what’s inside that ship,” I say, and realize I sound as stubborn as Squishy did when I was talking to her on Vallevu. “You haven’t been inside. Have you?”
I ask that last with an edge in my voice. He was under strict instructions not to dive the wreck. If he didn’t follow those instructions, I will not bring him along on the new trip.
“No, I haven’t been inside,” he says, “but you haven’t asked what we’ve found.”
I lean back slightly. I’m not used to Mikk talking back to me. Give him control of his own mission and he believes he’s in charge.
But he’s also right. I need to know what happened when he went to the Dignity Vessel, and I need to know before we make actual plans. Everything could change depending on what he saw.
“You’re right,” I say. “We shouldn’t be arguing procedure until we have all of the information.”
Squishy and Turtle both look at me, with matching stunned expressions on their faces. Apparently they’ve never heard me utter that sentence before.
Mikk doesn’t notice their response, although Odette does. She grins, apparently understanding what they’re thinking.
“We left just after you did,” Mikk says. “I rented a ship—I figured it would give us more verisimilitude—and I took Jennifer and Hurst with me.”
He took the younger-looking members of the crew. They were good choices if Mikk didn’t plan on diving. It would seem to a stranger boarding the ship that everyone on board was naive and new to diving.
“We brought rented equipment and stashed ours in the cargo hold, figuring no one would ever look for it, not with the rented stuff sitting out. Then we charted half a dozen courses, and began each one of them, veering off course every time. Hurst got us ‘lost’ so that it really looked like we had no idea where we were going.”
“I was beginning to think we didn’t,” Jennifer says.
Everyone laughs, but I don’t think she meant it as a joke. I think she had gotten nervous.
“The Dignity Vessel is a long way from nowhere,” I say.
Mikk nods. “I think that’s why they’re not too worried about it.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
He holds up his hand. “Let me explain,” he says.
They drifted in, like a group that’s tired and not sure where it’s supposed to be. They let the rented ship—called The Seeker—drift once they got close.
The one thing The Seeker did have was an excellent scanning system. Hurst used it to see what was in the vicinity. They located three military-class vessels, none of them warships. Two were quick maneuvering skips, and one was a command vessel. They formed a loose circle around one point in space.
The active vessels made it impossible for Mikk or Hurst to lock in on the Dignity Vessel’s signal, the thing that drew me to it so long ago, but they surmised it was there, just by the way the other ships surrounded it.
“There were only three ships,” Squishy says, interrupting the narrative. “And one of them was a command vessel?”
Mikk nods. He doesn’t seem irritated by the interruption.
I would have been.
“That’s not a lot of firepower,” Squishy says. “A determined someone could come into that area with the right equipment and drag that Dignity Vessel out of there.”
“It doesn’t sound possible to me,” I say.
“It is.” Odette speaks from the other side of the table. “There’s an easy maneuver to make the odds in your favor. But I want to hear what else Mikk found.”
She sounds a little annoyed. I’m getting a sense she’s not fond of Squishy. They’ve both been around diving a long time, so it’s possible they’ve met before and have a history.
It can also be that Squishy’s abrasive nature has already rubbed Odette the wrong way.
“We had to get a lot closer to see if the Dignity Vessel was actually there,” Mikk continues. “We drifted The Seeker in, as if we weren’t paying attention.”
Hurst knew how to do a casual mask of the scans, so it wouldn’t seem like they were looking for something. If they did get caught, he planned to say that the ships made him nervous and he wanted to know if they were a threat.
The three vessels didn’t seem to notice The Seeker. They didn’t come after it and they didn’t say anything to it.
Finally, the small team got a reading on the Dignity Vessel. They were even able to get a holographic image of it. They compared that image to the images I gave them before I left, and figured that not much has changed in the intervening years.
They even saw the probe.
Hurst wanted to go in closer. Jennifer agreed. It was Mikk who wanted to come back.
“I figured we were too exposed,” Mikk says, “but Hurst reminded me that Boss wanted a recon, and if we had to send another ship, then the people surrounding the Dignity Vessel might get suspicious.”
“I’m confused,” I say. “Those ships surrounded the Dignity Vessel? I thought they were small.”
“They were small,” Jennifer says. “But they were constantly moving around it.”
“The two skips were, anyway,” Hurst says. “The command vessel stayed in place.”
“You’re sure that was a command vessel?” Squishy asks.
Hurst nods. “I don’t think it could’ve been anything else.”
Neither of us tell Squishy that Hurst used to pilot ships in combat zones. He’s as familiar with military procedure as she is.
She shrugs skeptically, looking away. I’m not skeptical at all, and it’s my opinion that counts.
“I knew they were watching us,” Hurst says. “And I figured we should continue our ruse. We’re just a lost band of wannabe divers. Then we see the Dignity Vessel and we want to know more about it. We figured we would go in closer.”
“Did you?” Turtle asks.
Hurst nods. “I wanted to get into a better scanning range. I didn’t believe what we were seeing.”