Good man. His small form appears like a spider attached to the ship’s side. He returns to the exit hatch, still scanning it.
I look at the timer, running at the bottom of my main screen.
17:32
Not a lot of time to get in.
I know Karl’s headpiece has a digital readout at the base. He’s conscious of the time, too, and is as cautious about that as he is about following procedure.
Turtle scuttles across the ship’s side to reach him, slips a hand under a metal awning, and grunts.
“How come I didn’t see that?” Karl asks.
“Looking in the wrong place,” she says. “This is real old. I’ll wager the metal’s so brittle we could punch through the thing ourselves.”
“We’re not here to destroy it.” There’s disapproval in Karl’s voice.
“I know.”
19:01. I’ll come on the line and demand they return if they go much over twenty minutes.
Turtle grabs something that I can’t see, braces her feet on the side of the ship, and tugs. I wince. If she loses her grip, she propels, spinning, far and fast into space.
“Crap,” she says. “Stuck.”
“I could’ve told you that. These things are designed to remain closed.”
“We have to go in the hole.”
“Not without a probe,” Karl says.
“We’re running out of time.”
21:22
They are out of time.
I’m about to come on and remind them when Karl says, “We have a choice. We either try to blast this door open or we probe that hole.”
Turtle doesn’t answer him. She tugs. Her frame looks small on my main screen, all bunched up as she uses her muscles to pry open something that may have been closed for centuries.
On the handheld screen, enlarged versions of her hands disappear under that awning, but the exquisite detail of her suit shows the ripple of her flesh as she struggles.
“Let go, Turtle,” Karl says.
“I don’t want to damage it,” Turtle says. “God knows what’s just inside there.”
“Let go.”
She does. The hands reappear, one still braced on the ship’s side.
“We’re probing,” he says. “Then we’re leaving.”
“Who put you in charge?” she grumbles, but she follows him to that hidden side of the ship. I see only their limbs as they move along the exterior—the human limbs against the pits and the dents and the small holes punched by space debris. Shards of protruding metal near rounded gashes beside pristine swatches that still shine in the thin light from Turtle’s headgear.
I want to be with them, clinging to the wreck, looking at each mark, trying to figure out when it came, how it happened, what it means.
But all I can do is watch.
The probe makes it through sixteen meters of stuff before it doesn’t move any farther. Karl tries to tug it out, but the probe is stuck, just like my team would’ve been if they’d gone in without it.
They return, forty-two minutes into the mission, feeling defeated.
I’m elated. They’ve gotten farther than I ever expected.
FOUR
We take the probe readouts back to the Business, over the protests of the team. They want to recharge and clean out the breathers and dive again, but I won’t let them. That’s another rule I have to remind them of—only one dive per twenty-four-hour period. There are too many unknowns in our work; it’s essential that we have time to rest.
We all get too enthusiastic about our dives—we take chances we shouldn’t. Sleep, relaxation, downtime all prevent the kind of haste that gets divers killed.
Once we’re in the Business, I download the probe readouts, along with the readings from the suits, the gloves, and the handheld. Everyone gathers in the lounge. I have three-D holotech in there that’ll allow us all to get a sense of the wreck.
As I’m sorting through the material, thinking of how to present it (handheld first? overview? a short lecture?), the entire group arrives. Turtle’s taken a shower. Her hair’s wet, and she looks tired. She swore to me she wasn’t stressed out there, but her eyes tell me otherwise. She’s exhausted.
Squishy follows, looking somber. She looks solid next to Turtle’s thinness. But Squishy is thin too, just not as brittle. She has muscles like Karl does and a squat square face. Her hair is cut like his as well, shorn against her skull, which makes it easier for her to dive.
Jypé and Junior are already there, in the best seats. They’ve been watching me set up. They look like father and son. When Junior grows into his bone structure, he’ll be a handsome man like his father.
Right now, he looks like a partially completed sketch.
The completed sketch sits next to him. Jypé has a land-born’s way of moving—heavy and solid—but he looks too light to be land-born. He’s adapted to space better than I have.
Junior was born in space and raised in it, alternating between zero-g and Earth normal. He has the grace that his father lacks.
Leaning on the built-in couch, they both look strong and rested, ready for anything.
I hope that they are.
Karl is late. When he arrives—also looking tired—Squishy stops him at the door.
“Turtle says it’s old.”
Turtle shoots Squishy an angry look.
“She won’t say anything else.” Squishy glances at me as if it’s my fault. Only I didn’t swear the first team to secrecy about the run. That was their choice.
“It’s old,” Karl says, and squeezes by her.
“She’s says it’s weird-old.”
Karl looks at me now. His angular face seems even bonier. He seems to be asking me silently if he can talk.
I continue setting up.
Karl sighs, then says, “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
No one else asks a question. They wait for me. I start with the images the skip’s computer downloaded, then add the handheld material. I’ve finally decided to save the suit readouts for last. I might be the only one who cares about the metal composition, the exterior hull temperature, and the number of rivets lining the hatch.
The group watches in silence as the wreck appears, watches intently as the skip’s images show a tiny Turtle and Karl slide across the guideline.
The group listens to the arguments, and Jypé nods when Karl makes his unilateral decision to use the probe. The nod reassures me. Jypé is as practical as I remembered.
I move to the probe footage next. I haven’t previewed it. We’ve all seen probe footage before, so we ignore the grainy picture, the thin light, and the darkness beyond.
The probe doesn’t examine so much as explore: its job is to go as far inside as possible, to see if that hole provides an easy entrance into the wreck.
It looks so easy for ten meters—nothing along the edges, just light and darkness and weird particles getting disturbed by the probe’s movements.
Then the hole narrows and we can see the walls as large shapes all around. The hole narrows more, and the walls become visible in the light—a shinier metal, one less damaged by space debris. The particles thin out too.
Finally a wall looms ahead. The hole continues, so small that it seems like the probe can’t continue. The probe actually sends a laser pulse and gets back a measurement: the hole is six centimeters in diameter, more than enough for the equipment to go through.
But when the probe reaches that narrow point, it slams into a barrier. The barrier isn’t visible. The probe runs several more readouts, all of them denying that the barrier is there.
Then there’s a registered tug on the line: Karl trying to get the probe out. Several more tugs later, Karl and Turtle decide the probe’s stuck. They take even more readouts, and then shut it down, planning to use it later.