The award-winning “Diving into the Wreck” novella marked the first step in a large journey for New York Times bestselling writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch. She’s written many other award-winning novellas in the series, as well as the novels Diving into the Wreck, City of Ruins, Boneyards, Skirmishes, The Falls, and The Runabout. The next novel, Searching For The Fleet, will appear in September 2018. She’s working hard on the ninth and tenth novels in the series. When she finishes those, she’ll return to her massive Retrieval Artist universe. A eight-book saga in that universe has just been released in a single ebook boxed set—almost 2,000 pages long. She’s a Hugo Award-winning editor and writer, who has been nominated for most of the awards in the sf and mystery fields. She writes under several pen names as well. The public ones are Kristine Grayson and Kris Nelscott. To find out more about her work go to kriswrites.com. To find out more about Diving, go to divingintothewreck.com.
We approach the wreck in stealth mode: lights and communications array off, sensors on alert for any other working ship in the vicinity. I’m the only one in the cockpit of the Nobody’s Business. I’m the only one with the exact coordinates.
The rest of the team sits in the lounge, their gear in cargo. I personally searched each one of them before sticking them to their chairs. No one, but no one, knows where the wreck is except me. That was our agreement.
They hold to it or else.
We’re six days from Longbow Station, but it took us ten to get here. Misdirection again, although I’d only planned on two days working my way through an asteroid belt around Beta Six. I ended up taking three, trying to get rid of a bottom-feeder that tracked us, hoping to learn where we’re diving.
Hoping for loot.
I’m not hoping for loot. I doubt there’s something space-valuable on a wreck as old as this one looks. But there’s history value, and curiosity value, and just plain old we-done-it value. I picked my team with that in mind.
The team: six of us, all deep-space experienced. I’ve worked with two before—Turtle and Squishy, both skinny space-raised women who have a sense of history that most out here lack. We used to do a lot of women-only dives together, back in the beginning, back when we believed that sisterhood was important. We got over that pretty fast.
Karl comes with more recommendations than God; I wouldn’t’ve let him aboard with those rankings except that we needed him—not just for the varied dives he’s gone on, but also for his survival skills. He’s saved at least two diving-gone-wrong trips that I know of.
The last two—Jypé and Junior—are a father-and-son team that seem more like halves of the same whole. I’ve never wreck dived with them, though I took them out twice before telling them about this trip. They move in synch, think in synch, and have more money than the rest of us combined.
Yep, they’re recreationists, but recreationists with a handle: their hobby is history, their desires—at least according to all I could find on them—to recover knowledge of the human past, not to get rich off of it.
It’s me that’s out to make money, but I do it my way, and only enough to survive to the next deep space trip. I don’t thrive out here, but I’m addicted to it.
The process gets its name from the dangers: in olden days, wreck diving was called space diving to differentiate it from the planet-side practice of diving into the oceans.
We don’t face water here—we don’t have its weight or its unusual properties, particularly at huge depths. We have other elements to concern us: No gravity, no oxygen, extreme cold.
And greed.
My biggest problem is that I’m land-born, something I don’t confess to often. I spent the first forty years of my life trying to forget that my feet were once stuck to a planet’s surface by real gravity. I even came to space late: fifteen years old, already land-locked. My first instructors told me I’d never unlearn the thinking real atmosphere ingrains into the body.
They were mostly right; land pollutes me, takes out an edge that the space-raised come to naturally. I gotta consciously choose to go into the deep and dark; the space-raised glide in like it’s mother’s milk. But if I compare myself to the land-locked, I’m a spacer of the first order, someone who understands vacuum like most understand air.
Old timers, all space-raised, tell me my interest in the past comes from being land-locked. Spacers move on, forget what’s behind them. The land-born always search for ties, thinking they’ll understand better what’s before them if they understand what’s behind them.
I don’t think it’s that simple. I’ve met history-oriented spacers, just like I’ve met land-born who’re always looking forward.
It’s what you do with the knowledge you collect that matters and me, I’m always spinning mine into gold.
So, the wreck.
I came on it nearly a year before, traveling back from a bust I’d got suckered into with promise of glory. I was manually guiding my single-ship, doing a little mapping to pick up some extra money. They say there aren’t any undiscovered places any more in this part of our galaxy, just forgotten ones, and I think that’s true.
An eyeblink is all I’d’ve needed to miss the wreck. I caught the faint energy signal on a sensor I kept tuned to deep space around me. The sensor blipped once and was gone, that fast. But I had been around enough to know that something was there. The energy signal was too far out, too faint to be anything but lost.
As fast as I could, I dropped out of FTL, cutting my sublight speed to nothing in the drop. It still took me two jumps and a half day of searching before I found the blip again and matched its speed and direction.
I had been right. It was a ship. A black lump against the blackness of space.
My single-ship is modified—I don’t have automatic anythings in it, which can make it dangerous (the reason single-ships are completely automatic is so that the sole inhabitant is protected), but which also makes it completely mine. I’ve modified engines and the computers and the communications equipment, so that nothing happens without my permission.
The ship isn’t even linked to me, although it is set to monitor my heart rate, my respiration rate, and my eyes. Should my heart slow, my breathing even, or my eyes close for longer than a minute, the automatic controls take over the entire ship. Unconsciousness isn’t as much of a danger as it would be if the ship were one-hundred-percent manual, but consciousness isn’t a danger either. No one can monitor my thoughts or my movements simply by tapping the ship’s computer.
Which turned out to be a blessing because now there are no records of what I had found in the ship’s functions. Only that I had stopped.
My internal computer attached to the eyelink told me what my brain had already figured out. The wreck had been abandoned long ago. The faint energy signal was no more than a still running current inside the wreck.
My internal computer hypothesized that the wreck was Old Earth make, five thousand years old, maybe older. But I was convinced that estimation was wrong.
In no way could Earthers have made it this far from their own system in a ship like that. Even if the ship had managed to survive all this time floating like a derelict, even if there had been a reason for it to be here, the fact remained: no Earthers had been anywhere near this region five thousand years ago.
So I ignored the computerized hypothesis, and moved my single-ship as close as I could get it to the wreck without compromising safety measures.