The Diving Bundle: Six Diving Universe Novellas (23 page)

He’s my responsibility, and I need to get him back to the skip.

It only takes a few minutes. It’s not hard to move him along. Mikk moves ahead of us and pulls open the skip’s exterior door. Together we shove Karl into the airlock and then follow him inside.

I detach the lead. As I close the exterior door, I hear Mikk gasp.

I turn.

His body is visibly trembling. He’s looking into Karl’s faceplate.

I walk over to them and look.

Karl’s face has shrunken in on itself. His eyes are gone, black holes in what was once a handsome face.

“He’s dead,” Mikk says and he sounds surprised.

That’s when I realize I’m not. I think I knew Karl was dead when his belt appeared at that door. Karl’s too cautious to lose his extra breathers, his weapons, and the device.

“What happened to him?” Roderick asks from inside the skip.

I touch Karl’s faceplate. It’s scratched, cloudy, marred by the passage of time. The suit is so fragile that my grip has loosened its exterior coating.

He didn’t just die. He suffocated. Or froze. Or both. His suit ran out of oxygen. The environmental systems shut off, and he was left to the blackness of space as if he were outside the station, unprotected.

“Is it something catching?” Roderick’s voice rises.

“No,” I say. At least, not yet. Someday we’ll all die from the passage of time.

“Then what is it?” Roderick asks. I realize at that moment, he’s not going to open the interior door until I tell him.

“The device malfunctioned,” I say, and that’s true. It didn’t protect him, although it protected me. “The Room killed him.”

“How?” Mikk asks, his voice nearly a whisper.

All I have is a working theory at the moment, and I learned long ago not to let others know my theories. It causes problems, particularly if I’m right.

“I don’t know exactly how,” I say, and that’s not entirely a lie. I don’t know the mechanics of what happened exactly, although I do know what caused it.

That Room has a functioning stealth system. Ancient stealth, not the stuff we invented. The kind we found on the Dignity Vessel. Only here, it works, and has continued to work over time.

That’s why we couldn’t find an energy signal, like we did on the Dignity Vessel. Because the stealth tech is working here, masking everything, including itself.

The station isn’t growing. The stealth shield is degrading. The exterior parts of the station move in a slower timeframe . The interior part, nearest the stealth tech itself, is moving at an accelerated pace.

That’s why Karl died when the device malfunctioned. Time accelerated for him.

I wonder if that was when he saw the lights. Time passing, things appearing and changing, like the light from stars long gone, seen over a distance.

At least he hadn’t died frightened.

Or had he? Thinking he was alone in that big empty Room.

Thinking we had abandoned him.

Like all the other souls lost in that horrible place.

14

WE GET HIM INSIDE. It’s harder in real gravity; he’s heavier than I expected. Roderick and Mikk want to remove the suit, to see what really happened, but I talk them out of it.

We’ll do it on the
Business
.

We fill out logs, download information, remove equipment—all the things you’re supposed to do at the end of a dive. We do it without speaking, and while trying not to look at the body on the floor behind us.

Then Roderick goes to the cockpit. Mikk sinks down beside Karl, as if staring at him would bring him back. I take out the device. It’s still on. The lights run along the bottom in the same pattern they did when I picked it up from Mikk.

I shut it off again, then turn it on. I can feel no vibration, nothing to signal that the thing is working. Nothing changes around me—no visual shift, no audio hallucination.

Nothing.

Just like before.

I should have seen that as a warning.

But I didn’t.

It was my fault for trusting technology I didn’t understand.

15

MOMENTS LATER, the skip arrives at the
Business
. Roderick sends the signal and we ease into the docking bay. The doors shut behind us, and the countdown begins until the atmosphere inside the bay gets restored.

No one here knows that Karl is dead. No one knows how spectacularly we failed.

I tell Roderick and Mikk that Karl has to remain on the skip. We’ll send in some of the other crew to retrieve him, while I look up the forms he filled out so that we would take care of his body according to his wishes.

I also tell them not to say much until we meet tonight in the lounge.

Then I take the device, tuck the handheld into my pocket, and leave the skip. I’m going to meet the team first and I’m going to tell them what went wrong.

My father and Riya are standing near the door. No one else is with them and I have the distinct impression they’ve prevented the rest of the team from coming here.

My father is smiling. Riya is looking hopeful. Somehow they know we were in the Room.

All of my good intentions fade.

I toss the device at them. “This damn thing malfunctioned.”

It skitters across the floor. My father is staring at me. Riya bends down to pick it up. As she stands, she frowns.

“Obviously it didn’t fail,” she says. “You’re here.”

“
I’m
here,” I say, “but Karl is dead.”

“Karl?” Riya glances at my father as if he understands what I’m talking about.

And to his credit, he does. “You let Karl go into the Room?”

“I didn’t let him do anything,” I snap. “He’s in charge.”

Or he
was
in charge. But I don’t correct myself.

“He chose to go in. He decided last night.”

“You let him?” my father repeated.

Behind me, I can hear the door to the skip snap shut. Footsteps along the floor tell me that Roderick and Mikk have joined us, but have stopped just a few meters back.

“How irresponsible of you.” Riya shakes her head. “I gave this to you with the express understanding that you would use it.”

“Really?” I say. “You gave it to me so someone could access that Room and recover your father, which isn’t possible by the way.”

“You were supposed to go. That’s the basis for our agreement.” She’s still shaking the device at me. “You were supposed to go.”

She didn’t react to what I said about her father. Maybe she hadn’t understood me.

“What you want,” I say slowly, as if I’m talking to a child, “is not possible. Your father is not recoverable. Didn’t the previous people who went in tell you that? Didn’t they tell you how empty that fucking Room is?”

“It’s not our responsibility that he died,” she says. “You didn’t follow my instructions.”

I know she heard me the second time. And it’s clear she doesn’t care. She knew what was in that Room. She knew that her father—or some kind of ghost of him—wasn’t there.

I snatch the device from her hand. “What happens if I break this thing?”

“Don’t,” my father says, but he’s not scared. He is looking at my face, not at the device in my hand.

I turn and toss it to Mikk. He catches it, looking surprised. He holds it like it burns him, even though it’s cool to the touch.

Then I advance on my father. “Tell me what’s really going on here.”

“You were supposed to go in,” he says.

“I did,” I say. “I went in and recovered my friend.”

“He’s like almost mummified,” Roderick says, his voice shaking. “What does that?”

My father looks at me, then looks at Riya. She is staring at Roderick.

“They both went in?” she asks. “Together?”

“The boss already told you,” Mikk says. “She had to recover his body. He went in alone. It was a smart dive move. He was going to map everything. He thought he’d be clearer headed than everyone else.”

“You shouldn’t have allowed it,” my father says.

“Maybe if I’d had all the information, I wouldn’t have,” I say. “What aren’t you two telling me? Besides the fact that you knew the Room was empty.”

“It’s not our fault,” Riya says. “You didn’t listen.”

“I listened,” I say. “You wanted us to recover your father. You wanted me to treat it like I would treat any other wreck, and your father would be salvage. That’s what you offered. You came to me because I’d gotten out of the Room before and you figured I wouldn’t be scared to wear the device…”

My voice trails off as I listen to what I had just said.
I had gotten out of the Room before
. That’s why they hired me. Not because of the device. Not because of her father.

Because I had escaped once before.

“The device doesn’t work, does it?” I ask. “It’s just pretty lights and nothing more.”

“No,” my father says, but Mikk takes the device and rips it apart. He takes out the center piece, the part I couldn’t quite place, and stomps on it.

The lights still run along the outer edge of the frame.

“Son of a bitch,” he says.

Roderick takes the device, turns it over, then crouches and looks at the pieces on the floor of the bay. Whatever that circle piece was, it was solid. There were no component parts, nothing that built into an engine or a chip.

“What were you people thinking?” he asks my father and Riya. “Why did you do this?”

“You were testing something else, weren’t you?” I’m looking at my father. “This is something to do with your business, not with Mother, isn’t it?”

He doesn’t answer. He takes a step back. His cheeks flush.

“The others who went in, the ones you say tested the device, they’re all survivors too, aren’t they?” I ask.

Riya looks at my father again.

“I thought I was the only one still alive,” I say.

My father is staring at me.

“But there are others, aren’t there? And you found them. You sent them in. And they came out again. Didn’t they?”

I take a step toward Riya and I let her see how angry I really am.

“Didn’t they?” I ask again.

“Yes,” she says.

“With a fake device. A handful of us can come and go as we please, can’t we?”

“Yes,” my father says.

“Why didn’t you just tell us?” I ask.

“Would you have gone in then?” Riya asks.

“What does my getting into that Room prove?”

“That some of us can do it,” my father says. “Some of us are designed to survive.”

He clings to me. His helmet hits mine, and a crack appears along my visor. He covers it with his gloved hand and I can hear his voice in our comm system:
Hurry, hurry, I think her suit is compromised.

He holds me so tight I can’t breathe. We go through the door back to the single ship someone has brought and they stuff me inside. My dad can barely fit beside me. He checks the environmental system in the single ship, then pulls off my helmet and shoves a breather in my mouth.

C’mon, baby, c’mon
, he says,
don’t die on me now.

My lungs hurt. My body aches. I look up at him and he’s terrified. He keeps glancing out the porthole at the Room.

I had no idea
, he says.
I didn’t know or I wouldn’t have let her go in there. I certainly wouldn’t have let her bring you.

But I can’t think about it. I can’t think about any of it. The hum is too loud, the voices echoing in my head. I close my eyes, and I refuse to think about it. About the way she stopped talking, the way her hand slipped from mine, the way her faceplate shattered as her body slammed into the wall.

Then I wrapped my arms around my knees, waiting. My daddy would come. I knew he would come.

I stayed there for what seemed like days, listening to the voices, feeling my mother’s body brush against mine, as she got older and thinner and more and more horrible.

Finally I couldn’t look any more. I closed my eyes and wondered when the voices would get me.

Then my father grabbed me and pulled me out.

And I was safe.

I look at him now. His eyes are wide. He has made a verbal slip and he knows it.

“My God,” I say. “You know what’s in there.”

“Honey,” my father says. “Don’t.”

I turn to Roderick and Mikk. “Go get the others. Bring a stretcher so that we can take Karl out of here with some dignity.”

“I don’t think we should leave you here,” Mikk says. He’s catching onto this quicker than Roderick.