The Diving Bundle: Six Diving Universe Novellas (56 page)

“I feel dizzy too, ma’am. Officer Alistair Binek,” he added that last as if he wasn’t sure she would recognize his voice. She did. “And I’m pretty sure I cracked a rib. Nothing serious. I can breathe just fine.”

“I think I broke a few ribs,” said a new female voice. “Provisional Lois Baxter, ma’am. I’m breathing all right, and I don’t think my lungs are damaged. I suspect I’ll feel this more when the gravity comes back.”

Baxter was the only Provi on the bridge crew, and one of Elissa’s best crew members, even though—or maybe because—she had worked her way up through the ranks.

“With luck, Provi,” Elissa said, “we’ll have the gravity on soon, and someone medical will be able to ease the pain.”

“It’s not a problem right now, ma’am,” Baxter said.

Her crew was doing its best to convince her that they were fine. But she heard something in the voices, something that told her they were not fine, any more than she was.

“Officer Malachi Locke, ma’am. I’m pretty sure my right arm is broken, maybe in more than one place. But I’m functional, especially while the gravity is off.” Locke sounded almost cheerful, so Elissa knew it was a front.

She was about to respond when one more voice spoke up, sounding shaky.

“Officer Sepp Trombino, ma’am. I had a bloody nose but I don’t think it’s broken. I’ve had a broken nose. I know what it feels like and this isn’t it. My body has that same uncomfortable feeling everyone else has described, but I’m good to go, ma’am.”

She smiled. Trombino was one of her more gung-ho officers, but he often complained his way through things. She didn’t mind right now. They all had reason to complain.

She went over the responses in her head. Seven responses. She should have had eight.

“What about Lieutenant Calthorpe?” Elissa made sure her voice remained steady as she asked about the only person who hadn’t checked in.

She waited, watching the shadowy things float past her. Unidentifiable, even by shape. She couldn’t tell, but it seemed like the flare from outside the ship was fading as well.

“Anyone? Is Calthorpe near you or did he hit his head? Is he unconscious?”

“Someone keeps bumping me,” Ryder said from across the bridge. His voice echoed just a bit.

Now that she had asked everyone to identify themselves, she could recognize voices, even when they sounded just a bit off. She was beginning to think that whatever happened had affected her hearing as well.

Or maybe it had had the same impact on her brain as it had had on her heart.

That made her shiver yet again.

“Some
one
?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” Ryder said, his voice even. She didn’t hear uncertainty in him or even distress. And she should have heard distress, since he believed he had broken his ankle in the ship’s initial violent reaction to the explosion. “First, some fabric brushed my face, and then a little while later, I felt skin.”

That turned her stomach, and it shouldn’t have. She was usually made of stronger stuff than that.

“Anyone think that it might’ve been you bumping into Lieutenant Ryder?” she asked. “Anyone?”

“We all banged around a lot, ma’am,” Binek said. “I know I hit a lot of stuff at first. Might’ve been people, ma’am.”

A chorus of voices added their agreement.

“Since that initial explosion, has anyone brushed up against a fellow crew member?” Elissa asked, realizing that everyone’s brains were working too slowly. She had never encountered this before. It put the entire ship at even more of a disadvantage.

No one answered her with an affirmative. No one answered that question at all.

She took a deep breath and let it out. Was it her imagination or was the air noticeably cooler than it had been a few minutes before?

“All right,” she said. “We’re going to have to assume that Calthorpe is unconscious. If he floats past anyone, please find a way to ground him.”

She was still shivering. Shock? She hoped not. She didn’t need it, not right now. She needed to be clear. They all needed to be clear.

“Now,” she said, “we need to get near the console. We need to turn lights and atmosphere back on. Then we need to assess the damage.”

Something banged far away, as if it came from outside and was echoing through the ship. She could feel a vibration through her hand.

It couldn’t be one of the fighters. She would have seen its lights through the portal, right? Besides, it was too soon for one to get here.

Or maybe her sense of time was off.

She made herself take a deep breath.

If the Room had exploded, then there was a lot of junk out there. Even if it hadn’t, there would still be some parts—not to mention bits of Vilhauser and her two excellent soldiers—floating near the ship.

Plus, that device, that malfunctioning device that had caused her to separate from the Room in the first place, might not have come apart in the explosion. She had no idea what that device was, and she had no idea what it could do.

Everything was supposition at this point.

Everything.

Including their odds for survival.

6

THE EMPIRE CALLED the thing operating in the Room of Lost Souls stealth tech, but Elissa learned it was something more than that.

She finally understood on her first full day on the
Discovery
, as she went on a tour of the research labs with the head scientist, Keon Vilhauser. Vilhauser called himself a technician rather than a researcher; he said he liked knowing how something worked, not how to recreate it in the lab.

The labs filled the entire center of the
Discovery
. The ship was built with the scientific function in mind. Each section was walled off from the other sections in case something went wrong.

In fact, the
Discovery
could separate into three parts if necessary—the bridge and the front part of the ship could detach from the middle, and the engineering section, all the way in the back, could do the same. If an on-board experiment got out of control and the ship had warning, it could abandon the scientific middle and leave it alone in the darkness of space.

Elissa didn’t like the design. She preferred the older science ships that had the experimental labs in the back. The labs could be detached and left behind with the bulk of the ship intact.

The problem was that those ships were also easier to attack, and there was no better way to destroy a science vessel then to hit its lab with something lethal.

The
Discovery
was the command ship of this expedition. Elissa commanded a squadron of thirty vessels, most of which would simply stand guard outside the Room’s section of space. They would link their sensors, covering an established region of space. Such a technique was called an information shield, and it was highly effective. It made sure no other ships would enter the region while the
Discovery
was working at the Room of Lost Souls.

In fact, Elissa had added one additional protection outside the sector: she placed warning buoys along the way to the squadron, warning any outsiders that proceeding into the sector would be considered trespassing, and would be punished as such.

She believed in warning innocents that they might be getting in trouble. That way if they showed up near her squadron, and their ship had to be destroyed, they at least had sufficient warning.

After the
Discovery
had left port, Vilhauser invited Elissa into the science lab. He took her to his lab first.

Vilhauser had covered the tables with small vials of yellow pulsing light. She could see them from the doorway. The lab felt…unusual…as if it had more static than other places on the ship.

Vilhauser invited her to step inside, but stopped her near the door for a good minute before he spoke. He had watched her for that entire minute, as if he expected her to run.

Elissa had been stared down by stronger people than Vilhauser. As he stared at her, she stared at him. He had long black hair, curly like Rustin’s, but unlike Rustin’s, the curls were out of control. Vilhauser’s eyes matched his hair color, and probably made him attractive when he was younger. Now, frown lines turned his eyes downward, and marked two deep grooves that ran from either side of his nose down to his chin. He was thin and flabby, the kind of person who wouldn’t have made it through five minutes of her standard qualification drill for incoming crew members.

“Well,” he said flatly. “At least you have the marker.”

She knew about the genetic marker. She wouldn’t have been on this trip if she didn’t have it. Neither would her crew.

So she found his comment odd, almost as odd as she found him.

“They made sure we all have it,” she said. “No one would be on this mission if they lacked the marker.”

His frown lines seemed to grow deeper. Then he shook his head as if she were the most naïve person he had ever met.

“You have a lot of faith in your military masters,” he said.

She bristled, but she didn’t show it. She hated it when civilians who benefitted from a military presence bad-mouthed the military. Only her training kept her from expressing her disgust at him.

“I’ve been on half a dozen of these so-called SRPs,” he said, “and even though the crew is supposed to be vetted for the marker, the vetting is poor. If one of your crew members flew near the Room of Lost Souls, then someone considers them vetted.”

She hadn’t checked the vetting, and that idea gave her pause. But she didn’t move. And she didn’t let Vilhauser know that his point made her uneasy.

Either he sensed it, or he felt the need to justify his statement. He added, “I’ve had soldiers die because we’ve been running stealth tech experiments on a science ship. Usually nothing happens outside the lab, but every now and again, the wrong person walks inside, and dies. Horribly.”

His expression didn’t change either, as if “horribly” wasn’t all that horrible, or as if he had become very jaded about the whole thing.

“Your name is Trekov,” he said, “and one of your relatives
died
in the Room, which means that some branches of your family lack the marker. However, you wouldn’t be standing in here if you didn’t have the marker.”

She nodded toward the vials of pulsing light. “I take it that’s an active stealth tech field.”

“I wouldn’t call it a field,” he said. “But it is active, and someone without the marker would be in trouble right now.”

That anger she’d kept tamped down since she’d been on vacation rose again. The arrogant bastard. He’d brought her in here to see if she would
die
? What an asshole.

What a dangerous asshole.

She made note of that.

“Do you want to bring the entire crew in here one at a time?” she asked in a neutral tone, as if she hadn’t figured out that she would have died without the marker. Inside, though, she wanted to give full voice to the anger she felt. It was all she could do to keep her words from being sarcastic.

“Of course not,” he said. “We should have done something like that
before
we came out here. I looked over the records and made certain that a preponderance of the crew had gone into a prescribed stealth tech area at least once. The crew members who hadn’t are either on the lower decks or I asked them to be moved to other ships in the squadron.”

She straightened her shoulders and raised her chin ever so slightly. So that was where the confusing orders had come from. Lieutenant Calthorpe had informed her that certain crew members were not allowed on the
Discovery
for personnel reasons and that others would be confined to areas outside of the laboratory middle.

Some of those crew members did not like the constraint and asked her personally why she had ordered that. She hadn’t, she told them, and then approved their transfers to other ships in the squadron if they so desired.

Now, she wondered if she should have left any of them on this ship at all.

“I know no one has briefed you on exactly what we’ll be doing,” Vilhauser said. “Succinctly, our mission is this: we believe that the Room has an active stealth tech device, but we can’t find it. Our mission is to locate it and remove it from the Room. We will be taking items from the Room and testing them—away from the Room itself. You should know that if anything happens to the
Discovery
, we prefer it happen away from the Room so that the Room remains intact.”

That last part Flag Commander Janik had told her. The Room of Lost Souls was a valuable treasure and should not be destroyed under any circumstances. At the time, she had thought the circumstances he referred to were an attack by another ship. Now, she realized that he meant should something go wrong, it was better to blow up the
Discovery
(or parts of it) than to harm the Room itself.

“You do understand that this mission could last months,” Vilhauser said.

“Of course,” she said, this time letting just a hint of that sarcasm out. “I was briefed.”