The Diving Bundle: Six Diving Universe Novellas (59 page)

Still, she had one and her crew didn’t.

They were her priority.

“Okay,” she said. “We’re going to do two things. Binek, I want you to check the nearest life pod. See if its systems got fried. If the systems are fine, we will finally have a solution.”

She doubted that the systems were fine, but she didn’t say anything. Stranger things had happened.

“Secondly,” she said, “we need to open the equipment locker and remove the environmental suits.”

The equipment locker was part of the bridge. She wouldn’t have to manually open that door to the corridor. And the word “locker” was a misnomer; it was actually a small room off the bridge. The locker had a door with a manual override. The door opened with a simple pull if the power to the ship went down.

Someone had been thinking on that design, at least.

“You think some of the suits will work?” Trombino asked. Again, he sounded a bit too eager, as if he were clutching onto anything.

“I am not in the guessing business, Officer,” she said, her tone flat. A man prone to great highs would also fall to a great low if things did not turn out as he expected. She didn’t want to raise his hopes. “We’re taking this one step at a time.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. She could see his form, outlined against the portal, moving to the far side of the bridge. Apparently, he would be the first to the equipment locker. That was fine.

She followed.

Someone else—she couldn’t tell who—pulled the door open. It groaned, much like the sound she had heard from outside the bridge.

The interior of the locker was dark, the kind of blackness that hid your hand half an inch from your face.

“Ma’am.” Binek spoke from behind her. “I checked the pod closest to me. None of its systems work. I didn’t go in all the way, because it’s even colder than in here. But I’ll go deeper if you want me to.”

“No need, Binek, thank you.” She wished they could catch a break. She had never been afraid of dying in space, but now that she was faced with that reality, she vaguely wondered why she hadn’t been afraid of it. It was a bad way to die.

“I’m just going to pull the suits out so that we can see sizes,” Trombino said. “That work, Commander?”

“Yes,” she said.

He extended a hand holding a suit, and someone smaller—Gatson?—grabbed it. He continued to take and extend suits until no one picked up the final one.

“Should we put Calthorpe into his suit, ma’am?” Trombino asked, his tone carefully neutral.

Ryder answered before Elissa could even gather a thought.

“No,” Ryder said.

With that one flat word, they all knew: Calthorpe was dead.

The bridge was silent for a long moment, until a groan echoed in the compartment. The groan came from outside, probably from the way the ship was twisting.

“You have a suit, right, Commander?” Trombino asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“You know,” he said, “this locker’s big. We could get in it before the cold really sets in. Our combined body warmth—”

“Might get us an extra ten minutes,” Gatson said. “I’m not sure I want to be in that kind of darkness for an extra ten minutes.”

“An extra ten minutes is the difference between living and dying sometimes,” Elissa said. “If we need it, we’ll go in there.”

“No one’ll find us in time,” Lee said. “No one would think to look.”

“Unless we marked it somehow,” Binek said.

“There’s reflectors on the last suit,” Trombino said. “I’ll pull them off, see what I can create.”

Elissa didn’t argue. They needed to keep moving, needed to keep busy. Despite what she had said to Gatson, Elissa agreed with her: An extra ten minutes probably wouldn’t make much of a difference.

But she had to plan for everything.

“While he’s doing that,” Elissa said, “let’s see if there’s something we missed.”

“Ma’am,” Binek said softly. Somehow he had come up beside her. “I could try to go to the rear of the ship, see if anything is working there.”

She shook her head before remembering that he couldn’t see her. “We don’t have an airlock between the door here and the corridor. We run the risk of venting all of our atmosphere.”

She didn’t say anything about the groaning outside the door. She hoped she wouldn’t have to explain further.

“I just think we need to explore all of our options, ma’am.”

“Me, too,” she said just as softly. “The problem is that we have so very few of them.”

10

THE TRANSPORTS AND FIGHTERS she had requested were already in place by the time the
Discovery
got to the Room of Lost Souls. The
Discovery
hadn’t been that far away, which meant that some of her ships in the squadron had been running war games.

She still couldn’t quite figure out how that transport—that unrecognizable transport—had gotten in, particularly if her people had been participating in a military exercise.

On her orders, the
Discovery
docked at the Room’s lowest level. The unrecognizable transport had docked where ships usually did, on the middle level, quite some distance away.

She had already selected fourteen of her best combat soldiers. She would have brought a smaller group, but Vilhauser insisted on going as well, and he was going to bring the scientists who apparently specialized in that secret room.

She needed the extra staff to corral him. And she knew she couldn’t talk to him along the comm system. He would just shut her voice off, which would put her soldiers in the difficult position of having to choose who to listen to: their commander or the guy who was in charge of the scientific part of the mission.

She decided it would be easier if she went along. If the mission morphed into something scientific, she could make the call. If it didn’t, then she would keep Vilhauser under control.

She put all of that in her briefing notes, in case something unplanned happened out there, something caused by the stupid rules that General Command had set up for the SRP. She would make a case, when she got back, that the chain of command on an SRP couldn’t be this mushy.
Someone
had to make all of the decisions for the mission, even if that meant having a more scientifically versed commander in charge of the squadron handling the SRP.

She suited up, and then organized her team near the airlock. Even though Vilhauser wanted his team to go in first, she wouldn’t let him. She was sending soldiers in to clear the area.

As they waited for the last of the scientists, one of the soldiers, Ensign Enzo Dryden, pulled her aside. He was one of her youngest officers, but he had risen in the ranks fairly quickly. She trusted him.

And she didn’t like the look on his face. A frown creased his broad forehead and his jaw clenched.

Clearly whatever he was going to say made him nervous, but he spoke anyway.

“A few of the soldiers are worried, Commander. They’ve never gone into the Room of Lost Souls before. They’ve heard the stories.” He ran a hand through his short-cropped red hair. “I’m thinking it might be better if we change the team out a little.”

She had her bubble helmet under her arm. It wasn’t unusual for someone with combat experience to make suggestions, although it was unusual as everyone was suiting up for the mission.

Dryden had worked with many of these soldiers before. She noted that he named no names, which gave her confidence. He wasn’t recommending that anyone leave the team.

“When we selected the active soldiers for this SRP, Dryden, none of us expected a ground action. Now we’re faced with one—or something that resembles one.” She kept her voice low so that no one else could hear her. “I chose this team because everyone on it has had actual hand-to-hand experience.”

“I appreciate that, ma’am, but it might be better to have people with experience in the Room. Honestly, ma’am, I’ve never seen some of these people so terrified.”

She almost asked for names. She believed that discussing terror before a mission was unprofessional. Every soldier had been terrified at one point or another. It came with the job. She couldn’t count the times that terror seized her before a mission. These days, her adrenalin still pumped. She’d been worried the first time she had gone into the Room of Lost Souls as well, but she had come out all right.

“Can they perform their duties, Ensign?”

His green eyes widened just a bit at the question. “I believe so, ma’am.”

“Do you have suggestions of others who have had ground combat experience and who have also been in the Room?”

He swallowed. “Not off the top of my head, ma’am.”

“Well,” she said, hoping she sounded confident, “I’ve been assured that everyone on the
Discovery
has the ability to go into the Room of Lost Souls without effect.”

“Beg pardon, ma’am, but I’ve heard those assurances as well, and they’re incomplete. A lot of people have made it to the entire structure of the Room of Lost Souls, and died inside the actual room itself.”

She wondered if Vilhauser had told someone else that. Something else to discuss with him when this was all over.

“Are you one of the terrified ones, Ensign?” she asked.

A slight reddish hue colored Dryden’s cheeks. “I wouldn’t characterize myself that way, ma’am.”

“Good,” she said. “Because I will need you on this team. You’ll need to help the terrified ones through this. I’m not expecting anyone to go into the actual room that’s caused all the troubles. Vilhauser and his people can do that.”

“Even if there’s an action in that room, ma’am?” Dryden asked.

He meant even if the fight moved to that room. She thought about it for one small second.

“Yes,” she said. “Even if.”

He smiled. “That should reassure most of the team, ma’am.”

“Good,” she said. She was going to watch him, to see any reaction from the soldiers he talked to, but at that moment, Vilhauser and his scientists showed up.

So much for her plans.

She sighed softly. She recognized two of the scientists as people who had caused her trouble before.

Great. Not only did she have to deal with Vilhauser’s attitude, she would also have to deal with theirs.

She walked over to Vilhauser, stopping him and his four scientists before he got to the soldiers.

“I’m going to object again, Doctor, to five scientists going to the Room of Lost Souls,” she said.

He opened his mouth to answer her, but she didn’t let him speak. She’d made that mistake too many times in the past.

“We don’t know who these intruders are,” she continued, “or what they’re doing. For all we know, they’re going to react badly to our presence and immediately attack.”

He was carrying his bubble helmet under his arm. He gave her a look of both pity and contempt, and somehow that look also managed to convey how very stupid she was.

“Commander,” he said in a tone that matched the look, “it’s obvious that we’re about to meet scientists. They’ve discovered something that we’ve been trying to do for a very long time. We will have a meeting of the minds.”

“I’m sure you will,” she said snidely, since contempt was the tone of the day. “I’m sure that you’re facing scientists, because we all know that scientists prefer environmental suits with body armor and carry large weapons wherever they go.”

“That, Commander,” he said, “is what we have people like you for.”

Then he pushed past her. She opened her mouth to add that he had misunderstood, that the strangers had body armor, and then she decided the comment wasn’t worthwhile.

Vilhauser had completely undermined her authority, but there wasn’t much she could do about it, not under the rules the Empire set for an SRP. She’d learned long ago that a commander who had to demand respect would get even less of it than a commander who let moments like this pass.

Only she wasn’t going to let the moment pass completely.

“Doctor Vilhauser,” she said. “I’m going to treat this trip as a military mission. I will order my people back if I believe they’re in danger. If you do not follow my orders, then your people will get left behind. I will not send my people into a hostile situation because you ‘believe’ these intruders to be sympathetic. I will protect my own.”

He stopped, turned, and smiled at her dismissively. “I’m sure we won’t have a problem, Commander.”

One of the other scientists, a man whose name she couldn’t remember, half smiled at her and shrugged, almost as if he were apologizing.

She had to make a decision now. Either she ran this mission exactly the way she wanted to, or she did not go. Without her, though, her team would be subject to Vilhauser’s whims.

“Let’s go,” she said to her team, mostly because she couldn’t say anything else. “Let’s just go.”

11

IT ONLY TOOK TROMBINO ten minutes to make a sign out of the reflectors on the remaining environmental suit. He placed them on the door to the suit locker. The strips spelled
In Here
.