The Diving Bundle: Six Diving Universe Novellas Read online

  Copyright Information

  Collection Title

  Copyright © 2013 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  First published in 2013 by WMG Publishing

  Published by WMG Publishing

  Cover and Layout copyright © 2013 by WMG Publishing

  Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing

  Cover art copyright © Philcold/Dreamstime

  “Diving into the Wreck” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch was first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, December, 2005

  “The Room of Lost Souls” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch was first published in Asimov’s SF Magazine, April/May, 2008

  “Becalmed” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch was first published in Asimov’s SF Magazine, April/May, 2011

  “Becoming One with the Ghosts” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch was first published in Asimov’s SF Magazine, October/November 2010

  “Stealth” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch was first published in Asimov’s SF Magazine, October/November, 2011

  “Strangers at the Room of Lost Souls” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch was first published by WMG Publishing, 2013.

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction: The Old Way

  Diving into the Wreck

  The Room of Lost Souls

  Becalmed

  Becoming One with the Ghosts

  Stealth

  Strangers at the Room of Lost Souls

  Copyright Information

  About the Author

  Introduction

  THE OLD WAY

  AT A CONVENTION several years ago, the editor who would eventually buy the novel Diving into the Wreck for his brand-new book line told me he wasn’t sure if he should buy the book. His concern? That the first two parts of the novel had originally appeared in Asimov’s SF as novellas. It didn’t matter to him that both novellas had won the Asimov’s Readers Choice award for the best novella of the year. Or that they had received international awards as well.

  He worried that the previous publication would taint the novel somehow.

  I leaned back in shock. Even though he professed to know the science fiction field, he apparently did not know it at all. In sf, it’s customary to publish short pieces before the longer work appears. Books from Nancy Kress’s Beggars in Spain trilogy to Connie Willis’s time travel novels had appeared in short form first, as did parts of Joe Haldeman’s classic The Forever War or one of my very favorite pieces (in both forms), Daniel Keyes’ Flowers For Algernon.

  That this young editor thought it unusual to publish a book after the shorter works appeared showed how little he knew the field. I had to coach him on ways to market to book—using the novellas as a hook, not as a detriment. Yes, readers had seen parts of the book, but not all of the book. And readers would buy the novel in part because they wanted to read the rest of the story.

  I write out of order, and I never know what pieces of a story I have until I finish that segment. I initially thought “Diving into the Wreck” was just a novella, even though I knew what the Dignity Vessel was and how that myth/legend had come about.

  I had no idea the story was tied to “The Room of Lost Souls” until Boss started narrating that novella to me. Then I wrote what I thought was the next novella, but couldn’t finish it. That novella turned out to be the opening section of the novel City of Ruins, which does not stand alone. I had to back up and figure out what was going to happen next to finish the first Diving novel.

  I learned years ago that it’s more fun to tell myself stories to complete my world-building than it is to write a “bible” or some kind of background material. “Becoming One With The Ghosts” started as a way to explain the opening of City of Ruins to myself. Parts of the novella are in the novel, but not in the same order. (My mind is a jigsaw puzzle mess.)

  As I wrote that book, I needed to figure out what mission Coop had just completed. So I wrote “Becalmed” which, so far, isn’t in any of the novels. I suspect some day it will be.

  “Stealth” circles back to a character we first meet in “Diving” the novella—Squishy. “Stealth” is her story, just like Boneyards is, in part, her story. “Stealth” let me explain Squishy to myself. (And yes, parts of “Stealth” are in Boneyards in different form.)

  “Strangers at the Room of Lost Souls,” introduces a new character who becomes quite influential in Skirmishes, the fourth Diving novel. She’s got a role in several books, I think. “Strangers” was fun to write because it’s a companion piece—literally—to another novella called “Encounter at Starbase Kappa,” which Asimov’s will publish in its October/November 2013 issue.

  Both novellas get sewn together in Skirmishes, and they’re so closely related that I didn’t feel right offering Sheila Williams of Asimov’s both novellas. That’s why WMG Publishing did “Strangers” as a standalone volume before Skirmishes came out.

  There are two other novellas in the Diving universe as of this writing, and neither of them are parts of novels (yet). The first, “The Spires of Denon,” was an Asimov’s cover story in 2009 (and a finalist for the Readers’ Choice award). WMG reprinted the novella in 2011. I have no idea to this day how “Spires” fits in the overall set-up, although I trust that I’ll figure it out.

  The other novella, “The Application of Hope,” appeared in Asimov’s in the August 2013, issue. The novella shows what happened to Coop and his team from a brand-new perspective, which is one that I’m quite excited about. “Hope” will become a standalone WMG novella sometime in 2014.

  The novellas are fun—and the readers seem to like them. So far, the Diving novellas have won three Asimov’s Readers Choice awards and have been nominated for three others. They’ve received two prestigious UPC awards in Europe, and have been reprinted in several different languages. They’ve provided the inspiration for covers for Asimov’s as well as Esli Magazine in Russia. And they’ve helped me figure out what I’m doing next.

  I know there will be other Diving novellas long before I’m done telling the story of Boss and her group. I have several planned, plus I have a lot of world building to do, so I know that even more will crop up. The neat thing about writing novellas first is that element of surprise. Did I know that Coop had visited the Room of Lost Souls? Yes, but I didn’t know when until I wrote “Strangers” Did I know that Squishy hated stealth tech? Yes, but I didn’t know why until I wrote “Stealth.”

  Boss herself started as a mystery to me when I wrote “Diving.” I still don’t know her real name. She won’t tell me—or anyone else it seems. It doesn’t feel quite right to call her Boss either, since that’s not how she thinks of herself. But that’s what everyone else calls her, so I use that shorthand when I’m not writing about her.

  The Diving universe is constantly evolving, both on the page and in my own imagination. I’m glad you’ve decided to join me on the journey—and I hope in a few years to do another bundle of “Diving” novellas. I’m already three novellas into that bundle, and I’m sure there will be more. I just don’t know when the others will appear—or what, exactly, they’ll be about.

  Fortunately, WMG Publishing understands how the novellas and novels work together. It’s fun to continue a science fiction tradition—writing both long and short in the same series. I hope to do this for many years to come.

  —Kristine Kathry
n Rusch

  Lincoln City, Oregon

  August 16, 2013

  DIVING INTO THE WRECK

  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.

  Pitted and space-scored, the wreck had some kind of corrosion on the outside and occasional holes in the hull. The thing clearly was old. And it had been floating for a very long time. Nothing lived in it, and nothing seemed to function in it either besides that one faint energy signature, which was another sign of age.

  Any other spacer would’ve scanned the thing, but other spacers didn’t have my priorities. I was happy my equipment wasn’t storing information. I needed to keep this wreck and its whereabouts my secret, at least until I could explore it.

  I made careful private notes to myself as to location and speed of the wreck, then went home, thinking of nothing but what I had found the entire trip..

  In the silence of my free-floating apartment, eighteen stories up on the scattered space-station wheel that orbited Hector One Prime, I compared my eyeball scan to my extensive back-up files.

  And got a jolt: The ship was not only Old Earth based, its type had a name:

  It was a Dignity Vessel, designed as a stealth warship.

  But no Dignity Vessel had made it out of the fifty light year radius of Earth—they weren’t designed to travel huge distances, at least by current standards, and they weren’t manufactured outside of Earth’s solar system. Even drifting at the speed it was moving, it couldn’t have made it to its location in five thousand years, or even fifty thousand.r />
  A Dignity Vessel.

  Impossible, right?

  And yet…

  There it was. Drifting. Filled with mystery.

  Filled with time.

  Waiting for someone like me to figure it out.

  ***

  The team hates my secrecy, but they understand it. They know one person’s space debris is another’s treasure. And they know treasures vanish in deep space. The wrong word to the wrong person and my little discovery would disappear as if it hadn’t existed at all.

  Which was why I did the second and third scans myself, all on the way to other missions, all without a word to a soul. Granted, I was taking a chance that someone would notice my drops out of FTL and wonder what I was doing, but I doubted even I was being watched that closely.

  When I put this team together, I told them only I had a mystery vessel, one that would tax their knowledge, their beliefs, and their wreck-recovery skills.

  Not a soul knows it’s a Dignity Vessel. I don’t want to prejudice them, don’t want to force them along one line of thinking.

  Don’t want to be wrong.

  The whats, hows and whys I’ll worry about later. The ship’s here.

  That’s the only fact I need.

  ***

  After I was sure I had lost every chance of being tracked, I let the Business slide into a position out of normal scanner and visual range. I matched the speed of the wreck. If my ship’s energy signals were caught on someone else’s scans, they automatically wouldn’t pick up the faint energy signal of the wreck. I had a half dozen cover stories ready, depending on who might spot us. I hoped no one did.

  But taking this precaution meant we needed transport to and from the wreck. That was the only drawback of this kind of secrecy.