The Diving Bundle: Six Diving Universe Novellas Read Online Free PDF

conundrum no one else has faced before.
    I’m afraid of deep space itself, of the vastness of it. It’s inexplicable to me, filled with not just one mystery, but millions, and all of them waiting to be solved.
    A crackle, then a voice—Jypé’s.
    “We got a lot of shit.” He sounds gleeful. He sounds almost giddy with relief.
    Squishy lets out the breath she’s obviously been holding.
    “We’re coming in,” Junior says.
    It’s 40:29.
     
    ***
     
    The wreck’s a Dignity Vessel, all right. It’s got a DV number etched inside the hatch, just like the materials say it should. We mark the number down to research later.
    Instead, we’re gathered in the lounge, watching the images J&J have brought back.
    They have the best equipment. Their suits don’t just have sensors and readouts, but they have chips that store a lot of imagery woven into the suits’ surfaces. Most suits can’t handle the extra weight, light as it is, or the protections to ensure that the chips don’t get damaged by the environmental changes—the costs are too high, and if the prices stay in line, then either the suits’ human protections are compromised, or the imagery is.
    Two suits, two vids, so much information.
    The computer cobbles it together into two different information streams—one from Jypé’s suit’s prospective, the other from Junior’s. The computer cleans and enhances the images, clarifies edges if it can read them and leaves them fuzzy if it can’t.
    Not much is fuzzy here. Most of it is firm, black-and-white only because of the purity of the glovelights and the darkness that surrounds them.
    Here’s what we see:
    From Junior’s point-of-view, Jypé going into the hatch. The edge is up, rounded, like it’s been opened a thousand times a day instead of once in thousands of years. Then the image switches to Jypé’s legcams and at that moment, I stop keeping track of which images belong to which diver.
    The hatch itself is round, and so is the tunnel it leads down. Metal rungs are built into the wall. I’ve seen these before: they’re an ancient form of ladder, ineffective and dangerous. Jypé clings to one rung, then turns and pushes off gently, drifting slowly deep into a darkness that seems profound.
    Numbers are etched on the walls, all of them following the letters DV, done in ancient script. The numbers are repeated over and over again—the same ones—and it’s Karl who figures out why: each piece of the vessel has the numbers etched into it, in case the vessel was destroyed. Its parts could always be identified then.
    Other scratches marked the metal, but we can’t read them in the darkness. Some of them aren’t that visible, even in the glovelights. It takes Jypé a while to remember he has lights on the soles of his feet as well—a sign, to me, of his inexperience.
    Ten meters down, another hatch. It opens easily, and ten meters beneath it is another.
    That one reveals a nest of corridors leading in a dozen different directions. A beep resounds in the silence and we all glance at our watches before we realize it’s on the recording.
    The reminder that half the dive time is up.
    Junior argues that a few more meters won’t hurt. Maybe see if there are items off those corridors, something they can remove, take back to the Business and examine.
    But Jypé keeps to the schedule. He merely shakes his head, and his son listens.
    Together they ascend, floating easily along the tunnel as they entered it, leaving the interior hatches open, and only closing the exterior one, as we’d all learned in dive training.
    The imagery ends, and the screen fills with numbers, facts, figures and readouts which I momentarily ignore. The people in the room are more important. We can sift through the numbers later.
    There’s energy here—a palpable excitement—dampened only by Squishy’s fear. She stands with her arms wrapped around herself, as far from Turtle as she can get.
    “A Dignity Vessel,” Karl says, his