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

cheeks flushed. “Who’d’ve thought?”
    “You knew,” Turtle says to me.
    I shrug. “I hoped.”
    “It’s impossible,” Jypé says, “and yet I was inside it.”
    “That’s the neat part,” Junior says. “It’s impossible and it’s here.”
    Squishy is the only one who doesn’t speak. She stares at the readouts as if she can see more in them than I ever will.
    “We have so much work to do,” says Karl. “I think we should go back home, research as much as we can, and then come back to the wreck.”
    “And let others dive her?” Turtle says. “People are going to ghost us, track our research, look at what we’re doing. They’ll find the wreck and claim it as their own.”
    “You can’t claim this deep,” Junior says, then looks at me. “Can you?”
    “Sure you can,” I say. “But a claim’s an announcement that the wreck’s here. Something like this, we’ll get jumpers for sure.”
    “Karl’s right.” Squishy’s voice is the only one not tinged with excitement. “We should go back.”
    “What’s wrong with you?” Turtle says. “You used to love wreck diving.”
    “Have you read about early period stealth technology?” Squishy asks. “Do you have any idea what damage it can do?”
    Everyone is looking at her now. She still has her back to us, her arms wrapped around herself so tightly her shirt pulls. The screen’s readout lights her face, but all we can see are parts of it, illuminating her hair like an inverse nimbus.
    “Why would you have studied stealth tech?” Karl asks.
    “She was military,” Turtle says. “Long, long ago, before she realized she hates rules. Where’d you think she learned field medicine?”
    “Still,” Karl says, “I was military too—”
    Which explained a lot.
    “—and no one ever taught me about stealth tech. It’s the stuff of legends and kid’s tales.”
    “It was banned.” Squishy’s voice is soft, but has power. “It was banned five hundred years ago, and every few generations, we try to revive it or modify it or improve it. Doesn’t work.”
    “What doesn’t work?” Junior asks.
    The tension is rising. I can’t let it get too far out of control, but I want to hear what Squishy has to say.
    “The tech shadows the ships, makes them impossible to see, even with the naked eye,” Squishy says.
    “Bullshit,” Turtle says. “Stealth just masks instruments, makes it impossible to read the ships on equipment. That’s all.”
    Squishy turns, lets her arms drop. “You know all about this now? Did you spend three years studying stealth? Did you spend two years of post-doc trying to recreate it?”
    Turtle is staring at her like she’s never seen her before. “Of course not.”
    “You have?” Karl asks.
    Squishy nods. “Why do you think I find things? Why do you think I like finding things that are lost?”
    Junior shakes his head. I’m not following the connection either.
    “Why?” Jypé asks. Apparently he’s not following it as well.
    “Because,” Squishy says, “I’ve accidentally lost so many things.”
    “Things?” Karl’s voice is low. His face seems pale in the lounge’s dim lighting.
    “Ships, people, materiel. You name it, I lost it trying to make it invisible to sensors. Trying to recreate the tech you just found on that ship.”
    My breath catches. “How do you know it’s there?”
    “We’ve been looking at it from the beginning,” Squishy says. “That damn probe is stuck like half my experiments got stuck, between one dimension and another. There’s only one way in and no way out. And the last thing you want—the very last thing—is for one of us to get stuck like that.”
    “I don’t believe it.” Turtle says with such force that I know she and Squishy have been having this argument from the moment we first saw the wreck.
    “Believe it.” Squishy says that to me, not Turtle. “Believe it with all that you are. Get us out of here, and if you’re truly humane, blow that wreck up, so no