The Diving Bundle: Six Diving Universe Novellas (60 page)

Elissa then sent her crew inside. They didn’t want to go, but she made them. The longer they kept warm, the better chance they had.

Her cheeks ached with cold and her nose was numb. As she closed the locker’s door, she promised her bridge crew that she would join them shortly.

She just never specified that she would join them in the locker. She had a hunch none of them would make it, and she would join them in death.

Or rather, they would join her, since she would die first.

But she was going to do everything she could to prevent that.

She had no idea what had been in that wave which had hit them after the explosion, but she knew it had something to do with that malfunctioning stealth tech.

And she also knew that she lacked the scientific knowledge to figure out how stealth tech worked. Everyone who knew that was either on the other side of that creaking door or had died in the initial explosion.

So she could do only minimal things.

Her crew had tried to do the normal restarts. She was going to try some abnormal ones.

Nothing had power, but she didn’t see any fried equipment either. Whatever had gone through hadn’t burned out the controls. It had just disabled them.

And if she could figure out a way to jumpstart them again, she might buy some more time.

But focusing on everything had gotten her nowhere. Now she was just going to focus on the environmental systems.

Her crew needed warmth.

Somehow she was going to provide it.

12

ELISSA BARELY BOARDED the lower level of the Room of Lost Souls when the trouble started. Someone had turned on the gravity to the entire station, which had Vilhauser bleating excitedly—apparently, he hadn’t figured out how to do that either—and some of her team had trouble initially just because they forgot to turn off the gravity in their boots. Then, two of her soldiers—Kuether and Maichle—refused to walk to the stairs beyond the landing platform.

They were simply too scared.

Dryden wanted to send them back to the ship, get replacements, but Elissa didn’t. She ordered them to remain near the door, facing the stairs, in case the strangers tried to get to the
Discovery
.

At least, that was the solution. To get to that solution, she and Dryden had another round of private discussions, and Kuether and Maichle went back and forth like scared children, following one instruction and then another. If the strangers were watching, they would think her team completely incompetent.

And then Vilhauser wanted to take his little band of scientists and head to that secret room—without protection, without help.

“They’re
scientists
,” he said. “We’ll be fine.”

She wouldn’t give him the courtesy of an argument. Scientists were dying in pursuit of knowledge throughout the Empire, often at the hands of other scientists who had defected to the Nine Planets, scientists who believed that whatever the Empire was working on had to be evil, and therefore had to be stopped.

“You will go nowhere until we figure out what we’re facing,” she said to Vilhauser in a tone she’d never used with him before.

She could see his face through his bubble helmet. His eyes were wide. She had startled him.

She finally set up her team in a proper recon formation—the two cowards and the scientists would remain here, others would fan out over the stairs, and the rest would work their way up.

She would head to the secret room first. She knew how many of the strangers were there. That gave her a small advantage. Then, if need be, she would contact the unidentified transport, which was probably where their leader was hiding out.

She had just gotten her team to the stairs, when Calthorpe contacted her from the bridge.

“Commander, they’ve figured out that you’re on the Room. A group is heading your way.”

“How many?” she asked.

“They seem to be bringing in specific people. It started with two heading toward you from the secret room, but I see eight more people on the move. I think you’ll be facing ten. And of those ten, nine have those reinforced environmental suits.”

“And weapons?” she asked.

“Something that looks like laser rifles,” Calthorpe said. “But those are only the visible weapons. And I can’t tell from here what their capabilities are.”

“All right,” she said. “Update me if you get more.”

Then she turned her attention to her team. They had all heard Calthorpe as well.

“I’m going to greet them,” Vilhauser said.

“You are going to listen to me,” she said. “We’re going to assume they’re hostile. Then we’re going to—”

One of the soldiers facing her started, and she stopped. Four of her people immediately moved into attack position, backs straight, rifles at the ready.

Her heart pounding, she turned.

Ten people faced her, people she didn’t recognize, in environmental suits so thin they looked like skin. The only way she could tell the difference between the armored suits and the unarmored suit was that the armored suits looked a bit more rigid, particularly over the torso.

Unless she missed her guess, only one suit had no armor. That suit belonged to the man in the center.

At least, she thought the person facing her was a man. He was taller than the average space-faring person, with very broad shoulders and a military posture. But that was all she had to go on. She couldn’t see his face except as a shadow through his gray visor.

They didn’t even wear helmets. The environmental suits had some kind of hood component, which looked both more efficient and more constraining at the same time.

She had no idea how long they’d been watching, which made her want to curse out her people, even though the problem had been hers. Calthorpe had warned her. She shouldn’t have been taken by surprise.

Yet somehow she thought the strangers were farther away—that they had just left that stupid secret room.

“You got the secret room open!” Vilhauser said, sounding like a teenager meeting someone famous.

The idiot had used the speaker on his helmet, so he broadcast to the entire landing area.

“Doctor,” she snapped through the private comm. “Shut up.”

He moved toward the strangers and Dryden tried to hold him back. Obviously, Vilhauser wasn’t listening.

“How in God’s name did you get that room open?” he asked the strangers.

The strangers didn’t reply. Hell, they hadn’t even moved. But she did. She stepped in front of Vilhauser so that he couldn’t even see the strangers.

“If you don’t shut up,” she said, “I will personally send you back to
Discovery
, and you won’t be conscious when I do it.”

He gave her a sideways glance, clearly startled that she had spoken to him like that. At least he hadn’t shut off his internal comm link yet.

Then she faced the strangers. “You’re trespassing.”

“Oh?” The person without the armored suit spoke. His voice was deep and male. “We thought this place had been abandoned.”

He spoke with an accent she didn’t recognize. And she couldn’t tell from his tone whether or not he was telling the truth.

It really bothered her that she couldn’t see his face.

She raised her chin slightly. “The Room of Lost Souls is property of the Enterran Empire. Didn’t you see the postings?”

Because of the postings, she would have been within her rights under Empire law to shoot these people on sight. But she also knew she would get in trouble for that, because they had opened that secret room, and they did seem to have some knowledge of the way that the Room of Lost Souls worked.

“The maps we have state that this place had been deserted for generations. The maps also state that we should avoid it.” The stranger tilted his head just a little. “That admonition intrigued me.”

He didn’t call the Room by its designation, the way that someone from the Empire would. Anyone, really. The Room of Lost Souls had worked its way into myth long ago, and anyone from this sector would have acknowledged that.

She asked, “And you are?”

She deliberately phrased the question that way, because she wanted him to decide whether he would tell her his name, his rank, or the name of the group he represented.

Instead, the bastard didn’t answer. “I take it you’re from the Enterran Empire.”

“Yes,” she said, deciding to give him that. He nodded again, a little, as if in acknowledgement, and as he was about to tell her who he was, Vilhauser grabbed her arm.

“I need to talk to him. He got the secret room open.”

The idiot didn’t use his internal comm. He said all of that through his speaker. He shattered the delicacy of this initial contact.

“Technically, I didn’t get the room open,” the stranger said as if Vilhauser had spoken to him.

His reply clearly started Vilhauser. It startled her as well. She wondered what the stranger meant by
technically
.

He continued, “Give us a little time. I had no idea this place belonged to someone. I’ll get my people out of here.”

So he didn’t want a confrontation either. Good. Clearly, the Empire’s presence worried him. She opened her mouth, but Vilhauser spoke first.

“I’d rather you show me how to get into that room,” he said.

She resisted the urge to throttle Vilhauser. She kept her gaze on the stranger, knowing she was at a disadvantage. He could see her expressions—and probably her annoyance at Vilhauser—and she couldn’t see anything about him or his people.

“We need to check out your people,” she said. She didn’t want to be surprised again. She wasn’t even sure about their weapons.

“Why?” the stranger asked. “We all know this base is empty.”

She wasn’t talking about the emptiness of the base. She was more concerned with the fact that these ten people seemed to have no concern—indeed, no understanding—of the danger they were in from the Room itself.

Or maybe they weren’t in danger. Maybe they had no idea what the Room did to most people in the Empire.

Maybe they truly were strangers.

She wasn’t sure how to express that, without giving too much away. So she said, “Your people seem to have no trouble in this base. Plus, we didn’t see you entering this part of space.”

He straightened. Just a bit, but enough for her to notice. She might not have noticed, though, if she had been watching his expression. She was looking for anything that might give her a clue about him, and his posture was about all she had. Everyone around him had remained still.

She needed her soldiers to behave like his people. Hell, she needed the idiot scientists to behave like his people as well.

The stranger did seem surprised that she hadn’t seen his ship, but she wasn’t sure what that surprise was. Had they cloaked and he was astonished they had done so? Or had they slipped in through an opening in the information shield?

“I’m not sure why you would have expected to see me,” he said.

Damn. He was playing the same game she was: Be coy, don’t give too much away.

So she decided to give him more information, information he would know if he had somehow come through the shield.

“We’ve posted most of this region, informing ships to turn away. We also state that anyone who gets through will be considered trespassers and might get shot on sight.”

“Apparently, your postings aren’t as numerous as you thought,” the stranger said. “And it sounds like they make idle threats, since we never saw a ship of yours on our trip here.”

That statement matched what her people had experienced. But she wasn’t going to say so.

“You might not have seen us,” she said, “but we should have seen you. We had an information shield in place.”

“An information shield,” the stranger said as if he hadn’t heard that term before. “You believe that we would have passed through that on our way here?”

“I know you would have,” she said. “There’s no other way here. You would have had to go through our sensors.”

“And you don’t think there are gaps in your sensors,” he said.

“There aren’t,” she said firmly, even though she wasn’t certain.

“And yet we’re here,” he said. Was that sarcasm? What was it about her that provoked sarcasm today.

“You could’ve cloaked,” Vilhauser said in that same excited voice. She knew where his statements were leading. He was going to ask the damn stranger if he had stealth tech, and she needed to stop it now.

“No cloak is good enough to mask against our sensors,” she said loudly, and she was glad she did, because Vilhauser had actually added the words “stealth tech” before he realized he had said too much.

“Doctor,” Dryden said to Vilhauser through the comm, “please let the Commander handle this.”

She was both grateful and irritated at Dryden for speaking up. She needed to concentrate on the strangers, but she was having trouble. She was not a diplomat, and this situation was beyond anything she had done before.