The Diving Bundle: Six Diving Universe Novellas by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

suit up, and somehow I make it through those first few minutes, zip along the tether with Turtle just a few meters ahead of me, and make my way to the hatch.
    Turtle’s gonna take care of the recording and the tracking for this trip. She knows the wreck is new to me. She’s been inside once now, and so has Karl. Junior and Jypé had the dive before this one.
    I’ve assigned three corridors: one to Karl, one to J&J, and one to Turtle. Once we discover what’s at the end of those babies, we’ll take a few more. I’m floating; I’ll take the corridor of the person I dive with.
    Descending into the hatch is trickier than it looks on the recordings. The edges are sharper; I have to be careful about where I put my hands.
    Gravity isn’t there to pull at me. I can hear my own breathing, harsh and insistent, and I wonder if I shouldn’t have taken Squishy’s advice: a ten/ten/ten split on my first dive instead of a twenty/twenty/twenty. It takes less time to reach the wreck now; we get inside in nine minutes flat. I would’ve had time to do a bit of acclimatizing and to have a productive dive the next time.
    But I hadn’t been thinking that clearly, obviously. I’d been more interested in our corridor, hoping it led to the control room whatever that was.
    Squishy had been thinking, though. Before I left, she tanked me up with one more emergency bottle. She remembered how on my first dives after a long lay-off, I used too much oxygen.
    She remembered that I sometimes panic.
    I’m not panicked now, just excited. I have all my exterior suit lights on, trying to catch the various nooks and crannies of the hatch tube that leads into the ship.
    Turtle’s not far behind. Because I’m lit up like a tourist station, she’s not using her boot lights. She’s letting me set the pace, and I’m probably setting it a little too fast.
    We reach the corridors at 11:59. Turtle shows me our corridor at 12:03. We take off down the notched hallway at 12:06, and I’m giddy as a child on her first space walk.
    Giddy we have to watch. Giddy can be the first sign of oxygen deprivation, followed by a healthy disregard for safety.
    But I don’t mention this giddy. I’ve had it since Squishy bowed off the teams, and the giddy’s grown worse as my dive day got closer. I’m a little concerned—extreme emotion adds to the heavy breathing—but I’m going to trust my suit. I’m hoping it’ll tell me if the oxygen’s too low, the pressure’s off or the environmental controls are about to fail.
    The corridor is human-sized and built for full gravity. Apparently no one thought of adding rungs along the side or the ceiling in case the environmental controls fail.
    To me, that shows an astonishing trust in technology, one I’ve always read about but have never seen. No ship designed in the last three hundred years lacks clingholds. No ship lacks emergency oxygen supplies spaced every ten meters or so. No ship lacks communications equipment near each door.
    The past feels even farther away than I thought it would. I thought once I stepped inside the wreck—even though I couldn’t smell the environment or hear what’s going on around me—I’d get a sense of what it would be like to spend part of my career in this place.
    But I have no sense. I’m in a dark, dreary hallway that lacks the emergency supplies I’m used to. Turtle’s moving slower than my giddy self wants, although my cautious, experienced boss self knows that slow is best.
    She’s finding handholds, and signaling me for them, like we’re climbing the outside of an alien vessel. We’re working on an ancient system—the lead person touches a place, deems it safe, uses it to push off, and the rest of the team follows.
    There aren’t as many doors as I would have expected. A corridor, it seems to me, needs doors funneling off it, with the occasional side corridor bisecting it.
    But there are no bisections, and every time I think we’re in a tunnel not a corridor, a door