"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Diving Into The Wreck" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

Diving Into The Wreck
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
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