RUST IN PEACE
Seanan McGuire
The body of the ocean liner dominated the ocean floor, a great husk of rot and rust and broken glass. The color of her hull was no longer obvious, obscured by waving strands of opportunistic sea grass and the clinging bodies of the sea stars that had come to hunt and feed. Fish swam through the gashes in the ship’s side, bodies undulating with the current, untroubled by the slow approach of our submersible.
I had never seen anything more beautiful in my life.
“There she is, Dave,” I whispered, unable to keep the awe and delight—and yes, relief—from my voice. “Just where we knew she’d be. There she is.”
Dave didn’t say anything. He’d always been a careful diver, more aware of his surroundings and the risks that attended them, than anyone else I’ve ever known. This was the man I would trust to ferry me into Hell, if that particular dive ever became necessary. He’d get me through the rivers of molten iron and lava in one piece.
He’d gotten me here.
“The Sendale Star,” I breathed. If Dave tended toward silence, I preferred sound. It was never quiet this far below the sea. The water had weight here, and with weight came a soft but constant susurration, like we were moving through the veins of some great, living beast. I often thought that all the people who scoffed at the idea of “Mother Earth” should be sealed in a fragile metal can and dropped to the bottom of the Pacific, where they could hear the heartbeat around them, the sound of current and tide and living sea.
Of course, they’d probably demand we pave the oceans if we did that to them. Someone who doesn’t want the planet to be alive certainly doesn’t want it to be bigger than them.
I put that line of thought brusquely aside. We weren’t here for the living, or for the political. We were here for the dead, and for the biggest infusion of cash our bank accounts would ever see.
“Get us in closer,” I said. Dave answered with a grunt, steering the submersible slowly toward the great rusting bulk of the Star.
Damn, but she was beautiful. Her lines were still as clean as the day she’d been finished, emphasized rather than obscured by the alterations her time in the living sea had made. The absence of paint and polish did nothing to lessen her beauty—if anything, they enhanced it, showing that she was the kind of lady who needed no effort, no artifice, to be beautiful beyond measure.
The hole in her side was a gaping, jagged wound that would never heal. Even after we finished wandering through her bones, learning everything we could, and notified the authorities of her location—earning ourselves a fat finder’s fee in the process, naturally—that hole would remain. She had historical value, not nautical. She’d go to a museum or a lab somewhere, and everything about her would be picked apart and analyzed before she was released to someone who would tear her apart for scrap.
She would sail again. Not as she was now, but reincarnated into a hundred new forms, part of the bones of a hundred new ships. If I thought of it that way, this didn’t feel as much like a betrayal. More like a rebirth. We were going to raise this fallen lady from her watery grave and set her on the waves when we were done, and while she might not be grateful, she would be gracious to the end. I could see it in the proudness of her prow.
“This is as close as I can get without disturbing the ship,” said Dave.
“It’s close enough.” I gazed longingly out the front window at the money, at the history, at the opportunity spread before us on the sea floor, and I smiled. “We come back tomorrow, ready to dive.”
* * *
The Sendale Star was a luxury liner. Not in the same class as the Titanic or any of those other big, eye-catcher ships: she was smaller, faster, and equally, intensely expensive, even though she was only ever intended to make short hops along the Pacific Coast. She was beautiful, she was exclusive; everything about her screamed “class” to the status-hungry nouveau riche who had come to the golden, hardscrabble shores of California and the Pacific Northwest looking for a fortune and, upon finding it, found no path into the high society they so yearned to enter. To the East Coast, they were new money, little better than the poor.
But the Star…oh, the Star didn’t care about the age of their money, only the color, only the way it glimmered with power and potential when set against the price tag of the world. Better still, the Star took her bookings locally, which meant that if one of those fancy Easterners wanted to go for a ride through the most beautiful waters in the world, gazing out on miles of pristine, exploitable coast, they would have to travel to Vancouver or San Francisco, at no small expense, only to risk finding themselves in a third-class cabin, or worse yet, in steerage. This was something the West Coast’s wealthy could have that their unwilling peers could only dream of.
She sailed the coast four times, down and back, without incident. Maybe the bloom would have been off the rose before too much longer: novelty is in many ways the most expensive thing of all.
On her fifth voyage, a man—Mr. Matthew Alder, of Portland, Oregon—boarded with his family. This was, in and of itself, unremarkable: history would have forgotten him, if not for two things.
The ship was lost, with all hands, somewhere between the ports of Seattle and Vancouver. Despite being an increasingly trafficked stretch of sea, rich with cruise liners and Coast Guard vessels, the Star’s location would remain unknown for decades. The cruise line that had owned her and claimed her as their biggest asset went bankrupt in the aftermath of the disaster, and their records were seized by local authorities, not to be seen until an informant responded positively to the idea of bribery. That’s the first. The second…
When Mr. Alder’s sister came to clean out his home and claim his things, she found a note on the mantle, positioned so anyone who entered the home would be sure to see it. In her brother’s hand, it read only, I am so sorry for what is to follow. Be assured that the damage would have been greater had we not set out to sea.
To this day, no one has known what he meant…and to this day, treasure hunters have been seeking the fallen Star.
Until this day. When we finally found her. Untouched by anything save for the sea that became her grave, waiting for us to come and bring all her sweet and hidden secrets home.
Ours.
* * *
The nice thing about looking for a ship as famous as the Star is that it’s easy to know where not to look. Just go online and look up all the places people have written about going. Then dig a little deeper, and mine the social media of your competitors for references that tie them to a specific place, a specific time. While Dave had been applying his military research skills to going over maritime records and a hundred years of weather reports, I had been chewing on Facebook and Twitter and Reddit, filtering the noise, cross-referencing the “good spots” that people had been hoarding for years while they hunted for that eventual perfect payday.
Treasure hunters love to share our successes. We’re not always so happy to share our failures, reasoning that if we don’t tell the competition where we’ve already been, maybe they’ll waste their time going there just like we did. But then Dave found some current maps that had been adjusted with new data, and I confirmed that no one had yet been to our most likely site, in part because it seemed unrealistic for a ship as large as the Star to wind up in a region defined by little islands and shallow waters, and now here we were. Here we were, on the cusp of changing our lives forever.
My dive suit was skintight and comfortably confining. Some people find them claustrophobic, but I appreciate the way a well-fitted dive suit clings, keeping me from feeling like I’m alone in the open sea. Dave was fiddling with his equipment, checking the wireless feed that would keep my cameras streaming back to our ship. By presenting an unbroken chain of events from the moment we found the Star until we came up with the first of our many, many prizes, we could make it more difficult to challenge our claim to be the ones who had located the Star. Always important, especially with a find of this size.
Salvage law stated that, since the Star was located within three miles of the United States coastline, everything on her belonged to the government. But the find—the prestige and importance of being the first ones to shout “tag, you’re it”—was still a pearl beyond price. We could collect rewards from the surviving relatives of several of the passengers, who had been waiting for decades to know for sure what had happened. We could write our own ticket with burgeoning treasure hunters, who would suddenly see us as the best the sea had to offer.
There is more to wealth than chests of gold and jewels. Although it would have been nice to keep a few of those, if I were being honest.
“All signals strong,” said Dave.
“Awesome,” I replied. “I have enough air on me for an hour, counting descent and ascent, so I’m going to get moving.” Once I was in the water, he would be able to speak to me, thanks to my waterproof ear bud, but I wouldn’t be able to respond. There are things technology has not yet managed to achieve.
Dave frowned. “I wish you weren’t going down there alone.”
“Can’t be helped.” My girlfriend and I had had a parting of the ways six months ago, when she decided that waiting around for me to make the big score was not as useful as moving to Montana and working for an accounting firm. Prior to that, she had been my spotter on dives. Dave was right: it was dangerous for me to go down alone. But by the time Cynthia had left us, we had been so close to the Star that there hadn’t been time to find a replacement. We couldn’t trust anyone who’d want to join us.
I was good. I was accomplished. I would be fine.
Smiling at Dave, I slipped the mask down over my face and stepped off the deck, plunging into the water. A veil of bubbles accompanied me down, wrapping itself around me like a wedding gown. When it cleared, I turned on my light and began to swim.
Our small submersible was great for scouting runs: with it, we could travel miles along the bottom of the sea, recording and analyzing everything we saw. Sometimes we found things that were of clear scientific interest, and would set those aside until the meat of the dive was done and we were no longer concerned about leading the competition to our location. Most of the time, we saw lots of spectacular fish. That was enough. No one goes into a profession like ours unless they truly love the sea. Although the money, when it happens, doesn’t hurt.
Despite the submersible’s undeniable advantages, there are some things that have to be done by a single diver, alone against the sea. So I swam, the lights attached to my shoulders illuminating the water, until there she was: the Star, resting rusted and lovely on the bottom. I swallowed a sigh of relief and pleasure. Part of me had believed, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the Star would be gone, or crawling with rival divers, when we came back. She disappeared once before, after all, without a whisper, without a trace. Even this spot…
We followed the weather reports and we followed the last known headings for her position and we followed the rumors and we followed the gossip, and the fact remains that we got here first—us, out of all the people in the world—because we were willing to take the long shot. We were five hundred miles away from where we should be. There was no logical way the Star should be here, so far from where her course would have seen her go down.
But she was there, and she remained there as I swam toward her, my skin trembling within the confines of my suit. She remained there as I approached the gash in her side, my cameras rolling and my floodlights on, showing me her secrets.
The first secret was enough to make my breath catch in my throat—never a good idea when depending on canned air. The hole in her side was clearly what had taken her down to the depths. Historians had always assumed she hit something, since nothing else explained the disappearance of a ship of her size and status. They’d also assumed the hit had been sudden and catastrophic, since otherwise, she would have had the time to radio for help.
This hole was large enough to qualify as catastrophic, but it wasn’t a tear in her skin, and it wasn’t the punched-in pit of a hard impact. It was a blooming metal flower, the edges curled outward like petals, revealing a tempting glimpse at the secrets hidden within. The Star hadn’t hit anything.
The Star had died of a self-inflicted wound.
The crawling in my skin intensified as I continued forward, careful to turn and give my camera a panoramic view of the scene. The Star had been a suicide, whether accidental or intentional. Had this been an act of terrorism? Or had some essential system overloaded and blown, taking her down before anyone could call for help? Neither theory explained how she’d come to rest here, so far from where she should have been, but one mystery had been solved, even if the solution raised a dozen more questions.
I paused at the opening, panning my light around, revealing layers of damaged steel and devastation. My ear piece crackled.
“I don’t think you should go in there,” said Dave’s voice. “It might not be structurally sound.”
I couldn’t answer him, so I held my hand up to the camera and signed, slowly but firmly, ‘No.’
“Come on, Angie. It doesn’t look safe. You need to get away from there. Come back, and we can start checking out the interior later.”
I didn’t bother signing this time. I simply pushed forward, out of the open sea and into the confines of the Star’s hold. The walls closed in around me as my light played across them, revealing their details for the first time in a century.
I swam forward, and all around me, the Star shone.
* * *
Dave met me at the rail when I returned to the ship, a scowl on his face and a towel in his hands. “When I tell you something isn’t safe, you’re supposed to listen,” he snapped. From him, that was a soliloquy worthy of the stage, and I felt a little bad for inspiring it.
Only a little, though. I held up my bag of small treasures, items taken from the Star to prove that we’d been the first to get there, and more, that she really was the vessel we believed her to be. “Sorry,” I said. “You know how I love to shop.”
Dave managed to hold his scowl for a few more seconds before it melted away, replaced by eager greed and a childlike awe. He was here for the score as much as I was. “Show,” he said.
“Aw, did you use up all your pronouns on that little speech?” I asked. I handed him the bag and took the towel. “Give me a minute to dry off, and we can go through the goodies.”
Dave nodded, silent again, and walked with the spoils toward the waiting table.
There are historians who hate people like us, and for good reason: we disrupt the sites we discover in the process of proving that we were the ones who discovered them. They hate the ones like me and Dave a little less, because at least we roll cameras and don’t make off with millions of dollars in gold and diamonds and other valuables, but they still hate us. I can live with that. I hold secrets and answers in my hands every time I do my job right, and that’s worth a little hatred.
Dave was sitting impatiently, his eyes locked on the bag, when I came back, now wearing warm, dry clothes. He looked up at me and grunted. I grinned.
“Good things come to those who wait,” I said, and sat down to begin pulling secrets out of my metaphorical treasure chest.
Historians might hate us, but we were always careful: we only removed the pieces that were unlikely to be damaged by the transitions, and we never broke into air-filled rooms if we had any choice in the matter. Because of the way big ships go down, some compartments can stay sealed for decades, even centuries, and those are the ones with the most historical relevance. I’ve known treasure hunters who traveled with crowbars and small explosives, who didn’t care how much they destroyed in their quest for relevance and riches. We never did that.
One by one, I produced a jar of jam, a few pieces of tarnished silverware, a bottle of wine miraculously unbroken by the blast, a small jewelry box, and—most precious of all—a green glass bottle with a wax stopper jammed firmly into its neck, trapping both air and what looked like a hand-written letter inside. The sea had never been able to break through the wax.
“Why write a letter in a bottle if you know your ship is going down?” I asked philo-sophically.
“Maybe somebody who wished they’d been alive in the age of cellphones.” Dave produced a knife, beginning to slowly run it around the edge of the wax seal. He was easing it open, giving the bottle time to adjust to every change of pressure and temperature.
I should probably have told him to stop, to save this last mystery for the historians who would eventually take this site from us. I did no such thing. My cameras were good enough to have picked up the bottle when I claimed it from the silt clogging the Star’s hall, but not good enough to have seen that it was still air-tight and perfectly sealed. We’d hand over the message and the bottle, and if we chose to be the ones who read it first, who could blame us?
While Dave was distracted with the message, I reached for the jewelry box. It was locked, but time and the sea had had their way with the findings: the lock didn’t give way. The hinges on the box itself did. I flipped the lip open, peering greedily inside. Some of the pieces I’d seen dredged up from the bottom of the sea had been stunning. Even if the water had been able to rot fabric and thread, people used to sail with all manner of gold and jewels draped around their necks, as if their mere presence on the deck wasn’t enough to scream that they had money. This box could hold a king’s ransom—
Or it could hold a small brown rock sphere with a long crack down one side, barely revealing the sparkling shapes of the crystals inside. The water had eaten the fabric around it, but left the rock untouched: I had no doubt this thing was as smooth and inexplicable as it had been on the day a rich woman decided a rock was a better accessory for an ocean voyage than all the pearls in Portland.
“What the hell?” I picked up the rock, and nearly dropped it as the skin on my fingertips tingled, suddenly warm despite the chill lingering in the air. I tightened my grip, holding the rock up to the light. It sparkled with microscopic motes of shimmering dust. Still nothing impressive enough to have deserved a place of pride in the jewelry box. “This is bizarre.”
“This is bad.”
I glanced to Dave. He was pale, holding a curled sheet of paper toward me. It was shaking. There wasn’t a wind, and it was shaking.
He was shaking.
Wordlessly, I took the papers from his hand with my free one. Our fingertips brushed and that tingle was back, inexplicable and almost hot this time, more intense than it had been before. I set the rock back in its resting place, and I read.
This is my apology to the world. I would that it had been unnecessary: that G_d Almighty, in His wisdom and grace, had not seen fit to place this trial before me. But I am only a man, and I have no influence over the divine, and my time—such as it now is—grows short.
For those who have found this note, if ever it is found: flee this cursed ship. Take nothing, touch nothing, and leave our bones consigned to the deep, where perhaps they can be allowed to rest.
For those whose families set sail with me and mine: I am so very sorry. This was the only way to be sure the foul taint was cleansed from our fair land, and while each death is set upon my shoulders, I assure you that so many more would have died if we had not boarded this vessel. It is as a pebble to a mountain. This may bring you cold comfort, but they did not die in vain.
I glanced up. “What the hell is this?”
“Keep reading,” said Dave, staring fixedly at his fingertips.
I kept reading.
The fallen star was found by my son, Matthew Jr., a day before we were to sail. It had come down on the beach, and he tracked its descent with the bright fierceness that is the sole domain of children. Nothing had ever shone so brightly in his eyes as that star.
I am grateful that it was found, that tragedy was hence averted for the city and country I love. But though the thought may be shameful, I wish it had been found by other hands. That this cruel sacrifice should be placed on other shoulders, and not on mine.
My son is already dead.
“What the fuck.”
“Keep reading.”
The first signs of illness had already appeared, in all of us, when time came to depart for the Star. I left what apologies I could; I bought an extra ticket for my wife’s maid, who thought the ocean air would cure what ailed her. She does not think so any longer, but sees the necessity of what I must do. She has family in Portland. She would keep them safe. We will keep them safe.
The star, if such it is, carries with it more than a taste of the heavens: it carries sickness such as I have never known, sickness such as mortal flesh cannot bear. I have worn gloves to write this missive, and pray only that any who find our grave will find it before they find the star, which cannot be broken, not even with the crushing pistons of our ship’s engine, nor melted, nor destroyed in any earthly way. It is cracked, yes, but I believe that to be by some foul design, for the crack is where the evil escapes.
If you have already seen the star, it is too late for you. Please. I beg of you. Choose as I have chosen, and spare the ones you love by sacrificing yourself. No man is worth the world.
I only wish I could pretend we were.
Signed, in regret, your obedient servant, Matthew Alder.
I turned the letter over in my hand, looking for a postscript—some note on the back that would tell me this was all a joke played by a man on a sinking ship, looking for one last “gotcha” before the waves closed over his head.
There wasn’t one. But there was a purple teardrop sketched across my knuckles, like the flesh there had been somehow terribly bruised. I dropped the letter. Trying not to let my fingers tremble, I brushed them across the damaged skin.
There was no pain. Only a soft squishing sensation as the meat of my hand collapsed inward, revealing the structured scaffolding of the bones beneath.
I made a sound.
“Yeah,” said Dave bleakly. I raised my eyes. He showed me the fingertips of his left hand, where they had brushed against mine. They were the deep, blackened purple of a bruise, and the color was spreading, winding its way up his fingers like water soaking into dampened paper.
“He sank them.” He blew the boiler, or maybe he somehow had access to dynamite and smuggled it aboard. Anything to make sure the ship, once it left harbor, didn’t return. Anything to sink the star, and the plague it had carried, where no one would ever find it, because it was too contagious, and too terrible, and sometimes quarantine isn’t enough. Sometimes quarantine could never be enough.
There was still no pain in my hand. Whatever was eating my flesh was also deadening my nerves. A small blessing, in a day that didn’t contain very many.
“Yeah,” said Dave.
I looked toward the water. I looked at the box that contained the…meteorite? Asteroid? Weapon from beyond the stars? In the end, it didn’t really matter what it was. What mattered was that it had come here, it had fallen here, and now we all had to live with the consequences.
“At least we solved one last mystery,” I whispered.
“Yeah,” said Dave, and we sat together, and waited to remember how to breathe.
* * *
So here we are. If you’re listening to this, if you’re investigating the latest great maritime disaster—the disappearance of two second-tier treasure hunters and all their very expensive tech—or if you’re investigating something that happened a hundred years ago, congratulations: you’ve found us, and with us, the Sendale Star.
Now go away.
We have better than letters in a bottle these days. We have anchored probes and geo-locators, we have cloud storage and the ability to suspend messages until the right conditions are met. Until someone comes too close, more than once, which either means they’re looking for us, or that they’ve already found us. Scavengers always know our own.
Do not dive here. Do not search here. Leave it alone. Leave us alone. Be a hero by doing nothing, and save the world one more time from a falling star that we were never meant to catch. This is the only wish we have left, and we’re making it on the star that Alder carried to condemn a ship, and we’re making it on the Star, who tried so hard to hide.
This is Angela Madison and David Cooper, of the Catch and Release, signing off and going down with the ship.
End transmission.