The novella “Diving into The Wreck” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch was published for the first time in 2009. It’s part of the Diving Universe.
Boss hired a team to explore the wreckage of a spaceship she found drifting in space. Potentially, it’s a treasure because the artifacts she could recover can be worth a lot of money and ancient lost technologies can be worth a real fortune. The recovery operations are always dangerous because it’s impossible to know what you can find in a wreck, especially when it seems to date back to millennia before and it’s in a place in space very far from those that such ancient spaceships could reach.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch has set a series of works in what was called the Diving Universe. In some ways it can be included in the archaeological science fiction sub-genre because the characters look for and explore the wrecks – they dive into them… – of spaceships that in that future might be even millennia old.
“Diving into The Wreck” is told in the first person by a wreck hunter whose name is never mentioned and is generally called Boss. She always hopes to find a nice spoil, but for her there’s also a component of curiosity in a future in which many technologies have been forgotten and reinvented over many centuries. On the other hand, there’s also the component of the ever-present danger and especially in the first part of this novella, Boss is very explicit in talking about what can go wrong during a dive.
The author sets the tone of the story, which is immediately full of tension, telling the preparations for the dive and the first operations. These are moments when the team members face the unknown. The wreck is very old and this adds potential dangers between possible structural degradation and the presence of equipment that no longer works correctly, but precisely for that reason they can become traps.
The wreck is a mystery because Boss has established that it dates back to about 5,000 years ago, but at the time the spaceships were traveling much closer to Earth. The discovery that the spoils could be really big only increases the tension for the potential danger.
The twist reminded me of an episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, but Kristine Kathryn Rusch develops her novella in a very different way. That discovery allows to develop even more the relationships among the characters, well managed for a story told in the first person, and the ethical and moral issues connected to the consequences of the choices they have to make.
In my opinion, “Diving into The Wreck” is a novella that keeps the tension well throughout the story, and in the end leaves some food for thought. For this reason, I recommend reading it. Kristine Kathryn Rusch used a slightly changed version of this novella as the first part of a novel with the same title, so you might decide to read that instead.
