Free Rusch, Kristine Kathryn - Diving Universe SS3 by The Spires Of Denon (v5.0)

to check their equipment, she twisted her fingers, keeping them locked, but trying to pull them apart at the same time. She was nervous, almost frightened.
    Finally, the divers finished. They turned to Meklos and Dr. Reese. The divers were distinguishable now only by height and body shape. The suits themselves matched. The suits looked like a thin silver coating that someone had applied over every centimeter of the divers. They moved easily with the divers.
    After a moment, the divers gave Dr. Reese a tiny salute. Then Salvino walked into the water, followed closely by Bruget. It took them only a few steps to disappear.
    “Do you have some kind of communicator to stay in touch with them?” Meklos asked.
    Dr. Reese shook her head. “We can't use equipment that powerful here,” she said. “Although we did compromise and let them bring their emergency beacons. If they get in trouble, we'll know, and we'll know where to find them.”
    “Then what?” Meklos asked. “We don't have another diver.”
    “We'll figure it out if it happens,” she said. “I doubt that it will.”
    He shivered, a movement that had nothing to do with the cold. He loathed her callousness, and her blithe assumption that everything would be fine. No one knew what was down there. No one knew what they would encounter. And whenever anyone was in a situation where no one knew what could go wrong, something inevitably did.
    “I hope you're insured if something goes wrong here,” he said.
    She glanced at him.
    “I have no idea,” she said. Then she smiled. “But I do know that they are.”
    * * * *

18
    The water was cold. Navi couldn't feel it through her suit, but she knew it anyway, and that made her shiver. The whole dive was making her nervous, in a way that she didn't entirely understand.
    The final equipment check had worked. The comm was on. She walked down into the submerged cavern, the water rising until it covered her head. The water was chalky, murky, dark, like a lake after someone had disturbed the sediment below. She turned on the suit's dim lights—which Roye called fog lights—and could see a bit better. Then she turned on all of her cameras. She wanted this dive recorded, so she wouldn't have to repeat it. If they found something, she wanted to be able to identify it clearly.
    You back there ? she asked Roye through the comm.
    Right behind you,  he said.
    His voice sounded small and mechanical through the suit. She fought the urge to turn toward him.
    Deploy map , she said.
    She hadn't dared give that order above in case they were monitoring the communication. But she doubted they would monitor through the water.
    Gabrielle Reese didn't even seem to care about communications. She seemed detached, almost withdrawn. When Roye had brought up the idea of a malfunction, she had shrugged. She really didn't seem to care if they survived or not.
    That was one way to run a dig. It didn't matter how many people died, just so long as the artifacts got out. But Navi had checked before she'd even arrived on Amnthra. Gabrielle Reese's digs suffered no more deaths than other digs. No more, but no less, either. She always seemed to stay within the average, even though her earlier digs were on worlds much more hostile than this one. The only anomaly in any of the information was that Gabrielle Reese's digs often had deaths later rather than earlier.
    Navi could find no reason for that little statistical blip. Although now, as she walked along the bottom of this cavern in the murky darkness, she wondered if it wasn't because Dr. Reese ceased using precautions later in her projects—precautions that were in place early on. Navi turned on her map. It rose in front of her left eye. The map itself was a series of thin outlines, clear so that she could see through them. Except for the red dot that marked where she was standing, she saw no color at all.
    There's a lot of cave to go , she said.
    But not a lot of cavern,  Roye said.  We explore this