Diving into the Wreck by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

This is the first book of the series where people explore old forgotten spaceship wrecks. Some break them apart for raw material, while some take tourists to them for an adventure, and others try to find historically significant objects. The protagonist (unnamed, mostly she is just called “Boss”) of the book belongs to the last group. When she finds an extremely old and strange-looking large derelict ship, she can’t believe her luck. She assembles a competent team to study the wreck. It turns out to be very ancient and it contains stealth technology which has almost been forgotten. And that technology turns out to be very dangerous.

In the second part of the book, a famous war hero has also gone to the “room of lost souls.” It is a room on an old space station. If you go there, you won’t come back – although the “Boss” herself did come back decades ago as a child while her mother was left behind and lost forever. The daughter of the war hero hires the Boss to go to the room to try to retrieve him – for an extremely exceptionally good fee. She (the Boss) assembles a new team and even his father joins the team. The room turns out to be another piece of ancient stealth tech. And everything doesn’t go smoothly.

In the last novella, Boss wants to destroy the stealth tech so that a power of balance between nations won't be tilted. She also believes it is far too dangerous to exist and that the world is a better place without the stealth technology. She assembles a new team, and her aim is to destroy the ship she found in the first novella and to obliterate the stealth tech in it.

The book consists of three novellas that fit together well. I didn’t notice any continuation errors and only minor details that could be classified as small glitches. (In the second part Boss says that she doesn’t know whether her father has a video that was shot in the room – certainly, she would have asked about it – and most likely lied about it too – but she would have asked). In the last part, a spaceship that is spinning stops after the spin “dies out.” That doesn’t happen in space – if something is spinning, it never stops if there isn’t any force to stop it. As a whole, the book was a very entertaining and fun read. I had read at least the middle part earlier as a separate piece, but as a part of a whole, it worked much better – although I remember being a bit confused about some plot points. The main hero is a well-described character with more inner conflict, which is good for her – and which is often the secret of memorable characters. I will most likely look for the other parts of this series.


336 pp.