Chapter 11. Saskia’s Motive

"All right," Saskia said after a long pause, during which she seemed to be weighing not excuses, but something far more fundamental — whether to keep pretending at all. "All right. I'll tell you everything, but I'm asking you to hear it through before deciding what to do with me."

She sat down, for the first time in the entire conversation, as if the strength required to stand straight and keep her composure had finally left her.

"I contacted Victor Hale before the expedition even began," she said. "Not after his first visit, as you're probably assuming, but long before that, when I was just starting to arrange equipment purchases for the trip."

"Why?" Morten asked sharply, and there was more than anger in his voice — a clear sense of personal betrayal, from a man who'd recently endured unjust suspicion himself, now watching that same suspicion prove justified in someone else.

"Because I needed insurance," Saskia said. "Not against you. Against my own circumstances."

She told the rest slowly, choosing her words carefully, as if speaking it aloud for the first time in months of silence. The money she'd put into the expedition — her personal contribution, without which the project would never have raised the necessary starting capital — hadn't come from a bank or ordinary private lenders, but from people whose patience was measured not in interest rates but in far more direct methods of collection. The three weeks named in the letter she'd received on the sixth day of the expedition were running out fast, and failure of the venture meant for her not simply financial loss, but something considerably more dangerous.

"When Meridian Salvage first made contact," she continued, "I realized I had two options. Either hope our venture succeeded and I'd manage to pay off my debt before my creditors' patience ran out. Or build myself a fallback — in case everything went wrong, I'd have something to offer someone capable of solving the problem faster than three quarreling governments and a stubborn crew of divers."

"So you were selling us out," Leyla said quietly, "in case we stopped being to your liking."

"I never gave Hale anything concrete," Saskia countered, and there was real, not feigned, firmness in the claim. "No exact coordinates, no schedule, no plan details. I kept the line open, let him believe he'd get more from me eventually, because it felt like as long as that door stayed cracked, I still had some control over my own fate. But every time it came down to specifics — to anything that could actually harm you — I stalled, made excuses, refused."

"And the beacon?" Owen asked. "Someone installed it, and by every indication, that was you."

Saskia fell silent for a moment, and her next words came with obvious reluctance, as though this confession was the hardest of all to make.

"Hale's people installed the beacon," she said. "Not me personally. But I knew about it. One condition of continuing contact with him was agreeing to a covert tracking device in the equipment I was procuring — his way of protecting himself in case I decided to cut off the arrangement entirely. I didn't stop the installation because I was afraid refusing even the smallest of his demands would cost me the very insurance I needed."

The accusation hung in the room's air, weighty and undeniable, and yet — as Eva noted to herself, watching the faces of the rest of the crew — not quite as clean-cut as it might have been, had Saskia's motives been driven by simple greed rather than the desperation of someone backed into a corner.

"Why didn't you tell us sooner?" Eva finally asked, and there was less accusation in her voice than exhaustion. "We'd have figured something out. Found a way to help."

"Because confessing to debts owed to people you wouldn't even want to know about would have destroyed trust in me faster and more thoroughly than anything else," Saskia said. "And without trust in me, the entire financial backbone of this expedition would have collapsed. I thought I could manage both problems at once without letting either one destroy the other. I was wrong."

The silence that followed lasted a long time — long enough for everyone present to weigh, for themselves, what to do next. Rafael, silent until this point, finally spoke, and his tone was surprisingly measured, lacking the sharpness he'd shown discussing Hale's threat.

"We can throw you off right now," he said. "Put you ashore at the nearest coast with your belongings and let you deal with the consequences yourself. That would be fair, given the circumstances. But it would also leave us without someone handling the financial side of the operation at the worst possible moment, and it would leave Hale without a source inside our crew, which, I'll admit, sounds more like relief than problem."

He paused, looking at Saskia with an expression mixing both judgment and the cold calculation of a man used to making decisions from practicality rather than feeling.

"There's another option," he said. "Use what we now have instead of simply destroying it."

"What do you mean?" Eva asked.

"I mean," Rafael said, allowing himself, for the first time in the whole conversation, the shadow of a grim smile, "that we have a direct, functioning channel of communication with the man trying to stop us. And that channel, with proper care, might work in more than one direction."

Every gaze in the command room turned slowly to Saskia, and this time what they held wasn't only judgment, but something else — a question whose answer would determine whether she remained part of the crew, or whether her sole remaining role for the rest of the expedition would be as a tool the crew used exactly once, before parting ways with her for good.

"I'll agree to any conditions," Saskia said, before anyone could put them into words. "Constant oversight, reading my correspondence, anything. I don't expect you to trust me again after today. I'm only asking for a chance to fix what I nearly destroyed."

Leyla, silent through most of the exchange, finally spoke, and her tone held less anger than the tired disappointment of someone who'd held something in too long and could finally say it plainly.

"Do you even understand that if Hale had gotten real coordinates from you even once, we might not be sitting here talking right now, we might be drowning somewhere at depth because our tanks suddenly stopped delivering air on schedule? People like him don't stop at polite demands once they get what they want."

"I know," Saskia answered quietly. "That's exactly why I never passed on anything that could genuinely harm you. It's not an excuse — I understand I was playing with fire that could have burned all of us, not just me. But I hadn't lost my mind enough to send you all to the bottom for the sake of my own debt."

Morten, standing at the window of the command room, turned to the others with the expression of a man who'd reached a difficult but final decision.

"I vote we give her a chance," he said. "Not because I forgive her immediately and fully. But because Rafael's right — we have a far more valuable tool in hand right now than an excuse for righteous anger. And because a few days ago all of you were ready to suspect me on far less evidence, and it turned out I was just consulting a historian. Let's not make the same mistake in the other direction — this time the evidence is heavier, but it's the same person who's been through this whole expedition shoulder to shoulder with us."

The vote, formal only in the sense that a decision by six people on a small ship in contested waters can be formal, passed unanimously, if without enthusiasm: the crew would remain at its current strength, but under new rules applying to everyone without exception from now on — full transparency in outside communication, shared access to any correspondence leaving the Kestrel.