PRESENT

"L et's get a little closer there, please," Rosie requested, pointing to one of the twenty or so monitors in front of her. "I want to see what that is."

She looked down as the ROV operator used the joystick to move the remotely operated vehicle smoothly in the water below their research vessel. They'd been at sea for fifteen days now and only had two more days out here before they had to return because the storm season would hit, and it would be unsafe for the crew and for them to have the ship and the expensive equipment in the water.

"What is that?" she asked when she took in the same monitor and leaned over the small desk to get a closer look.

"Looks like a metal container of some kind."

"On a seventeenth-century English passenger ship?"

"It doesn't look seventeenth-century to me," the operator said.

"Yeah, agreed. Can we bring it up?"

"Your ship. Your rules."

"Let's get it logged first and make sure we note everything. It could be debris from another wreck. This part of the ocean is riddled with them, but nothing is within ten miles of where we are."

"That we know of," he pointed out.

"True," she said. "Let's get the ROV to bring it up. I want to take a closer look at it."

"We still have the whole bow to look at," he reminded.

"Yeah…" Rosie sighed. "Okay. Let's get the footage first, but I want to come back to this before we pull Hercules out of the water. I'm going to grab Herman. I want him to take a look at this video and tell me if he has any idea why a metal box that looks like it could be watertight would be on a seventeenth-century ship that brought people to the new world."

"He's the historical researcher. If anyone would know, it would be Herman."

"Right," Rosie said to no one in particular as she stared at the monitor, looking at the metal container, while the ROV moved on to other parts of the shipwreck they'd been studying from above for the past three days .

She was exhausted. Yes, she loved her job and being on the water, but she was also ready to go home now. This season had been rougher than most, with funding drying up on a research trip she was supposed to take and having to hop on to manage this one, which was less exciting to her. Sure, she'd found the ship they'd been searching for, but no, it was not the expedition off the coast of Greece, where she had hoped to explore a new find that non-marine archaeologists had decided was the ancient, mythical city of Atlantis. She'd been put on that team as the lead archaeologist, but the funding had been pulled for another research trip instead. Greece had also pulled its authorization for the search, so the local divers who had found it would be the only ones to see it for a while, at least.

Rosie returned to her cabin after asking Herman to take a look at the video. As the ship's history guy, he was the one to review the documents and historical records to tell them where to look, and he'd done a decent job. The ship had only been a few miles off the first location they'd searched, and she was glad that they hadn't found it on their last day here, which was very common on trips like this one. The ship they were exploring was thought to have gone down in a storm, taking all of its passengers with it, but no one had been able to locate the wreckage until Rosie and her team three days ago.

While this ship wasn't crucial in the grand scheme of things, it was one of the first to leave from England, carrying possible settlers to the new world. None of its passengers had been deemed of any major importance, but the ship had been rumored to be carrying a few artifacts of historical significance. They hadn't found anything yet. It was mainly just the boards of the wooden hull and the decks that had collapsed into it, which made it difficult to determine if anything was underneath them.

Rosie took off her clothes and climbed into the way-too-small shower, thinking that she couldn't wait to get home and take a shower in her own bathroom. She'd missed home more this season than any in the past, but she had no reason to, really. There was no one at home waiting for her, and at thirty-five, she was beginning to wonder if there ever would be. Her last relationship had ended precisely because she was never home, and that had been over two years ago. She had no pets because she was always on a ship and only had a few friends with whom she caught up a few times a year. Her parents were still around, but they'd moved to Portland a decade ago, and her brother was fine, she supposed, but he was four years older than her, worked from home, and had a wife and three kids to occupy his time.

That was it. That was her life. Well, her life was her job. Or, maybe it was the other way around, and her job was her life. Either way, she spent months at a time on ships, discovering, exploring, and seeing things that no eyes had seen in hundreds of years, and she loved it. It was just at the end of the season. That was why she was missing home now. The moment she got there, though, she'd start missing life at sea, and she'd find some ship to hop onto just to be a participant if she couldn't find an expedition to run herself.

"Rosie, we're ready to bring it up," a crew member's voice told her over the intercom.

She wrapped herself in the towel, pressed the button, and said, "Okay. Give me five. I'll be right there."

She knew Herman hadn't had enough time to research this metal box – or, at least, what looked like a metal box in hundreds of feet of water. Yes, the ship was from the seventeenth century, and there was some metal on seventeenth-century vessels, but they were still constructed primarily out of wood at the time. And even if the ship had been constructed mostly of metal, this box looked modern. From what Rosie had been able to see, there was some kind of rubber around where the top met the bottom, but visibility hadn't been great due to silt and the depth, so she'd have to wait to take a look when it was brought up. It could be easily dated then and brushed aside if it was just modern-day garbage and not something worth researching.

"Doc, it's coming up," one of the ROV technicians said when Rosie arrived on deck seven minutes later, choosing to towel-dry her short hair for an extra minute before heading out of her cabin, which was more of a jail cell than a cruise ship cabin with a porthole.

"Thanks," she replied and donned her blue expedition baseball hat that had the name of the research ship they were on and the logo of the investors who had put up the money to locate the ship. "What do we have?"

"A briefcase, maybe," one of her assistants suggested. "Bigger than usual, I'll grant you, but looks modern and has a padlock."

They lowered the cargo net ROV attachment, which had carried the item up to the ship, and Rosie leaned over it, taking a look at the object that was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It did look like a briefcase, but maybe one of those silver metal ones that locked, and it was probably three times as thick as a standard metal briefcase. It looked like one that might carry something important to an event that needed to be secured and protected.

"Weird," Rosie said as she moved around the object. "Let's move it to a table inside. Nothing historical about this, but I'd still like to take it back with us."

"No problem, Doc," the technician replied.

Rosie had no idea what a finding like this one would be doing in the wreckage of an old ship, but these waters were much more traversed these days than they had been in the seventeenth century, so it could be anything. There had been a few plane crashes around the area over the years, so she supposed it could've been debris from one of those, but she'd need Herman to help her figure out which one was most likely.

It couldn't be much older than the past ten or twenty years. There was minimal to no rust damage. In fact, Rosie was surprised to see that there were hardly any scuff marks. While crashing into the water likely wouldn't leave any, the currents at the bottom of the ocean certainly would. Storms would've dragged that thing all over the place down there, and it would be marked up and rusty had it been there for long.

Deciding to not open it on ship because she wasn't sure what was inside and didn't want to take any chances until they could get to land, Rosie had it packaged up and sent back to the office, where they could X-ray it first and get a better idea of what it was. It didn't look dangerous from the outside, but it was certainly big enough to hold something that could potentially do damage, so they boxed it up safely and, a few days later, headed back to port, where she'd spend the next few months examining all the objects they brought up, along with the footage of the wreck, to either confirm or change the historical record about this ship going down in a storm.