City of Ruins - [Diving Universe 02] Read online

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  City of Ruins

  [Diving Universe 02]

  By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

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  THE BEGINNING

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  ONE

  T

  he Ivoire dipped, then rose, then flipped and doubled back. Inside the bridge, the crew could feel no difference despite the rapid movements. The only way anyone could tell if something had changed was the flow of data coming through all the monitors.

  The six-person bridge crew had fallen into their various roles, speaking rarely. They all knew what to do. They had to evade the ships, which were coming at them fast and furious from Ukhanda.

  The ships were small and feather-shaped. They looked harmless, but already two of them had seared the Ivoire’s exterior with some kind of blast weapon.

  The Ivoire’s captain, Jonathon “Coop” Cooper, had been in tight situations before. He knew how to maintain focus—his own and the crew’s. He had just ordered the wall screens on the bridge darkened. Normally he could see through the screens to whatever was happening on the ship’s exterior.

  But seeing things just outside the wall as if he was looking out a window didn’t help him now. He had the navigational images front and center. Along the sides, a smaller image of the ship herself, and the enemy vessels pursuing her.

  By rights, those ships shouldn’t be anywhere near the Ivoire. The Ivoire had left Ukhanda’s orbit nearly a day ago to rendezvous with the Fleet and figure out what had gone wrong.

  No ship the Fleet had ever encountered had the speed to cover that distance in such a short time.

  And this wasn’t just one ship. It was a damn armada.

  “Whose ships are these?” he snapped at the bridge crew.

  The question was legitimate. Sixteen different cultures called Ukhanda home, although the Fleet had had contact with only two of them.

  Anita Tren answered. She was tiny—so small, in fact, she didn’t fit regulations for bridge crew. But she exceeded all expectations, outperforming every other officer in her class, and Coop couldn’t see any reason to deny her the post she’d earned.

  Even if she did have to kneel in her chair half the time to see what was happening on her console.

  “Quurzod,” she said.

  That surprised him. He knew the Quurzod were advanced enough to have space travel—they had taken their war with the Xenth into space more than once—but he hadn’t expected such sophisticated ships from them.

  He had expected something big, with more weapons than power. He should have known that expectation would be wrong. The Quurzod were the most violent human culture he had ever encountered, but the violence was ritualized, damn near beloved. Their approach to violence was sophisticated, so why wouldn’t they have sophisticated violence delivery systems?

  “I suppose good information on the ships is scarce,” he said dryly.

  “The Xenth captured only one,” Anita said. “The Quurzod had already destroyed the command center. But those things have a lot of weaponry.”

  As if to prove the point, six ships fired at the Ivoire. Coop could see the bursts of light on the navigational screens. Nothing showed up on the screens that depicted the ship’s exterior. Of course not. The Quurzod had made the blast weapons difficult to see.

  Coop’s first officer, Dix Pompiono, moved the Ivoire laterally, and the shots went under one of the gull-shaped wings on the left side of the ship.

  “Captain, those things have greater maneuverability than we do.” Dix was hunched over his console, but then, Dix always hunched over his console. He was tall and thin. Yet he could bend himself as if he were made of string and fit into the smallest of places. “They’re tiny and they’re fast, and in large numbers they’re a real threat.”

  Coop nodded. The ships were like insects. One or two were annoyances. But a swarm could overwhelm a larger and more powerful foe. And the Ivoire was alone. The Fleet was at least a half day away.

  “I can maneuver around them maybe twice more,” Dix said, “and then they’ll have us all figured out.”

  “Another wave of those things just left Ukhanda,” said Kjersti Perkins, the junior officer on the bridge crew. This was her first space battle. She clutched her console a bit too tightly, her short blonde hair mussed. But to her credit, her voice didn’t shake and she seemed as calm as the rest of the team.

  “How many?” Coop asked.

  “Twenty-five. No. Thirty. Make that thirty-five.” She looked over at him, her blue eyes wide. “An entire other wave. Did we know they had this many ships?”

  “I don’t think anyone knew,” he said. “Yash, figure out if they’re single-shot ships or if we have a bigger problem on our hands.”

  Yash Zarlengo, his on-site engineer, nodded. He trusted her more than anyone else. A former athlete, raised planetside, she had her family’s knack for anything technological.

  “Those things are built to fight,” she said. “If I had to guess—and that’s all I’d be doing, since they’re still too far away to scan—I’d say they’re stocked with weaponry.”

  “Given what we know about the Quurzod,” Dix said, “I’d expect the fight to be vicious, bloody, and to the death.”

  Coop flashed on the images of Mae he’d seen when they brought her on board the ship: blood-covered, too thin, eyes wild. The Quurzod had killed twenty-four members of her linguistic team. Only three survived, and two of those had fled before the massacre. Mae had somehow managed to escape during or after the bloodbath.

  “I think you’re right, Dix. We’re in for a real fight.” Coop cursed silently.

  He hadn’t wanted this. He didn’t have the weaponry for this—not if the Quurzod swarmed.

  “Send a message to the Fleet,” Coop said. “Let them know the situation. We’re going to engage the anacapa. Twenty-hour window.”

  “Yes, sir,” Dix said.

  Coop hated using the anacapa drive, but he saw no other choice. The anacapa created a fold in space. If the ship was in trouble, it activated its anacapa, moving into foldspace and then returning to the same point in regular moments or hours later. Sometimes moments were all it took to confuse the enemy ships.

  The Ivoire had the firepower, but not the maneuverability. Staying would subject the ship to too much damage, damage he could avoid with a simple sideways movement into foldspace.

  “Fifty more ships, sir,” Perkins said. “Maybe fifty-five. They just keep coming.”

  Coop nodded. That was what worried him. Too many small ships, too many small weapons.

  “Activate the anacapa,” he said to Yash.

  “I hate this thing,” she muttered, but hit the codes, then slammed her palm against the console.

  As she did, half a dozen shots hit the Ivoire.

  The anacapa, going through its cycle, froze. Dix’s gaze met Coop’s. Coop held his breath—

  —and then the anacapa reactivated.

  The Ivoire slipped into foldspace for just a moment while it waited for the Quurzod to give up.

  * * * *

  VAYCHEN

  * * * *

  TWO

  I

  travel to Vaycehn reluctantly. I don’t like cities. I never have. Cities are as opposite from the things I love as anything can get.

  First, they exist planetside, and I try never to go planetside.

  Second, they are filled with people, and I prefer to spend most of my time alone.

  Third, cities have little to explore, and what small amount of unknown territory there is has something built on top of it or beside it.

  The history of a city is kn
own, and there is no danger.

  But I’m going to Vaycehn on the advice of one of my managers. She has a hunch, and I am funding it, although the closer we get to the city, the more I regret that decision.

  I made the decision because I’m learning that a single woman cannot manage an entire corporation on her own. I used to run my own wreck-diving company, but I hired people when I needed them and let them go when the dive was over.

  Now I oversee hundreds of employees, with dozens of tasks before them. I need to learn to trust.

  Even in the area of exploration.

  Especially in the area of exploration.

  And I find that to be the hardest of all.

  Vaycehn sprawls along a great basin on the eighth and most centrally located continent on the planet Wyr. Wyr is tiny and warm as far as planets go. It exists in the habitable zone near its star but is a little too close for the bulk of the human population.

  The planet does have plenty of air and edible indigenous plants. A lot of farming communities have sprouted in its arable sixth and seventh continents. But the planet’s only major city—as cities are defined in this part of the universe—is Vaycehn.

  I’d heard of Vaycehn decades ago. Everyone who works in antiquities, history, and collectibles has. Vaycehn boasts the earliest settlement in this part of the galaxy. Its history has continued, uninterrupted, for at least five thousand years.

  The city has moved several times, but its footprint remains in what the people of Wyr call the Great Basin, a dip in the planet’s surface so deep that it’s visible from space. That dip provides shelter for the storms that buffet Wyr, and it also has temperatures twenty degrees lower than surface temperatures anywhere else on the planet.

  The perfect location for both an ancient and a modern city.

  A place I never thought I’d go.

  Until now.

  My team and I fly in on six orbit-to-ground skips, and land them in the spaceport at the edge of the Basin. We’re in the City of Vaycehn, but it doesn’t look like a city here. There are buildings, and a lot of dry brown ground. We’re only on the ground long enough to disembark from our skips and sign them into their ports. Then we get into the six government-owned hovercarts that were, Ilona discovered, one of the only ways to travel in Vaycehn.

  We left my ship, Nobody’s Business, docked on Wyr’s orbital business station. The Business has a cloned identity, one we adopted when I became a fugitive inside the Empire, and that’s how the Business is registered with Wyr. Fortunately no one seems to care who we are, so long as we spend money planetside.

  We’re spending a lot of money to come here. I look at this visit as an experiment; I’m not sure our search for stealth technology should even include land. All of the stealth technology we’ve discovered so far has been in space.

  But Ilona thinks differently. She has hired the ground team—with my supervision—and she believes in this project.

  I do not.

  In fact, part of me wants this project to fail spectacularly. Then I never have to think about land-based operations again.

  The hired pilots fly us into the Basin. I sit behind the copilot, separated by a clear wall. I almost wish the cockpit was blocked off so that I can’t see what these people are doing.

  These pilots aren’t one-tenth as good as I am. They make tiny mistakes that would kill them in the tight situations I’ve flown through.

  But they know the Basin, and they’re cocky. They come in too fast, going deep at the beginning of the crevice that marks the Basin, and get too close to the stone walls for my comfort. I grip the armrests so hard I’m probably leaving indentations.

  I hate cocky pilots, particularly ones whose skills clearly aren’t up to an emergency. Should the wings of the hovercart nick one of the stone walls, the craft will spin out of control. From my vantage, I can’t see any automatic overrides that will prevent such an accident.

  And I don’t have time to break through that clear wall ahead of me, hit a few buttons, and stop the craft from spinning before it crashes.

  If something happens, I’d go down with the craft, just like everyone else.

  The bumpy ride makes it hard to enjoy the scenery. Behind me, the main team—Ilona, Gregory, Lentz, and Bridge—talk about the mission ahead.

  They are all scientists and researchers. Never before have I brought them to a site without examining it first. They’re excited, thinking that maybe they’ll be able to be actual explorers.

  Maybe by their definitions, they will.

  But I’ve also brought a full dive team as well as some archeologists and a few historians. And I’ve brought the Six. They’re scattered throughout the other craft because if one of these things goes down, I don’t want to lose all of our most valuable people.

  We land on a wide patch of empty ground. Other hovercarts are parked in the distance, and large buildings outline the empty middle.

  I’m glad we have a lot of room for the landing. We still bounce on the ground’s surface—something I would never allow one of my pilots to do— and it takes several seconds for the rocking motion caused by the bouncing to cease.

  The doors open, and I sneeze as planetside air filters in. Planetside air has unfamiliar scents—-in this case, both sweet and dry.

  Most of the air I breathe is recycled. It has a faint metallic edge, and sometimes a warning staleness. I’m used to that. I’m not used to air that has a taste, air that tickles my nose and makes me feel a little light-headed.

  This air is also warm. I’d been warned that Wyr was a hot place, but I’d also been told that Vaycehn was one of the coolest locations.

  If this is cool, then I don’t want to visit any other site on the planet. I’m already sweating as I step off the craft. The metal railing of the makeshift stair is warm beneath my touch, even though it’s only been in the light from Wyr’s sun for a few minutes.

  Heat shimmers across the pavement in little waves that look like turbulence before a planetside storm. I’ve already decided I don’t like it here, and this is only the first of thirty days.

  Ilona is already talking with our guides. Ilona is slight, with black hair that looks almost blue in this light. She wears it tied back, but some strands have come loose in the wind. She brushes at them as she speaks.

  The guides—all male—watch her hands. The guides’ uniforms make them easy to identify. The uniforms are brown with red piping. Sleeveless, with shorts instead of pants. The men wear sandals on their feet. They also have their hair cropped so short that their scalps are visible.

  “Well, this is going to be interesting,” says a voice beside me. I turn to see Mikk, one of my best divers. He’s not built like a man who space-dives. He has too many muscles because he does a lot of weight work to maintain his bone structure. He’s also large.

  Most divers are small people with such delicate bones that being on a planet with normal gravity will hurt them. I’ve left some of my best divers behind because I don’t want them subject to the planet’s g-forces. Unlike me and several others, those divers grew up in space. I’m landborn and can handle gravity. I just don’t like it.

  Two divers and one of our pilots are getting off the second craft. So is Julian DeVries, one of the Six. He’s tall and broad shouldered. Out of all of my team who have landed so far, he looks the most out of place. He’s wearing a blue silk suit that has to be too warm. But aside from removing the coat and slinging it over his shoulder, he doesn’t seem affected by the heat at all.

  “You think those people know what they’re doing?” Mikk asks me. He’s still looking at the guides.

  “I think they know how to take us to the caves,” I say. “I suspect they’ll get us to our accommodations with a minimum of fuss, and I hope that they don’t have too many regulations to follow.”

  “What about canned speeches?” Julian says as he joins us. “I loathe canned speeches.”

  Mikk frowns at him. “Meaning what?”

  “Guides,” I say.
“They usually have a small spiel about the history of a place.”

  “Which we theoretically know,” Julian says.

  “Emphasis on ‘theoretically,’” I say. “It’s always good to listen to the stories and the myths and the legends. You can learn a lot from them.”

  Mikk gives me a nervous glance. He used to pooh-pooh the idea of the importance of myths and legends until he dove the Room of Lost Souls with me. Then he learned how oddly accurate legends could be.