City of Ruins du-2 Read online

  “Boss?” Kersting again. He’s probably going to nag about leaving. “I think I’ve found a door.”

  I turn, take a step back, and look at his position. He’s near the wide part of the ship, inside an area just under one of the curves.

  None of the other Dignity Vessels we’ve found has a door there.

  I think.

  There are still parts to those ships that we don’t understand. And on most of them, entire sections of the ships are missing.

  All four of us join Kersting. He has indeed found a door. It’s barely outlined against the blackness. In fact, Kersting found it not by looking, but by running his glove along the surface. The glove found a minor anomaly, something barely visible to the naked eye.

  I run my hand over that area as well. My glove tells me that there is a minute crack, one that goes deep.

  “I ran my hand all the way around the bottom,” Kersting says. “I can’t reach the top. But it seems to be a door.”

  I can’t reach the top either. Neither can any of the rest of us. But it does seem to be door-shaped. It’s large—twice as large as it needs to be to let in passengers.

  It intrigues me. Have we missed this on the other ships?

  “Did you find a latch?” I ask Kersting.

  “No,” he says. “But to be fair, I haven’t touched the middle part, just that outline. And not the top either.”

  I want in. We all want in. But we can’t hurry this, no matter how much I want to.

  “I guess we start mapping here.” I’m smiling as I say it. A Dignity Vessel and a door.

  At the moment, the future of stealth tech doesn’t matter.

  At the moment, all that matters is the mystery before me—and the answers it may provide.

  ~ * ~

  EIGHTEEN

  The woman stood outside the Ivoire for a very long time. The particles swirled around her, but she ignored them as if she expected them, or perhaps she was used to them. Coop watched her as she touched the side of his ship, as she beckoned the others to join her.

  One of them, a different man than the one who had nearly been crushed by the Ivoire, found the ship’s main exterior door. The outsiders gathered around it, clearly discussing what to do next.

  Coop let them. They couldn’t get in, not without codes and approvals. Or very powerful weapons.

  And none of the five seemed to have weapons, aside from the woman’s knife.

  “Can you get any readings on the atmosphere inside the repair room?” he asked Yash.

  “From what I can tell,” she said, “the air seems fine. It seems to be recycling from the outside, just like it was designed to do. But I don’t trust the reading.”

  “Because of the environmental suits,” he said.

  She shook her head. “Because of the particles. Those things are large, and if they get into lungs, they might do some damage, depending on what they are.”

  “Are the particles coming in from outside?” Coop asked.

  “Doesn’t seem that way.” Dix was bent over his console. He’d been replaying the entry imagery—Coop had seen some of it as he had walked past Dix’s station. “We’re coated with those particles and we didn’t bring them with us. So they’re inside the base.”

  “We need to get that stuff off the ship,” Yash said. “We don’t know what it is and whether or not it’s doing additional damage.”

  “We can’t do anything as long as those people are so close,” Coop said. He didn’t want to accidentally kill the outsiders.

  “How do we move them?” Dix asked.

  “We don’t,” Coop said. “They’re wearing environmental suits. That gives them some kind of time limit. Their oxygen won’t last forever.”

  “What if they’re just using some kind of filtration system?” Anita asked.

  “Not likely,” Yash said. “The woman has cylinders on her hips. Those looked like extra oxygen to me.”

  “You’re guessing,” Anita said.

  “It’s an educated guess,” Yash snapped.

  Coop glared at both of them. Nerves were getting frayed. He was going to have to relieve this crew relatively soon, even if they didn’t know exactly what was going on.

  “What kind of readings are you getting from the particles?” he asked Yash.

  “Nothing definitive,” she said. “But I’m not sure how well the ship’s exterior sensors are working.”

  “Test the exterior sensors on the woman’s glove,” he said. “Tell me what it’s made of.”

  Yash nodded. Coop moved closer to the woman’s image, as close as he could get without pressing his nose against the wall.

  “I don’t recognize the material,” Yash said, “although that’s not unusual. It’s composed of…”

  She listed a series of ingredients, talked about how they combined into some kind of microfiber that had incredible tensile strength, and went on at great detail about how effective such material would be in an environmental suit.

  Coop paid only the smallest amount of attention, enough to absorb the important information but lose all of the details. The upshot, as he understood it, was simple. The environmental suit, while thin, would work in space and be quite effective on short trips. But the suits on the Ivoire were vastly superior.

  Yash concluded with, “If that suit’s indicative of this culture, then these people are technologically inferior to us.”

  Which meant that they were far behind developmentally—at least, that would be how the Fleet’s playbook called it. Coop didn’t always agree with that. In some senses, the Fleet was far behind everyone else. The Fleet was operating on technology built by generations many years in the past. Yes, the engineers knew how to maintain the technology and how to replicate it, but they hadn’t really developed anything new.

  At least, not on their own.

  They had developed additions to the Fleet based on technology they’d discovered as they’d traveled through the stars.

  “You can tell all that about the suit,” he said to Yash, “but you can’t tell me anything about the particles.”

  “I can’t tell you why those people are afraid of them,” Yash said. “They seem like flakes off the equipment in the repair room or maybe some nanobits floating free.”

  “What would cause nanobits to float free?” Anita asked.

  “Serious damage to the base,” Dix said.

  “Or some kind of decay,” Yash said. “Something that made the bits’ bonding fail.”

  “Some kind of microscopic weapon?” Coop asked.

  “I don’t know,” Yash said. “I’m going to have to test with actual particles.”

  “So we’re going to need some samples,” Coop said. “Since these folks don’t believe that the particles will hurt their environmental suits, we can assume our vastly superior suits will do just fine out there.”

  “You don’t want to use one of the small probes, then?” Dix asked. Clearly that was what he had expected, probably what he would have ordered if he had been left in charge.

  “I want a quick grab,” Coop said, “maybe an airlock test for particulate toxicity, and then I want to explore that room.”

  More important, he wanted to check the equipment, see the records, figure out what the hell happened here.

  “So what are we going to do?” Anita asked. “Are we going to go out there and introduce ourselves to these people?”

  Coop shook his head. “They probably don’t even know we’re here—”

  “Don’t know we’re here?” Anita said. “C’mon, Coop. That woman’s been exploring the surface of the ship. She clearly knows we’re here.”

  “She knows the ship is here,” Coop said. “She doesn’t know that we’re in it.”

  “She’d think this thing is automated?” Anita asked.

  “Why not?” Coop asked. “The base looks abandoned. That group of five people probably activated the beacon that brought us here. Face it, Anita, if we were all dead, the ship would have come without
our guidance. It’s designed that way. We turn on the beacon and the anacapas does the rest.”

  It was another aspect of the failsafe mechanism. If the crew was in any way incapacitated, the ship would come here and, if they were lucky, someone would be here to help.

  “You’re making a lot of assumptions,” Dix said.

  “I certainly am,” Coop said. “That’s why I want some certainty. The sooner we can get out of here and explore that repair room, the happier I’ll be.”

  “But you don’t want to meet those people,” Perkins said.

  “We’re going to wait until they leave,” Coop said.

  “And if another crew comes in after them?” Dix asked.

  “We’ll analyze the situation then,” Coop said. “We have no other choice.”

  ~ * ~

  NINETEEN

  We map. It seems to take forever. I’ve never mapped in gravity before.

  The Six have cursory training in mapping. I’ve taken them on exploratory dives, and I’ve tested each in the ruined Dignity Vessels that we own. But to my knowledge, none of the Six have done real mapping— important mapping—aside from the work they’ve done in the caverns.

  And, honestly, that work is simple compared with this.

  We need to know each centimeter of the ship. We look for scoring marks, for damage, for design features and design flaws.

  We are all working near the ship’s door—all of us except Seager. I’ve placed her near the door to the room itself. We need to map this room as well, so that we understand all that’s inside it.

  I feel both overwhelmed and giddy. The gids haven’t gone away at all. I’m thrilled by this whole discovery, but the discovery is terrifying in its own way.

  I want to get as much information off the ship as I possibly can. Rea’s observation that the ship might leave has frightened me. I will spend the rest of my life cursing my own caution if the ship disappears because I didn’t investigate it while I could.

  If I were younger, I would find a way into the ship. If I were younger, I’d stay in this room until I was too exhausted to leave. If I were younger, I’d find out everything I could before the ship disappeared.

  But I’m both older and wiser. Sadly wiser. I’ve lost friends and colleagues because of mistakes I’ve made.

  And I’ve learned that I regret the deaths more than the missed opportunities. Opportunities find ways of repeating. Human lives are finite and precious.

  I learned that lesson the hard way.

  I can’t figure out what this ship is made of. I use the cameras on my suit to take images, and I use the chips in my gloves to take readings. I move slowly and wish I could vault upward so that when I finish a section, I’m really and truly done with it.

  Right now, I can only map the parts of the ship I can reach. I’m working from eye-level downward, and I wonder what I’m missing. For all I know the latch to the door could be just above me. Or someone might have written the Old Earth Standard word for “danger” across the top.

  We’ll have to bring in ladders or something to stand on so that we can explore the upper part of this ship.

  It seems to hum beneath my fingers, as if it’s alive. I’m not sure if that’s my gids or my imagination or the ship itself. I’m already imagining that it’s the ship, that the ship is operating, even in this enclosed environment.

  Of course I have no way to prove that.

  A hand touches my arm. I nearly jump. Instead, I turn. It’s DeVries.

  “Time’s up,” he says.

  I want to finish this small area. There’s a dark score near the edge of it, and that’s the perfect marker. I’ll know where I ended up when I come back in a few hours.

  If the ship is still here.

  “I’m going to finish this section,” I say.

  “Boss, we don’t have time,” he says.

  I sigh. “It’ll just take a moment.”

  He tugs at me gently. “Listen,” he says. “The worst thing we can do is take too much time and force Mikk to come in after us.”

  I almost say he wouldn’t, but I don’t know that. Mikk volunteered once to go into the Room of Lost Souls, even when he knew what it could do to him.

  I curse softly and let DeVries lead me away.

  The others follow. We meet Seager at the door. She taps a fist nervously against the side of her suit. She wants out; I want to stay in.

  DeVries opens the door.

  I take one last look at the ship. It gleams in the weird light. It looks like a predator, trapped in a room, and yet I think it oddly beautiful.

  It might be gone when I return.

  I pray that it’ll remain.

  I want to say good-bye to it, but I don’t.

  Instead, I let DeVries push me from the room into the darkened corridor as Rea pulls the door closed behind me.

  ~ * ~

  TWENTY

  It took another hour for the outsiders to leave. Coop watched them, both fascinated and tense. Everyone on the bridge remained silent, as if the people outside the Ivoire could hear them breathe.

  Of course, no one could hear anything. Even though he had opened channels so the sound of the exterior came into the bridge, all he heard was the rustle of the environmental suits the five outsiders wore. They clearly had an internal comm system, one he couldn’t seem to tap into.

  Four of the outsiders spent some time crowded around the Ivoire’s main exterior door, probably discussing how to open it. The woman walked around part of the ship, touching it and peering closely at any change in the hull. The ship was much too large for her to go all the way around.

  She was clearly examining it. She kept touching it. Yash believed she was running some kind of diagnostic.

  Yash ran a diagnostic on all of them as well, but couldn’t gather any more information than she had received from the initial impression she had gotten from the glove.

  Coop had explored all kinds of unfamiliar environments in the past, but he had never observed anyone else exploring, and he had never before been the subject of that exploration. If strangers came aboard the Ivoire, they had already gone through diplomatic channels through another part of the Fleet. The Ivoire was not the flagship of the Fleet. Nor was it designated a first-contact vessel.

  Coop had heard of these kinds of explorations, usually by natives of a newly discovered planet, but one that didn’t have the technological advancement that allowed the Fleet to contact them. He had never been privy to one before.

  Finally, one of the outsiders broke away from the group and loped toward the woman. She shook her head, as if participating in a conversation, and then the other person—one of the men—finally reached her side. He took her arm, gently but firmly.

  She shook him off and moved away.

  He took her arm again, and this time, she sighed visibly and walked with him around the side of the ship.

  They joined the others, and together the group left through the door that led to the corridor.

  “Maybe we should lock it.” Dix’s voice sounded unnaturally loud in the silence of the bridge.

  “No,” Coop said. “They’d notice that. It would make them more curious.”

  “I don’t know how we can make them more curious,” Yash said.

  Coop didn’t entirely agree with her assessment. If the outsiders were truly curious, they’d try to enter the ship. They would have stayed longer.

  Instead, they had left, probably when their environmental suits noted that they were low on oxygen, just like he had predicted.

  If that was the case, then the outsiders would be back. He only had a short window of time—and he wasn’t sure how short.

  “Send that tester through the airlock,” he said.

  Yash nodded. She had chosen a team of scientists to capture the particles, but the scientists would be monitored by the engineering staff—by Yash, really.

  None of the bridge crew had gone down to the main exterior doors. Coop wanted the crew to remain on the
bridge in case something went wrong.

  He even insisted that a junior member of the science team take the particle sample.

  Only two people, wearing their own environmental suits, would be in the airlock. They would take the particulate matter using some method that he didn’t entirely understand, and then they would bring it back inside.

  Coop wanted them to open the exterior door, scoop up some particles, close the doors, and get the hell out of the airlock.

  And that was all.

  Even though Dix initially protested. He had felt they should take advantage of the outsiders’ absence to explore the room.

  Coop had vetoed that. To begin with, exploring the room was the wrong phrase. It was a cavern, impossible to explore all at once. Besides, they’d all been in that area a dozen times before. They needed information, and they were going to collect it slowly.

  Coop wondered how long those suits needed to be replenished. He also wondered if the team’s leader was reckless. If the leader was, the same team would be back within the hour. If the leader wasn’t, either a new team would enter soon, or the other team would wait some designated amount of time, maybe a full day, before returning.

  Coop was going to try to get as much done as possible in the time that he had.

  He didn’t monitor the airlock experiment. He had Yash do that from the bridge.

  It only took a few minutes. Some of the particles got into the airlock itself, and Coop asked that they be captured instead of expelled.

  “We got everything,” Yash said. “It looks like it’s safe to go out there.”

  “Do the extensive tests,” Coop said. He wanted to go out there as much as the others, but he had learned about caution the hard way. It was always better to take precautions.

  “I’d like to go monitor the experiments,” Yash said.

  “No,” Coop said. “I need you here.”

  “What for?” she asked. “Standing around waiting?”