The Falls [05 Diving Universe] 2016 Read online

  Walk through the wrong area when a ship arrived, and you could die, horribly.

  The screens rarely activated, though. She preferred to use the holographic screens on her equipment or little screens she could attach to her work area. There were shelves everywhere, and more tools than almost any other workroom.

  Bristol liked using the best tool for the job, and sometimes the best tool was obscure.

  Since she was one of the most experienced anacapa engineers in Sector Base E-2, she felt safest working alone. Besides, if she ended up making a mistake—and everyone did, no matter how good they were—then she wanted to make sure the only person who died in the blast was her, and not anyone else.

  Which was why the sound of a door slamming bothered her. The door to her right wasn’t an exterior door. It was a blast door, separating this room from the ship storage area. She wasn’t working on a DV-class ship. She was working on an FS-Prime runabout from the Ijo, which had arrived for its five-year upgrade one week ago.

  She had graduated from DV-class ships, under direct supervision, to handling the smaller vessels connected with the ships years ago. But she hadn’t worked on anything like the runabout before.

  It was an older technology, one that the Fleet now recommended be retired. Captains of the DV-class ships didn’t have to listen to recommendations, however. They could maintain older equipment as long as they felt it useful.

  She hated the runabout. The FS-Prime designation referred to foldspace. The geniuses in ship design way back when hadn’t wanted to call these runabouts Anacapa models, so they hid it with the FS designation.

  This model was the only runabout model with an anacapa drive. For most of its history, the Fleet did not put anacapa drives in ships smaller than a DV-class vessel. Then, those geniuses, working before she was born, decided to test runabouts with anacapa drives. Early in her career, those drives had been the bane of her existence.

  But she, and several other engineers, had convinced most captains in the Fleet to retire their FS-Prime runabouts. Only a handful of captains had held out, including Captain Harriet Virji of the Ijo.

  No surprise that this ancient runabout was malfunctioning. The problem was, of course, the anacapa, which was smaller than the average anacapa drive. The small size was also a hindrance, because it carried a lot of power, but didn’t have some of the redundant controls.

  Anacapa drives sent ships into foldspace. If the drive was used properly, it would send a ship into foldspace for a short period of time, and then the ship would return to the same coordinates in regular space. Ships could also use foldspace to travel across sectors, using beacons that the Fleet had set up in various sectors.

  Sector Base E-2 had anacapa beacons, and could pull ships in trouble from anywhere in three nearby sectors—and maybe even farther away than that. No one had really tested the reach of the beacons.

  But everyone knew of stories in which beacons malfunctioned at long distances. That was one of the reasons the base was going to close.

  The Fleet had moved beyond this section of space, heading forward as it always did. In theory, by the time that Sector Base E-2 closed, there would be no more Fleet vessels within easy activation range. They would be better served by other sector bases, and that travel through foldspace would be safer.

  She was always cautious when she spoke about foldspace. Not only had she never traveled in it, she didn’t entirely understand it. No one in the Fleet did, and that made everyone who worked on the anacapa drives nervous.

  Some of the captains believed that foldspace was a different part of the universe. They believed the anacapa drive actually folded space, allowed the ship to travel across that fold, and end up elsewhere. They cited the fact that the star maps were drastically different in foldspace, so different that they were completely unrecognizable.

  But the theorists who studied foldspace believed that foldspace itself might be another dimension, something they didn’t entirely understand. Some other theorists believed the foldspace was a different point in time—somewhen else, not somewhere else.

  And a few of the theorists believed that the anacapa sent the ship into an alternate reality, and then, somehow—magically, Bristol thought—brought the ship back again.

  She didn’t even have a guess. She had been trained on the anacapa drives, so she understood what the interior of a drive should look like. She understood how to test it in the lab to make sure the drive was functioning properly.

  But if she or her family were to ever be invited to travel via anacapa drive, she would respectfully refuse. She didn’t like the fact that the drive could send her somewhere else, in a way that no one entirely understood. She knew, because she studied it, that ships got lost in foldspace all the time, and that terrified her even more.

  The fact that she wouldn’t go through foldspace was one of many reasons why she would never work at another sector base. To get to those bases, she would have to take a DV-class ship that traveled through foldspace. She would have to experience a working anacapa drive from the inside of a ship.

  She wasn’t willing to do that, which was rather hard to explain, since she worked on anacapa drives every day.

  She sighed softly. Maybe she hadn’t heard the door. Maybe she had misinterpreted another sound.

  Or maybe she had been so deep in her work that she hadn’t noticed someone else walking through her workspace.

  That idea made her shudder.

  She waved on one of the larger screens. She recorded her work from three angles. She recorded it from above, taking in the entire room, so she could see if she took the wrong tool for a particular job. She recorded it from the top of the anacapa drive so she could see what her fingers were actually doing. And she recorded it from the tools themselves, making a record of her every move.

  The caution had saved her from catastrophic mistakes more than she liked to think about. Sometimes, viewing her work on the three separate recordings at the beginning of the following day made her revisit what she had already done. If she had started up from where she had left off, she would have probably destroyed the device or blown herself up.

  Or blown herself—and the room, and part of the base—into some part of foldspace. Somehow. Somewhere. Or somewhen.

  The idea compounded her off-kilter feeling. She had been this way all day. It was unusual enough to have an all-base meeting; the fact that it had started at the beginning of her workday had thrown off her routines, making her feel behind from the moment she set foot into the room.

  Alone.

  “Overview of the entire room, please,” she said to the screen. She had set the voice command to respond to her voice only. Anyone else would have to use the access panel beneath the screen. But she liked accessing her work from here. “Show me the last hour at the usual pace.”

  The usual pace was a pretty fast scan. Her eye was good: she could see mistakes in her work at speeds where most people saw a blur. It felt intuitive when she worked like that, even though she knew it wasn’t. She processed things quickly; she just couldn’t always articulate what she saw.

  This time, though, nothing caught her attention—until she thought she saw a movement at the door to the right.

  She noted the time stamp, and let the replay continue all the way to the current moment. She saw nothing else unusual.

  “Replay at one-half the usual speed,” she said, and then gave a time stamp for the start five minutes before the stamp that she noted.

  She watched again, and sure enough, the door to the right bowed open slightly, and then banged shut.

  “Normal speed from the same point,” she said. “With sound.”

  She usually had the sound off because she had learned, years ago, that when she concentrated deeply, she either hummed a tune or she talked to herself. She found neither trait attractive. In fact, she found them massively annoying.

  But she wasn’t going to look or listen to herself this time. She was going to watch, in real time.
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  She moved the holoscreen kitty-corner so that she could watch the door in real time while watching the replay. The fact that she moved the screen made her realize that she was deeply unnerved. She hadn’t allowed herself to feel that before.

  She turned down the sound on the replay. The door opened silently. And she heard nothing except the room noise, not even a hum from her, until the door slammed closed.

  The sound, turned low, still made her jump. Her pulse pounded, and her mouth was suddenly dry.

  She had a couple of choices. She could leave the room, then report this. Or she could continue to work as if nothing happened. She could check out the room herself. Or she could ask for security.

  Only she didn’t dare ask for security out loud. She would have to do it on some kind of private setting, on a screen.

  She had never done that before.

  But she knew she couldn’t work in here any longer. Even if she wanted to concentrate, she couldn’t—not with enough focus to work on an anacapa drive.

  If she left, then whoever it was (whatever it was) could escape.

  If she stayed, then she might be in danger, although she wasn’t sure what kind of danger.

  Although she didn’t want to think about what could be behind that door, something not human that had forced it open.

  Because the runabout had a feature she hated: to remove and check the old anacapa drive, she had to replace it with a different anacapa drive. The runabout couldn’t even sit idle without one. It would begin its emergency procedures alerts without a drive.

  That was one reason the FS-Prime class of runabouts was no longer being made. They were delicate in a strange and unusual way, mostly about their equipment. And ships in space couldn’t be delicate in any way.

  Her skin crawled. What if the anacapa she had placed inside the runabout as a temporary measure was causing some kind of problem? What if what was going on in that room had no human agent at all?

  Her heart beat even harder.

  If that were the case, she needed to leave.

  But she couldn’t think of anything an anacapa could do that would cause a door to open and slam shut like that.

  Except activate.

  She backed away from the blast door. Then she went to one of the platforms, and stared at the controls for a moment. She could hit the emergency beacon, but that might start an alarm, warning everyone to leave the area.

  And if an anacapa had been deployed, that would be important.

  But she didn’t know, and she didn’t want to investigate on her own.

  Because if someone were in that room with the runabout, then she had just given that person warning.

  And who knew what that person would do to her?

  She certainly didn’t.

  She keyed in a request for an immediate security presence, saying she couldn’t tell anyone the nature of the emergency.

  And, with a last-minute thought, she also asked for the security detail to arrive in environmental suits.

  Then she signed off, and grabbed her suit from the container she kept it in. The suit looked dusty and a tad too small.

  But she was going to squeeze into it.

  She had to squeeze into it.

  Because she had no idea what was behind that door.

  THREE

  RAJIVK DECIDED TO contact Ynchinga Search & Rescue for the Sandoveil Region when he got home. Shoes, he thought as he made his way up the side of the mountain, were not a time-sensitive emergency. Let the YSR-SR determine what to do next.

  Besides, he knew how the YSR-SR felt about errant clothing. He sometimes volunteered with the YSR-SR, and abandoned clothing runs, without any missing person reports, were usually annoying, not decisive.

  He wasn’t working with the YSR-SR at the moment, but he might work with them again, and he didn’t want to upset anyone. So he’d tell them, and they might send someone out in the morning.

  His strides had increased because his adrenaline was up. It didn’t take as long as usual to reach the wall at the edge of the upper trail.

  At the moment, the wall looked like a silly precaution, something an overzealous city official had placed in position to protect tourists from themselves. In mid-spring, when the snowmelt was mixing with the rain, the water often covered the rocks that blocked his view now, and made the wall at the edge of the upper trail seem like inadequate protection.

  He always looked at the wall as an indication that he was nearly halfway done with this particular walk. This time, though, he felt a thread of disappointment. He really hadn’t paid much attention to the austere beauty around him.

  He had been thinking about the damn shoes. They irritated him. The fact that he had gone onto that overlook irritated him, the fact that he had to investigate the shoes irritated him, the fact that people had left them behind, probably for just that reason, irritated him.

  Of course, he probably wasn’t really irritated at any of those things as much as he was irritated at the overreaction of his colleagues to the morning’s news.

  All day, they had been acting like someone had died, as if their entire world had been destroyed. Apparently, they had believed—despite all evidence to the contrary—that Sector Base E-2 would never close, that they would have their jobs forever.

  The thing that irritated him the most? Half of his colleagues hated their jobs. They always said they would work elsewhere if there were an elsewhere to work. The sector base enabled them to live in this beautiful place, and the base would continue to enable them to live in this beautiful place, with retirement packages and guaranteed income for life.

  Not the income they had now, but a goodly portion of it. And they didn’t have to work for it. The base took care of their own.

  Or they could move. That option had been presented just that morning. The staff of Sector Base E-2 could move at any point, now that the end date for the base had been set. All anyone had to do was talk to their direct supervisor. They might not be able to move immediately, but they could set up a move date, when their job became less necessary to the base.

  In fact, the administrators had said that morning that they would love it if half the staff left sooner rather than later. The best thing that could happen to Sector Base E-2 was that half of its staff would leave and be replaced by younger, newer workers. Those workers would be trained by the remaining staff of the oldest sector base in the Fleet’s system, and then those workers would be sent to Sector Base G-2.

  Rajivk had to admit he didn’t like that part of the plan because he would be one of the people training the newcomers. But he accepted that as the price of remaining in the most beautiful place he had ever seen in his little corner of the universe.

  He was slightly out of breath as he crested the top of the path. This part of the mountain was deceptive. It looked like an actual mountaintop, but the mountain itself actually continued upward almost two miles away. This plateau was two miles by five miles, flat as the ground in the Sandoveil Valley, except in the very center, where the waters of the Jeleen River flowed into Fiskett Falls.

  At this time of year, the Jeleen River was slow moving. There was no snowmelt and the worst of the rains hadn’t started yet. From this vantage, at the very crest of the plateau, the river mirrored Rockwell Pool below.

  From mid-summer through now was the time of year that rescuers dreaded the most. It was the time of year when tourists would take off their shoes and wade in the river, the time of year when some gung-ho young adult would think he could swim across the river to the other side, the time of year when idiot parents let their kids splash along the shoreline.

  Signs hovered everywhere, ruining the vista, warning people away from the water. But people never listened.

  Every year, when the Sandoveil Council went over the budget and saw the cost overruns for saving idiots (or pulling their bodies out of the water), they talked about spending the money early and setting up actual barriers, preventing anyone from ever stepping in the water aga
in.

  The council talked about all kinds of barriers, from invisible barriers made of some kind of force field, to visible barriers made of modified nanobits that would turn dark as someone got too close, to a good, old-fashioned spiked fence that would injure anyone who tried to climb over it.

  Every year, those proposals got voted down—and every year, Rajivk was relieved. He liked the view just the way it was.

  This afternoon, the sun hit the river water just perfectly, turning the top layer golden. The current was barely visible, working its way around the rocks. To most people, the river looked placid at its low point.

  To Rajivk, the river simply revealed its teeth—all those pointed rocks, all those eddies, all that treachery that usually hid beneath crystalline waves.

  He walked to his favorite overlook. Tourists rarely used this one, even though it jutted over the Falls. You couldn’t tell that from the path, though. It looked like an overlook that had a view of the Sandoveil Valley or maybe just the gray-blue sky.

  But one visit to the overlook would change anyone’s opinion. It had the best views in the entire area.

  Rajivk smiled in anticipation. As he got closer, he watched the view come into focus. The view went from gray-blue sky to the sparkling water tumbling over the the edge. Sometimes the spray here was as thick as the spray at the overlook where he saw the shoes, but not at this time of year.

  At this time of year, the volume going over the Falls was down by two-thirds from its seasonal peak in mid-spring. The water almost looked as unthreatening as water pouring out of a large tap.

  But he knew better. Fortunately, the engineers who had built this overlook made it impossible to lean over the edge and dip a hand in the water. That much force—especially in mid-spring—could pull a person into the raging torrent without even much of a blink.

  When he stood with his shoulders squared and looked directly forward, he could see the entire Sandoveil Valley spread before him. The valley seemed to extend forever, with houses and businesses growing like weeds. In the center of the valley was the city of Sandoveil itself, formed on a grid pattern, like most Fleet-built cities. The city, with its red, gold, and blue buildings and perfectly positioned green spaces, provided lots of color. But beyond the main part of the city itself was another set of mud flats. They had very few pools. The land burped mud, making gigantic mud bubbles that looked like tents in their own right.