City of Ruins du-2 Read online

  “On an unknown fault line, maybe?” Carmak asks.

  I shake my head. Even I know this. We have the capability to map tectonic plates from space. There are no unknown fault lines on any settled planet.

  I’m about to say that when Lentz shakes his head.

  ”It’s more like an explosion from underground,” he says. “With a directed charge, made to create a hole in the surface above.”

  ”Have they gone down to check what causes the explosion?” Bridge asks,

  ”Initially,” Lentz says. “Which is why they’re called death holes.”

  “Because the investigators mummify,” Mikk says,

  Lentz shakes his head. “Because the investigators vanish.”

  ”Vanish?” I frown at him. He’s enjoying dragging this out. “What does that mean?”

  “It means that they’re never found,” he says.

  ”Does anyone search for them?” I remember how reluctant the guide was to let me down the corridor.

  ”Not after the first one or two don’t make it back,” he says. “Then they use animals to test. Usually after a dozen years or so have passed, something survives, and then it’s deemed safe. But until then, no one goes in the death holes.”

  ”Sounds like they learned about these places the hard way,” Ilona says.

  Everyone turns toward her, as if her statement is obvious.

  “I mean,” she says, “they have a protocol and a name for the phenomenon. So that means that these holes repeated, and then after a while, they needed a way to deal with them.”

  “Ilona’s right,” Bridge says. “A culture doesn’t name a phenomenon if it’s extremely rare. And it doesn’t create a protocol if the phenomenon happens once every hundred years or so. How many of these have there been?”

  Lentz shrugs. “I didn’t talk to him all day.”

  “But you found out a lot,” I say, wanting him to continue. “Does he think it’s odd that these places eventually become safe?”

  “No,” Lentz says. “He says it validates his theory, that some kind of gas or something builds up and then explodes. It then dissipates over time, and the hole becomes safe.”

  “If there was gas, it would be released into the atmosphere, contaminating the area around it,” Gregory says. “Did he find that?”

  “He’s only had two death holes to study since this became his expertise. But the records don’t show any areawide deaths.”

  “Because,” Ilona says, “they clear the areas when a death hole appears. You told us that.”

  “History tells us that,” Carmak says.

  “I’d like to know what happened the first time a few death holes appeared,” I say. Because it doesn’t have to be a gas. It could be a field. An expansion of a stealth-tech field—a different kind than we experienced in the Room of Lost Souls, but an expansion nonetheless.

  Still, I don’t say that. I’m still not willing to admit this place is tied to ancient stealth. We haven’t seen stealth tech act like that.

  Or have we?

  I turn to Gregory, whom I hired because he once specialized in stealth tech. He was one of the government scientists who tried to reverse-engineer stealth tech with Squishy.

  “When you guys were trying to re-create stealth tech in the lab,” I say to him, “did you get some localized expansion phenomena? Something that would resemble what’s going on here?”

  He sighs. He hates talking about that time. What Squishy told me in as little detail as possible was that in the two hundred years the Empire has been trying to re-create stealth tech, the program has lost ships, materiel, and people.

  When he remains silent, I add, “Squishy told me that a lot of people died while she worked on the program. I assumed they got trapped in the stealth-tech field. Is that what happened? Or were there ‘explosions’ to use Lentz’s word? Did the field expand unexpectedly?”

  “C’mon, Boss,” Roderick says, “we’ve already seen that. In the Room. The way the station just kept getting bigger.”

  “But that looked like it was falling out of the field,” Mikk says. Even though he gets impatient with scientific theory, he does remember it. Sometimes I think he’s too smart for the rest of us, which is why his patience with people who establish fundamentals before they get to the point is so short.

  “Greg?” I ask. “Did it suddenly explode?”

  “‘Explode’ is the wrong word,” he says. “Sometimes it would expand. It would be concentrated in one area, like air going through a tube.”

  “Or a narrow field coming up through the earth,” says Stone.

  Even though we’re not on the Earth, no one corrects her. We know what she meant.

  I sigh. “This isn’t evidence, you know.”

  “It’s another piece,” Ilona says.

  It is that.

  “Can you get more information from your friend?” I ask Lentz.

  “I can try,” Lentz says. “I can ask him to lunch or something. But we have to be really informal. He can lose his job.”

  “Hell, why don’t you just hire him, Boss?” Mikk says. “That’ll take care of the cloak-and-dagger stuff.”

  “I’d like to know if he has something to add before I do,” I say.

  “Besides, hiring him might cut off his access to these death holes,” Ilona says. “It’s becoming clearer and clearer that the Vaycehnese are protecting the reputation of their city, and they’re doing it at great cost.”

  “Cities do that all the time,” Carmak says. “Governments lie. They don’t want the bad stuff to get out. That’s normal.”

  “But sometimes it’s just there.” Cesar Voris, one of the historians, speaks up for the first time. He’s one of my new hires. Carmak recommended him because he’s an expert in this region of space. He specializes in ancient history, but he loves modern as well, and he spends his off time studying. I’ve never had another employee work quite that hard.

  “What do you mean, ‘there’?” Carmak asks.

  Voris shrugs. He’s a big man with a shock of white hair that makes his brown skin seem even darker than it is. His eyes are very black and very alert.

  He looks directly at me. “You said to find out what we can about the death toll in the caves, so I did.”

  “We couldn’t find anything,” Gregory says. “No one’ll talk.”

  “That’s right,” Voris says. “But we’re interested in information. History, when you come down to it. So I went to the City Museum.”

  “The director wouldn’t talk to me,” says Ilona.

  Voris folds his hands together and waits until the others stop speaking.

  “The City Museum of Vaycehn,” he says like the teacher he used to be, “is an amazing place. It has a great library, and so many fascinating exhibits, I doubt anyone could see them all in the space of a month.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Mikk says. “Don’t tease us with information and then not give it.”

  “The thing is,” Voris says as if Mikk hasn’t spoken, “the exhibits cover the history of Vaycehn as accurately as possible. There is a quick viewing area that the tourists usually go to, and indeed are directed to, being told that the rest of the place will take most of their trip to see.”

  Mikk sighs impatiently. I grab another spotted apple and turn it over in my hands.

  “But if you go in with an agenda, you can see quite a bit. I decided my agenda was the caves. The longer I was there, the more I realized I needed to know about the way the city center changed location all the time.” Voris raises his bushy white eyebrows and looks at all of us, individually, before going on.

  Now Stone sighs.

  But Voris doesn’t seem to care. “So I wandered, found an old ruin actually brought into the museum intact—that was interesting—and then found that each display has an information button. You push it and a holographic guide tells you everything you want to know and a few things you don’t. If you push it twice, you can get a hard copy of the transcript, and if you push it th
ree times, you can download that transcript to your own personal system, so long as you sign a few waivers promising not to use it for profit in any way.”

  “What did you learn?” Mikk asks.

  “That the fourteen archeologists were mentioned for precisely the reason that Dr. Stone said. Because they’re famous throughout the sector and it would look bad for them to just disappear here.”

  Stone nods. She clearly feels vindicated.

  “But,” Voris says, “I also learned that hundreds of Vaycehnese have died over the centuries in those so-called death holes. And for generations, the caves were off-limits to the Vaycehnese because people would die in weird little pocket areas.”

  I take a bit of the spotted apple. It’s sweet and sour at the same time. I could easily become addicted to these things.

  “There’s even some images of the first mummies—people they found in those pockets and then removed. There’s an entire section of the museum dedicated to the mummies of Wyr.”

  Ilona lets out a breath of air.

  “My God,” Bridge says.

  “You’re kidding,” Lentz says, but it’s not because he believes Voris is lying, but because he’s stunned that Voris has learned this.

  “You think your colleague knows?” I ask.

  “I have no idea,” Lentz says. “I’ll ask him tomorrow.”

  “He probably does, but doesn’t associate it with the death holes,” Voris says. “The reason the City Museum is there is for the schools. Children parade in and out of that place on assignments all the time. The mummies are one assignment, but they’re considered a mystery. Are they the first humans who came to Wyr before the colonists, or are they native? People connect certain areas of the caves with the mummies, but not the death holes themselves.”

  “But you just said that the fields in these death holes recede,” Mikk says to Lentz.

  Lentz nods. “I think the people who get trapped inside move away from the area where they entered. They lose oxygen or something—I don’t know—and they die. Then when the fields recede, someone goes in and finds a mummy—not where the person originally vanished, but farther inside.”

  “That’s a theory,” Stone says.

  “But a good one,” Ilona says, mostly because it reinforces her stealth-tech idea.

  “Wouldn’t the Vaycehnese figure out that these phenomena are related?” Mikk asked.

  “Not necessarily,” Voris said. “We’re looking for something specific. They’re all looking at the various peculiarities of their home.”

  “Some of those peculiarities are just accepted,” Ilona says.

  “Research blindness,” Bridge says. “That’s why we try not to have preconceptions.”

  I sigh. I am starting to hate that word.

  “We have preconceptions,” Ivy says. She is still rubbing her fingertips together. “Maybe they’re clouding our vision, too.”

  “Maybe,” I say, “but let’s listen to Cesar. I suspect he has more to tell us.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Voris says. “Because there’s a modern mystery to this place.”

  There are a lot of mysteries on Vaycehn, more than I want to solve, simply because I want to get away from this hot, gravity-filled planet.

  “You mean besides the fourteen archeologists?” Stone asks.

  “Sixteen,” Voris says. “There were sixteen.”

  We’re all staring at him now. He has a slight smile on his face, and his black eyes twinkle. He looks both impish and pleased with himself.

  “Sixteen?” Stone says. “We would know if two others were missing. It would be big news.”

  “It wasn’t big news because they were postdoctoral students,” Voris says. “They were working on some project of their own, hoping for recognition, when they just disappeared. The guides say they never came out. They hadn’t followed instructions, had gone into an off-limit area, and disappeared.”

  “Like the guides were warning us about,” Ivy says nervously.

  Bridge glares at her again.

  “Yes,” Voris says. “Maybe that’s why. I’m thinking we should talk to the guides, try to find out how many of their noncompliance tourists have died in those caves.”

  “Do that,” I say.

  “Before we start your dive?” Stone asks, as if I’m the one who has suggested something out of line.

  “No,” I say.

  “But what if this isn’t stealth tech?” Stone says. “What if you’re right and this is something else?”

  I shrug. “Then we might die.”

  Five of the Six gasp. But the divers nod. They know the risks. We face them every time we dive.

  “You knew that when you signed on with us,” I say to the five. “That’s part of what we do. We take risks in dangerous places. You signed waivers.”

  Half the team looks at their empty plates. Gregory takes more food, as if eating it will protect him.

  I half expect someone to say that waivers aren’t the same as realizing the risks. I’ve had tourists tell me that when I take them wreck diving. Then I would keep those tourists in the ship, not allowing them to dive.

  But to my team’s credit, they don’t complain. They know what they signed up for, and they’re not going to back out just because the risk has become real to them.

  “You think it’s stealth tech now, don’t you?” Ilona asks me.

  I’m not willing to concede that, at least not yet. But I do give her this: “I think the chances have gone up. But this could be something else. Maybe the Vaycehnese are right. Maybe this is a localized phenomenon.”

  “That makes its own lights?” Bridge asks.

  “There are stranger things in the universe,” I say. But not many. Things that act man-made generally are.

  “Should we track the deaths?” Ivy asks, clearly not wanting to go back into the caves.

  I shake my head. “The historians need to find out about Vaycehn’s earliest settlers. Take Cesar’s advice. Go to that museum. See what the prehistory stuff says. See if you can find evidence of what’s been forgotten.”

  “If it’s forgotten,” Stone says, “then no one will find it.”

  I smile. My business has always been about handling forgotten things.

  “Forgotten doesn’t mean invisible, Lucretia,” I say. “Forgotten sometimes means misunderstood.”

  “Or ignored,” Ilona says.

  “Or buried,” Bridge says.

  I nod. For the first time, I’m enjoying this project. I’m even looking forward to the work below ground.

  Maybe that’s because diving is my element, whether it’s underground or in space. Or maybe it’s because I finally believe we’ll discover something.

  Stealth tech or not, there’s something here. Something old. Something interesting.

  Something unexplained.

  ~ * ~

  SEVEN

  The dives are both easier and more difficult than they are in space. We can walk through sections, but we have trouble reaching the ceiling, where those magical lights are. We don’t float away from the area we’re examining, but we can’t pull ourselves forward, either. We have to walk, to view everything from a single perspective.

  I am frustrated and fascinated. I hate the feeling of gravity, but I love mapping.

  We take each section bit by bit. We examine each area for changes. The guides watch as if we’re crazy.

  I bring most of my good divers down—at least in the beginning—to train the Six how to do real wreck diving. The guides have precise maps of the areas in which the deaths occurred—not just the sixteen recent deaths, but all of the deaths since the Vaycehnese started exploring their own cave system.

  The guides show us these things, not to help us, but to discourage us. They want us to know how dangerous this place is, just so that we’ll give up and go home.

  Which we don’t.

  The deaths intrigue me. There are a lot of them—so many deaths, in fact, that the Vaycehnese forbid actual exploration by any
one and only allow tourist visits of the extreme edges. It is a sign of the Vaycehnese prejudice against foreigners that they allow any of us down here at all. Our lives are less precious than the lives of locals.

  If they lose a few of us, they seem to believe it doesn’t matter—so long as there isn’t a section-wide incident. It is known throughout the section that the caves are dangerous, and anyone who goes down into them is taking a risk.

  The guides think we’re foolish in our dive suits, standing in front of a smooth black wall, taking notes and talking to each other in jargon. I’m happy for the suits. Much as I hate pulling them over my sweaty skin, I love the suit’s automatic environmental controls. If it isn’t for the gravity, I can almost believe that I’m back in space, diving a particularly unusual wreck.

  It takes us nearly two weeks to explore the “safe” areas of the caves. By then, the Six have learned the routine. They’re still rookies, but they’re better than they were.

  On the first day of the third week, I dive with the Six. We’re going to the area where the postdoc students died. It’s farther away than the areas where the archeologists have died, and Ilona argues that we should explore those areas first.

  But in the time between our meeting and this dive, the historians have learned what the postdocs were working on. The postdocs believed that some kind of force created the caves—some kind of field that is part of the planet’s interior, a force that expands and just as quickly contracts. That force comes upward, like geysers on Earth or the spitting rocks of Fortuyuna.

  Planets shift and change. They’re living creatures, like we are, only older, larger, and slower-moving. They adjust their comfort levels, and that causes volcanic eruptions or groundquakes or an occasional eruption of steam. Those adjustments, no matter what they are, release a lot of pent-up energy.

  These postdocs believed that Wyr had a unique way of adjusting its own comfort level, a way that released energy that could be farmed. My scientists are still examining the research, trying to understand why the postdocs made that assumption, trying to figure out the energy readings (if any) that the postdocs took before they died.

  But the fact that they were trying to take energy readings is more than enough for me. If the postdocs were right, then there is some kind of natural field down here. If we’re right, there’s a man-made field.