City of Ruins du-2 Read online

  The rest of the team is scattered around the table. As usual, the hotel has given us a fantastic spread of food. If I’m not careful, I might actually gain weight on this job.

  “Dignity Vessels came from Earth,” Ivy says. “Everyone knows that.”

  “But we’ve never been able to adequately explain how they got out here,” Ilona says. “Maybe the specs were brought here, and the vessels were built here.”

  “Underground?” Bridge asks. “Not likely.”

  “Maybe there’s another way out,” Ilona says. “From what I can guess, that chamber is deep in the mountain. Maybe there was an opening like the one we went down, and maybe it closed.”

  “Or maybe this place has a different function,” I say, “one we haven’t yet figured out.”

  Ilona shakes her head. “The words ‘vessel’ and ‘assemble’ are everywhere.”

  “And so is the word ‘repair,’” Gregory says. “Maybe this is just a maintenance hub.”

  “Have you found the phrase ‘Dignity Vessel’ yet?” I ask.

  “No,” Ilona says. “But it’s only a matter of time.”

  I look away from her. “Anyone recognize that section of space that appeared on the screen above us?”

  “We can’t even pinpoint it,” Bridge says. “It’s not in our database or in the Vaycehnese’s or in the sector’s either. It’s unknown.”

  “And the numbers?” I ask.

  “You didn’t get a good enough look for us to examine them,” Ivy says.

  I know that, but I had hopes.

  “What about the console? Any idea what it does?”

  “The words are shorthand,” Ilona says, setting down her pointer and returning to the place at the table. “Like we would have on a child’s console. ‘On,’ ‘Off,’ ‘Start,’ ‘Stop,’ that kind of thing. But nothing that suggests what comes on or what starts and what stops.”

  “The intriguing word is in the middle,” says Gregory. ‘“Open.”‘

  “I didn’t find that intriguing,” Lentz says, speaking up for the first time since the meeting started. “What I found intriguing was the blinking light over the word ‘automatic.’ Isn’t the entire place automated? What does that mean?”

  I lean back in my chair. “I don’t know. I was hoping you guys would know by the time we had the meeting.”

  “This isn’t guesswork,” Voris says. “We must be precise. You know that, Boss. You’re the one who drilled that into us.”

  Once again, the soft-spoken man makes the best point. I sigh and get up. I can’t sit long.

  “We know that the team has suffered no ill effects from the dive,” Roderick says.

  “That have shown up yet,” Ivy says. “We don’t know what long-term exposure does.”

  I nod. I’ve had us checked by medics, our biologists, and several scanners, in addition to the Business’s decontamination chamber. So far, we’re fine.

  I’m still not willing to risk a longer dive. But I’m going to violate space rules. I’m going to let all of us dive again tomorrow.

  “We’re going back in the morning,” I say.

  Roderick shakes his head. “Boss, you know that’s risky.”

  “I think we activated something. If we wait the standard two days between dives, we might not know what got triggered,” I say.

  “Maybe saving yourselves,” Ivy mutters.

  I let that go. For the first time in one of these meetings, I look at Stone. I expect her to take command, but she doesn’t. She’s watching something on her handheld and taking notes. It’s as if this meeting doesn’t concern her.

  And, at the moment, it doesn’t. She can’t go into the chamber. She’s effectively shut out of everything.

  “I’ll keep tomorrow’s dive short,” I say. “But I’m planning to go in every day until we have an idea what’s going on.”

  “You saw the word ‘danger’ on the floor, right?” Mikk asks.

  I nod. “But we don’t know what it refers to. And we know how old Earth systems work. If the Earthers believed the chamber was dangerous, that word would have been on the door.”

  The historians immediately concede the point. The others shrug, all except the Six, who watch me with something approaching fear.

  “Come on,” I say to them. “Enjoy this. This is probably the most important discovery any of us will ever make.”

  “And we can’t even investigate it,” Bridge says.

  I look at him. He’s sitting with the other scientists. They seem frustrated.

  “You can’t do good science with recordings,” he says. “We need to be hands-on.”

  “I know,” I say. “But I don’t know how to get you there until we determine if that field reading we’re getting is not stealth tech.”

  “It has to be,” Ilona says.

  “It doesn’t have to be anything we already know,” I say. “The sounds are different. And we’re not sure about the technology. We have to be careful.”

  “I think we’re being too careful,” she says.

  My cheeks heat. “I think it’s bad policy to determine what something is in advance. We need to go slowly.”

  “I am not disputing that,” Ilona says. “Just your interpretation of existing data.”

  I shrug. “Right now, we’re all guessing. And I can hardly wait until the guessing ends.”

  “Me, too,” says Ivy. “Because I keep looking at that word, ‘danger,’ and wonder what you’re dragging the team into.”

  “The Boss always takes us to risky places,” Roderick says. “If you don’t like it, you can leave.”

  But Ivy remains seated. So does everyone else, including—to my relief— the Six.

  “Okay,” I say. “A short dive tomorrow. Maybe after that, we’ll have some answers.”

  ~ * ~

  TWELVE

  The chamber looks no different when we return. The lights are still on.

  The numbers run on that screen ten consoles down the wall. The screen above me shows that weird spacescape. The consoles glow.

  I am more convinced than ever that we shouldn’t touch anything. But now I’m willing to fan out just a little. I let Rea handle the middle of the room with DeVries beside him. I send Seager and Kersting to the space to the right of the door. They’ll never make it to the far wall—not today—but at least we’re moving.

  After about an hour, I look up from my examination of the second console. Something has changed, although I don’t know what it is.

  Then I realize that the screen above the first console has gone dark. I stare at it, and realize that I’m wrong. The screen isn’t dark. It’s showing complete blackness.

  The dark screens have a different look and texture. This one is showing a view of someplace completely without light.

  In spite of myself, I shudder. Then I glance at the other screen—the numbers screen. I can’t tell for sure, but it looks like they’ve changed too.

  I turn toward the rest of the crew to tell them and see Rea a few meters from me in that broad expanse of floor.

  He must catch something in my body language, because he says, “It’s easy to map a floor and emptiness.”

  I nod. He’s right, of course. But he’s doing something besides mapping, something that he stopped doing as I turned.

  “You were moving funny,” I say. It’s just a guess, but that’s the sense that I had, that he was making odd movements.

  “Flapping my arms.” There’s a smile in his voice. I wish I can see his face. “I figure if our movement triggers the lights, maybe my movement will trigger some lights buried in the floor.”

  “What’s in that floor might be what the ancients called danger,” I say.

  “Or not,” he says. “So far, I have had no results.”

  “Well, stop it,” I say. “Just map.”

  He sighs, but lets his arms fall. He’s going to listen.

  I start to turn back toward the console when the air waves. Like heat mirages. The air is actuall
y rippling.

  My breath catches. I turn toward Rea and realize that the rippling is stronger near him. Has he created it? Or is something happening there?

  “Rea!” I yell. “Run!”

  He doesn’t seem to understand.

  “Get out of here!” I yell.

  The others head for the door. I do too. Rea moves a little slower. The rippling gets worse. He looks like a video that’s falling apart. Then he slides out of the area and gets to the doorway.

  Something whooshes behind me.

  I whirl and blink, unable to believe what I’m seeing.

  A Dignity Vessel is parked in that broad expanse of floor. An intact, clean, vibrating Dignity Vessel.

  I murmur something—a curse maybe, or just a sound of awe. I’m aware of making noise, but not of what kind of noise I’m making. Rea pushes up against me.

  DeVries says, “Oh, my…”

  No one else speaks.

  “Was there something solid on that floor when you were there?” I ask Rea.

  He shakes his head.

  “I was standing there,” he says. “I would’ve been crushed.”

  The ripples. That Dignity Vessel became visible. We just saw the transition between stealth mode and nonstealth mode. Or something like that.

  I glance at the numbers screen. It has stopped on the last set. Nothing runs. Then I look at the other screens. The one that had gone black now shows a black room with little white figures in it. Human-shaped.

  It takes me a moment to realize those figures are us. We’re seeing ourselves in our suits staring at the screen.

  Looking away from the camera. Which has to be on the Dignity Vessel.

  It wasn’t in stealth mode in this chamber. It had been somewhere else until a little while ago. Somewhere with that strange patch of space.

  “We triggered it,” I say.

  “What?” DeVries asks.

  “I think we summoned it back here.” I make myself record everything— the screens, the changes in the console.

  “What do you mean, we summoned it?” Rea asks.

  I shouldn’t say this, with all my lectures about theories and suppositions. But I do. “We entered the chamber and it came alive. When it did, it must have sent some kind of message—maybe that someone is here. Maybe that the chamber is functional again. It called the vessel here.”

  “Called it home,” DeVries says softly. “Ilona was right. This is where they were built.”

  I shake my head. “She’s right about the stealth, and she’s right that Dignity Vessels are connected here. But look at this chamber. The vessel fills this part. There’s no room to build. This is an arrival port or a maintenance unit.”

  “Or both,” Rea says.

  “That’s why the danger,” I say. “No one can stand where you were. There’s not enough warning to get out of the way.”

  No klaxons, no bells. I glance up. The ceiling didn’t open. Nothing changed except the vessel appeared here.

  “I’ll bet there’s a death hole on the surface,” I say.

  “Above us?” Kersting asks.

  I shake my head. “Maybe around us. Behind us. Horizontal. Taking some of the force of that extra stealth energy.”

  “That’s what death holes are?” Rea asks.

  “It’s a guess,” I say. It’s all a guess. Until we can examine everything.

  I walk forward. A functioning Dignity Vessel. Probably with some kind of homing program, some way to come back here to this base.

  If our entry has called one vessel home, how many others will come?

  Maybe not many. Of all the Dignity Vessels we’ve found, none have been functional.

  This one is, by some miracle.

  This one is.

  ~ * ~

  SECTOR BASE V

  THIRTEEN

  They landed smoothly, which surprised the hell out of Coop. The Ivoire had suffered more damage than he ever could have imagined, and yet the venerable old craft had gotten them here, mostly in one piece.

  For a brief moment, he bowed his head. He took a deep breath and let a shudder run through him—the only emotion he’d allowed himself in more than a week.

  Then he raised his head and looked.

  The walls had full screens, top to bottom, just like he’d ordered. It didn’t matter much when the Ivoire transitioned, but now that the ship had arrived at Sector Base V, the walls told him a lot.

  A lot that he didn’t understand.

  The Ivoire had landed inside the base, just like usual. The ship stood on the repair deck, just like it was supposed to.

  The base was cavernous. It had to be. Like the other ships of her class, the Ivoire was large. She comfortably housed five hundred people, providing family quarters, school, and recreation in addition to being a working battleship. Two ships the size of the Ivoire could fit into this base, with another partially assembled along the way.

  Not to mention the equipment, the specialized bays, the private working areas.

  The sector base was huge and impossible to process all at once.

  But what Coop could process looked wrong.

  For one thing, no one manned the equipment. Much of it looked like it wasn’t even turned on. The lights were dim or off completely. The workstations—the ones he could see in the half-light—looked like they’d suffered minor damage.

  But he didn’t know how they could have. Like all the sector bases, Sector Base V was over a mile underground in a heavily fortified area. No one could get in or out without the proper equipment.

  To his knowledge, no sector base had ever been attacked, not even in areas under siege. Granted, his knowledge wasn’t as vast as the history of the Fleet, but he knew how difficult it was to damage a sector base

  Although it looked like someone had harmed this one. Because it had been fine a month ago.

  Before the battles with the Quurzod, he’d brought the Ivoire in for its final systems check and repair. He had known that he wouldn’t get another full-scale repair for a year, maybe more. Particularly if the Fleet conquered the Quurzod and moved on, like planned. Then the Ivoire and the other ships in the Fleet wouldn’t get the full-scale treatment for five years. It would take that long to build Sector Base W, at the edges of the new sector of space.

  He hadn’t planned on ever returning here.

  He certainly hadn’t planned on returning here in defeat.

  Or what felt like defeat.

  And now the base looked wrong.

  “You sure we’re seeing Sector Base V?” he asked Dix Pompiono.

  Dix stood at the station farthest from Coop, in case the bridge got hit. Dix figured that if as much distance as possible separated them, one of them would survive.

  Coop had always figured if the bridge got hit, the entire vessel would disappear. The anacapa drive—small as it was—was located on the bridge itself. If the drive took a direct hit, then the drive’s protections would fail. Half the ship would be in this dimension, half in another—if they were lucky. If they weren’t, the entire thing might explode.

  Maybe it was the half-and-half dimensions that made Dix want to stay separate from Coop. They’d never discussed it, and they weren’t about to now.

  “It sure as hell doesn’t look like Sector Base V,” Dix said. “But the readings say it is.”

  It looked like Sector Base V to Coop. He recognized some of the specialized equipment, built with parts of the indigenous rock.

  “We’re in the right point in space,” said Anita Tren. She stood at her post, even though her built-in chair brushed against her backside.

  “Have you confirmed that we’re under Venice City?” Coop asked.

  Venice City, the latest settlement. “Latest” was technically accurate, but the location, on the most remote planet in this sector, had been settled fifty years before Coop was born. At his first visit here, on his tenth birthday, he had thought the city old.

  His father had laughed at that, telling Coop there were place
s in this sector that had been colonized for thousands of years. Human habitation, his father had said, although no one knew where those humans had originated.

  The Fleet, everyone knew, originally came from Earth, but so long ago that no one alive had seen the home planet or even the home solar system. Earth felt like a myth, something rare and special and lost to time.

  The base looked dimmer than usual. The equipment seemed smaller in the emptiness. Some lights were on, but not many. And the bulk of the base disappeared into the darkness.

  “Is something wrong with the screens, then?” Coop asked Yash Zarlengo.

  She had left her station. She had walked up to the nearest wall screen and was investigating it with her handheld, as well as with the fingertips of her left hand.

  “I’m not reading any problems. These images are coming from the ship’s exterior just like they should be,” she said.

  Coop frowned and wished, not for the first time, that the original Fleet engineers had thought it proper to build portals into the bridge. He would like to do a visual comparison of what he saw on the wall screens with what he saw out the portal.

  But he would have to leave the bridge to do that.

  So he snapped his finger at the most junior officer on deck, Kjersti Perkins. She didn’t even have to be told what he wanted. She nodded and exited.

  Perkins would have to walk three-tenths of a mile just to get to the nearest portal. The bridge was in the nose of the ship, completely protected by hull. The original engineers had thought the portals were for tourists, and didn’t insert any until the ship widened into its residential and business wings.

  But Coop couldn’t just worry about what was outside the ship. He also had to worry about what was inside the ship.

  “Give me updated damage reports,” he said.

  “Nothing new,” Yash said, which was a relief. Coop had been expecting more damage all over the ship. Normal activation of the anacapa drive often revealed weak spots in the ship, and this activation had been anything but normal.

  It had been desperate—more desperate than he ever wanted to admit.