City of Ruins

TEN



Age and time have warped the door shut. It takes all five of us to pry m I the edges away from the frame, but once we do, the door moves with surprising ease. I pull on the lever, and the door squeals open.

As it does, lights go on. Red lights at first, flaring like warning lamps, and then they turn green before they fade to white.

Lights turn on in the corridor as well—along the floor, though, where I hadn’t thought to look. A quick check makes me realize that these lights are recessed. There was no way to locate them under the flaked particles until they revealed themselves.

The lights coming on scared the two at the junction. They use the comm to see if we’re all right, and I reassure them. Only after we sign off do I realize they also want to know what has gotten loose. They’re so untrained they think someone else has turned on the lights, not that the door triggered them.

I bite back irritation and peer inside.

What faces me is not a room, but a cavern. And it’s not empty. It’s filled with equipment. Old equipment that’s slowly powering up. I can hear the whines as it restarts, see the lights on the consoles flicker on, watch as screens sparkle to life.

Rea curses.

DeVries makes a sound of awe.

I make no sound at all. I’m staring at the wording on the floor.

It’s in Old Earth Standard, a language I’ve been learning because it’s the language of the Dignity Vessels.

I flick the comm inside my suit, hailing Roderick and Mikk. I’ve never tried to communicate from this deep in the corridors before, and I’m not sure when the two men will get the message—if ever. But I have to send it.

“It’s a gold mine,” I say. “But you have to stay away. I’m pretty sure now that we’re in a stealth-tech field.”

And if we are, that message could be lost to time. Or it could be delivered in a blink of an eye.

“Ilona was right, then,” Rea says.

I nod. And stare. And wonder how the hell I’m going to keep this secret from the Vaycehnese, and their tourist board, and their publicity machine.

Because the moment they announce a grand discovery, then it’ll go out through the sector. Eventually the Empire will figure out what’s here.

Eventually, they’ll try to take it over.

And then we’ll have the fight I’ve been expecting. The fight I’ve been preparing for. The fight I want to avoid as long as possible.

The interior of this chamber is huge—too big to be called a room. It goes on as far as the eye can see. The ceiling is domed. The walls, the floor, everything is covered with that black material, and here it hasn’t flaked.

We continue to follow the rules, mostly because I’m scared of the traps that lie within. I think of the way the lights came on, and I wonder what else we can trigger—and if that trigger will be harmful, even to those of us with the marker.

I make Kersting take samples from the walls and the floors to see why this area is different than the exterior. I want as much information as possible.

To that end, we plan to map and record every centimeter. We won’t make it in one dive—this place is bigger than some cities. We also won’t touch the consoles—I’m afraid of triggering something—or the screens. We just look and wave our cameras over each section; then we describe.

For the first time, I miss the scientists. I want their on-scene analyses, something I won’t get until we go above ground.

We’re timing this dive, like we time all the others, even though I want to stay for the entire day. No one knows the effect of stealth tech on people with the marker, so we are limiting our exposure.

Ivy suggested this the night before we got in the door, and I agreed with her then. I knew I wouldn’t once I was inside, and I was right. Even though the field readings—whatever they are—are stronger than anything we’ve ever seen, I don’t feel any effects.

Neither do the Six.

But they’re not experienced, and I tend toward the gids—something that happens when oxygen is low. There is no one to monitor us but ourselves, always a dangerous situation, and if we all get the gids, we will make bad choices.

The bad choice that looms is my own. I want to go deep into this chamber. I want to see how far it extends. I want to know everything about it now, not weeks from now. I want to know what it is, what it’s used for, and why it was abandoned.

For now, I have to satisfy myself with what I can see from the area near the door. Two dozen consoles, linked screens along the walls, and chairs built into the floor.

There is nothing in the middle of the chamber except clear floor—no stains, no markings, nothing. Around the consoles, instructions written in Old Earth Standard in large letters. I recognize only one word.

Danger.

I would have expected nothing less.

The consoles seem uniform except for one about ten consoles down. That one I can’t examine yet. From a distance, I note that it’s bigger and has more buttons, but that’s all I can see.

That the consoles have buttons surprises me. There are flat areas, like we have, areas that imply a touch command. But the buttons suggest that to make things work, someone must press them or move them or toggle them, which I think is terribly inefficient. Over time, the switch itself can decay and make errors.

Another reason not to let anyone touch the consoles. We do record as many as we can from top to bottom, examining the sides and the casing, lingering on the words so that the team outside this room can translate for us.

After we finish the first and second consoles, we’re out of time. As I stand, the screen above me flickers to life, and I worry that we’ve somehow turned it on.

What I see is an image of space. At least, I believe it’s space. I’m not sure where or when, for that matter. I don’t recognize any of the stars. I have never seen the placement.

“What the hell is it?” Rea asks from behind me. I turn a little, about to explain, when I see what he’s looking at.

He’s looking at a different screen—the one over the big console. Numbers scroll across it.

“I can’t record it,” DeVries says. “Can I get closer?”

“No,” I say, but the word is hard to utter. I understand his impulse. I want to record too.

Screens farther down the wall have activated as well. One shows the corridor we just left (at least, I think it’s that corridor), and another shows blackness growing on some rock.

I curse softly.

“What’s the matter, Boss?” DeVries asks.

“I just want to get closer,” I lie. I don’t want to tell him that I think we’ve done something here, something that might be irreversible.

My stomach is queasy and I’m feeling light-headed. I get that way when I’m nervous. I also get that way when I’m low on oxygen, before the gids start.

I still hear the humming, but it seems more focused—not singing, exactly, but concentrated, as if someone has compressed the sound.

“We have to go,” I say.

“But it’s just getting interesting.” That from Kersting, who usually hates the long dives.

“It is,” I say, “and it’ll be interesting tomorrow. Maybe by then, we’ll know what some of these readings say.”

The entire team groans, but they obey. I make them leave the chamber single-file. I pull the door closed behind us, then press it to make certain that it shut tightly. If that door is a protection between the corridor and the chamber, I want it at full strength.

Then we walk down the corridor. The moment we get past the area where the postdocs died, I send all the information from my comm links back to Mikk, with instructions to have him leave immediately and get the downloads to the scientists.

The other downloads can come out with us. But we need the scientists working hard before our evening meeting. I need some sense of what’s going on here.

I need to know if we’ve done something wrong.

* * * *