City of Ruins

FOURTEEN



A Dignity Vessel.

An intact, functioning Dignity Vessel. My heart rate has increased and my breathing is shallow. My environmental suit issues warnings, thinking I’m in space, thinking I could die at any moment.

If I were wreck diving, my team on the skip would be talking to me via the comm. They’d tell me to leave the dive, return to the skip.

They’d accuse me of having the gids.

But the four in this room aren’t experienced divers. I haven’t even told them to turn on their monitors to monitor each other’s suits. They should have thought of it themselves; after all, they’ve gone on practice dives.

Not that it matters.

We’re not in space.

I make myself take a deep breath, will my heart rate to slow, will the gids to go away. Even though they’re not the gids.

What I’m feeling is excitement.

I’ve seen a few intact Dignity Vessels, and they are pitted and scarred and ruined and empty.

This one—this one glimmers with newness.

Finally, my brain kicks in. “Check the environment,” I tell the team. “Make sure nothing has changed.”

Our readings so far have shown that we’re in an oxygenated environment. We could survive without the suits, but we don’t. I’m glad for that since flakes swirl around us.

The Dignity Vessel has disturbed the entire area. The ripples caused some kind of disturbance, which makes sense. One moment the area in front of me was empty; the next it was filled with a gigantic ship.

I feel tiny beside it.

Here, in this cavernous room, I get a true sense of how big a Dignity Vessel is. They look tiny in space because space is so vast.

Here, though, here the vessel is bigger than any building we’ve seen on Vaycehn, bigger than some active spaceports.

I have to force myself to take another breath. In fact, I have to use a trick Squishy taught me back when we dived together. I count my breaths— inhaling for five seconds, exhaling for five seconds—until my breathing evens.

I’m having trouble concentrating on the breathing. I’m having trouble concentrating at all.

I’ve never dreamed I’d be in this position.

All of my life, I’ve chased history. I’ve dived the oldest, most decayed wrecks I could find, not to loot them, but to study them, to learn about them.

The history of the sector is rich and vast, and we’ve forgotten ever so much more than we learned. I’m firmly convinced that no one person can know everything that has happened in this sector since humans started colonizing it. Every historian I know specializes, in a culture, in a war, in a planet or a technology.

None of them are generalists about the sector, although we all learn sector history—its broad sweep from early colonization to the beginnings of the Empire to the Colonnade Wars.

We study it. We imagine it.

We don’t see it.

Not as it was.

And yet, here before me is a piece of history. Not decayed or damaged by time. Not ruined by some long-ago battle. Not abandoned centuries before I was born.

Glistening, shimmering ever so slightly. Making slight noises as its hull adjusts to the temperature inside the cavern—a temperature that has dropped precipitously because this vast ship in front of me has brought the coldness of space with it.

I swallow hard. My breathing is finally regular. I take another step toward the ship.

“It’s colder in here than it was,” Kersting says. “But otherwise, I get the same readings.”

“Yeah,” Rea says. “You’d think that there’d be something different in the air. Maybe less oxygen or some hint of a fuel or something. But I’m not getting anything either.

“Me, either,” DeVries says.

“Is it really there?” Seager asks.

Good question. I suspect the ship is in front of me because of the temperature differential, but none of us has touched the ship. We haven’t even gone near it.

For all we know, this is some kind of elaborate illusion, something designed to keep us away from the platform.

My stomach twists at the thought. I want the thing before me to be a Dignity Vessel—a real, functioning Dignity Vessel, not an illusion designed to chase people from the cavern.

“Let me find out,” I say.

“Boss, one of us should deal with it.” Rea takes a step toward me.

I turn slightly and shake my head. “I know what I’m doing.” With wrecks, anyway, which this decidedly is not. “You stay there.”

I walk to the ship’s side. The external temperature recorded by my suit has lowered even more. Something is in front of me, or else the illusion is so grand that it includes temperature.

I wonder if it includes smell as well. I’m not willing to take off my helmet to find out.

I stop only centimeters from the ship. The side is smooth, black, and shiny, like the new walls at the exterior of the caves. I expected something more metallic. The Dignity Vessel we found all those years ago—the first Dignity Vessel, the one that started me on this path that led me to Vaycehn—had a metal hull and rivets holding plates together.

This has no rivets, no bolts, no old-fashioned parts. The side is so smooth that I can see my reflection in it.

Through the particles, that is. The particles are flaking off the walls, not the ship. The ship’s side is as smooth as glass.

My suit pings me. I’m holding my breath again. I make myself breathe; then I extend a hand before I can talk myself out of it. I press my palm against the ship’s side.

It’s solid beneath my glove. The suit protests—the ship is so cold the glove adheres to it for just a moment, and then releases. I have the suit take readings from the surface.

“It’s real,” I say with more relief than I intended. “It’s real.”

* * * *