City of Ruins

FIFTEEN



Perkins returned quicker than Coop expected. She had to have scurried down those corridors.

“It’s the same,” she said, somewhat breathlessly. “The view’s the same.”

He had expected that, and yet had hoped for a different outcome. Dix bent over his console. So did Anita. They checked their readings again, probably for the fifteenth or sixteenth time.

Coop took a deep breath. He didn’t need the repeated readings. The equipment said they were in Sector Base V, so they had to be in Sector Base V.

A different Sector Base V than the one he had left a month ago.

He ran a hand over his face. The anacapa created a fold in space. That was how the ships continued to travel through hundreds of years. They rarely got damaged in battle, and when they did, they could go elsewhere to repair. The Fleet had learned long ago how to do extensive repair in space, but they had also learned that sometimes parts simply wore out. Repair could only do so much, particularly when spread over hundreds of years, thousands of battles, and countless trips via the anacapa drive.

That was why the Fleet built settlements on hospitable planets, usually choosing a mountainous region, always picking a hard-to-reach (by ground) location far from the main civilizations (if there were any). The settlements were mostly underground and were never considered permanent.

Sector Base N, for example, had been abandoned for nearly four hundred years. No one from the Fleet went back to that sector, so they didn’t need the base.

Although on every settlement, a handful of people chose to stay. Some married into the indigenous population. Some simply liked life planetside better than life in space, although Coop never understood why.

As a kid, he’d thought about all those lost bases like he thought about the nearly mythical Earth, and wondered what it would be like to return to them.

His father kidded him, saying Coop was the only child whose adventurous spirit turned backward instead of forward.

Coop let his hand drop away from his face. Then he looked at the wall screens again.

“It doesn’t make sense,” he muttered.

The others were watching him. He wasn’t sure how many of them knew what he was thinking.

And he wasn’t exactly sure what he was thinking. Had someone left the base’s anacapa drive active, even though the base had been under attack? That didn’t make sense, because every commander—on base and on ship—was instructed to shut off an anacapa drive before enemy capture.

Shut off, or destroy.

Even though the Fleet had traveled all over the known universe, it had never encountered another civilization with an anacapa drive. They had encountered other marvelous technology, but never anything as sophisticated and freeing as the anacapa.

Without the anacapa, the Fleet could never have continued on its extensive mission. Without the anacapa, the Fleet would never have left its own small sector of space around Earth.

The anacapa had enabled the Fleet to travel great distances, carrying its own brand of justice and its own kind of integrity to worlds far and wide.

Had the anacapa drive here in Sector Base V malfunctioned, forcing everyone to leave? He’d heard of malfunctioning anacapa drives before. They were one of the most dangerous parts of the Fleet. A ship with a malfunctioning drive sometimes had to be destroyed to protect the Fleet and anything around it.

But that made no sense either. Because the anacapa drive inside all the sector bases was tied to working equipment. Not just working equipment, but equipment that had been turned on and used manually by a human being within the past twenty-four hours.

It was a failsafe, designed by some far-seeing engineer—or, as Coop’s father would have said, designed by a professional worrier, someone who tried to see all the problems and plan for them.

The failsafe had been designed to prevent exactly this kind of problem: a ship, arriving in an empty base, could get trapped. If the anacapa didn’t work, and the corridors leading to the surface had collapsed, then the ship— and more important, its crew—wouldn’t be able to escape above ground.

The human failsafe was necessary because no one knew—even now, after generations of using the drives—how long an anacapa could survive without maintenance. There were some in the Fleet who believed that an anacapa drive would remain functional long after the human race had disappeared from the universe.

The human race hadn’t disappeared. The anacapa drive still worked. But something had happened in the repair area. Something bad.

“Should we go out there, see what went wrong?” Perkins asked.

No one answered her. She specialized in communication. She spoke fifteen languages fluently, another forty haphazardly, and had a gift for picking up new languages all the time. She wasn’t as good as Coop’s former wife, Mae, the Ivoire’s senor linguist. But Mae had come back from her experience with the Quurzod damaged. As she healed, she worked on the communications systems, not on the bridge.

“We can’t go out there yet,” Coop said. “We need to know what we’re facing.”

“You think the base was attacked?” Dix asked.

“Possible,” Coop said. He didn’t want to reveal his suspicions any more than that. He wanted the bridge crew to explore all options. “Let’s figure out what’s going on here before we make any moves.”

“Sir?” Yash sounded strange.

He glanced at her.

She was pointing at an area on the wall screen. A woman walked toward the ship’s exterior. The woman was thin. She wore a form-fitting environmental suit of a type Coop had never seen before. She had cylinders attached to the belt on her hip and what looked like a knife hilt.

He could only get a glimpse of her angular face through her helmet.

As he watched, she reached out and put her gloved hand on the Ivoire’s side.

“Is she the one who attacked us?” Perkins asked.

“We don’t know if the base was attacked,” Coop said.

“But it’s been abandoned,” Perkins said.

“There could be a variety of reasons for that.” This time, Dix answered her. But he didn’t elaborate and neither did Coop.

But Perkins wasn’t dumb. Just inexperienced. “So is that woman part of a repair crew?”

“I don’t think so,” Yash said. “I don’t recognize her suit.”

“It could be special hazmat suits from Venice City itself,” Anita said.

Perkins’s eyes opened wider. “Hazmat? So it’s toxic out there?”

Coop shrugged. “We don’t know anything yet. All we know is that we’re here, nothing is as it was when we left, and a woman is in the repair room. We don’t even know if it’s a woman we’ve met before. I can’t see her face clearly, can you?”

“No,” Dix said.

“But she’s human, right?” Perkins asked.

“What else would she be?” Yash asked with a touch of impatience. The Fleet, in all its travels, had never discovered an alien race, not as the Fleet defined it, anyway, which was a nonstandard, unexpected life-form of equal intelligence to humans.

“I don’t know,” Perkins said. “That woman looks weird.”

Perkins’s voice held an edge of panic. She’d felt responsible for the Quurzod disaster, even though the fault didn’t lie with the linguists. She had held up well during the fifteen days in that unrecognizable area of space, but she must have been clinging to the thought that everything would be fine when they reached Sector Base V.

And now everything wasn’t fine. It was enough to break a more experienced officer.

“When was the last time you slept, Kjersti?” Coop asked.

She looked at him sideways, understanding in her eyes. She knew that he had caught the beginnings of panic in her voice, knew that he was about to send her to her quarters.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“Go rest,” he said.

“Sir—’”

“Kjersti,” he said. “Go rest.”

She straightened, recognizing the order. “Whom should I send to replace me?”

“No one,” he said. “Not just yet. I’ll send for you if we need anything.”

She nodded, thanked him, and left the bridge.

The others watched, knowing they were as tired, as worried, and maybe even as panicked. They just had more experience and knew how to push the emotions away.

“Are we getting any readings on the environment out there?” Coop asked. “Any idea at all why that woman is in an environmental suit?”

“Everything reads normal,” Yash said.

“But that stuff floating around her,” Anita said. “What’s that?”

Coop didn’t see floating material. The entire repair room looked dim to him. Clearly Anita saw something. But she was closer to the wall screen.

“Maybe that’s the hazardous material,” Dix said.

“We don’t know if it’s hazardous out there,” Coop said. “Perhaps the suit is just an excess of caution.”

“Why would she be cautious about a base underneath a mountain?” Dix asked.

“Tunnel collapse?” Anita said.

“Sometimes planets themselves create a hazardous environment. When they built Sector Base S, they encountered a series of methane pockets,” Yash said.

Everyone looked at her.

She shrugged.

“We had to study base building in training,” she said. “Sector Base S is a cautionary tale. We actually learned how to build without exposing anyone to underground surprises.”

“They weren’t building anything here,” Coop said.

“But a groundquake, a volcanic eruption, an explosion on the surface might hurt the integrity underground and cause something like Sector Base S encountered,” Yash said.

“Wouldn’t methane show up in the readings?” Anita asked.

“I’m not trusting anything we’re getting right now,” Yash said. “Some of the damage the Ivoire suffered is pretty subtle. We’ve only been focused on the major stuff. Once we look at everything, we might discover that some of the things we think are minor are more serious than we initially thought.”

Coop had a hunch all of the damage on the Ivoire was major. But he had been operating from that principle from the beginning. He had been relieved when the trip through foldspace to here hadn’t completely destroyed the Ivoire.

“Any way to hail that woman?” Dix asked.

Coop had just let his linguist go. He wasn’t going to try to contact strangers without a linguist on deck.

“See what readings you can get off the base’s equipment,” he said to Yash.

“I’ll do what I can,” she said. “A lot of the equipment is still inactive.”

“Inactive?” Coop said, startled. “Shouldn’t it be dormant?”

That was the customary thing to do in leaving a base. If the area was safe enough to leave the anacapa drive functional, then the equipment around it needed to function as well. It had to remain dormant so that the touch of a human being could bring the equipment up on a moment’s notice.

“Yes, it should be dormant,” Yash said. “But these things were shut off.”

“And the anacapa remained functional?”

She opened her hands in a how-should-I-know gesture. “Right now, nothing’s working like it should.”

“Is that because of a malfunction in the Ivoire?”

“Honestly, Coop,” she said, dispensing with the “sir” now that Perkins was gone, “I have no idea. I won’t know until I get out there and investigate.”

He looked at the wall screen. “None of us is going out there until we know who these people are and what the hell’s going on.”

“How do you propose we find that out, then?” Dix asked.

“We be patient,” Coop said.

“There could be an immediate threat,” Dix said.

“There could be,” Coop said. “But right now, we’re getting no indication of that.”

“Except an empty base, a stranger in the repair room, and malfunctioning equipment,” Dix said.

“We waited fifteen days to get here,” Coop said, “with a crippled ship and no answers to our distress calls. We were patient. We got here.”

“Where things aren’t good,” Dix said.

“They’re better than they were,” Coop said. “We’re not in an unidentified part of space. In that room, there are things that will help us repair this ship. If we’re patient, we’ll be able to fix the Ivoire and catch the Fleet.”

“If that woman doesn’t attack us,” Anita said.

Coop gave her a sideways look. She wasn’t speaking out of panic. She was just throwing out a possibility.

“One woman? Who happens to be carrying a knife? What do you think she’ll do, Anita, stab the Ivoire to death?”

He hadn’t meant to be that sarcastic. He was tired, too. And a bit worried about what he was seeing here. But no longer worried that the five hundred people in his charge would die on the ship in foldspace.

But whether or not they would die under Venice City was another matter. He was going to take this slowly, no matter what his crew wanted.

“How are our weapons systems?” he asked Yash. He hadn’t had cause to ask since they activated the anacapa to get away from the Quurzod. Nothing had approached them for fifteen days.

“We’ve repaired some of them,” Yash said, “but nothing we can fire down here.”

“Why not?” Coop asked.

“Because the walls are made of nanobits just like the hull of the Ivoire,” she said. The Fleet’s technology was nanobased, with the help of the anacapa drive. The drive powered the technological change on a planet, essentially powering the nanobits that sculpted the interiors of mountains into the best bases he’d ever found in the known universe. “The shots will bounce off. They’ll ricochet until the energy is spent.”

“Damaging nothing,” Coop said.

“Except the equipment,” Yash said, “and anyone who happens to be in the repair room.”

“Exactly,” he said.

“But these weapons weren’t meant to be fired in atmosphere,” she said. “If there’s a methane leak, for example, then we might have another kind of explosion.”

“Or an anacapa malfunction,” Dix said.

“The weapons won’t cause an anacapa malfunction,” Yash said.

“I know,” Dix said. “I meant if their anacapa has malfunctioned ...”

“It hasn’t,” Coop said. “It got us here.”

Yash gave him a sideways look. He knew that look. It was one that cautioned him to silence. The two of them had served together since they were cadets, and they had bolstered each other from the beginning.

“You disagree,” he said to her.

“Even a malfunctioning anacapa could have had enough energy to get us here,” she said.

“Great,” he said. “So we’re back to square one. We won’t know anything until we get out there and take some readings. And we’re not going to do that as long as those outsiders are here.”

He walked over to that part of the wall screen and peered at the woman. She was still touching the Ivoire’s exterior, as if she could gather information about the ship through the palm of her glove.

For all he knew, she could.

Her face was barely visible inside the helmet. He couldn’t really make out her features, but he thought she looked intrigued. Like she hadn’t expected the Ivoire. Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe she knew the Fleet was long gone.

She tilted her head. It felt like she could see him.

But he knew that wasn’t true. She couldn’t see him at all. She probably didn’t even know he was there.

“What’s she doing?” Anita asked.

Coop shook his head. He had a theory—he always had theories, and he’d learned it was never wise to share them, at least not when he led a mission. Always better to gather information.

Behind her, he saw movement. Four others, huddled near the exterior door, nearly lost in the gloom.

Only it wasn’t really gloom. The woman was teaching him that. Particles floated in the air around her. They were coating the exterior of the ship, which was probably why the base looked so damn dark.

Apparently he was finally able to see the stuff that Anita had been referring to.

“There’s some kind of substance on the exterior of the ship,” he said. “Look at her hand. It’s clearer than everything else.”

Her gloved hand. She had placed her palm flat against the ship. The glove was white, so tight that he could see the ridges in her palm, the bend of her fingers.

She knew nothing about the vessel. None of the outsiders did. From the way they huddled, they seemed frightened by it.

Of course, he was guessing. But they were human, and their body language wasn’t aggressive. It was protective.

“Do you have a visual of our arrival?” he asked Dix.

“I’m sure we do,” Dix said.

“Let’s see it. Center screen.”

Dix floated his fingers over his console. It took a moment, but the screen in the center of the bridge went dark, replaced by the shimmer created by the anacapa whenever a ship was about to arrive at its destination.

The shimmer looked silver, then slowly resolved into an image of the repair area’s interior. The equipment, looking just as odd, the screens over the command consoles, showing what the ship was seeing just like they’d been programmed to do. Redundant imagery at the moment, but useful most of the time. The repair crew could look and see what a ship saw as it traveled to the base.

Sometimes they could even figure out where the damage was because of something coming through the feed.

So the screens were working, which he hadn’t noticed after they arrived. Then he looked at the floor itself. It had yellow lines, outlining the landing area, and DANGER! written all across the face, so that no one would accidentally step on the pad.

Sometimes the repair crew didn’t know when a ship was going to arrive. A vessel’s anacapa drive could shut off and the vessel would appear on the landing platform, not realizing that the ship had just appeared where a human being had been standing.

Someone had been standing there in the feed. Someone wearing an environmental suit similar to the woman’s.

Similar, but not the same.

So this wasn’t a military team, then. Private? They didn’t have matching suits.

The person—a man, Coop guessed just from his general shape—whirled as if in response to someone calling his name. The man hesitated for just a moment—and then he sprinted off the platform, diving toward the main door just as the ship settled.

Coop could barely make out the five people huddled against the door. All of their helmeted faces were turned toward the ship, but none of the people moved.

While Coop had been relieved, while he was trying to figure out where he was and what had happened, they had been trying to figure out what they were seeing.

Eventually, they determined that it was safe enough to approach the ship.

“Thanks,” Coop said to Dix. “That answered a lot of questions.”

And created a whole hell of a lot more.

* * * *