City of Ruins

SEVENTEEN



I hate working in atmosphere. I want to float around the ship, investigate all four sides of it, all at the same time.

The shape is the same as all the other Dignity Vessels we’ve found. It’s rather birdlike, with a narrow front and a wide middle, but from where we stand, that wide middle is massive. Beyond it, the ship tapers a bit, but I know that from experience, not from investigating this ship.

The height impresses me the most. Maybe that’s why I want to float to the top, so that I can feel as if I’ve conquered this thing. Right now, it looms over me.

We’re not even going to be able to walk around it. We only have sixty minutes left. I’ve barely made it a few meters. I take readings, I record, I look.

The hull has damage. A lot of damage, in fact. Something has scored the side right near the place where, on the first Dignity Vessel I’d ever found, a hole punched its way toward the bridge.

I remember because that hole was my first warning about stealth tech. My team sent a probe into that hole—following procedure, just like I’m insisting here—and the probe got stuck.

If my team had tried to enter the Dignity Vessel through that hole, they would have gotten stuck in malfunctioning stealth tech. As it was, one of them did get caught in a stealth-tech field inside that bridge, and he died.

He mummified in a matter of hours. I used to think that was the first time I’d seen anything like it, but of course it wasn’t.

The first time I had seen it, I had been four years old, trapped in the Room of Lost Souls with my mother.

My mother, who didn’t have the genetic marker.

My mother, who died, just like any other unprotected person in stealth tech. She aged rapidly, entering a time field that sped up her future, but left mine alone.

Left me alone.

My father pulled me out. My father, whom I later realized had sent my mother into that field to test her. To test me.

The man was, even then, working to figure out stealth tech.

He became the lead imperial expert on stealth tech. He had managed to use me at the Room of Lost Souls to get his position with the Empire, and in doing so, he killed a friend of mine, just like he killed my mother.

My team—everyone in the company, really—believes that I’m funding stealth-tech research as a vendetta against my father. It doesn’t matter that he probably died in an explosion. They think I’m always going to act on some kind of revenge cycle, determined to destroy anything that old man might have created.

I don’t think my stealth-tech research is a vendetta. I think it’s the only way to maintain the balance of power in the sector.

I have tried, over the years, not to think about what would happen once we understood stealth tech.

Now I’m faced with a working Dignity Vessel, which has arrived inside a cavern with a stealth-tech field, and I know I’m near a breakthrough. I may actually be looking at working stealth tech.

I have to keep this quiet, and I have to understand it.

I might even have to control it.

Somehow.

The scoring near that part of the ship disturbs me. Does that mean the stealth tech in this ship has gone awry as well?

I wish I could climb to the top of this part of the ship. Up there is a hatch—or there should be one—a hatch that will lead me through a shaft that will take me down to a maze of corridors. At the end of those corridors will be the bridge, and inside the bridge, I might actually find functioning stealth-tech controls.

“Boss?” Kersting again. He’s probably going to nag about leaving. “I think I’ve found a door.”

I turn, take a step back, and look at his position. He’s near the wide part of the ship, inside an area just under one of the curves.

None of the other Dignity Vessels we’ve found has a door there.

I think.

There are still parts to those ships that we don’t understand. And on most of them, entire sections of the ships are missing.

All four of us join Kersting. He has indeed found a door. It’s barely outlined against the blackness. In fact, Kersting found it not by looking, but by running his glove along the surface. The glove found a minor anomaly, something barely visible to the naked eye.

I run my hand over that area as well. My glove tells me that there is a minute crack, one that goes deep.

“I ran my hand all the way around the bottom,” Kersting says. “I can’t reach the top. But it seems to be a door.”

I can’t reach the top either. Neither can any of the rest of us. But it does seem to be door-shaped. It’s large—twice as large as it needs to be to let in passengers.

It intrigues me. Have we missed this on the other ships?

“Did you find a latch?” I ask Kersting.

“No,” he says. “But to be fair, I haven’t touched the middle part, just that outline. And not the top either.”

I want in. We all want in. But we can’t hurry this, no matter how much I want to.

“I guess we start mapping here.” I’m smiling as I say it. A Dignity Vessel and a door.

At the moment, the future of stealth tech doesn’t matter.

At the moment, all that matters is the mystery before me—and the answers it may provide.

* * * *