City of Ruins

TWO



I travel to Vaycehn reluctantly. I don’t like cities. I never have. Cities are as opposite from the things I love as anything can get.

First, they exist planetside, and I try never to go planetside.

Second, they are filled with people, and I prefer to spend most of my time alone.

Third, cities have little to explore, and what small amount of unknown territory there is has something built on top of it or beside it.

The history of a city is known, and there is no danger.

But I’m going to Vaycehn on the advice of one of my managers. She has a hunch, and I am funding it, although the closer we get to the city, the more I regret that decision.

I made the decision because I’m learning that a single woman cannot manage an entire corporation on her own. I used to run my own wreck-diving company, but I hired people when I needed them and let them go when the dive was over.

Now I oversee hundreds of employees, with dozens of tasks before them. I need to learn to trust.

Even in the area of exploration.

Especially in the area of exploration.

And I find that to be the hardest of all.

Vaycehn sprawls along a great basin on the eighth and most centrally located continent on the planet Wyr. Wyr is tiny and warm as far as planets go. It exists in the habitable zone near its star but is a little too close for the bulk of the human population.

The planet does have plenty of air and edible indigenous plants. A lot of farming communities have sprouted in its arable sixth and seventh continents. But the planet’s only major city—as cities are defined in this part of the universe—is Vaycehn.

I’d heard of Vaycehn decades ago. Everyone who works in antiquities, history, and collectibles has. Vaycehn boasts the earliest settlement in this part of the galaxy. Its history has continued, uninterrupted, for at least five thousand years.

The city has moved several times, but its footprint remains in what the people of Wyr call the Great Basin, a dip in the planet’s surface so deep that it’s visible from space. That dip provides shelter for the storms that buffet Wyr, and it also has temperatures twenty degrees lower than surface temperatures anywhere else on the planet.

The perfect location for both an ancient and a modern city.

A place I never thought I’d go.

Until now.

My team and I fly in on six orbit-to-ground skips, and land them in the spaceport at the edge of the Basin. We’re in the City of Vaycehn, but it doesn’t look like a city here. There are buildings, and a lot of dry brown ground. We’re only on the ground long enough to disembark from our skips and sign them into their ports. Then we get into the six government-owned hovercarts that were, Ilona discovered, one of the only ways to travel in Vaycehn.

We left my ship, Nobody’s Business, docked on Wyr’s orbital business station. The Business has a cloned identity, one we adopted when I became a fugitive inside the Empire, and that’s how the Business is registered with Wyr. Fortunately no one seems to care who we are, so long as we spend money planetside.

We’re spending a lot of money to come here. I look at this visit as an experiment; I’m not sure our search for stealth technology should even include land. All of the stealth technology we’ve discovered so far has been in space.

But Ilona thinks differently. She has hired the ground team—with my supervision—and she believes in this project.

I do not.

In fact, part of me wants this project to fail spectacularly. Then I never have to think about land-based operations again.

The hired pilots fly us into the Basin. I sit behind the copilot, separated by a clear wall. I almost wish the cockpit was blocked off so that I can’t see what these people are doing.

These pilots aren’t one-tenth as good as I am. They make tiny mistakes that would kill them in the tight situations I’ve flown through.

But they know the Basin, and they’re cocky. They come in too fast, going deep at the beginning of the crevice that marks the Basin, and get too close to the stone walls for my comfort. I grip the armrests so hard I’m probably leaving indentations.

I hate cocky pilots, particularly ones whose skills clearly aren’t up to an emergency. Should the wings of the hovercart nick one of the stone walls, the craft will spin out of control. From my vantage, I can’t see any automatic overrides that will prevent such an accident.

And I don’t have time to break through that clear wall ahead of me, hit a few buttons, and stop the craft from spinning before it crashes.

If something happens, I’d go down with the craft, just like everyone else.

The bumpy ride makes it hard to enjoy the scenery. Behind me, the main team—Ilona, Gregory, Lentz, and Bridge—talk about the mission ahead.

They are all scientists and researchers. Never before have I brought them to a site without examining it first. They’re excited, thinking that maybe they’ll be able to be actual explorers.

Maybe by their definitions, they will.

But I’ve also brought a full dive team as well as some archeologists and a few historians. And I’ve brought the Six. They’re scattered throughout the other craft because if one of these things goes down, I don’t want to lose all of our most valuable people.

We land on a wide patch of empty ground. Other hovercarts are parked in the distance, and large buildings outline the empty middle.

I’m glad we have a lot of room for the landing. We still bounce on the ground’s surface—something I would never allow one of my pilots to do— and it takes several seconds for the rocking motion caused by the bouncing to cease.

The doors open, and I sneeze as planetside air filters in. Planetside air has unfamiliar scents—-in this case, both sweet and dry.

Most of the air I breathe is recycled. It has a faint metallic edge, and sometimes a warning staleness. I’m used to that. I’m not used to air that has a taste, air that tickles my nose and makes me feel a little light-headed.

This air is also warm. I’d been warned that Wyr was a hot place, but I’d also been told that Vaycehn was one of the coolest locations.

If this is cool, then I don’t want to visit any other site on the planet. I’m already sweating as I step off the craft. The metal railing of the makeshift stair is warm beneath my touch, even though it’s only been in the light from Wyr’s sun for a few minutes.

Heat shimmers across the pavement in little waves that look like turbulence before a planetside storm. I’ve already decided I don’t like it here, and this is only the first of thirty days.

Ilona is already talking with our guides. Ilona is slight, with black hair that looks almost blue in this light. She wears it tied back, but some strands have come loose in the wind. She brushes at them as she speaks.

The guides—all male—watch her hands. The guides’ uniforms make them easy to identify. The uniforms are brown with red piping. Sleeveless, with shorts instead of pants. The men wear sandals on their feet. They also have their hair cropped so short that their scalps are visible.

“Well, this is going to be interesting,” says a voice beside me. I turn to see Mikk, one of my best divers. He’s not built like a man who space-dives. He has too many muscles because he does a lot of weight work to maintain his bone structure. He’s also large.

Most divers are small people with such delicate bones that being on a planet with normal gravity will hurt them. I’ve left some of my best divers behind because I don’t want them subject to the planet’s g-forces. Unlike me and several others, those divers grew up in space. I’m landborn and can handle gravity. I just don’t like it.

Two divers and one of our pilots are getting off the second craft. So is Julian DeVries, one of the Six. He’s tall and broad shouldered. Out of all of my team who have landed so far, he looks the most out of place. He’s wearing a blue silk suit that has to be too warm. But aside from removing the coat and slinging it over his shoulder, he doesn’t seem affected by the heat at all.

“You think those people know what they’re doing?” Mikk asks me. He’s still looking at the guides.

“I think they know how to take us to the caves,” I say. “I suspect they’ll get us to our accommodations with a minimum of fuss, and I hope that they don’t have too many regulations to follow.”

“What about canned speeches?” Julian says as he joins us. “I loathe canned speeches.”

Mikk frowns at him. “Meaning what?”

“Guides,” I say. “They usually have a small spiel about the history of a place.”

“Which we theoretically know,” Julian says.

“Emphasis on ‘theoretically,’” I say. “It’s always good to listen to the stories and the myths and the legends. You can learn a lot from them.”

Mikk gives me a nervous glance. He used to pooh-pooh the idea of the importance of myths and legends until he dove the Room of Lost Souls with me. Then he learned how oddly accurate legends could be.

“You don’t think we’ve tapped everything,” he says.

“I don’t think we’ve even started.” I watch as the third hovercart eases down. If only we’d had that pilot. He, at least, is cautious, using the craft to hover before landing, just like it was designed to do.

This machine lands close enough to swirl dust and dirt around us. Mikk covers his eyes, but Julian merely adjusts his suit coat so that it blocks the worst of it.

When the engines shut down, Julian continues as if the conversation hadn’t been interrupted at all.

“That ride in was bumpy.”

I nod.

“I have a hunch things are more dangerous here than we planned.”

He sounds like he’s been involved from the beginning. But he hasn’t been. He has no idea how dangerous we think this is.

Five years ago, the city suffered a groundquake, and an entire section of old buildings fell into the caverns below, revealing caves no one had ever seen before. Like many ancient cities, Vaycehn has an underground component— old transportation routes, basements, and quarries where the original buildings were dug out of the rock. Supposedly, these new caves are different, structured with walls. They look like someone had built them purposely and then forgotten them.

When Ilona requested the visas to travel and work in Vaycehn, she was warned that the underground caverns were unsafe. The Vaycehn government denied her requests several times—and not because we were using false identities. Our identities, while fictitious, are impenetrable.

Any time we enter the Empire, we run the danger of being arrested. But we’ve been in and out so many times that we know no one is tracking these identities. We know we’re safe, so long as we don’t attract any notice.

As for Vaycehn, the problem was the city government itself. It didn’t want us in the caves. We finally had to sign waivers protecting Vaycehn from liability should any of us die. We also had to sign confidentiality agreements; we couldn’t run to any form of press—whether it was Vaycehnese, Wyrian, or systemwide—and tell the story of our explorations beneath the city.

What little off-planet income Vaycehn made came from tourism, and the government was afraid that negative publicity would destroy that tiny trade. Our guarantee that we would not do anything to harm their tourism industry got us into Vaycehn. I hope that we do not stay long.

The fourth, fifth, and sixth hovercarts land in a perfect row, as if they’ve practiced the maneuver. The engines shut off in unison, and before long, my entire team has gathered around me.

I have never brought so many people on a single exploratory mission. Thirty, plus equipment. Keeping track of all of them will be difficult, particularly when I have duties of my own.

The team knows the risks.

But I’ve learned over the years that knowing the risks and living with their consequences are two very different things.

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