City of Ruins

TWENTY



It took another hour for the outsiders to leave. Coop watched them, both fascinated and tense. Everyone on the bridge remained silent, as if the people outside the Ivoire could hear them breathe.

Of course, no one could hear anything. Even though he had opened channels so the sound of the exterior came into the bridge, all he heard was the rustle of the environmental suits the five outsiders wore. They clearly had an internal comm system, one he couldn’t seem to tap into.

Four of the outsiders spent some time crowded around the Ivoire’s main exterior door, probably discussing how to open it. The woman walked around part of the ship, touching it and peering closely at any change in the hull. The ship was much too large for her to go all the way around.

She was clearly examining it. She kept touching it. Yash believed she was running some kind of diagnostic.

Yash ran a diagnostic on all of them as well, but couldn’t gather any more information than she had received from the initial impression she had gotten from the glove.

Coop had explored all kinds of unfamiliar environments in the past, but he had never observed anyone else exploring, and he had never before been the subject of that exploration. If strangers came aboard the Ivoire, they had already gone through diplomatic channels through another part of the Fleet. The Ivoire was not the flagship of the Fleet. Nor was it designated a first-contact vessel.

Coop had heard of these kinds of explorations, usually by natives of a newly discovered planet, but one that didn’t have the technological advancement that allowed the Fleet to contact them. He had never been privy to one before.

Finally, one of the outsiders broke away from the group and loped toward the woman. She shook her head, as if participating in a conversation, and then the other person—one of the men—finally reached her side. He took her arm, gently but firmly.

She shook him off and moved away.

He took her arm again, and this time, she sighed visibly and walked with him around the side of the ship.

They joined the others, and together the group left through the door that led to the corridor.

“Maybe we should lock it.” Dix’s voice sounded unnaturally loud in the silence of the bridge.

“No,” Coop said. “They’d notice that. It would make them more curious.”

“I don’t know how we can make them more curious,” Yash said.

Coop didn’t entirely agree with her assessment. If the outsiders were truly curious, they’d try to enter the ship. They would have stayed longer.

Instead, they had left, probably when their environmental suits noted that they were low on oxygen, just like he had predicted.

If that was the case, then the outsiders would be back. He only had a short window of time—and he wasn’t sure how short.

“Send that tester through the airlock,” he said.

Yash nodded. She had chosen a team of scientists to capture the particles, but the scientists would be monitored by the engineering staff—by Yash, really.

None of the bridge crew had gone down to the main exterior doors. Coop wanted the crew to remain on the bridge in case something went wrong.

He even insisted that a junior member of the science team take the particle sample.

Only two people, wearing their own environmental suits, would be in the airlock. They would take the particulate matter using some method that he didn’t entirely understand, and then they would bring it back inside.

Coop wanted them to open the exterior door, scoop up some particles, close the doors, and get the hell out of the airlock.

And that was all.

Even though Dix initially protested. He had felt they should take advantage of the outsiders’ absence to explore the room.

Coop had vetoed that. To begin with, exploring the room was the wrong phrase. It was a cavern, impossible to explore all at once. Besides, they’d all been in that area a dozen times before. They needed information, and they were going to collect it slowly.

Coop wondered how long those suits needed to be replenished. He also wondered if the team’s leader was reckless. If the leader was, the same team would be back within the hour. If the leader wasn’t, either a new team would enter soon, or the other team would wait some designated amount of time, maybe a full day, before returning.

Coop was going to try to get as much done as possible in the time that he had.

He didn’t monitor the airlock experiment. He had Yash do that from the bridge.

It only took a few minutes. Some of the particles got into the airlock itself, and Coop asked that they be captured instead of expelled.

“We got everything,” Yash said. “It looks like it’s safe to go out there.”

“Do the extensive tests,” Coop said. He wanted to go out there as much as the others, but he had learned about caution the hard way. It was always better to take precautions.

“I’d like to go monitor the experiments,” Yash said.

“No,” Coop said. “I need you here.”

“What for?” she asked. “Standing around waiting?”

He shook his head. “I was thinking we could scrub the particles off the ship’s exterior now that the outsiders are gone. You think it’s safe to do that?”

Yash shrugged. “The preliminary tests came back that the substance is harmless. Essentially, the particles are the same material as the walls, so far as we can tell. I think it’s a bit of a gamble to scrub the ship, but not a major one.”

“Scrub it,” Coop said.

Yash entered the commands. At least that part of the ship was working. It scaled the particulate matter off its hull in a matter of seconds. More particles floated through the air, but the image on the screens was clearer than it had been just a moment ago.

The repair area was still dim. The lights had faded from their normal brightness to something that looked weak and grayish. Maybe that had something to do with particulate cover on the lights themselves. Coop couldn’t know that without a clearer view.

As the particulate matter settled down, he noted that the equipment closest to the exits appeared to be running. He could see lights and some of the screens above the control panels. But as he looked farther into the distance, farther away from the main door, he couldn’t see anything. The depths of the repair room seemed particularly dark.

“I still can’t get the systems to talk to each other, Coop,” Yash said. “I don’t think the problem is on our end. I seem to be making an exterior request, but nothing is coming back at us.”

He nodded, then folded his hands behind his back.

He was going to have no choice, then.

Someone was going to have to venture into that room.

* * * *