City of Ruins

TWENTY-NINE



Coop managed four hours of sleep before his active brain woke him up. ^^ He went to the captain’s mess, had a huge breakfast, and then headed to the communications array.

Shipboard communications ran through the bridge, but the bulk of the equipment was in the engineering area. Engineering covered the largest part of the ship. Located in the very center of the ship as a precaution, engineering was usually one of the most stable parts of the Ivoire.

Although the engineering section hadn’t been stable since the Quurzod attack. Their quick, sharp one-man ships had gotten too close to the Ivoire, and their weaponry, while lacking power, had a directional focus that went into one part of a key system and moved through that system, effectively destroying it.

The engineers were rebuilding certain parts of the ship from scratch, including much of the Ivoire’s weaponry. The anacapa, the most protected part of the ship, had been damaged, but not destroyed.

The communications array, however, suffered the most damage. Coop needed his best engineers on the weaponry and damage to the anacapa, so he pulled some of the linguists to work on the communications array.

Linguists got engineering training on the communications array so that they could tweak it to meet the needs of some unknown language. Most of the linguists had no knack for engineering or repair, but one of them had an intuitive understanding of the array that bordered on genius.

Mae, his chief linguist. Also his ex-wife.

She stood near the door, a repair pad in hand, studying the schematics before her. The communications array filled the entire room and looked like many of the ship’s important systems—tiny panels with flips and lights that provided a redundant entry to the touch screens on each panel’s front.

An efficient communications array would be small enough to fit on the bridge. But the Fleet had more redundant systems than any other group of ships Coop had encountered. Because the ships of the Fleet were designed to operate on their own for years without going to a sector base, having redundant systems made sense. One part of the system might go down, but other parts would still function.

Every system on the ship had that kind of backup except, of course, the anacapa.

He stood in the doorway and watched the team of five work on the array. Mae didn’t realize he was there. She seemed focused on the flat screen in her hand.

She was a beautiful woman, even with her red hair pulled severely back away from her face, a face that actually had some frown lines now. The lines gave her character, although he would never tell her that.

“Mae?” he said softly.

She jumped. She had been on Ukhanda for several months before the disaster. Her team had died at the hands of the Quurzod, and she had barely survived. It had taken her some time to heal once she returned to the Ivoire. Coop had pushed her into the repair work quicker than her doctors wanted, but he knew she had to keep busy.

And she couldn’t be busy with language. She felt that she had screwed up linguistically with the Quurzod, and she had lost her confidence. He wanted to ease her back to work. He figured fixing the array would do it.

“Hey, Captain,” she said with a bit of a smile, the smile she always used when she called him by his title and not his name. “I thought you’d be on the bridge, worrying about this strange place we find ourselves in.”

Two of her team members peeked out from behind the array. She waved them back to work. The other two didn’t even look up at Coop. They knew their priority was getting the array in top condition.

“So you’ve looked outside,” he said to Mae.

“I think everyone on the ship has,” she said. “We’re relieved to be out of foldspace. Some people don’t care that things are strange here. They’re just happy to be somewhere.”

He didn’t correct her. They had been somewhere when they were in foldspace. He just didn’t know exactly where.

“Repairs are slow, but happening,” she said, anticipating his question.

But of course, you know that from the daily reports.”

He nodded. She knew that he wasn’t here for the update.

“When we came here,” he said, “we came because they received our distress signal, right?”

She looked at him sideways. One of the benefits of closeness was that he understood the look without words. She wasn’t going to talk in front of her team.

He pivoted and went into the corridor. She followed. They moved away from the door.

“We sent distress signals on all channels the entire time we were in fold-space,” she said. “The base did receive our signal, but that’s where the information gets fuzzy.”

“Fuzzy?” he asked. She chose that word deliberately. Mae spoke twenty-five languages fluently, but her best language was Standard. She believed in precision on all things. So when she said “fuzzy,” she meant “fuzzy.”

“It blurs together,” she said, “and the condition of our array does not allow me to figure out exactly what happened.”

“What’s your best guess?” he asked.

Her lips thinned. Mae did not like guessing.

“I need a theory,” he said.

“From what I can tell, this sector base was offline for a long time.” She held up her hand. “And before you quiz me, I can’t tell how long.”

He nodded. He didn’t expect her to know when his bridge team hadn’t been able to figure it out, either.

“The strangers in the base probably touched the consoles, activating them.”

He nodded. His team had already figured that out.

“The activation,” she said, “includes a scan of outlying systems, looking for missed communications.”

“That’s when the base heard our distress signal?”

“Probably,” she said. “Then the automatic retrieval system activated, using their anacapa to power ours. At least, that’s what engineering tells me.”

“That’s the theory at the moment,” he said. “What’s the problem?”

She took a deep breath, as if she were uncertain. He was still not used to an uncertain Mae. He kept forgetting how fragile she was.

“I’m not sure they received our distress signal at all,” she said. “I can’t find notice of an acknowledgment, a receipt, or even that mingling within our systems.”

“Then how did they find us?” he asked.

She bit her lower lip. “I think this place sent out a signal when it activated, but it wasn’t a communications signal. It was their activation beam, the anacapa, pulling in anything within range.”

He frowned. “The system’s not built for that, Mae.”

“I know,” she said. “But the first communication—if you want to call it that—that registered on our system was their anacapa.”

He thought for a moment. Mae was thorough. He knew what procedures she would have run, but it was his duty to ask about them anyway.

“You don’t think the damage to our systems prevented us from storing the communication?” he asked.

“I’m hoping that’s the case,” she said in a voice that told him she didn’t believe it. She thought that the communication hadn’t happened.

“But?” he asked.

She took a deep breath. “Ever since we arrived, we’ve been trying to communicate with the sector base. I’ve redoubled the efforts since it became clear that we wouldn’t go out into the base for a while.”

“And?” he asked.

“And we can’t do it. We can’t reach those consoles out there, even though we’re only a few yards away. Either whatever’s broken on our side interferes with communicating with them, or something’s wrong on their side.”

“Or both,” he said.

“Or both,” she agreed.

“You’ve looked at the scans of the consoles,” he said.

She nodded. “They’re in rough shape, Coop. I’ve seen it before.”

“You have?” he asked.

“In our training. We had to take some ancient equipment and cobble it into an existing system. The ancient stuff had been in good repair. It was just old. The readings you got off the systems out there, they look a lot like the readings we got from the ancient equipment.”

“I assume you double-checked those readings,” he said.

“No,” she said. “I don’t have raw data. It was a school project.”

Meaning it was more than a decade ago, and she’d jettisoned the information, if she ever had it.

“Ancient,” he said, thinking of her precision with words. “Not old?”

“Not old,” she said softly. “Time ravaged.”

“Could other things cause that?” he asked.

She shrugged. “You need to ask a real scientist or a very experienced engineer. My specialties are communications systems of all types, and I remember that one. I could be wrong. I probably am—at least about this.”

“I trust you, Mae,” he said.

She looked down. “Maybe you shouldn’t.”

He wanted to put an arm around her, pull her close. But he didn’t. She was going to have to recover her confidence on her own.

“I’d like you to take some of the team off the general repairs. I want them to focus on communicating with the section base. If you have to cobble something together, then do so.”

She raised her head slowly. The frown still marred her forehead. “Do you think we won’t be able to go out there and do some work in the base?”

“I don’t know when the first team will leave the ship,” he said. “I want to be prepared for everything. The more work we can do from in here, the happier I am.”

She took a deep breath. “All right,” she said. “I’ll make sure we figure out how to talk to the sector base.”

“And it can talk back,” he said.

“Oh, it’ll talk back,” she said. “I’m just not sure we’re going to like what it has to say.”

* * * *