City of Ruins

THREE



I used to work for myself. I ran my own wreck-diving business out of my ship, Nobody’s Business. I specialized in historical wrecks. I’d dive them, but I wouldn’t salvage, believing that history should remain intact.

My first encounter with a Dignity Vessel taught me the dangers of intact history. That encounter also changed my life.

Now I run an organization so big that I don’t know the name of everyone who works for me. We operate out of a space station that orbits one of the planets in the Nine Planets Alliance.

The Alliance sounds more official than it is. In reality, the Nine Planets Alliance is a kind of no-man’s land, ignored—at the moment—by the Enterran Empire. Right now, any imperial ship that ventures too deep into Nine Planets territory gets destroyed.

Someday, the Empire will think it important to fight back.

Fortunately, that day hasn’t come.

Although I might be the one to provoke it.

The Empire and I are both searching for the secret to something called stealth tech. It’s a lost ancient technology, something no one entirely understands. The Empire has learned how to re-create it, but in order to do so, they need bits of actual ancient equipment, and so far, they can only take that equipment from Dignity Vessels.

Our mission, at least at the moment, is to find any Dignity Vessels in this sector and keep them out of imperial hands. Right now, we have four Dignity Vessels in various states of decay docked to the ring on our space station. We have parts of two more on a nearby ship—a decommissioned imperial military science ship that we bought through a proxy at auction.

I let my own team of scientists work on stealth tech. I’m in charge of finding more. Stealth tech doesn’t just exist on Dignity Vessels. We’ve also found it in a place called the Room of Lost Souls that we believe to be an ancient abandoned space station, though we don’t know that for certain.

We don’t know much for certain.

What we do know about stealth tech, though, is that it is deadly. It has killed three of my friends.

It also killed my mother.

It didn’t kill me, because I have a genetic marker that allows me to work inside stealth tech with no ill effects. The Empire has discovered thirteen of us with that marker.

Six have chosen to work with me.

We find, learn about, and will ultimately re-create ancient stealth tech. Then we will sell it to governments other than the Enterran Empire, in the interest of keeping the balance of power within the sector the same.

If there’s ever any serious deviation from that mission, I will shut us down and disband. I see no other way.

Vaycehn has sixty-five hotels, the best of which are in a ring around the city’s center. We’ve booked two floors in the Basin, one of the oldest and grandest of the hotels.

I saw to this part of the trip personally because I knew what I wanted. I wanted a hotel that wouldn’t mind thirty guests who arrived nightly covered in dirt and mud; a hotel that would cater to our every whim at any hour of the day; a hotel that would be able to provide secure communications off-planet since we would be so far from our ship; and a hotel that would guarantee our privacy from any inquiries not just during our visit but for years afterward.

I have the penthouse suite in the west corner of the top floor: six rooms, including a conference area, a kitchen, a bedroom suite, a “guest” bedroom, and a private sitting area. I’m going to need all of it.

We will have our meetings here. Some of my staff will set up the replay equipment in the conference area. I’ve already ordered the hotel staff to remove the furniture from the guest bedroom so that I can put some dedicated computer equipment inside.

I set up that equipment alone. I am the only one who knows how it works, and I want to remain that way. Usually I set up equipment like that in my own bedroom, but this is a hotel, not a ship. I can take advantage of the room.

From the conference room, I have a view of the city below. It sprawls. Buildings crawl up from the ground as far as the eye can see. Humans live and work in each of those buildings. Hundreds of buildings, maybe thousands. And if I think about that too much, I get claustrophobic.

I think the staff of thirty that I’ve brought with me is twenty-nine people too many; if I think about the millions who’ve settled here in Vaycehn, I will drive myself crazy.

Still, it’s a pretty place. The basin walls rise up around the city itself like the walls of a space station. Sunlight falls on ruins in the distance—one of the many abandoned sections of the city.

Those sections have been explored by historians and archeologists through the ages. Vaycehn is one of the most studied areas in this sector of the galaxy.

As I stand in these windows and look at the orangish light settling on the rooftops below me, I realize that layers are visible before me. If I squint, I can see the Great Ages of the city just in its architecture, and that makes my heart pound.

This is not one of the Great Ages of Vaycehn. Now it is merely the largest settlement on Wyr. The city itself has several million inhabitants. But in some of the more populous sections of the galaxy, there are permanent space bases that boast a similar population—and those are sprawled over a greater area. Attached by warrens and cubbies and gangways, those large stations were once small stations that joined with others for the sake of power or wealth or sheer greed.

Vaycehn became a city because of its location. It remains one because it has done several things: it has preserved its history; it serves as the center of trade for this small region of space; and it has the longest-existing continuous government in the known universe.

Ilona thinks Vaycehn is a major source of stealth tech.

I don’t think stealth tech can exist on land. I think the technology is too unstable, and too dangerous.

And even if it did somehow manage to exist on a planet, there is no way that the stealth tech could have remained hidden for thousands of years, only to reveal itself in a dramatic and frightening way just a few years ago.

Ilona argues differently. She says that since stealth tech originated on Earth, it was probably invented on land, and there were safeguards for working and living with it.

Maybe so, I have said in response, but in no way would those safeguards exist so many light-years away from the home planet, in a place those ancient Earthers could not imagine.

I feel safe in my argument; I have had several direct experiences with stealth tech. Ilona has not.

But she does have one small point in her favor.

The Six.

They all—and me, so really, we all—are built-in safeguards because we can work with stealth tech and survive.

The Six are in my conference room, along with the rest of the team. We are mapping the morning strategy session. The Six are Orlando Rea, a quiet, bookish man with a surprising amount of gumption; Fahd Al-Nasir, black-haired, dark-eyed, timid; Elaine Seager, a fit middle-age woman who hangs to the back of any group; Nyssa Quinte, skinny and tough, who should be my best diver, and is not; Rollo Kersting, a charming man, very fond of his comforts; and of course, Julian DeVries.

Our guides—who are not here—already know that we are not average tourists. Ilona spent an hour after our arrival explaining that we will not follow the same path as the other archeologists.

One guide has already threatened to quit. I’m sure others will as well.

The key point is whether or not we can legally work on Vaycehn without the guides.

I assign Ilona to discover that piece of information. She makes a note, while I continue directing the staff.

We will have six teams, composed of a diver, an archeologist or historian, a scientist, a pilot, and one of the Six. I will head a seventh team, and what I don’t tell them—but which becomes clear as I make the assignments—is that my team will have the best people from each division. I’m going to work the site just like everyone else, and if there’s a discovery, I want it to be mine.

Only two teams will go down with the guides each day. The other teams will explore the city, interview residents and experts about the city’s past as well as its legends, and investigate the fourteen deaths that preceded us. So far the Vaycehnese government does not want us to discuss those deaths with the locals. But I have promised Ilona that on my days off, I will fight that prohibition in the name of safety; I will say that unless we know what happened, we cannot know what went wrong.

I don’t know if that will work—I’m a diver, not a diplomat—but it’s the only argument I can come up with that the local government might back. From all the work we’ve done off-planet, the only conclusion we can come to is that no one knows what’s been happening here since the ground collapsed.

The collapsed section is visible from the conference room window. The section is a black smudge near the convergence of the basin’s two steep walls. I glance at it as I speak, pausing occasionally to wonder at the darkness below the surface.

When I finish laying out my plans, I open the discussion to the team.

Lucretia Stone, one of the archeologists, says, “I don’t understand why we need pilots on each team. The guides will drive the hovercarts.”

She’s squarely built, with muscular arms and legs. She’s worked all over the galaxy, on some of the most famous digs in recent years. That she signed on with us is surprising until you get to know her history; she’s lost five digs in the past ten years to imperial interference. She likes the fact that we’re not part of the Empire.

Signing on with us was as much a political statement for her as it was a personal one.

But this is her first off-site, on-planet work for us, and I can already sense how much she dislikes not being in charge.

“I’m not going to run this like a dig,” I say. “I’m running it like a dive.”

“A space dive?” She frowns at me. The other two archeologists look to her for guidance. In the past few months, they’ve all gone diving with me because I insisted. But it was tourist diving on established wrecks.

Even then, the archeologists were terrified. To them, space suits are something you wear in an emergency, when the ship you’re riding in loses its environmental controls, not something you don voluntarily to go into abandoned ships in the emptiness of space.

These people are, perhaps, the exact opposite of those of us who have spent our lives diving. The archeologists love the firmness of the ground beneath their feet. They understand gravity and they love to sift through dirt.

We prefer to float, and dirt is something dangerous, something that can clog our oxygen supply and damage our suits.

Not for the first time do I feel a slight hesitation. Maybe I am configuring these teams wrong. Maybe I should dump the historians and the archeologists and the geologists for people who understand dangerous free-floating situations.

Because if I’m wrong and Ilona is right, we will be in a dangerous space-type situation underneath the city of Vaycehn. We will need every bit of diver’s creativity that we have.

“You’re running this like a dive.” Lucretia repeats my words with a touch of incredulousness. “We’re going to suit up and everything?”

I nod. “We’re bringing our suits. That’s why I want an experienced pilot on the hovercart. It’s too bad the Vaycehnese don’t allow other vehicles inside the site. I would prefer something with more maneuverability and power. But they’re afraid that something with that kind of thrust might cause more collapse.”

“They have a good argument,” says McAllister Bridge, one of the scientists. He’s a slender man with long fingers and the glittering eyes of someone who has had expensive reconstructive eye surgery. “If you’re not sure what’s down there, you don’t want to do anything that could potentially shake it up.”

“The walls have held for five millennia,” says Roderick. Roderick has been with me since our mission to the Room of Lost Souls. In the intervening years, Roderick has piloted us out of some very tight situations. When I met him, I didn’t like his style, but now I trust him almost more than I trust myself. “They’ll probably hold for five more.”

“Except in the area that collapsed,” says Bridge.

“That’s something we need to find out,” I say. “How many other collapses have there been in Vaycehn’s history? And were any of them followed by deaths, just like those of the archeologists?”

Fourteen archeologists have died in Vaycehn in the past few years. All of the archeologists were working in the oldest parts of the city. And none of their bodies have ever been recovered.

That alone intrigued Ilona. But the fact that some claim the bodies vanished intrigues her more.

“You’d think information on collapses and deaths would be in the databases,” Julian says. He’s not a scientist or an archeologist. Until the Empire found him, Julian was an accountant in a small firm on Zonze, one of the most populous cities in the entire sector.

“Not if Vaycehn has always been as secretive about its problems as it has been about the fourteen dead,” I say.

“I don’t think they’re being secretive.” Ilona sits close to me, her fingertips tapping lightly on the tabletop. “After all, I was about to find out about the deaths.”

“Because most of those people were well known in their field,” Stone says. “If they came here and disappeared, it would be more suspicious than if they died.”

One of the other archeologists, Bernadette Ivy, nods. “We all know the risks of working underground. We don’t think twice when someone dies at a dig off-planet.”

Then she stops because we’re all staring at her. We all don’t know the risks of working underground. Most of us only know the risks of working in space.

“What risks?” Tamaz asks. Tamaz has also been with me for years. He sounds tentative, which is unusual.

“Ground collapse is one,” Ivy says.

“Probably the biggest one if you’re in a cave,” Stone says.

“Then there’s cultural issues,” Ivy says. “Sometimes the local population hates it when you touch something sacred—and you had no idea it was sacred.”

“Local laws prevail in some of those cases,” Stone says.

“Except in digs that are sanctioned by the Empire,” Ivy says, and then she bites her lower lip.

“Okay, so be honest,” Tamaz says. “The work you archeologists do is mostly safe, right? You don’t die if you make a mistake.”

He stated it like a sentence, but it was really a question. A nervous question.

“That’s right,” Stone says. “Mostly we don’t die when we make mistakes.”

“I mean,” Tamaz says, “if your clothes rip, you’re fine. You don’t usually need extra oxygen or some kind of gravity boot to keep you on a path or—”

“Enough,” I say.

Ivy’s cheeks are flushed, and Stone actually looks angry. I don’t want my people comparing their specialties. It does no good.

Tamaz bites his lower lip, as if he wants to say more. But he doesn’t.

I continue. “I think we get the archeologists’ point. Because those fourteen deaths occurred over time instead of all at once, they didn’t look that suspicious.”

“Exactly,” Stone said with a glare at Tamaz. “It just looked like that particular dig in Vaycehn was a treacherous one.”

“It took Ilona to put some of the facts together,” I say. “Like the fact that the dig itself didn’t collapse. These people died in a perfectly clear area.”

“And some of them,” Ilona says softly, “mummified in the short hours they were inside that area.”

Mikk shudders so violently I can see it across the table. A few of us have seen this before. Mikk saw it at the Room of Lost Souls. I’ve seen it more than once. First with my mother, then with one of my divers on the first Dignity Vessel I found, and finally, at the Room of Lost Souls.

“If you work this like a dive,” Stone says, going back to the original topic, “then we could lose a lot of archeological data. We need to spend time with each patch of ground, examining the layers of soil for evidence of—”

“You’ve only gone on tourist dives,” Tamaz says. “A wreck dive forces you to spend time in each section. You have to, or you really will die.”

An edge in his voice makes me hold up a hand. “I’m sorry to say that the in-depth archeological information is less important than the stealth tech. But you knew that when you signed on.”

Stone leans back in her chair.

“If we don’t find any tech,” I say, “then you and the other archeologists can stay if you want, and do some real fieldwork. The rest of us will return to base.”

“But there won’t be any more funding, will there?” Stone asks.

I’m paying for everything. Or rather, the company is. As a result, any discoveries we make will be the company’s, as is any information on how those discoveries were found.

“Whether or not the funding will continue depends on what we find.” I think, but don’t add, that it will also depend on how easy Stone is to work with now that she’s on-site.

“It seems strange to go into a dig with a preconceived notion of what we’ll find,” Stone says.

“Oh, spare me,” Bridge says. “You always have a notion of the area’s history before you go in. You know that the early colonists stopped somewhere nearby or that someone settled the area before the Colonnade Wars. You have a hunch or you wouldn’t dig in that area in the first place.”

Stone glances at him sideways but doesn’t answer. She’s finally realized that her comments haven’t made her popular with the group.

If she’s like me, she really won’t care about that.

But I’m slowly learning, as I’m managing more and more staff, that people actually care what others think. Sometimes that’s even a motivation for misbehavior.

I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. I will have to remind myself repeatedly that the very structure of this excursion is an experiment. And that will require some flexibility on my part.

“My team goes first tomorrow,” I say. “I want to know exactly what we’re facing.”

And whether there’s any hope that Ilona is right.

* * * *