City of Ruins

THIRTY-FOUR



At the end of Coop’s thirty-six-hour cutoff, the outsiders had not K I returned.

He sat in the captain’s chair, hand on his chin, elbow resting on the chair’s solid arm, as he stared through the screens to the sector base. Most of the particles had settled, although they still coated everything.

The room was empty and mostly dark.

It looked abandoned. He felt abandoned, which surprised him. He had expected the outsiders to return. The fact that they hadn’t seemed quite odd to him.

If he had been a betting man—and he wasn’t—he would have laid money on their return within eight hours or, on the outside, ten. What he understood of the body language of their leader (if, indeed, she was their leader), was that she was intrigued by the ship, by the room, by everything.

Maybe the rest of the team had to drag her out because their time underground was limited. Maybe they had left the entire region.

Or maybe a commander outside the sector base had ordered them to proceed with more caution.

His mistake, Mae would tell him if he gave her the chance, was that he expected other cultures to behave like his. For all he knew, they operated on a weekly cycle instead of an hourly one. Maybe they were more cautious than he was. Or maybe their goal hadn’t been exploration at all. Maybe they had some other goal for the sector base, and the arrival of the ship had ruined that goal.

Coop needed to send in his team. He had waited long enough.

Dix had spent the last hour looking pointedly over his shoulder at Coop and then staring at the screens. Coop hadn’t moved; he’d been studying those screens for at least two hours now. And he’d noted how many times his quite superior bridge crew had given him surreptitious looks.

Maybe the sector base itself could help with the decisions Coop needed to make. The repair room might have sophisticated ways to track the Fleet.

The Fleet always traveled on the same trajectory. The problem was that the Fleet’s mission determined its timetable. The Fleet’s mission, which it had adhered to without fail since it left Earth, was to support the underdog, fight the right battles, help individuals, nations, and entire regions of space become self-sufficient, able to protect their own peoples without hurting others.

The mission was vague, and sometimes the Fleet ended up on a side it didn’t want to be on, but mostly it had worked. And when the Fleet felt the peoples, the nations, the regions of space were stable, it moved on, secure in the knowledge that it had done its job well.

Sometimes, to do that job well, the Fleet had to stay longer than expected. Sometimes on a random stop for supplies, the Fleet would encounter a group that needed their help. Sometimes, no one they met needed help, not for years.

So the Fleet’s location along its chosen route would be a suggestion, a hope, rather than an actual schedule. And the stragglers could catch up, because the anacapa worked by folding space and could, with the right calculations, fold the Ivoire within a few years (and a few light-years) from the Fleet itself.

If the anacapa worked. If the Ivoire retained enough power to travel that far. If they didn’t get attacked by those outsiders.

If, if, if.

Coop stood up. He couldn’t think about that yet. He needed to focus on now, which meant repairing the Ivoire and figuring out exactly what had happened here. Then he would worry about catching up to the Fleet.

“I guess we send in our exploratory team,” he said to the entire crew.

“Why are you hesitant?” Dix asked.

“I keep expecting the outsiders to return,” Coop said.

“If they do, our people can take care of them,” Perkins said.

Coop resisted the urge to shake his head. Sometimes Perkins’s inexperience grated on him.

“We don’t want our people to take care of them,” Anita said, using a tone that was a bit too patronizing. “We want to stay out of their way for a while, figure out what they’re up to.”

“We could talk to them and figure that out,” Perkins said, and Coop finally understood what was behind her seemingly naive comments. She wanted to work too, just like everyone else. Only she had no work to do, not yet. Her job in first contact was to figure out the language and start the communication.

“We might not ever talk to them, Perkins,” Coop said gently. “They may never know that we exist.”

She sighed, but didn’t respond to that.

“I’ll summon the exploratory team to the conference room so you can brief them,” Dix said.

“I asked Layla to pick the scientists for the team,” Coop said. “Make sure I get their background information before that briefing. I want to know strengths and weaknesses.”

“Already have them on file,” Dix said. “I’ve had it for hours.”

Coop bit back a defensive response. He knew the bridge crew thought they should have gone into the sector base much earlier. The fact that the outsiders hadn’t returned made the bridge crew feel their point of view was the correct one.

But he knew that waiting had been right. He wished that the outsiders had returned so that he would know what they were doing.

Instead, he would have to warn the exploratory team to monitor the door, so that they could sprint for the ship if the outsiders returned.

He wanted the first contact on his terms, if there was going to be a first contact at all.

* * * *