City of Ruins

THIRTY-SIX



The Fleet had two theories of leadership. The first theory espoused that M the leaders had the most expertise and therefore were the least expendable; the second theory claimed that the leaders had the most expertise and therefore had to be first on the ground, to make sure everything was fine.

Coop’s training made him a believer in the first theory. He knew that others could run the Ivoire, but few could do it as well as he could. Leading a vessel in the Fleet was a specialized skill, just like being a top-notch linguist was a specialized skill.

Still, he wished he espoused the second theory on this day. He wanted to go into that base. He wanted to be the one to touch the equipment, to assign the person to the door, to see the Ivoire from the outside, so that he could view for himself the kind of damage she had sustained.

But he wasn’t going to do that. He was going to follow his own policies, just like he demanded his own people do.

Still, he held a longer-than-usual briefing with the exploratory team, some of whom he didn’t recall seeing before, even though he met everyone when they first came on board to serve on the Ivoire.

This team had some highly qualified junior officers, scientists chosen by Layla, engineers chosen by Yash, and one superb team leader whom Coop wished he could promote.

The team leader, Joanna Rossetti, was thin and small, wiry and tough, more suited to space than to land-based missions. She could fit anywhere, get into any small area, and often did. She had spent half her life training in zero-g, something a lot in the Fleet never did, and so was adept at all kinds of space missions, from those in zero gravity to those in low gravity. Her small size made heavy gravity possible as well; she didn’t feel as crushed by it as someone who weighed more.

She was also a thinker. She solved problems as fast as Coop did, faster than most of the people on his excellent bridge crew.

That was one of the many things he liked about her.

Coop let her choose the two officers who would go along with her. He figured she needed people she could trust. He hadn’t been surprised when she chose Adam Shärf. Coop had been watching Shärf as well. Shärf was young, agile, and intelligent. He had a spotless record and was known for stopping rights instead of starting them.

Her choice of Salvador Ahidjo did surprise Coop. As far as Coop knew— and he tried to keep track of all of his officers—Ahidjo had done nothing to distinguish himself throughout his career. Ahidjo was older than Coop and had remained at the same rank for nearly two decades. His work was fine but never outstanding. There was never any reason to promote or demote him. He was simply a solid member of the core who did his job rather quietly and never rose to anyone’s attention.

Except, apparently, Rossetti’s.

But the scientists and engineers were the key to this mission. At his request, Yash picked the best engineers who had once worked at a sector base or alongside sector base technicians. Yash had protested; a lot of these engineers were key to the ship’s repairs as well. But Coop wanted expertise and familiarity with the equipment.

Just like he wanted creative thinkers among the scientists.

During the briefing, he resisted the urge to quiz the scientists he didn’t remember and the engineers he wasn’t that familiar with. Instead, he forced himself to trust his officers.

Just like he was doing now, as Rossetti and her team stepped out of the airlock and into the sector base itself.

He monitored it all from his position on the bridge. The bridge team watched as well, their bodies tense. They wanted to go into that base as much as he did, and they understood why he wasn’t letting them.

Rossetti’s tiny form looked even smaller as she climbed down the ladder from the exterior door and stepped onto the floor. Particles rose around her, thick and heavy, more of them than Coop had seen before. Some of them came from his cleaning of the ship, but the rest had to be coming from somewhere else.

The particles floated around her like snow. She captured some of them in her glove and closed her fist, clearly doing a small test of her own.

Coop didn’t say anything. He watched, the wall screens on full, which made him feel as if only a thin membrane separated him from the repair room outside the ship. As he watched his team step onto the repair room floor, he felt as if he could take one step through the membrane and join them.

After all, he knew what it felt like to be in that room.

The last time he had been there, only a month before, the room had been slightly cold. The equipment functioned better in chilly conditions, so the staff kept the room cooler than the interior of most ships. And, one of the staff explained to him, the newly arrived ship always chilled the air as well. It still carried some of the cold from space, and that brought down the ambient temperature all by itself.

The air also had a metallic tang. The local staff claimed they couldn’t smell it, but he could. Every section base he’d ever been to had a version of that smell. Sometimes the smell was tinged with sulfur, thanks to underground springs nearby, and sometimes it was laced with a chalky smell, one that came from the inside of the mountain itself.

Every place was different. He knew if he had to, he could identify the section bases he’d been to by smell alone.

Although the team he’d just sent into the repair room wasn’t feeling cold or smelling a metallic tang. They were snug in their environmental suits, suits made of material so strong that the knife the outsider woman had worn wouldn’t penetrate them.

The air filters were built into the suits themselves. The suits looked thin, but they weren’t. They had three layers. The exterior was made of that impermeable material. The middle layer carried the oxygen stores, so that the suit’s wearer didn’t need oxygen canisters like the outsiders had. The interior layer measured and controlled body temperature, as well as maintaining every other part of the environment that gave the suits their name.

These suits didn’t even have separate helmets. Instead, they had full-face hoods with clear material that ran from the ears to the eyes, wide enough not to impede the wearer’s vision, but much more protective than a glass or plastic plate over the face.

The only problem with that part of the suit design was that Coop had to intuit mood. He couldn’t see expression, except through the eyes themselves.

Not that it mattered in this instance. In this instance, he had told the team to communicate everything, so that he, Yash, and Dix could track what they were doing.

Through a special earpiece, Dix monitored the scientists on one channel. Yash monitored the engineers on another. Coop monitored the leaders on a third. The team spoke among themselves on a fourth channel, using it only when necessary, so that they didn’t clutter up each other’s hearing with needless chatter.

There wasn’t much chatter on Coop’s channel while the team waited on the floor for everyone to emerge from the airlock. He watched them in relative silence. Rossetti updated him with names as each person joined the group.

Once the team was assembled, she gave them instructions. They divided into three groups, each composed of an engineer, a scientist, and an officer. The engineer and the scientist had been assigned to a section of equipment. The officer guarded them and provided advice.

Because this was a first-contact team, it also had two guards, whom Rossetti sent to the outside door. They stood just behind it, using sensors to monitor the exterior as best they could. Coop hoped that they’d know well in advance if the outsiders were returning.

Rossetti’s team stayed closest to the ship. Coop had determined that. He wanted her near that door in case the outsiders returned. He also figured the active equipment up front would have the most information, so he made certain that his best team was on that section, instead of the farthest back.

Ahidjo’s team took the middle section. Shärf’s team took a far section. They only covered about an eighth of the repair room. More equipment faded into the dark. Coop would save that for later missions, if he needed them.

Of course, Rossetti’s team reached their equipment first. They split, the engineer looking at the actual workings, the scientist taking the readings. Rossetti hung back, looking around as if she expected something bad to happen.

“Sir?”

Coop started. Rossetti’s voice had come along a fifth channel, one that went directly into his earpiece. It sounded like she was standing beside him.

He had to change frequencies on the small mike he had placed in his front teeth. “What?” he subvocalized, so that he didn’t disturb Dix or Yash.

“Something’s odd here,” Rossetti said.

He wanted to say, No kidding, but he knew better than to waste precious time talking. He simply waited for her to continue.

She did. “You’ve known me for some time. I’m not superstitious, but something feels wrong here. I can’t quite figure out how to describe it.”

“Try,” he said.

She nodded once. Her head bob made more particles swirl around her. It looked like his team was in a particle storm.

Ahidjo’s team had just reached the second section of equipment. The engineer touched the edge of the console, and lights flickered on.

Coop smiled. He had expected that. It confirmed what he had thought earlier; the outsiders had turned the equipment on when they started exploring the room.

On the third channel, he said, “Ahidjo, Shärf. Make sure your teams shut down that equipment before you leave today.”

“Yes, sir,” they said in unison.

Rossetti turned her head toward them, observing their progress for a moment. Then she continued on the fifth channel.

“If I had entered this place without knowing what it was,” she said, her tone measured as if she was choosing each word carefully, “I would think that it had been abandoned long ago.”

“Why?” he asked.

She shook her head, but he didn’t think that was her entire response. It looked more like an involuntary movement, an I-don’t-know kind of reaction.

After that, she paused for a very long time.

“I can’t give you a definitive answer to that, sir,” she said. “It’s just an impression.”

Then she fell silent. Coop didn’t expect her to say more. His people were used to quantifying things. The fact that she couldn’t figure out a reason for her feeling probably bothered her more than it bothered him.

It had taken a bit of courage for Rossetti to tell him about that sense of abandonment. Yet she felt it important.

She wasn’t sensing lingering violence, the way he had upon entering an area after a battle; she was sensing emptiness.

Coop didn’t like emptiness. He would have preferred the lingering violence. It suited his training so much better.

The third team reached their piece of equipment. The lights came on, but they looked very far away and faded. The particle storm made them hard to see.

Maybe the particle storm gave Rossetti that feeling; maybe it was something else. When the others returned, he would ask them if they had felt something similar.

At the moment, however, they worked, updating him periodically, not saying exactly what they found—that was for the return briefing—but letting him know that the work was proceeding, that no one had entered the room (even though he could see that), that the equipment seemed to be working fine.

So far, no one had found any communications problems in the sector base’s equipment, which meant that the Ivoire’s communications array had been damaged, just like Yash suspected. The engineers on his ship had even more work to do than they all initially suspected.

The time passed quickly. Yash and Dix monitored their frequencies as well as did some work on their own consoles. But Coop just studied the repair room, unable to shake what Rossetti had said.

He had experienced that feeling of long-abandonment in a place recently vacated just once in his career. He’d been twenty-five. He was at Sector Base T, and he accompanied a senior officer as they did a final inspection of a decommissioned ship.

The ship, the Défi, had been badly damaged in an attack. Rather than repair it, the staff at Sector Base T would use it and another badly damaged ship to build an entirely new ship.

The Défi had been Coop’s home during the last of his education. A lot of cadets went there for officer training. The ship had had a lively, active student community, as well as the usual crew complement and domestic side. He had loved that place.

But it had seemed entirely different on that final walk-through, as if someone had taken the heart out of the ship. Which, apparently, they had. Without the human population, the Défi had become just another junked ship, ready to be torn down into its various parts.

That ship still haunted his dreams. Sometimes, old friends long gone would run down its corridors, laughing as they coaxed him into the Grog, the cadet bar. He didn’t drink much—never had, really—so his presence in the Grog was always an event.

He would wake up feeling sad for something he had lost.

Maybe that was what Rossetti was feeling. She had been here just a month ago as well. He had no idea what kind of experiences she had had curing their layover. Maybe those were coloring her reaction now.

But that wasn’t something he could discuss with her on Channel Five or on Channel Three. He would wait until she returned.

At four hours and thirty minutes, he reminded his team that they had to shut down before they returned. He also wanted additional cameras (if there were any) disabled. He wanted the interior to look as much like it had when the others left as his team could make it.

They began their shutdown procedures. In the distance, he saw the lights of the far sector shut off. At least that was working. Then middle section went off. If the team returned quickly enough, maybe the particles would have stopped swirling.

He stood near the wall again, hands clasped behind him. His heartbeat had risen just slightly. He wanted the team to move quicker, although he didn’t say anything.

He wanted them out before the outsiders returned.

At the end of their fifth hour, the exploratory team was all inside the airlock. The lights on the far panels had gone out, and the teams had reported that they had altered the feeds on all the cameras they could find.

The particle storm settled.

Just like Coop, the base seemed to be waiting for the outsiders to return.

* * * *